The Ranger ➵ Kili Durin

PART I : CHAPTER 2

    After quite some time talking and chatting with Bilbo and getting to know the Hobbit quite well, she was glad when he finally became comfortable in her presence. It was hard getting anyone in the company to trust her, and she knew that it would be a fierce task as soon as Gandalf mentioned who she would be aquainted with. Nonetheless, she was determined to make them all see her as a friend, and a warrior in their favor, and Bilbo was the first (besides Gandalf) to accomplish this. Elvira soon heard her name called from the front of the riding company and excused herself from Bilbo's presence, but not before making sure that Bilbo and Ori were deep in conversation, for she did not want the Hobbit to be left alone. Elvira rode up quickly, passing the rest of the group to find the dwarf who had called for her. Or in this case, it was multiple. Fili and Kili, as well as Thorin and Balin, were all waiting for her expectantly, as well as Dwalin. Fili, Kili, and Balin all waiting pleasantly, while Thorin and Dwalin still had a look of discontent resting on his face as he glowered at her judgingly.

    "If you are to be traveling and fighting with us, we thought we should get to know you and your background a bit more," Balin began.

    "Just to see that you aren't a spy for the enemy or anything like that," Fili continued. He smiled like he was joking, but both Fili and Elvira, as well as the rest of them, knew that he was serious. They didn't trust Elvira, not yet anyway. They had no reason to. The only thing they knew was that she was a Ranger from the North that went about mercilessly killing orcs as a pastime. The company had yet to see anything in her that made her trustworthy at all, and she understood that.

"What would you wish to know of me, master Dwarves?" She asked amusingly, for as I said before, Elvira quite enjoyed being intimidating, and almost thrived upon the fact that she was feared. She loved it.

"Who are your parents? Where did you come from?" Thorin asks gruffly, beginning the conversation with a question about her bloodline, of course. She answered honestly, but not honestly enough.

"My father was a half-elf, half-man from the East, and my mother was a part- dwarf Ranger," she answered. Of course, she wasn't lying, but she wasn't telling the whole truth either. She knew that the dwarves would never come close to accepting her if she told them about her true identity, as well as the identity of her father, mother, and uncle, so she kept this information to herself. Fortunately, the information she gave was enough for the dwarves to move on in the questioning. Thorin, however, did not enjoy the newfound information of her blood. He was unsettled by her incredibly mixed heritage, and began to trust her less and less.

"When did you become a ranger? And why?" Kili asked her, with a tone that was full of simple curiosity, the very opposite of the question posed previously by his uncle. He wanted to know more about the mysterious woman who had thrown a knife at him not more than 13 hours ago. Elvira's tone lightened in her answer to Kili.

"I became a ranger shortly after my parents died, I suppose. I was captured and tortured by orcs for a number of years, and a group of rangers got me out. From that moment on, I stayed with them, learning how to fight so that one day, I could hunt down and kill the orc that held me hostage. That was more than 90 years ago now I suppose," She quickly retold them the story of her past. The 3 dwarves looked at her with pity, while Thorin's face was unreadable, as was Dwalin's. She did not want pity, nor did she need it. She had long been over the pain of her parent's death, and the only emotion she held now was anger.

The dwarves asked her a number of other questions concerning her time as a ranger, her missions, a few from her childhood that she managed to keep quite vague, and her parents. She got through them quickly, managing to make the group of dwarves laugh a few times. At this point, more dwarves were listening to her tales, including Dori, Bofur, Bombur, and Bilbo. Gandalf, of course, knew all of the things she was telling them, and he knew when she began to make things up instead of telling them the truth, but he could not blame her. Thorin would probably try to kill her if he knew about Elvira's true self, and he very much understood her hesitation to tell them.