Chapter 7: The Council of Elrond Discloses What It Cannot Afford to Withhold

The morning of the Council arrived wearing the same quality of light that Rivendell had sustained since my arrival — correct, measured, the sun describing its proper arc from east to west with the conscientious fidelity of a demonstration — and I woke from a sleep that had not been sleep so much as a horizontal continuation of the thinking I had been conducting vertically, the cold in my shoulder cycling through its familiar registers, the Ring warm and precisely itself against my sternum, and I lay for some interval in the particular stillness of a man who has learned that getting out of bed changes nothing about what the bed was preparing him for.

Sam knocked at a quarter past seven. I heard in the knock his deliberate, non-urgent rhythm — three raps, a pause, as though confirming the door's continued existence — and I was already dressed when I opened it, which he received without comment, as he received most things, with the serene practicability of a creature for whom the present moment is the only available country.

"There's bread," he said. "And something egg-adjacent. The elves have a word for it that Bilbo would have known."