A round of half-true reassurance later, once she was sure Bilbo Baggins wasn't going to bolt mid-quest, Bella took the magic carpet out under the pretext of scouting and flew toward the other side of the mountain.
The Misty Mountains were grim at night. The rustle of wind through leaves was constant. Now and then the dying scream of an Orc or some wild beast cut through it. There were creatures roaming these slopes that no outsider had names for.
Everyone knew the Misty Mountains were dangerous. Even the masters of the Misty Mountains—the Orcs that Sauron the Dark Lord secretly directed—agreed. The Misty Mountains at night were no place to be.
Bella did half a circuit of the area. Nothing seemed off. She didn't push her luck. She turned the carpet around and started flying back.
Out of the corner of her eye, a massive black shape suddenly came at her. A spike of warning crashed through her chest. She didn't waste a second—she dropped the carpet straight to the ground.
Whatever the enemy was, fighting on the ground gave her better odds.
A heartbeat later, an irregular boulder the size of half a basketball court came whistling along her old flight path, slammed dead into a peak in the distance, and shook the entire mountainside.
Another second later, the howl of displaced air finally caught up to her ears.
How much force was that?
Bella whipped her head around.
A humanoid creature six hundred meters tall, its body a single mass of stone, was strolling out from between the crags.
A moment ago it had been a mountain. Now it was a person—a giant.
The thing was taller than the mountain itself. The last creature she'd seen at this scale was the scarecrow at the Source Palace.
This one was a lot stronger than that scarecrow.
The Stone-giant reached toward a peak, tore another boulder loose, hefted it, and hurled it her way.
The boulder's spread of impact was huge. Bella didn't have the nerve to take it head-on, even with two doses of bravery. Brute force won most of the time.
Bella ran through every spell she knew. She didn't have anything for this. Mind magic? It was clearly a Stone-giant. Its mind would be as hard as the rock that made it. Throwing a Mind Blast at it would more likely hurt her than the giant. Maybe at the seventh or eighth circle she could put one of these things down. Right now? No chance.
Her only option was to send the carpet airborne again.
Once she lifted off, she pulled even more attention from the Stone-giant. The thing grabbed another boulder and hurled it. She had to drop down to the ground again. Then up. Then down.
Up and down, up and down—several rounds of this.
"Hey! Hey hey! I'm not your enemy!" she shouted, again and again. The Stone-giant didn't hear her. Maybe didn't even have ears as an organ. It just kept hammering rocks at her with single-minded persistence.
Stone-giants moved deceptively. They looked sluggish, but a single step covered hundreds of meters. The speed wasn't actually slow.
"Hey, look! I have the Ring of Fire! I'm a friend of the elves!" Bella raised her left hand so it could see the ring on her finger.
Weren't the elves supposed to be on good terms with the Stone-giants?
Apparently that was just legend. The Stone-giant didn't even register her gesture. It went right back to grabbing rocks and trying to splatter her like a whack-a-mole.
Bella scrambled back the way she'd come. On the way she ran straight into Thorin and the others, who had been jolted awake by the noise and come to investigate.
Even Thorin, who could keep a stone face through anything, went a little pale at the Stone-giant chasing on her tail. The other dwarves and the hobbit were even worse.
"Uh, that—just keep going! Don't worry about me!" Bella was on the carpet, getting chased everywhere. The carpet was weaving low to the ground in dizzy zigzags as it dodged the incoming rocks, like it had been drinking.
She blew past Thorin's company in a streak and then vanished again. The dwarves stared after her, baffled. They wanted to help. Plenty of them had the courage to fight a stronger enemy to the death. There was just nothing they could do.
Bella ran in front. The Stone-giant chased behind. There was no time to read the terrain. The night was pitch black. Her Eagle Vision was fully occupied tracking the boulders coming in from behind. She couldn't watch where she was going.
By her reasoning, a Stone-giant should have territorial limits. Once she crossed out of its turf, it ought to turn back.
The theory was sound. Except as she ran, a second Stone-giant materialized behind her.
The two Stone-giants probably weren't on good terms in normal circumstances. The kind of neighbors who never visited each other.
The new arrival saw its dear neighbor smashing rocks all over its territory and got very angry. Throwing rocks, are we? I'll throw rocks too!
The more Bella ran, the more they threw.
Her short-range teleport—line-of-sight teleportation—was useless. They covered hundreds of meters in a single stride. A teleport of a thousand-odd meters meant nothing. Long-range teleport needed prep time. Out of options, she just kept running, hoping to clear the second Stone-giant's territory.
The Misty Mountains' Orc population was about to suffer.
A lot of Orcs were lying around starving on empty stomachs. Then whoom—a small hill of a boulder dropped on their camp.
The two Stone-giants were hammering away. They missed Bella every time, but several hundred Orcs got pulped.
The Orcs tried to scatter. Bella ran straight toward wherever they were thickest. Eventually she put the carpet away, cast Invisibility, and merged into a band of routed Orc survivors, following them downward, going underground.
There were cowardly Orcs. There were also bold Orcs. Watching the Stone-giants attack out of nowhere, a knot of them charged in screaming.
Hacking at stone with swords looked stupid. Once you got into the hundreds and thousands, though, the damage added up.
The Stone-giants ended up hung with Orcs—their dim, blood-streaked skin crawling with tiny figures. The giants got tangled up brawling with the Orcs and forgot what they'd been chasing in the first place.
"Huff…huff… Damn it! Where am I?"
Once she was sure the Stone-giants weren't on her tail anymore, Bella let out a long breath.
Looking at the underground city around her, a very bad feeling came over her.
She'd already flown a long stretch. Then she'd run with those Orcs half the night. Now, looking at the towering square pillars, the broad roads wide enough for giants to walk, and the bones that kept appearing in her peripheral vision, her stomach dropped. Had she stumbled into the Mines of Moria?
The Mines of Moria—the dwarves called it Khazad-dûm.
Dwarves had carved into the earth here for several ages, building a magnificent dwarven kingdom. Then the Balrog appeared, and the dwarves fled in droves.
Barring some strange turn, in roughly a decade after the Lonely Mountain was reclaimed, Bella's old friend Balin would come here to retake the Mines of Moria, try to rebuild the Khazad-dûm kingdom, and briefly become its king. Old Balin was of the Line of Durin too. Unfortunately he would die at the end of an Orc arrow, ambushed in the dark.