⪼ @bjcrke // cont.
Faramir’s hand lingered upon the Tínu’s arm – cold from rain and travel – and his voice, though hushed, trembled not with fear, but with fervour.
He released his grip and turned, descending.
Carved deep into the bones of the city, the stairway they took was narrow and winding. It was this vein that bore them down into the underchambers, where the stones sweated like penitents, old with the memory of fire and siege and the cries of dying kings.
The garrison was still, save for the faint echo of distant forging, the beat of hammer on steel a pulse in the cold body of the city. Torches flickered along the corridor – yellow as fevered eyes – and every shadow cast upon the wall stood tall and monstrous. Faramir moved among them like a man threading a dream. His footfall was hushed, sure and solemn, as though he walked not upon stone, but on the backs of the dead who had raised the city upon their shoulders.
Tínu’s silence endured, a silence rich with inquiry. It compelled Faramir to speak.
“The youth of Gondor,” he said at last. “Are born in shadow and weaned upon the cry of the horn. They are not green – they are grey. Weathered. Burnished by loss.” He spoke as one who wished it was within his power to grant a kinder fate. “I do not dress them in armour to gild them in their final hour, nor give them swords to feed to Orodruin. They are ready. The flame burns in them still, because it must.”
They passed beneath a buckled archway, the scent of mildew and ash clinging to their cloaks. Outside, above, the White Tower pierced the shrouded heavens, and the banners snapped in the wind. Here, in the guts of the city, it was all memory and marrow and the ache of inheritance.
Faramir halted before the great doors of the lower armoury. The hinges groaned as they opened, and within lay row upon row of arms – some old, crusted with age, others sharp and gleaming, eager for their first taste of blood. The relics of slaughter past, the tools of sacrifice yet to come.
He looked over his shoulder, gazed at the one who had come so far, who had crossed the wold and the river and the ruins of Osgiliath to stand now in the underbelly of Minas Tirith. In that moment, something softening – something not of strategy, nor stewardship – touched Faramir’s gaze.
“Do I speak unkindly? Or too passionately, perhaps?” he asked, quieter now. The air between them was thick with the iron tang of coming war. “These men are my blood, my bone. There is not one here I do not trust with my life. Not one I would not die for.”
