I finally read the Lord of the Rings after growing up on the movies. The scene where Gandalf fights the balrog (a fire demon) struck me more from the page than it did from the screen. He tosses his burden of leadership on Aragorn, another main character, and the ink slid off the page and I held the weight of it like a taut rope alongside them. Aragorn takes the heaviness in stride, but would I? Is the unexpected and inconvenient load laid on unsuspecting shoulders one that I could bear? So I penned out this song to dwell on that tension for a while.