Stone Without Song

A Lament for Erebor

I.
It was not the gold we mourned.
It was the halls.
The sound of our names
echoing down the polished stone,
the hammer’s hymn,
the hearth’s glow.
Gone.

The mountain slept,
and with it,
so did we—
half-awake,
half-buried
in what was once ours.

II.
They called it The Lonely Mountain.
But it was never lonely
until we left.

Stone does not forget.
It remembers with weight,
with silence,
with the ache of roots
still searching for the veins
they once knew.

And so did we.
Though the years piled
like snow on stone—
we remembered.

III.
We are not soft folk.
We do not weep
where others can see.
But we carry grief.
We engrave it.

Each beard braided
with exile,
each blade forged
with unfinished songs.

You do not know
how loud absence is
until you have heard
a kingdom fall silent.

IV.
We wandered.
Mountains beneath our feet,
but none above us.
We built,
but only for warmth—
never again for wonder.

And yet,
always,
our dreams circled back
to that gate
cut in black stone
beneath the shadow of the dragon’s wing.

V.
They say we love gold.
They are wrong.

We love craft.
We love legacy.
We love what lasts.
And what lasts longest
is memory—
the shape of a hall
you cannot enter,
the sound of a voice
that does not return.

VI.
Now the mountain wakes again.
But this song is not for triumph.
It is for the long night
between.

For the fires kept low,
the hands that grew still,
the names forgotten by the world
but never by stone.

We are dwarves.
We endure.
But oh,
how we long.