***** Author's Note *****

Be advised: This chapter contains content that may be distressing for some. Read at your own discretion with the tags/rating of this story in mind. If you do not want to read such content, a summary of important plot details is available at the end of the chapter.

39

Thick ropes of saliva slung from Ar-Tashk's maw. His chest heaved and hot breath casting up plumes of dust that slowly settled across the carnage he had wrought. Orc and uruk bodies were strewn left, right, and center. Not a single one left intact.

The morning that his snaga had made her escape, he followed with dogged single-mindedness. The scent her, her blood driving him into a blind chase, tracking up and down the rocky hills. He could read the landscape as easily as if it was whispering its secrets to him.

Every place the tark's foot fell, every place she lingered, every rock she scraped against was plain before Ar-Tashk's keen senses. He could tell just from the strength of the smells how long she had paused, probably to catch her break, slow and pitiful as the human was. She wasn't made for trekking long distance like an orcish solider. What little distance she may have put between herself and Ar-Tashk, he could feel he was closing in quickly.

The closer he got, the more he could taste the metal of her blood in his mouth. Beads of it had soaked into the dry earth along her escape route. It created a tempting lure, clearly drawing the attention of olog and other predators alike.

More than once, Ar-Tashk identified the scratched, course ground that bore the sweated, beastly scent of warg, that was also following the blood-bead trail. The beast's trail wound and wavered, telling of how it would start to follow the trail, lose it briefly, then get back on track when it found the next blot in the path. Until, finally, Ar-Tashk caught up to it from downwind.

Just ahead, sitting at the edge of the riverside, Ar-Tashk's piercing, pale eyes spotted a half-grown warg that was completely consumed by a carcass it was eagerly digging into. It's broad snout was buried deep into the chest cavity of its prey, ears naively lax and inattentive. The sounds of bones crunching were so loud, it never heard the olog charge.

All of Ar-Tashk's fury burst forth, at the sights of the beast devouring what he could only assume was his snaga. The warg squealed as two massive hands grasped it and the weight of the olog slammed full force into its back. The poor beast's spine was instantly severed by the impact, making it drop limp before its attacker.

Ar-Tashk's pupils filled his eye with black, near to the point that there was only a sliver of his iris to be seen; the eyes of a predator in taking in its kill. The paralyzed warg whined and whimpered, unable to flee, unable to move even a twitch as the olog sank his own teeth into the base of the warg's skull. The long tusk-like teeth, though not razor sharp, had no issue puncturing and driving home into the warg's brain thanks to the immeasurable force with which the olog bit down.

When Ar-Tashk withdrew from the slaughtered beast, he started cursing, roaring in a sound like none he had ever emitted before. The vocalization split the silence of the barren fields around him, making even the river ripple and quiver. Had he really let a blasted warg, a pup even, steal the pleasure of taking his snaga's life?! The traitorous sharlob, that he'd spent so much effort with to keep alive for his own pleasure to snuff out, was devoured by a stupid beast of Mordor's wastes?! HIS SNAGA?!

His voice shuttered and he stalked towards the carcass that had been thrown towards the edge of the water in the scuffle. He uttered mad, dark oaths under his breath. Bloody machinations, crazed plans of he could get a dead-raiser to bring her back, just so he could finally get his chance to feel how to was to take the life from her.

He wanted to rip the scalp from her head and adorn his armor with the blaze of her red hair; he wanted to slit her wrists to drink her blood from her fingertips; he wanted to rip her entrails out for sausage casings... It was only when Ar-Tashk pushed some reeds aside to reveal the broken, half-eaten body, that the brutal thoughts paused. Before him, partially sunk in the water bobbed an unmistakably inhuman, headless body.

The gray and purple innards spilling from the gut of the body were coated in black blood; clearly that of an orc. Ar-Tashk's mind snapped from his ruminations, as he tried to piece together what it meant. The warg hadn't been eating his snaga, just some orcish shrakh!

As he looked around, he could see signs of a struggle, the scent of multiple orcs even, but no signs seemed to indicate the orc had fought the warg. No, the signs all pointed to a battle amongst orcs themselves; the unfortunate warg had likely just stumbled upon the body while tracking his snaga's blood trail. Which meant... His mind began to whirr.

A glint from under the water near Ar-Tashk's feet cut across his eyes. He snatched at the object, and with a dreadful, effortless tug, drew it from the mud of the river like a lance from a wound.

In the olog's giant hands hung the iron of manacles he was all too familiar with. Most tracking details had been washed away by the water, but despite having been in stuck in the muddy bank of the river, Ar-Tashk could still make out the barest hint of his snaga's scent upon the metal rings and chains- all the scents that marred them: strands of fiery red hair that had gotten tangled in the chain links, her blood and sweat, her fear and tears caught in grooves between welds, splashes of dried grog that had dribbled down her chin at one point or another and gummed the locks, the slight stench of uruk scum from his ex-overlord's touch stubbornly clinging to the metal surface.

Ar-Tashk uttered a guttural rumble, one so low only the earth could hear him. Someone had removed his snaga's chains and dumped them in the river, but why? His eyes flickered around, spotting black blood splattered on the reeds around him that hadn't come from the carcass floating at his feet. No, the blood held the scent of another orc. Two had died here; the one that the warg had started to eat, and another, whose body was nowhere to be seen.

He retraced his steps backwards, searching the dirt for more detail like... Beyond a tuft of grass he spotted the severed head of the corpse. And... there! A red drop of blood on a blade of grass, less viscous than the internal blood that his snaga had been shedding. Something had damaged her, making her bleed anew. His lip curled taking in two additional scents. More orc worms.

He had the trail now. It lead downriver, two orcs and his snaga, seemingly following with little evidence of resistance. Co-conspirators? Would she have willingly followed orcs? It made little sense to the olog. Whether or not they had anything to do with her disappearance from the start, Ar-Tashk could only speculate, but now, he mentally added them to his list for vengeance. Anyone who touched his snaga without permission, drew even a drop of her blood, was dead.

Before Ar-Tashk could make it too much further, he felt the winds shift, once more putting him downwind as he followed the trail, and with it came the heavy stench of more orcs. Just over the next hillock, a band of orcs hauling long forks, lead by a wizened and gray orc trawled over rock and ledge.

The old orc at the front of the pack motioned to his companions, "Come sunset we'll turn back an' meet the ship as she 'eads this ways. Til then, spread out an' look fer more for the tribute."

Another orc licked its lips excitedly, "Ya think we'll get ta attend one of those feasts at the fort when we'z get there?"

"I 'ear Ku'Gohn's a master of all eating finery. No ways he ain't throwin' a great feast!" another quipped. "I can just taste the endless grog, all the meat you can tear into. It'll be glorious!"

In a flash, Ar-Tashk's mind lit up in a frenzy at the mention of the orc he had originally slaughtered and claimed the sharlob snaga from. What did he have to do with any of this?!

"Maybe summa the old fortress guard will be on the menu eh?" The orc licking his lips was mid-response when he was bowled over and crushed under the foot of one of the biggest ologs the others in his company had ever seen.

Ar-Tashk let out a bellow, continuing his charge, bodychecking and bringing down another orc who screamed and gurgled as his skull was impaled by an iron spike that the olog drove through his head with a single hand.

An uruk wielding one of the staved forks snarled, running forward towards the fray while hollering, "Olrok! Another snagorsk!"

The uruk tried using his fork to pin the olog, but it snapped like a twig the moment that Ar-Tashk shrugged his broad shoulders. At the same time, the old orc, Olrok, whirled on his heel, screaming orders at his subordinates to subdue the rampaging beast that had fell upon them like a malevolent storm. It didn't matter much though, for the moment the old orc came within range, Ar-Tashk's nose flared, catching a familiar scent on the claws of the orc. He must have recently touched Ar-Tashk's slave, so he was to die as well.

Olrok could barely gasp as Ar-Tashk's boulder sized hand swatted him aside. His back cracked as he was sent tumbling and crashing into a jut outcropping and the orc sank to the ground before the eyes of his underlings.

One or two had the sense to turn and make a run for it. Olrok silently cursed at them from where he lay paralyzed. He could only watch as the remaining underlings all fell, one by one to the crazed fury of this mountainous, black-haired olog. Guts were scattered as he sliced them open with one of his great iron spikes, others were clobbered to death by a giant ballista that made the air collapse behind it in a hollow tone as it swung left and right with blinding speed.

Now, when the dust finally settled, the olog stood panting. Ar-Tashk sucked in great lungfuls of air to clear his head, to take in the carnage before him. Not a single member of the company still in the vicinity was left with any discernable features, They had all been turned to ground meet, except for one... Ar-Tashk's form turned ominously towards the old orc who had just witnessed his whole slave-hunting team be turned to pudding before his very eyes. Olrok sat limp and prone, without any ability to retaliate.

He groaned as the olog approached and seized him by his neck. An awful numbness would have crawled down Olrok's spine to his legs, if he had been able to feel them anymore. Ar-Tashk's eyes were black for how dilated his pupils were as he demanded in hideous blackspeech that the old orc tell him exactly where the tark sharlob was, "Mal ta, ik az zorr-lat?"

"You... poaching shrakh!" Olrok sneered as best his ruined muscles would allow. He could taste iron beginning to well up in the back of his throat. "This is... Frogblood's river! Yer blasted mates... and that sharlob bala... are his now."

"BALA..." Ar-Tashk intoned with a voice like a war drum, chilling Olrok to his core. "Lat hur-bugud snaga-izub bala?!"

"Yer slave... Ha! I know that weren't... yer whelp she spawned recently... Size... woulda killed 'er..." The old, mangled orc knew he had only moments to live, internal bleeding starting to make his vision grow dark as he mumbled, "If Frogblood sez she ain't fer... the Gourmet, Captain'll... just sell her back to the pits... Where... she... belongs..."

The orc's eyes misted over, staring blankly through Ar-Tashk with a hint of tortuous glee petrifying on his face at the idea he may have infuriated the olog with his dying breath. A pitiable revenge, but a revenge nonetheless as it dug into Ar-Tashk's psyche.

So what if it hadn't been his whelp his slave had given birth to recently? That didn't mean she wasn't his! The sharlob WAS his and his alone! He'd slaughter anyone who said otherwise, just as he had slaughtered Vezhir. His own voice was indignant within his mind, but was quickly overshadowed by the same vindictive tones of that second voice in his head; the one that fostered his darkest, most vicious desires. Vezhir took your slave from you. He made her his slave. HIS BALA. It was HIS whelp. Not YOURS.

Ar-Tashk felt his stomach lurch, like that of the rabid starvation he had fallen into so far back as his life in the desertous wastes to the East. He had been captured by uruks, muzzled, cowed and beat to the brink of death, cast aside and left for dead. The primal hunger he had felt all the way back then, a hunger for their blood, for his slave's blood, was returning now full force.

She spurned you, cast you aside! The voice murmured.

"Ta-izub!" Ar-Tashk angrily shook the corpse of the orc in his hand as if it could still hear him, as if the voice in his head would respond out loud. "Ta-izub! Snaga-izub! Isla...izub..."

As the olog's declarations fell on dead ears, the voice in his head seemed to laugh mockingly at him. If she is yours, then prove it. Hunt her. Take her. Make her bleed. Make her suffer. Make her yours.

Ar-Tashk gripped his ballista rightly, causing it's iron and timber to creak in protest. The voice was right, she would learn the meaning of who owned her. Now it was a simple matter of tracing back along the route the slaughtered slavers had taken, and he'd find this "Frogblood" the old orc had spoken of.

***** Summary to skip violent sequences *****

Ar-Tashk angrily fantasizes about how he will torture Alaesia, as he tracks her trail to where she was captured by Zathra, Barbaurak, Silgak, and Tuka. He finds a warg eating Silgak's carcass, and thinking it is eating Alaesia, he kills it. Upon realizing it wasn't eating Alaesia, he starts tracking again, following the trail that Zathra and Barbaurak took with Alaesia in tow. Along the way, he runs into the group of slavers led by Olrok (the same band that earlier captured Zathra, Barbaurak, and Alaesia).

Ar-Tashk slaughters the lot of them after hearing them speak of his old enemy, Ku'Gohn. As a last bit of spite, Olrok mocks Ar-Tashk's supposed "ownership" of Alaesia, which strengthens the influence of the malevolent voice in Ar-Tashk's head. He begins backtracking Olrok's trail to continue searching for Alaesia, now knowing that she is likely being held by an orc by the name of "Frogblood."

***** Translations *****

Snaga - slave

Tark - human

Sharlob - human (female)

Shrakh - Shit

Snagorsk - slave thief (poacher)

Mal ta, ik az zorr-lat? - Where is she, before I gut you?

Bala - Breeder

Lat hur-bugud snaga-izub bala?! - You dare call my slave a breeder?!

Ta-izub! - She's mine!

Ta-izub! Snaga-izub! Isla...izub... - She is mine! My slave! My... lifemaker...