POV - Gorthor

  Gorthor had always liked words.

  Not in the way scholars liked them. Twisted into riddles and stacked high in books no one actually read. No, he liked them for what they were. Blunt. Honest.

  A good word, like a good axe, had weight.

  Weight that carried itself through life and history in a way that he didn’t fully understand, but he felt.

  He traced a thick finger along the top of the parchment in front of him, enjoying the feel of real paper that the Bone King had given him. Taken from one of the latest party of adventurers to mistake their dungeon for a treasury. The ink was still wet, glistening in the cool torchlight.

  "Blades dull, shields crack..."

  He exhaled through his nose, staring down at the words with the same quiet scrutiny he once gave to weapons before battle. A lifetime ago, his thoughts had been simpler. How sharp is the blade? How strong is the armor? How many warriors will I lose today?

  Now, his worries were different.

  He tapped the quill against the parchment, thinking.

  "Blades dull, shields crack… but names remain."

  Yes. That was better.

  Names lasted. Songs lasted. The dead lived on in the speaking of them.

  Gorthor sat by the cistern, the sepulcher quiet around him, all stone and shadow and the kind of stillness that settled into your bones. Pillars rose into darkness, too tall to see the top, too old to remember their purpose. Blue torchlight licked at the carvings on the walls, picking out moss and dust in the cracks. The water didn’t move. It didn’t need to.

  It was quiet here.

  Not the fragile quiet before a battle, but the kind that settled deep in old places, where time slowed and memories pressed in at the edges.

  He liked this spot. It reminded him that the dungeon had always been here, long before him. It would be here long after. A warlord might carve his name in blood, but the stone did not care.

  Gorthor let out a slow breath, stretching his tired shoulders.

  Once, he had been a floor boss. A leader of warriors. It had been a brutal, thankless thing—endless cycles of killing, dying, and struggle. Each time, he had fought because that was all there was. Because that was all the dungeon allowed.

  Then the Bone King came. And suddenly, there was something else.

  The thought made him huff a quiet chuckle. No one—least of all himself—had expected a talking skeleton to change everything.

  The orcs were still warriors, but they were more than that now. They trained, they built, they argued about rations like old human soldiers reminiscing about past wars. For the first time in Gorthor’s long memory, there was something beyond the next fight.

  He looked back at his parchment.

  "Blades dull, shields crack… but names remain."

  Yes. He liked that. Not perfect, but good enough.

  He tapped the quill, watching ink gather like it might write something on its own if he waited long enough. No such luck. He rubbed the back of his neck, exhaled slow. His thoughts had drifted again, the way they did when things got too quiet. But it wasn’t a bad thing. Just part of being alive. Still alive.

  Funny how easy that was to forget, sometimes. That he’d made it this far. That the war was over, at least for now.

  He had made his peace with that fact a long time ago.

  It wasn’t dying he had feared, back then. It was dying for nothing.

  And that was why he had surrendered.

  The warlords of old would have called it cowardice. To them, a good death in battle was the best thing an orc could hope for. He had never agreed. He had always thought living was the better thing, the harder thing. The stronger thing.

  Gorthor smirked, shaking his head. He had spent years fighting because that was what was expected. What was needed. And now here he was, training orcs instead of leading them, scratching poetry onto parchment instead of carving up adventurers.

  It was strange, this new life.

  Even stranger was the fact that he liked it.

  His gaze drifted to the dark water, still and silent, beneath the steady flicker of the blue torches.

  This was where The Bone King, Edgar, had stood against the fourth floor boss. A golem. A nightmare of yellowing bone and grave dirt.

  It had no anger, no arrogance, no will of its own. It was not a tyrant, not a warrior, not even a predator. Just a thing, sitting motionless in the center of the chamber, waiting for something to kill. That was the dungeon’s way. No words. No hesitation. Just the next fight, and the next, and the next, until something stronger finally ended you.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Edgar had stood before it, staff in hand, staring up at its massive form. He could have attacked immediately. That was what Gorthor would have done. What everyone else would have done.

  But Edgar had spoken.

  It wasn’t a challenge, not exactly. It wasn’t even a question. Just a simple, maddening offer.

  "You know, we really don’t have to do this."

  The words had been laced with sarcasm, of course. Gorthor knew that. But even beneath the mockery, the irony, the tone—there had been something else. A flicker of truth. A question his world had never bothered to ask.

  And for just a moment, Gorthor had wondered if the golem had heard it too.

  The creature had attacked anyway. Because that was the way of dungeon life. That was what it was built to do.

  And Edgar had destroyed it anyway, fire and arcane fury reducing it to splinters and dust.

  But Gorthor remembered the moment before that—the silence. The impossibility of it. As if the golem, for the first time in its existence, had heard something other than an order or a challenge.

  That was the difference.

  Gorthor didn’t have a way with words. He never had. He had led with action, because action was all he knew.

  Edgar was different.

  It wasn’t that he always chose the right words. He stumbled over them sometimes, spoke too quickly, hesitated when he shouldn’t.

  But there was a belief behind them. Gentle. Steady. Contagious.

  Even now, after everything, Gorthor still felt it. That quiet, impossible feeling that things might not have to end in blood.

  He looked back at the parchment.

  “Blades dull, shields crack… but names remain.” He ran a finger over the words, slow and deliberate. Letting them sit.

  First time in a long while he’d had something worth writing down. First time it felt like more than just scratching symbols onto a page. And the first time—maybe ever—he’d actually had the time to do it.

  Gorthor rolled his shoulders. The old stiffness was there, same as always, creaking through bone like it owned the place. He set the quill down and breathed out through his nose, studying the parchment with the quiet focus of a smith eyeing the first pass of a blade. Not perfect. But it’d do.

  His gaze wandered toward the cistern, where dark water lay still as stone beneath the cold flicker of blue torchlight. Hunger stirred at the edges of his thoughts, a familiar pull. He ignored it. Hunger was just part of the landscape now—like dust, or damp, or the sound of steel being sharpened in the dark.

  They had survived worse.

  The orcs grumbled, the kobolds hoarded, the undead simply stood where they were placed and rotted at the appropriate pace—but Edgar was doing something about it. He wasn’t just waiting for the next raid, the next fight. He was thinking, always thinking, like the solution was out there if he just looked hard enough.

  And maybe it was.

  Gorthor rubbed his jaw, staring into the torchlight. A thought kept circling back, one he hadn’t found a place for yet.

  Two days ago, while making his rounds, he had seen an orc hand a scrap of meat to a kobold.

  It should not have stood out.

  And yet, even now, he could see it as clearly as if it were happening in front of him. The way the orc had torn the piece free, holding it out without fanfare, without expectation. The way the kobold had hesitated, tail flicking, before snatching it quickly, as if it wasn’t sure the offer was real.

  It was nothing. A passing moment, a bit of food, something he would have walked past without a second thought in another time.

  But the thought remained. And with it, a quiet, unfamiliar feeling. He wasn’t sure what to call it. So he let it sit. And for days, the memory would resurface as it did now.

  He took up his quill again, pressing it to paper, when a sound echoed through the chamber.

  Deep. Hollow. Not quite a drip, not quite a breath. It settled into the stone, fading into the stillness.

  Gorthor glanced up.

  Probably a frog.

  He liked the frogs on this level. They had the right idea. No battles, no worrying about what came next. Just sitting in the dark, munching on grave beetles, waiting for whatever it was frogs waited for. Taking things slow.

  A good way to live.

  Somewhere in the distance, a scream rang out. Muffled by stone, stretched thin by distance, but unmistakably the sound of a warrior who’d just lost a fight with something very small and very flammable.

  Gorthor chuckled low in his chest. Blisterblossom training. About that time.

  Ulthar had many strengths. Subtlety wasn’t one of them. He’d once tried to punch a firebomb into obedience. It had, with all the dignity of a proper explosive, disagreed. Gorthor had tried explaining that precision was just as important as power. Ulthar preferred lessons taught by fire, repeated until the screaming stopped.

  With a grunt of effort and no small amount of creaking, Gorthor rose. His knees popped. His back voiced its protest. He answered with a wry grunt and a lopsided smile, like the aches were old drinking companions come calling again.

  He dusted his hands on his thighs and glanced down at the parchment beside the cistern.

  Still there. Still waiting. A better response than most things in life.

  Maybe he’d come back to it later.

  And then something settled against his neck.

  A pressure. A wrongness against his spine like the weight of a hand light on your shoulder that you weren’t expecting.

  His body locked. The world tilted. And then he fell.

  For a brief, absurd moment, he thought he had only stumbled. His balance thrown, his stance uncertain, a misstep in his old age.

  A slow, weightless moment as his body gave out beneath him—no, not beneath him—away from him. The stone floor turned in his vision, torches spiraling, the blue light flickering as his head dropped from his body, turning, twisting—

  And then impact. Cold stone. The blurred smear of the ceiling above. His vision swayed, the torchlight cutting strange angles into the chamber’s shadows.

  In front of him he saw them.

  His feet. Still planted. Still standing.

  He watched the slow trickle of blood down his own legs.

  The realization came slow, creeping in at the edges of his fading thoughts, not as fear, but as understanding. He had survived so many things. But not this.

  He would not be around to see what happened next. Not for his people. Not for Edgar.

  His vision blurred, shadows bleeding into the torchlight. The darkness folded in.

  A brief sadness lingered in his fragmenting mind. He had wanted to see how the story ended. To see where they might wind up. Something other than life and death measured in moments of blood. A someday that he would never get to feel.

  As the world darkened and the last of him faded, Gorthor had a final thought.

  Blades dull, shields crack… but names remain.