Disclaimer: I own nothing of Tolkien's nor do I own the story of Sadako.

Bend down the wings...bend one of the tails to make the head...gently pull the wings out to fill out the body. Congratulations! You now have a perfectly folded origami crane!

Ella certainly didn't think her crane was folded perfectly. As she set it down on her desk, the small paper animal drooped to one side, and it joined the 993 other drooping birds that were cluttered around. Sometimes she would get lucky and manage to get a crane that stood upright, but most of the time they remained tilted. She sighed and looked over the multicolored sea of birds,

"Seven more and I can make a wish." She murmured, picking up another piece of folding paper.

While she had been in college Ella had taken a philosophy class; she managed to get a very eccentric professor who taught the class how to fold origami cranes one afternoon. He used the story of Sadako and her paper cranes during a class discussion on human nature vs world peace. As he folded his own crane, he told the class how young Sadako folded over 1,000 paper cranes in the months she battled leukemia in Japan after WWII. Her professor prompted the class: can world peace truly be obtained or is it in human nature to have conflict and war?

As the class discussed they folded cranes together and by the end of the period at least a hundred birds had been made. The professor instructed them to leave them behind and the following day the cranes were strung together and placed in a box to be shipped to the World Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, Japan. Ella had found the project strange, but the act of folding the cranes was calming and satisfying. She continued to fold the birds on occasion, saving them and keeping a tally on a Post-It so that she knew how many she had.

Ella added another crane to the pile and picked up a new piece of paper. As she neared 1,000 she had pondered on what to wish for, if she were to make a wish at all. It had been a very long time since she had believed making wishes would solve her problems; it was a childish fancy. Still, it was tempting to wish for a phone call in the morning telling her she would be working as an art teacher next year at Denfeld High School. Substitute teaching gave her the experience she needed, but was not nearly as satisfying as having your own classroom and teaching your specialty. She finished another crane, picked up another piece of paper, and started folding.

A flash it up the sky and Ella paused in her folding to look out the window to her left. Thunder rumbled from far off; a storm was coming in, and she resumed her folding. Thunderstorms were not uncommon during July in Duluth, in fact Ella loved them. The sound of rain battering against the windows and roof, and the way the whole house shook when particularly loud claps of thunder sounded made her heart race. With another bird finished, she quickly picked up the next piece of paper; she was so close to being done!

997...998...999...Ella slowly finished her last crane; a feeling of accomplishment flooded her senses. The gold paper glinted in the light from her desk lamp as she folded, creased, and unfolded the small square. Again, she paused. Should she wish on her last crane? Ella smirked to herself and shook her head a little; she would allow herself this silly thing. Ella looked around her room for inspiration; if she was going to do this then she was going to make it count.

The bookshelf to the right of her desk proved to be of some help. Her eyes lingered over her books, stopping on her most favorite. Her copies of The Lord of the Rings were well-read and slightly worn.

"I wish I could travel Middle Earth during the War of the Ring and beyond." She whispered as she folded the last of her thousand paper cranes. Ella set the bird down and was still for a moment before a clap of thunder made her start. The small golden bird stared back at her innocently and Ella gave a laugh. Glancing over her shoulder to the clock next to her bed, she groaned. The hands read 2:23 AM; she was up far too late. Ella stretched her arms into the air and arched her back, listening to the tiny popping sounds as her spine cracked. Letting out a yawn, she stood and took her long auburn hair out of it's ponytail. She made her way to her bed and settled in, pulling the comforter to her chin and rolled to her right side. The sound of the rain gently lulled her to sleep.

The first thing that pulled Ella from her slumber was not the harsh scream of her alarm clock, but the gentle singing of birds. Thinking she had woken in the early hours before her alarm would go off, she shifted and began to roll onto her back. However, instead of being further enveloped in the soft cotton sheets, as Ella moved she was met with a prickling sensation. Her blue eyes snapped open and she realized that she really wasn't in her bed, but lying on a forest floor. She sat up and looked around to try and get a sense of where she was.

As she turned in circles, she could not place where she was; there was no discernible path and the woods did not look familiar to her. "Did I sleepwalk?" She thought. Ella raised a hand to her head, intending to run her fingers through her hair, but found that her long hair had been cut down to a pixie style. Her clothes were not her own and had been replaced by a bright orange tee shirt and pants and her feet were bare. Ella looked at her arms; they were thinned and scarred. She pulled up the hem of the shirt and saw her ribs poking out and her stomach looked emaciated and sickly. Her breathing quickened as she looked over herself and realized she could not remember what had happened to her. She racked her mind trying to think of something, anything, that would explain how she got to where she was.

She let out a slow breath, trying to calm herself down. Panicking while lost in the woods with seemingly no way to get home easily would do nothing to help her. Ella looked around in all directions once more and, determining that there was no path, she opted to walk straight in one direction. She hoped that there may be a road or house nearby.

After several hours, Ella still hadn't come across any signs, paths, people, or indication that she was near a town. Her feet were sore and bleeding and her stomach growled loudly at her. The sun was now high in the sky and it had been getting hot. Ella was exhausted and beginning to feel ill. She kept a lookout for anything edible that could grow in the forest, but she had no such luck. As she walked a dull roar began to sound and she stopped. It sounded like a river and Ella felt a spark of hope; she began to move in the direction of the sound. The sound grew louder and louder until she found herself at the base of the falls; the white foam frothed and churned at the bottom and a permanent rainbow dazzled in the mist. She gazed up to the top of the falls and began to look for a way up, hoping that it would be high enough where she could see signs of life.

She moved along the rocky face of the falls and away from them in an attempt to find a smoother slope to climb. It wasn't long before Ella found one and she began the long hike up to the top of the falls. She raised a hand over her eyes and looked downstream, but couldn't see any tell-tale signs of a city or road. With a frustrated sign she dropped her hand and turned to look upstream. Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of something moving above the trees, twisting and curling away. It was smoke, and where there was smoke there had to be a home or at least people who could help her.

Frantically, Ella began to search for a bridge or some other way to cross the river. She could find none at the falls so she moved further upstream, looking for shallow slow-moving water that would be easy to cross. Such a point came sooner than expected, and Ella hiked up her pants to keep them dry and slowly waded across the river. Once she made it to the opposite bank, she searched the sky above the tree line for the wisps of smoke. When she saw it she took off in a dead run towards it, completely unaware of how loud her trek was.

As she ran, Ella failed to notice tall figures standing in the trees, carefully guarding how far she would go before they would stop her. A whistle was sounded; a signal to the figures, another bird call in the woods to Ella. A rope was quickly tossed across her path near the ground and pulled taut and it wasn't long before Ella met it. Tripping over it, she went flying before rolling several feet and landing sprawled face-first on the forest floor. The wind was knocked out of her and her whole body screamed in pain. As she lay gasping for breath, several of the figures warily approached her with bows drawn. She turned her head to the side and looked around from where she lay, not daring to move an inch after seeing their weapons.

"P-please!" She gasped, trying to catch her breath, "Do-don't shoot."

One of the cloaked guardians stepped forward cautiously and lowered his weapon. He tilted his head and said something, but Ella could not understand the language he spoke. He repeated the phrase and Ella merely knit her eyebrows together; he raised his bow again.

"No! Wait, wait! Please don't shoot, I can't understand you." She pleaded and she slowly got to her knees and held her palms out. "I'm going to stand up now." She said, looking at the one who had spoken to her before. Ella nervously looked all around her as she began to stand, but when she put weight on her left angle pain shot up her leg. She let out a cry but stayed standing, moving her weight to her right leg. The figure closest to her began to speak again.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I can't understand you. Do you speak English?" She asked slowly, drawing out 'English' to try and get her point across. The figure stared back at her blankly before replying as though unfazed that she couldn't understand.

"Please, don't hurt me! I'm just trying to go home. I don't know where I am and I'll do whatever you want. Just please don't ki-" but her sentence was cut short and the world went black. A cloth sack had been shoved over her head, and she felt herself quickly overwhelmed and restrained by many hands. As she shouted for help, the sack was shifted and another cloth was placed over her mouth to silence her. Her hands and feet were bound before she was lifted and carried away; back towards the house that Ella had been running so desperately towards.