This chapter is so long. I tried to cut things out, but everything seemed integral to some part of it. Hopefully the length isn't a pain in the ass. I feel like this is an important chapter, some of them might just be longer. What I'm going to do is upload it in two pieces, both from Meviahd's point of view. There's just no way this next bit could be told in anything but her voice, and I'd like to keep it in bite size chunks for you guys. So not long after I upload this, I'll do the next one as well.
Also, sixteen people have added this to their favorite/alert list? Well, I'll be. Shucks guys .
((WoW belongs to Blizz.))
Meviahd was first impatient to be free of him.
Two days had passed since the troll had truly awoken. Since then he'd slept almost eighteen hour a day. Sometimes he tossed and turned in a fitful, feverish sleep. Sometimes his sleep was a peaceful one, and he would whisper softly in his native language. When he was awake he was unfriendly, almost outwardly harsh.
He had taken to reminding her that she was a traitor, turning against her own people to save him. In some ways Meviahd almost felt sorry for him. Jandali could not demand that she leave him: he didn't have the strength of resolve to command his own death. Perhaps he felt that he could drive her away. Force her to leave so that he could be alone to wither away in peace, with his honor intact. And she would have left it to him. But he had not given the command yet, so Meviahd continued to return to the cave to tend to him. It was on her honor.
Meviahd paused in the tall Barrens brush, crouching lower to the earth and shifting her daggers in her hands. She'd rescued them off of the body of an orc on the battlefield and was happy to hold the familiar blades in her hands once more. Her quarry was a Plainstrider, one of the tall, sturdy bi-pedal birds that roamed the grasses. They were not usually hard kills, but the Plainstriders of the northern Barrens were particularly vicious. She was also being careful; her leather armor still stunk too much of vomit to wear, and she hadn't had the set of mind yet to search the dead elf bodies for new armor. She hunted only in her linen shirt and leather pants, careful to make surprise attacks.
Earlier, Meviahd had managed to get a good gouge out of one of the huge birds with her daggers, but the beast had fled. She'd been tracking it's blood trail for a good hour, following the steadily weakening creature. It was close to it's time now.
The rogue melded into the shadows, feeling herself become imperceptible. She crept forwards almost noiselessly and positioned herself behind the huge bird, ready to drive a blade between it's shoulders. Waiting, the right moment presented itself, and Meviahd raised her right hand to plunge it down.
A human materialized from nothing, appearing in front of the Plainstrider. The bird startled, screeching and making as if to move backwards. In a second the human was upon it. He lashed out with twin daggers of his own and slit the beast's throat. Blood poured freely from the Plainstrider, and the creature fell dead in the dust at the human's feet.
"That was my kill," without thinking, Meviahd revealed herself, letting the shadows drop away from her body.
The human didn't seem all that surprised to see her. In fact, he gave her a lascivious wink, looking her body up and down slowly. Meviahd shifted uncomfortably, but her annoyance at losing the Plainstrider still kept her mind.
He was a scruffy looking human, tall for one of his kind, but built leanly. Like a ropey-muscled wolf. Another rogue, obviously, the human shared Meviahd's careful way of moving. But his was a blunter, more powerful seeming subtlety that put Meviahd almost automatically on the alert. His hair was a brownish-red, pulled away from his face in a long ponytail. The armor he wore was all black leather. He grinned at her, bearing white, tombstone teeth.
"Well now sweetheart, sorry 'bout that. But look, certainly there's more than enough for my men and I. You're welcome to join us if you want."
"No," Meviahd responded immediately. She kneeled down by the bird and pulled a skinning knife from her waist, peeling the Plainstrider's feathered hide back from it's thick haunch. She began to cut the warm meat away from the bone, trying her best to ignore the look on the human's face.
"I have somewhere to be," the elf continued, piling enough meat for her and Jandali for the night into a bag she'd been carrying, "So if it's all the same to you, I'll just take a little for myself. You did say there was enough."
"Are you a traveler?"
"Yes," Meviahd was choosing her words carefully. Slowly, and as comfortably as possible. The rogue was too nosy for her liking, "I'm going down to Ratchet to catch the boat to Stranglethorn."
"Now why would a lovely lady such as yourself want to go there? All by your lonesome? Hell, the Barrens here is crawling with Horde scum. Maybe you want an escort? I'd be happy to help you."
"No," Meviahd repeated. She stood and pulled the draw string on the bag tight, still speaking with her fake careless attitude, "I'm fine by myself, thank you. You and your men travel well."
Without another word she began to head off in the direction she imagined Ratchet to be instead of towards the cave. The skin on her back prickled with what she fancied was the feeling of the human staring after her, but she did not turn around to see for a long while. When she finally felt it safe to look back the human had virtually disappeared. All she could see was the corpse of the Plainstrider bloating under the hot sun.
Eventually she changed her direction, making her way back towards the cave. Every so often she stopped to scan the cloudless skies. She was looking for Devi Devi, but he was yet to appear. Worry gnawed at her heart like a pitiless, tireless thing, but Meviahd still had hope.
She had to stealth once more to enter the area around the cave. The harpies were still a prevalent threat, attacking even the smallest creature that came within a certain range of their tree. The bodies of her fallen comrades and her captors sent an awful stench onto the wind, and they were a horror to look at. The usual scavengers, which would have picked their bones clean, had been driven away.
When Meviahd returned to the fire side, Jandali was standing, peering closely at the wall near his bed palette. The racial rejuvenation powers of the trolls meant that his wound was closing faster than a human's might, but it was still a long process.
"You are not supposed to be standing." Meviahd growled, throwing the sack of meat down on the cave floor next to a wide stone she'd been using as a cutting board.
"I'm not," the troll replied absently. He ran his hand over the cave wall, remarking, "Have you seen the writing here? There are things painted on these walls. They be too faded for me to read them, but..."
"There's more of them," Meviahd jerked her thumb towards the long tunnel of the cave that continued past the area they slept in. "I walked down it for a few minutes the first night we were here to make sure nothing unpleasant was hiding there, but it goes on forever. But there's more pictures and-"
"Why did you not tell me?" The troll began to make his way slowly into the cave. He walked with a limp; any sort of movement was an arduous and painful process for him. Sighing, Meviahd stood to follow him, grabbing a lit branch from the fire before she did.
"Because you were busy dying. I figured you didn't have the time. Were you going to come down here without any light? A lot you're going to read in the dark."
"Hush. Always snapping at me, girlie. Your mouth neva' stop moving." The troll was in a good mood; he hadn't begun to accuse her of treachery yet. Meviahd caught up with him and held the flickering torch to the wall so they could see. Once they'd walked about five minutes into the long cavern images began to appear. Crude, black, white, and red marking that sometimes seemed to be an alphabet, and at other times looked more like tiny pictures. Illustrations of long and lean forms ran up and down the cave walls. At one point Meviahd stopped so they could both fully inspect an image larger than her head. It was a troll's face, covered in ritualistic markings, and from it's mouth spilled hieroglyphs of trees, plants, and animals, all falling into a cylindrical stone form.
"A moon well." Meviahd said quietly. She drew the torch across the cave wall and found more glyphs: thin little figures with long ears. Blue and amber paint around their eyes made them glowing.
"There is writing here," Jandali reached out to take the torch from her, holding it to a large panel of wall covered entirely in a script Meviahd had never seen before in her life. The troll leaned in close to it, his face adopting a more serene, introspective visage than the scowl Meviahd had come to expect of him. He looked scholarly as any of her people hunched over a writing desk.
"Shu'halo," Jandali announced, stretching one of his long fingers to place it over one of the painted words. He had rather thin fingers for a troll. "This is the word the Tauren use to name themselves. This is taur-ahe, though different than I have ever seen."
"You know their language, too?"
"I am the Jandali amongst my people. My name means 'many languages'." He was only half speaking to her. The rest of his mind was elsewhere, trying to decipher the ancient language on the stone wall. "The troll shaman always keep a Jandali to understand the tongues of the people around us. To be ignorant of them is to be ignorant of a piece of the world around us, and we not want to be missin' even a small piece."
The beginning had sounded almost like a mantra he'd memorized. The end of was quiet, more heartfelt. He fell silent afterwards, his nose so close to the stone it seemed to touch it.
"So they declared it from your birth?" Meviahd asked after a moment. She found herself suddenly curious. This was a world she had heard was only full of savages barely capable of speech, certainly not of social custom or culture.
"Huh? Oh, no. They found I had a skill for it when I was little, and they train me."
Thinking for a moment, Meviahd asked, "What was your name before it was Jandali?"
"Tah'zir," Jandali's mouth curled and before she could ask, he translated, "Long nose."
"Huh, if trolls call you Long Nose..."
Jandali pulled his lips back and bared his teeth at her. Maviahd did the same to him. The troll laughed suddenly, shaking his head and turning back to the cave wall. For a while he was quiet and the studious look returned to his face. Meviahd sat on the ground next to him for lack of a better thing to do, staring up at the images of the night elves running across the wall.
"You know what this be?" Jandali asked, his voice breaking the silence with something like awe. Hesitation tinged his words, then he continued with more strength, "The writing is a little rough in places, some it missing. There a few words here and there I don't know but... It is an account of the night elves. When they were born into this world."
He cleared his throat and began to read from the wall, his hand hovering over the words, "'The people of the...' Well it's a bit hard, but I believe this symbol means troll. It's kind of like a combination of 'tusk' and 'warrior' but... So, 'The trolls entered the... water...' Here they got this symbol for their goddess, Mu'sha, the moon goddess. Some say that is your Elune. But it say, 'They became of a different people, with eyes that glowed like the eye of the Earthmother, faces fair and transformed. They turned upon those that had been their own and were a different people-.' Do you know how old this be, if it real? The tauren only allowed their shaman to write long, long ago. I only know the language after studying with one of their druids. And here there be so many different symbols, down towards the end I have no idea-"
"You're telling me this is when my people... We.... We were not trolls." Meviahd spat the last word from her mouth as if it had bitten her tongue, "We are the creations of Elune, modeled after Elune herself."
Jandali didn't say anything. He was inspecting his three-fingered hands, then looking at Meviahd's.
"You don't believe it, do you?" She demanded.
"I do not know. Could be a fake, could be a lie. I would need more time to inspect it, bring people who know more."
"Come on," Meviahd said, standing quickly and grabbing the torch from him. She marched back towards the fire, her back ramrod straight. "We should start dinner. I'm tired."
Jandali followed behind her still limping, but she did not slow for him. They settled back down around the fire, both on either side of it like warring factions positioned across the dead zone of a battleground. Meviahd began to cut the Plainstrider meat with her skinning knife. She speared thick chunks of it to roast over the fire. The only sound in the cave was the juices of it hissing as they dripped into the flames.
"You know what bother me?" Jandali asked, his voice introspective, but haunted. It was the hollow tone he used whenever the group of orcs he'd commanded was brought into the conversation. Meviahd knew he felt responsible for their loss.
"What bother me is, when the bird women came down, didn't matter that they had a common enemy. They were animals, you know? Creatures still pitted against each other because they were of a different breed. If they had just fought the bird women instead of each other, some might be livin'. It was Horde versus Alliance, and it was all they could see, they bloodlust. What if we were the same people, it make no difference now. Too much blood between us."
Meviahd said nothing for a moment, then, "What will you go home to, Jandali? Do you have a mate, brothers, sisters... Children?"
Jandali laughed in the sudden, surprised way he sometimes did. It was a chuckle that reverberated deep in the back of his throat. "No, I go home to my books and my studies. What do you go home to, Meviahd Moonweaver, when you go back to your people and not speak of me again?"
"Sisters, that's all. And Devi Devi. I hope." As if to change the subject, she allowed, "My mother died a few days before you captured me."
"Oh." Jandali distracted himself by pulling meat off of the sticks over the fire, "Your Horse Hawk was not with the Sentinels. Maybe you worry but, I figured him a strong, cleaver beastie. He was free, and he was coming back for you. I think little could stop him."
"Yeah, maybe."
Silence reigned again, lasting all through their meal. Meviahd was lost in her own thoughts of her sisters, Devi Devi, and the hazy blue forests of Darnassus: home. The troll seemed far away in his own mind as well, though Meviahd suspected he was thinking of the writings on the cave wall. She didn't doubt he'd have stayed there deciphering them all night, had it not been that he could not stay standing or sitting for long.
She allowed the troll to curl up for bed first. They alternated watches, but it was often Meviahd who stayed awake most of the night. Sleep would too easily plague the healing troll. That night, Meviahd made sure he was out cold, then she crept up closer to him. She was scrutinizing his face, trying to find something elven in those angular, wood-carved features. Here was the enemy, sleeping soundly next to her fire.
The elf looked up and caught the glint of the bronze blunderbuss behind a few of the packs piled in the corner. She slipped away from the troll again, pushing the pacs on top of the gun more. Hiding it.
Meviahd had kept it close at hand for the first few days, certain the troll would wish to cause her harm. But it seemed unnecessary now, almost insulting. The troll was many things, but she didn't fear him much now.
__________________
D: Phew. Like I said, this was part one of this installment, and definitely needs part two to tie up all it's loose ends. I tell you, I like part two :|
As always, review if you've got comments. I love, love, love to read them. The little e-mail alerts brighten my day.