Thanks for the reviews, please keep it up! Life Without a Heart Chapter 1

I swim up from my private ocean where I have been swimming in my dreams, drowning in the waters that endlessly torment me.  I cannot escape sleep, I may try to evade it, but it haunts me.  I am exhausted still, because sleep is hardly a rest for me, it tires me, perhaps more than going without sleep.

I stretch and then squint in the gloom, and try to make out where I am in the endless black that has been my home for five hundred years.  I sigh; I haven't been here before, or not that I can remember.  There is running water nearby, I can hear the cool trickling sounds it produces.  I like water, it is cleansing, but I cannot be cleansed.

So I sit by the pool of water, thinking of my master, all alone in Mordor without me to comfort him.  I hear my owner, Gollum, talking to someone about me.  They have been talking for a while and asking each other riddles, my owner loves riddles and he is good at them.  However the stranger is better and he has won.

Then there is silence except for the trickling water and footsteps…footsteps?  Yes small pattering ones, coming this way.  Again I squint my keen eyes so I can make out a small figure, could it be a halfling?

He is stout and dressed in finery, a waistcoat and jacket.  His eyes are dark and kind, his hair is a chestnut brown and curly, but what is most amazing to me is his feet, they are very large and hairy, also bare like mine.  He is shorter than me by miles it seems, but his heart is far bigger than mine could ever be, I have no heart.

He comes closer and I shrink and curl into a ball.  Then he bends down and offers me his hand.  I cautiously accept it and he pulls me to my feet, I lean against him and walk with him trying to get out of the cave.  You didn't seriously think I'd want to stay here did you?