Silverlocke980 here, with fanfic regarding the coolest damn RTS series in history... Warcraft.
(Starcraft would count, too, since I do like its game play better... but it's not a series yet and the story isn't as deep as Warcraft's. Blizzard, this is a sign.)
So, without further ado, it's...
"SHOWTIME!"
World of Warcraft
The Concept of Alliance
Alliance is a word with which the Forsaken are intimately familiar with; they are both in an alliance with the Orcs, and the races that stand with them, and knowledgeable about what the word, Alliance, capital A, means: Humans and those who stand with them.
Alliance is a word that the Forsaken use with a bit of sarcasm (alliance, they laugh through cold teeth), because they fully believe that they will destroy all the Horde when they take out the Alliance. They are dead. No one trusts the dead. Henceforth, the dead will trust no one. The new plague burning in the depths of the Apothecary will spread out and murder the world, all except the Forsaken who will be made immune before the plague starts spreading again. It is something they all know.
The death they will bring will make the Scourge look like amateurs at their own craft.
-
Still, appearances must be kept up until that day, so when Thrall arrives at the head of a small army to discuss their alliance with Sylvanas, he is invited to her palace, where a sumptuous room has been set up with the greatest furnishings that could be salvaged from the ghost city of Lordaeron. The talks go much as she thought they would until Thrall asks her what kind of trade the Forsaken require from them.
" What trade could you possibly bring us?" she asked instead of answering, not out of wit but out of confusion. Trade? With the Forsaken? Unthinkable. No civilized race would willingly consort with the damned.
Was Thrall joking or insane?
" Depends on what you want," he retorted, not smiling but still full of that young pride which states I can do this and I will. It is a strength of the young.
Sylvanas is not young.
" You can get nothing to us," she said, placing her hands on the table in a sign that she would brook no further discussion. " The lands about us are riddled with undead we do not control and the Scarlet Crusade will kill you on sight. Even if you could possibly bring us goods, there is nothing your people could bring that we would want or need anyway. Forsaken," and here she allows herself a smile, because she's the undead queen and she's supposed to smile creepily at this statement, " do not eat."
Thrall laughed in her face. If she had still lived, her breathing would have stopped, her eyes grown wide, and her teeth gnashed in fury at this insult. Dead, the first part had already happened and so she simply grew very, very stiff, ramrod straight. She was furious beyond belief. Nobody laughs in the face of the queen of the damned.
Nobody.
Her guards stepped forward, slightly, and perhaps Thrall noticed- or not, his raucous laugh out of place in the great Undercity and as blinding as sand in the eyes.
" Of course not!" Thrall boomed, and his laughter made the huge orc seem even bigger. " Of course not! But you need weapons and you need armor, my friend. We have them, we wish to sell them, your people need them, your people can buy them. Why would you say that you need nothing? Because Forsaken," and here the smug bastard grinned himself, " do not need broken weaponry."
Sylvanas just looked at him. She didn't need to explain her former resistance, it was self-explanatory. The Forsaken were in the middle of nowhere- a dangerous, Crusade-and-undead riddled nowhere. Her people were Forsaken, and that means unaccepted anywhere.
Who in the world would risk coming out here to sell them things?
" How?" she asked, though she suspected how. The Forsaken have never lacked for warlocks to perform Rituals.
" Simple," Thrall said, and as Sylvanas' guards stepped back at her unspoken signal, he detailed just how he was going to deliver his goods through the Plaguelands.
-
The place they chose eventually came to be called Merchant's Circle, because that was where all the merchants came from. Thrall had figured out how to get goods from one point to another with clever usage of a Ritual of Summoning, so between making sure the Warlocks were switched out on a regular basis- only so many Rituals could be performed before undead flesh grew tired- and that everyone did it right, Sylvanas had her hands full for a month. After the system was perfected, however, the inflow of Orcish merchants and wares and even immigrants continued on a regular basis.
The Orcs were comfortable with them, surprisingly- some even old enough to remember when the dead were servants of the Orcish Horde- and the truth was, her people needed them. The weapons and armor the Orcs brought with them were necessary, because all the plunder the Forsaken had taken from the carcass of Lordaeron had started to fall apart. They couldn't keep using old weapons with broken points and rotted handles, and the Horde was offering new blades and new axes and new armor, beaten to fit the smaller proportions of her undead. So her people bought them, the first time money was used in the Undercity.
(Because, before, if you needed something, you just kind of hunted around in Lordaeron until you found it. The Undercity was a haven for scavengers.)
So the dead kept civil tongues in their heads and bought weapons from Orcish merchants who, large and fat and boisterous, almost singlehandedly brought laughter into the Undercity. They were loud, noisy, and so different from the Forsaken that Sylvanas worried there might be a backlash against them (and a resulting war with Thrall), but nothing happened and the Undercity changed ever so slightly. Some Orcs grew to like it so much they settled there, of all things. Pigs, the great big boars the Orcs liked to eat, grew surprisingly well in the Plaguelands, because decayed soil was easier to turn over in the search for roots and few of the animals left in the area could take on the boars and win.
Sylvanas watched these immigrants with suspicious eyes.
It was impossible to believe this wasn't a trap. Or a joke.
Nothing lived in the Undercity (except Varimathras, who was a demon and didn't count.) Nothing.
But now a few damn Orcs were hanging around her city like it was a place to live and not die, and it was driving her mad.
-
She put up with the Orcs until she eventually came to accept them- the brutes were stupid, she decided, undeath something the Orcs simply couldn't think about with the appropriate horror. It was when the first Troll came through, however, a tall thin and blue counterpoint to the stout and hardy and very green Orc behind him, that Sylvanas realized she was being tricked.
Trolls didn't trust anybody and, above all, were the group who had opposed their inclusion into the Horde. Even the Earthen Circle had agreed to let them in- but the Trolls, through Vol'jin, had put an emphatic no in their vote. Overruled by the Tauren, who believed the Forsaken had "redeemed" themselves, the Trolls had nonetheless kept their distance. When mixed Horde armies went out to fight an enemy, Trolls stayed away from any Forsaken battalions that went out there with them. Trolls had barely learned to trust the Orcs, and they'd saved all their lives from Murlocs on their island home.
A Troll coming to the Undercity was unthinkable. She followed him and watched.
-
No Elf would admit it, but Trolls were quite capable of evading notice in the woods, their home as much as the Elves'. An Elf would take it to their grave rather than announce that Trolls were almost their equal.
Sylvanas. having passed the grave, saw no reason to place trust in her innate skills and worked on being as quiet as possible as she followed the Troll.
A new area had recently been set up, near the exits of the Undercity and extending slightly past it, that housed most of the recent Orcish immigrants. The Troll went there, as she thought he would- where else would he go?- and knocked on the outside of a hut. The Orc inside lifted the flap, looked outside, and the two said something- Sylvanas was too far away to hear- and then the Troll nodded his head and left, the Orc going back inside. Marking the house he'd approached for a later time, Sylvanas set off again, trailing the Troll as he made it through the winding streets of the Undercity.
Far away from the Orcish quarter, she found him sitting in front of a cathedral of the Forgotten Shadow, praying.
Still somewhat stunned at this sight, she saw a random passerby- a Forsaken of hers- come over to ask him what he was doing with his hands spread to the side and chanting.
" I am looking for answers," he replied.
-
When that first Troll went back to his homelands to preach about the Forgotten Shadow, undead counterpoint to the Light, Sylvanas thought her spies had been lied to. It was almost impossible to get good reports out of the Troll regions, anyway; the humidity and heat combined to decay even the strongest corpses quickly and the Trolls were too wary to allow Undead in their borders for any appreciable length of time. But eventually, even her sources in Orgrimmar were reporting Troll priests, trained in Shadow, that were preaching their religion in Ogrimmar, had set up tents in Thunder Bluff, had even, apparently, attempted to contact the recently-allied Blood Elves, though reports from that direction indicated little more than general amazement from the Elves at the very concept of preaching Trolls. Sylvanas could not believe it.
But apparently, it was true.
The Trolls, long practitioners of Voodoo, had apparently decided that the closeness between their religion and Forgotten Shadow was something more than coincidence; that first Troll had been sent in an attempt to find answers to the questions plaguing Vol'jin and his council of witch doctors in their island home, loathe though they were to try (Sylvanas eventually learned the Earthen Circle had played a big part in the decision). The answers that Troll brought back convinced them that Voodoo and Shadow were one, and all Trolls should study the way of Shadow to be proper voodoo practitioners.
This caused Trolls, still leery of the Forsaken, to appear at the Undercity in an attempt to find out more about religion; and the Voodoo masters were steadily replaced by bewildered, slightly stuttering priests who did their best to explain to Trolls just what, exactly, Shadow was. And as the students listened and the Trolls realized the Forsaken were nearly as hated as they were, if not more, they slowly came to trust them.
The why was something Sylvanas only heard from a spy- that Forsaken trust Forsaken, which some wit among the Trolls had come up with. It was the reason they'd allied with the Horde, once Thrall got them off the boats to do as they willed- because Orcs didn't belong on this planet anymore than Trolls did.
(The Tauren were the only exemptions from this reasoning. Trolls liked them because they were huge and stood in front of them during battles- as shields, according to Trolls. The Troll word for Tauren means, roughly translated, "arrow cushion", and is used quite fondly to describe their hooved friends.)
Sylvanas sat on her throne and fumed. The Forsaken were not supposed to represent religion to other people! They were undead! You don't ask undead what you should do in church!
But Sylvanas didn't stop the newcomers, because she felt something like... hope... in the sight of visitors coming to her city. Different from the merchants, somehow, these were people who honestly wanted to come to the world was becoming stranger by the day and she, raised as an Elf in all her ways, was finding it surprising that the Horde could have a viewpoint so unlike her own.
Maybe she'd been a member of the Alliance too long in life, because this Horde shamanism was much more accepting of her people than the Light had ever been.
(Maybe the Light of her time had forgotten that the moon and stars- night itself- has its own Light too, though Sylvanas never was able to articulate this thought in the thousands of years she existed as an undead in the future.)
In light of all this, Forsaken might not have been the best name choice she could have come up with for her people.
(In her defense, the only other name her bitter, sarcastic mind could come up with at the time was The Other Undead Scourge, and that hadn't exactly sat well with her.)
-
It was the night of the storm- the night Kel'Thuzad arrived at the head of an army so large that even by Scourge standards it was massive- that Sylvanas realized she and her people were going to die.
Kel'Thuzad had decided it would be better to kill her and her Forsaken before he killed any other group, because he believed that an army of Forsaken would be uniquely suited to destroy the Scourge, and so targeted them first. The army he brought with him was vast and almost unstoppable.
For the war, Sylvanas desperately erected fortifications outside the Undercity, nothing more than delaying tactics; she was able to use the Scarlet Crusade as a buffer, since the Crusade went near mad attempting to purge the Scourge invasion, but they were destroyed, the Monastery sacked and all their men slaughtered.
(Varimathras bitterly stated that at least they were finally free of the Crusade.)
Her castles were eventually pulled down, as she knew they would be; the soldiers in them destroyed. The plague was not ready and would not kill their undead opponents. The Undercity itself was next on their list.
Her people decided to die fighting out on the plains rather than in the dark. She did not know why.
(Perhaps they wanted to see the sun again before the endless Shadow took them.)
So when they marched out, in tattered rags under bright Orcish armor (all in garish purple, because the Orc blacksmiths in the Undercity thought Undead looked good in purple and they'd never figured out how to convince them otherwise), she and hers met his and theirs on a big, open plain. The plains led downward, into a bowl-shaped depression, the Forsaken on one side and the Scourge on the other.
It was to be a massacre. She knew her Forsaken knew it. They were all going to die again today. They could accept that because it wasn't like they hadn't died already.
When the two armies charged, the first sound was not the screams of the dying or the shrieks of the undead, but Orcish drums, pounding out from kodo back.
Her soldiers stopped dead and turned to the sound. And there, like some ridiculous hero out of the old Elvish legends Sylvanas used to read, was Thrall, waving his hammer around like a madman.
When he stopped and pointed towards the sky, the air became thick with spears.
Trolls can throw spears exceptionally well, and spears are heavy weapons; the farther up they go before they fall, the more power they get behind them when they hit the ground. Standing on a hill like they were, the trolls got a lot of height on those throws, and the people on the ground got a lot of force raining down on their heads.
Like mice fleeing from a bitter hailstorm, the Scourge tried to get away, but it was futile; Orcish raiders passed by, bringing all of them down, even flyers, with hand-sewn nets so thick even fangs and claws couldn't cut it. A wave of Tauren surged forth like a horned, heavily-armed wave, and the tied down Scourge were helpless to prevent themselves being slaughtered.
Sylvanas' own troops raised their arms and began to fight. Whatever was happening, they could explain later. Right now, they were going to win.
They were going to live.
(Or, well, unlive, but that wasn't the point.)
--
They eventually pushed the enemy back to a final surprise ambush, this one courtesy of their newest allies, the Blood Elves; a giant flamestrike maintained by over thirty mages. The whirling inferno killed what was left of the Scourge army, and Sylvanas and her people would have leapt for joy- if that had been part of the Forsaken way.
As it stood, they merely yelled for glee that their unlife was still continuing.
(And, hey, with the flamestrike having cooked the meat, the victory feast was going to be great!)
-
She eventually got to meet all of them in council; Thrall told her that the Horde water fleet near Northrend reported Scourge movement and was able to get back just in time to scrabble together an army, and a forced march allowed them to make it in time. Sylvanas never really got a chance to thank them, but she did get a chance to do something else for them.
Though the only thing the Horde ever knew about it was that one section of the Undercity seemed to be on fire for a month or so, though they never bothered asking just why.
(Living with troll batriders had taught them that, when someone set something on fire, you just pretend that nothing is burning.)
-
Alliance is a term that has new meaning to the Forsaken. It used to mean, in a loose manner, the peoples of the Horde, and the Alliance that was made by Humans. It still possesses that second meaning, but there is a new seriousness to the first now. Their allies are big, brutish, and dumb. But they were also loyal, and when the Forsaken had been ready to die again, the Horde had been there to pull them back up from the grave and say Not this time, friends.
So if big, brutish, and dumb was the way her allies lived, who was she to judge? Her people did not breathe, and the Horde didn't seem to mind that. The Horde had saved them when they needed them, after all.
So if the disease churning in the Royal Apothecary would kill them, then she would simply remove her scientists and burn the Royal Apothecary down, destroy the research notes, and make sure it never got out into the wider world.
Because Sylvanas was not going to have her honor impinged by a bunch of green-skinned louts, so if the Horde would not forsake the Forsaken, then neither would the Forsaken forsake them.
Ever.
(And when undead make promises, they tend to keep them.)
-R&R please!