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

We are just about to enter the home stretch now!

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94

The split of the rocky mountainside they emerged from opened up, not to the rain storm from when they had entered, but to what had grown into a vicious, unforgiving blizzard. Howling wind roared and echoed all around, like a giant beast screaming its death throes. A wall of gray and white as far as the eye could see damned any chance at spying into the human territories.

Zathra cursed, hopeless at the prospect before him, but it was his only option. The swarm of spiders would track the heat of their bodies anywhere they tried to seek shelter. No doubt every crevice, cave, and tunnel was infested with the arachnids at the start of their wintering, deep in the mountains until spring would come; starving for any meal they could get their fangs into.

No... They couldn't retreat. Ar-Tashk had bought them this one chance. Zathra couldn't afford to waste it hoping the weather would clear. Alaesia didn't have that kind of time.

Zathra mounted up along with his ward and spurred Grothraum onward with every ounce of his willpower, though floundering blindly, directionless. The orc prayed silently, wondering if his aimless pleading would be intercepted by the Dark Lord from this side of the Ephel Duath, or if it might reach some greater, more benevolent entity. Only pure luck could get them safely down the mountains now.

He commanded the warg to charge down steep drops and cragged cliffs with near reckless abandon. Chunks of ice and slabs of the mountainside were ripped into precarious freefalls by the gray beast's claws as he scrambled to keep his massive paws underneath his body. He was built for soft earth that he could dig into, but here his paws, though dexterous, glanced off the hard rocks, giving the warg no safe purchase. The terrain was unforgiving in its spires of stone, the stark and brutal division between Gondor and Mordor, made all the worse by the weather.

Drifts of snow softened the impact as they descended, but also hid dangerous chasms and jagged spears of the landscape that would either swallow them whole, or impale them like a banner to serve as a warning to any other who might try to cross such treacherous territories. There was a reason few braved dared to brave the mountains themselves rather than travel to the far north to the breaches that offered safer passage. One misplaced step would spell certain doom for all of them; the warg, the orc, and the human.

Though the venom coursing inward from her shoulder was already well on its way, dragging her towards that fate.

The world swam around Alaesia in a strange ethereal swirl. Flurries of white smudged the night sky, lashing across any skin bare to the elements until she thought she must have been cut, for how sharp the sting was. Crystals of ice formed at the corners of her eyes, almost sealing her lashes together. Zathra had her pressed down into the thick, warm fur of the warg's back, sheltering the woman as best he could with his own body, but his charge was incognizant of his intent, and primal resistance filled her.

Alaesia's breathing was faltering, her lungs burned for oxygen but her stomach had turned to stone. A pitiful gasp was the best she could muster, and even that faded to a silent gape of her bluing lips with time. She wanted to protest, to throw Zathra off her back, but she grew more stiff and languid with each passing moment. The refusal of her muscles to comply seeded a panic within her. But she couldn't cry out. Neither fear nor pain was enough to summon her voice.

A loathing tightened around the base of her throat, like the sensation of a noose of webs clinging to her skin quietly whispering warnings of instinctive danger. The orc was uncomfortably close, so much so that the rasp of his breathing threatened to split her eardrums. It was so horrible, so loud! Like the screech of metal sheering into pieces. Alaesia tried to ignore it, to blot out the echoes and the sensation of his chest pressed against her back as reason twined itself with frightened delusions of her limbs being torn away from her body.

The auditory hallucinations grew more palpable as the swelling fever at the back of her ankle was lost in the fuzzing sensation creeping from her toe-tips upwards. The loss of feeling might have been due to the venom, or perhaps the subfreezing temperatures, she couldn't tell. It chilled her like death, while somehow also feeling as though fire lapped at her flesh, and at the same time, it felt like nothing, as if her limbs simply never existed in the first place.

For a delirious moment, her mind fixated on the thought of the old hide footwraps she'd once worn, that had been torn from her feet at some point... When had that happened?

Was it after her last run-in with Vezhir? Maybe when Zathra had healed the cuts along the soles of her feet? Surely it hadn't been that long? She couldn't remember, but the confusion rose as anger in her chest; a disproportionate irritation with herself. How could she have been so careless, to lose track of them? Sure, she had done a terrible job preparing and curing the skins for making the wraps so long ago, but it was better than nothing, in this hypothermic chill. Perhaps she should have taken up Zathra's offer to make her boots.

She berated herself, both for having rebuked the peace offering and for thinking ill of Zathra even still. There was little she could do to shake some sense into herself, as she retorted between conflicting sides of her psyche, He's an orc; I shouldn't trust him! But he's stuck around... all this time, keeping his promises... Hasn't he? He's taking me away... Where is he taking me... Something's missing? What am I missing... I can't... think clearly... It's a trap... It's always a trap...

Her thoughts bickered absently as if there was nothing more important in the world right now. A part of her wanted to trust Zathra, but how could she? Why did she feel so alone, when he was right there? She wondered without any real intent of formulating an answer to her own questions. She would never admit the sickening feeling in her chest, at least not out loud. The feeling wasn't even from the venom; but rather a terrible ache arose from within, a pain of missing something or someone. What or who, however, was just beyond her ability to grasp. The delirium meant nothing but her most immediate troubles existed to Alaesia, and even that was slipping from her recognition of reality.

"Stay with me, lass!" Zathra grunted over the whistling of the whipping winds. The lurch and sway of Grothraum beneath them drained what little blood was left in her cheeks, as waves of nausea began rolling through her, "Don't close yer eyes! Stay awake!"

The woman's thoughts wove in and out so fast, with little rhyme or reason, that Zathra barely had time to grab one thread before it split and frayed into garbled meaninglessness. Flashes of anger disappeared in a fizzle, followed by confusion and heartache, only to be yet replaced by mundane musings of a long-since-past lifetime as an outcast, cut by shots of urgency at the finality of death.

Abrupt fear surged in the face of her mortality, and yet even that was punctuated by a desperation for comfort from the only thing she had come to rely on; the orc could do nothing to fill the void of the olog's absence.

The Reaper was the only balm that might have soothed her panicked, flighty, and wilding mind, without the risk of breaking her again, yet she couldn't even formulate a coherent thought of him. Each time she grasped to picture the thing missing from her mind, her thoughts only saw a mass of stone. This moment, now, was the only thing that existed in her bewilderment as the venom's mind-clouding influence grew stronger over the woman.

Blasted vermin... Zathra could feel a hint of it himself.

The spider bite he had taken on his wrist was itching with searing aches, but, to his relief, he found it struggled to travel through the scarred tissue of his burns. The restricted blood flow and gnarled flesh, caused by his haphazard healing so long ago, was effectively stopping all but the smallest amount of venom from creeping its way into his brain.

The orc had but a taste of what was coursing through Alaesia's now, but the curse of his scars had become a boon in ways he had never could have imagined. His only concern was the tensioned swelling in the skin of his knuckles from the venom pooling like molten lava at the injection site. Why couldn't those damn spiders have targeted his wraith-like arm instead of the flesh-and-blood one?!

The chances of the trio's survival hinged on Zathra's warg. The gray beast, named for just such a terrible storm, trudged across narrow valleys of snow, scampered down steep juts of rock, and forged a path through the fog. Grothraum's senses were nearly blinded, but onward he pressed with dogged obedience. More than once the wrong placement of his paws here or there caused a cascade of snowpack to drop out from beneath him, narrowly missing a long drop to the inky black of the mountain's belly below.

What seemed like hours passed without a moment of rest between the orc and the warg. Each grew more exhausted, but Zathra couldn't allow them to stop. Alaesia's thoughts were turning to static now; the venom's full effect had taken hold. Carrying his misfortunate passengers, Grothraum descended below the layer of clouds engulfing the mountainside, but as he did so, the storm finally broke and silence fell over them.

Before them, the night was awash in starlight, the land had turned into a great sea of white, disappearing into the distance and crowned by glittering jewels sewn into a tapestry of black sky. Zathra stiffly sat upright, taking in the sight. Never had he seen such clear skies; it both awed and unnerved him.

This land was wrong for him, for his kind. He was never meant to want such a sight, a creature relegated to shadow and darkness. And yet, it called to him.

Or maybe that was just the other voice in his head, murmuring a wordless melody to the sky. Grateful as he was for its sudden and miraculous guidance back in the cave, he had other worries than the thoughts of some mad elf-ghost pining for the sky.

He shook Alaesia's bony shoulder urgently, simultaneously shaking off the presence, "Lass, look! It's Gondor!"

But she didn't stir.

"Alaesia!" He snarled louder, trying to bring her back to consciousness. Her breathing had slowed to faint, far apart gasps, "Come on! Ye didn't make it this far ta die like this! Wake up, lass!"

Zathra jammed his heels into Grothraum's sides. Flurries kicked up behind them as they hurtled onward, until, there! His eyes scanned the dark horizon desperately, until a tiny flicker caught his attention. For a moment, he thought he spied a drop of orange light among the dark silhouettes of a forest's treeline below, but quick as it had appeared, it was gone. It was the best he could hope for. Grothraum switched directions immediately, as if his will was one with the orc's, while his master kept searching.

There it was again! It had to be a fire; maybe nothing more than a torch, but a torch meant life. And that hopefully, he pled a black-hearted cry of his own to the sky, meant tarks.

She deserves that much at least! The orc would have cursed the world itself, if after all Alaesia had gone through, he accidentally ended up taking her right back into the waiting hands of some backwoods goblin hermits or wild trolls on this side of the ridge.

The speck of orange light grew closer and closer, growing in size, splitting now into multiple points flashing through the trees; too big for a single torch, too many for a small band of travelers, and too structured for a ragtag orc camp. Through the dark, Zathra could just make out the sight of a modest wall constructed of stone and wood, as closer and closer he rode. Atop it a shadowy figure strode, carrying a lamp that glinted off the shape of the armor plates they wore, shielded by a billowy cloak of fabric and fur.

A guard.

The scent, as the orc drew closer, was unmistakable.

Humans.

***** Translations *****

Tarks - Humans