Bilba has grown up the unwanted granddaughter of the Thain of the Kingdom of Shire but, as she rarely visits the palace, the relationship holds little meaning to her. Instead she focuses on her second year of college, her ballet career and her slowly burgeoning romance with Bofur, a crew member with her ballet company.
The same day Bilba is set to preform on stage for the first time with her company, the kingdom of Shire is anticipating another event. That very evening will oversee the political, arranged marriage between Thorin Durin, Crown Prince of Erebor, and an unnamed Princess of Shire (so unnamed because Bilba's grandfather is a paranoid bastard).
Bilba doesn't care about any of this, she hasn't been invited and has no interest in other countries, politics or other such machinations.
Just before she's set to preform, however, Bilba suddenly finds herself dragged from the theater and taken to appear before her grandfather at the palace.
There she is informed she WILL be participating in the wedding after all.
As the bride.
Whether she likes it or not.
Bilba has been a slave her entire life. All she knows of the outside world is what she sees from time to time outside the gates of Moria and the stories her mother used to tell her. Stories of a place called the Shire where her mother once lived and a placed called Erebor where, as far as she knows, her father still lives. Stories of dragons a thousand times larger, and more intelligent, than the beasts the orcs rode and of a strange concept called freedom where one was allowed to live as they wished with no one to tell them what they could, or could not do.
The stories meant little to Bilba. The only future she had was to live, and die, as a slave as countless number had before her.
And then the orcs dragged an injured female firedrake through the gates, her rider screaming obscenities behind her as he fought to reach her side...and everything changed.