Lies

[Tahara]

Somehow it wasn’t the fire that bothered her most.

It should have been. After what she’d seen, after what they’d done to the tree and the elves up north, it should have been her first thought. And if not that, then the screaming, or the blood or the-

She couldn’t hear any of that. What should have been a moment of panic, of unbridled fear and shock was instead utter silence in her mind, as Tahara looked down at her hands, fel-green like they shouldn’t be, staring at armour that she never had.

This was wrong.

Not morally - of course it was wrong but that was obvious to all of them and not a thought worth repeating. It was wrong. Untrue. This hadn’t happened.

She didn’t realize she’d been left behind until she fell back against the wall of the barracks, her scars flaring up like they had been freshly carved into her back, the cool stone creating an instant relief - and came eye to eye with Vraxxar.

It took her a moment to squeeze something resembling a sentence out of the hazy fog in her skull.

“Did… did we really do this?” Tahara looked up, hoping for a different answer than the one she knew was coming.

Vraxxar replied simply: “Yes.” Not unkind, not pleasant, just honest.

She swallowed, trying to wrap her head around a second question, but she was cut off, gruffer this time.

“Outside. Now.”

If the fire and the screams hadn’t cut through the numbness before, the rough barking of orders finally sunk in like the merciful last arrow she fired at suffering prey. A sensation like her ears popping came over her, the clang of steel and the roar of battle clear as day now. Her body lurched into motion before her head could and she sprinted outside, trying to get back some sense of… what exactly?

As Tahara caught up with the rest of the orcs that didn’t look like they should, she stumbled-

-and fell, face first into the mud.

She felt hands on her back, pulling her back up by the harness that strapped her to the massive rock they were hauling. When she blinked up, face caked in dirt, it was Kroz who righted her, growling.

“Keep up! You’ll get us all whipped.” The older orc growled, a stark contrast to his helping hand. Tahara groaned, feeling every muscle in her back tense.

No one here cared whether it made sense or not, that a little girl couldn’t keep up with the grown men, but that was the only life to be had here. There were a few children helping with the hauling today. A storm had made it to Blade’s Edge - most broke on the mountains before ever reaching the Bloodmaul camps - and the rain was making everything harder.

But Lurog wanted those rocks. The ogres broke them open, like skulls, revealing the crystals inside. Apexis. A hard word, Tahara thought.

Kroz picked up speed for both of them and the other four orcs put their backs into it as well, yanking Tahara along.

“You need to get stronger.”

Tahara whined as something in her back creaked at the sheer pressure on her shoulders. “Try… ing…”, she eeked out in between pulls.

She couldn't say if she liked this better. Her head had been hurting for reasons she couldn't remember, so the not-particularly-fresh air helped somewhat compared to the small tunnels of the apexis mines she'd be crawling through at this hour. Dust in her throat would have likely just made her feel worse. But the strain was doing something to her back that didn't feel right.

At least she wasn't alone. The solitude, she hated the most.

“Grasha says... there's a gate at the end of the world. And if you go through, you're in a green place-”

“LESS YAPPING MORE HAULING!”

Tahara ducked her head at the foreman. She couldn't keep herself from whispering the last few parts to an increasingly disinterested Kroz.

“She says… over there, we are the masters. That-”

There was a shadow and a scream, cut off by deafening silence as one of the logs of lumber for Lurog's new house fell on the first two orcs in the chain. Mud sprayed over the others. And something worse than mud.

Tahara stopped, crashing into Kroz in front of her as they all were forced to a halt.

She barely heard the orders, as the next row of slaves had to lift the log. Underneath, she watched as the broken bodies were pulled away, tossed to a heap on the side. There had already been corpses there. No one had taken them away in the last week since they'd died, both from the dust in their chest, no longer able to breathe.

They were replaced and the chain lurched into motion again.

This time, it was Kroz who spoke up, refusing to look at the child behind him.

“Grasha is an old fool. The real warriors are the ones that went through that gate. Not people like you, or me.”

Tahara looked up at Kroz’ back, the scars of a dozen whippings marking him like they one day would mark hers.

“You want to know what would have happened? If you'd grown up free, with the real clans?”

Tahara nodded, a gesture Kroz couldn't see, but he decided to take what hope she'd had anyways.

“You would have been drowned before your sixth birthday.

This is the only life for us.”

She woke up, dazed and confused. A mixture of dream brew and her heart pounding in her chest. Her back still hurt as she sat up, ribs and spine cracking a few times. The noise woke Chuckles, a final kick with her leg in the air as her hunting dream came to an end. She licked her snout, looking over at Tahara and cooing.

Tahara answered in her language, repeating the noise and bumping her head into that of the hyena's. “Keep sleeping.”, she thought it meant. Or something like that.

Camp was quiet this close before sunrise. She looked up at the dark portal, the gate to a life she'd somehow escaped from.

They hadn't drowned her yet. That had to count for something.

Chuckles put her head in her lap, murring contentedly in her half-awake state, while Tahara scratched her behind the ears.

“You have it so easy, you know? You don't have to think about any of that stuff.”

Tahara didn't know what she was talking about - the dream that wasn't hers, or the one that was - but regardless, Chuckles didn't answer, drifting off to another hunting dream.

She gently picked up her head and put it aside, getting up from her furs and stretching, trying to get to a decent posture for the day ahead.

Her back didn't ache anymore as the last few satisfying pops sounded out.

The fire hadn't bothered her. The screams, the horrors of the dream brew hadn't kept her awake. Not really.

What Tahara felt, was envy. Grasha, Kroz, they'd all known it too. Whatever they've known or hadn't known of the invasion, they had all known something she hadn't.

That no matter what the fel could have done to them, no matter what they could have done to the world, to themselves - it had to be better.

In some dark corner of her mind, Tahara realized she would have rather gone through that gateway and slaughtered innocent people than to have lived her own childhood.

And that scared her.

More than fire and more than wrong and more than so many of the horrors she'd seen.

Tahara nodded to herself, realizing that she was a horrible person, but went outside anyways.

What else was there to do?