Nargi placed a fresh wet towel on Carmarina’s head. He had soaked it in the brew he made before, not healing, just calming. The old witch would die soon, probably somewhere this night and she was a little restless about it.

“What if bandits move in?” she muttered between ragged breaths. “I would have to come back from heaven and haunt them!”

“It will be alright.” Nargi said, holding the frail woman’s hand and trying his best to calm her down. He was speaking a human language now. He wasn’t very eloquent in it, but he knew the language well enough to have a meaningful conversation. Carmarina had taught him well the past two years. He also knew how to read and write now, which Nargi thought was pretty cool. None of his former tribe could do that. Well, they probably couldn’t be bothered with it anyway, but still. Nargi felt better adapted to the world with the skill. And he would need to be better adapted, because come morning he’d be alone again. And orcs are not meant to be alone.

“Are you sure you won’t stay Nargi?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Solitude is not for me.”

Carmarina sighed… “yes I know…”

Minutes past in silence, then Carmarina coughed loudly, then spoke again. “Take the book with you.”

“Which one?”

“The one you haven’t finished.”

She was referring to ‘The Fields of Light’. A large tome of mostly illusion spells Nargi hadn’t even begun to master yet. “But without you to teach me, the book will be useless.”

“You will find a way Nargi. Your eyes shine when you play with the light. This is something you should do. You have a very, very long life ahead of you. You will have so much time, my life will have only been a fraction of yours. You will learn. I know you will. Take the book.”

Nargi promised and gave the woman a small kiss on her forehead. She used to do that with him. Every time he’d done something new right, she had asked him to bend down so she could kiss him on the forehead. This was the first time he had returned the gesture.

Nargi still remembered every day of the past two years he’d spent with Carmarina. The way she had been a commander and a caretaker and a teacher all rolled in one. Now he was her caretaker. He had been for the past 7 weeks. She hadn’t been able to walk around by herself, even her staff didn’t have much use other than to light the fireplace with (which she could do from the bed). Nargi had urged her to stop doing useless magic, since she was so weak and he knew how to light a fire anyway. But she had still wanted to do it. There was some pride in being a witch, he figured.

And she was a great witch. She could do all kinds of magic, most of which Nargi would never be able to do himself. She LIVED magic. And she had decided to spend her last two years teaching him, of all people. She had known everything. She had had a vision about her death and Nargi being there years ago. She had been waiting for him and she had READ him when they first met. He still had no idea how she’d done it but she had known EVERYHING about him in only a matter of hours.

They had started out with communication spells, since that would’ve come in handy, but he hadn’t been able to work out even the most simple communication or empathy spell with any animal around, nor with her. At one point she gave up on it and had started teaching him human communication the hard way. It had bummed her out more than she would say out loud, but the type of non-verbal cues that signalled disappointment, THAT Nargi could pick up on. He’d been seeing it a lot in his youth.

She hadn’t giving up on teaching him magic though. For some reason she was sure he had magical aptitude and she had set her heart to figuring out exactly which type of magic would fit him. Elemental magic had taken them only one day of practice to cross of off her list, but they had been stuck trying telekinetic spells for ages. Without any luck. It was when they had started trying plant magic that something seemed to click. He had been able to channel energy into a withering plant and made it bloom again. 

After that they started all of those elvish nonsense. Nargi HATED it. He loathed being able to do anything an elf would, but after months of trying anyway (she had badgered him a lot for not trying just because he despised elves), they had given up on that too. He hadn’t been able to grow vines or produce flowers at all.

Back to the drawing board it was, but with the success of the one plant heal he had been able to do, she was more adamant on getting him to do magic then ever. Nargi laughed at the memory of her urging him to try more and do more. He remembered how worn out he was at that time, channeling energy into nowhere day after day. And then one day she had cut herself when they were preparing dinner together and something had clicked. She had him spend 2 hours trying to fix her cut. It wasn’t even deep and the bleeding had stopped long before he finally got it right, but he HAD gotten it right. He had been so proud. She had been so proud.

That’s when she had given him that first forehead kiss. He had been bowing down tending to her finger and she had just moved her head down and put her lips right above his eyes. He had been confused about the gesture, but it had all the warmth in the world in it. It felt like something a mother would do, except orc mums didn’t do that sort of thing. Nargi had felt loved and the feeling had stuck with him for the 17 months that came after that. And now it was coming to an end.

The witch had lived for 112 years. Nargi knew this was quite spectacular for a human being, but being a witch had it’s perks. She wouldn’t be able to avoid death though. Her body was just… done. It had given up. Nothing was actually wrong with it, nothing you could heal, but it was just… old. It wasn’t fair though. At 112 Nargi would still be in the prime of his life, yet she lay dying.

“I’m grateful I got to spend my last two years with you Nargi.” She suddenly croaked, shaking Nargi from his thoughts. Her words went straight into his chest and came out of his eyes in the form of tears.

“I wish we had more time.” He sobbed.

She raised her hand and wiped away his tears, then looked him in the eye and smiled. “It’s been good. Take care my friend.”

And with that she closed her eyes and never opened them again.

As soon as she exhaled her last breath her body changed. Not physically, but just… it was empty now. Nargi held the tiny bag of bones that used to be his friend close to his chest and cried for over an hour. Orcs don’t cry. At least, adult orcs don’t cry, but he had cried anyway and hadn’t felt ashamed one bit.

When there were no more tears to cry Nargi put the body back in the bed and packed his bag. It was a large bag containing all of his clothes (she had made him nice ones), camping gear, the food that was leftover, bags of water and the book. Looking around he decided to take ‘foundations of healing’ with him too. He knew the book by heart, but that was exactly why it had sentimental value. Carmarina had seen the power within him, a power that he couldn’t have imagined he possessed, and had taught him actual magic. And every word she had taught him, she had written down for him in the book. It was her gift to him: the gift of healing magic. A power so beautiful Nargi was completely stumped that an orcish brute like him could manage it. Nargi thought maybe the world had given him a second chance. He had been deemed unworthy as an orc, but maybe he could be a witch instead. Admittedly not a very good one, but at least he’d have a purpose.

Nargi wasn’t staying the night. Not because he did not want to, but because it wasn’t right. If he stayed one night the cabin would be his, as she had intended, but he didn’t want it to be. Nor would he let it dilapidate. No. He knew exactly what he was going to do. This house in the middle of the endless forest had been her shrine. Today it would become her funeral pyre.

Nargi had learned that humans stuck other humans into the ground when they died. But that was just not good enough. You can’t be a person like Carmarina had been and then just be shoved into the ground like a dead fucking elf would. No, she deserved a funeral worthy of a heroically fallen orcish war-lord. And Nargi was going to give it to her.

Hours passed as Nargi carefully tore the entire hut down to make a pyre that reached above the treetops. He used all the books and scrolls, the most valuable things in the house and also a testament to her being, to lay her body down on. She would be sent to the sky-lord guided by all of her magic words. Well, except the ones in his bag, but still.

As he lit it he sang an orcish funeral prayer as loud as he could. It had to be loud, the sky-lord needed to hear it. He improvised a bit with the words, because he was quite sure that Carmarina had never painted the forest with the blood of elves. Nor had she conquered the masses and arranged their ears. But the rest of the song was quite good. She’d been a hero in her own right, and she had surely saved him.

As the song ended the books started to take flame and Nargi would swear, for many years after, that he had heard the whispers of the spells rise from the pyre, accompanied with flashes of green and blue light. Inspired he had made a contribution of his own. Something he hadn’t quite finished learning yet, but he felt compelled to do anyway.

Nargi concentrated, thought of Carmarina’s smile as he had done this for the first time and produced a white light in his hand. He guided it slowly to the top of the pyre with slightly confusing hand motions to set it above the flames as a sign for Carmarina’s soul. As the flames engulfed the top of the pyre he sent the white light up and up and up into the sky as far as he could, until it was visible no more. Then he fell to his knees and finished his prayer.

Watching the pyre being dissolved into ashes Nargi slowly picked up his bag and started walking. Where to he did not know. It didn’t matter. He was going to find others who were lost and help them as she had helped him. He was her legacy now and he would try his best to live up to it for as long as the sky-lord would let him.