Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien

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.