Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 32. Ogre Storm

Lucy awoke to a semicircle of six, thousand-pound black tortoises grazing around her and the party. Both birds were still asleep, perched on the higher roots of the upturned tree, while Opal, still breathing thank God, lay under a blanket Marbles must have pulled over them that night. Opal was no longer sweating, and the color had returned to his once pallid face. An impromptu birch bark cone gnome hat stood on the ground next to his head.

Lucy had never seen these types of tortoises before. Obsidian bishops, named so because of their jet black shells, and because their gray, crinkled features and wide onyx eyes radiated an ancient wisdom, which they did not possess, being dumb animals and all.

Still, it was impressive seeing them all together, so big yet so quiet, their inky carapaces strewn with dewdrops, like stars, in the thick morning mist. Most animals move too quickly to accumulate condensation in the first place, and even if it did descend upon them, say while they were sleeping, these cold drops were quickly shaken off. Not so for these guys, whose slowness and smooth shells allowed for common water to coalesce into tiny, localized night skies that they dragged dutifully around on their backs.

A group of obsidian bishops is called a council, and they rarely gather except maybe to mate, oh and also when their entire ancestral birthplace, which has sheltered them like a second sacred shell for untold generations, collapses around them in an environmental disaster that rips away the only home they've ever known.

Usually they burrowed beneath the stone skirts of mountains, subsisting on moss that could only grow between the ground and the cold stone of their father/mother rock. When the collapse happened, they had barely had time to collect their things (one last mouthful of moss) and the shells on their backs before they joined the dewslick matte black diaspora currently quietly chewing the delicious, if unfamiliar, grass that grew in front of Lucy.

They were not entirely silent. Lucy could hear them chewing, and sometimes one would make a strange, baritone chirp, like a clown nose being squeezed underwater. The lead tortoise reared its head up to squint at the small white sun trying to rise and burn its way through the mist. He sighed, sad in an animal way, sensing the long, plodding journey, fraught with predators and peril, that awaited him and his tribe were they to seek out another mountain. Luckily, the ogre had an antidote to his instinctual ennui.

WHUMP! A giant capstone slammed dead center into the lead tortoise's shell, its body and the wet grass muting the sound of stone's titanic momentum, which still managed to clack Lucy's teeth together even thirty feet away. The tortoise exploded in a shower of shelled flesh, which smattered in hunks of wet shrapnel around Lucy and the party.

"Holy fuck!" shouted Lucy.

The capstone lay for a second, as if exhausted, in the middle of the tortoise's spine, which had collapsed, catastrophically, not unlike the mountain. The middle vertebrae lay like a pulped segment of sugar cane beneath the capstone, which was red with blood from a tortoise's heart that was still pumping somewhere, maybe in that thatch of grass over there. The ogre groaned in ecstasy and hefted his capstone hammer back up to rest on his right shoulder.

Twenty feet tall, retired lineman fat, small emerald eyes sandwiched between a thick brutish brow and a hippopotamus-tusked lower jaw. You know the score. Ogre. Big fucking thing. Symbiotic crows cawed between his toes, feasting on the woodland creatures the ogre had gone out of his way to stomp to death before he had hammered this particular obsidian bishop to death.

Ogres need to destroy something precious to someone else in order to make something precious of their own, which they would then in turn use to keep destroying other precious things. This red granite capstone had been painstakingly carved into a roaring lion's head. The capstone had held together an archway in a local church, before being plucked out by the ogre in the middle of the night and tied with wide swathes of ox leather to the end of a purloined cedar ship's mast.

Thick tortoise blood ran down from the lion's mouth and soaked into the once pleasantly fragrant cedar. The cedar was still fragrant, however that fragrance was now due to the lovingly curated patina of dead flesh that the ogre replenished daily.

He was what they called a green apple ogre, because he had tight, green, shiny skin, and because his joints and groin were rife with dry white blight. How do I know about his groin? Let's just say his codpiece was not in mint condition, which to an ogre was a shameful state of affairs, akin to a gnome having a birch bark hat. You can't go around stomping shit with your junk all out.

That was why this ogre was in the employ of a clan of wood elves, who needed him to load these rare obsidian bishops onto their wagons. They had given the ogre permission to smash one outright. Which he had done so, with authority. His name? Fuck if I know. You ask him.

"OK Cody that was your one smash!" yelled the lead wood elf from his seat at the wagon, which was creaking to a stop alongside the upturned tree, followed closely by the rest of the caravan. Wood elves are all tan and they have long hair and they wear a lot of bright glass beads strung in their hair and on the buckskin fringes of their vests and pants. Like, an inconvenient and unproductive amount of beads.

This elf was the one that Marbles had talked to yesterday. The caravan had not been rushing to render assistance to Marbles's party. These tortoises were incredibly rare and valuable, their eggs known to restore the sight of blind, the coveted segments of their shells often fashioned into faux abs on dark knight armor. These dark knights were always super fucking fat and out of shape, so they loved fake obsidian bishop abs, and even though everybody could tell they were overweight it didn't stop these dorks from ponying up obscene amounts of cash for a full plate of jet black tortoise armor.

Because tortoises lived like ticks underneath the mountain, both shelled and sheltered, they were rarely seen and very hard to pull away from their mountain mama. If you caught a council out in the open, and you needed them alive, the best thing to do is hire an ogre to lift them bodily up into your wagon.

Ogres base their self worth on the rarity of the creatures they manage to smash, so the best way to keep an ogre focused is to promise him one tortoise for himself to pound into oblivion. This is usually the last tortoise, after the other ones have been captured, but what are you gonna do? Boys will be boys.

The lead wood elf had hopped down from the seat of his wagon and was hitching his team of elks to the roots of the upturned tree. He looked down at the shellshocked Lucy, and injured Opal, and gasped in surprise.

"You guys should really clear out," said the wood elf. "Things are going to get pretty messy."