Disclaimers- I wish I could say I did, but unfortunately, I do not own The Hobbit.
I woke on a stormy day in late April, covered in sweat and shaking. It was another dream or more of a foreboding nightmare I should say; A dream filled with memories of a different life, a different time, a different place.
I had been having these dreams for months now, all leaving me with an impending sense of trouble, feeling out of place in my own skin. The fact that I couldn't remember anything from before I was five didn't help either.
As a senior in University, I was the adventurous type, always feeling more at home outdoors and in the mountains. I always had a great sense of direction, ever since I could remember. I loved hiking and backpacking, sometimes being gone for days at a time.
My parents had taught me how to hunt and fish from a young age, they themselves growing up in the woods of the mountains. I learned survival skills and in my high school years I had even taken up martial arts, becoming a second degree black belt.
All of that seemed irrelevant in the simple life I was living in the city, going to Uni and just being a student.
Then I started having these dreams. They were unclear, like faded memories, only grasping parts at a time.
The people in my dreams were different from people that I knew of in modern day 2014. They talked in a long forgotten tongue and in languages I had never heard of. Most were clothed in long tunics and breeches, wearing leather cloaks with fur and large boots. Not to mention the beards. Everyone had beards, woman or not, though some were much less pronounced, like the oddly familiar woman that always showed up in my dreams.
She was always screaming, her face flushed and shouting loudly. Every dream that came, I heard a rumble so low it would shake me to the core. At one point, I recognized that I was viewing the dream from the perspective of a young child, much too young to understand what was going on.
The only thing that ever seemed to be clear to me during the dreams was one phrase, spoken from the woman to a man in a deep blue tunic with a fur coat.
"Take her, keep her safe." Only it was spoken in a different language that I strangely could understand.
For some reason, I had never really felt like I had belonged here, and for the longest time I had thought it was just my hometown that I was sick of, but the more dreams I got, the more confused I got.
It was spring break at Uni (also the day before my 21st birthday) and I decided that I was going to go home and surprise my parents, mainly because I hadn't seen them since Christmas and I missed them, but when I arrived home, it was like they had known I would be there.
"Mum, Dad, what's wrong?" I asked as I walked through the door, seeing them sitting on the couch, my mum just looking at old pictures with tears in her eyes.
"Come sit, darling." My dad said, motioning for me to sit in the chair across from them. I did so and just stared at them. "We don't exactly know how to say this..."
"Say what? What's wrong?" I asked quickly, hoping it wasn't something serious.
"Do you remember anything from before you turned five, darling?" My mum asked seriously. I tried my hardest to think back and there was nothing. I shook my head to them.
"We found you, Aria. You aren't our real daughter. When you were five, or the doctor guessed that you were five, we found you in the woods here behind the house, just wandering. There was no one in sight and we put up posters, went to the police and everything and no one turned up, so we took you in as our own. " I sat there staring at them in shock. I wasn't theirs?
"This is all you had with you." My dad said as he laid something cold and metal in my hands, I looked down at it, recognizing it as a necklace, having some strange type of runes written on it.
My mum burst out in tears as she handed me a flyer that looked relatively old. I reached out and grasped it shakily, looking at a picture. It was me, no more than five, covered in dirt and wearing odd clothing, a dress of sorts, though it was ripped and stained with black splotches.
I couldn't handle it anymore. I felt the tears bursting from my eyes and I threw the flyer down running out the door without saying a word. My mum tried to stop me but I ran too fast, headed straight for the forest.
I ran with my vision clouded, grasping the necklace tight in my hands, trying to dodge trees and bushes as I went. However, my foot found a root and sent me flying into the nearest tree, hitting my head as I fell, turning my mind into a black pool of darkness.
I woke with a sharp pain in my head, hurting as I fluttered my eyes open.
"Look! She's waking!" I slowly opened my eyes to the masculine voice that spoke as it hovered above me. I lifted my head slightly just to look around me, seeing that I was laying in a patch of thick grass on a particularly hot, sunny day. Hadn't I just been in a forest?
I looked up at the person, well now persons that were hovering over me and gave a small squeal.
"You alright there, lass? You look to have hit your head, and your clothing looks much too big." A man asked. I looked at the group of people that were surrounding me. They looked oddly familiar and the clothing and beards reminded me of my dreams, was I in one of those?
I looked down at my clothes, just my simple t-shirt and jeans, which looked like they had at least tripled in size since before I had tripped.
"Bofur, give the lass a chance to breathe, she's clearly been through some type of ordeal." A larger man with grayish-white hair wrapped around his head in intricate braids yelled at the other.
Why did that name sound familiar, like I had read it in a book or something? Why did this all seem familiar?
"Out of my way!" I heard a loud voice say from the back of the group.
"Mr. Gandalf! We found the lass on the edge of the river!" Someone said. I froze as I saw the large man, now towering over me and the name associated with him.
"G-gandalf?" I sputtered, unbelieving. There was no way... no way I could be here. This was a dream, or something. Maybe my overly creative imagination was trying to trick me again and I really did hit my head hard.
"My dear, it has been quite a long time." I looked up at the super tall man wearing all gray as he reached a hand out to help me stand up. I noticed night was falling and I was so beyond confused.
"What do you mean? Where am I?" I asked quickly, my eyes darting around as I looked to all of the people surrounding me. They were my height, where as Gandalf towered over us all.
"You, my dear, are in Middle-Earth, the Shire, to be more precise." Gandalf replied. Dear lord, if this was Middle Earth, then those were dwarves and if there were dwarves... Dwarves. Why did that sound so familiar?
"This must be another dream..." I mumbled.
"I can assure you, my lady, that this is no dream. Though you were still quite young, the last I saw you." I looked up at the tall wizard curiously. I was beyond confused now.
"What do you mean, the last you saw me?" I asked curiously.
"Master Dwarves, you go on ahead and we will catch up to you." Gandalf told the group of dwarves who nodded and went along talking amongst themselves as they walked into the night. "You do not remember what happened before you left us?"
I looked up at Gandalf with a strange expression and shook my head.
"I don't remember hardly anything from my childhood, though I have been getting these strange dreams of a woman." I said honestly.
"You were born here, my dear." I twisted my head to look at him in shock.
"What?!" I practically yelled to him.
"Well, not exactly here in the Shire, but in Middle Earth, in Erebor. Your mother was part of King Thror's counsel." Gandalf continued. Erebor, wait- The Lonely Mountain? The last of the greatest dwarf kingdoms of Middle Earth?
"Would that make me a-,"
"Dwarf, yes." Gandalf replied.
"And you knew my mother?" I asked with hardly any sound in my voice.
"I knew of her, yes. Though there is someone else who will be able to tell you more about her. All I know is that you were very young when Smaug came and your mother left you in the care of another before passing on." Gandalf replied. Smaug the dragon, the rumbling...
"Then how did I get to Earth? My parents, well the people who raised me said they found me running through the woods." I asked, my mind was almost at the point of exploding from too much information.
"I do not know. You went missing, never to be seen again until this day, though it was foretold that you would return." Gandalf told me. I just stared ahead as we walked, letting the information sink in.
"How did you know it was me?" I asked curiously.
"A wizard knows, my dear, and you were clutching this." Gandalf said as he handed me the necklace. Like it was a habit, I unclasped it and placed it around my neck, relishing in the feeling of the cold metal on my skin.
"Wait, if you said I was alive when Smaug came, that would make me like over 170 years old!" I gasped. How was that possible? "I've only been on Earth for 16 years!"
"It seems, my dear, that time passes much differently in this realm. You are indeed 173 years old, though your appearance would suggest you are only in your mid 70-80s for a dwarf." Gandalf replied. All this information was too much for me and as we walked up the small hill towards the round doors of a place I knew as Hobbiton, I promptly fainted.
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