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When the guards on duty above the main gate shouted about a flock of enormous birds swooping in from the south, Thorin knew, in a bone-deep, stone-marrow sense of way, two things: that the months of long waiting were finally over, and that they weren’t out of the fire yet. Thorin was holding court, so he heard the ruckus of an emergency long after the chaos was set into motion. One of the disadvantages of a throne “room” larger than Men’s castles, located deep within the heart of the mountain. Immediately, he dismissed the pair of jeweller’s guild apprentices in a squabble with the goldsmith apprentices over their respective pay, each accompanied by appropriately incensed guild masters. They bowed themselves out of the way of a runner of Dwalin’s personal recruits for precisely such emergencies; a young lass panting with her eyes wide as saucers as she curtsied awkwardly in her full frock of chainmail.
“Speak,” Thorin bade her, already out of the throne with Dwalin a half-step behind him to the left.
“Eagles, your Majesty. The eagles from your legend are come again, and they seem to be carrying passengers, two big folk among them, but we can’t see far enough yet for identification.”
“How many?” Please, Mahal, he thought with his fists clenched so tightly his arms began to ache. The wounds he had received on the battlefield not a week ago were still smarting, and his old heart was beating like a war drum in his chest. Dwalin’s runner lass looked from her King to her Captain and back again with wide eyes, visibly shaken.
“Five, my liege. High up in formation, faster than anything I’ve ever seen in the sky. And there is a great white-headed one in front, your Majesty.”
“Aye, that is their Lord,” Dwalin said with the gravity of having been months at war. “Thorin.”
They rested their heads together for a single moment so Thorin could catch his breath back from bludgeoning fear. If this was Frodo come home, there would be a feast in Mahal’s name and prayers offered for a full week, he’d see to it. His aching chest swelled with hope.
“This is joyful news!” he declared to the hushed hall so the guild masters, the Longbeard and Broadbeam nobles fled here from the reaches of the realm and what was left of his advisors stopped nattering among themselves like a flock of frightened chickens in front of the fox approaching. Silence fell around his booming voice. “Fetch my husband as fast as you possibly can, lass! And send Tauriel up to the battlements to see further than we can. Friends are coming from far away, and I fear they had it harder than we did in our comfortable stronghold.”
“Sire,” agreed the lass, running off almost before Thorin could call a thank you after her. Dwalin pounded him on the back right between his shoulder blades. A wordless sound of fearsome joy slipped from Thorin’s throat before he could take it back. Hushed conversation continued, rising like the tide around them, pulling in and away again as Thorin turned into Dwalin to drown it all out.
“If it’s them- I feared I would never see them again. How can I thank the Maker enough-“ In he sucked a calming breath under Dwalin’s big fingers rubbing soothing circles into his back. He was frowning somewhere in between apprehension and desperation himself, never one to jump to hope before making ready for battle.
“Aye, we’ll give thanks enough for the old man to have our shouting in his ear for days to come, but Tharkûn didn’t call his eagles until we were all of us as good as dead, Thorin. We have to prepare for a sour victory. Don’t run out there alone; Dís would have my head.” And a sour victory it had been a few days ago, indeed. After months under siege, a third of the mountain filled to the very brim with dwarrows from near and far lay sick with either wound-fever or disease. The river running underneath Erebor carried with it things no-one wanted to drink, rationing of food and drink made the young and the old weaker than they already were. As if that wasn’t enough, just as last time, winter was hovering on their northern doorstep.
“I won’t be alone. You will be there with me, cousin.”
“Always,” Dwalin swore lowly. In public, Thorin could accept no help from him to get around on his battered leg, so he awkwardly hopped down the stairs and reached for the great staff which helped him walk up and down this mountain of endless stairs. He’d overcome worse. The sound of it on the good stone floor echoed in counter-time to Dwalin’s heavy boots. A hundred times the far-away walls called their steps back at them. The statues of their forefathers, larger than forges, watched them go. Distant relatives and guild masters alike joined them hurriedly, whispering their assumptions as pebbles did just out of Thorin’s earshot all the while. Thump, thump-thump, thump, thump-thump made Thorin’s current three feet on the floor. The guards on the portal stood to perfect attention for him, brimming with nerves where Dwalin hopefully wouldn’t see it. Thorin damn near shooed them ahead with his staff in a mimic of Gandalf with children underfoot.
“Open the gates! Get you going, off with you! Open the gates for my family coming back to us!”
“OPEN THE GATES!” it echoed down the halls, getting far ahead of him even as he tried to eat up more ground than his cursed leg would let him in so quick a pace. He could not contain the pounding anticipation which drove him forward. His people, hardy and recovering from months of siege in the middle of summer when they should have been bringing in the hobbits’ harvest into the stores, swept away in front of him in one single wave bowing the young and the old halfway to the floor. He left excited chatter in his wake, questions he could not answer, and hope; oh, there was hope in their wan faces once more.
By the time he made it to the entrance hall what felt like half an hour later, tired, in pain and no less nervously impatient for it, Nori caught up with him slipping out of the expectant crowds. Today, he was clad in a simple, if well-spun black tunic befitting the onset of the autumn chill, and not more silver beads in his hair than necessary. The sounds of the mountain, the heartbeat of the forges in the deep, drowned his quiet voice out enough to limit its reaches to Thorin’s ear only. His lined face was grave.
“Cousin,” he said, very shortly, “they’re come home.”
Dwalin exhaled an explosive breath for both of them.
“Thank Mahal, thank him thrice and thirteen times.” Thorin wasn’t ashamed to lean on his staff with relief. “Then why are you looking like the winter storms come early?”
Nori turned him away from the people by the shoulder, taking Dwalin with them by eye-contact only. The great emerald gates were grating on the stone floor inch by slow inch somewhere to the back left of them, at the edge of Thorin’s vision.
“Tharkûn rides in front on the biggest of them, the one that saved your life also. Tauriel is beside herself with joy; she’s spotted Legolas waving down and Gimli on another. But they all look like death warmed over, and the Gamgee boy is holding up your own nephew on another one of the eagles.” Such floating relief followed by the sinking dread had Thorin feel himself go pale.
“Frodo is with them?”
“Aye, unconscious or worse, Tauriel says. She’s gone to prepare the infirmary to eek out space and resources for another couple of patients somehow. I encountered your guards on the way upstairs; he was up on your balcony-garden out west, so he’ll be a while. I’m thinking it’s better this way, mayhaps. Thorin, we need to think about asking the elves for aid. For Frodo. If they are still caked in half of Mordor and starved from the journey- We don’t have the capacities to help them properly.“
Half an age ago, Thorin would undoubtedly have thrown a mighty fit at even thinking about asking elves for anything. As it stood, Thrandûil was an arrogant arse with his head so far up his damn treetops he forgot to look out of his own door for a couple centuries at a time, but he loved his son, and he had saved Thorin’s life as well as that of Fíli and Kíli besides. It pained him to agree, out of principle more than pride, but he gave a single nod anyway.
“Thrandûil will want to know of Legolas’ arrival right away. Let’s welcome them home and send straight for him as soon as we know how bad they are off. Thank you, Nori.”
“Pleasure,” said his spry spy-master and faded back into the crowd somehow half unnoticed by the excited gaggle of Erebor’s finest. If he pecked Dwalin’s cheek in passing, there was no-one dumb enough to remark upon it.
Settling a single hand on Thorin’s shoulder, the aging captain settled like granite next to him. Together they watched the emerald portal open inch by inch until the sliver of the wasteland beyond was just wide enough to let through a procession: Thorin raised his free arm to stop the machinery from opening them up further. Hungrily, holding his breath, he stood his ground against the urge to run to the strange motley group hopping down from their eagles landed in front of the emerald portals chirping their goodbyes as soon as their load had lightened. Somehow, he had forgotten how huge they were. Against the afternoon sky, they shrunk to the size of sparrows very fast. What was left made Thorin’s heart turn over in his chest.
Four figures barely recognisable as hobbits for their thin limbs, their height difference and the soot that covered them, a ginger-haired, short-bearded dwarf thinned too much as well, an elf prince never more than a half-step away from said dwarf, and the pest of Thorin’s life stumbled into the light of Erebor. In front: Gandalf, gleaming. White as mithril, white as fallen snow, he, too, was leaning on his staff, though he seemed to be simply as tired as all of them. In contrast to the hobbits, he did not appear to favour any injured body parts. There had been many, many times in the past decades when Thorin was a breath away from kicking him out to sleep in Laketown for all the trouble he brought with him, for his riddles and his elusive nature, though he had proven himself to be an invaluable friend to all hobbitkind when he’d led the exodus from the Shire on a tall horse right next to Bilbo, thirty years ago. Thorin could have fallen to one knee in front of him now. Being the King Under the Mountain, he did not bend his battered knee. Their routine was a clasp of arms. That Gandalf was very faintly shaking rapidly became only the first alarm bell in a growing orchestra of them inside Thorin’s mind. For a few long few seconds, they stood there in the ringing silence in the atrium, staring at each other and the memory of their last goodbye. Neither of them had known whether there was a dawn waiting beyond this war.
“Mithrandir,” Thorin greeted him quietly, lowering his eyes if nothing else. He could feel the amusement radiating off Gandalf anyhow, quick and surprised as a light blow.
“Do I look elven to you now, King Thorin? Have I grown this waspish in the long night?”
A dozen replies rose and died on Thorin’s tongue. Questions like whether Gandalf had drunk too deep of an elven concoction meant for their Kings only, remarks at Thrandûil’s famous vanity, a joke in poor taste that the Company should have taken Legolas with them all those decades ago from the start if this was what travelling with elven royalty got in the end. Thorin let go of his hand, reaching for honesty instead.
“You look more yourself than I have ever seen you. It is good to have you here again, Tharkûn. You have brought my family home to me.” It hadn’t escaped him that Gandalf was shielding the rest of his company with his very body (and his own bone-white staff, taller than Thorin’s by a solid meter.) Something in him softened now that the initial tension diffused between them; it went out of him with a breath of air.
“That I have.” He swept aside. A gasp travelled through the atrium. Distantly, Thorin could hear his nephews hollering for space to be let through. His heart was pounding too loudly to look for them.
Two of the hobbits had grown an entire head in their absence; Merry and Pippin, but they had lost their easy charm in the process. To see them inclining their heads to him – hanging them, more like – looked… wrong. Next to them, Legolas still stood out like a young birch tree with his hands folded too demurely; tall, proud, and as ungodly tired as Thorin had never seen him. Gímli was down on his knees – both of them with his axe laid flat on the ground – Thorin’s focus stumbled like a hare trapped in a dead end – They were all caked in half of Mordor as Nori had put it, but poor Frodo and Sam were nigh unrecognizable for the black colour staining every inch of them. Samwise held Frodo in his arms in a position that could with a lot of goodwill been called sitting up, and he wasn’t the only one weeping.
“Your Majesty,” he croaked in a ruined voice, painting tear tracks through the charcoal dust on his cheeks which he had evidently tried valiantly to wipe away some time ago with only a little water. Something cold slithered down Thorin’s windpipe.
“What,” he tried, sinking down to one knee, “Young Master Gamgee, how – you must tell me quick – are you returned to me from the very heart of that cursed volcano? Have you defeated Mount Doom, my friend?”
“Aye, your Majesty,” hick-upped the bravest hobbit in all of the thrice-damned Shire, “I carried him up and down those awful slopes myself, I did. But ‘m afraid – he’s barely been awake, Sire, the fire has crawled into him, methinks, ‘n I can’t – I can’t-“ Instead of lying there out cold, Frodo mumbled and shifted incomprehensively, limp as a doll in his arms. His eyes were rimmed red, his skin cracked and blistered and flaking in places like damp clay held too close to the heat.
“FRODO!”
Dear Samwise perked up like the world’s best, most loyal guard dog before his whole face crumbled. Thorin lowered his head in grief. A single head to Frodo’s forehead streaked in black dirt like an oily film of death told him all he had to know. He was burning up. Breathing, if weakly, with a fluttering hummingbird pulse. Dehydrated, all of them, stretched to the very limit of their hardy, sturdy bodies, exhausted to the point of falling over dead if he didn’t bundle them into the infirmary beds right this second.
“Thank you, Samwise Gamgee, for bringing my nephew home to me, and for carrying him through the very fires of Mount Doom itself. You saved the world, both of you.” Carefully, he withdrew his hand, even though it cost him every ounce of strength not to bundle Frodo into his own arms and to raise with him to do the long march himself. Instead, he couldn’t quite swallow a growl at the fates breathing down his neck as they had all his life. Tears burned his eyes. “We are not giving up on you, Frodo Baggins, you stubborn creature. You will live.” His coal-and-mithril hair brushed Frodo’s shoulders as he propped himself up heavily on his staff until his legs would carry his weight once more just as Bilbo crashed through the whispering throng of dwarrows with a cry of distress. Barely a moment of a double embrace he spared for Merry and Pippin in armour, leaning into each other, both a head taller than Bilbo and thus standing just above Thorin’s own height; the betrayal; before he drew back into Dwalin’s personal space to give the hobbits some privacy. Bilbo sunk to his knees in front of Frodo and Samwise.
A wail started somewhere in the crowd. A plea to the rocks. A prayer to the stone so it would not take a member of the royal family all too soon. Silence fell around that echoing, clear female voice. Thorin could not make out the singer, though she pierced him right down into his very heart. Too many funerals he had led these last months not to picture exactly how it would feel like to carry his adopted little hobbit-nephew to his grave. Hobbits laid their dead underhill, in stone chambers, covered as by a blanket with the good, cold earth. Their hilled burials dotted the Desolation, barely distinguishable from respectable hobbit-holes when one did not know where to look for doors and windows. Thorin was not ready to lie out Frodo on a stone-table surrounded by pots full of flowers, food and drink for the next life. For that boy of fifty-one winters (one year, whispered a voice inside his head, one long year you have let him out of your sight and here he lies) to go back under stone and wait out the rest of eternity for the Second Calling – not over Thorin’s dead body, he thought clenching his teeth so hard his jaws ached. Grown old without the Ring so rapidly Thorin felt like he was losing him before his very eyes, Bilbo was weeping loud enough for the sound to bury into his nightmares. Thorin, as Dwalin had earlier for him, laid a single comforting hand on his soft, familiar shoulder.
“My love, be calm,” he asked in a quivering voice, “he’ll live. My light, my heart, I will not let him die.” Briefly, ignoring all the staring masses, he pulled Bilbo to his creaking knees and touched their heads together. Smelling of the garden, of the hearth and herbs and home, Bilbo knotted his fists into Thorin’s heavy ceremonial velvet robes of a deep dark blue so tightly the silver embroidery creaked a complaint. His breaths came fast and panicked, but angry too, frightened, furious, so quick to cut himself with the blame these days. Thorin smoothed a gnarled hand over his cheek, breathing, breathing, until the air flowed in a single steady rhythm between them. “He’ll live,” he promised, “if it’s the last thing I do, we will save Frodo from Mordor’s foul grasp. The hard work they have done for us, now it is our time to pry those black fingers from his throat bit by bit until I have the whole evil hand crushed like mace in a mortar, my heart, I swear it.”
“I thought-“ Bilbo gasped, paper thin, “I thought when we got them back – when all would be well in the end –“ His fairy tale Prince Consort, the miracle of House Durin, blessing of Thorin’s long, undeserved years, his darling romantic Bilbo had been uprooted from the Shire gladly, but there remained something of that far-away dream in him yet. Thorin brushed the white locks away from his shoulder affectionately and kissed his forehead. The ring, or rather the loss of it, had done a lot of damage to his old soul. It would be the joy and duty of Thorin’s twilight years to soothe as much of it as he could.
“All will be well. Frodo has endured the very land of nightmares itself; Erebor will not let him slip away into Mahal’s halls quite yet. Do you want to accompany him to the infirmary? I will send for Thrandûil to drag your boy back from the same brink he has pulled mine from so long ago.”
“Yes,” Bilbo murmured, visibly inhaling strength, leaning into Thorin’s touch as he had for sixty hard, beautiful years now. Misery paled him, but his eyes were still bright, a deep-water-blue unparalleled by the very ocean itself. “How much pain are you in, darling?”
“Less now that they are come home to us. We have been blessed, my love. Blessed beyond my wildest hopes.” The offering he was going to make on the family altar would have to be significant – what was enough, what would ever be enough for this, he thought – “I will be right there as soon as I can, ghivashel.”
“I know you will,” Bilbo said, much calmer, before he stepped back to give Samwise the strength he lacked to carry Frodo from this chilled spot on the very doorstep of the mountain. With a glance to the wide-open south, Thorin breathed in the herbal autumn wind.
“Close the portals! Make haste, make space! Legolas, I need you to run along to your father-” In turning round, casting his eyes about for the tall, lanky prince of the woods, his focus once more caught on another one of his nephews. Both of them, in fact, were crowded in close to Gímli with identical expressions of confused distress. It made them look younger even in their full regalia from the audience hours. In comparison to their royal figures, Gimli appeared hewn from a different rock even though they were cousins thrice removed. Facing away from Thorin, he had his head bowed so that his short, matted ginger hair barely brushed his shoulders. It stood out like a flame among all the Durin-blue fabrics of court. Fíli was trying to pull him up to his feet, but Gimli was refusing to budge.
“Uncle!”
Dread coiled in his stomach.
“Here, Fíli, what is it? Frodo is bad off, but we shall have him healed in his own time.” Relief had both of his grown nephews exhale at once, but they had each a hand on Gimli’s shoulders, and not even their bolstering love could stop the latter from dropping to one knee again as Thorin approached him carefully. “Welcome home, dear cousin Gimli. You must not hide your face in shame from me, lad, I am beyond glad to have you back. You are a hero of our people, a true son of Erebor, a son of Durin and our long, blessed line.” Rounding him brought Thorin face to face with Legolas whom he barely managed to nod at before his heart was pounding for fear after fear again. Gimli’s beard was indeed hacked off just beneath the chin. A dull blade, a dull, hasty shave. Grief, he recognized, not shame, bowed his youngest fighting cousin round as a boulder in the swelling flow of dwarrows around them. Gandalf was already leading the procession of hobbits away to the left into better care than whipping wind furious at being shut out. The emerald portals scratched over the stone floor as Thorin exchanged a searching look with both Fíli and Kíli, but they both appeared as though bracing for a lethal wound.
“My King, you honour me,” Gimli intoned so full of sorrow as though they had lost the war and Sauron waited for the reaping of their souls in front of this very mountain. The double-axe lying between them like a wish for judgement Thorin wholeheartedly ignored to offer an open palm instead.
“Rise, Gimli Gloínsson, son of my kin, to tell me on your feet whom you have lost.” It was an order more than a request, and he could see the reluctance when Gimli took his hand to struggle to his feet. His tunic and armour sat too loose on him. Dark circles like half-moon ink stamps were pressed underneath his eyes, he carried the stink of foul eggs, smoke, old sweat and blood all the others carried around like a shroud. The imprint of Mordor on their bodies and souls. But when Gimli really looked at him, his King, at glittering Erebor standing strong after everything, at the people holding their breath, his gaze stuttered on Dwalin standing silent somewhere forever to Thorin’s back-left. Gimli closed his eyes and exhaled like one condemned before decapitation.
“All of them, my King. We have lost all of them.”
When the rock shifted all around you, when you were so deep inside the bowels of the earth that there was no sense of time left because so much darkness stole it all and the stone became uncomfortable with your step, this was when you must halt. You knew, instinctually, before your ever-busy brain could pick up on what your stone-sense already knew. When, not if, there was a rockslide imminent, you halt, and you duck, balancing, and you wait. Where did the rumble come from precisely? Whereto for safety: up or down?
“Dear cousin,” Thorin tried again in a trembling voice, feeling like the ground was about to give, “where have your journeys carried you from here to Rivendell and back?”
The answer was exactly what he feared.
“The Misty Mountains threw us off in the depths of winter. We had no choice but to go underneath.” A shocked murmur started in the very front rows; the guild masters, most of them older than Thorin, paled first before the rest understood. Longbeards turned away crying out tearing at their hair, beads and pearls and rings hit the ground like raindrops. He watched it sweep through the mountain in concentric circles.
“You have found a way into –“ His hand spasmed on the staff. Balin, Óin, Ori – Lóni, Frár and Náli – Little Ori, Thorin thought, spasming on the picture of his head librarian barely older than Gimli himself –
“Aye, Frodo solved the riddle of the starlit door. Ha, your clever little nephew could crown Balin King, I thought!” Gimli was shaking hist fist until it dropped. What a dream! With his eyes closed, he delivered the merciful killing blow which had been a long time coming. “Moria is lost to us once more. It has always been lost, and it shall be lost to all eternity now that the starlit door is blocked by rubble from our own battle with the filth that took my own uncle from me.”
He, too, would have shaven himself bald, Thorin mused in a very distant part of his mind shut off as in a mine shaft after the collapse from the rest of him, still shaking. The use of that name – Moria, the insult, the smear on the reputation of dwarrowkind – sent a gasp through the spectators. Like a play, like theatre. In between offended shouts, the wailing started again. Pleas to the rock, prayers to the Maker. Blessings upon the departed years too late.
Thorin lowered his heavy head, biting down a sob or a scream. It shook his entire, hardened body, it made his shoulders quake and his creaking back brittle like granite. Certainty, at last. There was mercy in that. This time, it was he who put a careful hand to Dwalin’s shoulder so as to steady or catch him. God knew he had every damned reason for his knees to buckle. But not Dwalin.
“Are they under stone?”
His powerful voice was a bare rasp.
“Aye, they are. Skeletons. Scattered where they fell.” He barely recognized Gimli’s easy Blue Mountains lilt either. Trembling with rage. Thick with tears. “We tread on them when we entered, chased by the fucking Watcher in the water. They died pressed against the doors. Shot down paces from freedom. Piled into heaps, bones among bones, weapons among weapons. Jewels dusted, dulled, useless.” The jeweler’s guild apprentices who had clamoured for equal pay earlier shouted at him to take that back, but Thorin silenced them with a lethally quick gesture.
“What of Balin?”
“Oh, poor old Lord Balin is the only one buried in a proper tomb. Shot in the back. It became their last stand, his mausoleum. Ori died propped up against the side of his tomb, writing to the last.” Blow for blow for blow. So, there it was, the price for their arrogance. Again and again and again.
“Your uncle,” Thorin heaved, dragging his own head upright by the very skin of his self-control, fighting back the fog of grief. He couldn’t allow himself to feel it, or he would bleed out, here in front of his people. “Do you know where Óin lies?”
Gimli dripped tears all over his chainmail, but at least he stood solid as stone in the face of the anguish he spread through the dwarrowfolk come together today to welcome home their own. His eyes were reddened, his palms flat against his shoulder-wide legs. Braced against the pain.
“We stumbled over him and six others at the upper Eastern gate, the one close to Lothlórien. Were it not for-“ His gaze darted to Legolas like a reflex. “Without the others, I would have drowned in my grief before I could deliver the ringbearer to his path. But I had orcs yet to kill, and so I took my revenge at Helm’s Deep, at Minas Tirith and the Black Gate itself.” He spat the name out like a berry gone foul. “It will never be enough. Moria is too deep a pit too full of filth, and if I take an orc’s head off every day for the rest of my life, I still won’t have made a dent in their legions.” Wiping away his tears quickly, angrily, he dragged in a deep breath to bow as far as he possible could in armour. “’Tis why here I surrender my axe, King Thorin, head of my House and grandest of us all. You reclaimed Erebor with a Company of thirteen, won the battle of the five armies and that for your life after. I – I led your nephew into the worst – the deepest – expecting Khazad-dûm, a feast from Lord Balin, my people restored as you have done, my liege. And I found –“
“Moria,” Thorin finished for him, understanding at last, when Gimli’s voice finally failed him. It was the full-body shudders of sobs repressed violently which stole his strength away. And still, in folding like a house of cards despite his corded muscle, he pulled forth a heavy tome from a pack on his back well-concealed under his travelling cloak.
“Ori took account of everything, he did. Reading this made me want to – to walk back in there and, and bury them all properly, before I throw myself right down beside them, but – I had friends who relied on me,” he said with another half a glance to Legolas between red lashes, there and gone like something forbidden. Legolas for his part had pressed his lips into so thin a line they disappeared near entirely. His rigidity was a forced one. Gimli’s damp hands pushed the book into Dwalin’s. “My Lord Captain Dwalin. You should have it. Please, I can take its weight no more.” Dwalin took the tome with the reverence of handling a stillborn babe. It looked heavy like a solid block of slate and twice as brittle. Shedding dust over the trodden floor of the atrium, it made dwarrows back up from it as though it was cursed instead of a blessing in disguise. At least, like this, they knew now. At least, like this, they could write the names of the dead lost to distant lands on the grand wall down in the crypts and put to rest the last hopes.
All around, there was weeping. Those who had not lost kin in this mad, greedy, doomed expedition saw now at once what this meant, finally, after a thousand years of dreaming of Khazad-dûm. Three times dwarrows had tried to retake their grandest kingdom. No more, Thorin decided then and there, shaking with ill-repressed rage. No more. It had been a doomed mission from the start; he’d known. Everyone had pleaded with Balin’s faction not to throw away their lives, none more than Dwalin, but in the end, Thorin had to let his oldest friend go where his soul commanded him. He had done no different himself in retaking the Lonely Mountain. Here lay the consequence: a book of death. A book for a hundred graves.
What was left when hope had died?
Thorin turned in a circle around his staff, pressing the curses back into his own mouth. Breathing in too deeply hurt. It cracked something in him. How he had cursed all those lords who had stayed seated on their fat, old arses when he, the King, had called for the quest for Erebor – and merely twenty-five years later, he had refused to partake in the farewell festivities for Balin and his own Company. He’d watched the emerald gates close on their backs. Twisted with fear and resentment.
Only the forges groaned in the deep. Everywhere Thorin turned, he was met with silence. Shocked or otherwise.
“From stone we come. To stone we go. From our first day to our last, we are children of Mahal, our Maker, to whom we return when we come into the Hall of our ancestors, blessed be the granite of their bones…”
Less than half-way into the last prayer over their bodies going into stone, this, too, spread like a tidal wave: by the time Thorin’s voice gave out on him, others had long taken over for him. Life in the Lonely Mountain stopped, if for but a moment. Punctuated by his staff striking the floor, the murmured Khuzdûl resounded like a rockfall in the gigantic, hollowed mountain. The great abyss of staircases rose from this atrium so that one’s gaze could not help but go up and up and up. Dwarrows of all classes, of all clans, ages, sizes and the far-flung corners of their world had stopped in their tasks to pray. Up and down the many stairs, straight ahead farther into the hallways to the kitchens and the treasure hall, as well as in the long tail of people coming from the throne room, the uncounted guards, the lowest servants and uppermost nobility of Thorin’s own shrunken family stood in unison with their head lowered. Their faith made the mountain hum. Funeral drums: boots and heartbeats.
In the aftermath, in a silence like falling snow when Thorin felt like he could not walk another step, he picked up Gimli’s axe one-handed to give it back. It made his shoulder twinge and the old battle-lust inside him scent the heavy air. Gimli was choking on his grief, great heaving breaths of it.
“Mahal has brought you back home to us, son of Durin. You are a blooded warrior, but more than this, you are the very embodiment of our people. Descended from safety into desperation, you prevailed, and most importantly, you survived. You carried this burden with you to share it with us. Put it down and pick up your axe, Gimli, brightest star of the line of Durin. You have done all of us, the living and the dead, a duty that will be remembered for all eternity.”
An echo in the vague shape of “and we will remember them” was flung off the many staircases into the abyss to the forges below. Gimli pitched into the single arm Thorin held out for him without the iron resolve to hold back the sobs. A single glance brought Dwalin into the embrace, book and all. It felt like embracing a boulder. He was a bull of a man, but he could be soft. His gratitude he pushed into Gimli’s thick skull some thrice or dozen times to ever more violent objections. Fíli and Kíli held their cousin together with hands bare and faces cracked open from the certainty of loss. From the crowds pulled Nori like a shadow, stepping into the light only to draw Gimli into a spine-shaking head-crack when finally Thorin had to unhand him in order to deal with the elf lost in the middle.
Quite contrary to his expectations, Legolas was merely crying as beautifully as a statue without moving a wit, the idiot. His entire face, pale, wan as an elf ever got, was yearning for Gimli so strongly Thorin had to bite back a deep sigh. So. Another one of Thrandûil’s children about to be married into the family before the next year was out, then.
“You pulled him through this hell?” It wasn’t so much a question as an open request to elaborate. He liked to think that his bloody fucking staff made him half as intimidating as the damned wizard usually was, but Legolas didn’t even glance at him.
“And I pulled him out the other side when all hope seemed lost.” Wiping the tears from his high cheekbones very delicately, he nodded a little without taking his eyes off Gimli. “You should know two things which my darling would not announce to all and sundry to hear, lest more went astray in Khazad-dûm.” How odd, to hear a Khûzdul name from elven lips. It sounded natural from him. Practiced. Then he sucked in a breath. “The Watcher in the Water is dead. I shot him until he moved no more and drowned.”
Thorin inclined his head just a tad.
“Thank you. That is one evil gone from the world. The other?”
Hesitation, of all things. Hesitation and a speck of fear.
“Mithrandir died falling into the deepest depths off the bridge, which now is destroyed. I understand that this makes getting from one half of the city into the other impossible.” Another warning off any ideas about retaking – Gandalf was very much alive and meddling, how on earth –
“Died,” Thorin echoed, dazed, believing the theory about elf-magic more as the moments ticked on. Legolas hummed in the affirmative. His gaze, silverfish-quick, held hidden grief tucked away for months where it could not fester. A wound calcified. Burned shut. Mordor’s black dirt looked like an insult on him.
“Durin’s Bane wrapped him in its leash to pull him into the depths. It is a fitting name, but what it really was… was a Bal’roq. And it, too, lies dead, dashed apart on the cliffsides of the Misty Mountains. Saruman the White sits locked in his tower, and in his stead, Gandalf the White has returned to us from the other side to lead us from peril once more.” Life around them bumbled on. Dwarrowdams picked up their skirts and the great book was very carefully wrapped in a shroud to be preserved for the ages later by experts of the book-binding craft, Dwalin was saying something too low to understand bowed into Gimli, Kíli was pushing their foreheads together, and underneath Thorin, the ground of his very world shook.
“A Bal’roq… Mahal preserve us, this is what we have wakened from the Deep?” If it had gotten out –
Legolas sighed out a long-held breath.
“And it feeds the crows now. Oddly fitting, is it not?” But the smile dimmed fast. “Do not try to ask Gandalf for the fight, or the aftermath, about the other side or how he returned to us. Until we met him again in the greaves of the Fangorn, he was half of himself. Lost to some… fog of the first days of the second song. Though he appears much himself, he could have slayed your dragon single-handedly as he is now, I suppose. But something of him is gone too. Memories, mainly. They seem to have burned away in this battle which must have raged on for weeks.”
“There is always a price,” Thorin muttered, wincing at the old pain somewhere at the very back of his mind where the gold-sickness had carved a piece of himself away as well. Shaking his head, he wondered at this brave new world, and what it meant that the worst of its old villains were gone now. “So many of my people and three more of my family lie in Khazad-dûm now. Only Balin buried – do you remember him?”
“Yes,” Legolas sighed, after all these years still ashamed of his father’s actions, “I do. He was the only one not shouting at us day and night for months on end. The oldest among you, I thought.”
“My mentor. My rock, the one I could always trust to be truthful to me.” It cut him to the quick to finally voice it out loud, the one thing he had suspected for twenty-five years: Balin was dead. “Both the Watcher and Durin’s Bane gone in one fell swoop… It feels like an axe come down on our past.”
“Let it sever the tangles, Thorin.” For the first time today, Legolas turned fully to him, taking his hands behind his back as he so often did here at court where he scarcely knew what to do with his tall, lanky self. Though he had cried himself dry, there was no hint of redness or unbecoming fluids on his ethereal face. Only the tiredness he shared with the others having come home. “Moria is filled to the very brim with creatures which the dark breeds when it is left to itself for too long. A million of your noble people could not stand a chance against those armadas.” He could see the conflict on Thorin’s face; his hands were itching to reach for Orcrist. “It is not just orcs; all the twisted abominations of the deepest pits crawl in that hallowed place. Your greatest kingdom once was beautiful beyond description, and I am – humbled by the sight of merely a sliver in the eternal darkness. But Khazad-dûm is lost. Thrice the mountains have told your people now to let them sleep. Please, King under the Mountain, let this be the end of a thousand years of tragedy.”
Oh, it was tempting… With both the greatest fiends gone - but he was right, of course. Thorin lowered his head under the bitter bite of defeat. This would follow him into the halls of Mahal, where he would seize Balin by the beard and conk their foreheads together so hard the old idiot would have his merry time explaining what he had been thinking to take that risk.
“Aye. It is. We have enough here. Erebor is bursting at the seams, the Iron Hills thrive under my first cousin and the Blue Mountains under my sister. None shall ever turn their feet to Khazad-dûm ever again to reclaim it. That age is long gone.”
“And a new one arises,” Legolas agreed easily, obviously relieved. Inclining his head in turns made them equals once more. He needed a bath, a meal, and rest, even if he was too damned elven to admit it. “I heard you call for me earlier; do not fret, King under the Mountain. I have delivered word to my father the moment we picked up Frodo and Samwise from an island in a sea of fire. He should be here before the sun goes to sleep entirely.”
Thorin exhaled a long breath, loosening his grasp on the damned staff. The different factions of his court, harder to organize than a bag of cats with fleas on a good day, were mingling to share their grief and question Gímli about the rest of his great adventure. Their well-meaning attention was going to make him snap sooner or later. Striking the staff on the ground, Thorin got their attention with a grim sort of determination.
“There is to be a feast as soon as I know my nephew to be safe. It would be poor manners to begin the party before the hobbits can crash it. Disperse, make ready! Mahal knows we need it.”
And the crowds scattered.
“Have you suffered much here up north? I saw the battlefield,” Legolas asked as the atrium lightened and the usual clamour picked back up. The forges breathed in the deep, hammers struck the stone, couriers climbed the endless stairs up and down, up and down.
“Pah, nothing we could not shake off,” Thorin huffed with the confidence of old age having gotten comfortable on the throne of his birthright. “Come, friend, tell me your story on the way. I want to know when you started looking at my littlest nephew with stars in your eyes.”