Lady Orc

Chp. 1

The sound of the bell spread out in almost physical waves across the near deserted school grounds. The students knelt silently on the floor of the assembly hall, which had been called to duty that morning as the entry class orientation room. The rich pealing tones surrounded them, lifting their spirits as they meditated on the path they were about to step onto. Slowly the vibrations died to silence.

Kaolaidhe knelt in the northern corner of the cavernous square stone room. She could feel the cold rough floor through her thin student's robes. A shiver ran through her like a single full body twitch. She was nervous, alone, starting a life away from her family and all she knew.

She glanced peripherally to her left at another student, kneeling and awaiting her fate. The Temple School on the western coast of the Great Lake Mishocan of the five magical institutions was the only one she had a hope of getting into, as well as being the only one within five hundred miles of her home. Every five years an entry class of three hundred was admitted. Each entry year, at least twice the number promised enrollment, came to study the five month novitiate and kneel in supplication, waiting to be judged.

Kaolaidhe was the most gifted of her clan and generation, but such simple accolades were common to find here, where everyone had been something incredible where they grew up.

The bell tolled again and everyone leaned forward, touching their foreheads to the ground. The instructors and administrators walked between the rows, trying to tune in to the life force of each potential student and decide who was meant to enter the hallowed halls and who had bitter disappointment waiting for them at the end of this day.

Every step of the way Kaolaidhe expected to be quietly shown the door. Orcs were just not allowed into formal magical training. She was reminded about the absurdity of her situation with that thought, but it only made her want it more. She had shown talent and talent was all she needed to get as far as this. Five months training in the novitiates hall and the orientation she currently suffered through.

But she knew how the world worked and it would take more than aptitude for an Orc to be accepted at any magic school.

As she knelt, forehead pressed to the stone floor, Kaolaidhe looked surreptitiously in front of her. There knelt Tsakaka'wia, the only pure blood to have befriended her at all. She was a Manitoba Aos Si of the Crane Clan, a notoriously liberal scion of a notoriously liberal clan. Their fathers were known to each other, though by no means friends. Tsaka was the first in her clan to take liberalism to the extreme of taking an Orc as a friend and

Kaolaidhe appreciated that, while not completely understanding it. Her father had more land and troops than Tsaka's dad. But one was a lord and the other barely a citizen.

Her father's lifelong efforts had made their mark on her, and she cared about his work a great deal, but she just wanted to be a mage and she knew rocking the boat socially would not help with that.

Tsaka wasn't a good friend. No one who considered their friendship with you to be a political statement could be a good friend. But they got along well enough. She was the one who told Kaolaidhe that she had a better chance than many Orcs to reach her dream, because she could almost pass for Aos Si.

The original name of the European High Fey That had become Sidhe when Ao Si had become a group name of all High Fey of certain morphology.

If she had been pure Satyr or pure Nephilim, she would be fine. Pure blood was expected from students. Not Aos Si necessarily, it was just the most common. And with her melange of races, Nephilim was the only one where she could pass for pure.  

She had no actual Aos Si blood at all as far as she knew, but Nephilim fell under that loose heading. Like all Orcs, she couldn’t guarantee her racial makeup, only make an estimation of those races she showed physical evidence of.