Chapter Text
He steps out from the sea like it is a staircase, the waves lapping at his knees and then his ankles as if it was sad to see him leave.
After months traversing it’s dark and sandy floor beds, it’s a little strange for him to be drawing in a sharp gasp of crisp oxygen and not feel bubbles cascade up his face like a gentle caress. He lifts his hands and presses them to his cheeks in their stead. His face feels cold. Like something was missing. He brings his hands back down and stares at them. They’re pale. Translucent, almost, but he can’t see the veins underneath the skin like he thinks he should be able to.
Sand clings to his boots. They’re soaked through with seawater and already beginning to crust with salt along the edges. Much like how the rest of him is. He snaps his fingers, and an abrupt warm wind buffets him from all sides. Suddenly, he’s completely dry.
He reaches his hands up to yank a dark leather hood over his head, and begins the trek to the treeline of the great, encompassing forest he can see in the distance, leaving the ocean in his wake.
He can feel it behind him. It’s almost like it’s trying to call him to return to it. Intangible fingers ghost at his nape, his spine, his shoulders. They tug on his sleeves, as if they’re trying to drag him backwards.
He ignores them. Ignores the ocean. He keeps walking.
He doesn’t want to admit to himself how difficult that is.
There are familiar creatures here, littered across this western continent. They’re big, and hulkling, carrying weapons across their scarred and bared shoulders with the leather hides of other species clothing their bodies, the entire race warrior-like to its last member. They bite and snarl, and the howls they crow at the world around them echo hauntingly across the skies.
That’s where the familiarity ends.
These creatures have little mind of their own, he discovers. They cannot be reasoned with, like the ones so similar to them across the sea. Their eyes are black, beady, pinning him like wild animals when their gazes focus on his presence. They’re lost, consumed, by the bloodlust that he can hear pounding through their veins.
He feels almost hunted. It’s exciting. He grins.
He spends his time hunting them back. They fight him full-tilt, with reckless abandon, using all of their might and holding absolutely nothing back. He revels in it. He can feel his blood pumping through his veins, heart fit to burst against the confines of his ribcage. It beats a tattoo into his diaphragm.
This is what being alive is suppose to feel like, he thinks to himself. Perhaps, he wonders, if he felt like this all the time that he was living, then he might not hate it all that much.
“Maybe just heavily dislike,” he mumbles to himself under his breath, shoving a rusted sword he’d found in a crevice along a cliff side through the throat of one of the grasping, growling beasts.
They’re called orcs, he eventually finds out. He hears it muttered quietly with foul avarice among a band of traveling tradesmen. He hands them two of the gold coins from across the pond that he still has tucked away in his bag, previously forgotten about. They ooh and awe over the exotic and unfamiliar legends and inscriptions, giving him a better sword in exchange.
It’s nicer than the cracked thing he’d found in the coastal cliffs. Shinier. He can see his reflection in its face. He sits before the fire with it some nights, when nothing’s happening to distract him from boredom, and shifts his appearance in its surface to pass the time. He makes his hair a rich earthen color, his ears slightly pointed, and his eyes warm like the bark of red trees. He laughs at the reflection he sees for a good while, and then tosses the sword into its sheath and sleeps.
He spends weeks traversing a desert like terrain. It is pinpricked with large patches of dead grassland, and the odd boulder and hilly outcropping. Orcs like to hide among the deeper ravines. He seeks them out almost as if he cannot help it. They growl at him and snap their jaws, telling him that he smells delicious. He laughs at them and swings his sword wide.
He’s almost sad when it becomes boring. He’d expected it, though. It was the inevitable outcome. Everything loses its excitement after a while. It was fortunate enough, for him, that the orcs have kept him as entertained as they have.
How long has it been? Weeks? Months? It could have been years already, for all he knows. He isn’t exactly the best at observing the passage of time. In fact, he’s purposefully terrible at it. It makes things easier to bear, in the long run.
Though the chase-and-hunt game he’s been playing with these creatures has become boring for him, they have apparently grown used to the routine. They whisper amongst their packs about the reckless and laughing traveling Man in the hood, and seek him out in droves. It is his own fault that he will likely never be rid of them, now.
After all, they lust for the excitement of the battle as much as he does. Theirs is finite, however, while he himself… isn’t.
It’s as he’s beheading another of their fellows that the idea comes to him—and in the form of a gravelly, growled threat from the now-dead orc, no less.
They are so creative with their vows of torture. He’s often found himself amused by them, occasionally even impressed. They hiss and hack almost longingly about the pain that they will serve to him, if ever they were to get their meaty, bloodied claws into him. They would drag him to their leader, they say. They would string him up by his own tendons, and slowly peel the flesh from his muscles and devour him while he still writhed against cold cave walls.
It sounds like a agonizing death. He’s had plenty of those. Many of them far, far worse than these orcs could ever dream of inventing.
Still. What are the chances that they could possibly end his life?
Very small, of course. Slim to none. Probably zero. He knows that. He has to know that, by now.
But, what if .
The next time they converge upon him like starving, rabid dogs, he fights against them with as much glee and skill as he has all other times, even if something is missing, now. He would never go down without a fight, after all. He goes as far as to deplete their numbers by over half, and finally stumbles over and into a small crevice of many that litter the dusty, dry and cracked soil of the tundra around them.
His leg plunges into it. He catches himself on the edge of it and thrusts his sword outward. It pierces the side of an orc that’s hustled forward to reach out for him with grasping, clawed fingers.
It tears itself back with a howl, glaring at him with hatred even as the blood seeps from its shredded hide. He pushes up, and makes to lunge after and finish it off, permanently.
Something makes him falter. He falls back to the ground with grunt. He glances down with some surprise, to find that his leg is stuck, pinned in place by walls of the earth.
Maybe it’s because he’d given up before the fight even began. Maybe it is because, in the dark of night and even under the light of the sun, he wondered . Longed for. What if?
Jagged claws sink mercilessly into his shoulder. They yank him free of the crevice, and he grunts in pain as his knee dislocates. The one that caught him hauls him up with both hands, and holds him above its head with a victorious roar that is soon echoed by its cohorts.
“We have caught him at last!” The thing howls, baritone bouncing off the empty space around them. “The Mad Man is ours to do with as we please !”
The orcs cheer, and stomp their feet, and throw each other to the ground in celebration.
Him, he laughs, long and hard, until he can no longer breath, even as they bundle him up with ropes tied far too tightly, and string him over the biggest one’s shoulder like the mangled prize of a hunt.
Madman indeed , he thinks, gasping for air. His vision goes black.
Hatred courses through their veins, causing them to run hot, as it has for years and years. Sometimes they feel like it’s been this way for longer than they can remember, and then the other smacks the one upside the head, to return him to himself.
It’s frightening, this idea that they could perhaps lose themselves to this boiling temperature that sat right beneath their skin. They could lose each other to it, or be lost together. They have gaps in their memory that they might be worried about, if they didn’t already known they’d spent that time slaughtering the gormless, creatures of evil that plagued all of Arda, a blight against everything that stands sacred.
They can not remember the moments lost to the hatred. But, no, they don’t much mind. It had been spent ridding the world of that which didn’t belong on it in the first place.
Something in the distance bellows a guttural, deep throated howl. It echoes of the seemingly endless hills under a twilight sky, and is soon joined by others. They sound closer than the two of them had initially believed.
The twins share a glance. They can see their own reflection in the face staring back at them, as well as in the gleaming, glittering eyes of an elf in the night. A haze crawls across their gazes. Heat sears and pops along their bones. It urges them forward in the direction of the triumphant crows.
These creatures don't deserve triumph. They deserve nothing but to return to dust and join the soil of the muddied floor of the world, mixed into the dirt of a cursed land and forgotten.
Their feet pound silently against the ground as they give chase to their unsuspecting prey.
The orcs are, perhaps, a bit more intelligent than he’d given them credit for. At least, this one seems to be.
“Tell me,” his tormentor hisses at him, fisting fingers in his hair and yanking his head back to see his face, “ what sort of Man are you?”
His tormentor is peculiar. Different from the other orcs. Different in the way that he carries himself with purpose, and authority. Different in the color of his skin, the quality of his armor and weapons. Different in the shine of sharp intelligence and cunning that exists in his eyes.
His head is wrenched at, again. His neck feels like it might break at any moment. The strange orc snarls, digging one metal claw into his side and dragging it down through his flesh until it tears out from above his hip. He feels it graze a rib or two along the way. He whimpers.
A mistake , he thinks silently.
Later, free of them, he would scoff at himself. Call himself pathetic, and be in denial. But now, in the moment of pain, he asks himself why . Why does he do this? He doesn’t like being hurt. Pain is not what he longs for.
“ Who are you?” The white orc gutters harshly, eyes narrow and cruel.
He hisses like a snake, and it trails off with a whispery chuckle even as he’s wheezing in agony. They can sometimes understand him when he speaks like this, he knows. He wonders why. This isn’t a language anyone but he and the reptiles that crawl along the dirty, dusty ground should be able to decipher.
A thin, cold metal is thrust into his upper arm and dragged through the muscles there. Not deep enough to cause too much damage, but enough to make white, hot pain erupt and tingle up his nerves like a piping steam.
“TELL ME,” the thing roars.
He hisses again. It’s weaker this time, but he finds himself grinning at the rage that sparks in the orc’s cold eyes.
The orcs that surround them beat metal and stone against metal and stone, and crow at the darkening sky like they’ve won something, when the white one grabs him by the shoulders and throws him with extreme gusto into the hard surface of a nearby boulder.
He feels himself slam bodily against the ground. His eyes are closed, spots swimming against his black vision. If he were to open them, and look up, he would see the rusted but firm shackles that are pounded into the rock above his head. He knows they are there, because he’s been hanging from them for too many days to count. Weeks? Time spins dizzily by, and he isn’t sure whether he can tell how long it’s been. Either way, he doesn’t want to think about it.
They roar and jeer at him as he’s hauled up again, wrists placed against chilled metal. He can’t hold back a whimper when they close the bindings of the shackles around his forearms once more. No mor e. He doesn’t want any more. He just wants it to end. He just wishes for an end.
That’s all he’s ever wished for. Why can’t they understand that?
Why can’t anyone understand that?
The beasts scream guttural cries at the vast, empty, twilight expanse above them. It’s cold, and cares nothing for what happens beneath its reaches. Fists find purchase against the shredded and sliced flesh of his torso, pounding ceaselessly without beat or tempo. His heartbeat quickens again, to match the hits that knock what little air he’s managed to gather back out of him. His lungs and ribcage creak ominously beneath the insistent pressure. He chokes on his own cries and clenches his teeth. He tastes blood.
He opens his eyes, finally, and grins at them all. They meet his gaze with empty eyes that hold only a never ending thirst for death and decay. Aside from the white one, who surveys his torture with a flinty glint in his that belies something else entirely. Something perhaps even more sinister.
Chills crawl up his spine. It’s slammed back into the stone he’s been strung up against, and protests against the abuse. He tilts his head back to meet the rock, and screams through his teeth.
Something whistles through the still air of an otherwise calm desert night. It lands with a thud into flesh. Not his. The orcs falls silent.
He opens his eyes once more, curiously, to see the one whose meaty fist is currently buried in his abdomen start to sway where it stands. It teeters around drunkenly, pivoting on its heel unwillingly until it’s back is facing him. He can see the fletching of an arrow buried directly between it’s oddly sharp shoulder blades. The creature tumbles face first to the ground without a sound, dead before it even falls.
The rest of the beasts burst into a cacophony of battle cries of outrage and blood-calling. They go for their weapons, and metals slides against metal with screeching and sparks. Five more fall before any of them manage to unsheathed their blades.
That still leaves twenty, he thinks absently. His head is spinning dangerously. A cough builds up in his throat, and he tastes copper as fresh blood spills down his lips like a ruby waterfall.
He sees them fall, one by one, between his shuttered lashes. There’s clumps of dried blood and rust caught in them that obscure some of his vision, but he can’t find the energy to blink them away.
He’s so tired. He just wants to sleep. He can barely move. It terrifies him.
He peers through the debris as best he can, even as his eyes close a fraction more. For a moment, all he can see is the bitterly disappointed sneer on the white orc’s face as it leaps astride the back of a great, bristling, wolf-like creature. It skulks on the outskirts of whatever chaos was currently razing the orc encampment to the ground, and then shuffles off into a shadow. It and it’s rider vanish into the dark of the twilight, leaving behind their fellows to their fate.
Orcs fall around him with cries, and arrows sticking out from where they’ve pierced through vital organs. They run amok, aimlessly, unable to figure out where their assailants are. Cries of rage and protests quickly turn to guttural howls of pain and death. As abruptly as it had started, it ends, and he is encompassed by a strange, eerie silence that sits in direct contrast to the loud mockery and rally cries he’s grown used to in his time here.
Soft feet patter against the cold, dry soil. Tall, shadowy figures with lithe builds make their rounds and rip their arrows from the gullets of the corpses that litter the camp. They are graceful, but it is dark, and he can’t make out much more of their silhouettes.
He opens his mouth. He wants to tell these archers that the paramount of their prey here is quickly getting away from them. But all that he manages to utter is a tortured keen.
He lets his head fall forward. His chin hits his collarbones. They’re bruised, and it aches, but he’s too tired to really feel it anymore. His eyes shutter closed. He’s so close, he can feel himself drifting away from everything. He wishes he could stay up there forever, and never come back down.
Cool fingers grasp his chin, lifting his head gently upward. A hand presses flat against one of his cheeks. Words are murmured, exchanged between the two archers, willowy and as dancing as they moved. The very language he can hear sifting gently through his ears is musical, and lulls him to full sleep faster than any lullaby.
Somehow, he is freed of the shackles. Strong arms wind around his waist, and he’s resting snugly against a stranger’s chest. The world rocks beneath them.
For a second, he wonders if he actually has returned to the ocean like he had promised himself he wouldn’t. But no. There had been nobody else down there but him and the marine life. It’s a horse that they are riding.
It gallops steadily beneath them. He can feels it’s muscles straining to go at speed. Whoever is holding him speaks, loudly over hoofbeats, to someone else.
Another person, on a different horse. They shout back in the same language, all tonal voices deep and firm though it passes through his ears with the swiftness of a river.
A light hand glides across his shoulder blades, and tucks material in close around his neck to protect him from the wind that whirls against their flight.
His eyes fall shut.