The smell of freshly turned earth filled Vac Fadric’s nostrils as he lay on the hard packed earth in the dark. As thought sluggishly returned to his mind, he felt as though the soil itself had invaded his eyes as he tried to rapidly blink the grit from the dried and salted orbs through which he was meant to see the world.

  It was vexing in the worst ways that he could feel his body’s every bruise, bump, and cut as his limbs splayed across the cold hard ground on which his insensate form had been tossed. As his eyes rapidly blinked in their own futile efforts, his fingers began to twitch and flex while seeking to refill themselves with the life’s blood that had been denied them by his limbs awkward placement by what he could only consider some ill favored Fate.

  The light had fled since his last waking thoughts, or was possibly now being kept from him by his jailors. At no point in these waking moments did he consider that he might have been slain in the battle he had just attempted to join when his skull had been clipped by some brute. Dead bodies, he was certain, felt much less pain.

  It was one thing he was fairly certain of: The dead felt no pain. Those had been the final words of some poet or other he had been forced to study the previous year by his tutor.

  …Porteas…? Partheas…?... He wasn’t sure what the man’s name had been at the moment, but Vac Fadric knew he had been forced to commit ritualized suicide by the Velspean Church when the man had refused to recant his supposed crimes. The fact that those crimes had involved marrying outside of his caste, and refusing to admit his actions had produced “abominations before the One True God” meant that the Velspean Church would allow him to kill himself, or alternatively, the Church would happily kill him over the course of a season.

  …Petreo! That was his name! HA!... He grinned to himself at the revelation.

  The poet chose to take his own life publicly.

  It had caused a small revolution to break out in the capital city, and ended in over a thousand people crucified on the walls that surrounded the city.

  …focus… his mind reminded itself. Experimentally, he moved his aching head, turning it slowly, lest it suddenly explode. The pain on the right side of his skull was more intense than he had expected.

  He heard a shilling noise near him.

  He still could not see. Either there was no light by which to see, or he had been beaten blind by whoever had taken him down when he had attempted to skewer the Hearainan man in the brown robe.

  Rough hands grabbed his shoulders, and pulled him up from the ground, leaning his body against a wall that was just as hard as the ground on which he had been laying.

  “Stop that, beast! Leave him be!” A rough voice hissed from out of the darkness. It sounded very much like Corporal Klee. He was, from the sound of his voice, several strides away at the very least.

  Weird movement around his head, accompanied by slithering motions around his neck and then rising up his cheeks into his hairline made Vac Fadric shiver and then flinch before light returned to his eyes with startling pain.

  Blurry sight returned as his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the small, barred room in which he now sat. The figure who leaned toward his face looked like a Ghorma girl around his own age, though her features failed to swim into focus no matter how much he blinked.

  Slender and long limbed, her face looked angular in the dappled halflight of the cell. He could see the blue green of her skin, but no tattoos to show family or trade. Her hair was very dark for a Ghorma woman, though that could, Vac Fadric reasoned, be due to the dark conditions and his failing sight. She had it pulled back from her face, which made her features feel more angular than they might look any other day had she let her hair down.

  “I said stay awa’ frae the boy!” Klee was angry enough now that his Auld accent was coming to the fore.

  A thumping noise resounded through the set of cells in which the survivors now sat or lay in various states of health, consciousness, and agitation.

  “I’m fine, Corporal!” Vac Fadric called out, though his voice was hoarse, and gravelly. “Can’t see too well, but she just took the sack off of my head, so it’s getting better.”

  The young woman held up the offending sack, and he could see in the contours of her silhouette that she was making a face at the thing, before she turned and threw it at the bars of their prison. The diaphanous grey shroud fluttered slightly before striking the bars, and sliding listlessly to the hard packed soil of the floor.

  Vac Fadric closed his eyes, and sighed as the pain in his head lessened slightly. It felt markedly better with his eyes closed, and he wondered if he could go through the rest of his life like this.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  The idea made him giggle. Lord Ashe always said “Too many people wander through their lives with their eyes closed, don’t be one of them.”

  Scuttling noises on the packed earth of the cell told him that the young woman had moved back to the far corner of their cage from where he now sat. Opening his eyes again, if briefly, he could see her sitting forlornly, looking down the row of cages.

  Vac Fadric began blinking rapidly, trying to clear the grittiness from his eyes. Slowly reaching up with uncertain fingers, he felt around his eyes, and found that much of his face was covered with fine, powdery sand. He wiped, and smeared, and brushed as much from his face as he could when Klee finally called out to him.

  “How are you now, Private Vac Fadric? We thought you may die, if ye weren't dead already.” The man said dead as Vac Fadric would have said “dayd.”

  Clearing his throat, and coughing briefly, “I was hit on the head, Corporal. It hurts like Rhoona’s own light, but I think I’ll live a while yet.”

  “Oh?” The voice came back. “That’s grand. Okay, then.”

  “Corporal Klee?” He asked, nis eyes still shut, but now watering and tearing up heavily. “How many of us are here? How many members of the unit were taken prisoner?

  He didn’t want to say “alive.” Asking specifically for “alive” felt a little too much like asking “How many of our unit did I utterly fail to save?” And Vac Fadric didn’t know if he could handle that calculation. He could even acknowledge that these other young soldiers were not his friends. He barely knew any of them. But, in these last few days they were his unit, and he had been one of them.

  He didn’t want to openly ask about that… not yet.

  There was a general muttering and mumbling coming from the other cage that he could see across from the cage in which he now sat. two other forms huddled together near the corporal.

  Finally Klee announced, “Captain Seema was with us, but some of these creatures pulled him from the cell when he woke up. I don’t know how long he has. The man was wounded, and still bleeding, even after I wrapped his wounds up in some torn bits of his riding coat. I guess they knew he was our remaining captain. Two of the other privates, like yourself, are here in the cell with me. Abuna and Tarhill. We saw Daunan fall. And Captain Marthi.”

  He paused then.

  The pause solemnly grew.

  Just as Vac Fadric though the man had possibly gone to sleep he started speaking again, “Private Lissara got out of formation, and was trampled by… something. I didn’t see what it was until it was too late, and then it was… too late. You were the last one they brought in, with that sack on your head and covered in sand. I thought they had thrown you into that cell as feed for that thing in there with you.” The man’s voice practically dripped with venom and bile as he mentioned the girl in the cell with him. “You be careful over there, Vac Fadric! They eat our kind. You mark my words, you will be in her feeding trough if you let your guard down!” The man was getting more worked up as he spoke.

  Vac Fadric’s eyes were clearing finally, though still incredibly gritty. They felt like cat claws were under each lip as he moved his eyes from side to side. But his vision was steadily returning, despite the discomfort.

  A general grumbling came from Klee, disparaging the young woman in the worst, and most monstrous terms. It was starting to offend Vac Fadric somewhat on her behalf.

  ‘Noted, Corporal Klee. I’ll do what I can to avoid…” He sighed. “Being eaten.”

  The young woman crouched in the far corner of his cage now glared at him sullenly, her mood possibly worsened by Klee’s coarse words. Her back to the bars of that far corner, her back straight as a wheat stalk, she had hunched herself into the smallest shape possible while remaining on her feet, her knees pulled up to her chin, and her lanky arms wrapped about them.

  Looking at her, Vac Fadric guessed that standing up, she had to be almost his own height, though so thin and willowy of limb that he wondered if she had been starved by their captors. Her cheekbones were incredibly wide, and her brow very broad over deep set eyes. He would guess her age around his own, or possibly a year or two younger, though the private would admit to not having nearly enough experience with young women to guarantee any accuracy.

  In a soft, angry voice, she said into her scuffed and dirty knees, “Hol eg una magn.”

  It may have been the barely whispered phrase, or possibly the sight of her very sharp and over-large teeth, but Vac Fadric finally knew why Klee was so worked up. She was an Orc.

  He didn’t know what she had said, but he recognised the sound of the language. Lord Ashe had made certain he had been tutored by the best linguists.

  He was in a cell… with an Orc.

  …but, she's not 7 feet tall. Why was she so short?... he wondered, as his mind began to race. The artwork he had seen depicting Orcs, and Orcish culture led Vac Fadric to believe the race was uniformly tall and bulging with extraneous muscles.

  She was staring at him,still. As he sat, dumfounded, so sat she, irritated, and possibly murderously angry. Maybe she was even hungry, Vac Fadric would readily admit the young… orcette?... looked famished.

  Butu he knew now, he was in a cell. With an Orc.

  The voice that startled him out of his unintended staring contest with the Orcish young woman diagonally across the cell from him was familiar, if only slightly. Vac Fadric didn’t know how long he had just stared at her after figuring out the threat she represented, but it was long enough that this new, heavily accented and jovial voice surprised him.

  He turned his head awkwardly, with a stiffness in his neck he had not noticed until this moment, toward the bright light of an opened door. And there he was, a bright smile on his broad, high cheekbones, seemingly Ocre face atop the tall, lanky shape of the Hearainan man in the brown robe stride down the passageway toward their cages.

  “Ah, another of your number has returned from that place of silence.. Welcome. I offer you Peace!”