A familiar voice woke him. He found himself inside a cave, sitting against cool stone, facing the brilliant golden wastes that shone beyond the entrance. Water dripped from the ceiling and spattered between his knees. The place smelled like the [brigadier]'s wine cellar. Like old things long decayed. He turned toward the voice and he peered down the cave's root where it sank into the world. The oldest orc he'd ever seen stooped there, wearing no covering except an undyed sheet of wool patched here and there with scraps of colored cloth and other things stitched in. A bat's wing. A fox's tail. The leathery face of a creature unknown to Orc, with its eyes empty and its mouth open and its long black incisors clacking together as they swung from threads weaved into the sheet.

Orc brandished the [Skyshard]. The [elder] didn't move.

"What is this place?" said Orc.

"Whatever you need it to be."

He vaguely remembered sitting in front of the bonfire on the strand, and the strange things he saw there. Things defying possibility.

"This isn't real," said Orc.

"No more or less than your mind."

He reached forward to touch the [elder] but the [elder] backed with surprising agility.

"Why'd you bring me here?" said Orc.

"I was a fool. Ask your question."

"What question?"

"Your question. Your question. The reason you're here. Ask it so I may go back to dying."

"You're dying?"

"The whole world's dying, cub. And that's not your question."

He studied the [elder]. The mottled sheet. The face in shadow. All familiar and foreign at the same time.

"Get on with it."

"Who are you?"

"That's not it either."

Again he reached for the [elder] and again the [elder] backed further into shadow. Not even his eyes were visible, only their glint of twice reflected sunlight.

"You don't know me," said the [elder].

"No."

"You will. Ask."

He considered what he needed answered. He thought about the [brigadier].

"Selfish cub. That's the answer, not the question."

"You're not making sense."

"It's your mind. Sense and nonsense alike."

He thought about what questions the [brigadier] might answer. He thought about that as he watched the twin yellow points glinting in the dark. Suddenly he knew the question he was to ask. He knew he already had the answer. He turned to the mouth of the cave and started walking.

"Ask your question," the [elder] said.

But Orc didn't stop. The very edge of shadow and sun lay before him. The [elder] called after him but he'd already left. Red sandstone blazed in every direction. In places stone spires scraped a sky so white hot only its uppermost vault held any blue. Arches drew curves like the sun's path from earth to sky to earth and decomposing stone swelled in arid crests like embers and ash to be blown around the world. Cicadas buzzed from sandblasted formations that seemed to stand and kneel and prostrate themselves before the mighty sun. A troupe of little gray birds darted from one to the next and alighted in their shade and hopped maddingly one over the other then whirl up and dart back again and they never made more sound than the shade. These were the Madlands. Dreadful fire and bare sandstone both monstrous like him. Alien in their ambivalence. Ready to turn the best years of his life into the worst, as they had for the [brigadier].

He walked ahead and never looked back. The wasteland stretched in all directions forever. It roused a base hunger that he never knew yet was always there, like a noon shadow that would inevitably veil the entire world, or the firmament's emergence from the day's sky to dominate the night's. He felt it not as a new garment thrown over old skin but as new skin grown over an old wound. It sought not dominance but [affinity] over all there was to see.

Booky tapped Orc's shoulder with the flat of her [blade]. "Now ya getting it."

"It's all mine."

"If ya can hold onto it. But first ya gotta reach out and take it."

He ran up the nearest ridge. Each blistering footstep sent pebbles rattling down the slope. At its top he stopped under the branch of a tree whose flexible upturned spines made for green leaves and stiff downturned spines made for a dangerous kind of gray bark. In its shade he looked out at the next canyon where orcs of Glad Nizam's nation shouted and ran along the floor with crushed scorpions hanging from ropes belting their waists and dressed boars sagged over their shoulders. Everywhere he looked he spotted more. Three running along that cliff. Five more stalking a feathered beast that reared and snapped at their [clubs] and [boarding pikes]. A legion more swarmed the Mad as it flowed along the canyon's deepest reaches.

"All are brothers," said a lion lying on a branch.

"Sure." He squinted onto the flats beyond the canyon's pit and saw only a great mass of orcs turning everything over and sending up clouds of dust from their feet and black smoke from their industry.

A man with a broken jaw stepped up beside him. He pointed to Orc and to himself and made a sign of brotherhood.

"Brother," Orc acknowledged.

The lion closed its eyes and licked its long pink tongue twice along the back of its paw then laid its chin upon it. The man shook his head and his uncoupled jaw wagged in place. He pointed to the foot of the tree where a dwarf sat with a spine of bark in his hands and his shriveled legs collected beneath him.

Orc looked at the dwarf. "Dwarf, with your eyes so near the ground, do you see Glad Nizam in the canyon below?"

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The dwarf turned the bark over in his hands. "Me da used te say humans were our brothers. Course he never wanted it te be true. Yer Glad Nizam's remindin me a lot of me da. Bit taller of course. And smellier. Human like , if we're tellin truths."

"There are no humans here. We slew them all."

"Then ye done the world a favor. Te the end o humans," and he raised the spine as if it were a tankard and cut his mouth on its blade and turned his head and spat blood.

Orc saw the bald strip shaved from his skull and the brown and purple discoloration on his scalp.

"Recognizin yer work?" said the dwarf.

"What choice did I have?" said Orc.

"Same as the rest of us I suppose. Die or don't die. Hell of a world they made for us."

The dwarf nodded at the wastes back the way Orc had come.

"And a hell of a home they left for ye."

Orc looked upon the barren land. "Who do you mean?"

"Humans of course. Don't be coy with me. I know one of them made ye into who ye be. Ye can't stop thinkin about her so I'm stuck thinkin about her too."

"She didn't rear me."

"Sure she didn't. Sure ye would've turned out exactly the same without her." He laughed. "I'd say be yerself but that's exactly the opposite of what she taught ye. So who made who?"

Orc frowned at the state of the dwarf and his lameness. "Did you die?"

The dwarf spat blood again. "May as well have."

"I'm sorry for what I did."

"The hell kind of orc gets sorry for winnin a scrap? It's plain as a nak's assend that ye don't know who ye are. I can help ye find yer way."

The dwarf held out the bark.

"Share a wee drink te smooth rough beginnins?"

"No thanks."

The dwarf nodded at the orcs down in the canyon. "What do ye think of yer brood?"

"They're a fine folk."

"Ye know ye can't lie te me lad."

"Then why ask the question?"

"I'm worried about yer well bein."

Orc shrugged. "They just aren't what I imagined."

"What ye hoped, ye mean."

"Sure."

"And yer home?"

Orc looked out upon the barrens. "It doesn't feel like it. Though I'm not sure how home is supposed to feel."

"Another lie."

Orc frowned.

"Don't clam up lad. Those kin of yers can't help bein who they were made te be. Not anymore than ye can."

"So we're born this way."

"Yer old lady didn't teach ye te be daft. They weren't born te suck the life out of the land just like ye weren't born te wring the life out of crooks. Men stamped out the orcs' way of bein decades ago. Dragged it into the yard and shot it dead. I'm regretful for our part in it."

Orc looked at him. Much diminished since they met on the span. He tried to remember what the daughter had called him. Waz.

"Glad Nizam's lot only knows how to be what the humans showed em. No different than ye, cept yer old lady wasn't some racist camp guard drunk on his armslength of power.."

"I hadn't thought of it that way."

"Hell. Of course ye did. These thoughts are all yers. I'm just the one blabbin em. Go ahead and feed me some more. Feels damn good te talk without blubberin for a change. As for your home, or yer folk's home anyway, take a look now."

The dwarf nodded at the canyon and Orc followed his gaze. Where once there was naught but orange sand and black water and teeming filthy orcs there now grew rows and rows of good green crops. Cubs swam and splashed in diversion canals. Orcs ducked in and out of stout burrows. From their place high on the rimrock he could hear the laughter and song.

He understood what needed doing.

"Aye," said the dwarf.

"I need to get back."

The dwarf sighed. He seemed sad as if hallucinations can feel such things. "Aye, course."

"Do I just go back the way I came?"

In a flash the dwarf swiped the [Skyshard] out of his hand and swung its pick straight into Orc's heart. As red blood rushed out of his chest and the world faded he saw the dwarf hold up the tool and regard it lovingly and say, "Ye really don't know what ye've got."

***

He fell forward into the ashen sand. It burned his fingers and the light burned his face, and as he turned back to the dwarf he saw only the bonfire, tremendous in size, forcing sweat from every part of him. He watched it burn and as he watched he [felt] it wasn't the same and the orcs gathered around it weren't the same and the sand sticking to his sweating flesh wasn't the same. The world and all its parts were new, as if their truths which had always been there were finally visible to him. Nothing would be the same.

He stood and grabbed Ogaz by the shoulder and pulled him upright.

"We're leaving."

The greenskin tried to stop him but Orc shoved him into the sand. Then he pushed past the ring of startled orcs, past Glad Nizam's staring [weird], past the sleeping cubs and tired sows and midnight fishers. Into the Mad's cool flow they waded. Saand waited there in the boat made from the tree in a treeless land.

"You interfered in the rite," said Orc.

"It was necessary."

He hefted Ogaz into the boat and climbed in after. As they unshipped the oars Glad Nizam splashed into the river and held the boat fast. Her [weird] stood behind her and her eye was red and wild from the unfinished ritual. Orcs drew near behind her. Some looked tired. Others looked angry.

"You leave?" she said.

"We can't stay."

"Why?"

"You overhunt the land and sea like men."

An orc somewhere snarled and Glad Nizam murmured, "Careful."

He said, "This shorthorn knows this place better than you who call it home. She says it won't bear your weight."

"And I say it will," said Glad Nizam. "It be home. It succored our great nations since the world's beginning. Ours be but a little finger against those who came before."

"Perhaps, but humans strangled it."

"So it be leaner. We know this thing. But we be stronger. We be born of the camps."

"Then stay and see. Take comfort knowing you're slaying your home to save yourself."

Someone said, "Kill him Glad."

"Yeah finish dis," said another.

"He ain't one of us," said another.

A thrown stone struck the side of the boat. Another sailed past his ear.

Glad Nizam leaned forward and he thought she would pull him from the boat. The others fell silent. Her great red eye shone overhead like a third moon. She whispered for only him to hear, "Find us food musheater."

"I'll do what I can."

"Do it quickly."

"It may take a season."

She nodded.

"Many may die," he said.

"Many have already."

She heaved the boat forward and slapped its hull with her crop. She said, "If you come back empty handed I'll kill you."

----------------------------------------

> Gained Attribute: [Awareness]

> +1 [Awareness]: It was that otaur that woke him to the wild world and what it'd mean if all them cubs grew up in a future without no trees in it... (1/10).

> Gained Attribute: [Naturalist] An affinity for things that grow.

> +1 [Renown]: ...him and old white eye were the only ones who ever started the warrior rite thing and never finished it. They called him somethin new for that. It sounded nice but it weren't. Sometimes little me thinks it might've been best if we'd never left Booky's maybe... (10/10).

> [Renown] Title Lost: [Noname of Nobody].

> [Renown] Title Gained: [Unburned] With self worth comes his self determination.