Power Trio

The first thing he realizes upon regaining consciousness is that he’s naked. Underneath the animal furs, someone’s taken all of his goddamn clothes off.

The second thing he realizes is that he’s underneath a bunch of animal furs, on the floor of a yurt, surrounded by warm-toned, intricate carpets and tapestries. He greets this realization with a strangled cry of alarm, throwing the bedding from his ruddy chest. He immediately regrets it when he starts shivering violently.

He hears a crunching sound hurrying closer, and a face appears in the yurt opening. It belongs to an orcish woman, with large brown eyes and emerald skin, her round nose flushed with the cold.

“Look who’s up,” she says. The old world brogue is heavy in her voice. “Morning, Slim.”

He seeks for his voice and finds only a malformed, slurring thing. He manages to use it: “Where’s my clothes?” It comes out like wherzmygloaths.

“Didn’t bring em with you.” She comes the rest of the way into the space. She’s short for an orc, two or three inches over 6 feet tall if he had to guess, which would put them eye-to-eye. A heavy fur cloak, powdered with snow, sits across her shoulders, and she wears an insulated ushanka-style hat with pouched flaps for her pointy ears. She removes both, revealing a cascade of hickory-colored hair and a padded tunic, broad in the shoulder and cinched at the waist with a raw leather belt. Her clothes are durable but artfully made, brocaded with a blue-threaded, wavy-lined depiction of a flowing river down her chest.

His eye goes to her hip, which has a massive chrome revolver hanging off it, along with a line of thumb-sized bullets. “Somebody had a whoopsie trying to do some magic, I’m thinking?” She clicks her tongue. “You crossed over.”

“This is the old world?” Thizztheolworl?

“Never ask a world its age. Little joke.” She uncinches the belt and gun, and steps out of the tunic. She’s got on side-zip nylon riding breeches underneath, and a black Legendary t-shirt. Her muscular green arms bulge from the sleeves. She is built. “Welcome to the O-Dub, buddy. We’re just outside the Packlands’ border. Found you in a snowdrift. Not a stitch on you.” She gestures to her ears. “Not even your piercings.”

She steps out of her hiking boots and kneels down to adjust a space heater nested in the center of the yurt. He lurches under the furs, unleashes another storm of shaking. His body is desperately fatigued; he’s weak down to his bone marrow.

“Don’t wiggle around too much, yeah?” The orc lies on her side and opens the furs. “You got hypothermia, man. I’m here to get you warmed up.”

She slips under the furs with him. She folds a thick thigh over his waist and pulls him close to the furnace of her body.

“Fuckin’ hell. You’re an ice cube. Poor guy.” Her breath on his face is melting-point hot. Or he guesses he’s just extremely cold. “What’s your name, Slim?”

“Nick,” he stutters. “Nicholas.”

“Nick-o-las.” She rolls it around. She smells like leather and wood-smoke.

He nods. His teeth chatter.

“You’re a half orc?” She appraises him. He becomes profoundly aware of his nakedness.

“Yes,” he manages.

“Thought you were just scrawny at first.” She peers at his mouth. “You got tusks, Nick?”

He stretches his lower lip. She chuckles. “Aww, kinda, huh? Look at those little guys. Razkrtha Pakdra?” He knows that one. Do you speak Packtongue?

“Wiek,” he says. “Tere’nek nai.” No, hardly any.

“That’s all right.” She tugs the furs up around her shoulders. “Think warm thoughts, Nicky.”

She’s certainly got that old world orcish physique; as she moves her leg, thick cords of supple muscle move below her nylon riding pants and the layer of winterizing cushion. Her round face and her big doe eyes give her a youthful, curious air.

She’s cute. Objectively. He’s naked under the covers with a big cute orc’s big warm thigh across him, pushed up against her firm belly and her soft chest. Waking up to this would be very appealing if he wasn’t frozen half to death.

“What’s yours?” he asks.

“Hmm?”

“What’s your name?”

“Diak’zinae, of the Voraag River Pack. Call me Dee.” Her muscles tighten a notch around him.

“Dee.”

“That’s right, Nicky.” She puts a hand on his back and moves closer. “You’re already warmer. How about you see if you can sleep for me?”

He wants to sit up, wants to figure out where the hell he is. He wants at least to correct how she keeps calling him Nicky when he told her Nick. But for reasons he can’t identify, he wants to obey this strange woman.

He blinks. And it’s the evening. His throat is dry, but his body feels much stronger. Dee is gone. Near where he’s lying, there’s a set of clothes, a bowl of water, one of those hand-crank flashlights, and a thick fur-lined overcoat. From beyond the thick, decorated felt of the wall, he can hear muffled music. He dresses and shoulders the overcoat on, then peels the flap of the yurt back.

Two dozen or more yurts like his dot a field of fresh snow half a foot thick. The paths dug out from them, by footfall or tools, converge in a wide centralized circle, a sizable campfire blazing in its center.

A small crowd of people rings round the fire. That’s where the music is coming from, something fast and drum-heavy. Conversation and laughter strains through the air to his ears. He takes an experimental step out into the snow and his new boots are sturdy and warm as they pack the powder down. It’s time to figure out who his rescuers are.

He crunches down the path to the tent city’s center. Over to his right he hears the whirring hum of a generator and sees a big silvery hitch trailer with a ring of ziptied metal barricades sticking out from its rear. A herd of hairy rhinos, tacked and blanketed, pile together by an outdoor heater set up just next to the trailer.

He makes his way to the outside of the fire. A figure on the other side of it stands at his coming and circles the clearing. The firelight glints off Dee’s revolver.

“There he is!” She slaps a mittened hand onto his shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Nicky. We got cider. You want cider?” She looks back at the collection of travelers around the fire. Most of them are orcs, bundled up just as she is. They survey the newcomer with wary curiosity. “Anyone know if you’re not supposed to drink after hypothermia?”

An orc sitting at a metal folding chair with a chipped mug in his hand shrugs. “Who knows.”

“Hey,” he says. “If that shit didn’t kill me, this won’t.”

Her eyes crinkle into a smile. “Cheers to that, brother.” She throws an arm around him and steers him closer to the heat. “Say hi to Nicholas, everyone. This was the snowbank dude.”

“Oh, thank fuck.” A lanky purple orc comes round, long black hair hanging out of a machine-knitted toque. Unlike most of the orcs at the fire, her winter clothes are clearly Earth-made, layers of puffy polyester down and waterproof fabric. “You looked dead as disco, dude. I was like ‘I’m seeing my first dead body. Jesus H. Christ.’” She sticks a hand out. He shakes it. “Name’s Kell,” she says.

“Nicholas.”

“I heard you like Nicky?”

“How about we go with Nick, please.”

Kell points at a bundled-up goblin redhead, who peers at him through big round glasses that reflect the fire. “That’s my wife Thekla and my hubby Evan is over there by the stove thing.”

The goblin gives him a little smile and a wave. “Hey, it's the isekai dude. So glad you’re up. Thanks for not being Kell’s first dead body.”

"Babe, what's isekai mean?" Kell asks. "Is that goblin?"

“Nicholas. Good to meet you.” A blue-eyed, bearded human passes him a hot tin thermos head full of steaming cider. “I’m Evan Kamiyon.”

He knows this human. He knows all of them. “You guys are Legendary,” he says. “Holy shit. You’re them.”

“Yessir. That’s us.” Kell’s hand lays proudly on her husband’s back. “You got some titties you need signed?”

Thekla dismounts from her chair and pours more cider. “You gotta stop asking people that, baby.”

“You’re wondering what’s going on,” Evan says, apologetically. “Where are you from? New Laytham?”

“Born and raised. You too, right?”

“Tennessee at first, but New Layth in all the ways it matters. What do you play?”

“Guitar.”

“And you were trying to incant?”

He hesitates. “It was just a little experiment, trying to light a match. That was it.”

Kell tsks. “You licensed?”

He thinks about lying, but there’s only about two dozen licensed bards on Earth right now, and he has a feeling Legendary knows most of them. “Not as such,” he admits.

“You got crossover’d,” Evan says. “Happens sometimes when an incantation backfires, ever since the Door opened back up.”

“That I get. Dee—” He looks around. Dee’s been pulled into a conversation with a couple of her fellow pack and a pretty but frazzled-looking high elf woman with green hair and golden skin. He feels a weirdly juvenile pang of jealousy that she’s not next to him anymore. “Dee told me you found me. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Thank her,” Evan says. “She’s the scout who spotted you. If it had taken long enough for the whole convoy to roll through, you’d be dead or down a limb to frostbite.”

“One way you can thank us is don’t try magic again unsupervised.” Thekla puts her hands on her hips. “There’s a reason it’s illegal unlicensed, man. Shit is dangerous.”

“Not that we can take the high ground, exactly,” Kell says.

He knows what she’s implying, was actually thinking the same thing himself. Two years ago, at their first UK concert, Legendary inadvertently opened the Door to the old world, using the first spell the Earth had seen in centuries.

“Okay, but that was different.” Thekla purses her lips. “We’re licensed bards now. You better be too if you’re gonna try and do magic on the tour.”

“Tour?”

“Yep,” Kell says. “You abracadabra’d your way right into the path of Legendary’s inaugural Old World Tour, bro.” She spreads her arms out and indicates the yurts. “Twenty-four spots and then Elfheim. Well, twenty left now. You caught us right at the beginning.”

“Lucky for you,” Evan says. “The Door’s just a few days’ ride south.”

Thekla nods. “I bet we could spare a couple orcs to get you back there.”

“We could. We surely could.” Kell is nodding along with her. “But, uh, Thek…”

“Kellax Kamiyon.” Thekla’s eyes narrow. “No.”

“Maybe let’s let Nick introduce himself around, and we go have a little conversation.”

“Babe, no. Not again.”

“What, because it went so terribly last time?”

Evan gives him an apologetic smile. “Would you excuse us for just a moment? That’s our manager right over there.” He points to the high elf, who’s glancing over with almond-shaped eyes as gold as the face they’re in. Her lips are green, like her hair. He wonders if that’s natural or if she’s made up. “Her name’s Anise. She can get you situated better than we can, I think.”

“Evan, please tell our wife that she’s being crazy,” Thekla says, as the Kamiyons move away.

“He’s gotta be good, Thek,” Kell is trying to whisper, but she’s not great at it. “You can’t even fuck up a spell unless you’re good.”

Dee whistles over to him. “Yo, Nicky!”

I’m not Nicky, he thinks. But as he jogs toward the woman who saved his life, he doesn’t say it aloud.