As Durok turned back one final time, he saw the square where he used to teach the children how to hold a wooden sword.
Now it was slick with blood.
The training dummies smoldered. The clay kiln shattered. Bodies — some with weapons, some without — lay strewn across the stone.
And above them, Vargosh stood atop the broken gatehouse, arms outstretched, laughing as if the gods themselves were whispering jokes in his ears.
Durok fell to his knees in the snow, just outside the tunnel. Silent. Empty. Broken.
He whispered to the wind:
“Forgive me.”
Then he rose, teeth gritted, and disappeared into the mountain.
The fires of Skarth’Darun had long since gone cold.
Durok wandered through the Profaned Region, where wind howled like mourning spirits and blackened roots clawed out of the soil like fingers of the dead. His armor hung in tatters, smeared in blood — some his own, most not. His arm still ached with every step, now bound in crude wrappings, useless for battle. But he wasn’t fighting anymore.
He was running.
Or drifting.
Time became a blurred smear of grey skies and muddy boots. Some days he moved with purpose. Most he couldn’t remember walking at all.
He could still hear their voices.
Varsha’s laugh — low, sharp, proud.
Tarn’s steady chants — reminding him to breathe during war drills.
Lukarr’s hands on his shoulders — “We follow you, because you never let us down.”
They were ghosts now.
Durok curled against a moss-covered rock one night, body trembling, not from cold — but from grief so deep it turned into sickness. The wind screamed through the canyons, and he whispered:
“Why did I think I could change them?”
We are orcs, the old voice in his mind said. Born of ruin. Fed by fire. Shaped for blood.
He had seen his own people become tools of daemonic corruption. They had torn apart a dream they helped build. He had failed them all. Failed the child who died in his first camp. Failed the elders who chose him. Failed every soul who had believed in something greater.
He clawed the dirt with his bare hands.
“I should’ve died with them.”
But every time he stopped, he remembered a voice.
“Go. Because what you gave us was more than walls and meals. You gave us dignity.”
He would wake up drenched in sweat. Covered in snow. Starving. But still walking. Still searching.
For what?
For the dream.
For the fields beyond the mountains.
The memory of the green valley he once saw in a dream — tall grass waving in a warm wind, untouched by blood — became his only compass.
He walked north. Always north.
Weeks passed. His body thinned, but his eyes sharpened with that singular hunger to see the sun again without smoke between him and its warmth.
One morning, shrouded in mist, he crested a ridge of black rock… and stopped.
There it was.
The Northern Wall.
Towering. Imposing. An ancient sentinel dividing the Profaned Wastes from the heartlands of Astravara. Its surface gleamed faintly under the rising sun, etched with symbols of divine law, watchtowers lining its top like the spines of a beast.
To orcs, it was a line drawn in blood.
Any orc approaching the wall was to be executed on sight. The Inquisition had made that very clear over centuries.
And yet here he was — one broken exile, with nothing left but the embers of a dream.
“They’ll kill me,” he muttered.
He thought of turning back.
But then he remembered something Varsha once said during a council night, while tracing a path across the map with charcoal-stained fingers:
“If we ever fall, there’s a trail carved in the stone south of the Ravenguard cliffs. Smugglers used it. So did half-bloods fleeing the fires. The Inquisition doesn’t watch it. Too narrow. Too old. But it leads past the wall.”
Durok stood in silence for hours.
The wind tugged at his cloak. Somewhere far behind, carrion birds circled ruins that once held his heart.
He took one step forward.
Then another.
Toward the secret path.
Toward the wall.
Toward whatever came next.
The wind cut like a blade between the jagged crags of the northern peaks. Durok pressed forward, hunched against the cold, his fingers numb around the haft of his axe. The smuggler’s path — once whispered about by fleeing half-orcs — was no road. It was a scar in the mountain, carved by desperation and time, long forgotten by those who still lived.
Each step was a test.
Narrow ridges crumbled beneath his boots, dropping into yawning ravines. Old rope bridges swayed in winds that howled like Daemon-borne spirits, and icy stones shifted under his weight, threatening to send him plummeting at every turn. There were no trails. No markers. Only instinct and fading memory to guide him.
“They said this path was real…” he muttered through clenched teeth, “but maybe I’ve already died. Maybe this is penance.”
His breath formed mist that clung to his face like a veil of ghosts. Blood seeped through the bindings on his arm, reopened by a slip on the rocks. Still he pushed on.
At night, he carved shallow crevices in the cliff walls and slept upright, half-expecting to awaken to dwarven scouts or falling stone. But the only things that visited him were cold dreams — of fire, of betrayal, of voices screaming his name and falling into silence.
At one point, while crawling along a crumbling ledge no wider than a man’s thigh, he froze at the distant sound of armor scraping stone — not close, but enough to send a spike of fear through him. He pressed himself into the rock, waited until darkness fell, and moved only by starlight.
He could not be caught. Not yet.
Three days passed.
Then five.
Food was almost gone. His waterskin had frozen solid the night before. But Durok’s eyes stayed forward, his heart bound by one thread — a dream stitched together by the blood of his kin.
He passed ruins carved into the stone — ancient and dwarven, overgrown and cracked — their forgotten gods watching him in silence. He left an offering there: a silver band from Varsha’s gauntlet, taken from her before he leaved her behind.
“May your ancestors know she was worthy.”
Finally, after crossing the final pass — a crag of sharp rock like broken teeth — Durok reached a narrow gorge. He pressed through thorned trees and stepped into shadow.
And then…
Light.
Green.
The air changed.
Not all at once — not like a miracle — but slowly, subtly, like the first breath after drowning. The scent of ash faded. The wind softened. And beneath Durok’s calloused feet, for the first time in years, he felt grass.
His boots sank into damp, living soil, not cracked stone or corrupted sand. Morning mist clung to the hillsides, and birds — real birds — called out in the distance. Not crows, not vultures, but voices filled with song.
And then he saw them.
The fields.
Rolling emerald hills, dappled in wildflowers. Trees swaying gently in the wind. A stream snaked through a distant valley, its waters gleaming like silver under the rising sun.
Durok dropped to his knees.
He gripped the earth as if afraid it might vanish. His fingers sank into the soil, and for the first time in countless seasons — he wept.
Not the silent grief of loss. Not the numbness of leadership’s burden.
This was a grief that broke through armor. A grief that cracked the dam of all the pain he’d held back since Skarth’Darun. For Tarn. For Varsha. For Lukarr. For Rugar. For every soul that died chasing a dream that died with them.
He pressed his forehead to the grass, shoulders trembling.
“I made you a promise,” he whispered. “I swore we’d see this together.”
The wind did not answer.
Only the soft rustle of leaves and the scent of life — clean, untainted — surrounded him like a cruel kindness.
As the tears dried, something else took their place.
Something hotter.
Hate.
Not the blind rage of youth, but a furnace of righteous fury stoked by betrayal and loss. His tribe had died for something real — for hope, for unity — and they had been slaughtered by monsters wearing the faces of their kin.
Durok rose to his feet, dirt-streaked and broken, but his eyes burned with purpose.
“They will pay.”
The words came like a curse, low and guttural.
“For every child butchered… for every loyal voice silenced… Vargosh will bleed for them all.”
His knuckles whitened as he gripped the hilt of his axe. But even vengeance needed a blade — and his was shattered. His people were gone.
He needed allies.
And then he remembered.
The dwarf.
Borrim “Stonebelly”, the captive who once taught his forge-masters how to temper steel the dwarven way. They’d shared fire once. Shared a bottle of brinewine smuggled from Krag’dun.
“One day,” Borrim had said, slurring his words through a smile, “I’ll take you to the stone halls of my home. We’ll drink like kings under the mountain, and I’ll show my kin that even half-orcs aren’t all bad.”
At the time, Durok had laughed.
Now, it felt like prophecy.
“If I must die to wake the wrath of the dwarves,” Durok muttered, eyes narrowing, “then let my blood cry loud enough to shatter the mountains.”
Chronicles of Astravara 
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