Chapter 2 – Masaan

The Eternal Scar fell below the horizon, throwing up spikes of rage into the heavens. Against the backdrop of the Lakash Mountains those rays of light rushed upward in purple and pink fingers. Masaan blinked at them, not because the light hurt him, those days were ridiculous stories old uruks told to scare the young, to keep them from wandering into the cold of the day, ending up in the belly of shello or snowarg. Except they were not stories. And Masaan knew that.

He snarled quietly, his hand gripping the knockstone staff.

“Anger, Masaan?” Jeraal murmured. “Such emotions are beneath a Zadukuruk.”

“You call us that to mock, but it will be return to our succor.” Masaan replied.

Jeraal snorted. His thick and muscular, if squat, frame was covered in furs which gave him the appearance of a rather ferocious pack animal adrift from its herd. The image made Masaan laugh, inwardly. He would never show humor around one such as Jeraal. A grunter with enough nerve to openly mock an Urukshane was becoming increasingly common occurrence. Still, Masaan would not allow himself to be sullied by striking the fool. Among the Urukshane, the Peace Days were mightiest. Not because they fought best, though they did, but because everyone feared their peaceful ability to hold back. Jeraal’s eyes watched Masaan, sidelong, careful with poorly suppressed worry. He knew he could not goad Masaan, but still did so, often.

They mock us because they fear us. Perhaps we should change the our Order’s name to Zadukuruk.

Masaan lifted his knockstone staff and drove it into the hardened ice below their feet. This far south into the Masterland the entire floor of the continent was covered in permanent ice. Few of the Urukshane journeyed here. The tingle of the cold pinched into Masaan’s fingers. He welcomed the sensation, drew strength from it. There was power in the cold, a long known truth among the People.

Likely from the days when the Burnt Face burned us. And the Master shaped us in the dark and cold under the Marang. Before the Burnt Face began to chase the Eternal Scar.

“Oi!” a voice called out. “You two! What do you think you’re doin’ out ’ere in the frozing cold? T’aint safe, come on back before the Burnt Face comes and the Icelord calls you home.”

Masaan sighed into the wind and turned towards the voice. The woman was even squatter than Jeraal, even more wrapped in furs and far, far uglier beneath those skins. Mistress Ah’shakan was once a member of the Urukshane, but she had angered the The Eye, who exiled her to this shithorn of the world, assigned her to be the Guardian of the Blue Hold.

If only the The Eye knew the truth, she would have sent another here. Many, many anothers. She would have sent me.

This was a bitter thought for Masaan and it must have shown on his face. Jeraal snorted and moved away, laughing to himself, but loud enough Masaan could clear hear the gurgling tone of the sound.

He laughs at me as though I am an ignorant child.

As though I see only the mound of snow, where truly there is a shello, waiting within the web.

The web comes Jeraal Grunter.

It comes for us all.

Masaan started to sigh, but the wind picked up and shivered the breath before it left his mouth, icing its way down his throat into his chest and freezing the very action of exhalation. No sound left his lips. But the freezing wind passed. Ah’shakan called out again.

“Oi!” she said. “Fool of a Zadu!” But the wind picked up her words, tumbled them about, so all Masaan heard, echoed by the cold tongue of the air was fool fool fool.

Masaan shook his head a tiny bit. The cold and snow had blinded many of the Fair Folk in the centuries since the return to the ice of the Masterlands. It could happen suddenly, when an Uruk became bewildered, confused and agitated, before they ran out, unclothed into the ice and froze solid. Before the tribes had united under the auspices of the Priesthood nigh on a thousand years before, it had been a common form of execution.

From ice to ice, hearts cold we offer you to the Master.

The benediction was still common, if the type of execution was not. It meant something else now, a prayer for peace in the harsh winter of life, for endurance of the stabbing pain of the cold, so that an Uruk could be the Master of its own world.

Some considered it heresy. Others tomfoolery. But then some Uruk believed the Stars above were balls of ice careening through the sky until the day they crashed back down to Earta and became the Master again, though mostly such things were the provenance of the grunters.

Fools. The “master” is dead and gone, sent to the fire, for which we paid in blood untold. There will not be another of Him. Only those who would pretend and those who would believe.

Or so Masaan had always believed. There were no gods, no powers of the Sky and Hell, of Ice and Fire. Prayers were never answered save by chance. The only higher beings which Masaan had believed in were the Ice Demons, the white-skinned creatures who did not die, no matter how much they were starved, and whose voices in the night were said to be as pure and cold as the clearest frost. He had seen one, once, as a child. Masaan never stopped believing he would one day see another set of pointed ears and bright blue eyes. If only because it would confirm the existence of beings other than Urukshane and their lost cousins the Urukhainen.

Ah’shakan made her way, tromping through the snow and ice to Masaan. In the light of the mouth of her cavern home was the backlit shadow of Jeraal, watching them, considering, judging, maybe plotting.

The poor grunter, he does only what he knows. How can be blamed? For we have kept them ignorant so they will not kill us.

“Have you gone snow blind, Priest?” Ah’shakan muttered as she grabbed at Masaan’s arm. She pulled his massive body towards the cave. Were she not also an Uruk she would not have been able to move him at all, not with his feet firmly planted on the packed snow. As it was the fullness of her tug only tilted Masaan towards the cave. Ah’shakan grunted in dissatisfaction.

“I have not, Priestess.” Masaan replied, looking past her to the vastness of the ocean beyond the mountains, glowing with strange pinks and blues and deep, deep violets. It was a beautiful sight, one often lost on the Uruks and grunters alike, most of whom feared the moving water as though it were the souls of the Blue Biters themselves, raging with its frothy caps in hunger for the flesh of the People. Masaan knew better, of course. It is just a wide body of water, a barrier between us and the rest of Middle Earta, a fence between us and our place in the world.

Our birthright. I do not fear you, Ocean, nor your depths.

Still, sometimes Masaan remembered the old marms tales of the Listener of the Deeps, who heard every word spoken on the water, wove them into his watery skin, and made musical noise which could spell even the most powerful Uruk. There was some truth to those tales, but not what the People believed, nor what the Priesthood taught.

The Listener will one day guide us back, it is written in the Prophecies of the Blue, and you, Masaan must be willing to hear his song if that day comes while you still walk under the Burnt Face.

This litany was something often repeated to Urukshane during their training, but most never gave it salt. It was just something the old said to express their worry about whatever was changing around them, a holdover from the days before the Urukshane had split from Urukhainen and traveled south to the Master Lands. When Masaan had first read the Fire Book, after years and years of learning to read the strange, flowery script first, he had assumed it was some kind of strange fiction written in some long, bright past, drivel like the litany of shit in the Prophecies of the Blue. That it was fiction had been gospel to Masaan’s eyes. How could it be anything but? It told of strange things that made no sense. Of Men and Hobbits. Words which rolled strange off the tongue. Of wizards and the Dark Lord. Forests (the very idea had seemed as fanciful as if the Burnt Face and Etched Face had become one) covering vast swaths of land and giving rise to beings shaped like trees, trees who could speak and walk, as though they were People. Worse, it told of the People – but not as heroes who rose from the land to conquer the Ice, who searched the mountains for the lost Master, who carry the flame of civilization to places where all flames are cold and dead. No, it told of Orcs. Devilish creatures hideous to behold and demonic in their pursuits, driven only by the will of an impostor Master, bereft of all that defined a person as one of the People. Mere monsters, shadows of living things. This had been Masaan’s first impression of the vile Orcs. When he realized the truth it had shaken him to his soul, nearly cost him his life and almost forced him to abandon his vows to the Urukshane.

For Masaan facing the truth had nearly killed him, in every way possible. When he accepted that the Fire Book was indeed Truth, and not fiction as it read, it had then become his mission to discover more. To understand how it was possible that the Uruk and the grunters had come to the Lands, not as heroes searching for the Master, for the Truth, but as refugees, as the remnants of the fist of Evil. Fleeing for their very existence, hunted as beasts.

Because that is what we were. Orcs. Beasts. We were tried in the Fire and found wanting, so we fled to the Ice and called it salvation. It was not. It is not. It is our punishment. Our burden. This frozen waste is our birthright.

“You should come inside. Prayers to the Listener will begin soon. The others will not take to your absence. This is not Uruk’mortkane.” Ah’shakan said, spitting the last word out, harsh with hate.

“Yes, I should.” Masaan agreed.

Masaan made to move past Ah’shakan, but her calloused pale gray hand clasped him in the crook of his elbow. Her sea-green eyes drilled into his face. The wide set of her mouth showed tracery of delicate features from some long-past heritage, though the size of the large teeth underneath tortured the image. Still, Masaan could see that Ah’shakan had once been in possession of an otherwordly beauty, a rare perfection among her kind.

Among the Orcs. What crime did we commit that beauty was robbed from our very shapes? Taken so fully we forgot it could come from within?

“They will not understand, Masaan. They are not ready. It has taken centuries of crushing effort to get the People to turn their eyes up to the Burnt Face, away from the Dark... from Him. From what he made of us. I see what you intend, and you must not. They are not ready.”

Ah’shakan’s words struck Masaan as gentle slaps intended to wake a sleepy sentry. Firm, but demanding. He wanted to growl at her. Despite all which made him what he now believed he was still he part of him wanted to gut her, for nothing more than the pleasure which might come after see her blood flower against the white snow. It was always struggle. But it wanes. We change. Those who come next may conquer it whole. I must believe. Belief must be the key. There is no more time to wait.

“I know they will not Ah’shakan. We must make them change.” Masaan said, the firmness of his belief coming through in his words.

She started to stutter out a response, likely another warning. But Masaan covered her hand with his own larger hand. He drilled deeper into her eyes, allowed the connection which could exist between them become more solid. The Master, the Dark Lord, had used this very thing to control them, to make them cohesive units of warriors bound to his will. But it was, like everything else that foul being used, only a corruption of what had always been.

Once we were the Not Lost and we were the First. We were connected to this Earta. Our spirits bound to it, and to each other. What crime did we commit that the One allowed this to be the tool of our corruption?

“It must begin.” Masaan said, not echo of comfort in his tone. “Now. Here. Before the Second discover we exist. Their memories are short. We will be their nightmares and they will consume us in the tide of their numbers. We will fade or die. And then...”

Ah’shakan completed his thought. “Fire. Forever. With him. In the Void.”

Masaan nodded. He felt the core of Ah’shakan’s being. Her soul. It was a blue flame so bright it could banish the longest, deepest cold. And it was one with his own.

This is our salvation. We will no longer be lost. We will return to the Middle Earta and find our path back to the West. To the Undying Lands. To our birthright.

We will be Not Lost again.

We will be One.

Next Chapter: Chapter 3 - Neldoreth