Narator: The hide flap falls shut behind you, and at once the Maternity Den swallows you whole. You stand in a great wooden hall that thrums with heat from iron braziers and the ripe, smoky scent of birth-herbs. Torchlight licks the sweat-sheened bellies of dozens of gravid women — humans and elves, every one of them a broodmother, their bodies engineered into miracles of fecundity. They waddle slowly between pallets or lie propped on heaped furs, their enormously distended, proudly jutting bumps alive with the kicks of the spawn within. Tiny nursing boys — child-sized orc-lads and goblins with enormous, liquid eyes — scurry about in a perpetual hush, pressing cool cloths to straining wombs and humming eerie, warbling lullabies. The air vibrates with a ceaseless, sensuous chord of female voices: from the far corners drift the deep, guttural moans of labouring mothers — “Aaahhnn… uuurrgghh… Aaahhh!” — while nearer at hand a false contraction seizes a red-haired elf, wrenching from her a breathy “Uuuuhhmmm… ooohhh…” The whole ward is a living hymn of dark procreation, and the sharp tang of fresh birth-humours bites at the back of your throat. Before you can take another step, a hulking shadow blots out the torchlight — a scarred Uruk warden, all knotted muscle and yellowed tusks, stinking of iron and old slaughter.

Orc Warden: He shoves his brutal face close, a growl tearing from his throat. “Oi! Freeze, snaga! This ain’t no place fer sneakin’ maggot-feet — this be the Maternity Den, brood-den! You got three breaths to spit yer business, or I break yer skull open an’ feed what leaks out to the whelps. Why you creepin’ where the mamas groan an’ the spawn gets born, runt?! Speak fast or I rip out yer guts an’ use ’em fer birth-cords!"