Chapter 3: The King's Lonely Release
The silence of the mountain was a heavy, living thing. It pressed in on Thorin from all sides, a deep, resonant quiet broken only by the occasional shift of stone settling in its ancient sleep and the crackle of the fire in his hearth. He lay in his wide bed, the furs scratchy against his bare skin, the weight of the day’s councils and the mountain’s endless demands a physical ache between his shoulders.
But it was another ache, lower and more insistent, that held his attention. His hand was wrapped around his cock, already thick and hard, the flesh hot and eager in his grasp. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t seeing the dark ceiling of his chamber. He was back in the steam, the water sluicing over scarred skin.
He saw her. Vanja. Not as the sharp-tongued guide, but as she was in that moment of surrender against the rock, her autumn-leaf eyes glazed with a pleasure she couldn’t hide. In his mind, her long, golden hair was splayed across his own dark pillows, a shock of sun-kissed silk against the rough-spun linen. He imagined the weight of it in his hands, the scent of pine and wildflowers that clung to her.
A low groan escaped him as his fist began to move, a slow, tight stroke. He pictured her mouth, that clever, infuriating mouth, parting. He imagined the feel of her tongue, first a tentative flick against the head of his cock, then taking him deeper, her lips stretching to accommodate his girth. The fantasy was vivid, torturous. He could almost feel the wet, hot suction of her mouth, the scrape of her teeth, her muffled sounds of protest and pleasure as he fucked into her throat.
“That’s it,” he whispered into the empty air, his voice rough with need. “Take it all, you stubborn elf.”
His other hand moved over his own chest, his fingers tracing the raised lines of the dwarven runes tattooed over his heart and across his ribs. In his mind, it was her fingers. Slender, elven fingers, exploring the history inked into his skin, following the patterns of clan and kingship with a feather-light touch that burned. She would trace the scar from the Moria goblin’s blade, the one that ran parallel to his hip bone, and he imagined her mouth following the same path, her tongue laving the old wound before moving lower.
The image was too much. His hips bucked off the bed, his rhythm becoming frantic, jerky. The base of his spine tightened, a coil of pure, desperate heat. He was back in the forest, slamming into her, her tight, wet heat milking him, her legs locked around his waist. He remembered the raw, filthy sound she’d made when she came, a sound that had nothing to do with elven grace and everything to do with base, animal need.
“Vanja,” he grunted, the name a forbidden prayer, a curse.
His release ripped through him with a violence that left him breathless. Thick, hot stripes of come spurted over his fist and onto the dark hair of his abdomen, the scent of salt and sex sharp in the still air. He shuddered through it, his body collapsing back into the furs, spent and hollow.
For a long time, he just lay there, the stickiness cooling on his skin, the shame a colder companion. This was what she had reduced him to. A king in a reclaimed mountain, alone in the dark, whispering the name of a half-elf he should have forgotten. He had a kingdom to rule, a lineage to secure, and yet his thoughts were consumed by the memory of her body and the sharp, knowing look in her eyes.
A firm, deliberate knock echoed through the chamber, stark and out of place in the deep night.
Thorin froze, his hand still wrapped around his softening cock. “Who disturbs the king’s rest?” he barked, his voice hoarse.
The great oak door swung inward before he could rise. She stood there, framed in the torchlight of the corridor beyond. Vanja. She was clad in travel-worn leathers, her golden hair braided back in a practical, unadorned style, but her eyes held the same defiant fire. They swept over the room, taking in the tapestries, the dying fire, and finally, him—naked, exposed, and unmistakably marked by his own solitary release.
A slow, infuriating smile touched her lips. “I see you started without me.”
Thorin surged upward, snatching a fur from the bed to cover his waist, his face a mask of thunderous rage and humiliation. “How did you get past my guards?”
“Your guards are dwarves. They look for axes and hammers, not for shadows.” She stepped inside, closing the door behind her with a soft, final click. Her gaze was unwavering, dropping pointedly to the mess glistening on his stomach. “It seems the mountain air hasn’t cooled your… temper.”
“Get out,” he snarled, his knuckles white where he gripped the fur.
“Or what?” She took another step into the room, her movements fluid and unafraid. “You’ll throw me out? We both know how that ended last time.” Her eyes met his, and the challenge in them was as potent as any weapon. “I didn’t travel through the wilds of Rhovanion to be dismissed by a dwarf who’s still wiping his own spend from his belly.”
He moved then, crossing the room in three swift strides, his dignity forgotten. He grabbed her arm, his grip bruising. “Why are you here?”
“The world is not as safe as you think, locked away in your stone tomb.” She didn’t struggle. She leaned into his grasp, her face tilting up to his. “Dragon-sickness doesn’t just rot gold, Thorin. It rots minds. There are whispers. Enemies are circling your precious mountain. You need eyes that can see further than the end of your own pride.”
“I need nothing from you.”
“Liar.” The word was a whisper, a puff of air against his lips. Her free hand came up, and before he could stop her, her fingers brushed through the cooling seed on his abdomen. She brought her fingertips to her own lips, her tongue darting out to taste him. His breath hitched, a traitorous sound in the tense silence. “You’ve been dreaming of this. Of me.”
He saw the flash of the hot spring in her eyes, the memory of the tree at the edge of the camp. The raw, frantic coupling that had solved nothing and everything. The coil of anger in his gut twisted, merging with a hunger so profound it felt like dying.
With a guttural roar, he shoved her back against the nearest tapestry, the woven scene of Aulë forging the first dwarves crumpling behind her. The fur fell from his waist. He didn’t care. He was hard again, painfully so, his cock jutting out, eager and angry.
“You want to see what I dream of?” he growled, his hand fumbling with the laces of her trousers. He tore at the leather, his fingers digging into the soft skin of her hips. He was not gentle. There was no pretense of seduction. This was a battle, a reckoning.
He turned her around, pressing her face-first into the woven stone. “This is what I dream of.” He spat into his palm, slicking himself, and then he was driving into her from behind in one brutal, deep thrust.
Vanja cried out, a sharp, choked sound as he filled her, stretching her to the limit. Her hands flattened against the wall, her back arching. “Yes,” she gasped, the word strained. “Fuck. Is this how the King Under the Mountain fucks? Like a common brute in a alley?”
“Shut up,” he snarled, his hands gripping her hips, pulling her back onto him with each punishing thrust. The slap of their skin, her ragged gasps, his own grunts of effort—it was a savage music. He leaned over her, his mouth at her ear. “This is what you came for. To be used. To be reminded of your place.”
“My place,” she panted, pushing back against him, meeting his violence with her own, “is right here. Making a king forget his fucking kingdom.”
He hooked an arm around her waist, holding her still as he pounded into her, his rhythm becoming erratic, desperate. The feel of her, so hot and tight, the way her body clenched around him, it was obliterating. All the politics, the gold, the weight of the crown—it all melted away in the face of this raw, physical truth.
“Come for me, Thorin,” she commanded, her voice ragged with her own rising pleasure. “Let go. I want to feel you lose that fucking crown all over my cunt.”
Her filthy words were the final trigger. With a broken shout, he buried himself to the hilt and came, his release a hot, endless flood inside her. His body shook, his forehead pressed against the tapestry between her shoulder blades. For a moment, the only sound was their harsh, shared breathing.
Slowly, he softened, slipping out of her. He expected her to pull away, to deliver a final, cutting remark. Instead, she leaned back against him, her head resting on his shoulder, her body trembling with its own unresolved tension.
His arms, almost of their own volition, wrapped around her waist, holding her there. The fire cast their tangled shadow against the wall, a single, warped shape in the heart of the lonely mountain. The silence returned, but it was different now. It was full.
It was full. For one breath, two, there was only the heat of her back against his chest and the slowing hammer of his own heart. Then the world dissolved.
Thorin’s eyes snapped open to a canopy of tangled branches against a dull, pre-dawn sky. The scent of sex and stone was gone, replaced by the damp chill of dew and the ashy ghost of a dead campfire. He was alone in his bedroll, his body tangled in coarse wool, not silken furs. A painful, throbbing erection pressed against his trousers, a stark and humiliating remnant of the dream.
He sat up with a jerk, the movement sharp with frustration. Around him, the forest was silent, holding its breath. No guards, no tapestries, no mountain. Just the endless, mocking trees of Eriador. And no Vanja.
He scrubbed a hand over his face, feeling the rough texture of his beard, and let out a low, guttural curse that hung in the cold air. The dream had been so vivid he could still feel the phantom heat of her around him, the taste of her name like ash on his tongue. It was a weakness, this obsession, a crack in his discipline that he could not afford. Not now.
With a grimace, he unlaced his trousers. His cock sprang free, thick and achingly hard, a traitor to his waking mind. He spat into his palm, the sound crude in the quiet, and wrapped his fist around the heated flesh. There was no finesse to it, only a grim, determined need to exorcise the phantom clinging to his skin.
He thought of her as he’d last seen her hours ago, cleaning her blades with a quiet efficiency that ignored him completely. He imagined pushing her down onto the mossy ground right here, the sounds she would make, the way her autumn-leaf eyes would flash with fury before clouding with pleasure. His strokes were rough, efficient. This was not about pleasure; it was purge and punishment.
A twig snapped at the edge of the clearing.
Thorin froze, his hand stilling, every sense screaming to alert. He listened, his breath held. Nothing. Just the forest. He waited a full minute, the cold air biting at his exposed flesh, before he began again, his rhythm more frantic now, fueled by a fresh wave of anger at the interruption, at his own vulnerability.
He came with a sharp, stifled grunt, his seed spattering onto the frost-kissed grass between his boots. The release was a hollow victory, leaving him feeling emptier than before. He cleaned himself with a handful of dead leaves, their crisp decay a fitting end to the sordid act.
As he stood and re-laced his trousers, the first grey light of dawn began to filter through the trees. It illuminated the small, lonely camp and the single other bedroll, neatly packed and already strapped to a travel-worn pack. Vanja was gone, likely scouting ahead as was her habit. The memory of the hot spring, of the raw hunger in her eyes that mirrored his own, felt like a taunt.
He kicked dirt over the cold fire pit, the motion abrupt. Today, they would reach the soft, green hills of the Shire. Tomorrow, he would stand on the doorstep of a creature named Bilbo Baggins and begin the impossible task of taking back a mountain from a dragon. The dream of a reclaimed throne felt more distant than the lingering heat of a phantom touch. The real quest was beginning, and he was already haunted.
The real quest was beginning, and he was already haunted. The miles unspooled beneath a leaden sky, each step taking them further from the wild places she loved and into the tamed, rolling hills of the Shire. Thorin’s silence was a wall, thicker and more impregnable than the stone of Erebor, and Vanja made no attempt to scale it. She simply walked, her presence a constant, needle-sharp reminder of the vulnerability he had revealed in the dark.
She left him at the edge of Hobbiton, a cluster of cheerful round doors and absurdly neat gardens. "I'll scout ahead," she said, her tone betraying nothing of the tension that had simmered since the hot spring. "A prince of dwarves crashing through this peace might cause an unnecessary stir." He merely grunted, his eyes fixed on the green door she indicated, the one marked with a rune only he could see.
Vanja approached the hobbit-hole alone, finding its inhabitant, one Bilbo Baggins, in a state of flustered preparation for an evening he did not yet understand. He was a compact man, all nervous energy and impeccable waistcoats, his feet covered in thick, curly hair. Within an hour, she had disarmed him not with weapons, but with a frank assessment of his pantry and a shared appreciation for the quiet art of pipe-weed. They sat in his cozy parlor, the smell of lamb stew and old books filling the air.
"You're not what I expected," Bilbo admitted, sipping his tea. "The message from Gandalf was rather… cryptic."
"None of this will be what you expect," Vanja replied, a grim smile touching her lips. The first knock at the door was thunderous, a sound that seemed to crack the very peace of the hill. Bilbo jumped, spilling tea on his waistcoat.
Dwalin was the first to enter, his massive frame filling the doorway, his bald head gleaming in the firelight. His eyes, sharp and discerning, swept the room and landed on Vanja. He stopped dead. The jovial greeting he had prepared for the hobbit died on his lips. He simply stared, his brow furrowing deeply as if unable to reconcile her presence in this unlikely setting.
Bilbo’s polite fluster turned to outright panic as more dwarves poured in, a tidal wave of booming laughs, heavy boots, and prodigious appetites. Kili and Fili arrived together, their youthful energy infectious. They were divesting themselves of weapons and cloaks when they saw her, seated calmly by the fire. Both froze, their identical expressions of shock mirroring their uncle’s stubborn jawline. Kipi’s mouth actually fell open.
“You?” Fili managed, his voice a low whisper meant only for his brother, but it cut through the din.
Vanja raised her teacup in a subtle, mocking salute. The chaos escalated as the company settled in, a whirlwind of discarded plates and raucous song. Through it all, Bilbo looked increasingly like a man caught in a earthquake he had not been notified about. Vanja remained an island of calm, observing the disorder with those unsettling autumn-leaf eyes.
The climax of the invasion was the final, anticipatory silence that fell after Gandalf’s headcount. "That is eleven," the wizard said, his voice hushed. "We are one dwarf short."
The door swung open without a knock. Thorin Oakenshield stood on the threshold, his presence sucking the air from the room. His gaze, dark and commanding, swept over his assembled kin, a king reclaiming his retinue. It moved past Dwalin, past his nephews, and then stopped. It locked onto Vanja. The carefully constructed authority on his face shattered into pure, unvarnished shock, then hardened into molten anger.
Kili found his voice first, a strained whisper. “Vanja? What in Mahal’s name are you doing here?”
She unfolded herself from the chair, meeting Thorin’s incendiary glare without flinching. A faint, knowing smile played on her lips, a private reminder of things unseen by the others. She looked from Kili’s bewildered face to Thorin’s furious one.
“You didn’t think I would let him go to this suicide mission alone, did you?”
The silence in the hobbit-hole was absolute, a solid thing broken only by the crackle of the fire. Thorin stood frozen in the doorway, the carefully constructed mantle of kingship crumbling into dust. He saw the familiar faces of his company, their expressions ranging from shock to confusion, but his vision tunneled, narrowing until it contained only her. Vanja. Seated calmly by the hearth in Bilbo Baggins’ absurdly cozy parlor as if she belonged there.
A cold dread, sharp as a Morgul-blade, pierced his gut. This was it. The gold-sickness, the curse of his line, finally manifesting not as a lust for metal, but as a waking phantom of the one creature who had crawled under his skin. He was hallucinating. The stress of the quest, the memory of their encounter at the spring, it had all fractured his mind. He blinked, hard, expecting the elegant lines of her to blur and dissolve.
They did not. She met his gaze, and the corner of her mouth twitched into a faint, entirely too-knowing smirk. It was the same smirk she’d worn when she’d tasted him on her fingers in his chambers, a purely carnal memory that flooded his veins with fire and ice. The word was torn from him, a guttural, harsh syllable in the sacred tongue of his people, a curse he hadn’t uttered since the fall of Erebor. “Fuck.”
“Indeed,” Vanja answered. Her pronunciation was flawless, the Khuzdul word rolling off her tongue with an accent so perfect it was an invasion in itself.
The effect was instantaneous. Every dwarf in the room—Dwalin, Balin, the young princes—snapped their heads toward her, their eyes wide with a mixture of shock and something akin to violation. Khuzdul was not for outsiders. It was not for elves, or half-breeds, or for the delicate ears of frightened hobbits. Bilbo, clutching a tray of seed-cakes, looked as if he’d just been told his pantry was on fire.
Thorin took a single, threatening step into the room. The door slammed shut behind him, making Bilbo jump. “Explain your presence,” he demanded, his voice low and dangerously calm, the kind of calm that precedes a avalanche. “And how you learned that word.”
“You talk in your sleep, Oakenshield,” she said, her voice light but her eyes holding his with predatory intensity. “You mutter all sorts of interesting things when you’re buried deep inside a dream.” She let the implication hang in the air, a gauntlet thrown down amidst the spilled ale and stunned silence. “As for my presence, I told you. The world is changing. Dragons are not the only things that wake in dark places. You need a scout who can move unseen by the Enemy’s eyes, not just a company of dwarves who sound like a rockslide with every step.”
Dwalin found his voice, a low growl. “Thorin, what is the meaning of this? You brought her?”
“I did not,” Thorin snarled, his fists clenching at his sides. He could still feel the ghost of her heat from his dream, a taunting echo. This was worse, infinitely worse, than finding her in his chamber. This was a public unraveling.
“Gandalf extended the invitation,” Vanja interjected smoothly, looking at the wizard who merely puffed on his pipe, his eyes twinkling with infuriating amusement. “I merely accepted. My terms are simple. I guide you through the wilds, I get you past the borders that your kind cannot, and I receive a share of the treasure. A very small one. I have no desire for your gold.”
“Then what do you desire?” Thorin shot back, the question ripped from a place of pure, frustrated agony. The memory of her body, pressed against the tapestry, scorched his mind.
Her smile widened, a flash of white in the firelight. “To see the look on your face right now is a decent start.”
The company erupted. A dozen dwarven voices overlapped in a clamor of protest and confusion. Balin tried to reason, Dwalin outright threatened, and Fili and Kili just stared, caught between adolescent curiosity and loyalty to their seething uncle. Bilbo Baggins sank into his armchair, looking as though he dearly wished to disappear into it.
Thorin heard none of it. The roar in his own ears was too loud. She had cornered him, manipulated the wizard, and violated the sanctity of his company and his language all in one move. This wasn’t a negotiation; it was a takeover. He strode across the room, scattering dwarves from his path, and grabbed her arm, his grip like iron. “We will discuss this. Outside. Now.”
He half-dragged her through the chaotic parlour, ignoring the outraged shouts, and shoved her out into the chilly night air of the hobbit’s garden. The round green door slammed behind them, muffling the din. He pushed her back against the cool, painted wood, his body caging hers. The scent of her, pine and wildflower, was maddening.
“This ends now,” he growled, his face inches from hers. “You will turn around and walk back into your damned forests.”
“Or what?” she whispered, her breath a warm cloud in the space between them. She didn’t struggle. She leaned into his confinement, her hips pressing against the rigid bulge in his trousers. “You’ll make me? We both know how that ends. You’ll fuck me against this door until I scream, and every hobbit in the Shire will hear the King Under the Mountain lose his composure.”
His control shattered. With a raw sound, he crushed his mouth to hers. It wasn’t a kiss; it was a battle, a punishment. He bit her lip, tasting blood, and his tongue forced its way past her teeth. She met his violence with a ferocity of her own, her hands tangling in his hair, pulling him closer, deeper. He groped under her tunic, his rough, calloused hands finding the soft skin of her waist, her stomach, then cupping her breast, his thumb grinding against her nipple until it peaked into a hard knot through the fabric of her shirt.
“You want a show?” he rasped against her mouth, fumbling with the laces of her trousers. “I’ll give you a fucking show.”
He tore at the leather, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips. He spun her around, bending her forward over a low barrel of rainwater. The cold wood bit into her stomach. He didn’t bother with preliminaries. He spat into his hand, slicked his aching cock, and drove into her from behind in one brutal, deep thrust.
Vanja cried out, a sharp, choked sound that was swallowed by the night as he filled her, stretching her mercilessly. Her hands scrambled for purchase on the slick barrel rim. “Yes,” she gasped, her voice strained, pushing back against him. “Is this how you establish your authority? By rutting like a starved animal in a halfling’s garden?”
“Shut your mouth,” he snarled, his hands gripping the bones of her hips, pulling her onto him with each punishing stroke. The wet, slapping sound of their coupling was obscenely loud in the quiet yard. He leaned over her, his mouth at her ear, his beard scraping her neck. “This is what you are. A hole for me to use when the pressure of the crown gets too heavy. A whore who follows armies.”
“Your whore,” she panted, arching her back to take him deeper, her inner muscles fluttering tight around his shaft. “And don’t you forget it. Fuck me, Thorin. Fuck me until you forget your fucking mountain.”
Her words, so crude and true, unleashed the last of his restraint. His rhythm became frantic, a desperate, piston-like drive. The world narrowed to the feel of her tight, wet heat, the smell of their sex on the cold air, the animal sound of his own grunts. He was coming undone, and she was the only thing holding him together.
“Come inside me,” she commanded, her voice ragged with her own climbing pleasure. “I want to feel it. I want to carry your claim inside me all the way to Erebor.”
That final, filthy permission shattered him. With a broken shout that was half roar, half plea, he buried himself to the hilt and came, his release a hot, pulsing flood that seemed to drain the very anger from his soul. He collapsed against her back, his forehead pressed between her shoulder blades, his body shuddering with the force of it.
For a long moment, they stayed there, joined, breathing in ragged unison. The cool air felt sharp on his sweaty skin. Slowly, reality seeped back in: the muffled voices from inside the hobbit-hole, the distant bleating of sheep, the immense stupidity of what he had just done.
He softened and slipped out of her. He expected a knife in his back, or at least a scathing remark. Instead, she straightened up slowly, pulling her trousers up with a quiet, deliberate motion. She turned to face him, her face illuminated by the light from the round window. Her lips were swollen, a tiny trickle of blood marked where he’d bitten her, but her eyes were clear and frighteningly calm.
She reached out and wiped a bead of sweat from his temple with her thumb. The gesture was intimate, possessive. “Now,” she said, her voice low and steady. “We go to war.”