Tusks And Flowers

** Tusks and Flowers **

Two female half-orcs scheme a better life for themselves.

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. All characters are legal adults and over 18.

** Chapter 1 **

It was said all the Western plain of Khorvaire looked desolate, but it was the independent area known as The Shadow Marches, it seemed to Glasha, that had suffered the greatest during the Daelkyr war. Even now, pale-brown plumes of smoke rose into a dimming late-day sun, the smoldering rubble of villages and war machines destroyed by other-world energies, forces beyond fire that had wrought great destruction before the Xoriat demons were banished to their native dimension.

Glasha hoisted a dead wolf, the last one of her chores for the day, onto a hook above her. Thirty-one of the beasts she'd hung, disemboweled, and cleaned - their prized pelts used for many purposes in her orc tribe. She thanked their patron Goddess, Luthic, the Cave Mother, for an end to the day's work. Her arms, strong from years of such work, had grown weak, and she needed to rest. She thought the word was foreign to her upon reflection. When did she ever get to rest? It seemed there was little to look forward to for her and the other low-status females in the tribe, those she felt were her only friends these days.

The Shadow Marches had been saved from the Xoriat devils at the last minute by the Gatekeeper druids, a mysterious and heretofore unknown half-orc tribe of the region, skilled in the use of natural energies and magic. The Gatekeeper's arrival had fostered a desperate cooperation between the races of the region - hobgoblins and orcs, even the humans. Glasha was a half-orc in a full-orc tribe, a product of the war and its chaos. She knew nothing more than that.

For a time, budding into her early youth, Glasha, with other half-orcs in her tribe, such as her friend Yazgash, had believed they would be welcome to study with the Gatekeeper druids as kindred half-orc, to learn their ways of magic and the mastery of nature, but the Gatekeepers had retreated to their Siberysis observatories, keeping an eye on the extra-planar shields sealing the dimensional rift the otherworldly devils had used to attack her land. What remained of her tribe was only concerned with breeding the strongest warriors to replace those lost.

The call came from the high leader of her tribe, Borglugha, that the purity of orc blood needed to be strengthened in preparation of future conflicts. She and the few other half-orcs in the tribe were no longer wanted in the breeding pits, and given the horrific scars she'd suffered at her only attendance trying to battle her way to a male suitable for sexual congress, she wondered if she still had the presence to bear children.

She didn't fancy her life of toil, scraping by to feed herself, alone in advancing years, no shared hand to put food on the table, and of little value to her tribe in this new age.

"Sun low, we return now," Yazgash said to Glasha.

"Glasha done with chores, but not done yet. Yazgash leave if want."

Yazgash grunted, throwing her last pelt onto the cart. "Glasha dreaming. Glasha always dreaming."

Their terse language betrayed the deep thoughts Glasha had, and, she knew, Yazgash's too. She'd once overheard a human during the war with the Xoriat say orcs were evil but not mindless. She did not know what qualified as evil to a human, and she was indeed far from mindless. She followed what she'd been raised to honor, what all orc tribes did: Fight the inferior, master all environments, and fear the orc gods.

"Glasha not dream, Glasha think. What if better?"

"You know better? Better than Gruumsh?"

Gruumsh was the orc God, betrothed to Luthic. It was Luthic, the cave mother, the planner, and the manipulator, whom Glasha felt attuned to of late.

"Not better. Different. You come, see what I see."

Yazgash affixed the brake on the wagon so that it would not depart its location on the hill without her wishing for it. Nothing else needed said. Yazgash would follow Glasha - for a bit.

Glasha wiped blood from her blade onto a wild braid of her hair which draped down her left side, and then she replaced the implement into her hip pouch, bounding off onto the trail east of her. It was her arms that were tired, not her legs. Her muscled thighs responded with lively enthusiasm as she ran the short distance to the wooded area ahead of them.

She slowed as the trail ended, content that she'd beaten Yazgash there. "You run more. You lazy!" Glasha said.

"Yazgash not lazy. You keep words. Yazgash not as strong as you - harder for me."

Perhaps Yazgash was right. She wasn't lazy, she was just the runt of the tribe, smaller, with more human than orc in her. She too was undesired in the breeding pits. Only the largest and strongest were wanted after the war. There was a time when they both would have been wanted, but times change. It made the orcs strong, they adapted, and perhaps Glasha neededed to adapt too.

She slowed her pace and started walking quietly, threading her way through the trees. It would be dark soon and there wasn't much time. Orcs had excellent night vision; they did most of their hunting and raiding at night, but being seen at night might send the wrong impression to their human neighbors.

Nearing the end of the Daelkyr War, humans had built formidable constructs, assisted by the magic of the Gatekeeper druids. Machines the size of trees, harnessing magic within to power their levers and gears. They fought with equal fury to a horde of the strongest orcs. After the war had ended, the planar seals were constructed, and the Gatekeeper druids fled the region, leaving a dangerous absence of power. The humans were weary of war, decimated and diminished in numbers as the orcs were, but they recognized the danger their orc neighbors presented with the war over. Orcs would march upon any weakness they sensed, and so, the humans threatened to send their remaining constructs in war upon Glasha's tribe.

The leaders of Glasha's tribe were not stupid. The orc's diplomatic reply was that the humans should send an artificer from their village to give them the construct technology if they wished to keep the peace. The humans agreed. While Glasha didn't know if the orcs would ever be able to build like them, she did know the first representatives from the humans were coming next week, to use arcane construct technology and automate the water pumps which brought water from the local river.

The sound of a twig snapping pierced the otherwise quiet fall of their footsteps.

"Careful, clumsy worg!" Glasha said.

Yazgash said nothing but glared in reply.

Glasha knelt down, her heavily muscled thighs folding upon themselves until they were stout planks, horizontal to the ground, suspending wide and generous hips a few inches above the leather and fur boot-backs which covered her heels.

Between a part in the trees, and down a rocky embankment with a thin but steady stream flowing, was a human dwelling, part of a small village at the northmost reach of their domain. It was protected by a wooden wall, and were it not for a height advantage, Yazgash and Glasha would not have been able to see so clearly the activities within.

Inside the fence was a flower garden with a curved and twisting walking trail cut through it. Colorful blossoms decorated its sides, and adjacent to it was a small crop of vegetables arranged in tidy rows. Glasha squinted to clear her vision in the midday sun. It crinkled the lines on her forehead, which made her look somewhat masculine, despite having the unmistakable human-female cheekbones of her Father's genetics.

She'd never met her Father. Orc children often had little to do with Fathers, being corralled off as whelps into arenas where they would fight to cull the weak, and then be sent to matriarchal schools to learn of battle and chores, while their fathers went off to more raids, frequently dying, and if not, fathering more children in reward of their warrior status.

A female orc who chose not to fight gained her status as a mother, and if she was extremely lucky, perhaps mother to a high-status male involved with ruling the tribe. It was in these latter settings that orc women were superior to men, planning raids and setting laws among the tribe, secretly controlling and dictating the behavior of many.

She'd once asked her Mother about her Father, and been viciously backhanded by her, claws out, so forcefully that she was knocked to her knees with blood streaming from an open laceration. "Worthy." Her mother said, and even terse as the orc language was, it was too little for Glasha to know what her Mother meant - beyond the fact she should never ask about her Father again.

Her mother held a half-body-length scar across the front of her, appearing to be left over from a wound that should have severed her left arm. Magic or medicine, Glasha knew not how she'd managed such a wound and kept her arm. It's possible her Mother had been captured by the humans. It was said, during the early parts of the war before cooperation among inhabitants of the Shadow Marches, that humans, in revenge for the many raids against them from orc tribes, had taken orc women in the same fashion the orcs had taken human women.

Stout of shoulder, broad of chest, and thick in arm, her mother might also have just as easily forced herself upon a human male. It was desirable, when the Gatekeepers were immersed among the tribe, to value the offspring of a human and orc joining, as the Gatekeepers were themselves half-orc. Yazgash and Glasha were half-orc, perhaps bred of such enterprising enthusiasm, but sadly, it was no longer the case that their kind were desired in the tribe. It was not a cruelty toward them, it was the orc way, decided by their leaders: Adapt and master all environments of the moment.

Yazgash, having grown weary of Glasha's rumination and delay upon their arrival, whispered to her, "Why spying. Why here?"

"Not spying. Learning. What you see?"

Below the two crouched orcs, in the garden, a female human gathered ripe specimens from the ground and placed them into a basket.

"Human working like we supposed be," Yazgash said.

"Glumbroots. She not working. Vegetable weigh nothing. She playing like small girl. Look at her lips - she singing."

Yazgash grunted in reply. Orcs never wasted words on what could be said with body language: a grunt, or a punch to the face.

"I saw human male bring girl flower. Knelt before her as if defeated in battle."

"Human smart, build machine but behave stupid. Flower no use for anything. Make no sense. Human female weaker, why male kneel?"

"Think he brought flower because he like her ... for just being girl."

"Orc not like that. Orc only value woman for children or skill in tribe with chores."

"Maybe we should have life as human."

Yazgash's posture changed, and she sniffed the air, subconsciously smelling for the scents that Orcs could smell, the social scents that humans ignored, or were incapable of detecting. It was another expression common among orcs, an economy of words, or rather, the lack thereof. It meant Yazgash was considering what Glasha was saying.

"Humans coming to tribe to show us things, why not we go there?" Glasha said.

"Glasha and Yazgash know nothing."

Glasha shook her head. Yazgash didn't understand.

"Not show. Be," Glasha said, tapping at the full of her breasts.

Yazgash started to laugh out loud, and then promptly bit her upper lip, with her lower tusks nearly piercing the skin. She knew she was supposed to be quiet. She covered her mouth with a hand and continued in a whisper.

"Humans not accept us that way. We disproportioned. More like him, than her," she said, pointing to one of the human males repairing armor in the distance. Rough looking, with a thick build, he was clearly one of their fighters.

"We have same parts."

Yazgash grunted, then shook her head. She pointed to Glasha's hips, then her chest and arms. "Too wide, too big. Hair where they not. Hair not same colors. Teeth not same. Ears not same ..."

Glasha pushed Yazgash's hand down, and covered her pointy ear with a tuft of thick, black, abundant hair. She got the point. But human and orc women both had children, both fed them at their breasts, she assumed. How much difference could there be? It was true the lady below had a shimmering golden yellow mane. A color no orc would ever have - there was never any color but black, and on extremely rare occasions, among the adept born females, red - never the shining yellow that humans and elves had. Glasha knew there were dark colored human heads too. Maybe yellow hair was a distinguishing feature of nobility among the human females, for the lady below certainly had an easy life, it seemed to her. The human male's life was filled with toil and untimely death, just as orc males. She would need a closer look at humans, close enough to smell them and figure out what made them tick.

"Try nothing, change nothing," Glasha said in retort.

Yazgash looked down at the earth. It meant Glasha's words had carried weight and that Yazgash had not dismissed them. "We go back now," she said.

Yes, it was time to return. The sun had set low. In the distance you could see ethereal streams of dragonshard energy spewing forth from the Siberysis observatories. It was said those beams of energy were strengthening the seal between the planes, the tear where the Xoriat invasion had begun. Such things were the realm of magic, and tomorrow the humans would be sending a delegation to show them the machines that harness magic, all things Glasha was interested in, but things she had little hope of being exposed to in her future, a future of lifting heavy wolf pelts until her arms were sore, day after day, childless.

Glasha stood in answer to Yazgash's statement, and together they returned to the cart of wolf pelts, taking turns bearing its weight while the other scouted the trail for any trouble that might be lurking. A careful orc always kept a watchful eye for things that might be out of place - a pack of worgs testing the boundaries of the village trail, perhaps.

** Chapter 2 **

Glasha awoke and went to the fire pit which all orc tribes kept in the middle of their place of dwelling. It represents their God Gruumsh's rage, and its coals can never grow cold. She'd seen that magic could do what fire did, but doubted her tribe would discard its tradition of keeping Gruumsh's rage present in this time of valuing the warrior, even after the humans arrived to show them arcane machinery.

It was Glasha's day to get her face art strengthened, and Yazgash was waiting for her as always, paintbrush in hand. They sat on the ground and Yazgash dipped her brush into a fresh blood paint made from the very wolves they'd gutted yesterday.

Human women painted their faces too, though in ways that were beyond Glasha's comprehension. They painted without meaning, no symbols, only shading parts of their faces. How silly. What could one learn about an individual by such a marking?

Glasha's symbol was a blazing lightning strike through her left eye. It was from her Mother; it meant: one who sees things clearly, and while she'd only seen it once or twice in the clearest of streams, and once in a visiting mage's mirror, she knew that Yazgash was a steady hand, and did a good job each time it was painted.

Glasha held still while Yazgash's brush darted around her eye.

"Today humans come," Yazgash said.

It was neither a question nor a statement, for that would be stupid, they both knew this fact. To state the obvious to another orc was to ask what they were thinking about it.

"I challenge for food from Sodagh's table. Challenge for human's supper."

"Cause trouble," Yazgash said, admonishing Glasha in word and gaze.

"Sodagh respect orc tradition. Worst, he laugh at me, and send me away with no good food. We already at low status table, nothing more they do to us."

"Then human dislike you."

"Human not angry, here to make good impression. Chance to meet."

Yazgash grunted that she neither agreed nor disagreed. She finished touching up Glasha's face art and they both left for their daily chores.

***

In the afternoon, as expected, the tribe horns sounded. The massive wooden front gates were parted, and they swung open wide, archers atop the left and right sighting platforms training their bows on the approaching humans. Glasha blinked, turning her eyes away from the bright command armor the human Captain advancing through the gates wore. Magic, or just reflection of the sun, she didn't know. It hurt her eyes to stare upon it too long. In her own tribe, the orc war captain had the brightest colors, but rarely wore metals of such finish. Orcs more often than not took equipment they liked from their latest raid, swapping gear as frequently as a new tooth might grow in to replace a decayed one.

Closing to meet them, with his ceremonial war axe held at bay behind his shoulders, was Sodagh, advisor to the tribe leader. He'd been the liaison to the Gatekeeper druids during the The Daelkyr War. He feared the gods and respected tradition, but was not solely driven by the warrior ethos. It was his open thinking which allowed Glasha's tribe to be the first to cooperate with the Gatekeeper druids and benefit from their magic. He'd been a voice for cooperation among the humans and Goblin's as well. Among the current generation, he was respected in the tribe for ensuring its survival in the war. Fair and even tempered, he'd even attempted to expedite Glasha's request to be admitted for studies with the Gatekeepers; but alas, when the Gatekeepers had fled permanently for the observatories, that hope was crushed.

The humans exchanged greetings and the gate was closed. Time passed until all were dining around the great fire and common area. And so, Glasha acted on her plan.

She stood and walked to Sodagh's table. Two young human arcanotechs sat next to their Captain and his Corporal. The one nearest her dared a look at her with his bright human eyes. A curious contrast to the red tint her tribe had. Glasha had been told her eyes bordered on brown, not red, likely owing to her half-orc heritage. He was smaller than the older human men of many fights but appeared healthy.

She took two steps forward. "Weakling. Not worthy of this table's food," she declared in booming orc voice, and thrust her well-labored forearm out, stealing the meat-on-bone from the human's plate.

The human Captain gathered immense enjoyment from the exchange. This was different than Glasha had imagined, though at least, so far, not in a bad way. The elder human obviously spoke enough orc to understand what she'd said. The human she'd challenged, for his part, looked completely confused. He neither spoke orc, nor had any idea what was going on.

"What is this?" the young man said.

His Captain looked to speak for a moment but then held his mouth still as courtesy to Sodagh.

"She doesn't think you're worthy of eating at this table," Sodagh said.

"But, I was invited here."

Sodagh pulled Glasha aside, knowing she understood common, and spoke in the tedious human manner for everyone's benefit. "Glasha, I respect our traditions; however, there are important matters to discuss. This is not a good time."

The tribe's leader Borglugh roared down from the head of the table in orc. "Let her have fun. Good for humans see fierceness of Gruumsh. Amusing to me, challenge by low-status female." The final part he spoke in common, "Indulge our tradition, but no harm come to these humans. Make sure you understand that, or you'll wish the Xoriats had taken you to their plane before I am done with the lot of you."