This is the first part of a fantasy series I have rolling around inside my head. Bear in mind, this is not a quick story that gets right to the action. I am actually trying to develop my characters a bit and have a bit of plot, as well as try my hand at something with a bit more romance in it. Sexiness ensues, but you might have to be patient. All the characters involved are over eighteen.
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I wanted desperately to go to him, to comfort him, but I could see rage still clouded his eyes. His massive shoulders shuddered with the effort to bring his berserker fury under control. His shirt was torn, and showed a thickly muscled torso beneath, now spattered with arterial spray. I felt like the sight of his arms, coated as they were, in dark, viscous blood up to the elbows, should have made me feel ill, but I felt only sympathy for him.
I could still hear his gravelly voice in my head from only a few days ago, "I cannot bear to give myself over to the rage again." I had seen deep pain in those eyes, only partially hidden in the shadow of his heavy brow ridge, when he whispered, "I would sooner die."
"Is it so unpleasant?" Looking back now I wanted to cringe at how naive my questions had been. I had clearly not been listening to him, or else I would have heard how heavily this burden weighed on him.
He had snorted and replied, "No, and that is the problem. I love it. I relish it. I crave it. When I reach out the rage reaches back and embraces me. I don't want to ever let it go. It is a drug, and I know that, if I let it, it will consume all the humanity in me. I have vowed never to allow it to feed on me again."
Yet, he had broken that very vow for me this morning. The guilt was a sharp stab in my chest as I saw now the internal battle playing across the rugged features of his face.
While I waited, partially hidden behind some packing crates, I undid the only remaining button on my shirt. I pulled together the tails and made a rude knot just below my ribs in an expedient attempt at modesty.
After a time I could hear the ragged breathing in his chest grow more regular as he wrested control back over himself. His head raised slightly and I could see again his deep set, electric green eyes. There was pain, disappointment and even fear in that look but, above all, there was the tenderness, and I knew my Drog had returned.
I approached him, cautiously, and perched lightly on a rock beside his. It was still wet from the rains last night. Drog hung his head, seeming unable to hold my gaze, instead he stared at his clenching and unclenching, blood-soaked hands.
If there had been any passers by we would have looked a strange sight. I was tiny in comparison with Drog's massive frame. Sitting there, the mutual affection between us must have been palpable, yet all around us lay evidence of brutal death.
"I am so sorry," he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
I placed my hand on his upper arm and gave it a squeeze. The muscle beneath his skin was almost too hard to impress upon. "It's okay, big guy," I spoke in my most soothing tones. "They left you no choice."
I saw anger flash briefly when he responded, "I always have a choice."
"Well, I am glad you chose to do you did," I tried to make my voice sound as firm as I could, as I let my hand rest lightly on his bicep. When he did not flinch I let it stay there.
He sniffed,"They were going to hurt you."
I nodded, still not ready to talk about it yet. They were going to do more than that, I thought. Beyond a doubt, they would have gang raped me and probably killed me slowly and painfully afterwards. I hugged his huge bicep, and pressed my head against him. He dropped an enormous, proprietary hand over mine, completely swallowing it in the thick, calloused fingers.
"Cember, if anyone ever tries to hurt you, know that, vow or not, I will crush them."
"I know, big guy. You don't have feel bad. These were terrible people, if you had not reacted the way you did we would both probably be dead." I adjusted the way I was nestled against him unnecessarily, merely enjoying the warmth of his skin against mine.
"You don't scare me, Drog," I added, although it was only partially true, the part of Drog I had just seen unleashed was impossible not to fear. But, I knew I had predicted his concern correctly when I felt his chest move in a deep, relieved sigh.
When I looked at the five corpses, strewn around us like broken rag-dolls, I felt no revulsion for his actions. I was too lost in my hatred for Clem's men to pay much heed to the sight of their bodies where they lay, rent open, split like over-ripe fruit, and covering the stony ground with splintered bone and viscera.
Looking at Drog now, with his kind and gentle face, and knowing him as I did, it was hard to reconcile that with the towering fury I had seen unleashed. My memories of the minutes before seemed to came back to me in flashes, as if the events had happened during a lightning storm. I saw their weapons seemingly bounce off his skin. Where his fists had landed, bones snapped like twigs, and where his broad feet stomped down, skulls cracked like eggs on the stones beneath. Bodies that had, only an instant before, been vital with life were turned into nothing more than wet, limp sacks of meaty blood his hands.
I had seen, in those moments, why he feared the rage. His eyes, which normally creased with warm affection when they met mine, had been blinded with hatred. I had been too scared to approach him, even after they were all dead, and he continued to worry their pulverized corpses like a wild beast. I had hid myself behind the crates until I could sense the fury was dissipating.
It should have terrified me to the core, now that I knew what he was capable of, but somehow it made me feel close to him. The man in him I knew and trusted. The ogre in him remained inscrutable, but I felt I was beginning to understand that side of him too.
I stood then and, taking one of his huge hands in both of mine, I began to pull him to his feet. No easy task, given that he probably weighed four times what I did.
"Come, Drog. Let's get you cleaned up." Somehow, despite our vast size difference, he always made me feel strong and confident. He allowed me to pull him up, probably doing more than ninety nine percent of the work, and trailed after me like a tamed cur, as I lead him down to the river.
The old path of the river, now a flat piece of stony ground that offered shelter on one side where the water had long ago carved a high, curved rock wall, had been our campsite the night before. It had been a good campsite, until Clem and his wild dogs had turned on us.
Looking back, the trouble was inevitable. We should have run when Sedge's body had been pulled out of the ravine, battered and lifeless. Clem, however, had examined the body and, ruefully, declared it a tragic accident. Drog and I had given each other wary glances back then but, stuck as we were near the top of the Sumry pass and with winter closing in, we had timidly consented to continue on with the oxcarts.
It was Sedge who had been the leader of this small caravan over the treacherous pass. The venerable old man was a friend, and sometimes business partner, of my uncle. Sedge was the man who supplied virtually everything my uncle had to sell in his outpost general store, and he was one of the few traders with the bravery and experience to make their return journey over the pass this late in the season.
I had know Sedge my whole life. He was a sweet old man. His greatest failing, it now seemed, was to be too trusting. He had trusted a team of unknown and untested men to guard his caravan, and he had kindly offered to transport fledgling merchant on her first buying trip. He had paid for these mistakes with his life, and now his wife, children and grandchildren would never see him again.
Drog stopped by the edge of the water. I had learned, despite the many jokes about his kind, that the ogre in him did not truly hate water. He bathed regularly, and smelled better than any other man I knew. In fact, he smelled wonderful to me. He smelled of Earth, and faintly of the animals he tended so lovingly. When he did smell of sweat it was the clean smell from a hard day's work. It made me want to nuzzle closer to him and breath him in deeply.
His apprehension around water, I now strongly suspected, came simply from not liking the feeling of no longer being the most powerful thing around. He was not used to being faced with a physical power that could surpass than his own.
I tugged impatiently at him. He was staring with a spaced out expression at the flowing water. He finally reacted when, upon glancing down at where my pale hand was pulling his, he saw the rusty smudges of blood that were being transferred onto my skin, and he acquiesced.
"Your clothes," he mumbled, his brows furrowed in mild confusion.
"Will dry," I completed his sentence, "Besides, I have more back with the caravan. Come, we need to clean you up. I do not want you to waste another moment worrying about those animals you put down."
In fact, calling them "Animals" was unfair to animals. Only humans could be capable of such evil and malice of forethought.
Sedge had apologized to my uncle on the day I had arrived to join his departing caravan on the outskirts of town.
There was no room for wide ox carts between the buildings of the town, with their quaint stone foundations and wooden superstructures, so all the caravans had to camp outside the town limits. The caravans were not frequent, but as regular as the seasons, and their masters seemed happy with this arrangement. It meant that they were able to set limits on the time and frequency of tavern visits for their guards and, any guards who failed to comply, were simply not brought back on the next trip.
Which is why it was so strange that all but three of Sedge's guards had failed to show up for the return journey to Hydora. Many of them had worked with Sedge for years, and he considered them solid, trustworthy men. Yet, apparently, they had received a better offer to travel with Malco's caravan North to Grimble. It was through bandit rich country, so the pay was far better than Sedge's relatively short trip through the pass but it was, nevertheless, out of character for men whose livelihood was often decided by their reputation for reliability.
It was only later that I began to consider that there might have been other, more forceful incentives, to encourage those men to seek another path and that these had, most likely, come from Clem.
