I love zombie stories. I make no apologies for it. This Zombie Renaissance that seems to have begun over the past few years—Zombieland, The Walking Dead, World War Z, Left 4 Dead, Dead Island—has suited me just fine, thank you. That is, first and foremost, why this story always began in the Plaguelands.
I wasn't able to play through the first Scourge Invasion, but I indulged in the second with no holds barred. I've earned my Tabard of the Argent Dawn, I'm exalted with the Argent Crusade, I rose through the ranks in the Argent Tournament, and I sifted and thrashed my way through Stratholme 218 times to get Rivendare's Deathcharger. Suffice it to say that my time in WoW has been entrenched in the undead, and so has Sythius's.
Hence, this chapter.
Watch your feet.
They came like a broken wave creeping up the shore of an abandoned beach, foaming and spreading over everything. Shuffling, bloated, blackened corpses crawling across rocks and debris. There was no male or female, no young or old. There was only death, crawling on a hundred bellies, clawing with two hundred hands.
All clamoring to chew and bite and tear the flesh off fifteen soldiers in rusting armor who carried chipped weapons that suddenly felt woefully inadequate.
"Keep yourselves, boys!" Captain Vant Lingham shouted, stepping out into the center of the camp by the cook-fire. "We've trained for this! Now comes the time to show these flea-bitten mongrels the real scourge of Lordaeron!"
The men stood strong, straightened their backs. But Olrec could read through his old friend's bravado. The man was petrified, barely holding his feet.
None of them had ever seen such a huge gathering of the things before. Olrec could count at least thirty just from a cursory glance, and Light only knew how many more would come behind those. They were coming in from every direction, all moaning and slavering and staring; those who had eyes were blind, and most only had a swampy, flickering light of unholy fire smoldering in their sockets. But they were all watching. They were all wanting.
They were all hungry.
"Heaven be damned, where's the fucking elf?" Lingham screeched. Then, as if realizing he may as well be asking where the Stormwind army was, he shook his head and shouted: "What are we, children? Bring the fight to the beasts! Move!"
And he charged.
Moved by their leader's courage, the men followed his lead, and metal met with flesh and black bone. What followed was a scene Olrec Stoutfeather had seen too many times before. For each creature that went down, another seemed to rise up in its place.
"The head!" the shaman shouted as he joined the fray. "Aim fer the head!"
Big Olrec's hammers were little more than slabs of metal on thick handles, without the ornamentation expected of his race. As one arced down and crushed one of the demons flat, causing the skull to implode and a fountain of blackening blood to spray up into the air, he whirled and sent another flying with its twin.
They weren't pretty, but the Plaguelands had no use for pretty.
One was on its feet, clambering toward him on limbs that looked too spindly to hold up a bundle of feathers. Olrec reeled back and sent both weapons crunching into either side of its neck. The thing's head soared.
Up came Lingham with his sweeping axe, lopping off limbs and heads in equal frequency. Human and dwarf become a single entity, a swirling vortex of crushing, slashing, smashing oblivion. They had one of the smallest companies in the entire region, but now—perhaps for the first time—the rest of the men understood why.
More simply weren't needed.
They dared think they might just live, after all. But even as the death toll rose—fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four—more kept coming.
More, and more, and more.
A snarling mouth. Crash! A searching claw. Crunch!
Swords and arrows and bolts and axes, limbs and ribs and heads, moans and shouts and screams, thrown into the air like unholy confetti. Lingham's camp became like every other field of war there had ever been, and ever would be.
Pure, unadulterated chaos.
One popped up across one of its fallen fellows and sent itself like a flesh-and-teeth bullet straight for the dwarf, when huge, snaking vines sprang from the earth and wrapped themselves around its middle. A dry-paper crackle-and-snap resounded through the air as the thing was torn in half.
Olrec crushed its head beneath one boot.
"Much obliged, m'lady!" he cried without looking back.
"Tor ilisar'thera'nal!" Rayne cried in return.
"What did she say?" Lingham demanded.
"She said shut yer trap 'n kill 'em faster, ye festering moron!"
Someone screamed.
It was like the eye of a great storm. Time itself seemed to slow down to watch. They all knew that voice. They all fantasized about silencing that voice forever. But Vant Lingham whirled, his face suddenly slack with horror.
"JONAS!" he shrieked.
Jonas Holfield, the good captain's squire, youngest of the company at only seventeen summers, was flat on his back with one ankle twisted at an unnatural angle. One of the creatures was crawling over to him, ignoring the frantic swipes of the boy's short-sword. Another was hovering over him, streams of rancid saliva flowing like strings onto his chest. A third was inching forward. A fourth had caught the scent.
He was surrounded, and he was doomed.
"Run, you idiot!" Lingham commanded.
He couldn't.
Olrec charged. He didn't care for the boy, thought he was too stupid and arrogant for the assignment he'd been given. He sometimes outright hated the son of a bitch. But Jonas Holfield was the captain's squire, and that made him a brother.
Olrec Stoutfeather had sworn too long ago to never watch another brother die.
He was too far. He wasn't going to make it in time. There was too much distance between them, and too many of the damned things. The boy was done. Olrec's vow was going to be broken.
After sixty-seven years of war…his oath was going to break.
No. No!
The old dwarf found speed he didn't know he had. He sped forward like a cannonball, hammers flying like hunks of shrapnel, bellowing at the top of his lungs.
One of them seemed to look straight at Big Olrec Stoutfeather before dipping in for the kill. More and more kept coming. As he looked around, he saw them. Scores of them, struggling to find a way at them. So many.
Too many.
And then…the roar.
The roar.
A huge, hulking white beast came barreling through the ranks of the plagued, a creature unlike anything Olrec had ever seen. It was like a fur-covered boulder with claws the size of a man's head and teeth like curved knives. It thrashed and tore, crushed and splintered, all while letting out that ear-splitting, earth-shaking roar.
It was a bear.
"They're rearing animals!" one man wailed.
"What fresh hell is this?" Lingham groaned.
It was twice as big as any bear Olrec had ever seen, with prominent, pointed ears. Its fur seemed to glow as the beast rent its way through the undead, stark and untainted by blood at any point but its ripping, tearing claws. The bear's strikes were too final for that.
One gargantuan paw crushed a bent skull into dust and gore; a sweeping slash from the other tore another in twain. The bear lowered one huge shoulder and threw itself forward, sending a third flying.
The men were screaming and wailing in abject terror now. They'd expected the undead. They'd anticipated the undead. But this had them reeling.
Olrec turned a panicked glance to Rayne, still standing near the boy. She was still sending her vines out and catching the meager few as yet untouched by the great bear's onslaught, crushing and strangling.
But her attention was riveted on the bear, and she looked radiant.
Her lips moved through her smile, and even though Olrec couldn't hear her, he could read the word she whispered, and his heart soared. He whirled back to face Lingham, grinning fit to burst. He grabbed his commander's arm and shook it. "The elf!" he cried.
Lingham seemed not to hear.
"The elf, man! It's the elf!"
Sythius Sil'nathin, exiled druid from Winterspring, was back with his company. And his thundering voice rose to shake the heavens.
"Tor ilisar'thera'nal!" - "Let our enemies beware!" (a Darnassian warcry)
