Bellow Wood is probably the worst place it could have happened. We was meant to camp on the other side – that being the place where the Etherians had set up, as it were, their destruction being our objective – , but we had been held up by brigands on the morn. We’d been marching for weeks in the rain, and Sir Archibald decided to press on. Git. That must have been an easy choice with two hundred men and a carriage around him. Me and Luthor were sent up front. Scout duty. Sir Name, we called him, on account of him having a surname. Anyway, we was accustomed to scouting, being smaller and nimbler than our brothers, but never in a place like this. Bellow Wood is a thicket quite unlike any other in the world. Some say it’s the placing of the land, some say it’s magic from the gods. But I’ve seen it and walked its ground, and I say only a demon could have made that thicket.
There is no quiet in Bellow Wood. Everything louder than a footstep echoes and echoes, and you can’t tell how far it will go or how long it will last. A man could be stabbed and five miles away would be heard the scream. That eve it was the column’s hooves that followed us. Talking weren’t allowed usually on scouting duty, but we was far too shifty anyway to do aught but watch the trees. Couldn’t even pray to Eldath – my thoughts kept being drowned out by the clatter of our horses. And a good thing, too. I mightn’t have noticed the arrow nocking in the branches.
Luthor must have been puzzled why I’d tackled him, but he twigged on quick. We both yelled as we moved in to the trees and fired back, hoping the Wood might work to our fortune for once. The shooter fell – one of two strokes of luck we had in that damned thicket. Heard no rustling, and then I chanced stepping from behind the tree. No feathers on me. I ran up to the body, and saw a man. No Orc or Elf, nay, a proper man, all garbed up in leather. I had Luthor help me drag and strip the body – the armor being nicer than mine, after all, and mine being the arrow that killed him, no matter what Luthor said. Weren’t any Etherian marks on the armor, and the man didn’t seem to hail from that region, neither. Men of the Kingdom usually have at least a touch of Orc to them, a hue or a tooth if nothing else, but he were brown-haired and plain.
Irregardless, I packed away his armor, and we ran back to the column – we knew a scout when we saw one, and the warning might have been enough to give us an edge. While we ran, though, the sounds changed – there was galloping now, and screams. Me and Sir Name picked up the pace, but by then it was too late. The first thing I saw through the trees were the wagon ruts and the hoofprints in the mud. Wild and irregular, they were. Then I saw the Etherians. Proper Orcs these were, clad in mail and screaming for blood as they charged the baggage train. Defenses were a mess, the carriages not even circled but in a line cutting the camp followers in two. No wonder since Sir Archibald had fucked off. It looked to me like, for a second, the camp followers on the west side would be mowed down. But then I saw it.
Luthor Stargrove, while I’d been staring, slack-jawed, had drawn his bow. A tall Orc, looked like a ten-footer wielding an axe, had been at the front of the charge, but he weren’t at the front no more. Then the one just behind him, too, and more and more until they took notice and wheeled about to the treeline. Stargrove kept firing into the mass, and then when he ran out of arrows, he drew his shortsword and charged. Charged, the madman. I started firing, now, firing until my quiver ran empty, but there was nothing to be done. He was a man, and a small one at that, and these were Orc berserkers.
Stargrove came to Prince Uthor’s Army through his father, some kind of a hero in his day, and everyone else who had signed on was a little suspicious of the runt’s right to be there… I am sorry to this day that I ever questioned it: He would have made the Prince himself proud. Saved half the camp followers, too, because of what happened on the other side.
There was a young lad traveling with us, with the Trading Company but an alright sort. He had made fast friends on the trail, but none ever took him for anything special. Thank Eldath for the camp followers’ sake, they was wrong. He was the other stroke of luck, him and his witch powers. A flash of light, bright enough to light behind the tree where I was cowering, brighter than the sun, so bright it seemed to quiet the infernal echoes, and then stillness. As I saw it, Tash was standing alone, the soldier having gone to support the western half, just stock-still, ashen, and surrounded by bodies. All human, these, in their leather. The air seemed alive, somehow, and I felt a hum as I looked at him, like the second before the quivering ground becomes a landslide. He and Stargrove’d bought time for the innocents with us, and most lived. I never will forget that. I can’t. The wood gave the sound of Luthor dying to me no matter where I went.
– Gawain Bellows, former warrior of Prince Uthor’s army, current Underclerk of the Acheron Text Depository, speaking to an AU scribe about his experience in Bellow Wood. –
Disassembly 