Book One – Chapter 16

Things moved in the dark below.

Nagrak heard them scratch and scatter in silence, something cautious in their rhythm, or perhaps something lurking, something that waited and watched. He could not see them, even though, by now, his eyes had adjusted to darkness. It was not full darkness. He could see for several armlengths, the faintest traces of pale glow filtered down from the opening far above — a weak, reluctant illumination that gave the ceiling in a dull, sullen hue. It was barely noticeable, yet it made all the difference in the world. A feeble light swallowed by the vastness of the void below. Below, there was nothing but blackness. Blackness and depth, and the swelling sounds of the unseen things that scuttered somewhere far beneath him in the hollow.

At first, when he had landed, when the shock still rang in his bones and the bruises had not yet hardened into full pain, there had been silence. Nagrak had not noticed it right away. Understandably, he had been quiet preoccupied with the stinging in his ribs, the raw heat in his shoulder, the struggle to breathe through clenched teeth and frigid air. But once he had stilled, once he had settled into the protruding curve of the cavern ceiling that had caught him, and his breathing slowed, he had realised: there was no sound. The moment he noticed the silence, it hit hard.

Simply put, Nagrak did not know silence. Oh, he understood quiet all right, but not raw and true silence. As an Albweiss ork, he had lived all his life amid the unending fury of mountain wind and blizzard, where the storms howled day and night. To live in the mountains was to live with a constant roar in your ears and a constant tremor in your bones, to feel the air tearing at you even when you slept. The wind was always there. Its voice filled the gaps in thought, smoothed over memory, and made the rare moments in which the storms settled just before shifting directions seem like fleeting dreams.