Joshua woke just before the alarm, some animal part of him counting down the seconds until the shriek came. When it finally tore through the pit, a grinding, metallic wail that bounced off the packed dirt walls, he was already blinking his one eye open, already feeling the weight of […]
Age 2 Garuk could not have been more than twenty months when his first memory took root, and even then it came back to him in fragments, the way the earliest kind of memories always do. He remembered the warmth of her first. His mother’s body, the heavy musk of
The bloody throne hall stank of wet iron and rot, and at the heart of it sat Kortul. She had taken her tusks years ago, ground the stumps smooth so that nothing of the common orc remained in her face. What was left was colder. Her skin was the pale
Ilza walked at the center of the line, where the others could keep her between them. She was young for an elf, not yet into the fullness of her years, and it showed in the unfinished sharpness of her face, all angles that had not quite settled. Her skin was
