I glance over at my brothers from the shadows of my hood. The rain rolls off the Elven-woven material; my horse snorts and shifts underneath me. They are all gazing down at the forest that lies below this wind-washed hill. None of them looks like he wants to be here.
Maedhros's face is transformed, but not marred, not really, by the fleshy spiderweb of scars spreading over the right side of his face, extinguishing the light of sight in that eye. Not many others realize that he has the use of only one eye; he has learned to disguise it well, not like the shiny knotted wrist stump layered under cloth and vambrace. His face shifts ever so slightly with the faint lines of pain narrowing his eyes and running their length down his cheeks. Ever since his rescue from the desolate crags of Thangorodrim, the rain has caused him great discomfort, creeping chills in the heart of his bones. His hair spills out from his hood, rain-darkened red laced with auburn lights. He will not bind it back, not even for battle; not after he waited so long for it to grow back. His horse is taller than the rest of ours' – save Caranthir's – and even from my position I can see the muscles of his long legs tighten against its sides, knowing that battle is a gallop away.
Maglor's long harper's fingers shift in their grip on the slender shaft of his spear. His eyes are down, and part of me wonders if the lines of water trailing down his face are tears of his own and not of the sky. They match the single earring dangling from his left ear, a tiny chain and tear-glass jewel, which he has forgotten to take off. It and its mate were given to him long ago by his captain, a token of gratitude for a rescued life. That captain is dead now, he and all of my brother's riders, burnt alive in the Dagor Bragollach. It was those flames that truly brought the song out in him, and I understand that for him speech is but a rough shadow of the true language of harp and voice and wild wind; thus when he speaks it is as though he is speaking to the lilt of sorrowful music in his heart. He is the deadliest of us all in the heat of battle; he keeps his heart cold and saves his rage and sorrow for the aftermath while the rest of us are caught up in the fire of blood and steel. But I fear this time he will break.
Celegorm, the shortest of us all, draws himself up in his saddle, the thick braid of his hair, the same brilliant silver of our grandmother's, draped over one shoulder. Huge, white-lashed eyes, black as rainbow-fired obsidian, tremble with the deed we are about to do. For all the overwhelming beauty of his face, my eyes are instantly drawn to the staggering ridge of a scar starting at the corner of his mouth and lurching up the side of his face to his hairline, the unfading reminder of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. He has been so quiet since the wound healed, no longer the wild, carefree brother who sets orc armies scattering. Now he fires his arrows into their midst, cool and wooden-faced, as though he hopes a shaft of their own will find him.
The high-crested head of Caranthir's massive war stallion arches above ours, equaling Maedhros' steed in height, its hooves lost in a torrent of feathering, its coat as glossy, fiery black as its rider's loosely curling hair. The hue of Caranthir's dusky skin softens the shadows about his eyes and mouth, but every muscle in his face trembles with almost imperceptible twitches, flickers of motion. The only sounds on this battle-tense hill make their origin with him; for as long as I can remember Caranthir has growled, like a vindictive wolf, just before he goes into battle, the muscles of his neck pulsing, throbbing, the deep feral sound grating through his clenched teeth, lips parted ever so slightly. I don't think he has ever been aware of it, no more than any of us would be aware of the quickening of our blood and heartbeats.
Curufin is slighter than Celegorm, however taller, but the coiled muscles of his smith's arms register a sort of wary relaxation of his body and mind. Crystal-blue eyes waver, never still, lucid and restless, to be read like the sky; otherwise he never gives any indication of his moods. His hands twitch on the reins, begging to curl about the red leather-bound hilts of his twin swords, to spring from his mare's back and vanish like some capricious battle sprite into the mixed dust and motion of the fray. He is a shadow-fighter, clad in light, unadorned armor, seeking the hidden spots to drive his blades into and pull them out again, leaving enemies to fall stiff and bloody and never knowing what it was that killed them. He frightens me.
Amrod, my own twin, closest companion since birth; no one knows the secret differences between us, the slight darker shade of his hair, the dimple in my left cheek, the gap between his two front teeth. They called us smaller Russandols in Aman, everything Maedhros should have been and was not. I never thought we looked like him. He is pale, pale as dawn, while we are dark and sunspotted from our forays into the wilderness. Amrod avoids my eyes, looking at his wispy bangs rather than through them, and he looks very small under the shield on his back, bowed down under the weight of our father's star emblazoned on its surface: eight sword-sharp, voice-sharp points, each another dying, unlanced wound, riven through armor over bodies and hearts alike. One for each of us, each of us a curse.
For that is what we are. We are the accursed, the fatherless, the dispossessed. We are the things of legend and bound to legend's laws, to strike down a ruinous path with a red dawn behind us. We are the blight on the world and our souls, and we are the ones who will purge us.
But for now, we gaze through the rain at the world we are about to destroy, and each one of us is thinking, how he would like to lay down his weapons and return to that world. We sense it in each other, and do not dare speak it. We must choose between many darknesses, and in my mind we have chosen the darkest of all.
"It is time," Maedhros says. We draw our swords.