"Light the fuse! Light the blasted fuse, will 'ya!"
Behind him was ... movement. Smooth, fluid movement, always in shadow. Always in pursuit.
-continued inside-
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A collection of quick-to-read flash fiction stor...
Slaving in the Deephold salt mines as a woman troll was hard enough. The dwarven slavers swung their whips with full emancipation. Slaving while pregnant was a whole other level of torment. It was a miracle that the troll woman Dobba still stood upright.
"Push!" The sadistic slaver Grull, young apprentice to the Keeper of Rakker Falls, swung his wicked whip with fervor.
"I ... can't," Dobba groaned, slumping down behind the salt crates. "My water just broke, master."
Alone in a slave cell in the Inverted Spire, Dobba had to deliver her own child. Perspiring in the cold cave, she labored through her labor.
As the baby lay crying on the salty rocks, the impossible was already apparent to her:
"You ... you be no troll."
Troll parents could sometimes bear forth a dwarf child, for reasons unknown. Tradition demanded that this child be a changeling, a commodity to be traded for a troll child. Her newborn, her son, would be taken from her. It was that, or death.
Weeping as she fed her babe one last time, Dobba knew his fate. The guards were at the bars.
"Slave, give us the dwarf."
The slaver Grull grinned with bared silver teeth. He pried Dobba's son from her embrace. As trade for her lifeblood, he thrusted a bundled child upon her.
Carrying her dwarven son away, the guards left with the torches. As Dobba was again steeped in darkness, she opened the bundle. Seeing her adoptive son by means of her palms, she gasped.
"You be a twoskull. Like my own mom once been."
Nursing the troll babe in darkness, both heads found a teat. She caressed his one hairy and one bald head, the baby peacefully grunting on her breasts.
"Worry not, child," Dobba soothed. "I be care for you like my own. Your looks or blood be no matter. You be here, you be mine. Dear Dobbum mine."
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This flash fiction story is connected to Spectrum Saga — Sanguine I: Everblade
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