And Zholl was truly taken aback, because his sister had never quite cussed him out this hard before. The way she emphasized ‘dick’, her tongue cracking off the roof of her mouth, made him feel that- yeah, he was being kind of dickish, wasn’t he?
But then he checked his relic watch that father gave him. He had to make a few calculations though, which he was never too sharp at. When he raised his head again he sported a devilish grin.
“Nah-ah, not for another five minutes,” he said in the characteristic Thraxes family singsong lilt.
But then he paddled over, spread his arms wide open and gave Githarie a hug. Zhon joined in too. And as they gave her a double brother bear squeeze, that same glint in their eyes when they were up to no good.
“Wait, wait- I’m sorry I-”
“Happy birth-rote to you-” Zholl began,
Oh no.
“Happy birth-rote to you!”, Zhon continued,
And they squeezed tighter and Githarie, who still couldn’t help but grin at the attention, thought to herself, how horribly awkward! She never knew how to react when being sung the birthrote song. But, truly, now at the stroke of the hour she let herself think-
Githarie Thraxes, Happy Birth-rote, gurl. Let’s make it the best rotation of my life.
“Happy Birth-rote, Gi - thar - ie!”, they both sang falsetto in unison, attempting to sing as high and off-pitch as orcanly possible, as they then tickled her mercilessly.
“A-HAHAH! NO! AHK-,” they all splashed into the water, and she wished she had some wood to knock on because she hated being tickled, she absolutely hated it. So, she kicked and fought so hard – like her very life depended on it – that she easily slipped away from her brothers. She was superior in the water even if they were superior on the board.
The ploy had worked, because instead of chasing as she expected to give her more hugs and maybe perhaps a compliment, they just paddled away.
Though she was both mortified and mollified, she refused to back down without at least another pout and a bargain, “-Agh next time, I get dibs on the nook!” she yelled, thinking- they couldn’t possibly hear her from this far now. She blew a lip trill. She started regretting attaching the foil.
They could both hear her quite well, having transmogrified bat hearing, but simply ignored her and resolved to themselves that they would have to enforce her a little more strictly before she got any ideas.
This far inside, the waves had lost their strength, and yet just a spark was all she needed to get her foil lifting her up again to her feet and pumping. While she looked wistfully at her brothers, she soon abandoned her fomo for the raw joy of being in the flow and hustled her way to the other side of the Social Room.
She tried to make a game of it, to see how far she could pump – for with just the compression and extension of her body the foil could generate its own lift and she tried to make a game of it, imagining herself a flying witch holding in her arms a broomstick which would lift her as she lifted it and her hips and knees twisting like corkscrews to really feel the wax rub around the soles of her feet – and with the graceful arc of her carve she could return back, once again, to the gentle shoulder of the wave to harness the generous gift given by the winds almost two thousand kilometers away.
“WOOT!” Jubilation. She felt so alive! She no longer regretted anything at all.
Tempus fugit. The rush of dopamine dilated her experience of time itself and what was really a whole ninety-six minutes felt to her roughly only as long as a short, soothing symphony.
The Godlike Beings said that the best surfer is the one having the most fun, and in that regard, Githarie was winning by far. She made a game of pumping all the way back from the gentle fat mushburgers at Socials, all the way up along the channel to the side, to the pocket of another upcoming wave in one fluid and uninterrupted line with her foil. Save but for a few times she never fell, and it was as if the waves were marching with her in unison in an endless drill to nowhere. Zholl and Zhon were jostling each other, all snarls and tusks to try and nab the next barrel before his brother could.
While it may appear that she was just riding around in a circle, a pointless and fruitless motion, Githarie was ecstatic. This joy was ineffable. To her, this was perfection. This was what she wanted to do all rote. Just play. For now, she had no agenda, nothing she wanted, nothing dear to her lost. She was too young and innocent, and it was easy for her. Conscious thoughts receded as she experienced the joy of simply being in the moment. Then she would inevitably bear too hard on one rail or the other and go splashing back into the sea, emerging eager as always to paddle for the next one.
They continued this way for a time, laughing and whooping “YEW!” But alas, as all things, the swell began to abate, and the brothers, finding their quiver choices no longer suitable for the job and already late for their duties, started paddling back to the Defiant. Now, though the waves were much wider and gentler, Githarie had it all to herself. Almost.
In the distance a gangly thicc Orcan gurl started paddling in towards Socials. Usually surfing Socials with other surfers was the last thing that the ambiverted but leaning heavily on introverted Githarie wanted, but this was a company that she welcomed.
Lawrah Varoka, aged nineteen revolutions, wore the tallest mohawk in the village, flourishing with tendrils and even little buds and purple and yellow petals. She was a strong orcan with potent blood coursing through her thick limbs, taller than Zholl but slenderer, and hadn’t even bothered to wear a full wetsuit as the three siblings did, just a G-bomb with a lovely floral pattern upon it. Her skin was rich, dark green. In orcan culture the darker the skin the more attractive the orcan was considered, as flourishing photosynthesis was a sign of orcan health. As she paddled by, and as the brothers paddled away, she glanced aside with a blush. Zholl’s gaze was fixated upon her, but Zhon only smirked and watched how his brother was going to flub this.
“Lawry! Lookin’ burzed!” – Looking tanned!
“Wazzap, Zholl?”
“Eh, sha know, same same. Agh sha?” – And you? They were both trying to be nonchalant.
“More or less the same too,” she tried to hide a fluttering smile and failed.
“Sha goin’ to the razza?” – the festival? He seemed to have succeeded.
“If I can sneak away from father, sure.”
“Yeah, I’m going too!” And then he didn’t.
An awkward pause. Lawrah had to demurely cast her eyes down because she honestly did expect something a little better from the self-proclaimed ‘alpha’ of the adolescents of the village of Rothera. And Zholl had to squeeze his eyes in embarrassment as he thought to himself: didn’t you just tell yourself not to get too excited? And no follow up? C’mon, pull it together, boi!
Zhon tried his best – and to Zholl’s relief succeeded – in suppressing a cackle, but Githarie just straight up had to kek.
“Yeah atul” – everybody – “going innit? It’ll be bubhosh ghash” – fucking awesome. A fumble and a recovery. “I’ll see you there.” And there was something about the way Zholl said it with surety, that no matter the fact that Lawrah’s father was Raigo Varoka, the Chief of Rothera, who would surely forbid Lawrah from going to an ad hoc gathering of youth, music, and alcohol. It inspired Lawrah to immediately begin concocting self-exfiltration plans.
Zhon looked at Githarie, Githarie looked back at Zhon, and they rolled their eyes in unison. Such a flirt. And now Githarie felt a little irritated because Zholl had better not break her best friend’s heart, as he usually did with the gurls he wooed.
Lawrah paddled up beside her.
“Sha shoulda seen it earlier, zug!” – you should have seen it earlier, gurl – “It was head high.”
A head high wave is no small feat in orcan terms, given that orcans could grow up to two and a half meters tall, much taller than runty Githarie. In all truth though, it had probably been less than shoulder high, and Githarie was simply taunting Lawrah with her exaggeration.
Tall Lawrah’s needed the nearly three-meter-long hollow wood longboard she paddled furiously and silently upon. Wood was the most sacred of all Reathean materials, although still abundant even after the Catastrophe, most high quality wood was under control of the elvans, who grew enormous trees in the Tunedenic and Jhiryan tundras of Upper Reath. They revered their sacred trees far too much to fell them, but for what reason, most orcans did not know.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Skai! Githie, sha knew I wasn’t going to get away from father’s chores.”
Lawrah was obviously bothered that she had missed the good sets.
“Ai-sha, c’mon, stop pouting,” Githarie said, “Sha in the water now!” Which was quite hypocritical, for Githarie was the one who was pouting just an hour or two ago.
Without a word, Lawrah had already paddled into a soft roller, the Socials special, far faster than Githarie could on her comparatively short and stubby foil board. She smoothly slid into a pop up and was soon dancing. She put her trailing foot in front of her lead first, a cross-step, then carefully pirouetted upon the forward foot to face backwards.
To see Githarie getting on the wave too! The foil made it effortless for Githarie to catch up with a longboarder.
“Party wave?” she said with a cheeky smile. She had taken advantage of the oncoming pocket to quickly paddle and pump herself up with a worm. It was, after all, just a soft roller, not a dangerously heavy wave - those had all already passed.
Lawrah wasn’t paying attention to her. She trusted Githarie, and Githarie’s surfing, to not even consider the possibility that Githarie’s foil could cut her.
Now Lawrah could see the length of the wave crumbling along, cutting diagonally into the corner of the horizon. Behind her was the smooth, unbroken swell rolling like living glass. She walked backwards once, twice – the board started getting a little wobbly and she bent her knees and hips to compensate – and then just before the wave finally sputtered out, she dropped to her butt and rode out the rest of the whitewash backwards, with a big, broad smile on her face. Her irritation had dissipated. She looked at Gith, cruising directly across from her, both still riding the wave, and yelled,
“I did it!”
She had! And on the first try too! Gith’s mouth was slightly ajar because she had seen her friend, in the orcish slang that her mother hated, pokgai – fall – too many times. On the face, or with arms flailing backwards into the wash, or just moving forward too fast into a pearl, usually with a loud bubbling curse, she had probably seen Lawrah fail to make the reverse boardwalk dozens of times. As she saw Lawrah succeed, she was oddly reminded of the times that they would dance the moonwalk together as very young gurls. It was their favorite. Made sense. The moves kinda looked alike. She had shown the technique to Lawrah, a long time ago, and her friend had steadfastly practiced every single time they had gotten swell since. Now Githarie, remembering their synchronized choreographing, finally understood why Lawrah wanted to learn how to reverse boardwalk so badly.
It wasn’t easy for a tall orcan to move with the finesse needed to dance on a longboard, and if Githarie had Lawrah’s build, she would probably prefer a power surfing style similar to her twin older brothers. Was it the grace of it that Lawrah liked? She was born androus but transmogrified her essence to change her sex, as a child. Indeed, Lawrah was much more talented at transmogrification than Githarie. With her massive lungs, she didn’t even need gills.
As she sailed alongside, she gave Lawrah a high five.
“Sha did it babe!”
“Terima kasih, Githie,” – Thank you, Githie. Githarie could see the sincerity in Lawrah’s eyes. But then a flash of recognition lit them up and then she burst out into a-
“Happy Birth-rote to you-”
“OH! No, no, no, Law, the zeds already did this, agh I-”
“Happy Birth-rote to you!” etc.
They continued to surf for about an hour more, but the early was coming to an end. The swell had weakened, and now Lawrah and Githarie were simply floating in the water, straddling their respective boards, far enough in the outside where waves were at their birth, an emerging rhythmic swell, an oscillation up and down, of the water level, the ocean itself rocking them to calm. The white noise of the waves breaking far behind them soothed, an autonomous sensory meridian response that lit frisson up the spine.
The fierce breeze in their face indicated that the wind had switched to heavy onshore, turning even gentle rollers to chaotic mush, and that the session was over. But if anything that just gave it a nice, cooling satisfaction to it as blood pumped generously through their fatigued muscles. The post-sport endorphin rush.
She pivoted to paddle back when she saw the unmistakable hulking shadow of her father standing astride the sea like the Mysterious Redeemer. But standing upon water he was not. He was just rowing a really big paddleboard.
“Da?”
A G-Shock, one of the very last made by the Godlikes, repaired and augmented with gryphantene and lithiated elvanblood, passed from corpse to corpse until it came to the scavenger and smuggler Zahul Thraxes’ grubby long fingered hands, and then passed on down to his son’s grubby long fingered hands.
Ok, so, nine minus one equals eight lunas, plus twenty one revs. He bunched his fists and put his knuckles together all in a row. He knew the first ridge was only twenty eight rotes, but he didn’t know why. Adding up eight knuckles and ridges, thirty one each, and ridges, thirty each for all others but the first, he came to a total of two hundred and forty three. Plus twenty one equals… 274. Yup. This was her birth-rote.
It was not that his orcan brain could not handle it, he was just too lazy to ever try and practice. We’re talking about practice. Practice. We’re talking about practice. Not even the game.
They would solemnly swear it. They could have been marauders.
But it would not be. Far from it.
They needed this because they were starting to get in much nastier situations than they should have been since their entry into the Rotheran gang, the Lions, and needed it to get the jump on their enemies- when they needed to ante up and yap that fool, kidnap that fool. You don’t fuck with Lions. And to protect their eardrums from sonic shock, bat ears always came with plug flaps, for bat hearing would deafen at higher decibels.
They chose to stick in the fleshy little plug flaps.
Whereas the elvans were most certainly a matriarchy, the privileges of the old patriarchy of the Beings persisted in the horde, even though with adaptive transmogrification, there was rarely a difference in physical strength.
Specifically, 1,367 kilometers away, for this swell had been generated by an errant typhoon spawn of a hypercane as it was sheared against the Furious Fifties.
When it comes to recording a subject’s subjective perception of time, it is impossible to use exact figures, for it psychically dilates and contracts. It felt like a song to her.
One idiomatic tradition that developed among the Rotheran surfers was to simply call the right “the Room” (Oh hai Mark) and the left “Socials”. The nook was simply the last takeoff possible in the room, and far better surfers than Zholl and Zhon could easily takeoff from the closeout section, which is really where the Room began, and sneak in a cheeky first barrel before they headed for the second one. Like most orcans, Zholl and Zhon thought far too highly of themselves, especially their surfing.
She had found Satori.
She was in dopaminergic flow, Dasein.
Zahul Thraxes’ prized blockade runner, which he had converted from an old shipping container of the Beings, heavily augmented with sixteen cylinder block internal combustion systems that burned on deezel or high grade ghasholine, and for evading dragonbreath, pressurized methane afterburner tanks, heavily protected by steel iron plates.
‘Burz’, orcish for ‘tanned’, ‘dark’, a compliment.
But different.
‘Agh’, orcish conjunction, ‘and’, one of the two orcish conjunctions, the other- ‘O’, as in ‘Lok Tar O Dar’.
‘Razza’, orcish for ‘music festival’.
‘Kek’, orcish for ‘laugh out loud’.
‘Atul’, orcish for ‘every’, as in ‘everyone’, or ‘all’.
‘Bubhosh ghash’, orcan lingo for ‘the great fire’, ‘the holy fire’. In orcan parlance, something that was ‘holy fire’ – the primeval preserved life force essential to orcan survival, what the elvans called the ‘forbidden fire’ – meant that it was excellent.
‘Zug’, orcish for ‘gurl’.
The Imperium would take wood that had naturally fallen and pyrolyze it into biochar, to be buried deep in the ground. Rogue traders would sell it to orcans.
An orcish interjection of contempt. Usually it didn't mean anything. If it did, it would have to be ‘fuck’, most similar to the Cantonese ‘diu’ [??].
‘Sha’, orcish for ‘you’ or ‘your’, by far the most commonly used orcish word, could be used as another type of orcish interjection of contempt. It was considerably softened when ‘Ai-’ was added in front of it, equivalent to ‘Oh, you!’, often by elderly aunties or younger orcans.
In the art of breakdancing, this move was also known as the ‘caterpillar’, the ‘centipede’, or Zahul’s doting nickname for Githarie, the ‘dolphin’, although very few orcans could remember what some of these cryptids were.
[仆街] a particular bit of orcish inherited from a dead Lower Jhiryan language that the Godlikes called ‘Cantonese’.
A dance move created by the Godlike Michael Jackson. Their favorite to dance to was always Billie Jean.
Young orcan girls loved to choreograph dances in pairs or trios, a practice that had become very popular since the Lost Age, recording themselves the arcane wandpad spell known as TikTok. Although the application had been lost – anything held in a singular server, and not distributed, was sure to be wiped – the practice persisted, especially if filming themselves with an arcane wandpad. It’s all the frame could fit, really- at best maybe a third, less talented or less liked perhaps, standing behind.
‘Terima Kasih’, orcish for ‘thank you’, taken directly from the living language Bahasa Melayu.
‘The Zeds’ was her name for Zholl and Zhon, sometimes ‘Zedheads’, ‘Zedbois’, ‘Zedholes’, in order of Githarie’s irritation at them.
Do we really need to do this again?
The Horde Master – spurning it as the opiate of the masses – did not encourage religion in the Horde but could not stop the spread of tradition from orcan ancestors. This Mystery, the Mystery of the Redeemer, was known in the Lost Age as Christianity.
