An AU-Warcraft with less magic, less pop-culture, and less hope. A travelogue of environmental collapse and consumed civilizations. A sort of meta-exploration of the relationship between PCs and NPCs. Inspired by the vast emptiness of Outland as the Burning Crusade expansion fades into memory, and the works of Chris Abani and Ryzard Kapuscinski.
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Her real name is Boyahwahtoye, but everyone just calls her, "Blaine."
My real name is Thessela, but everyone just calls me, "Thinny." Hello.
She told me it means "Iron Mountain," in Taurahe. An old man's language, she called it. The language of her kin, all dead, she admitted.
I don't know if I believe everything Blaine says.
We are hunters. Blaine is the shooter. I'm the spotter. It isn't a bad racket. I used to be a refugee in Shattrath. Parents came through the Portal for the First War and had the gall to bear offspring on this harsh red world. They were fools, but they are dead, and I have forgiven them.
The orphanage doubled as a clinic and a morgue-which is another way of saying "crematorium." They had to trundle the dead past the kids whenever someone croaked, and for a while they had this scheme where they pretended the bodies were alive and dozing. As if we had seen so little of death.
"Taking you upstairs, brother, so you can get some rest," they'd say to the body with the white sheet draped over it.
"Fine weather today, eh? Not like the storms last month."
"And your kids are doing fine? Good, good, times are hard," they'd nod to the tight-lipped corpse on the trolley.
This went on for years.
That was before I met Blaine.
First came the one they called Betrayer, and then, all of Azeroth. The Other World. Other-Worlders. They were back. We were unprepared.
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Blaine told me her real name that one time we almost died.
Tried our hand at pit lords in the shadow of the Black Temple. Learned the hard way why you don't go after them except with full squadrons. Headshots don't work, see-the demon core that runs them is down in the gut, guarded by fire and armor. Blaine popped one of those big winged bastards temple-to-temple and it barely flinched.
"Damn," she said.
It chased us to the edge of the world, where the green poison rivers wash into the aether, through a draenei graveyard worn to black thumbnails. We barely outpaced it as it hewed left and right, the open cosmic-sky sweeping out before us.
"Thinny," Blaine said, her legs pounding out the yards.
"Blaine," I wheezed. "We're going to die."
"My name," she said. "My name is Boyahwahtoye. My real name."
The pit lord bellowed and I felt the heat of its forge-heart fanning out before it. "Why Blaine?" I asked, half-laughing at the absurdity, the madness of it all.
"Because I knew it would make my mother angry!" And then she grabbed me by the back of my neck and threw me over her shoulder. The pit lord filled up my whole world, a jade-fire tsunami at our backs. Blaine feinted right, left; the pit lord's glaive hammering clouds of dirt into the air, and then-weightlessness, rock shattering, falling, a great shadow, a bellow, and a fast stop.
The pit lord cursed our names and our offspring's names all the way down.
Blaine tossed me back onto the ledge and crawled up after. She pointed at the spot where a huge disc of black slate had sheared away from the continent. "Four feet, but no footing," she panted. "And wings too small to fly. Useless." She spat over the side.
"Wanna go find another, Boya-hoya… whatever?"
"Never call me that," she said.
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Blaine's gun has a name: Pia Mupitsi.
She told me it is named for the great cannibal owl that lives on the dark side of the moon, who comes down in the dark of the night to eat bad children, damning their souls forever.
I have seen many guns since the people of Azeroth came to make war on the man they called Betrayer, but I have never seen another gun like Pia Mupitsi. A head taller than I am and too heavy to carry. Dwarvish, if I had to take a wild, wild guess. Black steel, black stock, black scope. "It matches my coat," Blaine jokes. The bullets are bigger than my index finger. Bolt-action with a 5-shot clip. Some tiny and unreadable runes scribbled on the bottom of the stock. Probably a warning.
There was a legendary Ironforge sniper who ran a tour in Outland during the war that went by the name of Gudrod Swarsson. Killed between five and five hundred Illidari commanders, depending on the person telling the tale. Best confirmed shot-a record-was a demon hunter dropped from two thousand paces.
As Blaine's spotter, I track the shot's vapor trail, note the range, and make adjustments. I carry a little pad for this. Pia Mupitsi's scope is covered in little white lines that mark distances. I've never seen another scope like it.
We spent a season in Hellfire. One lone man, wanted dead, staggering across the desert. A speck in the distance. A crosswind so fast and cold it made your teeth hurt.
I peered through my telescope. "Too far. Need to get closer."
"Across open ground in Bone-Eater territory? I think not." Blaine squinted, eye flush against the scope, seeing the world in red and white.
"Fine, it's your bullet."
"That it is." Bang.
Two thousand, two hundred paces. A scouting party confirmed it.
I asked Blaine where she found Pia Mupitsi.
"I won it playing cards against a dragon," she said, and grinned.
I don't know if I believe everything Blaine says.
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When we started, I kept a tally of how many we killed. First, gronn. Huge hunting parties, in those days. Glorious times, violent times. Whole sorties of us, laying waste to them in the heights of the Blades. We were on the front page of newspapers back across the Gulf, I'm told. But then the gronn became ogres, and Illidari leftovers, and deserters, and anyone with a price on their head, and I stopped counting, and they stopped caring.
I can read and write in Common, speak and scribble in Draenei, get my point across in Orcish, and puzzle out what an ogre is yelling. The orphanage had a bookcase of two-hundred and twenty volumes, priceless heirlooms from the bygone heyday of the empire of the starfarers, Orcish texts, and the more recent transplants from the Other World. Not much use when most of the population is illiterate and starving. I read the bookcase three times over, because you have a lot of spare time in an orphanage, and because one of the only memories of my father was of him showing me a book of animals from the Other World. He told me the names, showed me the funny squiggles, and said that words are a kind of magic by which we become wiser.
When the orphanage gave me the boot I ran packages for the Sha'tari through central Outland; the sort of low-security/low-value intel and equipment that can be packed on two-legged mules instead of wasting valuable flyers. Two years of duty with a hard-bitten Maghar C.O. who taught us the first rule of Draenor: hide first, flight second, fight third. True words that I live by to this day.
I met Blaine in the middle of a Lost One ambush that battered a supply train in northern Terokkar. Just our bad luck-me and another runner named Dain, both rookies-stumbling into the middle of that mess. Dain got his head bashed in and I ended up in a thicket-hidden gulley strewn so deep with pine cones it was like trying to walk in an earthquake. A Lost One with a rusty knife tied to the waxy stump of his right hand came howling through the bushes at me.
My life flashed before my eyes too quickly-childhood, orphanage, runner-as I fell back, the knife falling.
And then his chest exploded.
And I heard a voice say, "One life for another," and the sound of a bolt-action spitting a spent shell.
Our negotiations were simple. She asked how well I knew the land. I said well enough. She asked how much I liked my work. I said little at best. She asked if I wanted to feel alive. And I said, "What do I have to lose?"
She hauled me out of the cone-pit with one hand that dwarfed my own, and grinned. "Just your life," she said.
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Jet black from snout to hoof. Common among tauren, I suppose. Caught her changing, once. She didn't think much of it. Neither did I. No context for embarrassment. No reference points to be ashamed of. The only contrast is a white patch on her throat, running crosswise like an old scar. And the eyes. Red-brown. Flesh of wild palm dates. She shapes her horns into points. Thought it was a waste to be spending coin on files (metal doesn't come cheap these days) until I watched her jam one horn up to the hilt in a troll's eye socket and come back with a lump of brain. A sound investment.
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Blaine has a box of bullets. It is 16x14x6 inches. Each bullet is what she calls "hollow-point," which makes the bullet explode when it enters a target. That, I believe.
Each bullet is five and one quarter inches long and almost an inch in diameter. A box of such dimensions should hold around two-hundred and twenty-four bullets. That is a fact.
Blaine has fired at least three-thousand.
The box is dark black steel with buckle locks. Perfectly ordinary-looking. Blaine keeps the key on her person at all times, although I often carry the box. It feels rather light.
Whenever Blaine opens the box, it is always full to the brim. I have never seen Blaine buy bullets.
I asked Blaine where the bullets come from.
And she said, "I make them myself when you're napping." And she winked.
I don't know if I believe everything Blaine says.
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Outland. Draenor. A remnant of a relic of a ruin.
Walk out into the woods. Listen. What do you hear? Nothing. Decades ago: birdsong. Gone.
Sit under a baobab and watch the savannah. A decade ago: herds of clefthoof sweeping across the grass, following the tide of the wind. Now: a stunted, lame thing, alone, limping across the patched veldt. The grass turning brown too soon.
Walk into the mountains and climb the blade-spires, and look down. A decade ago-raptors roving through the cliffs, and ogres in the thousands hurling mad sorties against one another's shanty-towns. Now: bones. A nether-touched coyote, half its face melted to mush, picking through the dust for grubs.
A world hanging on by a finger for so long that when it finally slips, barely anyone will notice.
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We hear a rumor out of Blade's Edge: children disappearing from one of the Evergrove settlements. We haven't been in up to the blades in a while. The fall of Gruul sent the combined Horde and Alliance forces scrambling on clean-up in the few months before the pullback to Azeroth. The photo-op days. We made good money in our first year in the crags, working with the sweeper crews and other Gronn Hunters to wash out the mountains. None left now except for sightings in the high peaks, and those are only rumors. Most of the ogre population was wiped out during the invasion. It's only genocide when your team is losing.
The settlement is three walls set against a sheer cliff and a shamble of squat huts and guard towers. You can see the places where the gates have been battered in again and again. The people inside have that hunted look of Other-World settlers. "A New Life in Outland," the posters promised. Blaine recalls seeing variations on the riff in numerous Azeroth cities before she crossed the Gulf. A fresh world. A world to start over in. Unless you were already here.
Blaine started over. Came to find something, or lose something. Maybe both.
The ramrod-straight sergeant gives us the rundown: children disappearing for months and there are barely enough soldiers to man the walls, let alone mount a search. He's human; looks fresh, hale and healthy-probably a transfer from down south. Sloughing off the bad detail to the younger crop. Let them suffer in the high peaks. Even for an army man, he's cagey. Everyone gets cagey around Blaine. She's big for a tauren and she moves with a weird, reptilian quickness. It never bothered me, but then again, Blaine was the first tauren I had ever really known. All others seem tectonically slow compared to her. And the odd habits - the chewing, the gun, the casual ease of violence, and the way she tosses her head back and forth when you're talking to her. Like a predator sizing up plant-eaters.
The settlement guard is mixed-composition Horde and Alliance: typical of these small survival-before-loyalty holdouts. They say that sort of thing just doesn't happen back on Azeroth. I suppose there is a first time for everything.
Blaine negotiates prices. I get a cut, usually thirty percent. We pool most of it, anyway. Enough to get by. She sets this one steep, real steep: eight hundred. The sergeant practically jumps out of his seat. Says that's almost everything in the coffers. Blaine shrugs, says, "Then you cannot afford us."
"You're one of the best hunters left in Outland," the sergeant says. Left. Many have gone back to fight wars on Azeroth. Pulling out before the market crashes."Our sorties can find no trace of what's been snatching the settlement's children."
"We can find… them," I say, dangling the pronoun. The children, or the snatcher. Probably just the latter-I don't voice this forgone conclusion. It seems to be hanging in the air already.
"Guaranteed," Blaine says. And she grins, stretching the white scar upon her neck.
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They still call us Gronn Hunters but, truthfully, we do little of that these days. There just aren't any left. Blaine and the others shot all of them.
It's mostly the scraps, now. "A waste of bullets," Blaine complains. One shot through the neck or head and it's done. But we don't refuse. We need the cash. Sometimes I wonder if we should just join up with the freebooters that scavenge Hellfire and Shadowmoon, riding down the weak and sifting the ruins of empire. Blaine would never sink to that, though. She's too proud. And she'd kill me if I went AWOL, I think. Can't blame her.
The soldiers still stationed here tell us to go back to Azeroth. They don't know that I was Draenor-born; they think I came across for the War. They think I'm older than I look-elf blood. Why should I? Azeroth is as alien to me as this world is to them.
"Blaine," they ask her, "Why not go back?"
She only shrugs, and says, "The money's too good." It isn't.
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Blaine eats grass when we're on the hunt. Handy trick. She doesn't chew her cud when we're upwind of something, of course. Or under visibility risk. But for those long stakeouts, days on end in a hunting blind, she'll clear a patch around herself. One hand on the stock, eye to the irons, her back molars working through the roughage. She says the grass on Azeroth is far better. Not surprised. The break-up poisoned the rock. Eat anything here for long enough and it'll be the death of you.
I do know one thing for sure about Azeroth: the grass tastes better. I'll take Blaine's word on it.
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Most of the remaining fel orcs and traitor blood elves are in the gulag mines south of Shattrath. They started with hundreds of thousands. Now reduced to a fraction. Working them to death, for lack of a better solution. The profits go back through the Portal, so I'm told, after the bribery and skimming. Split for the new war effort, against a new foe. Something they call "The Death-Wing." These Other-Worlders always seem to have enemies at hand.
Blaine said that without them, they'd fall upon one other. And she grinned, and said, "Of course, they'd never beat me."
I said she was cocksure. She didn't appreciate the joke.
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We ask around the village. Details are sketchy. "Are there signs of break-ins?" I ask. Vague. Uncommunicative. They don't like outsiders. But we make a little headway. The earliest ones disappeared while playing. Wolves or warpstalkers, folks guessed. Mourn, make a gravestone, move on. Keep the kids inside. Later: broken locks, windows ajar. Babies and younglings gone. One or two every month. Nightly patrols turning up nothing, not that they search too hard. Village on lockdown-or whatever counts for it-and still losing them. Demons blamed, naturally.
Blaine works through the information in her head. I do, too. Would have to be careful, and quiet, to get in and out. Or something else.
"What do you suspect?" I ask Iron Mountain.
She checks the sights of her rifle. "We shall find out."
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Sometimes I get bits and pieces out of Blaine. A place called "Mulgore." Plains, high mountains with flat tops, and the cities of her people, the tauren, upon them. "A green ocean," she calls it.
"Like Nagrand," I said.
"No, not like Nagrand. Less trees. Less rivers. Less rocks. Only the sea of green, and Eternal Blue Sky above." She looks up at the corona of the broken world. Outland. Draenor. The twin suns. The stippled nebulas shot through by stars. The free-spinning chunks of a world being wheeled past those stranded below.
"Eternal Blue Sky?" I said. I heard the capital letters in her words. I tried to picture it, but couldn't imagine something so unreal.
She shook her head. "Nothing," she said. "Forget it." Back to the iron sights, back to chewing. A sniper and a spotter once more.
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We were on a sortie with a pack of Horde outriders gutting the remains of a traitor blood elf camp. Rough, ugly work-rounding up civilians. A man threw sand in Blaine's face, and she hit him with the stock of her rifle so hard that he swallowed teeth. His child picked up a rusty sliver of metal and ran at her. I saw the muscles in her calf tense. I said, "Wait, Blaine-" but she kicked him in the stomach.
Even the wolf-riders gave pause. The child went fetal, started crying. Sounded more like gasping. The survivors were too hounded and dazed to move.
When Blaine came up to me later, I said, "That wasn't right."
Blaine shrugged. "Perhaps he will remember me," she said.
"Perhaps he'll grow up with a mean streak and come calling," I said. "Perhaps he'll try to kill you."
Blaine sniffed. "He may. And then he or I will die."
"You don't honestly mean that."
"I do. Do you doubt me?" She gave me that lazy, tilted glance she does whenever she notices I'm getting flustered. "You know it is not in my nature to lie about such matters."
"Right," I said. She patted me on the arm.
I don't know if I believe everything Blaine says.
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My birth name is Thessela Coraja, but I've been Thinny since I was ten. It's apt. No one born on the red rock grows up right. So I'm thin and rangy, from two parents of good stock. Draenor spoils the seed, they say.
The plague, the nether-touch, the shaking cough, bloody flux, leprosy, ague; the clinic's ills came in every variety. Perhaps that was why they kept us orphans close by-to sift out the weak and leave only the strong. New sicknesses came: kinds that turned a man's blood black and made him speak the demon tongue, kinds that warped and changed the body until nothing was left but a monster. But then came the War in Outland, and the final hammer blow to Draenor.
A woman comes from something called the Stormwind Academy of Arcane Arts and Sciences. A great magi, they say. The matron shows her the new illness-the kind that makes people waste away for weeks or months or years. The magi calls it a new word: "cancer." When the matron asks her if she knows of any cures from the Other World, she shakes her head.
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I asked Blaine what happened to her family.
"They are dead," she said, "and that is the end of it. In death, we become nothing. We join the void. Absence."
"Then killing is not a sin?" I said. Sometimes she steers things in these philosophical directions, and I pull the thread for its own sake.
"In death, we can bear no ill will, for we have no will to bear. A death is between the killer and the killed. In death we can bear no grudge. The wrongdoing is erased."
"So a murder of good intentions in the end is the same as a bad?" I tugged at my earlobe. These conversations always fill me with a low, spinal nervousness.
"Perspective. Someone wrongs me, and I kill them. In my mind, good. In theirs, evil. It does not matter. Everything is erased in death."
"You don't feel the same way about torture," I said. Halaa, in the second year of our enterprise. A Mag'har sortie dragged back twelve draenei refugees. A couple of the browns-grown in the waning days of the First War-reverted to the old thinking. Got ideas about what they were entitled to. Spoils of war. Not that such ways of thinking are exclusive to the plains-dwellers. Blaine killed them both. I remember it well. The altercation, the orc shouting the old-tongue, Blaine sidestepping with unerring quickness-she jukes back and joint-locks the axe out of the orc's hand with a snap and then puts him in a headlock. And she snarls, "Begone." And the pop.
The first time I watched Blaine break someone's neck.
We haven't been back to Halaa since.
She spat on the ground. "To rob another of their livelihood, that is worthy of contempt."
"You mean their life?" I asked. Her grasp of Common is rigid.
"Not their life. Their spirit. Their power. Their dignity. To tarnish that and leave them alive to suffer thereafter," she thumbed the stock of her rifle, "is foul."
Our target-a renegade Alliance commando-left his tent. We were almost six hundred yards away, hidden in a copse of trees. Blaine fired before I could give her range adjustments. The man's right thigh disappeared in red mist and he crumpled.
"And in death," Blaine said, "We are both forgiven."
"You and him? Or you and I?"
She smiled, and pressed a blade of grass against her lips.
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You can tell an Other-Worlder, an Azerothian, by how they sleep and eat. The days and nights comingle in Outland. There is day and night, but they are sort of twilit un-days and un-nights. Circadian rhythms are just a myth. I sleep when I'm tired (whenever I can) and eat when I'm hungry (whenever there's food). It helps if you were born here. The Off-Worlders try to stick to schedules. Three meals five hours apart, and seven hours of sleep. Their bodies eventually give up trying and accept the rudderless hours.
Telling time in Outland is only a matter of seconds and minutes and hours arranged in a line. Five hours ago. Fifteen from now. A year ago. Ten from now. Nine minutes sleep, ten hours… it all looks the same when you wake up. I am in my mid-twenties, with no way of telling exactly how old. My gravestone will read: "Thessela Coraja. Lived. Died. In death, she bears no grudge."
"I'd prefer days and nights," Blaine said once, over beers in an Area 52 dive bar.
"Go home, then," an Alliance regular said. Their ostensive mission in Netherstorm: return Tempest Keep to Draenei control. Truthfully: hired muscle to watch over the survivors of Kael'Thas' army-more slaves-as they tore down the structure for Goblin investors.
"Nothing's bloody well stopping you," he said.
Blaine took a sip of her beer, and stared straight ahead.
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A season in Shadowmoon, banishing demons back to the void. They are melodramatic in the extreme. Blaine knocked the legs out from under a rogue Nathrezim and put two more in his hands, just to be safe. She wanted to see this one up close. Down in a ravine stained green-black with witchfire and decades of battle. Smelled like burning ginkgo and dog feces.
"Stinking, degenerate mortals," he intoned, slumped against the rock face. His blood was slow, sluggish, and smoking. "Your cowardly pea-shooter is no match for me."
Blaine expelled a spent cartridge from her cannon. "Looks like it was more than a match. Wouldn't you say so, Thinny?"
"I'd say so, Blaine."
"Your names shall be cursed for a thousand-thousand years," the demon bellowed. "I will drag you to the deepest hell and torment you for an eternity-"
"I have seen enough," Blaine said. She pressed the great cannibal owl between the dreadlord's horns and pulled the trigger.
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A season on the dead flats of Auchindoun; the bone lands, hunting traitors and Legion remnants on Scryer payroll. We sat atop an old draenei tower and pivoted all un-day and all un-night. Everything has a price tag. Arakkoa slavers. Ethereal vagabonds. Mad cannibal deserters. The tower was on a small bluff overlooking two ancient, barely-there creek beds to the north and south. No cover from there to the horizon. I matched up the distances with the bone piles for landmarks and gave her ranges.
Once the bodies started dropping I had more concrete distances to work with. They only had two options when they came under fire: try to get to the tower and kill us, or get out of range. Most were desperate enough to try the first. The chains of dead radiated outward from the tower for over a mile. The vultures looked down on a giant rotting grey flower. Lost Ones came to pick over the remains, scavenging equipment and organs.
"Should we put them out of their misery?" I asked.
"No," Blaine said. "A waste of bullets."
"And shooting starving deserters isn't?"
She shrugged, and impulsively reached to pluck a handful of grass from next to her. She scrabbled at the hard stone battlement and grumbled something in Taurahe.
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Another season in Hellfire. They do have seasons in Azeroth, I'm told. Not hunting seasons, but changes in weather. Cycling through hot and cold. I like the concept. I started calling our seasons by their names. An autumn in Terokkar. A winter in Netherstorm. A summer in Hellfire. Just for kicks.
The Watch-Captain was dismissive, complacent. A career officer. Forsaken. The dead ones unnerve me. "We still have problems with scavengers in the lower levels of the Citadel. Pays thirty silver for every dead, forty for the hedge-warlocks."
"Thirty silver?" Blaine snorted. "To hunt brain-rotted offal?"
The Watch-Captain gave us both a chilly look. "Five more than what the Alliance is offering for fel-beast sweeps of the roads-and the devil-orc stragglers don't try to bite your head off."
Blaine squinted and shook her head. "What about the bluffs? The pools of Aggonar? The highlands are swarming with demonkin."
"Been out to pasture for a while?" the Watch-Captain retorted with colorless monotone. Blaine didn't rise to the insult. "The Kor'kron Guard and 7th Legion ran a joint operation to subjugate the northern strand."
"You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a demon in the north," I said.
"I encourage you to try. You'll find that there isn't much left except the gan'arg that escaped the worst of it, trying like idiots to repair the machines."
"So there is nothing left?" Blaine grunted. "Nothing at all?"
"As I said: thirty silvers a regular, forty a blood-deacon. The upper-Keep's got room and board for when you aren't down in the pits hunting the fels. Take it or leave it."
"We'll leave it," Blaine said, tearing out of the room with heavy footsteps. "Come on, Thinny."
I looked back at the Watch-Captain. His ash-grey corpse-face stared back at me. "You two ought to go home," he said earnestly. I left.
Had I been with Blaine for so long that I'd started to look like an Other-Worlder?
Blaine decided to take the initiative. We'll go hunting, she said, and bring something back to make that Watch-Captain's head roll. A day climbing the sheer bluffs of the black mesa once called the Throne of Kil'Jaeden. We slept behind a tarp as the winds sheared against the mountainside. Blaine took the last thirty yards like a mountain goat, eager to see the prey. I heard her utter something between a gasp and a cough from above me.
The valley of the mesa once boasted the staging grounds of an entire demonic army-but no more. Nothing even smoked. The skeleton of a doomlord hung impaled on holy rune-daubed pillars at the center of the waste, watching even in death. The engines and forges reduced to piles of their component parts, melted and warped into uselessness. The only living things were gan'arg even more stunted and deformed than their predecessors. Mishappen toddlers in rags. They trundled about the wreckage, alone, silent; idiot-savants without direction, trying uselessly to do something, anything, with the pieces of the machines. Most only seemed able to stack them in separate piles, or arrange them in pointless schematic shapes.
"What are they doing?" Blaine said.
"The only thing they remember."
We watched them for hours, trying to find a pattern. There were none. Some forgot what they were doing and abandoned their projects, some fell over and lay prone so long they seemed dead until they got back up and continued on, and sometimes they bumped into one another without acknowledgment. Five hours on and one of them found a hammer and started banging monotonously on a piece of metal. The others paid no attention. The noise was a tiny tin rattle to our high vantage point.
"Call it."
"Why?"
"Call it."
I sighted the hammerer. "A mile. In this crosswind. Not worth it unless you want them all up here."
She ranged the target and fired. Seconds later, the hammering stopped. I checked my scope. A child-sized lump with a puddle beneath it. No reaction from the others. Fifteen minutes later, another gan'arg tripped over the remains of his kin. He sprawled in the dirt and laid there in the wet sand for thirty minutes before getting up and going on his way.
I packed up my kit and started back down the mountainside. Blaine was a long time in following; we said nothing.
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We set out in a northwesterly direction, towards the most treacherous crags in this part of the blades. I'm checking for sign: animal, sentient, anything. Little of it, these days. Droppings are scarce, and often old. Scavengers-two legged and four-make quick work of anything that hits the dirt. We come to an old road and see signs of Mok'Nathal, but they're three weeks gone and heading east. We squat beneath an ogre burial mound cracked and looted like a giant shell for an hour before moving on.
"What do you think took the kids?" I ask Blaine.
"What do you think?" she says, scanning the looming blades skewered here and there with old dragon bones.
"Children lost at play-could be anything. But nighttime break-ins, silent entry and exit; no other possible conclusion: demonic in nature."
Blaine's ears flutter. An "I'm thinking" tic. She says, "And what would a demon, or one of their servants, want with a gaggle of half-starved children?"
"Easy. Blood-rites. Sacrifice. Possibly new initiates. Pliable minds to rebuild and regroup." We leave the mound, cutting across a game path, back into the razor canyons.
She chuckles and tosses her head. "You are beginning to think like an Other-Worlder, Thinny. Too paranoid."
"Huh. Then what do you think it is, Boya-hoh-yeah?"
She sniffs. "We shall see, Out-Lander."
Through an ogre village, abandoned. The giant houses make me feel like a toddler again. Torched, toppled. Slash-and-burn policy. Unlivable. We wait in the shade of a leaning guard tower for an hour before we decide it's safe to cross. Something shuffles and moves deeper into one of the great houses as we pass-I catch a looming indigo shape in swaddling furs disappearing into the darkness.
"An ogre magi," Blaine whispers with a conspiratorial air. "A king without a court."
We move on.
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Too long without something to kill. Without blood on her name. For anyone else a respite. For Blaine, a curse. I can see it in her chewing. The obsessive-compulsive twitch it takes on. Anxious. The empty horizon, taunting her.
I could find something else to do. Another path through the wreckage. Maybe. But Blaine left something behind once already, when she stalked across that vast emptiness, from the Other World to this one. We can only leave so many pieces behind before we have nothing left.
Blaine says she knows what she's doing. She knows where the next score is. The next mark. The next big kill. Ask anyone and they'll say: "That Blaine-now there's somebody who knows what they're doing." I once asked Blaine if she knows what she's doing.
She was cleaning crumbs from her plate in a Shattrath cafe overlooking Alatari district. Nocturnal things hummed and shivered in the un-night. The other patrons were Expedition descendants, unsettled by her vague menace.
"I am finishing my fish. It is not as good as the trout of Durotar, but I cannot be picky."
"You know what I mean."
She grinned and picked a bone from her teeth. A bovine with canines. Azeroth must be very strange. "I always know what I am doing, Thinny. You can trust me."
I don't know if I believe everything Blaine says.
XXXXX
I think about going through sometimes. To the Other World. Both sides need troopers, they say, to fight the Death-Wing. Something terrible happened, they say. A shattering. The continents in disarray.
"Like here?" I ask.
"No," they say. "Not like this. It can still be saved." Can still be saved.
I met a high elf in the Zangarmarshes, an arcanist, who told me I ought to take the chance. High elves, she said, were much in demand among the Alliance forces, as spies among the blood elves.
"But I am a blood elf," I said.
"Who told you that?"
I shrugged. People. Folks.
"You are Quel'Dorei, sister," she said. "Do not speak such foulness."
You're wrong, I said. It doesn't matter, I said. I'm an Out-Lander. Nothing more, nothing less.
I told Blaine they needed elf spies through the Portal. She laughed.
"Pawns in their stinking game," she said, skipping stones across an acrid fungal pool. "Azeroth in flames and they must cavort and prod one another like feuding nobles. Fighting when there is an enemy at their door. Simpletons."
"I could make a pretty nice living. I was a runner once, and a tracker now. That's most of the trick to spying right there, isn't it?"
Blaine selected a smooth stone and skipped it one-two-three-four-five times and shut up and chewed her grass. Back to the Eternal Blue Sky in her head.
XXXXX
Across a ravine and back onto an old Mag'har road. Blaine hears the ogres before I do, pulls me down into a ditch beneath a briar eave. We push ourselves flat into the dead tangle and wait. A line of them trudge by, their women in the center, chained neck-to-neck by collars. Protecting the breeders. We hold our breath as they pass. Most are malnourished: spindly arms and legs, prodigious gut. Always the last thing to go on an ogre. Gross caricatures of themselves. They kick up dust and scan the crags for food. They are followed a huge wagon, pulled by four slaves even more abused-looking than the women, and four more rearguard. There are carcasses piled high on the cart, putrefying in layers. Raptor, Other-Worlders, Out-Landers and ogre. Cannibalism only feels wrong until the first bite.
XXXXX
A season in Nagrand, the land where Blaine killed the last gronn south of the Zangar with a shot through the eye-the only reliable way of killing one, she insists-and where she killed two Mag'har outriders and left their bodies in the middle of the town square for a crime they were about to commit. The first time I noticed just how depleted Draenor had become.
Resupplied in one of the fortress-villages. I was walking behind Blaine when some orcs began to heckle us from the steps of a tavern.
"Nice little pinkskin you got there, rega."
"She's in good shape. Still have all of her teeth?" said another.
"Shame to waste her on hauling," said a third.
Blaine rapped her fingers against the hilt of her short sword. "Speak ill of her, and you will have no tongues to speak. She is luktha of my blood." They shut up.
Later I asked Blaine what luktha means. She said it meant "kin in wartime."
I asked an old Tauren legionnaire when we next rolled through Hellfire. He said it meant to carry a load, commonly a debtor.
"Uncommonly?" I asked.
"From an older word, meaning "slave."
Blaine never demanded that I join her, never said I had to stay, and had never prevented me from leaving.
The orcs drank the blood of demons by choice.
In the wreckage they left behind, we do not have such luxuries.
On the way out of town we passed an old mendicant orc with gladiator tattoos lounging drunk on the steps of a shuttered foundry. "Where go, Other-Worlder?" he grunted.
"To hunt the clefthoof," Blaine said. The orc laughed.
"May your killing be plentiful," he said, and laughed again as we passed away.
Crouched beneath an umbrella thorn tree on one of the floating isles, watching the quiet savannah. Sixteen hours on a rock floating up and down, up and down. I threw up.
"Motion sickness," I said, and swilled my mouth with water.
Blaine chuckled. "Sea-sickness. Too much sway in the boat."
"I cannot be sea-sick without a sea," I insisted.
She shook her head. "All those books, and so little common sense." She took her gun apart and put it back together out of boredom. Sixteen hours and not a single clefthoof in sight. Nothing but the buzzing of insects in the ever-twilight.
I call our hunts across the Outland "seasons."
A season is only however long it takes for the prey to dry up before we move on.
We don't find any clefthoof.
The Scryers say the astral winds are blowing the air away from Draenor, imperceptibly, day by day. So slow you can barely tell. But I can tell. The air is growing thinner. The minutes catch in my throat. The seasons are growing short.
XXXXX
Hours into the wilderness. Coyotes scratching here and there, thin, nether-touched, wasting creatures. Too few. A depleted land. We cross a game path, and Blaine spots something. She plucks it from a thorn bush and holds it up into the light.
A dark blue thread. We look down. Old, washed away with the wind, but still barely visible-a footprint.
"And now we begin," Blaine says.
We stalk north, climbing higher, losing and gaining and losing gaining the trail. More footprints. Small, wearing shoes. Multiple sets. My mind spins with possibilities. I'm so distant I nearly run into Blaine when she comes full stop.
"What is it?"
She points at the ground in front of her.
No mistaking it: the print is huge.
"We are close," she says.
Gronn-sign equals bones. We find a lot of bones.
A thin channel running down into the deepest crags. More prints, fresher. We veer off, looking for an overhang, and find a small shaded ledge.
A ravine with a shallow brown creek running through and a large cave mouth opposite the gulch entrance. A dead raptor, freshly killed or else it wouldn't be there, steaming close to the brook. Feels like an ambush. We flatten ourselves and wait.
"This is a trap," I mutter.
"Listen," Blaine says.
I strain my ears. Nothing but the wind. We wait. Five, ten minutes without a sound.
Blaine's ears flutter.
She sniffs. Something darkens behind her countenance. "Numwaha washte ai polo," she whispers. I recognize one word of Taurahe: "mother."
It lumbers out of the cavern. Thirty feet at the shoulder, all folds, sagging. Dugs like empty burlap sacks. One eye. So tired. Gods, so tired. Missing most of her teeth, those remaining black and worn to nothing. Furred like a loincloth, her spines crumbling like brittle calcium. She reminds me of the old, old women in the refugee camps, who had seen much of war and most of their children lost to it, ground down to the final desiccated core of their being. A female gronn. A woman. The last. She gazes around the ravine, waddling slowly towards the brook.
I hear Blaine exhale; hold her breath.
No.
Wait.
Stop.
Blaine.
Blaine needs this. Needs this kill, needs whatever meaning or un-meaning she has ascribed to it. Needs something that makes sense in all this quiet ruin-something hot and real and immediate and terrible. We went too fast; we used up what was left of this world before it had a chance to recoup its losses. And now we stand at the edge, looking down. In death, all sins are absolved.
I don't know how old Blaine is. Not much older than me, maybe. There are grey patches at her temples. I brought it up once, and she dismissed it with a quip. Everything, dismissed with a quip. A chasm between us.
I'm pretty sure I love her. Not romantically, mind you. But as kin. For hurting me so bad.
I want to get through, to figure out what mangled her up and spat her out in this place. There is a scar on her abdomen, above her right hip bone. Below the belly-button. Neatly sewn and stitched, it's barely visible. Surgical. I asked her how she got it, once.
"Combat with an undead abomination. A wizard." She grinned. "But I got the upper hand."
I saw a scar like that, once. Except I was too young to remember. I was only just entering the world at that very moment.
"Blaine.
"Wait.
"No."
Bang.
The gronn's left shoulder blossoms red and she starts howling.
"How the hell did you miss?" I warble with honest shock.
Blaine swears as the gun jams. The gun never jams. Blaine is frantic at the bolt-action. Her eyes flicker with panic. The howling is deafening. She drops the rifle, unbuckles her gigantic hand cannon and short sword, and dives down from the ledge. The gronn trying to make for the cave.
"Blaine, stop!" I tumble down the rock wall, shredding my hands and knees. "Are you trying to get killed-" I stumble and nearly concuss myself on a boulder. Why am I following her into the open? I see something in the cave mouth-a very small person.
Damn, I think. Me and my pronouns.
The gronn is confused, tottering back and forth between the approaching foe and the safety of the cave. She jabbers something incomprehensible, arms swinging. Blaine storms across the brook, a rooster tail of water whipping up behind her.
"Stand!" she screams, "Face me! Faceme!" Her usual coolness has evaporated, now something in-between agony and torment.
There is a girl in the cave mouth. Alive, uneaten. Even if we survive, what will we find? I stumble in the brook and come up sputtering as Blaine reaches the titan.
Blaine is to the gronn-woman as a mouse is to Blaine. She fires her huge six-shooter from the hip one-two-three times, and two go in the left knee and one in the stomach. The gronn screams something weirdly high-pitched that sounds worse than any other gronn-noise I've ever heard, and she smashes her fists down like sledges. Blaine rolls out of the way, bouncing up and firing two more bullets. The plunk of shredding tissue. I circle wide. The child in the cave mouth. One yet to save. If we can survive.
The gronn over-commits to a swing and Blaine side-steps out of the way. She whips her sword up and over and down and it disappears into the gronn's elbow-joint. The gronn ululates something in a debased form of ogre that you don't need to speak to understand.
She said, why are you doing this?
She said, what have I done?
She said, gods, someone help me. I am beset by monsters.
I look back towards the cave mouth and there is a child hurtling towards my face with a rusty cudgel in his hand. A troll boy, almost black with dirt. I bring a knee up instinctively and catch him before he can bash me. He bounces up, screaming bloody murder, and flees back towards the cave, the other child already gone.
In a part of my brain far away from the terror and adrenaline, I think I already know what has happened.
Blaine loses her sword-slick with black blood-and tries to retreat, but the gronn grabs her. The air rushes out of her lungs as something somewhere cracks audibly. Their screams mingle in the air between them as the gronn opens her mouth and prepares to bite her in half.
I think Blaine is a kind of orphan, too.
Blaine wrenches her right arm free. She thumbs for the blood-slick hammer desperately. Five feet and closing. Four feet. A maw of maws that could swallow up the whole world. Six shooter. Five fired. One left. I hear a tiny scream. A small, frightened face in the darkness of the cave. The empty sky. The hard cracked earth. I stumble. Ruin, ruin, ruin.
Blaine jams the hand cannon against the woman's pupil, and cries, "May we be forgiven."
Bang.
A crash and the earth shakes and I hit the ground and lie face down until the shakes wear off.
"Thinny," I hear a voice say.
Blaine, battered and bruised but very much alive, sitting on the shin of the deceased. Her right shoulder dislocated. "Give me a hand with this," she asks hoarsely.
I sidle over, wary, examining the gronn, the pine-pitch wound in the center of her face. "Come on," Blaine says. "Just like last time." I plant my foot against her shoulder, get a firm grip on her outstretched wrist. I tell her I'm going to count to three.
"Okay," she says.
"One. Two."
She jerks back, and her shoulder going back into joint is loud enough to echo up and down the ravine a dozen times. She hits the dirt, blacked-out for a second, and I start gagging. You never get used to shoulders.
We pull other to our feet and brush ourselves off. And we turn around and there they are.
Two children, draenei, rib-bones showing. A boy and a girl, no older than eight.
"You killed her," the boy says, weeping.
"You killed her!" the girl shrieks, and starts hammering her fists against Blaine's stomach. Blaine stands still as a mountain and takes it. Pushes the girl away, gently.
"She wasn't your mother," she says. "She was gronn."
The draenei boy runs back into the cave in hysterics, and the girl follows.
"This cannot be real," I say.
"It is," Blaine says. We pass into the shadows, and walk until we come to a broad chamber with high walls and many alcoves.
And we find thirty-seven children, none older than the two draenei, of every race still extant on this ruined, consumed world, huddling around one another and watching us in horror. Malnourished, dirty, all made equal in their shared squalor.
Blaine says, "I'll stay here. Go and tell them what has happened."
XXXXX
My rush for the village has me half-dead from exhaustion by the time I get back, winding up and down the crags, stopping and cowering alone when I think there's something coming. Nothing does. I run sputtering back into town, giving the guards a fright. People come out to see the commotion. "A gronn has kidnapped your children and brainwashed them," I holler, my hands over my head. I get a few bewildered looks.
"All of your children are alive, alive," I say. "Bring wagons, carts." Everyone goes from listless to electrified. A caravan is assembled and a skeleton crew left to guard the village. The garrison sergeant attends us personally. He asks me to lead the way. I ask for a fresh horse, because my legs feel like they're about to explode.
It's slow going with three encumbered carts and dozens of people in tow. What took Blaine and myself three hours takes nearly six.
We find Blaine sitting on a rock near the fallen gronn, cleaning her rifle. There is a dead ogre in the dried creek bed, his chest a rafflesia flower. Drawn by the noise. The raptor is gone, a blood trail leading towards the cave.
"The brother and sister insisted," she says. "They believe they are on their own now." She watches the caravan winding down the ravine, and pops a dried strand of wild barley between her teeth.
We go in first with the sergeant and four guards and find the children trying to cope with their loss, five of them roving through the carcass of the raptor hungrily; an orc boy with a dull knife doling portions of protein-rich organs to the weakest-looking children.
The soldiers are dumbstruck. So am I. Blaine is reticent. I say, "You shouldn't eat carnivore organs," approaching slowly. Recalling my wilderness survival. In Outland, it's just survival. "They're full of poisons," I say. The children look at me with faces that say, we do not understand your words.
The babies go crying, of course. The older children comply. Most seem distant, numb. The worst are the toddlers. Too young to understand, too old to be oblivious. They fight and bawl and their faces screw up in terror. One young boy scrambles away from his mother and tries to climb on the corpse of the gronn, to the horror of the assembled. He has to be pried off, and comes away with a clump of coarse hair in each hand.
XXXXX
"You have done a great service," the sergeant says. "That this beast could have kidnapped so many of our children-"
"She didn't," Blaine says, rotating her shoulder. "The children came to her."
"Yes, well, the magic of the barbarian-beasts does strange things," he stammers. "Regardless of the circumstances, I can scarcely express our gratitude-"
"Eight hundred gold should be gratitude enough," Blaine says, taking a seat on a stone. "And perhaps any bits of food the parents would like to chip in for our trouble."
The sergeant nods. "We will have your payment on arrival in the village," he says sharply, and marches off to see to the caravan.
"They don't have eight hundred gold pieces," I say to Blaine. "They don't even have eighty."
"I know," she says.
"They'll sooner kill the both of us and dump us for the scavengers. Two less mercenaries…"
She closes her eyes, tilts her head back. Rubs her temples. Exhales. Uneven, ragged, like I've never heard from her before. "I know," she says.
I sit down in the dirt and try to rub the knots out of my legs. We watch the caravan as it passes out of the valley. Most of the soldiers nod, and Blaine returns the gesture. The parents either ignore her, or thank her, or look upon her fearfully, and Blaine either stares, or nods, casts her glance downward.
When the last wagon is just a creaking whine in the ravine, we are alone. The wind whimpers through the blade spires, and whickers through the withered heath.
A carrion bird alights on the gronn and pecks at her wounds.
"Ehne'pualo ka-nah," Blaine says.
"All who are dead are equal." A proverb from the green sea she left a world behind.
We both start gathering brush. No words need to be exchanged.
XXXXX
It takes the rest of the evening to gather enough wood for a pyre. Coyotes keep coming near; we chase them away each time.
We watch the twin moons of Outland as they spin their solemn jig, girdled by the meteoric chains of our world's broken bones, their steady process marked by minor collisions and the pantomime glow of the heavens behind them; as the constellations shift, turn, sliding fluid down the spindle of the cosmos to heave and churn like the caldera heart of ancient Draenor lost. We watch the aurora borealis of purple, green, and gold that wafts across the horizon, the smoking afterburn of dead earth that weaves contrails of memory across the void, orange flames rising high, high into the darkness, to kiss the face of Eternal Black Sky.
And so we slip away without notice, quiet as we came, into that drowning night.
END