The unbound powers of Chaos rolled towards Talion, a charging horde of stallions that bucked any attempt to direct or tame them.
Another hammer strike.
Chaos collapsed into a formless, tumultuous mess. Then it reformed back into distinct elements and resumed its full on charge towards Talion and his forge, though the stone structure had fallen away to where it now looked like Talion was working with a floating green blaze.
Another hammer strike, and Chaos lost its shape again. Again, it reformed and charged. Another hammer blow to the now shining gold band Talion wore blew the horde of chaotic power back in surging and writhing formlessness.
On the edges of his perception, Talion understood that some force was attempting to work against him, but he lacked the knowledge or scope of view to truly understand what now strove against his effort. For Talion was, however much it irked him, following the teachings of Celebrimbor. The wraith had lectured Talion about the mindset one needed when forging a ring of power on the long forgotten trek towards Mount Doom. Talion and Celebrimbor had needed an unwavering mental approach and belief in what they had wanted the New Ring to be when they were creating its silver band.
Now a whisper had dragged that lesson up for Talion to remember, and so he had applied it. Talion thought about nothing else but the fixing of the ring he wore. About its restoration to full glory and power. So Talion the Ringwraith forged with singular purpose. His hammer first struck at the edges of the painful, jagged wound that ran the length of the Ring, using the baleful green fire, itself powered by Talion's own inner magicks, to bring the wound to straightness.
The gold was heated by the green fire clinging to his version of Turánn, and when a section along the wound was judged sufficiently heated, according to Talion's experienced eye (for in his long mastery over Minas Morgul and the ancient knowledge of the Noldor Celebrimbor had shown him, the rogue Nazgûl had grown learned in the arts of the smith) and the whispering instinct that assisted him, a burst of quick forging strikes to straighten the metal. Then he moved on to the next section.
While Talion worked, the Chaos that surrounded him and his forge continued to throw itself heedlessly at the interloper to their domain. Maybe on some attempts they got closer to the shrouded figure, maybe on some they didn't move forward at all. However the constant was that Chaos never stopped attacking, but it was not organized. Otherwise it might have reached Talion and interrupted his work. Chaos was many things and could do many things, but it could not match the unceasing, orderly march of Talion's forging.
He forged without pause. Chaos raged in spurts and spats, against Talion and against parts of itself when it was scrambled into an indistinct muck and moved to reform into its individual parts. Chaos could not conceptualize working as a whole, casting aside the distinct identities of elemental power to work as one. So it could never reach Talion and the Order his work was structured around but it continued to try nevertheless.
After an eon of forging -or was it just a scant few minutes of work?- Talion had transformed the bleeding and oozing crack of a wound into a straight line that ran down the ring. A mar on its perfection but a lesser one than it had been, and a lesser mar was easier to erase than what it had been. He raised Turánn over his head once more in preparation to begin the final forging blow that would suture the wound into nothingness and restore the perfection inherent in his Ring.
Then a whisper of a thought crossed his mind, and Talion froze. The Ring had lost parts of its spiritual essence in the time since the end of the One Ring and Sauron. Like blood dripping from a man's wound onto the hard dirt of a battlefield, the Ring had lost some of what made it, and that lifeblood could not be stuffed back into a man's wound once it had been spilled. The same stood true for the Ring, Talion realized.
Yet a man's blood would be returned to him with healing and rest. Talion did not know if the same stood true for a ring of power, yet something whispered to him that it did not.
In a moment, Talion's plan changed. He needed energy to restore the Ring to what it had been and now no longer was. But where could he find that power and how would he channel it into the Ring? He and Celebrimbor had needed a complex series of channels and inscriptions to properly bind the power needed for the New Ring and flow it into the inert template of a steel ring, where it was forged into completion.
Where was he to get that here, in this long forgotten island in the far north of Middle-Earth?
Then a whisper bade Talion to turn his head, away from the fire and the Ring, and look to the side. Talion did so, as he always seemed to do when whispers spoke to him these days. And he saw, charging towards him, an aurochs made of fire.
Talion could have done many things in that instant. Many things that would have had many results indeed, but Talion chose to look deeper, beyond the shape and appearance that was charging towards him. His sight slipped into a deeper part of the Unseen world and Talion saw that what was really charging towards him at full tilt was not a threat, it was an opportunity. Talion saw unharnessed power before his eyes and he had a hammer in his hand.
And when you have a hammer in hand, doesn't every problem look like a nail?
In a flash, Talion reversed the position of Turánn, so the back spike was facing down instead of up and when the charging aurochs of fire reared up to trample Talion under its flaming hooves, Talion struck the power across the snout with Turánn's spike. Then he brought the spike down on the flat head of the auroch, and pulled. The beast form tried to resist, but it didn't understand what was happening to it. If it did, the fires of Chaos would have resisted much harder.
Because Talion wasn't pulling the auroch closer to him so that he could strike at it. No, Talion was directing the power into a waiting and eager vessel to hold and master it. The auroch lacked the time to change tactics before it was pulled into the Ring and sealed in with a hammer blow from Turánn.
Around Talion, the auroch's companions also charged in, having been slower than the fire of Chaos. Water, Earth and Air struck at Talion, not understanding where Fire had gone and unaware of the danger to themselves. Talion had his choice of power to take for his own. Fire had fit him very well, Talion knew more of the roaring flames of Mount Doom than any being yet living. He also knew well the piercing cold of ice, so Turánn lashed out at the octopus facsimile composed of crackling hoarfrost and roaring water, dragging the power it represented into the Ring.
Then he began to forge again, the ringing blows driving away the rest of the untame power from contesting the seizure of these two parts of it. After all, the Ring he wore had already been forged, so there was no need, as it was whispered to Talion, for carvings and purpose crafted forging implements.
Now Talion was aware of the struggle against him. Now he felt the wild power buck and thrash and rage at his machinations against it. But Talion was forging, and the wild power could not throw the combined will of ring and man away.
As Talion forged, a golden glow began to emanate from the band on his left hand. It wasn't the warm glow of a rising sun, chasing away the gloom of the night, or the last glorious embers of the sunset. It wasn't the healthy golden hues of wheat right before a harvest, or anything else that could be confused with a good bounty. This was the gold of command, of vast golden hordes jealously guarded, a golden glow that was, it seemed, to be the very conception of power manifest in material form.
This nevershifting aurora of golden light engulfed Talion, and in the momentary pauses in his forging, he realized that the light was coming from the Ring itself. And was Talion gazed at the golden light and at the same time continued beating the wild power into submission, his vision folded in on itself, and Talion began to see the Unseen world, not with just his own once-mortal eyes, but through the refractive lens that the Ring was suddenly acting as.
And he saw Creation itself stretch before him.
There was a land, a sea and a sky just as Talion knew there should be. Yet the heavens and the earth were lousy with burning and undulating lines of wild power that criss crossed each other and the firmament around them without rhyme or reason. Without Order.
But looking past the oh so bright veins of power, Talion realized that he was not looking down at Middle Earth as he recalled it. When had the Unseen ever looked like it did now or the essence of that realm behaved like that which Talion had greedily seized for his own purposes. Could he have missed it before, or just not remember it?
No, surely not. Talion could remember the unseen of Middle-Earth and it did not even feel like the unseen of where he was now. Talion didn't even think that he was in the same world as Gondor or even Mordor.
Gondor, bright and beloved, had been ordered by the benevolent and watchful rule of the Stewards. Mordor, for all its foulness of spirit and character, had had purpose to the way it was. An Evil purpose, as all things Sauron bent to his will were, but purpose all the same.
This land lacked any structure to its make. It was all wild and chaotic, and the brands of wild power that scored the fabric of creation only enforced disconnect between what Talion had known and where he now was.
Talion even turned his gaze to the heavens to look at the stars and their patterns, and even with the names of their shapes firmly cast away from his thoughts, he knew that they were not his stars. This land was foreign, and Talion felt his certainty of purpose begin to slip away. If he was not in Middle-Earth, if Gondor and Mordor and all that lay around those two lands were now lost to him in their entirety, what purpose…what fate was left for him?
As Talion began to slip, the whispers returned, beckoning him to look past the detail of the land and heavens and to that space where the two met. At first there was nothing, just a kind of gap between where the horizon would have been. Then Talion looked closer, and there was something growing in the gap. A razor thin line of gold that ran across the length of that strange gap, where it seemed that anything might be able to slip through and gain entrance into this land. Talion noticed that the line of gold pulsed and grew, but only ever so minutely, in time with the beats of his hammer.
Talion turned his head from one side, then to the other, before doing a full circle, studying the strange gap that laid between the land and sky. The thin band of gold stretched the entire gap, unbroken. So there was a circle in that strange gap, and Talion was the one creating it?
No, said the whispers, this was not a circle, it was a Ring.
The realization cascaded into Talion's thoughts and he was enlightened. He was not seeing a strange gap in the horizon! He was in the Unseen, where the spiritual truths shone brighter than the physical. What he was seeing was a literal gap in the fabric of this other world. Talion was seeing beyond the horizon and because of this he knew that he was in another world.
The whispers spoke to him following that realization, they told Talion of the power that could be his, if he had but the willpower to reach out and take it. This world was lacking in many places, the whispers said to him, and that meant there was a place in the Unseen for Talion to slot himself into. He would be greater than Celebrimbor could have ever imagined becoming.
Talion balked at that. He had just wanted to repair the damage done to the precious Ring, restore it to glory, not this. Talion was not an ambitious man, he had never sought power for the sake of power itself, nor to advance himself. He sought power so that things in the world might be protected, so that evil might not march unopposed.
He did not want power.
You are but a vessel"
But…
He did want to prove Celebrimbor wrong. A vessel would not look to better themselves beyond what their master had intended. So it had been with Celebrimbor, so it had been with Sauron. It would not be the same when Talion's only master was himself! He was free! And he would not let anything threaten that, Talion decided.
He would be free and the master of his own fate, now and forever.
So Talion followed the guidance of the whispers, and began to forge a ring on the edge of this new world. Because Talion had been enlightened. Because what was the world, be it flat or round, if not a ring?
If the world could be conceived as a ring, then why not see the world as a place in need of a ring? A ring was structured, ordered, deliberate in its shape and appearance. Was not the world the same? What of the one who wore the Ring? Would that not mean that they would become as impermeable and imperishable as that which they held as master of?
The ideas could be layered atop each other, Talion discovered, like a billet and then merged together until the two concepts had become inseparable from each other. The ring could not be destroyed without destroying the world and maybe the same applied for the reverse(though Talion did not forge with that intention).
It was a monumental undertaking, a great expansion of the role for which Talion's Ring of Power had originally been created. No longer was it a member of the Nine, one of the many links in the great Ring that Sauron had crafted his One Ring to rule over. Now this member of the Nine was the sole ring. It was the circle and the pieces all at the same time. Had this been Arda still, the effort would have failed. Magic in that world was not what it once was in Elder Days.
But Talion was not in Arda anymore. This new land was practically invested with so much power, all of it lacking direction, order and meaning; and Talion had already seized parts of the power. He had a connection with the far flung siblings of the fiery aurochs and watery octopus he had bent to his will, he just needed to master the rest.
Turánn flew at a faster tempo as Talion and the whispers together flung their will out across the new land, following the interlocking veins of power that crisscrossed this vessel and imposing the Order they sought on the wild power.
The wild power fought like their island cousins had but they fell before the ordered beat of Turánn. The bite and venom was hammered out of fire, and the duplicitous nature out of water. With every new vein of power tapped into and mastered, the golden Ring Talion was forging at the edges of the circle of this world grew wider and more real, the concept and power it's idea represented inserting itself into the fabric of this world
The new World Ring closed up the gaps in the edge of this new world. Gaps were in ages long past, different world spheres had blindly collided and discharged strange and otherworldly beings into this unlucky world. This event would have eventually repeated itself again, after many thousands of years, but the golden band that now encircled the world had closed off that possibility forever.
Why?
Because the Ring Talion wore was, after one final swing driven by monumental effort, repaired. Its power restored, the perfection of its golden form once again evident in its master's eyes. The spessarite jewel was crowned with flaring with renewed light, as did its master's eyes.
Then Talion gasped aloud in the now silent mountain forge. The completion of the World Ring and bountiful power that now flowed through Talion as a result had wiped away the fog that the long years of servitude under Sauron's Eye had caused. Just as the World Ring had plugged the gaps in the fabric of this new world, the golden light had cleansed Talion's mind of forgetfulness, restoring the pools of memory into a flowing river.
Memories of his life after death came back to Talion and in his mind he rejoiced, for that fog of forgetfulness had been a cruelly crafted punishment of the Witch-King. Turánn faded from his hand and Talion raised it to his face to brush away a fine layer of forge soot that was clinging to his mask and obscuring his vision.
But his hand felt the contours of his own face instead of the lines of crude iron. The backwash of soulfire had melted the mask in its entirety. At least his hood was still intact. Talion cleared his eyes and looked down to see it.
The Ring.
His Ring.
And it was perfect. Talion admired its form from every angle he could. The orange gem burned with life. The burnished gold shone with an entrancing light. The engravings danced along the golden band. And most importantly of all: the power of the Ring rang clean and true, unmarred by the ugly wound Mount Doom had cruelly given it.
What was Talion's had been restored. And it would never have to leave him again. He and it had been joined together, the two parts of the World Ring concept. The Ring that held the power and the wearer to wield it. Just as the power of the Ring could not be broken without breaking the world, Talion could not be destroyed without destroying the Ring.
"My fate is truly my own, now and forever Celebrimbor. You have no hold over me now. You are nothing Ring-maker, compared to a Ringlord." Talion thought vindictively.
A growing light broke Talion's attention away from his Ring, and he looked up into the sky above, where the first rays of dawn were chasing away the gloom of night.
The ocean far away glimmered and Talion knew that a new world laid before him. Old words that he had discovered in the vaults of Minas Morgul came back to Talion as he took in the sight.
"Out of the Great Sea to Middle-earth I am come. In this place will I abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world." Talion had no heirs but abide here until the world's end he would. The whispers now spoke to him of greatness and grandeur and Talion felt inclined to listen.
And the world over trembled at the Order the Gravewalker had wrought.
A/N: Well here it is. I'm happy with it, what about you, the readers?
For any confusion regarding the fairly high tier concepts invoked in this chapter. I'd recommend you look over the Morgoth's Ring concept and the Chaos/Order dichotomy, and Magic itself, in Witcher. Quote Talion says is just Elendil's Oath. Next chapter will be wider world reactions to Talion's actions, as all crossovers must do I suppose.