Dragonblight

“You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.”     ~Amy Lowell

     Damnable, frigid Northrend updrafts!  The taunka actually live here?  Why in the name of the Earthmother would anyone want to scrape out a miserable existence in this forsaken place?

     I have to stop more often than I’d like, alighting on frost-laden branches to fan my wings, hoping the wan sunlight will melt the ice that’s begun to glaze my feathers.  Of course, that allows the biting winds to pierce through the softer covering of my midsection, chilling me to the bones again.  I’d prefer the heat of Stranglethorn to this torment.

"The mountains have always been here, and in them, the bears."  ~ Rick Bass

Cold is more than merely a temperature to the Taunka.  We have many more words for it than the Tauren.  Our word for death, our word for stillness, even our word for breath all stem from the same word as cold.  Cold is a state of mind.  A state of spirit.  Cold is clarifying and painful, frightening and steeling all at once.  But never have I felt so cold as I do when I wake from my fitful sleep in the sparse forest of the Dragonblight.

The ghoul collapsed and momentum dragged it forward, the piled snow crowning his head jerking the lifeless corpse to a crumpled standstill.  A goggled eye stared upwards, already calloused before he had met permanent death by the priest’s hands.  Jaw dislocated hanging to one side with a rolling purpled tongue catching snowflakes.  Meters from him Melidane drew in a breath, the whipping wind and oncoming warning of a blizzard made the simple act of breathing a burning line through her lungs.  

The sent of blood was in her nose- blood not yet shed, blood still in the vein. She could hear the rush of it too, the frantic, frightened pulse throbbing in her ears like a lover's moans. Her eyes saw the world red and black, in looming shadows and ember-gleaming heart-fires - fires that would warm her and stave off the ever-encroaching cold of death.

"A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity."
     ~King Solomon

     The trek across the Borean Tundra was not an easy one, but once the blizzard abated, it was at least uneventful.  Three days, I’d had to sit there in the shelter of my ruined home.  Three days of memories haunting me as surely as the elven spirits that lurked by the coast.  More than once, I’d nearly stepped out into the fierce weather in a decision to simply risk the elements, rather than endure surrounding myself with a constant reminder of all that had been lost.  It was only the burning desire to find those who still lived that kept me still and steady, forcing me to sit and wait and endure.

Despite their solid, rotund, inert shapes, they looked like caged animals. Micah stood on deck, wrapped in his winter coat against the bitter Northrend cold, watching the crew. They heaved and hoed and the pulley system screeched with the weight of the new cargo they were pulling aboard; cauldrons. The crates were really just frameworks, keeping the massive pots and their lids steady and secure for their journey, with plenty of spacing between the slats so the eye could see the fat, squat things inside.

Toads. They looked like toads. They even had splayed claw-feet with three toes each.

The wind off the mountains was cold, but bracing.  I took deep breath of the fresh air and smiled as I walked after the Scarlet death knight who was trying to drag himself away from me.  No need to hurry, he wasn't going far with a broken hip.  Scarlet death knights.  I made a face; what was the world coming to?  The Crusade used to have some standards.  And now ... now those undead bastards were everywhere, like Ythgar Vinguld. 

Sinobel sighed, and snuggled deeper into the furs which covered her chair in her private Venomspite apartment.  The soft warmth did little to assuage the constant cold she felt deep inside her, body and soul, since her and Alainthal's return to the land of the living. 

She chuckled despite herself - funny she should call it that, when here she was, the only flesh-and-blood inhabitant of a Forsaken town in the middle of the Dragonblight. 

But the chill of Northrend was not the cold which haunted her, and the Forsaken in their current state were more alive than she had felt until very recently.

Her eyes lidded and her thoughts wandered as she stared out the window, through the blue-white gnarled Dragonblight trees she favored, and into the bleak scenery of a darkening Dragonblight sunset...

Splinters of memory, fractured images swirling through an icy wind…

The weekly meeting had been bizarre. Upon returning to Stormwind, she had met with Asilia to hear a report of Cultists in the city, trying to control the Death Knight through her blade, stolen and altered, and now destroyed.

Dreams and visions cracked at the edges…

She thrusts the ring and a water-marked letter into my hands as my Shadow spells finish their work on her body, and I say a prayer for her spirit as the light fades from her eyes.

I think for the thousandth time today how much I hate war.