You'd never catch them unless you were watching.

They looked like all the rest, pretty much and you had to look hard to see it, but you could do it. Of course by then they were glaring right back at you and you'd be lucky to get away with all your teeth. It was different for me though, you don't punch the man serving the drinks. I know most of us just sit back and serve them like one of those creepy gnomish robots, or try and be some kind of kind dear old grandfather like that old fart over in Goldshire, but I was never afraid to look them in the eye. Not in a bad way though. Most of them went into the adventuring business – not much other kind they'd be good for really – and I know people like to talk crap about the Guilds but those guys pull their weight. Stormwind would've burned down half a dozen times if it wasn't for those nutters. But anyway.

It would be the little things that tripped them up. They'd sit a little too close to the fire and the flames would go over their hands but they wouldn't even flinch. Or they'd order something hot and drink it still boiling and not notice the looks they got. Those were the lucky ones, who could pass. Maybe some girl or boy would come in dressed a little thickly for the sun outside and wouldn't take her gloves off no matter how much she sweated. They'd come in talking with their guild-mates and twist their head or arm just so without realising and you could see it on the neck or the wrist where the glove or scarf didn't quite meet the jacket. Even then unless you knew what you were looking for you might think it was a scar or something, but I know. I lived down in Dustwallow before I made enough coin to open up in the city and I know scales when I see them. Or it would be the eyes, or something, because no matter how human they look there's always one little bit left. A memento of their parents. One of them anyway. Not like the fakes who'd find any reason to work it into a conversation, would bluff and hope nobody noticed, trying to pass themselves off as children of Aspects or dumb crap like that with a shiny pendant that was supposed to be forged from dragonsbreath as 'proof'. The real ones didn't advertise.

It's the arrogance of the things, that's what gets me. They think they're better than us and they don't even try to hide it. Some of them have been good enough in the past but I never liked dragons. To them we're just smart dogs they can watch and get some laughs out of us. When a bigger dog comes through sometimes they help drive it off and sometimes they watch and see how we'll do. But they don't think of us as people.

The black ones are the worst.

-xx-

They came through would be fifteen years or so back now but I remember the day because she was beautiful. Yeah I'll admit it. Red hair's always been a weakness of mine and she had it down to the waist. Even past the armour which was black and red, all twisted weird on the shoulder where it looked like something had grabbed on, and covered in Light-knows-what that stank of blood to high-heaven. Ignoring that she was lovely. Even more so because I was drunk out of my mind, everyone was. They'd strung up the head outside the gates and everyone who walked in or out of the city saw it there hanging from those chains dripping everywhere. The entire day was a party, everyone was invited and if you were one of them that had gone in and taken that scaly bastard down you were a goddamn hero and you drank free for that week. Most of them went out to Goldshire or the inn by the square, mainly to ogle at Allison I reckon, poor girl gets more than her fair share of grief but she's a rich woman for all the coin she sees cross that bar. Anyway.

I reckon she came because it was quieter in Old Town, and because nobody liked dragons back then, not with what they pulled out of Nef…Nefarious? From the snake's lair when they were done with him. Hell, she'd probably been one of the ones that had done it and she just wanted to forget it. She wanted somewhere to drink in peace and that's what I provide. She walked in and was straight over to me. Didn't waste any time either.

"Hottest and strongest you've got." She looked me in the eye and I had to look away first. I pretended it was just to grab the bottle but I saw those red eyes and I couldn't look into them for more than a second. Like rubies.

She slid that gold piece over and either she didn't care or was too tired to care because I saw it on her hands too when she dropped it. Just a little strip of skin where suddenly normal pink flesh turned a little harder and greyer and made a diamond pattern before it turned back farther up her arm. I almost turned her out right there but I recognised the armour from the parade the other day and here its wearer was walking in with money. So I just poured and said the first was on the house.

She didn't miss a beat. "Then another after this one."

You did a damn good job out there, I told her, just for something to say. Then she laughed and it was in her voice was well, just a little hoarse and…different. Like the words had to kind of bend sideways in the throat to come out normally. I think one of the old hands in the back of the bar flinched a little, maybe he'd heard a similar voice out there in the forests when he'd been young and it had cost him that arm he was missing. But we were proud of the kids that day and I let her know it, just so everyone knew not to cause any trouble.

She laughed at that. "Proud. I suppose we should be." I wasn't sure what she was laughing at though, I poured her another and that vanished about as fast. It was around this time Jase came in, and he always was a little…clueless? He fancied himself a hero even if he never went farther from the city than Duskwood and now here was the real deal walking into his regular drinking hole, and a girl at that. Maybe he thought he had a chance. So up he comes and tries to start his routine. Little idiot, asking how easy it had been and what loot she'd gotten from the place, as if they'd gone into that mountain looking for loot. If he'd been sober I don't think he'd have noticed the scorn in those fiery eyes, it wasn't like he was looking at her face much. Like I said, beautiful, and rogues armour is a little more…shall we say form-fitting…than plate or robes are.

"So what'd you get out?" he asked, trying to shuffle a little closer. When she didn't move away he probably thought she was falling for his tricks, even if a five year-old could have seen she just didn't give a shit about him.

"What we got out?" she replied, and you could hear it in her voice; who are you, little man? The voice was all smoke.

"Gold? Weapons? I've seen some of the-"

"People." That shut him up, and me too. She turned away from the bar and taught the brat a lesson. "You want to know what we got out of there? We got out everything that Nefarion had put in, and everyone." Another drink down, and she didn't even stutter. "What do you know about black dragons, kid?"

Normally he'd have baulked at being called 'kid' but I think it was those eyes that did it. They were dragon eyes and I'll swear until I die she was dragonkin. All that fire and scorn and all of it focussed on poor Jase. "Just what-"

"Just what you get told as a kid. But I know." I wonder what stories she got brought up on. One parent having to explain away why she didn't have a daddy or a mommy, and awkward questions. "Dragons don't give a shit about gold or gems or weapons you see." She drew out her dagger from the armour and it gleamed. It looked rare, unnatural. I know a guild sent down teams into Blackrock's depths to the Core and this must have come from one of those trips because it even looked hot. "This? Nothing. Gold? They could have millions and not even realise it. What black dragons want is something different."

They hadn't expected it. Even after the mess with the Prestors, and the old broodmother down in the swamps they didn't know what that 'family' was like. She'd been picked to go on the final assault on the Lair because nobody was quicker against the scalies than her. There'd been forty of them, half seasoned old vets coming out of places like Stratholme, a couple lucky enough to have been into the Core and lived. The rest were meat, shields for the pros although Light knows the pros weren't going to tell them that.

"What black dragons want is power."

They had an old red down there and they were sucking him dry, using him as food or breeding stock or something even worse for the new batch. New batch? Jase asked and I knew he didn't get it.

They want power and they'll do anything to get more of it. But even dragons can't be in two places at once (although some of the Blue buggers make an effort to fix that). So they make armies, and either someone had an idea or Nefarion woke up nasty one morning because he had a hell of an idea for one. Like a rainbow except instead of all pretty light and a pot of gold at the end this one would have teeth and claws and spit fire from both ends. She talked on and I don't think she was even speaking to him. Maybe she thought if she told the whole thing that missing parent would hear her somehow.

"They were taking them apart, anything they could get their hands on. Red, blue, green, bronze, anything with a beating heart and they were sewing them back together and giving the bodies new brains, all working for him."

He grew them fast. They lost a good third to the first clutch of eggs when they walked through the hatcheries. She'd been there, this dragonkin whose name I never got, tiptoeing through the room when suddenly pillars had come out of the ground and started spewing poison.

"Adan got it first, he was right next to one when it came out. Just looked around and got a face-full of this crap and suddenly he's flapping around making a dumb noise like he's got his shirt stuck over his head. He spins around and there's nothing on his face but blank skin and he's choking and dying because he doesn't have a mouth or a nose or eyes anymore. Then the eggs hatched."

Thirty made it out, fighting their way through a mist that fused flesh together like it was putty, slowed them down as the babies came out around them and started feeding. They got through those rooms somehow, killed the drake at the end and they didn't know how, with swords they could barely swing and the mages half asleep from fumes, and if anyone fell down you didn't stop to pick them up or you'd fall next to them.

"We closed the door behind us, and Ceala was just a little too slow." The girl rubbed her shoulder like it was sore, and I could see the discolouration there wasn't a weird spot of metal but a burned-in imprint of a hand. "The portcullis came down with her still on the wrong side, and she reached out and grabbed on and screamed to open it, open it for god's sake open it. Eventually I managed to pull away and her arm came with it, the dragons had got to the rest."

I don't think Jase was really ever adventurer material; he never grew out of the swords-and-damsels phase most kids go through. He thought that adventuring was all castles filled with nameless mooks to 'slay' and a girl in a cage at the top to rescue.

"The rest was labs, goblins working on…on whatever the master had ordered them to." The eyes were on fire now and I could have drowned in them if she'd looked at me. "We killed them all and split up for the ones that ran, a few stayed behind to make sure none of them got past us and out. There was no mercy at that point. I can't go to Ironforge anymore, it smells too much like those labs." She looked over at Jase. "We weren't the first, those liars."

She'd walked back, blood all over her knives and dead goblins behind her, and one door too many away from the others, into the depths. Maybe she had been lucky and that other parent had stayed around for a little while to help bring her up because she could read the writing on those doors well enough.

Rendering.

Tanning.

Reconstruction.

Infusion.

Curiosity might be a human thing but I reckon dragons must have it too, and she went through one door too many, just curious. Because when Nefarion had his grand idea he didn't just stop at dragons.

"They were patchwork people. Some in the vats, some hung up like a rug you're still halfway through stitching together, and some chained to the walls. Those were the worst. You could look in their eyes and see them moving around, trying to figure out what they were."

Maybe she'd backed away and came too close to one or maybe one had been strong enough to get lose, because she felt a hand on her shoulder and for a second she thought maybe poor little Caela was still hanging onto it, begging to open the door, but when she turned wasn't her dead friend. It had been dead, once, but wasn't any more.

"It was half-finished, I could see that much." Jase wasn't talking much now. "All the little holes in the…fabric…where the stitching hadn't quite worked and you could see the muscles sliding around underneath. The eyes didn't match and the nose was a bad hackjob and whoever had worked on the mouth hadn't bothered to make sure the teeth aligned. It was trying to ask for help, I think. It had an eye I recognised though, from some old guild meeting. Just some poor sap went on the wrong job."

She ran. Oh she killed it first, as much as she could. When she turned and ran the parts were still kind of shuffling around behind her – Nefarion made his servants tough – and she didn't look too closely at the thing, or anything much, which was probably why she went through the wrong door.

"They were screaming, all of them. Like a butcher shop with meat hanging up and all of the meat is alive and it's looking back at you and it knows. It knows where they are and what's happened to them, and it's surrounded by things that look like it, and they know they can never get out. Stormwind must have sent in a raiding party ahead of us to gauge the land and the black fucker must have thought it a good chance to test his chromatic theory on non-dragons because there were thirty or forty of them and their pieces were all mixed up together. Just hanging there."

She killed them all?

"I killed them all. When I got back they must have been looking for me for about an hour. Sweet people, the best friends I'll ever know, because they stopped and came back for me. I led them to that room, it wasn't hard. I was covered in…in stuff and it had dripped everywhere as I ran. So we walked back like dogs following a trail of sausages and I showed them the bodies."

Then they went and killed the rest. There were others, normal dragons between them and the top and they didn't even slow them down. They lost another four of five, good people, good people who knew that there was no way they could turn back now. And she would have walked in alone if she had to, because she'd always feel that hand on her shoulder and the eyes on her back.

"We knew we'd done the right thing, because it was massive. I'm shocked we ever killed it. Just a giant thing with two heads, like down in the Core, but a dragon too somehow. It breathed fire and ice and it felt like fighting against time itself just trying to get past him but they did it, somehow. Pelinor lost to one head, just devoured wholesale while he stood there, unable to move or do anything but watch that endless maw descend on him. Velia put out of her misery as her skin sloughed away in huge sheets like paper after being just a little too slow against that corrosive breath.

"He laughed at us, at the end," she said. Not drinking anymore now, the bottle was empty and the rest was too cold. Some types of dragon can't abide cold and I thought I knew what kind she was then but I kept my mouth shut. "Even when we had him on all four of his knees. He knew, I think, just looking at us. Black dragons want power and even then he knew he had power over us. Knew that even if we chained his head to the entrance of the city for all time we'd still be afraid of him. Well I helped saw that fucker off and hang it there." She fingered the pendant around her neck, a gift from the Regent himself I knew, they had all got one. "We hung him from the gates and still I can't sleep. That hand. I'll always feel it." She stopped and stated across at Jase. He didn't really want to be there anymore I could see it, but I don't think he could leave either. "I almost didn't do it. I looked into his eyes and almost didn't do it."

"I have to go."

-xx-

She left then just as quickly as she'd come in and I never saw her again. Not in any of the guilds that came through here on the nights when the place was empty. Jase hung up his sword, found a steady life on the farm and he's happier now than he would have been out there I think. They kept the head up by the gates for about a week. They said they took it down because it had started to smell and the stench was driving out merchants, but I think they took it down because the eyes never decayed like the rest. I went in and out of the city a dozen times and every time I walked past the thing I'd swear it was staring at me, all of those teeth laughing and those red eyes still burning in the dead skull. I hated those eyes.

Because I think I know what she meant at the end there. You wonder why all of the black dragons are just so goddamn evil. They're living thinking creatures just like us, not storybook monsters, so sometimes you just wonder why they all seem to act like it. Well I asked the last scholar to come through here when he was just drunk enough to talk about what he shouldn't and he said it's because of the blood. The blood of the brood-master calls out to the children and smaller drakes and dragonkin and whelps and it's the strongest orders they've ever felt and they're glad to do it, like brainwashing or mind-control. Maybe she had just enough of it in her to hear him talk but not enough to really listen. Even if she was human from the top of her head to the soles of her feet those eyes were a dragon's, and I think that those eyes heard the order and wanted to obey. Maybe they already are, because a rogue isn't a path you fall into because you wanted to protect others or heal the wounded or pull back the curtain of mystery. They don't have any job but killing. Maybe she fell into the family business, even if she didn't realise it.

The sign outside? Yeah, it's a little strange but it's right; I don't close anymore and there's a reason. You don't want to walk Old Town at night, I stay open so there's always some place to come to if you're so pissed-up you can't find your way home, or you don't have a home to go to. The Guard doesn't give so much of a shit about us out here, we get more bodies on the streets than the rest of the city combined and that isn't just due to the gangs. They come in sometimes, normal people and the rough crowd, just looking for some place that's lit up, and they won't leave until morning. They feel breath on their backs and a hand brush their neck and they run here as fast as they can. Sometimes they look over their shoulder as they come in and they see eyes in the night, eyes that stare at them like they're just slabs of meat that barely got away. Eyes that that'll wait all night if they have to, and be waiting for them when they come out again.

Red eyes.


-x-

Hi and welcome (and hello again if you're here from the FFVIII section). This is going to be a series of short stories based around World of Wacraft, as told/narrated/written by the heroes to anyone that will listen, mainly about the 'big' events from the game but really any ideas I can get that I can turn into a tale. All feeback and critisim is welcome. I try as hard as I can but I can't proofread for crap so if anyone wants to volunteer I'd appreciate it, all I can promise is getting to see the chapters first (and you can start by helping me think up a better title than this one).

Hope you enjoy!

~Cobray