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Mount Doom was where it all began, thousands of years ago. Mount Doom was where it ended, too.
“Precious, precious, precious!” Gollum cried. “My Precious! O my Precious!” And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wail “Precious”, and he was gone.
Sauron was defeated, Gandalf came to rescue Frodo and Sam, and when Aragorn was crowned king, the Third Age came to an end. With all the festivities going on, no one seemed to notice that Frodo did not participate with all his heart. No one seemed to notice that his eyes were dull and that the fire once shining through them was gone.Frodo himself tried to forget the aching pain in his heart. He should be happy to be alive, right? Many had given their lives for the greater good and many had suffered under the reign of the Dark Lord. He should be grateful for everyone that helped him and saved him in the end. And yet, while he was happy to have destroyed the Great Evil in Middle-Earth, he mourned for what he’d lost. The prize it’d cost him.To observing eyes, Frodo looked like his normal self. When he was asked why he went to bed early, he would answer that his wounds were troubling him. The excuse worked well with his friends and even Aragorn believed him. It was not a lie that his wounds had been hurting ever since he got stabbed with the Morgul blade at the Weathertop. However, this was not the reason for the pain in Frodo’s heart and the guilt on his mind. He had fooled all of them.“I could not have destroyed the ring”Not only was it impossible for him to destroy the ring, he also never planned on it. The One was not an object, no. It was a consciousness. The ring lived, it had a mind, feelings and thoughts. Frodo had known from the beginning. The One revealed himself and along their journey he told Frodo everything he’s seen and every secret that was his to tell. While Frodo learned a lot through these things, there was one secret particularly outstanding. Knowledge that changed it all.Forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. Forged with magic. Returning the ring to the fires had ended Sauron. It had not destroyed the ring. The One was forged to rule. One ring to rule them all. The ring cannot be destroyed.So Frodo was desperate. He did everything that was asked of him. He gave everything. And still, he had to pay a prize. A prize so great that he was not sure if he could continue living with it. The ring was alive, yes. It was also out of reach for Frodo. For the ring now lived in the fires and the fires were the one place Frodo could not survive.Ultimately, he decided to go back to the Shire and try to live the life he had always wanted. He tried to be happy again and forced himself not to think about what had happened. He busied himself with simple tasks and it was in all this that he forget he had not been alone with Sam for the last steps of his journey. He forgot about the third being that accompanied him a great deal of the way. A being that had lived with the ring for hundreds of years. A being that absorbed a huge part of the ring’s magic. Deep inside the fires of Mt Doom, a shadow began crawling.
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The first thing he felt was joy. Mere seconds after, he was engulfed in pain. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t think. It was out of instinct that he tried to reach for something, anything, that could save him. But there was nothing for him to hold on to.In his haze, he accidently opened his fist and it was too late. The ring slipped through his fingers and no matter how desperately he tried to grab it again, he couldn’t reach it anymore. The lava took his precious away from him. He saw it floating in the stream, ever-glistening in the light of the fires burning in the depths of the mountain. Always flawless, even after thousands of years. It made his eyes shine with tears as he thought of the ring’s perfection. He watched it float away until he could no longer see it. And only then, as the mountain exploded, did he let the darkness take him over. Hours turned into days and days turned into weeks and time moved on. There was no longer a shadow cast upon Mordor and Middle-Earth thrived under its new rulers. As weeks turned into months, the world slowly started to forget what had happened. Of course there were a few who mourned what they’d lost and some who looked back and were proud to have helped free the people from Sauron and his henchmen. It was in this time that he woke and returned from the darkness. Deep inside the fires he could suddenly move again. As he began crawling in the flames he felt no pain. He could feel the wind roaring through the tunnels and the heat of the fires burning beside him but they didn’t harm him. They couldn’t. Fire and wind cannot hurt a shadow. For that was all he was. No longer flesh, no longer bone. A mere shadow.When he looked around he saw that he was in a cave. Dark stone was surrounding him and through a crack in the wall he observed the lava stream underneath him. He was so entranced in it that at first he didn’t notice the small disruption in the perfect stream. As soon as he did he felt faint. Suddenly he understood. Understood what the ring had been telling him, understood what it meant for him.Inside a dark cave deep inside Mount Doom, Gollum wanted to die. And in this same instant, he realised that he was bound to live.Finally he knew why Sauron had been the way he’d been. He knew why Frodo didn’t want to give the ring up. Knew why he himself was so incredibly happy when he had gained back the One. When Gollum came to think of it, it was just so obvious. The ring binds people to itself and when he feels a certain connection, he never lets go. Gollum lived with the ring for 500 years, he thought he knew everything about it and its story. Never in his life had been more wrong. But as he now saw the ring he understood.Throughout its life, there were three beings the One engaged with. The first was Sauron, its creator. Sauron made the ring powerful and in his might he came to love it. He pledged himself to him and worked a spell to bind his life to the existence of the ring. What Sauron didn’t know, was that the ring would not be destroyed if it were to be returned to Mount Doom. So the Dark Lord bound his life to the moment when the One would reunite with the flames in which it had once been forged. Sauron loved the ring, and the ring destroyed him gleefully.The second being the One engaged with was Gollum himself. It revealed many of its secrets but learned throughout the years that it was not love coming from Gollum. It was obsession. The ring decided to leave him after half a millennium because it couldn’t bear the thought of being a possession for the rest of eternity. But it was already too late. Gollum had been living with the ring for far too long to come out of it unchanged. Gollum craved the ring, and the ring condemned him gleefully.The third being the One engaged with was Frodo. Frodo didn’t crave the ring. He didn’t want to possess the ring. He didn’t want the ring. And yet, as the years passed by, he started to love the ring. The ring looked into his mind and found the love to be genuine. So it loved Frodo back. And when Frodo offered to give up his one true love for the sake of thousands, the ring knew that he had made his choice correctly. And it drowned in despair. Frodo loved the ring, and the ring loved him back. He loved the ring, and the ring was lost to him forever. So Gollum knew that he was screwed. He couldn’t die and there was no other way for him to escape the One’s power. He was scared. Scared and helpless because he knew that there was no way to escape the ring’s claws. With effort Gollum looked away from the stream and the treasure it bore, knowing that he was already involved in a plan he wanted to be no part of. A plan to reunite one love with another.