CHAPTER ONE: Silithus
WHAM! I hit something hard and dusty. Ah I've fallen off my bed. I think. Pain is shooting through my body, which doesn't normally happen. I open my eyes. A whirling storm of sand surrounds me.
"Ahhhhh!" I scream as I sit bolt upright, ignoring my pain. I immediately regret sitting up, as the sand begins to choke me. I lie down again, hoping that the storm will abate so I can see where I am.
As the storm dies down, I slowly get up. There's sand as far as I can see. Except for a lone mountain, rising up out of the middle of the desert. The setting seems familiar, but I can't place it. I guess I'll set off for that mountain. I start walking, trying to ignore the glaring sun. Then an idea hits me. I'm an adult. I have the height, my hair hits my shoulders, and boy, my shoulders are huge. Wow. I have to try out my speed. I start running. Hell, I'm fast! I'm not even sprinting! I start sprinting. My destination becomes somewhat clearer.
Then I stop dead. A hissing is coming up from somewhere in front of me. I cautiously sneak up to the first rock I come to, and peer around it.
A scorpion the size of my brother is there, fighting a woman, a woman wielding two axes. The scorpion makes a lunge towards her, the stinger whipping towards her head. NO! I think, thinking the stinger will kill her.
But she calmly steps back swinging her right-hand axe up and slicing the stinger off. She then follows through, bringing her other axe down on the scorpion's head, braining it. As its death throes subside, she quickly picks up the stinger and tosses it in her backpack. I decide to follow her, as closely as possible. She strips off her helm and my heart stops. Emily. My girlfriend back home. Either her or her doppelganger. I still don't know where on earth I am, so I decide to still just follow her. I follow her for several hours, watching her chop her way through scorpions and giant worms. I see a dagger in the belly of one of the worms, but she doesn't seem to notice it, so as she walks off in search of a new target, I run in and grab it. Ok, I'm armed now. I've watched her kill so many of these things I reckon I could take one myself. Mind you, I don't have two axes like her. Then, as we reach the base of the mountain, she stops. She turns around, looks around and says, "Right, you can come out now. You've been following me for an hour, it's time to stop."
I step cautiously out from behind a rock, and walk towards her. She assumes a fighting stance, so I throw my hands up in the air. She starts sprinting towards me.
Oh hell, I think. I throw my dagger to the ground. She stops a couple of feet in front of me, one of her axes extended to my neck.
"Who are you and why were you following me?" she asks.
As I finish realizing I'm not going to die this instant, I reply, "I don't know where I am, I don't know who you are but you're the first thing I've seen that isn't a scorpion, a worm, or sand."
She looks at me, quizzically, as if I'm an idiot. "Anybody should be able to realize where we are. Silithus is the only desert in all of Azeroth with purple sand."
Silithus. That's why I recognize my surroundings. Warcraft. My favourite game of the century. That's where I am. She seems amused by my stupefaction.
"Well? Who are you?" she asks, her earlier hostility all but gone.
"My name is Kirk." I reply. Her face goes dead white, and her eyes leak tears.
"No, no, Kirk is dead! KIRK IS DEAD!" she screams at me. What the hell? Her face turned to tears at my name, and how am I dead?
"It's ok!" I try, "I'm not the same Kirk that you knew." It seems to calm her down a bit, so I go on. "Is your name by chance Emily?"
She bursts into tears again. Damn it! Maybe I should just avoid questions about who she is and how she looks like Emily. But I do get an answer. "Yes," she replies through the tears, "I'm Emily."
