We came upon the bodies at midday.
They lay in broken shapes beneath the trees, black and unnatural. Orcs, perhaps fifty, a small war band. We went forward slowly, with caution, arrows nocked, and found that they were all dead. With them were the bodies of two Elves, dressed in the insignia of Lord Elrond's household, their swords sheathed. They were obviously taken by surprise. It is unclear how.
The grass was slick with blood, mangled so that we could get nothing from it but what we could already see. But the wounds inflicted upon the orcs spoke of more: a honed edge, small, whetted so sharp that I could almost hear it singing in flight as I looked on its work; unerring intent, each orc laid low with a single, killing stroke; and a grace of violence in the places and positions the bodies fell, so close together in time and space that the wielder of the blade would have had to have been killing them one after another, like beats of the heart, in close combat.
"The Peredhil?" someone whispered, and we looked at each other wonderingly. It fit - after many days of travel, we were very close to the valley where the Half-Elven and his children dwelt. I had heard tales of the battle prowess of the sons of Elrond, but this was beyond mere skill. If this was their work, then the tales I had heard had not done them justice.
But I doubted it, for one small, strange fact: from the way the orcs had stood, had died, had fallen, from the injuries done and the similarities in the doing of them, the logical conclusion was that this was the labor of one man, and one man only. But what man, Eldar or Edain, could fight like this?
I saw that my companions had seen this as well as I, and perhaps we would have spoken of it, had we not heard it then. A cry, like a wolf's, from the west, where the bodies led.
We followed it.
The corpses of orcs grew fewer and fewer, and at the same time larger, crueler in aspect, until I grew certain that these were the chieftains of the war band. The distance between each body became farther and farther, as if they had been running after someone who led them a merry chase, spreading them out in order to cut them down one at a time. Their wounds, as we went, grew coarser, the timing off by seconds, as if the wielder of the blade had become hurried, rushing his strikes. And then we began to see blood, bright red blood that spotted the black slime of the orcs. There was more of it as we went, so much that we were aghast that anyone could bleed so much and still stand much less fight, but so tainted with orcish blood had it become that we could not tell its origin.
We discovered the knife still stuck in the throat of the last orc, twitching in its death rattle, which had died face down choking on its own still-warm blood. I pulled it free in a black flood, found that it was nothing more than an ordinary hunting knife, though of Elven make. The blade was small, with a honed edge, and I could almost hear it sing.
"It cannot be," I heard whispered, and I looked up.
I saw her.