Bella wore the Ring of Fire on the middle finger of her left hand, the way old Círdan had worn it.
Narya had nothing to do with offensive rings or defensive rings.
The ring couldn't cast three fireballs a day or a single firestorm. It didn't grant fire resistance or strengthen armor.
No combat abilities at all.
What it did was help its bearer resist a whole range of negative states. It could balance out the cold creeping into Bella's heart with warmth, restore her inner state to something steady and normal.
For her, that was far more useful than any fireball or wall of flame.
A lot of the time, the harm done to the mind was silent and slow. Some terminal illness, long months bedridden, and even the most optimistic, upbeat person could grow bitter and volatile.
Water wears stone. The damage that built up over time was what was truly lethal. The Ring of Fire's effect on Bella was far greater than she had expected.
In the dwarves' view, Bella had simply turned sunny. She'd always done her best to seem cheerful before, but to dwarves who'd lived over a century, she had still carried a slight undercurrent of gloom—comparable, even, to the perpetually grim Thorin Oakenshield. Now she was much better.
Having accepted the Ring of Fire, Bella wasn't shy about taking the old elf's books either.
Círdan had lived fifteen thousand years and his collection was vast—legends, culture, poetry, history. After some browsing, Bella helped herself to a fair number of volumes.
Her pocket dimension wasn't large. It couldn't hold many weapons, but books fit just fine.
She used every spare moment to read, carefully noting the ways this world differed from the one in her memory.
Dwarvish, Elvish, and the tongue of Vanaheim's humans—she was studying all three in earnest.
The deeper she went, the clearer her picture of the whole world became.
According to the old elf's books, the sapient peoples of Vanaheim had many years ago mustered a great army and defeated the dark lord Sauron. But this Sauron was no Maia—in this world there were no Maiar, no Gandalf, no Saruman.
Where Sauron had come from, no one knew. They knew only that he was evil. This evil creature had gone around giving everyone presents—rings—with the intention of using the One Ring in his own hand to control the rings of the three great races. When the conspiracy came to light, the assembled peoples had gone at him together and hacked him down.
The Three Elven Rings had originally belonged to three powerful elves, and now the Ring of Fire had been given over to Bella.
Of the Seven Rings of the Dwarves, four had been destroyed by dragons, two had been reclaimed by Sauron, and one was in the hands of Thorin Oakenshield's father—though that one too was now lost.
The Nine Rings of Men had controlled nine human wraiths. They were all passed into legend now.
At present, the state of the continent was more or less peaceful. Even the dragon Smaug, the target of Thorin's company, was currently asleep.
"So it really is a strange sort of fate—" On learning that no Gandalf would be leaping out with an AK to gun her down, Bella felt a flicker of relief. Good, good. No danger of the real article meeting the fake.
Gandalf's ability to make it to the grand finale didn't translate into useful precedent for her. Everything was going to come down to her own improvisation. If she tried to follow Gandalf's path, she might get herself killed at any point along the way.
There was no creator god here to bail her out.
"Fate? What fate? Does this have something to do with the Shire you mentioned?" Old Balin overheard her muttering and couldn't resist asking.
"Yes. My divinations say there's a key figure there. We have to make a stop in the Shire."
The dwarves had bought mounts suited to dwarven riders back in the Grey Havens, and Bella had paid out of her own pocket for a horse. With mounts under them, their speed picked up dramatically.
If the route of the main Lord of the Rings trilogy began in the Shire at the western edge of the continent and ran south to Rohan and Gondor, Thorin's route to the Lonely Mountain began at that same western Shire and ran east, crossing the whole continent.
The starting point was the Shire in both cases. Like a beginner's village.
Their journey, in effect, was a Vanaheimian version of the Journey to the East.
Leaving the Grey Havens and riding east, the company passed through the Barrow-downs after a day. Three days later they entered the region known as the Westfarthing—a place not particularly famous anywhere on the continent, but legendary to a transmigrator like Bella. This was the Shire, the home of the halflings.
In Earth measurements, the Shire was some twenty-odd thousand square miles in area—about sixty thousand square kilometers.
"The people of the Shire have it very good. They're cheerful, optimistic, always cracking jokes."
The fat dwarf was clearly fond of the hobbits.
Old Balin flatly blew his cover. "What you really love is the Shire-folk's tradition of eating seven meals a day, isn't it?"
The dwarves roared with laughter.
The Shire was a bountiful land—but bountiful for its own people. The hobbits seemed to eat a lot and eat well, but it was all balanced against a particular equilibrium, the same way the Narnian valley had been. The moment an outside race moved in to seize the land, the produce stopped being enough to go around.
The Shire wasn't far from the Grey Havens. Whenever the occasional evil creature wandered over, it would usually be cut down by the elves heading to Alfheim by ship.
With that geographical advantage, and a small measure of luck granted them by the gods, the hobbits of the Shire lived an easy, comfortable country life. Rohan to the south, and Gondor further south still, could go at each other till the beatings knocked out brains, and none of it concerned them. They were perfectly content to enjoy their own quiet lives.
Thorin wanted to go around the Shire. In his view, the hobbits' pleasure-loving way of life would only erode dwarvish warriors' sense of honor. But Bella insisted they had a burglar to find here.
"Halflings have nimble hands—and, well, a kind of small good luck that outsiders don't quite believe in. We'll need someone with those qualities." Knowing dwarves didn't take kindly to outsiders calling them short, Bella skipped over the awkward fact that hobbits were also rather on the short side.
A couple of questions to random passersby got them the address of Bilbo Baggins.
But the look those hobbits gave Bella put her off.
"What's going on? Why are they staring at me like that? They're actually ignoring my beauty?" Bella saw no admiration, no awe, no longing at all in those hobbit eyes. It was unthinkable.
"Ahem." Old Balin cleared his throat loudly beside her in a rather theatrical way.
This mage companion of theirs was outstanding in every respect—except for her odd habit of asking everyone whether she was pretty. But nobody was perfect. If they could put up with Thorin Oakenshield's bear-grouch temper, they could certainly extend the same courtesy to the lady mage's little quirks.
"Well—different races might just have different standards of beauty." Looking heavenward and curling his lip, the old dwarf offered up the explanation reluctantly.