Author's Note: Posting two chapters today.

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When the arrows flew into Strozazand, Broden's first instinct was to charge the orcs at the end of the hall. Blood red fury washed over his thoughts like a tsunami, obliterating everything except the thought of smashing the laughing orcs' teeth in; beating them so soundly they wouldn't have time to choke on their teeth before he killed them. Broden took a step forward, his axe seeming to have leapt into his hands. His knuckles were white against the shaft as adrenaline filled him - and then was washed away as if by summer rain.

No. Go back the way you came. Find your friends, the clerics.

The… voice? smothered the rage that had been building in his mind. I need to go. The screams of his friends had been stirring his rage, now they fell away from him. Without even a glance at Shandra, he turned on his heel and sprinted down the hall.

Broden was so focused on retrieving Katrina and Cole that he ran right past the secret door they had found. As a dwarf, it was above his line of sight ordinarily. But as focused and driven as he was, his vision had tunneled so much, he barely even comprehended that there were walls in the hall he ran down.

He sprinted back into the room they had sealed the troll out of. The furniture stacked in front of the door had caught fire and burned down to ash. Broden walked over the entrance cautiously. The door still radiated an intense heat. As he poked around, it became clear to him that the burning heat from Stroz's flaming spit had made the door so hot that everything stacked against it had ignited.

Not only that, but the door had been heated so much that it had melted to the frame. Whatever attempts the troll had made to break through had resulted in dents, and obvious places where the door had buckled, but it hadn't made it through before it had presumably, died. No one would be using that entrance anytime soon.

Broden's eyes flicked around the rest of the room. What furniture hadn't been burned by the door, had been torn apart by Cole while he was waiting for Katrina to settle down. Even if Broden hadn't been driven to find them and he had been inclined to search the room, there wasn't anything left to search.

He was turning to go back down the hall when a section of the wall fell away, revealing five orcs, their assorted skin tones revealing them to be from different tribes: red, yellow, grey, green, and fuchsia. They were so engrossed in bickering, about what Broden didn't know, that it wasn't until he had cleaved one of them - green - from shoulder to groin that they noticed him.

Broden lopped off a second's head on his back swing. The ugly red thing fell to the ground, bouncing and rolling, frozen in surprise. While the third - fuchsia - was yanking out his scimitar, Broden kicked him backwards into a grey orc who already had his weapon drawn, skewering the fuchsia orc as it crashed into him.

The grey orc tried to retrieve his blade, but twisted his foot on the ghastly red orc's skull. The grey orc fell heavily to the ground, trapped under his comrade. Broden made short work of the remaining two orcs.

The yellow orc scored a hit against him, drawing a long thin line across his chest, but Broden had been able to back up enough that it was a superficial cut. It stopped bleeding soon after it was made.

The open passageway beckoned him forward, until the voice echoed in his mind a second time: Find your friends.

Without stopping to check the corpses, Broden turned back and returned down the hall. This time his head was up, his eyes were open and clear. He saw the passageway Cole and Katrina had used. Since this passage was open, and no voices told him to stop, he climbed in and followed it. He was glad no one was around to see him clamber up into it because he looked ridiculous. Grr. The open passage sat in the wall above his head. To climb into it, he had to stand on tip toe and pull himself up. Had his arms been less strong, it would have been much harder. His stocky body worked against him.

Broden wasn't one to dwell on things like shame, or really anything. He grunted mentally as he struggled up, but once he was in the passage all consideration of the struggle to get in disappeared in a wash of exhilaration.

If Broden had been a man of words or thoughts, he probably would have thought something like: On with the hunt! But he wasn't. He rarely thought actual thoughts. It was part of why he didn't care for speech. Broden thought in emotion and color, which was very hard for him to communicate. He was, however, proficient in something he referred to as "muscle speech" which was a complex language of physical proportions.

Broden flexed his pleasure in a series of various poses. If Katrina had been there to see it, she would have translated his poses into sentences like "I'm awesome!", "That was great!" or "No one is as manly as me!" and Broden wouldn't have argued with those sentences, because they weren't exactly incorrect. But in truth, they failed to capture the complex emotions and the depth of feeling that he was exclaiming with his body.

The inability of the common tongue to express what he felt was part of why he had given it up in the first place. The other reason, which he generally forgot about, was that he had been attacked by a wild cowbra and his vocal cords had been severely damaged. It had taken over a year for him to be able to speak again and by then he just didn't bother anymore. That was such a long time ago… he had forgotten. Or, that was what he told himself. When he thought about it, which wasn't often.

With these thoughts firmly out of his mind, he journeyed down the passage. When he came to the hall with the traps, he didn't know it. That is, he didn't know it until he stepped into the hall triggering the first trap. His sensitive ears, trained from an early age to detect the sound of weepse wings approaching or even smaller and more deadly sounds from all his time alone in the Skógur Forest, heard the click of some mechanical dart being launched.

Without thought, Broden adjusted his chest so the dart passed in front of him. He eyed the dart with curious disdain before turning to look down the rest of the hall. Unlike Cole, he was not glowing with a holy light that revealed hidden traps. Broden reasoned, with murky grey frustration moving through his mind, that if there was one trap there would be more. The hallway that Cole and Katrina had hopped and jumped, Broden charged through. Flames burst from the walls, the subtle sounds of triggers being activated caused him to adjust his movements. He wasn't fast enough, however. He singed his beard in the trap, but Broden didn't let that stop him. He did a rolling spring, letting him put his beard out while still advancing him. Unfortunately, one of the stones that he landed on was one that also triggered a collapse. He scrambled the last few feet, the callused, leathery soles of his feet pushing off against stones that were vanishing under them. When he reached safety at the end, he turned and watched as the entire hallway fall into a murky dark substance that bubbled and hissed.

Heh. He thought to himself, brushing dust off his legs proudly. Broden did a few victory flexes at the destroyed hallway, preening over his athletic skill before following the passage the rest of the way. At which point, he discovered the bodies of the orcs Katrina and Cole had slain. His shoulders slumped for a moment. He was disappointed that he missed the fun.

Katrina was shimmering with holy energy. Divine sparks danced around her skin. In other words, she looked like she always did. At least, she didn't look any different in his sight. Cole however was completely transformed. Before now, Cole had always looked like a normal human, somewhat dark, certainly not glow-y at all. Not now. Cole blazed. Broden couldn't look directly at him because it was like looking into the sun. Broden felt this was appropriate as a priest of the sun and felt a warm, happy yellow glow spread over him.

Katrina was bent over Strozazand, who was glowing with enough lightning he could be one of Shandra's experiments, while Cole was yelling at Kegar. Broden was surprised that cowardly Cole, of all people, would yell at Kegar. Broden knew from experience how petty Kegar could be when he felt threatened. Now that Kegar was going to inherit Pode through Lizzy… Cole's family, if not Cole himself, could expect some pretty stiff repercussions for this outburst… even if it took them a few years to be allowed to go home. Broden was awash with a sigh of blue thoughts.

Looks like they found their way without me. Broden wiped the orc blood off his axe, I guess there wasn't a point in me going to find them.