Obligatory disclaimer: I do not own World of Warcraft, or I would have gotten more of the details right.
She woke again to the feel of warm chain mail pressed against her face. For a while she simply relished the pleasant contrast of the cool night air on one cheek, and body heat on the other. As the haziness in her mind ebbed away, she slowly realized how pleasant it was - she felt neither too hot, nor too cold for once. Her fever must have broken.
She opened her eyes to look past the leather-clad arm that held her in place. At first, she thought she was looking at a meteor shower, until she realized the stars were quite still, but her head was still swimming. She lifted a hand to press to her temple, and felt rather than heard the troll grunt in surprise. He spoke, and the lower half of the starry scene was obscured suddenly by a furry black face. The tauren rumbled something as well, and brought a familiar vial up toward her. She shook her head and twisted away, trying to sit up. The troll's arm held her pinned. After a brief struggle, he loosened his grip enough that she could look around herself.
She was riding on a raptor. She should not have been shocked, but she was. As if sharing in her astonishment, the beast suddenly canted its massive head back to regard her with one black, beady eye. It made a soft, bird-like noise. At a sharp word from the troll, it straightened again to face in the direction they were moving.
Ahead, a dozen orcs plodded on foot, and several more rode shaggy grey worgs. The group was shambling through the sand dunes (Still Tanaris, she decided), and making slow progress. Off to her right, she could make out a gleaming white shape in the darkness - another huge skeleton like the one she had sheltered under after the attack. Litha caught a glimpse of a black feline shape darting amongst the oversized ribs, following the party at a distance. To her left, the tauren was walking beside the raptor, looking up at her keenly. When he caught her eye, he offered her the potion again.
Her leg ached, and she was acutely aware of the way the bandages shifted and pulled with each step the raptor took, but the pain was infinitely less than it had been. She shook her head at him, and he carefully tucked the vial back into a leather bag on his hip. The tauren and the troll exchanged words in a harsh language she didn't think was Orcish. Feeling more clear-headed than last time she'd spoken to them, she decided on the simplest question.
"Do either of you speak Common?"
She turned to look up at the troll, but he was staring straight ahead, all scowls and angrily curved tusks. She felt him tugging on the reins, and when she followed his gaze, she realized he'd slowed the raptor to drop back further behind the orcs. When she looked down at the tauren, his brown, wide-set cow eyes made her wonder that he spoke any language at all. He spoke now, though, and she was able to catch, "...Orcish?"
"Orcish..." she said, racking her brain, "...little." Not that they wouldn't be able to tell her knowledge of the language was limited.
The tauren's mouth turned up at the corners, in a way that was neither menacing, nor particularly pleasant. She was not sure if taurens smiled.
"Eikahe," he said, and pointed to himself, then pointed to her and asked in Orcish, "You?"
"Litha," she replied. When the goblins had initially taken her into slavery, she'd tried to withhold her name, thinking it would give them some sort of power over her. She'd been wrong, of course. The collar and the chains had given them all the power they needed. She'd relinquished her name after only a few days, but the obstinacy had cost her greatly.
"Lit... ha. Lidda. Li... ssa." He rolled the word around in his wide mouth, nodding thoughtfully.
When she looked up at the troll, he also seemed to be mouthing her name, but made no sound.
"Ga'vik," said Eikahe. When Litha looked back at him, he was gesturing up to the troll. "Ga'vik," he repeated, encouragingly. The troll shifted in the saddle and finally met her eyes when she turned to look at him again.
"Ga'vik," she repeated easily. He looked away abruptly, clicking his teeth together. It made the muscles of his jaw line jump.
Litha looked down at the tauren and asked in Common, "What now, Eikahe?" She spread her hands, palms opening upward in a questioning gesture. The tauren nodded gravely at her for a moment, before casting his arm in a wide arc, as if to encompass all that was behind them, above them, and ahead.
He seemed to say, "All of this." Litha started to nod her head back at him, not exactly comprehending, but trying to look equally solemn, when the troll cut in sharply.
"Gadgetzan," he said curtly, and gestured in the direction they were headed.
Litha felt her stomach drop out. Back to the goblins, then. She thought maybe she should feel relieved - the goblins were not likely to kill her, and they definitely did not eat humans. Everything she'd ever learned indicated that her fate with the Horde would be far worse than what the goblins could dish out.
Still, Eikahe and Ga'vik had done nothing but mend her wounds and ease her pain. They'd been ferrying her about quite gently. It seemed almost a betrayal that they would turn her over to her slavers after that.
Had she been hoping for something else? Maybe, but Litha let the feeling pass without lapsing into despair. A year ago, she had felt nothing but hope and despair. She had imagined that she would surely be rescued. The expectation had driven her survival every day, and her crushing disappointment every night. Later, when she contemplated a life of living with what had been done to her, she preferred to imagine that she would die an honest martyr's death (and her friends and family would rage and weep, and seek vengeance, and possibly slaughter all goblins everywhere). Then she had feared that she would not die, which was worse.
Now, Litha knew she would not die. The world had yet to starve her to death, to beat or rape her to death. The world had failed to burn her alive, and had spared her a grave in the belly of a hyena. She accepted that her fate was to live, and she vowed to do it with as much dignity as she could muster.
Leaning her head back against the troll's chest, she listened for a while as he and the tauren spoke to each other, in that low rough tongue that was not Orcish. She turned her face to the stars, watching them twirl slowly overhead as the night passed, until she dozed again.