The building trembled as another shuddering explosion rocked the area around the tower. Running to the small slat window, Tarn peered out toward the direction of the blast, where he could see a familiar smoking crater, one he could remember seeing in one of his earliest childhood memories.

Cannon fire?

The orcs had shelled the beach his parents had lived near, the day he and Sinah had become orphans. Peering past the jungle and toward the distant sea, he could see tiny dark shapes slowly crawling across the horizon.

“The orc fleet?” Bog stared over his shoulder. “They are shelling our position? How could they know we are here?”

Better yet, Tarn thought, aren’t they in danger of hitting the tower?

The vessels were too far away to identify, but if the Progenitors had figured out their plan, they might be controlling the fleet as well. Another blast landed in the jungle about half a mile distant, close enough to send Tarn’s ears ringing from the impact.

“Whatever they are doing, it’s not helping us. Grease Monkey, how’s that door going? Do we need to get Lash?”

As if on cue, he heard the click of the lock being opened. Isca quickly rushed in, using her wings to fly over the debris and to the far part of the room. A quick scan showed Tarn no other doors or exits, just two small slits for windows to allow in fresh air. Whatever they were looking for, it was here.

The scene in front of Tarn immediately reminded him of the heart chamber in the Sword Dungeon. He saw much of the same strange Progenitor equipment, black and silver boxes lined with sparking wires and pulsing tubes, most of them leading off to their target.

In the Sword, that target had been the heart of the dungeon itself. Here, the machinery seemed to be connected to an aged, shriveled orc.

Tarn knelt closer, at first thinking the poor soul was dead. Yet he saw the eyes moving behind the tightly shut lids and could hear the faint wheezing of his breath. The orc was barely alive and in an incredible amount of pain.

Gently moving wisps of white hair aside, Tarn could also see that the wires and tubes were not connected to the orc’s skull but rather a tight, metal helmet that sat upon his head.

“He’s an elder.” Urthin stepped next to Tarn, slowly moving some wires away from the orc’s chest. It revealed a blue tunic with several orcish runes sewn into the collar. “Their High Elder, to be specific.”

“What is that?” Bog asked, some redness coming to her face. “I guess I should know, but….”

“Elders are the keepers of orc history.” Urthin gently replaced the cables and stood. “Much like the Shattered Stone, but only with words. Their history is verbally passed from generation to generation. No one would know more about orc culture and history than the High Elder, not even the chieftain.”

Tarn took a glance at the door. The orc chieftain’s body lay not more than a few feet from the entrance, and now here was the orc’s highest scholar strapped to a chair before them.

“I guess we can see where the Progenitors are getting their understanding of orc history from.”

Stepping closer, Urthin studied the elder’s trembling form as it was strapped to the chair. The tubes attached to the helmet pulsed and throbbed, sending chemicals and substances Tarn could only guess at into the device.

“Then we shatter that antenna!” Bog pointed to the ceiling above her head. “Tarny get me out there on the roof somehow and I’ll bring this thing down.”

If you recall, Narsol already tried that.” Urthin said. “He was unsuccessful due to the energy shield. Granted we have more power here, but we also have limited time.”

“Very limited!” Isca said. “If the sounds from the stairway are any indication. Lash and the others cannot hold out forever.”

Tarn closed his eyes. They were right, but they were also noise and he needed to think. Their time was indeed dwindling, whatever action they took would likely be their only one. It had to work, or all this would be for nothing.

He looked at the equipment on the floor, the wires running from the silver and black boxes up to the orc elder.

“That thing… the device on his head. That’s what is sending the signal? The song?”

“Yes.” Isca moved over to the elder, kneeling by the series of metallic boxes next to the chair, dialing the lenses on her goggles. “I can understand… some of this. It’s like our gems. It is interfacing with his mind, feeding some sort of … obedience signal? It’s sending it through him.”

“The elder is the translator.” Urthin poked at the helmet with one finger, moving the headpiece slightly. “Somehow this device is using his knowledge of orc culture and … encapsulating the Progenitors signal. Making their message irresistible to the orcs.”

“So, we pull him out of it then!” Bog stepped forward toward the chair. “Right? Take out the elder and there’s no signal.”

“Stop!” Isca shouted, still staring at the device. “Bog – the connection cannot be broken that suddenly. You might kill every orc that is under its control! Hundreds, maybe thousands? It would be like pulling your gem out while in still-time!”

“Smashing the equipment would do the same, I’d guess.” Tarn thought back to when the Sword’s heart had been violently disconnected from the Progenitor machines, causing the heart to lose control and spawn monsters wildly.

I didn’t come here to kill everyone.

“Better dead than a slave?” Bog stayed within arm’s reach of the elder, looking at Tarn questioningly. “Tarny, I don’t want to kill them. But without them, the Progenitors may not be able to hold Ak Thanon. We might be able to drive them back into the dungeon.”

Tarn felt the pressure of the moment building on him as if the air were getting thicker and heavier. Both within and without the tower, the sounds of combat grew ever louder.

What would you do? Narsol had asked him that question over and over. How far would you go?

Tarn tried to think of how many orcs would be affected by this decision. Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? He had no idea how far-ranging the control of the Progenitors was or even the size of Ak-Thanon’s true population.

I don’t want to make those decisions! He had argued daily with Ramad about this. Let the politicians and administrators decide the fates of thousands. He was concerned with battles, not wars. Individual lives and choices, not ones that could doom a race.

Orcs had made both him and his sister orphans, as they had done to thousands of children for generations across the Realm. If somehow the Progenitors were to be beaten back, there was no guarantee that the Blood Summers would end.

This had been Yarex’s vision – the moment when he would doom a people. Not his own, as both he and perhaps Yarex had thought, but the orcs. Both paths before him would prove the prophecy right. Kill one race to save another, or stand by and let the Realm fall while the orcs stayed enslaved.

Life or death. Freedom or slavery. Orcs or humans.

As the battle raged on all around them, as their moments ticked away like a timer on his interface, all the eyes were on him. He would decide, despite never wanting to be in this position.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“No.”

His voice sounded like it had come from someone else, but Tarn had never felt more sure of anything in his life. He would not accept either choice. There had to be another way.

“Tarny, no?” Bog gestured at the barred door, where the sounds of battle were getting louder. “They can’t hold out much longer. What do you mean, no?”

“I mean we’re not killing the orcs!” He turned to Bog. “We’re not going to win that way. I’m not becoming… Lurim.”

“If we fail to act.” Urthin’s face betrayed no sympathy. “We may doom both races.”

His mind came back to Isca’s words, her warnings of the death that disconnecting the orcs from the song would create.

“Isca – you said the sudden shock would kill the orcs. What do you mean?”

“It’s like the gems, Tarn. When we removed them from people – in our early tests in the dungeon, the sudden shock killed them. The process can be done, but only slowly. This signal is like that. If we had an hour and a way to … step down the signal. Diminish it somehow.”

“Then I’ll put that helmet on.” Tarn stepped toward the elder. “If I put it on, the Progenitor’s message won’t work. There will be enough of a signal there and then we can .. slowly kill this box here?”

“Maybe?” Isca shook her head, concern growing on her face. “I mean – yes, I can shut it down. I’m sure of that. I just don’t know what will happen to you. It could kill you.”

“If that’s what it takes. But he’s alive.” Tarn pointed at the orc elder, breathing calmly as he slept. “I mean, we don’t know what state his mind is in sure, but we only need to buy you enough time.”

“Maybe,” Isca repeated. “I think I need about ten minutes to shut all this down. I can’t be sure – it might work, or it might not. But Tarn there’s another point to consider even if it does!”

“Which is?”

“You are human,” Urthin said. “Human memories. Human culture and history will be transmitted to all their minds. You’d possibly be re-writing the orcs to be … us.”

“There’s more.” Isca was kneeling by the chair, focusing her goggles on the cables leading between the Progenitor equipment and the poor soul strapped to them. “This helmet – these connections – they were built and designed for orcs, Tarn. I can’t be sure it would even work for you, and it might kill you in the process anyway.”

“We can’t leave them like this…” Tarn looked out the window again, seeing the fires of battle raging. “And we don’t have anyone who…”

He looked across the room, locking eyes with Bog and seeing the look of recognition in her stare. She had realized it too – the one way out of this mess.

“I can wear it.” She took a tentative step toward the chair, stopping to look at Tarn. “It’s the only way. I have no memory of orc culture, no knowledge of their …our… history. I won’t replace them with anything.”

“They’d be like you.” Urthin put his hand on Bog’s shoulder, turning her to face him. “You’d be doing to them what was done to you. Can you live with that?”

“I don’t know.” Tears stood in her eyes. “I really don’t know, Smiley. But I can’t live with watching them die or be slaves. Tarny, help me know if this is right.”

It wasn’t right. He could feel that in every fiber of his being. Stealing their memories, their history of what made them who they were. It had been an evil fate the mages of the Realm had visited upon Bog. It was fundamentally wrong to erase a person, wasn’t it?

Sometimes there is no good move, lad.

He thought back to Rykin’s words, as the old guard had pinned him in yet again during a game of King’s Squares. Tarn used to tease the old man for constantly using the board and pieces as metaphors for life, but once again those memories called back to him.

Sometimes all your moves are bad. You just have to take the one you think gives you the best chance to win.

With the orcs on the Progenitor’s side, they had no chance of overwhelming the Progenitors, no matter what strategy or tactics Tarn might devise. Yet with the orcs all dead, the result would be the same but with even worse loss of life. Ak-Thanon had already effectively fallen. All they would be deciding was if the Realm would fall too, and if anything at all could be built in the ashes of what the Progenitors had burned down here.

There was no choice after all. The only move was a bad one.

“We do what we have to do.” He held his hand out to Bog, feeling her trembling fingers clasp onto his. “And we’ll do it together.”

“Our pain brought us to this moment.” Her hand gripped his tight. “Yours and mine. The blood and dark of our past, give us the power to reshape our future. It is our strength, Tarn, and now it will be theirs as well.”

As Bog placed the helmet upon her head, her hand suddenly clenched Tarn’s with violent force. His vision went white, as a roaring hiss began to fill his ears.

Inside his mind, the same words were printed in dark red letters, over and over again.

MEMORY REWRITE IN PROGRESS

Behind the words, images began to form. More than images, they had sounds and smells, all of his senses engaged. They were fragments, the shattered mirror of days gone by.

But not his own.

He was on a wooden table. He felt incredibly strong, with a power in his muscles such as he had never experienced. Yet he could not move, he was bound and strapped. Leather and iron impeded his progress.

An orc in ochre-colored robes walked toward him, a long wooden staff in hand. He spoke a language using words Tarn knew, but somehow his mind could not understand. He could sense the power in the man as he came closer, peering at him from within a shadowed hood.

He pulled the hood, revealing himself to be not an orc but a human. His thin, dark beard was shaved ornately, conveying his status as a mage.

This was not Lurim, but a high acolyte underneath the Realm’s Arch Mage. He reached toward Tarn, holding the glowing tip of the staff as it grew closer and closer to his face. He could feel the heat from the weapon as it passed his eyes, then the searing pain as it came to touch his forehead.

A flurry of images fell upon him like an avalanche. The thick vines of jungles flew past in an instant. Blades clattered all around him. Orcs and humans both came at him, yet he was the equal of them all. Blood filled the sky as it fell upon his enemies. He was the Kai Vai Ryiah, the greatest of all the chieftain’s warriors. He had no equal in battle. He was…

Who was he?

His thoughts suddenly became clouded and disconnected, as if they had been thrown into a vast pool. He saw himself tending a field, then throwing out a fishing net. Sitting in the back of a class, accompanying his brothers on a hunting party, then saluting an officer in the chieftain’s army.

He was all of these things, he had the knowledge of hundreds of lifetimes. He had countless children, siblings, husbands, wives, elders, and infants. He died a thousand times and was born a thousand more. All under the hot sun of the Ak-Thanon sky, every life that of an orc.

The chorus of voices and memories became only one, a single song crying out in the lonely darkness. He was on a beach, back in the Realm. He was smaller, the world was bigger, and there was blood everywhere. Orcs and men rushed all around them, cutting each other down, while Sinah’s tiny hands clung to his.

His mother and father were gone, the end of a family he barely remembered. He would forge a new bond with his sister that day, but it was an alloy of pain, grief, and anger. In the end, it could not hold, and he lost his family once again.

“It’s done.”

Isca’s voice was like a lighthouse cutting through the fog running through his mind. He followed the sound, remembering the connections it represented. His team. Friends who had been by him, many through not just the darkest years of his life, but through the times when he found himself.

Urthin, Bog, Lash, and Isca. Family.

Yet his thoughts also contained the knowledge of hundreds of families and thousands of connections. Great songs and legends, traditions celebrated both culture-wide and just within families. Old stories, celebrated jokes, and tales passed down from elder to child.

Each cultural memory was a candle in his thoughts, their presence a sea of flame that ran across thousands of years of orc culture. Embedded within each was a whisper from another world, the thoughts and goals of the Progenitors added like a subtle fragrance.

One by one, the candles began to go out. The light dimmed, as did his knowledge of all the orc memories he had been connected to. The fire of their culture grew dimmer and dimmer, and with it, the whispers of the Progenitors faded with the smoke.

His mind was his own again, as the hissing died down in his thoughts. He could remember each moment of his life, who he was, and how he had come here. He was Tarn Arisfal and it was his curse to make hard choices. To change fates, to be an agitation.

“The orcs.” It was Urthin’s voice, cutting through the storm winds in his mind. “They have stopped fighting. They are simply standing there.”

Something ice inside his thoughts cracked, fractures running through the fugue state he had been confined within. It was possible their plan had worked, but the cost of that victory was higher than he could have imagined.

He opened his eyes and found himself looking into Bog’s. Tears ran down her face as she slowly lifted her head and removed the helmet.

Tarn tried to speak, but there was nothing he could think of to say. He felt Isca’s hand holding his, pulling him gently.

“Tarn?” Her voice was filled with concern. “Tarn?”

He barely heard her. Instead, he reached across, wiping the tear from Bog’s cheek with one trembling hand. She reached up, holding his fingers in her own for a moment before releasing.

“It’s okay, Tarny.” Her voice cracked. The lie was necessary, even if neither of them believed it. “It had to be done.”

He stood on shaking legs, allowing Isca to guide him to the window. Looking down through the slits, the dream-like state his mind was in quickly faded away as his mouth opened in shock.

The orcs were indeed simply standing around. Tarn guessed there were at least a hundred orc soldiers, all of whom had dropped their swords and bows and were just looking up at the sky, as if seeking answers.

A Progenitor was moving away from the group, headed slowly backward into the jungle. The massive insect was wearing a protective suit just as Durmin had described, reared up on its hind legs as it fired several projectile weapons back to defend itself.

Yet even this was also not what had Tarn stunned, his mind trying to catch up with his eyes. What shocked him was who the Progenitor was firing at.

Humans.

Somehow the Realm army was here. Charging forward, blades drawn, with a hundred now-helpless orcs directly in their path.