Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in turn, seems the loveliest.” ― Mark Twain

Nymphs. There are plenty, in this great unknowing world. Creatures of the mountains, stars and rivers, of shadows and the bees. They live in great numbers, divine spirits connected to the earth, to the sea, to the skies. They animate and maintain the beauties of the world, each with their own skills and attributions: the Hyades of the stars, the Kissiae of the ivy, the Hesperides of the sunsets, the Anthousai of the flowers. Their names are forgotten, their stories lost to the winds… all but a few.

Bilbo was a rather unconventional nymph. He had been told that since he was a young sproutling, growing in the groves of his mother’s lands, and he had found no reason yet to disagree with such an assessment. Born into a family of wood nymphs, he had the same natural inclination towards things that grow and flourish as the rest of his kind. Unlike his family, however, Bilbo never seemed to develop the skill of one particular tree. True, he never had too much of a knack for the tall oaks or hardy pines, but any tree that flowered and bore fruit responded to his touch. His family were not particularly pleased with this – those specialising in apple trees or fig trees were rather understandably upset that Bilbo could sing all of them into fruit, all the time, rather than just the one type that they could. He didn’t mind too much, though. His mother had always told him it was better to be different.

Despite that, the hostility of the other nymphs soon grew on him, and nymphs of a certain strength were supposed to head out and form their own lands anyway. So soon enough he left the forests of his people, and set out for himself.

That… turned out to be a mistake.

One thing he had not quite anticipated was the fact that there were other things in the world. Things that weren’t nymphs – things that were quite willing to hurt him. There were mighty beasts, both divine and mundane, always hungry; humans, with their sharp-tipped spears and hearts of anger; fell creatures of the night and, perhaps worst of all, the constant threat of other Gods, those more powerful than him, those who he could not protect himself again – nymphs had always been fair game, as far as they were concerned, for any sort of pleasure. He lay awake listening to the howling of the wolves at night and hid in shadows as the greater Gods wandered passed, until eventually he decided that enough was enough, and started to build.

Now, he was no mighty Vulcan, but if he could do one thing well, it was create. And sure, stone wasn’t the same as wood, but it lived in its own way still, and he could move it around with a bit of cajoling, even if it tended to leave him with headaches. It took him a while to get things where he wanted, but soon enough, he had the walls of a mighty enclosed garden around him. Once the walls were up, he pulled the roots from the earth to reinforce them, growing into a strong thicket of branches at the top.

And then, he reached into himself, into the deepest recesses of his being, and pulled from himself the essence of his magic, the strength of his conviction, the power of his thoughts. He poured it all into the wall, building stronger and stronger fortifications until none could enter but himself.

There was no gate, no entranceway. Only those he allowed would enter, and only if they were willing to go to the effort of phasing reality and shifting through the wall. Or else, were really good at climbing.

As for himself – well, he never intended to leave.

Finally, his walls were complete, boxing in acres of land. None could enter, and he could not leave. With this task over, he turned to the earth, dry and barren of anything but grass. It was a bleak landscape of greys and browns, but it wouldn’t be for long.

He took a well-needed nap, and then he did what he did best: he began to grow.

With his hands deep in the earth, he felt out the life lingering deep within it, and pulled. He had the gift for seeking out potential, left to those connected to the earth by Gaia himself, and now he used it, with more force than he ever had done before. Seeds waiting, stagnant, swelled with life, and the tendrils of saplings forced themselves through the earth around him. In his secret garden, hidden from the world, Bilbo created for himself a forest of fruit trees, endlessly blooming and heavy with ripe fruit, a wealth of sweetness. The tamarillo, with its thin branches and orange, egg-shaped fruit; the almond, with its fine blossoms. Avocado ripened on the bough; blueberry plants grew as tall as trees with their small, purple-blue berries, and redcurrants too. And because he did not know any better, mighty trees bore pineapples, hanging like gold in vast clusters (the reality of growth doesn’t matter much to a nymph, after all).

There Bilbo remained, hidden away. Outside his garden, the world moved on, mankind grew and wars were waged, Gods fell and other rose to take their place, and Bilbo knew none of it. The wolves howled, the wind roared, and Bilbo heard nothing. The garden walls weathered the storms of dragons and satyrs and other foul creatures trying to get in – nosy divine neighbours being the least of them. All the while the fruit trees grew, and Bilbo lived in quiet solitude.

And there is where our story begins.

“Hello, my dear friend,” came the voice, and Bilbo swore under his breath. He knew full well who that voice belonged to – there was only one God he knew that sounded quite that knowing and quite that full of secret laughter. And, as well as that, there was only one other God who had been given access to the garden, in all the long centuries Bilbo had been secreted away there.

“Hello, Gandalf,” he replied.

He had first met Bilbo in the wandering times, the years he spent after he had left the forests of his family and before he had built his garden. The God of fortune, of chance and providence, he had often turned up just when he was needed (though, as Bilbo always carefully reminded himself, there were many other times when he had been needed that he had not appeared at all). He carried with him the great oar that he used to steer fate, which he used as a walking stick, and which right now he was propping up against a damson tree carefully.

“How have you been?”

Bilbo narrowed his eyes. Gandalf never stopped by for pleasantries – he came for his own reasons, but there was always a point to his visits. Normally he wanted Bilbo to grow him something magical, or to gestate the fruit of some long-extinct plant for his own secret purposes.

“Nice and content,” he replied, carefully. “Living quietly, no one to bother me.”

It was pointed, but Gandalf was humming, and looking at the bees that had come over to buzz around his head. Bees had always liked Gandalf – they might have been prize pollinators, but before that bees had always been agents of destiny. They knew the ways of the world, had the entirely of living history engraved in their hearts from their hive mind of living memory, shared from one generation to the next.

“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Bilbo muttered to one as it bumbled past his ear, heading straight to Gandalf.

“Now, now,” Gandalf said. “There is no need to be so inhospitable, Bilbo. Here I am, an old friend popping by for a chat and perhaps a spot of tea.”

“I’m sure,” Bilbo replied with a curl of his lip, but Gandalf did not appear to notice. With a sigh, he led him back to the small shelter he kept hidden away beneath a carambola, with its peridot coloured fruit and fragrant flowers. It was a simple enough little bower, with a stove and soft leaves to sit on – he preferred to sleep in the trees, if he could.

He kept a careful eye on Gandalf as he brewed the tea.

“Alright,” he said when they had both finished their cups. “Get on with it then. What are you really here for?”

Gandalf sighed, and pulled a long pipe from the recesses of his robes.

“You are awfully cynical for such a small creature.”

Bilbo just kept staring at him.

“Oh, very well,” Gandalf said, after a long few moments. He held out his hand, and in its palm was a large, flat seed. Bilbo took it from him with a sigh.

“What are you after?” he asked, and Gandalf smiled.

“Just one flower,” he replied, and Bilbo nodded. He took the seed to a nearby empty spot and reached for the soil with his hands, scooping the earth back and depositing the seed. He covered it back up again, placing his palms against the flat soil, and began.

Gandalf, having seen all this before, looked around the garden, at the vines and plants and trees, everything growing huge and strong and healthy. It was an idyll – tranquillity in a world which was increasingly lacking in such things. Here there was no bloodshed but for the occasional finger pricked on a thorn, nothing worse than the mildest ripple in the great ocean of turbulence that was the world. He saw the beauty in it – of course he did. The thousand shades of green, the glowing gold of the sunlight as it caught the dew drops, the fruit of all conceivable colours growing anywhere his eyes rested. The watermelon, fat and full; the grapefruit with its softly dimpled rind; the raspberries, little jewels for the eyes and tongue. Jewels everywhere, precious and Beauty, yes, and constant – every time he had been here the garden had looked like this.

That was the problem.

All living things should change, and the garden never did. It existed outside the cycles of the natural order: the trees were always blooming with flowers and fruit at the same time. The weather was always the golden haze of midsummer. The air was always that heady warmth of the summer, thick with pollen, buzzing with insects that never had to die. The butterflies lived eternal and the leaves never changed colour from their many-hued greens.

He pulled a fig from a nearby branch, which seemed to have curled towards him, offering itself. It was at the finest point of ripeness, where the skin swelled with the richness within, splitting at the barest touch. He pulled it apart, and the taste of it was heavy on his tongue.

Beautiful. Cloying.

“Done,” Bilbo said. Gandalf looked back over – where before had been empty space there was now a small sapling, just a thin trunk with four fine branches and strange, silvery leaves. There were three flowers blooming, white and gold petals dancing gently in the soft breeze.

“Do I want to know what this is?” Bilbo asked. Gandalf said nothing, as he so often did, even when Bilbo started to scowl.

“Oh, very well,” the nymph muttered, when it became clear that no answer was coming. “Have your secrets. I’ll figure it out eventually anyway, you know. At least tell me – is it safe to leave growing?”

“Perfectly,” Gandalf replied, coming closer and carefully plucking a flower from the tree, tucking it away. Bilbo was tapping his feet impatiently – a sure sign that he was growing impatient with Gandalf’s presence here. Even after all their long years of friendship, Bilbo couldn’t cope with too much company, with people being in his garden for longer than was necessary.

“You need some change in your life, Bilbo,” Gandalf said, as he followed the nymph back towards the wall. “Too long you have stayed here without change or distraction. It isn’t healthy for you.”

Bilbo snorted.

“I see how it is. You know, the nymphs all talk about you, Gandalf. We know your ways. Always dragging us lesser deities into your grand schemes and foolhardy plots. Rash and reckless, that’s what they call you! You might be a greater God, but you cannot fool me!”

“I have absolutely no desire to fool you, a fool enough you make yourself!”

They glared at each other for a long moment before Bilbo sighed.

“Look, Gandalf,” he said. “No offence, but I am really quite content with things the way they are. I don’t see why I need any change, when things are so good. Why risk what I have, for something I don't even want?”

Gandalf nodded, slowly, and turned to go.

“Hey,” Bilbo called, right before Gandalf was about to fade through the wall, from one plane of existence to another. “Catch.”

Gandalf turned, reaching out to grab the peach, soft and warm in his hand.

“Goodbye for now, Bilbo,” he said, before disappearing.

He supposed he should have known better, to think that Gandalf would have left it at that. Most other people would have done, of course, but Gandalf was never one to conform to the norm - or to put off doing something just because other people did not want it. Several weeks passed in which nothing much happened, and Bilbo had almost forgotten about the incident, too busy dealing with a particularly stubborn rambutan tree to think too much about Gandalf and his strange visit. But one morning, he woke to hear the crab-apple trees muttering to each other, and the bees buzzing with unusual vehemence. The crab-apples were always one of the first to feel any particular disturbance in the garden – they were by far the most grouchy of any of the fruits. He assumed it was nothing more worrying than a minor infestation of longhorn beetles at first, until he heard the pawpaws crying – always a sensitive tree, but there was no way a beetle would upset them that much.

He proceeded with caution towards the source of the noise.

The insects grew more concerned the closer he drew, the birds chirping a warning, and he became increasingly worried at what he was going to find. Nothing quite prepared him, however, for what he saw when he finally approached the glade at the epicentre of the ruckus.

A God.

His hair was long and dark, threaded through with silver, and his hands were broad, with the callused strength of someone who knew how to use them. His skin glowed with silver and jade magic beneath his coppery skin, smooth and careless in the way of those Gods who could ignore the passage of time. He was staring up at an amla tree with some confusion, one hand reaching towards the fruit, as if trying to decide whether or not to pick one and eat it.

“How did you get in here?” Bilbo asked, his voice cold and loud, and the God jumped, turning towards Bilbo.

“Hello,” he said. “I'm Thorin. You must be the guardian of this place. Gandalf told me about you.”

Gandalf. Of course.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” he said, and Thorin shrugged, reaching beneath his shirt to pull out a small, strange medallion.

“Gift from Gandalf,” he said, shrugging a little apologetically. “He told me to come here. Said I should have a look at the trees.”

“And why would he want you to do that?” Bilbo asked.

“It’s sort of my business,” Thorin said, finally deciding against the amla and reaching for an apple instead. It had been a green one on the bough, but when Thorin touched the fruit it blushed a rosy pink. Bilbo glared at it. Traitor.

He wasn’t entirely sure what the God was – certainly not one he had encountered before. It was normally considered a little rude to try and read a Godhood without permission, but Bilbo wasn’t all that fussed about social propriety when someone had barged their way into their land. He squinted, focusing in on that small, glowing kernel that all divine being hold within themselves, and… oh.

Golds and coppers, colours kissed by fire, the reds of sunrises and the darkest browns of the winter earth. The smell of burning wood, of the frost in the air, of fresh grass and new growth and drying, dying leaves. Snowdrops, and sweet autumn clematis. Moss and freshwater, the silence of the snow. Thorin was a god of change, of the cycling seasons, of plant growth and plant death. Not a nymph, like Bilbo, but a true God, albeit not one of the Olympians. But like Bilbo, his power was in the earth, in the soil, in the seeds and the growing bough – but also in their death, in their end.

Thorin smiled. It was rather a lovely smile, one that crinkled the corner of his eyes and wrinkled his nose a little, and for a moment Bilbo found himself hesitating, until he remembered that he hated all Gods and all company without any condition or exception.

“Get out,” he said, flatly.

The God blinked, and then suddenly looked a lot less friendly.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Stab me with that little letter-opener of your?”

Bilbo’s hand moved reflexively to the small pruning knife he kept tucked into his belt – how rude! A cherry tree shook its disapproval close by, raining fragrant blossom down on the scene. It would have been rather romantic, if Bilbo hadn’t been quite so irate.

“Out, right now,” he said, again. “Or else I will have to force you.”

Thorin grinned, only this time it was not quite as charming.

“I would like to see you try.”

Bilbo tilted his head to one side.

“Oh really?” he replied, flexing his fingertips. “Well, I do aim to please.”

The orange tree closest to Thorin suddenly came to life, reaching out its great boughs and wrapping them around him, squeezing tight enough that the God almost lost his breath, ripe fruit squashing and bursting against his clothes, filling the air with the fresh scent of oranges. Bilbo was smiling now, just a little, and Thorin for a brief moment felt almost afraid – a feeling that was very suddenly solidified when the tree wrenched its roots from the ground and began to walk, with increasing speed, towards the wall, still with the God bound up against its trunk.

When it reached the wall, it rather unceremoniously threw Thorin over it.

“And stay out,” Bilbo muttered, before returning to his daily tasks, rather unnerved.

The first thing he did was go straight to the strange tree he had grown for Gandalf the last time he had visited. He wasn’t entirely sure if the flower Gandalf had been taken was for the spell that granted Thorin access, but he suspected it had something to do with all of this. It would have been too much of a coincidence if it hadn't. Unfortunately, killing the tree wouldn’t reverse the spell, and Bilbo probably wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to do so even if it would have.

He ate an apricot, sulking slightly.

If he was lucky, that medallion would have been good for a one time entrance only – but such a thing would be rather pointless, and therefore probably not Gandalf’s plan. He could try and reverse-engineer the flowers and create some sort of counter spell… but that sort of thing wasn’t his forte, and knowing his luck, he would end up with every bloody nature God crowding in his garden. 

He sighed, and plucked a flower from the tree anyway.

The opuntia shivered, and he narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t called a prickly pear for no reason – it was far more irritable than the true pear, which was a sleepy and absentminded tree.

It took him even less time to track down the intruder this time. He found him with the sapodilla this time, staring in some confusion at the fruit, as if he was trying to work out if they were kiwis or not. It was the same God, that much he was absolutely certain of from the taste of his magic on the air, although today he looked very different. Gone was the beautiful man – now there was a young boy waiting for him, with soulful green eyes and hair the flaxen colour of wheat. He was a seasonal God, a God of change, and as he shifted the seasons so too could he change his own appearance. But a God needed to try a lot harder to trick Bilbo in his own garden. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked, with some exasperation.

The boy turned, and offered Bilbo a guileless, beaming smile. If he didn’t know any better, he might have been charmed. As much as he might want to chuck the God out again, it cost a lot of energy to get a tree to lift itself from the earth, and nymphs did not replenish their magic with the speed that Gods did. 

“Who are you?” the boy asked. “I’m sorry – I wandered in.”

“Mmhmm,” Bilbo replied. So that was how he was going to play it. Fine. He turned on his heel, and went back to his work – there were trees that needed him, and there was nothing Thorin could do without Bilbo hearing about it from the trees. But to his annoyance Thorin followed him, asking a thousand questions about the fruit, the plants, the land. At first he was monosyllabic, but as the day passed he found himself drawn into the conversation more and more, until the two of them were chatting away. 

It was only as the sun began to set that he realised this, and caught hold of himself.

“You need to leave,” he told Thorin, who had maintained his illusion throughout the entire day. A breeze caught his hair, blowing the coppery strands across his face. He frowned: it was colder than he was used to, a wind straight from the mountains. The leaves above his head shivered in response, but before he could think any further about it, it was gone. 

“Can I eat this?”

Thorin was pointing at the luscious fruit of a gooseberry bush, and Bilbo raised an eyebrow, distracted immediately from the thought of that strange breeze.

“Of course,” he replied. “You can eat everything in this garden. Otherwise, what would be the point?”

Thorin smiled, a sweet thing. Bilbo had meant it as a statement, not as an invitation, but he couldn't quite work up the energy to correct himself - it seemed churlish when Thorin hadn't actually done anything wrong today. Despite himself, Bilbo had enjoyed his company throughout the day. He asked interesting questions and offered thorough responses, and didn’t seem to get bored at all listening to Bilbo talk about the trees. If only he had come in his real form – there was something quite disconcerting about talking to a child that you knew was anything but.

“It really is time to go,” he told Thorin. “You have work to do, and so do I.” That wasn’t a lie – the trees had all been spoken too, but the white flower sat still in his pocket, waiting for further exploration.

Thorin looked at him, and for a moment the mask faded – the eyes of the young boy became older, wiser. He looked at Bilbo quite shrewdly, as if understanding something for the first time. Then he bowed his head, just a little, in a gesture that didn’t match the disguise at all.  Despite himself, Bilbo felt a little jolt of remorse when Thorin disappeared from sight – he so rarely had visitors, and despite claiming not to want them, there had been something rather enjoyable about the day none the less.

Still, there were things to do, and magic to investigate.

Something caught Bilbo’s eye as he turned back in the direction of his shelter, where fire and cauldron waited. A magnificent quince tree, one of the first that he had grown, with huge leaves and fine fruit – it had long been one of his favourites in the garden. But the leaves did not look quite right: he peered closer. The fine green was touched with just a hint of gold, of copper, as if it was slowly changing.

Thorin came back several more times in the disguise of the young boy, more and more frequently as the months passed. He seemed increasingly curious at the state of the garden, which never changed, and remained perpetually luscious, an eternal August. He never said anything about it, but Bilbo could see his confusion, could feel it in the way Thorin reached out to touch the leaves, the fruit, the soft petals of the flowers. 

One morning Bilbo found him beneath an abiu tree – although the sight of Thorin took him quite by surprise. He seemed to have abandoned his young form, and now stood before him in the form of a woman, the curves of her body wrapped in silk, dark skin flecked with gold, hair shaved close to the scalp and eyes outlined in copper. At least the colour scheme was consistent, Bilbo thought to himself.

“Good morning,” Thorin said to him, her mouth turning upwards.

“Yes, yes,” Bilbo replied, almost enjoying the look of surprise in her eyes. “I have no time for pleasantries today. The coconuts are being rather pernickety, and I need to have a good talking to with a couple of pecans over on the southern border. I have no idea what they have been up to, but the bael trees will not stop complaining, and they are giving me a headache.”

Thorin trailed after him as he went on his way, obviously a little put out - no doubt she had constructed a wonderful story about who she was and how she had ended up there, and was annoyed that she wasn't going to be able to deliver it. Bilbo hummed to himself as they walked in silence, but after a while they started up a conversation again. Bilbo was rather entertained to note that Thorin made several references to things that Bilbo had said when Thorin was in the guise of the little boy – although whether Thorin was doing that deliberately or not Bilbo couldn’t be sure. After a few hours he caught sight of something that was definitely wrong, and he slowed their walk, cutting through the trees until he reached its base.

“What is that?” she asked, and Bilbo smiled a little as he turned from her, and climbed a couple of branches up the tree, placing his hands flat against the bark after he had found himself a convenient place to balance. 

“Really, after all these visits, you can’t tell the difference between one tree and another?”

Thorin blinked her lovely eyes up at him, and Bilbo snorted.

“I should have known. This, as I am sure I have told you in the past, is a loquat tree.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Bilbo turned to her, blinking. “What makes you think there is anything wrong with it?”

Thorin wasn’t smiling anymore. There was something serious lingering about her eyes, something shifting and cool. “Because you’re frowning. Because you stopped and looked at it and then climbed it. Because you’re pushing your magic through your hands into the bark and biting your lip when nothing happens.”

Bilbo turned away, back to the tree.

“You certainly do pay close attention,” he replied, quietly. He was a little flustered, though he wasn't entirely sure why. He forced more power through his palms in an effort to distract himself, and was rewarded by the small flowers on the tree finally bursting into bloom. 

He was still frowning even as he took one between his fingers. He had never had to force a tree to flower before – he had never had one fight back against him with as much strength as this one had. Something was happening to his trees, to his garden – something he had no true understanding of.

He climbed back down, and continued his rounds, from her persimmon to the walnut. Thorin trailed after him all the while, idle conversation barely distracting him from his worry about the loquat. Without quite meaning to, he led Thorin back to his camp, where the cauldron still hung over the fire, still in an effort to understand the strange flower Gandalf had grown. He had done the few things he knew how to do, and distilled it down to a potion, but he had absolutely no idea what it might do, or what else might need doing to it. 

“What is that?” Thorin asked, as he poked at the bubbling potion.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Bilbo replied. “But I suspect it is something disruptive that I shouldn’t be playing around with.”

“Then why are you?”

Bilbo shrugged. “Curiosity.”

He turned his back on her, intent on searching out the teapot since they were here anyway, but that did not seem to dissuade Thorin. When he looked back she was staring with great focus at the potion, and prodding gently at its contents with a stick that she had picked up from the ground.

“I think it is a concealment spell,” she said, still staring into it. Bilbo could just about see her reflection in the glossy surface of the mixture. “Or rather, a reverse concealment. One which undoes any disguise that has been created.”

She withdrew – rather quickly, Bilbo was entertained to note – and rubbed at her nose with her hand.

“What could I possibly want with something like that?” he said, wryly. She shot him a look, although both of them were trying hard not to smile. Why Thorin was still bothering with these disguises when it was very clear to them both that they were not working was beyond Bilbo – but he had to admit, he didn’t mind it too much. It was still Thorin, underneath. The magic that fell from him, the way he spoke, the curiosity – it was the same in this disguise as it had been when he was the boy, and when he was the handsome man. There was truth to that, even if there wasn’t to anything else.

Something caught his attention: a strange sound, coming from below them. A roaring, carnivorous thing, but coming from a great distance, muffled and muted. He dropped to his knees, hands against the soil, but when it still did not become clear to him he went even closer, cheek against the dirt, ear pressed to hear whatever it was.

“What is it?” Thorin asked, but Bilbo did not look at her – he was too focused on the earth beneath his hands, the feeling of the soil against his skin. There was something off about it, something strange. It took him a minute to work out what that was.

It was colder than it should have been.

There was something growing, deep down in the dirt, something like a seed but nothing that he had any control over, a power that he could not identity and did not understand. Whatever it was, it was a hungry thing, something gnawing and aching and growing, slowly but surely.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But it is getting louder.”

From then on Thorin’s disguises became more and more varied – a girl with green fingers like one of the Hamadryades ; an old woman with words as sweet as honey; a man with the blue-tinted skin of the Nereids; a boy with eyes that glowed silver. Never the same one twice, but always Thorin underneath – Bilbo was still a bit confused about the pretence, why he was bothering, but he was too distracted to ask him about it. The strangeness in his garden was getting worse, and worse. One morning he woke just in time to catch the glimmer of frost in the leaves of a durian tree, before the sun melted it away – frost in the middle of an eternal summer, when the temperature should never have allowed it.

Another morning he woke feeling it creep across his hands, leaving patterns in the whorls of his fingertips. An invasion of his space, of his privacy – a challenge to his power, in many ways, but without aggression or confrontation.

No, it was the garden that fought him.

The mango trees were the first to start refusing to flower at all – try as he might he could not get them to open up. After that, the lychees stopped putting out fruit, a new and worrying advancement of whatever sickness was creeping into his lands. He spent hours with both groves, to no avail – there was nothing he could do but keep them static, frozen in time. They could grow no worse, but no better, either.

One by one the trees sickened. Day after day passed, and his fear grew.

And there was Thorin, a stooped old man today, picking up an ugli fruit that had fallen from the bough.

“Is it supposed to do this?” he asked, and Bilbo shook his head.

“No. But the medlar fell this morning, all the fruit at once, and there is an elderberry looking very sickly by the east wall that will go pretty soon unless I can work out what to do to stop all of this from happening.”

Thorin was hesitating over something, Bilbo could see it in his eyes, dark as a winter night. There was something he knew that he was not saying, something hidden but known, and Bilbo was going to ask him, was going to finally question him – but then the air went suddenly grey, strange. The temperature dropped a little, and everything seemed out of focus, wrong in ways that he had no words to explain.

“What is this?” he asked, afraid. “What fell magic is this?”

“It’s nothing,” Thorin said, his voice soft, trying to be reassuring, but as Bilbo looked into the sky he felt his heartbeat pick up as a blackness fell across the sun, the bright light of it suddenly extinguished.

“It is just an eclipse,” Thorin continued. “The moon and the sun passing each other as they follow their paths across the sky. It will only last a moment, I promise.”

But that wasn’t the point, it wasn’t the point at all – it should never have been happening. Time had been frozen here, leaving him safe, making sure that nothing changed - and most importantly, that nothing could hurt him. There should be no eclipse because that indicated time, and change, and motion outside his control.

“No, no no no…” Bilbo mumbled, stumbling away.

“Bilbo,” Thorin cried after him, but he could not stay still. Suddenly the trees that he had always loved so well seemed to conspire against him: he scraped his skin on rough bark, stumbled over tree roots. Thorin was calling after him, but he could not stop, would not stop, until finally he fell to the ground, face-first into the strawberries. They were dying – he could feel it, could smell the first stages of decay in the air around them, that point when berries are at their sweetest, their last moment before rot set in. The scent of them was pungent, and he pressed his nose to the leaves, eyes screwed tight, hoping that when he looked again things might be back to normal. 

He opened his eyes - things were no better. 

“What are you doing?” Thorin asked, as he finally caught up, still in the guise of the old man but running like the immortal he was.

“Eating,” Bilbo said, around a mouthful of fruit. They sat heavy in his mouth, almost too soft, the red juice spilling from the corners of his mouth and running down his chin.

“Are you okay?”

“They’re dying,” Bilbo replied, choking a little as he tried to swallow. “Everything is dying! There is a sickness in the garden and everything is being destroyed - the summer has been taken from me. Everything with whither and rot, and everything I have worked so long to create will have been for nothing.”

“Bilbo…”

Thorin was staring at him, and there was some heavy grief in his expression, some strange longing that Bilbo had no name for. He shifted, quite suddenly - in one moment he was the old man, and in another, he was the arrogant and beautiful God that Bilbo had met in his garden several months previously. Bilbo was surprised that he was so familiar when he had only seen that dark-haired appearance once before. 

“It’s not a sickness, Bilbo,” Thorin told him. “It is just the autumn. It does not creep, and it is not here to harm you – the seasons happen naturally. Things change. It is how it is supposed to be.”

“Yet they never seemed to happen before you came here!” Bilbo snapped back. “Am I supposed to believe that was just a coincidence? That a seasonal God of change started lurking about dressed in various disguises and then all of a sudden the seasons start happening when I have kept them at bay for centuries? I don’t know what plan you and Gandalf cooked up-”

“I am not working with him, I didn’t do any of this deliberately! If your garden responded to my presence it is because it is ready to move on from this weird endless summer you have been forcing them all to live in!” Thorin was frowning now, his shoulders back, getting ready for a fight. 

“How dare you! What gives you the right to come here and criticise me?” Bilbo shouted back. 

“I’m not criticising you – but trees should not flower and carry fruit at the same time! They should not do so constantly! And half of these fruits shouldn’t be harvestable at the same bloody time!”

“Why do you care?” Bilbo cried, throwing his hands in the air. “Why do you keep coming back, why do you hide who you are as if you are afraid to show yourself?”

“I am not afraid,” Thorin snapped back. "I am not afraid of anything."

“I don’t believe you.”

They glared at each other for a long moment, until a gust of wind blew a handful of leaves from a jujube tree, crisp and dead. They rustled in the air, a chorus to autumn that Bilbo had never wished to hear, and something inside him broke.

“Get out,” Bilbo said, voice low. “Leave me alone.”

“Bilbo,” Thorin said, his voice still raised but cut through with a strange sort of sorrow, anger and grief warring in his words.

“I’m sick of whatever game you are playing. Get out of my garden. You have destroyed everything, and if I ever have to see you again it will be too soon.” The anger that had flooded him abruptly left him, and it took all his strength to stay standing.

“Fine then,” Thorin snarled, and he turned on his heel. The winds of winter rushed around his feet, chilling Bilbo to the bone.

And so Thorin left, and Bilbo sank to the earth, and wept.

Autumn had come to his garden, he could deny it no longer. The trees shivered around him, and no matter what he did they would not grow. The leaves formed a carpet under his feet, and the fruit began to die on the bough. He walked from tree to tree, from blackberry to nectarine, and he could do nothing. Still each morning he poured all his power into them, willing things to go back to how they had been, exhausting himself by the evening. As the air grew colder, soon he began to despair. There was nothing he could do to stop the slow advance of the season, and as the days passed he felt loneliness curl up inside his chest, a sleeping beast waiting to devour him. He had not meant to miss Thorin’s company – in fact, he had been certain that he would not at all, but despite himself he longed for someone to talk to. Even the bees were growing quieter, spending longer and longer inside their hive.

It was one frost bitten morning, as the earth was hurting his bare feet and he was contemplating fashioning himself a pair of shoes for the first time, that he felt a pulling at the boundaries of his land, strong and irresistible, as familiar as it was comforting. He had not thought to feel such a thing again, and he willed them entrance immediately, sitting and waiting, letting them find him.

“Oh, my dear boy,” came his mother’s voice.

When nymphs leave their mother’s glades, rarely do they return – though their bond and love remain strong, they are compelled to find their own trees, their own territories. They often do not see their family again for centuries.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, as he let his mother wrap her soft arms around him.

“I felt a strangeness in the air, little sprout, and I know you are fully grown and have no need for a mother’s worries-”

“Thank you,” he interrupted. “I do need you, even if I am to grow no further.”

His father was staring up at the trees, frowning a little. His mother was a nymph like him, but his father had been a mortal, many long years ago. He had fallen in love with an immortal, and had drunk from the sacred springs so that he might tie his life with hers: he was not divine, but his life was extended. He would never age, caught forever in the cusp of handsome middle-age he had been when first he had stumbled into her grove, and he would only die if her life force was snuffed out.

“What is happening here, my son? Why does the fruit linger on the branch when it longs to fall? Where are there flowers clinging to life when they should have withered?”

“I have been trying to save them, Father,” Bilbo replied. “Each day I walk from tree to tree and compel them to return to their state of eternal flower and fruit, but no matter what I do they will not. Each day it becomes harder to keep them, and the leaves do not listen to me at all. They all change colour, and die, no matter what I do.”

His father smiled, though it was a little sad.

“Perhaps it is because I was once mortal, but I think you are too afraid of letting things die, my little love. Plants are meant to retreat with the seasons – and once the seasons have taken their hold there is nothing anyone can do to stop them, not even the strongest of Gods. Even Jupiter must bow to the winter.”

Bilbo tightened his jaw.

“But I have held summer here for so long,” he answered. “What harm is there in beauty and eternal warmth? What joy can be found in the bitter months of autumn and winter? Why can’t it be August forever?”

His mother stroked his hair back from his eyes.

“Let us show you,” she said.

With their urging, Bilbo stopped urging his trees, and let them die.

His mother showed him how to tap the syrup from the walnut and the sugar maple, saving the essence of them, and his father taught him for the first time the joys of bottling, of preserving the sweet fruits of the summer. The cherries, boiled in their own juices; the lemon, trapped in honey. He learnt for himself the skill of drying fruits like guava, of trapping in their taste by pulling out their water, and he appreciated for the first time the adversity of the humble cashew, which grew so strangely on the tree but could be kept for months with proper storage. These were the sides of his fruit trees that he had never seen before, and as the autumn passed he came to see that there was more to them than he would ever have known.

But as the leaves turned to mulch beneath his feet and even the birds retreated, he still could not bring himself to see the beauty of the changing seasons, and when his parents left to return to their own forest, he felt that yawning loneliness rear its head once more in his chest.

“You will be fine, my sweet,” his mother promised, as they hugged him goodbye. “And when you feel like you cannot remember the kiss of sunlight, the taste of summer rain, open a bottle or jar, and remind yourself with the fruits of your harvest.”

They left him then, and he was quite alone.

The cold grew only worse. Soon the lurid colours of his garden had faded to nothing but greys and browns, the same colours it had been before he had grown anything, when first his wall had been built. He longed for power that he could never possess – he touched the grapevines, curling like fronds without their heavy loads, and wished for the power of an Olympian, for Bacchus’ strength, for any skill that might have stopped this from happening. He stroked the bark of the handsome mulberry, remembering those fruits coloured with the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe, and despaired.

The first snow took him quite by surprise. He had thought to hate it, but when it came, covering the land with a soft silence like a gentle blanket, he could not quite bring himself to. The stark lines of the trees against the background of white was different from everything he had known in his garden before. The cobwebs were visible, laced with frost: the bark was patterned with verglass. He found himself leaning against a pomegranate tree, and thought of Proserpina, ruling alongside Pluto in the Underworld, tempted by a bite of a forbidden fruit (or so the story went – Bilbo had heard rumours that she had eaten willingly, mouth stained crimson as if with blood, her God licking the juice from her fingertips). It was the actions of Pluto and Proserpina that had created the changing seasons, the despair of Ceres forcing the world to adapt to her grief. It was from that moment that so many seasonal Gods had been born, had been created to maintain the new balance.

He had been denying that. He had not thought that he was doing anything wrong, but he had been working against the natural order nonetheless. It was probably a good thing that Gandalf had forced his hand now, rather than leaving him until a greater God saw what was happening and took offence. He wouldn’t have been the first nymph punished for a minor transgression or accident that happened to upset someone more powerful than they.

The days grew darker. He felt the soil beneath his fingers and though at first it felt dead to him, he came to understand the earth of winter. The rhythms were slower, the song quieter, but there was life still beneath the earth. The trees that he had thought were dying were still living: he could feel the pulse of their own life force when he pressed his skin against the bark. The roots were still growing in the deep darkness, slower yes, but with just as much determination. The dead leaves were silent now, mostly rot, but he could feel the soil feeding on them, absorbing them, creating a new layer of earth, more fertile. He tasted the sweet plums in their honeyed nectar that he had made with his parents when the feeling of grief crept upon him,

He sat under the moonlight of midwinter, and he waited. He had thought that winter would never end, but here he was, and already the days were turning. Winter did not flee – it slunk out, as quietly as it had appeared. The spring came, full of the ripe taste of promise and the soft scent of wild garlic pushing itself from the earth. Plants he had never known began to appear, small and hardy, from the winter soil. He rubbed his fingers through the thin leaves of the rosemary bush, leaving the scent on his skin. And it wasn’t just the new plants, either – he felt the old too, not dead but merely waiting. The fallen fruit of the sweet chestnuts were growing in the warmth of the soil, stronger for the leaves that had died and fertilized the earth. The nature of living was to consume: growth required sacrifice.

Required death.

Bilbo sat, his hands pressed against the earth, and did not move as the spring took hold, wrestling the land back from the force of winter. The air grew warmer, the birds returned, and insects were born anew, ready to begin their tasks. Bilbo did not shift as the jackfruit flowered and the sharifa bloomed: he did not move as the spring rain soaked him and gave life to the plants that he had thought were dead.. He listened to the earth in a way that he never had before. He heard its song, its call, that slow lament for the sacrifice and its joy for the new. This was what it meant to live and to grow, he realised. The static he had created in his garden had been beautiful, but it had been a façade. Like a stagnant pool cut off from the stream, it had no way to grow, no way to nourish itself, sustained only by Bilbo’s will power. It had been beautiful, yes, but it had not been right.

Spring turned to summer, the sun forced its way through the rainclouds, and soon enough it was August again. The soil was warm beneath him, baked dry in some places, but it was not beginning to change.

It could not, he realised. Bilbo did not have that seasonal power, and he had built this place too tightly connected to his own strength.

He stood, and his bones ached from the disuse, from the weight of understanding that had settled on him like a mantle.

It was time to open the garden up again.

It was time to create a gate.

Bilbo waited. He was patient, he didn’t mind. He had sent the call out on the air and through the soil, and he knew that sooner or later Thorin would feel it. He could only hope that he would respond. He left the newly created gate open to him, open to the arrival of autumn, so that when he arrived he did not have to steal in, but he wove into it the magic he had drawn from those strange white flowers of Gandalf’s, so that when Thorin entered all disguises would be stripped away. No tricks this time, no subterfuge.

He watched the tomatoes growing plump and heavy on the vine, watched their colours change, and wondered at the beauty of it.

August was a month of change. He didn’t know why he had not seen that before. He did not force the fruit to grow at his speed any more, but let them take their own pace. There was beauty in the slowness, in watching the honeydew and the soursop. Slowness was a virtue, in its own way. He tasted the new fruit, and it was all the sweeter for it, for its long wait in the earth, for the potential drawn from the dead leaves of last year. There was his melancholy, there was his joy. The true delight of the summer was its fleetingness, was the fact that soon it would be over, and there would be something else. The cycles, which he had long feared, held no sway over him now. He was immortal, and in its own way so was his summer, which would always come back, stronger and more pleasing for its absence.

And finally Thorin came.

He looked different, even from the first time Bilbo had seen him. The dark hair threaded with silver, the broad hands - that was his base form, the reality of him, but now he was stripped of the illusions that he had clearly painted on in the past. Despite this, standing there bare of glamour he seemed all the more prominent. His shoulders were slightly bowed, though there was still something powerful about the line of them: there was dirt under his nails, the same as Bilbo’s. Still the same face, but with lines carved into the skin, freckles across the nose, an imperfect tilt to his mouth, and he was all the lovelier for it.

He approached Bilbo carefully, warily, but when Bilbo offered him a smile his shoulders relaxed. 

"You used the flower," he said, though it was not an accusation."You took my illusions from me."

"I wanted to see you as you really are," Bilbo told him. "Just as you saw me as I really am, kneeling in the dirt, crying and stuffing strawberries in my face."

"There was still something beautiful about you," Thorin replied. "Your vulnerability, your lack of artifice. I know many Gods, many immortals, and none of them are as honest as you are."

"Is that why you kept coming back?"

Thorin shrugged. "A little. There were many reasons - your garden, for one. It was - it is - beautiful. Gandalf asked me to keep an eye on you, that much is true, and I owed him a favour, but I probably wouldn't have done it if you hadn't enchanted me so thoroughly by having a tree throw me over the wall the first time we met."

Bilbo felt a heat crawling up his ears, a blush he refused to be acknowledged. Instead he looked up at the fragrant leaves of the lime tree and tried to collect himself. 

"Well you can thank yourself for that," he replied, folding his arms. "If you hadn't been so rude, I wouldn't have needed to do so."

He meant it as a joke, but Thorin's smile faded a little. 

“I am sorry,” Thorin said. “I was rude to you the first time we met, and many times after that. I am afraid I am quite an unsocialised God in many respects - no one likes to invite change over to their house for dinner, after all. And I did not mean to raise my voice in anger to you last time we met, and I did not mean to change your garden. I did not realise that I would, simply by being here - I had always assumed that I had to will it to happen. If any damage has been done, I would repay you for it, in whatever way is necessary.”

Bilbo smiled, a wry thing.

“There is no damage that I did not cause myself,” he answered. “And I am sorry too, for not realising sooner what it was my garden wanted, and for chasing you out. You are a God of the seasons, and you bring the change, and that is a good and true thing. I have lived through the autumn, through the winter and through the spring, and I have come to see the goodness in all them. And I thank you for it. My garden sorely needed it, and I think I did too. Now I know for certain that I can weather far more than I thought I could.”

Thorin looked down at his feet. There was a blush staining his cheeks the colour of the inside of a ripe persimmon. Bilbo reached out, and took Thorin’s hand in his own.

“I have to tend the olive trees,” he said, quietly. “Would you like to help?”

Thorin’s eyes were the colour of winter skies, but they were warm.

“I would like that very much. If... as long as I am welcome?”

“Always,” Bilbo replied. "And if it makes you feel any better... you are always welcome for dinner here."

In August the summer sours, turns slowly over the task of the land to the growing autumn in September. The winter comes, the snow falls, the hoar-frost reigns supreme. But then spring arrives, with its warm rains and the kiss of freshness on its breath, and riding its coattails, the summer.

Now it is not the summer that reigns in the garden of fruits, but the seasons. The winds blow, the leaves fall and the fruits come back all the sweeter.

Bilbo still grows his fruits, still tends his garden, but he lets them grow as they should now, lets the fruit come when it is best. The garden is still beautiful, but now it is a moving thing, a living thing. And other things change, too – now there is a God that visits, as unstoppable and inevitable as the seasons. The autumn clouds roll with him, and he is welcome. 

He eats the ber fruit and his kisses taste of kindness; his skin his hot to the touch and keeps Bilbo warm throughout the winter.