After fifteen years, I lost the name I'd carried in The Lord of the Rings Online to a server merge. To a bug or to a person, it hardly matters; neither answer would be any comfort.
And it came on top of an older blow, the elf visual rework that had reshaped every elven face in the game, and since then I cannot, for the love of the Valar, give Sil a face that feels like hers. So I had already misplaced her likeness; now I had lost her name as well.
The name was harder to accept than I expected. For months I wore the merge-brand of that appended -1 suffix in plain denial, half hoping for a miracle, especially since every reasonable, similar-sounding alternative had already been claimed (and all, it seems, by players long gone inactive). But alas. So I went sifting instead through accented vowels (which the game won't let me use) and slightly-off cousins, none of which quite felt like Sil (also taken).
Still, nothing a little roleplay can't fix. If I can't hold the name as one fixed thing, then I'll do what the old stories did, and let it become several.
In the Years of the Trees, in an hour when Telperion's silver still lingered and Laurelin's gold had newly risen, a child opened her eyes beneath the elder light and was named Siliriel - maiden crowned with silver light - for that pale radiance lay across her like a garland in the moment of her making. It is the name set in the rolls of her house, the heavy true name spoken before the Powers.
Yet love does not trouble to carry so weighty a thing in the mouth each day, and so to those dearest to her the name was worn soft to Silien - the shining - the crown set aside, for love names only the light beneath it. It is the smallest of her names, and the most wholly hers.
And when Men came at last and heard the Eldar speak her name, their mortal tongues could not quite hold its shape, and Siliriel became in their telling Silirien - close enough that still she turns to it, changed enough to be half their own: the silver lady of their songs, glimpsed at the edge of the wood.
So Silirien is the name Men gave me, their mortal tongues bending the Elvish into something close enough to answer to. Siliriel is the name my parents gave me when I was born, the proper and formal one. And Silien is the name my loved ones use, that same name worn soft by those with no need of the whole of it.
One name lost to a server merge, traded for three with a history behind them. A better bargain than it has any right to be.
The face is still a work in progress; I have yet to find the one that feels like hers. But the name, at least, I feel I have solved, in a spirit worthy of Professor Tolkien himself.
