Ursala: Interesting Times

This story concerns Ursala and is written of her before she began adventuring.
Somewhere in the Arathi Highlands, there was a small camp of orcs led by the humans. It was for the pregnant women and children, and the old men and women - the ones who would die if they were set to some of the more heavygoing work. A dead orc, they said, was a useless orc. They had uses for weaklings such as these.
It was into this camp that Ursala was born to a mother with blades in one hand and a father who would, truth be told, rather be chopping wood as long as it meant he had an axe in his hands. The father left when she was but five winters, and she did not mourn his going. Around the same time, the humans removed the blades from her mother's hand. The pup was too young to understand the implications of this, but her mother wept for those blades once they were gone.
Ursala grew in that camp, working as the others did. Sometimes it was repairing the tools for the other camps. Sometimes it was making basic clothing for goodness knew how many orcs (but it seemed like a lot; more than Ursala had ever seen in one place before). Sometimes it was counting things - although, Ursala was never very good at counting. She avoided it, if she could. If mistakes were made, punishment was given. The young pup learnt something very quickly: the humans liked punishing the orcs.
Slowly, things began to change. It worried Ursala, in a way, because men, women and some of the older children who she had previously seen barely able to get out of bed for lethargy were suddenly able to work alongside her and the younger ones at the same pace. She had assumed that the sluggishness was simply a part of growing older, but she was now told that orcs were not normally like this. Nobody knew why they were now - but, at least, things were getting better. Some of the older mothers and fathers were moved to other camps, away from their adolescent pups. The pups always cried. Ursala never understood this; she barely ever saw her mother.
The humans, she was told by the humans, were to be listened to. The orcs, she was told by the humans, were stupid. Her mother had always told her not to listen to stupid people (not even if they had a big hat on). And yet the older orcs - the old men in particular, who groaned and creaked and never got out of bed unless to repair or sew or count - told her that the humans were not to be listened to; not one bit. Once, she asked a human if this was true. She did not repeat that particular mistake.
It was no surprise that, by the age of ten, the young Ursala had decided that it was perhaps best not to listen to anybody at all. This did not mean that she didn't listen anyway, however. She had grown fond of, in the evenings, listening to the hushed stories of the older orcs. They did so love to tell them, and she listened. They were tired and old and apathetic, but she was energetic and young and excitable - they told tales of great armies; of duty and honour; of blood and thunder; of conquest and victory; and of other worlds. Other worlds! And how they had been betrayed, she was told. Betrayed by demons.
"They call us demons," would say the old men. "But not us. No. Not any more. Demons are without honour. The humans are the demons."
She did not understand much of the Orcish language, at that time, though they were teaching her slowly to read and write. Nontheless, she understood that word very clearly indeed. Dae'mon. Broken Soul. She did not know if the humans were demons, but she knew that - whatever a demon really was - it was not good.
It was not long after that that her listening ears picked up something more. Slow, careful, old thoughts rumbled their inexorable way into her mind. They were not hers, but they spoke to her - and they were... reassuring. They did not promise her power, no. They asked things of her, although they were not big things. Small, but not trivial. Planting seeds, mostly, but some other things as well. Moving a seemingly insignificant rock from one side of the camp to another. She got whipped a few times for "playing with stones" when she should have been working, but all the young Ursala saw was that moving the stones was important; more important than whether or not one orc pup got whipped.
One night, there was shouting outside the camp. There was excitement among the prisoners, and some of the older ones finally roused themselves from their beds outside of work hours. The orcs waited inside the barracks at the command of the oldest orc in the room - a wrinkled man, with grey hair and a grey beard and bright red eyes. He used to be something called a shaman, Ursala was told by a young father. She understood this to mean that he was wise. They heard violence in the courtyard, but with no weapons, there was no hope for them to join it. Eventually, all was quiet - and they risked a look out of the door.
There, with stolen axes and reclaimed clothes, were more orcs than Ursala had ever seen in one place before.
Later, once outside the now-burning camp for the third time in her life, Ursala was grouped with the other orphans and told that the Horde was on the move again. There was a Warchief, they were told, and he was in charge. He would ensure that things went better, this time. That they were not again tricked by twisted souls.
There was a lot of travel. All over Arathi - it struck Ursala for the first time how big it was - to different camps, releasing the Orcs there and moving on. One day, Ursala was told the Warchief's name: he was called Thrall. She understood the name to be humanspeak for "slave", but she also understood her place not to be questioning the Warchief. She also understood him to be called a shaman.
Perhaps "shaman" was another word for "leader," she pondered.
The orcs were split into smaller groups, you see, looking for a place to settle. They were generally reasonably-sized units with at least one shaman and a few dependants. There were two other orphans in the group with Ursala. The old shaman - there were two in her group, one young man and one old woman - took time to, in the evenings after camp was set and when the night patrols were starting their watch whilst the day patrols were sleeping, tell the pups stories.
Stories. Ursala had grown to adore them. These were stories of the way things were before the demons came, and before demons were made of the orcs. How whispers of elementals were heard in dreams. To the pups, it sounded like a fairy tale - and the language of fiction the shaman used hid the stories' significance to Ursala from her. This was purposeful. The shamans both saw it (as Ursala still planted seeds, moved rocks around in a seemingly random fashion, and shared her waterskin with small shrubs) but they said nothing. She was too young. Even if she grew older without falling to disease... they were not sure that her skinny, small, scrawny form would be able to take the strain of what was proposing itself.
Nontheless, over the course of the orcs' exploration of Arathi and Hillsbrad, the two taught all three pups how and when to meditate. How to control their breathing. How to relax their minds. How to order, but not control, their thoughts. Runt or not, it would not do to have a raw shaman at a time when the Horde needed its shamans the most.
They came to the fleet of ships. Ursala did not like the ships. She did not like the ships one bit. She spent most of her time on board curled up under blankets with an awful headache. She did not understand this, but she was told by orcs older and wiser than her that she would be well once they reached ground. She found them to be right - although the land they found was barren, at least it was solid.
The orcs regrouped. They met with the Tauren. There was a lot of travelling. Ursala did not really see the landscape - no, she listened to it. She was frequently accused by other orcs her age (she was now on the cusp of adolescence) of being a daydreamer, and became accustomed to the ways that Orcish boys and girls treat such. It was, she realised in retrospect, character-building. At the time, she had merely supposed that perhaps a smaller number of days that involved getting a black eye somewhere in their schedule would be appreciated.
And the voices changed. They changed from dry, crumbling voices to calm, rich ones as the land changed from dry dust to soft soil underfoot. The grasslands of Mulgore were beautiful, and Ursala was glad to see the Tauren there. She, as many of the orcs did, found a kinship with the Tauren. She could see a good number of them looking upon the planes with the same eyes she did, although she was still unaware of what exactly this implied.
More travel. There seemed to be more and more of it every day. Once, an older orc asked the clearly flagging Ursala if she would like him to carry her on his back. She stubbornly refused; aside from the mocking tone in which he had posed the offer, she had been being taught about the types of strength that a member of the Horde was expected to have. Although her body just as stubbornly refused to comply with her wishes for it to walk on, she would not allow the others to make fun. That was individual strength.
Flatlands gave way to mountains. They stopped, and waited for something. That was then the civilians were offered to turn around and go back the way they had come, for the warriors had to go onwards to a great battle at a place called Hyjal. Ursala knew where in that distinction she lay. There were many more weeks of travel until the civilians reached the place they had been sent: between the river and the sea, they were told, where the land is red.
Later, the warriors and the Warchief arrived. Orgrimmar was founded. Ursala was offered a place at the orphanage, but refused it. She was sixteen by then; in the culture of their new Darkspear allies, she was nearly an adult. She felt as though she could care for herself, and so that was what she did. After Rexxar and the others had secured the land under its new name - Durotar - she helped to found a town. Razor Hill. Although she could not build, she was taught first aid - how to bandage and salve, how to anaesthetise, how to use a tourniquet. She assisted a shaman with one particularly grizzly limb amputation for a troll who had crushed his leg with a log. She hoped that, one day, she would be able to be the one performing the healing and not just the one fetching the herbs the shaman had needed.
She lived around Razor Hill for the next few years. She could not hunt for her own food, but she could hold her own against the wilderness - she found that the solitude provided by living in a cave by herself on the coast allowed her to listen. She listened every day, meditating so that the thoughts did not overwhelm her own - and performed tasks as they were asked. As before, planting seeds. Taking away dead foliage from herbs and watering the dry ones. She found that she could trade the offcuts for food in Razor Hill, so that was what she did.
She had lost track of her exact birthdate, but years are counted in winters anyway. When she survived her twentieth, she travelled once more - south, to the Valley of Trials. That was when Shikrik named her as a shaman. Slowly, she began to understand.
Slowly. As is always the way, with those of the Earth.
Category:Story