Chapter 409: The Crack of Doom
Trapped inside the golden cage, Sauron received the news: the Fellowship had appeared at the foot of Mount Doom, and Frodo, the bearer of the One Ring, was nowhere to be found. In all likelihood, he had already entered the mountain.
The knowledge shattered what remained of Sauron's composure.
The One Ring was bound to his existence at the most fundamental level. If the Ring were destroyed, he would cease to exist. There was no alternative, no contingency, no survival beyond that. So Sauron made his choice: he would break free of the cage even if it cost him everything he had rebuilt.
His body began to expand. Cracks split across the dark, hardened surface of his form, and from each one spilled the reek of annihilation, the smell of something vast and terrible tearing itself apart.
Then it broke.
Like a volcano erupting from within, the dark power inside him exploded outward. The form he had spent so long reclaiming was obliterated in an instant, consumed by the eruption and replaced by a towering wall of destructive fire. Beneath the surface, the suppressed magma answered the blast, surging upward wilder and more violent than before, pouring through every crack and fissure in the shattered earth.
The ground convulsed. The land became scorched ruin.
Hogsmeade, already damaged, was flattened. Not a single building remained standing. Tens of thousands of wizards held the line and cast together, raising barriers and pouring healing magic into the survivors, and because of them, the people of the town endured what the town itself could not. Hogwarts Castle was another matter. Every stone of it had been inscribed with runes and layered with centuries of protective enchantments, and it still stood. But everyone inside felt the shaking, as though Weathertop itself were being torn apart.
At the centre of it all, the earth within a kilometre of where Sauron had stood was simply gone. The explosion had carved a pit a kilometre deep, and within moments it filled with magma, a vast, seething field of molten rock where solid ground had once been.
The golden dome tore apart. Cemya's connection to the earth was severed by force.
Kael took the full brunt of it. The colour drained from his face entirely. His body swayed. He kept his footing through will alone.
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel were no better, each pale and shaking. In the final moments, they had spent the last of their strength throwing everything they had into containing the blast, forcing the explosion to expend itself within that kilometre-wide radius. If they had not, the destruction would have spread for hundreds of miles in every direction. Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Bree: all of it scorched to nothing.
Sauron was free. But freedom had cost him.
The form he had regained was gone again, stripped away by his own explosion, and with it much of his strength. What remained was a wraith, a shape of dark fire and smoke with ancient hatred burning at its core, staring at the people who had taken his body from him a second time. Then it turned and streaked eastward toward Mordor like a falling star.
The Ring. Get back to the Ring. If he could return to Mordor, if he could reclaim the One Ring, his strength and form would restore themselves. And this time, there would be no fatal weakness left to exploit.
"No!"
Kael did not stop to weigh the cost. His body burst apart into a surge of black mist, his Obscurus form expanding as he hurled it after Sauron with everything he had left. In the extremity of the moment, the Obscurus form pushed beyond its usual limits, breaking into flashes of movement from one point to another, crossing the distance in a way almost like Apparition. Within moments, the black mist had overtaken Sauron's wraith.
It swelled. It grew until it blotted out the sky above the fleeing shadow, a vast dark cloud opening like a mouth.
It swallowed Sauron whole.
The sky erupted.
Black mist and dark fire tore at each other above Eriador, each trying to consume the other. The Obscurus drove inward, strangling. The fire burned outward, devouring the darkness. They raged back and forth, and slowly, inevitably, the mist began to shrink.
He's too strong. Even like this, he's too strong.
Kael had known that before he gave chase. He had done it anyway.
The cloud that had once stretched for a kilometre shrank to a hundred metres, then ten, then a mass barely larger than a man. Sauron's fire had burned most of it away. Kael could no longer hold the Obscurus form together. He collapsed back into himself, into a human shape, and fell.
The air rushed past him as he dropped toward the earth below.
Sauron came after him. The wraith descended with all the hatred of ages behind it, intent on finishing him before the others could react.
The sky split.
A bolt of lightning, thick as an ancient tree, crashed down directly onto Sauron and drove him back. Then Thorondor the thunderbird swept past like a stroke of light and caught Kael on his broad back, steady and sure, before he could hit the ground.
Kael lay against the great bird's feathers without moving.
His face was deathly pale, drained of all colour. Blood traced a thin line from the corner of his mouth. Black markings ran across his skin like fractures through stone, writhing slowly with the signature of Sauron's curse and the consuming nature of his dark power. They were still moving. Still spreading. Every inch they claimed brought fresh pain.
It was the worst he had ever been hurt. Without the Obscurus form's capacity to heal itself from within, Sauron's power would have torn him apart entirely.
But he had bought the moment he needed.
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel arrived together, throwing their combined strength around Sauron again before he could cross into Mordor, surrounding him, holding him in place.
Kael reached into his robes and drank the Elixir of Life.
The vast life force contained in that single vial moved through him immediately. The black markings slowed, then retreated. His body began to knit itself back together with a speed that should not have been possible. Within minutes, he was on his feet, unsteady but functional.
He joined the fight.
At the crater's edge, Mount Doom.
Frodo and Sam dragged themselves out through a crack in the rock, gasping.
Frodo looked ill. In the suffocating heat of the volcano's upper reaches, his face had gone the colour of old ash, with an unhealthy flush beneath it from the temperature, and his lips had cracked and dried. His eyes were distant. He was murmuring to himself as he walked, fragments of the same thought repeated in a loop: I have to finish this. I have to finish this.
Inside his dimensional pouch, the One Ring had felt the danger closing in. It was fighting back with everything it had, pouring mental pressure and temptation through every layer of shielding and containment, battering at the walls it could not quite break through.
The pressure had physical weight. Each step Frodo took felt like lifting his foot through deep water. And beneath the pressure ran the constant erosion of the temptation, wearing at his defences hour by hour, leaving a bone-deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with his legs.
Somewhere in the endless dark of the lava tunnels, when he could feel his mind starting to slip, Frodo had pressed the dimensional pouch into Sam's hands while his thoughts were still his own, and told Sam not to stop for him. To go on. To finish it.
Sam had not even considered it.
He had pulled Frodo onto his back and kept climbing.
Now they stood at the rim.
The Crack of Doom was close. Frodo could feel it. Some of the strength that had drained from him over the last hours had seeped back, just enough to stand on his own.
The path to it was still there, a ledge of hardened lava left behind when Sauron had walked this same route in the Second Age to forge the Ring in the fire below. The heat here was extraordinary: the ground itself was hot through the soles of their feet, scorching the bare skin with every step.
Ash and smoke billowed continuously from the crater, turning the air grey and thick. Fragments of rock rained down at intervals from the upper vents. The air tasted of sulphur and burning stone.
Perhaps because of all that, there were no patrols here. Nothing dark had chosen to stand watch at the edge of the volcano's throat.
Frodo and Sam pulled the Invisibility Cloak back over their shoulders anyway. Caution had kept them alive this far, and they were not about to stop now.
They walked forward together, slowly, toward the Crack of Doom.
It lay ahead of them like a wound in the mountain: a vast fissure splitting the rock of the crater floor, and from its depths came the glow of fire and the rolling heat of the earth's own heart.