Darkness, darkness and the clawing taste of dust in his mouth was what Aulë awoke to. Well, that and the sound of the boy, the small hobbit child, that he had bribed into being his guide, quietly trying to choke back his sobs of terror. It was that, more than the scarlet taste of blood in the air that finally made the great smith open his eyes at last.

Around him, the world was a haze of dark purple and an alarming shade of red. He could still hear the child's cries, as he sat up and desperately tried to remember the boy's name. He knew he had heard it spoken somewhere, but what…

'Hush, hush, now Boromir. We must remain quiet, until we know where we are.'

Yavvanna, that was Yavvanna's voice.

'Yavvanna,' hissed the Smith. 'Yavvanna where are we?'

'Take a look around husband and see for yourself.'

Slowly the smith's vision began to take focus. They sat on a grassy hill, yet the grass wasn't green as it should have been, no it was a dark, alarming shade of purple, rather like a bruise. In fact, it barely felt like grass at all underneath him, more like a tangle of thorns scraping against his backside. While this was strange, especially if they were still in Middle Earth, it was nothing compared to what hung over his head. His back was pressed against a tree of some kind, and he would have been more grateful that one of his wife's creations had managed to survive Fëanor's plague, if he hadn't made the mistake of looking up into its branches.

For you see this was no tree, no tree at all. No, what the great Smith leant his back on now, was in fact a hanging post. And when he stretched his neck backwards, to gaze into what he believed were the waving branches of that tree – what he saw was not leaves, or bared twigs, or even a squirrel, its tiny nose twitching at him. No, what he saw were bodies, bodies of hobbits, bodies of dwarves, bodies of men, and women, and children. All dead, all hung there like a deterrent to ward off potential passers-by. Some by their necks, some by hooks stuck between their shoulder blades and most were hung by their feet. Leaving them to sway hypnotically in the wind.

He did not know whether they had died like this, hanging here, amongst a field of wild purple thorns or somewhere else in this cold dead wasteland, but in the end, it really didn't matter. Either way they were dead now, and he knew as he hurried to catch up with his quickly fleeing spouse and their tiny guide, that he would never again trust the solid weight resting behind his back.

Curses, when this was all over and done with he may well be as mad as Mandos himself. Where was that fool anyway?

Darkness, that's what he woke to, the darkness of a tomb. Mandos didn't have to open his eyes to know, he felt it, he breathed it, he knew it because he had lived his whole existence in a tomb. Closed to the outside, with nary a soft face to turn to for comfort…this was who he was, his purpose.

Lacing his fingers together in front of his belly, he closed his eyes against the darkness and breathed in deeply. The air smelled cold…but then what else would you expect – and on his out breath he spoke these words.

'Let the darkness give way, and let the light in'

A simple phrase, with a simple meaning, but Mandos' will needed no grand speeches and clever prose to work that day. For all around him the world was already full of light, and as Mandos opened his eyes he finally beheld what he stood on: not the floor of a tomb, or a grassless hill in a purple sky, but a mountain…a mountain of skulls, cracked and splintered by his own heels.

Mandos did not scream, for his throat had closed, and he could hardly gasp to breathe. It shouldn't have shocked him not really, but there was something different in seeing the broken ruins of Men, to the wailing spirits of the first born. Not worse per say, but strange and alien, and something that should have never been seen at all.

'This feels…familiar.'

He hissed through gritted teeth, to no one in particular, for Vairë was gone and as the lord of death he knew where she walked now.

And in the distance, like dust slinking over the shattered remains of these once proud men, he heard a voice on the wind.

It was a mad song, but then these were mad times to sing it in. And besides what else could you expect, from the spell of a fool. Or at least he prayed it was a spell, for what kind of world would they be living in if such a song, could be a prophecy.

Ash, Ash on the Mountain

Ash in the Mines

Ash lying on the Hanging Tree

All the Ash of the land shall fall down

Down, Down

And come to me

For I am no crook

Or Fool be

For I am a God, and all shall bow to me.