Yren grumbled something to Finnall after her orders, but after slinging the boy over his shoulder, he found that the apprentice mage or whatever the boy was, was even lighter than he would have thought from the sight of the scrawny, gaunt features.

They didn't come across anything else on their journey except for a pair of wandering zombies which were easily dispatched. Not long after that, they left the road and went back into what had once been rolling plains with beautiful chasms, but was now all poisoned fields and jagged pits.

Soon, they were at the entrance to their base in the cavern, covered up and camouflaged, with a hidden door, if you didn't know it was there you would be hard pressed to discover it. It had been there even before the Scourge, some smuggler's hideaway.

Finnall grinned at the sentry, and nodded in confirmation that the hunt had been successful. The man, Lohn, then spotted Yren carrying the boy Tom, and gave Finnall a confused look, but she just wave to say that she would explain inside.

The butchered bear products were taken to the members of the group who would cure and salt the meat, and work the fur and skin into something nice and comfortable. The boy was dumped on one of the empty spots on the floor, and Finnall explained what had happened to the others.

"He didn't know where he was?"

She shook her head, the boy was exhausted and delirious. He had probably barely seen her standing directly in front of him. "He had an odd accent too, almost like Lordaeron gutterspeech, slurred slightly and with odd consonants. Didn't sound like anything I had ever heard though. So not from any of the Eastern Kingdoms."

"Where could he be from then?" the boy stirred on the floor, his bruised temple already healed.

"I think we'll have to ask him."

They waited for Tom, the mysterious boy to finally wake and sit up. He looked at the people and surroundings in confusion at first, before silently reaching for his pocket, finding nothing, and then looking at her with almost disappointment.

"Looking for this?" Finnall held out the boy's wand, assuming that was what he was looking for. He didn't say anything.

"Sorry for knocking you out, but standing out in the open like that, what were you thinking? The Scourge could have come along at any moment." Tom looked uncomfortable and a bit grumpy, which was kind of adorable, but he remained quiet.

"Look, we don't know you. For all I know, you're some Cultist trying to infiltrate our group. If you answer my questions, I will give you back your wand." he made eye contact at that, and she had an odd feeling in her mind for a split second.

"Alright. What do you want to know?" he really did sound young. His voice was a bit weak, but clear.

"Who are you really?" one of the other watchers asked, it was the paladin, Onno of Southshore. He had a gruff voice, but was not unkind. "You've said your name, Tom, was it?" Tom nodded, "And who are you, Tom?"

"I'm a wizard."

"Yes, we guessed that Tom, from your robes and wand." the boy was perhaps a bit slow, "But where are you from, how did you get here, and what do you know about where you are?" For some reason, for the slightest moment Tom looked relieved that they already knew that he was a wizard, as if he wasn't supposed to tell anyone.

"I'm from London. Wool's Orphanage, Archway, specifically." an orphan, there were lots of those these days thanks to the wars and the Scourge, though she had never heard of any of those locations, "I was at Hogwarts, that's our magical school, when something happened... it was... magic surrounded me, then I felt myself sort of leave my body, and then suddenly I woke up in the forest here."

Well, something similar to that had floated through her mind as a possibility, but none of the names were familiar to Finnall, which was a problem. They could be some refugee colonies in the west, or maybe an unfamiliar human kingdom somewhere on the northern continent.

"I've never heard of any town called London, or Hogwarts either. Are they in Kalimdor?"

"Uh... no, Britain actually. But I'm pretty sure that you won't find Britain on any of your maps. You see... I'm quite sure that this is another world altogether from my home planet." there was silence for a few moments, "Do you have any food?"

They were watching him eat now, like muggle botanists inspecting some newly-discovered Malay insect under a microscope. Finnall, who had knocked him out, as well as the other elves and humans were all standing or sitting around him in the cave(?), just watching.

If he wasn't so bloody hungry, and if they hadn't already given back his wand, he would do something to get them to stop looking at him like that, like he had done back at the orphanage. Since they had given him food and let him keep his wand, he would tolerate it for now. The meat was an odd texture, and he was sure it wasn't something so normal as beef or pork, but it was edible and he was half-starved.

Once he had a full stomach, he might spend some time awestruck at the prospect of being stuck in an entirely new world, but he had already kind of figured something like that, after all his navigation spell had failed to find any Earthly location or landmark he could name. His mind had already shifted from shock to survival, and given that these people were at least somewhat trustworthy, he was already coming up with plans to use them.

The first thing he had to do was learn as much as he could about his surroundings; unfortunately this wasn't Hogwarts and there wasn't a massive library he could throw himself into like he had done during his first terms in the wizarding world, but these people would know enough about this world. They had mentioned something called "the Scourge", which didn't sound too flash, as well as cultists, so it seemed like this place was going through interesting times, just like Europe with it's war against Grindelwald.

A few of them had gone off to other parts of the cave to do whatever it is that these medieval soldiers did, but most of them were still crowded around him, eating and/or staring at him annoyingly. The fact that they were so clearly medieval, or something like that, threw him slightly; the human muggles looked like they were related to that giant Gryffindor boy, all hairy and unwashed, in old and rugged clothing. They also all seemed to have swords, spears, bows and arrows and other old fashioned weapons more suited to display on a wall at Hogwarts, instead of the rifles and machine guns he remembered from home.

"What's this place called anyway? You said something about a Kalimdor, but sounds like that's somewhere else?" he broke the silence after swallowing another bite.

"We are in the east of Lordaeron, in the north of the Eastern Kingdoms. This planet is called Azeroth. Kalimdor is another continent, far to the west of here." the main elf woman, Finnall, clarified unhelpfully, "What planet is your Britain in? Outland?"

Huh, he wouldn't have guessed from their medieval style weapons and armour that they would know that there even were other planets, let alone having names for them. He thought he remembered from his muggle schooling that one planet near Earth had only been discovered a few years before, and named Pluto, and his muggles were a lot more advanced than this lot. Perhaps Outland was the Azeroth(ian?) equivalent of Mars and was occasionally visible in the sky.

"Azeroth." he tested the word, it was exotic, "My world is called Earth." he took another bite of the strange meat.

"And you have no idea how you got here?" someone in robes asked, and he grunted a response through his mouthful. He wasn't completely lying, after all, he didn't know what had went wrong with the ritual.

"Well, there are some things you need to know about this world..."

Elsewhere

It was a wet, cold day in the Alterac Mountains. It almost always was. In these highlands, near the old border with what was once Lordaeron, the snow covered the ground all year round.

He had known these hills since he was a child, being born and growing up in a shepherd's hut in Baron Mordis' fiefdom. Sam Sibend was his name, and he had been a shepherd once, like his father and his father before him.

But he wasn't one anymore. There were no sheep in these hills anymore, at least none still tended to by men. Those few men who had survived the Allies' betrayal and massacres, as well as the following demon incursion and Scourge raids, AND the attacks of the savage ogre clans, had been forced to abandon the old ways and band together to survive.

It was a hard life in these hills. It always had been. But it was different now.

He remembered his father, an older man with thinning white hair when he was cut down by Alliance knights. They were men too, they worshipped the Light same as him, they fought against the orcs to protect mankind, and then they came here and they killed his father.

He hated the Alliance. He hated the Orcs. He hated the Demons and the Scourge and everyone else too. He hated what he had become.

All he had now were his band of brigands; almost all of them were only teens, boys and girls that had been spared by the Alliance during the initial destruction because of their age. It may have been better to have been killed then, in the beginning.

They answered to a former Lord, one of the few who had survived this far. They had a set quota of loot they had to deliver to him each month, and in exchange, the Lord didn't have them all killed.

There was only so much loot to go around; only hardened adventurers, and brigands like him, travelled through Alterac these days; and searching the ruins of the cities was suicide with most of them under control of the ogres.

If he didn't feel a responsibility to keep these kids alive as long as he could, he would just lie down in the snow and let himself die. Tomorrow they would risk a journey into an old silver mine; perhaps they would be able to make the quota, or perhaps someone or something would have gotten there before them.