Gandalf had never once mistaken himself for brave.
Courage, to him, had always looked like a pleasant lie other people told about themselves so they could sleep. A story told with enough conviction that the teller believed it—until the world tested them and the story snapped.
He did not possess it. He had said so plainly—more than once, and with the earnestness of a man trying to stop a tragedy before it began—to Manwë, Lord of the Valar, whose halls were so bright and clean that fear felt like a stain.
"I am not the sort for danger," Gandalf had insisted. "I am not built for it. The very thought of it makes me sick."
"And that," Manwë had replied each time, calm as weather, "is exactly why you must go."
It sounded like madness. It was madness. Gandalf had turned the sentence over and over in his mind like a stone, hunting for the hidden edge—some divine reasoning he could grip. Why would fear recommend him? Why would trembling qualify him? He had even hoped, privately and shamelessly, that Manwë had misunderstood. That some careless confession had been mistaken for humility rather than what it truly was: dread.
But the will of the Valar did not bend to clarification.
So Gandalf was sent.
He crossed the Sea alongside Saruman, Radagast, and the two Blues—charged with a mission grand enough to belong in prophecy and stupid enough to belong in a drunkard's dare. They spoke of Sauron as if he were an errand. As if capturing a dark god and hauling him home in chains was the sort of thing you did before supper.
Gandalf listened and felt his stomach hollow.
He did not arrive in Middle-earth like a hero setting out on a noble quest. He arrived like a man shoved toward a cliff with his hands tied, told to fly, and promised it would all make sense on the way down.
The moment his boots touched the dock at the Grey Havens, the world confirmed every ugly suspicion he'd ever had.
Middle-earth smelled like wet wood and fish and honest labor. Salt wind. Tar. Rope. Bodies that had sweated all day. There were no clean marble floors here, no light that obeyed, no halls that made your fear feel obscene. Just gulls screaming, sailors cursing, crates being hauled, and the dull, grinding truth that this land ran on calluses and mud.
And it wasn't even the danger that hit him first.
It was the primitive misery of it.
No airships. No gleaming roads. No effortless comfort. People walked everywhere like beasts of burden, over bumpy tracks that passed for roads. They shat in pits. They bathed when they remembered. They lived in homes that stank of smoke and damp straw and called it normal.
To someone who had spent his existence in Valinor—where even the air felt filtered, where food arrived as if the world were eager to please—this place was an insult.
He stood on the dock with the sea behind him and the land ahead, and something inside him made a simple, humiliating click.
I can't do this.
Not the mission. Not the land. Not the discomfort. Not the idea of marching east into darkness to "capture Sauron" like he was some fugitive thief. It wasn't heroic terror. It wasn't noble reluctance. It was pure, selfish refusal.
And Radagast—dragged into this assignment the way a quiet child is thrown out of a warm house into rain—felt it too. Gandalf saw it in the slump of his shoulders, in the way his eyes drifted away from the horizon as if already looking for somewhere softer.
When Saruman confronted them, it wasn't with kindness. Saruman had never believed in kindness as a tool.
"Well?" Saruman demanded. "Are you coming?"
Gandalf tried to speak. Tried to dress the truth in reason. Tried to make cowardice sound like strategy.
But Saruman heard the rot under the words.
He spat—right onto the dock, close enough that the spray flecked Gandalf's boots—and looked at him with open contempt.
"Coward," he said. Not dramatic. Not angry. Just certain. Then he turned and walked away with the Blue Wizards at his side, leaving Gandalf and Radagast standing in the wind like men who had just watched the last ship out of a sinking city.
That was the moment they split.
Gandalf told himself he would follow in a day. In a week. After he learned the roads. After he gathered supplies. After he gathered information. After he did anything that would make him feel less like a frightened child pretending to be a messenger of gods.
But the West was comfortable enough. Safe enough. And safety, Gandalf learned, is a drug.
He and Radagast lasted only a short while before they began causing trouble—because they were immortal, bored, and arrogant, and they assumed the world would bend like Valinor did. It didn't. They stole. They cheated. They mouthed off. They acted like entitled parasites in a place that had no patience for it.
The Elves of the Havens arrested them.
Not for a night. Not for a week.
For a century.
A hundred years of cells and humiliation and lectures from beings who could afford to be righteous. A hundred years of being reminded—daily—that Middle-earth did not care who you were supposed to be. It cared what you did. And what Gandalf had done was nothing but make problems.
By the time they were released they were poor, penniless, and directionless, shoved back into the world without guidance or welcome. They walked out of the Grey Havens like two beggars who had outlived their own importance.
And they did what fearful people do best.
They stayed where it was safe.
At first Gandalf called it temporary. A season to learn the land. A year to gather knowledge. A decade, perhaps, to build a plan so clever that it would excuse the fact he still hadn't gone east.
But Middle-earth was wide, and time—when you do not age—becomes a slippery joke. Days turned into years with the ease of a story told over firelight. Years bled into decades. Decades into centuries.
And still Gandalf did not go.
Instead, he and Radagast lived small lives, the way men do when they decide not to examine their own souls too closely. They wandered green places where danger was still mostly rumor. They drank in taverns where the worst threat was a brawl and a bad stew. They learned the rhythms of common folk—the predictable greed of innkeepers, the lies told over dice, the way laughter can smother guilt if you feed it enough ale.
They worked when they had to. Plowed fields. Hauled stone. Helped raise bridges and walls and cottages. Sang songs for coin. Told stories for supper. And when gambling pulled them under—as it always did—they did what they were best at: they ran.
At one point, in a stretch of years Gandalf later pretended not to remember, they even became bandits.
Not romantic ones. Not noble outlaws. Thieves with knives and hungry eyes, taking from travelers because it was easier than being honest. They got good at it. Legendary, even—until the Rangers came, calm and relentless, and the legend ended the way all such legends do: with blood, broken teeth, and another desperate flight into the wild.
They fled into Mirkwood.
And there, Radagast—already half unmoored, already drifting—finally slipped loose from everything that had ever been asked of him. He found mushrooms. Found silence. Found the edge of the deep forest where the trees pressed close like walls and the world smelled of rot and green life.
He discovered what he insisted was his true calling: animals.
Not eagles. Not wolves. Not beasts worthy of songs. Ordinary creatures. Soft, stupid, quick to trust.
Rabbits most of all. Rhosgobel rabbits—bigger, hardier cousins.
He collected them the way a lonely man collects comfort. Fed them. Named them. Built shelters for them with reverent care. Spoke to them as if they were wiser than kings. When anyone mentioned duty, he blinked as if hearing a word in a forgotten language and returned to stroking fur with devotional focus.
Gandalf helped for a time.
Then he got tired of sleeping on dirt, tired of eating like an animal, tired of pretending that living like a woodland hermit was spiritual. He left Radagast behind with his rabbits and his mushrooms and his slow fade into irrelevance, and slipped back into the world of men—because men had taverns, and taverns had warm beds, and warm beds were closer to Valinor than cold soil would ever be.
By then enough time had passed that most had forgotten him again.
Gandalf became very good at being no one.
He learned accents and faces the way some men learn prayer. He learned how to vanish by acting as if he belonged. He played the wandering sage when it earned him respect, and the harmless fool when it kept knives out of his back. He sang in smoky rooms for applause and coin. He smiled at strangers like an old friend and walked away with their money.
And he discovered—quietly, to his shame—that he had a gift for gambling.
Cards. Dice. Underground wagers. Jousts and archery contests where men bet their last coins on heroes they barely knew. Gandalf watched, listened, read people with quick eyes and a softer voice. He could coax men into mistakes with a sympathetic tilt of the head. His hands stayed steady. His tongue stayed sweet.
He won.
And somehow he was always in debt anyway, because he never learned when to stop.
It was almost impressive. He could talk his way into riches and talk his way into trouble in the same breath. Tavern owners began to recognize him not by name, but by the strained politeness men wear when they are deciding whether to throw someone out or bury them.
There were moments—brief, sharp ones—when guilt pierced him.
A rumor from the East. A caravan that never arrived. A village gone quiet after an orc raid. Whispers of a dark sorcerer in the North—the Witch-king—raising a fortress that could threaten Arnor itself.
In those moments, Gandalf would feel Manwë's command like a hand closing on the back of his neck.
Go.
Do something.
Be useful.
And Gandalf would look down at his empty purse, think of cold roads and hard beds and arrows in the dark, and the old cowardice would rise like bile.
How could a man who struggled to pay for a night's stay in an inn be some great savior?
Then he would laugh too loudly, call for another drink, and throw himself back into noise until the feeling dulled.
So for centuries, Gandalf accomplished nothing.
Not because he couldn't.
Because he wouldn't.
---
So for centuries, Gandalf accomplished nothing.
Not because he couldn't.
Because he wouldn't.
That was the truth of it, stripped of poetry and excuse. While others shaped the fate of Middle-earth with fire, steel, or sacrifice, he drifted. He lived off small tricks and smaller comforts, moving from town to town like a man who had misplaced his own purpose and decided it wasn't worth the trouble of looking for it.
It was a sad life, and he knew it.
Then, in the year 1635, the world broke in a way that did not require bravery to exploit.
The Great Dancing Sickness swept across Middle-earth like a curse no one could name and no one could control. It did not come with fever or rot. It came with motion. With compulsion. With bodies turning against their owners.
It spread through sight and sound—through proximity, through crowds, through the simple human mistake of looking too long at another person's suffering. Those afflicted began to move: jerking, spinning, shuddering, convulsing in grotesque parody of celebration. Some laughed while they cried. Some sang as they danced, voice breaking, eyes begging for help even as their legs kept going.
They danced until their bodies failed beneath them.
They danced themselves to death.
At first, it was a curiosity. A handful of peasants stumbling in strange rhythms in a roadside square. People watched, uncertain whether to pity or mock.
Then it multiplied.
Villages. Towns. Cities.
The sickness spared no rank or age. Farmers and lords, soldiers and scholars, mothers and children—everybody was reduced to the same humiliating end: twitching limbs, shredded feet, broken throats, hearts that finally gave out under the relentless demand to move.
There was an uglier cruelty to it, too.
Many danced badly and sang even worse, and families—too ashamed to admit that their loved one's final hours were spent shrieking nonsense—carved the last words into gravestones anyway. Whole rows of markers began to read like a filthy choir's chorus.
Oh baby baby baby—
and I was like, baby baby—
Farms were abandoned. Roads clogged with corpses locked in unnatural poses. Streets became cemeteries. Even babies flailed in their cribs, tiny limbs jerking until exhaustion killed them.
Middle-earth staggered, emptied out in patches—not by war, not by plague, but by an epidemic of frantic movement that burned people alive from the inside out.
And the only cure anyone truly trusted was death.
Preferably fire.
Gandalf watched it all with the blank, steady gaze of a man realizing something important.
He was… mostly immune.
Not untouched—he felt it like a pressure sometimes, a tug at the edges of his limbs when music carried too far, when crowds moved in the wrong pattern. But it never took him. Never seized his muscles and owned them.
He didn't understand why.
He didn't waste time being grateful.
He did what he had always done best: he survived.
He looted the dead, picked through empty houses, took coins from stiff hands, drank untouched wine while corpses cooled in the next room. He told himself it was practical. He told himself he deserved it. He told himself whatever he needed to hear to keep eating well while the world burned.
Then he came upon the Shire.
The hobbits were different.
Not untouched—the sickness reached them too—but diminished in its effect, as if the curse itself struggled to take them seriously. They were hardy in their own way. Stubborn. Built for long, lazy movement. Built to shuffle and sway and keep going without panic. And they were, most importantly, terrible singers.
The sickness could still catch them, but it didn't take them as fast. It didn't tear through them with the same cruel efficiency. The Shire bent, but it did not collapse immediately.
And when Gandalf stepped into their green, foolish little world, they trusted him.
They always trusted him.
Something inside him—old greed, old hunger, the same desperate craving for comfort that had driven him to taverns and cards for centuries—clicked into place.
Here.
Here was a people who did not threaten him.
Here was a population incapable of inspiring fear.
Short. Soft-bodied. Generous to a fault. Eager for guidance. Eager for protection. Eager for someone taller to tell them the world would be alright.
An easy people.
A people even someone like him could rule.
When the sickness reached Hobbiton in force, Gandalf did not hesitate.
Under the guise of mercy and safety, the afflicted were gathered—calmly, gently, with soothing words and promises of help—into a large communal pit on the outskirts of town.
They danced there.
For days.
Hobbits stood around the rim with tear-streaked faces. Some threw sticks. Some threw nuts. Anything to keep the dancers moving. Anything to feed the fire that was coming. It became an awful ritual: the sick moving and singing themselves raw while their neighbors watched and pretended it was kindness.
Then, when the dancing bodies finally began to fail—when legs buckled and throats bled and the singing became thin and animal—the hobbits said their goodbyes.
And they burned the pit.
Conveniently, Gandalf had made sure the Shire's leadership was "safely escorted" into that same pit.
He called it unfortunate.
He called it necessary.
He did not call it what it was.
When the smoke cleared, the Shire had a vacuum where authority used to be, and grief is the best tool in the world for reshaping people. While they were still dazed and mourning, Gandalf stepped forward with soft eyes and steady hands and offered what they wanted most:
Order.
There was a vote. Simple. Almost comforting. A familiar little ritual to replace the one they had just completed with fire.
Gandalf was appointed Mayor—temporarily, he assured them—until stability could be restored.
Stability, however, is a word that stretches as far as you pull it.
Within the year, the Shire's political framework was "reorganized." Councils dissolved. Offices merged. Authority centralized. All in the name of peace, safety, and freedom from the horrors beyond their borders.
Years passed.
Men to the east fought and died and failed. Arnor finally fell to the Witch-king. The world beyond the Shire grew darker and hungrier, and that darkness became Gandalf's favorite argument.
Look at what happens when you trust outsiders, he told them.
Look at what happens when you leave yourselves exposed.
And the hobbits—small, frightened, eager for certainty—listened.
So Gandalf sealed the Shire.
He declared it independent. The first true kingdom of hobbits alone, free from the failures of Men and the corruption of other races. A sanctuary. A holy land.
And because hobbits did not merely want a king—they wanted a guarantee—Gandalf gave them something bigger.
He became their God-King.
Not metaphorically. Not as a ceremonial joke. Literally. Political authority and spiritual authority fused into one figure in grey robes who promised safety like a sacrament. They worshipped him because he brought them techniques they did not understand: better storage, better crop rotation, better systems of labor and distribution. No one starved. Food became plentiful. Life became ordered.
And when people are fed, they forgive almost anything.
Expansion followed. Breeding intensified. Polygamy became policy, framed as duty. Labor hardened into discipline, framed as pride. Prosperity—narrowly defined—flourished.
As Men, Elves, and Dwarves faded from the western lands, as whole stretches of countryside emptied under war and curse and fear, Gandalf seized the opportunity with both hands. He pushed borders outward. Resettled abandoned land with hobbit families. Built roads and granaries and watchposts. Built a quiet, expanding empire of small people who believed themselves part of something grand.
One nation.
One people.
One ruler.
A god who had saved them from dancing madness and promised they would never be powerless again.
One nation.
One people.
One ruler.
A god who had saved them from dancing madness and promised they would never be powerless again.
Gandalf sat at the center of it all—unchallenged, adored, and, most importantly, housed in a castle raised for him on Shire soil. Stone where there had once been nothing but hedgerows. Towers where there had once been wind. A seat of power planted into the belly of a land that had never wanted power in the first place.
For the first time in his long, cowardly existence, Gandalf felt it settle into him with warm, greedy certainty:
He had won.
Then he looked at his kingdom and saw the rot under the gold.
The Shire was peaceful because it was small. It was safe because nobody worth fearing had bothered to swallow it yet. Hobbits were hardy in their own quiet way, yes—but in war? In conquest? In the hard arithmetic of the world beyond their hills?
They were weak.
And weak kingdoms are invitations.
If the Shire was to survive, it could not remain a garden. It had to become something harder. Something proper. Something that could defend itself without Gandalf needing to personally stand on a wall throwing spells like a lunatic.
So he did what Saruman would later do with Isengard—only cleaner, gentler, wrapped in hymns and smiles.
He industrialized them.
Years passed after his claim, and with years came progress—then noise—then smoke. The rolling green of the Shire did not vanish overnight. It was shaved down slowly, like an animal being skinned while it still breathes. What had once been scattered farms became planned fields. What had once been family herds became vast livestock operations, driven not by need but by hunger for coin.
Because Gandalf taught them coin.
He taught them that money meant importance. That importance meant safety. That safety meant virtue. And, conveniently, that virtue came with taxes.
At first the hobbits didn't understand the idea of a kingdom. They hadn't been raised on banners or borders. They hadn't been taught to think in terms of "ours" and "theirs" beyond the petty fences of neighborly disputes.
But Gandalf understood hobbits.
He did not demand grandeur. He offered protection.
He promised peace. He framed obedience as safety, and safety as holiness. He made it plain to every trembling hearth that there were Orcs beyond the Shire's borders—creatures with knives and hunger and no respect for small lives.
And it wasn't even a lie.
There were Orcs. There were wargs. They came sometimes in the night and snatched the careless—lonely travelers, drunkards, children who wandered too far from lantern-light. The Shire had always been sheltered by geography and indifference, but the world was shifting. Darkness was spreading. The old borders were thinning.
So walls went up. Guard towers followed. Fortifications became common enough that hobbits stopped noticing how unnatural stone looked in their gentle land.
Within a generation, the word kingdom no longer sounded strange in hobbit mouths.
Within two, it sounded normal.
Outside the Shire, the world thinned and broke apart.
The ruins of Arnor sat like dead teeth in the hills. Roads grew quiet. Villages emptied. Men became scattered bands clinging to half-remembered flags. Elves withdrew as if ashamed of the age. Dwarves sealed doors that had once been open. The West grew ragged, hollowed out by time and terror.
And the Shire—strangely spared the worst of the plague's aftermath—kept growing.
Industry followed hunger.
They tried mines, briefly. The Shire was poor in natural resources, and the open pits mostly achieved one thing: they chewed scars into the land and returned disappointment. So they pivoted to what hobbits did best—farming, craftsmanship, and trade. They exported food. Wool. Leather. Simple tools. Anything that could be turned into coin. They became a small machine that fed on its own output.
It began with mills.
Then larger herds.
Then furnaces—once iron began to arrive through trade.
Then smoke that didn't fade after rain.
The fields remained, but they no longer belonged to families. They belonged to names—hobbits who grew rich enough to stop thinking of themselves as ordinary. Houses emerged, fattened by ownership and labor, swelling into something that looked suspiciously like nobility.
In Gandalf's Shire, nobility was not ancient blood.
It was acquisition.
Land gained through "hard work," yes—also through luck, cruelty, and the quiet violence of legal paperwork. But Gandalf didn't sell it as greed. He sold it as merit. He built a system where anyone could rise—in theory—if they had the will and the cunning.
In practice, five families rose faster than all the rest.
Five great houses controlled the Shire.
Not by accident. Not by tradition. By design.
Each held vast stretches of land, the majority of the mills, the storehouses, the workshops, the labor contracts. Each ruled a region as a feudal extension of Gandalf's will, their authority leased rather than owned. They built small castles—not fortresses, never that—but stone residences tall enough to be seen and small enough to be humbled. Each paid tribute upward and received legitimacy in return.
The system was elegant.
In the South, the Hornblowers prospered.
They found wealth where Gandalf expected it to be found: in cloth, and in bodies.
The Stoor Hobbits—darker-skinned, hairier, broader—had always been regarded as slightly apart, their difference politely ignored until it became convenient. Under Hornblower management, difference hardened into policy. Lord Toby Hornblower transformed the southern reaches into an engine: cotton fields planted in perfect grids, spinning sheds running day and night, barracks where entire families slept in shifts to maximize output.
Hands split. Backs curved permanently. Children learned discipline before play.
The Shire called it employment.
The Stoors called it survival.
Hornblower cloth was soft enough to impress Men who had never seen the fields. Blankets reached Gondor. Fine garments passed through hands that praised Hobbit craftsmanship while never asking how it was achieved.
The Hornblowers dined well.
Their workers died in mud.
To the West, the Brandybucks chose indulgence.
Doradoc Brandybuck understood that comfort pacified as effectively as force. Breweries, wine cellars, rich bread soaked in alcohol—Brandy Hall became a symbol of continuity in an age of collapse. Guests were welcomed. Tables were full. Stories were told. Suffering was acknowledged with sympathetic nods and then politely ignored.
Their estates were immaculate.
Their conscience required little maintenance.
In the East, the Bolgers remained poor, stubbornly devoted to old rhythms. Pipe-weed, hunting, herding, small farms. They resisted machines and were quietly punished for it—not openly, not brutally, just by being left behind.
Gandalf allowed it.
He enjoyed their pipe-weed.
That was the full extent of his mercy. Utility determined tolerance. The Bolgers were useful, therefore permitted. Nothing more was required.
But it was the Tooks who made the Shire powerful.
They did not dominate land or labor. They dominated flow.
Their banking houses extended like roots beneath every other family—through debts, investments, guarantees. Took gold reached Men, especially Gondor, and returned multiplied. They financed mercenaries, expeditions, "private ventures" that destabilized regions just enough to make further loans necessary.
War enriched them.
Instability enriched them more.
The Shire admired Took cleverness as if manipulation were proof of intelligence.
Gandalf did nothing to stop it.
Why would he?
The Tooks expanded his influence without requiring him to leave his seat. Their reach became his reach. Their risks were never his.
And above them all—above Hornblower cruelty, Brandybuck comfort, Bolger stubbornness, Took calculation—stood Gandalf's castle.
It dominated the center of the Shire, rising where hedgerows once grew. No structure was permitted to rival it. This was law. Not because height mattered, but because symbolism did.
Hierarchy had to be visible.
Every morning, every road, every trade route led the eye back to him.
The family closest to his favor were the Bagginses of the North.
They did not adapt to the new Shire. They accelerated it.
They claimed the ruins of Annúminas without hesitation, treating the bones of a dead kingdom of Men as raw material. Forests fell. Rivers were redirected. Furnaces were embedded in ancient stone. The Bagginses produced metalwork the Shire had never known and mills that turned grain into profit with alarming speed.
They also produced soldiers.
The First Royal Guard Legion of the Shire bore little resemblance to the rustic militias of old. These Hobbits were drilled into precision. Their armor gleamed. Their short spears locked into walls nearly impossible to break. Their discipline made them terrifying—not because they were large, but because they believed.
They believed they were chosen.
Gandalf approved.
He enjoyed that the world laughed at Hobbits—until Hobbits broke it.
That was the engine beneath everything: humiliation refined into ideology. The Shire would never be overlooked again. Never mocked. Never small.
If some Hobbits suffered along the way—if Stoors bled, if dissenters vanished, if the weak were worked to dust—then that was the arithmetic of greatness.
He called it destiny.
He called it necessity.
He called it the future.
In truth, it was fear stabilized into governance.
The Shire expanded. Borders crept into abandoned lands. Population increased by policy. Breeding was encouraged, then organized. Labor hardened into doctrine. Prosperity—carefully measured—flourished.
Caravans rolled daily. Cloth, pipe-weed, wine, salted pork, bread soaked in alcohol. Cigarettes harsher than any old pipe-weed dulled minds and throats alike. Potions circulated promising strength, beauty, desire—always desire. Trade brought back metals and stone, which became tools, then weapons, then more walls.
And always, more stone for the castle.
It grew every year.
Inside its halls lived Gandalf's servants—Hobbit women chosen for beauty and usefulness, housed close and guarded closer. They cleaned. They arranged. They decorated. They were not touched.
Not because of virtue.
Because possession without indulgence was control at its purest.
They were ornaments. Proof of dominance. Like banners or jewels.
The Shire never rested.
Industry replaced barter. Coin replaced memory. Work became worship. And worship became law.
Every year, on the first day of the year, every Hobbit knelt toward the castle.
One hour.
Silent.
The gray enforcers watched.
Gandalf observed it all from above, smoke curling through the air, machines humming, thousands of small bodies bent in reverence.
From his perspective, everything was working.
The East was distant. Sauron was contained by time, rumor, and other people's courage. The Shire was safe. Ordered. Predictable.
He slept well.
Then the summons came.
A sealed message. Old script. A name he had hoped would fade into irrelevance.
Saruman.
The words were polite.
The meaning was not.
A meeting. A council. Matters that could not be ignored.
Gandalf read it twice, then a third time, and felt the old sickness return—the cold at the back of the neck, the instinct to find an excuse, a delay, a way to stay where the walls were thick and the danger theoretical.
He did not want to go.
He did not want to leave his kingdom, his rituals, his quiet certainties. He did not want to sit across from a man who still believed the world demanded courage.
Everything here was good.
Everything here was safe.
And that was precisely why Saruman's call frightened him more than any army ever had.