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XI
I dreamed.
I walked through a pristine pine-needle forest. The path I walked on was beaten down by hooves, not feet – deer walked here. The air smelled sweet, as though a machine had never churned out fumes, as though the only fires that had ever darkened the skies had been started by lightning, and washed away by thunderstorms.
The forest thinned, and the path wound through a field full of great red and black flowers, the likes of which I had never seen. Their powerful scent intoxicated me, and for a moment my head swam and my eyes slid shut.
When I opened them, a small red squirrel sat in front of me, pert on its back legs and staring up at me. It tipped its tiny head quizzically, and then scampered off into the field. I followed it, dashing between the enormous, overpowering flowers, losing the tiny creature and finding it again, until the flowers ended abruptly and I found myself at the edge of a flat, dark space. The red squirrel sat on his back legs again, staring intently up at me, and in the darkness there were others – phalanxes of small red squirrels, staring intently at me, and their tiny intense eyes began to glow green. Dusk fell – the light faded – and the green eyes became disembodied green pinpricks of light, arrayed in pairs, then in circles and lines – a web, I thought. I stepped closer to look, but as I did, it bounced back, receding into the thick darkness. The closer I pushed, the farther away the web got – until it had dissolved back into a dim, green haze. The smell of the flowers returned, and in a moment they had overpowered me – my vision swam, and I was surrounded by – permeated by – one with – a great, opaque, infinite expanse of greenness.
I breathed easy. Moods, feelings, flowed through me – no thoughts, though – there was ease, and contentedness, and goodness and beauty – and then, at first almost imperceptibly, building behind the pervasive feeling of peace came its opposite, a whisper of discontent. I turned and looked, and a minute spark of sharp green light glowed in the mist. I moved toward it, and the mist parted ahead of me and the discontent grew to anger – and the light, no longer a pinprick, now blazed in front of me and around me and then inundated me with a howling, soul-filling, agonizingly pure rage. I screamed with it, as loud as I could, and then louder, and then—
I awoke. My fists were clenched. My breath was coming in short, painful bursts. I was cold.
Off to the east, the sun had risen a few degrees above the distant wall of mist. The sky was an early-morning blue and cloudless. Teldrassil’s canopy, so terrifyingly steep in the night’s darkness, sloped away gently to the south. I was still hungry.
“Horse,” whispered a familiar voice in my ear. “Horse, this is the voice of nature.”
I turned, and hovering just over my shoulder was the fierce, curved black beak of Tamilin the hippogryph.
“The voice of naaaaaature,” he repeated slyly, “liiiiisten for me!” I swatted grouchily at his beak, and he jerked his head up. “Hi,” he said cheerily. “Bad dream?”
It hadn’t been bad, exactly… but it certainly hadn’t been good. “Yeah,” I said, “there were squirrels. What are you doing here?” I stood and turned towards the magnificent beast.
“I’m flying you east,” he said. “Katy M tells me you’re going to Lordaeron, and I haven’t got anything better to do right now than taxi your butt around, other than, you know, clean my horns, or eat gravel.” The hippogryph winked at me. I smiled.
“When do we leave?” I said. “I’m starving.”
“Right now,” replied the hippogryph. He lifted his front claw, and dexterously extended a small brown sack to me. I took it and tied it to my belt. It was bulging. “M sends her regards, and enough food for the journey – for you, at least. I, of course, have to catch fish or something.” The hippogryph turned his wide, feathered flank towards me and gestured with his head. “Hop on and get comfortable,” he said. “It’s going to be a long, cold trip.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m honored,” I added, unsure of hippogryph-mounting etiquette.
The fleshy corners of Tamilin’s beak curled up into a smile. “Yeah, no problem,” he said. “M says carry you safe across the Great Sea, and that’s what I’m gonna do.” He gestured with his head again, and I clambered aboard his broad back. “Hold on tight,” he said over his shoulder. “I don’t have a proper runway, so this is going to be a little bumpy.”
“Oh good,” I muttered, my pre-flight jitters suddenly returning full-force as I imagined what an ungainly leap off the top of a world-tree was going to feel like.
Then my ride bucked, took two steps and lunged off the edge of the small green platform. We lurched out over empty space, and his wings pumped down with all their might. We rose for a moment, but as his wings pulled together and then up for another stroke, we dipped, and with a nasty jolt and a cry from me, he kicked his back hooves downward at the branches of the rapidly-rising tree. Another beat later and we were airborne – the tree rose behind us, the the platform and its bush receding to a speck, and Tamilin’s wings bore us out over the ocean. I gulped.
Then we caught a thermal, and rose high – I whooped, and Tamilin grinned and let loose a powerful eagle’s cry that echoed on the wind. He grinned at me over his shoulder. “It never gets old!” he yelled back at me. We rose up over the treetop, and the Drassi’n stretched out below us, its fountains glittering in the morning light. The Archdruid’s tree rose at its center, green and beautiful, its white stairways wrapping its trunk like garlands. Dark-skinned figures pointed up from the avenues at us and waved. Tamilin let out another fierce cry and then banked, and we rose in the sky. Minutes later, as I watched the great twisted tree fade into the distance, we passed into the thick mist which guarded Teldrassil’s shameful secrets. Another minute in the mist and the sun appeared ahead of us, and we had passed out of the world of the night-elves and back into the world of the rest of us.
I pulled open the bag that Tamilin had given me. It was full, brimming with flat breads and meats crusted in fruit-sugar. I pulled a leg bone out and took a bite. It was delicious, and I began to eat it ravenously – too ravenously, as it turned out, and I dropped it. It bounced off Tamilin’s feathered flank, and I watched in despair as it plummeted through the air towards the ocean far below.
“How bad do you want it?” called Tamilin over his shoulder.
“Bad!” I cried, watching my breakfast fall until it was almost too small to see. Before the full implications of my response had dawned on me, Tamilin gleefully yelled, “Hang on!”, folded his wings, and dove. I screamed at the top of my lungs for what seemed like minutes but was surely only seconds, clutching the hippogryph’s feathers in panic. The broad, glittering ocean rose, at first slowly and then faster as we drew closer, and the half-eaten chunk of meat after which we were diving drifted lazily into view. “NOT THIS BAD!” I yelled.
“Whatever you say,” said the hippogryph, and with a careless shift of his wings he snatched the meat out of mid-air and swallowed it. Hey, I thought, that was mine.
We pulled up, and my stomachs dropped precariously into my bowels. We leveled out, drifting east on the breeze, still a hundred feet above the gentle waves. One at a time, I unclenched my fingers from Tamilin’s feathers. My eyes were wide, and my breath was still short.
“Plenty more meat where that came from, right?” said Tamilin sympathetically. “It was delicious, though.”
“Can we do that again?” I breathed.
Tamilin screech-laughed. “You’ve caught the bug,” he said. “And hell yeah we can do it again!”
The hippogryph angled his wings and flapped mightily, pulling us laboriously up through the sky, up a thousand, then thousands of feet to where the wind bit painfully. I looked down, and for a moment regretted my request, but only for a moment – the fear turned naturally into exhilaration now.
“Toss another piece of meat for me!” called Tamilin over his shoulder.
I pulled a small slab of ham out of the brown sack, grasped it like a ball and threw it forward, over the hippogryph’s head. He turned a yellow eye towards me and grinned. “Sucker,” he said.
“Go!” I cried, motioning forward, “don’t lose it!”
And he tucked his wings, and I grabbed onto his feathers and inhaled as deep as I could, and we dove.
* * *
We winged east. Steep, rocky cliffs passed us slowly on the right, and I lazily finished breakfast.
“So how far back do you and M go?” I asked, through the last mouthful of thick oat-bread.
“Way back,” he answered casually. “She saved my life when I was a kid. She does that, you know?”
“I guess,” I said. She’d never done anything with my life but complicate it. “What’d you do that you needed saving?”
“I don’t really like to talk about it,” he responded. Oh, I thought. He paused for a beat, but as I cast about for a way to gracefully change the subject, he continued: “I was out over some waters away far to the south one day, teaching myself to fish, and I saw a big boat belching black smoke out the top. Goblin fishing boat, it turns out, but of course I had no idea what a goblin was at the time. Anyway, behind the boat the water was writhing, like all the water had just up and turned into fish! And there’s seagulls flying over it, diving down and having a feast, and I decide I want some.
“So I swing down and grab some. It’s the easiest fishing I’ve ever done – they’re just flopping about waiting to be caught. The goblins start shouting at me, but then all of a sudden they go silent – I should have worried – and there’s this bang, and then a weighted net wraps around me and I fall down into the water. It was freezing.” The hippogryph glanced over his shoulder to see if I was listening. I was.
“So they haul in their catch,” he continued, “and after they finish sorting it and throwing half of it back into the water like they do, they pull me up on deck, tie my wings down and start doing ridiculous things like laughing at me and hitting me with fish, like that’s supposed to hurt. I wasn’t scared or anything, though. Not until they started stabbing at me with knives and harpoons,” he added darkly. “I was still learning Common, so I couldn’t tell half of what they were saying, and I’m hollering in Darnassian because they’re stabbing me and clearly about to eat me for lunch or something, and suddenly there’s this green flash and some of the goblins get knocked overboard, and there’s this bull I’ve never met in my life standing there looking pissed, and the goblins are panicking because they can’t figure out how he got on the boat. He comes over and unties me and puts his hands on me and heals all the stab-wounds, and I tell him to hop on my back and I’ll fly him to land. He says he’s honored, informs me curtly that he’s a she, and then hops on. She’s big because she’s a bull, and I’m small because I’m still a kid, but I manage to get us off the boat. M shoots some more green from her hands, and we fly off. It was awesome. The goblins were hopping mad, those that were still on their feet.” He grinned over his shoulder.
“Good,” I grunted.
“Don’t like ‘em either?”
“One tried to saw my legs off,” I answered. “Did you make it to land with M on your back?”
“Nah,” he answered. “I start huffing and puffing, and she tells me not to worry. Then she jumps off my back, and as she’s falling, she turns into this big crow! And we fly around and have a grand old time, and we’ve been friends ever since. Plus, she saved my life, so I help her out whenever I can.” He nodded, signifying the end of his story.
“M can turn into a crow?” I said. Neat, I thought. Then I remembered the two big black birds that had eased my fall from the crystal spike, when M had appeared moments later to put me back to sleep. She’d saved my life, I thought. Sort of. I wondered idly who the other bird had been.
“You can turn into stuff too, right?” said Tamilin into my reverie. “I know you’re in training, that’s why I’m hauling you across the ocean like this.”
“I can, yeah,” I said. “I can’t turn into a crow, though. That’s awesome. You have any idea where we’re going?” I added as an afterthought. “All I know is there’s a shipwreck somewhere off the coast of Lordaeron.”
“M gave me really good directions,” said the hippogryph. “I can get you right to it. You gotta do the swimming yourself, though.”
I smiled. “You know all about the trip?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” replied Tamilin. “I know all about you druid types, running around and twisting life’s energies to do your bidding.”
“Woah,” I said defensively. “What’s that about? I spent all last night learning how important it was to let those energies guide me.”
“No you didn’t,” he said, his voice just a little hardened. “Listen, I don’t mean nothing by it, but you spent all night learning how to use that energy, to manipulate it. Where I come from, we don’t use it – we protect it, and we try to do right by it. I’m grateful that Katy M saved my life with nature’s wrath, but if she shot that green light at the good guys, it’d hurt them just as much as it did to the goblins.”
“Not if the good guys know their place in life, right?” I replied, hesitantly applying my new dogma.
Tamilin nodded. “True,” he said. “I’m pretty centered, for example. Shoot that green light at me and you’ll get a green-tinted, well-lit hippogryph. Unless you shoot more than I can handle, of course.”
“How much is that?” I said.
“A lot,” grinned the hippogryph. “Like I said, I’m pretty centered – I was raised in Moonglade, remember. And the stuff only works against us sentients. If you shoot it at a grizzly bear, you’ll get a green-tinted, well-lit, very angry grizzly bear.”
I smiled, my faith in my new dogma restored. Nature hurts itself all the time – lion eats gazelle – but we can’t make nature do unnatural things to itself. “That’s good,” I said.
“Unless you’re being attacked by a grizzly bear, I guess,” said the hippogryph.
The sun had been rising as we talked. I glanced up at it, then at the dim sliver of a white moon overhead. Elune, I thought, the mother of us all. The missing mother, apparently.
“What’s life magic about?” I said thoughtfully. “How is it different than normal magic?”
“Normal magic?” said the hippogryph. “I haven’t studied much, but I don’t think there is such a thing as normal magic. Magic is just energy that some people learn to use, right? There’s all different kinds of that energy, and most of them just come from the world around us.”
“Huh,” I said. I thought back. “I’ve seen fireballs… and flying skulls… and there’s the Light, and there’s life magic….”
“Yeah,” said Tamilin, “like that. Life energy’s always there. You’re only special because you know how to do things with it. That’s what magic is, right? Something that most folks don’t know how to do.”
I laughed. “That takes some of the mystery out of it.”
“Says the guy who’s flying across the world to get to learn the first, tiniest, easiest part of being a druid,” answered Tamilin, turning a yellow eye at me and winking.
* * *
Around midday, I pulled out my brown sack again and ate lunch. I offered a piece of meat to Tamilin, but he declined. “No more,” he said. “You’ll need it all for the journey.”
I looked in the bag. “There’s two or three days of food in here!” I said.
“Is that all?” said the hippogryph seriously. “You’ll want to stretch it out, then. Even if I fly high between meals and sleep on the wing, it’s still a week-long journey.”
“Ouch,” I said. “You can fly for a week with no rest?”
“Load me up and call me an albatross,” grinned the bird.
“Well thanks again for the ride,” I grunted in reply.
I’d already crossed the Great Sea twice in my life – more than most people would ever cross it in theirs, I thought. The last time, I’d been asleep on a rickety boat for weeks or months. The first time, I’d been stowed away on a goblin airship, and in the dark and with no knowledge of our route, I’d had no sense of how long it had taken. Only – a long, hot, cramped time. I had the feeling that this trip would be exactly the opposite.
We alit on a rock outcropping on one of the impossibly high cliffs which lined the north coast of Kali. Tamilin stretched gracefully, and advised me to do the same – “You won’t have a bull on your back,” he said, “but you will be sitting in the same position for a week.” Then I remounted, and we leapt off the cliff and banked right. He pointed his beak away from the afternoon sun, and we winged off over the Great Sea.
XII
(Discuss chapter)
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