I came to with a gasp – echoed by Bilbo's surprised own – and a throbbing headache that only got worse when I hit my head against Bilbo's forehead – the poor hobbit had leaned over to check my condition and got a painful headbutt as thanks when I tried to rise.
"Sorry," I muttered, brushing my head with a grimace of pain.
"It is alright," Bilbo choked out, holding his forehead, and practically toppling backwards from the hit. "No harm done," he squeaked, and I looked at his rapidly reddening mark dubiously.
I was pretty sure there was, in fact, harm done.
I groaned and closed my eyes tightly as my head throbbed, and it wasn't because of the hit.
I had the funniest feeling that I had just been dreaming of something from my childhood, something really important, and yet…I tried to grasp the dream and it seemed to slip from my fingers like butter. I could only remember something about a hospital, and a garden?
I clenched my teeth in frustration and resisted the urge to hit the rock behind me.
This was the closest I had come to understand even a little bit of what was happening to me.
I knew that much.
And yet I couldn't remember.
It was frustrating as hell.
But as much as I wanted to spend all day trying to remember my dream, there was no time.
I just couldn't think about this now.
I would leave the future breakdown that would inevitably come for future me – because, with my luck, bad things would probably happen no matter what I did – and I would continue the journey to the Lonely Mountain with my best friend.
I couldn't forget about the dwarves either. I didn't want to imagine how they must be feeling right now.
I took a deep, deep breath and then let it go.
Right. I could do this.
"Thank goodness, Mairon!" Bilbo exclaimed, his eyes frantically scanning me for any visible injuries or any signs of distress. "I was so worried you would not wake! It has been three days since we fell!"
I promptly choked on my spit.
Three days?! How the hell was I unconscious for so long?!
Bilbo fluttered anxiously around me as I practically coughed my lungs out.
"Are you alright? Do you need any water? Oh, let me get it from my pack…"
"I am fine," I wheezed, waving my hand at Bilbo, who slowly settled down again as my coughs subsided.
"What are we to do, Mairon?" Bilbo asked, still looking anxious but fortunately calmer than before. "Thorin and the others will believe we have perished! Oh, and what will Gandalf think? We need to do something!"
"And we will," I reassured Bilbo as I slowly got up from the ground. I quickly patted myself and blinked in confusion.
Huh. I felt fine.
Better than fine, in fact. One would think I'd have more injuries because of the violent landing we experienced – especially since I took all the brunt of the impact – but it didn't seem as if I had any broken bones.
Or even a scratch, really.
Mairon, you son of a bitch.
At least this body had its perks. Things could have been way worse. I mean, sure, the dwarves were probably freaked out – they did see me dive after Bilbo, though, so maybe they knew the hobbit had somehow survived, saved by a giant eagle that had appeared from the middle of nowhere – and would be wondering what had happened to him.
Maybe me as well, seeing as I had not returned to the Company.
Wait. I almost forgot. I cursed loudly and Bilbo looked at me in alarm.
"What? What is it?"
"The Goblin Caves," I grumbled as I quickly took Bilbo's pack – which was miraculously still intact – and ignored the choked sound Bilbo made at my words.
"We need to catch up to Thorin and the others. It has already been three days since we parted, after all. They probably escaped from the goblins on that same day – if they were able to, that is. But seeing as Gandalf was close to your position before you fell, it is not a stretch to say that he managed to get them out of there. Let us just hope they are relatively safe now."
"Relatively safe?" Bilbo asked hesitantly.
"One can never be sure in these types of quests, Bilbo," I sighed as I looked around and wondered which direction would lead us to the cliff the dwarves had been rescued from in the movies after escaping Azog and the other orcs.
I couldn't be sure Azog had even caught up to them, actually, seeing as things were starting to change from their previous settled course, but it never hurt to be prepared.
"Do you by any chance know which direction you were following?" I asked Bilbo, quickly giving up on my internal GPS. That thing was dangerous. Better to ignore it and ask people who actually knew how to reach places in time.
"I scouted a bit ahead while you were unconscious," Bilbo nodded, pointing at the path behind us, as if it was normal for someone who had almost died to be present enough to scout, of all things.
Maybe he had done it to have something to do and not focus on what had happened?
Either way, I was relieved we now had a direction to follow, as vague as that may be.
"Right, then. We should continue our journey. Do you have enough food in here, Bilbo?" I asked him, gesturing at the pack on my back while I turned around to the path he had just indicated me, and he nodded.
"It was fortunate that I brought plenty of food from Rivendell. There is not much left now, though. Some lembas bread and meat, and some water."
I shrugged, slowly starting to walk. "Well, it could certainly be worse. We were lucky this time."
Bilbo followed after me with a contemplative frown. "I did not know you could turn into an eagle."
I sighed. "Nor did I. It was quite a surprise. I suppose I should thank that squirrel. If it had not been for him, I would have never reached the Misty Mountains in time."
Bilbo paled slightly at the reminder, which almost made me wince guiltily, but he seemed to perk up at my words.
"Squirrel?" He asked, and I quickly looked away so he could not see my embarrassment.
"Nevermind that."
"Oh, but I am curious!"
"No, you are not. You really do not want to know, Bilbo."
-------------------------------
I had woken up in the early hours of the morning, so luckily for us, we were able to make good time and cross the mountains quickly.
Who would have thought that we only needed to descend the mountain and follow the ground path to arrive earlier at our destination? If it hadn't been for the fact that it was impossible to reach this place unless you could fly—or you simply fell and somehow survived—Thorin and the others could have taken this route instead and avoided the entire goblin debacle.
The path Bilbo and I followed actually led to the base of the cliff from the movies, and it only took us half a day to reach it. It was remarkable what you could accomplish and how quickly you could do it by following a straight path without any distractions, instead of going in circles.
As we reached the end of the mountains, the rocks started to diminish until we could see an entire forest in front of us. I looked upwards and saw the aforementioned cliff. There weren't any trees up there anymore, but I could spot some broken tree trunks scattered across the forest floor. They must have been the ones that fell after being uprooted by the wargs – and burned by Gandalf's deadly pinecones.
Bilbo yelped in shock, and I quickly went over to his side. "What is it?"
"Is that a warg?" he asked, pointing with a trembling arm towards a small clearing.
I gave it a closer look and winced. "What's left of it, anyway."
The poor thing was practically mauled to death. It had big claw marks all over its body, which were probably from the Great Eagles, and it was missing two, no, three legs. It was also covered in blood.
I couldn't help but feel sorry for it. It wasn't its fault it was bred to kill, after all. Wargs were like dogs in that aspect; they only did what you told them to do.
Then, Bilbo promptly turned around and lost his breakfast.
I sighed, softly patting the hobbit's back as he heaved. I had never been more grateful for having watched movies that showed worse things than that. Sure, it was quite different in person, but I didn't get nauseous or anything.
I took some water from the backpack and gave it to him, which he gratefully accepted and used to rinse his mouth.
"Where do you think Gandalf and the others are?" Bilbo asked me, still a little pale, as he visibly tried to ignore the sight in front of us.
I stowed away the water skin and gently led Bilbo toward the forest, carefully avoiding the dead warg and the broken trees.
"It will take us longer than I thought to reach them," I answered, wondering if the eagles had already taken them halfway to the Lonely Mountain. They probably had. Which meant… "Our best bet is Beorn's house."
Bilbo looked curious. "Beorn? Who is that?"
"He is a skin-changer. He can transform into a bear."
"Like you, then?"
I huffed. "Not quite. I suspect an eagle is not the only thing I can turn into. Beorn, on the other hand, can only turn into a bear."
"Is he friendly?" Bilbo asked then, looking worried, no doubt concerned about the safety of the Company.
I grimaced. Sure, Beorn wasn't a bad person... but who could really know if he would help the dwarves this time around? Wasn't he nicer once he met Bilbo, seeing as he was curious about him—as most people seemed to be when confronted by the existence of hobbits?
And Beorn didn't like dwarves... but he did hate Azog, so there was still that. If the pale orc was still alive—which I suspected he was—then it wasn't a far stretch to think that Beorn would help Thorin and the others this time as well.
If nothing else, he wouldn't kill them or anything like that. Maybe.
"I certainly hope so, Bilbo. There is no reason to worry, though," I said, very much worried, "Beorn hates orcs. We can count on that, at least."
"That does not reassure me at all."
I wasn't reassured either. But I would hardly tell that to Bilbo.
I then looked at the sky and decided this was a good place to stop for a short break.
I was a bit hungry now but considering it had almost been four days since I had last eaten, it was pretty awesome. It was clear I had many more abilities than Gandalf retained after leaving Valinor, so I wondered if the Maiar even needed to eat when at full power.
Probably not. I doubted they needed to sleep or do anything remotely human, either.
I actually loved that aspect of my new abilities. Not needing to sleep and eat as often as I used to was amazing. People lost so much time of their lives doing those things that it felt incredible when you didn't need to do them as much, or at all.
But Bilbo was still a hobbit, meaning he ate two or three times more than the average human and he got tired faster because of his small size, so he really needed to take a break every once in a while.
"Would you rather have your second breakfast now or wait until lunch?" I asked Bilbo, and I was surprised when, after a short moment of consideration, he said he'd rather wait for lunch.
I must have looked shocked because he laughed.
"Lembas bread is truly amazing," he smiled happily, shaking his head. "I only ate a bit before you woke up, and yet I am as full as I would be after a large meal!"
"Oh," I blinked and gave a shrug, "alright, then."
We ended up spending five whole days walking until we reached the cliff where the eagles had supposedly left the Company after rescuing them from the orcs.
We were running low on food, and I could tell Bilbo was about to become desperate. A hungry hobbit was not someone I wanted to be with for long, even if it was Bilbo. Hobbits in those conditions could get rather... I don't know if 'wild' was the right word to describe them, but it was close.
The sooner we found Beorn's house, the better.
To be honest, I was running completely blind. I had absolutely no clue where Beorn's house was, only that it was near the Anduin, which wasn't a very useful clue since it was one of the longest, if not the longest, rivers in Middle-Earth.
I just hoped we had a bit of good fortune this time around.
-------------------------------
The Universe really loved to mess with me, didn't it? It had only been about an hour after my hopeful musings when I heard a sudden, eerie noise that made my heart skip a beat.
I stopped Bilbo with a hand, looking around intently, and he froze in his tracks. "What is it?" He asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.
I motioned for him to stay still and crouched down, facing toward the west, while I strained my ears to pick up the distant sounds. They were still pretty far from us, but the rapid pounding of paws against the forest ground and the guttural voices speaking in the Black Speech of Mordor were unmistakable.
"Capture them! The master wants them alive!" A harsh voice yelled from the distance.
My heart sank. Shit.
I turned to Bilbo, trying to think of how to inform him about the orcs without alarming him, but the wild look in my eyes probably didn't help.
"What? What is it?" Bilbo asked insistently, and I quickly stood up and started walking faster, Bilbo hurriedly following after me.
"We are being hunted," I grimly told Bilbo, and he gasped, his face getting a few degrees paler.
"What do we do?" Bilbo asked nervously, fidgeting with his hands while he looked behind us continuously, clearly expecting the orcs to jump at us at any moment.
I simply gave him a serious look. "Run."
We took off in a sprint, our footsteps barely making a sound as we passed by and avoided all the trees in our path. I had never been more grateful for having a hobbit for a best friend. If I had been escaping with a dwarf, there's no doubt in my mind we would have been heard by all the fauna of this place in a second. Dwarves weren't exactly subtle when they walked. Or when they did anything, really.
Bilbo, on the other hand, could barely be heard running through the forest. And my own footsteps were as light as the elves'.
We raced through the woods, and once or twice I had to literally lift Bilbo from his feet in order to avoid him smacking face-first onto the ground after he tripped over fallen tree logs or stones.
I constantly kept my ears focused on the orc party, which was alarmingly getting closer each time, and just as I was about to say, 'screw it' and simply carry Bilbo like a sack of potatoes the rest of the way, the distant roar of the Anduin grew louder as we approached it.
"We need to cross the river," I told Bilbo, who looked seconds away from crying and keeling over, either from stress, exhaustion, or a mix of the two. "We will be safe then. Probably."
"Probably?!" Bilbo exclaimed almost hysterically, running even faster so he could keep up with me, and I was glad I had taken Bilbo's pack instead of letting him carry it. Granted, I was going slower than usual for his benefit, but for a hobbit he was freakishly fast.
After a few more moments of running, we finally reached the end of the tree line. A vast expanse of green fields extended as far as the eye could see, and the Anduin was there, already in our sight.
There was just one little problem. It was around 300 to 400 meters away from us. And when I looked behind us, I noticed the bushes start to tremble with the approach of the wargs.
"I smell mortal flesh!" What was clearly an orc exclaimed, and by the highly alarmed look Bilbo threw me, he could hear them too, even if he could not understand them.
Which meant they were about to catch up to us.
I practically threw Bilbo's pack at him, which he fumbled to grab while he looked at me in disbelief. "Wha-?"
"Put it on, quickly!" I exclaimed, and I started bouncing on the tips of my feet while I practically prayed for another miracle. It was going to work. It had to.
"Think of horses, Mairon," I murmured to myself in an encouraging tone, "Just think of horses."
Bilbo looked behind us nervously while he shouldered his backpack. "Uh, Mairon?"
"Roach, Blackjack, Maximus..."
"Mairon…"
"Spirit, Artax, Tornac…"
"MAIRON!"
"Bucephalus!" I yelled, and just as the orcs, riding atop their wargs, burst out from the forest, I picked Bilbo up, setting him onto my back, and I jumped.
My whole body tingled familiarly, my limbs elongated, and I fell down on my fours.
Bilbo screeched in panic, suddenly finding himself astride a horse as black as the night, and he instinctively clutched onto my neck - thankfully not strongly enough to strangle me - to avoid falling while he muttered hysterically under his breath. "Oh, dear. Oh, dear! An eagle – and now a horse! - oh, Eru!"
My newly formed hooves made contact with the ground after the jump, and I thundered toward the Anduin like a veritable comet.
Bilbo chanced a look back and promptly ducked, pressing himself onto my back as low as he could as I felt a weapon fly above us and continue spinning through the air until it left our sight.
Bilbo swallowed. "Great. They are firing at us, now! Do you perhaps have a plan in mind?"
I narrowed my eyes as I tried to calculate the distance between the two riverbanks. It was just our luck that the river we needed to cross was the Anduin – it couldn't have been a small river, could it? And we just happened to be in front of what appeared to be one of the widest distances between one riverbank and the next.
The other side must have been about 15 to 20 meters away.
But I could make it. Hell, I had probably gone faster and jumped distances like that when I carried Elrond to safety all those thousands of years ago. And that was while being in a humanoid form. As a horse, I supposedly had more jumping power.
Bilbo's voice quivered as he stammered, "Mairon, please tell me you are not planning to jump across the big, large river in front of us."
I snorted, my powerful muscles coiling in anticipation.
Without breaking my stride, I ran towards the river, the wind whistling through my mane.
"Oh, no," Bilbo whimpered in fear, clutching onto me with all his might.
I laughed brightly, a neigh escaping my mouth. Oh, yes.
And in a true Spirit fashion, I surged forward and leaped.
The world around us seemed to slow down as we soared through the air, above the rushing waters that stopped the wargs in their tracks, and for a moment, I could swear I felt as if I held the wild and indomitable spirit of the Stallion of the Cimarron inside me.
We landed on the far bank, the spray of the river splashing around us, and Bilbo laughed breathlessly and slid off my back, landing on the ground with a slight sway.
"You did it!" he exclaimed in wonder. "You actually did it!"
I gave him a look and rolled my eyes. He didn't have to sound that surprised.
I felt my body start to shift back, and I watched as the sleek, black coat gave way to fair skin and humanoid limbs once more.
I shook my arms once or twice and sighed. I don't know if it was in relief or disappointment. Was it weird that I was quickly getting used to the idea of transforming into animals when the situation called for it?
Bilbo watched me with fascination.
"I have never seen a black horse with red hair before," he commented, and I looked at him incredulously.
"Wait, I still had red hair?" I asked in reluctant amazement. "These genes sure are strong!"
Bilbo opened his mouth – no doubt to ask me more questions – when enraged guttural yells came from the other side of the river, and that's when we both remembered that the orcs were still there.
Bilbo paled and hastily took some steps back. I couldn't really blame him. The orcs weren't precisely pretty.
The one which appeared to be the leader – who I did not recognize as either of the Azog family members – snarled at me, his eyes shining both with defiance and... was that fear?
"Celebrate while you can," he threatened, his black tongue slipping through his yellowed teeth as he hissed at us, "soon, we will capture you, and deliver you to our master. He will surely be pleased."
"Oh, cry me a river," I scoffed back at him, and I couldn't resist wiggling my eyebrows. "Get it? Cry me a river?"
The orc snarled furiously and threw his axe at me, which I hastily ducked while I cackled madly.
Bilbo stared at me as if I was crazy. He was probably wondering why I was laughing when the orcs wanted to kill us. Well, capture us – and I really didn't get why their master wanted to capture us, but whatever. Who even was their master? – but Bilbo didn't know that.
I blinked as one of the wargs actually started getting into the water, heading towards us.
"I thought they could not swim!" Bilbo exclaimed nervously, quickly backing away even more.
"So did I, Bilbo. Clearly, we were mistaken," I told him, feeling surprisingly calm, and just as I was going to turn around to get the heck out of there, my right leg suddenly failed me, and I toppled toward the ground.
We both yelped in shock, and I cushioned my fall with my arms. A sudden burning sensation from my ankle made me look at it, and I gaped at the black arrow shaft protruding from my leg.
"When did that get there?!" I exclaimed wildly, trying to distract myself from the pain by cursing madly inside my head. They must have shot me just after I turned back. Or maybe during the transformation.
"Oh, dear. Oh, dear," Bilbo babbled in shock, his gaze alternating between the wargs that were trying to swim across the river – thankfully not with much luck – and my leg. "Oh, what do we do? You are injured! I am not trained for this! Gandalf! We need Gandalf!"
I groaned. "Do you see him anywhere near here?" I dryly asked, the sarcasm flying right above Bilbo's head.
Just when it seemed as if the wargs would actually catch up to us, because I couldn't exactly move at the moment, and I highly doubted Bilbo could carry me, a thunderous roar echoed through the fields.
The wargs in the water suddenly froze in terror and started whimpering. Some of them even turned tail and scrambled back out of the river.
The orc leader looked wildly at some point in the distance behind us, and Bilbo and I turned our heads to stare at the thing that was making the orcs so wary.
Bilbo gasped and I sighed in relief as a great, black bear suddenly ran past us and stopped in front of the river, roaring a challenge to the orcs, who clearly recognized a deadly adversary in the wild, highly intelligent beast and decided it was in their best interest to surrender the chase and flee for their lives.
The leader threw us another nasty look and turned his warg around, vanishing into the forest with the others.
After the sounds of the fleeing orcs faded into the distance, the bear turned towards us, and Bilbo gave a startled yelp.
I grimaced when I shifted my wounded leg slightly – the arrow still stuck in it – and tried to focus on the now slowly changing figure.
I had to say, I wasn't expecting Beorn to come find us so quickly – wait a second.
The black bear transformed into a really tall man with scruffy brown hair and keen dark eyes that observed us with barely hidden curiosity.
There was just one thing wrong with the picture. This guy wasn't Beorn. I was sure of it.
"Greetings," the unknown skin-changer said, his voice deep yet tinged with a youthful undertone. "I am Grimbeorn, son of Beorn. You must be the last two members of Thorin Oakenshield's Company. Perhaps I may be of assistance."
My mouth fell open in shock as I stared at a man who should definitely not have been born yet.
What. The. Hell?!