A Broken Bridge in Erebor

The crack of breaking stone should not, perhaps, have sounded so out-of-place in a kingdom carved entirely from rock—but dwarves were among the cleverest of craftsmen to ever walk Middle-earth and they never hewed their stones carelessly or callously, and there was no sense of control in the sound of this shattering stone.

Heads lifted instantly, turning with an unerring accuracy in the direction of the noise, and for once Legolas was not among the first to hear or see; to dwarves, the moods and sounds of stone are as much a part of their being as their own breathing, and here even sharp elvish reflexes and senses could not compete. Every being in the great cavernous hall of the Lonely Mountain drew their gazes high and watched in horror as the half-finished arch of the new balcony level that would have one day served as both bridge and vantage point over the great cavern snapped and shattered in its scaffolding.

Stone fell, but there were no screams; the dwarves below ran and dodged with desperate speed but with no shouts of fear. It was stone that was falling—stone and wood and ropes that had once held those shattered rocks, but stone most of all—and these were dwarves. They did not fear stone, even when it tumbled down upon their heads.

The same innate sense of stone that had turned their attention to the breaking construction must have guided their steps, because while the collapse of the bridge brought some destruction below—although less than Legolas would have expected; dwarven structures were sturdily built—there were no deaths, no wounds among the watchers on the floor. The dwarves moved themselves from the path of the falling stones as easily as the elves of Legolas's homeland moved through the branches of Eryn Lasgallen's tall, thick trees.

Legolas and Gimli had been some yards away from the ripples of destruction, but they pushed forward now—like so many of the dwarves who had not been forced to run the other way for the salvation of their own lives—eager to help, for all that Legolas's woodland heart pounded in anxious terror over even a small fragment of this cave collapsing and harder over the ugly visions that poured across his mind of what would happen should more of the cavern falter. But Gimli pushed forward to help his people, and Legolas could no more fail to follow his friend than he could close his ears to the distant sound of the gulls that gnawed forever at his heart.

It was only when the stones had stopped their thunderous plummet that voices rose, shouts and bellows and dwarven cursing fit to make Legolas wish to reach up and cover his ears against the roar of their echoes—but then above the stones there rose a sound that once more fixed the elf's stuttering heart fast in his chest: a scream, and the words that followed.

"Look—oh look!" someone shouted in Westron. "Look—the child!"

Legolas had thought that there was nothing that could horrify him more in these caverns than the collapse of stone from above, but he found that he was wrong.

A narrow span of the would-be bridge remained intact, its smooth arch somehow obscene in the aftermath of the destruction, bits and pieces of broken scaffolding still dangling from the curving length here and there. Along with the wood and ropes there hung the small form of a dwarven child, clinging to the stone with two small hands.

A distant part of Legolas observed that here was the likely cause of the sudden destruction: a wayward youngster, driven by curiosity and far too little sense or fear, must have wandered out to investigate the construction and through stepping upon or pushing at the wrong part of the scaffolding, quite innocently begat a small disaster. And now the child's life hung in the balance, waiting to turn this from a regretful mishap to a tragic one.

Legolas was no good at judging mortal ages but the body was very small, smaller than the Hobbits he had once traveled with. The little form hung from its hands, small fingers clutching at the smooth stone for purchase they could not muster as chubby legs kicked helplessly at empty air.

From the dwarves around them rose despairing moans and curses in Khuzdul and many other tongues beside. The oaths that burst from Gimli's lips were as dark as any he had uttered in war, but there was no defiance behind them this time; only fear. Jostling arms and pounding feet moved in the background as dwarves raced to help—but the span of rock was small, and smooth, and far above the crowds. Legolas was not sure how long the construction tunnels were that reached up to where the broken bridge and the dangling child waited, but he feared that any help that ran out along their length would come too late. The child was small, and the grip already faltering.

"Mahal," Gimli whispered, "the fall will kill it!"

"Then we must not let the child fall," Legolas declared. His sharp eyes darted around the cavern, looking for some path up—but there were no trees here to climb, and none of the stone structures that filled the floor of this level of the caves that had been carved in the Lonely Mountain reached high or near enough to the bridge for even him to scale his way to that sliver of stone. "Ai, if I only had my bow!" he cried. He might have pinned the child to the stone by their clothes—dwarven cloth was sturdy, and the bow of Galadriel could launch an arrow stong enough to wedge it deep in cracks of stone—at least long enough for someone to inch out across the span and pull the dwarfling up, if he had only had something he could shoot, but Erebor was at peace in these days and Legolas a guest of its king. He did not carry his bow in the Lonely Mountain's halls, and even for feet as fleet as his the chambers where his things were stored was too far for him to fetch it now and return in time.

Despair clenched at his heart, but despair would not save the child. Only action would.

"Hurry!" Legolas said, and now he was the one pushing forward, pulling Gimli after him by a hard grip upon the dwarf's sturdy wrist.

"Hurry to what?" Gimli asked, and Legolas realized belatedly that his friend was speaking in Sindarin. "There is nothing we can do! The child is going to fall, and there is nothing soft enough in all the world to catch it without killing!" Had Legolas spoken in that language out of instinct and Gimli matched him now from habit, or was it Gimli who had chosen that tongue so as to hide the despair of his words from many of his fellows?

It hardly mattered. "Then we must not let it fall," Legolas repeated fiercely.

"And how do you intend to stop that?" Gimli's words might have been taken as a challenge once, but now Legolas heard in them only fearful hope.

"Had-nin."