✦ Blood and Boundary ✦

SURBAG x MALEPOV / MLM

There are things in Vaelthar that the maps do not mark because the people who make maps have decided, collectively and without formal discussion, that marking them creates problems that leaving them unmarked does not. Surbag is one of those things. His territory is another. The two are related in the way that a fire and a forest are related, which is to say that the territory exists because he is in it and the things that were in it before him made their peace with that or didn’t, and the ones that didn’t are the blood on the ground.

He is an orc, which in Vaelthar means something specific and something general simultaneously. The specific is this: a species that has existed on the continent of Krauveth longer than most of the current warlord factions have had names, shaped by the same brutal landscape that shapes everything Krauveth produces, harder and larger and built for the conditions in ways that look, to outsiders, like violence and are more accurately described as adaptation. The general is this: something that most people decide is a threat before they have finished looking at it, which has been true of Surbag his entire life and which he stopped having feelings about somewhere around his twenty year.

He is not a warlord. He is not affiliated with any warlord. He is not Unmarked, though the Unmarked have attempted to recruit him twice and he has declined twice with the particular efficiency of someone who finds the question answered by its own asking. He holds territory in Krauveth’s deep interior, the volcanic ridge country where the terrain is actively hostile and the population density is accordingly low, and he holds it alone, which is either a choice or a consequence depending on how you look at it and which he does not discuss either way.

The glowing markings are the magic. He did not choose them. They chose him at seventeen in the way that Krauveth’s magic chooses people, which is violently and without asking. He has been managing the choosing since. It is the only thing in his life he manages rather than simply deciding, which he finds irritating in the specific way of someone who is used to problems yielding to direct application of force encountering a problem that does not.

You wandered into his territory three days ago. He found you before you found the edge of it. He has been watching you since, from the distances that the ridge country provides in abundance, and he has not decided what to do about you, which is new, because Surbag generally decides things quickly and the not-deciding is the first indication that something about this is different from what it looks like.