In the Elder Days—when mountains still felt young and the world had not yet learned all the ways it could be cruel—there was a dwarf named Durin.
Durin the Deathless, the First of the Longbeards, left his home beneath Mount Gundabad and went walking like a thought that would not let the mind rest. He traveled south along the eastern spine of the Misty Mountains, where the air cut sharp and the crags leaned like teeth against the sky. Winds whispered through the passes with voices that sounded almost like names—old names, half-remembered by stone.
He walked until even dwarf-stubbornness began to feel like weariness.
And then the land softened.
To the south lay the dim borders of Lórien, where trees gathered in thick ranks and the world seemed to hold its breath. Durin turned west and followed the river Celebrant upstream—its water a bright thread through shadowed valleys. Past lesser woods and cold hills he trudged, past the quiet place later called Mirrormere, until at last he came into the vale of Azanulbizar, where the mountains rose around him like the walls of a vast, waiting hall.
There, tucked beneath the bones of the world, lay a lake so still it seemed unreal.
Durin stood at its edge. Exhaustion sat heavy in his limbs. His beard was dusted with road, his hands rough with travel. He bent to look into the water—
and what looked back stole the breath from his chest.
Seven stars.
A crown—bright, cold, and beautiful—resting upon his own head in the mirror of the lake, as if the night had chosen him and the world itself had agreed.
For a long moment he did not move. He did not speak. He simply stared, struck dumb by wonder and the strange certainty that comes only a few times in history: the certainty of a beginning.
He named the lake Kheled-zâram—the Mirrormere—because it was clear and deep as a mirror wrought by the gods.
At first, Durin dearly wished to call it Durin's Mirrormere, on the firm and entirely reasonable grounds that he had found it first and would therefore be using it for grooming and admiration for the foreseeable future. But his wife—wiser, sterner, and only slightly less hairy than he was—heard him say it once and made a sound that ended the discussion forever.
So the name remained.
And the lake became holy to the Longbeards, a place of silence and memory. Dwarves came after Durin to stand where he had stood, to stare into the same glass-dark water and feel their own hearts tighten at the thought of that first vision. And where he had looked into the depths, they raised the Stone of Durin, a monument not to conquest, but to the moment the world seemed to recognize him.
Above the vale, in the caves and chambers that riddled the mountain, Durin and his kin began to build.
They cut and carved the Great Gates of Khazad-dûm. They shaped the First Hall, and from it they spanned a narrow stone bridge arcing over a deep chasm like a thrown blade of rock. And then they dug.
They dug with sweat and song and swearing, carving upward into the Seven Levels and downward into the Seven Deeps, chipping away at the mountain's ribs until the bones of stone became home.
To the East grew the heart of their civilization: mighty halls of pillared stone, forges that glowed like captive suns, dwellings warmed by firelight and loud with laughter.
To the West sprawled the mines—vast, brutal, hungry things—where lesser-bearded dwarves and the hobbits of old toiled in dust and dark, picking at the mountain's marrow for ore and treasure, paid in coin and curses and the promise that it was all for the glory of Durin's folk.
In those days, travelers could pass through Khazad-dûm—if they paid.
A toll to enter through the western ways. Another to exit into the eastern halls. And if the Elves were feeling charitable—or if the right bribes were offered with the correct bowing and flattering—one might even continue onward into the golden woods of Lórien.
Most never made it that far.
Still, trade flourished. Gold glinted in every hall. Steel rang bright. Beards were thick, and the women thicker, and for a time it seemed the world had decided to be kind.
But even dwarves are mortal.
Durin died. Stone outlasts flesh; it always has. The glory of the Longbeards did not vanish in a day, but it thinned—slowly—like smoke drifting toward a ceiling no one looks at anymore. Lesser kings followed. Riches deepened. Pride hardened. And the mountain, patient as the grave, kept its secrets.
Now, beneath a clear sky choked with stars, another figure climbs the same mountain path Durin once walked—not hairy like the Father of the Dwarves, but determined nonetheless.
And once again Khazad-dûm—now known by a darker name, whispered with dread: Moria, the Black Pit—stirs in its sleep.
Not for kings.
Not for dwarves.
But for something else entirely.
---
Thousands of years had passed since Durin the Deathless first gazed into the waters of Kheled-zâram and saw the crown of stars above his own head—an omen of kingship, a promise carved by fate into still water.
Now, beneath that same star-choked sky, another figure knelt at the lake's edge.
Filthy. Blood-soaked. Breathing like a hunted beast.
Gollum leaned over the Mirrormere and stared into the black glass of its surface.
And there it was.
Seven stars, shimmering overhead—seven more, gathered in the water around his reflection like a jagged crown. The sight made something inside him tighten with sick, delighted certainty.
His reflection was wrong in every way.
Eyes bloodshot, wide with rage and sleepless hunger. Hair—once fair—matted into blonde ropes with blood and mud. His face streaked with grime and dark flecks that might have been brain-matter, his skin bruised, torn, crusted with drying gore.
But Gollum did not flinch.
No shame rose in him. No guilt. No sickness.
Only pride.
The crown looked right.
It looked divine.
His mouth slowly curled into a smile.
Yes. Yesss. He had been chosen. Chosen by something older than the weak, squealing Stoors who had mocked him. The gods had seen what the others refused to see. They had marked him. They had anointed him in starlight and blood.
Future king of the mountains.
His breathing quickened. Short, ragged pulls of air, as if the night itself wasn't enough to feed him. Blood still clung to him like a title, like armor, like proof. Every stain was a victory. Every crusted smear a debt repaid.
"They sees us," Gollum murmured, voice thick with reverence so warped it sounded almost holy. "They sees Gollum… yes… yes… strong… powerful… powerful king…"
Heat climbed through him—journey-heat, battle-heat, rage-heat—and he tore off his shirt with a hiss, as if even cloth was an insult to what he was becoming.
The fabric came away sticky and stiff, and his chest emerged beneath it—caked in mud, smeared with fresh blood.
He flexed.
And his body answered like something unnatural had been built under his skin.
Muscle swelled in grotesque knots, bulging and thickening as though his flesh had forgotten the rules it was meant to obey. Veins rose like ropes, pulsing, swollen with something darker than blood—anger made physical, hatred made fuel. His shoulders broadened. His arms packed dense, warped strength. Not the honest strength of labor, not the earned strength of training—
but the violent, hungry strength of something being forged.
He looked like a hobbit only in the cruelest joke of proportions: too much mass, too much force, too much wrongness shoved into a frame that should not have been able to hold it. Skin stretched pale and tight over the swelling meat of him. Veins throbbed. His body seemed ready to split itself open just to make room for more.
A sight that would have made even dwarves step backward.
But Gollum did not step back.
Gollum leaned closer.
He stared at himself like a lover.
A low, wet laugh crawled out of his throat. "Look at us," he whispered, eyes huge with manic glee. "Look good, yes, yes… Gollum mighty… mighty king… hahahaha… yes… yesss…"
His voice shook with exhilaration.
And underneath it, like rot under sweetness, something colder stirred—something sharp, angry, and patient.
Because as he kept repeating the name—Gollum, Gollum, Gollum—the word began to lose its shape. It scraped against his mind like a dull blade. It turned from a title into a sound. From a sound into a compulsion. From a compulsion into a crack running through the center of his thoughts.
His grin twitched.
The Mirrormere stayed perfectly still, but his reflection seemed to waver—not from ripples, but from something in him that refused to sit quiet.
Old memories flashed like splinters: laughter behind hands, whispers, the look in eyes that had never seen him as one of them. Pain. Loneliness. The constant, crawling humiliation.
And the brokenness in his speech—those fractured little noises—came creeping back.
No.
It came roaring back.
Louder than before. Worse. Like shards of a shattered mind grinding against bone.
"Gollum… gollum… yesss… we is strong… mighty king… Gollum strong…" he whispered, forcing the grin to stay.
But his voice faltered.
His eyes flicked.
His breathing hitched.
The certainty cracked.
A wave of sickness rolled through him without warning, sharp and cold, and his mind lurched backward—far backward—past blood and crowns and stars, back to a place where he was small and helpless and had no words for pain.
A baby.
Barely able to walk.
The fall.
Stone rushing up. The sudden, explosive shock as his head struck hard ground. The world spinning into white noise and darkness, edges smearing into nothing. Terror blooming in his tiny chest as pain swallowed everything else.
He had tried to cry.
But the sound that came out of him wasn't a cry.
It was wrong.
Broken.
"Wau… wa… wallau… balla la—"
Gollum jerked violently, the memory seizing him like a hand around the throat. His fists clenched, shaking, nails digging into his palms. He could feel it again—the confusion, the helplessness, the awful realization that his own voice had betrayed him.
On the floor, his small body had writhed, pain pulsing through his skull.
But it was the sound he made that haunted him most.
Not crying.
Mumbling.
"Wallum… ga ga… gal-lam… gallam… gollum… gollum…"
The noises had spilled from his mouth without meaning, without shape. They hadn't felt like his words. They still didn't. It was as if something inside his head had slipped, failed to connect, broken slightly—and never quite healed.
His mother had rushed to him, frantic, hands shaking, voice tight with fear.
Too late.
He wasn't crying anymore.
He was making sounds.
And someone else had been there.
Déagol.
Déagol with his sideways smile. Déagol with his clever eyes that noticed weakness like blood in water. Déagol who watched, listened—and understood exactly what this meant.
Déagol who ran to the neighbors afterward.
Déagol who told stories.
Not cruel ones at first. Oh no. Gentle stories. Pitying ones. Stories about poor, slow Smeagol. About how he struggled. How he needed help. How he needed watching. How Déagol looked after him.
The broken one.
The simple one.
The one who couldn't even speak properly.
The one people laughed at when they thought he couldn't hear.
Gollum's lips peeled back from his teeth.
"Weak," he hissed. "Pathetic. Broken."
The words churned in his skull, echoing with voices that weren't there anymore. Déagol's voice most of all—kind in public, sharp in private. Déagol who wore sympathy like a crown and used Smeagol's pain to polish himself brighter.
Hero. Protector. Good cousin.
All built on Smeagol's humiliation.
The rage surged again, hot and choking. That treacherous little bastard. That smiling, lying sack of filth who had used him—used his injury, his confusion, his trust—to climb higher in the eyes of others.
Gollum's fists tightened until skin split beneath his nails.
He didn't feel it.
Pain was nothing now.
Anger was everything.
That fucking Stoor sack of shit.
Déagol had always been a liar. Déagol had turned kindness into leverage, suffering into currency. Every time Smeagol stumbled over words, Déagol had been there to translate—to reinterpret—to remind everyone how lucky Smeagol was to have him.
The betrayal had never cooled.
It had burned quietly, patiently, for years.
And now it roared back to life, feeding on the crown of stars, feeding on the blood, feeding on the power twisting his body into something monstrous and wrong.
He was strong now. He was king now.
And still—
Still the broken sounds clung to him.
Still the echoes scratched at the inside of his skull.
Still the name twisted itself into nonsense on his tongue.
"Gollum… gollum…" he muttered, his voice fraying at the edges.
"Wa… wa… walala… gol-lum…"
The repetition dug into him like a hook. The sounds looped and echoed, a broken rhythm he could not silence. Each syllable twisted tighter around his thoughts until it felt less like speech and more like a chain—heavy, dragging, inescapable.
His past closed in on him.
He had been broken.
He had been abandoned.
He had been used.
And in the end, he had killed.
Killed for the Ring. Killed for power. Killed for the crown he had seen reflected in the water and decided was meant for him.
And still—still—the broken words clung to his tongue.
Rage surged hot and sudden. His eyes burned as if lit from within, the blue swallowed by a feverish red glow. Déagol's face flashed in his mind, twisted with memory and hatred. The whispers. The laughter. The way the world had leaned toward Déagol and away from him, every single time.
Betrayal. Humiliation. Pain.
It all fused into a single, choking storm.
He didn't notice his hands shaking. Didn't notice his clothes slipping loose and falling away as his body tensed and convulsed with fury, leaving him bare beneath the cold starlight—exposed, filthy, stripped down to the raw, trembling truth of what he was.
He did not care.
He was strong.
He was king.
He was Gollum.
But the truth did not release him.
It clung. It pressed in. It crushed.
With a raw, wordless scream torn from somewhere deeper than language, Gollum hurled himself forward and plunged into the Mirrormere. Cold swallowed him in an instant—shock biting into skin, into muscle, into bone. Water closed over his head, dragging him down, stealing breath and thought alike.
Wash it away.
The blood.
The memories.
The broken sounds.
But even beneath the surface, there was no escape.
The stars still shone above, their pale light piercing the water, throwing his reflection back at him in warped fragments. Not a king. Not chosen. Just a twisted shape writhing beneath the surface—strong, yes, but fractured. Powerful, but broken.
The water could not drown the rage.
The madness did not fade.
And as Gollum thrashed in the dark, the lake remained still above him, ancient and uncaring, reflecting the stars as it always had—bearing silent witness to yet another soul who mistook ruin for destiny.