You all know the first part of the story: The song ended in blood. It was two years ago. Rick Green, the singer of Goblin Forest, crooned in his Osbourne-esque voice to 15,000 Goblin Metal fans. A short man wearing green body paint and brown leather stepped out from backstage, drew a sword, and cut the singer down from behind. The last lyrics Green ever sang were: “Take me back, take me back, take me back to the Misty Mountains.”
The man with the sword, of course, was Golfimbul—the rhythm guitarist for Krimpatul, the opening act. He and his bandmates escaped in the ensuing chaos and remain at large to this day.
Neither band has released a song or played a show since. The rest of Goblin Forest decided to call it quits without Green, and Krimpatul… No one knew what happened to Krimpatul. Fans deserted the genre in droves, and overnight Goblin Metal went from a stadium-rock fad to a niche interest of the obscure Cascadian orc cults where it originated. It was no longer hip to be green. If Golfimbul had been trying to take the Goblin Metal throne, as it were, he failed spectacularly.
Rumors have flown about motives and locations, but there’ve been no arrests and no public statement from the band. All we’ve had to work with have been rumors.
Until now.
Earlier this month, Orc Folk act Alsarath listed Golfimbul as the harpist in the liner notes of their single, “The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest.” Alsarath was as obscure as Krimpatul was infamous. The band had never done an interview; not even a photoshoot. Like everyone else these days in countercultural music, their videos feature only masked performers.
I’ve been casually obsessed with post-civilization culture ever since the 2020 communique from the junkyard rats of the Rust Belt, and I’ve covered the music of pretty much every secessionist movement and subculture I could get my teeth into since. After I saw those liner notes, I put out feelers to friends and friends-of-friends, and I waited, and last week I was invited to go to an orc village hidden away in the burned forests of Cascadia.
I was invited to be the first person to tell Golfimbul’s story. A Hellfire Harriet exclusive. Usually, I post full interviews for everyone but reserve my travel diary for the patrons of my blog. This time, though, I’m forgoing that. This story is too important, so I’ve interspersed the two below.
All I knew before I went was what everyone else knew: Three years ago, a bunch of metalheads and hippies and burners and nerds all decided to dress up like orcs and goblins, and some of them took it too far and decided to distance themselves from the rest of society. They got really famous one summer, then that fame died in a single bloody act, and who knows what kind of weird shit they’re up to now?
Before you get worried, no, I would never offer a platform to a fascist. Fascism, it turns out, is the furthest thing from Golfimbul’s mind. What he’s into is a lot weirder than that.
Still, it’s sort of lucky that I survived to write this story.
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Hellfire Harriet: So…you killed a guy.
Golfimbul: I killed a guy.
We stared in silence at one another for a while. He wore rawhide and fur and not much of either. He wasn’t painted up, but his skin was a sort of natural olive. His lower teeth were filed down to fangs, like any serious orc’s. There was still something unassuming about him that I have a hard time describing.
Golfimbul: You’re waiting for me to tell you about it, aren’t you?
The interview was not off to a good start.
Hellfire: Are you worried about how your words will sound in court?
Golfimbul: I killed Rick Green on stage, with a sword, in front of thousands of witnesses. Talking to the media isn’t going to make anything worse for me at this point. And I don’t respect the authority of the US government to hold me accountable for my actions—I will not go to court.
Hellfire: So why’d you do it?
Golfimbul: The old world is dying. My world—the free orcs of Cascadia—we’re not going to replace the old world, but we will be part of its replacement. In order to do that, we have to take ourselves seriously. An element of that struggle is the struggle to create meaning, to create a new sacred. I killed Rick Green because he was defiling something meant to be sacred.
Hellfire: How so?
Golfimbul: We share an aesthetic, but he didn’t understand what it meant to be an orc.
Hellfire: You killed him because he was a poser.
Golfimbul: I guess you could put it like that.
Hellfire: So…the lesson here is…don’t be a poser.
Golfimbul: Don’t be a poser.
You heard it here first, kids. Don’t be a poser, or Golfimbul will literally murder you.
They picked me up in the parking lot of Grocery Outlet in Northeast Portland. That’s a mundane detail, I suppose, but perhaps the single most remarkable thing about my trip was the ever-present contrast between mundanity and the bizarre. I bought a case of coconut water while I waited. Orcs might like coconut water. Who doesn’t like coconut water?
They showed up in a mid-teens Honda Civic sedan, and I’d been hoping for something out of Mad Max. The two women who got out—one cis, one trans, both white—were dressed in clean gray tank tops and leggings like half the women who live in Portland. To be honest, I only noticed them in the parking lot at all because the trans woman was cute.
“Hellfire?” the cis woman asked. She was tall and severe, with the fierce but almost-trustworthy look of a loan shark. Or, as it turned out, of an orcish enforcer.
“That’s me,” I said.
“Fenrick.” The cis woman offered her name but no handshake, fist bump, or hug.
I nodded.
“Norinda,” the trans woman said. Like a lot of trans women these days, she didn’t bother to feminize her voice. Her name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“How is this going to work?” I asked.
“We’re going to drive around back, where no one can see us,” Fenrick said. “We’re going to take your phone and laptop and any electronics and put them in a Faraday in the car. Then we’re going to put you in the trunk and drive out to the forest. We’ll provide you with a recorder and a notebook when we arrive. You’ll get your stuff back when you leave.”
I nodded. I’d pretty much expected this.
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” Norinda asked. “Have any medical conditions we should know about?”
“No and no,” I said. “Either of you want a coconut water?”
Hellfire Harriet: Goblin Forest sang in English, but Krimpatul’s lyrics were all in Tolkien’s Black Speech—
Golfimbul: Dark Speech. Our lyrics were in Dark Speech.
Hellfire: Tolkien referred to the language as Black Speech.
Golfimbul: Tolkien meant well but he was about the most influential unconsciously racist author of the twentieth century. All his villains were either green or Middle Eastern. When you engage with the work of historical authors, especially when you make derivative works a century later, you have to adapt to one’s own social context. Calling the language “Black Speech” today is, at best, wildly misleading. Its name is a translation anyway. It’s possible that “Dark Speech” is just as accurate.
Besides, Tolkien didn’t write the language. He only wrote, like, sixteen words or something. We wrote the rest. Most of us prefer to translate the name of it as “Dark Speech.”
Hellfire: Since when are murderers PC?
Golfimbul: My status as a person who has ended the life of another person carries no implications about my personal ethics other than that I clearly believe there are circumstances under which it’s okay to kill someone.
◆
Imagine being at the Renaissance Faire when the apocalypse hits, and you’re stuck trying to recreate society surrounded by swords and minstrels and thees and thous. You know how that sounds like either heaven or hell, depending on who you are and also who you’re stuck there with?
That was my first impression of the village of Gray Morrow. The fires out west have burned forest after forest and small town after small town, and no one tries to deny that pretty much every bioregion on the planet is going through a transformation right now. It’s in the worst spots, these dead ecologies, that the post-civilization movement has found its roots. Like wildflowers growing up between paving stones. Or rats hiding in the walls, I guess. Depending on who you ask.
Gray Morrow sits in the scorched graveyard of a Douglas fir forest, halfway up a mountain, occupying the remains of an evacuated town. Slab foundations are all that remain of the original structures. A seasonal creek runs through what was recently a riverbed at the edge of the village, and long-abandoned train tracks skirt the ridge above town. Even armed with all of that information, you’d still have at least seventy or eighty possible spots to search.
Satellite imagery would help, of course. I can’t imagine that the Big Six Techs or the US Government don’t know where Gray Morrow is. The residents of Gray Morrow in general, and Golfimbul in particular, had an awful lot to lose by letting me write this report.
Norinda let me out of the trunk, and she smiled when she saw me. Her bottom teeth were filed. That should have been unnerving, but I’ve always been a sucker for face tattoos or anything that really shows someone is going for broke. Fenrick just stared at me, severe. Being severe was pretty much her thing, as far as I could tell. She took a sip from her coconut water.
Three other cars filled a makeshift parking lot. The village itself was surrounded by a wall built from blackened logs, set upright and buried in the ruins of the road.
My escorts had changed clothes en route. Fenrick looked like a bandit out of Skyrim, complete with iron pauldron on one shoulder and hand ax strapped to her belt. I won’t lie, it was a good look. I’m no fashion reporter, but I figure half the magazines in New York would love to get someone out here to take pictures of orcs like her.
Norinda wore a simple, modest dress of undyed wool. Imagine a Viking kindergarten teacher who also wears a rather large dagger horizontally on her belt at the small of her back. My crush on her intensified. She handed me a spiral notebook and an old-fashioned digital recorder, and we walked into the village.
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Hellfire Harriet: A lot of people say you killed Rick Green because you were jealous of Goblin Forest’s success. That the orcish code insisted that if you wanted the throne, you had to kill the reigning monarch.
Golfimbul stopped fidgeting and stared directly at me, his dark brown eyes boring into me.
Golfimbul: That’s bullshit.
Hellfire: I’m sorry?
Golfimbul: It’s, like, three layers deep of bullshit.
He was still staring at me. I was starting to regret this line of questioning.
Golfimbul: Okay, to start, there are pretty much two ways to interpret the orcish code of honor. It’s not written down anywhere, but there’re some strong central themes. Like an interdependence between individual sovereignty and collective identity. We value strength, but the idea is that everyone develops their own strengths, whatever they might be, for the benefit of all. One should be as self-reliant as one is able to be, both for one’s own sake and, again, for the community’s sake. I care deeply about this. That same basic idea, though, can be interpreted two different ways.
Hellfire: So there’s a split in the orc community?
Golfimbul: Damn right there’s a split. The Free Orcs are matriarchal and the Orcine are patriarchal.
Golfimbul produced a cigarette from god knows where, considering how little he was wearing, and lit it with a lighter from the same mysterious origin. It wasn’t tobacco. It wasn’t weed. Maybe mugwort?
Golfimbul: The matriarchal way of interpreting those tenets is roughly anarchist. It’s anti-authoritarian and anti-nationalist, at the very least. We respect the wisdom of elders, children, and women—self-identifying women—but the hierarchy is anything but rigid, and the guidelines are anything but laws. Most importantly, our sense of community or tribe is fluid. Gray Morrow is a Free Orc village.
Go fifteen miles southeast and you’ll find a larger village, Lonely Mountain. They’re Orcine. The patriarchal way of interpreting orcish tenets is, roughly, fascistic. Authority is absolute. Rank within the hierarchy affects every aspect of one’s life. It’s not racialized, but it’s nationalistic—there are very specific considerations of who is and isn’t a part of any given social grouping. And definitions of “strength” tend to skew toward boring shit like physical size and power.
Hellfire: So you’d tell any doubters that you weren’t trying to claim the goblin throne because your faction of orcs doesn’t work that way?
Golfimbul: No orcish culture works that way. Even those fascistic shits don’t work that way. Among the Orcine, if you kill your superior, people aren’t going to just suddenly start kissing your ass. They will literally flay you and turn your skin into a battle flag. You advance in rank by demonstrating your capacity to lead. This isn’t some fucking Hollywood bullshit—evil is a lot more banal than that.
I didn’t have the heart—or maybe the courage—to tell him that, to me, to pretty much any outsider, Hollywood bullshit is exactly what the whole place looked like.
Hellfire: When you say “battle flag,” what do you mean? Who do they do battle with?
Golfimbul: Us. The Free Orcs.
Hellfire: Are you at war?
Golfimbul: For the very soul of our culture.
Hellfire: How’d that start?
Golfimbul: When I cut down Rick Green, the Mountain King.
Hellfire: You killed him because he was the leader of a rival faction, then? Not because he was a poser?
Golfimbul: They weren’t a rival faction until I killed him, but sure. He was a poser, though. All fascists are posers.
Hellfire: Did you go on tour with Goblin Forest specifically to murder him?
Golfimbul: Yeah, probably.
Hellfire: What do you mean, probably? That was a very specific question about a very specific intention.
Golfimbul: I mean, I guess. I’d been thinking about killing him for a while. It was premeditated and it wasn’t, you know?
Hellfire: No, I don’t know, because I’ve never killed anyone.
Golfimbul: So it’s like, I’ve known Rick Green almost five years. He and I and maybe thirty other people, we started this whole thing. Goblin Metal, the orcs, all of that. Rick Green’s always been a fucking bastard. I figured I’d probably kill him one day for being kind of a nazi or whatever. Then we go on tour together, and I tell myself, hey, if this goes badly, I can always just kill him on stage. You’ve got to understand, orc culture wasn’t even a year old at that point. We weren’t split into the Free Orcs and the Orcine yet; there were only maybe five villages total. We were just starting to explore what it meant to be ourselves, what kind of culture we could build. Then while we were on tour, I hear he’s got himself crowned the Mountain King.
And this isn’t a game. I don’t know how to get that through to you or your readers. This is our life. It’s one thing to put on a silly hat and pretend to tell people what to do in some LARP somewhere, but Rick Green had gotten himself coronated for real. Dictator. Over actual people. So I killed him. The Free Orcs split off, the Orcine closed ranks, and we’ve been at war ever since.
Hellfire: Am I safe here?
He didn’t answer me. At least he didn’t stare me down again. He just looked off into the distance, maybe toward Lonely Mountain.
◆
I’ve been to LARPs before where, when you show up, they make you put on garb. That is to say, they make you wear period-appropriate clothes, or whatever weird interpretation of period-appropriate that particular group of LARPers had come up with.
As I met the denizens of the village—they all came out to the parking lot to introduce themselves—I realized that they didn’t insist on anything like that because they weren’t LARPing. Pretty much every one of them was dressed either like a Viking reenactor or a fantasy game villain, but it wasn’t an act.
About thirty adults and eight kids lived there, running the age gamut from six months to seventy-eight years. They told me their names and pronouns—about a third told me “she,” a third “he,” and a third “they.” Many of them were white or passed as such, but a significant minority were black.
Norinda told me later that there are orc villages with substantially higher proportions of people of color. That might be true, but I got the impression she said it to convince herself or me that the Free Orcs aren’t a specifically white phenomenon. No one (no one decent) likes looking around their community or scene and seeing only white faces smiling back.
After everyone introduced themselves, I immediately forgot all their names. There are only so many fantasy names like Lazari and Demolan you can hear before they all just sound the same.
Norinda and Fenrick flanked me as we walked through a gate in the wall and into the village. It’s strange to say “village” in America. We don’t really have villages here. But in some ways, Gray Morrow isn’t the United States. And to be certain, it was a village. Maybe ten or fifteen houses crowded together along either side of a single, potholed street. Two architectural styles reigned: junkyard shacks built out of railroad cars and regular cars, and traditional American log cabins. Many of them were adorned with solar panels. At the end of the street, near the back palisade, the beginnings of a stone tower stood fifteen feet high.
I wasn’t sure if I was impressed or not. On one hand, the village couldn’t have been around longer than three or four years, and they’d already done so much. On the other hand? It was filthy. Everyone was filthy. I’m kind of obsessed with the post-civilization movement, so I wish I could tell you that everyone looked well fed and happy. They didn’t. People looked proud, and they didn’t look miserable, but there was an intensity in everyone’s eyes you simply could not mistake for happiness. A trash pile needed tending near the front gate and some of the animal hides stretched for tanning had begun to rot. Everything looked like it was about to fall apart both physically and metaphorically.
“What now?” I asked, when we reached the central square—a stone-cobbled chunk of what had once been an intersection now decorated with poorly tended gardens and rustic benches of dubious quality.
“You’re here to interview Golfimbul, are you not?” Fenrick asked.
“I am.”
“Golfimbul doesn’t live here.”
I waited for her to elaborate.
“Golfimbul lives in the forest with the rest of his band. He’s on his way—he’ll meet you a bit outside of town. I’ll take you to him when he gets here.”
Someone near the gate shouted, and both of my escorts flinched bodily and turned to look. It was just a kid, chasing another kid with a wooden sword.
Fenrick and Norinda were on edge. Something was about to happen.
◆
Hellfire Harriet: Tell me about your new band. Alsarath. What does the name mean?
Golfimbul: Alsarath is the Dark Speech word for the phase of the moon on the last night before the new moon. The last sliver of light. Alsarath is a holy day, a day of self-reflection. Our band’s music attempts to capture that spirit of self-reflection. On Alsarath, we listen to our naysayer and think about ourselves and our community.
Hellfire: Your naysayer?
Golfimbul: Free Orcish villages don’t have leaders, we have naysayers. Two years ago, we tried rotating leadership. It was ineffectual. We didn’t need leaders. We stuck with it anyway, because we felt like we had to, because those were the rules we had come up with. Then one person said, basically, “This is bullshit. We don’t need someone to tell us what to do. We need someone to tell us what to stop doing. We need someone to tell us what we’re doing wrong.” Every new moon, every village picks a new naysayer. That person spends the month picking apart group structures, observing what’s happening, being critical. On Alsarath, we fast and listen to the naysayer. They don’t offer solutions, necessarily, but instead bring our problems to light.
Hellfire: Does that work?
Golfimbul: Surprisingly well. Except about a third of the naysayers end up leaving after their month. Some go to other villages, some go to live in the forest—like Norinda, Alsarath’s singer, did—but most “leave the woods,” as we put it. Most go back to civilization.
Hellfire: That’s why Norinda’s name sounded familiar when she introduced herself. To be honest, I saw your name listed in the liner notes and didn’t pay much attention to the rest.
Golfimbul: That’s an argument for me to take my name off our next release, if there is one.
Hellfire: Why did you put it on there in the first place? Why did you agree to this interview? And what do you mean, “if there is one”?
Golfimbul: I told you we’re at war.
Hellfire: Yeah.
Golfimbul: We’re losing that war.
He took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm. He didn’t strike me as a man who was afraid to cry, but he was clearly trying to keep his composure.
Golfimbul: There’s no way that Gray Morrow would have let you talk to me here if any of us thought that Gray Morrow had a future. There’s no way I would have talked to you at all if I thought I was going to be alive to see another Alsarath.
Hellfire: Why are you losing? Why are you going to die?
Golfimbul: It’s not a question of military efficacy, or of bravery or strength or any of that shit. It’s just a question of numbers. Orcine society is a military society; every member fights. As far as we can tell, they’ve got fifteen hundred warriors. We’ve got five hundred.
Hellfire: So use guerrilla tactics?
Golfimbul shook his head.
Golfimbul: Striking Rick Green down from behind was a cowardly action. I can justify it—almost—by the fact that Green had declared himself my monarch. But the Orcine warriors are my peers. They would not stalk me in the night. I will not stalk them.
Hellfire: That sounds—
Golfimbul: I know how it sounds.
Hellfire: So this interview?
Golfimbul: I want to be remembered. I want the Free Orcs of Cascadia to be remembered. I put my name on the liner notes so that someone like you—an antifascist music blogger—would talk to me. I leveraged my own infamy to draw attention to what we’re doing, what we’ve done.
Hellfire: I fucking hate the tragic utopian trope.
Golfimbul: What?
Hellfire: Like, seriously. Fuck you, okay? I know I’m here as a journalist, but I’m not here to write your fucking obituary.
I don’t think I’ve ever turned on an interview subject like that before.
Hellfire: I get it. Hopeless causes are beautiful. But as I understand it, the whole goddammed point of holding on to your honor more firmly than your life is because the world is a better place for everyone if more people did that, right?
Golfimbul: Okay…
Hellfire: The world isn’t a goddammed better place if you let your subculture—and I’m sorry, I know it’s very serious and I’m not trying to downplay it, but that’s what this is, a musical subculture—be taken over by fucking nazis. And I respect that you’re going to fight them for it, that’s cool. But have you considered buying some guns? Maybe a few drones? They’ll come in here with spears, right? And you’ll fight them off with other spears? It’s the twenty-first century, man, there are fucking nazis everywhere. If you don’t give a shit about going to jail or dying, then fucking shoot the nazis who are trying to kill you.
Golfimbul: You don’t understand.
Hellfire: You’re fucking right. I don’t.
◆
If I’m being honest, most of the time I was waiting, I spent flirting with Norinda and avoiding talking to Fenrick. Norinda asked me to keep our conversation off the record. We didn’t talk about Gray Morrow or the orc thing much anyway—everything I learned about the village and its culture I learned by observation only.
An elderly man came by and offered us cold tea in wooden mugs. “Steeped blackberry leaves, sweetened with juice from the berries,” he said. “No caffeine, no other particularly strong medicinal effects.”
The three of us took cups from his platter and he continued down the street, passing out drinks.
No one else approached us. I watched people go about their lives, though the tension in the air was thick. I saw a few people look at cell phones, and I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time trying to decide if that was hypocritical and/or bad OPSEC. Eventually, I gave up because frankly it wasn’t my business and one of the most interesting things about all the post-civilization groups is all the bits and pieces they choose to carry over from mainstream culture.
Finally, after an hour, Fenrick stood up. “Come with me.”
I followed her to the other side of town and out through a smaller gate. On the other side, a box truck that had seen better days sat on a road that had, too. We skirted around the truck and up into the black forest.
The scorched hills look more like meadows than forests, with green grass and undergrowth broken only by the black spikes of burned trees. We followed the path this way and that, and soon I was lost. Soon after that, fog set in.
I was further through the looking-glass than I’d realized. I imagined us lost, a mile from a town full of people who give a double meaning to the word “stranger” and probably at least an hour’s drive from civilization. My guard hadn’t shown me much in the way of kindness, and I was on my way to meet someone I knew to be a murderer.
It’s the kind of shit I live for, if I’m being honest. I love my stupid fucking weird job and the stupid fucking weird world we live in. Thank you, my readers, for making that possible for me. Be sure to check out my Patreon page if this is the first thing you’ve read by me. Lots of members-only content over there, including a few snippets of orc song from Norinda.
The only thing I saw in the distance was a single black spire, thicker than the dead snags around me. As we approached, it came into focus as a boulder, jutting up into the sky like an angry finger. Sitting at the base of it was a short man with a sword across his lap.
Golfimbul.
“I’ll leave you two to it,” Fenrick said.
She left me alone with an armed murderer.
I sat down across from him, took out the notebook and recorder, and asked him questions.
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Hellfire Harriet: Alright. Convince me.
Golfimbul: We can’t fight them dishonorably, because you can’t protect an idea by defiling that idea. We don’t want them to destroy our way of life, but we don’t want to destroy our way of life ourselves, either.
Hellfire: The basic problem with the Orcine is that they’re interpreting your code of honor to mean “might makes right,” yeah?
Golfimbul: Yes.
Hellfire: By facing them in open battle and nobly dying or whatever your goddammed plan is, you’re just letting might make right. You’re letting their superior numbers dictate what your culture has to look like. It’s like majority voting but even dumber because more people die.
I expected him to double down on his position. Most men would.
Golfimbul: What do you suggest instead?
Hellfire: Fuck, I don’t know. Don’t be here when they attack. Go somewhere else. Stay on the move. Build your strength. Oh, shit. That’s what Rick Green was doing, wasn’t it?
Golfimbul: Huh?
Hellfire: Goblin Forest, singing in English, a stupid name like Rick Green…All that shit was designed to make Goblin Metal more palatable to the masses. To get fans. To get recruits. For his stupid fucking fashy goals.
Golfimbul: Yup.
Hellfire: Do that. I don’t mean become fascists or change your name or make your music worse—everyone knows Goblin Forest didn’t have shit on Krimpatul. Just…don’t be obscure for the sake of being obscure. Fucking advertise. You have a decent thing going here. People are abandoning mainstream society left and right. No political pun intended. Make it easier for them to get here. Make it so that when you fight the fash in your epic spears-and-swords Viking death match, you win. Better yet, make it so they don’t even want to fuck with you because they know they’ll lose.
Golfimbul: I don’t know whether that would work.
Hellfire: Yeah, but dying doesn’t work, either.
Golfimbul: The orc way of life isn’t meant to be some revolution. It’s not meant to supplant the mainstream. It will never appeal to the mainstream, not without losing its soul. Would you live like this? Would you want to?
Hellfire: You’re right. I’m obsessed with you weird cultures but I wouldn’t want to live like you.
We both stared at each other in silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. We were just both thinking.
Hellfire: Okay. Scrap that. You’re never going to get big numbers. You don’t need big numbers, you don’t want big numbers. You don’t need recruits. You need allies.
Golfimbul: What would that look like?
Hellfire: God damn, do all orcish men know how to actually listen to women’s ideas? I’m used to guys just talking over me, or shutting down completely if I get mad.
Golfimbul: Free Orcish men, I would hope, know how to listen.
Hellfire: Guns would break the spell. And the spell that you’re casting here? It’s powerful. It’s good. So no guns. Other people have guns, though. Let those people stand guard. Or make their armed presence known outside Orcine camps. Other people have access to, say, doxing. How many recruits are the Orcine going to get if every time some wannabe forest nazi dude joins, someone tells his mother what they’re about? Or access to the media: How many recruits are going to join if everyone knows that the Orcine are posers, putting out substandard, watered-down Goblin Metal just to try to lure in impressionable military-aged men to fight their holy war?
Golfimbul: You’ll write those stories?
Hellfire: I’m not going to write you any propaganda, but sure, I’ll tell the truth.
Golfimbul: How do we get allies?
Hellfire: Put out another single, maybe a full-length. “The Gray Fog of a Ruined Forest” was the best shit I’ve heard in years. You’re redefining folk music just like you redefined metal. Put out shit like that and I’ll cover it. Talk to more press—maybe someone other than you. Not everyone’s going to be sympathetic to what you did, even if that guy was a fucking tree nazi.
A hunting horn cut through the fog and through our conversation and my subject’s face fell into despair for half a second before determination took over.
Hellfire: What’s that?
Golfimbul: Interview’s over. I thought there would be more time. Another day, at least. We have to get you out of here.
◆
Turns out, Fenrick had taken us on a purposefully circuitous route into the woods. It wasn’t a quarter of a mile straight downhill before Golfimbul and I reached the box truck at the back entrance to Gray Morrow.
Norinda and Fenrick stood there talking with a kid, maybe fifteen, who was out of breath. She was dressed in scraps of fur and leather and cloth, like you might imagine a medieval beggar. It wasn’t until I noticed all the twigs and sticks and moss tangled up with the fabrics that I recognized it as camouflage.
“I saw about thirty,” the scout—for that’s what she was—said.
“About?” Fenrick asked.
“Exactly thirty. Ten with pikes, ten with tower shields and swords, five archers, two scouts, two command. One noncombatant, I’d guess a surgeon but I couldn’t promise.”
“How far away?” I asked.
Fenrick glared at me for interrupting.
“Five miles,” Norinda said. “Probably three and a half by now. Downhill from here. We have time to get you out with the children and the elders.”
That scout had just run five miles, uphill. Because she was too stubborn to use a walkie-talkie or a cell phone.
“We should evacuate everyone,” Golfimbul said.
“What?” Fenrick asked. “We’ve got walls and almost even numbers. Fuck them. This is our home.”
I wanted to shout at her. I wanted to shake her, to tell her that it wasn’t a fucking game, and that it wasn’t the twelfth century, and that killing people or dying over some squatted chunk of nowhere was somewhere between stupid and reprehensible. I didn’t, though. I’m a good journalist.
“This isn’t the place for us to debate this,” Norinda said, and all four of them walked through the gate and left me standing by the truck.
That was why the gardens were untended and the trash was piled up and the hides were left to rot. They were expecting this. They’d lost their will to pretend like their lives were going to continue to progress forward.
I’m not the first to suggest that nihilism is the dominant affect of society today. With climate change destroying communities and bioregions all over the map, with the economic crisis deepening and the wealth gap widening, I think all of us are guilty of forgetting to tend our gardens. All of us have a hard time figuring out why it matters whether or not we deal with our trash. All of us have proverbial or literal nazis marching on us.
The nazis the Free Orcs of Cascadia are dealing with are of the literal variety.
Some cosplaying fascist was about to stick a sword between Norinda’s ribs. Bile rose in my throat. I don’t believe in love at first sight or any of that shit, but I just couldn’t handle the idea.
I fucking hate honor.
I will never be an orc.
I got lost running through solutions to the problem of hypothetical arrows and swords that were going to interfere with Norinda’s continued existence. Most of those solutions involved assault rifles, which I didn’t have access to. Cars, though, were available. What’s thirty warriors in medieval armor versus one station wagon driven by an angry woman with a lead foot? I put the odds in my favor.
I wasn’t going to do it, though.
Instead, I waited to evacuate. I don’t think that speaks well of me.
Individually and in groups, people came out through the gate and loaded bags and baskets into the back of the truck. Norinda returned with a simple backpack, sewn from rawhide. Most of her belongings were probably wherever she and Golfimbul and the rest of Alsarath lived. She handed me my phone. I didn’t have service.
I wondered whether or not she and Golfimbul were dating. It wasn’t relevant to the present moment, exactly, but my mind has always had a way of thinking about bullshit to avoid thinking about impending doom. Another important affect of our generation. Distract ourselves from disaster with petty things like love and jealousy.
“I don’t know what you said to Golfimbul,” Norinda said, “but whatever it was worked. He just convinced everyone to evacuate.”
“Everyone?” I asked, shocked.
“Except him and Fenrick and Gorn.”
“Which one is Gorn?”
“The man who brought us tea, do you remember him?”
“He’s old as shit, though,” I said, because I have no fucking manners or common sense.
“Yeah. He’s old as shit. He’s a linguist by training. His main hobby is writing morbid poetry in Dark Speech, and when he can’t figure out how to say something, he just makes up new words. He developed about a third of the language. Did all this shit before orc culture was even around. He’s also a widower three times over. He doesn’t give a shit about dying. His last chapbook was called Soon, I Will Return to the Earth.”
“Oh.”
“Gorn is going to die today. Golfimbul and Fenrick, they’ll hold the wall for as long as they can and then fall back to the woods.”
“And you?” I asked.
“I’m driving us out of here, to another village. Then I’ll take you home.”
“After that?”
“I don’t know, girl. I don’t know if I signed up for this. I might leave the woods. Go back to being a vet tech.”
I just nodded. I was too biased to offer objective life advice.
“Oh, and Golfimbul said to give you this. He says it’s in case he dies. He says you’re right, you shouldn’t have to write his obituary, so he wrote his own.”
She handed me a piece of paper.
I piled into the back of the box truck with forty other people, many of them in tears, many of them in shock, and we drove away from Gray Morrow.
None of the three Free Orcs survived the battle. Gorn died, impaled on a spear while holding the gate. Fenrick was killed by an arrow that struck her in the back of the neck as she and Golfimbul ran. Golfimbul, Fenrick’s lover, turned and stood his ground over her body.
I didn’t know any of that yet. I found out when Norinda found out, two days later.
Maybe all three of them would have survived if I hadn’t interfered, and they’d fought with equal numbers. Maybe more of them would have died. Maybe I can forgive myself. Maybe there’s nothing to forgive.
In the back of the truck, by the light coming in through a crack in the steel wall, I read Golfimbul’s note.
◆
All my life, I didn’t give a shit about anything. I liked weed and metal and whatever counterculture trend was big any given year, but my heart wasn’t in it. I just went through the motions. Until I became an orc.
Saying I’m an orc, and meaning it, isn’t like a trans man stating he’s a man and meaning it. Gender is a social construct that goes back, as far as I understand, to the beginning of humanity. There has always been gender, and there’ve always been people who transgress the roles assigned to them at birth.
An orc is a social construct we just fucking made up. I mean, I guess the orc is an archetype, too. But it’s a fantasy archetype. We know it’s make-believe.
Make-believe is what gave my life meaning.
I promise you that for me, the day we decided we were orcs was the first day that the sun shone benevolence upon the world. It was the first day that color radiated from everything I saw. It was the first day that the rain on my roof tapped out codes of meaning. It was the first day of my life. My real life.
My first Alsarath, I fell in love with the world.
Everyone finds meaning in different ways. I found meaning by believing in some shit we made up, in letting that be real.
I was born Jason Sanchez. I died Golfimbul. I’m not sorry.