Chapter 399: The Ring of Earth
When the great dome of pale golden light settled over everyone, they all felt something radiating from it that was difficult to name at first. It was solidity. Weight. An unshakeable steadiness, as though the dome had sunk its roots deep into the earth itself and simply refused to be moved. Whatever came against it, however fierce, the dome said only one thing: I will not yield.
"What is that?" The shock on every face was unguarded. No one had seen this coming.
Sauron's burning red eyes fixed on the ring on Kael's finger and did not move.
Even those closest to Kael, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel, looked at that ring with unconcealed surprise. They knew no more than the others.
Kael stood at the front of them all, his expression composed and unhurried. He raised the hand bearing the ring, and in that golden light, he stood as one touched by the Valar, commanding an awe that surpassed mortal reckoning.
Sauron's dark power crashed against the dome from every side and found no way through. It could not advance a single inch.
The golden dome was rooted in the earth below, fused with it, and drawing from it constantly. Sauron's power was immense, but the power of the earth beneath all of Middle-earth was something of a different order entirely. The dome held.
Sauron finally moved. He appeared at the boundary of the dome in an instant, and in his hand was a colossal mace. He brought it down on the surface of the dome with his full strength.
The dome shook. The earth shook with it. Every person on the battlefield felt the tremor underfoot and struggled to keep standing, staring at the spectacle with wide, frightened eyes.
The shaking reached as far as Hogsmeade and Hogwarts, miles and miles away. It was not as violent there, but enough to send people scrambling out of doors, convinced an earthquake had come.
At the centre of the battlefield, Sauron's full-force blow had failed to break the dome. But the impact had torn the surrounding world apart. The ground in all directions split open, cracks racing across the earth for dozens of miles. Rivers broke their courses. Hillsides collapsed and slid. The landscape was rearranged as if the land itself had been ground between two stones. An image of the world ending.
Only the ground beneath the dome remained whole and untouched.
Sauron stopped.
He stood in the air above the broken earth, looking through the golden light at Kael. For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Then Sauron broke the silence. "What is that ring?"
His voice, for the first time, held something other than certainty.
Kael lifted his hand, letting the ring catch the light.
"This? This is Cemya," Kael said, his voice carrying a dry, almost amused edge. "The Ring of Earth. And I suppose I owe you a debt of thanks, Sauron. It was your own craft that laid the foundation; without it, I might never have forged a Ring of Power of my own."
Cemya was, by any measure, the greatest single thing Kael had created in decades of work.
He had looked at the Three Elven Rings and the three elements they were aligned to: air, water, and fire. Of the four classical elements that formed the world, only earth had gone unclaimed. That was the element he chose for his own Ring of Power.
The band of Cemya was forged from the last of the mother-mithril in his possession. The yellow gemstone set into it was rare in its own right, a magical gem brought to him by one of the more adventurous wizards living in his territory.
That wizard had been riding a broomstick through the Misty Mountains when he stumbled upon two stone-giants locked in what looked like a battle to the death. Stone-giants moved through those peaks like living mountains, utterly still in sleep and indistinguishable from the rock, but cataclysmic when roused. The wizard had barely escaped with his life, watching helplessly as the two giants tore at each other until one was dead and the other was left so grievously wounded that it fell into a deep, perhaps permanent, sleep.
From the body of the dead giant, the wizard had retrieved a yellow gemstone. It was the giant's core.
And at the heart of the gem, there was a single drop of blood.
Tom Bombadil's blood.
Kael had understood Tom's nature for a long time. If Ungoliant, the great spider-shadow, was a manifestation of the darkness that existed outside the world, then Tom Bombadil was the living embodiment of Arda's earth itself. He was not a Vala, nor was he, as Kael had once wondered, some form of Ilúvatar made manifest. He was the land itself, given form and a voice. That was why Goldberry called him the master of trees and rivers and hills, and why Tom took so little interest in the wars between darkness and light. As long as the struggle did not touch the earth itself, he would not stir.
So when Kael set about forging Cemya, his thoughts had turned to Tom.
Tom was the earth's own voice. He held the purest and most powerful earth-essence of any being in existence.
Kael had visited the Old Forest and asked Tom for a lock of his hair, hoping to draw out even a fraction of that essence and set it into the yellow gem. Tom had simply laughed and given him something better: a drop of his own blood.
Tom's blood was of a different order entirely from a few hairs. It held the purest earth-force that existed, and when Kael infused it into the gemstone, the stone's nature changed at the root. Its quality and its attunement were transformed completely.
The finished ring drew on the earth constantly. As long as its bearer stood on the ground, the earth would shelter and sustain them, pouring an unending stream of earth-elemental force into them, becoming the foundation of everything they could do.
Kael had named it Cemya, the Quenya word for "earth" and "ground." He had made it as an answer to the Three Rings, a fourth elemental ring where none had existed before. The Ring of Earth.
The Three Elven Rings each held their own domain. Vilya, the Ring of Air, commanded the element of air and carried with it the powers of wisdom, freedom, and healing. Nenya, the Ring of Water, commanded water and held the powers of purity, concealment, and protection. Narya, the Ring of Fire, commanded fire and carried warmth, inspiration, and the courage to endure.
Cemya commanded earth, and alongside that mastery, it carried the qualities of the earth itself: solidity, stability, and the power to nourish. Of all the Rings in terms of raw defensive strength, Cemya stood above the Three. Drawing on the limitless force of the ground beneath all things, it could raise a shield that nothing had yet broken. It was, before everything else, a ring made to defend.
Its nourishing power was something else again. It could turn barren soil rich, coax living things to grow where they had no right to thrive, turn desert into pasture and dead ground into green, reshape the face of the land itself. Whoever wore Cemya was, in a very literal sense, chosen by the earth to tend it.
On the battlefield, Sauron listened to the ring's description, and behind the wariness in his eyes, the greed was unmistakable and growing.
He had not expected Kael to have forged a ring comparable to the Three Elven Rings on his own. The talent and knowledge that implied genuinely surprised him.
The Three had only been possible because he had spent long and careful effort teaching Celebrimbor his craft. The fact that Kael had drawn on that same inherited knowledge and produced something like this was extraordinary.
But if the craft it was built on ultimately traced back to him, then Sauron had confidence he could find the weakness in it.
He attempted the same method he had used against the Three Rings: speaking the dark words that could force open the hidden door in a ring forged with his techniques, and pouring corruption through it to taint the ring from within.
The dark syllables rolled across the sky. His power surged toward Cemya.
It found nothing.
No seam. No hidden door. No weakness of any kind.