Although Zhon was indeed much bigger and stronger than her – Githarie intentionally remained petite mostly so she could fit into smaller waves, highly unorthodox for orcans, among many other reasons, and a choice which left her hulking father befuddled – Githarie was quick and could strike her dear brother’s weakest spots. She followed up with a quick right hook. As her knuckles slid along and clipped his cheek, she made sure to grab his tusk and twist hard.

  The ethos of the Horde was that every orcan ruled, and was ruled by, no other than her or his own living, breathing self. Yet by collective bond of kinship, each orcan was also bound to each other. To understand that contradiction was to understand the Horde.

  The Horde was decentralized, anarchistic, collectivist. The Horde did not have sovereignty over its members, the members were sovereign to themselves. The Horde could never take away freedom, there would be no jails for no orcan could be imprisoned, only banished from their village. So, when conflict emerged within the Horde, the Horde could not intervene.

  Conflict was inescapable. It could not be forbidden. The libidinal, gluttonous, id driven savagery of the horde was not repressed but instead allowed to run untrammeled. For the Horde Master believed that once violence had resolved itself, eventually empathy and reason would make the perpetrators see the senselessness of what they were doing.

  Village wars were a common occurrence. Some villages practiced the death penalty.

  Returning to the fight between siblings- Zhon snarled and using the forward momentum of her strike wrestled her into a headlock, but she slipped away. His jiu-jitsu was rusty anyway and he had no hope of outmaneuvering Githarie in the water. She smashed her elbow again upwards as she escaped, once again right into his nose and he cried out in proper pain now as his nose spurted red blood.

  “HAI!”

  And so, the Horde Master had also designed built in failsafe mechanisms should orcans ever be caught up in internecine drama:

  First, the Horde Master had fixed what he believed was a fundamentally grievous injustice in the naturally evolved essences of the Beings, which was to remove imbalances in bone mass and muscle density between the two reproductive sexes. Any other orcan can hurt any other orcan equally so, if they had transmogrified their body to inflict such pain. And the gynous slightly outnumbered the androus, this just made common sense to the Horde Master, for how else would they be able to reproduce in numbers quickly enough to counter any aggression by the elvans? Inheritance of property passed matrilineally so that the family could persist by progeny, it simply made common sense.

  Once again, back to the fight- Zhon dove into the dunk to try and grab Githarie, who had abandoned her board to flutter kick deeper and deeper. His nails scraped against the neoprene, but it was too thick and rubbery to leave anything more than a scrape, he had no claws now. And just as that happened, another wave crashed upon him, for Zhon had foolishly wrestled his way into the inside of the break. But Githarie had stayed aware and mindful enough to know it was coming. So, she dove deep.

  Second, the Horde Master purified the mutant essence, removing expressions he deemed unfit for the glory of the Horde. By giving his new children the ability to access any physical essence of the lost cryptids of Reath they could proliferate and fulfill every ecological niche from the same basic template. But so too could he restrict what they could become.

  They were in essence the same, it only mattered how the orcan chose to transmogrify themselves. The physiological playing field for orcans was intrinsically fair even if it came at an unknowable cost.

  This however wasn’t enough. Just because the orcans could now all beat each other to death equally, still meant that the orcans could beat each other to death. And that is where the Horde Master deployed a clever bit of game theory by creating the berserker rage.

  Returning, once again, to the fight- thunderous crashing water abruptly gave way to muffled bubbling, and the wave pulsed past Githarie’s body without leaving harm, but it pushed Zhon far away from her. It was a big wave so she would have to hold for a bit, so she opened the gills on her neck and a burst of vitality flooded her chest, enough to keep her going just a little longer. She opened her eyes to one of her favorite sights: the undercurrent, a serene, otherworldly inversion of the pounding surf above, refracting the light of the sky into an upside-down surface, both at once disintegrating into foam and reforming itself as they floated upwards.

  For a moment, she stayed there, suspended in the icy cold water, floating. She grabbed her leash, and as the tombstoned board shot back to the surface it pulled her upwards along- the leash climb. She slowly breathed out, a trail of bubbles flowing past her nostrils and mouth and tusks like great whiskers.

  Embedded deep inside every orcan is an inalienable instinct for survival. Should the orcan’s cortisol levels reach too high of a threshold, some mysterious mechanism – the exact details of which were only known to the Horde Master himself – would flood the orcan’s body with adrenaline, far beyond baseline. This was the berserker rage.

  Once the berserker rage had begun it was hard to stop. Depending on whether their need was fight or flight, instant transmogrification would occur. The orcan rapidly breaks down stores in their liver to morph their bodies for gruesome combat, whatever it took to do only one thing: survive.

  So, if one orcan were to bully another orcan to the brink, they would find themself in a spot of trouble. For a bullied orcan was a dangerous orcan. Push an orcan too far and you will meet the berserker rage, one way or another, and once that happens it is the bully who should fear. It was an unwritten law of the Horde that an orcan who was under the spell of a berserking rage should not generally be held accountable for his actions. Like all these so-called ‘laws’, it was all very adaptable to the circumstances needed. The orcans really played it by ear.

  It was natural then that sometimes two orcans in a wurl stah – that is, a tiff – would eventually both end up in the berserker rage. These orc against orc brawls could go on for a long time.

  And if the weaker orcan perished, so be it.

  The Horde Master did not suffer fools who wasted their bodies and lives to infighting, and so if they both perished before coming to an understanding, which was all things considered quite a likely outcome given the parameters of the rage, then good riddance.

  The Horde was not simply given the rage.

  They also had to overcome it.

  Or else they were just orcs.

  And as long as the elvans existed, the berserker rage was a necessary evil.

  But neither Zhon, nor Githarie, had raged now. Githarie had, in fact, never entered the berserker rage state. She did not need to. Not once in all her sixteen revolutions.

  Not yet.

  Without much in the way of a state, merely chiefs elected by their villages, bringing orcans together had to come from faith and from belonging. A nation. A Horde. As long as they had their shared history, their shared words, and their shared home, then they would share kindness.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  And this kept orcan society functioning and stable, more or less.

  Nonetheless, violence was still very much part and parcel of orcan life, as inescapable as conflict itself to the orcan condition.

  Finally, “Pah!”, she gasped as she breached. And thankfully, to a lull. Zhon emerged too, shortly after. He pressed his nose together to perform a valsalva, yawned wide and coughed to gather the sputum, and hocked a loogie. “Pt-tu!”

  “If sha gonna be cheating like that, skai sha hai,” – fuckin’ hell – “stay on the shoulder, agh” – and – “dinnae burn yer bru!” Zhon whined.

  He glanced at his wound, but creeping scab moss had already begun stitching across the long cut: a congealed, gelatinous mass of scabrous ochre. Even in the saline ocean water, brimming with endocrine disrupting bisphenols, the orcan constitution was formidable. He shoved his nose back into place and the bone wove itself back together with what even Zhon had to admit was a satisfying ‘click’.

  “Dinnae burn you, Zhon! I got past the closeout section, sha guys” – you guys – “were in the nook, agh” – and – “dinnae that means I have priority?” Githarie pouted.

  “Sha kooking out with a foil!” – you’re kooking out with a foil! Zhon barked, “Gave up any right to make the rules. Gul off,” – get lost – “before sha take our heads off.”

  “I. Didn’t. See you. Okay?” Githarie’s tone had softened but she emphasized her words clearly, without the accentuation like her Da’s. She had started feeling just a tad bit guilty. She had thought herself clever to use the foil, but now she felt bad. It was dangerous.

  “Just don’t surf the nook, ok, sis? Zholl and I are seshing it.” He too lessened the accent.

  “Stop being so tryhard, mubru” – my brother. Githarie knew this one would cut deep.

  She knew deep down that Zhon, despite his proclamations, was never going to shred as hard as Zholl. Besides, it would have been he who burned Zholl if he had continued down from the draining trenches of the nook and tried to climb to the high line where Zholl took off.

  Zhon lashed out with contempt to cover his insecurity in his own ability, for he was afraid that no matter how much he wanted it, he indeed was never going to shred as hard as Zholl:

  “Skai sha, Gith!” – Fuck you, Gith! She really knew how to be mean when she wanted to.

  And back and forth they went, as siblings who knew each other well enough to say the most hurtful things often did.

  “Ai-sha, shaddap, sha globs!” – you idiots! Zholl roared. The eldest – even by mere minutes – still carried authority. “Agh, Githie, piss off please. Nook’s ours.”

  Rotheran surfers called it the “Social Room” because it was usually the most crowded spot – other surfers were too lazy to get out here into the ocean at such an ungodly hour and the Thraxes had the edge because they lived on the water – and you could sometimes, if you were lucky like Zholl was, get barreled on the left, but never the right. It was a rocky reef, meaning the wave held form no matter the conditions, it just needed swell, a bit of a weird, uneven, lumpy A-frame in the middle of the Rotheran strait. But despite having a wicked left, the right was mellow and much more suited for longboarding and wasn’t even very long of a ride in the first place, much less so than the other most surfed wave in Rothera, a point break simply known as “the point”.

  There was just a flash of anger when the young orcan gurl bared her tusks and canines, her brow compressed with fury. Few surfers preferred the backside to the frontside. They were claiming this section all to themselves right now, it would be unreasonable to contest the better surfers. And, furthermore, they were older, and she had to respect their seniority. Githarie had to fume to herself- both surfing culture, and orcan culture, kinda sucked sometimes.

  But she had been counting down the rotations to this number for so long! Two hundred and sixty-four! It was her birth-rote! How could they do this to her?

  “Sha snaga nuk-nuk eating” – you bitch ass, shit eating – “piece of shit, Zholl, it’s my birth rote! Gerekt pokgai,” – go get wrecked and die on the street, unwept – “you gezzno glob-” – you stupid, moronic… she paused, having almost run out of swear words, “-Dick!”

  In practice, however, the orcans had to band together in city-state collectives known as ‘villages’, which, in the end, were governed by Chiefs. And so, in the end, the Horde was a compromise between an anarchic ideal, and the necessity of governance, much to the Horde Master’s chagrin.

  What was the perpetrator to do otherwise? He was outnumbered. The simplest force multiplier was still in numbers.

  Although many of the grappling techniques of the Godlike Beings were ultimately passed down master to student, they had fused into a single school known as Orcan Jiu-Jitsu, but its foundations were ultimately Brazilian.

  Or even transmogrify themselves hermaphroditic if they so desired, to fit whatever gender identity that they would care to create for themselves.

  For the scryer familiar with the Mendelian cross and wondering how this was mathematically possible, the truth was, every single orcan had a y-chromosome. The only question was whether it would be expressed.

  And yet for some reason patriarchal and chauvinist machismo pervaded orcan culture. Though the gender norms of the Godlike Beings had been shattered long ago, quite naturally over time many traditionalist orcans emerged that felt that the androus should still be the breadwinners, and the gynous should still be the housemakers, including Zahul.

  One example: a condition the Beings termed ‘psychopathy’, or ‘sociopathy’, which prevented empathy entirely, could emerge when specific essence reacted with trauma, a phenomenon the Godlikes called ‘epigenetics’. The Horde Master made sure to eliminate the original corrupting essence, so that every orcan could empathize- to an extent. For very practical purposes, he tailored a special essence that expressed the same phenotype under certain conditions, that being perception of an elvan. This wholesale tampering with essence would be unimaginable to elvans, who were prideful of the provenance of their ancestors. When editing their own, they only removed universal phenotypes – such as pigmentation itself – to make room for essence that managed their body’s merger with the spirits. Instead of essence, they relied on the spirits to augment their bodies.

  Which was the consequences of their loss of individual essence, a risk the Horde Master was willing to bear. To the elvan this would have been no less than the permanent loss of their clan’s divine inheritance from the Godlike Beings, to them their inherited essence was sacred.

  Great amounts of muscle mass, longer teeth and envenomed claws, sometimes horns, or even stranger ways to slay.

  For they would truly fit the definition of ‘orc’, and not orcan, if they were to continue senselessly beating the shit out of each other.

  The sight and scent of orcan blood sated the rage - it was better to withdraw upon a ghastly loss and preserve what might remain. On the other hand, the sight of black elvan blood drove orcans further into the rage in order to press the advantage in battle.

  If you ignored all the village wars, and waghs, and worse WAAAGHS. What the Horde Master discovered too late was that his precepts for a decentralized, anarchistic, collectivist society simply didn’t scale. It could only be a centralized Horde in wartime, in peacetime it was just a collection of bickering villages doomed to frustrate their fellow progress.

  ‘The Nook’ was what the Thraxes siblings called a curling pitchy section that shot the rider forward like a velodrome, and although riding this wave always meant you had to kick out at the Nook or else get dangerously close to the shallow part of the impact zone, Zholl and Zhon loved to sesh it and takeoff right there again and again, short rides be damned, so that they could practice their hardest maneuvers, which all required a great deal of speed, and which the Nook provided generously. Since Githarie was already on the wave – they thought she would never beat the closeout section and successfully make the backdoor – she did in fact have right of way.

  It was undeniable. Githarie’s use of a foil was considered too dangerous for other riders nearby, and it was the only way she could have backdoored the peak from the shoulder.

  Orcish for ‘fuck you’.

  Easiest to hurt the ones we love the most.

  The three Thraxes children, having learned from their father, were all goofy, and all wanted to go left.

  “Screw the Point!” Zholl had said to them the last rote, when they were planning out the mish. They didn’t want to deal with the gang of localists who would definitely assault them if they saw them in the water. Back off, Warchild.