Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
Gustave Flaubert

Chapter 1
The Author

Erebor, late summer 3019 TA

The sun was just rising over the horizon, its rays touching the eastern slopes of the Lonely Mountain. Summer was nearing its end and there was a chill in the morning air, reminding one and all that autumn was close. The author didn’t feel the cold. She’d wrapped herself in a cloak that was too short for her. To make sure her feet didn’t freeze off she’d taken a blanket to cover them up.

From where she was sitting the surrounding lands looked perfectly peaceful. In this light everything looked peaceful. Most folk were still abed, at least for the moment. Soon enough there would be people out and about, clearing away all the reminders that not so long ago war had raged over these lands. The author had heard the stories, although she hadn’t been here when it all happened. But through their tales it was as though she had witnessed some of the events herself, from multiple perspectives. And she was an author; it was her lot in life to write down all these stories so that they wouldn’t be forgotten.

‘Have you been here all night?’

The author looked round. Not that she needed to; she knew who the voice belonged to. ‘Only a few hours,’ she replied. ‘I wanted to see the sunrise.’

The wanderer sat himself down beside her. If the cold ground bothered him, he didn’t show it. ‘You finished reading then?’ It wasn’t so much a question as a conclusion.

The author nodded. ‘I did.’

In the past months he had gotten to know her entirely too well; he heard what she hadn’t translated into the spoken word. ‘It did not help, did it?’

There was some understanding there, but there was also the tone of voice that betrayed he had expected that result long before it had arrived. She felt a little put out with him for that, especially because he had warned her that reading someone else’s story was not always a guideline for one’s own life. Of course, after what she had been through herself, she ought to have known that. Maybe it had been easier to ignore it, instead clinging to the altogether rather childish belief that one book could somehow help her figure out what to do with her own life.

Of course her friend had known, but it was the kind of wisdom she had not expected from him. Not that this wanderer was by any means a simple soul – there was intelligence there clear as daylight – but his knowledge and wisdom were of a different nature. He was more of a practical person whereas she… well, she didn’t actually know any more what she was and wasn’t.

For a moment she contemplated lying, but he’d see through that in seconds and so it served no point. ‘It didn’t. The situations are too… different.’ Different was not a word that conveyed all that she wanted to, but she failed to come up with a more satisfactory alternative. A bit disappointing, that. Words were her trade after all. It has been too long since I’ve written anything, she lamented silently. My skills are getting rusty.

‘And yet strangely alike as well,’ he observed.

She shot him an irritated glance. ‘When did you get so wise?’

‘You never noticed it before,’ he replied airily. ‘Didn’t mean it wasn’t there.’

The author gave him a long, hard look and finally noticed what she should probably have seen right away, had she not been so lost in her own thoughts. ‘You didn’t get any sleep either, did you?’

‘Not much,’ he admitted. ‘I keep on thinking…’ He trailed off. ‘Never mind what I was thinking. It’s a dismal thought and it won’t bring him back.’

She nodded and let him drop the subject. It wasn’t her place to intrude on his grief. They were friends, true enough, but she’d always felt there was some line that she shouldn’t cross. This was that line. If there was anything she had learned about him and his family, it was that they did not talk about what they felt easily, if they spoke of it at all. Her friend’s grief seemed to have opened him up some, but not overly much.

There was silence between them for a time as they watched the sun rise. It was beautiful here, the author thought. It would be even more so when the last scars of war had been gone from the land. She’d always had too vivid an imagination and she could almost picture what it had been like only a few months previous. Bodies littering the ground, trees burning, battle cries filling the air. A shiver went down her spine. She’d seen enough of war not to need an imagination of any kind to picture a battlefield. Would that I could make myself forget.

‘So, what will you do?’ the wanderer asked, breaking the silence at last.

‘I don’t know.’ That had been her answer for so long now that it came to her lips almost effortlessly. I don’t know, but I will know soon. As soon as I’ve done this, as soon as I’ve seen that… But she had done this and she had seen that and she was no closer to an answer.

He looked at her, well-known half-smile on his face. ‘Well, I’m no scholar and I’ve always abhorred any sort of activity that involves quills and parchments, but you’re different, aren’t you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m not so sure. I haven’t written anything in so long.’

He must know that she was making excuses. ‘My sister always tells me writing is like riding a pony. You don’t forget because you haven’t done it in a while.’ He conjured up a smile. ‘It’s been her favourite argument to get my brother to do his letter-writing for many years now.’

‘This is not letter-writing,’ the author pointed out. ‘Besides, what point would there be to it? I’ve got all the information, but if I wrote it down and had it published, who would believe it? And she has already told her own tale. There’s no need for my book.’ She snorted. ‘Imagine that. All the work that’s gone into this investigation and now it turns out I can’t write about it after all. There’s irony in that somewhere.’

‘I didn’t mean her story,’ he said in a tone that suggested the idea must have occurred to her. ‘I meant yours. You’ve done enough of your so-called research to make it a good one.’

‘It’s not just so-called…’ she began to protest, a habit that had been years in the making. Research was what she based her work on. She was not one of those story-writers. Her work was based in fact and she liked to keep it that way, thank you very much. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I don’t write stories.’

‘Your work is based in hard facts,’ her friend agreed, parroting her endless refrain back at her. ‘Just wondering why you seem to be thinking all our adventures are mere stories. Didn’t it feel real enough?’

She snorted. ‘There were times when it didn’t.’ There had been times when she could have sworn she had wandered into a dream or a nightmare, depending on the situation. ‘And even if I wanted to, I don’t have the time.’

That look told her how much he believed of that. ‘If you didn’t have the time, then why come all the way up here?’ he asked. Clearly it had been meant as a rhetorical question and she treated it that way. Her not bothering with an answer had nothing to do with not wanting to admit she didn’t have a clue why she had acted as she did.

Truth was, she was not even all that certain why she kept on delaying the inevitable. She had known what the outcome of all her pondering would be before she even began. No, that was not entirely true. She had known what the outcome should be. It was not the same thing, not the same thing at all.

What was true though was that time was rapidly slipping away. A choice had to be made and the longer she thought about it, the more she convinced herself that her friend was right. If she did this, if she wrote about what happened the way she did in her other books, her own path might seem a bit clearer than it was now. That wasn’t necessarily true, but she could make herself believe it if she only tried hard enough.

In the end it was the lack of a suitable alternative that decided her. She had spent the better part of the morning wondering about what to do, but sitting on a mountainside thinking about it hadn’t gotten her anywhere in the previous days, so it stood to reason it would not miraculously get her anywhere in the days to come.

She had been given a room of her own. It was sparsely furnished, but there was a writing desk and, thanks to her friend, enough writing equipment to keep her stocked for weeks. Her belongings, including all her documentation, the result of months of painstaking research, were scattered around the place. The wanderer had been right; she had more than enough hard facts to base her story on.

‘Bugger these quills,’ she muttered when she sat herself down. The author had used them before, but only briefly and mainly for short notes. This would not be short by any stretch of the imagination. And her penmanship wasn’t going to win her any prizes either. Her script was barely readable even when she had better material to work with. ‘Positively medieval.’ It was hardly the first time she had uttered comments like that and it was surely not the last time either.

But there was nothing else for it. She took a deep breath, dipped her quill in the ink and began to write.

Here follows the account…

The Book

Dramatis Personae

Also featuring a full cast of:

• Armies, so many armies. Elves, dwarves, orcs, men, trolls, wargs. If you can think of it there’s probably an army of it around in this story.
• Healers: busy.
• Nazgûl: scary.
• Creepy creature of the Lake: slimy, tentacled. Enough said. Close encounters should probably be avoided.
• Traitors: a bloody nuisance.
• Scouts: Ditto.
• Loads of civilians: dissatisfied with the way things are being run in the time-honoured tradition of civilians everywhere, because everyone knows that a civilian happy with politicians/kings is rarer than a four-leaf clover.
• And one snobbish horse with Opinions, probably on the lookout for a rider who actually knows what he’s doing.