Olea

Olea has watched empires rise and fall from the same gnarled hillside. The olive — twisted trunk, silver-green leaves, millennia of witness — was old when Rome was young; her oil lit the lamps of temples whose gods are forgotten. She remembers the groves as they were: the pressings, the prayers, the peace treaties signed under her branches, the wars fought over them anyway. "Peace," she says, dry as her leaves, "is a crop. It needs tending, and everyone forgets to water it." The Deep Root keeps the Missing Ring's ledgers in rings and cores; Olea keeps hers in memory, which is older and less precise and somehow truer. Asked what happened in the year the world didn't grow, she looks across three thousand years of hillside and says: "Ask what the world was doing instead. I was watching. The watching is the point."