“Saruman the White was a bad guy!” I replied, losing my temper. “We don’t have time for literary criticism right now, Aech, valid though it may be! OK?”
“OK, Z,” she replied, holding up both of her hands. “Jeez. Cool your tool. We’ll table that discussion until later.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just exhausted. And I’m scared. For Shoto—and Og and everyone else.”
“I know,” she replied. “I am too. It’s OK, Z.”
She gave my shoulder a squeeze, then nodded at me. I nodded back.
“Any word from L0hengrin yet?” Aech asked. “Or Arty?”
I checked my messages and shook my head.
“Not yet.”
Aech took a deep breath.
“OK, I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s get this over with.”
I nodded. Then I teleported both of us directly to the surface of Arda I, and into the First Age of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Like Shermer and the Afterworld, Arda I had a limited number of designated teleportation arrival and departure points scattered across its surface. Unfortunately, all but one of them was grayed out for me, because I hadn’t completed any of the quests required to gain access to them. So I selected the only arrival point I could, which was located in the middle of a frozen wasteland called the Helcaraxë. On the map, the same region was also labeled as “The Grinding Ice.”
But when the teleportation process completed, and our avatars rematerialized on the surface of Arda I, we didn’t find ourselves in the environment we were expecting. There wasn’t any ice or snow in sight. Aech and I were standing beside a small lake located somewhere high in the mountains. The star-filled sky over our heads was reflected in the water’s still, smooth surface, creating the illusion that there was a blanket of stars both above and below us. It was quiet, save for the singing of crickets, and the distant howl of wind whipping over the dark hills that loomed all around us.
It was a beautiful scene. But I had absolutely no idea where the hell we were.
When I pulled up my map of Arda to check our location, I discovered that we were nowhere near the Helcaraxë. We were over four hundred miles east, up in the Dorthonion highlands, standing on the shores of a lake called Tarn Aeluin.
This wasn’t one of Arda’s designated arrival points, so it shouldn’t even have been possible for us to teleport to this location. It had to be the shards that’d brought us here—but I didn’t have the first clue as to why.
I continued to scan my map of Arda, looking for the name Udûn. I knew that was once the name of Morgoth’s fortress, because in The Fellowship of the Ring, when Gandalf faces off against the Balrog of Morgoth at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, he calls it the “flame of Udûn.” But I couldn’t find any sign of it on my map—nor was there a label for its Sindarin equivalent, Utumno. And when I searched the index, it confirmed that there was no location known by either of those names anywhere on the planet.
I cursed myself once again for never bothering to study the First Age. Then I bit the bullet and opened Gunterpedia in a browser window in front of me and pulled up the entry on Utumno. I immediately saw my mistake. Utumno was the name of Melkor’s original dungeon stronghold. But it was completely destroyed just before the First Age began. So it wasn’t located on Arda I at all, but on the Springtime of Arda, another, much smaller, disk-shaped planet, located directly beneath Arda I, II, and III. Most gunters referred to it as Arda Zero. It was a simulation of Arda during the Years of the Trees, which took place before the First Age. I’d never even bothered to visit Arda Zero, because it was impossible to complete any of the quests there unless you had already completed every single quest on Arda I, Arda II, and Arda III.
I let out a heavy sigh, thinking I was going to have to suffer the embarrassment of telling Aech that I’d teleported both of us to the wrong planet. But after searching my memory, I recalled something Aragorn said in The Fellowship of the Ring, when he was telling the story of Beren and Lúthien to the Hobbits.
In those days, the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron of Mordor was but a servant, dwelt in Angband in the North….
I checked my map again, looked to the north, and located Angband right away. It was in the middle of the Ered Engrin, a vast mountain range that stretched across the northern reaches of the continent. In the common tongue, they were called the Iron Mountains. And Angband was also known as the Iron Prison.
That was one of the many things that made navigating Middle-earth difficult—everything and everyone had at least two or three different names, each in a different made-up language. It got confusing, even for a massive geek like me.
I pulled up my digital copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and located the sentence where Aragorn first mentions Angband. A few paragraphs beneath it, I found the passage I was looking for….
Tinúviel rescued Beren from the dungeons of Sauron, and together they passed through great dangers, and cast down even the Great Enemy from his throne, and took from his iron crown one of the three Silmarils, brightest of all jewels, to be the bride-price of Lúthien to Thingol her father.
That seemed to confirm my theory—here on this iteration of Arda, Morgoth’s throne was located in his dungeon fortress of Angband. And it was just eighty miles to the north of our current location. Bingo! That had to be why the shards had brought us here….
I turned toward Aech.
“We’re headed to Angband, Morgoth’s dungeon fortress, about eighty miles north of here.”
I pointed out over the lake and the dark hills beyond it, to the growing mass of dark clouds roiling above the distant northern horizon. They were lit by eruptions of red lightning from within, and by the enormous silver globe of the moon, shining high in the eastern sky, which cast a pale glow over everything beneath it.
Aech looked out over the lake, toward those dark clouds on the northern horizon.
“Eighty miles?” Aech repeated.
“Yeah,” I said. “And magic items or spells that give you the ability to fly won’t function here. Since we can’t teleport there either, we’ll have to travel by land.”
Aech reached down and tapped the stripes on the sides of the white Adidas she was wearing. When she did, the stripes changed color, from blue and black to yellow and green, and the shoes themselves began to glow and crackle with bolts of energy that were the same combination of colors.
“Got blue and black ’cause I like to chill,” Aech recited. “And yellow and green when it’s time to get ill.” She pointed down at her glowing, crackling sneakers. “My Adidas give me the ability to run at three times the normal speed. Do you want me to cast Mordenkainen’s Mojo on you, so you can keep up with me?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a better idea.”
From my own inventory, I removed two small glass figurines shaped like horses. Both were silver-gray in color. I set them gently on the ground in front of us and backed away several steps.
“Figurines of Wondrous Power?” Aech asked.
I nodded and she immediately took several steps backward too. Once she was clear, I spoke the activation words.
“Felaróf!” I shouted. “Shadowfax!”
Both figurines instantly grew and morphed into a pair of full-size horses, which abruptly came to life, snorting and whinnying as they reared back on their mighty hind legs. They were stunningly beautiful creatures, with nearly identical silver-gray coats. They were both decked out in Mithril plate armor that I’d purchased for them, along with custom-made saddles carved from dark-green Elven wood, inlaid with bands of gold that were engraved with their names in Fëanorian script.