Wednesday, January 20th, Year 3019 of the Third Age (Steward's Reckoning; Year Anno Domini 1200 by the Gregorian Calendar)
Olorin could feel the world being ripped apart. The whole of the mountain began to shake and tremble, the earth beneath the Istari's feet starting to vibrate unceasingly. The storm worsened even further: not the slightest sound could be heard over the endless roaring of the winds and booming of the thunder, the air itself becoming like a solid wall of snow, hail, wind and lightning, through which sight or even movement was impossible.
But this went beyond mere weather and tremors. Olorin, well attuned to the more subtle parts of reality, could sense something far more awesome and terrible, a feeling almost beyond describing welling up in the very essence of his being. It did not take long for the feeling to reach its apex: The tearing sensation passed through his entire body in an instant, a feeling like every bone being shattered and remade in a single moment, but it was in his soul that the Istari truly felt the Breaking and Remaking of Creation. It was a distortion in the entirety of the Great Music itself, a sudden and drastic change in key that echoed throughout the whole of reality. The first chord of the new melody sounded out from atop Zirakzigil, reverberating out in all directions...
Caras Galadon, Lorien
Not far to the east, lying in the shadows of the mountain upon which reality had begun to be rewritten, lay the forest of Lothlorien and the ancient elven bastion within. The firstborn of Eru had dealt within the woods since the Great March, in the Years of the Two Trees before even the first rising of the Sun: many of those elves that had feared to cross that would in later days be known as the Misty Mountains had built settlements here, and many among those number had chosen to remain, never passing into the west. For at least seven millennia, and likely uncounted more, the elves had inhabited this land, waning and waxing with the times but always present in some capacity.
The sheer age of Lothlorien, and the subtle powers of those that resided within, left its mark on all who beheld it. If there was but one place in the whole of Middle-earth that could be described only as truly indescribable, than this would be it. The natural beauty of the place was near-unmatched in the whole of Arda, the golden-leaved and silver-trunked mallorn trees being especially famed.
There was a distinct sense that the entire region had been frozen in time, as if at the moment of Lothlorien's creation, someone had frozen the entire land in a single moment and then repainted it one stroke at a time, taking as much care in drawing an inch of this land as had been put into the whole of other lands. The artist had made not a single mistake, and although they had only used those colors that anyone would readily know, it was almost as if the artist had discovered new shades of gold and silver and green and blue to use, painting every single detail in such a way that everything seemed to have an extra dimension, beyond height, width and depth. And in all the innumerable years that had passed since, not a single speck of painting had been allowed to fade, warp or discolor, almost as if the artist had remained all these long millennia, working to maintain their masterpiece.
This idea was more true than one would expect. The magic of Galadriel, the Lady of the Golden Wood, enriched the whole of the land, aided by the power of Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, one of the Three Elven Rings that were untouched by Sauron's power. The Ring's powers of preservation, protection and concealment defended the realm against even the darkest of evils; so great were these powers that it was said that only Sauron himself could hope to overthrow elvendom's most ancient remaining land, and even then only if he regained the One Ring. Only then could Lorien and all its millennia of history be destroyed.
That was not to say that the Golden Wood could not be disrupted.
It was like being hit by a tsunami. The elves were the most ancient and noblest of the races of Middle-earth, closely attuned to the more subtle aspects of creation. And so it was when the entirety of the Music of the Ainur suddenly and dramatically shifted, as if every instrument in creation was being played at once and at the loudest possible volume, the inhabitants of Lorien could feel the world around them being torn asunder, feel the ripping sensation in their very souls, as if they were being cut out of the fabric of reality and sewn into the tapestry of an entirely different world…
It was not merely in the spiritual world that the effects of the change were felt. The entire forest was shuddering, the earth itself rumbling and quaking, the ancient trees groaning and creaking as they shook from their canopies down to their deepest roots. In less time than it takes to tell, a great storm had roared into life, lightning and thunder crashing down from the heavens, blinding hail and snow whipping in from all directions, deafening wind blowing in from every side.
The storm bashed itself against Lorien's magical defenses, the outskirts of the forest torn apart by lightning, hail and wind. As had happened atop Zirakzigil, powers beyond knowing grappled with each other, building ever further in intensity until finally the canvas of reality tore cleanly away, the seam of creation bursting, and the Golden Wood found itself hurtling through everything and nothing, thrown to the far side of existence in a moment that lasted an eternity, cast adrift in the infinite infinities…
And then, as suddenly as Lorien had been thrown into the void, it landed.
Trento, Prince-Bishophric of Trento, Holy Roman Empire
Northeastern Italy was not a place that one usually experienced an earthquake. The concept itself was not entirely foreign: Scripture held many writings about such things, and in living memory a large portion of the eastern coast of Sicily had been decimated by a massive earthquake and following tsunami. But such an event could hardly be expected here: it had been 83 years since the previous time that this region had felt the earth trembling beneath it (Verona, some 40 miles south, had been damaged by an earthquake in 1117), and that had been a massive exception to the norm.
And so it was that when what seemed to be the entirety of the earth began to shake and tremble (and a fearsome blizzard rose out of seemingly nowhere and sent blinding hail and howling winds and sending lighting screaming out of the heavens), the reaction in the city of Trento was one of panic and fear. The people cowered in their homes, praying desperately that their roofs and walls wouldn't come down on their heads. Children screamed, babies wailed and a wild cacophony of alarm and distress rose up from every household. Their cries echoed out across the whole city, begging for the Lord to protect them, to save them, to have mercy upon them.
For what seemed like hours, the ground shook like a plaything in a child's hands, the skies roared like the fury of a thousand terrible beasts, and the people of Trento screamed and prayed in fear and anguish. From the poorest slums of the city to the palace of the Bishop, the whole city was united in its fear: rich and poor, prisoners and soldiers, clergy and criminals, all praying the fervent prayers of those with the spectre of imminent death hanging over every one of their souls.
The wailing and lamentations from every corner of the city continued without ceasing until, at last, the storm began to die away and the trembling ground finally began to calm. The sky remained dark, and snow continued to fall, but the worst seemed to be over. Ever so slowly, the people of Trento emerged from their shelters, dazed and shaken and wounded. They found a city that was largely in ruins, with ruined homes and shattered buildings, broken by the quake or the hail or the winds, and wept.
There was likely not a single structure in the city that was undamaged in some way, with many of the simpler buildings entirely reduced to rubble. Homes lay broken and churches shattered, their dazed inhabitants stumbling out of the ruins. The screams of terror and prayers for salvation were now replaced by a singular, unending groan. Many lay injured. Some lay dead. A great disaster had befallen the city, a disaster that in normal times would have taken years to recover from.
And yet within a matter of weeks, Trento would be visited by a far worse fate.
The tear in the world travelled north and south, following the crests of the ancient Mountains of Mist, spreading outwards from the summit above Moria. These peaks, raised in the very depths of time by Melkor himself, acted like a seam, which the rip in creation could not help but follow. The whole of the mountains began to shake and tremble as they were torn asunder by forces well beyond any mortal, and perhaps even immortal, comprehension...
The House of Elrond, Imladris
Elrond Half-Elven, Lord of Rivendell, born in the First Age of Arda to Earendil and Elwing in Beleriand of old and perhaps the wisest and noblest elf remaining in Middle-earth, felt as if an oliphant had been dancing on his skull. Slowly and painfully, the millennia-old warrior and leader of the Free Peoples picked himself up off of the floor of his study, burning pain lancing through most of his body all the while.
What...just...happened? That was the only thought that Elrond could muster up. He clutched his head in pain, leaning heavily against his desk as he did so and trying to regain his bearings. The ancient elven Lord shifted through his memories, trying to recall any hint of what had sent him crashing to the ground. He had been reviewing several reports from his sons dealing with the increased activity of orcs at the High Pass, and then...what?
Elrond vaguely remembered a feeling of ripping and tearing, felt more in his spirit than in his flesh, of being torn away from his place in the tapestry of Creation and sewn into a new cloth entirely. It was not a feeling entirely alien to him, but it had been six-and-a-half thousand years since he had felt something similar. The moment that that thought crossed his mind, a deep worry began to form in Elrond's heart: that 'something similar', that feeling of the Great Music entering into a new key, was one he had not felt since the Downfall of Numenor, and not with such intensity since the Valar had thrown down Melkor in the War of Wrath.
As the clouds in his mind slowly began to clear, the Lord of Rivendell became more and more aware of a burning sensation emanating from his left hand. As he looked at the source, the feeling of dread in Elrond's heart only deepened. Vilya, the Ring of Sapphire, perhaps the mightiest of the Three Elven Rings, was aglow with light, the stone gleaming like a newborn star.
At that, a troubled frown came across Elrond's face, his thoughts becoming even darker yet. In all his thousands of years of bearing the Ring, Elrond had never known Vilya to act in such a manner. Clearly, it was reacting to something, but to what? The most obvious answer (and the likeliest) was that the sudden, dramatic shift in the Great Music was the key factor, but this did nothing to assuage Elrond's fears. If anything, it worsened them: his only precedents for such an event were left being two times in which entire continents had been all but destroyed. Neither were events that he wished to relive.
Left for the moment without any further information, the Lord of Rivendell knew only one thing: whatever had just happened, it was something to be feared.
Wien, The Duchy of Austria, Holy Roman Empire
Leopold VI of the House of Babenberg, Duke of Austria and Styria, looked out over his court. The room was emptier than it would normally be, with only those advisors that that could be summoned within the day attending (leaving the council to be filled largely with the local leadership of Wien itself), but it was no quieter for it: The atmosphere was tense, the various minor nobles, retainers and clergymen that filled the main hall of his castle unleashing a constant undertone of hushed whispers.
The Duke knew, vaguely, why the council had been called: a devastating earthquake had apparently struck the villages in the Alps, a crisis further worsened by a freak blizzard that had blown in not long after. Messengers had been trickling in from the south and east all day, each carrying the same tale and the same requests for aid and relief. The calls were common enough and consistent enough that they could not be easily dismissed as the ramblings of the uneducated or the drunk: with so many different people from so many different villages claiming the same things, there was either a massive, previously undetected conspiracy among the Duchy's peasantry or there was a kernel of truth to their claims.
How much truth remained to be seen. Leopold doubted that some vast, bizarre scheme had been hatched against him: claiming that half his lands had been wiped out by freak natural occurrences seemed too strange a place to start for such a plan. Still, it did not take long for Leopold to realize that it would be best for him to investigate the devastation himself, if only to see where the most damage had been done and to decide where the majority of aid would be sent: Every village in the alps, it seemed, was claiming that it had almost been wiped off of the map. Either they were exaggerating their accounts, or a massive swath of Leopold's lands had been decimated. The Duke would soon find out the truth.
Ideas of what he would find bounced idly around Leopold's mind as he prepared to set out. The 'freak blizzards' explanation seemed the most possible to him: the Alps in winter were not known for their accommodating climate. The earthquake seemed less likely, but still possible. The worst case scenario that the Duke could come up with was some form of Hungarian invasion, using a particularly bad winter storm to cloak their approach and initial attacks, but such a possibility was by far the most unlikely of the scenarios that Leopold could imagine; certainly, his cousin King Emeric had not been particularly fond of him ever since he had offered shelter to Emeric's younger brother Prince Andras after the latter's failed rebellion five years earlier, but the two had been in the middle of negotiations all throughout the winter to see Andras return to Hungary peacefully, negotiations that as of recently had finally started to become fruitful. And anyways, his own spies in Hungary would have informed him of such a brazen move well in advance.
No, this was most likely a simple natural disaster, and the journey of the coming days would likely accomplish little more than deciding on which villages were in the most need of aid. He would take his guard with him, of course, no matter how much they were unlikely to be needed; throughout Europe, despite the best efforts of most rulers, there was no such thing as a truly safe road. Despite that, Leopold VI, Duke of Austria, was doubtful that the events in the Alps would have much lasting impact on his life.
He had no idea how wrong he was.
The Orthanc, Isengard
The wheels in the mind of the Istari known variably as Curumo, Curunir or Saruman were spinning rapidly, gears turning and whirring like pieces in a great machine. Ideas moved through his mind at lightning speed, each one brought to the forefront, thoroughly analyzed and then moved aside. Even for the former apprentice of Aule the Smith, well-known throughout Middle-earth for his ability to think quickly and effectively, the sheer rapidness at which thought after thought after thought shot through his mind was staggering.
This is not to say that it was uncommon for the former leader of the White Council's thoughts to move at a staggering pace. Far from it: the Maia was quite possibly the most knowledgeable of the five Istari (although by no means the wisest), his studies under Aule having left him well learned in all manner of lore and worldly things, studies that had only advanced after his departure from Valinor. In terms of pure mental capacity, there were very, very few east of the Sea that could match him, even discounting his more subtle abilities.
It was Saruman's great knowledge, a knowledge not necessarily tempered by wisdom, that had led to his downfall. It has been said that the Maia of Aule were the most likely to turn towards evil, and not without reason: Sauron himself had once been a Maia of Aule, known in his earliest days as Mairon, meaning 'the Admirable,' and had been the most powerful and skilled of the Vala's students.
Perhaps the fault lay with Aule himself: It was said that the Smith was the Vala most alike in thought and action to Melkor, in that both desired to make great works of their own design. Aule had been the first Valar besides Melkor to create new life without consulting Eru: unwilling to wait for elves and men to awaken, he had forged the dwarfs with no regard for either the Great Music or the other Ainur.
By no means did this mean that the students of Aule were doomed to fall to evil; after all, Aule had only created the dwarfs out of a desire to have other beings to love as children, pass his teachings on to and to share the beauty of Creation with, and Eru (seeing his good intentions, akin to a child imitating their parent out of a desire to be like them) had taken pity on him and given the dwarfs the Secret Fire.
What it did mean was that Aule and his students were prone to bouts of pride and arrogance and often turned their great skills as craftsman towards more selfish pursuits. It had happened to Sauron, once the 'most admirable' of Aule's Maia, who desired to build a perfect, flawless world and could now see only himself as possessing the skill and power to create and rule it, and it had happened to Saruman, once Curumo the Istari, who's desire to know all he could about his opponent had slowly been warped from begrudging respect to envious admiration and now, finally, to open allegiance.
All this was to say that the mind of Saruman of Many Colors (as he now styled himself) was a formidable weapon indeed, and now one committed wholly to attacking the question of to what had just happened. The massive earthquake had shaken even the Orthanc to its roots, the unbreakable tower trembling as if it were a dirt hovel; even now, with the ground having ceased to shake, the sound of collapsing earth and twisting metal sounded out from Isengard's pits as tunnels and machinery, shoddily built to begin with, toppled down.
And all of that wasn't even considering the feeling that had just ripped through the Istari's soul, a ripping and tearing feeling that even Saruman would be hard pressed to describe. It was like nothing that the Maia had ever experienced before, and that left him feeling...apprehensive. The Unknown, always, hid potential threats, enemies waiting to be unleashed. Saruman was well aware that knowledge was his greatest source of power, and this sudden dearth of it was...unnerving.
Which is why he moved to consult the Palantir. The ancient Seeing-stone, surely, would let him cut swiftly through the veil of ignorance which had descended around him. If nothing else, it would allow him to commune with Sauron. As unpleasant as it was to maintain his "alliance" with the Dark Lord, Saruman was well aware of his need to keep up appearances. Betraying Sauron before he had acquired the One Ring for himself would be suicidal: he could yet hope to beat back the power of Mordor by himself, and his former allies among the Free Peoples would hardly be happy to take him back. Better to maintain the status quo: No need to rock the boat before it reached the shore.
When Saruman looked into the palantir, though, it became rapidly apparent that the boat had just gone off a waterfall.
Lake Geneva, County of Savoy, Holy Roman Empire
The wave receded. It brought with it all manner of refuse and debris: the shattered remains of buildings that had once been houses, churches and marketplaces; trees, once rooted deep into solid earth; bodies, of man and beast alike. It had swept across the whole southern shore of the lake, an unstoppable black sickle cutting down all before it. Nothing could stand against it: how could they, when the very landscape had been swept away?
Few that had been in the wave's path had survived, the majority of the inhabitants of the villages along the lakeshore having been huddled in their homes as the storm and earthquake had pummeled the region. They had never stood a chance as the waters had suddenly crashed down upon their walls and roofs, tearing the structures of sod and wood to pieces in less time than it takes to tell.
The survivors lay broken, clutching to whatever debris they had managed to ride the wave on, nursing torn flesh and shattered bones. Their screams of agony and wails of despair echoed out across the cold winter night, even as the freezing cold winds of winter slowly drained their lives away. It was as if Hell, a freezing, black and unstoppable Hell, had been unleashed upon the shores of Lake Geneva.
Such an idea was woefully close to the truth. If those that had survived the wave looked to the north, they would see that half the horizon had been changed, the whole of the mountains reshaped by forces that they could not dare to understand. A great black tower, taller than any native to this world, rose above the shores of the lake, unassailable, like a silent watcher to the suffering of the damned.
It would not be silent for long.
As the tear in the world reached the very northern tip of the mountains, its course was diverted. The Grey Mountains, the very last remnants of the Iron Mountains of old, those cursed peaks that had held Melkor's fortress of Angbad until it had been destroyed by the Valar themselves, formed another seam in the foundations of the world, and again the world was split asunder. The Grey Mountains were torn from their places and cast into the space between worlds, flung to a far different part of the cosmos...
The Withered Heath, The Grey Mountains
When a slumbering beast is struck, it reacts poorly. This is a truth that applies to nearly every living creature in nearly every existing world: it is a simple fact that that no creature possessing any level of awareness enjoys its rest being interrupted. This is especially true when said rest is interrupted in a violent or otherwise sudden manner, such as a massive earthquake shaking one's place of slumber like a leaf in the wind.
And so it was when the Grey Mountains were torn away from Arda and flung into a distant world, trembling from their roots to their peaks in the process, their inhabitants were not happy in the least. And the inhabitants of the Ered Mithrin were not the kinds of beings that were known for calm and peace: the mountains were infested with creatures of Melkor and Sauron, short-tempered foul things that's default mental states were ones of hunger and rage.
The creatures of the Grey Mountains reacted to the destruction of their dens and hovels in the manner that could be expected of them: blind, directionless anger. Millennia of being twisted towards hatred left them little choice. From Carn Dum to the Withered Heath, orcs, goblins, trolls and all other manner of dark creature clawed their way out of ruined hideaways, their already-meager existences reduced even further.
The Dark Lords had bred them well to hate. There was no grief, no mourning among those poor corrupted souls. No, the designs of Melkor and Sauron left them only one way to cope with their losses: with rage. The creatures of the Grey Mountains, inhabitants of an already godforsaken and barren land, could only lash out in blind fury at this newest misfortune. They lashed out against each other, against the earth and heavens, against anything and everything that they could reach.
Soon enough, their rage would reach the wider world.
Aslo, Kingdom of Norway, Scandinavia
Things can always get worse. This is another basic truth of Creation: there is no scenario so terrible, so utterly without hope, that it cannot be made worse. Weather can take an ill turn. Tools can break or go missing. Despair and rage can take root. The forces of evil, while lacking the ability to truly create anything substantial, may always find a way to twist a given situation so that it is even more terrible than before.
Take for instance the situation of the Kingdom of Norway as our story begins. The realm had spent some seven decades in a state of intermittent civil war, ever since the death of Sigurd the Crusader in 1130 (who, for decades afterwards, would be the last King of Norway to die peacefully). The reason was simple: the Kingdom as a whole seemed to scoff at the idea of clear Laws of Succession. Any male-line descendent of the original unifier of Norway, Harald Fairhair (who had died more than two centuries before), being born from a legitimate marriage or not, could be considered a worthy candidate for the throne.
For some time, a system of co-rulership had existed, where multiple men would share the rule of Norway with each other, but it did not take long for such compromises to break down and open civil wars to break out as oaths were betrayed and assassination plots hatched. Uncles turned on nephews, brother on brother and even father on son, ambition and greed driving good men to madness.
Compounding matters further were the mercenaries and adventurers like Harald Gille and Sigurd Slembe, men who arrived on Norwegian shores from far-flung places like Ireland or Iceland, seeking fortune and fame and claiming to be the bastard sons of some previous king, a claim that was usually nearly impossible to definitely disprove. And always, such men seemed to bring with them small armies of hardened fighters, eager to win glory, wealth and noble standing by pushing their commander's claim on the throne.
By the early 1160s, the Church became involved, seeking to strengthen its still tenuous position amongst its relatively recent Scandanavian converts. But the clergy had miscalculated: they chose to back a child-king, Magnus Erlingsson, who was not a male-line descendent of a king, but rather the son of the eldest daughter of Sigurd the Crusader, and thusly (yet again) of questionable legitimacy. He was only selected because of a lack of other viable options: those that had installed him were the former supporters of the deposed and executed King Inge, who had left no issue after being killed in battle by his opponents, the backers of Hakon the Broadshouldered (who was also a teenage figurehead selected due to lack of other options; his backers were the former allies of Inge's brothers Oystein and Sigurd Munn, who Inge himself had betrayed and killed a few years before).
Within the decade, despite the best efforts of the now-adult Magnus and despite the defeat of Hakon's faction, yet another rebellion had started. By now the endless wars were becoming entrenched along lines of region and wealth. Two distinct factions had begun to develop: the Birkbeiners, who drew most of their support from the poorer, oft-neglected border regions and the interior, especially among the peasantry, and the Baglers, made up of the old aristocracy and merchant class and backed by the Catholic Church, stronger along the coast.
In 1184, King Magnus of the Baglers was slain in battle at Fimreite, leaving Sverre Sigurdsson (a mercenary from the Faroe Islands who claimed to be a bastard son of Sigurd Munn) as the lone King of Norway. His rule was not secure: the Catholic Church continued to oppose him at every turn, going as far as to excommunicate him in 1194 and to place the entire realm under interdict in 1198. Multiple pretenders rose up against him. Bagler remnants had consolidated in Denmark, and in 1197 were once again a genuine threat, declaring a boy named Inge Magnusson to be a bastard son of the fallen King Magnus and once again starting a Civil War throughout Norway.
As the Year of Our Lord 1200 began, Norway remained an...unpleasant land. The Baglers had been driven back to Denmark, true, but they were far from defeated, and loyalists to their cause remained all across the land. The country had been devastated by the endless battles, the whole land bearing the scars of war; entire cities had been destroyed in the fighting, such as Bergen, burned down by the Baglers in 1198.
And yet the worst was yet to come.
At Aslo, the capital of the ravaged Kingdom, it would begin with a terrible storm, worse than any living could remember, splitting the heavens apart with thunder and lightning, unleashing an unending torrent of snow and hail from the sky. A devastating earthquake which caused whole buildings to topple and smashed ships in the harbor, ravaging the whole city. And finally the roaring, the inhuman, earthshaking roaring that came from the north, a sound that all those that heard it would never forget.
Things can always get worse.
The tear in the world continued. Now it moved across the forest of Mirkwood, the lands around the ancient woods coming free like a flap of loose fabric caught in a windstorm. A massive portion of Wilderland was torn off from the rest of Arda and drifted between worlds like a leaf lost in the cosmic wind, churning and twisting and fluttering and finally, after a split second that seemed to last for forever, was slammed down in a new part of Creation.
The Hall of Thranduil, Mirkwood
They kept coming.
The storm and the quake stirred up what seemed to be every creature in the forest. The beasts of Mirkwood poured forwards like water through a broken dam: spiders, wolves and other creatures twisted by the Necromancer's experiments. They charged like the ravenous monsters that they were, driven by hunger, fear and rage. They swarmed forth like bees whose hive had been struck, coming out to strike at anything that they could find in a blind fury. By the dozens, by the hundreds, if not by the thousands, the monsters of Mirkwood continued their attack.
They kept coming, and they kept dying.
The elves of Mirkwood were well versed in the art of war. These were not the scholars of Rivendell, or the mariners of the Grey Havens or even the mysterious, secretive peoples of Lorien. These were veterans of the Battle of Five Armies, of the endless campaign to keep the roads between Wilderland and Eregion open, of countless skirmishes with orcs from the Misty Mountains, the Grey Mountain or Dol Guldur. With endless time came endless training: Immortality had given the elves literal eons to hone their skills, and hone them they did.
Now they practiced their deadly arts to perfection. Endless volleys of precisely aimed arrows cut down the monsters as fast as they could arrive, arrowheads buried in eyes or hearts or necks. Those few that survived the veritable storm of shafts were impaled upon spears or cut down with swords. The carcasses of a dozen different kinds of beast carpeted the ground, in some places so completely that one could walk across the corpses without touching the earth.
Yet all was not going well for the elves: the storm and the earthquake, as it had done all across the pieces of Arda shorn from their old world, had been devastating. Most of the Woodland Realm's outer defenses had been smashed to pieces, and the damages to the Halls themselves were extensive, as despite the skill with which the realm had been constructed the raw power of nature had been overwhelming. The wounded lay everywhere. So did the fallen.
The elves themselves had been left scattered and disoriented, the feeling of the world being remade that each one of them had felt in their very souls leaving the defenders sorely vulnerable. The attacks had begun soon afterwards: The defenders had been quickly forced to abandon their forward positions, and the perimeter had only continued to shrink since. With increasingly frequency, the scream of an elf would ring out through the forest as they fell, injured or dead.
And still the monsters came. All too slowly, the flood was tapering off, becoming a trickle, as the beasts of Mirkwood became less and less willing to test themselves against the bows and blades of the defenders, but still they came faster than the elves could kill them, still the battle lines drew closer and closer to the entrances to the Halls of Thranduil, still did more and more elven bodies litter the ground, some moaning or screaming in agony and others all too silent.
The battle, the first of thousands to come across this new world, raged on.
Osma, Kingdom of Castile, Spain
Pater noster, qui es in coelis,
When the priest Dominic pulled himself out of the rubble, he was greeted by a sight from beyond his worst nightmares. The Canonry was smashed to pieces. The Cathedral was smashed to pieces. The whole city, it looked like, was smashed to pieces. Broken houses and building lay toppled in the streets, reduced to ruins by the earthquake and the storm. And everywhere there was screaming.
sanctificetur nomen tuum;
From every direction, from every part of the shattered city, the cries of the wounded and dying sounded out. It was a terrible noise, a sound of purified hopelessness, fear and agony. It was omnipresent, carried on the cold, bitter winter winds. Dominic stumbled towards the ruins, pulled in all directions by the sounds of suffering. It was all he could hear. It was all he could hear. It was all he could feel.
adveniat regnum tuum,
The storm had yet to fully pass. The sky remained pitch black, erasing all sense of time, illuminated only by the occasional bursts of lightning that revealed a scene of disaster and despair. Snow continued to fall, thick and wet and heavy. The ground became choked with ice, mud and slush, the shocked survivors now facing the hard winds with nothing more than the close on their backs.
fiat voluntas tua,
And it was then that Dominic, Canons Regular of Osma, began to pray. He prayed the prayers that he had learned as a boy two decades previously, prayed them with all his heart and soul. He prayed them a voice that carried above even the howling of the wind. As he prayed, he found himself moving without conscious thought, into the seemingly endless field of toppled stone.
sicut in coelo et in terra.
The rubble felt light in his hands. As Dominic prayed, he felt his fears, his pain and his despair melt away. An unseen fire began to burn inside him as he lifted away stone after stone after stone, always moving towards the endless cries coming from below. No boulder was too large, no cry was too distant: a mountain stood before the priest, and the priest began to make the mountain move.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
Dominic led, and his remaining brothers followed. The other priests of the canonry joined him atop the rubble at the city center, drawn by the same invisible power that had driven Dominic. Bloodied and beaten, but not broken, they moved through the mountain of ruin before them, moving the toppled stones aside with their bare hands, dressing the naked, healing the wounded and blessing the dying. And always did they speak the same words, the same prayer.
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
Soon other hands had joined theirs. First a few, then many, then all that were able. Every working pair of hands, young and old, noble and beggar, clergy and criminal, was busied helping. Helping to rescue. To heal. To bury. To bless. Bandages were wrapped, splints fashioned and blessings said. Great stones were pushed aside to free those trapped beneath. Ground was cleared for the wounded. Space was marked for the graves. And still the words continued.
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Time passed unnoticed. The storm slowly died away, moving off towards the northeast. The snow stopped falling. The work continued. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the mountain continued to shrink, and more and more were freed from its depths, some living, most wounded, many dead. Tears fell from every eye, of joy and grief and rage alike. And on every tongue the prayer continued to be lifted to the heavens.
et ne nos inducas in tentationem
Again and again and again and again the people of Osma prayed. They prayed for the safety of their loved ones. They prayed for comfort and healing for the injured. They prayed for the souls of the dead. They prayed for mercy. They prayed for answers. Above all, they prayed for salvation. They prayed for this darkness to pass away and for light to return. They prayed for the Lord to deliver them from this evil.
sed libera nos a malo.
And in the center of it all, the Lord's instrument of deliverance continued his work.
Amen.
Just to the east of where Mirkwood had been torn free, the lands near the Lonely Mountain were also coming loose. The tear spread towards them from both west and north, as if attracted by some unseen force. It was not long before the lands from the Mountain south to the Long Lake broke free and fell into the infinite beyond, twisting and turning in the space between spaces, following in the wake of the other lands that had been torn away from Arda, crashing down in a new world...
Dale, in the shadow of the Lonely Mountain
61 years of life had never prepared King Brand of Dale for anything like this. For most of his life and reign, he and his people had known little but prosperity and peace. His Kingdom had been in the midst of a golden age: in the three-quarters of a century since the death of Smaug the Golden, the greatest city of men in the north had been rebuilt to surpass its splendor of old. The friendship with the dwarfs had proven fruitful indeed: the dwarfs had material and expertise that the men lacked, and the men had the population figures and willingness to sail the rivers that the dwarfs lacked. Mutual partnership, even without the threat posed by the remaining orcs, wolves and Easterlings in the region, had been all but inevitable.
Dale had prospered beyond even the most optimistic hopes of those that refugees that had stumbled from the burning remains of Laketown in the days of Bard the Bowman. The ruined old city beneath the Mountain had not just been reclaimed and rebuilt, it had been vastly improved with dwarfen, and to an extent even elven help, as both Dain Ironfoot and Thranduil had understood well the benefits of a strong, allied state of men in the region.
By the ascension of Bard's son King Bain, Dale was no longer simply a city-state in the shadow of the Lonely Mountain. It had become a fledgling Kingdom of Men, a key portion of the Free Peoples' small foothold in Wilderland. Esgaroth had been rebuilt on the northern shore of the Long Lake, grander and more beautiful than before, a burgeoning center of trade that put the old Laketown to shame and strengthening the ever-growing foothold of the young Kingdom.
The merchants of Dale dominated the waterways of the north, becoming the middlemen of a trade network that stretched across the whole of Wilderland: raw materials and all assortment of tools, armor and weapons from the mines and forges of Erebor and the Iron Hills, exotic artisan crafts from the Halls of Thranduil, even foodstuffs and horses from Dorwinion and Rhun moved in the barges and boats of the Men of Dale, carried up and down the rivers Running and Redwater and along the western roads as far as the High Pass and even Rivendell beyond.
But even then, the forces of darkness had been gathering. The Easterlings had begun falling ever further under the sway of Sauron; orc raids from the Grey Mountains had ever increased; the routes across Mirkwood had become ever more dangerous, with those in the south especially becoming all but impossible to safely walk. A dark storm had begun brewing on the horizon, a fear that had only been confirmed by the recent arrival of dignitaries of the Dark Lord himself. The Free Peoples of Wilderland had begun to prepare themselves for the worst.
This...this was far worse than even the gloomiest possibilities that the men of Dale had considered. A massive earthquake had struck the city, accompanied by a sudden, devastating blizzard. By the time that the ground had stopped trembling and the storm had broken, it had become apparent that something far more terrible than tremors and sudden storms had happened: the entirety of the southern, western and eastern horizons had been altered.
The people were badly shaken: the number of injured and dead was still coming in, but it was already known to be high. Damage to the buildings of the city was nothing to dismiss either, with multiple structures having collapsed and many of the fortifications damaged. The mental health of the populace was even worse: panic and fear had already been building before it was noticed that most of the horizon had changed. Now some of the people seemed to be on the verge of hysteria.
As terrible as things seemed, though, the King of Dale was well aware that things could have been much worse. The physical damage inflicted by the quake and storm was nowhere near as bad as it might have been, owing largely to the repeated strengthenings of the city's structures in response to the growing threats on the borders. Erebor and New Esgaroth were both still recognizable, so at least the city was not alone, wherever they were.
Brand frowned as a troubling thought occurred to him: both the Lonely Mountain and the city on the Lake were likely to be in far worse condition than Dale was. New Esgaroth could easily have been swamped by waves caused by the tremors or the storm, and he doubted that anything good could happen inside of a mountain during an earthquake. They would need his help more than he would need theirs.
The King of Dale grimaced. He was learned well enough (as a King he had to be), but he was well aware that whatever had just happened was something far beyond him. This was the domain of legends and lore, both of which he lacked a firm grasp of, having never needed before. What he did know was that he needed as much strength as he could get his hands on. Contact with Erebor and Esgaroth had to be reestablished as quickly as possible.
Wherever Dale had been sent, Brand doubted that it could afford to stand alone.
Roskilde, Zealand, Kingdom of Denmark
King Brand's new neighbors were little better off than he was. Fate had chosen to spare Roskilde a more terrible fate: the Hornsherred Peninsula had absorbed most of the impact when the Lonely Mountain and the lands to the south as far as the Long Lake had been slammed into their new home. A devastating tidal wave had swept across the Isefjorden to the west of the peninsula, akin to the one that had hit the southern shore of Lake Geneva (decimating the Odsherred, the furthest west of Zealand's three northern outcroppings, in the process), but a similar wave had not swept down the Roskilde Fjord and wiped the Kingdom's capital off the map. The Hornsherred itself had been devastated by the resulting earthquake, but the heavily populated Nordsjaelland had been spared the worst of the destruction.
This is not to say that Roskilde had gotten off lightly. The earthquake and storm, as they had done everywhere that the worlds had merged, did deadly work here. Buildings fell, lightning and hail crashed down and a distinct feeling of doom had come over the populace. By the time the tremors stopped and the storm passed away, a fair portion of the city had been ruined; the poorer neighborhoods had been especially damaged.
As the people of Roskilde began the slow process of digging themselves out of the rubble, some happened to glance to the north, only to be stopped dead by what they saw. The whole island of Zealand, from the Kattegat to the north to the Danish Belts to the west and south and the Oresund to the east was, in a word, flat. Only a handful of small hills dotted the island, none rising higher than a few dozen feet.
Now they looked to the north, and saw a mountain climb two miles into the sky.
The convulsions of Creation weren't finished. The One Ring, Sauron's greatest and most terrible creation, had been torn away from Arda. The Dark Lord had poured so much of his power, so much of his very essence into Isildur's Bane that when it was flung to the far side of creation, its bearer swept away when Lorien had been, the Enemy and everything that his dark power touched was pulled after them. The whole of Mordor came loose from Middle-earth, Sauron's taint running so deep in that land that everything from the Mountains of Shadow to the Mountains of Ash, from the Udun to the Sea of Nurnen, was in many ways an extension of himself. The Land of Shadow followed its master in pursuit of the Ring, with all its terrible legions of inhuman monsters, ready to be unleashed on an unexpecting and unready world.
But it was not the forces of evil alone that was moving that night.
Other players were at work, things beyond the will evil. The moment that the first dissonant note had been played, they had begun composing a new melody. As had been done with Melkor's dissonance in the Ainulindale, the most triumphant notes of the discord were taken and woven into the new pattern, supplementing and harmonizing with it. While the music of Arda was rewritten to allow the departure of several chords without destroying the whole melody, the same departing chords were placed within their new orchestra, carefully arranged to make ready a new theme.
Yet this alone was not yet enough. The music of Arda alone could not hope to sustain the song by itself, not with the discord of Melkor and Sauron so strongly present throughout. This new world would have to contribute its own notes, lest its original tune be wholly drowned in the chords transplanted from Arda. The two melodies, so deeply separate from each other, would have to be harmonized.
And so the composers looked out over the new world, searching for the greatest and most melodious chords they could find to be used in the new song. They scoured the whole earth, listening closely to every note they heard played, weighing joining them to the main theme. In some places, they would leave the old music to be played as it had been playing, but a few sections of the tune were too important to leave unattended.
It was among these parts of the melody that the composers found the instruments that they needed. They varied wildly: some were subtle and near silent, others loud and impossible to ignore. Many of their tunes seemed to directly contrast. Others would harmonize even without the composers to guide them. But every one of them would have a part to play in the new theme of this hybrid creation.
With this in mind, the composers struck their first notes, and a new Great Music was begun.
