Prologue
Dagor Dagorath
Battle is an all consuming, confusing thing. Especially this battle. A battle of heroes, a battle of the dead.
Am I one of them?
I do not remember how I got here. I know who I am, I know those around me, but I have no idea where I have been, or how long I have been missing.
I just am.
War is familiar, a well worn path I have often trod and that familiarity comforts me in the midst of my bemusement. For all it's horror, fighting against the dark, fighting for my life, is something I know.
The sights are gruesome, the dust swirls, the blood flows, the screams of the dying flay my mind and my lungs burn.
And suddenly . . . There he is.
He is gold. A flash of light across the battlefield as his head turns sending the silken mass of his hair flying. A beacon. Can it be him?
And he sees me. We are locked—the two of us—in the midst of chaos, the midst of death, across the bodies of the enemy and our loved ones, in a gaze that says a thousand words with none at all.
"You are here," he whispers in my mind.
"Father!"
The scream of my son beside me shatters the moment into shards of glass and I turn to see desperation in his eyes, his sword slicing through an enemy who sought to end me even as I spin on my feet.
"What are you doing?" He gasps through ragged breaths. "Do you want to die? There is no time to stargaze on a battlefield!"
My son who is not my son, not the one I used to know. He looks like him, but he speaks like a King, like one long seasoned, much experienced, not the novice I left behind.
I do not answer. I turn back towards the one with the golden light as the battle surges around me. But that light is gone. He is gone.
"I saw him!" I tell my son. "He was there." But as he follows my gaze I know he sees nothing and his eyes tell me he does not believe me.
"You wish it so much you imagine it." He frowns. He lectures me as if he is the father and it is dislocating. "Since I do not wish to lose you so soon after rediscovering you, I suggest you focus!"
He has endured long years without me—my son, even though to me it is but a moment in time since I last saw him.
"Eldarion . . ." I reach out to touch but he is gone. Releasing his weapon from the creature at our feet, charging back into the fray, my son who is a stranger.
And when I look back . . . across the bodies and blood, across the death, across the bitter landscape, Legolas is gone also.
And I wonder . . Is Eldarion right?
Was he never there?
