Chapter 404: Sauron's Realisation
Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli formed a loose protective ring around the two Hobbits, keeping Frodo and Sam in the centre. Gollum trotted along with the rope looped around his neck, the other end held firmly by Sam.
The Tower of Cirith Ungol was the last checkpoint before the interior of Mordor, and from it a broad road ran north toward Barad-dûr. Without the Polyjuice Potion, none of them would have dared set foot on that road. They would have been forced to follow Gollum's alternative route, picking their way north along the eastern gorges of the Ephel Dúath, hugging the shadow of the mountains. But in their current forms, they had nothing to fear. They walked onto the road and along it with the unhurried, slouching ease of soldiers who belonged there.
The Tower was garrisoned by several thousand Orcs and Uruk-hai. When Frodo's group arrived, they drew almost no attention at all.
Almost.
The only thing that attracted notice was Gollum, roped and stumbling along behind them.
An Uruk-hai stepped out to block their path. "Who are you lot? What's that little thing?" The words came in the harsh cadence of Black Speech.
Every member of the group went rigid. Legolas and Gimli shifted almost imperceptibly, hands already close to their weapons. Gollum went white with terror, shaking silently on the end of his rope.
Aragorn met the Uruk-hai's gaze with an expression of careful deference, the look of a soldier addressing someone with more authority. His voice came out in a low, guttural rumble. "Patrol unit returning from the outer watch. The creature is a suspect we caught on the road. We're taking it to Barad-dûr for interrogation." He spoke in Black Speech.
The Uruk-hai, bred by Saruman to be stronger and keener than common Orcs, held a higher rank in Mordor's hierarchy than the soldiers around him. He opened his mouth to respond.
Then the wind shifted.
The smell hit him.
His face changed completely. He staggered back, one hand flying up to cover his nose and mouth, eyes watering, his expression contorting with pure revulsion. "Filthy, disgusting Orcs! What in the dark did you crawl through? Get away from me! Get away!" He was already waving them off furiously, retreating as fast as dignity allowed. Even by Mordor's standards, by the standards of creatures who neither washed nor cared, the stench coming off this patrol was something extraordinary.
The other Uruk-hai and Orcs stationed at the Tower reacted the same way. Every one of them took one breath in the group's direction and immediately wanted to be somewhere else. No one attempted a closer inspection. No one asked further questions. They simply gave the newcomers as wide a berth as the road allowed and looked away.
The group walked through the checkpoint without breaking stride and continued north along the road to Mount Doom.
On the plains of Eriador, the battle had now been raging for three days and three nights.
The land for miles around had been ground into ruin by the force of what was being exchanged there. The earth was cracked and scorched, rivers had been flung from their courses, and the air itself felt wrong, charged and heavy with the residue of forces that had no business existing in the same place at once.
Gandalf stood with his staff raised to the sky, calling down lightning from the clouds. A bolt the thickness of an oak trunk cracked downward toward Sauron. Sauron raised his mace and struck it apart, and the thunder of the impact rolled across the broken plain like the sound of a mountain falling.
Elrond looked battered, his robes torn and dark with dirt. His Elven blade had been shattered by Sauron's mace some time in the first day, and he was now fighting with a Sword of Flame that Kael had lent him, pressing forward with every measure of skill and ferocity he possessed.
Glorfindel's radiance had dimmed with exhaustion, but his will had not. He wielded Kael's divine spear Aiglos, matching Sauron blow for blow, and the fire in his eyes had not diminished in three days.
Galadriel fought at range. In her hands was a golden longbow, a gift from the Blue Wizards, a weapon that held the power of absolute accuracy and tremendous striking force. In her hands, it had been pushed to its absolute limit. She drew the string with the ease of someone who had been doing this for thousands of years and loosed silver arrows that blazed with concentrated light, each one locking onto Sauron the moment it left the string. They could not be dodged. However he moved, however he twisted, the arrows tracked him and would find him before they stopped.
Kael channelled the Ring of Earth, Cemya, drawing the golden dome of light outward to shield his companions while simultaneously reaching down through it into the ground beneath the entire battlefield. Stone and soil answered him. Spires of rock tore themselves upward from the earth, grinding and roaring as they erupted toward Sauron in a continuous barrage. The earth shook with it, and with each shaking, more of the broken terrain collapsed and reshaped itself into weapons.
With Cemya on his finger, Kael was the master of the ground they stood on, and he made sure Sauron had nowhere secure to place his feet.
Sauron's monstrous mount had been brought down by one of Galadriel's arrows and swallowed whole when Kael tore a fissure open beneath it. Sauron now stood upon empty air, completely untroubled, as though the ground were irrelevant to him.
He was not under serious pressure. His strength was at its full height, his body restored to him. He had not felt this complete in an age. Yet there was one thing that continued to frustrate him: he could not break through the dome.
The situation had settled into a stalemate that neither side could escape. Kael and the others could not bring Sauron down. Sauron could not break through Cemya's protection to reach them.
What made it particularly maddening was why the dome held. The Ring of Earth's defensive power was formidable in itself, but not unbreakable. The reason it could not be overcome was that Kael had fused it with the earth beneath it, making the two inseparable. Attacking the dome meant attacking the earth of Arda itself. The earth was ancient and vast and had borne the weight of the world since the beginning. Even the Valar could not easily unmake it. And Sauron was not a Vala. He was a Maia, and there were limits to what a Maia could do to the foundations of the world.
He turned his gaze westward and made a decision.
He had come to Eriador to reclaim the One Ring. If he could not break through their defences here, he would set that goal aside for now, go directly to the Ring, seize it, and deal with Kael and the others afterward. With the One Ring in his possession, the Three Rings, Cemya, all of it would eventually come to him.
Beyond that calculation lay something else, something he had not spoken aloud but which was beginning to press at him. His restored strength had been drawn from Morgoth's power, not his own. And the One Ring was bound to his life in the most fundamental possible way. A growing unease had settled somewhere deep in him. He could feel the Ring, but the sense of it was wrong. The connection felt precarious in a way he did not like.
He became shadow and darkness, and he flew west toward Hogwarts.
Every face in the group changed at once. "He's going for Hogwarts!"
Kael transformed into his phoenix form without a pause and vanished in a burst of flame.
The phoenix's flash-travel was faster than Apparition or any Portkey. In almost the same instant, Kael stood at the highest point of Hogwarts Castle, on the tower of Amon Sûl, and looked out at the darkness rushing toward him from the east.
He raised Cemya and called the dome up around him. The golden light expanded outward in every direction, growing until it covered the entire castle and swept down the hillside to encompass Hogsmeade as well.
Sauron, still moving as a vast shadow that blotted out the sky, struck the dome with tremendous force. The dome rang like a bell. Ripples spread across its surface, and the shockwave drove into the earth, making the whole mountain shudder. Stones rolled from the hillsides in cascades. The Black Lake heaved, sending waves crashing across its surface. The residents of Hogsmeade were thrown from their feet, not just by the shaking but by the oppressive weight of Sauron's presence descending over them.
Gandalf, Galadriel, Elrond, and the others arrived by Portkey moments later, gathering around Kael to add their strength to his.
Then Sauron's assault stopped.
"Something is wrong." His voice was low and sharp. "The Ring is not here."
He turned those burning red eyes on Kael and Gandalf, and the fury in them mixed with something that was very close to realisation.
"Where is it? Where have you hidden it? Why can I not feel its presence?"
They gave him nothing. No answer, no reaction. They raised their weapons and their magic together and pressed the attack.
Thorondor the thunderbird climbed into the storm clouds high above and seized control of the weather, drawing the lightning together until it fell in a continuous rain of blazing bolts toward Sauron. The great kraken in the Black Lake below stirred the water into a frenzy, hurling enormous columns of it upward into the sky like vast tentacles reaching for him. And Smaug, still carrying the memory of the wound in his chest, drove himself at Sauron again and poured his hottest dragonfire straight at him.
Sauron let it all come, and then he exploded outward.
What erupted from him was not an attack aimed at any one of them. It was simply force, absolute and total, spreading in every direction at once. Every assault dissolved before it reached him. The thunderbolts, the water columns, the dragonfire: all of it was extinguished in a single moment.
Everything outside the golden dome paid the price. For dozens of miles in every direction, the land was scorched to nothing in an instant. The hills of the North Downs to the north were flattened. The Forest of Chet to the west was reduced to blackened, smoking ruin. Only inside the dome, over Weathertop and Hogsmeade, was there anything left intact.
Sauron looked through the dome at Kael and spoke with the cold precision of someone who had just finished a calculation.
"The Ring was never meant to go west, was it? Valinor was never the destination. All of this was simply a way to draw me here, to keep me occupied in the west while the real plan moved in the other direction." He paused. "The Ring is in the east. You have already carried it into Mordor itself. You mean to bring it to Mount Doom and destroy it."