It felt like it had been days. Maybe it had been. He hadn't slept once. He hadn't found or seen a single living thing, not even plants. He once thought he heard growling in the distance, but whatever it was had failed to reveal itself.
He had kept himself hydrated, but by now he was extremely tired and hungry. It was like being back at the orphanage during the worst of the blitz, sitting awake all night in a tube tunnel pretending that it wouldn't just collapse and kill them all if it was hit directly.
Worryingly, he had seen plenty of dead things in these woods. Skeletons of various creatures lay on the ground, he thought he recognised the skeleton of a deer, but the rest were just dry bones to him. He saw a few rotting corpses of animals too, and he was sure that one was still moving as he passed.
Every time he used the navigation spell, it pointed out people somewhere in the distance, but he still hadn't found them. He couldn't risk apparating anywhere, as he didn't know the layout of the land, for all he knew he would appear inside a hill...
Tom wished he knew the enchantments to create a flying broom.
But no, he was stuck walking. He was finally come up to the end of this forest, with what looked like an old country lane in the distance. It looked like a basic unpaved track, but it should head somewhere. The people that his spell kept showing were somewhere in that direction.
So he kept walking. All the time thinking about what the hell he had done to get himself into this mess. Had he done the ritual wrong? He didn't think so, unless his research had been incomplete. It could have been, but he had trusted Slughorn's hints and assumed that was the end of it.
Or perhaps it was an issue of intent. That's what magic is built around after all, maybe some part of him had not wanted to go through with it? That didn't seem right, but he had never been very good at understanding his emotions.
No, that couldn't be right. He might regret the ritual, but that was just because of what had happened afterwards. He didn't feel bad about killing Myrtle, he didn't feel bad about trying to create a Horcrux and become immortal.
He did regret coming to this bloody place.
Once he got to the road, he saw that it was in just as bad a state as the rest of this place, with parts of it overgrown with dead plants or broken up with patches of raw dirt. After another spell showed people down what he thought might be the eastern side of the road, he kept walking.
His legs had been shaky for a long time, and as he walked he could barely focus on his surroundings. He needed food, and he needed it soon.
Finnall and her small band of hunters had scoured miles of dead woods before finding a single living creature, and as usual, it was one of the elven members of her group that had been successful, a high elf huntress named Enilia from a now destroyed elven lodge in the west.
It was a bear, thinner and smaller than they used to be, but still large enough. It didn't look diseased, so the huntress had humanely killed the animal and soon several of the more brawny human hunters were carrying back meat and furs to the bands hideout.
Their path took them onto one of the old trade roads that had connected the villages and towns in this area, all of which were now long gone.
The bear had enough fur to make one or two cloaks, or possibly a blanket or rug for their base in the cavern. They would be able to salt and preserve the meat so that it lasted for a while, but they would need to find another source of food in a few more days.
Beside her on the road were two of her closest companions, who had been with her since the very start. Yren, the son of a lumberer from the Silverpine Forest, who was her trusted right-hand man and advisor, and Narth, another of Dalaran's battlemages, who she had known long before the Scourge.
The trio were at the head of the group, and it was them who saw the figure first. Dark, humanoid, man-sized, on the road, coming towards them from beyond the horizon.
She looked to her men, and without a word they took up positions in the ditches on the sides of the road. They would wait for the figure to become more clear. If it was a single undead, or there were a small group with it, they would quickly dispose of the Scourge and continue.
If there were too many following behind, they would retreat back into the woods and find another route to take them back to their base. As the figure came closer they could see that it was wearing dark robes, but that was all that was visible.
"Let's get a closer look." she said, to the high elf huntress who had found the bear earlier. While Finnall was only half elf, she was still much more nimble and quiet than the humans in her group.
Sticking to the woods at the side of the road, they snuck to within a hundred or so feet from the being, before they could get a good view of the man.
He looked like an undead wizard or necromancer, a member of the Cult of the Damned. Shuffling down the road on shaking legs, hunched over, with very pale skin, gaunt features and dark bags under his eyes, it was a young human, maybe even a boy, with dark brown hair and black robes, with a green tie and a few unfamiliar insignias.
He was holding what looked like a wand in his hand. It was unusual, as wizards generally only used wands as a last line of defence, it was after all a mere enchanted stick that could fire weak bolts of energy at the target.
She had never seen a cultist with a wand before. That made her hesitate. With a whisper to the huntress beside her, she stepped out into the road and held her sword out towards the boy, the point at his neck. He stopped, with eyes that widened almost comically looking from her face (ears?), to her sword, to her armour.
"Who are you?" she asked, when he made no move to attack.
The young boy simply stood there for a few moments, and Finnall moved the blade even closer, if he even moved he would cut his throat. Finally he replied, "My name is Tom... What are you? Are you an... elf?"
It was an odd question. The boy standing in the middle of the road, in the Scourge-infested Plaguelands of Eastern Lordaeron, when faced with a sword to his throat, could only question whether or not she was an elf?
Something was definitely off with this boy. Her elven senses could feel the magic coming off him, he was clearly a mage, or at least an apprentice. Perhaps he had somehow been sent here through a portal accident, from Dalaran or somewhere else?
"Not quite Tom." if the boy was from Dalaran, he should recognise a half-elf when he sees one. His accent was unusual and unfamiliar, vaguely similar to some of the dialects of the Lordaeron undercity slums. "I am Finnall Goldensword, down the road are some of my warriors. If you pose a threat, if you even try to raise your wand at me, Enilia over there in those woods will fill you with her arrows. Are you a threat to me?"
The boy mumbled a no, and she lowered her sword and stepped closer, looking over his high-quality looking robes. One of the two insignias on his chest was a green shield, with a silver snake in the centre. The other was a green badge saying "Prefect".
"What are you doing out here, Tom?"
Tom was a bit delirious from lack of food and sleep, but he was pretty sure that the beautiful medieval elf woman in front of him was really there. He had heard of the high elves from Avery, but they were supposed to have gone extinct thousands of years ago. She was standing uncomfortably close to him, looking over his messy uniform.
"I don't know. I'm not sure what happened... One minute, I was uh, at school, and then suddenly I woke up in the dirt in the forest."
The elf lady (because he didn't believe that she was not an elf), Finnall Goldensword looked like she didn't believe him. He couldn't look away from her weird glowing, whiteless eyes. They almost seemed to radiate magic.
"Where am I, by the way?" she just stared back in disbelief, and quicker than he could react to in his current state, she slammed her sword's pommel into the side of his head, knocking Tom out.
"I don't have time for this." he heard, before everything went to black again.