18:23, Rotation 189 / 365 , 192 After Eucatastrophe, -63.902990, -58.871525, Reath

  The red blood was stained all upon this earth, smelling of rust. All mixed up with it was black blood, completely odorless.

  The black blood writhed; it desperately sought their fallen hosts. They struggled in vain to heal. But the spirits were too far from their homes spilled, from wounds that had opened too severely. The red blood was just hemoglobin. Inert and denatured.

  And all around their bloodstains were the bodies of the fallen.

  Irreversible damage had been done.

  This unhallowed earth had been desecrated long ago.

  Concealed behind earthen ramparts, the orcan berserkers observed their foes crossing the broken earth. Mud was smudged upon flesh, masking a flush of viridian, and it camouflaged those that did not already transmogrify chameleon skin. They readied their axes, glaives, and heavy machine guns.

  They had finally repulsed the knights all the way back to the shores, but only met more now, their enemy reinforced with new legions. No matter how many more elves were killed, it never seemed to be enough. They had to be routed; the position must be advanced.

  The berserkers were orcans, and the knights, elvans.

  But these orcans only saw the elvans before them as elves to be killed.

  And they saw the same- just orcs.

  Something lesser.

  Enemies.

  And so, they together charged at their racial enemy.

  The sole survivors of their vanguard battalion stood ready at the rampart of the western flank. Only two orcan warriors, Ghorto and Zahul, remained from nine hundred and eighty-four. While the reinforcing battalions surged to reach them, thundering footsteps echoing behind, the duo braced themselves firm against a remnant legion. The only way out for them was through, to break past the ranks through the weakest point and escape to the inland before the pincer enveloped them. They strode through, surging forwards erratically in hydraulic exoskeletal powered bursts. How many there were then, now there were just four.

  And it was two against one.

  Hardly fair odds.

  The elvan Knight Sirilde was a decorated orcslayer, but it mattered not, for as he swung at his target, the old orcan fighter Ghorto Luyee, rent apart the clasps of carapace chestplate with his claws. It tore a gap along the plate’s hem. He promptly shoved a stiletto through the gap, and up into the creature’s gut, puncturing the stomach.

  He thought, die painfully, elf. Then he wrenched his weapon to maximize damage.

  He snarled. Shook his wrist. The carapace plate fell away, followed by hissing acid eaten entrails.

  But another Knight, Saralhae, was upon him already, a spinning dervish. The speed glitched inorganic. But still it held grace in its erraticity. Orcan felid agility pulled him away from the blades, but not before-

  ‘GR-,’ he gnashed his teeth at the laceration. It deflected off his clavicle leaving only a nick he couldn’t feel. It spurted a rivulet of red blood, staining his chest.

  Ghorto clawed for the creature’s throat, throttled his attacker to meet the flourish with the punishment of brute force, throwing the slight blade dancer down by the nape. Even the ductile and compressed superhard gryphantene could not prevent cervical vertebrae from snapping, as it struck the ground. Saralhae’s brain was cut off from blood, as the vessels in his neck had burst, and he died.

  Clutching the wound to hold onto his precious blood, he could only think – this will be death by a thousand cuts [] – it was but a glancing injury for a full berserking orcan, but Ghorto was already at his limit. Previous battle had left him with herniated lumbar discs, hairline fractures on the shoulder blades, crisscrossing lacerations from glancing projectiles, and a broken pinky toe.

  Corporal Zahul Thraxes, only twenty-four revolutions old, his only squadmate left standing, was not faring any better. The Knight Selig lunged at Zahul with a crude pike, but the unwieldiness of the weapon was his downfall, for while it just missed Zahul’s chest and beating heart, he could then deftly trap the polearm in his armpit and wrest it away. The knight screamed as Zahul brought his battleaxe down upon his subpar polymer carapace. The cries did not cease as the body was battered, the bones crushed, but the young orcan just turned away. There was barely any time to even register the creature as a living, conscious, and intelligent being.

  In vengeance, a dragon dropped its breath merely two meters away. A blinding wall of light crashed upon their cones and rods, painful white to the kaleidoscope of searing phosphenes behind tightly shut eyelids. Ghorto shoved Zahul behind an accumulated pile of fallen bodies. A wave of heat blasted all around the cover, glassing the sand. It was followed by a sulfurous draft of incinerated flesh and melted stone.

  When his vision returned, he saw Ghorto’s green face, and his long-overgrown tusks, his scraggly beard that had branched and split, growing leaves, from hunger, but now was singed and smoking. His mentor was now staring him down with an intensity he had never seen before, to mask the winces.

  He uttered, “Another world-,” he coughed a sputter “- will be.”

  He said it often. Too often.

  He roared it to rally their platoon or thoughtfully mused it to begin a long and fanciful speculation of how utopic orcan life could be after they had liberated themselves from elvan oppression. Another world will be!

  Whispered it to steel himself, to screw his courage to the sticking place, a reminder for why he fought, to bring this safer, freer world into existence by pure will alone, if not for his poor, blood sodden, traumatized ass, then for his children, and his children’s children. Another world will be. It will be.

  Something to die for.

  That’s what those words meant.

  And they meant most of all when they had been spoken to Zahul in his deepest moment of despair, after Zahul had just been through the agony – and then in due time the ecstasy – of being dipped. To let him know that this too shall pass.

  It will be. It will be.

  For the new world would be, whether Zahul liked it or not, just as his new body, and his new mind, had become. Endless though this agony of feeling his former self melt away all those revs ago back in the vat may be. Even now he could still feel it in memory.

  Irradiated plasma had soaked through the roughshod barrier between them and the breath, lashing Ghorto’s side as he embraced Zahul in protection. Within an instant the superheated matter returned to vaporous state. Ghorto’s vital organs had already been flash broiled, not even his troll regeneration could repair the damage. But the tendrils of heat sputtered out their last gasps before they could penetrate Ghorto’s thick bulk and insulating gambeson. He had saved Zahul by shielding him with his own body.

  Zahul now found himself in this new world, without his fellow orcan. Not just a fellow orcan, but his dearest friend. Not just his dearest friend, but truly a brother. Even a brother-in-law to be.

  Ghorto’s neck slumped forward as he passed. Already his corpse felt unbearably hot to the touch but nonetheless Zahul clasped the back of Ghorto’s neck, once wreathed with his ragged mane but now just sizzling flesh and charred bone. It hurt to continue holding on, but pain didn’t matter anymore.

  He could only half-wail before this final battle once again consumed his being in the world. Another knight had stalked upon him.

  This was no time for hesitation, mourning would have to wait.

  He rolled on his shoulder blade, deftly grabbing his axe and brandishing it. His hands, still raw and peeling from clutching his smoldering comrade, should have felt punishing pain as he now clutched the handle, but the endogenous morphines of the beginnings of a berserker rage just pushed it away.

  Zahul whispered a battle prayer to himself, “Lok Tar,” – run to victory,

  “O Dar” – or die.

  Bloodshot eyes snapped forward, buried in folds of fury.

  The enemy was no longer He, the Knight.

  The enemy was It, the scum.

  The foul elves that took Ghorto’s life.

  It leapt at him and slashed his right blade laterally and Zahul was only able to barely lift the handle of his axe in time to parry the blow. The serrated scimitar’s tip raked across the underside of his upper arm, the nanoscopic teeth chewed through his tough orcan skin, spilling blood. Burning pain rippled out through Zahul’s tricep, but he only let the pain fuel his berserking. It could only offer a glancing blow. His would not be.

  “WAAA-AAAGH!”

  Deftly reversing the grip of his axe, he heaved upwards in a mighty uppercut slash, the axe blade slamming the chest of the hateful elf, scraping along the nigh indestructible carapace plate to the right shoulder; it cleaved the vulnerable hydraulic pumps and fastener tendons, slipping ever so slightly past the armor to sup on elf flesh. Black blood rained and splattered all upon him for he had nicked open the elvan’s artery. The blow lifted the Knight off the ground a meter and three-thirteenths, and it tumbled back to the soft earth with a thud.

  Zahul pounced upon him, dropping the unwieldy axe. He grasped the edges of the soldier’s helmet.

  The carapace helm was latched to the thoracic plate, but with a growl, tight fibers of muscle bulging across his trunk thick arms, the steel latches were soon bent and torn off, for Zahul’s greataxe blow had ripped open a hole where the thorax plate met the helm’s neck guard.

  The gaunt face of the elvan was now exposed to him. Spirits crawled across its eyes, blackening even the sclera- the whites of the eyes. This was no longer the blank and frozen visage of a knight’s helm, but just the same old two eyes, nose and mouth of a mere elvan soldier.

  He held aloft his twisted trophy for a moment to observe his enemy’s countenance. But the face was not its own.

  It was a contorted cackle, sharp and severe facial structures frozen, most notably its pointy ears, iconic to elvans. They pulled back from a brow furrowed with fury, stretching open a sick grimace. Plated teeth, silvery and black, gnashing uncontrollably. A hissing, screeching demon.

  Zahul brought the helmet back down, smashing the soldier’s brow with such force that it tore past the skin. Fresh, black, spirit-laden blood spilled across the soldier’s cheeks. The blow sent the back of the soldier’s head hard to an unfortunately placed stone. The combined force of Zahul smashing the helmet on the soldier’s face, and its nape smashing against the rock, sent it into a concussion.

  The soldier’s eyes, just recently glazed over with bloodlust, shuddered. The black spirits retreated from its eyes, agitated by vibration, revealing only blank, white sclera for its irises were thrust up into its eye sockets. As the eyes flickered back down into focus – it had pink eyes, common among the elvans – its pupils undilated, and they seemed to see clearer. The gray veins that clutched the visage faded.

  The psionic bond with its kin broken, the soldier now glanced up at Zahul, no longer in a battle trance, although Zahul’s own bloodthirst had only just begun. Zahul could peer directly into the soldier’s soul, and he could see nothing now but a pathetic, mewling creature, confused and shaken.

  “Pl- please!”

  Greasy locks of stark white hair, grayed with dirt and grime, fell upon the sickly pale complexion – as all their albinic complexions were – of this elvan. Hollow cheekbones betrayed that inside the cage of its carapace, this soldier was starved, and now it was badly concussed, the vibrations in its gray matter shaking him free of his enslavement. Deep sagging bags underneath his eyes betrayed exhaustion. How long had it fought without rest or sleep? Two rotations? Three?

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  The elvan had been sent to fight until death. It was expendable.

  “N- n- no… choice…”, the soldier stuttered. A black line fell from its nostril, neck twitching uncontrollably. This lowly soldier was rarely allowed to speak, and seldom used spoken language, taking command by telepathy. So, the words came rusty and alien. But it was especially difficult to communicate given that his skull was still ringing like a bell.

  “Sp- spare m- muh- kh-!” but then the nausea was too much. The sick filled up its throat and airways, choking it, suffocating it. Its eyes widened with panic. At this point perhaps it would already be kindness, but Zahul was now filled only with cruelty. He shot back a twisted, furious, hateful glare to let the elf know his begging was in vain.

  It somehow managed to swallow the sour stomach bile, and in a weak gasp, could only whisper,

  “Orcan, please…”

  In its final hour, finally unbound from its chains, was this last desperate bid for survival.

  That it chose to address him as orcan and not just orc, was not lost on Zahul.

  Every orcan knew the cruel elvan magick of psionics, they knew that every soldier and every worker was ultimately beholden to their Queen through psionic enslavement. Their minds were not their own. They belonged to their clan, which belonged to the Queen.

  In this one moment of freedom, he had chosen to address Zahul with respect.

  Was it out of craven self-preservation? But how could such an undeveloped mind, never having truly been released from his psychic chains, possibly comprehend such things? Was it a base instinct to live?

  He thought of the possibility that the elvan might share the same experience as an orcan – conscious and aware – had they not been psionically enslaved by their Queens.

  It was even crueler to imagine that conscious state, fully aware…

  …trapped in a body that was not theirs to command.

  He imagined that perhaps the elf might, after all, have some shred of orcanity.

  The most dreadful thought of all was that perhaps this was a person.

  An elvan.

  Not just an elf.

  Not just some creature.

  And this thought gnawed away at Zahul’s sanity, strained by the violence of war, because of course there had to be a person in this thing!

  He spoke language, however crude and impaired!

  He was begging for his life!

  Another world was indeed something to die for… but was it something to kill for?

  Or had the elvan soldier, with the imprinted knowledge bequeathed to him by the spirits in his hippocampus, somehow known not to call him orc because he respected Zahul as a fellow conscious being?

  Did he see Zahul as a person?

  … or was it just desperate deference? Craven survival instinct?

  The spirits reminding it not to use that slur!

  These thoughts would come back to haunt him again endlessly, many revolutions later, for Zahul could not help but mull over this violent confrontation as an older orcan. He would wake up at night covered in sweats recalling this moment in nightmares. But that was not now. For in the present recorded moment, there simply was no time to think in the heat of battle.

  The immediate intuition of the rage was that whether the elvan was in control or not, Ghorto was dead, and it had to be held accountable.

  It was certainly not directly responsible for Ghorto’s death.

  It was not as if Ghorto had died by its hands, no. That was the work of a dragon’s breath.

  Would mercy be to let the elvan live? The knight was defeated. Neutralized. It could pose no more harm to the advancing reinforcements. Perhaps- capture as a prisoner of war, so information could be… extracted. Zahul did not need to strike, where there was no need.

  But something needed to be held accountable.

  It had to be held accountable.

  “No elf-” he made sure to spit out his own slur, “deserves mercy.”

  He grabbed his weapon by his side and lifted it high, casting the helm to the side, which clattered to the ground.

  And then cleaved through the elvan’s ribcage, now exposed with the carapace sundered open, horrific cracks reverberating along the handle as the heavy blade crushed the collarbone, then snapped rib after rib, before sinking deep into soft lung tissue. The elvan gasped, and tried to cry out, but could only manage a croak as his right lung had collapsed. He glared at Zahul with hatred and fury in his eyes, his brow all twisted up with dying fear. It did not want to die…

  …but it was already dead.

  “You-” it was barely a whisper.

  “...wretched...” a thin black line traced its way down from the corner of his mouth to his chin as he struggled to cough out his last curse. And it was this curse that would haunt Zahul.

  “...animal.”

  Incapable of reasoning anymore, driven purely by emotion, Zahul’s nostrils flared at the insult, and he gnashed his tusks, the primordial power of the berserker rage still surging through his body.

  …or would mercy be to end needless suffering?

  “I take it back, elf”, he spat again, “Here is your mercy.”

  He ripped his axe out. Kicked the elf to the side so he wouldn’t have to look upon those hate-filled eyes, yanking the hair back to force his teeth upon the same hard, stray rock that had knocked his agency back into him.

  The elvan used his dying gasp to spit out, “filthy orc-”.

  “FOR THE HORDE.”

  …and pressed his boot upon the skull, applying pressure until it burst. It was like a relief once Zahul felt that pop. A sick, dark satisfaction. So great was his fury that he wished he could have stamped upon it forever, until this hatred could be slaked, though he felt it would never be. To let go of it would be to dishonor Ghorto.

  The anguish was all consuming now, and he roared his grief at the callous heavens.

  A warrior’s cry.

  The tears funneled his vision, but this was no time for weakness, the battle had not yet ended.

  He surveyed the battlefield around him.

  Or had the battle been won?

  Now the dragons held their breath. For whatever reason, the elvans now showed them mercy when he could not spare it for the elvan soldier he had just slain, for he knew well enough that the dragons could raze all of Orca to burning ash.

  Cacophonous roars rang and echoed across. The reinforcements had reached him finally, the sole survivor of his entire forward battalion. None of his enemies, those last four foul elves, remained. He could distinguish the unmistakable rally - “For the Horde!”. Surely the hateful elves had been routed! His comrades rushed forward into the smoky darkness past him, but he could only fall to his knees.

  It had been a very long time that the hope that the war would soon be over – that fluttering spark of joy that he held in the pit of his stomach, never to escape – had beaten its wings. He looked across the great shoreline that stretched across the horizon, terminating in great mountains and glaciers that touched both ends, in the corners of his wide angled eyes.

  Could this be it?

  Did they win?

  Could this be home?

  What is certain is that the orcans were descended from the mutants. What the mutants descended from was not commonly understood through the realms, although to the astute the answer was obvious.

  They had come to Orca, their namesake, across the seas during the Exodus – the birth and movement of their people, their nation – from Protorca where their first enclave had fallen to the elvans.

  From the holy glaciers, the Horde carved great temples and sanctuaries in situ, to find refuge from dragonbreath.

  From the ruins of the outposts of the very few and ancient Godlike explorers who first set foot on Orca, the Horde built new villages for their burgeoning people. These were named Aboa, Arctowski, Asuka, Belgrano, Bharati, Gabriel de Castilla, Carvajal, Charcot, Concordia, Davis, Deception, Elichirebety, Estrellas, Faraday, Ferraz, Sanae, San Martín, Gangotri, Gondwana, Greatwall, Jang Bogo, Jinnah, Kohnen, Lazarev, Leningradskaya, Maitri, Marambio, Maldonaldo, Matienzo, Maudheim, Mawson, McMurdo, Melchior, Mendel, Mirny, Mizuho, Molodezhnaya, Neumayer, Oasis, Orcadas, Plateau, Parodi, Progress, Risopatron, Russkaya, San Martin, Sanae, Sarimaraisa, Scott, Sejong, Signy, Soyuz, Syowa, Taishan, Tor, Troll, Vernadsky, Vostok, Wasa, Yelcho, Zucchelli, and Zhongshan.

  The lustful and hearty Orcans flourished in the revolutions since their Exodus from their original homeland of Protorca, most families birthing children of up to six or more. It was in the design that orcans were meant to go forth and multiply.

  Covered in the orcan’s skin was a symbiotic moss which aided the orcan its photosynthesis, but even with their ability to absorb energy from sun, the orcans were still a ravenous lot. Although capable of surviving on lean fare for many seasons given the aid of their skin – when starved it would sprout leaves to further bask in the sunlight – the appetites of orcans were indulgent. Greedy and vain, green as their skin in their hearts, for the orcan, more was simply never enough.

  And yet despite their seemingly individualistic nature, the orcans were a Horde. One people, once united under one liberator, the Master of the Horde, the Duruk.

  But Master did not imply rulership.

  Each village was beholden only to itself.

  The Horde Master had long retired from governing. Only in times of total war against the elvans could the Horde return to dictatorship; this was codified in the law of the Horde, fully realized though unspoken and unwritten.

  Through the magick of essence weaving, the Horde Master bequeathed each orcan the twin gifts of the orcan body:

  First was the gift of transmogrification. The elvans called this shapeshifting. With focused will and enough time, an orcan could morph their bodies to bear tooth, claw and tusk by a meditative reverie. Should they wish it, they could walk deftly through purest darkness relying only upon the echoing of their throats, breathe the oceans as if they were skies, or smell the scents over a thousand leagues.

  The second was the gift of the berserker rage, an inalienable will for survival that made the orcan nigh on invincible.

  But even though the Horde Master purged their essence of what he deemed were the weakest and darkest traits of the mutants, cleansing away all that was unworthy in their former selves, the Master still could not change the nature of an orcan.

  The definition of a ‘person’. Scryer, if this is your first time scanning this recording, and wish to skip the footnotes – perhaps to avoid spoilers – by all means, please do.

  Its rider, though at suborbital height, was well aware of what was happening on the ground and aimed directly for orcan commanders. It was naught but a scrawny shrimp of a dragon, but it too had fissile waste to spew, just like all dragons did. This was just a little small stream of it, but more than enough to snipe down a prime target. But the dragon, and dragonrider, had to turn away from the battle soon to respond to a surprise attack against their forces at home on Upper Reath.

  He had most certainly adopted this from a rallying chant of the Godlike Beings, ‘Another world is possible’, or, in its original language, ‘Un otro dias es posible’.

  The process of dissolving a mutant’s body, transforming them into the first generation of orcans. A process which necessitated the formation of the invading Horde Marine Corps, inspired by the Morquarran force of the same name, specialized in amphibious assault and conquest, their mission to liberate the enslaved mutants of Upper Reath… and dip them. Among their ranks included Ghorto and Zahul, and why they stood at the vanguard.

  But he could not remember a thing of his life before the dipping.

  ‘Lok Tar O Dar’, orcan lingo, also known simply as ‘orcish’ meaning literally ‘we run to life or death’.

  Lok’ meaning “to run”, and ‘Tar O Dar’ meaning ‘Life or death’. It was an incomplete language, but the Horde Master, understanding that a subculture thrived or perished upon the common bonds of the in-group, created the jargon to unify his new nation. Orcan linguists who further pursued study of orcish were almost all universally disappointed to learn it was mostly cribbed from fictional universes.

  The axillary artery.

  Shoryuken.

  the psionically administered epinephrine and acetylcholine paralyzing the expression.

  They were structured so to better receive external psionic signals in receptors embedded at their tips. In other words, elvan ears were also their antennae.

  Ebon from gryphantene plating, the legendary indestructible material of elvan magick, courtesy of the birthing spirits that wove their augmentations upon it even in a pre-fetal embryonic state.

  The wound, breaching subcutaneous, was stopped only by the hardest part of the skull, the frontal lobe.

  Striking the most vulnerable part of the skull, the occipital.

  The elvans were all albinos – any differentiation in color being dyes – for they needed to delete the nonessential essence that gave pigmentation to make room for the essence they needed to integrate with the spirits. But they kept what essence they could that made them unique. The spirits took on the radiation absorbing role that melanin provided, giving a gray tinge to the elvan pallor. The spirits in fact exceeded melanin’s capacity, so that elvans never, ever suffered skin cancer. But orcans never did too, their skin mosses providing protection, and their archive cells correcting any essence damage.

  The soldier, whose name was Sinai, named after the Reathean Peninsula, preferred the pronouns he / him / his, as did most soldiers, thank you very much.

  For just a moment, the pronoun that Zahul used to define the subject before him, unconsciously, flickered to the gendered. Just a switch of a bioelectrical fuse in his Broca’s Lobe.

  Any science, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

  Refer to footnote 1 for the definition of a person.

  O brave new world, O brave new world that has such people in it.

  But this brief flash of empathy abruptly ended as the sight of the soldier’s black blood triggered that deep, dark emergency failsafe essence that the Master had implanted in him and all orcans. Zahul needed a proxy for his rage.

  Zahul had developed from this moment on, a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder that he would leave untreated. The androus orcan was too stoic to believe he ever needed therapy.

  If, for naught, but to sate his desire for vengeance.

  Because, after all, ‘wretched’ was quite the elegant word. Perhaps Zahul had underestimated Sinai’s grasp of language.

  What was once called a ‘curbstomp’, in the Lost Age.

  They had forgotten what butterflies were.