1.
The whole feeking world is racist, even the clan, even the shaman. That wrinkled goat-scrotum refused to think a half-orc girl could save anything, let alone everyone. But with every painful barefoot step, that is exactly what she plans on doing, save everyone. Except that miserable bag of stink and bones, she decides, stepping over a sharp rock. The shaman will rue the day she said the world would be better off if she just found a cave somewhere and laid down for owlbear snacktime.
She adjusts the old wood-ax slung over her left shoulder. Nothing can stop destiny, not even absurdity, she thinks, not even meanness.
She seeks to save the clan, to show the clan she is better than them, even though they don’t want her, by finding answers among the very people that shunned and assisted in the murder of her mother.
Irony.
As she moves closer to the first mountain village, called Dharma and Hope, she thinks of the taphouse and its warm common-room, a place that has told her no before.
“Whoredaughter, leave!”
This reminds her, she should add the place to her list of things to do while she’s out.
She walks and works out a plan.
Save the clan
Kill the shaman
Save the world
And maybe while in town she’ll visit dear old dad and thank him for blessing her conception by driving mom crazy. He abandoned them to the wilds of clan life. He made her mother do the horrible, unforgivable thing she did, and sell her to the shaman for some spice.
And as a constant stream of steps match the circular thoughts in her brain, she arrives at the gray wind warped door of the taphouse. Beyond, she hears the revelry of drunken fun. It hurts her heart because she knows she will never, ever, have fun like this. Fun makes her sad and angry, and she hates hearing it had. Life is serious. Life is chores, and brooding, and hate.
“They think you are ugly.”
“Mom!”
“Well, they do. Yet, they thought I was ugly also, and here you are. It seems a fair list you have. What’s twenty more humans in the grand scheme of things?”
Being the dead don’t speak to the sane, the half-orc agrees and amends her list and basks in her dead mother’s opinion, “I am proud of you, girl. Now go kick some ass!”
“Thanks, mom, I love you.”
“I love you too, sweety.”
And the half-orc kicks in the door. It splinters into shrapnel, nailing many of the drunks with painful wooden shards.
With a war scream, she removes arms and legs and heads with her rough-honed ax. Even with a notched and dull blade, blood flows as she moves towards the bar. She more chases down victims than fights, “but beggars can’t be choosers now can they,” mom asks rhetorically.
But, as she pegs the last standing man, one trying very hard to escape out a broken window, in the back with her thrown ax, she agrees, “Mom, you’re right, a dead human is always better than a living one.”
2.
soon
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