Okay, I promise I will never again quietly snicker at statements like "I can't control my characters" or "the story writes itself, I don't know where it's going". This was delayed because I went and gummed it up with some weird rambling aside that came from nowhere. Maybe I can salvage it into a little one-shot or something.
The surroundings grew older and darker as they ventured on, slender saplings giving way to massive trunks, some of which visibly shuddered when the Orcs passed by. Their branches reached so high that in certain patches the forest's ceiling wasn't visible from the floor, fading off into thick mist.
The Orcs stuck to the general area of Ushûl's path to the best of their abilities. Razashûk wasn't scampering like he normally would in such territory. Ever since the embarrassing incident with the snares, he had been studying the ground with extreme caution, on the lookout for any stray oddities or telltale disturbances. He figured Durgrat could pick up the slack as far as inspecting the rest of their environment was concerned, since the Uruk had a better vantage point anyway. So far, it appeared to be working, considering they hadn't fallen prey to any of the zero hidden traps they'd encountered.
Still, it was maddeningly slow going, and the gargantuan scale of everything around them only intensified their awareness of it. Durgrat insisted that Razashûk was right, there was nothing immediately dangerous in the forest, and he was just fine, but his teeth were constantly bared and his hands gripped the strap of the bag he was carrying as if it were a fraying rope and he was dangling from the edge of a cliff. He periodically paused to survey the layout and sniff at the air. Razashûk didn't make a habit of actively looking for new scents so much as noticing changes in the present ones, and Durgrat's inefficiency was beginning to grate on him.
"Must you attempt to smell everything?"
"Yes."
"In that case, have you at least found anything interesting?"
"No, but if it stops smelling like just dirt and plants, then we'll know to be even more careful."
Razashûk sighed and left it at that.
They trudged. Looking on the brighter side of things had never been one of Razashûk's strong points, and his attempts at counting his blessings soon plunged into a bottomless pit of futility. At least these nasty old trees are all too huge and solid to take a swipe at us. At least Ushûl gave us some food before we left. At least neither of us got mauled by bears. At least I have legs. Some people don't have any legs.
The only thing breaking up the monotony so far was a smattering of color provided by an unusual flower that grew near the huge twisting roots of the most ancient trees, impossible to miss among all the browns and greys and muted greens. He bent down to get a better look at the plant. Nothing like it grew anywhere near the Misty Mountains. Its spiky yellow petals were darker at the tips, bursting out around a center dusted with vivid orange pollen. The stems were covered in glossy leaves with whitish spots near their jagged edges.
"I've seen that in a book," said Durgrat. "The drawing made it look important. A whole page all to itself."
"What is it, then?"
"No idea. That could have been a book about poison, for all I know. Plenty of 'em of in Isengard seemed the sort to have something like that around."
"If it's a big deal, we should take some and find out what it is later. Just keep it away from the food." Razashûk snapped off a handful of sprigs and tucked them away inside a stray scrap of cloth.
The brief distraction only served to remind them how dull the rest of the forest was so far. Getting slapped around by nature would have almost been welcome. They made a brief stop to rest under a large half-dead tree, shaded by its bare and splintered branches. The quietness of it all was smothering, but Razashûk was feeling too surly to share any more folklore at the moment. He gnawed on a piece of dried meat that he was glad he hadn't asked any questions about back at the shack.
Durgrat's stories, as usual, were rather limited in scope, mostly detailing vague, distant speeches from Saruman about the nature of the world and their role in it (apparently he never elaborated on much beyond crushing the domain of Men and grinding it to dust beneath their boots), or a particular shield-bearer he thought Razashûk would have got along with since they both loved complaining.
"...liked going on about that. Funny, since he had so many whiteskins from Dunland running about, doing his dirty work. He'd perch himself up on some high place and start raving about the sun setting on Man's weak and unworthy bloodlines forever, and all I could think was 'You know, I'm pretty sure they can hear you from here.' I'm not sure what he was expecting."
Razashûk had only been half-listening, but his interest perked up a bit when the Uruk mentioned his absent friend, simply because he wasn't some wizard nobody cared about until he decided to stick his magical nose where it didn't belong. "What was his name again?"
"Graznákh. He had sharp eyes, really good with knives and darts and that sort of thing. We both liked learning about things you can do with metal, watching them build things when we were supposed to be doing something else, but he was a lot better at it than me. And some other stuff we had in common, I guess."
"Like what?"
Durgrat screwed up his face. "What's it to you?"
"Fair enough."
"But yeah, I forgave him for eating my stoat. Seeing him roll wasn't that great."
Razashûk ignored the answer to a question he hadn't asked, and offered another one. "Why did he leave, anyway?"
"Not by choice. He got shoved into a raiding party. Sharkey sent them off to go get something for him, like he'd already done a dozen times before, and they disappeared like all the rest." His eyes wandered somewhere off in the distance.
Razashûk shifted and studied the ground. He finally choked out "Perhaps some part of his spirit lives on in you."
Durgrat concentrated for a moment and then shook his head. "Nah, I'm still bad at throwing knives. I'm pretty sure he's just regular dead."
Gradually the path became more clear, as parts of the ground were marked with streaks of bare, compact earth, obviously well-worn by footsteps over the years. It was no trade caravan road by any means, but it beat scanning every inch of cruddy ground for signs of sinister and humiliating trickery.
It also served up a tiny distraction. A collection of stones, arranged in a crude, wavering pattern that tapered off to a point, sat at the foot of a fallen tree. Their sizes and colors were varied, but they were all rounded and smooth, as if they'd been plucked from an old river bed.
"I think it's a sign. But I don't know what it means," said Razashûk.
"Oh good," Durgrat said. "I'm not alone."
They pressed on, and the forest got brighter. The dour silence in the air was chipped away by the occasional bird call or tiny scratching noise from various vermin hopping around.
"There's another one," said Durgrat. He motioned at a new pile of stones, similar to the one they'd run across earlier. He paused and narrowed his eyes. "It smells different here." He inhaled again, long and deep, with his eyes shut and his brow furrowed. "We should follow it. That way." He pointed and walked off towards an area that appeared less dark and clustered, and Razashûk trailed after him. The trees soon thinned out a bit, becoming both smaller and more spaced apart. Damp soil gave way to gravelly ground, and the source of the mysterious new scent became apparent.
The stream was only about knee-deep, and not terribly wide either. It burbled along at a leisurely pace and beyond the tiny reflective glimmers flitting across its surface, the rocky bottom was plainly visible.
"I wonder if it's all right to drink from it. We should fill up those skins while we have the chance."
Durgrat offered some more of that legendary wisdom from the White Wizard's tower. "Careful. Bad water makes you shit yourself to death, and that's a terrible way to be remembered."
"Well, it's clear and it's moving. That's a good start," said Razashûk. He scuttled closer as something caught his eye. "Hey, look!"
Durgrat followed him. Near the edge of the bank was a small shrine, roughly built out of wood gone split and grey with age. Traces of pale blue paint still clung to the sides. A large flat stone at the foot of it was covered with assorted trinkets and mementos: bits of carved bone and clay, a scattering of tarnished coins, small strings of colorful glass beads, even a few bundles of long-dead wildflowers, now brown and brittle as the leaves underfoot.
"I doubt this many travelers offered tokens of thanks for bad water."
"Huh." Durgrat crouched down and prodded at a few of the items strewn in front of him.
"We should leave something, too. Don't want the stream turning on us for being ingrates."
Durgrat snorted.
"It can't hurt," Razashûk said. The idea of such a gesture was comforting, a small vestige of the way things worked before Lord Sauron fell and the Great Eye was shut forever to ritual displays of loyalty and appreciation. Whatever vast unknowable powers that still lurked in the realm of the invisible might take pity on a pair of Orcs, wandering across a land with no place for them, if they saw that even Morgoth's spawn were occasionally capable of such things.
Durgrat fished around in his belongings and produced a silvery key with a curlicued design on the end. He plunked it down among the other baubles. "There, then. If we die, don't blame me. I did all I could."
Razashûk took a tentative slurp from the stream, interpreted it as a positive sign that it tasted all right and he didn't choke or vomit, then got to filling up the water-skins. He took out the map, marked it down, and scrawled "GOOD" across it for future reference, in case any of his hypothetical descendants (or if he really screwed up, a group of more competent scavengers wandering by his remains) needed a slightly outdated treasure map.
They found a narrow spot and stumbled over the exposed rocks that formed a crude natural bridge. When Razashûk stopped a couple hundred yards past it to check his map against the layout again just in case, he noticed an odd stone formation almost hidden by a tangle of vegetation. He wasn't surprised it was undisturbed. Mannish eyes would miss it in the gloom. Fungus and ferns and various other green things engulfed it, and at a casual glance it appeared to be just another hillock made from a massive boulder lodged into the ground. But Razashûk spotted little indentations in the carpet of greenery that were far too tidy to occur naturally, and one thin tree root was settled into a groove and grew down in a perfectly straight line. He went in for a closer look.
"Maybe it's a secret cache," he said. He scraped at the foliage while his head was swimming with visions of flighty Elves, like a pack of squirrels hoarding acorns, burying and then immediately forgetting about all their fancy knives and magic wine and bejeweled doodads as they tra-la-la'd all the way home.
"I'm pretty sure it's a tomb," said Durgrat, tilting his head while he leaned in and stared at the now-exposed seams in the rough grey surface.
"How would you know? You told me that where you come from, most people just get torn to shreds when they die."
"I'm not stupid. Just because I've never been buried in a tomb doesn't mean I don't know about them."
"Right, I see your point." He rolled his eyes and continued peeling away at the moss, brushing aside a few stray worms and bugs slithering over his fingers. Durgrat hunkered down and assisted him, and soon they uncovered a heavy door. Together they managed to get enough leverage to shove it aside to discover what it had been concealing from such an obscure corner of the world. Razashûk still hoped he was right and this wasn't an example of that ridiculous alien custom of building homes for corpses. At the very least, it should be filled with dusty old provisions if there was any shred of justice left in the world.
The interior of the cavern was much larger than Razashûk would have guessed, fading into pitch blackness going back into the hillside at least a good twenty feet. It was a different flavor of dark silence than the forest. The dryness of the cold stone walls and floor was a welcome change from the clammy air and mushy ground outside. "It's really not bad in here," he said, as his eyes relaxed after adjusting to the lack of light.
Durgrat sighed and slumped back against the wall. "No, it's not. We ought to rest a moment before snooping around in the back." The tension in his muscles visibly melted away as he slid down to sit on the floor, and for the first time since they'd entered the forest his hands were slack instead of balled into fists. He untangled the mess of metal and leather covering his chest and dropped it aside, leaving just a layer of rough black fabric that looked like it might have been patched together by someone who didn't have sewing knowledge, proper materials, or fingers.
Durgrat stretched his arms upwards, then shifted around. He looked infuriatingly at ease with his legs splayed out and his back bent so that his hips were tilted forward and...
Razashûk took a deep breath. It was time. The air was calm, the light was low. They were alone, with no threat of attack, or of creepy bastards lurking in the shadows. He gathered every ounce of seductive skill in his body, lowering his voice and his eyelids in order to deliver his message as alluringly as possible.
"I should, uhh, check you for tick bites."
He shuffled over, his blood pounding like he was in some pathetic youthful dream that had suddenly gone lucid. He thudded down on his knees in front of Durgrat as gracefully as he could manage, and sneaked a hand up into his tunic, sliding across his abdomen. Any other time Razashûk would have regretted not tripping him into the stream when he had the chance, but right now it didn't matter that he was a bit too grimy. Durgrat's flesh felt tough and solid but quivered slightly at the touch, and he closed his eyes and made a low chuffing noise deep in his throat.
He pulled Razashûk closer, and his mouth titled open and curled into a smile while his nostrils flared. Razashûk realized the Uruk was smelling him, and apparently liked what he smelled despite him being equally unwashed. He flubbed around and finally settled his other hand on Durgrat's thigh, cautiously stroking in and up while trying not to be too nervous about the weight of the huge arm rested on his back.
Just as Razashûk had calmed his nerves and decided he was going to grab Durgrat's other hand and show him exactly what to do with it, a chill swept in, cutting right through his clothes. He snapped backwards as Durgrat's arms jerked away. A low, muted voice hissed through the air and crawled along the walls. "Who goes there?" Neither of the Orcs could bring themselves to exhale, let alone answer.
"Who goes there?" it repeated, louder and faster. This unearthly whisper didn't so much go in Razashûk's ears as it resonated right through him, jittering over his skin and rattling his bones. Durgrat flinched, then looked up just enough to see something that make him go back to squinting downward. Razashûk caught a bizarre flicker from the corner of his eye, but whatever it was faded from sight before he could be properly terrified by its visage.
"Yeah, it's a tomb," said Durgrat.
Razashûk was all prepared to reply with something snide about owing him a beer or maybe the next bird he shot, but his voice caught in his throat as if there were long, cold fingers wrapped around it, ready to squeeze.