Sergeant Bradley looked from the observation tower at the frozen wasteland of ice. To the northeast those immense gates were rising at the end of the ice valley, the small base camp in their menacing shadow. Above the sky was a dark blue, brilliant stars shining in the almost-black sky of the polar night. Bradley noted idly that the Big Dipper seemed to have grown much brighter these past few months. Shining right above the valley right now, it sent a chill down his spine - though the feeling was somehow not unwelcome.
In any case, it was cold. His teeth chattered through the thermal clothing he wore, idly carrying his weapon. Far in the distance, a wolf howled far off to the south. The cry was replied to by one, then three, then dozens of similar howls which echoed all through the valley. They were miles away at the least.
Bradley decided to disengage the weapon's safety, as a few minutes later the howls resumed, closer now. Then silence reigned for ten minutes - Bradley knew he was being watched. The howls sounded again, this time to the east. This time they carried an air of predatory malice and hatred that burned in his blood.
Ancestral fear gripped him as his hands shook, remembering for an instant a midnight forest that he had never seen, and a great, impossibly large wolf blood-spattered, maddened with pain and rage, and filled with evil. A distant sympathetic pain struck his hand at the vision.
Then the wolf appeared in view. It was an immense creature, grotesquely overmuscled and viciously fanged. Its snow-white fur moved like quicksilver as it loped upon the ice, its eyes burning like orange fire. Behind it ran about four dozen smaller normal-sized creatures, still looking more vicious and bloodthirsty than any normal lupine - but not so crazed and malevolent as that singular monster.
It howled some fifty feet away - a long, cruel and utterly evil cry that spoke without words its eternal hatred for all men.
Then it began the attack.
It loped towards the fence under a barrage of assault rifle fire, bullets bouncing off its hide like rain. Bradley's hand, on his trigger, laid low three of the lesser beasts, their black blood freezing as it touched the ice, but the great wolf was unstoppable and smashed right through the electrified fence as if it was but air.
Screams and victorious howls swiftly filled the air, and possessed by some irrational madness Bradley rushed down the tower and to the breach site.
The horrid wolf-thing was smashing men aside with its paws, jumping and running through assault rifle fire, casually tearing heads and limbs off with its vicious fangs. For an instant Bradley saw into the thing's fiery eyes, and recoiled both at its human intelligence and its sadism beyond the measure of any beast. Then it began running at him.
How he did it he never knew. As it ran towards him, paws throwing loose snow off the ground, time seeming to slow to a crawl, he somehow got loose his combat knife and drew it, preparing to go down kicking and screaming.
The monster leapt before it could slow down, and impaled its neck on the outthrust weapon. Black, stinking blood flowed out in a high-pressure torrent as the beast screamed in pain, the foul liquid smoking as it touched the ground. But the monster was far from dead. It leapt at him again and pinned him to the ground, clawing at his face in feral pain and rage.
Red blood poured from his cheek and ran into his mouth, but he endured, the knife still in his hand, and stabbed the thing in the chest, the blade of the knife disappearing in its flesh and the hilt rapidly becoming slick with filthy black blood.
The horror slowed and tried to get itself off the weapon, but became limp as it did so. Its eyes however, retained their malevolent glare.
Bradley tried to get the rapidly cooling body off him, but as he did so a sudden and forceful wind blew from the west. The creature began to crumble, the white flakes of its form blown unstoppably eastward as it disintegrated, the last shred of its being to fade those malevolently-gleaming eyes.
Bradley began to breathe deep. The battle with that...thing had felt like minutes, but the people around acted as if it had been just a few seconds.
The wolf-pack outside, as if every member sensed some unheard signal, moved away as one and vanished into the night, seconds from breaching the fence.
+++THREE DAYS LATER, OXFORD+++
"Did you get the report from Site Beta?" the American asked his colleague as he put the beer glass to his lips and took a shot.
"Yes, and it scares me," the second man said in a British accent. "It's accelerating beyond our calculations. We only have till Solstice next year for the time predicted in Aelfwine to begin. The Westmarch source never anticipated this."
"These things are out of our control," the American spoke in reply. "All the choice we have is to decide what is done with the time that is given to us."
The British man nodded in agreement.
"Certainly," he said. "Is our search for the descendents going well?"
"Yes," the American said. "We've encountered significant traces of the old bloodline in close to a dozen families on the East Coast alone."
He handed his colleague a dossier.
"Speaking on other matters, how do our digs go at Site Gamma?"
"That is the Ukraine mountain?" the American asked, searching his memory. "Yes, we have the weapon and the stone. We can only trust that they aid us in the days ahead. Much worse is coming than that wolf."
"Indeed," his colleague said, his face turning to a dark cast. Behind him the news shifted from the antics of a Nebraskan televangelist to a spike in activity at Vesuvius and then blizzards around Washington D.C.
The British man spoke again after a long pause.
"If we have the weapon, we need a wielder. If it does nothing but sit it's not helpig anyone."
"Who should we give the sword to, then? It's not like there's a hundred of them."
"I'd say Bradley. The man deserves it."
"He'll certainly need it."
+++APRIL 2012, AFRICA+++
It was a minor thing. Weak, pathetic. A being of far greater malice than ability. And as it drifted formless and unclad through the burning jungle village, it laughed silently to itself. Around it, houses were burning, women were being raped, men were being slaughtered in droves. Mere confirmation of humanity's wickedness.
It had long memories. It had been a spirit of great potency in the old days and had had yet greater cunning. By his hand the Second Age had ended and the brightest star of men turned to a darkness. By his hand the last flower of the Firstborn in Middle-Earth had been ripped from the ground and burned from root to blossoming crown.
But then its tower had fallen, and it had fled from the ruin a bodiless shred of mind and unquenchable spirit, driven by the whims of the uncaring wind. For long ages it had drifted aimless and formless. It had seen orc-cults rise in Annuminas and raze half the city in beautiful fire. It had seen the hosts of the east destroy the last redoubt of the Edain, and then the great tide of destruction that had been unleashed to root them out, changing lands and rivers till they were nigh-impossible to recognise.
When the remnants of the Followers achieved their petty civilisations, their Babylons and Egypts, their Greeces and their Romes, it had been there. It had seen an oriental despot burn books and sink scholars - that wickedness had pleased it particularly, and had strengthened it much. Drifting westward, it encountered yet more war and disorder, seeing a brilliant city burn by the deceitful stratagem of a hollow wood vessel. It had in the same place many years later seen a despot from the east march on that same teritory, and drunk deep of the horrors of war - till the steadfast determination of a few hundred soldiers sent it retreating in pain and terror.
Some few hundred years later, in an eastern region it had felt much pain while drifting through coastal hills, almost as if the One himself were present close by. But that was impossible.
The following centuries had been a veritable banquet. An empire fell, and cities all over burned for many centuries. 'Heretics' and 'witches' had been tortured and hanged many times over. Religious schisms had led to decades of brutal war, and the pain and misery and fear had sped beyond all measure its recovery.
Then drifting through a city it had seen execution machines murdering scores by decapitation, and wars swftly following. Slave-plantations had been common in the west, and there again it feasted richly on the Children's ever-present failure.
It still remembered when and where it had regained self-directed motion. It had been a wasteland of churned mud, twisted trees and barbed wire - a Mordor of the Aftercomers' own making, a place of death and brutal slaughter matched only by the Unnumbered Tears. From thereon it had moved on to visit sites of atrocity and dictatorship and misapplied knowledge, growing ever more powerful through the decades. Soon it would be able to take a body for itself and begin again.
It remembered with great satisfaction a recent place far to the east of here, a city of high towers and palm trees. There it had seen a collection of women, wearing black all over, carrying placards of a gold-haired woman they evidently detested. They had spoken in unison their chant of honey-sweet, near-mindless fanatic hate, such as that it had not encountered but decades ago in a far northward country - a word that meant "infidel". The fallibility of the Children always always amused it, and that in particular had made it laugh for weeks.
Now it changed direction and began moving north-westward with the speed of the wind.
Suddenly it felt a new power filling it, almost like its old master back in the days of Gondolin and Nargothrond. Far more pleasing a repast than the atrocities it had absorbed from, the new power felt almost electric to partake of.
It most definitely had work to do.
+++DECEMBER 2011+++
'The claims these...activists have put forth about Orthanc Technologies are utterly ludicrous," the raven-haired man in white said, his mellifluous voice echoing in the conference hall. The black-armoured bodyguards standing by were silent as always, their faces granite. The journalists attending kept on taking pictures.
"We do not and have never had ambitions of assembling a military force," he went on, continuing to captivate the crowd. "What we have done is begun a major expansion in our on-site security force, due to threats by dangerous and malevolent eco-terrorists."
"Is it true that your Shanghai expansions have caused significant environmental deterioration?" a brunette woman asked.
"Any damage caused by our Chinese branch is minor and unintentional," the man replied. "There is lots of anti-industrial propaganda running round these days, but we take care for our workers within reason. Our military and electronics contracts with China and India are simply too lucrative to ignore. As you know, money does make the world go round."
The man seemed so reasonable and self-assured it was hard to disagree.
"What of the claims that your outsourcing is severely damaging the health of local communities?"
"When we do lay off workers we do what we can to help them, but industrial labour is expensive here in Britain and it just isn't profitable to keep these out-of-date factories in motion."
What he said seemed almost naturally true, and the journalists left the room, in general satisfied by what the clear-speaking man in white had said.