The battle began around eight in the evening.
After two hours of forced marching, the Orc host finally reached the vast plains lying little more than a thousand yards from the Grey Havens.
From the white walls of Mithlond, the Elves looked out upon that terrible sight: a seething, countless tide of foul and misshapen forms, their bristling spears rising like a forest of iron against the fading light.
Their breath caught for but a moment.
Both sides were ancient beyond reckoning, foxes of a thousand years, each knowing well the other’s arts of war.
Elf and Orc had been at one another’s throats for uncounted ages; there was little they did not know of their foe’s ways.
“Form ranks!
Form ranks!
Shields to the front, spears behind!” The Black Orcs of Mordor rode their Wargs through the disordered phalanxes, shouting commands in the ancient tongue of the North, long unheard in these lands.
With blows and curses, they drove the cowering, shuffling masses into something resembling order, herding the terrified wretches, whose jaundiced eyes now gleamed with avaricious malice as they fixed their gaze upon the Elves upon the holy white walls.
“Wait…
wait!” At nearly fifteen hundred yards’ distance, Azog the Defiler paced excitedly upon a crude wooden watchtower.
“Bring up our siege engines!
Bring them up!
Good, sound the horns!” A deep, resonant note, Woom, rose from the great conch-shell horns at the rear of the host.
At the signal, the ten frontmost battalions stirred into motion.
“WAAAAAGH!” With howling, raucous cries, the filthy, corrupted creatures raised their shields, hefted their bloodstained spears and scimitars, and lurched forward in ragged but recognizable order.
Behind them, five towering siege towers crawled slowly but inexorably across the plain.
“Ready!” Gelmir raised his left hand, his face serene.
Along the wall, a thousand Elves, fully armed, drew their bows as one, a single motion, like a single living being.
“Aim for their eyes and wrists!” Gelmir’s voice carried without the slightest tremor.
“Loose!” Both races possessed night-sight; darkness offered no concealment.
Judging the Orcs had entered range, Gelmir gave the command, and from seven hundred yards away, a storm of arrows descended.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
That dread volley claimed hundreds of lives in an instant, Orcs who had exposed nothing but their eyes and wrists.
The unlucky ones took shafts through the eye, the point piercing brain and ending life without a sound; others, pierced through the wrist, dropped their shields with shrieks of agony.
Those few who survived owed their lives to the chance that multiple Elves had aimed at the same target, or simply to Fortune’s whim, a jostle from a comrade, a sudden tremor in the arm, a buckling of the knee that carried them clear of death’s path.
Watching their fellows fall like dominoes, the foremost Orcs’ eyes reddened with rage and desperation.
They screamed and snarled, abandoning all pretense of formation to charge headlong, as though sheer speed could carry them beyond the reach of those hateful, accursed pointed-eared archers upon the battlements.
None turned back, of course.
The Pale Orc knew his northern kin too well, their cowardice, their bullying of the weak, their terror of strength.
He had already dispatched the second and third waves, pressing them forward to drive the first rank onward whether they willed it or no.
Before the surging tide of the Orc-host, the Elves of the North moved with mechanical precision: draw, nock, loose; draw, nock, loose.
Shafts fell like rain; the Orcs were scythed down in swaths, like grain before the reaper.
The terrible supremacy of Elven archery was on full display.
Yet Azog, watching from the rear, continued to feed battalion after battalion into the fray, his excitement undimmed.
He knew that only by closing the distance could he overcome these accursed, long-eared cowards who fought only from afar.
At last, after the loss of at least three full battalions, the Orcish archers came within range.
Upon the walls, Gelmir marked their arrival.
But though he directed his Elves to prioritize the enemy’s ranged troops, two obstacles hindered them: First, the shortbow-wielding Orcs were shielded by the ranks of spearmen before them.
Second, as more and more battalions poured into the field, nearly twenty thousand Orcs now crowded beneath the six-mile stretch of the Havens’ walls, all in heavy armor and dense formation.
Even Elven arrows could no longer reap lives with such ease.
Woom, The Pale Orc sounded another command.
The shortbow battalions raised their bows.
Thwack.
Thwack.
Thwack.
Black-feathered shafts arced toward the high walls, and the Elves began to take casualties.
Such was the grim arithmetic of battle; no man could dodge and hold his line, else the line itself would break.
And then, WOOOOM, The horns swelled again, deeper and more urgent, as more siege ladders, towers, crude catapults, and battering rams appeared upon the field.
Then the trolls entered the fray, massive brutes nearly five yards tall when upright, bearing great stones and catapult parts upon their backs.
Guided by the cunning, stunted Orcs of the Misty Mountains, they hurled their loads with greater accuracy than the hastily built machines, while their thick hides turned aside all but arrows aimed at their eyes or throats.
“Rear ranks, fire at will!” Gelmir called to the Elven archers stationed lower on the walls.
They loosed their shafts in high arcs over the battlements, and another rain of arrows fell upon the Orcs beyond.
Rank upon rank of the enemy fell, yet still the Pale Orc fed his army into the slaughter.
The catapults and trolls began their work, hurling stones over six hundred feet to crash against the walls of Mithlond.
While the main structure held firm, the stones that struck the battlements and merlons wreaked grievous harm upon the defenders.
Looking upon the vast numbers now pressing against the very base of the walls, Gelmir had to admit that Azog the Defiler’s relentless, piecemeal assault was indeed bearing fruit.
“Ballistae, ready!” He swept his hand forward.
Upon the walls, the Elves’ other great weapon was unleashed.
“Loose!” At Gelmir’s command, the great war-machines gave a terrible groaning cry, CRACK, BOOM, and sent forth gleaming metal storms across the dark sky, striking the Orcs’ towering, crude siege towers.
The impact shattered the Pale Orc’s engines into splinters, and the Orcs within were reduced to bloody pulp before they could even scream.
Nor did the devastation end there: the great metal projectiles plowed through the endless tide of Orcs beyond, tearing limbs and bodies asunder.
Only when the storm of death at last subsided did the survivors realize they had been struck by sharp, multi-faceted blades of cunning Elven craft.
One such blade found a troll, spinning through its hide like a knife through cheese, cleaving the brute clean in two.
Its foul blood showered the ground in a steaming deluge.
But the Orcs’ counter-strike was swift.
Driven by reckless abandon, a company of Orcs finally succeeded in hauling a crude scaling ladder through the deadly rain of arrows and hooking its barbed end onto the white walls of Mithlond.
With wild howls, they began to climb.
“Cut them down!” Gelmir drew his own bow, his expression unmoved.
Arrows flew.
The over-eager, filthy wretches fell from the ladder like stuck pigs, tumbling to the ground below.
Yet the battle had now reached its fiercest pitch.
Upon his watchtower, Azog paced in restless excitement, his eyes darting from the raging battle to the darkening sky.
He cast a glance southward, his agitation barely contained.
“What is it?” Upon the southern wall, Ilwen moved to stand beside Dragonborn, following his gaze into the wilds beyond.
But the rugged passes of Emyn Beraid and the deep shadows of night obscured her sight.
Finding nothing, she shook her head and asked him.
In her Elven battle-gear, the sleek, light armor did nothing to diminish her beauty.
Rather, in the silver moonlight, her raven hair and the fine contours of her war-dress made her look all the more radiant and fierce.
“I cannot say,” Dragonborn replied, his voice troubled.
He could not shake a nameless unease, his eyes repeatedly drawn southward.
The immense shadow of Emyn Beraid stirred in him something he had not felt before, a creeping sense of menace.
“As though we are being watched,” he murmured in Quenya, “as though something stirs in the southern hills, lying in wait.” At that moment, Amínír approached.
He was the commander of the southern wall, like Gelmir, an ancient Elf who had beheld the light of the Two Trees in Valinor.
He had followed Fëanor, the second High King of the Noldor, when he defied the Valar and returned to Middle-earth.
“Ocriannim has the right of it,” said the dark-haired, grey-eyed Elf, one hand resting upon his blade.
His face was serene, but his words were grim: “The wind tonight is still, still enough to make one’s blood run cold.” Ilwen frowned.
If even Amínír spoke so, after the Dragonborn’s warning, could something indeed be amiss this night?
She recalled the warning of the Master of the Grey Havens.
Could it be…?
Troubled, she stood beside them upon the southern wall, staring out at the deepening shadows of the mountain paths, her thoughts adrift.
As time passed, the clamor from the eastern battle grew ever more savage, horns braying, stones crashing, the din ever more frantic.
Even Amínír began to doubt his own senses.
Was it merely his imagination?
His brow furrowed, and for the first time his serene mask cracked with uncertainty.
He cast a worried glance eastward, his anxiety plain.
But then, “Wolves!
A host of wolves!” cried the raven-haired Ocriannim, the first to see them.
Amínír spun about, and beheld a sight he would not soon forget.
Beneath the dim veil of night, countless wolves poured from the deep passes of Emyn Beraid like a grey flood, racing with terrible speed toward Mithlond!
Hours earlier…
Bolg, son of Azog the Pale Orc, led thousands of Wargs on a headlong rush through the western edge of the Shire, skirting the halflings’ lands past the village of Michel Delving.
Then they veered off, passing the Far Downs and entering the narrow defiles between Emyn Beraid and the southern Ered Luin, to a hollow just a few leagues south of the Havens.
Bolg had inherited his father’s cunning; he knew the Elves of Mithlond were keen-eared and sharp-eyed, too close an approach would raise the alarm.
So the crafty Orc used the broken terrain and deep woodland of Emyn Beraid to screen his pack from Elven sight.
That was why the Dragonborn and Amínír had sensed nothing amiss.
Only when the appointed hour drew near did Bolg, under cover of deepening dusk, drive his enormous pack in a frenzied charge out of the twisted passes of Emyn Beraid.
Their plan, however, had long been betrayed.
Manwë, Lord of the Winds and Breath of Arda, had whispered the warning to the Master of the Havens on the breeze.
The Elves had not only fortified the southern gate in strength, but the Dragonborn’s amber-golden eyes, luminous in the darkness like a cat’s, had been the first to mark the silent, creeping tide of shadows advancing upon them.
“Wolves!
A host of wolves!” he called, rousing the Elves upon the wall.
“All ranks, fire at will!
Prepare!” Amínír, startled by the grey flood of Wargs, nevertheless did not forget his duty.
The Elves drew their bows.
But the Wargs’ speed far surpassed that of Orcs on foot.
Seeing that they had been discovered, Bolg and his pack threw off all pretense and surged from the darkness with a thunderous howl.
In the space of a few heartbeats they had crossed half a league and entered bowshot.
In another breath they were at the white walls of Mithlond.
The Elves had loosed but three or four volleys.
The hulking Orc blew a piercing note upon a bone whistle, and the great Wargs leaped with terrifying power, scrabbling up the holy white walls, clearing the ten-yard battlements in a single bound!
“Loose!
Loose!” Amínír’s voice rang out, sharper and more strained than Gelmir’s after hours of fighting.
Dragonborn donned a helm of exquisite craft, its shape reminiscent of a certain crown from another world, leaving only his eyes and mouth visible.
“Now we are one.” He blinked, shaking off the stray thought.
Beneath his helm, his heart hammered, sending blood racing through his veins like molten fire.
His golden, cat-like eyes held both fierce excitement and the trembling uncertainty of a warrior’s first true battle.
He hefted his silver-white warhammer, exhaled a scorching breath, and brought the weapon down upon the skull of a massive, savage Warg, smashing it to pulp.
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