AN: It was fairly obvious these two groups were going to run into each other eventually. Originally it was going to happen differently and earlier, but like most stories, this one went through a mental revision during plotting. So we have this instead.
I have taken (once again) some minor liberties with the geography of the landscape in Ashenvale. This is more because I highly doubt that the span of this forest could be crossed in seven minutes by mount, and there's always more to an area than what we see. I am reminded of a beautiful fanart that was done of Darkshore a few years ago, which showed the city as more than just a few buildings and made the events of Cataclysm a hundred times more painful for me as a writer.
For anyone curious about where this 'grove' is relatively located on the Ashenvale map, it's somewhere near the portal that once spawned Dream Dragons. I have no clue if that spot still exists (I have not yet finished Ashenvale on Brinella in-game), but for those people who used to slaughter the overgrown lizards as much as I did, that's the general area.
Hence the reference at the end. Oh, what lovely things are hiding, I wonder!
As always, feel free to review.
The fire was warm, fighting back the shadows that were cast around them with a cover of gold and red that threw Kalthor's features into sharp relief. The tension between all of them was tangible, save for the shape-changing woman that he could only classify as a Druid. Anything else seemed too far for him to reach. They sat in a circle, large logs having been rolled up by Brinella while Mixie trotted along behind in some sort of awe. Kalthor had to admit he had his own questions, but they could be saved for another time.
The one who complained loudest was Winnie. The forest rang with her objections to sitting with members of the Horde, to eating with them, and even to listening to them. There was nothing but hate in her eyes for the warlock and goblin, and though she finally sat beside Lydros, the flames of her anger were nearly as tangible as those that glimmered between them. While the bridge between the factions was a rickety one, Kalthor had never known someone who showed such outright hostility. Once again, his questions would have to wait.
"I am not ashamed to admit some shock at how time has affected you, old friend." Lydros did not let his eyes wander to the warlock, focusing instead on staring into the fire as if it might speak instead. His bow and quiver had been set aside, leaving only his ears to be his weapon. They twitched at every sound, and though Lydros did not completely trust him, it was not that which kept the hunter on edge.
Kalthor managed a thin-lipped smile, tearing his eyes from the wolf-woman to his hands where he spun a ring on his finger. Tria's ring. "We have all done things in our foolishness. Some are more grave than others." His voice lightened as he tried mirth, but it fell flat and hollow. "I see your taste in friends has not changed in the least. Short, feral... I half expect you keep Irial tied somewhere so that she would not complain. Where is the woman, Lydros? It's rare for you to travel without her."
He knew he had stepped wrong when the whole of Lydros' body tensed as if he had been stabbed. Even Winnie blanched, that mask of simmering fury failing her as it turned to open concern for her friend. "Ah, I grieve for your loss as well. Irial was an open and sweet woman, if a bit more opinionated than most would have liked." Kalthor chuckled softly, rubbing at the bridge of his nose in memory. "She took every chance she could to bring me down a peg or twelve, and loft you higher on that pedestal of yours."
"I do not recognize that name. This... Irial." Brinella's voice was coarse in her worgen form, and Kalthor furrowed his brows while he struggled to understand her. There was a long silence before the wolf-woman sighed and straightened, her form shifting and shortening slightly to become human. "I apologize. I forget sometimes that while I am among friends, I am not privy to their lives as I would prefer. I feel this is something better left to rest in the past than dig it up like a flower bulb to plant it where it does not belong." Kalthor watched her run her finger through her hair nervously, her eyes averted.
"You are almost as difficult to understand when you speak now, as you are when you are..." His hands moved as if struggling to find the right words for it. He found himself surprised once again when Brinella spoke, though he wasn't certain he liked the tone she answered him in.
"Monster?" The woman shrugged lightly, her own hands held in a motion of surrender. "You do not need to look at me as if I am insane, or degrading myself. I am a worgen, and a worgen is a monster. Not a woman, not a wolf. The only thing I am besides that is a Druid, though that does not make my presence any easier to bear." Brinella's fingers went to her lips, tapping lightly, and Kalthor was intrigued by the smile he saw there. "I do, however, sympathize. Your own tongue, though it is the common language you speak, makes it hard to understand some things that you say."
He chuckled, nodding slowly while his mind wrapped around her words. "I hear strains of a heritage from the highlands, but I have heard of no outbreak such as yours from anywhere other than secluded spots in some human areas. Perhaps my knowledge is as lacking as I feared it would be when I was younger."
"Gilnean." Brinella leaned forward, poking at the embers that surrounded the fire with a twig that she soon lobbed into the flames as well. "I am a daughter of Gilneas, a city that has been behind a wall for a long time. No longer, as we've suffered from civil war, this worgen curse, and an attack from what I understand are Forsaken. The wall is broken, and my homeland sundered. A tale that is not strange, from what I gather of what I see in your eyes."
Kalthor flicked his eyes briefly to Winnie, who had only moved to poke at the sleeping goblin at Brinella's feet. The tiny humanoid had been plastered to the Druid since Brinella had mended her ill-healing arm, though Kalthor was sure that they would still be forced to search their packs for explosive devices when they woke. Mixie was a wily one. "It's a common story, though no less tragic because of it. Suffice to say that you are not the only nation that has been dealt a severe blow. It is my hope that you will find a way to recover in a fashion that befits you."
Brinella smiled, her head tilted for a moment before she looked away and set her attention elsewhere. That lasted for only a few heartbeats, and then she rose to her feet and made her way into the wooded shadows outside the range of the campfire. Kalthor knew the reason before it was ever spoken. Brinella's apology had said it clearly; Lydros only confirmed it.
"We do not try to treat her as if she is a monster, but it is hard. She sets herself apart on her own, as if afraid she might corrupt us as well, but we do not do much better. It is difficult to trust that which might turn on you without warning, but I have always lived that way." The hunter slid his scarred hands together, knitting the fingers and pulling them apart almost nervously.
"Sadly, my friend... until you confide in her the same way that you do others, you are treating her as little more than an outcast. You perpetuate her notion that she is indeed nothing more than a monster. I have seen monsters, Lydros. No matter the body she might take, no matter how frightening or how feral, the heart of a woman beats strongly in her. She deserves the love of a friend, but deep respect would be enough for her at this point, I gather." Kalthor sat back on his palms, watching the dark where Brinella had vanished.
"Fat lot o' good it is fer ye ta sit here an' blunder aboot in things that are none of ye'r concern." Winnie turned her attention away from the goblin, now splayed out on her stomach and snoring softly, to glare at him. "Ye've no righ' ta come out o' nowhere an' dance aboot like ye own tha place." The dwarf couldn't keep her voice down, her pitch raising in anger even as she leaned across Lydros in a clear attempt to threaten the warlock.
It worked, and Kalthor breathed a sigh of relief as Lydros grasped his friend by the shoulder and pulled her back to her seat. "Hush, Winnie. Kalthor has never been a man of strict loyalties. Even when he stood beside others in the Third War, he was there to benefit himself and no one else. No matter the side he is on now, he can be judged on his own thoughts and values." Lydros' eyes met Kalthor's for a moment, his lips turning in a frown. "No matter how skewed those may seem."
"I've made bad choices, yes. For myself and for others." Kalthor fingered the map that lay open beside him. He knew the parchment like he knew his own body, and knew that it had been the one to belong to Sura. There was no question in his mind how it had changed hands; Sura's mark was still present on the map, it had merely been permitted to be modified by another. The worgen girl. "One mistake I hope to remedy before it is too late."
He took up the parchment, his eyes focused on the ink as it swirled and danced before his eyes. The map seemed happy to be in his hands again, but he had never given the item sentience. It was a hollow desire. "I've lost a friend of mine, and her trail seems to have died among the trees here. Mixie is no tracker, nor am I. I had little hope of finding her again, when I stumbled onto Brinella." He smiled as the map settled on the outline of Ashenvale, and the mark that represented the Druid slowly pathed along the landscape south of their own clustered dots.
"Never in my dreams could I have imagined that I would run into my own craft again. I gave the last map of mine to... to another friend, before I went through the portal. Ah, Sura was always far too kind." There was no mistaking the blatant curiousity that both had shown when he stumbled on his words. Was his pain that evident? "Yet I cannot summon the link that binds us and would allow me to show her here. My fortune is still not complete, it would seem."
They remained in silence for a time, Kalthor staring at the parchment as if it might yield beneath his eyes. It did not, and he rolled it up again, offering it to Lydros. "My own folly. Only a woman could press me into such a corner and not have me give up with my hands thrown skyward. Or perhaps it is only because I love her, and would do any foolish thing to make her see that."
Lydros took the map, tucking it into the packs that Brinella had abandoned before she had wandered away. "Many a strong man has fallen because of a nice pair of legs, as my friend here would say." He jerked his thumb at Winnie, who glared at him for a moment before looking away once more. "Why would you have been separated from this friend?"
"You remember the priestess that I accompanied during that war, do you not?" He saw Lydros nod, and continued. "I followed her out of friendship then, standing with her and others. You could say that she had begun to sway my loyalties to myself even then. Things began to change, and when we faced the troubles of our race... we succumbed to the grief of our brethren. I lost her in that time, while I began to toy with powers far beyond my control, she was harnessing the powers of a Naaru that had been captured. While I was falling, she was flying. While I chased her, determined to bring her to my bed, I was blind to the fact that she had already been caught until the last possible moment."
Kalthor chuckled, but it was a dry sound. His fingers lifted to ruffle his hair, and he rolled his head back to watch the sky. "How I missed it, I still haven't an idea. Her love went to another who followed her same path, and I was woken from my dreams of her as my mate with the announcement of her betrothal. It was a staggering blow, but I should have expected it. I had left her side to pursue my own power to impress her, and she had moved on. I was never more than a friend to her.
But I was not the only one to feel betrayed. Oh, I ached in all the ways a man would when losing a woman dear to him, but I was not alone. A week before the events were to come to pass, her beloved was torn from her by another woman." Kalthor's hands covered his eyes. "Not just a woman, either. Her own flesh and blood. The matters grew worse when that shattering moment was compounded and it was revealed that her sister carried the child of the man she had loved. Triadae changed the day she learned of the tryst, but that was what changed her.
The woman I loved was capable of laughter and joy. Her abilities to seal wounds extended past the physical and even into the mental and emotional, but she was never able to mend the ones that were inflicted on herself. Triadae would listen to no one else when they tried to explain; the poison of doubt and hate her sister had planted in her had spread too fast for us to rescue her, and Tria had always held a stubborn face.
Her betrothed had sworn up and down that he had never meant for what had happened to occur. Light, he could barely remember anything aside from having imbibed enough drink that it took three days for his head to clear and let him stand without a headache. He remembered little more than her sister offering him a glass of wine in celebration, and that was it. Yet Triadae never let go of the blow to her pride, and damned them both."
"One who was truly in love would never do a thing like that." Brinella's voice was quiet, but stern.
Kalthor nearly jumped from his skin, turning to cast his gaze up to her face, but his eyes never made it that far. Between the furred and lengthened hands was clutched a familiar object that made his throat constrict. Tria's two-handed sword, unmistakeable from the gilded sheath that encased it, to the golden pheonix with outspread wings that comprised the hilt, inset with tiny rubies. "Where..."
"When I first smelled you after Lydros demanded I stand down, you carried something beneath the rest that I couldn't quite identify. It was familiar, but not in a manner that struck me as anything that I should know. I knew that if I came across the scent again, I would recognize it better, but I figured the chance of that was slim. There are many scents in these woods." She held out the ornate blade, and Kalthor took it with shaking hands.
"While trying to find the others, I came across a..." She fumbled for the right word, then shrugged, "a grove. Not an accurate word, but the best that I can think to compare it to. It is a bad place," she looked to Lydros for support, but even he seemed not to grasp what she was trying to say and she stumbled, "the grove is completely surrounded by a thick growth of flora that has only one arch inward that I could find. That was natural, at least. The scent I found, that was on you? It ended where I found the sword, tangled in the growth like it had been stripped from the bearer and the plants were trying to make it a part of themselves."
"The feeling of that place is something that I cannot explain. Staring into the arch is like watching the filmy surface of a bubble, but one that you can only barely make out. There is great evil in that grove, and I fear your friend may have stumbled into it. Whether on her own or by anothers hand, I could not tell." Her canine features showed worry, and apology. "That place calls sweetly to me, but it is a call akin to a cloaked dagger held by a loved one."
Lydros leaned over again, grabbing the map and tossing it to Brinella. The woman opened it and set it down between them all, the clawed tip of her finger drawing a line from their current place as if she were retracing her steps. "Here." She touched a spot towards the north, still blank. "I know it seems as though I have not been there, but I have. It is this place." Her eyes went to Kalthor, who was instead looking towards Lydros.
His pale features did very little to comfort any of them. "That is the last place a troubled soul would want to travel," he finally managed to croak, "and I have seen many a place in that same position."
Kalthor moved to his feet with hurried grace, not even looking back at them and vanishing into the treeline. Frantic moments followed, with Brinella not knowing what to do until Winnie lifted the dozing goblin, handing her off to the worgen woman after a moment of pondering whether to throw her into the fire. Lydros thwarted it by dousing the fire, turning to Brinella, his finger pointing after the warlock. "Follow him, Brinella. No matter what calls for him, no matter how he fights you, do not let him enter that place. Or we will lose him as he has lost his friend."
Brinella nodded, tearing after the blood elf and rousing the goblin in the process. The worgen paused only long enough to shift into her familiar feline shape, Mixie scrambling onto her back and clinging for dear life as Brinella thundered through the woods. Behind her, she could barely hear the echoed warnings of Lydros chasing her.
"The nightmare lets no one live. Do not let him pass!"