The Ash Between Us

The second time Korax the Human Knight met Grath the Orc Warchief, the orc didn’t even bother reaching for his axe.

He sat on a burned siege tower halfway sunk into the mud of the Shattered Marches, elbows on his knees, staring at the empty battlefield as if watching a play that had already bored him. The air above the ruins hung with a thin veil of ash, the kind that never quite settled, a pale dust drifting in slow spirals, catching in lashes and beards, softening the jagged edges of rusted steel. Corpses had long since been taken by crows or swallowed through tears in the Veil; what remained were helmets half-buried in peat and pikes that leaned like rotted teeth.

Apollo snorted as Korax rode closer to the war-chief, ears pricked, but he didn’t shy. The black stallion’s hide shivered, picking up on the thinness of the air here and the way the Veil frayed realms like old cloth. Every breath tasted faintly of old smoke and iron, as if the ground itself remembered burning.

“Human,” Grath grunted in a voice like grinding stone. “You’re late.”

Korax reined Apollo to a halt a few paces away. The orc was broad-shouldered, tusks chipped, braids tied with bits of metal scavenged from a dozen lost banners. Scars crossed his green skin in pale ridges, each one a story that no longer mattered against the scale of what was coming. His eyes were old. Older than the war, maybe.

“I had to convince Duke Wellington that riding out to meet an orc war-chief alone wasn’t a very elaborate suicide,” Korax said. “He wasn’t sure.”

Grath’s mouth twitched. On his people, that was practically a laugh.

“And your wizard?” he asked, pushing off the charred timber and dropping down from his perch. Boots sank into wet mud with a squelch. “The grey one. He did not try to leash you with omen and warning?”

“He tried.” Korax slid from the saddle. “I came anyway.”

For a moment, they simply looked at one another. In their first meeting, they had met through arrows and steel, their “conversation” nothing but shouted orders and the clang of armor. Facing each other from across a river of fire and screaming. Grath had seemed taller. His shoulders straight, war paint bright, and his warband roaring on the ridge behind him. Korax had been a nameless wannabe knight with a brand-new sword and mud on his teeth, certain the war would finally be won before he had time to grow a proper beard.

Back then, the realms needed a hundred soldiers to speak for them. Today, it was just the two of them, Korax and Grath, and whatever they could salvage from the ashes of the Marches. The two who had outlived all the speeches.

They walked toward each other until they both stood in the shadow of the dead siege tower. Once, human engineers had dragged it across these plains, shouting, singing, convinced they would break the walls of the orc citadels and end the war in a season. The tower had burned from the top down, collapsing in on itself. Its black ribs stuck out now like the bones of some enormous, forgotten animal, powdered with a thin coat of pale ash.

Korax glanced up at it and remembered the night it fell. Lightning, screaming, the sky gone orange. He had been a younger man then, one squire among many, his name not yet heavy enough for Dukes and war-chiefs to speak aloud. He remembered Grath on the other side of the flames, a silhouette in the storm, and how much easier it had felt to hate a shape rather than a person.

Now, a decade later, the tower was a ruin, and most of those who’d marched beside him were names carved into stone, or lost to places where stone did not remember.

“Our realms keep meeting in the same place,” Korax said. His voice sounded small in the open silence of the Marches. “Dozens of years and nothing moves. My Duke sends patrols. Your clans send warbands. We both bleed, fall back, rebuild, and repeat.”

Grath grunted his agreement.

“Does your Duke think I enjoy this?” he asked. “My sons died here in the Marches. My brothers. My father Garthuun, the mighty Orc King.” His tusks clenched on the name. “I could build a fortress from their skulls.” He paused, shoulders sagging for a heartbeat beneath the weight of it. “Korax, I do not want more bones.”

A gust of wind shifted the ash, lifting it in a low swirl between them. It stung Korax’s eyes, a mix of burned wood, old oil, and something older, like the taste of extinguished hope. Beneath that, another scent curled in, sour and metallic: the sting of realm tears. Not rot, not blood. Wrongness.

Apollo’s mane rippled as he tossed his head, snorting uneasily.

“Everyone is vanishing now, faster than before,” Korax said quietly. “Not dying. Gone. From human watchposts, orc encampments, and animals in the Ghostwood. No bodies. Just weapons and armor in neat lines and footprints that stop in the middle of a stride.”

Grath’s jaw tightened.

“We know,” he said. “We follow the tracks. Tracks end. We hear… chewing. Under the ground.” His gaze flicked to Korax’s armored chest, where an amulet beneath his mail thrummed faintly. “My shaman told me of an ancient, vile king, The Bitter One, who sends his spawn to feed on both sides of this war’s line.”

Something far off cracked like a distant tree snapping, but there were no trees on the Marches. Dust puffed from the side of a hill, and a half-buried spear slid ten feet sideways without anyone touching it, leaving a smooth, glassy furrow behind. Then the land was still again.

They fell silent, listening to the empty field.

Nothing else moved but a few strips of tattered banner wrapped around a pike, fluttering as if some invisible hand were toying with them. Even the crows had since abandoned this place; only the wind spoke, worrying at broken shields half-submerged.

“Greybeard the Mystic tells me similar stories,” Korax said after a moment. “In his, there are six realms that fall to the seventh, the Veil; the ragged border where the Realms rubbed raw together.” He moved closer to Grath, carefully but without a hand on his sword. “I need you to know we encountered the Veil in flesh. In the Ghostwood, a grotesque Sentinel and his pack of followers drag animals into the Veil and… change them. Or don’t return them at all.”

Grath let out a low rumble from his chest and reached down to pick up a helmet from the muddy ground. Human-made, dented and rusted, the crest bent, its once-bright paint long since scoured away by wind-blown ash.

“You asked for this meeting,” Korax said finally. “Why?”

“Some of my warband fought your people three nights ago,” Grath said. “Not far from here. Out of old habit. Old hate.” His thick fingers turned the helmet in his hands. “We rushed each other and the world… slipped.”

His eyes went distant.

“Stars changed,” he said. “Ground went soft, like walking on backs. Air got thick. Muffled screams. Then they were gone.”

“Your enemies?” Korax asked.

“Some of your men and some of my own.” His fingers curled tight around the helmet and snapped the bent crest off with a sharp crack. “My cousin. Two of my best Elites. A Berserker.” His hand shook once, barely. “One heartbeat they were there, the next… nothing. No bodies. No blood. Just holes in the sound.”

He looked up, eyes suddenly sharp on Korax.

“We roared victory as boys when your forts burned before us,” he said. “But we do not roar when the shadows take our kin and enemy alike. This thing makes a mockery of war.”

“A week before that my scouts found a herd of elk standing in a ring,” he said. “All looking at the same point in the air. Nothing there. When they stepped into the circle, half my men heard their mothers calling to them. The others heard the war horns from their first battle. Then something…” He squeezed the helmet until the metal squealed. “When we came to, the elk were gone. So were two of my hunters. There was not even blood. I has chalked it up to a human mage playing tricks on us.”

Korax thought of Duke Wellington hunched over old maps that no longer mattered, tracing borders that realm tears ignored. He thought of Greybeard’s cracked voice explaining how, when realms overlap, the old rules of blood, iron, and land stop applying. Territories and battle lines meant nothing to a hunger that ate reality itself.

“You want a truce,” Korax said.

Grath spat into the mud, where spittle mingled with streaks of blackened rainwater.

“I want a target,” he corrected. “I want something I can swing steel at. But I cannot even see its face.” His tusks bared in a humorless grimace. “So I say this: your patrols stay east of the broken tower. My warband stays west. If we meet, we meet to kill whatever is eating the Realms, not each other.”

Korax thought of the men waiting back at camp. Some had lost family to orc raids; others owed their lives to the new ceasefires he had quietly arranged along the river. He imagined explaining this to the Duke, to the captains who had never looked an orc in the eye outside of battle.

“Do you honestly trust that to hold?” he asked.

Grath’s shoulders rose and fell with such force that Korax half-expected the ground to shake.

“No,” the orc said. “But I am tired. My people are tired. We have no warriors to spare for old stories.” He paused, eyes narrowing. “But we will not kneel. Do not mistake this for surrender.”

“I understand,” Korax said. “It’s not surrender. It’s survival.”

A faint draft pulled more ash up from the ground between them, a pale, drifting curtain that blurred green skin and human mail for a breath. For a moment, Korax couldn’t tell where the orc ended, and the knight began. They were two dark shapes standing in the same swirling dust, enemies outlined by the same dead war.

The Orc Warchief considered the Knight for a long heartbeat more.

“You ride a strange horse,” he said at last.

Korax glanced at Apollo; the stallion stood alert, muscles tight, ears flicking, nostrils flaring toward the far horizon where a thin line of wrongness shimmered like heat over a corpse.

“It’s a strange world,” Korax said bluntly. “He suits it.”

Grath nodded once.

“Then we meet today as…” He groped for a word his language might not have. “Not yet friends. But as ones who face the same hungry enemy, the Veil, as your wizard calls it.”

“Agreed,” Korax said.

They stepped closer and clasped forearms, thick human leather against scarred orc flesh, with a force that spoke of brotherhood, though neither would admit it. Ash smeared from Grath’s greaves onto Korax’s vambrace and from Korax’s glove onto Grath’s wrist, a faint gray print on green skin. A thin, literal stripe of the same dust marked them both.

Something in the air eased, just a fraction more room in their lungs, as if the land itself approved of the meeting. The Shattered Marches did not sigh in relief, but the constant, oppressive weight of the place shifted, almost imperceptibly, as though some small part of it was less alone.

“Tell your Duke,” Grath said, releasing his arm, “that if his men cross west with banners high and swords out, we will kill them as we always have. But if they cross with you, hunting the Bitter One’s spawn, we will stand beside them. For a time.”

“I’ll tell him,” Korax said. “Whether he listens is his problem. The Veil doesn’t care about his pride.”

Grath’s tusks showed in something that might have been a smile.

“The Veil doesn’t care about mine either,” he said. “That is what frightens me.”

Korax mounted his steed and looked back to the war-chief as he turned Apollo toward the Lowlands. Behind Grath, in the far distance of the Marches, Korax saw a dark smudge where an orc camp should have been. He knew the place; he had seen its fires before on night patrols.

Now there was no smoke rising from it. No movement. Just absence. A missing piece of the world wearing the shape of a stain.

Grath followed his gaze and said nothing.

The truce began there, over the bones of the tower and the ghosts of ten thousand dead. It would not last forever. These things never do. Pride would gnaw at it. Old wounds would fester. Someone, on one side or both, would eventually decide that hating the familiar enemy was easier than fearing the unseen.

But for a time, on that torn strip of land called the Shattered Marches, humans and orcs turned their faces in the same direction:

Toward the cracks in the sky.

Toward the sinking mud.

Toward The Bitter One.

Toward a future where enemies might die side by side instead of across a sword’s edge.

Years later, when the truce finally broke and the first human arrow in years flew toward an orc shield, Korax would remember this moment as clearly as he remembered his own knighting: the ash drifting between them, the weight of Grath’s grip, the way the air had tasted of old wars and new hungers.

It was the beginning of something fragile.

The end of something older than he was.

A relationship stitched together from the ash between them, standing for a little while between a dying war and a deeper darkness beyond.