[center][h1][color=948551][b]Gûshruk[/b][/color][/h1][/center][hr]Even through the nearsighted and blurry eyesight of his breed, the captain Orc knew that what scurried and skittered before him was neither man nor animal, but one of those detestable breeds lying between the two. He straightened his legs, stepping down from the boulder whereon he had squatted. Indeed, his goblin had returned, crawling along with filth crept up under its fingernails, and grease on its belly.

It knelt to him—not because he was particularly morbid and awe-striking as Orcs went—because it already was cultivated to be subservient, pitiful, cowardly, and to any noble creature which stood tall and proud, detestable. Its wide saucer-eyes and its long, bent nose and its huge wrinkled ears all were better-suited to dark and clammy places, drenched in shadows, where it could sneak and steal with all the better likelihood of skulking away intact thereafter. It sported gaunt, gangling limbs, but slithered nonetheless on its belly, which glistened, like the rest of it, with lanolin and all the grime which mingled with it as it was dragged along. And it wore its leathery rags with the same nonchalance as an emperor in velvet and sables.

"[color=B1C938]See? See?[/color]" said the goblin, clasping together its palms, interlocking its spindly digits. "[color=B1C938]Golgash has returned, master. He hasn't run away![/color]" But Gûshruk's beady eyes watched, instead, the space behind Golgash, where the trees grew nearer and nearer and formed ahead a great brittle curtain. For he knew that the goblin, weak and obsequious, was clever only in the matter of its own survival, and that it easily may have been followed as its cowardice threw it back toward the safety of the camp.

Reared on human values within a human city, Gûshruk's instinct was to pity his Golgash terribly; nonetheless he knew to keep him in line, and appeal to the sensibilities of his race. Gûshruk beat Golgash, but rarely, and only because he knew that if he did not, he would be deserted and betrayed. He had learned quickly as a bandit king that so many of his lessers responded not to mercy, kindness, rhetoric or logic, but rather, simply, to guttural, visceral fears; the fears of pain and of death. So the Orc kept up his façade of being a wild and irreconcilable force of violent rage, satiated only by obedience and by loyalty.

"[color=948551]Good,[/color]" he snarled. He began a slow, trodding march toward the camp, which the goblin took as his cue, predictably, to follow close behind. "[color=948551]Now tell me what we're up against.[/color]"

[hider=][@Fyre Unholy][/hider]