She thought of herself leaving Orca. To go on a journey like Frodo was taking now, like Bilbo took before. There and back again. She’d never imagined it before. Orca was the whole world to her. The coasts of Orca were the world-edges. She knew the world was round indeed, and that outside of Orca there were deadly storms which few survived, but for practical purposes she might have been on a flat earth. She had never thought about the other side of Reath though, she had never once put a thought to what Upper Reath might have looked like, or how elvans truly lived. She took whatever she was told about elvans at face value.

  “Yo, Githarie!”

  Lawrah jogged up to Githarie sitting alone by the bonfire furthest away from the main stages of the razza, behind the temple stage, reading.

  It just so happened that Lawrah and Zholl had still been fighting right around there a little while ago. It attracted the attention of the assholes, which forced the couple to get dressed. Once the assholes caught wind of what the sitch was, they began jeering. Of course, the orcbois got in each other’s face, and Zholl began trying to fight off several of them at once, and promptly got his ass kicked. Lawrah threw a few ‘illegal’ wing chun moves – eye gouges and throat slams – and sent the same number to the ground even though they all came at her at once. Taking the path of least resistance, they decided instead to pile on the already successful zerg rush on Zholl, and Zholl, taking all the aggro, was able to peel them off Lawrah. Without a ranged weapon to kite, she chose the only viable move left - running.

  Instinctively she sprinted full force towards the closest source of light.

  She heard some crazy hai singing- “Oh! Water cold we may pour at need, down a thirsty throat agh be glad indeed, but better is BEER! If drink we lack. Agh Water Hot poured down sha back-”, recognizing right away the unmistakable Thraxes singsong lilt. So, she ran towards that.

  Very soon she caught Githarie’s silhouette and raced over to share these - er - wonderful memories they were making. She hoped Githarie’s were going to be slightly more wonderful, hoped catching up would distract her from the immense disappointment she had in Gith’s gezzno fuckboi older brother. She was sure. Lawrah didn’t want to bring Githarie’s vibe down – though it was weird that she was sitting all the way out here by the fire alone like a nurd – so even though Lawrah herself was having some real issues, she piped up:

  “Oh Gith, gimbsha! Ain’t the razza great? Oh, my Gods, I’m having SO much fun, agh-”

  Githarie’s eyes shot up from the book with cold sullenness. The temperature of the bath ran icy cold as the Defiant’s shower now before dissipating entirely. She wasn’t trying to intimidate Lawrah as much as she wanted to make her feel guilty. She’d cried all her tears though, so as badly as she wanted to cry on command right now, she could not.

  “You ditched me, bitch.” No orcish. Real talk. Code switch.

  Lawrah was nonplussed. She did not know how to react when she was like this. Certainly, Githarie had her pissy moods, but she was usually openhearted, jovial, and laid back enough to forgive and usually forget. Ai-sha, just left sha alone for a few hours! Lawrah had never seen her this mad at her though- malice crackled on every T she spat. But one thing Lawrah always stood for was the truth. She tried to soften her tone as much as she could and said,

  “Huh? You- you ditched me-”

  “NO!”, Githarie interrupted, “YOU ditched me twice! Once at the Tusk and Tooth” – this was somewhat true – “-and now at the razza! We haven’t hung out at all-”

  And that was true though, she didn’t see Githie one lick. But she did not ditch her at the razza! “That’s not true!”

  “It is! You’ve been snogging Zholl all late-”

  “Githarie! I-” Lawrah so badly wanted to tell Gith about what happened with her brother but suddenly realized that things could get awkward. She was sure that Githarie would side with her, that wasn’t in question, but Zholl was still her brother. Would it change how Gith felt about Lawrah, permanently? Or worse, would it ruin things between Gith and Zholl? To Lawrah, who had nobody else but her own Dad, ruining a family bond would be worse than ruining a friendship. She felt she had to talk it out with Zholl at the very least before she could tell Githarie. That had to be the right thing to do.

  She had no chance to speak though for Githarie just keep yelling, louder and louder, “You ABANDONED your BEST FRIEND on her BIRTH-ROTE just to HOOK UP with her BROTHER!”, she was full blasting at Law, and the combination of the shouted words – put that way, it does sound pretty egregious – started attracting vain attention from other orcans gathered around the bonfire.

  “That’s TRUE, isn’t it, HAI?”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “HOW is it NOT? It’s what HAPPENED!” With each new shouted word, her hysteria ramped away.

  “If you hadn’t gone off with Zhon and Deyandra we could have all-”

  “Yeah RIGHT! Did you not know how DISGUSTING you two got? I bet-”, Githarie was starting to see red, she was hungry, tired, felt unclean, had bad tripped, her serotonin levels were dangerously low so she was in a pissy bitch mood if that wasn’t already made abundantly clear, and her dopamine levels were crashing hard all the meantime too so she felt fatigued, her thoughts weren’t forming correctly, and-

  "We were just at the psytrance temple!” Lawrah twisted. She pointed at the fence and hypothesized, “We could have all been dancing and having fun, I-”

  She wanted to say that Githarie should know she loved psytrance music, but due to wanting performative conformity to her father’s expectations of her, she had never told Githarie that she had liked it. And then she was caught, for they most certainly weren’t inside the temple, but outside of it, at the snog spots along the fence. Githarie would have just been dancing awkwardly alone inside, waiting for the zug-zug to end, even if she had followed. Realizing that despite how much she valued the truth- she had just been caught in a lie, Lawrah fell silent.

  This was a lot of detail that Lawrah had the benefit of having processed, but not Githarie. Nonetheless, the deception had been already caught. It was just a matter of when the redacted details would emerge.

  “Why are you out here then?”

  It began to dawn on Githarie that she wasn’t currently seeing the whole picture, something very important was missing, something that she might have just seen in a vision already.

  “Why aren’t you inside the temple like you said you were? You can’t see me reading by the fire from in there. You wouldn’t have heard me singing.”

  “I-”

  Githarie narrowed her eyes,

  “You fucked him, didn’t you.”

  Lawrah now looked like she was on the verge of tears. Her lips were trembling. She wanted to say something but what could she say? That it was just… okay? That he came in her? That he was a complete jerk? That she ought to have warned her about him? That the only reason she liked him was because he thought she was barren? It was all too awful to bear. She couldn’t admit anything, but if she lied Githarie would gesh it, especially now that she was suspicious. She couldn’t say anything, so Lawrah just kept crying.

  But Lawrah did not have the right to cry! She did not have the right to get dramatic or blame or say anything at all, from Githarie’s perspective, because-

  “LAWRAH! I got-”, she wasn’t going to shout this one, “-molested!”

  Law looked confused for a second, but instantly she understood the severity and the extent of Githarie’s pain, and she snarled, “We’ll find this snaga and we’ll rip his head off-”

  “That won’t help!” Githarie interjected. “Some zugs are already taking care of him. I got lucky that there were orcans – unlike you Lawrah – who had. My. Back. They were from ‘Behety, I didn’t even know them! Some friend you are.”

  Lawrah remained speechless as she was before.

  “I just want you to acknowledge that you ditched me!”, Githarie was shrieking still, but she had screamed enough to make her voice hoarse,

  “I don’t need you to go find the snaga who did it and rek him, I just-”, she got quiet now and sobbed.

  “-I want my friend back.”

  Githarie not only felt wretched, but she was also completely expecting Lawrah to collapse in sympathy from her pity party. It wasn’t even a conscious expectation, it had just worked so many times with her Da, her Ma, and the twins, hell, any orcan that was bigger than her and that was all of them. She was trying to out-pity her friend, thinking that Lawrah was just cranking out the crocodile tears. What the hell were crocodiles anyway?

  But Lawrah was feeling defensive because she was freaking out and bad tripping now just as bad as Gith too. Worse. She wasn’t having a bad trip until now, so it was totally unfamiliar terrain. Even worse. The traumatic incident had just happened and was still fresh and raw. No. Even worse. The perpetrator was this hai’s brother, and so Lawrah could not say a thing and had to pretend she was just having fun at a music festival.

  Instead of extending a steadying hand, Githarie and instead chose a psychic shove, and chose to minimize her very real pain for- for what? She ditched her? She had no idea how bad Lawrah just had it! But- but… it was doubly nuk-nuked up now that she couldn’t tell Githarie. She was backed into a corner by circumstance. So, she lashed out. There wasn’t much else she could say:

  “I did not ditch you. You left Zholl and I. And it’s your own fault that you got so fucked up, I didn’t make you do anything, like Dey always says, you can never handle it and you overestimate yourself, and look- we did the same stuff and I’m fine,” – she was not fine at all, Githarie was molested but Lawrah was actually raped – “but you’re just, like- this hot mess!”

  Lawrah had trapped her in logic and Gith didn’t like it. She did not want to admit she was wrong. She could not admit she was wrong. She was backed into a corner by her own stubborn refusal to empathize. And so, she too lashed out. She calculated the cruelest, most hurtful thing she could possibly say to Lawrah.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Yeah, sha hai?”, the orcish betrayed- “Then skai off..."

  And then she intentionally deadnamed her. "...Law-" Redacted.

  Lawrah was stunned and her hands flew to her lips. No. Not that.

  It was not that Lawrah now believed that Githarie was transphobic. She knew she wasn’t, that simply wasn’t possible, what transphobe would spend nearly every rotation of her life together with her trans best friend? It was that Githarie had chosen to think of the worst possible thing to say to her – the words that would maximize damage – and said it without even meaning it. Which meant they were said to hurt her feelings. That was all. Githarie didn’t want to communicate. She didn’t want to fix anything. She wanted to hurt Lawrah.

  She wanted to flay her.

  Lawrah tried to immediately retort, to comeback, show some face and respond and scowled and said, “We’re-”

  But she broke, and sobbed, and couldn’t seem to put her words together, even though it should have been a conditional reflex by now. Automated. She doubled over, put her palms to her face to sob a bit without letting Githie see. She couldn’t show weakness. Not what she was about to do.

  She wiped her hands away; her face was now just a stained mess of makeup and mascara and eyeliner. Fresh tears dribbled through the mess. She wiped a few times again and finally a stern, no-nonsense, no-makeup at all, save for a few smudges, totally authentic Lawrah said:

  “You,” no orcish.

  “And I,” real talk.

  “Are not friends anymore, Githarie.”

  Sometimes damage is done. Sometimes you aren’t stopped by a geshzugas older sister. Sometimes actions have consequences.

  When Lawrince Varoka died and Lawrah Varoka was born all those revolutions ago one random rote on what seemed to be a whim to Raigo – despite the fights, the protests, the screaming, and the bitter silent resentment with father ever since, and none of it helped with the loss of Mom – her father had never once truly disrespected her decision. He finally accepted it, even if he tried so hard to persuade her otherwise, such was his right as a father to make his case.

  It hurt him so much to lose his only son, even if he now welcomed a daughter. And even if they tried to spend time together, the dark cloud hung over Raigo for the combination of his duties, his loneliness, and the loss of his dear Uruyeh – the Varokas could not add more members to their clan if they tried, or, well, not quite yet, and maybe that was why Lawrah made her decision in the first place – it dampened the natural orcan warmth.

  “Deddy! Deddy! DE-EDDY!” became “Father.”,

  “AY! SHA NAKAZ RUNT RINCEYWIND C’MERE, SHA!”, became “Lawrah.”

  Lawrah kept trying to convince herself that she didn’t really like Raigo, no, she didn’t like her own father. He was too strict, too cringe, too uptight. But despite all the self-talk, the fact was, she loved her dear father. It was all she had. No matter what she might say in complaining to Githarie, she wanted badly to make her father proud, which was why she tried so hard at everything.

  He accepted it.

  He might have yelled. He had never derided her. He might have been frustrated, pleading, and most of all- condescending. Father knows best. But he had never attacked her self-worth. He only said that he could not change how he felt, and that he felt bitterly disappointed in her decision, and that he could not lie to his only child because he loved her. He hoped she would give him the magosh of being patient enough to wait until he could finally finish grieving his own dreams of a father and son relationship, before rejoicing instead in a father and daughter relationship. Those were his exact words.

  She loved father so much because of that: for accepting her. And she had been patient. And she thought that maybe, just maybe, it might finally happen. She had always dreamed of having a proper boifriend. Not just a hookup to test her new equipment, but a respectable orcan boi, a son of a war hero. But of course, he couldn’t be too much of a goody two shoes, as given the semi-adversarial nature that became of Lawrah and Raigo, she couldn’t help but be attracted to rebellion, just a little bit. Son of a war hero… senior member of the local gang. In Lawrah’s head it would have been perfect. And maybe that was what it took for Raigo to forget Lawrince, that ugly shadow of the past that haunted Lawrah, like a crawling, creepy, slimy creature of no self-respect, for self-respect was her true precious nazge. He accepted her.

  Because atul did not accept her. Not really. Sure, they might act that they are, they might say that they are, but always they would have some sort of assumption about her inner life that she found hurtful, because they never, ever asked her about what her experience was. At least they assumed her life was just like any other nakaz zug, and not like she was some freak, some monstrous abomination- orcans did not think that way about other orcans. Only elves.

  But still.

  Still, they did not try to understand. If there was any better example of this it would be the putrid selfishness Zholl had displayed earlier, how cruel gossip among orcbois led to… she didn’t want to think about it. Did he even really like her? They ignored the trans experience, it didn’t matter to them.

  But it mattered to her.

  Misunderstandings spun out into disasters, and once she had lost enough time and energy and happiness dealing with relationships that no longer sustained her, she had given herself a hard, cold rule that she told herself she would obey forever, no matter what:

  If you were transphobic to Lawrah Varoka, you were not her friend.

  Even if this meant it was Githarie Thraxes.

  Her only gurl friend.

  Former gurl friend.

  “Have a Happy Birth Rotation.”

  And then she ran away into the darkness of the bamboo forest.

  Githarie felt a wave of regret fill up in her. Horrible, horrible regret. She regretted almost every single decision leading up to this moment, this entire rotten rotation. She wished she slept in, instead of burning out sitting around waiting for waves. She wished she and Lawrah never went to the Tusk. She wished she did study with Zhak, maybe even play Docs and Demigods with him and Lawrah. She wished she Never. Went. To. The. Razza. She wished she had showed Lawrah a little bit more love, spent more time with her, asked her more questions, been more interested in her instead of just her own stupid fucking birth rote, her stupid scheme to get them to the razza, which was not lit at all - in that brief moment that they were so happy together, at brunch, in the hot tub, at the pregame. And she wished so badly that if they were going to go, it was at the razza that they could have shared their first psychedelic trip together. It had been deliriously fun, euphorically fun, at some points: she remembered her time laughing at Zhon the Glob. How meaningful could this experience have been, if they had just stuck together, like zugs do, listening to music, dancing, sharing their thoughts, their experiences - their love?

  No, instead the razza got waghed. Waghed out beyond repair.

  It trapped her like a cage, a bastille of her torment, a fortress-prison of her mind, a fortress of regret, because now- now she really didn’t know what to do, so her body was completely still, and she was cold. She felt like a corpse, frozen by rigor mortis, but really it was the paralysis of dread.

  The dread of having lost something forever.

  The dread of having done something that cannot be undone.

  She was still wearing Lawrah’s black sweater. Lawrah had long disappeared.

  Friendship over.

  “I’m sorry Lawrah, I didn’t mean it!”, Githarie chased after Lawrah into the darkness.

  The darkness will bind them.

  Time is a flat circle.

  That they were nothing more but an incestuous, insect-like, hive mind that followed the whims of a maniacal and tyrannous empress.

  She felt pretty bubhosh ghash gof when she combination eye gouge - throat slam - haymaker one hit-K.O. all three assholes that rushed her, she couldn’t help but admit the thrill of that was fun. She checked out her fake nails. They were ruined, but Eye Gouge musta felt it. And she had them just done yesterrote! Oh well. Hey, every lie has a kernel of truth in it, right?

  Really giving that Virgo energy, Githarie.

  Technically, it was Githarie who ditched Lawrah, even though Lawrah definitely wanted her to.

  Really giving that Virgo energy, now, Githarie.

  The culprit of course was the cocaine. And the methamphetamine for the assist.

  It was impossible to see the puppet masters – the source of the light – from inside the cave.

  Deductive reasoning. The ultimate magick of the highest archmages.

  Githarie didn’t because she knew she wouldn’t have listened. Besides, Githarie was kind of hoping beyond hope that maybe, just maybe, Lawrah would be the manic pixie dream gurl that would finally fix Zholl.

  His head wouldn’t exactly get ripped off, but- well, in the end, one could say that it wasn’t on.

  Taking that Virgo energy way too far, now, Githarie! Be careful lest you do something that cannot be undone…

  And let us be clear, ejaculating internally without express consent is, in fact, rape.

  She was a Virgo, after all.

  That it was not real talk.

  Lawrah was not mentally ill, far from it. Her gender dysphoria ceased to be an ailment when she transmogrified her body. And here was an external trigger – an insult from a best friend – to the latent pain from the trauma of her experience. No, it was not psionic. But it was flaying.

  It was cruel to think, but it made Githarie think of a clown. A sad clown that just couldn’t take it anymore, beat down by the cruelty of the world. And it unnerved Githarie because it made her think- she felt that sad now. What was the extent of what she would become to exterminate that sadness?

  Who, incidentally, was a drug dealer. Not exactly a role model. But her advice – do not out your younger brother without his permission – was wise.

  Ai-sha, Lok Ting, scryer. They’re teenaged pubescent adolescent zugs. They’ll patch it up. It just might take longer than it should have because of a long detour.

  Orcans still mostly passed patronymic surnames even if inheritance was matrilineal. It was to honor dead warriors- the Horde Master strategically kept as many gynous away from the frontlines as he could during the Exodus. It was one reason why Raigo was so sad at Lawrah’s decision. While Raigo was trueborn, had never been a mutant, he knew that they were the only Varokas on Orca. The name mutations upon dipping almost ensured it.

  Raigo was a huge fan of Terry Pratchett, a huge fan. Why he decided to name his firstborn after Rincewind was a mystery and was probably a reason why Lawrah hated her birth name and wanted to get rid of it.

  While Githarie made the excellent sacrificial therapeutic venting target, it meant that Githarie’s understanding of the whole situation was totally and completely skewed. She thought Raigo was a tyrant who wanted everything done in a certain way and a certain order and within a certain time, and always, or else Lawrah would get grounded. She didn’t realize Lawrah would lie about getting grounded sometimes because Githarie was annoying. So in turn, Githarie was a bad influence on Lawrah, constantly trying to get her to rebel, revolt, go rogue. She figured- Lawrah isn’t really living life! If she only knew how much joy Lawrah got from the all the classes that she enrolled herself into. Githarie just assumed Raigo made her do them, Gith didn’t get why she would want to wake up at six every fifth of fortrote to go training at the dojo. And in turn Lawrah liked having a scapegoat for her misdeeds, both internally and emotionally (Githarie made me do it.) and externally (Githarie did it, father, not me.) And once again in turn, Chief Raigo blamed Githarie as the rotten influence on his daughter, because it meant he could maintain the image of sweet, studious, hardworking Lawrah in his head, and never need to see the shadow. Where the shadow was, he just saw Githarie instead.

  That happened a while ago. Lawrah was no virgin, like Githarie.

  Githarie was the only one who did fully accept her. Which is why what she just said… hurt even more.

  Such as, for example, thinking that she couldn’t get pregnant.

  Such as, for example, getting her pregnant.

  Cut out toxic relationships.