Yaromira raced to the other end of the village, ignoring her husband's cries for her to wait. The sound of a young woman screaming had disrupted their planning session, and the only thing on her mind at that moment was rushing to the aid of those villagers. How ironic that Kiul had been the one who insisted on helping these people so much, despite there being no tangible benefit in it for them, while Yaromira herself had been the cold, objective skeptic regarding their story. As the village homes whizzed by, all that was on her mind was the fate of the four people murdered at the small farming village during the past week. She would not let there be a fifth.
The sun had only set a few minutes before, and many of the scared villagers were still milling about on their porches, watching the train of colorful visitors as they bolted down the main dirt road. Cecilia and Tyron, by far the fastest people in the group, overtook Yaromira and slightly blocked her view of the uproar with their large frames. Their suits of heavy metal armor clinked loudly as they both tossed stealth aside and barreled into whatever lied ahead, stopping so abruptly at the line of cowering villagers that Yaromira bumped into Cecilia and fell backward into Kiul's arms.
"Oomph!" she yelped just as her husband caught her.
So engrossed was Cecilia that she didn't even turn around, having been unmoved by the impact. The others soon caught up and nudged the locals aside defensively, and Yaromira caught sight of the distraught young woman being carried away by several other people.
"That's it!" she cried out in the native language of the draenei. "That was my nightmare! Since I was a child!" Her sobs were deep as she buried her face in her palms, not paying attention to the attempts of the other villagers to tell her that it wasn't going to happen. "I used to imagine them in my closet at night!"
Finally pushing her way to the front, Yaromira caught sight of what had caused the ruckus just as it dropped out of sight into the darkness of dusk. A tiny figure the height of a dwarf but much skinner hobbled away, and she could tell from its silhouette that it was a deformed, malshaped humanoid of some kind. Obviously scared off by all the pitchforks, machetes and torches that the farmers were wielding, the naked creature had fled snd Yaromira felt uplifted by the locals' efforts to stand up to whatever had been harassing them.
Gie happened to be standing next to Yaromira, and she looked to the death knight's flickering blue eyes for guidance. "Undead?" the draenei asked. "Demons?"
Her face expressionless as always, Gie nonetheless radiated a sense of disgust and determination combined. Whether out of simple habit or because she still needed oxygen, the relatively thin pandaren took a long breath before answering in a low voice. "No. It is neither. I've never sensed a presence like that before."
Ironically, Yaromira actually huddled closer to a death knight in fear of something else. "Do you think it's powerful?"
"No," Gie answered quickly with a shake of her head. "It is not powerful. But it is different. And that is just as problematic."
"And it's not the source," Tulaani added. "It's only a symptom. It's definitely not the source." She looked to Khujand for a moment, and they conferred silently until Tulaani finally noticed the stare she had been receiving from Cecilia. "We think it could be similar to the hornets they spoke to Kiul about earlier."
Once the young woman had finally calmed down, Yaromira left her friends to do the job of group ambassador, addressing her in their native tongue. "Ma'am, you're safe here. We are not going to let anything happen to you. Not you, and not anyone else."
The villagers clutched their sharp farming tools tightly. Some looked frightened, others looked angry. A few looked lost.
Still slumped on the ground, the woman's tears soaked her dirt stained dress, and she made no effort to stand up as others knelt around her. "I saw them again…in my dreams. They're always twisted and faceless…they weren't real. I was just a kid," she sniffled. The torches flickered in the young night, and Cecilia cupped a hand over her eyes as she watched the direction the creature had fled.
"It ran into the woods," the old school huntress - the type from before the Third War that wore plate and formed the front line of their people's army, Yaromira remembered - stated in her monotone serious voice. Cecilia's faded eyes gave her problems seeing in the daylight, but at night she could see more than a few miles on a flat plain - the cartel had tested her night sight more than once due to its value in the field. "It ducked around a bend in the dirt path once it entered."
"Dirt path?" blurted out one of the village elders, leaning on her staff. "We explored those woods just the other day, there is no dirt path. It's just densely grown trees all the way through!"
"My friend, I am looking at the path right now," Cecilia retorted politely but firmly as she continued looking into the darkness.
"I see it as well," Kirandros chimed in. "It's narrow, but it leads off right from the main road out of the village. It doesn't look as though any trees were cut to form it; it looks like an old, beaten path."
"This ain't an ordinary curse," Khujand muttered, only adding to the villagers' anxiety with his inappropriately timed observation.
"Then that's exactly where we're going!" Yaromira burst out, surprising even herself at the comment. Her husband beamed at the news despite the danger they were likely putting themselves in, and a number of the villagers relaxed a bit. She stood back up, facing the village elder leaning on a staff. "Keep your people here, and hold vigil all night; if this young lady is alone, she'll be gone."
The young woman cried a little more at the prospect, and a group of eight villagers led her back toward the communal long house, where another twenty of them were already congregating with whatever household items could be used as weapons. Yaromira could tell that the elder was many thousands of years old - possible even older than Cecilia - and had likely lived in many communities before founding this one. Regardless, she appeared unsure of what to do, and had likely spent those thousands of years in relatively peaceful communities.
"We've been too afraid to confront this issue directly until now," the elder explained sadly. "And I know some of our people will still hope that the problem will just go away."
"You know that will be the end of you all," Yaromira countered - not to the elder, but all the other draenei listening. "Ignoring the problem won't make it go away; rather, it will only fester. There is no sleeping for you all tonight. Don't let anybody stay in groups of less than five people, and avoid staying in homes on the outer edges of the village."
In spite of the fact that Yaromira was using her manager voice, the villagers still looked to their elder for guidance. They didn't have to look for long. "She's right. We might not be able to fight whatever this is, but we've waited for too long to at least take emergency precautions. Everybody, alert those who have already locked up for the night; we're congregating around the longhouse. We'll need at least ten volunteers patrolling those roads at all times."
"I can round them up now!" the cross-eyed, burly young man who looked sort of like Kiul but not really said while grabbing a gardening hoe and racing to the center of town with a buddy.
A large group from the villagers who had gathered at the edge of town moved back toward the longhouse with the crestfallen young woman who had a phobia of closet monsters. The elder remained behind for a moment with a contingent of five armed farmers, and despite the age disparity she looked to Yaromira as if asking what to do next.
"Our mounts are still at the front of the village," she instructed the much older woman. "They can help to alert you of any danger, and a few of them can even help defend your people from any potential threats."
"I'll take our young people here myself to lead them to the longhouse," the elder replied. "Are you sure you don't need us to send anyone with you?" There was an obvious reluctance in the woman's voice, as though she only offered out of politeness.
"What we need is for you all to remain safe; leave the dangerous work to us," Yaromira reassured the woman.
The last of the villagers were off, and once again all eyes were upon the area manager for a decision on what to do. Trying to take advantage of the ten millennia of experience standing silently with them, Yaromira turned to Cecilia.
"We know where the enemy is, and they know we're here; is there any point trying to sneak in to the woods?" she asked the dark elven warrior, already having a hint of the coming answer.
"Not if this place is cursed," Cecilia responded slowly. "They'll see us coming no matter what. Better to treat this as a proper pitched battle; we can sweep through and take out everything we see. This is no ordinary woodland."
"Then let's march!" Yaromira shouted, watching as her enthusiasm helped the others mentally prepare for a fight.
And so they marched toward the wood under the rays of a light generation spell Yaromira cast - one of the few she had mastered during her almost two years at the academy. As the most heavily armored, Cecilia and Tyron actually marched at the back rather than the front just in case a sneak attack occurred. Gie and Khujand led in the front; they could both fight at range in addition to being either heavily armored in Gie's case or just a medium armored meat shield in the case of Khujand. Lightly armored but just as capable as the other fighters, Kirandros and Meatball walked at the sides, forming a protective square around Yaromira, Kiul, Tulaani and Elizra in the middle. It was a solid formation, and they moved purposefully as the woods gradually came into view.
The woods appeared relatively small as the locals had described, perhaps too small to even be called a proper forest. Also as the locals had described, the verdant, non-twisted looking trees grew so densely together than it was nigh impossible to see in or out, and the air was as still and silent as their group. Nobody said a word as they entered, and although Yaromira felt no difference in the supposed aura of the place, she noticed that Tulaani began looking all around a lot more rapidly once they entered.
"There are trees, but nature is absent here," Cecilia whispered. Or possibly spoke; her normal voice wasn't that much different.
"What do you mean?" Yaromira asked intently, examining the altogether healthy looking trees.
"This is not a natural forest," Kirandros chimed in. "The balance is weak here; these may not even be actual trees."
The entire group took the words of the two elves seriously, but pressed on. Dimming her light spell, Yaromira felt like they were being watched, and not in the silly, cliche way. They all created surprisingly little noise as they marched, and even the three wearing plate managed to lighten their footsteps enough such that their armor stopped clinking.
Around a bend in the dirt path, Yaromira had a clear view of what had startled the young woman at the village.
Everyone froze, and at that point the path was still wide enough for them all to see at once, though up ahead they could tell that it narrowed considerably.
Standing there in the middle of the path through an almost impenetrable tree wall was the creature. It was the height of Vegnus but thinner, with skin that was pink like the humans of the northern part of the Eastern Kingdoms, but sickly. Naked and bow legged, it stood with its stooped back to them, and Yaromira immediately noticed that the skin of its right shoulder, pulled taut, was connected to the top of its hairless head. Most of the skin, in fact, was stretched and nearly transluscent, like someone who was so pale that all their veins and arteries were visible through the surface. Its limbs were of uneven weight and length, and as the creature just stood there, it didn't even appear to react to them.
Everyone remained stiff, but nobody made a noise, waiting for their leader to act first. Remembering that she was technically the leader of the ten person group, Yaromira called out.
"You! Hey you! You're not harrassing the good people of this village anymore!" she shouted.
No response.
"What is it?" Kiul whispered just loudly enough for the group to hear.
"Not undead," answered Gie. "It does not feel like a demon, either. It is something else."
Manipulating her light spell with her hand and a great amount of concentration, Yaromira directed the ball of light to float from the low canopy down in front of the creature, illuminating the vericose veins and gnotted warts on its skin. It still didn't react, even to the light.
Until Elizra shivered.
"I don't think we should disturb it, Yara," the worgen woman whispered nervously.
The creature stiffened, and so did the entire group as weapons were readied. Even though no sounds were created during the process, Yaromira could see how the rapid discoloration of the creature's skin ended once a sort of bluish color scheme set in. The skin grew rougher until the dark blue legs resembled denim, and the blackened feet shone like rubber as the figure increased in height. In utter shock, they all watched as a still malformed but very real looking human man turned around. His bone structure was elongated and twisted, and he couldn't walk so much as lurch as his long mustache twitched.
Before anyone could act, Elizra had already jumped on her husband, crying hysterically and preventing him from properly wielding his two handed sword.
"It's impossible! It's impossible! He died in jail!" Elizra sobbed, literally trying to climb up on Tyron's shoulders to get away.
"Elizra, let go!" he ordered in futility. "Just get off me and stand back!"
"Waaaant free candy, girliiieeee?" the disfigured figure creaked in a Gilnean accent.
The creature had barely ended its sentence by the time it had been cut into three frosted pieces. Gie's runesword had been swung so quickly that the creature didn't even have time to react, and the bloody parts gradually turned to ice on the ground.
"He's dead! He's supposed to be dead! This can't be happening!" Elizra continued to sob as Tyron gave up on trying to pull out his sword and simply hugged her as she nearly fell to the ground, behaving as though she were experiencing some sort of nervous breakdown.
Even though everyone else immediately drew their weapons and formed a circle around the unarmored members of the party, Yaromira still knelt on the opposite side of Elizra from the woman's husband, trying to provide her with as much privacy as possible. She quickly quieted down once Tyron began whispering to her, and all other members of the party save the worgen couple held still, on the alert for anything else. They were surprisingly organized, displaying none of the idle banter Yaromira's civilian employees would, all of them remaining silent unless they found it absolutely necessary to speak.
"There are more of them," Tulaani warned ominously. "They're among the trees."
"How many?" Yaromira asked urgently.
The three mediums all looked over their shoulders before answering in unison. "A lot."
"They aren't attacking, though," Kiul said nervously.
"They don't need to if they have us surrounded." Unlike the others, Cecilia didn't keep her voice down, and knowing her experience Yaromira figured it must be due to the fact that stealth was useless at that point. The group fell silent again as their most weathered veteran continued. "They could be observing or they could be mustering their forces. Either way, they appear to be comfortable in their current position."
Just then, Tyron interjected with another bombshell. "Guys...the path we took to get here is gone."
Thankfully, the party members mostly stayed focused on the direction in which they were defending as they stood in a circle. Yaromira took hold of Elizra so her husband could take a battle stance and point back from whence they came. The path had disappeared, simply coming to a dead end against the trees as though there had never been any sort of opening.
"What sorcery is this!" exclaimed Kirandros through clenched teeth, clearly irritated at the entire situation.
"THEY'RE HERE!" Meatball snickered in the lowest volume that was likely possible for the gnoll.
Before Yaromira could even see who 'they' were, green swirls once again filled the air as Kirandros shifted into bear form, growling lowly. Tulaani transformed into a partially transparent shadow and began singing a quiet hymn. Dark purple electricity gathered above her head, and that's when Yaromira, Elizra and Kiul all huddled together upon seeing them.
Dozens, literally dozens, of the malformed silhouettes approached between the trees. They were of varying shapes and sizes; a few of them were the size of a gnome, one looked like it was almost as tall as Khujand, but most were dwarven size or slightly larger. Yaromira felt her back stiffen in fear as she gripped more tightly to Elizra who reciprocated in kind when they heard them. High pitched, child-like wailing echoed through the trees; it was terrifying just to listen to, and Yaromira would have done almost anything at that point just to make the noise stop.
The others didn't wait long. Garnering a new wave of screeches from the lurching creatures, Tulaani sent multiple bolts of the purple electricity flying outward as she pressed a palm to her own temple in concentration. Multiple creatures dropped out of view into the underbrush while a few more began limping toward the group even faster, all pretense of a sneak attack thrown out the window. Not to be outdone, Gie reached out one of her gauntlets and made a crushing motion with her hand, sending chains literally made of ice leaping out of the ground and wrapping around a number of the creatures. They didn't struggle for long and appeared to die relatively easily, but as they fell more and more waves lurched toward the group, replacing those that had fallen.
"They're getting closer!" Elizra exclaimed frantically, visibly shaken by what Yaromira finally realized had been a phobia that had been sensed within her by the first creature.
The first wave of the creatures crashed into the group's defenses, and all was chaos.
Glaives, paws, swords and maces swung as the outer ring of party members fought off the mostly small creatures. The monsters were absolutely hideous, most of them completely deformed humanoids with misplaced eyes, mouths and limbs sprouting randomly from the twisted, bruised, stretched skin and a large number of the creatures had claws or jagged pieces of bone jutting out of their disfigured bodies that they used as weapons. Tulaani and Gie continued attacking as many as they could at range, while the others had to wait for the creatures to practically fall upon them.
Cecilia shouted something, perhaps some strategic order, but Yaromira couldn't hear it as one of the larger creatures fell dead in between Meatball and Tyron, knocking into Kiul who then bumped in to Elizra and Yaromira herself. Dozens of the creatures had fallen already, but the waves didn't stop as their attacks became more bold. Through the chaos, one of the creatures stood back and stared Yaromira down as its putrid skin crawled and transformed into that of another draenei female.
"It won't work on me!" she yelled at the creature without even realizing it.
Memories of a bad weekend in Shattrath almost two decades ago descended upon her as the repulsive, incorrectly proportioned draenei creature took the voice of a woman who had mugged Yaromira at knifepoint all those years ago. Her fingers elongated until they became like knives themselves, and the arm stretched out to reach for her.
Rage replaced fear as Yaromira felt the creature peeking inside of her head psychically, and her voice became strained and hoarse as she screamed her anger at it. "You're not her, you're just an ugly piece of trash that's about to get killed!" Her defiance was genuine, as was the physical pain it seemed to cause the creature.
Before Tyron could even cut it down with his sword, the fake draenei creature collapsed in on itself as though its ribcage spontaneously disappeared, folding like a discarded pair of pants on the ground. It took Yaromira only a second to figure out that she had been the cause.
"Don't be afraid!" she shouted to the others. "They aren't real; they can't turn into your fears if you don't let them!" That didn't prevent them from slashing at the group with their claws or swinging with blunt, club like limbs, and Yaromira reeled when she realized that there was an open gap in their defenses. "Where's Gie!?"
Looking all around, Yaromira couldn't see the death knight anywhere when she had been there just a few seconds before. Meatball was swinging his spiked mace furiously, taking out creatures large and small in midair effortlessly but also endlessly as they didn't stop coming. Khujand as well as Kirandros this time were both covered in many cuts all over as they used their bodies to block creatures from reaching Tulaani as the two large men continued cutting creatures in half left and right. The shadow priestess, for her part, focused entirely on her task as she greatly thinned the ranks of the creature swarm, making herself the primary target. She didn't even seem to notice all the aggro she had earned as Cecilia cut a creature in half just before it tackled the Soulbinder. Elizra made haste as she tried to heal those who had been hurt, nearly stumbling before Yaromira caught her as she rotated all around to see who needed help the most.
To Yaromira's dread, the smaller individuals among the monsters broke through the party's defensive wall, wreaking havoc as they slashed at the legs of the fighters among the group. Tulaani's incantation was interrupted as the tiny creatures tore at her robes, and Kiul ended up lifting them off of her and tossing them to the side.
"Don't let them separate the group!" Yaromira shouted just a few seconds too late as a group of the creatures made a mad dash right in between them all. They didn't even attack so much as they simply stampeded and tried their best to divide everyone, willingly allowing most of their ranks to be cut down in the process in order to push everyone in the group further away from each other.
The number of creatures seemed to have lessened, and their corpses melted into the dirt road after piling up knee high. The stench of their blood was nauseating, and she distinctly heard both the creatures and some of her party members slip and trip in the puddles of blood and corpses. It was only then that she heard the loud splash from behind her.
"He doesn't know how to swim!" Elizra cried, and Yaromira turned around just in time to see the worgen duck behind the trees, dodging around twisted, fleshy creatures without fear.
"Elizra, stop!" Yaromira called out in vain, and just as the worgen wife disappeared into the woods, it became apparent that the worgen husband was gone as well.
Her head spinning from fear not of phobias in her head but the very real threat of the disgusting monsters in front of them, Yaromira looked all around as she tried to locate her friends and allies. Somehow, she had ended up off of the dirt path, squatting on wet leaves as she ducked underneath another bolt of dark purple electricity aimed at monsters she couldn't even see. Cackling of a gnoll filled the air as Meatball's mace rang off the heads of the creatures, but he was nowhere to be seen. Her light spell had been disrupted, and in the darkness she dashed frantically to avoid the swipes through the air that she felt just at her back. This was a very different kind of fear; a very real, logically justifiable fear.
Four dimly glowing eyes caught her attention and Yaromira ran for them, leaping and landing in between Cecilia and Khujand. They fought back to back as they swung their glaives, Yaromira huddling in the middle as she crouched low and strained her eyes in the darkness. Purple shadow bolts, green Druidic swirls and lots of blood flickered through the air in the distance, all of it happening too fast for her flustered mind to focus.
"How did we get separated!" Yaromira huffed, not knowing what else to ask yet wanting a million answers.
In between cleaving swings, Cecilia tried her best to respond. "The landscape is shifting around us. The creatures don't have to try that hard," the night elf gasped.
"How can we stop-op-op ow!"
Before Yaromira could even finish her sentence, she lost her footing, having been leaning against Cecilia's back up until when the huntress disappeared on her. She hit the wet leaves again, her head a bit dizzy as her teeth clacked together. Filled with terror, separated from her friends and unsure of what to do, Yaromira hid herself behind the back of an unidentified member of the party as they downed more of the monsters, wondering how things could have gone so wrong so quickly.
