vieno's blog

It wasn't uncomfortable—if anything it was more comfortable than the business casual you'd been living in since your arrival, the fabric soft and broken-in, the belt giving you somewhere to hook the dagger that actually made practical sense. But you were aware of it in a way you hadn't been aware of your own clothes, the hem doing things at your calves that trousers didn't, the embroidered cuffs catching on things you rode past. You'd caught the skirt on a bramble twice already this morning and freed it both times with the specific irritation of someone still recalibrating a new spatial awareness.

"Third time," Bofur said, cheerfully, from just behind you, watching you unhook the hem from another branch with focused concentration.

"I'm aware, thank you."

"There's a trick to it," he offered, with a earnest chuckle. "You sort of—gather it here, at the front of your saddle, when you're moving through—" He mimed a gesture that you watched carefully and attempted to replicate, and the next few minutes of were slightly smoother, which you counted as a genuine victory.

"How does a dwarf lord come to know about a woman's dress Bofur?" You teased, with a raised brow.

"I've spent a time or two around a ladies skirt," he winked at you his grin turning wolfish "But never you mind about that, Lass."

The forest was dense, old growth pressing close on both sides of the path, the light coming through in long, filtered bars that made everything look a little like a painting. It was beautiful in a way you'd stopped being surprised by—this world was relentlessly, exhaustingly beautiful, and you'd given up expecting it to let up about it.

Thorin called a halt at the edge of what looked like a potential clearing, and the company spread out to assess it with the practiced efficiency of a group that had made this assessment many times.

"There's a stream," Kíli reported back, from somewhere ahead, his voice carrying clean through the trees. "Good one. Looks clean."

That was all that was needed. The company moved toward it with a collective, purposeful ease, and within the space of half an hour the clearing had been converted into something resembling an organised rest stop—ponies tethered in the shade, several dwarves crouched at the stream's edge filling waterskins, Óin already taking inventory of the medical kit with focused attention.

You gathered up a few things that needed washing with the same quiet, practical competence you'd been building into the daily rhythm of travel, and found a flat rock at the stream's edge that was good for the purpose, and got to work alongside Ori, who had brought a considerably more impressive volume of laundry than your own and seemed to consider the whole process a rather boring chore.

A single sharp howl rose from somewhere in the trees to the east—not long, not sustained, just one clean note that split the afternoon air like something thrown in a pool of still water—every head in the clearing snapped up at the same instant. The kind of total, collective stillness that wasn't calm at all. Every body in the company had gone tight and ready, and even you, who didn't yet have the vocabulary for what that sound meant, felt the air change.

"That's—what is that ?" Bilbo's voice had gone high and thin. He was standing shin-deep in the water with his waterskin still in his hands, frozen. "That's a wolf, isn't it—are there wolves out there?"

"No." Dwalin's voice was flat and immediate. He was already moving, axes out, the metal catching the filtered light. His eyes swept the treeline in a single, rapid arc. "That is not a wolf."

"What is it?" you asked, and the way every face in the company swung briefly to you—just briefly, just a flicker, before swinging back to the treeline—told you the answer was something you were about to experience rather than be told.

"Wargs." Thorin's voice cut across the clearing, low and controlled and carrying the specific authority of a man issuing orders in a situation he has been in before and survived. "Everyone up. Now. Move."

No one hesitated. Not one of them. The camp dissolved in seconds—packs grabbed or abandoned by some rapid tiarge, weapons up, the formation of the company tightening and consolidating with the practiced compression of a group that had lived this and lived it enough times that the motion was now bone-deep. The washing fell from your hands as you scrambled to your feet, heart lurching into a rhythm it had no business being at, and Bilbo was suddenly beside you, one hand briefly touching your elbow—not grabbing, just contact, just confirmation that he was there—and then they were moving and you were moving with them.

The second howl came from the north.

Closer.

And then a third, from what sounded almost directly overhead, and you looked up—you looked up at the rocky outcrop that bordered the clearing's eastern edge, twenty feet of loose stone and scrub—and it was there.

Your brain tried, for one awful, lurching second, to give it a shape it recognised. A dog ? some part of you suggested, grasping at something familiar. Just a very large—a very, very—

It wasn't a dog.

It was the size of a large horse, mottled black-brown and massive, its legs built wrong for a dog, too long, too angled, the joints moving with a force that made your stomach turn over. Its head was enormous, jaw hanging open, and the teeth it showed were not dog teeth—they were too many, too long, stained dark at the roots, and the saliva that swung from its jaw caught the light in thick, ropey strings.

Its eyes were pale and fixed and there was nothing behind them that you could identify as anything other than appetite. A ridge of coarse, matted fur ran up its spine and stood raised now, and the sound that came from its chest was not a howl, it was a continuous, rolling growl that you felt in your back teeth.

There was a hunched figure on its back. You registered that too—armoured, broad, gripping the Warg's scruff with a grey-green hand, a crude blade already drawn— and your brain tried to process the totality of it and simply failed, the information arriving faster than it could be organised.

"Three of them!" Kíli's voice, from somewhere to your right. "On the East side."

Three.

There were three more.

The one on the rocks had locked its pale eyes onto the clearing and was already crouching, haunches gathering, and the sound that came from it deepened into something that had nothing to do with communication and everything to do with intent.

"Run!" Thorin yelled.

You ran.

The company moved fast—faster than you'd expected, faster than their build suggested, dwarves built for endurance rather than sprint and somehow managing both—and you pushed yourself to match the pace, the dress's hem gathered in one hand the way Bofur had told you, the terrain turning rocky and broken underfoot the moment you cleared the stream. The clearing disappeared behind you. The trees thickened. Someone was shouting directions somewhere ahead and the words were fragmenting in the noise of movement and your own blood loud in your ears.

"Ponies are gone!" Fíli's voice, sharp and furious, from somewhere to the left. "Tethers are snapped—they've bolted!"

"Leave them!" Thorin, from ahead. "Keep moving"

An impact behind you—ground-shaking, enormous —something landing at force, and then a sound that was not the Warg's growl but its voice, a different register, and a crash of undergrowth and a dwarf's shout and the specific brutal sound of axes meeting something biological, and you could not look back, you could not afford to look back—

Dwalin had put himself between the company and the first Warg with the total, unambivalent commitment of a man who had decided this was his ground and by his beard he was keeping it. His axes moved at a speed and a precision that should not have been possible for their size—one blocked the lunge of the Warg's rider, the second bit deep into the creature's shoulder—and the Warg screamed, a sound that was all wrong for something its size, high and enraged and in pain, and the rider was already on its feet beside it, blade swinging, and Dwalin was already inside the swing and—

You ran.

The terrain turned into a broad rocky field, the grass long and yellowed, stone outcrops jutting at irregular angles like broken teeth, the sky vast and pale overhead. The company spilled into it from the tree line more Warg's were already waiting, circling the far edge of the field with rider's low on there backs, a third trope was coming from the trees to the north, and the arithmetic of it was—the arithmetic was very bad.

"We're surrounded!" Came the sharp shout of Kíli's voice, all concern, no whisper of the playful cheer you'd grown accustomed to.

"Hold your ground!" Thorin's voice, cracking like a whip across the noise.

It happened so fast you barely processed it. The company pulled inward and at the inward point, the center of the circle that formed—blades out, axes raised, bows up—was you. Not by your decision. Not with any particular discussion. They simply moved and you were at the middle of it, Bilbo a half-step to your left and also clearly where they'd decided he belonged, the two of you in the eye of a ring of armed dwarves that closed around you like a fist closing.

You reached for your dagger. Your hands were shaking.

"Kíli—shoot them!" Thorin again, positioned at the foremost point of the circle, his sword forward.

Kíli's bow came up, the string drawn smooth and fast, and the arrow left it before you'd processed he'd released it—a sound like a whisper and then a wet sound and a Warg's rider pitched sideways off its mount with Kíli's arrow through the meat of its shoulder, crashing into the long grass.

"Ori—stay close!" Balin, somewhere to your right.

"Down—get down!" Fíli and Bilbo dropped without question, and you went with him, crouching, and something enormous passed over your heads, the displaced air of the Warg's leap pressing against your hair and the back of your neck like a hot hand.

The sound of it landing was behind you now, and the sounds that followed—metal and impact and the wet, terrible sounds of a fight that was close and real and not remotely like anything any action squence had ever prepared you for—came from everywhere at once, the circle of the company breaking and reforming around individual engagements.

Thorin's voice cut through all of it.

And Balin "watch your backs Lads, watch their flanks!"

"second rider's up —it's UP—"

And underneath all of it, the continuous, overlapping sounds of the Wargs themselves—that wrong, deep screaming-growl, the sound of them in pain and the sound of them attacking—and you were crouching in the long grass with the dagger in your shaking hand and you were looking at all of it and you couldn't—you couldn't make it into something manageable, couldn't find any edge of it to hold—

"Move!" Fíli's hand hit your shoulder and you moved.

You didn't see what separated you, one moment you were moving with Fíli, the long grass closing behind you both and the next the ground dropped sharply to the right and you went with it—stumbling, catching yourself on your hands, the dagger scraping stone—when you looked back the grass was a rock wall and the sounds were on the other side of it, you were alone in a narrow channel of rock, a natural gully between two outcrops, barely wide enough for two people to stand abreast.

You pressed your back to the stone. Tried to control your breathing. Failed. Got partway there on the third attempt.

Okay. Okay. Just go find them. Go back the way you came. You can hear them—that's them, that's shouting, that's Balin and Kíli, the yelling is Thorin, if he's yelling they are fine, it's fine—just go back and—

The shape that appeared at the end of the gully was not one of the company.

The Warg came low, head swinging, its rider still mounted but listing badly, one arm hanging wrong and dark with something that glistened black in the afternoon light. Injured—you could see that, even through the blind static of terror, the creature's gait hitched, one foreleg dragging slightly, the rider's grip on its scruff loose and unsteady.

It didn't make them any less terrifying. The Warg's head swung toward you and those pale eyes found you and it stopped. Planted all four of its enormous paws in the earth of the gully and stopped, the sound that came from its chest was the continuous, escalating growl, getting louder, louder, and it was so close in the narrow channel that you could smell it—blood and animal and something rotten underneath, the hot, fetid wave of its breath reaching you as its lips peeled back.

The rider raised its head and looked at you.

"Goth-izub shulg brogb lat matat, Shulg-izg brogb akr grish-ob" it's words where like hate given form.

You didn't understand the them, guttural and harsh, consonants that weren't made for a human throat, spat at you like something thrown. But the tone needed no translation. The tone was a thing you understood somewhere below language—contempt, and rage, and intent—the rider was sliding from the Warg's back, slowly, its remaining good arm raising the crude blade, and there was nowhere to go. The gully wall was at your back, solid rock, and the Warg was at the gully's mouth, and the rider was between them, and the gap between you was closing.

Back against the rock. Back against the—

Your back hit stone. Already there. Already against it. Nowhere.

The rider was close enough now that you could see the texture of the armour—rough, crusted with old blood and something else, pieces of what might have been multiple creatures and multiple materials fastened together in no way that was meant for looking at. The face was—you looked at the face and your brain made a sound like a door slamming shut, refusing to catalogue it, storing it as wrong and not human and do not look.

It said something else. Lower, close enough now that the heat of it was physical.

Your hand was shaking so hard the dagger was vibrating. You could feel it. You could see it.

It's going to—it's going to—

Move. Move. MOVE.

The rider lunged.

Your arm came up—not a decision, not a technique, just your body doing the only thing available to it, the blade up between you and the descending weight—the rider's own momentum drove it forward and down, and the dagger found the angle between its jaw and its throat with a horrible, giving resistance that your hand and forearm absorbed all at once, and the weight of it slammed you back into the rock, the stone digging into your spine and shoulder blades with a force that would bruise, and the blade was—your blade was—

The rider's weight listed sideways.

Fell.

The Warg, let out a single keening howl that bounced off the gully walls and echoed back wrong, and then toppled and folded down in one heap, it's neck oozed black from a arrow lodged to the flecthing in its fur, it was only then you became vaguely aware the black wasn't simply liquid it must be blood.

You were standing.

You were still standing.

Your back was against the rock and your arm was still raised and the dagger was in your hand and your hand was—

Black. The blood that was black was everywhere—your fingers, the back of your hand, tracking up your wrist toward your forearm, more of it than you'd imagined, impossibly wrong against your skin, and the rider was on the ground at your feet and you were looking at your hand and you were not moving.

You were not—you were not anywhere, particularly. You were looking at your hand and somewhere in a great distance there was shouting and footsteps and voices calling your name but they were far away and you were here, looking at your hand, at the black blood drying between your fingers, at the specific and undeniable reality of what you had just—

"Here—Fíli— I found her—" Kíli's voice, close, suddenly very close, and then his hands were on your arm, and then Fíli was there from the other side, and they were pulling, actually pulling, your feet dragging before they remembered what they were, and then you were moving with them through the gully mouth and out into the field and the fighting was everywhere and the sounds of it were enormous and wrong and—

"Go, go, GO—through there—" Fíli's hand at your back.

A gap in the rock face. Hidden behind an overhang, invisible from twenty feet. The company was already moving through it, filtering fast into the dark, Thorin at the entrance directing them through with short, sharp gestures, Gandalf counting heads as each one passed.

Thorin eyes found you as you came through and something in his face shifted—fast, and only for a moment—and then you were inside and the rock closed around you and the sounds of the Wargs outside were muffled, and then distant, and then the passage turned and they were gone.

The interior of the passage was dim, the walls close, the company pressed together in the near-dark with the specific tight, urgent energy of people who were not sure, yet, whether it was over. Weapons still drawn. Breathing hard. Several of them with fresh wounds—Glóin's forearm wrapped in a makeshift bandage that had already began to soak red, Ori with a cut above his eyebrow tracking red down the side of his face, Dwalin's knuckles split open on both hands, the old, professional damage under his bracers showing the signs of someone who had been in the middle of it throughout.

Balin reached you first. His hands came to your shoulders, and his eyes moved over you with the quick, practiced assessment of someone who had done this—checked soldiers over after a fight, checked them for damage, catalogued what was salvageable and what wasn't—more times than he'd ever wanted to count.

"Are you hurt?" Flat, quick, direct. No softening of it, because there wasn't time. "Tell me where."

I'm not hurt you thought, but your voice was trapped somewhere slightly behind you, refusing to come out. That's not—it's not mine your mind catalouged for you looking at the sticky blackness on your hand, mine's red.

His scan reached your hand. Stayed there. Something shifted in his face, an internal adjustment he kept from becoming external for your sake, and he said, carefully and steadily "All right. Your all right, lass, you're safe."

Thorin moved through the press of the company with the specific, controlled urgency of a man completing a head count and arriving at the last entry, when he reached you he took your arms in both hands—not gently, not with ceremony, a grip — and he looked at you, the way he looked at things that needed assessing, and his voice came out rough and immediate

"Are you hurt? Where—"

You heard the words the way you'd hear something through water. The shape of them arriving without quite connecting to meaning. You could see him—you were aware of his face, the set of his jaw, the particular tight control of someone managing urgency—but the whole of it had a quality of distance, a glass-wall thickness between you and everything happening on the other side of it.

He shook you once. Not hard. But sharp—the shake of someone trying to bring something back from a distance he himself couldn't afford to travel too, trying to reach something that had gone somewhere it wasn't supposed to.

"Are you hurt?"

Still water. Still distance. You were aware of his voice. You were aware that his voice had a quality of concern underneath the bark of it. You were aware of your own hand and what was on it. You were aware of all of it, individually, in pieces, and the pieces were not assembling.

"Faslibkhêz!" You did not know that word, it was one the company refused to translate.

His hands shifted. One moved from your arm and came to the side of your face, palm flat against your cheek, fingers curving behind your jaw, and he moved your head—again, not gently, deliberate—until your eyes were pointed directly at his.

You looked at him.

He was talking. His mouth was moving. You could see the line between his brows, deep and drawn, the dark of his eyes with the dim light of the passage behind them, the specific expression of a man who is not alarmed in ways he lets himself show and who was currently working very hard at that. You could see all of it. You were looking directly at it.

The glass held.

"—answer me. Can you hear me?"

"She needs a moment." Gandalf's voice. Not loud. Not dramatic. Simply—present, arriving somewhere behind the company, his grey shape at the edge of your peripheral vision, and something in the particular, deep steadiness of it—the quality of very old patience, of someone who had stood at the edges of more crises than you could imagine and had never, once, let one become larger than it needed to be.

"Are you all right?" he said. Just that. Just the question, offered directly, without any of the urgency that had surrounded everything else in the last thirty seconds.

His calm eyes met yours and the glass cracked.

The sound rushed in, Thorin's hand dropped from your face. Your own breathing, unsteady. Glóin's muffled cursing from further back. Balin saying something quietly to Óin. Kíli's voice, very low, talking to Fíli. The drip of water somewhere in the rock. All of it, arriving at once, with the sudden completeness of a picture snapping back into focus.

"Sorry, I-I'm ok—I'm fine," you said. And then, because it needed a qualifier, because Gandalf deserved the honest version "I just need—I think I needed a minute."

"That will do for now," Gandalf said. His hand stayed on your shoulder another moment, dropping only after a short pat.

You leaned against the rock wall and looked at your hand in the dim and breathed, and nobody said anything, Balin appeared after a short while with a cloth and cleaned what he could of the black blood from your fingers with the quiet, practical efficiency of a man doing the necessary thing for the person he deemed necessary to do it for, and around you the company processed in its various overlapping ways, and slowly, you attenpted to reassembled yourself from the outside in.

Then the company was moving again, Thorin's voice resuming its quiet directives, and you pulled in a long breath and followed.

The passage opened onto a hillside track that wound down through country which grew gradually greener and more deliberate, the wild scrub giving way to something older—not farmed, not managed in any way you had a word for, but attended to, with patience rather than intervention.

You walked or rather let yourself be walked, the remaining black blood had dried on your hand, and you pressed your palm against the fabric of your skirt as you moved, and thought—in the careful, slightly removed way you were still thinking in—about the weight against the blade. About the sound it had made. About the rider.

Who you could not stop thoughts about with the specific quiet horror of thoughts patient enough to wait until the immediate danger was over before it arrived properly.

I have never—

I didn't mean—but I did.

The path curved around the face of a cliff, and the world opened.

Sound first a deep, resonant falling, water meeting water from a height, the specific acoustics of a very large space. Then light—impossibly warm and bright, flooding upward as though the valley itself were lit from within. Then, as you came to the true edge of the path and the full view resolved beneath you, the shape of it.

A valley, cliff faces rising on all sides in columns of pale stone streaked amber and copper in the afternoon sun, and in its floor, spreading along the winding thread of a river, something built in stone and open arch and flowing water, terraced and rising, architecture that had not been designed to a deadline or a brief but simply constructed, over more time than you had numbers for, into whatever it needed to be.

Nothing in your life had given you vocabulary for what you were looking at. The part of your brain that had been running cold and quiet since the fight went briefly, completely still.

"Imladris," said Gandalf, at your shoulder, and said it the way you said the name of something that required acknowledgement.

The path wound down along the cliff face, longer than the view suggested, before depositing the company onto a broad stone road leading into the valley proper. The quality of the air changed as you crossed into its borders—cooler, green, carrying the particular freshness of deep shade and moving water.

The figure who came to meet you from the direction of the first set of stiars was tall.

Your brain noted this before anything else, because everything else it needed a moment to process. Tall in a way that reframed the space around you, made the bridge and the stone archway and the flowing water look correctly scaled in a way that everything else since you'd arrived in this world had not, for you. Your eye found the top of the figure's head and drew a line across to the stone arch beside him and did a quick, involuntary calculation, and the calculation produced a result that sat outside the range of dwarf or hobbit and settled in the range of Gandalf or perhaps someone from a catwalk.

Dark hair, braided back from a face that had the kind of bone structure that shouldn't physically exist, the proportions of it too exact, too even, too—much. Bright eyes, clear and unhurried, carrying a quality of depth that your brain kept glancing away from and back to like a light that was slightly too bright to look at directly.

And then the figure drew closer, and you saw the ears, they where not aggressively but distinctly, unmistakably pointed, the tip curving upward to a delicate, deliberate peak that no human ear had ever ended in, and your brain emitted a small, clear signal that something fundamental about the category of person you had been operating with required immediate revision.

The figure's gaze swept the company, and something in your chest did the thing it did whenever you were being assessed by someone whose assessment you couldn't predict, and you moved, without quite deciding to, a half step closer to Bofur.

"Mithrandir," the figure said—a name, Gandalf's name in some other language you registered, confirmed by the way Gandalf's face shifted into the warmth of recognised greeting.

"Ah, Lindir!" Gandalf stepped forward and inclined his head, his eyes crinkled with the ease of an old and well-worn friendship. Then answered in kind, the same language, Gandalf's voice taking on a cadence in it that was different from his usual measured English—a stone-over-water language you couldn't follow, each word shaped differently from anything you'd ever heard.

"We heard you had crossed into the Valley" Lindir replied— his eyes moving across the company again with that composed, unhurried assessment.

"I must speak with Lord Elrond," Gandalf said, switching back, glancing once at Thorin, who stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set and the particular expression of a dwarf performing patience.

Around you, the dwarves had drawn closer together —not dramatically, nothing you could point to as a single action, but the radius of the company had contracted by a few degrees, shoulders tighter, feet planted slightly wider. Thorin said something very low to Dwalin, barely audible.

Dwalin said something back, barely above a murmur, and you didn't know enough Khuzdul yet to catch it, but the tone made the meaning clear enough.

"What did he say?" you asked Bofur, just as quietly.

"Don't trust them," Bofur said, out of the side of his mouth.

"Don't trust—" You looked at Lindir. At the impossible bone structure, the pointed ears, the quality of unhurried attention in the eyes. "What is he?"

Bofur looked at you sideways. "You don't know?"

"Did you miss the part where I fell from the sky a couple months ago?"

"Fair," he conceded. He dropped his voice another degree. "Their Elves."

You looked at him.

"Elves?" you said.

"Aye."

You looked back at Lindir. At the ears. At the height. "Right," you said, after a moment. "That's—okay. That's a thing too."

"Do not trust them," Bofur said again, with the firm, practiced certainty of someone reciting an inherited principle.

"I genuinely don't know enough about any of them to have an opinion," you said, which was true, and Bofur accepted this as an adequate if unsatisfying answer.

Gandalf and Lindir were still speaking—back and forth, something being negotiated or arranged in the easy, unhurried manner of people who had done this before.

The horns came without warning. From behind—the sound of them carrying down and around the valley with a resonance that put your teeth together, and you turned with the rest of the company to find a group of mounted figures coming along the bridge at speed, hooves ringing on the stone in a fast, controlled rhythm, armour catching the valley light along every edge.

Tall. All of them tall, helmeted, armed with the considered economy of people who wore weapons the way other people wore clothing—not in display, not threatening with them, simply having them, the way you had a coat, because it was sensible to have a coat.

Pointed ears beneath the helmets. Several pairs, visible even in the motion of their approach.

Thorin's voice cut through the company, clipped and hard "Ifridî bekâr, close ranks!"

The company moved with a speed that was slightly alarming even now, even having watched them fight—weapons out, bodies turning outward, the loose group compressing into a tight, outward-facing ring with a speed and coherence that spoke of something drilled so deeply it didn't require thought. A hand closed on the back of your dress—the fabric just below your shoulders, firm and decisive—and pulled you backward into the center of the ring, it happened fast enough that you were already in the middle of the company before you'd registered the movement.

The mounted figures arrived at the outer edge of the ring. Not a charge. Not an attack. A circuit—the horses moving in a controlled, deliberate loop around the perimeter of the company, the riders' faces unreadable under their helmets, spears held at their side's and the sound of the hooves on the stone and the quality of the encirclement—the studied, unhurried competence of it—produced a specific kind of fear that was different from your earlier fear, which had been immediate and animal. This was colder. More deliberate.

Around you, several of the dwarves were muttering, lowly, the sounds of people who had opinions they were keeping below the threshold of a confrontation but not by much.

"Nogothrim," one of the riders said, as they completed the circuit and drew up in a circle—the tone of it was neither friendly nor hostile and was somehow worse than either would have been.

One of the riders, swung down from his horse with a movement that was entirely too fluid for the amount of armour involved, and crossed the remaining ground on foot.

"It's Dwarves to the likes of you" Glóin offered in response from behind his teeth.

•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•●•

He was taller than Lindir. Taller, a little broader in the shoulders, the armour catching the valley light differently at this proximity—intricate work, you registered, even through the general overwhelm of the situation, the kind of craft that had cost serious time. The face beneath the helmet, once removed, was the same impossible construction as Lindir's — the bones too exact, though where Lindir's face had carried something quietly welcoming, this face carried something else. Ancient, and measured, and entirely composed.

"Mae govannen," he said then, to Gandalf, as the figure arrived at his side, and the two of them inclined their heads with the warmth of a long and complicated friendship.

"Lord Elrond", Gandalf said and the warmth spread to his features as the Elven Lord turned back to the assembled company.

You were still in the middle of the ring, surrounded by dwarves on all sides, the press of them close and warm and familiar in a way that your body had apparently accepted as normal somewhere over the journey without you noticing. You watched Elrond from above Dori's shoulders and the edge of Glóin's axe—which was still raised, the whole company still armed, nobody having given the order to stand down—and tried to reconcile everything you were currently looking at with anything you had a prior reference for, and failed, and filed this under the increasingly long list of things for later.

He held up something—a blade, black and curved, which he displayed to the company with the particular gesture of a man providing evidence rather than making a threat.

"We have been hunting a pack of orcs that came up from the south, we slew a number near the Hidden Pass" He looked at Gandalf with a slight, deliberate emphasis on the second half of that sentence.

"Ah," Gandalf said, with the serenity of a man who was not going to volunteer information under mild pressure. "That may have been us."

The corners of Elrond's eyes moved in a way that was not quite expression but indicated internal activity. He looked at the company. At you, briefly and specifically, in a way that lasted exactly one second longer than the others and left you with the distinct, uncomfortable feeling of having been placed in a category rather than simply noticed. Before his eyes moved to Thorin and stopped.

"Welcome, Thorin, son of Thráin," Lord Elrond addressed—with a quality of antiquity that you felt rather than heard, syllables shaping themselves around Thorin's name with precision.

Thorin stepped forward, the two of them regarded each other across a distance of perhaps five feet, and the quality of the silence between them had the particular density of two people conducting a full conversation through posture alone.

Thorin's chin lifted. "I do not believe we have met," he said, in flat, deliberate English.

"You have your grandfather's bearing." Lord Elrond's eyes moved across Thorin with recognition. "I knew Thror when he still resided under the Mountain."

The faintest tightening around Thorin's jaw. "Indeed. He made no mention of you."

A pause in which the Elrond absorbed this without visible reaction, which you suspected was itself a kind of response.

His gaze returned to the whole company, and he addressed them—in Elvish, measured and formal, several sentences, the words flowing with the particular ordered grace of a language that had been arranged carefully.

Glóin made a sound in front of you that communicated a specific flavour of deep, immediate and long held suspicion.

"What is he saying, does he offer us insult!" he growled.

"No Master Glóin, he's offering you food" Gandalf sighed, in the long-suffering tone of a man who had anticipated a misunderstanding with enough lead time to be tired of it before it arrived.