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[ xxxvi ]
In the year TA 2941, about a week earlier than expected, you die.
Of course you fucking die.
[ vii ]
Thorin is in the mountain when Smaug comes. He reacts quickly, mustering his men around him with the ease of a born leader. He heads every charge, a noble dwarf prince with fire in his mouth and wings at his feet. Using a combination of ingenuity, pragmatism and skill, he executes one of the finest frontal assaults of his age—and Thorin, brave Thorin, shrewd Thorin, dies all the quicker for it.
[ ix ]
You happen to be outside when Smaug comes. You were a fine adventurous lass in those days, always wandering about, and it saves your life that morning. You watch from afar as your brother (your twin brother, two hours younger and shining) makes his stand; you watch, too, the way his troops scatter when he’s vivisected with a swipe of the dragon’s claw (your mother used to say to him, “I could cut your head in half and you still wouldn’t be open-minded.” It occurs to you that, finally, someone has).
Later, much later, you will think: perhaps the best defense against dragons is enough meat and miles between you and it.
[ viii ]
Your hands shake, until they don’t.
[ x ]
Dís Oakenshield, they’ll call you afterward, as they sing stories of your bravery. But in the Battle of Azanulbizar, it is not bravery that makes you tear that branch from that tree (if you had to give it a name, it would be pure indignation. This is not how you end, not at the hands of an orc, on the whim of a king. Not for anyone’s mistakes but your own). You learn afterward of the death of your baby brother, the loss of your father, and you do not weep. You take up the crown and something deep inside of you grows a little bigger (here’s a hint: it’s not your heart).
[ xi ]
You are the eldest. You are the eldest and the Heir of the Line of Durin and this kingdom is your right. You can feel it in your bones, your beard; the tips of your fingers and the back of your neck. No one can take that from you—but, oh, do they try.
[ xii ]
You understand this: people will accept a woman king, but only so far as she remains nothing but a king. She is king despite her gender, not in addition to; everyone knows that she is forever fighting against her natural feminine tendencies, and weaker for it. One must be ever watchful: one gentle smile, one spring flower, and the whole kingdom could collapse.
[ ii ]
You’re just over four decades old and you look so much like your brother (your brother looks so much like you) that most people can’t tell the difference. When you go walking through the Lonely Mountain’s marketplaces, girls giggle and point, “There he goes! The prince!” They stop you in the street and gift you with beads, flowers, kisses (you don’t mind). Soon, your brother gains an unfortunate reputation as an incorrigible flirt and an easy lay, and you do not smile.
[ xxiii ]
The people of Laketown cry, “The King Under the Mountain returns!”
“No,” is all you say to that.
[ xiv ]
You don’t say “at your service” when Bilba Baggins, burglar, opens her home to you (you don’t say “so, this is the Hobbit,” either, but then, there’re a lot of things you don’t do). You eat what little there is left; you greet your friends in arms; you play your harp; you sing. In the morning, Bilba comes running after you, but you can’t remember whether she comes trailing a feet-long contract behind her or not (it doesn’t matter). Bilba is short and round, all curves and curls and freckles in the millions. Her brown skin glows in the sunlight and you think she might be the most beautiful person you’ve ever seen.
She’s the twelfth member of your company; including Gandalf, that’s thirteen, and you always did like bad odds.
[ v ]
You have been called many things: arrogant, hostile, stubborn, severe, greedy and officious; a bitch, a slut, a prude, a cunt.
These are all entirely accurate.
[ xv ]
You refuse to go to Rivendell. “I’ll die first,” you declare, “and I’m not dying yet.” Bilba thinks it’s a grand statement, though the Dwarrows seem less impressed.
“It’s like her goddamn tagline,” they mutter; “we need a new writer.” The food is running low and the Company grumbles (most of all Bilba) and Gandalf threatens to leave you to fend for yourselves.
“Save me from the stubbornness of Dwarrows,” ze laments on not one occasion, but you continue on, and Gandalf does not leave. No Wargs chase you, no secret tunnels are leaped into in the brink of time, and the Misty Mountains forever rise up on the horizon.
You study your grandfather’s map every evening, and wonder if there’s any way it could be as easy as it seems. You think of dragons, and miles, and pounds of flesh.
[ xxxxi ]
At your funeral (closed casket; dragon stomach acid is truly an amazing thing), Bilba delivers your eulogy. She’s crying and barely comprehensible; the dead silence that Bilba takes for respect could be more accurately described as straining to hear. Through her sobs, words like “heroic,” “brave,” and “tragic” can be heard. At the end, Bilba declares you “the last good and fair monarch in this Age” before choking on her own words and hurrying off the stage.
It comes time for the surviving members of the Company to file past your body and pay their last respects. "So full of shit even a dragon couldn't swallow it all," they mutter, patting your coffin fondly.
[ xvi ]
Half-way through the whole ridiculous adventure, Bilba asks you, “Why does everyone call you Queen? Is that a Dwarf thing?” and it’s all you can do to keep a straight face (to Bilba, she’s just asked you a perfectly reasonable question and all you do is look constipated and walk away quickly).
You send Dwalin to explain it to her (something Bilba sees as very rude indeed! Could you not even deign to tell her yourself?). That night, Bilba comes to see you. “So, uh...so, you’re a woman?”
“...Yes... Did Dwalin not explain it to you?”
“No, no, she did. I’m just a little— surprised. Do Dwarf women not have breasts?”
“Some do. Some don’t. It depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether they want them.”
Bilba thinks about that.
Progress is made, however: Bilba starts referring to you as Mistress Oakenshield, though she still mistakenly calls half the company men (they think it’s just hilarious) and seems almost unable to grasp that Gandalf is neither a man nor a woman, despite having known zim for years! Hobbits are strange little things, you think.
[ xvii ]
When you take up your sword and walk down that burning tree to the Wargs below, you are not doing it to avenge your line. Those who killed your family are not there that day; it is only wolves that are biting at your heels. You give Orcrist an experimental swing and move to dispose of some pests.
[ xviii ]
Bilba looks on the verge of tears, you think (she’s just saved you from the Wargs; she has no right to look so sad). Strands of her curly golden hair have started wandering off in odd directions and her eyes have gone all red and puffy no matter how much she rubs at them. She can’t seem to keep her hands still, constantly moving them from her lap, to the bandages on your chest, to your flask of brandy she’s been stealing sips of when she thinks you’re not looking. Beads of sweat have collected on her wide, freckled nose and all you want to do is lick them off of her, one by one by one.
“Stop fussing,” you chide and immediately wince at the pain in your chest (in between a constant stream of beratements, Óin had diagnosed you with one broken rib—two fractured—and a serious case of idiocy. “I’m afraid it’s terminal,” they’d said, and you were just drunk enough at the time to laugh. At that, Óin had stopped short, but they had recovered well enough that you might risk doing it again). At the sound of your voice, Bilba freezes in the middle of worrying the warg-tooth punctures in your discarded armor, her eyes wide and guilty.
“And stop fidgeting. If you can’t be still, be elsewhere. For fuck’s sake.”
Bilba’s mouth (pink against her brown skin, split and swollen in one corner where she’d been hit by any number of objects in the past few days), which had previously been hanging open, snaps shut with an audible click of her teeth.
You think you might be in love.
[ xix ]
“What was she like—you know—before?” Bilba asks Bombur on your second afternoon in Beorn’s hall.
“Bifur?”
“No—Dís.”
“O, well,” Bombur says, mouthing the stem of her pipe, “she spent a lot less time looking east, I suppose.”
“I just feel like she’s gone through a lot,” Bilba explains, “and she’s had to put on a lot of armor, physically and emotionally. She acts callous, but deep inside, I think she’s hurting.”
“No, no, she’s always been kind of a tit. I’ve met friendlier rocks, you know? and with more complex emotions, too.” Bombur shrugs, “But, maybe you’re right. You should ask her if she secretly cries at night and see what happens.” She laughs, heavy and deep, and taps her spent pipe out against the windowsill, her beard glowing copper in the fading sunlight.
That night, Bilba works up the nerve to kiss you for the first time. Due to your concussion, you don't remember it come morning, a mix-up that will take weeks to be sorted out, and then only by luck.
But, that is not what your story is about, not really.
[ xxxiii ]
You know this: dragons, like chickens, always come home to roost.
When Smaug returns, the ashes of Laketown still clinging to her wings and no arrow in her breast, you’re waiting for her (like a just dessert, Bilba had joked. "That's not how that phrase is used," Dís had corrected her. "No, I mean...like dessert. Like sweets. Uh. Because Smaug is going to kill and eat you." "What makes you think she's going to kill me first?" "It's just a pun.").
You draw Orcrist, and feel your life get that much shorter.
[ xxi ]
In Mirkwood, you’re captured by Elves. You’re questioned about what you were doing there by their Queen, but you would only say that you were starving.
“Why did you and your folk three times try to attack my people in their merrymaking?”
“We did not attack them,” you answer; “we came to beg, because we were starving. ”
“Where are your friends now, and what are they doing?”
“I don’t know, but I expect starving in the forest.”
“What were you doing in the forest?”
“Looking for food and drink, because we were starving.”
“But what brought you into the forest at all?”
At this, you shut your mouth and do not say another word.
“Very well,” says the Queen. When she motions for them to take you away, you don’t go quietly. Four kicks to the stomach and one broken nose later, you’re thrown into your cell to be fussed over by a heretofore invisible Bilba.
You set your nose with a grunt of pain and a dramatic wince (Tragic Hero indeed).
[ xxxv ]
Smaug gobbles you up just around tea-time, a fact that will haunt Bilba for decades after. The chiming of the clock at four will for years mimic what Bilba thinks bones breaking sounds like. Bilba, of course, has never heard what bones sound like when they break, and has certainly never heard yours do so, as you were swallowed whole.
Tea never will taste quite the same, nonetheless.
[ xxii ]
You reach the Long Lake inside of a barrel and your first good view of your Mountain in a hundred years is from your hands and knees, dry heaving on a dock at Bilba’s hairy feet. She pulled you out first and you are grateful for that, if nothing else (to Bilba, your untouchable self has just crawled, blinking and vulnerable, into the sunlight. To Bilba, your every smattered freckle and shaking breath is a confession). You stand up, spit, and move to help free the others.
[ iii ]
For all the years of your life you lose to lessons on your people’s past, you remember one thing: no woman, not in the entire written history of your line, is alluded to by name.
[ xx ]
“So,” Bilba hedges, “you mean to say that-”
“No one’s a man.”
“No one’s a man?”
“Yes,” you agree.
“That’s kind of-”
“What?”
“Uncommon?”
“Sure,” you allow.
“Why did no men come?” she asks; “are there not many? Or, why?”
“No, there are a fair amount.”
“So, why aren’t there any in the Company?”
You frown. “Here, may I ask you a question?”
“Okay.”
“Well,” you say, running your tongue over your teeth, “if there were only men in the Company, would we even be having this conversation?”
[ xxv ]
You step onto the north shore of the Long Lake and it feels like an arrival. The Lonely Mountain is still days away; you think that if you started running now, you could be there in half an hour.
That night, you make camp early, and there’s still enough light to send Ori out to try to shoot down some of the birds you saw along the way. She returns an hour later with three thrushes and a raven slung over her shoulders, grinning from ear-to-ear.
“It’s so strange!” Ori calls to the group as she walks up, “I could swear the little birdies were trying to talk to me!” Grabbing one emaciated thrush by its beak, Ori recreates its last moments in a shrill, mocking voice. “O, mistress Dwarf! O, my, please don’t eat me! I taste ever so bad! I have a wife and children; eat them!”
The Company breaks out in raucous laughter, in spite (or perhaps because) of the quality of Ori’s joke.
You stand up, and in under a second the camp has gone quite. “Ravens and thrushes,” you inform them, “taste revolting; old ravens and thrushes most of all. If you’re going to cook them, pray don’t do it where I can smell.”
[ iv ]
Most people think you have no sense of humor.
Most people are right.
[ xxvi ]
On the fifth day of your search, the door is found; the keyhole, however, is not. You breathe in, and breathe out, and no one mentions anything of invisible runes, or missed plot devices, or Riven-fucking-dell. Bilba suggests sitting on the doorstep and thinking it over a bit, and, in a fit of queenly magnanimity, you allow it.
Your teeth hurt only when you unclench them.
[ xxxxiv ]
Three-hundred years after your death, history tomes speak of how kind and noble a queen you were, how bravely you sacrificed your life to liberate the world from Smaug's terrible shadow and to save the lives of your wife and unborn child. How your actions, reasonable in face of intolerance, established the beginnings of diplomatic ties with the Elves that would last centuries. As the first (and, with time, only) Queen Under the Mountain, you will become a symbol of the progress made by women everywhere; it will become universally known how terrible misogyny was before you died your Strong Woman death and took it with you, and how wonderful it is that it no longer exists!
[ xxvii ]
You sit on the hidden doorstep for two weeks (really, Bilba does most of the sitting. You stand around, telling other people to sit on the doorstep, for two weeks). Durin’s Day comes, and Durin’s day goes, and you don’t notice.
Nothing happens.
On the morning of the fifteenth day, you gather up your weapons (one two-handed axe; one recurve bow; one bastard sword; one misericorde; one quarterstaff; two throwing-axes; two short-swords; two pairs of knuckle dusters, with and without spikes; three quivers of arrows; seventeen other knives of varying purposes; and Orcrist) and your armor (forty pounds of mail and leather and a shield as big as you are) and you stand up (an impressive feat).
“I’m going into the Mountain,” you declare, moving so you’re grandly silhouetted in the rising sun, “and I do not expect anyone to come with me.”
“If you say so,” the Company acquiesce, and go back to making breakfast. Standards have fallen, and a particularly annoying thrush that had been knocking around snails too early in the morning is roasting over a small fire.
“Wait,” Bilba cries as you turn away, “I won’t let you go to your death (or, at least, I won’t let you go alone)!”
You frown, Bilba smiles, and, together, you march off towards the Front Gate. Your strides are so long that Bilba has to run to keep up.
[ xxiv ]
Bilba is bizarrely confused the first time you have sex.
“You have a penis?”
“Yes,” you say; “do you not?”
"Yes. That is, no, I don't. Is this why you don’t have breasts?”
“No. I don’t have breasts because I don’t want breasts.” You frown. “Do you want to continue?”
“Yes!” Bilba consents; “I do.” Then she kisses you, and your nose goes pink. When Bilba sees, she starts giggling, and it takes five minutes for her to calm down enough to do it again.
You chalk it up to cultural differences. Hobbits, you've found, get weird about things at the oddest of times.
[ xxix ]
Half an hour after Bilba walks into the Front Gate, Bilba comes running out of it. “Barrel-rider!” she admonishes herself, “Bilba, you fool!”
Within minutes, Smaug comes out after her; a sudden rush of hot wind and a shower of shale over your head serve as your only warning to hide.
The dragon passes overhead, and you get your first good look at the thing you’ve formed your entire life around (smaller than you’d expected).
[ xxxi ]
You enter the Mountain, and your count of enchanted objects diminishes by one.
[ xxviii ]
You arrive at the Front Gate by suppertime. “I should go in first,” Bilba announces; “I’m the burglar, after all, and I’ve got my ring.”
You frown. You frown so thoroughly, in fact, that by the time you notice something had happened, Bilba has already slipped on her ring and disappeared.
“Fuck,” you say.
[ vi ]
Your first acquaintance with Smaug is a small tremor; the clattering of pebbles under your feet and a slight rattle to your breath. The trees creak above you, and your head snaps east (dragonfire is not your first thought).
The wind is warmer than it’s been in months.
[ xxxii ]
Erebor is smaller and hotter than you remember. Its atmosphere hangs warm and heavy, muffling all but the sharpest of sounds, giving room for a steady buzzing to fill your ears where outside noise cannot. Under the Mountain, the very air is cloying in your mouth, making itself at home in the back of your throat and beneath your tongue; the warm stench of a century of rotting shit, flesh and still water coming with every breath, clingling to you, too intimate, slithering behind your teeth and in-between the creases around your mouth.
The stone walls are hot to the touch, and it’s almost claustrophobic; a constant, unfamiliar push from above your head and between your toes that reminds you a thousand times over that this isn’t yours, that it hasn’t been for a long time. You shrug off your fur coat and let it fall, little this does but alert the heat to your presence.
The buzzing in your ears gets louder.
[ xii ]
Sometimes, you wish you’d had children, if only to continue your line. Other times, you are glad—a viscous, bitter sort of gladness that shouldn’t be associated with joy at all—that you will be the last.
[ xxxviii ]
The story comes out in whispers and yells. “The dragon is dead!” they will cry, long after her body has gone cold (which is a very long time indeed, if you know anything about dragons).
This is what the Company know: they saw the dragon leave, they saw the dragon return, and they felt its fall (though they did not know it at the time). Eventually, they find Bilba, or Bilba finds them, or something in between. “What happened?” they ask, demand, beg; “Where’s Dís?” (so, Bilba shows them).
This is what the Men of Laketown know: nothing, because they are dead. Next question.
This is what Dain knows: there are no ravens on the horizon (what she does not know: this is because there were no ravens to send; they were all eaten).
This is what the Goblins do not know: that there is anything unusual happening in the shadow of the Lonely Mountain.
This is what the Elves know: no one is immune to dragonfire.
Is it any wonder it takes so long to get the story straight?
[ xxx ]
The glow of Laketown burning is visible even from the Mountain.
“I can hear them screaming,” Bilba whispers, shivering despite the waves of heat coming off the water.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” you say; “They're too far by far! I mean, fuck, the wind’s even blowing the wrong direction. Really.”
[ xiii ]
When you first meet Gandalf and start getting it into your head to retake the Lonely Mountain, ze is dogged in zir assertion that the best way to reclaim your lost treasure is by stealth. “Direct confrontation,” ze informs you, “would be unwise.”
“Yes,” you agree, “it would.”
[ xxxvii ]
“I don’t know how it happened,” Bilba will say; “one second I was running for my life, and Dís was right there, she was yelling something I couldn’t hear, it was all too loud and I couldn’t see, and then Smaug started making the most horrible noises, all gurgling and whistling, and Dís wasn’t holding my hand anymore, and there was this noise and the gold just erupted, the whole mountain shook, and I was on the ground, and part of the ceiling had collapsed, I think, I don't know, I don't know, and I couldn’t stand up, the gold was slick, and then Orcrist fell down from somewhere, landed right next to my hand, oh my god, it was sticky to the touch, everything was, and Smaug was on the ground, and blood was everywhere, and Dís wasn’t anywhere—”
[ xxxix ]
The news spreads by inches. Bilba tells the Company, and the Company investigate. “Choked to death on her prickly personality,” Bofur declares, and Bilba starts crying. The dragon's throat is slit from the inside-out, steam seeping steadily from the wound and trailing up towards the ceiling, disappearing into the shadows there. Bofur breathes out, and the white of xyr breath too rises.
The Dwarrows tell the survivors, the stragglers, those who, for whatever reason, were not in Esgaroth when it burned. With every gold piece fresh from the dragon’s hoard, the story of Dís Dragonslayer is traded across the Long Lake and, eventually, out, over mountains and plains and cold deep rivers; in taverns and alleys and great lords' halls, your name is carved into the air.
[ xxxx ]
They sing stories, all right.
[ xxxxii ]
They crown your corpse in mithril and bury you with your sword still stained with dragon’s blood. The Arkenstone is never found. Somebody must’ve stolen it, they say; whomever it was, she’s never caught.
[ xxxxiii ]
A year after your death, Bilba gives birth. “Dís Baggins," Bilba calls the hobbitling (Dís is a very popular name that year, actually). Sometime during Dís' sixth spring, she starts calling herself herself; that same year, her beard starts to come in, curly and golden, though the tops of her dark feet stay bare, bare, bare.
Eventually, the Company visits, and the resemblance is unmistakable. The nose alone! they say, echoing what will be said and said again for the rest of young Dís' life.
“We could crown her,” Dwalin whispers, harsh and quick, her eyes flicking back to the toddler playing in the corner.
“Like you crowned Dís?” Bilba spits out, and Dwalin goes tense.
“Dís made her choice,” Dwalin recites, like she’s got it memorized, like she tells it to herself every night.
“Yes,” Bilba bites out; “and what a choice it was!”
(Years later, they try anyway—but, that is another story.)
[ xxxiv ]
Someone once said to you, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Only later, much later, will you realize—it might not have been a compliment.
[ i ]
You would be the best fucking King Under the Mountain the world has ever seen. The best Queen, certainly; but then, you would be the only fucking Queen Under the Mountain the world has ever seen.