Chapter 411: The Balrog of Mount Doom
The Eye of Sauron atop Barad-dûr watched. In the west, Sauron himself watched, still held in place by Kael and the others. Both of them saw the One Ring slip from Frodo's hand and begin to fall, and in both of them something fractured. Their eyes blazed with terror and disbelief and rage.
"NO!"
The Ring tumbled through the air, and even in freefall it fought. Its mental pull surged to its absolute peak, as though it too refused to accept the end, reaching out in one last desperate effort to find a hand that would catch it.
Frodo and Sam watched it drop, waiting for the fire and magma below to take it.
Then a dark shape flashed past them from behind, leaping over the edge without hesitation, snatching the Ring out of the air in midfall.
"Precious! My precious!"
Gollum clutched the Ring to his chest with both hands, his face split into a look of wild, rapturous joy, completely indifferent to the fact that he was falling. He held on and did not let go.
Frodo and Sam stared in stunned silence. Neither of them had foreseen this. They had not expected Gollum to have broken free of Aragorn's Petrificus Totalus so quickly, and they certainly had not expected him to navigate Mount Doom, crawling through an army of Mordor's searchers, and somehow reach the Crack of Doom at the very last moment.
Now he was falling with the Ring, and there was nothing to be done. They watched, feeling something complicated and heavy, and said nothing.
But the Ring did not reach the magma.
A tongue of fire shot up from below and coiled around Gollum before he could fall another foot. The heat was beyond anything living flesh could endure. Gollum's expression never changed, still that look of desperate, possessive joy, and then he was ash, and then he was nothing, torn apart in an instant. Only the Ring remained, caught in the coil of fire, lifted upward.
The fire did not melt it. Instead, the Ring blazed as though the flames were feeding it, the inscription on its band burning bright and clear.
The magma surged.
A Balrog rose from it.
Horned and vast, its entire body wrapped in fire, it heaved itself up from the molten rock below. Its fire-whip lashed behind it like a living tongue of flame. It had been sleeping in the depths of Mount Doom, and it was far more powerful than the one that had dwelt beneath Moria.
The whip drew back. The One Ring dropped into the Balrog's open palm.
Frodo and Sam looked down at it with horror on their faces.
For Frodo, the horror was accompanied by a despair so deep it felt like a physical blow. They had come so far. They had been so close. In the very last moment, at the very last step, this.
Sam grabbed Frodo's arm and pulled him back, fast, before he could do something desperate.
This creature was beyond anything they had faced. The pressure rolling off it and the sheer heat it radiated were already past what they could withstand just from where they were standing.
On the battlefield west of the Misty Mountains, the laughter that tore from Sauron was enormous and savage with relief.
"Your plan has failed!" He turned his burning gaze on Kael and the others, triumphant. "You carried the Ring all the way to Mount Doom, and what good did it do you? There is a Balrog sleeping within that mountain. The Ring has returned to me."
It had not always been there. Over decades, Sauron had sacrificed countless human lives and souls to Morgoth, and in return had received more than restored form and strength: Morgoth had told him of a Balrog still sleeping deep beneath the earth, one of the few who had survived the ancient defeat and fled into the darkness below.
The Balrog of Moria had been awakened by accident when the Dwarves dug too deep in search of mithril, and the result had destroyed Khazad-dûm. The Balrog of Mount Doom had been found deliberately, guided there by Morgoth's knowledge and brought to the volcano to dwell within its fires.
Their arrangement was not one of master and servant. The Balrog was an ally, not a subordinate. It would not take orders from Sauron. What they shared was mutual benefit: Sauron needed the Balrog to guard Mount Doom, and the Balrog drew upon the volcano's primordial earthfire to restore its own strength.
The faces of Kael, Gandalf, Elrond, and the others darkened.
Kael did not hesitate. He told Gandalf and the others to hold Sauron for as long as they could, felt for the mark he had left on Frodo, and transformed.
The phoenix vanished in a burst of flame.
It appeared above the Crack of Doom in the same instant.
"Lord Kael!" The relief and hope on Frodo and Sam's faces were immediate.
There was no time to speak. Two phoenix feathers fell from Kael's wings as he swept past, drifting precisely to where Frodo and Sam stood. Then he folded his wings and dove straight at the Balrog below.
The moment they touched the feathers, Frodo and Sam were pulled away, transported instantly out of the Crack of Doom.
The Balrog had seen the phoenix coming. It snarled and swung the fire-whip upward.
Kael twisted clear, then answered with phoenix fire. Golden flames landed across the Balrog's body, sacred fire meeting corrupt, and the Balrog felt it: it flinched and roared, genuinely pained.
But this was Mordor. This was Mount Doom, the source of the dark power that sustained everything here. The primordial earthfire of the volcano fed the Balrog constantly, an unending supply of raw strength, and that same environment pressed against Kael's phoenix fire from every direction, eroding it, eating into his life force with every passing moment.
The golden flames died. The Balrog shook them off and erupted, its fire filling the entire crater and surrounding Kael completely.
A candle in the dark. That was what he was here. One point of light encircled by endless dark fire, slowly closing in.
He could feel the dark power consuming his vitality. He could feel the fire wearing away at his phoenix form. He understood the situation clearly: he could not survive long in this environment, and a prolonged fight would only end one way.
The Ring. Get the Ring into the magma. Nothing else matters.
His gaze locked onto the golden band in the Balrog's hand. He made his decision, abandoned his phoenix form, and dropped.
Human again, he had no immunity to flame. The Balrog's fire struck him at once. The alchemical defensive items layered across his body began to crack and shatter one after another beneath the heat, unable to endure.
I am going to burn to death.
He kept moving anyway. Fighting through the agony of the flames, he gathered every remaining shred of magic and poured it all into Cemya. The golden dome burst outward, encasing the Balrog completely, and Kael hurled his weight downward, forcing the dome toward the magma with everything he had, trying to drive the creature beneath the surface.
The Balrog's strength was close to Sauron's own, and here, in the heart of its own domain, it was greater still. Kael had no real hope of killing it. He only needed the Ring to touch the magma.
The Balrog understood his intent. It stood on the surface of the molten rock and drew on the mountain, pulling the primordial earthfire up through its feet, feeding it into itself until it had grown into something like a giant of flame, and used that mass to resist the dome pressing down on it. It was not moving.
Inside Mount Doom, Cemya could not connect to the earth. The ground itself was saturated with Sauron's dark power, twisted beyond recognition, and the Ring of Earth could draw nothing from it. Kael was running entirely on his own reserves, and those reserves were being eaten away even as he spent them.
The Balrog was gaining ground.
It condensed a great sword from its own fire and began striking the dome from below, each blow heavier than the last, coming faster as the balance shifted.
Then Galadriel's voice spoke directly into his mind.
"Kael. Sauron has broken free. He is returning to Mordor."
The words hit him like cold water.
If Sauron reached Mordor, everything they had done would be finished. Every sacrifice, every gamble, every life spent on this plan, all of it undone the moment he crossed the border.
No. Not now. Not this close.
He looked down at the Balrog still holding its ground below him, felt the approach of Sauron somewhere to the west, and breathed in slowly.
He stopped trying to force the Balrog down.
Instead, he turned inward, wrung out every last drop of magic he had left, and drove it into Cemya with everything he could give.