How the Orcs came to Sarat

Orc blood, thick and grey like liquid silt, has healing powers, or so it is said.
Yet the dangers are many.
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So the story goes of a Ghost Kingdom or a Shadow Town, somewhere on the margins of the Blackriver Plain in one of those ages when the Waste fell back and fortune seemed to favor man.
Call it Sarat, as good a name as any.
Sarat prospered from its contact with the unveiled wilds. A through-route for hunters, pilgrims, treasure-seekers, waste-walkers, and the strange. The town built walls and grew fat.
Then Plague came to Sarat. Perhaps they delved too deep into the ruins beneath the town, or the contagion came from beyond. It matters little. Trade died. Families were locked behind painted doors in a town locked behind oak gates.
The wealthy of Sarat sought out healers at whatever price until a Greenseer of the Gloom Queens pronounced them doomed. There was nothing left to do, the Seer said, but to wait for the Flail and see who came out immune. No cure would work.
Yet there were more radical voices. A Plains Witch? Some Shadow Aeth or a Quileth? Who knows.
They told the sick people of Sarat that there was a cure. A dangerous one to obtain, and an immoral one to use.
Orc Blood.
Orcs, they say, do not get sick.
But the Orc is the absolute Other of Blackwaters cultures. What perverse being would willingly pollute their flesh with the blood of the Other? And for those few sceptical of that prejudicial logic; Orcs are still Sophonts. Thinking, self-aware beings. Would not that be Vampirism of a kind?
Yet the people of Sarat wanted to live, and more than that, they wanted their children and their parents and their wives and husbands to live. So, quietly, piece by piece, dark figures were employed at a staggering cost, and iron cages were delivered to the closed gates of Sarat, paid for in their own weight in gold, (with significant bonuses for injury loss of personnel).
Behind their locked and painted doors, the wealthy (for only the richest families could afford this dangerous new treatment), broke contact and seemed to disappear for a while.
Not dead, for lights still flickered behind windows. But silent.
And then loud with careless song. The cure worked! The weak and frail, infected young and old, sprang back into vigour! A miracle!
But the Orc Strain is like no other line. It does not fade and disappears with a long descent, blinking out as the generations pass by.
Like the Orc itself, it perseveres, it remains, even as so slight a trace.
And over the long, long, millennia in Blackwater since the fall of Esh, the Orcs have come many times, to many people. And those people have mixed.
Strange to say, a curiosity of hereditary; ultimately, if you go back long enough, everyone is related to everyone else.
So the Orc Strain, lying long, low and dormant in the flesh, awoke.
First in the children, who grew grey skin and glittering eyes, but with sharp teeth, feared nothing and found they enjoyed their meat raw and on the bone.
Then slowly and gradually, aspect by aspect, teeth here, eyes there, painless flesh for one and thick sharp nails for another, but most of all the mind, for it is the mind of the Orc which makes it truly a monster. Slowly, the people of Sarat began to disappear, until the wasted figures in the iron cages woke one day to find; only kin around them, grinning and brave.
Still, it did cure the plague, as promised. Or so the legend goes.
Of Sarat?
It is long lost now, except for legend, it's ruins the foundation for one more recent Shadow Town out on the margins of the Blackriver Plain in some age when the Waste falls back, and fortune seems to favor man.