Response to a challenge my friend Bjam gave me: write Sam's thoughts as he sees Frodo fail to destroy the Ring.



In a Drop of Amber




Everything is still in this crushing black haze. I struggle desperately to move, to achieve some unknown goal, kicking and thrashing; and yet I am caught, as an insect in a drop of amber, in this terrible stillness. Beneath the scalding rock on which I stand grind the jaws of a thousand dragons, and the overwhelming heat of their flames. But it is the sound, so far below yet shaking the ashen pebbles at my feet, that suspends me in this motionlessness.

At the brink of everything he stands, frozen, as I am, yet wrapped in suffocating heat. At the mercy of the diabolical power that holds sway over his mind. His hand outstretched, fist clamped sweatily over that Thing which I cannot bear to name--that seductive slice of the purest evil in the world. My heart crashes into my throat, pounding, still paralyzed.

A sickening light seeps from behind him, jumping and cracking on the distant looming walls of the tomb we are to be buried in. A fine tomb for two humble hobbits, I think to myself. His silhouette. Small and quiet, piercing the blinding light behind him with something never before seen here: the black shape of a hobbit far from home. Slowly, slowly...slowly his head turns, though I cannot see--but I know--how his face must be creased with worry, but eyes resigned in his steely determination. I cry out to him from the cloudy blanket of burning air that scorches my lungs and parches my throat. A flicker of doubt. A tense, endless moment where everything stops--no more deafening roars from the deep. The lights leaping on the walls cease to dance; my heart, in turn, ceases to beat. In this moment.

In this moment, I am flooded with images in my mind, torrents of memory. All my hope whittles down to this point, fragile; like a dead twig, easily snapped. The Shire. Green grass, green things, air. My gaffer. My friends. My Rose, should she chance to be mine. Something powerful stirred within me, a longing for what might be, what could be--if. If. No, when.

Rid of this constant torture, which has nearly consumed my soul, fight it though I have tried.

Poor Master Frodo well and merry again.

Time

halts.

Until his reverberating words send motion crashing back, the force of which shatters my hope into a million pieces and blows it away in the infernal wind. The black smoke curls in ringlets--a mockery of the faint memory of Rosie's hair, as if the Mountain knew all that I had just lost in that moment and wished to torment me further. The smoke crawls into my nostrils and chokes me. I hack out a rough cough and feel myself melting in the heat. No, Master. No, Frodo. Not after all this. You cannot do this to yourself. I love you. I will not let you. No.

And then the smoke is knocked out of my lungs by an unseen foe, sending me toppling onto stone that burns my hands as they try in vain to break my fall--I sense my head collide with rock, and my eyes turn black, black as the waves of defeat pounding me into despair.