Orc And The Lastborn [Progression, Gunpowder Sword & Sorcery]

High upon the mountainside he felt utterly lifeless except that his lungs burned with every drawn breath. He could not go on. He had lost all hope, all despair, all fear of dying. Even then as he held his destroyed shoulder in his hand, as he fingered the twine that wrapped his gangrenous muscle to his ruined arm, death seeped toward his arterial blood. Toward his heart. Toward his mind. He felt nothing. He no longer swatted away the flies clustering about his gray and stinking wounds. What will he had was gone. He thought nothing. He fell in the snow. He laid there for a time without definition or ending. It would never end if he allowed it. He carried with him the flint and the tinder under a seal of wax. There was nothing of him left to burn. He was no longer himself, he was no one at all, he was a seared pneumoniatic lung rasping above the clouds and the valleys.

Cold water on his split lips, now pooled in his cheek, now trickled against the back of his throat. A familiar voice. An insistent palm. The sensation of motion, perhaps an urgency he could no longer recognize. A second indefinicy passed.

He opened his eyes and saw as if through a sheet of ice, as if he swam below a fast frozen pond and watched the world through its wavered surface. A face turned to his and it looked as though it was made of putty. He tried to speak but there was only the clotted up phlegm and the air forcing through. With one eye he watched the housefronts passing him by. The other eye had gone black as if it was no longer there. Not gone black exactly, rather had gone completely. There is no presence in absence.

He tried to speak again.

"Keep it in ye," said the face and he knew her voice.

He hacked and his body hurt and he remembered he had a body. He turned his head and spat out a slug of sickness and it landed quivering on her boot.

"Sorry," he whispered.

"You'll be sorrier yet if ye go and die on me."

"He's dead already," said a woman.

"Fer real I mean."

Things began to warm and he began to hurt. Then things grew hot.

"He's smokin."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Go now child."

"Why's he look that way."

"Please Cousins do as you are asked."

"He's burnin up from the inside."

"Livin stones his skin's lek butter."

"Get it off of him."

"That?"

"Yes. Cut it off."

"Aye."

"Don't drop it."

"One thing at a time."

"Use me edge."

"Get that out of me way."

"Quickly Mym."

"Aye."

There was a chink of metal on metal.

"Got it."

He felt as if the blood blighting his veins boiled away. He breathed shallowly but easily. He opened his eyes and saw the concerned faces staring down at him. He turned his head and saw where he was.

"The black heart," he said.

"Yer welcome," grumbled Khaz.

"Aye we're down in the first colony," said Mym.

Carefully he swung his legs off of the anvil and lowered his feet to the span. At arm's length stood a stonecut dwarf, a lass with a lopsided smile and her eyes blank to the world.

"This is getting to be a regular thing," he said.

"I'd hate fer it te be," said Mym.

He spat again upon the span and drew his wrist across his brow. "The baron's dead."

"Aye," said Mym.

"The stones told you."

"I was party te the oath."

He put his hand to his chest. The puncture was mended. He reached around and pressed his fingertips under his shoulderblade and felt the pistolball there. He'd have to cut it out.

Daraway inched up between the two dwarves and reached over their heads to where the manstone in its chain rested atop the anvil. "You won't object to me taking this," she said.

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"I brought it back for you," he said.

Mym raised her hand and for a moment it appeared she might touch his knee but she looped it around a bandolier instead. "Well, how're ye feelin?"

"Empty." He looked at her. "I suppose that's how all vengin dwarves get to feel."

She shrugged. "Sometimes."

"Oy," Khaz protested. "He's te be a delver now too?"

"That depends on him," said Mym.

Orc looked at her hesitant hand and made no indication either way.

"Yer old lady's dead," she said.

"I know."

She lowered her eyes from his and they seemed to lose their focus and she looked as if she was mulling over saying something more.

"Did Booky make it out?"

Her eyes snapped back up. "Aye she's gone back te her place. Took the ogre and the grubby goblin with her but they're lookin te cross the sea whenever ye go next."

He nodded. "Alright."

"Uhquah's dead."

"And the longhorn?"

She shrugged. "I don't know that a creature lek him can ever die. Ye goin te go after him?"

"I don't know." He looked up into the undefined void of the chamber. The only light that reflecting up from the molten river below. Alive and dead and alive and dead and alive again. The part of him that had been the mother howled into that oblivion at the injustice of his waylaid transformation. If all was to be change what did it mean for him to remain himself? What did it mean to the individual and to the world to not pass on?

He heard Mym say, "Ye stay here and ye'll have te get used te livin underground."

Still looking up he said, "I did that for years at Booky's."

"Aye I imagine ye did."

He felt a hand slip into his, tiny and soft. He looked down and saw the girl Cousins standing at his knee in her oversized smock. "Hello again Orc."

"Hello miss Cousins."

"Are y'all fixin on stayin on with us?"

There was a courage in her question, a vulnerability in her hope that she didn't fully appreciate. Or perhaps she did.

"Would you like me to?" he said.

She nodded once and she smiled shyly and he saw she was missing a tooth.

"Yeah," he said. He looked at Mym. "I think I will."

The dwarf nodded gravely as if he had just taken another stoneoath.

"If you're feeling well enough to walk I'd ask you to please move off of the anvil," said Daraway.

"Alright."

He took a few steps along the span and he noticed the scorch where the armiger had finally been burned to nothing. He thought about the brigadier, bloating and decomposing in the sudden swelter of the deadlands. He wished he had thought to torch her.

Suddenly Mym was beside him. As if she knew his thoughts she said, "I made sure she wasn't raised."

"You went back for her?"

"I went back fer ye."

"I'm sorry I left you."

"Ye did as the stones demanded."

He thought about that. He didn't really believe it. He closed his eyes. He wanted to move on.

"Can I have my own house?" he said.

"Aye." She turned to him. "But there's somethin I need ye te promise me."

"A normal promise or one of your almighty dwarven oaths."

She shook her head. "There's not a whisker between em."

"What is it?"

"I'm goin te tell ye somethin but I need ye te stay put and think on it awhile fore ye go blazin off lek some bloodlusted orc."

"Excuse me," said Daraway.

They shifted to one side as the woman walked past with a bronze plate treasured in her hand and did something or other in the air behind them.

"What is it?" he said.

"Promise first."

"Alright. I promise."

"Excuse me," said Daraway again and she shifted through them again. "This way." She ushered them from around the anvil. Orc saw they had placed the stonechild upon the anvil and there was an arrangement of arcana upon the sculpted granite and the orcstone rested on its chest and the manstone rested on its forehead.

"Hold yer fire," Mym told him. She took up her da's alpenstock and she walked back to the anvil as the rest of them watched. There was a sort of hum that Orc had felt the night he took his oath to slay the baron. The wedwarf raised the alpenstock and allowed it to strike the anvil and a great quantity of molten rock and metal roped out of the darkness above and bloomed open to form a perfect sphere with Mym still somewhere inside. He held up his hand against its heat and its radiance and he clutched Cousins close against his thigh as if she might run toward it. The magma ceased, slid slowly over and off of the sphere it had made, and there was Mym beside the anvil as before. The stone child unchanged.

Khaz seemed to shudder. Daraway shook her head. "We're going to need the elfstone," she said.

Mym shouldered the alpenstock and bent over the stone child. Orc walked to her. He could muster no words of consolation. He laid his hand on her shoulder and there they stood side by side when down through the wyndings and into the first colony and into the forge of creation echoed the distant blast of the horn of the dwarves.

***

At the delving's gate he pushed through the gathered dwarves: the hunters and the trappers with their longarms and snares, the dusty stonecutters and the sour smelling tanners, the tall bellowers and the defthanded smiths. He saw her da there and her uncle and the ancient one called Thayne. He saw the bosun standing with his hand on the horn for he had been the one to sound it yet none protested this sacrilege. All of them leaned back with their faces upturned and when Orc passed out of the delving's shadow and onto the trailhead he saw why.

The heavens were sundered and sundering. The blue moon hung yet in the sky with a concentric of cracks radiating dead center upon its poxy face, but where was his brother? The great glorious sun dimmed in its seat and then darkened completely and the sky shuttered to black and the stars momentarily flickered from their daytime refuge and lo the sun suddenly blazed back aloft, blinding gold in the now azure globe. All eyes downcasted against the reappearance and when they looked up again they saw the shattered fragments of the missing moon spinning, rolling, tumbling across the sky oblique to the ecliptic. A hundred then a thousand plasmic contrails streaked high overhead as fragments of that alien world began to self immolate in the sky of theirs.

He knew things now had changed and that they would never be the same. Not for him nor for anyone else. The brigadier was gone and he would be gone too before too long passed, before it all became unrecognizable. The sky might break but the fields would still be sown in the spring and in autumn the straw scythed down along the Seaway where they had once practiced stalking oblivious passersby from under the shadowed olive boughs. It made no difference if the sky broke in two or twenty. He would never spar with the woman on the graveled grounds, never heed her careful lessons until there was no light left to see, nor would he be again someone to anyone. He had lost it all and he would watch all be lost again.

He glanced back and saw the others, Daraway, Cousins, Khaz, the bosun, the meteor storm livid in the wet globes of their unblinking eyes. He turned back and watched blue sky fill the spaces between the broken continents of the moon now spread thinly on their wrong trajectory like a skein of geese gone off for the season. He felt Mym press up beside him. "Adamantine everlastin," she said, and it was all she said.