Chapter 1 -- What a Drag

When I came to, my head was bouncing against the broken stones that once made up a road. I was being dragged. That much was as clear as the taste of blood at the back of my throat, but everything else was hazy--smeared.

The sky hung gray as a dull blade above me, blurred by something in my eyes. Was it sweat? Maybe more of my blood? Hopefully at least a little of someone else's?

I was still trying to figure it all out, trying to think through all the bone-deep pain, and quickly too, because there was a sound that was getting clearer now as well. A sound I remembered from the days when I was still "Blitzkrieg" Birk Brambleson, star of the Blood Bowl pitch. A sound that could make even 300-pound linemen soil their codpieces. A sound that used to curl my hands into fists back before that doe-eyed wood elf turned me into the "Broken Bramble," just another one of the sport's sad, where-bleed-they-now bootnotes.

That sound was growing clearer, breaking though the scrabble of the back of my head skimming across those stones, and as far as I was from any Blood Bowl pitch, I knew it promised even more trouble than when I'd heard it the past.

It was grunting--low, guttural, animal grunting. A sound that meant only one thing: black orcs, and plenty of them.