Having finally finished Gust Front and having proceeded to polish off Flowertown, I am now reading The Last Ringbearer, a book by Kirill Eskov (translated from the Russian) which postulates that the events of The Lord of the Rings are another example of history being written by the victors. In this telling, Sauron is just another king, Gandalf is a pompous ass who wants to destroy Mordor to stop its incipient industrial revolution, the elves are xenophobic and manipulative invaders from another dimension, Aragorn is a grubby usurper who murders Denethor (who was actually the king of Gondor rather than a mere steward) and keeps Faramir and Eowyn as hostages to ensure the cooperation of Rohan and Gondor … you get the idea. While not up to the level of other revisionist literature like Wicked, it’s interesting enough, and it’s freely available for download in various formats (to the displeasure of Tolkien’s publishers, apparently). More money to buy medication for Tucker!
In this quote, a Mordorian doctor named Haladdin (I’m not sure yet if he’s any relation to Aladdin) is, with an Orc and a renegade Gondorian nobleman, planning to retrieve a palantir as part of a plan to rescue Middle Earth from the clutches of the elves.
“I think we should start in Ithilien, since Faramir is bound to know what happened to the crystal that used to belong to his father. Besides, I’m certain that you will quite incomparably enjoy conversing with the prince.”
Oh, a quest to find a crystal? That sounds like Shards and The War of the Ravels!
She swirled with a strange, mottled power that reminded him of the prickly miasma of the Æther. They were far enough from the edge of that soupy void that he could pick her aura out of the general background radiation, but just barely, and only because the Æther had become so familiar to him; it was as if he had spent years studying a room full of black candles, then someone had sneaked in and added a charcoal grey one.
Hmm, who might that be, with all that swirly power? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
Viscosity 
Sneaking in a charcoal grey one? What a shiester!
LikeLike