This world was aflame.

Sitting in a tree, atop that mighty hill the Fool saw it all…saw as the Smith's face twitched from blank confusion, to clarity…to rage. An unstoppable, unsurmountable rage. Rage for everything he had not seen, for everything he had let happen to his people, for everything that had ever gone wrong.

It was a strange sight, to see a creature so lordly squirm and writhe in the dead dust that now littered Middle Earth. Perhaps if he had been any other creature the Fool may have been frightened, terrified even…but he was not just any creature. He was of Hobbick's seed, he was a memory of his kind, of a time when his people could do many things that were unheard of today…at least among the ruling classes.

The fool didn't even bother to look anymore, fixing his gaze instead upon the clear sky up above. Strange that it would be so clear today, why he couldn't remember the last time he'd actually seen the colour blue in the sky. Or smelled smoke in the air, or crawling across his vision…ah, well that made sense…his tree was on fire.

He probably should move.

Yavanna closed her eyes as the wind smacked against her face, this shouldn't have happened the tent should have protected them…but the walls were too thin. Everything was too thin in this tent. She had only known two hobbits in her lifetime, maybe three if you counted the child. They'd been thin, aye yes that certainly…and sick from the ring of power they had carried, but this was something different. This was not just starving; this was not just going without enough…this was…this was being used to it. Thinking that this…that this was normal.

They'd promised her and the boy…and her husband wherever he had vanished off to this time …. a feast, but it became quite clear very quickly that her definition of a feast and their's were two different creatures entirely.

There was no banquet, no magnificent feast, what they had been handed on small wooden plates would barely count as a meal to most peoples of Middle-earth. She wasn't even entirely sure what it actually was, but it crunched and withered in her mouth. It made her want to shudder, but they were all looking at her as eager as Elflings for praise. Her heart swelled almost painfully at their thin, dirty faces, and she plastered the lie across her face.

'Thank you,' said the lie prickling from behind her wide smile. 'I do not know when I have tasted a finer meal.'

The thin, ragged band of hobbits sitting around her preened at the complement, even if it was only a lie. It was her duty as not only the guest, but the greater being to make her hosts feel proud at the food they had provided, particularly when such a thing was not plentiful in their land. Her young companion on the other hand, held no such duty-bound propriety.

'Yuck,' he said as he spat out one of the charred shells back onto his plate and spat the rest of it out onto the dust floor. 'What the Blarney was that? It tastes like shit; it actually tastes like dog shit. Is this a trick…am I supposed to just swallow this and…and…?

A hard look from Yavvanna silenced the wayward tongue of the child. 'Sorry…I mean, mmm…can I have another?' The maiden that had led them in snorted at that, she was by far away the most presentable of the hobbits. She lacked the ragged, half-starved look of her peers…in fact she almost seemed well-fed, moving with the easy flowing grace of one of the first born as she stood up and bent to collect their plates.

'This maiden is pleased that you enjoyed this feast, Master Took, Lady Yavvanna. I'm afraid it is all we can offer you for the now, our resources are stretched thin.'

'Yes,' said Yavvanna clapping a hand over young Boromir's still gaping jaw, before he said something else…vaguely offensive. 'We of course understand, and we would not demand something that you do not have to spare.'

'We are so glad you understand.' Said the girl, who thus far was the only hobbit who had spoken since they'd entered this strange tent. All the others had barely opened their mouths to yawn, though they all seemed half asleep.

'You see, the winter will come hard on us in the lands of the North, and we must be prepared to go with less.'

'Yes…less.' Said Yavvanna, though it seemed almost obscene for these creatures to eat any less than they clearly already did. 'Tell me,'She began quickly, desperate to turn the talk away from the subject of food or lack thereof. 'What has happened to this land, my good hobbits?'

The girl blinked at the Valar Queen in a confused manner.

'We do not understand the question.'

'I mean to say,' said Yavvanna unable to keep the tremor from her own voice at the sight of the blank, gaunt hobbit faces all around her. 'From the tales I heard tell of your land back in my own, I would have thought this was a bountiful place. But now we come here and find it in ruins, even more so than the rest of the death ravaged Middle-Earth. Have the Dead been so terrible here? Or is it something else, something beyond that?'

The sharp rustle of wind as every neck snapped toward the girl, who still looked blank and confused, lovely, but confused.

'Dead? We are not dead.'

'I never said you were…'

'Not anymore at least.'

'What do you…'

'The Pippin Took saw to that. We might have been dead once, but now we're quite alive…we have bodies and everything to prove it too.'

Oh…Sugar Tart.

It was said that not even the birds sang over the land of the hobbits now, which was true from a certain point of view – for Crebain did not sing as other birds did. In fact, most days after the fall of Dunland the Crebain made no sound at all. They were the silent shadows in the trees, the wisp of smoke in the distance – for no elf cared to say otherwise in days like these. They were there, ever silent, ever watching over the people of Middle-Earth – what little remained of them in days like these.

They watched now, from high in the air untouched by the flames, as the Smith burned the tree the halfling sat in. Had sat in they should say, for the creature had vanished as soon as it had become aware of the flames licking round its hairy feet. Hobbit magicians were notoriously hard to kill, why should that be any less true for their god.

Thus, it was only the Crebain, floating high in the air against the dead breeze of the land, that beheld what the Smith did next. Setting one tree alight was not enough for this creature, for he was of the Valar and his power was great even trapped in days like these. The fire spread, twisting down the trunk like a snake and along the ground until it reached the boot of the smith. The madman laughed at that and cried, not from fear but joy as the fire climbed his body as sure as it had done the tree's.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' Roared the Smith, leaving it evident even to the slowest among the Crebain what his feelings were on this circumstance.

'I am Valar, I am he who shaped the earth and fire below, I am he who moulded you from the dark flames you once were, and I am fire. I have always been fire, before I was this, I was fire inside my maker's eye. Back in the days before the world, when all there was Eru and his nameless kin, I was the flame inside his mind. I am the spark of creation inside all minds, inside my own I am a forest fire. That is why I made the dwarves, not because I was impatient for the elves but because my fire commanded me to. I made the dwarves, the seven fathers and mothers of their people – they are my children as surely as no elf will ever be.'

The flames had spread all over his body, creating the image of a man made of fire, living, breathing fire. That is what they saw as the flame turned its head up and gazed at them, no, not at them, not at the sky, but what lay beyond it. At who lay beyond it.

'And you let your first born murder mine! Slaughtered like animals, butchered and drowned them until they could no longer call themselves mine. You made me blind to it, but I am blind no longer and I will make them pay for what they have done. I will make them all pay…every child of yours, Maker will burn. And they will learn, you will learn, that it was not Morgoth's wrath that they should have feared!'

And above the Crebain in the sky, there was a crack of lightening and somewhere in the distance there was a boom of a mountain top exploding.

'It was mine.'

The shells sat, frozen and cross legged around Yavvanna as she reached out and drew the boy…the hobbit child closer to her. They watched her as she did this, looking at the boy as if he were not a child at all, but a meal to be eaten and devoured with mint sauce. The girl smiled; her head cocked unnaturally to the side.

'I do apologise if we have misled you Lady Yavvanna, it was not our intention.'

'Oh no,' laughed the lady in question, her voice strained high with the fear she was desperately trying not to show. 'I'm sure you're not dead…anymore…would you be so kind as to tell me…what exactly you are? For you see…we had been told of the…new residents in this land, but you do not seem…Elven in your nature.'

'Elven,' said the girl, her long ringlet curls striking across her face as she jerked her head to the other side. 'Oh, you mean that lot up in the north, oh they are terrible aren't they? Munching on the scenery, digging up the dead…I tell you they've just ruined the neighbourhood. No, we're nothing to do with them…we are now as we were in our first lives, hobbits.'

'Hobbits.'

'Aye yes, no stealing other creatures' bodies for us.'

'I see…then since you understand our confusion, tell me why you are here?'

'Why are you? Our reasons are as sound as they've always been, the living do not appreciate what they have…the joy, the love, the open skies they experience. However, we as the dead, who have had all those things snatched away from us, understand what a precious thing it is. We understand what a gift life actually is.'

'So that gives you the right to take it for yourself?'

'Yell at me oh Lady of the Green Earth, do you know what the hobbit afterlife is actually like? What we experience? Has thy creator husband clued into the terror of it all?'

Yavvanna narrowed her eyes but said nothing to that, feeling her own power begin to return to her.

'Let me tell you, there is no light where our Ganymen have to send us, there is only the ever-crushing darkness of the beyond. We do not get a hall, or stone kingdom, we get nothing because he has forsaken us…because he has forgotten that we were ever his creations. Oh, over the years a land has been shaped from the darkness, but it is nothing next to the light that we must leave behind when at last we die. It is grey and shallow, and everywhere we stand we see not the sky above our head but the everlasting battle of what came before.

'We are not the first to be forgotten and we will not be the last, for they were before all of us. It was their world before it was ours…and then he made you…and broke through the gates to this world so that you would have a place to live and to rule far away from the others. Far away from his kin.'

The girl's voice was low and dead as sure as she was, it scared the boy causing him to cower behind Yavvanna's arm. But it did not frighten the lady of the earth, for she had seen and witness much greater foes than this…stupid, foolish girl who wasted her time speaking nonsense instead of disposing of her foes. Perhaps before the great lady would have held back, would have showed pity but now…now there was no time for that anymore.

No time for anything anymore.

And that is when the ground exploded.

He can hear their screams; in his mind he can hear the wails of the first born as they run…run from his mountain's wrath. Ah, for that is the joke of it, that when the Valar sang the dead rocks of Middle-Earth into life it was not Melkor that made the mountain with fire in its belly: it was Aulë.

It was the smith that had crafted such a beast in the heart of the first born's playground. It was the Smith that had forged the fires the enemy would use. Melkor had never truly been very creative, even the orcs, and the Dragons, were clearly not his own idea. That fool had been nothing but the vessel for the maker's more…unique creations, a tool Ilúvatar could use to further his own glory, but nothing more than that.

Aulë was creator in his own right, the dwarves had not been a part of Eru's plan…not as Elves, Men and Orcs had. The Dwarves had not been planned…nor would it seem their brothers, the hobbits, or the goblins. Hobbits…Goblins…his children as surely as the Dwarves, and yet he could hardly claim that title for them. He had not known then, he had remained blind to them and in his blindness, he had let this terror that birthed these strange, un-bearded people go un-punished. For how long had the elves told terrible stories of the first age in Middle-Earth, of the vile creatures they had named 'petty-dwarves'? For how long they had excused their vicious deeds, hunting these people as if they were nothing but animals…not even animals, for they would have never treated the children of Yavvanna with such a keen hatred.

Oh, they called it a mistake, even named the petty dwarves wicked and almost deserving of such a fate, but now the Smith knew better. A crime had been committed by those of the first born that had trespassed on his people's lands. And that crime deserved punishment, and as a Valar, as the father of the injured party, he was to be judge, jury and executioner.

Beneath his hand the ground rumbled in reply to his unvoiced command and all the burning man could do, as the fire spread beyond him and far, far down the hill, was laugh at that.