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XI
“Go get it,” said Fang. I stood at the edge of an
enormous star-field. There was a thing, a glowing blue thing, on the far
side of the vast, dark beyond, which the Murloc was willing me to fight
to, but I wasn’t sure. My mother stood behind me, silent, smiling
slightly. I wanted to run back to her. Fang grabbed me, and whispered,
“Creditors,” into my ear, before hurling me off the ledge. I flew out,
into space: stars, and worlds, and ancient and modern civilizations
hurled by me too fast to see. I tumbled, hoof over head, towards the
blue glow, the thing I needed more than anything else. I bounced,
suddenly, and looking back, it was a metallic wall that I had bounced
off of. As I fell farther back, I looked up, and up, and the wall had a
face, and arms, and legs: the huge metal humanoid spoke, and said, “Help
or hinder; fate or free will; the choice, ironically, is yours.” I fell
away from it, and there were more, hundreds and thousands of them
standing in formation, marching inexorably towards me. The closest one
suddenly gripped his chest, clawed at his face, and burst into spectral
flame. He screamed a terrifying, soul-chilling scream at me, hurtling
through life, intent on ending me, and everything. I cowered, and
suddenly a broad, furry, three-fingered hand snatched me bodily away.
Katy M held me in the palm of her hand, smiling down at me. “He’s
coming,” she said darkly, “but I got your back, kiddo.” And then, with
perfect benevolence, she clapped her enormous hands together, and I
died.
I jerked awake, safe in my too-short dwarven bed,
covered in sweat, and profoundly puzzled. I pulled the covers off, and
stared up into the near-pitch blackness.
The clock on the bed stand gave off a faint glow. It
was five in the morning. I’d slept for more than twelve hours. As the
ambivalent terror from my dream wore off, pleasant drowsiness took over.
For a moment, questions whirled in my head, fighting for attention, but
as I settled my body back into the mattress, I began drifting pleasantly
back into sleep.
“RISE AND SHINE!” Madoran the dwarf broke my door
open and threw on the light-switch.
“I hate you,” I muttered.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, after dressing, splashing
water on my face, and breakfasting with M and Madoran, I stood at the
hill-encampment’s apex, facing an enormous griffin.
“If she doesn’t trust ye,” said the flightmaster
dwarf, “she’ll drop you off at 2,000 feet. That’s not something you
recover from in a weekend. If she does like ye, though, nothin’ short o’
jumpin’ll make you fall, you can count on her.”
I nodded. M and Madoran both flown
before - I'd be flying with one of them - so I was getting the safety
instructions alone while they watched at a distance.
“Step forward, slowly.” I did so. The bird turned
her big head and looked at me sideways. She waved her head jerkily, and
gave a sharp squawk. I started slightly.
“She doesn’t not trust you,” said the dwarf
cheerily. “You right-handed?” I nodded. “Stick your left hand out
towards her,” he said, “slowly. That way if she don’ like you, you’ll
still have your right hand.”
I looked at him in alarm.
“Ah’m joshin ya!” he said. “She hasn’ hurt anybody
in a right couple weeks.” Without warning me, he tossed the beast a dead
rabbit. She snatched it out of the air and swallowed it whole, taking a
step back. “Just makin’ sure she’s not hungry,” he said, winking. He
nodding at me to proceed. She stepped towards me again, watching me with
one eye.
I extended my hand gingerly. The griffin sniffed at
me, reared her head back, and nipped my hand. I yelped instinctually.
Madoran laughed from his safe distance. I looked down at my hand. It was
bleeding.
“Means she likes ye!” said the flightmaster.
A dwarven medic bandaged my hand. Madoran and I
would be on one griffin, with the dwarf sitting just in front of me
holding the reins. M had her own griffin. When Madoran had suggested
this arrangement, M had balked for a moment, but it made more sense than
burdening one bird with two tauren, and she didn’t object. She helped
boost me onto my griffin, though (an unnecessary move), and whispered,
“Trust the dwarf, but believe in the Law.” I looked at her, puzzled, but
she didn't make eye contact. If the dwarf noticed, he didn’t react.
* * *
Our griffins stood side by side at the hill’s apex.
They were tossing their heads, straining against the reins, pawing at
the ground, itching to fly. The flightmaster stood in front of us,
holding a pair of red signs, one pointed at each griffin. Another dwarf,
sporting goggles with lenses almost two inches thick, stood behind us,
scanning the skies for incoming flights. The goggled dwarf called, “All
clear!” up to the flightmaster, who dropped Katy M’s red circle. The
griffin stamped its paws at the sight, looking over its shoulder at its
rider, who gave the reigns a shake. The beast bellowed, joyously, and
charged forward, past the flightmaster, who jumped heavily to the side
to avoid being flattened. I caught a rare grin flash across Katy M’s face as her griffin
kicked off the ground, flapping its enormous wings and rising rapidly
into the cloudless sky.
A few moments later, an “All clear!” came from
behind us. I felt our mount tense beneath me. The flightmaster dwarf
dropped our stop sign, and Madoran gave the reins a sharp shake. The
enormous bird bucked beneath me. It leapt forward, kicking with its back
legs and galloping past the flightmaster. As the hill began to drop, and
the low, stone buildings of the encampment began to rumble closer, my
stomachs dropped suddenly, and I could feel the muscles across the
griffin’s sides and chest contract mightily. The wings beat down against
the air, and I felt the world dropping away beneath us. My stomachs
dropped into my abdomen.
“I don’t suppose ye’d mind letting up a bit? I can’
breath,” yelled the dwarf up at me over the rushing wind. I realized I
was gripping him tightly. I let go.
My eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and I opened
them. I gasped. Morgan’s Rest was a mere speck behind us. The pastoral
steppes spread out emerald below us. Far ahead of us to the north, on
the horizon, was a mountain range. To the east, glittering in the
morning sun, was a black rock dome, with what looked like campfire smoke
rising from it. A river ran beneath us, idyllic and blue. Directly below
was a little herd of what looked like glass spiders, skittering across
the grassland, hunting something that we were too high to see. Soon, the
spiders were too far to see as well.
* * *
High above the world and with griffin wings spread
far to either side of us, we flew at speeds that boggled my mind. A mere
fifteen minutes later, maybe twenty-five, we were coming up on the black
mountain range that had been on the horizon when we’d taken off. It had
been a third of an hour of pure exhilaration.
Subtly, the rhythm of the wings and the constant
rush of the wind through my head began to tire me. I nodded, slightly,
listening to the sound of the world, the white noise, constant, rushing
wind, the feel of the dwarf in front of me, nodding slightly with the
beating of the wings of the creature that bore us, the rushing wind, and
I nodded slightly, my heavy eyelids closing. When I opened them up
again, the wind had turned into icicles that stung my eyes awake. They
teared, and the world below, the black mountains and Katy M’s bird far
ahead of us, the dwarf and the bird and the sky above and the clouds all
blurred. I blinked, and just for a moment, the clouds, the high, wispy,
stringy cirrus clouds, resolved themselves into shapes, running from
horizon to horizon, from south behind us to the northern horizon:
rounded characters, falling across the sky, and I blinked again and they
were gone.
“Horse,” the dwarf shouted back to me. I shook my
head. “Ye’awake back there?”
“I think so,” I called gruffly.
“You know anything about the history of the
Blackrock Mountains?” he called back, apparently intent on holding a
conversation over the roar of the wind.
“Not a thing,” I shouted. “M told me that they used
to be volcanic.”
“Aye,” shouted Madoran. “Hence the blackness of the
rocks. Not yer ordinary volcanism, either,” he continued. “Ancient
Elemental God of Fire volcanism!”
“Cool,” I muttered.
“That’s not important, though,” he shouted. “What I
wanted to ask was,” and he paused, as though unsure of how to bring
something up. His accent disappeared. “Remember, in the Argent Dawn
inquisition we put you through, that Fang had promised to fill you in on
the details of the quest we’re on?”
“I remember,” I shouted.
“Did he?”
Nope. I was annoyed for a moment. Then I remembered
why he hadn’t. “He was going to,” I called to the dwarf, “when we were
attacked in the mansion.”
“Right, that,” said the dwarf. “It’s funny that
they attacked you, in the mansion, sneaking in past everyone and out
again, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since.” He glanced back
and grinned at me.
You’re kidding, I thought. He knows we weren’t
attacked.
“Anyway,” he shouted, “as I told you when we met up
in the Elwynn woods four mornings ago, there are those in the Argent
Dawn who suspect that Fang the Murloc’s goals are other than our own. As
the head of Storm City’s Law, he has had a long and contentious
relationship with the Dawn. In the past we have questioned his motives,
but they have always turned out to be deep, complex, and clever; it is my
experience and opinion that he has always worked towards the good. The
same can be said of the Druid Katy M, whom we all hold in the highest
regard. I don’t know how they know each other, but I do know that the
two of them share goals and information. And as I said, I trust them.
“I also trust you,” he continued, shouting over the
wind. I listened, curious and silent. “You’re young, but I trust you.
Whatever the motivations of Fang and Katy M, and I believe them to be
honorable, I think you should know as much as possible about the
situation into which you are being sent, so that if you should be forced
to choose between two paths, you may be prepared to choose what you
believe to be best.” He paused, and looked over his shoulder at me. We
were over the peaks of the Blackrock Mountain now, and the air ahead of
us was smoggy. Katy M’s bird was ahead of us and slightly below,
coasting on a thermal down across the plain ahead. “How much do you know
about your quest?” he asked.
“Not much,” I said. “There’s a book on the dead
continent that we are to retrieve.”
“Not retrieve, necessarily,” he replied. “We may
only need to keep it out of certain hands, but the easiest way to do so
is to get it and keep it in our own hands.”
“Whose hands are you keeping it out of?” I asked.
He laughed a little. “Feel like a history lesson?”
he said.
“Always,” I said.
“So. The Dawn. How much do you know about it?”
“It defeated the scourge,” I said. “After that… not
much. I know it went underground and stayed in the northlands fighting
evil.”
“Right,” he said. “Sort of. The Dawn can’t actually
take full credit for the defeat of the Scourge. Arthas, the Scourge’s
Lich King, ruled it from the northlands for years. We fought long and
hard against him, and drove him to near defeat, but the killing blow
came from within the Scourge. We don’t know the exact details, but a
sect of zombies living in Lordaeron,” – I shivered – “led by a member of
the Burning Legion, a dreadlord named Varimathras, had apparently been
waiting for an opportunity. In our moment of triumph, Varimathras
attacked Arthas, defeating him and cliaming the Scourge for himself. It
caught us quite by surprise, and he routed us.
“While besting the weakened Arthas gave him more
power than he himself had ever had before, Varimathras was no Lich King,
and he rapidly lost control of some of the Scourge’s minions. The first
to break free were the Nerubians, Arthas’ first and oldest slaves, from
the lost continent of Northrend.”
“Northrend?” I shouted up to him. “Nerubians?” I
wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly.
He nodded. “Northrend,” he repeated, enunciating
clearly. “It’s a rocky, barren continent north of Lordaeron and Kali.
It’s disappeared from the consciousness of the world, and blessedly so.”
He bowed his head in what looked like a moment of prayer. “The Nerubians,”
he continued, “are a race of intelligent spiders from that dead place–”
“There was a spider,” I interrupted, “in the
mansion, behind me at the meeting!”
“He was one of their number. A relatively powerful
one, at that,” he called back to me. We were beyond the mountains, now,
over a gray, dusty plain. The sky had turned a toxic brown. “Anyway,” he
continued, “the Lich King, having chosen their frozen homeland as his
throne, took them as his first slaves. While they were not the cuddliest
or kindest of races, as I’m sure you saw, their collective experience
under the thrall of the Lich King impacted them greatly. When they freed
themselves, they vowed to fight evil to the bitter end.
“Luckily, the end wasn’t that bitter. Varimathras,
as I said, was no Lich King, and had apparently lost the love of both
his Burning Legion and his Lordaeron sect. With the spiders on our side,
we found him much easier an enemy than Arthas. In the end, he lacked
Arthas’s arrogance, and fell back strategically to Northrend. We trapped
him at the site of the Lich King’s original emergence, and in something
of an epic battle, imprisoned him in a huge, half-built frozen tomb that
we found there. The Nerubians agreed to guard his tomb, reclaiming
Northrend as their homeland and the trapped Varimathras as their ward.”
He stopped. I was somewhat out of breath. As high
above it as we were, the poison air crept up to us from the plains
below. Katy M’s bird was out of sight somewhere ahead of us in the smog.
Madoran began talking again, leaning over his
shoulder and yelling in the wind. “Arthas, to the best of our knowledge,
was defeated for good. The Dreadlord took the Scourge over for a short
time, but he had neither the will nor the power to sustain it. Its will
is gone,” he said, “but its evil remained.”
“Fang did tell me about that,” I interrupted. “He
called it toxic waste.”
He nodded. “An ichor of undeath,” he responded. “It
twists all life, fills it with hatred and an urge to destruction. It is
against this evil which the Argent Dawn is primarily arrayed: keeping it
contained, and keeping it from regaining a will.”
The dwarf fell silent. The rushing wind slowed my
thoughts, and I sat, straddling our enormous mount, for some time,
thinking slowly through what I had learned. Arthas’ was a name that I
knew, an echo of an echo from the old times: Arthas the Betrayer, Arthas
Frostmourn. Arthas the Scary as Hell. The dreadlord’s was not one I had
heard before. And Northrend, his resting place, an entire continent at
the top of the world that no one had ever heard of? Not no one, I
corrected myself, as something Fang had said days earlier came back to
me. Two dead continents, he’d said, not just Lordaeron.
As I ruminated, we winged steadily north. The dull
smog wind began to clear, after a time, and we could see M’s griffin
again. Mountains reared ahead of us, cliffs rising up from the dusty
plains like the wall at the end of the world. We began flapping higher
as we approached them, flying up and up, until the top of the cliffs
were visible above us. We reached them, still only about half way up,
and they resolved themselves into jagged, rising walls of rock, falling
back upon each other, sloping steeply into the sky. Our griffin banked
hard, interrupting my meditations, causing my insides to compress and my
voice to yelp wholly without my bidding. Madoran laughed heartily,
whooping as we spiraled upwards.
XII
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