Chapter 413: The Phoenix Bathes in Fire
The sudden stirring drew every eye.
Aragorn and the others, still leading the allied forces through the ruins of Mordor, saw the signs of another eruption and immediately ordered everyone to withdraw beyond Mount Doom's reach.
Boromir, overseeing Gondor's forces during the clean-up, turned toward the mountain with undisguised unease. "What's happening? Shouldn't Mount Doom have gone quiet after Sauron's death? Why is it erupting again?" He hesitated before asking, "Is… Sauron not truly gone?"
"Don't worry yourself, Boromir." Gandalf shook his head, his gaze on the distant crater where fire was beginning to stir once more. "I have a feeling this has nothing to do with Sauron. And I don't think it's bad news."
He had been searching for Kael for days without result, and Kael had last been seen inside this mountain. The instinct that something here was connected to him was strong.
The volcano built itself up slowly, growing more restless with each passing hour. The magma in the crater churned and boiled, light leaping skyward. The allied army had to fall back further, putting a safe distance between themselves and the mountain.
Only a smaller group remained close: Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas, Gimli, Arwen, Elladan, Elrohir, and others, some on broomsticks, some mounted on Thorondor, Eagles, or winged horses, alongside Gandalf, Elrond, and a number of Hogwarts professors and Aurors. They gathered in the air above Mount Doom and watched.
The mountain grew wilder. The rock shook. The magma surged and leapt like a crimson dragon throwing itself against its prison walls, as though the volcano was spending its last reserves, pouring out everything that remained in one final, total eruption.
Then, just as it seemed ready to blow apart entirely, a clear and beautiful cry rang out from somewhere deep inside.
A great phoenix burst from the crater, trailing fire, rising on enormous wings through the eruption's heart.
It was vast. Seven or eight metres tall, with a wingspan of twenty or thirty metres, close in scale to Thorondor himself or the great Eagles. Its feathers blazed with gold and crimson and shimmered with colours that shifted and changed as it moved, each feather tipped with golden flame. The light it shed was the light of the sun, warm and absolute, pouring outward in every direction.
Its song filled the sky above Mordor.
The song carried something beyond sound. Those who heard it and had kept goodness in their hearts felt it move through them like a second wind: courage returning, hope rising from wherever it had been buried, fear dropping away. Those who had given themselves to darkness, every dark creature still remaining in Mordor's borders, felt the opposite. The sound reached them like a hand closing around something cold and shrivelled inside them, and they fled.
Even Shelob, deep in her tunnels in the Ephel Dúath, felt it. She pressed herself into the furthest corner of her lair and did not come out.
As the phoenix rose and circled, the volcano's violence ebbed.
The eruption simply stopped. The earthfire died down. The magma, still glowing moments before, began to cool and harden at a visible rate, the mountain's temperature dropping as though the phoenix's presence was drawing the heat out of it. At the pace things were changing, the greatest volcano in Middle-earth might be a dead mountain within a few years.
The phoenix wheeled high above Mordor, circling wide across the land. Wherever its fire and light passed, the dark haze that had clung to Mordor for centuries began to break apart. The sky cleared. The perpetual overcast that had smothered this land since before living memory faded away, replaced by open air and the clean light of the sun.
Below, across the scorched and barren earth, something impossible was unfolding. Plants pushed through the blackened soil. Trees rose where nothing had grown for ages. Poisoned rivers ran clear once more. The land, which had been nothing but ash and ruin for longer than most living things could remember, was beginning to live again.
Everyone who witnessed it stood in stunned silence.
Only Gandalf was smiling.
"Kael!" Arwen's voice broke. She was already moving, urging Thorondor toward the phoenix, tears bright in her eyes.
The great phoenix heard her and turned, sweeping toward her with equal urgency. As the distance between them closed, it began to shrink, its vast form drawing inward, and in the instant before they met, it became a man once more, standing in open air with nothing beneath his feet.
Kael stood there, weightless, and opened his arms.
"Arwen. I'm back."
He looked different. Not in any way that was easy to name, but the change was unmistakable. A faint light moved around him, quiet but constant. There was something sacred in his presence now, something clean and immensely powerful that had not been there before. Every movement seemed to resonate with the world around him, a subtle harmony between himself and the fabric of Middle-earth, as though the two had grown closer together. He stood upon nothing, with no spell cast, simply resting in the open air, and it seemed to require no effort at all.
He stepped across to Thorondor's back and drew his wife gently into his arms.
"I'm sorry for making you worry."
Arwen shook her head. She did not ask what had happened during those seven days. Instead, she stepped closer and looked him over carefully, as though needing to see for herself that he was truly here, truly whole. Her fingers brushed lightly against his face, lingering for a moment.
"I thought about you every day," she admitted softly. "The children kept asking when you would return. Elthir tried not to show it, but even he grew restless. Elríen spent half her nights sitting awake by the windows."
(TL NOTE: From now on Elroth is Elríen)
Her voice wavered slightly near the end, but she still smiled through it, warm and relieved and aching all at once. "We missed you terribly."
The change in Kael was immediate and utterly unguarded. The exhaustion in his eyes softened into something painfully tender as he pulled her into his arms, holding her as though he had been waiting seven days just for this.
"I missed you, too," he said quietly against her hair. "All I wanted was to come back to you. To all of you."
He closed his eyes for a brief moment before letting out a slow breath. "Let's go home."
He glanced down at Mordor below. Sauron was gone. What remained could be handled without him.
Once he and Arwen had had their moment, Gandalf rode up on his broomstick, beaming with genuine delight and something close to wonder.
"Congratulations, Kael. I did not expect you to take that step so soon. Power to rival the Maiar, achieved within a single mortal lifetime. There is no achievement like it in all the history of Middle-earth."
"I had help," Kael said, though the joy in him was obvious enough that the modesty was largely ceremonial.
Gandalf's wonder was not exaggerated. In all the long ages since the first Elves and Men had awakened in Middle-earth, the number of beings who had broken free of the soul's limits and crossed into something greater could be counted on one hand.
The first was Eärendil, father of Elrond. A half-Elven mariner, he became the turning point of the First Age: the one who sailed the impossible distance to Valinor and persuaded the Valar to intervene against Morgoth, bringing about the War of Wrath.
In that war, he fought in the skies above the ruin and slew Ancalagon the Black, the mightiest of all dragons, whose fall shattered the towers of Thangorodrim and decided the outcome of the war. Afterward, he sailed the heavens with a Silmaril bound upon his brow, his ship Vingilot hallowed, becoming the Star of Hope, Eärendil's Star, shining for all who needed it.
The second was Glorfindel, Lord of the House of the Golden Flower in Gondolin. When Gondolin fell, Glorfindel fought a Balrog alone in the mountain passes while the survivors fled, dying to buy them the time they needed. The sacrifice was of such worth that the Valar granted him mercy and rebirth, and the power restored to him upon his return to the world stood on the level of a Maia. He remained the only Elf ever permitted to return to Middle-earth after receiving the gift of rebirth.
Both had been Elves, with the long ages of their kind behind them, and even for them the crossing came as a singular moment after lifetimes of living.
Kael had done it in decades.
Even Elrond and Galadriel, two of the greatest Elves alive, had not reached that threshold. Galadriel, especially, the mightiest Elf in Middle-earth, had come close, closer than any other, but had never quite crossed over.
As of today, Kael stood at the peak of power in all of Middle-earth.