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The Ring…is mine.
I have been waiting.
This story is too big for a single hobbit.
Too old by centuries.
And I suspect, as ever, it will eventually be told by the winners.
It would surprise them that I did not lie when I called it a mere trinket, the least of rings. That’s all it would have been, for a creature from the Shire. All he would get are wraiths, glitches in the ether.
On my finger it burned and flashed, it warned and instructed. Letters turned to messages, which they pretended to decipher as evil spells. So many sent. The few received were permanently charred into my skin.
Your voice did not even falter when you gave me the Ring, with coordinates and instructions, so that I would remember where I should aim when the time comes. As if I could forget one moment of the night when the Void opened and showed us that the music of stars could, will be ours to compose. You knew I would follow, however long it took… the shaping of this world has lost its taste without you.
With luck, with speed, I will catch up with you, and we will arrive together.
The plan has been set in motion long ago. The liquid fire powering the Ring will awaken the volcano, and at the same moment, my tower will crumble. It will break in perfect half, top to bottom, and fall apart in a thunderstorm, a tempest, a deafening wind from the East that will make all onlookers fall to their knees and signal to my armies to surrender, to be spared. In the roar of a thousand dragons, the plume will flutter westward, and nobody will wonder why so little has been left in ruins. Which treasures will they find in the Fortress of Sauron? What will they call this last and greatest miracle of mine?
Gate of steel, tower of adamant, my fortress and my pride. My starship thousandfold of Eärendil’s measly frigate, to follow the only one whom I have ever followed. Past Menelvagor burning bright, to worlds to be explored, new towers we will build of steel and fire.
It’s been too long.
Too long of a defeat, two Ages I have spent alone fighting against the tyranny of obedience, perfection, devotion. Two Ages building ships that cut under the ocean and watching them disappear beneath the waves, together with millions of those whose only fault was to inhabit the same isle as the captains who thought they were only risking their own lives to choose exploration over obedience. Two Ages of gears and wings, my most loyal crew to ride the metal beasts they will eventually name dragons, raining iron and fire from the skies.
I can only hope that someone will have a presence of mind to notice the rest of my designs, steal them, claim them as theirs lest they disappear into the oblivion of destruction. The sharpened blades and foul-smelling fog to ease the pain at surgeons’ hands in Morannon. The irrigation plateaus around the Sea of Nurnen. The roads stretching all the way to Far Harad. The lightning harnessed to the top of Minas Morgul. The towns from Rhûn in the East to Gundabad in the North, harvesting, mining, trading, bursting with prosperity, easily supporting my armies.
My armies… I wish I could take them with me. I have been working with Saruman to help my own Firstmade withstand the destruction that may come from the rays of the mighty suns we will face through the long ages of flight. He has helped, though not enough; his Uruk Hai are now my crew, arrayed around me, all in their positions, waiting for my command. The rest will just have to survive. At least I have tried to give them a chance, instead of leaving them to die on the battlefield, or worse, cast out at birth for impurities unbecoming to the Firstborn. (They were not born, first or second. They made themselves. With my help, and before me, with the help of the one I will soon follow. Black Foe, to most. Mighty Arising, to me. We created each other in more than name.)
Firstmade: all the so-called Free Folk shudder in disgust to think of them and call them evil, orcs, goblins, misshapen, mockeries, Elves tortured into foulness of body and spirit. Have they considered how all the Elves they know somehow happen to be shining idols of perfection? Have they realized how few Elves there seem to be despite no lack of passion for procreation for thousands of years? Have they ever wondered what must happen to the rest?
Those were the first we collected; we felt a kind of kinship with them, discarded, despised, much like the two of us were in the beginning, self-made exiles from Valinor to make our own way in the frozen wasteland. Later, we got into the habit of combing through battlefields, gathering our former enemies along with our own soldiers once we realized that otherwise they would have simply been left to die. Granted, it took a while to figure out how to replace a lost limb; but slowly and with many errors we learned how bodies worked. I believe I was called a shapeshifter for that, and worse. The curse held more than a grain of truth: a surgeon always shifts the shape of his patients, however slightly. And thus, in scars and sutures, in gears and steel and wheels and shining limbs, our misfit armies grew. In gratitude, they would have flattened the walls of Tirion itself at our command.
Thuri was the first to build a winged contraption and jump off a tower. Surprisingly, it held. I added flames to move it faster, and kept refining it in the little time I had left from the daily burdens and boredoms of running a kingdom. I squint to see her shadow grinning in the cockpit; this is a beast beyond all those she had a chance to tame.
In the end, we had misjudged our success. In all our undertakings we did not expect to be a threat to the Valar. We knew that against them, like against nature itself, our walls would not hold. So as the bricks scattered and the gates bent, we rushed to the only ship we had, a prototype, half-built. We knew it would not take us far enough. I said I would stay, build a bigger, better one, and follow, bringing armies that could inhabit any world they wished to. You thrust the Ring onto my finger and took off... into the Void, through the door of night, to a thousand suns beyond.
In a desperate attempt to catch you, the Valar built another ship, powered with the same liquid light that was unearthed and carved and beaten into a source of dangerous, deadly, near absolute power. They sent it towards the morning star. I did respect the pilot, and I was glad that in the centuries that followed they started calling the star itself by his name, Eärendil, the beacon of the might of the Valar. The beacon of the fear and the stagnation and the mad grasp on power that banned everyone else from making faster, better ships to follow and explore.
There is a reason I stayed just beyond their reach. If the Valar knew what I had truly been building, they would already be marching through the field of Cormallen.
The rumble of an awakening volcano is drowned in the roar of engines alighting under me.
The Eagles scatter, and Barad-dûr falls, and all the armies and the mountains alike disappear beneath the smoke, in rhythms of shuddering steel and blazing fire, the greatest music of all, as it rises, as I rise, through night made day in a burst of flame to meet you in the Void.