Tane

In New Zealand they named the greatest kauri Tāne Mahuta — lord of the forest — and Tane carries the weight of the name the way his trunk carries two thousand years. His kind are the giants of the southern seas, straight-boled and massive, their crowns lost in cloud. Pilgrims come the way they come to cathedrals: quietly, and smaller than they expected to feel. He gives them shade and asks nothing, though he remembers when the great forests fell to the kauri-gum diggers and the mills, and whole valleys of his kin became floorboards. "They took the bodies," he says, "and left the god." His shade is the Ancient Ones' meeting hall when matters are grave. Of the Missing Ring he says only that a tree who has stood through two millennia of storms has learned which questions are doors and which are walls — and he will not say which one this is.