The Lay of the Grandmasters Way - An Official Eternal-Lands Story

The Lay of Nerala, Act 5 - Part II.

She was a simple child. Thats what they said of her, in their grunting language. Fit for cooking, if she were watched over.

But even this task was thought to be beyond her, when she burnt down her father's hut, allowing the meat to burn to cinders and the straw matted floor to catch light, while she stood staring at the dancing flames, as if transfixed; like a rabbit will stare into the eyes of a snake about to strike.

She was chided and beaten for her negligence, and since these were orchan folks, the beatings were brutal in the extreme.

Yet from the time of the fire, all in the village were wary of her, and even her father and mother were afraid of her, despite being the ones to inflict her punishments. For she had walked unscathed from out of the burning hut, even though the village warriors themselves were unable to get even close enough to douse the flames with their buckets of swamp and marsh water. Not the walk of one who flinches and fears the touch of flame, but the sure and steady step of one who has walked out this same path all her childhood days and does not notice the wall of flame she is passing through.

The village Shaman declared her as unfit to follow his ways, being unable to comprehend the simplest of bone castings. He watched in angered astonishment as she buried the bones and placed a sprig of Ivy on the small mound, as if she were burying a kin.

But being orchan and a part of the village, she was tended to and fed and allowed to live with them, for the laws of the tribe decreed it. Only the murder of one of their own would allow exclusion from the tribe, and if the murder were of a child, then the exclusion would be from life as well as the tribe.

So she was taught simpler tasks. Gathering herbs, wood or various root vegetables seemed to be within her limited capacity of understanding, although she outright refused to go anywhere near a pumpkin, even beatings failed to cure her of this wayward and unorchan-like fear. Something about them simply made her recoil in loathing, screeching terror, much to the delight and entertainment of the younger male orchans in the village.

And thus it was that she was accepted, if somewhat uncomfortably, into village life, and her contribution to the village stores of herbs was recognized alongside that of the other hunter-gatherers in the tribe as being equal, despite the fact that occasionally there were odd plants she had gathered that had no use or value to the villagers. The gnarly-toothed old herbdrier who took them from Nerala simply patted her on the hands and smiled encouragement to the "simple one".

It was a small number of years later in passing, that the fire-fever hit the village. The shaman claimed it had been brought down upon them by Mortos, who was angered that his usual tributes were slackening of late. The warriors themselves muttered darkly about some of the herbs the kid-head had put in for the broth. The old herb drier, a dwarfish slave who had won her right to live amongst the orchan village through right of combat, knew for certain that no herbs of ill effect were to blame, instead thought that some of the meat that had been brought into the stores had been tainted somehow, perhaps by wild magic from the swamps.

Whatever the reason was for it though, the fire-fever was swift in laying hold of half of the orchan inhabitants in a matter of only a few days.

Nerala's own mother was struck down with it and writhed in extreme agony as her internal temperature soared, and cooked her organs from within, slowly but with inevitable certainty to the point where she would die without intervention of some kind.

It was then that Nerala went to the old herbdrier, and asked for her plants back.

Not quite understanding, the herbdrier was grabbed forcibly by the hand then, and dragged around to the store hut, with Nerala saying the word plants over and over again.