~*~ Author's Notes ~*~
Anyone else things that Tirisfal sounds like "tears fall"? I had assumed that they named the place after the mourning that went on there after the Scourge came threw.
Fun fact of the day: Not only is there an actual Tirisfal Glades, but there are at least four Brightwater Lakes (and one sinkhole) around the world.
Lastly: I've started marking the end chapter nodes with numbers to make locating them easier.
I now return you back to your regularly scheduled fanfiction!
~*~ Chapter 23 ~*~
She should have known the Priest wouldn't make it that easy to escape. First thing she had done was trying to hearth home. Every time the cast was winding up a shock from the collar went strait to her core and blocked her power. Her portal to the Moonglade would not be summoned either.
She was sick of the rules always changing; he kept tinkering with the contraption around her neck, improving on the older model, while she slept or was out cold. Stupid engineers.
The clearing they had been camped in was overrun with plaguehounds. Others had also come threw and made off with anything left behind. The frightening thing was the ring surrounded by burnt out candles where the ground was so desecrated even the blighted hounds avoided it. She had shuttered and left, not bothering with searching.
The hunting was going well. The plagued hounds that he spoke of were not so hard to kill. The first few she attacked had been downed with a few shreds of her claws before they knew it. The ferocity of the attacks, however, had turned the meat into mush almost, making gleaning of edible portions impossible (1).
She had gotten a lot stronger since she left Auberdine, perhaps as a result of the plague in her system? Toning down her attack power and speed seemed to do the trick. She got not just edible portions of meat, if not in need of a good Light bath to sanitize, but ragged bits of hide.
If there were glue in town, and the Priest still had her money, and if the Forsaken accepted Darnassian currencies, she could mold the scraps into workable leather. Briefly she wondered if their mailboxes here like the ones back home; small portals that would allow packages to travel threw the Twisted Nether to other mailboxes nearest their target(2).
One beast had split its side open in the attack and the contents of its stomach poured onto the ground. Amongst the content were glowing red bracers and the remains of a man's arm. The thick metal was not to her liking and so she stored them in the pack for latter. After that she split the stomach of every beast she killed, finding things of interest on occasion.
The blighted ground she walked over was so far gone it didn't even cry out to be saved. There was no confusion in the natural spirits of this land: the ones who were not outright destroyed had packed up or went to sleep long ago. The trees were in perma-hybernation it seemed, waiting the day when someone would burn away the coat of plague encasing them and the darkened skies would clear to let the sun shine threw.
There was a lake she kept away from. Mindless undead roamed its shores. Though they paid her no heed, they still could be dangerous in large numbers. The bats she had seen in the distance were her goal. Bat leather was good quality stuff. Also she had never tasted the meat and wouldn't mind trying it.
The closer she got the bigger they got; huge things with enormous fangs and black drool seeping from their mouths. They were so insane that all they did was fly around in circles halfway up the tree line, though too far up to leap and grab.
The solution was simple it seemed: a good running start up the trunk of the nearest tree, a turn of the waist and a leap-
The shriek that emanated form the vermin almost knocked her senseless. Claws dug into the wings and next thing she knew they were spiraling to the ground with alarming speed. Digging in she shredded the membrane as much as possible before kicking off it's side and clinging to a tree just twenty feet from the ground.
A second latter the bat landed with a considerable thud. Kicking off again, she landed on it's back, grabbed it's neck and shook. The head popped clean off its body. Surprised, she stood there feeling a bit foolish for all the force she put into the move.
Spitting it out she made quick work of carving the beast up. Such work goes faster when you wield five razors in each hand. The wing membrane would not be salvageable, but the wings themselves were de-boned and went into the sack. The rest of the animal was deemed too tough to make good food and so came the eventual splitting of the stomach.
When yet another arm tumbled out, this time with a little copper ring on the hand, she began to wonder where all these living humans were. These remains were obviously not undead at the time of their consumption. From what she had seen and overheard the vendors would pay good money for these scavenged body parts, but she just couldn't bring herself to stoop to that kind of recycling. Especially when she didn't have the former owner's permission or even know how to find them.
She called upon her natural powers and sunk the arm into the earth where it would be allowed to decompose naturally. Secretly she was delighted; she hadn't the mental capacity to work the spell before.
Her tree climbing and bat snatching acrobatics were repeated till she had a good supply of wings and tattered leathers. The feel of running threw the forests, though dead and decrepit, brought back the wild part of her love of being a Druid. This is what she was good at; this is what she had to offer.
Around the other side of the lake she could see mists. Or rather it looked like mist. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be thin gossamer strands of silk and a lot of it. Twanging the silk with her paw she found it hummed. She shifted to her elfin form and twanged it again, humming along.
Soon she found another strand within reach and twanged it. The hum was different: another strand and another note. Soon she was spinning round and round thumbing the strings and playing a melody she had been taught a long time ago. Though she had some skill with a dulcimer her calling was not to music. She still played out of enjoyment of the instrument and new many songs.
Something heavy landed on her back – lots of points of contact. She crumbled, twisted, and instinctively fired a shot of arcane energy at it, exploding it into a mist of green blood. Sitting up, she blinked threw the gore now covering her dress. "Great!" Her voice echoed into the trees. Can I not go a day without being covered in something nasty?
The trees answered: hundreds of voices came twisting out of the branches, down the webs. Spiders of every size, bleached white as bone, descended. Though not a one of them could take her alone, a hundred or more could pump enough venom into her system to do the job.
"Cenarius, Elune, Ysera, Malorn, a Druid in need calls upon your aid. Hear me!" The rolling beauty of the Darnassian language echoed in the valley and into the heavens. The light of the moon was nowhere to be seen, but power it contained sill answered her call.
Liquid drops of moonlight filtered down amongst the trees, drifting slowly. The first to land hit branches and sparkled before going out. The spiders, not understanding the danger they were in, advanced directly into the path. The sparks gently landed on their backs and legs. The Druid closed her eyes not wanting to see the result. Though there was great pity in her heart for the corruption of the wildlife here, there was no need to watch as the shower of moonlight kills them(3).
When she opened her eyes the multitude of spiders were on their backs dead as dead could exist in this land. Quickly, as more were advancing, she searched a few to see if there were any salvageable parts. Some of the good-sized ones not only had a bit of flaky white meat but also squirted out coils of the humming silk when they died. These she gathered up quickly, tucked into the bag and made off as the other spiders advanced. They were left behind, no match for the speed of her Dishu form.
The lake looked pretty appealing now. Weaving between some of the mindless undead, she took a great leap, shifted back to her elfin self, dropped the bag on the sand bar, and landing in the water. It wasn't exactly a proper bath but she could fix that.
Shifting into her aquatic form she swam a quick series of circles, adding the natural purifying energy to the strokes as she did. Soon a lightly glowing whirlpool was formed of purified water. In the center she changed to her elfin form again and allowed the jets of water to clean away the gunk and pollution.
Something grabbed her ankle and pulled her down out of the whirlpool.
'You stupid, stupid Druid! No wonder the masters don't think your ready for more training!' She chided herself harshly for not listening to her instincts in the first place. It wasn't hard to twist out of the underwater thing's dead grasp, but the fact that it got a hand on her to begin with irked her something fierce.
The purified pool stayed with her to the edge of the lake. Only then did she realize that all the undead in the area had sensed what she had done and were coming. Up and down the beach and out of the woods around came the moaning calls of the Scourge advancing.
Quickly she disbanded the glowing pool. As she was doing so faces broke threw the surface; rotting human faces. Wheeling back in surprise, she snatched up the bag, shifted and ran.
How many or how long the undead had been milling around the bottom of the lake she had no idea. The though that they would make their way into water sources was new, but quite obvious. She couldn't stop chiding herself. Of course they had! People would attempt to get away on boats; there had even been a broken down dock on one end of the remains of a half-submerged boat on the shoreline.
She shivered hard, not able to stop her compassionate mind from reliving someone's nightmare…
Undead running threw the woods after them. They see the dock and the boat. There is nowhere else to go so they had climbed in and rowed out to the middle of the lake. Only too late did they realize the undead had followed them and were under the water now, waiting to snatch them if they tried to swim to shore. It would only be a matter of time before their vigil was wasted though. Eventually they became too weak to keep the boat in the middle of the lake. Either the undead bloated, floated to the surface and overturned the boat, or the boat drifted too close to the shore and got overturned from underneath. More lives stolen by the Scourge to bolster the army's of the Litch King.
It wasn't till she was out of breath did she stop running. Panting she quickly scaled a tree in which to rest. Closing her eyes a moment she heard the sounds of movement beneath: wolves and lots of them. They had followed her scent form somewhere and were looking for her now.
Wolves? Wolves she knew well. A few minutes of rest were all she needed. Springing from the tree, she landed on two at once and took them out with nary a flick of claw along the jugular. They fled in panic, though the trail of blood would be easy to track back to the body latter.
She spun to send the rest of the wolves to the afterlife as well. From one to the next she went, barely killing each before another came with snapping jaws coating with spittle and sickness. When a dozen or more had fallen and the rest had fled, she quickly tracked the blood back to their sources and found her first two victims.
Making quick works of their edible meat, firs and stomach contents, she was disappointed to not find anything interesting inside. Shrugging it off she packed the last of her find into the bulging bag. She couldn't remember what all she had found, but the sack was heavy now. As she had when she first shifted into her feline form what seemed like ages ago, she thanked Cenarius he had taught his disciple how do so and keep packages and clothing as well.
It took a moment of getting her bearings strait for her to realize she was quite a way from the town. She was looking forward to getting back to the Priest; he would be able to remove the contagion from the food so that it was edible. The breakfast she planned to enjoy that morning was half the sack, and then some!
Pleased with her work, she headed back to the village.
"I think you enjoyed that a little too much."
She froze, knowing exactly whom that oddly echoing metallic voice belonged too. As soon as she located the source, a tree to her left, she darted right – and skidded to a halt when the Dark Lady appeared right in front of her.
The Banshee Queens lips parted in a toothy grin, her sharp canines gleaming, "I move a lot faster than you can, my dear Forsaken Druid."
~* End Notes *~
(1) This is my explanation of how you can kill 10 pre-Cata animals from the Barrens before you finally get one that drops any meat, tails, 'perfect/pristine anything', blood, hoofs, heads, feathers, feet, beaks, claws or eggs.
(2) Or, as McCaffrey calls it: going between. Or as Bishop calls it: vanishing something.
(3) AKA Starfall. If a Priestess can do it, so can a feral druid. Thank you Blizz for giving me loopholes to work with!
Lastly – Official artwork shows that Night Elves and High Elves have or had elongated canines. I left them in for all elves because there is something very primal about seeing a picture of 'innocent' Tyrande with feral canines.