Ancient Orc Name Generator

The story

Garr bought a red mat before he visited the arch. He had considered blue, but red would show less dust beneath a stone dog. He also bought a bowl, although he could not remember whether Bir had ever eaten. Memory supplied an enthusiastic answer whenever he pictured the reunion and withdrew it whenever he tried to recall an actual meal. He put both purchases in the room he had reserved beside the market. His daughter would arrive on Friday. By then, he intended, the room would contain a warm welcome and a companion she had heard about all her life.

Bir stood beside the arch with one stone forefoot raised. The door it had guarded was gone; so were the two walls that would have made the arch an entrance to anything. Someone had swept leaves from its back. Garr bent to the nick on its left foot, the mark he had made with a market nail when he was nine and foolish enough to sign a friend. The nick remained. He had expected to feel nine again. Instead he felt the age of the hand he placed beside it.

The courtyard keeper, Nalla, remembered him from earlier visits. She cared for Bir as part of the place and had agreed he could try taking it for walks. If the dog settled willingly elsewhere, they could discuss a longer arrangement. Garr thanked her as though the important question had already been answered. He called the old name. Bir lowered its foot, clicked twice, and followed him down the stair. At the third turning it stopped, swung awkwardly around, and went back to the arch. Garr laughed. He had forgotten how stubborn his friend could be.

On the second attempt he tried the whistle he remembered from childhood. Bir performed the same three turns. On the third, a porter went ahead of him and the dog followed the porter instead. It returned at the same place. Finally a basket rolled from a low cart, and Bir accompanied that with equal seriousness. Nalla retrieved the basket. Garr said the mechanism must be confused. She asked whether he had ever watched its whole route as a child. He remembered running beside it, climbing on a wall, shouting for it to catch up. He could not remember waiting to see where it went after he left.

An instruction plate survived beneath the collar. Its lower half had broken away long before Nalla’s time. Stay beside, the readable section said, followed by the edge of a letter that might belong to several different words. Garr supplied the household. An antiquities dealer suggested the doorway. A visiting reader said the missing object could have been a person, a place, or even another mechanism. None could turn the fragment into a complete instruction by wanting the rest to fit. The nick established the same old foot. It did not explain what Bir thought of the boy who had scratched it.

The dealer knew a workshop that could reset Bir into a tractable walking model. It would erase the existing movement routine, not restore the absent words. Garr imagined the red mat, his daughter at the door, and Bir walking neatly into the picture. Nalla would consider transferring its care if a safe new arrangement could be made, but she asked him not to call a reset the recovery of an original purpose. He disliked her careful distinction. He disliked it because he could hear how easily he had intended to make exactly that claim.

For two days he sat on a folding bench beside the arch. When Bir began its round, he joined it. When it stopped, he tried not to look injured. His bench acquired a blanket, a tea box, and the red mat, which at least gave his own feet somewhere comfortable to rest. By the third morning, a resident carrying a basket of washing could not get around it on the shared stair. Garr started explaining the dog. The resident said she could see the dog perfectly well. It was his furniture she needed moved.

Keeping a route for outsiders was an ordinary Orc duty, and an old friendship did not exempt him from it. He took the bench apart and carried his belongings to the side. Nalla offered the unused corner behind the arch for waiting, provided he kept the stair clear and did not turn it into a permanent barricade of possessions. He asked whether he could sleep there for a while. They discussed warmth, storage, and the mornings when the corner was needed by the market. He accepted real inconvenience rather than telling her affection should make all practical questions unkind.

Friday came with the room still empty. His reservation held it only until evening unless he paid for the next month. Garr let it lapse and lost the holding payment. His daughter found him folding the bench out of the way. She looked at Bir completing another three-turn round and said it did not appear to remember him. He nearly told her she was too young to understand. Instead he said he had hoped it would be more obvious. She helped carry his tea box into Nalla’s permitted storage corner, then went to her own lodging. She had not traveled there to become an assistant in his disappointment.

Weeks made Bir less mysterious and no less particular. A click before the second turn sometimes stuck. The raised foot came down more gently when its joint was warm. Garr learned where to leave his boots so that the wide stone flank would not knock them over. He stopped using the whistle as a test. On a busy afternoon, Nalla’s food cart took a new route into the shared storeroom. Bir followed the turning wheels, crossed the threshold, and stood inside while the empty baskets were unloaded. Nalla had permitted the visit. This was her storeroom, not Garr’s lost rented room or a new home quietly granted in its place.

Garr called his daughter over. Then he almost said, “It came in for me.” The words were ready, warm and perfectly shaped to keep the red mat from looking foolish. Bir turned, clicked, and went back to the arch. His daughter waited without rescuing him from the silence. “It came in,” he said at last. That much had happened. That evening he wrote Side-Path on the lid of his tea box: a place he had chosen beside an old companion, with a stair he meant to keep clear. When Bir began its round, he went along, carrying no whistle.