"Right, where are we? As it's fucking cold here, Smaug."
"North, obviously. Where it is cold," Smaug rumbles, twitching the tip of his tail at Bilbo. "Don't be stupid, not more than you can help. I'll start a fire soon enough, little one, once we are inside my lair."
The place where they've landed is populous with pine trees and boulders. That's about all it's got going for it, boulders and pine trees. It's high up, and terribly isolated, with a dragon's eye view over an emptied-out, fire-scarred valley below. Smaug shoulders aside the shrubby growth brushing up against what looks to be like a blank slant of a sheered granite rock face and presses his snout up against it, sniffing eagerly. "Oh, here," he murmurs, "that's it." Little puffs of smoke trail up from his flared nostrils.
"Is that?" Curious, Bilbo surges forward to the edge of the roughly flattened area, peering out hopefully, his coat no barrier against the constant buffeting winds. "Oi, Smaug! Is that a village I spy, down there?" He shivers; it is far from balmy at this latitude.
"No," Smaug replies flatly, turning to glance disapprovingly over his massive hump of a shoulder. He shrugs one wing, nearly tipping the inquisitive Hobbit over the edge. "Not any more, at least. Menfolk! They fled ages ago, the idiots. All of them vastly frightened of the terribly fearsome dragon, la-di-dah!" He sing-songs the last, shrugging and rolling his great slitted eyeballs about in an excruciatingly odd form of draconian scorn. "Perhaps you know how it always goes, Hobbit, when Men meet Dragons? 'Round and 'round all the miserable little sacks of flesh go, scarpering away from the terrible scourge!"
"Er? What?" It quite sets a startled Bilbo back on his heels, the sight of a terrifying dragon in a tiff over a few villagers fleeing him. "Um…? You frightened them away, then? What, by dint of singing nonsense at them? Fancy that."
"Fancy," Smaug echoes urbanely, one reptilian brow twitching in irritation. "And no, it wasn't my singing voice per se, wee Thief. Though that is naught to sneeze at."
"'Wee'!" Bilbo exclaims, hopping from one foot to the other and scowling. "I'm a Hobbit, you great git! Perfectly in proportion for my kind!"
"Yes, short." Smaug nods righteously. "'Wee'—as I've just said. And no doubt," Smaug adds sourly, shoving a crooked claw into a barely visible scar in the granite. "Those silly Men were as equally foreshortened of temper as you Hobbits appear to be." He twists it about, jabbing away till a resounding 'click ' is heard and a panel appears in the rock. "No, no. Likely it was some fribble or t'other, some habit of mine they dared find objectionable, those Men. Which is ridiculous, as I didn't even eat them—only their cattle and sheep!"
"Oh, I see. Only just their cattle and sheep, then," Bilbo echoes faintly, edging forward to peer past the bulk of oblivious monster fiddling away at a newly visible doorway, revealed to be one of gigantic proportions. "Hmm. You're a bit clueless, aren't you? Oh! Where does that lead to, Your Most Amazing Incognizance?"
"Bah! My foyer, obviously. What, did you think I was a compleat savage?" Smaug snorts. "All proper lairs possess a civilized area of entry, little one. And I don't know more and certainly don't care now about those damnable villagers, either. Boring! They were useless, anyway, the lot of them, cluttering up the landscape. I certainly had no use for them, nor they me. Now!" A scraping noise resounds, the sound of a massive amount of stone shifting, and Smaug smiles fully at Bilbo: a smug dragon's grin, all teeth, barely any lip, and with a hint of dozing flame tucked away at the very back end of it. "Through here, my wee friend. And hurry. I grow weary of standing about on my own stoop, chattering on and on of such tedious topics as Men."
On that demanding note, a huge cloud of stale air comes rushing out the massive doorway, enveloping both Hobbit and Dragon in a shower of dust and floating cobwebs.
"Dearie me!" Bilbo does sneeze…and sneezes, and sneezes! "Pa-pardon!" He stumbles forward, rubbing at his reddened eyes and itchy face. The initial corridor is huge, of course. Dragon-shaped and not terribly well kempt, but very grand all the same. "Dusty!" the hobbit mumbles, not at all caring he remarked on the obvious and trying not to stare too hard or too long at the gem-encrusted walls and the intricately crafted mosaic flooring as he goes. "Erm. Exactly how long has it been, now? Since you were at home, Smaug."
"Oh…hmmm?" Smaug, slithering his way forward, leading the way down a host of intertwining passages, hums loudly in thought, the brush of his neatly folded up wing joints now and again scraping along an array of differently sized ceilings. "No idea." Bilbo ducks nimbly after, shaking the resultant cascades of stone dust out of his rumpled curls with a series of grimaces. "At least a century, maybe more? Hmm…it is a bit of a mess in here, isn't it? I am afraid my housekeeper may've expired in the interim—"
"Hoo-hoo!"
"Oh, hullo!" Bilbo halts in his tracks, startled to encounter what seems to be a wizened old Elf woman peering inquisitively at them from the shelter of a recessed doorway. "And who might you be?"
But the ancient Elf lady ignores Bilbo completely, pattering forward to flap a wrinkled hand at the dragon.
"Hoo-hoo! Smaug, is that you?"