Nobody spoke until Luke was well out of sight.

Max and Dax just sat there. Adam could feel how uncomfortable they were, but neither of them made a move to leave. For that, he would be grateful later. At the moment, all that Adam could do was blink, over and over again. Something had caught in his eyes, but every muscle in Adam's body refused to obey his command. Each of Luke's words nailed Adam to his seat.

At last, Max broke the silence.

“I'm sure Luke didn't… he thought, I think he didn't meant it. He's…” Max's voice trailed off. He wanted to mitigate the damage, but it was just so hard to find the right words.

As Max spoke, a wave of memories washed over him. His mind jumped back to the days that he had placed under lock and key in his mind. The time before he was at Camp Ironblood, the first days that he had known Adam, and the memories he had of him and Luke.

—

Except for a camp’s chief, no orc was truly bound to a single camp.

Some orcs stayed years, while others spent weeks. In Max’s lifetime, he had seen plenty of journeymen orcs who travelled camp to camp, seeking the kind of combat that brought bounties, new experiences, or the right leaders.

Adam was different. Max couldn't remember a time when he wasn't at Ironblood’s camp. There was no suggestion that he knew anything but the camp, no evidence that he had seen the orc villages, towns, or cities further into their territory. He seemed to know everything an orc could possibly learn from a camp, but was as ignorant of the outside world as an animal that had grown up in a cage.

Max and Dax were not from camp Ironblood. They were born in a camp that was deep enough in orc territory to be safe. As they grew up, that became less and less true. The humans pushed the orc borders back, one camp at a time. It wasn't war, it was just a raw display of power. Both of them were too young to truly understand what was happening. They only saw the adults in the camp become more worried and less happy.

Reality came to them when, one night, they woke up to a burning camp soaked in blood and desperately defended by a few surviving warriors. The humans had staged a night attack.

Max and Dax ran and kept running when their legs burned like fire.

In the years since, they never met another orc that had survived from the attack on their camp. Maybe the humans thought that the two young orcs were too small or too weak. Either way, Max, Dax, and old orc maps were the only proof that the camp had once existed.

They were too young to know where to go once they had fled from the camp. In the following weeks, they wandered through the wilderness in a constant state of half-starvation. Food was hard to come by, and water was even harder. They slept on the ground without a fire, and when morning camp, they'd walk deeper into orc territory.

Talking was a luxury that they couldn't afford with their energy levels. Besides, there wasn't much for them to talk about. Dax, once a talkative speaker, never spoke much afterward.

It was a miracle they found Camp Ironblood at all. To be more precise, Camp Ironblood found them. They had collapsed and the support orcs, scavenging for roots, found them. They were carried into camp and laid in a tent just for them.

In the first few days, Adam was the only regular contact they had.

His job was to bring them meals and each time, he'd linger around the tent and talk. Words would come tumbling out of him like a waterfall. At first, neither Max nor Dax really registered the conversation. The shock of their memories blocked everything out. Slowly, Adam’s enthusiasm began to draw them back to reality. He'd blabber about the camp and the warriors. He'd talk about the battles where the chief fought dozens of humans at once. And he'd whisper about the future for orcs.

Even in those times, he was thinking about how orcs could rise again. Mostly though, he'd talk about Luke.

“You should have seen him! He tricked a rabbit by standing still!”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“He said that biting in a wrestling match is cheating. Do you think it is? I don’t.”

“He doesn’t talk much. You have to talk for him. But he's always thinking, so it’s fair.”

Max and Dax were twins. They knew each other so well that Dax would know what Max was thinking just by simple eye contact, and Max would see what Dax was going to do from the twitch of his muscles. It wasn't mind reading, but it was pretty close.

When they recovered enough to walk around the camp, Max could see that Adam and Luke had the same bond. They weren't twins, but could somehow communicate beyond just words. Adam had been right that Luke didn’t talk much, but with Adam around he didn’t need to. Adam knew what was going on in Luke's head, even if he made no expression or said no words. A single frown could somehow communicate a whole story.

With no other young orcs in the camp, Max and Dax were more or less forced to join up with Adam and Luke. At first, Max found he didn’t like this. Adam was, well, bossy. He'd have an idea, like where they should forage, and expect everyone to follow.

Luke was used to this, although he didn’t always obey Adam’s “orders”. Max and Dax tried to avoid Adam's commands but because they only knew places around camp that Adam had shown them, kept bumping into Adam and Luke.

Eventually, they began to listen more and more often. There was something about Adam that just seemed worth following in a way they couldn’t explain. He was different from other orcs. His eyes would sparkle as he heard stories about the past glory of orcs, and he’d repeat them endlessly as the group hunted or played.

Orc children usually weren't at frontier camps. There were rarely any female orcs, warrior or support. Instead, the children were usually sent to inner cities and towns to grow up. Ironblood, however, provided for them. More bluntly, he gave them charity. And so, whenever Adam told a story about orcs who grew strong and earned their place through battle, honor, and victory, he gave them something to strive towards.

Food and bandages had healed their bodies, but Adam made them orcs again.

Luke was the opposite of Adam where the stories were concerned. He’d often leave when they were told, only feigning interest out of fear when the chief recounted them to the camp as a whole. He seemed to like the company of the others, but for the most part, he was interested in simple things that accomplished simple goals.

When Max first met the Adam and Luke, the differences between them seemed small. But as time went on, he watched the gap widen.

Luke seemed to follow Adam because there was no other place to go. He never had much need for Adams' guidance or expressed interest in his ideas. When one of Adam’s plans went sideways, Luke was there to bail him out. If Luke minded, he never said and Adam never checked. Luke was reliable and Adam relied on him.

That was their relationship.

Adam hardly seemed to notice the distance growing between them. He leaned on Luke the same as always, even as Max sensed Luke becoming less and less comfortable with his role as a crutch.

But if Adam expected Luke to match the version of Luke he had built in his head, there was no malice in it. That was how Adam was. When he talked, he made Max and Dax feel important because they were his audience and subject. He always had big plans, and anyone around him was an indispensable part of that. Dax was especially drawn to this. He had Max, but after the loss of their home, that just wasn’t enough by itself.

Adam built worlds inside his head and made both Max and Dax part of them. He built them a home.

—

Max finally snapped back into reality. He was thankful to find that he hadn’t missed anything. Like him, Dax and Adam seemed to be caught in thoughts and memories of their own.

Something in particular about Adam’s thoughtfulness struck Max as familiar. There wasn’t anything obviously special about it. He was sitting on a stone and staring into the distance. Max watched him for almost a minute, trying to figure out what it was. Then he saw it. Adam looked like the chief.

Ironblood had been more talkative when Max and Dax first joined the camp. But as the meaningless skirmishes with the humans kept occurring and the deaths piled up, he retreated deeper and deeper into his own thoughts. Where once he had been as loud and boisterous as the other orcs, he now only spoke orders and guidance.

Even today, the chief hadn’t bothered to explain why he was staying in camp, and it hit Max with a shock that he hadn’t even considered asking. He had assumed the chief wouldn’t say, and the others probably had the same thought.

Looking back at Adam, Max saw that he was alone in the same way. As if he were haunted by ghosts of his memories that drew him deep into himself.

Even as Max stood and walked over to Dax, Adam's eyes didn’t focus. He was looking at something only he could see.

Max reached Dax and poked him. They didn't need to exchange words, Dax understood. They both looked at Adam and knew that whatever was happening inside of him wasn't good. It had to be addressed. Someone needed to draw Adam back to the world in the same way he had drawn them back after the loss of their camp.

Max finally found the right words.

“Adam,” he said, “I don’t know what the future holds. And I don't know if your ideas will end up saving us or getting us killed.”

Adam grimaced at the word, “killed”. An image of Sam flashed through Max's mind. But he held strong.

“But orcs can't keep living like this. Something has to change. You might not know it, the chief might not either, but I, we, would follow you.”

It was rare for orcs to cry, but Max could have sworn he saw moisture starting to gather in Adam's eyes. Still, he pressed on.

“We will follow you, wherever you go,” Dax echoed.