Chapter 405: Holding Sauron
The moment the truth landed, Sauron stopped attacking Hogwarts entirely. There was nothing left to gain here. He turned his will eastward and moved to tear open the void, intent on returning to Mordor to stop the Ring from being destroyed.
Elrond saw it in the same instant. "He's going back to Mordor! We cannot let him leave!"
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel threw themselves into the path of his escape without hesitation.
Kael made his choice and dropped the golden dome sheltering Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. He Apparated directly into Sauron's path, called on Cemya's power, and released a wave of golden light that expanded outward and closed around Sauron from every side.
The light hardened into a cage.
The golden dome that Cemya produced was ordinarily a shield, its strength drawn from the bond with the earth beneath it. Now Kael had turned that same principle inside out, making the dome a prison rather than a fortress: the earth anchored it from without, and there was no force within that could pull it free.
Sauron, finding himself enclosed, shed every restraint he had maintained until now.
His mental pressure erupted outward without direction or limit, a tide of will that struck Kael, Gandalf, and Galadriel like an invisible hammer. All of them went pale, bracing themselves against the assault, fighting to keep their minds clear. The dark force coiling around Sauron's body burst from him at the same time, thick and suffocating as smoke from a volcano. Wherever it touched, plants withered and turned to ash in a heartbeat. The stone fractured with black cracks running through it. The ground itself was eaten through, riddled with pits and fissures.
That darkness pressed outward against the golden cage, gnawing at it, trying to find the seam that would let it rupture.
At the same time, Sauron himself swung his mace, the dark red flames wreathing it blazing hotter, and drove it against the cage wall again and again. Each blow sent the golden light rippling in waves and made the earth shudder beneath their feet. The sky darkened with each impact as though the world were flinching.
Every blow Sauron landed on the cage landed on Kael as well. The feedback was immediate and physical. Each strike forced a short, involuntary sound from him, and the colour in his face drained steadily with each one.
Cemya's connection to the earth gave it extraordinary defensive strength, but that strength had a cost: channelling the Ring required Kael to pour the full current of his magic into it without pause. His reserves of power were vastly greater than they had been decades ago, the difference between a stream and a river, and he had never once worried about running dry under normal circumstances. But Sauron at full strength was not a normal circumstance. Against this, his river of power felt like it was being measured against the sea. He could hold the cage. He was holding it. But at the rate the impacts were draining him, his most conservative estimate gave him one day before he was spent.
One day. He could only hope Frodo and the others were moving fast.
Gandalf read the strain on Kael's face and understood exactly what it meant.
His voice came out absolutely steady. "Before Frodo destroys the Ring, Sauron does not leave this place. Not for any reason. Not even if it costs us our lives."
Then he stopped measuring consequences and drove everything he had into Narya, the Ring of Fire, letting its power flow freely despite knowing exactly what that meant. Every moment he channelled the Ring, Sauron's dark influence crept further into it. Use it long enough and Narya would be corrupted beyond saving, one of the great artefacts of the Elves reduced to nothing. Gandalf had weighed that against the cost of Sauron reaching Mordor and made his choice without hesitation.
The power of Narya entered Kael like sunlight breaking through cloud: warmth, courage, and an immensity of force that straightened his spine and pushed the exhaustion back. The golden cage around Sauron thickened visibly, settling into something more solid and enduring.
Kael recalculated. He thought he could last twice as long now.
When Gandalf made his choice, Elrond and Galadriel made theirs.
Galadriel called on Nenya, the Ring of Water. Its power moved through her and into Kael, dissolving the fatigue that had gathered in his body and spirit, washing away the mental erosion Sauron's psychic assault had been slowly accomplishing.
Elrond called on Vilya, the Ring of Air. Its effect was different and immediate: it opened a connection between Kael and the natural magic of the world around him, and the vast currents of elemental force flowing through the earth and sky began to pour into him of their own accord, replenishing what Sauron was burning away.
Then something none of them had anticipated happened.
The four elements responded to each other.
Air, water, fire, earth: each Ring had been pulling on one of them, and now all four were present in the same space at the same time, channelled through and around a single person. Where they met, they did not merely coexist. They recognised each other. They combined into something that was none of them individually and all of them at once, a primal, balanced, elemental force that carried the feeling of the world before any of its parts had been separated. Something that had the weight of creation itself behind it.
Under that combined force, Sauron's dark power simply ceased to register. His attacks hit the cage and produced no ripple, no vibration, nothing. The golden light did not merely hold; it solidified, condensing from something luminous and translucent into a cage that looked almost physically real, a half-transparent shell of gold as dense and unyielding as stone. Sauron moved within it and accomplished nothing.
And at the centre of all four elements converging, Kael was changing.
The transformation was happening inside him, deep and structural. The earth element hardened his body, driving through flesh and bone and remaking what it found there. The fire element turned its heat on his spirit and his soul, burning away impurities and weaknesses the way a forge burns dross from metal. The air element swelled his magical capacity, stretching its limits outward in all directions. And the water element moved through everything that had just been changed, purifying it, bringing it into coherence, making the new version of him cleaner and more complete than anything he had been before.
The benefit was greater than what the Philosopher's Stone had given him. Significantly greater. If he was given enough time for the transformation to run its full course, the four elemental forces would be sufficient to shatter the last constraints on his soul entirely and lift him across the threshold into the realm of the Maiar.
Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel all felt it happening and understood what it meant. If the bearer of the Ring of Earth advanced in strength, the balance of everything they were fighting for shifted with him. They poured more into their rings without discussion, all three pushing Narya, Nenya, and Vilya to their absolute limits, driving more and more elemental force into the convergence, feeding the transformation as fast as they could.
Inside the cage, Sauron watched.
What he saw filled him with what he recognised as alarm.
If Kael completed this transformation, if he emerged from it as a Maia, what confronted Sauron was not the same as dealing with Gandalf or Glorfindel, both of them Maiar operating under the Valar's constraints, their power deliberately limited. A Kael who had become a Maia through this process would be at the height of that power, unrestricted and newly forged. That was not an outcome Sauron was willing to accept.
He needed to stop it. And he thought he saw how.
"You are using the earth to hold me." His voice was cold and deliberate. "Then I will sever your connection to the earth. We will see how long your cage lasts after that."
The darkness that had been diffused across the sky and land contracted sharply, pulling back into him all at once. The presence he radiated became something different and more concentrated. The air around the cage felt as though it had just been drawn aside to reveal something underneath it that had always been there.
A sound rose in his throat that was more felt than heard.
Sauron gathered every fragment of his power into the mace in his hands, poured it into a single point, and drove it downward into the ground with everything he had.
The sound the impact made was not an explosion. It was deeper than that. It was the sound of something fundamental giving way.
The ground cracked along lines that ran for miles in every direction. The shockwave passed through the earth the way a stone passes through still water: outward and outward and outward, without diminishing. Every part of Eriador shook. The tremor reached Rivendell in the east and the Shire in the west and the Grey Havens at the edge of the sea, and everywhere it arrived, people stumbled and grabbed at walls and doorframes, looking at each other with wide eyes, certain that an earthquake had come.