Protect & Serve LotR-Lord of the Rings Fanfiction - Fan Fiction -WattyAwards2012

Part II: To Serve - Chapter 1: Can't Stay Here

"It is not your place to alter the course of this world. Nor to save those marked for death."

I turned in a circle, trying to determine where the deep stern voice had come from. Nothing met my gaze, only blackness for as far as I could see. Reaching out with my hands, I tried to find something to grasp. Yet only emptiness met my fingers.

"Am I dead?" I asked, surprised by the calm of my voice.

I had the impression of amusement, though I could neither see nor hear it.

"You have not yet passed from the plane of the living."

"Then where the hell am I and what the hell is going on?" I huffed.

"This is not Hell, least not as I understand it from your world's dogma."

"What's going on?" I repeated in a slow angry tone.

"Your actions have been as such that I felt it time to speak with you," he spoke, the sternness returning.

"And just who the hell—who are you?" I turned around, trying to pinpoint the direction the voice was coming from, but it seemed to be all around me. "Where are you? This talking to a disembodied voice thing is clichéd and creepy."

At once, I was standing back in the forest at Parth Galen, the scattered bodies of Orcs and Uruk-Hai all around. Laid against a nearby tree was the bloodied body of Boromir, his sightless eyes still gazing up at the treetops.

I stepped towards him when another man suddenly appeared beside Boromir's prone form.

"He's dead. But the others should have returned his body to the river," I said lowly. "Why is his body still here?"

The other man waved a dark hand over the body and it disappeared. "Indeed. They have given the son of Gondor what burial they could," that deep voice responded.

He turned to face me, and I took a shocked step back at the face that matched the deep resonating voice.

"James Earl Jones!" I exclaimed. "Fuuuuck, I've gone crazy again. Haven't I? Or I'm still crazy."

He looked down at himself in confusion. "Who pray tell, is James Earl Jones?"

"You don't know who you are?" I couldn't believe I was even having this conversation.

"I certainly know who I am. However, as one of the Valar, your mortal mind cannot withstand my true form. I appear to mortals as they wish to see me. It is your mind that has chosen this form."

"And my subconscious chose James Earl Jones?"

"It would seem."

"Huh. You do kinda sound like him, but I suppose that's my subconscious at work too." I looked at him suspiciously. "If you say 'Lane, I am your father,' I'm gonna know I'm crazy."

"I do not understand this reference."

I shook my head. "Why am I here? Why are you here?"

"To help you understand why you cannot interfere with fate." His voice and face narrowed, bordering on angry as he spoke.

"You mean trying to protect Boromir?"

"Precisely."

"What did I do wrong? What would it have hurt?" I demanded, stepping away from the scene of carnage and looking back down the hill I'd come running up to save Boromir.

He came to stand beside me as we gazed through the forest. "All things exist in a tenuous balance." He explained, his voice taking on a flat affect. "Strength and weakness. Light and dark. Life and death. Each must counter the other. Change the course of one, and the pendulum will swing wildly in the other direction to achieve balance once more."