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You are King Under the Mountain.
Does that please you? Does it give you pleasure to be accorded your rightful title? You, born the prince of a mighty kingdom, son of a mighty line. Those bitter years of exile and poverty have not diminished your pride, O King. For too many years you had nothing else with which to feed your heart, your hot and hungry heart. Not unwonted then, that your heart should be so full with it.
But there is no need to recall such galling memories. You have been lifted high above such distasteful history, high above such ignoble drudgery. You will never labor for your bread again, like some common third-rate smith with his sack of tools and no mine or mansion to call his own. You will never again ask for petty work at Men's doors, putting your royal hand to rude employment for the sake of others. Such things are beneath you, were always beneath you, and now you wear a crown to prove it.
Look out from atop your throne, O King. Who is there that does not bow before you? Who in those armed and mailed ranks does not lay his axe and hammer at your feet? Who among your kin does not acknowledge your right of rule? Who is there that does not bend the knee?
Your father died a raving fool and his father died a broken man, but not you. You are he who restores. You have renewed your kingdom, your house, and your line. You will be the rebirth of your people. Durin's blood has not thinned in you.
The Ring is lost to your line, but this does not concern you. Your stolen gold has multiplied manyfold in your absence; the Dragon was no idler. What need you an Elf-wrought ring, when you have so much gold? Yet you are not your father's father: you possess gold, gold does not possess you. You had that sickness once, that fever, but war and a crown cleansed you of that malady. It was your last and most difficult lesson, but you know now how to have gold and not let it have you. Would that someone had taught this talent to your father.
The world has knelt before you, O King. It has tamed itself to your hand. Erebor is yours, and so the Iron Hills, for Dain Ironfoot bends the knee to his liege lord. Your holdings in the Blue Mountains are not small or mean, and if Dale has a new King still Dale lies in ruins. You, knowing something of Elves, think the Dale-men will not find the Elf-king so eager to feed and clothe them for long. There is only one other direction in which to turn, and you, knowing something of being poor, do not think the new King of Dale will long forbear to swear if he sees his people starving.
Every day, your kingdom grows. Every day, more come to raise your banners and work your forges. Already you command more axes than there ever were in Ered Luin, and you can hear the Elf-king pacing uneasy in his hall. Let him. Let him look to the East, and remember that he once had you in a cell. Let him remember that he once left you and your kin to the Dragon and the fire, that he turned his back on you with the ruin of your house all around you. Let him remember all the wrongs that he has done you.
Let them all remember.
Your own halls have returned to life; they fill and fill with those who come to put themselves at your service. Entire clans come to avow themselves into your dominion, and you take them all. The Great Chamber of Thror is full of your captains, your councilors, your stewards, full of food and drink and gold and song. They sing in your honor, they sing of your deeds. They sing of the Company, and the retaking of Erebor, and there is golden pride in every verse.
They love you, O King. They love you as they love no other. They love you as Dwalin loves you, for being his King and his lord. They love you as Balin loves you, for you are the finest of your line, the best of your house. They love you as Bofur, Bifur, and Bombur love you, for bringing them home when they have never had one before. They love you as Dori, Nori, and Ori love you, for being their kinsman and allowing your lesser cousins to share in your glory. They love you as Oin and Gloin love you, for the sakes of clan and vengeance. They all love you.
Almost.
When did your sister-sons begin looking at you this way? Quiet and wary, a distance there that was not there before. They avoid your attention, withdraw from your confidences. Their eyes upon you are uneasy and even, you sometimes think, afeard. You tell them again and again that it is time for their mother to come to you in Erebor, to witness the restoration of your family's rights and be allotted all the honors of being sister to the King, and again and again they demur. They cavil. They balk.
Heretofore you have not commanded them, for it did not please you to force your will. But you have been King Under the Mountain for many months, and others are beginning to look at your nephews from the corners of their eyes. Do you think they will obey you if you do command them? There are those who say they would not wager gold on the outcome. You understand, O King, that the danger is not Fili's excuses or Kili's unwillingness, for they are your loyal kin. No. The danger is the doubt of others. And are these questions not just? If the King Under the Mountain cannot compel his own sister-sons, then what meaning is there to his authority? Will you not rule honorably and righteously? Or should others expect you to e'er give preference to your own, though they be defiant? Are you a King, or a doting uncle?
What is the worth of your command?
How bittersweet, O King, that those whom you love most should most begrudge you in your hour of triumph. Who could have known that these boys, whom you often thought of as you would your sons, would be such ingrates? The saying goes that there is no gold without the dross, and this is blackest dross indeed. Your heavy heart must take on one more burden.
For the succession must not be in doubt. While you were childless, Fili was your heir and Kili was your spare, as they say, and perhaps it is understandable, if not forgivable, that they should be malcontented to find themselves dispossessed of the throne before they could come into it. You had always thought that they were only reluctantly your heirs, but how well you know the innumerable ways in which a heart can change. If you can discard one kind of lust then surely they can pick up another.
How oppressive your duties must seem to you sometimes, these kingly concerns. You have long been familiar with toiling alone, sustaining yourself on little more than your will and a heartful of pride, but even you cannot always go without rest. Even you must sometimes need a reprieve, an abeyance, a moment of quiet and calm. A time, however brief, in which to take some solace for yourself. Even you cannot be made of stone, despite all your efforts. You spent all your tears in your younger days, in silence and solitude, so that you no longer know how to weep, and in this you are like stone, but there are other, more seemly releases a man can seek. Do you not have one?
You know that you do.
You closed the Back Door not long after your coronation. You filled the tunnel with earth and stone and the slag from the forges and then you broke the face of the mountain where the keyhole used to be. Yours is now a key without a lock to open, and there is no way out of Erebor other than the Gates. Perhaps in future you will construct a new secret door, to ward against the vagaries of fate, but you do not think so. Your house was expelled from the Lonely Mountain once. It will not be again.
At the bottom of that filled-in tunnel, you have built a vault.
You do not think of it as a vault. No, you always intended it to be a chamber. But in size it is the smallest room in Erebor, enclosed by walls, and the door you fashioned for it—with your own two hands because there was a time when you could not eat unless you were a smith worth paying—is so complex and exquisite that even Elves would gasp and gape, and what's more it is mithril. You have set a mithril door on this vault, and its sigil is a crown. Only you know the secret of opening it. Only the King Under the Mountain enters here.
The vault lies at the lowest point of the Great Hall, and there is gold strewn all about it, piled high against the walls and around its door. You kick jewels out of your way as you approach, scrambling gold with the toes of your boots as you pass.
Look, O King. Do you see? It is your reflection. Is there more white in your hair than you remember? Is your beard beginning to silver? You have always been grim of eye and face, but do you recognize the dreadful visage that the mithril shows you? Have your eyes always been so sunken, has your mouth always scowled so? But you are now a King, and a King's burdens do not wane but wax. At least, this is what Balin and Dwalin tell themselves while they watch you age ten years in one.
Open the door. Do not worry, your secret is safe. There is no one to see, and even if someone did, you are the King. What can they do? What can anyone do? This is your kingdom. This is your right.
Open the door, scattering gold and gems over the threshold. Do close it behind you, you will want no disturbances.
Lift your taper high. She will not mind.
The wizard looked old and grey as he searched the battlefield, even older and greyer than he always did. He picked through that valley of corpses and crows for the rising and setting of five suns. When the last mound of Orcs was smoldering ash, still he sifted the blackened earth, in the last detritus of his hope. Where is our burglar, he kept saying, where is our burglar. Where is my hobbit. He was weeping.
You left him there. You did tell him, didn't you, that you could not guarantee the hobbit's safety. You warned him, right at the beginning. If the wizard did not listen, then that is not your fault. He has only himself to blame, wherever he is.
You did not lie, O King. Be assured. When you said that you would not be responsible for her fate, all those months ago, this was not what you meant. So it was not a lie.
Does she not look well, lying there? Her face is soft with sleep, untouched by care. She breathes deeply, evenly, and there are no nightmares in that sweet face. She looks as if she could wake at any moment. Is that not why you always touch her, despite sometimes having come without any such intentions? It always seems so possible, so likely. You always think, This time she will wake.
She does not.
Her hair is growing longer. Her nails need cutting. There is a deaf, dumb, and half-blind woman, a mute, that you took into your service the morning after the Battle. It is the mute's duty to bathe her, to dress her, to make her woman's ablutions for her, to try to feed her and trickle water down her throat. It is also the mute's duty to ask no questions and tell no tales, telling no one of the hour that she spends every day behind the mithril door. The mute obeys because she has no relatives living and would have starved if not for you, and because she might still meet an even worse end if she does not. You see, you are not the only one who has had to pull penury like a hood down over your eyes, to water down repugnant truths with other, more immediate concerns. Your sister-sons, young and as relatively spoiled as you could manage—now that is your fault—have never had to learn such mental sophistry. The case may be that you did them a disservice. Do not dwell on this; it is too late to regret their upbringing now.
Those first desperate days were unspeakable for you. How you shouted, how you swore, how wroth you were at the stillness and the silence. How you shook her, bruising her arms and roaring in her face until you feared that you had broken her neck. You slapped her, that one time, in your agonies, and then you retched up bile at the shame of it. You could not eat, you could not sleep. You kept her concealed in your own chambers for the entire month, stuffing her into a gilded chest that you could lock while you were not there. She breathed and slept and was warm beneath your hand, but she would not wake and she made no sound. Do you remember how you laid her in your lap during the day, stroking her hair and talking to her closed eyes? Do you remember how you laid her out beside you in your bed, holding her through the night?
O King, do you suppose you lost your mind?
You mislike this suggestion. It is not surprising. Your pedigree has been plagued with sickly brains before. This has always been a particular dread of yours, that the weakness in your father and your father's father mayhap be a weakness in you, who have denied weakness all your life. You tell yourself it was the Ring, the Ring and the gold, and that you have lost one and conquered the other and thus are now exempt. Yet your father, who died drooling gibberish, never locked a girl into a box.
He never did a lot of things.
The vault was all but complete before you could not wait anymore. Do you remember, O King? Do you remember her lying quiescent in your bed, perhaps dreaming of her green and flowering country? Your stone-walled bedchamber was cold and her skin the color of moonstones, the front of her shirt pulled awry in your moving her so that one shoulder and a pink-tipped breast came exposed. Your eye was caught, your flesh stiffened—or would have stiffened, if it had not already been rigid. You are a man.
Do you remember that shirt? It was one of your own, goat's hair wool thrice-dyed. You still have it, and when you wear it you can breathe in her scent.
You removed it from her as if she were Nauglamir itself, bundled into your dark blue shirt. Your fingers are so huge and coarse against her skin, your hand made rude by the shape of her, your arm beastly-hairy and beastly-thewed, and every time you touch her you are shaken by some clinging sense of wrong, as if you profane some holy place without your knowing it. But that is not right—for are you not wed, you and she, by your honor and your oath if not by tradition or ceremony? Do you not make your vows anew every time you see her, have you not mouthed your covenant into every minim of her body? You shelter her, you clothe her, you see her fed and waited on, you array her in jewels and lay her down on a golden bed; you provide. Are you not her husband? What formality could possibly legitimize you more than all your spousal ministrations? What more could be required of a marriage?
Your shirt was her bridal gown, your royal bed her conjugal couch. How sweetly she slept, acquiescent beneath you. Her throat pulsed with life against your tongue, even if her arms were limp about your shoulders, her head lolling to one side. Her breasts blushed at the touch of your hands and your lips, the nipples indignantly stiff. The pointed shells of her ears were red from your teeth.
Beside her, you are as rough as crude iron. You are unshapen stone, made cross-grained and harsh by life, scarred and hairy. She is not made as you are made, or even as your sister, considered fair among your people. Beside her, all your kind are but hulking maladroits. It was not that long ago that it was not in you to think of this child of the kindly West as a woman, for she seemed so young and artless despite her age. Untried hobbits are as children to such worldly strugglers as you. You made no objections when Fili and Kili, her peers in years and immaturity, began to keep her company, because they were two young fools teasing and winking at a pretty maiden. You did not take their flirtations seriously, their yapping play as they competed for her wide-eyed stammering. How much more lenient you were then. How indulgent.
But that was then, was it not? Your early indifference to her womanly parts did not stop you later from parting her legs, from spreading them over your hips, from pressing your weeping cock to her own locked door. No key there, only the hammer, the battering ram, for this gate cannot be opened or closed, only broken. It would have been her most priceless gift to you, had she been awake to give it. But you have never shrunk from taking treasure.
Sweet and soft her face, and you pressing against her sweetest and softest place. A moment of opposition, a last-minute protest from her body or perhaps only the habit of innocence, and then she opened to you, helpless and yielding. How you cried out, a hard and desperate moan ground out between your clenched teeth, to be in her and a part of her. You knew less of this than you did of hobbits, for neither beggared princes-in-exile nor vengeful kings-in-exile can take wives, but it seems that your body needed no teaching then. Your hips pulled back and thrust again, pulled back, thrust, pulled back, thrust. There was blood on your cock and you were panting most unroyally with such need as cannot be found in the most desperate violence. Your mouth wide and wetly open, your forehead on her breast, you rocked her with your stabs, your jabbing loins, you labored over her broken maidenhead. Were those tears in your eyes? It cannot be. Are you not stone?
Then release, all your heartaches submerged in molten metal, your body shuddering at the ignited pinnacle, and your cock disgorging into her your rights and your claim.
What passes before your eyes in that moment? Is it her? Is it her as she was, awake and merry and sometimes irritable or whining when she was not startled or panicked? Or is it her as she is, this lash-cheeked moppet who does not whine or startle? Which memory of her makes your member twitch and rise?
Or perhaps you remember the her that lived, however briefly, in that fractured moment between was and is, when your hand came down with the Arkenstone in it and made a wet thump against her head.
No, do not cringe. The royal face should not display such anguish. She earned your anger by her own hand, willingly and in insolence—your heart was cut wholly out of you when you found the Arkenstone in her pocket. There was only one crime you could not forgive, and that was the one she committed. Anyone else might have forfeited his head for that, even your own sister-sons, even your faithful Balin. It could not be borne. That she, a hobbit grocer from a country of farmers and mud-plowing rats, should steal from you. That she, whom you were prepared to elevate above her birth and place, whom you planned to make a Queen and the wife and mother of Kings, would dare to try and cheat you. That she, your only she, your trembling, foolish, brave little love, the only woman for whom your proud and infertile heart has ever tendered, should turn on you even as the entire world becomes your enemy.
Truly, O King, you were merciful. Your remorse only proves your quality. You even took her without a bridal share, on top of all her transgressions, an unheard-of thing.
Her wound is puckered flesh now, and you cannot see it unless you brush away her hair. You are not required to look at it when you come to her, when you go to pay her a husband's attentions. You do not have to see it now.
Is she not comely, your traitorous wife, lying there on her slab of gold, in her ragged, brindled furs? She looks almost happy, does she not, as she sleeps beneath your eminent and greedy weight? She submits most prettily to your attentions, your hands and your lips and your tongue and your propagating limb. She never defies you now. Not even during your nuptials, that first urgent night in your own bedchamber before you carried her down to the vault, when you certainly must have hurt her, the sweet and unavoidable pain that is the first trepidatious duty of the bride. Your bedclothes were afterward stained with the proof of her maidenhood, her thighs and your cock and man's-hair smeared with blood and semen, but she slept untroubled in your arms as you sang to her.
Do you never wonder what the mute is thinking, when wringing out the dripping cloth to wipe the slops of fatherhood from her thighs and her woman's-hair? No?
Look, she is smiling in her sleep. Or perhaps it is only a trick of the light.
How you occupy yourself with her, your fingers tracing runes for luck and treasure and royalty over her heart, her breast. You hold her close. You mouth endearments, common Westron and more vehement Khuzdul, and sing in her ear. You stroke her ankles as you spread her legs. Her body has been familiar to you, has it not; you can look at almost any portion of her and recall the taste. Only one part of her is original to you again: her belly, distended against your splayed fingers, already so big that she cannot be turned onto it, swollen with life and your virility. What you know of hobbit-women you have learned in your bedchamber and in your vault, but there is a certain poetry in your charming notion of a nuptial conception. By such sacrifices is the future engendered, and it pleases you to think that it was in your bed she conceived the continuation of your line. Your member is engorged at the mere sight of her bulging flesh.
Let your sister-sons practice impudence. Soon will come a prince to usurp usurpers.
Look upon her, O King. Look upon your apostate Queen, a prince of the blood growing below her heart and only her dreams know what within. Does this please you? Does it give you pleasure to look upon all your treasures at once, locked away under the mountain? Does your heart burn with your repletion?
The Arkenstone looks quite irreproachable around her neck.
Was it some perverse conceit that made you clasp that stone about her throat, or was it some uncanny justice? Did you mean to proffer it up as an irreplaceable sign of your regret and enduring love, or do you feel that she has earned it, having paid a higher price for this relic of your house than either you or your father's father ever did? Or, perchance, is it only that you are titillated by its rhythmic clinking between flesh and stone as you exert your rights? Does its white fire urge you on? Does your jutting muscle gouge more deeply when the Arkenstone is wedged between your sweating body and her uncomplaining breasts, her fecund belly? Do you even know which it is, or do you only know that you would have it there?
O King, the answer is not important. All things are as you would have them. You have righted the world. Your kinsmen are at your side, if not all of them are at heart, and not a one lost to fire or war. Your kingdom is yours, taken back at what was, to be practical, not much cost at all when you consider what might have been. Your enemies are destroyed and dispersed, your grudging neighbors held in check by your assembling strength. Your jeweled and beloved wife is safe and guarded behind a mithril door, your son kicking in her womb, awaiting the day of a secure succession. Is it possible that you should have any desires left unfulfilled, after striking such a deep vein of good fortune? Have your one hundred and seventy-one years of privation and shame not been generously compensated?
Hence be joyed, King Under the Mountain. You have all that you could desire. Go to your waiting wife with an easy heart, whom you have forgiven for her betrayal. Close the mithril door behind you, and look upon your most precious treasures three. Let your hand rest upon them. Your thieving wife asleep in her white furs. Your unborn son, whom you will raise better and more carefully than you did your nephews.
And the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain. Set in a mithril chain and clasped about a hobbit's neck, though not before it did its work. Does it smell of Dragon to you? No? That is well.
Yes, go in glory, O King. O line-restorer. Not Dragon-slayer, no—that was not you. Not Goblin-bane, either—there was a host of others, and you came last to the battle. Perhaps Door-finder—but no, that was also not you. That was your little burglar, your thief of a hobbit, who got her comeuppance at your hand. Was it not also she who found the weak point in the Dragon's breast, just in time for a feathered tattler to rush to that up-jumped King of Dale's ear? Ah, but it matters not.
Listen! Do you hear? The whispering of your sister-sons. They are asking questions. They know about the mute. Concerned and disturbed, they have been following you to and fro, compelled by their love of you. Would that love be there still, if they could see what you do behind the mithril door? They grieved most terribly when the burglar could not be found. You yourself saw their tears. You watched them weep and could not stop thinking of those earlier days of bold and amorous glances of young fools. If your nephews can dare to covet your throne, what else could they spoil for?
Tuck that away into your heart of pride.
Go, ascend the golden bed. Your hobbit-wife is, if not waiting, at least unresisting. Lay down atop her, one beringed hand on her breast and the other on the dowry you made to her. Take out your fleshy implement and shove it inside her. Fill her with your seed. Drench her with it. Leave her sopping. She cannot say no; you bashed autonomy out of her head with a handful of your patrimony. Do what you will—you are the King, and she but a burglar, Queen only because you intend to put the crown on her head. Because you are a gracious and forgiving husband.
The Arkenstone has slipped off. You ought to put it back.
No, O King, her eyes are not opening. She does not murmur. Her eyelashes are still on her cheek. There is no tremble in her limbs. Her legs do not shift under your arms.
She is not opening her eyes. She is not looking up at you in confusion and pain, her arms too weak to lift her up. Her lips are not parting in a gasp as you deliver another vigorous thrust.
No, she has not cried out. She is not gulping your name, her small, hoarse voice hitching as you do not hold back in claiming your privileges. Her small and feeble fists are not beating about your shoulders, are not tangling and pulling at your hair. Those are not her legs struggling against your hips. Those are not tears in her eyes, wetting her face. That is not her voice, weeping and begging you to stop, to please, please stop, Thorin, please, I don't understand what are you doing it hurts you're hurting me what is happening Thorin please Thorin what are you doing why are you doing it I don't understand help me please help me somebody help me Thorin oh it hurts Thorin stop what is happening Thorin help me Thorin help me oh help me please please please help me Thorin Thorin Thorin.
She does not wail in her panic, there is no moment spent trying to pry your hand off of her breast and nor is there another moment used to clutch pleadingly at your face. She is not bucking hard now, not kicking and thrashing with all her uncomprehending terror. This does not only goad you on, your lust hot and consuming, your cock so hard and dribbling that you are at the point of pain.
This is not when she finally looks down, putting her dull eyes on her swollen belly.
She does not begin to scream.
Such screams, worse than any wailing. Brittle screams, touched with madness, screams that would deafen you if they were real. Screams to haunt your sleep. Screams to follow you in the dark.
Your back arches. Her nails do not rake your thickly-haired chest. Your seed pours into her in a protracted and spasming peak.
The screaming that never started now does not choke off.
Spent and panting, feeling as though you are breathing fire, you look down. Her breast is in one of your hands, and the Arkenstone is in the other. You have pulled it too far—the chain is tight around her neck, it is constricted around her throat. Her lips are pale blue, and her eyes are closed.
You cry out in fear and drop the Arkenstone, using both hands to loosen the chain. It leaves raw and red dents in the flesh of her throat, a circumference of her neck. The blue drains from her lips, but her eyes are still closed, her face sweetly composed. She is asleep.
Are you weeping, O King? Are those tears in your eyes, are you snivelling into the hobbit's hair? It seems you are not the stone you thought you were. Behold the King Under the Mountain, of the Line of Durin, exiled and returned, weeping like a woman while his cock shrinks inside his dumbstruck thief-wife's semen-flooded cunt. How you blubber, O King. How you fumble at her face with your royal paws. Is this not all you wanted? Are you not in possession of everything you once desired? Do you not have the kingdom, the gold, the Heart of the Mountain, and even the woman you love? Why do you weep so bitterly, as if your heart is breaking, your heart of golden and hoarded pride? Why does your regal head hang in despair? Is this not your hour of triumph?
You are King Under the Mountain, beardling. How do you like your revenge?