Chapter Text
Gorey miasma fills the air as a bloodied finger, golden band attached, falls to the battle-weary land, where it is trodden on and kicked far more than it ever expected to be; the finger, under the command of said golden band, wriggles and squirms its way off of the battlefield and into a dark, angry river, where it flows rapidly downstream, never to be seen again, supposedly lost to time in Ulmo’s domain, his unawareness causing centuries of strife to come.
One year later, after the Men have rebuilt and the Elves have replenished their strength, reports of strange happenings fill the offices of authorities all over Arda. Children are being born with supernatural abilities – such bizarre reports had always been filed away for a rainy day, but these were different. Babies who could breathe fire or freeze a person at a glance, who could look into your eyes and understand far more than a newborn ought to; it was uncanny, and quite frankly, scary, so the Free Peoples of Middle Earth did what they do best: ignore the problem until it either goes away or becomes normal.
The latter occurred faster than a babe could open its eyes.
Several generations later, almost all of Arda sustained themselves with these abilities; communication between settlements had never been faster, while crops grew exponentially thanks to some of the wandering small people who offered their gifts in exchange for a hot meal.
And that’s what they were, really – gifts. Gifts for those who had seen enough, for those who had acted the unwilling witness to true evil, and who had survived.
Oh, how wrong they were.
–x–x–x–
It only took a few centuries for people to connect the dots; as more and more people were born with eldritch capabilities, there were fewer and fewer who died peacefully. As the growing population of miracle-havers began to age, many noticed the horrible full-body side effects that came along with it. Most assumed it was a plague of some sort, similar to the Great Plague, and so called for aid from neighbours, only to discover they were in the same situation; borders were closed off, and everyone quarantined to their respective homes.
This did not help.
Full-body tremors, fevers so high they’d cook raw meat, hallucinations of an all-seeing eye met with paralysing fear – it was all too much for the mortals of Middle Earth to deal with. But deal with it they did, because, at the end of the day, they could not rid themselves of the parasitic abilities they were cursed with.
–x–x–x–
Accounting for the toll death took on a person was never a fun task, least of all while you were living. It is this train of thought that led two Hobbits onto a river on a bright summer’s day, upon the line between home and the wilds. It is also this train of thought that launched the two into the river below them, wanting to live freely while they could, and die quickly when they did. When one surfaced with a golden band, no finger attached – well, who could quite blame the birthday Hobbit for his actions? And if that precious golden band, lifted from the water, released its control over Ulmo’s domain, who had the memory to realise it was worth bothering about?
–x–x–x–
Elves were the first to live on Arda; they spread out across the ages, residing in their palaces carved out from nature. Soon after the Ring’s release from its watery grave, though they did not know it, they found that their Hawkeyes were losing their exactness, still maintaining sharper vision than most, but missing their shots once every so often; their Silvertongues found it harder to gather the attention of masses, now having to choose one or two targets, and their Revivers were susceptible to some of the more aggressive illnesses as opposed to none.
Men found that their Windwalkers could reach lesser and lesser heights, while their Temperates could no longer warm whole cities, now limited to streets or singular buildings. When they had children, they were born with weakened abilities, or none at all.
Dwarves were both the most and least affected; immediately, the majority of the Dwarven population became ability-less, or close enough to it; the stone grew silent, and the Archivists could no longer summon their weapons; those unfortunate enough to have bones of mithril found that their joints would slide out far too often, and they needed constant medication to avoid blood poisoning. Only the descendants of the original seven Dwarf Lords whose families still held their Rings remained unaffected; they grew weaker, but not unhealthy, and were never born powerless.
Hobbits had lived in the Shire for a long time. Before that were the Wandering Days. They did not make a habit of violence, with only one reported murder in their books since its establishment, nor did they make a habit of talking to the Big Folk, who only ever looked at them as though they were children, lesser because of their stature. These particular habits may not necessarily go hand-in-hand, but they certainly affected one another, despite what the Hobbits might think.
So, while the rest of the world went back to normal, the Hobbits were held to their mystical abilities and exorbitantly tortuous deaths.
Life, unsurprisingly, came and went as normal for the Hobbits. Life was simple. Life was good. Life was to be enjoyed, right up until the last percent, where it all went sideways.