Zhak dragged her hard, pinching the flap of flesh between the knuckles of her thumb and index finger, claw nail pinching hard to skin. “Oww! Zhak!” She strode ahead to meet Zhak’s pace so he’d relent.
The school was directly across the road from the library, right along the ancient runway. It was a very long, wide, squat pentagonal prism. Usually, it would be packed with delinquents milling about outside smoking sneaky rolled herbs, but since the sibs were late, all about was deserted. Any who bothered to attend were already inside.
They kicked in the double door entrance to find School Master Snorferd Striglin, bald and trim, standing in front of them, arms folded over chest.
“Eep!” Zhak squeaked.
He tsk-tsk-tsked. “Tardy bonk for you, Young Master Zhakkathan,” and swiftly rapped his knuckles on Zhak’s forehead, knocking his neck back a few centimeters. “Ouch!”
“And one for you too, little gurl,” he punched Githarie’s cheek, “-Pokgai!”, she interjected, and so, “Here’s another one for language,” and reversed the blow to a backhand. She turned the other cheek this time and took the sting stoically, though wincingly. Striglin shared Meldy’s distaste for orcish, though what he really hated was backtalk from rude orc kids.
“I believe that makes four in a row,” he took her by the shoulder as he led her to her class – Zhak slipped away to his advanced magicks course – “Now let me give you a copper coin’s worth of free advice, young lady. Those brothers of yours and their gang, they’re real dangerous. If you keep this up, skipping class to hang out with them, you’re going to end up in big trouble.”
Githarie swung her head up – she was still a little stoned so she was squinting hoping he couldn’t see the bloodshot in her eyes from getting high with Lawrah – and halfheartedly replied, “Oh yes, ser.”
Striglin smacked her shoulder hard to stop their walk and force her to face him, “You got a real attitude problem, Thraxes, you’re a slacker! Your older brothers, slackers too!”
“Can I go now, Master Striglin?”
He clawed her upper arm hard, “Your father was a war hero! One of the few who survived in our village. At this rate, he will be the only Thraxes that ever amounted to anything on Rothera Island. Do you want to drag Young Master Zhakkathan” – of course, the oh so talented master’s pet Zhak – “into these ‘Lion’ punks’ mess?”
“Like you said, I’m just a little gurl, it’s not like I’m going to change the course of history.” Githarie sulked, “Can I go now? I’m still late for class.”
He released and relented now that they had arrived. Silently he strode away.
With no more time to muse, she barged in upon her history class, her shoulder smacking the door, swinging hard to the wall with a bang, as she stumbled to a hasty stop.
History Master Guldung peered at her from his monocle. He didn’t need to wear a monocle, but the old orcan felt it made him look more knowledgeable, more intimidating, more gof, more geshzugas. Really it served as a magnifying glass, so he could scrutinize those beady little lying faces. At present he held it pinched to a bemused squint, zeroing in directly on Githarie.
“Late again, are we, Miss Thraxes?”
Everyone heard the hubbub with Striglin outside the door and were whispering to each other trying to get whoever figured out what was going on to spill the tea.
“Lost in the library!” she exclaimed, and it was the truth! But Deyandra had to suppress a snort.
In orcan villages, it was considered an ideal for a class to have a very low student to teacher ratio and therefore Githarie’s history class had no more than five pupils. They were:
Deyandra Ghadaz, an orcan gurl of nineteen revolutions. She was much older than the others, and was a mate of Zholl and Zhon’s, indeed she ran in the same gang as they did, providing illicit contraband to the youth of Rothera. Both her arms were covered in beautiful tattoos depicting legendary creatures, her left arm being Deyandra’s pride and joy, a deeply intricate rendering of the Orca, sleek and black but with white streaks along its belly and eyes. Githarie imagined it had to be very painful to cover that much green with black and white.
Urden Ughash, with flappy, wispy, feathery echolocator ears. They were snuggly covered up by muffs, lest the barest sharp shrill leave him clutching at his ringing head. Through them he could still hear everything just fine, as fine as any orcan could anyway. Urden was an orphan, a Vostokian. The orcan who looked after him was not even related by blood. Poor Urden was only fourteen revolutions and awfully shy.
Slater Shide, who used the pronouns they / them. Slater didn’t disclose their gender, and of course children, always being cruel, liked to gossip that Slater had intentionally mogged themselves hermaphroditic, when this couldn’t be further from the truth. Especially to Githarie. She couldn’t care less. She knew that she liked Slater’s company, the deadpan jokes she cracked were always top kek. Slater generally looked like a nondescript orcan youth, with short, cropped hair that curled and furled into sunlight mopping leaves, slender waist, and bony hips, but still was much taller than Githarie.
Reckerd Bhair, built for raging out. The big thick vein that bulged from his deltoid especially grossed Githarie out and she wished he would stop going sleeveless. Bhair was, of course, known throughout Rothera as being quite the bully. He and his scrappy gang of ruffians – whose membership was always rotating depending on how much Bhair could get his snagas to tolerate his intimidation, and they called themselves the Bear Brigade – were, of course, relied upon as the muscle in the Rotheran gang that all the ghashbois belonged to. They called themselves the Lions of Rothera. Zholl and Zhon weren’t bears but they too were Lions. But when they were around Bhair and his brigade, they acted just like those brutes, and she hated it. Githarie really didn’t like Reckerd.
And, of course, Githarie herself, tardy as always.
“Well, then, Miss Thraxes, I’m sure sha was busy in the library studying for the pop quiz, if so.” He slapped the quiz – thin sheets of bamboo fiber paper, coarse and stiff, which he had laid out in front of all the other students already – at her place on the table. “Piece of cake for sha, won’t it?”
Oh no. Was that this rote? She was too busy thinking about how to celebrate to care about study deadlines.
Bhair snickered but promptly stopped after Guldung gave him a glare.
“Oh, sha bet I did Master Guldung. Piece of cake.” Guldung shook his head and had to smile. Even he had to admire Githarie’s completely unearned bravado, though she really had to work on her tells. She blinked way too much when lying.
But nuk-nuk, nuk-nuk, was all that went through her mind as she pulled up the roughhewn boulder stool and sat at her assigned seat at the shared studying table, nothing more than a big fat block of conglomerate ocean detritus, fused together after it was all salvaged by the shores.
Printed upon the quizzes with charcoal ink were the following questions:
How did the Horde come to be free?
She hated this vague, cryptic way he taught. What insecurity, goading for the answer you seek - although she hadn’t thought this quite as eloquently, only something to the effect. Nonetheless it wasn’t as if Githarie was dimwitted, and she indeed had been paying attention in class, so she knew exactly what answer he was looking for. As if his constant tirades about the exodus, on and on again, wasn’t something she already knew from her own braggart father’s regaling of his heroic exploits!
She scrawled with the ball point pen she got visiting the metalsmithing village of Elichiribehety:
The Horde routed the elves in Protorca, where we came from – mentioning that would surely score her a point – ferrying all the orcans of the Horde to our homeland, ORCA. She made sure to write it in full and all caps, ORCA, just in case, even though she felt it redundant. Where else could they be, but home? This was called the Exodus. She underlined exodus.
But doubt began to percolate as she swirled the little concentric spiral of rolled ink into a full stop. She had been taught in class that the Horde had been victorious, it was the most memorable part of Master Guldung’s lecture, the strokes of his markers on the melamine board swooping like the platoons of the Horde crushing the bulk of the elvan army in a pincer – the Battle On the Land of Fire! –, but when her Da would retell his war stories, she always recalled him expressing relief that the elvans had, for some reason or another, decided to spare them. The way he told of the skies raining dragon’s breath as he ran a blockade made Githarie believe that if the elves had wanted to, they could have wiped the entire continent out.
Perhaps he was just exaggerating.
She clucked her tongue. No wonder she could never finish these things, she always let her mind wander! She remembered Zhak’s advice: do a bombing run, just try to answer all the ones you can quickly before returning to the ones that puzzled her.
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Next question:
Name the three elite superstates of the Godlike Beings.
This one was easy.
She wrote: Jhirya Tuneden Morquarra
She spelled them perfectly but forgot the commas. Two down, two to go.
Give the revolution AE after each event:
Catastrophe -
Eucatastrophe -
Exodus -
Another easy one. He even put them in order for her. How sweet of him. Despite Guldung’s gruffness, she knew in the end he was still an easy grader. He was practically begging for his students to succeed. She started with the easiest by writing a zero underneath Eucatastrophe, because everyone knew that that’s what the E in “AE” meant.
Eucatastrophe - 0 AE
The next one was easy too.
Exodus - 184 - 192 AE
But now, staring at what she had written:
Catastrophe -
Eucatastrophe - 0 AE
Exodus - 184 - 192 AE
She was stumped. She should have moved onto the next question, but something about leaving the timeline incomplete felt unsatisfactory, and compelled her to rack her brain. But the fact that the world had been much cooler than it is now hundreds of revs ago was common knowledge, when that had happened was not. Githarie hadn’t even been born when Reath was twelve degrees celsius cooler. So how could she possibly know when it was?
Realizing she was running out of time; she made an educated guess. As far as she knew, the world only really started unraveling from extreme heat roughly four hundred revs ago? Give or take? So, she wrote a tilde before her answer:
Catastrophe - ~100 BE?
Damn it! She cursed silently. She shouldn’t have written that question mark! She hoped that he wouldn’t deduct points for it. It was too late, she wrote it with ink, and it would look uglier if she scratched it out, she couldn’t do that. So, she moved on:
Describe the events known as the Eucatastrophe.
And when she read this, she felt her stomach churn. He had even underlined it, as if to emphasize the importance of the exact moment she fell asleep listening to him drone on! It was by far the most complicated part of the lesson. She was fairly confident she could make another educated guess though. It was just the word catastrophe, but with two extra letters! And atul knew what catastrophe meant. She began jotting without even having fully formulated what she would write:
What happened after the catastrophe.
She crossed that through immediately after she wrote it. There was no way a Master as strict as Master Guldung would let her get away with an answer like that, especially considering he spelled it out for her in the last question. He wasn’t that easy of a grader. You wouldn’t get to be a Master if you were. She might as well just admit not having paid attention! But as far as she knew, that was it.
She thought harder about those first two runes. If you could pick apart a word into smaller words, it was sometimes possible to understand what it meant without even having known it.
She thought of words that start with ‘eu-’. Euphoria? Euthanasia? She scrunched her brow, could she have picked two words with greater difference in meaning? And now she had to find something in common between them. What did feeling joy have in common with wanting to die? Wait- wanting to die? Who wants to die? She shuddered. She rarely thought about death.
Then she remembered the story of Uncle Ghorto. The only one that Da never liked to tell. When Uncle Ghorto, though she had never met him, saved the life of her father.
A good death. And then suddenly it came to her! Euthanasia! Geshzugas!
The prefix ‘eu’ means good or well, so perhaps it’s something like a good catastrophe?
She couldn’t imagine what could possibly be so good about scorching, blistering heat and mountain felling storms. Yet, at the same time, she had never known a world without them. She chewed on the end of her pen. How could death possibly be a good thing? But, then again, wasn’t that just the cycle of life? It was like how the farmers would plow the rotting algae that Da brought back from the seas into the soil to fertilize it. For something new to emerge, something else had to end.
She paused, unsure of herself. It sounded ridiculous, but it was her best guess. She didn’t want to jeopardize her chances, so she scribbled a little margin note to the side, so that the History Master would not think that it was her final answer:
Opp? A shorthand for ‘Opposite?’
The opposite of catastrophe.
She thought about her Da.
She set her pen down and wrote ‘First dipped orcan-.’
“Time!” Guldung barked. And he briskly stalked the ring of stools around the circular shared desk, snatching up the quizzes, at mid mark for Githarie, even! Her pen left a trailing line before she could even finish writing ‘orcans’. She muttered a curse under her breath, but Guldung was too distracted by Bhair glancing over Urden’s shoulder to notice.
“Thrak it ova! Deck!”
Guldung launched into his next lecture, working backwards from before the Eucatastrophe. The lesson plan for the rote was to go over the history of the Catastrophe, go into greater detail of the superstates, and how they coalesced after a period of fracturing and splintering in what was known as the Million Wars period. Intrigue! Then he would move onto the Harbinger, he figured if he connected something that they could relate too – and what orcan hadn’t caught a little covid before? – he could fascinate them with how an annoying seasonal sickness brought the Godlike civilisation to its knees. He thought he was certain to enrapture his class.
But one by one they dropped, arms folded over face, heads nodding and drooping, eyelids winking away. What did young orcans care about the long dead?
But it didn’t really hurt that much to the orcan constitution and Zhak was just being dramatic. Still, it was sad that corporal punishment was so intrinsic to orcan schooling.
But she wasn’t! She was in the library, returning books!
Strangely familiar. Perhaps just an odd reverberation of the legacy through the universe. Reality strangely following the course of fiction. It’s like poetry. It rhymes.
She will.
Orcish for ‘badass’. The monocle did not make Gullding look more gof.
Although a few bats survived somewhere deep and high in the icy ranges of the Tibetan Plateau, the orcans, who were so far away, had forgotten them.
Vostok, being an industrial village located in the Pole of Cold, had a population of mostly transient workers. Whoever Urden’s parents were, they simply banged, birthed, and bounced. It took a kindly orcan, Blagan Ughash from Rothera, to adopt Urden and bring him back home.
Atul would mix him up with Urghen Zurgast. He just wished that everyone would call him by his last name - Ughash - but no one would give him the satisfaction because, well, he just ain’t ghash.
Indeed, the fact that Githarie did not judge impressed Slater so much that they revealed the truth to her: that they were originally a boi who identified as a gurl and transmogrified breasts but chose to keep their penis because they were also a lesbian, and in Slater’s own words “no sense in wasting good hardware”. In the Lost Age, they may have been called a femboi, or, more pejoratively, a ‘trap’. But alas some taboos of the Lost Age persisted, and so gender fluidity was still something that was considered ‘weird’ to most orcans, and even Lawrah – who should not have been told the secret but was told anyway for Githarie lacked discretion – had to opine “They should just pick a side!” But even Githarie had to admit that Lawrah was being hypocritical.
A nasty bit of vascularization resulting from anabolic steroid use. Reckerd was lazy, and wanted his gains, without the pains.
A crew within a crew. In truth, the cryptid bear and cryptid lion hardly got along, indeed were not even to be found in the same biome. But they had not the faintest idea of what a bear looked like in the first place.
Neither did they know what a lion was supposed to look like, so in their imaginations their mascot was a chimera, with the tail of a serpent, big feathery wings, six limbs, and great feathers all across the neck as the only accuracy.
“Sha gonna flunk for sure if sha don’t study!” – Zhak, literally hours ago.
She was proud of knowing this word, for her father had used it many times.
It was a lie propagated down through the Orcan educational system, but for what purpose, only the Horde Master knew. Even those who had fought in the Exodus had already begun to remember differently, so thoroughly did the Horde Master ministrate this so-called truth.
While the Horde was only able to open up the opportunity to flee Protorca using such a maneuver, the retelling of it that the History Master gave them was mostly just a fictional, plagiarized retelling of the tactics used in a far more ancient battle known as the Battle of Cannae. It did not actually happen that way. At all.
Tierra Del Fuego
Eastasia.
Eurasia.
Oceania, but not that Oceania.
She didn’t give a fuck about oxford commas, and only sometimes used them, much to Zhak’s chagrin.
Which, luckily for her, was indeed correct.
He did not. On the contrary, he thought of giving her a bonus mark, thinking that with that tilde, it indicated she had heard him say that “Orcan scholars simply don’t fully understand when the Catastrophe began, and how it happened,” information that Gullding felt was suspect in its absence. How could the Horde not know?
She had learned this technique actually from her studies of an entirely different language: when she was young, her mother had attempted to teach her how to write the Lower Jhiryan language, known as Jhiryese, but although she had begun to decode those symbols that were the basic building blocks of Jhiryese, also known as a radical, she quickly gave up once she encountered the endless combinations.
An orcan like Githarie simply could not imagine being trapped in a body so destroyed, or mind so tormented, that oblivion was preferable to the suffering. She had simply not experienced enough pain to know what it really meant yet.
Entirely incorrect, which Gullding gave her a big red cross and zero with double underlines, because the Horde Master himself – who had crafted all this curriculum in the first place – felt even orcans needed to be educated that what the Eucatastrophe referred to was strictly the emergence of the elvans. If she had only written ‘first elvans’ instead. As they said in the Lost Age- the winners write the history books.
Bhair hated it when he was called Deck, he felt it sounded too similar to ‘dick’, and sneered back, kicking his feet up on the desk. He was obviously unaware of the place that the name Deckard held in the legacy.
Morquarra, Jhirya, and Tuneden had