You can find advanced chapters on my patreon.
.
.
.
Patreon.com/simpysensei
___
DISCLAIMER: omit if you don't want spoilers.
The silence of the apartment was deafening.
It had been weeks since the phone last rang with a breathless editor on the other line, weeks since a publisher had desperately messaged him begging for a blurb.
James sat heavily on his leather couch, the very throne from which he had once dictated the tastes of the literary world. Now, he was nothing but a pariah.
A jobless, disgraced exile pushed out of the critic circle he had spent his entire adult life cultivating.
He rubbed his temples, tracing the origin of the rot. Where exactly had it all gone wrong?
"It was supposed to be a simple transaction," James argued with the empty room in his mind. "A standard arrangement." All he had asked for was a little compensation from Michael Owen.
The kid had written *The Fault in Our Stars*, a tear-jerker that needed the sophisticated, high-brow seal of approval that only James could provide.
A guaranteed glowing review in exchange for a quiet, untraceable sum of money. People had done more for less.
But Michael hadn't just said no. He had been so utterly, sickeningly sanctimonious about it. The rejection had stung, festering into a hot, blinding anger. James wasn't a man who took rejection lightly.
So, he had waited for an opening. When Michael boldly proclaimed to the press that his next project would be a sweeping, grand fantasy epic, James had pounced.
He took to his columns, his essays, and his social media, dripping venom onto Michael's ambitions. He had mercilessly mocked the very idea of a YA romance author attempting to build a high-fantasy world. He called it arrogant. He called it commercial trash masquerading as literature.
"And then, the internet turned on me," James thought, his jaw clenching at the memory.
The "alleged" leak had ruined everything. Somehow, Michael's already-finished fantasy manuscript had found its way onto the web, and the public hadn't just liked it—they had devoured it.
They hailed it as brilliant. Instantly, the tide had shifted. The internet trolls descended upon James with a terrifying, unrelenting fury. His inbox was flooded with hate; his mentions became a graveyard of his reputation.
Yet, even then, sitting in the ashes of his credibility, James had believed he could survive it. He had drafted the perfect comeback piece—a scathing, brilliant defense of literary standards that would have painted the leak as a cheap marketing stunt. He was ready to hit publish and reclaim his throne.
Then came the kill shot.
Michael hadn't just rejected the bribe; the little sociopath had recorded the phone call.
James squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memory of that audio file spreading like a virus across the internet. His own voice—smug, demanding, dripping with condescension—asking for cash in exchange for stars. The bomb went off, and by the end of the day, he was fired. The literary circle slammed its doors shut and locked them.
James opened his eyes and stared at the coffee table. Sitting there, pristine and arrogant in its untouched glory, was the very book that had ended him.
*The Hobbit.* It had officially hit the shelves in the first week of February, and it was a cultural leviathan. You couldn't walk past a bookstore, open a newspaper, or look at a screen without seeing its name.
Critics—his former colleagues, the spineless sycophants—were raving about it everywhere. They called it a masterpiece of world-building, a timeless classic birthed overnight.
"Bought," James sneered in his head, his lip curling in disgust. "Every single one of those reviews. He must have bought them. The hypocrite wouldn't pay me, but he surely emptied his pockets to buy the rest of the circle."
He stared at the cover, mocking the very premise in his mind. "Elves? Dwarves? A creature with hairy feet walking across a map? This is what has replaced me? A children's fable written by a man who made millions off dying teenagers?" It was laughable. It was pathetic.
James leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He told himself he didn't care. He told himself the literary world was dead anyway if this was what it celebrated. But the pristine spine of the book taunted him in the quiet apartment.
With a bitter sigh, James reached out and snatched the book off the coffee table. He cracked the cover open, desperate to find the awful prose, the gaping plot holes, the amateurish drivel he knew had to be hiding inside.
"Let's see just how much of a hack you really are, Michael," he thought, and began to read the first page.
___
The hole was not a nasty hole. That needed to be said first, before anything else, because there was a great deal of nonsense talked about holes by people who had never lived in one and couldn't imagine wanting to.
It was not a damp hole, nor a dark hole, nor a hole that smelled of worms or the close, wet breath of earth that had never seen sun. It was a very particular kind of hole — the kind that only happens when someone has lived somewhere for so long that the place begins to reflect them back, like a face in still water.
The door was round and painted a deep, considered green, the color of moss on the north side of old stone, and it had a brass knob directly in the center that was polished bright every Tuesday morning without fail. Beyond the door was a passage, and the passage was wide and paneled in oak that had gone honey-dark with age, and the floors were tiled in a pattern of blue and cream that had been worn smooth in the center from eighty years of the same feet walking the same path to the same kitchen, the same study, the same comfortable chair.
This was the home of Bilbo Baggins.
He was, on the morning our story begins, doing precisely nothing of consequence. This was his great talent and his great satisfaction. He was sitting in the chair outside his front door — the carved chair, not the wicker one — smoking his pipe in the slow, deliberate way of a man who has nowhere to be and knows it and is deeply content with the knowledge. The smoke rose in thin white rings and dissolved into the late morning air, and Bilbo watched each ring go with the mild, untroubled attention of a man watching clouds.
He was not young. He was not old. He was, in the way of hobbits, somewhere in the long comfortable middle of life where the great disasters of youth have passed and the great diminishments of age have not yet arrived, and a hobbit with any sense takes that season and stretches it like good pastry, as thin and wide as it will go.
He heard the footsteps on the lane before he saw their owner.
They were long footsteps. Certain footsteps. The footsteps of someone who had been walking a very long time and expected to continue walking and was entirely unbothered by this.
Bilbo looked up.