Arthur had learned to recognize when a night refused to end.
Chapter 14 – Dawn Breach
The eastern sky held its grey promise, but the Rammas still shuddered under assault.
A runner reached Arthur's sector just as his men caught breath between waves, the man's face smeared with soot and blood. "North breach," he panted. "Giant through the gatehouse rubble. Torin's line buckling. Command wants anyone who can shift."
Arthur stood, wiping sweat from his eyes. "Eoric, six men. The ones still moving clean. We ride."
They mounted amid the ditch's churned mud, George surging under Arthur with familiar power. The small column galloped along the inner base of the wall, torchlight licking over broken stone piled like rough graves, wounded dragged by cloaks through farm lanes, smoking sheds breathing acrid haze, gaps in the Rammas where orcs poured like floodwater.
The air thickened with roars—deep, grinding bellows that vibrated in bone. Arthur leaned low over George's neck, reins firm. "Faster," he said.
They crested a low rise overlooking the crisis.
Three giants ravaged the northern line.
One troll, stone-skinned and hulking, tore at a barricade of wagons and rubble while ballista bolts from the wall punched into its flanks. Men swarmed it by dozens, spears snapping, bodies flung in red arcs—twenty, thirty lives thrown in just to slow it.
To the left, a swollen orc-chieftain in rusted plates crushed a shield wall, staggering under concentrated volleys, but every time it lurched, more Gondor dead lay at its feet.
Closest, driving into the gap toward Arthur's approach, loomed the third: a troll-kin warped by malice, black-grey hide stretched over knotted muscle, claws raking men from ranks. It had shouldered through a weakened stretch of stone where Torin's remnants fought to reform. Each swing pulped shields; each step turned soldiers into ruin Arthur's hands would never touch.
He saw it claim familiar faces: a man from drills crushed against rock; another's aura, in Spirit Vision, flaring and vanishing mid-charge; a third hurled limp into the dark. More lights winked out in clusters, whole knots of men extinguished faster than his hands had ever moved over a table.
No.
The word carved through him, sharp as a scalpel, then split open into something larger.
Hold the line. Stop the bleeding. Patch what's left. That was enough—until this. This thing walks through every bandage before it's tied. There is no table for pulp. No suture for paste. Every stride it takes is a ward full of men he will never see breathing.
The thought he had pushed aside for night after night refused to move this time. If I keep standing behind them, waiting for bodies, I'm not healing. I'm sweeping the floor after the butcher. Healing isn't what comes after. It's what stops this from ever touching them.
The old reflex flared—do no harm—and met the sight of another man smashed under a claw, aura blowing out like a candle in a gale.
Then don't do harm to them. Do it to what's killing them. Cut out the disease, not the patient. Killing this thing is the cleanest surgery I'll ever perform.
The block inside him broke. It didn't shatter with noise. It simply wasn't there anymore.
Something in him aligned—bone, will, whatever lay under both—and Twilight Giant Pathway, Sequence 7: Weapon Master rose like a tide that had been waiting just below his skin. Anything in reach became a weapon the instant he chose it to be, mastered without thought: sword or spear-shaft, shield rim or fallen stone, his own body as precise as any forged blade. Divine Blood hardened into something more defined; strength, balance, speed all tightened into the exact measures needed. His spirituality surged and settled, Spirit Vision sliding into place beside movement without scraping or strain.
The giant's yellow eyes found their rise. It bellowed, shaking the ground, and charged with orcs streaming at its heels.
Arthur swung down from George, sword drawn, shield up. "Ring," he said. "Nothing gets past you."
Eoric nodded, men spreading into a tight circle behind him. George tossed his head once and stood, ears pinned forward.
The giant's claw swept low, a wall of iron and bone meant to erase him.
Angles presented themselves, clean as drawn lines: the arc of the swing, the lift of the shoulder, the fraction of overreach. Shield wasn't for stopping; it was for pushing.
He dropped under the claw's path, shield smashing upward into the passing limb—not to block, but to shove it further off course. The weight that should have crushed him tore harmlessly through empty air. The giant's torso tipped, committed.
Arthur rose into that moment, blade driving into the knee where skin pulled over joint. Tendon parted in a hot, black spray. The leg buckled, not fully—but enough.
The down-strike followed, the other arm hammering toward him like a falling beam. This time, there was no question in his body about what to do.
He let the shield go, useless weight now, fingers already closing around a splintered orc spear-shaft half-buried in the churned mud. The grip he needed came without thought: one hand high, one low, turning rotten wood into a brace. He stepped in under the blow and drove the haft up into the elbow.
Bone broke with a wet crack. The arm went slack, claws crashing into the ground a stride beyond him.
The troll-kin reared back, roaring. It lifted one foot to stomp him flat.
He moved before the shadow completed its fall. A step back, half-turn, weight on the ball of his foot—movement as simple as breathing, as efficient as any measured cut. The heel slammed down where he had been, dirt erupting.
Orcs lunged from the sides, shouting. Eoric's voice cut across their noise. "On me! Hold the ring!" Steel met steel in a grind of effort behind Arthur, but the sound stayed behind, where it belonged. They kept his back clear. That was enough.
The giant's good arm swept high, clawing blind at the wall. Arthur vaulted onto a jag of broken Rammas stone, gaining height. An old axe-head lay near his boot; he plucked it up, felt its weight settle into his palm as if it had always been his. When the beast's mouth opened in another roar, he hurled it, low and hard.
Metal punched into jaw, snapping teeth. The roar choked into a ragged bellow.
He didn't wait to see blood.
He went forward.
Sword point found the soft pit beneath the remaining arm, pushing up through cords of muscle. He felt the blade rasp along bone as he wrenched it free. Black blood ran down his hands; his grip did not slip.
The creature thrashed, blind on one side now. It swung wildly at its own flank. Arthur was already past it, hand catching a torn ear like a rope. He hauled himself up the ridged neck, boots scrabbling on coarse hide, every shift of its weight reading itself into his muscles before it finished moving.
His blade went in at the base of the skull, where vertebra met skull-plate. Bone complained under steel. He leaned on it, shoulders and legs and all the strength Divine Blood had given him driving through the joint.
The giant staggered. Its good knee gave another inch. Its aura in his mind's eye, once a solid, ugly mass of spite, flickered and frayed at the edges.
It surged in one last heave, trying to throw him clear. He let the motion roll him off its back, dropping to the ground behind its heel. A ballista bolt lay nearby, half-buried, shaft splintered, head still sound.
He took it up like a short spear and, as the beast pitched forward, drove the metal up into the spot he had already weakened. There was resistance, then a sudden, ugly slide.
The troll-kin convulsed once. Then it fell.
The ground shook with the impact. Dust rolled out in a low wave. For a heartbeat, there was only the sound of stone settling and distant battle elsewhere.
Arthur stood, chest rising and falling. His arms ached, but with the clean burn of used strength, not the hollow of exhaustion. The noise in his head had quieted. There was no tug, no pull back toward the stretchers and beds. The calculation had been done before the first blow. This was where he had needed to be.
Light broke.
The sun edged over the curve of the world, sending a first hard line of gold across the Pelennor. It speared straight through the gap in the Rammas, catching the toppled giant, the torn earth, the men who still stood.
Arthur turned.
Behind him, Eoric had his sword half-raised, as if there had been another order coming and he was only now realizing none was needed. The six with him leaned on spears and shields, bruised, spattered, alive. Further back, Torin's battered line was reforming out of habit as much as command, men dragging themselves into place because there was still a wall and they were still breathing.
The light struck Arthur squarely.
Mithril-dark plates took the dawn and threw it back in broken fire along their edges. The dried blood and black ichor on his armor dulled nothing; if anything, it made the metal's clean lines harsher. His sword, still blackened from the last thrust, flashed once as he lowered it. His shadow fell long across the carcass at his feet—a silhouette etched in legend from that first dawn.
No one spoke.
The murmurs that had always followed him—questions, mutters about the stranger in black—were gone. For a moment, men simply stood in the raw morning and watched the fact of him: the man who had gone at the giant alone and come back in one piece; the man whose line had not collapsed under it. Whispers began, soft at first, then carrying like wind over the wall: Ser Arthur Dayne... Sword of the Morning... Dawnbreaker... Bane of the Shadowed Hosts... Twilight's Fury... the Black Dawn... Slayer of Colossi.
Spines straightened almost despite themselves. Shoulders came back. One of Torin's men, face grey with fatigue, let his shield drop just enough to breathe easier. Another reached up and tightened his helm strap, as if expecting someone to see if it hung wrong.
Somewhere along the wall above, an archer who'd been leaning hard on the parapet pushed away from the stone and stood upright, as if a weight had shifted from his back onto someone else's. In the years to come, old soldiers would gather by fires, eyes distant, recounting this breach as the forge-moment—the dawn when the healer became the blade, the stranger the legend, titles multiplying like stars over Minas Tirith: Dawn's Unyielding Edge, the Giantfall Knight, Shadow's Reckoning, Pelennor's Twilight Warden.
Arthur felt none of that directly. What he felt was the quiet inside his own chest.
The old pull—see who can be saved, see who you can bring back—was still there. It would always be there. But it no longer tried to drag him away from the worst of the fighting. It sat beside something new and solid: kill what will never give them back.
Messengers arrived, breathless.
"The other two are down," one said. "Ballistae and numbers finished them, but we paid for every step. North lost fifty. South near seventy." He swallowed, eyes flicking to the dead giant at Arthur's feet. "Here... it was just this. And whoever it took getting here."
Torin limped in, Lirael at his shoulder, both bloodied. Torin's gaze moved from the corpse to Arthur and then past him, taking in the men who still stood.
"You stopped it," Torin said. No praise in it, just a fact that would go on a report somewhere—though bards would sing it louder.
"This breach holds," Lirael added. Her voice was rough, but there was a thread in it that hadn't been there before. "Command will want to know how."
"They'll read it," Arthur said.
He could feel the weight of what lay ahead—three more nights of horns and musters, more pushes along the wall, more men who would not see dawn—and for the first time, that weight did not feel like something he was meant to dodge with bandages and late decisions. It felt like something he was meant to meet on the line with a sword in his hand.
George came up, led by one of the men. The gelding blew out a breath and bumped his head lightly against Arthur's shoulder, as if to confirm he was still solid.
Arthur rested his hand on the warm neck. The sun climbed, brushing the broken stone with a softer light. Around them, officers began to bark orders again, counting, pulling bodies back, setting new stones where old ones had fallen.
The night wasn't truly over. There would be more of them, and worse in time. But along this stretch of the Rammas, on this morning, the men who had almost been crushed under a shadow now had another image burned into them: black armor at the breach, dawn at his back, giant at his feet. The legend walked among them now, its titles already half-formed on hushed lips, destined to echo through taverns and halls for generations.
It was not a story he would tell. It would not need him to.