Book One – Chapter 15

By the third week, Yu’s existence had narrowed to silent endurance, his mind dull with fatigue yet crackling with the static of fear. The indistinct paths claimed his footing time and again, each near-miss dragging him closer to the edge where the madness of desperation dissolved into the cold clarity of indifference — the kind that comes when there is no lack for alternatives. Survival no longer felt like a conscious act; it was merely momentum, a grim inertia that carried him forward because there was simply no choice but to keep going.

In the fourth week, they. Fought. Orks. There were five of them, hunched around a wapa wedged deep in a rocky crevice, its mottled hide torn and slick with blood. Whether the beasts sought to drag it free or simply lingered to watch it die, Yu could not tell. What he did know was that neither the orks nor the travellers had expected the other. The moment Harrow spotted them across the fog-choked pass, the battle began.

Yu had never seen orks before. He had heard the tales, of course — boasts from mercenaries over cheap ale, macabre sketches etched into weathered books, and the shrivelled, mummified head displayed as a grim trophy in the Barnstream Harbour Guild. None of it prepared him for the sheer presence of them. The orks were immense, their hulking forms cloaked in patched leather and rough wapa furs that barely concealed the rippling, brutal muscle beneath. Their skin was muted, as if the colour had been drained by the frozen peaks they called home; pallid blues, ashen whites, and the earthen browns of dead soil.

The moment Yu spotted them, he froze. From one instance to the next, he was paralysed by raw, primal terror. To know of orks was one thing, to face them was another entirely.

He had dealt with bormen before — brutish giants capable of shattering a fina skull with one blow. Yet, for all their violence, bormen were familiar. In settlements, they could be tempered by grudging civility, their brutish nature held in check by the need to coexist. Orks, in contrast, were the stuff of nightmares, tales of unrestrained brutality: slaughter without reason, torture and disfigurement purely for its own sake, rape of the old and young, and other atrocities that defied comprehension. It was said they spared no one, not women, not children, and consumed the flesh of those they killed.