Dream

[Sadok]

An excerpt from Sadok's journal:

"I saw it in my dreams. High above the green lands. High above the foothills. Nestled amongst the white lands. Nestled amongst an inhospitable climate of oppressive cold and oppressive whip. Lordamere Internment Camp. I could smell then.

So vivid my recollections of scent. Rotting wood and sweat. Lantern oil. And the sensations of touch. Muck-tainted snow that crunched beneath the bare foot. Muck-tainted snow that numbed the bare foot. My lower extremities were always somewhat swollen. Swollen and frozen. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it was rather fucking cold. The wind howled like a wounded worg. The wind stung like the edge of an axe-blade. Cold. No, not cold - freezing. Cruel.

The follies of youth. Yes, I was young then. Very young. A cub. A pup. An urchin. A mite. Juvenile progeny parturitated into an chronically importunate despondency. No, I mustn’t satiate my predilection towards loquacious circumlocution - the aforementioned sesquipedalian vernacular incogitably engenders the cantankerous gesticulation of implacable animadversion and expostulated obloquy. Thus I shall endeavor to articulate myself in basal orcish.

I stray tangentially from my original point. I was young. The camp was all I had known. The camp was life. The camp was death. One labored under the humans’ whip, or when the day’s labors had concluded, you simply... sat. You sat and you stagnated. You fell into a physical, mental and spiritual decay - you became a fixture of the Camp, indiscernible from the Camp’s rotten picket-fences and cramped huts. An orc not of flesh, but of wood.

Then there was her. Is that correct? Then there was her? Then there was she? I care not - my mind has the current consistency of Talonslayer’s stew. But yes, her. I have forgotten her face. Her voice. Her words. Her ways. I remember her name: Iswer. Wrakks would often speak of her in fond, forlorn terms after she...

Yes, he would often speak to me. And then not so often. And then not at all. He stopped speaking. Then he stopped eating. And then he stopped. Such was the way of the Camps. Like a rotten wooden cartwheel in thick mud, you stopped. Some stopped before they started - bloodied aberrations of the womb buried beneath the snow. A burial was all there was. After all, there were no fires, not for the orcs at least - even the fires within the orcs had faded like a spent candle. There were no pyres, though I might have liked to set fire to the huts as a pyre to all we had lost in body and mind, to the lost world some spoke of mournfully. They were buried beneath the snow. Dirtied white with crimson bleeding through.

This I saw last night in my dreams. Not Mruthgor. Not the Scepter of the Shaman-King. Not the way forward in this desert-land. Only the way that leads back to the path we should never tread again."


((Loosely based on some RP a few nights back. Always felt like Sadok's experiences at Lordamere gave him an added dimension - many of my earlier RP characters seemed more one-dimensional sketches than fully-fleshed out people. Stylistically speaking, I've been reading a lot of Beckett (particularly Endgame), so there are obvious influences there, particularly in sentence structure.))