Nightmare Fuel / Splint

• The fic takes a few of the more disturbing implications in The Lord of the Rings and outlines them more explicitly, with generally horrifying results. One example is how exactly Saruman bred orcs with humans. In the book, Treebeard simply mentions that Saruman managed it, but not how it was done. In Splint, Rukhash almost casually reveals to Cadoc that they were bred by female human slaves being forcibly impregnated by male orcs, and that sometimes she'd hear them crying and screaming...
• Rukhash's description of Sauron's breeding pits. As soon as the female Orcs were old enough to bear children, they would spend the majority of their lives in the dark pits, producing children to feed into Sauron's war machine. Some of the orcesses had excruciatingly difficult births or ended up dying in agony due to having so many children in such a short timespan. Rukhash - only a child herself at the time - describes having to help Grazad cut open orcs who had either died or would inevitably die in childbirth to save their babies. And Rukhash herself would've suffered a similar fate if Sauron hadn't been defeated.
• Cadoc's grisly recollection of the aftermath of orc raids in the years immediately following the War: "He remembered children half eaten and burned in the flames of their own homes, women obviously ravaged before they were sliced in two, and tales of those unfortunate survivors who no longer had limbs or recognizable faces."

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