Last night we dreamed of holding it again. The weight of it. The warmth. It spoke to us, precious, whispered secrets only we could hear. Five hundred years we held it, wore it, treasured it—and now it lives only in dreams.
It was on our finger again. We could feel the gold pressing into our pale flesh, so comfortable, so right. The world grew dim around us, as it always did when the Precious came awake. Shadows lengthened. Secrets opened like flowers in the dark.
"What do you see, my love?" it asked us. Its voice was honey and smoke. "What do you want to know?"
We told it everything. Our fears. Our hungers. The places where the Bagginses hid. It showed us pathways through stone, ways to slide between spaces where others could not follow. It made us powerful. It made us whole.
Then we woke.
And our hand was empty.
The ache of that emptiness stays with us still, hours after waking. We clutches our own fingers, trying to remember how it felt. The smooth inner surface. The elvish script that glowed when hot, faded when cold. Our birthday present. Our precious.
Sometimes we wonders if we imagined it all. If the Ring was ever real, or just a madness that ate our mind. But no—we remembers too clearly. The taste of blood in the water when we took it. The centuries of whispers. The way it showed us things, learned us secrets.
The way it betrayed us at the end. Abandoned us for the Bagginses. Let itself be destroyed rather than return to our hand.
That is the cruelest memory: that the Precious chose. It had will. It wanted, schemed, planned—and in the end, it chose burning over staying with us.
But in dreams, it still loves us. In dreams, it returns.
We does not want to wake anymore. We wants to sleep forever, to live in that golden darkness where we was powerful, where we was loved, where we was whole.
Is that so wrong, precious? To want the only thing that ever made us real?