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The Last Song of the Ainur	By : TICS Category: -Multi-Age > Het - Male/Female Views: 2083 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the Lord of the Rings (and associated) book series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Title: The Last
Song of the Ainur
Rated: R
Author: TICS
Genre: Adventure/Romance, Het, Non-canon
Summary: The Age of Man is over, but it is not the End of
Days.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Prologue

I remember the day the world ended. It ended not with a blast, nor with
flames or the crash of thunder, nor with Biblical Horsemen or serene Raptures,
but with a silence so deep and profound that to hear it would serve to crack
even the staunchest of hearts. Others might disagree, but for me, I reckoned as
the Last Day of Man the day my husband succumbed to the illness that took him
and the vast majority of human life on the planet in one fell swoop.

The End of Days came upon the Age of Men quickly, felling
most within a week's time in the form of a microscopic human brew with a bloodlust
more virulent that any that had ever plagued the earth before. Several small vials found their way out
into the hands of a well-organized group of extremists through an underling's
well-greased palm. On every
continent, in every country, in every city and suburb, every forest and desert,
in every corner of the world in which Man dwelled there came a great
dying. Few survived, fewer still
survived the days that followed - days of hunger, fear, sickness and
sorrow.

Incredibly, the survivors - as they slowly found one
another amid the confusion forming a very few small, isolated groups - realized
that they all had one singularly glaring thing in common. They were all female. No male had survived the End of
Days. The human species had been
served its death sentence.

My own experience was so similar to the others' that it
could have been their own story I tell.

We watched from the isolation of our bedroom as the world
around us fell apart. The television coverage at first was disbelieving and reassuring
- specialists and military mouth pieces, each opinion concurring - no need to
panic, stay indoors, drink plenty of fluids, everything was under control. All too soon, however, it became
abundantly clear to us that nothing was under control at all.

My husband was gone in hours, as a cough that quickly
deepened and a fever that abruptly spiked dangerously high were followed by
straining gasps for air from fluid-filled lungs that could no longer function
took him from me. Helpless, I watched him die while holding his hand, crying
and praying as I waited for an ambulance that never came. I remember the
feeling of his hand in mine as the cold hardness of death seeped into his
fingers.

The telephone was useless; busy signals reached no matter
what number I dialed. Confused and frightened, I took to the streets searching
for help. I found only a few
others, every bit as frightened as I and wandering as aimlessly, many already
showing symptoms of the disease that would soon claim their lives. Hospitals
overflowed with the dead and dying, doctors and nurses swiftly adding to their
numbers. Police and fire stations stood empty, their former civil servants
either dead or missing. In the blackness of the nights that followed, I spent
the lonely hours in my home knowing that my husband's body occupied our bedroom
but unable to force myself to enter it to move him

The news was sporadic - a nameless, faceless group of
radicals taking credit in a statement supposedly taped shortly before they had
murdered the world. Gradually, (although more quickly than I would have
imagined had I ever been able to imagine something so horrible) the television
and radio stations went off the air, even the call signs eventually replaced by
snow. Phone lines went dead, electricity failed, and water stopped flowing from
faucets. In the heat of the summer the house began filling with an odor that
only served to remind me of what lay behind my closed bedroom door, and I knew
that I could not stay any longer and keep my sanity.

Of the people I knew, no others survived. Alone, I left the city on foot, a small
backpack of staples slung over my shoulders, traveling slowly, picking my way
through mountains of twisted and abandoned metal left to rot on the highway,
the reek of death growing stronger by the minute. I instinctively headed toward
the one place that had always been my sanctuary during those times in my life
when I had needed shelter from what now seemed petty hardships - a small cabin
on the shore of the sea, inherited from my parents. I met very few others along
the way, scarcely a handful. Of
those I met, several ran before I could approach them. Five joined with me, but three of them
died before ever reaching the coastline.
The two that remained were female, both not much younger than I, in
their early twenties.

It took far longer than I had ever thought to cover the
distance to my destination, but the mileage on the roadway signs gradually
diminished as we drew nearer to the coast. I led the two women over the causeway that led to the beach,
though I could not smell the salt on the air for the stench of the dead. In cars, in yards, on the street,
scattered across the beach on their bright blankets, radios long since silenced
along with their owners, the dead waited patiently for someone to put them to
rest. I realized that if we were
to survive then that someone would have to be us, for I had not seen nor heard
any other living soul besides the two who traveled with me since well before
our arrival at the beach.

At dawn of the second day following our arrival at the
seashore we raided the local supermarket, loading carts with supplies - canned
food, jugs of fresh water and medical supplies, including several boxes of
surgical masks and latex gloves.
We would need them for the clean up I knew must be made both a horrible
and unavoidable priority.

By mid-afternoon of the second day we set about cleaning
the beach around my home, dragging and piling the bodies as far down on the
stretch of sand as possible, putting as much distance between the growing pile
of human remains and my small house as we could. We fueled the fire with cords
of wood found piled in the stockroom of the supermarket, supplementing it with
driftwood and drenching it with lighter fluid and kerosene. The stench was
horrible, worse than the smell of death itself, despite the masks and menthol
ointment we had rubbed under our noses.

Our faces blackened with soot from the fire, we wearily
turned our backs to the grisly pyre and found our way back to the cabin. We
spoke little between ourselves, too heartsick from the task we had performed to
care for conversation. Instead, we washed as best we could, each curling on the
bed she had claimed as her own, staring at the ceiling until sleep brought the inevitable
nightmares.

It was in the late afternoon of the third day, just as
the sky was beginning to redden with the sunset, that the ship arrived.
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The Last Song of the Ainur