We Want You To Remember

Journal of Rowana, wife of Ash Nazg
06 / 06 / 2120 of the Fourth Age

I woke up from a dream of pipe-weed with a dull pain in my chest and a full bladder. Slid off the bed and on bare feet padded out into the darkened house.

There was a bear sleeping in the middle of my kitchen, wrapped around a naked Elfkin. Aubert and Amelia had taken our bed, the Hobbit's limbs off to recharge, and I smiled to see they were spooning too. Bob and Lilja were asleep in the tub, and the Dwarf did not wake as I took my relief. Her stomach looked definitely bloated, but her breasts rose and fell slowly and deeply.

It was the kind of sleep I'd seen before. When soldiers got back from the field to a familiar bed, and it was if the years fell away for a while. There was a time when a naked Dwarf and a Nameless Thing from the dark in my bathtub would have been a cause for concern. Now it was comforting. I didn't flush the toilet, so that I wouldn't wake them, but as I stood up, Bob stretched out a slimy arm and flushed for me.

Boots on my feet, I slipped out the kitchen door and surveyed the pipe-weed crop by moonlight. Bebe and Azzie hadn't been weeding, so there were a few little blooms amid the rows of growing green leaves. It must have rained while we were gone, because there were no signs of wilt, nor had any grasshoppers or weevils set to the tender young shoots.

The crop could be saved. It would grow and be harvested. We could dry the leaves in the shed and...in a few months, I could roll my first smoke.

I looked back at the house. Contemporary Hobbit holes were designed to be modular. We could add on a module for a nursery, get the birthing suite option, maybe. My feet took me on an ambit around the house, past the spot where I'd killed the gangsters on our doorstep, past the dark stains where White Hands had been tossed and broken against the walls when they dared come after me and mine. I saw the vehicles that the others had come in, a basic van and a big-wheeled SUV, the Pathfinder no longer looking alone and lonely.

The drying shack stood empty. The door to the root cellar stood open.

Instinctively, I switched my vision to the Unseen. The night seemed to sharpen; darkness took on depth and color. Nine shadowy figures stood around me, their tired faces ageless. I couldn't see the small one.

The door opened at a touch. The monofilament wire trap had been carefully set aside. Moonlight fell down the steps. I listend for a moment, heard nothing. Went down the ancient stone stair.

The room was empty. Yet where the pale moonlight touched the stone walls, moon-letters glowed. Letters in the Black Speech, that I had never known were there. One more secret. Something tapped at my knee. I looked down and saw Búrzi. With a leap, the Mordor cat jumped and crawled up my body to lay across my shoulders. Her little head nuzzled my cheek.

I sat on the lowest step and read Azzie's letters, then went back over my journals. There were more files in there, things I hadn't seen before. Journals and logs from Looseleaf, Carvedinstone, Daleman. I read about Tû the Black, and what the White Hands had done to Looseleaf, and Daleman's dealings with the Crown Players. Got a glimpse of a bigger picture, of forces that had been moving and came together at last.

The Hobbit had left a final note:

Rowana,

Daleman says all of this is evidence of multiple crimes and we should delete it all and never speak of it again. That's the cop in her. I think we need a record of what we did, and why we did it. If not for ourselves, then for those who come after.

Lilja wants to take Bob back to the deep caverns to find others and establish a breeding colony. Vanessë has moved in with Daleman. Aubert and I have enough creds to rehab one of the old houses in Rivendell, live out his little breeder fantasies. You and Azzie and Bebe have your pipe-weed farm.

All of our lives, we've lived in the shadow of the old stories, the ruins of old kingdoms, the expectations of generations that expected us to follow a set path. We grew up reading about heroes and magic, only to find the real world was megacorporate dayjobs and badly-designed technology. Only to find that we didn't fit in.

Those old stories couldn't grow up with us. It was up to us to live and write our own tales. No one else would do it for us. So we did it ourselves.

Now, we want you to remember. In the future, when your children play in the sunlight. When you're eating your wife's pussy, or when your old wounds ache at night. We fought for this life, Middle Earth is big enough for all of our stories.

—Looseleaf

I needed to spit again. Búrzi rode my shoulders all the way back to the house. The shadows of wraiths followed, remnants of the old tales. Not forgotten, not ignored. Always there. Yet the Hobbit was right. This story was ours.

Azzie opened the front door. Naked in the moonlight. Long dark hair unbound behind her. Big, dark eyes wide, ears out. The Great Eagle was in her right hand.

That brought a smile to my face. I hugged her close and she went up on her toes so that our lips could meet. One hot breath shared between us, and suddenly we clutched each other harder, fingers digging into our flesh as though afraid to let go.

I didn't know what the future would hold. If the wound in my throbbing chest would ever heal, or if someone else would come by looking for Azzie, or the ring, or something else. The world was still a dangerous place. Yet I had friends, family, a home—and I realized right then that home was where they were.

"That first night," Azzie said, when our lips parted. "I was scared. They'd raised me to be a weapon, and breaking out was a **** sentence—but I had nothing left to lose. Then I found you, and you...you saved me."

She clutched me tight, her Uruk-Hai strength painful on my ribs.

"You were the first person in my whole fucking life who saw me as something more than product. The first one who saw me as a person," she said. Her hand found mine. Fingers entwined. "You made me a person. Gave me a birthday. I owe you my life."

"Precious, you gave me purpose when I had none," I said, spontaneously. "I was an old soldier, used up, ready to drink and smoke myself to ****. You gave me something to live for."

Thin hands wrapped around us both. Bebe's had pressed himself against Azzie's back. I pictured his cock hotdogged between my wife's ass. A sentence I never thought I would write in this journal, much less smile while doing it.

Up above, maybe the Elf in the Moon looked down on the grasslands that had once been the ash-strewn plain of Gorgoroth. Perhaps, if his eyes were sharp, he saw the small young family, a point of light in the vast darkness that looked, from above, not unlike the map of Arda in the Matrix. For they say Eru Ilúvatar sang Middle Earth into being, and what was song but patterns of information...

Well. I don't know about all that. All I do know is that whoever reads this will know the whole tale.