My head swam, but the wind had picked up while I was out, and it bit through my travel jerkin and quickly focused my mind and my vision. I shivered and got to my feet.
I looked down. A tight circle of heavily-trampled grass surrounded where I’d fallen, as though whoever had saved me had kept vigil until I’d awoken.
It had been the bull and the murloc, I thought certainly. The memory of their voices swimming about me as I slowly regained consciousness floated up like a dim dream, but the voices had been unmistakable. I had run, but I couldn’t get away from them, I thought bitterly. I swore out loud.
But they’d saved me, hadn’t they? From the black-clad assassin.
I shook my head. The assassin, the human I’d caught the fleetingest glimpse of before I’d passed out, had worn a deep, blood-red arm band. I’d spent years in Storm City working for a group whose signature color was the same. Fang, Madoran, everyone I’d talked to since leaving Storm City had seemed to think that the Resurrection was a passing fad, a laughable group destined to extinction. It was just a red arm-band, I thought. Surely lots of people like red. For a lack of sensible answers, I shrugged it, and the fact that he’d known my name, off.
A trail of trampled grass, where the assassin had run off followed by the hulking Katy M, led uphill, into the west. Dully hoping for answers, I set off along it.
I crested the shallow ridge. The path of trampled grass continued dimly, ahead of me, out onto Kali’s wide, barren brown grasslands. A few scraggly trees dotted the wide plain. To the south rose a line of thorn-infested hills, and to the north a few lonely buttes stood against the gray sky. I hadn’t seen this dull view, this land, in years. My flight from my homeland to Orcmar had been long and labored – I had spent months at a time wandering the barrens, and the cold, hungry, lonely nights I’d spent under the stars were a burden on my memory. As I stepped out across the plain, my mind wandered to my cat, asleep in his carrier and tucked away in my pack. At least this time I wouldn’t be completely alone.
The trail dimmed and veered north, onto the cobblestone road, where it disappeared entirely. I swore. I stood in the road for a moment, looking back over my shoulder and forwards to where it turned and disappeared into the grass and the distance. Despite the danger, despite a shadowy someone out there that seemed to want me dead, something else was pulling me forward, west, and without a destination, I set hoof in front of hoof and hiked on.
Unbidden, the names of groups that could possibly want me dead began ticking themselves off in my head. The Resurrection, for abandoning them. Varimathras, for senselessly standing up to him. The Black Dragons of Orcmar, the gang whose bounty hunters I had successfully evaded in Lordaeron (I shivered), and to which I still owed a great pile of money. I was back on their continent again, I thought – their turf. Likewise Thrall’s Revenge, my old gang of misguided orcs. That worthless group had last seen me leaving their hall with their leader and a sack of coins, and I could only imagine what they’d thought when they’d come upon his body, coinless, at the top of the slum canyon cliffs. I could only imagine because I hadn’t stuck around to found out.
The Forsaken, I thought. The Argent Dawn. I’d failed them, catastrophically, and sending someone to slit my throat seemed the kindest fate they could wish on me. I wondered if they knew, though. Rhy’s city of the dead had been silent and defeated when I’d turned and run for the black book. I wondered idly what they had found when they awoke.
So many enemies I’d made, with no malice towards anyone! I just want to live my life, I thought, to live and let live. A bit too late for that, though, isn’t it?
I hiked on, for hours. The chilled north wind came in gusts, and idle snowflakes continued to drift down from the dreary sky. The sky began to darken as I walked. I was hungry, and weary, but I was hoping against dim, irrational hope to find a roof with a warm bed to spend the night.
The night fell slowly about me with no sign of civilization in view. The small farms which periodically dotted the grasslands had either been destroyed by marauders or were hiding their lights in fear of the same. The north wind picked up, whistling lonesomely across the plain. It drove the clouds ahead of it, and soon a few bright stars shown overhead and moonlight from the waxing moon streamed from behind me. I marched on, stoically.
Finally, on the horizon to the south and west, a faint light flickered, appearing and disappearing as I walked. I veered recklessly off the road, onto the night-fallen savannah, and marched towards it.
I drew closer to the flickering light. A few buildings rose around me, then more, with rough dirt roads and streets between them. They were abandoned – some of them, burned or battered to the ground – and I marched on, fearful of the shadows.
This was Crossroads, a bustling trade town along the north-south Kali Turnpike. The Turnpike was a toll road, periodically blocked by thick pikes, which would be turned aside only after you paid your due to the pike’s owner. Crossroads itself, it seemed, bustled no longer.
I had passed through Crossroads on my way to Orcmar, and I remembered it well: suburbs sprawling out into the barrens from its distinctive central square, a wide plaza atop a shallow plateau, a cluster of sturdy buildings surrounded by a high wall of canvas, designed to protect the square from the harsh winter winds. Crossroads the town seemed dead and deserted, but its central square, ahead of me in the night, was the source of the flickering light I had seen.
As I drew closer, the devastation increased. Houses had been demolished wholesale, and plucked clean of usable lumber. There were few trees in these barren grasslands, and so any building project might seek raw materials where it could, but I wondered what new construction had taken place in these dark days.
The light I’d seen resolved itself into torches, flickering back and forth in the dim moonlight. The floating torches resolved themselves into guards, a few thick-necked orcs and gangly trolls pacing about outside the canvas walls of Crossroads’ plaza. The canvas had been augmented: great thickets of wooden spikes faced menacingly outwards, to abet the town’s defense. That explained the missing lumber, I thought.
I approached a gap in the spikes. A torch-lit guard stood there, a muscular, olive-green orc with thick, hardened leather armor. “Hallo!” I called to him.
He hefted a heavy wooden mace, and peered out into the darkness, locating me. “Who’s there?” he called gruffly.
“A traveler looking for a bite and a bed,” I called back.
“No food for strangers,” he growled.
Damnit, I thought. I was getting really hungry. “What about a bed?”
The orc paused for a moment. “Step forward,” he ordered.
I stepped forward into the torchlight. The orc looked me over.
“You look harmless,” he said, and waved me through. Hey, I thought grumpily.
I passed through a break in the canvas wall, and into the Crossroads plaza. A dark, narrow, cobbled path ran inward, between a pair of high, stone buildings, lined with dead electric lights. I followed it. It opened up quickly into the plaza proper, a wide packed-dirt square lined with shops and houses and offices, and studded with dead streetlamps and live, sputtering torches. A pair of guards paced, and a few locals hurried from hither to thither, hunched against the night chill.
The town’s inn was the building to my right, and I turned towards it. A big, hand-painted sign hung on a sheet above the door: “NO FOOD,” it read, in Common. I pushed open the thick wooden door, and stepped inside.
The sound and smell of people and the orange light of a crackling fireplace overwhelmed me for a moment. The room into which I had stepped was filled with folk, sitting at tables and chatting noisily: orcs, trolls, a few cows and bulls, a few humans, and, in the far corner, an orange-bearded dwarf sitting alone across from an empty chair, busily quaffing a pint of ale. The bartender, a burly human, was doing a rollicking business. A doorway at the back of the room opened up onto a narrow, ascending stairway.
In front of me was a low, wooden desk manned by an old orc woman. She peered imperiously at me from behind a pair of spectacles. I stepped up to the desk.
“Room?” croaked the old woman.
“Please,” I replied.
She peered down at the book open in front of her. “How long?”
“Just the night,” I said.
She glanced up at me. The room had fallen suddenly quiet. “Attack gnome, or no?” she croaked.
“What?” I said dully.
There came a terrific, high-pitched battle yell from behind me, and I felt something land on and cling to my back. I whirled around uselessly, trying to reach it as it clambered about on my backpack. The room erupted in drunken laughter. The old orc woman smirked.
I pulled my mace off my belt and began whacking at my backpack with it. There was a sound of cloth tearing, and then the weight dropped to the ground. I snorted in rage and whirled about, and a pert young gnome stood, with spiky blonde hair and a brown eye-patch, a cherubic smile on her peachy face and a familiar small brown bag clutched in her tiny fist. “Got your purse!” squeaked the gnome, and then, to the laughter and applause of the room at large, she turned and dove under a table and out of sight.
IV
(Discuss chapter)
