Unlikely Heroes: The Fel Blademaster Veren Redmorning

Introductory Note:

All stories in the Unlikely Heroes collection are set between WCIII and WoW. This set of stories exists because most heroes are only heroic within their own tiny corner of the world, and because in the end, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.

This story concerns Fel Orcs, on whom little information is available, and the old death knights from WCII, whose fate is never explained. For the most part I've treated the Fel like Chaos Orcs, but it's my policy that anything not specifically elaborated or contradicted by Blizzard material may be made up by me. So unless you have specific proof of the point on which we disagree, don't email me. (Not talking to you, Lorok. I know you're generally right.)

Expect this to be longer than previous entries in the series. You need not have read the others, because they are not connected, but if you enjoy this, you might also enjoy them. This will be a trifle more serious, but there will still be humor involved.

A big thank-you goes out to Lorok for consulting assistance on both units and the main plot idea, and to Biniria for always being there to visit new worlds with me.

Prologue

The true beginning of this story occurs long before its first events.

It began on a battlefield near Alterac, when a small and desperate group of Orcs made a hopeless attack on a far superior force. The demon fire already began to die from their veins, and even the greatest frenzy was not enough to save them from the logical result of charging a well-armored and organized foe with a line of screaming berserks.

There is no need to name the clan. Few of its members survived to nightfall, and none lived long in the internment which followed.

But they were not all Orcs. Four or five Ogre magi stood with the battle lines that day. And behind them, hurling their coils of green mana from afar, came three death knights. If the spirits of the Shadow Council who rode the bodies of the Dead of Azeroth knew what was about to happen, perhaps they were as lost in the battle frenzy as their living brethren.

Or perhaps not. It is certain that two fell in battle that day, and their bones were taken joint from joint so that no unrestful necrolyte might return to them. The third, when it came to the last charge, broke and ran.

He traveled fast, for a dead horse needs no rest. By the time the sun began to set, he was well into the mountains that surrounded the bloody plain. If a snarling voice seemed to follow him, he no doubt took it for the sounds of battle ringing in whatever served him for ears.

Then the bony steed he rode put its foot into a hole. He was thrown. When he came back, cursing, to see what had happened, he found the undead creature lamed, its leg broken off above the hoof. The skeleton knight abandoned it, and went on into the mountains on foot. It was dark all around him, and he heard the hearts of beasts beating in the night, but he knew that nothing in the forest was more to be feared than he was.

As it happens, he was wrong.

When the Warlock Gul'dan first sacrificed the necrolytes and gave to them the bodies of dead knights, he took no thought for the previous occupants of those bodies. Human ghosts were not often seen in Lordaeron at that time, and the necrolytes assumed that the spirits of the dead had simply gone on to wherever dead humans generally went.

For the most part, they were right. But all that are dead do not rest. Some spirits require no summoning. And one of the knights of Azeroth was not willing to move on.

For months he drifted bodiless, gnashing in silence as he followed his own unrestful corpse from battlefield to battlefield. Much of what he had been wore away, and left behind only dreadful purpose, and a few shreds of memory more dreadful yet.

And now he struck.

The necrolyte had worn the body for less than a year. The knight had worn it for thirty long years of life. The contest was brief. The thing which rose from the forest floor on Lordaeron was not the same thing which had fallen there.

The knight felt the dark mana crackling in his bones, and took it for his own. And in that moment, Rokhyel the Shadebreaker was born.

Now we come to the present.

The sky was red that day.

The sky was red every day in Outland. It darkened to a deeper maroon at night, and paled to orange in the early morning, but all the light of that place fell in shades of crimson. There were those among the invading Naga and Blood Elves who speculated that its star was dying, fading from the gold of the sun of Azeroth toward its final shrinking. Since the sun of Outland was seldom seen, no one could be sure.

Four old warlocks stood before a frame of bone, mana crackling in the hot air around them. The rough structure was lashed together with what rope they could weave from the tougher fungal growths of the Hellfire Peninsula, and within its borders strange energy already began to stir.

A respectful distance from the warlocks and their work stood other Orcs, red-skinned and clad in gray. Perhaps fifty in number, the group consisted of peons and raiders, grunts and younger warlocks.

In the center of the group, a young Orc with a pair of swords strapped across his back stood and waited. He was no taller than the grunts, and less broad than the raiders, and strapped to his back he carried a scrap of gray fabric on a stick that might possibly be meant to serve as the world's most unimpressive banner.

Magic crackled and leaped from the warlocks to the frame and back again. Then a whirlpool of pale light sprang to life in the center, spinning around a small point of blue. "Go toward… The blue sky!" a warlock said, shouting to be heard over the tortured shriek of the crude structure. "Go now!"

The Orcs began to run. One by one, they struck the whirling white, and vanished from Outland.

The young Orc with the banner waited until last. "Are you coming?" he shouted at the warlocks.

"We will follow! Go!"

He turned and leaped without hesitation into the vortex. And, a moment later, the warlocks did follow.

It is well known that a magician of great power can open a path between worlds, a way through the Twisting Nether that is clear enough for others to follow. It was done by the shaman Gul'Dan, and it was done after him by Illidan Stormrage.

But there is a reason why only the greatest have found these paths. While the four warlocks had managed, through their combined efforts, to open the way and hold it for the others, even the four together could not hold the tunnel open and the energies back while they traveled through it themselves.

They were buffeted and torn by the Twisting Nether as they hurtled through. The results were…

Messy.