Disclaimer: I own nothing except my OCs. I can't be Tolkien because he's dead. And if I were him the Silmarillion would have had a vastly different ending.
It was a chill morning in early spring. Many people went about wrapped in furs to keep out the bite of the cold. In this weather, the Elf was the only person in the whole of Laketown who was sweating. But there was a good reason for that. Dûrfîn was the smith of Esgaroth. The furnace heated to a blaze by the bellows his assistant pumped, not to mention the heat emanating in waves from the metal he was beating, gave him a very good reason to be sweating.
Today he was repairing a ploughshare, for one of the families who farmed for a living rather than fished. It had blunted on a large stone, and its front end had bent slightly, so that it no longer worked correctly.
Swinging his hammer, Dûrfîn stretched to his full height and then brought the heavy thing down on the dented part of the metal. Sparks scattered everywhere, flying across the room, the metal made a protesting noise and straightened a little. The Elf looked at it critically, his head on one side, and then swung the hammer again. The metal bent a little further down towards the flat, and more sparks flew everywhere. It was nearly flat now. Two more blows and Dûrfîn wasn't exactly pleased with it, but he thought it would do. Once he would have kept on until it was perfect. Now he knew from experience that in cases like these his time mattered more than perfection.
Taking his tongs he gripped the metal firmly and plunged it into cold water. Living by a lake certainly had its advantages. Dûrfîn didn't need a trough, his smithy was built right next to the waterline. Steam erupted from the lake water, it hissed and bubbled.
After a minute or so, when the steam was dissipating, Dûrfîn removed the metal from the water and laid it against the left wall. Its owners could come to collect it later.
"What else?" He asked his assistant, who, aside from pumping the bellows, was also his encyclopaedia of work that needed to be done. The boy paused to think, then said "Nothing."
Dûrfîn nodded. His arms ached now, he had been swinging that hammer since the morning.
"Boy can go now." He said, and then began to tidy up his tools onto their hooks as the boy scampered away. He put out the fire and gathered up his pieces of scrap metal, putting them in their box. Then he stepped out of his smithy and closed and locked the door. He had actually gotten as far as half way to his home before his eye fell on the Lonely Mountain, standing tall and majestic over Esgaroth, and he muttered under his breath "Aulëonna!"
The Dwarves frightened him. He had been in Esgaroth for over a hundred years now, and he didn't want to have to leave. When he had first come, fleeing out of the East soon after the Dragon's attack on Dale and the Lonely Mountain, he had wandered the streets of the frightened township of Esgaroth, without a penny in his pocket and no way of getting lodging or food, unless he relied on someone's charity. And chances of that were scant, given both his race and appearance.
Then he had passed the smithy. It had been worked by someone called Tharn, then. Tharn had been beating out a knife for his son, laboriously striking the steel to flatten it, after twisting it for what looked like the final time. It hadn't been going to be a brilliant knife, either. Dûrfîn could see the impurities in the metal, and the mistakes that the smith had made. He had always had an uncanny gift for smithcraft , which was odd, as he'd never had to work to gain it; it'd been there from the very start. He had watched silently for a while, and then, at last, when the smith made a particularly bad blunder, could contain himself no longer. "Smith does it wrong!" He exclaimed.
Everyone stared at him, and one man in a long black coat said "Who are you to accuse our smith of not knowing his own craft?" The voice was undisguisedly hostile.
"Dûrfîn is a Noldo!" Said Dûrfîn. He had come to that conclusion after observing the Teleri, and hearing about the Vanyar. He felt nothing like either.
"You don't look like a smith to me." Said the man, looking him up and down, seeing the ropy scars across the Elf's face and his thin frame, and hearing his hoarse voice.
"Let him try, and make a fool of himself!" Someone laughed. The smith wasn't exactly pleased to let an unknown Elf touch his tools, but he agreed in the end, when his knife was finished.
And so Dûrfîn entered the smithy. He took the tools, and chose some steel from the pile of scrap metal that the smith kept. And he began.
He heated and twisted and hammered, he cooled it and repeated the process. Over and over again, until his knife was finished. And it was undoubtedly better than the smith's. Leaf bladed in the style of all Elven weapons, it shone and glistened in the light. Indeed, it almost seemed to make its own light, in a sidelong way so that no one could quite decide whether it shone or merely reflected.
Everyone stared at it in amazement, and Dûrfîn felt warm pride rise within him, although he couldn't help noticing where he could have made it even was a little nick down one side he could have avoided, and if a softer metal had been used for the edges it wouldn't have been so likely to break.
Someone fetched the Master, who compared the two blades, bending his head in furrowed scrutiny. He turned his pale eyes to look at Dûrfîn's hungry face, and spoke. "You are unusual for an Elf . . . I guess that you are in need of food and lodging?"
Dûrfîn nodded, not trusting himself to speak and ruin everything.
A smile flickered across the Master's face. "I can offer you both, Elf, in exchange for smithcraft from you. What do you say?"
Dûrfîn nodded again, and this time he spoke. "Dûrfîn agrees."
And so eighty odd years he worked for the Masters of Laketown. After a time he came to realise that he had let himself in for virtual slavery. He was well fed and clothed here, true enough, but if he ever decided to leave, he would once more be a penniless wanderer, and his features didn't exactly speak for him. His face had three knotted white burn scars stretched diagonally across it as though they had been inflicted by a gigantic whip. One crossed the left corner of his mouth, one just missed his right eye and scored through his eyebrow, and one ran across his crooked nose. These scars - and others that didn't show on his face - continued on down his body, curling around him almost as if someone had wrapped him in fire. One marred the palm of his left hand so that he had difficulty holding things with it.
It didn't bother him as much as it might. He'd looked the way he did for as long as he could remember. True, it meant that people underestimated him, even looked down on him. But he was used to that by now, and had suceeded in proving that he had far greater skill than they most of the time. And he was happy enough in Laketown. It was better than lots of places he had had the misfortune to end up in before.
And then the Dwarves had come back. Bard had killed Smaug the Dragon, striking him with the last of his arrows in his one vulnerable spot.
Dûrfîn remembered the water in which he had almost drowned. He couldn't swim, but neither could he walk through fire. Jumping into the lake had seemed by far the better option. The water had steamed and hissed and bubbled, like it did now when he cooled his work. He had clung tightly onto a jagged piece of wood from the town, and he had kicked away from the blazing fire, trying to keep the foul water out of his mouth and nose. He had been managing well enough, too and was thinking himself safe when the Dragon had crashed into the lake, the surge sucking the wood from his fingers, leaving him floundering. It was luck alone that a boat had happened to be near, and the people upon it had helped him in.
During the Battle of the Five Armies Dûrfîn had assiduously avoided the Wood Elves. Simply enough, he didn't like being with other Elves because they always looked at him with pity.
Alright, Men did that too, but they would also look at him with fear, and with condescension. And awe. Dûrfîn could dazzle them with his odd skill in the smithy, where he could not dazzle the Elves. They were too used to members of their race excelling, as most of them did after such long lives.
But he had fought in the battle. He had used the blade that he had preserved with care all these long years. An Elf had tossed it to him when he was a prisoner in Angband, an Elf who was a member of the army of the Valar.
He had it because he would not come with the Elf, he had been too afraid, and he guessed that the Elf had not wanted to leave him without any means to defend himself. He had kept that blade all these years. He considered it a memento from his birth, for he remembered nothing before the darkness of Angband, and that he did not want to remember.
It was not large - a shortsword, small but serviceable. Dûrfîn was fairly competent with it, but no more than he had to be. His experiences trying to get out of Angband during the War of Wrath had left him with as much combat as he wanted out of life.
When Laketown was rebuilt, Dûrfîn said to the new Master "Dûrfîn is not going to stay with the old agreement. If the people of Esgaroth want his services, they must pay him for them."
The new Master agreed. And for a whole human generation the Men of Laketown were proud of their smith. He might sound odd, and talk a bit funny. He might be an Elf, but he could do the best metalwork outside of Erebor. And that was saying something.
But recently the Dwarves had taken it as an affront to their pride that the Men of Esgaroth had a smith who was an Elf, when there was a whole mountain of Dwarves next door. Whenever the Dwarves ran into Laketown Men, they always seemed to be showing off their craftsmanship and ability to them, and that frightened Dûrfîn. He did not want to be wandering out in the wild again.
His eyes were starting to stray away from the Lonely Mountain when the whole top of it burst into flame. Pieces of it flew in all directions, flaming and red, and there was a deafening booming roar. Dûrfîn had just enough sense to throw himself down flat before the shock wave reached Laketown. As pieces of wood began to fall on him and a deafening wind filled his ears, he thought he saw something black and sinuous dive into the smoking ruins of the mountain's crest.
The explosion was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Dûrfîn pushed himself back up to his feet without getting too many splinters in his hands, and brushed himself free of debris. He turned his head in a slow semicircle, looking around at the aftermath.
The damage to Laketown was actually less than it had seemed while the explosion was happening. The roofs had been blown off most of the houses, true, but the destruction was nothing like what had occurred when the dragon attacked. Several people had been wounded, however their blood staining the wood all around them, and Dûrfîn was glad that he was not hurt.
Satisfied that all was relatively well, consider ing a mountain had just exploded, Dûrfîn tipped his head back to look at Erebor, scanning the smoking sky above the mountain's now considerably shorter crown. But there was no sign of whatever he had seen dive into the flames.
Someone shouted at him. "Hey! Smith! Stop gawking and help us!"
Shocked out of his thought, Dûrfîn turned to look at his addresser. It was a woman, her clothing dirtied with blood and wood, who was tugging at several collapsed pieces of wall that had apparently fallen on someone. The someone's legs were sticking out and waving in apparent panic.
Dûrfîn darted his gaze around in a quick circumnavigation of the area. Unfortunately, there was no one else available to help the woman. He ran over to her, being careful to avoid unsteady looking patches of the ground. "Dûrfîn pulls, woman clears the mess." He ordered.
She nodded, and started to tug at the wood lying on top of the trapped person.
Words failing him, Dûrfîn gave up and slapped the legs until they lay still long enough for him to get a grip and pull.
With them both working together, it didn't take long for the person trapped beneath the debris to emerge from the wood, whole save for a few cuts and bruises. It turned out to be an adolescent boy, long and gangly, and still panicked. He fled almost as soon as he was able.
The woman started walking, but turned and looked back when he did not follow. "Come on, there must be other people who need our help!"
Searching with a sense of desperation for the right words, Dûrfîn at last got out "Dûrfîn can't. He needs to look at mountain."
"You're going to abandon people who need your help?" She asked, her voice rising.
"Not – need his help. Look!" Now, at last, a group of people were coming around the corner of a street, carrying long pieces of wood, which he guessed were to act as levers when getting fallen debris off people. "Woman has other help."
And with that he bolted.
He ran through the narrow streets, avoiding blocked parts as much as he could. In the ordinary way of things he would have stayed to help, but this was anything but ordinary. There was nothing he knew of that could blow the top clean off a mountain like that, it was something new, something terrible and new. He had to find out what had caused it, and how.
Slowing at the edge of the town, he slipped down into a small that looked undamaged. He untied it from its mooring and began to row his way up to the mouth of the River Running.
The river water was dark with ash and mud, and he went slowly. If there were any new dangers in the water – like rocks close to the surface or rapids – he wanted to know about them. His oars slopped loud in the thick water.
As he progressed closer to the mountain, he began to hear the fire, roaring like a balrog. And amidst the sounds of flame, he heard the dwarves. Both deep bellows of anger – were they fighting something? – and voices in ordinary tone, as well as not a few moans, echoed out of the mountain's great gate. The damage here would have been far more extensive than at Laketown.
At the gate where the river flowed into the mountain, Dûrfîn was accosted by a group of Dwarves carrying large axes, their faces set, their beards torn and smouldering. One had a cut on his forehead, which bled into his left eye.
"What are you doing here, Elf?!" Demanded the bleeding on, wiping blood out of his eye and leavin ga sticky trail smeared across his forehead, already stained with ash.
"Dûrfîn came to investigate the explosion." He said, standing up in the boat. He did not feel in the least comfortable sitting down and surrounded by these dwarves. Standing felt far safer.
"Well you can turn around and go straight back again!" Said the Dwarf, hands clenched tight on his axe.
Dûrfîn didn't want to get into a fight he knew that he would lose. "Will you tell me what caused the explosion?" He asked.
At that moment their came a roar from the mountain, and with it a high pitched shriek that made the Elf shiver right down to his bones. He knew what that shriek was made by. He remembered them from the Second Age.
"Úlairë!" He cried, reverting in his fear to his first language.
"Get lost Elf!" Shouted the Dwarves, and shoved at the boat with their weapons. Dûrfîn fell over with the sudden jerk, but he was up again quickly. He began to row the boat away, but he shot an angry glare at the Dwarves. And then he saw the black thing claw its way out of the top of the mountain, and spread batlike wings. It looked like a small black dragon, but with only two legs. And seated on its back was a dark figure, clad in black robes from head to toe. It raised its right hand upon high and shrieked again, and Dûrfîn saw a globe of beautiful white light glowing in its hand. His eyes fixed on the light, and couldn't leave it. He lurched to his feet as the foul beast took off into the air, and found himself to be crying words, and he didn't understand what he meant by them, or why he spat them like poisonous things from his lips. "Moringotto! Ilumírëi! Fëanaró alahessa!"
He found himself running after the beast, leaping from his boat and running across the ground, hardly seeing where he was going yet somehow avoiding obstacles that whipped by him as half seen blurs. He was hardly what could be called conscious anymore. He simply felt a driving need, a pulsating, heaving want. He had to take that beautiful thing from the Nazgûl and have it for his own.
He ran until blackness overcame him.
He seemed to awake as if from a deep sleep. Dûrfîn rubbed his eyes, blinking in the soft green light. Where was he? Last he recalled, he had seen – he sat bolt upright, all sleepiness gone. The Arkenstone. That was what the Ringwraith had taken. No doubt of it.
But then – what had come over him? He remembered his strange, insane behaviour after seeing it, remembered the words that had fallen unbidden from his lips. Where had the words come from? He had thought he had shaken off all remnants of the mind-blanking fits that had gripped him from time to time for many years after – he started remembering. But that must be a remnant from the dark days of Angband! Fëanor is not dead, what kind of nonsense is that? He had died thousands of years ago, in the First Age, killed by his wounds! And the Arkenstone . . . Dûrfîn shivered, recalling its incredible beauty, and the mind blanking effect it had had on him. That was so completely not normal that it frightened him far, far more than he was willing to admit.
He got to his feet. He should get out of this wood, anyway, get back to Laketown. He no longer felt any curiousity asbout what had happened to the Lonely Mountain. He just wanted to get home, and maybe sleep for a while. In the past, sleep had usually helped.
And then he found he couldn't walk. No matter how much he tried, he couldn't take one single step towards Esgaroth and home. It wasn't as if something was pushing him back, not as though there was anything in his way. He just couldn't make his legs move.
His breath coming hard between his teeth, he stepped backwards. That was perfectly possible, his leg moved fast and with ease. What was wrong with him? Dûrfîn dropped to the ground and tried crawling. But no, apparently he couldn't crawl home either. Whatever was wrong, it wasn't only affecting his legs.
Getting back to his feet, he took a few steps back, and then tensed his muscles, and sprang back the way he had come.
Except he didn't. He stayed still, trembling with the pent up strength of the jump. Dûrfîn put a hand to his forehead. He could have done without this so much. The whole day had been a disaster. First the mountain blew up, then his mind went blank and something else took over – something that hadn't happened to him for many hundreds of years – and then, to cap it all, he couldn't even go home.
Something tuged at his calves, an itching, a prickling, as though ants were climbing up inside his trous.
He glanced behind him, but there was nothing there.
The prickling continued.
Taking a step back, Dûrfîn prepared to take a running jump.
The prickling disapeared.
Looking back in earnest now, Dûrfîn turned around and took a few steps the way. Nothing stopped him, nothing itched at his legs.
He turned back towards Esgaroth, and the prickling returned full force, so hard it has almost painful.
"Alright!" He cried. "Dûrfîn will go South! But he needs to get things from Esgaroth first!"
Instantly the prickling evaporated. Dûrfîn let out a great breath. He tried a few steps towards home, and nothing stopped him. He started to run towards Laketown. Something inside him quailed at the immensity of what had happened to him could mean. Who had he been before he had lost his memory? The possible answers to that question frightened him more than he cared to admit.