Image credited to Magali Villeneuve.
She knew of few who possessed such melancholic pride, and only one with the ferocity to match the fervency as what stood before her now.
"Rinthorad," she breathed. A haze of despair lifted as she basked in the relief that washed over her, so much so that she hadn't noticed the weight of it until it was gone. He stood ahead, his back turned to her, towering with an austere assertiveness that could only be lent by one of the Gódhellim. At his feet lay scattered a mass of orcflesh, sundered by his hand.
"Your unexpected foray saved my life," Annuviel began as she tentatively approached, her gaze set, unblinking, beyond him and into the crawling waves of a black sea. The land moved in the distance, still teeming with what remnants of the Dark Lord's forces that squalled betwixt themselves. "I've come seeking two Men captured by a band of orcs."
He regarded her then, looking down and drawing her eyes to his. Their ancestry lay along the same ancient path, his hair as dark as hers and skin seeming almost iridescent behind its golden sheen. Only their eyes told them apart; hers, a tumultuous tale of storm and steel -- his, cerulean depths that spoke of old memory in ages bygone.
"The Men are fallen, Glingaerel. Gone and yet avenged." His voice was coarse, but fine in its melody of words spoken in the tongue of old. "Look upon vengeance." He swept an arm outward, toward the macabre display around them. Blood pooled in shallow recesses, or soaked into the starve-thirsted ground. Limbs lay severed, strewn from the greater mass of putrid decay concealed in part by a fallen black banner. In some ways, it filled her with a sense of unbridled satiation to bear witness to the death of an irredeemable evil. In other ways, she felt weary of beholding such death; orcish or otherwise.
"Avenged, but still gone," she lamented in return, her Quenya tinged with the younger dialect she favoured. She had not known their names, or even their faces, and she wasn't sure whether that enflamed her grief or quelled it.
"You are a long way from the comforting boughs of Galadriel's woods," he mused, slipping smoothly into a familiar, Sindarin diction for her ease.
"I think we are all far from our comforts here. Such is but the smallest cost of this war. A war that was won," she continued pointedly, gazing upon him again. "What keeps you here?"
"The war is won. Yet, while destroyed and banished...Sauron cannot die." As he spoke, Annuviel watched his attention glide across what was once feared to be the ruination of the world, now succumbing to ruin itself. "Do you not feel it? The taint on the very air? I know better than most, the only way to rid the world of dark is to burn it away in the light. Thus, I have come."
Image credited to Dropdeadcoheed at DeviantArt.
It was not unlike him, she knew, to hold a great responsibility unto himself and shoulder the woes of all -- however it threatened to break him. A memory of their last meeting drifted ageless through her mind, standing at the Bay of Belfalas while her heart began to wither away from a hopelessness marked by the Tragedy of Amroth, sunken at the feet of her beloved Edhellond. It was his own compassion that Rinthorad invoked, imploring her to pull herself from the brink of sorrow everlasting.
"You speak an unpleasant truth, but a truth nonetheless. The attack on Elessar's camp is enough to convince that this darkness will not sleep. Yet, you cannot mean to face it in its entirety alone?" There was concern in her voice, in the way her brow furrowed.
"Yrrch are but yrrch," he responded coolly. "I fear no lurking spectre of a defeated power."
"And as you once reminded me on the cliffs at the edge of Ennor, there are those that would surely feel your absence if you were to stay overlong in this place," spoke Annuviel.
>His gaze settled upon her again, but she looked away to the littered bodies of orcs and uruk and foul beasts of a terrible nature.
"Though," she continued, "I am glad that you were here. As will be the families of those that you avenged."
"The tally is far from even," he surmises, studying with her the corpses. "Are you willing to draw your sword beside your kin once more? The Man age is ushered, we cannot prop them any longer."
Annuviel considered him a moment, searching for some insight as to his intentions. There was naught she held for him but utter trust, and yet she worried for what he might be willing to sacrifice. The familiar heft of her father's blade sat comfortably at her side, a reminder of the promise which bore its namesake. Rinthorad's truth was not one she feared, or shied from, but the density of such a task seemed greater than she could fathom with her long years and memories of endless battles. The thought of a time ending.
Image credited to Paul Lasaine.
She realized that it did not matter.
Drawing her sword with a glistening song, its blade imbrued still from her struggles, she stepped up to stand before him. "I will fight with you."
Rinthorad looked beyond her, down the blood-sodden trail he'd walked, and pointed at the smouldering gate in the distance.
"Then we must hasten away. Your Lady of the Golden Woods would wish to speak with you, before our campaign begins in earnest."
