How I Got Here:

I arrived on the island I now call home through what Gandalf and the young intern (I can't recall his name at the moment) who works at the Raptor Paddock would call a "time portal", a gateway between worlds. It had the appearance of an ordinary full length mirror that I would sometimes see in some of the guest rooms in some of the human kingdoms of Middle-earth that Thorin and I occupied when invited to a gala to celebrate some kind of victory. I came across it entirely by accident.

Whilst trying to get as far away from Thorin as I could, I hid behind some rubble in a section of Erebor that I didn't recognize. Unlike the rest of the kingdom, this part wasn't cleaned up from Smaug's attack, probably because it was mostly used for storage, so the dwarves probably didn't bother, not venturing this far into the kingdom.

The reason I was hiding was because I heard Thorin's booming voice behind me:

"Marida! Stop this foolishness at once!" he bellowed.

"Fat chance!" I thought of yelling back at him, but didn't, since then he would discover my little hiding place. It was at this moment that I heard the gentler tone of Balin, Thorin's most trusted advisor, and someone I still miss seeing around:

"Thorin, let her go. You two have obviously grown apart." Balin began, trying his best to calm the king down.

"Balin, she's my one!" Thorin protested, in a volume so loud that I wouldn't be surprised if the entire kingdom heard him, which was probably his intent.

"Is she though? It doesn't take a wizard to tell you that Marida is miserable. She has been for some time. Let her go. Don't continue to keep her prisoner here." Balin suggested.

Balin was right about that. I did feel more like a prisoner than a queen.

"Go where? Into the arms of another man?" Thorin shot back, raising his voice once again.

I hate to admit, but that idea never even occurred to me before, since I've been with Thorin for as long as I can remember, so I couldn't imagine being with anyone else, but look where I am now; in another world, with someone else.

"If that happens, then so be it. Would you rather her stay here and be miserable?" Balin concluded.

That was all I heard of the conversation, since at that moment, something behind me gave way (I thought I was leaning against some rubble. As it turned out, it was a door so damaged from Smaug's attack that any kind of pressure against it for a certain amount of time would cause it to fall inwards to the room beyond) and I fell sideways into an empty room. I landed on my right side. After I got up and dusted myself off (who knows the last time this room was actually in use), I saw that the room wasn't entirely empty; there was a large mirror (which was anything but) in the middle of it. It had strange markings all around it (I'm not even sure if Gandalf could dechipher the symbols, that's how strange they seemed to me). What it was doing in the middle of an empty room in a seemingly abandoned section of Erebor was anybody's guess.

What happened next was even stranger: I started to hear voices in the room (even though I was the only one in it, or so I thought), or more accurately, a singular voice, a man's voice. At first, I thought that Thorin had managed to track me down, but there was something different about this voice; it seemed gentler, commanding yes, but lacked Thorin's heavy baritone. What it said was even more of a curiosity:

"Eyes on me..."

At first, I thought the voice was talking to me (I found out later that it wasn't), so I wondered how I could look upon this man if I couldn't even see him. The voice in the room began to speak again, in a more scolding tone this time:

"Don't give me that shit!" it said.

Now I knew it wasn't the voice of Thorin, since he would never use those words. I also noticed something else that I seemed to overlook the first time I heard this voice; where it was coming from. It seemed to be emanating from the large mirror like object in the middle of the room.

"That's not possible!" I tried to convince myself. "How could a mirror be talking to me?" Curious (or some might say foolishly, with what was about to happen, since this wouldn't be the first time my curiosity got me into trouble), I approached the mirror.

It was quite a bit larger than I first thought, almost large enough for a person as tall as an Elf to pass through (I'm only about 5'6, so I'm not that tall, being part dwarven). What I mistook for glass began to swirl around the closer I got to the portal and an image appeared. At first, I thought I was looking on the coastline or cliffs of somewhere on the Undying Lands, since I heard that Elves sometimes seemed to favor these kinds of places, being close to the sea, until I saw the large bars as if they were trying to keep something concealed within.

"Is this some kind of cage?" I wondered, as I looked upon the scene. If this was a cage of some kind, it was definitely large enough for whatever was concealed within to run around in. Above the cage (I couldn't tell how far, but it was quite a ways up) ran some kind of metal walkway with a man standing on it. I recognized the voice. It was the same voice I heard earlier in the room, but now it was calmer, apparently rewarding whatever resided in the cage below, since it seemed to be calling out an individual name:

"Charlie, that's what you get!" it said.

When I saw what jumped up to receive the award, I nearly stumbled backwards. It was quite terrifying and something I would hate to meet face to face. It was the man I was more interested in. It seemed he wasn't talking to me after all, but these animals, whatever they were, but they weren't dragons, I could tell that right away, since I somehow doubted these creatures breathed fire, or at least it didn't look like it.

The men of this world seemed to wear their hair differently than those in Middle-earth; it was shorter. In my world, only Hobbits have short hair (but since Hobbits have curly hair, much like my own, though mine is much longer, even their hair would be longer than this man's) with Elves and Dwarves having the longest (my own hair is slightly longer than Thorin's, so if I would be totally dwarven, I might be mistaken for a man). One thing they didn't seem to lack was attractiveness.

"Whoa, where did that thought come from?" I scolded myself. Sure, this man was attractive, but didn't a similar thing happen when I first set eyes upon Thorin all those years ago?

As I was contemplating this, I wasn't paying attention to how close I was getting to the portal, and like what happened when I was leaning against the door that led me into this room, got sucked into it, disappearing from the room, Erebor and Middle-earth itself.