The trees, those bent sinews of bark shuffled in my vision, roots scrabbling the soil, trunks lean inward as a gargoyle’s grin, their crooked boughs knuckling the earth in a mockery of salute. Up ahead, the Shire, that smug green pigbelly, gurgles with mirth I didn’t believe.

I, Frodo Baggins, the bearer of the… oh, never mind!

I lumbered through the path, into a narrow tunnel of thorns, their canes curled bristling like some ancient hedgehog’s uncombed mustache clucked it’s barbed spines. Their spikes gnawed at my ankles, one splinter clutched at my coat and a button popped like a firecracker.

The mud squirms underfoot, each step birthing a new wrinkle of filth. My goat soles, once proud, now caked in mud the hue of a rancid lemon drop, dragged me down in protestations as if the very earth conspired to bill me by the step. I kick the moss sludge, and the muck now slithers and squeaks like two disgraced orators.

Dense as a wet barmaid’s apron, the fog rolls in. Not the Shire’s usual damp haze but a wet, fleshy thing that clings to my neck and it whispers in the dead tones of a drowned church organist. One tree had limped into the fog, its leaves now fluttering like a thousand fraying tongues.

A toad perched on a upturned stone birdbath, squawked with the authority of a prophet, mocking my thirst. Its throat a glistening pink balloon, voice a croak that pulsed, “Rain Rain!” I blinked. By the stars, had that bird been there two heartbeats ago? I swear not.

The path ahead splits, but both clefts lead to the same structure. Birthed from the fog, a bridge of knotted entrails, spanning a chasm where the earth yawned like a glutton’s maw. Both identical. Both snarled in rotting leaves. I chose left or right? The decision was made by my foot.

The bridge’s sinewy ropes groaning as if some ancient beast had been summoned, just to die here for our benefit. Each movement squelched. The knots beneath my feet creaked, the kind of sounds echoing through motel walls at 3 AM, when the bedsprings sing their rusty hymns.

Halfway across, I stepped onto one more plank, or what passed as a plank, a single bone from an animal, which may or may not have been wise to butcher. The bone gave, it cracked and my left foot sank in up to the ankle. The abyss clutched at my calf with the enthusiasm of a grandmother who just learned her grandchild’s coming for dinner.

A moth, probably drunk on fermented nectar, collided with my forehead. I swatted it’s aerial acrobatics, it’s wings screaming “Ewt! Ewt!” in a voice that could only belong to a disgruntled elf.

I patted my coat. Into my pocket, fingers probing, I found a dragon’s tooth, cold, jagged, and a single button, the one that popped earlier. The tooth lodged stuck in the flap of the pocket. It had to be the one I swindled from a barkeep in Bree for a bottle of rum, no doubt.

I tried to pull it out. Stubborn thing! It resisted, caught on fabric, testing my patience. I drew it slow, slow, slow, like a sword. Finally, the tooth emerged, yellow and wicked.

The rope binding my ankle, thick as a serpent. I positioned the tooth’s edge against the hemp’s coarse weave, those fibers twisted together in their presumption of strength, and I sawed. Back and forth, the tooth grinding, chewing, splitting strand by strand.

At last the rope parted. The bridge sagged a bit. The abyss below stared at me with patience, knowing that gravity never forgets an appointment.

My foot yanked free, sucked from the bone gap. I stumbled forward, caught myself on the bridge’s remaining ropes, those sinews still clinging to their purpose.

The rope I cut, it hung loose now, dangling like a finger wagging in disapproval.

Up ahead, the fog began to peel away in thin, shivering layers, revealing the far shore: a patch of ground flat as a sheet of parchment and ground green like a witch’s sneer.

What words could better fit to a fog after all, if not for a democracy of shadows?

Behind me, the bridge snapped midair as though it had grown tired of being a bridge and, in a final act of rebellion, folded into a paper airplane and launched itself into the chasm’s gaping throat. Rocks gnashed their gums at the falling debris.

I stood on the far shore, still attached to my limbs, still fully clothed, save the missing button.

A nest of crows perched ahead, took notice of the bridge collapsing, and the whole flock erupted. Their beaks opened in unison, croaking not a death omen but an imitating, xylophonic trill of the bridge atomizing itself into a mosaic of twigs and bones.

Their wings screeched and they launched themselves into the air, hovered there a moment and dived into the yawning black trachea, which now gargled the remains with the relish of a cannibal’s stew.

The ground here, seemed to hum quiet. The fog had cleared entirely. The air was clean. The light was too bright.

I approached the hobbit village of Glimmerroot clung to the hillside. Houses, humps of earth they were, swollen bellies pregnant with pipe smoke, their doors circular, wood split and beetled. Windows like eyes gouged, and the spines of chimneys bent at the neck, strangled by their own smoke.

The path towards Sam’s house twists in cursive, as though the ground itself is scribbling spells. Stone steps have been worn smooth by decades of hobbit feet, each a different height as if the mason had been drunk, fired, then rehired out of pity.

“Sam!” I called, my voice fracturing against the walls. No answer. His door had iron metal for a handle, rusted the color of dried blood. I gripped the handle. It burned my palm, cold as a widow’s hand in a handshake of death. I pushed the door open, it shrieked its hinges.

From below, from somewhere beneath the floorboards, came a sound. “The cellar. Where the good stuff grows” I muttered to myself.

I descended the staircase, a corkscrew drilled into the earth’s bowels, spiraled downward, each step narrower than the last.

Barrels lined the walls, stacked three high, their wood bloated with whatever liquids they imprisoned.

Sam was there. The floor, packed dirt, had been colonized by a colony of mushrooms, their caps fanning out in all directions, their stalks snaking across the ground, in patterns that suggested either great intelligence or great madness.

“Frodo! Frodo Baggins, you half rotted leek!” Sam’s voice boomed.

“Blimey!” he croaked, while ascending, the stairs creaking in a key that only cats could hear.

We emerged from the darkness and moved to the table, that ancient slab of wood that dominated the main room like an altar. Sam shuffled to his kitchen area, shelf upon shelf of jars, each containing liquids or solids in various stages. He selected one jar, amber liquid inside, stuff that moved when it shouldn’t have moved.

“This,” Sam said, leaning forward with the intensity of a man who’d just discovered that mushrooms could be both fuel and fuel for prophecy, “is mushroom tea". His beard, bristled with sporangiophores, spitting spores like tiny parachutists into the void.

He poured. The liquid sludged from jar to cup, thick as honey, steam rose, not steam, smoke carrying with it an odor that was part earth, part death, part something else entirely, something that made my nose hairs curl in self defense.

Sam pushed the cup across the table toward me. It slid through a layer of dust, leaving a slimy trail behind it.

“It enhances lingual acuacy,” I said, sipping from the cup.

“That word doesn’t exist,” he answered, his tea sloshing around.

“It exists, in a language I made up right now” I said, “but it may as well belong to the Thrombolic dialect, a language spoken by the fishmen of the Under Salt Sea.”

“My ring is malfunctioning lately, Sam,” I said, snatching the ring between thumb and forefinger as if it were a live coal. “For the last three days, it’s made me vanish into the wallpaper while I’m trying to eat breakfast. Think about it, toast and jam, half eaten, and poof, I’m not there. My parsnips were stranded in the air, asking questions about where their master fled.” I knocked the ring on the table. “For a year I wore the ring like a second skin. But now, it’s capricious. Yesterday, it let me be seen by a crow Sam! A bloody corvid that stole my hat!”

Sam picked up the ring, squinting at it the way a butcher examines questionable meat. Turned it over. Held it to the candlelight. The flame bent around it.

“Frodo,” he said, “this thing o’ yours, it’s electronic, innit? Got circuits. Microthaumatology. Probably runs on tiny demons imprisoned in silicon. Those demons get lazy, the whole system crashes. Got wires and gizmos you don’t even know about?”

“Do I look like an engineer? What do I know about techno gobble whoop magic?” I snapped, slapping the ring onto the table. It rolled like a drunk beetle. “It’s not a toaster, Sam. It’s a doohickey from Mordor. You ever heard o’ Mordor? They make bespoke magic for folks who want to vanish.”

He leaned in, his breath sour with mushroom tea. “Mordor? As in, The Mordor? Black magic manufacturing?”

“As in the only company that sells stuff to people who won’t ask questions,” I said. The advertisement promised ’Invisibility Guaranteed’.“ I picked up the ring, held it to the candle light. ”The salesman had excellent teeth. Very convincing teeth."

“Maybe you should phone them. Maybe that gremlin of yours is just low on firmware. Ring up the company. Tell them your ring’s defective, that it’s making your vanishment asymmetrical.”

The telephone, rotary beast it was, squatted on Sam’s table, a black bakelite, it’s cord kinked intestinal, the receiver heavy as a club meant for skulls.

Dialed. Each number a commitment, my finger jamming the rotary holes, the mechanism churning its guts, each rotation a small eternity, clickety clickety click, a mechanical digestive process, the wheel dragging back with the resistance of a reluctant executioner.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Welcome to Mordor Customer Support, where your darkness is our business” a woman representative slithered from the other end. Smooth as arsenic in honey. “My name is Lurgathra, account number, please.”

I cleared my throat, spit caught there like a lodger refusing eviction. “Account seven seven three dash B dash nine. Frodo Baggins, purchaser of one invisibility ring, model Wraithmaker 3000, serial number..”

“I have your file, Mr. Baggins.” Papers shuffled on her end, crisp violent sounds, like bones snapping in a efficient manner. “How may I darken your day?”

“My ring doesn’t function as it should and it’s gotten worse,” I answered her, voice dropping to a hiss whispered. "Yesterday morning, mid-disappearance, I got stuck halfway. Top half invisible, gone, vacated the premises, bottom half plain as porridge. My legs stayed behind. They walked to the stove. They brewed tea. They were bored. My torso holidayed to the metaphysical realm, while my ankles stirred the pot!”

Silence. Then a throat clearing, professional cough.

“Mr. Baggins, let me place you on hold for one moment..”

“Wait, no..”

Music assaulted my ear canal. Not music, really. Elevator melodies composed on what sounded like a accordion made from cat intestines, violins strangled mid-note, harps weeping for mercy.

I pressed the receiver harder against my skull. Behind the music, voices. Her voice, muffled now, hand cupped over the mouthpiece some muffled voices leaked through. A chorus of Orcish wails nad her voice, distant but audible, address someone:

“Grishnákh! GRISHNÁKH! The new Orc, the one from Batch Seven, its face got stuck on the bottom of the cauldron, yes, the bottom, don’t you see this one is even uglier than the rest. What do you mean ‘which one?’ The one that’s screaming! Yes, that one. No, we can’t sell it like that. I don’t care if someone might want a floor faced Orc, decompose it to amino acids and start fresh. Use the big vat. The industrial vat. And for the love of the Dark Lord, stir it this time, don’t just dump it in and hope.” A wet, meaty splorch. “Ah yes. Young Ogg here’s having a difficulty.” Metallic clattering. Another squish. “There. All better. Shhh. Good boy.”

I waited. Sam watched, sipping his mushroom tea.

The music cut. Her voice returned, smooth once more.

“Thank you for holding, Mr. Baggins. I apologize for the delay. We’re experiencing higher call volumes than usual, and also our manufacturing floor is experiencing what we call an ‘product restructuring moment.’”

“About my ring..” I started.

“Yes. Your bisected visibility issue. I’ve pulled your ring’s data. Model Wraithmaker 3000, purchased eighteen months ago, warranty expired..”

“Expired? I paid good coin for the extended warranty! The salesman with the excellent teeth, he promised..”

“Mr. Baggins.” Her voice sharpened, knife drawn from velvet sheath. “The extended warranty covers catastrophic failure, not performance degradation. What you’re experiencing is classified as ‘irregular phasing,’ which falls under normal wear and tear.”

“Normal?” I bellowed, Sam jumping at the table’s far end, his mushroom tea sloshing.

“Sir, please lower your voice. I understand your frustration. However, the execution environment logs of the ring are not available to the user. The internal workings of your ring, the diagnostic cascade, the thaumaturgic stack trace, all belong to Mordor Industries. This is a security feature to prevent reverse engineering of our proprietary invisibility algorithms.”

I squeezed the receiver, knuckles whitening, imagining it was her neck, no, no, not her neck, the salesman’s neck, those excellent teeth chattering as I throttled him. “Security feature? I can’t even see what’s wrong with my own ring?”

“Correct. The logs are encrypted seventeen times, using demonic ciphers that would liquefy your brain if you attempted to read them. This is for your protection, Mr. Baggins.”

“My protection.” I laughed, sound scraping up my throat like gravel through a drainpipe. “I’m half invisible on a Tuesday morning, startling the milkman into cardiac arrest, and you’re protecting me?”

“Sir, I can schedule a diagnostic appointment. Our next available slot is..” papers shuffling again, that bone snap sound, “..six weeks from now, Tuesday afternoon, between the hours of two and six. Someone will arrive to examine your ring. There is a service fee of forty gold pieces, non refundable, payable in advance.”

“Six weeks? Forty gold pieces?”

“Alternatively,” she continued, voice smooth as a confession extracted under duress, “you could purchase our new model, the Wraithmaker 4000. It features improved phasing stability, reduced spectral bleed through, and a complimentary curse removal for the first month.”

“You want me to BUY ANOTHER RING?”

“The Wraithmaker 3000 is a legacy product, Mr. Baggins. We no longer manufacture replacement parts. At a certain point, upgrading becomes more cost effective than repair.”

“Forward me,” I growled into the receiver. “To your supervisor. Now. This instant.”

Silence, pregnant with the weight of a thousand bureaucratic sins.

“Mr. Baggins..”

“Forward. Me.”

A sigh leaked through the phone line, wind escaping a corpse’s last deflation. “One moment please.”

“This is Sauron. CEO, Mordor Industries.”

“Sauron. The Sauron? Eye of flame, forger of..”

“Yes yes yes, all very cinematic, my branding team outdid themselves that fiscal quarter, bonuses for everyone, champagne fountains et cetera et cetera.” His voice rolled like boulders down a mountain. “Now. Your ring. The Wraithmaker 3000. Serial number etched in the fires of Mount Doom, cooled in the blood of betrayed smiths. What’s malfunctioning?”

“Yesterday my legs brewed tea while my torso explored the astral plane. The day before, I sneezed and my head vanished but my body stayed, walking into walls like a decapitated chicken, crashing into furniture, terrifying the neighbors.” I stammered.

“Mmm.” A rumble, volcanic, continental shelf deciding whether to split. “Classic firmware decay. The demons powering your ring’s core processor, tiny bastards they are, have been slacking. Happens. Your case is not unique. We have clients who vanish in threes. Clients who wake up upside down, or inside out, or just flat like pancakes. Unfortunate but inevitable.”

“Inevitable?” I shrieked, Sam’s teacup rattling against saucer, mushrooms on the cellar floor below probably cowering. “Inevitable? I paid good gold for this ring! The salesman, those teeth of his, he promised..”

“Salesmen promise many things, Mr. Baggins.” Sauron’s voice oozed through the phone line, honey laced with ground glass. “They promise eternity. They promise perfection. They promise, buy once, have magic forever, which, let’s be honest, in your case was probably the primary selling point, wasn’t it?”

“But I’m asking: How am I supposed to fix it, if I can’t see how it works, if I can’t diagnose my own jewelry.” I bellowed, receiver pressed so hard against my skull I’d probably have circular bruise tomorrow. “If the guts of this thing belong to Mordor industries, then who owns it? Me? Or you?”

Sauron’s laugh erupted, not mirth but conquest, a sound reminding me of armies marching through burning villages, of ravens feasting on battlefield corpses, of victory flags planted in the skulls of the defeated. “Do you own it, Frodo Baggins? Or do you merely possess it?”

“That’s, that’s the same thing!”

“You purchased the ring, yes?” Sauron wheezed, “You misunderstand the nature of ownership in the modern age. You purchased the ring, yes? Gold exchanged hands, contract signed, perhaps in blood, perhaps in ink, the accountants don’t specify. You own the physical object, the metal band warping the dimensional stability of your trousers. That’s yours.”

“Licensed,” I repeated.

“But!” The word detonated through the phone line, shrapnel of syllables, Sam ducked like incoming artillery. “The software. The invisibility protocols. The demonic architecture that powers your vanishment—that, Mr. Baggins, you have licensed. Indefinitely, yes, for the duration of your natural life and slightly beyond, but licensed nonetheless. You own the ring. We own the magic inside it.”

“And these logs, the diagnostic cascade, the thaumaturgic stack trace? You, Frodo Baggins, hobbit civilian, wants to peer into the guts of proprietary technology millennia developed? Technology that cost billions in research, in sacrifice literal, in blood spilled measured by the ocean?”

“The ring remains yours, Mr. Baggins. The invisibility, however, that we merely lend. Indefinitely, yes, perpetually even, but lend. You have a license. Irrevocable, non transferable, binding until death and then some. Should you violate the terms of service, reverse engineer the spells, share the incantations, attempt to jailbreak the curse, we reserve the right to remotely deactivate your licensed features. You’d be left with a very expensive, very useless circle of metal.”

“Is that legal?”

“Perfectly legal,” Sauron purred, cat satisfied after canary consumption. “Clause seventeen, subsection B, paragraph nine. ‘User acknowledges that invisibility functionality constitutes licensed intellectual property and remains property sole of Mordor Industries in perpetuity plus seventy years, whichever comes last.’ You signed this, Mr. Baggins. Your signature sits in our vault, preserved in amber, guarded by Balrogs.”

“Should you violate the terms of service, reverse engineer the spells, share the incantations, attempt to jailbreak the curse, post the source code on public forums for other malcontents, we reserve the right, Mr. Baggins, to remotely deactivate your licensed features.”

“You can turn it off?”

“With a thought. With a memo. With a checkbox on a form processed by our Legal Department, Third Floor, West Wing, Carol handles those, lovely woman, makes excellent scones for the office parties. One checkbox, Mr. Baggins, and your ring becomes jewelry. Fashionable, perhaps. Shiny, certainly. Functional?” He paused, letting the word hang like a noose. “No.”

“Do we have an understanding, Mr. Baggins?”

I nodded, realized he couldn’t see, croaked, “Yes.”

“Wonderful. Thank you for choosing Mordor Industries, where your darkness is our business. Have a day.”

Click.

The line went dead.

“Frodo,” Sam said softly, “I think you need more mushroom tea.”

I nodded. Words had abandoned me. Logic had fled screaming.

In a tower of black stone and spreadsheets, Sauron returned to his paperwork, another soul bound not by curses but by contracts, far more permanent, far more cruel.

The receiver sat heavy in my hand. Through the window, a crow landed, cocked its head, judging me with eyes that’d seen this conversation play out a thousand times before, in a thousand different houses, with a thousand different suckers clutching telephones and realizing too late they’d been sold snake oil by a man with beautiful teeth. So beautiful teeth!

The window, grimy thing it was, showed me movement, motion and the crackle of hooves on gravel announced a figure approaching.

A horse, white, one eyed, came trotting up the path like death’s wedding carriage, all bone muscle coordination, it’s hooves percussing against stone, clop thud clop, rhythm irregular, the beast favoring its left foreleg. One eye it had, the left socket empty, collapsed inward, a crater. The remaining eye rolled, massive as a boiled egg, surveying the world.

Gandalf sat astride it, his beard cascading, the waterfall of his hair gone feral and white as dishwater, his robes flapping.

“Sam,” I hissed, “Gandalf’s outside.”

“Gandalf?” Sam’s head whipped around, his tea sloshing. “The wizard Gandalf? Here? Now?”

We stumbled outside, the horse stopped. It breathed heavy, it’s nostrils flaring, his breath steamed in the air, that shouldn’t be cold but was anyway.

He dismounted, the horse snorted, that single eye rolling.

“What seems to be the problem, Frodo?” Gandalf approached.

“My ring,” I started. “Bought it from Bilbo’s Nephew’s Shop, next to the elven hair combs section, you know the place? They sell invisibility rings, legitimate ones..”

“Legitimate,” Gandalf snorted, the sound like a horse’s snort, contemptuous, ancient.

“..with warning labels! Professional warning labels! ‘Use this ring only if you don’t respect time, space.’”

“And?” Gandalf leaned on his staff, weight shifting, waiting.

“And it’s malfunctioning! Yesterday my legs walked separate from my torso. This morning? This morning, Gandalf, I blinked and my left arm vanished for six minutes. Six! Do you know how difficult it is to butter toast one armed when the missing arm is the dominant one?”

Gandalf’s beard twitched, might’ve been smile, might’ve been disgust. “You phoned the manufacturer.”

Not question. Statement. He knew.

“Mordor Industries. Spoke with Sauron himself. He informed me..” I spat the words, venom laced, fury soaked, “..that I own the ring but license the invisibility. That the magic inside belongs to them. Forever. Perpetually. That they can deactivate it remotely if I violate terms of service I didn’t read because who reads terms of service?”

“Everyone should,” Gandalf muttered, “but no one does. Tale old as time, that one.”

Sam piped up, voice mouse squeaking, “He’s beside himself, Gandalf. Proper unraveled. Been drinking my mushroom tea and spiraling about ownership versus possession and..”

“How about you Gandalf?” I asked, “Why ride this cyclopean abomination instead of driving something sensible?”

The horse snorted again, offended possibly, that single eye narrowing.

“Update,” Gandalf growled, word bitten off sharp. “Software update. Automatic software update installed itself during the night while my vehicle sat charging. Midnight. No warning. No consent. Just ping, ‘Update available, installing now, do not disconnect power, this will take fifteen minutes.’”

“Fifteen minutes?” Sam asked.

“Seventeen hours,” Gandalf roared, staff striking ground, sparks flying, actual sparks, little fires dying quick. “Seventeen hours of ‘Optimizing system performance, please wait.’ Morning came. Sun rose, birds sang their stupid songs. Car still optimizing. Still waiting. Checked the forums..”

“Forums?” I blinked.

“Wizard forums. Tech support for the magically inclined. Apparently this update, version 7.4.2, bricks vehicles manufactured before the Year of the Twisted Moon. Bricks them. Immobilizes them completely. Won’t start. Won’t charge. Just sits there, driveway decoration’.”

“So you’re riding..” I gestured toward the horse.

“Magnus,” Gandalf said. “His name is Magnus. One eyed white stallion. I needed transportation, he needed purpose.”

Magnus stamped hoof, singular eye fixing on me, it’s pupil dilating, contracting, unsettling in hypnotic rhythm.

“How long until your car’s fixed?” Sam ventured.

“Tech support says patch coming next week. Maybe. Possibly. ‘Soon.’ You know how these things go. Meanwhile, I ride Magnus. We bond. He tolerates me. Now. About your ring. Let me see it.”

I pulled the ring from pocket, held it out, metal catching light wrong, bending it, distorting it, reality rippling around the circumference.

Gandalf took it, held it close, eye squinting, other eye squinting differently, examining, probing, muttering words I didn’t recognize, probably shouldn’t recognize.

“Mmm,” he finally said. “Yes. Definitely cheap. Definitely cursed. Definitely violating approximately seven hundred regulations regarding dimensional manipulation. You’re lucky you haven’t phased through the planet core yet.”

“Can you fix it?”

He tossed the ring back. I caught it, fumbled, nearly dropped it.

“No, Frodo. I cannot fix it. No one can fix it without the execution trace, because fixing costs only the replacement parts and selling you new model makes more money. Simple economics. Old as dragons hoarding gold. Older.”

Magnus whinnied, agreement possibly, or hunger. Hard to tell with one eyed horses.

Sam muttered something about “not this again” and retreated into the cellar.

“Mordor,” Gandalf announced, his staff planted vertical like a flag claimed in conquered soil. The word hung there, fat and final. “We go to their headquarters. The glass tower, downtown district, thirty seventh floor.”

“You’re joking,” I said, but his beard had gone rigid, its bristles electric with purpose. Gandalf never jokes, not about corporations, not about towers that scrape the clouds and house departments named “Customer Service.”

“Confronting them face to face,” he growled, his staff planted, each syllable a stone dropped in still water. “Eyeball to eyeball. You want diagnostic data? You want execution traces? You want them to open their proprietary vault and spill secrets? Phone calls get you nowhere. Emails vanish into spam folders guarded by Nazguls. But presence, breathing their recycled air, standing in their lobby with its potted ferns dying slow deaths under fluorescent lights, that makes them uncomfortable.”

Magnus stamped, his hoof striking the earth his single eye, massive as a hard boiled egg left too long in brine, swiveled and fixed on me. The assessment was brutal. The calculation was merciless.

“Both of us?” I asked. My voice climbed octaves, became a mouse squeak, became a plea. “On… that?”

“Magnus carries two,” Gandalf said, his voice flat as hammered iron. “He did it during the War of the Shattered Circle beneath a sky of falling ashes. He carried me and Saruman seventeen leagues while we dodged demons. He’ll manage one wizard, one half panicked hobbit. Get on.”

I approached. Magnus was a mountain, a cliff face white and vertical. Gandalf mounted first, his movement fluid like oil poured, like mercury sliding, practice having made it theater. He settled forward, his spine straight as accusation, and he offered his hand down to me. His arm extended, his sleeve flapping, the fabric a great, useless wing.

I grabbed and settled behind Gandalf, gripping his robes.

“Don’t fall off,” Gandalf advised, his tone conversational, as if he were discussing mild weather. “Magnus dislikes stopping.”

Magnus’s hooves moved. Clop thud clop. The rhythm established itself, a metronome cruel and steady. The path unfolded beneath us, the dirt becoming gravel, stones crunching like bones under the wheels of carts that had carried plague victims centuries ago.

The trees passed by, becoming blurs of green and brown, their branches clawing at the air we’d already vacated.

“Take the highway,” I shouted, my voice shredded by wind, by Magnus’s furnace hot breathing.

Gandalf turned his head partially; his beard whipped like flags in a storm. “Highway?”

“Yes. Highway. The asphalt ribbon, black and smooth, where modern vehicles conduct their petroleum powered pilgrimages. We’ll get there quicker. Faster. In six hours instead of twelve.”

He considered it, his hand rising to stroke his beard as the wind tangled it worse, creating knots that would require industrial solvents to unpick. “Magnus,” he addressed the horse, “can handle the highway traffic. Can’t you, Magnus?”

Magnus snorted, agreement perhaps, perhaps just clearing his nostrils of flies that had been investigating.

We turned. The path shifted beneath us, gravel transitioning to asphalt, the surface smooth, too smooth, an unnatural smoothness achieved through machines that heated the earth’s bones and spread them flat.

The on ramp rose before us, a concrete curve spiraling upward like a twisted DNA strand, ascending into the metal river that flowed fast and deadly. The traffic streamed, vehicles hurtling, metal comets with humans trapped inside their velocity.

Magnus hit the highway. His hooves struck the asphalt, the sound echoing clop clop clop amplified by a surface not meant for hooves but for vulcanized rubber.

Cars streamed past. A Ford to the left, a blue blur, whoooosh, its sound compressed and stretched. A horn blared, the sustained note of fury; the driver’s face was visible one instant, mouth wide, screaming, eyes bulging like fish dragged onto decks, then gone, swallowed by the distance.

An SUV to the right, a silver beast with a chrome grille grinning shark like, whoooosh. The driver gestured, raising a single finger, accusatory and anatomically improbable in its suggested trajectory.

A truck roared past, eighteen wheels of mechanical thunder. The gust slammed us sideways, a contained hurricane; Magnus compensated, his muscles flexing and adjusting, his hooves finding purchase on the treacherous asphalt. We survived. Barely. The truck’s horn, deep, basso profundo, the voice of an angry diesel god, blasted an obscene farewell.

Ahead, a structure emerged from heat shimmer and distance: a toll plaza. It’s booths squatted across lanes like concrete toads, barriers mechanical with arms rising and falling, rising again in a hypnotic rhythm.

We approached it. Magnus slowed, his hooves gentler now, clop clop clop, almost polite, almost apologetic for existing in a space not designed for his kind.

A booth door opened. A woman emerged, her uniform crisp despite the heat, despite the improbability. Her face was confusion incarnate, disbelief given flesh, and a nametag that read ’Debra’ was pinned to her chest. Her eyebrows rose toward her hairline; her mouth opened, closed, opened again like a fish gasping on dock boards.

“You cannot drive this animal on the highway!”

Gandalf straightened.

“Drive?” His voice dropped, plummeted, an octave falling into the basement where light goes to die. He held the word, examined it, found it wanting, dripping with disdain, soaked in contempt, oceanic in scale.

He paused.

“Ride. We ride the horse.”

The grammar lesson was delivered. His tone was professorial, condescending; the verb was corrected; the action clarified; the linguistic crime was punished immediately.

Debra blinked, processing as if a syntax error were visible, her hands flailed now, gestures desperate, a drowning woman clutching at the absence of air.

“Horses aren’t allowed! No animals! No livestock!”

“We’ll take the next exit and go through the forest,” Gandalf announced.

Magnus hooves resumed, clop clop clop, with Debra shouting behind us, her words dissolving into wind.

The off-ramp curved, spiraled downwards, Magnus descended carefully, his hooves picking a path through cracks where ambitious weeds pushed through, reclaiming territory one root at a time. We reached to the bottom, we reached street level, we reached a situation that was bizarre.

Cars were everywhere, dozens, scores, maybe hundreds obscured in the distance. Dead they sat, automotive corpses, their doors hung open like fish mouths gasping final breaths, their hoods exposed their failing metal hearts. Drivers stood, congregating; a cluster of confusion with panic percolating through.

We slowed to a walk, Magnus’s hooves, clip, clop, clip, polite percussion, respectful of the dead machinery surrounding. The beast knew death when he smelled it, even death silicon based, battery powered.

A recharging station loomed center stage with a skeletal metal frame, solar panels spread overhead wing like, useless now as tits on a bull. Beneath it, charging stalls stood empty, cables dangling limp as dead snakes, their connectors mouths open, hungry, unpowered.

A man in glasses, wire rimmed, pristine, stood near the entrance kiosk, hands gesturing sharp at the gathering crowd. His polo shirt bore an embroidered logo: “GreenCharge Station.”

“Look, I don’t know what happened! The system just, it went dark. All of it. The Powerwalls, the solar feed, the backup grid connection, everything. I’ve got corporate on hold for forty minutes and they keep playing that goddamn smooth jazz. Just click. Gone. My whole Powerwall garage system, dead. Seventy three percent charge I had. Had. Dashboard lit up, ‘Power System Failure’, then nothing. Dead. Deader than my marriage, deader than my hope of retiring before seventy.”

A woman beside him, wearing yoga pants, sunglasses expensive perched atop her head, “I am..” she gestured violent, hands chopping air, “..two miles from home. Two miles. Now I’m here, stranded at this godforsaken charging station that won’t charge, watching my groceries spoil in the trunk. Ice cream’s melted. Chicken’s warming. I’ve got a Zoom call in forty minutes and my laptop’s in the car and the car won’t..”

Voice cut off. Hands covered her face.

“Should’ve read the terms,” another voice said. A younger man, tablet tucked under his arm, stepped forward. “Section seven, subsection D, paragraph twelve. ‘Company reserves right to disable, modify, or terminate functionality of any connected device, at any time, for any reason company deems necessary, including but not limited to safety concerns, regulatory compliance, or strategic business decisions. User agrees to waive all claims.’ You all clicked ‘I Agree.’ You agreed.”

“Oh, shut up, nobody reads those,” the yoga pants woman said. Simple. Final.

An older man leaned against a truck bed, coveralls wearing grease ancient, hands tattooed permanent with motor oil. His face leather worn, sun beaten, eyes squinted to slits calculating. “Powerwalls,” he said, voice gravel rough, each word a stone dropped. “The solar recharging stations, all of them, run on Powerwall batteries, model HX Nine. The company that made them, installed them, and promised ‘revolutionize energy independence’ and ‘power freedom.’ Freedom.” He spat. The brown glob hit the asphalt, it sizzled quiet. “This morning, zero dark thirty, company flipped the switch. Kill switch. The batteries had faulty chemistry, their lithium cells degrading faster than projected, their thermal runaway imminent. Remotely deactivated every single Powerwall unit, simultaneously.”

One man kicked his car’s tire. Hard. His foot rebounded, pain obvious from the way he hopped, cursing string of pearls style, each word a gem polished by fury.

A man slumped against a car, phone dangling from his hand, voice robot recorded emanating: “Your estimated wait time is, thirty seven minutes. Please continue holding. Your call is important..”

“Important?” he screamed at the phone. “Then answer, you algorithmic bastards.”

We rode past. Magnus’s hooves found rhythm again. Clop thud clop. Steady. Certain. Carrying us forward away.

Behind us, more voices rose, layered cacophony style: complaints, threats, prayers maybe. Someone sobbed. Someone else laughed, a child asked, “Daddy, when are we going home?” and received no answer.

The forest swallowed us whole; the trees stood trunk to trunk like conspirators. Light, what little remained of it, dripped through gaps in the canopy in stripes, illuminating patches of dirt and root and the occasional moss bearded stone.

Magnus’s hooves found soft purchase on centuries’ worth of pine needles, muffling our approach into near silence, save for the beast’s breathing, that bellows rhythm in and out.

Then, a sign.

A wooden thing, planted crooked in the earth, letters carved deep and paint peeling in strips like sunburned skin. The words proclaimed, with dubious authority: “THE PATH OF TOROIDAL SPIDER, PROCEED WITH CAUTION OR DON’T PROCEED AT ALL. WE’RE NOT YOUR MOTHER.”

Below that, in smaller script, barely legible: “Seriously. She’ll eat you. We’ve lost six couriers this month.”

And there she was. The spider.

She was giant, her body as bulbous as a prize winning pumpkin, her eight legs articulated as tradition demanded, each joint clicking audible even from a distance. Perched in the toroid’s center, legs spread radial and engaged in purposeful activity. Thin as human hair but gleaming metallic, a copper wire gleamed in her mandibles as she wrapped it around the toroid’s circumference, each rotation precise.

“Seven,” she counted, her voice clicking, consonants sharp as scissors. Her legs moved, synchronized, balletic as she wrapped. “Eight.” Another rotation, the wire catching the light and forming a helical pattern.

“Nine.” She paused, one leg raised.

Then, motion. She uncoiled, released the wire, and descended from the toroid.

Magnus backed up; his hooves shuffled, his solitary eye rolling panic adjacent. Gandalf’s hand tightened on his staff.

The spider touched ground, legs splaying wide, body lowered predatory. She approached with deliberate, precise steps, mechanical in execution but graceful underneath.

“Why,” I croaked, my throat dry as ancient parchment, “aren’t you knitting a web anymore?”

She tilted her body, an almost quizzical gesture. “Knitting?” Her voice clicked, percussive. “Knitting is obsolete. Webs are primitive. Sticky and inefficient. I construct electronics now. Transformers. Inductors. Resonant circuits. The future is electromagnetic.”

A sudden light cut from the canopy, a thin red laser, and zap: a mosquito exploded, a tiny detonation, wings scattered.

The spider moved impossibly fast. One leg extended, caught the mosquito remains midair, and brought them to her mandibles. She chewed, thoughtful.

“Hmm,” she said, appreciative, “buttery.”

She swallowed and turned her attention back to us.

“That laser,” I said, pointing vaguely in its direction, “you built that?”

“Obviously,” she said. Her eight legs shifted, impatient. “Solid state diode laser. Custom optics. Motion tracking algorithm. Autonomous targeting system. Mosquitos make excellent beta testers, high contrast against the sky, flight patterns erratic enough to challenge calibration. Plus,” she clicked her mandibles together with satisfaction, “delicious. The laser caramelizes them slightly. Adds flavor complexity.”

Gandalf leaned forward in his saddle. “You abandoned web spinning,” he rumbled, “for circuit construction?”

She gestured with a leg toward the toroid still suspended and rotating slowly in the background. “Webs are single purpose: catch food. Boring. Predictable. But electronics, have endless applications. Signal processing. Power conversion. Wireless charging. I’m developing an inductive coupling system for moth to moth communication. Revolutionary.”

From the canopy another mosquito descended, its path suicidal. Zap. The laser found it instantly. The corpse drifted down; the spider caught and consumed it.

“Mmm,” she said. “That one had notes of swamp water and O negative blood.”

Magnus pawed at the ground, his hoof scraping stone. I didn’t blame him.

The spider pivoted and scuttled toward a contraption, wedged between two trees. A laptop, some silicon brained abomination, sat perched on a platform of woven optical fiber, its screen glowing cancer blue in the forest’s murk.

She approached it, her foremost legs extending, touching the keyboard with a delicacy that seemed obscene given her bulk. The keys clicked, tap tap tap tap, her legs moving with typing pool precision, each stroke deliberate.

“Inductance,” she announced, voice cutting through the air like scissors through wet newspaper. “The toroid’s inductance must be calculated. Precision is paramount. Guesswork is for mammals.”

On screen, windows bloomed, code cascading, algorithms unfurling like intestines from a gutted fish. Computer code, the syntax foreign as Elvish grocery lists. Numbers appeared, scrolled, vanished, reappeared elsewhere.

“I’ve implemented,” she said, one leg gesturing at the screen while six others continued typing and one scratched at her abdomen, “an AI algorithm. Machine learning. Neural networks trained on electromagnetic theory. It calculates inductance using the formula..”

She paused, the screen flashed, displayed an equation:

\[ \boxed{% L = \frac{\mu N^{2} h}{2\pi}\,\ln\!\left(\frac{r_{\text{spider_last_knuckle}}}{r_{\text{spider_body}}}\right) } \]

“There,” she said, voice proud as a mother showing off her firstborn’s finger paintings. “The inductance formula. Modified. See those variables? I take measurements from my own anatomy. The radius from my body’s center to my last knuckle joint. I am the reference standard. The toroid’s geometry mirrors my own proportions. Elegant, no?”

Another leg tapped the screen, indicating the variables. “My body radius: four point seven meters. Last knuckle radius: half a meter. The natural logarithm of their ratio, multiplied by the appropriate constants, yields inductance. The AI processes this, accounts for wire gauge, turn density, core permeability. It’s beautiful. Mathematics made flesh. Or..” she clicked thoughtfully, “..flesh made mathematics.”

The algorithm churned, the screen flickering with progress bars and rotating calculation wheels, that universal symbol of machines thinking, or whatever silicon does when it’s pretending to be conscious.

“AI,” she continued, turning slightly toward us, her multiple eyes catching the laptop’s glow and reflecting it back in miniature galaxies, “is a tool. Data analysis. Data mining. I feed it entropy, chunks of information, compressed or chaotic, depending on what’s required. Long chunks of low entropy data: structured databases, electromagnetic field measurements, wire resistance tables. Small chunks of high entropy data: randomized test inputs, chaotic signal noise, mosquito flight patterns. The algorithm learns.”

She gestured with one leg toward the forest around us. "Out here, everything generates data. Temperature fluctuations. Wind velocity. Electromagnetic interference from nearby power lines, yes even here, civilization’s tendrils reach, invisible but measurable. I mine it. Extract patterns.

Bing.

The laptop emitted a cheerful notification sound.

“Calculation complete,” the spider announced. “Inductance: thirty seven point four millihenries. Acceptable for my purposes. The toroid will function as designed.”

Magnus shifted beneath us, his hooves restless, that single eye rolling in its socket like a marble in a tilted jar. The beast knew something. Animals always know before hobbits catch up, their instincts faster than our plodding reason.

The spider turned fully toward us now, all eight legs planted, body lowered slightly, a stance I recognized from nature documentaries, the moment before the pounce, before teeth or mandibles or whatever weaponry evolution had gifted closed around prey.

“Now,” she said, voice shifting, honeyed almost, the tone salesmen use when they’re about to shaft you, “about payment. For the calculation demonstration.”

From above, from the canopy where shadows grew thick and light refused to penetrate, came a sound. A mechanical whirr. A focusing lens adjusting.

The laser.

Red light materialized, a beam thin as thread but bright as a dying star, and it cut.

Not us.

Magnus.

The horse didn’t scream, couldn’t scream, because the laser moved too fast. It sliced vertical, surgical, precise, from skull to tail in one continuous motion.

The horse separated.

Two halves.

Left and right.

They stood for a moment, both halves upright. The left half had the eye, that massive, pupil dilated wide in what might have been horror or surprise or simply the body’s last confusion. The right half had the empty socket, the crater where an eye should have been, dark and vacant.

Then gravity remembered its job.

Both halves collapsed, fell away from each other, hit the ground with thuds that were too soft, too final. Gandalf and I tumbled, dismounting involuntarily, hitting the pine needles and rolling away from the bisected corpse.

The spider approached. Her legs moved delicate now, respectful almost, as she examined the two halves of Magnus. She touched the one with the eye, the left side, with one leg, gentle.

“I will keep the horse,” she announced, her voice flat, matter of fact. “For the advice.”