Storm and Stone Ch. 01

"Terrock..." the orc offered, Arawn smiled and nodded.

"Terrock, thanks. Nice name. Hell, for all I know Terrock could be in a completely different universe. I don't recognize any of the stars here."

"I did not understand much of that beyond your mention of recognizable stars... but, if you are not from this world, how in the hells can you speak the common tongue?"

"No idea. I was actually gonna ask you how you can speak English." With a British accent, at that, he thought. "This is the longest conversation I've had so far since I woke up here. They wouldn't let us talk in the cages. I learned the hard way." Arawn rubbed the back of his head and winced. He felt the adrenaline surge begin to fade and guided the orc to a crate and took a seat.

"Sorry, that was my first live combat, the rush is leaving me. Guess I'm blooded, now, huh?" Arawn gave the orc a nervous chuckle.

The orc smiled and waved it off, then pulled up a crate for himself opposite the human and sat.

"There, that's better. Captain, I can't think of any other way to ask this, but could you explain the situation here for me? On my world, orcs, dwarves, gnomes, elves, and... whatever that big guy is who broke us out," Arawn said as he aimed a discrete thumb at Kord, "...nothing like that exists on Earth outside of fiction and myth."

"Kord is an ogre. So, what does exist there," the captain inquired.

Arawn could not stop the double-take, "No shit, an ogre? Wow, another surprise. What exists on Earth? Earth has plants, animals, and humans, but humans are the only ones who speak or use tools, that sort of thing. Now that I think about it, those are flawed metrics... a more accurate way to put it would be to say that humans are the only race we know of on my world that have developed civilization."

"I see," Captain Grokan nodded. "Well, we are currently seated in northwest portion of the Kingdom of the Northern Oaks, which encompasses the habitable portion of the northeast corner of the continent of Athul. The Northern Oaks is the domain of the elves and their capital city is Lakehome. To the south lie the orc homelands, The Dominion of the Four. Our capital city of Durkhmat is situated at the center of the Dominion. The rest is small towns and farmland this side of the mountains."

The captain gazed into the distance for a moment in thought, and then looked back at Arawn once more, "That should take care of you for now, until you have access to maps of the continent. The borders are simple and the lands are safe here in the east, but once you venture west past the mountains it gets a bit more complicated. The Vaszul and The Pale sit between us and any other friendly kingdoms. We have trade with most of the friendly kingdoms, but our access is primarily restricted to the ports."

Arawn had a question ready, but a loud laugh from behind broke his concentration.

"There he is! Me and the boys was lookin for you."

The human turned toward the sound to find the orc whose eyes he met in the cage just as a massive hand clapped down on his back.

"I'm Nudjik. Thanks for the assist, stranger. Never seen a human make that kind of carnage look so easy. Never seen a human just drop out of thin air either, though. You're built like a muscle-y elf, but you hit like an orc. How?"

Arawn coughed a couple of times from the shock, then scratched the side of his head and offered Nudjik a lopsided grin, "I'm Arawn. I don't actually know, Nudjik. I've been in my fair share of fistfights back home, but if I had hit someone from my world like that it would have killed them. Hell, I don't even understand how I got here. I was exploring a cave back on Earth when the ground under my feet just disappeared."

That got the captain's attention and Nudjik went quiet.

" I mean, I looked where I was going; the ground was solid... not even so much as a crack in the floor from where I was standing to as far ahead as I could see. Then I started falling through this black void. It felt like I tumbled ass-over-teakettle through that shit for hours. I finally saw a light ahead and the last thing I remember is heading for a bunch of green at about ninety miles an hour. Then I woke up in that fucking cage."

"Magic...," Captain Grokan provided. "Who or what on Terrock has magic that can reach another world I do not know, but that was most certainly magic."

Arawn's eyes widened in surprise, then he shook his head and sighed.

"Guess I should have expected that since I'm talking to an honest-to-gods orc. Do you know who might be able to tell us?"

"I'm not sure. The elves that shared your cage, perhaps. Let me speak with them and I will let you know later. For now," the orc said as he stood, "I need to get these louts moving or we won't have a camp or a meal tonight. Nudjik, take him to the healer first and make sure she gives him a good look over, especially his head, then take him to the quartermaster so he can retrieve any possessions confiscated by the Vaszul."

"Right Captain. Okay mate, off we go."

Arawn rose and he accompanied Nudjik across the wreckage of the caravan to find the healer. Behind them, they could hear Captain Grokan bellowing his orders.

"Alright, you lot! Hop to it and get those backs to work! We're camping here tonight and I want to eat before the moon comes out to dance! Yakkar, have your squad clean this mess up and get the cooking fire started. Bokug, take Motarg and put some boys to work on the rest! Make sure you put up the command tent, I expect the first returning squads to be here by morning!"

*********

Nudjik led the human through the flurry of activity. Arawn was silent for a few moments while he took in the scene. Orcs bustled about everywhere and half-erected tents could be seen all along the roadside. He noticed that the dwarf added his own back to the teams, along with the male elf as well. That brought an unasked question back to his lips, but it was preempted by the captain's declaration that other squads would arrive.

"Nudjik, I don't know if I'm allowed to know, but what's he talking about with other squads? Are there more caravans like this one?"

"I don't see as he'll have a problem with it. You at least deserve to know why you ended up in that box with us...

"The Vaszul and The Pale are our eternal enemies. They have striven to conquer us at all costs for millennia. Before your arrival, they staged a new kind of raid on Frostleaf, an elven town that lies northeast of here along this road. We still don't know how they got there so fast with so many. Thanks to the dwarven tunnels, they didn't get what they had hoped, and most of the people escaped. They did manage to fill four caravans with prisoners, though. This one was the lead caravan; they had captured Lady Amevina, her brother, and his wife in the raid... so they sent this one out as fast as they could. They knew there would be retribution."

"How long had you been a prisoner?"

"We had been on the road about twelve days when you just dropped out of the air about a dozen feet off the ground and knocked yourself unconscious. The guards didn't know what to make of you, so they confiscated your gear and tossed you in with us. You know the rest."

"Oh yeah, I most definitely do. If you don't mind the question... how did you get captured?"

"Bah, they distracted us by porting in a demon at the gates, then a mage popped in behind us and knocked us out with some kind of lightning spell. I've been hit by those spells before, you don't forget something like that."

Moments later, the pair arrived at the newly erected healer's tent. The lovely elf was of the same complexion as his elven cage mates, but that was all he had time to take stock of. She introduced herself as Kem'erra Belqui'tasem and immediately launched into a full examination of the human. Nudjik chuckled at his predicament and Arawn was reminded of his physical exams for high school sports as she forced him down to his boxer-briefs in front of the orc. He was bewildered as she moved in circles around him and touched his body here and there. Nudjik roared with laughter when she poked his bum and the human spun covered his backside with his hands and spun around like he had been slapped.

"Easy now, Miss Healer-elf-lady-Kem, uh...erra-person. We can all see that my pants have no cuts on them, they're just dirty and smelly. No need to get so frisky down there."

Her eyes danced with unvoiced laughter and her smile gave lie to the apology offered by her lips. She opened a hand, palm up, in front of his face and immediately blew a fine, white powder into his eyes. Before he could react, a slender thumb pressed against his forehead and shoved his head back hard. Arawn took a step back and shook his head as she sang a word in a strange tongue, then everything went silent. The powder made his eyes feel gooey and he almost missed the faint tingling sensation that coursed through his body while his hands worked to clear his vision... almost.

"All done," she told him.

When his vision finally cleared, he looked at the healer in confusion.

"What the hell was that?"

Kem'erra smiled. "The touches established entry points for the healing energy. The powder and flick of your forehead kept your mind from interfering with the spell. The distraction was a precaution, a harmless fogging powder that blurs the vision; I sense that you have an exceedingly strong will that could have interfered with my spell."

Arawn touched the back of his head and found the knot completely gone, then laughed, "That's amazing! Thank you, but next time... don't worry. I don't bite the hand that feeds."

The elf laughed with him and attended Nudjik, then sent them on their way.

Their next stop was the quartermaster, a short orc by the name of Jezzik tag-Shabrat. Jezzik was the shortest orc Arawn had seen so far, but that was only by orc standards. The human guessed that Jezzik still towered over him by at least two feet. The orc was pleasant enough, but he had no time to talk due to the need for a proper inventory of the items taken from the elf village in the raid. Arawn found it amusing that the orc found the time to take his measurements for armor, though. The human's items were easy enough to find, Jezzik had only to look for things he did not recognize. Once the group was certain that the newcomer had received everything that had been taken, Arawn thanked Jezzik and he and Nudjik wandered slowly away.

Arawn pulled his smart phone from his pack and looked up at his new friend as he turned it on. The battery showed sixty-eight percent, he'd have to get his little solar charger out tomorrow. Tomorrow... now there was a word that had not carried much certainty until today. He turned the phone back off and put it away, but the strange device had not escaped Nudjik's attention.

"What's that thing making the noise?"

"That, my good man, is a mobile phone..."

"What's a mobile phone?"

"It is a device that lets me communicate with anyone who has one of their own, from anywhere that I am, and they can be anywhere on my world."

Arawn turned to his new orc friend and could see he had readied another question in the face of such a stunning revelation.

"Hey Nudjik, want to help pitch the tents and I'll explain about the phone later? I'll be able to relax a lot more once I've secured somewhere better to sleep than a hay-filled wagon."

The orc looked surprised for a moment, then grinned, "That sounds like a good plan."

Arawn was quite confused when they joined a group and he learned that the orcs only dug an inch into the soil that lay under the grass. It was not until he learned that they had created a larger version of the venerable manual fence-post driver that things made more sense. A team of orcs would hold the posts erect over what he now recognized as a kind of pilot-hole, and Kord would come along and sheathe them into the driver one-at-a-time, then hammer them into the ground with one mighty blow.

Arawn was forced to wonder how long they planned to be here when he hoisted one of the tent poles up and waited for Kord to come along. They were quite tall, about half the girth of a telephone pole, and it seemed that the ogre drove them deep enough to stand against a hurricane. His thoughts were cut short when Kord arrived at their site and drove his group's posts into the ground. He and Nudjik followed the group to another site and the process was repeated again and again for the next hour. It was not until they were finished that he noticed the second wave of teams who came along behind them and covered the structures in a heavy gray fabric. Efficient, Arawn thought. When they tried to join the teams that would complete the remaining tents, they were waved off with instructions to find an open tent and relax until dinner.

*********

Nudjik led Arawn to a tent in sight of the captain's lodgings, and left his new human friend to settle in while he did the same. The human took a moment to survey his new living quarters: a simple chair, an orc-sized bedroll that made his sleeping bag look positively tiny by comparison, a chamberpot and washbasin, an armor mannequin, a weapons rack, and a footlocker complete with lock and key. Something had seemed off about the place from the moment he walked in, and as his eyes left the footlocker, it finally dawned on him... the tent had a floor that made the dome tents of earth look cheap. It was far from plush carpeting, but it was a functional and mostly forgiving surface that would be comfortable on any terrain so long as it was level. When he sat down on the bedroll to empty his pack, he first leaned over to have a closer look at the flooring. The quality of the weave was surprising for this era, and he pondered how far they had advanced with their loom technology.

Arawn sat back up and emptied his pack on the bedroll. He laid everything out and did a final check to make sure everything was there. When turned back toward the foot locker a gentle cough came from the open doorway of his tent. He spun to greet the visitor and was treated to the unmasked glory of his elven cage mates. The male would have taken top prize at the Renn Fest with his brown leather armor tooled with a red dragon reminiscent of Celtic and Viking styles. A pair of rapiers hung from his side and a large, ornate recurve bow rested across his back. The ladies were nothing short of breathtaking; their hair had been pulled back into ponytails with a golden ribbon, and they wore matching crimson gowns that were embroidered along the torso with the same dragon pattern, in black against the red fabric of the gown, as the male's armor. The seams had been cleverly concealed beneath gold lace trim that was set aglow by the matte black of their skin.

His eyes were drawn to the one with what he could only describe as pumpkin-orange eyes as she pursed her lips to speak. Her long, slender face captivated his attention and her rich, throaty voice threatened to send shivers of delight down his spine.

"Greetings stranger, Captain Grokan said we might find you here. I would like to speak with you about your arrival. The captain mentioned that you are curious about it as well?"

He cleared his throat and offered his best smile, "Yes, that's right. I'm Arawn Stonebrook, my friends call my Rawn. I'll admit that I'm in no pressing hurry to leave, now that we are out of that cage. It would be nice to know how I got here, though, and maybe why... if we can figure out who did it."

"I am Lady Amevina Avrile'autur, this is my brother... Vorsah, and his wife... Ke'line Lussiandarus. I already have an idea about that, actually. I shall begin by saying that I am an archmage. Vorsah and Ke'line will soon be as well. The magics capable of bringing you here are difficult, complex, and would have required tremendous amounts of energy for mages of our caliber to gather. Every mage across our world would have felt such a working. We were also physically present for your arrival and I felt nothing, nor did my brother or his wife. Because of this, we will need to consult with someone a bit older. I can arrange for you to meet with the Great Drake, but it might take some time since you are new to this world. We take great care to protect the dragons from harm." She explained.

"Well that's understandable, dragons are a precious resource," Arawn answered before he realized what he was saying, then it hit him, "... wait... did you just say dragons?"

"Well, yes... of course," she said as she gave him an odd look.

The elves watched in fascination as the human's eyes took on a vacant look and he sat down hard on the tent floor.

"Dragons too? Holy fuck, what the hell happened to me? Did I die in that fall and now I'm in the afterlife or some shit?"

The human may have spoken clearly to himself, but his jumbled murmurings were indecipherable to the elves and they began to worry for his sanity when he leapt to his feet and stood before the orange-eyed female.

"Slap me," he told her with a bit more force than he intended.

"What? Why ever for?"

"Dammit, just slap me... please!"

And so she did. For his impertinence at taking such an unwarranted tone, she slapped the strange human's cheek so hard that his head snapped to the side. The resounding crack that filled the room caused the other guests to wince, Amevina's brother especially. Vorsah's sister had struck him a number of times during their youth, and he learned to beware her fury. They immediately began to chuckle when she clutched her hand. Amevina hissed in pain and glared at Arawn.

Rawn's eyes went wide and a hand shot up to hold his now-stinging cheek and groaned, "Yep, definitely not dead or sleeping."

"Shit, that hurt!" The pair swore in unison.

When the declarations of pain came simultaneously, Vorsah and his wife howled with laughter while Amevina scowled at the human.

"By the hells, man! What is your face made of... dwarven hammerstone? You almost broke my hand!"

"Flesh and bone, last time I checked," he told her as he worked his jaw from side to side. " If it makes you feel any better, I haven't been punched, much less slapped that hard in my life. I think you just may have loosened a few teeth. Call it even?"

Amevina still favored her hand, but she could not suppress her chuckle, "I think we have an accord."

Arawn shook his head and looked back to his guests, "So, there are elves, orcs, ogres, halflings, gnomes, dwarves, humans, and dragons?"

"You forgot the Hassiriin," Vorsah added.

"Bless you." Arawn said to the male.

"Come again?"

"Bless you. It's what we say on Earth when you sneeze."

Vorsah laughed and shook his head, "I see. No, Hassiriin is the name of the scaly folk that inhabit the southwestern peninsula of Athul..."

"Scaly folk... you mean lizard people?" Arawn interrupted with wide eyes.

"Some, yes. There are serpent kin among them as well; a few even have feathers. I've visited the port city of Yasuzzthra several times. They are quite pleasant to do business with."

"Thank goodness for that. There are some snakes from my world with legendary tempers." He turned his attention back to Amevina, "So, we can't figure anything out about my arrival until we consult with your Great Drake, right?"

"Well," she told him, "we don't own the Great Drake, but yes, that is correct."

"Then I'll table any further questions about my unscheduled vacation till then, since we'll just be guessing."

Arawn was about to pose a question when the dinner bell rang. He chuckled and shook his head, a rueful grin painted his face.

Bemused, Amevina inquired. "What's so amusing about the dinner bell?"

The human laughed again.