He came to in a large clearing with a good view of the valley of the Great River. His hands were tied behind his back, his Mordorian uniform was all singed tatters, and the entire left side of his body was one large burn – the device worked, praise Aulë! Belatedly he saw an Elf squatting to the left of him, on the side of the eye almost covered with dried lymph. The Elf was disgustedly wiping his flask with a rag – apparently, he had just been pouring Elvish wine down the prisoner’s throat.
“You awake?” the Elf inquired in a melodious voice.
“Mordor and the Eye!” Wolverine responded automatically (imagine dying as an Orc! Well, them’s the breaks…)
“Quit pretending, dear ally!” The Firstborn was smiling, but his eyes burned with such hatred that his vertical cat’s pupils narrowed into tiny slits. “You are going to tell us everything about those strange games of His Majesty Elessar Elfstone, aren’t you, beastie? There shouldn’t be any secrets between allies.”
“Mordor… and… the Eye…” The lieutenant’s voice was still even, although Manwe only knew the effort it took: the Elf had casually dropped his hand to the prisoner’s broken ankle and…
“Sir Engold, look! What’s that?!”
At the cry of his comrades the Elf turned around and stared, frozen, at something resembling a colossal dandelion swiftly grow to the sky beyond the Anduin, right where Caras Galadhon ought to be – a thin blinding-white stalk crowned with a bright-red bulbous ‘flower.’ Almighty Eru, if this thing is indeed in Galadhon, how huge must it be? What Galadhon? There’s probably not even ashes left there… A strangled cry made him turn back: “Sir Engold, the prisoner! What’s happening to him?..”
Fast as he turned back, it was all over before he could see it happen. The prisoner was dead and no physician was necessary to confirm that. In a few moments, right under the gaze of the astonished Elves, the man had turned into a skeleton covered here and there in remnants of mummified skin. The brown-yellow skull, its eye sockets filled with sand, grinned at Engold from between shrunken blackened lips, as if mockingly inviting him to ask his questions – immerse me in the truth potion, perhaps that will help?
And in the palace in Minas Tirith Aragorn watched in astonishment the subtle changes taking place in the face of Arwen, seated across from him. Nothing seemed to change, really, but he felt with absolute certainty that something important, perhaps the most important, was going, slipping away like a blissful morning dream slips from memory… some magical incompleteness of her features, which became completely human. When this metamorphosis was over in a few moments, he reached a verdict summing up that period of his life: a beautiful woman, no question about it. Very beautiful, even. But that’s all.
None of his subjects saw that, nor would they have ascribed any importance to it had they seen it. What they did dutifully reflect in the chronicles of that day was another event of that noon: when the Mirror was destroyed in Lórien, the other six palantíri remaining in Middle Earth detonated, too, and a monstrous geyser almost half a mile high shot up from the Anduin-receiving Bay of Belfalas. The geyser spawned a forty-foot tsunami that wiped out several fishing villages together with their inhabitants; it is doubtful that anyone recognized that those unfortunates, too, were victims of the War of the Ring.
The most surprising thing is that despite his powers of observation and insight His Majesty Elessar Elfstone had not connected those two events that happened at noon of August the first of the Year 3019 of the Third Age and in a sense became its final moment, either. For sure, no one after him had ever connected them, having had no opportunity to do so.
“Bend the arm, quick!” Haladdin ordered, tightening the tourniquet above Tzerlag’s left elbow. “Keep the rag pressed there, lest you bleed out.”
The sergeant’s hand ‘unfroze’ the moment the volcano swallowed the palantír, so now his blood gushed like it always does when a man loses a couple of fingers. They had no means to stop the bleeding other than the tourniquet: it turned out that the blood-clotting medicines from the Elvish medkit, including the legendary mandrake root (which reputedly could even patch a severed artery), have stopped working entirely. Who would have thought that this was magic, too?
“Listen… so we won, right?”
“Yes, dammit! If it can be called victory…”
“I don’t understand, Field Medic, sir…” it seemed that the sergeant’s lips, gray with blood loss, had trouble obeying him. “What does ‘if it can be called victory’ mean?”
Don’t you dare, Haladdin told himself. That had been my decision; I have no right to burden anyone else with it, not even Tzerlag, not even a tiny bit. He should not even suspect what he had just witnessed and indirectly caused, for his own good. Let all this remain our Dagor-Dagorlad to him – a victorious Dagor-Dagorlad… “What I mean is… The thing is, not a soul in Middle Earth will believe in our victory. No victory parades, you know? Mark my words: the Elves and the Men from beyond the Anduin will find a way to paint themselves as the victors, anyway.”
The Orocuen nodded and held still for a moment, as if listening to the slowly subsiding growl of the Fire Mountain. “Yeah. That’s how it’s gonna be, no doubt. But what do we care?”
Epilogue
“What will History say?”
“History, sir, will lie – as always.”
Have the courage to dream and lie.
Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition. It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to its veracity. The one who might have been expected to leave the most detailed account – Haladdin – had not recorded even a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons. Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old-age ravings of an Orc who wanted to replay the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact.