The Making of a Monster, Part Two

With the stink of raw rat on my breath and the slimy f’lassil salve glistening on my naked and bloody body, I began making my way toward Tranquillien in the hopes of finding a healer.  I had some concern about making it past the Second Elfgate, but my hope was that I would be allowed to come near enough for them to figure out I was a friend.

That’s when I smelled it.  Smoke.  It became stronger and stronger and finally, I saw the hellish orange reflecting from clouds.

The Blackened Woods were ablaze!

Those savage, fel-tainted monsters had set our kingdom on fire!  The vileness of it took my breath away!  The world was a wall of fire to the north, and it was spreading rapidly southwards.

I turned and fled.  And kept fleeing until I was in the mountains of eastern Lordaeron.

I could bore you with ten years…but I will not.  Part of the reason is that I do not remember it all that well.  My family destroyed, my body defiled and defaced, my kingdom a smoking ruin, the orcs rampaging across the planet…this led me to a breakdown, and I wandered the hills and forests of Lordaeron, living as a scavenger, keeping to myself, minimizing contact with the humans that lived there.  The few that I tried to contact for succor at the start of my ravings drove me off with fire and pitchforks, screaming at me that I was a monster and should die. 

So I lived in the wilds and likely started many rumors of the beastman of Lordaeron.  I did not care.  For a while, I became a creature of survival, not caring about anything but where next the food would come from.

Years passed in a devolved, depraved haze.  Then I met my first zombies.  I was hovering at the edge of the village I was living closest to, Silverdale, southwest of Stratholme, looking for junk and rubbish that I might use in the cave that I called home, when I saw a child…a girl child…shambling toward me.  I moved to hide, and hid well, but she seemed to sense me without seeing…indeed her eyes seemed oddly vacant.  I left rapidly.  I did not want this child to find me and did not want to have to hurt her, seeing as how she looked sick or insane.  I was digging up roots about a half a mile away from the dump when I heard a shuffling.

It was the little girl.  And three others.  And they all had that glassy look and lurched rather than walked.  And I knew…I knew that they were undead, and part of the listlessness cleared in me.  Undead were abominations and had to be destroyed, and even a worthless, useless coward such as myself had a responsibility to do so.  I drew the rusted sword I had stolen from a crypt and struck them down…they were not very powerful, so it was not a challenge.

I then, as awake as I had been in ten years, set to trying to find out *why* there were undead roaming.  I resolved to go into Silverdale and tell the local burgher of this troubling news.

Silverdale was quiet as I entered.  Quiet and still, and it felt very wrong.  I saw bodies of rats and cats dotted about the streets.  And dogs.  And then horses.  One was still weakly struggling, so I went to see if I might put it out of its misery.  I bent over the horse’s head, and its eyes rolled back in its head.  It stopped moving.  I sighed.  Some sickness was in this town, I thought, I must surely leave.

Then the horse’s eyes rolled back, no longer dark and glistening but milky, with a glowing cinder deep inside.  It lurched as if to get up, snapping at me.  I stabbed it repeatedly with my sword until it stopped moving.  Panting, I looked up and around, nearing panic.  Then I went past near, through panic and into sheer terror.  I was surrounded by the walking dead!  Villagers once, monsters now, shuffled toward me, moaning and keening.

I leapt upward and grabbed the edge of the roof of the building I was in front of.  I pulled myself up just as the first pallid arms reached for me.

And I did something I had not done in ten years.  I prayed.  I prayed to the Eternals to deliver me from this, to help me destroy them, or at very least to not let me fall and become one of them.  I recited liturgies half-remembered from centuries before, I prayed directly to the Light, as I had heard the humans do, and I ran.  Again, I ran.  All my life fleeing, this time from not merely death, but undeath as well.  I leaped from roof to roof, finally crashing through the thatch of a small cottage on the edge of town.  I recoiled in horror as two children looked up from devouring their mother.  I might have screamed like a woman.

My flight turned blind, and I lost track of my actions.  I came to my senses later…a few hours, it must have been, from fleeing Silverdale.  I was crouching in a field near the main road running from Stratholme to Browman’s Mill.  Refugees, a long stream of them, were making their way away from what I would find out was the Undead Plague.  Most of these poor peasants that I snuck through the grass and under a bridge to get past…most of these fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, all with stories that I will never hear…most of them did not make it and now reside in what is now the Plaguelands, endlessly hungry, mindless and evil to the core.  But for now, since I did not know what was going on, and when one of them would try to attack me with their soul-dead eyes, for now I fled.  My refain…I fled again.  This time, it was to the Greenwood Pass.  I had heard rumors that my people still lived in the woods that had not burned a decade prior, and so I determined that my fear of having them see me in my monstrous form was not nearly as strong as my fear of staying in dying Lordaeron.

I determined that I would stop by my estate and see what I could do.  Perhaps there were graves…perhaps just rubble that I might say my words to.  I started down the road to my old village.

I never found it.  The land had changed in a decade…and the fires had scarred this part of the land.  I did not find my estate, I did not find my village, and I still did not find closure.  I wandered the woods, praying to the Eternals again…praying for them to guide me to that which I sought.  I thought that, perhaps if I found peace with my past, that everything would be all right.  As I looked more intently and got more lost and desperate, I began falling into the wild-man again.

And that’s when they answered me.  Not the Eternals, they never did answer, and I am not sure that I believe in them any more.  Who did answer were my brothers, the elements.  Earth was the first to answer, as I dug at yet another set of ruins, hoping to find some clue.

What you seek, you will not find

I stopped digging, whirled, brandishing my shovel.  No one was there.

Redemption will not come from the past, brother

“Who said that?” I screamed, looking about wildly.

It is I, your brother Earth.  Do not fear.  I accept you as you are.

And I didn’t fear.  Just like that.  I sat down on the dirt and was still.

You have been on the wrong path, brother.  The things you seek do not exist.  The only way to make up for the past is to be in the present.  If you require someone with whom to discuss your eternity, I will be that someone.  You are lost.  Let me show you the way.

Someone to help.  Someone to listen.  Someone to guide.  It was what I needed.  “Yes,” I said, “show me the way…please.”

And that is when I became the only elven shaman.