Dís
News soon spread from the east, until it reached Ered Luin. The message was foul, polluting, and irrevocably disintegrated each single grain of joy the refugee dwarves of the Blue Mountains could have ever hoped to have forged in the wake of the desolation of Smaug.
Not only had they lived for years in exile, many families degraded into lowly crafts and forgetting the splendour of their ancestral home, but now their king, the heir of Durin and King under the Mountain, had set out on a fools' venture to slay the chiefest and greatest calamity of their age.
Many believed they would not be seeing the return of their king and his company. They would surely perish under the beast's tyrannical inferno; bathed in scorching heat, their ashes mingled with the overflowing golden wealth of Erebor. What a blow to the divine line of Durin it would be: the King under the Mountain and both of his heirs lost forever.
One Dwarrowdam however would refuse to lose hope.
Dís, sister of Thorin, daughter of Thrain, and granddaughter of Thror held onto the slim, and fraying thread of belief that tied her to all of Arda. The fragile link her heart contracted after the subsequent departure of her last remaining brother and her two sons. The belied that they would return to her. As long as this thread of hope existed, her strength would preserve the kindling embers of her soul that had decimated from a roaring fire after the loss of her immediate family, and the shattering wound left by the death of the holder of half of her heart, her beloved. Her Azyungal.
Succeeding the news that all three had died valiantly in battle snuffed the futile glow of the embers sparked within her.
The thread had snapped.
Nothing could hold her to the earth she walked upon now, as they travelled the paths her brother and sons may have taken on their perilous, and more importantly, their final journey.
It was announced they had survived the dragon, but a legion of orcs would be their undoing. The slight of orcs defiling her lineage would have once burned her, have spurred her into a fit of revenge and bitterness, but now, Dís could not feel past the voided stasis of her soul, and the slow thump of her heart in her chest.
Dain had been crowned as King in their wake.
It was a knife that stabbed between the layers of her armour, her clothes, her ribs, and pierced directly within her heart. It twisted. Her brother or her sons should be sat upon the throne. Not some cowardly interloper.
The landscape around those she travelled with now seemed bleak and numb to her. She doubted even the regaining and restoration of her true ancestral home would appeal; that to be trapped in the place of their desolation would smite her at any given opportunity.
Erebor was no longer a home for her. It was the austere figure it had always been from her memory. It lacked the warmth of family her rooms in Ered Luin had, when her boys and Thorin still lived and resided with her. Now they were gone, warmth and cheer was removed from the world.
No place in the stretching lands of Arda would be able to hold her body and the fractured remains of her soul; she was unlike her Khazad kin who were solid pillars of stone with hardened hearts. Dís had become a gale: a lost and lonely howling torrent that bit at the necks of travellers, and pushed along the clouds that carried tears. Tears that would fall, and fall, and fall, until the sky could no longer weep.
As she and other dwarrow families trekked to a place they would supposedly call home, a glorified tomb filled with ghosts, she straightened the kinks of her mind, formulating her next move.
She would kiss their tombs- for surely they would have had to have been buried by now, inquire of how the rest of the Company of Thorin Oakenshield faired, and would promptly leave.
She would not be held when grief forced her to wander.
It was well within her first month of wandering that Dís's bereavement cleaved in on her soul like Mahal's mighty war hammer upon an enemy. She fell from the pony she rode atop, rolling dumbly on the barren grass beneath as the animal bolted from the queer place they had happened upon.
The barren grass was dry, a putrid yellow and green colouration that rattled hollowly in the breeze. Great tors of rock lunged from below, reaching up like hands desperate to grasp the fragility of nature that grew above the surface of the earth. The land in turn replied, the great plane of sickly grass covering these fragments of rock, encapsulating the grasping hand in its own.
Laughter danced on the breeze. Dís realised it to be her own, though it was joined by two smaller high pitched squeals of joy; a much quieter contrast to her own hysteria.
Her head whipped around to locate the sound. Two children, boys from the looks of it, played upon one of the hardened hillocks, waving to her and darting to and fro. One had golden hair that shone in the pale afternoon light, the other a thatch of dark locks- Fíli and Kíli...
Her heart stuttered.
They laughed. She could see their smiles from where she stood stock still.
Another shrill giggle emancipated from the pair. Her lungs failed, great bellows rejecting her body's pleas for air to keep the forge-fire inside burning. A laugh- a whiny.
The boys disappeared, and replaced in their stead was the pony which had bolted only moments prior. Eyes widened and panting in disbelief, she patted the neck of the animal as it meandered back to her, chewing a thick wad of the bleached grass. This land had to be playing trick upon her, twisting her grief. Her sons were dead and buried, and the hope that arose at seeing those two younglings playing on the outcrop were her own, was unduly quenched.
She clucked her tongue, and lead the pony on. Feeling quite weak, she felt that to continue for today would perhaps only cause both horse and rider more injury. She would make camp for the night, unsaddle her stead and watch the light fade.
As she and her steed saw through the final dregs of sunlight, and watched the night creep up the panorama, sleep finally claimed Dís.
In her agitated dreams she was no freer than in her newly insipid life. The wandering itch that forced her feet onwards encapsulated even sleep. The madness and grief prevailed her slumber too.
Restlessly, she would murmur lowly and toss and turn on the hardened ground. She repeated the names of the lost as though it were a mantra:
"Kíli, Fíli, Thorin, Frerin, Adad, Amad, Thror, Azyugel! Azyungel!-" Over and over until her tongue grew stiff and her torment ceased slightly. Those were the only moments in which she found some peace; her incessant chanting replaced with kinder dreams of her family, whole and healthy and wrapped in white encompassing light, which upon her ogling nearly blinded her with its purity.
Then he stepped forward.
"Azyungel…" The soft whimper of her endearments to him makes him smile, and he strides ever closer, pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead, nose, and finally her lips in greeting.
When his ministrations cease, she exhales sweetly. Then he claims her lips with passion like a sparking forge fire.
Her eyes snap open.
She is still alive, and now so painfully wide awake; her family and her beloved are gone.
She is all alone, expect for her pony, which dozes idly on locked, jaunty legs.
She can still feel him on her lips, and it burns hotter than any forge Mahal could offer in his halls.
Dís screams, and the sky begins to cry.
Author's Note
A friend and I once wondered what would happen to Dis post-BOTFA, and we came up with this. I'd unfortunately forgotten I'd ever written this until this afternoon, and after cleaning it up a little and creating some cover art, I decided to post it on both here and A03.
I feel like I didn't do Dis justice in this piece, and that maybe she was strong enough to live after such tragedy. For my friend and I though, we believed she'd wander endlessly until the end of her days with no place to truly call home without her children and family there.
Playlist
(With a note for which section I wrote listening to it)
"Kids in Love" – Wuthering Heights Original Soundtrack (2009)
(For the news of their death)
"Without You" – Wuthering Heights Original Soundtrack (2009)
(For her journey to Erebor)
"She's a savage" – Wuthering Heights Original Soundtrack (2009)
(For Leaving Erebor to wander. I imagined her galloping off on a pony here…)
"Leaving the Heights" – Wuthering Heights Original Soundtrack (2009)
(Meeting the apparitions of Fíli and Kíli)
"Lovers" – Wuthering Heights Original Soundtrack (2009)
(Meeting her beloved and falling into madness)