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I mentioned on Tumblr that this would be up shortly and, despite me being 'on a break' for November while I work on my novel, here's a 7.7k word orc story. It’ll be up on Tumblr in a few days’ time. As always with me, it's a bit plotty and very fluffy, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I said on Discord too that the reader's best friend is a yeti, and his design is based on the yeti from 'The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor' who are adorable fluffy goofballs.
So, here's my late Orctober offering for you, featuring one Giant Fluff, eight smaller fluffs (huskies), three bigger fluffs (snow-bears), fluffy cliches, fluffy snow, and one Big Gentle(tm)... The reader is female, but for ~90% of it gender isn’t mentioned. It’s really only in the nsfw bit at the end…
With a shiver you stepped outside, the snow squeaking and crunching eerily beneath your too-thin boots, and you drew the soft fur of your jacket up around your neck. Squinting through your clouding breath, you blinked, eyelashes icing up before you had gone more than three paces, and the inside of your nose was quite literally frozen, but it didn’t matter. Selkie Rock Point was one of the most northerly villages on the continent, and not counting the various nomadic peoples who lived even further north, it was one of the last places to find permanent shelter and warmth. It was also home.
Tradewatch sat a little further south along the coast, and in the winter the great ice-breaker ships with their dwarven-forged metal prows could still get through until relatively late in the year, but up here you were locked in by sea ice much earlier.
You’d grown up here, the middle child of one of a handful of human families in a village comprised mostly of selkies and white-furred bear-folk, centaurs, cervitaurs, werewolves and other shifters. Most of the people who lived up here had thick fur or a natural resistance to the cold. Your siblings had left to go to the larger towns further south, but you still bred sled dogs in the house where your parents and grandparents had done the same thing.
Now, as you trudged on foot down to the store to stock your nearly empty cupboards up on essentials, a fresh flurry of snow swirled around you and you narrowed your eyes. If you breathed too deeply, it bit into the back of your throat, but you were relatively used to the cold by now.
Out of the murk of the perpetual twilight that choked this part of the world in the winter, you began to make out the large, dark shape of perhaps a centaur. The closer they got, the more details you could pick out, until you finally figured out who it was and called out to them. “Linny! Hey!”
The huge, dapple grey centaur, swaddled up in layers of coats and fur too, startled a little, but laughed. She had a dark fur hat on over her ice blonde hair, and all you could see of her face was a pair of dark brown eyes, her lashes also rimed with ice. “Hey,” she laughed back once she’d recovered her composure. On her back, already covered in a layer of snow, were two large panniers, though they looked empty despite the fact that she was returning from the shop.
“Everything alright?” you asked. Something felt wrong about the way she moved, a strange tension seeping through the air, though you weren’t quite sure what it could be.
She shuffled. “Yeah, just… uh… there are some ice orcs at the general store… I… I didn’t get very close. I thought I’d come back later. From what I heard, they’re only passing through on their way south.”
There were a number of clans of the grey-blue skinned orcs living this far north, and they had a reputation for being vicious, bloody-minded raiders, though not all of them were. A few of them were trappers and hunters by trade, earning their living by taking their sleds pulled by huge snow-bears down to Tradewatch and then across to Eyrie Point. Sometimes they passed through this little collection of houses on their way through, but they rarely stopped to talk or share the time of day with anyone.
“Fuck, it’s freezing,” you hissed as the wind bit at your exposed cheeks.
“Don’t let me keep you,” she said. “I’ll see you at the Whisky Tumbler tonight?” she added with a swish of her tail.
You nodded. “I’ll be there.”
As much as you were nervous of the orcs too, you really needed some more food, so you ploughed on through the deep snow, eventually arriving at the Selkie Rock general store. Outside it were three loaded sleds, and each one was hitched up to a colossal snow-bear. Muzzled, though not cruelly, the bears were either lounging around in the powder like a seal on a summer beach, or, in the case of the one at the front, sitting alertly, rounded ears pricked, nose snuffing at the scents on the wind.
Giving them a wide, cautious berth, you swallowed apprehensively and scuttled into the shop, glancing over your shoulder at them. As you yanked back the heavy door and stepped inside, you collided instantly with something as solid as an iceberg. As you bounced off and your arse hit the half frozen floorboards of the deck outside the shop, you gazed directly up into the face of a truly huge ice orc.
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