To us today, whether we be human, hobbit, or something else entirely – the morality of gods, in whatever form they take, may seem simple.
They are either good or evil.
Loving of us, or hateful.
A force of destruction, or one of creation.
And for some gods this holds true.
For instance, it is simple and altogether true to say that Melkor was evil.
Or that Sauron desired our destruction.
That Yavvanna was good.
And Fãö was loving.
But this did not hold true for all Gods that once walked the lands of Middle-Earth, all those ages ago.
The Blarney Son, for instance, was a far more… complicated creature.
Like many gods in that time, and let's be honest our own as well, he had not so much morality as we would define it – but more a purpose.
And that purpose…well, now we've stumbled on the right question haven't we.
But let's stop, for we're getting ahead of ourselves. So, let's turn back, back to the beginning of this tale. For if we are to understand this god of magic's final trick, we must hear his first.
Middle Earth, Western Rhûn; August, 2979th year of the Third Age of Middle-Earth
Alatar had never known true rage before. Oh, he'd known anger of course, everyone who'd ever had to work with Olorin did at some point – but it had never been like this. This was a seething thing deep within his body, it made him tremble. Funny, he thought nothing but the Silmaril could have done that.
Though, he supposed, that it was the Silmaril that had done this to him. Or rather the theft of it. The thief of it.
Pallando.
Pallando had abandoned him.
Though to be fair he had done that many a time before.
But this was different.
Pallando had betrayed him.
Pallando had…had…
'My Lord?'
An interruption to his rage.
Or maybe a target.
The wizard turned and stared at the man, no at the boy that had dared to speak to him while he raged in his solitude. Barely more than a child, the young youth of Rhûn held a spear in his right hand that was twice the size of himself.
Unlike the other men that worked for the wizard, he did not seem to be afraid of Alatar. And most strange of all, he was smiling, smiling at the wizard.
Alatar did not recall recruiting the mad, but it was not impossible the child had simply been driven so in his service. He hardly cared one way or the other
'Yes?' he said, the edge of his temper fraying the word into something brittle.
'Oh…' said the boy, clearly wavering in his purpose, under the clear rage in the wizard's face. But Alatar would have none of that, he had been interrupted in his solitude – he would not have it be for nothing.
'Yes? Spit it out, what do you want?'
The boy straightened and his young face took on a look of determination.
'My Lord, I just came to enquire when we are to go after the Silmaril? The men are readying their mounts, but they don't know the direction he went.'
'And what, exactly, gave you the impression that I did?' Said the wizard, past the point of simple rage now.
'Don't you sir?' Said the child, in blatant insubordination.
'No!'
'Oh, well don't you have somebody you could ask?'
'Ask?! Ask! Who, precisely would I ask?'
'Why the one who made them, sir. Who else?'
The rage called for him to strike the boy then. And yet he did not, for the terrible idea, the idea of Fëanor as the answer for any kind of query, had been planted in the wizard's mind. And he could no longer shake it, than could a gust of wind uproot a mountain. In his new distraction he waved the boy away, who bowed and made his exit quickly.
And as he strolled away from his lord's chambers, the boy did something that all those who knew him well, would have found most bizarre. He whistled. Not a strange thing in the vacuum of space and time certainly, but you see the boy – Lorgan to his kin and no one else – could not whistle at all.
And yet the tune that left his lips now, was strong and sweet like the gayest of birdsongs.
It was an even stranger sight to young Lorgan himself, who having woken in the weapon's closet with his armour missing not five minutes ago, was only now emerging.
But then again encountering your own doppleganger is bound to be a strange sight, no matter what said doubleganger happens to be doing at the time.
The two boys stopped, frozen in that dusty corridor, and stared at one another in astonishment. But only for a moment, before the whistling boy winked and then vanished, leaving the armour he wore to fall to the ground with an almighty clang.
This is the first trick; can you guess the next?
Arda, Next to and above the former plains of Rohan, the Kingdom of Eorl; F.O. 17
Eomer had never felt so angry in all his life. Not when his uncle had been murdered by the Dunlanders – or at least something that looked like a Dunlander. Or when his sister had left him, or when his cousin let the plains of Rohan be sucked back into Gondor's control.
Oh he had been angry then, for certain, but it wasn't the same. All those things, well they were mostly out of his control. The dead would murder the living no matter what he had to say on the matter. And as for Éowyn, well he could never convince her against anything else – so why should her marriage be any different? He was just grateful she had managed to smuggle a few of her children safely to his door; before everything had gone terribly quiet from Gondor's end.
Rohan's demise had hurt, but that too had been beyond his control. Not so this mistake, not so this…lunacy.
'You told the Dwarf Lord, what exactly?'
The hobbit matron before him did not wilt at the tone in her king's voice. Ganymen rarely did, and this one – Madam Mime, had a worse attitude than most in her profession.
'I could hardly keep the secret of the metal from him, my king, not when he asked me so directly. What would you have preferred me to do my Lord, lie? To keep this gift, this chance, to myself?'
It was the tone of her words that made the young king of the new mountain kingdom, grind his teeth in frustration.
'What chance? To die quicker on the battlefield? There's no proof this…this metal even kills the living that well. All the weapons they made of it were hoarded by Gondor!'
'And what does that tell you, my king?' Came another, slyer voice from his right.
The Fool. It was always the Fool.
'Nothing. It tells me nothing, other than Aragorn is a greedy shit – just like he always was.'
Anger and frustration sparked in the Fool's eyes then, and he stepped closer to the throne.
'If Gondor has not fallen already, my king, then it will do little to aid in this fight. But you are not Gondor, you love your people – so don't hide from them, choose to fight. Fight for the right to keep breathing without being harassed by the dead.
'If the Ganymen say the metal can be used then I would trust them, they are shepherds of the dead. So, use it, and if it fails, then it fails and we are no worse off than we are now. But if you sit and do nothing my king, knowing there might have been a chance, no matter how small, that you could stop the rise of the dead, well you will die the death of all cowards. A thousand cuts – for cowards die a hundred deaths, and the valiant only one.'
The Mountain king laughed at that. Wild and almost maniacally.
'Well, that is all fine to say in these halls, my fool. But this metal, these weapons against the dead – if you hadn't notice, we don't really have enough to arm an army. A single shield, and a few stick daggers wielded by hobtyla are not enough to slay this beast. Gondor has all those weapons.'
And at that the fool, for a second remained quiet. As if weighing the outcome, of what he said next.
And then he smiled, the smile that would damn them all.
'Then my king, why not take them back.'
'Take them back, with what spell?'
'No spell my Lord, just an army. Take Gondor, take back the lands that were snatched from you, and the weapons shall come with them.'
The king looked down at his hand then, his rage barely contained within his own shaking shoulders. He shouldn't, he knew it – keeping to the mountains was the sanest, most sensible option. He should say no, allow the dwarves and elves to study what little of the metal they still held within their grasp perhaps. Yes, after some thought he would do that. And yet the rest, to take the best of his army, to rally all those in the west that would hear his call and march on that city.
That city that still trapped his sister inside it's walls.
'My king,' said Madam Mime. 'It is the Ganyman's belief that Gondor has already fallen, that the dead have claimed it as their holdfast. If the living is to continue to rule this land, then to strike it down, may be our only hope.'
What would his uncle do?
Choose a course of action that would not lead his people to war.
Yes, that he would have tried to, at least.
But the dead…they would never stop; they were worse than orcs. They would destroy this land, if someone didn't stop them first.
Like they had already destroyed Éowyn.
And that thought more than any other, finally made the king's mind up.
'Then call the banners my good Hobytla, it looks like we're riding to war.'
No one was exactly sure when it had happened, after all Gondor had had an army for years, a very well-made army. An army that had nearly single handily defeated the Dark Lord Sauron and came back victorious. Yet it had begun to change. This did not necessarily worry its Commanders, after all every aspect of the Kingdom changed in some way when the new King took over.
It had all begun with the twelfth battalion. The King had been very eager…ecstatic even to see how his new army performed under pressure. Of course, most of the experienced captains thought it was too soon after the war, for these young and rather tired men to be undertaking a mission such as this. But then again, try talking a king out of anything and you may as well kiss goodbye to your neck, they knew the old stories.
Their King had told them that he wanted to test the men himself. And so, it was with the slow tug of terror that they waved goodbye to those boys that day. Staring after them with almost certainty of their deaths, as the youths jostled one another's horses to fight for a place beside the king. He didn't seem to mind this at all, if anything he found it funny, maybe that should have been their first clue.
Later when they'd arrived back seemingly unharmed, the Captains had patted themselves on the back and called themselves needless worriers. Yet those boys had changed, they walked not as youths in training anymore but battle-ready soldiers. Their faces were pinched, though not it would seem from the cold, and their eyes were far too hollow for such young faces.
These were not the same boys that had set out that day, they weren't boys at all, they weren't even men, they were something else. Maybe they could have stopped it then, stopped all of it, but they hadn't, and it had spread. Soon men who had been as healthy as any man could be would drop to the ground, plagued with some unknown sickness of the stomach, and then rise from their sick beds, changed men. No not men, monsters, creatures of the other world, wraiths of the dead.
And even the doubters amongst them could no longer deny what was happening, when the old Commander, the one that had died just before the king was crowned, walked now amongst this new army's ranks. The captains, those great men who still had their own minds, needed no further proof than that; so, in the middle of the night, when no other soul in the city yet waked, they stole themselves, their loved ones and anything that they could not bear to part with out of that city. They fled, they fled far away to a place where no one would even think to look, into the mountains. This was no longer the army of Gondor anymore; this was the Army of the Dead.
Some, who had clearly not been paying attention to anything else in this story, say that this war – this War of the Dead – truly began that day. That cold winter's day in the month of December, when those two armies of men, stood and faced each other on that snow-covered battlefield. It didn't of course, this had been building, building to this moment, to this day for more than forty years.
This was the moment not when it began, but when the peoples of Middle-Earth could no longer deny that it was already well underway.
It began like so many battles, with the raising of the banners and the sounding of the horns. Then the commander of the Eorl army gave the call and those brave men, those magnificent mounted steeds, began the charge. The Gondor Army stood there and waited. They didn't even raise their shields against the long-sharpened spears of their foe, they just stood there. They hardly seemed aware that they were even in a battle, of course, maybe they didn't need to be aware to do what they did next.
It took longer than one might have expected for those riders of Eorl, those hardened warriors of men to realise why all their horses seemed to be falling, whenever they came close to the Gondor front lines. Caltrops, the kind that had been outlawed in both Gondor and Rohan for centuries now. It was a cheat, a lie, and if Faramir or Éowyn had been in charge of that attack they would have never allowed it. But Éowyn was gone, and Faramir was worse than useless under the wrath of the Mad King.
The horses dropped, and then like wolves waiting for their prey, the men of Gondor attacked. Not with steel or shield, but as an animal would, with teeth and claw. They ripped into the flesh of the fallen. They feasted on them, not as men did with wine and hearty laughter, but as wolves, with the savage hunger that not even beasts could truly understand. For this was a gnawing, clawing hunger of one who would never know joy or laughter or love again. This was the kind of hunger that only the dead may feel, the kind of hunger that once someone had fallen to its whims, they would never stop. It was then that the men of Eorl, proud and as strong as they were, tried to run. But no man, woman or child living could out run what clambered up onto that battlefield that day.
Perhaps, if the tides had turned and Eorl had won that day those riders, those great men of Eorl, would have felt pity for such as these creatures were. Such rotting creatures whose jaws seemed barely to stay on their faces anymore, let alone work in conjunction with the rest of their bodies. But they felt no such pity now, there was no time to, for every moment that was not spent on the process of running away – like a coward many would lament later – was a moment spent in the process of becoming some creature's next meal. For this was no army of the Dead, this was more than that, this was a swarm, this was a plague. And that swarm, this plague, would sweep over all the lands of Middle-Earth, until nothing stood but the hollow shells of the dead themselves.
The time of the living was gone, the time of the Eorl people had set, and a new dawn would rise, yet not on their land. Not on the land of the Horse lords and the kings of men, not on the land north of here, not on the lands of elves and men of the north, not on lands of Hobytla, or Dwarves. Their time, as all things that breathed in this world, was over. And this new sun, well it would rise not their lands, but on the Land of the Dead.
Arda, Next to and above the former plains of Rohan, the Cavernous Kingdom of Eorl, the Chambers of King Eomer I, Mountain King; F.O. 17
The boy was going to die.
This was the truth that the Blarney Son could not hide from, that he had never been able to hide from, his own omnipotence would not allow him.
The boy was going to die.
This was the way the world was set; this was the path that the Blarney Son had placed them all on when he'd turned the Blue Wizard's head with talk of rescuing the elf spirit from the halls of Mandos. The boy was going to die, and he was going to do so in such a spectacular way that it would break the hope of what little resistance the living had.
But the living as a whole were not the Blarney Son's priority.
They never had been.
For the sake of his people, and his purpose he could not allow them to be.
He would not cry at their heartbreaks, or their deaths – as he would the boy's.
For in the end the Blarney Son was a god, or as close to a god as Hobbits can ever come, and he had long left the concerns of the living, and the dead behind. He saw the paths that his actions had provoked, he saw how each change had spawned another fate different to how it should have been in the original plan. In another life the boy would have lived to old age, a king of Rohan, and father to a long line of Rohan Kings. That had been his fate, the life he had been meant to live, a life where he had never once encountered a hobbit Fool - a fate that in the end would come to nothing more than dust now.
Luck and patience had taken them to this point, and he could not let his own sentiment for the Rohan…the Eorl boy king ruin that. As he had almost done so for the boy's sister – "Do not marry him, my girl" he had begged. "But if you must, do not dwell in the land of Gondor." He had pleaded, all to the ears of the deaf, or so it may have well of been. But he could not let himself think of that now. For the girl was dead, her grave traced in the hard stone of history – and not even the greatest of his magics could change that.
Nor should he want to.
He could see even now the strings of the future moving – tug them too hard this way and the whole sky would collapse. Trace them too softly and the great works of the past fade. Aye, not just the art and poetry of Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Goblins and Hobbits but Men as well. Eventually even the greatest of the Rohan's work would fade into rust and their people would forget their history and their craft.
They'd have to start all over again.
This is what the Blarney Son saw.
For this is the power of omnipotence, to be able to look into all times, into all paths and see the fates of all who pass through them. And on the day that the fate of the world changed, the Blarney Son had looked into a time that would come and had seen the children of Hobbick fade. First fade from relevance, then history, than the very world itself. The time of Men would come and those who had come before whether they be the children of Eru, or Aulë, Hobbick or even Cael, would vanish. Some over the sea, some under the ground, but most would simply outlive their usefulness in Eru's grand narrative. Outlive it until all that remained of them, as a people, as a memory, was a pile of bones on a tiny little island in the sea.
The Blarney Son had seen this and had not enjoyed it, and so had decided to stop it. And he did not regret his actions, not once, no matter how much blood stained the ground now. For he was a god, and gods do not know regret.
But this one here, with the death of the boy – that would hurt, even if he did not regret it. It will be a pain in his heart until he takes the last breath of his immortal life.
As the girl's had before him.
He tries to picture the white lady of Rohan now, as he watches her brother don his armour. Tries to think what she would say to all of this. But he doesn't let it go too far and quickly shuts it out. As he does with most anything that gets in the way of his purpose.
'Fool, do you watch me now because you have something to say to me? Or is there simply no other entertainment for you?
Says the boy, in the low deep voice of irritation he always addresses his fool with. It makes the fool smile despite himself.
'No my king to both, I am simply staying in the moment before our paths separate us.'
He does not say 'for good' but Eomer's grave look tells him he has heard it anyway.
'My Fool, long have you counselled my uncle and cousin when you served them – now I ask for the same service this night. Am I being foolish? To take so many of my warriors and ride against such a foe as this. Do I ride to my death today?'
'I think you know my thoughts on the matter, sir. A sad fate perhaps, but not one without purpose, my liege.'
Eomer nodded, his features flinching into certainty.
'Aye, it's what I thought then. Well then, what is to be is to be. I will ride, and perhaps I will die. But then perhaps that is a kinder fate then what would await if I stayed here and hid in my keep for the rest of my life.'
'Perhaps,' said the Fool. 'A man's life is never so much an adventure as what waits for him on the other side.'
'Yes…an adventure, it's such an adventure that the dead would rather cast the world into ruin than embrace it.'
'My king….'
'But never you mind that my fool I know my duty, and I would ride to meet it no matter what fate it brought me to. But I have another service to ask of you today. Please, if I should not return make sure the children are safe, as you once did for Éowyn and I.'
Overwhelmed with sudden affection for the boy then, the Blarney almost said something, almost tried to persuade him from this course of action.
But he stops himself, as he stops himself with most acts of love these days.
'Of course, my boy, I promise. I will care for them as if they were my own. They shall never leave my sight, no matter how many generations go by – they shall be under my watch.'
The boy smiled at that, as he placed the helmet of a horse Lord of Rohan atop his head once more. And the Blarney Son, well he watched him leave, thinking all the while on the weight of the vow he has just promised. A vow he will never break, even to the detriment of his own soul.
Never let them leave my sight, he had promised.
And dear readers, he never has.