Epilogue

It had taken them three more grueling days to reach the tiny logging settlement of Auxonne. Another day of heavy rains had sapped what little strength they had left, and Neuville had kept the remaining thirty-nine refugees moving at full speed until they had put several miles between themselves and the bloody orcish battles behind them. But finally, they had reached the Tourant border; Auxonne, a tiny community of three dozen or so stone and wood buildings nestled along a gentle, relatively clear rise, sat against a picturesque backdrop of low hills and dense forests of spruce and the majestic, tall pines that were so prized by the coastal shipbuilders in the early afternoon sun. They had lost seventeen villagers along the way, but now they would be safe.

"I appreciate your difficulties, Neuville, but I don't have the supplies or the space to look after these people."

"You don't have the space?" Neuville repeated, astounded by the remark. Montague, the leader of the logging village of Auxonne, tried to open his mouth to speak, but the ranger continued before he could begin. "You're on the frontier! You have hundreds of miles of space!"

"Then let them find their home somewhere farther away, then," Roche, the default leader of Auxonne's twenty man militia, stated coldly. The hulking logger had come out with Montague to meet Neuville and the refugees when they had first reached the settlement, and now Neuville could only be thankful that their current conversation was out of earshot of the surviving refugees. "They are barbarians," Roche continued, "and we don't want them here."

"They're women and children!" Neuville practically shouted, stunned by his countrymen's callous attitudes.

"They're probably the same ones that raided us last fall, and killed Arnaud and Gaspard!" Roche countered, raising his own voice.

"That's enough, Roche," Montague put in, more to defuse a fight than to dispute the militia leader's groundless accusation. Roche turned an icy glare on Neuville, but said nothing more. "I don't want to see these poor refugees left to fend for themselves any more than you do, Neuville," the town leader started again. "But, to ask me to take in people that have orcish blood-"

"They're not orcish!" Neuville interrupted furiously. "They're human!"

"Yes, the priest looks totally human to me," Roche observed, his words dripping with malicious sarcasm.

"Roche, may I have a word with our ranger companion alone for a moment?" Montague requested. Roche hesitated for a long moment, then spat on the ground in front of Neuville and walked back to the cluster of stone and wood homes set slightly farther up the hill. Montague watched the man go for a long moment, then turned back to Neuville.

"Honestly, I don't want to just throw them back to the wolves," the town leader said.

"Then give them a place to stay," Neuville countered.

"It's not that easy," Montague said, throwing his hands up in frustration as he looked back to Chessa, Oleg, and the rest of the refugees. "They are mountain barbarians. We've been raided by humans, orcs, and every kind of half breed in between. I have seventy-seven people here, and not one of them trusts your refugees for a heartbeat. They don't speak our language and they have their own barbaric rituals. I mean, I can't have people drinking wolf blood to take on the spirit of the wolf during some kind of lunatic hunt through our logging tracts."

"You're really something, you know that Montague?" Neuville growled out. The ranger spun angrily on his heel, ready to return to the refugees. "To the hells with you. All of you!"

"Neuville, wait," Montague called out. Neuville stopped, and turned back to the town leader. "I… I'll find a place for them. There's an area to our north that we just logged last summer. The stumps are still there, but… well, they can maybe pitch their tents there, at least until this summer. It's the best I can do for them."

"Thank you," Neuville said, exasperated. The ranger turned again and walked slowly back to the refugees. Thierry moved out ahead of the exhausted women and children, meeting Neuville a dozen yards ahead of them.

"That was a long conversation," the younger ranger observed, a faintly nervous tone to his voice.

"We have to move them to the north of the village," Neuville said. "There's a clearing there, where they logged last year. Chessa can set up camp there."

"They can't live in Auxonne?" Thierry inquired as Chessa and Oleg joined the pair. Neuville inhaled slowly, holding his frustration in check.

"They do not trust us," Oleg concluded, speaking the Khairathi language.

"They don't," Neuville agreed reluctantly.

"I expected as much," Oleg said with slight nod. "Like some others, they see an orc with these people, and expect the worst."

Neuville hesitated for a moment, wondering if the priest was pointing to his own initial reaction to Oleg, but Chess spoke before the ranger could think of voicing his own questions.

"They won't help us at all?" the young woman asked. "They'll just leave us in that clearing with nothing?"

"I'll… talk to them again," Neuville said. Chessa dropped her head in frustration. "If nothing else, Thierry and I will stay here until your new village is raised," the ranger put in quickly. Thierry turned a surprised glance to his partner. "I promised that you would be safe here, and I'm not going to let these ignorant bastards change that."

"Thank you," Chessa said, forcing a smile onto her face. The young woman turned back to her charges, readying them to move one last time. As Chessa began to round up the children, Oleg turned to the two rangers.

"We do appreciate what you have done for us," the old priest said, speaking near flawless Tourant. Neuville's jaw dropped.

"You… speak Tourant?" Thierry asked, astounded.

"I was acolyte to a Tourant priest," Oleg pointed out. "I do not know why my knowledge of your language should surprise you so."

"Montague and Roche will love having you as the translator," Neuville said, shaking his head. "The only one that speaks both languages is the half orc."

"I'm sure that, in time, they'll come to realize that we are no different from them," Oleg said. Then he too turned to help Chessa with her villagers.

"We're going to stay and help them?" Thierry asked, turning to his partner.

"They need help, and I don't fully trust Roche yet with them," Neuville said.

"I hope the marquis sees things your way," Thierry remarked.

"To the hells with the marquis, if Montague is following his policy," Neuville spat. "And if Montague isn't following his policy, the marquis will understand why we stayed.

"Just seems odd to see you siding with the or cove the human," Thierry said with a ghost of a smile.

"He's half orc," Neuville pointed out, referring to Oleg.

"I'm sure you thought that when we first brought Irina to his door," Thierry said. The older ranger paused for a long moment, unable to refute his partner's statement. "Come on," Thierry prompted. "We have a lot of work that you just volunteered us to do."

The last rays of the sun fell through the western windows of the temple, but the brilliant rays of the spring sun seemed to die as they traveled through the gloom of the temple of Grummsh. The temple's true illumination came from the smoldering braziers surrounding the huge Idol of Grummsh set in the center of the otherwise bare room, its one eye glimmering in the angry glow of the coals.

Libor knelt once more in front of the idol, his spear laid out before him as he kissed the stone floor at the One Eye's feet. After every battle, no matter how small or large, the chieftain of the Bloody Fist could be found in front of the idol, lost in prayer for hours on end in solitude.

Rather than committing himself to prayers of thanks, however, Libor found himself troubled by the outcome of his tribe's battle against the Cruel Blades and their scheming leader, Oleksandr. The Bloody Fist had finally emerged victorious after two days of battle, but the victory had exacted a heavy toll on Libor's fine warriors. Even as he prayed for the souls of those who had fallen to join the One Eye in his glorious feast halls, the chieftain worried that the three dozen or so young orcs who would join the ranks during the coming summer was not enough to replace all of the casualties. Likewise, while Oleksandr had been forced to retreat from the battle and admit defeat, the half orc's tribe had not been broken. Oleksandr would never forget such a slight to his pride, and Libor doubted it would be more than a year before their two tribes met again in battle. Such a vengeful enemy was doubly dangerous; when they met again, Libor worried that the outcome would destroy both tribes.

"Father of All, One Eye Who Never Sleeps, favor your servant in this time of uncertainty," Libor prayed, turning his eyes to the idol in front of him. "We who fight for your name invoke you, protect us from the unbelievers and those who would use your name for their own advance. Guide our spears in combat, that we may strike swiftly and unerringly. I thank you for your guidance and our victory over the bastard half breed that leads them. Now I ask you guide us to this coming season of battle, that we may glorify you in combat once again."

His simple prayer finished, Libor stood slowly, taking up his spear once more. With the heavy rains of spring, the summer would be a bountiful one. The humans would once more push west from their kingdom. Elves would once again journey west through their forest called Argent. Dwarves and goblins alike would take precious metals from the mountains.

And the Bloody Fist would lay claim to them all, in the One Eye's glorious war.

Afterword, Or, The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Molson…

When I first began this story, it was a simple premise. The idea from the Dungeon Master's Guide was Two orc tribes wage a bloody war. So I threw human village into the middle of it, and there we had it. Instant plot, instant terror(for the villagers, anyway), instant job for a pair of rangers that don't like orcs. It was supposed to be a slam dunk story, one that would take maybe three months from start to finish because of the simplicity of the whole thing.

Boy, was I wrong.

I quickly found myself painted into a corner on a couple of occasions, but I did manage to get myself out of the holes I had dug for myself. I finally installed a new game on my computer, and suddenly I was devoting a lot of time to leveling up a character on Dark Age of Camelot. I also found myself having to devote much more time to the orcs, as Oleksandr the Cruel and especially Libor Bloody Fist captured my imagination as wonderful characters who had come to life in their own right. But finally, last November, I had decided to come back to writing, and I had ripped through a marvelous display of absolutely sick priestly power when Predrag took on a bunch of orcish raiders and used every spell in the book to make himself a god of battle.

And then, in December, my computer's hard drive died, taking with it an almost completed chapter eleven.

And in January, my brand new Dell's hard drive crashed in the same exact, unforgiving way.

The end result is, I hope, passable, but this story suffered horribly from the two hard drive crashes. While I would have loved to recapture the brilliant spark that had written Predrag's romp over Ruslan and his cadre, it was long gone, and I am left with something that just doesn't sit quite right. Still, the story needed closure, and hopefully this has done so well enough to let me forgive technology for killing the first version.

Finally, I hope anyone that writes an orc in the future will take into consideration the fact that they can be powerful villains, not just something you throw out in order to break up the monotony of wandering around through the forest and a chance to get enough experience to reach level two. They have the potential to make amazing villains, and I feel I only scratched the surface of Libor's religious fanaticism, Oleksandr's cunning, and Ruslan's cautious determination. It is quite possible that these characters may make another appearance, possibly against Neuville and Thierry, or perhaps against the elves of Argent of even the dwarves of Arnheim, but in the meantime all I can say is, they aren't chaotic evil because the Monster Manual said they were.