Dim amber light filtered through the high arched windows, glancing off the white-veined stone of his chambers. Silence lay upon the place, broken only by the restless whisper of parchment turned beneath weary fingers.
Alone, Faramir sat beneath the ribbed ceiling. That brave warden of Gondor stroked the ancient spine of a Númenórean codex, though he was too exhausted to retain what he read. A storm of thought, half-formed and sorrow-cloaked, swelled behind his eyes – those dreams again, silver-veiled and shadow-stitched, of fire devouring the White Tree, his father’s voice echoing down tomb-lined halls, a woman’s shadow watching through time.
Yet it was not dreams alone that plagued him, for there was the horror and hardship of his last campaign along the borders. Mordor, ever-creeping, seeping its filth into the green a living world. Pits in groves and glades, sunken earth turned grave over the bodies of rangers slain and left far from home.
A breath. Faint and warm as summer’s sigh through river-reeds, it brushed his temple and pulled him from the depths of reverie. After it, the lightest pressure, the sacred solemnity of a kiss laid upon his brow.
The blood in Faramir’s veins quickened, though his body stilled. His heart beat thunderously for a moment, then quieted, as though cradled in something vast and ancient. Thoughts fled him like startled deer. What lingered was a comforting and ceremonial stillness, the kind felt beneath the vaulted sky of the Pelennor at dusk, when the meadow birds had ceased their song.
Something within him softened. That painful thing calcified behind his ribs, wrought by his father’s cold regard, by Boromir’s fading laughter, by the long, slow suffering of the city. It did not break but it yielded, thawing by fragile degrees.
Anoriel stood over him – fair motherland made flesh – a vision of bounty, memory, mournful wisdom.
“You endure,” he whispered, his gaze turned upward, to the face he was grateful to know. “As you ever have. Even now, as the days grow darker… we will defend you to the last.”
