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

Sleep wouldn't come. There was the subtle hissing of the lantern and the dwarf's shallow breathing and no other sounds. He turned onto his side and he looked at her. Sidelit with her hands folded on her chest like some funerary effigy. Her tomb the world entire.

"Are you awake?" he said.

"Aye."

"I can't figure out what happened to the snags."

"Maybe they all got carried off someplace."

"But the camp was there. The blankets and hides. The sacks of seed."

"Shivered te dust then."

"There's plenty of treefall still around."

"I don't know. They're the mother's children, aye?"

"Yeah."

"Then maybe she did somethin with them. Sent em off someplace."

He thought about this. About the freshgrown roots lining the chasm. Nothing comes from nothing. "She said everything's interchangeable."

"I thought ye might be communin with her."

"Yeah."

"What's it mean? Everythin's interchangeable."

"I'm not sure. What do you think?"

"This late I try not te."

"You've heard nothing from the rocks."

"Nothin worth repeatin."

"Nothing comes from nothing, she said. Nothing's different from any other thing."

"Sounds lek a bit of metaphysic te me."

"Yeah."

"Pose it te Dara."

He looked away. Up into the nebulous abyss. He didn't know how to say what needed to be said. The lantern burned itself out until there was but a mote of light left to the wick and then nothing. Finally he said, "We might be the last ones left."

"Others will be out there."

He didn't say anything.

"Might be the sea weathered it better. It's pliable. Lek the difference between hammerin calcites and hammerin gold."

"You think they're still waiting for us."

"Aye. They better be."

"And if they aren't?"

Now she was silent. He closed his eyes and he could almost hear the tidal lulls. He thought about the chinook fighting against it, slamming bodily into the river orckin called the Mad to return to their ancestral home. He thought about what it would mean for the world to carry on without anyone to people it.

She turned to face him and he looked at her. "Either way our path is the same," she said. "Get back te me mountain. Gather up the stones. Try and bring back whatever we can. Whoever we can."

"We don't have to."

"What do ye mean?"

"Nothing. Nevermind."

Later out of the darkness she spoke again. "Promise me somethin."

"Alright."

"If somethin happens te me ye'll not quit. Ye'll find a way te bring folk back."

"I don't think it'll be just up to me. You were right and there's bound to be others."

"Promise.

"Alright. I promise."

"Thank ye."

"Now you promise me something."

"Aye?"

"That nothing will happen to you."

He thought he saw her smile in the dark. "Aye. I promise."

He lay watching the night deepen. Extremis, this. Dark and cold silence. The tide and her breath each a lingering after the breaking. Senselessly drawn and expelled. The neck snapped, the back broken. He remembered kneeling in the sawdust and cupping the cheek and turning the head to make their eyes meet. At the end there was only fear. Only and always. That is what it means to change.

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There had to be others. There weren't any others. There had to be.

***

Unfocused, the day gathered over them without apparent cause. A brightening of a world gone gray. They got up. She went off over a fold in the land and he wrapped her tiny cloak about his shoulders and went down to the edge of the chasm. He crouched on the brink and watched things take shape out of the night. The roots reaching from under his feet like rigored fingers. The dark pan of the sea. A stygian front slipping up the horizon where the sun ought to have been. He coughed into his hand and hacked and spat another black glob. He looked at his hands and he placed one against the ground. "Where are you?" he said. "Will I see you again?"

He heard her coming. He stood up and waited. They passed down country all morning, always following the chasm toward the sea. He kept his weapons at hand, drank his skin dry. The land was empty as if swept clean. Lifeless. Boulders he'd never seen before stood in odd places like errants. A long and wide strip of driftwood, broken shells, tangled kelp still damp and smelling of salt. Here was a storm surge miles inland and upland of the sea. How could that be? A hundred yards farther the enormous corpse of a leviathan belly up and bloated. Tail twisted over. Flippers sagged open.

He halted when he saw what it was.

"How'd she get here?" said Mym.

Answering would seal a certain kind of doom that he was unprepared to face. Without word he walked back up to the storm surge and stacked up some driftwood and carried it back to the whale. Mym built up a fire and he drew Booky's blade and he flensed a length of blubber and butchered off two fillets which he slabbed out on a wide and flat stone. After these sizzled up he stabbed them off with the blade and they sat side by side eating them. It tasted of man, a trivia he did not share with the dwarf. The fire fell to embers that glowed redly in the monochromatic world and he warmed his hands over them. Then he went back and collected up the blubber and spread this along the stone to try out oil for the lantern.

What must have been afternoon found them sidestepping down the face of the chasm and onto the strand where even the beach had been cleft in two.

"We're going to have to swim it," he said.

She didn't look keen.

"Can you swim?"

"Aye."

He studied her, how she didn't look at him, how she only looked at the seawater foaming and swelling and counter-surfing away.

"Are you sure?"

"Aye. Just need te remember how."

He frowned and after a moment he left her there. He walked up the beach and back down collecting more wood as he went. Much of it broken limbs and shattered rounds from the elven forest, carried to the sea by the wadi and spat back again. He dropped his heap at her feet.

"Remember yet?"

She shrugged.

"Take off your pack."

She did so.

"Put your clothes in it."

She looked at him. Pensively. Shyly. He had seen her undressed before so this made no sense to him. He drew his handax and notched the woodscraps here and there and with the twine running through these he latticed the wood and tied it off into a small raft. Then he went down to the sea and swiped his hand through it. It was bitter cold and the wind so much the worse. He watched the seawater drip off his fingers and race off sideways. He went back up the strand.

The dwarf crouched in the lee of her overstuffed pack. He took off her cloak that he wore and he draped it over her. He lifted her pack and carried it down and placed it atop the raft. He kicked off his boots and stacked them on. He took off his trousers and his shirt and he rolled them up and stuffed each of them into a boot. Finally he laid on his weapons and with another length of twine he tied everything down. He stood with the water lapping his ankles and he turned to her.

"The elfstone?"

She held it out to him in her hand.

He nodded. "Wait here."

"Don't dilly dally."

A wave went by left to right. When the next one passed he walked into the channel. It was very cold and it got very deep very fast. Ten steps in and he was treading water. Ahead of him he pushed the raft of everything they owned. The next wave was coming and as it arrived the raft nearly capsized one direction and as it passed it dipped over the other direction and one of his boots tumbled off of the pile and into the sea. He felt it brush past his foot and then it was gone. When the next wave passed it was even larger than the last yet he rode it well and he managed to keep everything upright. He swam on. By the time he reached the far side of the chasm he was forty yards asea and he had to pull hard to get to shore. He dragged up the raft and knelt a minute to catch his breath. On the far side Mym yelled something at him from where she huddled. He pulled out his boot and unrolled the trousers and yanked them on. With trembling hands he tried to untie the twine. He drew out Booky's blade and he cut through the knots. He unrolled the pack lid and dug around inside until he found her flint. He collected another stack of wood and kindling and after several strikes it fired. The next time he looked at Mym she was looking miserably at the water between them. He stacked on two or three sticks of the bone-dry wood and a thin smoke had begun to rise. He yanked off his trousers and grabbed the makeshift raft and he splashed back into the channel.

This time across he went sixty yards out to sea and he nearly couldn't overtop the ebb nor outpull the undertow. He came ashore on all fours with the raft hooked over his arm.

"Ye alright?"

He nodded.

"Take a moment te warm up."

His teeth were clattering. He shook his head. He got to his feet and he trudged up to the head of the channel where it met the foot of the bluff and the sand stuck to his knees and his elbows. She followed him. The wind blew off his senses. She was rubbing her hands over his arms.

"Take a moment," she said again.

He pulled away and tossed the raft into the shallows. "Get on."

She turned. The raft had begun to sweep away. The next wave was coming.

He shoved her into the water. He was half in after her when she came up sputtering and a beard of brine pouring off of her chin. He grabbed the raft and he grabbed her braid as the wave came over them. On the far side he heaved her up onto the wood and began to pull and kick for the far shore and laughed at her cursing and newly forsworn oaths of vengeance and agony, of what she'd do to him and how his ancestors would feel it and how his cubs six generations hence would rue this betrayal.

They would have missed the beach if she hadn't stuck the elfstone in her mouth and got on her belly and paddled them ashore. It was all he could do just to kick out feebly and hang on to the raft. She dragged them in and got herself on dry land. The surf pummeled him but he made it. Up to the fire. Resisted the urge to lay bodily upon it. He had stopped shivering. Everything felt strangely warm. Warmer than it ought to have been. She had thrown her cloak over him and was dressing with her back turned. Next time she faced him she was wringing out her braid and when she saw his state she frowned deeply. She turned him over so that he lay with his back to the fire. She piled on more of the wood he'd collected and then she came around to his front. With her hands she brushed the water from his skin, everywhere. She toweled the inside of her fur coat against him. She blanketed it over his shoulder and then she unfurled her bedroll and spread it over him. She crawled underneath, faced away, and backed herself against him. She reached up for his arm and brought it over her. The bedding fell off of his shoulder so she flipped over in the sand and grabbed it back on. Her face pressed against his bare chest, her thigh wedged between his. His skin was ice. His heartbeat rapid. He had begun to shiver again. She rubbed her hand up and down his side.