So I wrote a moment and then had to slash it mercilessly to get it under the word limit. I was 840 originally.
And since I like it, I'm going to share it with you. Don't feel obligated to read it. Good chance it won't make sense if you don't play WoW.
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Quaint round clay buildings squatted together in circles around a central clearing with a firepit, like companions camping together, under a brilliant sky, blue and thick enough to hide what was outside. The grass was bright green, fur over the rolling body of the land, with unfamiliar curving trees easing their way out of the ground. Pieces of earth floated above, separate from the land, but adding their features like a crown to Nagrand.
This was my ancestral home.
Chesra looked around, trying to make the words fit. Trying to summon some feeling of belonging to the little village.
A head popped out from one of the buildings, followed by a fleshy body that had to stoop to get through a door designed for something much smaller. A feral growl escaped the uneven teeth in the pinkish face when its single eye caught sight of her.
Chesra hefted her axe. It whistled as it cleaved the air. The ogre gurgled as it slumped.
"Ho... home..." Chesra tried. It still didn't make sense. She scratched the shaved part of her scalp, letting her hand creep up and tug at her mohawk. She caught herself, and used her other hand to pull it down, leading to an inspection of her nails, then palms.
"You get out!" a voice bellowed. Her right palm was briefly occupied. A flash of scorn crossed her brain for the pinkish skin of the ogres. Her light green was much more pleasing.
Green. It followed the lines of her palms, burrowed under the edges of the nails, and stained the backs of her hands, going under her armor up her arms and there to coat the rest of her body.
Green.
And there was the difference, the barrier. Green was all she had seen in Durotar, and fighting all she knew as she cut out her survival from the heat and the dryness and the scorpions and whatever else tried to kill her. It had not been her home. Her people had come from somewhere else, Draenor, before the desert and the humans and the demons and the green.
She had seen them, the other orcs, the ones who had not touched the demon blood, not been exiled. Their skin was brown, as natural as the earth, untainted.
Her feet crunched over the dirt around the firepit. Her eyes, a rare blue color, darted among the shadows and the doorways, looking for a piece of the past, of her past. Her fangs worried her lip and she felt something rising in her, a feeling familiar as heat. Her heart started to pound in her ears and the world became sharper, more real, swelling in her senses as her steps quickened. The feeling reached her throat and she crowed, a mix of a growl and a roar and a taunt.
Ogres burst into her vision and her axe sang, every time it met their bloated bodies, parting the skin, releasing the blood, Chesra felt something in her rejoice, drinking in the violence until the bodies piled up and nothing else moved to challenge her.
She was here alone, which suited a warrior like her just fine. She had been brought up to fight alone and it had challenged her to keep herself alive long enough that survival had become her ability. She didn't mind being alone, but it nagged at her now. She was alone because they couldn't fight.
The town washed out in her eyes, the houses once owned by the brown-skinned orcs taking on a soft hue, clay just short of melting from too much water. Her hand gripped her axe handle until it hurt. How could this be home? Orcs raised in Durotar became strong and fighters. They had to fight because the harsh lands were not where they came from, and if the humans had their way, were not where they would stay. But all orcs who made it to adulthood were like the land: spiky, dry, and hard. The brown-skinned orcs brought up in this land were soft, soft like the sky and the grass. They had no blood rage in them.
She realized she had been pulling at her forelock again and used her left hand to bat her right hand away. She distracted it by hoisting her axe over her shoulder and heading back toward the brown-orc town of Garadar, affecting an easy, rolling walk. All confidence, not hiding, for she was sure she could take anything that might leap out at her.
Because she was an orc. A real orc, skin scarred green by their mistakes, hard from the deserts in Azeroth and the fight with the humans, blood surging with rage that kept them alive and made them strong. Because this wasn't their home, just a mark on their past, a blip on her timeline that she would eventually leave behind her.
The edges of her lips curved in a smile around her jutting sharp teeth from her lower jaw. She was an orc. And the world could BRING IT.
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