Emmaline sat on a log trying to catch her breath. Her captor, whomever he had been, had not bound her hands and it had been no great trick to get the bag off her head once she had opened some distance. At this point fleeing seemed like it might have been a mistake. She was alone and naked in a wood that she had no way of finding her way out of. If her abductor was to be believed it was teeming with orcs to boot. Emmaline had grown up in the Empire where orcish invasions were no joke and she didn't doubt, given the Laird had also spoken of orcs, that the claim was true. That ruled out calling for help even if there was someone in ear shot. The omnipresent mist concealed the stars although without any land marks or idea which direction they had headed from the village even that would be a dubious help. She supposed she might use magic to send up a beacon but there was no telling who or what would find her if she called attention to herself. The best option, and the one that appealed to her nature, was to find somewhere safe to hide until day light and then see if she could figure out where she was. 

"Feed all o'mies to Mork!" a gutural voice exclaimed nearby. Emmaline froze and then, when she realised freezing wasn't a good instinct, she slipped down behind the mossy log, peering underneath a small gap where the curvature of the trunk lifted away from the ground. Across the clearing she saw two brutal, heavily muscled greenskined figures slouch out of the treeline.

"Feed the painted ones to Gork, their women to Mork!" one of the creatures added. Emmaline felt unaccountably embarrassed that she could understand the orks, for that must be what these brutes were, better than she could understand the men and women in the village from which she had been snatched. Both creatures wore armor of a sort, bits and pieces of cast off steel tied together with leather and links of chainmail and both carried axes that looked like they were probably heavier than she was. Emmaline had seen orcish skeletons and the renderings of various Imperial artists, but somehow found herself unprepared for just how big the brutes really were.

"Galzeez says we feed them soon!" one of the orcs said with a guttural chuckle, running his thumb, almost the width of Emmaline's wrist, over his axe blade, drawing a bead of blood.

"No trust gobbo scum 'ike 'im, even if he does have the big waaaagh magik," the other orc snarled, spitting a gobbet of spit that hit the other side of the log from where Emmalime was concealed with a sound like a custard pie hitting a clown at the fair.

"Galzeez is cunnin' even for a gobbo," the other orc rejoined with a grunt. Their voices were so similar in tone and timbre that Emmaline could not tell them appart and she had the momentary sensation she was listening in on a single orcs internal monologue rather than a conversation.

"Yeah well cunnin' or..." the first orc said before lifting his fist into the air and silencing his companion. Both greenskins became as immobile as tree-trunks.

"I smell 'ommies," the orc snarled, fat lips drawing back from rotted and yellowed fangs that glinted like chisel faces in the moonlight. Emmaline willed her heart to beat less noisily and resisted the urge to duck back from her improvised view point. Any movement now would certainly give her away.

"Where..." one of the orcs grunted, turning slowly in a circle like a hunting dog seeking a scent.

"Da'know but fresh, lets get the lads out and hunt us some pink skins," the first orc snarled. The both turned and jogged out of the clearing, surprisingly quietly given their improvised armor. Emmaline let out a terrified breath and counted to thirty. Then she stood up and headed off in the opposite direction to that the orcs had taken. That was no certainty of safety, but it seemed like the best decision she could make under the circumstance.