___
By nine a.m., Cadence was eating breakfast in the Algonquin’s Round Table Room and taking in the ambiance of the hotel. It truly was a grand old great-aunt of a place. It was partial to dark wood paneling and presided over by a highly competent if entrenched and fuss-budget, staff. The hotel manager brought her the New York Times and unfolded her napkin for her and asked if she was enjoying her stay. He exited with a professional grace. Just as her orange juice came, she settled back and opened the paper.
Her cell phone rang to the high brass notes of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. She muted the sound and checked the screen. The display read CALLER ID UNAVAILABLE. As she accepted the call, the voice launched right in.
“Any progress?” It was Mel.
“Sort of. I’m here having breakfast at the Algonquin. Thank you for that. I went to a strange bar on the Upper West Side. Remember the menu I showed you that’s initialed JRRT? That place. I met a one-eyed bartender. Oh, and I talked to a madman, a street person who speaks bad Shakespeare, like a C-list Marvel Comics character. Anyway, he says he met both Tolkien and my grandfather. He’s a loon, but he may be all I’ve got. I also got rained on big time and had a weirdo for a cab driver,” she added, even as she could already hear Mel’s fingers drumming on a table. “Not much progress, huh.”
“You’ve been there maybe twenty-four hours, relax.”
“Oh yes, it seems Tolkien, or someone pretending to be him, hung out at the West End. Years ago.”
“Uh-huh. Listen, don’t despair, because I’ve got news about our good professor Tolkien.”
“Like what?”
“Get this. The critics at first hated him, then, as with all successful writers, they adored him. But they all call him the Great Borrower because he treated prior stories and sources like, as they put it, a dragon’s horde—something to be routinely looted. Or more politely, to be ransacked at will and without attribution. His stories are populated with creatures, proper names, places, happenings from works by Shakespeare, Finnish literature, Sir Gawain, you name it.”
“Yeah, I thought that …”
“Here’s just a few examples of the borrowed names, nouns, and other stuff. I jotted them down for you. For starters, the word hobbit. Then it goes from there: Frodo, Bilbo, Gandalf, Middle Earth, Bag End, Hasufel, Edoras, Mirkwood, Midgewater, Wormtongue, Medusheld, ents, wargs, balrogs, woses, and roughly two-thirds of the various dwarf names. The list goes on and on.”
“OK, but what’s wrong with borrowing when he used it to create such great stuff ?”
Her waiter unobtrusively placed her breakfast before her.
“Precisely, my dear. Tolkien felt no unease in this. To him, every name and every tale was a place to begin a new story. Which reminds me. Hell, I’m just a professional middleman, but I’d say Wagner’s opera, The Ring—about the one ring that could rule the world, and the remaking of the mythical sword that was broken—all sounds pretty familiar. Except Wagner wrote it in 1869. In any case as Tolkien said, the road goes on and on.”
“Yes. So?”
“So it means we’ve got the moral high ground. Tolkien’s view was that any story that borrows from older stories is a fair and natural part of the process. You see, creativity and innovation thrive on borrowing.”
“Mel, don’t take this the wrong way, but your inner poet must be trying to get out. You don’t strike me as one to rely on moral high ground very much.”
“Very true!” he laughed. “Nor will the ones I am about to talk about. They are the wielders of the power. They will seek to stifle and destroy anything new that is attributable to Tolkien even if it is authentically his.”
“Well, if you read what’s barely readable in this so-called fourth book, it looks like maybe he wrote, or at least translated, some small part of it, but by far most was written by other people, maybe at different times in the past. As in long, long ago. If you read it literally, it comes from some very strange place. Not his story book Middle-earth, but someplace different. The real one. The one he tried so hard to imagine. Ninety percent of it needs translation if that’s even possible. It’s just runes and stuff.”
“Let’s don’t get carried away. Parts of this may seem a little strange, but no matter.”
Cadence turned away from a nearby table of patrons and hunched over the phone. She dropped her voice. “‘Strange’ seems to be the operative word here.”
“Well”, he said, “I could have said ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In the vein of odd things, though, I just learned an interesting factoid about our Good Professor.”
“I can’t wait. No, honest, I want to hear it.”
“He was a spook.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed, as if he was a pure nut case. “You mean Tolkien’s a ghost?”
“No, stupid, a spy, a secret agent. As in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Because of his linguistic skills, he was recruited as a code-breaker at the beginning of World War II. You know, deciphering the Nazi Enigma Code, all that movie stuff. Anyway, he only did it for a short period. It’s a blurb in the news today. Declassified by M16.”
“How in the hell is that going to help me?”
“I don’t know. Who knows all the twists and turns in this? To answer your question, it probably doesn’t help. Only you can do that, with support from me.”
Cadence sat back and stared at her rapidly cooling scrambled eggs, wondering if things were about to get a lot curioser. “You know, Mel, I’m not sure what all this is about either. What I really care about though, more than anything, is finding out who my grandfather was and what happened to him.”
Cadence heard a voice in the background on Mel’s phone, “Mr. Chricter, Mr. Jackson’s office on 2.”
“Hey, uh … Cadence, hold on. I’ll be right back.”
She heard him put the phone down, get up, and talk on a speakerphone somewhere else in his office. It was dim but clear.
“Yeah, its Mel. Look, tell Peter I’m onto something here. I’ve been approached with something interesting. Yeah, I know they had to rewrite Tolkien again. Gotta have those ingénues. So this should also be interesting. Heck, maybe there are already clues somewhere. Where? The Narcross scene? I know you only want stuff that puts legs on the franchise. OK, OK, so talk to his people. Talk to Guillermo. I’m on a call.”
He picked up the phone again. “Cadence? Fine, just keep the faith. And don’t get into any strange cabs. This is big-time stuff and who knows who, or what, may be watching you.”
She hesitated for a moment. “OK, I’ll be careful.”
“One more thing.”
“Yes.”
“Since you’re having breakfast at the Algonquin,” and I’m covering your bill, she heard in his tone, “you’re in the Round Table Room. Back in the Twenties, that was the meeting place of the American counterpart to Tolkien’s Inklings group. All the New Yorker magazine hotshots and Broadway luminaries traded jibes there. So it may be a sign, right?”
“Right. Maybe some good will come out of that. If I can’t find the tracks of good ‘ole spymaster Tolkien, I’ll just switch to Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker.”
“Chin up. You’re on the right track.”
“Yeah, I guess I need to decide on my next move.”
Mel’s voice hushed. “Remember one word.”
In his pause she thought he was actually going to say “Plastics.”
“Provenance, Cadence, provenance. Is this stuff authentic? Prove that and we can get a deal.”
She wasn’t sure any more that she even wanted one of Mel’s deals. She said good-bye and hung up. What was her next move? She amused herself with the wry image of being marooned in a pathless forest, with discarded road signs leaning askew all about. “Secret Gate This Way.” “Moon Clock Running.” “Provenance and Proofs. Information Booth Up Ahead.” She especially liked the one that read “Homeless Man Advice. Next Exit.”
What she didn’t like was this feeling, like a pair of eyes peering at her from deep in that same imaginary forest.
Barren was studying his prey carefully now. He knew where she grazed. He would let her get comfortable and slack in her vigilance. He walked the streets to lower Manhattan and in time he came to a great excavation.
Instinct told him a great tumult had happened here, a fall of towers and a killing of innocents. From his own experience, he could sense the embers of panic and fear.
Now, however, he had a mission to conclude. The only question was where are the scribbles, the documents his master desired? He felt an easy confidence, having donned their garments and mastered much of their speech.
He walked north up the canyons of steel and glass, and came to stairs leading down into a tunnel entrance. It was just as an oracle’s entryway might be, he mused. This, he knew, was the roadway for their strange, noisy machines. He went to the ticket kiosk and bought a fare card with money he had pilfered from one of the bright-faced people. They never felt the gentle slip of his hand.
As he waited on the platform for the E train to arrive, he assessed his advantage. In his walking about, he had seen things he innately recognized from his past life, vestigial relics, like broken shell bits betokening a once great ocean. Now they were powerless fragments of magic and illusion. The power in the token in the small pouch slung about his neck far outstripped all the remnants here. It had, after all, served its purpose. It enabled him to learn, swift as an arrow.
So, if there was little magic to use here, he would still manage. He first had some distractions to take care of.
As Cadence left the entrance to the Algonquin, passing under the distinctive A’s, she looked for a Starbucks. She found three of them, all visible from the same spot. She chose instead an independent, Grousin’ Grounds, with an angry caffeine addict logo on the door. She ordered a triple macchiatto and handed over her credit card. It felt ever thinner. This time, inevitably, it would be the dissolving prop from Mission: Impossible. She bit her lip, praying it wouldn’t be declined.
The clerk slid it through the reader, and then said, “Hey!” Cadence quivered. “Is it … OK? I can pay cash.” She began to fumble in her purse, jockeying it with the valise that hung from her other shoulder.
The guy held the card out to read it. “No, your name. Grande. You’re named after a size of Starbucks coffee?”
She exhaled with relief and took the card. “Actually, it’s the other way around.”
“Then you should sue them for trademark violation.”
“Yeah, that sort of thing seems to be goin’ around. Thanks.”
Toward the back she found a booth with a big table. She opened the valise and spread out some of the documents at a safe distance from her macchiatto. She wanted to find more about Ara. Was she really the “Her” so detested by the wizard in the earlier fragment? Was she the one who was being erased by ink smears right out of the elderly halfling’s book? And most important, why?
She sipped her drink slowly, thumbing through the documents until, at last, she found a cluster of readable pages bound by some rough sinew. There was a small mark, perhaps archival in intent, in the lower right corner of each page. The annotation at the top of the first page said only, “Found at Delvrose, Year 64 of the Fourth Age.” It read:
Ara’s Rune
The one known as Ara, it was said, was learned of letters and utilized a grand and distinctive rune in the likeness of an A with eyes that watched over all. She was of average height for a lady halfling, but possessed both beauty (as her kind measures it: simply) and wit in full measure. Her eyes are described as large and expressive of thoughts beyond the ken of many a simple country halfling. She had feet more elegant than most halflings, and often wore her long, dark hair tied up in a manner unusual for those times.
She came, it is recounted, from an obscure hamlet known as Frighten. Residents thereabouts were regarded by other halflings as “a tad off” in the way an eccentric but loved relative might be. Even their names were odd. They called themselves by words favoring the fall: Spookymore, Pumpkinbelly, Gourdnose, Fallglint, Catspaw, Heatherlook, Yellowoak, Flameleaf, Firstfrost, Harvestcart, Orangemoon, Mapleflow.
This much is known: Frighten was a village of proper halfling dwellings and husbandry settled among gently rolling hills creased with sudden clefts filled with dark, tangled woods. In the fall the oak and hickory trees turned brilliantly hued, and the land transformed into expanses of hayfields, dotted with ricks guarded by the most notable product thereabouts: the Giant Pumpkins.
These Great Gourds stood man high or more and weighed on average a hundred stone. They were transported by sturdy wains and stood sentinel in every field and on the doorsteps of most halfling homes. As the final gibbous moon of the harvest waxed to fullness, the pumpkins were carved into fantastic, leering faces illuminated from within by beeswax candles. And so, of a crisp autumn night, the land was dotted with these laughing, leering, grinning, Frighten sentinels.
A note is in order here. Along with the few remembered “inventions” of the halflings, such as the cultivation of the enchantment plant, hoernes, and the fine points of their various dwellings, there was another, quite curious matter: the practice, or as they called it, the fine craft, of brewing pumpkin beer. Restricted largely to the region of Frighten, it was originated by the great-grandfathers of Ara (agreed by all to be of an offshoot of the inimitable Flameleafs — or Flameleaves if you want to get picky) and often described by the “outsider” halflings to be a cult of the pumpkin. This practice was not utilized in what we might today call worship, but, as with all their crafts, a happy and complete appreciation and use of the great gourds.
Those visiting the region in the late fall, particularly during the Great Celebration, would oft imbibe the pumpkin beer and declare loudly and with hearty belches, “Best south of the North Downs!” This was invariably met by the exclamation “Puts to shame the dregs they pass off at the Golden Sheaf!”
Those who recall these boasts also recall whispers—of a pumpkin bigger than anyone had seen since warm summers before the Long Winter, of a girth not surpassed by the largest hay wagons of men: a giant, renowned pumpkin known as Johnny Squanto. Its seeds each year produced equal giants, fat, deeply fissured, of a deepest orange, growing by a hand’s width each day in the long, lolling days of summer. To this day the saying survives among serious farmers and the crowds at county fairs, “Now there’s a genuine squanto, that is!
But we wander from the path.
Some records attest to an Aragranessa being crowned Queen of Frighten in 1109. Of her family it is known they were also of the line of Swallowhawks that gave rise in later years—beyond the span of this tale and even after the end of the Last Age—to the heroic stand of halflings at Wrandy before the onslaught of the Orc-Men. That, of course, led to the Final Scattering of the Halflings.
But of this tale, it must be surmised that Ara first met him …
Here Cadence stopped. Yes, the tale finally gets to the him, whoever he was.
… Ara first met him after a series of the Great Parties (for births and holidays tend to be clumped in spring and fall in this land). He was quite lonely. He was no doubt looking for someone, yet perhaps afraid to venture too far in search.
It is known that the one in times hence known as the Bearer had taken to long walks, even days of wanderings, about the far reaches of the little corner of the world then known. It was in this period, perhaps, that he met Ara. For one element of Ara’s character is—if “consistently told” is a reliable witness—well known: she loved the wilds and often visited the less trodden frontiers of the Far Forest. She was spoken of for her lore and wisdom even onto the far edges of their domain. She doubtless had, at times, passed well beyond those unguarded borders.
From this account, little can I glean of her in later times, save this: a promontory often described as “Ara’s Watch” or “View Rock” was marked on maps for years, even into our times. It lay at the far western guard post of the Old Land, and from its vantage the dark blue sea could first be spied. Less reliably, it was said that in local lore it was regarded as a place for lovers to share their vows, earnestly ignorant of the namesake for the place they had chosen.
As sadly, are we.
Your humble scribe
The legible text ended here. Cadence put the bound pages aside and searched until she found another bundle with the same archival mark. It was a thin crescent, as of a new moon.
She was looking for what happened to Ara after the village gate. She found the trail. The documents gave up their story and Cadence sat, engrossed:
When Ara awakened in the waning light, she jumped in fear at the memory of the burning gatehouse and the Wraith. Then she settled and looked about. She recognized the place as Signal Hill. She found herself bound with thick, rough cords around her wrists. They were crudely tied, fair game for the cleverness of a halfling skilled in the logic of knots. But first she had to see more. She sat up, prepared to relive the fear of the night before, but realized that she was a spectator.
She was on a small, grassy rise, below which there was an assemblage of black-armored men plumed and regaled in finest battle gear. They stood quietly in a line, their postures suggesting a serious and dignified purpose.
Across from them crowded a swaggering, jostling band of orcs. A small drum was entertaining them as some danced with crude, off-rhythm jerks. Some of them were immense, taller even than the men.
A Power Troll with huge muscles and gnarled canines stood to one side. A creature of some apparent distinction, his tattooed arms were festooned with gold and bejewelled crowns of murdered kings and princes, worn now as bracelets. He held in each taloned hand an array of leather straps used as leads. Those in his left hand restrained a snarling pack of great Dire Wolves. With their overdeveloped shoulders, long red tongues dripping wet pools of slather at their feet, they were shivering in fear and deep loathing. The Troll gave their leads a sharp jerk to curb their whining, his crown-bracelets clinking as the muscles rippled down his arm.
There was ample reason for their fear. Held by the thicker leads in the Troll’s right hand was a witch’s count of heavy-breathing brudarks.
Ara was stunned. She had seen drawings of them before, but no halfling had ever seen the horror of a brudark and lived to tell the tale. She blinked at them, not believing her eyes. They were leashed and hobbled, in one of their six pair of legs, before her …
Suddenly, like a wind, a presence approached to her left. The men bowed, removing their helmets. The orcs fumbled, stepping on each other’s feet in their confusion. The troll simply stared intently as what first seemed like a cloud quickly became a solitary person walking up between him and the terrified orcs. The person was clad in the hue-shifting robes favored by wizards when appearing in public. But the hues in this cloak were subtle in their range, like the variations of darkness in approaching storm clouds—deep, troubled grey shifting to the wisp of a misty white mare’s tale, then folding to a weather waif’s tattered dark skirt of approaching rain-squalls, and finally they darkened to the angry blackness of a cyclone’s heart. He bore no crown and no staff. A simple, rustic chair was brought out and on this he sat.
It was clear that they were assembled there to have an audience with others not yet present. The entire group was arrayed roughly along two sides, with this un-wizardly wizard sitting in his chair at one end.
Encumbered by her bonds, Ara rose quietly to her feet, unnoticed. She looked around and saw, on the far crest of Signal Hill, the black horses that with their riders had come upon her at the village’s east gate. She stared at the waiting Wraiths and thought better of trying to escape.
Horses neighed in the distance and the growing hoof beats announced the arrival of a mounted vanguard of men. Within moments they appeared, their mounts hard-ridden and sleek with sweat. They were arrayed in once-bright battle-tarnished armour and cloaks bearing the signs of great realms of Middle-earth. The yellow outline of the Tree of Council and the Elvish rune for M swept across their banners. Ara looked for the Woodsman, but he was not amongst them. A group of them, well armed and fearless, dismounted. Sturdy men, swaggering and cavalier in their manner, they walked halfway to where the wizard stood and stopped, whilst their leader approached the wizard directly.
Only the slatted breathing of the brudarks marked the silence. The leader spoke, his voice edged with disdain as he knowingly committed the slight of not introducing himself by name and lineage. He said bluntly, “I come as ambassador from the race of men as liege under the Great Houses and the offended One City. I bear this message to thee, Dark One, as well as thy errand-boys and minions gathered hereabout.”
The Dark Lord! Ara sank to her knees in shock.
The speaker paused to let the insult sink in. The line of black-armoured men stood fast and did not acknowledge it. The orcs remained oblivious. They were struggling just to follow the words.
The man continued. “We come to deliver this message, lest you misperceive our resolve and by the stroke of error deliver your lands into ruin. We are prepared to resolve this matter, and to allow you by the labour of war upon other lands, to forget our just reprisals for the grievous offenses you have committed against us. Our offer is thus: you must retreat from the lands west of the Long River, forego all rents and tithes from peoples under our dominion, and accept the contents of this letter as our last, final and permanent tribute.”
With that, he stepped forward and dropped a yellowed parchment unto the lap of the still-seated wizard. He then stepped back and stood, his feet apart in a wide stance, his hand posed firmly on his sword hilt.
The wizard looked at the package in his hands, and then began to open it up with calm deliberation. The sides folded back, then the top, then the bottom. He looked at the opened parchment. It was empty. He let it fall gently from his hands, its tiny, awesome, crackling sound as it landed on the dirt filling the assembly with foreboding.
Seconds ticked by like hours. Finally the wizard stirred and rose, almost wearily. “My gracious Ambassador,” he began in a quiet voice, “Wizards, and those that still honour them, and indeed even the misguided elves, have posed this conflict as one of great causes. Of momentous times, the ‘Passing of the Age of Middle-earth’ it is said grandly by some.”
His arm swept about in a mildly mocking gesture.
“Unfortunately, but inevitably,” he continued, “men such as you view it from a mortal’s perspective, as something to be won or lost in terms of territory and dominion and perhaps a few score years of kingly power. You see it only as power to be clutched at,” he clenched now his outstretched fist and then relaxed it to openness, “even as it evaporates into the transitory airs of your lives. I regret your perspective, but I can respect it. I ignore your arrogant and foolish jest with this letter, and I forgive it.”
He paused. “What I had earnestly hoped was that this council would be summoned amongst us without distraction and, forgive me, the shrill whisperings of those lawless insurgents known as Quicklegs and his outlaws. Let me speak clearly here. That man is a cruel usurper! He pretends to a crown only to rule you all for his own selfish purposes. And also blessed are we to meet this very eve without the, again forgive me, fear-mongering of this lesser wizard known as Stormhue …”
He leaned forward and lowered his voice, as if confiding, “Who, by the way, brings bad news to cover the bad luck he spreads everywhere like a disease. This council, then, I hoped would avoid the dialogue of ‘great causes’ and also the, forgive me one last time, the pettiness of settling things for a few generations of your race.”
He marked this moment with a deep breath. “Let there then be no cavil as to the terms that can divide us bitterly or embrace us both to greater purpose and most blessed peace. I am prepared humbly to accept your terms, if you will but render me one small token. To fill up a parchment such as that unkindly gift of empty space and unfeeling heart which you earlier bestowed upon me. The token I ask is but a small ornament, suitable as a trifling pendant or ring. Plain, of little value to others yet sentimental to me and my lineage. Just as your lands and heraldry are … shall we say ‘precious’ … to you. Help me find this bauble, give me this which is mine, and I, along with my supporters—” he gestured to the lines on either side of him, “for as you can see they are neither slaves nor minions, but worthy men of principle and allies of orcs who have been unfairly harassed and ungentled by your houses from time immemorial—these all shall withdraw. The Long River shall make us good neighbours and its waters reflect unguarded borders, rather than warring camps sending forth boats of fire and war, from this day forward.”
The visiting ambassador waited a moment to respond. He was cold and unyielding in his manner. “We know not of this token, save by vague legend bandied about by those who pretend to have memories longer than my many grandfathers’ lives. But if you value it so, it may be of greater value than you admit, or perchance of use only to those of your kind. In either case we care little. If we possessed it, we would in all likelihood deliver it unto you as ransom alongside your fear of defeat, and seal this offer. But we possess it not, nor shall we divert to aid your search for this trinket. You have made war upon our lands and now amass your armies at our borders, and indeed stand here at this moment upon some mission of secrecy deep within our own territory. You summon to our vicinity those hated dogs of terror known as the Wraiths. We shall not take the bait of your soft words. Quit our lands or we shall evict you by defeat and death!”
The Dark Lord did not regard the man. He simply sighed and said, “May you feel such fear that your balls turn as brittle as stones.”
In response, the company under their proud emblems pulled forth their swords, their sudden ringing like a cry of metallic harmonies. Shiiinnnggg! The swords reflected the reddening light of day’s end.
Just as suddenly those in the forward ranks shrieked. The troll had let slip the brudarks. The ambassador was torn into pieces in a moment. His sword and helm spit into the air like mere twigs and crumbs. The stunned company turned in panic, gave spur to their mounts in retreat, and then suddenly reined them in.
Ringing the path of their escape were five mounted Wraiths.
“Finish them, and bring me their banners that we may use them as rolls in our latrines and sop-rags in our banquet halls!”
With that, the dark knights and the orcs fell on the hapless few who quailed now between the Wraiths and the brudarks.
Here the scribe’s hand failed, as if interrupted. There were scribbles, scratch-throughs, question marks, and redos of various symbols. There was half of a note, something about a trap awaiting the Bearer, then an arrow leading to the words “The trap is set for the next full moon!” After further space, the writing again gathered momentum toward Ara’s fate:
There followed hoarse shouts and the screams of men and beasts, clashing and banging, the dull thuds of weapons on bodies, and a hideous brudark roar. As these subsided, the howls of Dire Wolves, now loosed to search out survivors, filled the glen.
One approached Ara’s spot, picking up a scent and eager to tear into a quailing prey. It pounced at a darker spot in the grass. Its jaws set upon the limp and empty chords of her bonds.
Ara was gone.
Maddening! Cadence looked at the clock and then leafed through the pages until she found once again the sign of a sliver moon. She read with a flash of energy as she saw whose paths had crossed:
Ara had been here. The Bearer felt it.
He stopped, smelled the freshening air that rushed down this glen, and knelt facing the pathway before him. The breeze sang gently of distant snows and the awakening of the Winter Giants far to the north as it rippled in wavelets across the expanse of green grass. Sunlight and shadow danced an ensemble as the nearby trees swayed back and forth.
The patterns of light caught a glint.
There! Gone. There again!
He stretched and pulled from the grass a necklace of gold. It was broken, and dark stains painted its delicate links. It was Ara’s. Its lineage traced back to the treasure hordes of the Last Dragon. He had given it to her as their first exchange of gifts. (He had received from her a green Shandy, the distinctive hat of travelers of the Great Road.)
She had been here. Perhaps only hours before!
He leapt forward holding his Shandy tightly in his hand, his feet compressing the shallower grass of the path, and left that place forever.
There was a note in the margin of the passage. The note-maker scribed these lines perhaps centuries after the original document, yet still of a time lost to antiquity:
Where this most famous Halfling thus passed— proudly wearing his Shandy as portrayed in the famous Tapestries of Ulmarest — he was intent on his search for the footprints of Ara. The grass grows there even today in similar long-bladed fashion. The wind still ripples across this expanse, just as it did then. The earnest aromas of spring still arrive there yearly. The rich, sad smells that herald the onset of fall are identical there today. The hares and marmots of the nearby rocky hillside reside there yet. And to those who say Middle-earth has passed on, let them stand here! For they are shown the lie by this moment.
That world exists still, for any that would kneel down and smell the simple earth, stoop and partake of the plain and honest work offered by a fine summer’s vegetable garden, or gaze to the snow-crested, blue mountains that beckon one to adventure.
If, of a moment, you next linger in such a place, perchance travelling a rude and simple country road, ask thyself who trod this path before? What errands did they seek? What stories did they live? Where did this path take them in their long journey?
Indeed, where does it take thee?
She read on, obsessed now, and came across a context for the evil toward which Ara’s feet carried her:
An Account and Prophecy.
By Gifol, Historian of the Third Age in the Court of Hrothulf. My Lord,
The tale of Ara and the single moon cycle which ordered so much of the end of that world and the beginning of our own, cannot be fully understood without the history of the Source and its Embodiment. Unfortunately this comes to us in tatters, rife with dispute and contradiction. Was this embodiment merely a ring? Or, as various sages maintain, a shield, or sword, or symbol? Was it a secret incantation, with the story of a ring attached merely as a myth? Ruse and distraction infect all history from these times.
A review of its popular names from antiquity tells us little. “Un-still” it was sometimes called in the south, but by far it was known, universally and simply, by one name: “Bind”.
I repent now that my long research in the few scattered archives that survived the wreckage of those times is complete. This is what we know: there was an Embodiment of a kind. It was called Bind. It was most likely a pendant or a ring. It was indeed destroyed. With it went much of the magic of the world, along with a pernicious concentration of evil.
Alas, the nature of evil is that it lurks and gathers. It is a seed in the hearts of men.
Magic is more fragile. Have hope, my lord, for I believe it too has survived. The makers at the Source made another Embodiment. Its fate is at present unknown. It may conceal itself as a ring, a book, or perhaps a secret gate.
But to your charge to me as historian of the Court, this I foresee: Evil will once again stir, as leaves gather in the eddy of a stream. Long hence, a holder of that other surviving token from the Source shall emerge. The ancient and esteemed tradition of ring-giving shall be revived. Magic shall be renewed and—”
It ended there. She leaned back and took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. Maybe another round of espresso, she thought, just to rev things up. Yeah. She hid the valise under her table and went up to the counter, glancing warily back. She returned and sat down and took a few contended sips. Her hands leafed through page after page of runic lettering. Then, like a wizened goldpanner, her eye narrowed as the black sands of unintelligible inscription revealed another gleaming nugget. She teased with the meaning and it unraveled easily. It shared key threads with what she had read already.
From the Histories of the Ara Society:
Not surprisingly, as the Fourth Age spread across the world, much was made of the power of rings. They became baubles of fashion that marked idleness and sloth as much as fealty to policy, tribe and guild. The market displayed false relics in all forms. They became counterfeit, tawdry, and trifling.
Ara, it was said, did acquire in her travels a ring of some power. That ring was imagined during the next century by untold numbers of cheap imitations sold in stalls in every market. Even as this common vulgarity of fake “Rings of the Third Age” spread, a few true copies bearing her unique rune bore witness to a secretive “Society of Rings.” These groups were in time banned as the last histories of her life were hunted down and destroyed.
And what was the power of her ring? That truth is lost, but one suspects it was but a symbol, a repository perhaps, for her own inner strength.
The text ended abruptly. Cadence could feel the cumulative effects of the shots of espresso. It was like a bubbling hot spring, welling up inside her. She sat upright in her chair, fidgeting, toes tapping, a jittery tempo surrounding her. Looking at the stack of documents, she knew that at best there could be only a few more readable pages. Then the story would dissipate, like a ship faitly seen and passing away in the fog. Her nervous energy told her to take a break, relax and just draw something. She got out a sketch pen and a piece of stationary from the Algonquin, and let her hand run free. Soon a rough-out of a mysterious gate, perhaps a secret gate, encrusted with vines and roots, began to form. She put her pen down and looked at it. Nice, but the most telling thing was that it was closed tight.
It is telling me something, she thought. She got out another blank sheet and doodled for more answers, her pen performing like a farmer’s dowsing road. It whished a few lines and circles and, faintly, she began to see an image of ponderous mechanisms. Her mind’s eye quickly outstripped the pen and paper. The picture was too big, too dynamic, too cinematic. Beyond feelings and intuition, her guts told her that she was about to lay her hands on the starter crank of some vast, dead mechanism. Something that had sat ice-entombed for centuries. If Leonardo da Vinci and Tim Burton had collaborated on the concept of an Early Industrial Transformer, this would be it. She saw her hands grasp and then turn the crank, felt it whipsaw back viciously, heard the dead clank inside. She tried again, and again, creating a pattern worthy of her name. Finally it coughed. Another crank and it sputtered and vomited coal-black smoke. With the next crank, it stuttered and found a jagged rhythm of pistoning heartbeats. Steam, or whatever life force drove it, was rising in its pipes. It was coming alive and its feet were breaking free of those bitter winter-welds.
Cadence looked at the documents and knew that the engine and its elusive crank lay hidden within those indecipherable pages.
The vision began to slide away. She scavenged the pile for a moment, then found two pages in an elegant and coherent hand:
By wager of battle goes victory, and with it the power to name. This alone, over the long expanse of time, may be worth the test. Kingdoms come and go, lines of noble blood are thinned to whelped vassals, castle keeps wear and tumble. But more enduring, surely, are the word and the name. What lost tales and feats of valor are tethered to simple names? Think only of Cragmoor and Selharm and Vitus! Middle-earth itself. Those coming long after will ponder such names and search for the tale of the victor.
So the protagonists of the Great War ultimately fought, in the long march of history, to brightly name their lands and mark their foes with enduring labels of dishonour.
The Valley of the Dark Lord, now long resigned to the stain of foul names, once had a more pleasant designation. ‘The Source,’ it was called, and a bit of its lost history tells much.
The one place in the world where the most basic elements of the world come together, save where ice and fire live as one on islands in the far, far north, was the Valley of the Source. Here forests and meadows and stags the size of three war horses once flourished, along with steaming vents and great geysers of boiling water. Beneath the valley floor, the very essence of Mother Earth dwelled. From a single great cone at the center of the valley, a place known as Fume, she periodically burst forth and poured molten rock down its slopes.
In this valley long there lived a cult of making, and the rich array of exotic minerals, plants, and waters led them to continuous learning. Rock pictures on the valley walls tell of the first nameless physics who here sought deeper truth. Along the way, the art of tanning, the making of inks not much different than that by which these words are scribed, paints and dyes, even the explosive powders secreted by the wizards in their fireworks— all were here invented.
So, deep in thought and process they delved, and the Source provided the materials and energy for their work. Their goals were noble, seeking to transcend by some metaphysical solvent the base diseases of imperfection, corruption, and dissolution. To create the gold that is alive, that imbues the water of life and provides panacea to all ills—that is the quest toward which all their powers were bent.
They tinkered and toiled, kept great scrolls, wrote books without words, and invented humors and elixirs to cure much malady in this world.
In time one among them, a secretive hermit of great wisdom, claimed to have created the Philosopher’s Stone, the noblest of substances, the gold that is not dead and that contains the force of life and destiny itself. His study was a cave in the bowels of Fume, and the substance he discovered was al-bimiva, the Quintessence. This he fashioned into many things, but chief among them were pendants and rings.
Fume awoke one day and belched a vomit of lava across the valley. By some miracle unrecorded, the old man that resided in that mountain of fire survived. His study, holding years of careful records and incantations, was destroyed. He managed to save a collection of tokens, each made of al-bimiva. They were precious to him. One in particular, the lost and legendary artifact known as Bind, was the very symbol of his power.
His lifetime secrets lost, he sought out and stole the libraries of others. But he coveted most those tokens. From these he would rebuild. He vowed to control as much of the vulgar world as he could with these tokens.
Of course, as for the Quintessence, it was not yet totally pure. In its flaws melded the imperfection of the world with the corruption of the hermit.
That bent figure, be he human or wizard (for in those days they competed in the quest of alchemy), became the Dark Lord. He returned to Fume to guard the Source and rebuild his library and plot his machinations.
His real name was erased in his vanquishing. In its place are evil names, some with damning mor- designations, and others of simple descriptions: Glutter of Crows, Lord of the Slain, and the like.
The glowering red ellipse at the summit of Fume’s soaring cone became known as the Glowing Eye.
Another surprise page seemed to jump forward or backward in time:
The ending of our age has begun in earnest.
It has, in the span of a generation of men, become a time of deepening cold. Springs arrive late and summers fail their promise with chill rains and early frost. The Great River as far south as Allnoon stays frozen half the year. At the winter solstice we dance the jig on the river like a gala of berobed skeletons. All weep at the frail forms of the children. Final stores of turnips and grazus [a form of lumpy, twisted, pale carrot — ed.] expire and the stock will go and then the people. All will be gone if the river’s thaw again slackens till the end of a long, drear spring.
I fear a turning is upon us, the scars of which will mark all lands and all peoples.
She stopped and checked the time on her cell phone— almost two o’clock. As she packed up the valise, she felt as if Ara and her tale were actually unwinding in real time. What was happening to her right now? She didn’t have time to search further. The second bell was about to sound at the library.
As Cadence rushed to catch the subway, Barren entered the West End Bar. He went up to the bar and waited for the ogre-man to come over. He watched him in the mirror, a man built like a warhorse. Certainly a potential nuisance if not taken care of now. The man approached as Barren sat, head down.
“What’ll it be, pal?”
Barren looked up. “Be?”
“What would you like?”
Barren just stared at him with his glistening dark eyes.
The big man stared back. He stood no-nonsense still, his huge nine-fingered pair of hands splayed across the expanse of copper bar-top.
Barren slowly said, “Medu.”
The man smiled wanly, doing his best convivial barkeep imitation. “If you mean ‘mead’, you’re in the wrong century. However, if you like weird old earthy stuff, I’ve got something for you.” He turned and retrieved a dark, dust-covered bottle from the back shelf. He put it gravely on the copper bar, label out, as if for inspection, then picked it up and poured a shot glass full. It was a deep brown. It smelled like overturned earth.” Fernet Branca. Italian. I don’t know what’s in it, but I think it’s a liqueur made of loam. You know, dark garden soil. Try it. On me.”
Barren looked at him and slowly took the glass and smelled it and drank the liquid. It swirled and stirred a flow of memories, the smell and taste evoking the very earth on which Barren had so often lain in ambush. He put the glass down and looked dead center into the barkeep’s single eye.
“Your days behind this bar are over, Cyclops.” He watched the big man stiffen, observed the knife scar across his face. “I’ve got some advice for you—leave this place. Now. Don’t be here when I come back.”
The man started to reach for a whiskey bottle, neck first, but something flashed in front of him. Barren’s knife hand sprung out like a viper’s head, cutting the two top buttons neatly from the bartender’s shirt and then whisking his throat. It was a teasing scratch, but not a cut. The buttons rose in the air in slow motion, the man’s lone eye rotating up and then down to follow them.
When the buttons clattered on the bar-top, he looked for the man with the knife. The bar stool was empty, the door already easing shut and cutting off a slice of afternoon light.
The one-eyed ogre-man flipped up the bar partition, walked away from his job that very day, and disappeared from this tale.
Six blocks away, Cadence was late and hurrying. She watched her feet as she quick-stepped up a massive set of stone stairs. She stopped and looked up. Her first impression of Columbia’s Low Library from the outside: Monticello on steroids. It towered up and forward, glooming over all that approached by the twelve immense casements of steps. The doors were massive wooden guardians, fit for a great keep that could withstand a hundred Grendels. She inquired at the door and was quickly redirected by a student. “The working library is the Butler Library. There.” He pointed to another stern edifice across the quad. She scurried over, entered, and stopped cold.
The Reading Room of the Butler Library stretched on and on, its roof soaring up into hazy dimness. She gawked her way to the entrance desk, where an officious-looking student served as minion. His overseer watched from an elevated plinth, half-walled in mahogany and gleaming brass. This man, obviously the head librarian, was thin and bent, long-nosed, with too-long gray hair thinned out on his pate. The whole effect was of a well-dressed, oddball hound dog. He looked impassively down at her over his bifocals, his bony hands resting on the ivory knob of an oversized, dark cane.
Students were coming and going in a stream, navigating through a turnstile activated by electronic ID cards. She approached the desk.
“Can I come in?”
“You a student?” Officious was right, she thought, but well dressed. His nerd-heroic style was straight out of Central Casting.
“No, just a visitor.” She sensed tentacles of red tape creeping toward her as he sighed and pulled out a blank form.
Half an hour later she was in. She walked around the Reading Room, looking back once at the head librarian. He stared down at her and then over his nose to inspect the form she had filled out.
The homeless man from the West End Bar was nowhere to be found.
Then a hand, barely extended from a rumple of coats, beckoned her from the far end of the room. Yes, she saw, that was the man hanging back behind one of the book stacks. Before she even got there he had turned and was disappearing down a long line of overburdened steel shelves. He had a distinctive limp as if dogged by sharp pain. She followed him to an alcove and a heavy oak table, its surface scarred like the back of a long-lived sea turtle.
“Here,” he said, “we can talk.”
She sat, feeling a strange security in the ancient grain and bumpy knotholes in the wood.
“Now you can ask some of your questions, Miss Cadence Goosebumps.”
Good, this was going to save her some time. “Look, until I find some clues about my grandfather, I’m here to get some proofs, to find out the, well, provenance of these documents. So, who exactly are you?”
He replied, rolling his eyes and muttering to himself, “Why have I allowed my indulgence to be so tested?” Then he took the weary breath of the patient saint.
“Very well,” he said. “For reasons I can’t disclose, I can tell you only so much. That being said, in nineteen sixty-eight I was a newly hired teaching assistant here at Columbia. My field, which I was faking, was Marxist literary criticism. Those being the times, I was in high demand. Like any good Marxist, I had come to despise all storybooks and their writers as distractions and opium dealers, respectively. I was offered positions at Princeton and Yale. But, feeling an … uh … urgent need to be outside the U.S. for a bit, and being adept at manipulating the systems of academia, I managed to get a one-semester teaching fellowship at Oxford. Once I got there,” he feigned the world-weary traveler, “I realized the stint was really a glorified go-fer position serving tenured professors. I looked around and grabbed a spot with the most fun guy around …”
“Who?”
“JRRT himself!”
He looked around, as if realizing he was being too explicit and too loud. He hushed his tone and hunched over, “Anyway, I spent six months in his company. That understates it considerably. I learned in a short time an immense amount about some very … obscure things. Then … it was over. I came back here.”
“So you went back to teaching … Marxist theory?”
“It’s … a little more complicated. I brought back some shadows with me. Hell, I was scared. More of that later. In any case, teaching, as in sitting behind a desk, was suddenly irrelevant. The revolution, you see, like the old mole Marx described, was popping up here! So I jumped in feet first, went to the barricades, embraced the vanguard of the movement, and helped shut this place down. Boycotts, marches, riots, the whole schmeer. You don’t remember, child, but that was a glorious time. Along with the tear gas, you could smell change in the air. Within the year, what with the precipitous drop in alumni contributions, that evading arrest thing, and my own refusal to support the system by teaching even one of my classes, I was, to use their term, removed from employment. Bastards. Anyway, that seemed to affect me more than it should, being a revolutionary and all. A kind of malaise took over from there. I ended up living on the street. A vanguard itself in a way, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I guess, but—”
“So, I learned the way of the downtrodden, mastered its perks and shortcuts, figured out how to survive the cold, the dehydration, the looks of disgust. I became used to the lifestyle. It wasn’t the first or last time I morphed my life. They even let me come in here now, as long as I don’t fall asleep. Now even that meager privilege is being questioned, I know it, by the new head librarian.”
He rolled his eyes to give direction. “You saw him, up on that station. I hide in the stacks now.”
“So how did you get to know my grandfather? And where does Tolkien fit in?”
“Charity, my dear, cuts through all distinctions. Your grandfather—an incurable good Samaritan, you should be proud to know—offered me a meal, even held open the door to the West End Bar for me to pass before him. This despite his own meager purse. Do you remember him or know what he looks like?”
“Not really. I was really little, and he didn’t leave behind any real pictures.”
“Ah, a shame, really. Anyway, times being what they were, I accepted. At the table—at the very booth in the West End where we sat the other night—Mr. Tolkien was sitting. ‘You look a wreck!’ he said to me. We all ate and talked.”
Steps echoed down the corridor, heading their way.
“Silence!” he whispered. The steps stopped, then continued. A student, complete with backpack, came around the corner. He stared, bug-eyed, obviously surprised to see two such dissimilar people huddled in conversation. He hurried on, his steps echoing away.
“Now we must hurry to the heart of it. Tolkien was afraid, but as he said, not afraid enough.”
“‘Jess,’ he told your grandfather, ‘As you know well from our discussions these past few days, I am an unexpectedly successful author. I invented languages. I toiled to wrest a history from the barest artifacts of language. But underneath, something beyond and older than me or my father’s father was stirring. It far eclipses my modest tales. It …’”
“Stop just a second. Before this second lecture gets going, tell me at least the simple stuff. What’s your name?”
“They call me Coats on the street. My real name I’ll save for now. Anyway, I remember that, like you have done, your grandfather stopped him there. He said something like ‘Professor, you look, well, flat-out scared!’”
“Then Tolkien sighed and said, ‘Yes, perhaps I delved too deep. There are many forms of good and evil, and there are many things that render our definition of those words irrelevant. I thought evil in my time had grown beyond measure or hope of redemption. I saw its hand when my closest friends were killed during our first month at the Front. I saw it drag its loathsome, dripping form up, not just in Grendel’s dam, but in a million acts of atrocity, until it no longer had a face. And then, as I struggled to explore it in these stories … this I fear you will have trouble understanding … something began to stalk me and demand changes in what I had to say.’”
“Was he really afraid?”
“Yes, and don’t interrupt now. Tolkien was saying ‘Then an … event occurred. A trove of documents came to me unbidden. Some in the form of an Elvish writing that, while superficially similar, was far deeper than those which I had been inventing. Like a pool of true deep water compared to a rain-filled pothole. Elvish, as you know, is a powerful language, of much depth and misdirection. It often whispers to you things which it does not literally say.’”
“He was visibly shaken at this point, and Jess told him to just say what he wanted to say, and to take his time about it.
“Then Tolkien nodded sadly and said, ‘This, Jess, is where you come in.’ He then grabbed your grandfather’s hand and whispered hoarsely, ‘I want you to keep them. These documents. All of them. It is you, traveler, whom I ask for help.’”
“Your grandfather was as startled as I was. He laughed and said it was a preposterous suggestion, but Tolkien was insistent. He said, ‘Many of the stories were not mine to begin with. Take them away, you must! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? These forces beckon me to their service. They urge me to edit away a truth. It has all gotten to be too much for me. I feel like a character in my own books, baffled at the end or just wanting it all to go away. Enough, I’ve told my tale as best I can. Let others pick up the clues where I have left them. Save this!’ And here he drew himself up, closed his bushy eyebrows together like twin hedgehogs, and talked as a man resolute in actions.
“‘There are many kinds of hidden gates’, he said, ‘and for these documents there is a special one. A key. An Elvish ‘Rosetta Stone’ in a way. But it is more. It is the beating heart of this trove. Through its powers I have unlatched this gate. Yet its true power and purpose remain obscure to me. The very use of the key draws this presence, as yet but a shadow, which would rob the world of all these tales! Thus I have resolved to hide this key away. Still and separate and secret. As for the rest of the documents, let them now be swept away with your travels, my Sharpener friend! May they and their key be long separated, and their meeting, if ever, not be an accident!’”
“And that’s pretty much where it was left. Your grandfather chose his own way.”
“What about Tolkien?”
“We’ll get to that later. Now I have to go. I will be back tomorrow. Meet me at the Archives desk. Heed my warnings until then. Good day.”
Struggling to get his balance, he heaved himself up and departed in a hitched, painful flourish, leaving behind a scent of damp coats and body odor that reminded her of a wet dog.
She stayed for a while afterwards, staring at the scars etched across the table’s oaken back. The cracks in it were deep: they ran in long lines that joined together in tight fists of knots, like crossroads. She put her hands on the whorls and closed her eyes. Her grandfather, gone by a year and untold miles, had once vectored to this crossroads, sat at the West End, met these people. He seemed almost … here. Just a few more puzzle pieces and some picture would appear.
Tonight she would concentrate. She would read more of the documents. She would find some new element. Maybe, she would sketch. Something would happen.
She opened her eyes and stood up, weightless as an elf, and almost ran for the library exit.
In no time, Cadence was at the Algonquin. The valise sat empty on the floor. Her bed was covered with documents. She made piles of rough categories: stuff she’d already read or tried to read, then stuff she would look at more carefully. From there she separated stacks into readable English (small), non-readable stuff like Old English and maybe Norse (medium), and a pile of what she thought might be Elvish scripts (large).
The latter included the scrolls, seven of them. They were brittle and resisted unfurling, as if they did not wish to be read. One or two had clever locks on the spindles, which she finally figured out. She regretted that she had not fully organized the documents before. She noticed again that some of them had little marks, not exactly numbers, but small symbols in one corner or another as if made by some monkish archivist. They sure looked like symbols for moon phases. After all, Ara’s journey had been set by a kind of moon-clock that metered her unknown fate. The archival effort was touch and go, as if it had been started but was never completed.
She cleared a spot for one of the scrolls and slowly began to unroll it. It resisted like the others at first, but then its tension relaxed. She gently led the finished hide back to reveal … a wonder. It was inked in perfectly beautiful script, long, elegant traces that led into and among the lines above and below. If ever there existed true Elvish writing, here it was, so precise and composed it seemed to glow in its balance of form.
She unrolled another turn and gasped.
There, in a huge hand that dominated the page was an elaborate runic “A”. She knew instantly that this was the sign of Ara.
Her muse was hovering there, anxious and eager. She took out her sketchpad and began to draw. She had to capture this moment. When it was completed she wrote at the bottom: Discovering Ara’s Rune.
She unrolled the scroll another turn. Tucked inside the curves were separate sheets. They seemed to be a working translation in English, perhaps of this very scroll. The notes spoke haltingly, of Signal Hill and the Dark Lord, and then picked up strength as they recounted more of Ara’s journey:
Beneath a moon that now nightly shed more of its rind, hidden in the deepish woods into which she fled from the Dire Wolves, Ara curled in a rugged burrow in a tree trunk. Taking warmth from a fire barely the size of her own cupped hands, she thought of returning home.
Slow and bitter came the truth. Her home, the small village of Frighten, would be all the more mocked if she straggled back in failure. She heard the shrill cries of other children when they had visited the Great Fair: “Frighten, Frighten, weird and wary.”
As all halflings know, if the truth be straight and fully told (as it is sometimes not, out of politeness), the residents of Frighten were viewed by the rest of their kind as eccentric and “keeping to themselves.” Whatever the positive traits of her own clan— resilience, persistence, and natural inventiveness—they were as nothing against the harsh judgments the residents of Frighten mete out to their own. The failure of her quest would be regarded as a folly, a black mark against them all.
She spent the night watching the darkness, the waning moon spent, and Narcross glowing its red dusk across the land. The bloody hue of night became one with the embered glow of her campfire, the smoke mingling with her doubts. As she fell asleep, she knew that here, at this moment, was her last chance to turn from this uncertain path. Now was her chance to flee toward home.
Dawn came swift and bright, dispensing the few clouds and unfurling a fresh breeze that swept away Ara’s doubts as if they were dandelion tufts. She left to another time the toting of grievances. She had skills to use and clues to find.
Perhaps all’s a journey, but most are as the errands of shopkeepers. Very few, and never by volition or knowledge foretold, slip the slope that funnels them into a quest. Even so, with the road offered, the heart in all its mystery will weed out those unsuited. Ara’s heart was true.
The next evening she hovered at the threshold to an unnamed byway. She was at once fortunate and ill fortuned. A current of air wended down from ragged purple mountains to the south, sending leaves skeltering along the path.
She stood for a long time at this crossroads—primitive tracks spun forth from great well-trudged roads. Roads were now her enemy. Roads like this had taken her away from home, ripped her from her comrades. Before her several loomed now, brooding and silent, save for the saw of the wind. Each path provided only a dumb way, withholding guidance to the itinerant who must choose She studied the four directions. Narcross had not yet risen this night. Soon, flickering points of light saturated the sky, overwhelming the fine lacework of black. One by one, a few died and fell in long arcs. For each one so lost, a thousand more flashed into view. The heavens were alive and breathing.
And moonless. Ara knew that soon it would emerge as a sliver, a battered fingernail eroding nightly until it was gone. From there, it would reemerge and wax swiftly to fullness that would seal her Amon’s fate. She knew that every day meant miles to go to a destination she had never seen, save in dark legend.
This week in Frighten, the great lamps of the Giant Pumpkins would be lit. She knew she would never see them again. She could hear her Mum, wise beyond even the village elders foretelling her destiny, “For some children, the front step, once truly left, can never again be found.”
With that thought, Ara stepped onto the broken and forked track that led away from her home. She walked south, watching a row of thunderheads illume and quiver against the distant mountains before being sucked away into the endless starry night.
Cadence put the manuscripts down. Exhausted, she took the blanket from the closet and flopped on the couch. Tomorrow would be tomorrow.
She met sleep halfway, and in the surreal, liquid seams of that union, her mind concocted a Technicolor dream. Intrepid Professor Tolkien, old and white-haired but all dressed up like some elderly Indiana Jones, and the Fearless Young Heroine, Ara. Armed and steadfast, they were surrounded by a lurching, drooling, moaning multitude of the Dark Lord’s zombie monsters.
The crazy scene froze mid-frame. Heartbeats passed. Any moment Tolkien’s face would mutate to something evil and he would be one of Them. Catchy synth bass notes would punch in, a great multitude of hands would clap in unison, and the Professor would break into the funky song and dance routine of Thriller. It was ordained; he had succumbed to the Dark Side! Ara and all the Heroines would be lost.
The dream fizzled out like a spent sparkler, closing with Ara defiantly sweeping forth her cutlass to confront them all.