That was enough to start with. So you nod at the title and start to read the opening.
The aftermath, as always, was horrific and bloody. As usual, it was the orcs who suffered the most. There must have been a dozen orc bodies littering the grass of the town’s main square. The wailing and shrieking of their wives filled Finnigan the Fearless’ ears—no, that was wrong; he was only Finn the Smithy. Awareness was slowly came back to him as he listened to the sounds of grief punctuated by shouts of “Cleric! Over here! Quickly!”
There were a few other bodies here and about: human townspeople, a few dwarves. Finn’s sword was bloodied and notched, the enchanted blade dark with soot from the magical fire it disgorged in battle. He heard the sword’s voice in his head—“Dude, that was freaking awesome!”—and he dropped the weapon in horror. Doubtless, he was personally responsible for several of the orc corpses.
As he always was.
Shreds of the night before came to him, already fading as he tried to hold onto them. The terrible light that always presaged the coming of the Gods . . . The feeling of being torn away and taken somewhere else . . .
Then: nothing. He remembered nothing of what had happened in the Light. Finn was suddenly panicked. “Jaxa!” he called out, searching about him frantically, afraid to look at the nearest bodies for fear that one of them might be hers. He could already feel the terror filling him.
“I’m here, Finn,” she said, and her arms went around him from behind. He turned in her embrace, relief filling him. Her left arm was bandaged, and a jagged cut crawled over her forehead just at the hairline. She was staring at the carnage in Auremundo’s main square, at the families walking slowly among the corpses in the dawn light, looking for their loved ones. “Worse than usual,” she said in a husky voice. “The Gods were having fun.”
Finn sighed and released Jaxa after stroking her cheek. He strode toward the carnage with Jaxa following. Orca 217 was there, kneeling in front of one of the orc bodies—all female orcs were named Orca; a number was assigned at birth to distinguish them all the other Orcas. Finn recognized the body in front of her: Grimsnack, one of Orca 217’s husbands. His leather armor was scorched around the blade cut that had severed his left arm and cut deep into into his chest. Finn glanced back at his sword lying on the grass. He thought he heard a distant chuckle.
“Two seventeen,” Finn said, crouching next to her. On the other side, Jaxa put her arm around the orc woman. “Hey, I’m really sorry about this.”
“ ’Tain’t your fault, Finn Smithy,” 217 said, with a hint of a shrug as she wiped at her eyes. “ ‘No one’s responsible for what ’appens in the Light.’ ” She gave him the old Auremundo saying as she wiped again at the tears, sniffing and leaning into Jaxa’s embrace. “Grim’d no doubt done the same to you if ’ee coulda. Them ’orrible Gods are t’blame. Still, Grimsnack was a good ’un. I’ll miss ’im.”
217 had at least a dozen husbands that Finn knew of—a factor of there being least twenty male orcs born for every female; a good ratio considering the usual death toll for male orcs when the Gods came—so while Grimsnack’s death would grieve her, it wasn’t as if she’d been left desperately alone, and orcs were stoic about such things. As for the orc males . . . it was often difficult to know how they felt. Terrifically shy creatures, they were only occasionally encountered outside of their houses.
It was only in the Gods’ Light that they seemed to be at all fearsome.
After her initial show wails of grief and sorrow, 217 composed herself, and Finn saw that her tears were gone entirely now. After all, in two weeks she might be grieving another loss. It was a rare appearance of the Gods when several orcs weren’t called into the Light. All orc wives were widows several times over by the time they’d borne children.
“Hopefully he got a few elves before he went,” a deeper and darker voice intoned from just behind them. Finn glanced over his shoulder to see a dwarf, bundled in chain mail and a battle-ax over his shoulder. There were rents in the fine mail and blood on the ax blade; like Jaxa and Finn, he bore the scars of recent battle. He was gazing with slitted eyes toward the crown of the steep hills beyond the fields that surrounded Auremundo, where shadows lurked under the closely-packed trees of the Elfwood. They all looked that way. “Assholes,” they intoned in unison toward the silent forest, then Finn clapped the dwarf on the back. It was like slapping a rock.
“Hey, Tim,” Finn said. “Glad you made it through in one piece.”
The dwarf sniffed. He made a face, as if tasting something in the back of his mouth. “Ale,” he said. “They had me drinking again, and I absolutely loathe ale. And these clothes . . . just look at them. You’d think the Gods would have some vestige of taste.” He shivered, then growled in his low voice, “Listen to me, complaining about nothing when Two Seventeen here has lost Grimsnack. Sorry, Two Seventeen. I’m still a little disoriented.”
217 gave him a small, fleeting nod. Finn took a long breath and put his arms underneath Grimsnack’s legs as Jaxa supported the top of the body. “Let’s get him back to your house,” he said to 217. “Tim, you want to grab that arm on the ground over there?”
You smile at that last line, which makes me feel good. You realize, of course, that what I’m trying to do here is turn the usual setup on its head a bit—with the orcs and dwarves and humans all living together in harmony, except that these “Gods” (and you figured out immediately what they were, because you’re an intelligent reader) keep yanking them out and making them do awful things to each other. You wonder about the “asshole” comment regarding the elves, and honestly, I’m not certain why I did that either, except—like the title, which I stuck on the story about midway through the opening—it felt right.
You’re not as certain about the humor. “217” as the name of the orc wife (a bit of a silly conceit) seems especially to be a stretch. Okay, maybe it needs some work. I make a vow to fix it in the revision pass. And you go on to the next section.
“A little more if you would, Custard.”
“Surely.” The dragon breathed a trickle of blue fire into the coals of Finn’s smithy furnace. The coals were glowing nicely now, and Finn plunged an iron rod into them to heat up. “You know,” Custard said conversationally, keeping his breath on the coals to maintain their glow, “I’m a little worried.” Only his head was in the smithy. His long, beautifully scaled neck, mottled blue and gold, snaked out through a large hole in the rear of the smithy to where the dragon’s massive body lay curled in the sunlight.
You stop there. A dragon named Custard? Didn’t Ogden Nash use that name for a dragon in a poem? Yes, he did—truth is, back when I was running games, we tended toward the silly in names. I mean, hey, a dwarf named “Tim”? Because he’s “tiny”? Yeah, you’d figured that out. You’re grimacing, but you continue on . . .
“How’s that?” Finn asked. He checked the rod. The iron was beginning to glow; he shoved it back into the coals.
“Well, when the Gods came last time, I’m fairly sure I felt myself snatched up, too. Worse, when I returned, there were suspicious chips in my scales, like someone had been hacking on them.”
Finn set down the hammer he’d picked up. “Oh, Custard!”
Custard blinked, ever so slightly, and let a wisp of blue fire curl over the glowing coals. “I know. I’ve told the family. I remember when my mother died that way—the Gods took her into the Light four times running, and the last time . . .” Twin tears tracked from the corners of his huge eyes down his scales, steaming as they rolled. “It must have been quite a battle. There were so many bodies, most of them human and dwarven, and I remember seeing a huge pyre in the Elfwoods as well.” He sniffed. “Assholes,” he muttered. “It’s always carnage when the Gods take a dragon into the Light.”
All right, you think. There’s the setup, the literary rifle over the mantle, as Chekhov would say. Custard’s being taken up into the game, and so the stakes have escalated for the characters . . .
You
also notice the repetition of “assholes” in reference to the elves. Yeah. I know. Now I really have to do something with that. But at the moment, I swear I have no idea what. I’m making this up as I go along, after all.
“It has a nice, clean, and complicated finish, don’t you think?” Standing in front of the hearth, Tim swirled the wine in the long-stemmed glass in his stubby fingers and inhaled the fragrance again. “Ah, an elegant nose: spice with raisins and prunes, and a faint note of black peppercorn. And on the palate, the texture is silky with lingering traces of black cherries and dark, foresty berries, all with an underlying hint of damp earth, yet the tannins keep a nice grip.”
Jaxa took a long swallow from her glass and shrugged. “It tastes okay,” Jaxa ventured with a glance at Finn. “Could be sweeter.”
The dwarf sniffed and shook his head, the neatly-braided beard swinging with the motion. “You are hopeless, Jaxa,” he said sadly. “You’re supposed to savor the wine, not gulp it. Finn, how do you put up with such plebeian tastes?”
“She likes me. That’s all I need to know about her tastes,” Finn answered. “Besides, who wants wine that tastes like dirt?”
Tim gave a long and dramatic sigh. “Damp earth,” he said. “Not ‘dirt.’ And it’s just a single expression within the complex flavor. You’re both beyond saving. The next time the two of you stop by, remind me to serve the two of you that piss-water that passes for ale at Lookout Tavern. That’s made for your uneducated tongues.”
“Hey, I like that piss-water,” Jaxa said.
“We’re not here to discuss alcohol,” Finn interrupted. “It’s about what Custard told me.” As Finn related the tale, both Jaxa and Tim’s faces grew serious.
Character development. And another attempt at humor, but Tim the Sophisticated Dwarf might be going a little over the top, judging by your grimaces. You wonder if I’m trying to make him gay. You’re right. In my mind he is, though it’s not going to come up in the story. But I do worry about the stereotyping . . .
So I have Finn tell Custard’s tale, and Finn wonders how they can stop this from happening.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Tim grumbled. “Every other Wednesday night, the Light comes and we respond helplessly. I grab that stupid ax”—Tim pointed to the axe over the mantelpiece, polished, burnished, and repainted now and looking more like a decorative piece than a weapon—“you take up that penis substitute of a sword, and Jaxa slips on her quasi-bondage leather bustier—I’m surprised you don’t come back with a cold, my dear, though you do look wonderfully fetching in it. We do all that without even being aware we’re doing it, and away we all go into the hands of the Gods to be spat out half a day later: sometimes wounded, or even dead, discarded by Them while the wisps of whatever nightmare we’re in vanish from our minds.”
“But if we could remember, if we could keep our awareness as we go into the Light . . . Maybe then . . .”
“Great,” Tim answered. “So then you’d remember killing your friends. Sounds perfectly dreadful to me, thank you.” He sipped his wine again. “Besides, you just don’t want to lose your forge-dragon.”
Finn scowled at Tim. “We might be able to stop it. They say that the elves remember, after all.”
“Assholes,” Jaxa spat. “But so what if they do? It doesn’t stop any of this from happening, doesn’t it?”
“Still . . .” Finn persisted.
“Still,” Tim said, mocking Finn’s tone. “There’s no way to do it. Unless maybe you want to try one of Beathog’s potions.” He lifted his wine glass. “Me, I’m going to stay with what I know is safe to drink.”
You roll your eyes a bit as you finish that one. It’s a bit of a weak ending for the scene, and you’re thinking that the “asshole” bit is being pushed a bit too hard now. At least I’ve figured out how to put the elves into this: they remember things “in the Light.”
You’re still trying to figure out whether “Beathog” is pronounced “Bee-thog” or “Beat-hog.” You hate unpronounceable names, don’t you? Well, be patient. You’ll know in a moment.
Beathog—“Piggy” to nearly everyone who knew him—lived up to his nickname. His house, at the southern edge of Auremundo near the Elfwoods, was the eyesore of the town. The lawn hadn’t been cut in years. The paving stones leading to the house were cracked and mostly lost in the dirt. Weeds grew to chest height among scraggly and ill-kept herbs. The house itself hadn’t seen paint in at least two decades, and the walls canted at an angle to rest against a thick oak tree as if the house itself were tired of standing on its own. Inside, one moved through narrows passageways between the stacks of books, boxes holdings indecipherable devices, and bags of dried plants and seeds.
Beathog himself was a tall, thin, and cadaverous old man. He often wore the same clothing—usually a dark robe—for weeks at a time, the front decorated with the remnants of all the meals he’d eaten in the meantime, and a strong odor of sweat radiating from him. His long, gray hair was greasy and tangled, his fingernails were blackened, his teeth were gray-brown and leaning at strange angles like the house itself.
He was unmarried. That was a surprise to no one.
He was also, invariably, snatched up by the Gods every other Wednesday, though he’d also managed to return alive every time, for as long as anyone in town could remember. “Even the Gods can’t stand his smell,” was the comment Jaxa had made once to Finn. It seemed as likely as anything.
“Why, Finn!” Beathog’s voice trailed a few seconds after his body odor wrinkled Finn’s nose. “I was planning to see you tomorrow; I have a set of iron crucibles I’d like you to make for me.” Beathog appeared from behind a stack of leather-bound parchments that was a head higher than the Beathog himself. Why Beathog had stacked them on the porch Finn had no idea: they were crusted with moss from the rain that had soaked them. Finn doubted that a single word inside them was still decipherable . . . not that Finn would know, since he couldn’t have read them anyway. If being able to read meant you ended up living like Beathog, Finn was content to be without the skill, frankly.
Beathog had evidently been working: his fingers were crusted with something that looked too brown to be blood and too red to be mud. He wiped his hands on the front of his filthy robe as he approached; the effort seemed to do neither fingers nor robe much good. “Care to come in? I was just fixing some bread and jam . . .”
Finn shook his head hurriedly. “Not today, I’m afraid,” he told the man. “I’ve come to ask you something . . .”
He explained to Beathog what Custard had told him. Beathog’s fingers were prowling his scraggly long beard by the time he’d finished, dislodging a few spiders who had taken up residence there. “There’s no hope at all if we can’t keep our awareness when the Gods come,” Finn concluded. “If there was something that could allow us to do that, then maybe . . . well, maybe we could do something to end this. A potion, perhaps?”
“Hmm . . .” Beathog scratched at his underarms, sending out a new nasal assault. His tongue prowled between missing teeth as if searching for crumbs. “Frankly, I never really had any inclination to want to remember what happens in the Light, seeing as I don’t really want to know who killed whom, but . . . I wonder . . . Some white maggots, maybe an extract of sourgrass, and a few belladonna berries, some dirt . . .”
“Damp earth,” Finn commented.
Beathhog rolled his eyes and grimaced. “I don’t care whether it’s wet or not. But we’d have to have a bit of elf blood. Wouldn’t work without it.”
Finn squinted suspiciously. “Is that some other kind of plant?” he asked hopefully.
Beathog sniffed, one bushy eyebrow lifting. “No, it’s blood,” he said, as if speaking to a child. “From an elf.” A pause. “They’re supposed to remember things in the Light, y’know. About fifteen drops worth would do it. You’d need to get it back here before it clots, though.”
“And I’d have to drink this?”
“I’d add honey,” Beat
hog said. “Everything tastes better with honey.”
“And this potion would be safe?”
“It would taste better,” Beathog answered. Finn waited. Beathog just stared.
“Fine,” Finn said at last. He sighed, looking at the deep forest clinging to the sides of the hills beyond Beathog’s house. “Elf blood. Get the rest of it ready, then. With lots of honey.”
I finish that, and I find I rather like Beathog. In some ways, he’s the most “round” of the characters in this so far, in just one scene. You liked him too, though you’re beginning to feel like this story is a bunch of “plot devices” not unlike most of the fantasy RPG games you’ve played: go here, get a little more information that sends you over there, where you get a magical device that allows you to move over there, and . . .
You wonder whether that’s deliberate or just clumsy. I’d tell you that it’s both. Still, you know you’re heading off to the elves, so you keep reading, if only to figure out why they’re assholes.
You start reading the next section, and you just skim all the fantastic description of the Elfwoods (and you’ll have to take my word now that it is fantastic description, since you’ve skipped it). You move on to where it looks as if Finn is about to meet one of the elves.
“Hallo!” Finn called for at least the thousandth time that day. The sword snickered.
“Y’know, they already know you’re here. Announcing it all the time is just redundant.”
“Then why aren’t they answering?”
“You haven’t annoyed them enough yet. However, you’re doing excellent job with me.”
“I suppose you have a better idea?”
“I’m a sword of very little brain.”
“I’d gathered that.”
“You could always just go home and give Beathog some of your own blood. Tell him it’s elf blood.”
“But then the potion wouldn’t work.”
Gamer Fantastic Page 15
