A Bite Long Scarred

There was not one man on his ship that cared for him beyond the heft of his name, the souls of those that had long fled to whatever world waited beyond. The men aboard Honor’s Marrow wore unscarred faces, fat unweathered cheeks and hands that had only just lost their softness. They knew him as Captain Kemp Bonefire, the Owl-Boar, half myth and half bloodlust; he had turned the tides of battle with his torn visage alone, frightening guardsmen so thoroughly that they surrendered their towns for the remaining attachment of their heads.

Captain Kemp Bonefire, the man that crawled from the ocean with a blade forged of bone between his teeth - the man lost now to a rumor.

“There,” he said, a voice once like the thunder of the sea now the hiss of a creek. His first mate repeated it for him, words booming over the buffet of the sails.

Bonefire bobbed his neat grey head, the white-gold of his eyes glinting beneath the midday sun like coins set in battered old leather. He had been a handsome man once. Regal, a king of the water and the sky and the battlefield. His first mate looked at him as if he were all of those things yet and more. Awe did not stop him questioning.

“All due respect, Captain,” the younger man began, wide black eyes alight with concern. “This is the middle of nowhere. Surely we’re a hardy bunch and surely we can fend off any predators that may find us, man or beast alike, but what’s here? It looks like nothing but jungle and rock from where I’m standing.”

“Perhaps that’s all it is,” Bonefire said mostly to himself. Louder, he continued, “I do not expect any of you to stay. I ask that you linger for four days and no more. If you have not heard from me - or of me - by then, you leave this shore and return to your homes. I will not let men starve for the fancies of an old man.”

“What’s out there?” His first mate asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Bonefire said. “Maybe where I’ve meant to be all along. You will know if I find it.”

The first mate blinked slowly, cat-like, his youthful face screwed up in doubt. He knew. At only a glance, it was plain that he knew. The treasure Bonefire had claimed to abandon lay fat upon his horizon, a target within his sightline the entire time: the Orcish-Draconic Treasure, the scavenged remnants of a long-past battle that nobody had proven the existence of, that nobody except Bonefire had cared enough to hunt for more than a thin year. In shorthand it was the Ordra, and in the long-term it was a waste.

“If you say so, Captain,” the first mate said, and he turned away to holler instructions at the crew.

Bonefire stood on the deck, watching the Tyrant’s Teeth peninsulas vanish behind a single, towering islet.

He rowed himself to the rocky shore, the crests of waves licking at the boat’s flimsy black planks like an overzealous wolf, wearing away the tar bit by bit. By time Bonefire landed, a leak had sprung beneath his feet. The boat groaned in agony when he stepped out, water rapidly filling its little hull. 

“Rest now,” he said to it, leaning down to smooth a hand over old, old wood. Water churned into the boat, pulling it further from the shore with each wave. Soon it was out of Bonefire’s reach, and he felt a great sadness burn through him.

Vine-laden spires of worn rock jutted from the island, wild and dangerous but calm, a sleeping lion to the incessant chirp of his meerkat. He eyed the face, fingers flexing at his side, and wondered if he had it in him to climb.

Bonefire had been the strongest of his village as a child, hardly a surprise to those who knew the well-kept secret of his parentage; in the odd angle of his teeth (alleviated every day by obsessive filing,) the orcish blood of his father manifested. He had not inherited the bristly hair or the greyish skintone, but he had inherited the man’s strength of jaw and hardness of his fingernails. He could climb a tree like a cat, talons buried in the wood.

But why would he? On his mother’s side he was a shapeshifter, blood of the owl, and flight was so much easier than climbing when you were fifteen, sixteen, aching for an adventure on the peaks of his snow-capped mountain home.

These were abilities that had lessened with time. His joints lost their flexibility, and he had not had reason to scale a cliff in decades. The Ordra Treasure had that effect, made him bold and certain.

Bonefire curled his palm around a spur in the rock, pulling down twice to test its integrity, and when it did not budge he reached further above him, repeated the test as if his life depended on it. Rock chalked beneath his fingernails, bits of dust and roots caught in the wind buffeting his weathered cheek. He climbed.

At one point the rock beneath his foot gave, tumbling a hundred feet into sand like blades, where he dared to watch it shatter like a cracked glass flute. He climbed.

A fine mist soaked into his jacket, at first only the sea then a hot jungle rain. The wind cooled until it bit through his clothes and into his skin, thousands of frozen mosquitos feasting upon expired blood. He climbed.

He reached the top breathless and painful, sodden but not hopeless. He eased himself slowly upright, knees and elbows and shoulders and spine throbbing with the beat of his heart. In the distance he saw Honor’s Marrow, the winged boar on its flags no more than a white blotch at this distance. 

The tip had been carved into the broken tusk of a long-dead orc crushed beneath a heavy stone. Runes decorated the yellowed bone, torn at the point but half-legible. From it Bonefire had deduced the following: 

The treasure was on a peninsula off of Alron, or rather on an island near it - the Tyrant’s Teeth and the Tyrant’s Bite, respectively. It lay in a cave covered with moss and vines and marked by a single skull, though it did not specify what type or size or age. It was possible that the skull had eroded away, in which case there had been a final clue carved into the curvature of that tusk.

The blood of the righteous will sing. What this meant exactly, Bonefire had not known, but perched upon this rock he felt it. Something hummed deep in his marrow, something he had not felt when he could shift, that he had not felt flying or fighting or sailing. The hum pulsed, smoothing the hard edge of age. Rain water dripped from a lock of white hair onto the wide bulb of his nose.

A compass embedded within him whirled, seeking magnetic north and finding it in a direction he knew not by nature but by education to be an adverse direction. The urge pulled and tugged, yanked him into its orbit, and Bonefire did not resist. 

It took him along a thin, rocky ledge, over a rotting log bridging a convenient gap in the face. Wood cracked beneath his weight, tumbling like hard rain to the coarse earth. He followed his internal compass then to a roundish ledge marked with a bit of white bone - his heart leapt. 

Dirt crusted the curve of the skull, easily scratched away by his orcish fingernails. Beneath it there lay a message etched into the arch of a deep eye socket in runes he would not have recognized years ago. The Giant tongue. The legend said that they had hidden it after their cliffs were shredded by the maw of war.

Here beyond the touch of Two Monarchs rests the cursed skin and sinew of a war not needed, metal fused with dragon’s hide and scarred by pig’s teeth.

“Thank you,” he said to the skull, smoothing his thumb over its chipped scalp. “You’ve done well.”

The cave lay beyond a curtain of black vines, small and nearly empty. A single skeleton lay within, its bones littered with poems in the Giant’s tongue and its head sat askew in its lap. A yellow scroll sat upon delicate, aged hand bones, and crinkled its protest against a brief gust of wind.

Bonefire lowered himself to his knees, his excitement simultaneously astronomical and buried deep within the earth. The paper crunched beneath his calloused fingertips as he unfurled it. He sat on his haunches next to the skeleton, stone cool against his shoulder blades.

The scroll was longer than he expected, filled to the brim with… names. Bonefire paused. Orcish names. Draconic names. Names that were neither, marked with the Giant’s tongue word for civilian.

“Ah,” he said softly, rolling the parchment back into a tube. He gripped it hard in his hand, crunching it in time with a wheezing breath. “So it was. The Ordra Treasure.”