Disclaimer: If I owned the Lord of the Rings, you would know about it, trust me, here. Since you don't know about it, that must mean I don't own it. Savvy?

A/N: Hello again! I feel tired. Don't ask me why, I'm not sure. Well, we are now getting into the meat of the story. Originally, this chapter and the next chapter were going to be the same, but I had to split them up because I'm longer winded than I realized. The next chapter is prepped and ready to go, so let's see some reviews!

"The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow sharp as swords..." - J.R.R. Tolkien

Borderline

A rider was sent straightaways back to Minas Tirith to inform the King of the terrible new developments, and to report Gandalf's reply to their request for council. Neither message was good, but they were both desperately important, and it was imperative that the king was informed as soon as possible. So off the rider galloped, leaving behind a sopping camp filled with dispirited warriors who now faced a nearly impossible task.

Unlike last time, Ramdur had not left a perfectly clear trail, and only perhaps Legolas owned tracking skills equivalent to Aragorn's. It would have been better to wait for the King and the massive reinforcements he was bound to bring with him, but there simply wasn't time. Nothing good ever came of being captured by evil, blood-sucking bat-people, so not one of them could think of a silver lining to the cloud they were residing under. Leigh didn't even have her faithful sword with her. The clunky thing she had been given as a replacement for the glorious elven blade was a far-cry from Nolemacil, and her hands moodily ached for the familiar hilt that they had grown so accustomed to. She doubted she would even be able to fight correctly with her substitute blade.

Thus, it was not a happy troop that departed in the wee hours of the morning to track down one vampire and one late-teenage girl. It had been agreed by general consensus that it would be unwise to go vampire hunting in the middle of the night, especially when there was no clear trail to follow. So this is why they waited for the first cracks of dawn before leaving the uncertain safety of their camp. The world around them seemed to reflect their mood, and they suddenly found themselves passing beneath more deciduous trees than they had before, and it was like the wet, dreary winters of the northern half of the United States. If you have ever lived there, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Fengel had picked up on his master's mood, and he plodded through the concealing mud with bored disdain. Any beast as faithful to his master as Fengel would feel dispirited by such waves of depression coming from the same. And so the massive, Rohirric warhorse plodded along unhappily and did not bother to smooth his gait to ease the ride or strut for show as his lord bounced along on his back like a sack of grain.

This is not to say that Jack was any happier with the situation. For some reason he had believed that his horse would be able to cheer him up to some degree, but now he found his horse's disposition to be even worse than his own. An especially large drop of water dripped down from an offending tree and splashed on the young minstrel's forehead. Suddenly, as the bead of water rolled down between his eyes and dropped from the tip of his nose, Jack happened to look up and discovered something wonderful.

"Look!" he shouted, stopping without warning in the middle of the road and throwing his arm up into the air to point.

Leigh, who was riding right behind him, and whose horse had suddenly reared, snapped back in reply, "What?"

But Jack was not to be dissuaded and kept pointing up to the canopy like a maddened buffoon.

"There's a trail!" he declared. "A track! There's a way to follow the bat!"

By now practically everyone in the party had their heads tilted up to investigate the validity of the boy's claims. Maylin lowered her lovely eyes to scrutinize her friend with scrupulous annoyance.

"There's nothing up there, Jack," she informed him like he was the most feather-headed fool she had ever met.

"No, no! Look again! That's exactly my point!" Jack insisted, thrusting his finger towards the lacework of branches above. "There are no birds, no animals! There's nothing there!"

Leigh wrinkled her eyebrows together and shook a limp lock of sopping hair out of her face to take a second look. "He's right. There's a strip for as far as I can see where no birds are perched, and I see no squirrels."

"May the Valar be blessed," Legolas breathed. "It's a trail."

.O.O.O.

For the second time in a little over a month, Jaden found herself waking up in a dark, cold, drafty place that practically reeked of evil... in more ways than one. The biggest difference was that there was no mistaking what precisely she was lying on when she woke up. There was no swirling grains from fairly new wood, and no even flooring to baffle her, only the uneven, rough rhythm of cold, hard stones. Wherever she was, it was not a little shack in the woods like her last prison cell. This was some serious stonework that she was lying on, and she somehow suspected that the rest of the place would be equally fortified.

Another thing that was different struck her a moment later as her mind distantly registered the sorry tap of dripping water. She was alone in this room of stone. Last time Leigh had been with her. Granted, she hadn't known that Leigh was with her for most of the time, but the fact remained that she had been there, and they had been captured together. This time she had been captured alone from beside the yellow campfire where her friends stood in morbid shock, and it stood to reason that she was also now alone in that black cell with the dripping water.

With painful sluggishness, the terrifying flight of the previous night (at least she thought it was the previous night) began trickling out of her memory and into her conscious mind. Back before the fateful incident at the fair that had transported the Four to Middle-Earth, Jaden had seen the movie Van Helsing with a few of her friends during a slow sleep over. Dracula did not do justice to the terrors of Tolkien's vampires. As she had watched the light of her friends' camp die into darkness far below, she had kept hurtling upwards with the heavy flaps of bat wings. The black fur they had seen as the suave devil morphed in front of them was not the soft fur of a kitten or the sleek fur of a yapping dog; it was hard and coarse, almost like slender spikes jutting out of the monster's skin. All through the mad, whirling flight the awful stuff had rubbed against her as Ramdur clutched her against him with his talon-clad limbs.

She remembered shrieking, she remembered shrieking a lot, actually, and she honestly wasn't sure whether she was still shrieking at that moment or if the whole nightmare was really in the past. At the time she had thought she would keep shrieking forever as the dark blue and black spears of the forest thrust up at her from below and the beast above her rumbled and roared in triumph. Somewhere along the line she also remembered being sick. Don't laugh. You may laugh after you have felt yourself tumbling through a weightless world, clutched in the arms of a monster that defied the imagination and knew that to escape was to fall up and be impaled upon one of the darkling spears spinning madly around below you. But the laughing had been terrible, and it bounced around inside her skull like the monster was still in extremely close proximity to her.

It did not take her long to surmise that it would be virtually impossible for her to escape whatever fortress she was currently in, and she would be forced to trust to hope that her friends would be able to track the mad demon's flight.

.O.O.O.

How many hours or days passed, Jaden never knew, what she did know was that by the time the door opened, her eyes were so starved of light that even the meager light of the hallway torches nearly blinded her. The moment her shock at the new universe of sight melted away, she was left with a nagging terror concerning what, precisely, had opened the door. Coiled up against the far wall, she worked herself into a state of senseless fear as she watched the open door like a wolf would come stalking around it at any given moment. Her breath panted raggedly through her cracking lips as the straight beam of light remained steady and unchanged by shadows. At last she cautiously unrolled from her fetal position and timidly approached the door that threatened death and doom.

There was no one there, not behind the door or along the long hall that stretched on into oblivion beyond it.

Jaden found herself now standing in the doorway of a long corridor lighted by steady red torches set up at regular intervals along the walls. Not a single door was in sight besides her own down the barren, ominous walls of the two sides, only one matching door that echoed her own stood at the polar opposite of the pathway. It was clearly set up the only destination of the hall, and Jaden felt the chilling sensation of being a rat in a narrow maze with only one exit, the exit that led to a worse maze, far more terrible than the one she was in, or, worse, the crazy scientist that had put her in the maze to begin with. But she had no choice. She was tired, she was hungry, and she would not be crumbling up her dignity to adventure down a bleak passage to a mysterious door, and to risk opening it to see what wonders or terrors lie beyond. Knowing her host, it would probably more along the lines of terrors, but at that point she was too weary to care.

The tread of her feet echoed down the empty hall as she padded towards her only destination. As her feet moved and life came back into her limbs, sense began rushing back into Jaden's head, along with caution. The positives of her situation were few and simple: she was alive, she had not really been tortured as of yet, and she had seen no evil thing thus far. The negatives were too lengthy to list, but chief among them was the fact that she been deliberately starved into desperation, and she knew that whatever nasty little tricks Ramdur had up his sleeve, they would not be beneficial to her in any way, shape, or form. With these things in mind, she measured her steps, drew herself up to her full height, and proceeded forward with wariness. Anyone else might have tried (vainly) to smooth their hair, but that was one of the many advantages with Jaden's hair: it was really hard to mess up, because it always had a messy look to it.

Once she reached the door, Jaden stopped. She listened, she squinted at the unyielding wood, and she even gave the air a testing sniff. A warrior she was not, but nor was she a fool. Everything about this set-up smacked of a trap, and she had no intention of being caught off guard again by the same nasty batty. The moment her fingers touched the metal handle, the door swung inwards, clearing the way for the master's guest.

Door that open by themselves are very common in our world, but for even Jaden to see one in Middle-Earth was unnerving. It meant one of two things: either the vampire was dabbling in the arts of the necromancers, which was likely, considering, or by some means he knew about the sciences of Earth, and had transported or copied them from Jaden's beloved home-land. Neither option is exactly reassuring, especially for one in Jaden's position.

Even as she stepped into the luxurious room beyond, the door performed another odd behavior which was even worse than the one it had already demonstrated. As if sensing that the prey was safely in the cage, it slapped back against the wall and slid back to its previous position with the same side Jaden had seen while walking up the hallway now facing into the room, proving once and for all that there were no hinges involved in its construction.

With the dreadful knowledge that she was now trapped in this new enclosure, Jaden surveyed her surroundings with a wary eye. Everything she saw was finely crafted, and made from the riches materials. Lush carpets had been thrown over the floor, shapely white candles flickered in golden candelabras, red jems glinted in their trappings of various precious metals scattered around the room, and thick tapestries of gory battles long forgotten hung over the walls, as if in denial that there was anything bleak or harsh about the stone hidden behind the furnishings. Despite the warm colors of the room, Jaden felt chilled in the dead apartment. She could feel the icy calmness of air long undisturbed by living breath, and the resulting cold. While the treasures and comforts spoke of exceeding wealth and abundance, the aura of the place reeked of empty death and decay.

Jaden found herself contemplating why vampires always seemed to be associated with red, despite blood. Perhaps they sought to retrieve the warmth that had once flowed in their own veins, before whatever curse, voluntary or otherwise, was set upon them. Perhaps the heat of the colors comforted them. She didn't have long to ponder, for just as she was finishing these thoughts, another, and very unwelcome person strode into the room with all of his usual pomp and arrogance.

As Jaden subconsciously backed away, Ramdur casually flipped the trailing bit of his cloak over his arm and proceeded over to a table laden with rich food that would put Aragorn's grand feasts to shame. The Elves still had the vampire aced, though.

"So quiet this day, Jaden," the vampire clucked as he investigated the food, touching it, weighing it, but never eating it. "I do hope your sleep was well."

"Couldn't tell you," Jaden replied, still keeping her distance.

Ramdur looked up, amused. "You can come closer, you know. I won't bite."

"Forgive me if I don't take you at your word on that one," Jaden retorted.

This time Ramdur openly laughed. "Wit, I didn't expect that from you. That's usually Leigh's department... speaking when she should be silent, getting herself into trouble, not that you haven't seen your own share of adventure," he said easily, like he was just having a normal conversation. "But, honestly, you have no need to fear my bite, Jaden. I would gain nothing by killing you. In fact, I would be set back considerably."

"What is this place?" Jaden leapt in.

"Fairly near where you were camping with your friends," Ramdur replied, bored again and examining a bunch of grapes. "It would have been easier if I had set up my fortress nearer the first breaking point, but that would have put me so very far away from you four, and it isn't that much harder to accomplish the same feat here."

"What feat?"

With a nasty little smirk on his face, the fiend glanced up at the girl before moving on with his inspection of the fruit. "Are you lonely here, Jaden? You seem to be a bit... unfinished without at least one of your friends with you."

"Stop calling me 'Jaden,'" the girl snarled. "You do not know me, and only a few select people are permitted to address me so informally in Middle-Earth."

"Ah, but you didn't answer my question," Ramdur sighed, "Jaden."

"What do you want?!" Jaden shouted. "What twisted scheme of yours could possibly involve me or the other members of the Four? In case you didn't know, we have very little knowledge of future events left."

"Oh, I have no interest in your knowledge of Middle-Earth," Ramdur said dismissively.

"Then what do you want?!"

With a dramatic sigh, the vampire pushed off from the table and strolled to the other side of the room. "At the moment I just wanted to make you happy. You see, I have someone here who you might know, and I thought it might do you some good to see a familiar face."

With that, he swept aside a draping red velvet curtain that Jaden had failed to notice before, and the prophetess found herself almost jogging across the room to see who else Ramdur had gotten his dead hands on. Shock and horror plugged her throat as her eyes bulged at the sight on the bed.

Every member of the Four had left people behind when they were transported to Middle-Earth, and one of those for Jack had been a young cousin who was eternally getting into trouble and hanging around his 'cooler' older cousin, and consequently the other members of the Four. There was a boy lying asleep amid the lavish coverings on the bed, and that boy was Conor, Jack's younger cousin.

If they had been anywhere else, Jaden would have backed slowly away from the slumbering terror and made a run for it; if you knew the little mischief-maker, you'd understand completely. But at the moment the annoying runt was in the hands of an evil and more than slightly crazed mastermind of deception and torment. This did not bode well for anyone involved.

"What did you do to him?" Jaden exclaimed. Mostly this was in concern, but there was definitely a bit of envy tossed in there as well. Not even the kid's parents could get him to sleep.

"Oh, it's nothing serious," Ramdur reassured his target. "He was just doused with a sleeping-drought when he tumbled through. In a few hours he'll be back to his usual self, I'm quite sure. Why? Do you indeed know him?"

"You know very well that I know him, you freak," Jay snarled.

Ramdur smirked and let the curtain fall back into place. "Oh yes, I'd forgotten."

With a raging glare shot in the vampire's direction, Jaden snatched back the drapery and scrutinized the much younger boy for any signs of mistreatment. Apparently he hadn't been with Ramdur for very long; he was completely unscathed... besides the fact that he was completely dead to the world. Jaden's nose twitched in slight disgust as a trail of saliva dripped out of Conor's open mouth. At least the kid didn't know he was in danger... yet.

As she let the curtain fall to, Jaden turned to rage at Ramdur again, only to find him standing by the door which he had entered by.

"Somehow I have caught the drift that if I stay in close proximity to your wrath I may enjoy myself immensely, but that pleasure will come at a price," he commented cheerily. "The door you came through will let you out again, and it will let you come back here any time you wish. The other doors down that corridor are also open now, should you wish to investigate them. It would probably be advisable, though, for you to be present when your small friend wakes. Such a transition can often be a shock as I understand it... but of course you know that already."

Jaden leapt up as Ramdur reached for the doorknob and shouted after him. "How did you bring him here?"

With supreme grace and obvious enjoyment, Ramdur turned back around with his trademark smirk splashed across his face.

"That is for me to know and you to find out."

With that he was gone, and Jaden was left once again alone with her newly compounded doubts and fears.

.O.O.O.

Eventually, Jaden found herself back in her cell/room, still hungry, cold, and now even more worried. She had been tempted to try some of the food, at least the fruit anyways (fruit is GOOD for you), but she had decided in the end that the stuff was probably laced with something or other that would put her at a disadvantage, not that she wasn't already, so she had left the food alone. It was a painful thing to do, but it must be done for the sake of survival. A little voice whispered in the back of her mind that eating was also part of survival, and she squashing it angrily into a back recess in her mind. Second thoughts can sometimes be your worst enemies.

As she sat and stared at the terribly fascinating wall, Jaden felt her self drawn back to her old memories of the life past to reminisce about Conor, the Boy Who Could... and usually did.

They had first met the boy by accident... well, all except for Jack, who lived exactly ten minutes away from Conor and his family. The troop had planned to see a movie that evening, and it just so happened that Conor and his parents were visiting Jack's family. As Jack had opened the door, there had been Conor, practically hanging off of him and by the look on the older boy's face this was not an uncommon experience. The second Conor gathered that his beloved cousin was going to go away and leave him during the visit to go off with his band of older, and thus amazing, friends, he had whined and begged until both his and Jack's parents ordered that the shortling be taken along by the unlucky fellowship. They had originally planned to see the latest action/adventure flick, but the little leech was too young to be taken in to see such violence and 'scary images,' so they wound up seeing another, lesser film. Such a film as they saw is the epitome of why G-rated films tend to be held in low esteem by the older masses. From that day on, Conor bore the brand of trouble upon his brow, and wherever he went, the four friends fled. The problem with this arrangement was that the boy had an uncanny ability to imitate a tick, and nothing could shake him once had spied them.

Not all incidents involving Conor were bad, though. When he grew up, the child would undoubtedly have a strong character, and he might just turn out to be an excellent leader. The problem the Four faced was that he was not yet grown up or a great leader, and he seemed to think that world revolved around the set of friends. Perhaps they weren't always quite fair to him, but the fact that he was extremely annoying at times could not be denied. The fact that he was an only child didn't help, either. He was a little spoiled when it came to having all of the attention, and the lad also tended to think on a bit of a shallow level, which most children do.

All in all, he was the last person Jaden would have expected to see in Middle-Earth, and she had no idea how he could have come there.

.O.O.O.

For the next hour or so, Jaden remained in the shadowed cell, trying to riddle out exactly what Conor's appearance forebode. It could be that he had been sneaking along behind them the entire time they were at the Renaissance festival and had been swept along with them to be transported away by the Nazgul before the rest awoke, but that was highly unlikely. What's more, he had still been dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, highly unusual garb for someone who had spent roughly a year in Middle-Earth. It seemed more likely that, by accident or design, Ramdur had found a way between the two worlds.

The teen sighed and let her head thump back against the cold stone wall of her cell. This was complicated, and it presented a host of problems and possible problems for the Four, not to mention Aragorn and the rest. What if someone else 'tumbled through?' How would the folks back home react to this portal or whatever if they discovered it? What if the Four wanted to go home?

Home... It was a strange thought for Jaden, that she might possibly be able to return to her original place of residence. As time had passed, each and every member of the Four had seemingly given up hope of ever going back, and not all of them wanted to anymore. One or two might have never wanted to go back in the first place. Maylin was married, she would stay, and Leigh was engaged, so it stood to reason that she would be reluctant to leave as well... though she could always use it as leverage to threaten Aragorn to shorten the waiting period. On the other hand, she and Jack had both been deeply impacted, unquestionably, by their adventures and experiences throughout their travels, but would they want to stay in Middle-Earth forever? Obviously they had thought there was no option before, and had thought about the situation differently. But now there was a choice, and she couldn't exactly say that the dream of slipping back into her old life didn't fascinate her. However, she also realized that things could never possibly be like they had before. Not only would at least half of their company be left behind if some of them chose to return, but there was also the fact that she had been irrevocably changed. Nothing would erase the memories of the tortures and joys she had felt as she journeyed as a member of the Ring Quest.

Disturbed by her reflections, Jaden rose laboriously to her feet and trudged out of her melancholy room. The steady drip of water had not desisted, and Jaden was quite sure by this time that its source was causing the terrible cold that chilled the air. Outside the cell, the corridor was lonely and echoed with the sound of her feet and the drip of the water.

When she had last come down the passageway there had only been two doors, one at each end. Now there were quite a few, all standing at depressed attention. Every here and there Jaden would pass one that had a small window with bars blocking it off, but most of the doors were solid, like her own. They were primarily empty as well.

Then, as she was passing one of the many solid doors, Jaden heard a noise.

With a brief, confused frown, she moved sideways until she had her ear pressed against the damp wood. The noise came again. It was a shuffling sort of noise, and Jaden could almost swear that she heard muffled voices as well. Jaden sucked in her breath and placed her hand on the latch. At the moment she couldn't care less who else Ramdur had gotten his ugly claws on, she just cared that she had some real company that was awake, alert, and that she wouldn't have to explain many complicated things to.

Eagerly, she swung open the door, and there before her was a small company of Elves huddled together on the moldy straw of a dungeon.

A/N: I have had people asking when I was going to put in the other new OC's I advertised in the trailer, and I can tell you that you will be introduced to them all within two... maybe three... chapters. Okday? Ai! I am on a MacGyver kick. Yeah, yeah, I'm a geek, I know, but it's so much FUN! Cough well, you know the drill: REVIEW!!! This fic shall be held hostage if you don't! Mwahahahaha! Anywho, say 'Murdoc' if you have read my author's notes, and kudos to you if you know who Murdoc is!

Review replies:

GodisGodandIamnot: Snrk. I totally missed that. It is quite funny, isn't it?