The Hunters - Ria, Yolna, and Karn

Ria led Yolna and Josk out of the town gates. They walked in silence for some time into the dusty steppes, until the walls were a distant spot on the horizon. The wastes were mostly flat, but the orc encampments were built into distant rocky outcroppings. They chose one at random and Ria scouted ahead.

She was not as adept a scout as Denni, but she was lightly armored, and the best of the three of them for the job. She approached the camp cautiously, keeping cover behind whatever boulder would hide her.

She crawled on her elbows in the dust, peering out at the camp from behind a large, pointed rock. The orcs in the camp were large, savage brutes, as she expected. They fought each other and drank from a stack of plundered barrels of ale. A pair of vultures were roasting over a spit by a camp fire. At the far end of camp were three large cages made from wood and bone. And in those cages...

Ria gasped. Two of the cages were empty, but in the third were two human women. They were uninjured, as far as Ria could tell, but they were stripped naked and looked forlorn and listless. Broken. Ria could only imagine what these orcs had subjected them to.