Once—so long ago the memory still kept its edge—Saruman had knelt before Manwë.
In Valinor, even distance behaved differently. The halls were not merely vast; they were made for beings who did not measure themselves against ceilings, or years against lifetimes. Light did not fall there so much as gather, soundless and golden, pooling in the high spaces like mist in a mountain vale. Pillars rose like pale trees in an eternal morning, and the air tasted faintly of sea-wind, as if the world remembered who ruled its skies.
Saruman had walked into that brightness as if it were meant for him.
His robes had been white as new snow, his hair unmarked by ash or sweat. He had stood straight beneath the immeasurable roof with the clean confidence of someone who had never been truly hunted. His heart had been a bright, hungry thing then—ambition dressed up as duty. He told himself it was courage. He believed it.
Above him, upon a throne that did not so much sit in the hall as command it, Manwë regarded him with eyes like distant weather—calm, ancient, unreadable. When the Lord of the Valar spoke, the sound did not need to be loud. It carried anyway, rolling through the chamber like tide against stone.
"Tell me, little one," Manwë said, "what is it that you fear? Is it we—who are infinitely more powerful than you? Or the future—the path you are destined to follow, and the darkness that will seek you there?"
The question should have hollowed Saruman.
Instead it sharpened him.
He straightened as if the weight of those words were simply another mantle to wear. Pride warmed his chest; arrogance made it feel like faith. He lifted his chin, and a smile—small, confident, almost amused—touched his mouth.
"I fear nothing," he said. "Not even Morgoth himself. Whatever I must face, I will face it with a smile, without regret. You can count on that, my Lord."
Manwë had been still for a moment. Then, slowly, he had nodded.
Saruman had mistaken that nod for approval.
He had not understood what was being measured. Not the boldness of his answer—any child could boast in a safe hall. What Manwë had weighed was the clean ignorance behind it, the easy certainty of someone who had never watched a kingdom die in a single season. Someone who had never learned that there are horrors you cannot outface with a smile—only endure, or flee, or break.
And now—
Now Saruman rode west with no smile at all.
Shadobane ran like a creature that knew death had chosen its trail. Wind tore at Saruman's hair and snapped the tatters of his once-white robes against his legs like a flag dragged through mud. The whiteness was gone anyway—dark with old blood in the seams, dull with grime and sweat. His skin stank of iron and smoke and exhaustion, like a battlefield that refused to wash off.
On either side rode his brothers—the Blue Wizards, older in years and older in the hard-won kind of knowing. Their horses were mortal things: strong, loyal, terrified. Saruman felt that fear through the reins, through the tremor in their stride.
For weeks they had been running.
Running from battlefields that did not end so much as spread. Running from cities that fell without songs, from kings who died without tombs, from the slow, grinding truth that the East was no longer a place where men stood tall. The kingdoms there—whatever pride, culture, and stubborn hope they had carried—were gone. Crushed into ash beneath legions that did not tire, did not soften, did not stop.
The Far East had been devoured.
And the worst of it was not that they had lost.
It was that they had lost everywhere at once.
Only the West remained—faint as candlelight seen through fog. Gondor. Rohan. The southern lands still breathing beneath Mordor's shadow. Fragile. Far. Unready.
Saruman's jaw clenched until his teeth ached. He thought of Gandalf and Radagast—of their hesitation, their excuses, their soft talk of "wisdom" and "restraint," as if disobedience could be called virtue.
Cowards, something bitter in him spat.
They had stayed where it was safe. They had left the East to rot.
The sound behind them cut through his thoughts and dropped into his gut like a stone.
A deep, rhythmic thunder.
Not hooves.
Paws.
Wargs.
Hundreds of them—maybe more—pounding over the plain like a drumbeat for an execution, kicking up a long tail of dust that smeared the horizon. Saruman could taste their hunger in the air: hot breath, saliva, the sharp animal stink of bodies that had learned to kill for sport as much as need.
And behind even that—worse than any pack—
a presence.
A pressure in the world, like a storm-front leaning down to crush the land flat.
The Witch-king.
Saruman did not need to see him to know he was near. The air thickened; each breath came colder. And with that presence came the thing Saruman had learned to fear with a purity that stripped pride clean from bone.
A dragon.
Not the bright, living terror of old songs—no fire-gold majesty from the deep of legend—but something wrong. An undead enormity with sorcery in its ribs and death in its throat. Saruman had seen what its breath did: men emptied in an instant, skin shriveled tight over bone, life pulled out like water from a cracked cup. No burning. No screaming. Just… husks.
Ahead, the distant walls of Rhûn lay smeared against the horizon—too far to trust, too far to save them. Between here and there stretched only open land: vast, empty, merciless.
No trees. No hills. No cover.
Only wind and grass and the certainty of being caught.
For the first time since leaving Valinor, Saruman felt something inside him tilt—an old belief slipping loose.
He had told Manwë he feared nothing.
He had meant it.
He had been a fool.
The weight of failure pressed down until it felt like the sky itself had grown heavier. A thousand years of struggle, of secrecy, of war in shadows—and still the darkness had come to this: armies in daylight, dragons in the sky, kingdoms wiped away like chalk beneath rain.
Perhaps Manwë's question had never been a test at all.
Perhaps it had been a warning.
Saruman twisted in the saddle, breath tearing in and out, and looked to either side. The Blue Wizards rode hard, faces set, shoulders tight—yet he saw the strain in their posture, the fatigue in their horses, the narrowing distance behind.
He raised his voice over the wind and the pounding pursuit.
"Hurry!" he shouted. "Or we'll never make it! I can already feel it—preparing to strike!"
However no matter how hard Saruman shouted, no matter how savagely his brothers drove their mounts, he knew the truth gnawing at the base of his skull.
It was a fool's hope.
Mortal horses could outrun wargs for a time. They could outlast Orcs across a hard day's chase. But nothing with blood and lungs could flee a dragon.
The world proved it a heartbeat later.
Light dimmed—not as if clouds had crossed the sun, but as if something vast had slid between them and the sky. A shadow spilled over the plain, wide as a storm-front, and the air turned heavy with a cold that did not belong to weather.
Then the dragon breathed.
Not flame.
A black exhalation—thick, roiling, hungry—came rolling low and fast, flattening grass in its path as if the land itself tried to bow away from it. Saruman had seen what that breath did to living men: no burning, no screams—only life emptied out in an instant, skin shriveling tight over bone.
On Saruman's right, Morinethar moved.
He rose to his feet atop his horse as if balance meant nothing. Blue fire snapped awake behind his eyes, then ran along his arms, wreathing his fists and shoulders like a mantle drawn from a forge. For an instant he looked less like a weary wanderer in travel-stained robes and more like something ancient and made for war.
Morinethar launched himself upward.
Not a leap like a man's—he shot into the air, driven by his own power, rising straight into the breath's path. In mid-flight he thrust both hands forward.
Cones of blue fire screamed out.
They met the black breath with a sound like the world cracking.
For a heartbeat the blue held—bright, impossible—cutting a tunnel through the darkness. Then the darkness bit down. It chewed into the flame, turning clean blue to bruised red, then to dying embers, smothering it as if it were nothing more than a torch in rain.
Morinethar snarled and pushed harder.
More fire poured from him. More was devoured. Heat and cold warped the air at once, and the collision point swelled—blue and black twisting together in a violent knot.
Then it broke.
The forces annihilated each other in a blinding flash—blue-white bursting against oily dark—and the shockwave slammed outward, hard enough to make the horses scream and rear.
The darkness did not vanish cleanly.
It scattered in tatters, whipping and curling like smoke with claws. Strands tore downward and wrapped around Morinethar as he fell, and Saruman felt—even at a distance—the moment that evil touched living spirit. Morinethar hit the ground hard, rolled once, twice, convulsing as the blackness tried to burrow into him.
His horse bolted, wild-eyed, vanishing into the plain.
Morinethar's power flared in reflex—an inner furnace snarling awake. Blue heat surged through him, burning the darkness out with a hiss that sounded almost like pain. But it had touched him. It had left a stain, however brief, and Saruman saw the twitch in Morinethar's fingers—as if his hand had forgotten what it belonged to.
Saruman hauled Shadobane around. Rómestámo did the same. They rode back hard, skidding in the grass, and Rómestámo was off his horse before it fully stopped. He moved fast—boots thudding, cloak snapping—and dropped beside his brother with the brisk focus of someone who had patched too many wounds already.
Ahead, the enemy closed.
Warg riders like a dark tide, howls rising, bows already bending. Behind them ran Orcs in a black mass, spearheads bobbing. Above them all the dragon circled, slow and contemptuous, and on its neck sat the Witch-king—still, patient, directing the slaughter with the quiet certainty of an executioner.
Morinethar forced himself upright, breathing like a man who had swallowed fire.
Rómestámo rose beside him, and together the Blue Wizards faced the oncoming army without a blade between them. No steel. No shield. Just two figures in travel-stained robes against numbers that should have drowned them by sheer weight.
The Witch-king lifted a hand.
The undead dragon obeyed. Its chest expanded, ribs pulling wide as if it drew in night itself. Something dark thickened behind its teeth—another breath being born.
Saruman felt it and knew: they would not outrun it. They would not slip away from it. The next strike would end them.
He stepped back from his brothers, boots sinking into soft grass. The world narrowed to a single decision.
Saruman slid his ruined white robes from his shoulders and let them fall. The wind caught the fabric and snapped it away like shed skin. Beneath, he was no frail old man pretending at strength—muscle moved under his skin, corded and dense, a body made for endurance and violence alike. He planted his bare feet in the earth and tipped his head back as if challenging the sky.
"Gods," he roared, voice breaking with fury and desperation, "give me strength!"
He clenched his fists and drove them into the ground.
The earth answered.
It groaned as if it resented being commanded—and then it tore. Stone wrenched free from the soil: a boulder huge and raw, wide as the dragon's skull. Dirt cascaded from it in sheets as Saruman hauled it upward—not with delicate spellwork but with brutal insistence, as if his hands could bully the world into obedience.
He lifted it over his head.
For a fraction of a second even the wargs faltered—beasts and riders stuttering mid-charge, caught by a flicker of awe and doubt.
Then Saruman twisted, drew the weight back, and hurled it with all the force of his body and will.
The boulder flew like a thrown hill, tearing the air with a low roaring hum. Dust streamed off it in a tail. It sailed over the pack, and the Witch-king—too high, too confident—did not turn the undead beast quickly enough.
Impact.
Thunder broke on stone. The boulder struck the dragon's head and shattered into jagged fragments that sprayed outward like shrapnel. The dragon screamed—a harsh, unnatural sound that should not have belonged to dead lungs—and its wings buckled. It dropped in a heavy spiral and slammed into the earth with crushing weight.
Warg riders scattered—some not fast enough. Bodies and beasts vanished beneath collapsing mass with wet crunches that carried over the chaos.
Saruman stood where he'd thrown, chest heaving. His hands shook from the effort, fingers flexing as if they still held stone. Dust and smoke rolled across the plain, and for a moment he could not see the dragon at all.
Then the haze thinned.
Bone scraped. Wings unfolded again—slow, relentless.
It rose.
Saruman's knees wanted to fold. The throw had taken something out of him that no shout could call back. His breath came ragged; his arms trembled as though the earth still hung from his hands. He tried to straighten anyway—
—and a heavy hand clamped onto his shoulder.
Morinethar.
The grip was not gentle. It anchored Saruman like a stone anchors a rope—by certainty alone. For a heartbeat the battlefield thinned, as if the world had narrowed to the space between brothers.
Morinethar's face was drawn with exhaustion; the black breath had left a faint ugliness at the edge of his collar, and fine tremors lived in his fingers. Yet his eyes still burned blue, stubborn as a star. He managed a smile—bitter, proud, bruised.
"Well done, little brother," he said. Praise and grief tangled so tightly Saruman couldn't pull them apart. "But this is where your fight ends."
Saruman swallowed. Dust and smoke clung to his tongue.
Morinethar's gaze flicked past him—to the oncoming horde, to the circling dragon, to the Witch-king waiting above like judgment made flesh. Then it returned, steady as a blade.
"One of us must reach the West," he said. "Someone must warn our brothers. Someone must warn the Valar what is coming." His jaw tightened. "Go. We will hold them here as long as we can. See to it that the Witch-king does not ride a dragon into the West."
Saruman's chest clenched hard enough to hurt. His eyes found Rómestámo a few paces away—already planted like a pillar, face a cold mask, hands loose at his sides as though the air itself were a weapon waiting to be drawn. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. He met Saruman's gaze and gave one small nod that felt like a door closing.
"No," Saruman said—too fast, too raw. The word tore out of him. "No—brothers, I…" He tried to gather himself, to make his voice obey. "I can still fight. The three of us together. Like always."
Morinethar shook his head once.
Not impatient. Not angry.
Final.
"Your strength is spent," he said, and his grip tightened as if to keep Saruman from lying to himself. "If you stay, you will only get in the way." The smile returned, smaller now, softer at the edges, and somehow worse for it. "Go. In time, we will meet again—in Valinor, or beyond. But for now…"
He held Saruman's eyes.
"…you must live."
Then, quieter—an admission shaped like a blade:
"We will not."
Saruman wanted to argue. He wanted to spit the word no back into the wind until it became law again—until brotherhood outweighed strategy and pride could masquerade as hope. He wanted one more moment, one more stand, one more shared breath before the end.
But his body told the truth first.
The tremor in his arms. The heaviness in his chest. The slow, sick certainty that there was no second boulder in him to throw. Weeks of flight and slaughter had hollowed him out, and what remained was will without fuel.
Time, too, had run out. The plain answered with it—howls rising, hooves and paws pounding closer, the dragon's shadow circling like a thought you couldn't outrun.
Saruman exhaled—long, shaking—and forced his head to dip in a nod that felt like surrender and oath both. His face had gone pale, but when he spoke his voice held steady enough to hurt.
"Morinethar. Rómestámo." He said their names like a prayer, like a fastening of armor. "Good luck, my brothers. Show them the power of the Istari. Do it for Khan Ali… for Tom Bombadil… for all those they've ground into ash." His throat tightened. "Struggle to the bitter end. If we do not meet again in Valinor, we will meet beyond."
He did not wait for an answer. If he waited, he would stay. If he stayed, they would all die.
He turned abruptly, stumbled once in the grass, then reached Shadobane and swung into the saddle with movements too stiff, too slow. His hands shook on the reins. For one last heartbeat he looked toward the Sea of Rhûn—dark water under darker sky—and then he drove his heels in.
He did not look back.
He could not.
Behind him, the two Blue Wizards shed the last ornaments of the West as if discarding a costume. Pointed shoes hit the earth and were left behind without ceremony. Robes followed—heavy cloth dropped into grass and dust. Any enemy watching might have expected withered old men beneath those layers.
Instead, what remained were bodies built for war.
Not frail. Not delicate. Not ornamental.
Muscle and scar and hard-earned strength—frames honed by discipline, not vanity. Because for them, magic had never been a parlor trick. It was labor. Pain. Sacrifice. It demanded a body capable of bearing it, a spirit capable of paying the cost.
Morinethar took the left, shoulders squared, eyes already kindling with blue fire that refused to die quietly.
Rómestámo took the right, calm as winter itself. For a fleeting moment his gaze followed the space where Saruman vanished, and something unspoken passed between the brothers—acknowledgment without softness, love without permission.
Then Rómestámo inhaled.
The air changed.
Moisture rose from the grass in a faint shimmer. The dampness in soil, the invisible water in wind, the sweat on frightened hides—everything answered his pull. His hands lifted, and within his palms enormous spheres of water gathered, wobbling with captured weight, cold humming through them like a second heartbeat.
Across the plain the warg riders had closed enough for their archers to grin. Bows bent as one. A dark cloud of arrows snapped free, hissing through the air toward the two figures standing alone in the open.
The Blue Wizards did not flinch.
Rómestámo thrust his hands forward.
The water spheres burst outward in a rushing wave—and in midair they froze. Liquid became crystal in an instant, motion becoming wall. A slab of ice rose between the brothers and the storm of arrows, shimmering pale and lethal under the dim light.
Arrows struck it and shattered.
Wood splintered. Iron skittered. The volley died like rain against stone.
The warg riders split immediately, trying to flow around the obstacle the way beasts and cowards always did. But the ice wall did not merely stand.
It changed.
Its edges softened, melting—not into puddles, but into mist. Crystal dissolved into a rolling, pale fog that poured out across the field. With a slight turn of Rómestámo's wrists, the fog billowed outward as if given lungs.
The temperature plunged.
Breath turned to steam. Blades grew brittle in their sheaths. Arrows stiffened in quivers as shafts froze solid. Orcs and wargs alike began to shudder as cold crept into marrow, stealing coordination, turning speed into stumbling.
The ground glazed over in a spreading skin of ice.
Wargs hit it at a run and slid—claws scrabbling for purchase that wasn't there. Riders cursed and yanked reins, but momentum didn't care. Mounts crashed together in a tangle of fur and iron, bodies piling up, spears snapping, bows clattering from numb hands.
And that was only the beginning.
Because the mist was not the only threat.
Morinethar moved like a decision made at the end of all patience.
Blue flame wrapped him from crown to heel—not flickering like torchlight but roaring like a forge with its doors kicked open. Fire pooled beneath his feet, lifted him, and he surged forward—skimming over the ice as if the world's laws had simply agreed to get out of his way. His torn garments snapped behind him like banners.
Then he rose.
Not climbing—taking the air, driven higher and higher until he hung above the frozen press of wargs and Orcs like a star dragged too close to earth. For an instant the battlefield looked up—faces squinting through fog and sleet, mouths open, fear tightening features into something almost human.
Morinethar folded himself and dove.
He struck the pack like a falling hammer.
Blue fire detonated outward in a violent ring and night turned bright enough to hurt. The first riders caught in the blast did not have time to scream properly. They and their mounts were simply erased—flesh gone in a blink, bone flashing white for an instant before it blackened, the stink of burning fur and meat punching through the cold.
The rest screamed plenty.
Wargs howled as flame crawled into fur and under skin. Orcs tried to turn, tried to run—but the ice had already stolen their feet. Morinethar was among them now, moving with terrifying speed, a blue blur in the storm. His hands snapped out and everything they touched ignited. He drove fists through crude armor as if it were cloth, leaving behind only char and collapsing bodies. A kick landed and a warg's skull split with a wet crack, steam pouring from the ruin.
He did not fight like a man.
He fought like an element given intent.
And the fire only grew—feeding on air, on terror, on the simple fact that Morinethar was done holding back. He drew in a breath so deep his chest widened, and the flames around him answered, swelling brighter, hotter, hungrier.
Then he exhaled.
A torrent of blue fire ripped from him in a wide arc, sweeping the battlefield like a scythe made of light. Wargs vanished in flares. Orcs went down in rows. Grass curled and blackened, earth scorching into glassy patches where heat lingered.
Behind that advancing inferno, Rómestámo remained still—controlled, conserving. His hands moved in small, precise turns, and the cold obeyed like a well-trained blade. Where Morinethar's fire surged forward, Rómestámo's frost tightened the world into silence.
Fire burned. Ice froze.
Opposites, yes—but together they formed a trap.
Those who charged slipped, fell, and were consumed. Those who hesitated stiffened into statues, their limbs locking, their breath stopping in their throats as cold took them from the inside out. The enemy could neither fight properly nor flee cleanly. Every choice ended in screaming or stillness.
For a brief, brutal stretch of time, the brothers fought as one—rage and control braided together into something the enemy could not understand.
It almost looked like victory.
Almost.
Then the cold began to thin—not because Rómestámo faltered, but because Morinethar's flames were eating the air itself. Heat rose in shimmering curtains; the mist burned away at its edges and became ragged, torn. The battlefield turned into a study in extremes—icy ground underfoot, blistering air above it, steam hissing everywhere like the land was boiling from within.
Rómestámo adjusted without drama.
He extended his will downward into the soil beneath him, and the earth groaned as if it resented being wrung dry. Every last thread of moisture rose to answer him. It gathered around his hands in glistening clusters, then snapped into shape—long icicles forming in a lethal arc, catching what little light remained like spearpoints.
He flicked his wrists.
The icicles launched.
They tore through the air with a thin, screaming whistle and struck with surgical violence. Orcs and wargs shattered under impact—bodies bursting like brittle clay. Those not killed outright were seized by an unnatural cold that flooded their veins like poison. Flesh frosted over. Eyes glazed. Limbs locked mid-motion.
In moments they stood where they had been—frozen statues in a battle that no longer cared what they used to be.
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