1: The Meeting
Lights flashed, buzzed, and wiggled before Bilbo's eyes in the moments before his death. Tired and sore joints began to finally lose the stiff tension they had carried within him for nigh on three decades now.
Life was over, and the oldest hobbit to ever live was ready to breathe his last in the healing land of the eternal elves. Between one heart beat and the next, the extra-ordinary hobbit known as Bilbo Baggins, Dragon Riddler, Ring Bearer, and Uncle, slipped free of his very old body and finally began his last adventure.
….
That was, until the hobbit sensed an immense presence. Two in-fact.
On his left he felt the seasons, warmth, cold, sunlight and growth, twilight and sleep, joy, sorrow, and unending surety of love.
On his right he felt the raw potential of creativity. The heat of a forge, the grain of wood beneath hands, passion, obsession, and pride.
Try as he might, his senses remained locked to these entities, but not the senses he had been familiar with in a body. Without the physical senses of sight, touch, or smell, he perceived these entities with his experiences of emotional responses. The joy he felt at some things, the distaste he found from others – it was certainly new.
'We have been awaiting you, dirt child', the entity to his right 'boomed', as if he had been shouted at. Not unlike the hearing sensation of a hammer on an anvil.
'We come to you, oh soul of fierce and fragile heart', the left entity cajoled, not unlike the content joy of seeing the harvest at full bounty.
'Yes, as we have come to you before.
As we might come to you after.
We have asked this of many.
May we yet succeed with you now as we have not succeeded before.' The right entity spoke with force and surety, strong and unwary. Confidence that every word would be heard.
'The tragedy of the line of Durin had far reaching consequences in the song of Arda.
The death of the dwarrow came too soon.
It strains the very fabric of your world, dirt child, in such away that there is no longer any guarantee that the world shall be remade.
For this we enlist your aid.'
As the entity drifted into silence, Bilbo thoughts began spinning in an unpleasant manner. He had many questions, none of this made a lick of sense. His poor heart (or what he identified as his heart) lurched and twisted in on itself at the mention of the line of Durin.
How had they requested his aid before now? One would assume he would have remembered such an auspicious occasion. How had their deaths put into jeopardy the only thing that would ensured the dwarrow were welcomed into the song of Arda?
Bilbo went to ask them these questions, yet before he could release a sound, the entity of fresh fruit and dappled sunshine spoke.
'We are of the very fabric that is Arda,
As such we have bent and shaped the reality again and again,
In defiance of Our Father to prevent this uncertainty from occurring,
We cannot directly affect the occurrence itself from transpiring,
That is why we enlist aid from the mortals
Yet no matter which way we split the song it still converges into the uncertainty.
It is distressing. '
It took only seconds for Bilbo to decide. He had spent years nursing the bitter turn the fates had taken with the Durins, and his part in it. Yet now, now he had a chance to alter that. To perhaps, stop it from happening at all.
As the decision was made, entities seemed to swell,
'Thank you again,
For being the brave soul,
The fragile heart,
The willing adventurer.' Whispered the morning song of blue birds.
'Dirt child,
We are attempting this with heavy heart,
We shall reshape you,
Put you in their path a different way,
You shall see yourself as you never have before,
Have heart, thief of precious things,
For you shall need it all your days.' Offered the deep song of voices in stone halls.
Bilbo then felt a tug at the very center of him, as if secured by a rope. This tug forced Bilbo to approach the figure on the right. The hulking, masculine, presence growing even larger in his perception. This continued, picking up speed, until alarmingly, Bilbo was rocketing towards the center of the presence.
The little hobbit soul cringed as he expected to collide with the entity. Instead, he passed through the entity with as much resistance as a spoon through jelly.
This was his last conscious thought before a calm weightlessness overwhelmed him.
nb: For those you who are waiting on my other story... its coming. these last few years have altered me in many ways. I am now trying to re-adjust my thinking so the story will be smooth. Also, I am attempting all of this on mobile. very new.