When Dragonborn returned to the East Gate, the plight of the Elves had grown dire.
“Waaaaaagh!” A seething tide of hideous, filth-caked Orcs shrieked and brandished jagged scimitars and iron hammers as they hurled themselves onto the walls of the Grey Havens.
Their eyes blazed with hatred, fixed unblinking upon the Lord of the Havens where he stood encircled by Galdor and his chosen guard.
They knew him, knew he was some great and precious lord.
His armour alone proclaimed it: wrought with such exquisite craft, set with crushed diamonds and glowing gems, adorned with mithril more costly than gold.
A king of Men would have envied it, for no treasure vault in all the kingdoms of Men held its equal.
About his brow he wore a slender crown of mithril, and beneath the starlight it caught the purest radiance in all of Middle-earth.
At his hip hung a blade of power.
The Orcs could not name it, but even sheathed its cold edge seemed to sting their skin.
So these foul, misshapen things stared with greed-lit eyes, mouths full of yellow fangs gibbering meaningless words, and rushed with blade and club toward that knot of high lords.
Galdor and his faithful swords were ready.
Bright steel flashed, and Orcs fell like chaff before the scythe.
They hewed them down before a single filthy hand could touch the revered Círdan.
But Azog the Defiler drove them forward with savage, simple terror; warg-riders of the Black Orcs from Mordor harried the broken ranks and forced the wretches to snatch up their weapons again, screaming as they surged onward in endless waves.
Their numbers were so great that even Galdor’s guard wavered for a heartbeat.
As the fighting thickened, a massive stone-troll seized its moment.
Shielded by a rain of Orc-arrows and iron-shod bucklers, it came lumbering, a monstrous, crudely carved three-sided ram of rock lashed to its head.
It thundered straight for the mighty oaken gates.
“Bring it down!
Kill the great brute!” The voice rang familiar: it was Fena, the chief cook.
Yet now she wore no cook’s apron but gleaming armour, and from her hands the bow sent arrow after arrow unerringly to the mark.
The chief cook we knew was in truth a Ranger-captain in the service of the Lord of the Havens, commander of the elven archers.
Her skill at arms was deadly, her eye with the bow uncanny.
That was why she had not been seen when the Elves first took up their war-gear again; why the guards who once teased the dark-haired Dragonborn had feared her so; why Círdan had declared the Dragonborn would need no other protection while she was near.
Immortal Elves must fill the long ages with some craft, and there is no crime in a Ranger-captain loving the art of the kitchen.
The northern Elves had known peace for more than two thousand years, after all.
That a chief cook might have neglected her post for a few centuries…
cough.
Fena did not yet know Ílwen had fallen, nor that the dark-haired Dragonborn had unlocked a new power.
Clad for war, the Ranger-captain saw the misshapen troll charging the gate with heedless momentum, and calmly sent an arrow through one of its eyes.
Yet the brute still hurled itself forward in a clumsy, stubborn dive.
The monstrous wedge of stone struck the stout doors with a boom that shook the gatehouse, a blow far heavier than any battering-ram had yet landed.
Even as the troll toppled, a second came on.
“Kill them,” Fena cried, her face gone pale.
Elven gates were strong, but not proof against such hammering, one after another.
Arrows fell like rain, but too late.
A second troll crashed into the timbers.
The ancient gates, which had never yielded, shrieked in protest.
The Orcs went wild.
“Grond!
Grond!” Their cry began a ragged howl, then grew and grew until a single fell name thundered across the field.
The Elves’ faces changed, for that name carried the memory of dread.
And true to the omen, there loomed out of the dark a monstrous engine, shoved and hauled by several trolls: the Orcs’ great battering ram.
It was wrought after the likeness of the weapon with which Morgoth, the Dark Enemy, had once smitten Fingolfin, High King of the Noldor: a vast wolf’s head cast of iron and foul alloys, with fire blazing inside its maw.
It took four trolls to drag it.
“Grond!
Grond!” The Orcs howled as if beholding a miracle, and their voices shook the air.
Azog the Defiler was now staking all.
He paced the watchtower in a fever of impatience, never noticing that behind his lines the Dwarves had already begun to ford the river.
The din of battle and the black, moonless night had masked their coming, and a strange cloud crept over the moon as if the Valar themselves lent their aid.
Below the walls, Orc archers poured every shaft they had onto the Elves near the gate to shield the advance of the thing named Grond.
Orcs on the ramparts hurled themselves in reckless fury at Fena and her archers.
No one could count the slain on either side, but by the time the dreadful weapon reached the gates, a causeway of blood and corpses stretched from the distant field all the way to the white walls of Mithlond.
Grond!
Grond!
The Orc-host screamed until the heavens rang.
Far off, Azog halted and stood rigid, his gaze fastened upon the gate.
“Wait, wait…
now!
Strike!” The baleful horns bellowed.
Boom.
The first stroke fell.
The great ram smashed into the elven doors, and the ground shuddered as if an earthquake had rolled beneath their feet.
The Lord of the Havens at last drew his blade, a sword of living silver like a river of moonlight.
With one sweep Círdan took the heads of five foul Orcs, then whirled into the tide of bodies.
No Orc claw touched so much as his sleeve.
He moved like willow-down in the wind, impossible to grasp, and struck like the wrath of Belegaer, fierce and overwhelming.
The silver blade rose and fell, reaping a harvest of heads while he walked unscathed.
Boom.
The second blow.
The gates trembled.
Within the portal, rank upon rank of Elves with faces like stone levelled spear and shield, arrayed in grim silence toward the shaking doors.
Beyond them, the heavy horse of Galdor’s company snorted and stamped, their destriers catching the scent of blood and ruin.
But the third stroke, the blow all awaited or dreaded, never came.
Fena loosed an arrow that nailed two slavering Orcs together through the skull, then slung the bow across her back and leapt down from the high wall with the grace of a deer.
Twin short-swords were suddenly in her hands; she drove them deep into the bare skull of a troll.
The beast slumped softly, never understanding why an Elf had fallen from the sky.
Fena was up in an instant, lunging, her left-hand blade slipping through an Orc’s forehead like a knife through curd.
She pulled it free without a glance and danced between two lumbering trolls, light as thought.
She sprang onto one’s arm, used the momentum to reach its head, and drove both swords into its eyes.
Then she rolled free, and before she had even risen, the bow was in her grip.
An arrow flashed and buried itself in a third troll’s eye.
That brute dropped its club and clutched at its face.
The blinded troll crashed to the ground, flattening several Orcs beneath its bulk and throwing the nearest foes into chaos.
In the confusion, Fena rounded on the fourth troll.
The last troll stared dumbly at its club, then at the she-elf, as if marvelling how something so small could fell three of its kin.
But its slow wits soon gave up that deep riddle.
It raised its great club and brought it smashing down.
And this troll had learned from its fellows: it covered its eyes with one thick, grimy hand.
Now the little elf can’t poke my eyes out.
So it thought.
Thud.
Fena swayed aside, and the iron-shod club hammered empty earth, jarring the troll’s arm numb.
Four arrows in swift succession found the brute’s exposed throat as it raised that shielding hand, and the troll dropped dead.
Watching the she-elf defy four trolls and slay three, Azog went nearly mad with rage.
“Kill that she-elf!
Kill her!” The Defiler’s howl tore through the black sky, drowning even the clamour of battle.
Orcs surged toward Fena, keen to take her head as a gift for their master.
She gripped the bow, her face still as deep water, her eyes unwavering.
His voice reached her before he did.
“Are all Elves so reckless?” A tall shape plunged from above and landed heavily before the she-elf, a broad, powerful frame that radiated an unspoken reassurance.
Dragonborn had come.
His eyes burned as he glared at the shrieking, stunted, vile things, and he swung his long-hafted warhammer.
The first seven or eight Orcs were swept aside as if swatted by a giant, hurled through the air like broken toys.
“Filth!
Die, every one of you!” There were so many Orcs that he needed no aim.
He hauled the great hammer back, a weapon near the size of a horseman’s lance, and lashed out with another thunderous sweep.
Seven or eight more Orcs in iron plate were flung skyward like straw, bones shattered, dying in agony.
[As in the prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring, when Sauron swept through the Elves and Men.] Fena wasted no breath on wonder; she slipped behind the Dragonborn’s towering, broad-shouldered form and let her arrows fly in swift support.
An Elf-woman, even a dead shot, could only account for three or four score at best.
But this fearsome, towering, hateful figure like the Pale Orc… what was he?
His hammer.
His hammer was horror itself!
Waaah.
He is a monster, his hammer more terrible than the Pale Orc!
Ah, there go seven or eight more of those nasty, mean-hearted Orcs who tormented Grimash… so frightening… Grimash does not want to be smashed!
Grimash is scared!
Grimash is going to run away!
Yes!
Grimash is fleeing, and this time no one will stop me!
While the Dragonborn, wreathed in silver armour and wielding that monstrous hammer like a god of war, alone sent Orcs spinning through the air to a shattering doom, a small, shifty-eyed Orc named Grimash felt his legs turn to water.
He slipped and twisted through the press, using the fools (as he thought of his kin who still charged to their deaths) for cover, and squirmed his way to the edge of the field.
He was far from the walls now, almost beneath the watchtower where Azog directed the host.
But the battle had fallen into utter ruin, and Azog had no attention to spare for one coward.
He did not know the Dragonborn, but the silver giant’s dreadful might made his blood chill.
“Kill him!
Kill that she-elf!” the Pale Orc raged, pacing, his roars the empty fury of helpless spite.
Then came the horns.
Aruuum.
Aruuum.
Aruuum.
Not the bleak, harsh horns of the Pale Orc, but a deeper, prouder call of Dwarf-horns, suddenly ringing from behind the Orc army, bold and fierce in the night.
All who were not locked blade to blade halted and looked back.
“Ocriannim!” On the wall, Círdan strode from a mound of Orc-slain, his robes soaked in black blood, his bright sword unstained.
He shouted down to the Dragonborn: “Shift that great thing aside!” Clad in his mighty plate, standing like a titan before the gate as he hewed down all comers, Dragonborn paused, then realized what Círdan meant.
He glanced at the monstrous battering ram.
Shift it?
How?
Ignoring the Orcs who now milled in dazed confusion at this fresh calamity, he stepped to the hulking engine.
“Heh.” What he did next stunned every watcher.
Placing one hand beneath the base of the immense ram, he tested its weight, then with a savage heave he overturned the entire thing, a mass that must have weighed over ten tons, flipping it onto its side.
The Orcs nearest fled shrieking in terror.
Monster!
He is a monster!
Run!
The monster has come!
These loathsome, squat creatures wailed and wept, scrambling over one another in another rout.
But this time, Azog could not reforge them, for the Dwarf host was upon him.
“Azog!” A voice like a thunderclap, the hated whelp of Durin’s line.
The Pale Orc spun, enraged and aghast, and saw the detested shape of the Dwarf-prince burst forth like a blade of white light cleaving the darkness, mighty and dreadful in his wrath.
Behind him poured a tide of Dwarf-knights on rams, and war-chariots.
Then came the phalanx of Dwarf Guardians in full harness, advancing slow and inexorable, their steady tread rumbling doom.
Azog could not fathom how Dwarves had come here, but old hate flared at the sight of his foe.
The Pale Orc felt a throb of phantom pain in the stump of his left arm, and his baleful eyes filled with venom.
“Hold the line!” he screamed, ordering his warg-riders to check the Dwarf advance.
He still had nearly twenty thousand bodies at his command, and he clung to the hope of rallying.
He sent his five freshest Orc cohorts to block the tightening Dwarf advance, while he himself descended from the tower and mounted his great white warg.
But then the Elven horns sang.
Aruuum… Unlike the horns of Orcs or Dwarves, the Elven horn was the voice of life itself: the roar of breakers, the wind through a forest glade, the promise of dawn before the sun.
Before the astonished gaze of all, the Lord of the Grey Havens led his solemn heavy cavalry, riding forth under the last starlight from the white halls of Mithlond.
That charge was later woven into the elven lay The Dawn of Mithlond, sung down the long ages until the end of the world and beyond.
———————— Thank you all for reading and supporting this story, also do leave your comments, reviews, stones, especially paragraph comments, they are fun to read.
If you want to read additional chapter, please do check my Patron page, it has 15 extra chapters right now.
com / Bruce305 (just search by removing spaces.) CREATORS’ THOUGHTS bruce_1321 Check this out!!