Chapter One

Sara stood up slowly, her back aching with the strain of hunching over the ground for long hours. She sighed, and wiped the sweat off her face with a ragged and dirt-stained sleeve. Staring up at the harsh sun, she wondered what had possessed her husband to bring her to this awful place.

"Doing our part to help the Alliance, pah!" she muttered under her breath as she headed back towards the make-shift hut that served as their home. "What about your wife? What about your child?"

Reminded, she hurried inside, where Laura was still sleeping as peacefully as when Sara had left to try and coax their seeds to take root in the dusty ground.

"There you are angel," she said soothingly when the babe started to mumble at the noise. "There you are." Sara sighed again. She seemed to be doing a lot of sighing these days. "You always were a good baby," she whispered, rocking the rough, hand-carved cradle gently, "Not like your father."

Sara thought back to when she had first meet Bran. He had seemed so gallant and dashing then, as if he were a lord, not the second son of a wealthy farmer. "He was always so kind," Sara thought out loud, "How was I to know that he'd force me to live in this wasteland?" And wasteland was certainly a fitting word for The Barrens. Even its name sounded, well, barren. There were hardly any trees, and the ones that did manage to survive the constant drought, searing heat, and voracious animals were small and scraggly. They had been here for two months, and it hadn't rained once! Not once! It wasn't natural.

She tried to envision Elwyn Forest, the home she had left behind. The cool breezes, the bustling markets, the plentiful food. It was less than a year ago, but that happy time already seemed like a dream.

It had all begun with Lord Samuel looking for "Brave families eager to do their part in defeating the enemies of humanity and the Alliance!" and once Bran had his mind set, there was no changing course. No matter how much she begged and pleaded, no matter how much she cried and how much she threatened, nothing she said or did changed his mind. They were to be part of the great movement to settle The Barrens, and, as her Bran had said, she would just have to accept it. And here she was, in a land were nothing seemed to grow and those dreadful bull-monster savages, not to mention orcs, were no more than a stone's throw away.

"I should have left him," she murmured to the sleeping child, "I should have left him, for both our sakes. Ah well."

Bran had gone out to try and kill some of the queer, flightless birds that stalked the desert. They need to supplement the supplies they had brought from Northwatch Hold, as their attempts at growing grain had failed miserably. Come to think of it, Sara thought, he has been gone for a while. She shivered, though the room was quite warm.

"He had better be back before nightfall," she told Laura. "One of these days I'll…" A muffled scream broke her off in mid sentence. Fearing the worst, she quickly picked up her child and ran outside.

Suddenly something knocked her over. She looked up so see her husband staggering around as if he had drunk too much wine, his face slack with terror. "Bran?" she asked, shocked. He moaned, and a gush of blood poured out of his mouth. Sara's eyes widened in horror as she saw the arrow sticking out of his back. Bran seemed to fall in slow motion, and suddenly Sara realized that she was screaming. Laura started to cry as a tall, dark figure stepped out from behind the hut. The last thing Sara ever saw was the hulking form of a Tauren warrior, raising his axe to strike.

By the time Kwahu caught up to his older brother, the warrior was wiping blood off of his battleaxe and the human they had been chasing was no more than a headless pile of carrion. The young tauren shuddered, and tried to avoid looking at the corpse without seeming to. It was Kwahu's first time defending his people's lands, and he wanted to make a good impression on Mahal.

Kwahu had only finished learning the way of the hunter under the guidance of Melor Stonehoof two full-moons ago, and he had been shocked when his brother had asked him help him get rid of some humans encroaching on Horde territory. Mahal was a great warrior of the New Horde, and had been to The Barrens and Orgrimmar many times, and even to the Eastern Kingdoms, but Kwahu had never ventured farther east than Thunder Bluff. He had never even seen a human, much less fought one.

Strangely, Kwahu had been a bit disappointed when he had seen his first man. The creature seemed so tiny and frail. The top of his head would barely reach the shoulder of even the smallest, oldest tauren. He hadn't been eating to well lately, either, from the look of him. It puzzled Kwahu that something so small could be so troublesome. Nonetheless, he had been the one who had shot the fleeing human; right between the shoulders, and from quite a distance, too. But he felt his pride at the shot start to slip away at the sight of the headless corpse.

In his desperate attempt to look at anything but the blood still gushing out of the severed neck, Kwahu realized that there was second corpse, a female. Mahal noticed the direction of his gaze and gave a snort of laughter.

"The fool led us straight to his mate," he said. "Typical human."

Kwahu turned away quickly, and spotted Kanti, his wolf, stalking silently over the hill. She was by far the biggest wolf anyone in Mulgore had ever seen; though she was barely more than a pup, her pointed ears already reached nearly to his waist. When she spotted them, she gave a short bark. Kwahu called her over, and then tried to control his growing nausea as she began to investigate the bodies.

"Stop that," he whispered hurriedly.

"That was an impressive shot," Mahal said, unfazed, "He was almost dead from the arrow by the time I caught him. Just a little higher and…are you well?"

"Very," gasped Kwahu.

"Don't worry, Honiahaka, war isn't for everyone."

The use of his childhood nickname, Little Wolf, infuriated Kwahu. Here he was, with the chance to finally prove himself to Mahal, and he could barely stand to look at two dead humans. He handled animal corpses nearly every day! Why, this was no different, really. But it was different, and Kwahu knew it. He couldn't get the look of terror on the man's face out of his mind, or his bubbling scream when Kwahu's arrow pierced his back. He wished he could explain it to his brother, but he knew that the big warrior would only grin.

"Don't call me that!" he snorted instead, "Kanti, come here!"

Mahal just shrugged, and proceed to clean the blood from his axe using a fistful of dry grass. Kanti, however, ignored her master and pushed over the female corpse with her nose. Kwahu grunted in shock; the body seemed to move on its own. A tiny face peeped out of a bundle of filthy blankets and began to cry piteously.

"A child," grunted Mahal, as he picked up the bawling infant.

"What are you doing?" cried Kwahu as his brother raised his axe.

"Better a quick death than starvation," replied Mahal, "You should know that."

"But it's just a baby! Tauren don't kill children." Kwahu thought back to Kotori Whisperwind, the tauren whose husband and three children were slaughtered by Kolkar Raiders. "That's centaur work!"

The child screamed and Mahal grunted impatiently. "What are you suggesting?"

Kwahu didn't know what to do. His brother was right; the babe would starve long before it was discovered by any of its own kind, if the raptors didn't get to it first. Returning it to another human settlement was obviously not a wise idea, but he could not simply stand by and let it be slaughtered. It should be killed, now, he tried to convince himself, after all, it will only grow up to be one more human that the Horde has to fight. Then he remembered the child's father's scream, and he knew what he had to do.

"Give it here," he told Mahal. The warrior grudgingly handed it to him, as one might pass a plainstrider carcass. Kwahu sniffed it delicately. "It's a girl." He sniffed again. "I think."

"Why does it matter?" asked a bemused Mahal.

"I need to know what to name it."

"You can't be serious!" gasped his brother, "Cairne Bloodhoof will never stand for it."

"I'll just have to ask him, won't I," replied Kwahu. Mahal shook his head slowly.

"Even if you do get his approval, the rest of the village will never accept her. You'll both be outcasts for the rest of your lives!"

Kwahu realized his brother was right. Several of the elder tauren still had battle scars from the second war, and would certainly not take kindly to a human being raised nearby. As for the younger generation, they had grown up on tales of the savagery and brutality of the Alliance races, and many dreamed of one day becoming great warriors and killing humans by the dozens.

"Your right, Mahal," Kwahu sighed, "but that still doesn't mean I'm going to let you kill her. We'll just have to live outside the camp. Kanti and I should be able to provide for her, and…"

"This is ridiculous!" Mahal growled. "Just don't come running to me when they tell you that you can't keep her!" He glanced at his brother's stricken faced and instantly regretted his words. "Come on, Honiahaka, we can't know until we ask. Let's get back to Taurahe, and we can head to Thunder Bluff tomorrow."