Strange Alliances

by Erestor

Disclaimer: I own nothing pertaining to The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, or the Harry Potter series. This story was written for entertainment purposes only.

To the wonderful reviewers: thank you! Your enthusiasm and encouragement means a lot to me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

'"Sauron himself was overthrown, and Isildur cut the Ring from his hand with the hilt-shard of his father's sword, and took it for his own."'

- J.R.R. Tolkien, 'The Fellowship of the Ring'

A long time ago...

... in a galaxy far, far away...

(well, not quite)

...Legolas was sitting on a balcony in Minas Tirith, at night, staring up at the starry sky.

(It was one of the many things he was very good at.)

It was nights like these that made him feel as though he were not alone, that he was being watched. Though it had been many years since his brief, unexpected trip into another World, he had not forgotten the terrible feeling of reality ripping, falling apart, and of tumbling through this tear, into another place.

He wondered if it would ever happen to him again, and he hoped not. It had been a horrific experience.

Lady Nienna of the Aratar had promised that all would be explained in time. But time had passed, and there had been no explanations. Perhaps when he reached Valinor, she would tell him what had happened. Perhaps it was wrong of him to expect a vision that would clarify matters.

He wanted to know what had happened to him. Why had he been chosen? Why had Nienna been there also? Where exactly had he landed? Who was the girl who had screamed at him, and made such strange signs to protect herself? Was she a wizard of some kind? He had seen two others: Lórien and Mandos. Was the presence of Mandos a warning of some unpleasant event to come?

Legolas wanted answers.

He would go to Valinor. It was his right. He had lingered in Middle-earth long enough.

Happy at having made a decision, Legolas got to his feet and left the balcony.

(Doom, doom, doom.)

"I'm hungry," whined Sauron for the sixteenth time. (Lórien had been counting.)

They had walked down the many flights of stairs and left the building in which Luthy lived. Now they stood on the sidewalk and watched the cars zoom by. Fëanor was staring, wide-eyed, at everything. It was a great shock to him to see so many strange beings.

Mortals. He did not think much of them. They were pathetic little creatures. He could have fought more than a score of them, all by himself, blindfolded, with one hand tied behind his back, and still beaten them all, Fëanor thought.

"What are we going to do now?" Nienna asked Mandos. "We don't seem to have learned much, except that whatever these people put in their computers comes true. I do not understand that."

"The computer devices must be filled with an evil power," said Lórien.

"Hah. You keep on saying that," snapped Nienna. "I think it is the people with the evil power. We can write things in the computer, and nothing comes about. And then they write it, and it happens."

Mandos nodded, agreeing with Nienna. Nienna grinned triumphantly at her little brother.

"I'm hungry," whined Sauron, interrupting this tender siblingish moment.

"Seventeen," thought Lórien grimly.

"Well then," said Nienna, "we should go and find something to eat. Can't have the little Dark Lord starve to death, can we?"

Sauron, sensing the Vala's sarcasm, wisely decided to say nothing.

They walked down the sidewalk. Fëanor was happy to have a body again, but the air he breathed was not as fresh as he remembered. The dangerous machines that whizzed back and forth along the roads were smelly. And the mortal's clothes were very strange and ugly, like the mortals themselves.

"When I get home," said Sauron, "and regain control of Middle-earth – which shouldn't take long, I might add– I shall invent one of those moving metal things."

"A car?" asked Lórien, who, being of the Valar, knew these sorts of things.

"Yes. Cars. Except I'll make them bigger," said Sauron. "They can pull my various war machinery. Look how fast they can go!"

It was probably because of his comments that the Valar started walking more quickly, and Sauron began to fall behind. Soon he was next to Fëanor, a fact that made him nervous. His memories of Fëanor were not pleasant. He had once been working in Aulë's forge, pretending to be the innocent, industrious Maia he had been before he met Melkor, and Fëanor, very young at the time, had bitten him. Things had gone downhill from there. It is hard to seem innocent and industrious when one is hopping around, trying to get an Elfling to detach his teeth from one's leg, yelling, "Melkor take you, you savage!"

Aulë had investigated the matter. He had given his Maia a lengthy lecture about how Melkor had misled him and he had been forgiven for his wrongdoing, and that if he wanted to stay in Valinor, he had to treat the poor Elves better. "Melkor has repented," Aulë had finished. "You should repent too."

Sauron, thinking back to this, couldn't help but smirk contemptuously. Melkor had repented? Nonsense! Melkor never repented. The Valar had been idiots to believe him, and Nienna had been particularly idiotic, because she had actually vouched for him.

Sauron glanced at Mandos. He wondered if Mandos had believed Melkor when he had come to Manwë, groveling and apologetic. Mandos never voiced his opinions unless Manwë asked him to do so, and he had stayed silent during that trial. If he had spoken, he probably would have made some reference to doom, in which case, he would have been entirely correct once again.

All things end in doom.

"There!" cried Sauron. "That place sells food!" He pointed at a small building with large glass windows. Someone was leaving, holding a large, flat box. There was a strange smell in the air, but it was unmistakably the smell of edible things.

They cautiously entered the building. There was a tile floor, and a counter, behind which a man was standing. He was wearing a peculiar kind of hat on his head. Behind the counter, on the wall, there were pictures of food with numbers beside them. There were some tables and chairs on the other side of the room.

"Does this place sell food?" asked Lórien.

The man was looking at the five strangely. "Yes," he replied slowly.

"What sort of food?" asked Sauron.

"Pizza," said the man.

Sauron pulled out the piece of paper money from his tea-cozy. "Will this buy us pizza?" he asked, waving it in front of the man's nose.

"Yes," said the man. He was looking more and more uneasy.

"Good," said Sauron. He looked at the pictures of the food. The pizza food. It appeared rather... interesting. There was lots of red stuff on it. And white stuff. And flat circles of a rusty colored something. Meat? Roast Orc was more appetizing. Sauron pointed at the pizza that didn't have the circles on it. "I want that," he said. "Three of that."

"OK," said the man, whose name was Harvey. "Would you like something to drink?"

Sauron narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "What drinks do you sell?"

Harvey rattled off a lengthy list, warily eyeing the child and the four adults. The woman was absolutely gorgeous, and two of the men bore some familial resemblance to her. But the fourth man was different. He had long thick black hair, with ropes of gold braided intricately into it. His robes were beautifully embroidered and bejeweled. Not to mention, he had his arms crossed over his chest, and one eyebrow raised menacingly and was practically sneering at Harvey.

These sort of people did not often drop by to purchase some pizza.

Actually, they never had.

"Do you sell water?" asked the man in blue.

"Um... yes, we do," replied Harvey, snapping out of his thoughts.

"We would like some water, then," said the man.

"They want water," said the child, waving a dismissive hand in their direction. "I want some of this so-called 'root beer'."

"All right," said Harvey, entering this information into his computer. He got a cup and went to the soda machine, pressed the button, and filled the cup with the drink. At this simple, ordinary occurrence, all five of the customers leaned forward, craning their necks to see what he was doing.

Harvey was beginning to think that he had entered the Twilight Zone. "It'll take about twenty minutes for your pizzas to be cooked," he said. He named the price of the food, and the child handed him the money.

The child only had four fingers.

Harvey stared at the poor, maimed hand, bug-eyed. "Your finger..." he began.

"Is missing. Yes, I know," said the child.

Harvey picked up the money and started counting out the change. "But how? What happened?"

"Horrific incident with a chopping knife," said the woman, patting the boy on the shoulder.

"Oh, I'm so sorry..."

"We're not," said the woman cryptically. She took the change and the five went to a table and sat down, Harvey staring at them in disbelief.

"Perhaps I have been terribly misinformed," said Sauron, speaking in Quenya for Fëanor's benefit, "but are you not supposed to be sympathetic, Nienna?"

"Yes," said Nienna. "And I'm also supposed to be crying all the time. As you can see, I am not."

"Anyway, you must realize that had Isildur not chopped off your finger, the whole free world would have been enslaved." (This was Lórien's wise contribution to the discussion.)

"And how is that a bad thing?" asked Sauron reasonably. "Do you think I wanted the whole free world to be having fun or something? I was trying to enslave them all."

("Noble goal," murmured Nienna.)

"Isildur attacked me in a very sneaky, unfair way."

"You had just killed his father," said Lórien.

"Trees of Valinor, it was a war!" cried Sauron. "Should I have poked him with a stick instead? Or maybe we could have tossed a coin to see who would take over Middle-earth. That would have made everyone happy, wouldn't it?"

"Perhaps you would have been happier if Isildur had poked you with a stick," said Nienna.

Sauron glared.

"Well, as you said, it was a war," said Nienna mildly. Sauron was thwarted by his own logic. That was a problem with being ten years old.

Fëanor had been listening to the conversation with interest. Melkor had been defeated, but apparently Sauron had tried to take over Middle-earth in his place. He realized that he had missed quite a lot since his death.

"When the Valar defeated Melkor, what happened to him?" Fëanor asked suddenly, with a nod in Sauron's direction.

"He went and apologized to Eönwë," said Lórien.

Sauron squirmed on his chair.

"And then?"

"He refused to return to Valinor, and ran off somewhere."

"Do you think that I wanted to be hauled back to Valinor for judgement?" demanded Sauron hotly. "Do you think I enjoyed being Aulë's humble little Maia?"

("Sauron prefers making jewelry," said Nienna under her breath.)

("You don't know how many times I've heard that before," said Sauron under his.)

The Maia decided it was time for a change in subject. He pulled out his tea-cozy and slammed The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion on the table. The Valar jumped nervously. "Would you explain why we wanted these?"

TBC