The ever-present fog caught in Elrac's chest as he struggled to quieten his violent wheezing. He stared intently at the shop in front of him to take his mind off the illness that threatened to slowly engulf him. The dark window of the store, encrusted with thick dust, frowned down at him across the abandoned street. It had once been the pride and joy of his father, the delightful toyshop where he carved and painted to his heart's content, chuckling as he thought happily of the tiny children his works would amaze. Now, it was no more that place than a withered skull is the smiling face it once displayed. Silence reigned along that street, its busy life cast down with the shards of glass and wooden beams strewn over its cracked pavements. It would be avenged.
With a thunderous yell Elrac hurled himself from the wall he had crept along and into the main square of the Trade District.
He flicked his fist towards the blood-stained grass curling up between the stone tiles, muttering a blessing breathlessly. Golden flames leapt up into the air to consume the corpses congregated in the centre as they raised their splintering lances in surprise. Amid the hissing and crackling Elrac held up his mace and swung with all his might as a fetid carcass shuffled towards him. The holy weapon glowed with pure energy as it crushed the skeleton's ribs, showering a stream of swollen maggots onto the ground below.
Elrac's fading ears faintly detected the quick tap of bone on the cobbles behind him. As he spun round to face the monstrosity a deafening crack split the air, and the ragged wraith only had time to tilt its abominable eye sockets towards the noise before it was swept away by a white wave. Yelping and snarling, the shape tumbled over and over with its foe. At last, the flurry of fur threw its quarry against a rusting lamppost. Elrac, startled by the ambush, just had time to make out the features of a huge white wolf, its claws and immense fangs yellow with mangled fragments of cartilage and shreds of flesh, before it pounced once again on steel and bone. At once, the paladin sighed as a wave of relief swept through his body. He had not seen that heroic creature for years, and it never wandered alone in the many realms of the plague…
"Cloudmane!" Elrac cried as cheerily as he could, desperately trying to hide his ill health from the deepest recesses of the streets wheeling away from him. The bulk of an aged tauren stepped out from the shadows of a dilapidated house teetering on the edge of the square. The gigantic creature ignored the eager paladin momentarily, leaning out to crush a leathery arm as it wriggled away from a Scourge soldier's smouldering remains. Thoughtfully, the hunter studied the stinking mess below his jet black hoof, and suddenly raised his head as if just hearing his companion's shout. A shiver shot through Elrac's spine like a raging hurricane as he sensed the deep anxiety in the elder's usually emotionless eyes.
"Cloudmane?" he called again, backing away slightly as the tauren strode towards him. Somehow, he sensed that whatever was to be said would fill him with an inescapable dread.
"Young Elrac", he sighed in a slow, weary tone like the ancient breath of the winds. "I see you are still alive after all this time. But only just alive…" he paused as he scanned the body of the familiar human before him. Or perhaps not that familiar. The holy warrior should still have looked youthful in his late twenties, yet the unimaginable atrocities he had suffered, the pain he had endured, seemed to have eroded his physique like the persistent tides wear away seemingly invincible rock.
The paladin rapidly tried to progress the conversation, partly due to his wavering denial of his deterioration, but also through great concern for his friend.
"But what of you, Cloudmane? I've thought of you as dead for years! I've thought of many as dead for years!" He lunged forward to grasp the shoulder of the being in front of him as if his bewildered mind failed to register this seemingly impossible presence.
The tauren shook his head sadly as he stared at his rifle, flicking his tail in an unmistakable sign of agitation. "You are half right there, my friend," he whispered as if in a daze, staring ahead as if collecting a jigsaw of distant events into some sort of sensible account. He was no longer standing in the forlorn Southern Kingdom, but whisked away to horrors of the terrible bastions of evil, the malevolent schemes lurking deep in the mortuaries of Ironforge, the scrabbling swarms of the damned clawing down the beautiful terraces of Thelsamar…
"I've been…on a visit to the north…" he mumbled more slowly than ever, snapping back to the present.
Elrac nervously bit his tongue to restrain the torrent of fear coursing through his veins. "And? What of the Dwarven resistance? The Argent Dawn's barricade at Blackrock Pass?" He almost choked with dismay as Cloudmane shrugged wearily.
"Nothing. If there's anyone north of us now, they are pitifully few in number and could not possibly hold out for much longer…" He broke off to study Elrac's trembling face, trying to reach the deepest fathoms of his brain to deliver his unwelcome news in the best way possible. "If we are not quick, we will be completely surrounded and soon join the ranks of the Scourge. We've done our duty here. It's time…" He sighed deeply, tired of avoiding the woeful topic. "…Time to abandon our posts here and retreat to Orgrimmar. You know it is the only possible course of action left. Do you understand what I am saying?" He peered, puzzled, at the human's toneless face.
Oh, yes. The paladin knew exactly what was being said. If he had not focused his entire energy into preventing his muscles from springing into action, he would have murdered the tauren on the spot. Murder? What was he becoming?
The placid face suddenly contorted into a horrible grimace as the man whirled round to turn his back on the so-called friend. Al his life he had valiantly fought for the freedom of his people, and this pathetic creature wanted him to forget everything? The losses? The sacrafice? The pain he had suffered? "Go on then!" he roared, his features burning red as blood rushed to his extremities as he gestured wildly about him. "Run away! Run away with the cowards of this beautiful land! Break your oaths to defend this continent! As for me…" He smugly pointed at his chest and began to wander off towards the sounds of moaning he heard drifting from a burning plaza somewhere nearby. "I have a city to defend."
The aged hunter smiled sadly as he whistled for his wolf to return from its prowling. "A city to defend? Looks like you are too late…" he muttered to himself under his breath. He swung his mournful head side to side, taking in the debris reaching out towards him from the twisted wreckage of what was truly a battleground. This city had once offered a formidable refuge against the Lich's macabre powers. Now, nothing was safe from the ominous mask of undeath.
Slowly, he turned to gaze at Elrac as the warrior's legs began to shudder, rattling his plate leggings in an eerie jig.
His head swimming, his vision blurred, his hands numb, Elrac heaved his body forward with the last of his energy, and, with a feeble gasp for air, toppled headlong onto the ground with a violent clatter.