In February of 2019, a silver ring bearing an inscription in elvish script inside and out was found by the North Yorkshire police during a raid on a house in York and was recovered as stolen property. Despite their best efforts, the police were never able to locate the rightful owner of that ring.

And then, inexplicably, it went missing from the evidence lockup. Unbeknownst to the Yorkshire Police, it was found over twenty miles away by an unlikely fellow from the town of Goole who happened upon it while walking near the outlet from the River Ouse which just happens to run all the way from York…

Chapter 1

It was past five o'clock, and Jim Frudd had just locked up the used bookshop for the day. He could never quite think of it as his bookshop as it had first been his uncle William's bookshop before it unexpectedly passed to him in his second term at Cambridge over ten years prior. It was always the bookshop in his mind.

An only child, his aunt and uncle had raised him after his own parents had died in a boating accident when he was ten. "Cul-de-Sac Books" had been their personal sanctuary from the world, and it had become his as well, instilling in him the love of books of all kinds. The smell of old books relaxed and soothed him and the stories and adventures they presented to him as a child had provided to him both an anchor and an escape in a world that had become all too turbulent. Those books had taught him, inspired him, and gave him the upper hand he needed when applying for admission to Cambridge. Jim had been studying English literature with a keen interest in Beowulf when he received the news of his uncle's heart attack. His aunt had gone into a kind of shock after Uncle William's death and never fully recovered. Leaving his studies, he took over the running of the bookshop, and in so doing meant to care for her as well just as they had done for him. And then she had passed five years after that, though the G.P. in Goole frustratingly couldn't give a reason why. Physically, she had been perfectly healthy for a sixty five year old woman.

After that, the bookshop passed into his hands completely. He had thought about shutting it down and returning to Cambridge to finish his studies, but he couldn't bring himself to close it up. It was still comfortable, even if it bore a few ghosts. They were comfortable ghosts, familiar and friendly. How could he face them knowing that he had sold or given away what was most precious to them?

He walked along the river parallel to Hook Road as he always did at this time of the evening. The sun was past its final throes and the lamp posts had already lit. His mate Sam had invited him for a couple of pints at The Jailhouse, the pub a few blocks from his shop, that evening. He had seriously considered it, but wasn't in the mood as he walked. After all, it was the fifth anniversary of his aunt's passing, and it just didn't feel right to him to be getting trashed just then. He didn't think she'd approve.

He had just passed Axholm Street, when off to his right as he walked something glinted with a silvery light. Then he realized it couldn't have glinted because the sun was already down and the lamp posts weren't really bright enough yet for that, nor were they the right color being a more yellow or orangish light.

Well, that's odd. He thought to himself as he stopped and turned his head towards the riverbank in the direction it had come from. And then it glinted again. How strange. He thought again.

There was no one else around him out walking that evening, and only the occasional car passing by on the road. It couldn't have been someone with a torch or a mobile phone because there was no one else there.

He had more of a mind to just keep walking and forget about it. That evening he wanted nothing more than to get to his house, make himself something to eat, pour himself a glass of blush (just one for the digestion of course, and nothing more potent), and sit down to read. He might have tried getting on his computer to play the Tolkien based online game to which he subscribed, but his mate already said he'd be at the pub tonight, and he didn't feeling like questing through Middle Earth alone.

It glinted again, almost as if trying to get his attention. Of course that was nonsense. There was clearly no one there, and why would they want to get the bookshop owner's attention anyway? He had always been a plain sort of man, shorter and a bit on the plump side with light brown hair and similarly colored close cropped beard. That evening he wasn't wearing anything particularly fancy. He never did. Just an olive green wool sweater and khakis with his somewhat trademark black fog coat and earthy brown scarf to keep out the chill. No, he had never caught anyone's eye, and as such had been a confirmed bachelor. He had failed to catch the attention of any eligible ladies, and no one would be trying to get his attention either, he was certain of it.

But then, it wouldn't hurt anything to see what it was, would it?

Fine. He surrendered to his curiosity, postponing his comfortable evening of private grieving, and ventured off the paved walkway and across the grass down to the grey rocks and mud of the river bank where the "glinting" seemed to be coming from. His leather shoes, well worn and comfortable, sank into the wet soil very uncomfortably and he soon began to regret his choice as it threw him slightly off balance.

It was much darker by the water, and the light of the nearest lamp post by the road struggled to reach it.

How am I to see or find anything down here among the mud and rocks? He asked himself, complaining internally as he tried to look for the source of the tiny light that had caught his attention. He spent a few minutes trying to see something, anything, before deciding it wasn't worth any more of his time.

He had just been about to give up and start back up to the lit walk way when it "glinted" again directly in front of him, just beneath the surface of where the water met the bank. Seeing it, he bent down and put his hand into the shallow water to feel for what it might be. His fingers closed around what felt like a solid loop of metal, though it felt rough to the touch of his wet digits. He swished it a bit in the water to clean what mud might be on it and then pulled it out expecting it to be some sort of rusted metal debris. It was not.

Even in that poor lighting, he could see that it was a ring of some kind which had been engraved, though whether it was of gold or silver he couldn't quite see for the lighting and for the spectacles he wore. His love of books had rendered him somewhat nearsighted as it does to every bibliophile worthy of the name.

Having retrieved his "prize," he then retreated carefully back to the safety of the walkway's lighted lamp posts where he had another, better look at it. It was then that he really was able to notice the inscription, no the inscriptions on the ring which he was now certain appeared to be of a silver color.

Is this some kind of a joke? He wondered, looking at the inscription. Maybe someone's having a bit of fun with me after all. Had been his second thought upon seeing the writing.

"Sam!" he called out towards the river. "Is this your idea of fun?!"

But his best mate didn't answer back. No one did. There was no one there but himself.

Of course upon seeing the writing, both on the outside and the inside of the ring he recognized it immediately even though it wasn't in English at all. It was written in the Tengwar letters of Tolkien's elvish writing system. He knew it on sight quite well from his own love of Tolkien's works, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and everything which had been published by the great fantasy author's estate since his death. It was Tolkien's works which had first inspired him to study Beowulf, Norse Mythology, and eventually to pursue a degree in Literature. Not to mention that almost everything in the online game he played was written in it. He could even guess what it said, and judging by the inscription, he had no doubt what the ringmaker had intended it to say even if he couldn't work it out word for word just right there and then.

One Ring to Rule them All, One Ring to Find them, One Ring to bring them All, and in the Darkness Bind them. He knew the words by heart well enough.

The ring he held was meant to be a near perfect copy of the One Ring, Sauron's ring, from The Lord of the Rings. Near perfect, that is, except this one was silver where Sauron's was meant to be gold, and seemed to strangely reflect the light of the lamp post, not as it was, but with a silvery glow of its own.

What was even stranger about it was that it appeared to be just the right size for his own ring finger.

My mind must be playing tricks on me. He thought to himself. He considered it even harder when it appeared that the writing shimmered with a blue incandescence every so often as he turned it in his hand.

Still, he thought to himself, there are worse finds for a lover of Tolkien on an anniversary such as this. I suppose I should take it perhaps as a gift from someone somewhere.

"Well, whoever you are who left this for me to find," He said out loud, "thank you. It has brightened what is otherwise a difficult day of the year for me."

He then decided to slip it onto the ring finger of his left hand, intending to show his find to Sam when next he saw him. He did so, meaning to stretch out his hand to look at it.

And then the whole world went wrong. Things began to bend out of sorts, and he began to see ghostly shapes in the darkness. His heart began to race in a panic and he took the ring off immediately.

No… He thought as he looked at the engraved band of silver in shock, breathing hard at the experience, his heart pounding in his chest, it can't be.

As an experiment, he slipped the ring on his finger again, and the world went wrong once more. He could see the ghostly images of people around himself in antiquated dress walking by the riverbank. The sky looked red and threatening above him and there were no stars. He could see the outlines of the road, the lamp posts, the houses and buildings across the road and down it, but they were blurred and uncertain as though only shadows. More than this though, he felt powerful. More powerful than he had ever felt before. He could easily see himself leading armies, and did in those shadows. Armies of long dead warriors just waited to rise up at his call. And there was… another presence there. Somewhere in the far distance, it was strange to him, it felt lost and confused as though it were trapped in this world and wanted nothing more than to be set free.

Finally when his heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest and he could stand it no more, he pulled the ring off his finger again, and all was quiet. A car passed by on the left hand side of the road. What stars there were shone above him in the moonless night. Everything had returned to the way it was.

Except it hadn't. He had the strongest urge to put the ring on once more, but fought it as his mind raced. He didn't want to go back to that frightening place it had taken him.

"What the bloody hell is happening to me?" He asked aloud as he looked at the ring in his hand once more. "This is lunacy. I've finally gone round the bend."

He tried working it out in his head, but nothing realistically made sense except that he was having a schizophrenic episode. Except he had never had a schizophrenic episode in his entire life, and neither had any of his relatives. And who had ever heard of someone having hallucinations from putting on a piece of jewelry? If he were to move outside the boundaries of reality, and accept that this was in fact what it looked like… Well, that presented even more problems that he wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

One ring. He reasoned. But even in the book, that ring was destroyed. It ended. There were never two "One Rings." Oh, I'm going mad just considering this. But still, it can't be Sauron's ring. It was destroyed according to Tolkien, and thousands of years ago at that.

That much he knew was true. Tolkien had been very keen on the dates and years involved for his lore, and he had based the fall of Numenor, a powerful island kingdom to the far west which became the foundation of the two kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor in Middle Earth, on the sinking of Atlantis. If you were to synchronize the two, then Atlantis, or Numenor, would have fallen around roughly 9400 B.C.E., and from there one could calculate when Sauron's ring was destroyed by the Hobbits, Frodo and Samwise, at around 6259 B.C.E. That was over eight thousand years ago. And it was no secret that Tolkien always intended Middle Earth to represent Europe of millennia past, and the Shire to represent England…

I think I'm going insane. He thought to himself again. All the stress of losing my aunt and uncle, leaving Cambridge, and being on my own has finally caught up to me.

Suddenly, he remembered Sam's offer of a pint at The Jailhouse once more. Under the circumstances, a pint or two of the Guinness didn't sound that disrespectful at all. He pocketed the ring in the front of his pants carefully and turned back towards the better lit town center of Goole.

Unknown to him, and unseen by him for what he was experiencing just then, a dark clothed, hooded figure emerged from the shadows across the road and began to follow the bookshop owner from distance, careful not to arouse any attention to himself.

At The Jailhouse pub in Goole…

Samuel Ogden sat at the bar watching the news report on the tele. He would have preferred to be watching a rugby or football match, but it wasn't the season. Not that he was really into sport of the physical kind, but anything was better than the mess the world looked to be in at that point. He'd invited his mate Jim there for a few pints after they both took off work, Jim from his bookshop and he from the Asda Supermarket he worked at during the day. Sam was pretty sure Jim wasn't going to come. He usually didn't on this particular day. But he wanted to be there just in case he changed his mind.

Someone had to look out for Jim, 'specially since Jim seemed to have a hard time with it himself.

He'd met the bookshop owner online as a mate from his kinship, their group of players which had banded together for their own survival in the online lands. They'd run dozens of quests and instances together before they realized they lived in the same town in the U.K. Jim loved his books and good food, and Sam had a flair for cooking and shared his interest in The Lord of the Rings, at least the version of it from the computer games and Peter Jackson's movies. He'd never been much into reading before getting to know his friend. Jim had been shocked that Sam had never actually read the book, and had been the one to introduce him to Tolkien's actual writings, which Sam found to be hard to get through at first, but eventually saw what Jim loved about it. Both were confirmed bachelors, at least for the time being, and both were definitely straight as far as that went. Sam had dark blond hair, and kept himself clean shaven because of his job. He wasn't much taller than the shorter shopkeeper though, only by a couple of inches, and he hadn't yet hit thirty years old. His face was round, and usually cheerful, and his plumper than usual body hid a decent amount of muscle from having to stock shelves and helping customers.

He nursed the pint of Guinness in front of him as he continued to absorb the BBC's outlook on the way the world was turning. As they told it, it didn't seem like the Earth wanted to turn itself much longer, leastwise not with humans still on it.

"Hello, Sam." Jim's voice pulled his attention away from the television.

"Jim! You made it! Good to see you, mate!" Sam responded with a genuine smile, surprised to be sure, but genuine nontheless. He got the attention of the barkeep, "Another for my friend, here!"

The barkeep gestured in reply, and soon Jim was sitting on a stool next to Sam at the bar with a full pint of cold, dark Guinness with a good frothy head on it. Sam's initial joy at seeing his friend soon turned to concern however as he really looked at his face. There was a strange, almost haunted look in the bookshop owner's eyes.

"Is it your aunt?" Sam asked, knowing what day it was, and how hard it still was for the slightly older man.

Jim continued to stare at his drink for several moments, the concerning look in his blue eyes never leaving them. Suddenly, he gripped his mug and began to down it as though trying to drown himself. Finally, the vessel half empty and Jim's close cropped beard retaining the remnants of the beverage's foam, he put it back down on the bar, but his eyes never left it. After a moment, he shook his head and said, "No. Not this time, mate."

"What then?" Sam asked.

Unbeknownst to either of them, the door to the pub opened at that moment, and a figure dressed in a dark woolen fog coat and equally dark clothes under it slipped into the establishment and took a seat at the end of the bar, but close enough to hear their conversation. He had long dark hair tied back into a neat tail, and a few days worth of beard growth. He ordered a simple beer and nursed it in his black gloved hands as he kept his face averted from Sam and Jim, but his ears open, and his eyes moving so he could catch glimpses of what was happening.

Jim hesitated at Sam's question. It was unusual for him. Jim could be reserved at times, it was true, but they'd known each other now for several years and there wasn't much Jim hadn't told him in that time. The same was true of Sam to him. Jim knew about Sam's crush on Rose McAllister, one of his co-workers at the supermarket, and how he always froze up when he tried to talk to her. Sam knew about the girl from Cambridge that Jim took out once right before his uncle died, and how she might have been the tipping point for him going back to his studies if he hadn't heard she'd hooked up with another undergrad.

"You know you can tell me anything, mate." Sam told him. Jim's behavior was worrying him. "What's wrong?"

Jim took his left hand and dug into the front pocket of his trousers. He retrieved something and brought his hand up and put that something on the bar between them. "I found this at the river's edge when I was walking home tonight." he told him as he took his hand away.

Sam looked down at what his friend had placed on the bar. It was a silver ring inscribed inside and out with elvish lettering of the kind he'd seen in the games and books they shared a love of. He recognized it of course.

"It's a ring." Sam said, stating the obvious, still not understanding what had so spooked his friend. "Pretty cool actually. It looks like one of those replicas you can buy from the specialty shops online. Course this one's silver. Kind of like Celebrimbor's ring from Shadow of War."

"Wait, what?" Jim asked. "Celebrimbor's ring? What are you talking about, Sam?"

"You don't know? You haven't played it yet, have you? Seen any of the YouTube videos on it?" Sam asked, still getting a blank look in response. "I'm surprised, seeing as you're such a Tolkien fan and all."

"Tolkien never wrote about Celebrimbor having a ring of his own." Jim replied.

"Well, no. It's part of the story from Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War. Long story short, it's about this ranger from Gondor who gets killed and then gets possessed by Celebrimbor who shares his body while they both seek revenge against Sauron hundreds of years before The Lord of the Rings. Really, I thought you'd know all about it." Sam told him.

"I've heard of it. I just never got around to trying it." Jim replied. "What about this ring?"

"Well, in the games, in order to challenge Sauron's power in Mordor, Celebrimbor creates a second 'One Ring.' But this one was created without Sauron's life force, and without his corruption. They use it to dominate orcs and form an army to keep Sauron at bay."

"What happened to this ring?" Jim asked, his attention focused on Sam, but his eyes never leaving the silver circle on the bar.

"Well, it's never quite certain. At the end of the last DLC which talks about it, the elf Eltariel takes the ring and wanders off in search of Celebrimbor's ghost who got freed from Sauron when Sauron's ring was destroyed. You don't hear from her or the ring after that." Sam told him.

The supermarket stocker studied his friend's eyes more closely. There was a fear in them that he rarely if ever saw. "What's all this about Jim? It's just a game. It's a good story, mind you, even if it don't follow Tolkien exactly, but it's still just a game."

"I-" Jim began to say something, and then stopped just as suddenly. Then he said, "I think I might be going insane, Sam."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, now truly worried for his friend who never spoke like this.

"I-" He began again. "I put the ring on after I found it, and… I-"

Just then, the man who had been sitting at the end of the bar appeared as if from nowhere standing in between them and covering the sight of the ring from the rest of the pub so only the three of them could see it.

"Good evening, friends." The dark haired stranger told them, speaking with a light accent which might have been Italian, or even Spanish. "I don't think you want to be talking about this in the open any longer."

"Who the bloody hell are you, mate?" Sam asked in surprise. "And what business is it of yours?"

"Two questions I will be happy to answer, my friends. Just not here, and not in the open. That is no mere trinket you have found, Mr. Frudd. I strongly suggest you return it to your pocket, and we all retire to my room at the Drake down the street. I promise to answer any questions you might have after that." The stranger told them.

"Is this some kind of a joke? You having a bit of fun with me, Jim?" Sam asked with a smile, turning to look at his friend. But Jim was not smiling.

"Jim?" Sam asked again.

"Am I going insane?" Jim asked the stranger.

"No." The stranger replied. "And it is no joke, I assure you, Mr. Ogden."

Sam's smile died on his face. "Look, whoever you are, I don't know what you've done to my friend here, but we're not going anywhere with you until we start getting some answers right here and right now."

Sam's tone of voice rose in anger, and the other bar patrons were beginning to stare. Sensing this, and with the air of a man for whom discretion is a way of life, the stranger leaned into them both and said, "My name is Estel en Aran, and right now I'm the person you need to trust." He then quickly pushed up the sleeve from his right forearm to expose a tattoo to them alone.

The tattoo was of a dark purple, almost black background with a white tree standing in the middle. Seven white stars surrounded its branches.

"That's-" Jim began, recognizing the crest and looking as if he might be further doubting his sanity.

Sam recognized it too. "That's the crest of Gondor, from the movies."

Estel en Aran gave a slight smile as he covered his forearm once more quickly. "It's the crest of Numenor, and its far older than either Peter Jackson's or Tolkien's works."

"I think I need to lie down." Jim said. "Please. I don't understand what's happening."

"My lodging is just down the street. I promise, I mean neither of you any harm. But we really should be going. Right now." The stranger told them.

"Why?" Sam asked, persistent in his protective stubbornness.

"Because I was not the only one paying attention to the North Yorkshire Police's Facebook posts." Estel en Aran told them in all seriousness. "They effectively told the whole world where to find what your friend picked up from the water tonight."

"And that's bad?" Sam said, coming around to the gravity of their situation, albeit slowly.

"For you and Mr. Frudd here? Moreso than you can possibly imagine." The stranger told them with no glint of humor in his eyes.

"I think we should go with him, Sam." Jim said, looking as if he was going to be ill. "None of it makes any sense. What I saw-"

"You can tell us both about in just a little while behind closed doors." He reiterated, looking at them both.

"Alright then. Let's go. But you try anything, and you can be sure I'll drop you before you can blink. Just so we understand each other, Mr. en Aran." Sam told him.

"So noted, my friend." He told them, a respect for Sam in his eyes. "Now let us go."