Thick, crudely forged iron wheels, massive and stamping deep wells of earth as it rocked back-and-forth, rolled over the threshold. The grass was green here, the air dry, and the flowers pink and orange and yellow. It probably smelled fresh, too; outside the wagon that is. For within, there was a solid inch of matted filth the men lay atop. Their weapons were stripped and in the other wagon, their armor they had long since peeled off and crammed into a corner of the iron-barred wooden caravan, or else taken to using as a head rest along the bumpy and nauseating path.
Josh was rubbing scabbed knuckles, still bruised and tender to the touch. He had made a sad attempt to fight. That didn’t last long. He was swiftly knocked to the ground, all the air forced out of his chest, as he gasped and wheezed. Then there was a dirt-crusted burlap cloth over his head, pressing hard against his nose, threatening to snap it to the side.
Garrett had conjured and revolved a mass of blue energy in his hands. He had held it threateningly. But the trolls moved quickly. Too quickly, one jabbed him in the kidney and he fell to his knees, while another headbutt him sharply in the brow, dazing him and making him forget momentarily that he was inhabiting the stature of an impressive mage.
The rest of the group had very little choice. Their weapons had either been dropped in defeat or else forced out of their hands. They had been bound and thrown roughly into the wagon.
Stephen’s furry companion had simply been executed, an axe driven cleanly into its spinal column. It was peculiar, he wept after it happened, mourning the loss of friendship. From a beast he had only known for a short time. Within a fantasy world.
“I’m pretty sure I heard ‘Garadar’,” whispered Raleigh. The men were not permitted to talk, and so they whispered.
“That would make this Nagrand,” whispered Alex.
They were heading south for an orcish stronghold. What would happen to the men when they reached their destination? Probably nothing good. Why had they been taken? Why not simply battled to the death? It didn’t make sense, the orcs and trolls in the game were all too eager to polish their trusty axes and spears with fresh blood. They wouldn’t plan a kidnapping.
“Snaps, do you know why we are being taken to Garadar?” asked Jason.
He had never quite gotten the concept of whispering and just then, he screeched, “nah’s, I dunno, maybe they are fixin’a cook us up into a stew-er somethin”.
The wagon stopped rolling. A brutish, brown-armored set of boots squished into the ground, having jumped off the seat at the front of the wagon. The green-skinned beast moved toward the wagon.
“Oh, motherfucker! Thanks Snaps,” spit Pat.
They knew what was going to happen, they would be punished for speaking. That big mean cocksucker would open the hatch on the top of the wagon, grab one of them randomly by the hair, and inflict pain, with a creeping grin on his face.
Jason tried to clear his mind. He readied his will with steady words beneath his breath. Though his magic was severely dampened without a staff through which to channel, he was still expected to soothe the pain, rinse the wound, and begin the healing process of the unfortunate man that was randomly selected. They had been through this process half a dozen times already; they bore many scars as tokens.
The hatch creaked open above them, putrid moist steam of the monster’s breath already filtering down into the wagon.
“I’m ready-” “I’m not ready!” two vapic, brutish voices grunted in the distance to their right. It was different voices perhaps, but they came as a set, as if identical twins were bickering.
Another savage voice sounded, this one grizzled and hulking and filled with a deep bass, “crush!” And then another similar, “no, SMASH!”
The orc hovering over their heads grunted, shouting in gibberish to his comrades and turned away, leaving the hatch swung wide open.
Clashes of steel on steel pinged and chimed feet from the wagon, as the men had a dawning realization of what was happening. Warmaul Hill, home to brutish blue-skinned ogres, was just east of them. The caravan must have come upon a trap set for travelers of the path, for the ogres were pressing in on the group of Horde.
That very moment, Josh’s body was through the hole, legs and feet pressing to free himself from his imprisonment. The rest of the group followed, as Alex stayed behind, passing plates of armor, helms, shoulderguards, and gauntlets up through the hatch where they found their rightful owner. Snaps slipped his opulent purple regalia on in one fluid motion. Stephen fastened his many buckles and satchels back to the belt now around his waist.
“We need our weapons!” shouted Jason over the fray of grunts and smashes and the clash of boulders attached to tree trunks meeting orcish plate metal.
But Pat was a step ahead. He had scaled the other wagon and was leaning over the far side, upside down, with a thin steel pick he had somehow managed to hang onto.
A massive two-headed ogre, dull blue skin and ugly brown fringe of material around its hips, lunged toward Alex, who was just then pulling his legs out from the hatch. It held an entire tree in its hands, thirty feet long. Stripped of branches and leaves, it had a nail, no, a stake driven through the swinging end, swiping dangerously close to Alex’s head. The space behind it lurched, void of air, as the brute thrust it forward. Even without his ornate staff, Snaps sprang into action, leaping in the path of the beast, with a burst of demonic-sounding shouts, Snap’s eyes glowed red and the ogre, looking down, paused, grimaced, and turned around, screeching in terror and running to put distance between him and the mad warlock.
The latch -chinked- open. Pat slithered inside the other wagon, and removed the mens’ weapons, passing them back to each hero with swiftness.
No time was wasted, the men fled at a full-sprint. Stephen had shouted something nebulous and the men banded together magically, their legs moving in pace with his, faster than they ought to, similarly to the movement of a pack of animals. Alex had shapeshifted into a tall stag and Snaps and Josh (who were the two shortest, stubbiest gnomes) leapt onto his large muscular back. Pat had removed a fistful of grey-black powder from one of the many pouches sewn into his vest and fogged the area behind them in a sweeping motion, where the cloud lingered like a Gaussian blur, masking the group from their subjugators.
---
No one could remember the name of the Alliance-held stronghold in the area. They knew it was somewhere to the south, probably just off this road, though.
The men veered west hard to put a wide gap between them and Garadar, also avoiding Halaa.
“That place is crazy in-game, I can only imagine what’s going on down there,” Raleigh had said. Josh and Alex had been all for making the trek and, as Josh had articulated, “pwning some noobs”. But they had been outvoted (and Snaps didn’t seem to have any idea what Josh had said in the first place). This world was far more treacherous than a video game landscape.
To die didn’t mean a mere thirty-second detour to run your ghost back to your body. It was an excruciating process. If you bled out, it was like the most exhausting feeling you’ve ever experienced, while helplessly tolerating the crushing pain of bone-deep incisions, carved trench-like by a rusty blade or a scorching flame. The soul would stare straight up into the sky through a foggy, empty gaze. The soul had nothing: no sense of smell or hearing, no thoughts or feelings or fears, no musings. It just stared, trapped inside an empty vessel. Then, with a well-rehearsed incantation of a kneeling comrade, and the sufferer would breath again, the pain would recede, and they would become whole. It was an ordeal to be avoided.
“Telaar!” exclaimed Garrett, “how could I be so dumb as to forget,” he finished.
“Thank you!” said Stephen, clapping his hands, as if just missing the buzzer on a gameshow. “That’s the town we’re headed for”.
And there it was. Lush green trees entwined sharply jutting hills. Streams of water flowed ever-downward, off mouths of rocks and into calm pools of crystal blue. Smooth alien-like architecture of a vibrant shade of tan dotted the landscape, blue shards of glowing stone protruding from them, imbuing the structures with fortitude. Finely oiled wooden plank bridges tied the ensemble together and the men, in wonder, passed the threshold into the manicured town.
Draenei, human, gnomish, and elven men and women populated the squat buildings. A residential quarter was off in the distance, farthest south, well protected. A few hundred homes stood modesty there. In the town center, a set of well-placed amenities garnered crowds of workers, traders, and leisurists.
The men already had a plan - three days of walking on foot will render a well-discussed strategy indeed. They needed to get to Shattrath, the capital, where investigation ought to tip them off as to how to get started on their journey home. For this, they would need to buy gryphon rides. For that: gold coin.
Snaps still was not clear on the nuances of the plan, but he agreed to help the men. He would start by surreptitiously calling down a doomguard in the town square. The mass of cracking grey stone raining from the sky would crash with brilliant green and yellow flames splashing outward, and begin running amok, triggering a diversion. This would give Pat an advantage, as he slipped into the bar, behind the counter, a emptied the clay jar most shopkeepers used as a “till”.
The rogue was in place, outside the door of the bar. He had already drifted into the shadows. The men all were loitering inconspicuously in the corner of the town center. They would move hastily toward the flightmaster and purchase the required taxi services, so as to evade suspicion.
There was a deep rumbling coming from overhead, like thunder readying to crack violently. The burst of flame, the mountain of crude stone, the splashing of earth and flame and waves of intense turbulence and thundering knocked the peasants nearest the crater backward by a foot, a few of the women falling off balance.
There were shrieks of panic, flashes of smooth brown-armored town guards rushing to the scene, and commotion erupting throughout the square. Not a moment later, Pat flashed behind the broad shoulders of Raleigh, taking up rank in the group, cooly.
“Here, it’s about twelve gold pieces, this ought to be plenty, I didn’t want to get greedy,” Pat hissed. He passed out the coin and the men shuffled toward the massive birds harnessed with fine leather leads to wooden posts sunk deep in the ground.
There was just enough creatures for them to get their own. They passed the coin clumsily to the flightmaster, there was a moment where he was untying and shuffling and seemingly passing on instructions to the graceful birds. Then, each of the six men hoisted a leg over their saddled beast, and gripped tightly.
Just as the birds began to stalk to the north, out of town, the men could hear, “it was him! Grab the warlock! This is his doing! Don’t let him escape!” A town guard had pinpointed the culprit of what was now a smoldering pile of dull grey rubble at the feet of the well orchestrated guard, many of whom were nursing singes or pulsing red burns.
As the muscular talons of the great beasts pushed hard upward, each man jerked and grinded his teeth, struggling to hang on tightly. The birds were moving upward farther, and down below, in the center of the town square, was the emblazoned purple robes of Snaps, forced roughly to the earth, the flexing knee of a town guard pressed firmly downward.
“We-” shouted Raleigh, but it was futile, he couldn’t even hear himself shout in the great gusting winds and thin streaming clouds of the voyage. His ears were six inches from his mouth and he couldn’t hear a thing he bellowed. “We have to go back!” Nothing.
Most of the men were thinking along the same lines, but there was no way to stop the massive feathered creatures, proudly flapping their muscular wings toward the tall pillars of Shattrath.
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