Private Tales Welcome to the Wild Hunt

[Nina]

They called her the Lost One’s little pet.

Man-things were breakable. Ragdoll, they called her. That might’ve been also because her clothes had been patched and darned in places, with love and care. Not that she looked any shabbier than Naghi’s (the Lost One’s) soldiers themselves, mind you. But Nina’s gypsy looks were a far cry from the flowing midnight cloaks and dragon bone scepters of the human necromants and sorcerers they’d been used to seeing strolling around. After a week of marching, her trousers felt like bark.

There were three types of humans in the Blightlands, she’d been told. Mercenaries, sorcerers, and pinks. She sure as hell wasn’t a mercenary, and didn’t look much like a sorcerer.

In the cold morning light, Nina walked through the war camp, feeling the orcs’ eyes on her. No matter how much she straightened her back, the travelling painter couldn’t hope to replicate the confidence of one who could turn a person into a pile of bones and a pile of bones into a person with a flick of the wrist. Normally the girl would try to pass by unnoticed, but drop her in her in the midst of a completely different species and it was tough as nails. The only humans around were the few mercs.

A town had died, and she had walked out of there largely unscathed. That provided her credentials. Right now, she was the only witch the army had. That, and a warlord’s whim, ensured her safety.

‘For how long?’

There were cauldrons, set outside the tents, bubbling with muddy concoctions. Nina had waited until the cooks’ ladles just about scraped the bottom before venturing for her meal. She handed a cook her traveler’s bowl, with a handle and a leather string tied to it, and watched him fill it with porridge. There were raisins and chunks of dried fish in it, from the town she’d just left. It’s not as if many people there would need it anymore. She clenched her hands. She was just glad that today it wasn’t crowded.

She watched him drop the bowl in the cauldron.

She said nothing.

Things like this happened. Nina thought. Of how she’d tried to help out, when she first arrived in the camp. Make herself useful. Even though the injury on her leg still hurt. Suds told her to stay out of the way, and she just tried harder.

That wasn’t the point, was it? Sorcerers didn’t offer to help slice vegetables.

Humans who did menial tasks, often without being told, and stayed out of the way of orcs…well they had a name, didn’t they? Thralls. Pinks. Pinks was the word some orcs used for thralls, along with those people living in the half-independent villages that the soldiers derided. It was a word powerful enough to start a fight on its own.

Nina didn’t say anything when the orc handed her back her bowl without wiping it. The porridge made it slippery, and it was hot enough that she bit the inside of her lip. Accidents happened. Did they happen too often? The girl just stared. The last days she’d been practicing her aura sensing, and it scared her that sometimes sense more than magic.

“You’re going to die.” Nina said.

“Like that.” It angered her that people were playing petty games while missing the obvious. The Blightlands angered her. The Blight Orc soldiers’ approach to medicine angered her. As if you weren’t orc enough if you needed to be patched up before literally missing half an arm. Under the orc’s jaw, she could feel, even with her eyes closed, the disruption of aura. Subtle, but she’d stared a lot at him in the passing days. Necrosis. Infection. Words burst out, breathlessly.

“Just because your teeth aren’t hurting anymore doesn’t mean you’re fine.” To the wide-eyed cook, it was as if the puny human had read his mind. No. She’d simply listened, before.

The girl turned on her heels, and didn’t stop until she reached her tree. There, she rested her forehead against the bark and breathed. She wiped everything and climbed up the tree, in the hammock she’d set for herself.

The Blight Orcs didn’t like to come near this tree. In the night, glowing motes floated among the branches. They were here now too, near-invisible glimmers above her shoulder.

Nina had collected them from the edge of an old battlefield. Walking in one was taboo. Ancient battlefields could kill you faster than practically anything else in the Blighted Lands, which said something.

As she ate, she leafed through her pages. She had sketches of the things and beings she’d found there. A rusted poleaxe landmark. The skeleton of an unknown being with scales and tusks, jutting out of the ground. A little map. Her finger hovered above the edge of what she knew. Maybe today she should adventure deeper in; maybe she should first go to the small town nearby and get some supplies. The orcs thought she was crazy; the mercenaries doubly so. Nina just laughed when questioned.

Because if she didn’t do the impossible, then her charade would fall apart.

Nina wasn’t a magician.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

"Why were you exiled?" Duresh asked. The weighty question one he had pondered about as a child, nearly forgotten during his time in Vel Anir, and kept to himself during the journey north and east from Alliria--until now.

His mother, Loakina, paused, her knife hovering above the carcass of the wild boar. She looked over the campfire at him. The great expanse of the Blightlands surrounded them, covered in the black of night.

"I will tell you," she said. "If you would do something for me."

"What is it."

Loakina put down the knife on the boar's carcass. Wiped her hands on the rough and bristly fur still left on its hind legs. Then took one of the two sheathed falchions from her traveling pack and walked around the fire and presented it to him, hilt first. Take it, the gesture said. As did her beseeching expression.

Duresh sat there, looking at the weapon. And he did not take it. He had thrown his own away, back in Vel Anir; the performative action that thus renounced the life Garron Banick, his father, had fashioned for him. A life of violence. Murder. Pain. He would use the bow his mother had crafted for him. Use it on wild game, hunting in the noble old way. He would use his field knife to prepare his kills. But he would use neither on men, orcs, elves, any of them. Not anymore.

"No," he said. The bass of his voice even deeper in the firmness of his refusal.

Loakina jerked it forward. Insisted. "Take it."

"I will not."

Loakina held it toward him still. This, for a fleeting moment. Then she sighed, relented, and sat down next to him, laying the falchion across her lap. They both stared into the fire.

"It is a false virtue that you hold," she said.

An ember of spiteful anger glowed in his heart. "I do not agree."

"Pacifism is nothing more than a willingness to let those you love be savaged by the malevolent."

"Did I not aid you when those bandits attacked?"

"You fought well, son," she said. "But if your fists had not been enough. If there were more of them. If it came to a choice between killing cruel men and allowing me to die."

"I would never allow such."

"The world does not abide by your wishes, Duresh. Nor does it heed your declarations of 'never.'"

He looked at her, but said nothing.

Loakina looked at him too. Said, "I never wanted you to go to Vel Anir. I knew well that only the malice of your father, and the slow death of your spirit awaited there. You need not tell me all that you have done in that awful city; I know it has scarred you. That life was not the true way, but neither is your pacifism. It is a mistake. An overcorrection. Your warrior's spirit will cry out as tragedies of a different sort unfold."

Duresh wanted to protest. To say that she was wrong. That to accept the weapon was to invite Garron's darkness back into him. But he banished those thoughts, and resolved to listen. And he asked, "Then what is the true way?"

Loakina once again presented the sword to him. Said, "Keep it close, but keep it sheathed. Know when to use it. Of this, only your heart can tell you, for only it knows the difference between the noble and the ignoble: so you must listen well to it. This is the way of peace for your spirit. Of living right with nature and those of the world. This is the old way: the way of the true warrior."

A long moment passed. And the campfire crackled, the scrub brush of the Blightlands in the pit burning and blackening and being made anew into ash for the hungry soil, and thus the world turned round and round.

Duresh reached over. Touched the hilt of the falchion. And took it. Laid it in his own lap.

Loakina smiled.

And, as she told him the story of her 'exile,' her smile faded.

* * * * *​

Duresh approached a small town. Alone. This, days after the night when he had taken the falchion.

He came with a fresh kill thrown over his shoulder. A smaller boar, one he could carry without too much trouble. Still, beads of sweat dripped from his brow. Off of his chin.

Perhaps he would be able to trade the boar to one of the local orcs. Barter for some supplies, if this small town even had a general store, or a store at all. It was the Blightlands; and though he had not been here himself before now, he had heard enough tales. It would be no surprise if there were no such stores for travelers and adventurers. These lands were not human lands, and he should not expect the amenities of Alliria or Vel Anir here.

Yet, promising, the homes--while hardly above the status of hovels--were indeed built to be permanent. This was not the settlement of a nomadic tribe. Even so, Duresh was aware that his clothes would make him stand out among the other orcs, who, as he could now see, wore leather and hide and fur. As would the softer, more human features of his face. An outsider, even here. Ironic.

But what mattered was supplies. Gear.

He would need it.

 

[Nina]

A few handfuls of salt. Waxed cloth. Tallow. Paper (made from wasp nests, here). A couple of herbs, filling the room with their scent. A small glass jar. Candles, two golden beeswax ones and the cheap tallow ones, like the one supplementing the dusty light filtering through the mica windows. Honey, precious, priced almost to its weight in copper. Nina touched her coin purse, wondering if it was sufficient. It was her last. She didn’t like the idea of asking the warlord for money. A loosely woven basket with a lid, to keep it all in.

“Do you ever have issues with the battlefield being this close?” Nina asked. On the other side of the counter, an orc with a deeply creased face was arranging sacks of flour. “Spirits or the like.”

“Or their ilk? Som’times.” He said. He spoke Common with a strong accent, occasionally devolving into a pidgin language of Orcish words and gesturing when he talked to her. “Mostly when the Little Dagger dries up. Good to stay on the right side of the water.”

The Little Dagger was the creek running along the edge of the village. Nina had seen it. It was more dust than water.

“And when it dries up?” She asked.

“Ghosts.” The shopkeeper frowned. “Funny lights. Some nights it’s good ta stay inside.” He stopped fiddling with the flour, and instead looked straight at her. As if he didn’t know where to place her. It was uncomfortable.

Nina walked around the small room, rising on her toes to look at the single bookshelf. She’d hoped for anything on history, or magic, to supplement ‘The basics of runes’ that she’d nicked from the temple, but out of the three volumes, two were in Orcish, one of them was probably an almanac, and the remaining one was ‘The Diseases of Cattle, By A Doctor’.

“Does anyone know who fought there?” The girl asked.

“My old man’s old man’s been the one to found this village.” The orc said. “The battle graveyard was just as old in his time. If he don’t know, then…All who knows is dead.” He shrugged. His tone was one of answering stupid questions. “May be not. Ask Menalus; he might know.”

Nina snorted at the joke.

“And are you sure you don’t have any ink?” She insisted. She once more looked around the shelves. Weapons and vegetables-

A loud noise startled her. A loud bark irrupted just outside, interspersed with a deep, whimpering growl. Nina strode towards the door, shouting the Command Word as she went. She suspected it was a swear word of some kind. She’d tied her mount in a corner of the yard, away from other animals, and muzzled it for good measure. Not that Grishka was particularly aggressive, for something that looked like a cross between a hyena and a dire wolf. Even though she still had to watch her fingers. Most often he was just scared of everything, including chickens.

“That yours?” The shopkeeper’s demeanor had changed.

“Borrowed.” Nina shrugged. Dire wolves were fairly rare, sort of like horses, and she’d only ever seen Naghi’s cavalry use them. But her knee was still weak after her injury, and no one was using Grishka anyway. He’d been born a runt, and even now his spine was too weak to carry an adult orc for long. Runts would normally be culled, either by their littermates or by their mothers or by the orcs, but one of the officers had wanted to keep it for her kids back home.

The orc reached out, picked up the basket with her shopping, and put it behind the till.

“I ain’t selling.” He said.

His face was like cold, like cracked ebony. Nina quickly looked at the door, but it had gone quiet now. The Command Word should keep the wolf in place.

“Your wrists. Show me your wrists or get out of my shop.”

Nina looked startled. She opened her mouth to say something, but the situation felt beyond her control.

“I ain’t selling to escaped thralls.” The old orc grumbled. “Nothing against people who’ve got the coin, mind ya, but I don’t fancy trouble.”

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

"Then sell to me."

Akin to the silent Spirit of the Wind, Duresh appeared, soft footfalls belaying his large stature. He came up beside the human girl before the counter, but his eyes were on the weathered orc shopkeep. The faint smell of his kill, the boar carcass, lingering on his left side where he had carried it. He had managed to sell it for local coin. And, as luck would have it, the town did have a store. He had come in, catching merely the end of the interaction between the old orc minding the shop and a severely out-of-place human girl.

And he acted.

"I am no escaped thrall." Duresh held out his open hand to his side without looking at the girl. "And I have the coin."

A very slight turn of his head toward the girl, yet his eyes remained locked and unmoving on the orc's own. "Put that basket on the counter."

Duresh stared down the shopkeep. Unblinking. In his gaze the quiet suggestion that he did not mind trouble. Welcomed it, perhaps.

 

[Nina]

“She with you, then?” The shopkeeper asked. Shrugged. “Not that I care. Your money’s as good as any.” The basket was dropped back on the counter. In his eyes there was the slightest hint of wariness towards the man who’d sipped into his store like a shadow. “Two silver. Anything else you’d like to buy, traveler?”

Nina’s cheeks burned, as she stared at the stranger’s back.

She crossed her hands, clinging to her sleeves. She remembered the shopkeeper asking her about her injury when she’d walked in. Subtle, but he'd caught it. She’d thought he cared.

“Sorry. I think you dropped this.” Nina mumbled at the edge of hearing, as she slipped something in the newcomer’s hand. It was her coin purse. “Earlier.” She clenched it white-knuckled, trying to avoid the clinking. Nevertheless, she couldn’t escape the loud ‘Harrumpf!’ from the orc behind the counter. ‘Fine, I’m leaving,’ her dropped shoulders seemed to say, as she faded out.

Nina went to check on Grishka. Most things alive would know not to mess with a wolf the size of a pony, but the poor thing being so skittish and claws sharp enough to disembowel a man was not a good combination. That absurd destructive power might be why humans, even in the Blightlands, didn’t use dire wolves as mounts. It was also why Nina had gotten some wild rope-burn, as Grishka had dragged her all around a field by the reins just two days before. That the marks left by the reins around her wrists had been deep enough to bandage was why she couldn’t argue with the shopkeeper. Cuff marks, he’d see. Not to mention that the cut on the back of her knee, from a Graveling claw, had nicked her tendon in a manner not too dissimilar to what some slave traders did to runaways to keep them in place.

“Her limp…I’ve seen similar things before.” As soon as Nina walked out, the shopkeeper switched to Orcish. “Usually happens in the Blightlands when a human runs a bit too fast.” He said.

When Nina stepped closer, she saw Griska lying on one side. He was a hunchback wolf-thing with grey, shaggy hair and yellow eyes that watched her intensely. The girl could never be sure if he was about to try to hide behind her, or maul her. At least, there was no one around. Perhaps the wolf had just gotten a bit excited sniffing food on the stranger when he walked in. Still, as she walked closer, she noticed that the hair looked matted just in front of her saddle (a pile of midnight silk curtains tied with leather belts). Just where the fur sunk into a depression, Nina saw a cat.

“Shoo.” Nina said.

The cat opened its eyes.

“You don’t want to go where I’m going.” Nina crossed her arms. The cat stared. Nina stared back.

She kept an eye on the store door.

“You didn’t have to do that. I don’t want to get you in trouble.” The young woman whispered, when the stranger walked out. Perhaps she’d misunderstood; perhaps she’d just handed the last of her money in exchange for nothing but rancorous laughter. But this was the Blightlands, and she was craving trust. Now that she could see him better, she realized that the stranger, too, didn’t seem to be from around here. His clothes were slightly too elegant, and his features different from those of the Blight Orcs. “Thank you.”

Her face lit up.

“Would…” Nina dropped her backpack in the nook of one elbow. “you…” She fished a drawing block from inside it. “like a painting?” She leafed through it, flickers of green seas and old bluish forests coming to life between her palms.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

"It is to my great shame that I thought I could run." Loakina couldn't look at him. And the orange light of the campfire deepened the shadows along her weathered brow. "I ran. But I did not escape."

Duresh held his mother close, his arm across the back of her shoulders. In that moment she seemed much smaller, much more frail, than she truly was, and his closeness felt lacking as a comfort. Yet it was all he could offer.

Her head was tilted down into the past, her gaze into the fire long and distant.

"Both choices were honorable," she said. "To respect my father's wishes and run. Or to stay and fight with him, my family, my tribe."

A chasm of silence, and the moon glided on its course through the night.

Duresh, as gently as he could, said, "Why would you not simply tell me this truth? Why say you were exiled?"

He could see her lip trembling.

And she said, "I did not want you to think that I..."

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. Sniffed. Let out a ragged breath.

"...that I was a coward."

* * * * *​

"It is a sign that she is not a coward," Duresh said to the old orc, in response to the comment of her limp. His own Orcish rough. Stilted. He was far out of practice.

The girl had placed the basket on the counter and placed her pouch of coins into his open palm. Duresh had said nothing more yet, only issuing a throaty "Hm" to answer if she was with him. He opened the pouch and took out the necessary silver and handed it over to the shopkeep and cinched the pouch shut and made a motion to leave with the basket when the old orc made his comment concerning the limp, and got Duresh's answer.

Duresh did not know everything of the Blightlands and Molthal, but he knew all he needed to know: the things his mother had told him. The rampant practice of slavery, and the false idol of strength that the Blight orcs, led by the Fire Giants, aspired to. They dishonored and perverted the old ways at every turn.

And, in truth, Duresh did not know the human girl at all. He only heard the shopkeep's accusation that she was an escaped thrall, heard his refusal to sell to her, and saw an opportunity--however minute and perhaps ultimately insignificant--to undermine the culture of slavery. The mention of the limp made the leap from the merely accusatory into the tangible, as a glance over his shoulder as the girl was leaving the shop confirmed. It might not be the case, but it was solid enough ground to think she had used her wits and her legs to earn her freedom. And this required an admirable reservoir of courage. A warrior's spirit, for it was right and noble to fight for one's freedom.

Duresh bought two things for himself with his own coin: a pair of throwing axes, and a small pouch of mint leaves. Unsurprisingly, the shopkeep had no throwing knives on offer, so the axes would have to do. The mint leaves he had no idea how the shopkeep acquired, but they would be useful. Basic herbs and natural salves he had already foraged under his mother's guidance, so he bought none.

His own possessions secure, Duresh took the girl's basket and stepped outside the shop. He saw her nearby, standing by a dire wolf of all things. A saddled one, belonging to someone. Even so, surely she knew the danger, but it was none of his concern.

Almost immediately she spoke to him. Said that he could have gotten in trouble.

"I will face what comes, or what does not."

He made to hand over the girl's basket and her pouch of coin, intent to simply turn and go on his way once it was done. But the girl had her hands full all of a sudden, having produced a drawing block from her backpack. The question took him surprise, and the slight and curious turn of his head displayed this.

"A painting," he said.

Mild puzzlement blended with the aforementioned curiosity. He didn't know what to make of the girl. She defied his expectations of the Blightlands, her continued survival here even more so. Mayhap his assumption of her limp was more correct than he knew.

"Of what?"

 

[Nina]

“I have the sea.” Nina said.

She presented her drawings as if they were the pages of a book. In those pages, a wave crashed ashore in silver spray, the sun sunk under a fine tapestry of red and gold waves, seagulls cried above rocky islands. There was even what looked like an underwater scene, with hands that seemed to be the girl’s own wading through clear water, and with curious and colorful spiny beings scuttling in the silt below. A fresh scar in the painting was a barely-visible line on the side of her hand.

But her work wasn’t only sea-scapes. There were forests and fields, often in different degrees of completion. Sometimes, colors that shifted subtly over time, depending on what pigments the travelling painter could get her hands on.

“That’s from the Spine.” Black branches and green shades. “That too.” Sketches of snow-covered landscapes, with outlines that grew increasingly sharper and rougher, as if the painter’s hands had been shaking with the cold. A moss-covered waterfall, with a strange red-eyed creature with white scales and wings flying across it. “That as well. Oh, and a dragon. There’s also these older ones, from a country in the far East. The Azure Archipelago, it’s called. They have strange clothing and customs, and a religion with thousands of gods.” Umbrella-like trees, robe-like garments of embroidered silk, tall gates that led to nowhere. Nina hesitated when she came across the painting of a young man. Like all the people in her paintings, he had no face, but the detail on his clothes was particularly fine. She pointed. “He tried to kill me.”

Pointing felt incredibly satisfying. The Duke would have been livid.

All this leafing through had gradually dislodged the pages at one end of the drawing block, the part that could be assumed to contain the artist’s most recent work. A few pages slipped and scattered.

“Ah! Not those. I still need those.” Nina laughed, and went to pick them up. A couple had landed near the stranger’s feet.

These weren’t paintings. They were just simple sketches, but they were sketches of fantastic creatures. From spiky balls to ghostly knights to floaters just like those one saw while their eyes adjusted to bright light, they filled the pages. Clinging to them were short names and notes on location and behavior, along the lines of ‘-peaceful if not disturbed; -burning sensation; -I run faster’.

At the bottom of the page, there were a few scribbled lines:

‘Gray says that life is just a matter of complexity.

Energy + simple things -> complicated

Magic is energy.

I wonder…’

Nina smiled, and twirled the papers in her hand. It was the least she could do for the stranger’s help.

“So, which one would you like?”

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

I have the sea.

At first it seemed to Duresh that this was a simple and straightforward statement. It made sense. As the human girl displayed drawing after drawing, painting after painting, Duresh figured that she was a peddler of sorts, selling odd wares in an odd place.

Then something disturbed this thought. Changed it. He saw the painting of someplace underwater--a scene almost entirely alien to Duresh, yet somehow appealing to his senses nonetheless--and in that painting the hands. The scar on one. The matching scar, softened by time, on her hand now.

During all his time in Vel Anir, Duresh had grown accustomed to the drab and dreary colors of the city; it was as if the earthen materials which comprised the buildings had--through the very act of being torn from their place in Arethil and used in such construction--lost a certain vibrancy that no architect could truly reclaim. Those buildings. Their clustering, the sharp angles and rigid lines, the tyrannical imposition of order upon the natural. City life had slowly inured Duresh to its own brand of ugliness.

But having left, having renounced the ways of Vel Anir and his father Garron Banick, having reunited with his mother and journeyed with her into the east and across the span of Epressa, Duresh had rediscovered a yearning that had languished not merely in Vel Anir but Alliria as well. To be among the spirits in the wild, to leave the stifling insulation of civilization behind. Out in the vastness of Arethil, away from those sharp angles and rigid lines, lay that vibrancy and beauty that pleased him on so deep a level that its quiet rightness could not be disputed.

Yes, this human girl had the sea. The sea and many other vibrant places, captured on canvas. She had it and she carried it with her, no matter where she wandered. How pleasant it would have been if he, too, had the sea in his small, confined tenement in Vel Anir.

Some notes fell from her drawing block then. Notes and barebones sketches, some landing by Duresh's feet. With the human girl's basket in one arm and her pouch in the other hand, he'd no free hand in which to help her collect her things. By the time he put one down, she would have picked up her pages anyway. He settled with placing the toe of one of his shoes on a page, such that it might not be taken by the wind.

He saw as he did this some of the notes on the pages. He made no comment, but kept them in mind. ‘Gray says that life is just a matter of complexity. Gray. Hm.

So, which one would you like?

"Those of the Spine," he said. And, with the affirmation of his memory journeying through the ranges themselves, he said, "Yes. I very much like the mountains. How much per painting?"

Still, even though he acknowledged there were things beyond brutal utilitarianism, he assumed that she was selling the paintings.

 

[Nina]

The girl’s lips curled in an ‘o’. A small sound came out.

“I wanted to give you one as thanks…But…” For a moment, a tug-o-war of wills flickered in her eyes, as her gaze brushed the dust at her feet. One painting was gratitude. All the paintings from the Spine, however, were a good part of her lifeline. The man offered to pay, but would it have been appropriate to accept? Her lips trembled. “Did you like them that much? You can keep those, then. I normally ask for a few copper, or what people can give, but-” She looked beyond him, at a point in the distance. Smiled. “Where I’m going, copper won’t help me.” Smiled wider. “Say, have you been to the Spine too?”

A way down the road, moments later, a door opened, and slammed closed. Coarse voices. Drunken laughter. Nina twitched.

Bolting from her place, she grabbed the basket, pushed her drawing block at the man’s chest, and rushed to grab the fallen papers.

“I’ll sort things out later. Go, for now. Go!” She fluttered the sketches at him, before sticking them in the basket, under the candles. “Go!”

She tied the basket to one of the many belts hanging from the dire wolf's harness, and fiddled with the reins that she’d tied around a post. A double knot, because it terrified her that Grishka would get free and maul someone. Her fingers ached. Heavy steps approached. Perhaps it wasn’t the steps that were heavy, at least not beyond what one would expect out of a few hundred pounds of studded leather, weapons, laughter and Blight Orc, but it was the voice that made hair stand up on the back of her arms.

The yard in front of the store was a rather plain dirt fenced-in rectangle, just some space to leave carriages, animals and parcels. There was only one gate to the street. If she was lucky, then they wouldn’t notice-

“I think I smell a witch.”

The orc in the street said witch. His tone said something else.

The first knot slipped open under Nina’s fingers.

“Oi, witch.”

He walked through the gate. His two companions stopped at the entrance, one on either side. Nina stayed quiet, until she could no longer ignore the presence literally throwing shade over her. He was a Blight Orc soldier, like the others, scarred, smelling faintly of sour beer. She knew not the name, but she knew the voice. She knew the voice very well.

“You with her, thrallspawn?” One of the two at the entrance would mock the half-orc, if still around. He spit to the side. “Scram.”

“Name’s Nina.” The girl said. She tried to look annoyed with the knot rather than afraid. She wasn’t sure it was working.

“Witch.” Measured words. The slightest bit of slurring. If the girl would have watched this from the outside, she would have wondered if he was someone just trying to seem drunk. “Why not join us for a drink, eh?”

Innocuous. The words, not the tone.

“Think you’re too good for us?” The tone was calm. “You and your…rat.” Suddenly, the orc turned on his heels and kicked the muzzled dire-wolf right on the side of the snout.

Grishka whimpered, and scuttled behind the girl, and because he was so large, it pushed her towards the orc. Nina was livid. She made some reassuring sounds meant for horses.

“The boss won’t be happy if you damage my things.” Coldly, she stated.

“This ain’t fucking Vel Anir.” The Blight Orc said. “We fight our own battles here.” There was a dark glint in his eyes. “I think you speak a tad too much for someone who can’t even rain down fire. Took you, what, days, to curse Three-Fingers? Poor fool was rolling in the dirt when I left.” He snapped his fingers. “Listen. I like you. I like human girls. And you need someone to have your back, right? Why not come with me and we can talk something out?”

Nina’s fight-or-flight response was awkward, at the very least.

“Think I’m being funny?” The orc grumbled, as Nina had to press a hand on her chest because laughter was making her run out of breath.

“Hilarious.” She managed to get out, tears in her eyes. “You, a hired soldier, fighting-“ She shook her head, as words struggled to escape. “-own-“

The orc grabbed her by the chin, and forced her to her toes.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

I wanted to give you one as thanks...

Duresh's brow furrowed, in a momentary misunderstanding that a second's passing just as soon cleared. He had misjudged the human girl's intent; made an assumption which proved to be false. He had not done anything which deserved such a thanks, not in his opinion. Hence the thought that she had to be selling them; a supplementary way she might have used to make a living.

"One as thanks," Duresh said. "It would not be right to take them all."

And, seeing as she didn't need copper, one would suit Duresh well enough. He didn't need paintings where he was going, much like the girl and her copper, but he was taking one anyway. It would bring him peace. Balance.

Duresh put down the basket and the pouch of coin on top of it. Leafed through the pages of the drawing block she held. As he reexamined the paintings of the Spine, the human girl had another question. Duresh looked up. Said, "Yes." Looked back down at the paintings, satisfied with the sufficiency of his answer. He browsed and examined.

The drawing block being shoved into his chest caught him by surprise. He simply watched the human girl with a level gaze as she told him to go all of a sudden, visibly trying to decipher the cause of her alarm.

He needn't ponder long. A Blight Orc came into the store's yard. Called the human girl a witch--and, for all Duresh knew, that much might well be true. Duresh could smell his inebriated from where he stood.

You with her, thrallspawn?

"No." He said it plainly. Matter-of-fact. But Duresh did not move.

He took a measure of the situation. The human girl's name: Nina. Her struggling with the knot of the dire wolf's reins. The inebriated Blight Orc kicking the dire wolf which then, in stark contrast to the tales he had heard, made to cower behind her. Nina's mention of a boss. The Blight Orc, curiously, mentioning Vel Anir. Was Nina from Vel Anir, or was that nothing more than a declarative?

Nina laughed. Her general sense of alarm giving way to it just like that. And the Blight Orc was not amused.

It was then that Duresh acted. He followed the old way as best he knew, as best his mother had taught him thus far. Violence very often was used to stay other violence with proper escalation. The noble brought a halt to the ignoble, and guided those who strayed--for all were imperfect--back onto the honorable path. Though some might need more guidance than others.

Duresh slipped behind the Blight Orc soon after he grabbed Nina by the chin. Poked his middle finger into a particular spot just behind the bottom of his right ear. There the nerve bundle. He applied hard pressure. Held his left hand against the Blight Orc's forehead to keep it steady and keep the tight, biting pain flowing. Matters of physical coercion in which Duresh was well-versed. His own piece of Vel Anir which he took with him.

And he said to the Orc, "You have no battle to fight here."

 

[Nina]

The orc picked her up with two fingers. Her breathing rasped her throat, as her head was pushed back.

Suddenly, she fell. She fell on soft, landing on Griska, and moments later something pierced her shoulder. Claws. A firm voice – the stranger’s voice – addressed the orc and kept the situation under control. A gasp escaped Nina’s throat, and her whispers wove through the chaos.

“Let go, buddy. Let go.” She reached for the paw on her shoulder, barely not toppling her over with its weight, and one by one teased out claws almost as long as her fingers. The dire wolf whimpered, a sound so low that Nina felt it more with her bones than her ears. “No time for a snack. Off you go.” Barely a scratch, but her carotid was only a few fingers’ width away. It felt dizzying. “Like that. Good job, Grishka.”

Meanwhile, the orc had to deal with the unfamiliar grapple. Whether due his to thick skin, inebriation or sheer willpower, he managed to swing an elbow backwards, right where his opponent’s ribs would be. He turned around, trying to get the pesky half-orc off him before pain overwhelmed him.

“Who the hell are you.” He groaned.

Nina had a quick look around. The stranger was competent, almost frighteningly so. The two goons at the gate seemed to be weighing whether to interfere. One of them had a crossbow at their side. The girl cut Griska’s reins, and reached for the saddle.

Her saddle was a pile of curtains, midnight blue, looted from a largely-abandoned city. Nina had chosen them because they looked soft and hardy.

She twirled on her heels, and threw the curtains in the air. There was a flash of fluttering blue.

Griska, the dire wolf, made a run for it and jumped over the fence, toppling over at least one of the orcs in the process. There was a splotch of blood on him. No one followed.

Because when the curtains touched the ground, the girl was gone.

(Duresh No worries, still nearby!)

 

[Duresh]

Duresh felt the elbow through his light armor; such was the strength of a full-blooded orc. He swallowed what would have been a groan of pain. Buried it somewhere in his chest. In a contest of wills it wouldn't do to show a lapse of any kind.

An ugly lesson from Vel Anir. For that is what torture amounted to, a contest of wills. The endurance of pain: of the body for the tortured, of the mind for the torturer. Who could hold out the longest. And there were some who were frightfully adapted to enduring as the torturer. Duresh, as he found with dreadful ease, had such a capacity. There was shame, now, for his actions. But not revulsion. And he knew, deeply, that there never would be.

This contest of wills, between himself and the Blight Orc, was analogous. Save that it was endurance of the body for both participants, the rules remained the same. Outlast the other. Lapses, shows of faltering, threatened to embolden the opponent.

So Duresh weathered the strike as best he could. Held his grasp on the Orc's forehead and the kept his finger lanced into the pain-inducing point behind the Orc's ear.

Who the hell are you.

"It does not matter who I am." Calm. Level. Despite what Duresh was doing.

He had no sight on the Orc's companions on the gate, but he did not hear them approaching. Mostly good. If they had ranged weapons or magic they might be able to hit him before he could react. So be it.

But, within moments, the matter appeared to resolve itself. The human girl, after having loosed her dire wolf (again, it was somewhat startling that she should have command over the beast), managed to vanish behind the screen of the blue curtains she'd tossed up into the air. There one moment, gone the next, as if the curtains themselves had erased her from Arethil. A useful talent. Duresh ought to know.

And at this Duresh let go of the Blight Orc and took a few steps back, allowing him some space.

He kept his ground, eyeing the Orc with an unblinking gaze, and said, "Your strength is better tested elsewhere, is it not?"

A slight gesture of his head, back toward the gate of the shop's yard.

 

[Nina]

“Bloody-”

The orc’s knees buckled just before Duresh let go. He rubbed the back of his head, flinching slightly, and turned around, supporting himself with a hand the size of a shovel on the back of his thigh. He looked around for the human girl, but it hurt to turn his neck and he wasn’t a snot-nosed recruit to lose track of his main enemy. His eyes narrowed. Still, he’d seen her vanish, and by the confused grumbles from his brothers-in-arms at the gate, wasn’t the only one.

“It’s like the earth swallowed her.” One of them said.

“Whoever the fuck you are, you’re really something.” The orc told Duresh. He bared his fangs. That was his reply to the half-orc’s polite suggestion to fuck off. That the Blight Orc soldier walked away moments later was a coincidence. He shouted as he left: “Ya might be a wee halfie, but head to the eastern road, won’t you? There’s a camp not far off. We follow the best of the Sons of Menalus-” His companions stomped their feet and shouted: “The best of the best!”. The orc continued: “Might be a pretty penny in the army for someone like ya.”

About a minute later, their voices had gotten lost in the distance. They were already bantering about the bets they’d place at the fighting pits if ‘the wee halfie’ joined in on that entertainment. Along the street, Nina slipped down from a tree, and sneaked right by her rescuer’s side.

“How did you do that?” The girl whispered.

She brought her arms in front of her and mimicked the hold.

“Thank you.” The girl flexed her fingers, once, twice, and stared at her fingertips. Her shoulder was streaked with red. She was glad that the soldiers had decided not to pursue the conflict. Even with her disappearing trick, even with the distractions provided by the fight and the curtain, even with Grishka being oddly forgiving of her clinging to the side of his harness as she hid behind his frame and fur during her escape, she’d been afraid. She’d been really afraid that one of the orcs would let loose a crossbow bolt before she could get in position, or that they’d gang up on the stranger. But Blight Orcs had somewhat of a cult of strength, and the stranger was strong. He was worthy of their respect. She was not. “I’m sorry for bringing you into this mess. Are you okay?”

She clenched her hands and stared at the ground.

“I walk in places that they’re too scared to approach, but somehow they don’t see that as strength.” Her smile carried the sort of sadness that verged on breaking into laughter. It was absurd. It was too absurd. “Please, have the Spine paintings. It’s the least I could do.” She said, as she bowed, and as they sorted out the items that had gotten misplaced in the havoc. Nina gathered up her curtain. A crackling laughter escaped her lips for a moment.

“Wish I had more of the paintings. Then I could try to hire you.” She dreamily joked.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

Whoever the fuck you are, you’re really something.

Duresh let out a throaty hmm. Watched the Blight Orc.

His shouted offer during his departure caught Duresh's attention, but not for the reasons the other orc might have expected. He took mental notes of the details: eastern road, army--true size unknown--and the Sons of Menalus.

Duresh considered the option. The infiltrator. Feigning loyalty or general compliance/interest to get close to one's target. He'd done it before. Experience mitigated the risk. But was it the best course to take? That remained the bothersome question. His ends remained the same, but the paths that he could take differed by appreciable degrees. It would take some consideration, and, to be as objective and rational as he could, he would need to set aside the actions of his mother and his feelings about them.

He pondered for a moment, turned to go, but there was the human girl--Nina.

How did you do that?

Nevermind that, how did you disappear? The question lingered in his head, unspoken, the brief smirk on his face the only revealing of its presence. He had an idea, one that would not have been very surprising to him if that was indeed the method by which she vanished, but certainly there were other ways. But his curiosity was mild, not enough for him to ask it of her.

So he answered her question with an instructor's informative tone, "I know some specific things about the components of the body. Most races have a spot just behind the bottom of the ear that houses vulnerable nerves," He reached over and slid his forefinger into the mentioned spot behind Nina's own ear. Just touched it. Didn't press in. "Pushing forward on this spot, towards the opponent's nose, will induce a sharp pain that is..." He searched for a way to phrase it, "...excellent at commanding their attention."

Duresh pulled his hand back. And the girl thanked him. Not for showing her the pain-point, but for interloping in the situation with the Blight Orc. She said she was sorry.

"I am okay, and you need not be sorry," Duresh said. A pause followed, but his voice was confident, "Perhaps this was just the mess I was looking for."

Again, he thought of Loakina.

And the thought dissipated as the girl spoke again. Said she walked "in places that they're too scared to approach." Interesting. Duresh was not one for superstition or any manner of fear, awe, respect, or whatever else for the supernatural. But he was also a city orc--or a city 'halfie' as those Blight Orcs would have put it--through and through. He acknowledged that his belief in all the Spirits Loakina had spoken of was vague at best. Was there truth in it? He wasn't sure. But it remained interesting all the same that those Blight Orcs were frightened of these places Nina mentioned.

He might feel the same if he went to one such place and discovered that a bow or a falchion, things mundane, were of no use against whatever dwelled there. Such remained to be seen.

Duresh watched her, arms crossed, as she gathered her things. Just what was a human girl doing here, going to such places that incited terror in Blight Orcs and riding a dire wolf and speaking of a boss and by extension employment and, through all this, painting various scenes of Arethil?

Wish I had more of the paintings. Then I could try to hire you.

Duresh actually chuckled. "Hire me?"

Add that to the list of characteristics which he found surprising.

His tone came down from unexpected mirth to stolidly level. "I left things such as that behind in a distant place. A true warrior does not seek payment. Just as he does not seek battle."

It comes to him, and his heart will tell him if it is noble and right. Though a novel concept which grinded opposite the ways of Vel Anir's 'politics,' Duresh intuitively understood the truth in it. He need only the chance to fully realize it in his life.

 

[Nina]

“What is it that you seek, then?”

Nina tilted her head, more closely eyeing her rescuer. She had misjudged him, then. Not a mercenary. Former? The calm in his voice. The straightforward manner in which he’d taught her how to cause pain. Nina’s forefinger traced the ghost of a touch behind her ear. She tilted her head to one side, then the other, slightly moving her jaw to figure out in which postures the technique would be most efficient. “Or perhaps you seek something to seek.”

A warrior, by his own words. The girl had joked about paying him in paintings, but her quip had uncovered something more. An idealist. That calm. That unbreakable, imperturbable calm. Her gaze fixed on his hands. Nina hadn’t flinched when he touched her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t wondering whether she should be afraid.

Idealists may save lives or commit atrocities past the time that people working for profit would down a beer and call it a day. But perhaps it wasn’t the orc himself unsettled her. Perhaps that self-assurance of his, and his cloak of dusty midnight, that just reminded her of someone else.

Someone who calmly caused pain.

There was a moment of quiet.

“Then, I will be taking my leave, and leave you with my gratitude.” Nina bowed her head. Dusty brown braids adorned with shards of coral fell against her smile, and she pulled them behind her ears. She gazed at him from under her fingers. “Unless you would like to accompany me for a walk? I’m not expecting to need anymore rescuing soon. It’s just…It’s nice to talk to someone. Only if you have nothing better to do.” Her voice faltered a bit. She glanced at the blue sky. “Just to talk.”

Between the blizzards of the Spine and being shipwrecked on an island with a single palm, the busy army camp was still the place she’d felt most alone.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

What is it that you seek, then?

"Peace."

This, a seeming paradox, as he was heading toward war. But he had not sought out this battle. It had found him, even before he was born. It had found him through his mother, through her tribe, and what had happened to them. It had found him through the actions of Menalus and his fire giants, through the Blight Orcs who had lost their way under their rule. It had found him through the small altercation between Nina and the Blight Orc who had threatened her, he who was possessed of raw physical strength but who was not versed in the noble restraint of its use.

Peace. Duresh would not find it if he did not heed the call of this battle Loakina had guided him toward. His warrior's spirit would cry out, for his heart had advised him that this fight was noble. The fire giants needed to be opposed--deposed, should Duresh dare to think himself capable of such a monumental task. The Blight Orcs needed to be shown the old way, not the corrupted idea of strength under which they currently labored.

Yes, he was heading toward war. But, in so doing, he was also heading toward the peace beyond it.

A moment of quiet between the two of them.

And Nina said she would be leaving. Though she soon after amended this statement, offering up the possibility that he could accompany her on her walk. Unexpected, even if it should not have been. Were they not both strangers in a strange land? And Duresh himself had been traveling alone for some time now.

"Yes. That would be fine," Duresh said. With regard to having nothing better to do, a minor rectification. "I walk toward that which is patient. It awaits me, and I will find it in time. I need not make haste toward the inevitable."

Victory or death. One or the other, in the battle to come. He would with all his might strive for the former, but he would accept by necessity the latter. What he could not abide was willfully avoiding this fight. Loakina knew this well.

So he could walk with Nina, spare as much time as he saw fit, so long as his destination remained the same.

Duresh gestured for her to go, and he would walk by her side.

He said, "You are a long way from home." He did not, could not, know that for certain. An assumption. "How have you come to the Blightlands?"

Perhaps battle had found her, too. Such need not be the same kind of battle Duresh was called to, the colloquial definition of the term. Mayhap those places the Blight Orcs dreaded called to her upon so discovering them, and through journeying within--overcoming strife and chaos, for this was the essence of battle--she found that it pleased her spirit.

And through this war, this overcoming: peace.

How she had come to the Blightlands to begin with? That remained to be told.

 

[Nina]

‘Peace.’

“It’s something hard to come by in these lands.” Nina said, without looking at her rescuer, as they walked side by side. “And where it is, it has a bitter taste.”

She walked out of the gate and along the dirt road, passing by fenced-in vegetable parcels and low houses with thatch roofs. A little orcling stared at them, picking her nose. Nina’s fingers brushed against a wall, and came off with cracked plaster. A poor town, they might not even be able to afford-

The thralls. By the countless spirits, the thralls. She gazed at the weeds lining the road. Slavery existed outside the Blightlands, of course, under many names, but nowhere before had Nina seen it treated so casually, on such a large scale. There was peace in the main river valleys, where most of the population lived, but that was because Menalus’s soldiers had the power to enforce the monarchy of sharp knives.

It was the little details that got to her. The way she’d been told to hide her books when passing through a certain village. The fact that in some Orcish dialects, the suffixes for counting humans were the same as for counting goats. The almanacs.

Weak and shrewd, was how the caricatures in almanacs presented humans. Keep them in their place, or they’d weasel their way in positions of power above the honorable and the strong.

It was in these lands that the travelling painter was trying to survive. Her interlocutor asked her how she got here. A valid question.

“A wizard-“ Nina dug her fingers into the blue curtain. “A Portal Stone.” It had been her choice to touch the stone, just like it had been her choice to play the wizard’s games. She had known that the Master of Crows didn’t like her. She had called out him being a manipulative ass. Nina hoped that Forcraig, teleported to a different place, would be safe. She twirled around the anger in her mind, like a shard of glass in a water bowl. “A wizard thought it would be fun to make me jump off a ledge, then send me here.”

She would have gotten out of the Blightlands. Should have. Nearly did. For one month, she patiently put copper coin over copper coin, doing chores too domestic or boring for the bona fide adventurers. Helping with the harvest. Weaving rope. But-

“I made a deal with one of the Sons of Menalus. So it looks like I’ll be here a while.”

A smile. A calm, competent voice. But something about it had the breathless grin of someone jumping off a ledge.

As they passed an orchard with strange, twisty trees bearing spiny fruit, Nina leaned over the fence and gestured awkwardly. She whistled in the manner of one not really knowing how to whistle. Griska the dire wolf lurked forward from behind a tree. Minutes later and some coaxing with a slice of fatback wrapped in greasy paper, the dire wolf was convinced to accompany them. Nina put the curtain-saddle back and removed the muzzle, looking like her main focus was to avoid getting injured as she danced around the beast on the song of reassuring small-talk.

They kept walking. There wasn’t much village to speak of. Soon, it gave way to fields, and beyond that the blight was so close that Nina could see it just by rising on her toes.

“If we walk out of this town together, are you going to kill me?” Nina asked. ‘Peace’, the word echoed in her mind. Idealists could go to dangerous ends. She waved her fingers around. “Being a gear in the war machine and all that.”

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

A bitter taste. Perhaps, if one would so allow the taste to be bitter.

Duresh wordlessly walked beside Nina. Thralls. He did not know for certain if she was one, or had been one, or never was one. But, regardless, there were thralls in the Blightlands. Slavery. The ultimate disrespecting of another and oneself. To lord might over those meek and to force them into labor that should have been one's own. It robbed the enslaved of their autonomy, and the slavers of spiritual fulfillment. This was anathema to the old way. For reasons apparent in the case of the enslaved, but even the slavers were degraded. Simple might was not strength. Those "weaker" were in fact stronger than those who enslaved them, for their endurance and especially for their courage among they who made attempts to escape.

Nina elaborated on how she had come to the Blightlands. How she literally had come to the Blightlands. A Portal Stone. But there was more beside the method of travel. A wizard. One who thought it "fun" to make her jump off a ledge? Then send her here?

Seemed that there was a lot left unspoken. But Duresh did not press her on it.

I made a deal with one of the Sons of Menalus.

Duresh made no outward change in his expression, but, inwardly, a flare of eagerness rose from his chest. He waited patiently as Nina summoned the dire wolf back (yet more left unspoken in that regard, how she had come to have such a formidable beast at her command). A Son of Menalus. One of the fire giants of Molthal. There was perhaps an opportunity in this.

The village fell away around them, and the fields and those tending them emerged. He did not know if they who were in the fields were thralls or not. If they were, then there was no clearer example of the sword plunged into the spirits of the slavers through the ignoble act of slavery. No task was menial, none beneath a person's so-called "station." It was not hyperbolic to say that there was no act more righteous and virtuous than tending one's own field. Literal field or proverbial, this remained true, for one's spirit--should one listen closely--well advised of this.

If we walk out of this town together, are you going to kill me?

The abruptness of the question brought a small smile and a single throaty laugh to Duresh. He said, "No."

He thought to clarify his position.

"I do not wish to bring peace to the Blightlands. I can no more control what ultimately happens here than I can the color of the sky. All I can control is myself. If some measure of peace results as a consequence of my actions, then that is all for the better. But I shall pursue the battle which has found me, which has drawn me here, and through this my warrior's spirit will be content."

He looked at her then.

"And that battle involves the fire giants of Molthal. The Sons of Menalus, who have led countless orcs from the old way."

 

[Nina]

“To treat all living beings as people.” Nina eventually said. ‘That’s treason,’ had been her first thought. She bit her lip. He spoke of the old way… It probably wasn’t, treason. Blight Orcs were too secure in their might to fear simple words. “Human, orc, dragon, plant, beast. That doesn’t mean expecting benevolence, or even similar motivations.” She continued. She spun on her heels, and her arms seemed to embrace the crops, the weeds, the workers in the distance, the sky. “But people are people because they can relate. If you can relate to someone, you can learn from them.” It was a subtle concept. It didn’t mean not causing harm, because some interactions were antagonistic, such as hunting. It meant being mindful about it.

Her grandparents even said that some rocks are alive.

For a moment, there was a flicker in her eyes. Something that hinted at the fire that had carried the travelling painter across the known world.

“My grandparents raised me. We call it tradition.”

Nina raised her palm, and asked for a minute. She climbed on Griska, and sighed as she took off weight from her knee. The goddamn cat was still there.

“I was going to suggest you turn back when we reached the river.” Nina said. She tried to pick up the cat huddled at the nape of Griska’s neck, but somehow it dug its claws into a matted knot of fur, and the dire wolf jolted meters away before Nina took control of the reins. “I still will. But perhaps it would be better for you to listen to my story and decide for yourself.”

The cat purred aggressively, and swung at her face a tail whose tend was split in two. Nina had some choice words for it.

“I’m not sure what to start with. Perhaps what I will share is tediously common knowledge. I haven’t been in the Blightlands for long.” She wrapped the reins around her wrists and pulled, slowing Griska down until the stranger caught up. Strangely enough, the beast seemed to be unusually content with him. It usually didn’t like people walking by its side, where it couldn’t see them, but this time he only growled a little bit. Nina leaned forward, closer to the orc, and pointed ahead.

“You see the road? How it follows the river at a stone’s throw away. Then meets it, and then abruptly darts off to the side? That’s strange, isn’t it?” Roads tended to follow rivers. “When we’ll get to that point, I won’t follow the road. I’ll follow the river.”

“Beyond that curve in the road, about quarter of an hour away, lies a battlefield. It is a battlefield larger than many towns I’ve seen, just scattered weapons and bones of peoples who’ve died too long ago for anyone I’ve asked to know what they fought for. Dwarven machinery of unknown purposes. Rust and metal and bone shards. They’re a common sight in the Blightlands, these ancient battlefields.” Nina shrugged, and chuckled. “Well not really. Most people tend to stay well away from them.” She shuddered. “And the magic. So much magic.”

It was colors beyond color itself. It was something so vivid that just looking at it felt like living another life, in the same way that a good book or piece of music did.

“It’s dangerous. I’ve barely scratched the edge of it, in the past few days. There’s…things, in there.”

The travelling painter tapped the back of her hand.

“Now. My deal is that I’m looking for magi-artifacts that could be reused or repaired. It’s what makes me useful for the army.” Her index finger raised. “But. It’s still an experimental process. I’m, as the orcs put it, puny. Perhaps together we could find more useful things, to share?”

A shrug. Her shoulders slumped.

“Either that or you’ll die. There is a reason why I’m the only one I know of who toys with that old junk.”

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

Tradition.

Yes, the old way was one of many, as Loakina had said to him. These things that Nina had said were indeed facets of the old way. To treat all living beings as people: this was the very foundation. Respect was paramount for such, yet it was understood that this respect was not to be given freely. Respect for the hunter who brought to his tribe a kill. Respect for the mother who tended to the needs of her children. Respect for the warrior who stood bravely to fight against you.

All people had the opportunity to earn respect. Those who strayed from their path--the warrior who abandoned his fellows in battle, say--could be put back onto it. For those who could not be put back, willfully or otherwise: shunning, exile, or--in grievous cases--death.

A hard way for a hard world. And it was called the old way for a reason. Duresh wondered how much Nina's grandparents with their own idea of tradition would relate to this--Duresh's understanding--of the old way. If Vel Anir was any indication, they might find it savage, in part or in whole.

But there was a particular gleam in Nina's eye when she had spoken of this. Perhaps she knew intuitively, having been in the Blightlands for a period time, of some of the old way's tenets. More so, perhaps, than the Blight Orc who had sought a quarrel with her.

Duresh followed beside the girl, now mounted on the dire wolf. Still a peculiar sight. True, Duresh's own personal experiences with dire wolves were a slim nothing, but he knew that dire wolves were not horses--nowhere near the same. There was story behind the wolf (maybe even the cat for all Duresh knew) that time and travel might reveal.

I was going to suggest you turn back when we reached the river.

Or perhaps not.

A brisk walk to catch up with Nina after the dire wolves jolt forward. And, instead of a friendly parting and the two of them going on their separate ways, an offer.

What she shared was not common knowledge. Not to Duresh. She might find it funny to know that she--clearly--had spent far more time in the Blightlands than him. All these lands were unseen by his eye before now. This revelation of the Blightlands being littered with battlefields stood to reason, for there were many conflicts spurred on by Blight Orcs and their Molthal masters; and, of course, before Molthal as well. Many tribesorcs, from what Loakina had said, thought that the spirits of the fallen would haunt them should they move the fallen from the site of their final battle. This superstition was often taken to its extreme of "moving anything from a battlefield shall cause said haunting."

Human scavengers, obviously, did not feel this way. Duresh dealt with some of them during his time in Vel Anir. Portal Stones made this unscrupulous trade quite accessible for the far-flung human cities.

Duresh let his eyes trail over the flow of the river. Let it guide his gaze down the direction Nina had indicated. Magi-artifacts. Useful, with any luck, in his struggle against the fire giants ahead. He would do well to at least see what this ancient battlefield could offer to his modern hands.

Back to Nina. He said, "I will accompany you, Nina, if you would have me. But in matters of magic I will be of little aid. I cannot detect it if it does not appeal to my senses: my eyes, my ears, the like. Will this be a problem?"

 

[Nina]

“I can deal with the magic.” Nina said. The nail of her index finger dug in her thumb. “A tad. I ain’t no Elbion scholar. But I’d appreciate having someone to watch my back while I do so.”

She didn’t say that her sense beyond sense required focus, that it uncovered a world as rich and fine-grained as the one it overlapped and sometimes more, that her mind wasn’t built for coping with all these senses at once, that it left her vulnerable. She didn’t trust him that much.

“Well, you know me. This is Griska.” Nina ruffled the dire wolf’s side. What she hadn’t realized was that ‘grishka’ was the Orcish word for ‘dire wolf’. “What is your name?”

Fields were encroached by barren lands, crops dwarfed under the dry air until they were replaced by thorns and black-grass, and the unlikely teammates continued on their path.

“The Little Dagger is our lifeline. The river, that is.” Nina pointed to it. Its waters were brick-colored, with flecks of blood where the sun struck it directly. It lazily crawled along the path, knee-deep in places, mostly harmless enough to be crossed while barely wetting one’s soles. A few flies buzzed above it. “The magic is weaker along its shores, at least at the beginning.” Nina explained. She wondered if the iron had something to do with it. Some lands were practically covered in rust, red earth with ribs of red rock, but iron was also a stuff that her grandparents would recommend for dealing with spirits. “Water can break down soil and rock, and sometimes it can break down magic. Sometimes. Sometimes it makes it stronger.” Rarely. Thoughts budded in Nina’s mind that this might have less to do with water in itself, and more with the fact that it’s easier for things to break down than to build up. A slippery concept, that Gray called ‘ent-rope-ee’, and ‘stat-is-sticks’. “If something unnatural starts chasing you, run. Run across the water. If I can’t distract it.” Her lips moved mutely for a moment, as she pictured the strategies that she’d attempted before. “I have an aipotesys.” A word that Gray used. It meant- “An idea. I’ve been wondering if the river valleys, the few places in the Blightlands not, well, blighted, are so because there’s water, or because the water, over hundreds of years, wore out the blight.”

If so, what could one do? It’s not as if one could summon a deluge over these lands, or even should. But with most of the Blightlands’ crops concentrated in a few river valleys, Menalus’s army had no issue controlling them. The place that was most independent, Nina thought, as far as independence went in the Blighlands, was Bhathairk, but that was because the creations of their highly skilled workers were valuable enough for the war machine to be worth their impudence. In silence, Nina wondered what possibly a single person could do in this cruel country.

Maybe they could meet a second person.

They left the path behind as they followed the river.

“It’s starting. Look.” Nina narrowed her eyes, and pointed to a patch of dandelions near the shore. She directed Grishka nearby with a tap of her heel, then anchored herself with her healthy knee in the saddle and leaned down to pick a bunch of the flowers.

The travelling painter separated them in her hands, until she found what she was looking for. A dandelion that seemed sketched with charcoal onto thin air, the caricature of a dandelion. On the ground or among other flowers, it would have looked like a shadow. Through its stem, Nina could just about see her knuckles. She blew on it, and the inky seeds floated away. She raised her hand, and they floated through it, leaving tiny black flecks on her skin.

“These are harmless. I think.”

She let Grishka go for now. Just like one would leave horses to pasture, one could leave tamed dire wolves to hunt the rodents in an area. They also dug up bugs and tubers. Nina gave the commands in very bad Orcish. She just hoped he wouldn’t eat the cat.

“Keep your eyes open. Some of the more interesting findings aren’t even magical.” Nina smiled. By now, it wouldn’t be uncommon to find blunt arrowheads in the dust, among tufts of dried grass. To see bone shards sticking out of the ground, turned to the earth’s color by age. One could see for miles around, up to the few trees and the looming towers of unknown war machines.

“And some of the magical things give other hints. The butterfly-flowers smell a bit like vanilla. But if you hear a howl, that’s bad, might be a Revenger or a Roc-Crone.”

Her fingers brushed over the riverbank. There was no grass here, suggesting that the water level had gone down recently. Perfect.

“The river has another advantage. The clay preserves things quite well.”

She stepped over the spine of a skeleton. There was an arrowhead embedded in its shoulder-blades. A deserter, possibly.

Nina blew on the rest of the dandelions, then let the yellow flowers and plucked seed-heads fall among the bones.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

"Duresh."

And only Duresh. Even if he could have had his father's surname before, he would have discarded it by now.

He followed after Nina beside the Little Dagger. And Nina had some advice that Duresh found peculiar: to run across these waters of the river should something unnatural come to chase him. Yes, Duresh could see the root cause of the Blight Orcs' superstitions--it was unnerving to face a foe against which steel did not serve. Perhaps also Vel Anir and the Dreadlords thereof had spoiled his view of magic: as purely a weapon of war, not an unbound force with far wider applications and manifestations.

He couldn't speak to Nina's hypothesis. Only a tautology popped into his head: rough lands are rough lands. Unless Arethil itself shifted and changed, so would it be.

It’s starting. Look.

Duresh's eyes narrowed with a species of apprehension and suspicion. Perhaps this is what those few people who had seen him fade into Invisibility felt, or anyone who saw magic so outside of their normal frame of reference that the mind struggled to comprehend. Harmless, she said of the apparent dandelion. Yet Duresh could hardly have known this for himself.

In a twisted way, it seemed easier, the life he had left behind: that of blood, steel, and politics. There was an intuitive sense to it all that Duresh could readily fathom. This was also true of the basic tenets of the old way. But of the many spirits of which Loakina had spoken? If they were real, surely they would up-end his understanding of the world to a degree far more severe than the strange flower Nina had plucked.

Some of the more interesting findings aren’t even magical.

"I should hope so," Duresh said as he broke from Nina's proximity and wandered more or less toward the center of the field. Battle-remnants awaited his eye, seemingly springing up from the hardy grasses once observed. It would have been easy to inadvertently stumble into this site, and mayhap many orcs did.

He called back without looking over his shoulder, "How often do you come here?"

And he was going to inquire further. To ask about the nature of the artifacts she was tasked to find by the fire giants' army; better to have an idea of what he himself might face.

But the sight of something stilled him. Froze him in midstep. The moment passed and his foot came slowly to rest on the ground.

Hanging from the hilt of a rusted sword sticking vertically out of the ground was a necklace. A simple necklace made of a rawhide strip and dangling a small jewel of jade. On the jade a familiar crack, right where he remembered it being.

The necklace belonged to his mother.

She had come through here.

 

[Nina]

“Three days.”

The river raised and sunk under the sun’s fiery gaze. Years passed; decades, centuries. Occasionally, the river would bite enough into one of its shores to meet the skeleton of a curved long sword, or the long curved tusks of an immense skeleton, and carved itself another path. Occasionally it triggered a magical trap left over from the war, and a new path was carved for it. Chunks of mud were torn from one shore, and deposited on another. History was buried just as history was dug out. These cycles were older than her, older than people, but Nina sought to understand them in the same way one might explore a corner of their home.

Crane-like, Nina stood on the riverbank on one leg. She eyed her surroundings, and as she focused on her magic the sky seemed to fall over her like a blanket of haze. She reached out with her magic sense – reach out, step, stop, reach out. Occasionally she’d lean forward and tilt her head, or dig in the silt with the tip of her boot. A few times she crouched down and dug with her fingers and knife.

If was a bad knife, she thought. Too sharp. The rocks would ruin it. Her finger clasped against the fragments that she found, and she rinsed them in the rusty river. Her fingertips stroked the feel of magic. An aura of ‘connection’ and ‘space’ lingered inside a shard of glass. A weave of ‘warmth’ hummed from inside a wooden flask. A faint aura radiated from a piece of wood, but shattered along with the wood as Nina tried to pick it up. Perhaps the glass was part of a far-seeing lens, she thought, but the flow of time had polished it to an opaque pebble. Opalescent colors flowed along its surface as Nina raised it up. Perhaps the ‘warmth’ was medicine against chills, or explosive powder enough to burn a city; perhaps it was just really good ale. Lost in thought, Nina hadn’t noticed that her impromptu bodyguard had walked away.

“Ah! Wait…!” For a moment the girl froze, as if something terrible was about to happen. “Wait, wait. Don’t get that far!” She whispered, hurrying to Duresh with long, awkward steps. She avoided a seemingly inconsequential patch of ground, and nearly stumbled onto a sword. “I can’t focus on magic so well at a distance. If you trigger a trap…” Nina’s lips tightened. She breathed out, and wove her ideas with gestures. “It might look like a dead place, but…the shadow dandelions aren’t the only things that are alive, here.” She crouched down and stuck her finger in the dirt. “There. Something starts…right here…Some people would call them ‘leylines’, I think. It’s…basically a river of magic. This one’s more of a creek, but it picks up later on. And I suspect…” The beginner magician’s voice broke a bit. She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘life’. “I suspect that some of the things that is supports are more different from anything I’ve ever seen, more different than either you or I are from a plant or, say, a disease.”

To think that the blighted lands could support such richness…

Was there tension in the air, or just her imagination? Had her ramble angered the warrior? Nina twitched.

“Are you o-“ Nina started to ask, but something caught her eye. She rose on her toes, put her hand over Duresh’ shoulder. There was something in his eyes. A familiar glimmer. “Wait. Don’t panic,” Nina said, not taking her own advice, “but I think you might’ve caught a spot of magic. Let me have a look.” She whispered in his ear, as she pulled herself up.

Duresh

 

[Duresh]

Caught in a spot of magic. In a manner of speaking, yes.

Duresh had indeed wandered from the shore of the Little Dagger and thus from Nina's proximity. He had watched his step--for hazards both mundane and magical, though there were far more mundane dangers to step on or step in. He heard the girl's worries once she noticed that he had gone some ten or twenty meters away on his own, but it was only when she said "If you trigger a trap..." that he stopped.

This, truthfully, he had not considered. At very first instant of her saying it, his immediate response in his mind was something like: Who would even trap such a place, and for what purpose? Dismissal. But this initial thought was intruded upon by a consideration starkly possible, and a danger very real.

Those very same human scavengers that he thought about earlier. Either through pure malice or as an attempt to keep others away from these sites, they could very well have set traps. Duresh knew these types of men, they who had no compunction against leaving an indiscriminate and deadly device out to do their dirty work.

Nina, with her warnings of leylines and things that were alive here, concerned herself with dangers of a more magical nature. Duresh, meanwhile, knew well the evil of mundane men, for that same evil dwelled in him too; he was concerned with their mundane doings, those dangers which needed no trace of the arcane to be harmful.

A perfect complement, actually, thinking about it now.

Then he saw it. The jade necklace belonging to Loakina. And he was thus caught in his own spot of magic.

Let me have a look.

Nina's words. Said close enough to his ear for him to feel the faint grace of the breath which gave them life.

"That necklace belongs to my mother. Loakina," he said, the sheer disbelief of actually finding it weighing down his tone to a quiet and almost reverential level.

Duresh thought nothing of trickery or illusion or magical deception of any sort. He saw his mother's necklace, and he believed it to be so. It seemed intensely unlikely at first that it could actually be hers. But why not? Were they not both going to the same destination? Was he not following in her wake?

Did she leave the necklace he specifically for him to find? Or...did this battlefield hold some significance to her?

Duresh allowed Nina a small moment of time to examine the necklace, the area, wherever and whatever she suspected for this spot of magic.

Then he asked, "Nina..."

He thought of how to phrase it.

"...have you ever been caught between two opposite choices? Where both are painful, and both are right?"

 

[Nina]

For a moment her companion’s words didn’t register. Even staring right at the glimmering jewel, all she could think of was, how strange for the leather strap to still be intact after all this time. Then the words hit. His mother’s. Necklace.

The travelling painter clenched her fingers tighter on his shoulder, eyeing the green stone and the leather string as if they were a leaping viper. Her eyes closed. Her other fist slowly closed.

Moments later, she spoke between her teeth:

“I assume – hope - that what I see in your eyes, you didn’t catch here. It feels too…elegant for wild magic.” A deep breath left her chest. “Like painstakingly crafted embroidery.” She let go, rubbed her eyes, and massaged the back of her neck. Rubbing her eyes didn’t help. It had taken effort to investigate that subtle weave engraved on the back of Duresh’s eyeballs, and it wasn’t her vision which bore that effort although her mind made it seem as such. Otherwise, how could she look at things that were straight behind her? “And there’s something even deeper inside you, but…” Her fingers hunted in the air for the right word. “Evasive,” that was it, “I’m not one to resent people their secrets, but please…Just tell me whether that comes as a surprise to you?”

Before she exhausted herself investigating things that Duresh already knew. A tiny whining noise escaped as a sigh. If it came as a surprise to him…well that would be trouble.

Still, what did he know? The travelling painter started to pace, then stopped herself. No point in stomping all over possible tracks. The necklace was his mother’s, she would trust him on that. But so many things could change the context of it being found on an ancient battlefield. Was his mother a formidable shaman, or a hardworking farmer that he hadn’t seen for twenty years? “An adventurer?” She mused. Or, she thought, his mother might not even be an orc. Nina shoved that thought aside before he could hear it.

Was it racist to suspect that orcs with what she perceived as ‘finer’ features had human blood?

“The necklace isn’t magical, unless its magic is beyond my capacity to sense.” She added. She looked at the necklace, at the ground around it. It didn’t look like it had been simply lost, she remarked – not in the way it’s been left hanging. But the ground was dry, and any tracks were hard to find.

Before she could ask anything more, Duresh startled her with a question about choices. Whether she’d ever had to make a really hard choice.

“I-“

I’m just a painter, Nina had wanted to shout. But it finally struck her that it might be a lie.

‘You’re not knowledgeable enough to kill me,’ she heard Gray say over her left shoulder. ‘Yet.’ The ghosts of his fingers grabbed her shoulders. She remembered the dizziness, the panic of feeling too tired to throw up without choking to death after being forced to eat the drugged meal that she’d prepared for the assassin. His hand patting her head. ‘But I can teach you.’

She left. A choice. A fork in the road.

‘No. I don’t like him.’ Nina remembered herself say. Yet she trusted the crooked Crowmaster with a teleportation stone moments later.

Wrong choice. But staying would have killed her.

‘Clemency.’ She heard the Warlord’s booming voice from back in the camp. ‘The Nobodies offer is acceptable - with one change. When the magic here is broken, you travel with me.’

A choice. And all the other possibilities disappear.

“I’m working for one of the Sons of Menalus. Does that answer your question?” Nina said, with a chuckle that carried the echo of a sob. She shrugged and drew circles with the tip of her boot in the dirt. “But it’s not about me, is it?”

Nina gave Duresh time. It was clear that he had something on his mind, and she hoped to hear what it was. All that she needed to say was:

“If you wish to head further in, I’ll follow you.”

The tension in her face suggested just how easy that would be.

Duresh