Tales from the Orc Chasm

1 Fawn

“It won’t fit.”

“It will.”

“N-no, it’s too big,”

the young woman gasped.

“Just try. You’ve got this,”

the orc murmured, the words impossibly gentle through his tusks. “There. That’s my girl.”

Fawn’s face flushed possibly the deepest shade of red it had ever been. He called her his girl. It sent a flush of warmth down her belly, making her all too aware of her body beneath her clothes.

“That’s right, just like that,”

Erryc coaxed, his hand closing over the top of hers, and through their combined efforts, the misshapen cork finally squeezed into the mouth of the bottle.

Fawn breathed a sigh of relief. That had been an ordeal.

Erryc held the bottle overhead, signaling to the others in the Hammered N’Aled Tavern that the deed was done. A few good-humored patrons cheered on the triumph, others ignored it.

“Until you have to open that vintage again,”

one at the table toasted him, raising his tankard of mead.

Erryc crossed over to their table, immediately drawn in by chatter and laughter. That was who he was, always starting another conversation with someone he just met. Not a moment later he clapped one of the patrons at the table on the back, laughing heartily, “My good man! You devil, you.”

Fawn, on the other hand, sank back into her seat at the corner table. Perhaps she’d been too excited over being called his girl, if it was a title so easily bestowed. She’d liked to have believed she was special to him, but he was just that way with everyone.

He was a sweetheart. Just not hers.

Even that little interaction had made her warm and a painfully obvious pink all over. It wasn’t a cute, cheeks-kissed-by-the-sun sort of pink. It was everywhere. Her forehead, her nose, her chin and upper lip all turned a concerning red that had multiple times prompted people to ask after her health.

With one hand, she gathered all her long brown hair up off the back of her neck in the hopes that it would cool her down faster, let some of her blush recede. It did nothing to settle the rousings between her thighs, though.

Most days like this, she would set up in the corner with a stein of mead, a lit pipe of dried ditchweed, and her bag of feathers and sticks as she watched the rest of the room, making new arrows to fill her quiver.

And many days like today, whenever Erryc decided she’d sat alone and unbothered for too long, he’d rustle up some odd task he needed her help with, like sticking an unusually sized cork back in a narrow bottleneck. He truly found the oddest of jobs.

Erryc had this way about him, that meant you couldn’t help but feel he was doing you the favor by asking you for assistance. Just last week, he had tasked Fawn to get a few silver coins to one of the tavern maids.

“She broke some plates last week and insists on paying for them, but I know she’s got kids at home and I budget expecting broken plates every month. She won’t take the money back, not from me,”

he had lamented after everyone had gone home for the night, wiping down the bar.

“Say no more,”

Fawn had replied, and he grinned in response, handing her the money.

The rush of sensation that filled her had been like nothing else Fawn had ever felt before. It couldn’t just be that his voice was deep and rumbly and warm when he said, “You’re amazing.”

Fawn wondered if he had known she would get along so well with the tavern maid, that they’d both had relatives in the city on the other side of the Chasm.

On many maps this area was marked as territory belonging to a nomadic camp of orcs following their herd of yakgoats around the split mountainsides. Those who preferred more permanent living quarters often moved to the village in the foothills. Everyone who lived near the Chasm had to travel the single road through the split mountain pass, and almost everyone who did stopped in at the Hammered N’Aled Tavern for a drink and a hot meal, sometimes to re-shoe a horse at the old anvil out back.

Her eye drew back to Erryc, finding with him a beautiful woman leaning over the bar, her bosom nearly tipping out of her dress, her cheek rosy as her lips and her long, long eyelashes batting.

The troupe of actors were only passing through, on their way to the next city over for a performance. Already Fawn couldn’t wait for them to leave.

“Wow, your hands are sooooo much bigger than mine,”

the tipsy actress giggled, swinging her legs under the bar, as she snagged his free hand and spread her palm against his, half the size.

“Yeah, it makes cleaning up really easy,”

he laughed, tugging his hand out of hers, and scooped up a number of empty tankards off the bar by their handles, as if to demonstrate.

The actress gave a little squeak of delight, even as he crossed down to the other side of the bar to fill another patron’s glass, away from her.

Fawn wasn’t surprised that yet another tavern patron was flirting with him, it was an almost hourly occurrence.

Erryc was easily the most handsome orc on this side of the Chasm. Fawn knew this as fact, as she traveled several times a season up the mountain to the orc camp, where they herded their yakgoats, selling the spare rabbits and foxes she’d hunted. She always stopped at the Hammered N’Aled Tavern on her way back down the mountain trail, and was always reminded of how true her assertion was.

Like many of the orcs, he had shaved one of the sides of his head for a smattering of blue woad tattoos, a number of fine metal piercings decorated his long, pointed ears, and his complexion was a hearty sage green. His shoulders were broader than most doorways and he of course, had arms and legs thicker than some tree trunks.

But Erryc was the only orc whose smile could stop a village. One of his tusks was chipped, giving it a little bit of an unevenness, but who would notice that, or even think it was an imperfection when his smile crinkled his eyes.

But he never accepted anyone’s interest.

He would never outright say no, especially not to a customer, or a neighbor, or a stranger. Erryc was well practiced in the art of the side-step, the redirect, and the non-committal answer. Over the years, she had seen him gently refuse the affections of hundreds. She’d contented herself to merely looking on from her view in the corner.

And what a view it was. Just looking at the slope of his shoulders, his well muscled back, the way his loose shirt hung off of him and then tucked into the back of his pants, Fawn once again found herself biting her lower lip too hard.

Erryc was mercifully unaware of her oggling. Rather, whenever he caught her eye on him, he always raised a brow at her and asked if she needed another drink. He was used to people looking at him, trying to get his attention at the bar.

Somehow he’d become callused against the same sharp edge of emotions that pierced her whenever she met someone’s gaze by accident. Fawn didn’t think she’d ever get used to it, but that was why she preferred the corner table, as it was shielded from the rest of the rowdy patronage and any eyes that might snag on her. If someone did notice her, they might be compelled to smile, ask her a question or two.

One such patron caught her eye, handsome young elf. Fawn’s heartbeat pricked in alarm.

“I’m just passing through. Is the local hunting any good?”

he asked her with a gesture to her bow strung over the back of her chair, a charming smile at the ready to draw her out of the corner.

Fawn answered in depth about the wild rabbits in the foothills, but it came out so softly, he couldn’t hear her.

When his brow furrowed and lifted, she pinkened, and answered louder, yet still only barely audibly.

The conversation, or lack of one, almost always fell into the pattern of trying to answer loud enough to be heard, and shaking heads prompting her to try again, an endeavor that only ever made her shrink back in embarrassment.

“Fawn! Over here,”

Erryc called, and waved the damp dishrag as if it were a flag, signaling her to cross the treacherous terrain of customers. Something more than butterfly wings twitched in Fawn’s stomach when his eyes met hers across the room, and Erryc’s smile widened just a bit more for her.

Fawn gave an apologetic look to the man, paired with a shrug as she quickly abandoned their silent awkwardness. She would not have left her preferred corner for just anyone.

She crossed to the bar, ready to pull up a stool, when Erryc shook his head and gestured to the back storage room. “Come around to the back, I need your help.”

“Did something get stuck under the shelf again?”

she asked, rounding the end of the bar.

It did make her feel the tiniest bit special that of all the people in the bar with hands smaller than his, she was the only one (that she knew of) who he’d asked to reach under the dusty shelf. Perhaps because she was already dusty with all the bits of feathers and splinters from her fletching.

Erryc paused and raised a brow at her.

“The shelf,”

she repeated, adding in a little hand gesture to mime slipping her hand in the narrow crevice.

“Oh, um, well, it’s a little more complicated,”

he said, ushering her into the storeroom.

It was half the size of the tavern’s main room, and yet three times as cramped. Every available space had gone to stacking casks of mead, crates of fruits and vegetables laid on the shelves, the stove in the back that always had something simmering on it. There wasn’t even counter space, just a couple of cutting boards balanced on top of a few barrels.

When Erryc ducked inside and closed the door, the space became only all the more cramped. Fawn shuffled further in, leaning back against one of the shelves. There was barely room to breathe between them.

“I’m in a bit of a pickle,”

he sighed, turning around to face her. “I know I just asked you for a favor last week, but I don’t know what else to do.”

He ran one of those massive, oft-compared hands through his hair, ruffling the dark waves that flopped back over his forehead, framing his soft brown eyes.

Fawn stared a moment, entranced purely by the effect. She blinked and stumbled to answer, “What’s the pickle? Bread and butter, or…”

“Bread,”

he said with a short, tired laugh. His eyes moved to the door. Even though the door was heavy and the main room always filled with chatter, he dropped his voice to the same level as hers. “One of my vendors, the village baker–”

“Oona?”

“Oona. She’s been hinting for a while that she wants to set me up with her daughter,”

he sighed again, putting his hands on his hips. “She’s been getting more insistent lately, too. Every time she comes in she starts lamenting about her neighbor’s new baby. She wants her own grandchildren.”

Fawn didn’t spend nearly the same amount of time talking to people and getting involved in their lives as Erryc did, but she wasn’t sure she saw the issue. Half the problems he found himself tangled in seemed like something better just left alone, with all parties involved a little disgruntled but willing to move past it eventually.

But that was why she thought he was the best person for miles around. He never left ‘well enough’ alone if he thought he could make someone’s day a little better.

Fawn folded her arms over her chest, a posture that more often than not just became hugging herself instead of a confident pose. “Did you tell her you weren’t interested?”

“I’ve tried,”

he insisted, though Fawn doubted he’d actually used the word ‘no’ in any capacity. “Look, I… any favor I can do for you in exchange, anything you want, I promise, you’ll have it.”

Fawn worried her teeth against her lower lip. “Anything? What if I wanted the tavern?”

That made him crack a smile, meeting her eyes again. He scoffed, “You’d be begging for me to take it back after a day. An hour, maybe.”

“So little faith in me.”

“I have all the faith in you, just not your social stamina.”

“Fine, I’ll think of something else,”

she replied, rolling her eyes.

It wouldn’t be the first time he promised her anything and she didn’t take him up on it. There wasn’t much she wanted, aside from the occasional free drink. Sometimes she thought she should be a little more creative in what he owed her, perhaps a bite of whatever he was eating for the rest of his life. He would do it, too.

Her eyes slipped down Erryc’s shirt, a habit of hers he had thankfully not noticed yet, or at least had not mentioned. It was simply easier to let her gaze rest on the worn brass of his belt buckle, than it was to constantly look up and make eye contact.

All too often her resting gaze traveled even lower, shape of the fabric of his pants below, the way it hinted and moved as he walked. Her tongue pressed against the back of her teeth as she bit her lower lip, contemplating.

No, she couldn’t even begin to think of what she wanted from him. At least, something that wouldn’t mortify her to ask.

“I’m more than willing to help, but what are you even asking for?”

she said, realizing he’d managed to skip right over that. She hugged herself a little tighter, giving him a lopsided shrug, “I don’t know that I’m the right person to steal a grandchild for Oona.”

“What? No, no.”

Erryc’s cheeks and ears flushed a dark green before he glanced back at the door again. “Maybe it’s a little much to ask, but when Oona comes in to drop her delivery off, if you could perhaps, uh, kiss me? Or maybe if that’s too much, just on the cheek? Or maybe just hold my hand or, I mean–”

“It’s not too much,”

she said, the words terribly quiet, even for her. She swallowed, holding his gaze a little too fraught. Her heart was hammering in her chest so hard she wasn’t sure how he didn’t hear it.

“It’s not?”

“No.”

They stood for a moment in silence, somewhat awkwardly meeting each other’s eyes and then glancing away, then meeting them again.

“Well. Thank you, that’s um. A relief. It’ll be good to nip this in the bud,”

he said, suddenly unable to figure out what he wanted to do with his hands. He filtered through crossing his arms over his chest, digging his hands in his pockets, straightening his shirt.

Finally he settled on grabbing the door handle to leave.

“I-it has been a while since, um, since, I’ve… uh,”

she called after him, stopping him before he opened it. “And you’re so... maybe we should try it out. Just the once.”