Vox Popoli

In Rivendell, the ground shook.

It was not a great sensation. It was merely a tremor, a shudder, the sort of thing that might have been mistaken for a cart passing on a nearby road. But the water in the fountains rippled, and the leaves of the ancient trees trembled without wind, and the light, the clear, golden light that always lay upon the valley of Imladris, suddenly dimmed, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. But there was no cloud. The sky above Rivendell was clear.

Gandalf felt it first. He was standing on the terrace where Gwaihir had departed that morning, his pipe unlit in his hand, and he had been watching the southeastern sky with an expression of quiet confidence that had been slowly, imperceptibly curdling into something else, something he had not felt in a very long time, something he had almost forgotten the shape of.

Fear.

The tremor passed through the stone beneath his feet, and the doubt became certainty, and the certainty was the worst thing he had ever felt.

Elrond emerged from the house. He did not run because Elf lords do not run, but he moved quickly with the controlled pace of someone who has received terrible news and is walking toward the place where he knows it will be confirmed. He came to stand beside Gandalf on the terrace, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. They looked to the east, toward the shadow on the horizon that was, even now, visibly darker than it had been an hour ago. It was visibly expanding to the north and to the west.

“The shadow grows,” said Elrond.

“Yes,” said Gandalf.

“Then—”

“Indeed.”

Elrond closed his eyes. When he opened them, they held something that Gandalf had never seen in them before, not in six thousand years of their acquaintance, not in the fall of Gil-galad, not in the ruin of Eregion, not even in the moment on the slopes of Orodruin when Isildur had taken the Ring and walked away to his doom. It was not despair, exactly. Elrond was far too old for despair, which is a youthful emotion that requires the ability to believe that things ought to be other than they are. It was something deeper, quieter, and more final.

“The Windlord has fallen,” said Elrond. It was not a question.

Gandalf said nothing. His hand, resting on the stone rail of the terrace, was trembling.

Behind them, in the garden, Frodo Baggins looked up from his book. He did not know what had happened. He did not yet understand the darkness that was gathering on the edge of the world, or the silence that had fallen over Rivendell as if the land itself was holding its breath. But he felt it. He felt the ground shiver, felt the light change, felt something vast and irreversible shift in the deep foundations of the world. The book slid from his hands, and he sat very still, and he was afraid.

On the terrace, Gandalf and Elrond stood side by side and watched the shadow rise in the east, and neither of them spoke, because there was nothing left to say.

The ring had been reclaimed.

The One Ring had returned to its maker.

The darkness was rising.

And soon the dark lord would rule over all Middle Earth.

THE END

And that, my friends, is why JRR Tolkien didn’t simply have the eagles fly the ring to Mordor.

QEFD

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It came from behind the peak — from the far side of Orodruin, where the mountain’s bulk had hidden it from view — and it rose into the sky above the crater with a slowness that was worse than speed, because speed would have implied effort, and this creature moved as if effort were a concept that applied to lesser things.

Felgarion. Son of Ancalagon the Black.

The dragon was enormous. Not the size of Smaug, who had been large enough to blanket a town in flame, but larger, far larger, a creature from the Elder Days when the world was younger and made things of a scale it could no longer sustain. His wingspan blocked out the sky above the mountain. His scales were green, not the dark green of the elvenwoods but the deep, liquid green of emeralds, and they caught the red light of the fires below and threw it back in dark, bloody reflections. His eyes were gold and slitted and ancient and utterly without mercy. His jaws, when they opened, revealed a throat that glowed like the inside of a forge.

And on his back, between the great ridged spines that ran from skull to tail, sat Sauron.

The Dark Lord had changed. He was no longer a quiet figure in a silk robe, the chess player, the sketcher of sleeping beauty. He wore armor of black steel, chased with lines of red-gold that pulsed with the same rhythm as the mountain beneath him, and on his head sat a crown of iron, and in his hand he carried nothing at all. He wielded neither sword nor spear, because when one rides a dragon, one does not require weapons. He was terrible and beautiful in the way that a fire is beautiful when it engulfs a forest, and his eyes, visible even at this distance, burned with the same lidless intensity as the Eye atop his tower.

The dragon and his rider crested the peak of Orodruin and hung there for a moment, motionless, silhouetted against the column of smoke and ash, and the image was one that would haunt the nightmares of every creature that saw it for as long as they lived, which in some cases would not be very long at all.

Landroval saw it first. The great eagle turned and threw himself without hesitation at the dragon, not because he believed he could harm it, but because Gwaihir was below and still diving for the crack and someone had to buy him time. It was the bravest thing Landroval had ever done. It was also the last thing Landroval ever did.

Felgarion opened his mouth. The fire that came was not the fire of Smaug. It was not the hot, orange, flaming fire of a lesser wyrm. It was the fire of Ancalagon’s line, white at its core, blue at its edges, a fire that had once melted the towers of the Valar’s own fortifications in the War of Wrath. It struck Landroval in midair.

The great eagle was instantly transformed into a torch. His feathers, his flesh, the very structure of his bones — all of it caught and burned with an intensity that turned the eagle from a living creature into a shape of pure flame in the space of a single heartbeat. He did not scream. The fire was burned too fast for screams. He burned, and he fell, and the wind of his falling trailed a long ribbon of white fire down the mountainside like a comet striking the earth, and then he was gone.

Gwaihir did not look back. He could not afford to look back. The entrance to the Sammath Naur was fifty yards ahead, close enough to see the ancient stone of its lintel, close enough to feel the blast of heat from within, and he drove himself toward it with every ounce of strength his fatigued wings could summon.

He did not reach it.

Felgarion descended upon him like a green star falling. The dragon came straight down, folding his wings and dropping with a speed that belied his enormous size, and his claws — each one as long as a ship’s mast, black as volcanic glass and sharp beyond the craft of any smith — closed around Gwaihir’s body from above. The eagle thrashed. His wings beat against the dragon’s grip, his talons raked at the emerald scales, but Felgarion’s claws held him with the casual, immovable strength of the earth itself.

The dragon’s head descended.

His jaws opened, and the teeth — row upon row, black and translucent and curved like scimitars — closed around Gwaihir’s neck. There was a sound. It was a sound that should not be described, because some things are too terrible for language and this was one of them. The Windlord’s headless body went limp in the dragon’s claws.

Felgarion landed on the slopes of Orodruin with a concussion that shook the mountain to its roots. His claws released the broken body of the eagle, and it slid down the black rock and lay still, the great wings splayed and bent, the golden plumage darkened with dirt and ash, the oozing red blood in stark contrast with the exposed white bone of his severed spine.

Sauron dismounted.

He walked to the body of Gwaihir the Windlord, and he knelt beside the left talon, and he unbuckled the pale leather pouch with his nine remaining fingers. The Elven craftsmanship was exquisite. Even in the moment of his triumph, he noted this with the detached appreciation of a fellow artisan.

He opened the pouch, and drew out the Ring.

It was warm. It was always warm. But now, here, on the slopes of the mountain where it had been made, it was more than warm, it was alive, singing in a frequency that resonated with the fire beneath the stone, with the will of its maker, with the vast and ancient design that had begun in the forges of Eregion and was, in this moment, finally and irrevocably complete.

Sauron stood. He raised his fist, his right hand, the one with the missing finger and held the Ring aloft against the burning sky. The mountain roared beneath him. The clouds above Mordor, the great pall of shadow that had hung over the land for years, began to spread across the sky, rolling rapidly outward in all directions like a dark tide unleashed. The Great Eye atop Barad-dûr blazed with an exultant light that could be seen from the Shire to the Sea of Rhûn.

Behind him, Felgarion raised his head and roared, a sound that shook the very foundations of the Ephel Dúath and sent avalanches cascading down every peak in the range, and the Witch-king, circling above on his fell beast, bowed his hooded head.

On the slopes of Mount Doom, in the shadow of his dragon, with the blood of the Windlord at his feet and the One Ring burning in his fist, the Dark Lord of Mordor exulted in his victory.

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They came to Mordor in the sixth hour.

The clouds broke apart as the eagles crossed the Ephel Dúath, and the land below them was revealed in all its desolation, with the brown, cracked wasteland of the Plateau of Gorgoroth stretching away under a sky of smoke and sullen amber, the dark mass of Barad-dûr rising in the distant northeast like a needle of black iron thrust into the heavens, and there, directly ahead, filling the southern horizon with its vast and terrible shape, Orodruin.

Mount Doom.

The mountain was active. It was always active — had been since Sauron first bent its fires to his will in the forging of the Rings — and now it breathed a column of smoke and ash into the sky that rose miles above the peak and spread into a canopy of darkness that blotted out the sun. The slopes were black and red, veined with rivulets of cooling lava that glowed like infected wounds, and from the fractured cone at the summit a dull orange light pulsed in slow, rhythmic intervals, as if the mountain itself had a heartbeat.

Gwaihir descended. The air thickened as they dropped below the cloud layer — thickened with heat and ash and the acrid stink of brimstone, and the winds became treacherous, gusting unpredictably as thermals off the mountain’s slopes collided with the cooler air from the plateau. The great eagle’s wings adjusted constantly, reading the turbulence with an instinct born of millennia, but even Gwaihir felt the strain. This was not his sky. This was a sky of fire and poison, and every breath of it burned.

Landroval flew on his right. Meneldor on his left. The three eagles were tired — six hours at altitude, at speed, without rest — but the mountain was before them and the Sammath Naur was close, a dark gash in the face of the cone visible now even through the haze of ash. Minutes. They were minutes from the end.

The Witch-king came out of the smoke.

He came from below and to the east, rising on a fell beast that screamed as it climbed — a sound like iron tearing, like the death cry of something that had never truly been alive. He had been waiting in the lee of the mountain, hidden by the ash plume, and his timing was precise. The fell beast’s vast wings beat the fouled air and drove it upward on a collision course with Meneldor, the youngest and outermost of the three eagles, and behind him came two more — Uvatha and Adûnaphel on their own mounts, spreading wide to flank.

“Nazgûl!” The cry came from Landroval, less a word than a shriek in the eagle’s tongue, a sound of warning and fury that cut through the roar of the mountain. Gwaihir banked hard, and the formation broke.

Meneldor turned to meet the Witch-king. It was the brave choice and the wrong one. The fell beast was larger than Meneldor, uglier, and utterly without fear, driven by a will that was not its own, and the Witch-king rode it with the cold expertise of a warrior who had been killing from the air since before the founding of Gondor. They met in a tangle of wings and talons above the eastern slope, and for a moment the two shapes became one, a thrashing, screaming knot of feather and membrane and raking claws, and then they broke apart with Meneldor bleeding.

The wound was along his left side, where the fell beast’s claws had torn through feather and flesh to the muscle beneath. Meneldor’s wing faltered. He dropped, caught himself, dropped again. The Witch-king circled above him, patient, and the fell beast’s mouth hung open, trailing ropes of dark saliva, waiting.

But the Witch-king had made a mistake. He had committed to Meneldor, and in doing so he had left Uvatha and Adûnaphel to deal with Gwaihir and Landroval alone.

They were not enough.

Landroval struck Uvatha’s fell beast from above and behind with the full force of a diving eagle — talons extended, wings folded, falling like a bolt of golden lightning. The impact broke the fell beast’s spine. The sound it made was extraordinary — a wet, structural crunch that was felt as much as heard — and the black-scaled creature folded in on itself like a thing made of paper and fell, spinning, trailing a banner of dark blood, and Uvatha the Horseman, who had once ridden the plains of Khand with an army at his back, fell with it, his black robes streaming behind him, silent, and not without dignity, until the slopes of Orodruin received him and he was gone from the sky.

Gwaihir took Adûnaphel’s mount head-on. The fell beast lunged for him with its serpentine neck and snapping jaws, and Gwaihir caught its long neck in both his talons and wrenched in opposite directions. The fell beast’s neck broke with a sound like a green branch snapping, and Gwaihir released it and beat upward as the dead creature tumbled past him, its wings still twitching in purposeless spasm. Adûnaphel fell screaming, and her screams gradually faded as she plunged into the fires that coursed along the mountain’s lower slopes.

Two Nazgûl down. The Witch-king, seeing his support destroyed in a matter of seconds, pulled back. He drove his fell beast away from the wounded Meneldor and climbed, circling wide, and for a moment the sky above Orodruin was clear.

“Go!” Landroval screamed at Gwaihir. “The crack! Now!”

The Windlord turned toward the Sammath Naur. He could see it clearly — the great opening in the mountainside, dark and wide, lit from within by the deep red glow of the fires below. The air above it shimmered with heat. He folded his wings into a shallow dive, angling his descent toward the entrance, and the pouch on his talon — that small, exquisitely crafted pouch of pale Elvish leather — swung beneath him like a pendulum. Within it, the Ring seemed to pulse, seemed to burn, seemed to cry out in a voice that only the mountain could hear.

Four hundred yards. three hundred. He could feel the heat now, rising from the cone in waves that distorted the air and made the dark opening dance and waver. Two hundred yards. He adjusted his angle, spreading his wings to brake, preparing to stoop through the entrance and release the pouch into the abyss below —

And then the shadow fell over him.

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