The red light beat against the walls of the chamber, and the river of fire below sent up a heat that scorched the lungs. Sam lay where he had fallen, his hands raw from the climb, and watched his master standing on the very lip of the Crack of Doom.
"Master," he croaked. "Frodo. Throw it in. Be done with it."
But Frodo did not throw it in.
He lifted his head, and when he spoke his voice was changed, ringing strange and clear above the roar of the mountain. "I have come," he said. "But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine."
And he put it on.
Sam's heart stopped in his chest. Frodo vanished from sight, and in the same instant a great shudder ran through the mountain, as if some far eye had turned and fixed upon this place with terror and wrath. Sam knew, with a cold certainty deeper than any thought, that the Dark Lord had seen. That across the burning plain the Eye had wheeled toward Orodruin, and that the wings were coming.
There was no time. There was no time at all.
Something seized Sam then, not courage exactly, for he felt no braver than a frightened coney in a snare, but love, the plain stubborn love of a gardener for the thing he has tended. He had carried Frodo up the mountainside on his own back. He would not lose him now to a bit of gold, not after all the long miles, not after Cirith Ungol, not after the cruel road through the ash.
He scrambled forward on hands and knees, toward the place where Frodo had stood. "Mr. Frodo!" he cried. "It's me, it's your Sam! Come back, come back to me!"
He felt the heat of the chasm at his face. He flung out his arms into empty air where his master must be, and his fingers closed on cloth, on a thin shoulder, on the dear familiar shape of him. Frodo was invisible and yet there, and he was struggling.
"Let go," hissed a voice that was Frodo's and not Frodo's. "It is mine. You shall not have it. None shall have it."
"I don't want it!" Sam shouted, and it was true, truer than anything he had ever said. He had held the Ring himself, in the tower, and given it back. He wanted no part of its great shining promises. "I never wanted it, sir. I only want you. I only ever wanted you to come home."
They wrestled at the edge of the fire. Frodo had a wiry strength born of the thing that drove him, and his hands clawed at Sam's face, and once Sam felt teeth at his wrist, as another creature had bitten in another moment that Sam could not see. But Sam did not strike back. That was the whole of it, in the end. He could have shoved, could have let the struggle carry them both apart, could have sent his master tumbling. He did not. He wrapped his arms about Frodo and held him as you hold a child in a nightmare, and he wept, and he did not let go.
"You're worn out, Mr. Frodo," he sobbed into the empty air. "It's worn you all away. It isn't you talking. Sam knows. Sam's got you."
And whether it was the sound of that name, the small ordinary name spoken with such grief, or whether some last unconquered corner of Frodo Baggins heard at last and answered, the figure in Sam's arms went suddenly slack. The Ring slipped, by Frodo's own failing hand or by Sam's blind groping fingers, neither of them could ever after say.
It fell.
For one instant Sam saw it, as it dropped from invisibility into the red glare, a circle of bright gold turning over and over above the molten river. He thought, in the way that whole lives pass before drowning men, of the Gaffer, and of yellow flowers in the garden at Bag End, and of a girl with brown curls whose face he had carried in his heart across all the black miles. Then the Ring struck the fire and was gone.
The world broke open.
A shriek tore the sky, a sound of such ruin and despair that Sam clapped his hands over his ears and screamed and could not hear himself scream. The whole mountain heaved. Fire leaped up the shafts and the floor split, and the chamber filled with a roaring light. And Frodo was visible again, white and small and himself, his maimed hand cradled against his breast, his eyes clear at last and full of horror at what he had nearly done.
"Sam," he said. Just that.
"I've got you," Sam answered. "Come on. We're not done yet."
He dragged Frodo from the chamber as the stair behind them fell into fire. They stumbled out onto the broken shoulder of the mountain, into a world gone mad. The Dark Tower far off was crumbling, towers and battlements falling like sand, and the armies upon the plain were scattering like ants whose hill has been kicked. The very ground rolled and split. Rivers of fire ran down the slopes of Orodruin toward the two small figures clinging to a tilted rock.
"I'm glad you're here with me, Sam," said Frodo. His voice was quiet now, hollowed out, an old voice in a young face. "Here at the end of all things."
But Sam would not have the end. "We came so far," he said. "There must be a way out yet. There's always a path, Mr. Frodo, if you keep your feet under you." And he hauled his master up onto a hill of ash that rose like an island in the burning sea, and there they huddled together while the world ended around them, two specks of the Shire in the heart of fire.
Frodo's head sank against Sam's shoulder. "I tried to keep it," he whispered. "At the very last. After everything. I tried to keep it."
"But you didn't," said Sam fiercely. "In the end you let it go. I felt it. You did, sir. That's what matters. Not the falling down. The getting up."
Frodo closed his eyes. "You let it go, Sam. You let me go, and held me both at once. I do not understand how."
Sam did not understand it either, and did not try. He only held on, as he had always held on, while the heat came up and the smoke rolled in and the cries of eagles, faint and far and impossible, began somewhere high above the dying dark.
Long after, in a green country, Frodo would wake from dreams of fire crying out that the Ring was on his finger and could not be taken off. And always there would be a hand in the dark, rough and kind, closing over his, and a steady voice saying, it's gone, sir, it went into the fire, I was there. And Frodo would remember that he had failed, and that he had been saved anyway, not by his own strength, which had broken, but by a love that had refused to break with it. He carried that wound all his days, the knowledge of how close he had come. But he carried, too, the knowledge that someone had reached into the unseen and would not let go.
That, Sam thought, was worth all the gold in Middle-earth, and a deal more besides.