A/N: My newest baby is going to grow up big – this one is a story of more serious storyline starring two exiles of the Horde, estranged from their brethren for very different reasons. Everyone, please meet Rokarna...
Chapter One: Demonfire
Sweet, sweet power. It could only be that – the thick, hot honey that flowed halfway to the knee, glowing with its own fierce, seductive brilliance.
Rokarna laughed gleefully as the power lit her face. She trailed her green fingers through the river, shivering at the tingle of magic that coursed through her body, shivering with a million emotions. The orc smirked and scooped up the liquid power, bringing it to her lips.
Yet there was nothing to drink. She looked down at her clumsy, big hands – the power was sliding off of them. Alarmed, Rokarna scooped up another handful - again it evaded her mouth, as if disgusted by her.
She was now angry. The orc got on her knees and stooped down to drink, but caught herself.
I will not lap it up like a dog!
She awoke wondering if the sweat that rolled off of her body was from the shock from the dream or from Southern Kalimdor's humid climate. It was unbearably hot even at night – the air lay still as if it had been killed from heat.
Rokarna sighed and sat up in her cot – only to find that she was not in her cot, but had fallen asleep upright in the uncomfortable bamboo chair that lay opposite of where she should have been sleeping.
"How..." she began to mutter, but sighed and instead forced herself up to get a hunk of meat from the underground icebox.
The orc's living quarters were humble; pathetic, actually. It consisted of one room. Her cot was pushed against the center of the wall opposite of the door, with the chair on its right hand. The icebox was a hole in the ground that was dug between the door's wall and the leftmost wall, and in the center of it all was the hearth – often used, but not for cooking or warmth.
The dream. Rokarna's thoughts returned to it as she bit into the raw meat and walked outside to the well for a drink. It was not the first time she had dreamt it, nor were the thoughts she always had at the end of the dream exclusive to it.
When Rokarana and her father were on the run from the Alliance internment camps, they stopped to drink from a stream. Her father had bent down to drink from the stream directly – like his daughter had tried to in the dream.
"Father, you look like a dog!" the proud, ten-year-old Rokarna had protested.
Her father had merely chuckled. "Rokarna, if I had not acted like a dog, as you put it, we would have wasted time and a pinkskin soldier would have found us. But lapping up the water is more efficient – it takes less time, and I drank more water. Now come – we must find a place to rest and hide."
"Father would have been so disappointed," the orc muttered, shoving the memory back into a dark, cluttered corner of her mind in which she kept older fragments of her past. She peered into the tranquil, glassy well water.
The moon shone softly, illuminating just enough of the world that the mystery and beauty of nature was both visible and enhanced. Yet the female's face was lit not by the full moon, but by her eyes – the eyes that blazed and smoldered with hellfire. Rokarna smiled fiercely and combed stray strands of her graying black hair from her face as to not obscure what she considered her best feature and a badge of power. It was those demonic eyes and the orc's own inner demons that had made her an exile of the Horde. They had scorned her, called her "Demon's Concubine" and "Warlock's Bastard", yet she knew that they were simply jealous, or ignorant, of the immense power that was available from sacrificing her soul and reputation to the hungry denizens of the Twisting Nether.
They did not know of the vow, either.
The woman drank her fill from a large, clunky ladle, pretending that she drank the finest wine, and that her decrepit hut was the grandest fortress. Both of these things she would have had, if only the pinkskins hadn't taken them first.
A/N: To be continued. The next chapter introduces our other main character, Elashk, and furthers the plot just a bit farther. Review!