AUTHOR'S NOTE. On the Far Shore is intended to be the first part in a series following The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. If you're looking for major LotR characters or a tenth-walker fic, you won't find it here. Some content of The Silmarillion will be altered for the sake of the story, and if you haven't read it, that's completely fine! Please enjoy this slightly unconventional, tongue-in-cheek "girl falls into Middle Earth" story. Disclaimer: the cover is edited from a photo from LOONA's album "[++]". Content warning: major character death and violence.

CHAPTER ONE.

You know isekai, right? It's a genre in Japanese media. MC dies, gets reincarnated in the beautiful body of the heroine in her favorite novel, knows the outcome, changes the storyline, gets the man. It's a story that's been written over and over and over again. She dies. She wakes up in the enchanted otherworld of her dreams. She falls for the male lead. They live happily ever after.

It would never happen. But a girl can hope for the best, right?

My name is Jolene, and if this makes your head hurt, consider yourself lucky. I was the one that died.

All things considered, it was a beautiful morning. Birds, as they tend to be, were chirping loud in the trees - huge blackjack oaks and sycamores - brave enough to alight on branches near my head as I walked by. I was hiking with my friend Amy. It had been her idea to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to scale the mountains near Cleveland - the backcountry town that was a little more than a church and a post office - where she lived.

But now she was lagging behind. When I turned to look at her, she was taking off her cap, re-tying her blonde hair into a ponytail. Amy was cute - snub-nosed, big smile, covered in freckles over her face and shoulders. We spent all of our time outdoors as kids and teenagers. It was our last summer before college, and I knew she wanted to spend the quality time with me before I went to Boston and she went to USC.

I shaded my eyes, waving her forward. "Come on! We're almost at the summit." My own smile peeked past the shadow provided by my baseball cap. Ragged and worn, I could already feel the sun warming my scalp through it. "You don't feel the burn if you keep pushing. It's physics. Newton's first law... or something."

"I don't think that's what Newton meant," Amy replied, her long stride catching up to me. She had the privilege of a tall frame and faster gait. I, standing at a very proud five-foot-one, had to struggle to overtake her. The blazed trail, marked only by a yellow diamond stuck haphazardly to a tree here and there, wound up the mountain face. Steep, but not so much that I was huffing and puffing by the time we reached the overlook.

It is a breathtaking view - I'd give it that, even at this ungodly hour. My wristwatch gives me a time of 9:41 AM - over two hours since we'd started our hike, and we'd be back in time for lunch. Still, the sun was bright, reflecting off of the leafy green of the trees and giving me a headache. Spring was always Amy's favorite time of year. I preferred the allure of pumpkin patches, apple cider, and Christmas on the distant horizon. But she was my best friend and it made me happy to see the smile on her face as she stretched in the warm glow of the sun.

I turned my eyes back to the valley below. Farmland and forest. If you lived on the east coast for long enough, it was something you'd get tired of seeing. But from this height, I kind of liked it. "Mm," I mumbled, resting my elbows against the safety rail. Erosion had caused the posts to tilt precariously in the dirt. It was close to the edge - maybe a little too close for comfort - but it was something I either didn't notice or didn't really care about. "I can kind of see why you like getting up early. It's beautiful."

Amy came up to stand beside me, though she leaned on her trekking pole instead of the railing. "Yeah? Didn't you call me an idiot, like, twenty minutes ago for dragging you up here?"

I laughed. "Yes, and I abscond my sins. Hand me the water, will you?" The back of my neck prickled in the wind, but I brushed it off as stray hairs that had escaped my ponytail. I was never really good at noticing things. Maybe if I had...

No, I doubt it would have changed the outcome. What's fated is fated. May Varda only know...

The bottle crashed from Amy's hand onto the ground. She had a look of shock and fear on her face. Not directed at me, but at something on my hairline. I said, quite stupidly, "What?"

"Sp-spi..spider, a spider," Amy gasped, and I felt a long leg stick to my forehead, and then move across my vision.

Fuck, it was big.

I screamed. She screamed. My arms windmilled on their own, which didn't help at all in removing the offender from my person, and only succeeded in letting me trip over my own two feet.

The spider scrambled down my cheek. I slapped at it. Legs and all, it was easily the size of my palm - and hopefully not venomous, because we were both pissed off.

And when my back tilts over the safety railing, I realized that was a bad idea.

Amy's face was a mix of shock and horror, her freckles standing out in superb definition. It was unforgettable, terrible. Burned into my memory. I reached for her.

Releasing itself on a string of its own web, the spider leapt off my face, floating across my arm.

I wasn't so lucky.

Branches scratched at my hair, my cheeks, my forearms, as I fell. It didn't hurt. Adrenaline pumped through my veins. The ground was far beneath me, and the trees, tall and protruding at odd angles, did little to slow my fall. Amy's face became a pale white dot and then the cliff face obscured my vision of her. I was still falling.

Horrifically, the only thing I could think of was Tom Petty, the one singer my tiny Taiwanese mother had on repeat. His voice bounced around my head: and I'm a bad boy, 'cause I don't even miss her, I'm a bad boy for breaking her heart.. and I'm free, free fallin'...

I don't remember hitting the ground.

Death is painful. Zero out of ten, horrible experience. Wouldn't bring the kids. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I felt hot and cold at the same time, vision watery, sucking in breath after breath in increasingly slow movements. I couldn't feel anything in my body, like bones or muscle - which I guess was a good thing. I could only imagine they were all broken.

I tasted blood. It wasn't good. Thick and metallic. Filling up my mouth along with my swollen tongue. It would be better to just sleep it off, right? Rest until Amy gets here with help. Sleeping sounded good.

My heart stopped somewhere around thirty seconds after hitting the ground. I drifted off just moments before. Later, the coroner's office would rule cause of death as myocardial contusion: bruising and damaging of the heart from my broken ribs, exacerbated by punctured lungs. It didn't take long for it to kill me, which I hoped would come as a comfort to Amy or my parents.

There was nothing you could've done.

Except maybe told me to move away from the edge a little earlier.

But no, I didn't blame Amy. In my haze of post-death - my brain swimming around like a fish in a toilet bowl - I could only hope she was okay. I wasn't prepared for the end, but there was nothing I could do about it now: I hoped I got a nice place in heaven.

For the record? Heaven looks less like the pearly gates and more like Mario Kart's rainbow road.

I wasn't sure if I was standing or floating. A prism of light stretched under me, almost like a bridge, stretching to my left and right until it disappeared into intense blackness. Stars twinkled above me. Some were so bright and looked so close I wondered if I would get burned if I reached out to touch them.

Was I really dead, or was this some senile comatose state? A dream? I touched my chest. It no longer burned - actually, I couldn't feel anything at all. I was entirely weightless. I got a sudden, horrifying feeling that that was the only thing keeping me from slipping through the multicolored bridge into nothingness.

I hadn't done anything bad in my life. Nothing particularly good, either. I was a straight-A student, played violin and varsity soccer after school, kept up my mom's expectations of me. I had just... existed. Maybe that put me in purgatory.

I didn't want to be stuck here forever. Something about the darkness, so wide and black that it made me claustrophobic, terrified me. I was now positive I wasn't alone. The stars twinkled like eyes watching me - like millions of expectant eyes.

JOLENE WONG.

A voice reverberated through my chest. My very bones rattled from the deep sound. I choked out a cry, but it was noiseless. The voice had come from outside of me - from somewhere out there, somewhere I couldn't see.

"God?" I called, stretching my hand out in front of me. I'd never been particularly pious, but you can't live in South Carolina without going to church at least once.

YOU WILL NOT KNOW ME AS YOUR GOD. The voice came again, booming through my body as if I was standing too close to a loudspeaker. My teeth clattered together. I AM THE ONE, THE ALL-HIGH, WIELDER OF THE FLAME IMPERISHABLE.

"So... you're God." I had forgotten to swallow out of fear. Gulping desperately, I took another look around. There was nothing. Nobody.

NO. BUT I AM YOUR DIVINE INTERVENTION. It was definitely a male voice. Fatherly and warm, but powerful, ageless, almost illusory. I waited a beat for the voice to say something else. When it didn't, I took a breath. I was glad I hadn't forgotten how to breathe... although by all accounts I shouldn't really need to.

"Why are you talking to me? Is this hell?" I called out. My voice seemed to stretch to the farthest corners of the darkness and bounce back, echoing in my ears. I begged, inwardly, for the voice to say no. The last thing on my summer bucket list was spend eternity burning in a fiery pit.

THIS IS NOT PUNISHMENT, JOLENE WONG. NOR IS IT YOUR ETERNAL REWARD. IT IS YOUR CHANCE TO LIVE AGAIN.

I blinked. "So... I'm not really dead?"

NO, YOU ARE VERY DEAD.

"Oh." I looked down at my body. I didn't feel dead - but then again, I didn't really feel anything. My clothes were soiled with dirt and blood, though, sticking to my skin. I pulled up my shirt to check my stomach. Nothing seemed out of place. No scratches, no scars. No broken ribs. I glanced back around, but the owner of the voice still hadn't shown itself. "What do you mean, live again? Reincarnation? How? Why me?"

YOU HAVE YET TO WALK THE PATH DESTINED FOR YOU, JOLENE WONG. COME FORTH.

I was about to ask where. There was nowhere to go. Then a flame flickered ahead of me. As big as a torch-light, and white-hot. Its warmth reached out to me, drawing me forward. I stepped off of the bridge. There was nothing to support me but air, but somehow I kept walking, drawn forward by the flame.

ONCE YOU TOUCH THE FLAME IMPERISHABLE, YOU WILL BE BLESSED AGAIN WITH LIFE. BUT YOU MAY NEVER RETURN TO THE WORLD OF YOUR BIRTH. THESE ARE THE TERMS I OFFER YOU.

The voice didn't come from the fire, but it surrounded me with the same warmth and comfort. I had halfway reached for the light, and then stopped. "What the fuck does that mean? World of my birth? What else can there be?" I hadn't realized that tears had sprung to my eyes, obscuring my vision. The fire now appeared watery and blurred. In about two seconds I'd been given the chance to see my family, my friends, again, and then told that that wasn't possible.

I wanted to feel rage, but I couldn't. It felt like I was being embraced, although I was alone except for the voice. It was all I could do not to sag into those phantom arms and cry.

YOU WILL RECEIVE MY BENEDICTION, AND YOU WILL WALK THE PATH OF EÄ. THIS IS A WORLD NEWLY WROUGHT, BUT YOU KNOW ITS FUTURE. DO YOU ACCEPT?

Eä. That sounded familiar. It tickled a memory at the back of my brain - something of eighth grade English class. I took a breath to calm myself. I didn't want to remember Mrs. Hudson's class right now. "And what happens if I don't?"

THEN THIS IS YOUR END. THERE IS NOTHING AFTER THIS.

"Oh."

My voice suddenly became very small. It shouldn't have been a hard decision: life or nothing at all. Life, or fading from existence entirely. Life somewhere else, leaving behind everything I knew. Mom, dad, my elderly nèimā - grandmother - and Amy, and Sara, and Beth, and gorgeous Caden that I'd gone to senior prom with just a couple of weeks ago...

All of them in exchange for another chance?

What else could I have? I'd lose them either way.

Maybe I was just selfish. I reached for the light.

This Eä... I hoped it was worth it.

Somehow, I expected it to hurt. But instead of burning, the flames only tickled against my fingers. Then I felt a sharp sensation in my navel, like someone was digging their finger into my gut. I doubled over in pain. Warmth washed over me - the fire had grown larger, burning away my clothes, the blood stuck to my skin, every impurity on the surface of my body.

I couldn't really worry about that. I was too busy clutching my stomach and crying. By the time my feet once again found themselves on the road of light, the voice had been silent for several minutes. I had to take a minute to catch my breath. Come on, Jolene. Get your head back in the game. This is nothing. Dying was way worse.

Looking down at myself, I noticed two very important things: one, I was naked, which wasn't very cool. Two, something was buried in my belly button: a multifaceted, cloudy gem. Its color was indistinct, seeming to change from flame-red to streaked with blue every few seconds. It had spread a familiar warmth throughout my body.

I was more than a bit grossed out. "I don't know how I'm going to clean that now. Imagine the belly button cheese." My fingernail slipped under the rim of the gemstone, trying to pop it out. Unsurprisingly, it hurt.

DON'T DO THAT, the voice boomed in my ear, and I immediately stopped. The pain subsided to a slight tug in my gut after a few seconds, but I was left squinting at the offending object. Reincarnation came with accessorizing now, apparently. THIS IS YOUR LIFE-STONE AND PROOF OF MY GIFT, JOLENE. DON'T.. DO NOT DO THAT.

I had begun picking at it again, resulting in the voice chastising me like a naughty kid. "Maybe if you give me some clothes, I wouldn't."

THIS IS AN IMMATERIAL REALM. WHEN YOU REACH VALINOR, YOU WILL BE WELCOMED AND CARED FOR. FOLLOW THE PATH BELOW YOUR FEET.

I turned to my right, looking up at the road bridging itself between my body and intense black sky. It seemed impossible to walk that far, impossible that anything would be waiting for me at the end.

NO, THE OTHER WAY. The voice said in my ear, and I turned around.

It was right. Now I could see a faint light glowing beyond the edge of the bridge. The stone in my belly gave an uncomfortable tug, as if jerking me forward. I took a step, and then another.

Then I looked back.

"Thank you."

The voice didn't reply. Hushed and empty, I could feel that it had gone back to wherever it came from. There was nothing for me to do now but walk.

You got this, Jolene. I squared my shoulders and marched forward with as much dignity as I could muster. Each step I took released a cloud of light against the bridge, like it was covered in stardust, or maybe glitter. I wondered if this is what Eve felt like leaving the garden of Eden. Going from her safe place into a great unknown.

The distant light took the shape of a doorway as I approached. It wasn't like the flame, but more like an open window. When I looked through, I saw a bright sky, and grass, and trees...

Too bad I collapsed the second I stepped through.