Koruk felt the last few drops of water touch his parched lips and wet his tongue. The cup in his hand was empty far too soon. The water jug was now nearly empty, and they had been rationing the last remaining few cups as far as they could.

  His throat felt dry. His skin felt dry. His lips were cracked and swollen. Conversation had stopped days ago. It hurt to even open his mouth.

  Surprisingly Oben was coping the best out of any of them. The small man needed less water, and his legs were still strong enough to walk where Koruk’s threatened to give way.

  After a few days they had resorted to drinking their own urine. When they stopped being able to pee, they started wringing out their sweat from their clothes and tried drinking that, but found it salty. Oben tried rigging the sail above a pit to condense water overnight, but marching through the day proved impossible as the heat burned their feet through their shoes and completely halted their progress.

  Semthak led the group, holding his stick in front of him, bobbing it up and down.

  Always with his stupid stick. What good was it anyways?

  Koruk swallowed the bitter thought along with the last of his saliva, and marched on. The moonlight threw a blue hue over the normally red desert, and cast the rolling dunes into beautiful reliefs. Above his head another shooting star twinkled into existence and then vanished. Had he not been so parched, he might have wondered at the rare cosmic event. As it was, it was all he could do do to put one foot in front of the next.

  When the last of the water was gone the next day, his heart sunk in his chest.

  So this is how it ends. He thought. He contemplated laying down in the sand and giving up. Gods but he could use the rest.

  Semthak’s stick twitched.

  The old orc halted suddenly, and Koruk nearly walked into his back. What was the old fool doing?

  Semthak’s cracked lips split into a huge grin, and he began frantically pacing around, murmuring to himself and following the twitching stick towards something only he could see. Has he gone mad, Koruk thought, looking around. This patch of desert looked the same as any other.

  Semthak tried to open his mouth to speak, but nothing came out but a strained noise. He pointed animatedly at the ground at his feet, dropped to his knees, and started to dig with his hands. Koruk joined him, as did the others. They shifted handful after handful of cool sand, a pit starting to grow in front of them.

  At that bottom of that pit, began to pool a tiny few droplets of water.

  Seeing this, the digging intensified, until the droplet became a handful. They took turns sucking at the water coming out of the ground, swallowing sand while they did so but not caring. The trickle soon dried up, but although they dug more they found that the sand began to collapse into the hole faster than they could excavate it, and they could get no more.

  Koruk crashed into Semthak, embracing him in a wide hug, laughing hysterically.

  “It worked old man! You saved us!” He said, his words slurred slightly. He felt revitalized.

  Semthak continued leading them, following a winding path westward by the twitching magical stick. As morning began to break every day, they stopped and dug, and every day they found a little more water at the bottom of the pit.

  One night, the scenery finally changed. As they scaled another dune, in the distance they spotted a parting in the sand, and the ground began to descend and grow rockier. The next night they found themselves entering a valley, a chasm hewn out of the earth, flanked by sandstone cliffs that seemed to lean in over their heads. Here when they dug for water, enough sprung out of the ground that they were able to refill their water jug. The heavy weight on Koruk’s back made him feel a joy unlike any he had ever experienced, and he shouldered it without any complaint.

  With his throat no longer dry and his head clear, he was able to properly appreciate the beauty of the land he found himself in. As they went deeper into the chasm, it took on the appearance of a long tunnel. In places the stone wrapped around right over their heads, forming archways that bridged the two halves of the valley, and strange stone teeth rose out of the ground much as they did at Brittle Teeth. Plants too grew in the valley here and there, their deep taproots going down into the aquifer. As they camped for the day, they noticed a few scurrying creatures that they couldn’t identify.

  The air here was cool, and they found they could travel by daylight again. They stopped and rested an entire day, and their spirits were good.

  The following day the chasm widened, and the found themselves entering a huge crater carved out of the earth. In the centre of that crater was a small lake, its clean waters blue as they reflected the sky above. Ringing the lake and extending all the way to the walls of the crater was a jungle of palm trees, ferns, and other plantlife. Huge insects buzzed by their heads, and they heard the squawks and calls of many strange birds and animals.

  Moktark ran towards the water and the rest of the group wasn’t far behind. The big orc slipped in the mud and landed facefirst into the lake with a loud splash that sent birds erupting out of the trees squawking in anger as their home was disturbed. Koruk dove in after him, Followed by Oben and the slower Semthak. They splashed each other with the water and laughed idiotically.

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  Then they noticed that they weren’t alone. Semthak called for them to be quiet, and they sunk down into the water up to their noses. On the far bank, hidden behind some trees, there looked to be some buildings, the same colour as the sandstone cliffs around them. And looking closer, parked near those buildings, was a sandskimmer.

  “Those conniving bastards, we found them!” Moktark said. He crept back ashore and grabbed his obsidian lined warclub, which he had stubbornly held onto the entire march.

  “If they didn’t know we were here before they certainly do now.” Semthak said. “You should have been more careful before splashing around like an idiot!”

  “I didn’t see you holding back old man.” Moktark growled. “It doesn’t matter. Let them see us coming! Let them feel the fear after what they pulled!”

  “Quiet both of you! What’s done is done.” Koruk hissed. The two arguing orcs shut up.

  They waited for awhile, listening for any call of alarm of sign of approach. Nothing.

  “Why haven’t they attacked?” Koruk asked.

  “By some miracle they must not have seen us. We might still get away with this.” Semthak said, wiping his brow with his still dripping robe.

  “Get away with what? Are you scared old man? Let’s kick their asses!” Moktark said, rising up from his crouch and swinging his club menacingly.

  “You idiot! There’s a whole town there! There could be hundreds of them.” Semthak hissed. “We need to see what we’re dealing with first.”

  “He’s right Moktark, don’t be brash. They’ll get what’s coming to them.” Koruk said. Moktark grunted and hunched down again.

  The companions snuck toward the village, hiding amongst the reeds as best they could. As the village came into view, they saw some lazy movement around the sandskimmer. One of the imps pushed a large basket aboard the ship, and another had his feet dangling off the edge and was napping under the shade of a tarpaulin. Not a soul stirred anywhere else in the village. It was as if it was abandoned.

  “They’re sleeping.” Semthak said incredulously. “No sentries. No wall. They’re just napping in the sun without a care in the world.”

  “They’re about to care!” Moktark said furiously, rising to his feet.

  “No, wait!”

  Moktark roared in fury as he stood, shaking water and bits of reed loose from himself, and charged. The imp who was carrying the basket dropped it, and started shouting in alarm. The other two imps on the barge were slow to react, rising from their nap in confusion, but Moktark found his charge slowed by the mud sucking at his feet with every step. By the time he had reached the sandskimmer the crew had abandoned it, running for the hills. Koruk arrived soon after Moktark, and loosed an arrow at the fleeing imps, but the shaft clattered off the rocks and missed its target.

  Worse, after they had gained a higher vantage point, the imps began slinging stones down at them, and the orcs found themselves battered and bruised by the projectiles, and were forced to retreat back to the safety of the sandskimmer.

  “Filthy cowards!” Moktark yelled at the cliffs as a stone whizzed past his head. He sighted something shining on the deck of the skimmer, and rolled out of cover to snatch it. His lost shield. He grabbed it and swung it out in front of himself just in time to hear a stone smack against it where his head would have been.

  “Wait you fool! We need them alive!” Semthak yelled between breaths. He was covered in mud, and must have fallen in the muck at some point during the charge.

  “What for!?” Moktark yelled back.

  “Can you pilot this thing!?” Semthak said, thumping the side of the sandskimmer for effect.

  “Yes! No. Probably!”

  “No you bloody can’t! Use your head you oaf!”

  A rock skipped off the deck of the sandskimmer and whacked Semthak in the face, causing him to swear in a way that Koruk never would have expected from him. Suddenly the hailstorm ceased.

  “They go up the hill!” Oben called out. He was holding his knife in a white knuckled grip and hiding behind a pile of baskets filled with fresh fruit.

  “Damn!” Moktark said.

  The party pursued the fleeing imps up into the cliffs ringing the oasis. They quickly lost sight of them, but Koruk and his brother had years of tracking experience, and had no trouble finding their poorly disguised tracks in the sandy soil. A winding path made its way up and up along the cliff face, and for nearly an hour they relentlessly pursued their quarry, breathing hard as they ascended.

  Suddenly from ahead of them they heard a cry of alarm and pain. A huge black shape swooped over their head, the captain of the red men dangling helplessly from its mighty talons. It was some kind of enormous black bird, its wingspan so wide that it blotted out the sun as it passed overhead. It, and the captain of the sandskimmer, were gone before Koruk could even raise his bow. They forged on ahead, towards the sounds of commotion.

  The two remaining imps were taking cover behind some boulders near the entrance of a shallow cave, desperately slinging stones at a group of the terror birds that were flapping about them. Moktark bellowed a war cry and charged forward, and the orcs joined the battle, bow and axe against talon. The imps didn’t object to the unexpected support, and increased their missile barrage with renewed vigor.

  Koruk fired an arrow which dug deep into the belly of one of the birds and as it fell from the sky Moktark beheaded it with a heavy blow from his razor edged warclub. Another bird took a stone to the skull and tumbled down the cliff out of sight.

  Suddenly Koruk felt huge talons dig into his sides as one of the monsters attempted to pick him up and carry him off. Unfortunately for the beast, it found him a great deal heavier than one of the thin red men, and it flapped around unable to fully lift him off the ground, Koruk headbutted it, driving his tusks into its belly, and it released him and flew off with a shrill cry that made his ears ring.

  One by one they killed the monster birds. One of the imps took a talon to the face and was left bleeding out, and Semthak rushed over to tend to him. Eventually the flock had enough of them, and fled into the sky, leaving them alone.

  Koruk clutched at his side where the beast’s talons had dug into his flesh, but he didn’t seem to be badly hurt. The imp on the other hand…

  The older imp coughed up blood as red as his skin, and clutched at his throat, gurgling and rasping for breath. As Koruk approached, Semthak looked up at him and shook his head. He soon perished, and breathed no more.

  The smaller imp, who Koruk recognized as the orcish speaking one he had talked to on the sandskimmer, was huddled in a corner, his legs pulled up against his chest. Semthak approached him, and he didn’t resist as the orc bound his hands behind his back. Koruk picked up the body of the dead imp, and together they returned to the village.