PROLOGUE
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There is a very real price to pay for those who engage in war.
Doesn't matter if you're on the frontlines or doing the grunt work. The price is always the same, and the stakes are high no matter who you are or what you've seen. You never come home the same person you were when you left—that is, if you make it home at all.
The price is not death, as you might be expecting. Death, dying—that is just a means to an end. It is absolution. Not one of us is invincible, though there are those who like to try to convince themselves otherwise. Death is ingrained in our very species from the moment we exit the womb. The clock starts and if you're lucky it doesn't stop. Not for a while, anyway.
No, the price is something far more sinister than death, something that many of us go our whole lives without experiencing.
The price is pure, unadulterated fear.
And this is a different kind of fear, a fear that is poles apart from that which is felt when tragedy strikes in the everyday rat-race of life: when your child never makes it back home after playing in the forest and you think goodness, what if they've been kidnapped? Or when a storm strikes and the plates in the cupboard rattle and the wind outside howls like a savage beast, and you think this is it, I am going to die. It is a fear far different than when you get that letter—your sister, your brother, your mother or your wife—caught a sickness, stabbed in a brawl, fell down the stairs, trampled by a horse. It's always the same and never different.
These kinds of fears can be categorized, and when all is said and done, grief sets in, and that can be categorized too, put into five neat little stages.
There are no neat, pragmatic stages for the grief felt by warriors after battle.
There are no stages because that pure, unadulterated fear? It never. Goes. Away.
And Kili knows this better than anybody, because Kili is a warrior, and he has been ravaged by this calamity called war.
He knows that some of the other dwarves don a practiced apathy. And they have to, because how else are they supposed to cope? How else are they supposed to go back to the wife and kids and family and pretend like they're fine when in reality they've had to witness one of their best friends being cut to pieces by orc scum? Or when they've seen their comrades strewn and sobbing in red-pink snow, bones twisted at angles they shouldn't be, and they're begging for help even though there's nothing for you to do but stand above them and look away while you sink your sword into their skull. Make it quick, put them out of their misery before you can start to think too hard and heavy about the ramifications of it all, about playing Mahal in someone else's life.
Later you come back to salvage what you can, and then you and a few others dig a mass grave. And as the jab of your shovel hits the rock-hard cold earth and sends vibrations up your arm, and it starts to snow anew and it's too quiet save for the metal thud of your shovel, that's the worst part, because you can't help but think about how you put them down like a animal just so they'd stop hurting, so they wouldn't feel pain.
Another lost life, another grave without a headstone.
And how else are they supposed to cope after the bodies? So many dead bodies. You lose count after a while.
And the thing is, you never really get used to it, but you pretend that you do. You have to, if you want to survive. Back home you know they're waiting with smiles and cheers. They'll drape gold over your neck and shower you with jewels and call you a hero, but it doesn't change the fact that you're a different dwarf now, that your leg's been amputated or that you get flashbacks when you least expect them, flashbacks that leave you paralyzed and for a few sickening heartbeats turn the world black and gray around you, noise and sound canceled, until somebody says your name a few time or rouses you with a hand on your shoulder. And it doesn't change the fact that in the dead of night you wake up gasping, seeing rivulets of blood, and it's so real you can taste it. Even after you wash your teeth there's still copper beneath your tongue and coating your throat, and no amount of alcohol will chase away that taste.
And Kili knows this better then anyone—he's tried.
You're forced to cope, then you don't because you can't, and life moves inexorably on.
Things are different though, for Kili.
Unlike those dwarves who are forced into a semi-half life—a life which is a pathetic excuse of an existence, a hard-forced shove in the direction of some semblance of normalcy even though life is and only ever will be a shadow of what it once used to be—Kili is here instead, sitting on a throne made for his Uncle, ruling a kingdom he was never meant to rule. Fili was not going to save him like he usually did, not with him being twelve feet under in an early grave.
Balin and his mother say he's lucky to be alive.
But he only wishes he wasn't.
He wasn't meant to be King. He wasn't like Thorin and Fili—intelligant, respectable, proud—the epitome of a dwarven noble, born to rule. They should have survived, not him—why couldn't it have been them?
He thinks of his Uncle often, but he mostly thinks of Fili, because he's always had Fili, even when he had nobody else. He thinks of the good times they had—their afternoon spars and swimming in that lake in the summer, and how they'd race their ponies down the flat plains of land behind their home, yelling dwarven war cries at the top of their lungs as they pretended to head into battle.
Mostly though, he thinks about the moment they first headed out to Bilbo's home in Hobbiton two years ago. He wishes that night would have gone differently. They were both so happy back then, ecstatic at the thought of reclaiming their homeland and proving themselves. Fili was still alive and Kili was just Kili, and that's how he liked it.
But Fili was gone now, and he was ruling a kingdom that belonged to his Uncle.
He wasn't meant to be a King.
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