Nuadhu

Timothy, the black fox, took a white-tipped ear in his mouth and growled. The owner of the ear, a long, golden cat stretched out on the houseboat deck in the sun, rolled slowly over, loose spotted coat flowing after the initial torsion, big white paw lifting to spread toes across the fox's cheek. Echo smiled at the lazy feline and poked Timothy with the toe of her boot on the cat's behalf, though her interference did little more than motivate the fox to switch ears. The two animals curled into a playful, harmless wrestle, Whistler the parrot hopping to and fro around them, bobbing his head and spreading his wings like some kind of mad referee.

My study of relics brings me to that great old wall.

As I sift the dust and fragments, I find my own crest, fallen from armor I once wore.

I take a news clipping out of my pocket, staring at it, and the crest.

I came looking for history.

This place holds my history too.

Leaving the Citadel was less of a relief than I had been hoping. On the way to Stormwind, there were just as many hungry reborn shuffling through Icecrown. I'm told they are weaker now that Arthas has died-- and they do seem less of a threat. They just look lost, somehow more human.

In Stormwind, we wished the wise Nuadhu well as he settled to rest after so much struggle. He certainly earned it. I sat in the damp earth next to him as our little group dissipated-- everyone having their homes or families waiting for them. I fell asleep trying to decide where to go next.

My dreams took me back to the Citadel, and it felt like more of a home than the little cottage I had tended a year ago. I woke up and I wanted nothing more than to return to the Citadel, but I knew I would never go back there.

I shift in the saddle, five miles from Warsong Hold. Dusk lowers his head, the slip and clatter of his barding ringing in the Borean stillness, as he seeks rare fodder among the lichens. The wind is sharp and relentless along my right side, blowing down from the North.  As I sit waiting, it reminds me.

This is my first return to Northrend since that night.  The cold wind feels both fresh and familiar, ruffling the fur of my cloak's collar and seeping through the layers of my clothing.  I am wearing leathers beneath the warm hide on my back, and carrying only my axe and my crossbow.  I have not come here to make war.  The war is over.

The war is over.

Trust is your weakness...

It's too damn cold up here.

((After a few months of missed or short raids due to real life events and after a welcome break for the Meet and Greet, the Ghost Scions finally got another full night of attempts on The Lich King...and guess what happened?  Big grats to the best little raid team out there.))

The cold pervades everything here: The air that snaps at our lips as we breathe, the bright clattering of weaponry and armor, the low rumble of crunching ice beneath our feet.  The spire is brittle and threatens us with its tenuous surface; if our boot-heels catch the edge, shards break away, whirling down into darkness.  It would have us fall, tumble away from the icy throne and the evil we seek to destroy.  But we cannot fall.  We will not fall.

He will not fall.  Melersian Corinth is one with the abyss, despite the voice of amusement often rising from behind his mask.  How much is he still human?  He will not fall.

She will not fall.  Beisel Goldthread sets a dwarven table, feeds us with laughter, then disperses in a puff of shadow.  How can a shadow be smashed or broken?  She will not fall.

I touch the little cut on my neck, the least wound I have received in months.  Half of an inch long, it appears as a mere translucent line across my skin, hardly opening any chasm to flesh beneath.  It does not require a bandage.  I smear a thin salve over the incision; it will probably close by nightfall.

The assassin's sharp knife had hardly nicked my skin, not nearly deep enough to grant his poison's passage into my bloodstream.  His attack had been awkward, thrusting between my neck and my heavy shoulder-armor, having to leap for my height, grabbing my hair with his unarmed hand in an attempt to pull me back and down while slicing deep and true.  He could have cut my throat; he could have left me bleeding out and poisoned on the lawn.  He could have killed me, no more than ten steps from the entrance to my home. 

I let bowstring loosen, abandoned weapons. The sporebat lingered in the fresh spring night.

I shed my armor upon entering, death and plague left behind.

I went upstairs, my hair at my shoulders, every step one step closer.

I took her in my arms and lifted her up.

One step closer.

The Professor had fallen.

The girl walks through a field of tall grass, where there had once been a city.

A wind blows, and lines of motion run through the grass, a ripple of the graceful seedheads nodding before that breeze. The plants part before her as she walks; the ceaseless waves of rising and falling flow around her and rejoin, seamlessly; her white dress flutters in that same wind. She stops once, briefly, to look up at the moon. Of all things, that is still exactly the same.

Then she begins to walk again. She makes her way slowly, without haste. No longer sleeping or waking, she has all eternity if she wishes: time in which to wait, and to think, and--in a strange and wholly conscious way--to dream.

I entered through the back door.  The maid's face, when she saw me, fell open like a sheet to a gale-force wind.  I found my voice, caught in my throat as it was, and rasped out hoarse words.

“Tell the lady of the house I am home.  Tell her not to come down.  I will see her in the morning.”

The maid nodded, her eyes still wide and fixed upon me, her mouth a thin line.  She turned away swiftly.  If she spoke words from the place of her expression, Cassie would know not to come down. 

I did not prop my polearm against the wall, or set my bow where I usually did.  I did not touch anything.  Another maid and a houseboy came into the pantry, their faces as wan and eyes as wide as the maid before them. I stood without moving.

“I need three vats of hot water.  One with lye, one with vinegar, one with soaps.  I need a pitcher of warm oil and one of boiling water, crushed icecap in each.  A fire in my den.  Many hot stones.  Many towels.  Many -”  My rough voice broke, and I swallowed back the interruption.  “Chamber pots.  Many of them.” 

((Since there are spoilers about Yogg-Saron's dialogue, I've hidden this behind the cut.))

Lord Kast commands us ever deeper into Ulduar. His eyes face forward only, as if in rebellion against the fear that awaits beneath; every guardian and watcher is only an obstacle in our way. One by one they fall.

Among the scrap heaps, where the giant mechanical screams and throws its tantrums, I spotted a shadow. It dashed for cover when we entered the chamber and disappeared when we engaged the mechagnomes and their equipment. While the others picked apart the remains, gleaning for gold or treasure, I sought the shadow among cast off metal plates, piles of robotic guts, wires and gears and cogs. A shadow amid the shadows, it huddled beneath a great beam and hissed, batting at my gauntlet as I reached for it. I could pick it up with one hand, wrapped about its ribs.

It had taken a long time and the elements had been patient. But everything had fallen into place with the efforts of Oshan, Nuadhu and the de Montvalle sisters who she had recently met. She was standing at the entrance to the lair of a creature of earth that was so powerful that she could feed off it's essence. The only issue was that it needed to be defeated since it was not going to give it up willingly.

It had even been a challenge to get to the mouth of this cavernous walkway. The Horde had not seemed interested in letting them pass into this place unharmed. It did not bring them joy, not all of them at least, to cause destruction and harm to the Horde. But the Horde had stood in their way and no Orcs or Trolls were going to stop them from fulfilling the dying wish they had determined to obey.

He should be used to this sort of thing by now – the slow, slow stiffening, the wrapping of oneself in a mantle of bark. He should be used to the way his hands curl into themselves tiredly some nights, worn and wizened beside the teacup that has managed not to chip with those clumsy, grey fingers.

(He should be used to watching mortals die, fade backward into a languorous blackness, eyes turning back to fix upon some unseen horror or wonder. He should be used to the sound of breath all rushing out in a miniaturized windstorm. He remembers where the freed souls of the elves flee; he remembers the halls. He does not know where it is they find their way to, and still, he is not used to the descent into colorless decrepitude; he thinks it should be some other way, some brighter way, or not at all. Less still is he used to the sudden culling of the warrior from his horse, falling as the arrow-pierced bird falls as prey to the ravening host beneath.)

Ever since setting out to find a way to revive the spirit they carried, the elementals had met with nothing but trouble. The first issue they faces was the inability to communicate. They understood what the people around them were saying but they could not talk back. Trying to speak only resulted in the sound of howling winds or water bubbling out of her mouth. Even if they gained a voice, they spoke in Kalimag and not in the words of humans or elves.

Melitza was a young woman who had been in the Exodar when they escaped from Dreanor. At the time she had considered herself lucky to be escaping the grasp of the Burning Legion. She had heard terrible stories about them but she knew nothing of war and was a simple leatherworking apprentice who had recently started work when things went terribly wrong. As the Exodar fell towards Azeroth, peices broke free and many fell to their deaths. Even those who managed to stay inside the wreckage were maimed and killed.

I've been marching for a long time now. I haven't stopped getting up and heading out every day, not since Durnholde, even when Kast re-formed the Scions. I started marching double-time when he showed up again. I have the feeling I'm still in retreat. The forces of the scourge seem a lesser obstacle than settling down and finding someplace to fit in again at times, but that's not really it. I could go back to Shattrath if I wanted to quit. The Scryers would laud me as a hero for the rest of my life, and even the aldor admit a grudging respect for my actions in the Shattered Sun campaign, even if I hung up my armor and lay in the World's End with six hired women until I died of booze. No, I'm not ready to quit and it's not because I don't fit anywhere.

We arrived in Arathi two nights ago now, late in the evening, and didn't even bother with tents or fires. In a small hollow in the land, overlooked by standing stones and withered trees, we edged our bedrolls up against some rocks, Shar and I sleeping close together for warmth in the chill fog. When the morning light touched our eyes, we woke to see the others, all of them moving slowly but deliberately, now beginning to gather wood for fires, now beginning to set up campsites, now beginning to order our stay in the hills for the mission to come.

But what is this now? What is this corner that hums and thaws and sings?

Ah! And the color still lives in this discarded trinket. She is still there, though he knows now that she has been gone these many passing Springs. She lingers, and she has left streaks of light across the edges; tangled webs of memory.

The ancient he is journeying, and seeks shelter beneath a low spread tree: a giant’s shrub in days past and grown small. His load is light, a far cry from the burden he carries in his silent, roving mind; a burden he’s been given but one that he has also been chained to and wrapped in and sunk in and buried under.

The ancient, he is master of both life and color, and beneath craggy fingers a weaving light brings forth warmth. He stares into the creeping glow, and he watches the light, and he watches the sky, and he watches the earth. One cannot be sure of the unknown or even of the known, and he is no fool, this wanderer clad in bark and in humble thought.

Flickering flame from a single candle cast its pale light over the cluttered desk and tired eyes of the worn looking man sitting alone in the small office.  What could only be described as a small mountain of papers lay about him in various stacks and leaning towers.  Tax reports, applications, hate mail, bills, everything a budding politician and weary military leader could ever want to never see again.

Elrin rubbed his eyes slowly after placing his pen back in the ink well and leaned his chair back against the wall, a snap of his fingers lighting the crumpled cigarette held crookedly in his lips.

He traced the line of a wicked scar curving its way up his arm and exhaled slowly.

They never said this would be easy.

((Title means "A warrior" taken from Windir's album.  Just couldn't think of anything else to title this))

"I SAID that Archmage Alturus would like to speak with you right a--aahhck!" Apprentice Tasserel's voice trailed off into an odd little squeak as Amara's armored thumb pressed slowly into his windpipe.

"This," the warrior said, holding the smaller man beside him by the neck without looking up, "is a beer. Specifically, a lager."

Amara Niall sipped his beer before glancing at the man he held. He eased his thumb up, allowing the apprentice to gasp for breath, then continued to educate the young mage. "Dwarves prefer ale, and Stormwind has always been a town for wines, but this is a good old-fashioned Lordaeron-brewed lager. It was a gift from the pretty white-haired lady over there, who happens to be a bronze drake, because she appreciates my help from time to time."

I'm flyin'…

Storm, get me home.

Rain in Zangarmarsh. I cannae reach me hat. Stings me eyes. Faster, Storm…

I'm fallin'...

I'm fallin' away from th' world…