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[center][colour=indianred][h2]Peks[/h2]
[b]Scion[/b][/colour][/center]

Sir Galn Erbius of Paterdomus, Knight of the Hare and leader of 'this merry little jaunt of an expedition', pushed a cobble around the rubble with his foot as he inspected what remained of the granary. Whatever hopes he had of discerning from the little ruin a culprit for its destruction had been carried away with the grain, which had for the most part survived and been recovered by the villagers with much excavation and heaping-up of the simple mortar and masonry. Their greatest concern now was rats- rats infesting the sacks of oats and barley they had moved to bury in a makeshift storage pit while they rebuilt the grainhouse.

Their second greatest concern, of course, was the ogre.

Sir Hasse Lomar of Paterdomus, also a Knight of the Hare and more easily bored than Sir Erbius, saw nothing worth noting in the rubble and had already questioned the villagers at length (that is, for about five or six minutes). "The beast was [i]especially[/i] large, you say?"

"Aye, m'lord," said the nearest farmer. "Ain't none of us [i]seen[/i] it, o' course, but they do say an ogre ain't meant to be bigger'n twelve feet at the crown. And they see 'em too, sometimes, stealin' sheep. Well, this one had footprints bigger'n I am tall, so..."

Sir Lomar frowned. "Are any of these footsteps extant?" Beat. "Are any of them still around."

The man raised his eyebrows and pulled a half-shrug. "Been a fair few days, m'lord, but you can still see the dent o' them, aye..."

That became the closest thing they had to any hard evidence of the beast: a string of muddy ditches shoved into the soft earth of a fallow field in a rough pattern of a man's gait. None of them looked particularly like footprints, nor were they so large as the man had said ("Well, they've filled in a bit, sir..."), and Sir Lomar suspected it would not take especially long to produce the very same thing with two men and a shovel.

"I suppose we'll have to investigate the plateau," said Sir Erbius over dinner, a generous and simple offering of chicken, carrot and bread. His squire was chasing village maidens outside, and the longer he spent eating the less he had to care about untangling the mess that was no doubt about to be made.

"Bollocks to the plateau. I'm not taking my horse round those cliffs without even a single eyewitness to tell us what we're looking for. It's bad country, Galn, this is the Ashmonts; there could be orcs up there, or worse- [i]Cales.[/i]"

Sir Erbius raised both eyebrows. "We won't make a whole quest out of it. I'm just saying that if there really is an ogre, and it comes back, and we hadn't even bothered to look for bones or such around its nest-"

"Shut up, I know." Sir Lomar sighed and drained his mug of beer in two long gulps. "I'm just cross about it. Let's go first thing tomorrow."

So they did.

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"My arse hurts."

"Your arse would hurt worse if you'd been [i]my[/i] squire and [i]I[/i] had caught you cavorting with a peasant lass." Sir Lomar's own squire flinched at his words. "She wasn't even pretty."

"I thought she was pretty."

"Shut up."

Sir Erbius held his face away so neither of them could see him laughing. Eventually Sir Lomar's squire piped up.

"Sirs, I'm not sure we can make it up this valley by horse..."

"If we can lead them over this rockfall, we'll be alright." Sir Erbius anticipated the question and followed, "Squire, climb to the top and tell us how bad it is on the other side." His squire nodded, dismounted painfully, and began to clamber.

Sir Lomar smacked his squire around the shoulder. "Well, you heard him. Go!" -Barely a minute passed before Sir Lomar himself sighed, dismounted, and began to lead the horses over the easier parts of the slope.

A shadow passed over the sun.

Sir Erbius's steed panicked with such suddenness and terror that the horseman was immediately thrown, hurled from his saddle and beaten across eight feet of mountain stone before his foot slipped out of the stirrup. The earth quaked. Horses screamed and men screamed with them. He heard the sound of a great mass of gravel sliding.

Through bloodied weeping eyes, the knight watched a shape like a man bend its oak-thick legs and leap up the valley wall, out of sight. Ungodly laughter echoed and was gone.

[hr]

"So, to be quite clear on the matter... no one was killed, in this attack?"

Sir Hasse nodded. His colleague, still in bandages, had been firmly advised by the physicians not to move his neck overmuch. "No, my liege. None of the villagers were injured."

"None of them saw the ogre?"

"Only its footprints."

"It... stole horses? Other livestock?"

"Three of our horses, yes. The fourth bolted. We found it later."

"Cattle?"

"Sheep, sometimes. The, uh, the villagers suspect that may have been a different ogre."

"And the grain? Lost along with the granary?"

"...No, my liege. Under the debris most of it was quite unharmed."

"I see." The Count laced and unlaced his fingers. "I see no reason to investigate further. Perhaps such assignments should be left for... others of your order."

Sir Lomar gripped the arms of his chair, nearly rising from his seat. "My liege, we are ready to swear-"

"Sit down, Hasse. I know you are." The Count smiled warmly. "I will have it marked by the cartographers that the plateau has an ogre presence- of course, I believe most of them note this already. In the meanwhile, I wouldn't want any giant to turn into a waste of my best knights, would I?" He laughed a fatherly little politician's laugh. "Dismissed."

The knights looked at each other, bowed and departed. [i]Bastard idiots,[/i] thought the Count, and called his mistress back into the room.

[hr]

"Wake up. Sheng! Wake up! We need to light the fires!" Yorgh kicked the fur-laden mass of his brother's sleeping form until it twisted violently into wakefulness. "Get your tinderbox. Light the bonfire!"

The big orange orc eyes scowled at him, then flew wide. Sheng scrabbled from his bed. "What's she got?"

Yorgh turned back and squinted into the dark. "Horses. Three of them." Sheng swore a lurid orcish curse. His brother turned to the other orc, already roused by the commotion.

"Peks is here."

She too flew into action.

So great were the lungs of the beast that approached them that her laughter was almost too deep for orcen ears to hear, but so powerful was her mirth that they heard it clearly anyway. Weak flames began to lick the piles of tinder under the great heap of mountain-pine they had already prepared as she threw down the fresh carcasses she had claimed and seated herself on the barren earth of the plateau. Her lips smacked across teeth set in a skull twice the size of the largest in the archives of Paterdomus, and easily four times its weight.

[color=indianred][b]"Make fire!"[/b][/color] The six orcs flinched under the force of her voice. [color=indianred][b]"Fire for Peks!"[/b][/color]

"Fire for Peks," yelled Yorgh in reply. He knew that you should always trick an ogre, as his grandfather taught him, and never obey it, but one's wits have a way of departing when faced with a giant who eats two warhorses in a single sitting. If it wasn't for her willingness to share meat, the six of them would have fled this accursed plateau long ago.

[color=indianred][b]"Fire! Meat! Meat for Peks, and fire!"[/b][/color]

"Yorgh..." Sheng pointed to the horse his wives had dragged into the firelight to butcher with crude hatchets. The hooves were the first to go, horseshoes being a precious boon of iron if the ogre didn't eat them. "This isn't even horse country. Where in Hell's name did she find these? These look like warhorses..."

Yorgh grimaced and turned away. Peks laughed until the mountains rang with her voice as dawn trickled over the horizon.
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