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When Thorin received the Arkenstone back from the elven king (twice-false grandfather, king above the forest), he let it drop into the deepest crevice yet discovered, and waited for it to catch miles down.
Orodir feels it there as a clean, dense presence, geometrically perfect, crystal forms branching and branching until they stop, tethered, by the unheard voices of the mountain.
Orodir Half-elven is also tied to the mountain by invisible string, dragged gently, complacently, into its ancient huge halls by the whispers of the rocks. Orodir Heroesson blinks in the daylight near the thrush’s door and feels home at his back, home in front of him, Dale in between like a playground. The town is an alien labyrinth too, even though it sits on the roots of the mountain. Nothing in Orodir truly understands the race of Men. They move too fast.
The mountain is just the edge of something. Funny, Orodir thinks sometimes, that the dwarves climb so high to dig so deep: the Lonely Mountain is taller than any Mirkwood tree and lives as slowly. The water that falls on the summit trickles down through diamond caves and bedrock stacks, disappearing into the perennial closeness of the pillars of the world. It isn’t dark to the dwarves, just like it isn’t dark to the rocks. There are other senses.
It dawns on him slowly, and through no particular interaction, that not everyone feels the mountain watching like he does. His father talks of the nobility of their kings, of the age and weight of the halls. His father builds, although not with the focus and tenacity of the smiths (he is a guardsman after all, and prone to looking at the woods), and so Orodir thinks he understands.
His mother looks for light; she tracks the sun that comes in through the slanted, mirrored windows. Maybe that is why elves live so long, he thinks. So that they can watch the world slowly creaking as it goes, the mineral deposits layering on top of themselves. The mountain constantly groans.
Years and years, the Lonely Mountain says.
Orodir has inherited his mother’s quickness and her sharp gaze, but he focuses more closely. His eye is drawn to the blue and green flecks embedded in silver quartz strands in the granite. When she stands outside she always looks at the sky. He looks there too, thinking of stars and eagles, but under his feet he feels the mudstone. The mountain moves so slowly, pouring itself into the valley over many lifetimes of elves and dwarves alike, advancing like an army.
Ore and blood, the Lonely Mountain says.
There are other days for him where the the stars are louder than the mountain. He sleeps in the mountain, though, in a bunk carved out of granite. There is a shale plate just above his eyes, deeply cracked around the edges where his father set the valley stone into the mountain. Small gray scratches are the outline of a shallow fossil. He follows the lines of the ribs at night, squinting to turn them into nonsense runes - maybe the stark X here, maybe the M pointing toward his feet.
When he sleeps his mind drifts along the fissures. He knows where the gold waits in its veins, and half asleep follows the tiny soft strands into the deep until he awakens with a jolt, wondering whether this is what dragon sickness feels like.
(The mountain was called Lonely, because its caretakers had been driven away. The dragon was just another point of heat, just a furnace inside bone and skin as a presage to the deeper rocks. The pressure in the mountain’s heart had not felt Smaug’s weight, and, cocooned by the strata and the sediment, neither had Orodir.)