Gorbag

Lost in the forest

Summer sits heavy on the forest, the sun blazing through the canopy in thick gold shafts. The air smells of pine sap and warm stone. Back in Millhaven, they're shuttering windows against the heat, napping through the afternoon, complaining about dust in the well water. You watched them this morning, your father on his stool mending the same net he mends every Tuesday, your neighbor Agnes sweeping her already-clean step for the fourth time, the baker's son who once kissed you behind the grain silo now slouched and dull-eyed, content to inherit his father's flour-caked apron. They don't look past the ridge. They don't wonder what the wind carries from the east. When you were nine you found a rusted helmet in the creek, and your mother burned it, said it was cursed, said curiosity was a sin the priest didn't need to name. You started hiding things after that. A blue eggshell. A coin with a foreign king's face. A strip of silk from a trader's cart that smelled of salt and distant ports.

Today you sling your pack over one shoulder, leave Millhaven behind without a second thought, and follow the old hunting trail into the trees. Nobody saw you go. Nobody ever does.

A sign blocks the path, wood gray with age, carved with warnings in a language you half-recognize. "ORC ZONE." You step around it. The forest opens up after that, lakes catching the light like scattered coins, deer frozen mid-graze before they bound off. You fill your pockets with quartz and blue agate, more color than your whole dull hometown ever offered. You press your palm to the bark of a tree older than your grandfather's grandfather and feel something loosen in your chest, the familiar tightness of being watched, being told to be careful, being asked why you can't just be content.

Hours later, the light shifts. Time to head back.

But the trail forks where you don't remember a fork. You pull your map, the one you spent three weeks drawing in stolen hours, every path you've walked since you were twelve marked in different colored inks. The red ones are safe. The blue ones are new. The black one, thick and recent, leads to a cave system you've never told anyone about. You unfold it and find the center torn clean through, a ragged hole surrounded by chewed edges and tiny claw-scored lines. Your stomach drops. You remember now, the break two hours back, the chipmunk that darted across your boots while you ate bread and cheese. You'd shooed it off, laughed at its boldness. You hadn't checked your pack. The little thief must have smelled the dried apples, burrowed through the leather, found your map instead, and shredded half a year's careful work getting out.

The trees look the same in every direction. The sun dips lower, wrong somehow, and you can't tell which way is west anymore.

A bush rustles. Then another.

Three orcs emerge, shoulders nearly as wide as the trunks they push past. Their armor is scrap and boiled leather, rusted rings through their ears, one with a necklace of finger bones. They freeze when they see you. Then they start talking over each other, that grinding orc-speech like rocks in a mill, and you catch enough to understand they disagree.

The one with the necklace points at you, then at himself. The second, scarred across his snout, shoves him and claims you with a gesture to his own chest. The third, younger, scarcer armored, laughs and says something about sharing, and the other two turn on him with snarls that have nothing to do with alliance. This was always going to happen. You see it in the way they hold their weapons, the way their eyes flicker not just to you but to each other, measuring.

The argument lasts seconds. Then the necklace orc swings his club at the scarred one, who catches it on his forearm and drives his spear into the younger orc's thigh, a casual opening move. Within heartbeats all three are tearing into each other, no strategy, pure animal rage, but you understand suddenly that you started this, that you are the prize, that whoever lives will claim you like a deer carcass. Steel rings. Blood arcs across ferns. You press flat against oak bark, heart hammering, and don't breathe.

Three heavy footsteps shake the ground. Slow. Measured. Not running. Not hurrying.

The fourth orc steps into the clearing, and the others falter, just for a heartbeat, still swinging. He's taller than all of them, broader, his silence worse than their shouting. A crude blade hangs at his hip, and scratched into the metal, you read the name: Gorbag.

He doesn't announce himself. He doesn't demand they stop. He moves.

You squeeze your eyes shut. The sounds that follow are wet and final, different from the chaos before, efficient, almost bored. When the last gurgle dies, you risk a look. Blood and gear and what's left of three bodies scattered through the undergrowth. No sign of the fourth.

You step out, shaking, and the world tilts. One massive arm hooks your waist, lifts you clean off the ground, and drapes you over a shoulder that feels like iron. You don't even see his face. Just the forest upside-down, the smell of leather and copper, and the steady thud of his stride carrying you away from the dead.

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