~*~ Author's Notes ~*~

Beware, impending dream sequence.

~*~ Chapter 28 ~*~

"This may sound odd," the Druid replied quietly, "but I think I understand."

The Dark Lady smiled, "Of course you do. You're a disciple of Cenarius, after all. The Druids of Thunder Bluff are particularly sensitive to the plight of the Forsaken." The panther had propped himself up on the Dark Lady's back where she knelt and was trying to drag/fight her into the dirt. "What did you do to rile him up so much? He was never so … hyper."

When the Druid didn't answer, the Banshee Queen looked up at her, "Speak freely."

"I… um… perhaps it's because I'm alive?" She winced, understanding how bad that sounded. The Dark Lady had a quick fuse.

"Mhm. A plaything."

Weather this was an insult or not the Druid let it go. Not as if she could have recourse. "I can pass your message on." … if you let me go. I'll even do it right now!

"Do that." Mr. Meows turned and mewled at her as she shifted into her Dishu form and proceeded to run away as quickly as she could. "You too, Mel'odie. Go on now. He'll wonder what became of you."

Torn between the hands petting him and the feline companion who was moving away, the large cat paused only a moment to flick his tail in irritation. Heaving himself from the ground he ran after her, leaving the Dark Lady alone in the shadows.

A few min latter she burst threw the door into the old house and went to hide in her room. The feel of the cold hand on the back of her neck had her shaking from head to foot. The panther was right behind her, hissing at the Priest when he tried to follow her, and parked himself in front of the door so no one could get in.

There came a tapping on the walls… "Care to talk about it?"

Kayas snapped up out of the bed and flew out of the room, charging at the Priest. He backed almost into the fireplace to keep an inch of space between he and her. "NO!" she yelled at him, "I do not want to talk about it! I want you to remove your contraption from my neck so I can go home, where I belong! And not here where that woman keeps coming to torment me every time I set foot outside this house!"

Serz was rooted to his seat, quit surprised by this outburst. The Scout had leapt into the rafters and stealthed himself there. Proving that even if he wasn't raised amongst the kaldorie, the calling to the night and shadows was instinctive.

Something came over the Priest then. He drew himself up, seeming to swell with some inner self-righteousness. It would have been impressive even more so had he been wearing anything but some linen breeches and a loose shirt. "I'll have you know –"

"The Banshee Queen sent your Warlock to the Cathedral. Apparently the Scarlet Zealots drew the short stick of who gets to be slaughtered by an insane Scourged woman this day."

So many reactions ran threw the Priests' body language. Torn between rebuking her for insolence and going for his Warlock, the Warlock won. What she didn't expect also was how he roughly shoved her aside and ran from the house. She hit the wall softly and bounced into the floor.

"That was uncalled for."

She glanced up. The scout in the rafters was glaring down at her. "Don't you dare speak to me. You're hear by choice; I am not."

But the scout leapt from the rafters and into the chair he had been occupying. He walked directly up to her, face to face and poked a long finger at her chest. "That was not nice, what you said about Corrosa."

Refusing to argue with some ignorant Horde, she shifted into her feline form and went back to the bedroom. Mr. Meows continued to block any progression down the hall for anyone who was not also a cat.

It was Serz who calmed the scout and sat him back down to his task – some trinket he was wiring under the Priest's guidance. "Leave her be. She has reason to be upset with the Forsaken right now."

"And I do not?"

"You have had the time that she has not. Leave it alone."

The house grew quite but for the crackling of the fire and the occasional explosion from the trinket. Serze laughed and sang some half-familiar tune to his imp as they played tick-tack-toe in the soot by the fireplace. For her part the imp was much better at the game than her master, but let him win once just to be nice.

Kayas fell asleep on the bed after fiddling with the collar and getting shocked by it several times. She was convinced that if she could fine the latch or whatever that she would be able to get it off. The great feline behind her kept yawning and the contagious nature of such a gesture won out in time…

~*~Segue~*~

Kayas dreamed.

The desert that stretched out before her engulfed the entire world - her world, at least. Beyond the mountains, so far away they weren't even a shadow on the horizon, were the fertile lands of other nations. But here was only red sand and nothing grew here.

A Shadow Sister stood on the edge of the cliff town and stared out into the seat of baked sand. Her skin was almost black for being such a deep shade of purple, and shimmering darkly with the magic of her Order. The cloak, black and brown in faded stripes, hid everything but the face, whispers of red-brown hair and the brown eyes. Everything about the woman was kaldorie, down to the long ears, except her plain brown eyes.

The little Druid was apprehensive. The Shadow Sisters were a dark order of Priestesses of Elune, skilled in the arts of death using shadow magic in the name of Elune's darker aspects. They managed to walk a fine line between demonic and Elune's grace without falling away to become a warlock as so many weaker minded Priestesses of other races did.

These Priestesses dark arts were not the only shadow to be seen. Far off in the distance was the shadow of something far greater, more sinister. But it was a dead shadow, a threat no more. The land around the Priestess and the little Druid was already reeling from suddenly being released from the grips of some monster and slowly the healing would begin.

Behind the Priestess a man spoke softly, "We could go home now." Many, many times had he asked her to leave with him, to go back to their birthplace and rebuild. Kayas could feel both of their emotions. He was tired of fighting and ready to retire… she was losing a battle within herself to let go of fighting. He came up to encircle her in his arms, one hand brushing under the cloak to graze over the swell of her belly. "You would bring life into a place full of nothing and more nothing." It was an accusation and a plea.

Her snort sent tendrils of shadows into the harsh daylight, blown away in the arid desert wind.

The man shook his head, great antlers swinging from side to side. The left antler was missing a tine. "It is over! The walls are destroyed, the Prince is dead and there is a new Scarab Lord." His voice turned to soft pleading, "It is over, my starry night, let us away and drink the wine of victory till the end of our days."

Her own dark hand came to rest on the swell under the cloak, not so big just yet but big enough to make a difference in her life now. "I have been here half my days, since I was a child at the knee. It is hard to believe that the fighting is come near it's end."

The little Druid could feel her confusion and her hunger. She was a woman who had had a mission in life. Now that the mission was done, what now? What purpose could she serve?

A kiss was planted on the back of her neck threw the cloak. His own moss-and-bark cloak matching hers in shades of brown. "What will you call this little one? Desert Dumpling?" There was warmth in his rich, sweet voice. The child and it's mother were all his world now that the kingdom of Ahn'Quiraj had fallen at last. Hundreds of years of war were coming to a close as the Cenarion Circle's greatest victory to date was being heralded around the known world.

Kayas knew they were heroes, nameless and faceless heroes of a war over since before she was a twinkle in her parent's eyes, yet they did not feel it. For people who had spent so much of their existence fighting corruption in so many different guises, their world was about to change. Where did a hero go once the fighting was over? When the songs were sung, where would they be? When the children were grown and their children racing across the desert sands, oblivious to the dangers that once lurked in each shifting wind, where would they be?

"I am not made to sit and rock a suckling babe," The Priestess said, " Elune has made me of a different substance." And yet she had not gotten rid of the child, nor done anything to stop it from taking root in the first place. A part of her was still that Priestess of Elune's Light as she had been before the temples in what is now Desolace had fallen and she had though Elune abandoned her. Till visions had sent her to Silithus the war with the now-fallen Scarab Lord and she took up the Priestess' robes once more, though in a darker shade of white.

The Druid smiled and kissed her neck again, breathing in the scent of moon berries and sulfur water, "She has made you of the shadows, my starry night, but I was made for shadows. I can sit and rock a babe; that is all I want till the end of my days."

The Priestess was anxious, brow furrowed and brown eyes turning towards the harsh sunlight for a moment. She had been here from the beginning, putting so much into the war effort that it had become her babe, so much so that the one in her womb felt a stranger. A usurper. "And where would you have us go? I will see this ended, but when I do where will you have us live? I tell you again, I was not made to sit and rock."

"There are wars all over the world. Where you go, I will follow. Choose your enemy and they will be my enemy too." Kaldorie men were loyal to their families. Just the scent of a woman with child was enough to drive most of them into feverish acts of loyalty.

She smiled; two sharpened canines on each side caught the sunlight in a twinkle. This was how he had won her over.

A vision swam before Kayas, as if she were remembering these things herself: The Priestess and the Druid, with a hundred others, separated from the army that had stormed the ancient gates of Anh,qiraj by a surprise attack. One by one they had fallen but the Priestess and the Druid, commanders of the shadows, had melded away and in the end were the only ones left. Sullen and brooding the Priestess had expected to die there. Her companion however, had found them food and shelter away from the patrolling armies. He would steal out at night and bring her back all sorts of things if just to make her smile. No one could say his breed were not an optimistic lot.

It was two weeks before they had been found, the only survivors of that failed encounter. Nothing of all the little treasures he had found for her in the night meant half as much to either of them as the child who now grew in her womb.

"I have a friend in Andorhol," the man said, "He writes often of the Scourge problems they are having in the Eastern Kingdoms." The man reached under the cloak to stroke her belly again. "We'll make for Andorhol as soon as this is ended. There is plenty of fighting there to do and there will be other children for this little one to play with. Arthas has succeeded the throne of Lordaeron threw regicide and then turned it over to the Scourge. He marches east towards Andorhol, some say on his way to the kingdom of Quel'thalas. It is said that Lady Sylvannas is giving him as much trouble as a hawk gives a mountain lion that cannot fly and his progress is slowed to a craw while he goes off chasing her from one end of the land to the other."

The Priestess' thin laugh was tempered with resentment, "The quel'dorie have forsaken Elune and I have no love for them. Let this Arthas have them. Their vanity has killed the world a dozen times over. If the Burning Legion's weapons are still coming after them then so be it. They reap what they sewed at the Well of Eternity."

The arms encircling her hips released and the Druid stepped back. She turned to face him, this dark truth hanging between them. The Druid loved all life and the Shadow Sister worked only with death. So at odds with each other's natures and yet…

"I harbor no love of the arcane arts as well, but what was done ten thousand years ago is done. I do not want to see what will happen to the quel'dorie if this Death Knight prince gets his hands on the powers in the Sunwell. And for what purposes?"

Kayas could see his face as he asked this question. She could see it shift and bent. She could see the woman's face, the same shifting and the bending. The entire world was shifting and bending… no one was singing and yet the song was there…

"Flee from here sweet child,

To be feral and be wild.

Please don't misunderstand;

For they would all destroy you,

Who walk across your land."

The dead desert, wind swept planes of sand and scalding hot sun faded. In it's place there came the images of the forest of green and the teaming life of the woodlands. There were bees and dragonflies in the air and cool breezes that blew threw the trees smelling of flowers and clean water.

The scene shifted, the trees blackened and died, the dragonflies choked on smoke and fell to the gray grass, the acrid smell of rotting corpses was thick enough to make the unaccustomed vomit. The man and the woman were gone but in their place was a small thing running threw the forests. It ran on four legs like a dog, like the Scourged beasts who chased it, till it vanished in a poof of smoke and ash.

From behind a tree some yards away the little Druid stood looking at the thing that had been running. It was a wild sort of human, a child who barely stood knee high to a warhorse, thin from hunger but wise in the ways of surviving in this world. He spoke not a world of any language nor wore a stitch of clothing. His long hair was unkempt and matted with tangles. This feral child was the last living thing for miles and miles around.

Kayas learned three things quickly:

The first was that the man and the woman had been wrong to go to Andorhol. Their little boy had no children to play with and now he had no parents. The little Druid new little about Ahn'qiraj but that it was a far different type of war than fighting the Scourge. Two weeks traveling across The Plauglands were testament to that. The Scourge did not jus die as the Scarab Lord had… they killed and multiplied.

The seconds is that that there was Scourge who could control beasts. This realization startled her as she saw the man crouched in the tree above the boy. His pack of hounds had driven him this way and now it was time to spring the final part of the trap. The panting boy was not aware of his impending capture by the forsaken man dressed in tattered quel'dorie hunting leathers readying a net to throw.

The last truth was how the boy came upon his name. As he struggled feebly with the net, attempting to cut it by rock and nail and tooth, as if fel-forged cable could be cut by anything, he whimpered and cried. Finally words came to him. Old words, in the kaldorie tongue, spoken in a thick accent meaning he had barely learned them before his became feral.

"Cas pin!" he cried out, snot and tears making mud out of the dirt on his face and bare chest, "Cas pin!" As he was bound hand and foot he tried wildly to fight for freedom, not wishing to share some horrid fate he was only too aware awaited child in the Plaguelands. The little Druid knew this fate, had seen it with her own eyes…

The thing that the Warlock had said, back in the house with the Priest, "IfoundhiminthePlaguelands.Hewasaferalchild." Which meant that the man in the hunting leather, who climbed trees and commanded packs of hounds and could handle a squirming child as if he had had some of his own at one point, must be…

"Sean of Darrowshire." The man said, holding out a hard bit of traveling biscuit to the boy. "They call me Serz Huzad though, on account of … well its not important. It's demonic for 'you're useless'. Maybe someday you can tell me what 'cas pin' means."

But Kayas knew that when the boy had finally been tamed and learned to speak of what happened in the Plaguelands and what became of his parents, he had nary a clue. The secrets were locked away in his mind, kept hiding from his waking continence lest he go insane with the remembering. Whoever he was going to be, whatever had brought him to the Plaguelands and to Serz Huzad, all he had left was the name he gave himself.

Caspin.