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 as much practice in torch-making as any wanderer in the west, and she had watched carefully the techniques that the dwarves used as well. She had no difficulty in fashioning a light for herself – and two to spare - with cloth cut from the sling around her shoulder and a thick, damp branch. She had carried a very small pot of oil wrapped up in her pack that she had bought with the last of her coins beneath Ered Luin, and although she regretted using the meager supply to explore for pleasure and not for survival, she did not trust grease from their meat to hold a flame for as long as she would need it.
With her crutch under her left arm, Betta was forced to hold the torch in her right, and her shoulder protested the treatment, but it was well past time that the arm should have healed and she ignored the pain as she hobbled out of the cave. For a brief moment, she wondered whether she should leave some message for the dwarves, but decided that it would serve them right to suffer a little worry if they thought that they could leave her trapped at home while they moved freely about. She took orders from no man, dwarf of otherwise.
Walking out into the darkness with only her little torch, Betta saw that the cavern was much larger than she had guessed. The bright daylight that filtered in through the ice cave glowed around the mouth of the cavern and onto the floor, but it lit only a small portion of the massive space and made strange shapes out of the distant hills of troll hoard.
There was time enough to explore the sunlit paths of the upper cavern after her torches burned out; for now, Betta turned her sights on the farthest wall on the other side of the troll's hoard. The fast flowing, cold water might have scared her away, but she had little to fear from broken stone and iron.
With her torch to light the way, she quickly found entrance into one of the many paths that wandered in and out of the scattered piles. If there were any system of direction in that small labyrinth of winding ways, she could not see it. There were hills of stone, rivers of iron rods, swamps of foul waste and rotted cloth. Her path at first took her down toward the back of the cavern, and she was tempted to climb over the debris in search of another, but almost as soon as she began to look for safe passage, the path curved upwards again and wound steadily up and to the left, taking her toward the far wall where she wished to go.
Although there were many bits of broken stone, and she was tempted to search them all for marks similar to the ones on her map, it was the iron work that caught her eye. There were plain, straight rods, rusted red and orange even without the warm light of her torch upon them; and there were broken shields and the heads of great hammers, the remnant of lost wars long ago; but, as she crouched down and looked closer, there were also more delicate pieces so rusted through that they crumbled when she tried to free them from the tangle of other metal. Those pieces reminded her of the finer works that the blacksmiths in Gondor would make to decorate wagon wheels and horse harnesses. Here and there, she caught the glimpse of finer things: a carved, wooden bowl broken in two; scattered rings that might have been silver or only silver in color but were certainly meant to be decorative and not of chain mail.
Even as she searched the piles, Betta limped steadily toward the far wall. She did not want to waste all her light on the hoard, and she was determined to have a look at the cavern itself before she must give up the search and make her way back to the lighted top of the cavern.
Leaving the hoard finally, and with more than a little reluctance, Betta found herself on the eastern side of the cave. She shone her light upon the wall and looked up and up and up into darkness, marveling at the height of their chosen shelter. There were more caves here than on the other side, but the walls had not been polished smooth and there was more fallen stone on the ground. Betta poked her head into a few of the caves but found little to interest her there.
That is not to say that the caves were not strange. The floors were flat and sandy, the walls unusually rounded, but Betta did not know stone the way that a dwarf would. She had made her camps under trees and not in caves; she did not know that there was nothing natural about the way these had formed. In one of the deeper caves, she saw a flattened shelf cut almost cliff-like from the back and thought it oddly smoothed. It never occurred to her that the broken stone she had seen in other caves had also been cut smooth but had fallen in over time. She passed by the caves, never guessing that Fili had looked into them as well and that he knew exactly what was there: shelves shaped by human hands.
The cavern floor under her feet had begun to slop downwards again, and she could hear the sound of rushing water in the distance. Betta's heart beat quick as she thought of falling into those icy waves, but she leaned her weight upon the crutch that Kili had made for her and trusted that it would hold her.
One more cave, she told herself, and then she would go back.
The next cave was farther from its neighbor than any of the others that had come before, and its mouth was much larger. When she shone her light into it, she could not see the back of it. "A tunnel?" she said softly and stepped over the threshold. She stood staring down into the darkness that seemed to beckon her onwards to explore.
She walked down a few more yards, always with the dark shadows ahead of her. Looking back, she could still see the mouth of the cave, but she hesitated. She knew neither stone nor stonework; her only experience with either had been walking over it or climbing upon it, but even she could not deny that this tunnel appeared to have been cut. The roof was high overhead, more than twice her height, and if she had been able to stretch out her arms on either side, she could not have touched both walls. Still, it was not large enough to fit a full-grown troll. Were there smaller creatures that lived with the old sentinel and still patrolled these passages?
And then she began to wonder, Fili had Kili had explored the cavern. How could they have missed a tunnel as large as this one? Had they missed it?
"If they saw it and did not tell you, it was only because they did not want you to worry," she told herself, but her heart was troubled. Looking up, she saw that her torch was about to burn out; looking down, she knew that she had only one left. She remembered the blackness of their own cave that morning and wondered whether she was wise to go on, but the tunnel was too strange and too providently placed to be ignored.
She lit her last torch in the light of the other and then left the failing light behind her. She pressed on, limping slowly down, down into the shadows. Even with the lingering light of the torch that she had left behind, when Betta looked back, she could not see the mouth of the tunnel.
On either side of her, the stone was scraped and polished in places, smooth enough to reflect the shining firelight. Parts of the roof had been knocked down and she had to step carefully around the fallen stone. Perhaps the troll had been able to fit his mountainous body down here. She knew that even the largest rat in the barn could squeeze through the smallest hole in a farmhouse wall if he thought there was food to find.
Betta's crutch bit into the rough, stone floor and helped her to shuffle along, but she could feel her sore legs protesting the long walk that she had already taken to get here. Her shoulder had ached from the start, but now she began to feel a sharp pain under the muscle, reminding her that she was not yet recovered. Shadows stretched before her, front and back, and even darkened the roof of the passage over her head. Her world was a few feet of light all around her, and she felt cut off and alone from all else, buried under miles of stone. She should turn back… but there was a bend in the passage only a few yards ahead. At least, she must see what lay beyond the bend, and then to go back to the loneliness of the cave. What was a few more yards, anyway?
And then she felt it, a tremor in the stone under her feet. The walls seemed to shudder around her, groaning and shifting as if the mountain were an old man turning in his sleep. From somewhere far beneath her feet, she heard a sound that she could not describe, like a strong wind blowing over an empty field where there were no leaves to rustle and no grass to whisper. It made a hollow sound, rising up from below and rushing towards her.
Panic finally gripped her and no adventurer's spirit could restrain her. She turned and fled back up the passage as quickly as her injured legs could carry her, but it was not fast enough. The strange sound caught up to her, washed over her and knocked her down. A great gust of foul-smelling air blasted through the passage above her head as if it had been shot out of a canon.
Betta fell and struck her head. Her world went dark and for a long time she lay, convinced that the blow had blinded her. Slowly, into her dark thoughts, she caught the scent of smoke and looked up. A few feet away from her outstretched hand – or, where she guessed that her outstretched hand must lay – she saw the last glowing embers of burning linen as the light from her torch dwindled and went out.
The darkness was complete, darker even than it had been in the cave when Kili woke her that morning. Then, at least, she had still had the glow of the coals from their fire. And there had been Kili's voice to comfort her. Now, she lay alone and in total dark, unable to see her hand before her face. She had never known that darkness could have weight, but here it was a physical oppression bearing down on her as heavy as the mountain above her head. Her legs ached and her shoulder throbbed, but she welcomed the pain. Without it, she could not have known whether her limbs were still attached to her body.
She felt for her crutch and found it not far from where she had fallen. With it, she dragged herself to the side, reaching out blindly, not knowing what she would find there.
Cold stone met her fingertips, and she sighed with relief, then sat cowering against the wall. The floor of the passage had a gentle slope, and so she knew which way was the mouth of the tunnel, but it was a long time before she felt strong enough to move again. All around her, the stone continued to groan, and from the lowest end of the passage, she could still hear the sound of wind and something else. It was dripping water, the chattering of insects, the flapping of wings and other things that she could not name.
It took all her will to prevent the panic welling up in her throat to emerge and send her screaming into an even deeper and more lasting dark, but she held on, swallowing her fear and clinging to her sanity. The dwarves lived in mountains deeper than this; she must be at least as brave as them.
Using her crutch to feel her way, Betta turned and crawled slowly forward. She could not remember how far she had gone along the passage, but it was many yards at least before she would see the fading light of the falling sun filtered through the mouth of the cavern. As she crawled, she muttered to herself, calling herself a fool and many other things besides, but still she crawled on and eventually the sound behind her was drowned out by the sound of calling voices ahead. Fili and Kili were searching for her; had she really been gone that long from the cave?
The darkness of the tunnel still choked her, and she could not call out to them, but she crawled faster and faster as her shoulder throbbed and her hands scraped over the rough stone. There, beyond the shadows, was a faint light. She saw the round mouth of the tunnel ahead of her and the brighter dark that promised daylight. She could hear the sound of the dwarves coming nearer and, not wanting them to find her cowering on the floor, Betta braced herself against the wall and with a grunt of pain and the crutch to help her, she hefted herself onto her feet.
Walking then on shaking legs, she stepped out of the passage and into the cavern, which might have been as bright as day after the dark that she had dwelt in for so long.
Kili stood only a dozen yards away and was searching the upper caves with his torch. Betta blinked her eyes at the brightness of that light. She could hear Fili's voice calling her name from somewhere down near the stream.
"Betta!" Kili shouted, moving on to the next cave. His torchlight had not yet touched her.
Looking back, she saw that she still stood within the mouth of the tunnel, and she stepped away, hurrying to the side and out of sight of anything that might be looking up at her from below. "I am here," she said, but barely that. Her throat was dry and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. Her voice sounded hoarse in her own ears.
Kili heard her and spun around. "Betta!" he cried, hurrying towards her. "What in Durin's name were you thinking, wandering without a light?"
"I had a light," she said, but her voice was still weak and Kili did not hear her. He had turned away and called down to the back of the cavern where his brother still searched. "She is here, Fili," he shouted. "I found her!"
"Hush!" Betta hissed, taking hold of his arm. Kili looked down at her in surprise. "There is something in there," she said, pointing back toward the tunnel. "I heard something moving down there."
In the red torchlight, she could not see the blood drain from Kili's face as he remembered the strange sounds that had emanated from the western tunnels. He pulled her close and held out his light, but he could not see past the thick shadows of the tunnel to what dangers might lay waiting for them.
You simply cannot recreate the feeling of standing in a cave half a mile underground... and then they turn the lights out. If you've never done it, you should. It's a rush! Darkness really does have weight when you know that you might never get out of it...
-Paint