[POV: Elrond]
After the dream, Elrond found no rest in waking.
Imladris still sang as it always had—water over worn stone, wind threading through pine, the hush of hidden paths. Yet the song had changed. Not in note, not in beauty, but in presence—as if another melody had begun to braid itself beneath it, older than the river, stranger than the stars. One could almost miss it, as one might miss a spider's thread stretched across a doorway in moonlight—until the face brushed it, and the whole body learned to listen.
The child's laughter returned to him when he least expected it.
Not as comfort.
As a blade turned gently within memory.
He would look upon the pale lanterns of Rivendell and recall the gold-lit city that was not of Arda. He would hear the soft feet of Elves in the halls and remember the quiet footfalls in that misted place where no floor could be found. And when he closed his eyes, he saw again the Lady of Lórien—Galadriel—standing in the dream as if she were carved from distant light, and those eyes of hers that had not merely seen.
They had remembered.
Elrond had endured long ages. He had watched shadows gather slowly and then break like storm over mountain. He had learned that doom seldom announced itself with trumpet; it preferred whisper, the small turn of a leaf, the faint shift of air before the snow begins.
So he did what he had done whenever the world shifted by the smallest breadth and something nameless stirred in hidden places:
He sought the counsel of the Lady of the Golden Wood.
Without delay he departed Imladris and took the long road south.
The journey was not arduous for one such as he, yet each league felt weighted, as if the earth itself wished to slow him. Birds watched from branches and did not sing. Leaves moved when there was no wind. At times the light that fell through the canopy seemed thinner than it ought to be, as though the world were holding its breath and rationing brightness.
Even the river-fords felt unwilling. Water slid around stone like a creature that had learned fear.
As he neared Lothlórien, the air changed—not with perfume and green ease, as he had known it, but with a hush like a hand pressed softly over a mouth. The Golden Wood was listening.
At the borders he was met by Celeborn.
Celeborn's welcome was graceful, his manner steady, his voice the voice of an old friend. Yet his serenity had fissures in it, fine as hairline cracks in glass—visible only when the light struck at the proper angle.
"Elrond," he said, and his smile arrived an instant after the name, as though it had been summoned from habit. "How do you fare this day?"
"Well enough," Elrond answered, bowing. "I have come to speak with Lady Galadriel."
At the mention of her name, Celeborn's gaze shifted—briefly—toward the heart of the wood, as though he listened for a sound that did not wish to be heard.
"I fear your journey may find her in silence," Celeborn murmured. "Since yesterday she has remained… withdrawn. Not ill, not weary—only far away, as if burdened by something that cannot be spoken plainly."
Elrond's brow tightened.
Celeborn continued, the words measured, careful, like one laying cloth over a wound. "This morning, when she woke, she found a seed in her hand."
"A seed," Elrond repeated, and the syllables felt strangely heavy.
"Golden," Celeborn said. "Radiant. It bore a warmth that did not belong to any sun I know. She went to her private pavilion and planted it among the living things she tends with care. Since then she has sat there—fountain at her side, greenery around her—watching it as if to leave it alone would be to invite ruin."
Elrond's breath slowed, and a quiet unease settled behind his ribs like a stone placed gently upon the heart.
After a pause he said, "I think I understand the well from which her silence is drawn. Will you guide me to her?"
Celeborn nodded. "Come."
They walked beneath the mallorn trees. Their gold leaves whispered overhead—old, gentle voices speaking in tongues of memory. Elves greeted them as they passed, their faces calm, their eyes keen. Yet even among them Elrond felt something altered: a subtle restraint, as though the Wood itself held its breath, and the Elves had learned to breathe with it.
At length they came upon a stone stairway half-hidden between roots and shadow. Celeborn gestured downward.
"She is below. Follow these steps, and you will find her."
Elrond bowed. "Thank you."
He hesitated. Words rose in him, too many and too uncertain. Celeborn seemed to sense this and set a steady hand upon Elrond's shoulder.
"Do not force what is not yet ready," Celeborn said quietly. "When the shadow becomes clearer, I will understand. For now, speak with my wife. And when you have found some shape of meaning, return."
Elrond nodded, and began his descent.
The air grew cool—yet not with winter's chill. It was the hush of places that have heard sorrow spoken aloud and kept it. It was the coolness of a chapel after the last candle has been extinguished, when the stones remember the prayers.
At the foot of the stairs he found Galadriel seated beside a tranquil pool.
Moonlight lay upon the water. Silver fountains murmured, and the leaves above whispered in the night breeze. Yet it felt as though the garden had been emptied of all lesser sound, leaving only the quiet insistence of her presence.
Her gaze was fixed upon the pool's reflection, yet it did not seem she looked at herself. It was as if she watched a different world ripple beneath the surface.
When she sensed Elrond, she turned.
In her eyes Elrond saw the same weight he carried—only older, deeper, more patient, as if she had been holding it since the first dawn.
"My friend," Elrond asked softly, "did you feel it too—in that place of mist?"
Galadriel did not answer at once. Silence gathered between them like a veil drawn gently across a doorway.
Then, slowly, she spoke.
"You mean the child."
Her voice was quiet, and yet there was a coldness beneath it—measured, edged, as if she spoke with restraint only barely held.
Elrond's throat tightened. "Yes."
"You mean how her laughter," Galadriel continued, "her innocence… her voice—everything but her face—called back my daughter."
The name did not need to be spoken. It fell between them like a stone into deep water.
Elrond shivered—not from cold, but from the precision of her grief.
"When I looked upon her," he said, "it was as if I glimpsed what was lost. Yet I knew it was not your daughter. That light… it did not belong to Arda."
Galadriel nodded once, solemnly.
"No. It was not Celebrían. But the feeling… the likeness… it was undeniable."
She drew a breath as though the air itself were heavy.
"And the seed that came to my hand—look."
She gestured beside the pool.
There, among her careful plants, a sprout had risen.
Golden. Ethereal. Its glow pulsed faintly, calm and steady, as though it carried peace in its veins.
To an Elf, its light felt familiar: the hush of Valinor, the remembrance of the Two Trees, the ache of exile softened by hope.
And yet—
Something else lay beneath.
Alien. Ancient. Not dark, not corrupt—simply other, like a song sung in a tongue the world had never learned. It was as if a new note had been pressed into the Music, not dissonant, not harmonious—unaccounted for.
Elrond took an instinctive half-step back.
"This should not be," he whispered.
Then, sharper—fear breaking through his composure:
"Galadriel… did you send word to the Valar?"
Galadriel met his gaze, unblinking.
"No."
The word was simple. Its meaning was not.
"But," she added, "not long ago Mithrandir sent me word. He spoke of a woman—encountered in the mountains."
Elrond went still.
Galadriel's eyes narrowed slightly, as if she tasted iron in the memory.
"This woman… it is easier to show you than to name. Do not resist."
She rose and placed a hand upon his brow.
And with her ring, she bridged their minds.
The garden fell away.
The world folded inward.
The Shared Memory
Fire.
A forest ablaze.
Orcs laughing, their eyes alive with cruelty. Wargs circling like wolves around a bleeding stag. Thorin, Bilbo, and Gandalf trapped upon a pine like a last, doomed prayer.
Then—
Cold.
Not winter. Not weather.
The cold of an opened grave.
Silver light drifted through smoke.
Within it floated skulls—silver and deep blue—circling in patient paths, unhurried as judgment. One struck an orc. He screamed. His flesh blackened and cracked as if the soul itself had been bitten by frost.
Gandalf's voice rang out like iron:
"Leap. What draws near is Death!"
Eagles descended, and the company fell into claws and salvation.
And then she emerged.
A woman cloaked in night.
A helm like a hollow void where a face should have been.
Brittle gray hair escaping like ash.
Eyes like coagulated blood, glowing from the emptiness.
A staff carved from the heart of a cursed tree—wood that had learned hunger.
A ritual weapon thirsting behind her.
The memory ended.
The garden returned in a rush of fountain-sound and leaf-whisper.
Galadriel withdrew her hand.
They sat in silence, the pool's water speaking softly as if trying to soothe what could not be soothed.
At last Elrond spoke—barely audible.
"That woman… was the child."
Galadriel did not answer with words.
She only nodded.
Time passed—minutes, or ages. Elrond's voice trembled when it returned.
"What cruelty could remake such innocence into that? What wound could forge her into a harbinger?"
Galadriel's breath shuddered.
"Sometimes," she whispered, "I fear what we are capable of doing to one another. What Morgoth did to his kin. The wars we fought. The cruelty Men still carry, even when they call it necessity."
Her voice cracked—only slightly, but enough to betray the truth beneath her composure.
"Whatever happened to her… it was something I cannot gaze upon without grief."
The golden sprout pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
As if it listened.
Galadriel's gaze returned to it, and something in her face tightened—not fear alone, but a kind of reluctant reverence.
"I will try to reach the West," she said. "They must know of this growth."
Elrond looked up. "And if no answer comes?"
Galadriel's lips pressed thin.
"Then we will know," she murmured, "that it is not Laurelin that blooms."
She turned toward the light and spoke as though naming an omen into being, binding it with language the way one binds a wound.
"It is something from beyond the circles of this world."
A breath.
"Its name… is Erdtree."
And softer still, as if confessing to the water:
"That tree… was not born of our world."
[POV: Gandalf]
Many things lay heavy upon Gandalf.
Dol Guldur. The Necromancer whose shadow had not yet shown its full shape. The strange woman in frost. The dream—the child's laughter, the voice that spoke like a rite over broken worlds.
He sat alone, pipe in hand, smoke rising thin and pale.
It did not comfort him.
Not now.
The night around their camp felt too still. Even the small noises of travel—leather settling, embers shifting, the occasional mutter of a dwarf turning in sleep—seemed to avoid certain spaces in the dark, as though there were places the sound did not wish to enter.
Then Bilbo came quickly, almost stumbling, his face pale with wonder and fear mingled.
"Gandalf!"
The wizard looked up.
Bilbo held out something in his palm.
"When I woke," he said, and his voice was too small for what he carried, "this was in my hand."
A golden leaf—shimmering as if it remembered sunlight from a place too holy for mortal feet. It did not glow like flame; it glowed like blessing.
The dwarves, seeing it, quieted. Their shoulders eased. For a moment the burden of their road lightened, as if they walked not toward a dragon but toward home.
Gandalf studied the leaf.
He did not touch it at first.
He only watched it—listened to the air around it.
It made the darkness hesitate.
Not flee.
Hesitate.
"I do not know what it is," he said at last. "But it bears her mark."
He swallowed, and the word that followed had the weight of an unwilling prayer.
"Not the woman of frost—"
His eyes lifted toward the black hills, as if expecting crimson eyes to open in the distance.
"—the child."
Bilbo's fingers curled around the leaf as if around a charm.
"And… is it good?" Bilbo asked. "Is it meant to help us?"
Gandalf did not answer at once.
There are moments when a wise man understands that truth will not soothe. It will only carve.
"At times," Gandalf said finally, "a gift is given not to save you—but to bind you to a road you cannot refuse."
Bilbo stared, his mouth opening without sound. Then he lowered his gaze to the leaf, as though it might whisper its purpose.
They resumed the road at dawn.
Yet Gandalf's thoughts lingered behind them like a shadow.
And as they walked, he spoke to himself, voice low as prayer:
"We will see her again."
A pause—long enough for the wind to move through pine.
"And next time… mercy may not follow."
[POV: Saruman]
In Orthanc, Saruman sat among towers of books higher than any troll's reach, where candlelight trembled and shadows clung to stone as though they had grown roots.
He had slept.
And he had been taken.
He sat now in the aftermath of the dream as one sits after hearing a forbidden hymn—mind still ringing with it, heart unwilling to admit it was moved.
He sifted through old words, older signs—patient, hungry, meticulous.
"No," he murmured, and the word was not denial but certainty. "It was not Laurelin."
That certainty sat in him like a nail.
The dream's tree rose in his mind again—vast, radiant, connecting heaven and earth, carrying a presence too great to be merely beauty.
He found a passage buried in an older text and read it twice, then a third time as if repetition could turn dread into mastery.
Then he leaned back, breath slow.
"That feeling," he whispered, "was like the presence of the Powers… and yet it was not theirs."
His fingers tightened on the page.
"Almost… almost eternal."
A cold smile curved his mouth—not warmth, not joy, but the thin satisfaction of a man who has smelled a door opening.
"Fools cling to trees and songs," he murmured, "while the world decays."
But curiosity gnawed at him like a worm in fruit.
If a power existed beyond Arda's Song—
He would find it.
And if it could be taken—
He would not be the one to hesitate.
[POV: The Mysterious Figure]
Far away, a figure sat alone.
No fire warmed him. No lamp comforted the corners. He held a withered leaf in a gloved hand—darker than Bilbo's, as if scorched by frost and sorrow, as if even grace could be wounded.
Fear still lived in him.
Yet something else lived beneath fear.
Warmth.
A memory of a lullaby buried under ash.
He looked to the horizon and whispered, as if confessing to the night:
"That tree… was not born of our world."
A breath.
"…and yet, it feels like home."
He closed his hand around the leaf.
Not to crush it.
To keep it from vanishing.
[POV: None]
Night fell again.
Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves made camp. The pipe's ember glowed faintly. Bilbo held his leaf close, as if it could keep the mist from his dreams.
They spoke little.
At last Bilbo asked—quiet as a child asking a priest beside a grave:
"Will it come again?"
Gandalf drew smoke and let it out slowly.
"I do not know," he said. "But I do not think it is finished with us."
Sleep came.
And the dream returned.
The Second Descent
Mist everywhere.
Not fog, but absence given shape. No sky. No ground. Only white, curling emptiness—arranged, deliberate, as though prepared.
They stood together again—Gandalf, Bilbo, Galadriel, Elrond, Saruman—waiting, listening.
The silence felt intentional, like a held note.
Then metal clashed.
Not near. Not far.
Within the mist—like a blade struck in a shrine.
And the veils tore.
A man in strange armor stood beneath a bruised sky.
Bronze darkened and ridged like fossilized muscle. A horned helm that erased humanity. A blade vast and ancient, veined like ore dragged from a dead mountain.
Opposite him—the child, now grown.
White hair like snow and starlight. Ruby eyes. A curved blade whose hunger could be smelled.
Its name entered their minds without permission, not as knowledge learned, but as knowledge imposed:
Rivers of Blood.
They fought.
She moved like wind—precise, unreachable.
He struck like a mountain—unyielding, crushing.
Steel met crimson. Crimson met bronze. The air shivered with each impact, as though the dream were a thin glass and the blows rang against it.
At last their blades rested.
The knight spoke, voice heavy with pride and disbelief.
"How far you have come… The girl who once struggled to lift a blade now dares to challenge me—Ordovis, commander of the Crucible Knights."
He laughed softly. There was teasing in it—an old familiarity, like a man speaking to a child he had once steadied.
Then he spoke of Radahn.
A name that landed in the mist like a stone into deep water.
And when the woman—Tiriana—spoke of joining him, when Ordovis teased and then softened, the dreamers witnessed something almost unbearable:
Warmth.
Brief.
Human.
Tiriana's mouth curved as though she had forgotten, for one breath, what it meant to be hunted by destiny. Ordovis's posture eased. His voice lost its edge, and in its place was something like pride, or blessing, or fear disguised as sternness.
Then Tiriana spoke again, quieter.
Not to boast.
Not to threaten.
To confess.
"I am with child."
For a moment, joy lived in the mist.
Ordovis laughed—once, loud, startled, as if the sound had been dragged from him by pure surprise. Tiriana's eyes shone. Not with blood. With light.
And the dreamers—watching from nowhere—felt their hearts tighten.
Because joy, in such a place, felt like standing unarmed before a blade.
The words did not fade when spoken.
They lingered.
For a heartbeat, the mist stilled—as if the dream itself had forgotten how to breathe.
Then—
Resistance.
Far beyond the reach of the scene, something vast recoiled.
Not in anger. Not in wrath.
In refusal.
A pressure rippled through the dream, subtle but undeniable, like a string pulled too far and loosed too suddenly. The air thickened. The silence sharpened.
It felt as though unseen hands had reached into a loom and drawn two threads together that had never been meant to meet.
Galadriel's light wavered, as if brushed by a shadow.
Elrond's breath caught, though he did not know why.
Gandalf felt it as one feels the wrong note in a sacred song—small, precise, dreadful.
This was not meant to be.
Children were not written into this path. Their lives were not counted among the permitted outcomes.
Somewhere beyond worlds and laws, the strands that governed becoming twisted—then strained.
And fate—whatever ruled that distant land—did not yield gently.
It pulled back.
The mist shuddered.
Not to end the vision.
To mark it.
Joy remained.
But beneath it, something had cracked.
And in that crack the dreamers heard—faint, distant, yet unmistakable—the sound of a thread beginning to tear.
They did not yet know what it would cost.
Only that the cost had been named.
And the dream, having shown them the first sweetness, held them a moment longer—cruel as prophecy, tender as a knife.
Then the mist thickened again.
Not lifting.
Not releasing.
As though it meant to lead them onward—step by step—until they had witnessed the price in full.