I feel as though the title of this chapter speaks for itself. For both the contents of this chapter and the timing of its release. Two years after the last chapter was published. My bad...

Chapter 25

Sophie P.O.V

Ahead of me, I could hear Gandalf counting out the company off by name. As I reached where the company had paused to rest for a moment, I glanced over my shoulder to see Caroline bringing up the rear of the group, looking a bit worse for wear but otherwise whole, despite her impromptu salon trip.

"Miss Caroline makes fifteen, " Gandalf said, his eyes darting about the mountainside, "Where's Bilbo? Where's our hobbit?"

At that news, the dwarves began cursing Bilbo. I couldn't say I didn't blame them. I'd lost track of him once we'd been marched away from the wooden cage trap, and hadn't seen him since.

When Caroline reached me I pulled her into a brief hug, making sure she was really there. She quickly broke the hug and gave me a slight nod, letting me know she was all right.

"Well, where did you last see him!" Gandalf demanded, the conversation having moved on after I'd zoned out for a moment to embrace Caroline.

It was Nori who spoke up, "I think I saw him slip away when they first collared us."

"He could still be in the mountain then?" Caroline said, walking towards the group to stand in between Gandalf and Thorin. "He could still be back up there with those beasts!"

Gandalf nodded his head a few times in small succession, "What happened exactly. Tell me!"

Thorin looked away from Dwalin and gave Gandalf a hardened glare, "I'll tell you what happened. Master Baggins saw his chance and he took it! He's thought of nothing but his soft bed and his warm hearth since first he stepped out of his door! We will not be seeing our Hobbit again. He is long gone."

"That's not fair and you know it." I clapped back. "Even if he has thought of home all this time could you really blame him?"

"That supposed burglar was hardly what we were told, he has abandoned us." Thorin's voice was sharp, in the way a teacher scolding a gifted child for disagreeing with their lesson would talk. He clenched his jaw at me; Caroline visibly stiffened next to me. Even without looking at her face I could tell she was ready to defend me if he went any further.

"I'd like to thank you, Miss Sophie. But no, he hasn't abandoned you."

The familiar quaky voice came out of nowhere, as though it has materialized by some magic. Knowing this world as I did now I wouldn't argue against it very hard.

Turning on my heel, and practically forcing Caroline to follow suit, I saw the very hobbit in question standing not ten feet away from us on the incline of the mountain. A knot in my stomach untied itself when I saw his dirt-smeared face and slightly disheveled dress, though to be fair we were all a bit disheveled at this point. Behind me, the company beheld the same sight with what I could only call disbelieved relief. There was a chuckle that could only belong to Gandalf.

The wizard chuckled again, "Bilbo Baggins, I've never been so glad to see anybody in my life."

"For how old you must be, Gandalf, that's pretty high praise," I said with a breath.

"Quite long my dear, quite long," Gandalf replied, still seemingly stupefied.

Bilbo grinned, glanced down at his feet, and strode forward with more confidence than I thought hobbits could pose. The hobbit patted Balin on the shoulder, the gray-bearded dwarf laughing into the pat, and gave me a sweet smile before passing Caroline and me.

"We'd given you up," Kili said striding forward as if he meant to embrace the hobbit in a bone-crushing bear hug but decided against it at the last moment.

"How on earth did you get past the goblins?" Fili followed up, standing next to his brother.

"How indeed," Dwalin grumbled his corded tattooed arms folded across his chest as he exchanged glances between a few of the other dwarves.

We all seemed to wait for Bilbo to produce an answer, resulting in a few long moments of silence as we all gawked at the hobbit. He fidgeted slightly; I recognized a familiar sense of gears working to find a solution to an impossible question. Whatever the answer to his escape from Goblin Town was, Bilbo was clearly not very keen on letting us in on the secret. With a nervous laugh, Bilbo cleared his throat and placed his hands on his hips, pushing back his corduroy waistcoat he tucked his thumb and pointer finger into his pocket and then removed them. I cocked my head, I'd only seen that particular move done on YouTube videos on how to successfully pickpocket, or in this case put pocket. Unbeknownst to the rest of the company, Bilbo had totally slipped some hidden something into his pocket.

I caught Gandalf's eye, he seemed perturbed and quickly broke eye contact with me, "Well, what does it matter? He's back now."

Thorin turned to bore a glare at Gandalf. He looked equally confused as he did angry, his brows knitted together and jaw clenched, "It matters, I want to know why." He turned to the hobbit that looked smaller than ever in the shadow of the dwarf king. "Why did you come back?"

The confidence Bilbo had seemed to be diminishing under Thorin's gaze. Nevertheless, Bilbo steeled himself and planted his oversized hairy feet into the mountain dirt and then swallowed hard as he looked to the King, "Look, I know you doubt me, I know you always have. And you're right, I often think of Bag End. I miss my books. And my armchair. And my garden. See, that's where I belong. That's home. And that's why I came back, cause you don't have one. A home. It was taken from you. But I will help you take it back if I can."

There was a strangely peaceful silence that fell over the company. Normally silence among this company was the opposite of peaceful, stressful and discord would be the words I might use if asked to describe it in any other time. But this was something else. Something that felt new and shiny, like finding a quarter on the ground right at the moment you needed it.

With a slightly annoyed clear of her throat, Caroline broke the peace, "I'm glad you're not dead Bilbo, it's the best news I've heard all day. But I don't know about any of you, but I would very much like to get off this mountain and as far away from it as I possibly can."

"Caroline's right," Fili said, coming up to stand next to me, "daylight saved us from the goblins, but we don't have much of that left. We should make way and put as much distance between them and us as we can. What say you?"

The company nodded in agreement, myself included. Putting a few miles behind us sounded like the best plan I'd heard in weeks. Though the contender list wasn't very long.

"Right then shall-"

A chest-piercing howl stopped Bilbo mid-sentence. My heart retreated to the bottom of my stomach as I was brought back to that day on the plains outside of Rivendell. My mouth had gone dry. Couple that with the way my arms were shaking, I had become a script for a quaking damsel in every Hollywood action film.

"We need to get off this mountain. Now." Caroline growled. Her breath would have been visible if the words had sounded any colder coming from her lips.

"Out of the frying pan," Thorin said keeping his eyes on the mountain peak where the warg howls had echoed from.

"And into the fire," Gandalf finished, moving his staff from one hand to the other. "Run. RUN!"

We needed no more encouragement, the howls and snarls that we could already hear were enough to send us sprinting straight down the mountainside. Not to my surprise, my hand ended up in Fili's like it had in Goblin Town, making sure I stayed sure-footed and on a safe path. Only this time the dwarf prince kept his eyes forward instead of glancing back every so often to see how I was fairing. This mad dash was much different than the last. Compared to Goblin Town this was much more a run for survival than even running from goblins was.

Caroline had dashed ahead of me early on, from the way she went off the beaten path and hurdled over fallen logs and boulders she was eager to stay true to her suggestion of removing herself from the goblins. Some of the others tried to follow, but with their lack of vertical leg abilities, it wasn't long before they wove their way through the brush and under logs instead.

I made sure to keep an eye on Bilbo, the poor hobbit was trying his best to keep up and navigate through the mountainside forest. He mostly kept behind Nori and Dori.

As we ran, the brush and ground plants started to thin out, revealing more rocks and boulders jutting out from the ground than I would have liked to see. Even the trees were becoming sparser than they were at the beginning of our sprint down the slope. There was something about thinning trees that was a whisper on the edge of my mind, something important that I couldn't seem to get a good thought on at the given moment.

Another close snarl came from behind, followed by a rather large furry figure leaping over our heads. The warg snarled and snapped its jaws at Bilbo, who managed to duck just in time to be spared from the beast's snaggletooth maw. He gasped and drew his sword, the beast charged at him as Fili and I ran past.

"He'll manage!" Fili shouted, right as the warg impaled itself on Bilbo's sword.

The hobbit looked as surprised as I felt.

More wargs caught up to the company and were quickly dispatched. Some taking axes to the skull, each one falling down as dead weight with their heads smashed open, while two went down with an arrow sticking out of an eye, each one fletching deep into the socket. The red feathers signaling Caroline's hand in their deaths.

I kept a hand on the hilt of my sword, Illuin, the supposed watcher of peace, so much for that name. So far I had yet to spill warg blood on it, only the oily thick slosh that was goblin guts. Though, I had a feeling taking down a warg would be much harder than the sparsely armored goblins were. From the few glimpses I'd gotten of them, it was no secret that their thick fur coats provided armor enough, not to mention the matting on their chests and forelegs that acted as additional armor to the mad dogs.

I heard boots on rock coming to a halt. Looking father than Gandalf was at the point of our group, I saw the cliff that marked the end of our path. The thinning trees had been a sign that the mountainside was coming to an end. Oh yes, that's what that meant. If only I had worked that out sooner this could have ended a different way. A different path that leads down rather than out. Somewhere away from this outcropping, away from this deadman's drop that nobody could survive, nobody. If only I had given myself a moment to think! We could have avoided this whole situation. Looking frantically from side to side I saw we had missed not one, but two branch off paths that lead further down the mountain, further away from the wargs.

"Were trapped," I muttered, feeling my heart in my chest beat faster and the palms of my hands went clammy.

Gandalf looked around desperately, even his options had been exhausted at this point. Had we really escaped one evil only to die at the hands of another?

"Up into the trees! All of you, climb, Bilbo Climb!" The aging wizard bellowed as he turned his back to the wargs again to ascend the tallest tree that sat at the very edge of the cliff.

More wargs were on us as the company began obeying Gandalf's command. Bifur threw one of his hand axes into the throat of a particularly large warg, then turned to jump and grab one of the low hanging branches of the pine trees that peppered the rocky ground. Bofur launched himself off a rock and used Dwalin's head as a stepping-stone to get higher than the base branches so he could begin his climb.

"Come, Sophie!" Fili shouted yanking me over to a tree that had yet to acquire a dwarf in its branches.

I nodded and leaped to secure a hold around one of the branches. Swinging my body back and forth I gained enough momentum to fling the rest of my body upwards and get another, better, hold on the branches. Reaching a hand down I helped Fili, and then Kili, up into the same tree. They grinned widely at me, each taking my hand gratefully, wasting no time to climb higher into the tree.

Once I felt I was high enough I searched the trees. My heart pounded loudly in my chest as I extended my panicky search to the ground where I saw Caroline rushing back to where Bilbo was still trying to yank his sword from the fallen wargs skull.

"They're coming!" Thorin shouted, shooting a glare at the back of Caroline's head

"Hobbit!" Caroline shouted back, as though she just knew that he had been yelling at her. As she reached Bilbo, who had finally managed to free the sword, she yanked him back towards one of the trees that already held two dwarves in its branches.

Bilbo looked up to see the main force of the wargs breaking down upon him. He glanced at Caroline who had a firm grip on him under the arms. Like some kind of burly Scottish highland game competitor, Caroline hurled the hobbit up into the trees. He managed to get a good hold on a branch, before gravity had time to fulfill its scientific duty, and climbed higher into the tree.

As the hobbit was climbing another warg charged down the mountain. It snarled and snapped, its paws beating the ground with loud thuds as it barreled towards Caroline. Slinging the white bow over her shoulder, Caroline dashed towards another tree. Using one of the many rocks that lay scattered about on the ground, she launched herself off of one and landed with both hands firmly on a tree branch with her feet planted on its trunk. Pushing off the trunk and branch at the same time, I watched as she managed to get high enough up the tree to barely miss getting a leg chomped off by a leaping warg.

She scanned the trees in the dimming light and finally landed on my form. Giving me a nod and a thumbs up she climbed even further. It was then I realized she had ended up in a tree that had no other members of the company in it. Typical.

I laughed through a shaky breath and pressed the side of my head against the stiff and prickly tree trunk. I felt a warm hand on my shoulder as Fili pulled me in closer to him. His thumb gently stroked up back and forth, through the thick elvish armor I could only really feel the leather slightly move under his touch. The thought was what mattered most, however.

The tree shook violently as a pair of wargs tried to charge and climb their way up. I held down a gasp and crouched down to keep my center of gravity closer to the trunk of the tree. We shook again, this time the warg managed to get its fore elbows locked onto the bottom branches, but the wood snapped off against the excessive weight. The warg tumbled down to the rocks below, letting out a high-pitched squeal that might have made me pity it if it hadn't been trying to kill me.

Soon, the wargs were stalking the ground around the trees, snarling and growling up at us in frustration as they stared up with burning charcoal eyes. All at once the wargs fell silent and looked back to a large boulder formation farther back against the mountainside.

Slowly making its way to the end of the rocks was a stark white wolf. It had sharp angular designs in its fur that were either scarred into its flesh or shaved into the fur. My money was on the former. Sitting on top of the massive white warg was another white being. The orc had no hair and had scars running all over its body. They gave the orc a sinister aura. If I'd seen somebody back home who gave me this feeling I would have made myself cross the street to walk on the other side. What was worse was the orcs left arm had been amputated below the elbow, in place of a hand was now a gnarly three spiked claw lashed and bolted into its flesh, a real-life Frankenstein's Monster. In the other hand was a massive mace outfitted with six wicked blades on its end, a real-life Frankenstein's Monster with a murder vendetta and the tool to go through with the job at that.

The pit in my stomach bored deeper. Sweat beaded down my forehead and back as I watched the orc survey the trees, meeting each of our eyes for a moment before moving on to the next. He paused and looked back over the company again, then back. He was looking for someone. Thorin perhaps? Or even Gandalf. No. When his eyes passed me again I glanced towards Caroline's position for a split second. The orc snapped his gaze to her and chuckled, the sound resonating from deep within his chest.

Fili tightened his grip on my shoulder and maneuvered himself so his sword was in front of me. I gripped the hilt of my sword tightly as well until the dull spiraling pommel dug into my palm surly leaving a red mark on the smooth skin.

Behind us, in a tree closer to the cliff, I heard Thorin say one word.

"Azog."

Like Loki returning to Asgard on that Saakarian ship proclaiming to be their savior, I present you with a new chapter to quell that burning emptiness in all of your hearts that was not knowing what was to happen next in this fan fiction or if it was ever to be continued. The answer is your welcome and yes. Though it took a whopping two years to get to. Sorry about that. Totally my bad. Um. Yes. Well, here you go!

Thank you to all who have stuck around and to all of you new people who favorited and followed this story even when it hadn't been updated in quite some time. You're all the real MVP's. Again, thank you to all of you and I hope you enjoy the new chapter. Stay classy my lovelies.