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Socks.
The eternal mystery.
More precisely, Dwarves and socks.
Long, long ago in a land far, far away there was a city of short hairy folk who lived underground. It wasn't some dark, cold hole though. The Dwarves had over many years carved out great halls and filled them with bright lanterns and warm hearths. Miners and metalsmiths of renown, they became fabulously wealthy as they sold their products far and wide, especially to a nearby city of Elves.
This is not a story of their finest art, nor of their tools, weapons or even their ores.
No, this is a story about their footwear.
You see, Dwarves get through a lot of socks. They clump around in big, heavy boots as they go about their industry, tramping back and forth through the halls and tunnels, up and down the stairs, day in, day out. Thousands upon thousands of booted feet, each of which needs a bit of padding so as to not get blisters. While it certainly works, the constant rubbing quickly wears holes in those socks.
One can only get so far with patches before the whole lot falls to pieces and the same goes for imports, in a fiscal sense. No upstanding Dwarf would be caught cavorting with sheep, oh no! Such were the strange dotings of Elves and Men.
Yet the socks had to flow. The botanical world had its answer, but essays in subterranean agriculture always hit a wall. Therefore, some unhappy souls would trudge across hidden mountain vales every day beneath the sky's yawning gaze, risking the horrible fate of a tan out in the flax fields for the noble cause of podiatry.
Thus were the socks made, from coarse linen to the finest Elvish fabrics, but once sufficiently holey, they all needed disposing of.
Here's where the real problem began. You see, Dwarves made their socks to last. It was the only way they'd go more than a week without a new pair. Used socks would get thrown out with the other waste fabric or bought by rag and bone Dwarves for various uses, but there was always an excess of supply.
Slowly but surely, unwanted socks began to pile up in side rooms. They didn't decay, for the craftsdwarfship was of the finest quality and as it happens, Dwarven sweat has amazing preservative properties.
Years passed.
The socks piled higher.
Soon the Dwarves began carving out new chambers purely to contain the socks. Things were fine for a while.
Then the stink started to get out. Tendrils of sweaty sock smell drifting down the passages like mist in the woods.
The Dwarves designed and fitted airtight doors to keep the smell inside the sock chambers. They even invented the first airlocks for the purpose. Again, the problem was solved, for now.
Trapped, the smell kept building up and as more socks were piled in the chambers, it got worse and worse until the Dwarves found they simply couldn't breathe inside those fetid halls any more.
Again, the engineers set to work and made compressors, filling tanks with clean air so specially-suited Dwarves could enter the chambers to deposit socks. Things were fine.
One day, a sock delivery Dwarf thought he saw something move in one of the chambers. Rumours began to spread.
The socks were alive.
One day, a delivery Dwarf thought he heard whispers in the chamber.
The Socks were plotting.
One day, a delivery Dwarf went missing.
The Socks were revolting!
The rumours spread like wildfire through the city. Dwarves stockpiled dried food and forbade their dwarflings from leaving their homes.
The King was bombarded with petitions and his councillors weren't much better.
"The Socks must be stopped!" shouted the Minister for Mining.
"We have to send in the army!" cried the Clothier's Guild representative.
"The revoluthion ith upon uth!" lisped the Foreign Secretary.
"Hic." belched the Brewer's Guildmaster, who had been drowning her sorrows. This insight was followed by a thud as she fell face first on the table and started snoring.
The King held his head in his hands, despairing. Nobody knows if he despaired of their chances should the Socks rise up, or of his people's collective imaginations.
"Erm, excuse me?" a timid voice piped up amid the chaos.
The King looked up. A young Dwarf, hardly with a full beard upon his face, had his hand raised like a child trying to get their teacher's attention. Unnoticed by his panicking councillors, the King rose from his seat and ushered the youth into a corner of the chamber.
"Um, well, you see sire..." the Dwarf, who was the new Trade Minister, stammered.
"Yes..." the King prompted, silently wondering how the lad had got the job in the first place. Not to mention many of his own life choices which led to this point.
"Well, we could get rid of the socks, sire."
"Go on..."
"We could, um, sell them?"
"Sell them?"
"Um, that is, if you don't mind sire..." the Trade Minister squeaked.
"Sell them..." the King repeated slowly.
The Trade Minister seemed about to wet himself, his knees knocking together furiously like a pair of angry woodpeckers.
"Sell them..." the King repeated again.
The Trade Minister fainted.
"Good idea!" the King roared with delight, picking up the limp minister and shaking him.
A week of preparations followed. Armed teams were drilled in anti-Sock warfare and went into the chambers with the usual delivery Dwarves.
The missing Dwarf was found buried under a drift of Socks, a look of horror still frozen upon his face.
Some of the workers fled at the news, but were prodded back in by burly Dwarves with sticks.
Slowly, Socks were removed from the chambers and taken to an underground spring which flowed through the mountain before emptying out into the River Sirannon. There they were cleansed in the cold waters and the grime they carried was washed downstream, turning the river black for days afterwards.
Soon enough the first shipment was ready and several wagonloads rolled out with the usual weekly caravan, heading for the city of the Elves laden with metalworks, ore and now the corpses of Socks as well.
"After all, they like their knitwear, those Elves." said one Dwarf to another at the gate as the wagons rolled over the horizon.
Generations passed and amazingly, the Elves kept buying the Socks for good money.
The haberdashery industry boomed.
The chambers were still not empty though, for the Dwarves could not sell all the Socks at once for fear they'd flood the market. Socks went in, Socks went out, but the overall sockiness of the rooms lingered.
Occasionally a Dwarf would go missing and so the rumours persisted and morphed, now whispered as legends in the light of evening fires and used to scare unruly dwarflings.
Then one day, disaster struck. The Elves went to war and lost badly. Something about jewellery, as usual. Their city was razed and the gate leading out to the western plains upon which it had stood was sealed.
The Socks began to build up again.
The Dwarves tried to export to their eastern neighbours, but they had far less of a craving for used footwear.
Some enterprising Dwarves even tried to sell to the northern Orc tribes, but the demand still wasn't high enough and a few ended up roasted.
The chambers began to fill up.
Then one day the Minister for Mining proposed a bold new plan: They would dig to the bottom of the world, drop the Socks out the other side, then seal off the passage!
Teams of miners worked tirelessly, digging deeper and deeper into the earth, delving an endless staircase downward and also up, so as to act as a vast chimney pipe.
Despite the chimney, the heat began to grow unbearable and progress slowed, so engineers once again at enormous expense came up with the solution in the form of special heat-proof suits.
The great endeavour continued until one day, they dug too deep.
Miners unearthed a great chamber deep below the ground, deeper than anyone had ever dug before. But it was clearly not natural.
A team of brave adventurers were conscripted from a nearby pub and prodded down to the depths to explore.
They were never seen again. Nor was the rescue party.
After long and only slightly drunken debates over the finest of ales, mining operations were slated to go forward, simply walling off the chamber to continue deeper. After all, once the Socks were dumped they'd be collapsing the shaft anyway, so who cared?
Apparently, something in the depths cared.
The boring teams went missing.
Soon after, miners on the lower levels working on other projects also began vanishing.
Not even the most learned of scholars knows quite what happened next, but the King died. The city became known as Moria, the Black Pit to most, but what they don't know is that in the secret language of the Dwarves, Moria means Sock Pit. They never speak this fact aloud to any not of their race, for it is an ancient shame and their greatest secret.
The mystery of the fall remains. Some tell of the Socks hammering day and night against the doors of their forgotten chambers until they eventually broke loose, hordes of shrieking knitted horrors flooding the corridors, rebelling against their creators. Those people are called crazy and ignored. What anyone with a shred of credibility claims is that an ancient evil was released from the depths, slew the King and drove out the Dwarves.
They are probably right. But if they are, that means one thing and one thing only:
The Socks are still out there.
The Socks are waiting.
They slumber in their chambers.
They do not age.
They do not decay.
They endure amid their stink.
An ancient, ravenous horror lurking in the depths.
One day, someone will open those heavy doors, thinking to find the lost riches of the Dwarves beyond, ignoring the warnings scrawled on the walls.
Failing that, one day the earth will shift, breaching the seals.
On that day, all will know the true terror of the Black Pit.
On that day, the asockalypse shall come.
Sweet dreams.