Bag End is too small for the number of bodies inside it.

The ceiling presses low, the walls round and soft in a way that makes my shoulders tighten on instinct. It smells of pipe-weed and bread and comfort—things I have not trusted in years. Voices overlap. Laughter rises and falls. Gandalf stands near the hearth, staff braced against the floor, already halfway through introductions.

This is a gathering. A beginning.

I step forward with the weight of habit, crownless but no less commanding, my focus narrowed to the task at hand. I listen as names are spoken, as kin answer, as promises half-formed begin to take shape. I tell myself this is all that matters. The quest. Erebor. The Mountain.

Then the room shifts.

Not in sound. Not in movement.

In presence.

She stands near the far wall of Bag End, half-shadowed by a beam, her brothers Bofur and Bombur flanking her like stone set to guard a vein of gold. She is not speaking. She does not need to. Her hands rest easily at her sides, close to the haft of the axe slung across her back, as if it is simply another limb.

Ríkdâsha.

For a breath—just one—I am certain my mind has betrayed me. That grief, long locked and buried, has finally clawed its way free in cruel imitation.

But the room does not fade. She does not vanish.

Her hair is darker than I remember, copper burnished low rather than bright. Her stance has changed—more balanced, more lethal. Exile has written itself into her bones. Survival has shaped her.

Alive.

The word strikes me without mercy.

My chest tightens, sharp and sudden, and my hand drifts to the inside of my coat before I can stop it. My fingers close around the small weight I have carried there for years—a single forged bead, smooth and dark, worked by my own hands in another life. It was meant for her braid. A wordless offering, never given. I thumb it once, grounding, then still my hand as though it has never moved.

Bofur’s voice cuts through the room, cheerful and entirely unaware of the ruin he has just delivered.

“—and this one’s comin’ with us,” he says easily. “Didn’t see the sense in leavin’ her behind. Have you seen the way she wields an axe?”

A ripple of interest moves through the Company. Bombur’s sister smiles faintly beside him. Her brothers shift, proud and watchful.

Ríkdâsha does not look at me.

Not yet.

She keeps her gaze steady, forward, as though she has not felt the sudden weight of my attention cross the room like a blade drawn slow.

I cannot breathe.

The Mountain fell. I remember the smoke, the fire, the sound of stone screaming as it split. I remember counting names that never answered. I remember standing amid ruin and telling myself—once, only once—that some losses were too deep to reach.

Dwalin moves before I realize I have shifted at all.

A single step. A glance.

Our eyes meet.

His expression does not change, but something unspoken passes between us—recognition, confirmation, the silent understanding of a truth carried alone for too long. He has always known. Of all of them, he was the only one I trusted with the weight of it. The only one who saw the way my gaze lingered once, long ago. The way it never did again.

His jaw tightens.

She lives.

I straighten.

King or not, I cannot afford to falter. Not here. Not now. Not in front of her.

At last, she turns.

Our eyes meet across Bag End, across years of silence and stone and fire. Her expression flickers—surprise, sharp and contained. Then something harder settles in its place. Control. Distance. The kind forged by loss endured without answers.

She inclines her head. Formal. Respectful.

As though we are strangers.

It is that—more than anything—that nearly undoes me.

I incline my head in return, every ounce of will holding my face steady as the world tilts and rights itself again around the space she occupies.

Alive.

And standing in the corner of a hobbit hole, as if she has always belonged there.