The Battle for Lordaeron - Part Two
Oct. 27th, 2019 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lionofthelightThe dawn sun turned the night sky silver. With the warm light of the burning town behind me I watched the long shadows of the siege towers grow and then recede. Atop the city walls, torches were snuffed out one by one. After a moment of uncertain darkness the sun hit the armor of the Forsaken high on the ramparts. My palms were sweating in my gloves and my arm was already tired from holding my shield. I was grateful that the fighting had not yet begun, but in some strange way was anxious for it to start, if only so that it could be finished.
Whatever the outcome, let it end soon.
And then in front of me, far to my left, the gate of the city dropped and there came the hiss of steaming pistons. A burning cannonball soared above me, shot by our own siege towers. It crashed into the city walls, and I was startled by the sound of crumbling rock. I held tighter to my shield and squinted at the sky, waiting for a volley of arrows that never came.
And then, all at once, my formation was staggered, and I was thrown to the ground. All around me soldiers fell to their knees as we were rocked by a blastwave that burst in my ears and threw men and women from their feet. I felt it vibrate in my armor, in the hollow of my ribs. It stole my breath away. I looked, and I saw my father on the ground not far from me. With the help of another man he rose to his feet, and I rose to meet him. We turned and braced each other just in time to remain standing when the second blastwave hit us. Deafened as I was, I couldn’t hear the explosion but felt it grip my bones and rattle them. I looked around for what was causing it, but though my eyes were open I could not see. I shook my head to clear my sight of hair that could no longer fall around my eyes, but even then there was only whiteness. Whatever had caused the explosion had burned away my vision.
A far-off rumble traveled up my feet, and I knew whatever terrible creation was on the field would strike a third time. My father put his hand to my face and covered my eyes. I dropped my shield and brought my palms to my ears. We held fast against each other and together we weathered the volley’s third blast — the final, I prayed.
When my father dropped his hand I could see again, and my hearing was returning, though in an instant I wished I’d stayed deaf. All around me voices screamed out in agony. I forced my face away from the crackling roar and the furnace heat of the magical fire consuming their bodies. More cannon blasts exploded from behind and once again I heard the falling of rocks from the city walls. I held tightly to my father and guided him toward the crumbling walls. Away, I hoped, from the worst of the carnage. My regiment’s ranks had already broken, and I felt no remorse in running from the flames and the mechanical grinding of whatever was slaughtering us. A tank I thought, but didn’t dare look back. I had to move quickly. My father couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He needed me to guide him to safety.
At any moment another blast from the machine would throw us from our feet, I was certain of it. I knew that if we were to fall we would surely die. The fear of it propelled me forward. To die in this blighted land that wasn’t worth a dog’s life, let alone the blood and souls of Alliance men and women… That would not be our fates today. I forced us forward toward the walls until the ground gave way beneath our feet and we slid down an embankment into the long-empty mote around the city.
Then there came a fourth blast, and I felt the rush of air that sailed over our heads. The sound didn’t deafen me, but the heat of it still drew sweat from my brow. I sat my father up against the slick, green filth of the earthen wall and looked into his face. His eyes were roaming frantically, but they saw nothing. With the Light in my hand I touched his brow, but I couldn’t return his sight.
“Father,” I said as loud as I dared, “You’ll have to follow my guidance.”
He didn’t nod but continued to stare fearfully, looking through me as if I weren’t there. He could neither see nor hear me. Deaf and blind in a war zone...
I looked up to grey sky. Gryphon riders were shooting from the air, all trained on a singular target. The machine, I was certain, though I could not see it from my place below the level of the ground. And then there came a cranking sound, the noise of rolling chains, and I watched as two of the siege towers turned and faced their cannons toward the thing. I cupped my ears and hunkered down in the trench, but even then I could hear the explosions. I held my father close and gripped his hand. I wished I had not heard him scream in fright when he felt Azeroth rattled by the death throes of that infernal tank. The heat of its destruction, even buffered by the earth, began to sear my armor, and I feared I might boil alive in it. I prayed to the Light, and I felt its relief, but I began to stumble in my words when my eye caught movement at the city’s gates.
The Forsaken were taking the field.
Corpses in their armor, unshaken by the sights and the sounds, began to file across the drawbridge not twenty yards from me. I covered my father’s mouth with my hand, for it was the only way I knew to keep him quiet, and I felt for his sword. I drew it from its scabbard and forced it into his hands, and I wiped away the tears that smudged the ash on his cheeks. I pressed myself against the muddy wall and watched as the ranks of the dead flowed endlessly out from their city.
Their city. It was true. They had lived here, and they had died here, and they would not give this place to us. This was a place for the dead. We had set foot on this land to claim Lordaeron as our home, but now I feared that in a twister manner our wish might be granted.
I drew my sword carefully, as if the sound of it might cut louder than the fire and the agony all around me. Slowly, cautiously, I rose to my feet, and I urged my father up with me. He held his sword out in front of him and I saw as he did that it caught the light of a fire above us. I rushed to push the blade down, but it was too late. Three of them had seen the bright reflection and dropped from the drawbridge into the pit of the moat. They marched together, side by side, swords at the ready, and I knew that if they caught us they would end us. There would be no time to climb out from the slick-walled trench. No, we had to run. I gripped my father with one hand and my sword with the other, and we fled.
Hardly three strides off something heavy fell before me, clattering as it hit the ground. An armored corpse — a Forsaken soldier, its teeth exposed in a lipless grimace. I drew my sword and prepared to attack, but it didn’t rise up. It was truly dead. I tugged my father’s arm, but before we could get our footing to run again another body fell nearby. And then another. And behind me, I heard more. From above me, up over the ridge, came a horn’s deep groaning.
“Zandros!” my father called, louder than I’m sure he meant to. I turned to put my hand across his mouth but found when I looked at him that he was looking back at me, seeing me now for the first time since the siege engine had blinded him. He spun on his heel and held his sword at the ready. We’d wasted time, and the soldiers were on us now.
Another howl from the horn above us.
I gripped my sword and let the Light flow through my free hand. My father stood beside me, weapon at the ready, deaf but no longer blind and not yet ready to be a corpse himself. The three Forsaken charged forward, hurdling the bodies on the ground as they came. I called the Light to cut through one of them, and it shrieked as holy fire shredded its arm to ash, leaving its armored limb smoldering on the ground.
The others made it to us, and we met them with our blades. I couldn’t watch my father fight — it took everything I had in me to parry my own adversary — but I wasn’t afraid for him. He’d never lost a fight to evil things, and despite his age I didn’t expect him to now. It was me I was afraid for. With both hands on my sword I couldn’t call the Light, without my shield I couldn’t properly block, combattants live and dead were falling all around me, and I had never truly —
The corpse pushed me back and pinned me to the wall. I felt myself sinking into the muddy earth and only pushed myself deeper when I kicked the swordsman’s legs out from under him. I struggled against the muck, but it had taken hold of my armor. Bodies were dropping all around me into the mote, and this time some of them still moved. I had to free myself — and fast — or if this corpse didn’t kill me, the next one would.
I called for the Light’s aid and tore myself free only to fall forward toward an outstretched sword angling for my stomach. I could only close my eyes so not to watch my own demise, but the sound of clashing metal brought me right back to my senses. I fell farther than I expected and landed face-first in the muddy ground. Looking up, I felt a dreadful sickness at the sight of a runeblade. Not the one I had become accustomed to, but another, a long-handled polearm fiercely glowing. The sight of it made me feel infested, but I fought the urge to scratch my flesh raw and scrambled out of the mud just in time to watch an Ebon knight topple the Forsaken soldier that had nearly taken my life. The Forsaken tried to roll, but a boot on its neck pinned it squarely in place. With a sickening eagerness the death knight ran her polearm through its guts and wheezed a hollow laugh that made my skin crawl.
She turned to me then and I only gripped my sword tighter when she grinned at the sorry sight of me. She lifted her head as if she expected to see someone cresting the ridge above us, and I saw that where her neck should be was instead a rotting gash. I wasn’t going to stick around to thank her but she caught me off guard when she shouted, “Converter! Look! It’s your darling!”
I followed her gaze to the top of the trench, but all that appeared was another corpse toppling into our pit. The knight raised a rune-carved horn to her mouth and blew, and with the haunted howling came a blast of snowy air. And then, without a goodbye, she turned, and she and her polearm went hunting Forsaken.
The mote was filling now, growing heavy with corpses — some still, some writhing. Other fighters had slid down into the pit with us, each of them locked in combat with another. Swords crashed and armor clattered. Past a pair of combattants I saw my father dispatching his adversary with swift sword through the eye. When it fell he stood tall and looked across the trench. He sought his son, he sought me, ignorant to the thing that was rising up behind him. The one-armed corpse that I had burned had brought itself back to its senses and taken up a weapon in its other arm.
I shouted for my father, but he could not hear me. I would have to save him myself. I struggled over the bodies beneath my feet, swiping at grasping claws where I had to, but the way was rough, and my legs were weak.
“Father!” I called, hoping that the Light might carry my voice to him. “Behind you!” I shouted, and I thought for a moment that he must have heard me, for his eyes found mine and he smiled in relief to see me.
“Zandros!” he called.
My name was the last word I would hear him say. A dead hand caught him by the face and held him still, and I could only watch as a sword burst from his stomach.
The Light can still save him, I lied to myself, scrambling across the fallen soldiers and bolting past a dueling pair. The Forsaken withdrew its sword from my father’s body and stabbed again, and once more, and by the third strike I knew I was too late. His life had left him before I was at his side.
The Light could not save him, but it might avenge him. I called for it again and it blazed on my sword, its fury at the injustice as bright as my own. My father’s body hit the ground and I rushed forward, and I didn’t stop until I’d run his murderer through. I watched the creature burn away to ash, squealing as it did, and I hoped for the first time in my life that this was one soul which would not be redeemed in the Light’s grace.
When it was over, when all that hung on my sword were the empty tatters of leather armor, I collapsed. It was too much. It was all too much. If I never made it out of this mass grave then so be it. If that was what it took for this day to end, then let it be.
But the battle had just begun, I realized. Scarcely an hour could have passed since that first deafening explosion. An hour for my father to die. An hour to see things I could never forget. An hour for my life to fall apart. My hands began to sink into the mud, and I accepted Azeroth’s cold call. I would lie there, I resolved, until the battle or my life had ended. I would lie by my father, the man I was destined to fail one final time. I saw my breath in the cold air when I muttered his last rites, and when I closed his eyes I also closed my own.
I might have laid there forever, but the sound of horns set my heart to beating again. It wasn’t the runic blast of the Ebon knight, I realized, but something else. Trumpets. A song. Something familiar that I couldn’t quite place. I hummed it to myself and felt the mud quake with another corpse falling down beside me.
The Lament of the Highborne. The song of the dead. The song of the Forsaken. Those were Forsaken trumpets calling, and before their song was done it was Forsaken catapults that drowned them out. I saw the barrels streaking overhead and moments later heard their explosive crashes.
Then the sounds of weapons, the sounds of fighting, were — just for a moment — replaced by a sickening silence.
And then there was the howling, the wailing, the groaning of a hundred men and women vomiting. I could already smell the blood, the chemicals.
They were plaguing us.
Just like they had at the Wrath Gate. Plaguing the Alliance and the Horde alike. A green light reflected on the walls of the capital. The air grew thick with the scent of chlorine. From the corner of my eye I caught a serpentine coil of bright green smog as it rolled down into the trench.
I took a deep breath of clear air and frantically I wrapped my cloak around my face. I looked above to see a wave of putrid mist building at the edge of the earth. The slightest breeze broke its pooling, and in a rush it fell around me.
I’d never been so quick to my feet, but looking around me I realized I was trapped. The plague was pouring in from the battlefield to one side, and I didn’t entertain the idea of scaling the city walls to the other. With no other option, I ran toward the drawbridge. Green smoke pooled at my feet, and as I ran it rose up around me, following me in the air as if it had a mind of its own. I felt it in my nose, in my throat. The taste of blood and the sting of the chemicals. I took one final, deep breath of air, and I prayed it might last me longer than I knew it could.
From far away it seemed as if the drawbridge might have rested just above the level of my head. It would have been a difficult climb in my armor, but nothing impossible. But when I was under it, I realized how much higher it was than I’d guessed. As the cloud of noxious death rose around me I leaped for the edge, and my fingers barely grazed the bottom of the thick wood. I jumped again, missed again, and when I landed the air left me in a rush. Death clung to my armor. It grew like ivy up my boots and swirled around my waist. In seconds it was at my breast. A corpse fell beside me and the greedy smoke filled its open mouth. I heard it sizzling, dissolving from the inside out, and if I hadn’t been breathless I might have sobbed.
The plague was at my throat now, and I felt it pecking through my flesh like a hundred hungry crows. I closed my eyes, I prayed in my thoughts, and I made one final leap.
To my surprise a hand was there to catch me. It lifted me from the pit as easily as if I were a doll. A dead man, I thought, and I looked into its face to find that it was one I knew.
“Harrowheart,” I wheezed. I’d never been so glad for a familiar face, and his least of all, but in that moment I could have thrown my arms around him. I deserved to be saved, but I didn’t deserve his aid after everything I’d put him through. “The Light delivered you.”
I clung to him, and he held tightly to me as well, for we weren’t alone on the bridge. The gate that crossed the gap was already filled with armored knights, and my heart was the only one among them that beat. We were packed as tightly as could be, and not a space remained for a single other boot upon the bridge.
Harrowheart looked to me, but he didn’t speak. There wasn’t time. The trumpets were singing again. Another volley of the plague would be on us in a moment.
The call of the horns roused the men and women on the field who had been lucky enough to survive the first volley. All who had been left outside the gates went rushing for them, Horde and Alliance alike, neither wasting time to cut the other’s throats but each and every one of them hurtling headlong toward the drawbridge. A wall of bodies swarmed the too-crowded bridge and I heard the wood groaning beneath our weight. In the time it took me to turn I was already wedged by armor at all sides, and to my back the fog-filled pit. If I fell I would be lost, so I held close to Harrowheart and onto a stranger’s cloak. But the crowd shifted, and the woman I’d gripped onto was elbowed from the ledge. I saw as she fell that she was a golden-eyed Forsaken, and I couldn’t reconcile it with the guilt that gripped my gut as I watched her sink, screaming, into the smoky trench.
Harrowheart was strong, but not strong enough to control our course through the tide pushing from behind us. He held my armor tightly and I fought to keep the cloth around my face for fear of what came when the trumpets went silent. Just ahead of us a metal gate was dropping from the ceiling. Fear of death brought me strength I didn’t know I had, and I pushed with all my might to make it through before it closed. The crack of a mage’s spell conjured a pillar of ice beneath it, and the descent of the gate was stalled, but I could hear the grinding of gears and the rattling of chains as unseen engineers inside the walls tried to force it down.
Ahead of us a barricade of Forsaken soldiers waited, patient and unmoving. Anyone who made it past that gate would die on their swords. So be it, then. Better to die with a blade at my throat than my insides pouring out my mouth.
A body wedged between myself and Harrowheart and broke my hold on him. I tried to turn but could only catch a glimpse as he was dragged backward in the flowing crowd even as I was pushed further toward the gate.
He shoved at the scrambling soldiers at his sides. He had no compunction about pushing others to their deaths to save himself. There was fury in him still, and despite his condition as much a need to survive as I had in me.
I fought my way toward him, intent on repaying him for what he’d done. In the same way that he pushed remorselessly against the crowd, so did I. I had to do right by him now — now and forever. I had to take him by the hand, had to pull him past the gate, had to save him so that whatever happened within the walls of the city, it happened to us both. If we were to die by the sword or take this land, we would do it together.
I reached out and so did he, and finally I had him. I held him by the wrist and pulled with all my might… And something crunched. I pulled again and he pushed forward, and something beside me cracked. The bridge, I thought, and that was all the time I had to wonder.
Shards of ice exploded from beside me. Fast as the blade of a guillotine and just as deadly, the metal gate fell down. It tore through my arm and I fell back against the crowd of bodies behind me, and I watched as Harrowheart fell back himself.
I was in the city. He was on the bridge. He stared at me, for a moment stunned, eyes wide and lips parted. And then he seemed to calm, as if everything that had just happened hadn’t. Tranquil acceptance smoothed his features even as the pain from my severed arm twisted up my own.
“Harrowheart!” I croaked, but he was no longer listening. His eyes were on the ramparts.
A curtain fell between us, acrid and green. I could scarcely see him through the mist that pooled below his chest, but I watched, until my consciousness left me, as his flesh, like wax, dripped away from his bones.
Whatever the outcome, let it end soon.
And then in front of me, far to my left, the gate of the city dropped and there came the hiss of steaming pistons. A burning cannonball soared above me, shot by our own siege towers. It crashed into the city walls, and I was startled by the sound of crumbling rock. I held tighter to my shield and squinted at the sky, waiting for a volley of arrows that never came.
And then, all at once, my formation was staggered, and I was thrown to the ground. All around me soldiers fell to their knees as we were rocked by a blastwave that burst in my ears and threw men and women from their feet. I felt it vibrate in my armor, in the hollow of my ribs. It stole my breath away. I looked, and I saw my father on the ground not far from me. With the help of another man he rose to his feet, and I rose to meet him. We turned and braced each other just in time to remain standing when the second blastwave hit us. Deafened as I was, I couldn’t hear the explosion but felt it grip my bones and rattle them. I looked around for what was causing it, but though my eyes were open I could not see. I shook my head to clear my sight of hair that could no longer fall around my eyes, but even then there was only whiteness. Whatever had caused the explosion had burned away my vision.
A far-off rumble traveled up my feet, and I knew whatever terrible creation was on the field would strike a third time. My father put his hand to my face and covered my eyes. I dropped my shield and brought my palms to my ears. We held fast against each other and together we weathered the volley’s third blast — the final, I prayed.
When my father dropped his hand I could see again, and my hearing was returning, though in an instant I wished I’d stayed deaf. All around me voices screamed out in agony. I forced my face away from the crackling roar and the furnace heat of the magical fire consuming their bodies. More cannon blasts exploded from behind and once again I heard the falling of rocks from the city walls. I held tightly to my father and guided him toward the crumbling walls. Away, I hoped, from the worst of the carnage. My regiment’s ranks had already broken, and I felt no remorse in running from the flames and the mechanical grinding of whatever was slaughtering us. A tank I thought, but didn’t dare look back. I had to move quickly. My father couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He needed me to guide him to safety.
At any moment another blast from the machine would throw us from our feet, I was certain of it. I knew that if we were to fall we would surely die. The fear of it propelled me forward. To die in this blighted land that wasn’t worth a dog’s life, let alone the blood and souls of Alliance men and women… That would not be our fates today. I forced us forward toward the walls until the ground gave way beneath our feet and we slid down an embankment into the long-empty mote around the city.
Then there came a fourth blast, and I felt the rush of air that sailed over our heads. The sound didn’t deafen me, but the heat of it still drew sweat from my brow. I sat my father up against the slick, green filth of the earthen wall and looked into his face. His eyes were roaming frantically, but they saw nothing. With the Light in my hand I touched his brow, but I couldn’t return his sight.
“Father,” I said as loud as I dared, “You’ll have to follow my guidance.”
He didn’t nod but continued to stare fearfully, looking through me as if I weren’t there. He could neither see nor hear me. Deaf and blind in a war zone...
I looked up to grey sky. Gryphon riders were shooting from the air, all trained on a singular target. The machine, I was certain, though I could not see it from my place below the level of the ground. And then there came a cranking sound, the noise of rolling chains, and I watched as two of the siege towers turned and faced their cannons toward the thing. I cupped my ears and hunkered down in the trench, but even then I could hear the explosions. I held my father close and gripped his hand. I wished I had not heard him scream in fright when he felt Azeroth rattled by the death throes of that infernal tank. The heat of its destruction, even buffered by the earth, began to sear my armor, and I feared I might boil alive in it. I prayed to the Light, and I felt its relief, but I began to stumble in my words when my eye caught movement at the city’s gates.
The Forsaken were taking the field.
Corpses in their armor, unshaken by the sights and the sounds, began to file across the drawbridge not twenty yards from me. I covered my father’s mouth with my hand, for it was the only way I knew to keep him quiet, and I felt for his sword. I drew it from its scabbard and forced it into his hands, and I wiped away the tears that smudged the ash on his cheeks. I pressed myself against the muddy wall and watched as the ranks of the dead flowed endlessly out from their city.
Their city. It was true. They had lived here, and they had died here, and they would not give this place to us. This was a place for the dead. We had set foot on this land to claim Lordaeron as our home, but now I feared that in a twister manner our wish might be granted.
I drew my sword carefully, as if the sound of it might cut louder than the fire and the agony all around me. Slowly, cautiously, I rose to my feet, and I urged my father up with me. He held his sword out in front of him and I saw as he did that it caught the light of a fire above us. I rushed to push the blade down, but it was too late. Three of them had seen the bright reflection and dropped from the drawbridge into the pit of the moat. They marched together, side by side, swords at the ready, and I knew that if they caught us they would end us. There would be no time to climb out from the slick-walled trench. No, we had to run. I gripped my father with one hand and my sword with the other, and we fled.
Hardly three strides off something heavy fell before me, clattering as it hit the ground. An armored corpse — a Forsaken soldier, its teeth exposed in a lipless grimace. I drew my sword and prepared to attack, but it didn’t rise up. It was truly dead. I tugged my father’s arm, but before we could get our footing to run again another body fell nearby. And then another. And behind me, I heard more. From above me, up over the ridge, came a horn’s deep groaning.
“Zandros!” my father called, louder than I’m sure he meant to. I turned to put my hand across his mouth but found when I looked at him that he was looking back at me, seeing me now for the first time since the siege engine had blinded him. He spun on his heel and held his sword at the ready. We’d wasted time, and the soldiers were on us now.
Another howl from the horn above us.
I gripped my sword and let the Light flow through my free hand. My father stood beside me, weapon at the ready, deaf but no longer blind and not yet ready to be a corpse himself. The three Forsaken charged forward, hurdling the bodies on the ground as they came. I called the Light to cut through one of them, and it shrieked as holy fire shredded its arm to ash, leaving its armored limb smoldering on the ground.
The others made it to us, and we met them with our blades. I couldn’t watch my father fight — it took everything I had in me to parry my own adversary — but I wasn’t afraid for him. He’d never lost a fight to evil things, and despite his age I didn’t expect him to now. It was me I was afraid for. With both hands on my sword I couldn’t call the Light, without my shield I couldn’t properly block, combattants live and dead were falling all around me, and I had never truly —
The corpse pushed me back and pinned me to the wall. I felt myself sinking into the muddy earth and only pushed myself deeper when I kicked the swordsman’s legs out from under him. I struggled against the muck, but it had taken hold of my armor. Bodies were dropping all around me into the mote, and this time some of them still moved. I had to free myself — and fast — or if this corpse didn’t kill me, the next one would.
I called for the Light’s aid and tore myself free only to fall forward toward an outstretched sword angling for my stomach. I could only close my eyes so not to watch my own demise, but the sound of clashing metal brought me right back to my senses. I fell farther than I expected and landed face-first in the muddy ground. Looking up, I felt a dreadful sickness at the sight of a runeblade. Not the one I had become accustomed to, but another, a long-handled polearm fiercely glowing. The sight of it made me feel infested, but I fought the urge to scratch my flesh raw and scrambled out of the mud just in time to watch an Ebon knight topple the Forsaken soldier that had nearly taken my life. The Forsaken tried to roll, but a boot on its neck pinned it squarely in place. With a sickening eagerness the death knight ran her polearm through its guts and wheezed a hollow laugh that made my skin crawl.
She turned to me then and I only gripped my sword tighter when she grinned at the sorry sight of me. She lifted her head as if she expected to see someone cresting the ridge above us, and I saw that where her neck should be was instead a rotting gash. I wasn’t going to stick around to thank her but she caught me off guard when she shouted, “Converter! Look! It’s your darling!”
I followed her gaze to the top of the trench, but all that appeared was another corpse toppling into our pit. The knight raised a rune-carved horn to her mouth and blew, and with the haunted howling came a blast of snowy air. And then, without a goodbye, she turned, and she and her polearm went hunting Forsaken.
The mote was filling now, growing heavy with corpses — some still, some writhing. Other fighters had slid down into the pit with us, each of them locked in combat with another. Swords crashed and armor clattered. Past a pair of combattants I saw my father dispatching his adversary with swift sword through the eye. When it fell he stood tall and looked across the trench. He sought his son, he sought me, ignorant to the thing that was rising up behind him. The one-armed corpse that I had burned had brought itself back to its senses and taken up a weapon in its other arm.
I shouted for my father, but he could not hear me. I would have to save him myself. I struggled over the bodies beneath my feet, swiping at grasping claws where I had to, but the way was rough, and my legs were weak.
“Father!” I called, hoping that the Light might carry my voice to him. “Behind you!” I shouted, and I thought for a moment that he must have heard me, for his eyes found mine and he smiled in relief to see me.
“Zandros!” he called.
My name was the last word I would hear him say. A dead hand caught him by the face and held him still, and I could only watch as a sword burst from his stomach.
The Light can still save him, I lied to myself, scrambling across the fallen soldiers and bolting past a dueling pair. The Forsaken withdrew its sword from my father’s body and stabbed again, and once more, and by the third strike I knew I was too late. His life had left him before I was at his side.
The Light could not save him, but it might avenge him. I called for it again and it blazed on my sword, its fury at the injustice as bright as my own. My father’s body hit the ground and I rushed forward, and I didn’t stop until I’d run his murderer through. I watched the creature burn away to ash, squealing as it did, and I hoped for the first time in my life that this was one soul which would not be redeemed in the Light’s grace.
When it was over, when all that hung on my sword were the empty tatters of leather armor, I collapsed. It was too much. It was all too much. If I never made it out of this mass grave then so be it. If that was what it took for this day to end, then let it be.
But the battle had just begun, I realized. Scarcely an hour could have passed since that first deafening explosion. An hour for my father to die. An hour to see things I could never forget. An hour for my life to fall apart. My hands began to sink into the mud, and I accepted Azeroth’s cold call. I would lie there, I resolved, until the battle or my life had ended. I would lie by my father, the man I was destined to fail one final time. I saw my breath in the cold air when I muttered his last rites, and when I closed his eyes I also closed my own.
I might have laid there forever, but the sound of horns set my heart to beating again. It wasn’t the runic blast of the Ebon knight, I realized, but something else. Trumpets. A song. Something familiar that I couldn’t quite place. I hummed it to myself and felt the mud quake with another corpse falling down beside me.
The Lament of the Highborne. The song of the dead. The song of the Forsaken. Those were Forsaken trumpets calling, and before their song was done it was Forsaken catapults that drowned them out. I saw the barrels streaking overhead and moments later heard their explosive crashes.
Then the sounds of weapons, the sounds of fighting, were — just for a moment — replaced by a sickening silence.
And then there was the howling, the wailing, the groaning of a hundred men and women vomiting. I could already smell the blood, the chemicals.
They were plaguing us.
Just like they had at the Wrath Gate. Plaguing the Alliance and the Horde alike. A green light reflected on the walls of the capital. The air grew thick with the scent of chlorine. From the corner of my eye I caught a serpentine coil of bright green smog as it rolled down into the trench.
I took a deep breath of clear air and frantically I wrapped my cloak around my face. I looked above to see a wave of putrid mist building at the edge of the earth. The slightest breeze broke its pooling, and in a rush it fell around me.
I’d never been so quick to my feet, but looking around me I realized I was trapped. The plague was pouring in from the battlefield to one side, and I didn’t entertain the idea of scaling the city walls to the other. With no other option, I ran toward the drawbridge. Green smoke pooled at my feet, and as I ran it rose up around me, following me in the air as if it had a mind of its own. I felt it in my nose, in my throat. The taste of blood and the sting of the chemicals. I took one final, deep breath of air, and I prayed it might last me longer than I knew it could.
From far away it seemed as if the drawbridge might have rested just above the level of my head. It would have been a difficult climb in my armor, but nothing impossible. But when I was under it, I realized how much higher it was than I’d guessed. As the cloud of noxious death rose around me I leaped for the edge, and my fingers barely grazed the bottom of the thick wood. I jumped again, missed again, and when I landed the air left me in a rush. Death clung to my armor. It grew like ivy up my boots and swirled around my waist. In seconds it was at my breast. A corpse fell beside me and the greedy smoke filled its open mouth. I heard it sizzling, dissolving from the inside out, and if I hadn’t been breathless I might have sobbed.
The plague was at my throat now, and I felt it pecking through my flesh like a hundred hungry crows. I closed my eyes, I prayed in my thoughts, and I made one final leap.
To my surprise a hand was there to catch me. It lifted me from the pit as easily as if I were a doll. A dead man, I thought, and I looked into its face to find that it was one I knew.
“Harrowheart,” I wheezed. I’d never been so glad for a familiar face, and his least of all, but in that moment I could have thrown my arms around him. I deserved to be saved, but I didn’t deserve his aid after everything I’d put him through. “The Light delivered you.”
I clung to him, and he held tightly to me as well, for we weren’t alone on the bridge. The gate that crossed the gap was already filled with armored knights, and my heart was the only one among them that beat. We were packed as tightly as could be, and not a space remained for a single other boot upon the bridge.
Harrowheart looked to me, but he didn’t speak. There wasn’t time. The trumpets were singing again. Another volley of the plague would be on us in a moment.
The call of the horns roused the men and women on the field who had been lucky enough to survive the first volley. All who had been left outside the gates went rushing for them, Horde and Alliance alike, neither wasting time to cut the other’s throats but each and every one of them hurtling headlong toward the drawbridge. A wall of bodies swarmed the too-crowded bridge and I heard the wood groaning beneath our weight. In the time it took me to turn I was already wedged by armor at all sides, and to my back the fog-filled pit. If I fell I would be lost, so I held close to Harrowheart and onto a stranger’s cloak. But the crowd shifted, and the woman I’d gripped onto was elbowed from the ledge. I saw as she fell that she was a golden-eyed Forsaken, and I couldn’t reconcile it with the guilt that gripped my gut as I watched her sink, screaming, into the smoky trench.
Harrowheart was strong, but not strong enough to control our course through the tide pushing from behind us. He held my armor tightly and I fought to keep the cloth around my face for fear of what came when the trumpets went silent. Just ahead of us a metal gate was dropping from the ceiling. Fear of death brought me strength I didn’t know I had, and I pushed with all my might to make it through before it closed. The crack of a mage’s spell conjured a pillar of ice beneath it, and the descent of the gate was stalled, but I could hear the grinding of gears and the rattling of chains as unseen engineers inside the walls tried to force it down.
Ahead of us a barricade of Forsaken soldiers waited, patient and unmoving. Anyone who made it past that gate would die on their swords. So be it, then. Better to die with a blade at my throat than my insides pouring out my mouth.
A body wedged between myself and Harrowheart and broke my hold on him. I tried to turn but could only catch a glimpse as he was dragged backward in the flowing crowd even as I was pushed further toward the gate.
He shoved at the scrambling soldiers at his sides. He had no compunction about pushing others to their deaths to save himself. There was fury in him still, and despite his condition as much a need to survive as I had in me.
I fought my way toward him, intent on repaying him for what he’d done. In the same way that he pushed remorselessly against the crowd, so did I. I had to do right by him now — now and forever. I had to take him by the hand, had to pull him past the gate, had to save him so that whatever happened within the walls of the city, it happened to us both. If we were to die by the sword or take this land, we would do it together.
I reached out and so did he, and finally I had him. I held him by the wrist and pulled with all my might… And something crunched. I pulled again and he pushed forward, and something beside me cracked. The bridge, I thought, and that was all the time I had to wonder.
Shards of ice exploded from beside me. Fast as the blade of a guillotine and just as deadly, the metal gate fell down. It tore through my arm and I fell back against the crowd of bodies behind me, and I watched as Harrowheart fell back himself.
I was in the city. He was on the bridge. He stared at me, for a moment stunned, eyes wide and lips parted. And then he seemed to calm, as if everything that had just happened hadn’t. Tranquil acceptance smoothed his features even as the pain from my severed arm twisted up my own.
“Harrowheart!” I croaked, but he was no longer listening. His eyes were on the ramparts.
A curtain fell between us, acrid and green. I could scarcely see him through the mist that pooled below his chest, but I watched, until my consciousness left me, as his flesh, like wax, dripped away from his bones.