Ring of Darkness

Wrapping this all up in a nice golden bough for you, so get out your hatchet, ceremonial knife, machete, mace, or preferred trauma inducing instrument of kingmaking

This goes out to you Kurtz. The jungle maybe crazy. You may not be. Though the quest for your absolute pristine white whale of perfect goodness may get you drowned. Or chopped up. Crystalline diamonds are conceptualization wraiths, vivid and bright and without substance.

Good fresh tilled earth would have told you this. So would a hobbit. Though I'm sure a scarcity of hobbits coupled with the iconoclastic rants of absolute infatuated elves contributed to your taking hold of the one ring and binding yourself to it's fate. Maybe I'll just start calling you Isildur. Maybe Saruman. He had his uber-orcs, you had montangnards. Though that's splitting hairs.

How in these tales of the ages does the PBR get morphed to an ill-fated fellowship? Well at least Conrad and Copola got their question answered. Though those are just questions posed again and again and only now recently heard again.

Maybe they had it right all those centuries ago, and it's all just about that crazy little sprig near the spring and power is absolutely corrupting... so you'd better make it's cost terrible and swift.