15. The Heart is a Furious Hunter

A/N: Oh hey, it's me, your friendly neighbourhood writer. Special shoutout to Erika Karvenberg (when you eventually reach this chapter), Jozko Mrkvicka, and Realworld no Shinobi for reviewing, it's always appreciated. Now, remember that *angst* I warned you about way back at the beginning? Well, you're about to experience pretty much all of it in one fell swoop, so buckle up and keep your arms inside the story-coaster at all times. And maybe also line up a video of puppies in Halloween costumes, or something else fluffy and comforting, for when you've finished reading. Alrighty. Here we go.

As she clambered across structurally unsound rope bridges, Sarah focused on her breathing. If someone had told her even two months ago that she'd be climbing over and then inside a mountain, on Earth or Middle Earth, she would have asked what they were smoking.

The smell inside the caves wasn't just nauseating, it was ... spooky. The dampness in the air was overpowering. Nothing in this place had seen sunlight. The din of a thousand goblins grew louder with every step.

As she crossed another rope bridge, a sentry goblin, all jagged bones and slobbering jaw, appeared from the shadows and raised its sword. Sarah yelped. Before she could even think, she swung her branch into the goblin's side as if she were sweeping a spider away: it screeched and fell right off the path, crashing into a number of things on the way down.

' … Oh.'

It had happened so fast Sarah didn't quite know how to react. Eventually, after checking there were no more goblins in the immediate vicinity, she quietly high-fived herself and moved on. She hauled herself up onto a ledge so high that it clearly hadn't been designed with actual walking in mind.

She had to work even harder not to hyperventilate when she finally emerged above the centre of Goblin Town with a steep bird's eye view of the whole hideous place. There were so many goblins, cheering like hooligans from wooden platforms all around the perimeter. And in the middle, visible from a mile off, was the Goblin King himself. "Grotesque" was too nice a word. He hacked and spluttered like sickness personified.

'Eurgh, why couldn't you be David Bowie instead,' Sarah muttered contemptuously, holding on to the ledge wall (if it could even be called a wall). 'This would be playing out very differently.'

'I feel a song coming on … ' His voice, dripping with grease like a chicken leg, rose to the cave ceiling.

Sarah could make out the Dwarves a long way below, protesting and elbowing all the way across the main bridges that led to the King's throne. Bifur's hands were clamped over his ears, and Sarah wanted to do the same — the clamour was too much.

She got the Elvish coil of rope out from her satchel and tried to think of the most secure place to tie a knot, when she realized she might not need it after all: a jagged spoke of rock stuck out from the rest of the ledge with a length of rope already tied around it. Sarah followed it with her eyes — it was one of the ropes the messenger goblins used, as part of their pulley system to get around the caves.

'You can yammer and yelp but there ain't noooo help …' the Goblin King sang with relish (if you could even call it singing).

Sarah tested the rope without moving it too much - she couldn't afford to blow her cover yet - and compared it with the Elvish rope. Equal tensile strength. If it could cope with goblins pedalling back and forth all day, it could cope with a human's one-way trip.

'That's not a song,' she heard Balin shout defiantly, if distantly. 'It's an abomination!'

'Abominations! Disfigurations, mutilations, repulsions — that's all you're going to find down here.' The Goblin King lurched forward, sizing the Dwarves up. 'Who would be so bold as to come armed into my kingdom? Spies? Thieves? Assassins?'

'Dwarves, your malevolence,' one of his lackeys said.

'Dwarves?'

'We found 'em on the front porch.'

'Well don't just stand there, search them! Every crack, every crevice!'

Sarah winced as the Dwarves were beset by slimy hands, until every sword, axe, flail, dagger (and, in Nori's case, an entire sack of Elvish silverware) was confiscated and dumped at the Goblin King's feet.

'Just a couple of keepsakes ... ' Nori said in response to the twelve sets of eyes that rolled in his direction.

She was impatient to enact the next phase of the plan now - the Goblin King and his cronies were really starting to piss her off - but she had to stay hidden until the right moment. Otherwise it might all fall apart. Well, it might fall apart even if she did everything perfectly, but she decided not to dwell on that.

'You're going to have to speak up,' Oin shouted. 'Your boys flattened my trumpet.'

'I'll flatten more than your trumpet,' the Goblin King growled.

Bofur hastily took over, trying to stay buoyant even under the most dismal circumstances. Sarah used the time that he and Dori spent spinning their story about distant relations in Dunland to fish Miriam's lighter out of her bag, plus sunglasses and the can of insect repellant, and tucked them deep into the pockets of her new cloak. Please for the love of God don't fall out …

'SHUT UP!' The Goblin King roared, bored of the Dwarves already. 'Very well. If they will not talk, we'll make them squawk! Bring up the mangler! Bring up the bone breaker! Start with the youngest.' He pointed at Ori who, even if he wasn't actually the youngest, must have looked like the easiest target.

'Wait!' Thorin finally stepped out from his relative anonymity in the crowd.

The Goblin King's expression changed.

'Well, well, well. Look who it is. Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror. "King under the mountain".' He extended his swollen arms and pretended to bow. 'Oh, but I'm forgetting: you don't have mountain. And you're not a king. Which makes you … nobody, really.' The caves filled with nasty goblin cackles. 'I know someone who would pay a pretty price for your head. Just the head, nothing attached. Perhaps you know of whom I speak. An old enemy of yours. A pale Orc astride a white warg.'

Thorin's voice was so controlled that Sarah couldn't actually hear him from all the way up in the ridges, but she knew he was denying the Goblin King's claims.

'So you think his defiling days are done, do you? Send word to the Pale Orc,' the Goblin King ordered his messenger, who scribed with demented glee. 'Tell him I have found his prize.'

As the messenger wheeled itself away down another rope line, Sarah felt a change come over her blood. Watching the Goblin King, in all his arrogance and disdain for others' lives (even his own species'), reminded her of a fair few leaders back on Earth. In fact, he reminded her of every last despot who had bribed, cheated and brutalized their way into their seat of power. Of the staggering acts of negligence and cruelty they'd inflicted on the world at large, so frequently, day in and day out, that neither she nor anyone else scrolling through their social media feeds had been granted enough time to truly comprehend the carnage they'd been dealt. Every day, even long before the pandemic, there had been something new to fear.

Sarah dusted her palms with a fresh layer of chalk, got out her cooking knife, and started sawing through the base of the goblin rope.

She'd spent all of 2020 living in fear.

And. Quite frankly. She'd had. Enough.

She wrapped the end of the rope tightly around her hands, which were now the only things holding it taut. From the depths of the caves below, the goblins were starting to wheel up their gruesome torture contraptions. Sarah stood to full height and, instead of feeling afraid at the vertiginous drop beneath her, she treated her surroundings as nothing more real or consequential than a lucid dream.

'Any last words,' Sarah asked herself, 'in case this goes horribly wrong?'

She recalled Act One of Hamilton - 'pray that hell or heaven lets you in' - and leapt from the ledge.

The rush in her ears and her heart was extraordinary.

It was impossible not to scream, but she channeled it into something like a coyote howl that pitched louder and louder as she swung through the depths: 'AWOOOOOOOOOO!'

She kicked out at any goblins unlucky enough to be in her way, their shrieks ringing up from the shadows. To gain extra momentum, Sarah swerved sideways and ran - sprinted - along the cave walls themselves. Then she put her faith in physics to take care of the rest, launching herself up towards the central column where the Goblin King's throne sat. She released the rope.

For one electric moment, she was flying.

Her hands grabbed at wooden railings. She held on with all her might and - like long jump on sports day - hurled her legs over the top.

The fact that she managed to stick the landing amazed her more than the fact that she hadn't immediately plunged to her death. Shouts of surprise echoed around the caves, from goblins and Dwarves alike.

Fuelled by adrenaline and virtually nothing else, she jumped to her feet and flipped back her hood.

'What the—?' The Goblin King rasped, too taken aback to shout any executive orders.

Sarah looked at the Dwarves. They looked at her.

'Morning lads,' she said, as if they were back in the Shire on a sunny day. 'Did you miss me?'

Oh how the tables had turned: they were speechless. Kili broke out into a manic grin and laughed in disbelief.

'What is this?' the Goblin King hissed, standing from his throne and thumping his ghoulish sceptre so hard that the whole platform shook. 'First Dwarves in league with Elves and now … the race of Men.' His face twisted from confusion into something much more perverse, as he noticed the locks of hair that had come loose from her bun, and the difference between her proportions and the Dwarves. 'No. Not a man at all. How pleasing.'

Sarah could have thrown up just looking at him.

The Goblin King made a megaphone of his enormous hands and called to the goblins at the back of the caves, the ones hauling up the torture devices. 'Change of plan! Save the youngest Dwarf for later. Let's start with the girl.'

Sarah's eye twitched. 'Not today, Satan,' she muttered, uncapping her insect repellant and rattling it with the force of a centrifuge. She retrieved Miriam's lighter from her other pocket and held it directly in front of the repellant nozzle.

Some of the goblins started to rush her, but she stayed exactly where she was and pressed hard on the spray can. Any creature stupid enough to approach her promptly got a face full of second-degree burns.

'Stay back!' she shouted, arcing her makeshift flamethrower until the other goblins were too scared to come near her. 'One more step and you're dead.'

The Goblin King recoiled on his throne, the goblins beneath him squealing in pain. 'Witchcraft!'

'Not a witch,' Sarah clarified, holding back on the repellant but keeping the lighter poised in front of it like a gun barrel. 'Just a strange lander.'

'What did you say?'

Sarah knew the Goblin King wasn't completely oblivious to the outside world — he'd recognized Thorin, after all. Even he must have known a legend or two.

'Galandrandir. Wanderer between worlds. A stranger in a strange land.'

A commotion flared up around the caves. The Goblin King scoffed. 'A strange lander? Don't make me laugh, girl. I don't believe it.'

'Whether or not you believe it is of zero concern to me.'

'It's true!' Bofur called out. 'She stepped through a door into our world. She's the real thing!'

'Silence!' The Goblin King snarled, and so there was silence. He tightened his grip on his sceptre and peered down at her. 'Very well, "strange lander". This could prove amusing. Tell me — what sort of world have you wandered from? Does it have mountains as tall as ours? Caves as dark and damp as ours? Or kings as fearsome as ME?'

He swooped down to her height, veering as close to her face as a double decker bus once did, back in London, when Sarah had been standing on a pavement corner and watched the wing mirror come within an inch of her nose. Like a true Londoner, she hadn't even flinched.

The Goblin King had clearly been expecting her to fall backwards, possibly through the railings, and more or less die of fright; she refused to give him the satisfaction. The only thing between fear and fearlessness was herself.

' … Oh, I see,' she eventually said. 'You think I fear you.'

The Dwarves slowly turned to each other, to make sure they were all seeing the same thing. The goblins on the platform grew nervous. Their king slowly drew back to his full height, bewilderment outweighing rage.

'Well … don't you? Does it not fill you with fear to look upon me?'

'Utter repulsion, sure. But fear? No. Not really. You see, fear is a finite resource, and all my reserves are depleted. You think your world is scary? Please. You've got nothing on mine.'

'Is that so?' the Goblin King retorted. He beckoned for the other goblins to continue bringing up the torture contraptions. 'I have a feeling that whatever horrors lurk in your world, we can easily outdo.'

Sarah smirked, which visibly annoyed him. 'Right. You think horror means pulling limbs in all directions until the bones pop out of their sockets. You think horror means falling through a trap door, or being whipped with flails until your back is more blood than flesh.' She craned her neck up to meet his eye. 'You don't know the first thing about what horror really looks like.'

'Well, well … what a sharp tongue you have in that pretty little head. I must say, I've never seen anything quite like it. Perhaps you do hail from another world.'

The wheels of the torture devices came to a halt just behind the Dwarves; the Goblin King held up a hand and ordered them to stand by. 'Go on then, strange lander. Tell me. What is there to fear in your world? What could possibly compare to my empire of terror?'

'You want to know what my world is like?' she said, her blood heating up. She glanced, fleetingly, at Kili. 'You really want to know? Okay. I'll tell you what there is to fear. The question is where to even begin.'

She started to pace by the railing, pretending to think.

'How about … rampant wildfires that decimate forests and the creatures who depend on them, and turn the sky orange with smoke? Or glaciers melting faster than we can stop them, causing sea levels to rise and entire coastal communities to crumble into the ocean? Or hurricanes that grow stronger and hungrier every year, destroying swathes of towns and cities? Or how about species going extinct because their climate is changing too quickly for them to adapt — climate change which, might I add, we could have stopped long ago if we'd bothered to take the early warning signs seriously. But we didn't, and soon it will be too late to reverse the effects, which means I'll be lucky to see middle age, let alone old age. Imagine expecting you have a certain number of decades to live, planning all your hopes and dreams around that number, and one day you realize that number's been slashed in half. That's terror.'

The Goblin King looked undecided about whether or not to let her continue. The Dwarves stayed silent.

'But wait — I'm just getting started. There's plenty to fear from climate change, but I haven't even touched on the horrors that my people are capable of inflicting on each other. If the colour of someone's skin differs even slightly from the dominant shade, and they get stopped by an authority figure in the wrong place at the wrong time, that person could wind up dead. Executed. For the crime of existing. Not to mention that, over the last hundred years or so, we've managed to come up with an extraordinary number of weapons that can inflict maximum destruction and pain. First confined to battlefields, now unleashed on civilian populations. Schools. Hospitals. Weapons you couldn't even begin to imagine.

'And, in a truly petrifying turn of events, even the things we created to help each other are turning on us: we've created so many medicines, and become so eager to dispense them so that the manufacturers can turn an obscene profit, that those medicines are now failing. In a matter of years, all the progress and innovation we've achieved is set to slide inexorably backwards. That's terror.'

Even counting the first three days after she got her voice back, Sarah had never talked so much in her life. Her hands were shaking.

'But wait! It gets worse! All of this would be a waking nightmare even under the leadership of the fairest, wisest, and most virtuous people each nation could offer up. How many of those people are currently in power? Not enough, that's how many. In fact, some of the wealthiest, most populous nations - my own among them - are headed up by the most inept, narcissistic, morally bankrupt tyrants who don't give a toss about the people they're meant to be serving. Some of them are even sitting back and allowing - nay, encouraging - entire minority groups to be rounded up, detained, and tortured en masse. Even after we vowed, collectively, that we would never allow something so evil to happen again. They don't care. Can you fathom that for just a second? They don't care. They're happy to sit back and watch the world fall apart if it means more money in their offshore accounts and the promise of a few more years of luxury. History repeating itself — that, too, is terror.'

Her voice was starting to crack, her throat sore with the words that couldn't come fast enough.

'BUT WAIT!' she continued, making some of the Dwarves flinch. 'It gets even worse. Because as if all of that wasn't bad enough, this year my world has been turned upside-down by the influx of a new, unprecedented, and devastating plague. A plague so insidious that it spreads through the very air we breathe, invisible to the naked eye. It can infect anyone, at any time, and manifest in any number of symptoms, or none at all — you can spread it without knowing that you have it. And even if you're lucky enough to survive, there's a chance you'll suffer multiple organ failure later down the line. Because that's what this plague does: it burrows in your lungs and takes the rest of your body hostage, destroying you from the inside out. And there's no cure. No end in sight. Just mass graves and no memorials.'

Sarah took a ragged breath.

'Those are the things I fear. I was powerless to stop any of them back home, and I'm just as powerless here. But at least in my world, I knew where I stood.' Sarah let her gaze drift to the middle distance, as if she were talking to no one but herself. 'As long as I'm stranded here, in Middle Earth, I'm cut off from everyone I've ever known, all my obligations and responsibilities, and … well, most of the things that make me who I am. Which means not only am I veering towards a full-on mental collapse, but I also have nothing left to lose. And that means ... '

She slowly turned her head back to the Goblin King who, much like the rest of his kingdom, didn't know what to do other than stay as still possible.

' ... I'm not the one who should be afraid of you,' she said, eerily calm. 'No. You should be very fucking afraid of me.'

The only audible sounds on the platform were rippling torch flames. Sarah refused to back down from her staring contest with the Goblin King. His sceptre was starting to quiver in his grip.

But one of the first things a king learns - even one as decrepit as the Goblin King - is to never, under any circumstances, lose face. He swiftly took his sword from his belt and angled it in her direction, making the Dwarves hiss through their teeth.

'We'll see if you still believe that,' he said at last, a malicious smirk creeping into his face, 'after you've been through the mangler.'

At this point the Dwarves wouldn't have blamed Sarah if she'd fallen to her knees with fear, or burst into tears; they hadn't expected her to start laughing.

Nor had the Goblin King. He lowered the sword, baffled once again, as Sarah cackled like the Witch she claimed not to be.

'Wow,' she gasped, catching her breath. 'You're even stupider than you look. That's impressive.'

'What,' he growled. The sword returned, pointed at her neck now.

Sarah was undeterred. 'Are you seriously telling me you haven't figured out what I've been doing for the last—' (she glanced at her watch) '—fifteen minutes?'

'…'

'Distracting you.' She retrieved her sunglasses and slipped them on. 'Obviously.' Then she turned to the Dwarves. 'GET DOWN!'

She took her own advice and dropped to the floor just as Gandalf sent a shockwave of white light through the caves.