they were about to die.
Her grin disappeared as she came around the far side to see not two, not three, but a score of the humanoid creatures, standing ready, weapons drawn.
Confident that she had not been seen but knowing well that her band had been spotted long before-likely as they were descending into the dell-the woman edged back around the boulders and turned into a sitting position. She was thinking to ward her friends away, or at least to assemble them in some kind of defensive position. She started to motion for them to do just that, swinging her arm up from pointing at them to showing the ridge behind.
She froze. Her face, gone stern from its previous smile, slipped into an expression of sheer dread. There, up on the ridge behind her fellows, the woman saw the unmistakable forms of many, many enemies.
A cry from back there, from the trailing human scout, confirmed the horror, and the other members of the party swung around. A horde of orcs came down fast, howling with every step. The woman started to scramble up to go and join her companions, but she fell back at the sound of footsteps rushing around and coming over the boulders. The score of orcs went right past her, bearing down on their prey, and the woman knew that her friends were doomed to a man. Too many enemies, she knew. Too many.
She fell back, recoiling instinctively from the horrible screams of agony that began to erupt all over the bloody battlefield. She saw one man go up several feet into the air at the end of a trio of orc spears. Howling and kicking, he somehow managed to fall back to his feet and somehow hold his balance, though he was surely mortally wounded.
He stood determinedly-until a group of orcs leaped atop him, smashing him down.
The woman melted back, crawling between the paired boulders, squeezing into the dark place underneath their abutting overhangs. She tried to control her breathing, tried to stifle the shrieks welling up within her. From under the stones she could not see the battlefield, but she could hear it well enough. Too well.
She lay there in the dark, terrified, for a long, long while after the cries had abated. She knew that at least one man had been dragged off as a prisoner.
But there was nothing she could do.
She lay there, praying every minute that some orc wouldn't happen by and notice her, and she held back her tears as the long night passed.
Overwhelmed and trembling, sheer exhaustion overcame her.
The sound of birds awakened her the next morning. Still terrified, it took every ounce of willpower she could muster to crawl out of that small cubby-hole. Coming out the way she had gone in, but feet first, was no easy task, physically or emotionally. Every inch that she moved out made her feel more vulnerable, and she almost expected a spear to be thrust into her belly at any time.
When she had to blink away the bright sunlight she gradually managed to sit up.
There she saw the bodies of her companions, hacked apart-an arm here, a head lying over there. The orcs had slaughtered them, had mutilated them.
Gasping for breath, the woman tried to turn to her side and stand, but stopped halfway and fell I to her knees, falling forward to all fours and vomiting.
It took her a long time to manage to stand, and a long time to wander past the carnage of those who had been her companions, her hunting partners, her friends. She didn't pause to reassemble any corpses, to look for lost limbs or lost heads, to count the bodies to try to determine how many, if any, had been taken off as prisoners.
It didn't seem to matter then, for she knew beyond doubt that any who had been dragged away were already dead.
Or wished they were.
She came up out of the dell slowly, cautiously, but no sign of the orc ambush group was to be found. The first step over that lip came hard to her, as did the second, but each subsequent stride moved more quickly, more determinedly, until she was running flat out across the mile of ground she needed to cover to get back to her home.
"It ain't right, I tell ye!" yelled one dwarf, who was a bit too full of the mead. The feisty fellow stood up on his chair and pounded his fist on the table in frustration. "Ye just