Dark Days in Mordonut
NescaFrodo and Sanka struggled across the desolate lands of Mordonut, creeping in the near-gloom of the low-wattage fluorescent illumination that flickered on and off like weak lightning. They were careful to avoid the crowds of horcs and gobblings that milled around the drying reservoirs of diluted, bitter coffee with which Sour'on fed his teeming armies. The half-caffs own coffee reserves had been used up long ago, and now they were moving forward fueled solely on willpower and tigermilk bars.
NescaFrodo was close to exhaustion. He could smell the coffee of Sour'on, and it was a torment he could never have imagined. Also, the Coffee Ring hung on him, whispering of indulgence and enervation but all the time growing heavier and heavier, so that he seemed to bow to the earth bearing its great weight.
Sanka followed NescaFrodo, silent but for clumsy words of encouragement and an occasional knock-knock joke. He had given NescaFrodo the last of his own carefully hoarded coffee, and his mouth was so dry that he could not even nibble on the poptarts the elves had given them.
Their goal loomed before them; Café Doom, the mountain of Java. Its base was littered with stale grounds, scorched and reused until they were almost paste. Its sloping sides were scored with pock-marks and flamescar from the blazing whole coffeebeans that were blasted from the restless core of the angry mountain. Down those slopes poured syrupy rivers of espresso, like bitter chocolate. Constant smoke and steam issued from the mighty percolator. The whole place smelled like a Starbucks dumpster on a hot summer afternoon.
And away beyond, to the East, rose the tower of the Eye, blinking furiously amid all the smoke and ash, wishing eternally that It had possessed the foresight to make Itself tearducts or maybe a tinted monocle, for ever It was getting burning fumes drying out Itself. The horcs had to dumping Visine over It by the bucketful. It couldn't even watch Its favourite programmes on the PalanTV, for the reception in Mordonut was terrible. Several centuries of this had left It feeling a tad irritable.
But to compound Its misery, It could sense that the Coffee Ring was near... ITS Coffee Ring! It could have smelled it, if It had possessed a nose. Why, o why hadn't It made Itself a nose?
"Well," The Eye shrugged, "I suppose that would have looked pretty silly on a flag..."