How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying

Book 1: Dark Lord Davi

by Django Wexler

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy; Humorous Fantasy

Synopsis

Groundhog Day meets Guardians of the Galaxy in Django Wexler’s laugh-out-loud fantasy tale about a young woman who, tired of defending humanity from the Dark Lord, decides to become the Dark Lord herself.

Davi has done this all before. She’s tried to be the hero and take down the all-powerful Dark Lord. A hundred times she’s rallied humanity and made the final charge. But the time loop always gets her in the end. Sometimes she’s killed quickly. Sometimes it takes a while. But she’s been defeated every time.

This time? She’s done being the hero and done being stuck in this endless time loop. If the Dark Lord always wins, then maybe that’s who she needs to be. It’s Davi’s turn to play on the winning side.

Burningblade & Silvereye
Ashes of the Sun 
Blood of the Chosen 
Emperor of Ruin

Release date: May 21, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 528

Sample

It takes me two weeks to die, locked in my own dungeon.

Not for lack of trying on my part, mind, but orders have come down from the Dark Lord that the Princess isn’t allowed to pop off early. I found a bit of chicken bone in my soup once, but the spoilsports got to me before I could choke on it.

On the plus side, to the extent that there is a plus side to being tortured to death, I don’t have to see what’s happening out in the city. I assume it’s bad. It’s usually bad. If I got into therapy and unloaded half the shit I’ve seen, Dr. Freud would take a running leap out the nearest window. So not having to actually watch is kind of a relief.

I hear Artaxes coming, the clank clank clank of his rusty iron shitkickers. When he opens the door, I give him a little wave with my fingers. This is all I can manage, since I’m manacled to a wooden contraption that raises my arms like I’m in the middle of a cheer routine.

“Morning, chief!” I sing out. “What’s the haps?”

I keep hoping being cheerful will annoy him, possibly enough to rip my throat out, but so far no joy. It’s hard to tell how anything lands with Artaxes, since he wears his iron armor like a second skin.1

“How do you poop?” I ask him. “Just between us. I won’t tell anybody.”

He gives a grunt and steps aside. There’s someone else in the doorway. Tall and gaunt, black robe hanging limp from her bony shoulders, mouth full of long curving teeth. Sibarae. She looks me over and raises her scaly eyebrow bumps.

I’m naked at this point, modesty provided only by a crust of dried blood and matted hair. For all that matters to Artaxes, I might be a side of beef on a hook. I mean, maybe he has a raging hard-on inside his rusty codpiece, but I doubt it. I’ve seen Artaxes serve as the right hand of the Dark Lord more times than I can count, and he always goes about his business with the dumb brute efficiency of a buzz saw. You get exactly what you expect with him. It’s comforting, in a way, although obviously not when he’s tearing my fingernails out.

Sibarae is a whole other kettle of snakes. She’s practically drooling at the sight of my gory tits. Her tongue comes out, long and forked, to taste the air. I briefly contemplate what it would be like to get head from a snake-wilder,2 but I have let’s say a premonition that this is not on the agenda.

“Look, clanky,” I tell Artaxes, “I realize you’re worried about not… you know, getting the job done anymore, but you can’t just introduce a third wheel into our relationship without talking to me about it. We have something special together, I don’t want to spoil it.”

“My master worries that you may become accustomed to the conditions of your imprisonment,” he says. His voice is as cold and dead as his armor.

“And I begged him to be allowed a turn,” Sibarae says. “I’ve always wondered what a princess tastes like.”

This is not a sex thing, trust me.

“Sorry, scaly. I only date girls with tits.”3

“Those bulbous mammalian things?” She glides forward. “So soft and… vulnerable. Like the rest of you. Skin.” She pronounces the word with a contemptuous flick of the tongue.

“Remember our lord’s instructions,” Artaxes admonishes.

“Oh yes,” Sibarae hisses. “I’ll be sure to show… restraint.”

He clanks out, shutting the door behind him. She gets on with the business at hand. Which, let’s not put too fine a point on it, fucking sucks. You think you’d get used to this shit after a while, but nooooo, when someone bites your finger off, your body’s gotta be all like, oh no, someone bit my finger off, pain pain pain! I know, okay? I was fucking there, you don’t have to remind me.

So I scream a lot and piss myself, which is breaking character a little. Cut me some slack. Artaxes at least doesn’t bite. In between screams, I amuse myself planning how I’m going to kill her next time we meet. Rusty, jagged metal will be involved. There may be, like, a little corkscrew bit on the end, possibly some kind of barbed flanges. I’ll use my imagination.

Eventually I pass out, thank God. When I wake up, there’s a teenage girl in the uniform of the palace healers, the glow of green thaumite leaking between the clenched fingers of her shaking hand. A small pool of vomit by the door marks where she lost her lunch at the sight of me. I wonder what the wilders have threatened her with.

She grows back most of my missing bits, but leaves me with a few open wounds just for shits and giggles. Dark Lord’s orders, presumably. Fucker likes to twist the knife, figuratively and distressingly literally. At least when he killed Johann, my poor beautiful himbo boyfriend, he didn’t have time for any of this sadistic bullshit.

Now that I can think without being completely submerged in white-hot agony, I’m getting pissed off. I know you’re thinking, Davi, just now you’re getting pissed off? And it’s true, this anger has been building for a while. It’s taken some time to bubble to the surface, but it’s been stewing down there in the acid swamps of my subconscious.

To put it bluntly: I am about done with this shit. The whole being-tortured-to-death thing, obviously, but also the rest. Finished. Kaput. No more. Fuck every last little bit of it. I have a new plan and it’s time to get started.

Fun fact: Did you know that snakes lose their teeth and constantly grow more, like sharks? Actually I have no idea if snakes do that, what the fuck do I know about snakes, but snake-wilders do. I know this, as of today, because I have one of Sibarae’s fangs embedded in my palm.

The healer has grown the skin back over it, but it’s merely the work of an excruciatingly painful eternity to dig it out with my fingernails. The fang has a nice curved shape and a vicious point, and I grip it between two fingers and press it against my wrist, right on the artery. I don’t have much leverage, so the best I can do is work the point back and forth, sawing through the skin. Hurts like a motherfucker, but sometimes a girl’s just gotta die, you know?

When the artery finally pops, the spatter of blood hitting the floor is like music to my ears. I keep tearing at the cut, opening it wider, willing my stupid heart to pump harder and get my whole blood supply out before someone notices. The fang slips through my fingers about the time my vision starts to go gray, but by then I can taste victory. Also blood.

I slip into the sweet embrace of death with a contented sigh. So long, #237. Go fuck a porcupine.

“Well now.” The voice is frustratingly familiar. “That won’t do at all.”

1 He seriously never takes it off. How does he poop? I have to know how he poops.

2 The tongue would be fucking weird, right? Dunno. Maybe I’m into it.

3 This isn’t really true. I’m just trying to piss her off. No offense to my flat-chested sisters!



I sit up out of the cold water of the pool, gasping for breath. Again.

Twelve seconds.

Done done done with this shit, for real. No more.

Still naked, of course. Death, birth, nudity, very mythic. Frankly if it has to be that way, I’d rather die in bed during an epic fuck1 than bleeding out after weeks of torture in my own fucking dungeon, but beggars, choosers, you know.

Ten seconds.

Anyway. Naked in a rancid pool of chilly water at the top of a hill. Edge of the Kingdom, right up against a wilder-haunted forest. I’m healthy and hale of limb once again, and also about three years younger, with a lot less muscle tone and a ghastly sort of pixie cut. Same as always. I figure it’s what I looked like when all of this kicked off, when whatever happened happened and I got here from Earth some-fucking-how.

Six seconds.

I focus on breathing. Calm and centered, that’s me.

Four seconds. Sound of someone scrambling up the rocks.

Take a deep breath. Hold it. Let it out.

Two. One.

“My lady!” Tserigern says. I mouth the lines with him. My timing is perfect. “So it’s true, then. Gods preserve us. We have a chance.”

I look over at him with my best expression of doe-eyed innocence. He climbs the last few feet, dusts off his motley robe, and approaches reverently.

Tserigern is a wizard, a very old and famous one. Everyone says he’s the most powerful wizard in the Kingdom, but frankly I’ve never seen him do magic for shit. Light the way in caves and get cryptic messages, that’s about it. You could replace him with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. But he at least looks the part: He’s a bony old motherfucker with a beard you could lose a sheep in, like Santa Claus after a debilitating illness. He has kind, crinkly eyes and a sly grin, a weathered, avuncular voice perfect for laying out the mysteries of the universe for an awestruck young naïf. Just the guy you want on your side when you wake up all nudie in a weird fantasy universe with no idea what the fuck is going on.

He bends to one knee and offers me his gnarled hand.

“My lady,” he says as I wrap my fingers around his, “I—”

He doesn’t get to finish, because I grab the back of his head with my other hand and slam his face into the fucking rocks. I hear his nose break with a crunch, and my heart sings, it’s so goddamn cathartic. He lies out flat and I swing astride his back, both hands in his hair, and start pounding his stupid fucking face into mush against the stone edge of the pool.

Seeing as how he’s a little occupied, I say his lines for him.

“I know you must be frightened”—crunch—“but I swear to you, I mean you no harm”—crunch, you fucking liar—“I have hoped against hope for your coming, and I thank the gods my reading of the texts was true”—crunch, they didn’t predict this, did they, motherfucker?—“you must come with me, the fate of the Kingdom is balanced on the blade of a knife”—ca-crunch.

Holy fuck, it’s better than sex. I don’t stop until long after his legs have quit kicking and bits of blood and brains are floating in the water.

“I’m done,” I tell the body, leaning back and breathing hard. “Hear me? Done. I’m not some holy savior here to protect your fucking kingdom.” I’ve been doing that for, hold on, let me check my watch, fucking ten centuries, and where the fuck has it gotten me? A fucking snake-woman eating my goddamn fingers, that’s where.

I strip off his nasty-ass robe and wrap myself in it. He’s wearing trousers, too, but I’m not touching them without a hazmat suit.

“What am I going to do instead?” I say in response to an inaudible question. “I will tell you what I am going to fucking do. We have an expression back home concerning what course of action to take if you find yourself under no circumstances able to beat ’em. I intend to follow its advice.”

I tie the corners of the robe under my chin, plant my hands on my hips, and let it flap behind me like the cape of an extremely inappropriate superhero.

“I,” I announce to the world, “am going to become the fucking Dark Lord.”

Okay. I’ve been going full speed ahead in the interest of keeping my res fucking in medias, but it’s possible you have some questions, such as:

1. How could you beat a friendly old man to death like that? and

2. Didn’t you die, like, two pages ago? What’s the deal?

To which I answer:

1. The key is getting a good grip on the wispy bits of hair on the back of his bald-ass head. Once your fingers are really dug in there, then it’s pretty simple.

2. It’s a long fucking story.

To keep confusion to a minimum, though, here’s the airline safety video version: Hi! I’m Davi. I’m in my early twenties, dark hair, light brown skin, freckles like someone flicked a paintbrush at my nose, body you’d probably swipe right on but maybe not brag to your friends about afterward.

For the last thousand years,2 I’ve been trapped in a time loop, like in that movie or that other movie. When I die—and I always die, for reasons I’m about to explain—I wake up here, now, naked in the pool. Tserigern turns up to give me his spiel. What he would have told me, had I not enmushified his head, is that the Kingdom is in dire peril from the impending rise of the Dark Lord, and only I can save humanity from the monstrous armies of the Wilds. Chosen by the fucking gods, promised by prophecy, generally just absolutely lousy with momentous portent. Get your ass in gear, Davi, there’s heroing to do.

There was a time when I bought this horseshit. I mean, it’s not like he’s completely off base here. Try to maintain appropriate humility all you want, it’s hard to believe the world doesn’t revolve around you when it rewinds the tape every time you fall on your head. And whatever prophet wrote the one about the Dark Lord destroying the Kingdom makes Nostradamus look like a stock-picking hamster, because that shit happens Every. Fucking. Time.

It’s not always the same Dark Lord, and sometimes it takes a little longer, but they always turn up. And as of a few minutes ago, I have fed 237 quarters into this fucking game and I cannot get past the last boss. I have tried everything, and it always ends with me getting sliced into sashimi. I am becoming a little peeved about this, hence my admittedly emotional outburst slash face-smashing.

So! Yeah. Davi. Freckles. Time loop. That’s me.3

Anyway. Dark Lord! Plenty of other people have managed it, why not me?

There’s actually a whole itemized list of reasons. The two big ones are (a) I’m a human, not a wilder, and (b) my total current resources consist of a ratty cape and whatever Tserigern has in his pockets. I may have a bit of a hole card in re (a), but (b) is definitely going to be a significant obstacle. I don’t know exactly how they pick the Dark Lord, but a major factor is personal charisma as measured in armed henchpersons; most candidates turn up with armies, and I don’t even have pants.

When I go with Tserigern, as I usually do, he helps me manage this transition. He’s not the most popular guy in the Kingdom, but he can provide me with an entrée to high society and also pants, probably not in that order. Having tenderized his face region, I am more or less on my own in the pants department and also all other departments. I will have to be extremely lucky to get this enterprise off the ground.

Fortunately, in this very specific time and place, I can manufacture my own luck.

I tear some strips from Tserigern’s grody robe and tie them around my feet, because fuck if I’m putting his boots on. I also help myself to the contents of his pocketses, which are distinctly subpar. Dude is supposed to be a badass wizard and he only carries around enough thaumite to stock a village rectory.

Then it’s down the hill and into the forest. The spot where I wake up is on the shifting border between the Kingdom4 and the Wilds. Every year, the Guild pushes its patrols a little farther out, and the Guildblades kill a few more gangs of wilders, with axe-wielding peasants following behind to turn the forest into farms.

Ordinarily I’m all for this, of course. It’s hard to shed many tears about people who kill you over and over, right? But if I’m going to be Dark Lord, I need to flip my perspective. Screw those humans and their jerk-ass Guild, coming into our forests to kill us for our pretty stones! What a bunch of total dicks!

Honestly, you can see why they’re pissed at us.

Anyway, once I get to the bottom of the hill, it’s pretty easy going. This is old forest, and the big craggy trees drink in so much light there isn’t much left for pricker bushes. I walk on a soft carpet of decaying leaves. Another strip from Tserigern’s robe becomes a makeshift pouch, and I gather a few handfuls of maidensrest vine for purposes that will eventually become apparent.

So far, so good. There’s a crunch of footsteps ahead of me, and I freeze and try to memorize exactly where I am. Half a second later, a couple of orcs emerge from behind a tree.

I mean, I call them orcs, because I’ve had the benefit of a classical education. What they call themselves means something like “the tusked ones.” They have greeny-gray skin and curling tusks at the corners of their mouths, which to me says orcs. They’re pretty common among wilder bands on the border, especially north of the Kingdom. I have personally slain enough orcs to fill a soccer stadium.5

These two orcs are a bit ragged-looking even by raider standards. One has a sword, the other a spear, and their dress sense might euphemistically be called “rugged.”

The way they’re gaping at me isn’t promising, but you have to start somewhere. I put my hands on my hips, push my cape back over my shoulders, and tell them, “Hello, my friends! I am the next Dark Lord! Will you join me?”

The one with the spear stabs me right in the tit. Fucking orcs.

So, about what I expected. But here’s the thing about being so close to my starting point—it doesn’t bother me much.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, being stabbed fucking hurts. Other than that, though, I haven’t lost anything. Another quick walk through the forest and I’m in a position to try again. And again, and again, and again, if necessary. I can’t help but think of this as “save-scumming,” after the old gaming practice of loading your save over and over to try to get a good result on some RNG.6 I don’t even count these mayfly existences against my total roster of lives. Keeping track is hard enough as it is.

Point is this is not an unexpected result. Next time I go into the forest, I know where my orc friends are going to be patrolling. They catch me one more time (sword to the back of the head, instant death, 5/5 stars), and then I’ve got an idea of their route, which makes it easy to get past them. I’m tempted to murder them, if only for their boots, but given my ultimate objective, it seems counterproductive. I guess that they’re walking a circuit around a raider camp, and lo, so it comes to pass. There’s a whole bunch of tents pitched around a big clearing with a bonfire. I can see a gang of wilders, maybe thirty, mostly orcs with a few wolves and lizards for variety.

I know these guys. In fact, I’ve killed them many times. A more typical start to a life might go like this:

1. Follow Tserigern after his stupid fucking speech.

2. Meet up with a party of Guildblades in the area. Offer to guide them to their prey to prove my worth.

3. Find the closest raider gang (this one) and get to hack-’n’-slash.

It’s a nice trick because it gets me in with the Guild from the very start, which helps propel me into the thick of the Kingdom’s affairs without too much “Who’s this scruffy girl who says she’s here to save us?” style bullshit. Since I’m now reversing the polarity on everything, though, it behooves me to get to know these people as something other than a red mess on the other end of a battle-axe.

The trick is living long enough to do this, since as far as they’re concerned, I’m just some human wandering into their camp, and for wilders pretty much the only good human is a dead human. Some fast-talking is called for.

“Hello, friends—gark!”

“Can I speak to you before—blarg!”

“Please listen for a minute before you stab—whatever noise being stabbed in the eye makes!”7

It takes a few tries.8 I vary up my approach, trying different angles. The direct route brings me up against a big deep-green orc with a sideways mohawk who barely seems to notice what I say before he slaughters me. Taking the long way around means the first wilder I encounter is a woman stitching leather who seems less inclined to immediate violence.

At this you might say, Davi, why bother? I get that you don’t want to fight the orcs, for altruistic and/or emotional reasons relating to your mindset on this particular life, but you could at least go around them. Just dodge the scouts and get on with the plan!

So, first of all, where the fuck do you get off giving me advice, imaginary person? Have you been horribly killed an unknown but four-digit number of times? I suspect not, and I invite you to (a) respect my expertise, and (b) fuck off into the sun.

Second, if I must elaborate, talking to the orcs is the plan. See, Dark Lord isn’t a thing you just stroll into. You have to work your way up. For obvious reasons, I don’t know very much about the actual process, but the Dark Lord gets crowned9 at a big wilder shindig called the Convocation, way up past the mountains at the other end of the Hedsine River. As noted, it’s a bring-your-own-minions sort of occasion.

In other words, just turning up isn’t going to do me any good. Ideally I’d be at the head of a vast horde, but even a little horde10 is better than none.

Thus: orcs. Small-time and close enough to my starting point that I can fuck around.

“Hey,” I tell the leather-stitching orc, who startles and jabs herself in the palm with a needle. “S’up.”

She looks at me wide-eyed but doesn’t immediately disembowel me. Progress!

“Please don’t scream,” I tell her.

She screams. A whole gang of orcs arrives and does unpleasant things with edged weapons until I stop moving.

I reconsider. Maybe a more layered approach is needed. Next time I stay out of sight around a tent and call out, “Hello? Lady with the sewing?”

There’s an intake of breath, and then, “Barlav? Is that you?”

Actual conversation!11 “Um, sure?”

“What?”

Footsteps. She looks around the corner and I give her a reassuring grin.12 She screams. Chop chop chop ow ow splat.

Try again.

“Madam, I am forced to admit that I am not, in fact, Barlav.”

“What?” A rustle. “Who’s there?”

“Before you turn the corner,” I say, “let me put my cards on the table and further admit that the sight of me will probably alarm you somewhat. I assure you that I have no intention and indeed no ability to harm you or your companions, and my sole desire is to establish peaceful relations and amicable dialogue.”

“What the fuck—” She turns the corner, screams. Choppy choppy.

Again. Maybe adjust the verbiage to be a little more immediately approachable.

“Please don’t scream. I just want to talk, I don’t have any weapons.”

She turns the corner, sees me, sucks in a breath. Pauses. Lets it out slowly.

“You—” Her eyes flick to me, then back toward the center of camp, where the choppers are waiting. “You’re human.” A deeper shade of green colors her cheeks. “And naked. Why are you naked?”

“As to the first, I’m not, I swear.” Better to start laying the groundwork early. “I’m guilty on the second count, though. It has been a rough”—thousand years—“couple of weeks.”

“You speak properly.” She straightens up a little, coming out of a defensive crouch. “I’ve never met a human who can do that.”

“As I said, I’m not a human.” I cough. “May I ask your name?”

“Maeve,” she says.

“It’s good to meet you, Maeve. I’m Davi.”

“What are you doing here?” Her eyes flick over her shoulder again. “They’ll kill you if they find you.”

“Believe me, I am aware of that,” I say with a certain amount of well-earned gravitas. “I need to speak to your leader about something important. Is it at all possible we could arrange that without too much bleeding on my part?”

“You…” She shakes her head. “You must be mad.”

“As a March hare,” I answer automatically.

“A what?”

“Never mind. Can you just… go and find the person in charge and tell them I would deeply like to have a word? They’re free to kill me afterward.”

“Maeve?” a deeper voice says from around the corner.

“Over here, Barlav,” Maeve says, backing away from me. “There’s something you should see.”

The sideways-mohawk orc comes into view. He sees me and his eyes go wide. But, crucially, Maeve is between him and me, so he has to pause a moment to push her out of the way.

“Wait!” I shout at him. “Please. I know I look human, but I’m a wilder and I can prove it. Please just let me show you.”

I reach into my makeshift pouch and pull out the thaumite I got from Tserigern. There’s not very much, two green stones, one orange, one purple, none of them larger than my pinky nail. They’re polished into smooth spheres, like marbles that glow very slightly from the inside.

The sight of the little gems at least gets Barlav’s attention. I grab one of the green ones, put it on my tongue, and swallow. It makes a hard lump in my throat as it goes down.

Maeve and Barlav stare at me. I stare back at them, waiting.

So, thaumite.13 Thaumite is pure arcane power crystallized into glowing gems, which come in every color of the rainbow. Back in the Kingdom, it’s considered the ultimate bling, and for good reason—with the right training, humans can use thaumite to do magic. What exactly they can do and how much of it depends on how big a chunk you have and in what color, among other factors; if you ever see someone coming at you with a chunk of red stuff the size of a fist and an angry expression, for example, all your shit is about to get blown up and/or combusted. On the flip side: I am, of course, probably the best magic-slinger the world has ever seen, but with the junk Tserigern had on him, I can probably manage to cast “Heat to the Point of Mild Discomfort” or “Cure Hangnail.”

That’s what humans do with thaumite. Wilders have a much more basic, primal relationship with the stuff, which is a fancy way of saying that they eat it. The magic runs through them and lets them do things, not as flashy as human sorcery but more reliable. But the salient point at this specific juncture is that if a human is stupid enough to eat thaumite, that human is going to have a bad time, somewhere along the axis from “painful and immediate death” to “actually exploding like a decomposing whale.”

So, Davi, you say, are you about to explode? Because that seems like kind of an elaborate prank, talking your way up close to these orcs only to shower them in your mangled guts.

And you would think so! Because I am, as best I’ve been able to determine,14 human. Like I don’t have fangs or cat ears or a snake tongue or the other shit that wilders usually have. And yet, as I determined by experiment long ago, I can eat thaumite with no ill effects and even use it the way wilders do. And I can use human-style magic! Kind of a cheat-level skill set, right? Not that it’s done me much good, since in the Kingdom if they find out you can eat thaumite, they burn you at the stake and not as a figure of fucking speech.

Now, however, I’m hoping I can take advantage of the opposite. By popping a chunk of thaumite like a happy pill and then conspicuously not exploding, I can demonstrate my bona fucking fides to Maeve and Barlav. Wilders can look like all kinds of things; the idea that one could pass for human isn’t too implausible.

Worth trying, anyway. What’s the worst that can happen, I get brutally murdered?

Somewhat to my surprise, I do not get brutally murdered. At least not immediately.

Barlav grabs me, not gently, and twists my arms behind my back. He frog-marches me through the ring of tents to the central fire, with Maeve making vaguely distressed noises as she follows behind. The rest of the raiders quickly gather round, two dozen or so variously armed orcs, wolves, and lizards versus little naked me. I’ve stared down worse odds.15

Up until this point, I’ve been too busy dying to pay much attention to the details of the camp. The gear is your basic raider mishmash: half wilder-made stuff—lots of leather, bone, bits of shell and carapaces from beasts—and half looted human junk, not particularly well cared for. I have to admit that it doesn’t get my hopes up. But this riffraff somehow manages to squash the civilized Kingdom, with its knights and castles and flush toilets, every single time. Which is why I’m here, right? Get on the winning team for once.

There are a few family-sized tents and a lot of smaller ones, some little more than a ratty hide on a couple of sticks. Out of one of the nice ones comes an orc woman who has the unmistakable air of someone In Charge and with no patience for your shenanigans. She’s big, a head taller than my admittedly below-average height, with her hair shorn down to a thin stubble and curling tusks carved with elaborate abstract patterns. She stares at me and scowls, and I stare back and try to look like a harmless little bunny.

I kind of want her to step on me and make me lick her toes, if we’re being honest. What can I say? Something about a girl who can wrap her fingers all the way around my neck does it for me. Her biceps are as big as my thighs.

“What the fuck is going on?” she says. “Who’s this?”

“Looks like a human,” one of the other orcs says.

“Might be a spy for the Guild,” a wolf mutters.

“I caught her sneaking into camp,” Barlav says.

“She said she wanted to talk,” Maeve puts in, raising her stock with me about a million percent.

“Nivo and Myr are supposed to be on patrol,” the leader snaps. “They’re in for a kicking when they get back.”

Sorry, Nivo and Myr. You did a fine job killing me the first few times.

“She says she’s a wilder,” Barlav goes on. “Took a piece of thaumite right in front of us.”

“Wilder?” The leader’s eyes narrow. “Seems human to me. Must be a trick.”

“She speaks properly,” Maeve says. “Not that human gibberish.”

“I do,” I say, judging this to be the time to put my verbal foot in the door. “And I am.