Title: A tale about friendship, Part 25?

Author: Dís Thráinsdotter

E-mail: Overall rating: M, for violence and orctorment. This chapter: M

Summary: A group of children are told the tale of their friendship with the dwarves in general and the Folk of Durin in particular.

Warnings: The overall rating of this fic is M, as parts of it deals with violent battle and torment. There are also Original Characters in the fic, but no Mary Sues. Unbetaed, all mistakes belong to me.

Disclaimer: I don't own any one of Tolkien's characters, never have, and never will. The only ones I own are the people you have never met before.

Chapter 25, Across and into the Misty Mountains

Gandalf said to the children "there are many roads from Rivendell to the Misty Mountains and many paths across them. But you have to go the right road and the right path, because if you don't the best that can happen is that you have to go back to where you started and the worst …" Gandalf didn't finish the sentence but he had no need to, all of them shivered when they thought about the Orcs. "Fortunately Elrond gave us good advice about which road and which path to go" Gandalf continued "and we took them."

Balin said to Gandalf "I saw you speaking with Bilbo one day, he looked a bit sad" and Gandalf answered "Bilbo thought about all the things the people of the Shire were doing and what they would be doing by the time we started to go down again on the other side. I didn't say anything at the time but I knew that the chance that we would get across the mountains without running into Orcs wasn't large. As you know" he said to the children "the Orcs were driven out of the Misty Mountains during the War of Dwarves and Orcs. They stayed away for some years but then they started to sneak back again. By the time we were making this journey they had retaken many of their dens and they were attacking the Elven realms. But we had made it a long way up the mountains when things turned against us."

Balin shivered at the memories. "One day there was a thunderstorm or rather a thunder battle. We lay under an overhanging rock and the rain poured down. The lightning flashes hit the mountaintops around us and we could see Stone giants on the other side of the valley. They were throwing stones at each other and it wasn't nice at all to see them smashing and falling down to the bottom. Then the wind started to blow and we were no longer protected from the rain. All of this combined, the weather and the sights and sounds of the Giants made the ponies nervous, and Thórin said that we faced many dangers. We could be blown off the mountain, swept off by water, hit by lightning or picked up by the Giants and kicked sky-high; and all of these things sounded horrible. Gandalf told him to take us to a safer place, if he knew about any safer place in the area, and Fili and Kili were told to look for one. They were the youngest of us, around 80 years old, and were given such tasks when they couldn't be given to Bilbo. ´There is nothing like looking if you want to find something´ Thórin said to them and that is true. But what you find isn't always what you look for, as we found out later.

To make a long story short Fili and Kili went away and came back quite soon to tell us that they had found a cave that was large enough for all of us, and for the ponies as well. Gandalf asked them if they had searched the cave and they answered that they had, but Gandalf didn't look convinced. But it was decided that we should go there, and after packing we followed them to the place where the entrance was located, which wasn't easy, and we went inside the cave."

Gandalf smiled when he caught the questioning glances the children gave him and answered "when you have travelled as much as I have then you will know that in the mountains, particularly as high up as we were no good cave is unoccupied. They did say that they had searched the cave thoroughly but they weren't away long enough for that. After we had gone through the entrance and the ponies and our gear was inside as well, I lit my staff and searched through all of it. We saw that there were no dark corners in the cave where someone could hide in order to ambush us. But I still didn't allow any fire in the cave, we would have to make do with getting out of our wet clothes, we were thoroughly drenched by the time we got there, and put dry ones on. We lay the wet pieces of clothing on the warm and dry floor, and then we sat in a circle talking about what each of us would do with his part of the treasure when we got it. At the time it didn't look so hard for us to get it. Had things gone according to plan we would have woken the following morning, had breakfast, packed the clothes that would have dried by then and gone on. But things didn't happen that way."

"What happened?" Fili asked and Balin answered

"After we had smoked and talked, Gandalf made our smoke rings dance under the ceiling which was fun to watch, we fell asleep one by one. We found out later that Bilbo was the last of us to fall asleep and that he had horrible dreams about a crack in the wall becoming larger, and the floor rising up so he started falling down into a dark place. All of a sudden I woke up, hearing Bilbo shouting that some thieves were taking the ponies. Before I knew what was going on I was taken by at least six Orcs and carried inside what had looked like a small crack in the wall but turned out to be a door. We were all taken by them save Gandalf."

Gandalf nodded and said "I was wide awake in a splintered second when Bilbo yelled and when the Orcs came to grab me I was able to kill them with a flash".

"So that was the cause of the lightning stroke inside the cave that was followed by a smell of rotten eggs?" Balin said. "I did see a number of Orcs who had been killed before the crack snapped closed, with us on the wrong side of it. There we stood in the dark" Balin said to the children "not knowing where Gandalf was and the Orcs didn't want to wait and find out. So they grabbed us and forced us inside the mountain. It was pitch black and stuffy inside, and we could hear the echoes coming from many passages around us. Then the Orcs started singing, or croaking rather, when we saw the light of a fire in the passage and the song was horrible. At the end of the song they took out whips and started hitting us with them. We ran as fast as we could and some of us were yammering and bleating when we ran into a great cavern."

The children looked at Balin and said "so that is how you got the whip marks mother saw on your backs?" and Balin nodded.

He said to them "they bound our hands behind our backs and linked us together before we were dragged across the cavern to a very ugly Orc with a large head. We saw the ponies huddled together in a corner and Orcs going through our sacs, but we thought more about ourselves than about the ponies. Thórin had been placed at one end of our line and Bilbo at the other, while I was fairly close to Thórin. I looked around at the Orcs who were jeering at us while we went past them. When we came before the Lord of the Cave he looked at us and asked who we were, and one of the Orcs who had brought us there answered ´Dwarves and this´, causing Bilbo to fall to his knees. The Orclord looked straight at Thórin when he asked who we were and what we were doing. He spoke about all things that according to him were likely, among them that we were thieves, spies, friends of the Elves and intent on molesting his people. In the light coming from the fire and torches I could see that Thórin looked worried when he named himself and told the Orc that we had been driven inside the mountain by the downpour, and that we hadn't planned to molest any Orcs. Thórin didn't name his father when he named himself but still the Lord of the Cave used his surname when he said ´I know enough about your Folk´ and threatened to prepare something particularly uncomfortable for him. He had to come up with an answer quickly and told the Lord that we were going to visit our kinsmen on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains.

Then one of the Orcs who had brought us there said that some of them had been killed by a lightning bolt when they ´invited´ us into the mountain, and that Thórin hadn't mentioned the sword the speaker showed the others. They knew it immediately and cursed us. The Orclord rose, shouting orders to his people and went towards Thórin. I thought that we were done for then.

Then all torches went out and the fire was turned into a pillar of blue smoke that hit the ceiling of the cavern. White sparks fell on the Orcs, not a single spark fell on us. They must have been painful because the Orcs howled and cursed, shrieked and skrieked. It sounded as if hundreds of cats and wolves were roasted alive together and they were rolling on the floor; biting, kicking and fighting one another. I had never seen anything like it before. Then we saw a sword with a blue light coming from it and it went straight through the Orclord before it disappeared again. The Orcs who had been standing closest to their Lord fled when they saw the glowing sword. Someone took the chain that linked us all together and said ´follow me´ to us. By then Bilbo had been able to get back on his feet and I had the feeling that I had heard the voice before as we ran into a passage leading from the cavern. We went as fast as Bilbo could trot and that was a quite high speed, but it wasn't fast enough as we were told that we needed to go faster. The torches would be relit soon and then they would see that we had disappeared, and that their Lord was dead. Dori who was closest to Bilbo aided him up on his shoulders, and then we ran faster for a while. The chains clanked and we stumbled at times but we kept running for a long time until we stopped for a while. Then we saw a light coming from Gandalf´s staff and he drew his sword. We were relieved to see him and we would have asked him a lot of questions, but we didn't have the time to ask them. It didn't take long for Gandalf to cut the chains that we were bound with and we had a moment to catch our breath. Gandalf gave back the sword to Thórin, Bilbo´s dagger had been hidden from the Orcs so it was still on him, and after making sure that all of us were there we ran on."

TBC