It is a fact of life that everything has to stop eventually, nothing lasts, not even the eternal beauty and wisdom of the Elves. So, it only stands to reason that any shower, even one so deadly and violent as this one, must end eventually. And so it did, with only the dust and the quiet startled breathing of the five travellers to show it had ever been there at all.

They picked themselves up from the dusty ground and brushed the small metal projectiles off them, as if they had been nothing but dust caught in their eye. For they were gods and even the mightiest of mortal made weapons cannot fell such as they were.

'What,' began Aulë mightiest of all the Smiths. 'Was that?'

In the end it was not his wife, or their insane guide that had led them here that answered him…but the youngest of them.

'Bullets.'

'What?'

Olorin bent, his back creaking with the strain…though it no longer held the same age it once had… and picked one of the fallen bullets from off the ground.

'I know these markings…. I've seen them before…this was Shire made.'

'Hobbits? These things, this…this metallic machine comes from the hands of hobbits?'

Said the smith incredulously.

'Yes, I believe they started making them at the end of the third age after…after things began to change. But I never paid it close enough attention, even when I should have.'

Aulë scowled at the once wizard unable to accept what he'd just heard. Dwarves had never made anything like this, so how could a race so small and 'gentle' be capable of anything so…dwarf like? It was beyond comprehension to the father of Dwarves.

'You have to be joking…'

'Aulë, be silent…we are not alone.' Yavvanna stood up herself, and reached her hands out to the figures hiding within the dense maze of the dead trees all around them.

'Come forward, though you tried to harm us we will not do the same to you. For I am Yavvanna, and I am this earth and I am these trees.'

The sound of voices, the voices of the very young, and the very stupid rose then, in conference.

'She doesn't seem like one of them.' A boy's voice, with the telling twang of the Dunlander said.

'They just walked out of that wall, O'Hare, don't be so free with that choice yet.' A girl's voice higher, softer, with the drifting lilt of a Took.

'Shut up both of you, or they'll hear us.' Deeper, closer to adolescence than childhood, and distinctly un-hobbit like.

'Settle down now, I'm the leader I'll see to this.' That was the voice of the boy, the boy that walked out from behind the hollowed-out husk of a tree. An old Hobbiton gun strapped to his back, and a Tookish smile upon his lips.

Yavvanna knelt, letting her dress trail – flattened as it was with the crinkling of leaves that made it – and settled into the deep, ashen colour of the earth, so that she could look the boy straight in the eyes.

'Good evening, child of the Kindly West.'

'Good morning.' The Boy said, his heavy-set brows knitting together – brows that were un-like the smooth forehead that most hobbits possessed.

'Do you know who I am, child?'

'Lost?'

She smiled at that, and her smile like so many things about Yavvanna was as bright and as glorious as a Silmaril.

'Yes, yes, we are, can you help us find our way?'

'Depends on where you want to go? Or why you want to go there? You know that's a dead cave, right. Only the dead stumble out of there, but you don't look dead, so you either have to be lost or really, really stupid.'

Giggling from behind them, the other children, all with similar weapons in their hands or strapped to their backs, slowly begin to climb down from the hollow trunks of the trees. Children, at least twenty by the count spilling down to the ground: hobbit children, Men children, a dwarf child here and there, and even…even an orc child, thinner and smaller than you would have thought, rushed up to the young hobbit and giggled loudly.

'Or both, don't forget both, Boromir.'

The Orc croaked, in what he clearly thought was a conspiratorial tone.

Behind Yavvanna, Aulë reached for his sword, but without so much as having to raise her hand she stopped him, and he stepped back...though still not at ease.

'Please, child, where…where are we?' This was directed at the Orc boy, giggling at the hobbit's side.

'The Forest of Fangorn, Mam, where else would you think you were?'

It was as if something, something strong that held the Valar tighter in its grip than mere common sense broke then, broke at the boy's words, and the general casual, non-demeanour of the children in general. She snapped, and as with all things her fury was as bright and wondrous as a Silmaril.

If you have been lucky enough never to behold the devastation an angry Valar can inflict, then you have very little grasp on what the children saw then.

Around the children the world seemed to change and morph, into a colour they hardly recognised. If you or I had stood there, in the eye of that terrible storm of life and growth, perhaps we would have revelled in the Green of the world, but to the children it was nothing more than a disease, nothing more than some silly trick played on them by these strange people.

The whirlwind of green finally settled on the ground, and for once the children stood not in the middle of a dead, lifeless wasteland – as they had done for most of their lives, no now they stood amongst a forest, a real forest filled with life.

Perhaps it was this, far more than the storm, or the mighty lady's rage, that frightened them. For such powers, such powers of life should not have been possible, not now, not in this land. Even the strongest of their people's magicians were rendered powerless, at least in this way – under the lifeless soil that the dead had left behind – but not this woman, not this stranger. And it was this new power he had never before seen, that made Boromir Took step forward with his right hand outstretched in greeting. For beyond the fog of childhood trauma…Boromir remembered the tales of his father's people, and he knew now what stood before him.

'Lady Yavvanna, welcome, I am Boromir son of Diamond, daughter of Took; as heir to the chief, I welcome you to our home and offer you sanctuary while you recover.'

She smiled then, as if this reaction had been her intention all along, instead of just a logical conclusion to her temper tantrum.

'Thank you, Master Took, we would be delighted to accept your offer for shelter. To tell you the truth, I am far more tired than I thought I would be when I began.'

She laughed then, like this were nothing more than a dream that everyone will wake from soon.

The hut was too small, as most of the things in this village seemed to be – or at least small to Olorin. But then maybe that was the point, maybe it was him that was the wrong size this time. Perhaps they all were, still it didn't exactly make the self-satisfied smirk on the chief – an elderly drug woman – any less condescending. She clearly did not care for outsiders – or rather she did not care for their kind of outsider. The kind of outsider that pushed their way in, that tried to change how the game was played.

'To change the world back to what it was, is no simple task, even for gods. If you do this, you mean to, then two ways there are for you.'

In front of her heavy seating cushion, she laid the long-twisted branch that was her chieftain's staff.

'In the middle our people stand, not close enough to provide challenge to either side.'

'Either side?' said Aulë who, was in far more discomfort by the size of the hut then even Olorin. 'What the Mandos does that mean?'

She smiled at him then, and Olorin was reminded once again why the Rohan had for so long, mistaken the Drugs for an evil race, worthy of being wiped out. Her smile was not simply unsettling, but nearly disfiguring in its intensity. And she did not drop it once as she continued to speak.

'I do not speak of a war, facing sides across a battlefield, nor good fighting evil, I speak instead of two plains of existence. If to set right what once went wrong is what you wish, then a choice you must make.'

She reached out and tapped the top half of her staff, which was facing South.

'If to purge the land of walking dead, creatures that claim the bodies of the fallen, then this way you must turn. Be warned, the creatures you must face are beyond the manner of good taste for your kind. Consume flesh of the living they will, and he will never stop them, never slow them, for his madness and obsession is too deep, too ingrained within the things that glow and shine above the earth.'

'He?' Olorin wavered.

'You know whom I speak of, Wizard of Grey.'

Fëanor.

Her smile was no more fake, or no more unnerving when she turned away from the wizard, turned instead to face the great smith and his wife when he said.

'And the other option?'

'Ah,' said the great Chieftess, as she trailed her long-gnarled finger up her staff, until she was pressing on the North facing end.

'That way leads further down a different path Smith, I see pain, and…and truth. That way leads to a world twisted by souls, the souls that so long you have shunned. Go there, or stay by your own hand Smith, but lay not the burden on these shoulders, for I see pain whatever way you choose.'

'What way is the quickest?' Mandos, for as silent as he had been, was as loud as glass shattering against cobblestones, now.

'Depends on your purpose, Dead Lord? Truth or extinction, either way doesn't matter, both shall come to you in the end.'

'Just me or all of us,' ventured the once great lord of Mandos.

'Death comes to us all in the end, Lord Mandos. Which way you choose, stay or go, is a moot point – you will all die in the end, and be happy so.'

'Please cut the mystic crap, chieftain, just tell us where we need to go to kill Fëanor.'

The chieftain pointed South East.

'His base lies in wild Gondor, but go there I would not, more death awaits you then at his hand. If destroy him you must then go to Rohan but step not where the faces of painted blue once dwelled, for death and other such fates will only greet you there.'

'It is our duty to destroy him and free this world from what he has brought upon it.' said the lady of the green. 'To Rohan we shall go.'

The Chieftain nodded, never letting her eyes drop from the smith, whose own were trained, fixed specifically to the north facing end of the staff. It was as if he were transfixed… transfixed by the slow twisting vines of the creatures, no of the forces that made their way down from the tip of the staff.

Yet, there was nothing there, nothing but the wood, and surely the voices…the voices that whispered for him to come north, to come and find them again, were only in his head

'Yes,' he repeated, though he seemed not to know entirely what he was agreeing to.

'To Rohan we will go.'