As always, Araminta could will herself to sleep just about anywhere, so there curled up safe and sound on Theon’s lap it took no struggle at all to doze away. Grumbling under her breath here and there with a hint that her dreams were not so sweet, though it thankfully never sent her into being restless or shrieking awake.
Outside of the tent, life went on for the divided orc clan and they were no quiet people! A drum circle out by the bonfire suggested a social gathering, unclear for now if it was a celebration of the hunt, of guests, or if it were merely the night’s entertainment. No one came to bother them directly as all were ordered to leave the guests be until the next morning, for the chief had much to think about.
But it did not stop the whole of the clan from chattering and many conversations could be heard in their casual passing by the tent going about their evening’s business.
Lazog and Duvak were so sick of eating venison that they would sell their own toes to raise big fat piglets. Except pigs didn’t do well traveling in these snowy lands, which was why they rarely got wild boars either. Duvak grunted that they might as well start eating gobbos to which Lazog gagged and spat.
Grash missed his mum because she always made sure his tunic didn’t smell like a gobbo’s ass and no self respecting warrior wanted to smell like gobbo ass. Not that it mattered anyway because there were no women around here to impress with his prowess of hunting and his skills of cleanliness!
Undug and Muzuruk were antsy about the queen’s blood being in their camp. Would the chief hold him hostage like what was done with their prince Kragar, asked Muzuruk? Undug doubted that bitch gave two shits about her own blood. She betrayed him as she betrayed all orcs. They argued over what was more important, family loyalty or a clan’s honor… coming to the conclusion that the Blood Witch was a traitor on all fronts, so what did it matter.
Two young orcs got curious enough to push the boundaries and try to have a little peek at the guests. Both too old to have been considered children and leave with the women, but both too young to have a grown man’s sense. They lingered around the edges of the tent trying to lift up the bottom edges trying to have a look inside until they were caught by an elder and promptly thwacked several times with a staff and shouted at to go chop wood for the fires if they didn’t have something better to do.
After a while the lively sounds of the orc encampment began to die down as most headed off to their own tents to sleep. Prince Kragar did not return to share his own tent, leaving them to their privacy. All fell into an easy hush in the night, with naught but the winter winds whipped outside and the occasional call of a night bird.
It must have been well past three in the morning when a sudden explosion struck the camp, a bomb of fire hitting with such a force it made the ground shake. Erupting nearby tents into rising flames. Shouts went out as the camp came alive in a frenzy of activity, horns of warning sounding off that they were under attack.
At the end of the camp, coming out of the tall fir trees and marching forward were a large band of hulking figures. Familiar figures for at first glance they seemed like clan brethren wearing the furs and skins and colors of their clan… except these orcs, their skin had faded from it’s healthy greens to a dour shade of ashen blues, some of it even hanging off their bones as if it were no longer attached. Their eyes once full of life were hollow and black. They shambled forward in formation as if directed along the frostbitten ground on puppet strings.
Taking up the rear behind them was a fearsome soul, dressed in an obsidian black armor with a sort of unearthly sheen that practically oozed something demonic. Unlike the others, her eyes gleamed a bright living gold, although even she herself did not quite seem right. Having once upon a time being like any other half-orc soldier, now she’d been born anew, with a sinister new gift. One she was all too glad to use as she raised up the sword in her hand and summoned more fire to rain down from the sky and ordered her undead unit forward.
“Yorva has returned! You will obey and bend knee to me or-” she paused there, mouth widening into a tusky grin as the first of her undead soldiers barreled into those towering bodies that dared to come fight first. A few already falling to a swift and immediate death. “…You will simply obey.”
The blast rolled through the earth like a hammer striking an anvil, and immediately his eyes opened! Though he did not jerk or gasp or startle as that would have implied he had actually slumbered, but immediately his grasp tightened on the cloak he had drawn themselves, the motion subtle, silently protective. The warmth of her pressed to him remained the only softness in the moment.
Outside, the camp erupted—horns, screams, the roaring bloom of fire catching hide and timber. Smoke began to seep thinly through seams in the hut. And in the hollow of his chest—where a heart should have lived—something else stirred. It wasn’t in pain or in ache but rather an old, unwelcome familiarity. A shape made of memory and blood.
Fear. And it absolutely wasn’t for himself but rather for what this might mean.
Without thought his jaw set—no tremor, no outward crack in the composure he had forged over years of war. Shifting slightly as he hardly expected Araminta to have slept through such a booming crash, “The camp is under siege.” Stating likely the most obvious thing there ever was. “You must find shelter, Ara. This is not something that will be quelled by diplomacy I fear.” A beat of quiet, not hesitation—just gravity that understood that whatever had come here, came for a fight.
Only then did he rise—and only when she moved first less he tumble her to the floor. The cloak fell from his shoulders, pooling across the furs. In the light leaking through the hide walls—embers reflected in the fur lining—Theon’s presence seemed to sharpen. Tall and controlled. Still as a drawn bow.
He did not look outside yet. Not when one could feel the air shifting. The wrongness of it hardly mistakable. “Hasten, love.”
Not even Araminta could have slept through such a shuddering boom, stiffening in the way she awoke rather than flailing or yelping. Freezing in place during those brief moments of hearing the shouts of warning and seeing the blaze of embers glowing through the deerskin tent. She’d been here before, shocked awake by screams and chaos. Dragged out of her bed by panicked hands and sent running into the night.
Araminta was not in her bed, she was in the arms of someone she loved dearly and his words were so simple, so calm. Not soothing in the way she wished they could be, yet it tempered her and kept her rooted. Slipping off of his lap to rise to her feet, feeling her heart twist into a cold vice as he told her to seek shelter, for diplomacy would have no effect here. The hit of more falling flames crashing into a tent in the near distance sent the ground shaking enough for her to waver on her feet. To stay in the tents would surely mean a fiery death. Araminta found herself once again in this helpless state of being no hardy warrior that could fight or defend. She was a liability, a hinderance, useless to this fight.
Except Araminta was not that same girl anymore. She had changed in such subtle ways into someone new. Someone that met his, fear there in her own for certain, but with a steadfast Araminta surely learned from him. Taking in a deep breath to absorb his calm and slip into that calculating part of herself that’d always been hers to give him a nod.
Claiming only a single bag to heft onto her shoulder, as it wouldn’t be wise to go without some sort of supplies. For the worst case scenario would send her running into the ancient forests alone and she’d die just as fast out there without them as she would here in the middle of a battle. She followed Theon out, doing her best to focus on the right details. The ones that would help her stay out of the swing of weapon or the line of fire, to not let the sight of things that sent shivers through her to be what she focused on.
The invasion into the camp was swift and deadly. Despite the skill of the orc’s, they’d been caught off guard by this surprise attack and worse than that, it wasn’t steel against steel for a fair battle. The undead orcs that were their own fallen, lost in the woods to fights with gobbos and unable to be recovered were now their enemies. To their absolute horror, those unfortunate enough to fall in the here and now with a swift death were being risen from the ground by invisible strings to breath once again, not full of life but something hollow and horrifying.
Yorva bellowed out a cackling laugh. “Come out, come out, mother’s little mouse. I can smell your filthy little fae blood…”
A snarling curse in orcish followed as the Great Chief Burule made his appearance, haphazardly dressed in his armor and his son and a few other warriors took up arms against their own dead brothers. Prince Kragar hefting up a spear that he threw with such a force it pierced through one of the invading orcs, shot through the body and landed at Yorva’s feet.
“Still alive, Kragar? Good. Watch your clan bow to me as I take my rightful place as it’s queen.”
“DEMON.” he spat. “You raise the dead with black arts and think you are worthy?! We have our king. We have our pride.”
Yorva’s smile widened to something purely unholy, vicious, almost feral. Slamming her hand against her chest as she marched forward.
“THIS is what we are! Born of the molten mountains, blood of warriors, masters of DEATH. Your clan is weak, pathetic. Divided and scattered across the lands because you believe honor means something. We were meant for war and I am the blade that brings it.”
Steel met steel in those moments as living orc warriors crashed once again into the dead. As father and son took their chance to take on Yorva herself, discovering in quick bloody succession that she was no longer a body of mere flesh and blood. Necromantic magic now flowed through her veins thicker than the red. Her strength slicing into the Great Chief and kicking him clear across several feet. Slicing a nasty blow across the Prince of Orc’s chest to have him sprawling bleeding into the snow.
“Come to Yorva! Die your honorable deaths and become my army!” she cackled into the sky as the flames grew higher.
Theon moved like a shadow that still remembered gentleness, and oddity compared to what he once knew so intimately. And yet he tightened the cloak around Araminta with a single practiced hand and let his other hand find the hollow behind her ear. Easily stealing mouth to hers, a brief, deliberate kiss that carried everything he could not say: promise, regret, the small fierce tenderness that survived his harder edges. There were no words; the world around them cracked and flamed, and in that silence the kiss was a small, stubborn vow. When he broke it, his face showed nothing more than the slate calm of a man whose private mercy need not be explained. Having to trust Araminta had learnt enough to stay out of harms way and to use that clever mind of hers to aid such things.
Rising with blade in hand and the warrior’s cold readiness settling like armor. The explosion’s heat still smelled on the air; the snow around them hissed where embers landed. For a heartbeat he felt the old terror coil in him: the memory of Yorva’s hands, the things she had done, the nights he had almost bled out beneath her. It was an old scar that tightened into a fresh ache. He let it come, acknowledged it with the barest inhale, then set it aside like a tool that couldn’t fail him now.
Approaching the edge of the broken camp he watched her: Yorva, risen and laughing, the mockery of life stitched to her. His mouth thinned; no tremor in his grip, only the cold that came before action. The past scraped against him — the torture, the betrayals — but there was a new line beneath it now, a steadiness born of changing and surviving. He would not kneel to fear. He would not give her the satisfaction of seeing him crumble!
When Yorva crowed, the sound split the air — a shrill, triumphant thing that warped the very notion of voice, half-belonging to her and half to the rot animating her. Snow churned underfoot as orcs — living and dead — crashed together in desperate violence. Sparks from burning tents drifted upward like fireflies thrown to the sky. And in that chaos, Theon stepped forward.
There was not a part of him that moved to rush, nor roar, nor brandish his blade like a banner. He walked. A measured stride that parted the fray around him, as though the battlefield itself recognized something in him too dangerous to obstruct. His sword rose slowly, the steel catching the hungry orange light of fire — but his hand was steady, as though he had held this weapon a lifetime before he ever really learned his own name.
He looked at her — really looked. Yorva’s face was still hers in shape, but wrong in every other way: eyes lit unnaturally from within, mouth stretched in a rictus of delight, black magic pulsing under corpse-pale skin. The memories surged, unbidden and sharp: her laughter when he bled, her voice whispering cruelty in the dark, the weight of her hand around his throat. Fear flared in him — real and searing, like iron pressed to bone, but he did not hide it from himself. He used it.
It crystallized something inside him.
When he spoke, his voice was soft — quiet enough that only those nearest would hear, but the words carried the weight of a blade being set to a throat. “You had to die to become useful— even your ruin needed to be borrowed.”
Theon tilted his attention slightly, “All this effort to prove what? Call me a mouse as you wish, but I’m the one who still stands part of living flesh without necessary aid from someone who will not mourn your second death,” He did not scream a challenge for pomp’s sake; he offered one like a gauntlet thrown with clinical accuracy. “Stand alone, then,” he said, voice steady as flint. “Prove you can bleed without strings. Prove you can win without slaves.” Theon’s eyes did not leave hers; if she required puppets and necromancy to make herself feared, he made the implication plain — she was weak where he was whole, dependent where he was self-sustained.
A kiss from Theon could mean a thousand things, but in those moments Araminta held fast to it being a promise. One that said no matter how things here had taken such a turn after starting so well, they would both make it out in one piece. After all, the one thing they most had in common was being survivors. Against all odds, against all hope, they were survivors.
So when they were forced to separate – for Theon to take the stage against the invasion of hollow, undead orcs – Araminta swallowed hard the fears she had for Theon. Most especially when it became apparent the leader of this unholy band of creatures was the very sister that had tormented his childhood. The orc sister that sliced his throat ear to ear and left him with scars inside and out. Nearly bolting herself out there and having to plant her feet firmly not to do so. Araminta would throw herself in front of Theon in an instant to protect him, but she couldn’t be stupid about it! Not get herself killed in the efforts and leave him behind to suffer alone!
She had to trust that he could face his sister on his own terms. That he too had grown into a new sort of man.
Being small had it’s advantages that the mountain princess took full advantage of. Shrinking into the shadows and skittering out of sight to make herself useful in other ways. Blood and gore did not do her stomach well, yet she swallowed any rising queasiness and focused on those that had fallen and weren’t showing twitchy jerks of unlife. Araminta returned weapons to hands and gave small words of encouragement – they were orc, they were strong! They had to live to save their stolen brothers. Hope was something Araminta had in spades and she gave it freely and fiercely. Then when she found the fallen form of their Chief, unconscious but thankfully not dead and soon to join the ranks of puppeted orcs, Araminta did her best to stop the mass of bleeding and be sure he stayed in the realm of the living.
As for the powerful Yorva, eyes of golden hue practically flashing with eager impatience to see her long lived brother step out into the fray. Toothy grin gleaming by the light of the fire’s she’d summoned and rained down on the orc encampment. Both beautiful and terrifying in the tinted armor that looked so eerily close the sorts Gusteau himself once wore. A vintage set forged from the same demonic source without a doubt.
“The mouse can speak now?” she queried with a dark laugh. “What brave words for one that used to bleed so freely under my knife.”
Yorva had always been a born predator, one who moved in a sooth flex of muscle and a dangerous grace. Now it was amplified with a dark power that flowed beneath her skin and within the armor she wore. Fingers flexing on the sword she held in one hand, though she made no movement to run and attack. Her head did tilt, sending the last of her undead minions to spread out and give them room.
“I have nothing to prove,” she spat with a wild laugh. “Don’t you see what mother has given me? Reborn from my own heart, now death is mine to control. Now I will be the mercenary, the hunter. This realm will know fear in a way it never has before. Come to Yorva and let me finish what I started all those years ago! I’ll put you in the grave where you belong and lay your massive mouse head beside you.”
Theon let the world narrow to the flat plane of Yorva’s face and the weight of the sword in his hand. He did not answer her laugh with heat; he answered with a hollow, small smirk that sharpened the angles of his cheek. It was a smile that said he had catalogued every cruelty she’d ever committed and then folded it into a single, patient plan. He felt the old fear like an animal at his ribs — loud, immediate — and forced it down into the place where it did him use: a tempering, not a surrender. “And you wear other people’s power like an ill-fitting cloak,” he said, voice levelled and dry. Holding his stare on her all the while paying heed to the surroundings.
Yorva’s taunt about him being the mouse drew no bark of anger from him. Instead he stepped, a single measured pace, the motion more of closing distance than of frenzy. “Brave words,” he murmured, “For one who still needs her mother’s hand to make the scene.” He did not sneer aloud at their parentage, but the implication was an edge — she needed crutches, less she couldn’t stand. “All show, Yorva. Puppets and borrowed demons do the screaming for you. How perfectly, you.“
When she spoke of burying him and laying his head as a trophy, Theon’s smirk widened by a fraction — no humor, only disdain sharpened to a knife’s edge. “Oh, wee lamb,” he said softly, like one might address something pitiable. “Hurting a child never made you fearsome. It only proved how little spine you ever had.” He tilted his head, eyes narrowing just enough to become precise and merciless. “The orc blood in you must be broiling knowing what you’ve became and what you always were — a coward who needed try and kill a little boy to feel powerful. No honor. No pride. Just a butcher pretending to be a warlord.”
Theon let that sink — the truth of it, the rot of it — before finishing, still quiet: “You were pathetic when you were alive. Death hasn’t improved you.” Stated as the only clean fact and delivered like a verdict. He made it plain she did not frighten him into retreat; she unsettled him, yes, but he walked through that unease with sword in hand.
He did not bait her further. He did not rise to her fury. No, what he did was to move first.
One breath he stood among the burning state, blade lowered, snow hissing under falling embers. The next, he was already cutting through the field. It was not teleportation, nor spellcraft, but a speed so disciplined and lethal it seemed to erase the space between where he was and where he needed to be. He moved like a shadow freed of its body: here, then gone, then suddenly at Yorva’s side. The undead that shambled into his path simply fell — throats neatly opened, joints severed, skulls split with the casual finality of a butcher dressing game. He did not spare them time, nor energy; each motion was precise, optimized, merciless.
This was the Huntsman.
The title did not belong to Yorva. It never had and it wasn’t going to change now. And Theon — for the first time in far too long — wore it without apology.
His fae blood showed in his eyes; not softly, not subtly. They brightened into something illuminated from within — a predator’s gleam sharpened by centuries of instinct. Not rage, but focus. Not frenzy, but hunger. Steel rang as he aimed the sword tip upon her, when he closed in — close enough to smell the cold death threaded under her skin — he smiled. Not the small, tired smirk he had worn before. No — this was bright, terrible, a grin that bared white teeth and sharpened fangs in the firelight. A smile that belonged to a creature who had known darkness intimately and decided to sharpen it into something usable. It was beautiful the way a starving wolf is beautiful: terrible because of exactly how alive it is.
Leaning in close —breath ghosting her cheek — and his voice came low, almost gentle. “The Imperial Queen never made you the Huntsman.” The words slid like glass across a vein — clean, inevitable. “Instead, she sent you to die wearing nothing as you had never earned a damn thing.”
He twisted, aiming to take her wrist — a swift, brutal strike meant to maim rather than test. Whether the blade bit or not, he did not relent. He slid through her guard with the inevitability of winter settling into stone, every movement controlled, every strike cold-blooded. “You’ll never be me.” His smile widened, something cruel and delighted flickering in his gaze — not joy, but recognition of a truth finally spoken aloud. “And when I make you squeal,” he murmured, the whisper like the closing of a trap, “It won’t be fear I’m hearing.”
His sword rose again, his body coiled and sure, his steps carving purpose into the snow. “It will be acknowledgment. Let’s see how fucking good you think you really are, tomb-sow.”
“How brave he’s become now that he is the hunter instead of the hunted,” shot back Yorva through a smile of gritted teeth. Until those words of her orcish blood wriggled in, the insult to her very being. A laughing snarl let out from deep in her throat. “And what is wrong with a butcher when one is oh so good at it. Or do you now pretend there isn’t blood all over your own hands.”
His words could not harm her, for Yorva knew down to her bones what she was born for. Violence sang in her heart, the sounds of suffering were a thrill. Watching the light going out in something eyes had been her greatest joy, and even in her own death she’d known bliss in pain. In her mind she was what all orcs should be, glorious vicious and brutal upon the world.
And yet.
He zipped across the field of battle at a speed most unexpected, taking the first move which was not at all characteristic of the little mouse she’d made squirm under hand and steel. The second he appeared at her side Yorva moved, swinging her hefty sword with all due intent to cleave his arm right off only to have the clang of steel parrying her blow.
“The Imperial Queen never made you the Huntsman.”
Yorva howled a battle cry of her own, rage sending those golden eyes into a spark of amber. Fury taking control of her movements to force him back, to deflect. A blow caught her wrist, flicking black stained blood across the field of snow, near deep enough to cut down to the bone, yet Yorva did not stop her counter attack. Throwing her full body into every swing, all of her attention laser focused on making sure he found himself at the tip of her blood.
“Mouthy fucking little shit! I am death and when I’m done with you, I’m going to take that little princess you’re so lovesick over and use her fucking bones to make my crown!”
That attention so focused upon Theon that the magic she cast to reanimated the fallen was no longer in play. The orcs of the encampment still with able arms and hands plowed through the undead with a righteous fury of their own. Chopping down their own brethren in a war that brought no joy or thrill of the fight, but a grim resolve.
Until soon there was no undead left, leaving only the burning hatred of Yorva and the very Baneslayer himself on the field of battle.
Steel shrieked, sparking as his blade met hers. The clash ringing like iron being drug over bone and he kept his ground. Rolling the force of her strike into turning it aside with the effortless precision of someone who had mapped every angle of her violence so long ago. Where each shift of weight, each step, each cut was chose with deliberate purpose. Where her attempt to suggest that he was unaware of the blood on his hands, only made his grin further warp. Made of contempt but brightened and truly unsettled. The brandished beam of a creature that had found the hunt again and was becoming intoxicated by its aroma once more.
“Oh, I don’t pretend about the blood,” he said, almost lightly, almost pleasantly, as though this were a conversation over tea rather than death. “I’ve earned every drop on my damn soul, Yorva.” Slipping soon beneath her next wild swing—a blur of presence and absence, like the space between blinks had forgotten how to hold him steady! The blade flicked once, clean as a whisper, carving a fresh line of blackened blood down her forearm. Not deep enough to cripple but just deep enough to humiliate. A reminder of I can do this whenever I please.
When Yorva’s snarl tore from her throat like something primal, he merely answered with a low laugh—quiet, delighted, deeply wrong. “There she is,” Murmuring sweetly, pacing around her, letting her fury set the rhythm. “The little tomb-sow who thinks screaming is strategy.” Once more slipping from reality for half a heartbeat and reappeared beside her, boots crunching softly in the snow. Those silver eyes gleaming in the gloom of the warfare she started, bright and feral, the fae in him rising like fire through oil. “You always did mistake slaughter for skill,” the former crown prince continued, tone even, almost conversational. As if he were simply remarking on nip in the air. “You always have. And how sad that Bloody Heirra didn’t choose you but the one that survived every attack you just couldn’t finish. Instead she spent you like coin in a wishing fountain. Worthless.”
Waiting for her next assault and mused in such a way of comical enjoyment at this assaulting horror that made his life hell. Brought leagues of trauma and misery and bitterness upon himself, that now such things were only fuelling the real truth. The pure vitriolic hatred he had for her! When she attacked once more, he reacted. Reaching out to catch her wrist and held it. His fingers locked around bone with a strength no living man should have possessed. Waiting for that brief moment that temporary surprise or annoyance would appear. Urging him to lean in, “You want to talk about butchers?” His voice was soft, intimate, patient. “I was carving throats clean while you were still crying for the Imperial Queen to look at you.”
Shortly driving his boot into her gut and sent her crashing backward into blood-wet snow, the impact cracking frozen earth beneath her. “You’re not death, Yorva,” Theon whispered, eyes bright like a predator’s under torchlight. “You’re leftovers.”
A step back as if to coax her to stand, with gaze never leaving, did he chuckle at her softly. Listening to the storm that was no more than the battle between waste and life. Waiting till she gathered or whatever she needed too before he stepped in. Letting the means of weapon pass by a hair’s breadth of himself –feeling the cold wind of it- and closed the distance with the declaration of truth that violence itself only ever answered.
Driving fist upward in a tight, brutal arc. The impact cracked through the field like a tree splitting under winter weight. Knuckles to bone, no wasted motion or a present of hesitation. Just motive that spurred from so long being brutalized by someone who had made his life hell. And now, the reply was to be giving back every bit of utter loathing he felt for her. All paired with a sound that was odd to hear. A bright, oh so delighted and twisted laugh that. “I’ve been alive,” he continued, tone smooth as sharpened glass, “Learning. Fighting. Killing.” His grin widened, luminous fae-fire still flickering in his eyes. “You? You haven’t grown. You’re not more than what you were.” Gesturing at her with his sword — a lazy flick of the wrist. “You’re just a dead thing that a miserable fucking whore queen stitched together so it could keep disappointing people.” That smile sharpened into something hungry. “Now, I’m going to make sure that for the next century, people keep finding your fucking parts everywhere, you fucking worthless scrap of half human-orc shit!”
All around them as the last of the undead had fallen, those still living and able bodied were still fighting to run and put out the fires that were taking over the entire encampment. To lift the injured out of harm’s way and retreat them back to safety. Though many found themselves enthralled with this last battle of blood against blood. The spawn of their very hated enemy now facing off in something that was a long time coming.
Araminta helped as many as she could with what skills she had, but she too found herself at the edge of the battlefield, watching with growing horror as Yorva swung steel and Theon hurled bitter words back at her sharper than any weapon. How they landed on his half-orc sister, she did not know, but it was his feral laughter and the coldness to which he sliced and cut at the woman that twisted the tender parts of her heart.
This was not the gentle soul that she knew – it wasn’t even the desperate and fiery one that came to save her in Ichor’s Keep. This was a Theon teetering on the edge of something dark, a place of festering pain that had laid torment for so long that now it was bubbling up to the surface as a vicious calling.
“Theon,” she whispered under her breath, about to dart out there to do something. Unsure of even what that might be!
Prince Kragar caught her elbow and held her fast, covered in layers of streaming blood staring down at her with a stern resolve.
“Do not interfere,” he grunted, a shade of regret flashed in his eyes but he held fast.
“He needs me to-“
“No,” firm refusal, but not unkind. “When a reckoning comes, a man must face himself in battle and make a choice. Whether he chooses vengeance or justice, it does not matter, it is his right to choose. Do you understand?”
Araminta did not quite understand, not this time. But no matter how much she tried to wriggle her arm free, the orc prince held her tight and refused to let her go throw herself into the middle of that battle.
Yorva had become an inferno of reckless rage, finding herself still bound to the limitations of her mortal body even in this new life. No matter how she struck, he always seemed to be that much faster, that much more precise to his strikes. Finding each one of his biting taunts that much more offensive, for what utter SHIT all of it was. Yorva had always been the strongest of their siblings, she had been brutal and vicious! Everything their mother had wanted in a child and this pathetic faerie shit thought that he was now the strength of their bloodline simply because he was the last living.
“I’M DONE PLAYING WITH YOU,” she screamed, flinging the point of her sword at him and dropping this bullshit game of muscle against muscle. Yorva was MORE now – he could insult her physical self all he liked, now her blood was made of infernal magic, necromantic power and it would be used. Her hands were thrown out to the sides and the area pulsed with thrumming energy, using the fallen dead to fuel her spell – to suck the very life out of all within her deadly radiance.
Orcs too close to the battlefield found themselves falling to their knees as their very souls drained and that circle of effect quickly spread to that of royal beings, both orc and mountain mortal alike.
Theon stepped through the ripple of Yorva’s necromantic radiance, the way one might walk through the edge of a bonfire’s heat—close enough to blister, but not enough to slow. The air around them vibrated with the drawn-out breath of dying soldiers, their life pulled threadlike into Yorva’s grasping spell, yet Theon’s expression didn’t shift. Smoke curled from his skin; his veins thrummed uncomfortably against the pull of her magic, but he simply adjusted the angle of his shoulders. Yorva screamed about being done playing and it would have been so easy to point out that she was hardly worth playing with. Theon only released a quiet, nearly dismissive huff of breath, as though acknowledging a storm he’d walked through once before and found smaller than memory had promised.
He moved when she expanded her stance to channel more power—his timing exact, step measured, sword held without flourish. The blade slid beneath her ribs with a clean, deliberate glide, guided not by anger but by desire for silence. Yearning for that first gasp to with sharp surprise, as though the idea of him reaching her first had simply never crossed her mind. Theon leaned in just enough for his voice to brush the side of her face, low and steady, without heat or cruelty—only fact. “How nice it was for you to say that you had your heart back, Yorva” His wrist turned, smooth and controlled, and the point of steel shifted within her, angling upward.
Heat rose from his palm into the hilt, flame summoned not like a roar, but like a forge brought to proper temperature. The sword reddened, metal blooming with molten color, until the fire spilled inward first—light leaking through the wound like the glow inside a cracked kiln. Yorva’s chest cavity smoldered. Smoke unfurled from her skin in thin, trembling grey ribbons.
Theon’s free hand lifted to her jaw—fingers pressing with patient strength, thumb digging beneath the hinge, the way one breaks the spine of a stubborn book. Her black blood welled, slick and heavy, dripping down his wrist. He tilted her head back in a single, slow draw of motion. The vertebrae resisted for half a breath. Then yielded—clean and decisive. The sound was sharp in the winter air, sharp enough that the falling snow seemed to pause as it listened.
He let her body slip away only when gravity pulled at it, the flames now licking outward from the wound, devouring her from the center. Theon stepped aside rather than retreat, watching as she folded into the snow, smoke rising in slow spirals. One stroke followed— his blade descending in a single practiced arc—and her head separated from the rest of her with no theatrical flourish, only the efficient finality of a task completed. The corpse twitched as fire spread under the skin, consuming what had been remade. For certainty—not doubt—he drove the burning sword back into her chest, grounding her heart to the earth one last time.
Then he crouched.
Her head was still warm when he lifted it by the hair. Her expression held that unfinished realization—the look of someone who never imagined their ending could be this quiet. Theon’s grip tightened. He broke her tusks free with a steady pull, the crack of bone clean and unlabored. To make use of at least something from all this misery.
The head followed.
He placed his boot upon it—not a stomp, not a flourish, only pressure, increasing by measured degrees until bone softened and gave way. The snow darkened beneath him. The sound was muffled, nearly gentle.
Theon wiped his hand on the nearest drift, streaking the white with black, and rose without ceremony.
There was no triumph in him. Only the quiet, unbroken calm of a man who has always known himself. “Fucking stay dead this time.”
Araminta should have turned away; never let this sight burn it’s way into her memories. In Ichor’s Keep she had covered her face and shielded her eyes, even though she could heard the crack of bone and twist of metal has he hacked away at the madman who’d kept her and others captive. She’d heard his desperation then and his fear, yet it was so different from the here and now where he was practically unrecognizable. Even when Yorva’s black magic was pulling on the souls of all who was too close, Araminta would not look away.
What she saw now sat in her like a lead weight, chained to her heart and baring down pressure. She wasn’t so naive to believe that killing shouldn’t happen. Araminta knew well that there were some evils in the world that could only be stopped by death. Nor had she forgotten that even Theon had innocent blood on his hands and a history steeped in violence.
There was something frightening in this and she wished, wished she hadn’t witnessed it.
A loud whooping cheer suddenly erupted from all around as the warriors sounded off shouts and horns about a victory won, just long enough to make it known the danger had passed, for it was barely a victory when one had to fight their own kin disfigured into soulless skin suits by necromancy. It near jolted Araminta out of her skin and she realized that Prince Kragar had already released her to cross the field where Theon stand and the mangled form of Yorva laid sprawled across the snowy ground. Finally she forced herself to turn away and pressing a hand to her stomach to fight away that queasy feeling.
Prince Kragar dropped a heavy hand to Theon’s shoulder, giving a squeeze and a gruff humming sound.
“Earned with honor, Baneslayer.”
It should’ve been relieving. It should’ve been freeing and yet there was nothing more than a burning loathing eating at his insides. Looking down at his brutal work with an oh so familiar presence and knowing that even if this beast was slain once more, the damage still lingered.
The sounds of victory ringing of empty hum and a reminding chord that even if Yorva had been slain, he still very much was the remaining monster.
The Imperial Queen’s crafted machine, the huntsman.
It should feel like relief to have returned such pain to the beast that had left him with scars, but it was just… hollow.
Squeezing the tusk in hand, his attention drifted immediately to that of Kragar. Then outwards to those that had been made to fight fallen brethren. The devastation that had come all because of one person’s everlasting cruelty.
Turning under palm, he hummed softly. “There’s no honour in this. Just necessary.” Stepping back slightly so he could fully turn, searching and finding. Only pausing to reclaim the sword which had been pierced through, “Destroy the body with iron, and burn it so hot that it’s white. Once burned, scatter the remains into salted water.” He suggested with a drag of sword blade through frost.
Politely bowing head as a way to pardon. Sheathing sword with new hesitation, “If you need aid, merely ask.”
With a breath to force steps away to move cautiously forward, and quietly, “…Ara?”
Prince Kragar was quick to shout out others in the guttural orcish language, with the absence of his injured father it fell to him to organize the mess that’d become of their clan. Orcs took great care with their dead and here where their bodies and blood had been tainted with the dark powers of necromancy, all the bodies would need to be tended to with special care lest they wound up rising again through some accidental means.
Araminta’s hands were shaking so bad she had to draw them close to her chest and hold them there tight. Taking in slow deep breaths trying to still the stuttered beating of her heart. The orc prince had said this was something Theon needed, a choice to make of his own free will – inferring that her meddling was the wrong thing to do. Only now she felt she’d left him alone and abandoned where he needed someone to remind him of his gentle heart.
Or was it Araminta who refused to see a real and true part of him that was dark and shadowy simple because she could not handle such things?
She didn’t know how she felt – not until she heard him call for her and dared to turn around. To face him, to look him in the eyes and see him now in ways she never had before.
And her answer did not come in a simple form. It was twisted and complex, confusing, unsettling, but above all it was rooted in what she saw staring back in those moon silver eyes. That same uncertainty, same fear.
“Tell me what you need,” she declared gently. Not yet reaching out, for goodness, what he had just faced down, gone through… those feral violent moments. What did Araminta know of war and what a man needed to soothe such a thing! A little afraid that he might have unleashed something inside himself that he might not be able to put back to sleep.
It was an unusual twist in his empty chest to feel the vessel that wasn’t there, squeezing as she turned around. To raise gaze up and to find a sort of panicked pressure building that was so foreign that it nearly made him breathless. Hearing the way the missing beat was pounding in his ears almost waiting, expecting a sort of bright horror to paint itself over her features because well… there had been numerous times surely that she had been warned that who she travelled with was in fact, someone that was very capable of doing heinous things. Had before, had now.
It didn’t matter the reason for those acts, just that they were done.
And now, there was a clarity to why and how he had been a pretty damn good soldier of misfortune for the Imperial Queen till things started to change with Araminta’s presence.
His stomach twisted, his head was suddenly overwhelmingly loud and it all funneled down into an awaiting realization that he simply expected her to finally see and declare exactly what she’d been warned about before. That everything between that had happened from good and bad, was superficial. Easily broken apart when the final blackened truth had begun to ring.
Tell me what you need?
Such a statement was gentle but it cut in a way that it caught the sharp breath in throat. Blinking more than once as the query pulled through thoughts and he was trying to fathom what the right answer was. Mouth moving, shutting and repeating an added few times till it gave up trying all together. Shaking head softly and cautiously approached a little slower to simply extend out palm so she could take the pulled tusk.
Shortly sidestepping so he might go and at least check around the camp on things he might be able to help with. And sort the variety of things tumbling around in that of head quietly.
Araminta watched him carefully, every flicker of stare, ever clench of his jaw. His body seemed trapped in slow motion, as if he were trying to force himself to move through rushing waves of water and that his mind had been left somewhere behind him. Prince Kragar had not lied, Theon was facing some sort of reckoning within himself and Araminta had no idea how she could help. Her own feelings were tumultuous, she couldn’t imagine the storm inside his head now.
There was a hesitation to reach out for the claimed tusk, with knowing who it belonged too and having seen how it was claimed. The trial had been won, yet no sense of relief came nor a feeling of victory. They couldn’t have possibly known that his sister would return to plague him, and perhaps this was a moment fated to happen for Theon. But Araminta couldn’t help feeling she’d drawn him into the idea of a life filled with peace, only to thrust him right back into facing the violence he’d been tortured with his whole existence.
What would happen when the time came, the trials were done, and they had to deal with the very Queen herself? A true war would have to happen. There was no one in this world powerful enough to face that woman head on. Not when she could raise the very dead.
Gingerly Araminta plucked the tusk from Theon’s hand, her fingers curling around it tight within her palm. Verdant eyes following him as he stepped to the side, having not being able to utter a word to her at all. It broke her heart into tiny pieces, but at least this part she understood. The overwhelm and heavy weight too complicated to just accept and put away.
“I love you,” she called out before he got too far. “I will be here.”
There was a stall in step when she called at him about affection. Hearing it but something about it all didn’t seem exactly right. A strong measure of doubt crept in having seen the hesitation she provided when he offered over the tusk to complete that of her trial and without it having to come from an orc that didn’t deserve to be disfigured.
A slight tilt of head was given towards the call, but returned forward with nothing in return. It wouldn’t be very long till those three words were nothing but empty –if they weren’t already.
He veered right—quietly, deliberately—choosing the long perimeter instead. Snow dragged at his boots, but he welcomed the drag, the physicality of it. It kept his body occupied where his mind churned like black water. The fires of the camp glowed warm across the fur laden tents, silhouettes moving—grief, relief, exhaustion, the slow work of tending to the living and counting the dead. Voices murmured low, guttural, intimate. He did not want to be among them. Not as himself or one who had just killed his own blood. Something he should feel really victorious about having defeated the physical manifestation of one of his deep laid trauma’s, but it wasn’t that at all.
The path he took cut behind a row of felled pines and broken wagons—wreckage from the earlier raid. He followed the shadows, skirting torchlight with practiced familiarity. He knew how to avoid being seen and just moved to aid where he could with a silence and a presentation of body.
There was no denying that Araminta was the sort of person who was uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. More inclined to brush feelings of unease and difficult thoughts under a rug, to paint a smile on her face until she’d weathered through the storm and things were alright once again. To try and wash things over with sunshine, fix them so all was right and well. Theon had told her before that she needed to allow him to sit in his feelings, to work through them because even with her best intentions Araminta couldn’t wash away decades of pain with the snap of her fingers.
Truly, perhaps Araminta needed to learn how to sit in her own feelings as well. To not bury them and pretend she was fine, when it was quite clear that this trial had managed to drag out every ugly memory she’d been doing her best not to think about.
As much as she wanted to follow him and be that little chipper bird on his shoulder, Araminta forced herself not to. What she’d seen in him had scared her, but she needed trust that he’d find is way through it. One moment did not make the whole of a man and she knew in her very soul that he was someone soft of heart.
That left her with making good use of herself to help in ways she actually could control, instead of trying to fix what was not hers to repair. Having experience with the aftermath of a brutal attack, she helped tend to the wounded, drawing a mixed reaction from prideful orcs. People always tended to either find Araminta delightful company or a grating annoyance and orcs proved to have similar feelings! Gruff and disgruntled fighters made a great fuss to her gentle attention and lack of fear towards their hollering, having too much pride in tending to their own selves. Others who missed female company or simply just craved a gentle touch found themselves smitten with a woman that carried a different kind of strength than what they were used to.
By the time dawn cracked on the horizon and the frosted cold night turned to morning, the Chief Burule was conscious again. Being told the events of the night by his son how the camp was defended and the final blows from the Baneslayer having felled the Black Witch. If there had been any doubts where his intentions and loyalties might’ve lain, it was proven on the field of battle that day. As it was proven the reputation of the Huntsman was not one of exaggeration.
This time Araminta was allowed to be present as the Chief spoke with his son and council about her offer and the potential for the clan. Though more than half the time it was in the orcish she couldn’t speak. It did give her the time to quietly think to herself… mostly of Theon, even though she needed to be more mentally present in the conversation. She’d known Theon was fae, but that fight was the first time she could remember seeing him use faeish gifts beyond just his speedy steed. Where something about him had not seemed mortal man, but something far beyond that… a little eerie, powerful. Like some of the fae in the enchanted forest.
“Liberator.” The querying voice of the prince drew her attention back to the present moment, where they were seated outside near a fresh bonfire away from the mess of the night. “This place you have offered us as an orcish stronghold?”
“Hmn, yes. There is a gorge cut through by a mighty river that connects the mountain tunnel out of Caeldalmor to the mountain tunnel that brought me to the edge of the Imperial Lands.” she explained. “It would not be an easy start, but there are resources there enough to built a city into both sides of the gorge. You could become a traveling port into the mountains for traders and travelers.”
Chief Burule grunted. “What would you gain from such an overly generous offer? To have orc control passage into your very kingdom.”
“My kingdom is small and has been isolated for a very long time, perhaps for too long. When the demons invaded we had no defense and I fear that when the tunnel is reopened, there may not be a kingdom to go back to. The information I give you is in good faith to help a people that struggles here with no strings attached. However, if you wish to honor an alliance I would ask for your warriors to help defend the people of my country. To help weed out the demons and to protect from any future invasions.”
To this they began to talk back and forth again, animated and fiercely to which Araminta could only gauge how things were going based on the their body language and the tones of their voices. Everything in orcish always seemed to sound just a little bit angry, and there was anger renewed here for certain. Heirra’s name spat out like a curse. Yorva’s gross dishonor of their people and the dead. Yet there was excitement too – a gleam of something shining and hopeful in their eyes that had been renewed.
“It will not be easy making out way to that passage,” pointed out the prince. “To sent out word to the scattered clans of where to meet without the Blood Witch’s eyes on us.”
“I will be continuing the trials,” Araminta told them. “…my continuing the trials is helping to shield the actions of others as well.”
It was then that Araminta told them of the paladins she’d met, now reaching out across the lands and beyond to other holy orders. Of Darien and their island of rebels secretly building a network of spies and allies to hopefully be making real moves against the queen. Although she left out the detail that Theon was not the only son that’d turned against her, purely for Talongrath’s own safety for she did not know when they wanted to reveal that card in their hands.
This new tidbit of information certainly turned the tide of the conversation in a new way – they had already been highly interested in promised land, but now it was not just a promise of roots that could be set down. A changing of circumstance altogether was on the horizon against a traitorous woman that had freshly reminded them just how little she value life.
The agreement was sealed. Araminta even wrote up her letters to send to Sir Reeves and presented them before closing them up with wax and the press of her signet ring. A couple of the swift young orcs would take it the Temple of Light and from there a new ally and piece of the plan would fall into place.
Araminta felt as if she’d not gotten any sleep at all in the night, and all of the unsettled energy had kept her heartrate up to such a thunderous beating that she found herself exhausted. What she wanted was to seek out Theon at last, even if all she could do was sit next to him in quiet companionship, but it seemed their hosts did not feel it safe to let her wander in search of him. Instead she took up residence back in the prince’s tent, where things were a little haphazard but otherwise hadn’t been one of the places that’d been destroyed in the fires. They left her with a ridiculous amount of food considering she was near thrice the times smaller than even their shortest orcs. None of which she had any appetite for eating. She had just enough in her to curl up in the furs and let herself drift off into a dead, weary sleep.
Theon stayed only long enough to be useful.
Moving with and through the orc encampment like a shadow that didn’t belong to itself—lifting the wounded, helping to lay the dead in neat rows so their kin could grieve with dignity. No one asked him to speak and no one thanked him for the greater appreciation that was. Rather they just simply let him work. And, he was grateful for that silence. It was easier to keep his thoughts compartmentalized when his hands were busy. It was easier to pretend that he was simply a function, not man.
But the moment his tasks dwindled—when the fires dropped to low embers and the cries of battle softened into mourning—he felt the weight of his own presence crash back onto him. Too heavy, too sharp, too conspicuous.
He did not wait for Araminta to come looking.
He did not risk hearing her voice again.
Theon left before dawn broke properly so he might take to the treeline. Appreciating the biting cold and the snow being a quiet blanket to welcome that of his retreat. Moving freely untill the campfire smoke faded to a memory on the wind and the only sound was his own breath trailing in the dark. When he found a small clearing beneath a stand of firs, he made camp—no fire, only his cloak drawn tight, the world around him muted in frost. A sort of mollifying experience that felt rather thematically appropriate for it all.
The first night was quiet enough that he could almost believe in stillness.
But stillness was not mercy.
His thoughts came like wolves once he stopped moving! Left to think and face the reality that had believed as a youth, that killing Yorva would free him! The woman who shaped his childhood into a crucible, who carved pain into the marrow of him—gone by his hand. Dead. Done. Finished. A chain cut! But he knew the truth now with every hollow breath: He had been shaped by her, yes— But he had become her on the inside. Violence lived in him the way marrow lived in bone, there wasn’t a lot different from her proclaimed air in the heat of single battle. They were both raised in a hateful environment, where she thrived and he absorbed. Just all it took was being confronted by it with flesh made alive from rot, and it all broke. And now, with it cold and settled, that fear that had been clawing quietly around in his stomach amongst that fight, was free to do as it pleased. And it gleefully sought to bite, tear, rent and abuse every part that had attempted to mend.
Even when he tried to choose peace, peace did not recognize him. It slid off him like oil on water, leaving him with only the knowledge of what he was beneath the skin. A thing built from cruelty, sharpened by survival, incapable of being anything gentler for long.
So he stayed away, seeking a quite refuge that was a temper to the blister.
Three days passed in a cycle of silence and bitter self-awareness. Foraging only what he needed, keeping his perimeter tight. If he heard footsteps—orcish, human, or otherwise—he was gone before they could breach the treeline. His tracks were light, deliberate, easily erased. He existed as if the world had never had a place for him to begin with. At night, when the cold settled deep into his bones, he would lie awake and let the truth burn through him:
There was no great redemption waiting.
No peace earned by survival.
No version of him that fit cleanly into someone else’s life.
Yorva was dead.
But the damage she dealt had already rooted and grown and shaped everything that he originally believed in and now it had successfully re-rooted itself. If that had been the plan, it had been very superbly executed! A task that was so subtle and effective that really, did it matter that Yorva had been slaughtered at all when the end result had bruised, damaged and mangled the budding resolve for change? And so he stayed in the woods, quiet and unseen— not because he feared being found entirely, but because he feared what happens after.