Disclaimer : I do not own any recognizable characters. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are the intellectual property of Tolkien.

Chapter One : Call Me Aulë

Amelia Jay Lucas, 69, passed quietly in her sleep in her Rogers, Arkansas home Friday night after a decade long battle with lung cancer. She died surrounded by loving family and friends. An avid philanthropist, Amelia was well known for giving tirelessly of herself to help those in need. She was preceded in death by both parents, Marie Blakesly and Earl Lucas, and an older sister, Annabeth Taylor, nee-Lucas. Amelia never married. However, she is survived by 8 children, all of whom she adopted from the Arkansas Foster Care system, her 18 grandchildren, and 7 great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to the THRIVE Foster Family Foundation, an organization that Amelia remained passionate about throughout her life.

—-

Mia had long wondered what would be waiting for her in the afterlife. Ten years of off and on chemo and radiation treatments had given her plenty of time to contemplate her death. In the end, it had come as she would have wanted it to. She hadn't felt a thing. That had been all she'd dreamed of. An end to the pain. Pain she'd brought upon herself with a two pack a day habit, she thought sardonically.

The bad thing, she thought, sitting here surrounded by white shores bathed in bright light, was that all she could think about was how badly she wanted a cigarette.

It wasn't the nicotine. She knew the effects of nicotine withdrawal, and that apparently hadn't followed her into the afterlife. But she'd been sitting here for ages, staring at the waves rolling in, wondering what she was supposed to be doing. A smoke would have given her something to do with her hands, at least. Mia leaned back on her elbows and lifted her face to the breeze. It was nice here. The kind of place she could see herself staying forever, if it wasn't so, well…

"Boring?" Amelia flinched, snapping her eyes open to to glare, askance, at the figure now seated to her left.

She had to crane her neck to see his face. She imagined that if they were both standing, he would be at least three feet taller than her. His face was wide to complement his broad shoulders and hips. And he was covered in hair everywhere she could see, from the elbow length braids that graced the top of his head and his chin, to the thick, curly ringlets on his arms and what she could see of his chest and lower legs. His beard twitched as he cut his eyes down and to the right, meeting her gaze. His eyes were mischievous. Like she was a child he was playing a prank on, and he was waiting for her to realize just how gullible she'd been to believe the lie.

Mia turned to face the waves again, unconsciously mirroring her neighbors position, resting her elbows on her knees as she brought them up to her chest. Her shoulders relaxed. She was dead. What could he possibly do to hurt her?

"Are you, though?" His voice interrupted again.

"Am I what?"

"Dead." She swore he was laughing at her. He wasn't making any noise, but his beard kept jumping erratically with his twitching cheeks. She raised an eyebrow in question, mouth hanging open slightly at the sight before her. He kind of looked like she'd always imagined Hagrid would.

"Who are you?"

At this he grinned and turned to face her excitedly, like that was exactly the question he'd been waiting for. Mia wished he'd moved a bit slower. His massive thigh shifting so quickly had resulted in a spray of sand directly to her open mouth.

"Sorry, honey." He chuckled as she frantically spat onto the ground in front of her. "I wanted to meet you in a nice, warm cavern. With a roaring fire and warm couch to snuggle down into. Somewhere comfortable and safe. My wife insisted on a location that would seem more realistic after your death." He laughed again as he handed her a waterskin and a clean, white handkerchief from inside his vest. "White shores." He said it like it was a joke and eyed her speculatively. "Though, judging by your thoughts on my appearance, perhaps a train station would have been better?"

White shores. Of course.

Gandalf.

She sniggered. The tone of voice her thoughts had taken was just as exasperated as Bilbo's had been when the dwarves showed up at his door in the movie.

"Should I be looking forward to a far, green country under a swift sunrise then?" She paused to take a swig from the skin, swishing the water around in her mouth and gargling before she spat it out again and quirked a smile in his direction. "Or am I boarding a train to the next great adventure?"

"I'm glad to hear you enjoyed our stories so much, gaihith." He took the handkerchief from her hand and used it to brush more sand from her cheek, unperturbed when she smacked his hand away.

"Your stories?"

"But of course."

"Because you inspired the authors? Because you're God?" She'd taken a leap with that one. He didn't feel like how she'd thought God would. But there was something omniscient and omnipotent about the always present quirk of his lips.

"Not hardly." He scoffed and lowered his head in the semblance of a bow. "You may call me Aulë, dear one."

Admittedly underwhelmed, Mia shook her head. "Of course it's really that simple. Everyone was wrong, weren't they? No religion was right after all. Do we all just drift off into a dream world after we die? One of our choosing? I'm seeing you because Tolkien was my favorite author, aren't I?"

"You are not dead, gaihith." His voice was gentle and consolatory. It took her back to her twenties, and doctor's offices, and soft eyes paired with quiet voices telling her she'd never bear her own child. She shied away from that voice as a matter of course. She had no interest in pity.

"So I haven't passed yet, and this is just the drugs paying havoc on my mind." She huffed. "If I'd known that, I would have conjured up a cigarette an hour ago." She turned her face away from him and concentrated on what she wanted, forehead scrunching as she waited for her pack and a lighter to appear in her hand.

A finger reached around to smooth the creases of her forehead before lowering to take her chin and turn her back toward him. She would have resisted, but the smell of burning tobacco was coming from that direction. In the half-minute she'd been turned away, he'd produced a pipe full of tobacco and lit it. He offered it to her now.

"You smoke. I talk. You listen." Well, a pipe was better than nothing. She took it and settled back, wiggling deeper into the sand to give her lower back something to rest on.

Heavy eyes settled on her face for a long moment. Mia noticed he wasn't smiling anymore, this being who claimed to be Mahal. It was foolish to believe he really was one of the Ainur. But if that's what her mind chose to conjure in her hour of need, she wasn't going to sit here and argue with herself. She took an experimental draw of the pipe and closed her eyes in ecstasy. It reminded her of rum. Deep. Spicy. And it made her throat burn in a pleasant way.

When his voice came, it was contemplative.

"What if I told you, gaihith, that it was a dream? The stories. The buildings. The men and women you worked with. That grubby little boy who bit you on the ear in the first grade. It was all a dream, perfectly designed to keep you happy and occupied. Designed to let you grow up and have a full and worthwhile life. While, in reality, you slept. For sixty-nine years, you slept. Dreaming dreams of baseball, and high school prom, and college. Dreams of a life full of service to others. Of saving children." He continued to stare hard at her face, watching as she blew perfectly formed smoke rings, one after another.

"Dreaming was I? Ok. I'll bite. And, pray tell, what was my body doing while I was in this dream?"

"Sleeping of course." The look he gave her was very dry. But Mia had raised eight children on her own, and simply raised a brow in return. He must have liked her moxy, because the mirthful beard twitch returned, and he rolled his eyes and leaned forward with a sigh.

"Seventy years ago, there was a dwarrowdam named Dogrlia. She was a resident of the Iron Hills. A young journeyman silversmith who excelled in her craft and was well loved by her family. She was only seventy-five when a representative of the royal family arrived in her home, carrying a call to arms. Barely an adult. But the moment of their meeting was written in the Great Song millennia before her birth. And their joining was passionate and all consuming, as most are among the Dwarrow." The beard twitch had stopped by this point, and his eyes, still boring into her, were incredibly sorrowful. "They only had the one night together. But when he left her the next morn, it was with a marriage braid in her hair and a great treasure planted in her womb."

Mia tapped the ashes of the pipe out on her palm and blew a puff of air through the stem to clear out any debris. Knocked up on the first shot. Wasn't that lucky? She'd wished all her life to be that woman. The one whose body didn't betray her.

"Lucky girl." Was all she said.

"No, gaihith. She really wasn't." He murmured. "Her husband was lost in battle not two months later, along with her father and brother. Dogrlia fought the grief of losing her one, determined to live for the child inside of her. Her own mother, however, was not as strong, and succumbed to grief less than a month later. Dogrlia was left alone, as many were after the Battle of Azanulbizar."

"Wait. I know this one. It was in the story. That's the battle where Thror was killed, and Thorin fought Azog, right? Or were the books just stories to entertain?"

"No, not just to entertain." He answered. "We thought if it was displayed in an entertaining medium, we could use the opportunity to teach you at least some about your people."

Her disbelief was evident in the incredulousness of her stare. "My people?"

With a smile, he reached out and tapped her on the nose like a child. "We're getting ahead of ourselves. Yes, that is the battle to which I'm referring." He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, holding himself close as if for comfort. It was strange to see such a familiar gesture in a being so large and otherworldly. His eyes seemed far away now, lost in memory. "The number of my children I welcomed into my halls that day was beyond count, but I remember Dogrlia's young mate well. He begged to return to her, and thrashed in his grandfather's arms when he was told he couldn't. He cursed my name for giving him his One on the eve of battle, just to rip him away from her. I don't blame the lad. He knew the pain his mate was likely to be experiencing, and was nearly mad at the thought of her suffering so."

"Well, it was pretty irresponsible if you think about it." Amelia couldn't imagine doing such a thing on the eve of war. Creating a child and then leaving it like that. She'd seen plenty of abandoned children through her work with the Thrive Foundation, but the ones who were orphaned by their parents carelessness always struck her as particularly devastating. They'd had parents who loved them. Parents who wanted them. And parents who condemned them to lives of loneliness due to their own incompetency.

"Ah, child. You have not yet felt the pull of your One. You will understand one day how impossible it would have been for him to walk away from his."

"So the myth is true, then? Dwarves have Ones? The one person who makes them whole? Love of their life? Other half of their soul? All that nonsense?" He would have to forgive the slight sarcasm in her voice. Mia had never believed in soulmates.

"You will see." He only answered. "That is not part of what I am here to discuss with you and our time grows short. Now, where was I?"

"Dogrlia was alone."

"Right. Dogrlia was alone after the death of her mother. Alone and three months in to her pregnancy, she made the only decision that made any sense to her. Packing up her tools and most beloved possessions, she joined a caravan headed for Ered Luin, where her husbands family dwelt. She would appeal to his older brother to care for her and her child, as Dwarrow tradition dictated he should."

She scoffed. "Husband not even cold in the ground and she headed off to marry his brother?"

"Not marry, child. She was his brother's wife. By Dwarrow law, she was his sister and he had an obligation to care for her. But that doesn't matter. Because Dogrlia never made it to Ered Luin." She didn't interrupt to ask what happened. Her last interruption had hardened his voice and sharpened his eyes. In that moment, she'd felt very very small.

A finger at her chin lifted her eyes to his, a gaze that was not broken as he finished his story. "Amelia, there are forces in this world that would seek to disrupt the Great Song as it is written. Forces that would seek to tear families asunder and shape great leaders to be hard, hard males. The caravan master had chosen the safest road, considering the fact that there was a pregnant dam in their midst. One who, by that point, was due to give birth at any time. But as the caravan passed through the Gap of Rohan, south of Isengard, the ground was weakened and an underground cave collapsed. Dogrlia was the only one who fell that day. Down into an underground river that carried her even deeper, until she washed out into a cathedral deep in the southern part of the Misty Mountains. Dogrlia never left that cavern, my dear. She lived just long enough to give birth to her bairn, Just long enough to give birth to you."

And there it was. The declaration she'd been halfway expecting and halfway dreading since the beginning of their conversation. Staring into his eyes, Mia began to believe that maybe this wasn't a figment of her imagination after all.

She wasn't that creative.

She reached up and firmly removed his grip from her chin, before rising to her feet and walking away. She needed a moment. Just a moment.

She'd had a foster child with severe anxiety once, and she could almost imagine she was talking to little Carol again as she replayed the mantra in her head. Find five things you can feel. Just find five things. The sand was warm beneath her feet. The breeze cool on her face. The closer she got to the water, the firmer the ground got.

Deep breath in.

She could feel the air moving into her lungs, without the pain that she'd become accustomed to over the last decade.

Deep breath out.

She unclenched her fists, allowing the pain her nails had left in her palm to be the fifth sensation she focused on. Still facing the water, Mia addressed the Ainur. "You're saying I'm a dwarf. And that this Dogrlia was my mother. And she gave birth to me in a cave in the Misty Mountains after some kind of evil force tried, and succeeded, in killing her."

"Yes." One word, spoken evenly and plainly. That was all he said.

"And what, that evil put me in a sleep for sixty-nine years?" She scoffed, still focusing on the waves in front of her. "Why not just kill me?"

"Amelia, whatever force it was that ripped the ground from beneath your mother's feet did not touch you. You were left in that cave to die, just as your mother was."

Her brow furrowed in confusion and she turned to face him again. "But then how…"

"Us." He interrupted, rising to his feet and coming to stand in front of her. She had been right earlier. He had a good three feet on her. At least. "We are limited in the kind of assistance that we can provide, Amelia. I could not march into that cave and save you. Nor could my wife. But the dissonance in the song could not be allowed to stand. You were meant to live, and so live you did. We placed you into that sleep. We gave you your dreams. We taught you the best way that we could, until our agents could find you."

Here, he frowned and placed a hand on the back of her head, thumb running over her scalp in a soothing manner. Mia wanted to protest the treatment. She was an old lady, for Christ's sake. But her heart felt like it was going off the rails, and his fingers moving through her hair felt so damn soothing.

"I am sorry, gaihith, that we could not give you the one gift you craved so deeply. But your body was still your body, whether you were asleep or not. They were one and the same. Your body in your dreams could not go through a pregnancy that your true body was not also a party to." He let out a slow, sorrowful breath. "As I said, we were limited."

Amelia ignored the tears gathering in her eyes as she looked up at him. "You're saying my fertility issues will be solved now, when I go back to my body?" She paused, suddenly unsure. "I am going back to my body, right? That's the whole point of this conversation?"

He chuckled, letting go of the back of her head and chucking her under the chin. "Yes, Amelia. Nienna's agent, Olorin, has found you at last. After years of searching, your body has been recovered from it's prison and you will be able to return." He settled his hand on her cheek and smiled down at her, eyes having once again regained their mischievous spark. "You'll be glad to know that Dwarrow live quite long lives. At sixty-nine, you are still a young adult. Not even of age yet for another seven months, I believe. You'll have a long life ahead of you."

He bent down and laid a kiss upon her brow, before turning to walk away.

Reaching out, she dared to grab his arm before he left, stopping him.

She had one more question for him, after all.

At his quirked eyebrow, she started "My father…."

"Ah." He nodded. "We never cleared that one up did we?"

"No." She agreed. "You didn't."

He chuckled.

"My dear Amelia, his name was Frerin."