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.
"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."
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.
"You should rest, Captain," said a voice from the stair. Madril, his second, climbed up with a torch that fought a losing battle against the fog. "The men speak of a figure on the far shore. A hooded shape that does not move."
"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.
And the Anduin ran black.