come back unto the caverns old (hobbit movies | tauriel, original characters)

[fiachairecht]

come back unto the caverns old. the hobbit (movies), tauriel, original female dwarf. the stories have many things to say about how the lonely mountain was won back from the dragon and rather less to say about what else remained. 1.6k words, rated t. for legendariumladiesapril 2016.

But if you remember, then turn away forever
To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,
there you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,
and the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart.
—Sara Teasdale, Water Lilies

You're born into a world that's already fading and it's years before you see the sun that's slowly pulling the colours from the air. You're born underground, cool and dark and not safe but whole and for a while it is enough.

It takes a long time for you to understand that time is different here. You tumble through caverns until you're coated in the dust of ages and people long dead, chase silver fish through rivers that were eternal before you were born and will be eternal after they've seen you dead. Your stars are unchanging, glittering jewels embedded in high vaulted ceilings and they will never burn out and never be anything but yours.

It's better, down here. Here, where you keep everyone's stories safe but don't have to worry about yours being lost because the rocks hold them safe and still for you. Outside, during ages past, your songs were heard by so few and loved by even fewer; here glittering cavern walls reflect them back at you a thousandfold, a chorus that refuses to fade, refuses to erode, even as you grow and grow and hear the top of the mountain being worn down by time a pebble at a time.

One day the mountain will be as flat as the stones you pluck from the river and craft into jewellery and sculptures still unmatched in any of the lands. You don't go out, don't like the idea of a wide open sky that can't cradle you, can't promise to hold you forever, but your mother does, and some of your older cousins, those who were there for the rebuildings and the alliances and who still feel the echoes of old friends and old friendships in the lands. We are not alone, in this mountain, in this world, they tell you, and though you agree with them you think they ought to be more concerned with the shadows that dwell with you in the deeps than the men who don't have the sense to stay close and quiet.

These shadows are not things that are seen long enough or with certainty enough to be put into tales. They are not dragons to be drowned, not orcs to be beheaded, not even Balrogs to be slain. They are shadows deeper and stranger even than those, shadows with eyes and shadows that don't stay put and shadows that want you just as much as the stone does.

Maybe the shadows are hiding something. Maybe it is them alone that you should fear. Either way, you cannot turn away. You cannot meet the eyes that are waiting for you, cannot respond to the clicks and whispers that the walls echo back at you along with your own voice, but neither can you run.

(You should run. Oh, you should run.)

*

There is an elf in your halls long after all the elves should have left and her hair is redder than the sun, redder than the skies when they burned in wars that your kin didn't particularly want but that took them anyway. Her hands are calloused in ways you've never seen: not from mining, not from crafting. Her tunic is green and she is crowned in green leaves and green branches and you've seen the colours of every gem that is to be found under the mountain but you've still never seen green like this before.

There is an elf in your halls and she knows some of your stories and a few halting, accented words of your language and it's the first time since you were very very young that you're fascinated by something that you can see. The elf is called Tauriel, and she is of this world but not of your world: she knows not of rocks warmed by underground rivers, knows not of the music of the smiths. Her world is the forest and the stars, the Wood of the Greenleaves under lights so far and cold you wonder how she could ever draw comfort from them.

But the stars don't shine through the leaves anymore, she tells you, not unless you climb high enough to lose your breath. You think of the cold at the top of your mountain, about the warmth beneath it. You think of trees, trees you've never seen but that can't grow so fast in a land that's bleeding out its magic westward, and when you start counting the centuries that must have taken on your fingers they still when they reach five.

Have you been here that long? You should remember, but you can't.

It matters less, though, because Tauriel wants to see your stars, wants to see the caverns and the constellations and the first word on the tip of your tongue is no. No, because those stars are yours, warm and unchanging and nothing like the ones of the elves that let mere branches stop them from shining. No, because the sadness that rests in the corners of Tauriel's eyes and the crease of her lips is old and tired and no longer frightening, and if you take her down far enough that she can see the gems the way they ought to be seen you'll have to take her past the shadows, past a river less and less content to stay in its banks, into spaces where silence has strangled away lives.

She says, I am no stranger to shadows and the things that live within them, I came to Lasgalen when it was still Mirkwood and know the parts that still are.

She says, you too know that your home will take you in the end, I want to see this before I return for the last time, because I do know that I will return, I do know the trees would not have it any other way.

(You should still say no. Oh, you should still say no.)

*

It is with Tauriel that you step outside for the first time. It is her gift to you, she says, for showing her your stars: she wants you to see hers.

Outside. It is a strange thought, one you haven't entertained much over the years. You're too thin and pale for outside, too used to pressing yourself through crevices hardly visible until you yourself seem hardly there.

But you hold her hand tight and you step outside and she's told you so many stories but nothing, oh, nothing could have prepared you for the lights, the sprawl, the colours that bleed and spread and twist and can't be confined to single stones or veins of rocks. The sky above you is studded with whited-out stars, and except for the spaces where you can see it broken by mountains it has no lid, and you're dizzy and faint with its horrible sort of freedom.

You stumble. Tauriel catches you. You hadn't imagined she would, for some reason.

She takes you down to the lake and in the space between the stars and their drowned reflections in the water there are shadows in the mist that you don't know how to live with. Smaug lies at the bottom of this lake, Tauriel tells you how she saw him fall, and you shiver. You are not naive enough to think that dead is dead, and you think of Mirkwood and wonder how Tauriel could possibly be. The spiders, you suppose, were at least solid.

You camp by the lake for two days and you don't get used to the noises of outside, the birds and the soft shallow waves on the lakeshore. You don't get used to the emptiness of this world: Tauriel is with you and the world is full of life but it's so spread out, so cold, so unlike the warm clusters of home and the heartbeats running through the rocks that you know. You don't get used to the sun: when it rises, you curl yourself into the shadow the mountain casts, and Tauriel raises an eyebrow that asks all the questions she knows better than to voice.

There are lilies on the lake and when Tauriel first reaches for them you grab her hand, whisper no like you should have when you were still underground, tell her they are not yours, they are barely the lake's, think of how long the dragon has lain in the mud of the lakebed.

She laughs in the moonlight and plucks their petals anyway, sends the eyes and their thin cold bodies splashing away. Tauriel's hands are very much like leaves and she weaves the flowers into a crown for you. Her teeth are very sharp when she murmurs that you are a princess of a realm that will take no more royalty but swallow you whole anyway, just like me, remember we are loved and we love — and you tip your head back as the moon's silver flame licks around the shadows rising from the lake and her fingers thin and gnarled like vines damp from the lake slide over your lips and through your beard.

(You are not alone, and you expected this but not like this and you should go. Oh, you should go—

where?)

*

Tauriel returns to the forest and you return to the mountain and the smell of the water lilies never leaves your nose anymore now, no, not when the flowers crowd pale and sickly-sweet through the rivers, not when coloured fires spring from walls and never chase away the shadows, not when you delve deeper and deeper past the lowest mine and past the level where the soil tells you Durin's Bane awoke in Khazad-dûm. The mountain's own shadow curls around your heart and squeezes, and you let yourself expand to meet it.

(You should remain. Oh, you should remain.)