A/N I feel the need to explain this here, as it is a general problem, even though it has appeared in reviews and should really belong under Review Replies. Apparently, I had the eighth chapter already written before my break from FF, but I forgot to post it. Therefore, this is actually the first new chapter after the break. I decided to post this later, instead of on the same day as the eighth chapter, so that's why most if not all of you will probably have received a message that the ninth chapter was up already yesterday. I'm terribly sorry for the inconvenience.

A large chapter, as an apology. Hope you like it.

Chapter 9: Past the Misty Mountains

I advise those of you that haven't done it yet to read the author's note above. It could help clear up some things.

After the Lord's sudden departure, it took another half of an hour to get to the Eagle's eyrie. The Dwarven Lords were deposited in some sort of huge cave, while Gandalf and Thorin were taken with the Lord of the Eagle's entourage to what Solana guessed was the throne room. Faced with the choice of staying with twelve grumpy dwarves ready to puke and going to the throne room with Thorin and Gandalf and possibly get thrown in whatever prison the Eagles had for trespassing, Solana did the logical thing.

She went to the throne room.

It took only five minutes of flying to get to where Gandalf and Thorin were taken, though Solana had to amend her earlier statement; the 'throne room' looked much more like a gigantic stone shelf with absolutely no way down than a large hall with a throne – Solana guessed the Lord of the Eagles was much more comfortable this way. The Eagle certainly seemed like he liked informality, if their earlier conversation was anything to go by.

The Eagles posted as guards let her pass, surprisingly enough (in reality, the Lord of the Eagles had known that Solana would come, and told the guards to let her Eagle form, which had a distinctive white spot above her left eye, pass) and Solana landed right next to Thorin, who jumped two feet in the air when a gigantic eagle landed next to him. Gandalf wasn't surprised in the least.

With a "Hello!" in the language of the Eagles in greeting, Solana turned back to human, surprising Thorin once more.

The King under the Mountain frowned at her rather angrily, but refrained from saying anything. Solana chirped, "What were you talking about?"

Gandalf chuckled. "We were talking about where we were going next. I wanted to go to Beorn next," Solana perked up at the familiar name, "and was hoping that the Eagles might drop us off near his house."

"Yes," The Lord of the Eagles interrupted, "But you forget; if we go anywhere near any human settlement – and this includes Beorn – we will get shot down by those bows of theirs, thinking that we were after the sheep. That might be true other times, but certainly not now. We will take you to the edge of Beorn's forest, but no further. You might have healed me from a near-fatal wound," Solana and Thorin shot a surprised look at Gandalf, "but even that isn't worth those I rule over dying. Nothing is."

"But that is more than a days' walk to Beorn's house!" Gandalf protested – another difference between him and Dumbledore, Solana noted. Dumbledore had never needed to protest against anyone, because even in the ICW, his word could be considered law, and there wasn't anyone in a higher station than he – well, except for the English monarch, who was the appointed Queen of Magic during the Blood Wars, but she almost never had anything to do with the Magical World. However, here in Arda, there were many a high figure that Gandalf was considered lower than or an equal of. Then, Gandalf sighed. "Fine, I suppose that that will have to do. Take us the furthest you want. We are already deeply obliged to your kind."

The Lord nodded. "Very well." He screeched out orders to his two guards, who nodded and flew off. Then the gigantic Eagle turned to Solana. "I do not know if you have thought about this, but perhaps Beorn came from your homeland." Solana's eyes widened, and a spark of hope entered her eyes, before it snuffed out. The chance that another Animagus got transported by the weird voices was tinier than the chance of winning the lottery while in a plane just as it crashed into a three-way crash with a zeppelin and a dragon.

She shook her head. "No, the chances of that are non-existent. My method of coming here was… unique, to say the least. Nevertheless, I will ask him. Thank you for the idea."

If the Eagle had had lips, they would have twitched. It was remarkably nice to have a conversation without 'Lord,' 'Milord,' or 'My Lord' thrown in every other word, together with lavish praises that he really didn't want. "Yes, that would be a good idea." He replied just as the other Eagles came back, green-faced dwarves in their claws.

"But for now," Thorin interrupted their conversation, "I am quite famished – and I'm sure that everyone else is as well. Do you, perchance, have food for us?" Even the usually pompous Thorin seemed to realize that being nice every once in a while was advisable, especially when your host could throw you off of a mountain without repercussion.

The Lord of the Eagles chuckled. "Sure. Solana, if you could make a fire, then I will give you your first lesson of hunting like an Eagle." As the Dwarves that hadn't seen Solana's Eagle form yet all looked on curiously, Solana grinned widely, and with a few flicks of her wand, a large fire was cackling in the middle of the shelf of rocks. Then, before their astonished eyes, she transformed into a majestic fiery-red Eagle with a slight white spot above her still violet eyes, and flew off with the Lord of the Eagles and his large entourage of hunters.

Oo0oO

It was quite some time later that Solana and the Eagles returned to what the former learned was called 'the Shelf', rabbits, hares, and sheep clutched in their claws. Solana herself had scored a wandering cow, which was bound to provide food for the coming weeks.

Still chuckling at the Lord of the Eagle's misfortune – the unfortunate Eagle had picked a sheep that packed a surprisingly hard kick, as evidenced by the blue bruise showing through the Lord's face-feathers – Solana dropped the cow right next to the fire, which was still going strong, and transformed back into a human. After a few seconds of staring proudly at her catch, she turned to the Lord of the Eagles.

"Thank you so much for letting me come with you, milord." Solana bowed rather teasingly to the frowning Eagle, chuckling as the Lord let out a huff.

"And to think that just a minute ago, you were laughing at me. So disrespectful." Then, the Lord of the Eagles turned to the large feast of meat spread across the Shelf, and to the Dwarves and Gandalf, who were watching their byplay with interest. "Well, what are you waiting for?" The Eagle spread his wings grandly. "Eat!"

The Dwarves let out a roar of approval and started skinning, hacking, slicing, and dicing up the fresh meat with their weapons to make their own meals in stone bowls Solana had conjured. The bowls were placed onto the fire, where they cooked quickly due to the extra-hot magical fire, and a mere ten minutes after Solana and the Eagles returned, everyone was happily eating sheep, cow, rabbit, and hare, for the moment uncaring about the large task that came nearer and nearer with every day that passed.

Oo0oO

The next morning, the dwarves were, for the sake of their stomachs, allowed to climb upon the Eagle's backs and cling between their wings. They cried out farewells and promises to repay the Eagles if they ever could, while Gandalf, from his place astride Solana herself, simply waved. Solana, for her part, squawked out another thanks and a promise to return after they were done with their journey.

After a while, the Eagles had to have spotted what they were making for – Solana didn't know herself, she simply followed the other Eagles – for they began to go down circling round in great spirals, and Solana did the same. They did this for a long while, until Solana started to look around the ground just to have something to do and not fall out of the air out of boredom.

The earth was much nearer than before, and below them were trees that looked like oaks and elms, and wide grass lands, with a river running through it all. But cropping out of the ground, right in the path of the stream which looped itself about it, was a great rock, almost a hill of stone, like a last outpost of the distant mountains, or a huge piece cast miles into the plain by some giant among giants. The Eagles all swooped down and dropped off their passengers one by one, until only Solana and Gandalf remained in the air. Then, Solana swooped down and settled herself on the rock as well, waiting patiently until Gandalf climbed off before she transformed back.

"Farewell!" the Eagles all cried, "wherever you fare, till your eyries receive you at the journey's end!" Such was the polite thing to say amongst Eagles.

"May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks," answered Gandalf, who knew the correct reply from earlier visits, and Solana, who had learned it the night before.

And thus, they parted, and though the Lord of the Eagles and his fifteen chieftains would fly back with a golden crown and golden chains respectively, gifted to them by the Dwarves, Solana wouldn't see the Eagles for a long, long time, save for from far away during the Battle of the Five Armies – but that was a story for another time.

An old path led down from the rock to the ground, where the path continued over a ford and onto a grassland, until Gandalf led them down to a cave a little ways off where they would discuss what would be done next.

Gandalf frowned as he looked at the fourteen before him. "I meant to see you all safe over the mountains, and now by good management and luck I have done it. We are now a great deal further east than I had intended to come with you, for after all, this is not my adventure. I will look in on it again before it is over, I promise you all that, but in the meantime I have some pressing business to attend to."

The Dwarves all groaned and looked distressed, while Solana frowned a bit. They had begun to think that Gandalf would be with them all the way, there to help them out with any difficulties. That, and Solana hadn't gotten to ask what that ring that she found in the Goblin halls was – or what it read in full. The parts that she understood weren't nearly enough to read the entire text and find out what was going on.

Meanwhile, Gandalf continued, "I am not going to leave you this very instant, though I can only give you a day or two more. I can most probably help you out with your present plight, and I need a little help myself. Due to the Eagles picking us up, we have no ponies, no supplies, and no food –"

"Actually," Solana cut Gandalf off, "We do have supplies and food. Here." Solana opened her bag, which nobody had spotted until now, and brought out a large score of other, familiar packs that could never have fit in there; their ponies' rucksacks. "I swiped these off of the ponies' corpses – they were killed by the wolves, if you must know, though Gandalf's horse escaped; I imagine it to be halfway to Rivendell by now – before I took after you guys. And I still have what's left of the cow in here as well."

With grateful nods, the dwarves accepted the packs and swung them over their shoulders, before turning back to Gandalf. "Alright, as I was saying; we have no ponies, and you do not know where you are. Well, I can tell you that last bit; you are still some miles north of the path that you should have been following if we hadn't left the mountain pass in a hurry. Very few people live in these parts, unless they have come down here since I last was here, which was some years ago. He made the steps we just went down on, in fact. He does not come here often, though, and certainly not in the daytime, and as such, it is no good waiting for him – that would be extremely dangerous, even. We must go and find him, and if all goes well at our meeting, I think I shall be off and wish you farewell for the coming months."

To Solana's great amusement, the younger dwarves and even some of the older ones started begging Gandalf not to leave them, offering dragon-gold, silver, and jewels, but he would not change his mind. "We shall see," Gandalf said after a minute of begging, "We shall see. And I think I have earned some of that gold already, have I not?"

The dwarves relented after that, and the twelve lords and their king went outside to the river to go bathe en-masse, while Gandalf stayed behind, seated next to Solana while they blew smoke rings. Eventually, Solana dug her hand in her pocket.

"Gandalf?" She asked, and got a questioning hum in reply. "When I got separated from you guys, I found something on the floor. Thing is, it has the Black Language engraved upon it." Solana took the little gold ring, and handed it to Gandalf. "What is–"

She was cut off by Gandalf, who let both the ring and his pipe clatter to the floor in shock, staring with wide eyes at the ground, where the ring laid. Then, he picked the fallen items back up again and turned to Solana, handing the ring back to her.

"This," Gandalf whispered urgently, pointing at the ring sitting innocently in Solana's hand, "is Sauron's ring – the One Ring." Solana's eyes widened, and her mouth went slightly open in surprise. "Do not, ever show this to anyone! Your life and many, many others are at stake! Keep this on your person at all times, understand?!" Solana nodded quickly, conjuring up a chain around the ring and binding it around her neck, before waving her wand a few more times to set up wards on the chain.

"Good." Then, as if nothing had happened – though Solana could still spot the unease and the calculation taking place behind the aged wizard's eyes – Gandalf turned back to his pipe and started blowing perfect smoke triangles.

Solana shook her head in disbelief at how casual Gandalf could act. She certainly couldn't after that revelation.

Oo0oO

A few hours later, the Dwarves had returned from their bath and the fifteen travellers were making their way to Beorn's house. "Beorn is a very great person," Gandalf was telling them, "And you must all be very polite when I introduce you – he gets angry easily, and when he is angry…" Gandalf trailed off for a moment, "Let us just say that you should not anger him, though he is kind enough if humoured. Still, I warn you, he gets angry easily."

The Dwarves all started muttering anxiously – except Thorin, of course, who didn't let any emotions show. Solana merely frowned as the dwarves started asking doubtful questions – "Is that the person you're taking us to now?" "Couldn't you find someone more easy-tempered?" and so on – and decided to meet Beorn first before getting any pre-drawn conclusions in her head.

"Enough!" The wizard roared eventually, when he got fed up with the questions. "If you must know more beside his name, know that he is very strong, and he is a skin-changer."

Solana knew that that was Arda's word for Animagi, but Kili apparently didn't. "What! A furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn't turn their skins into squirrels?"

"Good gracious PATRON VALA, no, no, NO, NO!" said Gandalf immediately, over everyone else's chuckles. "Don't be a fool, Mr. Kili, if you can help it; and in the name of all wonder don't mention the word furrier again as long as you are within a hundred miles of his house, nor rug, cape, tippet, muff, nor any other such unfortunate word! He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard. I am not at the liberty to tell you much more, though that ought to be enough. Some say that he is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came. Others say that he is a man descended from the first men who lived before Smaug or the other dragons came into this part of the world, and before the goblins came into the hills out of the North. I cannot say, though I fancy the last is the true tale. He is not the sort of person to ask questions of."

That… actually sounded as if Beorn stemmed from some tribe of ancient shaman, that transported themselves here from Earth through a ritual. The only thing Binns ever talked about beside the Goblin wars was really, really ancient history, back before the Muggle Egyptians started to write.

The Ancient Shaman Tribes were independent groups of Wizards and Witches, living in Africa, that used magic through feathers, which until Solana had left nobody had been able to replicate. The feathers were laid into patterns around a bonfire, until a rainbow-coloured carpet of feathers stretched out from the fire, and then, for a reason nobody really understood, the Shaman started dancing on the feather-carpet. The little records of that era had said that the bonfire would light up into a colour unique to each ritual, before the ritual would complete and the desired magic would commence – ranging from a thunderbolt into the enemies' camp to the instant building of a wooden hut.

These Shaman all called themselves skin-changers, as they could transform themselves into a single non-magical animal of their choice; the Shaman would choose an animal, and that animal would be their Animagus form for the rest of their life.

The reason Solana was suspecting that Beorn stemmed from an ancient tribe of Shaman was that, back then, there were already magical civilizations in every single continent, though none had figured out how to transform into an animal. Thousands of years later, when the Ancient Shaman Tribes had all but died out, a Chinese woman had figured out how to transform into an animal – she called it the Animagus.

Of course, there was also the possibility that Beorn had absolutely nothing to do with Shaman, Africa, or Earth in general, but Solana didn't like to think that.

Solana was broken out of her thoughts by Gandalf, who continued his lecture about Beorn – he had only stopped talking because there had been a rather steep hill, and Gandalf wasn't exactly in his prime anymore.

"At any rate," Gandalf said, "he is under no enchantment but his own. He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly as marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey. As a bear he ranges far and wide. I once saw him sitting all alone on the top of the Carrock – that is what he calls the rock the Eagles set us down upon – at night, watching the moon sinking towards the Misty Mountains, and I heard him growl in the tongue of bears: 'The day will come when they will perish and I shall go back!' That is why I believe he once came from the mountains himself."

Everyone now had plenty to think about, and no more questions were asked. They still had a long way to go, after all, and there was more time for questions later.

It was a refreshingly calm walk to Beorn's house.

Review Replies!

Dainm: It's a really good idea – like, really good – but I'm afraid that I have no idea how that would work out. You should post it as a challenge, though, with a female Bilbo or something!

Skendo: See the A/N at the beginning of the chapter.

Dinosaur Imperial Soldier: Yes, of course they are. Why wouldn't they?

Hamof: I know, I know, but I love input from readers – it tells me that people care enough about my story to actually spend time of their day to write something. As for your question, please see the A/N at the beginning of the chapter.

Leez: The reason she is making splashes and waves everywhere she goes, as you put it, is because of a pet peeve of mine; characters that don't affect the storyline whatsoever. I have read this in some of the other HP/LotR crossovers, and it really, really bugs me; the best example of this is in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where – I won't spoil anything, don't worry – everything happens as it would have without Indiana Jones there. That is the main reason why I have Solana affect the storyline this much.

HomeByTwilight: I apologize for the long wait. The frequency of the updates was getting to me, and I felt like taking a break – like when you play a computer game, for example an MMORPG, for an entire week every second you have a bit of free time before suddenly realizing that you don't feel like playing anymore and take a month-long break. You understand what I'm sayin', brah? (It's nice to know that some of my older readers haven't given up on this story, by the way.)

And, as always, a thanks to the other reviewers.