Archive of Our Own

So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.

--Paradise Lost

Why, you chivalric fool. As if the way one fell down mattered.

--The Lion in Winter

The voices rose and fell on the cool night air, now so soft they mingled with the sound of the wind sighing in the treetops, now high and clear and mournful.

Mithrandir, Mithrandir, have you fallen into darkness?
Will you come to us no more at evening when the sun’s light slips from the leaves?
Now laughter is stilled among us, now our hearts have grown cold.
Ah! Who will teach us to weep that you might be mourned?

Frodo, resting beneath the trees, drifted off to sleep to the sounds of the sweet, sorrowful laments of the Elves for the Grey Wanderer, half in a language that he knew and half in the strange woodland tongue of Lórien. [1] 

It was the first time he had dreamed since crossing the borders of the Golden Wood. From the soundness of the sleep he had enjoyed in the bowers of Lothlórien, he would have said that some power kept all ill dreams at bay, that nothing might disturb the gentle cycles of sleep and waking in that timeless land, peaceful and unhurried as turning leaves. How long had it been since he truly rested? His sleep in the wild had been fitful and wary and cold, he had lain down ready to spring up at an instant at the first sign of danger. Even in Elrond’s house–the last place he had really been warm–he had slept the thick impenetrable sleep of healing, and his dreams had been dark. 

In Lórien at last he had slept without fear and without dreams. Even the Ring had grown quiet. He was still aware of it–it gleamed in his mind like a fire on a distant mountain peak–but its presence did not prey on him here. There was healing in the very air of the place, as if sorrow might be felt without danger, and gladness without guilt.  

This night was different. As happened occasionally on the border between sleep and waking, Frodo found himself suddenly dropping. But he did not catch himself with a start, safe on the soft grass of Caras Galadhon. Instead he kept falling; he plummeted through a rushing darkness and in nightmare he saw the shape from more dreadful waking: the black flame of the terror of Moria, Durin’s Bane. 

It seemed to him that he cried out, and tried to pull himself away, but he was lashed to the creature with tongues of fire, and they burned as they fell together. Down, down, down; the carven halls of lost Khazad-dum vanishing above them in an instant, and the raw stone of the chasm around them lit only by the fire that they trailed in their precipitate wake.

And yet, for all that, Frodo found that he could bear it. There was terror, yes, and pain, but they had not fully caught up to him yet. He was alight with his own purpose, ablaze with something like triumph. My foe is fallen, my quest fulfilled. All I have to do is hold on.

But then he saw it move, its shape resolving before him. He had thought, or hoped, the demon might be merely a shadow, but it turned on him a face, and all hope failed. Things like eyes opened out of that horror, and it looked on him as they fell, and it laughed.

“Little brother,” said the Balrog.

And something within him–his dream-self, perhaps, or some other spirit within his own–knew that voice. Across years and distance that recognition rang, racing over ages uncountable, beyond the limits of the body and the spirit. Something like a hand was laid on the side of his face; he heard the hiss of burning and his own voice screaming.

“Was this the price of thy treachery? This the high reward of thy cowardice? Thy bird-lord has tired of thee, bound thee in flesh, and cast thee out to crawl beneath his empty skies? Or has the Flame Imperishable no mightier champion now than this old husk?”

He tried to laugh, but his throat was filled with fire. “That may be so,” he heard his own voice rasp, “but it seems this husk will quench your flame yet. This is the fall from which there is no rising.” 

The darkness around him roiled and shook. “This is my realm,” the Balrog rumbled, “Where now is thine? Thou hast fallen farther than I, little brother. Thou–”

It paused, and a note almost of wonder came into its ruinous voice, a voice which he heard not with his ears so much as with his mind.

“Hast thou forgotten?”

And all at once the dream changed. The pain was gone, the darkness was gone, that grip and that voice were gone. He stood on solid ground; he was home and it was morning.

With the strange double consciousness of dreaming, Frodo knew and did not know where he was. His dream-self knew the place, but his own dreaming consciousness struggled even to see it clearly. It was not something framed to mortal sight. He was not alone; it seemed to him that he stood once again at the Council of Elrond. No, not quite–the one before him, gazing down at him with sad and kindly eyes, was not Elrond, though try as he might, Frodo could only see Elrond when he looked at him.

“I’m not going,” he heard himself saying, “and you can’t make me.”

“I would not make you even if I could, Olórin,” said his lord, and smiled through his sorrow. 

“Me? To fight Sauron? I hesitate to call your personnel management practices in question, but might I suggest any number of Tulkas’s servants might be a more appropriate choice?”

“To fight?” It was a woman now who spoke. “Not as Tulkas knows it. Too long and in too much sorrow have we labored in vain to defend the world that we love, the Children that we guard. Even offered in friendship, our touch shatters them. You shall descend into the form and frame of mortals. In other wise now shall the aid of the Powers visit Middle-Earth.”

“Yes, but, and this is key, that’s where Sauron lives. ” He shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “I have seen all I care to of the Marrer’s works. I am, and I don’t mind saying it, much too frightened to be of any use to you.”

“It is because of your fear that I am sending you,” said that quiet voice, “and because of what you have seen that you will choose to go.”

The dream rippled like water; he was in a garden now, beneath a tree, and the pain of looking upon his home so soon to be lost echoed so exactly in Frodo’s own experience that for a moment there seemed to be no difference between memory and dream. But this was not the Shire; this was no garden such as Frodo had ever seen outside of dreams or half-remembered reveries. 

No. Frodo’s thought caught on a point of correspondence. It was something like Lothlórien, though not in its appearance. But he felt the same healing in the air, the same sense of time without time’s hurts and rest without oblivion. Flowers whose names he did not know blossomed around him, a stream was singing somewhere, and the silver light–whether of morning or evening he could not tell–ran like a caress over branch and leaf.

“Do not be grieved, Daydream, not yet.” A cool hand rested on his. “There will be enough of grief to come.”

“I am miserably afraid,” he said. “Lady, you know what horrors the Marrer wrought; you know why I entered your service. I do not know if I can face them again.”

“Daydream of Lórien,” said the Lady, “Nairendur of my own service.[2] When you came to my brother you were a ray of sunlight; when you came to me, a wisp of smoke. In the time yet to be, you shall be a spark, a fire, a light to lighten the darkness. You were not framed for weeping, though you have learned to weep. No, you are a flame and you shall kindle flame, you shall call forth courage and joy from hearts grown cold and dark.”

“Why does it have to be me?” He felt the hesitation heavy on his lips, though Frodo did not know why the words should be so hard to form. “Is this because of what I was before? Because of where I came from?”

The Lady answered neither yes nor no. “You are a changing creature, Olórin; perhaps it will not be so difficult for you to understand mortals in their changefulness. Not all change need be change for the worse. Besides,” and there was a smile in her sorrowful voice now, “it will do you good to meet them as they are in the world, before they come in death to my brother and to me.”

“Perhaps,” he said, and was silent, looking out at the groves, the winding paths, the places of healing. “I will walk strange roads,” he said at last, “in light and in dark, but some part of me will never leave this garden.”

He closed his eyes, and felt a kiss pressed to his forehead, and a tear that was not his own fall upon his cheek.

With a start he woke, an old man, under a tree, with a cold rain beginning to fall. The garden seemed to be fading from him, like a dream within a dream, and the self that he knew was fading with it. Had he ever walked wing-footed among the stars? Now his feet ached, and his back, and the joints in his fingers. Had he ever drawn on material form like a cloak and cast it off as easily? Now matter was everywhere, it was all of him: hunger and weariness, fear and anger, pain and death.

The claws clutched at him, the darkness was all around him. There was no garden, no light, no strange and ancient voices that spoke to him as one of them. There was only an old man and a monster, falling, falling, falling.

It was not always this shape that I wore he thought, and looked again at the creature that he strove with, recognition thrumming through him. He clutched at the sword in his hand. The Balrog laughed, or perhaps it splintered; pieces of burning stone or its burning blood flew past his face. 

“Well!” he managed to gasp out, “I can’t say I ever expected to see you again, nor that I’m particularly pleased to do it. You have certainly come down in the world since our last meeting!”

Evidently Balrogs did not understand wordplay, or perhaps it was only the Common tongue that it did not understand. He pressed on:

“It’s a long way from the Iron Hells. Have you been tunnelling all this time, until you fetched up in poor Durin’s basement? I don’t think you’ve improved the place, not at all.” 

The Balrog hissed. Perhaps it did understand, though Frodo, dreaming still, did not.

“You really could think of nothing better to do with your freedom than to crawl about someone else’s house like a rat come up through a storm-drain? And you call me fallen? Do you remember when you saw me last? I do; I remember it all now, I remember who you were ”

The claws raked at him, the teeth snapped. He lifted his sword, and plunged it down with a cry, and felt the black fire crawling up the blade toward him. And suddenly Frodo was not falling at all anymore, but he was still beneath the earth, and he was burning.

No. Burning, yes, but not as a creature of flesh might burn; not even as a creature of matter. He was a spark, a coal, a creature of light made solid; he burned, but was not consumed. He was the flickering glow of a hearthfire, he was the play of the sun on water, he was the shape that danced in the flames. He was 

He found it hard to say Gandalf even to himself, so different was this being from the old man that he knew, gray and weary with long journeys and the weight of his terrible wisdom. But Frodo thought of his quick temper, his merry eyes, of the fearful power that he had glimpsed unveiled for a moment on the bridge of Khazad-dum, glinting through his age like a mithril-coat through rags, and he knew it for the same fire that leapt within him now.

It was becoming harder to hold onto the dream, or to hold onto himself within the dream. Frodo’s mind spun and ached, searching for a way to translate what he was seeing, who he was, into something that he could comprehend. Youth. War. Mountains. Fire. Healing. Pursuit. 

A recognition that was neither Frodo’s, nor Gandalf’s, but its own, came welling out of that portion of Frodo’s mind that never left the Ring. From somewhere high above, he heard a voice that Gandalf knew and trusted, that the Ring knew and hated.  

Angband is fallen! Let Estë’s people, and Irmo’s, tend the wounded, bring up the prisoners, cleanse the pits! Angband is fallen!

There. That was a commander’s cry, that was something he could understand. The dream came back into focus. A battle, then, a terrible one. Gandalf was a soldier–no, a healer–in a war of some sort. He was seeking through the dungeons below the enemy’s fortress to see if any other prisoners, in body or in spirit, remained.  He was holding something in his arms, and a trembling pressure was pulsing through his chest and behind his eyes. He wanted to cry.

Weeping had never been his nature, not before now. He was a dream, he was Dreaming, he was a shaper of smoke and a visioner of things unreal, but he had never imagined in the darkest of his fantasies that such violence could be visited upon spirit and on matter. Frodo was suddenly terrified that Olórin of Valinor would look on what it was he was carrying; he did not think he could bear to see, even in dreams, what it was that could make such a being weep.

Something moved in the darkness of the tunnel before him, and he was gripped by a terror so familiar that at first Frodo thought it was his own memory and not a part of the dream. Run! Fling yourself down, don’t let it see you; this is a foe beyond your power, if it catches you there will be no escape –

Frodo felt his dream-self master the fear, the fire within him burn low and guttering with the effort. Olorin advanced steadily toward the Balrog.

Brother, he breathed.

He reached for the Balrog’s name, and found nothing; the world was scorched where his old companion’s name had been. His being was altered, mired in matter, a change more fearful than the ruin worked upon the forms of the Children that had twisted them into orcs and fouler things. Yet he knew him.

Brother? Do you not know me?

The Balrog laughed at him, or perhaps it snarled; it glowed within as a furnace. At the sight of that ruined brilliance, he felt his heart twist, his fire wavering like a candle caught in a draft. He flickered, shaken by the wind that he would one day learn to call pity.

Once we sang together, do you not remember? Is this the great theme to which we lifted our voices? Is this –

Something stirred in his arms; the smallest of the maimed spirits of Angband’s dungeons crying in terror and pain. The Balrog cringed away from him, and he stepped towards it.

Come –

But he did not know whether he wanted to say come and be healed or come and be judged or come and be destroyed. He reached one hand out toward the creature. It gave a hiss, and a shriek like tearing metal, and it sprang away into the deeper darkness.

The face that the Balrog had turned on him before it fled was a ruin of wrath and gnawing hunger, and quite apart from the dream Frodo found himself thinking of another twisted creature beneath the mountains. How long had it crept in the darkness, consuming itself, till there was nothing left but hatred and desire?

The dream was spiraling away from him in a confusion of images, vision and memory mingling together. There were dragons coiling in the sky and stars breaking through clouds. What a pity that Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance! His companions had broken the deep dungeons of the enemy fortress and were bringing up the prisoners. A ring burned on his finger, a knife in his shoulder, a wordless sorrow in his heart. There were many figures, sleeping on the grass, in the gardens of Lórien. He was burying his head against someone’s chest. Who cannot weep, said the Lady, come learn of me.

Farther down, always falling, fire and water, earth and stone. It was not the Lady of Mercy that held him now, but the whip and the claws of the Balrog. He looked on that face he had last seen fleeing into darkness, and though it was stronger now, and wreathed in flame, it seemed at the same time more fragile, more fixed in its own ruin. 

Brother, he began again, but now the Balrog only snarled and howled. Had it ever spoken at all, or was that only another dream? 

How could they still be falling? Surely they fell through the void between the stars and not the endless darkness of the earth, their own burning the only light by which they could see. And even that light would be quenched, late or soon; there was no other end to a fall like this.

The fire in his heart wavered again. Was this worth it? The long years of toil and care, the ceaseless, helpless watch against the rise of the Dark Power in Mordor? All this, solely to carry down one of his brothers with him into darkness? No, not solely; the Ring that he had found and named was moving now to its destruction, and its bearer with it.

“Well, Frodo,” said a familiar voice, “it seems you’re not the only one with whom the past has caught up–though evidently I was a good deal more personally involved with that past than you were, so I haven’t got any grounds to object.”

“Gandalf!” The dream had separated them at last; Frodo was himself once more, sitting on the grass of Lórien with his old friend beside him. The joy of seeing him again, coupled with the knowledge that in the waking world he never would, shivered through his heart. “I thought I was–I dreamed you were–”

“Ah,” said Gandalf. “Sleeping in Lórien this sort of thing is only to be expected–I know your uncle would probably quibble with me on the finer points of etymology, and go on about false friends and so forth, but there’s a good reason that Lórien’s name ended up in what used to be Laurelindorenan. Galadriel knows all about it; you can ask her though I doubt she’ll tell you. The topic of Valinor’s a sensitive one with her, and is only becoming more so, these recent years.” 

Gandalf sighed. “She’s tired, Frodo, and wants to go home, but she’s not sure if she can, or even what home is anymore. I know the feeling, and I dare say you do too.”

Half of what the wizard was saying made no sense to Frodo, but the thought that Gandalf also longed for a home to which he could never return struck him with sudden pity and an intense fellow-feeling. “Your home,” he said carefully. “I saw a garden. Was that…”

“A dream, Frodo,” said Gandalf, staring off into the midnight shadows where the starlight filtered through the treetops. “ But it is not home, not now, or not exactly. If I could dream now, I would dream of the Shire, of a long evening on the cool grass, with a pipeful of the Shire’s best in my hand, and your uncle beside me going off on one of his ridiculous stories, with the voices of your innumerable nieces and nephews and cousins rising over the meadow as the stars come out one by one. But I do not think that I will dream again; I will not see that garden any more.”

The night wind stirred the mallorn leaves, and the voices of the Elves, raised in their sweet lamentation, were carried on the breeze.

“And the–the dark tower, the fortress. When you first saw the Balrog. You were something like a flame, and something like a doctor, and thank goodness I didn’t get a proper look at who you were tending to. Did that really happen?”

Gandalf gave him a keen and evaluative glance. “I can’t say for sure that it happened just how you saw it,” he said. “Let things pass far enough into memory, and they might as well be dreams. It was a world that is no more. And yet that world still shapes our own. You know that better than most mortals,” he added. “Just when you think you’re safe, the past comes reaching up to catch you by the ankle and drag you down.”

“How is it that you speak to me?” said Frodo after a moment.

Gandalf smiled, the lines of his face deepening. “You are a dreamer also–because of your own nature, and because of the time that you have spent with me, and, I am sorry to say, probably thanks to the influence of your burden as well.” 

With an effort, Frodo restrained himself from reaching for his throat, from seeing whether the Ring had accompanied him into dreams or not. “You have walked in the Unseen and have been wounded by it,” the wizard went on, “you have chosen to take on something that is not of the mortal world, and so naturally you’re able to see a bit beyond it. Nor is this the first time we’ve met like this, if it comes to that–though I wasn’t paying attention the first time.

“Also,” he added, “I think I wanted you to see me. This is where my part in the tale is to end, and I wanted you to know–as much as you can, of course, without doing permanent damage to your mind–who I was. Where I came from. What I was sent for. It’s foolish, of course, but if I am now to belong only to memory, I would like to think that you’ll remember me.”

“Where you came from… so you’re not from this world at all. I suppose I’m not really surprised. When I was a boy I thought you walked out of a fairy-tale, and I sometimes hoped you might whisk me away into one like you did my uncle. And then of course you did , but it wasn’t at all what I thought of as a child.”

“Oh, I am very much from this world,” said Gandalf, laughing as if at some private, rueful joke. “I am more from this world, I think, than you are quite ready to comprehend–certainly than I was ready to be reminded of, before I knew that I was leaving it.

“Do you know, I think I finally understand the terror that you mortals have of death? I knew that my own death was a possibility when I first embarked on this project, but among the other potential terrors of the work–loss, failure, every one of the devices and designs of the Enemy–it didn’t seem especially troubling. And it’s still not the worst thing, not in the least. But the way the possibility of death collapses into certainty, faster and faster, plummeting down toward that point beyond which imagination cannot reach–well. 

“So perhaps I’ve come to you for comfort. For hope. After all, it’s in your hands now.”

“What is?”

“Well,” said Gandalf, “everything, really.” He looked about for a pipe, but the dream had failed to provide one. “Don’t look so stricken! Everything’s in your hands in particular, of course, as you know, but everything’s also in Aragorn’s hands, and in Elrond’s, and in the hands of that stalwart gardener of yours, and in the hands of the thousands and thousands, great and small, living out their lives in spite of the Shadow. I first heard of your kind when I was in confusion and despair, and you have been my best source of hope ever since.”

That last made little sense, but Frodo was lost in his own thoughts.

“I–I do know what I’ve chosen, Gandalf.” Here in the dream he could say what he could never bear to in the waking world. “I won’t survive this. The Ring–I may not even…” But even the freedom of dreaming failed him; he could not bear to think it, let alone speak it aloud. 

“It will–change me,” he said after a moment. “The change has begun already.” 

Gandalf did not deny it, but looked at him thoughtfully. “There are many ways to fall, Frodo, and some are better than others, even if they do all end in darkness.” 

Something within him–a much younger self, the hobbit-lad who had thrown his arms around Gandalf’s knees when the old wizard visited his uncle–was crying out in protest. Why did it have to be me? Why you?  He felt a cool hand laid on his own, and thought of the Lady in the dream-garden. But it was Gandalf beside him, reaching out to give comfort and to receive it.

“I do not think you will fall as my brother fell, Frodo, change as he changed.”

“Your brother! That has to be another fairy-tale, doesn’t it? Even in the dream, in the fortress, you weren’t the same sort of thing at all.”

“No?” The word hovered between a question and a statement. 

Frodo thought again of how Gandalf had looked at the Balrog, of that dreadful splintered recognition. “But it seemed as if you knew each other.”

“We did. From the very beginning.”

“How?”

As he asked the question Frodo felt the dream change again. Something flashed in the wizard’s eyes, a spark or a star or a field of stars, and the garden was gone. Falling flickered across his mind, but up and down were gone, day and night were gone, time and space were gone. All around him the music of the Elves of Lórien rose, and changed, and blended into another more music, mighty and terrible, and he found that he was singing as well.

Perhaps music was the wrong word for it. Vibration. Pattern. Light. Thought. Image. His mind raced through possible names to put to it, for some kind of understanding to interpose between his mortal frailty and the overwhelming reality into which he had been plunged. Even the shield of that other dreaming self–and this was still Gandalf’s dream, he recognized and partook in this music, he was making it, made by it, native to it–could hardly keep Frodo from being torn apart and swept away in glory and in terror.

In all of the other visions, Frodo had been able to find some mask, some metaphor, that would enable him to understand at least a part of what Gandalf was remembering. But this was his nature fully unveiled, and there was no image that could translate it into something that a mortal mind could experience and remain whole.

He seemed to be very large, or perhaps very small; to have no substance and yet to have shape. He was a collection of potentialities, of directions, forces and symmetries and resonance, and great forms moved in the darkness around him.

In that primordial turbulence, Frodo felt a still point at the core of his being, and he clung to it desperately. As if that brought him closer to whatever kind of creature Gandalf was, at this unutterable beginning of his existence, he began to understand his surroundings. The image settled: music, a self, other selves around him. Experience. Emotion. Desire. He was not alone; there were others like him, all interweaving the great themes and counterthemes that bore them along.

He was overwhelmed and frightened because Gandalf was overwhelmed and frightened. His song had faltered, lost in the confusion raging around him. He looked for guidance and found contradiction. He looked for beauty, and found struggle. He looked for help, and beside him he saw for the first time the being with whom he fell.

It seemed as if you knew each other.

There was no question of resemblance to the Balrog, not now in the days before the formation of the universe. And yet it was the same being, just as Gandalf was the same being. Both voices in the great chorus, both authors of the world’s creation, both servants of the –

That still point ignited. Unbearably painful, unspeakably bright, the Ring shone through him with recognition. 

His master. The first of the Powers. The being from whom he was tearing away, losing himself and his song together. Whatever it was we wanted, it wasn’t this.

Then, like a drowning traveler catching at a rope, he felt – or heard – a new theme in the chaos, and he seized upon it in desperate hope. Clinging to that sweet, sorrowful thread of music hardly perceptible through the tumult, it seemed to him that he turned, to utter his farewell and his defiance. 

But the Ring was blazing on his hand and in his soul, and Frodo knew with the intense and immediate certainty of dreams that if he saw who it was that Gandalf was defying, he would burn like a handful of dry leaves. He pulled away from the revelation–stop, stop, I can’t bear it– and woke with a start.

“Master?”

It was a long moment before Frodo felt quite steady enough to turn his head toward the voice. But when he did, he saw kneeling beside him on the grass, Sam, looking distressed.

Frodo drew a long breath; the night air was cool and the grass tangled beneath his fingers where they had dug into the earth.

“You’re awake then!” The relief on Sam’s face was clearly visible in the starlight. “I didn’t know if I should wake you, begging your pardon; you need all the sleep you can get but it looked as though you were having some sort of nightmare. You were talking in your sleep. It sounded–well, not like orc-talk but it hurt my ears like it, and it must have hurt your throat. I thought I should get one of the Elves maybe, but I was afraid you might wake up and there would be no one here–anyway, I’m glad you’re awake now,” he finished in a rush. 

Frodo nodded, not trusting himself to speak. 

“It’s too bad, really it is,” Sam muttered, to have something to fill the silence of the Golden Wood. “I thought that here in the Elf-country you could find rest, if anywhere. Not that you don’t have the right to have a few nightmares, with everything that’s been going on–” He looked at Frodo beseechingly, in equal parts worried and unwilling to press him.

“I was falling,” Frodo said, distant and quiet. “I have been falling for–a long time.” And his hand went to the Ring.