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The tomb of the kings was buried deep within the Mountain.
Legolas trailed Gimli by the hand as they wound deeper, deeper down, the stone staircase carrying them in tight, dizzying spirals. There was a lift, Gimli had explained, for those dwarves who could not walk such distances or bear such stairs, but for those who could, the long journey down was meant to be a time of quiet contemplation, of memory – each coil of the staircase a new layer stripped away between the living and the dead, until they wound their way down to those who meant most to them.
Legolas had thought about this more since meeting Gimli than ever before, the created immortality of such a blurring, the way the living might remove the boundaries between themselves and those they had lost. Elves did such things, too, but the memories were stored in songs and those alive to sing them. Here the stories were told on the walls, in carvings that drew the eye into a labyrinth of epic, of memory – tales so intricate it was all Legolas could do to keep his feet on the narrow steps while his eyes wandered hungrily over the walls. Great battles and greater crafts; the slaying of a dragon beside the forging of a crown of gems. The making of a home. Tender scenes of mothers with children, of lovers locked in endless embrace . . .
Legolas’s hand clenched in Gimli’s own at that last, at that reminder of love and life and death all intertwined, and his companion asked not what he had seen, but returned the pressure.
Silent contemplation, indeed. The quiet pressed so loudly upon them that the walls themselves nearly hummed, the song of their making and the loving hands that had crafted them trembling on the edge of consciousness. Legolas would have followed the path of the carvings with his own voice, were it permitted. But in silence Gimli had grieved his kin in Khazad-dûm and in silence now he would grieve his fallen king, and Legolas would say nothing to disturb him.
It was honor enough to be brought here, an honor that had been granted only once to his father before him, all those years ago. Legolas had watched him descend beneath the mountain, and he had not wondered, then – not like he did now. He would not have understood the generosity of it, the weighty import of being allowed to witness something so sacred.
But now, after travels with Gimli, after hearing the way his voice rang in the darkened halls of his people’s ancient home, watching the way his eyes glowed when he spoke of the halls in his future dreams – now, after seeing the depth of his friend’s grief and the breadth of his love, after feeling the latter turned inexorably onto himself, with all the weighty intensity of a dwarf at his craft –
He could not say that he understood, not as a dwarf might. But he understood as himself, and perhaps that would be enough.
He could smell it, even, the difference in the air here from that in Moria – in Khazad-dûm. The same scents of rock and earth and stone, of memory and care – but here there was no hint of brimstone and flame, of evil awaiting. Only a deep sadness, an echoing longing – and the sharp edge of myrrh, smoke from incense curling into the air around them.
“We draw near,” murmured Gimli, his first words since they had begun the descent.
Legolas squeezed his hand in response, but spoke no word aloud – and then they were there.
The hall of kings opened up before them at the end of the last coil: vast and expansive as the staircase itself had not been, grander and higher-ceilinged than Legolas could have imagined, so deep underground. The walls were polished until they shone – polished still, though surely their maintenance could be no easy task – and the carvings continued, vast and stately, story winding into story, the tale of ages carved into the walls above the bodies they housed. Legolas’s eyes followed one pattern, then the other, in dizzying circles, but before he could lose himself in contemplation, Gimli tugged him forward – and there they were, the newer burial sites, stone freshly-cut and gleaming with newness.
Dáin’s tomb was magnificent: polished onyx inlaid with sapphires larger than robins’ eggs; the lines of the runes filled in with gleaming gold. It was grander even than Balin’s in Khazad-dûm, the only dwarven tomb Legolas had yet seen – and, as he had then, Gimli walked forward a few steps, releasing his hand, and sank to his knees, casting his hood over his face. His shoulders bowed, and he did not speak.
Legolas did not know the customs to observe, and he dared not ask – not now. But if he could not grieve in the dwarven way, he would grieve in his own.
He had known Dáin: not well, only as befitted a king to another’s son – but well enough to sorrow at his passing. He had been grim yet fair, even-tempered and even-handed, with the elves at least – and so, surely, with his own kin. Legolas’s father had spoken well of him, had made league with him gladly – had spoken with sorrow of his passing when they passed through Mirkwood on their way to Gimli’s home.
His passing. In battle, as had Thorin before him – but he had been old. Old enough that his time would have come soon enough, anyway.
Legolas did not like to think of that. He bowed his head to Dáin’s tomb, mouthed the words of a Silvan blessing. He dared to think the king might not have turned it aside.
Gimli knelt for long moments, his face hidden. He did not speak; he did not weep. He had not wept at Balin’s tomb, either – he had wept for his kinsmen and for Gandalf in Lothlórien, in the safety and shelter of the mallorn trees, but at their tombs he had said no word, made no sound.
Would that they could be interred thus, he had said to Legolas when they left his family’s home to descend into this graveyard of memory and history. Would that we could honor them as they deserve, build a housing for their bodies that we might tend in their memory.
Where would their tombs lie? Looking up, Legolas allowed his eyes to wander – the kings lay in the greatest state, but there were lords at rest here, too, others of Durin’s line. And behind Dáin’s tomb, some steps to the left –
He left Gimli’s side as though drawn by some unseen force, his steps guided forward by the grandest of the three and the sword that rested there. Thorin Oakenshield, laid to rest eight decades before with a stone on his breast and the sword –
The sword, Orcrist, which his father had brought with him into these depths, had left behind him when he returned. A show of respect and sorrow – one greater, perhaps, than any other there could have known.
It compelled him, almost, to reach for it, and only politeness stayed his hand – the knowledge that these tombs and all that were left there were not meant for his touch. The blade had passed beyond its time with the elves; it too had found its final resting place . . . and yet. He could remember, still, the look on his aunt’s face when his father showed her the weapon taken from the dwarves in their wood. The memory of her home lost long before Legolas’s birth, before her marriage to his father’s brother; the memory of a father she still loved, gone now forever over sea. Legolas’s own namesake. Had Dáin known what it meant for them to relinquish this blade again to the tomb? Had he known what a gesture it was, to heal the rifts worn between them?
Gimli would know, someday, but not now. Not today, not in the midst of his own grief, his own sacred ritual.
“Were you here?”
The voice preceded the echo of Gimli’s solid steps on stone. He had risen at last, had come to stand beside Legolas, a warmth in this garden of cold stone. Legolas could feel him there, even untouching: a stability, a strength. “Mm?”
“When they were buried,” said Gimli, and nodded to the tombs of Thorin, of Fili and Kili his nephews. “Were you here?”
“No,” said Legolas, “only my father. But I am glad to be given the same honor now.”
“They say the Arkenstone was buried with him,” said Gimli. “That on the darkest of days, should all the light in the Mountain go out, the stone would flare forth with light and keep these halls aglow.”
“Has it ever happened?” Legolas could not help asking. Enough of his people had been present for its making to know that myth so often had a basis in truth.
Gimli chuckled. “No. These halls will never be allowed to grow dark.” He gestured around at the sconces flickering on the walls, casting a glow on the carvings. “This space is always well tended, as a way of protecting the memories of those who live here.”
“I see,” said Legolas, though he did not, truly. Elves did not often tend to the spaces where their dead were buried – thinking instead of their spirits’ new lives over sea, holding the memories of them in their hearts instead of in the places where their bodies resided. But then, so often, such memories were meant for the living. “As they deserve.”
“Indeed.” Gimli seemed as lost in thought as Legolas, gazing upon the three tombs. “His sister lives yet, you know. She keeps their memories alive, for now.”
“She lives!” said Legolas – shaken for a moment from his melancholy with astonishment. Why had he not heard of the matter, then, after all his education in the dwarven families of the Lonely Mountain? For that matter, why had he not heard of a sister at all? “I knew not that Thorin Oakenshield had a sister – is she not held in great esteem?”
“Oh, she is,” Gimli assured him. “Indeed” – and here he hesitated, then squared his shoulders as if to sally forth – “she knows your people well. She has visited you more than once since our reclaiming mission. Dis, she is called.”
“Oh – I know Lord Dis!” It had been twenty years at least since the dwarven diplomat’s last visit to the Greenwood, but he remembered it now, or looked on the memory anew. The dwarf had come as part of a retinue, all of whom had treated him with great deference, but he had introduced himself as – “But I thought” –
He stopped, drawn to silence by Gimli’s expression. He was watching Legolas carefully, an edge of some kind of caution in his eyes – a caution he had not worn since those early days in Lothlorien . . . as though he was waiting for something.
This was a secret, then. This was a truth of dwarfkind he must have been forbidden to reveal, and now he was testing Legolas with it, waiting to see how he would react – or perhaps testing himself, to see what he was willing to reveal. Legolas did not understand why it might be so, but he knew enough of Gimli, at least, to know this, and so he would take this confidence as it was offered: as a jewel to treat with carefully, even as the Arkenstone hidden beneath the tomb before them.
“I see,” he said at last, softly. “So the tales they tell, then, that dwarves keep their treasures carefully guarded . . .”
“Are true,” Gimli confirmed. “If that guard is not always what others expect it to be.”
“No,” said Legolas, and now he was thinking about beautifully-crafted armor hiding sensitive skin, guarded tongues concealing layers of hurt. His people lived concealed by danger – borders of a wood none dared to traverse protecting them even as they threatened them, an armor with thorns on the outside and inside both. He looked at Gimli’s face now, open with trust, soft with the remnants of his grief, and he wondered what wounds Gimli too bore from his own armor. And then it was bursting out of him, unable to hold it back, “But I hope that even a dwarf might dare to lower his guard – or her guard – when the time comes.”
“When the time comes,” said Gimli, and he caught Legolas’s hand in a grip that promised him he had not overstepped.
It was steadying, calming, to be held thus: to be grounded, here, in this room of stone and death, by the living yet beside him. He held tight, felt the thrum of Gimli’s blood beneath his skin, the enclosing strength of his fingers. He breathed, long and slow: polished stone and myrrh and memory. “Lord Dis,” he said slowly. “Lady Dis. I will not reveal it to any other.”
“Perhaps not now,” said Gimli gruffly. “But I begin to wonder what of the old secrets are better kept, and what are better shared. It may be that her memory deserves to be passed on along with her brother’s in the lineages that are preserved and taught, even outside the Mountain.”
“Perhaps she might have something to say on the matter herself,” said Legolas. “If she is willing to speak to it. Memory is better shared by the living.”
“While they can,” said Gimli. “And it may be she would pass hers on, as well, for of all the stories and tales, there is none who remembers these here better than she does.” And his gaze passed again over the cluster of tombs, Thorin’s nephews buried beside him as they had fallen, that line worn to its end.
Something rose up in Legolas’s throat, a stone sharper than the razor edges of Orcrist itself, tearing him until he felt he must collapse, his throat shredded from the inside out. These tombs were all well tended, but there was something about these three, the subtle gleam of perfectly-polished stone, the faintest shine before each one where a dwarf might have knelt even as Gimli had before Dáin’s tomb, where a dwarf might have come every year – every month – every week – to sit with her grief. And abruptly he could see it in his mind: Gimli’s own tomb, placed beside his parents’, or – or perhaps somewhere else, lonely in the jeweled caverns of the Glittering Caves he yearned to return to; Gimli’s tomb, inscribed with dwarven runes and elven words, even as the Doors of Durin had been; representative of a friendship that had been –
Gimli’s tomb, tended by his own hands, for how could he ever leave a land where Gimli lay?
And he understood it, suddenly, abruptly, this reverence for the shells of the dead. There was no West for Gimli, no land to rehouse his flown spirit. Wherever it would go would be a land out of Legolas’s reach, away from the touch of his hands, and all he would have would be the shell of a body where Gimli had once lived, the tomb that housed it, the memory of their too-brief time together –
Memory is better shared by the living. By him, then, for who else could hope to live long enough to share it? Gimli’s life would be a story for dwarves to hear, his deeds translated into tales and carvings like those that lined these halls – but who would be there to remember the warmth of his hands, the sparkle of his eyes, the tenderness of the skin below the armor? These carvings, beautiful and majestic as they were, felt cold in the face of that, cold and emotionless and empty and –
“Easy,” said Gimli gently, and only at the feeling of his knuckles flexing did Legolas realize that his grip had tightened, crushing even Gimli’s large, sturdy hand. Never had the bones beneath felt so fragile to him, and he loosened his grip, sank teeth into his lower lip instead, for desperate need to hold onto something with the world wheeling away beneath him. “Is the deep-air too thin for you?”
“No,” Legolas whispered, nearly sobbed. It was not the air in here beneath the stone that ailed him, but the scent of memory, of loneliness – of a loss too few years away, rushing closer with every second. “No, it is only” – He looked again upon the walls, the stories imprinted in stone for all to see, for all to remember. He could stay here no longer in this place of mourning, but neither could he leave, while Gimli stood still with his own grief. “Thank you for sharing these stories with me,” he managed, and he knew his voice was thinner than a summer wind.
“No, I thank you,” Gimli corrected, and he pressed Legolas’s hand with such care that Legolas nearly wailed with it. “For letting me place them safely into your hands.”
“I will care for them as they deserve,” Legolas promised, for he could do no less than this. He would carry these stories – Gimli’s own, and any of his people’s that he was allowed – into a world that would hold them as immortal as they could possibly be, and never as much as they deserved. He would carry them in his heart until it broke with the burden, in his body until it faded to nothing, in his song until his own voice withered away to faltering breath – would lend what immortality he could share to the memories of a people whose lives would always be more fleeting than their memories. And he would do it for nothing more than Gimli, for nothing less than the memory of a love he would carry with him until he had no body, heart, or song left to bear its imprint.
“I know,” murmured Gimli, and he pressed a whiskery kiss to Legolas’s knuckles. “I know you will.”
And with no more words, he turned them away from the tombs and led them back towards the stone staircase, up into the light.