Night Anglers
A scream and something sparked across the green line of the wood, a gust rippling as angles shaken in moonlight on a lake; the Dragonmaw glared up at it from exhausted eyes, saw the night panic around the movement and fell back faint.
She retreated then, who was just a hair of stars on the night's head...
When the orc woke a halo of daylight ringed his vision. The air in the clearing smelled of phosphorus and charred game, and his ears rang with the pulsing light. It was morning, and his grimy armor was soaked in blood. He stood, collected the bow by his side, and looked for the bear flank he was sent to gather. Miles off the Dragonmaw camp spat to life, wordless anger on the wind. His head throbbing he cursed and started for the noise, dragging the carcass one foot before the other until the swamp pines parted into a clearing before him.
"Brugo, where have you been all night and day?" Gar'shan the hunt leader stood beside a crude smokehouse trimming the carcass of a deer, its ribs open and wild. The other orcs, a force of nearly thirty, gathered behind Gar'shan in a nervous half-circle. Her grimace changed when she saw the bear carcass, and Brugo saw fear in the red orc's eyes.
"What is that?" Gar'shan snarled, pointing behind Brugo to his burden. What was left of the bear seethed with a purple flame, visible in the daylight of the camp clearing, and behind it a fainter trail of fire led back through the woods. Head teetering like a stone on a hill, the exhausted orc made no answer.
"Twilight witchcraft, and you've tracked it here, fool! Gather your things, all of you, and take the meat, we return to Gor'zan at the camp below the Redoubt..."
"Wait, Gar'shan," Brugo started, but he felt whatever strength had carried him through the Wetlands collapse beneath him, and crumpled to the ground.
In his exhaustion he dreamed of the encounter in the wood. A strand of willows, outline of a human female. He drifted into darkness and stepped through that space without a sound, daggers of drake fang materializing, inches close, smell close. Then a flame like the opposite of the sun, a figure visible in a richer dark, like a shaman trance-lost before a bonfire, the witch rising on a column of screaming nothing. He attacked, viper-quick, but here his speed was overmatched. The poison on his blades hissed in the purple flames and cut empty air. Spinning through the night the witch moved back and away through the trees for better footing. He sensed the attack coming, pulled himself into shadow and fled back to his kill. His bow was raised before the purple fire engulfed the trees around him. Brugo was a killer-killer of men, killer of dwarves and of dragons-but before him was more than a killer. In his mind the arrow left his grip, but in the space between instinct and the world she'd crossed the wood and latched burning arms around his neck. Then a sound in the distance like voices screaming into other voices. The witch fled, and the orc collapsed in flame in the burning wood.
When Brugo woke the camp shaman stood over him, whispering into his old hands. It was night, and smoke filled the small hide tent, but Brugo could see from his mat that most of the camp had been broken. The orcs had ventured into the Wetlands in search of game once Orgrimmar had fallen, abandoning Dragonmaw Port and moving deeper through the Highlands. Zaella was gone from Grim Batol, none knew where, and troll longboats gathered beyond the tides. The Wildhammer dwarves, always a threat, made emboldened raids on whatever orcish settlements remained, most perched on the brittle stone of ruined Twilight encampments. The Dragonmaw, of the Great Clans pure in war, hand of the Hungering Death beneath Grim Batol, wandered Azeroth again in defeat.
"Throm'ka, Dragonmaw." The old shaman waved a smoldering herb under Brugo's nose, and the world began to refocus. "We must talk, my friend, tell me what happened to you in those woods."
"Bregga, go, you must tell Gar'shan it was not the Twilight's Hammer. A witch or some filth, but nothing I've seen before. I stumbled upon her on the hunt. She could have finished me easily, but fled a noise north of the marsh."
"The screaming? We heard it here. Gar'shan was much concerned, but the spirits are silent. They will not tell me what it was. Here then, drink this."
Brugo rose from his reed mat, and the shaman handed him a brew of swiftthistle and Gromsblood. The orc took the mixture in a single pull, and his senses hardened again. The anger returned. To be defeated by a woman, a human woman. He looked down at one hand: purple flame danced the length of his forearm, but there was no pain.
"What is this Bregga?"
"An enchantment of some sort. It doesn't consume, only burns. From a distance it's barely visible. A gift from your witch I assume." Bregga lifted a bundle from a small table beside the fire, "Gar'shan and the others were not pleased at the sight of it. She has gone with most of the hunt to the Redoubt. The rest she left here with you." Bregga dipped his head, offering Brugo two daggers wrapped in hide, "Maggar the Red, I suspect, means to kill you. It would be best if you vanished somehow, if you're up to it."
Brugo took the blades. "I will go to the Redoubt, Gor'zan must hear of what I've seen."
Bregga grabbed his arm as he moved to leave, "There are nine of them, Brugo of Shadowmoon, plus Maggar. Only kill who you must. I, at least, will need them."
"Lok'tar, friend."
The shaman stood a moment, noticed his hand burning with a violet flame, and waved it slowly through the smoke of the tent fire. The flames spun in the mist and were gone.
Brugo stepped into the night. The camp was a small clearing in the surrounding marsh, circled by a low forest of scrub and pine, and the moon cut shadows through the few tents that remained. A large bonfire was set far to the right of where he stood, and nine Dragonmaw sat around it, eating roasted boar and barking lies to each other. The orc moved deliberately, each step fading further into darkness, making for the treeline, away from the camp and the burning witch. If he made good time he could arrive at the Redoubt within hours of Gar'shan...
From deep in the night there was a sound then, like throats of men twisted one into the other, screams woven into screams. Brugo froze. The nine Dragonmaw around the fire were up, weapons in hand, and Maggar was among them now. Bregga emerged from his tent, eyes that weren't his own already far off in the distance watching for a source. Again the strange chorus darkened the night, this one voice of many agonies.
In a panic one of the Dragonmaw launched a flare off into the trees above Brugo, and Maggar bellowed at the sight of him. "Cursed rogue, where do you slink off to on this night? Come by the fire, there is warrior work in those woods!"
In the moment Maggar took to laugh Brugo was behind him. A blur of pain, and the huge red orc was motionless. Brugo spun off at the other warriors then, blades singing. One charged, polearm too far above his right shoulder; Brugo hesitated a moment until the warrior committed to the strike, faded to his left, and with an upsweeping blow severed the orc's right hand at the wrist. In a snarling cloud Brugo stepped through the emptiness between the remaining warriors. "Defeat, don't kill," his brain barked at his blood. Two several paces from the fight were crippled with shuriken; another he struck in some hidden electrical valley in his spine, and the giant warrior fell gasping dust.
The chorused screaming again, but now closer in the trees and joined by something else. Brugo didn't hear the sound at first, but felt the earth beneath his feet swell, rising as though shoved aside, then returning as waves moving through rock. The fight froze like a chessboard, the pieces who could still fight motionless with their ears to the night.
"Bruuuugo!" Maggar hissed through his frozen throat.
The wavelike pressure approached, wrapping itself in sound. The Dragonmaw stood in amazement, turning their eyes to the sound of the behemoth, mountain-large, moving through brush and trees. A darkness tore at the night sky: the rough shape of a man, but ogre-sized, or greater than ogre-sized, and moving like a thing with a thousand joints, like a kraken made of cracking bone. Its shadow rose horrible swallowing the stars, a quivering mass just out of the light of the bonfires.
The behemoth stopped then, and a figure appeared at the edge of the clearing. In shape it was man or night elf, but too lean, moving unwhole like smoke billows from a fire. Long ago Brugo had seen the form of a sentinel scorched in her last moments, and touched this statue of ash with his blade. What form was left to her swirled as a sooty cloud on the breeze and was nothing. This thing moved like the destroyed elf: a cloud of ash continually reforming. It stopped at the dancing edge of the firelight, and from the trees its army of horrors gathered. Shapes too narrow or elongated, shoulders too widely set. Dried things, like desert corpses, or others like bodies left too long in still water; yellowed husks with retreating eyes, or purple and drenched in their own stink. Not human, not elf, not tauren, not orc.
The Figure stretched taut, a carrion bird rising before them.
"The witch," its dead voice crackled, and Brugo thought of the wastes of Kalimdor, late at night, when wind and dried sticks would speak any word from your fear.
"There is no witch here, undead," Maggar growled, still paralyzed where he stood. "Take your menagerie and march to your Whore of Tirisfal."
The Figure was before Maggar then, its face like a starved animal, "We are not undead."
"And what are you, wretch? We do not fear death."
"I do not offer death."
The Figure turned from Maggar, and made a gesture with its hand. From the shadows tendrils of darkness edged in flame rose, lashed about the legs of the Dragonmaw and held them fast. The thing of smoke bent to the ground then, retching a pile of ash at its feet. The ashes glowed unnaturally, then burst into flame, and from the heart of it the Figure retrieved a heated brand.
Bregga began to chant the old words, native songs of Draenor of fire and earth and storm, and the Figure turned to him. "Crippled song. We remember our own song, spiritwalker." In the time it takes to snuff a candle it was before him, "This is the only word."
The Figure pressed the brand to Bregga's throat, and the ash-grey skin twisted around the iron, leaving a rune that glowed white-hot then vanished. Wordlessly the thing passed from prisoner to prisoner, branding in each the strange symbol with the heated rod. When it reached Brugo it saw the purple flames dancing beneath his armor.
"You know," its dried voice cracked, "Tell me what you know." When Brugo failed to answer, it burned the rune into his cheek. "Then sing with us, orc, and we will find her together."
Then Brugo was beyond it, bursting free across the dust. The Figure turned on him but the orc moved arrow-quick, slicing through the carnival of dead things and away from their ashen king. The Figure screeched and the horde of dead encircled the camp, a coliseum with walls of rotting flesh, the bonfire at the center, and Brugo danced within, hacking through hollowed limbs. Maggar leapt free of the shadows, too, struck the earth like a fallen tree and tore his ax through the dead things. Like a bird of ash the Figure rose into the stars, fading, one with the night, then fell screaming onto Maggar. The orc raised his ax to the thing, but was overwhelmed, his body shattered. Blades whistled through the Figure, Brugo appearing suddenly to its right. It spun on some internal axis and lashed at him with black wings, but again the orc was too quick. Both blades buried in its flank, the cruel thing screeched and retreated to the stars.
A many-voiced scream, and the trees near the edge of the forest groaned and cracked. The behemoth was moving toward the clearing, and the Figure, a cloud of ash choking the stars, cackled from above. Brugo lashed out at the dead things, thought to cut a path through to the opposite treeline, but they were too numerous. The voice from above mocked his fight, "Ours now, orc, shall we march to Tirisfal?"
Something happened to the sky, a wailing that bent the stars and sent the dead things hissing together in a pack. The Figure collapsed from the air; purple flames played in its ash like lightning in a cloudbank, and it screeched again, this time in pain, "Witch! Scarlet witch!" A wave of fire churned through the crowd of dead then. Through an alley of twitching limbs Brugo saw the dark flame and figure of the witch, an undead, not human, empty eyes burning. She snatched Brugo's arm and he was weightless in the air, twisting from tree to tree like a bird. The clearing pulled back from his vision at incredible speed, but there was a song now. He could hear their song on the wind.
The witch fell to the ground at the sound of it, Brugo crashing at her feet. Instantly she drove a thin dagger through the meat of his leg, pinning him to the dust as the singing grew louder, crazed, a single word dancing madly in the night. Brugo felt a pressure in the bones of his face, and far off the screaming began, ten voices screeching in undiscovered agony. The Dragonmaw lifted from the forest floor, the witch frantically pressing him to the ground and hissing curses, searching him for the mark.
Silence now. In the distance the Figure spoke, a dead voice now, beyond emotion. "Come back to us, orc," the unnatural calm echoed with ten screams, "COME BACK TO US, ORC!"
"Or we will begin our song without you."
"COME BACK TO US!" screeched the ten voices, the song rejoined, and below it the sound of the behemoth moving through the trees.
The dagger cut a groove in the forest floor, the horrible screams dragging the orc into the song. The witch clutch to his chest and went dead. In her mind she willed the world to end its turning, crushed its bends and dirt into crystal shapes, beginning things, forming a simple space from insanity. She fell then, saw the nothing that hungered beneath, and spat her orders in hate. Approximate plumblines dropped, like dowsing strings bowing the forest straight. She dreamed a room formed of her tension, a cell, and the orc straining in that cell against the pull of whatever emptiness screamed from the forest. Its line of force, a point in invented space. She had passed through it. "I know you," the witch thought, "I know where you hide."
A flash of steel severed the branded half-face of the orc, and the emptiness that called it screamed back alone through the trees. There was a sound like a great beast drowning, then of a second behemoth thundering toward them.
Brugo jumped to his feet in agony, the blood from his ruined face pooling at his feet. He meant to kill her, but his blades held. Without agreement they began to run.
"What is your name, orc?" she asked him, passing close through the willows.
"I am Brugo."
"Brugo Half-Face, run with me tonight. My name is Lilian Voss."