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

The inside of the bunkroom was coffin dark. The smell of their extinguished fire like a crematorium. The cat had crept off to who knows where. He lay there listening to quiet so thick it was deafening. Not a sound in the world of the world. No nighttime insects or birds, no startled dogs barking, not even the hush of the surf that was supposed to have been eternal. There was nothing left alive.

He extracted his arm from under the dwarf and he got up. Out of his things he retrieved his handax. He felt his way along the walls until he came to the locked door. With the axblade he tried to lever out each of the boards. He tested the hinge pins by blows. Finally he stepped back and with all of his strength he chopped its face. The handax clanged out of his hand and went skipping across the floor. He gripped his wrist and wrung his thumb along his palm.

"What's all that then?" he heard her say.

"Nothing."

"Ye get anywhere?"

He touched the face where he thought the strike had landed. Smooth as stone.

"No," he said.

He heard her shuffle away. After a while he got down on his hands and knees and he felt along the corner of the floor and the wall until he found the handax. The blade was sharp as ever. He got up and went back to the door and he swung at it again and it clanged off again but he held onto the haft this time.

"Oy," she called. "Slag off. I'm tryin te sleep."

***

The next morning they plodded down to the harbor and out onto the jetty. The sea rolled away into the slate haze. The townsfolk spread out below them. Cold and pale and bloated up in the swirling plopping murk of the oceanfront. He had hoped to scavenge a coat but the bodies were lost of their clothing. As if they had all stripped down ahead of some sort of ritualistic suicide.

The jetty had collected debris and trash from the town and some of this was still lodged in between the rocks. They bent slowly, stood slowly. She found rum in a glass bottle. He found a yardlong length of lead pipe and three panels of dry woodplank nailed up as in a box corner. They stumbled along to the end of the jetty and then back on the seaward side. There they came upon the dark oily corpse of a juvenile sea lion draped over a rock. Its tail floating in the chop of the sea.

He approached it. It was fresh, which was itself a strange thing. His mouth began to salivate. He drew Booky's blade. When he plunged it into the blubber to make his first cut Mym retched. Perhaps from the rum. He had to work slowly, he was so hungry. The cuts more difficult than they should've been. He tested his thumb on the edge of the blade. It wasn't the blade. He put his knee on the lion. It slipped and slid under him. He couldn't hold it down it was so fat. Its obsidian eyes filmed over like clouds sliding across the midnight moons that had been.

They fried steaks of it in its own fat over a fire built out of the box corner. The cat came back for a two ounces worth and stole off again after. They ate the first share undercooked but they couldn't help it. The second share he cooked longer and they ate that one too. After that he hung out strips of the meat in the smoke and he used the pan to reduce the blubber and it went into the bottle with the whale oil.

It tasted like saltbeef. It tasted like they were eating something not to be eaten by thinking beings. She retched again and he took the bottle from her and dumped it upon the floor of the bunk room. The next batch of fat he poured into the rum bottle and he doled it out upon the fire a splash at a time until the rest of the meat was sufficiently smoked. He pulled down the last of it and they wrapped it up and all told it was a lot less than they had hoped.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Late in the day it was sleeting filth. He was huddled in her spare blanket and she was sitting with her back against the pedestal and staring out into the gritty weather. She was still drunk.

"The way ye eat that lion won't last more than a few days," she said.

"We'll find another."

"What if we don't?"

"We will."

"Ye don't understand me. I'm sayin it might be best if we don't."

He looked at her. "You're drunk."

"Aye. A bit."

"Come help me with the door."

"Nothin helpin."

"We can use the lion fat, burn it down."

"Fat burns colder than wood grayback."

"Then let's go find some wood."

"What fer? Tell me what fer? Ye want ye live lek this?"

"We have to."

"Fer what?"

"For each other."

She shook her head. "It's not enough. Yer not enough. I'm not enough."

"There will be others."

"Where? Ye seen any?"

"Maybe it's better on the far side of the world."

"This is the far side of the damned world."

"You know what I mean."

"Aye maybe but how're we ever goin te know one way or the other bein stuck here?"

He shrugged. "We don't have to know. So long as it's better that's what matters."

She laughed. "It's no better. Ye know as well as me where the moon struck. Look what it did."

She raised her hand to the outside.

"Look what it did."

***

The meat ran out some days later. That was the last he saw of the cat. Six days after and they were too tired to range more than a few hundred yards from the tumbledown tower. They'd burned all of their whale oil and lion fat upon the door and it stood solid and unchanged. The fish were a mass of rot. The townsfolk all sunk to the sea bottom. He had taken to rubbing the elfstone on his belly yet he was never as hungry in his life as he was then. Even hauling plow for the yeomen with no food but what he foraged he wasn't as hungry. It was the kind of hunger to make you weak, to make your bones rubber and your teeth fall out. To kill you.

On the morning of the seventh day he was alone on the shoreline looking for anything the sea might've deposited there. Wandering in the grainy rain like a mule. The surf no longer came and went with any purpose. It was shallow and weak. It didn't gnash, it didn't spit, it didn't breathe. In it he saw himself. He tried not to think about it.

She came to him in a vision, the brigadier. She came to tell him he was a survivor. He had to press on. He couldn't give up. No son of hers would give up. Was this a memory? The rain wetted her hair and it clung to her forehead in a slithered tendril. Like some sort of cephalopod suckered onto her skull. He asked her what did it mean to survive a life of disappointment to an afterlife of nothing. What had he survived exactly? What was he giving up on? This dead world, this world of the dead?

He stepped on a bulb of kelp. It popped under the arch of his blown out shoe and the cold seawater soaked through to his sole. He reached down and drew up the wet branches, hand over hand. He brought them up onto his shoulder and he staggered under their weight. There couldn't have been more than twenty pounds there. It felt like two hundred. It felt like enough to keep them going for another few days.

He thought he heard another voice. He turned and looked out to sea. The rain a kind of soiled sheet curtaining his little part of the world. There was no one there.

A little farther along he shuffled over an old hemp net. The kind with weighted ends he'd seen used for beach seining. Perhaps knitted together by his ancestors. Perhaps by his own father. His real father. Not the ghost haunting behind every of his thoughts and fears and hopes. His regrets.

He heard a voice again. It sounded like a woman. Not the brigadier. Someone else he knew from the time before. He turned and looked for her. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement. The cat perhaps. Or another memory come to torment him.

He turned back to the sea. The rocks, the water, the sky all a grayscape. Out of these emerged a gray triangle, isosceles of being, equal sides focused upon the one point, the single inflection to change all of what happened before and what was to come. What should he have done differently to change everything?

Dark figures flew under this new vision. They sat within it. Seemed to lurch out of it. "Orc," called one.

He tried to raise his hand but it dragged the net behind him. He nodded instead and smiled. What memory was this?

"Orc," she called again. "Where's Mym?"