Adult-FanFiction.org : Lord of the Rings

Love's Redemption	By : mthorsta Category: -Multi-Age > Het - Male/Female Views: 7108 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own the Lord of the Rings (and associated) book series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter 4 - Conversations, Revelations
  Zach tensed and bolted upright in his chair. Leaning across the table, his eyes narrowed in suspicion, locking right onto hers. The realization of what she had said just hit him. In a harsh whisper, he said, �Where did you hear that?�

  �Oh, crap! Crap, crap, crap.� She thought. She wasn�t prepared to impart her knowledge about the book to Zach yet, if ever. She racked her brain trying to think of a believable answer. �Uhh, I heard my father talking about it.� �Please let that be a good answer.� She prayed. Zach relaxed a little and slumped back in his chair.

  �Oh.�

  �Zach, what is that? What does it mean?�

  �Your father never told you the story?� He asked in surprise.

  �No.� She said shaking her head. �Uh�I overheard it in a conversation.� �Shit!� Her father never even utter the words Rehmahrg Teh Dovah or Middle Earth, whatever, let alone told her anything about it. She hoped it didn�t seem strange to Zach.

  �No, I guess I could understand why he might not want to.� After a short pause, he looked at her curiously with a newfound realization and said �So, you don�t know why he left the Restoration Council then.� It was more of a statement than a question.

  �He retired.�

  Zach shook his head no.

  �I don�t understand.�

  He spied around the room. �We should go somewhere else.�
~~~~~
  She followed him to the Great Stairs where they could sit looking out over the cavern. Glancing around to make sure they were alone, Zach leaned in towards Jordan and spoke quietly.

  �Okay. On your father�s last excavation, a manuscript was found. Now the manuscript was not nearly as important as what was found inside; a vital piece of information about an age called Rehmahrg Teh Dovah or Middle Earth, like I said, in English. Her face fell in disbelief.

  �I found that.� She murmured to herself, not meaning Zach to hear. �How could it be possible that I found - no, more like they were revealed to me - the manuscript and now a book both having to do with this Rehmayr..Reg, age, whatever! I can�t even say it.� She thought.

  �Really?� He said in astonishment. �That part was left out.�

  �Yeah. I didn�t understand what it said or why it was important, but there was such a commotion about it, I just stayed out the way, and shortly after that, I was sent home.�

  �Well your father and Victor were greatly at odds on how they should proceed with this new information and your father, not wanting to be responsible for the consequences if they should pursue the route Victor wanted to take, decided to leave the Council.�

  �What consequences? I don�t understand.�

  �Okay, maybe I should start from the beginning. You are familiar with the Guild of Writers?�

  �They are the ones that wrote the linking books.�

  �Right. But the linking books are just short cuts to an age. In order for them to work, you need a descriptive book. The descriptive books are what define an age; what it looked like, what it contained, down to the minute detail. Great care had to be taken not to write in anything that could be conflicting or the age would be unstable. Learning how to write a linking book was easy. The descriptive books required a much greater skill the D�ni called �The Art�. In order to be accepted into the Guild of Writers, one had to train for many years and then only a select few, those who showed the highest level of skill, were chosen. It was one of the greatest honors for a D�ni to be accepted into the Guild of Writers and with it came great success and privilege. But there was one who held a mastery of The Art so great, none who came before or followed after could ever rival. His name was Tolkien. We don�t know if that was his first or last name, not much is really known about him other than what I am telling you now. He wrote some of the most incredible ages ever seen. He achieved great power and status among the D�ni, eventually becoming Guild Master, and there were some that held him in higher regard than the King himself. But with this came a great price. Tolkien�s power caused much dissention and jealousy among the Guild of Writers and he had many enemies. Ominous plots of an �accidental� death and whispers of sabotage abound. The shadow of unrest grew silently within the Guild for many years. When Tolkien wrote the age of Rehmahrg Teh Dovah - or Middle Earth for now - it unleashed a hailstorm of controversy and the very foundation of D�ni was shaken. There was a great uprising and D�ni was divided.�
  Jordan finally spoke for the first time during Zach�s telling of the story, �Why would a book, err, age, cause such a controversy?�

  �For one, it was without a doubt, the most powerful, the most detailed age ever written. No one in the history of the Guild of Writers had ever possessed such skill. It was so powerful in fact, it scared people. Also, there were very strict laws and regulations governing the writing of ages, passed down through the Guild for many generations. Among all of these, the most important was the law concerning the creation of living things; animals, but especially people. It was explicitly forbidden by the Guild and none had ever, up until this point, even attempted it. Tolkien broke this law and wrote beings into the age of Middle Earth.�

  �Why was it forbidden?�

  �Well, to do so was looked upon as deifying yourself and went against the religious beliefs of the D�ni.�

  �I thought all the ages, or most of them at least, were once inhabited by people.�

  �They were, but by the D�ni who chose to settle there. Most of the D�ni people believed in one, called the Maker, who was the creator of all things. They believed that the Maker, not the writer, created the ages; ages being universes or worlds, okay? The Art of writing was considered a gift from the Maker and allowed a link to be established to the age that most closely matched the writer�s description. They also believed that the Maker created an infinite amount of ages making up what they called The Great Tree of Possibilities. Metaphorically speaking, the further a writer defined or described an age, the further down the branches of the Great Tree of Possibilities they progressed, dissecting again and again into smaller branches until an age was reached that most closely represented what was written. This was considered �the leaf�, the very end of the branch. One small change could deflect the writer to another branch and thus another age, though they might be very similar. Now there was a smaller group that believed that an age was neither created by the Maker nor the writer, but existed somewhere as an unrealized idea. To understand this, one needs to understand quantum mechanics, which I won�t get too much into, because I don�t really understand it all, but basically there are an infinite amount of unrealized possibilities floating around in the universe, okay? And the moment an action is taken, one of those unrealized possibilities become a realized possibility. Are ya with me so far?�

  �Kind of, I guess.�

  �Okay, it�s like this. There is a cat in a box. Is it alive or dead?�

  �Uhh, I have no idea. Dead.�

  �It�s both,�

  �What?!� She said, dumbfounded.

  �Until you open the box. Both possibilities exist, but the action of opening the box makes one of those possibilities a reality.�

  �Okay, I kind of understand now.�

  �So, according to this theory, countless potential ages exist in the universe, but the act of writing and describing an age brings it into a reality. Okay. So, we don�t know which view Tolkien subscribed to, but this age-old debate was once again brought to the surface and tensions ran high between these two groups. For about a year, the age was allowed to remain but the Guild of Maintainers refused to approve it. Tolkien and several of those loyal to him took it upon themselves to investigate the age and found it stable. It was reported that it was the most beautiful and wonderful of places he had ever seen and Tolkien and his followers revisited the age several times. But mounting pressure for Tolkien to be expelled from the Guild of Writers forced the Guild Council to set up a hearing. They would give Tolkien a chance to explain his actions but he failed to show up. It was rumored that he had become trapped in his own age, or worse, it had become unstable and linking there brought about his death; no one knew for sure. Because of this, the Council had no choice but to rule that he be removed from the Guild of Writers and the descriptive book and all linking books to Middle Earth be destroyed. He did appear briefly, before the books were scheduled to be destroyed, but those closest to him said that he was not the same. Soon after that, he disappeared again. Like I said, not much was ever known about Tolkien either before or after this brief account, until that manuscript you came across.

  �What did it say?�

  �Like I said, the manuscript wasn�t all that important but inside the manuscript was a letter signed by Tolkien. There was no mention as to whom the recipient was, though; I assume it was for secrecy. I don�t know if the person ever got it or not. It said on his last visit to Middle Earth something went wrong with the age; that there was a great evil there. He hid for a time, watching events unfold, which was his reason for not attending the hearing. A war was coming. But he said he saw strength in the peoples of Middle Earth and he would not let the book be destroyed in hopes that the D�ni might come to dwell there again. The descriptive book the Guild Council had was a fraud, the real one hidden for safe keeping. He said the linking books could be destroyed because they weren�t necessary, you could link from the descriptive book. He finished by saying to this person good luck and long life and that he had written another age, secretly, called Dovah, or just simply Earth; that he was going there to stay and to destroy the descriptive book to Dovah when the person got this letter.�

  �You mean our Earth? So, he left the cavern and went to the surface then?�

  �No.� He chuckled. �We thought that at first, so we ran an extensive search and there was no record of any person with that name. A handful of the D�ni did disappear during the collapse and it was rumored that they actually left to live on the surface; that�s a different story. But looking at the document closer, we realized it had been translated incorrectly and that he did, in fact, write an age which was very similar to the surface; the Earth we know. But our Earth already exists on the same dimensional plane as D�ni, so there would be no possible way he could write a link to it. It doesn�t work like that.�
  �So, what does all that have to do with my father leaving the Council?�

  �Well, when it was discovered that the descriptive book to Middle Earth had most likely survived, Victor wanted to shift the team�s focus towards recovery of this book. Your father felt that it was important to stick to the restoration schedule, or they could lose their funding. He thought that the book was a distraction and if they were to actually find it, the results could be disastrous if Victor insisted on taking a team in. It was far too dangerous to risk unnecessarily. There had already been too many �accidents� and Sharper�s death nearly shut the project down."

  �Yeah. I remember hearing about that.�

  �So Victor and your father went round and round on the subject. Now I told you before of the book�s power; Victor somehow felt a connection to that age. It progressed to the point that it started to become an obsession. Finally it came down to your father telling Victor that he would have no part in helping him find the book and if that was the direction the project was heading, it was going to be its downfall and he would not be responsible for that. Victor wouldn�t back down, so your father left.�
  �I don�t understand why it was such a risk. Don�t you guys link to different ages all the time?�

  �Well, yeah, but those are well-established ages that we have done extensive research on, and even so, we still have had some �accidents�. There is, to our knowledge, no additional information on Rehmahrg Teh Dovah. It was never authorized by the Guild of Maintainers. If the age was unstable and the link incomplete, you would die; trapped in some void between the ages. If you did manage to link there in one piece, it�s a good possibility that the linking book to return would have been lost or destroyed, especially since there was mention of a war. You would be trapped there with no way to get home.�

  �So, was that what you were doing when the building collapsed? Looking for that book?�

  �Yes. And Victor�s �quest� almost cost him his life and the lives of others.� He said almost bitterly.

  With that comment, the conversation died off, and they both sat staring out over the cavern. Zach replayed the day�s events in his head and thought about how Victor was doing and about what it would mean if this project was shut down. This was his life. What would they do now? What would he do?

  Jordan�s mind was reeling. She was certain the book he spoke of and the book she was hiding in her quarters were one and the same. It hadn�t been destroyed! She fought to maintain her composure. She had the very book that someone almost died trying to find; it was right there in front of them, and they didn�t see it! And now, she was hiding its existence from them. They would most surely be angry and definitely take it from her. Only she did not want to part with it. But what could she do with it? She couldn�t use it. If any of what Zach said was true about the age, it was too dangerous. Even so, she felt almost a desperate need to learn what the book said, what the people and places of Middle Earth were like. Zach could translate it, yes, but he would take it. No, she could not ask him anymore about it or he may get suspicious. She forced herself to think of other things, for now.
  They sat in a long, uncomfortable silence until Zach finally said, dismayed, �Your father was right, that book became the project�s downfall.�

  �You really think so?�

  �The project has been badly managed by Victor. I think after this latest incident, it�s a good possibility we will lose our funding and be dead in the water.�

  �Oh.� It saddened her in a way she didn�t understand, to think about everyone packing up and abandoning D�ni; left alone to succumb to the slow decay of time. It was a part of her father; and through him, a part of her.
  There was nothing left to say on the subject. Zach yawned and said, �Well, if you don�t mind, I�m awfully tired. I think I�m going to head back to my room and get some sleep.�

  �No. I don�t mind. I think I need to do the same.� She said softly. She paused, and then added, "Thanks, for the story. I�m leaving tomorrow, back to work, you know, so I suppose we won�t see each other again.�

  �You never know.� He shrugged his shoulders. �Thank you for doing what you could to save Victor. Uhh, who�s taking you to the surface?�

  �I�m supposed to meet Scott at the tunnel entrance at 9 a.m.�

  �You�ll be in good hands then.�

  They shared a brief hug. �Take care.� Jordan said.

  �You too.� And they parted; walking off in separate directions.
~~~~~
  Once back in her room, Jordan paced the floor, too anxious to sleep. �Last chance.� She thought. �Should I tell what I know? Who would I tell?� Zach, she guessed. He was the only one she sort of knew. She ran through all possible scenarios in which she would tell Zach and what she thought he would say or do, each one resulting in her losing the book. �No. I need to keep it�I want to keep it. Victor�s out. The project is over.� Who would translate it for her? Obviously, she couldn�t have Zach do it. That only left her father. But she would not give him the book. Instead, she would scan the pages and email them to him. Finally, with some semblance of a plan in place, she shoved the book in her bag before she could change her mind, flung herself down on the bed, and fell into a fitful sleep.
  Morning came too quickly. She would be late if she didn�t hurry. She forced herself out of bed, still in a sleep-induced haze, collected up her belonging scattered about the room, took one last look at what had become her home for the past couple weeks, and left.
  As she approached the tunnel entrance, she saw a man standing there, waiting. �That must be Scott� she thought. She shook his hand and introduced herself and he did the same. Turning around to look at the cavern one last time before following Scott into the tunnel, she knew she would not be returning and she said goodbye to D�ni forever�
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Love's Redemption