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VI
The grass, heavy with rain, rose past my knees and soaked my trousers. Fang disappeared entirely into it, and the grass waving as he moved through it was all I had to follow.
The grass thinned out and a low, wooden fence, well-maintained and painted black, appeared ahead of us and to the west. I recognized it: it was Bloodhoof’s graveyard, a wide, shallow dell sunken into the earth, full of small stones, each carved with the name of the tauren whose ashes were buried beneath it, each poking out of a tuft of lush, untrodden grass. They were laid down by family, the stones forming lines from near us and to the south, where our fathers and mothers were buried, past us and away to the north, back in time, through the centuries to when our ancestors had ceased their migration and become a sedentary people.
Fang moved to the edge of the fence and stopped. He stared down into the barrow dell, blinking slowly. I stood silently, watching him through the mist. “She’s almost here,” he said, quietly, into the gentle hiss of the rain.
“Who?” I said, dreading the answer.
He turned his head. I followed his gaze south, towards the graveyard’s gate. A figure, bent nearly double, passed into the graveyard from the mist beyond, moving towards the side opposite us. Sudden tears welled up in my eyes: the shuffle was slower and more stooped than I remembered, but I had recognized the figure. It was my mother.
I emitted a stifled a cry, torn between running to her, or away, but certain I had to do one or the other. "Wait," said Fang, a firm fin on my arm.
I wrenched it away. "Why?" I choked.
"Just wait," he said simply, eyes locked on the figure in the mist.
I stared at him, then back at my mother. The fear and doubt which had shadowed me since I had entered my homeland intensified, and I stared dumbly as she knelt at a gravestone. It was my father's. He’d died, when I was still a calf. She’d spent hours a day like that, at a small stone with his name carved in it, kneeling silently or speaking quietly, to him, to herself, possibly to no one at all; I'd never known. I'd resented it. He had abandoned us - let her come spend her hours with me, who was still alive, I’d thought. My stomachs twisted, and tears welled in my eyes again.
Soon, she rose to her feet again. She turned, south, and moved a gravestone down, towards the present, before kneeling again. I cocked my head at it. One stone south of my father? Had he had another child? Impossible, I thought.
After another moment, she stood, and turned, and shuffled slowly out of the graveyard.
I whirled on the murloc. “Why?” I cried. “Why did you stop me?”
He looked calmly up at me. “You can run, Horse,” he said, “to her or away. But not yet. If you chose now, you’ll miss everything I have to tell you. Your choice may not be the right one.”
I stared at him. No one had ever called me by my Common name in this place.
Then I whirled about, unheeding and cursing the murloc in my mind, and ran towards the graveyard’s southern gate. I bowed my head as I entered. I slowed, deferentially, and walked quietly towards the graves at which my mother had knelt. Their carved names were hidden in their tufts of achingly green grass. I stopped at my father’s. Ceta, it read – Hawk, in Taurahe. I’m sorry, I thought to him. I’m sorry I ran away.
Fang had trailed after me. “You’re not allowed in here,” I growled dangerously.
He looked impassively up at me, standing next to the other gravestone. “Horse,” he said.
I choked up again. “No one here calls me that in Common,” I whispered hoarsely, eyes narrowed at him, viciously wishing him away.
He stared at me, mouth clamped shut, his red eyes blinking impassively, his body swelling and subsiding as he breathed. I held his gaze challengingly, overwhelmed but forcing myself not to cry.
After a moment, he opened his toothy mouth again. “In order to live your life," he intoned softly, "you must first lose it." I cocked my head at him. He pointed down to the stone at his feet, the second one my mother had knelt at.
I knelt at it in turn, parting its tuft of soft grass and looking. My breath caught in my throat.
"Oh," I breathed.
Tashunke, it said. Horse.
I stared at the word in silent shock. Hokato, I thought – my old mentor, the only one who’d known that I’d run away. He must have lied to her, to everyone. Anger flashed through me.
“She has peace,” said Fang after a moment. “You should know that, at least.”
“Peace!” I cried, standing bolt up. “You wanted me to wait to run to her so you could tell me she thinks I’m dead?”
Fang smirked. “I mean, that’s not the only thing,” he said easily.
I stared dumbly at him for a moment. Months and continents and promises later, the murloc was toying with my curiosity again.
Successfully. I sighed. “Did you bring Varimathras back to unite the world?” I said into the silence.
“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” said the murloc. “But, yeah.”
The thick, misting rain had tapered off, but the mist itself remained, cloaking the world outside the barrow dell.
“How’d you know I’d come back here? You were ahead of me on the road.”
Fang smiled. “How could you not? I know you that well, at least.”
“That well from the last few months,” I said, “most of which I spent asleep?” I smiled in spite of myself.
“Heh,” said Fang, without answering my question. “Well,” he continued, “if you figured out Varimathras, you probably got the big one too.”
I looked back up at him. “The big one?” I said. Nemesis? They were forcing me to help them? That didn’t seem big enough. I shook my head.
Fang smiled. “What are the two things you want most in the world?” he said patiently.
“Home,” I said, unhesitatingly. It had been, ever since I’d run away from it. I’d almost had it in Storm City. I’d run from Orcmar because I hadn’t had it there. I’d run from here… I stared down at my father’s smooth gravestone, gritting my teeth and suppressing the sudden but familiar sense of shame.
“What’s the other?” said the murloc.
I had only recently found out, I thought. With the help of a hyperactive eyepatched gnome. “I want,” I said slowly, “to be a hero.” I paused. Not exactly. “Not, like, a hero to my people or anything… not just to the Tauren or to Orcmar or Storm City. I want to be a hero of Az. I want to bring Az together,” I finished certainly. “I want to unite the world.” As I said it, I felt it burn suddenly, intensely in my chest and my mind, eclipsing the shame.
Fang nodded. “What if I told you I could give you the second one,” he said quietly, “but that you’d have to give up the first one?”
I grimaced. “You want me to help you,” I said. “With whatever you’re doing with Varimathras.”
Fang shook his head slowly. “Not just help us,” he said, “not just with that. We want you to join us, to become one of us.”
I went rigid. I stared across at the murloc. “You mean,” I said, “be an agent. Like you.”
In all that time, all that way across the span of the known world, it had never occurred to me that they would want me to join them. Help them out – be their fall boy – something, I’d been sure, but not join them.
“Yup,” said Fang.
“Wow,” I said.
“You have no idea,” muttered the murloc.
I blinked. Wow. “Do I have to decide right now?”
Fang laughed. “I wouldn’t let you if you tried,” he said. “You haven’t heard the half of it yet.”
He looked past me, to the north. There was a distant look in his eyes. I stared back at him, my mind reeling. That explained what they had been testing me for, back in Lordaeron, I thought. I shivered.
“Let’s walk,” he said finally, and turned.
We walked north, on opposite sides of my family’s line of gravestones. There were too many questions whirling about in my head. I flashed back suddenly to the mansion in Storm City, so many miles ago. I recalled the same feeling, wondering whether the Argent Dawn was real. It seemed laughable now – I’d been desperately confused about such small things.
“No questions?” said Fang.
“Millions,” I said truthfully. “I just can’t think of which one to ask first.”
Fang smiled toothily. “How about that.”
I shook my head and looked across at him. “In Storm City,” I began, “we knew what it meant that you worked for the Law. You told us about the laws it made, and you listened to us complain about them.” Fang smiled humorlessly. “Since then,” I continued, “all I know about working for the Law is that you run around, do inexplicable things, and don’t tell me anything.”
Fang’s unhappy smile turned into a grin. “Yeah,” he said, “sorry about that. Actually, not at all, because it was fun as all hell.” I glowered.
“Working for the Law,” he continued slowly and soberly, “means moving nations. It means knowing the most powerful people in the world, and knowing secretly that you’re more powerful than they are. They all lead their little lives being important to their little in-crowds, but none of them,” and he stared intensely up at me, “none of them create history.”
I gaped at him. “What does that even mean?” I said after a moment.
He laughed shortly. “Right now, it means trailing your sorry tail around Kali making sure you don’t get killed. More generally, though, It means that the world is your home. Its people are your people. When you think, when you move, when you scheme and plot and advise and negotiate, you’re doing it for them.”
“For the people of Az,” I breathed.
“You got it,” said Fang.
“Wow,” I said.
We had come far down through the centuries of my ancestors. The graveyard’s northern fence was visible ahead in the mist – the first Tauren to be burned and buried. Beyond it was the more misty past. When we had been migratory, we built platforms to set our dead upon, face to the sky so their souls would know which way to go.
We stopped walking. Fang looked down at the nearest gravestone, and something like a look of affection passed over his blue face. Then he looked upwards, into the thinning mist, and inhaled deeply. “I love this place,” he said.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
He smiled. “I sure have,” he said. “Whenever I took a break from Storm City. It was sort of my second assignment.”
“You didn’t take any breaks while I was in Storm City!” I said. “It was legendary how much you worked.”
He laughed. “I didn’t have to, by then,” he said. “By then, you’d come to me.”
I cocked my head at him slowly. “What did I have to do with it?” I said.
Fang inhaled, staring intently at me. Then he looked off distantly, away south, down past my ancestors. “Everything,” he said quietly. “I watched you at school, and I watched you training to shift shapes. I listened at the window to your mother crying out as she passed you into the world.” He locked his red eyes back on me. “I watched your mother and father fall in love,” he said quietly. “They almost didn’t, but I saved it. I knew both of your grandfathers. I’ve been coming here, once every ten years, since before your great great grandfathers were born.”
I stared. “How old are you?” I breathed.
He smiled thinly, and looked down. “Older than I should be, at least,” he muttered. He looked back up. “Working for the Law?” he said. “It means, starting today, and for as long as it pleases the Law, you stop aging. You don’t get older, and you don’t worry about dying. The Law doesn’t lose its agents. It holds onto them and waits, years, centuries, until it decides to let them go.”
It was impossible. Completely implausible, unrealistic and stupid. “That’s crap,” I said.
“No kidding?” he said. “Who ran Storm City before me? Who preceded the Tooth? Or the Whelp in Orcmar? Nobody,” he answered firmly. “That’s who. I ran that damn place for five hundred years.”
It was true. There had never been any talk, any knowledge of a pre-Tooth, or a pre-Whelp. They had simply always been there.
I stared at him. “You’re immortal,” I said disbelievingly.
“Not quite,” Fang replied. “But I am, by far, the oldest murloc on Az.” He inhaled, swelling his body, and then breathed out, staring off into the mist again. He looked back up at me. “You wanna know what it means to work for the Law?” he said. “It means being lonely. It means being knowing that your whole family, all of your friends, are growing old and dying, and it means forgetting them, because why not? Their great great great grandchildren don’t even remember them.” He looked up at me and laughed, but there was a faint note of desperation in it. “I mean, I’m a murloc!” he said, spreading his fins. “My greatest joy in the world is to get together with my entire family, and run at something and kill it!” He looked down and sighed. “But my family is dead. Everyone I knew has been dead for centuries.”
I shuffled my hooves. “Is this supposed to convince me?” I said awkwardly.
“No,” he said. He glanced back up at me. “It’s supposed to let you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. We owe you that, at least.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the desperation had gone, replaced with a quiet sadness. “It’s a trade,” he said firmly. “You give up everything you’re close to, but in return, you get the world.”
The mist began condensing into rain again.
I inhaled slowly. “Why did you come and watch me?” I said. “Why not M? She would have fit in better.”
Fang frowned, and looked down at the ground. “Katy doesn’t come to this place,” he said quietly. He pointed to the gravestone at his feet.
I knelt and parted the stone’s grass. Its carved name read, Suyeta. I looked up at Fang. “This is Old Taurahe,” I said.
Fang nodded. “It means ‘Anointed One,’” he replied. “Of course, it’s just a name, no more than ‘Horse’.” He smiled. “We make fun of her for it sometimes.”
I stood up. “This is Katy M’s grave?” I motioned away south with my head. “It’s got to be….” I trailed off, counting generations in my head.
“…seven centuries old,” finished Fang.
“Wow,” I said. Then, the most obvious question, perhaps the most important: “Why me?”
“No idea,” answered Fang casually. “Because the Law said so.”
“Oh.” I inhaled deeply, then let the air hiss out of my lungs. “This is too big,” I said. “Every time I think I have a handle on this whole thing, it gets bigger. And now this, this waiting for me to be born thing, and living forever-ish, and being some kind of immortal super-agent while everyone you know grows old and dies?”
“Oh, not quite everyone,” said Fang. “Pets are sort of exempt from that. The Law keeps them around too, like Katy’s whelpling.”
“She said she found Screech twenty years ago!” I protested.
Fang hiss-laughed. “She’s been telling people that for seven hundred years,” he replied. “Anyway, I’m just saying so you know. That cat of yours, you’ll have him forever too.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yup,” said Fang.
We stared at each other for a moment. There was the shadow of a grin on his face.
“You can decide now,” he said lightly.
I looked down at Suyeta’s gravestone. I looked south, into the mist, to where my own stone lay. I looked down at the lonely murloc and shook my head. A battle was brewing inside me, tearing me between duties, between guilts, between guilt and tremendous, irrepressible excitement, the need to find out what it was all about, to be part of it. Then the guilt regained the upper hand, and my stomachs clenched, and the murloc’s two red eyes were staring up at me, waiting for an answer. Yes! I thought. Then, Never!, and then, before I quite knew what I was doing, I had sprinted for the north fence, vaulted over it, horsed up and galloped off across the great green mist-shrouded plains.
"Go on, run away, RUN!" shouted Fang after me, his voice fading with the distance and the falling hush of the rain. “If it's not the last time you run away,” I thought I heard him say, “then there won't ever be a last time.”
VII
(Discuss chapter)
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