Ogre am I

Chapter 19: Ogre am I

I am the owner of the Ogre City Meat Factory. My name is Lovecraft and I am 1,769 year old. Even for ogres, that’s pretty old. Now, I am about to die, and I wish, with my last breath, to explain to you the circumstances of my death, and perhaps, why it happened.

Of the actual moment, I can say a little. First of all, I find myself surrounded by fire, amidst the ruins of the Meat Factory, surrounded with the dead, friends, family who worked and lived here. Hate had its way with us, and we reaped just as we sown. None of our humans remain, not even the veggies, whom we all tenderly cared for. Oh, the irony.

Grummush, our God is surely not pleased by the destruction to this temple of our carnivore path. We fed Ogre City for hundreds… maybe thousands of years. And now, the acts of a hypocrite gnome leave us starving, forced to kill the fauna in our own forests of die of hunger. I don’t thing Jigolanthas thought of genocide with the destruction of our way of life, but certainly, famine of ogres means nothing to him, a gnome.

The Meat Factory became of the principal businesses in Ogre City the second, which was only beat to the first business of the city by the smithy, who made sure all ogres were armed, who were going to settle together in this, once flat plateau. My family, the Lovecraft Klan kept us all fed.

 As our Ogre City grew, the need to feed more and more ogres with the freshest possible human meat became more and more difficult. Usually, since Nagaloka is officially at peace by authority of the submarine Naga Lords, we could not rely upon riding or war on the human settlements, and we were reduced to trade for corpses, which became, in human and humanoid lands, an important business. Our business, the Meat Factory adapted as times grew our population even more.

Finally, a stroke of luck of ogre engineering, the lobotomy, freed us from the need to import human flesh. We could grow it here, and keep it here. It was a simple process. Human slaves would be bought, lobotomized, and used to produce human babies.

Our own farms…

Damned Jigolanthas! He has doomed our people to die of hunger!

Anyway, from the moment we opened the farm-part of our business, Lollipop City began to attack us politically. First were the trade embargos. Then the occasional raids. But this… This… debauchery! The Meat Factory burns.

My faithful Gurgle Kopf, headmaster of the farm lies, bleeding at my side. My own wounds are closing my eyes, and I must, if I can, finish this story…

I proposed the addition to the factory to King iSam, a powerful sorcerer Ogre Mage. He understood the profit possible by having a home-grown supply of humans to devour, but he was nervous. He knew although he was allied to Lollipop City and the powerful Three Towers, all the human cities would boycott the plan. And Lollipop City was one third human.  The trade in human meat was dangerous business, and more than one Ogre had lost his head in the effort to keep the butcher shops open.

Our spies in Lollipop City told us about the plan to attack the factory long before the actual attack took place. Some goblins working in the Pink Tower heard rumors of an elite strike group led by … an ogress!

So, when an ogress came with a group of mixed warriors from Lollipop City to supposedly study the history of Ogre City, King iSam surrounded the group with plains clothes soldiers.

The strangers held up in one of our taverns, “the One Eyed”, and there, they stayed for weeks, with brief visits to the public library. So King iSam lost interest in the newcomers and their “tail was cut” so to say, which means that the soldiers assigned to watch over the outlanders were reassigned to other duties.

Worried and not at all relieved by the King’s measures, I decided to call upon two mercenaries, an elf and a dwarf, to watch over the Lollipops.  

But as fate would have it, those damned useless thugs lost track of their prey somewhere in the market. They did come in time to tell me that an attack was imminent. When word got out to me, I immediately had the guard on the Factory go on alert.

It was a green-skinned ogress named Green Light, two dwarves named Superfly and Ginger, a gnome named Rufus Ayala and three humans, the brother’s McCormick; Malcolm, Maxwell and Maximilian. Of these three I had heard before. They were NOT from Lollipop City, but from Castle McCormick, a small independent human village in one of the Centaur Mountains.

Within thirty minutes of the return of my mercenaries, the attack began. It was lighting quick, and brutal beyond measure. It was also devastating. Hundreds of Ogres murdered, and the human cattle gone… gone over five thousand humans of both sexes, of various ages and over half lobotomized.

How the deed was done, I can’t fathom, our human farms were deep underground, in a complex of caverns and tunnels deep under the earth, and, I thought, impregnable. Over thirty levels of subterranean human farms were utterly destroyed by the invasion force. Were they supermen? Surely they were.

But it was the ultimate irony, the most terrible thing that during the attack, I got to see face to face the green skinned ogress, Green Light. And this I must clarify, because decades ago, I fell in love with a green ogress trespasser in my property, a young orphaned ogress who had lost her parents in a dragon-accident who was looking for shelter.

And she became pregnant by me, so I had a daughter. A beautiful green little girl.

Well, at a very young age, this girl showed no interest in eating meat. She repudiated meat in all its forms, and were it not for a friendship I keep with the troll owner of a vegetarian restaurant, she would have starved to death.

At a very young age, when she was barely entering into her teen age years, my daughter disappeared. And her mother and I cried our loss for years.

But by now, you can more or less know who it was…

I head the explosions at the deepest level, under my feet. I heard them although there was no reason to know it was happening. It was deeply under the earth, and there was no reason… but I am an Ogre Mage, and I feel things and sense things and know things other ogres do not know.

So I tele transported myself to where I thought the “noise” was coming from. And I found her. She was in the middle of a pile of corpses, all friends of mine. And when she looked at me, with that terrible face, that beautiful, sharp toothed, crazy-eyed face, I saw my missing daughter. And she recognized me.

“Manuela?” I cried.

“Dad. I’ve come back.” She said with a cold, distant voice.

“What are you doing? What did you do? You murdered all these people. You are … they were … my friends…” I was in shock.

“They were murderers, like yourself, father. And I have come here to deal that which they dealt to all humans.”

“Manuela, what happened to you? Why did you leave?”

“Because I was not like you and mom, father. I was different. I couldn’t do the things you do.”

“But you could have … “

“Told you? I did. Everyday. You never listened. You thought I was mad. And so, in my heart, I began to grow distant from you AND mother. I found other friends. Non-Ogres. You never knew me, father. I kept all manner of things from you and you never suspected. And now it’s too late.”

She swung both her swords at me at the same time, and were it not that I am an experienced warrior, I would have been dead that very moment. But I haven’t lived so many centuries … by being stupid. So I disappeared myself, turning myself into a creature of foam, through which the sword passed right through me without doing me anything but tickles.

My daughter grabbed a torch from the wall and tried to extinguish my life with fire, but I was prepared… Turning myself back into my huge and powerful ogre form, I was able to hit her squarely on the side of the head with my huge mace.

The blow sent her flying against a cavernous wall, and she crumpled down like a fallen tree. Just then,   Gurgle Kopf, nursing a wound on his arm and holding a great axe burst through the hall…

“We’re under attack!” he shouted.

“Tell me something I don’t know…” I grunted.

“Who is she?” he said, looking at Manuela lying like a heap with a trickle of blood coming out of her ear.

“That is Manuela. My daughter. She was trying to kill me.”

“Boss, they set all the humans free, even the veggies. They are going deeper down the caverns.”

“Call the Kings Guard!” I cried.

“Impossible.. They collapsed the top caverns. We’re trapped!”

“Hmmm.. But so are they.” I reasoned.

“They are only seven. Including her.” Said Gurgle, gurgling. The gurgles of Gurgle were a tick of sorts, and he had no control over it.

“How many of us are left?” I asked.

“After the initial attack? Maybe three dozen. We’re holding off the human hoard on the sixth floor. They freed all the humans on the top floors. There must be hundreds of them.”

“But the top floors are mostly used for veggies, and those will not attack.”   

“What do you want me to do, Boss?”

“We need to get word to the city guard.”

“Do you have a way to transport yourself or someone else to the surface?”

“Yes, but it’s in the next level down. I have a magical mirror of transportation.” I was already building a plan to trap the attackers in the deeper levels of the Meat Factory, but I would need to get to the office where the magical mirror that could transport me to the surface waited.

“What about her?” asked my loyal friend, pointing to where lie “Green Light”.

“Let’s tie her up over there…” I said.

There were a number of holding cells for human children in this level of the compound, and all I had to do was to tie her up well. I grabbed some chains from the storage. I locked her up good and shut her down into one of the children’s holding cells. There were about a dozen human pups, none of them lobotomized yet. But they had no real language, since none had ever been thought to them. They communicated amongst themselves with crude grunts, yelps and whistles.

We were walking to the office where we could find the mirror that would help us escape the doomed underground compound when we ran into Maximilian McCormick. The armor-clad human looked ridiculous to us, in his shiny silver armor with his dragon-faced helm and his huge Claymore sword, swinging over his head.

Gurgle used the carpet under our feet to trip the warrior, but instead of tripping, in his tumble, he grabbed flight and sliced my friend twice in the belly, spilling his guts.

“Where is Green Light, monster!?” he screamed at me.

“You call me a monster, when it is you who has come here murdering and destroying?” I replied, angry.

“What you were doing here has come to its end, vile creature.”

“You mean feeding my people? You mean … famine?”

“You are feeding your people HUMANS!”

“And so do you feed yours pigs and cows and chickens. But they can’t defend themselves.” I replied, trying to find an advantage in what was about to become a very violent act.

“But we are men! We DO defend ourselves!” His sword kept flying overhead, like a kind of mad-sword disc.

“You and I are no different, human. You fight for your people and I fight for mine. Perhaps under other circumstances, we would be friends…” I tried to reason with this mad human.

“After all I have seen in this dungeon of horrors, beast, the only friendship you will find is my cold, cruel steel.”

And he attacked.

But like I said, I am no novice, and I saw his attack come long before he had purchased it. I stepped to one side of the cruel two handed blade, and blew some magic dust on his face.

“I’m blind! Oh, no! I’m blinded!” he screamed.

His two other brothers came in shortly after. The mage, Malcolm, dressed in a typical mage’s robes including the ridiculous conical hat pulled out a pair of glasses from his pockets and put them on my victim.

“Thanks, Malcolm!” he replied, obviously having returned his eyesight.

The other, Maximilian, another warrior clad in a clever suit of leather buckled armor and holding a small sword and a small shield carefully tried to flank me.

“Who sent you, damnable humans?”  I cried.

“I brought them…” said my daughter.

She had gotten free. And she had freed all the wild- terrible human children…

“And now, this ends, father. Goodbye.” She said to me without a smile. And she struck me with an arrow. Had I not seen the bow? It lie on one of the tables where the children were prepared for market. It was a simple enough short bow, barely a child’s toy, used for hunting small game, like dogs and cats. But in her expert hands, it became a deadly weapon that send spiraling towards my chest.

My daughter broke my heart in two.