It's strange to hear Ellie talk about her home so negatively; Kili came from a world of relative peace and grew up after Durin's folk settled in the West. Of course, he could count on Thorin to talk of death, to remind him of everything that could go wrong in their quest, but he rarely followed it up with a note of positivity about how much the world could change with one person's influence.

He's just one dwarf, one of Durin's unbreakable line yes, but still a singular dwarf. His brother, though, he's quite sure could do something very real here, but that was the catch. He didn't want Fili to arrive, didn't want to sacrifice his brother to a cause Kili otherwise had little stake in.

"Maybe we can," he posits hopefully, smiling up at Ellie. "We're not just one person, after all."