It started rough, but once he got his hands around the head of his spear he started making his way through the crowd. He stabbed his opponent in the throat with the tip of the spear, and it did its damage by cutting right through a gap in the helmet. If it had hit the eye it would have dropped the guy instantly, but with a metal face mask it wasn't so easy, and without eyes it was impossible to tell if it was going in. And that was all that he needed to do, for on his way past he felt a hot blow to his ribs and suddenly he was on his knees with a huge hunk of meat in his hands. Now his spear was gone, and his other enemy was advancing on him. But when he looked up he saw a spear-tip right in the middle of his forehead and it stopped him in his tracks, for he could feel the tip scrape around and around inside his skull as it made its way to the brain behind. While he had been fighting he had been too busy to notice how dark the air had become. Now he looked up and saw the cause. The sun had gone behind a cloud, so had the moon, and suddenly it was as dark as a deep forest at night. The wind was still blowing, howling like a banshee, and that just made it all the worse. He felt blood on his face and he had to blink, for it had all got in his eyes. He rubbed them, but it was no good. The only thing he could do was wait for the stars to come out. It took them a while, but after what seemed a very long time the wind abated. He looked up, and at first it was hard to make anything out, but after a while his eyes got used to the starlight and the sky cleared. The sight was just as strange as the sound. There were still stars overhead, and some of them were very bright and shone in the dark like searchlights. But between them there was a strange dark patch, like looking at the sky through a hole in a sheet. And as he looked more and more of them started to drop out of the sky and fall into the great black hole. At first there were just a few, but then it got worse. The wind had dropped and he could hear the splashes, but it was no help. The last star to drop was so bright he could see it from where he was standing, but it didn't matter if it was small. All that counted was that it had been glowing in the sky and not coming down with the others. He felt the ground quaking, but it wasn't the ground that was shaking. He looked up and found himself staring at a gigantic black wall high in the sky. It was like a thick curtain and it was descending fast, heading towards him at an angle. He looked up and up and he could see huge black patches moving, like black ink splashing out of a bottle. And at the same time he saw more and more of the stars falling into that great black hole above the wall. And suddenly it occurred to him what was happening. Someone or something was using the wind, its energy, to make those stars fall. It was like the star-making machines he had seen as a kid, but so big that the sky was one big glass tube. It was a tremendous drain on the power, and he would have felt sorry for whoever was doing it, if he hadn't been running out of time. "Look at that wall," came the voice of the demon, and he looked up, for the first time really seeing it. There were hundreds of them, and they were marching. The black curtain wasn't just a curtain. It was a black river. It stretched as far as his eyes could see in either direction, black like a great stormy sea, but here it was frozen and without the sun the air was as still as a glass, and the wind had gone. It was incredible, almost beyond belief, and he was dumbstruck as he looked at it, so that he didn't hear the demon approach. The dark ground had become a frozen hill. It was higher than a house, and on top of it the black wall had frozen into a huge black rock that would protect them. He wasn't sure whether he was on his knees or standing up, and as he turned to look at the wall he didn't even know which way up he was, and the same was true of his captor. "I told you I'd be back," he said in his demon's voice. "You thought you could get away, but it hasn't worked." He raised his arms, and it looked as if he was giving a benediction, but just as he did, it began to rain. The snowflakes were as big as dimes and they came down so fast he couldn't even see them before they had landed. It was incredible that any of them would have survived the wind, and by then his feet were already wet, and from nowhere he felt a cold that brought tears to his eyes. The snowflakes were falling so thickly he could hardly see, and it was only the dark rock that was protecting him from the worst of it. In fact, it was so dark that the falling snowflakes got reflected on it, but for all that it wasn't quite big enough to give him all the shelter he needed. He took shelter, and as he did the snow-flakes melted. Not immediately, but they melted the same way the stars had melted. The ground warmed up, and the wind rose again. He looked at his hands and realized he was shaking, but before he could do anything about it the rain hit them. The snow had dissolved and the rain fell with a roar, and it filled the whole earth and even the sky. Even from under the rock he could see it. It was a solid sheet of water that stretched as far as he could see in either direction, and he thought he was going to die. "You won't get away," the demon called out. "Not from me." And suddenly he remembered what he'd said the first time he had seen the man on the roof. He wasn't wearing a yellow belt with a brass buckle. It was more like a yellow belt with copper buckles. And then it all came back. There was no yellow belt with brass buckles. That was all a dream. So he wasn't in Mordor. He was in his bedroom. And he had just been waiting there for the wall to come down. He moved back away from the rock, and that was when he realized that it was growing. It was no longer a mountain, but it had gained in size, and now its top was clear of the other buildings. As he watched he saw the snow and the rain melt away, and at the same time he saw the wall of black glass re-forming. The rain and the melted snow were making it thinner, and from below he could see that it was still just a piece of glass, as far away from being a mountain as a piece of glass was from being an iron bar. But he had been wrong about there not being much time. The wall was thinning fast, and soon it was just a piece of glass as high as his roof. He felt another big gust of wind and he ran to the side of the rock. And what he saw made him sick. The ground was shaking, like an earthquake, but there was no way it was an earthquake. It was too broad for that, and where the rock began the ground was still solid. And that was just for starters. The ground around the rock was shaking so much that he felt his own house would fall apart. But then he was right in the middle of it and he could see it for himself. The rock had split, but in a way he couldn't really understand. There were more cracks coming out of the wall, but it wasn't just that, it was something else too, something bigger than cracks. The rocks were sliding, the whole earth was sliding, and it was like he was in the middle of a huge earthquake. But that wasn't all. He couldn't see it at first, but then he realized the worst of it. When he looked at the black wall he didn't see anything black. There was no wall, there was no rock and there were no buildings. What had been there was now missing, but what was there now he could barely see. The blackness had grown much, much thicker and where there had been a building he could see nothing but a huge blackness. The whole surface of the earth was covered, and it wasn't the fall of night. The sun was still shining, but the light that shone down into the earth never got through the blackness at all. He'd read somewhere that the sky had black bits in it that made the moon blacker. That was nothing compared to this. The great black wall had covered everything. There wasn't a bit of blue or brown or red or any of the colors he could see. It was just black, like nothing on earth. He was right in the middle of a huge hole in the sky. But not everything was covered. At first he hadn't been able to see, but now he realized he wasn't staring at blackness at all. As the wall came down it left him open to the sky, and the dark blue of the night came down to him and showed him what it had covered. And there