Aris hauled himself onto the muddy bank, his clothes dripping. He stared back at the waterfall's churning curtain, then struck his forehead, hard enough to leave a mark, and shook his head.
How stupid. I was about to make a fatal mistake. He turned away, his voice a murmur against the roar of the falls. In his desperation to ward off Lilly's encroaching hypothermia, his mind had defaulted to a primitive instinct: make a fire.
But in the enclosed, fifteen-square-meter space of the cave, it would be a death sentence. Carbon monoxide would smother them in their sleep. And if the smoke somehow found a fissure in the rock, it would rise into the sky like a beacon, advertising their position to any orc with working eyes and a nose.
How could I overlook something so simple? A cold spike of self-loathing lanced through him. The more intense the situation, the calmer the mind must be. Breathe.
He suddenly froze, his muscles locking as he realized he had made another mistake. He had been standing in the open, muttering to himself, completely exposed.
Idiot.
The internal reprimand hadn't even finished when a sharp snap cracked from the nearby brush. He bolted for the nearest cover, dropping low and merging with the shadows as the dense foliage swallowed him whole.
Crouched in the damp shadows, Aris held his breath until his lungs ached. He strained to listen, but the forest offered nothing beyond the relentless roar of the falls. Through the gaps in the leaves, he forced his eyes to scour the open ground; the dark hollows between tree trunks, the shifting patterns of sunlight on the moss, the deceptive, mirror-like stillness of the pool.
He waited, every nerve screaming for data. One minute passed. Then two, all while the biochip remained silent, its scan detecting nothing within his immediate vicinity but the erratic movement of small, skittering insects.
Slowly, the tension in his shoulders began to uncoil, though he kept a firm grip on the hilt of his crude knife. Probably a falling branch. Or a small animal. But the surge of adrenaline had served its purpose.
It burned away the last of his complacency, reminding him brutally that in this place, an enemy could materialize from anywhere without warning. He couldn't afford to drop his guard. Not for a second.
He exhaled slowly, feeling the adrenaline bleed from his limbs. But the relief was short-lived. The foremost problem remained: Lilly was freezing in a cave where he couldn't light a fire.
His mind raced through possibilities, cycling, searching for a workaround. Dry wood is useless. His mind raced through possibilities, searching for a solution. Dry wood would be useless, and finding any in this part of the forest was unlikely, given that the trees were saturated by the constant mist and proximity to the falls. Even if he scavenged enough for a spark, the smoke would be a flare for the orcs.
Should I return to the village? He considered it for a heartbeat. He could walk back in, dripping and bedraggled, playing the panicked brother searching for the sacrifice.
The chief had bought the Prophet act once, or perhaps had simply been overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of it, backed by the ten percent Orcish. But twice? Aris knew the old man wasn't that stupid. Those cold, calculating eyes didn't miss much.
Even if he talked his way past the gates, claiming he was resuming the search, he would never talk his way out again. The chief would detain him "for his own safety as the Prophet." An old man with the strength of three grown men wouldn't need chains to keep him there. Looking at his own battered weak body, Aris knew he would be powerless to return to Lilly.
He continued to turn the problem over in his mind, his gaze drifting back to the pool—and then he froze. The sight of the water derailed his thoughts entirely.
There was no river extending from it.
No matter how he studied the periphery, there was no stream, no visible outlet. The waterfall plunged, the water churned at the base, yet the banks remained unnervingly still.
He had been so fixated on immediate survival that he had missed a fundamental inconsistency. Waterfalls fed rivers. That was the physics of this world—of any world. Unless the system possessed a hidden drain. Unless the water was being funneled underground.
He crept closer, sweeping his eyes across the entire expanse. Beyond the crash of the cascade, the surface lay undisturbed. The outlet has to be small, or perhaps blocked by debris. Maybe it is a natural filtration system, or a subterranean bypass. That would explain it.
He filed the observation away. Whatever secrets the bottom of that pool held, they would have to wait. Lilly came first.
If dry wood won't work, stones might. It was the only sound idea to emerge from the chaos of options. Yes. This could indeed work. Use the stones as thermal batteries, heat them out here, then carry them back to Lilly.
He slipped away from the undergrowth. The stones near the pool were useless—porous and saturated, the kind that expanded and exploded like grenades at critical temperatures. He needed something denser. Stones that could hold five hundred degrees or more without shattering.
He activated the biochip's scan and moved stealthily between the trees. His vision dimmed at the edges as data layered over the forest floor; mineral compositions, heat tolerances, structural integrity scores scrolling beside each stone in his field of view.
Minutes later, dozens of meters from the waterfall, he was still crouched and moving, gaze flicking from stone to stone, dismissing most before he even bent to examine them.
Five minutes passed, a long time in this damp forest where perfect stone was rare, but it was worth the search. He found a cluster of dark, fine-grained stones nestled against a rotting log. The biochip flagged them instantly: high density, low porosity, excellent thermal retention.
Basalt. Exactly what he needed.
He gathered the stones in a strip of tattered cloth and moved west, putting as much distance as he could between his planned work site and the waterfall. Four minutes later, where the soil felt firmer and drier beneath his bare feet, he dropped the stones and fell to his knees. His fingers clawed into the dirt, and with the sharpened end of a sturdy branch, he began to dig.
Moments later he dug two holes, a foot apart, connected by a narrow tunnel at the base. The tunnel would act as a natural bellows, pulling oxygen into the heart of the pit to feed a flame hot enough to bake the basalt while keeping the smoke and light hidden beneath the rim. Out here, a standard campfire was nothing more than a dinner bell for anything hunting in the woods.
He scavenged every scrap of dry bark and brittle twig he could find and packed them into the larger opening. Then he took up his flint.
Once. Twice. Three times he struck. Sparks jumped, glowing briefly against the damp tinder before vanishing into the humid air.
The biochip provided constant feedback; strike angles, force vectors, tinder density, but it couldn't move his arm. Worse, the flints in this region were poor: brittle and dull.
On the eleventh attempt, a curl of bark finally caught fire. He cupped the fledgling flame immediately, shielding it with his body and feeding it his own breath until it steadied. He added the remaining tinder, and the pit roared to life. Deep in the holes, yellow flames began to dance, their intense heat radiating upward to bake the basalt stones he had already positioned across the rim.
He fed the blaze the last of the dry fuel, enough to sustain the burn for an hour. By the biochip's calculations, the basalt would soon climb past five hundred degrees Celsius. The perfect thermal output to stave off Lilly's hypothermia. It was also a dangerous tool; if he mismanaged the transport, the heat would sear his flesh to the bone.
He glanced toward the falls, now obscured by a dense screen of brush and trees, his mind already dissecting the next hurdle. Transport. Getting back to the cave meant moving through the waterfall. If the cascade hit the five-hundred-degree stone, the thermal shock would not only extinguish the heat, but also shatter the basalt, potentially sending superheated shrapnel into his body.
The problem was still cycling through his mind when a female cry cut through the forest—thin, desperate, in a language he didn't understand.
Aris went still. A human? From another village?
Heavy footsteps followed, and the clink of metal. They grew louder, mingling with the exhausted sobs of someone who had cried themselves hoarse. Cutting through it all came the guttural rasp of Orcish. His ten-percent fluency was just enough to catch fragments, and what he caught made his pulse spike.
Meat... fresh... tender.
It can't be. He parted the leaves with agonizing slowness, afraid even a rustle might give him away. Through the gaps, the nightmare took shape: Three orcs led the vanguard, tearing raw strips of flesh from a severed human leg. They ate as they marched, their heavy jaws tearing meat. Blood slicked their chins and stained their bare chests like sacred war paint.
Five more followed, heavy iron chains coiled in their massive fists. Tethered behind them like livestock, nearly twenty humans stumbled through the damp mulch—women, men, children of varying ages. Their heads hung low, their eyes hollow. The eyes of those who had already resigned themselves to their fate.
"Volrag save us!" a woman's voice cracked, clinging to a sliver of desperate hope in a hopeless place. "Volrag, deliver us from the jaws of—"
A rough snarl cut the woman off. The chains rattled with a sudden jerk, and she fell silent at the warning, though the sobbing resumed seconds later, quieter now. The procession moved on, leaving only the cloying stench of orc sweat, old rust, and blood in its wake.
Aris lay prone to the left of the trail, frozen meters from their path, his breath shallow and controlled. It didn't matter if he was being paranoid. If a powerful one lurked among them, one with extraordinary hearing, even a single snapped twig could end him.
Watching their back grow smaller and smaller, clawing dread warred with the cold logic of his mind. Where are they taking them? How many more of these monsters are there? I have to follow. I have to see their settlement. I have to understand them.
Long minutes passed after the sounds faded, yet he stayed rooted to the earth, ears straining for the telltale rustle of a straggler. Only then did he force his body to rise. He moved to the flank of their trail, weaving through the deep, suffocating shadows, using the massive trunks as sight-line breaks. Every silence felt fragile and every shift in the plants looked like an ambush.
Minutes later, he stumbled upon remains.
It had been a man from the group. The head was still intact, the eyes wide and fixed on a canopy he would never see again. The abdomen remained untouched, but everything else; limbs, pelvis, and ribs had been ripped away.
Aris stared at the body, at the ground where there were no clear signs of struggle. The urge to flee surged from his gut, a primal scream warning him: This could be you. This will be you.
He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached and forced the fear back down. This was something that had to be done—one way or another. He stepped past the corpse and moved on, his pace slower now, his presence vanishing deeper into the trees.
Minutes later, the canopy began to thin. The footprints ahead broke from the forest's suffocating gloom and spilled into the vast, open glare of a clearing.
Aris halted, his heart hammering against his ribs in a frantic beats. His body was nearing the edge of exhaustion, too long on guard, too long tracking. He chose a massive tree near the treeline and began to climb, his fingers finding holds in the rough bark, his muscles burning with every agonizing inch. Near the canopy, he steadied himself on a thick branch and turned his gaze toward the horizon.
A vast, circular expanse of trampled bare earth sprawled before him, scarred by deep ruts and the debris of countless brawls. At its center squatted the orc settlement. Five times the size of the village, perhaps more.
He didn't dwell on the scale. His focus locked onto the grim, ivory palisade encircling it. He narrowed his eyes, and even without straining, his frown deepened. The walls were neither timber nor stone. They were bones. Thousands of them—femurs, ribs, skulls—lashed together into a jagged, sun-bleached rampart. A monument meant to terrify. To remind humans exactly where they stood in the food chain.
It worked. Even at this distance, the hairs on his arms stood on end. Every instinct screamed at him to leave. But the sickness and the fear spiked deeper. Most of those bones were probably human. Perhaps even this body's parents were among them.
An ache tightened in his chest. He stifled it and kept observing. The area around the settlement was empty save for the orcs and their human captives. The absence of wildlife in this region finally made sense. Since entering the forest, he had seen no deer, no boar, no predators. Yesterday, men had hauled in a deer, and the villagers spoke of hunting grounds, but Aris could glimpse the truth now.
How could these monsters allow anything else? The hunting grounds were managed pens. Humans were permitted to hunt only what the orcs allowed, ensuring the livestock remained healthy until the harvest.
A ranch within a ranch. His stomach turned, but he forced his focus toward the center of the bone-village. Tiny, chained silhouettes moved between the huts, hundreds of them, if not thousands. A massive labor force of the damned.
At the settlement's heart, a statue jutted from the sprawl like a blasphemy. Ten to fifteen meters tall, it depicted a violent, horned figure standing over a monolith. Carved into its back was a great wheel with five razor-sharp points.
Volrag.
Aris barely had time to register the idol when heavy footsteps thudded from below. He pressed his chest against the rough bark, shielding himself, and peered down.
Three orcs entered the forest, moving with the casual, bored menace of landlords inspecting their property. Trailing behind them, head bowed in submission, walked a figure Aris identified immediately. The chief.
So he didn't buy the Prophet act after all. Or perhaps he had, and had come here to confirm the truth with the masters themselves.