Meryn Lobos had started life in the gutters of Dalaran, son of one of the countless thousands of non-magic citizens of that Kingdom that toiled away at the behest of their masters, his mother had worked at an Inn, and he had never known his father.
His early years had been a tale of barely getting by, eating the leftover scraps that the inn's patrons left and stealing from the city's wealthier inhabitants and trying not to get caught. His fate had changed one day after he attempted to burgle the wrong home, and found himself face to face with a powerful mage.
The man had sensed something in him, and agreed not to turn him over to the city guards if Meryn would become his apprentice. It had been a dream come true; every non-magic Dalaranian had a slight fantasy about one day discovering their powers and donning the robes of a wizard.
He owed everything to that mage. Tallan Vaskoff had come from a peasant family in a tiny hamlet on the shores of Darrowmere, but that hadn't stopped him. A life of adventuring and acquiring knowledge, gaining wealth and reputation in the process; it had made him a powerful man.
Meryn's mother had been only too happy to have him off living with some wizard, it was one less mouth to feed. He sometimes wondered what happened to his mother and siblings, he had never seen them again, spending all of his time learning the arcane arts that had been handed down to humanity in aeons past by the High Elves.
He had loved his time with the mage, he still remembered the rush of elation he had whenever he had mastered a new spell, or finally wrapped his head around some arcane riddle. Every minor outing to collect some herb or ingredient needed in one of Vaskoff's potions had seemed like a grand adventure to him at the time.
He had become a man a few years before the Third War, and had proudly accompanied his master to the front with the Dalaranian contingent in the fight against the undead and their demonic masters.
And then that bastard Arthas... While Dalaran hadn't been immediately affected by the fall of Lordaeron, the fallout had reached their nation soon enough, and the armies of the dead had ravaged the countryside. His teacher had been killed by a deathlord while defending the Silverpine Forest. Only the capital city of Dalaran was safe, the immense power of it's mages easily turning back any of the enemy's attacks.
But they had never pressed the offensive. The all powerful mage-lords of Dalaran had just left their people to die. They had even placed an impenetrable magical barrier around the centre city, trapping many thousands of their citizens, mages and soldiers, outside and alone with the dead at their backs.
He had been one of those mages, trapped outside the dome with the dead getting more powerful all the time. He had been one of the many to rush north, to where the living fought still in Lordaeron. Tens of thousands of men were fighting a Crusade against death itself; at the time they were mainly the remnants of the Lordaeronian and Alliance forces that had been stationed in the area, but a swell of volunteers came as the dead destroyed town after town.
Look where they were now. All that remained of the Crusade, and of humanity itself north of the Thandol Span was a group of barely one hundred men, women and children, freezing in the cold after a spell that had promised salvation had delivered them...
Well he didn't know what the spell had done really. Meryn and the only other two present with any degree of arcane knowledge had been trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the ritual for hours now, with Sir Castred and the other Crusaders occasionally stopping what they were doing to glare at the trio of magic users; himself, the Dalaranian battle-mage Thea Peronne, who was really more of a warrior than a wizard; and the young apprentice Erin Solliden, who only knew what Meryn knew, and not even all of that.
The most confusing thing was that they had done everything correctly, as far as they could tell. The spell hadn't failed and killed all of them, or drained all the life out of anyone, or summoned any fel entities, and they had obviously been transported somewhere or somewhen other than where they had started off. Nothing had been disturbed inside the Pallisade, and nobody had appeared with half their body missing, accidentally killed by the short radius of the spell...
But where where they, and why?
"I don't get it. I just..." he mumbled to himself, the other two had given up and were now sitting on the ground, looking defeated as he paced around the square, before having a sudden realisation. "Oh Light, what have we done!"
"What?" the typically blunt battle-mage asked. She was a strong, stout woman with dark hair and permanently tanned skin that contrasted to the overwhelming paleness of the Crusaders who had lived in a dark and corrupted world for so long.
He didn't answer, but motioned for the others to follow him, and the three hurried over to where Sir Castred, leader of the Crusaders was speaking to Tom Solliden, the leader of the farmers. Tom was the brother of Erin, and their father had been the one to unite the peasants of the area after the Scourge had attacked; leading the defence and securing one pocket of life in a dead kingdom.
The senior Solliden had been murdered by adventurers years ago now.
"I know what happened with the ritual!" Meryn blurted out as soon as he was close enough to the pair. The old Crusader turned and looked at the wizard, his light blue eyes boring into Meryn's own brown. "The ritual, I think I know what happened!"
"THE SCOUTS ARE RETURNING, AND THEY HAVE COMPANY!" one of the guards on lookout duty on the walls shouted down. "THEY HAVE MEN WITH THEM, LIVING MEN!"
"Your explanation will have to wait Meryn." Sir Castred immediately formed up a group of Crusaders into a bodyguard and left the Pallisade to meet the approaching party, leaving the farmer and the three wizards behind.
It had been a strange day for Chief Eiruk of the Yeolings. After finding out he was to be a father yet again, and celebrating this fact with a feast and some fun with his kinsmen, a party of what he at first thought were kneelers had appeared, wearing strange red armour and carrying well-made weaponry.
He had been about to charge at the men, thanking the god of war for providing him yet another blessing on that good day, when one of them spoke in the Old Tongue. He had still wanted to attack them, if any other tribes found out how good they were living at Hardhome then bastards would start flocking there and it would turn just as bad as anywhere else.
He then thought they must have been Thenns, the only people north of the wall to know the secrets of smithing. But the man had simply asked "what are Thenns?", imagine that! Everyone knew the Thenns! A conversation had ensued, with the red armoured men claiming to come from a far-away land called Lordaeron (bloody kneelers always did have big heads, imagine naming a whole kingdom after some lord named Aeron!), and that they had been magically transported to wherever they now where, and by the way where was that?
Eiruk had always considered himself to be a smart man, not falling for so many of the superstitions that so many other Free Folk believed in, and so he had obviously found this hard to believe, and loudly and violently disagreed until one of the men had suddenly pulled out a glass bottle full of what looked like blood.
After cutting a gash in his own hand and showing the assembled wildlings the wound, the man had drunk from the bottle and amazingly the wound immediately and completely healed.
That was more than enough to convince Eiruk and the Yeolings that these kneelers, and they must be kneelers since they claimed not to be Thenns, had the blessings of the gods and powerful magics at their command. All hostility had vanished from Eiruk's face and he approached the man who had cut himself to inspect the hand more closely. There wasn't even a scar!
The conversation had then been much friendlier, the leader of the outlanders had introduced himself as Corun Salvaine and Eiruk had followed suit, shaking the man's now bloodless hand happily and inviting him in to the village, where they received a very strange tale that somewhat resembled the Long Night his grandmother had often warned about.
Now, only a couple of hours later, Eiruk, Jarki and Fuldir were accompanying the foreigners through the woods and back to their encampment. Oddly they hadn't understood the word that Corun used to describe the structure, and several other words were twisted, as if their dialect had been influenced by some other language, so when they broke through the last clearing and saw the Pallisade they were shocked.
"It's a castle! A bloody kneeler castle!" Fuldir swore, and Jarki looked confused, "What the fuck? I was hunting here just this morning and it was an empty field? How did your magic bring this here?"
"I have no idea." the so called "Crusader" (whatever that meant) shrugged and they continued. The magicians must have been very powerful, Eiruk was glad he hadn't attacked the men and brought the gods' wrath down upon his clan.
Before long another group of men in red left the castle and walked up to join them, escorting the group inside. They were all armed and had a familiar hungry, tortured look about them. These men were survivors, they looked more like Free Folk than any of the Crows he had seen before.
"I am Sir Castred Wicken, and you?" the old man at the head of the new group asked, thrusting his metal glove forwards for Eiruk to shake.
"Eiruk, chief of the Yeoling clan..." these red armoured men looked wary of the wildlings, but also curious. "Why have the gods sent you here?" the old man laughed, but some of the others suddenly stopped walking, and Eiruk heard a whisper from one of the warrior escorts.
"He believes in Gods? Is this ancient Arathor?"
"I don't know where this bloody Arathor is, or that fancy sounding kingdom your lad told me about, but this is Storrold's Point, and my village is called Hardhome." that had sent the outlanders into a furor, and they all started mumbling to each other as the group entered into the castle.
It was an impressive structure for the wildlings; large walls and watchtowers surrounding some sort of strange little village, a handful of wooden buildings with people peeking out at them from inside, as well as above and all around them. There must be a hundred people in the castle, quite a lot for a clan of Free Folk, though there were much stronger tribal confederations and warbands.
The group entered one of the buildings, only the older man, a few of the guards and a strange looking man wearing a purple dress following with them. The leader of the strangers motioned for Eiruk and his kinsmen to sit at one of the benches that were lining a few tables.
"Tell me everything about this world."
As it turned out, the savage didn't really know very much about the world. Corun Salvaine and his small group of scouts had been shocked to see a tribe of what looked like ancient Arathis living in a collection of log huts on the beach. The small village was surrounded by ruins, they looked like old ruins too, piles of timber and debris where once primitive cabins had been.
The shock of it was the only thing that stopped them from instantly attacking the strangers. He had reminded himself that they were now in another time, or place, and whoever these men were, they couldn't be infected with the myriad of Scourge plagues.
They had reacted as he expected a band of bearded savages wearing thick furs and wielding heavy weapons would, shouting in some strange language and threatening violence. Surprisingly, they had understood common, and after showing off what a minor healing potion could do, they had awed the primitives and were invited inside.
He had told the chief of the locals the truth about where or when they had come from, and the man had accepted it with a grim nod, saying that they had escaped the "others" by the will of "the Gods". That had set the men on edge, these savages were not followers of the Light, but idolisers of the sort that could easily be lead to heresy, demon-worship and necromancy.
But the man's humanity was enough to stop the Crusader party from taking any immediate action against the heathens, and soon they found themselves back at the Pallisade's main guardroom with a few of the tribe's leaders, and their own.
"Seven kingdoms, you say?" Sir Castred and the other Azerothians had been briefly excited to hear this, but the chief, Eiruk, had been able to name a few of them. Alterac, Dalaran, Gilneas, Kul'Tiras, Lordaeron, Stormwind and Stromgarde were not among them.
"And which kingdom is this in? The northern one?" the wizard Meryn asked, receiving a furious outburst from the tribesman who insisted very strongly that they were Free Folk in these lands beyond the wall.
"What wall?" Corun chimed in, this got him pitying looks from the three wildlings, and the one named Jarki answered "The great big bloody ice wall, bloody Crows on top, you don't have them in your world do you, the Crows?"
After a distracting but amusing conversation about birds of prey, they found out that these Crows were actually men. Warriors that only seemed to exist to cause the Free Folk problems, coming up and attacking them, stealing their resources, stopping their raids, and so forth.
"Well. It sounds like we've found ourselves in quite an exciting... new world. Meryn, why is that, exactly?" one of the women in the room asked, and the wizard jumped up with a wary look on his face.
"Yes, uh... One of the runes used in the ritual. It was clearly the one that activate the teleportation, but some of it's components were unfamiliar and we weren't sure exactly what they did. I thought that it must have been the key to time travel, but... well you've seen what happened, so it must have done more than that."
The chief of the wildlings, Eiruk, looked just as confused as most of the Crusaders by that explanation, before blurting out "You are the magic one? What can you do?", his blue eyes shining out from his dirty face and thick black hair and beard. The other one, Jarki, looked in awe as he stared at the robed man, and the third, silent member of the tribe seemed wary.
Meryn looked pleased to shift the conversation away from the ritual, and quickly showed off a couple of basic spells; conjuring a delicious looking cake on the table they were sitting around, and a small blue flame in his hand, which the man juggled for a few seconds before dismissing.
Corun smiled at the display, but the three wildlings looked both terrified and amazed, and started whispering frantically to each other.
Sir Castred cleared his throat, and the attention of those in the room shifted to the older man, "Chief Eiruk, I have a proposal for you. We are... new to this land, and find ourselves in great need of allies. Would you be interested in some kind of mutual pact?"
The wide-eyed wildling looked back and forwards a few times between his clansmen, the conjured cake and Sir Castred, before grunting and raising himself up to give a reply "Aye, you outlanders have the gods on your side. We are Free Folk and we kneel to no man, but from this night until the Long Night, the Yeoling clan will fight by your side, if you will fight by ours."