„Let us not perform common, ordinary challenges,” Durotan said, wondering where the words came from even as he uttered them, „Let us do something truly different in the history of our people.”
Orgrim's bright gray eyes gleamed as he leaned forward. „What do you suggest?”
„Let us be friends, you and I.”
Orgrim's heavily muscled jaw dropped. „But—we are not of the same clan!” he said, in a voice that indicated that Durotan might have proposed a friendship between the great black wolf and the mild talbuk. Durotan waved a dismissive hand. „We are not enemies,” he said. „Look around you. The clans come together twice a year and there is no harm in it.”
„But . . . my father says it is precisely because we come together so seldom that the peace is kept,” Orgrim continued. His brow knotted with concern.
Disappointment colored Durotan's words with bitterness. „Very well. I thought you braver than the others, Orgrim of the Doomhammer line, but you are no better than they—timid and shy and unwilling to see beyond what has always been done to what is possible.”
[…]
„I am no coward!” he snarled. „I back down from no challenge, you upstart Frostwolf!”
He sprang on Durotan then, knocking the smaller orc off his feet, and the two pummeled each other until the shaman needed to be brought in for healing and lecturing on the inappropriateness of fighting in a sacred space.
„Impetuous boy,” scolded the head shaman of the Frostwolves, an ancient orc female they called „Mother” Kashur. „You are not too old to be beaten as a disobedient child, young Durotan!”
The shaman who tended Orgrim muttered similar displeased sounds. But even as blood streamed freely from his nose, and as he watched the shaman heal a wicked gash on Orgrim's brown torso, Durotan grinned. Orgrim caught his gaze and grinned back.
The challenge had begun, the final challenge, so much more important than races or lifting stones, and neither was willing to admit defeat … to say that a friendship between two youths of different clans was wrong. Durotan had a feeling that this particular challenge would end only when one of them was dead … and perhaps not even then.