The cold has teeth today, precious. Not the gentle cold of deep caves where water drips slow and steady, but the biting cold that gnaws at our thin limbs, that finds the gaps between skin and bone. We shivers in the dark, wrapping our long arms around our knobby knees, trying to hold what little warmth remains. Master has not lit the fire in the upper room, and the chill seeps through stone and shadow to find us where we hide.
We remembers warmth. The warmth of the sun on the Gladden Fields before the Ring came, before everything changed. The warmth of fish fresh from the water, still quivering with life. The warmth of the Precious itself, which burned with a heat that had nothing to do with flame—an inner fire that made us feel alive even when the outside world froze. Now we have only memories of warmth, and memories are poor fuel against the cold that bites.
"Why does Master let the fire die, precious? Does he not know we suffers down here?"
"Master has his own warmth. Books and scrolls and the work of his hands. He forgets the caves below."
"We could creep up. We could sit near the ashes. Just for a little while."
"And if he sees us? If he catches us creeping?"
"He is kind, Master is. He would not turn us out into the snow."
"Snow? There is no snow in the Shire, precious. Only rain and mist and the grey that never lifts."
"Grey is better than white. White is the color of forgetting. Of ending."
"We has not ended yet. We endures. Cold or no cold."
Our breath makes small clouds in the darkness. We watches them form and fade, form and fade, each one a tiny life born and dying in seconds. Sometimes we tries to catch them with our hands, as if we could hold the warmth of our own body before it escapes into the vast uncaring dark. But they slip through our fingers like everything else—like fish, like time, like the Ring itself when it fell with us into the fire.
There are creatures that love the cold. The wargs that hunt the high passes. The spiders of Mirkwood with their many legs carrying them across frozen webs. The dragons, if any still live, who sleep beneath northern ice and dream of gold. But we are not such creatures, precious. We are a river-hobbit twisted by magic and time, made for soft mud and cool water, not for the sharp teeth of winter.
We remembers the Misty Mountains. The deep places where we lived so long, where the cold was constant but companionable, like an old ache one learns to work around. There was a sameness to that cold, a reliability. This cold is different—changeable, treacherous, promising relief one moment and biting harder the next. It reminds us of the Precious, how it warmed and cooled by turns, never letting us settle into comfort.
Perhaps that is why we endures. We has practice in discomfort. Centuries of it. The cold is just another form of wanting, another hunger that cannot be satisfied. Wanting warmth is no different from wanting fish, from wanting the Ring, from wanting to be Sméagol again before the darkness came. All wants are the same want, precious. All hungers stem from the one great hunger: to be whole, to be complete, to be enough.
Master moves above. We hears his footsteps, the creak of boards, the rustle of parchment. He works on some great labor, some task that absorbs his mind and keeps him from feeling what we feels. We is glad for him, precious. Glad that someone in this cave is warm and busy and whole. Let him have his fire and his work. We will huddle in our corner and remember the sun, remember the water, remember the weight of gold against our chest that made all cold seem far away.
The biting will pass. All bitings pass, given time. And we has nothing but time, precious. Endless, stretching, cold time. gollum, gollum.