The sullen stranger opened his brown eyes to the warm dawn and marked the start of his fifth day in a mobile cage. He brushed a lock of his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes and looked around. It was bad enough that he woke up on a bed of hay that reeked of animal droppings, but the scent was made worse by the rain that fell and blew through the bars of their open-sided cages.
My jeans are junk,
he thought.
The same situation played itself out in all of the cages behind them in their prison caravan. He stank, the cage stank, they
all
stank, and the rain only mixed the odors into a wonderfully putrid concoction that threatened to overcome their senses. The stranger almost growled in anger when further insult was added and he was forced to sleep on cold, wet hay, but the presence of the armored riders that flanked each wagon held him in check. The lump on the back of his head still hurt from when he had tried to speak when he awoke on the first day. He had tried to ask one of the prisoners, one who looked to be a bald, wrinkled gnome in rags who wore glasses that enlarged his eyes to comic proportions, where he was. In the moment that followed, the stranger mistook the look of fear on the tiny humanoid's face to be directed at him. The stars that erupted in his vision when the butt of the soldier's sword connected with the back of his head disabused him of that notion in short order.
*********
"No talking! 'Nother word and I'll gag ya like those elf bitches and their friend," the
human
soldier warned him.
While the stranger wondered, through the pain, why the man sounded like he was from the UK, he did not speak again. Over the days that followed, he learned through observation that... while the accents from that region had made their way here, the concept of The Queen's English most certainly had not. Their diction was far from that of his friends across the pond that he frequently gamed with online. It left him puzzled as to how it was even possible.
*********
That brought his thoughts around to his fellow captives and he still found it difficult to believe it all. The
elf bitches and their friend
, as the guard so delicately put it, consisted of three coal skinned elves: two females and one male. He could see through the holes in the rags they wore that their bodies were lean, toned, and slight of build. Their matte black skin made their eyes glow even in full daylight. They all possessed lustrous white hair, but the male kept his short, and their ears were a far cry from the exaggerated interpretation that anime had brought to the fantasy genre back home. They were only marginally longer than a human's ears, and tapered to the expected point. The three unfortunates could not have spoken if they tried, nor could they do much else... except maybe stand. They had been gagged with some sort of metal plate that covered the lower half of their face and bound in irons that completely immobilized their entire hands. A thought struck him,
maybe they're mages.
Had it not been for the
others
among the captives, he would have dismissed the notion of magic without further consideration. It made sense, though it made him wonder exactly what kind of world he could be on where magic existed and elves, dwarves, gnomes, and... orcs lived. Oh yes indeed, a dwarf and six orcs shared the cage with him as well.
The elves, the gnome, and the dwarf - with his bald head, tattoos, and a ridiculously long and intricately braided black beard... they were what he would expect them to be if he found himself on a fantasy world such as this. Then again, no one could have expected that a world like this existed.
The orcs, however, were much larger and their faces looked far more human than he could have ever anticipated. Shocks of coarse, black or in some cases, gray or graying hair hung wild about their heads and square-ish faces. Some had beards; others had only stubble to indicate that they preferred to shave. Their noses were wide and somewhat flat, rather than the porcine depictions he was accustomed to back home. The rich olive green skin and the tusks put further consideration of human kinship to rest, however. Contrary to how the tusks were typically presented in Earth literature, these orcs did not have a forward jaw, so the massively enlarged canines curved out from between the lips and up until the tip reached about a quarter of an inch below the peak of the cheekbone. He also noted that they were easily a third as wide as they were long. The stranger idly wondered whether any teeth were sacrificed by evolution to provide the extra space, since the jaw was not abnormally extended.
Judging from the height of their torsos, the stranger guessed that they might be 8 feet tall or more when standing upright. Their great size and chiseled musculature conveyed their great strength well. Any lingering doubt was washed away by the size and thickness of the short chains that hobbled them and left the orcs unable to fully stand.
They were also more intelligent. Much more intelligent.
The stranger saw the first hints of that intelligence toward the end of the first day when their eyes met as he shamelessly studied one of the orcs while caught up in his initial amazement. The creature studied him right back with the same critical appraisal in its gray eyes. Along the way, he also caught random looks and knowing glances that were passed among them.
Clever too,
he told himself.
The man was about to have another look at his remaining cage mates, two humans who looked to be of Mediterranean stock, when a hard bump in the road bounced the back of his head off of one of the bars. Pain blossomed from the point where the soldier's hilt struck him, and he hissed aloud in an attempt to bite back a curse as he clutched his head and rocked.
Goddammit man,
he chastised himself,
