The Defiler's house was slowly crumbing. Half the beams had been chopped out from under the roof, and the cracks in the floor were growing wider every day. But nobody else was fit to rule it, and a run-down house could be salvaged. A pile of wreckage was another story.
Building it was not something he had gone about lightly. The foundation alone had taken him nearly ten years, amassing a force of trustworthy labor who sympathized with his anger at the old king's complacency and apathy, who understood that Moria could not thrive if left to sit and rot like a forgotten village. The Watcher only had so many arms, and the beautiful, terrible presence in the depths answered to no master.
A branch snapped underfoot behind him. Azog turned, hissing through his teeth. Darûk crumpled under his glare and mumbled something nearly inaudible about not doing it again.
"No, you won't," said Azog, gesturing towards the scout with his claw. He slunk down low again, fixing his eyes back on the clearing past the mass of dead branches in front of him. The massive white Warg at his side curled her lips back and sniffed at the air as she shifted and pressed herself against the ground, hiding in wait for the quarry they stalked. She had caught their foul scent on the wind some time ago, and led Azog to the traces of three pairs of stubby footprints in the damp ground. It was only a matter of time before they wandered towards the glade, no doubt thrilled to find a brief respite from the difficult terrain. Pests couldn't resist bait like that.
The sky rumbled, and Darûk started, snapping back on his wiry legs and just barely keeping balance. Azog didn't bother acknowledging it. Berating him any further would only make him more on edge and therefore more prone to completely fucking it all up. He was starting to regret not just going it alone, considering success hardly hinged on Darûk's presence and several of Azog's better hunters flanked the area from the opposite side. But the young ones had to learn sometime, and Azog had never been keen on that soft rubbish about training through stories and schemes. There was no teacher like experience.
Ideally he'd have brought Bolg, but someone had to hold down the fort and keep all those pathetic scroungers in line. Yazneg and his ilk hovered like fleas, riding on the backs of Orcs more sharp and adept than themselves and taking little jabs to slowly bleed out those too strong to confront directly. Azog recognized a spark of potential in Darûk, and wanted to keep him as far from their influence as he could.
Still, it would have been gratifying to have Bolg at his side, to meet Durin's spawn with his own flesh and blood, to settle scores both ancient and raw.
For years, Moria prospered as the house Azog built. His fighters were strong and swift and his advisors were astute. The dark waters teemed with fish, untapped veins of precious metal emerged from the rocks with little coaxing, and the bursts of flame from the abyss beneath were few and distant.
But the balance was more delicate than he let on, and nearly faltered when he lost half the foundation.
He'd had plenty of lovers, casual and close, male and female, even the occasional human with strange tastes and stranger sympathies. The Defiler could take any wives he chose, any number of wealthy traders' daughters or highborn women from neighboring tribes. But Lagláz was the one he wanted. He knew from the moment her dark eyes pierced through him as she strutted through the cavern with a deer carcass slung across her shoulders, trails of crimson blood trickling down her back like a map of a river. He beckoned her to him, and she laughed with a snort and said "You get over here, arsewipe. I don't care who you are, I'm not lugging this thing any more than I have to."
She was as close to perfect as anyone could be.
Lagláz was no spoiled princess. He needed a column of iron, not some simpering inbred bitch with weak bones and a will to match. Her body was tall and stocky, possessing a wonderful suppleness that belied the strength tensed below the surface of her.
That first night they'd met, she let him squeeze and suck on her round little breasts, and if Azog allowed himself to stew too long he could still feel the flutter of her pulse on his skin as she grinned wide and he darted his tongue through the gap where she'd lost a couple of teeth in a fight with a pair of Men. Their teeth were strung around her neck, standing out against her ash-grey skin and reflecting dying embers as they huddled together on her wolfskin cloak.
She matched him stride for stride, could track beasts better than anyone he'd ever known, and scaled trees and cliffs almost as if she were some creature of the wilderness herself. He knew no other could make his blood sing and his breath tremble like she did. They were wed in an impulsive but impressive ceremony in a massive corner of the caverns where the firelight danced over the walls and the high jagged ceiling to the sound of laughter and boasting, while the thudding of drums and stomping caused glittering ripples in the water below.
Not long after, Bolg showed up by surprise, barely making a swell in his mother's belly before sending her into convulsions and abruptly plopping out onto a hastily-arranged pile of rags on the floor only a few minutes later. "The fucking nerve of that brat, sneaking up on me like that," she'd joke, much later, after the shock and fear were only faint shadows in the distance. The tiny bundle of squealing flesh defied expectations and grew into a healthy, energetic boy.
For as long Azog could remember a wordless vow lay in the back of his mind that any child of his would have a far better beginning in life than he had. With his parents' blood and his status as the Defiler's son, Bolg would know neither weakness nor want. Azog and Lagláz doted on him as only a pair of Orcs could, teaching him to heft a mace, skin a stag, bash a wall in, set a fire. A ruler who could not do for himself what common people managed every day was disgraceful and undeserving and would eventually topple under his own helplessness. Azog's predecessor had demonstrated that all too well.
Even the sturdiest house could be fractured by a sudden disaster.
One particularly dank and cloudy summer a rumor reached the tunnels of Moria that a rockslide in the foothills had revealed a structure of sorts, possibly a temple, untouched by living hands for hundreds of years. Azog and Lagláz took with them a dozen sharp and tenacious Orcs to investigate the ruins for any treasures abandoned by whatever presence had left it to be forgotten and swallowed by the earth.
Apparently someone else had the same idea. A small band of Dwarves had beaten them to the punch and crowded the entrance, led by a handful who would have looked imperious if they hadn't been half Azog's size. Their armor was too ornate to be that of any ordinary Dwarf, embellished with intricate carvings and glittering jewels. Even their bodyguards were dressed in shining steel and embossed leather that looked like it had spent far more time being polished than being worn.
The Orcs knew what they had to do.
The skirmish itself was a loud blur in Azog's memory, and all he knew for certain was that the high-ranking Dwarves escaped, and one of his troops reported that the ruins were full of nothing but rubble.
But he remembered the stillness of the air and the sound of a crow in the distance and the ache in his lungs catching up to him as he yanked his dagger out of the last straggling Dwarf's side. One voice was conspicuously absent from the disappointed murmurs, and his eyes darted frantically as he scanned the area for any sign of his wife.
Time slowed to a crawl and his veins froze. He scrambled towards the still and silent shape collapsed on the rocks, his mind a turbid haze of despairing fragments. ...can't have happened...maybe if I shove her ribs just right...no...if I could go backwards, only a few moments...no, no, no, no...
But there was no movement remaining in her body, nor in the black stream that flowed from her neck and shoulder, and he was left there, like one half of a pair of shears, flailing uselessly.
And thus the line of Lagláz's tiny mountain clan was ended, and there would be no other heir to the Defiler's rule.
His grip on the mountains grew tighter and for the first time, desperate.
Azog had almost lost the only hope for his succession once already, when Bolg had just barely left his stripling years behind and a small mob of Dwarves ambushed them. Some fat fucker wielding a woodcutter's axe like the peasant he was landed a swing at Bolg's head that would have pulverized anyone lesser. If it hadn't been for the sharp medicine the old sawbones and her nimble-fingered assistants took such pride in, Bolg would have died - or worse yet, be damaged beyond saving, a numb slab of meat unable to watch out for himself, let alone fight.
The air was tense for many days afterwards. Bolg's skin scorched and his skull took too long to knit itself back together. The wound seeped through the stitches and rivets that could not quite keep it closed, and all the while Azog was unable to pry himself away from Bolg's side for longer than a few moments. A cold, ugly weight rolled in the pit of his stomach when he recognized that if it had been anyone else lying there, he would have soothed his pain with a swift slash to the throat.
Finally, after countless fidgety hours, noxious poultices, and whispered promises to dark presences in the earth and sky, Bolg's fever broke and he returned to the world. The relief from simply hearing him speak, lucid and unaffected, was immeasurable. With his reawakening came an unquenchable thirst for Dwarven blood, beyond what was expected of any Orc, or even the bitterness the loss of his mother had instilled in him. Maybe this was that hidden blessing those grizzled dimwits full of cloying proverbs were always going on about. It was about time something in their dealings with the vermin paid off.
Years down the road, father and son would inadvertently bond over their shared experience of mangled and rebuilt flesh when Azog lost his arm at Azanulbizar. "A fair enough trade for Thrór's head," he insisted through gritted teeth. Still, he could appreciate the value it held as a display of defiance and tenacity. He never saw Men or Elves or Dwarves with clever mending like they had, the obvious explanation being that their healers were shit and getting injured was an instant death sentence among such peoples. Perhaps their relentless animosity was born of envy that Morgoth's chains and knives had not cleansed them of their frailty at the beginning of things.
The sky churned again, and the near-full moon peeked through the patchy blanket of clouds stretched across it. A familiar, sickening rhythm emerged from the distance. Darûk's face was calm now, and his bony hands clasped around his bow like a pair of spiders waiting to jump. The Warg matriarch's fur stood up on her neck as her ears were hit by the sound of small but heavy bodies trudging over mossy rocks and gnarled roots.
Azog breathed in, deep and slow, taking in the scent of the coming storm. His left arm twitched around the mass of iron running through it, and he felt a cramp in the fingers he no longer had, grasping for the memory of a knife.
Written for this prompt:
Being an orc is tough. It's like being an evil henchman in a spy movie. And yeah sure, their pretty ruthless terrifying creatures. But maybe there's a reason behind their seemingly evilness. So Azog canonically has a son. I want a fic where Azog is hunting down the durin line as vengeance for them killing his wife, or something like that. Just something beyond the usual Orcs are Evil trope. And if you can actually make in not crack I would be really, really impressed. With some Azog, his son, feels.