Psychoscopy

Psychoscopy

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"The matter is simple, Honored Wolf-King: the past is entombed within the present. This world is its own enduring monument."

Joro'khanan Dawngazer, Oracle of Clan Red Blade

It was late evening, and the day's light had largely given way to darkness. The wind whistled gently through the Blade's Edge Mountains, the barren landscape bathed in the Twisting Nether's coruscating purple hue.

Legs spread wide apart, an orc stood with chainmail legplates around his knees. Sharptongue relieved himself on the thorn-bush, drawing some small pleasure in soaking the shrub's mutated spines. He directed the stream back and forth like a low-pressure hose, attempting to cover as much of the bush as possible in the dark yellow (almost amber) liquid.

Sighing hoarsely, with a couple of tugs on his now-drained member, Sharptongue clumsily stuffed his privates back into their loincloth and slowly worked his tight legplates back up, over his somewhat flabby thighs. With a final inwards puff of his gut, he secured them back around his waist with the uncomfortable but reassuringly snug clefthoof-leather girdle.

Everything intact, Sharptongue inwardly bemoaned the extent to which his trips to the thorn-bush had become ritualised. The same elongated trek away from camp to ensure he was not spied upon or caught in the act; the same delicate teasing-down of the tight legplates over ever-widening hips; the same soaking of the very same bush, which depending on the exact content of his urine, was surely the most watered plant in all of the arid Blade's Edge peninsula.

He had made the pilgrimage roughly nine times that day alone, and in the past few weeks Sharptongue had began to consider his weakening bladder an increasingly bothersome matter -- his frequent 'communing with the spirit of water' had the effect of disrupting and fragmenting his daily duties, from his attempts to establish a direct and stable connection with the elemental spirits to his efforts at studying the frustratingly inscrutable and incomplete Annals of Clan Redblade.

And when his duties weren't interrupted by the deed itself, they were laid aside for the constant rumination as to why his urinary excursions had so lately multiplied in number. He wasn't wholly incontinent -- he had at least managed to maintain control and hadn't had any (he gulped) involuntary leakages thus far. It couldn't be the amount of liquids he consumed -- he had only downed half a water-skin when he awoke painfully wheezing and hacking (as he did most mornings), and sipped sparingly from the skin otherwise.

Perhaps he was pregnant, Sharptongue mused waspishly, trudging steadily on the dirt-track back to camp. Whatever the case, he hadn't taken this to any of the tribe's menders or spiritualists for fear of embarrassment -- he knew that should the problem continue or even worsen, this would not be a sustainable course of action, but he nonetheless couldn't bring himself to initiate the surely-awkward conversation with whoever he would broach the topic with.

Grom knows they had enough to poke fun at him over, Sadok grunted, itching his patchy beard with dirt-encrusted fingernails. There was the matter of his infrequent attendance at official gatherings and other scenarios -- he knew that he couldn't stand too long in one place without the urinary urges starting to take hold, and at the last tribe meeting, he had already started fidgeting and trying to take his mind from the swollen bladder when he was (praise the spirits!) saved by an ogre incursion upon Garadar.

After the first group of brutish oafs had been dispatched, Sharptongue had taken the first available avenue of escape to conduct his 'private business' by the river that flowed out of Garadar -- he took care not to directly contaminate the tribe's and the Mag'har's own water supply, though he took a small amount of satisfaction in knowing that the river flowed downstream to the Nesingwary Expedition encampment. Not that the dwarves were likely to drink much pure water, he grunted.

The Thunderlord Stronghold, where the tribe was currently sojourned, was now within view again as Sharptongue feebly descended a rocky hill with carefully-placed footsteps. He had taken some flak for 'abandoning' the tribe during the ogre's assault, but most orcs had not cared enough to continue pressing the matter, and surely the potentially-lachrymose humiliation of wetting himself during battle would have been worse yet.

Certain orcs had already made sure his unconscious goblin-centric fantasies, babbled out while wounded pumped up with anesthetics in a hammock following a Southern Barrens skirmish some three years ago. Three years, Sharptongue marveled! Or a matter that stung all the more deeper: Talonslayer having cuckolded him in favour of his Chieftain, then meeting her demise at his blade after the pair's relationship self-imploded into sedition and treachery.

Sharptongue's occasional contact with the tempestuous, hot-tempered she-orc's spirit in the months since had only drawn further mistrust and ire, especially from the Chieftain and Marshfang, and he couldn't help but feel caught in the middle of a bitter conflict that he didn't (and perhaps never could) fully understand. He had been urged to sever ties with the spirit altogether, and had tried to persuade her himself, but she still held a lethal grip upon his fragile heart-strings -- and in earnest, he didn't want to see her go, even after all the pain she had caused him.

He wondered why exactly that was the case as he entered camp, nodding grimly to the bored guard stationed at the gates. Her spirit's intangible, non-material presence could never truly hope to replace the physical, authentic sensations that once enthralled him so. But sometimes, just sometimes, when he stroked the sun-cracked Warmask of Korgak, he felt an ineffable connection with the past that felt as real as the uneven, coarse ground beneath his feet as he walked now.

Psychoscopy, he had thought he heard it once described. In short, it was the idea that each material object had its own essence, one which was fixed throughout time -- a kind of inexorable energy field that might be read like the rings on a tree. A spiritualist sufficiently-trained might be able to harness this psychic sixth sense to intuit all manner of esoteric information from the simplest of objects: who had interacted with it; where it had been; its entire history from creation to present (and potentially, into the future).

Korgak's Warmask had its own psychoscopic emanations, Sharptongue was sure. When he concentrated carefully and shut off all external stimuli, he could gently place his fingers on the stitched hide and feel the entire passage of its history and existence, as though through a mirror darkly.

He felt the fierce but loyal worg roam the plains of Kalimdor and Northrend in service of Wildstride, its master; he seemed to perish alongside it as Korgak drew his last breath in Nagrand, resting his head on Talonslayer's lap and drifting into one final eternal sleep. And crafted into a lupine warmask, he felt himself seemingly perched atop the Varog'Gor's head as she fought in duel, skirmish and warfare alike.

A familiar sensation returned to Sharptongue however, as his bladder had returned once more to near bursting-point. Snarling in impotent anger, Sadok looked outside the camp into the distance where the anointed thorn-bush lay -- he knew the journey was a quarter of a horn at a breezy jaunt, and that he would have to desperately hold on until then. He started out within further ado, growling bleakly.

On the rocky slope to the 'golden' shrub, Sharptongue's mind struggled to return to its prior psychoscopic focus. If Korgak's Warmask held such memories within its weather-battered hide, what might other objects reveal to the trained eye?

He peered briefly at the notched blade hanging from his girdle, shaped crudely in the shape of the Horde's emblem: it was Wrokk's blade. Might, with the right touch, it show him a young, idealistic Red Blade? Might it show him an orc whose aptitudes were shaped and manipulated by the Kor'kron, or a ruthless assassin perfectly suited to infiltration and subterfuge?

Might he feel the paralytic poison that coated the blade, or the warm riven flesh of a High Blade Thur'ruk cut down in his prime within the auspicious locale of Revantusk Village? Sharptongue shuddered, seeming to feel the blade's ice-cold numbness even now in his scarred bosom. Memory was a double-edged blade indeed, and for each unearthed kernel worth knowing, there was another troubling recollection better left forgotten.

What of artifacts of Clan Redblade, Sharptongue pondered? If he concentrated long enough upon a page of the Annals, might he feel the press of quill to parchment and the deliberate hand of its many authors spanning back generations? Would the cursed Warmask of Magoth, its location known to none but Akesha herself, allow a wily psychometrist to gaze back along the Line of Wolfkings, all the way to Kraag himself? The possibilities were potentially endless, if only they might be realised by an orc devoted and skilful enough to unlock the mysteries in even the simplest of objects.

Sharptongue arrived at the thorn-bush, girding his thighs together uncomfortably as he tried to contain the beast within his bladder. Hurriedly prying the girdle loose and hastily sliding the legplates down his thighs, he took his member into his hand and directed the high-pressure stream out just in time.

Breathing a sigh of relief, he closed his eyes and simply felt himself slowly emptied. In his state of urinary serenity, he became inordinately conscious of the psychoscopic energies emanating from his private parts -- and delving back into years past, he felt through that organ and felt...