Borgut gasped, his eyes flying open as his fingers were suddenly overwhelmed by a cold that entered his very bones, sending shivers up his body, and pain into the depths of his soul. As he look upwards towards his outstretched arm, the world collapsed around his mind, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. He seemed to still be hurtling down some sort of space, he could feel the speed of it rushing past him. Above him, what he was falling down towards stood a portal of some kind, and he could see the world beyond, an ocean, an azure sky. And yet through that portal it seemed the world slowed down to a crawl, timing ozzing its way forward, at odds with the manic speed at which he was falling. The arm, his arm, that was beyond the portal also oozed forward, even as the rest of his body seemed to catch up with it this side of the portal. And before he really could even begin to comprehend what he was seeing, the deathly-cold sliver around his fingers made its way up his hand, then arm, then the rest of him, as he made his way through the portal and out into a warm world domed with a bright clear sky.
Borgut stared up at that sky a long while. Sea salt filled his burnt nostrils, and he thought he could hear the ocean somewhere to his right. A lazy white cloud drifted into view just as an ocean bird wheeled around, free in flight. To be ‘free’… What did that really mean? Was he free? Truly? And his friend?
A mangey face blocked his view, and caused his wondering thoughts to crash back to reality.
‘Master-master!?’ the Skaven squeaked in horror.
There were six of them left. Just six. That is all that had survived the ordeal. Every orruk that had joined his ranks since the skaven attack was lost to the gnawhole, with a single exception. Gorgut knew that their deaths had not been pleasant. Of the six that now sat on the sandy shore, five wore the mark on the bicep that Borgut shared. He had been born with that mark, it was stained into the skin, like a tattoo on his very muscle, and he suspected that the rest were just the same. All six marks now shone green, even below that bright sun. A single orruk had survived that did not own the mark, he had fallen into a hatch of the machine they had been protecting, and it seemed that that had protected him in some fashion. Why Borgut and the other five had survived, he didn’t know.
Although only these few orruks had survived, his skaven numbered into the dozens. He was only able to count up to seven, but he was able to count to that seven a good amount of times before he thought he’d got about halfway. Thankfully, a good number had obviously died in the fighting at the markets, so that even though the greenskins were outnumbered, they weren’t outnumbered so much as to give the sneaky rats any bright ideas.
‘You three, and you,’ he said pointing to a handful of skaven sitting around looking at the machines and nattering between themselves, ‘find out where da bluddy ‘ell are we!’ The skaven took off in four directions, and Borgut collapsed back onto the sun. He suspected it would be awhile before they came back with news, but he could wait, he could rest. The sand felt good on his skin and the ocean smells drifted past him as he stared up.
‘Soon…. soon I’ll find you.’