This part of the woods still hadn't regrown yet. Tharin couldn't understand it. The druid brushed through his long teal beard with his callous, thickened fingers as he studied the earth. Nothing told him that anything was wrong with it.
In the Emerald Dream, there was a lush bayou exactly where this valley had been, but all that the druid could see was ground. The salt would make things difficult, certainly, but not to this extent. The only thing that the Emerald Dream didn't account for was the volcanic activity in the region, but if anything, that should have helped matters rather than hinder them.
"M-mister druid...?" A druid didn't startle or rouse easily and, unexpected as this intrusion was, Tharin didn't let himself be startled. The antlered, broad-shouldered night elf rose to his two feet and turned around. He was supposed to be alone. Far away from Ashenvale...
Yet, before him stood a child. Not unlike the one he had had a century prior. A tiny, vulnerable little thing. Her deep purple hair was stuck to her cheeks and her scalp and her once-green robes. Her amber eyes looked up at him with a terrified look, "I-I'm lost- I don't- I don't know where I am..." she said.
The druid struggled for words for a moment. So long had his vocal cords not found use, it hurt to even move them now. "Come, child..." The druid's knee landed upon the dusty floor of the bayou that should have been. The motion itself threw up dust that clung to the fur of his mantle immediately.
His callous, thickened fingers brushed dirt off the trembling child's shoulders and arms. "How did you find yourself here...?"
"I-I don't- don't know..." she stammered between held-back sobs. "I fell through- through a brush and then I was here..." She tried to wipe the tears out of her face, only smearing the dirt deeper in her eyes. "I-it hurts-" she squeaked.
It was true. In this dust-bowl, all the dust was tiny and jagged. Judging by the minute whistles he could hear, her lungs weren't what they should be. An infection was impossible. Teldrassil prevented such mundane ills now. With a furrowed brow, Tharin rubbed the dirt taken off the child between his thumb and his index finger. He smelled it deeply to his face.
"Show me where you got this coat of dirt on you," the druid said. He wasn't very charismatic and he knew that. But if she had fallen through a fissure in the Emerald Dream, the sooner they retraced her steps, the sooner they'd find it. Then he could heal the fissure and send the girl home.
"I-it's in a cave- it's- eh- it's nearby. I-it's hot in there," the girl said, glancing up at the druid, stammering still.
"I know. I smelt sulphur in the dirt. So show me," the druid repeated before rising from the dusty floor. "Then I will get you home, little one."
With a nervous look, she nodded and sped away. Tharin mused that he hadn't asked for her name. How different things were now... Only half a millennium ago, he would attend all manner of parties in Suramar and now, he treated his own kin as nameless, transient things. It was not a bad change. Tharin preferred it this way now.
"How much deeper is it, child...?" Tharin asked. The cave was getting deeper. He couldn't sense any of the Emerald Dream within this place. Nothing living at all. Just the raging elements. She must have stumbled her way in here. This was not at all his domain, nor that of the Emerald Dream. Tharin stopped. Were his senses betraying him? Where even was she now...?
"Not that much deeper. Wait..."
He turned around. And then everything turned to blackness and a very brief, very sharp pain.
The druid had entirely disappeared under the boulder. One moment he had been there and then another moment, he hadn't been. Living and a guardian of life itself one moment; nothing the next. It made her stomach turn. She stood trembling on her bare feet. The night elf child looked on, the tears drying upon her dirt-ridden cheeks. Cheeks turned up into a massive, sadistic smile.
"Well done, Onyxia," the graveling, burning voice of her father said from the depths of the cavern. His powerful elven hand touched down upon her bared shoulder. "Very cleverly done."