I stumble back and fall straight through the shadowy, incorporeal body of Ihsan, feeling the barely noticeable coolness of the snow when my haunches plop in it. I quickly try to right myself, suddenly finding my new, jet black body rather heavy. Purbas stands side by side with me; she is lighter, but roughly the same dimensions, and she leans against me so I can stand.
"A little light on the mana, there?" the nerubian chitters at me while straining to hold me up.
"W-what? Well, I..."
As if he understands my apprehension, Barghash stops looking at me directly. I sense no sensitivity of any sort from him, but he does appear to have a measure of respect such that he dislikes seeing an ally squirm. "Sweetiepie, Dak, scout the area."
"We'll earn our badges for 'crazy' yet!" cackles the little pipsqueak as she rides the forest troll in a circle around the snowy, lightly forested area.
"You," he tells the ghouls and frost revenant, "keep the captives stretched flat on their stomachs. Screech if the priest needs his mana drained again." Not even needing time to think, the horrid horrors turn and drag our bound enemies into prone positions, hanging over them in order to keep discipline. With Purbas by my side and all others busy, I find myself much more relaxed, faced only with Barghash not looking directly at me and Ihsan floating around. "Mighty ally, you're totally sentient and in possession of speech...haven't you a name? Is it not true that your kind are former tol'vir?"
I blink at the word he is saying, struggling to comprehend it. "Tol...vir?" I ask in confusion, drawing up a blank. "I...remember nothing. I am a person! I am not a machine! But...I do not know who I am," I sigh, slightly more comfortable without all the eyes directed at me. As shy as I feel to confess that, the reality is that I have been alone, ignored and forgotten for so long that I can bear the discomfort if it means keeping the respect of these strangers.
Ihsan gives me a jolt when I realize that he is hovering above me head. "I checked the records, Barghash. This ziggurat was only used for the production and storage of obsidian destroyers, using technology considered forbidden by Purbas' people. The nerubians loyal to the Scourge tapped into those methods, using mummified tol'vir from their vaults."
I try to pull him down to eye level with my crook before remembering that his body is incorporeal, but he notices and floats down anyway. "Records?" I ask, a bizarre sensation of excitement without blood or adrenaline flowing through me, causing an odd vibration beneat my hard skin. "Records of this place? Of who I am? There were more of us?" One of the enemy humans tries to look up, and screams when he is scratched by a ghoul for doing so. This time I do feel bad for our fallen enemies being beat up, but my eagerness to learn about who I am is too great.
Barghash and Purbas turn their full attention to the shade now, and he begins to ramble. "Well you see, the nerubians keep meticulous records, as Purbas here can tell you - they adopted that from your people, apparently, who were taught record keeping by the Titans. Their architecture is borrowed from the aqir but their education was taken from your people. You see, the tol'vir were bred in two populations-"
"Get to the point!" Barghash nearly growls, showing a bit of the wrath I sensed in him from the beginning.
"Yes, well, the record of every obsidian destroyer ever stored here was written in the upper floor, which was sealed off during the zigurrat's construction; I only fit in because of small, porous air pockets in the cement blocks. The way it works-"
"Please, I must know!" I almost shriek, despairing in part because I have no idea what a tol'vir is even though he insists I am - or was - one.
"Ihsan, do you know her name?" Barghash asks impatiently, though his displeasure is lost on me in my joy at him referring to me as 'her' and not 'it.'
"Yes, yes, I found a record that matches her chamber. Apparently, she was a villager and an escaped slave from a village of tol'vir that the Titans placed so her people could naturally breed and continue guarding relics here without the need for supervision. The name of the village is lost, but her personal name could either be Rahotepa or Raha'otepa - the diacritic marks on the script of Titan used in the ziggurat aren't the same dialect as what I studied. It could be either way."
From the corner of my eye, I can see Purbas leaning more closely to me. "Rahotepa...does that ring a bell?" she asks quietly, her voice soothing even when her appearance still unsettles me.
But I can not focus. "I...was a villager?" I ask, feeling a bit of my hope die inside. I had expected news like this were I ever to escape, but nothing could prepare me for the time when the news finally came.
For a good few seconds, all eyes are on the shade, his expression unreadable due to the lack of features other than lidless and browless eyes. "According to the records, you were one of the early individuals embalmed and permanently preserved in volcanic glass, and which the Scourge later unearthed and enchanted into said existing volcanic glass with their anti magic magic. I memorized the date and I'll need to run a conversion once we return to the lab at Brill, for the calendar differences...but based on my preliminary estimate, you and apparently half your village died in a blizzard roughly sixty five thousand years ago."
My reaction must have been apparent, because Barghash immediately motioned for Ihsan to leave. In my rapidly blurring vision, I can see Purbas hugging me. "It's alright, Rahotepa - hey!"
Despite my newfound clumsiness, I still manage to cause Purbas to stumble as I flee, gasping despite not breathing as I galloped in the nearest place with heavier woodland that I can see. "Damnit, guys, give her some space!" I hear Barghash shout at the others as I run, weaving in and out of the trees the best my heavy, uncoordinated frame will allow. Pressure mounts behind my eyes as I feel tearless sobs threatening to claim me again, and I try to run away from pain that already clings inside of me.
My front leg hits a root beneath the snow and I trip, falling haunches over head as my L shaped body tumbles down a steep hill. I crash into a snow pile near a riverbank, causing a mild explosion of the white powder that scares some small trout away from the spot. Even if I no longer breathe, I still experience vertigo, and I take a moment to roll around in the snow before I remember which way is up again after my slide. My wings flap against the ground, entirely unfamiliar and possibly not even mine originally; I have no way of knowing, because nothing that Ihsan claimed was familiar to me. All I know is that I am lost, an amnesiac with only a name and a death date from so long ago that for sure all the people who once cared for me are long gone.
Covering my upper body with my wings, I clasp my hands over my face before remembering that I have no tear ducts. For the longest time I just lay there in the snow, wondering if this new group of people grew tired of me already. It would fit the general pattern of my existence.
I dig my fingers into the snow, unaffected by the cold as I drag myself over to the edge of the water. On such a clear day, my reflection is very easy to see. At least I can say that my time spent frozen like a statue, unnoticed by people or worshipped by them, plus the revelations about my embalming, all cushioned the blow. My face is made of moveable stone like my joints, colorful and adorned with a nemes made from copper and several varieties of softer metals colored like gold but not gold. I spend a long time staring into that face and those eyes...
"I do not know you," I whisper to my own reflection.
As if I could not become any more cliché, I actually slap at the reflection only for it to reform and stare back at me again. Left alone to my own futility, I find a way to fold my wings against my horizontal back again, hugging myself around my vertical back and staring blankly into the water. I wish I could think of some sort of a plan, of how to maturely react to being an amnesiac, but the reality is that my mind was empty. I was more like a statue then than any time when I had been trapped.
The reflection of Barghash appears next to me; he can not walk softly if he tried, but my situational awareness had bottomed out. Dragging a log next to me, he sits down and I find him at my eye level. I tremble, wondering what sort of hard talk he might give me about moving on; even if he chooses to, I must listen. I am trapped...I am still a slave. Because if I leave these people, then I have nothing. Breaking free from my encasing was not what I had thought it would be.
He speaks without looking directly at me. "I can't pretend to understand what it must feel like. I've seen it before, including among those you've met here...those whose lives have been taken by the Scourge rarely find their new powers to be to their liking." When he notices the inquisitive look I give him at the sound of that name I keep hearing, he tilts his head toward me. "The Scourge is...an entity. A force of nature that's against nature. They take the lives of the living and assimilate them into the ranks of the undead. I use the same magic, of course, but never to take the life of someone who doesn't deserve it."
He is so strange...all of them are. They were clearly searching for others of my kind, yet all of them have treated me as an equal in the brief time I have known them. The ghouls are clearly viewed as different from them...me...us. Were Barghash to abuse me, I might actually accept it simply to avoid being alone. Whether he is aware of that or not is beyond me.
"Why did you save me?" I ask, immediately regretting my verb choice. As if I am not in a weak negotiating position already.
For the first time, Barghash removes the goat skull he wears as a mask. While I know next to nothing about humans, I can see that his skin is young; much younger than the scowl he wears. That expression softens a bit, though, as he watches both of our reflections in the water.
"Our client is a man of science; all the world is an experiment to him. We know of the power of the obsidian destroyers, but those in Ahn'Qiraj are loyal to the few remaining qiraji. Since the small handful of those in Northrend were loyal to the Scourge, we assumed that my necromancy would be able to bind one to be loyal to us. We didn't realize..." He paused to grumble for a moment. "Ihsan neglected to mention - throughout the entire flight here - that those of you on this continent are not machines. We came seeking another minion, like the ghouls; we didn't realize that you're a person."
For what feels like the hundredth time on this fateful day, I can feel something inside of me clench and release. My existence has been entrapment from the beginning, and all that happens around me has not been my choice. For him to call me a person means almost as much as setting me free.
"Thank you," I tell him, quicky pursing my stony lips thereafter for fear of becoming too emotional again.
Without his mask, he seems different. More open perhaps, or more relaxed. We spend a decent amount of time sitting, and the others do not approach. It feels nice...I never thought that silence and solitude could actually be desirable things before.
He turns to look at me finally, the cruelty which I feel is so strongly is bound to his nature melting away when he speaks to me.
"Rahotepa...I told you that you're free to go once you're out of this and I meant it. We're going to return to our client and report our findings, both here and elsewhere. Probably bring Nehekaia in as a specimen, too. You're free to follow us until the end and decide where you want to go, either at a Forsaken city here or across the ocean. I won't compel you, because you're clearly sentient; even Sweetiepie and Dak are below you.
"But if you agree to come with us, and join us as a companion on our team, I can promise that you'll have a home. Your talents will be of immense interest to our client, both because he wanted the aid of a destroyer and because you're clearly intelligent. Your help will earn you the loyalty of myself and the others forever. You'll have a place to belong, which - no offense - you don't have here. All of your race in Northrend had gone extinct, either wiped out or turned into destroyers. And so far. You're the only one we've encountered that is sentient. So-"
"I ACCEPT!"
