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The name of said destiny was Barbathera.
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Unbeknown to Nagrak, he had not stumbled upon Barbathera because of divine calling, nor because he was chosen for some grand purpose. No, his discovery was embarrassingly mundane; a statistical consequence of his chronic clumsiness. A creature of perpetual stumbles, he could only trip over so many rocks, roots, and corpses before he would eventually stumble over something extraordinary. Be it a wizard’s staff, an artefact of power, or, in this case, a withering scorchborn — chance, not fate, had brought them together.
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Barbathera could not survive without an energy source. She needed constant rooting, an anchor from which to draw sustenance, and there was only so much to gain from the dead scattered around her. Since losing the wizard, she had dwindled. She was withering, starving, freezing, her once-thriving form reduced to a husk. The intricate lattice of lichen, roots, and fungi that had adorned her body was now compressed into a dense, knotted core. She had reduced herself into a survival state, her head buried deep within this twisted mass, cocooned in a failing attempt to conserve the last shreds of energy and long-lost warmth.
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She had hoped to endure long enough for a beast or traveller to come close enough. But the cold had seeped into her core, numbing her senses and paralysing her. She was dying, frozen and inert, when chance delivered her the runt.
His touch jolted her back into awareness, a shock so sudden it sent ripples of terror through her form. Her body reacted instinctively; sheer panic turned into a surge of relief as she burrowed into him.
The witches had fed Barbathera on both orks and wizards before. She knew how to extract from them without outright killing them — at least, not immediately. As her roots bore into the runt’s arm, they spread like threads, thinning into filaments that wove their way beneath his skin. They latched onto his veins and his flesh. She drew with ravenous urgency, pulling greedily at everything she could reach: liquids, nutrients, all that would be energy, life and growth for her.
In return for what she took, Barbathera made him compliant. Her roots secreted subtle enzymes, chemicals that softened his resistance, dulled his pain, and lulled his senses into a haze of euphoric submission. The runt did not recoil, did not fight. He simply stood, his body trembling as the warmth and pleasure consumed him.
He was so much easier to subdue than the wizard had been. Salgier had been defiant to the last. The runt, this malleable, dull-witted ork, showed no such strength, lacking the cunning or resolve that had defined her previous host. He was weak, dim, and small in every way that mattered. Yet in his simplicity lay opportunity. She had seen the orks of this mountain before — their endurance, their ferocity, their connection to the cold and stone. If this runt was even a shadow of that strength, he might prove useful. He could be reasoned with, guided, manipulated. A vessel, a path off this cursed mountain and toward survival. But reason and subtlety would have to wait. Barbathera felt her filaments tightening, siphoning, as she drew from him for dear life, all of it channelled into the withering mass that was her core.
As she regained life, her thoughts drifted to those who had lost theirs in their failed escape. They had been a band of refugees, arbitrary in their unity, bound together by circumstance, desperation, and fleeting purpose. They had been prisoners, captured or coerced by the Shaira. Some, like Barbathera, the wizard, and his avian familiar, had endured years of servitude and slavery, their bodies and essence subjected to the Shaira’s abhorrent experiments. Others, like the voltera, had been new arrivals, their chains barely forged before they had been cast into the doomed bid for freedom.
Barbathera had been both a tool and a subject in the Shaira's experiments. For years, they had used her for their grotesque ambitions, twisting magics to influence and manipulate the bodies of other beings. Magic that forged overpowering new forms. Magic that stripped essence from others or imbued it into empty vessels. Barbathera had borne witness to unspeakable horrors inflicted upon captives, both wizards and beasts alike. She had done nothing to stop it — could do nothing to stop it. To survive in that place had demanded obedience. To endure meant to comply. Survivors lived on silence. Even now, there was nothing she could do for those that had remained, nor for those that had escaped with her — not if she did not survive.
It was a truth Salgier had never learned.
He had tried to save everyone, and in doing so, he had failed to save even himself. None of them had foreseen the scale of the ork resistance. None of them had spotted the orichs, nor the trap they had so meticulously laid. Their escape had been doomed before it began, their defiance a spark swiftly smothered.
The moment the voltera fell to the mighty ork warrior, Barbathera had felt the battle’s weight shift, tilting irreversibly against them. Salgier, desperate and defiant, had summoned the last remnants of his strength to transform. His body had twisted, elongated, reshaped — a grotesque act of willpower as he became the grand avian beast. Barbathera had not thought him capable of such a feat, not after the years of torment that had chiselled him into the gaunt shadow she had latched upon. He must have harboured this strength where even she had not reached, deep within the marrow of his being. Yet he had risen, wings cutting through the storm-laden skies, the fallen voltera clasped in his talons.
He could have fled. As the avian, he could have left the Albweiss behind, gliding down the frozen expanse of the mountains to whatever semblance of freedom lay beyond. But he had not. Instead, he had turned back and tried to gather the others. For one fragile, desperate moment, Barbathera had dared to believe he would succeed — that he would save them all. She had seen him, towering and majestic, swooping low over the battle to pluck their broken forms from the snow. All of them — except Barbathera.
It was then the orichs had struck. Silent shadows beneath the blizzard’s veil, they brought him down with ruthless precision. His grand form, his fleeting defiance, was torn from the air, dragging with him the last hope Barbathera had dared to harbour.
Perhaps he had deemed her unworthy, a calculation made in the raw chaos of survival. Perhaps he would have abandoned the voltera, his familiar, and even the golem too, had known about the orichs. Perhaps he had simply lost Barbathera in this madness of battle. Perhaps he had intended to return for her later. Perhaps, in his final moments, he had not thought of her at all.
Whatever his plan had been or would have been, Barbathera would never know. In the aftermath of a battle, decisions always crystallised into deliberate intensions, revealed reasonable strategy, or stood as glaring mistakes. Hindsight gave you time to look back, and to look around for all that had been invisible in the storm of blood and snow, for all you could not have realised or reasoned in the moments between life and death, between the present and the unknowable future.
Facing this future, with her roots newly nourished by bitter sustenance, the fragments of Barbathera’s scattered memories began to align with a clarity that was both cruel and deceptive. Salgier had tried to save everyone. And in doing so, he had saved no one. Ahrasik and Sahir lay frozen. M, sealed within the golem, would not rise again. Only Barbathera remained.
Survival was all that mattered now, be it for her own good or to pass on all she had learned about the Shaira. She could not afford hesitation. If she stayed on the mountain, she would freeze and starve. The only path forward led down, into the swamps below, those forgotten lands she had been taken from so long ago that her memory of them had become all but a blur, warped and fractured. There was nothing now but the mountain’s inner confines and the vast, uncharted unknown beyond it. She recalled little of the world below, save for vague, distorted echoes. The clumsy, malleable runt was her only hope of reaching it.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
There was no alternative. Barbathera had to descend now, before the other orks noticed her, and before this new source of sustenance that was the scrawny ork ran dry. But she was at an impasse. She did not know these mountains or the myriad hidden paths that threaded through them. Her only reference was the Snowtrail, an untrustworthy guide at best. It offered no guarantees of safety, only a general direction. Even that was fraught with danger. Whispers had reached her of its treachery: markings obscured by time, sudden shifts in terrain, and predators lying in wait at its edges, ready to strike at the unwary. The Snowtrail was not a lifeline. It was a vague thread of possibility stretched across an abyss of uncertainty. Even in daylight, it would have been difficult to follow. Under T̰́̇ͦ̀è̸̷̸̬̤̗̊_̸̵̰̦̗̒͜ȟ̗̍ͤa̶͉͉͍̭̰̅̀̈͜ͅȓ̶̶̛̦͇͙̟̈̿͒ͮ͑̋̚͡u̟͖͔̖̙͙͆̄̿ͩͧ̃̽̓̈̌̀͟͞n, there was no chance.
The darkness around her was absolute, suffocating in its vastness. Her vision had always been poor, even during the day, but with T̰́̇ͦ̀è̸̷̸̬̤̗̊_̸̵̰̦̗̒͜ȟ̗̍ͤa̶͉͉͍̭̰̅̀̈͜ͅȓ̶̶̛̦͇͙̟̈̿͒ͮ͑̋̚͡u̟͖͔̖̙͙͆̄̿ͩͧ̃̽̓̈̌̀͟͞n’s veil still lingering, she could not see anything. She was blind, exhausted, and overwhelmed, her senses battered by the relentless cold, her body drained from the desperate struggle for sustenance.
Barbathera found herself trapped in a maddening dilemma. She could not do it alone. She needed the ork to follow her will, yet still navigate autonomously. Her own instincts were useless here. She had no memory of these frozen heights, no understanding of their twisted geography, no familiarity with the labyrinthine routes and passageways the orks had spent generations mapping and mastering.
But this was what she had been taught to master, was it not? If the Shaira had imparted anything to her, it was the manipulation of minds.
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His breath escaped in short, ragged bursts, each cloud of steam snatched away by the ravenous wind as he wrestled with the storm of sensations coursing through his body. Nagrak had no idea where it had come from. He had no idea what was going on. But, given that this was often his natural state of being, he simply decided the sensation was the mountain itself pressing against his mind. What a sensation! He could barely comprehend it, but why would he need to? The mountain’s will was vast and sacred — it demanded belief, not comprehension.
Awareness trickled back to him like icy water seeping through cracks, slow and invasive. He staggered to his feet, clutching the staff. Though the Full Dark robbed him of sight, he felt its weight, its intricacy. The gnarled roots near the head were dense and heavy, far more elaborate than he had realised. Taller than himself, the staff was a rich and complex creation of delicate, interwoven layers, its surface a labyrinth of twisting, textured patterns that begged exploration. His fingers wandered reverently over it, tracing its endless spirals.
The staff had chosen him. The truth of it was etched into his marrow, undeniable and immutable — The others had to see this! Gorak, Bayazak, and Tergak, they all needed to see! Nagrak could already imagine their awe, their astonishment, the shift in their gazes as they recognised his ascension.
Reaching out with his free hand, Nagrak felt the jagged cliff wall beside him. Its biting cold and coarse texture grounded him, anchoring him against the Full Dark. The wind howled, sharp and biting, carrying with it the metallic tang and the faint echoes of the battle, now swallowed whole by the night. Tightening his grip on the staff, Nagrak steeled himself and pushed forward, determined to return to what remained of his horde.
But his knees buckled. Without warning, the world tilted and he collapsed in a heap. A sudden, vile sickness surged through him, twisting his insides into knots. Panic flickered, then flared into full flame, as he clawed at his chest with frozen fingers, searching for some hidden wound or injury. He probed frantically, but his numbed hands found no bleeding, no breaks, no external sign of harm. Perplexed, he writhed where he lay, twisting and turning as though movement might unearth an answer, straining to listen, to feel — to find anything at all, yet nothing revealed itself. The sickness churned through him, relentless and formless. It offered no explanation, only agony.
With great effort, he hauled himself upright, leaning heavily against the icy wall for support. His breath rasped in uneven, ragged gasps as he tried to gather his bearings. The Full Dark was no place to be alone. The Full Dark was death. He knew this with absolute certainty. He needed the horde, and they needed him. And yet, as soon as he turned towards their direction, the sickness struck again, fiercer than before. It drove him to his knees, doubling him over as spasms wracked his body. This was no mere nausea. It was complete rejection. His body shivered uncontrollably as the cold surged inward, hollowing him out, stripping him of all strength and stealing all of the astonishing warmth within in a flash.
Panic surged, an feral roar of instinct. The Full Dark was a predator, and he was prey. He had to return to the horde. Yet his body defied him. Each attempt to turn back met with stronger waves of surging sickness. It battered him into submission, leaving him retching and broken on the frozen ground.
Nagrak did not understand. He did not draw the connection between action and reaction, between his movements and this violent rejection. He simply did not get it, and so, with the stubbornness of the dumb and desperate, he tried again. And again. And again. Each attempt ended the same —his body convulsing, his strength abandoning him until eventually, he collapsed entirely. He vomited, violently and repeatedly, his frame shuddering with exhaustion and defeat.
The staff never left his hand. Even now, it lay beside him, a silent sentinel.
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SCORCHBORN [not reduced in their form]
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