Disclaimer: Nah...I'm just this unpaid bookworm with a thing for Kili. Aw yiss.

...

Exile.

That was all this was.

Nothing more, nothing less.

These days left much time for musing, pondering—and that was perhaps the worst part—the waiting. The strive up the mountain itself; even with the longest of strides, time trickled its sands down past the legs, stretching farther than the Lonely Mountain itself.

And dwarven legs, tough as boiled leather, were still never long enough to wade through those sands. Thorin Oakenshield could count each step he took, for all the good it would do: thirty-nine steps, long with trailing shadows, were a far, far way from twelve thousand.

It was maddening.

But...in his lone lifetime, had no not come across more than enough madness to fill four?—four, like the changing seasons? It was no stranger to him; the wait, frustrating as it was, settled in his belly, stilled in his mind, as a familiar old friend, as he accepted the winter that came year after year.

But as ice seals the fire, the fire burns the ice.

Hope came flying on the wings of the thrush. Its throat pale and flecked and dark—formless, shapeless, like fire molten, a substance indescribable. And the fire was gold, gold as the flowing rivers within the depths of Erebor itself.

And suddenly life rekindled anew.

(Home is where the heart is.)

(And his willing heart unraveled like fire.)

The maddening wait would give way to the core of a home long lost, but not forgotten. And the day seemed to stretch further and further away with the passing days. The numbered, inching steps up the mountains.

But the peak was there, hidden as it was.

The madness could settle, the same way they settled in the Blue Mountains. But soon it would give way to the fires. Fires, bright as gold—

Nestled within the Lonely Mountain—

To be claimed once more...

...

PT: By my standards, pretty crappy and repetitive. But it's a start. I just pulled out of a long, long writing slump. I got obsessed with the movie. Really want to reread the book, which I read years ago. Wanted to cash in on the fandom's sudden popularity. Wrote this little drabble thing. Oh yes. Dwarves are sexy.