Author's Note

Been a while since I updated. Experienced a minor, although fairly productive case of writer's block (look over on AO3. Same name, new story). Got over it, and school's almost ending, so it shouldn't be as long a wait until the next chapter. Which will feature Goblins, possibly Orcs, and Kíli gets a flying lesson.

25

He ignored her for the next few days, but towards everyone else he behaved the same as always, so she figured he was fine. She could do without their nightly chats, anyway.

Increasingly often, instead of just dozing, she used the time to actually get some sleep in. It wasn't the daily trek tiring her out, she had a far easier time of that than the rest of the Company. A few flaps of her wings got her over a cliff that took the Dwarves nearly an hour to scale. It was the hunting, gathering, and basically looking after them that was the problem.

She had always taken care of herself and done whatever she liked. If she felt like lying in the sun all day and watching the clouds morph by, that was just what she'd do. She didn't hunt every day, sometimes just contenting herself with some grass or berries. And even if she did, she only chased down big prey when she felt like it.

Now, she had no choice but to go after deer and the like, because if she didn't the Dwarves got hungry and were very moody as a result. While she liked the thrill of the hunt, the forced necessity kind of took the fun out of it.

The mountains kept looming ever closer, and she found herself dreading the moment they entered more with every passing day. Their progress would be severely slowed. Valleys that she crossed in minutes would take the Dwarves hours, and she could only hope none of them fell and broke something. The only highlight was that Gandalf had said he would join them in the mountains, which would at least allow her to share the burden of looking after the Company. How he would catch up to them, she didn't know, since as far as she knew he didn't have wings. But she didn't doubt him. Wizards were creative.

The day they reached the mountains came sooner than she had thought. Thorin called them to a halt pretty early in the day and announced they would set up camp at the foot of the mountains tonight and enter in the morning. The rest of this day was to be spent training.

She didn't join them, for he had asked her to fly ahead and figure out the easiest path through the mountains. She found a nice broad, steep path, but then remembered she had to account for the Dwarves' lack of claws and had to go back to settle on a narrower and winding one. By the time she landed next to the campfire, it was evening.

The atmosphere was relaxed. Bombur offered her a bowl of fish-soup, and it wasn't half-bad. She took her time licking it empty before turning to observe the rest of the Company. Most of the Dwarves were either talking quietly or taking care of their weapons. The peaceful zzzzgghhhh of a whetstone across a blade filled the air.

She trotted over to Fíli and Kíli. Kíli was sharpening his sword, and Fíli had apparently laid out every knife he owned. He was surrounded by more than ten daggers of different shapes and sizes, and he was cleaning every one of them in turn. When she approached, they greeted her with a smile and watched absentmindedly as she sniffed the blades.

If they'd known her better, they might have recognized the purple glint in her eyes for a spark of mischief. As it was, it took them completely by surprise when she snatched up a curved, one-sided dagger and sprang to the other side of camp. Her posture, with her chest on the ground and her behind sticking up, tail swaying lazily, spoke volumes.

Fíli narrowed his eyes at her, exchanged a glance with Kíli, and they got up. "No flying, no fire," he warned. She raised her head and huffed at him, but vanished her wings.

A short tussle followed that had everyone hastily moving their things out of the way. In the end it took three Dwarves to keep her down so that Fíli could saunter up to her and playfully ask "Give up?" She blew a puff of smoke into his face and opened her mouth to relinquish his dagger.

She seemed to be in one of her relaxed moods this evening, so much so that when Fíli and Kíli installed themselves once more, she lay down to join them. She was big enough to curl up around them, with their backs against her side and her tail across their legs. At first, they sat tensely with stiff backs, but eventually they relaxed unconsciously and settled against her warm body.

After a while, Kíli, who sat closest to her head, absentmindedly reached out to rest his hand on top of her head and scratch between her ears like he used to do with a cat or a dog back in the Blue Mountains, listening to his brother lecture him on how to properly take care of this-and-that blade. Thorin, who had followed the entire exchange alertly, saw one light blue eye blink open and felt a flash of surprise jolt through him, followed by something close to melancholy and settling in acceptance. She closed her eyes again and began producing a deep, rumbling sound.

Kíli noticed, looked aside, paled and snatched his hand away. He looked about to apologize, when her eyes fluttered open again, this time a deep brown, which, as they had learned, was not a negative colour. She blinked once, very slowly, almost like she was winking at him, lifted her head like it weighed a ton, and dropped it into his lap.

Kíli looked at his brother, who shrugged. Hesitantly, he lowered his hand to scratch around her ear again. She blew out a long puff of dark smoke, and continued purring.

Thorin had been brooding, as he usually did. This time about the perils of the mountains they would face in the morning. He was dragged from his thoughts by the erupting wrestling match, and when it ended, he wasn't at all sure who had won.

Although she'd surrendered the knife the whole thing had started about, she had been surprisingly gentle while fighting. While he agreed with his eldest sister-son that wings and fire would have given her an unfair advantage, he couldn't help but notice she kept her claws in and was very careful with them. When Bofur jumped onto her after getting her on her back, she did kick him off and sent him crashing to the ground, but her claws didn't pierce his gut like they could have easily done. Her self-restraint made him wonder how much damage she could do when she truly put her mind to it.

And then she'd surprised him even further by laying down with his nephews and even allowing Kíli to pet her. Typically, such an interaction would lead to her pulling away and isolating herself for the next few days. He wondered why this time, she didn't just accept it but even went along with it.

He got his answer later that night, although he didn't recognize it as such.

Their camp happened to be located next to a lake, formed by the meltwater that came rushing down from the mountains from time to time. It was where the fish they had for dinner had come from, and they had all taken a bath late in the evening, just before crawling into their bedrolls and going to sleep. He had seen her dive vertically into the shimmering surface and come out again with a fat fish in her mouth, which she spent a few minutes picking clean on the shore. What she was doing now however, he didn't quite understand.

For the past half hour, she had been flying from one end of the lake to the other over and over, soaring low across the dark surface. From the way her head kept turning, he'd almost say she was looking for something. He wondered what, but didn't dare ask, as she didn't seem to want to be disturbed in doing whatever she was doing.

Finally, she stopped, hovering above the centre of the lake. The knob on the end of her tail glowed, a prelude, they had learned, to her doing magic, which was always interesting to watch. He sat up a little straighter, intent on discovering what she was going to do.

Apparently having made up her mind, she suddenly shot up, straight up to the dark sky. But she wasn't going alone. She was followed by a swiftly growing spire of water which stuck to the very tip of her tail. It followed her wherever she moved, and as she flew in circles a large mass of water gathered in a rounded bulb below her, still connected through an umbilical cord of water to the lake's surface, which he could see dropping by the second due to the large amount of water she was pulling up.

It was when she started separating the ball into sections that he realized what the shape reminded him of: a flower. She carefully shaped each petal, working her way outwards from the centre and moulding the still flowing water. And it was when she turned it into ice that he realized she had made a rose.

A gigantic, icy rose, rising up from the lake and absorbing the moonlight. Its petals were a transparent silver at the base, and a solid snowy white at the tops. It was lovely, and he felt privileged to see it.

She had been hovering beside the flower, admiring her work. But apparently, she was not yet satisfied, as she flapped a little closer to one of the outermost petals.

When she breathed fire, he felt a pang of sadness that she would destroy her creation. But when fire met ice, it did not consume it, but entered it. Her tail glowed brighter until it was almost painful to look at.

The fire spread through the flower, its swirling colours bringing it to life. It reminded him of the Arkenstone, with the red shimmering through the white. Her tail burned like a star as she kept the two elements from blending together and destroying each other.

She kept up the vision of beauty and perfection for a few more minutes, allowing Thorin to etch the image into his mind. Then abruptly, the light of her tail turned off like a fire being doused, and almost instantly he heard ice creaking and drops splattering the lake as nature took its course.

When the last of the ice melted away into the water and she landed on the shore close to him, he remembered the names Elrond had given her, and wondered what they meant. "Dreamcatcher, Deathseer, Tonguespeaker," he told her. Only the last one made sense.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Dragonegg, Goldsitter, Stoneclaimer," she responded. Without waiting for a reaction, she curled up with her back to him and was asleep in seconds.