March 21 - The Slopes of Orodruin

The wind let up for a few minutes, and the fumes from the volcano swirled around them, sulfur and soot and acid smoke. His Chief Assistant coughed and rubbed his eyes.

"Oh, that reeks!" the man said.

Mairon drew a deep breath. To an earth spirit like himself, the bitter fumes smelled like the creation of the world, rivers of fire deep underground, gems and minerals, the birth of mountains. He smiled to himself. "Actually, I like it."

They arrived in late afternoon. The servants had already set up camp. A dozen tents were pitched upwind of the campfire. Tent canvas flapped in the wind, which blew almost continuously at this altitude, three thousand feet above the plane of Gorgoroth.

Orodruin, the burning mountain, was only ten miles from Lugbúrz[1], but it was a difficult trip even on horseback. For every two steps they took up the cinder cone, they slid back one. In places, the road was gone, blocked by new lava flows, or fallen away entirely. Whenever Mairon visited his workshop, he camped on the cinder road in front of the Sammath Naur rather than return home at night.

Mairon kicked his feet free of the stirrups and dropped to the ground. He tossed the reins to a servant, then undid the buckles of his saddlebag and pulled out a bound leather book. The servant offered to take it from him, but Mairon waved him off.

The notebook contained the final design for the Ring, page after page of notes, calculations, and drawings. He'd been working on it for years, and now it was finished. It wasn't elegant or beautiful like something Celebrimbor's work, but it was reliable and solid, and it did almost everything he wanted it to. He would have to put some of his own power into it, although not so much that it would break him. But no matter, whatever he sunk into it, he'd more than get back.

In a leather purse on his belt, he also carried an ingot cast from an alloy of gold and iron, from which he would forge the Ring. If the ingot were ordinary gold, he'd keep it with the other supplies and tools. But it was hard to mix, and he couldn't replace it easily. The notebook and the ingot were precious, and he would keep them on his person until the forging begun.

He tucked the notebook under his arm and walked to the entrance of the Sammath Naur, the Chamber of Fire. Cinders crunched under his boots, and tremors shook the ground beneath his feet. Even before he reached it, he could hear a dull rumble from within.

He entered the chamber with his helpers following close behind. Inside, the roar was even louder. Orange light flickered from the crack in the floor and played on the ceiling high above them. In the still air, the heat was intense. He began sweating the moment they came in. Within minutes, he was dripping wet.

Originally, the Sammath Naur was a natural cave extending into the mountain's core. A fissure cleaved the floor from wall to wall, reaching down to the lake of molten rock beneath the mountain.

A hundred years ago, when he claimed Mordor for his own, he enlarged the cave into a chamber large enough to house his workshop and forge.

An anvil rested on a granite slab at the edge of the crack. There was no fence or protective barrier against missteps.

Racks against the wall within easy reach of the anvil held the tools of a smith: pliers, chisels, awls, and the countless sizes and shapes of hammers and tongs.

A heavy cabinet against the back wall held delicate instruments. On its highest shelf, a dozen hourglasses were clearly labeled and lined up in order of size, from ten seconds to an hour.

In the center of the chamber, far back from the edge, there was an ordinary forge of the sort found in any village smithy, fueled by wood and charcoal. It was surrounded by the normal tools of a blacksmith: anvil, bellows, racks of tools, and a slake barrel for quenching hot metal.

Near to the forge was a massive workbench. Delicate instruments: scales, bimetallic coils to measure temperature, and glassware full of solvents were arranged on its surface.

Near the main workbench, there were other work stations: an annealing bed, benches for grinding and for cold forging, and a long table where the scribes could sit to write or do calculations. People working there sat on three legged stools; anything else would teeter on the flagstones.

Mairon went to the scribes' table and unrolled a long scroll. He used small bags of lead to weigh down the corners. The scroll illustrated the entire process he would follow to forge the One Ring. Each step was shown in the order it would be performed, with arrows showing how the steps were related.

He planned to forge the Ring in a single day, working from first light until it was done. He thought it would take eight or ten hours to finish.

While his helpers unpacked the tools and supplies brought from Lugbúrz, he edged over to the crack and looked down. He saw boiling rock far below, yellow and orange under the grey dross that formed on its surface.

When he came to Mordor to live, almost a century ago, he announced his presence by lighting the volcano. During the forging, he would raise the molten rock almost to the chamber floor, and in this unimaginable heat, he would forge the Ring.

The chamber was too hot to stay in for any length of time, so as soon as they finished setting up, they went back outside. The breeze felt good. Sweat made his hair stick to his face, and plastered his clothes to his skin, and of all of them, he was the one who could stand the heat the best.

They went to the campsite to get something to drink. The only water up here was what they'd brought with them. The servants untied wooden casks from the saddles of pack animals and lined them up at the edge of the campsite where they doubled as seating. For tomorrow, he'd leave orders that water casks would be placed in the workshop, as well.

-o-o-o-o-o-

Hours later, when he'd done everything he could think of to prepare for the next day, he called a halt to the work. His smiths and helpers laid down their tools, hung their aprons on hooks, and gathered up every last scrap of paper to be locked away until they returned the next morning. Mairon forbade anything pertaining to the Forging of the Ring, whether sketch or plan or calculation, be left unwatched overnight.

Mairon left the Chamber and stepped onto the slope of the mountain. The cool air struck his face. He shivered and wrapped his cloak more tightly around himself.

To the East, a deeper shadow against the purple sky revealed the outlines of Lugbúrz, its sharp edges blurred by concealing mists. In one of the gatehouse towers, a window glowed with yellow lamplight.

Above the curtain walls, the base of the Tower rose twenty stories or more. Its jagged upper edge, where construction stopped, marked the point where the Tower's own weight had begun to crush the foundations beneath it.

Mairon stood for a moment, lost in thought. Then he turned and began the descent towards camp, his people followed close behind him. The cinders of the narrow path crunched beneath his boots.

He rounded the shoulder of the mountain and saw that even at this hour, the last light of the day was not quite gone. The sky to the West glowed like burnished copper, and the clouds were rippled like a mudflat when the tide is low.

Camp smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. Mairon thought he was too keyed up to eat, but when a servant put a plate in his hands, blackened meat, turnips, and the bread already buttered, he fell on them like wolf-Sauron, at one time his accustomed form.

When he'd finished eating, he stood and addressed the hand-selected group who would assist him the next day. Some of them were goldsmiths who would work with him during the Forging itself. The rest would perform small tasks like fetching tools and reading aloud from notes.

The Forging of the Ring wasn't really about gold-smithing, it was about creating a magical object. Much of the work would involve casting layer upon layer of enchantments over the piece. But there were no sorcerers among his helpers because he'd deliberately excluded them.

It wasn't that he couldn't use their help. It would be nice someone to handle the simpler spells, to take over for a few minutes when he was tired, or to help diagnose a problem if there were any glitches along the way. And it wasn't as if there were no sorcerers at his court. The most ambitious ones from Umbar, Rhûn, and Haradwaith came to Mordor to study under him. Many of them had impressive skills.

The helpers he chose would witness everything he did, but they wouldn't understand what they were seeing. That's how he wanted it, his methods were secret. No, that wasn't it. Someone who understood his work might find fault with it, and he couldn't stand to be judged.

"Tomorrow, we'll walk through the entire process. We'll stand in the same places, use the same tools, and follow the same timeline as we will then. You each know the part you will play.

"I want things to go absolutely smoothly when we do this for real. Anything that might go wrong, we will fix beforehand.

"And one more thing. You're all accustomed to working in the forge. But when we do this, you'll be exposed to more heat than you've ever felt in your lives."

He bade them good evening and retreated to his tent for the night.

[1] Barad-dûr