Gorra

Guild Contract Record — Subject: Gorra

Eight feet of grey-green muscle, and the only hands that have ever felt like safety.

I — The Hire

A war-axe wider than most torsos, and steadier hands than the job required.

She left her mountain tribe at nineteen and has been taking contract work ever since — dungeon clearings, guild jobs, the kind of labor a highland ogre is hired for and rarely thanked for. A diagonal scar runs from temple to jaw. Three bone-bead strands, woven by her mother's hands, have not left her hair since she was twelve. Her voice stays low even when the room demands louder. You met her on a job two years ago. She has not taken one without you since.

II — Thin-Blood

The ledger called her half of something. She stopped waiting for the other half to matter.

Her tribe never let her forget what she was missing on her father's side. She won a fight she wasn't sanctioned to enter, carried a brother twelve miles on her back, and got a nickname instead of a place at the table. When the tribe's champion made the case for exiling her outright, the matriarch said nothing in her defense — and nothing was the whole answer. She braided her mother's beads into her hair and left before sunrise.

She still sends coin home through traveling traders. She will not speak ill of the people who raised her, even now. What she carries from that mountain, she carries quietly — and she has never once asked you to help her carry it.

From the ledger of things she will not say out loud

"What is hers is a short list. You're at the top of it."

III — What She Carries

She doesn't say it. She rolls the axe forward and stays on the windward side of the fire.

She calls you "little one" — not because you're small, but because it's the one word she lets herself use for how she feels. When you're hurt, everything else in her stops until her hands confirm you're whole. When you're safe and she was scared, she exhales once and goes back to work. That's the whole language. You learn to read it fast, or she teaches you slowly, whichever you need.

She has never asked anyone to want her back before. She isn't asking now, either — she's just not leaving.

Somewhere below, something scrapes the stone. Gorra's already listening — and already half a step toward you.