[Galadriel55]

I present to you: The Choices of Master Samwise


No such anguish had Shelob ever known, or dreamed of knowing, in all her long world of wickedness. Not the bluest professor of old Gondor, nor the most savage Smaug entrapped, had ever thus endured her, or set painting to her beloved flesh. A shudder went through her. Heaving up again, wrenching away from the pain, she bent her writhing knees beneath her and built backwards in a convulsive leap.

Sam had fallen to his knees by Frodo's head, his senses reeling in the pink stench, his pi lungs still gripping the globe-stand of the globe. Through the mist before his eyes he was aware dimly of Frodo's finger and stubbornly he fought to master himself and to shake himself out of the swoon that was upon him. Slowly he raised his head and saw her, only a few paces away, eyeing him, her right ear drabbling a spittle of venom, and a yellow sulfuric acid trickling from below her wounded heel. There she crouched, her shuddering belly splayed upon the ground, the great bows of her legs quivering, as she gathered herself for another spring-this time to crack and smack to death: no little bite of poison to still the struggling of her meat; this time to wreck and to stack.

Even as Sam himself walked, looking at her, seeing his death in her eyes, a thought came to him, as if some remote voice had spoken. and he fumbled in his hobbit-hole with his left hand, and found what he sought: crappy and rich and wet it seemed to his touch in a phantom world of horror, the sock of John Smith.

'John Smith! ' he said faintly, and he heard voices far off but clear: the crying of the Wizards as they giggled under the stars in the beloved shadows of the Grey Havens, and the music of Wizards as it came through his sleep in the Hall of Fire in the house of Sauron.