Kili
Basic Information
TIME-SCALE:
RACE: Dwarf
AGE: Around 77
YEAR OF BIRTH: Third Age 2864
PLACE OF BIRTH: Thorin's Gate, Ered Luin
SEX: Male
OCCUPATION: Archer, Composer
MARITAL STATUS: Engaged
SEXUALITY: Straight
PARENTS: Dis (mother) Vili (father - head canon)
SIBLINGS: Fili
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Lyndheid
CHILDREN: Linhildr
LOCATION: Erebor
WEAPON(S) OF CHOICE: Sword and Bow
Appearance
| Stats: | |||
| HEIGHT: | 1.43m | ||
| BUILD: | Slim, by dwarf standards | ||
| HAIR COLOUR: | Dark Brown | ||
| EYE COLOUR: | Brown | ||
He has the dark hair that is common in the Line of Durin. At times, it appears almost black, but it is really only a dark brown. Kili is not one for vainity and avoids making a fuss over his appearance as much as possible. As a consequence, his hair is usually very unkept, though he sometimes tolerates his mother braiding his hair. As long hair sometimes gets in the way of his archery, he uses an hair clasp with the knotwork symbol that he designed engraved upon it.
His eyes are dark brown and when he is in trouble with his mother or uncle, or wants something which he thinks his mother will be reluctant to let him have, he can adopt a puppy dog expression to try and worm his way out of it. It worked very well as a young dwarfling, but as he's got older, it doesn't work as well.
Kili is rather slim for a dwarf, lacking the musculature that dwarves like Dwalin who have worked many years at the forge and wielding heavy weapons in battle have built up over the years. However, he is still more robust than most elves and hobbits in terms of upper body strength. At 1.43m (or 4ft 8in), he is tall for a dwarf, though not quite reaching his uncle and Dwalin in height.
Typically, Kili prefers to wear comfortable, plain clothing that is practical. His favourite colours to wear are blue, brown, grey and black. In battle, he prefers to wear chain mail but does have a regal suit of armour which he wears when it is required to 'impress' visitors when they visit his uncle's halls in Ered Luin. When he is traveling, he usually wears a long, brown leather fur trimmed coat, a brown vest decorated with geometric dwarven patterns, a blue woolen tunic, brown trousers and heavy boots. Many of the items he owns are inscribed with his royal knotwork symbol, including his sword.
As he is a young dwarf, he does not have a long beard and often gets teased about it because along with his favoured weapon, the bow, dwarves say it gives him an elvish appearance. However, he has decided that growing a long beard is out for him if he wishes to remain an archer, so he will not grow one even when he is old enough for it to start growing out. He is quite proud of his Durin heritage and had a talented scribe tattoo the Durin anvil and seven stars to represent the seven dwarf races on his arm when he came of age, along with his knotwork symbol. He hopes one day that he can add the knotwork symbol his One to it when he finds her.
Kili has been trained all weapons that his close elder kin are experts in, but his favoured weapon is the bow, a weapon he chose because it is light and not unwieldy. Although he can wield axes, war-hammers and maces, he finds that he has difficulty wielding those because he lacks the strength to do so as it takes a lot of practice building up the strength and control. In close combat, he prefers the sword and carries one which he smithed himself.
Personality
Before the Quest:
Kili is a friendly dwarf who makes friends easily. Other than losing his father he has experienced very little hardship in his young life and as such he looks on the world with a positive light. The hard life in the mountains is off-set easily by the love and closeness of his family, the lack of which would have worn down a dwarf in the same circumstances.
Being young and lacking in experience of the wider world, he can be reckless at times and acts without thinking of the consequences on occasion. As he has not experienced the real dangers of the world, he sometimes sees orcs, goblins, wargs, trolls and dragons as something of joke to scare younger dwarves with.
Along with the rest of his family, he wants to see the dwarves great again and retake their home. He is content living in Ered Luin as it is all he has known, but he sees how heavy their exile weighs on the shoulders of the older dwarves, especially his uncle and he wants to do the right thing by them and their people to see them restored in their rightful place. He hopes that when/if Fili becomes king of their people that he can stand at his side and give him the help he needs in looking after their people. He has seen the struggles of his people as they attempt to scrape a living in Ered Luin, he has listened to their stories and even lived some of their hardships with them and wants to give them a better life.
On a more personal note, he wants to find a wife who will love him for himself, and not the status or the perceived wealth that being his wife will bring. He is tired of seeing the pettiness, in-fighting and manipulation that he sees is common among the dwarrowdams (dwarf women) who think of themselves as nobles and worthy of high status and finds their behavour off-putting. He wants a lady he can share his interests with.
His main fear is that he will lose a member of his family, especially his brother and his mother. The prospect of the quest both frightens and excites him because he wants to explore the wider world, but is unsure of the dangers that he will face. From the stories that his elders told him, he knows the quest will be a challenge, but his lack of experience of it is a source of anxiety.
Being inexperienced, he is nervous of letting his family, especially his uncle down. He is also frightened that he will fail to live up to the promises he made to his mother of returning to her. Although the burden of the problems facing their people is heavier on his uncle and his brother, he often wonders what will become of them if the quest fails because they will remain in poverty and hardship in the Blue Mountains.
Unlike his elders, especially his uncle, he is more willing to accept elves because he's had no direct conflict with them, only what he has heard from stories. He has a gregarious nature and is particularly fond of hobbits because when he is in the Shire, he enjoys spending time in their pubs. If given the opportunity, he will play a fiddle if it is available. During celebrations or meal times when there is a large gathering of his kin and people, he has a tendency to get rowdy and drunk, but in a good natured way. He is a bit of a prankster and enjoys coming up with jokes to play on people.
His family, especially his brother, mother and uncle mean a great deal to him and his very protective of them.
After the Quest
In the days before he went on the quest to reclaim Erebor, he was reckless, flirty and a bit of a prankster. His experiences on the quest, particularly the incident when he was shot with the arrow, have caused him to mature in his out look on life, but he still retains his love of pranks. Kili has always been a kind dwarf who loves his family deeply, particularly his mother and his brother. He is completely devoted to his Azyungal and daughter. He is very protective of his family and friends. He is a generous dwarf will help those in need because he values family and friends above gold and gems. He tries to be friendly with all races, even elves, even though his uncle dislikes them. Due to his experiences on the quest, he is not as sociable as he was when he was before and as a result prefers to spend time alone in nature, or in the company of animals when he is not with his family. Occasionally he does feel the need to be gregarious and will go to the tavern or mead hall when he's in that mood to drink and share his music.
Other Important Information:
[WILL FILL IN LATER.....]History:
Early Life
Kili was born in 2864, of the Third Age. He was a small, rather sickly baby. He doesn't remember a great deal about his father, who died while his sons were very young. His mother is the sister of King Thorin Oakenshield and, after the death of Kili's father, Thorin became the main father figure in the young dwarf's life.
From a young age, Kili developed a fondness for animals and longed to have a dog, but life was hard in the mountains, even for members of the royal family and they would have had great difficulty keeping any animal that didn't have a practical use. The winters, especially were bad because of the extreme cold and growing food was difficult in the mountains. Pets would put on an extra strain that the dwarves couldn't afford, and his mother didn't want her sons exposed to more hardship than they needed to be. However, Fili took pity on his younger brother and one summer he found a toad which he gave to Kili for his birthday. His mother, seeing that a pet toad was not a difficult creature to look after (they wouldn't have to feed him from their own stores), decided to let him keep the toad and Kili's fondness for frogs and toads grew from there. There was one group of animals that the dwarves were not forbidden to keep and when he was old enough, Kili began to spend time around the ponies and goats that the dwarves kept in their settlement. Dwarf children have a long childhood of almost 80 years, and reach puberty at around 40 years of age. When that happened, Kili was given his first pony and was given the responsibility of caring for his family's ponies. Gloin kept a pack of hunting dogs that were used to track game in the mountains which Kili and Fili often took out hunting, usually with an older dwarf like Dwalin. This did not compensate fully for his disappointment at not being able to have a dog of his own and he was determined that one day he would have one.
Dwarves are a very musical race and part of his education was to choose a musical instrument to learn to play. There were many winter evenings when he, his brother and his mother would sit by the fire-place listening to Thorin play his harp. Fili chose to learn to play the fiddle and Kili followed suit. It was something that he learned to enjoy and both brothers became good enough to play at the celebrations held throughout the year in their uncle's mead hall. He would sometimes try his hand at composition but he only remained an amateur at the skill at this time. However, he did not progress his skills beyond being a festival musician in Ered Luin because his real interests laid elsewhere.
In addition to his love of animals, he enjoyed exploring the outdoors, especially when Fili accompanied him. Most of the time, he was content with exploring the snowy pine woods that surrounded their settlement, but one day he wanted to explore further afield, and unknowingly wandered into a dangerous part of the mountains where orc-kind lurked. He became separated from Fili but was not worried at first because he had found the tracks of a fox and he wanted to find its den, so deeper into the orc-kind's territory he went, thinking that Fili would catch up with him. Time wore on, Fili failed to join him and, he found that he had wandered too far from the settlement and he had no idea where he was. He first noticed that something was wrong because all the birds had gone quiet and he spotted a hideous tattered flag that warned travelers that they were in land controlled by orcs. He was rescued by Thorin, and Dwalin as Fili had gone to fetch him. He was in a lot of trouble afterwards.
The task of educating the young princes in academic studies was given to their cousin Balin, who was one of the wisest and most knowledgeable dwarf in Thorin's service. Kili was not overly fond of these lessons, for he preferred the out doors to being shut up in a dusty library learning things he thought were of little use to him. He was instructed in the dwarven language Khuzdul and taught the various languages of the elves and of men. In addition, he was also taught all that Balin knew of the history and traditions of their race. Kili learned all of this with the resistance of a youth wishing to fill his days with fun and excitement and often got into trouble with his elders for skipping lessons. As a minor punishment, Balin would make him do work in the library instead of allowing him to go out to play when his lessons were over. This was how he met Ori, and it perplexed him that the younger dwarf loved books. At times, Kili's truancy became quite severe and that earned him harsher punishments from his mother and his uncle.
The life of a dwarf in exile is not an easy one, and the task of training the princes for battle was split between their uncle and Dwalin who was one of the best warriors in the settlement. Kili preferred his lessons with his uncle than those with Balin, but he was always felt a bit intimidated by Dwalin. Together, they made certain that the princes were competent fighters, and Kili learned his lessons in sword fighting well. Instead of choosing the warhammer or axe as his main weapon, which was traditional for dwarves to take up, he settled on the bow instead.
Both his mother and Thorin were quite concerned with Kili's skipping of Balin's lessons and concluded that perhaps he would respond better to a practical education instead and when Kili was old enough, they began to instruct him at the forge. Kili took to this better than the lessons with Balin, and he forged his own sword. However, he felt that it wasn't quite what he wanted to do.
Once Thorin considered him skilled enough, he was allowed to join the guards when they escorted trade caravans to and from Bree and the Shire.The mines of Ered Luin were poor and held little in the way of valuable metals and gemstones as the majority of the valuable material had been stripped from the mines during the First Age and the dwarves were forced to make a living forging tools and low grade weapons. The dwarves would trade the weapons and tools they made in Bree and purchase food which they couldn't grow for themselves from the farmers of the Shire. Kili liked these trips as it allowed him to see some of the world beyond his home and it instilled in him a desire for adventure.
The longest trip outside Ered Luin that he undertook before the quest was to escort a trade caravan to a settlement in Dunland, a place where his great grandfather had taken the dwarves who followed him after their long wanderings in the wilderness to find a safe place to start over. They still kept ties with those people. It was long and arduous, quite different from the expeditions to the relatively safe Shire and Bree.
As he grew older and neared the age when he would be considered an adult, he began to realise that there was something missing in his life, a female companion. His travels with the caravans caused him to become increasingly aware of the scarcity of dwarvern women as he saw how common women of other races were, especially among the hobbits. As a possible heir to Thorin, he attracted quite a bit of attention from ladies, but he soon saw that what they were interested in was his title, or the mistaken idea that he possessed a lot of riches. Despite his loneliness, he turned them all away because he saw that they didn't want him for himself, only what the status of being his wife would bring them. He began to think that he would spend his days alone.
The Quest to Reclaim Erebor
His uncle encountered Gandalf in Bree, and plans were made to go on a quest to reclaim Erebor. The prospect of going on an adventure both excited and frightened him, but in the end, his desire for adventure won out over fear. He knew that he just had to go! His mother was reluctant to let her sons go, especially Kili, being the youngest. She did not want anything to happen to them after the losses of her grandfather, father, brother and husband and she was afraid that she would loose her sons and remaining brother too. But it was their birthright and in the end she let them go. She gave Kili a runestone with a promise that he would return to her.
He approached the journey with a light heart and youthful enthusiasm. The threat of the dragon at the end was a vague threat and, as he had never encountered one, the danger posed by it didn't seem real. He had faced goblins, wild animals such as wolves and bears and robbers in the mountains, but never real war, and his innocence such matters bolstered his courage. The trolls, his first encounter with danger on the journey did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm and he considered it to be an amusing tale which he could tell dwarflings, or recite to a group drunks the next time he was in a tavern.
The first time he was truly scared on the quest was the encounter with the giants in the Misty Mountains. They could have easily ended the lives of his companions and himself, but there was no malice there - the giants were more concerned with fighting each other than squashing dwarves and hobbits, and though he was relieved when the giants were behind them, the fear of the incident soon faded - he had got what he wished for when he began to see the world on the trading expeditions.
There were several other incidents on the quest where they were put in danger, the goblins in the Misty Mountains, the wargs and subsequent rescue by the eagles, the encounter with Beorn in his bear form, and the spiders of Mirkwood. When they almost lost his uncle to the wargs, he had his first taste of what real horror felt like and the accumulation of these incidents began to make him question his notion at the start that it was all just a lark, but it wasn't quite enough to effect his spirit. That changed when he was wounded in the leg by the Morgul arrow, a wound that almost cost him his life and from which he never fully recovered. It was his first brush with his own mortality.
The Battle of the Five Armies took a huge toll on him and along with Fili and his uncle, he was badly wounded. They were rescued by the intervention of Beorn and brought back to the healing halls by the Beorning and Dwalin.
Post Battle of The Five Armies
It took him a long time to recover from the injuries he received at the Battle of the Five Armies. For a time, he even thought that Fili and his uncle had both departed for the Halls of Mahal. It was in those halls that he met Beyla the dwarrowdam he would employ as his house keeper - a recently widowed woman with two children from the Iron Hills who lost her husband in the battle. She helped the healers care for him while he recovered from his injuries, and her children kept him company while he recovered from the worst of it.
It was during his incapacitation that he began to see the value of the scribe's work, and began to take a keener interest in music. Music seemed to be one of the few things that dulled the emotional pain inside of him brought on by his experiences during the quest, even if only Oin's treatments could dull the physical pain he felt. The wound in his leg only partially healed and continues to pain him. The pain is worse in the winter and upon the anniversary of being wounded.
For a time, he shunned company apart from that of his family, his friends and those who helped him heal from the battle wounds. One day, he felt that he should go on a trip out, and went to Dale. It was difficult for him to do that because he did not like strangers seeing his weakness. There, he encountered a raven being kept in a cage and knowing the friendship that existed between the ravens and dwarves, he grew angry at the sight. He was able to bring the bird home with him.
His experiences during the battle and his leg continued to trouble him, and he kept mainly to himself, visiting Balin's library, caring for his raven, and playing music. Playing the fiddle became the main focus point of his life as it allowed him to forget the pain while he played. He begun to experiment with the instrument to see if he could make his own scores, and he began composing. He began to realise that what he wanted to do with his life was make music and he started to search for all he could find on the subject, which led him to spend more and more time in Balin's library.
While he was there, he found a journal, which was mainly composed of nature writing and the personal experiences of a young dwarf woman he had never met before. Intrigued by it, he took it to his study and read it. He expected the dwarrowdam to come looking for her journal because it wasn't complete, but time passed, and she never came for it. He found out that Balin had given the lass shelter but she was inclined to go wandering and had gone off on one of her trips, even though winter was coming and it was not the season for journeying.
He started to spend less time in his study, though composing was still important to him, and spent more time in the public areas of the mountain. One day, while he went to Erebor's market to search for new inks and parchment he needed for a new project he was working on, he came across a notice about a puppy that was needing a new home. After he made his purchases, he visited the dwarrowdam who'd placed the notice and brought the puppy home. Over the next few weeks, he came to know the dwarrowdam and her family and it soon became clear that they were the relatives of the dwarrowdam whose journal he had found, and he returned the journal to them.
Around Yuletide, the dwarrowdam, Lyndheid, returned home and he began to court her. She was the kind of lady that he wanted as a companion because she cared little for gold and treasure, loved the young archer for himself.