Chapter 406: The Earth Cracks
Rocks and boulders tumbled from the hillsides. Birds and beasts fled in every direction.
Hogsmeade, closest to the heart of the battle, had taken the worst of it. Most of its buildings had collapsed. Cries and wailing filled the air, and ordinary people wandered the streets with terror written across their faces, convinced the end of the world had come. Fortunately, the Ministry of Magic and the assembled wizards were present: anyone not killed outright in the first moments was pulled clear and treated with spells and potions.
At the epicentre, the ground around Kael and the others looked as though a meteor had struck it. Cracks radiated outward in every direction, spreading across the earth like threads in a vast, broken web.
At the very centre, beneath the golden cage, the ground had been driven down into an enormous pit.
Sauron stood at the bottom of it. He raised his mace again, gathered everything he had, and brought it down into the earth a second time.
The ground heaved. A new fissure tore open beneath the blow, splitting the rock to a depth no eye could measure.
He struck again. And again. Each blow sent another shockwave rolling outward, leaving the land more broken than before.
After the final strike, the plain east of Weathertop split apart completely. A vast rift tore across the land, running north to south, more than ten metres wide and stretching for dozens of kilometres. Seen from above, it looked like a wound carved into the face of Eriador, dividing it in two. Even the Great East Road to Rivendell had been cut apart. A new bridge would have to be built before anyone could cross it again.
The rift seemed bottomless. Looking down into it, one could believe it reached the very core of the earth.
Before Gandalf and the others had time to react, Sauron began to chant. Ancient dark words rolled from his lips, and the ground shuddered in steady response. A low, deep rumbling rose from somewhere far below.
Then a glow appeared in the depths. It rose quickly.
"Magma!" Gandalf's voice cracked with alarm. "Lava from below!"
He was right. Deep within the rift, molten rock was surging upward.
A wave of scalding heat burst from the fissure first, carrying the sharp stench of sulphur. The temperature around them spiked as though they had been dropped at the mouth of a volcano. Then the lava itself came, roaring upward with the force of an eruption, a river of destruction surging toward the surface.
Sauron's intent was clear. He meant to use the erupting magma to hammer Kael's golden dome from below, through the earth itself.
The natural force of such a surge could not compare to Mount Doom, but it was far beyond anything Kael could comfortably suppress, and Sauron was directing it. If the lava broke through to the surface, the land around Hogwarts would be transformed into a wasteland of molten rock. There would be no hope of holding Sauron after that, let alone trapping him. Even stopping the eruption itself would be a desperate struggle.
It was a vicious stratagem.
Elrond moved first. He called on Vilya, the Ring of Air, and drew every drop of water from the Black Lake, sweeping the entire lake into the rift in a rushing torrent to force the lava back.
It was not enough. The water was vast, but not vast enough. The lava had been building in the depths for millions of years. The lake's water was consumed and vaporised within moments, and the surge pressed on, erupting upward like a colossal fountain of fire, blazing and unstoppable, threatening to drown everything around it.
The golden cage expanded rapidly, stretching outward to enclose the rift and seal the erupting lava inside.
But the magma was relentless. It hammered against the dome's underside without pause, forcing the golden light to keep stretching wider, straining to contain what was building beneath it. The pressure grew and grew.
It was like a pump forcing air into a balloon. The balloon might be strong enough never to burst, but given enough air and enough time, something had to give.
Sauron and Kael had become a perfect contest of opposing forces: Kael using the Ring of Earth to draw the earth's own strength against Sauron, and Sauron turning the earth's molten heart against the earth's surface defences.
Gandalf was forced to call on Narya, the Ring of Fire, trying to exert his will over the fire element churning within the lava, coaxing it toward stillness. Galadriel brought Nenya, the Ring of Water, to bear alongside him, pressing water against fire to slow the surge from a different angle.
With Sauron on the verge of breaking free, Kael abandoned the transformation mid-course and redirected everything into the dome. While reinforcing it from above, he simultaneously reached down into the earth and tried to force the rift closed, to seal the channel the lava was using.
It was not possible. Magma that had been building for millions of years was not a thing that could be plugged. It was like trying to dam a river in flood with bare hands: the moment a breach opened, nothing held it.
Kael drove torrents of soil and stone into the rift, shaping them into masses that drove downward against the flow. The lava melted them. Each wave of rock and earth was absorbed and made part of the surge, adding to the force pressing upward rather than slowing it.
The lava moved with something beyond its natural violence. Sauron's will was inside it, driving it, agitating it into a fury it could not have reached on its own.
His reserves were burning away at a terrifying rate. Kael clenched his jaw and held on, and silently, urgently, he hoped Frodo and the others were moving fast.
Meanwhile, deep inside Mordor.
The Fellowship, still disguised as Orcs under the Polyjuice Potion, had passed through several checkpoints without incident and reached the foot of Mount Doom.
The mountain was exactly what it looked like from a distance. An ashen, smoke-choked wasteland where nothing lived, and nothing grew. The air smelled of ruin.
But reaching the foot of the mountain had not made things easier. If anything, caution pressed down on them harder than before.
The moment Sauron had understood Kael's true purpose, he had acted through his connection to the Nazgûl, ordering every remaining force in Mordor to concentrate around Mount Doom. Not a single person was to be allowed into its bounds. The Eye of Sauron atop Barad-dûr fixed its gaze on the mountain without blinking, a ceaseless all-seeing watch that would detect even a fly crossing into the restricted area.
Above the mountain, Nazgûl rode fell beasts in continuous patrol. Vampires, giant bats, and crebain swept the sky alongside them.
On the ground, Orcs and Uruk-hai and Trolls ringed the outer perimeter. Within that ring, great spiders, werewolves, Dark sorcerers, evil spirits, and corrupted beasts of every kind prowled the slopes, almost one at every turn. The sky offered no gaps. The Eye offered no blind spots.
Mount Doom had been turned into a fortress, layer upon layer of encirclement sealed from above and below, with no approach that was not watched.
The party stopped at the foot of the mountain and stared.
Even in their Orc disguises, they could not pass. Every Orc approaching the perimeter was being checked thoroughly, and none were permitted through regardless. And even if they somehow slipped past the outer cordon, the slopes above were crawling with werewolves, evil spirits, and great spiders, barely any space between them. The Nazgûl, vampires, giant bats, and crebain left no patch of sky uncovered. And behind all of it, the Eye of Sauron swept the mountain like a great beacon, missing nothing.
The Fellowship could not move.
Aragorn took in the situation, and his expression went very still. "Sauron has realised what we are doing," he said quietly. "He has pulled nearly everything in Mordor to Mount Doom. We don't know how long Lord Kael and the others can hold him. But we have to put the Ring into the fire before he gets back. If he returns, we lose our only chance."
The words settled over the group like a weight.
Legolas pressed his lips together, his eyes moving across the perimeter. "Even getting inside is the problem. And if we do manage it, there are patrols on the slopes at every step. How do we reach the Crack of Doom without being found?"
The Crack of Doom was a vast fissure deep within Mount Doom itself, where the fires of the earth's core burned without end. It was there that Sauron had poured the greater part of his soul into the One Ring, forging it in those primordial flames. And it was the only place in all of Middle-earth where the One Ring could be unmade.