A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Third Entry - The River's Edge

Eventually we began to circle down, and alit upon yet another outcropping. I slid down from the eagle’s glossy feathers. “Farewell!” they called, as they one by one divested of their passengers and lifted off again. “Wherever you fare, till your eyries receive you at journey’s end.”

Gandalf appropriately replied, “May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.”

We then began our way down from the hillock of stone. I felt as surefooted as I ever did, but the others were less familiar with such things than I. Oin walked behind me, with everyone else ahead of us, but gave no indication that Dori had spoken to him already, as I imagined he had. Why wouldn’t he? I only worried if he would feel the need to tell Thorin of my predicament. But how would I ever explain that I wasn’t really here? That, in my world, I was truly dying? Of course there was the slight chance that they would be able to save me, the doctors. But there was certainly nothing that could be done for me here. In one moment when Nori had made a little headway ahead of me—surefooted as I was, I was mincing my steps so my shoes wouldn’t slip—Oin lightly laid his hand on my shoulder, and I looked warily over my shoulder at him.

“Is there anything else you can tell me that I can help you with?” he asked, bushy brows pushed together.

My shoulders dropped. “I truly am sorry, Oin, but there is nothing you can do.”

“Can you tell me more of what ails you?” he persisted.

I shook my head. “My fate is already out of the fire; it can’t be changed. If it will help to settle your concerns, I can tell you that I am suffering from a curse, and it cannot be broken. I accepted it myself as payment for a favor.”

“How will this curse affect you?”

I sighed, eyes flickering to where the others were still ambling down and away. “I am not entirely well now, and will be entirely unwell by the end of it. I will explain further when I have to, but I would prefer to allow it to bear on your conscience for as little time as possible.”

Oin sighed, but I knew he would permit my silence, and my opinion of him soared as high as the eagles had. “We’d best get back, then,” he said, and gladly I returned to trekking after the others of the Company.

They had paused at the bottom of the hill, at the beginning of the returning vegetation, presumably to allow us to catch up. Dori glanced quickly at me and away.

“—I may look in on it again before it is all over, but in the meanwhile I have some other pressing business to attend to.”

The dwarves all looked stricken, and I know I was taken aback as well by Gandalf’s planned departure.

“I am not going to disappear this very instant,” Gandalf informed them. “I can give you a day or two more. Probably I can help you out of your present plight, and I need a little help myself. We have no food, and no baggage, and no ponies to ride; and you don’t know where you are. Now I can tell you that. You are still some miles north of the path which we should have been following, if we had not left the mountain pass in a hurry. Very few people live in these parts—” He looked my way when he said this, to warn me I suppose. “—unless they have come here since I was last down this way, which is some years ago. But there is somebody that I know of, who lives not far away. That Somebody made the steps on the great rock—the Carrock I believe he calls it. He does not come here often, certainly not in the daytime, and it is no good waiting for him. In fact it would be very dangerous. We must go and find him; and if all goes well at our meeting, I think I shall be off and wish you like the eagles ‘farewell wherever you fare!’”

The dwarves begged him left and right, blue and green, and remembering the fires the wizard had made in the pinecones and atop the eyrie I quite wished he would commit to staying as well, though Gandalf only shook his head and smiled, promising nothing to the clamoring dwarves. I would have clamored as well, but I didn’t feel I had the right to put in an opinion as to the fate of whatever pilgrimage the dwarves were on, since I was neither one of them nor part of their Company, and wasn’t intended to stay.