trying very hard to whip this thing out as fast as possible before it leaves me to die tbh~ o;
one more part to go!
oOo
When Thorin had first rallied friends of his own so that he could go forth to claim back the lost throne of the mountain from Smaug, the old forest of Mirkwood would come to stand in his path.
With ten in his company and a generous halfling and his two sister-sons, he would be fated to cross it, and learn quickly of its terrible land.
And it was terrible, for its ground moved and spun in continual vertigos whilst thick webs of monstrous spiders blocked and hid away all the sun. So despite the grey wizard's cautions and various warnings, Thorin soon realized that he'd managed to get them all lost.
They roamed and scoured for even a shred of a footpath for what could have been hours, but the debris and the perpetual stinging of imminent hunger made it nearly impossible to even begin to focus their eyes.
And when Thorin supposed that at least things could not possibly worsen, the spiders that prowled the dank shadows around them pounced with their poisonous fangs bared from both and all sides.
Hideous creatures they were with thick heavy hairs bulging from the tallow staves of their legs, moving like lightning despite their sizable heft. And though each dwarf stood bravely on their feet with their weapons well drawn, most would find themselves swinging at nothing in the nearing dimness of dusk.
And before Thorin himself could barely just sink his sword into the swollen belly of one of the incoming beasts, a great sleight came echoing towards them from somewhere within the murk of the trees.
They (whatever they were) swarmed in like insects, great wooden bows and double-edged daggers held in their hands, cutting down what was left of the creatures and leaving not one to maybe survive.
Congealed in surprise, Thorin noticed whilst he stood there quite dumbly, that the swarm of intruders who had taken their glory were indeed the witless brown elves of the wood, and with their sharp pointy ears and wretched complexions, Thorin growled quietly his genuine scorn.
Wasting no time, each one of the dwarves took quick to formation, baring the sharper ends of their weapons to any of those who would stare for even a moment too long.
There was one particular elf among them, however, who stood himself tall at the very head of the pack. One, who for some odd and unsettling reason, did not come to look at all like the rest of the flock. With woven white skin, and with a long spill of gilt hair, he swiftly approached and just as swiftly drew the length of his bow mere inches away from Thorin's glowering face.
"Do not think I would not kill you, dwarf," he spat, the arc of it creaking with the strung flex of the arrow he'd drawn. "A pleasure it would be, in fact."
Thorin, despite the rage at his throat, knew it best to have held his tongue.
They were outnumbered, after all, starving, tired, and weak. And on a single whim of the elf's white hand, Thorin's head might lie pierced, and all of his efforts for nothing.
So when the elf gave the order, the rest of his kind searched them like thieves in an alley, taking their weapons and most of their belongings. Thorin could only seethe as he watched on, his hands twitching against the haft of his sword.
But that too was soon taken from him.
"This is an ancient thing," the leader-elf mused, inspecting the blade in what little light there was. "Forged by my kin. Where did you get this?"
Thorin glared, his nostrils flaring.
"It was given to me."
And it wasn't really a lie.
Immediately, the elf bared the sharp end of the blade at the skin of his neck, nearly pushing him back into the ground.
"Not only a thief," he said. "But a liar, as well."
And then the elf shouted an order and all of the others he led took each dwarf by the wrists and roped together their hands as if they were nothing but cattle. But before Thorin could abandon all hope to both their journey and possible escape, Bofur turned towards him through somewhere in the chaos and whispered, very urgently:
"Thorin, where's Bilbo?"
Indeed Thorin looked from around him and did not see a sign of the halfling. He grinned, allowing one of the elves to take him away without much of a fight.
Hope lingered yet.
They were herded along through the dells of the wood for what felt like hours, until finally the darkness of the dusk began to brighten and the sun itself began to shine through great fissures of leaves, revealing a fortress not far that might have almost touched the top of the forest's canopy.
A palace, thought Thorin.
A cage.
oOo
When Thorin had first learned of the hospitality of elves, he and his company had been jailed down like animals.
With no food and no drink.
Not until after Balin's dreadfully humbled words, that is.
"We've no food," he'd said to one of the guards. "No drink. My friends and I will surely parch within the hour."
Only then did the elf-guards lift a finger to place scraps of food through the clefts of the pens out of what must have been pity.
Thorin's belly roared in a terrible ache as he stared at what had been given to him (bread and water and halves of apples, and the bread was warm and soft, but even that didn't matter), but like both of his nephews, he refused to even touch it.
He heard Dwalin from the opposite pen ruthlessly throw himself at the bars with the force of a bear, and with him soon followed Fili and Kili. Balin spoke up after a moment however, and told them very calmly that what they did was a useless endeavor, for these were no orcish crates, these were the elven dungeons of Mirkwood, and not one of them would be let free if not with the king's consent.
Thorin scoffed, spitting to the side.
"Will they starve us, then? Fatten us like horses? Will we sit here and try nothing?"
"We wait, Thorin," said Balin. "Your name is no secret. They will want to know our purpose, and why we came to roam the wood."
"A purpose they will not know," shot Thorin loud enough so that the elven guards outside could hear him. "They will let us go, or each one of them will face Mahal's wrath!"
Other dwarves followed in his cry, earning them nothing but a kick to one of the cells. Balin, shaking his head, sighed softly to himself.
Hours must have passed them at a point, but not one of the dwarves relented in their shouts nor their curses. Not until, of course, most of them fell fast asleep from sheer exhaustion.
That's when the leader-elf from before came down for the wooden footsteps of the dungeon, a sort of self-loving swagger plastered all about him. Thorin foamed at the mouth at the mere sight of him, going immediately to clench at the bars.
"Let us out, you pilfering fool!" he thundered. "You know nothing of whom you've crossed!"
In time, the elf stopped himself precisely in front of Thorin's cell, mere inches away, the obvious leer on the thin of his lips looming through in the way he looked down at Thorin.
"You will assess yourself, dwarf," he said simply. "Or you will regret the use of your mouth."
Fuming, Thorin quieted himself. And though he longed for the sweet sight of the elf's arrogant mouth crushed against the weight of his fist, even he knew how a rightful king should attempt to behave in the face of all this.
He scowled, instead, snarling.
"The king calls for a private audience," the elf told him. "And named you by name. You will be escorted to the washrooms so that you may cleanse the silt from your face. You will be dressed in robes that do not reek so foully of sweat, and you will behave yourself upon it, lest your wishes lie in the pit of an early grave."
"Do not dare tell me what to do, filth!" retorted Thorin with outrage. "Do not—"
But then the elf grabbed him through the brace of the bars, reeling him in by the collar with a strength in his arm so massive that Thorin could not even begin to understand it.
"Do not test me, dwarf," said the elf. "My patience wears thin."
So Thorin (despite the venom clot in throat) quieted himself once more and allowed himself to be taken easily enough from his cell.
And out of all the dwarves, Balin was the only of them left awake to watch him walk by and be led towards the steps of the exit, a knowing look knit upon his face.
For his friends, thought Thorin, and for the lost glory of Erebor, he would endure even this.
oOo
When Thorin had first learned the terror of being bathed against his will, many elves had been harmed in the process.
He kicked and squirmed as if he were to be drowned, and he might as well have been drowned, for the tub he was placed in was perhaps thrice his size, and the water drawn up just as high, so much so that it was a miracle that he had even made it out alive.
For he had bore the slime of elvish soap upon his head that day, as well as the spice of seeds upon the seat of the tub to scent him as he were a piece of furniture to be exchanged.
But one thing Thorin did not allow under any circumstance, was the touching or the undoing of his beard. And when one of the elves had dared to try it, Thorin had bitten down hard on the hand that'd come too near.
He was treated less kindly after that, but at least he still held the broader dollop of his pride. As for the robe that he was presented to wear (a frail miserable thing meant for not even the ilk of whoring or flower-picking), he tore apart as if it were no less than the harbinger of plague.
He dressed in his previous wraps and furs, instead. Marked with grime and cobweb and worse, but at least they fit him properly, and at least they were sewn and platted in traditional dwarven fashion.
He was taken once more by the leader-elf after that, drenched still and angry, herded along like a lamb through the long wooden walkways of Mirkwood's palace.
Thorin hooded his eyes at the sight of it all, for its architecture was but a joke at the heels of even the lesser types of dwarven dwellings.
No stone, no metal, and no gilded ceilings. Plain timber, rather, carved out and shaped without at least the core foundations of rock.
A small flame, thought Thorin, would be all it would take before its utter ruin.
"Where are you taking me?" implored Thorin. "What is stopping me from simply killing you as I speak?"
The leader-elf chuckled from behind him, saying nothing.
Thorin remained quiet for the rest of the way until at last they stopped at a large door unlike all the others they'd passed before it.
Thorin, very subtly, looked around him.
Indeed they were alone in the cavernous reel of that particular corridor, and the elf had already cut through the ropes of his restraints. If Thorin could just gain the upper hand with the heft of his fists and steal at least one of the blades that hung from the elf's back, he could run for an escape.
He was no foolish dwarf, after all, for all along Thorin had been learning and drawing out the large plains of the place in his head like a sharp stick through sand. And if all went as planned, he could easily find his way back to the dungeons, free his friends, best the guards, and perhaps even meet Bilbo Baggins somewhere along the chaos.
And the halfling was clever (oh so clever), clever enough that he would undoubtedly know where to go (and where to hide, need be) until they finally reached the opposite border of the wood, and make their way once again towards the summit of the Lonely Mountain with the grey wizard at their side to guide them once more.
Wasting no time, and thinking no further on the gaping holes in his plan, Thorin spun fast on his heel and immediately braced himself to leap against the elf with all of his weight, in hopes that he could bring them both to the ground where the fight would be fair.
But Thorin learned quickly that the elf was already behind him, prosed with daggers crossed and bared against the blood-throb of his neck.
"I would strike you where you stand, dwarf," hissed the elf. "Were it not for my father's leniency stamped upon your head."
At the end of those words, Thorin found himself frozen over.
He paused in his breathing as if he'd been beheaded already, a foul weight suddenly pressing down into the mechanical pulse of his heartbeat.
He saw it now, as if he'd never once seen it already, here, in the candled lighting of Mirkwood's hallways: the color of the leader-elf's hair.
The length of it.
The spill of it.
The gold of it, like strings of threaded diamonds.
And his eyes (this time so clear in Thorin's), shone brilliantly blue in the lurid charms of their color.
Like ice, like a ghost of snow, like the frost that caked the peaks of northern mountains, but as real as silver coins.
"You.."
The elf rose a single dark brow, perplexed by Thorin's unexpected show of repose. He spoke some wry comment through the fog of the moment, though Thorin had failed to hear his words.
For he could hear only the sound of his own ragged breathing the instant the great door before him had opened from its opposite side, and could only just hardly contain the awakened rage in the pit of his tongue the moment something very fair from years long since past met his eyes like a blunted axe struck deep into the red flesh of his heart.
So tall and so lucid, like the elder stars the Silvan worshipped, stood there with his simper of a serpent, the last of elf kings.
Deathless, untouched by his lifetime of centuries, an ancient thing wrought from the shallow shores of fallen Beleriand, a gust of winter wind.
"Legolas," said Thranduil. "You will lower your knives."
oOo
