Gandalf, Elrond, and the others stared at the magical barrier woven by nearly ten thousand wizards, undisguised wonder on their faces.
Each individual wizard's power, compared to theirs, was like a firefly set against the full moon. But gathered together, the force they produced was sothing even the greatest among them had to take seriously. They could feel it instinctively: even if they attacked that barrier with everything they had, it would not break quickly.
That knowledge settled sothing in all of them. As long as they could pin Sauron down and keep him from interfering, every lesser servant under his command would crumble before Kael's army.
Ti passed, and the black clouds to the north advanced with an almost physical weight, pressing southward like a hand closing around the throat of the sky. The light dimd without any sunset to explain it. The air thickened and turned heavy, each breath harder to draw than the last.
The clouds ca with the feel of sothing hunting, sothing reaching toward Kael and the others, and they broke against the magical barrier like a tide against a cliff. On one side of that shining wall, the sky was open and clear. On the other hand, it was swallowed entirely by churning black. The division was absolute, a line drawn across the world.
Beneath those clouds, the distant hills ca alive with darkness.
The army was imnse. Orcs, wargs, Trolls, Barrow-wights, corrupted n: every creature in its ranks had been soaked through with Sauron's power, twisted and strengthened and stripped of all reason until nothing remained in them but frenzy. The Witch-king of Angmar commanded them from the front, while Sauron himself rode atop a fell beast far larger and more terrible than any other of its kind in Mordor's service.
This creature was the progenitor of all fell beasts, the source from which the rest had descended. Its wingspan was vast enough to blot out the sky, its body armoured in scales hard as iron, its breath reeking with a stench that turned the stomach. Its eyes burned with malevolent red light, and when it scread, the sound carried sothing more than noise. It reached into the chest and found the fear already living there, pulling it upward, unravelling the will to resist.
The dark host surged the mont they saw Kael and the others, bloodlust boiling over into sothing beyond control. The fastest among them, the Barrow-wights and wargs, moved like shadows, hurling themselves forward in great leaps, clearing the river, closing the distance to the wizard line in an instant.
Then they hit the barrier.
The instant any of them passed through it, their bodies turned to ash. Even the evil spirits inhabiting the Barrow-wights could not escape in ti. A shriek of agony, and then a wisp of black smoke, and then nothing.
The charge stalled.
The Witch-king, perhaps wanting to distinguish himself before his master, rode his fell beast forward from the rear and took position at the very front of the army. Dark power, the colour of ink rolled from his body in a surging flood and slamd into the barrier, trying to batter through it, trying to corrode it from without.
Ripples spread across the shining surface. The barrier did not move.
The Witch-king's red eyes burned darker. Just as he was drawing power for another assault, Sauron's voice stopped him.
The Witch-king went rigid. He bowed with deep, fearful reverence. "My lord, I have failed you."
Sauron paid him no attention. Standing atop his monstrous mount, he looked through the barrier and fixed his gaze on Kael, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Glorfindel in turn. His expression held nothing but absolute, unshakeable confidence.
"Wizards. Elves." His voice carried across the distance without effort. "You cannot stop . Hand over the One Ring. I have returned to full form and reclaid my strength. You are not my equals. Surrender the Ring willingly, and I will be rciful enough to spare your lives."
As he spoke, a crushing aura erupted from him. The sky darkened further, and the earth itself seed to shudder.
Pure, overwhelming darkness poured outward from Sauron in every direction, filling the air between heaven and ground like a black and limitless sea. It surged against the barrier with the force of a breaking tide, wave after wave, relentless, as if determined to shatter the dam entirely.
The barrier, raised by ten thousand wizards working in concert, rippled violently under the assault. It swayed. It felt, for a mont, as though it might fall.
Even behind it, every person present felt the pressure crushing down on them, filling the lungs, pressing on the mind, making it difficult to think straight or hold their ground. Their faces showed the strain plainly.
Kael raised his silver-white wand and poured his magic into the barrier in a steady, powerful stream.
The swaying stopped. The barrier steadied, and though Sauron's force continued to batter it, it held.
The wand in Kael's hand was the finest he had ever made. Its shaft was a branch of a White Tree, not the one growing in his garden, but a cutting from Galathilion: the very first White Tree, the one Yavanna, Lady of all growing things, had fashioned in Valinor as a lesser image of Telperion, one of the Two Trees of Valinor. Galathilion was smaller than Telperion, and it did not radiate the sa light, but Yavanna had given it to the Elves and planted it in the square of their great city Tirion, where it beca the ancestor of all White Trees that ca after.
When Glorfindel was sent by the Valar back to Middle-earth to stand against Sauron, he had broken a branch from Tirion's White Tree as a keepsake. In the decades since, Kael and Glorfindel had grown close; Kael had taught him the ways of magic and crafted him a wand of his own, and in return, Glorfindel had gifted him that sacred branch.
As the first White Tree ever created by Yavanna's own hands, it was sacred in the truest sense. It carried divine power and inexhaustible vitality. Even after Glorfindel had carried it away from Valinor thousands of years ago, the branch remained as bright and fresh and green as the mont it was cut, alive in a way that seed to defy all ordinary ti.
Kael had taken that branch and paired it with the nerve of a Balrog as his core, blending the techniques of both wand-making and staff-crafting into sothing entirely his own. The result was a wand fifteen inches long, silver-white from tip to tail, with a brilliant erald Elven gem set into the base. At a thought, it could extend, stretching and thickening until it beca a full staff two tres long.
In a single instrunt, it held both the precise control of a wand and an amplification of magical power that no ordinary staff could match. It was nothing less than a divine artefact, surpassing the Elder Wand by a degree that made any comparison feel almost unfair.
It was because of this wand that Kael had the confidence to stand before Sauron at the height of his returned power.
With the barrier reinforced, Kael called out to the others. "We can't just let him keep battering the shield. We have to press the attack."
He stepped through the barrier and walked out onto the open ground beyond, then turned his wand directly toward Sauron.
"Avada Kedavra!"
A blaze of lethal green light, carrying the absolute finality of the Killing Curse, shot straight toward Sauron.
Decades of ditative practice had transford Kael's power utterly. He was not the sa person he had been when this journey began. The curse he cast now was sothing far more potent and far more deadly than anything his younger self could have produced, and behind it was the full force of a wand made from the branch of Galathilion and cored with the nerve of a Balrog.
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