What I saw was the cold, hard glint of an unbreakable will.
They led her away, a tiny human female swallowed by the might of my army. I stood alone in the square, the victor, the conqueror. My land was reclaimed. My enemies were scattered.
But as the sweet, intoxicating scent of her lingered in the air around me, all I could feel was a profound and unsettling sense of chaos. The battle for the city was over.
Chapter 4
Kael
The general’s command, barked in the guttural Orcish tongue, was a sound that sealed my fate. I didn’t understand the words, but the meaning was clear in the way two of his largest warriors lumbered toward me. This was it. The end of the line. I braced myself, my muscles coiling, ready for the crushing grip, the snapped bones, the beginning of the end.
Their hands landed on my arms like stone vises. They were impossibly strong, their grip firm enough to hold a wild beast, yet… it wasn't brutal. There was no vicious twist, no deliberate wrench of my shoulder from its socket. It was a hold of pure, inescapable control. They lifted me from the mud as if I weighed nothing and began to march me away from the square.
The walk was a journey through my own personal hell. We moved through the city I had sworn to defend, now a conquered territory. Orcs were everywhere, their dark iron armor and green skin a stark contrast tothe familiar stone of our human buildings. But they weren't rampaging. They weren’t burning buildings indiscriminately or dragging screaming women from their homes, not anymore. Instead, they moved with a grim, organized purpose. They were securing strategic points, tending to their wounded, and piling the dead—both Orc and human—with a kind of detached, professional efficiency. This wasn’t a riot. It was an occupation.
I was led past the huddled groups of survivors. The men, stripped of their weapons and dignity, stared at the ground, their faces blank with shock. The women and children huddled by the fountain, their soft weeping a continuous, heartbreaking sound in the sudden quiet of the city. I saw the baker and his family among them. His wife met my eyes for a split second, her expression a mess of terror and pity, before she looked away. I was no longer their savior. I was a prisoner, a piece of war spoil being claimed by the victor.
They took me toward the command tower, the tallest building in the fortress, the very heart of our now-nonexistent defense. The irony was a bitter acid in my throat. I had scrubbed the stone steps leading upto its heavy oak doors just last week on a punishment detail. Now I was being hauled up them as a captive.
Inside, the tower was in a state of controlled chaos. Orc warriors moved through the halls, their heavy boots thudding on the flagstones. They had already torn down the Magistrate’s banners, their own blood-red standards being unfurled in their place. They marched me up a spiral staircase, past the rooms where I’d once seen Captain Valerius and his cronies laughing over maps and spiced wine. The smell of his cloying, expensive drink still lingered in the air, a ghost of the coward who had left us all to die.
My mind was a frantic, screaming thing, trying to prepare itself for what came next. Torture. It had to be torture. I had killed one of their warriors. I had fought against them. They would want information—troop numbers, supply lines, laughable things we grunts knew nothing about. But mostly, they would want revenge. They would want to make an example of me. I pictured knives, hot irons, the breaking of bones. A small, hysterical part of my brain began to hope they would just get it over with quickly.
My escorts stopped before the large, iron-strapped door of the main strategy room—the General’s newthrone room, I presumed. They shoved me inside and forced me onto my knees in the center of the vast, cold chamber. The room was empty except for two elite guards who stood flanking the door, their faces set like stone masks, their enormous twin-bladed axes held at a formal rest.
The door boomed shut behind me, the sound echoing like a tomb being sealed.
And then… nothing.
I knelt there on the cold stone, every muscle screaming with tension, waiting. The two guards didn’t move. They didn’t speak. They didn’t even seem to look at me. Their gaze was fixed on some point in the middle distance. I was an object. A piece of furniture. Less than a prisoner.
Minutes stretched into an eternity. The adrenaline of the battle began its slow, agonizing retreat, leaving behind a deep, throbbing weariness. My body began to catalog its injuries: the deep ache in my arm where the General had gripped me, the thrumming pain in my head from his blow, a dozen smaller cuts and bruises I hadn’t even realized I’d sustained. The bindings on my chest, soaked with sweat and someone else’s blood, felt tighter than ever, a cage within a cage.
One of the guards finally moved. He strode over to a table where a pitcher of water sat and poured some into a simple clay cup. He walked over and set it on the floor in front of me.
I stared at it. Water.
My throat was a desert, my mouth thick with the taste of blood and fear. I needed it so badly it was a physical pain. But my mind screamed,Trap! Poison!It was a test. A cruel joke.
The guard said nothing. He simply placed the cup down and returned to his post, a silent, implacable statue of green flesh and black iron.
The water sat there, mocking me. The battle had raged for hours. I was dehydrated, exhausted, bleeding. Without water, I would weaken further, making their work easier when the torture finally began. But if I drank, and it was poisoned… a quick death might be a mercy.
My own thirst, the body's simple, desperate will to live, won the war. With trembling hands, I reached for the cup. The clay was cool against my fingertips. I brought it to my lips and drank.
It was just water. Cold, clean water. It was the most incredible thing I had ever tasted. I drained thecup in three long, desperate swallows. The simple act of kindness, if it could even be called that, was more disorienting than any threat. It didn't fit the narrative. Monsters didn’t give their prisoners water. They let them choke on their own blood.
The hours crawled by. The light coming through the high arrow-slit windows shifted from the gray of midday to the deep orange of late afternoon. My body went from tense to trembling to a state of dull, aching exhaustion. My mind, having exhausted every possible scenario of torture, simply went quiet. There was nothing left but the waiting. This, I realized, was a torture all its own. The slow, methodical stripping away of hope, the grinding down of the spirit until nothing was left but a hollow shell.
Just as the sun began to dip below the mountains, painting the room in bloody hues, the heavy doors opened.
General Korvak filled the doorway.
He seemed even larger now, out of the chaos of the battlefield. He was a walking mountain, his presence sucking the very air from the room. The two guards at the door immediately stiffened, their bodies snapping to a more rigid posture of attention. He strodeinto the room, his eyes sweeping over it, assessing his new domain. He didn’t even look at me. It was as if I wasn’t there.
He walked to the massive strategy table, a slab of oak scarred with the knife points of human officers, and leaned his hands on it, studying the map of the surrounding territories that was still pinned there. He spoke in Orcish to one of the guards, his voice a low, commanding rumble. The guard answered in a single, clipped syllable.
Then, the doors opened again.
