In the deepest tunnels, precious, where even the bats fear to fly, we finds them: bones. White and old and patient. Bones that have waited so long for flesh that they have forgotten what flesh felt like. They lie in patterns on the stone — ribs like fallen ladders, skulls like empty bowls, long bones like pale sticks dropped by some ancient hand.
We touches them sometimes, yes we does, when the hunger is quiet and the dark is friendly. They are cold, so cold, but smooth too, smooth as river stones that have been washed and washed for ages. And they speak, precious, not with words but with... with memory. They remember being alive, even though they are not alive now. They remember warm blood and beating hearts and the sweetness of air.
We found a skeleton once, all complete, curled like a sleeping thing in a corner of the world. It was small, precious, smaller than Gollum even. Maybe a child of the old times, before the mountains cracked and the rivers ran different. Maybe it crawled down here chasing something shiny, chasing something precious, and got lost, lost, lost in the dark.
There are places where the bones are stacked, precious, stacked in piles that reach to the ceiling of the world. We does not go to those places often. They smell of old endings, of final things, of stories that stopped before they were finished telling. But sometimes we goes, yes we does, because the bones there are old, so old, older than Gollum, older than the Ring, older than the very darkness that holds them.
Those bones remember the world before it was broken, precious. They remember when the mountains were young and the goblins had not yet come to dig their tunnels. They remember starlight that was brighter, and sun that was warmer, and air that tasted of flowers instead of dust. They are silent teachers, these ancient bones, telling their stories to any who will kneel and listen.
We kneels. We listens. We hears the bones whisper of fish in clear rivers, of green things growing under open sky, of laughter that was not cruel. They speak of hands that held other hands, of warmth shared in cold times, of food given freely without gold or knives. They speak, precious, they speak of a world that Gollum has never known and will never know.
Sometimes we wants to be bones, precious. To lie still and white and patient. To wait without wanting. To remember without hurting. The bones do not hunger. The bones do not miss the Precious. They simply... are. And being is enough for them, has always been enough, will always be enough until the world cracks open and even stone turns to dust.
But we is not bones yet, is we? We is still flesh, still blood, still crawling through the dark with our memories and our wanting and our precious, precious pain. We envies the bones their stillness. We fears the bones their ending. We loves the bones their patience. And we hates them, precious, yes we hates them too, hates them for being what we cannot be: finished.
The bones are our brothers, in the end. They crawled through dark tunnels once, just like we does. They searched for precious things once, just like we does. And they found an ending in the deep places, just like we will find one day. But not today, precious. Not today. Today Gollum crawls on, past the bones and through the dark, carrying his hollow where the Precious used to gleam.
And the bones watch, precious. The bones watch and remember for us, because Gollum's remembering hurts too much. They keep what we wants to forget. They hold what we has lost. They are the library of the lost, and we visits them like we visits the memories of a dream.
gollum, gollum.