The Orc’s Protection (Sunshine Valley Orcs #1)

Prologue

No one expected it.

On a Tuesday in September, eight years ago, a routine high-energy particle experiment at CERN, the prestigious European physics laboratory, produced results no one has yet to fully explain to the public.

What the official report called “an anomalous spacetime event” lasted eleven seconds.

What it actually did was tear a hole between worlds.

From the other side, it grabbed orcs from half a dozen clans, scattered across distances that should have made any single event impossible.

There was no discernible logic to the selection.

A father, not his children. A warrior, not her clan leader.

A child pulled from sleep while her mother, standing in the next room, was left behind.

Whatever the experiment disturbed, it did not discriminate by family or clan or proximity. It simply took.

The aperture opened over the Missouri Ozarks.

People in four counties reported the same thing independently before any news outlet picked up the story: a sound, not quite an explosion, more like the atmosphere had inhaled.

Then light above the tree line—not lightning, witnesses insisted.

Something that held. Approximately six hundred orcs emerged within a half-mile radius of each other.

What the watching humans could not have known, what took weeks and much cautious observation to establish, was that the newcomers were bewildered, not dangerous.

The humans built a compound while they sorted out what to do.

Appropriate-scale housing. A large community hall.

A perimeter that was, depending on who you asked, either a precaution or a cage.

The orcs cooperated. They had arrived in a strange world with nothing but each other, and they were practical people.

That CERN bore some responsibility for their displacement was never officially confirmed.

But it was never convincingly denied either, and the silence shaped everything that followed.

The surrounding communities couldn’t quite summon the outrage that might have come otherwise. Fault has a way of softening hostility.

Gradually, the towns decided the newcomers were permanent.

Jobs appeared: labor first, then maintenance work, then for those willing to undergo years of vetting and certification, security.

They learned English quickly and imperfectly, their accents never fully smoothing out, but well enough to work, bargain, and make themselves understood.

Eight years in, Sunshine Valley and its neighboring towns have reached something that looks, from a distance, almost like ordinary life.

It is not ordinary life. But it is a life.

Among those six hundred was a StoneWatch warrior who had spent eight years learning to be less frightening. He was almost convincing.