NÚMENOR PREMIUM

Quick situation report on the humans of Middle-earth: McEvilface had been running the place like a doom cult for centuries, and most Men either served him or got flattened by him. But one group — the Ed Boys — refused both options. They fought against McEvilface, badly outnumbered, with nothing but loyalty and an unreasonable amount of courage, which is dodgeball-against-the-entire-gym energy. Their greatest was Spaceboat Eddie, the sailor who crossed into the undying lands and personally delivered the complaint that got the Valor Squad to come arrest McEvilface themselves.

So after the war, the Valor Squad looked at the Ed Boys and went: you have earned something no one has ever gotten before. And they built them an island. A whole island. Custom-made — the biggest thing anyone ever built for me was one (1) cake — sitting in the ocean between Middle-earth and Valinor, close enough to reach, far enough to be its own zone. They named it Gift Island, "the Land of the Gift." Everyone else just called it Númenor Premium — and if this was a subscription tier, it's the one with the gold trim.

So Elliot Mortalbro took the mortal path, took a new name — Tar-Minyatur, first King of Númenor Premium — and got a consolation perk: the Premium Islanders were granted lifespans way beyond normal humans. Elliot Mortalbro made it to five hundred. Elliot Called-It took the Elven path, which means the two brothers ended up on different realms permanently, and Elliot Called-It is going to be around for a very long time.

The Ed Boys followed the light of Spaceboat Eddie's star — their own dad, now a star, which is the most insane GPS situation in history — across calm seas to their new island, and from then on they were called the Premium Leftovers, the Men of the West. And honestly? The island went hard. They were best friends with the Elves, spoke Elvish for fun, gave their cities Elvish names, and put all their genius into shipbuilding instead of weapons. On clear days they could literally see Lonely Harbour, the Elf-harbor on the horizon, glowing.

One catch, though — and this is the load-bearing catch of the entire chapter. They were forbidden to sail west out of sight of Númenor Premium. They could sail anywhere else on the planet. Just not that way. And nobody fully explained why, and I'm still mad about it on their behalf — no note, no assembly, nothing, just a rule stapled to a gift — and as policy it aged like milk.

The Elves kept visiting, sailing over from the west with gifts — the flex of a lifetime, honestly. Their best gift was White Tree Jr., the White Tree Jr., a descendant of the tree Vanna Bloom herself made for the Elves back in Valinor. The Premium Islanders planted it in their king's court like a flag that said "the gods like us specifically," which is a lot of trust to put in a plant — I once killed a classroom cactus in under a month, and it wasn't even descended from anything.

And the Premium Leftovers paid it forward. They sailed east to Middle-earth, found the humans there — including their own kin who'd never made it to the island — and instead of conquering anyone, they taught them. Farming, building, crafting, everything. The Men of Middle-earth saw these tall, glowing, long-lived teachers coming off the ships and basically concluded they were gods, and honestly, can you blame them? For a while, the whole thing worked. Darkness stopped being scary, because the Premium Islanders were the tutorial level who came back to check on you.

Now here's where it gets worse, and it gets worse for the dumbest possible reason: they were having such a good time that they stopped being okay with it ending.

Because even five hundred years ends. The Premium Leftovers lived longer than anyone, but they still died, and somewhere around the reign of King Nevergonnadie, the whole island's attitude flipped from "grateful" to "wait, why do we have to die though." They started talking about sailing west anyway — to the Elf island, or even to the undying lands itself — because they'd convinced themselves of something that was completely wrong: that the land over there was magic, and living there would make them immortal too.

The grumbling reached the Valor Squad, and instead of ignoring it, they sent a messenger to King Nevergonnadie with the single most important correction in this entire book. The messenger explained: Aman doesn't make anyone deathless. It's the other way around — the beings who live there are already undying, and they're what make the place holy. Moving there wouldn't save you. Your fate is yours, only Eric could reverse it, and here's the part nobody wanted to hear: death isn't a punishment. It was never a punishment. It's just what being human is — and the immortality of the Elves isn't a reward either. Two different fates, neither one a trophy.

And then the messenger said the quiet part: if you think death is a punishment, that belief didn't come from nowhere. That idea was McEvilface's. He planted it in Men back when he had them under his thumb, and it's still running, years after they locked him up — his last cheat code, still live in everyone's heads, rent-free, in a world he can't even touch anymore.

King Nevergonnadie heard all of this and said, effectively, "cool story, no." He refused to accept it. He clung to life and to his throne with both hands until his wits gave out and his son was well past his prime — a man refusing to log off while the next player stands behind him for decades. And his son, King Splitsville, grew up watching that and absorbed the exact same mindset.

Under King Splitsville, the island cracked in two. One faction — the King's Men — were the rich, haughty majority who'd decided the Elves and the Valor Squad were gatekeeping jerks and death was a scam. The other faction were the Team Elf-Friend, the Elf-friends: still loyal to the king because he was the heir of Elliot Mortalbro, but quietly trusting the Elves and the Valor Squad knew what they were talking about. And every single person on that island, whichever side they were on, now had the fear of death hanging over them like a low ceiling.

So their genius went to the worst possible places. They poured their wisdom into unnaturally stretching out their lifespans. They hoarded wealth they'd never spend. They built enormous, elaborate tombs — a whole culture of people pre-gaming their own funerals — and they stopped offering the first fruits of anything to Eric. The gratitude was just gone.

The King's Men looked east instead, and this is where the golden age officially rots: they went back to Middle-earth, but not to teach. To rule. The humans there, who used to call them gods, became their subjects and their tribute-payers. Meanwhile the Elf-friends still slipped off to visit Gilbert Glowstick, the High King of the Elves, and helped him in his quiet war against a rising problem in Middle-earth — a guy named Sigmauron, back to his old tricks, who wanted to be king of everything, hated and feared the Premium Islanders, and had already ensnared some of their own lords with the Bossy Bling. When the Head Spooky & Friends rose, his first attacks hit the Premium Islander cities on the coast. Man's conflict-resolution strategy was, and I cannot stress this enough, ghost kings.

Back home, the King's Men kept escalating. Elvish was banned from being taught. The Elves' visits were banned too. The White Tree Jr. — the living souvenir of their friendship with the undying lands — was left untended in the king's court, wilting on their watch. You had one tree, King's Men. One tree. Anyway. And the Elf-friends got stuck in the worst group project of all: loyal to the House of Elliot Mortalbro, loyal to the Valor Squad, and forced to pick a lane while both sides glared at them.

Then came the crackdown. The Elf-friends were moved from the west of the island — where they could see the horizon they dreamed about — to the east side, where the King's Men could keep an eye on them. Many of them just left for Middle-earth, where they could still talk to Gilbert Glowstick's people, and they were forbidden to come back. Every letter, every visit, every scrap of contact with the Elves and the Valor Squad in the west: cut. A kingdom built on a gift had decided the giver was the enemy — and the only thing it couldn't forgive was that everything ends.