Ya'aburnee

Beorn

Sometime in the middle of the night she stirred, turning over before freezing, hearing the latch on the door open and shut. In the darkness of the house she saw an enormous figure, not one she recognized. It must have been Beorn.

She did not get much sleep the rest of the night, rising at the first light of the sun, tired of lying in the dark with nothing to lull her back to sleep. When she entered the main room, she saw Gandalf and the figure from the night before. She walked tentatively into the room. "Ah, Olivia." 

Olivia smiled tiredly, nodding politely to the wizard, walking around the table to sit. "This is Beorn," Gandalf introduced, and Liv smiled and politely bowed her head to the man. He was much much taller than her, strongly built, although he looked kind. There was a metal cuff around his wrist, but she did not let her eyes linger on it, not wanting to make him uncomfortable.

"You are the healer," The man asked in the form of a statement, and Olivia nodded, though furrowed her eyebrows, not entirely sure how he knew, but assumed Gandalf must've told him. Without another word, the man slowly walked away, Olivia watching him go curiously.

"He is not much of a talker," Gandalf explained, and she nodded in understanding. "He has offered to provide us with breakfast, and then he will hear our case." Gandalf muttered more to himself than to Olivia, "Let us hope that Thorin is reasonable today and holds his tongue where he should."

***

Soon all of the dwarves had awoken, and were sitting around eating, although no one had the heart to wake Bilbo, who joined the table last. A few did not sit at the table, having eaten earlier in the morning, including Thorin who did not sit at the table, sitting instead near the corner of it, sort of between Fili and Liv. He had been quiet that morning (as if he wasn't always), and he watched as Beorn filled Fili's mug with milk. "So you are the one they call Oakenshield." Beorn spoke as he poured. Thorin glanced up at him for a moment before the skin changer turned away. "Tell me, why is Azog the Defiler hunting you?"

"You know of Azog?" Thorin asked. Since the night the pale orc had revealed himself, Thorin had been visibly pensive, and was much more tense and quick to anger than usual. He turned to Beorn. "How?"

"My people were the first to live in the mountains," Beorn replied, "Before the orcs came down from the north. The defiler killed most of my family. The rest he enslaved. Not for work you understand, but for sport." The metal cuff she had noted earlier on his wrist made sense with that information in mind. "Caging skin changers and torturing them seemed to amuse him."

"There are others like you?" Bilbo asked. He was ever eager to learn about the people he met along the journey.

"Once there were many," Beorn replied, turning away.

"And now?"

"Now there is only one." Olivia's eyes fell at the statement. She did not quite understand, but it felt similar enough to her own loss that she felt for him, a pang shooting through her chest. The skin changer directed his attention back to Thorin. "You need to reach the mountain before the last days of Autumn."

"Before Durin's day falls, yes," Gandalf confirmed. 

"You are running out of time," The skin changer spoke, and Olivia glanced to the side, eyes falling on Thorin, who stared forwards pensively, arms crossed, eyebrows furrowed slightly. 

He felt her gaze on him and turned, and she raised her eyebrows slightly in question, as if to say, 'what is it?' 

He just shook his head, 'Don't worry about it.'

"Yes," Gandalf's voice drew her attention back to the main conversation. "Which is why we must go through Mirkwood."

"A darkness lies upon that forest," Beorn replied. "Fell things creep beneath those trees. There is an alliance between the orcs of Moria and the necromancer in Dol Guldur. I would not venture there except in great need."