While the light lasts

Gimli spun around, panic tightening his throat, pounding into his chest like a drum-beat, but the circle of torchlight was utterly empty. Aragorn was gone.

'No!'

Frantically, Gimli snatched up the rope on his wrist, ready to drag Aragorn back from the dark...but he found only a severed end. The rope had been cut through, quite neatly, about two inches from his hand. The tether that had held them together was destroyed. Aragorn was gone. Gimli had lost him, too.

'Aragorn! Aragorn!'

At first Gimli shouted and raged. Cursed at the darkness, demanded his friends back, challenged the spirit that had taken them, dared it to stand against him. But there was no answer. There was never an answer. It was too late.

At last, he fell silent. Standing in that lone pool of flickering light, the darkness crushed in on every side; a darkness like he had never known before. He was alone. He was alone in the dark, and soon this torch would go out too.

Somehow he found he was on his knees. He put his hand to his mouth, not knowing if he was about to shout or weep or merely vomit right there on the stone floor. He was alone.

In the dark, something moved.

Terror overcame grief. Gimli scrambled to his feet, heart in his mouth. The dying torch cast a narrow circle of weak, flickering light around him, and the guttering flame must surely be deluding his senses, because he thought he had seen…

'Legolas? Legolas!'

He cried out to his friend, and ran forward. There was a flicker of shadow against deeper blackness, just beyond the edge of the light. Then the shape shifted again in the dark, and he saw it.

Gimli had thought he could feel no more terror.

It stood tall and upright, like a man. But it was not a man, and Aragorn had been wrong too, for it was no Elf either and Gimli doubted it ever had been. It was clothed not in fabric, but in garments of shadow that just resembled tunic and cloak. From its not-torso extended limbs that were nothing like arms, ending in long, white, falsehoods of fingers. The pale oval wobbling above the narrow neck merely imitated a face, and from atop it cascaded glistening pale strands which none could call hair. Where there should have been eyes were spheres of white and black and iris blue; where there should have been elegantly tapered ears, merely folds of fake flesh and cartilage; where Gimli might hope to see that familiar barely-there hint of smile was nothing but a pretense of a mouth, flat like a knife slash. All the components were there, certainly, and each in isolation might at first glance be a flawless imitation. But Gimli doubted that any, even one who had never before seen one of the Firstborn, might look now upon this melded mass of parts and think it an Elf. Certainly none could ever think the thing that stood before him was Legolas. It was a perfect facsimile, and yet it rang false in every way. It was repulsive.

Gimli's mind convulsed with the sheer wrongness of the presence in front of him; his gorge rose and his skin prickled with horror and disgust, cold sweat beading his brow. The thing that was not Legolas waited on the edge of the dark, unmoving. Watching. Terror pinned Gimli's own gaze to the thing and, barely daring even to breathe, he crouched and felt around blindly for the fallen torch. Into his other hand, though he knew it would do little to aid him, he drew his axe.

The thing watched him with those gleaming, unblinking ovals that Gimli's mind insisted could not be eyes. Then, in a terrible imitation of curiosity, this effigy of Legolas tilted its head to one side. Its mouth opened wide like a silent scream, and the Gimli heard his friend's voice, even though the puppet-thing before him did not move its mouth when it spoke.

'Run, Gimli. '

For a moment, blind with fury, Gimli considered hacking at the thing where it stood, just on principle. How dare it even imagine that he would be fooled by such a hideous parody? But he breathed out his terror and disgust, even though he could still not take his eyes off the thing, even though his hands, steady through a dozen battles, were shaking.

'You are not him,' Gimli spat. 'Tell me where they are.'

The thing looked on, impassive. And though its expression did not falter and the tone of the voice changed not, somehow the next stolen words Gimli heard sounded gloating.

'...They are dying...dead. They remain here. Go back, Gimli.'

'I will not leave without them,' Gimli retorted, raising the axe. The thing stared at him from the shadows. That terrible open mouth gaped, wordlessly.

'Run,' said the voice, and now it was less an entreaty and more a threat. 'You must run. Retribution...you will be...dead. It is...time. It is...blood...'

'Aye, is it?,' said Gimli, throat tight with grief and with terror that drove him to a kind of madness, and he spat out his defiance. 'Well, that's too bad because the longer you talk instead of attacking me, I'm starting to think you can't . So maybe this fire can't burn you. But you don't like the light, do you? While the light lasts, you won't come near.'

The thing looked on. The cold pressure of its hideous gaze felt like it would crush the air from Gimli's lungs. Then, without another motion or word, it was gone. It did not walk away, flicker or fade out. It was just gone, from one blink to the next.

Gimli spun around, a little frantic, staring into the dark. But there was nothing. The blackness was still and complete, and the vile thing could be steps away in the dark, watching, watching...

He waited for a long time, listening to his own breaths in the dark. The torch hissed and spat.

While the light lasts...

In truth, Gimli knew he had been bluffing. The creature had made to seize him when he had been holding the torch before, after all. But it had not tried it twice. It had stolen Legolas with ease, had attempted to snatch Aragorn away more than once, though it had only succeeded the second time and that time Aragorn had been sitting in the light too. But perhaps it was growing stronger. It had been naught but a shadow when Gimli had first seen it after all, barely more than the impression of form. Aragorn had seen something more manifest, with form enough that he had thought he had seen something resembling an Elf. Now its hideous mockery seemed to be complete. It was stronger. It was taking on more and more of Legolas each moment. But it still had not taken Gimli.

While the light lasts...

When the spirit had not burned, when sword and axe had failed to leave any mark, they had thought no weapons could harm it. But what if that was not true? What if there was something else that protected Gimli from its grip beyond just the light of the torch?

'Gimli,' moaned the voice in the dark, on his right. ' Gimli, I cannot move. Please, Gimli.'

Gimli turned towards the sound but he went no closer. His iron-capped boots clinked against the stone floor.

Cautiously, Gimli, sheathed his battleaxe. Then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the simple forged cloak pin he had found on the floor of the first chamber. At the time he had pocketed it without even thinking, distracted by something Legolas had been doing. Gimli examined it now. The iron ring was about the size of a child's hand, the pin an inch longer. It had been torn from Rickon's cloak and discarded, cast away from the tomb. Surely the poor dead farmer would not have done such a thing?

The arrows that Legolas carried were headed with steel, and steel too were the sword and blades of Aragorn. The white hafted knife of Legolas, a gift from the Elvenking his father, bore a blade of mithril, the buckles on his quiver and belt were of bronze and the clasp of his shirt was of silver. There were no fittings of iron about the Elf's garb or his gear; of that Gimli was certain. And neither did Aragorn wear clasps or buckles of iron; even though he was dressed again as any Ranger and not in his robes of royalty, he would not wear a metal that would rust out in the wild long 'ere it served its purpose.

But though Gimli's battleaxe and corslet were of steel and mithril and the fittings of his jerkin were of gold, he wore as he always did good, dwarvish boots with soles of studded iron and iron toecaps. The stamped plates on his belt were dwarvish iron, and iron clasps glimmered amongst the gold and rock-crystal beads in his beard. In his pocket he carried Rickon's iron cloak pin, and in his pack were the iron keys of his lockbox and the house in Minas Tirith, an iron trade coin, and a tiny fragment of lodestone no larger than his thumbnail with which he had been experimenting. Strange chance that all these small tokens he bore could have warded him from an evil of which he had known nothing.

'I do not know,' came Aragorn's voice from the darkness of his left; soft, mournful. 'We have wandered too aimlessly in the dark.'

The spirit had not been able to take Aragorn before, not fully, though it had tried. But then the man had been snatched the moment he had taken off his pack...

Gimli turned away from his friends' voices, and went to where their packs lay abandoned by the shore of the silent lake. He carefully laid the torch on the ground—it was failing fast, there were but minutes of light left in it—and began to search.

It did not take long to find what he sought. They had not intended a long journey, or an arduous one, and bore with them little but what might be needed against ill chance in the wild. The nearest village was but a few hours' walk away, where the tanners hoped for news of their lost child and the wives of Rickon and Holden waited in vain for the return of their husbands. But there were some things Gimli knew Aragorn always carried with him. A whetstone. Needle and cloth for repairs to garments or skin. A healer's pack of bandages and medicines, a tinderbox with flint and firesteel. And there, at the bottom of Aragorn's pack were the items Gimli sought. Artefacts of iron. A skinning knife, and a hatchet.

Gimli drew the items out, and inspected them. Neither were large as such things went; the blade of the knife was not much longer than his palm, forged in one piece with the handle wrapped in worn leather. The iron hatchet too was no battle axe; it was short-handled and light, intended for splitting firewood, not skulls. But Gimli had no choice. No friends at his side, no light, no escape, and no idea what he was facing. But if he was right about the iron—and please, Mahal , let him be right—he now had a tiny spark of hope. Pin, axe, coin, knife, lodestone and key. Maybe it would be enough. If it wasn't, well. He did not think he would have long to regret it.

He left their packs at the edge of the water, and beside them laid his battleaxe and Andúril, their useless steel glinting palely in the dark. Instead he hung the keys around his neck, pushed the knife and axe into his belt, and put the other iron tokens into his pockets, ready at hand. Then he stood, raising the torch, and looked across the lake. The black water rippled like silent oil.

'Well then, Gimli, my lad,' he said to himself. 'Best get on with it.' And he steeled himself and stepped into the lake.

The voice shrieked.

'Gimli! Gimli!' It cried, as Legolas, as Aragorn, as some hideous noise that was neither. 'Gimli, leave, run, dying-'

What was he doing? His friends were behind him, right behind him on the shore. Legolas was in agony , Gimli need only turn and maybe he could still save them…

No. It was deception, falsehoods and lies. Gimli caught his breath, hardened his heart to the sounds of his friends' pain, and forged on into the lake. The water was shallow, coming up no higher than his ankles. He was a half dozen steps from the shore before he felt the bitter cold of the water as it seeped into his boots.

'Help!' wailed the voice of a boy-child, so close it sounded like the child stood just behind him. 'Help me! Please!'

Gimli did not turn. The spirit had led or corralled them with its voice for hours uncounted, tempting and mocking, drawing them to follow on, searching for loved ones or for something to fight, driving them in circles about this sightless, hopeless place. Perhaps there was no end to it. But now Gimli was going to go to the one place he knew he had not gone before, a place the voice had ever drawn them away from. The lake, and whatever lay beyond.

'Please,' begged the boy, just out of sight in the dark. ' I'm scared. Please!'

Gimli paid it no mind. The water swirled like frozen ink around him, and it was deepening. Now it was nearly to the knee, clinging cold and silent around his legs.

Something bumped against him in the darkness, a deeper shadow on the shadowed water. He reached out with his free hand and touched the shape; it was heavy and soft, and yielded to the push of his hand, bobbing gently. It was a body. A man, as far as he could tell. Gimli hauled the floating head up from the surface and saw through the flickering torchlight and streaming water a pale face, bloated and swollen with drowning death. The second of their missing farmers. Master Holden the plougher. Sorrow rose up in him, and he lowered the corpse back into the water, letting it float. He had known these men not at all; they had been used up like bait, writhing worms on the fisherman's hook. In the eternal darkness of this hideous place they had met their pointless end, and the efforts of Gimli and Aragorn and Legolas to save them had been pathetic. Hopeless. Gimli had never felt so utterly powerless.

'Gimli, I cannot move!' Legolas begged, to his right.

'You must go to him!' Aragorn cried, close on his left.

'Mama,' wept the child from the shore he had left behind. 'Mama, please. I'm sorry.'

'They are nought but lies,' Gimli muttered, and he gripped the torch. He slipped and caught himself, and he stumbled on through the water. Holden's corpse slipped away out of sight into the black stillness. 'They are but lies. I will not heed you!'

The night-black pressed in behind him; the cries and whispers filled his ears like smoke in the dark. The water gripped around his legs with icy hands, and he felt, or thought he felt, chill fingers against the back of his neck, tangling in his hair, but they could not seem to grip. The dying torch hissed and spat, dropping sparks into the rippling water and on the edge of the dark, moving shadows flickered. His time was nearly up.

The water was up to his waist now, a dozen more steps and it was up to his chest. He forced himself on against the pressure of it, the cold draining his strength, sapping his will, even as the voices began to scream.

What if there was no end to the lake? What if it deepened and deepened and he went under, drowning here alone in the dark, as the ghost voices screamed and the water filled his ears, his mouth, his eyes….

Everything went suddenly quiet. Movement, and Legolas stood there, on the liminal edge of the light. The black water around his waist was as calm as mirror glass, as if no living thing disturbed it.

'Why do you try?' he said. It said. The mouth hung open, grotesque and unmoving, regardless of what words were spoken, as if the thing had heard of speech but the mechanics of how it was achieved had passed it by. But that was not what frightened Gimli most. Why do you try? the thing had said, in the voice of Legolas. But those were words Legolas had never spoken. It was no longer just imitation, just a simulacrum. It was something else now. Something more frightening.

'Because I must,' Gimli answered into the darkness. He did not look at the thing. Even a glimpse of it turned his stomach. Looking too long might somehow make it more real .

'We will take all that they are,' said the thing, the houseless shade who had woven an image of Legolas about it like a cloak. Like a chrysalis. 'We will be them. They will be us.'

'What are you?' Gimli demanded, despite himself. 'Wraith, barrow-wight? Phantom?'

'All that they were. Sound and sight and touch, flesh and bone and blood...'

'That is no answer. What are you?'

'Legolas. We are... I am ...Legolas.'

'No,' Gimli said, and he pushed on. 'You cannot have him, or Aragorn, or anyone else. You cannot have me.'

A laugh, like a whisper of cold wind, like ice fingers on his back.

'...do not want you.'

Gimli snatched the hatchet from his belt, dragging it out of the water and swinging it around. It met with nothing but air. 'You cannot touch me,' Gimli said, feeling the words leave his mouth before he even made sense of them. 'I am one iron-forged, iron-armed and iron-shod. You cannot touch me. I'll find them. I'll find a way out. I'll…'

'Dead soon. Your fear. Breathing your last alone, the darkness crushes, blind-eyed, your throat, choking on cold water. Your name dies unspoken.'

Gimli clenched his fists. He forced another step and he pushed himself on. The thing was trying to distract him. He had been numb to its screams and pleadings in the voices of his friends, and so now it tried to taunt him outright. It would not win.

'Eternities of night,' it whispered. Suddenly, with a flicker of dull hair like tarnished gold, it was on his left. Close, too close. Gimli kept his eyes turned away from it. He struggled on. The water was rising.

'Endless dark,' it whispered. 'Infinite silence…'

Now it was on his right, dull green cloth like a faded shadow. Pale hands reaching, reaching...they came up to the torchlight, fluttering in the glow for a moment, and then drifting back into the dark. Testing the boundary.

Gimli forced himself on.

'Sustain us,' murmured the stolen voice behind him . 'Gimli. Feed us. Free us.'

'No,' said Gimli, and the torch died.

The blackness was sudden and absolute. It pounded down onto him and he was utterly swallowed by endless dark. There was barely time to cry out his terror before he was falling forward; icy water poured into his open mouth, closed over his head and...and his knee hit against solid stone.

Steps.

He heaved himself from the water, throwing all of his weight forward onto the mercy of the stone, clawing and scrambling up out of the lake as if it would consume him. He heaved his legs out of the water and collapsed onto cold, flat stone, almost weeping.

All about him was silent. If the thing was nearby it did not speak, and if he moved he heard it not. The only sound was his own breathing, harsh and gasping, and the lap of the lake against rock, which quieted as the disturbed water stilled once more. The blackness about him was boundless.

He lay for a long time, unmoving, crushed beneath terror and the cold, silent dark. He was shaking. Cold or fear, he knew not what possessed his limbs, but the mail of his corslet rattled loudly as he shivered. He had no torch. No friends, no light and no hope of escape or rescue. But he managed, somehow, to summon a wisp of willpower, because he knew he had three things in his favour, small as they might seem. Firstly, the voice of the thing in the dark had fallen silent once more. Second, he was out of that dreadful lake, and dripping wet and chilled deep to his bones was far better than the terrifying crush of the black water as it crept deeper and deeper...And thirdly, the iron hatchet was still in his hand. The comfort those facts gave was immense. So Gimli pulled the tattered fragments of his strength together and felt around him with his free hand, like one blind.

The flat stone stretched away in front of him and on both sides as far as he could reach, featureless and empty. He would have to go on. He had not the strength to stand, and so he crawled instead, feeling ahead with his hands.

The ground was flat and cold. Darkness and silence and stone, and this hideous tomb that went on without end.

He crawled.

His mind filled up the oppressive silence with figments of sound; ringing hammers, the pulse of a heartbeat, whispers that went on and on into madness, and beyond.

He crawled and crawled, and-

Gimli almost longed for the voice to return just to relieve the terrible pressure of silence on his ears.

In the blackness his hand came down onto something. He picked the artefact up and ran his fingers over it. It seemed to be a narrow rod an inch or so across and more than a foot long, smooth and dry and brittle. It felt warmer than the stone around, and had the slightly uneven surface of material not worked but grown. One end terminated in a rounded ball, the other was broken off and inside he could feel something sharp and scratchy like dry and brittle honeycomb...

Gimli cried out, horrified, and dropped the bone to the floor. He had to force himself to reach out and pick it up again. It was, he thought, a long bone, perhaps from a forearm, but he could not say from what creature. Not a dwarf. Steeling every ounce of courage, he felt around. On the stone nearby lay more bones: narrow ribs curved as crescent moons; thick, round disks of the spinal column; small finger bones and teeth scattered about like pebbles. Even a few thin slivers that could be from a skull, shattered upon the rock. Gimli was no stranger to death, nor to the mortal remains left behind once life departed. But after finding Rickon dead, he had been expecting Holden's body. In a way he had been prepared even for Rickon's before that, for though he had hoped when they entered the tomb to find both men alive, he was much too practical in mindset to be unprepared for a more tragic outcome. But these startling bones...these he had not expected, and they now were too horrible a reminder of his own helplessness against this unstoppable horror, of how long his friends had already been missing. Many had died here, it seemed, before Holden and Rickon and Alfy Tanner. Before Aragorn and Legolas. This dark place and the thing that lurked inside it had stolen other lives before these. Maybe it will claim one more yet.

He brushed the bones carefully aside and crawled on, trying not to notice if he crushed any chips of bone matter beneath his hands or feet. Time and distance were impossible to measure here in this lightless, soundless place, and hard even to guess. But he did not think it was long, nor far, before he next touched something new. Not bone this time, but cloth. It was rough and dry beneath his fingers, wool in a coarse weave, and he followed the drape of it up onto another body, laid out as if in a tomb. The form was small and slender, narrow in the shoulders, and the face when he patted his hands across it was beardless and topped by a mop of tight curls. From the body rose a faint reek, but it was not the rot of decay, but rather the stench of the tannery. The missing boy from the village. Alfy.

Frantically Gimli shook the child, and shouted, but Alfy's skin was cold and he did not wake. Gimli could feel no pulse and in the darkness he did not know if the boy still breathed. Alfy had been here a long time, after all, longer than the farmers who had sought him and lost their lives in the doing. But the thing that abided in this place had been speaking in Alfy's voice and it had never spoken in theirs, in Rickon's or in Holden's. Aragorn had seen meaning in that, had found hope in it that the child still lived. With Aragorn gone and the voice silent, Gimli did not know what to think.

Still, Gimli took the iron cloak pin from his pocket and pinned it to the front of the boy's tunic, and put an iron key in his limp hand. Perhaps it would protect him. Perhaps it would help.

Then Gimli left the boy on the ground—what else could he do?—and he crawled on, one hand outstretched. Ploughman Holden's body in the lake, the skeleton on the shore and now Alfy. Three victims close together. If the wight had brought them here then perhaps, perhaps his friends would also be found close by.

Perhaps.

Abruptly, the floor before him vanished. Gimli fell back, narrowly avoiding plummeting forward into the dark. He felt around; the ground dropped away just ahead in a sudden cliff, the edge straight and knife sharp. The rocky island on which he crawled disappeared beyond where he knelt, dropping without warning down into the lake below; he could hear beyond, unnaturally muted, the soft slap of water against stone. He had found the edge of this place.

Gimli turned away from the edge and shuffled on, holding his hands out, hoping any moment to feel cloth again. But instead his elbow knocked against more stone. A raised step. He wondered for a moment if there would be another set of stairs climbing up, but crouching he felt just three steps leading up to a broad platform. Atop it he once again felt stone, but not the rough granite which so far had made up the walls and floor of this place. This stone felt very different beneath his hands; smooth, glassy and utterly featureless. He reached up and up, and the shape of the thing before him began to form in his mind.

It was a chair. An obsidian throne, seamless, cold and unadorned, looking out across this unlit place, over the blackness of the unseen lake. A chair of night that saw only darkness. And seated upon this throne was a figure. Gimli groped about and touched the leather of a boot. His fingers fumbled over knees in rough trousers, up a familiar leather coat with its knotted ties, up to a bearded face with a high brow and narrow nose. It was, by now, a face he knew better than his own; Aragorn Elessar, King of the Kingdom Reunited.

'Aragorn!' Gimli shouted, and shook his friend hard, harder than he had dared to shake the boy. He pinched the man's hands, slapped his face until his head rocked against the stone back of the chair. 'Aragorn, awake!'

There was no response and Aragorn did not stir, but he did not seem to be dead, for he sat upright upon the chair like one turned into stone, or a man ensorcelled in an unnatural, unwaking sleep. Nothing Gimli did roused any response. Desperate, Gimli turned from the throne and stumbled back down the steps, his hands outstretched. The tanner's son had come into this tomb, and Rickon and Holden had followed. Gimli now had found all three, and Aragorn too who had come after. There was but one still missing. Legolas must be nearby.

And he was. Gimli did not know how he had missed him before but he found the Elf just moments later almost by tripping over him. Legolas was not laid out like the boy, or posed like Aragorn. Instead he was huddled against the side of the throne, drawn in on himself like a child after a nightmare, his head slumped down. But, just as with the others, Legolas did not wake. He did not move or speak for all that Gimli issued demands and threats, and his skin was like ice. He also had not the cold stiffness of death about him, but if he still had breath in him Gimli could not sense it in this utter darkness.

What Legolas did still have, Gimli quickly established, was the possessions he had borne into his place. He had still his quiver, his white knife and his unstrung bow, and also his light travelling pack. And pushed beneath the straps across his chest were the two torches Aragorn had handed him so long ago. They were still dry. Gimli was already weeping, with fear and grief, but now there was some relief too in the tears. He pulled the torches free and felt around in Legolas' belt pouch until he drew forth fire-steel and flint.

The first flare of spark was blinding in the perpetual darkness, but Gimli dared not stop, even with the white specks crowding across his vision. He struck, and struck again, and with a rush of glittering sparks, the torch caught alight, throwing up blinding golden light. A thousand shadows ran out and across the floor and away. In its stark glow, Legolas looked terrible: gaunt and hollow and somehow empty . Gimli called and called, but the Elf did not wake.

Not knowing what else to do, Gimli stood and looked around, searching for something that might help. The torchlight illuminated the entire island, or more accurately the platform, on which he had found himself, for it was not large and possessed a strangely, unnatural form, being perfectly square and straight edged as if it had been sliced and then neatly placed into the middle of black pool rather than something eroded there by the natural passage of time. In the very centre stood the black throne, and the light showed nothing else on the platform but the dark shapes of his friends' bodies and all around them a scatter of white bone. Beyond the edge of the platform, he could just make out the nearer reaches of the lake's waters, glinting and glistening in the darkness, but utterly silent. And there was something else out there, too. Not close, but not far away; a shadow that lingered on the edge of the dark, just out of the light. Something that looked like Legolas, and watched Gimli with uncanny, unsettling eyes.

He turned away with a shudder and, almost as if drawn to it, went back to the throne. In the light he could see now that the stuff of which it was made was deepest black, like shimmering glass. Aragorn sat arrayed there in an awful mockery of majesty, his hands resting neatly on the throne's black arms, his head tilted as if waiting to hear the plea of some supplicant, as if any would think they would receive mercy in a place such as this. Gimli could bear these mockeries no longer. He jammed the torch into a gap in the stonework and went up the steps. He grabbed Aragorn's shoulders and heaved him bodily from the throne. Quickly and as carefully as he dared, Gimli dragged Aragorn's limp form down the steps and onto the cool floor of the platform, lying him on his back beside Alfy. Aragorn did not wake at the treatment, and Gimli could feel neither pulse or breath in his friend, but when he had calmed himself enough to think and pressed his ear to the man's chest, he thought he could hear the slow beat of a heart.

'Aragorn!' Gimli cried again, uselessly. 'By Mahal, you will wake up, Aragorn, right now, or I shall travel all the way to the Halls of Waiting myself to show your spirit my displeasure with the flat of my axe!'

But this too elicited no response. Desperate beyond fear, Gimli looked around across the platform for inspiration, but there was nothing here but what he had brought with him. A few dozen feet away, closer than it had seemed crawling in the unending darkness, lay Alfy Tanner. The iron cloak pin resting on his tunic glimmered dully in the light.

Gimli did the only thing he could think of. He took from his pocket the strange iron coin Legolas had once gifted him. The Elf had picked it up from a travelling tinker in the White City years ago, thinking the dwarf might find it a curio of interest. It was marked on one face with the southern stars and on the other with the visage of a ruler amongst the Easterlings. A trade token, Legolas had thought it was, or perhaps a measuring weight. Gimli could not see neither stars nor king now, but he was a son of Durin, and thus he could feel the pure iron in his hand, the song of it. Reaching up, he pulled on Aragorn's bearded chin, pushed the coin into his open mouth and then jammed his jaw closed.

Nothing happened for a moment, and Gimli feared he had been wrong about the coin, about the iron, about... Then he felt Aragorn's body give a great heave; the man's head flew back and cracked against the stone, his arms flailed and legs kicked, and he would have dislodged any lesser being. As it was, even Gimli had difficulty holding the man's head as it thrashed side to side, trying to spit out the coin.

At last Aragorn gave two more weak shudders and went still. Gimli relaxed his iron grip on the man's jaw, just as Aragorn's hands came up, reaching blindly around. He gripped weakly onto Gimli's tunic, and his eyes fluttered open.

'You're alive,' said Gimli. 'Aragorn. You're alive.'

tbc