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

With the first gray light she crawled out of the shattered goosepen and left Orc sleeping under her coat. She climbed up the treefall and sat atop the fallen trunk of the mother with her feet hanging off the side and she studied the lands to the east. Empty, quiet, lifeless. She thought it had only been a day but she wasn't sure. They hadn't seen the sun for a long time. A great dry haze had come out of the east in the night and now it settled over everything. It got in her nose and in her lungs. They needed to get moving. There was no water here.

She turned south. A whole pale country of ash. It seemed at one with the sky. No tree yet stood in that forest. Each snag that had been standing when they came north was now vanished. Not felled. Not flattened. Just gone. It was as though they had been sucked down through their dead roots. She looked at what she could see from her vantage. Searching for any movement. Any life. Any suggestion of orckin, of the seer, of the woman she loved. She balanced up on the trunk and dusted her hands on her thighs and then she studied the land again. The slope down toward the wadi was busted up with newly upthrust formations and a gorgon's scalp of twisted roots clodded up with compacted soil. She eyed the rocks. She would have to go hear what they had to say. She knew what the orc had said about the flying mountain and she knew why he'd had to lie. She might have done the same. Perhaps her home had not been utterly obliterated. She would have to hear what the stones had to say.

When she ducked back into the well Orc was still asleep. She dragged out the elf and when she came back she pulled her coat off of Orc and shouldered into it. She spun around her pack and unrolled the lid and spread out what she had. The cartridges, the canteen, the food. She shook the canteen. She unclipped the powderhorn from her belt and she laid it beside the longarm and the alpenstock. She looked up through the great hole where the mother had once stood. This wasn't a good place. There was no food or water. She sat and waited for Orc to come to. She watched him. He opened his eyes. "Mym," he said.

"Aye I'm here."

"Alright."

They made their way out of the mother's vale. What had been a vale. Now the land fell away in every direction as though a cinder cone had somehow raised up under them as they slept. This did not make sense to her. Perhaps it had happened as the world was breaking. At a crag she addressed the stones for some explanation yet they knew only of a long-endured darkness and of a great waiting now at its end. As if the events that had happened were known to have been coming.

She cinched up her pack and looked south downcountry. Everything a waste. Worse than when they'd arrived if such a thing were possible. Below the new hills and the old, both gray and barren.

"Ye ready?" she said.

"Yeah."

They set forth downslope in the iron murk, treading softly through fresh fallen ash that hushed their footfalls like drifts of snow, each all that was left to the other.

They crossed the burn by some reckoning of the orc's and some miles on they came upon the camp of his folk. They stood on the perimeter and listened to a rhythmic clanking coming from within.

"I can't tell what it is," he said. "But it looks empty."

"Aye."

"We should have a look."

"Aye." She didn't move.

He turned to her. "I don't think she's in there."

She tore her gaze away from the tattered tent, the heaps of goods and supplies, the wrecked smokehouse.

"I think it's alright."

"Go on then. I'm right behind ye."

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They crossed the seeded spread where the furrows and the tracks had all been shaken out. They found the cistern lying in the middle of the field up on its side. The tank was cracked and Orc dropped on his knees with his water skin out but there was only the scent and a dry mineral wash chalking the crack. He stood and looked at the grounds. The firestones still lying in a ring. The hide hovel was still strung and Mym went in. A wooden sea chest in a corner. She opened the lid and rifled through it but there was nothing there that she needed. A box of good nails. Old boots. She turned and looked out. The heaped up blankets strewn across the ground. She went to the smokehouse. Metal skewers inside. A flint in the dirt. Orc stood just behind her. She toed through the blankets. A mortar and pestle wrapped up in canvas. A horseshoe. Seed sacks. She took those and showed them to Orc. He pinched out the seed and let it fall back in the bag. "Green beans," he said. "Tomatoes."

She weighed them in her hand. "We can pound em into meal."

He shook his head. "Leave them."

"Why?"

"In case they come back."

"I don't think anyone's comin back."

He looked at her. She looked back. She put the sacks back where she found them.

A mile south they came to the edge of the burn and there they stopped. On the grounds where Glad Nizam had made her last stand they looked out on a wide chasm where no chasm had been. Ash flitted down over its edge in gossamer sheets and the clacking clamor of rockfall echoed up off of the far side. From horizon to horizon it went. Any bottom to its fissure was lost in the murk. Severed root tails protruded into space from the near side and opposite hung their continuations. They stood in the sunless cold and the wind, staring in wonder. She looked at him.

"This was the drainage," he said.

"Aye."

He put his hand on her shoulder and pointed east over this gash in the world. "The fallen tree was about there. There was a plunge pool downstream of it."

"Aye and I watched ye slip over it."

They stood in the burn and gazed the gap down there where the watery rim of the world hazed out of the gray. A waste to look upon. No people.

"What do the rocks say?"

"Nothin but confusion."

He knelt and touched an exposed root where it came out of the wall of the chasm. Its wood was green and supple and nothing like that of the snags. Lately alive.

"What do ye make of that?" she said.

"I'm not sure yet."

"Looks like they continued on yon the far side of the gap."

"Looks like."

She put her hand on his shoulder and she lifted her face to the sky.

"It's snowin."

"Yeah. I feel it."

"In summer."

"Yeah."

Now she leaned forward. "That the Mad down there?"

"It can't be."

"I don't recall any other river runnin down this country."

He stood up. He shook his head. "It can't be."

They left the chasm and made their way back among the burn until they found a treefall that had not disappeared with the snags. They sat under its overhanging trunk and watched the gray snow flit down and stick upon the coalblack crust of the ground. It was getting cold. She sat against him and gave over her coat again and after a while the wind quit and there was just the silence of falling snowflakes.

"A run of chinook ye say?"

"Yeah. That's what the seer said."

"I hope they found what they were lookin for."

"Yeah. I imagine so."

She nodded. Her eyes plundered the depths of the distant chasm. "May it have been with the rest of them."

When the snow ceased they went down to the chasm and picked their way along its rim. They walked with their shoulders hunched as if the sky itself oppressed them. The sandstone was cold and damp from where the snow had soaked into it and she kept an eye on the night soon come to pall them. Her hood up, the fur brushing her cheeks. The black gouge of the chasm poured its night forth to encompass the land and they halted before one of them plunged into its unseen void. She made a small fire from a spark and lit an oil lantern and she left him huddled there over the tongue of flame to walk out alone to the brim. She could see out over the chasm's eastern terminus, standing there in the dark, hands inside her coatsleeves, watching the dim surf roll in palely as if from nothing at all. Back the way she came the lantern a solitary yellow star twinkling in the black. She walked back. He had fixed a mush from the meal he carried and this he shared with her. They bedded down with the lantern between them.

"You see them down there?"

"No."

"You'll let me know if you hear anything from the rocks."

"Aye. Ye'll know."