"Help! Please, oh God, Allah, Buddha- the almighty freakin' Internet! Please help me I don't want to die again!"

Let me introduce my brother, Zane. He's an outstanding fella, sweet like sugar, stubborn as a mule and I often refer to him as 'My Brother Lionheart'- referring to a children's book I used to read as a child. My brother, however, is more like the lion from 'The Wizard of Oz'- before the meeting of Oz, that is. He's contradicting like that.

Speaking of lions, we were currently being chased by a close cousin of that particular feline species- a leopard to be exact- and whereas I was saving my energy for something productive like running for dear life, my brother for some reason, felt the need to voice his distress. In that regard, I guess he was also kind of like the scarecrow, not with the most solid head on his shoulders, if you catch my drift.

Perhaps I was not all there in the head either, though, seeing as my mind was spinning with children's stories when I was in the middle of running from a deadly predator…

"Oh god, that's disgusting." I commented while applying pressure to the profusely bleeding wound on my brother's leg. The white leopard had unfortunately managed to snatch Zane's leg with its claws shortly before it gave up the hunting and disappeared in the opposite direction.

I never knew predators would actually give up like that, considering the few feral animal shows I'd seen on Animal Planet once. According to those shows, these kitties were supposed to run after you until it caught you or you drifted away in a powerful river or fell to your death from a cliff or something. Either way, it gave up when you were dead.

Odd, indeed.

"Here, hold this," I told my brother and he quickly complied by taking the once white but now red cloth from me and continuing to apply pressure to the wound on his leg. Exhausted, I laid down in the snowy ground and closed my eyes while I focused on my breathing for a while. What a messed up situation we had gotten ourselves in.

The last thing I could remember before waking up in this unfamiliar place had been bright lights, gasps for air, then a very heavy thud- a crash. Everything beyond that caused me a headache to try and remember, yet I vaguely recalled pain, blood and… my brother.

He had been dead.

After that, there was nothing. There was nothing until I woke up five days ago on an unfamiliar, icy riverbank, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, with a killer headache and my brother- my very much alive brother- looking down at me worriedly.

As if all that wasn't a weird enough experience already, the following days, we saw… well, frankly we saw some shit.

We'd seen tiny people reaching maybe the height of my knees, playing with fire in their hands. We'd seen slightly taller and bulkier people with impressive beards carrying rifles on their shoulder with a black pig as their hunting partner; and then there were the weird rituals performed in broad daylight that seemed to have the purpose of summoning- I'm definitely loosing it- demons out of thin air.

So yeah, last few days had been strange for the lack of a better word.

It was maybe around an hour or so that passed in blessed silence before I turned to my brother again, who had been lost in his own thoughts,

"How's your leg?"

Zane jerked at the sound of my voice, so deep in thought as he was, but soon enough loosened the grip on the cloth on his wound to get a better look at it. "Well, my pants are ruined, that's for sure." I rolled my eyes but didn't comment. "I actually think it's healing," He then added.

I raised an eyebrow at that, shifting to a sitting position. Wounds didn't heal that fast, and definitely not in a matter of minutes- or that was what I thought before I looked at the wound on my brother's leg, gaping.

The wound that had been profusely bleeding before was now only three claw-like scars.

"It's weird, right?" Zane said, grinning, but I didn't reply. 'Weird' was a heavy understatement. This kind of quick healing only proved further my theory regarding our whereabouts, my theory that we might have somehow ended up in a different reality.

Some may argue that the sight of people in dark robes summoning demons out of thin air, and midgets casting fireballs like it was nobody's business would be enough to convince me that I was no longer in my same old universe, but I had always had what I would like to call a healthy dose of skepticism.

I had already scratched out the possibility that this was a dream (painful revelations, no need to specify), so the next theories in line were that I was under an incredibly strong hypnosis that allowed me to feel side burns after running half a marathon, or that we had somehow ended up in another reality. Excuse me if I wanted to hold on to the last bit of my sanity and deny that very theory.

"Can you walk?" I asked after a few moments and Zane's answer was to stand up and jog in place "I think I can do better than that," he replied cheekily, to which I simply rolled my eyes before standing up as well. I didn't bother to tell him to be careful of reopening his wounds, not seeing the point of doing so. "Let's continue then. But let's try to stay on the road and out of trouble, yeah?"

"I hear you," Zane agreed with a meek grin and with that, we continued on our way.

A quick glance at the sun told me that it would start to set in maybe a couple of hours. That meant that we needed to start looking for a safe-looking place to settle down for the night. The thought sent a chill down my spine because even though I was strangely not cold in the snow while we were walking, the simple cotton shirt on my back wasn't quite enough to keep me warm during the night.

Our usual sleeping spots during these last five days had been either abandoned caves or up in a large tree. Both were uncomfortable, as one could imagine, yet sad as it was to admit, I had kind of forgotten the sensation of a warm bed.

I had found that most of my memories before the… crash… were blurry, as if they were covered in a fog. I remembered most, but they were difficult to find within the haze and caused me a headache to dig after. I wondered if it was the same with Zane, but for some reason I got a knot in my stomach every time I though of bringing it up, so I didn't.

After we woke up five days ago we had been focusing on staying alive and getting to a safe place, preferably with civilization. It was almost as if we were being pulled into some direction: neither one of us really questioned where we were going and even though it didn't seem like we were making a particular process, we didn't stop and talk about it. I had thought about it, of course, but almost as soon as I did I would start thinking about something else and forget about it in a matter of seconds. It wouldn't be the first time my short attention span got the best of me.

My feet were a little sore after all the walking, and my hands were freezing because I had no gloves to warm them. Luckily, however, I did have some sort of skin shoes on my feet. They were rather thin, and didn't keep water away, but they still kept my feet warm which was enough for me at the moment.

Strange, I had never been one to count my blessings, but these last few days it had been practically the only thing I found myself doing. It was almost irksome.

"Hey, sis, isn't that…?"

I pulled myself out of my deep thoughts to see what had caught my brother's attention and noticed that he was pointing at something straight ahead. With furrowed brows, I let my gaze travel to whatever he was pointing at and stared. It took me a while before my eyes opened to their full size in realization.

"…Is that a road?" I asked in a small voice, not taking my eyes off of the stone bricks arranged neatly in a long line, reaching further than my eyes could see in both directions.

A few moments passed before I slowly turned to look at my brother, my face still one of disbelief. This thing was just too good to be true, we must have been hallucinating from the hunger or something. While we hadn't gone through five days without food, the portions we allowed ourselves to eat had gotten smaller and smaller. Luckily- or perhaps strangely- enough we had woken up with backpacks next to us, each containing a bottle of water, two loafs of bread and some cheese,

Zane, once he managed to rip his eyes from the stone worm in front of us, looked back at me and in a second, his face was stretched into the most brilliant smile.

I was about to tell him that we shouldn't be too hopeful, but managed to stop myself. Being the reasonable one was fine and dandy, but that didn't mean I had to be a mood killer.

The right corner of my mouth stretched slightly upwards as I allowed myself a small gleam of hope after all this time. My half-smile didn't last for long however, as I suddenly found the grip of my brother's hand around my wrist and before I could question it, he had started running, dragging my stumbling form after him.

"Wait up!" I tried calling a few times, as well as "Slow down!" and "Where are you going?!" but my idiotic brother wouldn't listen and kept running, not loosening his grip around my wrist the slightest.

We must have ran for at least ten minutes, probably longer, when he finally stopped. I jerked my hand out of his, smacked him on the head, which he reacted to with a yelp; then I bent over, resting my hands on my knees and breathed.

"Idiot," I puffed in between gasps but he only chuckled. I was about to hit him again when I realized Zane wasn't even looking at me but straight forward. Following his gaze, I stared for a while and then felt my jaw slacken.

In front of us was a town. Civilization. Houses made of stone, chimneys puffing smoke and the wonderful smell of warm food. I could have cried. Heck, I felt my eyes water at the sight at the same time my mouth watered at the smell.

Instead of crying and/or drooling, however, I stood back up and tugged at my brother's sleeve before I began walking towards the town, Zane quietly following.

It was strangely familiar, this town. I didn't remember ever being there before but still I felt as if I knew that place. There were so many people, most of them dwarfs and… gnomes. I could deny it all I wanted but those little creatures were gnomes, I knew.

The other things I also "just knew" was that inside the big, round building to our left were blacksmiths and armorers. Armorers, I couldn't believe I was realistically thinking that word. On the building to our right, I knew, were large beds, plenty of people and warm ale. I began to shiver and my stomach twisted uncomfortably. I felt sick, tired, confused and I couldn't believe what was happening around me but heavens help me, here I was and it was as real as fireworks on new year's.

This was Kharanos, the small town below the dwarfen capital of Iron Forge.

Author's Note:

Thanks for reading this far! This is my first WoW fanfiction so please forgive me if I get any facts wrong- and if I do, please tell me. It would be a great help.

I Have planned this story out so, so very far and I really hope many of you will feel like sticking around for the journey. If you would also be so kind as to review and/or follow I would really appreciate it.