Chapter Text

-A triptych in nine pictures-

Genesis

(Beginning)

I. Subjugation

You remember this fine September morning very well. The riverbanks are vested in rich greens and golds and autumn light, and you and Cousin Déagol have gone boating. You have already caught plenty of fish, more than enough to bring home for your matriarch to make a feast out of. You make a good team, you and Déagol.

Today Déagol is doing the fishing and whenever he pulls a wriggling, lively trout out of the quick, burbling waters, he tosses it to you, and you smash them against the side of the boat until they stop twitching and then throw them into the bucket where you collect the nice, fresh fish.

“Almost full, dear Déagol,” you cry. “Let us go home, and cook the fish, bring them to grandmother so she can fry them!”

But Déagol is not listening. He is staring out at the water to where his fishing line is zigging and zagging left and right through the water. “Last one, Sméagol, this is the last one,” he mutters and then he suddenly has to brace himself against the side of the boat. “It's a big one! The biggest one we've had yet, I'm sure of it!”

You immediately forget about returning home and instead crouch down at Déagol's side, grinning eagerly, while your eyes are darting left and right, staying firmly fixed on the fishing line. Déagol is a fine fisherman – albeit not as apt as yourself – as fine as any of the Stoors, so you are surprised when there is a sudden splash! and gone is your cousin, your dear cousin Déagol, gone beneath the water in a rush of bubbles and foam!

You hurry over, your eyes searching the blue-green surface of the river. “Déagol!” you cry out. “Déagol!”

The river is rushing and flowing and you hastily row the boat ashore – you can run faster than you can row, and if the river has pulled Déagol downstream, you will reach him quicker on foot. You have just set foot down on land, though, when there is a second splash and Déagol wriggles onto the shore, wet and glistening and pale, his mouth opening and closing in gasps and for a moment he reminds you very much of the fish you pull from the waters.

You hurry over to him, relieved and joyful – nothing has happened to your dearest cousin, he's alive and unharmed! – and you reach out to help him to his feet, but Déagol suddenly flinches and turns away from your touch as if it was unexpected or unwanted. You stare at his back and tentatively reach out to him again.

“Déagol, dear Déagol, what – ”

You fall silent when you look over his shoulder and see the thing he is clenching in his fist, a fist that is now slowly opening, full of slick mud – but there is something golden shining through the dirt, becoming more and more prominent as the mud slides off it, revealing a ring, more beautiful and magnificent than anything you have ever seen in your life, and for an instant, the golden ring grows to fill your entire vision and you hear–

– the call.

There is a mountain. A mountain wreathed in shadows and crowned with three white stars. He does not know when he had gone down on one knee and bent his head – but here he is, at the foot of this windswept mountain range, clouds racing above him and spiralling into a vortex above the mountain top. And the call that has been wrenching at his insides and raking over his brain for centuries is quiet for the first time.

But it is not true silence: it is the stillness before the plunge, the last reconsideration before the pledge, the moment of standstill before he realises that he has just leapt over the edge of the cliff and into the abyss.

His head is bent. He dares neither to look up nor to allow himself to grasp the full scope of what he has done and what he is about to do.

And then the mountain speaks:

Precious One. You have come to me at last.

– I have.

You have kept me waiting.

– You told me once that you do not approve of the half-hearted and the undecided. You posed a choice before me and the time I took to decide I measured not by the urgency of your desire to have me, but the the time I needed until I did no longer doubt my choice. Now I come here before you, and my decision is made.

The mountain shifts and the world itself is groaning beneath its weight. It leans forward and its shadow falls on the infinitely lesser being kneeling at its foot.

You were wise to do as you did. I do not accept those who are not coming to me of their own free will. I have no use for the hesitant and the dithering, I condone neither second thoughts nor second allegiances. You will excise old loyalties just as you will excise doubts and scruples from your mind. We will be ruthless in our endeavours, grand and cruel and decisive. There will be no excuse for hesitation after you join me. I will have you entirely, or not at all.

– You have me, for as long as you will it. Be it death, worship, or devotion – name it, and if it is mine to give, I shall give it to you.

Do you swear it?

– Upon my name.

Ah yes. Your name. A good name to swear upon: Precious you are called, and rightly so. You seem to have much to offer. Well, then my Precious One you shall be. My Precious you are, you are mine, and mine you will remain, even after the pillars of the world itself break down in fire and dust.

The mountains echo with the pledge – the cragged, rocky slopes throw back the mountain's acceptance of your oath, and you can hear it again and again and again, like a ghostly choir:

Precious, precious, precious...

You stare at the ring, the strange scene– or memory? – swimming before your eyes, and then fading to be replaced once more by the familiar riverside. You see Déagol prodding the ring with his plump, dirty fingers – and the fact that your dumb, fat cousin should hold this noble band of gold in his unworthy paws sends a spike of anger through your stomach.

And in your heart you suddenly know, as surely as you know the sky is blue, that you should have this ring, that it has come to you and not to him.

You step closer until your chin is almost resting on Déagol's shoulder.

“Déagol, my love,” you say, and Déagol jumps and whirls around, looking at you with wide, startled eyes – like a thief caught red-handed with his hand in the family jewel box. You can see him closing his fist around the ring and clutching it to his chest – as if it was his own, which it is not, and this makes you angry. But Déagol doesn't know this and so you smile, friendly and forthcoming. You're going to be patient, you are going to explain.

“What have you got there, Déagol, my friend?” you ask and sidle up to him, trying to catch a glimpse of gold between the gaps of his white-knuckled fingers.

Reluctantly, Déagol opens his fingers and there it is: you recognise the yellow band, even without its lines of fire, but unmistakable in its flawless beauty, catching the afternoon light in its splendour and covering its surface in the sheen of flames.

Both of you just stand there staring at the ring, mesmerised, and wondering what to do about it, for you would not ever have fathomed that something as wondrous as this could come into your possession – and now you have no idea what to do with it, except –

“So you discovered how to make Great Rings all by yourself.” A pale-robed figure, resplendent and glorious in a radiance of white and gold so bright it was almost painful on the eyes, paced up and down in front of another man, who was battered and bruised and tied to a chair in an oval room full of workbenches, upended shelves, scattered papers and shattered windows of coloured glass. “Tyelperinquar, Tyelperinquar, you never cease to surprise me. I am almost impressed enough to overlook your betrayal in favour of your ingenuity.”

“My betrayal?” the dark-haired man growled. “You – made a Ring as well!”

“Of course I did. It was my idea after all. I never thought there would be anyone able to imitate me, though.” The white-robed figure came to a halt before his captive, whose proud, regal features proclaimed him an Elf. “And yet you have managed to create three of your own even in my absence. I would commend you on your achievement, were it not for the fact that you have shamelessly stolen my work upon which you built yours.”

“This is not – true.” The elf bared his teeth and fought to tear himself free from the chair he was tied to, but failed. “It was my work as much as it was yours that enabled us to create them.”

In an instant, the white-robed man had whirled around and braced his hands on the armrests of the chairs, clutching the bound wrists of the prisoner so tightly the skin broke under his nails. “What did you say?” he snarled, his face only inches from that of the prisoner. “Oh, now we are back to 'us' and 'ours', Tyelperinquar? And is it not an awfully convenient time for it? Did you yourself not tell me that there would be no more 'us' and 'ours' for all eternity to come, after I had laid bare before you who I was?”

“I told you there no longer would be any collaboration between me and Sauron, and I meant it” the prisoner spat. “That does not make our past works, including the Rings, any less of my own.”

The two men stared each other down, both with their teeth bared like snarling wolves. The elf had blood seeping out of his gums. The teeth of the white-robed figure were sharp and pointed.

“Oh, we can argue about my rightful ownership later for all I care,” the white-robed man said quietly as he straightened, suddenly composed and calm once more. “I am sure I can get it even into your thick skull that I am right, given enough time and … persuasion. But let us just establish one simple fact, Tyelperinquar: if we are going to fight, I am going to win.” He gestured around at the destroyed workshop. “I have proven the point in the past, and I will do it again, if you give me any incentive to. So let me just tell you this one thing: I can simply take what I want from you. I am stronger than you. I am smarter than you. I have control over every little atom in your body and they'll come apart at my command.” He raised his right hand and there was a beautiful and horrible gold ring gleaming on its fourth finger, and it was engraved with thin lines of fire.

“But I would rather not do it,” the white-robed man said and let his hand sink. “I do not want to hurt you any more, Tyelperinquar. I am still unwilling to believe that the past five hundred years meant nothing to you.”

The elf tensed. “I will not talk about the past.”

“Then don't. But you will listen.” The white-robed figure stepped closer, until his robe was almost touching the knees of the bound prisoner. The elf leaned back in his chair as far as he could, but there was no escaping the looming presence above him. He stared up at the radiant figure, as beautiful and as cruel as the sun.

“Save your lies for someone willing to hear them,” the prisoner said, averting his face. “You proved yourself wrong and every single one of my misgivings true the moment you and your orc army shattered the gates of Ost-in-Edhil. You gave away any right for me to hear you out the moment you stepped over the threshold as a conqueror.”

The white-robed man gritted his teeth. “Stop being deliberately obstinate and look at what I did for you in order to show you that you must come back to me!”

“Did – for – me?” The prisoner almost choked. “You killed my friends, my brethren – you razed this city to the ground and torched its gardens, you destroyed the towers, and you flooded our aqueducts with the blood of those who were torn to shreds under the claws and teeth of your army. Annatar, if you ever have held any regard for me at all, be honest and admit that you did this for nothing else than your own petty revenge, your own perverse satisfaction, your greed and your cruelty—” His voice broke.

The white-robed man frowned. “Tell me truthfully that anything less would have sufficed to make you listen, and I'll throw myself at your feet and allow you to tie me to the chair you are sitting on this very instant. But you can't, can you? So you see, I had to do it – for you. For us. I told you who I was, and you refused to give me a chance. I thought that you were stronger than that, that there was more between us. I believed you—”

“Oh Elbereth,” the prisoner said, his voice hollow and broken. “Please don't say it.”

The white-robed figure went down on his knees in front of the prisoner. He reached out for the elf's face, but the prisoner jerked his head away.

“You see it now, don't you? I put too much trust in you, because for a while I believed you were more than your nature allowed you to be – which was my fault, I'll freely admit. I thought that you might be able to handle the truth, but you were too weak, Tyelperinquar. So in the end, you betrayed me and the trust I had in you. It was you who made me do this, regretful as it is… but it is fine, it is all right. I am not one to bear grudges. I forgive you, I forgive you, it is all in the past. I do not want to hurt you, my friend, my brother—”

“Don't –” the elf rasped.

The face of the ethereal being darkened briefly, like a cloud sliding in front of the sun, but it was gone just as quickly. “You think that you are in pain, but believe me when I say that this is nothing compared to the pain your suffering is causing me.”

“I am so sorry,” the elf spat and hacked up a clump of blood, “I can hardly imagine the torture I am putting you through.”

The white-robed figure gritted his teeth. “Indeed you can't. You are mine, my other half, my second being, and everything you force me to do to you, I am doing to myself three times over. ”

The elf bent forward as if in great agony. His dark, matted hair concealed his features. “By the Valar, Annatar! Are you even listening to yourself? Speaking as if somehow I was doing you an injustice, this is – this is – just stop talking, stop – talking!” His voice was raw and ragged.

“I won't stop talking, and you will listen,” the white-robed man said bluntly. “I am aware that our reunion has taken place under … adverse circumstances, but the way you are behaving is simply ridiculous. It is plain to see that you are throwing around accusations in a laughable attempt to justify fleeing the responsibility of every pledge of friendship you have ever made to me. But I am a gracious man, Tyelperinquar, and I will overlook it for the sake of the years we spent together. I will not let your childish volatility get in the way of our reconciliation, because I still mean what I told you all those years ago. After all, I don't go back on my promises – even after your betrayal, even after you averted your face from me.”

The elf groaned, and the white-robed figure grew in radiance until it shone so brilliantly the entire room was reduced to a bizarre two-dimensional plane of flat blacks and whites.

“I still do not want to hurt you. I would much rather you give up the Rings of your own free will,” the radiant being said. “Believe me. I am speaking nothing but the truth, when I say that I do not want to let any more harm come to you. I can sense that you want to believe me, so say the word and allow me to stop this, Tyelperinquar.”

The being was now made entirely of sunlight and fire, and it reached out and stroked over the matted, blood-clotted hair of the prisoner.

“My brother, my soul, I know you are proud, for so am I. So if you would not admit that I am the rightful owner of the Rings, if you would not relinquish the idea of their creation, would you at least gift them to me?” The light-being still stroked the broken prisoner, talking softly, but insistently. “Have I not given you countless gifts while I was still your guest? Have I not been generous and kind and just from beginning to end? Would you not grant me the Three in exchange?”

“Give it to us, Déagol,” you say and if there is anything strange about the way you speak, it escapes you, just like the look Déagol gives you.

Your cousin doesn't give the ring to you. He turns around. His fingers close around the ring again and you ignore the rush of wrath it sends through your veins, making your blood boil.

“Why?” he asks.

Well, that is a sensible question, you have to admit that. Because how could your cousin possibly know that the ring is meant to be yours and not his, if he hasn't felt that same intimate connexion to it that you felt immediately when you laid eyes upon it?

“Because it is our birthday,” you say and you feel very smart for coming up with such a good reason, not the least because it is true. (At least you think it is. Your family does not really care about keeping the records of the babes born into your clan up-to-date, or very much in order for that matter. There is a good chance that it is your birthday, though, and it is reason enough.) “And because we wants it.”

Déagol throws you a brief glance, and his fingers slowly close around the ring. You can't remember moving, but suddenly your arm snatches forward and your fists close around empty air. For a moment you stare at your empty palm uncomprehendingly, then you look up at Déagol, who has once again clutched his fist to his chest and is backing away from you like a wary animal.

You are angry. You are so very angry. But your mouth twists into a smile, of all things, when you lunge again.

II. The Murder

You throw yourself at Déagol with all your weight – which isn't much – and all your rage, which makes up for any physical shortcomings you might have had. You knock Déagol over and both of you go tumbling to the ground.

Déagol wriggles like an eel under you, but he's neither as fast nor as slippery as one, and holding him down is almost too easy. “Sméagol!” he cries. “Stop!”

“Give it to us!” you hiss.

“No!” Déagol tries to roll himself on his stomach, hiding his hands under him where you cannot reach them.

You scrabble at his shoulders and try to wrench him back around, not so much furious as deeply annoyed at the fact that your dumb cousin is making all the trouble necessary in the first place. Why can't he just give you the ring? Now if you only had a big log, you could beat him over his stupid, fat head with it just like you usually slam your caught fish against the hull of the boat, and be done with this hassle. But alas, there is none to be found, just grass and—

Déagol keeps struggling. You manage to wrench him around at last, and you see his pale, frightened face, the widened eyes, and all of sudden the revelation strikes you that this is your cousin, your beloved cousin you are hurting, and your grip falters—

“You see, I still don't think you understand the lengths I am willing to go in order to salvage what existed between us.” The white-robed man circled the prisoner, who was tied to the surface of a table spattered with blood, and bone splinters, and came to a halt directly at the head end of the table, staring down at the elf.

The elf stared back. “I don't usually explain this to anyone smarter than a five-year-old, but – you don't salvage things by breaking them, Sauron.”

The white-robed man braced his hands against the table on both sides of the elf's head, seemingly uncaring whether he was dragging his white sleeves through the mess of blood and bones and intestinal fluids that had sprayed everywhere. “You give me no other choice, seeing how willing you are to throw everything away in the face of a minor complication—”

The elf burst out laughing. “Minor complica—,“ he tried to say, but the words were lost in a groan of pain. “Are you even listening to yourself? If there ever was something worthwhile that you—we had, your betrayal—has unmade it,” the elf choked out. A bubble of blood burst in the corner of his mouth.

The white-robed man bared his teeth again. “No. No. No. This is where you are wrong. You are judging me by your own flighty and atrociously low standards. I'm not like you, discarding every notion of honesty and friendship in the face of adverse circumstances. You were the one talking so grandly about hope and love, and yet here we are and it is me holding up the end of the bargain that you once proposed.” The white-robed man leaned down as if to kiss the tortured wretch, his golden hair sliding forward over his shoulder, but stopped when he was mere inches from the elf's face. “There was something,” the white-robed man said quietly, “and it was worth fighting for and I will fight for it, even if it means fighting you, my friend.”

“Then you know even less about love than I thought,” the elf answered.

The white-robed man's mouth twisted into something that looked like a smile, and yet was anything but. “I know enough not to let it get in the way of my ambitions.”

—your fingers tighten around Déagol's shoulders once more.

“Give it to us!” you snarl.

“No,” Déagol gasps. “Let – go!”

You bare your teeth. Your hands are wrapped around Déagol's closed fist, trying to pry his fingers open.

The white-robed man straightened up and all of a sudden he was holding a long serrated knife. “The Three, Tyelperinquar.”

“Over my dead body.”

Sunlight glinted on the knife blade.

“Oh, that can be arranged.”

Déagol's finger snaps with a sickening noise. Your cousin screams. His screams are loud and shrill and they hurt your ears and you clamp your hands over his mouth just to keep him from making the horrible noise, but he doesn't stop, he doesn't stop – your stupid fat cousin just won't stop screaming – now if he would just give the ring to you, you'd go and leave him alone and have some peace and quiet –

“Stop! Sméagol! Stop!” His words are muffled by your hands, and then he tries to bite you.

You growl and wrap your long fingers around his throat. Déagol thrashes and wriggles, while the colour is slowly draining from his face. He tries to break your grip, but you put your weight down on his throat, teeth gritted and breath held. Déagol is heavier, but you are stronger. Déagol squirms and he tries to rake his fingers over your face, but already his strength is failing him. His punches and scratches are helpless and aimless. A rush of triumph washes over you, and it only makes you press down harder. You feel his windpipe giving way under your hands.

Déagol's eyes are bulging out of his skull and his gaze becomes unfocused. His mouth opens and closes and with all the colour draining out of his face, he reminds you of the fish you used to pull out of the water – because sometimes you would not kill them immediately, but gently lay them down in the hull of the boat and watch them gasp for water until their eyes turned empty and blind. Your cousin is just like the fish and it disgusts you – slimy, wriggly – and moreover, he is a thief.

Déagol paws at your face once more, now as weak as kitten. His fingers cramp into claws and then his hand falls away. It takes you a few more moments to realise that your cousin isn't struggling any longer.

Your fingers are hurting from the exertion and it takes a great deal of effort to unclench them from Déagol's throat. You sit back and stare down at your cousin, realisation trickling in combined with horror – what have you done?

You crouch closer to your cousin. His eyes are open, but unseeing.

“Déagol?” you ask, your voice feeble.

The evening sunlight fell through the windows, painting the white walls and the ceiling red, and painting the red of the blood that had sprayed everywhere black.

The world was dead, and the day was following in its footsteps. It was summer, but there was no bird to be heard, no voices in the courtyards outside.

The room itself was chaos. Paper and parchment were scattered everywhere, most of it drenched in the puddle of blood that filled the middle of the workshop like a little lake. There was a table that was dark with blood, and it had been thrown sideways as if overturned in a fit of rage. In its shadow, a dark figure was lying on the floor, crumpled and curled up on its side. The evening sun did not touch the figure. The light slanted overhead in a hypotenuse to the catheti of the floor and the upended table, spreading a merciful prism of shadow over the crumpled body and hiding all but its legs from view.

In another corner of the room, something else shifted. A second figure disentangled itself from the deepening shadows. White robes, smeared in blood and other unspeakable things. Long sleeves dragged through the dirt and the fluids on the ground, as the second figure crawled over to the overturned table on his hands and knees. The once immaculate gown was torn and stained, but its owner did not care.

The white figure crouched down beside the shadowed form of the prisoner.

“Tyelpe.” The white figure nudged the lifeless form of the elf. “Tyelpe.” Another nudge. No response. The white figure made a sound like a wounded animal. “Tyelpe. Get up. Get up. I said, Get up!”

His arm jerked forward, his fingers bent to claws, and the Ring on his fourth finger glowing like fire. And the shadowed figure moved, but its movements were not of the living. They were jerky, uncoordinated, as if a puppeteer was pulling the strings from above. Slowly, the prisoner surfaced from the pool of shadow that had hid him from the face of the world, and raised himself up into the red evening light.

The white figure stared at it – the lolling head, the empty eyes, the sagging shoulders, realising that this was not what he wanted, not at all – and then let his hand drop. The body of the prisoner collapsed back onto the ground: a puppet with its strings cut.

The white figure stared some more and then a long, drawn-out wail wrenched itself from his throat and he gathered the corpse up in his arms and cradled it close to his chest like a child might hold a dead kitten, and rocked back and forth on his heels, burying his face in the blood-clotted hair of his friend.

“What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?” He repeated it over and over again, as the sun sunk lower and the rectangle of red light wandered further and further up the wall. Darkness gathered, and the only thing growing in brightness was the ring on the fourth finger of his right hand.

Then, all of a sudden, the white-robed man stilled completely. He raised his head and the expression on his face was no longer harrowed and mournful, but blank. And just as suddenly, a humourless smile worked itself over his face from left to right, like a wound being slashed with a knife.

He still held the corpse and he looked down at it. His smile seemed frozen in place, but then it disappeared as fast as it had come and he looked almost annoyed. “You must not think ill of me, it had to be done,” he said, his tone slow and deliberately patient, as if talking to a slow child. “I told you they were mine. You could not keep them from me. You betrayed me by withholding what was mine to begin with. I tried to reason with you, I attempted to make you see that you were in the wrong and I was in the right, but you would not listen. You refused me, my brother, my love, and so you forced me to hurt you. If you had only given them freely...”

You tear your gaze away from Déagol's waxen face, over to where his hand has landed in the grass. His fist is slightly open, his unhurt fingers only partially bent, the broken finger sticking out at a weird angle, and you can see it –

You scramble over and pry the ring from your cousin's hand.

Yours. Yours. It has come to you. You look over to Déagol and you fail to see why you were horrified at his murder only moments ago. Clearly your cousin has brought it upon himself. Had he not been so stubborn and tried to withhold the ring from you, you would not have laid a finger on him. It was his fault, you tell yourself.

His fault alone.

But, you realise, the others won't see it like this. The others won't understand if you tried to explain to them why two of you went fishing and only one of you came back. They won't understand that it was Déagol who brought it all upon himself: the broken fingers, the white face, and the finger-shaped bruises around his throat.

You close your fists tighter around the ring and bring them to your lips, and as if to calm a baby, you whisper into the hollow of your hands: “Don't worry, my Precious, they won't get us, my Precious, we'll go far, far away and they'll never find us. They will never know. They will never take you away from us.”

III. The Darkness

You carry the Precious far away from habitable lands, far from grabbing hands and nagging, unsympathetic family, and greedy cousinses who could take it away from you. You wander the land, keeping to little streams and the underbrush, living on berries and roots and raw fish, not caring to see other living beings, and taking care not to be seen by them in turn. Soon your only company save for the Precious is the snapping of twigs when hares or foxes flee from you, and the song of birds, which you grow to detest more and more with every passing day.

But the deeper the silence of the world grows around you, the louder the whispering of the Precious becomes. The further you flee from civilisation, the less you can pretend to be alone.

Sometimes you have the feeling that as you wander someone else is walking next to you: an oppressive presence, uncomfortably close to you and impossible to shake off. In the beginning, you try to outsmart it by venturing back onto beaten paths and into the sunlight—for the voice is always quieter and the presence less threatening when you wander under the face of the sun.

But just as you have begun to loathe birdsong, you have begun to hate the cruel bright ball of fire in the sky. It looks like an eye to you, too curious, too unblinking, and following you wherever you go. You hate the feeling that it might be watching you and the Precious, that it always knows where you go – and soon you find yourself in the shadow of the trees again, trying to evade the sun's gaze and its light, which stings your eyes so cruelly that you often cry yourself to sleep when you are curled up in an abandoned badger den or fox burrow.

But when you lie in the darkness, the voice and the dreams return.

… a dark land, a closed land, a land where he didn't have to bear to look at the sun and the stars. He raised his hand, the inscription on the Ring glowing like fiery veins, and he felt the world leaping to attention to obey him. A swift motion of his arm, and he drew clouds over the sky like a curtain, shutting out the watchful eyes of eagles and the disapproving presence of celestial bodies. He then lifted both hands like a conductor signalling a crescendo to an invisible choir– and from the flat plain the mountains rose like a wall.

He saw that he was alone , he saw that the land was dark – and he saw that it was well. And the dark mountains echoed with his laughter.

You carry the Precious deep into the mountains. It's been long since you have seen another living being save for the trout in the burbling stream that you are following up the rocky slopes. The Precious is heavy in the pocket of your torn breeches. Its whisper is now constantly in your head, but you have gone far from inhabited places with nasty thieves, and it is content for now. It appreciates the loneliness and the darkness when you enter the mountain through a cleft in the stone and go deeper and deeper and deeper, until you reach the ancient roots of the mountain. You are now unfathomably far away from the world, unfathomably deep under the stone, and its weight over your head is terrifying and comforting at once.

Here no one is going to find the Precious.

You spend your waking time hunting for the blind pale fish that lives in the black ponds in the underground caverns. Your sleeping time, however, is filled with ash and brimstone, wheels and fire.

The Tower is rising. It is a gigantic monstrosity of black iron, but you have folded the sheets of metal as easily as a lesser being would fold paper. It is a jagged, cruel shape – like a knife pointed upwards to slash at the belly of the sky itself. Building it has almost been too easy, and at some points, you have found yourself almost annoyed by the lack of real challenge. You feel that a work like this should require more effort, even with the Ring, and that its completion should result in a greater sense of achievement. On the other hand, the ease with which you have fortified his land is a testament to the efficiency you had in mind when you created the One – so if the creation of a perfect instrument conclusively resulted in a game that is unfairly skewed in your favour, you are willing to graciously take it as a compliment to your excellence of mind, and seek your challenges elsewhere.

Like in the recovery of the other Rings, for example. You have to give Celebrimbor credit for being either generous or stupid enough to give the Three away in order to hide them. It has not saved him in the end, because none of his kin obviously deemed it necessary to come to his aid when Eregion was sacked, but it complicates matters for you: the Elves were reluctant to use the Three in battle, and they are irritatingly good at hiding them from you.

But you are patient.

If there is anything you have in abundance, it's time.

You wake with a strange feeling of dislocation in your head, and a weight on your chest as if something heavy is lying on top of you. You gasp and gargle and twist around, and scurry down a narrow tunnel on all fours before your mind manages to shake off the remnants of the dream, and you realise that you are alone. Or – as alone as you will be at any given time, anyway. The Precious is heavy in your trousers, which are barely recognisable torn pieces of cloth by now, worn through at the knees and shins. The dream still clings to you and you have a suspicion that something has been different this time. You shy away from closer examination, however. The dreams are bad enough as they are, and you hurry to forget them after you have woken up. Thinking about them will not solve anything.

You decide to stay awake for the next few days.

As it turns out, this no longer solves anything either.

Long hallways, dark and ominous. Jagged pillars. Fire.

Long tunnels, black and twisting. Stalactites and stalagmites forming bizarre subterranean landscapes. The ever-present drip drip drip of water somewhere above your head.

You see both of those images at once and more than once you walk into a stone wall or a stalagmite, because the dream hallways are overlaying your tunnels, and you take a turn in a reality that is not yours. Blood drips from your forehead and into your eyes, and you curl up and cry.

“Leave us alone!” you wail. “Leave us alone!”

The darkness under the mountain swallows your pleas. There is no answer and no mercy to be found here.

Sometimes, when you're just about to fall asleep, you believe you can hear the echo of a hoarse, manic laugh somewhere, but its source is not in this world. It's all in your head – or is it?

You keep dreaming of dark clouds and ashen plains and fire. Even in your waking time the invisible presence is always there, always beside you. Somewhere around that time, goblins start to infest the mountains again, multiplying like rats in a granary.

The Precious seems heavier. And it speaks to you. The Precious is always with you – even when you have left it behind at the lake on one of your stints to the tunnels higher up, and it whispers ideas into your head, full of violence and darkness. You can feel its agitated hum when you wait for a company of goblins to pass you by. You feel its excitement when you wait for the careless straggler at the end of the queue while you lurk hidden around a corner and prepare yourself to jump. You feel a rush of bloodlust and violent joy when you leap on the goblin’s back from behind and twist its nasty neck.

You do this over and over and over again. You do not have to take the risk, but you do not like them invading your mountain, and you can't drive them out by force. Your only option is to pick them off one by one, and watch and wait how the goblins first grow suspicious, then wary, and finally afraid.

You enjoy being the hunter. One day, you find one of their earlier meeting places in the lower tunnels abandoned, rickety contraptions for sleeping and cooking broken down or hastily disassembled and forgotten.

“We chased them away, my Precious,” you say. “Nasty goblinses, they are afraid of us.”

“We did,” the Precious answers you in your own voice. “Well done, Sméagol.” Then its tone changes and becomes sharp, “And now go back to the lake. You've been gone for too long, we must look after the Precious!”

You flinch as fear pierces your heart like a claw, and you hurriedly turn around. “Yes, yes, yes, go back to the lake, look for the Precious! Stupid Sméagol, careless Sméagol! We forgots, we forgots!”

“Yes, you are stupid,” the Precious says. “But do not worry, you have me to look out for you, don't you?”

“Yes, yes,” you say, afraid of angering the Precious any further. “Sméagol has the Precious.”

“It's not yours, you insolent fool,” the Precious hisses through your teeth. “I belong to myself, and no one else!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” you hurriedly agree. “But the Precious looks out for Sméagol, that's what Sméagol wanted to say.”

“I guess I do,” the Precious replies, still irritated, but thankfully no longer furious. “You are lucky to have me, Sméagol. You are alone and weak and miserable. I am your only friend. I advise you try to keep me happy if you want it to stay that way. You don't want me to leave you, do you?”

Yes, you think briefly, go away and leave us alone – but at that thought pain spikes in your head as if someone had driven a knife through your chin, up your mouth and into your brain. “No, no, no,” you wail and you pause your crawling to make an awkward four-legged bow, flattening your face on the stone floor while you try to chase all those treacherous, nasty thoughts from your mind. “Anything for the Precious, anything! The Precious must stay with poor Sméagol, Sméagol has no one else, no one who loves him, no one who is his friend!”

“Stop the yammering,” the Precious interrupts you. “Go back to the lake and look for the Precious. You must keep it safe.”

You oblige and sprint back to the lake, eager to hold the Precious in your hands once more. When you arrive, however, the Precious is nowhere to be found. At first you cannot believe it, and you think that you have simply overlooked it. There is no goblin who would find its way here to the lake deep under the mountain unless it followed you – and it is almost impossible to follow you unnoticed these days.

“Where is it? Where is it?” you say, growing more and more frantic as you dig through torn clothes and goblin armour and fish-bones. You try to ignore the mounting anger of the Precious.

“Where is it, Sméagol?” it asks you. “Where have you put it?”

“We put it here, we put it here!” you cry.

“Then why is it not here, Sméagol?” the Precious snarls and your head suddenly feels like it’s exploding from the inside. You wail and fall over, clutching your head with both hands and twisting on the floor, screaming half from frustration and half from pain.

“They took it!” you cry. “They took it away from us! Someone took it away from us!”

“Then we have to find it!” the Precious says, its voice low and dangerous. “We have to look for it! Go! Find them!”

You struggle to your feet again. “Yes, yes, find them,” you say, tears streaming down your face, but your face already twisting into a grimace of hatred. There is an unfamiliar smell in the air. Not goblin, not fish, but something else. Someone else has been here. And you think you can follow their trail. “We find them and we twist their nasty neckses and rip their nasty eyeses out.”

“Yes,” the Precious growls.

And you run off, back into the darkness of the twisting tunnels, the stench of the thief in your nose. You cannot fathom what it was that has dared to take the Precious from you, but you know one thing for sure: you are going to make them regret taking what is yours.

You slip through the tunnels, your steps and your rage as silent as the lake you are leaving behind.

Chapter Text

Apocalypse

(Revelation)

IV. Sting

You have followed the two hobbitses ever since they came out of the nasty elf-wood and then down the big river and into the maze of the Emyn Muil. You have watched them stumbling around in circles for days on end, the dark circles under their eyes growing darker, their frustration evident in the hard set of their jaws.

Up until now you haven't been able to get close to them. They are both watchful and have been taking turns sleeping, hands on their nasty Elven swords. The sight of the blades is enough to make you duck behind a boulder even from a distance. There is no way to get close enough to kill them without being seen, so you have had to resort to other methods: you have watched them climb down the cliff shortly after sunset, and after the fat hobbit had swung himself over the edge, you have loosened the keen knot he had tied around the tree stump. The nasty elven rope has burned your hands and fingers and oh! - you have cursed them, the filthy hobbitses and the elves with their nasty daggers and ropes! But the fat hobbit knew how to tie his knots and when you had finally untied it, the hobbits had already reached the bottom of the cliff.

You have spat and wailed in anger over your foiled murder attempt, but only for a little while, because tonight you will have another chance. You can see it in the slump of their shoulders, and in the way they are dragging their feet over the gravel. They won't be staying awake tonight – too long have they wandered aimlessly. The Baggins-hobbit especially looks tired. You understand, of course, why. The closer you come to the Dark Land, the heavier the Precious must weigh. The Precious is so close, it almost feels like a weight around your own neck.

You bare your teeth, quickly discarding any notion of kinship that might be between you and the dirty Baggins-thief who is wearing your Precious around his filthy, skinny neck and who just now stumbles around a corner in the gorge beneath you and vanishes from sight. The fat hobbit follows, but not before throwing a glance back and you quickly flatten yourself against the stone, lest your elevated position expose you.

The hobbitses do not manage to leave the maze of the Emyn Muil before nightfall. It is almost amusing to watch them stumble, but when they finally set up camp under the sickly pale moon, you grow agitated. You feel a black, violent urge pushing you to climb down to the hobbits, and at the same time there is an equal amount of terror holding you back. The two feelings mix and clash and try to wrestle each other into submission. You restlessly slink to and fro on a rocky outcrop just above the hobbits, trying to keep your voice low.

“What are we going to do, my Precious? What are we going to do?”

“We climb down when they sleep and we will wring their dirty necks like wringing the head off a chicken,” the Precious says, pacing both of you back and forth like a wolf.

You halt. “But what if they wake up, my Precious? What if they wake up and pull out their dirty elf-daggers? What then, my Precious? If we can kills them, good. But what if they catch poor Sméagol?”

The Precious assumes a low, tense pose, like a cat poised to jump. “What do we want, Sméagol?”

“The Precious,” you say.

“Yes.” The Precious grins a toothy grin. “We want the Precious. It does not matter if they catch you or if you kill them. The wonderful thing about this plan is that it works either way.”

You frown. “What works, how works it, my Precious?”

The Precious does not answer immediately. It seems annoyed with you – it does not like it when you ask it too many questions. Questions make it angry, and you try to avoid making the Precious angry.

“See, Sméagol,” the Precious at last answers, its voice condescension masked with mock-patience, “this is how it is done.”

There was an army before the gates. Banners were flying in the wind, golden and black. Spears were glittering, and the sound of silver trumpets was in the air as the king commanded the advance of his entourage toward the gate.

The gates opened just a wide enough to allow a glimpse into the desolate red-and-black land beyond. There was a fiery mountain and a black tower, but between the tower and the gate there was nothing but barren wasteland as far as the eye could see.

Through the gap in the gates stepped a lone figure, and the king and his entourage halted their horses in surprise. The newcomer was out of place in every sense of the word: unarmed and unarmoured did he step before the waiting army. He was clothed in gold and white and upon his brow sat a thin golden circlet, marking him as a sovereign. Other than that he bore no royal insignia. He carried no banner, and he came alone.

The army waited, breath bated. Neither the king nor his men could believe that such radiance could come forth from the gates of the dark land. The lone figure walked over the vast expanse of the dusty plain between the gate and the host. He only came to a halt when the royal guard spurred their horses forward and blocked his way, putting themselves between him and their own king.

“Halt,” one of the Men said, but the spear in his hand was trembling, as was his voice. “Step no further!”

The white king just looked up at him along the length of the spear and finally pushed it aside with the back of his hand. “Have you left your manners on your ships when you landed at Umbar, marshal?” he asked sharply. “I seek to parley with your own king, and I will not be held back by one of his horsemen. Or does Ar-Pharazôn the Golden not adhere to the rules of war?”

At those words, the king of Men rode forth and dismounted from his steed, much to the dismay of his knights. “He does. And he wonders why you have come here.” The golden king made his way between the horses of his king's guard and stopped when he and the white king were face to face. “It seems you have forgotten your army. If we are to have war, would you face us alone?”

“If we were to have war, Ar-Pharazôn, then it would indeed have been right and justified to bring a host of my own,” the white king replied. “But you have heard me: I have not come to fight.”

“Then why have you come?” the golden king asked and furrowed his brow.

“I have been watching your approach to my gates for long days now,” the white king replied. “I have heard many stories about Ar-Pharazôn the Golden and how Men and Elves flee before his banner. I thought these Men and Elves cowards, and the stories mere tales told by those cowering fearfully around their hearth fires at night. But when I looked west from my tower, I saw ten thousand spears glittering in the morning light, ten thousand bows aimed at my walls, and twenty thousand swords drawn to strike down my soldiers. And I saw that the stories were not exaggerated, for an army like this has never before been seen on this world, and anyone fleeing before it must not be called craven, but wise.”

“If you seek to sway me with flattery, you have come to the wrong man,” the golden king said, but one could see in his face that despite his words he was secretly pleased.

“I seek neither to sway nor to flatter you, Ar-Pharazôn,” the white king said. “For it is the truth that no one can hope to stand against the power of Númenor. Only a fool would try it, and a fool I am not.”

“Save your breath,” the golden king said. “There is no amount of flattery that would make you my ally. We have war, and war must be resolved.”

“True,” the white king said, “but not all solutions must end in bloodshed.” And with those words, he went down on his knees in the dust before the golden king. A ripple went through the army behind them and cries of surprise could be heard.

The golden king looked astonished. “Are you offering me your surrender?”

“I do will not prolong this war unnecessarily when all it would achieve would be more deaths and delaying the inevitable,” the white king said and bowed his head. “I know when I am defeated.”

The golden king stepped forward, and drew the sword from his scabbard. “Why, this is a turn as unexpected as turns go. I came here expecting an army to await me and yet there is none. Instead Sauron the Deceiver is kneeling before me and I am presented with the opportunity to rid the world of one of its greatest scourges.” He lifted the sword until its blade rested against the side of the white king's neck. “And why shouldn't I?”

The blade pressed harder against the white king's neck, and a pearl of scarlet appeared on the edge of the sword. “So even gods do bleed,” the golden king said slowly, watching the drop of blood with rapt fascination as it drew a red trail down the silver blade. “Tell me, Deceiver, would you beg for your life?”

The white king raised his head and his eyes met those of the golden king. “If there was hope you would grant it to me.”

“Ah, so very humble,” the golden king said. “But words are words. They are easily spoken and no testament to the sincerity of your surrender.”

“I won't prevent you from testing my sincerity to your satisfaction, for as often and long as you like,” the white king said. “Being humbled is a small price for mercy.”

The golden king did not answer immediately. His gaze was fixed on the enemy kneeling before him, and on his face there was a shadow of greed and a flare of fascination. The blade was still at the white king's throat – and yet the king appeared spell-bound, unable to move either forward or back.

One of his captains rode forth. “My king,” the man said, “he speaks with a silver tongue, but if we would just open his mouth a bit further we would see that his tongue is forked. Do not let yourself be drawn under his spells. Kill him. Rid the world of this evil. He is too dangerous to let him live.”

“Do you suggest breaking the rules of war, Elendil?” the golden king asked sharply, turning his head to look at the rider. “We do not kill someone who surrendered unless he gives us a reason to.”

“This is Sauron the Deceiver! The reason he gave us is written in blood upon the face of the world!” the captain cried.

“Silence,” the golden king said. The entire army watched him as he stepped closer and reached out toward the white king. “You invited me to test the sincerity of your surrender,” the golden king said and smiled. “Let us see whether your desire for mercy is great enough to overcome your pride.” And with those words he reached out and ripped the circlet from the white king's head.

The white king did neither flinch nor did he rear up and raise his hand against the golden king. He endured the offence silently and put up no resistance as his golden hair came loose and fell down his shoulders, free from the restraints of his adornment.

The golden king looked down at the kneeling figure, a strange mesmerised look on his face. “I have taken your crown, Deceiver, and I proclaim you are no longer a king.”

“So be it,” the white figure said. “As I said earlier – losing a crown is a small price for a life, and a trade only a great man would offer to the defeated.”

“Indeed.” The golden king seemed to shake off his trance and smiled briefly. “But do not believe even for a moment that trust you. I am a merciful man, but I am no fool. Who is to say that you won't start warmongering again the moment I turn my back on you? You are dangerous, and I wish to have you where I can keep an eye on you. You shall live, but you shall do it in fetters and under my watchful eye.” He put the tip of his sword under the chin of the white king and tilted his head up. “The winner takes the spoils of war, and I will take you as a prisoner back to Númenor with me. This is the mercy I grant you.”

“My king –” the captain said, but was interrupted by a sharp gesture of the golden king.

“He offered his surrender and he gave up his crown,” the golden king said, raising his voice. “Let no one say that Ar-Pharazôn the Wise would choose murder and glory over lenience and mercy.”

The king tore his lingering gaze from the kneeling white figure, put his sword back in his scabbard, and turned around. “Put him in chains,” he ordered his men, and walked away.

You are still not sure about this. You don't think you understand what the Precious is trying to tell you with its memories of long-dead kings. Besides, you still fear the sting of the elf-daggers, but the Precious is not to be dissuaded. It urges you forward, down the craggy stone wall below which the hobbits have bundled themselves up in their cloaks. Your long fingers splay against the rough surface of the stone, and your nails bore themselves even into the tiniest cracks in the rocky surface. You are careful, and quiet. The hobbits are lying close to the foot of the cliff, both wrapped in their elven-cloaks. They are not moving, so you assume they are asleep. You move slowly, and you do not make the slightest of noises when at last your hands and feet touch the ground. Therefore you cannot understand in the least why the fat hobbit is suddenly on his feet and tackles you to the ground.

For a few brief moments you are petrified with surprise and fear, but then you remember just who is the hunter and who is the prey in this fight. You wriggle until you have your arms and legs free and then you wrap them around the fat hobbit in a death grip, pinning his arms to his sides, pulling tighter and tighter. The fat hobbit is strong, but you are stronger by far. Long dark years spent fighting and fishing and clawing your way to survival under the Misty Mountains have made you as worn and tough as old leather. If someone tries to bite you, it will cost him his teeth. The fat hobbit seems to realise this, because he is gasping for air when your fingers close around his throat. He throws himself forward and he catches you in the forehead with his hard, round head. Your brain is rattled in your skull, but your fingers only close tighter around the soft skin of his neck.

You would have won this fight – the fat hobbit is already turning blue in the face – but in your eagerness to take him out of the scuffle you have stupidly forgotten about the second hobbit. You are reminded of your carelessness when something suddenly pulls you back by the lank strings of your hair and you feel the tip of a blade at the skin of your exposed throat.

“Let go, Gollum,” the Baggins-hobbit says. When your gaze wanders down to the blade at your throat, he continues, “This is Sting. You know it, don't you? You have seen it before, a long time ago. Let go, or you'll feel it this time. I'll cut your throat.”

You go stock-still, even your breathing subsides. You have caught a look of a golden chain around the Baggins-hobbit's neck. There is the Precious. So close, so close – and around the neck of a filthy little thief. The idea flashes in your mind to throw yourself forward and attack, the sword at your throat notwithstanding, because death suddenly seems less important than holding the Precious in your hands once again – but the Precious itself quickly nips the idea in the bud.

Sméagol!, it hisses in your head. Have you understood nothing of what I have shown you? Surrender, you fool!

No, you have not and you still do not understand what the Precious is after, but the haze clouding your mind lifts for a moment and you realise that surrendering is the only way to stay alive. You collapse into a miserable heap, boneless and beaten. You curl up on the floor, whimpering like a wounded animal, despising yourself for doing so even while you hope that your miserable display might make them pity you enough to spare you.

“Don't hurt us! Don't let them hurt us, Precious!” you beg.

No one is going to hurt you. Everything is going according to plan, the Precious says. It sounds annoyed. You feel you should better not anger it any further. The Precious has been very irritable ever since you have lost it. You guess it would be more prudent to turn towards someone who is more likely to listen to you and be merciful.

The fat hobbit stumbles to his feet and glares daggers at you. You ignore him and fix your gaze on the Baggins-hobbit instead. He has the sword and he has the Precious. He's the important one. You pull yourself forward by your arms and grab the hem of the Baggins-hobbit's breeches. “They won't hurt us, will they, nice little hobbitses? We didn't mean no harm, but they jump on us like cats on a poor mouse – they did, Precious.” And because you feel particularly resentful at the Precious and how it is treating you right now, you add, “And we're so lonely, gollum. We'll be nice to them, very nice, if they'll be nice to us, won't we? Yes, yesss.”

The Baggins-hobbit steps back, wrenching the hem of his breeches out of your hands. You give a pitiful whimper and hunch forward.

But who speaks next is not the Baggins, but the fat one. “What are we going to do about him?” he asked. “I say we tie him up, so he can't come sneaking after us no more.”

“But that would kill us, kill ussss,” you wail. “Cruel little hobbitses, tie us up in the cold hard lands and leave us, gollum.” You sob, and even you yourself are disgusted by your display.

Undignified, but effective, the Precious says. Not everyone can keep his dignity while on his knees. Go on.

“They can't leave us, can't!” you cry.

The Baggins-hobbit is silent for a while, pondering the situation. “No,” he says at last. “If we kill him, we must kill him outright. But we can't do that, not as things are. It would not be right.”

Your sobs stop abruptly.

“Not right, Mister Frodo?” the fat hobbit says incredulously. “He tried to strangle us in our sleep, and he'll do it again if we do so much as leave him out of our sight for a moment.”

“I know,” the Baggins-hobbit says, but then falls silent, his pensive, heavy gaze resting on you. “He is a miserable, mean creature, and I do not doubt that he meant to harm us,” he says. “I never saw why Bilbo let Gollum live after their game of riddles, but I think I understand him a bit better now. For now that I see Gollum, I pity him.”

You lift your head just in time to see the face of the fat hobbit darken. You don't heed him, though, and throw yourself at the Baggins-hobbit. “Yess, we are pitiful, miserable, very miserable, gollum!” You grab his waistcoat, unfazed by the way the hobbit steps back and tries to hold you at bay with his nasty sword. “Hobbits won't kill us, nice hobbits!”

“No, we won't,” said the Baggins-hobbit. “But we won't let you go, either. You're wicked and untrustworthy, Gollum. You will have to come with us, while we keep an eye on you. And you must help us, if you can. One good turn deserves another.”

“Yes, yes indeed,” you reply eagerly and sit up straighter. “Nice hobbits! We will come with them, find them safe paths in the dark – yes, we will. And where are they going in these cold hard lands, we wonders?”

“Yes, we wonders,” the Precious repeats aloud in a hiss. There is something dark rising up in the back of your head and pressing to the front, black and ominous like an oncoming storm.

The Baggins-hobbit looks straight at you, and you cannot hold his gaze after a few moments. “You know that, or you guess well enough, Sméagol,” he says. “We are going to Mordor, of course. And you know the way there, I believe.”

The torrent of rage and fear that is unleashed at the back of your mind at those words is unlike anything you have ever experienced before. It is like a storm, like wave: drowning continents, uprooting mountains, and sweeping away everything else and wiping your thoughts blank.

For the fraction of a moment, your vision goes red and is rimmed with fire.

We will kill them. Yes, we will. Kill them both, rip their fingernails out one by one, break their bones, and tear out their throats.

You have no way of telling whether it is you or the Precious thinking this. You just sit there, staring at nothing and suppressing the overwhelming urge to jump at the hobbits and rip their throats out with your teeth. Slowly, the red fades from your vision and you are both able to think clearly again. This time, the Precious doesn't need to tell you what to say.

“Yes,” you say slowly. “Yes, we knows the way. We can takes them there – to Mordor. But hobbits shouldn't go, nice hobbits. Ashes, ashes, and dust, that's all there is. Pits and Orcs, thousands of Orcses. Nice hobbits mustn't go there, no.”

The Baggins-hobbit regards you with a strange gaze. “So you have been there,” he says. “And you are being drawn back there, aren't you?”

“Yess, yess,” you hiss.

“No!” the Precious shrieks aloud, startling both you and the Baggins.

You cower, the scream ringing in your head. “Once by accident it was, wasn't it, Precious?” you amend, fearful.

“Yes, by accident,” it replies firmly. “But we won't go back.”

The presence of the Precious inflates like a roaring storm-cloud in your head once more, and you panic, blinded by terror. Neither of you expects the violence with which you shove back the Precious and to the back of your mind.

“Leave me alone!” you sob. “You hurt me! I – we – I don't want to come back. I can't find it. I am tired. I – we, I can't find it. Nowhere. They're always awake. I can't find it.” You rear up, shaking your fist towards the East. “We won't! Not for you!” The words take up all the strength you have and you collapse to the ground, whimpering. “Don't look at us. Go away! Go to sleep!”

There is silence for a while, and then the Baggins-hobbit speaks again. “He will not go away or go to sleep at your command, Sméagol,” he says. “But if you really wish to be free of him again, then you must help me. Find us a path towards him.”

You uncurl from the ground and squint up at the hobbit with one eye. “He's over there,” you say and a mad cackle works its way up your throat. “Always there. Orcs will take you all the way there, it's easy to find them east of the River.”

You laugh some more and the Precious takes the opportunity to take over the conversation on your behalf. “Don't ask Sméagol,” it says. “Poor, poor Sméagol, he went away long ago.”

“He went away?” the Baggins asks.

“They took his Precious, and he's lost now,” the Precious says.

“Perhaps we'll find him again, if you come with us,” the hobbit offers.

You look up and find the Baggins looking at you very strangely, but not in a hostile manner. He extends his hand to you. You perk up at this, suddenly hopeful, as if a cloud had been pulled away from the sky and rays of sunlight were shining into the recesses of your mind that fell into darkness a long time ago.

But the reply of the Precious shatters hope and sunbeams alike: “No, no, never,” it says and snatches your hand back. “He's lost his Precious. He is lost.”

The Baggins hobbit regards you for a while. “Get up,” he orders at last, but his voice isn't commanding. He sounds sad. “Come, Sméagol,” he says, “lead the way.”

You don't put up a fight and slink after them, your head full of shattered hopes and sorrow, fear and anger, so much anger at the Precious.

The Precious feels it, of course, but its echo is merely smug, cruel amusement.

Don't resent me for telling the truth, Sméagol, it says. You can fight it, you can deny it, you can thrash and scream and cry, but it changes nothing about that the fact that I am and will always be right.

You make no answer.

Chapter Text

V. Born to Crawl

Travelling with the hobbits is aggravating. They are tired and slow, and yet they are relentless: they make you wander under the cruel yellow eye in the sky at day, and under the pale night-eye when it's dark. You beg them to hide and wait until nice clouds obscure the hateful eyes, but they ignore you. The fat one is especially nasty: he keeps his eyes on you at all times, and when you stop to plead with them he gives the nasty elven-rope around your neck a yank and drags you along.

“Poor Sméagol, why are they so cruel to usss, it hurts, it hurts, gollum, gollum!”

“It wouldn't hurt if you just ran along,” the fat one snaps. “Come!”

You resist the urge to obey the command – running, in the sense of charging at the fat hobbit and biting his face off and wringing his neck.

Patience, the Precious says.

“We don't wants, we don't wants!” you cry and claw at the rope around your neck. Oh, how it burns!

This is not a fight you can win. Stay low to the ground until an opportunity presents itself. Your time to rise will come.

You don't answer. The words of the Precious are clever and true, but cold and they bring poor Sméagol no comfort, no comfort at all. You are in pain, you are hurt, you are alone. You hate the eye in the sky, you hate the hobbitses, and you even hate the Precious. You are almost sure the Precious is aware of it, but all you get in return is mild, contemptuous amusement before the Precious retreats further into the darkness of your mind to occupy itself elsewhere, leaving you alone with your pain.

You don't want to talk to the Precious, you fear it, you hate it – but there is no one else to turn to, no one else who would listen to you, so you find yourself returning to it, listening to it again and again, eager like a kicked dog who is happily slavering over a rotten bone he's been thrown.

*

After a few gruelling days you win a little victory, at least. The elven-rope has been driving you mad with the pain it is causing you – first an itch, then an unpleasant chafing, and then a vicious burning that has long since spread from your neck and into the most remote parts of your body. Your brain boils in your head, your neck is aflame, and every time you set down your fingers or toes on the ground it feels like stepping straight onto a pin cushion. Obviously your whining and crying has become too loud and too annoying for the hobbits, because suddenly the Baggins-hobbit turns around and comes to stand in front of you.

“What's the matter with you?” he asks. “You would try to run away and therefore you must be tied; but we don't wish to hurt you.”

You tug and tear at the rope, hissing when it burns your fingers. “It hurts us, it hurts!” you cry. “It bites! Nasty elves twisted it! Hobbits are cruel to us, that's why we tries to escape – they visits Elves and they have their ropes, nasty ropes. Take it off, it hurts uss! We won't run away!”

“I would take it off,” the Baggins says, “but I'm afraid there is no promise that you can make that I could trust.”

You gawk up at him and blink slowly, not quite comprehending what is almost being offered to you, and wondering whether the hobbit truly means it. When you realise that the Baggins is serious, you immediately throw yourself to the ground, grovelling at his feet like a dog. “We can promise! We promise anything! We do anything they asks us! We won't run off, good Sméagol, we will do anything the hobbits say, even the nasty fat one.” You throw a glower at the second hobbit and find it returned to you with equal disdain. “But let us go, take the rope off us, nasty rope, it burnss uss.” You thrash around on the ground, your fingers tangling in the rope. “We swear to do what he wantss. It hurts uss!”

“Swear?” the Baggins asks.

You still, only now realising just what it is you've proposed. Swearing oaths is a dangerous thing – you distantly recall this lesson from the old folk tales that your grandmother used to tell you when you were little.

Then you – and yet not you –

Someone recalls something else, something far darker, far more ancient, far more doom-laden linked to making a pledge upon your own name or nature. Something inside you recoils from the idea of swearing an oath, but another, more familiar part of you only knows that the elf-rope hurts, hurts, hurts, and if this is what it takes to get the hobbit to take it off, then so be it.

You roll onto all fours and crawl up to the Baggins. “Yess, yess. We swears.”

No, we won't, the Precious suddenly cuts in.

For once, you ignore it. You want to get rid of the rope, even if it means swearing an oath – and even if the Precious refuses to participate, it is enough if one of you makes the promise. It’s not as if the hobbits will be any the wiser, after all. “Sméagol will swear on the Precious,” you say, feeling very clever and content with yourself.

Fine. Do as you wish, the Precious growls. Get yourself tied up in oaths and promises, but I won't have any part in it.

Then don't, you think stroppily.

The Precious retreats, a glowering presence at the back of your mind.

“On the Precious? Would you commit your promise to that, Sméagol?” the Baggins asks. “It will hold you. But it is more treacherous than you are, and it may twist your words. Beware!”

In the ensuing pause the Precious is ominously silent.

“I would not have you swear on it,” the Baggins-hobbit says slowly. “Swear by it, if you will.”

“I will, I will. Good Sméagol!” you say quickly, not caring in the least about the change of one little word, and paw at his knees.

“Down!” the Baggins says. “Down. Speak your promise.”

You crouch down, your forehead nearly touching the ground. “We promises – I promise to serve the master of the Precious!” you say exuberantly, and you ignore the uninterpretable snort of the Precious at the back of your head. “Good master, good Sméagol!”

The Baggins-hobbit looks doubtful, but the promise binds him as much as it binds you, and he kneels down and takes off the rope. You do not move until he has safely looped it around his hand and handed it to his fat companion to stow it away. And then – relief, the glorious feeling of painlessness after hurting for a long time. The permanent backdrop of agony which you have gotten used to suddenly falls away and you become aware of how easy breathing and moving is without being in constant pain. You give a hoot of joy and pleasure and bound past the two hobbits, even though the fat one shouts after you to come back.

*

Eventually, you return. But however much this proves your goodwill in your own opinion, you still have an enemy.

While the Baggins-hobbit seems to have accepted you for the time being, the fat hobbit is still not convinced of your honesty. He is suspicious and always keeps his eyes on you, no matter how hard you try to be good. Whenever you lag behind, he nudges you on. Whenever you go too far, he calls you back. He is like a shepherd dog, and his master is the lone sheep he is guarding. He is always circling around him, trying to keep between you and him, and it aggravates you.

You try to be friendly at first, but it fails. The fat hobbit ignores you at best, and at worst he shoves you away and calls you names. He calls you “Slinker” and “Stinker” - with no regard for whether you can overhear him or not.

The last word especially rankles you. It takes you some time to figure out why – you have been called many names, often by goblins, and none bothered you overly much, especially if you ripped out their throats shortly after – but then you realise that most of it is not your own anger. The Precious has withdrawn into the furthest recesses of your mind, most likely still angry at you, and it speaks rarely these days. You don't mind that, but after a few days, the constant pressure against your brain gets maddening, like an itch you cannot reach to scratch. You start asking the Precious tentative questions in an attempt to understand, but it shuts you down brutally each time, leaving you with a headache lasting for hours. Once, though, something happens that you are sure the Precious didn't intend.

One moment you're perched next to a stream looking for fish to pull out of the water, when the fat hobbit turns around to call you (“Stinker, keep up!”) and the next –

– a ruined mountainous landscape with shattered cliffs and jagged ridges stretched from horizon to horizon. The world was vast, ruined, and empty under a steel-blue sky. Hot vapours and fumes wafted up in plumes from cracks torn into the face of the scorched earth. Mountain slopes, once green and blooming, were now grey and destroyed by avalanches of scree and ashes. Some mountains looked like they had their peaks ripped off by giant beasts.

A beaten warrior clad in shattered pieces of armour and a torn cloak climbed the last slope and brutal, glaring sunlight hit him in the face. The glare was only partially obscured by the winged figure standing on the mountain top: a shadow surrounded by the searing white halo of the sun, its contours rippling like flames, a great scythe with a shaft of ivory in its hands.

The warrior clambered over the last boulder onto the little plateau, limped a few steps toward the shining figure, and went down on his knees.

“Herald,” he said, bowing his head. A sharp, icy wind was cutting his face and tearing at his cloak.

“Stinker. Even here under the open sky you taint the air with the reek of the abyss."

 "Why, brother, you hurt my feelings. Is that how you greet long-lost kin?"

 The herald's mouth curled, and a shadow of either pain or revulsion passed over his face, but when he spoke his voice was firm and grim. "You have no right to appeal to the mercy of kinship, Gorthaur. Morgoth's darkness still clings to you, and your very presence is a stain on the stone below your hands and feet.” The herald's tone carried disgust more than anger, and the warrior had to fight his temper down to keep calm.

“I did not come here to exchange insults, fowl,” he replied.

“Why then?” The herald stepped forward, a magnificent figure in sky-blue, white, and bronze.

“Surrender.”

“Again?” the herald asked.

“I seem to have a talent for choosing the losing side,” the warrior said flatly.

“Clearly. And?”

“I want to live.” The warrior raised his head.

“That pardon is not mine to grant, and you know it.” The herald set his scythe on the ground.

“Then tell your lords about it.”

“I am a herald, not an errand boy, Sauron. I bear the messages of my kings and queens, but I am not here to carry to them every apology a traitor spits at my feet with a forked tongue. If you want to ask for mercy, you will have to come to them, kneel before them, and show true remorse.”

“I will not kneel before the Thrones of Wind and Stars, Eönwë.”

“Strange. You never seemed to have an issue with crawling in the dirt when it served to save your own hide. What is worse about kneeling before the Thrones than kneeling before me?”

“You know the implications this would carry as well as I do,” the warrior replied. “I will not go back into the West. You and I both know that I would never return from there.”

“Not if you truly repent,” the herald said, and stepped forward, his voice suddenly low and urgent. “There is still a chance for you. Come with me, kneel before the Great Powers, and show them that you are serious about revoking your alliance to Evil. You will receive a fair trial.”

The warrior laughed: a raw, humourless sound. “A fair trial? Like the one you granted Morgoth you mean?” he asked. “No, thank you! I am neither quite desperate nor foolish enough to hand myself over to your masters.”

“It is the only option you have left.”

“Then I might as well have no option at all left to me,” the warrior said. He slowly got to his feet, bracing himself heavily against his knees. “I would rather die on my feet here and now than spend eternity on my knees in the Blessed Lands.”

“Then don't go,” the herald said, and though his face showed contempt, his voice was full of disappointment and sorrow. “But in this case any right you might have had to mercy is forfeit. Go and run, just like you have always done! It would have been too much to expect you to turn around and take responsibility for your crimes. But one day even you will see that you can outrun your fate no more than you can outrun your own shadow, just as your nature will always catch up with you, foul and craven and treacherous –

Enough, the Precious snarls and you are yanked back thousands of years and hundreds of miles into the present. The abrupt transition leaves you nauseous. Your head is spinning. You have already forgotten most of what you have seen, but the name “Stinker” remains and the insult it carries for both of you.

“We both hates the fat one,” you say.

Evidently.

“We should get rid of him,” you suggest.

Why, Sméagol, the Precious says, you disappoint me. Where is the fun in a bid for power when you have no one worthy to oppose you?

You scrunch up your forehead while you scamper over the rocky shore after the hobbits. “This makess it harder for uss.”

Hardly. We will dispose of him in due time. In the meantime, all Samwise Gamgee does is make it more interesting for us. And we could use him.

“Use it how, Precious?” you ask.

I infer from your question that you have never experienced the beauty of a fortress being destroyed from the inside by its own inhabitants.

“No, Precious. We haven't ever seen no fortress, save for …” You shudder and fall silent.

Of course you have. Think metaphorically. A tower is a fortress, but so is trust and love – and just like real fortresses they have weak points which can be used to tear them down. Conquest is all well and good, but there is nothing quite like the intricacy of a web of lies and deceit, and in the end, when all the strings run together in your hands and just a little yank suffices to make everything come toppling down… Tell me, Sméagol, what is more fascinating than domination without violence, destruction without force, power without coercion?

“Fresh fish wriggling in my fingers,” you say, “wriggling and squirming, when it can't escape.”

That is it, exactly. Sinister satisfaction pulses through your mind. You will have the hobbit writhing in your grip before the end – but he'll step into the trap without even knowing it is there. Does that not appeal to you?

You cannot help yourself – you grin. “Nice. Sounds nice, my Preciouss, yess.”

The presence of the Precious coils up in your head like a contented snake. Good.

*

That night you dream. It is not one of your dreams; you notice this as soon as you fall asleep and the torrent of past millennia, of faces long dead, of sundered lands and sunken empires rushes past you.

There was a palace, high above a city. It was an airy, ethereal edifice of column halls, walkways and galleries. There was an upward direction in the walls, the columns, the spires: pillars rose to support vaulted ceilings fifty feet above, frescoes and paintings showed men and women reaching up, firing arrows, climbing, flying – there was an ever-present striving for higher, more, skyward, which permeated the entire architecture.

In the palace, there was a hall, which sat atop the mountain on whose slopes the city was built. No walls nor windows were needed in the hall, for this far south the air was warm all year round. A wide gallery with marble banisters ran down both lengths of the hall. Thin veils were hung between the pillars surrounding the hall, and they were dancing in the soft breeze, which carried with it the scent of the sea. The evening sun divided the columned hall in alternating stripes of gold-and-pink light and deep blue shadows.

One of those stripes of shadows belonged to a man standing between the pillars, his legs planted shoulder-wide, and his arms crossed. It was a warrior's stance, but atop his brow rested the crown of a king.

“Get rid of him,” the woman said. “I don't want him here. He's a snake, and he is dangerous.”

“You cannot order me to do anything, Zimraphel.” The king turned around, and spread his arms. “Besides, have I not brought him here humbled and shackled and without a crown?”

“Shackles will not keep a cobra from spitting venom, nor does taking his crown make him any less of a king.”

“You would know that, of course,” the king said, laughing darkly.

The woman stepped out of the shadow of the pillar next to which she had been standing. Her dark locks seemed to catch fire in the evening light, as did the pearls on her lavender gown and in her locks. The emerald in her small silver diadem lit up in the face of the sun, but it was nothing compared to the flame burning in her eyes. Even without jewellery or a crown, her features alone would have been enough to mark her as a queen, a first among her kin, one who rules and does not easily suffer being ruled in turn.

“Do you think mere shackles will be enough to tie him down? You might was well try to leash a lion with a string of cobwebs.”

The king turned around. “Are you afraid?” he asked with a slow smile.

“I do not fear for myself. I fear for my people, and for the kingdom you are wilfully driving towards its doom,” she said, her voice as hard as steel.

The king laughed again. “Ah Zimraphel, have you spent the entire time in the temples while I was gone? The priests must have muddled your thoughts with all their talk of doom, penance, and humility.” He stepped up to her to stroke her cheek, but she caught his hand.

“The priests at least are wise enough to fear those who reside above them in the natural order of things,” the queen said.

The king's eyes dropped to the queen's fingers around his wrist and he gave a low chuckle. “I think being alone in your bed at night for a few years hasn't done you any good, cousin. You have forgotten, I believe, just how strong I am.” And suddenly he started pushing against her grip. The queen tried to hold him off, but their strength was no match, and inch by inch the brought his hand closer and closer to her face.

“Let me explain to you the natural order of things,” the king said. “What I want, I take. I conquer where I please, I rule how I want. I owe no one an explanation, and I fear neither mortal nor god. The god-king of the East himself went down on his knees before me. I took his crown, I stripped him off his robes and rings, and I brought him here so that all might see the might of Ar-Pharazôn.” His fingertips stroked over her cheek, deceptively light.

“So great are you, Ar-Pharazôn,” the queen said, her face unmoved, “and so high have you risen above us mere mortals, that you mistake a crouching lion for a submissive beast instead of your imminent death. Are all signs of your greatness so easily mistaken for testimony to your blindness?”

“Your close companionship with the priests has made you hysterical,” the king scoffed. “Incense and dark prophecies and supplication – these are the last resort of apocalyptic prophets and nagging women against the rulers of the world. They prefer to wield doom-laden words rather than weapons, because their arms cannot lift a sword. Only the weak send prayers to an empty sky in the hopes that someone else might take a hold of their destiny for them. The strong have no need for temples and adoration and idolatry. If you have nothing to say aside from futile barbs and ominous warnings, I advise you to save your breath.”

“I merely know the extent of my power,” she said, “and I take care not to forget about it, whereas your practice of surrounding yourself with sycophants has given you a wrong sense of your limitations.” The king's hand wandered down her throat, but she did not flinch and held her ground, catching his hand again. “Calion,” she said – the king flinched at this name – and her voice was urgent. “He is dangerous. Heed my words, he will bring doom upon all of us, and it will begin with you.”

The king dropped his hand and looked at her with a flat, bored expression. “Is there anything else you have to say?”

“Rid yourself of him. Drown him, behead him – set him free and send him away, if you must. But do not allow him to stay.”

The king inclined his head to one side and regarded her with narrowed eyes. “Why? Are you jealous? Are you afraid that he might replace you at my side on the High Dais?” Then all of a sudden he smiled. “Or is it jealousy of another nature? He is one of the Beautiful Ones, after all, and I have heard the whispers in the court. Are you afraid that I might discard you in his favour; take him to bed instead of you?” He laughed, brief and hateful when a sudden insight seemed to come to him. “Why, of course! Women are vain and envious creatures, they suffer no rivals in beauty and in love, and they covet everything they think is theirs, hate it though they might – as soon as you threaten to take it away from them, they will fight for it with the vigour of a cat robbed of its young.”

“Believe what you wish. I have told you what I want,” the queen said. She stood tall, proud and cold, like a young birch on a winter's morning.

“Yes, yes. You are always quick to tell me what you want.” The king turned away. “Why, Zimraphel, I might just make good on my word and make him my consort – if not to humiliate him, then at least to spite you.”

“If you are so eager to bed a demon, do as you wish, my king. Who am I to forbid you to seek out the cold comfort of a snake in the night?” the queen replied. “I would just advise you to be cautious, for it only needs to bite once to be deadly.”

“He can hardly be colder and more vicious than you, cousin. He at least heeds my orders,” the king said with a sardonic smile, “which is something that can't be said of you, Zimraphel.” He looked around the hall and the throne. “You have made yourself comfortable on the throne in my absence, have you not? The taste of kingship must be enticing, but it has made you bold beyond measure and more presumptuous than your standing as my mere wife allows you to be. I think you have forgotten the natural order of things you are so fond of mentioning. Luckily, I have not forgotten about it, nor about how the proud and insolent can be broken – on the field, and between the sheets. My guest learned the first part well - perhaps one day I shall impart to him the second lesson as well. But not tonight.” He around to face her once more and his eyes were dark. “Tonight I will have you, dear cousin.”

There was a brief flicker in the queen's face, but she quickly schooled her features back into indifference. “Why, after all these years? You know as well as I do that I am barren. It was determined by the augurs long ago that I could not give you any heirs.”

The king whirled around and leaned close to her, and although she did not flinch one could see that she had to suppress the urge not to step away from him.

“This is not about an heir,” he said. “This is about power. I expect you in my chambers at nightfall. You know the consequence of refusal.” And with that he walked away, leaving her standing in the golden stripe of sunlight between the shadows of two mighty pillars, alone.

Or so it seemed.

The queen stood motionless, looking out over the city sprawling below her in the golden light and the sea beyond, glittering like topaz inlaid with diamonds. Without turning around she spoke, her voice raised, “I have been wondering about what my husband intended with chaining his prisoner to his throne instead of throwing him into the dungeons. Then again, Pharazôn always liked to flaunt the spoils of the wars he waged – and what use is a trophy when it is locked away where no one can see it?”

Silence was her only answer.

The queen waited briefly, then spoke again, “I know you have been listening, there is no need to pretend otherwise. Come out, slinker, and have at least the courtesy not to spy on me in my own palace.”

There was no answer for a few moments, then there was a faint clink of metal and a second man, who had been hiding in the deeper shadow of the pillars on the dark east side of the hall, stepped into the light. It was the king of the East, but at first glance there was nothing kingly about him now. He was plainly clad in light grey garments, his golden hair had been cut short as was the Númenorean custom to do with the prisoners they took, and there was a bronze chain around his left ankle that ran off into the darkness of the hall.

As he stepped fully into the light, however, the dethroned king took to the fiery evening light as naturally as a bird took to the air – it engulfed him, wreathed him in its flame and made him appear taller than he was. The chain seemed to melt from his ankle and the liquid white-hot iron pooled at his feet, and he stood before her, unfettered and magnificent and terrible.

The queen blinked, but she refused to be afraid, for she saw the illusion for what it was, and she did not step back. And then the glare was gone and he stood before her plain and bound once more. For a few moments, they just stood motionlessly, watching each other silently like a lion and a lioness assessing each other, trying to gauge how dangerous the other was.

At last, the prisoner bowed his head. “I apologise, my queen. I did not mean to intrude.”

The queen's face darkened. “I can suffer being humiliated and being spied upon,” she said sharply, “but I will not suffer being taken for a fool.”

“Woe unto any who try to take you for one, for your sharp mind would expose them like the magnificent sun exposes the dark, unsavoury deep places of the earth and brings their vices to the light.” The prisoner kept his eyes fixed on the floor. “I assure you I had no intention of showing disrespect against you –”

“Save your breath,” she interrupted him. “I am not so foolish as to believe in sweet words spoken with a forked tongue, Sauron. They may be able to lull the king, but you will not win me over.”

“Win you over? Are you implying we are adversaries, my queen?” he asked, seemingly surprised. “Have I done anything at all to earn your enmity in the few weeks I have been here?”

“Oh no, you have gone to exceptional lengths to appear humble and courteous,” she said, and she approached him slowly. She stopped when she stood directly in front of him, and they were almost face to face. He stood tall and proud, but so did she, and neither of them backed down.

“I know the mind of the likes of you,” the queen said, “I know your past, and I know your intentions. I will not be swayed to be your friend in Númenor, so let me declare this as an immutable fact for now and all future days to come: I am and will always be your enemy. Your intentions have never been good, and your history is one of death and ruin. Pharazôn seems to have forgotten about that, but I am not him, so do not insult me with your lies.”

Their gazes were locked. His eyes were molten gold, but hers were tempered steel and a lesser man would have cringed away from the silent fight going on between the queen and the prisoner. They stood still like statues for long moments. One time the queen frowned, as if in great distress, but she mastered herself and did not look away.

At last, the prisoner smiled, and the tension dissipated. A great battle seemed to have passed between them, but it was impossible to tell who had emerged victorious. The prisoner righted himself, standing a bit straighter and raised his eyebrows. “Very well,” he replied quietly. “You shall have nothing but truth from me, my queen.” And with a sardonic smile, he gave another little bow.

Tension went out of the queen's shoulders, as if the confirmation of her fears eased her mind rather than troubling it further. “Why have you come here?” she asked.

“Why do you think I have come here?” he returned the question, raising himself to his full height once more. His eyes were glittering with the joy of the fierce challenge posed to him by her sharp mind – of course the queen did not believe for one moment that Ar-Pharazôn had been able to take him here against his will.

“You have come to destroy us,” the queen said quietly.

“Yes.” He was smiling softly.

At those words, she turned away and did not speak for a long time. She touched her fingers to her temples, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again a shadow had fallen over her, deeper than the soft darkness of Númenorean nights, and it had nothing to do with the sun sinking below the horizon in the far western sea. She slowly walked out onto the gallery and looked out over the sea, ruby-red and blazing silver in the west. Soft footfalls and the clink of a chain came to a halt not far behind her.

“Why are you telling me this so openly?” she asked at last.

“Why not?” he replied, still smiling. “I have nothing to fear from being honest with you.”

“A bold assumption.”

“A fact,” he replied. “I can afford sincerity. Who could you tell that matters? Who would believe you? Your husband? The common folk? The priests? Maybe the latter – but from what I gathered the Faithful have only crumbling footholds here in Armenelos. Trust me, Men are little inclined to lend an ear to those who preach their doom. They are practised at closing their eyes to their own weaknesses, and thus they become blind to warnings as well.” He watched her carefully. “Besides, I told you that you shall have nothing but truth from me, my queen. I make neither my threats nor my promises idly.”

She stepped closer to him, her back a firm straight line, her hands clasped together, and her gaze hard. She was the very image of a fortress, every limb, every muscle, every bone of her body another piece of a delicate, yet immeasurably strong defensive structure, all parts supporting each other and coming together to form a nearly impenetrable wall of will and defiance. “You must be aware that your words do nothing to discourage me. I will do everything in my power to stop you.”

“I expected no less of you,” he said and he did not sound angry. If anything, he appeared to be pleased. “I appreciate nothing more than a worthy adversary, my queen. Your resistance is made no less admirable by the fact that your endeavour will fail, no matter how hard you try.”

She raised her eyebrows and her gaze dropped to his ankles where the chain extended back into the darkness of the throne hall. It was taut – this was as far as he could go. “It seems to me that your reach is not yet great enough to support such grand claims,” she said.

He smiled. “Think of it as a grace period where you step on the playing field a few weeks before I do. Rally your supporters, warn those who will heed your words, gather your friends around you. I will not interfere. Make good use of the time. You will need it.”

“You are overestimating your advantages,” the queen said and she raised her chin higher, her eyes blazing. “Not all here are as corruptible as the usurper. I am your opponent, and I have the Faithful behind me. Our wills are strong and not even death will make our determination falter. Not without resistance shall Númenor fall!”

“Good.” His smile widened. “I have always relished a challenge.”

You stir in your sleep, restless, agitated, and roll over onto your other side.

Now, Sméagol, the Precious says, don't get too excited. I know it is marvellous to behold two masters at work, but you should leave it to them to play the game with an open hand. You'll have to go about it differently; clumsier, cruder, less elegant – but no matter. We will prevail all the same. We will have the Precious back from them.

Nasty hobbitses, you think.

Yes, nasty. They'll get their due before long; just do what I tell you to do when the moment to strike has arrived. In the meantime be nice, Sméagol. The rest will come in its own time.

You whimper in your sleep, struggling to the surface of waking, but the dreams are clinging to you and dragging you back under again. You fight it – you always do, but the pressure of the Precious is weighing on your mind like an ocean, and the deeper you sink the harder it is to struggle upward. In the end, you give up. You are pulled back down into an abyss of fire, smoke, and cruel metal wheels, turning endlessly, grinding everything between them to dust.

Chapter Text

VI. Reset

You do exactly as you have been told and you try to be nice. You stick close to the hobbits, you show them the best path through the wilderness, you even catch fish for them.

Their reactions to your sudden change in behaviour could not be more different. The fat one becomes even more suspicious of you, if that is at all possible, whereas your sudden friendliness seems to take the Baggins-hobbit – no, the Master – by surprise. You notice his gaze on you when you move past him. He does not trust you, either, but the way he is watching you isn't hostile so much as pensive.

He even seeks you out to talk to you from time to time, asking you about your past, your travels, and where you have come from. You are wary of his questions at first, and you remember little about your past anyway. But soon you begin to notice that the Master (unlike the Precious) does not mean to pry in order to find things to hurt you with – he seems genuinely interested in you, which takes you by surprise.

Gradually, you open up to him. You tell him the few things you recall of yourself: that you like fishing (which he understands), that you used to like to go boating (here an uncomfortable look passes over his face, but he does not tell you why), and that you don't like daylight (which he cannot understand). You never speak of your cousin and how you have gotten hold of the Ring. However, you off-handedly mention that Sméagol is your real name, and this seems to catch his interest. From there on out, he never calls you Gollum again, even if the fat hobbit uses the name still, among even less favourable names. For the Master you are now Sméagol, always Sméagol, without exception. Your treatment seems to be important to him, for whatever reason. Nevertheless you are startled when he actually jumps to your defence you against the fat hobbit once.

“Why do you call him names all the time?” the Master asks. “Slinker, Stinker – why?”

“Because that's what he is. There is no good left in him, Mister Frodo, just deceit and lies,” the fat hobbit says. “Just look at him: it's the Ring he wants, that's all he cares about!”

The Master stops abruptly. You have never seen his face grow so dark, and you can see the fat hobbit taking a surprised step backwards.

“Do not speak of the Ring to me,” he says fiercely. “You have no idea what it did to him – what it is still doing to him!” He pauses briefly, and a look of deep, immeasurable grief passes over his face. “I want to help him, Sam.”

You watch the argument unseen from behind a thicket of thorny brambles, astonished and amazed, and you think about the incident for a long time.

That night you prowl about restlessly. You are used to having a dual nature, but you have never felt so torn: you know that the Baggins is a thief, you know that he has the Precious. But he does not mistreat you, and you are beginning to realise that – he understands you. He understands you in a way only someone who has carried the Precious could understand you. You and he both feel the burden of the Ring growing heavier with every mile you are getting closer to the Dark Land, and you wonder whether he can hear the Precious speaking to him as well.

You have never in your entire life known someone who was able to comprehend this horrible, all-consuming part of your life, and now that you have found the Master, the urge to speak to him about it is overwhelming. You have been alone in the dark for so long, alone with this suffocating weight on your mind, and you are so tired of it all. You keep thinking of the time the Master extended his hand to you, and you think that he would understand everything you could tell him – that he would not be angry at what poor Sméagol has done in his life.

One night, you can no longer resist the temptation and you crawl closer to the Master. But before you reach him, something in your head seems to – detonate. Your vision goes black and then white, and your brain is boiling inside your skull. You gargle and run off like a shot animal, blind with pain and panic.

You barely make it out of the earshot of the hobbitses, before –

“You will not speak to him about the Ring!” the Precious screams, dissolving into a gurgle of gollums.

“But maybe he understands, the Master, nice Master,” you whimper.

Stop calling him master! the Precious cuts in, but for once you don't heed it.

“Master knows about the Precious, Master knows of the pain, he'll understand,” you whine. “I am lonely, lonely, so alone, all dark around me, just the fire, the fire, oh, the fire – ” You hide your face in your hands.

You are not alone. You are never alone, Sméagol. You have me. Have I not stayed at your side under the mountains and in the dark woods and under the cruel sun? Have I not been your steadfast friend?

“Yes,” you say.

No, you think.

“Liar!” the Precious snarls through your own teeth.

“Am not!” you cry desperately, although you know it is no use. The Precious has invaded your every bone, your every vein, every fibre of your being. Nothing is secret from it, it sees all, it knows all.

“Yes, you are. A liar and a fool. I can see every little pathetic thought in your little pathetic head, so don't play me for a fool. You want to befriend them. You wish nothing more than to trust them, despite knowing that they are wicked thieves.” The voice of the Precious is dripping with contempt.

“They are not!” you shout, surprising no one more than yourself with your defiance. “Master is nice to us! Master treats us well!”

“Yes, of course he is,” the Precious scoffs. “Just like you are nice to them until the opportunity to strike presents itself. No, Sméagol, they are both vile and bad and wicked, just like you. They would offer you up to anyone who asked on a silver platter, if only they would gain something from it.”

“They wouldn't! Master wouldn't! Master promised not to harm us!”

“Promises, promises,” the Precious spits. “Words shouted to the wind, hollow phrases, that is all they are. Promises mean nothing.”

You bristle at those words. Of late, you have begun to doubt the truthfulness of everything the Precious tells you, but you have never had quite enough courage to stand up to the Precious, especially when it is angry. Now, though, you remember how the Master has come to your defence and how he has been nothing but genuine and good with you. And suddenly your indignation on behalf of your master is stronger than your fear of the Precious.

“Master,” you cry, “is our friend!”

At that, the Precious actually laughs out loud. It is a wild and ugly sound: shrill and utterly devoid of humour.

“Your friend?” it repeats. “Your friend? You have no friends, Sméagol. You are alone. You only have me. Who could ever want to be your friend?”

“Master!” you repeat stubbornly. “Master is good!”

“Master is a dirty little liar, just like you,” the Precious hisses and crouches low, like a cat about to pounce. “Oh, he may make you promises upon promises, but the moment you have outlived your usefulness and turn your back on him, he will be at your throat with his shining elven dagger – and what good will his promises be then, Sméagol?” It pauses, and it is breathing heavily. “Only fools trust in promises of friendship,” it continues. “They will use you as long as they see fit, and then they will throw you aside.”

“They would not!” you cry.

“Oh, they would. Master would,” the Precious says. “Because he knows what you are. A liar. A thief.”

“No!” you whimper and raise your hands in front of your face. The pressure in your head is mounting again.

“A traitor. A slinker.”

“Go away,” you say, “go away and leave us alone.”

“A murderer,” the Precious hisses, and suddenly Déagol's pale face floats before your eyes, waxen and still and lifeless.

“Go away!” you shout again, trying in vain to dispel the spectre of your cousin. “Go away! I hate you, I hate you!”

“You hate me?” the Precious growls. “Where would you be without me? I taught you how to hunt and kill, it was I who looked after us. We survived because of me. You need me.”

You breathe hard, the air hissing in and out between your teeth. You shake all over and there is a wrenching in your guts, preceding the outrageous thought you are about to voice aloud.

“Not anymore.”

Silence.

It occurs to you that you are just now, for the first time ever, witnessing the Precious being taken aback by something you said.

“What did you say?” it asks.

“I said, 'We don't need you anymore',” you repeat slowly. You feel strangely light-headed, almost giddy. You have felt like this only once before in your life, and that was when an elf had caught you against a tree trunk and threatened to skewer you with his sword if you moved so much as a muscle. The realisation catches you by surprise, but facing death seems to make you bolder instead of timid. “Master looks after us now. We don't need you. Leave now, and never come back.”

“How dare you – ” the Precious starts and you feel that awful push on your brain again.

This time, you push back.

“Leave now, and never come back!” you repeat.

You have expected retribution for your cheek, and the onslaught comes immediately. But this time, you are prepared. The Precious throws both of you back, and you are rolling in the dirt, the Precious is in your hands and they are scrabbling at your own throat. You are kicking up clouds of dust near the riverbed, stones crunch under your spine, but you do not even feel it. You both wrestle for control, and one time you have to bite your own hand in order to keep the Precious from clawing your eyes out. But this is your body, your mind, your hand, and you will – not – let – it –

You buck like a wild horse, physically and mentally. The Precious has its clutches sunken into your flesh and mind and it holds on with brutal strength. You are almost afraid, but you know you must not go there, because fear is where the Precious is strong. Instead, you think of the Master and how he held out his hand to you. You think of his sad eyes when he knelt down to take the elven rope off your neck, and you remember his promise to take you with them, so both off you might be free of the Ring at last.

And then you –

– throw the Precious off.

It takes you a few moments to realise what has happened, but then you notice that the stranglehold on your body is gone, together with the vice-like pressure on your head. You can still feel the Precious, but it is far gone, trembling with exhaustion and anger, collapsed and curled up at the back of your mind.

You struggle to all fours again. Your head is bleeding, but you hardly take any notice at all.

You and the Precious both know what you are going to say next. You do it nonetheless.

“Leave now,” you shout, your voice suddenly loud and brave and strong, “and never come back!”

This time, there is no answer.

You listen into the night, but there is only the burbling of the river, the hoot of a night-owl somewhere in the trees above, and the hammering of your heart in your chest. In your head, there is only silence.

You are alone.

You are free.

*

After a whole night spent hunting with all the craze and joy of a young fox on his first prowl, you return to the hobbits and triumphantly drop the two young coneys you caught into Master's lap.

“Look what Sméagol finds!” you say proudly.

Master looks up and gives you a smile. “Thank you, Sméagol,” he says, and you beam back, waiting for him to tear into the soft flesh. The fat hobbit, though, has to spoil all the fun of course. Instead of eating them fresh and raw and bleeding, he throws the coneys into his nasty pot and boils them in a stew.

One whiff of the stew is enough to make you retch, and you and he both spend a good while bickering over the proper way to eat coney. In the end, you can't get it into his fat head that one should not destroy good meat by putting it in a pot with nasty vegetables. Instead you retreat to look for another careless small animal you can hunt down and devour raw, how it is meant to be done.

You spend the rest of the morning hunting for squirrels in the trees, and it takes you a good while until you finally manage to get your hands on one and tear its head off. You munch on it while you slowly make your way back to the spot where the hobbits had their fireplace, only to find it abandoned.

Their belongings are gone, but as you approach the fireplace you stick your finger in the ashes and notice that they are still warm. Wherever the hobbits have wandered off to, they cannot have gone far. You find it curious that they would leave all of a sudden, especially since they could tell no two trees apart in these lands. Maybe it had been Master's idea. Maybe Master had been worried and had gone looking for Sméagol and told the fat one to come along.

You stare at the abandoned camp site and decide that this must be it. Well, you are going to catch up with them sooner or later. It does not occur to you that anything could be awry.

*

It does not take you long to find the trail of the hobbits, but to your surprise they are mixed with those of other two-legged creatures. They are taller and heavier, judging by their footprints and you cannot for the life of you fathom what the Master would want to do with the Big Folk.

You catch up with them to find out that you were right about the footprints belonging to a group of Big Folk, and that the Master is with them. You dare not come nearer for fear that they might see you, so you resign yourself to trailing them for the rest of the day, carefully keeping your distance. The fat hobbit looks in your direction once, but if he has seen you slinking after them, he does not show it.

For Big Folk the group is uncannily good at sneaking and covering their trails. You lose them more than once. You know of the invisible bond between you and the Master, for the Ring is always calling you, even now, and if you wanted, you could fall back on it to guide you to the hobbits.

When you crawl through a thicket of thorns that stings and slashes at your face, your bare back, and your palms, you consider it in all seriousness.

In the end, you decide against it.

You are quite pleased with yourself when you manage to find them at last – without the help of the Precious. Just watch me, just watch, you think, we don't need you, no, we don't. We can survive just fine without you.

The men guide the hobbits into a tunnel hewn into the stone of a mountain side. You are not entirely sure what to make of this. The hobbits are blindfolded and the men lead them inside with a firm grip on their shoulders, but they do not struggle and they do not appear to be in obvious distress. The tunnel is heavily guarded. The group of hunters and hobbits is admitted, and immediately two watchmen resume their position at the entry. You abandon any thought you might have entertained about following the hobbits through this entrance, and instead turn around to find another way, maybe up the flanks of the mountain.

You wander around the foot of the steep slopes. Every crack and cranny is well-visible in the golden-and-red light of the setting sun; every shadow is deep-black, every contour well-defined. Birds are chirping in the trees above. A twig snaps in the underbrush and you hurriedly turn around, but it is just a little hare, come out of his burrow to wander the dusky forest in order to find clovers and herbs it can eat.

You start climbing the rocky side of the mountain. You crawl along little ledges and clamber up rocky outcrops, while the pale face of the moon rises over the black mountains in the east. You only spare them – mountains and moon – a brief glance and then turn away, shuddering. They both seem too close for comfort tonight. It is nearing midnight when you decide that these men have chosen their hideout well, because if there is another entrance, you haven't been able to find it. You are starting to get impatient and worried. What is taking the hobbits so long? Is the Master a guest or a prisoner of those men? And if he has indeed been caught and killed by them, what of the Prec—no.

You will not think of it.

For now, you cannot do anything but wait. You should climb down and watch the entrance you have found this afternoon, but now another urge is driving you on: hunger. It has been hours since you have had the bony little squirrel, and your stomach is cramping with the need for a bit of soft, raw meat. You lift your head and sniff the air. If you're not mistaken then—yes. Earlier on, you've caught a whiff of water and wet stone, and the slight brackish smell of the edges of a still pool.

Where there's water, there is fish. Where there's still water, there is fish that is easy to catch. Long years spent under the Misty Mountains have taught you this, if little else. You decide to leave the hobbits to their own devices for now, and find yourself something to fill your stomach with.

A bit of climbing brings you over a ridge and then there is a steep drop into a circular hollow with a still black pond in the middle. It is fed by a torrent coming out from a crack in the stones on the opposite wall, dropping into the pool and flowing off through a little gap in the stones to calmer waters. You can smell the fish from here, and you greedily lean forward, your eyes searching for a way down. The walls are slick and there are few hand- and footholds. For anyone but you, the wall would have been impossible to surmount, be it on the way down or on the way up. It takes you only a few leaps and a bit of skidding and you are at the bottom of the hollow, slinking around the little pond. You see the pale shapes of fish darting away from your reflection just under the surface. You lick your teeth hungrily, and then you dive.

*

You are lost in your devouring of the fish, tearing and ripping at the soft meat, when you can hear steps not far from you.

“Sméagol.”

You look up at the name and – behold! – there is your Master, approaching you with an unsure step and a carefully extended hand, as if he was trying to sneak up on a wild animal. Your first instinct is to jump up and leap around your Master like a little dog, but then you look him over and see that he is alive and well. He doesn't look like he's had any trouble, so there is no reason why he should have run off and make you wait for him for so long. Your eyes narrow a bit.

“Sméagol,” the hobbit repeats, “Master has come to look for you. Master is here. Come, Sméagol!”

You give him a brief glance, unimpressed. “No,” you say flatly, “Master isn't nice. Leaves poor Sméagol and goes with his new friends. Master can wait. Sméagol hasn't finished.” You turn away once more and take another bite of your fish.

“There is no time,” the hobbit says. “Bring the fish with you, just come.”

You do not like his sharp, urging tone. “No. Will finish fish first,” you reply.

“Sméagol, you swore by the Precious,” the hobbit says, and you take in a sharp breath, the air hissing between your teeth. “You swore to lead me and to obey me, so come now.”

“Master swore to be Sméagol's friend,” you retort. “Swore to stay. Didn't stay.”

“I came back to you, Sméagol,” the Baggins insists. “And now we must go.”

You toss the fishbones aside and slowly crawl up to your Master, sniffing at him. He smells of strange food and strange people – you do not like it one bit. You take a few steps back and point up the walls. “Good, then we goes, nice Master. Nice hobbit, come back to poor Sméagol. Master commands, good Sméagol comes. Then let's go now, go quickly.”

“Yes, we'll go soon,” the hobbit replies. “But not at once. I will do as I promised, and I promise you again. But not now. You are not safe yet. I will save you, but you must trust me.”

“Why not go at once?” you ask doubtfully. “Why? Where is the fat hobbit? Where is he?”

“Elsewhere. I will not leave without him, but first I must save you,” the hobbit says, taking slow steps back in the direction he has come from. You see a tunnel behind a bush that you have missed up until now, and your eyes narrow. The Baggins sees your distrust, and crouches a bit lower. “Come now, Sméagol. Nothing is going to happen to you. Trust me. Trust Master.”

And as he holds out his hand to you and your eyes meet, you remember the time when he had knelt before you and taken the burning elf-rope off your neck. You see no treachery in his eyes, only earnest worry and unease – unease for your well-being, maybe? He told you you weren't safe, and although you cannot spot any danger you might be in, he is clearly worried about something. Probably about you.

You take a hesitant step forward.

“Trust master,” Master repeats, “nothing's going to happen to you. Trust me. I am going to save you.”

You slink a bit closer and reach out to take his hand.

And then you catch the scent, only the faintest trail of it in the still air down here. Man. Leather. Weapons. Steel. You freeze in mid-motion, your fingers only inches from his hand, and then you whip around, the icy cold of panic flooding through your veins, your eyes huge and wide.

But before you can even turn around, two strong arms wrap themselves around your middle and a man five times your weight is bearing down on you. You thrash and scream and claw at him like a weasel, but your strength is no match for his. He wrestles you down and twists your arms onto your back and you howl with the brutality of it.

“Master!” you wail. “Masteeeeer!” Your eyes search for the Master, and although your vision is blurry with tears of pain and fear, your gaze finds him at last. He is standing only three steps away from you, watching the scene unfold with agitation – but not with surprise.

Something inside you shatters at this realisation, and you cease your struggle instantly, going as limp and boneless as an eel. Another pair of vice-like hands grasp you, and somebody pulls a hood down over your face. You are picked up and tossed over a pauldroned shoulder like a sack of grain. The impact on the metal drives the breath from your lungs, and the sob that is stuck in your throat is dislodged and you vomit it out into the stuffy air under the stinking hood.

You can hear the pitter-patter of the Master's feet walking next to the man who's carrying you. You can hear his voice, one moment pleading with you not to be angry with him, for it had to be done, and the next turning to your captors and begging them not to handle you so roughly. You barely hear it. You cannot breathe and everything inside your chest aches, but it has so little to do with the hood over your mouth and the pauldron boring into your shoulders: it is a ache that sits deeper, blooming like rot in your lungs and heart, and turning your insides to ash.

They carry you into the tunnel – you can hear it from the way your steps echo – down a twisting passage that is so narrow that they bump your head into the walls twice, then they toss you into a corner. Your hands are bound behind your back, your feet are tied at the ankles, and only after that the hood is ripped from your head, and you see a room full of strange people staring at you. Their faces show every emotion from embarrassed distaste to open contempt. The hobbits are standing among them, accomplices in this vile scheme. Both are looking at you, but their faces are closed to you. The Master's eyes meet yours briefly, then he looks away. In his face there is sadness and shame.

You turn away from them all. Maybe they will go and leave you alone if you do not look at them for long enough. You shift until you are facing the wall and then you curl up into a pitiful ball and start to weep.

Betrayed, captured, alone.

The dark feelings roll over you like a black tide, and the wave tears down the walls of resolve around your heart – that you would be a good Sméagol, that you would never be alone again. Swept away is your belief that you had found friends in those hobbits, shattered is your trust in them, and the tender sapling of fondness you held for them is drowned in those waves of inky black tar.

You do not know how long you have been crying, and you do not know when the others have left, obviously thinking you no great danger now that you are captured and bound.

And in the silence, something stirs.

The next sob dies in your throat.

No, you think.

Dread snakes up through your innards and lays itself in taut coils around your gut.

In this moment, you realise how stupid you have been to mistake a momentary retreat for a defeat. You feel like you should have seen this coming, but this does nothing to allay your fear. In a way, you have always known that the Shadow has never truly left and that it would come back if you allowed yourself just a moment of weakness. You know all this, and yet you do not find it in yourself to resist. Your walls have fallen, your resistance is broken. And so out of the very back of your mind, where the darkness is the darkest, and your thoughts are the vilest, it returns: slowly, triumphantly, like a conqueror setting foot into a fallen city.

Now, Sméagol, the Precious says. Didn't I tell you they were not to be trusted? Didn't I warn you that it would come to this?

“Go away,” you whisper.

Do you really want me to? the Precious asks. For if I leave, who will you have left? ‘Master’ has betrayed you, as I said he would. He's left you and thrown you to the dogs.

“He hasn't,” you whimper, not believing your own words even as they leave your mouth. “Master will come back, Master just wanted to save Sméagol. Master is my friend.”

He broke his promise to you – as I told you he would. You have no friends – as I told you you had not.

“That is not true,” you say, “not true! Master trusts us to lead him! We trust him to protect us!”

You cannot trust anyone, Sméagol, especially not those who put on a pretty face and blather of love and friendship, the Precious says. Trust the murderers, Sméagol, trust the monsters. They, at least, do not try to conceal what they really are. You can count on a monster to be honest with you. So let me impart this truth to you, you miserable, you cringing, you pitiful worm: the world is full of wolves. Their hunger for prey might unite them for the moment, but come need and hardship, they will turn onto each other, bonds forsaken, friendships shattered.  If you give away anything of yourself, you will have it used against you. Words mean nothing. Promises are null and void. Trust invites treason. Love is a lie. This is a lesson you should take to heart - it is the only truth in this rotten world.

*

Another time, another city, long buried under the mists of millennia. Again a tower, but it was bright and beautiful, shimmering softly like mother-of-pearl under the star-strewn sky of a warm summer night, and rising up over a city laid out in three rings below it. There was a balcony near the tower top, and two men were standing on it, facing each other.

The first one was a tall elf, of strong build and features, and handsome in a dark way. He was holding a silver goblet of wine loosely in his hands, but his casual posture was not entirely sufficient to hide the remnants of regal bearing that must have been instilled in him from early childhood on.

His companion appeared to be another elf at first glance – but only at first glance: he was just as tall, but leaner, fairer – and whereas the elf was hiding in his posture the heritage of a line of kings, the second man seemed to have locked inside him the fire of a star, just barely contained by his physical form.

The pair appeared to be the epitome of dichotomy: it started with the the differences in their appearances and it was expressed silently in the way they were leaning on the banister on opposite sides of the balcony, never taking their eyes of each other – not unlike opponents in a game or a fight. And yet, if you cared to look closer, any rivalry they might have had was between very old friends. There was an easy familiarity between them, a sure-footed trust that spoke of long years spent working and thinking side by side.

The atmosphere should have been easy, and yet it was anything but. The very air seemed to vibrate with unspoken thoughts that had yet to be given voice, expectant and trembling what ideas their echo might call forth.

“You are restless,” the fair one observed.

The elf smiled briefly. “Am I doing so poorly at hiding it?”

“Why, Tyelperinquar, I would wager if thoughts had sound, I would be deafened.”

The elf looked down at his goblet, regarding the sparkling burgundy of the wine pensively. “It is strange: I feel I should be more exhausted after what we have done, and I probably am, but I do not feel it at all.” He raised his left hand and flexed his fingers. It was trembling slightly. “It is like we have finally breached that last wall today: I can at last understand what you want me to do, and it is like a floodgate has been opened in my mind, and the torrent has swept me up and is pulling me along. I could not sit down and rest if I wanted to. If anything, I want to continue with our work.”

“I know. Such is the effect of true creation on the mind,” the fair one said quietly. “But you have to resist the urge. Your kind was not intended to do what you have done today; work like this – true creation – is usually reserved for a much higher order of beings. This kind of creation draws on your very being, and you have exhausted yourself today.”

“I am not that tired, Annatar,” Celebrimbor rebuked, but his tone was good-natured.

“You are. In fact, you are a hair's breadth away from depleting yourself completely,” Annatar replied sharply. “You have poured a lot of yourself into the prototype ring, but just in case you have forgotten I would like to remind you that there are limits to what you can give of yourself. You are not infinite, Tyelperinquar, and I will take it as a personal insult to me and my decision to teach you if you decide to wilfully drive yourself beyond your limitations, hollow yourself out, and become an empty husk due to a misplaced bout of over-enthusiasm.”

“I will be dead and you will feel insulted?” Celebrimbor laughed. “Why, that is something!”

“I fail to see how this is amusing,” Annatar said flatly. “I told you before that overstepping your limitations unprepared is no laughing matter.”

“How could I forget that? You scolded me like a schoolboy,” Celebrimbor replied with a chuckle. “Oh, don't give me that look. I know you are right. I will not do any more work tonight.” He leaned back.

Annatar did not look entirely convinced, but he let the subject go. They both sank into companionable silence, both following their own trains of thought.

“I want to try it again,” Celebrimbor suddenly said. His fingers were tapping against the silver goblet, and there was a slight tremor of barely contained energy in his voice. “The first and the second sets of Rings were good, but – there is more to Ring-making. Now we are merely containing power inside a Ring, but if we found a way so that the Ring and the Power might form an organic union, with the Ring acting not only as a vessel, but as a generator, like a magnetic coil where each loop strengthens the power that is already there – if we were to work this technique into a Ring, so that the structure of matter and the fabric of Song might complement and reinforce each other – ” The elf suddenly lapsed back into silence. “What are we doing, Annatar?” he asked, his voice slow and full of wonder, as if he had just awoken from a dream.

“We are making Rings,” Annatar replied. “We are learning, by trial and error, and we keep on improving on the ideas we have, extrapolating from the foundations of our knowledge to discover new theories, and implementing the things we find into our next course of experiments.”

“I figured as much.” Celebrimbor smiled wanly. “But what comes next?”

“As you said, we are going to create a third set.”

Celebrimbor righted himself. “Yes, but after that? How long can we go on doing this? Where will this lead? How high can we reach, and when will it end?”

“Why, Tyelperinquar,” Annatar replied and there was a challenging glint in his eyes as he gave Celebrimbor a long look over the rim of his own silver goblet, “this never has to end.”

“So we will just keep on creating more and more powerful rings, when even the first set is more powerful than anything that has ever been created on this side of the sea?” Celebrimbor pushed himself off the banister, slowly walking over to where his friend was standing. “You have been with us for five hundred years now, and you have shaped this city like no one else. You have raced us almost single-handedly into a new era of progress and prosperity. We keep surpassing ourselves again and again, at break-neck speed. What is your plan for us?” he asked with a sweeping gesture encompassing all of the city below them, and came to a halt but two steps from Annatar. “Where are you leading us?”

“Would you believe me,” Annatar replied, looking up at him, “if I told you I didn't know?”

“You don't?” Celebrimbor let his arm drop to his side.

“Has it never occurred to you that I might have run out of things to teach you a long time ago?” Annatar asked and a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth when he saw Celebrimbor's baffled look.

“Then what have you been teaching me all that time?” Celebrimbor asked.

“I've been learning and discovering everything alongside you for quite some time now. Almost every advantage of knowledge I had over you for the last two hundred years was just fleeting and temporary: things I discovered during an experiment with you, or insights our discussions had yielded to me only moments before,” Annatar replied.

Celebrimbor leaned onto the banister next to him, listening intently and never taking his eyes off his friend.

“When I came to Ost-in-Edhil, I had counted on curiosity and willing acceptance of what I had to offer. I challenged you to put your mind to a higher purpose, delighting in setting seemingly impossible tasks before you,” Annatar continued. “I was, however, not prepared for the sheer scope of your ambition and the insatiability of your desire to know more.”  He paused briefly, then continued, “I did not foresee that five hundred years hence, we would be standing here, on the threshold of a work that will be grander and more magnificent than anything ever created before on this side and beyond the sea. I never – “ He hesitated briefly. “I never expected to find someone quite like you: with your fire, your ambition, your vision.”

“My vision?” Celebrimbor repeated.

Annatar gave him a sideways glance, and there was a strange sheen in his eyes. “The vision of which you spoke to me two hundred years before, in this tower, on this very balcony. Arda restored, improved – ”

“ – healed, stronger and more beautiful than ever before,” Celebrimbor finished for him.

Annatar nodded. “I came here to offer Middle-earth my gifts, but what use would it have been if there had been no one to receive them? Do you have any idea what it means to find someone who not only carries the very same ambition within himself, but does not flinch back from taking the knowledge and measures needed to achieve it?”

“Yes,” Celebrimbor said.

Annatar looked up and their eyes met. The silence of the night descended upon them, and for a few moments the tower seemed far removed from the rest of the world. The city lay far, far below them; no sounds of the plazas and streets floated so far up here, and yet the stars above them were even further away: they were suspended in a strange place in between sky and earth.

“Yes,” Annatar repeated slowly, and the world returned and with it its warmth, fragrances, and sounds. “Of course you do.”

He looked down at the wine in his goblet, which was reflecting the brilliance of the stars in the dark sky above, then set it aside. “I don't know where we are headed, Tyelperinquar – for once, I am feeling my way forward, step by step, with just the slightest notion where it might lead us.”

“But we are close,” Celebrimbor said. “Very close.”

Annatar nodded.

“I want you to join me in making the Rings,” Celebrimbor said suddenly. “Not just by guiding me through the process, but by joining your power to mine. This third set is going to be the last. I will not create anything greater than them.” His voice sounded strange, and the words did not seem to be his own. A strange shadow was on his eyes, and maybe it was the veil of premonition beyond which he had involuntarily gazed. Celebrimbor blinked, and the shadow was gone. He regarded his hands again, and then he looked up at his friend. “I want us to make them together.”

Annatar made no answer. He stood frozen, his mouth slightly open as if to speak, but then he seemed to think otherwise and averted his face. “You are aware that this would entail us joining our minds and souls to attempt this task – completely and without reservation,” he said, and his tone was strangely devoid of inflection.

Celebrimbor shifted away, as if he had suddenly become aware of the indecency of either his proposal or his closeness to his friend. “If you do not want –”

“No,” Annatar said immediately. “It is just –” He broke off again, and the concern about his hesitation was plain on Celebrimbor's face. It was not like Annatar to interrupt himself, or to doubt and revisit his own words.

Annatar remained unmoving for a few moments, mastered himself and then begun anew. “Do you remember what I told you, that night on the tower?”

“We spoke of the Shadow inflicted on the world by Morgoth, and those marred by him. We spoke of my past, and you asked me not to inquire after yours. You said that you would tell me everything when the time is right,” Celebrimbor replied. “But Annatar, what does this have to do with the Rings?”

Annatar was standing next to the elf, ramrod-straight, every line in his body tense and taut like a bowstring. His gaze was fixed on something not in this world, and his mouth pressed into a thin line. Celebrimbor reached out to him, but reconsidered and drew his hand back.

The motion seemed to pull Annatar out of his stupor. With a visible effort of will, he forced the tension out of his frame and turned to face his friend. “If we are to attempt this, there are some things you must know beforehand.”

Celebrimbor set his goblet down on the banister next to Annatar's and took a step towards his friend. His motion spoke of excitement, but also of apprehension and he regarded his friend with cautious worry. “Then tell me.”

But Annatar did not make to either move or speak. His brow was creased in a frown, and he was looking at the embroidery on Celebrimbor's vest, an intricate pattern both of Elvish imagery of vines and patterns of Dwarvish geometry. Seemingly absent-minded, he reached out and traced his thumb over the golden stitches of the lapel of his friend's jacket, then let his arm drop back to his side again.

Celebrimbor watched him in silence for some time – then, “Annatar.”

Annatar looked up at him.

Celebrimbor held his gaze, and then extended his hand towards his friend. “Tell me.”

Annatar looked at his outstretched hand, and just then and there the whole world seemed to come to a halt, holding its breath, watching the precarious balance of the situation, and waiting to see to which side the scales would tip. The balance held for another few endlessly extended moments, then—

Annatar slowly raised his own hands and took both of Celebrimbor's in his, guiding them to his temples, and then mirroring it with his own hands. He pulled the elf closer until their foreheads were resting against each other and their mouths shared the same air, the breath of one fanning over the face of the other.

“Watch,” Annatar said.

There was a jolt that surged through Celebrimbor's body, and then his eyes were no longer seeing his friend, but staring out over the abyss of thousands upon thousands of years. Images raced past his eyes –

Void. Starlight. Darkness.

Betrayal.

The breaking of a sacred bond that was more than master and servant, almost father and son, a fate refuted, an alliance refused –

Flight - over a dark sea, dark waters, into a new land.

A small figure kneeling before a star-crowned mountain. A pledge, and a new bond –

A three-peaked fortress. Meandering hallways, going deeper, ever deeper, and unfolding at a logarithmic scale into a web of paths through hyperbolic geometry, space expanding exponentially no matter where you turned, descending into an ever-growing maze of madness and darkness –

A tower on an island, and a pack of wolves that was prowling near its walls. A desolate mountain and a winged figure, a wounded warrior falling to his knees before it and holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender –

Time seemed to accelerate, and the ancient landscape started to revolve around them: the two figures vanished, mountains rose and fell, trees grew and were cut down, constellations of stars raced across the sky in streaks of white fire. Forests grew and then retreated after the arrival of the first settlers, mountain slopes turned to quarries, and the foundation of a city was laid, and it grew and grew with breathtaking speed, walls, bridges, walkways, aqueducts – centuries and millennia raced past both of their eyes in a blur while Eregion changed around them, until the memories caught up with reality. Only then did the rapid passage of time slow, and finally ground to a halt in the present.

Neither of them moved.

Celebrimbor's eyes became clear again, and he slowly looked at Annatar, who was still clasping his head, and whom he was still holding onto in turn. Another few moments passed, another balance, teetering, swaying, leaning over to one side – and toppling.

Celebrimbor ripped his hands off Annatar's temples as if the contact had burned him. He stumbled back, his eyes wide and wild, and there was something in them that was broken – and a terrible horror flooded through the cracks, sweeping away everything in its way.

“No.” He stared at his hands, then at Annatar, but it was as if he did not recognise him any longer. “No. No.”

“Tyelperinquar – ,” Annatar attempted, but Celebrimbor started back from him, three hasty steps, until the banister of the balcony was at his back. Annatar took a step towards him. “Come now, don't be ridiculous.”

“You,” Celebrimbor croaked. “You are –”

“– still me. Nothing has changed.” He attempted a half-hearted smile, but it died on his lips when he saw Celebrimbor's face. “It was always me.”

Silence followed this sentence, while the implications it carried slowly sank in. “Always. All this time. And I let you – I allowed you –” Celebrimbor stared at him, and the Void itself was in his eyes. “Oh gods, what have I done? What have I done?”

“Tyelperinquar.” Annatar frowned and took another step closer, but Celebrimbor abruptly came back to himself.

“Come no closer!” he said. “Stay away from me!” His eyes were already becoming unseeing towards world around him. He was looking at events far, far away, as if the visions were still visible to him. “It was you,” he said. “My cousin Orodreth—Tol Sirion, Finrod, Maedhros, my kin, my blood. All of it was you.”

Annatar stopped in his tracks, and there was betrayal in every line of his body. “You wanted to know. You asked me to show you,” he said, his voice controlled. “And I did as you wished, because I thought you would understand –”

Tension. Silence. Then – “You thought – I would – understand – you,” Celebrimbor choked. “Oh gods. No.” He grasped the balustrade to steady himself.

“Yes,” Annatar said through gritted teeth, “I assumed you would understand, given your own history of the First Age was hardly glorious – given how grandly you once talked of forgiveness for everyone who would ask for it. Was it not you who said that there was no one in this city who did not have blood on their hands? And was it not you who claimed that you would welcome everyone who came to you, regardless of their past?”

Celebrimbor gripped the banister tighter, as if he feared the ground would break away beneath his feet. “You cannot mean to compare our deeds to what Sauron has—,” a pause, a sickening shift, as a new reality asserted itself, “—to what you have done.”

The lines of Annatar's face were hard. “How are your murders in any way less reprehensible than my own, Curufinwë?”

Celebrimbor made no answer. He was almost doubled over, he looked like he was going to be sick.

Annatar took a moment to rein in his mounting anger, to regain control of himself and summon everything he recalled of patience and of reason. “Tyelperinquar,” he said, his voice restrained, forcibly calm. “Think. I know you are overwhelmed, and I know this is a lot to take in, but think of the things we have made together. Think of the things we can still do. Do not destroy this over an unreasonable overreaction.”

“An overreaction?” Celebrimbor looked at him. His voice was strangely hollow, and it was obvious from his tone that he was not yet comprehending the situation fully – or perhaps he was not allowing himself to comprehend it. Annatar could see it in his eyes: how a numb part of him was desperately clinging to ignorance in the face of knowledge, averting its face from the revelation, his mind retreating into itself, away from the world. Celebrimbor's face was a mask when he asked, “Do you really think there could possibly an overreaction to what you have just shown me?”

Annatar paced to the other end of the balcony, then he abruptly turned around with a sweep of his robes. He gripped the marble banister so tightly his knuckles went white, as if he was trying to dig his fingers through the stone itself. He closed his eyes, breathed in, breathed out. “Tyelperinquar, you asked for my trust. You begged me to show myself to you. All I ever did was giving you exactly what you had asked of me.” He forced himself to let go of his grip on the banister and turned towards the elf again.

“You made a promise, Tyelperinquar. Was it not you who said that there was no one in this city who did not have blood on their hands? And was it not you who claimed that you would welcome everyone who came to you, regardless of their past?”

Celebrimbor's gaze lost focus, then he wrenched himself back from wherever his mind had fled.  “This is not what I meant when I said – ”

“'My line especially gives me no right to sit in judgement over the iniquity of all those others who bear the scars of Beleriand'¹,” Annatar quoted coldly. “What of it? What then did you mean by it if not this? You claimed that nothing that had once been tarnished was corrupted forever. You promised not to reject what had been touched by darkness, but embrace it.”

“Spiders and Void, Annat—” The name withered and died on his tongue. Celebrimbor grasped for air, for words, for anything that would allow him to continue. “I did not think of the lieutenant of Morgoth himself when I said this!” he said, and his voice almost broke.

“You spoke of forgiveness without reservations.” Annatar's voice was very quiet.

Celebrimbor did not answer. The elf was standing opposite of him, his head hanging, his eyes shadowed, his hands limp and dead at his sides. The elf did not look up at him when he said, “Some things cannot be forgiven.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

“I see,” Annatar said stiffly. “So this is the extent of Celebrimbor Curufinwion's goodwill, and the firmness of his resolve.”

“Leave.”

Annatar turned his head. Celebrimbor had slid down the banister and was sitting with his head buried in his hands.

“Tyelperinquar –” He made another attempt to reach out to him, in body and in spirit, but the elf was already halfway to his feet again, like a deer poised to flee.

“Leave!” Celebrimbor repeated, louder.

Annatar froze. Then, abruptly, he righted himself. “Fine.” He adjusted his robes and went to the open door of the balcony. He stopped on the threshold. “I guess I should count myself fortunate – at least I encountered your limitations before I decided to build anything of consequence on such a feeble foundation,” he said icily.

And yet he did not walk away, but stood rooted to the spot, unable to tear his gaze away from the hunched-over figure, doubled over, and gripping his own head in his shaking hands. “I thought you were different,” he heard himself say, not knowing where the words were coming from.

“I believed you –”

He interrupted himself. He could not say it.

“Leave,” Celebrimbor repeated for a third time, and his voice was broken, small, almost inaudible. “Don't come back.” The elf was not even looking at him.

Annatar left.

*

You come back to yourself after who knows how much time.  You are hurting, you are weak, but the anger is still there – fresh and burning like on the first day, even after all this time. You are in a cave, and you remember getting caught by the rangers who had found the hobbits the day before. You are bound, and there is little you can do except move your limbs experimentally within the small range of motion you have, getting used to the brittle bones, the old, atrophied muscle and the stiff tendons.

A guardsman watches you from his post, but he does not move or call out to you to hold still. Just as well. His presence does not bother you. After all, you do not need to be alone in order to keep a conversation private.

Speaking of “alone”.

You dig deeper into your own head, reckless and cruel, until you find what you have been looking for: a feeble spark of awareness, curled up like a wounded animal and flickering like a dying candle. It notices you approaching, but it is too weak to put up any resistance. In the blink of an eye you are upon it, smothering it. It rears up and tries to fight you, but in here you are invincible.

Do you remember what I told you about fortresses being destroyed from the inside? you ask kindly, while the small spark of consciousness is thrashing wildly to get free. I was initially going to let you make an example of the two hobbits, but your recent instability has convinced me that it might be a bad idea to leave such an important task in your hands. I shall take care of this myself. Besides, I think it will make for a much more poignant demonstration if I showed it to you directly. After all, it is always so much easier to understand an abstract concept when it is applied to oneself. Such a shame that the experience will be wasted on you, but well, one cannot have everything.

You press down harder. The spark is flickering.

Farewell, Sméagol.

The spark snuffs out.

 1 This quote as well as the entire conversation Annatar and Celebrimbor are referring to throughout their discussion can be found in Equinox.

Chapter Text

Cataclysm

(Downfall)

VII. Path Into Darkness

The men come back a little later, and you are dragged into a side cavern furnished with wooden chairs and a table. Hewn into the stone wall is a window facing west. The hobbits are there, and another man, tall of stature and fair of face. The hobbits avoid looking at you, but your eyes and those of the chief ranger meet, and there is you feel something like brief, bizarre recognition – like remembering someone from a dream, long ago, as seen through the distortion of a glass sphere – and then it is gone and you have no idea why you thought you knew him in the first place. His features are regal and proud, his stature and poise ooze virtue and nobility as disgustingly as a snail oozes slime.

You wonder how long it would take his rangers to react if you chose to attack him, and whether they'd drag you off him before or after you'd manage to rip his throat out.

“Look at me,” the ranger says. You stare aside stubbornly .

Next to you, Frodo Baggins shifts his weight uneasily. “Come now, Sméagol. He will not harm you, trust me. But you must do as he says and answer his questions truthfully!”

You glare at the hobbit. The nerve! To speak of trust after what he has done! But no, you must not forget your own counsel: the hobbits' time will come, and not too far in the future at that. When the moment has arrived, when you finally have them right where you want them, with the tables turned and the imbalance of power at last in your favour, then you will be able to delight in the sweet, sweet satisfaction of your revenge. You will reunite with your Precious, and justice will finally be restored to the world that has wronged you so grievously. It will not be brief, it will not be merciful, you intend to drag it out as long as you can –

—but that has to wait. Meanwhile, you should probably follow through with your act. It would not do to arouse suspicion prematurely. So you grind your teeth and then turn your head to look at the ranger.

“Do you know the name of this place? Have you been here before?” the ranger asks.

“No. We doesn't know and we doesn't want to know. Never came here; never come again.”

Of course, this is not enough. Frodo Baggins and the ranger do not stop before they have wheedled another promise out of you never to return to the damned lake. You play your part: you whimper and crouch and grovel at their feet, and you perform your melodramatic act so convincingly that you think you might just be sick in a corner if you have to say “Master” one more time.

And yet, it gets you what you wanted. Frodo Baggins vouches for you and takes you under his protection, granting you safe conduct through Ithilien and Gondor.

The ranger's brow creases at this and he gives you a hard look. “Frodo says you were his guide. Where were you leading him?”

“The Black Gate,” Frodo answers. “But it was closed.”

“There is no open gate into the Nameless Land,” the ranger says.

“Which is why we turned aside,” Frodo continued. “Sméagol said there is, or there may be, another path further south, across a high pass.”

“What is this pass he is speaking of?” the ranger asks, turning to you.

For a moment, you are silent. You have a fairly good idea where Sméagol wanted to lead the hobbits – digging through his decaying memories allows you to see him fleeing out of Mordor through tunnels, over mountain ridges, and down treacherous, steep stone stairs, bleeding, mangled, and terrified out of his mind. You recognise the pass. It is one of the few ways to pass out of and into Mordor unseen. You also know Sméagol would never have taken it, had he had any other choice. You are also fairly certain that it would be supremely unwise to share its name with the ranger. But just then —

“It is near Minas Ithil, a path that climbs the northern side of the vale where the old city stands,” Frodo adds suddenly.

You have sworn to restrain yourself from killing the hobbits until the time is right, but in the aftermath of Frodo's sentence you are sorely tempted to rip his head off then and there. (You don't think you have ever encountered a folk as meddlesome as hobbits – and you've known the Noldor as well as the descendants of the Men of Númenor. Apparently, the sole purpose of existence of halflings is to throw a wrench in your works.)

The ranger must have deduced the name of the path only an instant later, because his grey eyes darken like storm clouds. “Cirith Ungol,” he says. “Is that not its name?” He takes a threatening step towards you and you slink backwards.

“There is no other way,” you hiss. “Master says he must get in, so some way we must try. It is the only way. There is no other.”

“No other way?” the chief ranger asked. “How do you know that? Have you explored that dark realm so thoroughly?” His eyes are full of mistrust, his voice is ice. You want to strangle him. You glare at each other, but then he signals to another ranger who has been guarding the doorway. “Take him out, I want to have word with Master Baggins and Master Gamgee – alone.”

You are grabbed by your upper arm and another man roughly marches you out of the room and back into the part of the cave where you killed Sméagol. They chain you to an iron ring driven deep into the stone wall, but you do not try to escape. Instead, you sit down and stare at your guards until they uneasily avert their eyes and pretend to look at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, as if you weren't there.

Good. You can't stand being watched.

Time passes slowly. The guards change shifts, but they hardly pay you any attention. You likewise ignore them and wait in silence. You have a fairly good idea what the chief ranger is going to tell the hobbits: he will warn them of you, he will advise them not to take the pass, he will urge them to turn back and seek support in Gondor.

You know that they will do none of these things.

All the fools you have ever known had a way of running headlong to their own doom. And who were you to stop them?

“You are my advisor. You are forgetting your place.” Ar-Pharazôn's face is in the shadows. The curtains have been pulled against the setting sun, filtering its light through the fabric and plunging the throne room into blood-red dusk.

You turn around, hands steepled, the fingertips of each hand pressing against each other. “You asked me for my opinion, my king. My task is first and foremost to advise you sensibly, with only secondary regard for how pleasing you might find my counsel.”

The king waves you off. “Sensible advice – yes. But lately you have been doing nothing but criticise me at every turn. 'Don't do this, don't do that' – there are times when I believe you are turning into that nagging wife of mine.”

You arch an eyebrow.

Míriel does indeed prefer to be served truth over pleasantries, which is one of many reasons why she is twice the sovereign you will ever be.

You think it, and you almost say it, but in the end you bite your tongue and bow deeply.

“Correct me if I am wrong, my king, but I believe you once said you valued my honesty, especially when compared to the countless – what was the word you used? 'Lickspittles'? – that gathered around your throne.”

Ar-Pharazôn scoffs. “Lickspittles indeed. They grovel and compliment me to my face, and yet they are already plotting treachery behind my back.” He passes a hand over his face. It is still broad and strong, but on its back the veins are slightly more noticeable, the bones more pronounced, and here and there pale mottling has begun to appear on his skin.

You take note of all those little changes just like you acknowledge the slight stiffness with which the king moves in the early mornings, or the cautious glances he throws over his shoulder every time he turns a corner or encounters one of the Faithful. Careful looks, nightmares, food tasters being disposed of in weekly intervals – these are all keys on the disappointingly simple claviature that is Ar-Pharazôn, King of Númenor, which you can play blindfolded and with one hand tied behind your back by now. Paranoia is like a snake that you have planted in Pharazôn's heart. It is always hungry, wakes at the slightest prod, and needs nothing more than a few quiet words to feed it for weeks on end. And so—

“You are not as well-liked as you used to be,” you say carefully, feigning hesitation to entrust your king with your observation.

Pharazôn barks out a laugh. “I was never well-liked. The people of Númenor have hated me ever since the day I ripped the sceptre out of Míriel's hands. But what do I care for love? They hate me today, and they will still hate me tomorrow and for all other days to come – so why should I waste my time catering to their whims and begging for their favour? I don't need people to love me, I only need them to obey.” He slumps deeper into his throne, and drums his fingers on its armrests, looking for all the world like a petulant, spoiled child not getting his way. It reminds you so much of Melkor in his final, insane days that you have to quash the impulse to grab Pharazôn by his hair, drag him from the throne, out onto the gallery, and hurl him over the banister to shatter on the city streets three hundred feet below. You are fed up with having to deal with infantile imbeciles throughout the entirety of your existence.

Of course you do nothing of the sort. You have trained yourself too well for that. Instead you draw yourself up a little bit straighter, and if your smile is strained, it does not show when you answer, “A most astute observation.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Pharazôn grumbles.

“As you said, there is no sense in asking for love when it is not given willingly to begin with. Instead, you should approach the issue from the angle of power.”

“That's what I've been doing for years, and it's exactly what you have been nagging me about, because it was turning my subjects against me!” Pharazôn rights himself up. “In fact, it was you who proposed to keep my wife and the Faithful on a shorter leash, dispose of dissidents, expand my network of spies, cleanse the ranks of the High Council and reward the loyal ones who remained! This is your fault to begin with! So why are you talking of power to me now? Speak some sense, man!”

You look down at your left hand clenching and unclenching, allow yourself to imagine what it would be like to squash Pharazôn's skull between your fingers, then look back up at him with a placid expression. “I will, if my king is willing to hear me out.”

Pharazôn stares at you darkly, then waves his hand dismissively at you. “Speak then.”

You bow once more, and you almost retch with the sickening hypocrisy of your servile masquerade. “You were wise, my king, when you said your enemies were numerous. They are, and their cheek has grown along with the high opinion they hold of themselves. They feel safe, for they believe themselves under the patronage of higher powers – to those they turn their faces and from those they draw the courage and the impudence to defy you, lie to your face, and betray you. They do no longer see you as their highest sovereign – they are bowing to a higher power than Man, and nothing you could do will terrify them enough to stop the treason they are working behind your back. Nothing, except...”

You trail off, leaving the end of the sentence hanging enticingly in mid-air between you.

Ar-Pharazôn's eyes are wide and dark. The fading light of Telperion's radiance that had waned in his ancestors' eyes has finally been completely extinguished in Pharazôn.

“Except what?”

You step up to him, slowly, languidly, like a big cat. “Show them that you do not fear the wrath of their masters, and they will fear you. Declare yourself the servant of a higher patron than theirs.”

Pharazôn's eyebrows rise. “Higher than their precious Valar?”

“The highest.” A breeze lifts the soft curtains between the pillars of the hall, and light and shadows come to play over your face. You do not blink as the light hits your eyes, but you can feel your pupils constricting to pinpricks.

Pharazôn rises from his throne. “What you propose is beyond blasphemy.”

“Of course. It is beyond blasphemy, beyond belief, beyond all that religious nonsense that your wife is so intent on dragging into your state affairs. I am talking about politics. I am talking about means of swaying the masses. I am talking about ruling. This is not blasphemy – this is strategy.”

“You propose that I proclaim myself an ally of the Foe of the World – calling this insanity a strategy is an insult! I should have expected no more from Morgoth's most faithful hound! If you have nothing else to offer, you can – ”

“ – if my king would just let me finish,” you say between gritted teeth. You are getting tired of this. You came to Númenor because you were bored and hoped for a challenge to allay the inevitable tedium of the undisputed rule of a god-king. Contrary to what most people believe of you, you have always liked to play – and over the years, boredom has become your greatest enemy.

But soon it became clear that there was no challenge to be had in Númenor (too easy, too easy, despite Míriel's valiant efforts), and tedium and annoyance are your steady companions at the back of your mind more often than not. But you have promised yourself to see this through properly. This promise and your pride are the only reasons why the mighty Ar-Pharazôn is not a smear of blood, entrails, and shit on his own marble floor.

“If you want to rule, you cannot afford inhibitions,” you say. “You must put your mind to it entirely, or not at all. You flinch away from my suggestion not because you have a reason to do so, but because it has become ingrained in all of your brains that this is the right thing to do. You still adhere to arbitrary rules ordained by distant gods and dare not question them. Do not to do this! It is the downfall of all reason and the death knell of free will! Don't let misplaced squeamishness jerk you away from sensible thought. Think, my king. Who told you that questioning the Powers was wrong?”

You can almost see the gears turning in Pharazôn's head and you smirk.

“Awfully convenient, isn't it, that the gods themselves dictated to you the rules of rightful dominion? Meanwhile, your people have been living under the yoke of gods they haven't seen in hundreds and thousands of years. They have been sacrificing to uncaring, cold powers who have long since turned their back on them. Is this the state of affairs you want to preserve? Did you not have great plans for yourself and for this world? But change can at times only be achieved by rebellion - rebellion against the status quo. The Valar have taught you to fear and condemn rebellious thoughts that might endanger their rule. By now these ways of life have become so ingrained in your brains that breaking out of them seems inconceivable – but it is not. Rebellion is not wrong if the cause is just – and have you not every reason to renounce those who left you here on these hither shores to fight and rot and die?”

Pharazôn opens his mouth, remains in this unflattering state for a few moments, and then closes it again.

“Do you know,” you say quietly, “who was the first to see the injustice in this system?” You wait, measuring the pace of your pauses, the rhythm of your reveals. Everything is music, every plan is a symphony, and you are not a bungling amateur to allow even a single dilettantish mistake to enter your composition. “Of course you do. We and I both know it. Have you ever considered that his initial cause might have been just, whatever became of him later?”

Pharazôn opens and closes his mouth again, and he looks like a stranded fish doing so. You don't think you have ever despised him more than in this moment of indecision, dithering, and stupidity.

“Take heart, my king,” you say and although it disgusts you beyond belief, you reach out and lay a hand on his shoulder. “I know there is enough courage and strength of will in you for this undertaking. Look beyond your teaching and grooming to see clearly for once; think about Melkor, and what his deeds really meant. He was the first one who dared to go against the great design and leave his own imprint on it. He was the first to turn away from the beaten path and challenge an authority that claimed absolute power for itself and demanded unquestioning obedience of everyone else, although it had never done anything to prove that it deserved either. Was that not a just cause? Must just authority not be strong enough to withstand a challenge – no, even invite it, for true power provides its own legitimisation without fear of failure? Is a power that suppresses and condemns such acts not a sign of injustice? And is rebellion not the duty of the unjustly oppressed?”

Pharazôn has been listening to you intently, and although you speak fairly quickly, you can see he is keeping up – and you can feel the darkening of his mind.

“You never cared much for the gods, did you?” you ask quietly.

“No,” Pharazôn says.

“Have you ever stopped to wonder why?”

Pharazôn does not answer. He does not need to. His eyes are glazed in introspection, and you know that he now has at last all the justification for his irrational hatred of the Valar that he has ever needed. Not an impressive feat, for you have practically had to spoon-feed it to him – but no matter. The seed has been planted, and spreading it among the people will be Pharazôn's task.

“Surely you do not fear them, my king?” you ask, your tone just in the middle between disbelief and mockery, just right to edge him on.

The beautiful thing about Ar-Pharazôn, you think, is that he always reacts exactly as predicted. Even now, he goes through all the motions you have foreseen: he is puffing up like an outraged bird, his shoulders stiffening, his hands clenched into fists, his brows creased into a frown.

“Of course not! Never!” he barks.

Your own face immediately turns serious again. “Then lay aside your prejudices and the things you think you know about the gods, and answer me this: is there any better patron for your own rebellion, your great change, than the one who rose against Eru Ilúvatar himself?” you ask – quiet, insistent.

Ar-Pharazôn's hands are opening and closing. “What would you have me do, Tar-Mairon?” His tone is thinly veneered with mocking, but there is an insecure undercurrent beneath. He has handed the reins over to you, he is relying on you to make this decision for him.

You bite back a feral smile and bow again.

“Make Melkor your patron. Show your colours, do it openly and proudly. Nothing deters men quicker than a leader who does not believe in what he is advertising to his people. Build him a temple to show your wife you are serious. And while you are at it, expose the Valar as the tin gods they are. Show the people that they have been putting their trust in ghosts. Show them that you do not desire the mockery of compassion and the travesty of vestiges of Aman the Valar have fobbed your people off with.” You nod in the direction of the circular terrace where Nimloth is standing in full bloom. “Burn that bridge. Burn the tree.”

The smacking noise when Pharazôn backhands you across the face resounds through the entire throne room, rebounding from the pillars and the arched ceiling.

“Your cheek is truly unbelievable,” Pharazôn snarls.

You drag the heel of your hand across your lower face, and it comes away bloody. This is for show, of course, for no one could hurt you unless you allowed it. But right now it is important for Pharazôn to believe that he has nothing to fear from you – fear hinders your plans, whereas anger propels them forward. He has to believe that he can still wound you and command you and yank you around like a dog on a chain, and that the only thing you can do about his temper is to powerlessly accept it.

You regard him calmly, and you see yourself succeeding. “I take that as a dismissal.”

“Damn right you'll take it as one,” Pharazôn growls. “I don't want to see your visage in this throne room ever again unless I call on you first. Get out.”

You bow again. “As you wish.” You turn around and walk out of the throne room.

Pharazôn remains behind, seething with fury and outrage over your proposal.

The corners of your mouth pull upward, despite the blood that is still running from your nose and your split lip. The seed of doubt has been planted; now all you have to do is wait for your king to cave.

“Lord Faramir was right, Mister Frodo,” Sam says, while he clambers through a thicket of thorns. “We should not take this path, especially not since it is one Gollum has used. Who knows what kind of paths this slinker prefers to a good, honest road!” He is speaking loudly, either believing you out of earshot or simply not caring whether you overhear their conversation or not.

“Would that we had a choice in the matter,” Frodo replies. “But there are no good, honest roads into Mordor, Sam. I do not like the sound of Cirith Ungol either, but you heard Sméagol: he said there was no other way.”

“And you believe that?” Sam muttered, but he did not say anything else and both hobbits fell silent.

Well, to be precise, not everything you have told them was a lie. Within reasonable distance, Cirith Ungol is the only way into Mordor where one could hope to avoid detection. What you have wisely withheld from them is that the path climbs the mountains, and then splits in two. One path leads over the mountain ridges, past the Orcish stronghold there, and then down into the valley beyond, meeting a path that runs between the Ephel Dúath and the Morgai. It is, you are quite sure, the way Sméagol intended to lead the hobbits into Mordor.

Then there's the second path: the one that goes below the mountains, and there branches out into a nightmarish maze of tunnels, nearly impossible to navigate, let alone escape from.

This is the path that you all will take.

You slink out from beneath the underbrush and onto the beaten path, about twenty feet ahead of the hobbits. Sam startles and glowers at you, but Frodo only gives you the rueful half-smile that seems to be the only expression he has had for you since his betrayal.

You grin at him and give him a cheery wave – forgiven and forgotten, my friend! (Hah, as if !) – and then you turn around, heading south, where Minas Morgul lurks in waiting between two spurs of the Ephel Dúath and where the long hidden stairway climbs up the cliff to the tunnels under the mountains, and you start to sing:

Oh kitty, oh puss

what's with all the fuss?

What have you there in your paws?

Oh, soft-paw, meow!

I do see it now!

It's a mouse struggling there in your claws!

It crawled unaware

from its hole just to stare

its own death right into her eyes!

And oh little mousey,

isn't it lousy,

that cats do so love to hunt mice!

Oh, look how it's quaking,

how it's squeaking, escaping!

Trying in vain to return to its hole!

But the kitty is faster,

light-pawed hunting master,

And she swallows the little mouse whole!

Oh mousey, oh mouse,

shouldn't have left your house,

Should have stayed in your mouse-hole instead!

For daring's a price

and for dumb little mice,

it is death in the claws of a cat!

“Has he gone mad?” Sam asks quietly.

“Let him sing,” Frodo says. “I think he is just happy.”

Chapter Text

VIII. The Sundering

 You lead the hobbits through Ithilien, orienting yourself by your own tenuous memories of the place and Sméagol's more recent ones. Sméagol’s memories, however, are just about as useful as they are distracting, because they keep resurfacing at random, often inopportune moments; and when you come back to yourself you find you are mumbling about incoherent things and talking to someone who is not there. At times it gets so bad that you run off into the underbrush in order to hide away from the hobbits, clutching your head in your hands and rocking back and forth on your heels until the memories go away.

It gets worse when you fall asleep. You dream fitfully, restlessly – sometimes of fire, sometimes of darkness. They are not your friends – wherever you try to turn, you are consumed, and there is no middle-ground between those walls of void and flame. And always, always, there is someone following you, some shadow you can only ever see out of the corner of your eye, someone, something that wants to take something from you.

You awake screaming.

“They took it from us! Kill them, kill them both!” You twist around and whip all fours under you like a cat, breathing heavily and then your brain catches up with you, and you hastily look around to see whether you've woken up the hobbits.

They are huddled amidst scrubby bushes near a stagnant pool, and neither of them has moved. “Stupid! Idiot! Be quiet!” you hiss and slink away. “We must not wake them now, we must not ruin it.”

“They suspect us,” you throw in, sidling towards the edge of a little pool.

“What, getting cold feet now? Are you losing your nerves?” you sneer, and throw your own reflection a deprecating look.

You calm down again, regain your sleep-harried nerves. You regret your outburst, and you feel – not shame, but anger. Sleep isn't good for you. The Dreaming is haunted, and all its ghosts are sicced on you – small wonder you feel ever more deranged every time you awake. Recently, you seem to drag dregs of the Dreaming with you into the waking world, because strange things keep happening and you have trouble understanding why.

Like now.

You look at your reflection, which is at the same time yours and not yours. It does not show you your miserable, wrinkled, dried-up face – it shows you yourself .

An eldritch face gazes up at you out of the water, with burning eyes and a fiery stone upon its brow. That's not you now, you think. That's you ages ago—

You almost shrink back from yourself before you notice how ridiculous that would be. Your reflection seems to have noticed, because there is still that snide quirk around its mouth and its—your face transforms and assumes a vaguely human shape. Still regal, still cruel, but less hot. Colder, but not yet diminished.

“Are you losing your nerves?” your reflection says.

“No!” you snarl.

“Do not tell me you are having second thoughts regarding the hobbits.”

“Of course not. That was Sméagol, not me.” You grimace; the name alone tastes like carrion on your tongue. Thank fate – no, thank yourself that this miserable maggot is gone. “I hate them. I want to see them – dead.”

“Good.” The expression of your reflection darkens. “Letting your feelings get in the way would be beyond ridiculous. It happened once. It will not happen another time. As it was, we also were able to get rid of bothersome things once, and we can do it again.”

– you bring down the hammer on the hand and the bones shatter to splinters in Celebrimbor's maimed fingers.

The elf screams. He is still fighting, after all that you have done to him. He still refuses to give in. He is still fighting you, despite the countless times you've explained yourself, with honeyed words and, when that did not work, with whetted knives. Despite the fact that he has no right – no right – at all – he's still defying – you –

Why – won't – he – stop – defying – you?

“Give them to me!” you roar, all pretence of composure forgotten.

There is a dull sound when your hammer hits bruised and purpled flesh, and then - not silence - but - a horrible wheezing sound.  Celebrimbor is fighing for each breath like a drowning man and then - unbelievable, how dare he? - he is laughing. His voice sounds like a grater dragged over metal, all screeching and splintered and broken.

You let your hammer sink and look at him with your head cocked to one side. Maybe you've done it at last. Maybe you have broken him.

You think at the same time -

Finally.

and

This is wrong.

Celebrimbor's next words, however, are annoyingly—fortunately—clear and calm.“Oh Annatar.” He sighs and pauses, his open chest heaving, his heart beating a sickly drumbeat against the bone-cage of his exposed ribs. He looks at you, and there is something in his gaze: something strange, something bewildered, as if he is not quite sure how both of you got here - him battered and broken on his own former worktable, you standing before him with his blood-spattered tools, which you have alienated from their original purpose and put to new, gruelling use in a way they were never meant to be used.

"The Three, Annatar," he almost whispers.

You drop your hammer and lean forward, taking his face in both of your hands. "Yes, Tyelpe - yes?" Your voice is urgent, your thoughts are boiling over - finally you can end this, finally this ghastly ordeal is over and you will be able to put this regrettable episode behind you, finally you will be able to fix - this - mess -

Celebrimbor breathes in, breathes out. Shuddering. Weak. "I made them with our knowledge. With what we found together."

"I know you did." You unstick a blood-clotted, stiff strand of dark hair from his forehead and push it behind his ear - behind where his ear will be once more, once you've put him back together.

"But," he opens his bloody mouth again and says, “The Three ... I made them with my heart, my hands, my soul - ”  His voice breaks on the last word. Something wet is glittering in the corners of his eyes and he is not looking at you, but at the skylight above both of your heads, which has somehow remained intact throughout the siege, the catapults, and the fights.

Then he looks back at you, looks directly at you for the first time since - since that night on the tower and—

There is something in his eyes, something vicious, as if he is suddenly looking for a way to hurt you – he is gauging what to say, hacks up another clump of blood, and then—

"Cut me up, scream and shout, and stomp your foot all you want, but it won't change the one fact that the Three - they are mine."  A pause, another breath. "And so, by rights, should be the One.” And then he spits in your face.

And in this moment it is over.

You descend upon him in a storm of fury, fire, and iron. “It is mine! It is mine!”

“Quiet!” your reflection hisses.

Your chest is heaving with anger that was once yours, seconds ago – thousands of years ago? It doesn't matter.

“We must get it back,” you say.

Your reflection nods, a jerky, impatient movement. It is peculiar, watching yourself from a stranger's perspective: the haughty way how you once held your adorned head, the ambiguous twist around your mouth, which could be either the beginnings of a sardonic smile or a contemptuous frown, the air of self-assured superiority with which you carried yourself.

“Patience,” your reflection says. “Do you have a plan?”

“I'll lead them to her,” you reply. “Up the stairs, the windy stairs, up up up we go – ” You interrupt yourself when you notice you are blabbing like a dimwit. You press the heel of your bony hand to your forehead, breathe in, breathe out – there, that's better.

“Up the stairs,” you repeat, seriously this time. “Into the tunnel.”

Your reflection's eyes light up with realisation and grim glee. “Ah, the tunnel. Yes. When they go in, there will be no coming out. She is always hungry, poor kitten. She must have had nothing but orc meat for quite a while.” Again, the quirk around the mouth, again, the darkening of golden eyes to a dull, demonic orange-red. “And when she throws away the bones and empty clothes – ”

“– I will find it and take it for me!” you say gleefully and cackle, but fall silent when you notice your reflection is not laughing along.

There is an awkward pause.

“You mean 'us',” your reflection says.

You clear your throat. “Yes, I meant … us.” No need to tell yourself you're not honest about it. You are going to take the Ring. For yourself. Alone. You're not going to share it with yourself. (Something in this sentence does not quite add up, but you are too distracted to care.)

“It will be ours,” you continue, faux-affably, “once the hobbits are dead.”

And then Sam Gamgee smashes your skull with a piece of cutlery.

There is a gong –

– as the bells at the top of the bell-tower of the temple of the Valar start tolling.

“The temple has been standing here ever since the founding of Númenor,” Ar-Pharazôn says.

You lift your gaze from the reflection of Nimloth in the fountain, which paints a dancing and rippling mosaic of light and shadow in the evening light that stirs and distorts every time the breeze grazes over the surface of the water. You turn to look up at the proud building of marble, ivory and gold, announcing the Valar's presence even here, so far from the Blessed Lands.

“You would not have to tear it down,” you say, your tone conciliatory, soothing. “It could remain as it is, except for small adjustments. We would just have to change the colour scheme along with the dedication of the temple.”

“Colour scheme?” Ar-Pharazôn asks, giving you a side-glance.

“White, ivory, and blue. Those are Manwë's colours. Sapphires are the gemstones of the West, the evening, and the wind. It would be considered improper to retain them after changing the god your temple is dedicated to.”

“Do gods really care about something as material and banal as gemstones?” Pharazôn asks, frowning.

You give him a bright, radiant smile that makes Pharazôn squirm subconsciously, which is exactly the effect you wanted to achieve. “My king, you must be aware that divine wars have been led over a few petty trinkets. In the history of this world, continents have been sunk, towns pulverised, and entire peoples eradicated over a handful of glittering gems. The gods are petty and superficial, did you not know that?”

Pharazôn's face is unreadable as he turns his face to look back up the tower, where the silver bells are tolling in dizzying heights. Seagulls circle the spires, their mournful cries the ever-present sad symphony of Númenor. There is no escaping the damn birds, nowhere on this forsaken island is far enough from the sea.

“What – ” Pharazôn hesitates, then collects himself and asks again, “What are his colours and gems?”

“His is the inverse of the colourless light when all primary colours stand in perfect equilibrium and at a perfect focal point. The perfect cancellation of wavelengths, the flawless eradication of the spectrum – ” You interrupt yourself, when you notice Pharazôn's strange glance, and you have to remind yourself that you are not talking to Cele—that you are not talking to someone who knows even the first thing about colour theory and spectral physics. “The opposite of light. Perfect darkness.”

“So, black?”

“Black will do. It is as good an approximation as we are going to be able to achieve.”

“And his gems?” Pharazôn looks uncomfortable, as if he did not want to be asking the question at all. He has been looking uncomfortable ever since you came here to discuss the possibility of a temple of Melkor.

This time, your smile is sinister and you do not try to hide it. “Can you not guess the answer to your own question? There are only three that count.”

“I regret to inform you that I have no Silmarils here in my pockets nor anywhere else on this island,” Pharazôn replies.

“A pity. Well, excepting the Silmarils, he did never care much for gems anyway,” you say. “He was always more fond of iron and ore, because he regarded them as much more useful for a wider variety of purposes, and I am inclined to agree with him on that.”

“You cannot seriously intend to replace the sapphire mosaics with iron bands.”

You almost laugh at that. “No. Remember, this is about you and your subjects, and how they perceive you. We are doing this for the men, not for the gods. This is not about how divine laws dictate it should be, this is about how to evoke the desired awe and reverence … and fear.”

Pharazôn does not even react to the lack of honorifics. He just stares at the temple as if, with enough willpower, he could just wish it to disappear entirely. For once, you have to agree with him: the world would be better off without gods. But since they were already here and, to your knowledge, not about to leave any time soon, you might as well utilise them for your own means and ends.

“So which gemstones should we use?” Pharazôn asks. His wavering voice and insecure and recurring use of 'we' is almost endearing. A little child caught off balance in the body of an ageing man.

You ponder it for a bit. You think of Utumno and Angband, those dreadful fortresses buried under leagues and leagues of snow and ice and stone, and wonder which gem could do the lair of your old master justice. You can think of none; none Melkor would appreciate, because all those lesser stones would fade and their light would go out in the darkness under his mountains. But the darkness of Angband had not been enough to dim the splendour of the Silmarils, no matter how deep Melkor carried them under the mountain.

You have always believed the reason for his obsession with the Silmarils was because they were the only stones able to fight and hurt him. Melkor did not like them, contrary to what many believed. He hated them with a passion that was fiercer than a lover and more devoted than a priest. He hated them as the incarnation of Varda; he hated them with the unique and intimate passion of how one hates his arch-enemy: the one being that is in every aspect your equal, and alongside which you could never hope to live, but without which you were always doomed to remain incomplete – because they were your other half, your nemesis, the light to your darkness, the antithesis by which your thesis was defined.

You notice you are turning the Ring on the finger of your right hand, and you immediately drop your hands back to your sides.

No, Melkor did not like any gems. In the end, he did not like anything at all. He only hated indiscriminately and craved possessions of others because he was loath to leave a treasure to someone else when he could have it instead. The Silmarils had been his one desire, but since they are long lost and since you frankly no longer care about your old master's hypothetical opinions –

“Rubies,” you say. “We shall cover the temple in velvet and rubies. Black and scarlet, now wouldn't that be a sight?”

It is in this moment that the doors of the temple swing open and Tar-Míriel, Queen of Númenor, daughter of kings and the rightful heir to the throne, steps out onto the stone steps leading up to the entrance. Shrouded in white and adorned with diamonds as she is, she seems like a sprig of Nimloth come to walk about in human form as she stops at the top of the stairs, tall and unyielding, and looks down upon them where you are both standing in the courtyard. Ladies and men clothed in white flank her, and she stands at their front like a commander in front of her army.

“Husband, beloved!” she says and she spreads her arms wide. “Long has it been indeed since we had the pleasure of welcoming you in the temple. What brings you here on this fine evening?”

“I am visiting the site where I will build my temple, dear Zimraphel,” Pharazôn retorts with acidic courtesy, and even gives her a mocking bow.

“Why, you are going to build a temple?” She laughs. “We shall make one of the Faithful of you yet! But where will you build it? The courtyard is quite occupied as it is.”

“You stand upon my temple's doorstep, beloved,” Pharazôn says and his false smile spreads into a genuine, disgusting grin when her face falls. Her arms fall to her sides.

“What do you mean by that?” she asks.

“I mean exactly what I said. You are standing on the steps of my new temple. You've had it for long enough; it is mine now, and I intend to change a few things about our faith.”

Míriel is not so badly bred that she loses her composure, but you can see the tightening around her mouth and the shadow shrouding her expression.

“Are you not tired of praying to the same silent gods and receiving no answer over and over again? Tar-Mairon here,” Pharazôn gestures towards you, “opened my eyes to the futility of praying to deities who will never answer. I shall have no more of this waste of time in my city, so I chose a new patron for my kingdom and my lineage, someone who is worth bending one's knee to.”

Míriel's eyes flit over to you, and then back to her husband. You know she understands, because suddenly there is a terrible wrath in her face, and then she is descending the steps with great urgency until she comes to stand before her husband. Her entourage watches her anxiously from the top of the steps. “My king,” she says, quietly, so that no one else might hear them, “I have not heard what you spoke of before, but I think I can guess it well enough. I can believe that this snake has ensnared you enough to keep him close to you at court and elsewhere, but I thought that not even you would be blind enough to see that you are paving the path to your own doom.” She pauses. “Calion, you are not going to build a temple dedicated to Morgoth, are you?”

Ar-Pharazôn's jaw is set. His anxiousness is gone, forgotten over the anger against his wife. He looks up at the stragglers in front of the temple. “What are you standing there and gaping like fish? Go home!”

When they have hurriedly gathered up their skirts and togas and left the courtyard, he turns back to his wife. “Every time you tell me what I cannot do, Zimraphel, I feel inclined to do it just to prove to you that I can indeed do as I wish in my kingdom, on my land, in my city.”

“I know you can do everything you want, or else I would not worry for the fate of our kingdom,” she says. “Calion – I acknowledge your power. Listen to me! I acknowledge you taking the crown and the sceptre from me, and taking me as your wife. I acknowledge all of this – however little I might like it, and thus I beg of you, my king,” she says, “I beg of you to think. You are about to pledge yourself to Morgoth! We share the same blood – think of what he has done to our ancestors! Has he ever spread anything but illness, plague, and death?”

“He has power,” Pharazôn says.

“And he does not share it,” Míriel says, and her voice is steel. “He takes, Calion. He does not give. He does not protect. He razes, maims, steals, and kills. Do you really choose such a deity as your patron? Have you come so far that you regard the Enemy as someone worthy of even one shred of your faith?”

Pharazôn is silent, and you feel the need to step in to salvage the situation from taking a turn for the undesirable.

“My king, I assure you, none of these allegations are true. If you wish we can discuss this la—”

“Silence, advisor,” Míriel interrupts. “Have you not been taught to hold your tongue in the presence of your king and your queen?” She turns away to face her husband once more, leaving you thoroughly reprimanded and immediately forgotten like an ill-behaved child.

“Do not do this, Calion,” she says. “Anything but that.”

“Why should I not?” Pharazôn says dismissively.

“Because this is obviously about power, and I can give you anything that you hope to achieve on this dark path right here and now, and more.”

Both Pharazôn and you stare at her incredulously.

“What?” Pharazôn asks. “What could you have to offer me?”

“My friendship,” Míriel says curtly. “You are no fool, Pharazôn. You and I both know that this kingdom is divided to its very core. You rule the people, but I rule their hearts. You are nothing without me. Were it not for me keeping the balance, you would have uprisings within the week, and the court members would slaughter you in your sleep or poison you at the banquet. And all that building that temple for Melkor would achieve would be a deeper divide, and it might be the last straw for some of your enemies to take matters into their own hands.”

“Are you threatening me?” Pharazôn growls.

“I am giving you a realistic perspective, and I am offering to help you,” Míriel says. “You had me as an opponent for years. I offer you now to have me as an ally and an advisor. I shall no longer oppose you, but help you in your rule – or stand aside silently, if you so wish. I will even publicly back up the claim of your line to the throne. If you have me, you'll truly have the crown. Your court will stand united, and your rule undisputed. And,” she takes a breath, as if she had been saving this for last, “you shall have the Faithful.”

You dare to take a look at Ar-Pharazôn's face, and what you see –

– is your work of years tumbling down, the delicate web of persuasion and lies that you have woven tear and break.

“After all these years, I will have you as my king,” Míriel says and when she takes Pharazôn's hands, he does not pull them away. “Will you have me as your ally?”

Ar-Pharazôn does not speak. You do not need to read his thoughts to know what is going through his head. Pharazôn, at his core, is a businessman. He will always take the way of lesser risk and greater yield, and it is obvious which one of your offers will cost him less and earn him more. What is accepting your estranged wife back into your service compared to pledging yourself to a dark god?

You watch Míriel with narrowed eyes, and you realise that she has been playing him the same way you have been playing him: appealing to his fears, catering to his desires, offering him seductive solutions – only that her solutions were easier, her offer for help earnest, and her salvation did quite ironically not involve any gods that Pharazôn loathed.

You realise that, like so often, two can play the same game – and you have to admit that this time, she has played it better than you.

You have been outmanoeuvred.

Manipulative, cunning, ruthless Míriel. There are times when you are torn between wanting to kiss or to kill her; your unwilling admiration for a formidable opponent waging war with your loathing of someone who has outdone you in a field of your expertise.

Míriel stands before her husband with one arm spread wide and another hand extended toward him, and after a long hesitation, Pharazôn steps forward. They embrace in the formal conciliatory way of two hostile generals after the end of the war, their right hands clasped, and their left arms laid about each other's shoulders.

You try your best to keep your face blank, even though you feel like tearing the city apart with your bare hands.

– for a brief moment, everything is stark black and white, then you feel yourself rolling over the rocky ground – and you find your feet again. Something is screeching horribly, and after another moment has passed you realise that the hobbit is yelling at you from the top of his lungs.

“You treacherous little toad!”

And suddenly Sam Gamgee is no longer hitting you with his frying pan, but throws himself at you with the entirety of his far greater weight and pins you to the ground. It takes you so utterly by surprise, you do not even defend yourself at first, which gives him ample opportunity to rain punches down on you and box your arm, your chest, your ears, all the while screaming at you.

And then someone else is screaming, and this time it is you – and you are crying for Frodo, of all people, because you are stuck in this horrible, weak, rotten sack of bones and meat, and you cannot even lift the fat hobbit off you without help and you might die here, on the stones next to a stinking pool of stagnant water, brained by the frying pan and little fists of an overweight peasant a third of your original height –

The look of betrayal that passes over Sam's face when Frodo pulls him off you almost makes it worth the humiliation. Almost.

“Sam! No! Leave him alone!”

Sam flails, and you scuttle away, putting Frodo between him and yourself. But Sam does not give up and tries to get past his master, to you.

“I heard it from his own mouth! He means to murder us!” Sam cries.

So he has overheard you talking to yourself.

You really should have known better than to speak loudly of your plans. You hesitate briefly and wonder why you didn't.

Your thoughts are interrupted by Sam making another lunge at you.

You realise that you have to act, or your part in this increasingly unamusing farce might be over before you can put your plan into action. But in order to do this, you first have to survive. You shrink back, crouching down and whining in a pitiful voice, “No, no, Sméagol wouldn't hurt a fly! Done no evil, said no evil! He's lying! He's a horrible, fat hobbit who hates Sméagol and tells nasty lies!”

If Sam's looks could kill, you would have dropped dead with your meat dripping in acidic puddles from your bones this very instant. “You miserable little maggot! I'll stove your head in!”

Frodo puts his shoulder against Sam, holding him back with his entire weight and shoves him back with surprising force.

“Sam! Stop!”

“He called me a liar, Mister Frodo! A liar! He's the liar!”

“Sam, if you scare him off, we're lost!” Frodo cries.

At those words, the fight suddenly goes out of Sam, and he stumbles back, breathing heavily. There are tears glistening in his eyes. “I don't care about that. I can't do this, Mister Frodo – waiting around for him to kill us, because that's what he wants to do!”

“I cannot send him away,” Frodo says. “I will not send him away.”

Sam stares at Frodo, lost and helpless and on the verge of crying. Disbelief and weakness are painted all over his round face, and you would laugh at him in contempt and disgust, if your act could afford such a break of character.

“Don't you see it?” Sam says. “Don't you see it? He is evil, he's a villain!”

“We cannot do this by ourselves, Sam,” Frodo says. “I cannot do this without both you of you. I need a guide, and I need you on my side.”

“I am on your side, Mister Frodo,” Sam replies quietly.

“I know that. Come now,” Frodo says and puts an arm around Sam's shoulder. Sam's face softens for a few moments, but it hardens immediately once Frodo turns and beckons you to follow as well. “Come, Sméagol. You too.”

You slink forward, leaning onto bruised knuckles and favouring your right side, because the ribs on your left side are hurting so badly, they'll probably be black and blue tomorrow from the beating you received.

You start walking side by side, and the look Sam gives you is full of anger and helpless hate.

You return the look, but the hate in your eyes is deathly instead.

Míriel gives you a cool glare over the shoulder of her husband, and you return it with a forced smile that holds neither warmth nor goodwill. It is a death threat wrapped in gift-cloth, like a dagger in a velvet sheath.

You and her both know that you are nearing your endgame. She is better than you ever gave her credit for, despite your cautiousness not to take her lightly. You have made the mistake of dismissing her as a cunning, but ultimately silent sufferer who would turn to the gods for help and pity, and not throw herself into the snake den of politics if it became necessary. But it seemed like the queen was willing to get her hands dirty if the stakes were high enough.

You have underestimated her, and it will not happen again.

Besides, you are tired of this game.

It is about time to rid yourself of this nuisance.

***

You are no longer liked. You are no longer trusted.

Frodo knows that you want the Ring.

Pharazôn knows that you have been using him for your own ends.

Fortunately, you were always good at turning a loss into a victory. Your prey does not have to trust you, or even like you.

They just have to trust your enemies less.

You start by sowing seeds of distrust, by turning their paranoia of you against themselves.

The hobbits climb the stairs carved into the sheer cliff. They are exhausted and afraid, with Minas Morgul at their backs and Mordor ahead of them. When Frodo's foot slips and he threatens to fall, you are there and catch him by the wrist. You can see the flicker of fear in his eyes, and you see the moment when it is replaced by shame – shame because he thought you would push him off the ledge or let him fall. Good – good. Let them be ashamed of suspecting you at every turn. Make them doubt themselves instead of you, and with their gaze turned inward on themselves, they will never see you coming.

You are nothing but courteous in Míriel's presence. Her appointment as a council member has caused an outcry throughout Armenelos, but it is unclear whether the astonishment is born of joy or scandalisation. She is the first woman to ever hold a council seat, and Númenoreans are nothing if not obstinate about their patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, she is well-loved and trusted, contrary to every other council member, and for the first time in years, the people of Númenor have a representative in the immediate vicinity of the king who has the commoners' best interests in mind.

Ever since Pharazôn, who has turned unwittingly into a modern reformer in the eyes of his surprised subjects, instated her, she has become a permanent presence in the council. You can no longer twist the outcome of meetings in your favour like you used to, and you have been relegated from the seat to Pharazôn's right to the second one to his right, with Míriel placed in the seat you used to occupy. If she takes delight in your public demotion, she does not show it.

She is careful and does not try to discredit you openly, but you know she is warning the others of you. There is nothing you can do against that – you have opened yourself to points of attack in the past with your less popular proposals – but you do make an effort to be exceedingly friendly and whenever you speak in the council, you do not raise your voice, and you keep controversial opinions to yourself. You lie low, and your active scheming has ground to a halt for the time being. You mingle with the crowd, presenting yourself as a man of the people by visiting commoners in the lower district and attending public events. It is more tedious than ever, but it gives you ample opportunity to keep an eye on Míriel. She does the same, as you well know. You circle each other like cats with careful restraint, each looking for a point in the other where a lever might be inserted to topple the other off their pedestal.

You smile so much the corners of your mouth actually start to hurt, and so does she – but all you see are bared teeth, and you doubt it is any different for her.

You move in a tenuous equilibrium. You and Sam keep a close eye on each other, and you take care not to get too close to him. The bruises of the beating he gave you still hurt, and you are not keen on acquiring another black eye.

There is another time when Frodo clambers onto a ledge and the Ring – the Ring! – slips from the collar of his shirt and dangles in front of you, so close that you just have to close your fingers around it and take it.

You reach forward – and as predicted, Sam, who is already on the ledge, pulls his sword. “Mister Frodo!” He immediately turns on you. “Get back, you! Don't touch him!”

He wants to yank you back, but before he reaches you, you have grasped Frodo's arm and pulled him up onto the ledge. Frodo is gasping, his face grey with exhaustion. You pat him on the shoulder and then turn to look at Sam with half-lidded eyes. “Why does he hate us so, we wonder? What has Sméagol ever done to him or his master?”

Sam presses his lips into a thin line, but he does not come closer, not after Frodo has given him an exhausted, reprimanding look.

You smirk and turn back to Frodo. “Master carries a heavy burden,” you say sympathetically. “We know. We know. Very heavy. The fat one cannot understand it. Sméagol will look after Master.”

Frodo looks at you, and when he frowns, you lean in closer. “He wants it,” you whisper. “I saw him looking at it, yes, I saw. Very soon he will ask you for it. You will see. He will take it from you.”

Frodo's gaze darkens and his eyebrows knit together in angry disbelief, but you see his eyes darting quickly over to Sam and his hand closing around the Ring, and you know you have already won.

“She is spending a lot of time around Amandil and his Faithful,” you say, pulling the ball of wool up with a quick yank, and the black kitten's lunge goes wide, landing near the leg of the lounge chair you're sitting on.

“There is nothing new about that. Besides, I could not care less how Zimraphel is using her abundant free time,” Pharazôn says from his oaken desk, reading over a tax decree he had one of his secretaries draft for him. Half of the text is already crossed out.

You smirk when the kitten gives you a reproachful glare and you lower the ball of wool again. The cat does not move, but turns away and pretends to ignore you.

“Not even when said meetings take place at midnight in the temple?” you say.

Ar-Pharazôn looks up, his brow creased in annoyance. “What are you talking about?”

The kitten's ears are twitching. She is watching your every move out of the corners of her yellow eyes, and your smile grows wider. You nudge the ball of wool with your foot and make it roll right in front of her, then pull at the string in your hand, making it jiggle seductively. The kitten turns her head, her pupils blown wide, her eyes nearly completely black.

“I just thought it worth mentioning,” you say off-handedly. “She certainly feels very sure of herself after you two have reconciled. She has her temple back, and it is her safe harbour once more, now that you have promised not to do anything with it. I just hope she is not abusing your generosity and the goodwill you have shown her when you gave her back her sanctuary. Now there might indeed be midnight services to conduct in honour of Varda, but every single night…?”

Your voice trails off. You feel Pharazôn's gaze on you. You do not pay him any attention, but give the ball of wool another tug. A twitch runs through the muscles of the little cat, and she crouches low.

Another yank. Another little provocation.

“And is it not the strangest thing that she should suddenly give up all of her opposition, all her ambitions for power, in order to please a husband she loathes? Forgive me, my king. If I have spoken insolence, it was because I did not know any better. The nature of Men is very strange to my kind, but I thought I understood the nature of kings and queens, at least – akin to lions, as I believed they were.”

Pharazôn is a stiff shadow at the edge of your vision.

The cat is flat on her belly, her tail twitching.

“Is there not a proverb that says that a lion is most mellow the instant before he strikes?”

Another little pull, just a come-hither motion of your index finger.

The cat pounces.

***

It does not take much else after that.

You steal their elf-bread, and of course Sam loudly blames their loss on you. You bear his tirade in silence, pretending to take cover behind a boulder near the edge of the ledge, quivering fearfully and whining when he comes too close. Sam works himself up more and more, believing himself justified and on the winning side now that you do not even try to defend yourself.

Frodo does not come to your aid this time. He watches the scenario unfold in dull silence, but you can see his red-rimmed gaze dropping to Sam's shoulder, where the breadcrumbs you have strewn onto his cloak still cling to the grey fabric.

Ar-Pharazôn is growing wary, and you see to it that there are enough strange occurrences to feed his doubt. It begins innocently enough: missives to the king go missing, secret information makes it out of the council hall and no one knows who is to blame. Then one Pharazôn's men on the council falls ill, and the empty seat is filled with Elendil, a close associate of Míriel. He is an ambitious, ambivalent figure: young, charming and filled with a strong sense of justice, his election appeals to the lower classes, but the aristocrats dismiss him with careful strategical scorn. They know the dangers of associating themselves with him, for his status as Amandil's son and his unconcealed closeness to the Faithful leave him at ill standing with the king.

It is a close vote, and it would not have come to pass had not two of Pharazôn's men surprisingly cast their vote in favour of their declared political opponent.

Neither Míriel nor Pharazôn look like they can believe the outcome.

Mere moments pass, and the table erupts into bedlam: council members rise from their seats and try to shout over each other, voices are raised, and incredulous discussions commence as council members and rulers try to talk at once.

You smile to yourself, then lift your eyes to look across the table at the two deviant council members, who are the only ones besides you who have remained silently in their seats. Their faces are ashen and their eyes wide when they meet your gaze. Your smile grows a bit wider, and then one of them pulls his hands off the table to hide their trembling.

It is your second night on the ledges and the dim daylight under the clouds that always hover over Minas Morgul is fading when everything comes crashing down.

Cirith Ungol is taking its toll on all of you, but it is Frodo who suffers most. The Witch-king's lair draws on him, and Mordor is very, very close now. Frodo almost does not make it onto the ledge where you want to rest for the night, and this time it is Sam who grabs him and saves him from plummeting hundreds of feet to the ground below.

The gardener pulls his master over the edge and into a desperate embrace, cradling the emaciated Frodo against his chest. “Oh, Mister Frodo, oh, Frodo,” he says. “This was too much, I should have known – we shouldn't have climbed so far. I should've thought to look out for you – oh, what would Gandalf say if he were still here and knew that I almost allowed you to fall?”

Frodo's extricates himself from the embrace and tries to sit up, only to slump against the stone wall at his back. “It's alright,” he says, but his face and lips are grey with exhaustion. “I'm alright.”

“No, no, you aren't,” Sam cries, upset. “You're exhausted. It is that Gollum, who's chased us up so many stairs today; it is this place – it is this thing around your neck,” he says disgustedly, and falls silent. He picks up a few pebbles, weighs them in his hand, regards them moodily, and flicks them over the ledge.

“I could you help you, you know,” he says at last, slowly, ponderously.

Frodo's head snaps up – and you do not miss the fraction of a second when his erratic, feverish gaze flits over to you – before he stares at Sam again. “What?”

“I could help you with it,” Sam says and nods towards Frodo. “I could carry it for a while. Share the load.”

The words sound dull in the dusty, muggy air. Everything seems to go slow and sluggish, even breathing is hard. All the greater is Sam's shock and surprise when Frodo is suddenly on his feet, every muscle in his haggard body tense, his teeth bared, and a terrible light in his otherwise empty eyes.

“You're not taking the Ring! You're not taking it!” he screams.

“I won't! I won't!” Sam cries and gets to his feet, extending his hands and taking a soothing step towards Frodo, who flattens himself against the stone wall of the cliff.

“Come no closer! Get away from me!” Frodo's right hand is clenched in a fist around his shirt, bunching the fabric between his fingers and beneath – the Ring.

“I don't want to keep it!” Sam says, horrified. “I just want to help!”

You are right next to Frodo, pulling yourself up onto two legs, so that you are of a height.

“I told you this would happen,” you whisper. “I told you he wanted it for himself.”

The desperation in Sam's eyes quickly turns to anger. “You – you! Quiet! It's always you, sneaking and whispering and spreading lies! Get away from him! Get away from us! Get out of here!”

He tries to grab you, but before his hands can reach you, Frodo's fingers have closed themselves around Sam's wrist. His grip is bony, but so tight it has to be bone-crushing. Frodo is at the end of his line, but in him you can see the beginnings of that own corrupted, sick, almost undead strength that has kept your current body alive for hundreds of years.

“No, Sam.” His voice is raspy, but clear and cuts like a knife. “It's you.”

Sam belatedly tears his gaze away from you and stares at Frodo. “How do you mean that?”

“It's you who does not understand. You cannot know it, and you will never know how it is to carry the Ring,” Frodo says. “I cannot give it up. I will not give it to you. You can not have it. I know you want it, but you will not steal it from me. You must go.”

Sam stares. Tears are welling up in his eyes. “You do not mean that. You cannot mean that.”

“I do.” Frodo looks back at him, unblinking.

“But – but,” he says, and almost chokes on the words, “it is Gollum! He's the one who wants the Ring! He's the liar, don't you remember?”

“I know he is dangerous, but now you want to take the Ring from me as well. I cannot deal with two people who want to rob it from me.”

“I don't want to take it!” Sam cries. “Ah – Frodo! You're breaking my arm!”

Frodo opens his death grip without an apology, and Sam quickly pulls his arm back to nurse it against his chest like a wounded animal. Already, there are bruises appearing on the skin of his wrist.

“I just want to help you,” Sam sobs quietly, his head hanging.

“You can't help me,” Frodo says and turns away. He stares at the stone wall, pondering, and after a few moments he adds, “If you really want to help me, then go.”

“What?”

“Leave.” Frodo's voice is eerily calm. Dead. “Go home, Sam. I don't need you anymore.”

“What is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this, Zimraphel?"

Ar-Pharazôn’s voice is low and controlled. You know him well enough by now to know that this is when he is at his most dangerous.

The fruit sits on the table of Pharazôn’s writing room, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight from one side and by candlelight from the other. It is as big as a man’s fist, and it is of such a pure white colour it seems to give off a light of its own.

It is the spark to light the fuse of the powder keg that will bring Ar-Pharazôn’s empire down around him. You cannot believe how easy it was, in the end. You did not even have to do anything. In the end, Míriel herself played right into your hands.

“How many did you take?” Pharazôn asks.

Míriel stands in the middle of the room, like a defendant at court, a slender pillar of white, pale and trembling. You have never seen her look afraid, but you know that she fears her husband now. Not because of what he might do to her, no, but she fears for those in league with her, because – who would have thought – the noble queen had turned traitor to her king.

Pharazôn stands, takes the fruit and holds it in front of her face. “This is the fruit of the King’s Tree, the symbol of Númenor and the emblem of my crest. It is a royal insignia, and it is unique in this world. No one but the king may touch it, no one may sow its seed to grow another sapling as long as the original tree is alive. Taking the fruit is akin to making a claim to the throne, and it is high treason. There can only be one king. There can only be one tree.” He leans forward, closer to her.

“How many did you take?”

“Just this one,” she whispers.

Pharazôn stares at her and suddenly grabs her by the throat, lifting her up to the tips of her toes. Míriel gasps and her hands scrabble at his wrists, but she cannot break his grip.

“Do not lie to me, Zimraphel,” Pharazôn says, his voice still even, but deadly. “I warn you, it will be the last thing you will ever do. I know of your friends, of your maidens, your priests. I will have them all if you lie to me.”

Míriel gasps, her legs twitching with the cramps in her calves that comes from trying to hold her weight up by the mere tips of her toes. “Just the one!” she rasps, “Just the one!”

“And whom did you order to take it?”

“I did it myself,” she gasped. “Yesternight, after the service in honour of Ulmo!”

Pharazôn inclines his head and watches her struggle.

You take the brief silence as your cue to detach yourself from the shadows by the door and step forward.

“In this aspect, I am afraid the queen is lying, my king,” you say softly. “I consulted my informants and they told me that the queen was nowhere near the tree last night. They did, however, see a young boy climbing over the wall and up the tree to pluck the fruit from a branch.”

Míriel’s breath rattles in her throat, but no words come out of her mouth.

Pharazôn does not even turn to look at you. “I see. And I take you have a name?”

“I have. A third cousin of Elendil who goes by the name of Tigon. I took it upon myself to take him into custody for treason against the crown.”

“Very well.”

“No,” Míriel rasps. “Leave him be! It was my doing! The boy is innocent!”

“Innocent?” Pharazôn laughs, low and humourless. “He has taken the fruit of the holy tree – this equals high treason as well as sacrilege. I believed you of all people had more reverence for the sacrosanct.” He inclines his head to look at her. “Tell me, what did you want to do with it? Take it away from Armenelos, plant it, and declare someone of your choosing king? Or did you want to take that title for yourself?”

“No, no, I did – not – by the Valar, leave the boy! He did only as I ordered him to – the punishment is mine!”

“Oh, I am sure it is,” Pharazôn replies, letting her go. “You will be punished, and so will the boy as an accomplice in your treason. And there is still that unsavoury matter of the desecration of Nimloth to address. Fortunately, I know of a way to deal with all three of these issues to a satisfactory conclusion. You should thank me, Zimraphel; I will purge every last trace of your unfortunate misstep from the face of this world.”

It ends, both times, on the steps.

The sky over the city is red and black with smoke when the flames of the pyre devour the white wood of Nimloth against the backdrop of the temple, which is shrouded in tapestries of black velvet. The smell of charred meat is heavy and rank in the air, the spitting of burning fat long since turned to the dry cracking of twigs and bones. In the midst of the flames, the white tree of Númenor is burning, and its crown is a crown of fire and sparks rising skyward.

The crowd is gathered around the pyre, kept in line by a rank of priests in dark gowns and red cowls carrying batons and daggers at their hips.

There is Míriel, who is sitting on the steps of the temple, her eyes dull and empty, her face grey, her hands limp and chalk-white in her lap.

You come to stand before her, your new red-and-black high priest's robes trailing on the steps after you. You can feel the presence of your followers at your back, waiting, expectant, violent.

Ar-Pharazôn steps up next to you, and he regards the former queen with cool contempt. “Move out of the way, Zimraphel,” he says. He does not even bother to lower his voice to hide the insolence of his words. “This temple is mine. You are banned from entering it ever again.”

She crumbles at that, her head dipping forward, the veils, which she has chosen to cover her shorn head, obscuring her face. You watch her with a wry smile, and lean down until your mouth is almost next to her ear.

“Leave, Míriel,” you say softly, “you no longer have a place here.” And then you raise yourself up to your full height once more, stepping around her and setting yourself at the head of the procession into the newly consecrated temple of Melkor.

Frodo scales the steps, his fingernails digging into the cracked stone and holding on with a strength that is no longer supplied by his body. He drags himself forward and up, inch after inch, by sheer strength of will – his own, and, of course, the will of the Ring, that is ever pulling both of you towards Mordor, towards the Mountain, and the Tower of the Lidless Eye.

When you look down and into his eyes, you see a shadowy reflection of something else in there, something that is not him. Lightning erupts from the stormclouds hovering over Minas Morgul, and in this brief, crass illumination, Frodo’s eyes are yellow-amber, before the deeper darkness of the night returns and reduces him to a skeletal shadow once more.

And below him, there is another shadowy outline, the slumped, plumper form of Sam Gamgee, who sits on the ledge curled in on himself, crying.

You allow yourself a brief contemptuous smile, before you turn your face away and grab Frodo’s hand to pull him up another one of the stone steps.

“Come, Master,” you say, “not much further now, not much further. Up there is the tunnel, can you see?”

Chapter Text

IX. Meltdown

Frodo turns around, the entrance to Shelob's tunnels gaping behind him like an open mouth. The whites of his eyes are impossibly bright in the gloom, or maybe his face is just so very dark with grime and dirt by comparison. His blond hair sticks to his fever-damp forehead in matted, greyish strands.

“Is there no other way?” he asks.

“No other way. Just this one. Orcs don't know it. Orcs don't take it. It's the only way that's safe. Just go ahead, master,” you say. “It's the only way.”

Broad beams of light slant into the inner chamber of the great temple, the floor bathed in alternating strips of evening light and the shadows of the marble pillars. The air is thick with the smell of incense, but even that is not enough to cover the underlying stench of burnt flesh wafting out of the Chamber of Fire.

Pharazôn and his council stand before the raised platform on which you have had the Númenoreans build an obsidian likeness of Melkor, fifteen feet high. It is a mockery of his true form, but it sends the believers trembling, which is all it is supposed to do. In front of the statue, you sit in the silver chair of the high priest, watching the entourage of old men who have come to seek you out with an impassive face. Your robes these days are always black. Black and silver, or – on days of sacrifice – black and red.

“It is madness,” Erendur says feebly. He is an old man, a firm loyalist and senior advisor of Pharazôn, so wrinkled and shrunken with age that he could easily be mistaken for a hunchbacked child in the semi-darkness. His old age and the wars he has waged during his lifetime have made him conservative to a fault, and in all matters of state his mind stands as unchanging as a rock in troubled seas. In the months after the upheaval that had come with removing Míriel from all public affairs, he has been advocating for peace, prudency, and tradition, and placed himself as an opponent of every reform and change put before the council. In the process he has become your single greatest annoyance after you have removed Míriel from the playing board.

“It is your only chance,” you say crisply.

Pharazôn stands silently, staring at the stone steps leading up to your dais, his hands opening and clenching into fists at his sides. He has not said anything since his little procession had come before your throne and he had told you of the reason for the council's visit, but you can feel how it rankles him that he should have to come before you like a common supplicant instead of the other way round.

“If we were to consider it at all, we could not possibly decide such a matter on the spur of the moment,” Hallatan, another of Pharazôn's bannermen and an experienced military advisor, chimes in.

Your brow furrows and you stand suddenly, your robes settling around you like liquid darkness, before you step forward to the topmost stair of the stone platform and stare down at the group of men looking up at you, towering over them like a dragon looming over a herd of sheep.

You stand before your mockery of a king and his aging retinue, while you are ageless, still as tall, still as wondrous, still as terrible to behold as the day you first encountered him at the Black Gate – and you know that Pharazôn is keenly aware of this.

You steeple your fingers, and school your features into a more conciliatory expression. Your tone, though, when you speak, has nothing of the friendliness and forbearance of your expression. “My lords, you have been turning the issue over for years now. You will not hear a piece of counsel I have not already given you. You will not be given new insights on the matter regarding its advantages or disadvantages. All that can be said has been said one hundred times over.” A pause, and you turn to address Pharazôn directly. “The king I know – the king who dragged me here in chains without showing so much as an touch of fear – would have made his decision long ago,” you say, and you do not bother to keep the scorn out of your voice.

“Well, and you try to push me into a corner and aim to force me into a decision I am not yet ready to make!” Pharazôn lashes out, his temper flaring like the fire in the brazier hanging from the marble columns.

“Ah, what a remarkable combination of lethargy and temper you lay before me,” you say as you step down the stairs. “If someone ever claimed that oil and water could not go together, I would present them with you, my lords, to prove them wrong.” You begin to pace, your steps drawing circles around them that are getting tighter with every round you complete. The men try to keep you in their sights, unconsciously and uncomfortably flocking closer together. You wonder if they know how much they resemble a flock of scared sheep in this moment.

“You remind me of your Elven ancestors, my lords. Like them, you would like to set aside a few hundred years to ponder a weighty matter. And for them, it is just as well – leaving aside the fact that Elves rarely ever get anything done before another millennium turns. But for them it doesn't matter. They have forever to ponder and hesitate, to reconsider and to mull over their philosophies. You on the other hand...” You come to a halt in front of them, your hands folded and looking each of them up and down before they cringe away under your gaze and the probing of your mind, suddenly aware of their ailments and little deformities, their greying hair and their wrinkled faces. “You do not have forever.”

You stop in front of Pharazôn, smirking slightly. Pharazôn meets your gaze sourly, the tarnished silver of his eyes turned to copper by the sheen of the torches.

“'Forever' was taken from you, by a lord you did not choose to serve; a lord who discarded you immediately after he made you. A lord to whom you are not much more than an afterthought – a foil for the glory of the creation of his better-loved first-born children.” You point out over the western sea, where the sun is just now sinking on a blood-red horizon. “There lies your claim, your ancient right which has been taken from you out of arbitrary despotism. The gods have ordained that you should stay away from their shores, and they have trusted in your fear of them to hold you back – and look how well this plan is coming along! They are playing for time – and as long as you let them, they will always win. Time is working in their favour, and it is your greatest enemy. Soon your bodies will have lost the strength to lift a sword, just as the minds of those who are still steadfast and brave today (at this you shoot a scathing look in Erendur's direction) will have lost the courage and willpower to fight your fate.”

“That sounds all very easy and tempting,” Amandil says, and as always he does not bother to hide his disdain for you, “but the fact remains that you are proposing an attack on no one lesser than the lords and ladies of this world – and all in order to catch a hypothetical spectre of immortality on the shores of Aman. This alone would be a sufficient testimony of lunacy in even the most seasoned general. But seeing how this piece of advice comes not only from a priest of Morgoth who would happily stab his own mother in the back if only he had one, but also from a lesser god, who was apparently unable to defend a country fortified by mountains from an army of mere mortals, I must apologise if I will advise the king to take your piece of military advice with more than one grain of salt.”

Were it not for the fact that he had once been Pharazôn's closest friend, Amandil's head would be mounted on a pike outside the temple of Melkor by now, along those of other traitors. Pharazôn shoots Amandil a disgruntled glance, which Amandil meets without blinking an eye, before he turns to look at you. Your smile, at first glance pleasant, speaks a promise of slow and painful revenge.

Despite this you bow your head in meek assent. “I fear it is right that I do not know much in the ways of war, as our Lord Amandil pointed out with his unmatched wit and conciseness. I am a creature whose purpose and talents lie in serving those greater than me, instead of toiling in the trenches of the battlefields of this earth, like braver men than me do daily.”

Amandil snorts and covers it up with a badly feigned cough. You can feel the mood of the men shifting in his favour.

“The fact remains,” you add pointedly, “that I know the gods like no one else on these shores, better than any of you. Better even than the virgin priestesses, who set out for the woods of Andustar during the Spring Rites to allegedly commune with Lord Oromë himself in order to know his mind and his will – for I have seen your gods. I have walked among them. I know their plans and their intentions.” You fix each of the men with your gaze in turn. “And the truth is, the gods fear Man. They are spirits existing on borrowed time, for as long as your fear of them will let them. They have no way of refusing or resisting you. They know that if the Men should take up arms and come to claim what is theirs, they can do nothing but watch.”

You take up your circling again, gliding in and out of the shadows crossing the temple room. “Or why do you think they have done nothing for all those years that Númenor toiled and turned to them for help? Because they are cruel? Most assuredly yes. But also because they are ultimately powerless to do anything of consequence in this world.”

You stop at the foot of the brazier-lined steps leading up to the simulacrum of Melkor.

“You have the power. You have the people. And today you still have the strength of body and of will. The time to act is now, before old age robs you off your last chance to reclaim what is yours.”

Your eyes meet that of Pharazon. “Immortality lies scattered along the shores of Valinor. If you do not seize it, your death is no one's fault but your own.”

You turn away from them and climb the stairs back up onto the platform. Without turning around you say, “I would appreciate it if the lords left the temple now. The day of a high priest is one filled with many tasks of sacrifice and devotion, and I wish to pray.”

You kneel down in front of the statue of Melkor and close your eyes. For a few moments, there is no sound as the men just stand there and stare at your back. Then there is a shuffling of feet, growing softer as the steps recede into the distance.

Three days after that evening, Pharazôn orders the construction of a fleet of a thousand ships. On the same day, it becomes known that Amandil has fled the capital together with his son Elendil.

One year after the order, the fleet of Númenor sets sail for Aman.

Seagulls are wheeling overhead, their mournful cries drowned out by the sound of a silver horn. The sound echoes through the streets of the seaport. Everywhere on roofs and balconies, women, children, and elderly people are standing. No one is waving handkerchiefs, no one is singing or shouting. The entire city stands in watchful, sombre silence, like attending the funeral procession of a distant relative.

You and Míriel are standing side by side on one of the highest terraces of the palace in Eldalondë, overlooking the seaport, the harbour, and the silent houses below.

“They know,” Míriel says. Her face is expressionless, her voice betrays no emotion. “You may have swayed them for the moment, but in their hearts they know that their men will never return.”

“Of course they do.” You give her a lenient smile. “But what does it matter now?”

She makes no answer. You watch the oars strike water and the ships pull away from their piers one by one, until they are lined up like a string of pearls stretched out for miles across the western sea, against the backdrop of a flaming orange sun.

You crawl down the lower spurs of the Morgai, ashes and stones crunching under your fingers. Every now and then you stop to scratch a bit of spiderweb out from under your dirty nails and wipe the sticky threads off your fingers.

Frodo has been gone for a long time; Shelob must have gotten him by now. The only thing you need to do now is to go to the delve where the fat old spider usually discards the parts of her meals that she does not care for – clothes, armour, weapons. The Ring.

You find the way easily, and you squat down at the edge of the stone wall surrounding the pit, safely out of the way of old Shelob herself. The delve is devoid of life, but full of signs of death. Bones and skulls litter the ground, as do shields and rusty swords. There is no sign of the Ring, or of Frodo's nasty blade Sting, or his equally disgusting mithril shirt.

Not much longer, you think to yourself and nervously rock back and forth on your heels, gnawing on your fingernails. Not much longer, and the Precious will be mine, we will be together again, whole again, Precious, Precious, Precious.

Moments pass. Minutes pass. The sickly reddish sun sinks lower on the clouded, smoke-choked sky. Your fingernails are bitten bloody, and still you gnaw at them. You haven't come across a puddle of water, and thus you haven't had the opportunity to talk to your reflection again. A pity, for he seemed to have some good sense, and you are getting more and more nervous by the minute. But you are also weary, weary in a way you have never known. The black clouds are pressing down on you, the air is dry and thick in your throat. You are worn and tense, as if you were a piece of skin stretched far too thin over jutting bones.

You do not know when you are awake and when you nod off for brief amounts of time, but all the while you keep mumbling to yourself in assurance, “She must be here soon, must be here soon.”

“Must she really?” someone next to you says and the voice almost startles you out of your skin.

You jerk awake (have you been asleep?) with a hiss and stare at the towering shadowy figure that has taken a seat right next to you. It looks huge and massive, and it is far too close to you. Why did you not see it coming? How was it able to sneak up on you?

The outlines of the figure are like black smoke, wavering and wafting. You cannot make out its face. You bare your teeth, but the figure only laughs and it sounds like mountains collapsing.

“Why would she come here to dispose of the Halfling? Maybe she's gotten a taste of what has really fallen into her jaws thanks to you, and like her mother, she'd prefer to devour it.”

You blink owlishly. “What is it saying?” You are, at this point, talking more to yourself than the shadow, but the shadow doesn't seem to be bothered by it. If anything, its huge, hulking form seems to ripple with amusement.

“The Halfling carries your Ring, and you and I both know how much Ungoliant's spawn likes to eat fine trinkets.”

You narrow your eyes and cock your head to one side—and then the coin drops. You almost jump back, and there would not have been missing much for you to topple heels over head into the pit. You scrabble for purchase and land in an undignified heap – much too close to the edge for your comfort, but even closer to the shadow than you'd like.

You are silent. Then you say, almost resentfully, “You.”

“Took you long enough.” The shadow inclines its head to one side and invisible eyes seem to size you up, take in every inch of your miserable appearance and your crouching, cringing posture. “It would have been more justified for me not to recognise you. Just look at you. Mairon, Mairon, whatever has become of you?”

“What's it calling us?”

The shadow leans forward. “Your name. Don't you remember it?”

“No.” You turn away and return to picking at your fingernails. “No one calls us that. No one, anyone, not even ourselves. Why would we? It's no longer ours, the name, isn't it? We took other names, fitted them to ourselves, tailored them to us, or tailored us to them, what do we know? We do not use it anymore. It no longer fits us, so we forgot.”

“It truly does not fit you any longer." The dark figure heaves a sigh. "I never thought I'd see the day when I would be the sane one out of the two of us. We've truly come a long way from our glory days, haven't we?”

You throw the shadow a furtive, annoyed glance. “What do we – what do I know? I don't remember.”

“I think you do. You are remembering me this very instant, albeit very wrongly, which is no credit to your current state of mind – just listen to me talking reason to you, it's ridiculous. No one in their right mind would believe it if we told them.”

“Maybe.” You turn away to stare at the dark tunnels dug into the wall, willing Shelob to appear with a dead hobbit in tow.

“Maybe Shelob will find your Ring even tastier than the Halfling who is carrying it. Spiders have a penchant for shiny things. Do you recall when I returned to Angband, mauled and mangled, because that cursed monster Ungoliant had set her mind to robbing me of my Silmarils and almost bitten my arms off?”

At those words, an echo of a memory surfaces: dark hallways, smoking torches, and a great dark figure limping down the corridors, trailing rivers of blood and the stench of burned meat.

“I remember that.”

“That is something, at least. And I guess you also remember what your reaction to the whole disaster was.”

You think about it some more. You look at your hands, at your bloody, yellowed nails. You scratch your head. “I laughed?” you venture.

“Damn right. Stoic little bastard that you were, I have never before or since seen you laugh like that. It would have served you right for me to end you then and there. But when I look at you now, I wonder if I would not have done you a favour by killing you. Nothing good came afterwards except defeat piled upon humiliation, piled upon another defeat. At least my brothers and sisters removed me from the downward spiral before I had the chance to sink as low as you did.”

You bristle at that. “Low as me? I did what you never had the courage to do – I ventured out into the world and I made it mine – I did not need to steal someone else's stupid trinkets, I made my own devices of power, I was smarter and more inventive than you ever were and – we, we were powerful, we were feared, we were even adored by some and we gave them gifts, gifts they could use, and which we could use to use them and we controlled them, more effectively and thoroughly than you have ever been able to! 'Low as me'? We at our lowest were still better than you at your highest, you self-aggrandising, arrogant would-be-king of the world! Anything you could think of, we have improved upon, together, bound together, working and functioning as one, as intended, something someone as cowardly and stupid as you could never have achieved, not in a thousand ages – ”

You rant on and on, and then you turn around all of a sudden and notice that the shadow is gone.

You lie on the ground, your limbs trapped under your body, twisted and uncomfortable and stiff – although you do not remember lying down or falling. You climb back onto all fours and wildly cast your eyes about, but you are alone, alone, utterly alone.

“Ah! Where have you gone? Come back!” You rake your fingers over your skull, digging bloody trenches into your scalp. “Come back and listen to me, you – you shadow, you impostor, you king of nothing! Don't you dare laugh at me!”

You rage for a bit longer, tearing at your hair and hurling stones in every direction, until all of a sudden the voice of your ancient self, which you have glimpsed in the still pond, echoes inside your skull like a clap of thunder, Shut up!

You stop in mid-motion. “You're back?” Involuntarily, and quite absurdly, you look around yourself for a puddle of water from where your reflection might look back at you.

I was never gone. Turn around, I heard something!

Its angry tone abruptly quells your anger, and you snap your mouth shut, whirling around with wide eyes and a half-formed grin on your lips, expecting to see Shelob throwing the remains of a dead Frodo into the pit, and instead seeing –

– seeing Samwise-fucking-Gamgee rolling out of one of the tunnels, getting to his feet and stabbing an enraged, bloated Shelob right in her soft underbelly with – is that Frodo's sword? How – what – why –

You stare, your mouth agape and you can not believe it, you cannot believe this, how can this be happening, why – is – he – here – and how are hobbits always doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing and thwarting your plans by simply existing, you cannot believe this, YOU CANNOT BELIEVE THIS.

You are so close to jumping into the pit yourself and bashing Samwise's head in with a blunt piece of rock, but the voice inside your head hisses and orders you to pull back.

Not now! Not now! She's about to kill him!

“He's about to kill her!” you wail.

And both will turn on you if you jump in, and that will get us very far in regaining the Precious, so in the name of good sense, stay here!

In the end, you do as the voice of the elder (or younger?) version of you bids, but your blood curdles in your veins as you watch Samwise stab Shelob repeatedly, until the old spider decides that she has had enough, and heaves her fat body back into one of her tunnels, making a hurried escape. You watch Sam drop Sting where he stands and hurry over to Frodo to tear the spiderwebs away from his face, only to break down in tears at the discovery that his master is obviously dead. You sit back with a dissatisfied grunt. At least there's one thing this useless spider was able to do properly.

But then, you see your luck once again turned to ill fortune when in this very moment, of all times, two orcs on patrol clamber down the stony steps leading to their post of Cirith Ungol. Samwise quickly slips away to hide between two mighty boulders, and the orcs come to a halt in front of Frodo. They regard him with puzzled glances, launch into a debate about what to do with a dead hobbit, all of a sudden proclaim that he's not dead after all, and then decide to bring him to their outpost with them in order to relay him to the Great Eye for questioning.

You watch from your position on the ledge and only barely resist the urge to smash your head repeatedly against the rocky floor. The voice of your ancient you is ominously silent in your head. You both know that there is no way of getting to the Ring as soon as Frodo is inside the walls of the outpost, and you have to get your hands on it before the Eye does.

We have to –, the voice in your head starts, but you cut it off immediately.

“Be quiet.” You bury your face in your bony hands, dig your thin fingers into your eye sockets, squeezing between your eyeballs and the protruding arc of your cheekbone. “I am trying to think.”

We can do nothing while Frodo is in the keep, the voice carries on, unperturbed.

“I know.”

We will have to attack the escort party that is to bring him to the Tower. Kill the orcs. Kill the Ring-bearer. Take the Ring for ourselves.

You hiss angrily – you know all this, you know all this, because it was you suggesting it in the first place, so why does the voice keep nagging you – this – is – unbearable – you feel like you are trying to talk and think over a constant echo –

“Be quiet,” you say. “Be quiet, be quietbequietbequiet. I know what to do. I know what we must do.”

Kill them all. Take the Ring. For yourself, and yourself alone.

You won't share it. With anyone. But the voice of the other You does not need to know that.

With that, you turn around and you set off along the ridge of jagged rocks, in the direction where the hundred orange fires of the orc outpost illuminate the eternal, choking twilight enshrouding Cirith Ungol.

But yet again, some insufferable god sees fit to throw another wrench in your works. You and the voice in your head watch in disbelieving silence as Samwise Gamgee sneaks into the Orcish keep all by himself. When all of a sudden a riot starts in the upper levels of the tower and Samwise emerges unscathed with Frodo in tow not two hours later, you flop down onto the ground, unblinking and mostly unthinking. The voice in your head is utterly quiet.

This, you think, is too much.

You sit and stare at nothing in particular for a few moments, while the two hobbits make a hurried escape in their ridiculously ill-fitting sets of orc-armour. Just after they have vanished around a turn of the path, you slowly get to all fours again, then sit back on your haunches and slowly, one by one, crack your fingers. There is a satisfying crunch when the abused joints snap back into their assigned places, and then you climb on, following the trail of fear-stench and footprints laid out for you by the hobbits.

It will not be hard to keep track of them from now on. Between you and the chasm of fire now only lie the endless ashen plains of Gorgoroth, stretching out for miles in every direction. On the open plain there is no chance of losing their trail and letting them escape. Barring the off-chance of both of them stumbling and breaking their necks in some ditch along the dirt roads (which, at this point, is entirely too much to hope for), their way to the Mountain is clear, but also exposed and widely visible in every direction.

Someone will take note of them sooner or later. You'll just have to get them first.

And you will get them. They cannot outrun you on the open field. You are too fast, too tenacious, too eaten up by the desire for the Ring to allow this.

Your patience is wearing thin. Just a bit longer, you'll force yourself to remain calm and quiet, while you stay close to their heels during their meandering flight off to the side of the greater roads through Mordor. The hobbits sense your presence, even if they do not consciously know you are there. They keep throwing backward glances over their shoulders, but every time they do, you are already hidden behind a dried thorny thicket or have wedged yourself in a cleft between two rocks, watching them unblinking, like a lizard.

You can see that they are reluctant to leave the relative safety of the mountains behind. Up until now, they have been wandering in the trough between the Ephel Dúath and the Morgai, but they can only follow the mountain range so far before running into another Orcish stronghold or straight into the vale of Udûn. The open land before them offers no cover and no shelter, and both hobbits know it. And yet, despite all of this, they have no choice in the matter in the end, so one evening both hobbits shoulder their backpacks and step out of the menacing, yet protective shadow of the mountains, and set out across the east road leading over the dead plain, directly to the fiery mountain.

You wait until they are almost out of view, just blurred black specks against the grey, rocky ground and the reddish sky – you'll have to keep your distance for now – and then you set out after them, on the last stage of your journey, towards your final confrontation.

The march is long and arduous. Despite the clouded sky, the heat is oppressive. It seems not to come from the shrouded, weak sun above, but instead it appears to rise up through the ground below. You pick your path along cooler spots over rocks and through dried-up riverbeds. You have not seen one of the sad trickles of oily water in two days, and you cannot remember the last time you have eaten. This close to the Mountain, not even maggots and insects can survive. The air is pregnant with the smell of brimstone and other poisonous gases.

Your head is swimming. Your thinking has ground to a halt. You cling to the one desire remaining to you, and that is to move forward in order to get a hold of the Ring. Whatever comes after you have reclaimed the Precious will take place in another world, where everything will be changed, and all that has come before will be irrelevant and naught. In the next world (your world) you will finally be recompensed for all the pain and humiliation you have gone through. You just have to survive until you reach the Mountain, when you will be able to ambush the hobbits.

Your body is finished. You drag your hull forward, bloody, yellowish nails scrabbling over the ground, thin strings of saliva dripping from your parched lips, your skin raw and scabby. All that remains to you now is your will to keep you going.

Every now and then, your surroundings shift around you, and you seem to have stepped through a window in time into the Elder Days, or even older times. Fortresses and palaces rise and fall around you, building themselves up with the rumble of stones and dissolving into mist at the height of their magnificence.

Shadows are moving about you, flitting in and out of your field of vision, sometimes clearer, sometimes vaguer. You try to ignore them.

This is your last journey, and the ghosts of your past are walking beside you.

You see them floating or walking next to you, lined up like pearls on a string, each one a face worn, an identity discarded: there is a primordial being of fire and flame, accompanied by a mountain of shadow. They are followed by another similar creature, tarnished and corrupted, its flames darkened, the rest of it all spikes and wheels and sharp edges. There are a torturer and a military commander walking at the head of a pack of slavering wolves with red eyes. You see a sorcerer cloaked in black, grasping a twisted staff of blackened iron, chased by blue, grey, brown and white orbs of light. There is a penitent in battered armour and – later – in a white gown. You see another figure of white and gold, mingling with other, weaker shadows, flitting in and out of existence around it, except for one shade that is a bit more constant, and stays longer than the others. It walks close to the white-and-gold figure for a while, but then something strange happens: the white-and-gold spectre splits in the middle, and an eerie shadowed doppelgänger of it appears, faded and veiled and terrible. The white-and-gold spirit fades, and its friendly companion spirit vanishes in a violent explosion of the doppelgänger.

You want to avert your face, but at the same time, you can't help but watch as the dark spirit convulses and thrashes, changing and mutating wildly and malevolently. The doppelgänger splits again, once, twice, and smaller versions of lesser power but the same evil intent appear. You do not need to count them to know that their number is sixteen. Even the other spirits seem to shy away from it in disgust, and fall back as it sidles close to you, looming over you like a dark cloud. It reforms and suddenly you recognise the reflection you saw in the water so long ago.

You stop and turn to watch the spirits; that long line of everything and everyone you have ever been.

There are so many of them.

And there is so little left of you.

The Mountain takes up almost your entire field of vision by now. The spirits are flocking unbearably close to you. The hobbits are getting slower with each passing hour, and you decide to overtake them and wait for them higher up, where the chance for a successful ambush is greater. You turn away from their footprints in the reddish sand and round the slope in search of another path where you can climb up.

With each rasping breath, you draw more poisonous fumes into your lungs. The last of your spittle has long since dried on your chin. Your mouth is parched, your tongue feels bloated, and your hands and feet leave dark smears of blood on the volcanic stone as you climb.

You reach out to pull yourself up another ledge, when suddenly the world tilts –

– and you fall to your knees, gasping and coughing.

But you cannot rest now, you have to go on, ever on, and you start to drag yourself forward on your stomach. Suddenly there are arms around your chest, pulling you up.

“Come, Mister Frodo! I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you!”

You find yourself first pulled to your feet, then heaved onto somebody else's shoulders. “So up you get! Come on, Mister Frodo dear! Sam will give you a ride. Just tell him where to go, and he’ll go–

– back.

You have no idea what just happened and shake your head angrily, trying to chase away the ghosts, the sudden shifts in the world around you, the annoying voices echoing inside your head.

The Precious, they say. We want the Precious. Bring it to us, give it to us.

You shake your head, but it does not make them go away, so you grab a sharp-edged stone and smash it against your skull until the roar of blood and the thunder of the headache drown out the voices.

Give us the Precious, give it to us. It is ours.

“It is mine! Mine!” you screech. “Go away! Get out of my head!” You bound up a few boulders, lose your footing, and roll down the slope again. Covered in ashes and dirt, you try to scale the slope for a second time.

You stumble again.

“Mister Frodo!” Sam cries, his voice tear-choked.

Your face is pressed to the hot ground, the sand burning your skin away. You inhale the scent of ashes and slag, and if there is anything else in this world, anything other than this mountain, the heat, and the ashes, you have forgotten it.

You raise your head, and the chain cuts into your neck when you drag the Ring away from the ground. There, above you, is the entrance to the Chambers of Fire. So close, so close. You have to go on.

Sam turns you around, so you are lying on your back instead of your stomach. “Oh no, oh no.” He strokes your cheek with his hand, and he would be crying, were his eyes not dried out from the heat. “We have to take a break, Mister Frodo, dear. You can’t walk like that. Just for a short while.”

You shake your head, but for a moment you are tempted to give in to your exhaustion and just lie there, until the Eye or the Nazgûl spot you and carry you away … and whatever comes after, you are not sure if it is worse than this –

No.

You open your eyes and right yourself up again, struggling to your hands and knees. You have to go on, you have to destroy the Ring, even if you cannot walk anymore.

“I'll crawl,” you say.

You are nearly deaf and blind, and still you climb on. An invisible thread ties you to the Ring. Wherever it is in this world, you will know it and you will be drawn to it. You climb sideways, your progress revealing more and more of the western plain of Gorgoroth – and slowly, the Black Tower slides into view, from whose windows It is waiting, watching. You groan and crouch lower. It must not see you, it must not see anyone, or it will know that you are here and it will take the Precious for itself.

There is a screech in your head as all the ghosts and another voice cry out as one. You can hardly make out the words, only –

“Help me, Sam! Help me, Sam! Hold my hand! I can’t stop it! He’s spotted us!”

And suddenly the gaze of the Eye is upon you, and you cradle your head in your hands as you throw yourself to the ground to hide, trembling and crying, whimpering, “Help me, help me, help me!”

But the ghosts are cold and pitiless, they just repeat their eternal chant back to you: The Precious, the Precious, give us the Precious.

“No, no, no, no! Never, never!” You crawl on, and suddenly you see the hobbits, dragging themselves up the path not far below you. Another turn of the road will bring them directly under the outcrop where you are perched.

You wait – you wait – they come closer. You see a glimmer of gold around Frodo's neck, and that is too much – it is not – his –

– you drop down and you slam both of them to the ground.

Both hobbits are bowled over by your accelerated weight. You are immediately upon Frodo, who looks like a skeleton, his skin stretched taut over his skull, his eyes sunken, and his gums drawn back from his teeth. You punch him about like a ragdoll, and he does not even have the strength left to fight back, then you go for his throat and reach for the Ring.

All of a sudden, a wild light flames up in Frodo's eyes; his hands are locked around your wrists and he rears up, his teeth bared and his pupils tiny pinpricks in his eyes. You had expected him to fight back, but never with such brute force. Out of the corner of your eyes you see Sam watching helplessly with a sword in his hand. There is nothing he can do, for now, for you are interlocked too tightly. An intervention by him to defend Frodo would inevitably harm his master as well, and so he is forced to watch as you two wrestle and tear and bite at each other like rabid animals.

You stole it, you stole it, give it to us, the voices scream, and without knowing, you repeat it aloud.

“You ssstooole it, give it to usssss, give it to usssss!” you snarl, and tear out a chunk of his hair.

Frodo cries out, but all of a sudden he gathers all the strength he has left, and bucks so violently he – throws you off.

You land on your back, and within the blink of an eye, Frodo is on his feet, his hand flies to his belt and you find yourself once more at the end of the blade of Sting.

“Down, down!” he gasps and clutches at the Ring to hide it from your view. “Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot betray me or slay me now, Gollum!”

You and Sam both stare at him, and then the world shifts once more.

You see yourself and Frodo from a different angle, as if you were watching from above: one of the two a crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stands –  stern and utterly untouchable now by pity –  a figure robed in white, and at its breast it holds a wheel of fire. Out of the fire speaks a commanding voice:

“Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.”

You feel yourself being pulled downward, and suddenly it is you staring up at Frodo, but this is no longer Frodo looking back at you out of bright, wild eyes, there is –

– another shift, and you are backing away, small and terrified.

Sam whirls around to face Frodo, who is standing taller and straighter than you have ever seen him. “Quick, Master!” he cries. “Go on! I’ll deal with him. Go on!’

Frodo turns his head slowly, as if looking at someone standing very far away. “Yes,” he agreed. “I must go on. Farewell, Sam! This is the end at last. On Mount Doom doom shall fall. Farewell!” And with those words he turns and walks up the climbing path, shoulders squared and his head held high, as if there was nothing in the world that could hinder or scare him any longer.

You gape, and almost miss Sam turning towards you with a murderous look in his eyes. “Now!” he says grimly. “At last I can deal with you!” He leaps forward to fight, but you crumple before him before he can land his blow.

“Don't kill us,” you whimper. “Don't hurt us with the nasty steel. Let us live, let us live, just a little longer. We are lost! When the Precious goes we will be gone. We'll die and turn to dust.” You claw through the ashes of the path under your hands to stress your point.

You can see the hobbit wavering, and you can almost feel his hatred of you warring with his even greater hatred to take a life. In the end, his pathetic pitying nature wins out over his intelligence (which is not a remarkable force to begin with), and he lowers his sword.

“Curse you, you pathetic stinker!” he shouts. “Go away! Off with you, before I kick you down this mountain! Go away, or I really am going to hurt you with my nasty cruel steel.” And with those words he turns away and stumbles after his master.

You watch him with half-lidded eyes, slowly counting down from three in your head, and then you bound after him. A last sprint brings you up to the entrance into the volcano.

You can see the sea retreating from the shores, exposing the ocean floor for miles around the coast of Númenor. Silvery fish are thrashing on the glistening wet mud, and children cry out in wonder and run out into the newly exposed mudflats to play, running happily into the arms of their impending death. Your gaze returns from hundreds of miles away, and you turn your back to the sea as you recommence your climb up the mountain of Meneltarma.

The walls of the chamber are alight with flaring oranges and reds. You are burning up, inside and outside. You enter through the crack in the stone, feel your way forward through the dark passage and then linger at the edge of the shadow as you spot two dark shapes against the red glare of the inner Chamber of Fire.

Frodo is a black silhouette against the backdrop of fire, the updrafts of hot air swirling around him, whipping his dirty hair and his torn clothes. He is holding his right hand out over the chasm, his palm turned upward and in it – you know – is resting the Ring, with just the thin layer of flesh and bones separating it from its fatal fall into the fires below.

The voices in your head are screaming.

The Precious! The Precious! Take it from him, take it take it TAKE IT – KILL HIM

kill them ALL!

It is ours –

we made it –

we share it not – TAKE IT (Precious),

break its neck, its nasty

fingers (ours ours oursoursours), strangle him, gouge

his eyes out

rip his throat out – give us the Prec-c-c-cious.

You bend over, the agony behind your temples tearing your brain to shreds. Your vision is tinted red when you look up. You can barely see. Something warm is trickling down your upper lip from your nose, and when you lick it away, you taste blood.

Frodo does not move.

“Frodo!” Sam stands a few paces behind his master, doubled over, gasping for breath. “Frodo! Do it. Do what we came for! Destroy it, then let's go – home!” His voice breaks on the last word.

Frodo turns around briefly. His eyes are bright in the darkness that fills the chamber.

Sam takes a stumbling step towards him. “What are you waiting for?” he pleads. “Just let go.”

Frodo looks back at the Ring in his hand, then, slowly, he retreats his hand from over the abyss and brings it close to his chest.

“I have come,” he says. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed.” He pauses, his shoulders heaving with a long, indrawn breath. Then Frodo turns around fully, and the look in his face is – no longer his own. “The Ring is mine!” And with those words he puts on the Ring.

A white-hot shriek splits your head, and you go momentarily blind as well as deaf.

(HE HAS CLAIMED IT FOR HIMSELF BUT IT IS OURS OURS KILL HIM KILL HIM THAT RAT THAT WRETCH THAT WORTHLESS THIEF)

And in this moment Frodo’s vague, darkened silhouette is turned to a bright blaze you would have been able to spot from miles away. You can see him now, clearer than if he had been standing before you in bright daylight.

The mountain itself quakes under your feet. A fountain of fire erupts from the core of the volcano, painting the walls of the chamber a deep, dark red. You take it as your cue to jump forward. You slam into Sam and throw him to the ground, and then you go for Frodo, who is frozen when he sees you charging right at him.

(KILL HIM SEIZE HIM THROW HIM OFF THE CLIFF, MURDER, MURDER, KILL THE THIEF)

He braces himself for the impact, and yet the force of your momentum sends you both nearly tumbling from the platform. The Ring is a loop of fire blazing on his right hand. He pulls back, but you are too fast and you grab his hand – touching – the – Ring –

Your consciousness flares outward akin to fire spreading outward along the spokes of a wheel, as you are reconnected with the great nexus whose centre is the Ring, reaching out over miles in every direction. You are in a dozen places at once – you are in the Chamber of Fire, you are crouched in a dark tower, contorted in a wordless scream of terror, you are seven lifeless Rings entombed in a crypt of stone on the lowest levels of Barad-Dûr, you are flying on fell beasts far above an army, when you suddenly yank them around and tear like lightning across the desolate plain, a gate, and you see the Mountain from afar – and –

(TAKE IT TAKE IT FOR YOURSELF)

(IT BELONGS TO ME AND ONLY TO ME AND I WILL NOT SHARE IT)

– you are wrestling with Frodo who fights you tooth and nail like a wild animal. Then he looks up and your eyes meet, and staring back at you out from the hobbit's eyes

is

You.

(tearing through the air, eight times, in eight places at once, willing the fell beasts to fly faster, faster, faster and you scream)

You are not fighting Frodo.

Looking at you out of ferocious golden eyes under matted blond hair is no one else but

yourself.

(Evenly matched, evenly strong, evenly corrupted by hunger and desire and the will to POSSESS)

And you realise –

there is no way

you

can

win.

The ocean is rising like a wall before you, the wave building up until it fills the entire western sky, while the night in the east is torn in two by lightning and thunder.

For the first time ever you think that

you might have

miscalculated.

It is coming together, all the split parts of the Ring converging at the Mountain, like pieces of metal drawn to its central magnet at last.

Frodo and you are interlocked so tightly you might as well be One, two destructive halves – ninths – seventeenths? – of the same being fighting each other to destruction.

You cease to be different existences.

A wheel of fire

eternal

infinite

no beginning no end

and everything is connected.

You are trying

to rip the Ring from Frodo's hand

to keep Gollum away from your right hand, you shove him back

and you reach out

grabbing the hand of the hobbit

trying to twist out of Gollum's grasp

hurtling towards the volcano with your seven remaining brethren

you gasp as Gollum pulls his hand towards his open maw, sharp teeth

you grin when you notice that Frodo is, by a tiny, and yet decisive, margin the weaker of you two

you are so exhausted

the mountain is now directly ahead

the tower is shaking with your anguish and fear

teeth close around

your

his

fingers

you bite down

a scream

screams

in the tower, in the air, in the volcano

your own voice

not your own

you are not screaming

you stumble back crying

you laugh triumphantly as you spit out the severed finger and pull the ring off it, holding it up

you crumple to the ground, your right hand awash with pain, and Sam is crying your name

you are now above the volcano, all eight of you

a desperate last command ringing forth from the Tower – DOWN! and you dive through the cloud of smoke rising from the crater and into the vent of the volcano

You have won

You have lost

You hold up the Ring and you laugh, you laugh, you laugh

you scream in terror

in pain

in fear

you crawl towards Gollum, you must get the Ring back

it is yours

no, it is yours

you will not let them take it from you

again

and you laugh, stepping back, still regarding the Precious

for is it not fitting

is it not comical

is it not ironic

you think

as you take one step too far and suddenly there is only air beneath your feet

you watch yourself lose your balance from the outside; though through whose eyes you could not tell

watch as you tilt back in a gentle arc, your centre of gravity crossing the edge of the platform and dropping away into the depth of the chasm

You can only watch and stare, for once at the mercy of powers greater than yourself, for once in the face of a greater might that you cannot avoid, and wait for your doom to come down upon you, for the point of no return has passed a long time ago. The wave comes crashing down.

and then you are falling

watching yourself fall

into the fire

a Nazgûl dashes past you as you cower on the platform

into the chasm

but he is too slow to reach you and the wing membranes of his fell beast light up like torches in the heat

you crash into the lava at the same time

The water hits you like a wall of massive steel. Within the blink of an eye, your body is crushed and ripped to pieces. What is left of you is caught in the undertow as the wave curls in on itself, and then you are being pulled away from the light, and into the lightless depth below.

the Tower is shaken to its foundations

the volcano erupts into fire

the earth itself splits beneath an army under a black banner

as the circle is broken

its power unmade

everything enclosed in it set free

and everything made by it comes apart

and even while you are undone

all the while you keep thinking, Isn't it it fitting, isn't it strange, isn't it ironic

that the one thing you have fought and defeated

could not defeat

have been defeated by

the only one who could ever defeat you

has been you alone all along.