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Bloodraven
P L Nunn
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This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Bloodraven Copyright © 2007 P L Nunn
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For more information please visit my website at http://www.bishonenworks.com
Smashwords Edition 1, March 2010
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Published by P L Nunn
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Chapter One
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Yhalen fled with Yherji’s blood on his skin and the flashing image of Yherji’s death-shocked face dancing behind his eyes. Yherji’s last cry as the mallet crashed through bramble to crush the back of his skull with no more effort than a man might make to squash a beetle under his foot, echoed in Yhalen’s ears.
He could imagine Yherji’s laughter, Yherji’s mocking smile, his crooked nose and his humor in the face of the most dire situation. What had they been talking about? Phralen, perhaps and how very high she’d gotten on blackfern berries at last year’s festival of rites. Of some silly thing she’d done, after Yhalen had reluctantly declined her offers of body and self—something that Yherji had seen and Yhalen had not. She’d never have done so silly a thing in Yhalen’s sight. Rebuffed by him or not, she’d never have risked her value in his eyes, though in Yherji’s, who wasn’t so favored a match within the small confines of the Ydregi young, she’d lapsed.
Yherji might have been Yhalen’s crib-mate, his closest companion—a young warrior of reputed skill—but his bloodline wasn’t so powerful. His father not the war chief of the Ydregi, his mother not the healer, his grandfather not the rites master and his paternal great grandfather not the high druid of the ancestral forest. Yhalen was as close to royalty in his lineage as the Ydregi knew. It was a given thing that Yhalen follow in his father’s and grandfather’s and great grandfather’s steps. Of course, the unbonded girls wanted him and didn’t want Yherji so much, whose lineage wasn’t so bountiful.
But Yhalen did, on occasion—when a young body rebelled against the edicts against congress with an unbonded maiden, no matter the willingness of that maiden—not when one’s mother could sense things and always knew when a body had strayed. A body learned well enough there was no physical thing that could be hidden from a Ydregi healer—so a body found pleasures in other pastures.
They had been about that, out of earshot of their elder companion, Yhakinor, when the forest had crashed in around them. When young trees had been swept aside and the impact of the stone mallet had smashed into the back of Yherji’s curly head, spattering bone and blood.
And Yhalen had run. Forgetting honor and courage and simple loyalty to a young man who had been his crib-mate, his friend and on occasion more—Yhalen fled for his life, shocked beyond rational thought by the lumbering shape of the monster that had followed that bloody mallet out of the woods in attempts to send him along the path that Yherji had gone.
He’d heard Yhakinor’s cries after that and those had brought back some semblance of the here and now. Those had chased away the sheer terror that had gripped him in its teeth—it had been Yhakinor and Yherji and him—escorts to Yhalen’s grandfather, the Master of the Rite. Yhalor on his journey to parlay with the men of Nakhanor, to discuss with their wise men and their leaders the possibility of an accord with the Ydregi. A six-day journey past the boundaries of their ancestral forests and into the lands of Ghary and Prauul and Nakhanor. A series of meetings between many tribes and clans to discuss a heretofore unheard of alliance between men, though Grandfather said that many of those clans were more than that: they were great kingdoms that held the loyalty of many thousands of men. Yhalen could hardly imagine a thousand men together—could hardly fathom so many people when the Ydregi were so few.
There were four hundred Ydregi who lived in the ancestral forest. Four hundred of the people whom the great wood sheltered and blessed and of those four hundred there were perhaps a few dozen who had not seen the great fires that had taken the western slopes of the Glazentooth some sixty odd years past. The Ydregi women were so seldom granted the gift of life in their bellies—so seldom brought a child to term and so seldom found themselves blessed with female progeny. The curse of long life, the wise men said. The curse of longevity in the face of other men’s short lives.
Until the blow of a crudely made mallet took it all away. Oh, Yherji.
Yhalen stumbled to a halt, shoulder pressed to a vine-covered tree, chest heaving with lost breath and unshed tears. He could not banish the image of Yherji’s face, or the sound of the impact as the back of his skull was bashed in. Yherji had been laughing in the midst of his story, as they took their leisure out of sour-faced Yhakinor’s presence. Easier to sneak a bit of stolen pleasure without the older man’s censure. They were the escorts of Yhalor and ought to be taking their jobs more seriously, but Yhalor was ensconced behind stone walls with the other wise men and his forest-bred escorts felt caged and trapped within the confines of such. Better to wander the woods outside the Nakhanor village and find more entertaining means of passing time.
Yherji was dead and Yhalen had never heard the conclusion of his story. He never would. He heard a sound that might have been Yhakinor’s cry. If he didn’t go back and help the older man, what would that make him? A coward. Worse than a coward, a traitor.
Yhalen had never known such fear, had never flinched at challenge—had taunted Fate and always come out blessed by her. But he’d never seen an ogre before. Only heard tales. He had never imagined them true. But the thing that had lumbered out of the brush could be nothing else. It was why Grandfather was here—because of the things that were creeping down from the northern heights to plague the fertile, forested lands of the south. Yherji’s blood was on his face. Cold now. He could not stomach the thought of Yhakinor’s on his hands as well. He gripped the hilt of the short sword at his belt and slid it from its sheath, starting back first at a cautious jog, then at a run when the forest revealed no further sounds. Branches whipped past his face, caught in his hair. He had no grace in his turmoil of guilt and fear and adrenaline-fed movement.
“Yhakinor,” he cried, knowing it was foolish to give away his own position, but desperate for some clue that the older man was alive. No answer. He forced himself to slow. Forced himself to breathe, to feel the essence of the wood—the flow of its life. He was no wise man and certainly no druid, but he was still Ydregi, and even the Ydregi young were attuned to the forest. This one was tainted. The wash of death overlapped the tranquility. Death and dying.
“Yhakinor,” he whispered, staring down the dark path that led to the most intense disturbance. He moved that way, careful now to make no sound. Aware, so very aware, of the stigma that lay over the wood. Yherji, he thought, had died not far from here. Almost—almost he could smell the scent of Yherji’s blood—of his body’s last dying breath.
There—against the trunk of a gnarled tree, a body lay twisted—the upper torso at an odd angle in relation to the hips and legs. Yhalen moved forward, trying to pierce the shadows, sword on the verge of shaking in his hand. Yhakinor’s eyes stared up at him. His head had been twisted so that it stared over his back, as if something had taken his body and distorted it, head backwards and hips and legs turned around. Wetness soaked the roots of the tree. A great deal of it.
Warmth trailed down Yhalen’s cheeks. So few Ydregi and two dead in the span of moments. He slipped to his knees, a half dozen paces from the dead man. He’d only ever seen the dead once, when old Phelecaas had been called to roam the heavens with the ancestral spirits. She’d died in her sleep and been lovingly wrapped and prepared by the tribal women before they buried her under the roots of the Great Tree. It had been so quiet and dignified—Phelecaas’ passing. She’d lived longer than any of them.
Yhakinor was Yhalen’s father’s age. A young man still. Yherji—Yherji had been a child. Yhalen was simply a child who had won this honor to accompany his esteemed grandfather on this most important journey and failed to live up to the trust given him.
“I’m sorry. So, so sorry,” he whispered, inching forward, wanting to dig his fingers into the blood-soaked earth and smear it across his face in shame.
A tree moved behind him, or something that seemed like a towering forest monument. Yhalen almost cried out—caught himself in time to save himself that indignity and scrambled to his feet, his sword held warningly—and could only gape in shock when he saw fully the creature advancing upon him. Twice his height almost, with shoulders wider than he could stretch his arms, biceps that were thicker than a large man’s torso and thighs like tree trunks. It held an axe that Yhalen doubted he could have lifted off the ground, in one thick-fingered hand. Its armor was leather and metal, crudely put together. A beaten helm topped his head, doing little to hide the long, pointed ears or bristly black hair. Its eyes gleamed yellow, and sharp white teeth were a considerable contrast against skin of a shade to match an algae-covered swamp, yellow-tinged green.
Yhalen felt quite suddenly like a burrow mouse confronted by a hungry bear. He took a panicked step backwards, and saved himself from the swipe of the one that had come up behind him only by the sound of creaking leather as it drew back its arm to smash the mallet down.
Yhalen hissed and jumped, half staggering over Yhakinor’s sprawled legs and felt the stinging slice of the axe as it cleaved through the material of his tunic and raked his back.
A shallow cut at best, that could have sliced him in two if he’d not stumbled. There was no easy path to escape. Their long arms prevented it as they closed in. He lunged at the one with the mallet, preferring to tempt fate with the blunter of the two weapons. His blade caught the ogre—he was certain they were indeed ogres—on the inside of the palm, above the protection of a thick wrist guard. A mere scratch, but enough to make the thing howl and lash its unhindered arm out in a wide sweeping arc.
Almost, Yhalen avoided it. He was faster. He was smaller and more agile, certainly—but he was hemmed in and on uneven terrain with tangled roots under his boots. The edge of that great hand caught him on the shoulder, knocking him back and off his feet. He came up against something hard, the breath knocked out of him. A heavy weight came down upon his head. It covered his face and compressed his skull and when he frantically lifted a hand to pry it off, he felt leathery skin and nails. The ogre. The one had knocked him into the other and that one was about to crush his skull in its mammoth hand. He slashed desperately—blindly—with the sword and it flicked his wrist hard enough to make his entire arm go numb. He didn’t even hear the sword hit the ground. He couldn’t hear anything past the ringing in his ears. He clawed at the hand, digging his nails into thick skin, but it hardly seemed to make a difference. It just made the thing mad—made it lift him up by its grip on his head and shake him like a rag doll. He struggled still, feet kicking uselessly above the ground.
He thought they spoke. A guttural, harsh language—or perhaps it was merely the ragged sound of his own breath, his own body betraying him in its weakness, in his terror.
It released him suddenly and, unprepared, his legs crumpled under him when they hit ground. The other one made a swipe at him, cuffing him across the side in what might have been a light tap for an ogre, but sent Yhalen tumbling across the knotty ground to come up hard against the other ogre’s legs. It reached down and jerked him up, hand enveloping one of his arms. It lifted him, threatening to dislocate his shoulder and drew him in close to a face twice the size of his own, his feet dangling almost his body length from the ground. It growled at him, showing its yellowed fangs, and barked something. It shook him once then tossed him back to the ground. The impact took what little breath he had left, bruising his shoulder and hip, making him shred the inside of his mouth on the sharp edges of his own teeth. He couldn’t quite see for the dark spots crowding his vision. He could not have escaped the hands of the other one even if he’d been able to, with his legs unstable, and his breath shallow and scarce.
They played with him like big cats with some small helpless victim. The sharp edges of their blunt nails tore his clothing and the skin under it. They didn’t kill him. They broke ribs and tore skin. He twisted his ankle badly on the roots when they played at batting him back and forth between them. After that, he couldn’t keep his feet for long enough to entertain them.
All he could do was lie there, curled in pain, and wish for the blackness that would take it all away. But it wouldn’t come. Oh, it most stubbornly refused him its grace.
One, with a line of gold hoops in its pointed ear and a ring through its flat nose, snatched Yhalen’s braid between its fingers, winding it around its index finger. It drew him up by the hair, almost off his feet, but not quite, and bent down to peer at him. With its other hand it pulled at the neck of Yhalen’s tunic. The lacings snapped like fine spider web, and despite Yhalen’s attempts to prevent it, the ogre tore the tunic off, baring his lacerated, bruised upper body.
The ogre said something, almost questioningly, and the other one came and crouched next to him, reaching out and running one big hand down Yhalen’s chest and stomach. The fingers worked themselves between his legs and he hissed, struggles renewed at the indignity.
Another bout of conversation, and something seemed to be decided. With an almost casual movement the second ogre flicked one large finger against Yhalen’s stomach. It drove the air out and then let the blackness in.
He was only marginally aware after that, of being swung with ease over a shoulder the size of a horse’s back and of the two ogres picking up their weapons and moving through the woods.
He came to again in darkness. The sound of more than two voices. The crackle of a fire. The smell of roasting meat. Himself on his side, his arms numb behind him, his breath constricted by the rough rope around his neck that they’d attached to the ropes binding his arms and then tied to the tree at his back. If he struggled too much, he’d choke himself.
A miserable situation for a man to find himself in. Disgraced by his cowardice, captured by creatures out of the distant north—he lay there, glassy-eyed, stunned, seeing Yherji’s face over and over. Seeing Yhakinor’s twisted body. What if no one found them? What if there was no one to send them on their way? To bury them under a great tree so that their bodies might contribute to the continuity of the forest and their souls might soar? He needed to make sure of that. He needed to at least do them that justice.
He turned his face into the soft leaves and tried not to shame himself further by crying. Tried to gather his scattered wits and make sense of what had happened. Ogres as far south as the Nakhanor Valley? How? How could they travel so far and not have it known? They were most certainly not the stealthiest of creatures.
His grandfather, Yhalor, had come to Nakhanor to discuss the dangers of the ogres’ migration—the eventuality, not the actuality.
Oh, Goddess—Grandfather—what if they’d come, these brutish people, because of the gathering at the Nakhanor city? What if they meant to kill the wise men of the southern races to ease their own invasion?
He narrowed his eyes and stared into the fire-lit night. It was full dark now, and the shadows deep. He was in a clearing, a dozen paces from a good-sized fire. Around that fire sat four large forms. They spoke and laughed amongst themselves, tearing at the meat of some animal that they’d spitted over the fire.
Only four. No great army, that. Even four creatures as large as ogres could not defeat the forces gathered at the Nakhanor village. Two well-armed, well-prepared men might take one of them, Yhalen thought. If they were lucky. Just these four were no danger.
There was a glint of yellow eyes and a short burst of laughter. One of them had turned to look his way. The others followed suit and Yhalen shivered at the malicious gleams in their eyes, in the wide grins that split their faces.
Oh, Goddess, please, please, please let them forget me. He very seldom begged the Goddess who permeated the forest for anything. Having a druid as a great grandfather, one learned not to lightly call on the Goddess for minor things. He prayed to her now, with a frantic zeal. But she ignored him, perhaps punishment for his flight when he should have stayed to confront the evil that had taken his childhood friend.
They gathered around him, the four of them crouching or kneeling, and he could hardly tell the two new ones apart from the ones that had taken him, except for one had gold in his ears and a gold circlet around his head and the others seemed to defer some small bit to him. That one held a large wineskin, from which he took a great swig, wiping one hand across the back of his mouth afterwards and nudging the one next to him with a sly word. That one laughed and leaned forward, poking Yhalen in the chest and barking a question at him. Bound as he was, there was little avoiding it. He lay there and glared, drawing his knees towards his stomach in a reflexive motion to protect himself.
They laughed at that, and one grabbed his ankles and stretched his legs out. Yhalen cursed then and tried to kick his way free of that grasp, writhing so much that the rope at his neck cut off his air and he had to stop, gasping and lightheaded. They enjoyed that, watching him suffocate—sat and chortled over it until he did black out and the one with the earrings finally reached out and loosened the noose. Yhalen came back to himself with tears in his eyes and bile in his throat.
They’d gathered more rope while he was out, and like children with a doll, two of them diligently caught his legs, discussing among themselves perhaps, the best way to deal with him, their new toy. The one leg they looped rope about thigh and ankle, then pulled them close together. He’d lost a boot along the way, he didn’t remember where, and would hardly have noticed if the rope hadn’t cut into the flesh of his bare ankle. The other leg, they looped rope about his injured ankle and used it to hoist his leg up. He cried out, as it tightened around the already swollen joint, but they cared little for his pain, and pulled the leg up until it was perpendicular to his body and tied it off to the tree.
It was a position that left him brutally exposed, his legs spread wide, his hips almost suspended from the ground. He felt cool air against his thigh and realized with growing horror that there was very little left of his trousers, shredded as they’d been from the play of the first two ogres. It took little effort for them now to simply rip them further, and the cool night air touched his shrinking balls and the flesh of his buttocks.
What did they want? What could they possibly want? The difference in size most certainly prohibited sex, didn’t it? There was no possible way that he could accommodate one of them. What then? Curiosity? Simple torture? Yhalen shut his eyes and pressed his face into the mulch, body shivering in convulsive little twitches that he had no control over. He wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t give them that victory along with the rest.
They touched him, big, rough fingers pressing his balls flat, rolling his penis between their fingers, laughing no doubt at the size in comparison to whatever it was they hid within their pants. It hurt. Oh, it hurt a great deal to have their brutish hands explore him, taunt him, tug at him, and squash him. He bit into the thick braid that lay under his cheek to keep from screaming when they caught the head of his penis between their fingers and pulled it brutally out from his body. He thought they meant to rip it off—it felt like something tore at the root of it, and he could stand it no longer and drew breath to scream at the red agony that shot through his groin—but they let it go. He hardly had the time to shudder in relief when those same thick fingers prodded ungently at the clenched entrance behind his balls. He bit his lip, trying to bring the leg tied ankle to thigh up and prevent it—but another of them simply pressed his knee to the ground and he was helpless to do anything but lie there and tremble and gasp.
The one with the earrings leaned over, grinning, and tipped the mouth of his wineskin up, dribbling strong red wine over Yhalen’s thighs. It dribbled over his balls and down the short channel to his anus, making the cuts sting and his ball shrink. The one at his bottom laughed and smeared his big finger in the wine, then pressed the tip of it against Yhalen’s opening. It was thicker than Yhalen’s engorged penis and considerably longer. The nail was blunt but ragged, and tore flesh as the ogre twisted it into Yhalen’s resisting body.
The wine lubricated nothing so well as the thick blood that began to flow, hot and stinging down Yhalen’s spine and across his thighs.
He did scream then, when the bulge of the knuckle threatened to split already torn muscle. Cried and cursed and spasmodically tried to jerk his body away from the intrusion and failed. And hopelessly, miserably failed. He did nothing but scrape his arms and hands against the bark of the tree and amuse the gathered monsters. They thought it great sport, his humiliation, this brutal torture. He thought he was going to die. The pain was a molten knife at the small of his back that ripped up into his guts and shredded his insides. It dug around inside him, twisting its punishing finger, curving it so that it felt as if it pressed against his belly through the bruised mass of his colon.
The world went dark then, and he tried to let himself fall into that trance that Mother and Greatgrandfather let themselves experience when they were working some magic or another or trying to speak to the ancestors or the forest or the Goddess. He had that power in him—his bloodline was the oldest of all the Ydregi—he was merely too young for the training of it. A young man had to go through the rites of the warrior—of the philosopher—before he could be trained in the rites of the druid. So many years ahead that they became clouded in his mind just thinking of it. But he still knew the ways. He still knew what Grandfather did and Mother—who was a healer of the tribe despite the fact that she’d only seen sixty summers. Yhalen hadn’t seen quite twenty and still, he could almost reach that place and the power that rested there—waiting for the right touch to draw it out. Almost he could feel the overwhelming essence of life that emanated from the forest surrounding them....
He almost had it—almost—and was brought back by the sudden shock of his head being twisted up, his jaws hinged open and a splash of wine so bitter it made him choke, poured down his open mouth. He swallowed and spat and hardly realized the finger gone from his rear until it was jammed down into his mouth. The taste of blood and shit made him gag. The ogre barked something at him, jamming his finger between Yhalen’s straining jaws. Again the same word and he thought the brute might have wanted him to clean it of his own blood and his own shit. He shut his eyes, refusing to do anything but lay there and passively let it rape his mouth. It wasn’t until he felt another blunt, thick finger pressed against his ravaged anus and another gruff voice repeated the same foreign word, that he panicked and thought perhaps a little capitulation in the face of insurmountable odds might not be a bad thing. It filled his mouth to capacity, but he tried to comply. The ogre grinned hugely and pulled his finger out, rubbing it across Yhalen’s lips with bruising force, urging him to lick it clean. He did, stomach churning with nausea, tongue hesitantly lapping at the rough flesh, which was mostly clean, from the thrusts down his throat.
The second finger pressed into him and he jerked, crying out in shock and anger.
He’d done what they’d asked and still.... He choked, the finger jammed back down his throat, curling down the back of his throat.
The pain ate him up from the inside, bloody, raw, torn, stretched wider than a body could stretch and recover as they expanded their games and found other things to force inside him. He lost what sense of dignity he’d striven to hold on to and screamed and pleaded and begged, and all it did was inflame them. He saw through red-tinged vision, one of them take out the horrifying thing between its legs and start to pump it in excited vigor. It was as long as Yhalen’s arm from shoulder to wrist and thicker than his biceps along the shaft, bulging larger at the bluish green head, which was swollen and angry and leaking clear fluid.
They went into a frenzy, with the smell of the ogre’s sexual fluids so strong in the air that it made Yhalen’s eyes water. The thing reached for him, wild-eyed and intent, and Yhalen knew that he would die, impaled on this thing and knew that he wouldn’t die well or honorably. But, the one with the ear rings, the only one that hadn’t violated him yet, snarled and shoved the one with the frightening erection back, smacking its own chest once then stabbing a finger towards Yhalen’s tortured form. The other one growled, backing down reluctantly, hunching over to vigorously massage the length of its cock. A tattooed length, Yhalen noted absently, his head swimming with something akin to relief—or perhaps it was blood loss. There were tattooed symbols on their arms and the hints of them under the edges of their armor.
The leader, who had claimed Yhalen for his own, moved to sit at his legs, taking another swig of the bitter wine, before pouring the last of it down Yhalen’s raised leg and watching as it dribbled down. It burned like liquid fire and he screamed and convulsed weakly. His cries had grown hoarse from so many shameful screams. From the bruising of thick malicious ogre fingers.
The ogre leader pushed his finger inside to little resistance, blood and torn muscle easing the way. Yhalen moaned and pressed his face into the mulch, having no strength left to even flinch. With no resistance met and no cry of pain evicted, the ogre drew its finger out and added a second. It was no new tactic. They had already invaded him that way, eager to see how far his flesh would stretch before it split. It was split now. He shut his eyes and tried to find escape in blackness, but unexpectedly the ogre pulled out of him and leaned over, jerking his head back by his hair.
Yhalen’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself no more than a hand’s span from the malicious, calculating eyes of the ogre leader. It forced his face down, making him look down the length of his body to the throbbing erection the ogre had freed from its pants. It was huge and unforgiving and glistening with clear fluid. The ogre jutted it hard against his belly like a fist in his gut, knocking the air from his lungs. It said something to him, low and soft and promising. One word that Yhalen thought with detached horror might have meant death. Then the ogre eased backwards, clutching his bloodied thighs in its meaty hands, thumbs stretching the cheeks of his buttocks wide as it pressed the blunt tip of itself against him. The other’s paused in their reverie to watch, wide eyed and expectant—breathless over the final execution of their captive.
With great hands clutched tight around Yhalen’s thighs and buttocks, it slowly, methodically worked itself inside, slowly deliberately split him asunder, and oh, he screamed then. Opened his mouth and soundlessly cried out in shock and profound, mind-altering agony. He could not even twist his body in the animal desperate need to escape the torture, so filled—so cruelly skewered was he. All he could do was convulse and twitch and reflexively try to keep breath in his lungs. Soon he didn’t even have the stamina left to do even that and breath came short and unevenly. No stamina left to protest, no cognizance left to beg with anything resembling coherency.
All he could do was lie there, body jerking with the motion of his assailant, oozing blood. So much blood that it soaked the mulch on which he lay. The ogre fucked him methodically, not able to completely immerse itself, even though it tore through his insides in the effort—again, until his hands and great hairy balls were smeared with Yhalen’s blood and Yhalen was fading again, light-headed and distant, the pain receding in favor of something else.
He was dying. They were making it as slow a process as they could, but he was finally being drawn down the dark path of death. He was barely aware when the ogre pulled out, spewing a great splash of hot liquid across Yhalen’s body, licking his fingers clean of Yhalen’s blood
Ancestors—please don’t reject me. He was afraid they might. Afraid that he’d disgraced himself—afraid that these beasts would consume his body after they killed it and that he might never return to the ground. He had to be buried in the ground at the roots of a mother tree in order for the forest to lift his soul to the place where the ancestors dwelled. Still, even the eternal nothingness that would come if he were not lifted up by the forest, was better than enduring more of their torment. Even being cold and alone forever was preferable to waking up tomorrow and living through this again.
The darkness came down, like a blanket tossed up and gently floated down over his head. The pain was still there—still present in the background—but the rest was quiet and still. He strove to reach the darkness—the peace. He could just see it. Could feel the overwhelming call of it.
Even the pain went away—there was nothing.
Nothing.
And then a faint gentle presence that pushed him away with a force than made the ogres seem fragile, weak things.
No singular essence—no perceptible identity—more an overwhelming awareness of...life. Of bursting vitality and deep rooted, undulating vigor. He didn’t want it. He wanted endings. He sobbed and railed at the loss of the darkness and the pain came back with so brutal a stab that it drove him grasping after that ethereal power—the essence of the forest that had always protected the Ydregi and given them strength and life and energy. And surprisingly enough, it responded, like it did to his mother when she set bones or healed wounds. It swept over him and enveloped him in warmth and chased away the pain.
And then, there was darkness again and this time, nothing interrupted it. No dreams, no voices, no essence of power.
~~~
Yhalen woke up. It was such a profound shock to do so that he didn’t quite believe it at first. He’d expected to die. Had expected to never know anything but that dark nothingness again. It was baffling to open his eyes to filtered daylight. Even more so to open them to anything other than blinding pain. Oh, he hurt. He was sore and miserable, and his muscles were cramped from the awkward position he’d spent the night in. But it didn’t feel as if he’d been so cruelly and methodically tortured—impaled, torn, and left to bleed out his life on the forest floor. He twisted his head a little to try and look down his body. He was covered in dirt and blood, but his flesh seemed oddly free of the deep cuts and gashes he’d received during his time in the ogres’ care.
How? How had this happened, this miraculous healing? Even his mother, an experienced healer, could not have regenerated such grievous wounds. Not so completely. She could only have aided. Panicked, he looked for sign of his captors and saw them—four huge, sprawled shapes deeply asleep around the burnt out fire. They were snoring to wake the dead, and there were no animal sounds to break the morning solitude—all the birds chased away by the clamor, or perhaps merely by the ogres’ corrupt presence. But—there was something else.
Yhalen hadn’t noticed in the dark, but the trees, the bushes, the brush, the vines—even the weeds struggling up through the pine mulch—everything surrounding the campsite was dead. Brown, shriveled and lifeless. Likewise, the tree he was anchored to was brittle and dead, though it was apparent from the dried leaves still on their branches that it had not been dead long.
How? He’d not felt this, this profound lack of life before. All the essence, all the life force had been sucked out of this small area of wood—a cruel twist on the gentle borrowing that the healers and druids of his people practiced.
Had he done this? Had he, in his desperation to stop the pain—had he pulled the life force from the surrounding wood and used it to heal himself? That was the way of it, according to his mother. To borrow from the forest—from the Goddess—to heal their hurts. But Mother never killed the forest in her little thefts of power. She never left dried husks in her wake.
Yhalen began to tremble, terrified at the audacity of what he’d done. Terrified that any remote chance he’d had at redemption in the eyes of the ancestors was now banished. Terrified that he hadn’t died. That he’d done nothing more than heal his body so they could do it all over again. That they would wake up and see him....
He couldn’t stop the shaking. The fear ate its way through him, chasing away all other rational thought, all senses, all emotion until all he could do was lay there and stare at those snoring hulks in frozen anticipation. He jerked mindlessly at the rope binding him. He was bound in the same manner as he’d been last night when they’d finished with him, one leg up, the other folded tight and both so cramped that new pain lanced up his back as he twisted. The dead tree rustled and dried gray leaves floated to the ground.
One of the ogres snorted, disturbed in its slumber and Yhalen froze—wanting it back asleep—wanting a few precious more moments of safety before they rose. But it turned onto its back, lifting a muscled arm and wiping the back of a broad hand across its face. His face. Most definitely male. All of them. Gold eyes turned his way, an absent sweep of the campsite, passed him over in his stillness, then swung back, narrowing as the ogre realized with some surprise that Yhalen was alive.
An unexpected thing, to be certain.
Gold earrings chimed as the ogre climbed to his feet, padding over to tower above Yhalen, glaring down with something akin to accusation in his small eyes.
Krebakle ouvbre ne sekhre? he hissed. How are you still alive, Yhalen imagined the words to mean. He’d asked the same of himself.
The ogre bent down, and ran his fingertips tentatively down Yhalen’s trembling body, between his legs, the rough pad of one finger prodding behind Yhalen’s shrunken balls at whole, untorn flesh. Then he pulled back, muttering a word, eyes wary, fingers touching a rune-like tattoo on the inside of one arm. A rune against evil, or magic perhaps. For a while, with those hands on him, Yhalen grayed out. Just ceased to see in his panic and his terror and only came back to himself an indeterminate amount of time later when all his captors were up and warily clustered together, across the clearing. They seemed to be conferring amongst themselves, occasionally casting dark, uncomfortable looks his way.
Eventually some decision was made, for one of the lesser ones, one without an abundance of rings in his ears or gold on his person, ambled over and roughly released Yhalen from his bonds. Or the majority of them. His released legs sent blood rushing to numb extremities and the ogre was unreasonable in his refusal to understand why Yhalen couldn’t stand on his feet when it yanked him up. His legs wouldn’t hold him, though the sprain in his ankle seemed to have fled with the rest of last night’s injury. All he could do was lie there, with his arms still tightly bound behind his back, and try not to sob as the needles of returning blood flow attacked his legs.
He was kicked and harassed until he desperately tried to gain his knees to avoid the punishment. He was promptly snatched then and a noose looped around his neck, which was jerked tight as the ogre at the other end of it, pulled at it like a child urging a reluctant dog to follow its lead. It was either find his feet or choke as the slipknot tightened. The tatters of his pants hindered him, hanging off his knees as they did, tripping him and making him stagger until one of the ogres hissed and hauled him back against its hips and tore the rags and the one remaining boot from his body, leaving him completely naked in their midst. Shriveled and pitiful and scared and jerked ruthlessly behind them, bare feet catching every thorn and every sharp bristle and burr that he passed.
He was bleeding again in short order, body lashed by whipcord branches pulled back by the passage of the giants ahead of him. His feet were torn and bruised, knees scraped bloody from too many falls to count, blood trickling down his neck from the abrasion of the rough cord looped about it. They spoke very little when they moved, the passage of their bodies noise enough through trees that were not always spaced wide enough to accommodate them.
Once, they were alerted to something that he was too numb to notice and one pulled him up into its arms, hand covering his face in a smothering embrace while the others slipped into the wood. Yhalen blacked out from lack of breath and came to ass up over a broad shoulder, the others back from whatever had caught their attention.
Easier to lie there, carted about like slain game, fading in and out of consciousness, then stumble along in their wake, so he kept his body limp and let the afternoon pass in a haze of disorientation. It only lasted so long. The brute carrying him tired of it soon enough and tossed Yhalen to the earth, barking at him in irritation and prodding at him with a huge booted foot. Yhalen rolled away as best he could, clambering gracelessly to his feet and standing there with his head spinning from being carried so long with it hanging. His leash was snatched up and again he was yanked along in their wake.
Helpless. Hopeless. Fearing the onslaught of dusk when his massive captors might stop and renew their play from the night before. But night and a cessation of travel proved agonizingly far away. Yhalen was no stranger to vigorous exertion—the rites a youth had to pass to be called a warrior were strenuous and harsh—but the pace these creatures set with their long legs and their boundless strength was relentless. He had to jog more often than not to keep from being jerked off his feet and dragged along the ground behind them.
He became numb to the pain of torn feet—numb to the scream of protesting muscles, to the constant abrasion of rope about his neck, to the bite of the insects that were drawn to the stench of the ogres and found his naked skin irresistible—numb to everything but the need to keep his feet and stumble along at the end of his leash. The world narrowed to that simple goal. He forgot Yherji and Yhakinor, forgot shame and dishonor and the censure of the ancestors. When he’d been cognizant enough to desire it, death had seemed a precious thing—now, with cognizance numbed and hazy, instinct took over and all his body sought was survival.
When they did stop, with night sounds breaking the stillness of the forest—Yhalen stood trembling on rubbery legs, head down and breathing harsh, like a beast driven too far, too long. His bladder ached, full and hard from a day forced to hold it in, but the ogres had no care for tending him in such matters or releasing him to let him tend himself, so, able to contain it no more, his body forced release and the urine dribbled down his legs, hot and stinging the scratches on his skin.
He hadn’t even the presence of mind to feel mortification. Just stood there and shook until the ogre into whose care he’d been given loomed over him and without warning knocked him from his feet. Yhalen hit the ground face first, an ungainly sprawl of legs that the brute squatted down and seized, catching both ankles in one hand and drawing them back towards Yhalen’s head, bowing his body painfully as the end of the leash around his neck was twined about his ankles. His thighs screamed protest at the awkward position, but there was no choice but to strain to inch his legs closer to keep the noose from choking him.
He was abandoned like that, after a cruel chuckle from the ogre, to lay gasping for what air he could suck in through the tightening loop around his throat. Through spinning, wavery vision he watched them set up their crude camp. Listened to the gruff rumble of their voices as they spoke amongst each other. One of them came back with game and they sat about skinning it and spitting it and watching the meat sizzle over the flames. They looked his way a few times and he quaked in dread, but they made no move to come and torment him.
Once after their meal had been consumed, their leader padded over and crouched over Yhalen. The ogre ran one speculative finger down the taut bowed line of Yhalen’s chest and tummy, lingered at his unprotected groin and nudged the limp flesh at the juncture of his legs. The ogre whispered something that might have been a question. Yhalen hardly knew. Yhalen hardly had the sense to rationalize anything, the terror so completely overwhelmed his mind and body. He hadn’t even the power to shut his eyes and block out the hated face with its yellow eyes and its gold nose ring and dangling ear hoops. The ogre spoke again, softly to himself, then rose and retreated back to the company of his fellows.
Yhalen didn’t sleep. He couldn’t, with his muscles screaming in pain and strangulation imminent should he let his body relax. When they released him in the morning, ready to take up their march again, his legs were good for nothing, no matter how hard they yanked at his leash or shoved at him to make him walk. With blood in his mouth from their encouragement and his legs cramping so badly that tears streamed down his cheeks, he was tossed over an armored shoulder and carried. He did sleep then—plunged into blessed oblivion for some time until he was woken abruptly by the cold touch of water enveloping his body.
His reflexive gasp for breath succeeded only in filling his lungs with water and it wasn’t until a large hand hauled him up by the hair that he was able to gag and choke and spew the water out. He was dunked again, in short order and held there, regardless of frantically kicking legs and twisting body, while sand was scrubbed over his skin, roughly washing away the grime and blood. He was allowed air once more, helped up by a grip on his upper arms, with his feet dragging the surface of the stream, while the ogre peered at him critically. Apparently satisfied, it flung him to the sandy beach where he landed on his knees. It splashed out of the water behind him and drew from its belt a large, wicked knife, every bit as long as Yhalen’s sword had been. Longer, and yet in the ogre’s hand it seemed short and stubby.
Yhalen cringed, but it only grasped his arm and sliced through the ropes binding his hands behind his back. After two days bound, his arms fell numb and useless to his sides. His hands were red and slightly swollen and he prayed to the Goddess that he’d not lost the use of any fingers. He wouldn’t know until the feeling came back and that in itself was a dreaded thing, for even now, as the first blood rushed back, the pain was horrible. It hardly gave him time to regain sense in his limbs though, before it snatched his hands again and retied them in front of his body, leaving a long stretch of rope as a lead, which it then grasped and used to haul him to his feet.
Yhalen managed to stagger along in the ogre’s wake, his vision swimming in and out of focus, his hair dripping wet down his shoulders and the sodden tail of his braid lying heavy against his spine. It took him a moment to make sense of the sounds. Of voices, loud and gruff and foreign. And numerous. Of the sound of animals and the constant clang of what might have been a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. In dull surprise, he made himself look beyond the ground at his feet, and found himself at the edge of the wood, where a great grassy vale spread out.
And within that vale sat a camp. A collection of huge tents and cooking fires, around which milled a great many hulking ogre forms. Dozens of them. More than his overtaxed mind could account for. And here and there, he thought he saw the smaller forms of human men. Men in ragged scraps of clothing, with pale blonde hair and beards, who squatted over cooking fires or carted buckets of water, or wood. Men who walked with their heads down, bare backs more often than not decorated with bold tattoos and necks adorned with crude iron collars.
Some of their eyes flickered at him in passing. Dull, emotionless stares that held no pity for his nudity or bondage, or the cruel way he was jerked along the ogre’s wake.
The four who had captured him, he thought numbly, had been scouts. And this was a war camp. It could be nothing else with the armor and the weapons that were so apparent. And one that had already seen battle—or slaughter, if the rancid, decaying human heads that hung from a rope outside one tent were any indication.
Yhalen gagged, shutting his eyes on the atrocity, at the casual display of death—and came up short against the back of his guide, when the ogre stopped to converse with the familiar one with the gold hoops. Yhalen’s leash was transferred to that hated hand and without a look in his direction, he was led further into the camp until finally they reached a tent more ornate than the others. A set of tall, thick spears sat on either side of the door flap and from between them was strung a line that supported dangling trinkets. Gold-tipped bones, cast iron adornments that might have been rune signs, the curved claws and teeth of some animal that must have been monstrous even in comparison to the ogres themselves.
Gold earrings shoved Yhalen to the trampled grass, hard enough to take his breath away, and he leaned over his knees, forehead pressed to the ground to stop the world from spinning. His captor called out and was answered. Yhalen was aware, distantly of the gathering of many large bodies, of their heavy shadows on his small, cowering person—of feet crunching the grass by his head and of conversation exchanged. Finally a hand reached down and snagged the rope trailing from his wrists, pulling it and him up to his knees and holding him suspended there, with his arms over his head, his face bowed, aware—oh, so very painfully aware of the gathered eyes that skimmed his body. A hand reached down and grasped his jaw, tipping his head back.
Through the damp tangle of his hair, Yhalen focused on a face that didn’t tower quite so far over his own as the other ogres. A face that didn’t have the broad, blockish bone structure of the others. A face that might have looked human, save for the sharp, protruding points of the canines and the gold eyes and the long pointed ears crowded with dangling gold rings and the greenish ochre cast to his skin. A frightening face all the same, with eyes that were cold and intelligent and assessing.
He was very large, the creature that held Yhalen’s hands above his head, a good two heads taller than Yhalen himself, and rippling with dense muscle—but his body, under the beaten metal armor and the creaking black leather that adorned it, wasn’t blocky, or stout like his larger brethren. Rather, it hinted at agile, supple strength and—one dared to hope—more human proportions. Granted, no human Yhalen had ever seen was so large, but it wasn’t out of the range of possibility that a man might be born of such stature. But compared to the other ogres, this one with his dangling trinkets and fine armor and long broadsword hanging from his belt was a dwarf. He stood an arm’s length shorter than the smallest of his brethren and was probably half their weight, and yet still they seemed to afford him great respect. Even the largest of them wouldn’t quite meet the eyes of this smaller creature.
Yhalen’s former earringed captor did, though. There was something akin to malicious humor in his eyes when he spoke, inclining his head in an almost mocking manner as he indicated Yhalen himself. It seemed as if he were being presented as a token or a gift from one to the other. Why or for what purpose, Yhalen had no clue, but the smaller ogre spoke a few words to one of the large ones at his back, and that one swept Yhalen up under its arm and carted him out of the cluster of ogres, under the heavy flaps of the tent behind them and into shadowed darkness.
He was dumped unceremoniously onto a low pallet covered with furs. It had been made to accommodate someone of an ogre’s stature and Yhalen was dwarfed upon it. He didn’t protest when the ogre dragged his hands over his head and fastened the rope to the wooden frame of the pallet. He left him soon after, retreating back outside the tent to join in the loud discussion between its fellows.
Yhalen curled on his side and lay there, listening to the sound of his own hammering heart and the rumbling voices of the ogres outside that gradually retreated, leaving only the background noises of a large encampment. It was the most comfort and peace that he’d had for two days. A body could almost find itself lulled to sleep on soft, clean furs, if the prospect of what horror the future would bring didn’t keep him coiled and tense and frightened.
Father would be so ashamed, he thought, pressing his face into the crook of his arm. Father who was the proud, fearless protector of the Ydregi—who expected nothing less from his only offspring. If Father only knew how badly Yhalen had disgraced himself, how irrevocably his honor had been shredded, both by his own deeds and the actions of others. He didn’t know if he could face him again—didn’t know if he could stand beneath the censure of his father’s eyes and not shrivel in upon himself. He couldn’t even fathom meeting the eyes of Yherji’s father and Yhakinor’s bondmate.
It must have been hours that he lay, immersed in his misery—for when the heavy flaps of the tent next shifted, there was the purple light of evening outside. Yhalen tensed, almost not wanting to see what entered, but to his vast relief it was only a human man. One of the collared, bearded slaves, with skin and hair so pale that Yhalen had never seen the like. The mostly naked man lugged a large pail of water, which he poured into a bronze basin.
“Help me....”
Was that Yhalen’s voice, so hoarse and shaky that it was almost unrecognizable as his own?
Pale blue eyes flicked his way. The broad, lined face held no emotion, no empathy for Yhalen’s plight.
“Please,” he whispered, as disheartened by that blank stare as by anything else he’d seen in this camp.
The slave made no motion that he’d even heard. Maybe he didn’t understand Yhalen’s words at all. He left, taking his empty bucket with him and soon after the tent flap shifted again, this time under the hand of a much larger creature. The ogre who was not quite an ogre entered, gold eyes passing fleetingly over Yhalen’s curled form before ignoring him in favor of shedding the armor that encased his body.
Yhalen stared—couldn’t help but stare in horror—at the creature into whose possession he’d been given. Piece by careful piece, the armor was shed and placed on a crude wooden rack. Thick, rippling muscles, encased in smooth, pale skin that shifted in the light between olive and ocher, were revealed. A fine coating of black hair matted a broad chest, trailing down a stomach corded with muscle, to disappear under the band of leather trousers. Black hair shifted about those broad shoulders, sweat damped, but for all appearances soft and sleek. The ogre went to the bronze basin and washed its face, soaking a rag and wetting the back of his neck under the thick mane of hair. It was a methodical ritual, almost, the care in which he cleansed his body. Quite surprising, considering the stench of the four that Yhalen had traveled as a prisoner of.
Finally, the ogre turned, damp with drying water, all seven foot plus of him bristling with barely suppressed masculine energy, piercing gold eyes very much now interested in what lay upon his bed. He padded forward, his movements rolling and predatory and bent to press a knee to the pallet.
Yhalen flinched, nails biting into his palms with dread. He curled his knees close to his body, in a vain effort to protect himself—to cover himself—and the ogre’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile of amusement, before it reached down and grasped his knees, turning him easily onto his back, forcing his legs down so that it could access his shrinking body.