Voodoo Child

Chapter 26 – On the Road Again

By Genoscythe

The man lay on his back, staring at the sky and looking for all the world like a corpse. Blood ran down the left side of his face from a deep gash in his cheek, and he reeked of arcane forest.

"Marek…?" Sir Hans Lightsword asked, leaning over the body. He knew his old friend was still alive because every now and then he would blink and whimper. "Are you okay? Say 'big breasts feel best' five times fast."

"Muuuuh…" Marek groaned. "My face…"

"Don't worry about it, they're just flesh wounds. That one on your cheek looks like it'll leave a scar, but – "

"WHAT?" The paladin suddenly burst into motion, cracking his forehead against Sir Lightsword's and causing them both to fall cursing onto the grass. "DAMN that troll!"

"Ugh…what troll?" Hans got to his feet. "Where have you been? I thought you were banished."

"I'm scarred…" Marek twitched on the lawn of Cathedral Square.

"Deep breaths, Marek. Calm down."

"I CAN'T CALM DOWN!" He bellowed. "I'M A MONSTER!"

"Fine, I'll get you inside the Cathedral. Let me check with Gadwyn and see if there's any – "

"No don't!" Marek grabbed Sir Lightsword's cape and kept him running immobile on the slick grass.

"Oh, what do you know," Hans remarked, pointing through the cathedral doors. "Somebody already saw you. Looks like he's going to find a room for you him…self?"

Marek had disappeared.

"This is impossible," Sir Ulrich Gadwyn growled, dropping the blank prayer book onto his nightstand and following the nervous priest out into the hallway.

"I don't understand, sir," the lowly priest said.

"What don't you understand, acolyte?" Gadwyn asked impatiently.

"Why you said it's impossible after it's already happened."

Gadwyn stopped, grabbing the priest by the shoulder and forcing him to do likewise. "I will enlighten you then. It is impossible for Marek Belheim to be lying on our front lawn because we took his hearthstone and sent him on a suicide mission to Kalimdor."

"But he must have…"

"No, I confiscated it personally. It's sitting in my room, if you'd like to see it."

The priest gave him a sidelong look. "In your room, sir?"

"The last I saw of it, yes."

"Then where's your hearthstone?" The priest asked, immediately regretting it and wanting nothing more than to suck the words back out of the air. Implying that a member of the illustrious gang called the Silver Hand was irresponsible, no matter how accurate an assessment, was always punished with extreme prejudice. However, it seemed that this time, the paladin under question had bigger things to worry about.

"FFFFFFFFFFF-ather!" Gadwyn artfully turned the explosive swear into a sign of reverence as the Archbishop and his lovely nubile daughter passed through the hallway. "-uck," he muttered as soon as they were out of earshot.

"If you don't mind me saying, sir, we should find Sir Belheim before he escapes. Coming back to Stormwind, with the kind of charges he has garnered, he will not likely stay to face the hangman."

"Don't call him 'sir'," Gadwyn corrected under his breath as they emerged in the nave of the cathedral. A short walk through the overcompensating front doors, and Gadwyn was standing before a thoroughly soaked and terrified Marek Belheim framed by two guards.

"Morning watch had to fish him out of the canal and chase away one o' them giant sewer crocolisks," one of the guards explained. "It almost made off with his hand," he added with a satisfied chuckle. "You'll take it from here, sir?"

"Yes," Gadwyn snapped. "Give him to me and be gone." The guards snorted, pushing the shivering paladin forward and trudging away.

"O-okay…" Marek started in first, waving a dripping, trembling finger. "Let me j-just say this first. This has been, undeniably, the worst d-day of my life, so if you want to dump some new k-kind of banishment on me, just k-keep that in mind."

"You jumped into the canal."

"Y-yes."

"And a sewer beast did that to your face?"

Marek attempted to reply, but he soon broke down in tears.

"He was going on about some troll," Sir Hans Lightsword offered, standing behind Marek.

"So you did make it to Kalimdor," Gadwyn pursued. "With my hearthstone."

Marek nodded silently, wracked with sobs.

"I assume you at least managed to kill a few Horde?"

Marek shook his head, breaking into a fresh bout of tears.

"And the other Marines, they're all dead?"

Once again, Marek shook his head.

"God DAMN IT!" Sir Gadwyn boomed, stomping hisbooted foot on the pavement. "Sorry Padre," he offered after a few moments of disdainful silence from the Cathedral.

"I-I did help the Sentinels of Astranaar destroy themselves…" Marek offered feebly, to stunned silence. "Oh…nevermind, that wasn't good."

"Marek Belheim…" Gadwyn growled. "You're telling me you failed to kill everybody you were supposed to except the Night Elves, who you weren't supposed to?"

"It sounds like that, but – "

"You may have very well just redeemed yourself."

"What? How?"

"Well, our alliance with the night elves is tenuous at best. Shaky, even. Nigh unexplainable. To be honest, I can't recall how or why such reclusive and solitary beings decided to join us in the first place. It's no big deal if a town or two of theirs is wiped off the face of Azeroth."

"Are you sure the king's okay with that?"

"I'm joking. You're going straight to hell."

"Wait, what about all that blackmail ammo I have on you?" Marek insisted as he was hoisted up by a pair of acolytes summoned by Gadwyn.

"I'll have you guillotined so fast you won't be able to say a word."

Melchiah swatted away Xan's curved blade for the last time. He signaled for the troll to desist, but Xan tried to get in a cheap shot by pretending he hadn't noticed. Dodging the extra blow and kicking a sizeable rock up into Xan's chin, Melchiah put a stop to their sparring match for good.

"Okay, we're done for today," the Forsaken announced, plunging his sword into the softest earth the Barrens could offer. "When we start up again tomorrow, I'd like you to try not to totally suck at it again."

"Tanks, mon…" Xan grumbled, numbly falling back on the parched sand and rubbing his jaw. Twilight had recently fallen, casting a sort of beauty onto the Barrens enjoyed mostly by the blind and deaf. The landscape was still hideous, the sound of ravenous wild animals was still the ambience of choice, but it was the only time of day that wasn't unbearably hot or intolerably cold.

The group, in a wagon stolen from Astranaar, had traveled the forest of Ashenvale in two days and halfway across the Barrens in another. With four days left until Melchiah's mysterious retching baggage did something unspeakable, Xan felt he was in no rush at all.

"You still move like you're using a pansy-ass dagger," Melchiah instructed. "Cut that crap out right now. A sword is not just a long dagger. If you think of it like you're eating dinner, a knife is what you would use to spread butter or silence your stupid family members with."

Xan gave him an odd look that suggested he was losing faith in Melchiah's omnipotence.

"Well, that's what I used my knife for at the dinner table."

"Go on."

"A dagger is like a butter knife. A sword is the thing your dad used to kill the main course with."

"…dat's good?"

Viciously, Melchiah ripped his sword out of the sand and turned toward their camp. "Think about the meaning of the word intelligence, then come to me when you want to learn more about swordplay."

As soon as Melchiah was gone, Meridia was out of the underbrush and laying down beside Xan. Ever since the Druids of the Fang were slaughtered by Zuridan and Melchiah, the Barrens had started getting slightly less barren, and it began with the appearance of several ponds like the one bubbling before them.

"He means well," Meridia offered consolingly, digging her toes into the wet sand.

"Joo don' know wha' he said," Xan pointed out matter-of-factly.

"He looked like he meant well."

Xan told her what Melchiah had actually said.

"…oh. What did you do to him?"

"'parently he forgot I jus' saved him."

Meridia rolled over, coming into actual physical contact with Xan. He was more than thrilled, but his vocabulary didn't go much higher than 'thrilled' so we'll leave it at that for now. "I didn't forget."

"Feels good, positive reinforcement," Xan remarked, laying back himself and rubbing his bruised chin. "I don' be used to it."

"Well, don't get your hopes up," Meridia countered. "I haven't seen you do anything as heroic as what you did three days ago."

"Hey babe, I caught us dinner las' night."

Meridia propped herself up on an elbow incredulously. "You think catching dinner is heroic?"

"It be in da right direction."

"So…you are talking about that zhevra?"

"Ja."

"The one that was already dead and half-rotten?"

Xan suddenly looked away. "…ja."

"The one that Argam ate before anyone even had a chance to refuse it."

"I get it, babe. Message heard." Meridia simply smiled and moved a little closer. A rhythmic pounding was attempting to trip Xan's mental alarms, but the steady impacts were unable to penetrate the euphoric haze around his brain.

"Relax, I'm just kidding!" Meridia soothed,playfully pushing them apart. Both rolled onto their backs just as something furry eclipsed the moon and rocketed into the pond. Meridia scrambled to her feet, nearly tripping into the thorny underbrush if not for her elvish sense of balance. Xan remained motionless, even as the miniature tsunami thundered down on him.

"Dat be Argam, babe," Xan assured Meridia. Moments later, the gigantic tauren reared out from the now waist-deep pond and turned to face Xan.

"Xan, I'm out of weapons. Can I use her until we find another quirky blunt object?"

"Uh-uh. We need her."

"Why?"

"She knows first aid."

"Oh. That's a good reason."

Meridia sighed, stretching out on the sand once more. "Now I know how you felt back in Astranaar."

"Wanna get a translation?" Xan asked in trollish. Argam slapped his dripping paws over his ears, for fear that Xan was speaking in tongues and some demon was trying to tell him, yet again, to kill everyone.

"What did your tauren friend just say?" Meridia asked. Argam screeched, falling backward and floundering in the remains of the pond.

"I told you last night, I don't want to bathe in the blood of my allies!" The tauren bellowed at nobody in particular.

"He said he wants ta give joo a big hug," Xan told her with a worried grimace.

"Is that what all the screaming and flopping around is for?"

"Ja. He be happy ta see joo. Give him a hug."

"I'd rather that he didn't snap my neck."

"Can' have da best o' both worlds, babe."

"I'm going back to the camp," she announced, getting up and cautiously slinking away from Argam toward the pitiful fire they had coaxed into existence.

"Now look wha'choo done, mon," Xan scolded.

"Xan, you're not possessed anymore!"

"…when was I?"

"A few minutes ago, when you were speaking that demonic language."

"Joo mean trollish?"

"Oh," Argam pondered. "They have a name for it now?"

"I'm a friggin' troll! Trolls talk trollish!" Xan was uncomfortable with stating something so obvious, even if it was the only way to get Argam to put two and two together.

"You're saying…" Argam began, counting on his fingers until he realized that counting wasn't actually involved with what he was trying to figure out. "I don't know what you're saying."

"Figures."

The next day, Xan and company continued the grueling trek across the Barrens. Stopping the taint and bringing life back to the wasteland did nothing to the heat, which even the chill of Melchiah's presence couldn't fight back. Xan refused to believe that the Barrens was once a forest like Ashenvale, and instead thought it was a story made up by the Horde to make themselves feel better about owning the worst bits of land on Kalimdor. By that rationale, was Durotar a tropical paradise once, and did Mulgore ever have a stable predator/prey ratio? Like anything involving the natural order of Azeroth, Xan doubted it.

The party dreaded going on a zeppelin again (even Melchiah, but only because he was certain it would explode and all the setbacks were driving him mad). Meridia, of course, was not – but nobody besides Xan considered her a real member of the 'party'. Argam had told Zuridan to paint NO GIRLS ALLOWED on the side of their wagon, but Xan rubbed it off before it could dry.

None of this – it turned out – mattered. There were still no zeppelins available. What the goblins didn't want to tell them was that there had been a new one made, but it caught on an experimental weathervane and detonated half of Booty Bay.

There was no way around it this time. The group had to take a boat, and for wont of being vindictive, Melchiah made everyone come with him.

But before that…

"Joo outta ya mind, mon," Xan casually pointed out, basking in the shade of the Drag.

"No, I'm just too damn determined for my own good," Zuridan explained in a growl, pacing their resting spot. Xan had offered up Argam to show Meridia around the Horde capital city, hoping that with her hood off she would look enough like a troll that nobody would cause trouble. He should have realized that sending her with Argam was trouble in itself.

"So joo know what'cha did wrong before?" Xan asked the tall orc. Zuridan shook his head.

"I'm just gonna hope I don't do it again."

"If it don' work out, den joo got tree demons ta deal wit'."

"I know, but if this works, then I can…"

"What, seduce the other ones and tell 'em to leave you alone?" Melchiah quipped, leaning against a crate with his arms safely crossed. Xan would have sent Melchiah out with Meridia – hell, he would have gone himself – but he didn't trust the Forsaken around her and they were both needed for moral support anyway.

Zuridan was stupidly going to try and bind a succubus.

"I thought, maybe it can communicate with the other two. You know, tell 'em to back off and whatnot."

"Just like dat?" Xan scoffed doubtfully.

"It could work," Melchiah growled (not to say there was undue malice in his voice, but Melchiah couldn't speak softly in much the same way a mouse can't warble). All eyes turned to him. "But it probably won't." He added sharply, and everybody relaxed.

"Well, wish me luck," Zuridan gulped, trembling like his skeletal structure was experiencing a magnitude 5 earthquake.

"Why?" Both Xan and Melchiah justifiably asked.

End

AN: Not much to report, mostly because I'm not sure which direction to go in now. I could follow the game more closely and send them off to some place like Desolace (but not for long, because everyone hates Desolace) or I could follow the story that's evolving in my head and take the group to Stranglethorn. I could go either way. Your thoughts?