When Nozdormu called me to serve the Bronze Dragonflight in defending the past, I thought I had an idea of what to expect, because I had already worked with the Keepers of Time to defend the history of Azeroth against saboteurs. I and four fellows traveled back in time to release Thrall, the future leader of the Horde, my Horde, from where he was kept prisoner in Durnholde Keep.
However, this instance was quite different.
I learned that I was to fight alongside Arthas Menethil to purge undead from the Lordaeron city of Stratholme, while there were still humans living there.
The blood ran cold in my veins. Firstly, I am a proud Blood Elf. It offended my loyalty to the Horde to defend humans of Lordaeron against a plague that my own people suffered. Secondly, if the plague had spread to the city, it would be hard to get any survivors out alive. And thirdly, well, I didn't have a third reason, I just felt a cold gnawing deep inside that warned me against traveling through the caverns to this event in history, but I didn't become a champion of the Horde shying away from things that made me uneasy.
So I agreed, and with four others stepped through into the past. I took a moment to get used to the too-bright light of the days gone by. I looked down at my hands, the human illusion cast on me making my fingers short and stumpy. I would have to adjust for that when firing my bow. I felt my ears to find them small and rounded over the top. My waist was thick, and because I had become shorter, the world seemed compacted vertically. I closed my eyes and shook my head for a moment trying to make this new image seem real.
"Maldorana?" The warrior asked me, in a tone that implied he wanted to know if I was alright, but there was no warmth in his voice. It was the tone of a military commander who wants to make sure all his men, or women, as was the case with me, were ready for the fight ahead. I squared my shoulders, my mail armor clinking, and said
"I am ready." I couldn't afford to have my head clouded in the heat of battle. I had died before, but that did not mean that I wanted to again. The faceless angel who shepherded my soul to a graveyard nearby always filled me with a sense of dread. What had she done that she was trapped here in the world, doomed to retrieve mortal souls?
We rode up toward Stratholme and the very sight of it gave me chills. It was walled in the same pure white stone of Stormwind. The Stratholme I knew lay in ruin, wrecked by fires, blackened by ash, and teeming with the walking dead. This place looked pristine except for the first tendrils of black smoke I could see curling over the walls.
We witnessed Arthas argue with Jaina Proudmoore and Uther of the Silver Hand. They both protested his strategy of razing the city. It was then that I knew how Stratholme gained the appearance it had when I was younger and killed undead there. The Prince of Lordaeron had burned one of his own cities to the ground. He sacrificed countless human lives in an attempt to save the rest of Lordaeron from the plague of the scourge.
He ordered us into the city and we followed, helping him to kill the reanimated corpses of the humans who had eaten the plagued grain. He once caught me staring at his plain, human visage and asked what was wrong.
I replied that his presence made me uncomfortable. He told me to think of him as a fellow warrior, not as my Prince; but that was only because he thought I was a human, a citizen of his kingdom. I could never think of Arthas Menethil as my Prince, nor my King. The very idea of it made me feel sick.
Yet as I watched him raise his weapon and strike out against the abominations that filled smoke-choked streets, I could not flush the thought from my brain that this was the man who would one day become so consumed by evil that he descended into insanity and became the Lich King. That he would one day be the leader of the scourge he so despised.
And as I fought alongside him to kill the Dreadlord, I remembered the blue smoke from the slits in his helm. The glint of Frostmourne's edge, and his heavy black armor. I thought of the day in my personal past (yet far in the future from where I stood now) that I and my fellow champions of Azeroth would storm his fortress at Icecrown Citadel, and kill him.
Years later, now that I have left the wars raging in Azeroth for younger heroes to fight, that mission commanded me by the Keepers of Time still causes a sickness within me. Despite the fact that those caverns lie in the sands of a desert far away from my home in Silvermoon, the visions of that day still haunt me, but I bear it silently.
My family does not know the horrors I have witnessed over my thousands of years, the sins and the deeds I committed in the name of doing good for which I was praised. My husband never took up the fight, and I pray that my children will never have to.