Orc and Bunny

Chapter 3 - Kicking the Goblin Nest

Anne landed with a sickening crack that turned the darkness around her into nothingness. When she came to, she was disoriented, not only by the pitch blackness around her but also by the way the world rotated like someone was slowly turning her head over heels. Her head ached and every breath caused a sharp pain in her ribs.

She felt something warm and wet sliding down her cheek. Her hands came back sticky and her stomach revolted. She vomited uncontrollably until there was nothing left, and then she dry heaved for what felt like forever after that. When she finally managed to get control of herself, she leaned back against the cold, gritty, unyielding stone beneath her, and passed out once again.

Anne finally came around again when a rock dug into her ribs. She heard whispering in a strange language, and felt herself being dragged by the ankles. Then the pain from her torso forced a noise from her and the dragging stopped. She heard the crunching of footsteps fleeing.

There was a flickering orange light that it took Anne far too long to realize was the glow of a fire. It danced around the rough walls of the cave in a way that made Anne’s head swim. She gasped as she rolled over onto her stomach, gritting her teeth against the pain, and bringing her knees under her. She winced as she slowly brought herself to her feet, leaning against the cave wall. The tips of her ears brushed the top of the cave as she moved forward, hunching over and holding her stomach to fight the pain and nausea.

Belmoral waited outside the entrance of the cave, back to a nearby tree. Luckily, the goblins were too stupid, or too confident, to have a lookout, so she was able to get close and could hear their garbled chittering nonsense without necessarily being seen. After nearly an hour, she had decided to leave, when a scream rang out of the cave.

“Help! Someone, please help me!”

Belmoral ran into the cave with her bardiche ready for anything. She saw a half dozen goblins surrounding a girl wearing a ridiculous bunny costume. She was swinging the fanciest, and also the thinnest, sword Belmoral had ever seen wildly at the creatures surrounding her. Four goblin corpses twitched horribly at her feet.

The girl was clutching her side with her free hand, and with what would have been a dramatic swoon in any other situation fell on her side, the sword clattering against the rocks. Belmoral charged in with a deafening roar that made the goblins freeze for half a second. That was more than long enough for her to swing the ax-like weapon through two of them. It stuck with a crunch in the third.

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She didn’t hesitate to use her foot to pull it from the screaming creature. She chopped down with her full weight, and split it in two. The other three backed off, snarling and hissing at her in their nonsense language. She bared her tusks at them and growled. One of them tripped on a rock, and she took that opportunity to finish them off with deft swings of her bardiche.

Belmoral checked her surroundings to make sure that all the goblins were dealt with before checking on the strange bunny girl at her feet. She dropped her satchel of herbs on the ground next to the girl. When she rolled the girl over, the ears sticking out from the girl’s messy bun followed limply.

“I thought those were some sort of costume,” Belmoral gawked openly, and then scolded herself for her own insensitivity, “I’m sorry, I need to see the extent of your wounds. If you can even hear me…”

She opened the girls shirt surprisingly easily, it was covered in buttons down the front rather than tied closed like her own. The fabric was thin and gauzy, and had clearly once been white. She blushed slightly at the sight of the girl's bare chest, and winced at the ghoulish purple bruises that covered her ribs. She quickly applied a thick gooey slather of Bellip paste to her ribs. It wouldn’t fix the ribs, she would need the village healer for that, but it would slow the internal bleeding, and help with the bruising.

That was when she noticed the large gash in the girl’s side that had been beneath her when she fell. With the pressure of her body weight no longer holding the blood in, it gushed freely. Belmoral quickly grabbed clean linen from her satchel, and applied pressure with one hand while digging through her bag for what she needed with the other.

Britom apparently decided that things were going too easily for her, because that is when the adrenaline from the fight wore off and she started shaking uncontrollably. With shaking fingers she managed to get pinches of cottony Spider Web Moss from the linen it was neatly folded into, and packed it into the wound. Even unconscious, the girl on the cave floor let out a gasp of pain.

“Gods, I hope that these herbs work on you the same as it does on us,” Belmoral muttered under her breath. She had heard horror stories from traveling herbalists about how some races reacted differently to treatment than was normally accepted. The last thing she wanted to do was accidentally poison her patient.

Belmoral sat on a log near the dead goblin’s fire taking deep breaths and gentle sips of the cold water from her water pouch. When her nerves finally settled, she looked at the girl lying unconscious behind her. Steeling her resolve, she stood and packed her satchel. She paused over the girl, trying to think of the best way to carry her. After a moment she re-buttoned the girl’s stained white shirt, and positioned herself to carry everything she needed to.

Belmoral lifted the bunny girl in her arms. Normally she would carry her over her shoulder, but given the bruising on her torso, she didn’t want to break her ribs any more than they were. She squinted as she left the dark cave and entered the bright sun. She then slowly picked her way down through the forest and towards her village.