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Your world is shifting on its axis, the threads of what you once knew tattered and fraying in the breeze as the storm breaks upon you, tearing apart everything you thought you were.
But in the moment before everything shatters around you, there is silence. Utter quiet and stillness such as you have never heard during your entire life.
Just before your world crashes down in shattered fragments all around you and you cut yourself to pieces trying to pick up the shards of your old life.
He knows what is coming. He prepared for it, consulted ancient texts in the libraries, spent untold hours practicing with his sword and axe, pored over all he could remember of Thrór's old stories of a dragon falling upon the Grey Mountains.
In the end, it makes no difference.
Thorin remembers rushing up onto the battlements, feeling the hot wind whistling around him and knowing, deep in his bones, what is to come.
The first few moments sweep past in a rush of fire and terror, of roars shaking the air and wind from the dragon's wings almost blowing him off his feet before he can make his way down to the lower hall behind the great Gates, where his father waits with the army.
And as he charges towards the gates already creaking from the force of the dragon trying to shove its way through, he feels the world slowing around him. And as he takes up position at the head of the army, his father at his side, sword in his hand and leveled at the entrance, he feels the world freeze in place around him, the entirety of Middle-earth holding its breath as it waits for what would come next.
That was the last breath of Prince Thorin of Erebor. The young prince died that day, burning in the dragonfire and drowning in the helpless, pleading screams of innocents who would never be answered.
He remembers, for the rest of his life, how it felt to take a breath as one person and release it as another. Remembers forever the feeling of a storm sweeping the world halting around him, waiting with utter and perfect silence for the next heartbeat, when the world will change forever.
But that moment inside the walls of Erebor is not the last time he feels it.
You try and try, over and over again, to remake the shattered pieces of your old self, to try and reclaim what was lost.
You try, until your hands are stained crimson from your blood as you try and fail to pick up the broken fragments of your world and fit them back into an image that makes sense, into the way they used to be.
Until you finally realize: there is no way to piece back together what has been broken.
Thorin stands on the stone at the Eastern Gate of Khazad-dûm, amidst blood and death and the screams of thousands dying, and he recognizes the horrible grating feeling in his head as the glass that forms his mind and world begins to crack and strain against itself, waiting to be released, but for now the battle is entirely too real around him, screams of dwarves and orcs alike echoing in his ears and bouncing off the fractured pieces inside his mind, Smaug dancing in front of his eyes until he cannot tell if he stands inside the halls of Erebor or upon the rocky plains before their ancestral kingdom.
But then he hears a roar of victory, loud and consuming upon the wind, louder even than his own cries as he watched his little brother fall from yards away and could do nothing but stand and watch.
Thorin looks up, and even though the battle rages all around him he can hear the pristine silence, a droplet of water as it falls, as he looks up and sees the decapitated head of his grandfather held his above the battlefield.
And then the head hits the ground, the golden crown clattering against the stones as his grandfather's head rolls towards him, and he cannot hear the sound of his own scream as the world shatters to pieces around him once more.
Thorin does not know, at Azanulbizar, what moment the exiled prince died and what moment the exiled king was born. He recalls the battle with Azog, but never with clarity, his vision fragmented by the world breaking to pieces around him.
But what he does remember, clear as a cloudless, moonless sky, is walking through a battlefield strewn with dead bodies, a shield of oak at his side, and looking up towards the sun upon the horizon as he feels the weight of the new world settling in upon him.
Thorin Oakenshield, Erebor's king-in-exile.
But you pick up the pieces as best you can, even though it's never quite enough, even though every second of trying leaves slashes upon your hands that never quite heal and blood on the fragments of glass that you try to piece together.
You create a new reality, but it's not enough, it's never enough.
And so you chase down an impossible dream, try to remake your world at the place where it was first broken.
And so you try to find your way back to the world that you once knew, try to remake the lost pieces of your old self even though you know it will never work, because the pieces of you are twisted and broken and will never truly fit back together.
But the others are relying on you and so you try knowing it cannot work, even knowing you are doomed to failure.
You expected this to come crashing down around you. You just never expected the fallout to be so great when it does.
Thorin hears the Wargs howling all around him, his hands clenched tightly around the tree branches, the scent of pine around him an old comfort from when his mother would bring in branches to scent their rooms in the mountain, and yet now all he feels is the terror seeping into his very soul as he recognizes their helplessness, his helplessness to defend his kin, and he knew it was an impossible hope, and yet that makes it no less terrible when that hope comes crashing down around him.
But he has been expecting this shattering, and so when he looks up towards the Wargs he thinks he knows the depth of the pain that will strike him as he watches the Company die around him.
It is so much worse.
For when he lifts his gaze his eyes catch and hold upon the giant white orc upon his Warg and he feels his lips moving in a whisper of no, it cannot be but he doesn't hear it, for his world has gone suddenly silent around him and when the storm hits, it steals all the breath from his lungs.
The fire whirls around him and in between one breath and the next, or so it seems to him, he has moved from the tree hanging out over the yawning abyss to being struck down by Azog's Warg, but no matter what he tries to do he cannot move, he cannot fight, he can do nothing as the mace strikes his chest and his single triumph is destroyed before him.
The darkness closes over him and he seems to know that this will be the moment he will not awaken, his own death and the Company's to follow not long after, and so he falls into unconsciousness with the sound of the world breaking echoing in his ears.
But he awakens, impossibly, and there is Bilbo Baggins before him, the dear, sweet, wonderful little lunatic of a Hobbit who allowed himself to be caught into Thorin's impossible dream and somehow managed to believe it can be achieved.
And when Thorin lays eyes on Erebor for the first time in centuries, he thinks he believes it can be done.
You feel as if you start to piece the world back together, start to make some semblance of order out of the destruction that you have been dealt, and even though your visions of triumph are bloodstained from the never-healing wounds upon your hands as you try to create an impossible reality, you feel as if you are truly succeeding, and though every step is marred with the sound of shifting stone in your mind and the roar of wind from the abyss you stand upon the edge of, a cliff that one small step could send you tumbling over to break to pieces on the stone below.
You walk a balance between destruction and unmaking, and every breath threatens to shatter you to pieces as the storm builds upon the horizon and threatens to break you into pieces and tear you apart until there is nothing left of you but broken mirrors streaked with crimson.
Until the final blow comes and sends you over the edge as your world shatters before you.
Bilbo stands before Thorin and he cannot help but pray that he somehow misheard, for Bilbo could never - would never -
Thorin looks upon the Hobbit who convinced him he could make it this far and though he feels the icy wind whipping around the mountain, he cannot hear it, and he knows this feeling, of a world standing upon the edge of a knife, the space between one breath and the next holding the power to shatter him past recovery.
He knows the sensation of seeing the entire world perfectly frozen in time, even breathing halted so he can see everything through clear glass and wait for the next moment to bring the clarity of this single second crashing down.
He looks at Bilbo and thinks that this cannot be true, and suddenly he is terribly, terribly afraid to meet the Hobbit's eyes, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is his world, and to feel as he breaks into pieces to become someone else, his old self dead and utterly irretrievable. Thorin wishes, in that moment at the eye of the storm before the world breaks him, to stay in that second of frozen clarity forever and never move past, to halt the world there for all eternity.
But as he meets Bilbo's eyes, the look of regret and apology but also utter lack of remorse, the resolute knowledge of having taken the only right course no matter the consequences, takes that single second and breaks it into tiny fractured pieces that he knows cannot ever be remade.
His movements are not his, his will torn apart in the moment of shattering, slashed to pieces and broken into death and suffering, and he is holding Bilbo at the edge before he realizes what he is doing, before he can find a way to fix this, fix any of this, and as he banishes Bilbo from Erebor he wants to apologize but he cannot before the pieces of himself are remade, before the shadows of himself are fit back together in a twisted imitation of a whole.
Your dream breaks before you and everything disappears into a whirlwind of shattered glass as you try to clean the cuts on your hands, but they go down to the bones and the tiny shattered particles of glass have found their way deep into your flesh and you cannot get them out, no matter how hard you try.
You live in the seconds of falling, of hearing the unique and horribly familiar sound of breaking, a storm that you cannot center yourself within, a hurricane that you have long since lost the ability to navigate, if you ever had it at all.
You try to piece the mirror together before the wind comes upon it and breaks it, again and again in the seconds between the sounds of shattering, in the rare moments of not-quite-peace that you can steal before everything that you are is torn apart in the storm that follows.
Thorin wanders the halls of Erebor, the storm in his mind quiet for the moment, and he finds himself walking upon the gold where he thought for the briefest of moments, that he could achieve his goal without everything else being destroyed in the firestorm to follow.
The gold shimmers below him, bright and beautiful and horribly comforting in a way that sends shivers through him, something hovering just out of reach in the shattered fragments strewn about him, pieces of himself and the world alike scattered within his mind and he would try and piece himself back together if he knew that there was something to piece himself together for.
But Bilbo has betrayed him and he knows this Quest could never have succeeded without their Hobbit, and without him Thorin knows he will never be able to bring himself back together.
And then the storm crashes over his mind once again, fragments and impossibility dancing just out of reach, reality and hallucination intermingling and he is terrified of the remembrance of shadows and death, and even more so at the knowledge of the world breaking about him all over again.
And then Bilbo's voice rings out in his mind, clear and terrible and penetrating the haze overhanging him, cutting through the shadows in his mind and the echoes of shattering alike.
You are changed, Thorin.
Thorin's breath stutters, halts for a long moment, and in the cavernous halls of Erebor there is only silence as he stands upon a floor of gold with a crown upon his head, as his eyes fall to the ground beneath his feet and the shadow of Smaug is reflected in his place.
And the world breaks around him just as he always knew it would, silence sweeping away the storm to reveal the truth of what has been happening to him ever since he entered the mountain, and he knows he will never forget the taste of bitter realization as the moment of shattering brought a clarity he has never known, not for the rest of his life.
But as the silence stretches, there is a moment when you look up, and catch a glimpse of yourself in the bloodstained mirror that the pieces of your old lives have made, and you see that you are no less shattered than the world around you.
And as you see the nightmare you have become, everything around you breaks into a thousand pieces of glass that break into fine fragments like snow at your feet, dust that can never be pieced back together, not if you spend a thousand years.
Thorin lies upon the ice with the taste of blood in his mouth and choking his breath, and he stares up at the sky and he can still hear the silence echoing around him, the Eagles above him but winging through the winter air in utter silence, just as the silence has been enveloping him ever since Fíli fell to the ice with a sword through his back.
And then he hears the clattering of footsteps on stone, his eyes flying wide even as he coughs on the blood in his lungs, and when he lays eyes upon Bilbo the other's name falls from his lips as if it has always been there.
And Thorin can hear the sound of his world breaking around him, slowly and agonizingly as Bilbo's words hover around him, echoing and unreal even as he feels the bite of cold, cold that has nothing to do with the frigid ice beneath him, and he breathes in Bilbo's sweet scent of pipeweed and green earth and sunshine and he cannot help the apologies even as he wonders when it will be that the storm hits and he is finally unmade.
But then Bilbo tells him not to apologize, tells him that he was glad to have stood by Thorin's side and something within him cannot quite believe it even as the rest of him knows it is true, beyond any doubt.
And he thinks that maybe that last part of himself cannot quite believe it because he has become too used to the sound of shattering and the feeling of being unmade, over and over and over again, and he cannot believe that there can be anything so beautiful, so undeserved, for him.
And Thorin looks into Bilbo's eyes and he knows his other half, in that moment, recognizes his One in the guise of a sweet, kind, utterly indomitable little Hobbit, and he cannot help but smile as he feels something within him start to break.
Thorin slips into blackness with the whispers of hope in his ears as he feels himself be broken and made anew, and in that moment he feels assured of his own death but knows, too, that if there is any being in this universe who can save him, it is Bilbo Baggins.
And he remembers dying once before only to awaken with an impossible hope proven true before his eyes, and he knows that Bilbo's hope can guide him home.
And finally you realize: perhaps the shattering does not have to be the end, for even as you shatter you are reforged, and you know that this kingdom of impossible dreams will never be remade, that you cannot make again something that was destroyed so long ago.
But you know, deep within your soul, that you have the strength to fight for this, and that your hope can find a way through even the greatest and most terrible destruction.
You cannot piece back together the world you once knew. But what you can do is take the fractured pieces of yourself, your old life, and build a bridge across the abyss to the world awaiting you beyond the horizon.
When the storm fades, you will be still standing, and you can forge of the shattered remnants a world worth dying for.
You have walked a path no other could tread, and you have shattered in the journey but you have remade yourself over and over again because you still had hope.
But this destruction does not have to be your ending, for out of the ashes comes a fire rekindled, and you have the strength in your soul to take your broken world and remake it into something worth living for.
You will reforge yourself, for I have hope yet in my spirit, as yet do you in yourself, even if you cannot see it.
And you will never be alone, not while I still have breath in my body to fight for you.
For the shattered are not destroyed, and every unmaking is a new beginning.