When the light dies and in creaps the dark whelm,
the door is revealed under the Moons guise.
Speak Friend and enter into the realm
of an empire domed by granite skies.

Behold, visitor! The majestic halls
that echo the clanging of hammers still
a whole age later after these walls
first bore marks of our patience and skill

woven together into an endless grid,
with caverns and roads stretching far and wide,
once richly adorned and brightly lit,
meriting to our mastery and pride.

Every day and night our smelters gorged
upon the hills of a precious ore.
The blunt pounding of our mighty Forge
through these passages that we bored

never ceased. The domain breathed with its draft,
that fed fires hotter than veins of Earth,
and in generations of labor in this craft
amassed riches of a boundless worth:

Silver, jewels, iron and mithril too,
all freed from the crampy grasp of stone -
as our picks slowly razed their way through
the Mountain towards the old and unknown.

There was no such thing as a well too deep
... untill there was. And in our greed and vain
we suddenly woke from it's lengthy sleep
the herald of our doom. The Durins bane.

Silent now stands the greatest of all
Dwarwen kingdoms. It's heirs deceased.
Defiled by vermin. Plundered. Appaled
from the enduring presence of the Beast.

But it's foretold that we will return
once that the Fiend is bested and slain.
The rekindled forge will again burn
and breathe life into the Mines again.