Ugru Six-Fingers

2. A Thrashing Bull
Ugru comes tumbling down, rolling over and knocking down books and podiums. For a
second, he lays on the ground, his muscles having finally given in and his veins throbbing with
each heavy heartbeat. Instinctively, he bends his elbow, placing his six fingered hand atop his
blue chest to feel that drum beat. He can’t quite make out where he is, still hazy and struggling
to keep his eyes open, but the strange lighting tells him he is not outdoors anymore. Like cracks
in a damn, more of his thoughts return to him. It is too quiet. Sure, there is a mumbling buzz
around him, but none of it he can make out anything other than it not being the bellowed
orders and battle cries of his comrades.

The chittering grows louder as Ugru starts sitting himself upright. He was never one to
complain about migraines, but this one was so intense that the young vedalken is almost
knocked off balance with the increased incomprehensible chatter. It is too loud now, and
distressed he feels the animalistic pull to look up at its source. Blue and metallic. Foe. Spring
onto feet, uppercut, run. His fighting spirit instantly kicks back in and he is already darting out
in the hole left by the metallic man he struck down.

Two more half metallic blue figures try to place themselves ahead of himself, but they
look rather frail compared to what he had fought so far. He backhands one of them and
shatters his arm. The second one, yields to a simple shoulder bash. Ugru can see the door he
will try to break through. His skin burns once more with the wards that accompanied him
throughout his adult life. He crashes through the elegant metal door, that shatters in unwinding
strips of metal. He tries to look around for an exit, but all he sees are corridors of winding steel
and more of the metallic figures, wearing cloaks or holding parchments.

This is all wrong, he thought. Free enough to catch his breath, thought begins to return.
He needed thought, he needed to figure out where he was and how to get out. Screaming can
be heard from the room he just left and the various blue figures in robes begin to hurriedly
make their way there. Ugru knows that the cause-and-effect connection is surely being drawn
in those monstruous minds. The metallic skeletons begin to hold their arms out, some
reshaping their metal limbs into blades, others cackling with a growing cyan haze.

Ugru takes a short hop to give his sprint an explosive start. The wizard let loose a cone
of some sort of mystical cloud, but against his skin, it felt barely different from normal smoke. It
runs off his burning skin, barely registering as a light numbness that would likely be what
remains of the wizard’s intent with the spell. The bladed skeleton winds his arm for a
downwards swing, but never delivers. Ugru was too fast for it. He grabs the metal arm by the
elbow and bends it outwards until it snaps. Using the torn limb as an improvised weapon, Ugru
cuts down the horrified wizard and flees down the darkened corridor.

What had those blue monsters he had been fighting done to him? Ugru tackles through
another blue skeleton guard. These didn’t look like any of the halls he walked through in the
past. Had he been displaced by some sort of Izzet trickery? These didn’t look like Izzet’s halls.
Sure, they have the frail looking metal and the geek looking sorcerers, but they feel… cold. And
the monsters, they aren’t as hellbent as they were before. Ugru could attest to that, as he ran
past a group of the metallic blue skeletons. They recoiled in fear, instead of trying to attack. He
hadn’t seen them show fear so far.
 Ugru spots a large glassless window that let in a cool soft breeze. It was round and
covered in filigree hooks and spirals. Taking the moment away from the chase, the vedalken
stops to look through it. The sky is dark grey and heavy, much like the rest of the city. He was
several stories high. The buildings also looked uncanny and weird, built like giant all metal pikes
and splinters. He was gripping the curved edge of the window while he took in that panorama
when he heard yelling coming from behind him. They speak gibberish, but it is authoritative
gibberish.

The vedalken turns around to see several of the metallic skeletons standing in orderly
formation, slowly making their way to him. Now that he had an opportunity to look at them
without a bit less adrenaline, Ugru notices that they aren’t quite skeletons: They have skin
faces, blue like his, like the vedalken he knew, that seamlessly melds with the metal covering
the rest of their bodies. And the metal itself isn’t arranged in a carapace like fashion like before,
but rather, thin strips like broken clockwork arranged around narrow stick bones. Once more
the metallic soldiers bellow nonsense at him while cautiously approaching, weapons drawn.

– What are you saying?! I can’t understand you? – Ugru remembers to ask, but is met
with more angry gibberish. He isn’t one to start problems without being asked to, but he gets
the hunch he is being apprehended. Ugru takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, trying to still
himself. He was not going to be arrested today, not now not ever, especially by folks he can’t
understand. His lungs still hurt from the strain, and the pain in his stabbed right arm reminds
him of the wound from not long ago.

Suddenly, Ugru’s face and demeanour drastically change into a wide mouthed roar
reminiscent of a predator. This always works for startling neatly organized types. He starts
running at the biggest crack he made in the encroaching circle, and with two well placed
punches to his right and left, the crack becomes a hole he can slip out of. The guards try to
close the gap, but it is two late and Ugru had escaped the siege.

They run fast, but Ugru runs faster. Their legs bounce like pistons, but they are barely
able to keep up with the Gruul runt. Some lunge with their blades and lances at Ugru, whose
skin is aglow again, letting off a trail of steam as the sweat evaporated in contact with his
markings. Their weapons linger dangerously close to his flesh, barely able to dodge them, until
eventually, one of them comes apart, unwinding explosively like tightly coiled springs. The
metal strips lash at his lower back causing Ugru to wince in pain. But thankfully he was not the
only one hindered by that accident. The guard who held the weapon trips over when the
weapon disassembled, starting a chain reaction of the guards next to him falling over and the
ones next to him and so on.

Ugru leaves the gridlock behind him as he takes a sharp left into a stairwell. He takes
large leaps between steps. The walls, if you can call them that, are an arrangement of steel into
a smooth curved texture, with wide gaps between each other that let in the outside light.
Using this, Ugru gages himself to be close to the ground floor. The yelling returns, this time,
singing to the beat of dozens of running footsteps. Whoever they were, these skeletal guards
were waiting for him at the bottom so he has to think of another way out.

The young vedalken once more peeks through the gaps of the filigree. He can see a
plaza of sorts, just below, and something vaguely looking like a fountain. It is very far from
ideal, but at least there was the chance of breaking his fall, rather than the certainty of being
caught. Ugru gets to work at slipping his fingers through the gaps of the carefully interwoven
metal, and doing what he does best: breaking craftwork.
 He wasn’t much of a sorcerer. He was tried into the practices of the shamans and
druids as a younger youth, but to say he wasn’t adept would be an overstatement. Magic
fizzled and trinkets broke, from his presence alone. At first, this was the cause for a good
whooping or two from his elders, but soon they realised it was not clumsiness. It was a gift. A
gift for destruction. A gift much appreciated in the Gruul guilds. A gift he most appreciates now,
as his great but not superhuman strength is aided by his powers.

The metal begins to glow red hot where the twelve fingers tugged and soon the metal
began to bend. Ugru strained and put all the power left in his chest into tearing open a hole in
the metal big enough for him to slip through. He tries not to grunt as he still hadn’t been
confronted by guards yet and wished to keep it that way, but he knew that time was of the
essence. The gruul clansman’s efforts are rewarded though, as the first chunks of overstrained
metal get broken off like dried branches. He tosses them aside, clanking drily.

The sounds of the search begin to hush down, alerting the wilderness savvy Ugru. He
looks back. If a predator is making no sound, that means that it is about to pounce. He had to
work faster. Haphazardly and franticly, Ugru rips more and more metal strips from the wall,
putting his right leg to work at widening his escape hole. As he expected, a sudden rush of feet
ringing on the metal steps echo in the tubular shaped stairwell cage. But he is already on his
way out. Wide enough to slide his shoulders past, Ugru nimbly shimmies his way onto the
outside of the building.

The guards pursuing him can’t catch him, as he already hangs from the outside of the
building holding the ribbing of the sculpted steel tightly. Ugru’s neck snaps between two
positions, one looking downward, to size up the impulse he needs to put to land on the
fountain he had seen before, another looking back and up, seeing if the metallic living
skeletons had thought to poke his fingers out or some other unsavoury doing on his vulnerable
position.

Ugru doesn’t want to wait, as he notices a sphinx circling around the building where he
hung from, eyeing him with raptor-like swooping intent. If it wants to catch him, it will have to
do it mid-air, Ugru thought, as he pivoted his torso and hips to spring from the delicate metal
weave of the wall and into the air. He is confident that his legs that now start to sway to his
front as he falls through the air will get him to his destination, so the vedalken’s worries now
shift to surviving the fall.

Ugru lands rear first on the water, whose stinging slap burns across his back. He hisses
and swallows water, but he can still kick his legs to swim back up to the surface. That’s a good
sign. Whenever someone has a bad fall like this, the legs are the first things to go. Not wasting
the moment, Ugru climbs over the edge of the bowl-shaped sculpture of filigree that
impossibly held the liquid despite the numerous large gaps. Or rather, it did until Ugru pushes
his leg over the edge causing the elegant decoration to start to leak from where he was
hanging.

The Sphinx from before circled above him like a vulture, its shadow swam on the
ground in a neat circle. The young vedalken sees it up close when he landed outside the water
on all fours. It was his cue to start running again, going from a baby’s crawl to an athlete’s
jumpstart. He has had more than enough encounters with sphinxes to know how fast they are,
and how they sway just as they are starting to plunge. He will not outrun it. But he can
outmanoeuvre it. Hopefully.
 The wind feels refreshing on his wet skin from his previous dip, and it helps soothe the
aching skin from the battering it had endured for these few hours. And it is kept nice and
cooled by continuing to run as fast as he could, closer to one of the strange city blocks. The
sphinx begins to fall on him and he ducks into the alleyway, pivoting by grabbing hold of a spire
in the corner to redirect his momentum. The sphinx has no such aid so it curves wider and
slower. All he needs is a few more turns like this and he would be able to lose the man-raptor.

Upon the next the unfamiliar intersection, Ugru breaks, as another sphinx crosses
ahead of him towards where he wanted to go. He curses the loss of his lead as he turns to
where the second sphinx, now performing an elegant aerial U-turn, had come from. Shocked
and disgusted are the faces of the people, blue like his, but heavily coated in metallic apparel
like the invaders. He won’t end up like them, enslaved, Ugru thinks. He will regroup with his
clan. Again. So he hopes.

The shadow that loomed over him grows larger and larger, until Ugru twists in the nick
of time before being hooked off of the floor by sharp talons that resembled a weapon stand,
dangerous, metallic and neatly arranged. Thankfully, they didn’t dig into him, rather, they
scratched near the centre of his chest and got caught in the leather straps of his shoulder pads.
The sphinx stares at him with the cold contempt he knows sphinxes are known for. This one
however, was neither robed nor naked, but wearing metallic coils in the vague shape of
musculature, with just as much strength as what the mimicked.

The sphinx stares deeply into Ugru’s eyes, like two shinning beacons trying to
illuminate the back of Ugru’s skull, and just as unpleasant too. And yet, he struggles to flinch, to
close his eyes. The sphinx is slowing down, landing. He can feel that despite the burn marks
where he gripped it, he isn’t making any progress loosening the grasp. When its metal paws
touch ground, a small bump makes Ugru reactively blink and headbutt his face.

Not his best idea, as it felt like headbutting a iron plate, and he is sure the sphinx’s nose
gave him a gash on his forehead. Nevertheless, the sphinx seems to be the worse for wear in
the exchange, letting go of Ugru to palpate its own dented face. Ugru lands into a frog stance
and gazes up. A bit behind the struggling sphinx, two more readied to land as well, and no
doubt try to catch him again. Ugru springs up, ready to turn tail and flee. One bout with a
sphinx was about as much as he expected to win.

Still, his strike must have produced some effect, as the other sphinxes merely hovered
over him, menacingly rather than prodding at his weakness to pounce. He slinks into a tight but
short alley, leading to yet another wide street. One of the sphinxes overtakes and barely misses
him, landing instead to his left, leaving Ugru to stare into the uncanny stern eyes placed on the
lion’s prowling body. Before he can get the chance to cut him off entirely, Ugru kicks off the
other way.

Time and time again, he gets his path barred and an alternative found, by the relentless
sphinxes. A slip of his sandal on the rare pebble isn’t enough to get him caught, crawling, if
need be, away from the sphinxes. The city merges into a small cliff, overlooking a tar-black sea,
and a couple boats rocked in the mild waves. What looks like a picture of a pier, sculpted out of
silver and then proceeded to melt partway stood before him. It was almost empty, like most
streets he’d seen so far, but only now does Ugru notice the eeriness of it.

The jump is doable, and arguably safer than the one before, Ugru ponders. His
hesitation eats into the precious seconds he had over them, as a small group of no more than
half a dozen sphinxes beset him on all sides. All but one, leading conspicuously clear path along
the edge of the land, down to a large archway that rose at the end of what he reckons of his
sprinting distance. One of the sphinxes of the pride steps closer to him cautiously and
bellowing something he can’t understand. Taking it as his cue to leave, Ugru starts running
again, full speed.

His thigh’s muscles pumped in crescendo like a machine picking up steam, far and
above what he considered his top speed. And they didn’t stop there, as he continues in his
powerful stride long after the blink of going underneath the archway is come and gone, and
the smooth metal gets replaced with soft and irregular sand. And when he finally begins
slowing down, he looks back onto the city and the arch he passed, looking like a mirrored
version of what he saw as his out.

Ugru’s gaping mouth pushed and pulled the air into his ballooning lungs, as he stared
incredulous at the sight. The city was small and unfamiliar. The vedalken bends over holding
himself onto his rigid thighs and then falling back, seating himself in the sand. Aside from the
foam of the rolling waves, the only other sound was his justified hyperventilation slowing
down. The rush begins to fade sapping the final bit of strength that held his torso upright. He’d
heard poets mention how “the sun pierced through the clouds like cracks in stone”, and he
never quite understood it until seeing the sky like it was now. A tinge of regret he feels then,
over having burned their books and shattered their lyres.

His feet still, it is now the mind that races over the strangeness Ugru saw. The metallic
people from before, greatly differed from the invaders, looking matching more and more his
idea of a vedalken, at least partially. Ugru wasn’t sure what trickery held them together with
scrap, but much like the city itself, it was the great unknown in his head. He’d never been to
this district or seen this lake before.

Time feels fuzzy for the resting vedalken. At last able to not have to act within the
second, what feels like both half a minute and half an hour pass and he tries to stand up.
Immediately his debts to his body begin to default: Aching muscles, burning skin and the sharp
acute pains on his right arm and chest reminded him of where he had been cut, stabbed or
bludgeoned. And without the adrenaline, the pain is tenfold.

Ugru lets out an animalistic yelp, startled by the sudden return of his suffering. The
young vedalken winces and clutches his right arm for a moment. His breathing feels weighed
down, as if someone was sitting on his chest. He musters the fortitude to get back on his feet,
with the aid of his left hand planted on the soft sand. It does not feel right, as that heavy rock
tethered around his chest with a rope pulls downwards, back to the comfortable sand. But he
knows it is a trick. It is a trick of the vultures to get him to die and feed them. No chance he’d
become cadaver to a bird so weak that couldn’t even hunt live prey.

Ugru clings towards that childish spite towards carrion feeders, as without the driving
force of an immediate threat, Ugru’s body would not obey him. A motive he needed, to beckon
his body to continue, to walk away from the citadel, to not lose consciousness. He limps
dragging that large boulder behind him that compressed his lungs. The feeling becomes so
tangible at times, that Ugru has to actually palpate at his pecs and look behind him to make
sure there was no real rock.

So, he walks, by himself, along the dunes’ length, following the seashore. The gloomy
lighting of the grey highlighting the unnatural coldness in the air. It was not the same minty
freshness of cold water on an inflammation. It wasn’t relief that it provided to his numerous
aches and pains he was experiencing, too many to count and enough that they overrode each
other, but discomfort. Ugru felt a nagging ringing in his ear, now that the only sounds were the
soft scratching of his sandals on sand and his own short raspy breaths.

He wasn’t sure for how long he had been walking. He didn’t know what time of day it
was. Nor for how long he had been walking for. Or if this heaviness in his eyelids was the final
sleep approaching. He struggles to think any further. Thoughts of his youth so quaint replace
the thoughts of survival. The druid initiations that he failed spectacularly, Narbulg’s face when
he broke some precious staff, how the druids came to his defence despite that. There wasn’t
going to be anyone coming to his defence this time, he thought, sighing through the remnants
of his tattered lungs.

The worn sandal’s strap snaps, getting hooked on the heavy sand and bringing Ugru to
his knees for the first time since this incident began. He stoops down on all fours, letting the
sweat and blood stream off of him and onto the blurry sand. His elbows buckle and bring him
down, closer to the floor. Ugru coughs, trying to jostle himself awake, but exhaustion proves to
be stronger than his will. First falter his arms, then his eyes, then, his consciousness.

Niella walked her usual afternoon trek, down from the cliffs at the border of Valeron’s
realm, to patrol the usually quiet beach in Esper’s domain. She carried with her a bag held
close and a walking stick that she was fond of, for the sagely appearance it gave her. This had
been her duty, every other day, for the last ten years, as a scout assigned to the outpost
between the edges of the shards of Esper and Bant.

From her overlook, she spotted someone walking alone, and assumed to be some sort
of emissary or merchant so she took the chance to go meet him in person. Once down from
her vantage point she squints as the figure seemingly disappeared. She shrugged and
continued her patrol for a bit until spotting the walker from before collapsed onto the sands.
Startled she rushed to his aid and lifted him with his arm around her neck.

The human scout hauled the unconscious man back to her outpost, and laid him
sprawled on one of the small cots she kept tidy for emergencies like this. She wasn’t a healer,
but she knew enough to perform a simple lay hands to complement her first aid. Her curiosity
over the wounded guest fuelled her need to keep him alive, at least throughout the night,
feeding him water with honey and bandaging him.

She had her questions should he awaken. He had blue skin like a vedalken, but he had
no metal implements, as well as a slender but toned physique and he was dressed like a savage
from Jund. What was someone like him doing? Was he fleeing? She had heard of vedalken who
had fled Esper in search of a more natural way of life, but he looked like he had already lived
that life, judging by how his skin was adorned with numerous and extensive tattoos.

To Ugru’s surprise, his eyes eventually open to an unfamiliar room once more. The
morning rays attack his face which scrunches in response. He felt like he was awakening from a
terrible dream, where he was fighting non-stop only to die in the middle of nowhere. The stone
stiffness from his muscles when he tries to sit up, confirms that it was not a dream. But if it
wasn’t a dream, what was this room he was in? An hospitaller looking lady strutted to his side
muttering something. Ugru’s immediate reaction was to shoo her away.
 – Where am I? Who are you? – Ugru spoke over the lady’s own voice, bombarding her
with questions. But her answers were gibberish like the people from before. Or rather what he
thinks are answers. He can’t understand her either way so she could have just as well be
admitting to poisoning him. But Ugru has a feeling that she wasn’t meaning harm. Otherwise,
he wouldn’t have woken up.

– I am Ugru Six-fingers. – The vedalken tries to introduce himself, more calmly this
time, raising his rigid arm to his chest. In doing so, he notices how much it hurts, and how his
bicep was wrapped in bandages. He pauses, hoping that the lady would take his lead.

– Ugru Six-fingers. – Ugru repeats, both the words and the motion, to which the lady
mimics his motion and answers with what Ugru assumes to be her name: – Niella.

The lady speaks more slowly, but he still can’t make heads or tails of what she is saying.
She wore baggy white linen robes with dark yellow rims, and she couldn’t be more than a
couple years older than him, despite the matronly face.

A couple more exchanges with Niella led Ugru to be sure that the two couldn’t speak
with each other. She spoke some dialect he’d never heard before. Still, he had enough mind to
deduce a few simple meanings. He’d immediately learn what her word for “no” was once he
tried to stand up. It was the word she repeatedly yelled while she blocked him from standing
with her open palms.

Over the rest of the morning, the two go back and forth attempting to parse what each
other meant. The most Ugru managed to understand is that Niella had done what she could to
nurse him back to health. Despite Ugru’s protests, Niella keeps him in bed. He couldn’t strain
himself, both because of the recovery and being unable to in the first place. He sighs, as Niella
prepares some broth for lunch in a caldron for the two.

A few days of being bedridden pass with Niella kindly working the job of caretaker to
Ugru. The outpost was a lonely place, so company, even if of hard ear, was welcome. While
Niella went for her strolls, Ugru took the time to try and walk around the room, with increasing
ease. The outpost sat atop a cliff, overlooking the beach where he was found. It was a single
division that served the duty kitchen, bedroom, office and infirmary. He had peeked outside as
well, to see the delicate little garden that Niella so neatly kept.

Ugru’s first physical task became grabbing some water from a nearby well and tossing it
over the plants, performed mostly out of boredom and gratitude. One day, Niella caught him
watering her plants and laughed at how his condition had improved. Ugru laughed with her,
due to the infectiousness of her laugh, even though he didn’t get why she laughed.

And so, for week after week, Ugru repaid his debt to her, helping maintain the small
outpost, while he tried to figure out where to go. Or if he wanted to go in the first place. It was
clear from the maps he looked at and was shown that none of the places ringed any bells. It
could be months or even years to get to a place he knew. But why should he? This place was
quiet, peaceful, and had little to no civilization aside from the little hut itself.

He felt bad over never seeing Narbulg or his clan again, but as his friendship with Niella
grew, Ugru started to find that maybe this little place on the seaside would make a nice home
for him.