To Make things Rite
A fantasy short story...
Two Orcs climb a sheer rock face so steep, anyone who fell from its face would forget to see their life flashing before their eyes. Halfway up, the Orcs don’t look down at the clouds clinging to the rock below them. They only have eyes for the top. Muscled and tanned, wearing short wool jerkins and half-shirts on their chests, spears affixed to their backs, they climb with vigor.
Grok, the chief-in-waiting of Village Hidden in Dreams, licks her right cheek horn and grins. She hangs with her arms extended to give them a break, and lets the wind carry her tied-up hair like a kite’s tail. She smiles wider. The effort of the climb, the burning in her biceps and legs, make her feel more alive than she has in months. Climbing is far more exciting than bushwhacking through the Deepgreen’s jungle, watching for predators and venomous insects and poisonous plants every second. But more importantly, this climb makes her feel capable after the failed rite; her head’s been mucked up from the concussion, the death of her lover, and not to mention those disturbing visions.
She thinks, But all that’s behind me. Now I can get back to being me, to doing what I’m made to do: heroic feats, hanging over the world, and taking what’s mine.
That’s what she tells herself anyway. You don’t get over losing a lover and seeing his bloom—his spirit—and chatting with him about how he’s going to follow you in the afterlife as a protector. She could go on, of course. That same day where she lost her chiefly rite and gained that terrible concussion she was visited by an ancient geckodile spirit, was laughed at by monkeys playing cards, and was chastised by sheep. Never drink while concussed, the lesson goes.
Climbing this cliff feels like a return to form, and is as far from that terrible day as she could possibly be. Now she’s very close to reclaiming her rite by slaying the same metalauch that smashed her head and killed her lover in one fell swoop of its clubbed tail.
“Enjoying the view?” says Shikaza her warrior mentor. The grizzled, older Orc’s green skin is getting lighter with age, but the muscles beneath grant no sway to time.
“I am enjoying the air. I feel like a hawk waiting to strike. Like I can finally breathe.”
Shikaza smiles and carefully touches one hand to a cheek horn in a blessing. “Surely no one has come this far to finish their rite.”
Grok scoffs, “No one’s been fool enough to do so.”
“No one except you,” she jokes. “Keep going, before our arms and legs grow weak.”
“And our hands raw. This damn rock is sharp!”
They navigate a roundabout route to avoid an overhang that only a god could climb. Ending up on the northward side of the sheer rock, the wind blasts them and slows their progress. But not by much. Of all humankind, Orcs are the most able-bodied. Dwarves would carve their way up the mountain. Elves would survey the land, plan a decade’s-long project to reduce the cliff to beautiful, navigable steps with a garden at the top. Men would assemble tools, slaves, and pay someone else to do the work for them.
The Orcs, as you can see, just looked at the thing and started climbing.
They reach the top at evening but do not stop. Grok and Shikaza crack on to escape gale-strength winds that would throw small animal bodies into the air. They only pause when their feet meet the lush grasses of the high steppe and allow themselves to catch their breath. Shikaza rubs her hands and mumbles something about callouses.
This is what I’m made for, Grok thinks again. She smiles. She can’t stop smiling now. Grok looks up at the mountain, obscured by thick clouds. The wind billows with sudden haste, pushing Grok a step forward. Moments later the jagged, steep face of the mountain reveals itself. She marvels at the sliver of pure sunset upon the heavens, the peak gold as an idol. All thanks to some bloody cold, rain-tasing wind.
“I’ve never seen such a thing,” Shikaza says. “Praise Dué.”
Grok, not normally one for piety, says, “Praise Dué indeed.”
Thousands of feet in the air, a thousand miles from their village, they look from the peak to the cloud forest at the feet of the mountain. Grok’s nostrils flare and scent the moisture, her emerald eyes hungry for her quarry hiding somewhere in that vast mangle of trees and vines and ferns.
It’s there that she’ll make things right. She’ll kill the metalauch, gain her chief-rites, assume control of the village, and restore the people’s faith in her. Faith is what she needs most on account of the many who died that twisted day. There are few Orcs in her village who believe in her blessing as a chief.
And that’s before she considers the problems outside the village.
That damned Lord Marlton and his army of Orc-hating men. The fact they call her people less-than-human spells a sickness that can only be tempered by might. This is the burden of a leader: to see the threats that others don’t, to see the many futures and protect her people against the worst ones.
Grok cracks her neck and glances at Shikaza. Her mentor is silent, probably exhausted. Grok, too, is beginning to breathe hard, and her head has started to ache. She wonders how the two of them will be able to kill the beast if they cannot fight at peak condition. Normally, she would speak of these issues with her mentor so there would be no surprises in combat, but with all that Grok has to prove, all that Grok has to lose, she digs in. To see what she’s made of.
Or so she tells herself. Pride always comes before the fall.
It’s not until the moon’s high that they reach the verdant cloud forest. Not that they can see the moon what with that storm-front blowing in, those thick clouds buzzing with electricity and pregnant with rain that’s cold and sharp as needles. Grok searches for a tree with large enough leaves to shield them, then she and Shikaza climb it.
“How are you feeling?” her mentor asks after they’ve cleared a spot of detritus, horned beetles, and a tree viper.
“Strong. And a touch cold,” Grok lies. Her head’s hurting worse.
Shikaza lifts her head in humor. “My bones are creaking like millstones. I haven’t felt so old before.” Grok inclines her head in respect. A quiet settles over them and they listen to the rain pattering, the warbling of night birds, the infinite noises of a jungle that has no reason to fear people.
Shikaza’s honesty about her age opens up a sliver in Grok’s heart, makes her doubt.
Grok picks a violet-veined leaf from a vine and twirls it. “Is this a mistake?”
Shikaza narrows her eyes, then turns to the forest, mist settling in around the floor many heights below them. “You ask this after we have come all this way?” Her mentor bares her teeth a little, her anger waxing. “We have been away from home for months, traipsing through strange lands, facing all kinds of foes, and you’re losing focus now?”
Grok bares her own teeth. “I ask because we have come all this way. Those rabid men who hunted us. That Orc tribe enslaving their own people. The arena! It’s all adding up. If we don’t return home with the rite fulfilled, I won’t be able to live with myself.”
Shikaza sets her jaw and says, “You and I came alone so no one else in the Spear would die. But that also means…”
Grok connects the dots, “If we die, we die alone, and forever leave the tribe wondering what became of us. Our blooms will be lost in the Everdream.”
Shikaza states flatly, as if it’s easy, “Then we must not die.”
The Orc who has always dreamed of being chief leans against the tree’s trunk and peers through the canopy. No moonlight comes through, but a fat raindrop splatters her forehead. She blinks away the water. “And how do you plan on beating the beast?”
“I’d advise trickery. Caution. Bold and quiet as vipers.”
They eat their ration of tri-horned goat jerky, then go through their warrior stances before sleep. Grok takes the windward position while her mentor settles in close, like one hand nested in another. Shikaza’s smaller, lean body produces ample heat to stave off the cold. There is tenderness in their proximity, but only one from many nights spent just so - Shikaza raised Grok more than anyone else. Long ago, Shikaza took the windward side. But now, Grok can protect the aging Orc.
Before she falls asleep, Grok’s skull starts thumping to the rhythm of her heartbeat, right behind her eyelids. She resists the temptation to eat a few numb-berries, as they will leave her painless but also restless. Eventually, she sleeps, her unconscious mind plaguing her with fears and the worst possible futures.
Such is the weight of a leader who will not allow herself to fail.
…
The morning delivers colder, thicker showers than those that persisted through the night. It’s possibly the most miserable way to awaken: damp, shivering, head pounding, and hungry. Grok groans to awareness and briefly imagines ending her life with her spear.
Shikaza shivers heavily and chatters, “Sh-should have brought cloaks.”
“Should have found a cave,” Grok replies. “The beast’s trail will be impossible to find in this.”
Shikaza replies with the oldest of their warrior mantras, “First needs first.”
Grok reaches for her hip-pack, stashed in a nook, and swears. The numb-berries are gone. Some quiet-stepping creature made off with them in the night. Grok is furious, the rage compounding her headache, and places a broad thumb to her temple and squeezes.
She thinks, Just…stop hurting. Gods, I beg you, have mercy on me. I want to make things right. I just want to correct my course. I need to become the chief I’m supposed to be.
The gods are silent beneath the thunderous rain, but even if it wasn’t raining, Grok doubts she’d hear anything.
Shikaza slips to the ground from the tree, splashing mud. She finds a cup-like leaf and drinks deeply from its reservoir of water. Grok does the same. After emptying many leaves of their liquid, the Orcs feel much better, if colder on the inside. The goat jerky does little to boost their morale, as it’s all they’ve eaten for weeks now.
“Time to hunt,” Grok says, despite feeling like death.
“Deeper we go, into Dué’s embrace,” Shikaza recites from the burial song.
“Deeper we go.”
But the deeper they delve the more uncertain their terrain becomes. They pick their way through ferns taller than horses, over jungle floor as treacherous as a thief. Ankle-twisting roots, sprouting from mountainous trees, are preferable to the puddles and rivers of muck. Who knows what holes might wrench a foot out of place, or what creatures lay in wait in the murk. They already have to keep watch on the glimmering eyes that follow them, ears trained on the slithering of venomous serpents or the snap of a twig from a tree-borne carnivore. At least the rain’s let up a bit.
“Night vipers, jungle cats, whip-lizards,” Shikaza recites, going down the list of nighttime predators that plague their jungle back home.
“Don’t forget metalauch,” Grok whispers, pointing at a monstrous tear in the underbrush, like a hundred blades had shorn through it. “Months of nights on hard cold earth, eating old tough goat jerky, facing growing piles of problems…and here it finally is.”
Shikaza muses, “I wonder how it scaled the mountain.”
“And why has it traveled so far from the Deepgreen? I’ve never heard of metalauchs doing so.”
“It must be a sacred place to our quarry. Important somehow. Predators like them don’t do things for without reason.”
Grok considers it fitting to take her vengeance in such a place and imagines the satisfaction of killing the beast, even as her head pounds. Shikaza removes her spear from the back-sheath and Grok follows suit. They settle into the silent crouch of hunters, of those ready to work as one mind. In the rain, she can’t tell how fresh the trail in the foliage is, or if the metalauch stormed through minutes or weeks ago. There are still footprints in the mud, but they’re faint. Maybe a day old.
They follow the tunnel carved through the understory for a long time and lose it briefly when the path dips into a deep swamp.
Shikaza’s eyes narrow and she hisses, “It swims, too?”
They notice ripples disturbing its surface, and Grok catches the flash of razor-sharp teeth as something snaps its snout shut. The pair find their way by fallen trees and branches, leaping like frogs, until the ground rises again to become traversable mud, then changes again into some sort of shale interspersed with boulders just as a cave’s mouth opens before them.
“Well, this mucks things up,” Shikaza grumbles.
Grok says humorlessly, “Mucks?”
“We cannot go into the cave. The metalauch only has to charge us in the tunnel to trample us.”
“And we do not have the resources or time to wait it out.”
A gale of bitterness and doubt crosses Shikaza’s face. “Maybe this is a sign to stop.” Grok turns from examining the cave and levels her gaze at her mentor. They stare fiercely at each other. Shikaza goes on, “Dying here in pursuit of your rite is worse than giving up. Dying here leaves our village with no future.”
Exasperated, head flicking toward the sky to incriminate the gods, Grok says, “I have no future now. The people have no faith in me. They will not accept me without the rite. Without this damned tradition.”
Shikaza, in answer, sticks her spear into the ground. “I am not here to argue. Only to guide. I will take your lead, chief-in-waiting. Even if it kills me. Or you.”
Head pounding, Grok massages her temple again. At this point, she’d rather die than return a failed, cursed chief. She cannot go back unavenged and empty-handed. Grok jabs her spear at the cave. “I will fight.”
“I came with you all this way so you would not travel alone. Sleep alone. Eat alone in the wild places. I will not let you die alone,” Shikaza promises, touching both cheek-horns to make an oath.
Grok’s head sends a shock of sharp agony like her body was turning her grief into physical pain. Into a warning.
She hides the pain. She buries it. And the broad-shouldered Orc weighed down by her duty forces herself to step inside the mouth of the cave for the fight of her life, the fight of her death.
…
Grok thinks, This darkness is one shade less than being buried alive.
The cave is damp, its ground soft and its stench like a gullet. Grok’s mouth goes dry with fear. It feels like a palm-cat is trying to claw out of her skull. Three hundred silent steps in and the smell of churned earth is in the air, alongside foul decay, and she detects a slight breeze. This cave must have another opening somewhere, which means the metalauch might have moved on.
Grok grits her teeth. She’s being stupid. She should turn back and face the tribe like a brave chief with nothing to hide or prove, because she could prove herself worthy, in time. She could do anything!
Time won’t bring back Totuiki or my eight friends who died that day. Time won’t stop Lord Marlton from eating up the Deepgreen or make him and his hateful men disappear.
She needs strength, and for strength she needs faith, trust, and oaths. The chiefly rite of the metalauch guarantees those things and more. She needs the symbol of her rite — the spear forged from the metalauch’s armored plates.
The cave is widening up ahead. Grok can tell from the greater movement of air and the intensifying scents. She puts a hand on the ridged walls, packed hard by the metalauch’s bulk, and gathers herself to fight this beast in its lair. She taps into her anger and malice and rage despite being trained to never do so. Warriors require calm, balance, and a free mind to react and fight as though in an improvised dance. Ego must be laid by the wayside.
She takes a silent step forward, and finds a future she did not foresee.
“Fuck,” Grok swears. “Fuck this waste of a journey.”
A nest is there, all around her, eggs in a semicircle spiral in the large cavern. In all the Spoken Past—the histories of her people—there was never a mention of metalauch nests.
But her real focus is the metalauch lying against the opposite wall. It hisses out a warning. But its enormous armadillo body sprawls awkwardly, its long, skinny, barbed tongue hanging out. Even its once-vicious eyes are half-closed. A stench of death barrels over Groks senses.
Shikaza steps beside Grok and notes sadly, “An illness. The beast is dying.”
Grok’s breath catches. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. I need to make things right.” She screams at the metalauch, challenging the half-dead creature, “I NEED TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT.”
The monster shifts slightly.
“Get up! Get! Up!” Grok yells, exploding all that pent-up hate, all that pent-up loss. “Fight me! Fight me that I might avenge my dead!” She swings her spear around and smashes one of the giant eggs as high as her knee. The unborn metalauch squeaks once, twice, as Grok smashes it, red liquid slopping out.
The metalauch’s bloodshot eyes fly wide open and the beast heaves itself onto its legs. It roars weakly, displaying blackened teeth, and charges, or rather, makes a desperate lunge. The poor beast makes it as far as Grok’s feet before collapsing, wheezing. Those once-wise and fearsome eyes meet Grok’s irate, pitiless gaze. She holds the spear at its head. In resignation, the metalauch shuts its eyelids, offering its life with no strings attached. It begs for mercy. Shikaza gasps at the sigh.
Monsters don’t offer themselves up.
Beasts don’t lay themselves in another’s hands like this.
Grok, her hard heart untouched, takes the spear and plunges it into the base of the metalauch’s skull. It’s one of three soft spots on a creature that’s almost impossible to kill at full strength. She takes the life without thinking, without pleasure, without gratitude.
It exhales a final throaty gurgle and dies.
Shikaza circles the metalauch, wary, as if it will return to life at any second. Something catches her eye. “The base of its tail bears a swollen wound and there is pus leaking out. You made this the day of your rite, didn’t you? Wasn’t this how you drove it away?”
Grok removes the spear in response.
Her teacher closes her eyes and places a worn hand on the metalauch’s shell, whispering a blessing of thanks. Then, she addresses Grok, “You finished it. Why do you look so angry?”
“I have finished nothing.”
“Why are you so bitter?”
“I came to do battle,” Grok says, “not to end the life of a sickly creature in its sacred nest. The ground is tainted. Maybe I should end the lives of her offspring.” Grok’s head hurts so bad she sees spots. She cannot see the difference between her pain and her anger.
Shikaza says, “You’ll do no such thing. They are the next chieftain’s rite! To kill them would stain the future of our people.”
“The future is already stained by my failure.” She hefts her spear firmly, then crushes an egg beside her, behind her, smashing them one by one like autumn gourds. She’s deaf to the weak, squeaking protests of the infantile metalauchs.
Shikaza storms over, catches Grok’s spear arm, and in two swift movements disarms and slams her to the ground.
“Stop it. They are innocent! How can you do such a thing when you have been given the rite by attrition. Your spear felled the monster long ago.”
“But I lost so much. Totuiki…” She cannot even mention the other names. She’s carried the grief so deeply for so long that it’s unbearable to speak of it.
Shikaza releases her grip, sensing Grok’s momentary madness fading. She says, softly, “He is gone. But his bloom is with you, forever. And now you can return, forge your spear, and claim the faith of our people. That is your rite.”
Shikaza’s answer does nothing to soothe Grok’s internal chaos and infernal head pain. It does nothing to quell the fear that she is beyond any point of correcting the rite, and by that dark thinking, beyond redemption. Things are piling up and piling up and piling up, eclipsing her once-bright future.
Shikaza leaves her to hunt and forage. She finds numb-berries and they ease Grok into a deep sleep. When she awakes, her mind is greatly relieved. She faces the next task: separating the metallic scales from the metalauch to haul back to their home. In the sunlight of the next day, she finds that the sickness affected those armored plates, making them denser and turning the color from dusty brown to gray-green. Grok takes this as an omen of her chiefdom, that it’s been touched by a deeper kind of sickness. She faces this reality: Her path is already mired by her failures. Why look for higher ground? Why look for the good in the world? Why look for the good in anything?
If the gods set her feet in the mire, then through it she will trod.
This story is a Proof of Concept for a novel I’m working on here and there. Its temporary title is Orc Blood. The world, called The Kiss, might be similar to other fantasies you’ve read, but has its own spin on it (which I’ll keep to myself for now.)
Let me know if you liked this, if you didn’t like this, or anything else.
If you did, I’ve got more stories in this incredible world coming for you.
For clarity - Dué is the god figure of the world. Bloom is the term Orcs give to the soul and/or spirit.
Until next month, readers.