Frodo stands on the edge of Emyn Muil and looks down into the stinking, festering marshlands below. He wonders how he will ever get down…. and further yet…. across them.
‘We’ve been going in circles for days now, he grumbles to himself. ‘And going nowhere. It’s that Sam. I knew I shouldn’t have let him come with me, but NOOO, he had to almost get himself drowned and all in the river, and now he’s stuck with me.’
He looks up, and lo and behold, in front of his eyes dances a mirage of scintillating lights, like freshly fallen snow in the sunlight. He reaches out to touch one and pop! It explodes into more lights, but this time they are a dazzling blue, brighter than the sky on a clear autumn afternoon. Fascinated, Frodo once more touches one of the blue lights, and fizzle! It melts into an iridescent green, like the sunlight shinning through new leaves in a forest glade. Thus it continues, until lights in every color of the rainbow surround our most joyful hero. What they are, he cannot tell, just yet, but he doesn’t care. They are beckoning to him…and he follows.

Samwise comes back to the small bluff where he had last left his precious master, only to see him disappear around a rather large boulder.
“Mister Frodo!” He runs after him, and just as he rounds the corner, he suddenly comes face to face with…. Smeagol!
“Yessssss my preciousss…” he hisses. “we wantsss it, yessss, so we makses pretty lightses to lead stupid hobbit to his death off the cliffses!!” And he begins to chuckle madly.
“No…” whispers Sam, too frightened to speak.
“There! Down the gullieses, stupid master fell, and now I have my precioussss!!”
And there, in his wrinkled palm, lay the One Ring.
Suddenly it seemed to Sam that Gollum began to grow, and a great gear seized him, and he fell on his knees and begged for mercy.
“Please!” he pleads, “where is my master, that I may go and bury him?”
“Stupid, fat, hobbit, he fell down the gully, and you can to for all I care!” And with that he pushed Sam into a dark chasm, and he fell and fell, and as he was falling, he thought he heard Frodo’s voice calling to him…and no one has ever seen or heard of either of the hobbits ever since.

But, since I am so nice, I will finish the story for you. Gollum took the ring and overthrew Sauron, and reigned in his stead. And he punished all living things, except the dwarves, for they had never wronged him. The hobbits he was especially cruel to; as punishment for Frodo and Sam’s treatment of him, he subjected all hobbits to slave labor in the mines. To the elves he made to work in shipyards, to be forever tortured by their love of the sea, and the crying (ahem, Legolas) of the seagulls, and to never release them and allow them to sail away to elven home. The Men he made to work in the fields, and all other work that reqiures physical strength, and he built a mighty army of them, and all the orcs that were left in middle earth. But he never had servant orcs, or orc-officers. Those positions he saved for the dwarves. And they grew fabulously rich and spoiled, and there was a saying that endured until the world ended (when Smeagol threw too much Jiffy-pop into Mount Doom (ode to VSD) and blew up the world. (the Jiffy-Pop in itself was not the real reason for such utter destruction-it was Sadaam Hussein. Somehow he sneaked into Middle Earth, looking to create a totalitarian dictatorship, and he brought some of his weapons along, and hid them in Mount Doom when he thought no one was looking…. so that’s where he and all his bombs have lit off to…)) as I was saying, there was a saying that existed until the world ended; it was ‘Never trust a dwarf,’ strangely enough, and that’s where we get all our superstition about little people from.

And then… Sam woke up, and he went to Mount Doom and back, and saw many strange things, but he never found out who Sadaam Hussein was, and what a nuclear bomb is, and died the most heartbroken of hobbits. Little did he know he didn’t miss much…

(Moral of the story being, don’t follow the lights…)

Frodo

P.S. no, if anyone was wondering, I did not write this from personal experience, it’s all those peanut butter cups…. 🙂