Lotr -

The sound ripped through the fog, bold and bright and utterly, magnificently defiant. Behind him, a hundred tired men lifted their spears. Before him, the hooded shape on the far shore turned its head slowly, as though noticing a fly that had chosen to sting a giant.

"Madril," Boromir said quietly, "do you believe in a darkness that thinks?"

The river moved in silence, darker than the space between stars. Boromir, eldest son of the White Tower, leaned upon his sword and watched the water slide past the piers of Osgiliath. Behind him, the great city groaned under the weight of shadow; before him, the east bank lay clenched in the fist of night.

"Let them come," he said. "There are still brave men in this broken land."

Above them, the stars winked out one by one, as if snuffed by a cold and patient finger.

And the Anduin ran black.

"I have seen it," Boromir replied. His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. The blade, forged in Gondor’s brighter years, still held an edge that could part silk and orc-flesh alike. But edges mattered little against what he felt pressing against the veil of the world.

The night answered with a thousand pairs of eyes.

"And yet," Boromir turned from the river, and his face was the face of a man who has glimpsed a crack in the world, "something hunts us that does not hunger for meat or gold. It hungers for the sound of a horn that does not answer. For the name of a king that no one sings anymore."

And the last watch began.

He had stood here for three days without sleeping. Not from courage alone, but from a growing dread that tasted like copper on his tongue.

From the east, a single long note echoed across the water. Not a horn. Something older. Something that remembered the light before the first sunrise.

The younger man hesitated. "I believe in orcs, and in the treachery of Haradrim. I believe in walls and spear-points."

Then the shape laughed. Softly. Once.