** 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."
