Work Text:
“He’s actually reading the terms and conditions,” Kili said, voice torn between horror and awe. “No one actually reads the terms and conditions. We’re going to be here forever.”
“‘He’ is right here, thank you,” their potential hacker said grumpily from across the table. “And if you want this signed sometime tonight, ‘he’ will be given some peace and quiet to read it in.” He didn’t look up from squinting at the contract. The flickering glow of the neon above them had finally given up entirely, and he appeared to have resorted to catching what light he could from the glow of the advertisements making their way through the grime of the window.
Thorin appreciated the grime for once. It meant anyone on the street would have a harder time peering in, and at the moment, that suited his sense of caution.
It was not, despite what Fili thought, paranoia. Not after what had happened to Thrain.
At last, the hobbit folded up the flimsy roll of paper. “Well, most of this seems to be in order,” he said. “Very straightforward, really, and I do appreciate the terms of payment included; one fourteenth of the vault contents, very fair. And the proof of ownership looks in order; you’d be surprised how many people think ‘virtual locksmith’ means I’ll just find the password of any old thing - “
Thorin had never met a hacker quite so dedicated to pretending to be on the legal side of the fence as Master Baggins. It was reassuring, really; it spoke to a level of discretion he appreciated.
“But I do admit to a few questions about this burial clause.”
“Precautionary only,” Fili said at once with his best charming smile.
Thorin was very glad he had Fili here for that. Despite his best efforts, his own smiles still mostly looked like threats, when he could muster them up at all.
“Yes, well, the language was very ambiguous. Surprisingly so, given how clear the rest of the contract was . . . “
“Well, you know,” Fili said with a wink. “All perfectly aboveboard, of course.”
Thorin was not entirely sure Master Baggins did know. Perhaps he should have had Balin take that clause out; it simply hadn’t occurred to him when everyone else -
But Master Baggins appeared to have accepted it and moved on. “And then there’s this business of the location,” he said. “I do understand wanting to redact the location of this vault of yours if it’s so valuable, but you do understand that an operation like this can’t possibly be done remotely, don’t you? That I’ll need an actual address at some point?”
“Oh, certainly,” Fili said when Thorin had once again been silent for too long. “Once you’ve signed, we can discuss the general location so you can make any region specific preparations you need, and we’ll provide transportation to the exact coordinates.”
“Hm.” Master Baggins swept them all with one last suspicious look before sighing. “There will be protection, I suppose? If it’s in a rough part of the City?”
At this, Thorin at last moved, quietly shifting his jacket so that the hilt of his blade was visible. A faint hint of blue light was just visible where it met the sheath.
For his part, Kili had shifted his own jacket to reveal his gun. “There’ll be plenty of weapons,” he said cheerfully.
Master Baggins jumped a little but nodded. “And you came with a referral from a reliable source . . . oh, very well.” He scribbled his name at the bottom of the paper. “I don’t suppose it can be anywhere too terrible if you’re coming along. So where are we headed? I’ve different kits depending on how old the wiring is likely to be . . . “
“Erebor,” Thorin said, speaking for the first time.
It came out as more of a growl than he’d meant it to. Long years in the fumes of the factory had taken a toll on his throat.
Still. That was probably not why Master Baggins was staring at him, wild eyed, before collapsing on the table with a decided thump.
Smaug was dead. When Thorin told the story of his people to his wide eyed nephews as children, he was always very clear on that point. Smaug was dead, as dead, at least, as anything could be when it had never truly been alive; only an AI really, and a poor one at that, terrible workmanship never meant to last long, just plopped into its frame of steel and diamond and sent to rain death on the rebelling district below.
Smaug had been shot down. That was recorded fact; Thorin had seen the footage. Not a death blow, admittedly, not unless the developers had decided to house the AI in a wing of all places, but an undeniable hit. The resulting crash had destroyed at least a block of the district. Probably more. That could have been the end of Smaug. It was a theory Thorin had heard often enough in whispered conversations as the machinery of the factories roared.
But something must have ended it permanently, whether the crash or something else; otherwise it would have dragged itself out of the district and back to its masters when its ruinous work was done. It was dead, and the moment of the crash was the likeliest moment to kill it. You could find a dwarf on any street corner who would agree to that.
Most dwarfs on most street corners had not had the opportunity to see the timestamp on the video for precisely when Smaug had been shot down. Most of those who had seen the timestamp didn’t have access to another important piece of data.
Smaug had been shot down at 7:32 pm.
Thorin’s mother had received a jubilant call announcing their people’s victory at 7:38.
Twelve hours later, Erebor had been pronounced extinguished of all life. Drones seeking heat signatures had been unable to find so much as a rat.
Smaug was dead. Thorin had assured the whole Company of it.
He was less sure about whatever had emerged after 7:38.
They could have waited until Master Baggins woke up. It probably would have been kinder.
But they had a tight deadline if they were to make it to the vault during the correct window, so into the hovercar with Thorin he went. It could just barely fit the two of them; Fili and Kili would take their own.
The diner, thankfully, was not the sort that particularly cared if you hauled an unconscious patron out to your vehicle.
They were halfway back to Master Baggin’s apartment to pick up whatever supplies he needed when the hacker finally woke up.
“You’re insurgents, aren’t you,” he said in tones caught somewhere between panic and resignation. “I’ve signed a contract with insurgents. I should have known. My mother always said Gandalf was a maverick.”
“We just want what’s ours,” Thorin said, weaving through the riot of vehicles that darted between the seemingly endless levels of the City. “And if you help, you’ll get your share. A fourteenth of that vault is enough to buy yourself a long stretch of immortality.”
It was not what the treasure of the Durins had been meant for, but it was what would appeal to the hacker, he was sure. It was what everyone wanted, in the end: a little more time before they were condemned to Dol Guldur.
Always, always, just a little more time.
Let Master Baggins have it, if that would keep him silent and on the job. Let him have it, and the Company would have the rest; enough to launch a new satellite in the skies above the City, if only a small one. Enough to give their people a new start.
They would still have to swear to the City, of course. Still have to send down something for Dol Guldur.
But up there . . . it would be so simple to have accidents up there. Names left out of birth records. Bodies accidentally lost to space. Dol Guldur would have its share, but Mahal’s Halls would have something.
And Thorin could go to one or the other knowing that he had not failed his ancestors. That he had not failed in Mahal’s tribute. That he had not left his sisters’ sons wholly without hope.
That he had not left his family entirely unavenged.
It was not, to be clear, that Thorin’s people had any objections to the concept of working after death. They were not lazy, no matter what the propaganda had tried to claim. They embraced that aspect of things readily; they had always expected to work after death and accepted it accordingly. Celebrated it, even. Existence, after all, should never be devoid of purpose.
Nor was it that they thought the work of running the City unimportant. (Badly designed, perhaps; he had heard a few dwarves grumble that. What sort of system required a never ending stream of more computing power? What sort of system would only accept revived brain tissue in order to run? Why must those minds be forever aware as they toiled in the system, left alone in the dark with only their share of the data to accompany them? Why, just let them at the computing towers in Dol Guldur, and they would - )
But they remembered the ancient words of their fathers, even when so many others had forgotten their own. They knew they had already been earmarked for Mahal; that he needed their service in his great foundries and machineries to make his constructs for the Last Great War. What would become of them all when the end days came and Dagor Dagorath struck if they had denied him the souls of centuries of dwarves?
The government had not been impressed with this argument, any more than they had been impressed with the dwarves’ furious insistence that Mahal was not, of course, in any way connected with one of the Forbidden Ones. Who was this Aulë others spoke of? Certainly they knew him not. They followed Mahal and Mahal alone; surely they could not be faulted that his name and that of one of the Forbidden Ones rhymed.
Apparently, it seemed they could.
Just as they were also faulted for just how many dwarves had been, tragically, dying in conflagrations so intense that no brain matter was left for Dol Guldur. Unfairly, of course; foundries, you know. So much molten metal. So much fire. So little time to make sure of safety regulations when there were quotas to be met. Certainly they would not go to such a death intentionally; not when it was treason to deny your mind to Dol Guldur; not when it would be such a terrible death.
(Yes, of course some of those who had perished in those flames had been sick or elderly. Had they not already established the injustice of calling the dwarven folk lazy? Had they not already established the dwarven will to work?)
(Rank slander to claim they had already been dead of those other causes before they went into the flames. Fighting words to even suggest it.)
(And hypocritical of the government to complain, really, since it was the government who sent in Smaug and ultimately sent far more dwarves than anyone else had ever managed to be lost into the flames.)
It was not hard to get to Erebor, precisely. Thorin had flown right up to the edge of the district more times than he could count.
Getting past the edge was the problem.
The district had been sealed by the Necromancer of Dol Guldur after Smaug. Every corridor into its streets had been blocked with concrete; every rare window up to open sky filled in. You could enter any of the districts that had once surrounded Erebor, but east, west, south, north, above, and below; all of them were utterly cut off from it.
Officially.
Unofficially, for every public road into the district there had always been a dozen service hatches, sewer lines, smugglers’ runs, and politicians’ escape routes.
Thorin knew it well.
He had spent Erebor’s last hours in a bunker connected to one of them.
Fili and Kili should have known those tunnels as well as he did. They should have grown up racing through the passages of Erebor grand streets and secret warrens both instead of running wild through the tenements of Ered Luin until they were old enough (old enough! Ha!) to follow in his footsteps to the ever more noxious fumes of the factories.
They should have had schools and tutors and the great libraries, not the knowledge Dis and Thorin could scrape from their exhausted minds at the end of the day. They should have all of their people’s histories handed down properly in the great tales, not picked up in whispers from Balin and from their own scattered delvings into the endless gossip of the Net.
Should have, should have, should have.
He’d had enough of those words being painted in his people’s blood.
And tonight -
Tonight, the endless sweep of the cameras, the constant march of the patrols - tonight, in all the endless webs there were tiny gaps -
Tonight, for the first time in ten years, the algorithms for all that endless surveillance would align just right for all those little tiny gaps to line up and for a small company of dwarves and one hobbit to make their way to a seemingly innocuous grate and slip in.
The tunnel within was not grand; it was bare concrete, small enough that they were all forced to crawl.
There was no precise point that the tunnel switched from Laketown District to Erebor. The concrete didn’t switch to marble; there were no trumpet calls summoning them home.
Still. He almost thought he could feel it, like a buzzing in his chest.
There was no lighting in the tunnel, of course. There had been once, but it had been hooked into Erebor’s generators, and those had long since been cut off from the great grids that stretched out from Dol Guldur. They had run on their improvised fuel for a time - they’d had to, during the rebellion - but that too had long since failed. They had brought their own light, blue and glowing in their helmets, like the miners their people had been in times of old.
The light was enough for the narrow tunnel. It was more than he wanted for the bunker the tunnel emerged into, where he had huddled with Dis and Frerin, waiting for their mother to pass on an all-clear that never came.
The light was not nearly enough for the street the bunker opened into.
The hatch in the ceiling had still opened easily, air hissing as the seal broke. Thorin had been the first through the tunnel, the first through the bunker, and he was the first to push up the ladder and emerge into the silence.
The beam of his helmet light cut a narrow path through the scorched street. The scars of laser fire had been all but obscured by the trail of Smaug’s fire.
Ash now, of course. Ash and a trail of bones that his beam of light followed helplessly, leading inevitably to the great metallic heap.
Dwalin was behind him in a moment. He had been in that bunker too. He knew.
The light grew slowly as more and more of the Company emerged; Fili and Kili next, pressing close, Master Baggins bringing up the rear . . .
In the combined light, the great crater on Smaug’s damaged wing glinted tauntingly. A deeper crater centered around one mechanical eye; he could almost see the central workings.
More concerning was the great rent in the construct’s stomach.
Probably just another blow Erebor had managed to strike. Probably just -
“Makes you think about things crawling out of there,” Kili whispered. “Lots of little spider things, all swarming out of the corpse - “
Thorin turned, very slowly, to glare at him.
“Shutting up now.”
The whole street was ash and death; it would be impossible to avoid all of it, but they would do what they could. There was a moment of reverential quiet for the lost before Thorin spoke: “The fire took them.”
In the old days, Balin had told him once, their people had buried their dead in stone. Fire had been too impermanent a monument.
But it was an easy choice to choose from, between Dol Guldur and the flames. The fire had taken his people; Mahal had taken his people.
It was victory.
Or the closest thing anyone would ever get to it.
“From the fires of Mahal’s forge we came,” Balin said quietly.
“And to them we pray to return,” the rest echoed.
Master Baggins, of course, was silent, but he stood with his head bowed through it, and that was respect enough.
The City had not always just been the City, of course; once, before it had conquered and bargained and slowly consumed all else, up to the top of the breathable atmosphere and down to the roots of the earth, once there had been other cities and so it had needed a name.
Once, it had been Mordor.
But that was a very long time ago now.
They made their way out of the burned streets slowly, step by careful step. Gradually, the ash vanished.
The skeletons did not.
They remained, tangled up together, arms still reaching out, weapons still waiting where they’d fallen. With most, it was impossible to say now what had killed them.
But with the bodies so close, so tangled together . . .
It was impossible not to remember what Kili had said. Impossible not to imagine small, skittering things that could have scurried up from the shadows, lurking onto vulnerable necks as his people frantically tried to tear them away -
Impossible not to stare at the shadows now.
“Skulls are intact,” Fili said quietly. “Most of them.”
It was true, he saw. Some few were smashed, but that was easily enough explained, whatever they had been fighting. Most were intact.
Which meant that even after the Necromancer had won, he had not sent in drones to collect minds for Dol Guldur. Not even from the bodies that had not been burned.
The Company scrunched a little closer together.
Because that . . . that, even more than the rest, sent a wary shudder up Thorin’s spine.
His mother had received another call after the first one announcing their victory. It had not been the all-clear as they had expected.
She had never said what it had contained. All that Thorin knew was that whatever it was, it had been what had convinced her to run.
The vault was at the very center of the district, of course. At the very center of all the twisted up corpses of the people his forefathers had once sworn to protect.
At the center of the district, in the lowest level of the home he had run through as a child. The home Fili and Kili should have been able to call their home.
The home his grandfather’s bones might yet wait in.
The buzz beneath his skin that promised homecoming was beginning to feel less like anticipation and more like dread.
The gates were twisted and hung open. The door to the great entry hall was smashed in.
There were no cobwebs across the entranceway, at least. No skittering in the shadows. Just the nervous buzzing of his own dread and the long empty stretch of hallway to where the first of the proper barriers to the vault began.
All of it was meant to be opened with a series of passcodes. Thorin’s father had known them all.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t passed most of them on before he’d been . . . lost.
“Nori,” he said softly. It seemed dangerous to speak too loudly here. “You’re up.”
Nori stepped forward with a small bow. He pressed his ear to the door and began spinning the small wheel, listening for the clicks.
“What’s he doing?” Master Baggins asked. The others hushed him frantically.
“Listening for treasure,” Nori said with a wink after a long moment and a last spin of the dial. “Can’t you hear it?”
The first of the doors swung open.
“Apparently not,” Master Baggins said with a sigh. “Hobbit ears must not be as keen as their dwarven fellows.”
“That’s alright,” Fili said reassuringly. “You’ve your own part here. And I believe it’s time for it!”
The next door was the one Thorin had been unable to find anyone qualified to open on his own; the one he had nearly despaired of until he had once again stumbled across Gandalf, who had hemmed and hawed over the danger of the journey before admitting it might be worth the risk and saying he knew just the man for the job.
He hadn’t looked a day older than he had the night he had sold Thorin’s mother false papers for every refugee of Erebor she had gathered together at what only as an adult Thorin had realized must have been a fraction of a fraction of what should have been the price. That he had not seemed to age would have surprised Thorin less if that age had not been “probably old enough to remember the hills.” Those who bought immortality usually bought enough to also secure youth.
But perhaps that was more than Gandalf could afford if how he had conducted business with Thorin’s mother was any indication of how he usually ran things. And it didn’t truly matter, one way or another; all that mattered was whether his judgment was better than his bargaining skills.
Master Baggins had unscrewed a panel from the wall and was muttering quietly to himself as he rearranged the wires, replacing some entirely, until at last he plugged in a small device and started watching its flickering screen anxiously. Unlike Nori, he evidently did not require silence; he still had not stopped babbling. “It’s just a puzzle, really. A game of riddles against a computer. And of course, when playing a game it always helps if you . . . “
“Cheat?” Kili asked cheerfully.
Master Baggins sniffed. “Explore all your options. There we go! Let’s give it a try.” He turned to the keypad by the door and punched in a long string of numbers.
The door slid open.
The final door awaited.
This one, Thorin needed no help with; this one was his birthright.
It was anticipation, surely, that was causing his veins to buzz with electricity. Not nerves. He could not be nervous now.
He clapped Fili and Kili on the back as he approached. It was too late for them to see Erebor as it was, but they were about to glimpse the best preserved bit of its glory that still remained.
A needle extended from the final door as Thorin approached. He offered his arm to it.
A jab. A moment. And then -
“Durin identified,” a robotic voice said coolly.
And the vault of Erebor swung open.
Metal stairs stretched down two levels, winding around broad mezzanines and allowing a clear view down to the floor. Each level was packed with treasures: glass cases glittering with jewels here, vast racks of perfectly preserved real wood there, weapons glowing with ancient magic and crackling with innovation just decades old. Artifacts, jewelry, data chips, scrolls -
“Seed banks,” Master Baggins breathed, rushing to press his nose to a climate controlled case. “With mushroom spores.”
“Never got too much use out of those,” Balin said thoughtfully, crowding in with the rest of them, but less distracted by awe; he, of course, had seen it before. “Offered to sell some to one of the farm corps before all this, but apparently Dol Guldur’s computers have the best type of seeds all figured, and of course outside of one of their terrarium blocks you haven’t got much of a prayer of getting anything to grow.”
“Not much of a prayer!” Master Baggins said indignantly. “Why, all you have to do is - “
Thorin stopped listening. It was clear, at least, what would be making up a good portion of Master Baggins’ share.
For his part, he could only stare.
For decades, his people had starved, had choked themselves on the factory’s fumes, had lived in tenements, died in plagues -
And all the while, this had waited.
His people would wait no more.
He pulled the pack off his bag and pulled out the small, carefully compressed square that snapped out into a float pallet. “Work parties,” he called. There was no time to linger. Not here. Not when they still could not be sure where the danger was.
The others split immediately: Ori, Nori, and Dori heading to the lowest level, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur to the mid level, Balin, Dwalin, Oin, and Gloin heading to the far side of the level they were on. Fili and Kili, of course, stayed with him. They were long used to working together; Thorin had fought for it, when they had first joined him at the dangerous work of the factories, and they stuck together still, though they usually let Fili be the one to talk their supervisors into it now.
They could not take everything, of course, but they had strategized for this. What would be most valuable to sell; what would be best to take for their own use.
Dwalin came jogging back with one of the latter items now, a small sheet of comm-beads already linked together.
“We’re likely to get spread out as we journey out,” Dwalin explained gruffly to the hobbit as he passed them out. “If you see danger, just shout through this.”
The hobbit jumped a little but took one.
That was good; the buzzing, not anticipation after all, had only grown worse, and Thorin was itching to be gone. He formed a relay line with Fili and Kili, piling their float pallet higher and higher until he judged it would take no more.
They were the first ones ready. There was a reason Fili had been able to talk their supervisors into letting them work together time after time, and it wasn’t just to do with his nephew’s charm.
“Nori,” he said, checking the comm-bead and his directions both. “North Street?”
“North Street,” Nori’s voice confirmed through the bead.
Their path in could not be their path out. The float pallets would never fit through the narrow tunnel.
But Nori had sworn up and down that he knew a smuggler’s tunnel they could take. It would not have done for a way in - he didn’t know the smuggler’s code for the other side - but he knew the one for getting out.
So he had sworn. He had best not fail them now.
Thorin began to push the pallet toward the entrance.
His mother had never told him what she heard on the very final call.
She had never told him, but she had fought bitterly against Thrain trying to find a way back in; she had made Thorin swear that she would never have to see him make the same mistake.
He had sworn.
And he had made sure he had waited until she wouldn’t have to watch.
The streets were still smothering in their stillness. Still covered in ash and bone.
Still silent, save for the buzzing in Thorin’s ears.
It was maddening, this feeling; never before had he felt such dread, such electric certainty that around the next corner - or the next -
It was so loud that he almost didn’t hear Fili call out, questioningly, if he was sure this was the right way.
Of course it was the right way. Of course it was. Thorin knew these streets. He knew -
He squinted at the street sign in the dim light of his helmet’s beam. The letters swam for a moment before resolving.
Not the right street. Not the quickest street, at least; they were closer to the scorched square that marked Smaug’s final resting place than the smuggler’s tunnel they had aimed for, but that was - fine. They could still recover from here without turning around.
The others were chattering on the ancient comm, making it buzz with static. It mixed with the buzzing in his blood like a swarm of insects from ancient times, blocking out all other sound.
In the shadows, something shifted.
He swung his head immediately, light raking through the shadow.
Nothing.
Over there -
Nothing.
Over the comm, he heard Dwalin’s battle roar.
He swung around, hand going to his sword. Behind him, his nephews -
(Buzzing, buzzing, constantly the buzzing. Was it really in his blood? Or ever so faintly, could he just hear - )
Those weren’t his nephews.
He had turned his back for a moment and something had taken their place.
Something with their faces. Something with their voices. Something that knew to call him “uncle,” voice tight and tense -
But the game was up and they knew it; he could see their faces twisting now. Twisting, twisting, twisting, guns whipping out, and they were too monstrous to trust even each other, turning to fire at the foe beside them as he crashed through the tangled bones back toward them, sword whipping forward, neon blue light slicing through the twitching shadows -
He taught his nephews how to fight. With their fists, with their teeth, with their blades, with their bullets, with whatever metal Mahal saw fit to grant ready to their hands when the moment came that they needed it.
He taught them in the tight space of their single room apartment; he taught them in the narrow alleys that twisted lightless through the district that would never be home. He taught them as he had taught Dis and Frerin, and he had taught them desperately, hoping that this time, this time, it would be enough.
Kili’s keen eyes were best for the bullets. Fili took up the guns, but he longed for the blade. “I’ll be as good as you one day,” he had sworn to his uncle.
“Better,” Thorin had promised and disarmed him. “One day.”
One day. One day. One day.
Not yet.
There was an endless roaring in his ears. Screams of enemies hiding somewhere he couldn’t find them. He felt he had wandered these streets forever, fruitlessly searching for someone else to fight. It was hard to walk and getting harder, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the roaring in his ears.
Nothing moved but the shadows; no sound but that nestled in his ear. Not even any shape but the endless bones, and -
Smaug. No matter which direction he tried to head, he seemed to keep ending up here, to the square where he had vanquished his last opponents. Here, where Smaug was lying dead as anything of its kind could be, but he swore, he swore, he could still hear a faint buzzing of sound.
The streets would be silent again. The streets must be silent again.
There was a great crater around Smaug’s eye; dented, almost pierced through, but not quite. There was a great pile of bones where others had sought to silence it.
Thorin stumbled up the bones and thrust his sword at it. Once. Twice. All his waning strength hurled at that buzzing, buzzing, buzzing -
The metal shrieked. His blade slid through. Sliced through the tug of wires. Skittered with electricity. Rang with one last clang -
The buzzing stopped.
All the world was silent, save for his own ragged breath, and the suddenly quieted static of the comm-bead in his ear.
Thorin swayed, held upright only by his grip on the sword, still lodged deep in Smaug’s darkened eye.
Even the hilt was slick with oil.
And blood.
Thorin let go.
He was on his knees in the rubble almost immediately, but he didn’t mind that; better to be on his knees in the ashes of his people than to be leaning against the thing that destroyed them.
There was blood on his hands.
There had never, he was realizing, been anything hiding in the belly of the beast. Never been any monsters sent to scurry out among the streets. Never been anything taking his nephews’ place.
Only madness lurking in the thing’s eye. Spreading. Growing. Until -
There was so much blood on his hands.
“Thorin?”
The voice was high and scared and for a moment he thought of Kili when he was just a child, calling for help as Fili’s fever climbed and he clutched at his brother with too small hands -
But that was years ago now, and it was the hobbit behind him.
“Thorin, are you - I promise it’s just me, totally harmless - “
“Master Baggins.” For some reason, it was hard to get breath to speak.
“Yes! Yes, it’s me. Are you - oh, dear.”
He could see Master Baggins now, more or less. He blurred a bit around the edges.
“Fili,” he managed. “And Kili.”
“They’ll be fine,” Master Baggins said, voice too high, too thin. “You’ll all be fine, you dwarves are a hardy lot, let’s just worry about you - No - oh, don’t look, please, Thorin, let me just get you a - a bandage, or - “
Master Baggins leaned him back against a pile of rubble before Smaug’s feet. It curved, slightly; he couldn’t see -
Couldn’t see. Not anymore.
“Fire,” he rasped. He couldn’t be sure Master Baggins would know; couldn’t be sure it was safe, even here, even with all the other minds even the Necromancer hadn’t dared pollute Dol Guldur with.
And if Mahal felt the same - if Mahal didn’t want them -
Thorin, at least, would die sane. Surely Mahal would accept Thorin’s tribute at least, and if he did - surely Thorin could convince him. They had died in Mahal’s service; surely Mahal could find some purpose for them even if they had not died sane. Surely there must be something he could offer to convince -
He could not have doomed his nephews to the dark with his own hands and foolishness. Please. Please, let him not have done that, on top of all his other unforgivable sins. Please.
Master Baggins stared at him, uncomprehending, but Dwalin had appeared, he saw in relief. Dwalin was there, blood thick on his own hands, but Dwalin was there, and Dwalin understood.
“Aye,” he said. “Fire for them all. And I’ll get the rest to the skies, Thorin. It won’t have been in vain.”
He could trust Dwalin, he knew; could trust him even with the wildness in his eyes that came with the smears of blood. He could trust Dwalin to do what Thorin could not and give his people what last, little safety he could.
“Don’t talk like that, he’ll be fine,” Master Baggins insisted. It was hard to make him out now. “He’ll be fine, he’ll be carrying out his treasure soon - Thorin, you saw, there was a whole seed bank in there, with mushroom spores and everything - Dwalin said I could have some as part of my share. You’ll have a hero’s welcome in my district, just you wait - “
A hero’s welcome. That sounded nice. Impossible, but nice.
He could use that in his arguments when he was begging mercy for his nephews from Mahal . . .