The air is thick with iron and stormlight. Snow drifts across the valley in slow, spiraling currents, carrying the stench of blood and fire. From the ridge, I watch the battle unfold — two hosts woven into one desperate tide.

Legolas rides below, bow in hand, his movement precise as breath. Every arrow he looses finds its mark — calm amid ruin, as his mother was. Yet beside him fights another — a young warrior I do not know.

He moves differently: faster, wilder, as though the world itself burns around him. Two blades flash in his hands like twin streams of starlight, cutting through the ranks of orcs that swarm the front. Each swing bears grace and fury both, the kind of balance one does not teach but inherits.

Then I see it — the red hair, bright as living flame beneath the grey sky. For a moment I cannot move. The sight stirs something I thought long buried. That color should not exist on this field, not here, not now — not unless the world remembers what I have tried to forget.

He turns briefly, calling to the archers to cover his flank. His voice carries across the snow, steady, commanding, and for an instant the sound pierces the years between then and now. The same steadiness. The same defiance. The same eyes that once met mine beneath the moonlit boughs of Taur Im Duinath.

It cannot be coincidence.

I know nothing of his name or his blood. Yet when his blades cross with Legolas’s arrows in perfect rhythm — light and fire, leaf and flame — something ancient stirs beneath my ribs. Memory, perhaps. Or regret given form.

And then I see her.

Far beyond the haze, astride a white doe streaked with blood and frost. Serefin Peacebringer. Her standard rises in the wind, silver and green — the crescent of the Moonwell gleaming faintly against the storm.

My reins tighten. Faerondil stamps, his breath misting in the cold.

After centuries of silence, the forest has seen fit to place our sons side by side.

And though I cannot yet name the boy, I know the truth that trembles just beyond reach: the river between our realms has begun to stir again.