Fiddler's Green by Prackspoor  

The mote had been erring around for a long time without memory and mind. It remembered wrath and pain, confusion and the overwhelming agony as something was ripped from its very being, as if a big dog had closed its teeth around the mote's soul and torn it out. The mote was blinded by lightning and obscured by poisonous fumes as it flew across the barren waste under a red-and-black sky. It climbed ashen mountains and fled from crevice to crack, seeking refuge in the fissures of the world, because the mote was the weakest of them all now, so weak it was unable to take even take the smallest of shapes.

For a long time it dwelt in the dark for it feared the blinding light of the sun. But every time, only moments after it had come to rest in a murky place under the earth and stones, ants and spiders came to chase it away. They scurried and scuttled about with their disgusting multitude of legs, gaping and gawping out of many black eyes. They tried to bite and grab it, clicking their awful jaws. Spiders came and tried to spin their cocoons around it and the mote desperately flew left and right and darted between the legs of its prison-keepers, it squashed under the thick, soft belly of a great spider and fled past the vermin and out into the dreadful light.

It reached a great marsh and it fled to a riverbank although the mote feared water almost as much as it feared sunlight. There it rested between pebbles and the mud, but its reprieve didn't last long, because small lizards thought it prey and hunted and chased it through over the riverbank and into the reeds. Left and right it flickered, because the mote could not even bend a straw and it had to avoid the sharp blades of the water-grass. The little spirit was flickering with exhaustion when night fell at last and the lizards retreated to their holes under the swamp. But as soon as the last ray of sunlight had gone and merciful darkness blanketed the world, strange lights rose from the water of the marshes. The murky water itself was glowing in a sickly, greenish colour. Wisps of mist rose up like fog and in their shifting form the mote could see faces, long dead and forgotten and misshapen with decay, pain and wrath. The mote huddled deeper into the darkness under a rotten leaf of reed where it was hiding, but the faces slowly turned and then they were all looking in its direction. The lights that had risen from the water were swaying in place, then they glided forward, homing in on the mote. The world of the mote had once been greater than life itself, but now it had shrunken to the size of stones and holes-in-the-earth. And this whole small world was now filled with terror as the mote saw vengeance in the faces of the dead who had noticed its presence, and once more it left behind its hiding place and it staggered away, trying to escape the wraiths on its heels. But they were not to be shaken off that easily. They surrounded the mote and pushed it and rotten hands reached out of the water and tried to pull it under the surface. The mote zigged and zagged and with a last burst of strength, it left the marshes behind.

The mote flew ever westward. It did not heed the sun any more, because the night harboured as many enemies as the light of day brought forth. There was no comfort to be found, no resting place where it could stay. It flew over endless grassland until snowy mountains rose up, their white caps twinkling and sparkling in the sunlight. The mote crossed the mountain range and turned north. It held no love for the cold and the snow, but the land there was dead and devoid of any beasts of prey. It spent a long time on the cap of the highest of the white mountains, higher even than the clouds, where it was blinded and burned by the sun. It was lost and exposed under a cruel blue sky and the winds battled around the mountain top, threatening to rip it off the peak like a leaf. The mote huddled down and clung to the sharp ice crystals, while day turned to night and to day again. The lands below were hidden by the clouds and the mote was alone on the mountain top, without a name, without a life. It stayed there for some time until the winds and the cold had worn it down and the mote surrendered to the elements. It waited without doing anything, and perhaps there was something that should have happened now that it had given up, but neither death nor life seemed to want to claim it. Finally, a gust of wind gently picked up the mote and carried it down from the peak and north.

The mote allowed itself to be carried on the little swirls and eddies of wind. It flew over a stretch of forest land, over ruins of long-abandoned cities and along big stone gates hewn into mountain sides. A memory of two ancient cities stirred and submerged again, for the little soul of the mote was not able to support conscious thought. For a while, the mote withdrew from the outer world and curled up into itself and allowed fate to decide where it would be carried. Some days, it didn't touch the ground at all. Other days it spent lying in the soft grass and moss, not caring whether the floor was shaken by a hog digging through the earth right next to it or whether the sniffing nose of a fox nudged it to one side.

Such was the existence of the smallest of the small, until the wind or a twist of fate carried it over a ridge of hills called Barrow-downs and into the valley on the other side where a river was merrily leaping down from the Downs and past a house with friendly windows.

____________

The mote unfurled from looking in onto itself when it took note of a clear, bright sound nearby. The mote thought it the sound of a swiftly burbling river, but then it heard the melody and the words, which interwove to form a song:

“Douse and wring and swiftly spread

the linens under the sun

with frost on tree and riverbed

at last summer's end has come!

Quickly now, wax shoes and floors

For winter's not far gone

Clean the windows, open doors

During fresh and golden dawn.

At mid-day, bring the water in

To polish knob and glass,

Fetch lilies of my river-kin

from meadows of green grass!

When at last blue evening falls,

put logs onto the fire,

come home into our friendly halls,

and sing to your heart's desire!

When almost all our work is done,

and winter snows come hither,

there's yarn and wool that's to be spun,

but our flowers never wither.

Even when ice encrusts the ground,

winter's grip won't hold us faster,

for here there's merriment to be a-found

With Goldberry and the Master!

The clear and bright voice rung like a bell and thrummed through the little mote and it suddenly remembered homely houses with warm, yellow windows and welcoming friends at the doorstep. Tired and battered, but still curious, the mote rose from the ground and glided over the grass until it reached a pond, drawn by the song and the promising words.

The pond was clear and not very deep and in it stood a woman with yellow hair and flowers in her braids. She was clad in green and silver and her skirt floated like the leaf of a water-lily around her knees. She was scrubbing and washing white linens, then shook them out and laid them to dry on the grass next to the pond. The mote watched her work until she suddenly walked over to where it was hovering and almost spread a bed-linen over it. The mote darted aside as quickly as its tired state allowed, but it could not help being caught under the sheet.

“Now, now! What do we have here?” the woman said and lifted a corner of the bedsheet where the mote was caught under it. “A little spirit perhaps? Or a traveller?” She lifted the mote in the cup of her hand and her touch was cool and soothing like water and although the mote did not love rivers or the sea, it could feel her cool touch easing the burning pain that was plaguing it since it had lost most of its soul, and maybe even before that.

“Ah! But you look worn and tired! And your light is flickering! But there is something to be done about that, I am sure. No one comes here to Tom Bombadil's house and doesn't leave with more strength or courage of heart.” And with those words she leapt out of the water and her laughter was like the river that came down from the mountains and fed into the pond. “Come now, if you'll allow me to carry you!”

The mote didn't object, and even if it had wanted it would not have been able to. Thus, it let the woman carry it over to the house and settled into her palm. A lot of pain and worry eased out of the little being at her touch. The woman carried it into the house and when they crossed the doorstep, the mote felt a faint prickling which was strange, but not unpleasant. The woman entered a room with a table and rush-seated chairs. On one wall, there was a fireplace and on another a window which was looking out over the gentle slope of the hill where a path was leading eastward and into the mountains.

“Now where to put you, little friend?” the woman asked. “I would seat you in a chair, but you seem a bit small for it and the table or the floor hardly are fitting places to rest. We also have beds, but you would probably be bothered by the blanket.”

The mote was unable to talk, therefore it slipped out of the woman's palm and slowly floated over the floor which was made of big flagstones. It flew over to the fireplace where the remains of burned logs and ashes bore witness of a fire long gone out and settled between the dust and cold embers.

“Curiouser and curiouser.” The woman put a finger to her lips. “But then again, you are drained and have come a long way. I smell the air of high mountaintops on you. You must have been cold for a long time and warmth is good for resting and healing. Would you have me light a fire?”

The mote flew out of the chimney once more and wavered off to one side in a wordless attempt to make room for the woman. She smiled and took some kindling in her hands which she lighted carefully and then placed logs onto each other. When she was satisfied and the fire was crackling merrily, she stood aside and made an inviting gesture.

“Here you are, little spirit. Your request is unusual, but if we can fulfil your wishes they shan't go unheeded in Tom's house. Now sleep—or rest, whatever you prefer—and when Tom comes back he may be able to help you in a way that I cannot. He is the Master of this place, you must know. I sense that you have a lot to tell, but no tongue to speak with. Maybe we can remedy that. But rest now and fear no dangers and no cold! You are in a friendly house and neither shadow, snow or wind are allowed in here if they do not behave.”

With that, she turned around and left the mote. The mote in turn glided between the warm, orange flames which encircled and embraced it like old friends. This was not a consuming, dark fire like the mote remembered, but merely a warm glow to invigorate tired limbs and soothe troubled minds.

_______

The sun wandered past the window and was already low in the western sky when the mote woke again. The shadows in the room had turned to a bluish colour and outside white mists began to rise. The fire had died down to glowing embers, but mote felt stronger than it had in a long time and with newly awakened curiosity set to exploring the house. The door had been left ajar and the mote glided down a short passage to where it could hear sounds of clanging pots and smell the scents of cooking. The mote floated into the kitchen where the woman was standing in front of a stove while on a trestle table behind here, three dishes were being prepared. There was an oven with warm bread baking in it and bowls filled with honeycombs and autumn fruit.

The woman turned around, noticed the mote and her eyes crinkled in a merry smile. “Ah there you are! I came to look in on you in the afternoon, but you were fast asleep and I did not want to disturb you. I thought you would come on your own as soon as you were awake, and you chose a good time to leave your bed. Supper is almost ready!”

The mote floated up onto the table and watched her work when it heard the front door open and suddenly, someone sang out loud:

Hey dol! Merry dot! Dong-a-long a-dillo!

Who has come back home at last? Tom Bombadillo!

Hop, now, derry doll, while the mists do grow and shiver,

Ho dol, cheery-oh, Tom brings lilies from the river!

He wanders far and fearless, but not beyond his gates,

for when the even-shadows fall his Goldberry awaits!

The woman laughed. “Listen, Tom has come home at last! Now it won't be long before we will solve the puzzle of your coming. Come with me, we will set the table together!”

The mote, which of course could do nothing to help the woman called Goldberry, followed on her heels into the room with the table and the fireplace where it had slept away the day. Inside stood a man, but he looked quite different from anything the mote had expected. He was shorter than a man, but not as short as a dwarf and his face looked different from both. He had round, red cheeks and twinkling blue eyes. He was wearing yellow boots and a blue jacket and on his thick brown hair sat a hat with a blue feather. His face bore a thousand crinkles of laughter and he pulled off his hat with a swift gesture when Goldberry entered and bowed to her while he presented her with a big leaf on which water-lilies were assembled as on a tray.

“For you, river-daughter!” he exclaimed merrily and Goldberry took the lilies with a smile on her face.

“Long have you been gone and what marvellous lilies did you find!” Goldberry said. “But look, we have a guest tonight!”

At those words, Tom straightened up and Goldberry stepped aside to reveal the mote. Both mote and Tom Bombadil looked at each other for a few moments. A ripple seemed to go through the air and suddenly, the mote recoiled and flitted toward the door.

“Ho, little fellow! Not so fast!” Tom Bombadil called. “It's impolite to leave when you have not even introduced yourself!”

The door clicked shut with a gust of wind that came out of nowhere. The mote halted and darted into a corner and from there to the window, frantically searching for a way out. But alas, the window was closed and Tom Bombadil stood before the chimney, his hands on his hips and a serious expression on his face. He watched to mote flitting to and fro for a while, looking for a place to hide, but to no avail. Finally, he raised his arms and clapped his hands.

“Halt!” he cried and there was something in his voice that magnified the words so that, albeit not loud, they reverberated through the floor and the walls and the lilies in Goldberry's hands were shivering.

The mote fell to the floor as if it had been struck down. Tom Bombadil walked over to where it trembled and flickered and picked it up in his brown, broad hands.

“Now, now!” he said and wagged a finger in front of the mote. “No more darting around and no more trying to run! I know that you especially might be afraid to find yourself here, but do not forget that most people are better hosts than you have been, my little friend! I know who you are and what you have done, and I even know what you would have done to this place had you come into power. Do you fear being treated like you once treated those who were brought to you? Some people would do that, no doubt, but Tom's house has no dungeons and dark rooms with spike-wheels and instruments to inflict harm!”

The little mote shivered and tried to escape, but there was power in Tom Bombadil's words and it found itself frozen on the palm of his hand.

“The world outside has changed, has it not?” Tom asked the mote. “I am here in my realm and I do not leave it, but it did not escape Old Tom that something has been going on on the outside. You have risen high and you have fallen even deeper, I can see that. There is little left of you now. Where did the rest of you go?” Tom's blue eyes regarded the mote with frightening insight. “Tinkering with the fabric of Creation is dangerous business, little spirit,” he murmured, so only the two of them could hear.

Then he turned around to Goldberry and raised his voice. “It is rare that the great wide world comes knocking on my door, but Tom doesn't turn it aside! I am sure our guest has a lot to tell and many questions to answer, and I think he would be more comfortable doing it in his own body.”

Goldberry smiled and set the leaf with the water-lilies aside. “So there is more to you than meets the eye. See, Tom will help you!”

Tom looked at the mote when it shrank back in fear. “I will do you no harm, little spirit. Tom harms nobody and nobody harms Tom. So keep still and let me see what we can do for you.” And with those words, Tom turned around and ran outside, skipping from one foot to the other. It did not take long before he returned with a handful of earth, a few twigs and a jug of water in his hand.

“Jolly-oh, little fellow!” he exclaimed. “We will do some old magic now!”

The mote recoiled in distrust, but Goldberry knelt down and smiled at it. “Courage, little one. Tom has never hurt anyone and he knows what he is doing. What you have done is now behind you and we shall save judging you for another day.”

“First of all, we need a focus,” Tom said. “All magic needs boundaries. We can't have old spells skipping about like deer in spring!” He looked around, his brow creased as if he was looking for something. When he saw the water-lilies, his face lit up. “Ho dol, merry dot! The lilies, of course! Goldberry will make a circle of them to keep the magic inside and close to you.”

Goldberry took the water-lilies and fetched some yarn, then sat down on one of the chairs and with swift and deft movements, strung the lilies together until she had a loop of flowers which she placed on the floor between Tom and her.

Tom clapped his hands and then knelt down next to the loop. He placed the jug of water and the handful of earth on the ground, and then took ahold of the twigs.

“First,” he said, “come the bones.” And he put them together to form a spine and two arms and legs. “Now, blood and flesh.” And with that he merged earth and water until it was a malleable mass and he started to form a small body with a round head and four limbs. “And at last—the soul.”

And with that, he gestured for the little mote to enter the circle of flowers where the small mud-man was standing. The mote, however, hesitated. It remembered something about this man in his blue jacket and with his feather-hat, but the knowledge was alarming and for reasons it did not remember it knew that it should fear him.

“Ho, little fellow! We can't wait forever!” Tom made a shooing gesture with his hand, pushing the mote into the circle. Then he stood and spread his arms.

“Out of water, out of soil,

rise from this immortal coil,

twigs to bones and soil to flesh,

blood bubbling from water fresh,

soul to mind and mind to matter,

focus to thoughts so wont to scatter,

head to neck and hand to arm,

from death to life, from cold to warm,

rise now fast and ever faster,

heed the call of Tom the Master!

Goldberry watched calmly while Tom sung, but even her eyes widened in wonder when the mote started to grow with a bright light that grew until it filled the entire circle, swallowing the little man-likeness of mud and twigs and the water-lilies. It grew and grew until it was a round pillar of light standing in the room. Then, slowly, the pillar started to take form. It shrunk until it revealed a white-glowing body and arms and legs and finally a head. A strange music filled the room, echoing long after Tom's words had faded, but it seemed like the song was repeated again and again by disembodied voices all around them. Finally, the melody died down and with it the blinding light.

The figure of a man was left standing in the middle of the room. He was tall, much taller than Tom and even Goldberry. His limbs were long and slender and his hair was golden and fell down his back in wild curls. Around his neck rested the loop of lilies Goldberry had made and they were glowing with the ancient magic of Tom's incantation. He was unclothed safe for the necklace, but he held his head high without shame or fear and there was a fire in his amber eyes, like embers that were just waiting to be stoked into flame once more.

Tom regarded the man thoughtfully, his blue eyes twinkling. “Now, wouldn't you agree this is better?”

Slowly, the man turned his gaze to Tom and looked at him for a long time. His face was unmoving and at last, the Lord of the Rings nodded.

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Night had fallen over the Old Forest and Sauron the Abhorred was sitting alone in a bedchamber in Tom's Bombadil's house, clad in a makeshift tunic Goldberry had stitched for him with her deft hands. He had his legs crossed under him on the mattress and stared out of the window and into the darkness beyond.

There had been a great many questions on both sides after he had been resurrected. The little man and his wife had wanted to welcome him, but Sauron had declined curtly and asked them their names and where they were. They had introduced themselves as Tom Bombadil and Goldberry and had told him that he was now in Withywindle Valley. “Where is this valley?” Sauron had asked. “Near the Shire,” Tom Bombadil had answered. Sauron vaguely remembered having heard the name before, but that did not help him place it among the many kingdoms and provinces of Middle-earth. “And where is the Shire?” he asked and Tom Bombadil had said nothing to that except, “Next to the Old Forest and not far from Bree-land, dol. But more I do not know, for Tom does not go very far beyond the boundaries of his land.” And that was that. “Good,” Sauron had said, because that was the end of the conversation for him. “Ho, do you not want to tell us who you are and where you come from?” Tom Bombadil had asked to which Sauron had answered “No” and turned away.

Then, when he had been already half-way out of the door, something very strange had happened, because all of a sudden he was frozen to where he was standing and unable to move another step forward. It took him only moments to understand that the strange little man in the blue coat and yellow boots was holding him back, working whatever twisted magic had brought him back to life. Sauron's wrath had flared brightly inside of him and a very familiar desire to overthrow and dominate and subjugate had grown within him. He would have killed both man and woman then and there and he strained against the grip of Tom Bombadil, not moving a muscle in his arm or his face, but to his growing anger and horror found that there was nothing to strain against. Tom Bombadil's will was not tangible or forceful, but incorporeal and all-encompassing, (not forcing him to kneel, but the universe folding around him in such a way that there was no other choice but for him to bend) and it slowly and carefully brought Sauron's own will to its knees and made it bow to Tom's terrible and gentle power.

Of his own free will (and then again, not) he turned around and sat down at the table, almost choking on his own wrath and hatred. But buried deeper than that, there was also the mindless fear he had felt when he had been a mote, raw, naked and unshielded before Tom Bombadil when he had come home from his evening stroll, carrying about him an aura brighter than the sun and older than the stars, gentle and joyful and terrifying.

Tom and Goldberry had dinner afterwards, laughing merrily and singing songs, once in a while asking Sauron a question he did not give an answer to. He had watched them instead, with half a mind to behead the insufferable couple with the knife buried in a wheel of yellow cheese, but a look of Tom Bombadil had stopped him in his thoughts before he could do so much as move his hand. He had left the room as soon as Tom bade him good-night and not a second too early before he lost his temper.

Now he was here, alone in a room with a long bed to accommodate him. To distract himself from his anger, he tried to get used to his new body. He remembered now the forms he had once worn, but this one was different. He heard the blood rushing through his veins and there was a heart beating in a cage of bones in his chest. The new body was slow and sluggish and even without trying he knew that he would not be able to shape-shift. There had been power inside him once, there had been a flame he had been able to drawn on to do great and terrible things. But wherever the flame had been was now only void. He felt cold and hollow, with the fire that had always accompanied him missing.

What have they done to me?

He looked at the necklace of flowers around his throat which was brimming with old, treacherous magic.

Flowers, mud and twigs. He snarled and considered ripping it off, but then reason caught up with his temper.

No, not yet. I may yet need this body, weak as it is.

He loosened the grip of his fist around the lilies when his gaze fell on his right hand. Up until now, he had merely remembered himself and who he was, but now that he saw his maimed hand with the missing fourth finger, he remembered the past. He clutched his head in his hands when a wave of memories came crashing down, when centuries and millennia raced past him and the force of the ages he had seen and lived through ripped every other thought away.

He remembered fire and flame, then darkness and cold, endless black halls hewn into giant mountains, a dark figure on a dark throne with three stars upon its brow, he remembered a tower on an island and an Elven fortress on a mountainside, faces of countless Elves and Men, he remembered forges and tombs, the heat of magma and the cold touch of the dead. Years and decades rushed past him in the blink of an eye. He saw nine kings kneeling before him and then old men clad in blue and brown and grey and the colours of the rainbow casting him down. He saw a mountain of flame and the chamber of fire at its heart. He watched the building of a black tower, its foundations stronger than the world itself. He saw a ring and a son crouching at his father's side, swinging a sword that was broken. The rush of memories slowed down and at last he saw the mountain of fire crumbling to dust and the tower breaking away beneath him.

He was kneeling on the floor when he opened his eyes again.

For a few moments he crouched there on the flagstones strewn with rushes and the last feeling he remembered before his memories ended with the fall of Barad-Dûr gripped him again. Fear and despair spun a dark web around his mind—for a moment he remembered another which had also spun webs of darkness—and he came very close to succumbing to it, but then he shook his head and made a gesture with his right arm as if to chase away a ghost, and a sinister smile appeared on his face.

Nonsense. This is a mere inconvenience. I have a body, and while it is weak it is better than having nothing. And I still have my mind which as far as I can see is undamaged. I have come back from worse than this.

With renewed purpose, he strode up and down his room, testing the limits of his new form and finding them too quickly, quite to his chagrin. So instead of getting angry over the limitations of his incarnation, he decided to think on what to do next.

Thus he sat on his bed, cross-legged and lost in deep thought, clad in Goldberry's tunic and trying not to listen to the blood rushing through his veins and the heart beating in his chest.

I have to leave, he thought, there is no question about that. If I ever want to regain what I have lost, I need time and a place where I am left in peace to find out what has happened and how do undo it. Maybe I can find the ruins of Dol-Guldur if the Elves have not yet claimed it. Or Angmar, in the north. No one will have dared to settle in its ruins. Yes, Angmar is where I shall go.

Sauron unfolded his legs and stood. He opened the door, walked out into the hall, turned a corner and headed down the short passage to the front door. Unexpectedly, he found the door unlocked and unbolted.

Clever fool, he thought. As if a lock could keep me here.

Cold autumn air hit his face and involuntarily, he raised a hand to shield himself against the cold. He tried to ward off the air, but the elements did no longer bow to him and the fire that had once been at his beck and call had been extinguished. With gritted teeth he took the first step onto the grass. Hoarfrost crunched and cracked beneath his bare feet and the cold was like a knife he could not deflect. He stumbled forward and raised his head to the sky which he loathed and the stars which he feared. He made a gesture of Doom in the direction of the Sickle which hung high in the northern sky, its shimmer distant and cold.

“Your threats won't keep me from going north, Star-Kindler,” he spat at the stars and then looked around at the dark valley that stretched in all directions. Where to go? He was unfamiliar with this land and when he had been reduced to a spirit, he had been in no state of mind to determine where the winds had taken him.

To his left the path went down, wound itself along the river that cut through the valley and vanished into the shadow of a dark forest. There was no wind, but still he could hear the rustling of branches and leaves and one time he thought he heard a gnarly voice creaking tree-ish words.

To his right the path wound itself up the hills where it met a second path that led into the range of bare hills to the east.

Sauron frowned and regarded the downs with a thoughtful expression.

“Cardolan's capital, I see,” he said, then turned back to look at the Old Forest. “So this must be a remnant of the forests of old, when trees still walked and talked. Barrow-wights or Huorns. An easy choice then.” And with that he turned east and climbed the path that led into the downs. Tom Bombadil's house fell away beneath him, but the going was slow and more than once he had to stop and search for the path because his eyes were not as all-seeing as they used to be. The higher he climbed, the steeper the path seemed to become. Gravel slipped under his feet, stones were cutting into his soles and he could not draw in enough air into his pumping lungs. Nevertheless he climbed on and some time later he noticed that he was crawling on all fours and bleeding from his hands and knees. He spat blood and curses and felt a nail splintering on a stone. In the end he was not even strong enough to crawl and he had to drag himself over the ground like a snake. He made a last feeble attempt to reach out and pull himself forward another arm's length when the tips of his fingers splintered and crumbled to dust like old wood.

Sauron looked at his fingers and then at the yellow boots that had appeared on the way before him.

“Ho dol! What are you doing, creeping away like a thief in the night?” Tom Bombadil asked.

“I am leaving,” Sauron ground out between his teeth. “Have you come here to keep me?”

Tom laughed, but quickly became serious again. “No, no! Tom won't keep anyone here against their will. You are free to go—if you can. But you look like old Lumpkin trampled over you. You could go on, but crawling over the downs will take you too long and you know what waits in the shadow of the standing stones at sundown. You would need a form, but you are too small and too weak in this world to hold a body for yourself, and Tom's magic doesn't go further than the boundaries of his realm.”

“So the further I go the faster I will come undone? A fine gift you have given me.”

“It is not a gift.” Tom Bombadil's eyes twinkled and for a moment Sauron was reminded of a time long ago when he had still answered to another name and when the first stars were born and set into the sky by their queen.

“What then? A punishment? Who are you to punish me?” Sauron stared up at the small man and not so long ago his eyes would have sparked fire and flame in anger. “Who are you? Answer me!”

“I am Tom Bombadil,” Tom Bombadil answered. “And that is all there is to know.”

“You are lying,” Sauron said and his voice was like the growl of a big, old wolf.

“And you, on the other hand, are talking when you should be thinking and charging forward when you should be going back. Tom's realm ends where he stands and so does his magic. You are very close to the border, just look at your fingers. They look like broken twigs. So unless you want to pull yourself forward by your teeth, you should use your head while you still have one and decide if you do indeed want to go up that path and onward until there is nothing left of you.” Tom regarded him with eyes that were deep blue even at this hour when everything else was grey and black.

Sauron did not answer for a long time; instead he remained on the ground as motionless as a snake that was about to strike. But the longer he remained that way, the stronger the pain in his limbs and head became and he knew that he was not far away from going back to from where Tom had called him forth—a world of eternal twilight where he was a bodiless, mindless thing with only the basest of instincts, driven by nothing but pain whose cause it could not remember and fear as its only companion.

“Why should I go back?” he asked at last. “What is there to be found in a house at the edge of the Old Forest? I am not seeking redemption.”

“Good, because I haven't seen it loping about here,” Tom said with a laugh. “No, little spirit, there is no redemption to be found here. But there are songs to be sung, lilies to be brought to Goldberry River-daughter, and there is a lot of time to heal and become whole again and maybe there are one or two lessons to be learned.”

“I do not wish to be lectured,” Sauron said.

“A foolish thing to say for someone who is supposed to be so bright.” Tom's eyes twinkled like the first drop of dew under a young sun in a newborn world. “There are lots of new things to be learned every day, even for Tom, even for Old Lumpkin! If he feeds on the same patch of grass every day, the grass becomes brown and dies and my Fatty Lumpkin is hungry and unhappy. But if you move out with open eyes, you might find a meadow even greener than your old pastures. Don't be shy of new things just because you think you are old! Do not refuse to learn because you believe yourself wise! The first one is lazy, the second one foolish!” Tom jumped to his feet. “For compared to many things in this world you are quite young and I am beginning to think you're not nearly as clever as you would like others to believe. My Lumpkin is not as lazy as you and smarter at that. But I believe you can learn if you can bring yourself to want it. The forest hides a lot of things and I am sure there is something for you to be found here as well.”

“Like water-lilies? I already have those,” Sauron replied drily and looked at his necklace whose petals were now dry and wilted.

“Ha!” Tom clapped his hands. “A sense of humour—the first, but far from the worst thing to discover about yourself! We'll find other things that will do you some good. Now turn around and get back on your feet again. Crawling up the Barrow-downs is not something that befits you and you are ruining the tunic Goldberry sewed for you. Up now! Derry dol! Back to home and house, to a merry fire and warm beds!”

With great effort, Sauron turned around and crawled after Tom who was skipping down the hill and singing loudly. Had he not needed his hands to pull himself forward, he would have very much liked to cover his ears. For a moment he was severely tempted to turn around and forge on northwards despite Tom's warning. But, lo!, even after the first few steps he had crawled back, the pain in his limbs eased and the bleeding out of his nose and ears stopped. His fingertips grew back and soon he was able to stand on two feet again. With every step he took back into Tom's realm, the load of a mountain seemed to fall off his shoulders and by the time he reached the Tom's house there was a spring in his step and his strength had returned to him. The water-lilies had straightened their petals; once again they were fresh and young and shining like little white stars around his neck. Only when Sauron was standing on the porch of Tom Bombadil's house and candlelight was greeting him it came to him what he had done and that the little fool with the feather-hat had indeed kept him from walking away. But after having spent quite some time lying in dirt and on gravel, the absence of pain seemed like a blessing itself and he did not quite find the will to kindle his anger when he walked down the small passage and back into the room he had all to himself. There he lay down on the bed and this was the end of his first attempt to return to Angmar.

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Sleeping while having a body that was not made of fire and air was a most terrifying experience, as Sauron found out. Of course it was not entirely unlike the mind-wandering he had occasionally done before he had lost his real form. Back then, however, he had merely abandoned his form and taken his being with him wherever he went and the smallest exertion of his willpower would form a new body for him wherever he chose to reappear in the physical world. Mortals, of course, shared a different fate. When they went to sleep, their souls abandoned their bodies to venture into the deep, chaotic realms of the Dreaming, and in the mornings when they woke the souls re-entered their bodies and they would go about their daily business.

Sauron did not know whether returning from the Dreaming came naturally to mortal spirits or whether it was a hard-won ability. Whatever it was, he found that it did not come easily to him. He had never had to make an effort to return from somewhere and his spirit was used to straying and roaming by nature. Therefore, as soon as sleep overtook him, he was uprooted and caught in the grip of forces unknown like a leaf in the wind. Sleep took him far away from his body and after being confined to the small safety of a corporeal shape the infinity of the Dreaming around him horrified him. He could not navigate the bizarre world in between sleeping and waking like he used to. Instead Sleep batted him to and fro, threw him into dream after dream, every single one more bizarre than the one that had come before. Memories interwove with glances of futures not yet-lived, worlds like the one he knew were followed by worlds that consisted merely of sound and colour. It was a chaotic and erratic orchestra and he flew and leapt between dreams and nightmares until he suddenly found a golden thread that led through and away from the chaos around him. He followed the thread, gleaming as the only thing never-changing in the world of ever-changing things and at last, he woke.

The sun was shining through the window on the eastern side of the room when he opened his eyes. He could hear birdsong in the garden and another, brighter voice that fell in tune with them. For a moment he looked down at himself and when he found that there was nothing wrong with him as he had apparently successfully returned to his body, he immediately threw back the blanket and got out of the bed.

What to do now? he thought. His body felt rested, but he had been (and remained) a spirit at heart and being confined in any way did not please him in the least. There was nothing he could do about the predicament of having a body made of mud and twigs, but leaving all this aside he still felt discontent for he did not like having nothing to do. For more than a thousand years his spirit had been confined within the black walls of Barad-Dûr and his fortress had at last become his prison. Now that he was finally free of the tower, he was not one to abandon himself to idleness. Thus, he left his room and went in search for something to occupy his mind or his hands with. In the room with the fireplace he found a table set with one dish, where bread, milk and honeycomb had been left for him. He was hungry, but did not feel like giving in to the demands of his body just yet, therefore he turned around and went outside.

The sun was already high in the sky above the pale and forbidding Barrow-downs which lay east of Tom's house. The air was crisp and cool, but not yet entirely devoid of the warmth of summer. The cold sting of winter's air had not yet found its way here. The sky was of a washed-out pale blue and white clouds flew across the sky chased by strong autumn winds. The forest around them was yellow and orange and brown and the trees were bent with the weight of their fruit which glowed golden and red in the sun.

Goldberry was in the back garden around the house where pumpkins and apple trees grew and where vines that were heavy with grapes climbed up the back wall of the house. She was hanging up laundry and pristine white bed-cloths on a thin line, but when she caught sight of him, she lowered her arms and laughed.

“Good morning, friend! Tom told me that you would not wake up early today! Have you seen the breakfast we left for you?”

Sauron considered for a moment of which kind his answer should be. He would do well to be friendly with the woman. She was the only other inhabitant of the valley, it seemed, and he already much preferred her silent joy to Tom Bombadil's singing and skipping. And although the time in which his existence had been split between Barad-Dûr and the Ring had eroded both his mind and his manners, he retained enough of his old shrewdness to know that there was nothing to be won by making enemies. He no longer had the strength to shatter those who he did not approve of, therefore he had to try to make them inclined towards him.

In the end, he settled for a small bow which was deep enough to be polite but not quite deep enough to flatter and make her wary of him. (Was there even wariness under that joyous demeanour of hers? He did not know.)

“Good morning, Goldberry River-daughter,” he replied, his tone carefully neutral. “I have seen it and it is very friendly of you. But please do not concern yourself with me more than necessary, I do not intend to stay for long.”

“But you won't leave immediately,” Goldberry said, still with a smile on her face.

Sauron regarded her for a while, then he nodded and bowed once gain. “Excuse me, Lady Goldberry, I have a mind of exploring the valley. Do not trouble yourself with waiting for me, I might not return for the night.”

She did not say anything but merely looked at him with a glint in her eyes that was neither mocking nor scolding, but nevertheless told him that she thought differently about when he would return.

Sauron turned around and left her behind. He followed the small river that cut through the meadow and in the west vanished in the ominous shadows of the trees of the Old Forest. He passed an old willow and went on until the grass under his feet became sparser and the trees around him grew taller and darker and the sunlight was eclipsed by leaves and needles. The path wound itself into the gloom beneath and vanished after a right turn. The silence under the trees was absolute, there were no birds singing and there were no small animals creeping through the undergrowth. The forest stood there like a silent threat, daring him to walk further, daring him to enter.

Once, Sauron would have turned into fire and flame and burned the mocking, evil old trees to the ground with a single breath, but now he only stalked along the outline of the forest, a bit ducked and carefully keeping his eyes on the trees. He walked to the very end of the valley until the forest suddenly jutted out and up the downs that surrounded the valley and cut off his way in that direction. Sauron halted and looked around, unsatisfied with what he had found.

The valley was quiet and peaceful, the bustling liveliness of summer making way for the drowsy days of early autumn and finally the solemn stillness of winter.

His eyes were not as keen as they had been and his ears not as sharp, but he could feel the land like a living thing all around him. He was diminished, but not entirely blind and deaf. Even now he was able to notice things that stayed hidden from many others. It was a good land, friendly and open, even to him who held nothing but silent loathing for it. But there was something else which caught his attention. Under the calmness on the surface there was an underlying malevolence that had escaped him until now and whose presence did very much surprise him. It felt as misplaced as Minas Morgul in tranquil Ithilien. But it was there, running below the ground in thin veins which all came to a centre somewhere in the valley. His curiosity finally awakened and drawn to something which more closely resembled his own nature, he set out to find the centre of the malevolence. Perhaps there was an ally here he had overlooked until now, or at least someone he could persuade to join his cause. Despite last night's events, he still had not given up on escaping from the Valley.

He walked, following the veins of dark intent that lay dormant just below the soil under his feet. His way brought him back to the stream that cut through the valley and back in the direction of Tom's house. He walked past an old willow, his eyes fixed to the ground so as not to miss what he was looking for, should it choose to surface. After a few steps, however, he found that the notion of closeness to the source became weaker, while the feeling of being watched suddenly made itself known.

Sauron turned around and looked back, but there was no one to be seen. Only the branches of the grey willow were swinging lightly in a cold breeze from the east. Sauron went back and circled the tree with the careful steps of a wolf that didn't know whether it was slinking around the den of a fox or a bear. He heard the rustle of branches in the wind and the slight crackle of twigs. At first he thought nothing of it and continued his circle when he suddenly noticed that there was, in fact, no wind blowing in the valley right now. He dropped to one knee just in time to avoid a thick, sharp branch spearing right through his neck. A moment later a gnarled root dug itself out of the earth and tried to wrap itself around his ankle. Sauron stepped aside and avoided another branch lashing at him like a whip. He ducked and caught it in his hand.

“You should have known better than to assault me,” he ground out. “Do you know who I am? I have felled hundreds of your kin and I will burn you down as well. A fool you are if you think you can stand against me!”

The tree lashed out at him once more. Sauron stepped aside, but one sharpened branch caught his shoulder and ripped through fabric and skin. With his teeth bared in a snarl he gripped the branch trapped in his fingers, stepped back and pulled. There was a sound like a cracking whip, the wood snapped and broke and was flung away from the old willow. A screech of groaning wood and anger as old as an age ran up the tree from root to crown. The ground rose and fell with the movements of awakened roots which had been digging into the deeps of the world for hundreds of years and now returned to the surface, called forth like summons by the anguish of the tree. One root rose like the ridge of a dragon's backbone from under the ground, shaking off soil and stones. Another branch lashed out at Sauron and he shielded his face with his lower arm. The branch struck with the force of lightning, but while the blow rattled his bones he did not feel any pain.

“Halt yourself!” he shouted. “I did not come here to fight you, but you are trying my patience.”

And indeed did the old tree stop his assault for the moment, its branches pending menacingly over his head, twigs moving like fingers poised to grab and tear. Sauron stood still, his chest rising and falling, with air whistling down his windpipe and blood rushing through his veins so loudly he could hear it even now. “It is bad form to attack me when you have not even given me the opportunity to introduce myself. Then again, do you know me already? What are you? Another servant of the Ancient Ones gone astray? Of Yavannah, mayhaps?”

The tree did not move and he let out a hoarse laugh. Anger reverberated through the ground.

“What a coincidence! I was formerly of her husband's fellowship. When have you fallen from grace? Two or three ages ago? And what for? To seek greatness in exile? Have you found it and gone mad here, thinking yourself king of the valley?”

He noticed a movement out the corner of his eye. A thin root was creeping up to wrap itself around his ankle. He side-stepped it and let out a wolfish laugh.

“Be that as it may, I came here to seek you out and offer you friendship, but now I see that there is no reasoning with you.”

He evaded another blow of the tree and reached out to snatch another oncoming branch out of mid-air when a booming voice resounded over the clearing.

“Ho dol, fellows! What are you doing there, fighting like squirrels over the last chestnut?”

And skipping down the path came Tom Bombadil in his blue jacket and yellow boots, the blue feather on his hat blowing in the wind.

The tree immediately went still and drew back its branches, righting itself up to its full height and blustering its foliage like an angered bird would puff up its feathers. If Sauron had been in his wolfish form, he would have stood with his hackles raised. He kept the snarl behind his teeth and backed away when the small man in he blue jacket stopped, putting himself between the tree and Sauron.

“I see you have found Old Man Willow,” Tom said. “But I would have expected you to have better manners than to seek a fight on your first day here in Withywindle Valley.”

“Quite the contrary,“ Sauron replied. “You should train your creatures better. The tree attacked me, I was merely passing by.”

Tom turned toward the tree. “Why, Old Man Willow, did you forget what I told you?”

“Raise your leaves into the sun

Drink rain whene'er the clouds do weep

Dig with your roots to Arda's core

And go back now, go back to sleep!

Awaken you shall nevermore!”

Thus sang Tom Bombadil and slowly the mindless wrath faded, the boundless strength in those thick wooden limbs was sucked out and away and the movements of the tree became aimless and slow, like an unwilling child trying to shake off sleep with heavy lids and trashing arms and legs. The ferocious will lost its edge and danger, like a sword turned blunt. Te malevolence was enshrouded in words that spoke of deep places, rich soil and water as Tom Bombadil sang the old tree to sleep, locking his spirit away from the waking world, each word a chain in front of a door and each verse the turning of a key in another lock. With each word the tree moved less and after the first verse had been completed the old willow had gone very still and did no longer move on its own, except for the light breeze rustling gently though its leaves.

Sauron stood and watched, his eyes narrowed and a clenching anger in his chest. He knew that his wrath was now merely concealing his fear, because he saw what Tom Bombadil could do to his creatures and to himself - for no more than one of his creatures was he now. He raised a hand to Goldberry's necklace of water-lilies and his fingers closed around them, ready to rip it off. However, when he moved his arm, a sharp pain lanced up through his bones and up to his shoulder and he let his arm fall to his side with a grimace. He looked down and only then did he notice that the hit of the willow, which had caused him no pain before, had split the skin of his arms, which were now beginning to throb. Blood was flowing down to his palms and the back of his hands in little rivulets, dropping from his fingers and onto the ground where it vanished between the roots of Old Man Willow, as if even while falling asleep the tree and the ground around it thirsted for his blood.

Sauron frowned, but while he watched Tom Bombadil sing and raise his hands as if to ward the valley against the malevolent spirit in the tree, he felt a stirring of something very old inside of him and a kind of magic that he had long forgotten about resurfaced in the dark coiling thoughts in his mind: Music and song. He remembered having used it very often at the beginning of time, when the Darkness had not yet touched the shores of Middle-earth, long before the Darkness had touched Sauron himself—even before he had become Sauron. The veils and mists of time and corruption shrouded those times from his memories. All he could recall was a vague shade of a memory full of light split up into all the colours of the rainbow and cities of glass and diamond under a sky of always-dawn. And yet he knew that he had once possessed the power to reach into the fabric of creation with his voice and, at first, shape and coax it into the forms he wished and, later, bend and break it to its will.

Music and song held power, and so did blood. He may no longer have the Ring or be able to change into the form of a big wolf and the fire inside him was all but quenched, but he still had his voice given back to him.

And even while his blood was dripping into the earth and onto the roots of Old Man Willow, he opened his mouth and quietly spoke old words of Power, Rousing and Awakening, of Fight and Toil and Overthrowing. Hatred against the one who was his master now made him weave dark melodies with his tongue and anger lent strength to his words. He felt the ground quiver beneath the bare soles of his feet and his song made its way into the earth and the roots and he could feel the drowsiness in the branches bleed away, he could feel the roots and limbs clenching and flexing and remembering that they were strong, and he could feel the spirit of the tree freeing itself from the bindings as light and strong as spiderwebs that Tom Bombadil's words were laying about it, unburying itself from the tomb of eternal sleep were it should be sent to.

One branch lashed out with a crack and swished only a few hands above Tom's head who ducked out of the way and skipped back. Sauron wondered whether he was surprised, but there was no break in his song and his song became stronger, forcing the awakening tree back into the darkness of oblivion.

Sauron raised his own voice and went down on his knees, pressing his bloody palms to the ground. Blood and words united and the tree drank in both with murderous hunger, its own will lending itself to Sauron's intent and merging with it to become stronger, like a torrent breaking free of its dams. The wood of the trunk of the old willow creaked and groaned and suddenly, the ground started rising and undulating like water. Old roots, thick and gnarled and black, broke free from the ground, the leaves were rushing as if a storm was blowing through their midst and twigs like hands stretched out, beating and grabbing, aimlessly at first and then turning onto Tom Bombadil.

Sauron's mouth opened in a smile not unlike a wolf baring its teeth. The old tree did not like him, but its hate was for Tom Bombadil, the one who controlled and ruled it and longed to take its wakefulness—no doubt a gift hard earned over the course of thousands of years—away again. Roots hurled stones and sought to grab the yellow boots, but Tom skipped aside and backward as if he was dancing. Twigs and limbs lashed out at him, seeking to crush and maim, to rip and tear.

Sauron added words of Failure and Missteps, of Darkened Eyes and Error and directed them at the little man in the feathered hat. He might yet win over the master of the valley. But Tom Bombadil did neither fall nor stumble. He circled the tree until he was standing knee-deep in the water of the Withywindle and he spread his arms and sang, his voice loud and clear, while Sauron still knelt on the other side, his words low and dark. Both songs battled and interwove, dissonances ringing loud through the clearing where syllables and notes crashed like the soldiers of opposing armies. Old Man Willow shivered and trembled, torn at by two forces of equal power and while none could win over the other, his own being was ripped apart between them. Branches lashed out in an uncontrolled manner, the roots were coiling and uncoiling and some of them pointed skyward like big thorns, as if the tree wanted to escape the place where it had grown for such a long time and walk away like the Tree Shepherds of old.

Louder and louder and fiercer and fiercer got the song and Sauron was now no longer speaking words in any mortal tongue, but the ear-splitting and unbearable speech of the ones that existed before the world came into being, a language that did not call the things as they were named, but as what they were at the deepest core of their being. With his voice, he reached into the nature of the tree and wrenched its will from it, the words an imperative that no lesser being could deny. Weak as he was, the words still carried power and the old willow was trashing and lashing out and now it was no longer in anger, but in fear and pain.

Tom Bombadil did not cease his words either, they were slower and louder, and he seemed to speak his own language, too, much of which would have sounded like non-sense to anyone who listened. At the beginning, they were light-hearted but stern, like a father scolding a disobedient, yet beloved child. Then the mirth faded away and left only room for a pure, unfettered will.

Sauron was pushed back and out of the mind of the old willow, but he held his ground and raised his voice once more.

The trunk was trembling and then, with a crack like a breaking spine, the tree was split open in the middle.

Tom halted his song and clapped his hands once. He was not laughing any longer. “Enough!” he called and there was no twinkle in his eyes, but a stern sheen like blue steel. The word expanded out from him in a circle like ripples from a stone dropped into a still pond and immediately, the tree stilled and Sauron gripped his throat as no more words came out.

“You have done enough damage today,” Tom Bombadil said.

Sauron summoned all the willpower he possessed and spat out one syllable that sounded like the slash of a knife, raising his hand against the man and drew a line in the air, right over his neck—but before he could finish it, a cramp ran up his wounded arm and his muscles locked and both his arm and his curse were twisted away from its target.

Tom Bombadil had his hands raised, still standing in the middle of the Withywindle which was gently washing around his yellow boots. “No, no, you will not raise your hand against Old Tom! Tom is master of this valley and he is master of the spirits that dwell here!” He was not shouting, but still the sound rang in Sauron's ears like the blaring of a trumpet.

“I have no master!”, he growled and turned away. “And I need neither your nor anyone else's help! I have came back from the brink of destruction more than once, I have balanced on the edge of unmaking and I have found my feet again! Even now my voice was enough to split the tree in half! What makes you think that you have any power over me, wood-man? I will go and even without your ridiculous magic, I will find a way to return, as I have done it before! Farewell!”

He turned and clutched his cramping arm to his chest, smearing the tunic with half-dried blood. He followed the path down the Withywindle and withstood the urge to look back where the old willow had been ripped in two by their trial of strength. Instead, he looked forward. Ahead, dark and forbidding, loomed the Old Forest. The path veered sharply to the right and disappeared in the underbrush. Sauron looked down at his arm and forcefully opened the cramped fist of his right hand with the fingers of his left one. When he looked up again, a path that had not been there before had opened before him, broad and even. It led into the murky darkness under the trees, welcoming him, trees fanning out to both sides like arms posed to embrace him. Sauron did not think of his loathing for greenery and mud and twigs. Instead he stepped into the shadow under the forest and the forest admitted him. He went forward, ever forward, and the light faded behind him until the way before him was the only thing visible in the absolute darkness: a silver band that wound itself around trees and roots and up and down little rises and valleys until it became narrower and more twisted, treacherous roots sticking out to trip him. When the last of the light had faded and the way was barely visible even to his eyes, he looked up. There was no sky overhead, no stars to light his way and watch him. He smiled grimly and then turned around.

The road stopped a few feet behind him. There were no windings and no left curve around a big boulder as he remembered. The way back was lost and the valley was long out of sight. The trees had closed around him and the air was stuffy and unnaturally warm.

The smile did not quite fade from his mouth, but it was stiff and dishonest and frozen to his face as he forged on, trying to get away from Tom Bombadil and out of his realm.

To the north, he thought. To Rhudaur and Angmar. And neither tree nor water nor man will keep me.

And with that thought he stepped off the beaten path that led (as he knew) westwards and into the underbrush and the green and black gloom of the Old Forest.

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Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Cantica I.

The Shadow might have been pulled away from the forests of the world, but here in the deep heart of the Old Forest, traces of it still lingered and no light of the Eldar or other powers would ever be able to heal the marring that was so deeply engraved in this land and the trees that inhabited it. The darkness had never fully consumed the Old Forest, but it had taken root here and it would not leave.

The trees huddled close around him, their evil intent clear in the air. Branches whipped at his face, thorns tangled in his hair and at the seams of his tunic and stones and rocks cut into the soles of his feet. At first Sauron tried to keep the dark machinations at bay with the power of his voice, he sang and cursed, spoke incantations and bans, but it did not work like it had worked with the old willow. For one Old Man Willow had himself already possessed a will to wake and Sauron had merely incited it, and besides the tree had been alone. Here, instead, he was straining against the united mind-force of an entire forest and soon he found that the words died in his throat, that the air itself became as stuffy and clotted as his blood and soon he was bent over, gasping for air. For an unfathomable amount of time that could have been hours or days or weeks, he marched on, dragging himself forward through the under-brush, climbed down into low grounds and valleys of rivulets long dried out, and up on the other side again. He did not know for how long he had been here nor how big the forest was, only that he should have reached the end by now, for not even Mirkwood had taken so long to traverse on foot. He was heading westward, as far as he knew, but the forest seemed to twist around him, sometimes goading him with a sliver of a silver path visible between dark tree trunks, other times leading him to dead ends between great boulders.

And suddenly, in one moment, when the canopy of leaves seemed merely inches over his head like the lowerable ceiling in false guest rooms in his old fortresses, when he thought he was breathing water and chunks of earth more than he was breathing air, when he was scratched and bleeding, doubled over and soiled with dirt, his feet cut and bleeding and his hands scratched and ripped open, when nature, which he had dominated and tortured for so long, bore and pressed down on him and threatened to snuff him out like a candle-flame—only then did Sauron realise what he had done when he made the Ring and what a great part of himself had been irrevocably lost and destroyed.

For years and centuries he had desired to rule and not be ruled over, be it by madmen or gods. In his desire to dominate all life, he had made the One Ring, but he had cut out a piece too big of himself and poured it into the Ring and then the Ring had ruled over him. And now that the madmen had sunken into their graves, the gods were banished to the Outside and the One Ring had been destroyed, he was caught in the valley of Tom Bombadil and he was less than a ghost, less than a wraith, and not even his feet left any prints on the path he walked now. And he saw that he would never make it to Angmar, not even as a mote; and even if he had, there was no way that he would ever be more in this world again than a speck of dust in the twilight, casting not even the slightest shadow in the midday sun.

And just with that his resolve, which had been like hardened steel, melted away and out of him and it became to hard to make another step. He stood there, in the middle of the Old Forest, lost not only between the trees, but lost also to himself. The heavy, stuffy air was weighing him down and slowly, very slowly, his knees bent and he slumped backwards against a big old tree trunk and slid to the ground until he was crouched there, half-sitting, half-leaning against an adjacent boulder whose sharp edges were digging between his ribs. An echo of his determination told him to stand and go on, but Sauron, who had never since the beginning of Creation been without ambition or goal, found himself bereaved of both.

What for? he asked himself. Every further step will avail me nothing except exhaustion and pain. There is no escaping this forest or this dilemma. For once, I am well and truly caught in a trap I cannot escape. What none of the Valar could do to me, I did to myself. I created the Ring and I poured all of myself into it and when it was destroyed, so was I. I am not even a whole living being anymore. I am less than a shade, and I would come undone were it not for a necklace of flowers holding me together.

He lifted the necklace of lilies before his eyes and let it slide through his dirty and bloody fingers. The white petals were already wrinkled and drying, wilting before his eyes, even if it took longer than the night before for reasons he could not care to guess. So he had left Tom's realm. At least in this he had succeeded, although this success and every other victory he had ever achieved felt hollow and useless and when he looked for the difference between his past victories and his losses, he could find none. For every thing he had gained, there were ten things a hundred times as precious he had lost, until he was left with nothing more to give and nothing left to lose.

The gathering darkness pulled closer around him. Trees were hunkering over him, some branches hanging dangerously low now. They moved faster and with more courage. It must be night then, Sauron thought, for darkness lent strength to her spawn, as were those corrupted trees. But darkness was no longer his friend and no longer did he find refuge in the night. She seemed to pull back from him, even, refusing to hide him and instead leaving him clear to see for all her creatures, bright like a bonfire. He belonged nowhere and to none, an outcast of this world, overextending his allowed stay.

One last time he tried to move, but he could not get his feet under him. He fell against the boulder, his back aching where the jagged stone and thick bark pressed against skin and bones. He tried to drag himself upward, but his body was not as strong as his fading will and at last he sat still, his eyes clouding and unseeing, his right hand gripping Goldberry's necklace, while the wilting petals of the lilies slowly fell to the ground like a the fall of the first snow in the Old World before the sun had been born.

He felt the bounds that held him to this world coming loose and fading. Bonds that were keeping him together became weaker and broke, one after another. The pain in his limbs faded as he himself started to fade and the rustling of the advancing trees became muffled and distant as the cracks in the world began to open around him. Deep bottomless gorges they were, swallowing everything that never was, or had been forgotten even by the Gods or had been so thoroughly maimed and destroyed and taken apart that the net separating Above and Below was too wide-meshed to keep it from falling through. Sauron wondered if there was the Void waiting below, but the idea was fleeting and vague and evaporated like mist but he found he did no longer care.

For a thousand times a man's life he had wandered from the icy crags of the Mountains of Shadow in the north to the southernmost reaches of Far Harad in the south before the face of the world was forever changed and Beleriand was sunk. He had lived and fought alongside and against Men and Elves in more battles than he could remember. He had been a disciple and a teacher, a servant and a master, a friend for a lifetime and a mortal enemy; he had lived in palaces of Elven lords and he had hunted under the stars in the endless grasslands with the dark-skinned people who knew no kings and queens except for the sun and the rain. He had seen ages of the world come and go without being aware of the passing of the millennia, for he was immortal and the world was an ever-changing miracle. It had cost him no strength to be all this and to fight and tear and forge his way through the world, no. On the contrary, the constant need to fight had invigorated him and forced him to become smarter to survive against the powerful enemies he provoked again and again with fierce joy. It had poured fire into his soul and sharpened his thoughts to a point that he had thought he could see the plan the Ancient Gods had envisioned for the fate of the world.

But now, his limbs were sore and aching, his mind was fogging over, his eyes were burning and his throat was dry. He felt exhausted and worn and the weight of a thousand years that he had never felt before came to weigh down on him all the heavier now. For the first time in all the ages of the world Sauron could remember he wished to rest.

He let his grip around the necklace become loose, his fingers opened and his hand slid down to rest on his legs, his empty palm turned skyward. He looked at it and a wry smile curled around the corners of his mouth. No more rings. No more gifts. He was tired. Sauron closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the tree behind him.

A darkness deeper than any other enveloped him, but it was not complete and from time to time he could see a sliver of grey or green light or the smell of damp soil. He felt a root tightening around his wrist, first like a caress, then like a tight embrace and finally crushing. Leaves were piling on top of him and little creatures with many legs were skittering to and fro on his arms, his neck, and his face. He tried to bat them away, but then remembered his right hand was trapped and his left hand was wedged between his side and the boulder. He drifted off again.

He thought he heard the sound of rain, once, and ear-splitting thunder. He started awake, but when he listened, there was only silence. A thick, gnarled root had wrapped itself around his shoulder and his ribcage. A few white petals of water-lilies were glowing like stars on the ground. He looked up, but there were no stars visible through the thick canopy of leaves. With something akin to regret he let his head fall back forward and tried to sleep.

When he woke for the third time, he was blind and could no longer move. Roots like iron vices were holding him tight and he was more than half-buried in dirt and gravel and dead leaves. But—hark!—there was something else: a jingling bright as crystal water upon white stones and it danced just at the edge of his hearing. Annoyed, he turned his head away, as if it could drown out the sound of bells. Just when he was about to drift off, he heard someone calling him by a name he had not heard in aeons—a name which he had forgotten that he had once held. It grated with him like nails on a chalkboard and it rattled the very bones inside of him. But despite his unwillingness, his spirit was forced to rouse itself by the power of the ties that bound him to his true name and answered to its call.

Ho, now! This looks like an uncomfortable place to sleep, my friend.

“Leave me alone, I am tired,” he forced out between teeth that were grinding themselves to dust on the words.

Of all the times when you could have rested, you pick the worst one. Ho dol! You are inclined towards bad choices, little spirit. Your part in this story is not yet over! Here, let me help you.

“Begone, I wish to rest,” he snarled, and his voice was raw and dried like old parchment.

Not now! Come back and out of the deep dark water! Water will only quench the fire in your soul! Don't let yourself be buried! You are fire and air, not water and earth! Breathe! Breathe air, not mud and dead leaves! Move your arms, your legs!

And as the voice spoke, a fresh dark wind blew the decaying foliage from his face and the roots which held his body tight retreated and let him go. A sudden brightness struck as if he stood face to face with the sun and he opened his eyes, one arm shielding his face against the light.

And then the glow became weaker and he noticed that he was, in fact, just looking at the starry night-sky through a gap in the foliage. He was in a small glade and there was a silhouette leaning over him, sharp and black against the midnight blue sky.

Tom Bombadil was standing before him and held out his hand. “You've been far gone if the starlight is hurting you so! Come now, come! You have two legs, let us make good use of them!”

Sauron glared up at him.

“Is this my way of doing penance?” he growled. “That I cannot be rid of you? Do the Greater Gods desire to see me humbled and punished so badly? Are you the one to carry out their punishment?”

Tom Bombadil's gaze was not unfriendly, but nevertheless it pierced him to the bone. “I am old, and I am master of this valley,” he said, drew his offered hand back and spread his arms wide. “But while I am sure you will be judged for what you have done the judge is not me. Tom Bombadil tends to his land and its trees and stones and to Goldberry River-daughter. He is no judge.”

“Good,” Sauron said sharply and rose to his feet. “Then there is no reason for you to follow me around, either!” He dusted himself off and started to walk away.

“Ho dol, merry dot! I don't think so! Someone who wanders off and gets lost and then falls asleep in the forest and fails to wake again might need a bit of help.” Tom caught up to him and started to walk next to him.

“Leave me alone.” Sauron accelerated his steps, but Tom Bombadil was not to be deterred. They walked winding paths, over hill and under tree and under low-hanging branches, across dry riverbeds and climbed over stones in their way.

To his great chagrin Sauron noticed that the trees were keeping out of their—no, Tom's!—way. Indeed, the shadows themselves seemed to shirk away from Tom Bombadil, who was whistling a merry tune and every now and then burst into a mirthful, albeit nonsensical song. Every attempt to shake him off went in vain.

At last, they reached a high, dark hedge with an iron gate set into it. Sauron looked up at the forbidding hedge, looming over them like a sinister guardian and frowned.

“Here we are!” Tom called out merrily, and walked past Sauron with long strides and a spring in his step.

Sauron bristled. “You have led me here on purpose?”

“Why, no, little spirit. You have been leading the way the entire time.” Tom pulled out a wooden key of his jacket and unlocked the door. “But as it is, you have come to a very interesting place and while we are here there is something Tom wants to show you. Come!”

Sauron did not believe for a single moment that Tom had not meddled with him or the forest paths, but when he saw far and open lands on the other side of the dark hedge, a very close promise of getting away from the damned roots and evil trees, he stepped through, resigned and angry.

The moment he reached the other side, the whole world opened up around him. Rolling hills fell and rose gently, wide fields and acres lay full of corn, dotted with trees here and there, and every now and then the yellow lights of little farmhouses twinkled beneath a high and deep starry sky, vast and dark like the ocean. The very air itself seemed to be as fresh and new as on the first day; gone was the stuffiness and murk from beneath the forest and Sauron, for all his loathing of stars and nature, felt like a load had been lifted of his shoulders.

“Ho dol, breathe deeply and with joy! The air is always fresher in these parts! This is what lies west of Tom's realm,” Tom Bombadil said. “Few still know of this land and it gets overlooked very often by the tall peoples and then by some even greater than them. Stay with me now and stay close! Goldberry's gift alone will not keep you in one piece outside of Tom's realm and I do not want you to fall apart while we are wandering outside of Tom's lands!”

Sauron followed him along the path between young birches and elms. “Where are we going?” he said slowly.

“Tom has a dear friend on this side of the Old Forest,” he spoke into the silence. “He is a Hobbit, and a remarkable one at that.”

“A Hobbit?”

“A Halfling,” Tom said. “A people which you would do well to remember. His name is Farmer Maggot and I have yet to see another creature as shrewd as him. He has not seen a lot of the world, but the part which he has seen he knows like the pockets of his waistcoat. He used to come to visit Tom when he was younger and Tom in turn went to find him at the borders of the Old Forest, back when the trees were still asleep and their roots not yet filled with so much wrath. Maggot lives near the Old Forest, but he is not afraid, neither of Trees nor of other things. He knows what he can and what he cannot do and he has a sure footing in his world, because he is keeps his eyes and ears open and knows when he has to be careful. But see for yourself, you will meet him shortly!”

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The winding road beyond the hedge was a pleasant change from the twisty and evil roads of the Old Forest. It looped between wild arbors and hills in the beginning, then cut through fields and acres. The harvest had been done and only a few forgotten stalks of corn and wheat remained standing where a few weeks ago it would have been nodding golden, green, and yellow in the wind. Autumn was in the air. They wandered with the sky over their heads, silent and fast like ghosts, while the stars rose and descended in the dome of the nightly sky. When he saw the Sickle hanging over them, Sauron felt a cold shiver running down his spine, but the night stayed quiet and peaceful. Finally, they came to a farmhouse surrounded by a great fence. In the middle between the fences, a road broad enough for a horse-cart led up to a farmhouse. There were flowerbeds and little patches where pumpkins and turnips as well as mushrooms and strawberries grew, their bright colours dimmed by the night.

Sauron followed him. They passed through a wooden gate and suddenly, a ferocious, three-voiced barking cut through the silence.

“They have heard us, as expected,” Tom said without worry when the lights in the dark farmhouse came on and the barking got louder. “Now, I fear that Maggot does not think very highly of the Big Folk and he pays close attention to who he lets over his threshold. He is a Hobbit of Buckland and therefore more suspicious by nature. He does, however, take more kindly to everything which has four legs and good manners, so I suggest you change into a more appropriate form for this visit.”

“Change? How would I change?” Sauron asked, his voice acerbic. “I lost the power to change my shape.”

Tom Bombadil winked. “What has been lost can be found again, but Old Tom can help you if you want.” He clapped his hands in front of Sauron's face.

Startled, he blinked and stepped backwards, and when he opened his eyes again he became aware that he was sitting on his haunches. He turned his head and found himself in the shape of a big wolf the colour of sand. He looked up at Tom Bombadil who was smiling down at him and bared his teeth in a snarl.

He was, however, distracted when three big shadows came running down the road between two fences, barking and growling.

Sauron stood and his fur bristled. His head was nearly of a height with Tom Bombadil's shoulder and his size must have taken the three dogs by surprise because they stopped a few fathoms in front of them, eyes flashing and growling, but dared not come closer. The brown dog showed his fangs, his muzzle drawn up in a menacing grimace. Sauron bared his own teeth without making a sound and the brown dog laid his ears flat against his head and made a step backwards.

“Ho dol, Merry dot! Where are Maggot's brave boys?” Tom Bombadil made a step forward and to Sauron's surprise the ferocious dogs did not try to bite him, but they sat back and looked up at him. “Watchful as always! Good lads!” He reached out for the head of the big grey beast that looked more like a wolf than a dog.

“Grip, Fang, Wolf!” a voice called suddenly. “Back to me!”

The dogs' ears perked up and with a last suspicious glance at Sauron, they turned around and ran back the way they came.

In their place, a curious creature appeared. He bore the semblance of an old man carrying a lantern in his right hand and a long pitchfork in his left, but he was even shorter than Tom and did not wear shoes. Instead there was a patch of hair covering the back of his (for his size, at least) impressively big feet. He was wearing a white shirt and brown trousers and a pointed night cap. His face was brown and wrinkled and his eyes were dark and hard, but when he recognised Tom Bombadil, his eyebrows raised in surprise.

“Now that is unexpected! Tom Bombadil!” Maggot set his pitchfork on the ground. “Forgive the rough welcome, but you cannot be careful enough these days. I thought the Wizard of Bag End had sent some of his men again! They like to come here in the dead of the night and steal my crops, but my lads have been able to chase them off until now. I'd never thought I'd say it, but I miss the time when it was just Bagginses, Brandybucks and Tooks getting up to mischief in my fields. They, at least, left my crop in peace at night. What do you want? And what is it with the wolf sitting next to you?”

Farmer Maggot's eyes turned to Sauron, who was still sitting on his haunches and stared back without blinking.

“Someone I am taking care of,” Tom Bombadil replied. “He came down from the mountains, starved and lost and Tom and Goldberry took him in to give him time to rest. He was eager to get out of Withywindle Valley, so he and Tom took a walk and came here.”

“He doesn't look very starved,” Maggot said, inclining his head and the look in his eyes was shrewd and suspicious. “He reminds me of how my father described the wolves that came into the Shire during the Fell Winter. Big beasts, yellow eyes and teeth as long as fingers. Be glad that my boys haven't attacked him; then again, maybe they are smarter than that.”

“He's well-behaved,” Tom said, “and he will not cause trouble. But it looks like a lot has happened in the Shire since we last talked and we, on the other hand, have wandered for a bit and Tom wonders whether you have some honeyed milk for him and his friend.”

Maggot leaned on his staff and snorted. “It would be too much to ask you to appear at sensible times of the day, wouldn't it? Ah, what does it matter? You know I told you you could come whenever you wanted although I honestly hoped you wouldn't take it so literally.” He threw Sauron another glance. “And keep your wolf-dog reined in. My boys will behave as long as he does, but I will not call them back if your friend thinks he must start a hurly-burly.”

“That he will not do.”

Sauron saw Tom looking at him, but he kept his gaze straight ahead and merely a twitch of his left ear let on that he had been listening.

They walked down the road toward the house which looked like an ordinary house built by Men, except a bit smaller and with lower ceilings. Halfway, they were joined by the tree big dogs which kept circling Sauron and Tom, giving the wolf distrustful and the gleeful small man elated glances. Maggot led them inside and into a hallway that ran off to the back of the building, with a lot of doors going off left and right. The first room on the left was a dining room with wooden ceiling and floor, which held a heavy wooden table and a corner-bench and in a corner a small pot-belly stove of cast iron. It looked lived-in and comfortable, and in this it was quite different from the dwellings of Men he had seen. While Maggot lit a few candles and kindled a fire in the oven, the three dogs immediately slipped under the table and curled up in the darkness under the bench, only the glow of their alert eyes betraying their presence.

Then, a hobbit-woman entered the room. Farmer Maggot's wife seemed just as unsurprised to find Tom Bombadil in her house in the middle of the night as her husband. When she saw Sauron, however, who was standing at the edge of the flickering circle of candlelight surrounding the table, head lowered and eyes reflecting the orange sheen of the flame, she ran back out into the hallway with a scream. Maggot went to bring her back and after she had been calmed, she entered the room again and welcomed Tom and busied herself with heating up milk and slicing bread in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, Tom and Maggot took out their pipes and filled them with dried leaves.

“Old Toby,” Maggot said, “the best leaf of the South-Farthing.”

Tom Bombadil laughed, his cheeks red and his eyes crinkling. “That it is!” Then his face turned serious again. “How are the things standing in the Shire? There is a wizard under the Hill now?”

Maggot blew out a puff of smoke. “Things are dire, as far as I know. The Wizard came half a year ago and he brought lots of Big Folk with him. They took governing the Shire into their own dirty hands; even went so far as to throw the mayor of Michel Delving out of his own town-hall! The Wizard took up his seat in Hobbiton and things have been getting worse ever since. He's all cooped up under the hill like an old badger and never leaves, but his spies and enforcers are everywhere and see to it that the Wizard's will is done. There is not enough crop to feed them and the Hobbits, so they roam the lands and steal where food is not given willingly. But the worst are the hobbits who think they are better off cooperating with the Wizard instead of putting their foot down.” Maggot chewed on the mouth piece of his pipe. “Lotho Sackville-Baggins and Tim Sandyman, may your dead mothers have mercy on you when I get my hands on you!”

Tom Bombadil frowned, but did not look overly concerned which surprised Sauron. “The south wind has brought new tidings,” he said and winked at Sauron who flattened his ears and averted his gaze, glowering. “They came into my valley not long ago and believe old Tom, my friend, when he says that things are about to change very soon.”

Maggot leaned back in his chair, one eyebrow raised. “And how would you know that? I am not sorry for asking this, since you barely leave your valley and it has been years since you set out foot of the forest.”

“I listen,” Tom Bombadil replied simply.

Maggot shook his head. “If I didn't know you so well, I would not believe you. Still, the times are stranger than ever. Wizards under the Hill and wolves as big as calves in Withywindle Valley and now under my roof, too! Are you sure this beast hasn't come creeping straight out of the barrows of the Downs?” He looked at Sauron and his bushy eyebrows knit together. “His eyes alone are enough to send a brave hobbit running.”

“He is a wolf and thus wild and untamed, but he is smart enough to learn when it is better to keep his paws still.”

“So it is a wolf?” Maggot drew on his pipe. “I won't lie; were it not for our friendship, Tom, I would have had the lads chase him out as soon as you both came here. His eyes are unsettling. I don't like the way he is watching me.”

Tom looked at Sauron who met his eyes without blinking.

“You were so tired you wanted to lie down and sleep in the middle of the forest not so long ago,” Tom said. “Go over to the oven, warm yourself and rest, but keep your ears open. We will talk about interesting things before the night is over!”

Sauron sent him a morose glance, but walked over to the oven wherein the wood was cracking and spitting. The orange glow of the fire seeped out through slits in the hatch. Warmth was already beginning to emanate from the iron pot-belly and laid itself about his shoulders like a blanket. There was a knotted rug on the floor in front of the oven and there Sauron lay down and curled up until his bushy tail covered his muzzle. His eyes, however, stayed open and he watched Maggot's back and Tom Bombadil. Then his glare wandered lower at the three pairs of eyes underneath the table. He stared at them until all of the dogs blinked and turned their heads away, only then did he look up at the hobbit and Tom again.

They talked about this and that, over Hobbits and Men, pipe-weed and Saruman, who had apparently made himself a home in a town called Hobbiton. This surprised Sauron. As far as he knew Saruman, he held an even greater dislike for acres and open fields than Sauron himself. That he would flee so far in order to hide among Hobbits in the Shire amused him.

Maybe he tried to escape my wrath after Isengard fell and it seemed wise to him to hide in an unlikely place. It may well have been clever, seeing how I overlooked Hobbits and their existence until it was too late.

At one time Farmer Maggot's wife came in and brought milk, cheese and bread and honey for Tom and a bowl of honeyed milk with soaked clumps of bread for the dogs which she carefully placed near the oven. Sauron did not move, but watched her as she quickly and cautiously retreated, then his empty stomach won out over his pride and he lapped up the bowl, keeping the other three dogs away with a low growl and a warning look. The dogs who had hopefully peeked out from under the table turned tail and slunk between the table legs again. When he was done, he returned to his place on the rug and rested his head on his fore-paws while the fire in the oven behind him warmed the fur at his back. The crackling and spitting of the wood made him drowsy. He closed his eyes, but kept his ears open at Tom's suggestion.

The talk came back to matters at hand and Tom wanted to know about how Maggot was doing. Maggot in turn seemed to be a shrewd hobbit indeed, for the questions he asked were concise and pointed and to the questions he did not want to reply he gave no answer and none of Tom's skipping and dancing which he did even while making conversation could bring him to reveal what he didn't wish to.

At last, Tom asked about the dogs who were still lurking beneath the table, their eyes fixed on Sauron as long as he wasn't looking and quickly slinking back into darkness whenever he opened his eyes and glared in their direction.

“Wolf was a right and proper beast to deal with when he was younger,” Maggot said. “Kept chasing around the delivery-boy who brought the news from Michel Delving every week. The boy was fast, mind you, and he escaped every time; but it made Wolf only more intent on catching him. I tried to rein him in of course, but you know how young dogs are. I leashed him, but he managed to slip out time and time again just so he could chase the boy. A single-minded fool, he was. Makes you wonder why it was so important for him, then again, I don't believe a dog thinks much about these things. It's the hunt and nothing else they want. Well, you would not believe with what kind of schemes a dog is able to come up with. He kept to his kennel and pretended to be chained and when the boy came, he slipped out of his collar and hunted him down.”

Tom listened intently, but at this part his blue eyes flitted over to meet Sauron's eyes and the big wolf looked up and tilted his head sideways to listen more closely.

“That was when I came out of the barn and saw them and for a moment I was thinking, 'My, now the boy really is in trouble,' but do you know what happened next?” Maggot leaned back in his seat and spread his arms. “Nothing. The dumb dog had finally caught the boy, but he didn't know what to do with him once he had him. He just walked around him, then he lost interest and slunk off. 'Foolish dog,”, I remember saying, 'all this time you wasted your head and energy for this?' And I swear he understood that, looked right ashamed that day. 'Well,' I said, 'I'll find another task for you to put your thick head to.' And find one I did. Not much later, Grip and Fang were born and I trained them as guard dogs. They've been calmer and easier to rein in ever since. Needed a task, they did. As long as they didn't have one, they would get up to all sorts of foolishness, but afterwards they were usable and good dogs. I dare say it did them good.” Maggot blew out a smoke ring. “Sometimes they need a good whack over the head to beat some sense into it and something to keep them occupied. Whelps and hobbit-boys are alike, in that respect. I'd know, I have three sons myself.”

“Not only dogs and young hobbits,” Tom Bombadil laughed, but the underlying meaning was not lost on Sauron. “As always, it is a joy to hear you talk. You are old and wise in a way none of the more ancient races are. The old saying still holds true that if you're in need to hear some common sense, you have to talk to a Hobbit.”

“Do they say so?” Maggot folded his arms. “Well, with what is going on in the Shire right now, one would not think so. There's little common hobbit-sense left there.” He shook his head.

“Smile, my friend, and think no longer of darkness!” Tom stood and clapped his hands. “I told you that change is near, nearer than you might maybe think. A pebble at the peak of the mountain may yet be enough to cause an avalanche at its foot. A great many pebbles have been moving in Middle-earth recently and some of them will not halt before the Shire.”

“Hopefully the change will be for the better,” Maggot replied dourly. “I don't know what could be worse than a wizard governing the Shire, but if it doesn't get better fast, I will burn down the High Hay myself and lean back and watch when whatever comes creeping out of the Old Forest hopefully takes the Wizard with it.”

Why, and I would hold the torch if it was in order to set Saruman's cloak on fire, Sauron thought. And then we will see how proud the White Wizard will be when he has been thoroughly roasted.

He eyed the old hobbit with grudging respect.

“No need for that, my friend,” Tom Bombadil said. “The winds from west and south are rising and you won't have to wait for much longer. But now, derry dol, we shall leave you and your wife. Thank you for your food and your open door, although I advise you to keep it closed after we have gone. The night is not over and you might find some sleep yet.”

“Is it not?” Maggot looked out of the window at the still-dark sky, strewn with stars. “Strange, I could have sworn that we have been talking for a long time.”

“The nights of autumn are long,” Tom Bombadil said. “We shall leave now.” He turned to Sauron. “Ho, my friend, I know you like the warm stove, but come now; we have a ways to go before the sun rises.”

Maggot stood and watched as the big wolf slowly stood, stretched and yawned languidly before he trotted over to stand beside Tom Bombadil. “He doesn't have a name?” he asked.

“No. Like all other masterless beings, he doesn't,” Tom said. “But he nevertheless knows when he is being spoken to.”

Maggot extinguished the candle in the sitting room and accompanied them to the gate, carrying once more his lantern. His wife saluted them from the doorstep, while the three big dogs trailed along, keeping a safe distance from Sauron. At the gate, with Maggot's friendly home behind them and nightly Buckland ahead of them, they stopped.

“It may be useless to tell you this,” Maggot said, “but be careful when you walk through Buckland. Keep off the main roads, at least as long as it is dark. There are strangers patrolling the big streets who you wouldn't like to meet, not even in broad daylight.”

“Your worry is kind, but unneeded,” Tom said. “No one has ever caught and held Tom Bombadil. Good-bye, good friend, good-bye boys!” He pulled off his hat, bowed and saluted both the hobbit and the dogs. “Keep your doors closed at night for a bit longer and your eyes and ears open! We'll meet again in friendlier times!” And with that he skipped off, singing a song with lots of hop dol, merry dot and dong-a-long which echoed loudly in the wide land around them.

Sauron watched him go, then he turned his head around to meet Farmer Maggot's stare. The old hobbit was returning his gaze gruffly.

“What are you looking at?” he asked. “Go with him, he is one for wild things and strange creatures. And don't think you fooled me for a moment. There is something queer about you. It's always like that with Tom Bombadil's friends.” He shook his head. “Off with you now, and keep an eye out for Tom, he is far too loud. They must hear him even at the outpost on the Brandywine Bridge.”

Sauron gave a last look to the farmer and a farewell growl to the dogs, then he turn around to follow Tom, remembering the warning to stay close to him outside of his realm. At first he fell into a light canter, but his long legs moved faster and faster until he broke into a run, his strong lithe body by turns coiling up and stretching like a spring. The ground flew by beneath his long leaps and anyone who might have been watching would only have seen a sand-coloured flash streaking over the countryside.

It was still the middle of the night and the sky was dotted with a thousand stars, just like the countless questions that were turning in the wolf's head.

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When Sauron had caught up to Tom Bombadil, they wandered the nightly countryside together, Tom singing, while the wolf followed silently. But the further they came, the further the wolf let himself fall behind until he finally sat down on a track between two harvested fields and would go no further.

Tom Bombadil turned around. “What is it? Are you tired?”

Sauron met his eyes with a glower, then he beat one paw impatiently on the ground.

“Ah, I see. Yes, I can understand that we have to talk about this. You must have many questions.” Tom clapped his hand and a gust of wind swept over the fields, blowing up dried ears from the fields and wilted flowerheads from the meadows. The wolf closed his eyes and averted his face from the wind and when he opened them again, he found himself standing on two legs, back in his old form.

“What was the meaning of this ridiculous exercise?” Sauron asked, his voice low and dangerous. “Do not fear, I understood the overly subtle comparison with a dog that hunts a senseless goal very well. The creation of the One was madness, but you need not remind me of that.”

“Ah, dol, I think I do.” Tom left the track and walked over a patch of soft, wet grass to where the Brandywine flowed silently in his deep riverbed. “Closing your eyes to your errors will not make them go away and you seem to have forgotten that.” Tom stood at the shore and looked out over the dark water.

Sauron did not reply but frowned at his reflection in the water, dark and sharp and unnaturally bright against the reflection of the dark sky overhead. Then he lifted his gaze and out of the corner of his eye he watched the small man who was swaying forward and backward with his upper body, humming a quiet tune. He regarded his round, wrinkly face and his red cheeks, the everlasting smile and the deep blue eyes and he thought of the nameless terror he had felt when he had seen Tom Bombadil for the first time. And like fear was so fittingly and unchangeably entwined with anger among wolves, and like dogs always lashed out when they were backed into a corner, Sauron, too, replied in the only way he knew when he was afraid:

“What is it to you?” he snapped. “Why do you concern yourself with me? Who sent you here? For what? There must be a great intent behind all of this! Who sent me?” Sauron stepped closer to him, resisting the urge to grab him and force it out of his throat by force.

Tom Bombadil turned towards him and although he was smiling, there was an abyss as deep as Time in his eyes that were blue even now, in the darkest hour of the night. “Nobody sent you here but the winds and maybe a bit of chance. And there is no plan and no higher will governing your stay. The Ancient Ones watch over many things, but I don't think they can see you any longer.“

For some reason, this answer bothered him more than it would have if Tom had told him that his coming to the valley had been foreseen by greater powers. Until now, he had forged his way forward though space and time, in his mind the firm belief that he could build his own fate and tie it to the world's. The thought that there might be nothing there, no fate, no greater intention, no plan, no goal, but that they were all adrift in the void of chance made the warmth drain from him. He had fought to distance himself from what he believed was the main creation. He had endured ages of torment and throwbacks, of solitude and in the service of madmen, just so that he could be his own lord in a distant future. And now Tom told him that he had, despite losing the War of the Ring, obviously reached his goal. The world did no longer care what he did, he was free to go and do whatever he wanted. Then why did victory taste so stale in his mouth?

He knew the answer, but he was reluctant to truly look at it. What good was free will if there was nothing you had to defend it against? To whom would you shout your convictions and your protests if there was no-one who cared? What good was it to be king on a throne if you were alone in a world of your own? Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, would fade. As soon as he left the valley, he would go back to being a mote in a world of eternal twilight, Ruler of None and King of Nothing.

“Then why you?” he asked. “Why do you concern yourself with me if you have no orders to do so?”

“Why, because I am here and because I want to, of course,” Tom replied. “And because you are lost. Tom on the other hand knows his ways and he might yet be able to help you.”

There was silence after Tom had spoken and for a while they were just looking at each other, two opposites sizing each other up as if they were taking note of each other for the first time; tall and short, and young and old, burning like embers and cool like an old river, exalted and rooted; like the sun and the ocean regarding and mirroring each other, watching each other intently and recognising themselves as equals.

“Who are you?” asked Sauron.

“I am Tom Bombadil,” Tom replied.

“You told me that,” Sauron said.

Tom swayed forward and backward, onto the balls of his feet and then on his heels. “And the answer remains the same, for Tom, too, remains the same. But you are asking the wrong question.”

Sauron stepped a big closer to him. “What is the right question then?”

Tom gave him a glance out of the corner of his eye. “I think you know.”

Sauron raised an eyebrow, the remark that Tom seemed to be too forgetful to remember not lecturing him at the tip of his tongue. He briefly considered giving the question deeper thought, but came to the conclusion that of course Tom Bombadil would want to hear the obvious answer and he decided to humour him. “'Who am I?'” he asked, feigning seriousness to mask the scathing irony of his tone.

Tom, however, did not seem to either notice or bother. He turned around to look at Sauron and spread his arms. “Why, that is a good question. For all the interest you have in my name, you surely have told little about yourself. I don't even know your name. Who are you?” He leaned forward a bit and looked at him with twinkling blue eyes.

Sauron scoffed. “This is ridiculous. As if I did not know who I was.”

Tom did not move, but there was something in how the shadows fell over his face and his wrinkles and his smile that made him seem very old all of a sudden. “So who are you?” he asked with a shrewd smile.

Sauron, for his part, had had enough of his cheek and his questions. He turned around to walk away along the moonlit path and find his own way back to the valley, but after three steps his temper got the better of him and he spun around. “Fool!” he snarled and with every word he moved one step closer to Tom Bombadil, this small, smiling, singing, insufferable creature and advanced until his large shadow fell over the little being.

“You want to know how I am? Well, I shall tell you who I am,” he said and his words hissed like water meeting fire and turning to steam. He felt a pulsing in his veins and the very air crackled around him. “I am Mairon the Admirable who was there when the world was built and the pillars of creation were beaten from the molten core of the first suns at the very Beginning, I am Aulendil the Disciple of the Great Smith who forged Elbereth's eldest crown and set ten stars upon her brow! I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts under whose beck of the hand empires rose and fell! I am the High Priest of Númenor who was there when the sea came to claim it and escaped unscathed! I am Gorthaur the Cruel, I am the Lord of Werewolves, the Necromancer of Dol Guldur!”

He stopped and snapped his teeth shut as if biting off his own sentence and stared down at Tom Bombadil, his chest pumping, his fists clenched and his eyes sparking flame, daring the intolerable creature to speak.

Tom had his arms crossed and looked up at him now. He wasn't smiling, but his frown was less one of worry and more one of mild curiosity as if Sauron had explained the difference between various pipe-weeds to him.

“Is this who you are or what you like to call yourself?” he asked. “Because right now I see no-one admirable. And Aulendil is the name of a friend of the Valar. But you cast that friendship aside long ago, so Aulendil you are no longer. Neither are you anyone's disciple because you have no one to guide you and you told me you did not like to be lectured, as it is.”

Tom Bombadil looked up and down, assessing him from tip to toe. “I see no Giver of Gifts, only someone who has nothing left to lose. Gorthaur the Cruel is as much a title and as little a name as the Admirable, and I see neither werewolves nor the dead bowing to you. Who are you?”

“I am the Lord of the Rings!” Sauron shouted and a murder of ravens burst from the trees above and for a brief time the shine of the stars seemed to dim before they returned to their former brightness.

Tom was still very much unimpressed. “And the rings have been destroyed. Clearly, you are no longer lord of anything, be it dark fortresses, wolves or rings. What else?”

Sauron opened his mouth to reply, but no words would come to his mind. He shut his mouth again. Silence came creeping back over the silent meadows and acres.

Tom Bombadil was still looking at him. “Is there any other name?”

Sauron wanted to answer, but there was nothing he could say. There was one other name, yes, which he abhorred as much as those who had given it to him. Sauron, yes, that was what they called him. Not his name, but what he was named, a description, a title in the worst sense and a word so foul that it defiled the very syllables used to form it.

And it is not who I am, either.

He was looking out over the nightly acres. The first grey streak of dawn tinted the sky in the east. Mists began to rise over the meadows which lay blue and turquoise in the gloaming and over the riverbed of the Brandywine. The grass under his bare feet was cool and wet with dew. His legs and arms felt numb and his mind was fogging over when here, at the edge of the river and under the stars, realisation crawled up his throat like a lump he had to retch out.

He knew what to say now, but his pride was keeping him from uttering it aloud and embracing the truth. But then he thought of the other Dark One before him whom he had served for two ages and he remembered how pride, blindness and unwillingness to see his own flaws and madness had finally led to his downfall. Morgoth had wanted to rise higher than anyone else, but he had gone from a god with the world in his hands to a mad moon orbiting his own crazed mind and reflecting his own thoughts back at himself, until all noble intent that might have been there in the beginning was lost and had become so distorted that it was rendered unrecognisable. In the end he was a fly caught in the spider web of madness he had spun with his own hands. It was so tragical and so comical at the same time, for no one would have been able to bring Morgoth down, no one except himself…

I committed almost exactly the same folly when I created the Ring. I very nearly destroyed myself, although I swore to myself I would not step into the same traps like my old master. Do I want to fall and be remembered in the same way as him? Surely not. I have begged and crawled more than once and I was not too proud to do it, because reason was stronger than my sense of pride. But how strong am I when I cannot even bear my own truth?

And so Sauron swallowed his anger and his pride and he said, “There is one more name … but it it is not my true name either. There is nothing left. No name. Nothing left of me.” He had not wanted to speak the last sentence aloud, but there it was and when he listened to its echo in his mind, he knew it was true. Something within him, a fire—his anger, maybe?—went out at this. He tore his gaze away from Tom and stared at his reflection in the dark water, feeling hollow, but also strangely calm and a bit puzzled.

Tom followed his gaze and stepped a bit closer to where the ground beneath their feet suddenly fell away and after a drop of about three feet, met with the water of the Brandywine. “That's what Tom was thinking. There is nothing left. You have had a great many names, and I see them lined up behind you like pearls on a string, but none of them is any longer who you are. You cannot go back to being Mairon or Annatar or who you once were and there is no longer a place in the world for Sauron the Abhorred. You have lost much more than a piece of jewellery and a dark tower.” Tom was not singing now, nor was his voice skipping up and down and to and fro like a bird as it usually did.

I have lost myself. He followed him to the edge of the shore. “So what am I?” he asked, and this time the question was genuine.

Tom inclined his head to the left and to the right, tapped his finger against his chin and then hunched down at the shore, pointing at something out of his sight. He followed Tom and hunched down next to him. His eyes followed Tom's fingers when the little man pointed out something small and soft dangling in an unfelt breeze just below the edge where the firm ground dropped away. It was a feather; a down, judging by its small size. It was ruffled and encrusted with earth and dust, its flawless white spotted with brown. It dangled helplessly in the wind a hand-width above the water and in the dim moonlight he could see that the feather was kept from falling only by a silvery string of cobweb attached to a blade of grass which grew at the edge of the shore.

“As old Tom sees it, you are not unlike this feather here. You are dangling on a thin string, while your past mistakes still cling to you and make you too heavy to ever fly away from them. Sauron has fallen over the edge and is weighed down by the things he has done, he has no hope of ever climbing back up again. Many deeds are swept away with time and waiting, but some are too great for that and they remain.” Tom Bombadil regarded the feather as it was pushed up by a soft breeze and fell again when it subsided. “Before long, Sauron will be pulled under by the weight of everything he has done.”

The feather turned and whirled, spinning from white to brown and back again until its colours and edges blurred.

He crossed his arms and suppressed a sound that teetered somewhere between being weary and angry. “So? Hearing you talk it sounds like you have all the wisdom of the world in your head, however unable you might be to express yourself clearly. What counsel can you give me, Tom Bombadil of Withywindle Valley?”

Tom rose from the ground and brushed off his knees with his brown, nimble hands. “I cannot see the future, but only who you have been in the past, little spirit. You have been a slave for many ages. To Morgoth, to mad kings and queens and to the Ring who was to no small part yourself. You asked me who you are, but you must see that it is entirely up to you to answer this. It's your decision who you will be and what you will do, whether you will continue in this manner (but I can assure you that you will not last much longer if you do) or try to become free of what you did.”

He snorted and this time, it was clearly full of scorn. “And how would I do this?” he asked scathingly. “I cannot change the past, not even if I wished to.”

Tom turned around, his hands braces against his sides and his blue eyes bright. “No one can. This is beyond all the powers you might know, even those who are greater and older than both of us. But Tom was talking about Sauron. Sauron is caught, Sauron is lost. In this case, the answer is obvious: You have to become someone else. Cast Sauron off like a snake that sheds its old skin. And then you have to find out who is standing where you are standing now and who is looking back out at you from the water.”

He looked down at the river and his own nameless reflection looked back at him, one eyebrow arched in a questioning manner, almost demanding as if it wanted to say, Well?

“Become someone else,” he repeated. “Change.” He stopped himself, tasting the word on his tongue and then gave a derisive snort. “Ha. Change. I have changed more often than I care to remember. Changed my name, my face, my alliances…”

Tom hummed, but it was less amused and more serious than he had heard him speak before. “Ho dol, no. This is not the change Tom is talking about. Tom is talking about the true change. One that happens on the inside, not on the outside. You are empty right now; does it surprise you that you are fading? You need to find something to fill yourself with, before the winds will strip away the thin shell of Being that's hiding the hollowness at your centre; only then will you be able to talk about I and Me with meaning ever again.”

He smiled, albeit without humour. “And you think this will be enough to appease the gods and stop the world from making me come undone?”

“The world is not doing anything to make you come undone,” Tom Bombadil said. “You yourself cut the ties binding to it and only you can renew them.”

He was pacing silently up and down he riverside when he thought about how the greatest part of him had been destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom together with the Ring, and wondered whether there was enough left of him to pull himself back out off the abyss. But then his face darkened almost immediately. “So let us suppose that I did indeed succeed in regaining a Self,” he said and stop in his tracks. “What would the Valar stop from smiting me where I stand as soon as I took form again?”

“I don't know about the manners of gods,” Tom Bombadil said, “but when you spill ale over someone else's coat, the hobbits of the Shire at least ask for forgiveness.”

He barked out a laugh that was about as mirthful as it was genuine. “Hobbits! How does everything these days come back to them? Truly, I am surprised they haven't claimed dominion over all other peoples with all the wisdom they supposedly have.”

“Because they know well enough what they want and who they are. It is not in a Hobbit's nature to dominate and subjugate and hurt, but you they are an extraordinary sturdy folk, and stubborn when they need to be. And they are remarkably able in finding simple solutions to difficult problems.”

“If everything were this simple—,” he began, but Tom held up his hand.

“I said simple, not easy. There is an important difference between the two. It is simple to understand that you need to apologise for an error, but how easy is it to get to your knees and ask for forgiveness with true repentance?”

For a while they looked at each other and neither said a word.

“So,” he said thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed, “my choices are to either to come back as a repentant and mend my ways, or be unmade either now by myself or the Greater Gods as soon as I return?”

Tom shrugged. “Who can say for sure what is going to happen? But you have to make your decision and make it quick, little spirit. There are cracks between the world that go deeper than stone or fire and already they are opening up around you, following everywhere you go and becoming bigger with each passing hour. You were nearly gone when I found you in the forest. The threads keeping you here are wearing thin; you are standing on a crumbling edge.”

He looked down at the necklace of lilies. The petals were drying and wilting and the pristine white was giving way to a dull grey.

He smirked. “So in the end it all comes down to what I want. A fine choice, though, almost as fine as the ones I left others with in the past.”

Tom Bombadil did not reply, but was looking out over the river which was gurgling softly in a night that had already lasted too long to be considered ordinary.

His reflection looked back at him. For a while he stared at the suddenly foreign appearance, then he raised his head to look up at the stars. “Submission or annihilation… is that what they offer me? Is this all that is left in this world for me?”

Tom still did not answer.

He thought of something someone else had told him a long time ago: Some bridges, once burnt, cannot be rebuilt. Some doors, once shut, will never open again. Some opportunities we have only once, and yours is gone.

The stars shone distant and cold, but to him it seemed like a twinkling mockery, an unspoken demand.

You have your choices presented before you. Choose.

Submission or annihilation?

They stood in silence. Tom had his arms crossed, while he had his fists clenched at his sides and the cold from the wet grass crept up his legs. The feather dangled in the wind in silent turmoil. At last, when a chance meeting of a hidden whirl of water and change in the current met at a stone underneath the surface, the calm water of the Brandywine surged up in a crest; they both watched as the lap took the feather and the string of cobweb snapped. The river carried it away swiftly, and the mud-encrusted feather quickly sunk into the murky depths of the water and soon it was gone and there was no trace that it had ever been there.

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There were no things he appreciated about his new incarnate form, but least of all the liked the dreams. They were uncontrollable and wild, they followed no logic that could be grasped with the mind and if it was simply a higher kind of order that lay outside of the realm of normal comprehension, he had lost the ability to follow it.

He glimpsed visions of his own past, the faces of those he had met in his long life and of those he had killed, which were almost as many. For a long time he wandered his own desolate mind-scape: A street cutting through a barren wasteland under a red-and-black sky, down the road he had chosen which was paved with the bones of the ones who had fallen to Sauron. The further he went, the more numerous they became and the ground on both sides of the road opened to reveal dark chasms out of which half-rotten faces with white eyes followed his steps. They stretched their maimed and bloody hands out at him out of their graves and tried to get a hold of him, they crawled forth from their pits, grabbed his ankles, made him fall and piled themselves upon him like dogs, weighing him down, tearing and clawing until they had wrenched him to pieces. He heard their voices and their screams and the last of their echoes rang in his ears even after he awoke.

He got up from his bed slowly and looked out of the window looking out over Goldberry's back garden, waiting for his mind to calm. The fruit was ripening and hanging heavy from vines and trees and golden sunlight was reflected from the dark green leaves of tree, plant and bush. Slowly, the dream-shadows fell away, destroyed by the sunlight and the screams of the tortured and the damned changed to birdsong.

He turned and saw that there was new clothing laid out for him on a low table: a shirt the colour of the light washed-out greyish green of reeds in autumn and trousers that were slightly darker. He could not remember the last time he had worn green—he had carried a great many colours in his life, but green had never been among his chosen ones—but he deemed it better than the simple tunic with a few stains of dirt along the hems. There was little doubt that it was Goldberry's doing and while he was surprised that one day had been enough for her to make this, he had seen greater works being completed in less time. The clothing was light and felt partly like water, partly like soft grass when he pulled it on. It was foreign, but not as unpleasant as he had expected, although he missed the weight of something heavier around his shoulders or shoes on his feet.

Freshly dressed, he stood on the rush-strewn floor in the middle of the bedroom and pondered what to do next. The revelations of yesternight were coming back to him and the magnitude and multitude of what he had to do next towered like an insurmountable range of mountains before him. The consequences of failure had been shown to him clearly enough in his dreams. It was enough to drive any sane being out of its mind, for there was too much to do (among them the near-impossible) and too little time to weigh his options and choose a course of action. Many would easily have given in to panic or rushed forward without thinking so as not to lose any time, but he did not see how losing one's head was any better.

Therefore, he refused to let the future overwhelm him, for the future was just that and nothing more. At present, he was still safe and sound and he did not see that changing for a few days at least. There was still time, if not much, and he would not rush things if he could help it.

One thing after another, he thought, and then, funnily enough he thought of Hobbits and their famed common sense. What would a Hobbit do now in my place if he woke up facing a sunny day full of planning against his own annihilation in the near future? The answer took him less time to find than he expected, for really, there was only one thing he could imagine that a Hobbit would do: Probably eat a healthy breakfast. Second breakfast, judging by how high the sun is standing.

There were decidedly worse things to do and he had already noticed his present body was not inclined to do great thinking with an empty stomach. Removing an easy problem before putting his mind to the more difficult ones seemed sensible, therefore he exited his bedroom and walked down the corridor to the room with the wooden table and the fireplace.

The door was slightly ajar and to his surprise, he could hear voices coming from inside. One was the voice of Tom Bombadil. The other one he knew as well, and to hear it again, here of all places, was enough to almost make him take a step backwards, something he had done fewer times than he had fingers on his hands, even considering the missing finger on his right hand.

As it was, he remained where he was, thinking about what to do now. As he would not suffer a retreat to his room and Tom Bombadil would not approve of having his house set on fire to burn the unwelcome guest, he settled (albeit reluctantly) for a quiet entrance. He pushed the door open and the room came into view. Seated on one side of the table was Tom Bombadil, a pipe in his hand and wearing a crown of leaves instead of his usual feathered hat. He was talking merrily to the guest who was seated at the other side of the table, clad entirely in white and smoking his own long and elegant pipe. A long staff was leaning in the corner of the far wall which had not been there in the days before.

Had he not heard the voice, he would have thought Saruman had crawled out of his hobbit-hole and come to share his pipe-weed with Tom. But clearly enough, it was a different wizard who was sitting in Tom's house, the one whose meddling had nearly single-handedly brought about the fall of Barad-Dûr, no less. Secrecy and stealth, heirs and hobbits. He should have known.

“Why Olórin, you seem to have recovered well from your fall in Khazad-Dûm. That a Balrog would be enough to keep you from interfering and sticking your nose in other people's business was apparently too much to hope,” he said.

Gandalf the White turned his head, took his pipe out of his mouth while he regarded him with a frown and then stood so abruptly that he would have hit his head if the ceiling had only been a bit lower.

“Tom Bombadil!” he said and his face was so thunderous, it would have sent an army of goblins running. “What is the meaning of this?”

Tom Bombadil looked quite unperturbed. “This is my guest, just like you. I would introduce you, but I'm afraid he has yet to find out who he is.”

Gandalf gave a him a dark look from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “An introduction is very much unneeded. I know who this is. But who do you think you are, giving someone like him form and shelter? You are overstepping your boundaries!”

“I am within my own land,” Tom replied and took a drag from his pipe. “My boundaries stretch from the edge of the Old Forest to the Barrow-downs. We are inside Tom Bombadil's land and there is no overstepping his boundaries, for he is master of the place and does as he pleases.”

“Tom Bombadil, it is very clear that you are master of this place and you are lucky indeed, because had anyone else done the same, I would hit him over the head with my staff to rattle his brains back where they belong!” Gandalf said and his face was no less than frightening when he turned to look between Tom Bombadil and the one he knew as Sauron.

At last Gandalf faced Tom Bombadil again. “While Master Elrond and a great many others including myself were aware that you care little about what is going on outside of your valley, we assumed you were, if you were doing anything at all, working for the good in Middle-earth. But this? I still believe that you have not taken sudden leave of your sense of right and wrong, but you must explain why you are undoing everything the Free Peoples have worked toward for more than a thousand years!”

Tom Bombadil laughed and his face was crinkled and red like a ripe apple. “I am not undoing anything. You shall have your explanation, but first we shall have something to eat. Important matters are best left for after breakfast.” He waved for them to sit down. “Stop fighting now and have a seat, both of you. We can eat and smoke and then we can discuss everything that needs to be discussed.”

Gandalf's face still looked frightening, but he sat back down and all the while keeping a sharp eye on the newcomer when he walked over towards long end of the table, as far from the wizard and Tom Bombadil as the table would allow.

“If Olórin can be convinced to behave civilly, I will deign to stay,” he said with a mocking graciousness that made the wizard's brows furrow further. He sat down and inclined his head to Gandalf in feigned courtesy. “You look different than the last time I met you.”

Gandalf took a puff of his pipe. “If you are talking about the time when we drove you out of Dol Guldur with your tail between your legs like the cowardly hound you are, then the answer is yes. I have since assumed Saruman's position and colour. He seemed busy enough betraying Rohan and talking to a Palantír. I relieved him of some of his duties.” The wizard threw him a withering glare from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“Which enabled you to smoke pipe-weed while you were sending Hobbits and Men around like pawns on a chessboard. Yes, I can see why you would like to be Gandalf the White.” He filled himself a cup of tea.

“Do you want to accuse me of cowardice when it was you who hid his formless being in a tower for the better part of an Age?” Gandalf asked.

“You know as well as me that my confinement to Barad-Dûr was involuntary. If I had had a choice in the matter, it would have been my pleasure to meet you on the battlefield, believe me—one one one, for that matter, not five on one like back when you broke into my fortress. But the War of the Ring is over and I am neither willing nor able to fight you,” he said. “As regretful as it is, we will have to settle for drinking tea and hurling insults at each other.”

Gandalf huffed angrily and shook his head. “I shall be very curious to hear what you were thinking when you gave him back physical form, Tom. The One Ring was bad enough a manifestation of this scoundrel, but at least it had no mouth to talk with.”

When Tom merely chuckled and Gandalf returned to smoking his pipe, he spoke up again. “Well,” he said, “I must say I am disappointed in your new appearance, too. Where did you leave your grey cloak? And your wizard's hat? I miss it sorely on you.”

Gandalf threw him a side-glance. “The lack of wizarding hats on my head is more than made up for by you, of all beings, wearing a flower necklace, I dare say.”

Their eyes met and Gandalf raised his eyebrows as if waiting for an answer. Then the wizard apparently choked on the smoke of his pipe and turned away, huffing and puffing and meeting no one's eyes for quite a while.

They finished their breakfast in silence and only spoke when Goldberry came in to bring them clear water from the burbling stream and strew the floor with fresh rushes. Afterwards Gandalf and Tom first wanted to talk about something which involved Hobbits (again) and the wizard wished no one else (and Sauron especially) to listen to it, so he was politely pulled outside into the garden by Goldberry where she set herself to work on the pumpkins, while he watched her sitting on a small wooden bench.

He listened to her humming and watched her work with swift and deft hands for a while, then he said, “The magic Tom and you have been doing to restore me is remarkable.”

Goldberry righted herself and smiled. “There is little secrecy to healing when one knows the illness.”

“True enough.” He plucked a wilted flower from the rose vine and rolled it between his fingers, the brown petals coming apart with the motion. “Although I am still surprised that someone except the Eldest would know of the Deep Magic in the world and be able to invoke it.”

“Tom is the oldest and fatherless. He was here before the first Dark Lord came from Outside and he was here before the first magic was done,” Goldberry replied. “He watched it grow and become twisted, then shaking off its shadow and fading. He remembers the Time before Light and Darkness and he remembers the old powers be born and come into the world. They heed his call because he is older than all of them.”

Sauron frowned. “Very old then.”

Goldberry nodded and smiled.

“Who is he?”

“He is Tom Bombadil.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You keep saying that. But why won't you give me the other answer?”

Goldberry stood and walked over to him. “Because there is none. He is what he is. Tom Bombadil is all he ever was and will be. Just like a tree is at its very heart a tree, no matter whether you call it willow or oak, fir or spruce. Those are names, but a tree is what it is and remains. Tom Bombadil is the only true way to describe him and the only true answer to your question.”

He rested his chin on his hand, all the while looking at her. “I know only one truly old and fatherless being and I doubt he would be hopping around on meadows and singing silly songs.”

The smile Goldberry gave him was friendly, but in a strange way unsettling. “I would not know,” she said.

“Good, then what is he? He effortlessly brought me back to life and I am no longer foolish enough to fall for the skipping and silly songs. He has power. Everything here heeds his call.”

Again, Goldberry shook her head. “He does not have power. He is.”

“He has power,” he snarled, annoyed with her incessant repeating. “It is impossible to use power over something else without having it in the first place.”

“He is,” she said again and sat down next to him.

He wanted to say something, then thought better of it and breathed out. “If you say so. Stick to your plays on words and keep talking in riddles for all I care.”

Again, she laughed. “This is no riddle. This is how it is.”

“I am merely surprised that someone who can raise a dark spirit back to life without much effort and whose words are enough to keep Barrow-wights out of his land and split old, evil trees in the middle would not try to expand his dominion.” He plucked a wilted rose from a wooden arch next to him and rolled it between his fingers until the brown petals came apart in his hand.

“Tom has no interest in the lands outside. They are not his,” Goldberry said. “He does not care for power and ruling, and even if he wanted to, he cannot be master of anything but his own land.”

He thought about this for a while. “Is this why I cannot leave the valley without returning to a mote? Because what power he has is bound to this place?”

“Bound is the wrong word, because it implies forcefulness and imprisonment. There is no force here and there are no fences and walls to keep anything inside, just like the lilies around your neck are a necklace and no chain. Both are bonds, something which holds and forms a closed circle, but a chain imprisons while this necklace does not,” Goldberry said, reached over and touched the lilies around his neck, now returned to white bloom. “But yes, Tom Bombadil does not leave his valley, or at least only briefly, and he always returns. So do the trees and the animals, the spirits and magic. If you wanted to leave the valley, you would have to be strong enough to remain whole without his magic, otherwise you would fade again.”

“I see.” His lips drew up in a wry smirk. “I must say I am astounded that it obviously took so long for a wizard to show up on Tom Bombadil's doorstep. I cannot imagine what other outrageous things he usually does before dinner when he is not resurrecting Dark Lords, but I am surprised that none of the Valar have appeared on his doorstep to stop it.”

“The gods from Outside do not come here, because it is not their land,” Goldberry said.

“If course it is, the entire world is theirs,” he said, then he stopped himself in his words.

Goldberry just looked at him, that friendly and inexplicably discomforting smile on her lips. He looked back, wordless and motionless. There was something nagging inside him, just like in the past when he had been skirting at the edge of a great discovery or crucial realisation—

It was in this moment that Gandalf the White rounded the corner of the house and saw them sitting on the bench. His white, straight staff was in his hands, but he was not leaning on it for support. His strides were long and sure and his face was set in a grim expression that lightened a bit when he approached Goldberry.

“Lady Goldberry, might I interrupt? I need to have a word or two with your guest.”

Goldberry stood, tall and slender as a reed and pale like the first grass after a rain in spring. “I can see you are in a hurry. Your step is sure but your face speaks of unrest. I would not dream to keep you from soothing your unease. Talk as long as like and walk the gardens while you do, they are at their most beautiful in autumn!”

“Very kind of you,” the wizard said. Then he turned and nudged his staff against the namely guest's shin none too gently. “Come, quick. I have a lot to do and I would like to say that there are more urgent matters I must attend to, but as it is I must resolve this mystery Tom has put before me before I can turn my eyes on something else.”

He batted the staff away and stood so he was eye to eye with the wizard. “Your manners, at least, have not changed at all, Olórin or Gandalf or whatever you like to call yourself, and your impatience has no equal among gods and mortals.”

“I will not discuss politeness with someone who considered it good manners to throw his enemies into the cells of Barad-Dûr,” the wizard grumbled. “Up now, we don't have all day.”

Both gave each other a disgruntled glare, then they walked through the garden, out of the gate in the wooden fence around Tom's house and in the direction of the meadows. Gandalf waited until they were well out of earshot before he spoke.

“I talked to Tom about what has happened and I must say his reasoning for bringing you back is not very convincing,” Gandalf said, using more force than necessary to set his staff down and as a result stabbing its end into the soft ground with every step.

“And that reasoning would be?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow.

Gandalf's own eyebrows were furrowed. “None that I can discern. He talked about you being able to learn something important, but there is an old hobbit-saying about—”

“Not hobbits again!”

“—about an old dog being unable to learn new tricks. And I don't see what those tricks would be for, either. You have done more than enough to earn your place in a shadowed non-existence. But Tom Bombadil doesn't seem to share this opinion. In fact, he doesn't seem to have given this much thought at all, as far as I can see. Judging from what I know of him, he might just have been bored. He cares little about Middle-earth, but I thought he would stop at disinterest and not go as far as to openly oppose the forces that govern it.”

“So he is not part of those forces?” He stopped in his tracks and the wizard, clearly surprised by his sudden halt, did as well. Gandalf turned around and gave him a measuring look.

“I cannot without lying say that I know anything about Tom Bombadil. He is a mystery and he is surprisingly resistant to being unravelled. What I can say about him is that he did not align himself with anyone up until now and he certainly won't make a habit of it in the future. He is a queer creature, but because he has shown little interest for the outside world, the outside world in turn showed little interest in him, dismissing him as an oddity—curious, but unimportant. But now I am thinking that we might have made a mistake in overlooking him.”

Gandalf gave him a glare. “He seems to believe that you can be reformed or remade—I did not understand his exact purpose and I don't believe he did, either. I am less than inclined to agree with him. You are a scourge of this world and you have rejected every chance at redemption you might have had with a laugh.”

He snorted. “If you still think me a menace, why don't you destroy me here and now, Gandalf the White?” he asked mockingly. “Or does that staff have no other use than to spur your pawns with hits on the heels?”

“Would that I could,” Gandalf said. “But I cannot undo Tom Bombadil's magic in his own lands, just as much as I cannot interfere with his intentions while we are here.”

This admission of the White Wizard made him frown. “You cannot?”

But Gandalf obviously did not want to elaborate on it. “Be that as it may, I have been sent back to guard and protect Middle-earth. I cannot leave and go West before my duty is fulfilled. For all intents and purposes, it should have been over the moment Gollum fell into the fires of Orodruin and the Ring-bearer was rescued from its slopes. But now I come here and see Sauron sauntering into Tom Bombadils dining room and having breakfast at his table! It is obvious that my task is not yet over. I am still a guardian of Middle-earth and as such I have to decide what is to be done with you.”

The wizard's eyes landed on him and his stare was boring and had he been a lesser being, he would have shrunken from it. Instead, he held his ground. “And what are you going to do?” he scoffed. “Lurk just outside of Tom Bombadil's realm and roast me as soon as I set a toe over the border?”

The look in Gandalf's face spoke very plainly that the wizard would have very much liked to do just that. “You have few things speaking in your favour, least of all your own past, Sauron. Tom Bombadil seems to think that you are no longer a threat. I do not agree with him. I would not be so foolish as to extend trust and forgiveness to you after all you have done.”

“I will live. It's not your trust and your forgiveness that I want.”

“Truly, you are unchanged,” the wizard said. “Even when all of your thrones and fortresses lay in ruin you remain prideful and unrepentant.”

“I am merely telling the truth. I am sorry if my honesty insults you. Would you rather I'd craft a comfortable lie to ease your mind?”

“No,” Gandalf said, “I would rather have you tell me why I should not tell the emissaries of the West the very same you have told me and watch them purge you from the face of the world.” The wizard clasped his staff and for a moment, the anger made way for something else that almost looked like sadness and in this moment, he looked truly old. “Do you not repent anything?” he asked.

Instead of answering with a flat “No”, he chose to give the question some honest thought. Gandalf was not his friend, but his inquiry merited some consideration, if only because the wizard had for thousands of years been the greatest and most persevering of Sauron's enemies, which had earned him his respect if nothing else.

“I do not regret the ends I saw in my plans,” he said slowly. “But I would choose different means to bring them about, could I do it one more time.”

“And I will do everything in my power to see that there is not another chance for you,” Gandalf said and gone was the moment of sadness. The wizard straightened and he was back to his powerful self with a face set in stone.

“Who says I will ever leave the valley?” He held up his hands with a wry smile. “Maybe I will just stay here and be content to wear flower-necklaces and watch birds forever; until the end of time or until the world cracks apart, whatever happens first.”

“You will not stay, I know you too well for that.” Gandalf said. “And even if it were so, Tom Bombadil told me enough about you to know that 'forever' is no longer an argument which you can wield with any meaning. This problem will be solved soon enough and I will only stay long enough to see that you can do no harm before that happens. You can do nothing and fade, or you will take a step forward and face judgement for what you have done. This time, you cannot hide in a hole and wait for the storm to pass. You will have to make a decision sooner or later or the world will make it for you, and I will be here to see the end of it.”

He did not answer. He could not deny the truth of the wizard's words. Time was passing. The world was turning. And the time of his doom, for good or bad, was drawing near, as inevitable as the rise and set of the sun.

Submission or annihilation? What will it be?

“Leave me alone,” he said finally, turning away to look over to where Old Man Willow's split ruin stood, one half of his trunk bent over the Withywindle, while the other was bent over the short grass on the shore. “As you yourself said, I have a decision to make, but I cannot think when an old man keeps rambling next to me.”

He almost waited for the wizard to say something more, scolding and reprimanding as he seemed so inclined to do, but all he heard was a low huff and the retreating steps when Gandalf made his way back to Tom Bombadil's house.

It was evenfall and the sky was already turning purple and violet with the brightest stars appearing like silver dots above, when Tom Bombadil found him. He was sitting on the ground, leaning against the trunk of Old Man Willow, lost in thought and numb from sitting still for so long.

“Aren't you cold out here?” Tom Bombadil asked. “There is a fire and warm honeyed milk waiting for you at home.”

“Waiting at your home is also a wizard I cannot stand,” he answered, speaking to Tom's yellow boot in his field of vision. “I find I prefer the quiet out here.”

“Ah yes. The valley is quiet when the spirits aren't getting up to mischief. And quiet is good for thinking.”

He raised his head and saw Tom looking out over the valley with a joyous pride. Mist was beginning to creep over the meadows which were now coloured grey instead of the vibrant green the sunlight called forth from within the grass. Crickets were clittering under the trees and in the bushes and fireflies rose from the grass to dance once more before winter came and put them to sleep. The grass under his hands was growing cool and wet with dew.

“You did a lot of thinking for today,” Tom said, suddenly looking back at him. “Is there an end to the long yarn of ideas you are spinning or anything remarkable you found out?”

“Quite. I think I solved two great enigmas today.”

“Is that so?” Tom sat down on a root next to him and pulled out his pipe. “Which would be?”

“The first? How I will go on from here.” He twirled a long thin twig of the willow between his fingers that had fallen off during his and Tom's fight.

Tom stuffed his pipe and put it into his mouth. “Ah, that is a useful revelation indeed. What did you find out?”

He inclined his head to one side, pondering his words for a few moments and then snapped the twigs between his fingers. “I need three things before I can leave this valley: A name and a purpose to build a new Self, and protection. I found a purpose already, but I still need a name so I don't fade and protection against the Valar, at least for a few years. As chance has it, the wizard sitting in your house can provide me with both.”

“So you will leave?” Tom took a puff of his pipe and blew it into the blue evening air. “And then what do you want to do? What is the purpose did you find for yourself?”

He told the little man and afterwards, Tom Bombadil seemed genuinely surprised for the first time he could remember.

“That is an unusual plan if I have ever heard one.”

“Not as unusual as you would make me believe,” he said with a smirk. “In fact, it was you who first brought it to my mind.”

“Old Tom gave you the idea?” Tom Bombadil let his pipe sink.

Fireflies were rising around them, in a weaving peacefully between bushes and the branches of trees and illuminating the night with a thousand little suns.

They were both looking at each other.

“Yes,” he said at last. “That's the second riddle I solved. I talked to Goldberry this morning. I did not understand at first what the answer was when I asked who or what you were. I always thought you were master of this valley in the sense of a king ruling over his land. Then I thought you were something akin to a god of this land, seeing how unlimited your might was within your boundaries. But that is not the answer, is it? You are not something of this valley…” His voice trailed off, his eyes on Tom Bombadil's face, his expression a questioning one.

Tom Bombadil's mouth grew into a broad smile. “Who would have thought!” he exclaimed. “You really are smarter than you made me believe the night when you tried to crawl up the Barrow-downs.”

His wanted to reply, but his feeling of triumph faded a bit when he wondered briefly whether Tom Bombadil had just praised or insulted him.

“You are worse than the wizard. He, at least, is honest with his insults and doesn't disguise them as backhanded compliments,” he said.

“It was not intended as an insult. I was merely doubting your willingness to learn and you must agree that I was right at that time.” Tom Bombadil wagged his finger admonishingly then put his pipe back into his mouth.

“That was Sauron at the time,” he replied drily. “He was headed down the same abyss his master had gone down before him, blinded by madness and forsaking what could have been greatness for power. I was able to avoid that, but even without madness clouding my judgement, some truths are harder to accept than others. Your truth is unbelievable even when it is the only answer left that makes sense. Also, we never had any reason to think there was more than one, it is in the name after all...” He interrupted himself. “But there is one thing I do not understand: Why restrict yourself to a valley? Why not a country, a continent … a world?”

Tom Bombadil smiled. “There are those who seek their destiny among the stars. And there are those who are content with a home, a house and a lady to bring flowers to. Gods and men and elves and all things come in all sizes and shapes, what makes you think it is different for us?”

The way Tom Bombadil said it made him shudder against his will. A thought of something greater than himself brushed his mind, gone before he could get more of a glimpse and he suddenly understood, he saw that there were many. They were countless, more than grains of sand on a beach; some of them as small as a marble others as big as… The image grew and grew and he saw dimensions even he could no longer comprehend, and with it came a weight that seemed to press down on his head, heavier and heavier—and at last his mind flinched back from the greatness it could not comprehend, lest madness would pull him under.

It took him less than the blink of an eye to regain his bearings. He smiled wrily. “Truly, Gandalf was right when he said that they were wrong to ignore you. There is not telling what would happen if they found out what was sitting in the midst of their precious world. And I am surprised the Valar did not object to your presence.”

“Why would they object to me being here?” Tom shrugged and blew a smoke-ring into the now softly violet air. The grass was cold and wet with dew. “They mind their lands, I mind myself. Everything else being equal, I have not done anything to offend them. They are content to let me be. I occupy little enough space and I do not meddle with their world.”

“I hope you are right. I have every intention to stop meddling with this world,” he said, “but I am not yet sure that will be enough for them to leave me alone.”

They stayed outside for a little while longer, then they returned to the house where Goldberry was weaving a basket out of reeds, while Gandalf was sitting on a bench in front of the house, smoking his own pipe.

He wasted no time in stepping up to the wizard and stopped before him, and started talking before Gandalf could say something.

“I have made my decision.”

Gandalf raised his brows. “Well?”

“I have come to understand that the options presented before me are limited.”

“An astoundingly astute observation and the first reasonable thing I have heard you say in the Three Ages of this world,” Gandalf said, looking up at him from under his eyebrows. “Six, if you count the ones before the First Reckoning began.”

“You speak rather grandly,” he replied drily,” for someone who managed to overlook a Great Ring lying right under his nose for decades. A little humility would suit you as well.”

Gandalf harrumphed. “I was not the one who tried to rise above my assigned place. I know my role in the great workings and I'd thank you if you did not question it.”

“And I would thank you if you let me finish speaking. As I said, my options are limited. I have considered all of them and I have made my decision.”

“Which is?” Gandalf watched him intently.

“I will leave this world,” he said. “And I don't expect to return.”

Had he not been entirely serious, he would have laughed at the wizard's face. His eyebrows went up and his pipe almost fell out of the corner of his mouth.

He smirked contemptuously. “Do you want me to bring you your staff for support? You look like you might fall over, did you try to stand.”

Gandalf sputtered then coughed one time very deliberately and stood. “Leave this world? After you spent Three Ages trying to wreck it?”

“Wrecking it, as you so impolitely put it, has never been my intention for Middle-earth. But I don't expect you to understand that.”

Gandalf made a low noise of disbelief. “Well, firstly, you had a rather odd way of caring for Middle-earth, if that was what you intended by laying waste to great parts of it. Secondly, indeed I do not presume to know what is going on in your head, if there is anything at all worth mentioning in the first place. So you intend to leave. And why is that?”

“You know of my intentions, but I intend to speak of my reasons to no one except one being, and I intend to meet him at the Gates of Morning in the Far East of the world.” He stood tall and proud, a dark silhouette against the purpling evening sky, with the stars lighting up over his head.

“Who?” Gandalf asked and his gaze wandered from Tom Bombadil who was shifting his weight back and forth from his heels onto his toes and back.

The being who had once been Sauron smirked, his lips drawing up in a wolfish display of what was half amusement and half some sort of vaguely hidden disdain. “As chance has it, I cannot reach him on my own, otherwise I would not tell you this. I need your help for an undertaking, Olórin, and seeing how it will end with me gone from this world I think you will be more than willing to provide it. I need you to relay a message for me. I want to talk to our Father.”

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Sunlight was streaming into the fireplace room and the garden outside was filled with dappled golden-green shade, filtered by apple and pear trees. The windows were open and fresh autumn air was streaming into the room, while specks of dust were dancing like fairy lights in the air. The only sound inside the still room was the scratching of a quill on parchment and Gandalf the White was pacing up and down the room with his hands on his back. His heavy steps echoed dully in the small room and the wooden boards of the floor creaked every time he turned to walk away from the door and to the fireplace; a turn which he had completed quite often by now. Every once in a while, he would look up and over to the table, where Sauron was sitting, hunched over a pile of paper, filling page after page with his narrow, pointed handwriting.

Finally, Gandalf stopped pacing, his hands still on his back and his brow furrowed. “By the Cats of Berúthiel, what can you have to write that takes all morning?”

The scratching of the quill paused briefly and Sauron lifted his head, but didn't turn around. “Patience is a virtue, Olórin,” he said, then went back to writing. He paused once more. “I'll be leaving this world once and for all and I want to say my farewells. Allow me that much, at least.”

“And who would you know who wants your farewells?” Gandalf turned around to face Sauron, who was still sitting with his back to him.

“I don't know if they are wanted and I certainly won't impose myself on the ones who receive them. They can always use them as kindling should they feel insulted. I, however...” There was a slight hesitation. “I feel—not obliged, that is too strong a word—I think there is something I should say to some people before I leave.”

Gandalf raised his eyebrows, but he did not inquire any further.

Sauron finished his letters in silence and after he was done, he folded them and put them into envelopes of green leaves which he again sealed with candle-wax.

“Are you done?” Gandalf asked.

“Almost.”

Sauron wrote another note, and this time the scratching of the quill filled the room only for a few seconds. Again, he folded the note and put it in an envelope, but instead of putting a name on it, he merely added an Elvish calma on the outside and slid it in the middle of the stack of letters. For a while he stared at the stack with a strange expression, then he turned around and rubbed his hands with a wide smile.

“Why now, Olórin, I am finished and we can proceed with our venture.”

Gandalf watched him with a sombre face. The war had ended, but there were still odds and ends that had to be tied up neatly. He was far from the most patient wizard out of the five who had come here to Middle-earth, but right now he felt especially irked, because while he had to worry about going West and clearing up Tom's meddling, Sauron obviously did not even have enough decency to feign remorse.

Gandalf crossed the room with long strides, his staff thumping against the wooden floor. “Fine.” He took the pile of letters and stowed them in a leather bag he was carrying on his belt.

“I will talk to the Emissary as soon as time allows it. I might need a few days to reach the Grey Havens. Shadowfax is a King among horses, but even he can only run so fast. I have no doubt the Emissary will already be there when I arrive and I shall tell him everything you have told me. But,” Gandalf said, “I will neither repeat your own wording nor shall I speak in your favour. I shall give him your message and a piece of my mind to go with it, provided the Emissary wants to hear it.”

Sauron shrugged. “I cannot keep you from doing that. I merely want you to relay the message and hand him the letters.”

Gandalf nodded, albeit a bit unwillingly. “I will do that. However, I cannot guarantee that the Valar will grant you their protection after all you have done. All I can and will do is bring forth your request.”

“That's all I'm asking.”

“As for the other matter concerning your name, when do you intend to do that?” Gandalf wanted to know.

“Tonight. There is still something else I must do before we can do the trade,” Sauron said, looking out of the window. “I still need some things before I leave...” His voice trailed off, then he turned on his heel and walked outside, leaving Gandalf to look after him with furrowed brows.

He found Goldberry in the gardens where she was tending to the flowers. She was kneeling in the grass next to a patch of tulips and lilies, singing softly and touching her fingers to them. They seemed to respond by bobbing their little heads slightly and swaying from side to side as if Goldberry's song was the melody to their dance.

Dance, autumn flowers, in your glades!

The year now turns towards its end

When the emerald of the forests fades

And the world will heal and mend.

Pumpkin, berry, meadow, heather,

Orange, purple, green and blue,

Cuckoo's call and starling's feather,

And everything will be made anew.

Sing, trees of forests, wide and deep!

When the north wind comes to whistle,

Echoing from the mountains steep,

Grazing, freezing thorn and thistle.

A sunset, gold and red and green

paints valleys, slopes and woods so bright,

The lakes are mirrors of fire-sheen,

Filled with the stars above, alight.

He watched her silently, kneeling in the green and gold orchard filled with sunlight and for a brief moment, he was able to see the beauty that lay in the world he had come to detest, almost as if one was looking at a malformed child and suddenly saw the radiant soul that was hidden behind his eyes. In that moment, he felt something stab at his insides, a feeling you might have after having set sail over the sea, during the very last moment in which you could glimpse your homeland before it vanished behind the horizon.

In this very moment, he allowed himself to think Would it be so bad if I stayed?, just for the thousandth part of a second; he allowed himself to indulge in what might have been if he could have been content wearing crowns of leaves instead of crowns of iron, walking under trees instead of burning them down, and if he were able to look up at the stars without being afraid.

Sleep now, children of the earth,

The winter of the world is here,

Wake again when spring returns,

I will be waiting, have no fear.

The sun passed behind a cloud and the golden light was gone, and with it the radiant dream. The valley lay in grey shadow and a cold breeze came from the Barrow-downs that made the flowers cower and the trees shiver. And he knew that he would never be able to stay, that his path was a different one and that he would go through with his plan.

It was a dream, but never mine. This was never meant to be my road.

“Lady Goldberry,” he said, his voice quiet, his tone sombre.

She rose and turned around and although she was smiling, there was a shadow on her features like on the entirety of the valley—and it made him wonder what she knew of the future of the world, and whether this was an autumn that was longer and greater than the ones before, that would have no spring following the winter and leave the trees black and barren, with no new green that would come afterwards. She stood there like a reed, straight and slender and incredibly sad despite her smile and when the next gust of wind came, it took the crown of lilies from her hair and carried it away. The air smelled of snow.

“You have been generous and kind, probably more so than you should have been with me,” he said. “Still, I must ask a last favour of you.”

“A last favour? So your mind is made up?”

“It is.”

“Very well. Tell me what you need.”

“Two times have you clothed me and two times your necklace has been renewed,” he said. “I ask you a third and a last time for both; your nimble hand and your goodwill, for otherwise I will not reach my destination.”

“You shall have both. What would you have me make you?” Goldberry asked.

“A cloak,” he said. After a brief pause, he added, “And a hat. Both must be grey, but it does not matter if they are not of fine make. I need travelling clothes and old fabric will do just fine.”

“Grey they must be,” Goldberry said pensively. “Ah! I have an idea and I think this should suit you just fine. You are, I believe, adept at the various crafts that there are, but we have to wait until evenfall before we can begin our hunt.”

He raised an eyebrow. “A hunt?” He tried to picture the smiling daughter of the River-god as a warrioress with bow and arrow in her hands and the look in her eyes ferocious instead of calm and lenient.

“Not the kind of hunt you are thinking of,” Goldberry said and her eyes were twinkling. “Meet me at the pond a-ways up from the house where I found you at dusk. I shall tell you everything then; in the meantime, I will make my preparations and you will make yours.”

Surprised that she obviously knew that he had other things to do, he inclined his head, taking her in from head to toe. “You are a keen observer. There is not much which escapes your eyes, I guess.”

Goldberry laughed, brightly and merrily. “And how good is that! Otherwise I would not have found you in the grass when you first came here, small as you were.”

“True. Well, I shall leave you to your business then, and I shall attend to mine as you said.” He bowed slightly which she answered with a slight nod and a smile, then he turned and left the garden.

It did not take him long to find Tom. He was neither singing nor skipping around on the meadows and over the river, therefore he had to be occupied with something that kept him inside. Seeing as he wasn't in the house that left only the stable where his old, fat pony lived.

Currently, Lumpkin had to share both hay rack and the stable with Shadowfax, the regal white stallion of Gandalf who seemed not at all pleased to be housed in such humble lodgings. The stallion stood proud and tall, looking down at the mousy pony along his aquiline, long nose in a very displeased manner. Lumpkin on the other hand took the slightly cramped space and the shared food with serene indifference and a bit of lazy curiosity. He was obviously set on getting to know his fellow kinsmember a bit better and started sniffing at Shadowfax's mane, who gave him a disapproving look, shook his head proudly and then turned away from the pony—and very nearly kicked down the back wall of the horse box when Lumpkin started chewing on his silvery tail.

Tom set aside the pitchfork with which he had refilled the hay rack. “Boys! Behave! If you ruin the stable I will have you drag the trunks for rebuilding it out of the Old Forest yourselves!”

The horses looked at him. Lumpkin wore an honest expression of baffled innocence, while Shadowfax looked as disgruntled as he had ever seen a horse looking. He leaned against the box wall, careful not to get too close to the white stallion. (In his dislike for him, Shadowfax had taken strongly after Gandalf, as he had found out.)

Tom turned around and noticed him. “Good morning! Or good early mid-day, if you prefer so! You seem to be sleeping well here. One barely gets to see you before late morning.”

“A misconception. I sleep only as much as I need to and I doubt I will gain a fondness for sleeping while I am still here,” he replied. “And I spent the morning writing letters, while we are at it. I will have you know that I rose with the sun and have been working ever since—which you would know if you did have breakfast like a decent person instead of skipping around during grey dawn and singing to flowers and trees.”

Tom laughed and his entire face crinkled. “Who would have thought that a few days could improve your temper as much as your sense of humour?”

He smiled wrily and stepped away from the box when Shadowfax (who had silently crept up behind him) made a move to bite him. “It is either 'getting a sense of humour' or despairing. I prefer the first, seeing how I loathe self-pity.”

Tom reached out to scratch Lumpkin's muzzle. “It seems like the sensible choice. But I know that even now we are not good enough friends for you to come here without a deeper purpose. What do you need?”

“A hatchet and a knife,” he said.

Tom did not seem surprised. “Hm, dol, I see. I know what you intend to do, but I cannot give you tools that are suited for what you want to do. I have no axe, and no knives fit for anything but spreading butter. You can, however, use what you find in the shed. Maybe there is something in there that you can use.”

They left the stable and entered the adjoining shed which was small and a bit dusty, but neatly kept. There was a wooden chopping block in one corner and a worn trestle in another. Hanging from nails on the back wall there was an array of hammers, tongs, awls and iron nails and on a small shelf he found a bow saw, iron clamps, rasps and mallets, but while some of those tools would be useful, they were not enough to make a hatchet or a knife.

He stood before the shelf, the cold of the stone seeping up his bare soles, absent-mindedly slapping the bar of the rasp into the palm of his free hand.

“There is nothing here I could use,” he said. “I almost thought so. As it happens, however, a place came to my mind where I might find something sharper than your butter knives.”

“And where would that be?”

“A place that has a more violent past than your valley.” He turned around to face Tom. “I intend to climb the Barrow-downs and see what I can find in the tombs under the stones. Would you accompany me?”

Tom's face fell and something dark seemed to flit over his usually so bright and joyous features. “It is not a good place. Even I go there only when I must. Cold stones and evil wights is what you will find there, and no treasure is worth taking the risk of going under the earth.”

“The wights should be gone now that the Witch-king of Angmar is no more,” he replied. “I need to go there and I will do it, the only question is whether you will accompany me or not. If your answer is no, I must hope Goldberry's magic alone is strong enough to overcome the dark power and the coldness of the tombs under the earth.”

Tom gave him a sharp look. “The Witch-king's wraiths may be gone, but he was not the first who shed blood on the Downs and there are beings that are older than him or you that live there. I don't think you are strong enough to go there on your own.”

“Then help me,” he said sharply. “For days you forced your help on me when I did not want it, and now that I need it you hesitate.”

Tom rocked back and forth, onto his toes and heels. “Wrong. Tom helped you when you needed it, but I still think one has to be careful to give you what you want, because you have an extraordinary talent to desire things that are bad either for yourself or everyone else.”

“Well, I need some tools and therefore I will climb the Downs and I won't be dissuaded by word-picking or songs or enigmatic arguments.” He put the rasp back onto the shelf and looked at Tom who in turn regarded him with his sharp blue eyes.

“We will have to be quick and silent as mice,” Tom Bombadil said. “I can show you the way and the doors to the houses of stone, but you will have to find what you seek on your own. There are still a few sunlight hours left, and we must return before evening falls. We must have left the Downs far behind after sunset. Not even Tom's power holds there after night has fallen.”

“This fits nicely into my own plans. I have to meet Goldberry at sundown and I might as well do something useful in the meantime.”

“Very well! Then come! We have no time to lose! Quick as a river, swift as a stream! Hop-hop, derry dol!” And with that Tom Bombadil turned around and skipped out of the shed.

He followed as fast as he could, which was quite fast, but nearly not fast enough. It obviously took some time to convince Tom Bombadil to go somewhere, but when he had made up his mind, he was quicker on his feet than a deer. He skipped past the house and up the path where Sauron had tried to flee during the first night he had spent in the valley.

They descended into a hollow and for a while they wandered between the hillsides on short and springy grass. The sun was high in the sky and it was warmer than in Tom's valley. It was a shadowless land, neither tree nor brook were to be seen and he thought how hot it must become here in summer, when the stone of the hills that were drawing up left and right were warmed by the sun.

They rounded the foot of a steep hill and the valley opened up broad and deep before them. Westward lay the distant Forest, ahead north lay the soft green hills that were topped with the old standing stones. But Tom all of a sudden turned right and started running up a path that was almost hidden in a fold between two hills and rose swiftly eastward, were the forbidding jagged Barrow-downs rose up. Tom's stride showed no faltering or exhaustion, even when the path started to rise steeply and it was all he could do to keep up. The grass receded to make way for treacherous slopes with gravel that slipped under one's feet and stones with hidden cracks where an unsuspecting wanderer could easily catch his ankle and break it.

“The land here looks more treacherous than the hills in the north. There are standing stones on them as well and I bet there are barrows, too,” he said. “Why did you turn east?”

Tom jumped from one stone to the next. For a moment it looked like he would slip, but the stone held and did not roll away. “You are right, they are the mere outskirts of the Downs and easier to reach. The hills to the north are less dangerous and not as deeply woven into the dark workings that slumber under the stone in the heart of the downs and Tom prefers to have green grass under his feet, too, but we must hurry because it is already past mid-day and we need to be gone before the sun sets. Therefore we will take a path that is faster and more dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as the Downs after nightfall.”

They climbed on and the higher they climbed the cooler the air became. Hard gusts of wind fell from the Downs and into the valley. He was stronger than Sauron had been during his attempt to escape and Tom was close by, but the ascent was still long and exhausting. The sun was already starting to sink on the south-western sky when they reached a flat hilltop that was grey and grassless. A lone standing stone stood there like a warning finger pointing skyward. A coldness emanated from it that came neither from the early winter nor from the winds that caught in the folds of their clothes and the blue feather on Tom's hat.

“Now we only need to find the house of a wight,” Tom said. “They should be empty, although no one can be sure. There are a lot of tunnels that go deeper than their dwellings to the dark heart under the mountains. We need to stay away from those and be quick about our business.”

Tom's words were quiet although his voice was usually loud and clear, and that was disquieting because it was as if up here the wind was suddenly strong enough to pick the words from his mouth and muffle them and bereave them of strength and melody.

He turned away, looking out over the flat hilltop and up to where a jagged ridge rose up to a plateau with even more standing stones. Even the sun seemed distant and powerless, an almost white circle in a washed out sky. “There are no marked entrances, at least no markings that you can easily notice. But I know a thing or two about dark magic and since we are looking for an entry to a shadowed place we should look for places the light doesn't reach.”

Tom Bombadil walked off with his heavy steps, he did not skip any longer. Together they circled the standing stone, looking for something that might hint at an entrance into the Barrows. Sauron had been versed in the dark weavings and knowledgeable of the creatures that lived in the dark and shied away from the sunlight. He remembered Sauron's knowledge, but with a growing sense of unease, as if his mind was reaching for something it should not touch upon. When he wandered under the shadow of the standing stone, an unearthly cold brushed him and he was harshly reminded that shadow and darkness were no longer friendly toward him—in the end he had forsaken even them as his last allies. He wanted to take the next step, but his feet felt very heavy all of a sudden and it cost him a great deal of strength to step out from under the shadow and continue his circling. He threw an angry glare at the stone which remained still and dark.

At last, he found what he was looking for.

“Tom, come here,” he said. “I think I found a door.”

For a while there was no answer and he began to fear that Tom had somehow skipped off a precipice or had wandered off into a wight-hole alone when the little man appeared from behind a boulder and stepped up to him.

“Where is it?” Tom Bombadil asked.

He pointed at a stone that, at first glance, appeared like any other stone, but when you looked closer one could see that it had scratches and nicks as if sharp claws had been scrabbling at it. Also, the stone was suspiciously flat and even though it was lying in a sunlit place it appeared shadowed.

“Do you know how to enter?” Tom asked, almost slyly.

“We could knock and ask nicely, but as you said I do not think anybody is home,” he replied flatly. “I would have paid in blood to enter. Blood opens many doors into the netherworld.”

“You could, but I doubt you would be able to sacrifice a part of yourself without coming undone afterwards,” Tom said. “Well, I can try to convince the door to let us in.” And with that he stood before the stone, his feet a shoulder-width apart and raised his hands.

Bandings break and locks will shatter

Stone will crack and shadows scatter

All you of darkness' lurking slaves,

wights and wraiths, fly now and fear!

Crawl back into your empty graves

For your master is now here!

Underneath their feet there was a rumbling that seemed to rise from the bowels of the earth and then something cracked and snapped like something giving way under a heavy weight. There there was another rumble and suddenly, fissures appeared on the stone slab and with a deafening crack it broke into pieces.

“Well,” he said, “I am glad no-one thought of bringing you to the Black Gate and make you sing before it, or I would have feared for my defeat much sooner.”

Tom's eyes crinkled with laughter, but then his smile vanished and he said, “Quick now, let us carry away the pieces and enter. The sun is already halfway down the horizon and we must be gone before the shadows grow too long.”

With that they set themselves to the task of hauling the pieces of the stone slab away until a narrow tunnel was revealed underneath, which quickly and steeply descended underground. Cold, stale air hit them in the face like a bad, ill-omened breath.

He stared down the path, then he set his shoulders and stepped forward. “Follow me.”

Tom stayed behind him. The sunlight barely illuminated the first two fathoms of the tunnel, then they were left in the dark. There was no movement in the air and their steps didn't echo. He kept one hand on the side of the tunnel, but from time to time the stone fell away into nothing, his hands grasping empty air. In those moments he knew that they had just passed one of the many invisible crossings that permeated the stone. The mountain was full of them, as if giant moles had dug their countless tunnels through the stone while millennia passed aboveground.

At last they saw a faint greenish glow before them and he realised that they had reached one of the lower chambers. Here the kings of old had been buried before Angmar's shadow had fallen over the city that had stood on the hilltops, and devoured it. The Shadow had slaughtered the living and razed their houses to the ground while the dead in their graves rose again to a new and dark purpose unbeknownst to everyone but themselves.

The sick green light grew stronger.They rounded a last corner and then they were there. It was a small round chamber of stone and eight tunnels were hewn into its walls. Two were leading upwards, including the one they had come from, three were neither rising nor falling and three were leading even deeper under the earth. There were long holes hewn into the walls, forming low, broad sills. Their ceilings were low enough so that a man could not sit there, but only lie down on the ledge. On a few of those ledges lay the remnants of the dead kings who had been buried here: the once royal funeral clothing falling to dust over caved-in ribcages and pale crowns on their head. Much more unsettling, however, were the niches that were empty—and there were a lot of them.

Tom stood in the middle of the chamber and turned his head. “A bad place. The air is stuffy and what should be asleep since hundreds of years ago is still running around.”

“Do not fear the dead. Fear the living,” he replied absently, walking around the room from niche to niche and looking for a sword or a knife or a hand-axe he could use. “The dead rarely do harm to anyone.”

“Hm. You are right. What once was defeated and died may die again. I am more worried about the things that never lived.” He started whistling and the sound in the chamber was stifled, and yet somehow jarring.

“I wish you would stop singing and whistling and talking in riddles and instead help me find a sword or some such.”

Tom stepped forward and started searching the chamber, walking in the opposite direction.

It was in the exact moment when he found a small, jagged knife with an evil-looking saw blade and Tom turned around with an axe in his hand that a sudden draught of wind came blowing out from one of the paths leading downward. It was as cold as ice and it carried an echo of the void that surrounded this world, a memory so terrible and ancient that the mere memory was nearly enough to make him drop the knife and run. The sickly green light started to falter and darkness began to creep out from the tunnels. And then the draught reversed, as if something on the other end of the tunnel was breathing in, slowly and with a heavy sigh. The air itself began to exert an unrelenting pull on their clothes and hair and Tom just barely snatched his hat out of the air when it was ripped off his head.

“We must go,” Tom said and he did not look cheerful at all.

He could only nod, because the wind was ripping the air out of his chest and for a moment he thought he would not be able to draw breath again. He wanted to move, but found that he could not. His feet would not lift and the pull became stronger. The light was almost completely gone, breathed in and swallowed by whatever that was creeping up the tunnel in the wake of the inky darkness.

“Come! Derry dol!” Tom Bombadil grabbed his arm and pulled and they both started to run. When he took the first step he felt like he was being weighed down by an ocean full of water, but when his bare foot hit the cold ground, the spell was broken and he ran as fast as he could. Up the tunnel Tom led him, while his free hand was brushing the tunnel wall, looking for guidance and balance. Suddenly the wall fell away—another tunnel branching off—but instead of emptiness he felt something touch his fingertips and he snatched back his hand and then lashed out with the jagged knife. He hit nothing.

“Now that I am no longer a friend of darkness a few of Elbereth's stars would be welcome,” he said through gritted teeth. “I'd like to see what follows us.”

“No, you would not,” Tom said loudly, and in his voice was a warning. “Do not waste a good knife hacking at it. You cannot hurt the dwellers of the Deep Places. No stars shine there and neither Elvish names nor the daggers of Westernesse can harm them! Run!”

They did not see the sunlight until they burst forth from the tunnel and into the light of the evening sun.

When they turned they saw that the tunnel had been filled by impenetrable blackness. It was as if still, dark water had flooded the underground passages of the mountain. The sun was hanging low in the sky, a pale red disk that was sinking swiftly into a sea of grey and white fog.

“Quick now! Quick! As fast and far as our feet can carry us!” Tom called, waving the hand that still held the small hand-axe. As quick and nimble as a goat he hopped down the slope of scree and stones.

He tried to keep up and more than once he almost slipped when a stone suddenly rolled away under his feet. He skidded and leapt and although his legs were a lot longer than Tom's, he found it hard to keep up with him. When they reached the bottom of the slope and their feet touched grass, they stopped and turned around. The Barrow-downs were shrouded in mist, and only the barest shadows of the standing stones were discernible. When they strained their eyes and looked very hard, they thought they saw thin and crooked figures moving on the hilltops while weak voices were calling out, sorrowful and haunting and hungry.

He was breathing hard and his mouth was dry when he turned to face Tom, a wordless question in his eyes.

“Why are you so surprised?” Tom Bombadil asked. “Surely you were not so proud to think that you were the darkest shadow that had ever fallen upon this world? No, there are others that are far older than you and they have been sleeping for a long time. If fate wills it, they will sleep for longer still! Now come, we have to get home, I believe Goldberry is waiting for you.”

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Indeed, Goldberry was standing on the porch and waved at them when they ascended the hill that led up to Tom's house from the small green hollow. The valley was already shrouded in blue and violet dusk. White mist began to rise out of the Old Forest and from the Withywindle, but the hill upon which Tom's house stood was still bathed in the last light of the evening. The sinking sun turned Goldberry's hair into spun gold and the new lily crown upon her head blazed like white stars.

“You have been gone for a long time!” Goldberry said. “The sun is sinking while the mists are rising. The time of the hunt is now! Quick, put your tools into the shed and then come into the garden!”

They carried the hatchet and the knife into the shed. Tom locked it and then twined a wreath of grass and little white star-shaped flowers around a nail in the door and another nail in the door frame like one might put on a door chain.

“Those are weapons of Westernesse,” Tom said and turned around, “but they don't look good anymore. Tom suspects someone might have been tinkering with them. The dagger has an evil blade. It is better to lock them in while no one can be spared to keep an eye on them.”

Afterwards, Tom went into the house to talk to Gandalf, and after that they met Goldberry in the garden like she had told them to. She had been waiting for them, standing among the flowerbeds and trees, looking like a slender young birch herself. When they rounded the corner of the house, she approached them.

“Are you ready to begin the hunt?” she asked him while Tom stood aside.

“In all honesty, I do not know nor can I imagine what we'll be hunting,” he answered.

“You described to me the cloak you needed,” Goldberry replied. “But I do not have a fabric at home which fits your needs. Therefore, we have to find a few sheep first and catch them.” She smiled.

He was usually not one to be taken aback easily, but now he found himself at a lack of words. “Sheep? We will be hunting sheep?” He looked around and down into the valley with the absurd expectation to find a big herd of sheep grazing down there, which he had somehow managed to overlook until now. Of course, the valley was empty safe for the silver band of the Withywindle, the vague shadow of Old Man Willow, and the rising mists.

“Yes, for their wool!” she laughed. “Even I cannot weave something from nothing! But I have made a net in the afternoon while you were gone, and we can catch the sheep with it.” She held up her hands and now he saw the neatly coiled loops of green-and-grey meshes which looked like they were either woven from grass or reeds or thin branches.

“I do not claim to be versed as a shepherd,” he said, “but do you not usually use nets to catch fish?”

Goldberry laughed again. “Why yes! But these are special sheep and we could not catch them with traps nor shear them with knives.”

The answer was less than satisfactory and he shook his head. “I have seen a lot in my life, but your valley has to be the strangest place I have ever been. Magical sheep that are caught with nets! What will you next introduce me to? Invisible cats? Talking rabbits?”

“Not today, I am afraid,” Goldberry said. “But the sheep are flighty and in order to catch them I need your help—which is only fair since it is your cloak I will be making.”

“Very well. Then let us go and find these magical and obviously invisible sheep.” He took another look out over the valley, his arms crossed and a frown on his brow.

“Before we go, you might want to change your form,” Goldberry said. “What you are going to do will be much easier on four legs.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Lady Goldberry, I have to say I do not understand in the least where this is going. You have a net in your hands, yet you need a wolf at your side? What should I do? Kill the sheep for you so you do not get your hands bloody?”

“No one and nothing will be killed,” Goldberry said leniently. “You will understand when you see it.”

He shook his head and then turned around to face Tom. “It seems both of you cannot be bothered to give clear explanations to reasonable questions. You think yourselves nice, but you are the two most aggravating people I have ever met. Be that as it may, I need your help and it seems the lady needs a guard dog at her side while she goes hunting. Would you help me change into a wolf?”

“Of course. You need only ask! Ho-dol, merry-dot, four long legs and a swishing tail, tufts on ears, the nose on a trail! Tom shall help you. Just a clap and the blink of an eye—look!”

There was a gust of wind and in the next moment he was standing on all fours between Goldberry and Tom. Goldberry smiled while Tom was laughing and doing a little dance on the spot.

“Dong-a-long! Tom shall leave you two to yourselves now! He has something he needs to ask the wizard about.” And without another word he hopped off and stormed out of the garden.

Goldberry looked down at him. “Shall we go?”

He nodded his head in agreement and together they headed off and down the hill into the valley. The grass was dewy and springy beneath their feet and the air grew cooler the further they descended. The sky was of a pale, thin grey-blue—it was the strange hour of the evening when the sky was still bright, nearly white, while the trees and everything that lay beneath them was already dark.

Goldberry had the net thrown over her shoulder and led the way with sure, light-footed steps. She was even faster than Tom and he had to fall into a swift canter to keep up with her. While they descended the slope, he looked around for any sign of animals, but he could only hear and smell birds and rabbits. There were no sheep.

They stopped at the bank of the Withywindle. A pale yellow moon was rising in the east, hanging low over the Barrow-downs. Crickets were clittering and owls were hooting. Little feet of unseen creatures were skittering over stones and through the grass. Before them was the stream and beyond the great expanse of the meadow, bordered by hills, mountains and the Old Forest. The meadow was bluish-green and tattered wisps of mist wafted over the grass.

The wolf looked out over the valley then up at Goldberry as if to say, Well, and now?

Goldberry just put a hand on his head, turned it toward the valley again and pointed out beyond the Withywindle. “Look,” she said.

And behold! What he had first taken for the falling and rising of mists in the slight evening winds now took the shape of slow moving creatures, white and ghostly. They made no sound, but he could see them raising their long heads and turning them, looking about watchfully. A hundred of those misty shapes formed and became clearer with every second. Mist like woolen fur curled around their backs and necks, and their slender feet stood in the grass that was glazed over by the silver sheen of the moon. Most of them stuck close together, but every now and then he could see a few lambs breaking lose from the herd, skipping about in daring circles until they returned and fled to vanish between the legs of their mothers.

The wolf watched all of this with curious incredulity. If he had been able to speak he would have asked What are these? What are they doing here?

But although he could not talk in this form, Goldberry seemed to have guessed his thoughts or maybe she had read his expression.

“I cannot say for sure who they are, but I think they might once have been lost and wandered the world, before finding a safe haven here. You and they are alike, I believe. There is no longer a place for them where they have come from - wherever that may have been before,” she said. “But when they arrive in the valley they see that they are not alone and as far as I can see, no one who came here—like flotsam washed up on the shore after a storm on the ocean—left again. Tom takes care of them, because he is the master.”

The wolf tilted his head to one side and regarded the ghostly sheep. Were they spirits? Ghosts? Or other things entirely? His time in the valley had taught him that there were many things outside of the world he had thought he knew inside out; many things that he suspected not even the Valar knew existed.

“Come,” Goldberry said and with a leap she crossed the Withywindle and unloaded the net from her shoulder. Her feet barely made a sound when she moved, merely her gown rustled softly like wind in the reeds.

The wolf leapt after her and caught up to walk by her side.

“What we need is something of their wool so I can make your cloak,” Goldberry said. “But they are very shy and they are not used to anyone approaching them. They are watching us already and they will run if we come too close. Alone no one can hope to catch them, but together we might succeed. What you will do is to muster them and drive them toward me and I will have my net at hand to catch them.”

The wolf looked up at her doubtfully.

“Not to worry,” Goldberry laughed. “It won't hurt them. They are shy, that is all. But all sheep must be shorn from time to time.”

He still did not understand how they were supposed to hunt and shear sheep without hurting or scaring them, but he would leave this to Goldberry. He had had his task laid out for him and she would take care of the rest. After all, it was her who knew the art of weaving and the ways of the valley, and if she needed mist sheep to make the cloak he needed, who was he to tell her no?

“I will walk over there,” Goldberry said and pointed to their right where the valley rose slightly in the direction of the heights. “You can walk in the direction of the forest to get behind them and use the river to herd them in my direction. They do not usually cross the water. Good luck!”

And with that she turned around and ran off, her steps sure and light.

He looked after her for a few moments, then he turned around and trotted in the opposite direction to get behind the herd. He could see the sheep turning their heads to follow him with watchful eyes, but he ignored them and plodded on. Only when he had gotten behind the last stragglers did he turn around and fixed them with his yellow eyes. He sat down and regarded the ghostly herd thoughtfully.

The moon had risen high above the Barrow-downs and bathed the valley in silvery light.

The grass was not tall enough to hide him completely and the plane was wide enough to make it very hard for a single hunter to slink up to the herd, let alone muster it in a controlled manner. It would have been easy if it had been a hunt in a traditional sense: Even for a lone wolf it was not hard to prey on a herd of sheep, single out a weak one, separate it from the herd's protection, and kill it. But handling an entire herd whose movements could be as complex as a swarm of fish without hurting the sheep or allowing the herd to scatter to all four winds—that was a heroic undertaking. It was always much easier to use brute force to overwhelm an opponent. But now he had to outsmart a herd of ethereal creatures who, if their appearance was anything to go by, did share the cautiousness and mystic understanding of each other's intents and movements that was common to prey animals everywhere in the world. And even if he had been allowed to hurt them, he could not have done so—for they were ghosts and he was not—not yet, at least.

He stood and circled the herd sideways until he reached a patch of higher grass. There he let himself drop flat, then rose again slightly, his underside almost brushing the ground, his legs angled and his head low, slinking forward.

Most of the sheep had returned to grazing, only a few were standing watch on the outer edge of the herd. Mist wafted around their feet, hiding them from view, making it appear as if they were standing in snow.

When he was close enough, he suddenly sprang up and charged forward.

The entire herd started and moved as one. As expected, they tried to scatter, but he ran left and right and cut them off before they could come too far. Finally, half of the herd broke away and turned right toward the Withywindle.

The wolf let them be—half a herd must surely be enough for Goldberry.

But a herd of prey had a mind of its own and with an almost uncanny ability to coordinate the movements of themselves and the herd around them, the sheep turned left and right, split up and reunited, flowing around the wolf like water, galloping in spirals and circles on the ground.

The wolf however, was not to be dissuaded. He darted left and right, covering ground with long leaps, his claws digging into the earth and his tail lashing out to balance him when he stopped and took a lighting quick turn in the other direction, driving the herd up the valley where Goldberry was waiting. He cut the sheep off wherever he could, staying close to their misty heels. The herd did neither bleat nor did their hooves make any sounds when they ran.

He saw Goldberry waiting for them. Her net was tied between two silver-white birches which were standing about nine feet apart. The net was nearly invisible in the moonlight. Still the sheep seemed to sense something and tried to go around the trees, but the wolf would have none of it and even Goldberry stepped aside and raised her arms to funnel them into the net. Many sheep broke away to the side, but a few ran straight into the net.

They did not tangle themselves in it; instead they briefly dissolved in a soundless blast of blinking and glittering mist, and the net suddenly shone as if it had been doused in liquid silver. Then the sheep reappeared on the other side of the net, unchanged and unharmed.

The wolf stopped, confused. Goldberry stepped forward. “Well done! But it is not enough, we need more of them! Round them up again!”

The wolf turned around and chased after the sheep once more. Again he circled the herd until he had all brought the runaways close the rest, again he drove them uphill, running right and left, and chased another few sheep into the net. The net glowed, pale and bright. Goldberry was not idle. She ran along the Withywindle, singing mysterious words that echoed through the valley although she was whispering. Mist rose from the stream and crept over the meadows, bringing the sheep closer together for they dared not cross it.

Again and again they chased the sheep through the trap and with every time, it glowed brighter and the ropes of the meshes grew thicker and ticker, until it seemed more like a blanket than a net.

The wolf ran and leapt, zigged and zagged, slowed down in a flurry of mist and grass, took a sharp turn and ran off again, clawing up earth and grass and flowers.

When Goldberry raised her hand at last, he turned around and trotted back to where she was untying the net, his head low and his tongue hanging out. His chest heaved like a bellows.

“Well done,” Goldberry said and held the net out for him to see. “Behold the wisps of silver and mist caught in the mesh! I can make your cloak out of this and it will shield you from harm and unfriendly eyes as long as you stay friendly and do no harm to someone else.”

The wolf regarded the net, then let his head hang again.

“Come,” Goldberry said. “There is still something you have to do tonight, but before you shall go back to the house and rest briefly.”

They wandered over the meadow and crossed the Withywindle again. When the wolf had jumped to the other shore, he turned his head and looked back. The ghostly herd had vanished and all that was left were formless wisps of mist quietly and slowly floating over the blue-green grass.

Tom was awaiting them back at the house. The wizard was nowhere to be seen, for which the wolf was thankful.

Tom was laughing when he saw them approaching. “You do like like you've been a-hunting!” he half-said, half-sang. “Come inside! There is clear water to drink and something to eat waiting for you inside!”

The wolf stepped over the porch and when he crossed it he shed his form and rose in the form of a man, albeit he still looked ruffled.

“This was the most nonsensical hunt I have ever taken part in,” he said as he walked past Tom and into the fireplace-room. “You use nets to catch fish, not sheep; and wolves hunt in packs, not alone. Is there anything at all that makes sense in this valley?” He pulled out a chair from under the table and dragged it next to the fireplace, not expecting answers and not getting any, either.

To his chagrin, Gandalf hat chosen this as sitting place as well. He was smoking a long, elegant pipe and was watching the flames. The wizard's keen eyes flicked up when he took a seat next to him. “When are you done?” he asked.

“There is one more thing I have to do,” he answered and took a wooden mug of water that Tom had brought him. The water was cool and clear and soothed his dry throat. “I shall do it now. Afterwards we can finish the ritual and you and I can be rid of each other.”

He finished his drink and went to the shed. There he untied Tom's knot of grass around the door and opened it. The hatchet and the knife were visible even in the absolute darkness of the shed, for they were glowing with a weak unholy green sheen that was a visible echo of the light of the barrow they had found them in. They were also not lying in the same place on the shelf where they had put them this afternoon.

He narrowed his eyes and took them carefully, but the weapons were still and lifeless under his hands. He found a tool-belt and donned it. In one of the leather loops he hung the hatchet, but he preferred to keep the knife in his own hands. He also took some sandpaper, which he found lying next to the knife. When he left the shed, the light of the moon was not reflected in the blade - instead it seemed nearly black for it swallowed the light instead of throwing it back.

He walked down the hill, turning away from the path and following the Withywindle instead. The little stream burbled and gurgled merrily to his left. He followed its winding band of silver until the ground evened out and reeds sprang up next to its shore. The night was silent and still. There were no owls hooting, no crickets clittering, and no mice moving through the grass. It seemed for all in the world that he was utterly alone.

Not before long, a dark, bent shape appeared before him, bent and gnarled like and old man. Old Man Willow was as still as the rest of the valley, his branches hanging and the leaved twigs hanging around him like curtains as if he was hiding in shame.

He walked up to the dead tree and circled it once to look for a tree limb that might fit his purpose. When he found one, he stepped up, climbed onto the roots and from there up the trunk until he could set his feet in a bifurcation between two great limbs. He gripped the hatchet tightly and began to hack away at the gnarled bark.

The hatchet was small and it took him a long time to chop through the old and slow-grown wood. He felt the age of the tree below his hands: the willow was ancient, although he could not say for sure that time in Tom's valley was passing in the same way it did in the rest of the world. But the malevolent wakefulness was gone. In death, Old Man Willow was not more than any other tree.

Either you bend or you break, he thought.

With a dull thump, the limb landed on the ground and the bright circle where he had sawed through the wood stood in stark contrast to the grey-silver bark of the willow. He climbed down, put aside the hatchet, and with the sharp knife he began to work on the branch. Layer upon layer he peeled away, working around knots in the wood and cutting them out, and dragging the sandpaper down the limb until it was smooth and even under his hands. Then he set the knife to the wood once more and started carving intricate patterns down its length. He briefly considered letters and symbols, but upon second thought he decided against it and settled for leaves and spiral patterns. They were simple and primal and, unlike letters, had not been abused by Sauron for a dark purpose before.

The moon rose and began to sink before he was finished. His hands were raw and his shoulders were aching, but when he looked at his finished work, a very old, long-forgotten feeling of elation rose within him. Long before the shadow of the Ring had fallen upon his own mind, even before Morgoth had come to Middle-earth, it had not been the violent desire for destruction that had driven him—no, in the beginning it had been creation that had given fire to his thoughts and wings to his spirit. There was nothing that compared to the knowledge of having made something of high purpose out of simple materials with one's own two hands: of bending earth and fire to one's will, of trapping starlight in jewels and crowns, back when creation itself had been the purpose and not the function the creation would have later—creation not as a means to an end, but for it's own sake.

What he had done tonight did not even come close to what he had made ages before, but even something as plain as cutting and carving wood gave him simple, but nevertheless true contentment.

He stood, stretching his arms and legs, then he picked up the tree limb which he had - with patience and through trial and error - cut into the semblance of a long wooden staff with a gnarled top not unlike a nest of bent, short twigs.

His steps were shorter and slower when he climbed back up the hill. The previous day and night had been strenuous and long. The hours had flown by while he had been working and running and climbing, but in retribution they now weighed down on his shoulders twice as heavily.

The lights in Tom's house were still on, as expected. He knocked on the door with his staff and it was opened only a moment later by Goldberry. She let him in and led him into the fireplace room where Gandalf and Tom were expecting him.

He looked at Goldberry who was standing to his right. “Have you been able to finish the cloak, Lady of the River?”

She nodded and held out a grey bundle for him. He took it and unfolded it: wrapped up in his arms there were a cloak and a broad-rimmed hat, just like he had requested, and gloves which he had not asked for, but took nevertheless.

Gandalf followed his inspection of the new clothes with sharp eyes and a shadow briefly crossed his face, but he said nothing.

“Then let us do magic!” Tom said. He skipped out of the room and came back with a broom. Whistling, he swept the rushes aside and then he pulled out a piece of chalk from the pocket of his jacket and drew two circles on the floor. Following that, he drew smaller circles outward like the petals of a rose and in each of those petals he drew strange words in an alphabet that no eyes in Middle-earth had ever seen.

While Tom was drawing, he busied himself to pull on the cloak and cinch the belt at his waist. At last, he put the grey hat on his head with a flourish and turned on his heels to face Gandalf, who regarded him with a thoroughly disgruntled expression.

“How do I look?” he asked when Goldberry handed him the staff.

“Like someone trying to impersonate one of the istari,” Gandalf said. “And failing,” he added. “We are a humble order, but you resemble a spoiled princeling who believes changing his clothes is enough to pretend to be part of it.”

“The clothes are just a start, although not as horrendous a start as I had imagined. While your order has no overall sense of how to present itself, I must say I do like the hat.”

Gandalf frowned and shook his head, unnerved. “This world will be better off without you and your clever opinions on robes and hats indeed.”

That was when Tom got their attention by clapping his hands.

“Ho dol! Now, all the preparations are made and the ritual can begin.” He turned toward his guest. “Do you have everything you need for your journey east?”

“I have a purpose to keep me going. Protection to keep me safe on the way was what was promised to me by Olórin. All that is missing is a name to fill the void and keep me from coming apart.”

“We shall remedy that.” Tom waved toward the circles. “You and Gandalf should stand inside.”

Both followed his instructions.

“Are you going to do the ritual?” Gandalf asked, his tone suspicious. “I shall be honest with you Tom, your recent deeds have done nothing to reinforce my trust in you.”

Tom Bombadil did not look insulted. “Hm dol, yes. But we are in my valley here, and Tom is the master. It will be better and the magic will be stronger if I do it. Besides, giving away a true name is not something that is easily done. A lot can go wrong and you could both come to harm.”

“I am familiar with that,” Gandalf said. “And I expect that as soon as Sauron is gone from the world, the name will fall back to me. It is something I am going to lend him without wishing him well, but I am not going to give him gifts.”

“No. That won't be needed.” Tom turned away from the wizard and spoke now to his guest who had come to him as Sauron and now stood before him, nameless. “Let us begin with you! Stand in the circle and don't break it. Now, tell me your names!”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

And so he did. He recounted every name and title he had ever held from the beginning of time on until the evening at the Brandywine when he had let go of Sauron. Tom nodded and humming a strange tune, adding another rose petal around the circle for every name he was told, and wrote the name in. When he was done, the rose had grown to twice its size and the wooden floorboards were covered with letters of the Westron tongue, Elven tengwar, Dwarvish runes and even the jagged script Sauron had used amongst his armies, which resembled an elaborate kind of cuneiform. He did not ask how Tom knew the script.

Then Tom turned around and repeated the same process with Gandalf, who recounted his own titles and names and whose own rose grew as Tom circled the wizard and wrote his names down on the floor. When Tom at last righted himself, both wizard and former Dark Lord were regarding each other's circles, their eyes following the names of the other one, spiralling outward from where they stood.

He squared his shoulders and drew up his gaze, meeting Gandalf's eyes.

“Can we begin, wizard?”

Gandalf met his gaze, unflinching. “If you like and if you dare—under one condition. I want you to renounce who you have been - not just to yourself but to the world, and during this ritual. I will not soil my name by having it be associated with someone who has carried the names you carried once. If you are going to carry my name, you will have to be a blank canvas first and bear it with humility.”

“Changing the terms of an agreement in the last possible moment might be considered bad form by some,” he replied, an eyebrow raised.

“You forget your place,” Gandalf said. “But I have not forgotten your past nor do I intend to. This is nothing I do out of spite, and everything you deserve. I have given this a lot of thought while you were outside robbing graves and doing Lúthien knows what else.”

Tom stepped forward. “It should not be hard, my friend, you have already done it once.”

Having someone call him friend jarred within him on a very deep level and he did not like it. Still, he had no other choice and if he was being honest with himself (which he was, because contrary to Morgoth he saw no sense in deluding himself about his position in the world) he knew that Gandalf had good reasons to make it a condition. Sauron would have demanded a lot more, had their positions been reversed.

“Very well.” He knelt down, careful not to destroy the lines of the circle and the rose Tom had drawn and started with the second outermost petal. It was filled with the script of Mordor—his own script, and it was at the same time strange and unsettling to see it here in Tom's house, amidst his intricate drawings and the scripts of Elves, Dwarves and Men.

“I renounce the title 'Lord of the Rings', which I claimed for myself,” he said and wiped it out with the heel of his hand. There was a slight sting in his chest and something pounded once behind his temples. He turned toward the next petal. “I renounce the title of the Necromancer and the claim over Dol Guldur. I—“ Another pounding, stronger this time. Still, his voice did not waver and he went on, wiping out name after name, although it became heavier and more painful each time. He knew it was a trial. He was being tested one last time and he would not fail.

Still, when his hand hovered over the last name, the first name he had borne which he had been given at the Beginning, his movements faltered. He looked at it and for the first time realised that it was not a script standing there, but musical signs—the original form of creation, the first written design that had been. His first name, his true name. It could not be spoken in a worldly language without losing its power and its deepest description of his own being, because the First Language had been true and without fault and it was impossible to tell lies in it. He regarded it for a while, the high rises and drops to deepest tones of the melody and he thought that his fate had been written into his name even before he himself had come into existence.

Was anything ever my own choice?, he wondered.

His hand remained a few hand-breadths above the chalk script. He had grown to loathe his name as he descended into madness and even now all it evoked within him was a feeling of bitterness, but he was well aware that he was severing the last tie to who he had been. He—someone else, in fact—would continue to exist after this, but the cost was the destruction of everything he had been.

Then, with a tremendous effort of will, he dragged the heel of the hand over the notes and smeared them beyond recognition. Instantly, the pain vanished. Still, when he got back to his feet he had to wipe his brow and his arms were trembling.

“Nameless I come before you and a name I come to ask of you,” he said to Gandalf who was watching him with an unreadable expression.

The wizard pointed down at the names that were arranged in spirals around his feet. “One name I shall grant you, not as a gift, but as a loan. Name your choice.”

“I have a long pilgrimage before me,” he replied. “Give me 'Mithrandir', the Grey Pilgrim. In grey I am vested and I a pilgrim I desire to become.”

“The name demands integrity and truthfulness,” Gandalf said.

“No lie shall cross my lips while I wear it,” he replied.

“It is tied to a pilgrim's restlessness and renounce the need for worldly comforts.”

“I will wander far and wide and I shall not sleep beneath any but the humblest roofs, my hands and neck unadorned by gems, gold and silver,” he replied wearily.

“The name demands humility,” Gandalf said.

“Then I shall banish pride from my behaviour.” He waited, but when the wizard didn't speak on, he went to his knees, his gaze fixed on the floor, the staff resting over his thighs. He was exhausted and empty. Even Goldberry's necklace was weighing him down, although it was the only thing keeping him here in this world now that he was at his weakest and most vulnerable.

“I grant you 'Mithrandir',” Gandalf said. “For the time being and as long as you stay true to your word and remain in this world, until you cross the threshold to another. Abuse the name or act against its nature, and it shall fall back to me before that and you will be undone.”

He nodded, then they both looked at Tom who stepped closer and bent down, drawing a straight line of chalk from the petal that held “Mithrandir” to the outermost petal that surrounded his own circle. As soon as they connected, the chalk lines on the ground started to glow. A white fire seemed to run from Gandalf's circle to his own and engulfed him.

For a few moments he could see nothing but white and he had to close his eyes against it. There was no heat and no warmth, but he knew that it would have been very unwise to overstep the lines of Tom's drawing now.

When he opened his eyes again, the rose pattern on his side had burned away, leaving only the petal that held his new name. Gandalf's circle was unblemished, but “Mithrandir” had disappeared from his side. The petal was empty.

Slowly, he got to his feet. It was harder than it had been before. He felt older. The hands that were clutching his staff were as strong as before, but now they bore the lines and signs of old age. His hair had turned to grey, just like the beard that had not been there before. Even when he drew himself up to his full height, his posture remained slightly bent like someone who had wandered very far and was hunching slightly under the effort.

To anyone on the street he might have appeared as a mere old bearded man and no one would have found anything peculiar about him safe for his strange sharp gaze, his mysterious clothing and the old wooden staff he was leaning on.

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Dawn came pale and fresh on the next day. The sun rose into a sky of washed-out blue and there was a light, cool wind coming from the East, stirring the soul and filling the heart with the longing for wandering to find what lay behind the horizon. It was a day for beginnings, for great journeys and farewells.

Lumpkin and Shadowfax had both been brought out of the stable and while the pony roamed the vicinity of Tom's house in order to find a good spot to graze, Shadowfax remained at Gandalf's side, proud and poised, and only every now and then nudging him with his muzzle as if the stallion himself was impatient to depart and run again after being constrained to the narrow interior of the stable for two days.

Gandalf, Shadowfax and Goldberry were standing on the path that was leading north where the Barrow-downs lay, harmless and still in the daylight, but their forbidding, dark nature still simmering just below the thin veneer of sunshine.

Sauron—no, Mithrandir now—and Tom Bombadil were standing off to one side, their heads stuck together and they were talking quietly. It took a greater mind than Gandalf's own to explain what had transpired between those two and guess what they were talking about. If there were two beings in Middle-earth of whom he would have never thought that they might become friendly with each other, those two were it. He hesitated to call it friendship, because there was a lingering watchfulness and a coolness mainly from Sauron's side that did not allow for a close bond, but Tom (while he obviously knew everything Sauron had done) did not treat him different from how he might have treated some old acquaintance from Buckland visiting for afternoon tea on Thursdays.

It was mainly Tom who was talking now and it looked like he was explaining something, because he was skipping up and down, making a lot of sweeping gestures, while Sauron leaned on his staff and listened intently.

“They make a strange pair of friends, and granted, Tom's intentions seem honourable enough,” Gandalf said, “but I hope Tom Bombadil is as wise as he first struck me and can see the ends of his actions.”

“Not to worry,” Goldberry replied and stroked Shadowfax' mane. “Tom saw the beginning and he can see the ends. His eyes are keen and neither favour nor grudges cloud his judgement.”

Gandalf sighed. “In the end, it will not concern our world anymore regardless of Tom's good or bad judgement, or so I hope. I do not know where someone like Sauron might settle down after he has left Middle-earth, for there are many places barred to him, but that is for others to decide.”

“For a while I thought he might remain here,” Goldberry mused, “but then I realised that he isn't one to stay where somebody else built a home and offered it to him. He must do it himself, I think: Build his own home and his own world.”

Gandalf thought of burning rivers, black fortresses and, more recently, of Mordor. “Regretfully enough you are right, Lady Goldberry. Even more regretfully, he has always been very eager to do so in the first place.”

In this moment, Tom Bombadil and Sauron finished whatever it was they had felt the need to talk about and came over to them.

“A good day to wander!” Tom Bombadil said, skipping over to where Gandalf and Goldberry were waiting. “The winds will carry your feet swiftly no matter where you will head and the friendly sun will light your path. Today you will make good speed!”

“Good,” Gandalf said, “for good speed is needed. Shadowfax and I will have to cover many miles before sundown. Farewell, Lady Goldberry! Farewell Tom Bombadil!”

“Until we meet again, Gandalf,” Tom laughed.

“Very soon, if everything goes as I think it will.” Gandalf mounted Shadowfax while the stallion stood still without saddle and bridle, waiting for the wizard to tell him with or without words where he needed him to go. He looked down at Sauron, now in the guise of a false wizard with his grey cloak and staff and the hat that was sitting a bit askew on his head.

Sauron—Mithrandir looked up at Gandalf with a sly smile from under the wide brim of the hat. “Farewell, Gandalf. I hope we do not meet again.”

Gandalf snorted. “I'm sure you would like that. As soon as my business at the Havens is finished, I shall catch up with you and keep an eye on your for the rest of the way. Try not to stay out of everyone's business and don't set anything on fire in the meantime,” he said curtly.

Sauron grimaced. “I do not need a chaperone, Gandalf. I am very well capable of finding my own way east, thank you very much.”

“I'm not worried about you getting lost on the way,” Gandalf said. “It's what kind of mischief you could do while you are unsupervised which gives me grey hairs.”

Sauron looked for a moment as if he was very much tempted to make a snide joke on grey hair and the title Gandalf the White, but for his own good he kept his mouth shut and stepped back to make way for Shadowfax to pass him on the path.

Gandalf nudged Shadowfax on and the stallion stepped forward with a regal, slow pace. When he passed Sauron, he threw him a warning look. “Remember who you are,” the wizard said. “Ill comes to those who do ill against their name.”

“I will remember it,” Sauron replied drily. “Now, should you not make haste? You are dallying quite long for someone who is allegedly in such a hurry to get his business done.”

Recalling that after everything he could say only another scathing comment would follow, Gandalf averted his gaze, hefted his staff in his grip and touched Shadowfax' mane.

“Carry me swiftly, my old friend, I will not need to strain your favour for much longer.”

And with that, the big stallion fell into a swift canter and very soon, the wizard and the horse rounded the foot of a hill and then they could be seen no longer.

Mithrandir looked after the wizard until he could no longer see him, then he turned to Goldberry and Tom.

“The wizard is gone at last, and I see no sense in dawdling any longer. Thank you for your hospitality and your kindness, however misplaced it may have been with me.”

“It is the wonderful thing about kindness that it is never misplaced, no matter with whom. Something that is good does not suddenly turn wrong because it is extended to a different being,” Goldberry said. “My wishes are the same for you as they were for Gandalf; a swift wind at your back and may your legs not tire for a long time.”

“I doubt they will, but thank you for your gracious wishes nonetheless.” He bowed to her and turned to Tom Bombadil at last.

“Tom Bombadil,” he said, leaning on his staff with an expression torn between admiration and aggravation. “Let it never be said that we were friends, because spending time with you is more trouble than it is worth most of the time. However, I will admit, that you do have a refreshing view of the world and I certainly learned something from you.”

Tom's blue eyes glittered like a sea filled with sapphires. His cheeks were red and he was laughing. “I told you there would be something for you to find here.”

Mithrandir nodded. “I know what I want now and I am ready to ask for it. It is easier than I thought to push aside what you really want by piling other desires upon it, even when they are just a weak substitution for what one truly wishes for.”

“You were a scared little thing when you came here, hiding wounded pride and fear behind the stubbornness of a mule and the sharp tongue of a snake,” Tom Bombadil agreed. “But I daresay that you are braver now than you were before and not so angry, although it took you a lot of effort.”

“Braver and calmer? Maybe. Or maybe I just learned patience with you, because otherwise I would have razed your valley to the ground.” His tone was flat, because there was a lot of truth to his words, but he could not hide a quirk of his mouth.

“You learned a lot, and that is another thing Old Tom told you would happen,” Tom said. “But you will find your way, Mithrandir, wherever your feet will take you and wherever your final haven will be.” At those words, a knowing glint passed through his blue eyes.

They had never spoken directly about his true intentions, but Mithrandir could tell that Tom Bombadil had already guessed them. The little man, however, did not make mention of any of this. Rather he simply let the matter be as if it was not important to him at all. (Which, judging by Tom Bombadils curious interests, was probably true. The world outside the valley could fall apart and he would in all probability still be more worried about the flowers in his garden.)

Mithrandir regarded the little man for a while, wondering whether he should ask Tom Bombadil about what he knew of his voyage, but then he decided against it. It did not matter in the end and it would not change his decision. He straightened up.

“Farewell, Lady Goldberry, Tom Bombadil. I don't think we will meet again, but you should know that you have my respect and my gratitude for what you did for me.”

“You were hardly any trouble,” Tom Bombadil laughed. “As to not meeting again—do not be hasty. Unlikely as it may be, forever is a long time, even for someone like me. Now go and make haste to leave the Barrow-downs behind before nightfall. You know the way!”

“I do.” He raised his gloved hand in greeting, looked at each of the them one more time, slight wonder in his mind at the strange pair he had happened upon, then he turned around and followed the path to the north. He passed Lumpkin who walked a few steps beside him not unlike a dog who was surprised that a visitor was leaving so soon. After a few steps the pony stopped and looked after him, then it turned around and walked back when Tom called him. He happened upon the pond where Goldberry had found him and in passing it, he saw his reflection, old and foreign. The path descended behind Tom's house, then rose again. Behind him, Tom suddenly started to laugh, loud and clear like the water that came running down from the downs. Its sound followed him and echoed far and wide in the valley until he rounded the foot of a hill and Tom Bombadil's house was out of sight.

He had not expected to meet other travellers on the path he had chosen, least of all hobbits. Then again, they seemed to invade his life wherever he walked, so he should not have been so surprised when he came to the Great East Road and saw four of them sitting in a circle around a fire in a clearing, talking and laughing. What was unexcected even for him, however, was the nature of those hobbits. They were wearing Rohirric and Gondorian clothing, the white stallion of Edoras and the White Tree of Minas Tirith emblazoned on their cloaks. Furthermore they carried daggers that had the aura of Westernesse and one of them—tall for a hobbit and silent, preferring to let his three friends speak—was missing the fourth finger of his right hand.

This took him aback and he as if a locked door had been pushed open felt Sauron's wrath—forfeited, but not forgotten—threatening to come back and flood his veins. Just in time, he remembered Gandalf's warning and his new name, and he fought back the anger that did no longer belong to him and approached them carefully instead. He had not planned to make himself known, but the nine-fingered hobbit seemed to be more aware of his surroundings than his comrades. Like a string of cobweb, there seemed to be a connexion between them—Mithrandir remembered now that he had felt a strange unrest long before he had seen the hobbits, and he had no doubt that the hobbit was sensing him, too. He seemed to hark into the darkness and carefully looked around, sensing his presence more than he was feeling it, but aware of it nonetheless.

Mithrandir was surprised. He did not know what he had expected: A fat, bumbling fool of a hobbit, digging into his food and laughing merrily? Maybe. But surely not this still, ponderous hobbit, whose posture and contemplative, careful nature reminded him more of an elf than of the carefree inhabitants of the Shire which he had overlooked for too long. His eyes were watchful and intelligent—grey like those of the Noldor of old and although he looked young his eyes betrayed the things he had seen and endured. It almost did not add to his surprise when the hobbit began to sing a hymn to Elbereth in heavily accented, but nevertheless flawless Sindarin.

Mithrandir inclined his head. A curious creature, member of a young race, yet with the poise and watchful intelligence that more closely resembled beings that were much older than him. A traveller, well-versed in Elvish lore and educated in their tongues. Nothing had suggested to him that hobbits were scholars—in fact, his companions seemed anything but.

Still, the longer he stayed the more restless the hobbits became and he wanted to back away when a twig cracked under his foot and the silent fellow jumped to his feet and turned around.

“Who is there?” he called.

For a moment, he considered backing away further and avoid the encounter, but then curiosity drew him forward and he stepped out to meet them.

Frodo Baggins. We meet face to face at last.

He knew Gandalf would have his head if he could see what he was doing now, but the wizard was not here and he was curious—and he found that was all. He did feel nothing but a detached anger which did no longer belong to him, and it was easy to put it aside in the face of those little creatures which were flocking around Frodo to defend him, while the Ring-bearer watched him with wary and intelligent, but not necessarily unfriendly gaze.

Frodo was measuring him just like he was picking apart the hobbit in his mind and for a few moments they tried to gauge each other, skirting around the edges of revelation but neither saying aloud that they felt something familiar in each other.

Mithrandir remained quiet and calm in the storm of their questions and soon he found himself sitting around the camp-fire with the hobbits who were notably quick to make friends and even quicker to tell him more about hobbits than he would have ever wanted to know. Still, he sat silently through the talk, asked a question every now and then, but time and time again he found his gaze drawn to Frodo Baggins, who was keeping to himself for the entire time, his gaze lost in the distance and his sombre demeanour a stark contrast to the exuberance of his friends. This little hobbit had been the cause of his downfall—and now that Mithrandir could see him, he was no longer as surprised as he thought he would be.

Frodo Baggins was no king and no warrior; then again, no king and no warrior would have been enough to bring the Dark Lord Sauron down. There was a quiet, but steely determination about this hobbit, the way his brows were creased in a slight frown and his gaze did not once waver when their eyes happened to meet. Maybe it was just this; the only thing that one could have hoped to set against Sauron: Calmness, where the Dark Lord was hot rage, quiet and pensiveness where Sauron had been filled with madness and rashness, and an unbending will to carry the Ring straight to the chasm where Sauron had created it.

For the entire time, he felt more than saw—safe for a glance out of the corner of his eyes—Frodo looking at him when the hobbit thought he was not paying attention and trying to make sense of him. He knew he reminded Frodo of Gandalf, and yet the hobbit was intelligent enough to sense that there was something off about him.

Suddenly, he was filled by a mad desire to reveal himself, to see the shock and fear in their faces, to see them cast aside their hospitality and see them blanch and flinch away from him. But he reined himself in, the intention jarring harshly with his new identity. Sauron would have done so, but Mithrandir would not.

Yet, when the hobbits had fallen asleep (not before Frodo's servant had sent him a warning glare that, should he even think of harming his master, he would have to get past him first) he debated with himself what to do. He should go and leave them alone—their presence, tied to old memories, brought Sauron to the fore, no matter how hard he was trying to push him aside, and his lost ring-finger was beginning to pound with a ghostly pain—but in the end could not resist to reach out and touch Frodo's temple with his finger, giving to him the images that would lead him to the right conclusions.

He did not paint a glorious picture of himself in the dream he gave to Frodo. Quite the opposite, he drew Sauron as the wretched, desperate and mad thing he had become in the end. It was not meant to scare the Ring-bearer, but there was an itch he could not quite understand himself in that he wanted the hobbit to know that it had been him—that the two of them, whose fates had been intertwined by the One and who had despite all odds avoided each other for the entire duration of the War of the Ring, had met at last. It felt like a fitting conclusion, another thing coming full circle, another loose end tied up.

He rose from his seat, careful not to wake them. At the edge of the clearing he turned around for one last time and looked at them, huddled around the fire, small and deceptively harmless, almost like lost children. But now he knew better. If anything, he would never underestimate the Small Folk again. With a wry smile he turned around and left.

It had been around the beginning of November when he had left Tom Bombadil's valley, yet the year was nearing its end when Gandalf caught up to him at last. By then he had reached the white-capped, craggy range of the northernmost end of the Misty Mountains in the east of the lost kingdom of Arnor, the cold had set on and an early snow had begun to fall on the desolate and empty land. The air was wintry, the winds were cutting and sky and earth had turned to grey, black and white. Making good speed was hard and the paths became increasingly treacherous. He was just resting under a rocky outcrop on the slopes of a tall and bleak rise, the steep mountains ahead and the endless, flat white land behind him when the wizard finally found him.

Mithrandir raised an eyebrow when Gandalf approached. “Where did you leave your horse? Did he finally have enough of carrying you around?”

“I have asked more than enough from the Lord of Horses,” Gandalf replied. “He returned to Rohan, I think, where his kind belongs. Horses are made for wide meadows and open grasslands, not for searching their way through narrow gorges and climbing mountains.”

“If you say so,” he replied, looking away and holding his maimed hand over the flames he had conjured with his staff. Mithrandir was not a very powerful name, but powerful enough to allow him a bit of magic which was a good thing because with the onset of winter, his missing finger had made himself known more often and in increasingly painful ways. He stared into the flames and waited for Gandalf to speak, but his impatience got the better of him at last.

“And? Have you been to the Grey Havens? What did the Emissary say?”

Gandalf who had pulled out a long pipe and stuffed it with Shire-weed blew out a ring of smoke and made a pensive hum-hum noise. “I was there and I talked to the Emissary for a long time. They will allow you to walk unharmed to your meeting with our Father, albeit reluctantly. And they were even more displeased when they heard that I had given you a name to shield yourself with. As it is, the powers of the West will be keeping a close eye on you, they would not allow anything less.”

Mithrandir snorted and squinted up to the sky. It was grey and overcast, a herald of the imminent snowstorm, but he had little doubt that if the sky was clear he would see a watchful eagle circling above.

“So, are you really going to stay on my heels and snap at my calves like a sheep-dog if I move too fast or too slow?” He turned toward the wizard.

“Someone has to do it,” Gandalf replied, and that was that.

A few days later, they passed under the ominous shadow of Mount Gundabad. The orc stronghold lay abandoned, but there was a lingering malice even now, as thick as blood in the air and the snow here was ashen-grey. The Dwarves had not yet reclaimed it, but Mithrandir didn't doubt that they would do so in the near future, after the rot and sickness the Orcs had left behind had been washed away by a few rains and winter snows. Gandalf watched it with a gaze that was half displeased, half sad, then he turned away and walked on.

They left the Misty Mountains behind and crossed the border to Wilderland where the ground became more even and the weather less fickle. The snows were still deep and impeded fast travels, but the land opened up wide to the east and south, while the range of the Grey Mountains ran along to their left, forming the northern border of Rhovanion. Before long, the misty grey-green shimmer of Mirkwood appeared to their south, but they did not enter it but rounded its north end instead.

They wandered past the Lonely Mountain which Gandalf watched for a long time and as long as Erebor was in sight, the wizard was even less inclined to talk than usually and his thoughts seemed to be far away in another place or another time.

They followed the Celduin, rested briefly in Esgaroth and then went further east, down into the river delta where the Celduin met the Carnen flowing slowly down from the Iron Hills and both fed into the Sea of Rhûn.

It was spring when they crossed the border of Wilderland and left behind the Western World for good. Before them Rhûn stretched in an endless land of green-and-brown seas of grass, lonely table mountains and slow, shallow streams that flowed in narrow beds nearly hidden by the high grass rippling like water in the stiff breeze coming from the east.

Beyond Rhûn there were no names for the lands that lay beyond in the Westron Tongue. Mithrandir himself remembered only the names the inhabitants had given them in their tongues, very different from any language that could be heard in the west. After a while, even the mountains and trees fell behind and then there was merely the horizon in every direction around them. The land was vast and wide and Mithrandir wondered if Gandalf felt the vague unease as well that came with standing somewhere where every direction was the same, where there was nothing except the sky above, and the world looked like it had no end.

“Have you ever been so far east?” he asked, turning to Gandalf.

The wizard shook his head. “You and your likes have kept me busy enough in Middle-earth. But two of us went east after we had driven you out of Dol Guldur—the Blue Wizards, they called themselves if you remember them.”

Mithrandir frowned. “Vaguely. The likes of you have kept me too busy to mind other wizards than those running around in Middle-earth.” He grinned snidely at Gandalf.

The wizard just shook his head and they wandered on.

Mithrandir enjoyed the journey more than thought he would. It was a means to an end, not a journey for the sake of travelling. But after being stuck inside Barad-Dûr for so long, being able to roam freely for weeks and months without chains or borders to keep him back, and nothing safe for wild horses and Gandalf's mostly silent company to distract him, he found an odd sort of simple contentment in just putting one feet in front of the other. Long ago, he had spent centuries like this, wandering and roaming wherever he pleased. Back then he had done it for the sake of wandering (for he could no longer stand being bound to one place for long) and to satisfy his curiosity regarding the young races that had come to live on this continent.

They did not move very fast and Mithrandir was not opposed to taking detours whenever something awoke his interest. Sometimes he remembered a place he had once passed by or he wanted to see a city he had once visited or even helped build (“Build?” Gandalf asked with raised eyebrows. - “Yes,” Mithrandir replied, “I was not always about destruction and death.”).

They cut in a south-eastern direction and the soon the grasslands gave way to desert highlands and then again to mostly barren lands of sand and stone with red mountains. But hidden near these mountains were the hidden treasures of this land: Hewn into the side of the slopes, cities had been built of red and white stone and while the people had built their homes inside the mountains, they had also found the secret of this hostile land: Diamonds as big as eagle's eggs, emeralds, sapphires and gold. There was so much of those riches that they had built entire city walls of it.

Mithrandir had been there when they had been built and the red temples to fiery gods of the sun and light had been erected. The streets and plazas were cobbled with colourful stones and marble fountains were to be found in every little square and even in back alleys. Time had done little to dull the beauty of the city, but some time during the Second Age, the men that had lived here had moved on and now the cities of emerald, ruby and sapphire were slowly falling into ruin.

Their fifty-feet-high gates of pure gold stood open and they entered the silent city that lay behind. The streets were abandoned, the windows without blinds were black and empty. Doors stood open everywhere as if the inhabitants had just left for a moment minutes ago and would be back before soon. They wandered over eerily still market places, looked into abandoned houses where plates and goblets were still standing on the tables awaiting guests that would never come. They even entered a temple dedicated to an unknown god, a vast and massive building covered with dry vines. Inside shafts of sunlight fell in through cracks in the vaulted ceiling into the gloom below and through the mosaic of colour of a rose window where the light was split up in a thousand colours of green, blue, red and orange—vibrant back in the day, but dull and weak now. The air was still and dust had settled over everything. Neither of them talked and both kept their footfalls silent like respectful visitors of a vast grave.

“The world is older in these parts,” Gandalf said after they had left the awe-inspiring and yet strangely depressing city behind. “Even though those cities have been built by Men whose lives and works are shorter than ours, it is a strange reminder even to us that one day even our time will end and even our names will be eroded away and no one will be left to know that there ever was something like our world.”

“Oh, so you plan to be here when that happens?” Mithrandir asked with a sardonic smile.

Gandalf frowned. “It is not as if this is a horse you can choose to jump off of.”

Mithrandir merely gave him a cryptic smile, then made a gesture with his hand for the wizard to follow. “That is one thing I will never understand about you lot—accepting your fate just because others tell you it is impossible.” He snorted softly. “Let us go. Seeing all those abandoned and dead places is giving me a headache.”

Gandalf followed patiently in the beginning, but soon his temper and patience grew thin. Sauron behaved about as skittish and volatile as a young foal, and he seemed to have gained an equally short attention span. They kept walking east, but ever so often, he would suddenly demand a change of direction and visit places where he had once stayed and lived for some time, only rush through the ruins and declare after a very short time that he was indeed bored with what he had found and that they should move on. While he appeared outwardly calm, his behaviour was erratic and his purpose was anyone's guess.

Even Gandalf could not make sense of his behaviour, even less so because he did not know his old enemy's final intentions. He had demanded to speak to their Creator and had, unbelievably enough, been granted his wish. (Well, Gandalf thought sourly, cheek and insolence are obviously the ways to success.) But what he had meant by “leaving the world” was a puzzle that had yet to be solved. Initially Gandalf had believed that Sauron wanted to leave the known world behind, which was Middle-earth, but they had long since crossed the last border, left the last homely house behind and were now wandering lands that were almost as old as this world, nameless and ancient and silent.

“What is the purpose of zigging and zagging through the country without a moment's respite when you do not even enjoy what you find?” Gandalf asked one day when they were leaving behind another abandoned city, this time consisting of strange pyramids and pillared houses whose inhabitants had apparently had no use for either doors or walls. They set to traversing a wide-open flat land with odd bushes here and there and gazelles grazing on the sparse tufts of grass that were breaking through the cracked ground here and there. The days were growing shorter and summer was nearing its end.

“I am not doing this for fun,” Sauron said, not turning around. “I am trying to remember this world, where I have been and what I have done, but not for my own enjoyment.” There was more he was not saying, but the edge of wistfulness that had stolen into his voice gave him away.

Gandalf watched him march on, his stride as determined as ever and his maimed hand clutched around the staff that had quickly become his walking stick. It seems he is saying his farewells. But to whom? And to what end? If he did not know Sauron better, he would have said that he was drawing out his journey, as if he was afraid of what was waiting for him at the end. But his purposeful stride and his stoic demeanour belied this theory, and Gandalf resolved to wait, hoping his patience would be enough before to keep him from blasting his wretched travelling companion eastward with explosions of his staff just to hurry him along.

He did not know how many winters had passed when they finally reached their destination. Time flowed differently in different parts of the world—faster in the bustling cities they had visited, while it was almost at a standstill in the endless empty lands where it passed no faster than the mountains grew and fell. Their journey had taken them thousands of miles eastward and while they both did not tire easily, Gandalf felt worn and bent when they climbed a hill on top of which there were two white standing-stones, and all of a sudden, at last, there was nothing before them but the sea. The grassy overhang was jutting out over the water and the waves were crashing against it far, far below. Seagulls were crying and the air smelled of salt—but it was a different sea than the one west of Middle-earth. Stranger, wider, and it was unknown what lay behind. The water was glittering in the sunlight, reaching from horizon to horizon. They had reached the eastern end of the world.

Gandalf looked around, narrowing his eyes against the glare of the sunlight on water. “And now?” he asked.

Sauron shrugged and tipped his wizard hat back a bit. “Now we wait.”

Waiting did not bother him as much as Mithrandir had expected. When he had set out from Tom Bombadil's valley, he had been in a hurry to get his journey behind him. But now that he was at the end of it, he did not feel the need to make haste any longer. His time was coming to an end and the sure knowledge of the impending finale gave him calmness and patience he would otherwise have lacked.

While Gandalf wandered down the cliff side, looking out over the waves and the sea, he leaned against one of the two standing stones and watched the sun pass overhead.

It was evening and the world that lay behind them bathed in red and orange light in its entire, vast expanse (which was still a strange thought), when their Father came at last.

Mithrandir had been looking out to the west when the sun's glare suddenly flared to impossible brightness and for a moment, the entire West was hidden by the sheen of with red-and-white fire. When the brightness subsided and the twilight returned, a shadowy shape was standing only three steps away from him. It was tall and vaguely resembled a human, but it was ever-shifting and as soon as the eye searched for a remarkable, constant trait about it, the figure shifted and something entirely different appeared in its place. It was like trying to watch something that was constantly moving out of the field of your vision, which was unsettling and a bit aggravating.

At the beginning of time, this would not have bothered him. He should be used to ever-shifting, ever-changing things. Stillness and form were something that was usually for the mortal races who needed bodies to move and certain traits to recognise each other. The realm he came from was usually made of air, sound and fire, where everything was fleeting and powerful and nothing stayed the same. But there was something like a headache growing at the back of his skull the longer he watched and finally he averted his eyes.

It seems you cannot forever trudge through the mud of this world and expect not to be stained by it.

“Father,” he said curtly and briefly bowed his head.

Gandalf made a bow. He, too, could not bear the appearance of their father.

Mithrandir could not hide a grim smile. So not even those who love this world go unsoiled by it. Behold, Gandalf, how different, how small, how like the Children we have become.

The All-Father stood before them, all radiant light and fractals of sunshine.

My wayward child. You have asked for me, and I came. What is it you desire?

Mithrandir looked up, fixing his eyes on the horizon behind his Father instead of his ever-shifting, disconcerting shape that was at once like a man, an elf and geometric shapes and prisms of light.

“I need to talk to you.”

He stood at the edge of the cliff, the Eastern Sea—the Coastless Sea—before him. The sinking sun was at his back and painted the water red and orange, while the waves crashed at the foot of the cliff in the shadow five hundred feet below.

He felt his Father standing behind him, waiting expectantly for him to start speaking. Gandalf had wandered off, knowing he would not be welcome during this conversation. Mithrandir looked out over the sea and at this last, outmost needlepoint of the world, he felt the vastness of the sky and the sea around him and the strange, bittersweet loneliness that dwelt in those wide-open places, where great things ended.

“We have come a long way from the Beginning, haven't we?” He did not expect an answer and it did not come. “Although truth be told, if somebody had told me that at the end of all my plans I would stand here at the end of the world, carrying Goldberry's cloak, Tom Bombadil's wisdom and Gandalf's name, I would not have believed it.” He turned around. “Life is a strange thing, and it does not become less strange just because you grow older.”

His father had no face to speak of, but Mithrandir could feel his attention resting on him and it was like a weight, feather-light but still noticeable because it was brimming with carefully restrained power—and he knew that if Father had wished to, his will alone could have grown to such unbearable weights that it could have squashed him like a planet squashing an ant.

You had an eventful life. Mostly shrouded in darkness, but not uneventful by any means.

Mithrandir turned back and stared at the sea. He wanted to ask a question that was itching inside his skull, but at the same time he did not want because he dreaded the answer. In the end, his headstrong desire to know won out over his hesitation. “Did you know it?”

Know what?

“Everything. What I would do. That I would plunge myself into Darkness. That I would try to conquer Middle-earth. That I would make the Rings. Did you know it or was it all planned from the start?”

Father was silent. Mithrandir's mouth was a thin line. He waited a bit, then he shrugged. “Fine, keep your secrets. It is not as if it matters any longer. Father, I am old. I am tired. Tired in body and in mind. I spent all Ages of the world fighting, conquering or wandering and now in the end I find I achieved nothing of what I wanted and I no longer have the will to try again here, for good or worse. I am tired of this world. I want to leave.”

You wish to go back to the Holy Lands?

Mithrandir snorted. “No. No power in this world could bring me back there. I don't belong there anymore.” He felt an ache inside his chest and he thought that maybe this was the first and the last time that he should speak freely of his inner thoughts to anyone.

“I think you knew what I was destined to become. I think you let me do it, although I can only fathom why you would unleash a monster like me on the world. You may or may not know this already, but I always fought against the world because I could not fight directly against you. Fighting the world was my way of thwarting your plans. I hated the idea of running down a predetermined track, like a carriage on the railway in the mines of Khazad-Dûm. I wanted to become my own fulfilment, to forge a new path where no one else had dared to tread before me. Did you know that in the beginning I did not do Evil for evil's sake, but out of spite, because it seemed to be the only thing that you could not have wanted for this world and would therefore be my decision, and mine only? Something that was so vile and dark that it could only be my own volition, never yours? Naive, of course. But we all make our mistakes.

“But still I went down the path I had chosen for myself, although I eventually forgot about why I had begun to do it and what I had wanted in the beginning was lost in delusions of power. But power is only ever a stepping stone, a rung on an endless ladder. If you have to fight for it, you do not have it. If you have it, you need never struggle for it—look at you! Who holds real power must neither shout nor fight, because true power is its own validation. But whether I did or did not succeed in going against your intentions does not matter in the end. I achieved nothing. I chafed against the mould that I thought had been intended for me, but all it has left me and the world with is a greater loss than if I had sat still and done nothing.”

The rush of waves and the cries of seagulls were the only sound in the empty world around them.

“Still, after all of this I see one thing clearer now: This world is yours and you set everything in a billion mosaic stones to create the great picture. I am no longer blinded by pride. I do not overestimate myself and I know I am just one little piece in your work, however...” He trailed off, for the first time in a long while at a loss as how to express himself. “But I am no longer the flawless piece you created, Father. My life was long and hard, because I tortured myself as much as I tortured others. I am worn and I have become chipped and rough around the edges. I do no longer fit into the place you have assigned me. As a matter of fact, I do not want to. This world is so big, and yet I feel like I have barely enough air to breathe. Knowing that I have never truly been my own lord irks me and makes me hate this world. And I know this world hates me in turn. I have done too much harm here. The ground recoils under my footfalls, trees shiver with disgust when I pass beneath them and the sun herself averts her gaze when I wander. I cannot find peace on the shores you created, I cannot lie down in the shadows of your trees and rest under your stars, knowing all of this is yours and will never be mine.

“You may be wondering why I am telling you this—or you have known from the beginning what I would say, but what do I care?—No matter. I say all of this because you asked me what I desired. Only a few years ago I might have said power, but now I see clearer, or maybe I have just changed while I stayed with Tom Bombadil. He paid no heed to my madness and he asked question upon question, dismantling my threats and my arguments, peeling away layer upon layer of false goals and pretenses until I was left with the naked truth. And the truth is this: I want my freedom.” He turned around and now he faced his Father although it made his eyes burn and his head throb. “I want to leave—completely. This is why I called you here, to the Gates of Dawn at the eastern end of the world, where the veil between the world and Outside is thinnest. I have been part of your creation for a long time, Father, and it has been good for neither of us.” He gripped his staff a big tighter, then looked the All-Father in the eye. “Let me go. Open the door for me and release me from your creation. It is the only thing I want and the only thing I cannot do myself. Give me the freedom to be free from your world, free from your predetermination and not even your eyes shall ever see me again.”

His Father was silent for a few moments. You ask a strange thing.

“It is not a great favour,” Mithrandir said. “I do not ask you do build a palace for me, I merely want you to unlock the door for me to step outside.”

Some would say you do not deserve it.

“You asked me what I wanted, not what I think I deserve.”

Some would say that it would be unjust to let you escape like that, without having faced judgement like Melkor once did.

Mithrandir's face turned grim. “Some would say, indeed! And what do you say? If you knew everything what would happen beforehand and still chose to let Morgoth and Sauron wreck Middle-earth, who are you to pass judgement upon me—you who unleashed me upon the world in the first place? And if you are indeed not omniscient, you still sat back and watched it happen after the events unfolded. So tell me, All-Father, from which moral high ground do you dare to pass judgement down on me? Was it curiosity that stayed your hand? Laziness? Or cruelty? We might never know, but no possibility speaks in your favour. Or am I mistaken and you do indeed favour free will over everything? Then how would could you justify throwing an obstacle in my path now of all times, instead of when I razed Eriador to the ground, goaded the Valar to drown Númenor or built Barad-Dûr?” He snorted. “Spare me the answer, Father. 'Just' and 'unjust' are no words that count for you, so do not fall back on those comfortable mortal ideas now. Whether your actions were good or bad was never the question. The only one you have to answer to is yourself, and that is why I asked you and not the Valar for this favour. They are bogged down by morality and feelings which are too small for such great decisions. They are blind to sense as long as it helps their moral compass, and they'd carry sand to a beach in a sieve if they believed that it would help justice being done. You on the other hand are, and that is all. You can do as you please and I know that you do not care. I cannot presume how you make your decisions, but I know weighing fairness against injustice is not one of them.”

It is my decision, the All-Father agreed. And yet I am not sure whether you understand the implications of your own wish. You have become a cynic and you no longer care about anything including yourself and it may make you blind for what follows after you get what you are asking for.

“I understand the consequences of my actions. Do not pretend to be capable of worry, it tires me.” Mithrandir waved it off with an impatient twist to his mouth.

You are not to be dissuaded.

“No. I have had a few years to ponder the idea and my mind is made up. Nothing you can say will sway me to stay.”

The void is a terror, but even the void belongs to my world. What awaits you beyond is nothing you can begin to imagine. You can not know the consequences of your actions this time. I do not know the consequences of your actions.

“I am not afraid,” Mithrandir said, his voice firm. Then he added, quietly, “Set me free. It won't harm you or anyone else. It costs you nothing, and it is the first and the last thing I will ever ask of you.”

The All-Father was silent for a long time. Then he shifted and the stars shining on the purple-and-orange sky through his transparent from were flitting over convex surfaces as if they were caught in a lens magnified by a strange kind of refraction.

Very well.

The boat lay at the foot of the cliffs, rising and sinking softly when a wave rolled under it. It was a simple wooden boat with two long paddles, fit for making good speed on a calm sea. The sky was dark blue and stars were twinkling. The sea was flat and calm, a black slate.

Gandalf stood next to Sauron who was waiting for their Father to finish building the boat, which he was not doing with his hands as far as they could see but with his mind.

“So,” Gandalf said, taking a puff from his pipe, “Freedom?”

Sauron was leaning against the stony face of the cliff next to him, arms crossed. “What of it?”

“A noble intention for someone like you.”

“Even monsters like their freedom, Gandalf,” Sauron said, his tone not very friendly, but obviously he did not care enough to be angry about it. “Ask a dragon how it would like its wings being cut off; do you think there is a difference? There is nothing noble about it.”

“You seem to be very adamant about maintaining your bad reputation.” Gandalf raised his eyebrows.

“I make no habit of denying who I am to myself. Morgoth was fond of it, and look what became of him.”

“Morgoth succumbed to madness. But even Morgoth did not leave willingly when he was thrown into the Void,” Gandalf added.

“Yes. Because he was afraid. Morgoth feared a lot of things,” Sauron said, his voice oddly calm.

“And you do not?” Gandalf asked.

“No.” There was no hesitation in Sauron's voice, unbelievable as it may sound.

Maybe if he understood what he was asking for he would be afraid, Gandalf thought, but refrained from saying it out loud. Then again, he has always been the one out of all of us to do what everyone else was afraid of. He respected no limits and the impossible was only ever a challenge, never a hindrance. Suddenly he noticed their Father standing next to them, silent and almost invisible.

The boat is prepared, he said.

Sauron pushed himself off the cliff, rammed his staff into the sand and rubbed his hands. He turned to Gandalf. “You have heard it. So this is it, the time of our last good-bye.”

Gandalf just looked at him: the determined set of his brows, the confidence in his eyes and the mocking tilt to his lips as if Sauron still knew something that Gandalf did not. He was not afraid, and Gandalf had to, albeit unwillingly, admit that he was impressed. How once could be so self-assured in such a moment he did not understand.

“It seems it is, Mithrandir,” Gandalf said.

“Ah yes. That name. I won't need it where I am going. You can have it back.” And with those words, the old face that bore a strange resemblance at Gandalf himself (safe for the eyes and the slightly vicious twist around the mouth) faded and Sauron had his own face returned to him. He straightened again, no longer bent by Mithrandir's name, once again tall and proud, like a fire given the shape of a living being. He bent down to push the boat off the sand bar, but turned around again once more. “I can't say it was a pleasure knowing you, but it is a pleasure to say farewell, at last.”

“The pleasure is mine,” Gandalf said and meant it. “Farewell.”

Sauron nodded and that was when their Father stepped forward.

I will open the Gate when you reach it, he said.

“I know,” Sauron said and he was looking at the All-Father for a long time. Then, after a time of hesitation that would have been more appropriate for his decision to leave the world once and for all, he added, “Thank you.”

The All-Father inclined his head, but in the darkness only the moving outline of his silhouette was visible when the refracted stars flitted around the contours of his form, suddenly distorted like in a glass lens.

Farewell, my child.

“Farewell.” And without another word, Sauron pushed the boat into the waves, leapt inside, gripped the paddles, and with strong strokes started rowing out onto the still black sea.

Gandalf and the All-Father stood there until Gandalf could no longer see him, then they climbed the cliff again. Only when they reached the top, Gandalf dared to ask what had been occupying his mind for the entirety of the evening.

“Where is he going?”

The All-Father's attention shifted and landed on him, soft and gentle and yet incredibly strong. But his answer shook Gandalf to the core.

I do not know.

He rowed with long, sure strokes toward the horizon and he did not once pause to think about the fact that this time, he would indeed reach it. Reach it—and pass behind it. He did not slow down. He feared that he might begin to reconsider if he allowed his grim determination to waver just in the slightest.

He had talked to Tom Bombadil about what he intended to do, and while Tom had warned him, he had told him with no word that it was impossible.

“What you are planning to do will take everything from you even if you succeed,” he had told him while they were sitting at the roots of Old Man Willow many years ago. “You will find the freedom you seek outside of this world, but whatever you do, you must not hesitate. You will be stripped of every last bit of yourself, your hands, your face, your being. The only thing that will carry your forward will be your willpower.” Then Tom Bombadil had laughed. “But I know how stubborn you can be, so you need not worry as long as your determination does not waver.”

He saw the cliff sink beneath the horizon until there was only the sea around him. He loathed it and feared it like few other things, but still he kept on rowing. It was at dawn that he knew he was there. The sun was close, incredibly close, hot and searing and blinding. Had he been outside the boat, he knew that he would have burned to ashes in less than moments. Before him, the world ended.

Sky and sea met and there was no distinction to be made between them. Everything was fire and colour and nothing more.

But then, something appeared out of the blinding white: A dark spot that quickly grew and it seemed like it drank in the light of the world and sucked it out into its darkness. The spot formed and grew and there was a pull that almost beckoned him in. The gate formed and stood there, gate and yet not much more than a tear in the fabric of the world, allowing him a glimpse of what lay outside. Forbidding and inviting at once, it waited.

He paused and looked back. There was water in every direction, safe for what lay in front of him. But forward was the only way to go. Even if he had acted on his own free will all of his life, there was one thing where there had never been a choice for him: He had never gone back. And he would not start now.

Your determination must not waver.

And it would not. This was his last plan, his final work, and if he succeeded, his biggest coup.

With a deep breath he filled his lungs with the cool, salty air once more, then he gripped the paddles tighter. The blades pushed into the water, then rose again in a sparkling arc of water-drops, dove in again, rose again, and the next time they did not meet water—

Gandalf felt it. It was as if something was shifting in the bowels of the world, as if a supporting beam had been pulled out from under a great pile and the weight from above had sagged and settled itself differently.

“He is gone,” he said.

The All-Father nodded.

“There is no returning from where he is now, is there?”

No. He is beyond my reach now. The Gate is the outermost structure of my creation. He has passed beyond it.

“So in the end he got what he wanted,” Gandalf said. “I only wonder what he intended. Will he not be undone out there?”

No one will know, Father said. Then he turned and looked west, where the last wisps of darkness were fleeing and the stars were quickly fading. Morning had come.

Gandalf followed his gaze to the horizon behind which lay the familiar soft green lands he knew and loved and suddenly his heart felt heavy. “I have been gone for a long time. Too long, I daresay.”

Not as long as you think. There is still time.

Gandalf nodded. “That is good. I would hate to miss another one of Frodo's birthdays.” The stepped forward and started to climb down of the cliff, his staff thumping against the ground with each step. “Do you know that hobbits have exceedingly well-organised birthday parties?”

How interesting. The All-Father followed.

“They are a curious folk. Not prone to quick thinking, but remarkably able to enjoy the small things in life.”

A very good thing.

Gandalf nodded, smiling beneath his white beard. “It is not the worst thing to content oneself with a simple life,” he said. “I think this is one of the major shortcomings of our kind that above all this meddling in the great wide world, we forget about the joy it brings to simply sit on a bench outside our house and smoke a pipe full of Old Toby. I admit that during the war I have shamefully forgotten about this as well. But I think my part here is done now and I will be glad to return to the Shire and see my old friends again.”

It is time to go home, then?

Gandalf considered this for a moment, his eyes on the western horizon behind which, far away, somewhere behind seas of grass, mountains and rivers, lay the Shire.

“Yes, it is time to go home,” he agreed.

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Outside was nothing he could have prepared himself for in all the ages of the world. It was nothing, neither light nor dark. The closest thing that would come to describing it would be drifting in the ocean so deep where the sun does not reach, but without the water and without the sense of up and down. And yet this description would be insufficient because nothing could describe the absolute absence of everything. There was nothingness around him and this nothingness did not bear anything beside itself. And he was an intruder, imposing himself on the emptiness (in every moment, all the time, but it was like a footprint in the sand that was being washed away by the waves as quickly as he could set his foot down into the sand.).

After some time (if it existed at all here), the attempts to wipe him away became more persistent, the emptiness around him trying to flatten the ripple his appearance had caused in the eternal calm of the Outside, trying to smooth out the disturbance that was upsetting the unending, timeless and absolute equilibrium.

And yet here he was, an intruder, a stranger, a conqueror boldly setting down his foot on new land, only there was no land to speak of and he was lost in this abyss of stillness and death which had devoured space and time long ago or had never been subjected to it in the first place.

He felt the resistance, but he did not budge. There was something out there, not a being, but the opposite—a non-being, invisible like the black corpse of a collapsed star, because nothing that entered its domain ever escaped, invisible, lurking, deadly and discernible only by its unrelenting pull toward equilibrium, stillness and cessation of life.

Some nothing shifted out there and he knew he had attracted attention.

He stood his ground, as he always had, refusing to be wiped away, refusing to come undone and refusing to bow to the rules of this not-place. The pull to tear him apart became stronger. He had become a nuisance.

Something encircled him, drew its circles closer and closer and he could feel the pull now—it was above him, below him, everywhere and it was terrifying. It was the undertow of something that was greater than worlds straining to settle back into absolute nothingness.

The vortex around him swirled around a centre that became smaller and smaller. Bits of him were being ripped away, memories were evaporating into darkness, his names erased by the black ocean around him that wanted him gone, still and lifeless like everything around him in this a horrifying peace in this lightless graveyard of Unbeing.

“What you are planning to do will take everything from you even if you succeed,” Tom Bombadil had said.

He had listened. And he had learned. When you were caught in a spider web, struggling only served to pull the strings of cobweb tighter around yourself. No god would have survived this and no Vala. Not even Melkor who, for a while, had been more than his siblings and had allowed his thoughts to walk uncharted trails, would have prevailed here. Too strongly ingrained was their need to be themselves, to hold on to their spirit, their soul, their names, their powers. Their greatest power would turn out to be their doom here, because what you possessed could be taken away.

You could not face a wave head on and hope to stand. You had to roll with it and emerge after it had shattered on the coastline. The grass bends in the storm, the oak breaks. In order to win, he had to lose. Utterly and completely.

He bent and let go, leaving himself open, dropping his defences and allowing all that he was to pour out into the void.

I am Mairon the Admirable who was there when the world was built and the pillars of creation were beaten from the molten core of the first suns at the very Beginning.

I am Aulendil the Disciple of the Great Smith who forged Elbereth's eldest crown and set ten stars upon her brow.

Like werewolf attracted by the smell of blood the Unbeing crept closer, drawn in by his surrender.

I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts under whose beck of the hand empires rose and fell.

I am the High Priest of Númenor who was there when the sea came to claim it and escaped unscathed.

I am Gorthaur the Cruel, I am the Lord of Werewolves, the Necromancer of Dol Guldur.

I am the Lord of the Rings.

The vortex coiled around him like a snake and devoured him.

I am Mairon the Admirable who was there when the world was built and the pillars of creation were beaten from the molten core of the first suns at the very Beginning. I am Aulendil the Disciple of the Great Smith who forged Elbereth's eldest crown and set ten stars upon her brow. I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts, I am the High Priest of Númenor…

Bits and pieces were ripped off him and out of him, his arms and legs, and his spirit. The pain was like a pillar of molten lead, but he stood still, with his eyes closed and endured, teeth gritted and jaw locked.

“Your determination must not waver.” Tom Bombadil's parting words rang out to him; an echo of another world.

I am Mairon the Admirable –

                           when the world was built and the pillars of creation were beaten from the molten core

of the first suns              at the very Beginning.

             I am Aulendil the Disciple of the Great Smith who forged Elbereth's eldest crown and set ten stars upon her brow. I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts, I am

                          - of Númenor…

The vortex tore at him and he could feel himself growing thinner and thinner, like a single drop of water being spread and dragged out to cover all of the earth. Piece upon piece was taken away.

I am Mairon

                     - when the world was built and

the pillars of creation were beaten from the molten core of the-

first suns                     - Beginning.                      I am

- Aulendil the Disciple of the Great                    Smith who forged Elbereth's -

                                   stars upon her brow. I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts-

Númenor…

It was tearing at him, biting, locking its jaws into his limbs and chest and he was coming apart at the seams, his physical form disintegrating at last, mutilated and torn and ripped.

I am

- world and

the pillars of creation-

first suns - Beginning. I am

- Aulendil the Disciple of

the Great Smith who forged Elbereth's -

stars upon her brow. I am Annatar the Giver of Gifts-

I am

-creation-

first suns - Elbereth's - stars upon her brow. I am Annat…

Thoughtlessly, wild, frenzied, the Nothingness kept wiping him out, coiling itself tighter and tighter around him, unaware that it was working toward its down doom. But it did not think about what it was digging up by peeling away layer and layer of names and memories. It did not know what it was unearthing, because how could it? A living being could not comprehend nothingness and it was true the other way around. The Unbeing did not know what lay at the centre of someone who was alive and had let go of all of his outer defences in favour of protecting what lay inside (like a commander allowing the enemy to storm the keep, only to trap him on a killing field between the walls of the inner and outer ring.) The metaphor surfaced and was immediately ripped away like a leaf in a storm. For a moment he very nearly hesitated, his instinct rearing up and urging him to cling to it, but then he remembered Tom's warning not to doubt and he let it go.

I am

suns

Elbe-

stars.

I am A-

The Unbeing kept devouring, snapping at the last bits of him, when he suddenly slammed his will against its attack and the Nothingness recoiled, exuding sense that would have resembled confusion in something that was alive and sentient. Clearly, it was against every rule that he was able to force it back at this point. The Unbeing circled him, roiling, coiling around the remains of what had once been a Maia, a spirit of fire, a deceiver, a traitor, a torturer, a warlord … but he was no longer any of that. There was a silence of a greater kind, a stop, like a great, incredibly slow and deep heartbeat stopping. It was then that the Unbeing realised:

There was nothing more it could take away.

But there was something that remained.

I am.

The words burned through the darkness like a pillar of white-blazing flame, not a statement, not an identity, but only an expression of pure, unfettered will and truth, undeniable, untouchable, boundless and eternal.

The nothingness recoiled. The Unbeing shrank back, hesitating, unbelieving, in the face of its own antithesis it had created.

I am.

It was a claim of being, a sliver of light in the dark, not tied to a single being, not tethered to an identity, not fettered and weighed down by fears of small beings that needed to hold on to something in order to exist.

It was anything and nothing, so great and yet so elusive that neither darkness nor death nor the void could touch it.

It was defiance thrown into the face of an enemy, it was a seemingly defeated warrior rearing up once more, the triumphant call of a silver horn when a new sun rose behind a black horizon.

He reformed, but it was not as who or what he had been earlier. He was different, unbound, unfettered. He was.

Slowly, with a slight effort of will—because that and being was all he was (and it was enough to triumph over the darkness and nothingness a billion times as big as him, for even the slightest spark of life was enough to lighten the deepest dark, if just a little bit)—with a slight effort of will he regained a form.

It was similar to what he had been earlier, but it was not constrained by boundaries any longer. He was endless now, eternal, a pillar of white flame that rose light-years in every direction.

FOOL, he spoke, voiceless and yet his words carried into the last corner of the Unlight, the Unbeing, the Doom that was all around him. His lips curled in a smile, triumphant and slightly feral.

BEGONE, THIS IS NO LONGER YOUR DOMAIN. YOU HAVE NO LONGER ANY POWER HERE.

And the emptiness fled before him, retreating from him, far, far away where he could not reach it.

And then he was alone.

Truly alone.

No one came to challenge him.

Everything around him was calm.

If the dark ocean around him at been whipped by winds and storm before, he was now standing on the surface of absolutely still water, flat and glazing like a mirror. Everything was calm… and yet... and yet brimming with expectation.

(A bowstring about to let an arrow fly.)

(A rope pulled taut to the breaking point.)

(A branch about to snap in two.)

There was something akin to air, and it was vibrating, waiting, like something to break loose and burst forth any moment now.

Something was about to happen.

He looked around in the void surrounding him. It was about time to fill it.

He waved his hand around in a circle and there was a sphere that sunk and stopped to float a few inches over the palm of his hand. He watched the sphere inside of which light and darkness intermingled and the occasional sheen of fire burst forth. It was turning and brimming with immense power, something incredibly huge compressed into an immeasurably small place under impossible pressure, forcing its way outward, but held back by his will and not escaping… yet.

A slight smile played around his lips and it was genuine.

Submission or annihilation, indeed. Keep your choices, I have made my own. I choose freedom.

There was only one thing about these situation that he regretted and that was that, by definition, they happened without an audience. How magnificent it would have been to have the others watching him, see what he could do now with a little more than a wave of his hand and an effort of will.

Well. He shrugged it off. You can't have everything.

Still, who was to say that he had to forgo a little bit of dramatics? This was his undertaking and his stage. He might as well make it memorable and see to it that the story was told in the right way later on.

The sphere was floating between his hands, aloft between his fingers that surrounded it but did not touch it. He could feel it pulsing with energy and vibrating with power contained in a space that was much too small, just waiting to be unleashed. Fires were lighting up and dying inside, clouds and mists of every colour sunk and rose, obscuring patches of darkness, glinting lights.

How do we begin?

He thought about it for a moment, his head inclined to one side, watching the sphere ponderously.

Music? No, that had been done already. There was something else, another way of beginning that was more appealing to him, an echo of the nature he had given up.

Then he smirked. Ah, I know.

He raised the sphere higher until it was floating over his head, still holding it pressed together by force of his will. A last moment of silence, a bated breath.

And he released it. The sphere bloomed outward at the speed of light and for a moment everything was white flame. Opposing forces of gravity and repulsion, light and matter and a mixture of both.

The incredible pressure set the air itself aflame.

Stars were born and burst into flame in the darkness.

Trails of debris were spiralling around them, becoming denser, taking form.

They turned into spheres of stone and gas that formed themselves into planets racing around young suns.

Solar systems converged and rotated around greater stars, mass and time deformed space, creating an invisible landscape of hills and dales, trapping stars and planets in their depressions, making them circle each other like little wheels in a giant clockwork of fire and light.

Gravitation pulled it together and galaxies formed in the blink of an eye, wheeling through space like disks made of billions of diamonds zooming past him like lighting.

Clouds billowed and built themselves, electricity building inside them and releasing themselves in bursts of rays of light that traversed clusters of galaxies and destroyed entire colonies of stars before they had even finished maturing.

It was a the first storm, the Great Storm, it was fire and light and immense power.

He stood in the middle of his new universe and watched, a spectator of his own play and although he knew the script he watched with awe as it played out.

Finally, after the initial eons of chaos had passed and the mad race of rotating galaxies and planets had calmed down to a slower speed that would carry them through the ages that were to follow, he moved.

There was one last thing to do and the one thing he had been waiting for, trying his patience one last time while he waited for the storm to pass. He was shaking with excitement himself, and he was just so able to contain his power after the initial rush had subsided, because this was what he wanted, what he was good at, although he might never be able to repeat on a scale so grand as before. But scale was not everything.

Most of the time it was not the quantity that mattered, but the quality. And in sense of quality, this would be his greatest work.

He reached out to an unassuming little planet that was all stone and magma. It was not great and it was not remarkable, but it was as good as any other. He had made his choice. His mind was set on the unassuming sphere of magma and stone and there was no hesitation as he reached out and touched his finger to the little planet ever so slightly.

LET THERE BE LIFE.

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