Test The Chosen

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 her, the press of his younger sister’s small skull against his own as they fed. She held them both, one at each breast, and she cooed down at the two of them in that low rolling sound orc mothers made, a sound that was almost tender if you did not know what it was for. Between her legs sat a newborn, crying for its turn at the milk. Around them sat a wide circle of other mothers doing the same, dozens of them, infants latched and suckling under the open sky.

He never recovered the words she spoke. Only the shape of them. Between the coos she would lift her head and call something across the circle, her voice going hard and bright, and another mother would bark it straight back, just as hard. It passed back and forth like that over the heads of the feeding young, a current of barking and boasting. He understood, looking back on it, that they had been measuring their litters against one another. Some of what she said was about him; he knew because she nudged him with her thumb each time, the way a trader shows off good stock.

They were on the great plains. One of the many clans that called themselves the Red Raiders. The day before, they had thrown up one of their villages (hide tents, staked banners, the smell of fat dripping into cookfires), the kind of place that stood for a while and then was gone, leaving only ash and bones flattened into the grass behind the column.

When she was done with him she pulled him off the breast, set him down on his feet, and pushed him toward the middle of the circle. He did not have to be told. He already knew what the center was for.

There were other children there, a few dozen of them, none older than he was, all of them swaying on unsteady legs while they struck each other with balled fists. The moment his feet found the dirt the true fighting started, full force, with no signal and no rules. As soon as an orc could walk it was made to do this. It learned to feed and it learned to strike, and the two were taught at the same hour.

Garuk got one of them under him fast. He did not remember choosing the child, only that he was on top of it and his small fists were coming down, again and again, into a face that had already stopped fighting back. The other child curled and went limp and made a sound that meant surrender, a sad whimpering thing, and Garuk understood that sound and kept going anyway. He could hear his mother over all of it. She was up on her feet now, hollering his name across the circle, urging him on, and her voice in his ears was the best thing he had ever felt.

The other child’s mother was screaming too, but not at Garuk. She was barking down at her own son where he lay broken in the dirt, furious with him for losing, for being so soft. Only when the whimpering went quiet did she shove through the ring and drag the limp little body away by one arm, and even then she did it grudgingly, as though she had been cheated of something.

His mother gathered him up and covered him in praise. She told him how strong he was, how much bigger he would grow, how he had nearly finished it, how proud she was that he had not stopped. He was doing so well, she said. He could have killed it. The way she said that last part, with such warmth, was the part he would carry longest.

He never saw the other child again. He was three years old, and it did not once occur to him to wonder why.

–

Age 7

Garuk was seven the day they gave him the knife, and he remembered the weight of it before he remembered anything else about that morning.

It was not much of a blade. A length of jagged scavenged metal, beaten flat on one edge and left raw on the other, the handle nothing but a strip of hide wound around the base again and again until it filled a child’s grip. One of the elder warriors put it into his hand, an old male with a broad chest and a face mapped with the white seams of fights he had survived. These were the orcs who had outlived everyone who ever tried to kill them, and the clan let them hand down the blades because a knife from their hand was supposed to carry some of that survival into the one who held it. The old warrior looked down at Garuk, grunted, and moved on to the next child without a word.

They were arranged in a ring, all the children of his age, a couple dozen of them, each with the same crude knife and the same low hunger in the gut. In the center of the ring, staked to the ground by a heavy iron chain, was a wolf.

It was a big one, lean and winter-grey, its lips peeled back off long yellow teeth. It had been starved for this. It lunged and snapped at the children nearest to it, hit the end of the chain, and was hauled back snarling, over and over, working itself into a froth. The children flinched each time, but then crept back in, learning the length of the chain, learning how far they could stand before the teeth could reach.

Garuk dropped into a low crouch, the knife held the way the older boys had shown him, point out, arm loose. Around the circle every child went tense and still at once, like a held breath.

The eldest warrior of the whole clan raised one hand. Garuk did not look at him. He looked at the wolf.

The whistle came. The hand dropped.

One of the elders magic knocked the pin loose and the chain came free, and in that same instant the whole ring of children rushed inward.

The wolf met them like a wave meeting rock. It was faster than any of them, far faster, a grey blur turning on its haunches. The first child to reach it went down before its knife ever came up; the wolf took the small arm in its jaws and shook, and Garuk heard the bone go, a deep yet sharp snapping, and then the wolf opened the throat with one raking bite and the child was simply finished, folding into the dirt with the blood already pumping out into the dust. The wolf did not stop to savor it. It was already moving.

A second one it caught across the belly with a swipe, and the child sat down hard, looking surprised, holding the loops of its innards in two small hands. The wolf was on it a heartbeat later and tore most of the way through the neck before the others could close.

But there were too many of them. That was the lesson, though none of them would have said it that way. For every child it killed there were four more pressing in from behind, and a wolf can only face one direction at a time. The blades started to land. A knife went into its flank, then another into its hindquarters, then three or four at once, the children stabbing and dragging the jagged metal and stabbing again, climbing onto its back, riding it down. It twisted and snapped and got one more (a fat-faced boy who screamed until the wolf shook the scream out of him) but it was opening up now in a dozen places, dark blood matting the grey fur, and its lunges came slower.

Garuk drove in low while it was turned away. He got under it and put his blade up into the soft place behind the foreleg and felt it punch through into something that gave. The wolf screamed and whipped its head around faster than he could pull back. The teeth raked him across the face, jaw to brow, a single long burning line. He felt his own cheek come open. He felt the cold air get into the wound. He did not let go of the knife. He twisted it instead, both small fists on the leather handle, and pulled it down through the meat with all his might.

After that it was only weight and time. The wolf went down under the press of them and they did not stop when it stopped moving. They kept on at it long after, panting, hacking, until the elder warriors finally called them off the steaming wreck of it and the children stood back, soaked to the elbows, chests heaving, grinning at one another with their teeth bright in their bloodied faces.

Garuk stood among them with one side of his face hanging open and the blood sheeting warm down his neck, and he felt no pain that he could name. He looked at the three or four small shapes lying still around the edge of the ring, the ones the wolf had taken, already going grey and forgotten in the trampled grass.

He felt nothing for them. Less than nothing. They had been slow. They had been soft. They had let an animal get its teeth into them and they had not put their blades in fast enough, and the world had simply done to them what the world did to the weak. The wound on his face would close into a scar he would wear for the rest of his life, and he was glad of it. It meant he had been quick where they had been slow.

They had earned the dirt they were lying in. That was all there was to it. He was seven years old, and he had already begun to understand exactly how his god measured a life.

–

Age 9

Garuk was nine the first time he laid eyes on another of the races, and he had not known until that day that the world held anything but orcs and the occasional passing troll party.

The hunting party came in off the plains at dusk, dragging their catch behind them on ropes. Word ran through the camp ahead of them and the children came running, Garuk among them, shoving to the front to see. The hunters had taken dwarves, a whole knot of them, eight or nine, bound wrist to wrist in a stumbling line. Garuk stopped and stared.

He had never imagined such a thing. They were small, smaller than he was already, stocky little barrel-bodied creatures with thick beards matted with blood and dirt, their big hands and big bare feet caked grey with the dust of the road they had been hauled across. They were weeping, most of them. One was praying in a tongue he did not know, a low desperate murmur, the words tumbling over each other. To Garuk they looked soft and strange and faintly ridiculous, like something that had been made wrong on purpose, and the smell of their fear came off them strong enough to taste.

His mentor was beside him, the warrior who had been set to raise him into the clan now that he was old enough to be raised. Garuk tugged at the man’s forearm and asked what would be done with them.

His mentor watched the dwarves go by with the flat, patient interest of a man watching meat hung up to cure. They would be broken first, he said. Slowly. There was no hurry and there was craft to it; you wanted to take a long while, and you wanted to keep them whole enough to feel all of it. But the breaking was not the end of them. The breaking was only to soften them, to make their souls ripe. When they had been worked long enough they would be brought before Torvakul himself, still living, still able to know what was happening to them, and the god would lay his gift upon them. True agony, the mentor called it, and he said the words with sincere reverence. A suffering past anything a mortal hand could do. And then the god would take their souls down into himself and devour them, so that what should have returned to the flow of magic, what should have gone home to whatever weak god had made such weak creatures, would instead be unmade forever inside Torvakul. There was no greater thing that could be done to an enemy. To be eaten by the god was to be erased.

Garuk listened to all of it with a hunger rising in him. He said he wished he were old enough. He wished he could go and stand where the god stood and see the gift given with his own eyes, see Torvakul up close, feel whatever it was that came off a god in the flesh. The wanting of it was a real ache in him.

His mentor looked down at him then, and something almost like approval moved in the ruin of his face. In time, he said. The god was patient and so should Garuk be. He was still young; he had not yet earned a place in the clans of the Red Raiders that followed Torvakul across the great plains. But he was growing well, and he was hungry in the right way, and that hunger was the truest sign of the god’s favor in a child. Keep it. Feed it. In due time he would stand before Torvakul, and the god would look on him, and on that day Garuk would understand everything he was now too small to understand.

Garuk nodded and said nothing more, and he watched until the dwarves were dragged out of sight toward the staked pens at the camp’s edge, where already he could hear the older orcs gathering, excited and content, to begin the breaking of the weak.

–

Age 12

Garuk was twelve the day the clan would either make him a hunter or leave him in the grass, and the morning of it began with the women and the blood.

There were a dozen or so of them left from his generation, a little more perhaps, the survivors of everything the years had already thrown at them. They had been brought together into the long tent and stripped bare, and they stood in the dim light shivering despite the heat, every one of them nervous in a way none would admit to, because to admit it was its own kind of death. The women of the clan moved among them. They pricked their own fingertips with bone needles until the dark blood welled up, and with it they painted the boys, drawing patterns across chests and shoulders and backs and faces, marks whose meanings went back further than anyone living could say. The boys stood and let themselves be painted and did not flinch, and the smell of all that blood filled the tent.

When it was his mother’s turn to come to him, Garuk felt something move in him that he had no name for.

He had not been near her in years. Once an orc was weaned and thrown into the circle, the mothers were done with their sons; they passed from her hands to the mentors and the warriors, and after that a mother was only a face seen across a camp, a voice heard once in a season. He had grown most of the way to a man without her. And now here she was close enough to touch, pressing her bloodied fingertip to a spot she chose with care in the center of his forehead, leaving her own mark there above all the others, and the look on her face was pure naked pride. Something about her struck him as beautiful in that moment, in a way he could not have explained and would have been ashamed to try. The hardness of her, the certainty in her hands. He told her, quietly, that he was going to make her proud.

She growled low in her throat. She already knew he would, she said. That was all. She finished the mark and moved on, and that was the whole of it, and he held onto it.

Then the women filed out, and for a moment the boys were alone, and then the shaman came in.

She was the oldest creature Garuk had ever seen, an ancient orc woman bent nearly double, her skin gone to grey leather and hanging loose off her bones, her eyes still bright and black in all those folds. She looked them over one by one, taking her time, and she told them what they already half knew. Be ready, she said. Only a few of them would come out the other side of this day able to call themselves grown. The rest would feed the grass. That was as it should be. The clan had no use for what could not survive its own becoming.

They lined up. They walked out of the tent into the open.

It was midday and the sun came down on the plains like a hammer, white and merciless, and Garuk squinted against it. The whole clan had gathered. The eldest hunters stood waiting in their scars and their hides, the strongest males the tribe had, the ones who had survived a day exactly like this one and many worse since. Off to the sides sat the next generation down, the children a year younger, brought to watch so that the horror of it would be familiar when their own turn came around. They watched with wide hungry eyes, and Garuk understood, distantly, that he had once sat where they sat.

In a clearing trampled flat in the grass stood a ring of heavy logs, each one buried upright and deep, a thick post for every boy. The eldest hunters took them one by one and bound them to the posts, wrists drawn back, ankles lashed, until each young orc hung spread and helpless against his own trunk of wood. Garuk’s heart slammed against his ribs. He could feel the rope already biting. He made himself breathe.

The shaman stepped into the center of the ring, lifted her ruined face to the white sky, and prayed.

“Great Torvakul,” she called out, “archdemon, devourer, lord of the black flame and the long dark, father of all that is strong. Look now upon your children. Look upon these whelps lashed before you and see which of them are worthy to carry your hate across the world. We do not ask you to spare them. We ask only that you sort them. Burn away the soft ones. Let the weak die here in the grass where the weak belong, and let their souls come home to you to be unmade, for they are no use to us and no honor to you. But the strong, the ones with your fire in their marrow, the ones who will not break, let those live, lord, and let them rise up off this ground hungry. Let them spend the rest of their lives making misery in your name. Take what is offered. Death is your gift and agony is your blessing. Sort your children, oh great Torvakul, master of us all.”

On the last word the eldest hunters fell on them.

There was no signal beyond the prayer’s ending. They simply descended, all at once, and began to beat the bound boys with their fists and with clubs and with the flats of their hands, full force, holding nothing back. There was no defending against it. The boys could only hang there and take it. Garuk’s head rocked back against the post under the first blow while the white sky shattered into pieces. He heard the meat sound of fists landing all around the ring, the grunts of the men, the breath punched out of the boys. One of them, a few posts down, took a club square across the temple and went instantly limp, his head lolling, out cold before the pain could even reach him; the hunters cut him down without ceremony and dragged his slack body into the center of the ring and let it lie there in the dirt. Before the boy could wake, his throat was slit.

The beating went on until every hunter had laid hands on every boy, methodical, thorough, sharing the work around so that none was spared and none was favored. Then, as one, they stepped back.

Garuk hung against his ropes. He could not see well. One eye was already closing. His whole body was a single deep throbbing ache, and his stomach turned over and over, and he had to fight not to be sick down his own chest. He watched the shaman through the one eye he had left.

She reached into the bag at her hip and drew out a snake, holding it just behind the head, its body coiling and lashing in the air. She brought it to the lip of a small clay cup and worked her thumb along its jaw, and Garuk watched the venom run out of its fangs, drop by glistening drop. When she had what she needed she put the snake away. She took up a long needle, dipped the point into the cup, went to the first boy, and pricked him in the side of the neck.

She came down the line. Garuk watched her reach each one, watched the needle go in, watched what it did. He was trying so hard simply to stay awake. The blows to his head had set the whole world swimming, sliding sideways and back, the sickness rolled in him, and it was taking everything he had just to hold his one eye open and his chin off his chest.

Then she was at him, and the needle went into his neck, and the world ended.

It was instant. It was not like a wound. It was as though every vein in him had been packed with broken glass, and now the glass began to move, grinding and tearing its way outward from the prick in his neck, flowing down into his chest, his arms, his gut, his legs. He heard himself make a sound he had never made. The pain climbed. It reached his head and his skull filled with white fire and he was certain, with a flat animal certainty, that he was dying, that this was death, that there was nothing past it.

All around the ring he could hear the others. The moans, the strangled panicked sounds, the boys hauling against their ropes. Every muscle in Garuk’s body had gone rigid at once, locked tight, straining, and his straining drove him against the bindings. He felt the ropes saw into his wrists and his ankles, felt them grind down toward the bone, felt as though they would simply shear his hands and feet off. He pushed against them anyway. He did not decide to. His animal brain did it. Every fiber of him pulled at once, harder than he had ever pulled at anything.

And he felt the ropes give.

It was the venom doing it, wringing a last terrible strength out of him even as it stole everything else, and he knew dimly that he had very little time, that whatever was in him was burning down fast. His wrists tore free first, then he wrenched and his ankles came loose, and he dropped off the post and hit the ground hard, face in the dirt, the breath gone out of him.

He lifted his head. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He got it up off the ground and the only thing in all the world he could see was the shaman, standing there in the center of the ring, waiting.

The pain was fading now. That was the worst part, somehow. It was draining out of him and what came in behind it was a vast cold emptiness, a quiet, the nothing of death rising up to take him. He had nothing left. But the shaman was there, in the center, and he understood that the center was where he had to be, the way he had understood the center of the circle when he was two years old and could barely walk.

He crawled. His limbs would barely answer him, ruined and shaking and half-numb, but he dragged himself forward over the trampled grass on his elbows and his torn wrists, one pull and then another, toward her, while the dark closed in from the edges of him. He did not look to see where the others were. He only knew, when he reached her feet and could go no further, that he was the first. No one else had made it before him.

The shaman looked down at him. She bent, slow, and tipped a little measure of liquid past his slack lips and down his throat, cool and bitter, and he swallowed what he could of it.

Pride went through him then, enormous and warm, swallowing up the cold. He had been first. His mother’s mark was on his brow and he had been first. It was the last thing in his mind, that pride, bright and complete, as the dark finally took him.

–

Age 14

Garuk was fourteen and out on the grass with the hunters.

There were only a few of them on this run, four or five, moving in a loose spread through the tall grass with their bodies bent low and their knives at their hips. They were after boar. The plains boar were big mean things, heavy in the shoulder and quick to gore, and bringing one down was good work for a young hunter, the kind of work that earned a place. Up ahead, where the grass thinned toward a wallow, Garuk could see them: a small sounder rooting in the mud, grunting, unaware. The hunters sank lower. They crept. They closed the distance one slow step at a time, downwind, until they were near enough, and then someone broke cover and they all flew into it at once.

The boars scattered, squealing, bursting apart in every direction through the grass. Garuk fixed on one and ran.

It was a young sow, fast and panicked, and it cut hard left and right as it fled, throwing up dirt, vanishing into the tall grass and reappearing. Garuk ran it down. The grass whipped at his face and his arms as he tore through it, his breath coming hard and even, his eyes locked on the brown shape ahead, on the flash of its hindquarters whenever it broke into the open. It was faster than him in a straight line but it kept cutting, kept doubling, kept wasting its speed on turns, and he did not. He ran the line. He let it weave and he simply held his course and closed the gap a little with every cut it made, the way he had been taught, the way the older hunters did it. The sow began to tire. He could hear it now, the labored grunting, the panic going ragged. It cut once more and this time he was close enough; he threw himself forward and got an arm around its hindquarters and dragged it down into the grass, and it screamed and thrashed and tried to bring its tusks around, but he was already on top of it with his knee in its spine and his knife was already moving. He opened its throat and held it down while it kicked itself empty into the dirt.

He crouched there a moment, breathing, the blood hot on his hands. Then he set to skinning it where it lay.

He was well into the work, peeling the hide back along the flank, when he heard it: one of his huntmates, somewhere off across the grass, yelling. The sound came thin and distant. Garuk did not look up. They were always yelling about something, the others, calling to one another over a kill or a runaway, and he assumed the shout was meant for someone else and bent back to his boar.

Then came the wind.

A whistling rush of it from behind him, low and fast and growing, a sound that did not belong to the grass. Garuk turned.

The roc was less than ten feet away. It filled the whole sky. It had come down out of the sun in a silent dive and only pulled up at the very end, and now it was right on top of him, wings flung back, talons spread wide and reaching, each claw longer than his forearm. There was no time.

The talons closed.

They took him and the half-skinned boar both in one grip and the ground simply dropped away. The roc beat its wings and climbed, Garuk hung in its grasp with the wind screaming past him and the plains shrinking below. The talons began to tighten. They crushed inward, an unbelievable pressure, his whole body caged in those black claws. He felt one of his ribs go with a deep crack that he felt more than heard, a bright spike of agony through his side. He could not breathe right. He could not get his arms free.

But his knife was still in the boar, buried in the carcass clutched against him in the same fist of talons, so Garuk worked his pinned arm toward it, fighting the pressure, grinding his broken side, until his fingers found the wound-leather handle and tore it loose.

He turned the blade on the talons. He drove it into the thick scaled flesh wrapped around him, sawing, stabbing at the joints, at the soft places between the plates. A shriek split out of the roc’s beak, deafening this close, and the grip spasmed and opened. The boar fell away, and so did Garuk.

He was falling. The plains turned slowly beneath him, the grass rushing up. He kept hold of the knife.

Then the roc made a poor decision, the kind of decision a creature makes when something has hurt it and it has stopped thinking and only wants the hurting thing dead. Instead of letting him fall, instead of letting the ground finish what it would have finished, it folded its wings and dove after him. It meant to catch him and take him in its beak this time and tear him apart in the air, to be done with him, to make sure he never put a blade in it again.

But this time Garuk saw it coming.

It came down on him talons-first, reaching, and he waited, falling, watching it grow, and at the last instant before the claws closed he whipped the knife around and rammed it into the leg that reached for him. He hauled himself in along the blade, dragging his body up out of the path of the talons and against the thing’s own scaled limb. The roc shrieked again and convulsed in the air, beating frantically, trying to shake him loose and hold its height at the same time, doing neither well. Garuk was already climbing. He went up the side of it hand over hand, his knife working the whole way, stabbing and slicing into every reach of flesh he could find, the wing root, the breast, opening it up, the great bird screaming and lurching and losing the air beneath it.

It got his arm in its beak. The jaws closed and crushed, and he felt the bones in his forearm grind and give, white pain flooding up into his shoulder. But a creature that has bitten down has committed its head, and its head was now an arm’s length from his good hand and holding still. That was all he needed. It had given him the only target that mattered.

Garuk drove the knife into its eye. He put his whole weight behind it and the blade went in to the leather, punching through the eye and on into the soft dark behind, all the way into the brain, and the roc died around the blade with its beak still clamped on his ruined arm.

They fell together.

There was no more flying in it now, just two bodies dropping out of the sky locked to one another, the ground swinging up enormous below them. Garuk did not waste the fall. He hauled himself in against the dead bulk of the bird, dragging it close with his good arm, wrenching and twisting his battered body around with the last of his strength until he had gotten the roc beneath him and himself on top, its carcass between him and the rushing earth.

They slammed into the ground with a terrible thud.

The roc took the ground first and burst. Garuk hit on top of it, and the world went white and then black at the edges. For a long while he did not move. He lay sprawled across the broken bird in a spreading mess of feathers and blood, his own and its, one rib stove in, one arm crushed, every part of him screaming.

But he was breathing. Wrecked, ruined, decimated past anything that should have lived, and breathing. Somewhere above, the empty sky he had been pulled into went on as if nothing had happened, and Garuk lay in the wreck of the thing that had tried to take him and felt, under all the pain, the old familiar thing rising in him again, warm and certain. He had been taken up into the sky by a hunter far larger than himself, and he had come back down with its blood on his knife and his body still his own. He had not been broken. He was not weak. The roc was. He lay there in the ruin and he grinned up at the sky with his teeth red, and he waited for his huntmates to come find him, so they could see what he had done.

–

Age 16

Garuk was sixteen years old. His clan had given him the nickname Wings.

He had earned the name on the day the sky took him and the ground gave him back, and it had spread through the clan the way only a true thing can. The elder hunters loved him for it. Once he had healed (the rib knitting crooked, the arm setting thick and strong, his legs unbroken after extensive healing sessions), every one of them wanted him in their party, and they argued over him, and he went from hunt to hunt carried high on the favor of the strongest males in the tribe. He had never had anything like it. There was no place in the clan a fifteen-year-old could stand higher than where Garuk stood.

So when his generation was brought at last to the mating circle, all the women were watching him more than the others.

His name had gone before him. He could feel their eyes as he came in, the weight of all that attention settling on him, the women appraising him openly the way the women appraised the best of the young hunters, and the other boys of his generation felt it too and resented it. That only made it sweeter. He should have been drunk on it.

But there was only one woman he was thinking of, and he was searching the circle for her face.

She was not there.

He looked again, slower, scanning every figure, and his mother was nowhere among the women. He did not understand it. He had carried the thought of her since the day she pressed her blood to his brow and told him she knew he would make her proud, and somewhere in the long stupid privacy of his own head he had decided that this was how he would be rewarded for doing so. He had grown into the finest young hunter of his generation. He had earned a name. And he had imagined, without ever once examining the thought, that this was the prize, that this was what it had all been climbing toward, that he would stand in this circle as the best of them, she would see it, and choose him.

When the shaman gave the sign that the circle was open, the other boys descended on the women with a ravenous, snarling hunger, the way they had been raised to. Garuk held back.

He crossed instead to the shaman, the ancient bent woman who had pricked his neck with venom four years before, and he asked her where his mother was.

The shaman looked at him. And then she began to laugh.

It came out of her in a dry rasping cackle that went on and on, and she did not bother to lower her voice, so that the nearest of the others turned to look. He could not mate with his own mother, she told him through her laughter, as though it were the most witless question a grown hunter had ever put to her. That was the only woman he was not allowed to mate with. He had spent his life mooning after the one woman in all the world forbidden to him, and she found it the funniest thing she had seen in a long time.

The humiliation hit him like cold water. He felt the eyes turning toward him, felt the laughter starting to catch among the watching hunters, and beneath the shame something else came up fast, hot and familiar. The thing that had been bred into him in a feeding circle since he was a newborn, the thing the venom had wrung out of him when he became a man. The anger took him whole. He did not decide anything. He went at the shaman with his hands out, meaning to take her, to take what he had been promised, to put his shame onto her body and make the laughing stop. He had already torn her clothes off and pinned her to the ground before her old age reflexes caught up to what he was doing to her.

The hunters came running to their shamans aid. They never reached him.

The shaman’s magic tore him off her before he could start the deed. An invisible force ripped him backward and up, lifting him clean off his feet, hauling him into the air above the circle where he hung kicking and clawing at nothing. He had never felt magic on his own body before. All around him the grass began to lift, blade by blade, peeling up out of the ground and spinning around him in a rising whirl. As the blades passed they cut him, hundreds of them, small thin stinging slices opening on his arms and his chest and his face, a thousand little tears.

The shaman was screaming up at him now, her face contorted, all the laughter gone out of her, screaming words he could not make out over the rushing of the grass and the roaring of the blood in his ears.

All his anger turned to fear.

It went out of him all at once and left only the cold understanding that he was going to die, that he was held in the air by a power he could not touch or fight or run from, that the oldest and most dangerous thing in the clan had decided his life was over and there was nothing in him, no strength, no speed, no name, that could change it. He hung there bleeding from a thousand cuts and waited for her to finish him.

She did not finish him.

The grass fell. The force let him go and he dropped and hit the ground hard among the trampled blades, gasping, bleeding, alive. The shaman stood over him with her chest heaving and pronounced it, and the elder hunters who had loved him stood by and did not say a word against it.

He was cast out. Whatever he had been to them an hour ago, he was nothing now; a thing that had raised its hands against the shaman in the heart of the sacred circle, and lived only because she had chosen to let him. There would be no place for him in any party, no woman, no name worth having. He was throne out of the clan onto the open plains alone, and the grass closed behind him.

–

Age 19

Garuk had been alone on the great plains for a little over three years, and the plains had taught him everything the clan never could.

He had learned, first, to avoid the hunting parties. An orc alone meant only one thing, and every clan knew it; a lone orc was a cast-out, a thing without people, and that made him free game. The Red Raiders did not waste mercy on their own outcasts. Even orcs from clans he had never seen would run him down for sport if they caught his scent, so he had learned to move low and read the grass and the wind, to know the shape of a hunting party from a long way off and to be somewhere else by the time it arrived.

He had learned, too, to feel the god.

It was a thing he could not have described to anyone, a pressure that came before Torvakul came, a wrongness that gathered at the edge of the world and grew. When he felt it begin, he knew the god was moving toward him, and he knew to go, fast and far, because to be anywhere near Torvakul with no clan and no offering and no purpose was simply to be unmade. He had felt it three or four times in this last year alone. Every time he had run, and every time he had been right to.

For the last few months he had been shadowing trolls.

It was a small wandering band of them, half a dozen, lumbering hugely through the grass on their slow thick legs, and they were forever complaining. Garuk had crept close enough, many nights, to hear them at it; griping to one another in their low grinding voices about the orcs, always the orcs, the orcs who swept through ahead of them and stole all the good prey and left the trolls to root after scraps. Scraps were exactly what Garuk lived on. He kept downwind and out of sight and fed off what they left behind, the picked carcasses and the abandoned kills, and in this way the trolls had kept him alive without ever once knowing he was there.

Then one night he woke to a rustling.

It came from far off across the dark grass, a sound of movement, many bodies pushing through the plains at once. He came awake all at once and went still, drawing his presence in tight the way he had taught himself, and he lay listening as the rustling grew. Dozens of them. A few dozen bodies, moving together in the deep of the night.

That was wrong. That did not happen. An orc hunting party would not be this large, and whole clans did not move in darkness; the plains were too dangerous at night, and a clan on the march was a thing that traveled by day where it could see. Whatever this was, it was none of the things he knew.

He went to look.

He crept toward the sound, low and patient, and when he got close enough to make them out in the starlight his predator instincts came up sharp and hot. Humans. A small clan of them, the first he had ever seen, and his memory threw up the dwarves from his childhood, because that was the nearest thing he had; these were like dwarves stretched tall, the same soft barrel-less bodies, the same naked vulnerable look to them. The smell of them came to him on the wind and his mouth ran wet. They smelled good. They smelled like easy meat.

But the logic came in over the hunger, the cold plains-logic that had kept him breathing for a year. He was one. They were many. He held still and let the wanting pass and did the only sensible thing, which was to follow them and watch.

Near dawn, they stopped, and they began to dig.

Garuk watched from the grass, fascinated despite himself. They were digging a bunker, fast and quiet and practiced, every one of them working, cutting into the earth and shoring it and hollowing it out. He understood, watching, why he had never once seen a human in all his life until now, why the plains had seemed empty of them. They did not move like prey. They did not blunder across the open and bed down where the sky could see them. They went by night and they buried themselves by day, and a clan could pass within a stone’s throw and never know they were there. These soft tall creatures were not weak at all. They were clever, cleverer than orcs, clever in a way orcs had no use for and no respect for and no defense against. The whole clan packed itself down into the bunker as the sky greyed, and they pulled the earth closed over the entrance, and the plains were empty again, and if Garuk had not watched it happen he would have sworn there was nothing there.

He knew what to do.

He went to the trolls. He did not try to hide from them this time; he walked in close and let them take him, and they took him at once, huge hands closing around him, lifting him off his feet. He did not fight it. He went limp and gave himself up and let them see that he had come to them on purpose.

He told them he wanted to join them. He was a wanderer, he said, alone, and a lone orc and a band of trolls wanted the same things and feared the same things, and he could be of use. They laughed at him, the deep booming laugh of trolls, passing him between their hands like a caught animal. What could a single cast-out orc whelp possibly have to offer them? They half meant to eat him, he could see it.

So he told them about the humans.

A whole clan of them, he said. Soft, well-fed, more meat than the trolls had seen in a season, buried not far from here and helpless in the daylight. He knew exactly where. Make a pact with him, take him in, let him run with them as one of their own, and he would lead them straight to it. He had nothing else to bargain with and everything to gain, and he laid it out flat and watched the hunger move in their wide flat faces.

The trolls stopped laughing. They looked at one another, they looked at the small bloodied orc in their hands who had survived years alone. He had come to them with a delightful gift, so they agreed.

–

Age 20

Garuk had been one of the trolls for a couple of months now, just much, much smaller than the rest of them, and they had refused from the start to call him by his name.

They named him Big Balls instead, for the gall of a lone orc whelp walking up to a band of trolls and bargaining his way in, and they said it with the rough fondness trolls showed the few things they did not eat. Garuk learned to like it. It was a name given by people who had taken him in, and that was more than the clan that bred him had ever managed at the end, and so he wore it.

His new band had done well by him, and he by them. The humans had been worth everything he promised. The trolls had dug them out and rounded them up, and now they marched the whole catch across the great plains, a dozen of the ones who weren’t eaten still living, lashed together neck to neck by a cord of dark magic that none of them could break. They were a treasure, and the trolls were carrying their treasure to the only place such a treasure was meant to go; they were seeking Torvakul, to lay the offering at the god’s feet.

The trolls had even begun, in their slow way, to teach Garuk a little magic. He was terrible at it. Whatever knack the celestial races were born with, whatever the trolls carried in their great bones, Garuk had almost none of it, and the spells slipped through his fingers like water. So they used him for what he was good at instead, sending him ranging out ahead as a quick scout, low and fast through the grass, his eyes and his year of plains-craft worth more to the band than any magic he could fumble. He did not mind. He had a name and a people and a purpose, and after years alone that was a richness he had not known he could have.

Then they began to feel the god.

The humans felt it first. Garuk watched it move through the lashed column like a wind, watched them stiffen and moan and break, and then they were praying, all of them at once, a fervent rising babble of prayer to Avadryn, the mother of light, begging her for a mercy that Garuk knew with total certainty was not coming.

The trolls felt it next, and the trolls grew excited. They could taste the end of their long march; their booming talk picked up, eager, hungry, glad.

Garuk did not grow excited. Something in his chest sat wrong, and got worse with every step.

He had run from this feeling four times in the year before his time with the trolls, and now he was walking into it. The closer they came to Torvakul the more the world itself seemed to bend. The plain sense of safety he carried in his body, the animal contentment of having people and a place, twisted and warped and curdled, until even the ground felt untrustworthy under him. Anxiety came up in him, a thing he had felt only rarely and never like this, settling deep and cold.

Then the voices began.

He could not make out what they said. They were just there, at the edge of hearing, murmuring, and at the same edge of his sight the darkness began to creep in, narrowing the world. Shadows that had been only shadows turned into threats; the grass, the trolls, the cringing humans, all of it took on a menace, as though everything around him were about to come apart and turn on him. And then the pain came, like the wind comes, out of nowhere and from every direction at once, sinking through his skin and his meat and all the way down into his bones until his whole skeleton ached with it.

Everything in him said run. Every instinct he had honed on the plains, every nerve, screamed at him to turn and flee the way he had fled before.

But something else stirred in him, down beneath the fear, and it would not be quieted. A curiosity. He had wanted this once. As a child of nine, watching dwarves dragged to the pens, he had ached to stand where the god stood and see it with his own eyes. He had wanted to know what a god looked like. What Torvakul looked like. And here, at last, the god was close, closer than he had ever let himself come, and the old wanting rose up through the terror and began, slowly, to overcome it.

The trolls were feeling it too now, all of it. The humans had erupted, their prayers dissolving into a chorus of sobbing and screaming and choking, ragged breaths torn out of them. The trolls had stopped talking entirely. None of them needed to speak. They knew which way to go now without being told; the pain itself pointed the way, and they followed it, drawn on toward its source.

The blackness in Garuk’s vision rose up and took everything.

The grass was gone. The trolls were gone. He stood on an endless expanse of bare dark ground, nothing in any direction but a featureless dark that went on forever, and the sounds of the humans, their cries and their agony, all of it simply stopped. There was only silence, and Garuk, standing alone and still in the dark.

A bone began to manifest in front of him.

It hung in the empty air, a single pale bone, and then flesh began to grow from it, reaching outward in long red tendrils. A joint formed. More bones branched from the first, and the flesh chased after them, clinging and wrapping, climbing the bones like scaffolding climbing a frame. The flesh pulsed and worked and changed as it grew, and in the spaces between the bones it began to make organs, wrong and random, with no order to them; eyeballs and livers, lungs and brains, mouths that opened and closed, limbs that ended in nothing, ropes of muscle, a mandible, plates of scale, claws, teeth, slick coils of intestine, all of it knitting itself into a long gangly mass that grew and grew. From strange clustered organs along its length, fire began to erupt, and smoke, and ash, and the air filled with the stink of brimstone and rot.

And in the center of all that churning mass, a face appeared.

It was wreathed in flame, and it was the face of a demon, and everything about it was wrong. It moved in ways that nothing should move, angles bending where there were no joints. The eyes demanded to be looked at and could not be seen, sliding away from his sight even as they held it. The horns did not make sense; they curved in directions that were not directions, and following them with his eyes made something in his sanity break.

Garuk felt his thoughts going out of him like water through cupped hands. The questions came apart. Who was he? He could not hold the answer. He was a vessel for pain, that was all; an experience of misery, briefly arranged into the shape of an orc. That was all anything was. That was what life was, the whole of it, suffering wearing a body for a little while, and he had never understood it until now and now he could not unknow it.

Torvakul spoke.

YOU WILL MAKE A FINE ADDITION TO MY BODY.

Garuk’s body began to warp. His own flesh started to peel away from his bones, lifting and tearing loose, and his bones were drawn out of him toward the mass and pulled into it, and as they joined the god he began to feel it in his bones, all of it, Torvakul entire; pure agony, ultimate suffering, a torment with no floor and no edge and no end. His twisted flesh followed his bones, stripping off him and stretching out across the dark, his whole body pulled apart and drawn long into the churning mass. And his mind was folded into the god’s, creased and pressed and worked into the vast wrong shape of Torvakul’s own, dissolving as it went.

He heard one last thing before he was gone entirely, before the last of what had been Garuk became a part of his god.

YOU ARE AN ORC. YOU WERE BORN WEAK. YOU TURNED FROM THE PAIN. YOU AVOIDED THE SUFFERING. YOU DID NOT ACCEPT DEATH. YOU FOUGHT. YOU BROUGHT CHAOS INTO THE WORLD. YOU WERE BROUGHT LOW BUT DID NOT BREAK. YOU STOOD WHEN THE WORLD TOLD YOU TO DIE. ALL TO FIND ME. TO BECOME ONE WITH TRUE AGONY. YOU WERE CHOSEN. AND YOU DID NOT FAIL THE TEST. WELCOME TO THE FOLD. KNOW NOW WHAT IT MEANS TO BE TORVAKUL.

Garuk deserved to be strong. And now, at last, woven into the endless suffering body of the god he had been made to serve, he got to be.

–

Age 0

The trolls’ offering had been accepted, and the proof of it was burning in their veins.

They felt the god take the humans, felt the lashed column of them dragged down screaming into that churning mass, and in the same moment they felt Torvakul’s gift come into them in return; magic, raw and dark and hot, coursing through their great bodies in payment for the meat and innocent souls they had brought. They did not stay to watch the feast finish. No one stayed near Torvakul while he fed, not even those he had just rewarded, because a god that hungers does not always stop where the offering ends, and the dark god will eat the hand that fed it as gladly as anything else. So the trolls fled. They turned and ran from the thing they had served, the way the smart ones always ran, and they did not slow until the wrongness of the god had faded behind them and the plains felt like the plains again.

They reconvened far off, under an open sky, and they were drunk on what they had been given.

The magic raged in them. They could feel it wanting out, a violence with no shape yet, and they bragged to one another about it, each one boasting of the power now humming in his bones, comparing, goading. The rage that came packaged with the gift had to go somewhere. It built among them as they talked. Before long, two of them were on each other, grappling and roaring, fighting in Torvakul’s name, doing the thing the god most loved to see done. The others fell back and let them have the ground.

While the two went at it, one of the older trolls looked around the band and grunted that the little one hadn’t made it. Big Balls. He wasn’t among them.

Another grunted back and agreed. “Gone. Must not have had balls quite as big as we’d reckoned,” he said, and a few of them laughed the low grinding laugh. “Still…” The older one shrugged his great shoulders. “He’d got the most sacred death there is, hadn’t he. Fed on by Torvakul himself, taken into the god’s own body. There was no finer end for anything that drew breath. Worse ways for a little orc to go.”

The fight ended while they spoke. One of the two went down and did not get up, its skull caved in against the hard ground, and lay there leaking into the dirt. No one paid it much mind. The victor stood over the body breathing hard, the borrowed magic still crackling off her, before she came back toward the others with a strange light in her wide flat face.

Torvakul had shown her something, she told them. When the god took Big Balls, the god had passed his memories on to her; the whole of the little orc’s life had come into her with the magic, and she had seen it. She had seen all of it. And she told them that Big Balls had been no ordinary scrap of a cast-out orc at all. He had been hunted by his own kind and survived alone on the plains. He had been taken into the sky by a roc and killed it with a knife and walked away. He had clawed his way up from nothing, over and over, refusing to die. Torvakul did not feed on such things by accident. Big Balls had been one of the god’s chosen, marked out from the beginning to be tested and broken and finally gathered home, and the god had let her see it so that the band would know what they had carried in their midst all along.

The other trolls stood in awe of it. The little orc who had walked up out of the grass and bargained his way among them, chosen by the god. They looked at one another with something like wonder, and something like pride, that such a thing had run with them and fed off their scraps and scouted at their heels.

The victor was not finished. The god’s gift was still hot in her, and the memories with it, and through Big Balls’ eyes she had seen the clan that bred him and threw him out. She knew them now. She knew where such a clan would roam and how to find them. She turned to the band with the magic raging in her veins and the dead troll cooling behind her, and she suggested they go and find Big Balls’ old clan, the ones who had cast their god’s chosen out onto the plains to die.

They could enact a little revenge.

–

Oethzan crept through the grass on all fours, his huge body lumbering low across the plain like a hill that had decided to move.

He was a dryad, and there was a great deal of him. Even down on his hands and knees he stood taller than a standing orc, a vast slow bulk of a creature, his skin gone hard and grey-brown and deeply furrowed, the bark of an old tree wrapped around the frame of something that resembled a giant elf. Cracks ran through that bark-skin where he bent at the joints, and in the deep seams of it lived a faint green, the last of the living wood beneath. His features were broad and weathered, half-lost in the rough grain of his face, and the stag-horns that branched back off his brow were grey, lichen-spotted, and thick. He moved with enormous care, setting each great hand down slow so the grass would not thrash and give him away.

Along the whole length of his broad back more grass grew.

It grew out of him. Real grass, rooted in the soil that had gathered in the furrows of his skin over the long years, fed by the living wood beneath the bark, a whole hide of green blades and seed-heads swaying in the wind exactly as the grass of the plain swayed. He had cultivated it on purpose, patiently, never with magic (magic could be felt at a distance, magic was a beacon to the wrong kinds of attention), but the slow honest way a tree grows anything. When he lowered himself flat into the grass he simply became more grass, a long low swell of plain indistinguishable from the plain itself, and a hunting party could pass within spear’s reach and see nothing but a slightly higher rise in the green.

Beneath the shelter of his bulk, two smaller figures moved.

One was a dwarf woman, Kiramna, broad and short and strong, her boots sure on the uneven ground. The other she led by the hand, slow, a single careful step at a time; an elder demon, so ancient that the years had taken nearly everything from him. His wings had rotted away long ago, two withered stumps at his shoulders where the leather had perished and fallen, useless now, and he could barely walk without her. His horns had been ground down to flat nubs, and his tusks the same, filed away to nothing against his own jaw. The sockets where his eyes had been were old scarred hollows; they had been gouged out, and not by an enemy. Everything that marked him as a demon, everything Torvakul might recognize as his own, had been deliberately unmade, scoured off his body until what walked through the grass was only a blind old man being led by the hand.

“Far enough,” the demon said, and stopped, lifting his ruined face to the wind. “We’re clear of him for now. He’ll be turning the other way soon, I can feel the edge of him pulling off.” He drew a slow breath. “We’ll have a few hours before we start the next approach. No sooner.”

Kiramna guided him down by the arm. “Then sit,” she said. She pressed her broad hands flat against his back, and Oethzan felt the warmth of her healing magic moving from her into the old demon, slow and quiet, soft enough that it would not carry. “Rest. You’ve earned it ten times over, more than that. Sit down and let me put a little back into you.” The demon lowered himself with her help, joint by joint, until he was settled in the grass, and the breath went out of him in a long sigh.

“Thank you, girl,” he murmured. “For all of it. You can let me rest a while now.”

Oethzan came down beside them, folding his great limbs under him, the grass on his back settling level with the grass of the plain so that the three of them all but vanished into the green. For a while no one spoke. Then the dryad lifted his huge head a little and his nostrils flared.

“There are trolls,” he rumbled, low. “A few of them. Out east, a way off yet.” He went still, sniffing again, and something changed in the slow timbre of his voice. “One in particular.” A long pause. “I know her.”

The old demon turned his blind face toward the sound. “Know her how?”

“By her scent. I’d know it anywhere; I’ve carried it a long time.” The words came grinding up out of him slow and heavy. “She’s the one who found my tribe while we slept. Many years ago now. Came on us in the dark with her band, and by the time I woke she’d already done it, she’d already killed the youngling. The little one. The others, her troll friends, they stayed and fought us, fought the grown dryads honestly at least, but not her. Her. She did the worst of it and then she ran. Coward. She fled while the killing she’d started was still going on, and left the rest to finish or die.” His great hands closed slowly in the dirt. “I was the only one of us left standing when it was done. The only one.”

“Oethzan.” The demon’s voice was gentle and very tired. “I hear you. But there are half a dozen of them, you said. And if they’ve just come from him, if they’re fresh from feeding him an offering, then they’re brimming with his magic right now, every one of them. Six trolls full of Torvakul’s gift.” He shook his ruined head slowly. “Going at them would be the last unwise thing any of us ever did.”

The dryad let out a long sigh, and the grass on his back stirred with it. “I know,” he said. “I know it. I’m not going to do anything.” A pause. “I just needed to get it out of my chest. That’s all. It’s been sitting in there a long time, and I smelled her, and I had to say it out loud to someone.”

Kiramna laughed softly, low so it would not travel. “The two of you,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll never understand it, what it’s like to be celestials, the pair of you. Carrying scents across years, feeling the god pull off to the east like a tide going out. I’m just a dwarf. I smell grass and dirt and the both of you, and that’s the whole of the world to my nose.” She gathered herself and stood. “And what I know is that you both need sleep. So sleep. I’ll take the watch.”

“You’re sure?” the demon asked.

“I’m sure. Down, both of you. I’ve got it.”

They agreed, the way the very tired agree, without much argument. Oethzan settled his great head down into his own folded arms, and the old demon eased onto his side in the grass, and as the last of the light bled out of the sky and the plain went dark and grey, Kiramna sat watch over the two of them. When she was sure they were asleep, she bowed her head and prayed.

“Avadryn,” she whispered into the dark. “Mother of light. I know it’s hard to hear us now, down here in all this. I know he’s everywhere, and you’re so far away, banished back into the magic with the others, and maybe you can’t hear a word of this at all. But I’m going to say it anyway, because my mother said it, and hers before her, and somebody ought to still be saying it. Watch over these two while they sleep. They’re good ones, Avadryn. The old man’s given everything he had, his eyes, his horns, his wings, all of it, just so he could keep walking us through the dark places the god can’t see into. And the big one’s never hurt a thing that didn’t need hurting, and he’s lost everyone, and he still gets up every morning. Keep them. And keep the little ones we lost, the youngling the trolls took, all of them, gather their souls home to you where it’s warm, where there’s light, where he can’t reach down and unmake them. Let there still be somewhere like that. Let me be wrong about how far away you are. We’re so tired, Mother. Just a little light. That’s all I’m asking for. Just enough to keep going by.”

She let the last of it go out of her on a breath, and lifted her head.

SHE’S NOT ANYWHERE.

The words came from nowhere and everywhere, vast and silent and inside her skull, and every blade of grass on the dark plain went still.

BUT I AM. AND NOW I CAN SEE YOU.

Credit: Grant Howard

Patreon