Chapter 412: The Destruction of the One Ring
The Ring of Earth, Cemya, released a torrent of light that burst upward through the crater and into the sky, cutting through the black clouds above Mount Doom, bathing that dark and ancient evil in a blaze of golden radiance.
Across the mountain, every dark creature felt the tremors begin. The ground beneath their feet shook, and it was getting worse.
Wargs, werewolves, and great spiders panicked immediately, scrambling and clawing their way down the slopes. Giant bats and crebain took to the air, fleeing outward as fast as their wings could carry them.
Only the Orcs were slow enough to hesitate. One of them looked down at its feet, then back up, its expression shifting from confusion to terror. "Is the volcano erupting?"
Nobody answered. Every creature on the mountain had already felt whatever was building inside, and every one of them was running. None of them wanted to find out what would happen if they stayed.
Inside the mountain, Kael was spending the last of himself.
He had stopped trying to force the Balrog down into the magma. Instead, he turned Cemya's power outward and let it reach into the mountain itself, into the rock and weight of the entire structure of Mount Doom, and began to shake it.
The mountain responded. Boulders cracked loose from above and rained down into the crater. The molten rock that had lain in a sullen, churning mass far below suddenly became something else entirely, something vast and violent waking from a long sleep.
The Balrog felt it. It roared with alarm and turned toward the crater's opening, scrambling to get out.
Kael blocked it.
"You're not leaving." His face was bloodless, his voice barely above a rasp, his robes hanging from him in scorched tatters, his skin burned raw in a dozen places. But the force in him had not gone out. He pushed Cemya to its absolute limit and beyond, spending everything that remained without counting the cost.
The crater walls gave way.
With a sound that went through the chest rather than the ears, the rim of Mount Doom collapsed inward. Thousands of tons of rock came down into the volcano's throat, carrying enormous force, crashing and grinding toward the depths below.
The Balrog scrambled desperately, searching for a direction to run. There was none. A falling boulder caught it and drove it down.
Kael had nothing left to hold himself up with. He fell.
In the last moment before he dropped, he reached out and seized the Balrog, ignoring the fire burning through his hands, and called the Sword of Flame into his grip. He drove it into the Balrog's chest. Then they fell together, into the magma and the earthfire at the heart of the mountain.
The collapsing rock came down behind them and sealed the opening shut.
"NO!"
Sauron's voice, somewhere over Mordor, was full of terror and despair and helpless fury.
The Eye of Sauron atop Barad-dûr flickered. Once. Twice. Then it went dark and did not come back.
One by one, across every part of Middle-earth, the Nazgûl came apart. Their shadowy forms dissolved in silent anguish, and the Rings they bore were emptied of power, falling dead and lifeless from vanished hands. Mere rings of metal now. Nothing more.
Sauron's wraith, hovering over Mordor, twisted and contorted above the land he had ruled for so long. Then it detonated.
The force of it swept across all of Mordor. Every structure Sauron had built, Barad-dûr and every dark tower and fortress within his borders, was levelled in an instant. The black clouds that had blanketed Mordor for a thousand years were torn apart by the shockwave.
For the first time in an age, starlight and moonlight fell on the land of Mordor.
Mount Doom, its heart collapsed and sealed, shuddered in a long silence.
Then it erupted.
Not the way it had erupted before. This was something it had been building toward for an age. Fire and molten rock shot into the sky and fell back like meteors, like the mountain was throwing its own guts outward. Any Orc, warg, or Troll that had not already fled was buried under it. The lava poured from the broken flanks of the mountain in rivers of red, flowing over the scorched plains of Gorgoroth, dissolving stone and ash alike wherever it went.
Nothing that remained in its path survived.
At the foot of the mountain, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli had still been fighting when the Nazgûl simply ceased to exist around them. The three of them looked at each other, and then they looked at the mountain, and understood. They triggered their Portkeys without hesitation and were gone.
The Portkeys brought them to the garden of Hogwarts Castle.
They landed almost on top of Frodo and Sam, who had arrived moments earlier by phoenix feather. Boromir, Merry, and Pippin were already there waiting.
Aragorn went straight to Frodo. "Did you do it? Did the Ring go into the fire?"
Frodo shook his head slowly. "We dropped it. But there was a Balrog inside the mountain. It caught the Ring before it could fall into the magma." His voice was strained, and worry was written across his face. "Lord Kael arrived in time and sent us back with his feathers. He stayed behind to fight it himself. I don't know what happened after that."
He looked up. "Do you think he succeeded? If the Ring went back to Sauron..."
Aragorn's expression had already shifted from relief to certainty. "The Nazgûl vanished right before we left. All of them, at once. And the mountain erupted." He shook his head, something close to wonder in his voice. "That could only mean one thing. Lord Kael succeeded. The Nazgûl don't just disappear unless the Ring is destroyed."
Frodo's breath came out in a rush. "Then it's over. It's really over."
The others felt it too: that sudden lightness, the absence of a weight they had been carrying for so long they had stopped noticing it.
Meanwhile, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel had been watching with deep unease ever since Sauron broke free and fled eastward. Galadriel had reached across the distance and spoken directly into Kael's mind, warning him, hoping he could finish it before Sauron arrived.
Then, without warning, the Three Rings went quiet.
Their power simply ceased. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel each felt it in the same instant: a strange stillness where there had always been a presence. They looked at one another in startled silence, and then that silence turned to joy.
The Three Rings had been forged using the craft Sauron taught Celebrimbor, and at their root they were bound to the One Ring. Their power had always been constrained by it. And there was only one thing that could make them fall silent like this.
The One Ring had been destroyed.
With it, Sauron was gone. The great shadow that had lain across Middle-earth for so long had finally lifted.
They returned to Hogwarts and waited for Kael.
A day passed. Then another. He did not return.
Galadriel tried to reach him through thought. Only silence answered her. Others tried as well. The result was the same. No one could find him.
Arwen left her children in Galadriel's care and rode north on Thorondor with Gandalf beside her, toward Mordor. She and Kael were bound at the soul level, and though she could not tell what state he was in, she knew with certainty that he was alive. She refused to believe otherwise.
She searched the slopes of the still-erupting mountain for one day. Then two. Then three, four, five, and six. She found nothing. Still, she kept searching. Gandalf remained with her, and he sent word to the Eagles as well, asking them to search.
While the search continued, Elrond and Glorfindel had not been idle. They gathered an alliance: Elven armies from Rivendell, Lothlórien, and Mirkwood; the armies of Men from Gondor and Rohan; Dwarven forces from the Lonely Mountain, Moria, and the Iron Hills; and the Aurors of Hogwarts. Together they swept through the Morannon and into Mordor, and they did not stop until every Orc, Uruk-hai, Troll, warg, Dark sorcerer, and corrupted creature that remained had been hunted down and destroyed.
Mordor was being scoured clean.
The eruption slowed. Lava cooled and hardened. A quiet settled over the mountain, the quiet of something spent, something that had burned through everything it had. Those who understood such things could feel it: Mount Doom was dying. Given a few centuries, it would become nothing more than dead rock.
With the eruption finally subdued, Gandalf and the others were at last able to approach the crater.
They were certain Kael was somewhere within the mountain. They were equally certain he was alive. Yet the silence from him made no sense, and the longer it dragged on, the deeper their unease grew.
On the seventh day, just as the mountain had finally fallen still, it suddenly stirred once more.