The rumble of the crowd surrounded the thin entryway, feet stomping, throats screaming, voices murmuring, all folding together into a dull, encompassing roar above Tari's head. The air was fresh and electric, and outside the open arena was dark. Tari sucked red dust into her lungs with every breath, sitting on the dry floor of dirt and hay, hugging her legs, watching her father strip off his robe.
"You don't have to do this, Go'el," her mother told him forcefully, "We can work with Baine, just give it some time-"
"He's wasted enough time already, Aggra," Thrall stated sternly, pulling the heavy prayer beads over his head and letting them spill from his fingers into the dirt. Aggra dug her nails into his bicep.
"The time for revenge is coming, my heart, but you need to accept what has happened to our son," she whispered. Tar'ash had never thought she'd hear her mother sound so desperate. She pulled her knees closer into her chest.
"I'm doing this for Garad, Aggra," Thrall growled, his crystal-blue eyes fierce and angry as he leaned down to lift the Doomhammer, "I thought you of all people would understand that."
"Garad was important to both of us-"
"He's my blood. My family," Thrall roared, throat hoarse, leaning over Aggra menacingly as far off thunder rolled, melting in among the rumble of the crowd. Tari's mother leaned back, but stood her ground.
"What about the child we still have?" she asked, shaking, "What about Tar'ash?"
"Tar'ash will understand-" Thrall began without giving his daughter a glance.
"How can she if you won't be there for her?" Aggra asked, baring her fangs.
"You were the one who said she needed to grow up-"
"Not like this! Not left to bear Garad's death alone while you wage a war." Outside the entryway, Tari could see Baine's huge silhouette facing them across the arena as another tauren bull in heavy shaman robes carefully stroked oils onto the blade of his spear. Droplets of rain began to cut through the air between them.
"You'll be there for her-"
"I can't!" Aggra howled, covering her lips with her hand as she choked back a whimper, "If you die, Go'el, I can't..." Thrall's posture softened, and he slipped his meaty palm against Aggra's cheek, thumbing away a tear.
"I have to do this, Aggra," he told her, sternly, but not unkindly. Her back bent in surrender, and she nodded, pulling a bottle of oil from her robe. As Tari's mother poured the oils into her sinewy palm, her body lurched with a swallowed sob. Aggra's face twisted with anger then relaxed, and she massaged the oil against Thrall's body, hands tracing familiar paths, finding and gripping his hips before reluctantly snaking off. At last, Thrall offered the Doomhammer, and Aggra caressed oil across its ancient, scuffed metal, making it gleam. Her fingertips brushed against the relief of a frostwolf's head, and Thrall reached an arm around her waist and kissed her. Aggra's hands lifted to pull him to her, but he was already breaking away, turning and marching into the ring. Aggra nearly followed him out, stopping only at the roughly-hewn wooden archway clutched into place by rope and clay. When Tari's father stepped into the arena, the crowd's voice rose to a din. He marched to meet Baine as if he couldn't hear them.
Thunder roared ominously, closer now, swelling up to the arena from behind them. Tari shivered and clasped her hands around the crutch at her side, squeezing the hard wood in her fist, feeling how smooth it was, how it didn't give. She pushed herself to her feet and hobbled over to Aggra, who slipped a hand atop her head without taking her eyes off Thrall's broad, green back. Baine walked to meet him, and when he was closer she could see the spear in his hand was carved along the haft. The runespear, she knew. She'd heard the tale of Baine's father, and how he fell to the wicked Garrosh Hellscream.
"This dishonorable Hellscream conspired with an evil Grimtotem crone," the storyteller had told her, gesticulating grandly, the bones of his staff clattering, "The coward orc feared to face Baine's mighty father, so he asked Cairne's old enemy, Magatha, to anoint his terrible weapon with a poisonous tar. He did not fight mighty Cairne on equal ground; he murdered him, then laughed and celebrated while Baine mourned."
When she recounted this story to her father, he seemed as if he had his own version of the tale, but Aggra had cut him off. "The tale is true enough for you to know, Tari," she'd said shortly. Thrall had gone silent after that, and despite her prodding, Tari couldn't get her father to tell her his version.
Both Baine and her father were always glorious in any tales she'd heard about them...seeing the pair approach one another in the ring made Tari wonder, in years hence when shaman told children of this moment, who the hero of the tale would be.
She was rattled from her thoughts when her father threw back his head and roared, joined soon by the masses in the stands, rain coming down steadily now, darkening the mud of the ring. Baine's thick fingers clutched his ancestral spear. His mighty chest bloated out like a bellows and he answered. Voices joined his as well, but softer. The combatants began to circle one another, and Tari reached her arms around her mother's waist, waiting breathlessly for someone to strike. Rain poured from the sky, Thrall lifted the Doomhammer over his head, and then a sound as if the building was cracking in half shook the entire stadium. The arena lit up with blinding blue light, and when Tari could see again he father had charged.
Baine stepped aside as the Doomhammer slammed down on the muddy earth, shaking the ground and spraying mud out in a halo. Baine turned the spear down towards Thrall's mighty shoulders, but Tari could see a split-second of hesitation in his muscles. It was all her father needed. His claws buried themselves in the earth beneath him, and his thick, corded muscles bulged with strain as he pulled up a sheer rock wall in front of him, knocking the Warchief onto his back.
Thrall got to his feet with a clean, liquid movement and clutched the Doomhammer in one meaty paw, blue electricity skittering across its metal surface. He moved around the clay wall he'd called up from the earth and descended on the prone Warchief. A whining sound, like wind-up Goblin toys, began quiet then crescendoed to a screech as her father called more and more lightning to his hammer. Baine rolled, but it was not enough; the hammer came down against the earth a foot from where the tauren's chest had been seconds ago. From the Doomhammer's head cracked a great charge of blue lightning , climbing instantly to the heavens. The force blew Baine fifty feet back against the walls of the Arena. The crowd gasped. Aggra and Tari simultaneously grasped each other tighter.
"He would have killed him," her mother breathed, and Tari buried her face into her mother's robes. She couldn't see another dead body. She didn't want to watch that moment where someone living and breathing went limp and soulless. She heard the crashes, the cheers, the song of metal on the wind. With her eyes closed she saw the fuzzy image of Garad's cavernous opened throat swallowing her. From the black depths there she heard the low growl of a voice.
Give up.
Behind her eyelids she began falling down into the darkness over and over feeling her stomach lurch until she had to open her eyes just enough that the world was a blurry, fluttering sunset.
"Give up." She heard it again, clearer but farther away. Tari whimpered.
"I said give up, Baine! Concede!" the roar came, ringing against the arena walls, and Tari finally realized it was her father, howling over the crowd's hushed silence. She looked up to see Baine prone on the ground, the Runespear far out of reach, and Thrall with his hammer raised over his shoulder, ready to strike. Baine's broad chest heaved up and down for long, terrible moments while her father's fist shook.
A frustrated sound keened from his throat up and out between his clenched tusks, and Thrall began to wind the hammer back for a strike when Baine's hands came up in supplication. "I concede to you, Son of Durotan," he said in a voice quiet and mournful; resigned. Thrall's hammer slowly came to rest on his shoulder before turning away from Baine and looking up at the crowd.
He took sure steps, shoulders back, and projected his bellowing voice for all to hear. "Baine has been defeated. Raise your voices, sons and daughters of the Horde. Your Warchief has returned!"
As the arena shook with the cries of Thrall's citizens, he turned and extended a hand towards Tar'ash and Aggra, beckoning them to join him in his victory. Aggra's fingers pinched Tari's neck, pulling her daughter up as she lifted her own chin and pushed back her shoulders. "Stand up straight, girl," she said in a raspy whisper, then pulled Tari out with her into the rain.