House Kyvare and House Ildanan of Quel'Thalas

The healer with a limp cuts potatoes at a counter, humming a quiet hymn learned in Lordaeron long ago beneath his breath as he works. The sound of children’s laughter echoes from somewhere else in the big manor by the sea, the home that both is and is not where he’s settled.

Home is wherever his family is, and while some is here, more is elsewhere.

Tyrvarden Grimstryke is an only child, but his found family is vast and his cousin Kalsyn, Lady Ildanan, is as near as any sister. Long rumored to be a pacifist whose dedication to helping others led him to open free clinics in the capital and—before its fall—in Dalaran, and his service to the Argent Dawn and later the Argent Crusade is well-known.

Rumor has it that he ran afoul of Garrosh Hellscream some years ago and that may have played a role in the death of his then-fiancée. These days, he’s said to be running a hospital somewhere in the southeast of the Kingdom, attached to some unit or another, whose activities have been classified at the highest levels.

Married, now, to a former Scryer with three children, and seemingly well-settled.

So why is it that he’s so often rumored to have been seen consorting with mostly Alliance-based elements of the Argent Crusade and writing and sending cryptic warnings? Why has he been seen remarkably often on and around Murder Row?

The first most of us encountered it—the first most of us could trace a first encounter—came that night at Vol’jin Point.  The SOS came unexpectedly, so quiet at first that if I hadn’t been in the infirmary at our old post in Val’sharah, working on Zelrus Lightbinder’s hand, I might not have heard anything at all.  The transmission was buried beneath static at first, only became more recognizable upon repeat.  Even then, at the time we had a ranger in our number—Halaris Redspear—that usually used code on the comms, owing to an old injury, so more than a few wondered if it was him.

It wasn’t, of course—he was in the barracks at the time—but we didn’t know who it could be calling for help.

Looking back now, I know it was a trap laid carefully for us.  It was a bid to end the threat we represented before we had any idea what it was we faced.

Before any of us who were there at the end realized what we were meant to do.

Up until then, up until that transmission, it had just been another normal day at Dawn’s Reach.

It’s always been Dawn’s Reach, too, no matter where we landed.  I suppose I never thought about that piece before setting down to write this in fits and starts.  Even today, I sit at a desk at Dawn’s Reach—this one, likely the last, in the Everlight, south of Dawnglory Manor and the township, west of the shore, east of the Reprieve with its chapel, settled deep in her forests.  We’ve already rebuilt twice here.  I hope we never have to again.

Of course, we did the same in Val’sharah, before we moved on.

But I digress.

The sun was already down by the time the initial call came, making that mayday even more unusual.  Still, the static, the strangeness of it—that should likely have been our first clue.  I’ve listened to the playback half a dozen times while readying myself to write this and I don’t know how we didn’t realize it then.

But I do know.  We weren’t yet who would we would become in the months and years that followed.  We didn’t know—couldn’t.

“Lieutenant General Grom'thar reporting... mayday, mayday... blue aggression from... not... w... it... repeat, all-out assault from the north...”

Blue aggression.  In those days, it meant the Alliance.  I remember my stomach twisting, bile rising in my throat.  At heart, I was still a pacifist, still against the war, despite my position with the 194th.  I think Dra’zar knew but as long as I followed orders, did my job, it didn’t matter.  As long as I could put that on the shelf when he needed me to, then it was fine.  Feelings be damned.

Sometimes, I wonder if he appreciated my insight all the more because of it rather than in spite of it.

“Overrun... mayday, mayday... requesting re... no hope... falling all around...”

Grom’thar had a thick accent—if he wasn’t Mag’thar, then he’d spent years in Outland, among the orcs there.

It felt wrong, but I started checking the gear, the kits.  Grom’thar’s transmissions were fading in and out even as Zanrethan Sunforge reached out to Orgrimmar on Dra’zar’s orders, trying to get more details on Grom’thar and his posting, the forces under his command.  That’s where El found me.  The look on his face is one I still sometimes see in nightmares—eyes wide, gaze somehow knowing above and beyond anything we were hearing on the comms.  It was the same knowing that knotted my guts and made my heart heavy in my chest.

“We’re going to need you tonight,” he said to me.  He was already half-kitted, bow at hand, dagger in the other.  That knowing in his eyes aged him a century and more.  All I could do was nod.

“I have my oaths as a healer to uphold.  Need to check the gear.”

And then, just like that, the knowing was gone from his face.  His fingers and hands twitched, as if nerves had suddenly flooded back into where that awareness had been.  “Do you, uh...do you need any help?”

I’d turned back to him, then, reached out and grasped his shoulder.  Held a moment.

Maybe the next words had been a mistake.

“You’ve got your own gear to set, don’t you?”

He’d started to say something in response, then looked toward the windows.  I saw the shadow come across his face and he seemed to change his mind about how he was going to respond.  “Yeah.  Call me if you need me, Tyr.”

I squeezed his shoulder again and started to turn before we started to hear the screams.

It was like every communicator at Vol’jin Point had suddenly tripped.  All we could hear on the lines were screams and breaking glass, the sharp report of gunfire and shrill shriek like the ringing of ears after a shot passes too close.  Death-howls and the screams of the dying, slowly fading under the roar of wind.

And then, one last transmission, clear as the peel of cathedral bells: "Ancestors help us all."

Grom’thal.

Then there was nothing—silence.  Not a breath.  Not a scream.

Nothing.

Dra’zar gave the order a few moments later.

“194th, we depart in one hour, given that we hear back from command regarding Grom'thar and his regiment. Prepare adequately.”

We never stood a chance.

Sometimes, I still wonder if it was meant to be our garrison, not Vol’jin Point, that was hit that day.  Most of the time, though, I’m more confident that it was all a trap laid for us by the enemy we would spend the balance of the following years fighting.  Vol’jin Point was north and east of our position, close to the border with Highmountain, while our position was more central, deep within the primordial woodlands of Val’sharah.  Close enough that we were the most likely to respond to any mayday—if the transmission itself was real.

On that count, I’m still not confident at all.

The people, though—those were real.  They were real.

We would realize the horrors they went through later.

When we portaled in, no one had any reason to suspect that it was anything other than an Alliance attack—anyone other than me, anyway, and perhaps Arius.  If Dra’zar suspected any different, he gave no sign, though something tells me that when we got word that there was no response from any settlements or camps in the vicinity of Vol’jin Point, either, that something was even more deeply amiss than it seemed on the surface.

The forest around us was dense and dead silent outside of Vol’jin Point—our portal dropped us short of the fort itself, just in case.  Even at a distance, we could smell the smoke, see pillars of it rising above the trees.  There was a crackle to the air, eerie, like the whispers of power before a terrible storm, the kind that set your hair on end.

There was enough smoke to blot out the moon and stars.  Morbid as it is, the glow of the fires inside of the shattered post lit our path right to it through those primordial trees.

It smelled like a charnel house, like the pyres that burned in Northrend day and night during the height of the war there, when I was with the Argent Crusade.  I remember thinking it and feeling a chill creep down my spine.

Dra’zar sent three of ours—Alodrane Falconwalk, Syche Darkarrow-Sunforge, and Corey Dawnchild—north to flank the rest of us as we headed for the remnant post from the west.

They reported devastation.

They were the first to see the bodies as they drifted down the river that flanked the post to the north, the water running thick with debris and the dead, laden with ash and hissing with embers blown by the wind.  Beyond the river were shattered ramparts and scattered spent artillery mingled with blood and the bodies of the dead.  The watchtowers stood shattered, silent and dark against a smoke-stained sky.  And as if a mocking sentinel set over the dead, an orc’s head stood speared on a pike, sightless eyes staring off toward the road that we would approach from hours after his death.

Dora was the one who told us about the head.  Syche was the one to report no movement, no sign of life—just the dead.

Just the fires still burning in a shattered fort miles from where our own post stood.  A shattered fort that stood between a river to the north, mountains to the east—and us approaching from the west.

Dra’zar cursed and turned to Zanrethan Sunforge, who was his second in those days.  “A river to the north and mountains to the east. No foreseeable way we're walking into an ambush, aye?”

I remember Zan taking stock of the situation and shaking his head.  “Not that I can see, sir.”

I think perhaps in that moment most if not all of us knew that the situation was much more complicated and dangerous than we’d believed when we’d portaled in less than fifteen minutes earlier.  I know I did.

It was that sinking of the stomach, the souring of the throat that I felt, neither of which had anything to do with the smell of death and burning.  I knew something was wrong—I just didn’t know what.

Not yet.

Dra’zar ordered the three to rejoin us, asked Senithvia—she was one of his captains, too, in those days, leading the 194th’s spell-flingers—to give us as much invisibility as she and hers could muster.  When the others rejoined us, they were in agreement—it was all staged for the benefit of whoever found the place.  Corey was the one to identify it as too still, too quiet for a recent attack—especially with the fires still burning.

Something was amiss.

I suppose that’s why Dra’zar told Vigilynce Baldesion, Melania Dawnweaver, and I to weave and hold an aegis between us and Vol’jin Point for our advance on what was left of the place, then set the heavies between us and the aegis.  He must have at least suspected what my gut was already screaming.

If this wasn’t a trap, it was something worse.

“One hour,” Dra’zar murmured as we’d started our advance—he was talking to Corey, though I was certainly near enough to overhear.  “Surely they’d have pillaged the place.”

“Unless loot wasn’t their aim,” I said in response.  Maybe I shouldn’t have, but the words came anyway.

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.  “This is a declaration of war, Grimstryke.  Any army, no matter how disciplined, will have its spoils.”

I didn’t say anything more, and his attention shifted as the others got into position.  He turned to one of youngest among us, Parr Va’loren, a young sin’dorei piecing together druid training in fits and starts.  Parr was trying to read the trees, to sense what he might be able to from the environs of the forest, and Dra’zar knew the look of it.

“Va’loren, what do you feel about us? Anything out of the ordinary, aside from the fire?”

Parr frowned.  “It hurts,” he said.  “But it’s hollow, too.”

It was not the first time nor the last time I saw that exact frown on Dra’zar’s face, but that moment caught and held in my memory.  It was only for a moment before it shifted from it and into the usual grim countenance.  “We move onward.”

And so we did.

On, toward the smell of burning bodies, toward the source of the acrid smoke that blotted out the stars and set eyes watering.  We made the gates only to be greeted b a pile of bodies set alight with violet flames—huge, seeming more than what should have been there.  All seemed to be soldiers—orcs and trolls, sin’dorei and shal’dorei, Forsaken and tauren and even goblins.  At the fore was tauren’s head speared through with an Alliance standard that fluttered on the wind, its edges only now beginning to catch from the violet flames.

It all felt so wrong.

The ground was soaked in blood, the grass matted, flattened by boot and hoof, scattered with artillery shells that we had to tread carefully to avoid.  Tension rose with each step, trepidation grew.  All of us were alert, waiting for the ambush, for the other shoe to drop.  Syche scanned the walls with arrow notched, Zan and Corey stood as living shields between those of us holding the aegis and anything ahead.

Most of the bodies weren’t whole—they were pieces held together by sinew and tattered clothing, parts piled together in some terrible pyre.  My gaze went to that pyre even as Vigilynce’s snapped to the standard.  Beyond the macabre stack, tents—densely packed, some still standing and seeming untouched while others lay collapsed or burning.

For a few seconds, there was only silence except for our breathing—Parr gagging as he pulled his collar up against the smell—and the sound of the wind and the flames.  And then, Dora: “We can’t stay here.”

But we would.  Dra’zar’s order brooked no argument, though the words were stiff—not as if he was shocked, but something else, something I knew I couldn’t name at the time but marked just the same.

“We search for survivors.”

Dora and Vigilynce both pointed out there probably weren’t any even as others moved to obey. Duty, Dra’zar said, bound us to at least making sure.  Corey pointed out that perhaps there were some that weren’t too far gone to revive.

Somehow.

Dra’zar set Vigilynce and Lindrayëda Tal’enor to watch our backs while the rest of us were to set to the task of the search.  I was about to begin myself when Parr’s voice stopped me.

“There’s nothing living here.”

I paused, turning to look back at him.  All I could see of him were whitened knuckles where he held his cloak over his mouth and nose, wide eyes, and pale face from the cheekbones up.  “Are you certain?”

There was only bleakness in his eyes—bleakness that even swallowed the fear.  I squeezed his shoulder.

Before I could move away, Dra’zar asked me to hold the shield, so I stayed where I stood as the others began to search for any sign that we were not the only things still breathing within those shattered walls.

As the silence deepened around us, slowly we heard it.

Sobbing.

It came from what must have once been the command center for Vol’jin Point, which was half reduced to rubble, the roof sundered and collapsing, supported by a single still-standing support.  Dra’zar called Zan and Corey to him, had Dora and Syche cover his back.  It was only later that I heard about the sight within, the source of the sound—Zan told me, voice breaking, eyes bleak, later, after it ended.

A hooded figure, he told me hours later, his voice choked with horror and fingers clutching at the mug of something steaming as we sat later in a shadowed kitchen, long after most of our brethren had retired to fitful dreams or drunken stupor.  There were corpses all around in a ring—human—and that figure was kneeling in the center.  Whoever it was—whoever they’d been—their shoulders were shaking, writhing.  When the general pulled back to strike, that—thing looked up. No ears, just holes.  Tendrils like spilled ink across its scalp, weeping black blood into a toothless maw.  Not a person anymore.  Something else—something other.

It would not be the last time he, or Dra’zar, or any of us would witness such a horror.

While they found that monster within the shattered command center, Vigilynce saw the trees to the south bend.

Then she saw the eyes glowing a strange and sickly gold from the trees.

Dora’s curse mingled with a gunshot.

Then the dire wolf that wasn’t emerged from the trees.  Shadows bled around it, black ichor dripped from its maw as it stalked from the south toward the gate.

Toward Vol’jin Point.

Toward us—those of us who hadn’t gone into the shattered command center with the general, those of us who weren’t yet facing the monster and its dead puppets they were met with inside.

As bedlam erupted, all I could do at first was weave that shield tighter and hold it—and pray.  Pray that this wasn’t a mistake.  Pray that we’d make it out of this alive and relatively intact.

Void bled from the command center, mingled with Light, and the sound of shouts and steel splitting bone echoed from that direction.  Outside, where I still stood, Vigilynce charged the wolf before it could get too close.

Except it was already too close.

The rangers tumbled free of the command center first, firing back the way they’d come, scrambling, cursing. Lin threw herself at the wolf, too, she and Vigilynce the only things standing between it and where Senithvia and I stood—me with the shield, Seni with the invisibility spell.

Lightning cracked across the sky, thunder booming loud enough to momentarily deafen, to shake the very ground, and a moment later, the heavens opened with a deluge of ice-cold rain.

The wolf didn’t bleed—I watched as Lin’s twin blades cut deep into is flank and only saw black, ichorous smoke billow from the wounds she’d carved into its flesh, something that clung to those blades and hissed against them as she stepped back, reset.

The others boiled free of the command center, pursued by the corpses of those humans that Zan would later describe to me.  Seni launched an attack of her own on them as soon as they came within sight, but all that did was draw their attention.

To us—to she and I and Parr, who stood suddenly all but defenseless but for the shield I still held.  Lin and Vigilynce were still engaged with the shadow-wolf, very much occupied and utterly unaware of the sudden additional danger.

Then, suddenly one of those corpses was on top of Parr, void spiking from its hands even as it tried to sink its teeth into his neck.  He tumbled back, shrieking, just beyond my reach.

There was no time.

The words that came from the corpses next came as many voices merged into one, in a tongue I didn’t know then but recognize now as Shath’yar.  The spell they wove was one of malevolent shadow, designed to spear and bind, inky, twining tendrils snaking through the ground like vines to impale us.

It was neither an act of desperation nor anything less than a delaying tactic.

I was still taking stock of who was hit when the corpse that had been attacking Parr instead threw itself at me.  For a heart-stopping moment, I thought it’d killed the boy, but even as void speared into my shoulder I realized he was still breathing, wide-eyed and bloodied, but very much alive.

The rain only grew worse.  The wind whipped around us, swirling, as if trying to gather us together—to gather us in.

Light seared through the corpse and I fell back a step, heart hammering fast, too fast.

The spot where Vigilynce and Lin had ended the wolf was empty but for a bubbling puddle of void-laden smoke.  The other corpses were falling dispatched by the skilled blades and fire of Blood Knights and the shots of rangers.

The places where those corpses fell held similar puddles of void—puddles of void that seemed to coalesce and solidify.

Dra’zar’s voice cracked across the space between all of us before I could fixate on what I was seeing—and what I was starting to see.  “Back to the entrance—let's rendezvous with Lin and Baldesion before we're caught completely unawares. Whoever that hooded man was...”

Somehow, my voice didn’t shake.  “What was that?”

As if in answer, a war horn sounded to the northwest.  Bile curdled in the back of my throat and my stomach shrunk into a tight knot.

Dra’zar cursed as I did.

“Nevermind.  It was a bloody distraction.”

Distracting us from what, I didn’t know.  Wasn’t sure I wanted to.

We regrouped quickly and just as he started to order Senithvia to get us the hell out of there, an arrow shot right past Dra’zar’s ear and embedded itself, quivering, in a pile of corpses a dozen yards behind him.  Even as Seni was opening that portal, a force broke through the trees, clad in Alliance colors, armed with spears and lances.

“Change of plans!” Dra’zar shouted.  “Arm yourselves, form up!”

I was wrong about the distraction.

This was the distraction.

It was very nearly a rout—we were terribly outnumbered, but our enemy was not nearly so skilled as one might have expected, even in the driving rain and crackling storm.

Above us, all but unnoticed, the shadowy smoke that had drifted away from the corpses and the wolf swirled together.

The smell of gunpowder and burning flesh began to drown out anything else—the rain, the scent of magic, blood, horse, fear—all of it.

Something was very wrong.

A flash of lightning told the tale.

These forces were too clean.

Too fresh.

They hadn’t been behind Vol’jin point.

They were the distraction.

The whole thing was a trap.

A trap for us, though it would take time to understand why.

A crack of thunder, louder than the rest, shook the whole damn world around us, set horses rearing, their eyes rolling back in terror.  It took what must have seemed an eternity for their riders to pull them back under control, to form up, all of them somehow ignoring the rising electricity in the air as they did, arraying themselves opposed to where we stood.

I was already weaving a shell around us all thanks to the crackling energy I could feel in every healed break of bone in my body when Dra’zar bellowed, “Shield us!”

The others—Zan and Vigilynce and Parr—joined me in my effort.  The shield held—barely—as bolts rained around us.  The forces in front of us were not so lucky.

I still remember the screams in my nightmares.

Because my nightmares sometimes take the shape of what came next.

As the brightness and afterimages of the lightning began to fade, we started to see the bodies—contorted in agony, blackened, expressions locked in final, shocked pain and fear.

Dead center among them stood a hunchbacked, hooded old man with a cane, utterly untouched by the hell that had just erupted all around us.  Palsied hands folded over the head of the cane as he regarded us across the gap.

The words that came next were in perfect Thalassian, no hint of accent, clear as the stars on a moonless night but trembling like a leaf on the wind.  “This is certainly an inconvenience, is it not?”

He raised one of his hands, a gnarled finger pointing upward toward the clouds.  They had coalesced above us into a perfectly rendered eye: lidless, its iris detailed, absolute.

Something within me curled back in on itself as I stared up at it for a few seconds, then tore my gaze away to regard the old man again.

He was smiling, coughing with laughter, and hissed the words: “The Eye sees all, young Children of Blood…the Wolf and Shepherd stand trial. Tonight's tribulation is only the first of many.”

It was not the first time we had heard those terms—the Wolf and Shepherd.  But this felt different somehow.

I had not been there when Antorus of Riverstead came to us in Val’sharah.  It was another thing I learned of in whispers later.  But that had been the first.

Would that we had known then all we came to know later.

Dra’zar answered.  “Stand down, creature. The sands have all fallen.”

The stranger’s next words came sharp, honed like a blade made of bone, “Death awaits you, all of you. The sea grows restless, children, and high tide draws near. His laughter echoes from seven maws, his damnations spill from seven tongues.”

The defiance in Dra’zar’s voice must have either been expected or galling.  “We have felled worse than the likes of you. Stand down.”

And yet, somehow, the stranger simply seemed amused, though his laughter was the sort to set the teeth on edge, to set toes curling and children shrinking back into the safety of an adult at their backs.  “Even your nightmares fear me, Wolf. The Eye beholds all paths, and they all end at your death. Take heed, children, that your transgressions do not end you: prove yourselves worthy tonight.”

His lips curled in a cruel smile.  “N’raqi.”

For the space of one heartbeat, then another, we couldn’t see anything.  As our visions faded back in, he was gone, but something terrible stood in his place: a Faceless One.  It was clad in armor made of ivory sheets, a mask painted crimson settled over where a face should have been.  A pair of battleaxes of some kind of black alloy were its weapons, its tentacles tasting the air as it oriented toward us with nothing short of terrible malice.

“Fuck,” I breathed, even as Dora loosed an arrow.

It skittered off the Faceless One’s mask and off to the side, lost among the twisted ruins that were once human that sprawled around it.

I still do not know how we managed to fell the thing that night.  We were not what we would become and we were already battered, depleted.

But we did.  We lived to tell the tale.

That night, anyway.

That was the night that Dra’zar named me a captain.  I would remain such until the 194th dissolved.

I have never stopped granting him my counsel.

As I tended to the wounded, hours before I would find out what they found in the command center, Dra’zar radioed Orgrimmar to deliver the news.

From the day and the hour it began, it would be a long road, though none of us at the time knew how long it had been nor how long it would last, not even the one who drew us together in the first place.  Even I do not know the whole of the story of the beginnings, though I suppose in my attempt to chronicle the tale I will come across that information somehow, if it truly exists.  My uncle has written what he knew based on the stories of his youth and the experiences beyond it, every scrap that he could find created the Compendium—a volume that I know I’ve been through a dozen times and still find something I’ve missed each time.  Perhaps, if I ever dare to bind this all together, it shall be so as well.  More than likely, these scattered pages—for I do sense that is their fate—will simply be collected together and tucked away in an archive somewhere, a lost history of when Azeroth was nearly lost and only the barest handful of us knew.  For certain, there were more than a few other conflicts ongoing through all of this, and Light knows that those seemed far more pressing—and in many ways, they were.

Still, this world seems one rife for world-shattering, world-ending conflicts from its very foundations.  That, too, is the way of our world.  This one just happened to be a secret one that raged for more than ten thousand years.

And if not for accidents and happenstance, for choices made, it would have remained secret until it was too late.

For now, it seems we have reached a balance, an ending.  I imagine there is much we have yet to unravel, and I will pepper these pages with all that we learn later as well as what we knew then, what I and my brethren can recall—those of us who have survived and what I can glean from the writings and impressions of those we have lost.

Many of them I was honored to call my friends.

Thus begins my chronicle, my memoir, my war journal—my tale of the Wanderers and their war.

=========

Knowing as I know now, I must look at the Compendium as a document that would stand as a contingency plan, a ‘just in case’ document that would provide us with information and perhaps insights in the event that the general fell before the war reached its conclusion—and in case the Wanderers were all but destroyed, leaving our war to the next generation or beyond.  As near as I can tell, the order was down to the barest handful—perhaps only two or three, though seemingly more, just far-scattered and sorely divided—before all of us came.

I speculate regarding Dessera Ilthyrii and her connection to it all, though I’ve never asked the question.  Like as not, it’s not my place.  Perhaps Akaelus Demor’s affection for her was genuine and was not a different flavor of threat, though I doubt it is so.  All that I have ever learned of the Eye is that they played the long game.

Even though the board has changed, I imagine that there are still pieces along the edges that we have not yet faced—and will soon enough.  I can almost feel it in my bones.  There is something more that remains beyond the war’s end—beyond the Neverdark War’s end.

But I digress.

I imagine that I will, if this even happens to see the light of day rather than moldering in family archives until the day the world ends, append a copy of General Dra’zar’s Compendium to this chronicle, as it was a guiding map for us in at least some ways.  Of course, there were other things, things that never made it into the actual document, things that only made it into reports and even then only as oblique references.  Other fragments lived and died on scattered scraps of paper, penned in the margins of books and letters and journals in the possession of those who lived and died as part of the fight.

Should someone someday have to fight them again—may the powers that were, are, and shall be forbid such a thing—I imagine that the heroes who face them will have an even harder time than we did of gathering the necessary information for that war, given the scattered and obscured nature of sources.  After all, while there were elements of the Kingdom that were, of course, aware of what we were doing—even elements of Alliance intelligence in the form of a particular bloodline and a particular ancient priestess—much of what we did do was hidden out of necessity.

It was a shadow war, one that had raged for ten thousand years, but a threat no less potent than any that we have faced here—simply one far more insidious.

========

I came to it by accidental design.

The Resolute Blades were the first quiet incarnation of what could come, and I use the term ‘quiet’ with a touch of humor and facetiousness.  The Blades were a handful, something I learned early on in my association with them—a fractious mix of nobles and salt of the earth, of soldiers and ruffians, mages and rangers, of veterans and raw talent.  In those days, we had more than a dozen of the Order’s rising stars among us.  Things would change, as life inevitably interferes, and many of our number would fall along the way or end up reassigned as more threats to the Kingdom—and Azeroth—arose.

Of course, it’s my professional opinion that at least some of them went batshit crazy in facing what we faced.  It’s understandable, all things considered.  Only a few of us from those early days made it to the end.  I, just barely by virtue of when I joined them, was one.

The unit was stationed in Val’sharah at the time, and my recruitment was ultimately recommended by Gloriana Trawyn Ilthyrii, who at the time was growing increasingly close to General Dra’zar—the story of that is one I will perhaps detail later or ask her to for the purposes of this chronicle—as at the time he was seeking competent medics to join his Blades and I was her first thought.  I can dimly recall some uncertainty on my part—anyone who knows me well knows that I am no soldier, not in the truest sense, and in some ways I still cling to the pacifism that was perhaps ultimately responsible for the loss of someone quite dear to me.

And yet, I agreed.

Sometimes, I still can’t believe it myself.

Of course, within perhaps a month or two, I’d been asked to be his chief medic and the rest, I suppose, is simply history.  For most of my tenure with the Blades, I served as one of his captains, though I imagine I was the least conventional of any of them—which says a great deal, as I served alongside Mourne Sunblaze.

It was at the very beginning of all of the troubles that I came to them, came based on a summons from surrogate sister, having heard hints of what was afoot for the regiment from both her lips and those of Senithvia Dra’zar—the general’s niece and, though I did not know it then, my future wife.  There had been a battle and though I don’t fully recall the particulars (though at some later date I will be consulting the archives with regard to it), the volume of wounded from that encounter were considerable.  I arrived with little fanfare to the regiment’s home in Val’sharah, not far from another Horde post that would, in time, be far more important to our war than we could have ever imagined then.  We had not yet fully stumbled into our war with the Eye, not so far as I could tell, nor would any of the consequences of what we faced become clear for some time.

The morning after my formal recruitment was the first time I met Arius Dawnglory—though he went by Elendil in those days.  He was a smartass, brash young ranger, trained by his uncle—though I’ve never asked him if it was Lord Hawksong or one of his Dawnglory uncles—to the bow.  He’d long since thrown in his lot with the company.  Looking back on it now, I have to smile.  Such small beginnings can lead to so much more, can reshape lives.  To this day, he remains the brother I needed then and, I imagine, always will.  That bond, perhaps beyond any other, has reshaped the course of my life for whatever it is and has been worth.

The former Ebon he’d met on the trail still hadn’t given him her name, but she’d told him enough to win enough wary trust for him to return to the outpost with her.  The enterprise had been aided by a sudden ache that began somewhere deep inside his knee and a shift in the wind.  He’d lived in Northrend long enough to know what those two things together heralded.

Stormclouds swept down onto K3 as they reached the inn, led by biting wind that stung his face and made his eyes water.  The inn at K3 was decidedly worn, weather-beaten, but in good repair.  The windows looked like they’d been replaced recently and the floors and tables in the common room were decidedly clean, though they still carried a timeworn, hard-used charm, battered and scuffed as they were. Its warmth and shelter—and the smell of venison stew and cider—were a welcome comfort after so narrowly dodging the storm.

The table his newfound companion led him toward was tucked into a shadowed corner and was already occupied by a figure tall enough that he guessed it must be another Kaldorei.  The figure had both hands wrapped around a mug of something steaming, beringed—and there was something else, something he didn’t quite see until the figure lifted the mug to drink, a glint of silver.

His heart slammed into his throat and he stopped in his tracks.  His companion put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently.

“She won’t harm you,” she said softly.  “You have nothing to fear from her.”

“There are—”

“Yes,” she said.  “But something tells me your face will strike her familiar.”

“I’m not—”

“It has nothing to do with your resemblance to Ildanan Sunstar.”

He swallowed bile, but started walking again.  The figure—a woman, and unless he missed his guess, the woman called the Mistwraith—was looking at them now, argent eyes gleaming in the shadows of a drawn hood. He swallowed again as he carefully drew one of the chairs out from the table and sank into it, glancing back over his shoulder to see where his companion was going to sit—and found her gone.

“She’ll be getting you something bracing,” the hooded woman said.  There was a faint rasp to her voice but the familiarity was unmistakable. He nearly swallowed his tongue.

“I—”

“You’ll be needing it, Lord Kyvare.”

He rocked back, eyes widening.  In the shadows of her hood, there was a flash of a smile, almost but not quite feral.

“Yes.  I’m aware of who you are.  I’m also aware of what you were taught.”

“How—”

“I’m not certain the answer to your question matters overmuch, but if you really want an answer, I’ll give you one in exchange for an answer to a question of my own, first.” She leaned back and he could feel the weight of her gaze hanging heavy upon him.  “Why are you, of all people, seeking them when you have a family and responsibilities that should preclude a mission like this—one, I might add, that has been forbidden by the organization that saw you bound to them? Of all the sorts seeking those lost, you were among the last I would have imagined to see here.”

“What of you?” he blurted. “Why are you two looking for them?”

“Because she is my mother,” she said.  “And they are her family and I should think, with all that’s happened, I should owe her that much.  And you?”

“Because I didn’t think anyone else was and I wasn’t about to ask my family to come unless—unless I knew.”

“Whatever goes into that gully doesn’t come out,” she said.  “But they’re not dead.”

“No,” he confirmed.  “No, they’re not.”

“You’re certain?”

“Your cousin is.”

She fell silent.  The former Ebon returned to the table, setting a mug slowly down in front of him as she looked between him and the hooded woman.

“Well,” she said dryly. “I see you’ve gotten started without me. I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t do that anymore.”

The hooded woman reached up to push back her hood, smiling up at the Ebon.  “One time.”

“Near unmitigated disaster one time,” the Ebon said, seating herself.  “And a lesson learned.  What have you told him?”

“Likely no more than whatever you did to get him to come back with you.”

He coughed politely and wrapped his hands around the mug, letting the warmth bleed into his fingers. “My apologies, ladies, but I think we’ve missed a few things.”

“You already know who I am, Lord Kyvare, and I know who you are,” Mistwraith said, studying him.  “Unless it’s not pleasantries you’re getting at.”

“I—well, it was, yes, but also no.  How—how long have you been looking?”

“Long enough to know there are two sites of interest,” the Ebon said.  “You stumbled across one.  The other is a frozen waterfall and a river that don’t seem quite right.”

The trees thickened as he followed the game trail up into the foothills, a trail that doubled back on itself twice to take a more easy grade.  That was enough to make him begin to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t a game trail at all but an old patrol route or a hunting trail.  The ground was hard, though there was little snow on the path as the trees grew thicker, blotting out the light as much as the weather as he climbed higher into the foothills.

His leg ached, though ignoring it was easier than usual.  Perhaps it was his level of focus, or knowing that perhaps he was on the right path.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that no one back home knew he’d come here, that the Crusade didn’t know he was here, that if something were to happen to him, it could be days or longer before someone managed to sort it out if Arius didn’t find the note amongst the bottles on his workbench.

But he trusted that Arius would find it soon enough if it came to that.

Wind worried the treetops above him, setting needles and branches rustling.  He exhaled slowly, squinting upward for a moment, then into the gloom of the path that continued onward, upward, for at least a hundred yards before it curved again.  Somehow, the mile described by the trapper seemed longer than any mile he’d walked before.

But they, too, would have come on foot.  The trees were too thick and they would not have risked missing anything by attempting to teleport or fly.  Perhaps they would have deployed some aerial patrols later—or had scouted from the air before starting their trek—but looking at the branches above him, even with the change of seasons, he couldn’t imagine that they would have been able to see much from above the treetops.

No.  No, they would have walked this same trail.   He was sure of it.

There was a small clearing beyond the bend in the trail, one where he could see the sky.  A few rocks jutted up from the snow and he sat down on one of them, stretching his bad leg for a few seconds and taking a water bottle out of his satchel.  He watched a few fair weather clouds drift through the blue sky as he drank, taking slow, deep breaths of the cold, clean mountain air.

It was so, so quiet.

“About two hundred more meters down that way, there’s a switchback.  Beyond it is a gully and anything that goes in doesn’t come back out.  I can’t let you go any farther.”

It was a woman’s voice, her Thalassian carrying a slight accent and the weight of age.  He twisted toward it, saw her emerging from the trees behind him, far enough from the mouth of the trail that he knew she hadn’t followed him along it.

“Why’s that?” he asked softly, studying her for a few seconds.  A kaldorei dressed in armor reminiscent of the Watchers and Wardens of old, complete with the glaives strapped against her back.  Her hair hung long and loose but for a pair of thin braids that kept it back from her face and there was a pallor to her flesh that he recognized. A Death Knight—or a former one.

“I won’t have the death of one of Sunstar’s brood on my conscience,” she answered, resting her wrist on the hilt of the blade at her hip.  “No matter how many generations removed.”

He stood slowly, capping his water and putting the bottle away.  “You knew him.”

“Not as well as some,” she said.  “But yes. I knew him.”

“I came looking for the Argents—”

“—that vanished along this trail.  We thought perhaps you had.  Come. We’ll go back to K3 and tell you everything we know.”

“We?” he echoed.

Snow crunched beneath his boots and his breath steamed in the frigid air.  The air was still this far down in the valley, but as he glanced up toward the cliffs above, he could see the pines bending against a stiff wind. He adjusted his gloves and scanned the area, then tugged the map out of his pocket.

I’m close, now.

He folded the hand-sketched map again and resumed walking.  The trek from K3 had been less arduous than he’d expected and so far, he hadn’t run into anyone but a grizzled trapper who’d smirked at his trimmed beard and clean hair and asked if he was on vacation.  It wasn’t until he’d told the man why he’d come that his demeanor had shifted.  Teasing had faded and in the end, the trapper had been able to give him a better idea of where he needed to go.

Apparently, the remains of their last camp had still been visible long enough for some trappers to come across it.

And to come up with ghost stories about what lay a mile beyond it.

He wasn’t sure how much of the story he’d believed, but there was an air of truth to enough of it that he’d known that it bore checking.  Even though the air was cold, the sun was high and bright, no hint of coming storms.

He’d picked a good day to take Lumeal’s advice.

It was another half an hour of walking before he reached their last base camp.  Rings of stones and patches of ground cleared for fires and tents lingered here, freshly used, bearing out the trapper’s tale of some of the area’s hunters and trappers making use of the abandoned camp long after the last time the missing Argents had last used them.  The only sign that this had once been an Argent camp—was a pennant hanging limply from the branch of a fir tree at the north edge of camp, marking the beginning of a game trail that started a winding trek up into tree-shrouded foothills of the Storm Peaks.  The pennant’s colors were marred by months in the weather and wind, dulled, but occasionally there was a glimmer of gilt or argent, a flicker of deep blue against dark wood and bright snow.

It was an old style of pennant, the pennant of the old Argent Dawn rather than the silver and white of the Argent Crusade.  No, this was the dark blue and silver with white and gold, the pennant he remembered clearly snapping in the wind above Light’s Hope, the tabard he’d worn for years. His throat tightened.

This wasn’t just a camp.  This wasn’t just the camp where one of the three lost units had been.  This was where the last lost unit had been.

And he remembered that exact pennant snapping in the wind over the barracks at Valiance not terribly long ago.

This had been their camp.

“Light help me,” he murmured under his breath.  “Please still be alive.”