One moment, I was sneaking into a cottage in the Chetwood north-east of Bree-town that looked abandoned. The next thing I knew, something heavy clubbed me from behind and I dropped like a stone, unconscious. When I woke, I found myself in the last place I wanted to be: a cell.
I wasn’t alone, though. A hooded man, a Ranger by the looks of it, stood outside the bars. My head hurt and before I could really ask many questions, the Ranger broke me out of the cell. I had no real gear or clothing. It had all been taken from me. Brigands, I realized even as we found a weapon for me to use. Once outside, Strider, as he was called, told me he had to hunt down a servant of Mordor in the camp, but that I had another job to do. There were two hobbits, little folk, also trapped in the prison that we – or at least the Ranger – wanted free. I wanted to leave and save myself. I know what I did to get in the place. I don’t know what the Ranger thought we were there for, to be honest; however, if Mordor got involved with Blackwolds, I didn’t want to stick around to find out and figured the other captives felt the same. Given I pay my debts, if the Ranger wanted me to break the lock for the hobbits so we could all escape, I would do it without question. In my profession, you don’t ask those.
He wasn’t alone, though. Another Ranger, Amdir, would help us once I got the hobbits freed. One was there unnecessarily and the other due to mistaken identity. I quickly moved to free one, killed at least four Blackwolds guarding her to do it, and let her take the lead to find her companion. She set fire to the camp as a distraction along the way. Clever girl. It did the trick and left one guard at the hobbit’s cell, which she and I quickly dispatched. He mentioned something about a Black Rider before he died. The Mordor servant, perhaps? I would quickly find out – once the nasty little hobbit fellow finished being rude enough that I almost left him there tied to his bloody pole.
We fled for the main gates, where Amdir stood between us and some horrific figure on a black horse. Strider could do nothing as the… man?… hissed and stabbed Amdir. I hardly know from the way the fires danced and the shadows swirled. The horse itself seemed odd, too, not quite right. Strider managed to drive off the Black Rider, swearing revenge, but the Rider claimed the hobbits weren’t the ones it was after. “This is not the Baggins I seek,” it raged. I remember it clearly against the flames before the horse reared and it fled.
I don’t really know how long we stumbled and staggered about through the trees with Strider supporting Amdir. It was near morning when we found ourselves near the torch-lit walls of a town – Archet, Strider had said. My head hadn’t stopped throbbing and we hadn’t stopped once to rest or find something cool to drink after Strider had bound up Amdir’s wound. The female hobbit, Celandine, seemed reasonable enough, if worried about Amdir’s paling features and shadowing eyes. The male hobbit, Mundo, mostly complained about his empty belly and all the walking we were doing until Celandine shushed him in irritation. Amdir didn’t speak much. Neither did Strider, though when he did, it was to the hobbits and he sounded firm but gentle with them.
We settled just inside Archet with permission from Captain Brackenbrook, the official in the town, though I don’t have to tell you how much legal officials comfort me. The sun had already risen for at least a few hours when I woke from a restless sleep. Celandine bade me check on Amdir’s state, worried more than when we had arrived, but Mundo only whined about his hunger. Amdir was dying. He claimed to be fine; that the blade had barely pierced his shoulder, but his look was a man nearing his end through his increasingly violent chills. Whatever business Strider had with “a different Baggins” would see him off before the village of Archet, and his companion, could be saved.
I should’ve left then and there. Gathered some food and started walking south toward the next town or Bree itself. Strider, however, gave me a charge: talk to the Captain and warn him of the Blackwolds. I tried. He didn’t believe me. I went around the town on his orders asking key people if they felt threatened and of course, none of them did. Strider grew frustrated at their lack of concern and sent me to a trainer, more, I think, for his peace of mind than my own given I knew how to fight. Then, he said the words that had me groaning inside: “Are you ready to begin your great venture?”
Angmar had awakened? Mordor had come? The village and others nearby would be razed to the ground? Everything inside me told me to leave. I had a son to think of far, far away from this madness. But I was tasked by the Ranger to aid his companion, and I knew I had to at least do that much before I slipped away. Whatever would make Amdir more comfortable in the end. He deserved that much for helping us and sacrificing his own life. Strider claimed the Black Rider was the most fell thing I would meet in my travels. Apparently, he’s never met my accursed ex-wife.
I was sent to ask the Captain for the location of kingsfoil and to offer my assistance to him. All I could do was sigh and agree. Attaching the second request to the first assured Strider I would do it for him. I couldn’t return with one thing and not show myself doing the other. I was told where they were and to assist a man named Calder Cob with some wolves. Cob would tell me where they were.
Off I went down the road with a bit of new gear in place given to me by one or two of the people of Archet. When I reached the man, Cob said both the wolves, the source of them, and the kingsfoil were all in the same set of ruins to the south. It took me a little while to get there by foot – a place named Bronwë’s Folly, though I wonder at the name – and I picked the kingsfoil first. I had to fight aggressive wolves on the way up to the top of the ruins, only to find a strange banner there. When I threw it down, a Blackwold man walked toward me claiming that Cob had informed him I’d be showing up there. After I killed him, I returned to Cob in a fury and demanded to know why he had betrayed me.
“I’ll have all the gold.” I wasn’t in my right mind all of a sudden. I had been knocked out, rescued, watched a Mordor servant stab a man who was now slowly dying, been rooked into helping this town of idiots rather than leaving, and ran halfway across what felt like all of Bree to gather kingsfoil and kill vicious wolves just so a bunch of brigands could get rich? And Cob had the audacity to say I’d die too if I didn’t clear out before nightfall. For gold.
I like gold, mind, but not enough to ally myself with Mordor and an awakened Angmar to do it. There is honor among thieves.
But he was right about one thing: Captain Brackenbrook wouldn’t believe me about him if I told him. Strider’s advice, when I gave him the kingsfoil, was to question a Blackwold in the stocks about Cob before offering that information to the Captain. The brigand yelled about being a friend to Cob and that it was all a mistake. “I suppose that might have worked at some point — if I hadn’t just been betrayed by Cob,” I informed him. He squealed like a piglet about the truth while the jailer stood there listening. He believed me and sent me back to Brackenbrook with that news – who still refused to believe it until I went to talk to some man on a farm to the south named Cal Sprigley. If I’d had a horse of my own, I would have ridden it away from all of this nonsense. Toodle-oo!
Celandine wanted me to pick up some berries in that area for a tea that she thought would help Amdir. Mundo wanted some pig to eat. I had to run back toward Bronwë’s Folly and then further on to get to the farm. Cob sneered at me as I ran past, and I had to force myself not to stop and blacken both of his eyes and leave my knife in his gut. Amdir wouldn’t be the only one dying slowly, I swore it.
I killed a few piglets along the way and made it to Sprigley’s farm. Imagine my shock – shock, I say – when Sprigley informed me the Blackwolds had attacked and some of his farmhands had chased after them. One of them who had stayed behind asked me to find the four men to make sure they were all right. Sprigley asked me to head the rest of the way to Combe and get help before the Blackwolds attacked again that night. Why must everyone rely on me for this? How am I trustworthy? I don’t even have a trustworthy face!
I’m not, actually. I fully intended on entering Combe and sending help their way before stealing enough to pay for a night at an inn in Bree. I’d had enough of this hero business. I’m not a hero and never have been. I’m no better than the brigands threatening everyone. Maybe slightly better, now that they’ve gone to Sauron.
My escape plans were foiled as soon as I found Blackwolds guarding the gate into Combe. They heckled and jeered at me until I had to turn back and let Sprigley know the situation. I then went off to find the missing farmhands.
I couldn’t bring them home, though. The Blackwolds had cut them down in various places along the stream I found. I did find the berries for Celandine’s tea and brought everything back to Archet. Sweet Eru, my legs were twitching and tired by then. Mundo could stop his incessant whinging. Celandine could feel she had helped, though Amdir didn’t eat or drink anything and only pretended to, and Brackenbrook read Sprigley’s letter and finally realized how much of a fool he had been. He had left no time for Archet to prepare its defenses given he sent me running around. To be honest, neither had Strider.
The idiot Captain even admitted his own son had tried to warn him of Cob’s treachery three years before, and Brackenbrook had exiled him, dismissed him, and called him a jealous child. If I hadn’t needed the old idiot, I might’ve stabbed him in the eye then and there. I can’t even see my own son and this man refused to believe his and sent him away! Strider, anxious to leave for whatever purpose he had, sent me off to Jon Brackenbrook and his hunters as the only hope to save Archet, despite the Captain’s despair and resolve to fall with the village. I could see Amdir losing his fight. “Amdir assures me he just needs rest,” Strider claimed. Lies. He knew it’s a lie, too. The kingsfoil wasn’t working. I knew Strider could see the truth as well, but abandoning him before his death…? Before an attack that might destroy the town? What could possibly have that much importance for a man who acted as if he had more honor in him than I did? His actions said he didn’t.
I still had no horse. Why was nobody offering me a bloody mount if there was so little time? I had to run on foot once again down a road, this time to the east of Archet, to a cabin near a pond full of massive insects and choked with reeds. At least Jon Brackenbrook agreed to help his father. Did he send someone along with that message? Of course not. He sent me off to the Blackwold Roost to find their plans, though, and bring them back. Once I had, another hunter in the cabin offered a sleeping bag to me since I looked so exhausted. I don’t know when they thought I had the time, but given the hunters meant to scout the East Path into Archet, where the Blackwolds and Angmar meant to sneak inside, I figured it wouldn’t hurt. That, and I actually felt like I might fall over at any moment. Had I even eaten since the day before?
I don’t know how long I slept, almost certainly no longer than an hour, but the vivid dreams I had… an elf-queen, a beautiful garden, a dark castle in Angmar stirring. So many visions and the queen assuring me that I was in them all somehow, involved, and that my fate was tied to that of our world. I woke in a cold sweat knowing it wasn’t just a dream. It didn’t feel like one. Either I was losing my mind or needed to run for cover and soon.
I stepped outside to speak to Atli Spider-bane, a dwarf from east of the Misties somewhere north of my own chosen home of Lake-town, to find that the East Path contained giant spiders and thus the hunters had avoided it all this time. “So, I have to be the one to scout it?” I wanted to know, already regretting my choice to burgle a cottage in the woods and get into this mess. “How is your name Spider-bane and you’re still sitting here and sending me in there?”
By this point, I had regained some adequate gear once again. I don’t know how many spiders I stabbed and sliced and maimed, but by the time I found a Blackwold’s body at the end near the walls of Archet, I stabbed it another few times just out of frustration. I had to fight my way back out, too, and informed the hunters that the wall was indeed intact and a scout for the enemy had become a victim of the eight-legged denizens of the place. Why Archet hadn’t been overrun by the blasted things, I’ll never know. It’s not as if they couldn’t climb over the wall.
That’s when Jon Brackenbrook went to Archet and his father, of course. After all the hard work had been done by me. Why didn’t I just leave at that point? Mostly, because I needed to stab something repeatedly until it died screaming and gurgling. That would be most satisfying after the day I’d had and given the people responsible for most of that frustration wanted to attack the town I happened to still be in, I felt I should oblige my murderous side. I headed to the town with them determined to find Cob in the fighting to come so that I could punch his face and put a knife in his throat.
The worst that would happen was that I’d die trying to save a town. I had to admit that Leith and his guardians wouldn’t mind that story of my end, rather than the one that said I had died on the wrong end of a hangman’s noose. That one was the one I knew would be headed for them at some point or another.
I think I saw more death in a few minutes than I had ever thought possible, though. I shouldn’t have slept. One hour earlier… the town wouldn’t be ablaze and the fighting wouldn’t have already begun. The jailer died and his wife ran to his body. Strider was long since gone. We lost several hunters and it seemed that for every building and area that we freed from the Blackwolds’ grasps, the more cries for help that rose from just another bend. We found Atli alive and pressed on toward the Captain’s position, where he stood protecting the two hobbits and the sickly Amdir. We fought against waves of brigands that seemed unending. Each one dropped and satisfied my vengeance a little more. And then… It showed up.
It walked through the fires as if nothing bothered it, dressed in crimson robes, but looking like the Black Rider all the same. The same wave of dread overcame me so that I could do nothing more than shield myself and quiver in terror, just as Atli and Jon Brackenbrook. With it came Calder Cob, curse him for seeing me cowering, and though the Captain tried to stand against this creature, it called to Amdir – and the Ranger obeyed it willingly. Had he always been its servant? Or had this been his fate since the wound he took? Why, then, did Strider not slay him before he left?
The robed figure and the Ranger left, and Cob killed his one-time mentor. It seemed to help break the hold that the creature had on us as the dread lifted and we could attack once more. Never have I felt such deep terror as what that Thing laid against us. We dispatched Cob, with me punching him in the nose and then stabbing him as I’d been thinking of all day, and the Blackwolds followed his fate. I helped dampen the flames of the town along with the surviving townsfolk. By morning, smoking rubble is all that remained of so much of Archet, and within another day, coffins had lined the places where market stalls once stood. Weeping was all that could be heard. The hobbits were sent back to their home, a place named the Shire, west of Bree, and Jon Brackenbrook took up his father’s legacy to help start rebuilding Archet. I stayed only a little while, to clean up and eat and rest, before moving on to Combe.
Little did I know that these same Blackwolds weren’t finished troubling me yet. Not in Combe, where I wound up having to clean out the Chetwood and destroy warg-wolf hybrids, and not in Staddle, where it seemed every hobbit and his dog needed my aid saving pipe-weed or romantic relationships. To be honest, getting a mysterious note to come to Adso’s Camp west of Bree in order to learn some new burglar skills was a relief since it meant I could vanish into the big town and have a breather. No more heroics, I told myself, remembering my dream. You are not going to tie yourself to the fate of an entire world. That would doom it utterly. You can’t even save yourself!
Right.
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