This war is over, but the smoke yet lingers. Ashes remain. Danger abates, but for how long?
Mordor felt a sickly place. The air was breathable but soaked with a wet, sulfurous heat that clings to skin and seeps into bone; reminiscent of a fevered face bereft of life, pallid and diseased.
An evening ago, a petty band of orcs and Black Uruks infiltrated the infirmed of Elessar's camp. A fringe attack, futile, but such creatures were known to take pleasure from senseless acts of villainy. They were dispatched within the night, save for a few who managed to escape with captives back into the recesses of their vile encampment. Annuviel, having seen the foul things slinking away with her fellows, broke from the battle to make chase.
Like a shadow unbeholden to the light, she crept, moving southward beyond the ruined remains of the Morannon. It was an easy enough task for an Elf, who could remain unseen when she wished, but furthermore it was the lack of dark agents that plagued the pockmarked wasteland. A convenient and unexpected trail of orcish bodies laid her a path to follow, carved through the heart of Udûn. Still, the blackened landscape crawled with verminous foes, however lessened their numbers were. It was not difficult to follow into the shallows of this Dark Land, but the deeper she tread, the further from certainty she ventured.
The great mechanisms of Anglach churned on and on, their rusted screams filling the air aimlessly, despite the inevitable Doom of their Final Day. The forge would ultimately fall, Annuviel was sure, either by destruction's hand or dereliction. Sauron was dead and the serpent's body writhed, headless and still dying. So it was that Mordor lay dying, but Annuviel bore too closely a reminder of what danger there was in leaving evil to bleed out.
"Gosto, Gothrim!"
A shout, not her own, broke her concentration. A familial battlecry ringing out above the metallic ballad rumbling in her ear. It filled the hollowing space behind her breast with hope, and she quickened her pace onward. Let them live, she prayed.
Now apparent, her presence drew what orcs that still wandered amidst their camps along the byroads. None were so formidable as to pose more than an obstacle, meeting swift ends at the edge of her blade as she danced with sword and stave down the waylaid path to a silent rhythm she found in the warcries of her kindred. Threats of tooth and bone and black iron lashed out, only to be swept aside by singing steel. She tired not, though for every two foes rent, a third appeared soon after and she knew that to idle would be to die.
With an arcing sweep of her staff, Annuviel cleared her perceived path and turned to advance down the narrow of the vale. Behind her she could hear the high pitched howls of the foes she'd disengaged reclaiming their footing to make their pursuit anew. The ground beneath her began to tremble with the erratic beat of a hundred more wicked things drawing nearer.
As the pass thinned, the jagged cliffs on either side seemed to grow taller. If she could but reach the other side...
And then there, in the distance, she saw it against the rock face ahead. The shadow of her undoing cast in front of her, lit dimly by the glow of the forges around the bend: a host of orcs pouring in from the southern exit, that which had been her only hope for salvation. Surrounded by naught but rock and death, she readied herself for the impending onslaught. They would come, but she would not fall alone.
Like a wave, they hit. A frenzy of undulating voices, cracked and shrill. The first orc skewered itself on her blade, which she flicked free to open the second's belly as it failed to dart around her. It was only after the third fell to its hands and knees and desperately crawled whence she came did she realize that not only had her pursuers behind never reached her, but that she was being passed by at the head.
Image credited to ThreshTheSky at DeviantArt.
Annuviel looked south as what few orcs remained fled past, leaving her standing in their wake to face the wrath they sought to escape.
The silence hung for a second that dragged on into a moment, and then she heard it again. The voice, now roaring above the broiling noise around her.
"ETYANION, VELERIANDE!"
