Chapter 1 — The Stranger on the Mountain
Fire is honest.
It does not pretend. It does not bargain. It does not lie.
It devours what it touches, and in its hunger it makes confession of every fear hidden inside flesh.
So when Gandalf, the dwarves, and Bilbo found themselves trapped upon a pine like condemned souls clinging to the last splinter of a gallows, there was no dignity left in the world—only heat, smoke, and the certainty of teeth closing in.
Below them, the mountainside writhed.
Orcs poured through the flames like ants through spilled pitch, howling and beating their weapons against their shields, drunk on the smell of victory. Warg riders circled, their beasts snarling as if the very air offended them. The firelight turned their eyes into glints of wet glass.
The pine groaned under the strain. Its bark blistered. Resin bled down its trunk like molten tears.
Thorin stood high upon a branch, his boots planted with the stubbornness of stone. Smoke curled around his crown of hair, and the embers that landed on his cloak died there as if ashamed to touch him. His face was soot-stained, but his eyes were bright—too bright, the way a blade is bright before it breaks.
Bilbo, lower down, clung to the branch with the simple, desperate devotion of a creature that has never believed in glory and has no interest in dying for it. His fingers ached. His throat burned. Every breath tasted of ash and panic. The world had narrowed to a single commandment: Hold.
The dwarves crowded the branches, packed tight, muttering prayers in old Khuzdul between curses and coughs. Their beards were singed. Their armor was hot enough to brand. Still, they bared their teeth at the orcs below, because pride is often the last thing a warrior loses.
Gandalf stood near the trunk, leaning on his staff as if leaning on memory itself. His hat had been knocked askew. His hair was wild with sweat. He looked, for a heartbeat, like an old man caught in a story too young for him.
But his eyes remained the eyes of a Maia—deep, ancient, and aware of when the world's air begins to change.
Azog the Defiler paced beneath them, carving a circle through fire and shadow.
His pale skin shone in the blaze. His scars caught the light like old lightning trapped under flesh. The jagged blade in his hand rose and fell with the slow rhythm of a predator savoring the final steps.
He smiled up at Thorin, and in that smile was the promise of a wound that would never close.
"You can smell it, can't you?" Azog called, voice scraping over the crackle of fire. "The end. I will carve my name into your line."
Orcs laughed. Wargs barked. The mountain echoed their ugliness.
Gandalf tightened his grip on his staff.
He was searching—not for escape, but for a crack in fate.
And then—
The air went wrong.
At first it was subtle, like a chord played slightly out of tune. A hush slipping between sounds. A pressure behind the eyes. Then the cold arrived.
It did not fall from the sky. It did not rise from the earth.
It simply was—sudden, absolute, and intimate.
It slid into lungs and froze the breath before it could become air. It tightened around bones as if the marrow itself were being touched by unseen fingers.
It was not winter.
It was not weather.
It was the kind of cold one feels when a grave is opened.
The flames around the pine faltered.
They did not extinguish at once. They recoiled, shrinking back as if the dark had grown teeth. Fire, that most arrogant of elements, began to lose its courage.
Orcs noticed. Their laughter stumbled. Their howls became uncertain, turning into muttered questions.
Azog's smile flickered.
Then something distant appeared between smoke and shadow—a speck of silver light, faint as the first star seen through tears.
It drifted closer, slow as a verdict.
Orcs pointed, jeering again, relief returning. "A sign!" one shouted. "A gift!"
But as the light drew nearer, relief curdled.
The light was not one thing. It was many.
Within it floated shapes—skulls, silver and deep blue, circling as if in a patient dance. They moved like moons untethered from heaven. They did not hurry. They did not rage.
They approached with the calm of something that has never been refused.
Bilbo's stomach dropped.
The dwarves went still.
Gandalf's eyes widened—not in surprise, but in recognition.
He had seen such things in older darkness, in far lands where hope is an artifact rather than a promise. Yet even then, never had he felt them here—under these skies, upon these mountains.
Death had wandered into Middle-earth wearing a foreign face.
The skulls drifted into the ring of firelight.
Their emptiness looked back at the living.
And all—orc, dwarf, wizard, hobbit—understood without needing words:
This is not an ally.This is not a weapon.This is a sentence.
One orc, foolish with fear and pride, raised his axe and spat a curse.
A skull moved toward him—quiet, unhurried.
It struck his chest.
The scream that followed did not belong in any language.
His flesh did not burn. It froze.
Blackness crawled over his skin like ink spilled under ice. His veins hardened. His eyes clouded. His mouth opened wider, but the sound broke into a wet, strangled sob as his jaw cracked.
He fell and shattered like brittle coal.
Silence swept the mountain as if someone had drawn a blade through sound itself.
Orcs stared, their courage collapsing into animal dread. Wargs whimpered and backed away.
Azog's blade lowered a fraction, his knuckles tightening. He did not understand what he saw, but something in him—something older than hate—recognized danger.
On the pine, the dwarves exhaled in sudden, foolish hope. A few of them cheered.
The cheer died when Gandalf's voice cut through them like a lash.
"Why are you celebrating, fools?" he roared. "Jump! What approaches… is Death!"
They froze.
To jump meant surrendering the last illusion of control. It meant trusting air to become mercy.
But Gandalf's tone left no room for debate. It was not command born of pride. It was command born of truth.
Thorin's jaw clenched. Pride fought instinct. Then he moved.
He leapt.
One by one the dwarves followed, dropping into darkness like stones cast into a bottomless well.
Bilbo's heart hammered. His mouth tasted of copper. He looked down and saw only smoke and distance and the shape of ending.
He jumped.
Wind tore at him. Fire spun. The world became a blur of heat and falling.
Then—
Wings.
A thunder of feathers, a storm of talons, and the violent grace of salvation.
Giant eagles swept from the skies and caught them midair. Claws seized cloak and belt and arm. Pain flared as joints were yanked, but pain was a blessing compared to the cold that waited below.
They were lifted, rising above fire and screams.
Gandalf, clinging to the eagle's back, looked down.
Azog and his remaining warriors withdrew, snarling, dragging their pride away like a wounded animal.
But before he fled, Azog looked back.
Gandalf looked back too.
And there—
From the shadows beyond the dying firelight, she emerged.
A woman.
Not striding, not running—arriving, as if darkness itself had exhaled and she stepped out of the breath.
Her garments were woven from night, drinking what little light remained. Upon her head sat a helm that did not merely hide her face—it erased it. A hollow void where features should have been, an emptiness that made the mind recoil.
Wisps of brittle gray hair escaped from beneath, thin as ash.
And her eyes—
Crimson.
Not the bright red of fresh blood, but the dark, coagulated red of violence remembered. They glowed through the void like embers burning inside a skull.
Her armor was dark as coal and wrong in the way living things can be wrong: it seemed to listen as she moved, as though it carried memory. Not only of battles, but of suffering. Of things offered up.
In her hand she carried a staff carved from the heart of a cursed tree—wood that had learned hunger. The grain of it looked like veins. It was the sort of relic that would not rot, because rot itself would fear to claim it.
Across her back hung a ritual weapon, hooked and twisted like a bone made into blasphemy. It did not gleam. It drank the firelight, as if starving.
She stood amid the smoke, and the world held its breath.
Bilbo, in the eagle's grasp, clutched at his shirt instinctively.
The Ring lay hidden beneath.
It pulsed once—faint, offended.
Not fear.
Jealousy.
As if the presence below had brushed it, and something inside it had awakened, sour and possessive.
Thorin stared down at her, fury fighting terror, because he did not know how else to face an embodiment of ending.
The dwarves fell silent. Even their prayers stopped.
And Gandalf—
Gandalf turned his gaze away.
Not in cowardice.
In recognition.
Because beneath the cold of death, beneath the dread of annihilation, he felt something else radiating from her—something that did not belong to death at all.
Pain.
Ancient, immeasurable pain. A grief so deep it had become an element. It did not merely accompany her; it was her.
Azog roared, not in courage, but in frustration—like a beast denied its kill.
He fled.
Yet even as they soared away, the sensation followed them like a curse: the certainty that this was not a chance encounter.
This was a beginning.
They landed later on stone and earth that did not burn. The eagles departed, leaving feathers drifting like pale omens.
Silence reigned.
Not the peace of forests, but the hush of survivors who have seen something they cannot speak into reason.
The cold remained. It sat behind their eyes. It clung to their thoughts. It made every flame they lit afterward look fragile, temporary.
Gandalf stood apart. His staff was steady; his hands were not.
Thorin approached him, trying to shape anger into a shield.
"What was that, Gandalf?"
Gandalf did not answer at once. His gaze stayed fixed on distant smoke, as if looking long enough might turn dread into certainty.
Then he said quietly, "Thorin… did you feel anything from her beyond death?"
Thorin frowned. "No. Only that Death stood before me and wanted my heart. Why? Did you feel more?"
Gandalf's mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed as if against a memory he had not yet named.
"Perhaps nothing," he murmured. "Perhaps I am growing old."
He forced a gentler tone, though it rang hollow even to him.
"Come," he said. "We must move on."
But inside him, a fear had begun to take shape—fear not of dying, but of what it meant that such a presence could walk beneath these stars.
Later, in Beorn's house, the world pretended again to be ordinary.
Wooden walls held back the wind. Herbs and honey sweetened the air. The hearth crackled with a kindly fire. Beorn's silence was the silence of a man who did not waste words, not the silence of men haunted.
The company ate, rested, and tried to forget the taste of cold in their bones.
Bilbo lay down with a heavy body and a heavier mind.
He pulled the Ring out from beneath his shirt and watched it gleam in the dim light. It looked harmless. It looked beautiful.
That was part of its wickedness.
His fingers turned it over and over, as if touch could grant understanding.
Sleep crept up on him gently.
Beside him, Gandalf's pipe had long since died. His eyes closed as though he could bargain with exhaustion.
Neither of them knew that this night would not belong to them.
When sleep took them, it did not merely cover them.
It carried them away.
Mist.
A place without edges. Without sky. Without ground. Only white curling emptiness and a silence that felt arranged, deliberate—like a temple waiting for worshippers.
Gandalf stood there, breath visible though there was no cold wind. Bilbo stood behind him, smaller than ever, clutching at his own courage.
Before them appeared three figures, as if stepping out of thought:
Elrond, calm as a river that has never forgotten its source.Galadriel, bright and distant, her light like starlight seen through tears.Saruman, white and severe, eyes sharp with judgment.
They regarded one another with the uneasy familiarity of those who know this meeting was not meant to happen.
Gandalf inclined his head, voice softening by habit.
"My lady," he said to Galadriel, "it is a pleasure to see you again."
She smiled gently, but her gaze was far away—as though her attention listened to another music beneath the mist.
Gandalf turned to Elrond. "My lord, a pleasure."
Elrond nodded, eyes scanning the mist as if seeking the rules of this place.
"Saruman," Gandalf said at last.
Saruman's mouth tightened. "I was well," he replied, "until I found myself here after resting."
Gandalf exhaled. "Then we came the same way. Sleep."
Bilbo swallowed, forcing himself to speak. "Is this… real?"
No one answered at once.
Because even the wise were unsettled by how solid the mist felt—how the silence had weight.
What none of them noticed was the presence of an unseen spectator—close enough to hear every breath, hidden as though the dream itself protected him.
Galadriel spoke without turning her head.
"Something is happening."
Then the mist began to thin.
Not dissolve—withdraw, as if a veil were being drawn back by invisible hands.
And at last, they saw.
A city of gold bathed in quiet light, its towers gentle rather than proud. Bridges like pale ribbons crossed between shining spires. The air itself seemed filled with warmth that did not burn.
Above it rose a tree.
Not one of Arda.
A radiant titan of gold, leaves shimmering like drops of sunlight caught in perpetual dawn. Its presence made the heart ache, as if remembering a home it had never known.
Then came laughter.
Not cruel. Not mocking.
The pure laughter of a child.
It spread warmth through their chests. Bilbo smiled despite himself. Gandalf's shoulders loosened. Even Elrond's expression softened.
Saruman remained silent, but his gaze sharpened.
Galadriel's face changed.
In that laughter she heard something older than this dream—something that cut through centuries.
Celebrían.
The memory struck her like a hand on the throat. For a moment she could not breathe.
The unseen spectator, too, felt an ache bloom—an inexplicable warmth, like a lullaby half-remembered beneath ash.
They saw the child then: pale hair, eyes like rubies, elven ears catching the golden light. She played among golden sheep, laughing as if nothing in any world had ever died.
From above descended three glowing fragments—like blessings torn from a greater light.
One hovered before Galadriel.One before Bilbo.One before the unseen watcher.
Galadriel extended her hand. A Golden Seed landed upon her palm, pulsing gently—alive, warm, brimming with a will that was not hers.
Bilbo reached out hesitantly. A fallen leaf drifted down and settled into his hand.
It was warm, like a hearth remembered.
As he touched it, the Ring beneath his shirt pulsed faintly, as if awakened by insult. The leaf's warmth soothed Bilbo, wrapping him in a sensation like unseen protection.
Yet the Ring pulsed again—envious.
The unseen watcher received a withered leaf, darker than Bilbo's, scorched by sorrow and cold—as if even grace could be wounded.
Above the city, a rune burned in the air—unknown to them yet ancient, whispering without sound a name that the mind understood:
Grace.
Then the mist curled back in upon itself.
A sound echoed—like metal struck by metal. Not a bell. Not a gong.
A hammer.
And a voice rose—faint, then growing, shaking the ground of the dream.
The child spoke.
And the dream became a rite.
"The fallen leaves tell a story…"
Her voice was young, yet older than her body. It carried the cadence of prophecy, the rhythm of something recited over graves.
"The great Elden Ring was shattered…"
She spoke of a world across the fog—the Lands Between. Of Queen Marika vanished. Of Godwyn first to perish in the Night of the Black Knives. Of demigods and shards and war. Of the Shattering, a conflict without lord, ending in abandonment by the Greater Will.
Her words did not feel like tale.
They felt like law being spoken aloud.
"Oh, rise now, ye Tarnished…"
Names came like tolling bells:
Horah Loux.Goldmask.Fia.The Dung Eater.Sir Gideon Ofnir.
"And one other… whom grace would again bless. A Tarnished of no renown."
The child's ruby gaze lifted, and for a heartbeat the dreamers felt as though another world had looked directly through them.
"Cross the fog… to stand before the Elden Ring. And become the Elden Lord."
As her voice faded, the mist returned, curling upward again.
Somewhere beyond, the child stood silent, her form dissolving into fog.
She turned—ever so slightly—as if sensing eyes that had watched her for a very long time.
Then the golden city dimmed.
And the dream broke.
They awoke breathless, drenched in sweat, hearts hammering like drums before war.
Bilbo clutched the leaf that was not there, fingers curled around empty air as if refusing to accept loss even in waking. The Ring lay hidden, cold and innocent.
Gandalf sat upright, staring into the darkness as though expecting it to move.
Neither spoke for a long moment.
Because words felt too small for what they had witnessed.
Yet in each of them burned a strange certainty:
It had been real.
And it had only begun.
Gandalf rose and moved to the window. Outside, the night sky looked unchanged. Stars glittered with their usual indifference.
But the wizard's voice was low, almost a confession.
"The world is changing," he murmured. "Something unknown walks through Middle-earth."
He paused, and his gaze tightened as if against a memory of crimson eyes under a hollow helm.
"And it walks with grief older than death."
Far away, in Orthanc, Saruman sat in cold stone and spoke to the darkness as if it were a friend.
"Dreams mean little," he said softly, "unless the world itself begins to dream."
And somewhere between worlds—unseen, unnamed—a watcher held a withered leaf in his gloved hand and listened to the silence, as though waiting for it to confess what it had done.