Middle-earth, and all who dwell within it, belongs to Tolkien. I am grateful to him for growing this beautiful garden in which our imaginations can play. Please review!

Betta had insisted that she be woken for her fair turn at watch, but she was not surprised that the dwarves let her sleep. When she did wake, daylight was shining through the seams of the shelter and morning birds were chirping outside. The fire had died down to glowing embers, but the hut was still warm and one of the brothers – she could not guess which – had taken down her cloak and laid it over her as a blanket.

She sat up, pulling the cloak around and fastening it. There was no sign of Kili, but she saw Fili still bundled up and snoring, only his long nose poking out through the many folds of his hood and blankets. She took up her knife from where it lay beside him and admired the sharpness of the blade; he had done a good job on it.

Betta left the shelter. In the calm after the storm, the morning was quiet and beautiful. The black branches of the trees were draped with white snow, and the sky shone clear and blue where it peeked through from above. The ponies stood behind the shelter, swishing their tails and searching the ground for the grass between lumps of snow.

Her arm ached, but she felt refreshed, and for the first time she looked forward to that morning's ride, even if she did wish that it was through warmer lands.

The snow inside the shelter had almost all been melted away by their fire, but outside there were still several inches, and she could see the tracks from Kili's boots, both fresh and those from last night. She followed them around the shelter until, looking up, she found him standing atop a low ridge that overlooked their hollow. His back was to her, and he was looking up at the stone that they had sheltered under. It was larger than it had seemed at night and under snow, nearly fifteen feet it rose above the ridge; and, in the clear light of day, she could see plainly that it was no natural boulder that they had found.

Upon the ridge, Kili heard footsteps and looked back over his shoulder. He had expected Fili to wake first, and when he saw that it was Betta, he smiled. For all of his brother's talk that the injured woman was the one who needed rest, it was the hearty, elder Dwarf who had slept in that morning. Kili gestured for her to join him up on the ridge. He didn't care who shared in his discovery first, so long as he could be the one to take credit for the finding.

It was a steep climb up the southern slope, and Betta could not use her arm. Kili pulled her up the last few steps.

"You did not wake me for my turn at watch," she said.

He did not answer. "Look," he said, and pointed up at the stone.

Betta looked. There, along the sheer western side of the stone, nearly hidden under years of accumulated dirt and wear, she could see marks that had been cut into the rock with ancient tools. It was too crude to be Dwarf-work, but the hard strokes were not the delicate design of the Elves, either. The stone was not masonry; at least, it was not of any craft that she recognized. She guessed that it had originally been a natural formation that was later shaped by human hands.

"A Dwarf would know stonework better than I," Betta said. "What does it look like to you?"

Kili reached up high, but he could not touch the cuttings. They were far up on the stone, near to the broken heights. "It is old," he said, "and like nothing that I have seen before. I would guess that it is some primitive work of Men from long ago. As to the cuttings, those are not as old as the shaping of the stone, but reading the letters is your job here. I cannot speak to what they say.

"I have walked all around this stone and seen the shape of it. I believe that it is the remains of a cornerstone, to a castle or… perhaps a tower?"

"You say my job is to read the letters, but there is no more than one or two that I can make out," she said. "It is the same writing that is on our map…"

"And what does your map say, then?" he asked.

She always carried the pages folded in leather close to her skin. She took them out now and turned over the page that had marked on it the tower they looked for. Holding it up to compare the writing, Betta looked at the page, but Kili looked at her. The marks on the map meant nothing to him.

"The letters on the wall, I believe, are… nk… r…," she said. "And the tower on the map is called Ankor. Unless Dwarves can climb sheer stone to clear away the debris, I cannot say for certain, but…" She said in disbelief, "By chance, we have come to the very place."

Kili shook his head. "I think that there is more than chance in this unlooked for meeting," he said, looking up at the stone again

"We would have passed it in the storm. We did pass it, and only this," she gestured to her bandaged arm, "and my own clumsiness brought us here at all. If that is not chance, then I do not know the meaning of the word."

"Perhaps, but this was once the land of your people, was it not? Myself, I am not surprised that the very wind and snow would speak to you and bring you to your home. I have seen you speak to trees before."

"But they have never spoken back to me," she said.

Kili shrugged. "My brother does not believe in chance or the omens of dream and sky, but I am not so certain." He frowned and ran his fingers over the cold stone wall. He thought of the ghosts of the Men who had shaped the stone, and he thought of the ghosts that haunted Thorin, driving him on towards Erebor.

"If it is indeed time to return to the Mountain, it will be more than chance that brings us there," he said quietly to himself.

"What Mountain is that?" Betta asked. She was surprised to hear words of omen coming from the younger brother, or from either brother in fact. But the journey was changing them. She wondered if it had changed her as well.

"It is nothing," Kili said quickly. "We should go back. Fili wanted to sleep late, but he will not forgive us if we waste a morning because of him."

They made their way back down into the hollow, with Kili helping Betta down the steep slope. Fili was awake when they returned, and grumbling that they had not woken him sooner. They ate a meager breakfast that morning, saving their rations for colder days, and then the dwarves packed up the shelter while Betta stood with the ponies and felt useless.

Before they rode out, Fili insisted on looking all around the stone. He did not see anything more than Kili, but both brothers agreed that it was most likely the southwest corner watchtower of an old guard wall. It bore the same cuttings that Fili had seen on the stone hut, and he guessed that the main body of the wall would have also been built of wood and so would have rotted away. There should be three more cornerstones on the plains, but they did not need to look for them.

They led their ponies out of the trees and onto the plains. The sun was rising bright in the cloudless sky and would melt some of the snow away, but not all. The dwarves talked cheerfully as they rode along, and Fili felt that their journey had taken a turn for the better. He kept a careful eye on Betta, determined not to let her fall behind again, but that did not mean that he missed the knowing winks that Kili tossed his way. Whatever dark mood had haunted his brother's thoughts last night seemed to have been banished by the morning light.

.

The northernmost hills of Emyn Uial had faded away behind them, but that was not the end of their reach. Twenty miles further north, the same rocks that had stretched upwards toward the sky now sank below the earth creating a span of treacherous ground cut through with ravine and shallow valleys, steep drops and even steeper climbs out of them. Old stories told that the delves in the earth had been made by the cracking cold of Utumno itself, but there had been more than one dark lord to dwelt in the north since His overthrow, and not all barren lands were of His making.

Whatever its origin, the stretch of tortured land was only a few leagues wide and little more than twice that long, but to navigate those gorges and gullies, canyons and chasms, was a fool's errand, and it would have taken them out of their way – even if they had known for certain which way that was.

After they passed the remains of Ankor, Fili led them north until they were in sight of the rocky valleys, then he turned them east to skirt the southern edge of the rent plains. They would turn northeast again once they passed them.

In the cheerful light of day, Fili was confident that he could lead their small company through the softly rolling hills of northern Eriador, even though he had only dim memories of his journey there with Gloin many years ago. His mind was not troubled with that leg of their journey. What worried him was that they were fast approaching lands that had once been under the sway of the dark powers and, though there had been no reports of them in recent years, if there were any part of the western lands were orcs could dwell in number, it was in the haunted north at the fallen fortress of Carn Dum.

Fili frowned as he looked ahead, counting their strength against an unseen multitude of orcs. Two Dwarves and a one-armed woman would not last long if it came to that.

Kili was untroubled by thoughts of orcs or of ghosts. Although, now and again, his thoughts were darkened by the wind that howled in his hears, his eyes turned less to the north and more often to the east where, beyond sight and hidden behind the easternmost mountains of Angmar, was the desolate Dwarf-kingdom of old, Mount Gundabad, that was a holy name and the root of all the other, grander tales of the Dwarves of Durin.

Abandoned since the second sacking when the Dwarves had cleansed it of the foul orcs that had stolen it, Kili had not thought much on that lost kingdom. In his youth, he had been more interested in tales of the Lonely Mountain of Erebor or of the more famous chasms of Kazad-dum. It was on the threshold of the Dimrill Dale, in Azanulbizar, that Thorin had earned his great name Oakenshield, and that Dain had been called Ironfoot. Though the battles that had come before it had been important, the history behind them belonged to old Dwarves with their gray beards and not to the young.

Now that they traveled nearer to the northern kingdom, Kili wondered what grand halls had been carved there, before the orcs had ruined them. Were they huge and filled with light, as had been the halls of Kazad-dum? Did they once echo with the music of falling hammers and falling water as in Nogrod when its stone fountains still sang in the deeps? What mines of gold and precious stone were delved beneath the earth before they were filled-in with the filth of foul creatures?

There was no hidden treasure in Mount Gundabad; the orcs had plundered it long ago.

And as his thoughts drew back into the ancient tales, Kili remembered how the seven Fathers of the Dwarves had been laid to sleep each in his own mountain and each with his own partner to lie beside him. All save Durin Deathless who had been laid in Gundabad alone, and he had woken alone and explored the misty peaks of Hithaeglir, alone. Kili thought of Thorin, who was a descendant of Durin, pacing alone in the cold hall at Ered Luin. And finally, not knowing why, Kili looked at his brother, at Fili who was so much like his uncle in mind but not in heart. At least Fili would not be alone, when he had his brother beside him.

Betta knew nothing of Mount Gundabad or of the great and bloody history of that holy city. The dwarves had not mentioned it on their journey, and the northern mountains meant as little to her as the southern coasts did to Kili who stared at her blankly when she spoke of the Sea. She gave only a passing thought to the fortress of Carn Dum, for her thoughts were on a different land in the north, on the haunted plains before the mountains of Angmar. Their path would wind east around the stone valleys and then turn north to the dry riverbed and bridge that Fili knew.

After the bridge, it would be Betta's turn once more to guide them on the winding road, and she felt a shadow on her heart as she thought of it. She knew her map better than the two dwarves she traveled with, and she had not yet told them that it drew up very near to the haunted realm of the Witch-king, which was a dark land in any tale. She had not told the dwarves that, although their map led them to the boarders of Angmar, the path stopped there and seemed to go no farther.

Well, I hate to break the news, but with Spring here now, like any good Hobbit, I will be spending much more time in my garden. Until the earth is turned and the seeds planted, I may not be able to make my twice-a-week schedule. You'll still get once-a-week chapter updates, and with luck and good weather, we'll be back on track by the end of the month.

Wishing you lots of sunshine and soft morning rain,

-Paint