Evie closed her eyes and felt the hot, dry wind whisper across her cheeks. It shook the leaves on the plants around her, creating a crackling, snapping symphony of abandoned possibilities. She was sitting in her garden, if one could still call it that, on the little bench she had placed at the center of her small sanctuary carved into the mountainside. Everything around her was barren and dry, lacking any promise of grace or renewal. She had been trying to find repose in a desolation; instead she gave in to a silent mourning of all the young life rendered helpless by the sun's cruel rays and the clouds' bitter lack of indemnity. The queen looked around her, taking in the innumerable corpses of her beloved plants – the wasteland which had once been the pride of her personal labors and her secret space of solitude for when she needed a moment to herself. There was little greenery inside the mountain fortress, and so Evie had always taken refuge in her garden, where it was just her and the living things she cared for. Now that they were no more, it was hard to imagine she had ever found peace here. Her little plot was now a wilderness, harsh and inhospitable to anything with a desire to thrive.

But it had not always been this way. It was not so very long ago that her garden had been green and flourishing, full of all sorts of good and growing things. Yet over the last few months, those precious spring months when everything was meant to bloom, nothing had gone as it was supposed to. The rain had not come, and without it the flowers did not blossom. Instead their buds wilted and died, leaving splintered husks in their place.

Evie gently tugged at the last leaf hanging on a small bush beside her after watching it shiver and quake as the wind rustled by. When she touched it, the crisp brown plant crumbled into dust between her fingertips. The hobbit sighed, lamenting the life which had once been so vibrant and hopeful yet now proved forsaken.

Evie's morbid musings were disturbed, quite abruptly, by the sound of approaching footsteps. The hobbit was surprised (usually no one dared disturb her while she was here unless it was concerning an urgent matter), and a little afraid. She would have been even more startled upon recognizing Dis had the dwarf not been wearing the largest grin Evie had ever seen.

"Evangeline!"

She cried, flinging her arms around the blonde's shoulders and holding her tight. The queen stood up so their contact would be less awkward and cautiously embraced her husband-sister, still too suspicious of whatever would have brought on such an unexpected visit to feel quite at ease.

"What is it?"

She asked softly, trying to rise to Dis' demeanor and fake a smile. The hobbit had simply not sustained her spirit since the rain had stopped, and she could not seem to regain the faithfulness and eagerness she had felt before, no matter how hard she tried. The drought was an unimaginable burden to Durin's Folk, and each day they waited for rain which never came, their situation became more and more dire. It was Evie's responsibility as queen to provide for her people and ensure their wellbeing, but even she could not make the rain come.

Despite all this tragedy, Dis was beaming. Her hands surrounded Evie's, squeezing them so tightly the hobbit wondered if they might bruise. The dwarven princess's sapphire eyes were larger than ever before and her face was flushed.

"Evangeline… Oh, my sweet sister – I am with child!"

She whispered it, as if it was too great a piece of news to be shouted. As though if she proclaimed this wonderful discovery too loudly some great deity might notice and decide she was feeling too much happiness for any one person to enjoy, striking her down on the spot. Evie smiled, her eyes filling almost immediately with sympathetic and happy tears.

"Oh, Dis! How wonderful!"

She hugged the brunette close, breathing unevenly into her shoulder. Somehow this news had struck Evie like a blow to her chest – her heart felt suddenly very hard, as if it had become a trembling, aching stone. She was more than a little woozy and had to lean on Dis for support, even though the dwarf likely did not notice in the force of her rapturous glee. Dis was positively euphoric, her pink cheeks glowing as she took a step back and met Evie's eyes.

"I was feeling strangely and when I went to Veneir to get some herbs to soothe me, he looked me over and decided that I must be carrying a child. Oh, I do hope it's a son. A little girl would be so very nice, of course, but could you imagine anything more fantastic than – !?"

She couldn't quite finish the thought, but she didn't have to. Evie smiled as largely as she could even while her stomach took a great turn in her belly. A son… An heir. Durin's heir. The child Evangeline could never bear, no matter how much she wanted to. Even if her body was suitable for carrying (half) dwarven children, no child of hers would ever become king. Evie was not a cold person, and there was very little cruelty in her, and yet at that moment she was more jealous of Dis than she had ever been of anyone. It stung her deeply, and she hated herself for it, but despite her best efforts to celebrate this new life growing within her husband-sister, instead all she felt was the barrenness of her own womb and the withering garden around her.

For jealousy is its own sort of seed. One that, once planted, grows into a fierce and malicious weed whose thorns prick anyone who dares get too close. And so a selfish, bitter rancor began to develop in Evie's heart, regardless of her best and most sincere intentions and her great affections for Dis. It grew and it ate away at her like a parasite, bound to leave little else but the reek of its cancer, having devoured her heart from the inside out.

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The dwarves were a brave people – they bowed their heads and struggled with this burden as they had every other, and although there were whispers of accusations bandied about in the deepest caverns of the mountain, none were ever given full voice. Some blamed the king – it was his marriage to an outsider which had brought this plague down upon them (while others argued that it had been far too long since their marriage for divine retribution and dismissed such blathering). Others thought it was a sign that war was coming, and that evil had taken a greater hold over Middle Earth and this was just a prelude to the horrors that were to come (although no one had heard much in the way of evil lurking anywhere near Eriador, and life had been so peaceful it was hard to imagine an attack of any sort upon the mountain). There were other rumors and claims, of course, but all had their suitable rebuttal and none were given enough credence to be labeled more than heresy whispered deep within the mines.

Thorin was a mighty king, but even he could not harness the elements and bend them to his will, however strong it was. He felt powerless to help his people, and as he watched their water supply dwindle day by day and witnessed the belts of every dwarf around him begin to tighten inch by inch, he waited in anguish for a deluge when all he received was a dry wind, mocking him with its hot, malicious touch.

He was sitting alone in his favorite chair, staring blankly into an empty fireplace. It was too hot for a fire, and for how dry and brittle everything had been lately he would almost be afraid to start one lest it catch and burn the whole mountain range to ash. They were having enough trouble down in the forges, where the fires had grown to be nearly uncontrollable due to the lack of humidity in the air. Thorin could feel it even here, in he and Evie's shared space (it was a room next to their bedroom which they used as a sitting room – a long time ago it had been Evie's personal bedroom when she had first come to Ered Luin). The air choked with its dry, oppressive heat. He loathed it, and the suffering it brought.

He did not know what to do, and so for the moment he did nothing. It was unlike him; a king with such a characteristically active, practical spirit, yet this drought had disturbed him to his very core. He did not know what to do to combat it, and he wracked his mind for any suggestion, no matter how small. As long as he could do something, anything, to help his people, at least then he would feel as though he deserved the name king. Sitting here would help no one, and yet he could not find a greater purpose for himself. His hands curved into fists, but when he opened them there was little he could do but stare down at his palms inadequately.

There was a soft knock on the door, and he bid his wife to enter. She had a particular sort of knock which he recognized instantly, like the soft tap of a bird, yet expressing all ranges of emotion without needing any words. Today she seemed hesitant and distressed, and so her husband had steeled himself for whatever the issue proved to be before Evie had even entered the room.

The hobbit approached quietly and sat down in the chair opposite the dwarf, her hands folding on her lap as her grey eyes traced his gaze back toward the fireplace. He did not look up at her. They had been married for twenty seven years, and now each could read the other like a book with just a glance. Thorin was on the edge of a temper, brooding by himself because he did not know what else to do, and there was nothing which angered him more than the thought of his own uselessness or the futility of his designs. Evie was doing her best to control her own emotions, bubbling ever so clearly just underneath the surface of her calm demeanor, and Thorin didn't even have to look at her to sense it in the air.

He knew what she was feeling – he had been given the same news she had received earlier that day, and although his heart had filled nearly to breaking at the thought of having an heir (for though it would be Fildur's son, be it male, it would be Durin's (and therefore Thorin's) heir), he had too much on his mind to give in to the full force of his joy for Dis. For his whole family. The birth of a child was a great moment in the life of a dwarf – their people had few females, so when they did select a mate and produce children it was always a grand event. For any mother there would be celebrations, but for Dis… All of Ered Luin would rejoice the coming of this child. It would be a chance to make merry despite their circumstances, to celebrate life in the face of the growing desert surrounding them. Yet how happy could they be, when this would be one more thirsty mouth which they had not the resources to satisfy? This came at Thorin like a challenge – he must end this drought or find a new supply of water before this child was born, and they could use its arrival as a sign of the prosperity to come. Yes, somehow he would do it. But how?

And then, of course, there was Evie. Sweet Evangeline, who had always wanted to have a child of her own and yet could not seem to. He knew she was happy for Dis, this hobbit who loved his sister so very much, but he also knew she must be torn apart inside by the idea of all her kin celebrating the life she could not create herself. It was a selfish thought, and she was ashamed of it, no doubt, but Thorin recognized it as he would the start of a storm brewing. Indeed, the horizon line of her brow quivered, suggesting the oncoming tempest. The dwarf watched its arrival from the corner of his eye, wishing (and not for the last time) that it was a true storm and not simply his wife's undulant emotions he saw coming.

"Why do things which once seemed so very simple now feel so very hard?"

She asked him softly, and there was a mourning in her voice which he felt echo in the pit of his stomach. The king sighed, tugging at his beard in a gesture which was uncommon to him.

"What would you have me say? A fish might one day dream of flying, but until he learns to accept that it is only in his power to swim he can never be truly happy…"

Evie looked at him, and there was something in her tempered grey eyes which struck him deeply.

"What if I am not a fish at all? And if I am, what does that make you? We are certainly not of the same sort, and yet we have somehow made a home together. I am not asking more than that, more than simply to make a life… I do not need to fly, I wish only for the ability to climb up so high that I can see the view all the same."

She mused, almost teasingly, and it was as if they both forgot for a moment the great pain which was hiding just behind that gentle smile. She was trying to humor him, their people, Dis… Everyone expected so much from her, Thorin realized, and perhaps all his wife needed was a little time to grieve for the life she may never have. Yet such things felt so senseless to him – why despair for a tomorrow which might never come when they were still surrounded by the upheaval of today? They could not know what the next day would bring, let alone the next year, or, even more unexpected, the next decade… He refused to give in to her melancholy and accept that this was fate and not fear.

"You must be the most ambitious hobbit to have ever lived."

"And the most ungrateful."

She added, sighing heavily. Thorin shook his head, leaning forward to kiss his wife on her flushed cheek.

"Evangeline, there is nothing stopping you from your climb. In fact, you have already begun it. Our people look to you during these hard times for guidance and for strength. You and I must set an example for Durin's Folk and prove to them that no matter what hardship befalls us, we will stand united against it. I know that you are hurting, but we must think of those amongst us who might be in even greater pain."

He was right, of course. Thorin Oakenshield, King at Ered Luin, was more perceptive than he seemed and although he did not always know the right things to say he almost always knew the right thing to do, and at this moment the right thing was to attend to their people in their time of need, and not to think of the couple's own trifling worries.

You wanted children, Evie chided herself, well you have hundreds who are waiting for your guidance and your aid… Hundreds of hungry mouths and, more pressingly, parched throats..

The hobbit nodded, her brow setting. Thorin was not sure if this was a positive or negative sign, but he trusted that she was thinking on his words all the same. She reached out and placed her petite hand in his much larger one, holding it with tender humility.

"Well then…" She began, her smile becoming a little truer. "It looks like we have quite a lot of work to do."

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Author's Note: I'm so sorry for the huge break since the last chapter was posted! Work has been crazy and I went to Comic-Con and all sorts of insane things! But I am trying to write more consistently again and with the new movie coming up soon it shouldn't be hard to get inspired! You may have noticed that there was a very big time jump in this chapter… We're moving things along now and it took me a little while to get a good sense of what Evie and Thorin were going to be like a little older than when we left them last. We're not meeting them again in the happiest of times, but when has anything in Middle Earth been easy?

In any case, I really hope you're still enjoying the story and I would absolutely love to hear any thoughts! Your comments inspire me more than you know, and sometimes they can have quite an effect on the story in different ways!

Thank you so much for reading! Xoxo!