The bonfire flickered in the cool seabreeze in a pale imitation of the exploding cosmos. As they crossed the strand he saw groups of his folk in its growing light. All made way for Glad Nizam and all bowed their heads as she passed. When they raised their eyes it was Orc who they saw and though they said nothing he felt their judgment in the way they watched him.
Saand took his arm in her hand and leaned against his side. "Ogaz said much while you slept."
"Yeah well he lives to talk."
"He told me of your time growing food. Of the corn you tended for the yeomen, and the herbs and teas and olives for the woman. And of the varied beasts you slew and slaughtered to feed your spectators. You know much of growing and foraging, and something of butchering."
"Alright."
"You must tell Glad Nizam what you see here."
He shook his head. "She doesn't listen to me."
"She does. Have you noticed how she looks at you?"
"She sent me up the maw to die."
"You are a fool to think thus. Or a liar. You have her respect and more and you must use it. Tell her she must leave."
"There's nowhere to leave to that won't kill her and her folk. Leaving means dying."
"And you do not wish to be the one who sends them to their deaths." She pulled him close now. "But for them staying also means dying. You entered the maw. You walked the dry path of your folk's sire. What did you see fit for eating? Look around and tell me, what do you now see? What does this army?"
"Isn't an army," he said. He knew armies from the [brigadier]'s tales of drills and parades and wars. Twenty five hundred starving refugees wasn't it.
She gestured ahead of them. "Look again."
By moonlight and firelight he looked. He saw the cubs had won their game with the gulls and shared their feathered spoils with sows who smiled proudly and pretended to eat then gave back the meat. He saw tuskers broiling sea stars over small driftwood fires ringed by sandstone rocks brought down from the wall, and others squatting and cracking open the stars on the rocks and picking the meager flesh with probing fingers. He saw scalers like him gathered in the seafoam and casting wide nets of tarred line into the black water.
"They've got to eat," he said.
"The reef will not sustain them."
"It won't have to. There's a whaler coming in with enough oil to feed this lot for a year."
She leaned in. "And if it does not? The one you call Mad cannot bear your weight. Forever he fed the sea, and for a time he fed your forebears. Then men and dwarves carried you away and dammed him and drove him into the unclean well. The sea here starved of his nourishment. No fingerlings descended to it. No adults ascended from it to spawn and yield their bodies to his will. Now he finally flows again, but no seafaring fish recall his scent. Those brave enough to swim up his tainted flow will be clubbed and eaten by your friends gathered here."
"They aren't my friends."
"Yet you wish they were."
He didn't say anything to that.
Her grip tightened on his arm. "You must do something."
"She won't listen to me."
"Then you must make her. He is counting on you."
He looked at her like she was crazy and perhaps she was.
She caught him looking. "Yes, he is a river. He knows only what has happened and what happens as it happens. He cannot know what will happen. But I can, and so can you. Look around. Your wouldbe friends will consume all. They will leave nothing. You do not wish to kill but if you do not intervene then your kin will die when the reef fails and this place will die and when it passes so shall he."
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"Everything dies."
"You would know."
He tried shrugging her hand off his arm. "You don't know a damned thing about me."
She tightened her grip. Each finger pressing so hard they'd mark his underarm for days coming. "Mother sun and moons may never meet yet she recognizes her luminescence in their faces. You must convince Glad Nizam. A hundred thousand others depend on it. Creatures that creep and fly and burrow and sing to the stars. Creatures who cannot so easily sail away to another place."
"This is our home."
"Theirs maybe. But you are not them. Not yet."
Again he tried to shrug off her hand. "It's my home too."
"More lies. Lie to them. Lie to me. Do not lie to yourself. Repeated falsehoods are not truth. They are ugly and they conceal your beauty beneath their hideousness."
She let go of him and he saw her pinch something from a small bag hanging from her belt and crush it between her hard palms and he suddenly smelled the [brigadier]'s morning coffee and wet mud and hops left to rot in the rain. Then the firesmoke overpowered all other scents. The great old trunks roared and cracked and sparks rained skyward to die alongside the other worlds stuck in the sky. Dozens of orcs stood in a ring around it and several sat before it with legs crossed and backs straight and eyes fluttering behind closed lids. Among them he saw the sow from the span. Her cub was elsewhere.
Glad Nizam's greenskin shouldered between Saand and Orc and flashed his little sharpened teeth. "Boy I'd enjoy seein how far up this longarm'd go, maybe see its smoke comin out your piggy nose and ears, maybe fire comin out your traitor's gullet, maybe little bit of that woman what broke yew come out her little toy."
Orc said, "What's happening here?"
"Boy yew ain't never spent time in no camps."
Ogaz came up beside them. "Is warrior rite brownskins call trial of fire. Ogaz never partakes. Ogaz only watches. Now Ogaz partakes also. Orc and Ogaz becoming warrior brothers of all brownskins. Of all orcs. Very rare for scalers and tuskers to partake, but Orc's something special and he makes Ogaz something special too."
The greenskin scowled at Ogaz. "Care yew don't lose your last tooth campwalker, else yew'll be eatin mush with this here woman lover." Then he prodded Orc's back with the [longarm]. "Sit yew here and ain't you movin or I'll stick this down your foulin throat and blow your insides to your outsides and fry em up for breakfast."
Orc sat. Ogaz sat beside him. Saand stepped between them and the fire while shaking her waterskin like Booky's [barkeep] mixing a drink. "The ritual is long," she said. "Your new brothers will journey to one place but you must go to another."
She handed him the skin.
"This shall send you there."
He unstoppered it and sniffed. He looked at her as if in question.
"Do not lie to yourself," she said.
He drank and tasted the earthy bitterness. He started to pull away but Saand put a massive hand against the back of his head and another over his holding the skin. She squeezed both together and his mouth filled then overfilled with the mixture.
"Swallow," she said.
He did.
She plucked something from his wounded cheek and he heard the sound of broken straw and smelled sage and mint, and the blue moon seemed green and the green moon seemed red. Her waterskin sloshed as she took it from his grasp and she went to Ogaz to plant a seed in the shattered end of his broken tusk. Orc tried to warn Ogaz against drinking but his tongue fell out of his head and he could only watch the waterskin empty into Ogaz's mouth. Then the other shorthorn nudged Saand's side with the butt of her [spear] and both vanished.
Now Glad Nizam's [weird] held something before them and started saying some words. The [weird]'s face twisted and stretched and when Orc reached out to hold it still he caught a tusk and it broke off in his hand and it crumbled between his fingers like a piece of white chalk.
The [weird] placed something on Orc's tongue and closed his mouth with a kiss, and tusks grew out of Orc's mouth.
The [weird] said, "Go to the desert."
Those gathered said, "Return with its gifts."
A woman was thrown on the fire. She did not scream or writhe as she burned, and her flames were blue like the stilled and swollen Mad and her flesh marched sharp blades outward like armies of spears and charging horse to crash against the driftwood's reds and oranges and yellows. Back she beat them, back and back until the whole fire was made blue. All the gathered orcs melted into the land and the sea boiled away in thick white steam hot on his face and in his lungs. He closed his eyes against it.
"Burn," he heard Saand whisper, "and become."
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> +1 [Rage]: ...I do not believe he ever wanted to fit in. Not really. He was still too attached to what he had been given in the life he once had... (9/10).
> +1 [Renown]: ...there were some other greenskins white eye made warriors. I never knew em. They weren't my brudders. Not like he was... (9/10).
> Gains Attribute: [Altered Consciousness] Don't drink the water.