In Remembrance of the Empty Words

Warning: This chapter has various descriptions of injuries and torture (though I don't find it very graphic…but I'm also a med student, so…) Evaluate yourself and whether or not you want to read it, and be aware of the mentioned triggers. With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy the next chapter.

Up ahead he could see a child tired of running, dark hair whipping about in the chilled hair, pressing forward against all good judgement. He drew closer and closer until he could hear the child breathing, and slipped into the past footsteps that had failed him.

Kili's boots were full of snow. His face had gone cold a while past, and his fingers were long numb. Yet he kept trudging on, led by the false hope that he had turned himself around in the blizzard and was truly going home. A voice begin was carried on the wailing wind, but the little prince didn't truly know whether he was dreaming as he stumbled through the thick white sheet. He clasped stiff hands over his red ears and closed his eyes, if just for a moment. Focus. Get a hold of yourself, his uncle would say. The thought made him fight to keep moving. He didn't know if they had followed him. He'd heard someone calling out for him early on in his race towards nothing, but it had stopped ages ago. Now they were replaced by brutish cries carried by the stinging breeze, and Kili was now quite sure they were a figment of his own imagination.

And then he looked up from his caked boots and saw a figure in the distance. Stood between the two trees was a broad shouldered creature, hands tucked behind its back as if in attention. The dwarfling stopped dead in his tracks. "Thorin?" Kili called. His voice was raw and whistled somewhere in his throat. He turned his head slightly enough to see a similar figure around the back a snow covered thistle. If his veins were not already frozen, the blood ran cold. He spun to face behind him and found the largest of them all, towering above the stance of a normal dwarf. It raised an arm; a glinting war mace sparkled in the ice.

"Fili!" the child shrieked out of habit, fumbling backwards, "Fee! Fee, where are you?" The creature gave a gravely laugh that rumbled in the chest and hissed between the teeth, covering the sound of another voice within the woods. The sound of Kili's heart was like that of a chariot, loud, creaking, and about to break. "Thorin!" the child screamed at the top of his splitting voice, continuing to stagger backwards, though he knew he was doomed. "Uncle Thorin! Please!" He wanted his family. He needed his family. In the distance he heard the edge of a response, before the creature was upon his and the mace when slamming into his legs. "Uncle-"

He woke crying, eyes almost sealed shut by the cold, his breath out before him. It was dark and misty, wherever he was, and while he could see the tops of crumbling stone towers, he knew he wasn't anywhere a friend of his had ever been. Kili stifled a scream as he tried to sit up, the lower half of his body so damaged he could barely see. He was about to call out when he heard a voice that made him forget his pain and focus on his fear.

It was a hissing, harsh sound that echoed around the surrounding area, and while the dwarfling knew they were not speaking a language he had ever heard before, looking back in memory, he understood it.

"You have ruined the child!" the voice accused.

"Not ruined," a deeper, gruffer tone responded, on the verge of laughter. "His leg will knit back in time."

"If he cannot stand he is of no use to use to us," the voice drawled. "Bring him here." Heavy footsteps were heard coming towards Kili. His first instinct was to play dead, to feign sleep, anything so the great monster would leave him alone. But his eyes refused to close, crusted over with salt water frost. A great brutish face, came into view, smiling to display a large array of teeth. The child had been too scared to cry out, too tired to fight as it grabbed him around the middle and pulled him up to face the source of instructions.

At first glance, it seemed to simply be a dark doorway, bathed in shadow, but the longer Kili stared at it, the more the figure of a man began to develop in the shade. It was rough around the edges, as if melting into its space, but there was also a sense of great power in its presence, one that petrified the dwarf into complete submission.

"If you can stand for more than a quarter of a minute," the voice informed him in a pleasured tone, switching to Common Tongue. "you will live to endure a day. If you can't, the Defiler can feed you to his wargs." Kili blinked, not quite comprehending what was put out in front of him. Everything was moving so quickly. He had no idea where he was, who or what the speaking darkness was, or why he had been plucked from home and brought to such a murky place full of the enemies of his race. But he was given little time to think about anything before the monster set him on his feet, and the world went white.

The young prince couldn't remember if he'd screamed or not, but he remembered doubling over and trying to keep his mangled leg limb off the ground and supporting himself solely with the foot that felt almost broken, but not shattered. It was a deep, scorching horror compared to the chilled environment around him and he recalled it cauterizing every nerve, strengthening every muscle in his body to keep himself from falling. The shadow never told him to stop, that it was over, but when the little dwarf finally collapsed the silence told him that he had succeeded.

The orc had dragged him by his hair away from the main pavilion, Kili unable to do anything but whimper as the coarse ground seemed to violate every part of his skin. It was the first time in his life that the prince ever wished for death to take him away. He could hear the sneer in the shadow's voice as he whispered instructions to a different servant. The current tormentor finally let him lose, dropping his head so suddenly it hit the stone ground with a horrible crack. Kili almost bit through his lip trying not to cry, and simply set his teeth and squeezed his eyes as hard as he could until he heard the footsteps fade away into nothing.

"Fee," he sobbed, scared to look at anything but the mess of tangled hair that fell in front of his face. "Where are you? Mama! Uncle…" He called their names in a cracked and broken voice that whipped at his tongue. He would have continued his misery if not for a rustling laugh that came to his ears on a harsh gust of wind. Kili froze. "Hello?" he demanded of the shifting shades. Padded footsteps could be heard on the dense floor. The young prince tried to push himself up to see, but shook so badly he could barely flex his wrists.

"What's wrong with you?" the rattling tone requested, growing louder. It was coming closer. His neck began to hurt from the tense muscles, sweat sliding down his fingers despite the cool air.

"I have a bad leg," Kili stuttered in response, warranting a hollow chuckle from the other prisoner. Then, there was silence. The child waiting in complete terror, listening to how the wind seemed to cry as it slithered through the treetops. Suddenly hands were on his back, shaking his, something sharp pulling at his ears. A scream, a name, was torn from him completely involuntarily, one that he called upon in all danger. "Uncle Thorin!" he wailed as the other victim forced him onto his back, breathing foul air into his face. Its face was one recognizably dwarvish, or at least Kili thought so, with empty eyes and a scraggly beard and hair that appeared to be half pulled out. Nail rakes covered its face and there was something animalistic in the shocked way it looked into the dwarfling's face. And then, he was free, it let go of him, retreating into the corner, muttering something that the prince could not fully understand. Kili's eyes followed it back to the pile of rocks in which it nestled itself into, hiding within worn clothes and thin skin.

"When the shadow brings you forth tomorrow your leg will not hurt so bad," the creature croaked, still huddled in its corner of rags. The tone made the child's skin crawl.

"Will it heal me?" Kili asked, biting his lip as a wave of liquid fire shot from his shattered knee. While he hoped for the best, he knew it was almost impossible.

"Heal you?" the thing cackled in a voice that sounded like snapping wood. "Where do you thing you are? It is simply that once you endure what it will put you through, all your mortal pain will seem insignificant." The prince didn't sleep until he was called on again by the shadow in the door.

The orc dragged him forward into its presence while Kili let his head hang, hoping the knocks to his head would either force him into unconsciousness or distract from the rest of his body. When the monster left him in front of the arch again, the dwafling refused to look at the dark figure that he knew would be standing there waiting for him.

"You have a name?" it whispered. Kili kept his head down and his lips sealed. The shadow gave him time to say something, and seemed to radiate frustration when it wasn't given an answer. "He has to have a bare back," it instructed one of the smaller, impish looking orcs. The child braced himself and expected something worse than the creature ripped the fabric off his chest without even touching his skin. Something cold and metallic pressed against his flesh for the first time however, and the orc seemed to notice it as well.

"It has a title," it snapped back at the doorway. The larger of the orcs, a pale and carved thing with horrible cold eyes and a snarl baked into its face stepped forward, taking the underling's place. It wrapped a clawed finger almost delicately ripping the chain off his neck and holding the bead in its hand like a trophy. Kili struggled, trying to sit up, to reach it, to take it back. It was his title, his family, his life that the orc was holding in his hand. It was enough to make him miss that the orc was missing its other arm.

"Kili," the Defiler read in a mocking snarl. "heir to the throne of Durin." When it got to his family name, it barred its teeth in disgust.

"The spawn of kings," the shadow mocked, "lying in the dirt, voiceless and weak." Azog raised his weapon clad arm, ready to strike the child at his lowest. "No!" the shadows seemed to fill more of the door as the orc stopped in its tracks. "The other is too mad and weak for it now. This one still has a spirit that still breathes like a living creature. We can shape him. We can make him." Kili still didn't know what it meant, but he could feel that same spirit throbbing in him as it began to ebb into agony now. "I will let you do it," the door's resident granted Azog who smiled that caused a twisted carved rift in his face.

"Are you ready to scream?" the orc leader taunted as one of the other creatures held Kili off the ground as if he were one of the targets Fili had used back in Ered Luin. The dwarf paused half a second before responding in a voice he hoped sounded as fierce as his angered uncle would have.

"Showing pain caused by you would be an insult to my name," he spat, though his hands were twitching so badly he feared that they would betray him. "It is not in my blood."

Soon that blood was spattered across the cold stone ground and the tattered prisoner picked out black arrow heads from his back. Kili didn't ask the remainder of a dwarf why he helped, and it never offered an answer. Somewhere after that first time, it all became the same repeated memory. He would be horribly ill for days afterwards, and the other captured creature told him that his body would begin to learn and fight it, that the shadow would not allow him to die so quickly. His leg knitted back, though the flesh was warped and scarred. Now he could walk to his fate instead of being forced to face it. Fate came in the form of the chain and bead that was tethered back around his neck like the collar of an animal.

A year passed without Kili saying a word, without screaming when the orc used the black weapons against him. Perhaps, he thought, I can live knowing that those words were my last. Standing up for my family name. Somewhere else in his head a different voice reminded, The family you left behind.

The creature asked, "Who did you call for the first night you were here?" The prince rolled onto his side away from the prisoner, as if he didn't want to answer and hadn't forgot all other names except his own.

Eventually everything became numb and vacuous, with the underlying pain of a constant headache. He had given up before he even opened his eyes. Kili knew nothing but the shadow and the orcs and the tattered creature. Sometimes he would awake in the middle of the night, crying over someone he could almost name, and the minute he opened his mouth to speak his tears had dried, and he couldn't remember why his chest felt so horribly gutted and his tongue was so dry.

"Stop it," the shadow demanded one morning when Kili had bared his back to the bow and arrow. "He has outgrown it. We can start using a blade, I think." He felt fear for what seemed like the first time in his life. Two years on monotonous pain, all leading up to something larger. His only companion had told him the shadow planned for the little prince to be something bigger, that each time the black arrows pierced his skin he was preparing him for a greater task or trial. Every blow that was done upon him fueled something that moved under Kili's skin, something that he couldn't see but could sometimes feel in the darkest of nights when the wind blustered around the crumbling towers with a voice that sounded like one he used to know. On those nights something would twist between his ribs, something that made it impossibly monstorous. On those nights he could hear the shadow laughing.

Azog came stalking back, carrying a curved dagger in his one remaining paw. The dwarfling tried to think of a song he knew he once knew. The snowflakes can't fly forever, he hummed to himself, cursing his mind for remembering something so trivial when his heart ached in the night because of events he couldn't recall. But they soar as they fall. With that the orc leader dragged the tip of the knife across the base of his neck, and Kili felt like he was drowning.

He didn't recover that night. Every inch of his body was cold and slick with sweat, but his insides felt like they were burning to the point of melting. The other dwarf would come over every so often, muttering sentences that meant nothing before crawling back to its corner. The prince wished he could just beg, beg for the other prisoner to place his hands over Kili's mouth until he stopped breathing. But the tattered dwarf made a very different call.

"He'll die if you keep him here," it called into the doorway on the third night. "If you let him go into the forest, you can take him back whenever you want, but the elves can heal him. Your plan won't end with him." The child's ears felt like they were full of cotton at the mysterious force responded.

"I want something from you, something you haven't give me, as compensation," it demanded. Somewhere in Kili's addled brain, he cried at the other prisoner, telling it to let everything stop when he had the choice.

"If it means he will live away from here," the captor agreed.

"You won't remember him, Thrain," the shadow taunted. "You will know he's your grandson for an hour at most before you lose all ideas that he ever existed."

"He'll remember me," the mad king assured. No, I won't, Kili knew as he was hauled onto his feet, dizzy and sore. He couldn't tell if the moisture on his face was sweat or tears. Thrain helped him step by step away from the pavilion. "You said a name when you first came here," the elder dwarf insisted again. The prince shook his head. He didn't know any names besides his own and those of his enemies within the cursed place. "It was important," the old king reminded in a melancholy tone, "I hope you find them again." Kili was surely crying then as they reached the edge of the dark forest, his fingers clasped around Thrain's hands so he couldn't leave him alone to slip into shadows. "I have to go Kili. You have to go," the other prisoner wept, cupping one hand around the side of the prince's face. "I promise it will be better out there." The dark-haired child tugged at his grandfather's arm.

Don't leave, he shouted in his head. We won't remember each other. I'll abandon you without even knowing it.

"Run before it can catch you," Thrain whispered, wrenching his grip free and shoving Kili into the tangled trees of Mirkwood. Momentum carried him forward, though his heart tethered him behind. The prince never saw the tattered dwarf turn back to Dol Goldur, but the brush made him disappear before the child decided to say goodbye.

It was when he was found by the healers his grandfather spoke of when he finally found a voice. "Uncle," he called the tall elven king, the word finally coming to his tongue, but somehow completely empty. He couldn't recall what it meant.

So, thank you for reading this most recent chapter of my little story. If you want to be notified for when the next chapter is posted, I recommend you follow it. And with that, I feel like it's time for this announcement. According to my outline, we have three more chapters left until the end of this story. It snuck up on me! I hope the conclusion is satisfying to you guys as if comes in the next month or so. If you like where this is going, please favorite it to share Mirkwood with other authors and Hobbit fans. And, as always, I love hearing from you guys, so please leave your comments, predictions, critiques, etc. in a lovely review. Until next time…