A/N: Graphic violence lies ahead.
Running at full speed despite his exhaustion and blood loss, Khujand followed the winding tracks of Garot'jin's two unevenly sized bare feet as he tried to prevent the kingpin from escaping. The beaten mountain path was just as uneven, and once it began to slope downward toward the bank of the Southfury River where he had heard the drug shipments were dropped off, he had to strain his sore leg muscles to avoid sliding.
Garot'jin was nowhere to be seen, but his wheezing breaths could be heard, along with his insane rambling off in the distant dark of early night.
"Wort'less sunsa bichis, da whollotta dem," the drug dealer coughed as he cursed the dozens and dozens of henchmen he had lost that day.
Ears perked up, the Shadow Hunter slowed down as to avoid alerting Garot'jin to his presence as he approached. This wouldn't be a fair fight, and although Khujand had never been stealthy, the death merchant's perturbed, distracted state just might make him easier to sneak up on.
Khujand had burned out his mana using his chain heal spell in a real combat situation for the first time. He had only begun training for the single healing spell a few months ago, and although the fact that he bore a natural aptitude for spirit magic and was already experienced with other spells based in voodoo, he was still an amateur. The chain heal was inefficient in terms of effectiveness-versus-energy use, bled out much of its power into the air or the uninjured parts of his allies' bodies and required more focus than it should have. By all measures, he shouldn't have been able to stop Garot'jin's swing with the abomination-sized meat cleaver in midair, but for whatever reason, he had been. And now he was still alive.
With Khujand's mana spent, the power of his voodoo left him temporarily along with the healthy glow of his eyes. Loose gravel and sand increased in volume at the very end of the mountain pass in leading toward wharf used as the narcotics dropoff point, and he had to tread carefully to avoid slipping.
There was no rain from the clouds that night, but heat lightning continued to ripple from cloud to cloud, causing minimal noise but illuminating the path every few seconds. The mountains of Durotar parted and a the land dropped into a short cliff over an inlet of brackish water. The wharf was rather difficult to detect from Khujand's vantage point many, many yards up the path, but when the heat lightning flashed again, he could just barely make out the image of a crude rope bridge leading to a barrier island covered in palm trees and, unless his eyes were decieving him, the Barrens far across the river.
It was only a split second of illumination, but it was enough; the nearer he came to land's end, the better he could see due to being up close. Garot'jin had knelt down near the beginning of the rope bridge - there was no way it could have supported the body weight of either of them - and appeared to be gathering up items in a bag. If the drug dealer was as paranoid as the Shadow Hunter was, Khujand surmised about himself, he would keep a stash of emergency rations and travel gear near the hidden dock in case he ever needed to slip out and abandon the narcotics lab.
Not so, thought Khujand to himself, his mind now occupied by only one voice but his thoughts clearer than they ever had been in his many years. Garot'jin had threatened to kill his children, had tried to kill his current wife and abduct his ex-wife, had drugged a dozen young people into base slaves and demanded tribute from their families, had murdered a brave soldier of the Horde in a cowardly way, and had ruined so many families with the poison his thugs were pushing in back alleys throughout east-central Kalimdor.
Khujand was not innocent either, but at least he repented and was even slowly trying to make up for his crimes. Garot'jin was a different level of scum. Khujand's guilt complex might have clouded him to the realization before, but as he slid down the last of the sloping mountain path onto flat earth, he realized fully and knew what he had to do.
Paranoia seemed to be a shared trait, as the drug kingpin had already turned to face Khujand by the time he stood close enough to see him clearly despite the dark. Both of them paused, having been rushed in their efforts and catching their breath. Rather than waving Khujand's combat knife he had stolen in a threatening display, Garot'jin faced him with a crooked smile that reeked of bullshit as he pulled an oversized coinpurse from his travel pack and tossed it to the Shadow Hunter's feet. It fell with a clank, and both of then stood motionless as they stared each other down.
"A tousand gold pieces raght deyea," Garot'jin beamed in Orcish with acting skills that could possibly have helped him find a legit career in another life. "Take it and back da fuck off. Ya nevah found meh."
Before the death merchant could even finish his smarmy offer, Khujand had already snatched the bursting-at-the-seams purse and weighed it with his hand. Another silent flash of heat lighting revealed a troupe of spawning crocolisks beneath the rope bridge, and Khujand tore a hole in the coinpurse before flinging it at the enraptured reptiles. The coins tumbled out, bouncing off the scutes of the reptiles and sinking deep to the riverbed.
Garot'jin only sighed, his eyes betraying no fear at all from the wounded Shadow Hunter. "Ya just made da biggest dumb mistak-"
"Ya threatened ta kill my children," Khujand hissed also in Orcish, the two of them foregoing their shared mother tongue without noticing.
Like a wave, the kingpin's smarmy expression fell away from one high ear to the other lower ear. Irritation spread across Garot'jin's face as he finished stuffing items in his travel pack and zipped it up. His full attention was devoted to Khujand, the petty mockery clear in his tone. "And now ya leetle brats be okay, so no harm dun." He finally brandished the stolen combat knife and slouched forward, the silent challenge accepted. "Ya elfie be okay after all. It would be a damn shame if, aftah all dis, ya unable ta join dem."
Khujand's nostrils began flaring, and no longer from fatigue alone. "Ya threatened to kill my children."
Two more flashes of heat lightning illuminated the pure hate reverberating back and forth between the two jungle trolls. "How's da arm?" Garot'jin taunted spitefully.
More silence. Khujand sized up the nightmare version of himself - just as heavy as him and perhaps half a head taller and a whole lot meaner - as Garot'jin's fingers twitched nervously in impatient anticipation.
"Ya move, mistah voodoo MREH!" the drug dealer roared as he tried to throw a cheap shot during his own sentence. Garot'jin had been standing too far away for his slash to connect, and Khujand slouched as well with his arms spread wide as he tried to grab the psychotic dealer by the wrists.
The two men scuffled, pushing and pulling back and forth as Garot'jin swung like the madman he was while Khujand tried to dodge and control his opponent's forearms. Another thin, bleeding cut was opened in the Shadow Hunter's hide as his own knife connected with his upper arm. The pain stung, but it gave him time to push Garot'jin away. A hesitant, almost reluctant wrestling match ensued as they alternated between charging and back pedaling, beating circles next to the ledge and teasing the crockolisks with a potential meal were either of them to fall.
"How ya tink dis gonna end, huh?" Garot'jin bellowed menacingly as he circled Khujand. The circle turned into a squiggly, uneven shape as Khujand constantly pressed him back, never ceasing the attempts to grab his wrist. "Ya got no weapons! Ya got no mana! Ya go nothin'!" Garot'jin charged, swiping the knife in two big arcs every second and never seeming to tire.
Khujand was weary and hurt, fighting at as big a disadvantage as he could remember. Dragging things out would serve no purpose, he knew, and the others were likely still rounding up, restraining and cleansing their young people while Garot'jin was trying to escape. He was on his own.
"One way or another…" Khujand rasped knowingly between panting breaths. "…Garot'jin's gonna meet his end tanight."
With a final lunge, the fading Shadow Hunter leapt forward and swung. Garot'jin brought the combat knife down at the same time, stabbing into Khujand's arm again at the same time that Khujand throat jabbed the crazed drug dealer. Garot'jin reeled as he choked on his own blood, the force of the punch against his esophagus causing his right eye to tear as he stumbled backward. Reaching forward with his hands, Khujand tried to clasp the back of Garot'jin's neck and pull him into a wrestling hold in preparation for using his knees like battering rams against the drug dealer's ribcage.
Khujand failed to see Garot'jin's ashy, crusty neck flex as hie lulled back his head and then swung forward.
"Gah!" Khujand grunted as Garot'jin gored him in the shoulder with that one remaining tusk, piercing all the way into the meat. The tusk pushed past his muscle and into the bone, fraturing it for sure and embedding itself immovably.
Using his single tusk like a hook, Garot'jin stood up straight and grabbed Khujand around the waist as he lifted, tossing the Shadow Hunter in the air and slamming him down back-first onto a jutting rock near the edge of the short cliff. Although Garot'jin lost his footing as well, he quickly pulled his tusk out of Khujand's dismantled shoulder and crawled to his own hands and knees. The crocolisks below flew into a frenzy induced by their own pheremones in the air, the shininess of the thousand gold pieces and the smell of the two Darkspear tribesmen's blood.
The ashy kingpin jumped on top of the downed do-gooder. "Ya shoulda walkt away!" Garot'jin screamed as he slammed his forearm down onto Khujand's chest, pinning the fallen hero in place.
The combat knife was raised in Garot'jin's free hand as Khujand's failure revealed itself in full, crushing his fighting spirit. Garot'jin would kill him, escape to restart his venomous operation elsewhere and eventually threaten Zulwatha, the kids and now even Cecilia again. So much effort, and all for naught; his only success was putting more people in harm's way.
A light shone, though it was neither the heat lightning nor the gleam from the knife.
"Hhhrrrrrrnnn fuck fuck fuck shit!" screeched Garot'jin with that grating high-pitched angry voice as he arched his back and gimaced in pain.
The combat knife slipped from his hands and fell down among the crocolisks, lost to them both as half the drug dealer's body felt like it went limp. Khujand braced himself against the rock, realizing that he wouldn't have had enough energy to fight for the knife anyway.
Garot'jin struggled surprisingly little as Khujand shoved him off, the kingpin who thought he was untouchable now a bleeding, twitching mess thrashing in the dirt, unknown and unmourned as his life slowly slipped away on the forgotten banks of a brackish inlet. Sticking up from the cracked, peeling hide of Garot'jin's back was a single arrow embedded almost directly inside his spine, perhaps half a foot deep into the cracked trollflesh. Had the shot been even half an inch to one side, it wouldn't have had the paralyzingly effect that it did. The suddenly fallen kingpin's legs twitched and then laid motionless as though he had no sensation in them.
Fighting up to his feet, Khujand put pressure on the gaping wound in his shoulder as he scanned the area. Only the two jungle trolls appeared to be there at all, though the terrain was too uneven for someone particularly far away to have shot the arrow. They must have crept right upon the scuffle.
A light shone again. Flickering, unstable and weak, the image of the bushes in front of his wavered until a transparent being came into view. She was tired and beaten like him, a fresh but no longer bleeding cut showing through her mangled plate armor as she sat on her knees. A crude bow was in her firm, unshaking hands, though it rocked slowly along with her heavy, panting breaths. Her long ears perked up and down as beads of sweat ran from her scalp down the sides of her head, matting down her dark azure ponytail that had grey roots. Her features were elven, though her eyes only cast a weak, dim glow, just barely enough to reveal the very clearly trollish war paint on her face. Her lip quivered with anger as she glared at Garot'jin, not noticing as Khujand grasped her by the arms to help her stand up.
Wife and husband both shared the same shaken look of two people who had just seen their lives flash before them, clinging to each other tightly as they found neither the words nor a need for them. In the darkness of night with only flashes of lightning in the clouds to illuminate the pair, Cecilia and Khujand stared into each others' eyes the way they did a year and a half ago, so much shared between them with a single look. Relief dominated their emotions as the two of them tried to calm down, both having been so close to losing a love unlike either of them would ever feel.
Not wanting to make the mistake of many an adventurer and drop their guard when the bad guy still breathed, they supported and each other and hobbled over to the source of so many people's pain.
Garot'jin didn't even bother rising for a final futile blow. His legs had stopped twitching entirely and he already stank of a released bladder, Cecilia's mark on his spine having been true. He propped himself up with his single, half functioning arm, not even bothering to defend himself. Recalcitrant to the very end he refused to show any remorse or even hope for mercy.
"Ya lab got smashed up," Khujand growled with more malice than mockery. "Ya henchmen got ganked. Ya whole drug ring got busted. Ya plans got foiled. And now tha hunters ya were abusin' are gonna move on, tha region is gonna be free of ya poison, my kids are goin' home and ya gonna die alone."
Simple and perhaps petty, but very true words. Garot'jin spat up some of his own blood and gulped as he swallowed even more, a quake erupting across his bony shoulders. At first, it looked as though he were weeping in regret, though knowing his nature such a thing would be impossible. The quaking increased until a sound finally escaped his chapped, oozing mouth.
The writhing of the spawning crocolisks was drowned out by a cackle. Unsettling, maniacal laughter filled the air as the defeated death merchant appeared undaunted and unrepentant, hacking up blood as his laughs echoed down the short cliff. A pure, honest victory showed itself in his vile smile, adding to the mockery and spite as Garot'jin voiced his amusement at the suggestion that he'd somehow lost.
"Ya ain't got no kids, mon," snickered Garot'jin in a childish, mocking tone that would even make a world-detached monk want to punch him in the face. "Dose two brats ain't ya's."
Khujand stiffened as Cecilia clung to him a bit more tightly, the both of them waiting for the madman to explain what he meant.
"I be Groty now, not ya," the drug dealer wheezingly laughed. "Dey meh kids, and dey know I tried ta killem. Dey daddy a sick sonufabitch, an' ya nottin but some wanderer dey gonna foget about in a year." With a final evil grin, Garot'jin looked up at them, returning the look of pure hate Cecilia had shot him back at the couple tenfold. "Dey ain't nevah gonna be ya kids."
With his head turned in the same position to face them, Garot'jin's life faded from his eyes. Foregoing even the last rites his people reserved for their fallen enemies, Khujand stomped on the corpse's chest and skidded it off the short cliff into the inlet below. The frenzied crocolisks set upon the body with gusto, tearing it apart and swallowing chunks, ensuring that Garot'jin, the outcast terror, had truly met his end.
With a sense of foreboding in his chest, the bleeding jungle troll walked with his night elf wife back up the mountain pass, knowing it was time to help the other heroes on their way and face the former family that could never be his.
Cecilia surveyed the remains of the open air drug lab. The tables and shipping crates had all been smashed and the contents poured into the dirt; burning the drugs would risk both explosion and mass intoxication. Most of the debris had already been swept away and the stolen money and goods formerly possessed by Garot'jin had been apportioned like the spoils of war. The food and household items were bequethed, at Jhash's insistence, to the troll hunter families of the impoverished hamlet; while their isolation meant they had little use for cash, their lifestyle called for the copious amounts of tools, rope and plywood scattered in the drug lab's makeshift storage area.
The bodies of the dead henchmen had been laid out head to toe at one end of open expanse on the small mountaintop, not worth the effort of burial but not demanding any exceptional disrespect either.
The elf warrior and her troll husband and missed much of the aftermath during the chase and confrontation with Garot'jin and the limping hike back. To her surprise, every one of the Darkspear youths had not only been cleansed by Kinjara already but also seemed mostly coherent, with a large group of peers fawning over the young female whom Cecilia had hamstrung with an arrow.
There was jammering in several different languages, though no translation would have been needed for the display of emotion among the throngs of tired, battered people post-battle.
Chanting in Taurahe could be faintly heard in one corner as the three surviving Horde soldiers knelt over a pile of rocks over soft sand that signified the third, nameless orc's grave. True to his people's customs which had spread throughout their entire faction, the funeral had been so swift that the dim-eyed night elf and short-tusked jungle troll had missed it entirely. No fanfare or great oratory was likely to have taken place, the only indication that the pile of inscriptionless stones formed a grave being the low funeral chant of the tauren brave. Jhash and Kerr knelt on either side of him, so solemn that neither of them even prayed; they just closed their eyes and appeared to reflect for a few moments, probably thinking of how all of them would end up in the same position one day, no matter what their material gain or fleeting fame in their worldly lives.
A muffled sob distracted Cecilia again as she turned to the leader of the hunters clutching a big, gangly teenager with a foot-shaped bruise on his chest. Kinjara, the cold, hard witch doctor, the determined matron who led her people in such a harsh environment, the greying fighter whose old eyes spoke of many fallen friends and loved ones…was weeping.
Though her Zandali was broken by her poor grammar and cracking voice, what she was saying would have been clear even without sound. With a sea green mane matching that of the young man who had been deputized by the kingpin, the son clung to his mother without any embarrassment typical of adolescents, sobbing just as loudly at the reunion of their two-person family.
The entire scene of reunited friends and families, now free of the outcast terror, was a reminder that even the sacrifice of the brave orc soldier, his very life, had not been in vain, and his death had been as noble as any warrior would desire.
Before she could say anything more, Cecilia was jerked to one side as Khujand stiffened suddenly, his muscles tensing as though he spied another threat. Peering up at her troll of a husband, the elf saw him absolutely paralyzed, his jaw loose as though it would slack open in shock were he not clenching it so tightly.
Three figures emerged from their hiding place among the crowd, two small people clinging to a fully grown person as they peered around and searched for a fourth.
"Papa!" cried a tall Darkspear girl in both exasperation and joy as she ran toward the group.
Cecilia looked from the girl with oddly familiar features back to Khujand, and saw his salty eyes widened with incredulity as who she deduced was his biological daughter ran in their direction…
…and passed right by as though he were invisible.
"It's okay, kids!" Taro cried right back as the girl jumped into her stepfather's arms, crying into his shoulder. "You're safe now!"
Khujand sucked in a breath through his shaking mouth as a man he'd never actually met embraced his little girl, not even noticing when Zulwatha and his biological son, both shocked into a traumatized silence, walked right by the interracial couple as well. Cecilia's eyes darted back and forth between her husband and the family that was once his but now lead by another man - a good man who was doing his best to provide a stable civilian life.
She wanted nothing more than to tell them the truth for her husband's sake. To tell them about the legal identity swap all those years before, about her husband's repentance from his crimes, about his desire - even if he never spoke of it out loud - to still be a part of the lives of his two children, about how they could all still have cordial relations.
But she couldn't. She had no right.
The details would only burden them with more unanswered questions and quash any closure they could have that would help them move on. The logical side of her wise, ancient mind knew that her husband was remaining silent for a reason: it had to be this way. They had to be free of him in order to live normal lives.
Speaking Zandali slow enough for Cecilia to understand without issue, the son - Cecilia's stepson, as she suddenly realized she was technically a stepmother even though Khujand had never met the boy - turned with pained eyes to Zulwatha.
"Mama," he whimpered. "Why was birth daddy mean to us?"
Zulwatha's eyes began to tear up as she found no words to console her son from the horror they had just experienced. Her new husband patted the boy on the head as he tried and failed to find the right words to explain to a child why his own father had threatened to harm him.
Cecilia looked to Khujand in desperation as he stepped forward, his usually sleeve-worn emotions uncharacteristically repressed as his features suddenly became blank. All she could do was watch helplessly while her husband ripped his own chest open and proceeded to intentionally break his own heart into a thousand pieces.
"Ya daddy," he creaked flatly and without passion at the children who only knew him as a helpful stranger, "was an evil man who did evil things. But that don't mean ya are like him, little ones. Ya aren't like him, and he's gone forever." Khujand'a face softened for only a split second as he addressed the next sentence to both his unknowing children and his increasingly suspicious ex-wife.
"Ya never gonna have ta see ya daddy again. It's over now."
He stood up and pretended to lean on Cecilia for support from his injuries, though the trembling in his hands told her of the depths of the ache splitting down into his very core. Oblivious to the very end, the skinnier, more urbanized Darkspear actually shook Khujand's hand, surprising the Shadow Hunter before he could even pull away.
"Thanks for all tha help, mister!" Taro beamed as the children seemed consoled by never having to see their biological father again. All three of them were entirely unaware of who Khujand really was, and Taro thanked both him and Cecilia again before taking both children by the hand and catching up to the hunters packing the saddlebags of the raptors.
Before turning to leave, Zulwatha stood to look Khujand over one last time. Despite the territorial spike of protective jealousy at the way her husband's ex-wife looked at him, Cecilia said nothing, allowing them to share one last speechless goodbye.
The two jungle trolls stared at each other in discomfort, feelings of recognition and familiarity almost tangible in the air between them. The man born as Garot'jin but now known as Khujand stood, his mannerisms, body language, voice and sad yet intelligent eyes the same even when his appearance had changed so much over the past decade. Zulwatha peered at him not with desire so much as a painful nostalgia at what had once been so innocent and pure but was later destroyed and ripped away from them. Cecilia could not be entirely certain that Zulwatha knew this was the boy who had been her dearest friend and closest confidante, the youth she was forced into an arranged marriage with that sullied their bond, the man who caused her so much pain and embarrassment with his arrest for war crimes. But there was something there, some fleeting sort of recognition.
Lingering for one second more, Zulwatha mouthed the Zandali words for 'thank you' to Khujand before rejoining her two children, her new husband and her new life.
Kinjara rounded up all the heroes from that day once everyone was packed to leave, addressing them about the good they had done and the great evil they had ended. It wasn't so much a speech as it was a quiet few words to the tired yet triumphant crowd as they prepared to leave that godforsaken place to be forgotten by the world. Before anyone could leave, Kinjara addressed the preoccupied night elf.
"Raptors of you with travel bags of you," she said wearily. The two women both felt the need to part graciously considering all that had transpired, but both were exhausted physically and mentally. "Rider Kerr promise lodge of us not forgotten. They stay with us for some days, and mail comes to us after some days. The world remembers us."
Struggling to form coherent thoughts in her eighth language while urgently trying to get her husband away from the group, Cecilia said fewer parting words than she would have liked. "We write mail of you after some days," she panted in her even more broken Zandali. "Want see you and see other hunters after days."
For sure, a person in Kinjara's position had received many broken promises in the past. Across the language barrier, however, the sincerity of the message must have carried over. "Welcome, you," the witch doctor replied. "You one of us, now. Anytime, come." Catching Cecilia off guard, the woman with a greying mane or mostly sea green hair actually grabbed her, though this time there wasn't any strangulation involved.
Acquiescing to Kinjara's overbearing behavior, Cecilia released Khujand only for a moment to hug the witch doctor back and salute Jhash and Kerr one last time before returning to her husband and their raptors. Before the others had even left the site, the elf and the troll with matching wedding bangles mounted up and rode down the mountain path back toward the Southfury River. They were far from home, far from the sister she wasn't so sure they had the energy or emotional stability to visit and far from any other signs of civilization along their way. Sighing as she reached out and held on to her devastated husband's shoulder, the couple rode on to the river knowing they had a long remainder of the night ahead of them.
On the banks of the Southfury River, a woman and a man both with long ears led their raptors by the reins in the midday sun, making their way north on the Barrens side. They were tired and the weather was hot, but there was something else amiss.
The blue-skinned, redheaded man shuffled slowly as though he did not know or care where he was going. His head drooped down and he seemed completely unaware of his surroundings. Even from a distance, his demeanor still betrayed a deep, crushing depression and things left unsaid.
The purple-skinned, blue-haired woman spoke for the first time since the night before, no longer able to bear the heartbreaking silence of the man next to her as she affectionately ran her fingers through his mane.
He tried to respond, but couldn't force the words out and when her own face was strained with heartache, he stopped walking altogether. They embraced tightly just as he began to break, and she panicked when she realized there was nothing to be said in such a situation.
As he dropped to his knees involuntarily, she went with him, telling him he wasn't alone and never would be. Telling him it was beyond anyone's control and that he had made the best decision with the situation that had been thrust upon him. Telling him a hundred and one things neither of them would remember as desperation compelled her to frantically pick up the scattered pieces of his heart, only to find that two of them were missing.
They both fell to the soft sand of the riverbank. She held him close, pleading for him to stay with her, to stay awake, to stop bottling it in as he had done for the past twelve hours of silence. She said so many things she knew couldn't reverse what happened, unsure of what else to do as the shattered pieces kept slipping from her hands.
There the couple sat in the riverbank, a woman utterly helpless to mend the wound of the man who collapsed sobbing into her arms.
End of his arc.