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The orc’s squirming intensifies as you withdraw your claws, sliding them back through his mangled innards. Almost rent in half yet still struggling for life, you’re quite impressed with the orcish ability to endure suffering, you must say. Perhaps he has enough life left in his draining veins to be of some use to you.
You pick the orc up in one claw and spin him around to face you, his ruined lower half hanging by mere strings and lagging behind. He goes to shriek but you fix your eyes on his and exercise your will over him, seizing the sound before it can escape his throat. Struggling for breath in the madness of his agony and terror, he goggles at you as you bring the tip of your snout right up to his face.
It suddenly occurs to you that these will be the first words you will ever have spoken to someone not a dragon. You must make them worth remembering, even if only to yourself, and elect to use the tongue of the Éothéod.
“Harken unto me, orc,” you say, as imperious and grand as one of your race ought to be, yet also keeping your tone even so that the half-dead beast might better grasp them. “Tell me of your lair and your leader, and where I might find them. Give me this, and I shall end your torment.”
“<span class="mu-i">Kul… kodar…</span> no…” The creature, wild in his last moments, simply chatters his teeth and spits up black blood over his chin.
You sigh. It would seem that in his pain the orc did not heed you, likely more a result of his death throes than any ounce of willpower he might possess, and your words did not hit their mark. That said, crazed though he may be, his eyes are still immovably locked upon your own. There is no doubt that this orc is under your power just as the seals and deer of the far north had been, so why does he resist?
You think, then, of how you had held the simple animals in place with your gaze, and a realisation dawns on you. From the moment you first immobilised a fleeing seal in its tracks years ago, you have only ever used the power behind your eyes to halt, to strangle, to imprison in a cage wrought of your sheer overwhelming will. You project your intent as a great grasping claw born of a desire to control, and so it is that whatever you affect has all control ripped away from it.
That, you now understand, is what you are doing to this orc. You are choking the words in his throat, preventing him from speaking as you wish him to while the muscles in his jaw work against him. He says nothing because he cannot wrestle himself free from your iron grip, and so can do nothing but sit paralysed as his lifeblood spews from his ruined lower half.
You see now. You must alter your approach.
You ease the glow from your eyes, feeling it become less of a raging inferno and instead envisioning it as something warmer, softer, almost enticing. Rather than attacking his will through simple brute force, you opt instead for subversion, trying to direct it or maybe mould it to your own desire.
