“Worg’s Bane!” the shout had gone up, albeit very
briefly after he had dispatched the beast. Now, more than
a tenday later, he hung, starving and beaten, in the Pit.
His left wrist, bloody tatters of skin and exposed
bone, was held fast by a thick, rusted manacle of flaking
iron. Flaking, but plenty strong to hold boy to chain to
damp cavern wall. Hunger gnawed at his gut, grew great
spindly fingers of fatigue that stretched throughout his
limbs, left him shaking, shivering and dizzy, less like a
thing sprawled than a viscous fluid oozing ever outward,
intent on losing cohesion, seeping through the cracks of
the cavern floor, dissipating into unconscious shards of
agony, sharp and uncaring.
Through the agony of lacerations on his back, the
lightning that shot through his ribs, the throbbing that
suffused his face and head, he heard the wails of others,
the facts of their lives similar, momentarily parallel, but
their fates, he hoped, far different. One creature hacked
and moaned, hacked and moaned, its agony evident only
in the pain of each shallow, sobbing breath. Another’s
wheezing had completely ceased. No good sign.
The myriad smells of shit, blood, tears, urine, sweat
and other hints of olfactory disgust that he could only
guess at, nudged at his flat nose and narrow nostrils, mere
aromatic wraiths of their real strength in his half-breed
nose. Nevertheless, his eyes watered with it. His throat
stung, aching and swollen with flakes of dry, clinging bile.
To an orc all smells were equal, save for one’s own grunk.
50