Midnight.
Five thousand warriors—Falmari and Sindar both—stood in a thin, bright line across the throat of Eagle's Beak Gorge.
Every face was pale beneath the starlight.
Every pair of eyes held the same thing:
A calm, unshakable resolve to die here.
Elured stood alone at the very front, one Elf, one sword, framed against the sea of stars above.
He couldn't help but remember the First Age.
Back then, he and his brother Elurin had still been children, barely taller than a sword-hilt, when Fëanor's sons led their kinsmen in bloody madness, storming Doriath for the Silmaril.
His father Dior, High King of the Sindar, had led their people in desperate resistance,
And died beneath a tide of Elven blades.
The brothers had been cast out into the wild, abandoned in the forest to starve and freeze. Their home burned. Their people scattered. Their childhood ended under the shadow of war.
Later, they had been found and taken back to Aman to be raised in safety.
But the noise of battle never left their dreams.
They learned early to hate war,
And yet war had walked beside them now.
"Avoiding it only makes the enemy bolder," Elured thought, fingers tight around his sword hilt. "Only by facing fate head-on can we show them our unbroken courage."
He turned.
Behind him, thousands of Elf-folk crowded the gorge—elders, women, children, the last breathing future of their people.
They were all weeping.
One after another, they bowed deeply to the five thousand doomed warriors, and to their prince who stood at their head.
Then, under the guidance of several nobles, they began to climb,
Hands and feet clutching at the hidden passage carved into the cliffside, hauling themselves upward into the night.
"Not good! The Elves are trying to escape!"
"Attack! Don't let a single one get away!"
"Wooo–ooo–oo!"
In the darkness beyond the gorge came the hollow bellow of war-horns.
Hundreds, thousands of torches flared to life like a swarm of fireflies in the black.
A moment later, the pirate army surged forward in a roaring wave, charging straight toward the Elven line.
Elured drew his sword.
Behind him, five thousand Elven warriors took a single step forward as one. Elemental light burned to life across their armor, flowing over them like rippling moonlight, forming a glowing wall before the waiting civilians.
"To death!"
"To death!"
The Elves shouted their battle-cry and hurled themselves at the oncoming tide.
Steel clashed.
The fires swayed.
Blood sprayed the stones.
High above them, along the cliff, the Elf-folk clung to the rock, dragging themselves upward with trembling fingers. Tears blurred their sight, but they did not stop.
Time was too precious.
Every heartbeat they hesitated meant another warrior's life burning away down below, another body collapsing into the narrow, blood-soaked defile.
The Elven shield-wall was built out of lives.
Wave after wave of pirates crashed against it, and wave after wave were broken—
For a time.
When the golden glow of sunset finally painted Eagle's Beak Gorge the color of spilled blood, Kaen's host arrived.
From far off, he could already see how the battle had gone.
At the mouth of the valley, a black tide of pirates hurled itself again and again against the shrinking Elven defense.
Most of these raiders hailed from Umbar. Their skin was sun-burnt dark, their hair woven into greasy, filthy braids. Rusty scimitars and hooked spears flashed in their hands.
Their tactics were crude, chaotic, more of a feeding frenzy than an army.
But they had one advantage: they did not fear death.
Whenever the front ranks fell, those behind simply stomped over the bodies, shrieking, scrambling up the corpses of their own comrades just to get their blades a little closer to Elven flesh.
And yet, at the very front of that slaughter, a single figure still stood.
Prince Elured's silver-white armor had long since turned the color of dried blood. His longsword was nicked and jagged, the edge beaten blunt by ceaseless killing.
Hundreds of corpses lay piled at his feet.
He stood like a god carved from tarnished steel, refusing to fall, barring the entrance to the gorge with his own body.
Behind him, the five thousand-strong death squad had been whittled down again and again, until now barely a fraction remained.
Some of the Elves were missing an arm. Others had bandages so soaked in blood they'd turned black.
But still they fought.
White robes, once pure as snow, were now stained purple-black from shoulder to hem. Yet not one of them took a step back.
For ten thousand… twenty thousand… nearly all of their people had already climbed out of the gorge.
Only the last few thousand still clung to the rock, a living thread stretching toward hope.
The sight was so brutal that the warriors of Eowenría drew sharp breaths without meaning to.
"We can't wait any longer," Kaen said quietly. He raised the Sword of Courage and Glory.
The blade burst into searing gold beneath the setting sun, like a second dawn lighting in his hand.
"Form battle lines!"
"King's Guard—wedge formation for the charge!"
"Shadow wardens—spread and envelop!"
"For Eowenría! For freedom and justice! For the Light!"
"Kill!!