A Better Place - The Hobbit Fanfiction

Seventh Entry - Into the Forest

I don’t know who was more unhappy about Gandalf’s departure the next morning—Bilbo or the dwarves. I would miss Gandalf simply because he was a wizard, but otherwise I didn’t know him well enough to form too solid an opinion. But Gandalf reiterated Beorn’s advice—well and thoroughly—bade us farewell more than once, then spun and galloped away on his appropriated borrowed horse.

I hefted my assortment of supplies, the straps of which cut into the very bones of my shoulders with its weight, as late as I possibly could, as the others were already stepping tentatively into the wet gloom of the forest. Oin waited until I went ahead of him to leave the sunlight behind. His wrinkle-rounded eyes flickered over my pack, my shoulders and spine, deciding whether or not he ought to object in regards to the weight I’d claimed I was able to bear. I had been so careful though not to let anyone else lift my pile of supplies once it was arranged, for fear they would claim I overestimated myself. I swear they all looked at me with a little more concern each day, since I had told them that I would progressively worsen as time scraped on.

I was only two steps past the trunks of the first wretched trees when the dark closed in around me like a heavy theater curtain that stretched up farther than I could ever reach. If I wasn’t still convinced of my other life, the real one, I would be sure that this forest would kill me. It would kill all of us.

We had to walk in single file. The path—paved with irregular broken stones nearly overgrown with roots and ropy vines like brown centipedes—wended and switched through trees that, in my eyes, had once been mighty and grand. There wasn’t a new growth tree among them, and I didn’t know if that made it more despairing or less. That there should be nothing new growing here, or that there was nothing young to be taken by the evil that seemed to seep up out of the very soil like a noxious fume. Some of the trunks were rent from stem to stern, even more than once, and had split so wide that Dwalin could fit comfortably inside them. Some had twisted so far as to crumple in at their turning point and topple. Some grew as if they no longer knew where the sun used to come from. All of them looked wretched, and corrupted.

The chitterings of strange creatures watching us from hidden shadows were terrible. Occasionally a dark squirrel with white eyes would streak across the path, skinny and pointed, or we would hear muffled grunts and rummaging off where we couldn’t see. The screech of some predatory bird and the pall of smaller creatures that immediately followed. What seemed to unnerve the others most were the spider webs, thick and tangled, spread like a thin froth throughout the forest. They grew thicker the further in we went, and sagged beneath their own damp weight. I suppose I wasn’t immediately frightened by those because I’d always rather liked spiders and didn’t stop to think about the proportions that the creators of these webs must be. But none dared stretch across the path, for whatever reasons, and for that even I was grateful. I did know how strong the webs of my own spiders were, and knew that should any of us tumble into one of these there was a small chance of any of us being able to get them out again.

The first night we had to spend in that forest—which somehow grew even darker even if no daylight seemed to ever reach down to us—was one of the most suffocating I had ever spent. I was not surprised when I woke, standing, to find Ori throwing small stones at my back. We had to sleep in a line to remain on the path, and he’d been at the other side, unable to extend his arm far enough to touch me. If I’d wandered off the path I would have been lost forever.

Shaken I sank back down into my spot and did my best to stay there. But of course I couldn’t control my feet when I was sleeping. They controlled me.

I woke that next morning to every one of my companions staring at me, their expressions ranging from uncertainty to regret, from anger to sorrow. “What?” I asked softly, afraid to rise in case I had somehow done something to offend them.