Death, so near. I hold him in my arms, and he looks up at me with dimming eyes, misted in shrouds of dying; my own injury, from the deadly blast from the Staff, is roaring through my entire being, and I can see, as if from a great distance, my comrades milling around us, speaking excitedly. I wave them all away, and manage to whisper hoarsely :"Leave me, leave me, I beg you..."- I cannot see clearly anymore, and my cloak is no longer white, but a charred and smoking ruin. The pain is unspeakable, but no more so than the agony in my soul.
My fallen antagonist, my lover, my friend of two millennium, plummeted like a falling star from the very pinnacle of the Tower, and was brutally impaled upon the huge spike of one of his own ruined machines. I watched him fall, through eyes seared by the fireball he had cast at me only moments before. I watched, and yet grieved.
But I did not cause his fall, how could I, I who loved him still?
It was Wormtongue, pushed to the very breaking point of his soul, and finally snapped utterly, who rushed at his tormentor and stabbed him deeply, and as they grappled, Saruman was pushed over the edge, and fell that dreadful 500 feet to death awaiting him below. I had staggered over to him, and as gently as I could, managed to lift him off the spike, which had thrust entirely through his chest. What a horrific sound it had made, as I lifted him off, ah, I will never forget it! But he had made no sound himself, save a single very quiet gasp.
We are both dying now, and it all seems like a dream, some good, and some ill; and I would ease his pain if I only could, but I am far too weak now, to be of any help to him, or anyone else. I whisper to him, with a tremendous effort: "Curumo, Curumo, if you can hear me, if you can understand, give me some sign- I know you cannot speak -" He looks up at me drowsily, and his eyes are losing the fire in the midnight of their darkness, yet he seems to comprehend, and he grasps my shoulder with a trembling, bloody hand, and squeezes weakly. He raises the other hand and waves it slightly, and then collapses against me. I know he is gone, gone to face the Valar, gone to find, perhaps, peace at last.
With my last moment of vision before I too depart my Earthly body, I look in the direction he had motioned to-
-there, in the mud of ruined and flooded Isengard, lies a single Black Rose.
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