The stench was nauseating.
Haldir, newly ranked Marchwarden of Lothlorien, stared at the corpse before him.
The dead elf, Haldir's predecessor, Lord Celeborn's brother, had been butchered. It wasn't a spread-about fact that the late General was any relation to Lorien's Lord. Most who had known this had already gone oversees, and at the time of Celeborn and Galadriel's crowning in the woods they had deemed it wise to keep the kinship a secret as close as their hearts.
Haldir only knew of this because Galathil was his father. Was his father.
The general was now gone, his fea fled to Mandos with the act that had claimed his house. The elf's ageless face was frozen in a look of pained terror, his taught stomach a gaping maw of pierced organs and oozing blood. His arms had been ripped off. His legs were twisted. His heart was ripped from his broken chest; it protruded from his mouth, open in a scream that hadn't ended. And his eyes, once silver, bright, laughing: they had been peeled.
But Haldir wasn't here to roil in his anger, to cling to his father's bloodied cloak and scream curses at the fates who had allowed this slaughter. Nor to grieve, to show weakness before the soldiers, older than he, who were now his to lead.
He was only here to affirm what everyone wanted to deny.
"This was no orc," Haldir said, his voice tight, pained, despite his best efforts to smother the emotion that was instead smothering him. His next words were laced with fury, the harbingers of what must be death:
"This was kinslaying."
A/N: R&R, and I might go somwhere with this.