Evangeline Took remained in Moria for a few weeks more, tending to the injured and working to help create the healing she had mentioned before. Physically, at least. The rest was up to Thorin Oakenshield, as he had begun to be called, the dwarf prince whose legend grew each day. Evie had not spoken with him since their extraordinary exchange on the last day of the battle. They had traded glances, but never words. Just as she had predicted (it seemed the females in her family were uncanny in their foresight), she was forced to bury her father as surely as Thorin saw both his grandfather Thrór and his brother Frerin interred into the stone of the mountain, his own father at his side. She saw him through the tears clouding her eyes, standing tall with the nobility of his race, his head bent elegantly as he watched the burial.
She felt jealous and angry and bitter toward him all at once – the way he stood so still, so calm and cold… The respect she had felt for him before, when she had assumed that he didn't want to show fear or sadness in front of his people, crumbled away in the wake of her own overwhelming grief. How did these dwarves go about their lives, showing such little emotion?! Didn't they feel anything at all? The memory of his fingers against her skin only made her angrier, and a little frightened. She didn't understand this warrior, this prince… And maybe she wasn't meant to. Maybe this was all very much beyond hobbits altogether. Even as she thought it, however, she looked across to where the other dwarves were tending to their dead, and it struck her that just as not all hobbits were alike (to confuse a Took and a Proudfoot would be a sour notion indeed), so were the dwarves different. For although there were many who appeared as stony and stoic as Thorin, there were also those who bent over their brothers, their friends, tears falling from their eyes into their beards in a sight that made her quake with sympathy. The lament of the dwarves touched her own despair, and she felt less alone in her grief knowing that she was not the only fatherless child to feel burning tears cascade down her face as though a relentless torrent.
Although her father had been a simple hobbit, just one more of the numberless dead, Evie had been surprised to see that he was laid to rest with a special sword of dwarven make – one which had not been his own. His daughter, honored yet rendered inconsolable by her father's brave sacrifice, was undeniably humbled by the gesture, and astonished that the dwarves could show such grace in recognizing his support. She was also given a small token, a single ring of mithril, for her own services in healing the wounded. She had saved many dwarves' lives during and after the battle, and they were more grateful than she had expected when all was said and done. Theirs was a quiet, arrogant thanks, but she knew it came from the heart. As much as none of the warriors she tended to had wanted to admit that they needed aid at first, especially from the likes of a hobbit, they were not too proud to acknowledge that they owed their lives to her when the wounds had begun to heal and the battle put into perspective. She received a few gifts of gratitude and even one marriage proposal, and when she was finally packed up and ready to return to the Shire, she felt a deep heaviness in her heart.
Moria was not for the dwarves of Erebor, those of Durin's folk who would continue to wander and find a more permanent home than what the mines could afford. It was a dwarven stronghold, to be certain, but it was not theirs. The orcs still lived deep within the mines, and even Thrain's bravery could not match the sensibility of his people – they would not fight a battle they were so sure to lose. Evie was not the only one packing and preparing to move on. She left Moria a wiser and more stalwart hobbit than she had been before, tested through the blood of the battle if not the clash of its steel. She had dealt with the massacres of war just as surely as if she had been on the battlefield itself. She cared for the warriors, injured and struggling although never able to admit it, and bolstered their spirits as well as their broken bodies. She had watched the dead burn, a terrible sight to behold, their bodies taken by the flames so bitter to their people. There were innumerable dead, too many to bury properly within the mountainside, and so the pyre served as their funereal end. It struck Evie to her core to see those fires, those mind numbingly countless fires… Something changed within her. The plight of the dwarves had always been the cause of her father, something he obsessed about little to her own knowledge (although she guessed her mother had known about this long before he had decided to go to Moria), but Fellin had shared his feelings with his daughter as they traveled to the deadly mines. She was his only heir, and he passed onto her not only a love for adventure and for placing herself in the service of others, but also an unshakable tie to the mountains so alien to her Shire home.
And so her fate was tied to that of Durin's Folk in a peculiar and unpredictable way. Evie looked down at the mithril ring on her finger and wondered how this reality would continue to change her life – interaction with the dwarves had already ripped from her a grandfather she would never know and a father she would mourn until the day she died… What else? Where would this new fate lead her? For now she was wrapped up in it too, in the bane of her family, and as much as she wanted to deny it, she realized the legacy of the Took line in herself. This may have been her father's final journey, but it had only been her first.
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Author's Note: I look forward to hearing your comments and reviews! This is the first thing I've posted on here, so it will be an interesting journey. Thank you for reading!