"What happened, Master Gandalf?" yelped Sam, startled by the sudden light.
"It's gone," whispered Frodo. Though he felt a tugging sensation in his heart, a yearning for the ring, it was but a minor feeling and by far overridden by his intense pleasure at being free of having such a weight on his conscience.
His pleasure was short-lived, however, as Gandalf seemed to age before his eyes. Gandalf eased himself into a chair, looking at Frodo with sad eyes. "I don't know what happened," he said then muttered, almost to himself, "I've never heard that any of the Great Rings could do such a thing."
He straightened in his chair and fixed Frodo with a piercing gaze. "It changes nothing for you, my lad. You must still leave, for the name of Baggins is known to the Enemy now, and lack of the ring will not avail you. He would take you and torture you to garner whatever clues you might possess to its location. If he does not already have it." That thought seemed to age Gandalf still further.
"But you will have to make your plans without me, I am afraid," he continued.
"But Gandalf, you've only just arrived!"
Gandalf sighed unhappily, looking into the worried face of his young friend. "The consequences will be ill if the ring falls into the wrong hands, but I must admit that I have no real idea how to find it again. Very well, Frodo. I will stay for two weeks and help you prepare for your trip. I think now, that you should go as soon as you possibly can."
Gandalf sighed when he saw Frodo's expression. "I had thought to let you leave in your own time," he admitted. "But if the Ring itself is going to be playing a more active role, there may not be time."
---
Tofu was understandably furious with Ranko for her little prank. "You should have slid through the shadows, Ranko! You know that an unguided teleport is hideously dangerous!"
"Hah!" Ranko laughed merrily. "Come on, Tofu, it can't hurt us even if we had ended up in the same place as something else. Besides, there are no mountains near us, we both knew that, we've seen enough, so there was little risk in teleporting a mile up and several over."
This discussion was progressing as a flashing golden ring whistled through the air, falling towards the ground far below. Turning her mind from Tofu's continued complaints, Ranko checked quickly about to be sure that she was unseen.
Quite suddenly the ring became a miniature dragon. "Hurry up, Tofu," Ranko urged as the dragon tumbled listlessly through the air. "Take over and start flying already."
The opportunity to move again, to take over their shared body for a short time, and even more so, the chance to fly once more cut off Tofu's protests in mid-stream, as Ranko had known they would.
Soon the tiny dragon was flying easily over acres of well looked after farmland. Tofu's mind was better equipped than Ranko's to process the visual information their surface could give them and his keener sight soon found a rising thermal. They began to make lazy, sweeping turns as the warm air lifted them upward again.
Tofu felt their mouth stretch into a grin without his influence. It widened when he himself smiled, please at the evidence that Ranko was enjoying the flight as much as he.
"One of these days, Tofu, you're going to have to teach me how to do this!"
While Tofu could not activate nor deactivate the magic connection that Distanfae had given Ranko between her soul and the body, the connection that let her move normally and use her martial arts skills, he could, with her assistance, place himself between her soul and the body. If the connection was active, he could insinuate himself into it and take control. In doing so, the connection seemed to change to fit his soul's experience, so he was able to work a body with six limbs, two of which were wings. Having experienced a human form before, like many ancient dragons, he was also able to operate Ranko's drow form.
Ranko found this extremely unfair but was of the unswerving opinion that Tofu would eventually figure out a way for her soul to gain the experience to be able to fly the dragon form that Tofu had crafted for them.
As the land continued to shrink beneath them, Tofu slipped out of the updraft and began a long glide. Ranko had been very confused the first time they had done this, becoming worried as he continued to hold his wings steady, never flapping. These days she was as used to it as any large bird, though she still couldn't read the air as he could, to find the thermals that they traveled between.
Their sharp eyes tracked the roads on the ground below for great distances and caught in the air the rising of smoke away to the east. The roads from within the land they were leaving were two, one fairly straight to the east, well-maintained, and one that wandered to the south-east, over-grown where it left the shire, though it did not look wholly unused.
"Which way should we go, little one?"
Ranko thought for a while then on impulse, she opened her senses to the ring. She felt several pulling sensations, as if the ring were tugging her first one way and then another. One was back the way they'd come.
Another, fainter pull, was to the east, but the strongest pull was to the south-east, in three very slightly different directions. Of course, if they were quite far off, the distance between them given even a tiny deviation here and now could be immense.
That the ring's desire seemed to coincide with the over-grown path decided her. She did not want to wander the wilderness forever, just draw the heat away from the Shire for a time.
"That way," she said, indicating the direction of the strongest pull. Tofu bobbed his head in acknowledgement and they veered to match the course she had set.
They crossed the course of a river, far below, and Ranko nodded to herself. "We're out of the Shire now, I think. I'm going to start exploring the ring."
"Should I land first?"
"No, if something happens because of this, they'll have a harder time actually coming upon us if we keep moving fast. Besides, if the worst happens, a fall from this height wouldn't hurt us, but it would put us far from where the worst was felt, assuming they can feel it at all."
When no further objections were forthcoming, Ranko began to examine the ring. As she had done with the other items she had eaten over the years, as opposed to those she'd merely drank power from, she traced the lines of magic power within.
She quickly realized that this ring was like nothing she'd seen before. She was used to finely woven patches of power that led to even more complex deeper weaves, a pattern of activator and effect. This ring held almost nothing of that sort. There was a response to fire, that she could see, though it was not crafted in the way to which she was accustomed.
The greatest portion of the ring did not seem to be organized at all. It was little more, it seemed, than a deep reservoir of power. No, it was more like a well, a well brimming with power and drawing from some deep source she could not see. She could not resist tasting the power, letting a little of it trickle to her quicksilver.
She jerked back instantly. It wasn't that it was a foul taste... in fact, it was rather sweet, but it had carried a metallic tang, a sharpness that seemed to bite her, as if she'd bitten aluminium. "Damn, I'm glad that evil we destroyed wasn't smart enough to draw on this. It should have crushed us!" That errant thought brought another one. According to the old wizard's words, somewhere in this world was a being of great evil and this ring was his. If she fell into his hands, could she keep him from using this well of power, that he had created?
Exploring further she eventually found new patterns beyond the well. It took her hours to puzzle out the strange patterns and recognize them. One was the pattern that stretched the wielder's life. It was bit disturbing, because it was intimately linked to the second pattern which was similar to her own shadow shifting. It brought the wielder into a different state of being temporarily, rendering the wielder invisible. The two together, though, worked to bring the wielder permanently into that other realm.
She dimly heard and acknowledged Tofu's warning that he had come across a city and was going to land and rest for a while on the central tower. A corresponding realization filtered into her quite slowly and she screamed for him not to land, only moments too late. The place that the thing the ring was trying to draw her to was here, right here, wherever they now were. She desperately pulled away from the ring, trying to re-engage her senses and find out where they were.
Even as she turned from the ring she felt the process of assimilation begin again, the magical process activating on its own in the absence of her control and intention. For a moment she merely sighed in irritation, hoping that this one wouldn't be evil. Then the scale of the assimilation hit her, the unbelievable mass of the magic they were becoming one with. Opening her senses wide, she saw the sky, the spires of black stone rising about her, the city far below, for but a moment, before the black stone swallowed her.
She could feel the thirst growing within her already. Tofu, fragile as his mind was after her terrible attack so long ago, and even more millenia from his last true sensation of need than she, was quickly overwhelmed by it and she was left to resist it alone.
Normally she had more than time enough to prepare, to make sure that her quicksilver was well-fed before her dead elements absorbed a new item, a new power. If the item she wanted to eat was unusually large, she always made sure that she had smaller magic sources nearby to drink.
The thirst immediately turned her mind to the well of power she'd just pulled away from. For the barest instant she considered quenching her thirst at the well. The memory of the evil that had tainted the ring held her back. She did not know from what source the well drew. It could draw on something's lifeforce. It might be drawn from the nearest living thing or draw on the world's strength directly. There was no way of knowing what evil she might cause by drawing on that well and that she would not do.
Knowing that when she lost her senses, or they were overwhelmed, her mind, after Tofu's training, sought to slow, to let time pass unnoticed, she fought to regain her senses. Already, though it seemed but seconds to her, weeks or months might have flown by.
The assimilation of this monstrosity could take her months or even years, or longer still. She had to find a source of magic to quench her thirst lest the drain kill her quicksilver. If it managed to slay the last of her that was truly alive, Dist only knew what she would lose. She was supposed to be impervious to harm but even Distanfae had admitted that he had broken all the rules in creating her and there were no guarantees. If anything could harm her, she felt, it was overextending her reserves. If she drained all the magic from within her she might well die, as the magic that held her soul imprisoned crumbled and released her into death.
Forcing herself into the portion of the stone that she had so far assimilated, crying out in pain at the rawness of it, the untamed resistance, she thrust herself through it, driving herself once more to the surface, a surface, any surface.
Her dismay was terrible when rising from her ordeal she found herself on the pinnacle of a black tower and the nearest source of magic the very wizard she'd left behind. He lay there, Gandalf the Grey, sleeping. He did not look peaceful but weary, burdened. He looked huge to her, for though she had managed to increase her size from that of the ring to the winged lizard form she had after taken, her unconscious grasping of her trained form had not managed to restore her size.
Ranko stumbled backward, her feet never leaving the black surface. Indeed, they were mired in it, as if the stone were a treacherous bog. She drew away from him, feeling the thirst gnawing at her. The ring too she could feel pulling her to him. For just a moment she tried to increase her size so as to look on him with normal eyes, hoping that his gauntness was but a trick of perspective, but the attempt left her crumpled in pain. She had not completed her assimilation of the stone and it held a magic nearly as strong as her own, that held it together as one unbroken mass. Her attempt to increase her size would have affected all of her equally, but the unassimilated mass held what she had taken of the tower bound and its size could not change.
The unwise struggle left her weary, her thirst and hunger burning and growing within her. "I've got to get him away from here before I lose it," she muttered unhappily. Her eyes burned though she had no tears with which to moisten them, much less to let fall in her pain. Moving with slow and painful effort, she drew forth the ring, the one ring that seemed to mean so much to these people. "If I'm trapped here, eventually I'll give in to the thirst. I'll drink, and they'll all know where I am. Even if I drink my fill it will take forever to finish eating this damn tower. How can the whole thing be a single damned stone anyway!?"
Her eyes flashed between the ring and the wizard, dueling fountains tempting her to drink. A vague memory of a suggestion Tofu had made, one she had not really understood at the time, flashed in her mind. Even now she did not truly understand his words but intuitively, amidst the stress and fear, her ever agile mind finally understood what her body must do. As so often before, she found the key to defeat her enemy just in time.
Her hand plunged into the dark shadow cast by one of the spires gleaming like teeth upthrust around her. The ring in her hand shone forth from the shadow across the way. In a mind-warping twist, the ring inverted, swallowing the shadow within itself even as she pulled her hand back. As her hand threatened to leave the shadow, her fist clenched then melted into a fluid mass before it reformed, a second shadow held in a tiny open space inside her.
The ring fell to the ground, a single metallic note proclaiming its freedom.
Moving quickly in spite of apparently being mired in the stone floor, she slogged across and grabbed the ring. Holding it in her hand, her eyes crossed momentarily as she tried to comprehend what she'd done, how it could be separate and yet still part of her. Even worse, she could feel the drain of the shadow cloak increasing her thirst.
Eyes and throat burning, she slipped the ring into a deep pocket in Gandalf's robes. She moved to teleport him back to the one place she was sure she could remember; the little room in Frodo's home where they'd had their long discussion about the ring, the room she'd been held in, in the open, for several hours. As she reached for the magic of the ring of teleportation, she felt the quicksilver drinking power from the wand of fire. She grasped frantically for the thin skein of gold that held the power of teleportation, but it was empty, quiescent. To be sure, she knew how to power the magic items she absorbed with her own magic essence, but it was of precisely that essence that she was in such desperate need.
She collapsed then atop the tower, feeling a growing sense of hopelessness. If her quicksilver died, taking with it the pool of magic that sustained her, would she still be able to defeat Saffron and save her family when she finally made it home? Worse yet, would she even be able to make it home? She shivered, curling into a fetal ball, resting within the surface of the black stone as if it were inch-deep water.
She gave in to the feeling of hunger, losing her grip on all other sensation, surrendering to the unfettered flow of time. To her astonishment, when she was brought back to herself by a series of thunderous crashes, she found that she had been covered by a torn strip of cloth tucked in about her. She realized that she must have moved unconsciously to secure the makeshift blanket, for it was beneath one foot and grasped in her hand. There could be little doubt that the wizard had done this, gifting her with a portion of the cloak he could ill-afford to spare on this windswept height, but even he could not have slipped it beneath her foot, for in the absence of her will, though to her the black stone was like a thick mud, any other who sought to move her would not be able to effect even the most minute separation between her and the floor in which she lay.
She struggled to her feet and stifled a startled cry of dismay when she saw the huge wizard crawling toward her, a look of pity and compassion in his dark eyes. Quickly, fearing to reveal her nature, she swallowed two shadows on the far side of herself, where he could not see, granting her a means of apparent separation from the black stone, the gnawing hunger and thirst growing even stronger as she drew more heavily on the cloak of shadow.
The world whirled about her as he gently lifted her free of the entangling stone, gazing at her with mixed wonder and compassion. Murmuring soft words of comfort and assurance, he brought her close within the circuit of his cloak, cutting off the wind that blew chill upon the unprotected height.
The hunger assailed her once more and she felt even more keenly the strength that lay still within him, starved and chilled though he was, and a great terror leapt up within her. She could not free him from the height; she was too small even to simply carry him away in flight and she had no strength left to send him away through the shadows, as she should have done when first she discovered that her ring was dry. Somehow the shadow cloak, perhaps by virtue of its being already in use, had been undrained, but it was already strained by maintaining two open paths through the shadow.
She could not risk the possibility of hurting him should the magic fail as she moved him through it and she was leery of the danger of passing through two shadows at once or passing a shadow through a shadow, or whatever it was that would happen if she passed through the shadows while using them to separate her from the tower. Just thinking about it made her head hurt.
She shuddered as the pain worsened with her nearness to food but she would not drink of what was to hand, and there were no sources of strong magic within the ready reach of the portion of Orthanc that she had so far assimilated.
Despair grew within her once more at the realization that the strain on her quicksilver was becoming unbearable and the death she so feared could not be far off. She would never now be able to save her family. Two beings felt that despair and moved to aid her. One was long dead, acting from beyond the veil by virtue of the foresight granted by great intelligence. Her creator, Distanfae, had been well aware of her honor and how it could bind her hands. He had seen for himself in her memories her death at her own hands because of honor. Though he admired that in her, he wanted his creation to live forever, to bear witness to his greatness for all time.
She refused to do what she had to do to survive, but there was that within her which would not. Within her the barriers she had built failed, and a passage she had never known existed opened to release the feral power and hunger of the Neko-ken.
When Distanfae had first explored the Neko-ken after finding it locked away in her mind, he had triggered it in a similar manner to the way it had naturally been triggered, sending her mind into a deep blackness. She still remained conscious, something that had not been true of the original Neko-ken, but she had been unaware of what her cat-self was doing.
This time she found herself retreating in fear, unable to escape to blackness as the cat took over. She had no alternative, no way to avoid seeing what the cat did. Her fear grew but there was no way out, no way to escape the cat that shared her very being.
Then the other who had felt her despair acted. Feeling the shudders and whimpers of fear from the tiny bundle he held, Gandalf reached out with his will, gently pressing her into sleep. He sighed and tucked her close by his body as the wind wailed about them. At least he could ease her torment, even if there was little he could do about his own.
---
Ranko awoke to the sound of snapping cloth and rushing wind. She found herself still being held and instantly she identified the hand as belonging to her master. In her despair she had put up no defense against his will and now she was bound to him. She felt a moment's distress at the thought until she remembered who he was. It did not hurt his case that the first command he had given, the first exertion of his will over her, had been to put her to sleep, a state she had not experienced for more than a thousand years. She felt unbelievably refreshed and though hunger and thirst still gnawed at her, the sensations felt suddenly familiar instead of terrifying.
They had deeply unsettled her when she felt them again for nearly the first time since her death but now sleep had brought dreams and memories of her first life, her time as Ranma, and waking up hungry had ever been a part of that. Indeed, hunger and thirst had been her... his constant companions through most of his early life.
Dimly she felt the pull of the power in the ring in another pocket of Gandalf's robes. In the distance she could feel the cat moving and she shivered in sudden fear but it soon passed. He was far away. She quickly turned her attention away, not wanting to know what he was doing, nor attract his attention. Hopefully he would feel the draw of the ring no more strongly than she. She remembered again the sudden spurt of sheer terror she had felt when the walls in her mind crumbled, but looking back, she understood now what Distanfae had intended.
Turning inward she verified her suspicions. The pool of her reserves in her quicksilver was not as low as it had been, nor had it ever been as dire as she had felt it. It had been the raw newness of feeling the unaccustomed sensations again that had made them seem so overwhelmingly powerful.
The sound of a single powerful wingbeat caught her attention and she deduced that the sound of wind was due to their passage through the air rather than wind on the tower's height. As that realization settled in she became aware of the occasional rocking motion as their carrier tilted this way and that to take advantage of the air currents.
She wondered why the wizard had not taken earlier advantage of whatever means of flight he had at his disposal, but as she shifted in his grasp preparatory to reaching for the pocket's lip to peer out, the wizard grew aware of her wakeful state, and concerned over what might befall were she to be afraid of heights or open spaces, he pressed her to sleep once more.
When she awoke for the second time, it was at his gentle insistence, and she sat up to find herself lying in his hand, while he looked down at her with a twinkle in his eye. She looked about quickly, trying to judge her location, and found that they stood between two lines of green mounds, while in the distance lights glimmered against a darkening sky.
"It is alright now," Gandalf said, smiling, "we are far from Orthanc, Isengard, and Saruman, though," and a frown stole the smile from his face as he looked about with concern in his eyes, "perhaps not far enough for safety. Soon he will be reaching out to strike against Rohan, I judge," he continued in a low tone, almost as if speaking to himself.
He shook his head, beard wagging comically, and turned his attention back to her. "Ah, but I am rambling, and we have not yet been introduced. I am Gandalf, also known," his eyes slid a tiny bit to the right, "as Mithrandir amongst the elves." Ranko realized that he must be looking at the tips of her ears and before she had even considered her actions, her hand had risen to grasp the top of her pointed ear.
"I apologize if I have startled or frightened you," he continued, "but I could not imagine any would voluntarily sleep on that windswept height and so assumed you shared my prison and would prefer to share my escape?"
Ranko nodded but a shiver ran through her as his words reminded her that he had done more than merely take her away from a dangerous situation without asking nor introducing himself; he had inadvertently bonded her, becoming the newest in a line of masters. He seemed unaware of what he had done though, for which she was thankful, and she had good reason to hope that even should he become aware of their link, he would not understand how to use it, if her sort of magical item was uncommon in this world.
He sighed at noting her shiver, thinking her still afraid, as could hardly be surprising in one so small, faced with someone so much larger. Then too he was conscious that while he did not think he looked particularly like Saruman, they were both old men, white of hair and tall of stature, and all men might look alike to one so different as she.
"We are in the land of Rohan," he said, "south of the Golden Wood where the High Elves still dwell. I am making all speed for Rivendell in the far north, where elves and men dwell in the house of Elrond Half-Elven. Close at hand," he gestured at the lights, "lies the long-house of Theoden, King of the RidderMark, the Horse-Lords. South and west at the end of the mountains stands the white city of Minas Tirith, seat of the Steward of Gondor. The Gap of Rohan, soon to be my path upon the swiftest steed I can find, lies to the west, near to the Isengard where Orthanc stands and from whence we both escaped."
"You may do as you will now. If you wish, I will bear you with me to Rivendell." His tone was gentle but questioning and Ranko looked up at him. He had not tried to choose her way, nor even in offering his company had he concealed the dangers of his path. Most importantly, he had not phrased any of his words in the form of an order, which left her unconstrained, unworried about losing her easy mobility as a consequence of disobedience, of being restricted once more to reshaping herself to move.
She smiled softly, but shook her head and stood. Bowing, she said, "I am Ranko, and I thank you for taking me with you, but I will not go with you if you pass Isengard." A frisson of fear rolled through her at the thought of the cat still loose there, though surprisingly it lacked much of the irresistable and illogical force it would have once held. Perhaps it was because she was considering it at a distance. "There is a new danger there of which you know nothing," she continued, though privately she wondered whether her respect and lack of anger to this man would translate to her cat-side's behavior, as it once had. Was this manifestation of the cat actually the same as that which came out when she was subsumed by the darkness? Or was it some creation of Distanfae's?
Gandalf frowned, wondering what she might be speaking of, but seeing that her shiver, assumed she feared it too greatly to speak more of it. Could it be merely the gathering orcs and goblin-kind that he had witnessed? Or was there truly something new, something unknown there, that she had seen to cause this fear in her?
"Well, it would be a less comfortable road for a horse, but I could pass north, across the Snowbourn, the Entwash, and Nimrodel, passing Lothlorien where the Lady of the Golden Wood dwells, and up the Dimrill Stair," Gandalf mused. "To be sure, the first part of the journey would be more pleasant, but to take a horse up the Stair . . ." Gandalf paused, considering. He had thought to take the Gap, to judge the preparedness of Rohan and Isengard for war, and that he might pass through the Shire on his way back, for urgent as it was that Elrond learn of Saruman's treachery, he greatly desired to know whether the Enemy's spies had reached the Shire and where they stood in their search for the Ring. Most importantly, he wished to learn if anywhere in that Land sign of the Ring had been seen again. If he could use the Enemy's spies to learn what he needed, so much the better. At the least, perhaps he could discover if the Enemy still believed the Ring to be in Frodo's possession, or in the possession of the Wise.
Still, passing up the Northward road would not be slower, for the snows of winter were yet far off, and doubtless Elrond had sent Aragorn and others in search of these very answers some time ago. In fact, he probably already had the answers he sought. The first searchers had left Rivendell on the tenth of June, the day after he and the hobbits had reached Rivendell. By now, they would have returned, and more searchers sent out with more specific goals, and the same cycle passed yet again. Elrond might even have the Ring in hand again. He nodded, stroking his beard. "Yes, you are right, it is the better road." He turned his gaze down to her. "And if I take that road, north to the Dimrill Stair, will you ride with me?"
Ranko nodded, "I will, at least as far as the Golden Wood you spoke of." She was not sure about staying too close to the Ring, and if she had known that Lothlorien lay across the river from Southern Mirkwood where the Enemy's former fastness of Dol Goldur stood, a region of growing evil, she might not have chosen that course. Knowing what she did, however, she felt that the elves were most likely to have the wealth of magic that would allow her to deal with the assimilation of Orthanc without pain. Coming as she was from a world where half-breeds, particularly of elvish descent, were often second-class citizens, she felt no appeal for Rivendell, where like as not the only item of great power would be the Ring, still hidden on Gandalf's person. She was somewhat worried that she might face prejudice because of her skin color, but Gandalf's complete lack of reaction to it had reassured her that at least drow had not here the all-encompassing reputation of evil that had so often haunted her in the past.
And so Gandalf went in search of a horse.