Heirs of Hatred

Chapter 10: The Ashen Dagger

All orcs knew that the end of their lives was only ever another part in the grand circle of all things. The south knew that their death would feed nature, have trees grow from their lifeless bodies until it's leafs would spawn more again. An endless cycle that started with the dragons of yore and would go on until the entire world was full of trees and life.

The North however, believed that even a dead orc was still a conqueror. Their ashes would be carried with the wind and sooner or later all would find their way to the last of all battles. The grand grey ash of the Bladespire wastes. The place where all would one day end, as after generations of war and death it would engulf all the land, drown the seas and maybe even, one far day if their kind lived long enough, mount to the stars, until the orcs conquered all there was, and nothing but ash would remain.

Those clans that travelled the wastes, nomads aligned to the dragon and his riders, saw themselves as protectors of the dead. As those who remembered all their stories and their suffering. Inscribed on the great obsidian spires that had always been risen from the grey wastes, the stories were told. Some in runes of ancient times that reflected the fires they served, others in pictures painted from blood and fruit to colour the spires with the lives that once had lingered. Too many of those stories had been forgotten and even more would be lost in the time to come, but they all painted the black spires in the grey dunes and shared the colours of life in the land of the dead.

An old man climbed one of the spires. His dark cloth protected him from the strong ashen wind that even darkened the sun that day, while a rope around the spire and around his back protected him from falling. It was the strength of his old legs that held him up there, pressed against the spire. Still he seemed relaxed as he painted it with his hands. It was not pictures he painted but simply forms that felt right to him, as his eyes were hidden beneath a blindfold and his hood. On both were chains and trinkets. Melted and flattened rocks of different minerals that loosely hang from both and made their clinking sound in the winds.

He sang as he painted, an old song that would be carried with the desert wind while he continued to paint different shapes and colours onto the spire. Some red, some blue, some yellow and often enough a mixture of plenty. Most of the shapes he drew were but simple circles but he knew they painted the story of the life that had been. The paints were from bags on his belt and whenever he took a new one, he saw to remove every remains of the last from his hand with the other with wide motions, almost like a dance. It made one of his hands as colourful as the spire he painted, while the other always carried out the task.

He stopped his song and work as he felt a shift beneath the ashen dunes. Holding both his hands at the spire he felt, listened and then nodded as his blind gaze went over the distant grey dunes. He knew the tremor was from a sandwyvern but it took his blinded hidden sight a moment longer to know it had a rider.

He smiled and removed the remaining paint from his right hand to then make a print of his coloured left on the spire. With a wide grin he used his arms to hold the rope even tighter to slowly let it glide lower while he took careful steps with its height until he had climbed down again.

Down at the grey dunes he took his staff that was still leaning against the spire. Now with his bare feet on the ashen desert ground he felt the tremor even clearer until the big sand wyvern sprang out from the ground and landed quite close to him. Even without eyes, he knew how big the beast was, from both the big vibrations it made in the waste as it landed and simple old memories.

It sniffed the old man who simply smiled and layed the coloured hand on its horn. "It has been long, old friend..." he said to the beast before its rider jumped down from a saddle that was carved inside its giant grey scales. The beast remembered the old man's scent and made a small but loud movement with its twin tongue.