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By Root 927 0

function have been so far ahead of his time as to fall out of scientific context and be forgotten. Only three centuries later did the medics of the Ithilien School come across his works while searching for ancient antidotes. It became clear then that Haladdin had beaten the famous Vespuno by more than a hundred years; not only did he prove experimentally the electric nature of axon stimulation, but he also predicted the existence of neurotransmitters, and even modeled how they should work. Unfortunately, only historians are interested in the 'who was there first' kind of things; the scientific community has no use for this information. In any event Haladdin's last known work is dated year 3016 of the Third Age and the official version is that he perished during the War of the Ring.

Let's go back to Tzerlag, whose historicity is beyond doubt. As is known, the occupation of Mordor ended (suddenly and inexplicably) by the winter of 3020, and life there started slowly getting back to normal. The population of the cities had suffered tremendous losses (strictly speaking, the Mordorian civilization had not fully recovered since then), but the nomads have mostly avoided those tribulations. The sergeant used to say that a real man whose hands grow from the right place (rather than out of his butt) will come out on top whatever the situation, and proved this maxim with his entire life. After returning to his home grounds, he ended up the founder of a large and powerful clan, which had preserved the tale of his journeys in its oral tradition, as is customary with nomadic peoples.

Incidentally, the fate of the other sergeant, Runcorn, was almost the same as Tzerlag's, aside from the fact that the ex-ranger lived on the other side of the Mountains of Shadow in the valley of the Otter Creek, rather than on the Morgai plateau. The hamlet he built under a strange name Lianica had grown into a regular village in only five years. When his little son found the first gold nugget in Ithilien in the creek's gravel bed, the neighbors only shrugged: money always attracts money. Had he and the Orocuen met in their old age, undoubtedly they would have put their Mirkwood debates about the comparative advantages of dark beer and kumiss to a practical test, but it was not to be.

Tzerlag had decided to return the mithril coat to Haladdin's girl together with the tale of his vanished friend's heroic achievement. But Kumai had perished, and the scout himself knew nothing of the girl beside the name Sonya (very common among Trolls) and vague knowledge of her participation in the Resistance, so all his efforts to locate her failed. The despairing Orocuen then decided that he and his clan were the keepers rather than the owners of the artifact (the nomads' punctiliousness in those matters is truly without limit). The sergeant's great-great-grandson ended up turning it over (together with the associated headaches) to the Núrnen History Museum, where anyone can see it today together with the other relics of the mysterious Mordorian civilization. At this point the apologist for the legend might say: "Aha! Isn't the coat of mail proof enough for you?" The grave and absolutely correct answer would be that the coat proves nothing even within Tzerlag's narrative, since Haladdin had obtained it before receiving the nazgúl's ring.

By the way, concerning mithril… There is a total of four such coats of mail in the museums of Arda, but the technology of their manufacture remains a mystery. If you want your metallurgist friend to throw something heavy at your head, ask him about this alloy. It's been analyzed to death: 86% silver, 12% nickel, plus trace amounts of nine rare metals from vanadium to niobium; they can measure these proportions to the ninth digit after the decimal, X-ray its structure, and do a myriad other things, except reproduce it. Some say (not without a trace of mockery) that the old masters would supposedly forever invest a fraction of their souls in each batch of mithril, and since today there are no souls, but only the 'objective reality