The Profane Region knew no peace.
For years, Durok Thrazk led his warbands across its scorched bones, fighting not for conquest, but for cohesion — for survival. The old tribes fell one by one, absorbed by the growing force of the Thrazk Alliance. But every victory left behind a wound: in the earth, in the people, and in Durok’s heart.
The Profane Region was a land of ruins and ghosts. Twisted forests clawed at the sky. Rivers ran thick with silt and ash. Crops failed. Animals were scarce. Tribes that once flourished became starving packs of raiders — desperate, vicious, beyond reasoning.
The Thrazk moved like a disciplined storm, assimilating what they could, cutting down those who would not listen. Each step forward meant fire. Each alliance was born from ash.
At night, after the feasting and the chants had died down, Durok would walk the edges of camp alone. The laughter of his warriors no longer reached him. The praise felt hollow. He bore the burden of every choice made in his name.
His hands, once calloused only from combat, were now stained by diplomacy, executions, and compromise. Tarn noticed the change, but never commented. Varsha said nothing, but her eyes sometimes lingered on his face longer than they used to — as if searching for the orc she had once sworn to follow.
Durok still believed in the cause. But he no longer believed in its simplicity.
How many more would need to die? How many more young warriors like Rugar, whose only crime was belief?
He began keeping a journal. Few knew it existed — a roll of treated leather, tucked beneath his armor, filled with half-sentences and scratched dreams.
“There must be a way to feed a people without cutting open the earth first.”
“I saw a child die today for a patch of weeds. We cannot call this strength.”
It was the slaves who planted the first seeds of his new longing.
The dwarves from Krag’dun, begrudging but alive, spoke of rivers that ran cold and pure, where fish jumped freely and the trees grew straight and tall. The elves taken from border skirmishes told tales of cities hidden in emerald canopies, where magic lit the streets and food was harvested with song.
But it was a human, a scarred old woman once captured from a caravan that wandered too close to the Profane Region, who first described to Durok the vision that would haunt his nights:
“Out there,” she rasped, “are fields so green you could weep. Hills that roll like ocean waves. Wheat, boy, golden and tall. Enough to feed ten tribes. And peace, Durok. Real peace.”
At first, he dismissed it. A story to cope with chains. A fantasy.
But the next night, as he stood staring across the dry, cracked horizon of his homeland, her words returned — uninvited, unshakable.
Over the years, Durok ordered fewer punitive raids.
Instead, he began targeting only hostile outposts, favoring those who had dwarven or human slaves — not to pillage, but to liberate and learn. Slaves who proved honest and skilled were given food, shelter, protection — and more importantly, dignity.
He stopped taking orcish slaves entirely.
“We build now,” he told Tarn and Varsha. “We do not harvest blood like grain. We harvest knowledge.”
In the heart of the camp, near the war tent, stood a newly constructed enclave — the “Iron Circle.” It housed not warriors, but craftsmen and scholars. And not all of them were orcs.
Dwarves captured from rival tribes — often under abusive bondage — were now offered an alternative: serve with dignity, or rot in chains.
Many spat in Durok’s face. But some, especially the broken ones who had tasted orc savagery firsthand, hesitated. And then… they accepted.
Those who did were well-fed, protected, and respected — given small forges, tools, and even guards for their own safety. They taught metallurgy, advanced siege tactics, even script. The orcs in turn began learning. Not just how to kill — but how to build.
Tarn, once a youth full of grief, now supervised many of these exchanges. Where Rugar had died in shame, Tarn honored him by ensuring his people lived in purpose.
Varsha watched all of it unfold from her forge atop the cliffside. Her hammer rang in harmony with the tribal chants, and for the first time in decades, she believed that this tribe… might outlive her.
Yet Durok remained solitary.
He visited no feast. He drank no mead. At night, he stood by the central fire alone, scar burning beneath the cold wind.
His reforms were working. But they came at a price.
Was it worth it, Rugar?
Would you still have chosen this, if you knew where it would lead?
Durok never asked aloud.
Instead, he stared into the flame and whispered the words that now defined his soul:
“No more half-measures. No more mercy without purpose. If we are to survive… it must be as one.”
In the camp’s center, a new symbol was raised — not a flag, but a stone monument etched with runes in three languages: Orcish, Dwarvish, and the human trade tongue.
It read:
“What we build, we defend. What we learn, we keep. What we conquer, we raise higher.”
But it was the nightmares that changed him most.
In his sleep, Durok began to dream of a world without steel and war cries. He walked through open meadows. He saw orcs tilling the land, side by side with humans and halfkin. He heard children’s laughter, not from dominance, but from safety.
He always woke in silence.
But the fire inside him burned different now.
No longer just a weapon of survival. Now, it warmed the path to something more.
The years carved his name into the bones of the Profane Region.
Durok Thrazk, now called The Unifier by warriors and enemies alike, had forged more than just a tribe — he had built a movement. Under his banner of fire and reason, orcs and half-orcs abandoned blood feuds and ancestral grudges to serve something greater.
But unification came not from peace treaties, but from the crucible of battle.
In the southern Flame Wastes, the Ashmaul Clans held fast to brutal tradition. Known for their fire-worship and feral berserkers, they sacrificed their own elders before every war to “awaken the rage of their ancestors.”
Durok sent envoys. They returned with broken bones and tongues removed.
There was no diplomacy. Only fire.
The Thrazk descended at dusk. Tarn led a small vanguard to ignite their outer tents and draw the berserkers into open ground. Varsha and her hammerguard flanked from the east, collapsing the canyon paths the Ashmaul had used for ambushes. Durok himself led the center, wielding not just his axe, but the trust of warriors shaped by years under his command.
The Ashmaul Clans fell in three days. Their fire altars were torn down. Their forges rebuilt. But among the fallen, Durok noticed something strange — a chieftain with deep scars across his chest in the shape of burned runes, charred permanently into his flesh.
“It’s not tribal,” Varsha said after examining the corpse. “These markings… I’ve seen them before. Long ago, during the days of the Great Pillaging.”
That’s what the orcs called the Daemon War. Not a tragedy. Not a warning.
To the old tribes, it was a time of glory, when the orcs showed the world the true price of underestimating them. When their gods — especially Mordhekan, the Lord of War — whispered from bloodied skies.
“Just superstition,” Varsha muttered. “Symbols of old myth. Tribal scare stories.”
But Durok felt no comfort in her words.
After that, the dreams began.
He would stand upon a battlefield, victorious, until the sky itself began to bleed. The corpses of the fallen rose, their skin crackling, their eyes weeping fire. From the smoke, a colossal armored figure emerged, faceless and burning, dragging a blade that screamed when it moved.
Every night, Durok would wake drenched in sweat, the runes from the Ashmaul chief etched into his mind.
He said nothing at first. He had no time for fear. The campaign continued.
To the east, the Bonehand Reavers ruled through cruelty. Their warbands were known to hunt not for conquest but for sport. They flayed the faces of their prisoners and wore them as masks, offering trophies to gods they no longer named.
When the Thrazk forces surrounded their stronghold, the Reavers emerged willingly — not to surrender, but to burn themselves alive and chant in tongues no orc recognized.
As the fire consumed them, Durok watched in horror. Their skin bubbled and split — revealing, beneath the ash, the same cursed runes.
“They are not just myths,” he said to Varsha. “Something… something is waking.”
She nodded, this time with less confidence. “Then we may be too late to stop it.”
Tarn began reporting sightings of black-robed wanderers in distant tribes. Warriors who did not bleed when cut. Elders who spoke in unison. Camps found torn apart with no signs of attackers — just strange symbols carved into walls.
Durok ordered a map drawn — and the pattern was clear.
A slow encirclement. A whispering influence, not of brute force but of corruption. Some tribes weren’t conquered. They simply… changed.
And now, even among his own, Durok began to sense unrest.
Strange chants heard at night. Soldiers speaking of voices in the flames. One of the newly integrated chieftains carved a rune into his own chest during a feast — claiming Mordhekan had “blessed the Unifier’s vision.”
Durok had him executed the next morning.
For months, whispers of blood and rebellion preceded the name of Gorrath — The Flayer — a legend in orc circles, once presumed dead or broken after refusing Durok’s unification years prior. But now, his name surged across the Profane Region like a blade drawn across flesh.
He had returned with a vengeance — not to unify, but to tear apart all that Durok had built.
Gorrath’s banner was simple: a bleeding skull flayed of skin, nailed to the mast of a rusted war spear. His warbands were numerous, fanatical, and bound not by loyalty — but by shared bloodlust. Tribes that refused to join Durok found in Gorrath a brutal sanctuary.
Where Durok built, Gorrath destroyed. Where Durok forged alliances, Gorrath sowed chaos.
At first, Durok thought to outmaneuver him.
He deployed scouts, flanked his raids, choked supply routes — but Gorrath’s forces were not traditional. They moved through forgotten caves, struck from shadow, vanished into cursed lands others dared not enter. They desecrated every settlement that bore the Thrazk standard, impaling the heads of Durok’s diplomats as warnings.
It was more than war. It was mockery.
Even Tarn, ever calm, admitted:
“This one isn’t like the others. He doesn’t want to win. He wants you broken.”
Varsha bore a gash across her ribs from a skirmish gone wrong and added:
“And he nearly did. If your orders had come a second later…”
Durok knew. For the first time in years, the tide did not move in his favor.
Each clash with Gorrath’s warbands came at a higher cost.
At the Battle of Blackstone Hollow, Durok lost nearly fifty of his best — including two of his war captains — just to stall a Gorrath advance. At Bone Cradle Pass, the enemy used civilians as living shields, forcing Thrazk warriors to retreat or slaughter the very people they’d sworn to protect.
“He fights like there’s nothing left to save,” said one veteran with dead eyes.
But the most painful blow came at Fury’s Crossing, where Gorrath personally appeared on the battlefield for the first time.
A mountain of a warrior — covered in flayed trophies — Gorrath wielded a cleaver forged from the bones of his enemies and enchanted with sigils no shaman could trace. When he appeared, his soldiers went into frenzy. When he killed, he screamed in joy.
He slew a Thrazk subcommander with a single blow — and drank from his skull before the battle had even ended.
That night, Durok sat in silence beneath a blood-soaked sky, staring at the fire, lost in thought.
The strange omens — the branded enemies, the whispers of Mordhekan — faded from Durok’s immediate concern. There was no time to investigate shadows when Gorrath was gutting his future tribe by tribe.
He turned his attention fully to war.
A high war council was held in secret. Varsha, wrapped in bandages; Tarn, bruised but unbowed; and three surviving warband leaders. The map before them bore scars, like the land itself — black markers of battles lost, red runes where Gorrath was last sighted.
“We have chased his echoes,” Durok muttered. “Now we bring the fire to him.”
He pointed to the heart of Gorrath’s territory — Redfang Hollow — an ancient ravine-camp built into the bones of a Daemon-warped canyon.
“We hit him there. All of him. One strike, one chance. No more slow deaths.”
The council agreed.
The final campaign against Gorrath was to begin.
As Durok left the war tent, a cold wind swept through the camp — unnatural in its chill.
And for the first time in months… he remembered the runes, and the dreams.
“When blood flows for blood’s sake…” he whispered to himself. “…what gods awaken to drink?”
But he shook the thought away. The Flayer awaited.
And Durok would answer.
The air in the Profane Region hung still — too still, as if the land itself were holding its breath. The skies above the Thrazk encampment were overcast with heavy clouds, but no rain came. Only silence. As if the coming bloodshed had stilled even the wind.
In the heart of the camp, fires glowed gently, not with the violent hunger of orc warbands past, but with warmth. Children chased each other between stone forges and canvas shelters. Smiths worked late, perfecting weapons not just for conquest, but for defense. For a future.
It had taken years, but Durok had done the unthinkable.
His people — halfkin and orc alike — were no longer starving in ruins or drowning in rage. They had order, a purpose, and even something faint but precious: hope.
Durok walked the perimeter of the camp alone, as he often did before war.
He passed the gardens, humble rows of mushrooms and medicinal roots grown in troughs made of salvaged stone. He remembered the first dwarf slave who had shown them how to filter the soil. That dwarf had chosen to stay, even after being freed.
He passed the children’s hall, where younglings learned more than just blood rites — they studied maps, languages, engineering, and tactics. A world beyond steel.
A few of them waved to him. He offered a faint smile — but inside, his heart twisted.
They’re what I fight for now. Not glory. Not revenge. Not even unity. Just a tomorrow they can survive in.
Later, he summoned Tarn and Varsha to the war tent, a small fire crackling at its center. They did not speak at first — they only watched him, as they had since the beginning. Always loyal. Always prepared.
“This tribe is no longer just a camp of survivors,” Durok finally said. “We have families now. Craftsmen. Healers. Even fools in love. We have people. And that means we have something to lose.”
Varsha rested her hand on her hammer’s hilt. “Then we fight harder.”
Tarn grunted. “Or smarter.”
Durok looked to them both. “I need you alive tomorrow. If I fall…”
“You won’t,” Varsha said firmly.
“But if I do,” Durok continued, ignoring her, “lead them. Build something. Don’t let this end in ash.”
Tarn hesitated. “If you die, Durok… the tribe may not hold.”
Durok nodded solemnly. “Then we make sure I don’t.”
They clasped forearms — not as commander and soldiers, but as brothers and sister of purpose.
That night, Durok tried to rest.
Sleep came slowly, and when it did, it came not as peace, but as a storm.
He stood in the middle of a vast battlefield. Not one he knew. Not one he remembered. The skies burned red. The earth cracked and bled. Around him lay not his enemies — but his own warriors, eyes wide in betrayal.
At the edge of the field stood a figure of pure shadow, marked by burning runes — the same marks that had haunted him for years. It extended its hand.
“You built something strong,” it whispered, a voice like splintering stone. “Let me finish it for you.”
Durok stepped back, shaking his head.
Then, suddenly, the dream shifted.
He stood instead in a field of green, a meadow stretching beyond sight, alive with color. Children ran freely. Orcs — his orcs — worked the land with pride. Rivers shone like silver threads. In the distance, mountains loomed — but not in threat.
He could smell the grass.
“This is the Astravara I want,” he whispered. “This is the dream.”
Durok awoke before dawn, sweat on his brow, fists clenched.
He rose, armed himself, and stepped into the chill morning air.
The sun had not yet risen, but already, the camp was stirring. Warriors gathered their arms. Scouts checked their gear. Priests lit the sacred fires of blood and unity.
And Durok — the halfkin who had once been spat on by his own kin — stood at the heart of them all.
Tomorrow, he would march on Redfang Hollow.
Tomorrow, he would confront the last great obstacle to his people’s future.
He whispered the words aloud, low but clear:
“For the green fields. For the blood already shed. For the last time… we fight.”
The sky was a shroud of steel. Clouds hung low, thick with the scent of rain and blood yet to be spilled. In the center of the Thrazk camp, fires had been lit — not for warmth, but for ritual.
The warriors assembled in silence, arranged in concentric circles around the Flame Pit, a sacred trench filled with coals that symbolized the forge of their unity. Each warrior stood bare-chested before the fire, smeared in clay and ash. One by one, they stepped forward to have their forearms cut lightly with obsidian blades, letting their blood fall into the flames.
“Not as sacrifice,” intoned the priest. “But as promise. Not for the gods, but for each other.”
This was Durok’s doing — a new rite, built upon old traditions but transformed. Blood was no longer spilled in isolation, but in solidarity. Half-orc, full-blood, male, female — all bled the same. All burned the same.
Tarn inspected his spear personally, its haft wrapped in sinew from the beast he’d slain to prove himself. Varsha ran her fingers across her hammer’s newly reforged head, etched with dwarven rune patterns — knowledge taken, not stolen, from their former captives now turned teachers.
Around them, rows of warriors donned reinforced armor, a patchwork of orc hide, chainmail, and riveted plating. Crossbows, rare in orcish arsenals, were checked and loaded. Oil bombs — crude, yet effective — were passed to those at the rear.
Durok had changed them. They were no longer just a warband.
They were a nation born in fire.
Durok stepped up onto the stone mound at the center of the camp. The drums fell silent. All eyes turned to him.
“Many of you were born with nothing,” he began, voice steady but thundering. “No name. No place. Just blood in your mouth and chains at your ankles.”
“I was born the same. A mistake, they called me. An insult to the orc bloodline. A bastard.”
He paused, and the wind carried the silence across the fires.
“But today, they call me Unifier.”
“Not because I’m the strongest. Or the smartest. But because I refused to crawl. I stood. And I built something that’s never been built in these lands before — a future.”
His gaze swept across the faces before him — scarred, hardened, but lit with resolve.
“Redfang Hollow is the last stronghold of the old ways. Gorrath and his dogs would tear apart everything we’ve built, and laugh as we bleed.”
“So tomorrow, I’ll be first through the gates.”
“You don’t follow me because of my blood. You follow me because you believe. And if I fall — let that belief carry you forward.”
He lifted his axe overhead.
“Tomorrow, we carve a new path through stone and bone. For Thrazk. For the dream. FOR THE FUTURE!”
The camp roared. Weapons clanged against shields. Chants echoed through the barrens.
“For the dream! For the future! For the tribe!”
At dawn, they marched.
Redfang Hollow loomed before them — a fortress carved into the jagged walls of a ravine, surrounded by barbed barricades and watchtowers made of bone. Gorrath’s banner — the flayed skull — flew high from the peak.
The path into the Hollow was narrow and treacherous. Natural chokepoints made it a death trap. And Gorrath was ready.
The first vanguard advanced with shield walls, a rare tactic among orcs, but one Durok had trained them in tirelessly. Arrows rained from above. Boiling pitch was poured from cliffside vents. Still, they pushed.
Every meter was bought with blood.
Varsha led the flank squads, deploying smoke bombs to blind archers while others scaled the ravine on grappling lines — another innovation from the dwarven blacksmiths. Tarn commanded the mobile skirmishers, weaving between fire and blade, cutting off reinforcements and collapsing ambushes before they could form.
At the center, Durok himself smashed through the front line, his axe cleaving two warriors with every swing. He fought not as a leader, but as a symbol — tireless, unyielding.
“Burn the gates!” he roared.
Sappers brought forward the oil casks. The massive bone gate of Redfang Hollow erupted in flame. Even as defenders poured water from above, Durok charged through the smoldering wreckage, his armor glowing from heat, his vision locked ahead.
The outer defenses had fallen, but Redfang Hollow was not just a fortress. It was a labyrinth. A bone-choked warren of death, built to bleed invaders step by step, inch by inch.
Durok led from the front, but the deeper they advanced, the darker and more unnatural the air became. The walls — once simple stone — were now marked with crimson runes, pulsing faintly. Whispers filled the ears of the warriors, not from the living — but from the stones.
“Something else lives here,” Tarn muttered as they passed through a black-iron gate slick with old blood.
They pressed on.
The defenders inside the Hollow were fanatics. These were not just orcs — they were marked. Many bore twisted scars carved in spirals, and some had torn out their own eyes and replaced them with shards of obsidian, blind but maddened with fervor.
Each room became a slaughterhouse.
At the Bridge of Iron Teeth, Durok lost thirty warriors when a trap collapsed the walkway into a pit of metal spikes and fire. Screams echoed for minutes as the wounded burned.
At the Halls of Hunger, an ambush erupted from false walls, where Tarn was pulled down into a blood-soaked corridor by three enemies. Durok heard the fight behind him — heard the gurgled cries — but could not turn back.
Only later did Tarn limp from the shadows, half his armor torn away, bleeding but alive.
“It’ll take more than madness to kill me,” he growled.
In the Shrine of Warped Kin, Varsha was separated from her unit. When Durok reached her, she was pinned beneath a fallen statue, holding back two corrupted warriors with only her dagger.
He hauled the statue off her with a roar, but she was barely breathing. Her ribs shattered. Her warhammer gone.
“Don’t stop now, Unifier,” she wheezed. “Finish it.”
Durok kept walking — bloodied, battered — and passed the bodies of his own.
Each time he stopped.
Each time he whispered their names.
“Hron, who taught the children to hunt.”
“Bara, who sang during rainstorms.”
“Kel’Rath, who made us laugh when food ran thin.”
He did not weep. But his fury burned colder. Deeper.
This wasn’t just about war.
This was desecration.
At last, they reached the final chamber — a vast cavernous hall beneath the mountain, lit by torches made of charred skulls. At its center rose a throne carved from bone and obsidian, set atop a mound of twisted corpses — trophies, piled high.
And there he sat.
Gorrath the Flayer.
But he was no longer the beast Durok had once known.
He was bigger now, his veins glowing faint red beneath scarred skin. His eyes were pits of smoldering fire. His armor pulsed with sickly symbols, and in his hand, he held a massive war mace, black as night, pulsing with runes that throbbed like open wounds.
The air reeked of sulfur and blood, and every breath Durok took tasted like rot.
Gorrath stood slowly, each movement cracking the bones beneath his feet.
“I told them you’d come,” he rasped, voice no longer entirely his. “I called you here.”
He raised the mace, and the very stone shivered.
“You think yourself a builder. A unifier. A fool. We were made for war, Durok. We were forged to conquer.”
“And I,” he smiled, lips splitting at the edges, “have been chosen. The Flame of the War God burns in me now. And with it, I will tear your dream from this world.”
Durok stepped forward, axe in hand, his gaze unflinching.
“You were never a god’s champion,” he growled. “You were always just a butcher.”
He lowered into stance, the last of his strength coiled.
“Let’s see if your god can save you.”
Gorrath stepped down from his throne of bones, the surviving warriors — on both sides — began to move.
They knew this rite. This law.
Even in this age of blood and ruin, the old customs held: when two warleaders challenged each other before the eyes of their kin, the result would bind the future of all who watched.
The warriors began to clear the hall. Weapons lowered. Bloodied but silent.
No interference. No retreat. No mercy.
A circle was formed. Torches lifted. Even the torchlight seemed to flinch at the tension in the air.
Durok limped into the center, Varsha and Tarn watching from behind the ring of fire and faces.
“If I fall,” he had told them quietly, “carry the dream forward.”
Tarn had nodded, eyes blazing. Varsha only gripped his shoulder in silence.
Across from him, Gorrath loomed — a walking juggernaut, breathing like a beast, his war mace crackling with infernal energy.
The circle sealed around them. There would be no escape. Only truth by steel.
Gorrath attacked first — a storm of brutality. His mace swung like a meteor, shattering stone and bone alike. Durok dodged by a hair’s breadth, rolling beneath the first strike. The second grazed his shoulder, sending sparks from his armor and pain screaming up his spine.
Durok’s axe retaliated, hooking under Gorrath’s guard, drawing a line of blackened blood. But Gorrath laughed, grabbing Durok’s arm and slamming him into a pillar hard enough to crack it.
“You should have stayed in the dirt, half-blood!” he roared.
Blow after blow rained down. Durok barely blocked, his axe cracking at the haft. He was being overwhelmed.
His knee buckled. Blood poured from his temple. One eye began to swell shut.
But even as his body screamed, Durok’s mind burned clear.
Strength without discipline is a dull blade.
He baited Gorrath — staggered, feigned a limp, drew the monster in.
When Gorrath roared forward, Durok dove beneath his guard, driving his shoulder into Gorrath’s ribs and slamming his knee into the warped runes glowing there. Gorrath howled, staggered — and Durok’s axe bit deep into his thigh.
Blood sprayed. But Gorrath didn’t fall.
Instead, he slammed his mace into Durok’s chest, sending him flying backward across the stone floor.
Durok struggled to breathe — ribs shattered, blood bubbling at his lips. Gorrath approached like a demon born, dragging his mace that sparked with every step.
“I will burn your dream,” he growled. “And salt its ashes.”
Durok couldn’t rise.
Not yet.
He closed his eyes. And saw it — again.
The vision.
Green fields. Rivers clean and cold. Children, orc and half-orc, building — not burning.
And behind them, at the highest peak, a banner bearing the mark of Thrazk.
“It’s not over,” he whispered.
Gorrath raised his war mace high, runes flickering violently, as if hungry for the kill. Durok, coughing blood, knee on the ground, knew he couldn’t take another hit.
But he also knew: this was it.
Not just for him — for everything. For the dream. For Rugar. For Krador. For Lena’thar. For the nameless half-blood children now watching behind the ring of flame.
As Gorrath brought the mace down in a final crushing arc, Durok lunged forward, using every last ounce of will left in his body. He let the mace strike his left forearm — bone shattered with a sound like dry wood snapping — but the block deflected the trajectory just enough.
The force spun him, but he didn’t let go of his axe.
Instead, he turned the spin into momentum — his body twisting low beneath Gorrath’s reach, his right arm lifting the axe in one final desperate strike.
A horizontal arc. Deep. Measured. Brutal.
The blade bit into Gorrath’s exposed side, under the ribs. Bone cracked. The warlord bellowed — not in rage, but in shock. Durok twisted the axe, pulled, then drove it upward into Gorrath’s heart.
Gorrath staggered, blood pouring from his mouth.
He looked down at Durok — as if truly seeing him for the first time.
“You… were never meant… to win…”
Durok’s reply was a whisper:
“That’s what makes it real.”
He twisted the axe one last time — and Gorrath collapsed.
The hall fell silent.
Only the crackling of torches and the slow drip of blood echoed across the stone.
Durok stood, trembling, one arm hanging limp and shattered, armor torn and soaked in crimson. But he stood.
The warriors watching knelt, one by one. No one dared speak. Not even Tarn. Not even Varsha.
Durok lifted his axe — with his good arm — and stabbed it into the stone beside him.
“Redfang Hollow is broken,” he rasped. “But the future still stands.”
He walked two steps forward, every muscle screaming. Then another. He refused to fall — not in front of them. Not now.
Only when the fires dimmed and the hall cleared — only when it was just Tarn, Varsha, and him — did his legs give out.
He collapsed into Tarn’s arms, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Chronicles of Astravara 