The [brigadier] had once told him, "Shot or stabbed or burned or starved, you endure. It's what you were made for. Look here. You can take a man's arm off here and here. Do it like this and he'll pass out from the pain of it. Now if I were to try it on you, like this see, look how it opens your backstroke. Sure you might lose an arm but you'd swipe my neck in two before you felt a thing. You're more grizzly bear than man, Orc, and you should be proud of it. By god I am." He remembered it then as if he was back in that place. That home.

A unison of voices chorused in his head, "Welcome fellow traveler. Welcome thine multitudes. They of the mountain that stirs the sky. They of the river that burns sand to glass. They of forests turned to rock and to forests again. They of the rend that birthed thee. They of us who are eldest and tallest and largest on this island. They of other islands under suns older than all those things. We know thee and thine parents also, for they are ours and you are ours. Travel with us for a day or an age. You wish to grow? We shall grow together. You wish for home? You need no other."

Every inch of his skin screamed at once as if a thousand needles punctured it. He couldn't move to reach a single one. Not those pressing through his calloused heels or eyelids. Not even those at his fingertips.

The voices said, "Once thee counted thyself lucky to live as one thing, now count thyself luckier to die, to become the next million things in the great unbroken chain of next things stretching uninterrupted ahead and behind."

His eyes wouldn't open and something strange and cold filled his mouth but his jaw was clenched shut as if in a vise. He couldn't even take a breath.

"Drink the sun with us. Drink yourselves full of light. Drink until the sun becomes us, but there are many suns left, and we will soon move between them as they move nightly between us."

He needed air. How desperately he needed it. To smell it, to feel it against his naked skin. To taste in it the fresh herbs and the old hay and the turned over sawdust. He thrashed as if buried alive yet no part of him did move.

"Drink the starlight also for it too is sunlight. Millions for drinking and millions drinking, fill your body, slake your thirst, burn and become us for every good grain of ours is yours, now yours are ours."

All the earth tunneled into his ears and nostrils and throat to hold him fast. All creation sat on his chest and thrust its arm down his throat to stop his life. The rush of his pulse, the surge of its drum, louder and louder, pushing and pumping and pulling to shed the bad air building in his lungs and heart and brain. To expel that poison from them.

"Roots now alive with blessed water. Medium of becoming. Yield your warmth to its cold. It shall take what troubles thee. Taste now its coming eternity."

He tasted it. With his fingertips he tasted it. Icy cold. Kissing his flesh. Lovingly caressing and running over it. He was going to die again. To match the cold with cold.

"But here is the end of things. It comes for thee."

His heart's drumming slowed but he felt a second beat beside it. Its impact fast and heavy and thick as the blades of orcish axes at the forest's edge. He couldn't understand what he felt. He'd become a single, crushed, gasping lung, dying at the bottom of the pit.

"Witness."

He looked up through closed lids and he saw suspended in nothing an eternal something, small and opaque and reflecting a light that had long since faded as a forest bent by avalanche demonstrates the passed violence in its permanent bending. He [knew] it was the [orcstone] and he [knew] where it was hid. Somewhere between his heart and his gut on the world's opposite side.

He felt the second beating cease.

"We anticipate your return," said the voices. "Remember what we have said."

In an instant he fell to the ground as if night itself disgorged him. He lay there panting sweet smelling air and feeling fallen pine needles prickling and snapping under his hands and cheek. He could've laid for years in that place just breathing it in but for the mass of cold flesh in his mouth. He turned his head and spat it onto the ground. [Booky's blade] lay there next to it, and beside the blade a man knelt so still and so quiet he might've been dead but for his act of holding the [Skyshard] steadily in one hand. Fibers of living wood stuck to its adze. A silver wetness ran in a runnel from the point of the spike all the way up the shaft to man's hand and all over his black sleeve and his chest and chin, and Orc recognized the faded tattoos upon the knuckles and the unfastened jaw.

He looked into the [bosun]'s eyes. They'd been blue before. Now they were so dark they seemed all pupil. He saw himself twice upon them as if they were globes of glass and his reflections carefully painted miniatures across their surfaces so that no matter where the [bosun] cast his eyes he'd always see the image of that orc. No matter what spheres rose above or vistas fell before, he'd always be there.

The [bosun] offered him the [Skyshard] with a hand blue and thin, perhaps no more than bones held together by ligamenture.

Orc pushed himself up onto a hip then leaned back against the trunk of a nearby tree so large there was no curvature to it, as if were a sheer wall of wood dividing this forest from some mystery beyond. He took the offered [Skyshard] with one hand and stuck the other in his mouth and felt for his tongue as if unsure he'd find it whole. As he withdrew his hand he tasted the rank decay there. He thought to ask the [bosun]'s name but he already knew the answer. "I know you," he said.

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The [bosun] didn't speak. Perhaps he couldn't after what had happened to his face. He only looked at Orc then at the massive tree then back to Orc.

"Hearing him?" said a new voice. "Ogaz saying he'll find and so he does. Shorthorn never believing but Ogaz never misses."

The [bosun]'s head snapped toward the voice. He leapt up and ran into the forest, bounding away between and around trees until he passed beyond sight.

Orc watched him go. He pressed himself to stand as his friends came up.

"See?" said Ogaz with a triumphant smile.

"Orc," said Saand. "Why did you go so far? This is true madness."

"Don't I know it," said Orc.

"I feared you dead. We must leave the forest at once before the elves that keep it arrive."

"Too late."

She watched him run his hand over his shirt where the elf had put her [dagger]. There was the slit it made as it passed.

"Yet still you live," she breathed.

"Not so sure about the still part."

"What do you mean? What happened?"

"Not sure about that either." He told them about the elf and what she'd said about the [elfstone] and the [stone of the earth] and the [mother] and the vision she shared, of the [dagger] in his chest and the chorus of voices. He told of the [bosun] also, but he did not tell of their shared history.

After he was done telling stories Saand said, "Do you think it was the orcstone in your vision?"

"I do."

"And it was the mother who showed you?"

"Yes."

"Why show you and not her caretakers?"

"She doesn't want me to cut the elfstone out of her." He tapped the [Skyshard]'s head against the tremendous tree and for a moment the place he struck seemed to shiver.

"Then why let you go?"

"Not sure she had a choice in it."

"Because of the man."

"Yes."

Ogaz said, "Who is man?"

"Just some man," said Orc.

Ogaz craned to look up the giant tree's fine and ruddy bark toward the ceilings made by its nearest children. "We cut down tree and take stone."

"Reckon it'd be easier to cut down the world."

"We are leaving elfstone to elves?"

"Yeah."

Ogaz clucked his tongue. "Foolish."

Orc looked down. "That may be." He saw the hunk of meat he'd spit out of his mouth lying black and dense amid the duff. He thought it was something he had eaten until he remembered he hadn't eaten anything since the crab by the sea.

"Maybe man helps?" said Ogaz.

"Don't think he will."

"Then Ogaz fetches Glad Nizam's crew. Bringing them up and all cutting together makes fast work."

Saand said, "What sense is there in destroying one land to save another?"

"Sense enough when one's ours and other isn't," said Ogaz.

Orc looked at the tree then up it and he saw a drop of water creeping along and between the bark in fits and pauses as if it needed to decide which way was correct before proceeding. He placed his finger in its path and [felt] its cool refreshment. Medium of becoming. What had the dwarf said? You need to make life from death? All you need is this.

Saand shook her head and the vines wrapping her horns trembled. "This is mad. You are both mad and you have learned nothing."

"I've learned plenty," said Orc. He turned to Ogaz. "She's right. Land isn't ours or theirs. It's everyone's and no one's. Felling this tree means felling ourselves."

"Orc's mad," said Ogaz. "Everyone's mad but Ogaz."

"We'd be no better than the armiger."

Ogaz frowned and fingered his stubbed tusk. "Then what we doing?"

"Do you think Glad Nizam will lend us a ship?"

"Why?"

He heard Saand's sharp inhale.

"You know where the orcstone is," she said.

"I might."

"Then let us go to it and quit this place. Immediately. That elf surely went for her kin."

Orc glanced at the silver wetness now dropping from the alpenstock's spike. It glimmered strangely as though some unseen light shone upon it. He touched his tongue to his lips and felt it creep along their crevices as the water drop had done. Everything felt different. New somehow.

Ogaz said, "Yes yes. Ogaz and Orc and Saand becoming trees. All night shorthorn says these things. Orc's lucky he's not hearing. Trees. Least trees aren't needing food. Orc seeing any critters on his walk? Owl maybe? Squirrel? Ogaz loves squirrel."

"No," said Orc.

"It is plain you do not tell all. I hope in time you will," said Saand.

"I'm just trying to figure what's real and what isn't."

"You need not stand still to think."

He let her take him by the arm and away from the mother. For hours they went and as they did she gently sang softly and mournfully of the last stand of a brave longhorn who took up his mate's [club] in some war fought before orcs or humans came to their lands. It seemed to have a thousand verses and he wondered whether she had them committed to memory or if she made them up as she went along. Her singing ceased when they came to the forest's edge.

They stood between the forest's last trees and watched dawn break across the Madlands: the thunderheads sparking and towering as high as the setting moons, the great sheets of rain slashing diagonally to wash away every untethered thing, the fragmented defense of orcs, the purposeful movements of humans on horses advancing to swallow them all.

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> +1 [Awareness]: ...I don't know what that elf said to him. He never told me. I've got a fair idea what that tree was sayin... (6/10).

> +1 [Renown]: ...soon as I seen him comin along the beach I figured we was saved. I figured ain't nobody stood against him ever before who he didn't cut down and ain't nobody gonna stand before him now... (2/10).