He put the bacon down, his appetite suddenly gone. He stared into the fire, his jaw tightening. The light of the flames flickered across the old scars on his face, making them seem deeper. The comfortable quiet of the morning had evaporated, replaced by the chill of old ghosts.
“Because our own are rare,” he said, his voice a low, gravelly thing, heavy with a sorrow so profoundit seemed to have its own physical weight. “Orc females of child-bearing age are rarer than dragon’s teeth. We are a dying people. And it was your people who signed our death warrant.”
I flinched as if struck. “What are you talking about?”
“One hundred and fifty years ago,” he began, his eyes still fixed on the fire, as if watching a history play out in the flames, “this entire mountain range, all the way to the Ashewood, was ours. We had treaties with your human kingdoms. The Grayfang Mountains were the border. We did not cross it. You were not to cross it.”
He fell silent for a long moment, lost in the past. “Then your people discovered something in our mountains. Blackrock, they called it. A mineral that burns hotter and longer than any coal. Your Magistrate’s ancestors wanted it. They offered to trade. Our chieftains refused. The mountain is sacred. It is not to be mined, to be gutted for profit.”
“Your humans did not like that answer,” he continued, a bitter edge to his voice. “So they broke the treaties. They marched their armies across the border.And they started a war. We fought them. We are warriors. But they… they did not fight like warriors.”
His gaze finally left the fire and met mine. The pain in his eyes was raw, ancient. “They did not just fight our men. They targeted our future. They raided our settlements while the warriors were on the front lines. They went after the women, the children. They poisoned wells in the clan valleys, brews that did not kill, but left any female who drank from them barren. It was a slow, quiet genocide.”
The food in my stomach turned to stone. “That… that can’t be true.” The words were a weak protest, a desperate denial against a horrifying truth that was beginning to settle in my bones.
“Before that war,” he went on, ignoring my interruption, “our women were as likely to carry an axe as a babe. They were battle maidens, fighting alongside their mates. But after the poisonings, after the raids… we could not risk them anymore. They were too precious. We hid them away in the deep strongholds, protected them. They stopped being warriors and became treasures to be guarded. Over the generations, their numbers dwindled. The poison was in the soil, in the very water of the mountains. Few births, and fewer still are female.”
He leaned forward, the full, crushing weight of his history in his gaze. “Your kingdoms pushed us from our lands, stole our resources, and murdered our future. They built cities like Grayfang Pass on the bones of our ancestors and on the ashes of our hopes. And then, they wrote the histories. They painted us as the savages. The monsters who crawled out of the mountains to raid and pillage. A convenient lie to hide the fact that they were the aggressors. The thieves. The murderers.”
I sat there, frozen, the piece of flatbread in my hand turning to tasteless dust in my mouth. Everything he said, the sheer, passionate conviction in his voice, it rang with a terrible, undeniable truth. My entire life, my entire identity as a soldier of the "civilized" kingdoms, was built on a foundation of lies. The stories of the savage Orcs, the heroic human expansion… it was all propaganda. A children’s story to hide a history of genocide.
A deep, profound shame, so heavy it felt like it might crush my ribs, settled over me. Shame for my species. Shame for the uniform I had worn, the cause I had fought for. We weren’t the victims defending our borders. We were the monsters.
Chapter 9
The days that followed settled into a strange and unnerving routine. I was a ghost in the General’s longhouse. I was not locked in. I was not chained. But I was a prisoner all the same, captive on an island of silence. The Orcs of the stronghold would look at me, their dark eyes filled with a mixture of curiosity, contempt, and something that might have been pity. They spoke around me and to each other in their guttural, rumbling tongue, and their words were a wall I could not scale. I understood nothing. I was utterly, completely alone, a piece of human furniture in my captor’s home.
Korvak was gone most of the day, busy with the endless duties of a general solidifying a new frontier. His mother, Grakka, would be in and out of the longhouse, her presence a silent, assessing weight. She made sure I was fed. She made sure the fire was lit. She never spoke a single word to me. The isolation was aslower, more insidious poison than any I had faced on the battlefield.
Four days after our shared, awkward breakfast, Korvak found me sitting by the fire, tracing patterns in the ash with a stick. It was a pointless, mindless activity, but it was better than staring at the walls.
He cleared his throat, a sound like a rockslide in the quiet hall. I looked up. He stood there, looking profoundly uncomfortable, his massive frame seeming to shrink in on itself.
“This… silence,” he began, his voice in the common tongue a low rumble. “It is not good.”
I said nothing. I just watched him, my hand resting near the dagger tucked into the waist of my borrowed tunic.
“You cannot live among my people and not understand them,” he continued, frustration warring with a strange sort of helplessness in his tone. “You must learn the tongue.”
“And who is going to teach me?” I asked, the words sharp with a bitterness I couldn't hide. “Will you command one of your warriors to grunt at me until I learn to grunt back?”
A dull, dark flush crept up his neck. “No,” he said, his voice tight. “I… I will teach you.”
I stared at him. The conquering general, the Bonecrusher, was volunteering to be my personal tutor. The idea was so absurd it was almost laughable. But I saw the truth of it in his eyes. He wasn't doing this as a command performance. He looked as if he was about to face an executioner's ax. And yet, he was doing it anyway. He wanted an excuse to be here, to close the distance between us. The realization sent a complicated, unwelcome flutter through my chest.
“Fine,” I said, shrugging as if it meant nothing to me. But my heart had started to beat a little faster. “When do we start?”
And so began the strangest battle of my life. Our battlefield was the hearth. Our weapons were words. He started with the basics, objects around us, his deep voice wrapping itself around the harsh, alien sounds.
“Agnar,”he said, pointing to the fire.
“Ag-nar,”I repeated, my tongue feeling thick and clumsy.
“Krag,”he rumbled, tapping the stone of the hearth.
“Krag.”That one was easier.
He pointed at his own chest.“Vok.”Me. Then he pointed at me.“Zil.”You. The lesson was both practical and deeply symbolic. He was defining our world, our relationship, one word at a time.Fire. Stone. Me. You.
