The city of Osgiliath slumbered beneath a blanket of river fog and cracked stone. The ruins whispered with ghosts, and the only signs of life were faint and flickering: a guard murmuring to another over a cookfire, the dull clang of a blade being sharpened, the rustle of wind through arrow slits. It was the kind of quiet that came before a scream.
Faramir walked the ruins like a shadow. His boots crunched gently over old bones and gravel, his cloak drawn tightly around his shoulders. He passed soldiers hunched behind barricades, rangers watching from windows like hawks. They all moved slowly, cautiously—like men walking inside a dream they could not wake from.
Madril met him near the broken dome of the old city hall, his face weathered by too many nights like this one.
"It's been quiet across the river," Faramir said.
"Too quiet," Madril replied. "The orcs are lying low. We've sent scouts upriver to Cair Andros. If they're coming from the north, we'll see it."
But Faramir wasn't looking north.
His eyes were on the black waters of the Anduin, wide and dark, like an open wound between the living and the dead. He didn't like the silence. It was too deep. Too perfect.
And far across the water, in the blind spot of Gondor's vigilance, evil stirred.
A flotilla of orc rafts slid down the current—hundreds of them. Black wood. Silent oars. No torches, no drums. Just the hiss of water and the faint breathing of beasts that should not have known silence. They moved with discipline that had not belonged to Mordor in an age. This was not a raid.
It was an invasion.
At the prow of the central raft stood Gothmog, his skin cratered with rot, his malformed face twisted into a sneer. His armor was fused with his flesh in places, and he leaned on a jagged cleaver as though it were a cane.
He looked ahead—at the ruined city and the flicker of torchlight along the distant walls.
"Quiet," he muttered.
The orcs obeyed, falling into a predatory silence. Like wolves approaching a herd of blind deer.
Back in the city, a soldier yawned as he climbed the lookout scaffolding. He reached the top, rubbed his eyes, and squinted out over the river.
His breath caught.
Dozens—no, hundreds—of dark shapes glided toward them.
He opened his mouth to shout.
"Kill him," Gothmog said, watching from the raft.
An orc loosed a black-fletched arrow. It pierced the Gondorian's throat. He toppled backward, landing hard among the others.
The men jolted upright. Faramir and Madril heard the fall and came running. Faramir knelt beside the corpse.
A Mordor arrow jutted from his neck.
"They're not coming from the north," Faramir said coldly. "To the river. NOW!"
Soldiers scattered into action. Horns rang. Boots thundered. Oil pots were lit. Arrows were distributed. Civilians who had not yet crossed the bridge were shoved toward the exits.
On the eastern shore, Gothmog's rafts surged forward, propelled by frantic rowing. The first boats slammed into the riverbank as the Gondorian lines formed.
"Draw swords," Gothmog hissed.
Orcs leapt from the boats, claws and steel flashing. Behind the first wave, more and more arrived—thousands upon thousands, funneling into the city like a flood through shattered gates.
"Hold!" a Gondorian captain shouted. "Hold them!"
The men fought bravely, but the river vomited forth monsters in endless waves. In moments, the outer line had been breached. The streets of Osgiliath turned to blood and fire.
Faramir ordered fallback positions—kill zones, spike traps, alleys primed to collapse. Flaming pitch was unleashed from rooftops. Orcs burned and screamed, but the wave did not stop. There was no end to them.
Above it all, from a black ridge behind the army, twelve towering shapes watched in silence.
The Nazgûl.
They did not join the battle.
They didn't need to.
They were here to witness the fall.
The eastern wards were gone.
Faramir watched from a collapsed balcony as the city's outer defenses were swallowed in flame and shadow. He could hear the screams now—too many to count. His men were dying. Some quickly. Some slowly. All of them bravely.
But the trap had only just begun to spring.
He turned to Madril beside him. The captain's face was streaked with ash and blood. "Signal the first collapse."
Madril nodded and raised a green flare. A ranger loosed the arrow.
It soared over the city and vanished behind a gutted watchtower.
A heartbeat later, a section of the street exploded in a shower of stone and flame. An entire alley—the one the orcs had just begun flooding through—gave way beneath them. A pit of sharpened beams and burning oil swallowed the first hundred.
Faramir didn't flinch.
"Signal the fire wards," he said.
All across the southern quarter, fire runners dashed through narrow alleys, hurling torches into oil-lined ruins. In moments, blocks of buildings were engulfed. The air turned thick and yellow with smoke. The screams now came from both sides.
"Evacuation line?" he asked.
"Still moving," Madril replied. "Slower now. We lost part of the bridge guard."
Faramir nodded. "Then we buy them time."
The defenders were pulling back street by street, bleeding the enemy for every inch. At each corner, barricades of carts, furniture, and shattered masonry forced the orcs into narrow kill lanes. Archers fired from rooftops. Rangers dropped oil flasks into the crowds. Swordsmen ambushed from doorways.
The orcs kept coming.
The fire illuminated their faces—snarling, burnt, some howling with arrows in their necks and spears through their bellies. But they didn't stop. They never stopped.
Faramir led the charge into the Needle Path.
It was the narrowest corridor left—barely wide enough for two men shoulder to shoulder. The orcs piled in, thinking they had found an opening. Faramir met them head-on, sword in hand, shield tight against his arm. His blade flashed, cutting low, cutting fast. Madril fought beside him, as did two dozen elite spearmen.
The alley became a blender of steel and blood.
An orc lunged with a scimitar—Faramir sidestepped and drove his sword into its throat. Another came, and he cut the legs out from under it before stamping its skull into the cobblestones.
A horn sounded.
A green one.
Faramir turned.
"Bridge complete," Madril said. "Civilians are across."
Faramir gave no order.
He didn't need to.
The runners knew what to do.
A final flaming arrow arced over the city and struck the oil drums at the bridge's center. The entire span exploded in fire and screaming timber. The orcs on it—maybe two hundred—fell into the black water, still burning as they sank.
Faramir looked east. Through the smoke, through the flames, he saw the shape of a massive troll pushing through the wreckage, dragging a siege ramp behind it. And beyond that, he saw the shadow of Gothmog—still grinning—waving more units forward.
And beyond even that, on the high ridge above the battlefield, he saw the Nazgûl.
Watching.
Silent.
Unmoved.
Faramir wiped blood from his face. His armor was dented. His shoulder bled. He could barely lift his sword without shaking. But he stood straight.
"Fall back to the old bell tower," he said. "We make our last stand there."
"You're not planning to leave with the others?" Madril asked.
Faramir didn't answer.
He was already walking into the fire.
The ground was slick with blood.
Faramir stood at the edge of the bell tower ruins, where the street had become a corridor of death. The barricades had held—for now. A narrow avenue, funneled between half-collapsed buildings, was clogged with blackened corpses and shattered armor. The fires burned high, casting flickering light across the carnage. Smoke clung to the air like a shroud. The men coughed. Some vomited. Most just waited. Silent. Tight-gripped. Resigned.
And from the eastern alleys, the drums returned.
Low. Slow. Building.
The Orcs came again.
Not in ranks. Not in formation. Just in masses.
They screamed as they ran—screams of hunger, pain, madness. Starved to the point of delirium, many hadn't eaten in days. Their flesh hung loose and pale on their bones. Their eyes were sunken, wild. Some had already begun to gnaw the fallen, tearing bites from the dead before charging again, their faces wet with blood.
Behind them came the next wave. Thousands more. Pushed by the lash. Driven forward not by command, but by need.
They were no longer soldiers.
They were animals.
The Gondorian line braced. Shields locked. Spears out.
And the tide broke.
The Orcs hit the wall of steel with such force that the earth seemed to groan beneath them. Bodies smashed into the shields, teeth gnashing, claws scraping. The front ranks died instantly—cut down by rangers lunging from behind the spear wall, or crushed between comrades too frenzied to stop. But they kept coming. Climbing over each other. Screaming. Biting. Slashing.
Faramir thrust his blade into a howling orc's face and kicked it back into the crush. Another replaced it instantly, its shoulder already mangled by the press behind it. One ranger went down beneath a wave of claws—his screams didn't last long.
"Hold the line!" Madril bellowed, blood splattered across his face. "Push them back!"
The men of Gondor shouted, drove forward in unison—and the Orc line cracked for a moment.
Only for a moment.
More came.
Thousands more.
They stepped over the bodies of their own. Climbed over them. Used the piles of corpses as cover. Some even bit chunks out of the dead to fuel themselves for the next charge. They laughed through broken teeth. Screamed through torn throats.
And then the sky changed.
A whistling, hissing sound filled the air. Faramir looked up—so did Madril.
The moon vanished.
Arrows. Tens of thousands of them.
The orcs didn't aim. They just fired.
The night sky became black with death. Shafts rained like a storm, slamming into stone, wood, flesh. Some hit their own. Dozens of Orcs dropped, twitching with arrows sticking from their backs and faces.
Gondorian shields came up just in time. Wood splintered. A dozen men screamed. One soldier near Faramir tried to run and was pinned to the wall by five shafts, his mouth open in shock as blood bubbled out.
"Return fire!" Faramir shouted.
The rangers answered. From rooftops, towers, hidden perches, they unleashed hell. Their arrows were fewer, but they found their mark. Dozens of Orcs dropped every second. Some began crawling on all fours, using the dead as shields. Others simply screamed and kept running.
The ground became uneven. Not from stone—but from the bodies.
Faramir could barely move without tripping over limbs. The streets were stacked waist-deep in corpses, tangled and twitching. Some still lived. One orc dragged itself with one arm, the other torn off. It was trying to eat a foot that no longer belonged to it.
"Dear gods," Madril muttered.
The orcs didn't stop.
They climbed. They piled up the dead and charged from atop the mound like a living siege tower.
A troll burst through the alley behind them, stomping down the path of corpses, using its massive hammer to smash the way forward. Gondorians were flung into the air like dolls. Faramir signaled—two fire barrels were dropped from a rooftop.
The troll caught fire.
It kept coming.
It tore through the line—until six spears skewered its gut. It screamed, collapsed, and was immediately swarmed by starving Orcs who began to eat it alive, even as it flailed.
More Orcs climbed over the twitching troll, using its body as a rampart.
Faramir pulled his sword from the chest of a howling beast and shouted, "Fall back to the second barricade! Set the first on fire!"
A horn sounded. The men began to move. Wounded were dragged. Oil was poured.
The first barricade burned.
And still, the Orcs came. Burning. Screaming. Devouring their own dead.
Faramir knew it wouldn't end until every last man had fallen or every last beast had been drowned in blood.
There was no strategy left.
Only attrition.
Only fire. Steel. Bone. And pain.
The retreat began as ordered, but it quickly became a slaughter.
Gondorian horns wailed across the burning ruins of Osgiliath—short, sharp notes that signaled the fallback to the second line. Faramir and Madril led from the front, rallying scattered rangers and city guard alike. They moved in tight formations through the winding alleys and over corpse-littered barricades, covering the wounded, dragging the dying, shouting orders hoarse from smoke and blood.
"Pull back! Form up at the Broken Fountain! Leave the dead—move!"
Men obeyed with grim precision. The defenses weren't breaking. They were collapsing, suffocated under the sheer volume of flesh being thrown at them. The Orcs came in waves, sometimes five deep, trampling their own just to reach Gondorian steel. The kill lanes had become rivers of meat, and the fire traps had been spent. All that remained now was space—and that, too, was vanishing.
Then came the sound.
It wasn't horns.
It wasn't drums.
It was the sky screaming.
A shriek tore across the heavens, high and unnatural, loud enough to make men clutch their helmets and fall to their knees. Even the Orcs paused, confused, growling, sniffing the air like beasts about to be fed.
Faramir looked up—and his breath caught in his throat.
From the clouds above, twelve black shapes descended like comets. They didn't glide. They fell—each mounted on a massive winged beast of nightmare, their shapes wreathed in armor and flame. The air bent around them. The clouds churned.
And then they hit.
One after another, the Nazgûl slammed into Osgiliath's upper district like meteors.
The shockwaves shattered buildings. Stone erupted. Walls collapsed. Men were flung into the air like broken dolls. Screams rang out across every corner of the city.
The closest impact sent three entire squads of Gondorian defenders flying. Where they landed, there was no time to scream. A Nazgûl stepped from the crater—over two meters tall, black armor hissing with residual heat, runes pulsing with red light. A curved greatsword dragged behind him, gouging the stone with every step.
One soldier tried to rise.
The Nazgûl impaled him with one fluid motion, lifting him into the air like a kebab and hurling his body through a stone arch.
Another knight charged from the side—sword raised, shouting defiance.
The Nazgûl didn't even parry. He backhanded the man so hard his spine shattered audibly, and he collapsed in a twitching heap.
Then the others moved in unison.
Twelve of them. Spreading like a black tide through the city ruins. Their weapons were not just steel—they drained light. Their presence caused torches to gutter, fires to die. Men's blades rusted in their hands. Their very will began to break.
The Orcs howled with glee and surged forward, emboldened by the arrival of their generals.
Faramir saw it all from a balcony overlooking the market square.
He had expected orc reinforcements.
He had not expected gods.
The Nazgûl weren't gliding over the battlefield like in the stories.
They were here.
Walking.
Killing.
Leading.
He didn't hesitate.
"MADRIL! SIGNAL THE RETREAT! ALL UNITS FALL BACK TO THE CITY! NOW!"
Madril hesitated for only a moment, then blew a horn so hard the veins stood out in his neck. It was the emergency call—three short blasts, then one long.
From every corner of the city, men began to flee.
Civilians who had been hiding emerged, eyes wide with terror, scrambling to follow the soldiers. Some tripped on the corpses. Others ran barefoot over burning debris.
The Orcs gave chase.
The Nazgûl ignored them.
They walked toward the withdrawing forces—not rushing, not shouting. They strode, like judges in a court they already owned. One stepped onto the main avenue, raised his hand—and unleashed a pulse of energy so powerful it vaporized the barricades ahead. Three men were turned to ash where they stood.
Another leapt from a second-story ruin and landed with a crash that flattened four Gondorians beneath his boots.
The retreat was no longer organized.
It was a stampede.
Faramir turned and ran with them—not because he lacked courage, but because he knew the truth:
This wasn't a battle anymore.
It was survival.
But luckily the Nazgûl did not follow.
They stood atop the shattered ramparts of eastern Osgiliath like statues cut from shadow, their armor slick with blood and ash, their burning eyes scanning the field. They made no sound. They didn't need to. The city had fallen. Their work was done.
Instead, one raised a hand—clawed, armored, etched with runes that pulsed with a dull red glow—and pointed west, toward the fields leading to Minas Tirith.
The command was wordless. But it was understood.
From the alleyways and smoking corridors of the city, they came. Not the disciplined orc troops. Not the elite Uruk regiments.
No—this was the rabble.
Goblins, small and hunched, their eyes fevered and bloodshot from hunger, poured from the cracks of the ruins like rats from a burning ship. Their mouths foamed. Some carried clubs. Some carried bones. Some carried nothing but sharpened rocks and teeth.
Starved Orcs followed—those deemed too sickly, too unstable, too insane to be trusted with the front line. They had been penned up, held back from the main assault like feral dogs, fed nothing but fear and rage for weeks.
Now they were let loose.
What poured across the fields toward the retreating Gondorians was not an army.
It was a plague of meat-hungry nightmares.
They didn't run with discipline. They ran on all fours, screeching, leaping, clawing at the ground. Some bit each other mid-sprint. Others gnawed on still-warm corpses they found discarded in the rubble, dragging limbs along with them like trophies.
And they were fast.
The Gondorians had barely cleared the ruins when the howls began. Faramir looked over his shoulder once—and that was enough. He saw them cresting the rise behind the ruins, spilling over the debris like a wave of black insects.
The soldiers behind him saw it too.
And they broke.
Discipline vanished. Formations dissolved. The retreat turned into a panicked flight across the Pelennor Fields, as men, women, and children ran with everything they had, pursued by the hungriest army ever vomited from Mordor.
The sky was still dark with smoke, and the fields were muddy, slick with blood from skirmishes days prior. Men slipped. Horses reared. Screams echoed through the mist. Rangers tried to cover the rear, loosing arrows from horseback—but they were too few.
The goblins were too many.
Then came the screams—not from the front—but from above.
The first catapult stones had been spotted.
Massive chunks of black rock, carved with jagged, cruel symbols, began to sail through the dawn air from Osgiliath. The Nazgûl had signaled the siege engines.
And the engines answered.
The first boulder slammed into a patch of retreating cavalry, turning horse and man into meat paste. Another struck a makeshift wagon filled with children and elders, detonating it into a geyser of gore and broken wood.
There was no warning. No mercy. No logic.
The goal was not to kill strategically.
It was to terrify. To wound. To break them utterly before the gates.
Faramir screamed for order. For the men to hold formation, to cover the civilians, to run faster—but even he could see it: they weren't going to make it.
Not all of them.
Maybe not even most.
Behind them, the Nazgûl remained still, unmoving on the ruins of the city.
And the field between Osgiliath and Minas Tirith became a slaughterhouse runway, as Mordor's waste was hurled westward—not to conquer.
But to feed.
The field was chaos.
Mud churned under a thousand fleeing boots. Blood mixed with ash. Faramir ran until his lungs felt like fire, shouting to those still standing, dragging the wounded, hurling orders that no one heard. Behind them, the horde came—a screaming wall of gnashing teeth, rotted flesh, and sharpened bones. The weakest of Mordor, but no less terrifying.
And then—
A horn.
One blast. Low. Long. Completely out of place.
Faramir's eyes snapped westward.
The gates of Minas Tirith were opening.
And from them came madness.
An army poured forth—not gleaming knights or trained men-at-arms, but peasants. Thousands of them. Farmers with rusted scythes. Bakers in aprons wielding rolling pins. Shepherds with sharpened crooks. Blacksmiths, brewers, thatchers, and bootlickers, all howling like lunatics, eager for death, glory, or both.
They came down the slope like an avalanche of absurdity.
The city had emptied itself of every fool and fanatic, every old soldier with something to prove and every stable boy with a stick to swing. Women with braids and breastplates of hammered tin. Grandmothers with pitchforks and wine jugs slung on belts. One man wore nothing but a bucket and a loincloth, swinging a rake in one hand and a bottle in the other.
At their head, a shirtless tanner with one eye screamed, "TO ME! TO PAIN! TO THE FIELDS!"
And they screamed with him.
Faramir blinked. "What in the name of Eru..."
Madril stumbled up beside him, blood down his face. "Reinforcements?"
"No," Faramir said. "Something worse."
The peasants collided with the advancing goblin tide in a cataclysm of limbs and shrieking.
There was no strategy. No formation. It was like watching two plagues meet in the middle of a dying world.
The goblins, ravenous and shrieking, hurled themselves at the new meat. But the Gondorian peasants wanted this. They weren't fighting out of fear. They were fighting for the thrill, for the story, for the vague idea that dying on a battlefield meant something.
An old washerwoman shattered a goblin's skull with a frying pan and cackled as the blood sprayed her teeth. A teenage boy with no armor tackled a troll's leg and stabbed it repeatedly with a dining fork.
The goblins bit and tore. The peasants punched and screamed. The dead piled up fast.
In the middle of it all, someone had started singing. Badly. Off-key. Loud.
And more joined in.
It was the most terrible war song ever heard.
"♬ TOOOO THE MUD! TOOO THE FIRE! TOOOO THE MOOOOON AND MAAAAARROW—♬"
A goblin tried to run. Three peasants tackled it and beat it to death with shoes.
Faramir stood at the edge of it all, stunned. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard Madril say:
"I think... we might win this."
"No," Faramir muttered. "But we'll die less alone."
And the field, for one insane hour, belonged to the mad and the starving—as two armies with no discipline, no honor, and no plan tore each other apart in a storm of iron, bone, and laughter.
The screams on the field were already deafening when a new sound rose above them—clear, thunderous, and full of demented conviction.
A white horse galloped from the gates of Minas Tirith, its rider clad in swirling robes of smoke-stained silk and silver. His staff blazed with light, though it did not strike. His sword was sheathed, untouched. His beard fluttered with wind and theatrical gravitas.
Gandalf.
But not the quiet, contemplative wizard of legend. No—this was God-King Gandalf, the self-made prophet of pipeweed and blood, drunk on his own cowardice and the power of peasant worship.
He stood tall in the saddle, eyes wild, chest bare beneath an open robe that revealed a ripped, godlike physique—pecs that glistened with olive oil and delusion. His voice boomed across the fields with unnatural force, echoing through the valley like a sermon sent by the Valar themselves.
"RISE, MY CHILDREN! RIIIIISE FOR THE WHITE CITY! FOR GLORY! FOR GRAIN SUBSIDIES AND POSTMORTEM TAX EXEMPTIONS!"
Peasants who were already howling with madness now howled louder. They surged forward, screaming praises, swinging pans and hammers and spiked bedposts with renewed vigor.
Gandalf pointed his staff like a war trumpet.
"YOU! MILKMAID! SLAY THAT GOBLIN IN THE NAME OF DAIRY RIGHTS! YOU! BARREL BOY! RIP AND TEAR FOR THE HONOR OF THE SHIRE!"
And then—a new thunder.
From the hills behind the city, the ground began to rumble. Hundreds of tiny hooves beat the dirt, and down the slope came a new tide:
One hundred Hobbit Pony Knights.
They rode shaggy, armored ponies outfitted with bark-plated barding. Their lances were broomsticks tipped with steel. Their shields bore wheat sigils and crudely drawn White Trees. They were led by a lone figure in a too-large helmet that bounced with every trot.
Pippin.
The Fool. The Bard. The Suicide Squire of Gondor.
He raised his tiny sword with all the dignity of a drunken pageant queen.
"FOR THE SHIRE! FOR GANDALF! FOR BREAKFAST!"
The Hobbit Knights screamed as one.
"BREAKFAAAAASSST!"
They smashed into the flank of the goblin horde like a divine prank. Ponies kicked, hobbits stabbed, and the sheer unexpected violence of the charge broke the momentum of the entire left wing.
A goblin shrieked as a hobbit polearm rammed through its throat. Another tried to run and was immediately trampled by three ponies and a goat-rider named Ted.
Faramir watched, slack-jawed.
He stood in the center of the madness—peasant hordes battling orc filth, hobbits slashing through goblins like wheat, fire and arrows and screams rising into a storm—and now Gandalf was riding through it all like a preacher at the end of the world, swinging his staff not to strike but to point, to command, to inspire.
"WITNESS THE MIGHT OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE!" he bellowed. "SEE HOW EVEN THE SMALLEST CAN BREAK THE DARKNESS—IF PROPERLY MOTIVATED BY AGGRESSIVE ECONOMIC INCENTIVES!"
Faramir exhaled hard, bloodied and exhausted.
Madril stumbled up beside him, gripping a ruined spear.
"This is... insanity," he said.
Faramir nodded. "Yes. But it's our insanity."
And then he raised his sword.
"GONDOR! FORWARD! RALLY WITH THE HOBBITS!"
The battered remnants of the city guard joined the charge, reforming behind the peasant front and hobbit knights. With screams and curses, they surged back into the fray.
And the field—once a corridor of retreat—became a bloody, thunderous stand. A wall of pitchforks, broom-spears, and hobbit lances met the flood of orc and goblin hunger pouring from Osgiliath.
Above it all, Gandalf shouted with divine passion:
"WE WILL DINE TONIGHT ON DARKNESS—AND PIP'S BRINGING PIES!"
The Age of Heroes was dead.
But the Age of Glorious Madness had begun.