Storybook Orc

P.D. Haynie

Storybook Orc

First published by Spiral Path Publications 2020

Copyright © 2020 by P.D. Haynie

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

P.D. Haynie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

The world of Grandilar, and the various unique places, persons, creatures, and organizations of the Dragon Storm game are used under license from Gatekeeper Publishing.

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without digital rights management software (DRM) applied, so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. (Iteration 082020)

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-950237-08-1

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

Find out more at reedsy.com

For anyone who has ever walked the surface of Grandilar, and seen a Warp Storm on the horizon.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

Prologue: Willow

One: The Blank Slate

Two: Names and Places

Three: Across the River

Four: A Night With Jikadell

Five: Into the Woods

Six: Dealing with the Dead

Seven: Home Again

Eight: Martyrdom

Nine: The Order of the Red Wolf

Ten: Walking in Shadow

Eleven: Fire and Moonlight

Twelve: Sundry Complications

Thirteen: Necromancer's Nightmare

Fourteen: Departures

Appendix One: Leaving Grandilar

Appendix Two: Three Schools of Magic

Appendix Three: Orc Creation Myth

Appendix Four: The Necormancer’s Horse

About the Author

Also by P.D. Haynie

Preface

Somewhere I got it into my head that a sufficiently talented fantasy writer shouldn’t need an expository preface to enable his readers to make sense of his story. It was a silly idea, and I have no idea where it came from; Tolkien felt that The Lord of the Rings needed an expository preface, and while I am seldom accused of having great wisdom, I certainly know better than to attack the credentials of JRRT.

This story stands pretty well on its own, but it was originally written for an audience that was already familiar with the setting. As I am now attempting to broaden that audience, some sort of introduction seems necessary.

I first encountered Susan Van Camp’s Dragon Storm game sometime in 1996, in the form of a bright orange card box with a roaring green dragon on the front. The back of the box described a card based role playing game (still a pretty unusual concept two decades later) in which players became shape-shifting freedom fighters (Dwarven Gargoyles, Elven Unicorns, Human Dragons and Werewolves) in a world controlled by evil necromancers. I was intrigued. I was also broke, and in the game store for a specific item for which I had saved (the identity of which has been lost to time). I sadly put the box back on the shelf.

A year and a change in financial circumstances later, I finally bought one of those little orange boxes. The cards were beautiful, the game mechanics were decent, if a bit simple for my rather masochistic tastes, and the setting…

I fell head over heels in love with the world. It was a beautiful and magical place in which the bad guys had WON. The player characters had amazing gifts with which to fight their soul-eating enemies, but those very gifts also made them targets. And on top of that, since the enemy was in control, the common people believed that the shape-shifters were WORSE than the ruling necromancers. The shape-shifters supposedly controlled the huge magical dragon storms that shredded the landscape and caused horrible mutations in anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in one. Of course, there was always a chance that someone who had a bit of dragon’s blood in them might find themselves changed into a shape-shifter by the storm, and since dragons had ruled the world for thousands of years, and could shape-shift, and… Let’s just say that EVERYONE had a drop or two of dragon’s blood. Things could get complicated.

While the dragons had ruled the world for thousands of years, that changed some two hundred years before my story starts. During a draconic religious festival in which all of the most powerful dragons were in deep trance states (The Day of the Dead, or Death Day), a coalition of draconic enemies attacked and killed the sleeping dragons and stole their power, releasing enormous amounts of toxic magical warp into the world in the process. The triumphant coalition then dissolved into a back stabbing brawl, but the damage was done. The ancient dragons were dead, and the warp using necromancers were in control.

World-designer Van Camp calls the world Grandilar and has given most of the traditional fantasy races a bit of a twist. Grandilar’s orcs are light-fingered gray-skinned wanderers who revere dragons, worship their ancestors, and enjoy causing trouble, but are not fundamentally malevolent. Dwarves have a predilection for stone and metal work, but have been so scattered by wars with dragons, necromancers, and each other that they have no culture of their own. Elves are long lived and magical, and their heritage is in the forests, but only the dark skinned Ebony elves have maintained their original culture. The fair-skinned Farillan elves have been assimilated into the general mortal polyglot culture, and the warped (and often green skinned) Haskalads are both the leaders and the primary victims of the necromantic regime. Humans, as usual, are a little bit of everything. And that is only the major races; there are the wakana man-wolves, werewolves who sacrificed the power to shift shape to warp magic; the vermite rat people; deer— and goat— and sheep— headed Vorn, who tend to eat their enemies; the Tigreans (anthropomorphic tigers); the Das Karr (anthropomorphic foxes, occasionally with wings); ghosts of every size and temperament; the list goes on.

And then there is the matter of religion… The dragons never seemed to feel a need for religion, but the mortals in their service chose to worship an earth goddess named Elethay. When the necromancers came to power, they invented an alternative goddess named Jikadell, and it seems likely that after a couple of hundred years of insincere worship, there just might be a person behind the name after all. And then there is Valaria, the raven haired barbarian werewolf who, five hundred years before my story starts, jumped into the middle of a bonfire and predicted a day when the dragons would be brought low, and evil beyond imagining would walk the world. When she stepped out of the fire, Valaria found that her hair had turned permanently red. She soon learned that there was no way to avoid the coming cataclysm, and started training people to survive and fight back in a world that the dragons no longer ruled. Valaria died before the Death Day massacre, but her legacy lives on in the Valarian Champions, one of the few forces for good in the otherwise bleak landscape of Grandilar.

And having said that, on with the story.

P.D. Haynie

Acknowledgement

To Susan Van Camp, who built the world;

To Mark Harmon, who designed the game;

To Tim Kennard, who kept the lights on;

And to Jim Keeley, who opened the door.

This book simply would not have exited without all of you. Thanks.

P.D. Haynie

Prologue: Willow

Willow reached the end of the row she was weeding, stood up, and stretched. She looked across the river to the west and squinted at the advancing clouds that had blocked the late afternoon sun before it could settle behind the forest. A storm, definitely, though at this range she still could not tell if the advancing clouds signaled a natural storm or something more sinister. She decided she had time to weed at least one more row and turned to her task.

She hoped that it would just be rain; any sane person would, of course. She wasted a happy moment at the thought of standing in the cold rain and letting it run over her, and of pulling a comb through her hair as the water poured through it. I ought to hate rain, she thought, but knew better. Nature’s rain had not burned rivulets of scar tissue into her skin; the Dragon’s rain had done that.

She finished another row and looked across the river to gauge the progress of the storm. There was still time for at least one more row, and she was still unsure if nature or dragons drove the storm. Willow dropped her gaze from sky to forest, and sighed sadly. If only…

If only what? All of her life, those woods had meant freedom to Willow, freedom from a life where no one valued her as anything other than a field hand and a joke topic. She was known as the tallest man, the ugliest man, and the hardest-working man in the village, that she was not a man at all not withstanding. Across the river (assuming she could make the swim, which was doubtful) there were no chores, no villagers, no Haskalad overseers… no certain food, and no shelter. But there was freedom.

Another row finished, Willow stood to check the progress of the storm and gasped in horror. The storm front was galloping across the river in red and blue draconic fury at the speed of a fast horse. Willow wasted a quick glance toward the village—impossible minutes away even at a dead run-and charged straight into the storm. If she could submerge herself in the river, she might avoid the worst of the storm’s hostile magic. She closed her eyes as she hit the storm front, hoping that the rain would not be too hostile. Dragon’s rain could be anything: boiling hot, freezing cold, acidic, mud laden; it almost always carried the magical disease called the Tox.

She had one foot on the riverbank when the lightning struck her, and then she was in the water and impossibly tangled in her clothing and her limbs didn’t seem to be working properly. Her face broke the surface, and she watched herself gulp air through the long snout…

She had been transformed into a wolf! She was a shape-shifter! Willow took a deep breath and allowed herself to sink while she tore free of the remains of her clothing, an easy task now that she knew what limbs she was working with. That done, she returned to the surface and swam resolutely toward the west bank of the river, and freedom.

One: The Blank Slate

It is said that once upon a time, before the dragons had learned to shape-shift, they decided to use their magics to create a race of perfect servitors. The creatures they created were strong, and quick, and prolific, and so hardy that they could live on a diet of filth and poison.

Unfortunately, they used their own criminals and lunatics as raw material, and the creatures were invariably surly, uncooperative, and not quite sane.

The dragons called them, Orcs.

—Leod, the Storyteller of Freepost

I woke up in a pleasant forest meadow. The sun was warm, the grass was cool, and the birds were singing sweetly. I felt like the local militia had used my body as a drill field while breaking in their new hob-nailed boots. I opened the eye that wasn’t buried in the turf and saw nothing of consequence, so I gritted my teeth and lifted my head to have a look around. The birds stopped singing. After I had forced my unhappy body into a sitting position, I was still in a pleasant forest meadow. I was also stark naked and hopelessly lost.

I found myself staring at my hand, which was the color of mildewed rawhide— not a color I normally associated with living tissue. I looked closer and saw vestigial scales, which meant I was an orc. I didn’t remember being an orc. On the other hand, I didn’t honestly remember NOT being an orc…

Orcdom was not a bad state, all things considered. Orcs could thrive on a diet of anything their teeth could grind, and their teeth could grind anything of animal or vegetable origin. I found a likely looking tree, and set about gnawing it off at the base. Several hours of boredom later, I had a very serviceable spear with a bit of a hook on its nether end. I climbed into a tree to watch the sun set and try to sleep; my spear was tangled with a nearby branch and within easy reach.

I didn’t have a name. I’m tempted to say I knew nothing about myself, but that would not be true; I knew I was well educated. I could name the titles of several books I had read, and I could recite most of The Fall of Aneshka Skyrider, but I had no context for the knowledge; I knew that literacy was unusual because I had read the fact in a book.

I assumed that I had been teleported into the clearing where I awakened; I was no tracker, but the earth was soft and there were no marks of any kind except those I had made myself. As far as I knew, I couldn’t cast a teleport spell, and there was no way to teleport someone without going oneself— or so my books told me. So someone had taken me out here and left me, which meant I had a fairly powerful enemy. No name, but an enemy. Such joy!

I had an odd feeling that I didn’t belong in my body, as if it were a new set of clothes that were not quite broken in. I had no idea if that were meaningful or not; there were too many things definitely wrong with my mind to make much of a vague uneasiness. The sun went down; I relaxed into my tree branch, and fell asleep.

The