Polarity by StarSpray

Polarity

It is high summer in the Shire: the fields are all green and growing and the orchards are laden with growing fruit, and the blackberries are ripening in the thickets, and the Water is filled with fish for hobbit children to catch and take home for their mothers to fry up with golden taters and sweet herbs out of the garden. The mallorn tree is tall and slender, bending like a dancer in the wind as the silver-green leaves rustle like whispers. The children of Hobbiton tell one another that there's words in the whispering leaves, if you listen closely.

Frodo does not hear any elvish words, only the leaves. Tiny elanor blooms have begun to pop up in the grass in among the clover and the buttercups, and it is a pleasant place indeed to sit with his notes and his pen while he works on his book. He leans against the old stump, mossy and turning soft now, of the Party Tree, and hums old snatches of walking songs as he sorts through Pippin's disjointed accounts of Fangorn and old Treebeard, and Gimli's rapturous descriptions of the Glittering Caves.

.

It is deep winter and a brittle frost lies over the Shire, glittering in the cold moonlight. The Water is frozen solid, and the air is very still. Smoke curls gently from chimneys, and occasionally a warm yellow light will flicker in a round window. But the windows of Bag End are shuttered and curtained and dark, and in Frodo's room the only light comes from the dying coals on the hearth.

He does not notice, huddled beneath his blankets only half-asleep, caught in a dream filled with hissing voices and knives in the dark beneath Weathertop with its ruined fort crumbling atop its head like a the broken crowns the pale wraith-kings wear. Frodo cannot feel his arm, nor move his fingers, and in the dream he tries to call out to Elbereth as he had in waking life, but he cannot speak and the Witch-king laughs as his knife flashes—

Frodo wakes fully with a gasp, reaching for his throat where there is no longer a chain or a ring. It is over, but for the pain in his shoulder and the empty feeling in his core.