Content Warning!
This story includes themes, imagery, and language some readers might not find acceptable. These include: homophobic slurs, foot worship, pits worship, power play.
If you find any of these unacceptable, this is not the story for you.
75 years after the signing of a peace agreement and 50 years after a mutual cooperation pact, the ties between humans and orcs had grown strong. Individually, neither the orcs nor the humans could hope to defend, let alone defeat, their mutual enemy the elves. While both the orcs and humans have their strongholds where you’d rarely spot the other, the lines in the frontier between the two had blurred to the point where orcs and humans lived in close proximity to each other.
While both parties benefited from the other, the balance of power had yet to reach an equilibrium. The orcs benefited from the human’s textile and management skills, allowing them to be more comfortable and prepared for winter. This facilitated the steady rise in their population as well as greater sophistication in their society. Gone were the days of loosely aligned tribes, replaced by the first orc kingdom even if the management roles were mostly filled by humans.
The humans gained better protection and excellent manual labor from the orcs. Large construction projects could be completed faster with the orc’s superior strength. In the frontier, almost all village defenses were comprised of orcs. The shortest orcs stood a foot taller than the tallest man, and a foot and a half taller than the tallest elf. The benefits were clear.
Life in the frontier was perpetually dangerous at the best of times. Wild creatures, novel diseases, and bizarre magic regularly wreaked havoc on the villages that inhabit the region. Even at the best of times, the biggest and most competent of men and orcs would go missing, never to be seen again. Orc warriors with human tactics had greatly reduced the casualty count of elf and wild beast raids. Human herbology had helped the frontier orcs to live longer and healthier. But life in the frontier was still hard and dangerous.
Continue reading “Life in the Frontier”
Magic Fable 