The fire devoured Barad-dûr.Flames rose in a blinding roar, tearing from the black sky showers of embers like muffled screams. The Dark Tower, once impregnable, cracked with a rumble, its stone frame twisting beneath the fury of a world breaking free. Amid the chaos, at the heart of the inferno, Sauron screamed without a voice.
He no longer had a body. His being was now but an essence, a shadow crushed by the light. The One was destroyed.The Ring... my Ring...
The bond that tied him to Middle-earth had been broken. That power he had forged, that perfection cast in the fires of Orodruin, had been reduced to ashes by a hand he would never have suspected: that of a hobbit. An insect. Nothing. That thought alone inflicted a pain worse than the disintegration gnawing at him.
He had planned everything. The human kingdoms consumed by fear, the elves retreating into their woods, the dwarves locked in their caverns, his armies of Orcs crushing the plains. And yet... everything had failed. Because of one detail. A weakness he had not foreseen: the hearts of weak creatures, which even terror cannot fully subdue.
Around him, the world crumbled. The ground shook as if wanting to vomit the filth of his reign. Lightning tore the sky, and the enraged wind carried away the cries of orcs in the storm. But Sauron heard nothing. His mind perceived only the void, the absence, that darkness closing over him like the jaws of an abyss.
He was going to disappear.No.
No.
He would never accept this end. Not after shaping centuries of domination, not after being the hand of Morgoth himself. Not after dreaming of a perfect order. He had failed once, he had been broken by Isildur... and he had returned. Today, he would return again.
He felt his remnants of essence dissolve, pulled out of the world by the sentence of the Powers. Death, that nothingness even a Maia cannot defy. His memories were already fading in fragments. His legions, his forges, his oaths branded in red iron on souls... all sinking into oblivion.
He needed an anchor. A crack in the order of things. A door.
I am Sauron, the Lord of the Rings. The one who commands fire, steel, and wills. No force exists that can reduce me to nothing...
Then, he uttered a word. A forbidden word, born from the depths of Arda, from tongues even Morgoth barely whispered. He twisted it, carved it into his very essence until the scream tore the very fabric of creation.
A rupture opened. A black hole in the light, a rift to... something else. He didn't know where it led. It didn't matter. Anything was better than nothingness.
The burn of separation was agonizing. His mind tore from Middle-earth, sucked through that breach. Time, space, the song of Eru himself twisted. He fell faster than thought, farther than imaginable, until a brutal cold gripped him.
Silence.A breath. A scent of milk, clean linen, crackling hearth. A sharp, weak cry... his own.
Human arms embraced him. Warm, trembling hands. A soft voice murmured words unknown, yet understood:— Look at him, Cassandre... our son.
A newborn.He was... a newborn.
His senses, trapped in that tiny flesh, suffocated with helplessness. His limbs were weak, his breath short, his sight blind. But his mind remained intact. Twisted, torn, but alive. And he understood.
He had found a refuge.A world... different. Magic pulsed here, diffuse, strange, foreign. It was not the raw power of Arda, but it vibrated with rules, structures... which he would learn. And inwardly, he rose.
He was not dead.He would never die.
— He will be strong, murmured the woman. Like his father.— Yes, strong and worthy of our name.
Your name? he thought with icy irony.
— We will call him Marius. Marius Rosier.
Rosier. A name that breathed pride, purity, decadent nobility. Perfect.
Sauron remained still, hidden behind the gray eyes of the infant, and made a vow:This world will be mine.
Years passed.And every day, behind the laughter and tears of a child, he watched. He listened. He learned.
He discovered this society was divided between those who wielded magic and those who had none. A fragile aristocracy, vain, trapped by its traditions. Clans that hated, spied on, feared each other. Absurd laws, ridiculous superstitions... fertile ground.
Magic itself intrigued him. Here, no blazing forge, no runes carved into eternal stone, but wooden wands serving as channels, formulas chanted to trigger forces barely understood. A weakness and a strength at once.
He tried. Very early.And he succeeded. Without a wand. Without a formula. Magic bent to his naked will like a dog trained to return at the master's call.
His parents believed him a prodigy. They adored him. They showed him off. But he, behind the mask of a well-behaved child, contemplated his future.
One day, he received a letter. An owl dropped on his desk a thick envelope sealed with red wax.
Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
He smiled. Slowly. A smile with nothing childlike about it.A school to train them... a school to enslave them.