Brother of the Betrayer: The Tree
I was alone.
The wind whispered through the bare, skeletal branches of the spectral forest, the voices of ghosts rising from the dead, blackened grass which covered the ground. I had long since stopped trying to determine which whispers belonged to the wind and which whispers belonged to the ghosts. Once these woods had been beautiful, a land of eternal springtime. The silver-barked trees had borne a bounty of golden leaves, and wondrous creatures had crawled through the undergrowth. Now the trees were bone-white, their leaves withered away, all the creatures of the forest dead or fled. The only things that still walked in these woods were the dead.
The bulk of the Scourge's forces had left Quel'Thalas, their dark purpose, whatever it was, fulfilled. But the dead remained, shambling corpses wandering the broken land they once called home, tortured spirits reliving the moments of their deaths and lashing out against any who disturbed their ritual. I quickly learned to stay far away from buildings, as anywhere elves once lived was sure to be cursed. Like the rest of these… Ghostlands. Quel'Thalas was the High Home of the Elves no longer. It was little more than a memory, a ghost of what it had once been. Like me.
I wandered like the dead I avoided, sleeping in the skeletal limbs of ghostly trees and scavenging through the forest for anything resembling food. An emptiness ate at me, a feeling which began not long after my failure. The Sunwell, the heart of all I had once held dear, had cut me off from its light. It was a just punishment for my failure, for letting my pride lead my brother into darkness and my sister to the grave. The azure light in my eyes faded, and there was a hole, an emptiness in my soul where the Sunwell's power had once resided. I think that anyone who saw me then might have mistaken me for one of the dead, the way my flesh had shrunken, my eyes drifting listlessly, empty of any hope or light. Certainly, they would have never imagined that I had once been one of the rulers of my people.
Sometimes I imagined I could feel the pain of the land around me, as if it too were furious with me for my failure. The very earth itself seemed to be crying out, the spirit of the wilds tortured and strangled by the power of Death that had carved its way through my homeland. I assumed these sensations to be delusions, symptoms of a broken mind.
As time passed, the hunger grew. Not merely physical hunger, but something far greater. I didn't know what it was I craved, but it ate at everything within me as I wasted away. It filled my mind every waking moment, and in my sleep, I dreamed of the hunger. While part of me wished for release, dreamed of sating that hunger, much of my mind was resigned to my fate. I had failed my homeland, my people, and my family. My hunger for power destroyed everything I held dear. It was only fitting that it should be hunger that destroyed me.
But that was not my destiny. Once night, while I was wracked by a feverish, hunger-filled dream, a voice came to my mind, soothing my thoughts.
Peace child, the voice whispered. I saw a great slitted emerald eye, covered by a translucent eyelid. It stared into my soul, and somehow it found something that it approved of. You are lost, but you can be found. You forgot the wilds, but they have not forgotten you. Come south child. Come to the Tree. There you will find purpose again. But for now, you must rest. The voice pulled from my mind, and I had the first deep, restful slumber I had since burning Alana's corpse and leaving the Magister behind me.
When I woke up the next morning, I did so with renewed energy and purpose. The hunger still ate at me, that emptiness still reaching deep into my soul, but for a small time it was no longer the dominating force in my mind. At the base of the southern mountains of Quel'Thalas lay Thas'alah, the Light of the Forest, the mother tree. It had stood since the creation of the Sunwell and the founding of Quel'Thalas, and the thought that it could have survived the Scourge invasion filled me with hope. Perhaps there, beneath its ancient boughs, I could find answers. I did not know whose voice I was following, but I knew that I needed to find out.
So, I made my way south, making sure to stay away from the dead. Silent as the spectral woods were, it was easy for my elven ears to pick up the sounds of jangling bones and low moaning from skeletons and ghouls as they wandered near. I hadn't seen another living soul since my failure at the Sunwell, and I didn't expect to any time soon. But that was because I had forgotten another threat, one very much alive: trolls.
The forest trolls of the Amani Empire had been the sworn enemies of my people since the Quel'dorei first landed on the shores of the land that would become Quel'Thalas. The savage cannibals made a sport of collecting elven ears, stringing them around their necks as a show of power. While they were pushed out of our lands, wiping them out proved impossible. The Troll Wars, the Second War, every time we slaughtered them, they always came back. And now with my people butchered by Arthas, they saw their opportunity.
I crested a hill in a once-familiar section of forest and stopped, staring down at the sight below. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. It was as if I had walked out of a nightmare and into a children's fairy story. Smoke drifted up from a fire at the center of the crude camp, carrying with it the smell of roasting flesh. My stomach rumbled at the smell, but I knew what it was they were cooking, so I shoved my hunger down. Trolls wandered the camp, massive hunched-over creatures with moss-covered skin and wild manes of brightly colored hair. Many bore strange tribal tattoos or wore wooden ceremonial masks. I couldn't see too many details from where I hid, but I knew the stories.
It was surreal. Trolls were the creatures mothers warned their children would eat them if they strayed to far from home at night. Oh, I remembered the Second War, of course. I helped maintain the shield that protected Silvermoon during the siege. But I was always far away from the actual fighting. Other than the stark memory of Alleria Windrunner tossing a troll's head at my feet, I had never seen a troll in my life. Now I was standing above a whole camp of them.
It was then that I realized I was far too visible.
Darting behind a nearby tree, I weighed my options. Fighting wasn't a possibility. There were at least a dozen trolls in that camp, and my skills with the sword I had pilfered on one of my early scavenging trips were nothing to brag about. A short time ago I would have laughed at the gathering beneath me and incinerated them all with a thought, but that was a different man. I was not going to be that man again. No, magic was not an option either. It would never be an option again.
Of course, I should have realized the trolls inside the camp wouldn't be the only ones. They always have scouts to ensure they weren't surprised. As I watched the camp, something powerful gripped my leg, and I looked down in surprise at the massive mossy hand, just in time to lose all sense of direction as I was ripped off my feet and held upside-down by my ankle.
"And what be dis now?" the troll questioned, leering at me through his massive tusks. "A little elf mon tink he be sneakin up on us?" I stared into the soulless red eyes of the monstrous troll, and I couldn't make myself respond. "Yah not wanna talk?" the troll asked, shaking me roughly. "We gonna make yah talk." He tossed my frail form over his massive shoulder and turned towards the camp, beginning to walk back to the others.
I couldn't let that happen. Something waited for me at the mother tree. I didn't know what it was, but it was the only thing I had left to hold onto, and I wasn't going to let go. Frantic strength filled my desiccated form, and I bit down hard into the troll's shoulder with everything I had.
He cried out in pain, hurling me off of him, my vision blurring as I hit the ground hard. He spun towards me and charged, infuriated. But in my panicked frenzy, I became like an animal, biting his hands when he reached for me, nearly taking off one of his fingers. My nails felt like claws as I tore at his eyes, ignoring his tusks gouging me as I left his eye sockets bleeding and empty. He clutched at where his eyes had been moments before, falling backwards into the underbrush, and I ran. I don't know I far I ran or for how long, but I ran until the adrenaline faded and I couldn't go any further and collapsed beneath a withered bush.
I woke up the next morning surprised to find myself still alive. The trolls had either lost my scent or were unwilling to chase me so far into the corpse-infested woods, and by some miracle none of the dead had come upon me while I slept. I bandaged my wounds by tearing strips from my already tattered clothes into wrappings and thanked whatever gods or forces might have been watching over me, continuing my journey, taking much greater care to watch out for threats both living and dead. Luckily, I encountered no more trolls, but the more south I went, the more wandering dead I had to avoid. If not for the death and destruction all around me, it might have been exciting to run through the treetops as I had when I was little, back when trolls and monsters were merely stories. But instead it was terrifying. I moved from branch to branch as silently as possible, hoping desperately to not alert the shambling corpses below that had once been elves.
But worse than the corpses were the ghosts. Spectral visions of elves, all reliving the exact moments of their agonizing deaths. Each time it was as if I was watching my homeland fall all over again. I saw Farstriders and Magisters fighting valiantly against invisible enemies before falling, only to begin the battle once more, while civilians wept and screamed in fear, their cries echoing into my soul. I wanted to go out, to tell them that their battle was over, that they could rest now. But the ghosts only saw enemies, lashing out against those who came too close as if they were the monsters that had killed them. It was torment to watch, but whenever I saw these specters, I couldn't turn away. I had to watch, had to remember the dying moments of those I had failed to save.
Finally, I reached the main road, cutting south through Quel'Thalas, and there I found something horrifying. I had thought the woods around me dead and skeletal, devoid of life. But compared to what I saw then, they were practically brimming with life. Not far from the main road, a pitch-black scar cut its way through the land, the land devoid of even the semblance of life. It was covered in the undead, the shambling corpses seemingly drawn to the inherent foulness of the earth there, the power of death radiating from it. All Quel'Thalas had been killed by the Scourge, but this was the wound that had killed it. A foul, dead scar that oozed sickness and decay. It cut through the land northward all the way to the horizon, and it came from…
No.
When my people first settled in the land we would name Quel'Thalas and created the Sunwell, the land itself drank in the magical fount's power. It is from the Sunwell's power that the trees gained their golden leaves and silver bark. But one tree in particular drank up the Sunwell's power and grew to immense proportions. We named her Thas'alah, the Light of the Forest, the mother tree. Our Magisters bound the Runestones which protected our land to her, tying their arcane magics to the primal powers of nature. I had believed that this was the tree that my dream had referred to.
But the tree was gone. Where once the Light of the Forest had stood tall above her children, now stood a dark fortress. Massive skulls adorned the dark stone walls, scores of the foul undead standing guard on the walls and at the gates. It was from this fortress that the Scar emerged, and it was there that the oppressive foulness had its greatest strength.
Despite all I had already suffered, this new wound still managed to cut deep. With most of my time spent in Silvermoon, I had seen Thas'alah only on a few occasions, but it had been marvelous. Growing far above the woods beneath it, it had been a testament to the eternal power of nature. Much like the Sunwell itself, it had been a sacred place, a place that would stand until the end of time. But it hadn't. Arthas and his Scourge felled the mother tree, turning a bastion of life into a fortress of death and decay.
For a moment I just stood there, not knowing what to do. If Thas'alah was not the tree in my dream, what was? Where was I supposed to go?
South.
The thought came unbidden to my mind, almost as if someone were speaking to me. But where south? I questioned. What tree?
South.
Apparently, I wasn't going to get anything more direct than "south." I glared in the direction of the dark fortress where Thas'alah once stood and turned away, carefully moving through the trees along the road passed the dark fortress, down towards the mountains that separated Quel'Thalas from the outside world and towards the Thalassian Pass.
My journey took me up into the mountains, past the twisted spires of the dark fortress and into the Thalassian Pass. There stood the outer elfgate, the fortified entrance to our kingdom. To my shock, as I cautiously climbed up the Pass, I found the elfgate seemingly untouched. The towers still stretched high into the sky, their white stone and golden decoration as bright as always. Not even the iron gate itself was broken, instead it simply lay open. The only sign an invading army had passed through the gate at all were the Scourge banners, depicting the cursed blade Frostmourne over a pair of broken hammers, a pair of grinning skulls off to each side.
It was Dar'Khan, I realized. Not only had he murdered his fellow Magisters at the Sunwell, he must have first killed the garrison here and opened the gates to the enemy. Yet another betrayal.
Could I have stopped it? I couldn't keep the thought from worming its way into my mind. It came whenever I thought of my brother, and the monster that he had become. Could I have stopped it? If I had been a better brother, if I had helped him, if I had at least paid attention to anyone other than myself? Would I have seen the signs? Would I have been able to stop this before it came to the end? Would Quel'Thalas still stand today if-
Stop.
It did no good to dwell on such thoughts. Not even the greatest Magisters truly understood the eddies of time and its many flowing rivers. To question possibilities was to court madness. And I was not the only influence in his life. He had friends, whose exploits I had heard of, though I had paid little attention. The priestess Liadrin, the ranger Lor'themar, and another, though I could not remember his name. They had failed to see Dar'Khan's true nature, and they spent far more time with him than I did. They had failed to see the darkness hiding beneath the surface, just as I had.
I pushed the thoughts from my mind as I hesitantly stepped through the open gates, expecting ghouls or ghosts to attack at any moment. But none came. The structure was empty, a pristine relic, an empty monument, a memory of the glorious kingdom that once lay behind it. Now it was an entrance only to a land of ghosts.
Rarely had I ever left the boundaries of Quel'Thalas, and even then, I had never relied on my own feet. On a few occasions I had traveled to the wizard-city of Dalaran, but I had traveled the entire distance through a portal each time, space and time folding themselves to keep me from having to walk more than a single step to reach the distant city. Now I truly saw the outside world for the first time.
Apparently Arthas hadn't been any kinder to his home than he had been to mine. I emerged from the pass to the scent of death and sickness, the air filled with some foul fume that dimmed the sunlight and cast a pallor over the land. Not that it needed to, as death had claimed everything in sight, trees and grass all withered and brown, a single ruined guard tower standing within view where a battle must have taken place. Perhaps some human soldiers had nobly resisted their former prince's push towards the High Home of the Elves, seeking and failing to protect their allies from the tide of death. Perhaps they had simply been alive, and that was enough for the monstrous death knight to want to destroy them.
To my right I caught sight of an elven lodge nestled in the mountains outside the Thalassian Pass. It looked mostly intact, but I didn't hold out much hope of finding help from the Farstriders that should have been stationed there to guard our borders. I doubted they would have stood by idly while the Scourge marched through the pass, and even on the slight chance any had survived, I had no desire to reunite with my people. I was very likely the last member of the Convocation alive, which made me the highest ranking Quel'dorei official left, except perhaps Prince Kael'thas himself, if the undead had not come for Dalaran, where the Prince had been residing, first. If I found survivors, if there were any to be found, they would either view me as their leader or as a traitor, and I had no desire to face either of those responsibilities.
It proved much more difficult to evade the wandering dead in these shattered, plagued remnants of the once mighty kingdom of Lordaeron, as the undead seemed to cover nearly the entire landscape and the trees were not nearly so close together as they were in the ghostly remnants of my home. But somehow I managed, my withered, shriveled form barely registering as life to whatever natural or supernatural senses allowed the monsters to discern each other from the living.
The hunger still grew within me, both physical hunger from lack of true sustenance and that deeper, fouler hunger that had arisen ever since I had been cut off from the Sunwell's power. The physical hunger I was able to keep barely under control by killing and eating some of the grubs which seemed to be the only living beings to thrive in the cursed lands, apparently immune to the plague which infested everything else. Some of these grubs had grown to monstrous sizes, but I kept clear of those, sticking to the smaller creatures. They smelled foul and tasted worse, but they were free from the Plague of Undeath. Unfortunately, while my physical hunger was kept at bay, that other hunger only grew worse with each passing day.
On my journey I passed several more ruined guard towers and skirted around the remains of a town positively brimming with the undead, following the pull that lead me south. Finally, I reached what seemed to be a dead end. Mountains rose high above me, their cliffs sheer. I did not see any way to pass them. Still the invisible pull continued its ever-present directive. South. Perhaps I could have made my way around the mountains, but while I had studied maps of the world during my education, I had never cared for the outside world and retained little of the information. I had no idea how many days more the journey would take me, or how many more undead monstrosities I would have to evade along the way. I was looking more and more like them every day, my body gaunt and skeletal, my eyes sunken pits. The only thing keeping me from collapsing and letting myself die was that pull, that desire to find the purpose of my dream.
The Tree. I didn't know what the Tree was or why it was important, but I knew it was on the other side of this mountain range. So I climbed. I had never climbed a mountain before, I had no climbing equipment, there was no path to follow, and my body only grew weaker as my climb continued. I fell many times, getting bruised, cut, and concussed, even breaking a few ribs in one fall, but I kept climbing. In retrospect, taking the long way around might have honestly been the faster route, as my meandering path up the mountain took over a week, and I ran out of grubs to eat a few days into the climb.
Finally, after a particularly nasty fall that nearly broke my leg, I looked up and realized I had fallen into the perfect position to see between two of the mountain peaks. And it was then, staring between those two peaks, that I saw it for the first time. An immense tree, taller than the mountains themselves, taller by far than Thas'alah had been, branches reaching above the peaks into the sky, bright green foliage covering the massive limbs, each the size of a fully-grown tree themselves.
Thisis the Tree.
It was a wondrous sight to behold, and I tried to pull myself up to finish my climb, but I soon found that I could not. My legs refused to move. I simply had no more energy left. I pathetically grasped at the dirt, attempting to drag myself forward, but my desiccated arms were to weak to move even the miniscule weight of my emaciated form. I stared at the Tree in despair, so close to my goal but unable to reach it. The twin hungers ate at my mind, and darkness began to close in around me. I knew then that I was going to die there on that mountainside, but I could barely summon the energy to be mad about it. The darkness claimed me.
I dreamed as I died. I dreamed a great hand picked me up and flew me through the sky, taking me to paradise. The whole world was tinted green, a beautiful emerald hue that infused all my surroundings with vibrant life. It was a beautiful dream, but I knew how it ended: with my life coming to an end.
Except it didn't.
I woke up to the sound of birdsong, the smell of flowers, and the sight of green. Lots of green. For a moment, I thought I must have still been dreaming. I was laying in the grass in the middle of an emerald forest, ancient ruins overgrown with moss and ivy hidden amid the trees. It felt like a lifetime since I had last seen green grass or heard the sounds of creatures that were not either plagued or undead. As for the smells, it felt almost alien to not have the smell of decay and rotting flesh filling my nostrils. Flowers seemed like something out of a myth.
Finally I spoke. "Where am I?"
You have arrived, just as I knew you would, my child, a voice echoed in my mind. It was a familiar voice, the same voice from my dream. Looking up, I saw that I was laying at the roots of the Great Tree I had seen from the mountainside, its majestic branches stretching high above my head, into the sky above and seemingly beyond. But an even more startling sight than the wooden behemoth was creature that flew in the air between me and it. Shimmering emerald scales shown in the sunlight, immense wings beating at the air to keep the beast's immense body suspended in the air. Claws like spears, fangs like swords, it was a terror to behold. But strangely, looking at it, I felt peace. Even stranger, its eyes were closed, but I could still feel it examining me attentively. I am Ysondre, the voice declared. An emerald dragon and a protector of the Emerald Dream.
A dragon? I didn't know whether to bow or to flee. After a moment's hesitation, I decided bowing was the more prudent course of action. I felt stronger than I had in a long time, but I doubted that would mean anything when my pursuer was a dragon. Looking up at her, I saw through her transparent eyelids and recognized her great emerald eye. It was the eye from my dream. She was the one to call me to this place.
"Why did you bring me here?" I finally asked, keeping my head bowed.
To show you your true potential, child, Ysondre answered. Now come. You have much to learn, and I have much to teach you. She landed on the ground lightly, emerald light swirling around her as she transformed into the form of a violet-skinned elf with long green hair – a Night Elf, my people's distant kin from across the sea. Her eyes still closed, she turned and began to walk away. Not knowing what else to do, I scrambled to my feet and followed after her. I didn't know what came next, but it appeared that my story was far from over.