The Dwarves fashioned a basket from materials on hand. Bilbo sat inside it like a passenger in a hot-air balloon, carried aloft by a Gryphon.
Time was short. Thorin rushed to draft a deed of gift. When he reached the bottom, he flipped his signet ring over and pressed it into the wax to seal his name.
Erebor—the mountain itself and all the surrounding land—now belonged to Bella, in writing.
The deed made no explicit demand about the dragon, but both of them understood it perfectly: as long as Smaug lived, no one could feel safe there for a single day.
Thorin looked up from the last line and asked: "What will you call your kingdom? Are you keeping the name Narnia?"
The question caught Bella off guard. Everything had moved so fast there'd been no time to think about it.
She turned it over for a moment. "I've heard the settlement at the foot of Erebor also goes by Dale?"
Thorin gave a quiet nod. "It does."
Bella tapped her staff lightly against the ground and let her thoughts surface one by one: "The West has Rivendell—the jewel of the Elves. Then the East should have its counterpart. Arendelle—a place of justice, a home for all peoples of goodwill. That will be the name of my kingdom."
Thorin finished the deed and held out the parchment. "Then farewell, Monarch of Arendelle."
"Farewell, King of Khazad-dûm."
The Warg-riders were closing the gap fast. To buy Thorin's group time to slip away, Bella called the other Gryphons and had each of them grip a wooden post dressed in Dwarven clothing. From a distance it looked exactly like each Gryphon had snatched up a Dwarf. Thorin and his company took the mountain paths and quietly vanished from the area.
"Damn it! Aah—! I'll kill them all!" The Orcs who saw the Gryphons banking away overhead went nearly insane with rage. Every eye was drawn skyward. Not one of them noticed Thorin's company disappearing into the mountain trails below.
Bella had the Gryphons circle high on wide sweeping loops and scanned the ground below.
One Orc stood apart from the others—pale-skinned, enormous, glaring at the sky as if he could rip the Gryphons down by sheer force of will. Bella's leisurely circling instead of fleeing had driven him past the edge of patience. He roared and hurled his war-hammer. It flew over a hundred meters (328 ft)—and still fell well short. It was a hammer, not a missile; the Gryphons were far beyond its reach.
"THORIN! I will take your HEAD! I will KILL you!"
The giant Orc's voice echoed off the valley walls.
That one's something else, Bella noted to herself.
The average Orc stood roughly level with a human, and some were shorter. This one was different. His skin carried an unnatural pallor. His left arm was gone at the elbow, replaced by a bladed prosthetic. He stood at least 2.2 meters (7'3") tall, every inch of him knotted muscle—the kind of build that announced crushing strength before he'd moved a finger.
A pity that strength couldn't reach the sky. The Orcs watched the Gryphons shrink to specks on the horizon, helpless.
Bella turned the Gryphons east, toward Erebor.
Thorin and his people had a long march ahead. They would split up and ride to every corner of the reach of Durin's Folk, gathering warriors to reclaim Khazad-dûm—hammering themselves into that mountain like a nail that no force could pull free.
When that day came, the line from north to south would read: Rivendell, Khazad-dûm, Lothlórien—and further south, Rohan and Gondor—a continuous chain of bastions against the dark.
Once that line held, it would press down on Sauron the Dark Lord's forces like a mountain collapsing on them. And if the line broke—well, it was Dwarves who would die. No Elves. No Men of the south.
The Gryphons loved the skies over Vanaheim. They flew with open, exuberant joy. Bella, meanwhile, found herself worrying about Thorin's company, and not quite understanding why anyone would knowingly walk into a fire like this.
"Will we see Thorin again?" Bilbo asked from his basket.
Bella tried a divination. The result was no result—too many variables in play.
"Mr. Baggins, that's the kind of question better left unasked. In my experience, when you say something like that out loud with that much gravity, the universe finds a way to make it go wrong."
"Why? Is it magic?"
"Will you stop asking why about everything?"
Bella reached into her dimensional space and fished out an Elvish travel memoir of the continent. She tossed it to Bilbo. Go read.
She turned her attention back to the problem of Smaug.
Thorin had quit halfway through the journey—got comfortable in the Kingdom of Women, so to speak, and refused to budge. Bella couldn't afford that luxury. She had to see this through. Smaug was her problem now, entirely.
The ideas she'd been working on before the Balrog fight had evolved somewhat since then. But she still wasn't confident.
She told the Gryphon Anna not to eat the Hobbit—and not to drop this important companion either—then opened a portal back to Kamar-Taj. She wanted to consult the Ancient One.
The Ancient One was gone. Traveling to some other plane, apparently. Bella waited three days. No word came.
She asked Wong about the Ancient One's itinerary.
"The Ancient One's movements are never predictable," Wong said. "Three to five days on the short end. Half a year. Even three to five years—that's happened before."
Wong's words made Bella's heart sink. She couldn't afford to wait.
"Something urgent?" Wong asked.
Isn't that obvious? Bella shot him a look.
"The kind of urgent that involves countless lives? The kind that might reshape the balance of the whole world?"
There was something pointed in Wong's question. Bella studied him.
She gave a measured nod: "Yes. I'm facing an extremely dangerous enemy. I can't guarantee I'll win. If I fail, his retaliation could spill across many nations and many peoples."
"Then please—follow me."
Wong led her through the library, unlocked two sets of doors, and brought her into the inner sanctum—the Ancient One's personal collection. Bella had been here a handful of times before. At the far end of the chamber, set into a low alcove, was a small niche. It had always been empty, bare of any icon or relic.
Today there was something inside it.
It was a pendant, ancient in design and covered in esoteric markings. At its center hung a metallic piece shaped like an eye. From within it breathed a faint thread of pale green light.
Bella had never seen it in person, but she knew it immediately. Every sorcerer at Kamar-Taj knew what this was. It was the Eye of Agamotto—the artifact entrusted to every Sorcerer Supreme across generations. The Time Stone.
"Wong, what does this mean?" Bella's expression turned extremely serious.
Wong was completely composed. "I don't know either. Only that before she left, the Ancient One gave me one instruction: if you came to her with a question and she wasn't here, bring you to this room."