The light brightened as they continued west but the clouds were a unbroken, uniform gray from one horizon to the other. Aside from the complaints of his empty stomach while it gnawed on itself the trip was uneventful. They had put many miles between themselves and the shelter and they had yet to see either hide or tail of the white horse. After a while he felt reassured enough to relax his watch and allow his horse to slow to a walk.
When they came upon the first ruins, he knew they were finally coming up on the outlying edge of the Tuskarr town of Unu'pe. He led the way through the remains of shattered homes, where bits of tattered hides, their decorations now faded, hung from the broken arches of massive whale bones.
"What happened here?" May said, her voice respectfully hushed.
"Kvaldir. The Tuskarr call them 'walkers of the mist' – they're ghosts of the seafaring vrykul," he explained. "The pirates blame the Forsaken for stirring them up; the Forsaken say it was the pirates. Doesn't really matter when the Tuskarr are the ones dying."
May looked back the way they had come, then turned her horse about. He stopped as well, thinking she had seen the charger, but after a few moments she kicked her mount into a fast trot back to his side.
"Do those huge stones have faces or am I seeing things?" she said, flipping her thumb at the statues in question. "If they do, they're all looking in the same direction."
He nodded. "They are a place for the Tuskarrs' ancestors to inhabit. It's said they're able to talk to their children. Speaking of which, how much of that cloth can you spare?"
"Depends on how much you need," she said guardedly.
"We'll need provisions for the remainder of the trip to Dalaran," he explained. She acted as if he were asking her to part with one of her own arms. "For the horses, mostly. There's damn little for them to eat the further we go inland."
"Why is cloth valuable to them? Give me an idea just so I can get a feel for how much they'd – how much I should ask for it," she said. Her eyes were actually gleaming with excitement.
"They fly kites in the shape of fish from some of these stone statues," he went on, enjoying the role of being both fisherman and lure to her. "Before the Alliance and the Horde landed in Northrend all they had to build them with was seaweed and hides. Once the Tuskarr were introduced to cloth they immediately saw its value. It can take and hold color longer and it's a bit more sturdy."
"What are these kites used for?"
He sighed and looked ahead. There was a dark blue line he hadn't seen earlier; it could only be the Great Sea. "Some of their gods live in the sea, where they get most of their food. Maybe they try to reach beyond this sea of air to talk to the gods who live in the stars." He shrugged. "No one but the Turkarr know."
She was very thoughtful the remainder of the trip into Unu'pe.