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“Will you shut up? I’ve had enough of your meaningless demands!”
She crawls back against the wall, and I see her assuming the form I always see. She’s just a frightened little girl, too naive to understand how the world works.
“Thank you!”
I bring my eyes back to focus, looking back over the desert and surveying the activity of these roaming caravans. I find the orc caravan a few miles away from where I last sighted it.
Focusing in a little more, I can hear them chattering. They have taken chunks of iron, mined from the depths below the desert, and are currently hammering and smelting them together.
Before them stands the start of a metal tower. They’ve laid the wooden basework and have constructed parts of the wall. In the midst of it is a tall scaffolding, signaling its intended design and height.
The orcs work fast. Although I hate that such a slight has gone unnoticed, I look forward to bringing down their towers, crushing them with the debris of their own ingenuity.
“They say there’s a special kind of monster that lurks in these desert caverns,” one of them says, gently taking a chunk of refined iron and moving it to the hammer. “You can hear his roar from miles away.”
“Oh, wait. I’ve heard this one. Let me guess. He killed all of our other expeditions single-handedly? Flies bright like the light of the sun, striking vengeance all around him?”
“You catch on fast.”
“Come on. You can’t really believe that? That’s just an urban myth.”
“No? Then what was that roar we just heard?”
“Wild animals.”
He continues to hammer, coming disappointingly close to scarring himself with the burning debris.
The other shakes his head and stares.
“You’re a gullible fool if you believe that.”
Intermittently, I poke my ears up, expecting to be interrupted.
Any minute, she’ll place herself in the middle of my work again, preventing me from completing even basic tasks.
But hours pass.
And as I snap my other set of eyes back to reality, I just see her, huddled against the cavern wall, pouting.
I sigh. “Don’t you have any means of entertaining yourself?”
“And how would I do that?”
She is short and disrespectful to me.
“I don’t know. You’ve got an entire cavern to explore.”
“I’ve seen caverns. They’re not that interesting.”
I restrain myself from punishing her insolence, just this once.
“And besides that,” she says. “I’m very hungry.”
My mouth twitches a little as I look at her. I’m attempting to not take her ingratitude personally now… Perhaps she just doesn’t understand her trespasses. But the more she speaks, the more I want to lay waste to her.
“You’ll find fungus and mold in the cavern chambers below us,” I instruct. “If you let yourself get lost, I’m sure you’ll find something to consume.”
She puzzles over my words, tilting her head.
