Hours later, Kadara the shaman was in the library attached to the tower. It hosted a great variety of books, most of which posed very little interest to him; he intended to have them catalogued, archived and removed from public eye. The Council of the Clans had many discussions on what things out there actually merited being written down. Orcish culture relied heavily on spoken lore passed from one generation to another, and Kadara was a proponent of preserving that tradition. Besides, what was there to learn from elvish scribbles? The age of the elves was over. Their kind was now chained and bound, and it would never change again. There was a faction among the Orcs that pushed to make sure that the subservient status of the elves is forever written into the very social fabric, and Kadara was spearheading the effort. 

He was sitting at a large wooden desk with a pile of scrolls in front of him. Elven scrolls. They were special. It was a collection of drawings accompanied by short blocks of text. They seemed to depict historical events, he understood. One pictured a city being founded; another — a great victory on an ancient battlefield. A third showed an elven goddess revealing herself to her people: she walked down a dirt path, and the happy elven citizens tried to touch here, and the ground wherever she trod sprouted with grass and tiny flowers. 

Idyllic. But wrong. So very, very wrong.

All three scrolls were magical. Holy, even. Segments of inviolable elven history. Well, today he was going to make some alterations. The Orcish kind was victorious, and victors get to decide, what is true and what is not.

“Quill”, he demanded. 

Lune started moving immediately. The metal lacework that used to make her (and her sister) into a ring now changed form and function, locking Lune into moving on all fours and pulling something after her. Right now, she was attached to a little wooden platform supporting an ink pot and a quill in a bronze holder. Groaning, the tiny woman dragged the platform across the table towards Kadara, who watched her with utmost satisfaction. 

When the woman finally stopped, exhausted, he told her: 

“Stand up”. 

The lacework relaxed, allowing her to get to her feet. She avoided Kadara’s gaze. The orc reached out with his hand, his index finger and thumb connected in a circle. Without a warning, he flicked her in the chest, sending Lune tumbling into the platform she’d just dragged over. She cried, hitting the wood. 

“Faster next time”, he said, pulling out the quill from the holder. He didn’t dip it in the ink, though. Instead, he turned towards the other sister-priestess.

Selma was lying down, pinned to the table; her part of the metal lacework turned into a sharp system of claws and brackets digging directly into the wood. Her mouth was gagged. Kadara pointed the quill at her and lowered it, letting the sharp tip of it trace a line from her belly to her neck. He tapped her face very lightly, watching her squirm as the tip of the quill came near her eyes; then, with a swift, precise motion he moved it over to her left arm and pierced the skin of her palm. She trembled as a little blood seeped out; a couple of droplets, no more, and Kadara took the quill to her other arm, letting some blood out of her other palm, too. He pondered then, looking at the elfwoman and her bloodied hands. 

“Which first?” he asks, setting the quill back in the bronze holder and now reaching for Selma. He picked her off the table with ease; the metal bindings retracted, no more restricting her. In the orc’s fingers, Selma looked like a strange, bluish insect. He nudged her face with his fingernail, then ran his thumb over it, feeling her lips and nose. His fingers were softer than the average Orc’s, but the ridges in his skin still painfully rubbed her face. 

Selma and Lune were the ones he captured, but there used to be other priestesses and priests, too. He killed them with his bare hands. He missed that. But, if he wanted to build a new world order, in which this entire wretched race was reduced to worshipful bugs, he had to leave *some* of them alive. 

He looked at the three scrolls again. The moment he touched any one of them with Selma — the moment her blood soaked in — he’d say a word, and then the scroll would change. He suspected it would be an unpleasant experience for her, because these were ancient writing and drawings, and, to seamlessly alter their content, she would have to end up *inside* one of them, even if momentarily. But then he’d pull her back out. Besides, she could use some novelty in her life, could she not? 

He thought of the scroll describing a battle. In his version, the elves would not be victorious.They would be facing an Orc coming to teach them a lesson; an Orc so massive they’d be like ants to him. They would perish, in thousands, beneath him, smashed into the blood-stained dirt without mercy or reprieve. As they deserved. 

Or, perhaps the building scene? A city being founded? No, elven cities are dust, litter, they are nothing; no, this is elves coming to terms with their defeat and coming to the Orcish cities to accept their fate and volunteer themselves as property, to be shrunk and repurposed. 

Finally, the scene of the divine nature? It is not a Goddess that came to them, but an Orcish superior, and they shall welcome him, they will pave his path with their bodies, beg for his blessings, revel in the scraps of his generosity… 

And there were a few more, too. Visions of times long gone. Threads he had to pluck out. Falsehoods. Tales. Legends that had to be put to rest and replaced with new legends, which would seal the truth once and for all: the Orcish kind ruled the elves, and it was meant to be that way. The elves were now in their rightful place.

Laughing, Kadara lowered the distraught woman to one of the scrolls — and, the moment that he did, her vision suddenly blacked out. In less than a minute, she would find herself in a terrible dream, as the lines of ink running through ancient scrolls morphed and changed to tell a new story. Kadara’s story.

Selma found herself...