Episode 5: Little Ghost Town on the Prairie

I knew the next part of our journey would be the most treacherous. It would take us within a day of the Kolkar clan's territory.

The Kolkar were a dangerous group of centaurs. Nomadic and belligerent, they were the bane of the Barrens settlers. You never knew when a band would roam too close to established farms and spark a skirmish.

The Horde outriders made it a practice of attacking whichever band of centaurs was the closest to the settlers. There was no telling whether this discouraged them from getting too close, or only fanned the flames.

On the map, a large spire marked the path down from the plateau to the lower barrens. In reality, the spire was not nearly so large as we expected. By the time we spotted it, we had wasted most of a day's travel going in the wrong direction.

Despite the lost time, I was glad to have found it. Taking a cart down a cliff is a dangerous process. Had we given up and decided to forge a new trail, I would have had to leave the kodo and cart at the top and try path after path on foot until I found one that Slobbers could handle.

We reached the lower Barrens in the late afternoon and headed West again to find the smallest town on our route. I wasn't comfortable setting up camp out here in the open, so we pushed on until dusk.

As the shadows grew long, we reached the triangle on the map, but there was no town to be found. The buildings we found had burnt, been abandoned, and been reclaimed by the desert. It didn't appear that anyone had lived here in quite some time.

"Let's set up camp in one of these old farmhouses. If we build a fire in a fireplace, it'll draw less attention."

But instead of scouting the houses around us, Johnny pointed across a field toward a dim light glowing in a window.

"Perhaps someone is home, after all."

I knocked on the door and was greeted with a pitchfork in my chest.

"I bring word from... are you the only one here?" The house looked only slightly less abandoned than the others, and the lone occupant was an Orcish boy. He was tiny, under five feet tall. Scrawny and filthy, he reminded me of a rat in its nest.

I ducked deep to enter and still had to lower my head to keep it out of the cobwebby rafters. He returned to the pot that hung over the fireplace and avoided my gaze.

"Where's your family, son? Where is everyone?"

"Dead." His anger sounded blunted by exhaustion and time. "Killed in a Kolkar raid, last fall."

"Just you escaped?"

"I was fishing when they attacked. I came back when I saw the smoke, but everyone was gone."

Wow. Settler life was rough. "So why did you stay...?"

"This is my farm now," he spat. He turned to face me. "My father built it and died defending it."

"But you're..." I didn't really know what to say, "only a calf..."

"I am not!" he screamed at my belt. "I'm twelve! I'm a grown-up!" His voice made a funny cracking sound. There were a lot of tears.

The Orcish furniture looked small, so I sat on the floor, against a rough-hewn wall. "Twelve?" I snorted, "That seems unlikely." My father was nine years old, and I bet he weighed more than this child when he was newborn. "You're pretty small... for twelve."

He wiped his eyes on the ratty sleeve of a shirt that was too small for him. He gritted his teeth. "I am not small."

"Well..." I conceded, "perhaps everyone seems small to me."

"So, did you walk all the way out here from Mulgore just to insult me?"

"No." I reached in the satchel and removed the scroll marked with a triangle. He took it but did not bother breaking the seal. "Orgimmar has given your village a month to provide one conscript to serve the Horde."

He stared at the red insignia on the scroll for a very long time. "Okay, let's go."