Chapter Text
Mount Doom was where it all began, thousands of years ago. Mount Doom was where it ended, too.
“Precious, precious, precious!” Gollum cried. “My Precious! O my Precious!” And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wail “Precious”, and he was gone.
Sauron was defeated, Gandalf came to rescue Frodo and Sam, and when Aragorn was crowned king, the Third Age came to an end. With all the festivities going on, no one seemed to notice that Frodo did not participate with all his heart. No one seemed to notice that his eyes were dull and that the fire once shining through them was gone.
Frodo himself tried to forget the aching pain in his heart. He should be happy to be alive, right? Many had given their lives for the greater good and many had suffered under the reign of the Dark Lord. He should be grateful for everyone that helped him and saved him in the end. And yet, while he was happy to have destroyed the Great Evil in Middle-Earth, he mourned for what he’d lost. The prize it’d cost him.
To observing eyes, Frodo looked like his normal self. When he was asked why he went to bed early, he would answer that his wounds were troubling him. The excuse worked well with his friends and even Aragorn believed him. It was not a lie that his wounds had been hurting ever since he got stabbed with the Morgul blade at the Weathertop. However, this was not the reason for the pain in Frodo’s heart and the guilt on his mind. He had fooled all of them.
“I could not have destroyed the ring”
Not only was it impossible for him to destroy the ring, he also never planned on it. The One was not an object, no. It was a consciousness. The ring lived, it had a mind, feelings and thoughts. Frodo had known from the beginning. The One revealed himself and along their journey he told Frodo everything he’s seen and every secret that was his to tell. While Frodo learned a lot through these things, there was one secret particularly outstanding. Knowledge that changed it all.
Forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. Forged with magic. Returning the ring to the fires had ended Sauron. It had not destroyed the ring. The One was forged to rule. One ring to rule them all. The ring cannot be destroyed.
So Frodo was desperate. He did everything that was asked of him. He gave everything. And still, he had to pay a prize. A prize so great that he was not sure if he could continue living with it. The ring was alive, yes. It was also out of reach for Frodo. For the ring now lived in the fires and the fires were the one place Frodo could not survive.
Ultimately, he decided to go back to the Shire and try to live the life he had always wanted. He tried to be happy again and forced himself not to think about what had happened. He busied himself with simple tasks and it was in all this that he forget he had not been alone with Sam for the last steps of his journey. He forgot about the third being that accompanied him a great deal of the way. A being that had lived with the ring for hundreds of years. A being that absorbed a huge part of the ring’s magic.
Deep inside the fires of Mt Doom, a shadow began crawling.