We’re getting to the brass tacks of the story now! I hope you’re still enjoying it ^u^
To my new paid subscribers: THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! I am so so grateful and excited that I am starting to make a bit of money with my writing! You guys are amazing, and I appreciate you so so greatly
I’ll leave this little reminder here that not only would you be able to read this and other chapters early if you click the link below, but you would also be supplementing my ability to pay rent and have fun little snacks while I write.
On the topic of fun little snacks, would anyone be interested in a once-per-week recipe post from me? No weird fluff piece about my great-grandmother’s failed marriage or whatever, just a recipe like homemade marshmallows that are good for your skin and hair, marshmallow-flavored coffee from those marshmallows, IRL lembas bread (the stuff the elves give the fellowship, if you remember) that tastes like shortbread cookies, (genuinely good, even by my meat-loving standards) marinated tofu, etc. I just came up with the thought to offer y’all this, so if nobody comments about it I probably won’t remember to bring it up again, but if you were interested.
Anyway! Onto the chapter!
The chain mail vambrace stays warm under Bilbo’s layers of shirts and coats all the way to the planes before Mirkwood, a relatively undisturbed leg of the adventure. Almost too undisturbed. Surely Bolg has realized his father is dead now? Or was Azog prone to hunts of a week or more? Bilbo knows failingly little about orc customs and the lack claws at the peeling paint of his cranium with every quiet night of sleep.
They reach Beorn’s house while he is still in the shape of a giant man, and he refuses them at the door. Although most of the dwarves chafe and gripe at the lack of consideration, they bear the refusal well. Gandalf stays to speak with Beorn about what is to come, the orc army and the dragonfire. He tells the abbreviated version of their tale, without the timeloops or the Ring, and, as before, it sways Beorn and he allows them one night of rest, and the use of his ponies to get to the edge of Mirkwood.
Bilbo would be content to sleep, wake, and ride off, but dwarves, of course, are nothing if not loud, are nothing if not excitable, and are nothing if not discourteous houseguests to those who won’t know them, and therefore spend a large portion of the evening singing and stomping and making a ruckus, and it is unclear if Beorn despises or appreciates their joviality.
But they are still alive the next morning, so at least he didn’t kill them. And he lets them use his ponies.
They send the ponies back at the edge of the plains in the mid-morning, and venture into Mirkwood with confidence, despite the miasma of evil that oozes sluggishly like blood from a shallow slice from the very trees themselves. Gandalf says he will lead them true through the haze, and lead true he does. Seemingly unaffected by the evil, or perhaps more able to remain clear-sighted despite it, they do not lose the path under Gandalf’s guidance, and their journey remains spider-free until they find themselves surrounded by archers.
Gandalf speaks to them in elvish, demanding to know why they would point their arrows at him when he and his company are merely walking on the forest road that the elves allow anyone else to pass through on. Legolas, flanked by Tauriel on one side, demands to know what a party of dwarves— he pauses as he says this, looking at Bilbo and frowning— is doing here. Gandalf says that this business is their own, and they would appreciate being left to it. Legolas says that will not do at all, and they’ll need to speak with Thranduil if they seek to go even a foot farther. Bilbo made the mistake of trying to interject on their behalf early in the conversation. He stopped himself before he could be outed as knowing Silvan, but it doesn’t mean that the dwarves, who know him to have an extra few decades of life experience he hasn’t told them every in and out of, don’t immediately recognize he can understand the elvish conversation. They have been asking for a transcript of what they’re missing since.
As they walk, more escorted than arrested, toward the Woodland Realm where Thranduil made court, Bilbo manages to come up behind Legolas to ask, “How is Thranduil these days?”
And Legolas, young and impertinent and not quite as wise as some would prefer, sniffs contemptuously. “What do you know of my father, dwarf?” He never interacted much with Bilbo in the original timeline anyway.
“Hobbit, actually,” Bilbo corrects, and the words sour on his tongue with the memory of Bolg’s cruel smile in knife-reflected light, so he keeps talking. “Doubt he’d remember me anyway,” he laughs.
Tauriel makes a face, like she might understand the joke, but Legolas snaps to look at Bilbo hotly. “On the contrary. Elves have impeccable memories.”
Bilbo mutters under his breath, “Not in the face of time travel they don’t.”
Tauriel’s face cracks a bit more, and she half-laughs into her palm. Just to check the immutable course of fate, Bilbo turns around to see that Kili is fully smitten already. Another thing for Bilbo to make sure goes well. Wonderful.
Thranduil is imposing from his intricate throne above the wood-and-marble dais where the company stands, awaiting his word. They are dirty and tired from a week or so of miasma-addled travel through these accursed woods, but they keep their heads raised.
The elven king speaks first to say, “You know elves can see quite far,” which is new to no one. “While you mortals perceive the world as curved, as though a round globe, we see it as it truly is: flat. But the Valar granted our kin many gifts. Excellent hearing,” he glares directly at Bilbo as he enunciates, “among them. And, of course, the ability to perceive time as it truly flows.” The words don’t hit immediately. “No matter what direction.” Gandalf and Bilbo get it, along with a few of the dwarves. “Or how many times it loops around itself.”
That’s about as subtle as dwarves like it.
Thranduil’s glare deepens now that everyone is on the same page. “Who among you is playing with the waters of time? And to what ends?”
Bilbo would greatly prefer to move this along. It’s nine days to Durin’s Day and they have an appointment with a knocking thrush and a ray of moonlight. “It’s me,” he confesses. “Against my will albeit, but I am where the loop is centered.”
“You,” Thranduil appraises him slowly as he steps forward from the midst of the company. “I remember you, hobbit. You bartered for the dwarves’ lives.” This seems to be getting him less animosity than anyone else in the company, save Gandalf, would have garnered in the same shoes.
It’s as much the truth as any other version of that story that’s been told. He nods.
“You seem to attract trouble,” Thranduil says, and Bilbo kicks Thorin’s shins to get him to quit that growling. “And now you’ve had, what, some twenty resets over the past few months?” A pause. Some of the dwarves mutter, disgruntled in their concern. There hadn’t been a formal discussion of how many loops Bilbo has had so far. Thranduil leans forward in his throne, a hand on either armrest as he demands, “Why?”
Gandalf shakes his head minutely, and Bilbo agrees. There is no good outcome of telling this overcautious elven high-nose that the One Ring is involved. Instead, he merely says, “There are things which must happen a particular way, and I will do whatever I must, however many times, to make them so.”
Thranduil does not seem to care about his circuitous answer. He leans back in his throne and puts a hand over his eyes. “Yes, yes, saving the line of Durin, sparing those of Laketown. I understand that it must be done, but please be better about doing it. My people have been having various troubles of all sorts because the physical world keeps being reset every so often by this knavery!”
And truly, has it been such a small thing, the impact of the loops on elvenkind?
It’s at once disheartening and reassuring, how small their problems in the eternity of the elves.
“Things may progress better,” Gandalf proposes cautiously, “with some more adept assistance.”
They are escorted to the edge of Mirkwood by an elven party that seems to treat them as a group of unruly children. Half the dwarves— the younger half, mostly— make a game of trying to annoy them, and the older half, plus Bilbo, try and get them to quit. Gandalf seems to find the antics funny, and pretends not to notice.
At the edge of Long Lake, the elves dispatch Tauriel as a messenger to alert Bard the Bowman to practice his archery, and the dwarves, accompanied by Legolas, continue around the edge of the lake until they reach the steps of Erebor, just hours before the last light of Durin’s Day. Bilbo has reassured them that the last light is, in fact, moonlight, but this does not stop them from huffing and rushing all about trying to get there before the sun sets.
To Bilbo, this is the third time the door to Erebor has opened. To the rest of the company, it is the first, and excitement is almost headier than trepidation of dragonfire for most. Thorin hangs to the back, avoiding even the entrance, eyes dark and wary.
As predicted, Radagast the Brown reaches out to Gandalf for some task involving a necromancer, and now that the company has reached safer grounds, and with nothing but twenty-four days of waiting before pitting dragon against orc, Bilbo and the dwarves bid him off and off he goes to see what the fuss is about.
Meanwhile, the remaining company holes up in the remains of Dale and make plans. The elves have left Tauriel and Legolas as the elven envoys at Laketown and Erebor, and the two rotate shifts of check-ins with each and report to Thranduil once every three days. This level of vigilance feels overkill to the company of Thorin Oakenshield, who have assured knowledge of how these events will play out, but, at least, it provides Tauriel and Kili time to bat eyelashes at each other.
What they all forgot was that Bolg, for all that he is his father’s son, is not his father. There is a century or more of missed wisdom, as distorted as orc wisdom may be, that Bolg is missing, and in that century or more is the wisdom of patience in the face of revenge. While he had been willing to take his time in the act of assured vengeance on Bilbo at the hunting camp, he was not willing to wait for the dwarves to chase out Smaug when, by Bolg’s logic, he could kill the dwarves before they wake the dragon and then claim the glory over both the line of Durin and the great serpent in one afternoon.
He comes fifteen days early.
The orcs burst up from the ground with their were-worms while the company is, essentially, dicking about in Dale, and suddenly there is a mad scramble to get into the mountain, to wake the dragon before the army can try and take Laketown.
But Bolg doesn’t care about the measly men of Laketown, he cares for vengeance and glory and naught else, and the battalions of orcs have reached the innards of Dale before the dwarves have even climbed the steps to get to their little mine entrance!
Waking the dragon becomes entirely unnecessary as Smaug, startled by the commotion of a siege so near to his horde, in all his intelligence, realizes his nest is under siege and flies out to raze the orc armies to the ground.
Bolg, in his relative youth, has never actually seen a dragon.
Neither have most of the orcs, who feel, for the first and only time in their soon-ended lives, a trait that was supposed to have been bred and beat out of them: fear.
It is not even a fight. Bilbo has seen how this went when Smaug was warned of the impending approach and went about, leisurely sweeping orcs away with flaps of his wings and charring their already-bludgeoned corpses for dramatic flair. This time, not attempting to preen for an audience, motivated solely by offense at the attempt to plunder under the nose of Smaug the Golden, there is desolation comparable to what the people of Laketown experienced when Bilbo first completed this journey.
But this time the experience is fully centered on orcs filtering through the ruins of Dale.
The smell of burning flesh is acrid even as high up as the tunnel entrance to Erebor where the company is waiting out the carnage. Tauriel is with them, while Legolas happens to be in Laketown.
All of this is fine, Bilbo thinks. Ideal, even.
Tauriel and Kili are making moony little eyes at each other, Legolas will surely help Bard aim the black arrow true, or else Bard will reassure him of his skill and Legolas will go fetch his father and a small accompaniment of woodland elves to finish off stragglers of the orcish army, if any are left by the time Bard kills Smaug. All the dwarves are safe next to Bilbo, Laketown is relatively unsinged, Gandalf isn’t due back from his wizardly errand for another several days at least. All is fine.
But there is something dark and quiet in Bilbo’s chest. It wants him to go to Ravenrock. What does it matter, the quiet thing asks, if he or Thorin or someone else dies on the way? He can reset it all, with the Ring. He could do it again. Do it better. Surely, there are things to fix here?
No! No. This time everything is fine. There is nothing to fix, and Bilbo will not go to Ravenrock. There is the urge to throw the Ring far from him— surely it’s the source of these thoughts, and he wants it far from him now— but he resists. If he throws the Ring now, then when he emerges, out of breath near the goblin tunnels, he will no longer be wearing Thorin’s vambrace. Neither he nor Thorin get to pick which memories Thorin will keep if the loop resets. Bilbo keeps his arms stiff at his sides, and ignores the rising scream of the Ring in his ears.
Uehehe!! next up will be the more lotr-esque quest with the One Ring! I hope y’all’re excited for plenty (mayhaps too many) easter eggs and callbacks to lotr in the next chapter!! I’ll see you there!!
In the meantime, Scream at me in the comments, nothing brings me more joy!!