Death's Avenger 18 (Patreon)

I don’t own WoW or anything from the universe of Warcraft, nor do I own JKR. 

OH, I have to bring up a thing that I have not included in this story from the very beginning: the so-called veil of mist around Kalimdor that the kaldorei created to hide themselves from outsiders after kicking out the Highborne.  Neat idea, only… this is purely a reason to explain why the kaldorei weren’t around for any of the events of the first two games or the events canonically leading up to them. The kaldorei were created to make a new faction in Warcraft III.

Now, there are a lot of problems with going back and shoehorning a whole new race in, especially when you make it the oldest race on the planet.  So… the mist, and the idea of needing to hide… from what, exactly?  The Satyrs? You just had a war with them, and hiding from them would be an abysmally stupid idea.

The tauren? Most are separated by a massive Fuck You, You Shall Not Pass’ type of mountain range, the sort that would make Mount Caradhras go ‘senpai!”  The others are the Highmountain tribe on the Broken Isles, and they are historically allies.

 The dragons? Allies or just elsewhere.  The Black Dragon Flight is historically broken.

The Vrykul? On Northrend, not united, not coming south, etc.

The Highborne?  Banished across the ocean to that new-fangled continent they’ve got over there.  Oh, and ocean travel is insanely difficult because the Maelstrom is on the other side of the Broken Isles, and kaldorei and highborne aren't natural mariners.

Trolls? Same with satyrs.  The Naga? The kaldorei have no idea they exist. No one does, not even the elder god in the form of a turtle keeping the Maelstrom under control. At the time the mist was created, they wouldn’t even be a danger on their own.

Humans? Still not on the scene in anything approaching a civilization for more than four thousand years. So… no reason for it. 

This chapter, this chapter got away from me.  I wanted to show the kaldorei fighting the undead; I wanted to show the campaign going from bad to worse, and so on.  But I didn’t expect it to balloon like this.  I will try to cut down on side scenes in the future, but… Anyway, here’s the chapter. It’s been Grammarlied and seen by Alex Crate.  Thank him for pointing out a lot of small mistakes both me and Grammarly missed. Especially one that replaced ‘blonde’ with ‘blood’... LOL.

Chapter 18: Undeath and Snow

The day after the massive column of saronite-created constructs, skeletons and trolls had been spotted, the Druid of the Talon that Davo had assigned to find Nealu had returned, and a meeting point was set up at a notable point: a segment ahead of the column where a lone finger of stone jutted up out of the snow, marked on the maps the groups had copied from Topographer Pinefrost’s masterpiece. While normally it would have been covered by new snow at least whenever a storm came by, this stone, which did indeed look like a finger, was far enough away from anything else that the typical biting wind of Northrend just as routinely scoured it clean.

To his surprise, Nealu had already decided to pull his entire force away from the north segment of the cordon and arrived at the meeting point with the twenty sentinels and five druids he’d been leading.  Seeing the confusion on his fellow’s face as he walked through the resting troops, Nealu shrugged his shoulders. 

“When I heard of the size of the column your scouts spotted, I decided there was no point in my trying to keep watch on the direct north of Vordrassil. Frankly, with the size of the area where the troll shaman holds sway, our small force isn’t really good enough to provide even a decent watch. If not for the Druids of the Talon giving us the ability to watch from on high, any attempt to encircle the area would be ridiculously foolish.”

His ears twitching in a shrug, Nealu admitted, “I’d honestly hoped our presence would force the troll shaman to concentrate his efforts against us, but it’s obvious that we haven’t.”

The two Seekers fell silent for a moment, then Davo, with a grimace on his bovine features, admitted something they had both been forced to acknowledge since they and their fellows had snuck in and out of the contaminated area.  “The troll shaman’s resources are much larger than we thought at first. That old furbolg city, the battles around Vordrassil when the kaldorei had to burn it out… All that’s stopping him is the time needed to bring more constructs or skeletons to life.”

“I wouldn’t call it life in terms of the flesh golem.  Even the least intelligent of elementals have more willpower and individuality than those, those flesh golems,” Nealu stated, frowning heavily.  “They aren’t created by the saronite corruption like the giants Potter and Lady Whisperwind ran into in the Frostfang Mountains. The troll shamans' magic constructs them and gives them will on top of the saronite. An entirely new, and horrific thing.”

“Heh, I agree, and I like the term flesh golem, even if you stole that from Harry’s vocabulary,” Davo snorted, before admitting it was fitting and becoming serious. “That column… there’s only one reason why the trolls would be sending a force like that away.”

 “A giant settlement of some kind,” Nealu stated, no guessing in his tone. “The trolls will want meat and will want to bolster their numbers with more Abominations. Let us make that the official term for the extra-large flesh golems.”

“Agreed. But if the trolls can add even half the dead of a single vrykul settlement to their numbers, even if they lose half or even more of that column, with most of it being made of furbolg flesh golems and skeletons, it will be a—"

“A worthy investment on their part.” Nealu grimaced visibly as he interjected.  “I’ve already made a note in my logs of this journey that finding a way to make certain the dead stay in the ground might be a very good research project for our librarians in the future. Not only will vrykul be far more dangerous in general, but being more whole will make them faster and more durable even if they weren’t giants in the first place.”

Davo grunted agreement, then reported that he still had half of his own force moving around the column, keeping the game away.  “I’m not certain if there are any living trolls within the column. I didn’t come close enough to notice that kind of thing. However, if there are, they’re going to be very hungry quickly.”

“Which might dent their cohesion, when they fall to cannibalism,” Nealu’s tone dripped with even more than the normal distaste a kaldorei would show when speaking about trolls. Not that Davo could blame him. The idea that a race could evolve to the point where they had magic, their own special brand of shamanistic magic perhaps, but still magic, even a language, and other trappings of civilization and still consider cannibalism normal was horrific. Mind you, if you eat a portion of a troll, that portion grows back over time. And I know that the records we have of trolls in Trueshot Lodge mention how they like to make drums from their own skin. So it isn’t exactly the most unusual thing about them.

“Regardless, I want to approach the column, see it for myself,” Nealu continued.

“You’ll get your chance soon. The Finger isn’t on their direct line of advance, but it’s close enough that if we go southeast from here, you’ll see them in a few hours’ travel.”

The two of them fell silent for a second, then Davo stared at the stone, his wide mouth widening into a smile as he noticed the body language of the kaldorei around him and his fellow Seeker. “So, it isn’t just me who thinks that stone is a finger doing a particularly rude gesture?”

“No,” came from many of the kaldorei around him, with giggles and chuckles abounding.

The fact they would indeed be able to see the column, and that from far away, wasn’t discussed overmuch. There was very, very little in the way of cover or even a change in the landscape for dozens of leagues around the lone Finger raised in anger from the ground. As far as the eye could see, there was an endless plain of ice and snow, much like some of the terrain the expedition had moved through in the west, although this area ended in a large hilly area to the northeast and directly east.

The wind was horrendously biting, making Davo very happy for both his cloak and the fact that he had a natural fur lining. The goggles, which had for centuries been typical winter gear for the Unseen Path, were also a godsend, and he could see that most of the kaldorei around him had tried to come up with an equivalent, wrapping their heads, and even their ears on occasion, with cloth, protecting their eyes from the harsh winds.

Worse was the reflection coming off the snow during the day, but that was yet another reason for the kaldorei to not move during that time. Something most of them didn’t need, really. Davo had heard nearly every kaldorei on the expedition complain about having to move around during the day.

The upside of all this flatness, though, was that the horizon was a good bit further away than it would otherwise have been, something that Nealu, Davo, and the small group that Nealu trusted sufficiently to hide their presence even in such territory took advantage of. They moved unseen over the snow and ice, their cloaks and various skills letting them blend in, but not move quickly while doing it, especially in Davo’s case.

He was simply that much larger than the others, and when it came to silent movement, kaldorei feet had a marked advantage over tauren hooves. Even when both wore snowshoes.

Still, he and Nealu shifted themselves until they were close enough to the course the troll-led force had been following to see it well enough with their own eyes when it passed them. There, they quickly and efficiently made themselves a small hiding place as their four companions spread out in their own burrows.

Completely hidden beneath the snow, save for a thin slit to see out, the two spotted the enemy host several hours later as it came into view.  With a spyglass that Tyrande had passed on to Davo for the duration of this operation and one he had brought from Trueshot Lodge, they were able to make out far more details than before.

Despite this, Davo still had trouble estimating how many undead furbolg skeletons or flesh golems were down there, but there was a significant number, making him understand why the first scouts to spot this force had been unable to really estimate its numbers. After the column began to pass their position, Davo estimated he’d counted at least three thousand skeletons and flesh golems, maybe a bit less as it was hard to tell the difference between one skeleton and the next. Worse, there were a lot of abominations down there too, as he had seen previously from afar.   At least there, my guess of forty was right.

Now he took them in more detail and noticed that a few of the Abominations were carrying what looked like litters. Staring at one of them, Davo saw a troll sitting there. He wore the outfit of a troll shaman, and his chair looked like a small throne whose feet were nailed into the back of a platform itself set into the back of one of the monstrosities built on one of the giants who had been sacrificed during the ritual that had empowered the senior troll shaman with necromantic energy. 

Two other monstrosities had similar platforms, although in their case, they lacked chairs. Whether the chair signaled greater authority or was a personality quirk, Davo had no idea. Given the gleam of magical energy around them, their deep, putrid green eyes and the way further green energy showed within their mouths when they barked orders, it was clear these shamans were powerful.  They might have been given a tiny sliver of that loa’s power after the ritual began to end.

“How close do you think you’d need to be to be able to put a few arrows into any of those?” Davo asked aloud idly.  “For my part, far too close for comfort, I’m afraid.” 

Nealu snorted, keeping his voice low as his friend did the same.  Both men were chewing ice to keep any hint of their breathing from showing.  “Considering the draw weight of my bow is a little less than half of yours, Davo, yes. We would need to get far too close for that to work. There are also three of them, and even attempting to ambush them like that would be very, very dangerous.  Even the undead and flesh golems will know to hunt down any ambushers”

“Perhaps, but if we could get even two of those shamans, it might be worth it,” Davo grumbled a little. “They have to be important too, and I refuse to believe that the trolls have an endless number of shamans to call on.”

Nealu’s ears twitched a little at that, and he absentmindedly ducked a little lower as the tips of his ears scraped the top of their hiding hole even as he verbally agreed with his companion's statement.  “Regardless, there’s nothing we can do about them unless we want to throw our lives away. Which I refuse to do unless it is to win the campaign, not simply a single battle.

While Nealu might’ve meant it as a joke, Davo nodded seriously. That was indeed something that any member of the Unseen Path might need to be ready to do at a moment's notice: to give their lives to keep demons from returning to the world, or to combat other lesser darkness. The whole brotherhood understood this. Indeed, since that time in the troll village, Davo had been struggling with thoughts of regret on that score.

“Do you think we can get ahead of them?” Nealu murmured after a few minutes. “We have a Druid of the Talon follow the column while we parallel their course out of sight.”

“The undead don’t stop moving, and if those shamans, they won’t need to slow down, although the Abominations at least don’t move as fast as we can,” Davo mused slowly.  “I don’t know. We should be able to move faster, but in this terrain, maybe not.  Regardless, my idea of keeping the trolls in that column from getting food obviously isn’t going to work.

Davo nodded and raised a hand to the roof. Soon, he had carved enough of the snow away to wave his hand very slightly, his fingers appearing above the snow line for a second. With a few signals, he got the other members of their small party moving back and away from the troll-controlled undead. They accomplished this over the next hour, during which time the column kept moving, without changing its course or its general speed.

Thanks to Davo’s mistake in spreading his force around, it took a while for the full force of forty sentinels and eighteen druids to be brought together. But soon, they had three Druids of the Talon trailing the column in the air, one of them ready to rush away to the rest of the group at all times at need.

That undead host never deviated, almost as if they knew precisely where they were going at all times a comment made by a druid that had Davo wondering if the troll shamans had figured out some kind of point me spell like the one Harry had mentioned a time or two. His, however, only had limited utility on a planet filled with so much background magic as Azeroth.

“Actually, that might be accurate,” one of the other druids murmured, stroking his sideburns as Davo explained that spell. He was a little older-looking than most of the other druids, and in fact was the only druid outside of Fandral who had any facial hair. In his case, two long sideburns that fell to his collarbone. “There used to be many uses of the law of similarity in Arcana, who is to say that troll shamans couldn’t create a similar spell. Something from a giant who once lived in that settlement perhaps? Considering they had captured those five giants originally, that wouldn’t be so out of place.”

Davo grimaced.  “Captured by trolls, then sacrificed in a hideous ritual during which your very soul was eaten as you screamed, only to have your body defiled by the touch of saronite. Then, to add further insult to horrible injury, something you were carrying on your body leads your killers back to your people…”

Everyone there shivered at that. Even those kaldorei who disdained the vrykul, looking down on the giants as barbarians, could only feel horror at the idea of such a death.

Out of sight of the column and able to pick up the pace, the kaldorei and Davo, with his Unseen Path training, should have been able to move much faster than the shambling monstrosities and the lesser flesh golem or skeletons around them. However, this proved to not be the case. As Nealu had predicted, they simply kept going, not noticing the weather, day or night. The kaldorei of the expedition had learned to travel during the day if they had to, but it was never pleasant for them, given the harsh glare of the sun down onto the snow reflecting up into their eyes. Druid spells could energize them and protect their eyes, but even with Davo and a few Druids of the Claw clearing the way, it was still unpleasant.

Worse came when a snowstorm, more wind than snow, blew down from the north. It was so cold that the Druids of the Talon had to come down from on high or be frozen on the wing, despite all their spells could do to keep them warm. It was so bad that even Davo felt the chill bite through his multiple layers, and despite their Nature Magic, the group had to stop and dig into the snow to defend themselves.

It didn’t last very long, only five hours, but that was three hours at night, prime travel time for the kaldorei. By the time the Druids of the Talon had gotten into the air and found the column again, the kaldorei force had to race to keep up, ignoring the need to hide.

Four days of harsh, hard travel followed before the Druids of the Talon reported seeing signs of sporadic fighting. The column had split up at some point, with a large portion of the furbolg-based flesh golems and skeletons shifting ahead of the rest of the column, able to move even faster than the other undead, including, ironically, the few undead in the column that were based on trolls.

This forward force ran into the first of the giants. A small scouting party, or patrol force perhaps? It wasn’t clear, but the Druid of the Talon who reported what had happened to the rest of the host said that the seven giants had gone down swinging. When the rest of the column arrived, however, those seven giants unfortunately…

“What are we looking at here?”  Nealu murmured, keeping his gorge down with difficulty.

The Druids of the Talon who had seen the event hadn’t been able to. They had all retreated, only harsh training keeping them in the air or from making calls of distress that might have drawn attention from the three troll shamans.  Now one of them answered, looking away. “The, the shamans each did some kind of spell.  There was a conference before that, but then, they, they…”

“They cast a spell that tore the skeletons out of these bodies,” Davo murmured.  He’d seen worse a time or two after monster attacks, but rarely, and knowing that these had been sentient beings made it far worse.  “I… why?”

“I think they only brought along a certain amount of saronite.  These bodies, they were nearly torn apart by the furbolg skeletons and flesh golems. They wouldn’t have made very, very ‘whole’ Abominations.”

“That’s… on the one hand, it’s nice to know they couldn’t transport an infinite supply of saronite, but on the other hand, this is horrible… every dead they kill or, or worse, buried body they find, they’ll turn into new skeleton soldiers,” Faelitha whispered, one hand covering her mouth in shock.

“I know,” Davo said with a shake of his head.  He looked around the battlefield with a hunter’s eyes, noting the damage, the other bones, the remnants, before looking over at Ugyl Rainblade, one of the Druids of the Talon who had witnessed the battle. “They lost, what, sixty of the flesh golems and eighty furbolg skeletons and gained eight giant skeletons…”

“That’s what we assumed, aye. A… a good rate of exchange, I’d say, but not the best. If the other Vrykul this column encounters can fight as well or better…”

“Best not to put too much behind that hope,” Nealu grimaced. “Let’s move.”

Early that night the party reached the edge of a forest, the trees of which were massive, even to the kaldorei. Any tree in this forest would’ve been at home in Ashenvale at least during the wintertime. The smell of pine pervaded everything, overwriting even the scent of the undead host that had pushed into this forest ahead of them, making for the original target of this assault regardless of anything in their way.  It left a trail a blind man could follow with bushes and even a few of the smaller trees knocked over to make way for the rest.

Nealu and Davo were debating whether or not to simply follow along the course or break out into the forest to one side when one of the Druids of the Talon flew down from on high, transforming a moment after alighting on a nearby tree branch. “The, the undead host hit a defending force of giants around half a night’s journey ahead of us,” the Druid of the Talon reported grimly, his dark blue skin paler than normal by a good margin.  “There were simply too many of the undead, and the trolls were too canny. They left their Abomination mounts before the battle was joined.  The vrykul saw them, lost it, and charged in.”

“Lost it… ah, yes, I suppose my folk wouldn’t be too different if we saw our dead so defiled rather than resting in Mother Musha’s embrace,” Davo murmured.  “Let me guess, they were surrounded and wiped out?”

“Yes. The corrupted forces took significant losses in that fight. The vrykul learned pretty quickly they needed to crush the undead utterly, which, heh, um, came pretty easily to them.  But there were just too many undead.  The Vrykul were all pulled down and slaughtered. After... I’d estimate they added at least another twenty Abominations and ten more skeletons to their number. Another thirty vrykul fled when the fight went against them.”

Davo reached over and gently patted the Druid of the Talon’s shoulder. “Take a break, Ugyl. Such sights stick with you, and you need to be among your companions now.”  He didn’t wait for the acknowledgment, turning to one of the other Druids of the Talon, one that had been resting with the rest of the force up to that point.  Cyras, you’re up.”

Up to this point, Faelitha had been content to follow the two members of the Unseen Path as they trailed the enemy host. Now, though, she pointed to the side before Cyras Starswift could start transforming.  “I think we need to start spreading out through the forest as we go. We might still be too far behind them to change what we all know will happen, but if we can spread out far enough and come at them from different angles, we might be able to assassinate those shamans, who will surely be at the back of any fighting. And we can make up more time in this forest than we would out on the flatlands.”

The Druids of the Claw all nodded in agreement, transforming into deer or moose forms. The sentinels had mostly been using their bonded animal companions up to this point, and most of those animal companions were nearly exhausted after the past four days of harsh travel despite all Nature Magic could do to help. The Druids of the Claw, however, had magic to imbue them with more energy, and being in a forest was enough to help that process along.

Just as they had feared, the force of skeletons and saronite flesh golems were able to reach the giant settlement and attack it, although they very much did not have it all their own way. The nature of the troll-led host had reached the rest of the giant tribe, and they had fire arrows, torches, and stakes ready for them on the wooden palisade surrounding the village.

Still, to the watchers from above, it was a foregone conclusion which side was going to win. It might’ve seemed so to the Vrykul as well, because more than a dozen of them tried to flee from the wooden palisade, but too late. The children, young vrykul only the size of a normal kaldorei or smaller, were born to the ground by a few flesh golems that looked to have a mix of furbolg and giant spider parts, while more of the flesh golems followed up, completely surrounding the settlement.  None of those young rose even as skeletons, though.  The three commanding troll shamans were in fact nowhere to be seen.

This time, the defending vrykul didn’t react, shouting imprecations and howls of rage instead of charging out to defend their young.  It was a cold choice… and it would not save them.

The troll host attacked from all sides. The smaller flesh golems climbed the massive wall, losing eight or nine for every one of their number that reached the top, but getting up onto the wall in a few places, while the flesh golem based on vrykul that had already been gathered smashed the entrances down with some difficulty. After all, the settlement had been built to withstand raids from other giant tribes, so the defenses were built both incredibly thick and sturdy.

However, a wasting kind of spell from one of the shamans dealt with a significant portion of the defending wall, causing it to become rotted within seconds. When that portion of the wall fell, the undead poured through behind the newest flesh golem, and the battle was mostly over. Unfortunately, before any of the watching kaldorei could get into position to attack the shaman who had revealed himself, the troll moved forward, surrounded by flesh golems as living shields against their unseen fury.

Then came the clean-up. First, two of the shamans went around their own host, reinvigorating the flesh golem that had been smashed or badly abused. They even occasionally performed what looked like surgery, connecting bits and pieces of one flesh golem to another to give the ‘new’ one some further semblance of unlife. Meanwhile, the flesh golems themselves spread out, searching for more vrykul, gathering the bodies slowly and, unfortunately, pushing out into the forest, forcing the kaldorei to retreat out of bow range of the settlement.

But this process was quite slow. A significant portion of the furbolg, kaldorei, and troll-based flesh golems, and even more of the undead furbolg skeletons, had been smashed in this battle. From where he hid in the boughs of a pine tree near the cleared area around the village, Nealu estimated that they’d lost at least two-thirds of their starting force. Of course, they had plenty of vrykul bodies to rebuild with now, but still.  “There are at least four hundred giant bodies down there of various ages,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Given how slow this process is going, it’s going to take them days to ‘revive’ them.”

“That is a horrible use of the word revive, Nealu, and I counted four hundred and fifty-seven, an even mix between men and women, and around eighty children, depending on where the cutoff age is between child and adult among the vrykul, which I don’t know offhand,” Faelitha muttered from next to him, shivering as a shaman appeared, chewing on a vrykul finger.

He wasn’t in sight long enough for her to grab her bow, alas, but the sight both horrified and infuriated her further. “Do you think we can attack them? Pick off the undead in the Forest, then charge in close, aim for those shamans?  With them out in the open, if we can get up on the walls or on top of some of those huts…”

“I thought of it, but the troll shamans are no fools. They are leery of reprisals, and look, they’ve stationed some of the skeletons on the wall. I’d still try it, if we could get there, but there are too many flesh golems around the open area,” Nealu disagreed.

The vrykul had cleared more of the forest than needed for their palisade, leaving the area around it free of cover.  They’d even knocked down a few houses that served what looked like some kind of farming area before it was trampled by the corrupted and the skeletons under the troll’s command.

A moment later, one of the troll shamans shouted loud enough for his voice to reach the pair of kaldorei over the rest of the noises of the undead host. As the two kaldorei watched, a green glow rose from within the palisade, and suddenly several dozen new vrykul skeletons rose from one area of the walled settlement.  They began to move off, coming, it looked, straight towards the tree holding Nealu and Faelitha.

 “You have the right idea, though. We just can’t get away with an ambush here. Signal fallback, full fallback. I want us to start our trek back to Vordrassil now,” Nealu ordered as he led the way down the tree.

Faelitha nodded, even though a part of her, mainly her legs, complained about the very idea of more marching, particularly after so little time spent in the forest. However, Nealu looked like he had a plan, and after sending the signal, a single screeching owl noise followed by two caws from a crow, she began descending to the ground, asking, “And our destination?”

“The Druids of the Talon mentioned a place where we might be able to ambush this force on the return, a defile in the land they followed on the way out. “But only if we can get in position before they arrive.”

Leaving the trolls to their grisly victory feast, the work continued within the ruins of the giant settlement as they made their way back along the trail the undead had left behind, out of the forest and toward Vordrassil.  With two of the Druids of the Talon remaining behind to watch the enemy, they made good headway, stopping the next day to rest, then pushing on that night, doing this for the next three days.

Soon, they came to the area where Nealu hoped to ambush the enemy column. It was a defile, a far more open one than the expedition had taken at one point, which had been more like a barely covered-over tunnel, but if the troll host had passed through it heading towards their target, they were almost undoubtedly going to simply retrace their steps coming back. And in that defile, we’ll have surprise and height on our side.

 “If we’re going to ambush the troll shamans, this is the only place we can probably do it,” Nealu explained, causing Davo and Faelitha to nod.

For the next day and a half, the group rested and prepared the ambush site as best they could. Meanwhile, the Druids of the Talon continued to watch events back at the giant settlement. Turning the Vrykul into undead took a lot out of the troll shamans, and they had to take several hours between each iteration of that spell.  They did indeed have only a limited amount of saronite, but they used it all, creating a further thirty Abominations, those with the most intact bodies. The others were all raised as skeletons.

Thus, it took them the better part of a week to transform the entire settlement and reach the ambush site.

The defile worked even better as an ambush point because of this change in the formation's makeup, at least at first. Within the defile, the Vrykul had very little room to maneuver, and the troll entered the defile with the giant flesh golem only able to walk one abreast. This allowed those who were still acting as the carriers for the troll shamans to be targeted directly by the ambushers with almost ridiculous ease from the sides of the defile.

Elation filling him, Davo freed his fingers from the bowstring to count down, then fired. The arrow, almost large enough to be a stabbing spear to a troll or kaldorei, slammed into and through the side of one of the troll shamans, burying itself entirely through the shaman from one side and out the other, hitting its heart as a sentinel put an arrow through its brain from the other side equally.

Three of the other shamans fell similarly in that very instant, but the fifth raised his staff, shouting a spell even as arrows came his way. The Abomination directly behind the one acting as his carrier reached forward, using its arms and upper body to defend him.

Arrows and spears slammed into and through the skin, burying deep. A few of those spears had come from Druids of the Claw, who had placed Nature Magic spells within them, and seconds later, Astral Kindling assisted arrows and Stellar Flare spells and others exploded throughout the host, causing chaos.

However, that one troll shaman was still alive, and even as its carrier went to one knee, and another Abomination in front of it moved to join the one already defending him with their saronite corrupted bodies, the rest of the column split. Within seconds, the skeletons, flesh golems and abominations were scrabbling up both sides of the defile towards the ambushers.

Even as he loosed further arrows down into the defile, Davo noticed something, something that made him hesitate even as Nealu signaled the fallback on his horn. Dozens of the undead skeletons, the ones raised from the burial site and the vrykul who had not been given the saronite treatment, had collapsed where they had been standing.  At least half of them.

A wild surmise hit him then, and he quickly turned, jumping into one of the small personal igloo-like constructs, leaving behind his bow and quiver in his haste.  Uncaring of that, he began to dig himself deeper into the snow and ice, ignoring the sentinels and druids trying to hold the edge of the defile.  Seeing the worried expression on Faelitha’s face, visible on the young kaldorei’s expression and in the set of her ears alike, he hissed.  “Go, pull entirely back, just as we planned. I’ll be all right. We in the Unseen Path know how to hide.”

Faelitha hesitated for a moment, but the undead were swarming up the steep edges of the defile so fast and so quickly that it was horrifying. Even the Vrykul made their way up the defile quickly, indeed far quicker than they could have otherwise. Each upward reach pulled the flesh golems or skeletons a few dozen yards at a time, their large hands digging deep into the ice and ground.

Thanks to the days spent planning it out, all of the sentinels were able to retreat from the ambush point by simply hopping onto the backs of Druids of the Claw in their deer or moose forms. They raced away both on this side of the defile and the other side, making no effort to keep fighting.

As Davo had hoped, the flesh golem, abominations and remaining skeletons milled around the enemy host for a time. The flesh golem and undead had programmed responses. They didn’t have true intelligence, and it took a moment for the troll shaman below, the sole surviving living member of the march, to order them to race after the retreating sentinels and transformed druids.

As they did, Davo was left there for a moment. He heard a particularly heavy thump and chanced to slowly shift his head sideways to peer through an area of snow that wasn’t as thick above him as the rest. A large Abomination had just stepped down almost directly on top of him. This one was followed by still more, but no one found him.  The Abominations and skeletons didn’t have any extrasensory abilities, no heat sight to find the living. They could be fooled.

Remaining where he was, Davo counted at least two dozen sets of massive feet moving past him. He kept his breathing even, watching the defile, then his eyes widened as the Abomination who was carrying the one remaining shaman climbed up the other side of the defile. Two other Vrykul climbed on either side of the first, and a fourth came up behind, using only its legs to climb, its arms raised protectively.

But it wasn’t enough. Those arms didn’t reach high enough to protect the troll on his ‘throne’ and Davo saw his chance.

Surging out of his hiding place, Davo pulled his war staff off his back with one hand, even as he reached the edge of the defile.  Several of the Abominations were still in the area, and one of the Abominations turned, sensing the movement.  It reached for him, but Davo hurled himself through the air, launching himself across the defile with a bellowing roar. “For Mother Musha and Ohn’ahra!”

The giant that had followed the one carrying the troll shaman up the defile turned, tried to surge upward, and tried to swat him out of the air, but missed; then Davo was on the back of the strange platform holding the troll shaman. Before the shaman could do more than raise his hands, the edge of one side of Davo’s war staff slammed down, blazing with the fire array that Harry had worked into it.

When the brutal blow struck, it chopped the troll shaman’s head in half down to its neck.

Davo had no time to celebrate, of course, and hurled himself sideways. A fist of the Abomination to the left of the carrier crashed into where he had been standing, and Davo grunted in pain as the blow caught his leg, breaking both bones within. Davo had broken his legs before and knew that feeling. He grunted as he slammed into the side of the defile, where he stabbed his arm into a handhold made by an Abomination.  Hanging there, Davo looked around and down, wondering if he had just sold his life, and finding at least that his guess had been right. No fucking skeleton army for you, my trollish enemy!

All the remaining giant skeletons and the re-risen skeletons among the rest of the host had collapsed. This left just the Abominations, of which there were still far, far too many. At least thirty in sight of where Davo hung, and many more up on the snow chasing after the rest of the ambushers. 

Ah well… I didn’t think that this would be a round trip, Davo thought, hanging there with his free hand, his other hand clenched around his war staff’s shaft.  “Come then. Let us see how many chunks of you I can carve out before you crush me!”

As Davo waited to be slain, the Abominations, both those still in the defile and those still climbing out of it, turned. Not towards him, but down the way they had been moving. Nor were they alone.  The Abominations and flesh golems out on the snow above paused in their pursuit of the sentinels and transformed druids.  Then, they began marching.

Once more, even the ones that have been chasing after their fleeing sentinels twisted around, making a course towards Vordrassil. The Vrykul who had been climbing up the side of the defile began to shift back down to join the rest of the column as it moved, none of them making any effort to attack Davo. 

Seeing that, Davo held his hand even as one of them idly smacked into him hard enough to nearly break his arm where he was hanging. Davo held on grimly, gritting his jaw tightly to keep from shouting in pain, although stopping himself from attacking was just as hard. The giant saronite corrupted construct didn’t even seem to notice him, continuing on his way down, and then following after the others, the whole column moving on.

For several moments as they departed, Davo was left hanging alone in the defile, marked now by the corpses of the troll shamans, the bones of the skeletons, and the worse-smelling offal of the twice-risen. Then, a hawk swooped down from on high, transforming into Cyras midair, a trick the Druids of the Talon occasionally like to do. Cyras landed on the snow underneath where Davo still clung, shaking his head as he stared up at the tauren.  “You are a madman, Davo Bluefeather.”

“I am a member of the Unseen Path. We are oath sworn to destroy those who use Fel or Tainted magic wherever they are and seek out lesser threats to the world. Nowhere in that oath is our sanity guaranteed,” Davo quipped through bleeding lips. He had nearly bit through his lip trying not to cry out. 

Then Davo’s broken leg ground against the side of the ice and snow, and his attempt at humor disappeared into a hiss of pain.  “Now, could you please help me get me down from here, hopefully without further breaking my leg?”

Soon, the ambushers started to make their way back to the ambush point. When they arrived, they found the shaman who had ordered them to follow the ambushers had been far too smart. The Abominations had been ordered to attack from range.  And while they might have been made of ice and snow, the projectiles the Abominations had created were each the size of half a kaldorei’s body.

These makeshift projectiles had claimed one sentinel, smashing her off of the druid she was riding with such force it had broken her spine and neck, killing her instantly. Two others had taken injuries, and on the other side of the defile from where Davo had started the battle, things had gone a little worse. Nealu had been a little slower than Davo to retreat with his own group despite signaling that very thing, and more of the smaller flesh golems had been able to get up and after them. Hurled spears and hatchets had wounded four of the druids and sentinels on that side, although none had died, thankfully, even after the Abominations had reached the top of the defile and begun to hurl their deadly snowballs after them.

The druids saw to the wounded with alacrity, while Davo explained to Nealu and Faelitha what he’d seen and what had instigated his addition to their ambush. While Faelitha admonished him about acting on a hunch like that, Nealu simply stroked a finger up one of his ears in thought.  “That’s actually good to know. And the fact that we cost the enemy at least three hundred giant skeletons between us isn’t exactly a bad thing.”

He turned away, staring in the direction that the remaining corrupted dead had gone.  “I wonder… It’s obvious that the flesh golems somehow have orders to return to their creators.  Judging by how they dropped everything to start in that direction, they can’t deviate from those orders. And there’s no longer a living shaman here to give them further orders…”

“You're thinking we can attack again? Pick them off one by one? That the flesh golems won’t have the intelligence to respond, regardless of their size? The furbolg-based ones and the rest have before when we hit their patrols,” Faelitha warned, playing devil’s advocate although she very much wanted to do that very thing.

“Maybe, but maybe the order to return to the area where the shaman’s influence has corrupted the ground overrides that kind of thing this far away from it. It’s something to discover,” Nealu argued back.  “The shift from trying to follow up on our ambush, trying to close with our retreating forces and then simply marching away was too abrupt to be anything else. We can take advantage of that.”

“If we can catch them,” Davo reminded his fellow Seeker, causing Nealu to grimace a little.

“We can but try,” Nealu argued back.

To that, Davo and Faelitha could only nod. Soon, the small force was on its way once more, with most of the sentinels resting on the backs of the transformed druids.

Through the use of even more Nature Magic than before, the group was able to eventually catch up and attack the end of the column. This time, there was no time to set up an ambush, nor was there any way to get ahead of them to do so. Instead, the small force of mixed sentinels and druids simply raced in, arrows flying from the sentinels and Nealu, while Davo charged forward, knowing his war staff was far more dangerous.

Several of the Abominations at the back of the column, those struck directly by their attacks, twisted as they came under fire, charging back into the attackers. The rest of the column, though, as Nealu had thought, simply continued on its path. However, that didn’t make the assault suddenly easier.

Dealing with Vrykul was never easy, and most of these were some of the most recently risen, still clad in chain mail or heavy leather armor for the most part. They were immensely durable, and these new Abominations moved in a coordinated manner that the skeletons and the less put-together flesh golems could never match.

One druid paid the price as he closed in. His moose form’s horns gored one Abomination’s legs, only for another one’s fist to crash down on his head, crushing skull and brain alike. Another Abomination raised a spear at a bear as it closed, goring the grizzly even as the bear’s claws raked its neck and chest.

Seeing their arrows having little effect without Nature Magic, many of the sentinels charged in as well.  Moon glaives swung at legs, while Davo ducked under a blow. Rolling through the snow, he came up, thrusting his spear upward into the testicles of one of the saronite-infested corpses. The blow didn’t do anything but grab the creature’s attention, but Davo got behind it, his war staff flashing in either direction.

Without a shaman there to give its form more of a facsimile of life, some physical constraints quickly became paramount. The giant collapsed, its feet no longer obeying its commands. It still tried to swipe at one of the nearby sentinels, but he danced out of the way, moon glaive flashing into the Abomination’s wrist.

This didn’t make the hand any less dangerous, though, as another sentinel found to her cost as she tried to slash in, only for that flailing, useless hand to smack her aside with as much power as a ballista bolt. She flew through the air and landed in the snow, ribs broken. Another Abomination tried to finish her off, but then Nealu was there, stabbing down into the back of the Abomination with his own moon glaive, breaking its spine. The creature fell, spasming, not dead, but no longer able to move its body as its corruption demanded.

Nearby, Faelitha darted in, bow raised, an Astral Kindling spell-imbued arrow on her string, firing into the eye socket of one of the still fighting giant flesh golems. Its head exploded in the next second, and she whipped up another arrow, firing down into the flailing construct, before shouting orders for other druids to spread around the same spell among the Sentinels.

Four more of the giant flesh golems fell, but the rest of the column continued on its way, completely unperturbed by the losses behind it. By the time the last of the new Abominations had been dealt with, the rest were almost to the horizon.

“I think this proves that we can still pick off portions of their forces, but the new Abominations might be too deadly for us to keep this up for long,” Nealu growled, shifting from the shoulder of one of the flesh golems who had stopped moving while kneeling in the snow, a polar bear Druid of the Claw having torn out its heart.

“Agreed. I think we’d be able to do this twice more before luck starts going against us,” Davo grunted, wiping blood from the edges of his war staff, smiling faintly at how well Harry’s work had done.

“Could we send a report to Lady Whisperwind? Maybe she can get her forces around Vordrassil? Or maybe Archdruid Staghelm’s forces?”

The two members of the Unseen Path shook their heads at that. They had far better understanding of the distances involved, and also now understood the speed of the corrupted hosts.  “Doubtful.  Still, let us see if we can pass them by tonight, rest, and do this again tomorrow.”

Soon after burying their two dead, the force moved on, leaving the detritus of the flesh golems where they had fallen. They were able to indeed get ahead of the remains of the once-mighty host and hit them again the next night.  However, a snowstorm hit just as the fight wrapped up, so cold and dangerous it forced the hunters to take shelter.  They were on their way the next night once more but found trying to gain on the undead harder next to impossible now.

They were well behind the remnants of the corrupted force when Ugyl swooped down out of the sky to report that there was absolutely no chance of them catching up with that force before it hit the area where the shaman’s influence around Vordrassil resided.  “The lead portion of the enemy host already hit the outer edge of the corrupted zone. I watched them closely, and they are moving with more alacrity, more spirit? It’s hard to describe the difference between the influenced flesh golem and the uninfluenced ones,” the druid of the town muttered, before frowning and staring up into the sky.

Another raven flew there, surprising everyone within the small force. One druid of the talon was supposed to be above them, while two remained over the enemy force as a third reported in and another moved in between the two positions on rotation. Now though, one of the ones that had been over the enemy force had shifted to join Ugyl.

When he landed and transformed, the new druid’s words chilled every heart that heard them.  “The force we have been dealing with wasn’t the only host! Another just came from the east to meet the remnants when I left them.”

This second host had been even larger, with far more in the way of green-skinned trolls and four more shamans. It had headed in an entirely different direction soon after Nealu and Davo had pulled their forces together and gone after the first column. This second troll-led host had headed straight east and was coming back now.  With it came several thousand giant skeletons and at least a dozen vrykul-based Abominations.

“I don’t know what happened out there, but there aren’t nearly as many Abominations as there were with our column. Whatever tribe they hit fought back hard and seemed to figure out pretty quickly what they had to do to their own dead to make sure they couldn’t be used against them,” the second druid reported.

“Maybe they hit a skeleton graveyard first, and that gave this tribe the clue? Or maybe they were already fleeing ahead of the enemy, and the local troll commander decided to come back with his current spoils. Heck, they might have just run out of saronite,” Nealu mused. “Regardless, this changes everything. We were already badly outnumbered. Now? Any thought of keeping a cordon in place around Vordrassil might well be lost entirely.”

“That’s not all, and this news might be good. Before I left to report back to you all, I saw something else in the distance, something trailing after the trolls and their corrupted creatures.  I think it’s a small band of Vrykul.”

Nealu and Davo exchanged glances, and Davo pushed himself to his feet from where he had been resting his legs.  Spells of invigoration and healing could only do so much before the body really began to feel the pressure they'd been putting on themselves.  “In that case, let’s go see if we can make certain that it’s not only the trolls that can add to their numbers.”

OOOOOOO

While Nealu and Davo’s force moved southeast on a new mission, this time one of diplomacy, to the south, Fandral’s company was hard-pressed. While he had been able to decimate and turn away that first small column of undead, the enemy was making a concerted effort to get past him, and while the Druids of the Talon could patrol the area around the contaminated zone well enough, that didn’t automatically mean that the kaldorei could stop forces from getting out.

And as Nealu and Davo had recently learned to their cost, the troll Shaman was no fool.  Around the same time, Davo and Nealu brought their troops together and began to parallel the troll-led host to the northeast, and the trolls tried to get past the southernmost portion of the cordon with small groups of fast-moving, gray-skinned trolls led by a few normal trolls.

At first, Fandral and his group got lucky. The Druids of the Talon who spotted the first such group led a band of sentinels to not one, but three such small bands, one after another. The next day, another eye in the sky was able to do much the same, with Fandral leading the force this time against a group of seven trolls. Four were gray-skinned trolls. They were accompanied by two green-skinned warriors, able to fight with their full faculties and well armed as trolls reckoned things, along with a single shaman.

The shaman was a barely trained apprentice, and Fandral tore him to pieces with ease. In fact, to call him a shaman, in Fandral’s opinion, was a misnomer. The youngster barely knew a few spells, and none of them well enough to use them in battle.

However, at the same time, another group was able to get past them further to the west. Only the Druid of the Talon who spotted them and called in several of his fellows to attack from on high, stopped them from escaping to wherever they were trying to go to the south. While the sentinels and druids could move extremely quickly, the trolls could move decently well and had proven on the journey to Vordrassil that they were masters of moving through the snow unseen. 

The cordon was simply too loose, too wide. In an effort to combat this, Fandral decided to move his main force closer to the corrupted area and sent out his Druids of the Talon on longer patrols to either side, with small teams of sentinels, three each, spread out in a much wider area. This meant the druids of the talon could call in smaller forces, deal with any small bands if they called in enough of their fellows, and he and his would stay in a central location, able to respond to any larger force.

This worked for five days, but then around the same time Davo was proving his insanity, things changed again.

“Lord Fandral, druid incoming,” a male sentinel, whose name Fandral hadn’t bothered to learn, said, pointing up into the sky.

Fandral’s eyes from where he had been meditating, staring up into the sky. The dot in the distance quickly grew to the point where he could make out what kind of bird it was, and he frowned thoughtfully. “An owl, with gray and blue feathers. Pellonian Fogbow from the west, part of Lusa Silvertalon’s patrol. Hmmm… he would not be coming to us if he did not have something of import. Get the rest of the troops up and ready to go.”

The sentinel nodded sharply and moved away from the tree, if such a name could be used to describe the scrawny thing that Fandral had been leaning against, shifting to other points in the small makeshift campsite they had thrown up here. Most of the camp was hidden under the snow in the form of buried igloos, but there were a few areas like this tree and a raised stone to the north where a scout could hide in a snowdrift to watch out for trouble. Yet from a distance, even Fandral’s form against the tree would’ve been difficult to discern with the amount of snow that he had allowed to pile on the blanket he carried around his shoulders at present.

Secrecy like that was second nature to any kaldorei force and had become doubly so since they reached Northrend. And, although Fandral hated to admit it, the lessons passed on by Narvae and Purde had proven too effective for him to ignore.

Even the tauren knew and could pass on lessons about hiding ourselves in this strange terrain, Fandral remembered now, scowling at the idea, a part of him resenting the idea that the tauren had been placed in command of some of his own druids elsewhere around the corrupted zone. Still, he couldn’t argue with the competence of the warriors of the Unseen Path. Only a fool would ignore competence like theirs.

Pellonian landed on a tree limb for a moment, then began to transform, hopping down from there as he did in a smooth transition from one form to another, which earned an approving nod from Fandral.  All too often, transforming from one form to another when you were excited or had just exerted yourself was difficult for druids, especially young ones like Pellonian.  “Lord Archdruid,” the younger kaldorei intoned, bowing his head, his ears standing rigid at attention, one hand clenched to his chest. 

“Report,” Fandral said, waving off the formality. It had its place to be sure, and if circumstances were otherwise, he would’ve insisted on such things as his just due. But that was back in Nordrassil (the city, not the world tree whose name it shared), not here in this frozen realm of endless cold and wind. 

“There is a force of trolls and their constructs to the west of us. Fifty strong. Twenty green trolls, at least four of whom looked to be shamans from their panoply. They are accompanied by a force of eighty skeletons, all of whom are based on furbolgs.”

“Skeletons? Not constructs?” Fandral nearly demanded, while around him his attack force quickly got ready, summoning their bonded companions and readying weapons, be it moon glaives, bows, or, in many cases, spears. 

“We flew down to be certain. Skeletons, not constructs.  We didn’t see a single construct, and the mix between green- and grey-skinned trolls is accurate.”

“Skeletons…Less susceptible to element-based spells, but more susceptible to impacts both physical and Nature Magic- based,” Fandral mused. “But with that many trolls?” Twenty green-skinned trolls were more than had been seen so far on this front at any one time.

“We thought it strange as well, my Lord, and Senior druid Silverwing had us traveling in every direction, as well as deeper into the corrupted area to make certain there was no other force around.  We did not see any such,” Pellonian reported.

The druidic lodges did not have a rigid hierarchy like the sentinels, but occasionally those more senior among the brotherhood were given formal titles.

“Hmmm… sound thinking,” Frandral begrudged. “If this is a trap, we should have warning enough to break contact. Good. Guide us there.  We will gather up any of our smaller squads between us and the target.”

With that, Fandral turned away from the younger druid, gesturing to the sentinels and other druids around him.  “Transform to your fleet-of-foot forms. Pellonian will tell us when we are close, so we have time to transform into our battle forms. We will be joined by further sentinels as we go.”

His druids all nodded, and within seconds, he had transformed himself into a giant stag. This body was more sure-footed than a moose or any of the local herbivores that they had seen so far, and faster over long distances. The others followed suit, taking various forms, and soon, the whole force was off.

They traveled for a good portion of the night before they met the first smaller sentinel squad.  This group joined them, and they moved on, finding two more before, near dawn, a harsh call from on high stopped them for a moment. This area was rocky scrub brush, covered with numerous small trees, which bore the name of tree just about as well as the one that Fandral had been leaning on when Pellonian found them: that is, not very well at all.

Even out here beyond the area corrupted by saronite and Vordrassil’s foulness, the soil simply wasn’t good enough to support further growth.

Fandral wondered if that was because of Vordrassil, or because the land hadn’t yet fully settled before he had planted Andrassil out here. Admittedly, at the time, Northrend had yet to completely separate from the rest of Kalimdor but back then this whole area had been a vast forest, home to all sorts of animals and several furbolg clans. What had happened since the burning, though, he had little clue and less time to ponder.

The kaldorei slowly wound their way forward still, following the dot of Pellonian in the air, now moving slower and with an emphasis on hiding themselves rather than speed. As dawn broke in the east, they moved even slower, grimaces on many faces as the too-bright light invaded their eyes, even causing a few to curse under their breath.  But they pulled cloth strips over their faces, and even over their eyes in places, and the group continued. When at war, the time of day did not matter any longer.

Fandral did, however, call a brief break, transforming and raising a hand flat over his head before bringing it down.  Small bits of jerky and gulps of heated snow water went around, followed by a few rejuvenation spells to remove any tiredness.

Soon after the group resumed moving, Fandral heard the sound of feet on the ground ahead of them. The trumping of troll boots, followed by the strange tik-tak-crunch noises of skeletal feet moving through the snow. Even troll voices reached the kaldorei as they talked to one another, joking and laughing as they moved.

The noise set Fandral’s teeth on edge, and he wasn’t the only one. Many of his fellow kaldorei grimaced as they heard that noise, and not just because it was troll speech, a language that was harsh and grating to kaldorei sensibilities. No, it was the idea of the trolls being so lost in depravity as to be joking and laughing as if everything was normal while trooping alongside such unnatural things as the skeletons, or their somehow neutered fellows, the gray-skinned trolls.

“Spread out,” he whispered, pointing at two of his druids.  “Shalu, you will take command of one force, five of the sentinels and six of our fellow druids go around behind them to the other side of the formation. Signal us when you’re in position. Musa, three of your brethren, and five of the sentinels. You’ll attack them from behind. The rest of us will stay here and attack them from this flank. The signal that you are in position will be three owl hoots followed by one crow call. The signal to attack will be a bear’s roar. Mine.”

Without further preamble, the company broke apart, the named druids gathering their fellows before racing off in the same direction for now to get around and behind the enemy flank. Meanwhile, Fandral and his folk continued to parallel the trolls as they moved south, but… slowly. More slowly than Fandral had thought they would be moving, but he guessed even the skeletons and the gray-skinned trolls couldn’t really move all that quickly, even without any of the flesh constructs with them.

Whatever had been done to the gray-skinned trolls, and Fandral did have a few ideas of how Nature Magic spells could siphon the energy off someone, it had definitely hampered their coordination. They just couldn’t move as fast, with the dexterity or coordination as a normal troll.

Fandral fanned his people out, slowly paralleling the trolls, making certain to stay hidden among the snow and the scattered trees and rocks. When the signal reached him from the other side of the troll formation that Shalu was in position, Fandral imbued himself with several body-enhancement spells, then called upon his war form, changing into a massive polar bear.

Once he was done, hiding behind a large snowdrift, Fandral charged out, bellowing a battle cry as he crossed the intervening distance between himself and the first six skeleton warriors on that side of the troll column. He crashed into and through them, smashing all of them to flinders before they even realized they were under attack, but the other skeletons reacted with alacrity. The furbolg and scattered kaldorei skeletons brought their stabbing spears down, trying to slam them home into his body. The skeletons found their tips turning or shattering against his massive frame, his durability enhanced by both the Barkskin and Ironfur spell.

From behind him, the sentinels of his small force fired, targeting the green-skinned trolls. Several of them fell, looking more like pincushions than living things, but still twitching, still moving. The trolls’ unnatural regeneration was such that only a shot to the brain or heart could put them down. Only two of them fell, the other with one straight through the heart, injuries that even troll regeneration couldn’t deal with.

From out of the woods, the rest of the druids came. Then, from the other flank and behind the column, the other ambush teams joined in, arrows hammering in.

Despite being so beset, the trolls did not panic or fall into berserk fury.  One of them, an unmarked warrior, blew on a horn, while a shaman whirled his staff around his head and slammed the end of his staff into two large drums that he was carrying on his back, the top of them sticking up just above his shoulders.

At first, Fandral, busy as he was with the skeleton warriors, thought that they were ordering the undead and the gray-skinned trolls around.  However a second later, a dome of putrescent gray energy formed around that troll and a few of the others. Arrows sent their way withered and decayed midair, losing their points.  Even the ones that had been infused by the magic of a few of the druids crumbled, the spells going off midair, without hitting their target.

Another shaman revealed himself at that point, stamping on the ground and doing a mad dance for a brief second before flinging out what looked like some kind of Arcana, a misty, putrid green-colored wave of energy. It struck the druids coming in from behind, and all of them seemed to slow. One or two shook their heads groggily, losing some manner of vitality.

A weaponized version of whatever had been done to the gray-skinned trolls, perhaps? Not that it matters right now. That troll had just made himself enemy number one in Fandral’s eyes, and he roared, smashing through several gray-skinned trolls, charging towards that shaman.

Six green-skinned trolls got in his way. They hurled hatchets, but not aimlessly at his large body. Rather, each of them aimed for his head or feet. Every hatchet connected, but the only one that did any true damage was the one that slammed into his forehead and almost skittered into his eyes, causing Fandral to reflexively flinch away. This opened him up for a slash at his neck from one of the others with another hatchet as they closed, while still others hacked his legs. They were coordinated, working together, a sign that the trolls, for all their wildness, for all that they leaned heavily on the constructs and the undead skeletons for their numbers, still retained the coordination and ability to be dangerous, especially with more skeletons trying to turn towards Fandral from the rest of his charging folk.

If, that is, Fandral was a normal bear. He wasn’t, and with his body toughened by two enhancement spells, with his speed and strength enhanced, Fandral smashed two of them into the ground, crushing their skulls and chests alike, to the point where even troll regeneration would never bring them back. Another he bit down on, tearing him in half, before crushing his head.

After all, being torn in half might allow a troll to eventually regenerate, he reflected, before a sound from above caused his eyes to widen. Five crow caws, coming from the throat of an owl. It wasn’t exactly a perfect signal, but that very unnaturalness was a signal in and of itself: a signal of incoming trouble.

Instantly, one out of every three of the druids backed away from the front line or tried to. The trolls didn’t let up, instead they tried harder to fight back against the ambush along with their skeleton constructs. Only a few of the other war forms were able to break away, shifting back to rejoin the sentinels and the other druids who had engaged in close combat.  Meanwhile, the group of sentinels at the back of the enemy formation, the ones closest to the corrupted zone, had already shifted away, disappearing back into the scrub around them, leery of an ambush.

However, it was too late. From several hiding places within the scrub came two large arachnid-based abominations, matching the first variety of such the expedition had seen. They weren’t nearly as big, or as well-formed as the Abominations that Davo and the rest to the east had been dealing with, but just as dangerous, and could be hidden within the ice and snow to an alarming degree, as they showed again here.

One of them burst out from a snow mound where it had been hidden almost directly in front of two of the sentinels. One of them got off a shot up into the construct’s face before one of its large chitin-covered mandibles swung. Grabbing up one of the kaldorei by her head, the construct crushed her skull with the ease of a kaldorei with a grape.

The other one had already pulled out her moon glaive and hacked into its side. He was able to duck under a blow from its other hand, raising his moon glaive and almost removing a few of the small hands sticking out of the limb at a haphazard angle, before the body of her companion slammed into her, taking her to the ground.

The other abomination wasn’t quite as close, but at the same time as that was going on, in the air, several of the Druids of the Talon were shocked to realize that they weren’t the only ones there. Several undead constructs, their tiny bodies marked with very small amounts of saronite black, were also winging their way closer.

With a harsh cry, the senior-most druid of the talent in the area, Ydent Silverwing, dove towards the incoming flying constructs. Soon, a battle erupted in the sky, with the constructs getting by far the worst of it, but there were several of them.

As the spider abominations charged forward, the battle soon became general, worsened when several lesser flesh constructs moved to join the fight from nearby hiding places. How the saronite constructs had been hidden so well, Fandral wasn’t certain. Perhaps the two shamans with this group had made them as they moved, hiding them at the same time from the eyes of his fellow druids? Perhaps they had been settled there in some past time, and only activated now at the shaman’s behest? 

Regardless, it really didn’t matter. The lopsided ambush had turned against the ambushers, and his troops were taking casualties. Casualties, which, as always, they could ill afford.

Fandral barreled through the last of the defenders around the two shamans, raising a paw and slamming it down, sparking with the energy of a Sunfire spell into and through the shaman shield. The blow crushed the head of the one who had been creating the shield like a melon.  Splattered by the blood and brain matter of his fellow, the other one tried to race away, only for Fandral to bear him to the ground with a howl.

Biting the shaman’s head off, Fandral spat it into the face of one of the gray-skinned trolls, causing the female troll to flinch backward. This put her in goring range of one of his fellows who had taken the form of a moose.

With the death of the second shaman, the skeletons in the party lost their unnatural life, collapsing in small piles to the ground. Not enough to turn the tide of battle alone, this still gave Fandral room to maneuver, and he shifted back into his normal form, roaring. “Retreat! Retreat straight south! Move through and beyond this force!”

The sentinels fighting the abominations will have to do for themselves; I can’t afford to be stuck here as more troops come our way from the north, He thought, before using a wide ranged Sunfire down, burning more than eight of the enemy at the time.

Luckily, it looked as if the trolls were as ignorant of the kaldorei language as the kaldorei were of theirs, and the sudden shift from trying to simply pull back in every direction that they’d come in from to shifting further southward caused confusion and surprise enough among the trolls and constructs such that they got in one another’s way. The two abominations still claimed another two lives, one druid and another sentinel from Musa’s force, but they were able to eventually wound both constructs enough that they slowed the abominations down enough that they could break out in both directions, shifting further around the fighting.

As they did, four of the remaining sentinels with him summoned their bonded companions. On animal back, the four charged in, helping to extricate Fandral and the other druids. Fandral himself smashed two more green-skinned trolls to the ground, then stomped on their heads, his hands and feet covered in a Rip spell, turned.  Batting aside a spear from a grey-skinned troll Fandral leapt up onto the back of one of his fellows and used a Typhoon spell to blast every creation and troll in front of him off their feet with gale-force winds.  As the spell left him, Fandral swayed, his three ongoing enhancement spells flicker for a moment and Fandral grimaced.  I still need to get better at empowering spells long term, damn it! 

“Away!” He shouted, as that same call came from above again. More trouble was still coming their way.

Transforming from one form to another while engaged in combat was incredibly difficult, but the druids under Fandral’s guidance were able to do it. Soon half of the number were on the back of their fellows, and they and the sentinels, on their own bonded companions, were racing southward.  After a few more seconds, they broke contact entirely, helped by a last volley of arrows from the sentinels under Shalu. Their arrows, further enhanced by one of the druids with them via the Astral Kindling spell, hammered into the constructs that had helped turn the ambush back on the kaldorei.

Fandral ordered his party to keep going until the hateful day gave way to the soothing night, cursing himself all the while for thinking attacking that group during the day was a good idea. We should have trailed after them, waiting until they were further from the corrupted zone and attacked at night, but I was too certain we could overcome them quickly. Too certain our eyes in the sky would see any trick or trap.

The losses they had sustained were bad, and worse, at least two of the sentinels’ bodies left behind were in enough shape to perhaps be raised again as constructs through contact with saronite. That was a horror that no kaldorei could face with equanimity, and none of his group were in a very good frame of mind when Fandral ordered a halt.  The druids shifted off their fellows and continued on their way on foot as Fandral called out with a harsh, blistering falcon cry, so harsh it hurt his throat.

A Druid of the Talon, a fierce-looking eagle, landed on his upraised arm, and Fandral ordered brusquely. “Find us a place to set up a hidden camp and get Silverwing and the rest of your fellows down to us. We’ll only want two of you on watch as we rest. I need to talk to Silverwing about what happened. I know something was going on, but I couldn’t make out any details beyond the constructs and abominations whose presence you all missed.”

The Druid of the Talon hopped off, landing in the snow nearby.  A moment later he stood up in his normal body, marching alongside the

“The troll shamans have started to create flying constructs, Archdruid,” the Druid of the Talon reported grimly, not taking umbrage at his senior’s tone.  “They aren’t dangerous, but there were twelve of them, and smashing them out of the sky took us time. But we all saw skeleton warriors marching out from the corrupted zone in the distance.”

“So it was a planned ambush of us then? I hadn’t thought that trolls would be able to change their tactics like that! And hiding those two abominations, let alone the lesser flesh golems? How did you miss them?” Fandral growled angrily, wanting very much to blame someone for what had come from his own arrogance.

At that, the Druid of the Talon flinched, but did not look away, simply saying that he had no idea. Fandral grunted at that and sent the man off. Soon, the watchers in the sky were able to direct the sentinels and their fellow druids on the ground to a small hill.

The hill allowed for a greater line of sight for the sentinels, although the area within that ring of rocks was a bit cramped until they began to dig into the snow and down to the ground underneath, which was a surprisingly deep way down. The snow in this area of Northrend was monstrously deep and densely packed, as if this area hadn't known a true spring, as the kaldorei would call it, for decades.

Ydent Silverwing joined Fandral as the work on the makeshift camp was going on, reporting more details about the flying constructs, and his own opinion on how the two abominations and the lesser saronite-created constructs had been missed.  “They must’ve been sent out and hidden there at some point in the past during the day. We’re not very close to the corrupted territory, but the trolls might’ve been able to do it at some point while we were busy spotting and leading the small squads to the equally small troll groups.  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other flesh constructs or skeletons hidden in similar places occasionally far past their normal perimeter.”

“And finding such would be difficult at the best of times, especially from the air. Hmm… could they have been sacrificing those smaller groups to lure you away?” Fandral mused to himself, scratching at the beard he was rather pleased he had grown in order to further emulate the age and power that Stormrage had shown while in the mortal realm.  Not that he would ever admit that. “If they were already aware of you before even creating those flying creatures, it might make sense.”

Silver wing frowned pensively.  “I don’t know. But I think that the worst aspect was the flying constructs, Lord Archdruid. They’re not dangerous on their own, but they are a very dangerous precedent. Worse, I’m not sure we got them all in that fight. If they simply can keep their distance and relay what they are seeing back to the shamans who created them…”

“Then they will match our ability to watch from on high. Not a pleasant thought. That has made the difference in our situation several times,” Fandral grumbled.  “Still, there is nothing we can do about it now.”

“Should we not warn Lady Whisperwind?”

Fandral ground his teeth at that, keeping his expression calm and analytical despite the sudden wave of anger rising in him at the amount of respect that Silverwing, another druid, paid to Tyrande Whisperwind.  Damn her to the Legion’s hells, how is it she still retains so much respect across our society?!  “No. For one thing, such a flight would take one of your fellows at least the rest of this day and maybe longer. For another, I doubt the expedition as a whole is lucky enough that the trolls are stupid enough to use such a tactic on one front at a time.”

He shook his head then, placing a hand on the younger druid’s shoulder, fighting an urge to squeeze in his still boiling anger.  “Pick the three most rested among your fellow Druids of the Talon. Send one to meet with your brethren to the west and inform them and the other small groups of sentinels what happened.”

At present, there were four Druids of the Talon and six sentinels still out there operating in small groups. 

“Set the other two as overwatch on us. I’ll pick out four of the sentinels to put on watch. The rest of us can get some sleep or meditation time in. Whichever, I think we deserve a little bit of a rest while that blasted sun is in the sky.”

However, in a true example of there being no rest for the wicked, Fandral was woken up nearly four hours later, with daylight still above them, by the harsh calls of hunting hawks.

He and the rest of his party woke up quickly, with Fandral being one of the first ones out of the buried igloo, staring up at the sky. Where before there had only been two bird forms up there, now there were at least sixteen, a murder of ravens or crow-shaped constructs attacking the two larger forms of the Druids of the Talon.

“That won’t be all. There is no way that the shamans who created those things would’ve simply sent them out after any other bird in the area,” Fandral murmured, scowling as he peered out into the darkness. Night elves could see like owls in the dark, and soon a cry went up as movement could be seen, coming in from the north.

“Silverwing, get your fellows into the air, help drive off those constructs. Everyone else, get ready to move,” Fandral ordered.  With the druids in the sky above, they’d been given enough warning to get away before the incoming host of skeletons and flesh golems reached them, and he was going to take it. But not without leaving a little present behind.

With that in mind, Fandral picked out one of the sentinels who had proven herself as one of the best in terms of hiding and gave her brisk orders even as two of his druids began to work Nature Magic over the woman and her quiver.

Hidden within snow, she waited, only one eye able to see through the snow to see the vague shapes, more outlines than anything else, of the undead force, which trooped in and over the makeshift camp. They entered the igloo, toppled quickly, then came back out without pause, having found no one inside.

As they began to move on, she slowly shifted, pushing lightly out of the snow until she could see the back of the column. There, she zeroed in on one green-skinned troll, a shaman.

Between one second and the next, the sentinel raised her bow, a Nature Magic-infused arrow on her string. Even as the sudden movement made noise and the shaman turned, she fired. The arrow took him in the side of the head and through the brain box. A second arrow quickly flew, hammering into a second troll’s heart, and then she turned, grabbing at her totem.  A snow leopard appeared there, and she leapt onto it, shouting, “Get us out of here!” even as hatchets came at them and spear-armed grey-skinned trolls turned in her direction.

One of the hurled hatchets grazed her shoulder, and another nearly hit her companion in the rear, but then they were away, racing off.

For the next two days, smaller, swifter ambushes like that were the name of the game for Fandral and his forces. The Druids of the Claw made extensive use of their enhancement-type spells, and very rarely engaged in close combat. Only when they were certain they could get at some of the green-skinned trolls, and there was no other way, would they do so, and even then, they were still surprised by hidden corrupted forces, although thankfully only one more abomination.

Worse was to come, though. Where they came from, Fandral and the others didn’t have any idea, but suddenly, along with the flying constructs, dozens of skeletons of all kinds began to be seen. These forces pushed south, hiding occasionally during the day, splitting off into smaller groups or adding to the strength of troll columns as they tried to push past in larger groups.

Fandral and his forces could not contend with this mix of tactics except with pinprick-sized attacks. Such just wasn’t successful enough.  Especially when the hidden ambusher was found, something that cost them six more sentinels and a druid, and soon, at least two columns of mixed troops were past the cordon, still heading further south.

It was with teeth clenched and rage in his heart that Fandral ordered one of the Druids of the Talon to wing their way to Tyrande as the last attempt to ambush a troll-led host failed.  “Tell Whisperwind… tell her that we cannot hold. Whatever the trolls are up to in the south, they have gotten past us. We can harass them, but only in minuscule ways, and only when they are unwary. I am requesting either reinforcement or instruction as to where to shift my forces instead.”

OOOOOOO

“… We made a mistake,” Tyrande said, sighing faintly as she looked across at her daughter.  Ironically, the two Druids of the Talon from Fandral and Nealu’s forces had arrived almost on the heels of one another, and their words had not made for good listening.  “We had assumed that the trolls would see us as an enemy they must overcome. That the trolls would try to concentrate their forces on us here. Worse, we had assumed it would take them time to build up their undead troops. Neither of those assumptions have been proven correct.”

Not that it’s been silent on this front, Tyrande reflected. In the time it had taken Nealu and Davo’s team to follow the corrupted army back and forth from the northeast, Tyrande and Shandris had been in several successful ambushes, and one pitched battle. Several of the spider-based monstrosities had suddenly raced in, so fast the Druids of the Talon, who had, as Fandral had anticipated, been battling with flying constructs, had barely gotten the word down to the fighters on the ground in time for them to pull away.

“I’m honestly worried that the main shaman was able to gift his ability to raise whole skeletons to some of the others. I’m grateful that killing the lesser shamans also deals with the undead they’ve raised, but that ability makes me very worried. Without that ability, they couldn’t have sent such forces out to assault the vrykul. The fact they did that means that they are shifting from quantity to quality in terms of their forces, which is also worrisome.”

Shandris paused, thinking hard. “I think the other one, the force going south, there must be a reason why those attempts have included so many of the green-skinned trolls, those the shaman apparently can trust? If that is the right word for it. I’m not even certain that’s the right word,” she muttered, shaking her head.

 “True believers, or members of his own religious sect, I suppose. Considering that he did trap and attempt to kill one of the trolls’ own loa, the trolls who have stayed with him must believe he is more important or more powerful than even a Wild God,” Tyrande agreed. “Regardless, it was a mistake to stay on this side of our cordon.” Tyrande allowed her ears to twitch just a little bit to indicate humor, looking over at her daughter as she deliberately teased Shandris about her words. “If that is the right word for it. I’m in no way certain it is.”

However, Shandris shook her head, her words dispelling what little humor Tyrande had tried to interject into the proceedings.  “Worse is the losses both Nealu and Fandral’s forces have sustained. Losses we cannot afford. We’ll need to start assuming that getting in close is a fool’s game regardless of the disparity in our available forces. Hit from long range, hit and run, and, as both Nealu and Fandral were able to do, concentrate on slaying any shamans we see. No more close combat, not even for the Druids of the Claw.”

One such had fallen in the pitched battle Tyrande and Shandris had fought before he could retreat, selling his life dearly, admittedly, by destroying one of the spider constructs despite being completely surrounded by the undead. Still, the loss stung, given they were fighting an enemy that literally could not care less about such things.

“We can’t keep the cordon in place in every direction, so we must be strong in the most dangerous directions. Shandris, you will take half of our troops and reinforce Fandral.” Tyrande allowed a faint grimace to appear on her face as she saw how quickly her daughter’s ears flattened at that news, knowing that Shandris did not look forward to dealing with Fandral on her own.

But Tyrande had a reason for this decision.  “I will lead the rest of our host up and around the corrupted zone until we’re on the other side of Vordrassil and able to meet up with Nealu and his troops. If they have indeed been able to make allies out of some more of the vrykul, I need to be there to speak to them as leader of this expedition, but we also know Fandral needs aid.  We must do both.”

Leader of this expedition and our people, Shandris added internally, shaking her head slightly at her mother’s attitude. She’s always one of the first to step in and lead, and yet still thinks that she doesn’t have the temperament for it. The dichotomy of my mother’s attitude in a nutshell. “Understood, Mother.”

“Just be wary when you move, Lady Whisperwind, General Feathermoon. There’s far more of those flying constructs in the air now than there were when I started flying to you. You’re not going to be the only one who can see their enemy from on high,” the druid from Fandral’s force warned.

His concerns on that point were warranted. Two days later, as Tyrande led her now much-reduced troop northward around the corrupted area, steering clear by several leagues, the Druids of the Talon signaled that the number of aerial constructs was growing. Then, as a tremendous snowstorm forced the group to dig in and take shelter, they were attacked by a large host of skeleton warriors. These skeleton warriors, backed by twenty white-skinned trolls and none of the green-skinned trolls, attacked out of the snow, almost surprising the kaldorei because of the weather.

The kaldorei beat them off, retreating farther north and west to avoid them while fighting through the snowstorm. Eventually, thanks to Tyrande leading the majority of the attack, they broke contact through the storm. If the kaldorei had the eyesight of a normal human, moving through such weather might well have gotten them all lost, but while several of them did indeed do so, the majority were able to stick together even in the densest of the snowstorm.

Tyrande met up with her folk later, led to them as soon as the storm ended by one of the Druids of the Talon. The druids kept busy for a while after finding other scattered members of the company.  Yet the whole event was just one more sign that their enemy's tactics were evolving.

At one point, a few of the druids called a halt and asked Tyrande for time to analyze some tracks they had found. What they said wasn’t good.  “At least fifteen, maybe as many as twenty trolls came this way, heading straight north with a few thousand skeletons.  I can’t tell what type, although there’s no sign of any of the abominations. They were heading straight northward.”

“Can you track them?” Tyrande asked, frowning a little.

The druids all shook their heads, looking up at the sky, which was still extremely overcast, blocking out the moon’s light above them.  “Perhaps for a little while, but it looks as if it’s going to snow again, and if so, the tracks will disappear far too quickly for us to catch them up.”

When called down, the Druids of the Talon reported that they saw no sign of that force at all.  “It must have passed on beyond our sight, Lady.  If you want us to head north, we could perhaps find them, but…” the druid shrugged.

Waving that thought off, Tyrande considered, then decided to take a chance. She turned to one of the sentinels Shandris had pointed out as having good leadership skills, Nym’ruin Ashfang and quickly picked one of the Druids of the Claw. “Pick two more sentinels to stay with you. When the snowstorm hits, it will force the flying constructs to the ground. Move back in this direction during the storm and build a permanent hiding place, something that will fool even the watching aerial constructs. I want to know what this group was up to if it returns. Don’t engage them, just observe, then head west and link up with us when you can.”

The druid and sentinel both nodded, and the sentinel began to shift through the loose formation, picking out two of his fellows, then moving to the back of the column with the druid. When the snow hit later that night, the three of them waited a little longer, then split off and retreated the way they’d come, even as the snow continued to whine and whirl all around them.

Tyrande and the rest continued on, eventually heading southeast after circling the edge of the contaminated zone. Here, a small force hit them again. This time it consisted mostly of furbolg-based flesh golems, again led straight to them by the aerial constructs. However, once more, the lack of long-range fighters among the constructs and skeletons hampered the enemy, allowing the kaldorei to break contact after a little while, leaving many of the flesh golems returned to un-life behind them.

Not two days later, they met up with Nealu and Davo’s team. They had indeed made allies, if not friends, with a vrykul force.

There were twelve of them, all told. Several of them bore new scars, evidence of injuries that had been healed by the kaldorei druids. A whisper from Nealu told Tyrande that there were no magic users among the vrykul, and when questioned, they didn’t seem to understand what Nature Magic was.  If there were such among the vrykul, they were very rare.

The twelve vrykul represented a wide variety of ages, with half at least as young-seeming as the two vrykul that Tyrande had met with weeks ago who had been on the trail of satyrs and another group of vrykul.  The others were middle-aged, or, in one case, somewhat elderly-looking, if Tyrande was making assumptions based on what Harry and the other members of the Unseen Path had reported about the giant folk.

He was also obviously the leader; the other eleven looked to him every time he spoke, as if waiting for orders. The man, who introduced himself as Mordreek, had iron-gray hair throughout, his face sallow and shrunken from both new horror and age. He had his hair cut down almost to the point of going bald, without the scars that would necessitate such a move among kaldorei. Yet on top of heavy sideburns, he also had a very lengthy beard, the vitality of which made even Malfurion’s seem a pale imitation. It was also wildly untamed, and he and the others looked as if they hadn’t slept well for days and hadn’t bathed or cleansed themselves in any manner in that time either.

At least someone had the good sense of making certain this meeting was occurring out in the open, Tyrande thought, shaking her head before speaking, asking the specifics about how the twelve came to be on such a quest for vengeance. Neither Nealu nor Davo had questioned them on that score just yet.

“//What does it matter? Our tribe is dead. We are here to deal with those who were behind the attack,//” the old man grunted.

Nealu had been able to translate and, using the same greeting Narvae and Purde had used with the two vrykul brothers, managed to make contact. His accent, though, was even more horrific, making translation a lengthy process, complete with much finger-pointing and miming. 

It would, Tyrande felt, have been actually funny if not for the state of these vrykul.  The two brothers she had spoken to were proud warriors, their kit and equipment well cared for, their clothing well made and looked after.  These twelve had very obviously been through a very rough time.  Cuts and scrapes had long since healed, but missing pant legs, bits of fur coats, torn clothing, missing hair and shredded totems showed what they had gone through; the replacements were threadbare and mismatched.

Even their weapons showed wear and tear: swords bent, chipped or broken, spears left as mere sticks. A few were even missing their daggers, something that Nealu had whispered to not point out, as it was of extreme social significance. Their bucklers, the small shields the vrykul seemed to favor, were also dented and ruined.

“True, but your campaign against them can tell us much about their abilities. I will not lie; we assumed we knew what our enemy was capable of going into this. But he is beginning to surprise us, and it has cost us several of our warriors,” Tyrande answered, believing that honesty was the best policy at times like this. 

“//It will not in our case. We have already talked to these two, and they say another tribe of our folk died similarly. A few fights. In our case, Chief Steel Spear found a good, defensible position away from our main settlement. Our warriors were able to get all of our secondary settlements' owners to start fleeing eastward the moment we received reports of the nature of this threat,//” Mordreek stated, before hesitating. “//I do not know how many of those were able to get away before the undead ran them down. We can hope some escaped to find shelter elsewhere, but our clan has been wiped out.//”

After giving her heartfelt commiserations and waiting once more for Nealu to translate her words, Tyrande asked solicitously, “Is there anything we can do for you besides healing your injuries? And will you be willing to follow my orders in battle?”

“//In a pitched fight, yes. Otherwise, no. We need more food than you little spirits, and our weapons are larger and stronger, too. We will need to take some time to repair some of our equipment, though,//” Mordreek consulted with the other vrykul before turning back.  “//Our slings and bows are all in atrocious state, and some of our armor needs work as well.  We might need to venture back to our village and use the smithy, Makers curse it.//”

Tyrande nodded, then asked a few questions about how the vrykul liked to fight, wishing to work them into her overall force structure. She then hesitantly asked if the vrykul would be willing to split up, with some heading southwest to join Fandral and Shandris.

When Nealu finished putting the question to him, Mordreek flatly refused this idea.  “//No. We will fight and die together. We're willing to work with you forest spirits against the buried horrors and their tusker creators, but that's not the same as trusting you. We have ancient stories of your folk. You spirited away children and solitary hunters to your empire to the south, before the world cracked. Something that many of our wise men have said might be laid at your feet as well.  Old tales they might be, but powerful.  I will not dishonor my ancestors by being overly friendly with you.//”

That caused Tyrande to twitch a little, but she said nothing. After all, the man was right in a way. Azshara’s desire for power and even more beauty was indeed why the portal had been opened. “Are you willing to memorize the bird calls and so forth that our Druids of the Talon use to pass on information?”

“//The ones who shift to the form of birds, yes?//” Mordreek shivered, his face twisting in revulsion, almost like a young kaldorei when faced with the idea of Arcana. “//Aye, so long as they do not use such foul magics on us. We are willing to be healed to fight all the harder, but that is all.//”

Tyrande nodded slowly, keeping even her ears from showing her sadness at what those words and the body language of the vrykul conveyed to her. Perhaps because of her time traveling with Harry, she found she could read these twelve easily.  All of them had a look in their eyes that she all-too easily remembered from the War of the Ancients. It was a look of people who were looking not just to fight, not just to kill the enemy, but also for someplace to die. These vrykul have lost everything: family, loved ones, children, tribe. All they have is a desire to sell their lives dearly.

Yet she did not argue with them. They were not her people, and even if they had trusted her, it wasn’t Tyrande’s place to try and convince them that life was worth living if they had already lost so much. Sometimes, all you can do is direct such thoughts, and mourn the lives such men and women might’ve lived. Even if you bar them from seeking the death they seek, such folk are never the same, mere ghosts going through the motions.

Mordreek nodded at that, and Tyrande assigned one of the Druids of the Talon to get them up to speed on those calls, then asked if they needed anything in terms of weaponry. While the weapons that the vrykul used were oversized in comparison to those of her folk, a spear was a spear and a bow a bow, after all.

Surprisingly, she did receive a few replies in this area, although not in the form of bows and arrows or spears. The vrykul wanted to build themselves more clubs and force weapons. Tyrande had a few of her sentinels help them to find a nearby grove of trees and sufficient stone to do so.  Apparently, blunt force objects like that worked better against the constructs and far better against the skeletons, something that Tyrande had only noticed peripherally before this.

At that point Nealu brought up an idea, asking if word had been sent out to other tribes, but Mordreek simply snorted.  “//We already sent warning out the moment the tuskers and their unnatural creations were spotted. Whether or not other tribes heed those warnings is up to them, and no business of ours. Killing as many of those foul things and their tusker creators as we possibly can is. By Blood and Bone, we have decided our way and will see it through.//”

The low growl his words drew from the other vrykul sent a shiver down many kaldorei spines. Tyrande, though, just nodded sadly.

The next day, as the groups sent out to craft giant clubs for the vrykul came back in ones and twos, word arrived from one of the Druids of the Talon, passing on word from Fandral and Shandris. Shandris had arrived and joined their forces together just in time to stop another attempt to sneak past them. However, that front was even more of a sieve than they had feared. At least two small forces and one large one had gotten past them before this, and now, Fandral and Shandris were simply worried about what would happen when they tried to return.  They hadn’t done so yet, but it might be just a matter of time.

Worse, though, was that Shandris reported a new type of construct, whose description made Tyrande pale noticeably. “They were completely without flesh or bone, made entirely out of stone. General Feathermoon said they reminded her of the descriptions that you gave her of fighting the Frostmaul giants, Lady Whisperwind.”

“There were only two of them, correct?” She demanded, her ears shifting to indicate worry and anger alike. 

“Yes, Priestess, but both of them were so durable that even the blows of a Nature Magic-enhanced polar bear mattered only a little. Only precise strikes with enhanced Moon glaives were able to do any damage.”

Tyrande grunted at that, having known that it had been her own Elune-blessed blades that had allowed her to harm the Frostmaul giants. While Harry and his magic made it somewhat easier for him, she reflected, her tone rueful, as she once more wished idly that Elune had been correct to send the pair of them in two different directions that night in Danaviea. Mind you, with trolls making trouble in both places, I can understand why, but still, facing each threat one after another would have been more fortuitous.

Of course, Tyrande also knew that even thinking that was a bit churlish. After all, if they weren’t here to stop this, who knows how large this problem might have grown without them here to counter it.  As little as we have thus far.

Still, the news that two saronite constructs completely made out of stone had been seen was worrisome. Tyrande did not expect that to be within the power of a troll shaman, and certainly, giving power to stone like that wasn’t something that a loa that apparently had something to do with souls and undead would be able to do either. They could use them with elementals, of course, but that would be an entirely different thing, and Fandral and Shandris would surely know the signs of such. 

“Nealu, Davo, do you think the two of you can sneak into the corrupted zone again?” She asked, frowning pensively.

“…” The two Seekers looked at one another, then Nealu answered, running a finger along one of his ears thoughtfully. “It was amazingly touching the last time, and the trolls hadn’t really begun to react to our presence at that point. It might be possible, but with the aerial constructs, it would certainly be very difficult, and we don’t know if these trolls might be able to use some kind of detection magic, especially after draining that loa of all of his energy,” Nealu murmured,

“What would we be looking for anyway?” Davo asked.

“How much more saronite there is now from the time you previously had done so,” Tyrande answered firmly.  “If Vordrassil is still producing a steady trickle, that is one thing. But we need to know if the enemy trolls have begun to harvest even more of it, or if the land, the stone and harder substances, have started to be corrupted, and not just the bushes, trees and so forth.”

Both members of the Unseen Path grimaced, understanding the mission's importance. They looked at one another, then Davo raised a hand.  “I am willing to try it, but both of us shouldn’t go. Nealu’s got to stay here to translate for you with the vrykul.”

Nealu snorted, something most kaldorei wouldn't do, muttering something under his breath about stupidly brave tauren for a moment before reluctantly agreeing with his companion.  “Just remember, you’re not there to cause trouble. Get in, get out unseen. With the weather turning against us as it has, you’ll actually have a little more cover than we did last time, but don’t get cocky. And don’t try for the shaman. There’s no way that lead shaman is going to be easy to put in the ground.”

“Yes, oh so honored elder, I will remember,” Davo said, causing Nealu to reach over and punch his arm in a manner that had several nearby kaldorei blinking. Evidently, the kaldorei among the Unseen Path had begun to emulate some of the mannerisms of the tauren, not just vice versa.

Davo was gone within an hour, which was just as well. A snowstorm hit, which downed all of the birds in the air, construct and druid alike. That weather continued for a day and left the area around Vordrassil in a new foot of snow or more in places. Not that this seemed to slow down the troll’s expansionist ideas.

Over the next few days, the kaldorei on the western side of the cordon fought several small skirmishes. During these clashes, their enemies were almost all flesh golems based on furbolg bodies, or their skeletons. These types had apparently become the most expendable troops under the troll shaman’s command, although what these clashes were meant to tell the trolls was in question.

At the same time, the Druids of the Talon were slowly losing ground in the air against the ever-increasing numbers of flying constructs.

These were not birds. They might have wings and talons, but that was where the likeness ended.  Indeed, there was no uniformity at all in these small constructs.  Four eyes, two, three wings, or two wings but two beaks.  They were beyond strange and occasionally were made more of vrykul or troll flesh than bird bits.  It was an endless horror show for the Druids of the Talon, but they remained steadfast in every battle.

Soon, though, their numbers were such that the Druids of the Talon could no longer venture into the corrupted zone for fear of being overwhelmed by the host of murderous winged creatures that traversed the area too quickly for them to retreat. Two of the Druids of the Talon had fallen like that, and now all of them went everywhere in packs of three or four. This cut down how much of the cordon they could watch, but it let Tyrande at least keep communicating with her daughter and Fandral.

Davo returned four days later, looking much the worse for wear, cold and weary in a way Tyrande hadn't seen a tauren be in several thousand years. Inside the command igloo, she hurriedly had him bundled up with as many spare coats as the group had, which, unfortunately, by this point weren’t all that much. Clothing and equipment were quickly becoming a problem, as wear and tear of battle and the necessity of moving in such frozen territory took its toll despite the best Nature Magic could do to aid the bodies beneath.

Still, the warmth of the fire within the buried igloo, an extra-large one to accommodate the vrykul (who still had to crawl in and out) and a cup of something hot made by one of the vrykul on kitchen duty that day seemed to help the tauren. After a few sips, his shivers had disappeared, and he smiled faintly.

“I would’ve been back much earlier if I didn’t have to hide out as often as I did to avoid being spotted. There are fewer green-skinned trolls by this point, and indeed gray-skinned ones, near their hamlet, but the number of constructs and raised skeletons has grown to a tremendous degree. They haven’t hit us with more than a tenth of their total strength,” Davo reported, looking not so much at Tyrande but at Nealu, who scowled, crossing his arms, showing more anger and annoyance than most mature kaldorei would have.  “The rest they have doing mundane things: farming, smithing, creating weapons and other things. Oh, and helping to create new skeletons. It… it was disturbingly organized, to be blunt.”

“Undead and flesh golems are one thing. The very ground creating saronite-corrupted monsters is another. Is that shaman in danger of becoming an avatar of the Old One?” He asked bluntly.

The two giants there, their leader and the one on cooking duty, both frowned as Nealu hesitated for a moment before continuing.  Neither, though, looked as if they understood the term, and in fact looked simply confused.

 “I was actually able to get close enough to see the patrol leader,” he said, “I didn’t see any sign of his succumbing to saronite influence. I saw a lot more skeletons. A lot more.”

He took a sip, then continued. “I think he’s turning more to his powers over death than saronite, but Vordrassil is still producing a certain amount of the substance. Not as much as I feared, and I saw no sign of it corrupting the rocks. I think those two Frostmaul Giants were just another experiment by the troll shaman. Whether or not we’ll see them again, I don’t know, but I didn’t see any sign that they were able to replicate themselves, as Harry told us all that the ones you and he dealt with were.”

Tyrande allowed herself a brief smile of relief, then asked more about Vordrassil and how much saronite it was still producing. Luckily, it seemed as if, judging by what Davo said, that a large amount of the saronite that had built up around Vordrassil and on its sides had already been used. Equally thankfully, it seemed that once it was used to create one of the flesh puppets, it couldn’t be reused, the fel power within used up. 

“Vordrassil’s stump itself is still producing a little trickle at a time in various places around the stump, but many of the trees elsewhere have only produced a few tiny droplets in the weeks since we snuck in previously. The droplets can still be harvested, but it’s obvious the area took centuries to build up to an appreciable amount. They still have those reserves, but not a constant stream.”

“Praise the goddess,” Tyrande murmured, whispering a prayer of thanks to Elune that Yogg-Saron wouldn’t be able to spread his influence through his blood just yet, while Nealu struggled to explain the old gods to the vrykul, who looked terrified at the idea of some ancient evil being buried deep beneath the earth.

Tyrande wasn’t certain how the cages of the old gods really worked, but so long as the trickle didn’t become a fountain, they could still shut down this infestation. And if we can burn away Vordrassil entirely this time, then perhaps… Perhaps even his corruption of the Emerald Dream will fade. Tyrande knew that was probably wishful thinking, but it was certainly a nice dream to have.

With the way the Druids of the Talon were being pressed hard in the air, and the weather turning nasty again, Tyrande and their new allies were unable to interdict a war column heading southeast the very next day. It was large and consisted of, hopefully, the tiger’s share of the remaining furbolg flesh golems, along with several thousand skeletons, and more than thirty new vrykul-based abominations and a hundred grey-skinned trolls.

Honestly, Tyrande knew that, upon hearing the full tally, they probably wouldn’t have been able to stop a force that large regardless, but she still would’ve tried. Instead, Tyrande sent her most fleet-footed sentinels and druids out in pairs, hoping to trail after the column, and maybe get into position to slay some of the shamans with it, of which there were at least seven, along with nearly a dozen more green-skinned trolls.

Meanwhile, Tyrande had the rest of her company up and moving, hoping to interdict this force as it came back. When they arrived at the trail left behind by the unholy host, Tyrande took several of the Druids of the Claw and began to build a simple barricade made out of stone, ice and wood from the few trees around the area. When they saw what she was up to, all the vrykul quickly pitched in. 

“It is we who will hold this line, and you and your tiny folk who should do the skirmishing, the hit-and-run tactics. You are far better built for that than this. Let these monstrosities that have been created by the husks of our honored dead come to us, and we will reap a terrible toll,” Mordreek declared. It was very obvious he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and his folk actually gave a cheer at the idea.

“Just remember, do not just try to stop them, but survive. If we die, if you die, all you do is feed the power of the enemy,” Tyrande reminded the man firmly.  “If it looks as if we are going to be overrun, it is better that we all retreat and fight another day than die to a man here, our corpses turned to their purpose.”

Many of the vrykul who heard Nealu’s translation of that stiffened a little, but the dead, dangerous look in their eyes did not dim, and Tyrande grimaced. Still, she had known that the moment she had ordered the construction of a wall.  Now, seeing the size of the one the Vrykul were throwing up, she knew they would be a formidable cork in the bottle here. 

Nealu, Davo, Tyrande, and Faelitha spent the next two days planning the rest of the ambush, setting traps, arrow markers, and hiding places, hoping this group would, like the other two, return to the corrupted zone along the same route they had taken out. If it held true again, they could deal a harsh blow to the enemy. So long as the trolls don’t try to just go around us, anyway.  If we have to run after them, it will not go well for us, not at all, Tyrande thought, even as she worked alongside the others.

It was still a minor mystery how the trolls figured out where the giant settlements were, but the druids all agreed it must be something like the Laws of Similarity. When questioned, Mordreek admitted his tribe, the Ironteeth, had been skirmishing with the ‘tuskers’ in this area for the past decade. They had lost several hunters to them over that time, and it made sense the other tribes within several weeks’ distance had lost the same.

By the time the troll-led host was making its way back to their territory, the area around the ambush point had no sign whatsoever of the Kaldorei expedition. Only the vrykul on their wall was visible. Only twelve vrykul, standing on the stone, ice and wooden palisade, staring out into the distance towards the incoming host, whose largest members wore the bodies of their brethren, slain and brought back to unholy life by saronite contagion.

As the trolls came forward, their host spread out, slowly but surely, and it was a large one. Nearly all the furbolg flesh golems and skeletons that had been with it were gone, shattered and destroyed in various ways in the contest with whatever tribe they’d attacked. However, in return, they had added at least eighty more giant-sized abominations, all of them showing the wounds of battle. There were only a hundred or so skeletons, all of them adult-sized, many of them still dripping the gore of the body they had been pulled out of.

Evidently, the other tribe had taken some of the warning to heart and had done something with their buried dead. What that was, Tyrande didn’t know, but it was evident that this tribe had fought hard, even if most of the losses on the troll side had been among their most expendable forces.

If Tyrande had thought they would stop and try to analyze what lay ahead, the trolls quickly disabused her of that notion. One of the shamans, standing on top of a platform jutting out of the back of one of the giant monstrosities, began to hammer down a staccato rhythm on a pair of drums, their tops just as green as his own skin. A globe of energy began to appear around him and a few of the other similarly carried troll shamans, while their defenders milled around the feet of those trolls in particular.

Once the last shaman was behind a similar field of energy, the newest abominations surged forward, spreading out. They clearly intended to circle the vrykul defenders at the wall from every side.

However, as they did so, they ran into traps. Pits, spikes, a few areas where the druids had spread thin vials of poison or more.  These traps were built to catch giant-sized enemies, and it worked.  The flanking maneuver was stymied, although only nine or ten abominations became crippled or unable to move. Meanwhile, the Vrykul were firing their enormous bows at the abominations or the troll shamans.

Their entropy-based shields worked, although even crumbling, one of the arrows was fired with such force it smacked into a shaman, nearly tossing him off his platform to the laughter of his fellows. He shrieked in fury at them and then waved his staff again.  A bolt of putrid green energy flashed from his staff, hitting the wall but doing little beyond melting some of the ice.

Regardless of that shaman’s continued humiliation, the front line of abominations charged, shoulder to shoulder, several hundred tons of undead flesh and corrupted spirit.  The vrykul stayed where they were, roaring in return, tossing bows aside and grabbing large spears or clubs.  The spears were nearly as large as three kaldorei laid out feet to head, with tines set behind the sharp point to hold the enemy at long range.

The first abominations hit the foot of the wall, and the spears stabbed down.  Two abominations lost limbs, others' heads to the long clubs, while others found themselves speared and pressed down, held in place. 

As the attack slowed, the other abominations, grey-skinned trolls and the rest, milled about behind it, and the kaldorei struck. On the wall, Faelitha and her force, ten sentinels and three druids to enhance their bows, leaped up onto the barrier, firing down.

Druids of the Claw roared as they came out of hiding places right behind the traps on either flank.  They attacked the group of abominations already limited by the traps, hamstringing them, shattering bone and sinew and putting them down quickly.  More sentinels appeared from behind, firing over their heads at the other flesh golems and the huge number of skeletons still waiting there.

Again, each and every arrow in those quivers was filled with Nature Magic. They each hit like small ballista bolts, shattering flesh golems and skeletons alike, even putting down the gray-skinned trolls if they were caught in the head or chest.  Still, the enemy had numbers galore, and a few abominations and skeletons were ordered back the way they came to move around the area where traps lay.

That was Tyrande’s cue, and she charged from behind and to the left of the enemy host.

With the moon high above, the high priestess called upon the powers of her goddess to imbue her blade. That was all she had expected or asked for. Instead, a rush of power and energy filled Tyrande, and her entire body, not just her blades, burst into white light. Much like the times she had called on Elune to act as a beacon, she now glowed with the reflected glory of the moon above, and nearly every undead construct that saw Tyrande turned, charging in her direction.

Tyrande met them with a cry of “For Elune and Azeroth!” cutting down the first two flesh golems, then jumping up over the fist of a giant abomination as it came down. Landing lightly on the nearly whole arm, she charged upwards, hacking at its neck with her blade. Her blade struck some of the saronite that had been drizzled into a gash there, and it hissed and sizzled. Then the whole construct shuddered, collapsed, and she jumped off it into another's chest, her moon glaive stabbing. 

The blades of her moon glaive found what remained of its heart, sending that construct to its death as well. Then others were smashing at her, while other skeletons and flesh golems alike tried to stab her with spear or hatchet, and she whirled, hacking, slashing, ducking, dodging, the light of Elune empowering her and her own skill on display for all to see.

Where she led, the last of her own Druids of the Claw could but follow. Many of the sentinels also forewent bows and arrows despite standing orders to remain at range, ignoring that in favor of following their high priestess into close combat. “For Elune and Ashenvale!”

The sheer shock of that motion, the way that the constructs and even many of the skeletal undead turned in Tyrande’s direction as if sensing Elune’s purity and hating it, broke what little cohesion the enemy force had. All the while, the vrykul on the wall began to batter away at their fellows on the other side.

The troll shamans, now faced with attacks from all sides, began to respond as they should have. They let the concentration of abominations fighting the vrykul at the front remain there, while using their lesser forces to fight the kaldorei among the traps to either side.  The rest of the abominations and the giant skeletons, which made up the majority of their forces, were turned against Tyrande and the others at the back. They couldn’t have done otherwise, given how their creations reacted to Tyrande’s presence.

What they didn’t know was that Davo and Nealu were both hiding directly alongside the path that the host had taken on the way out, even closer than any of the others. Indeed, both had almost been stepped on several times, and Nealu had been stepped on, but thankfully only by a few dozen flesh golems.  Davo had a vrykul skeleton do it.

Now, as the troll shamans concentrated on organizing her forces, the furious pair came up and out of hiding underneath the snow, shaking off the remnants of their hide. Davo stabbed a spear deep into the back of the knee of one of the giant-based abominations directly above him, snarling. Even a magically created flesh golem still needed to obey the laws of a body’s self-control, and with a spear going through its knee and out the other side, that knee did not work.

It collapsed, and the troll on his platform yelped, grabbing onto a stanchion to hold himself steady, losing his concentration on the defensive field around himself he had been maintaining.

Nealu took his chance, an arrow twanging off of his string a second later, hammering into the troll shaman’s forehead and deep into his brain. He fell, dead in the snow, as the remaining troll shamans started to try and order their mounts to turn and engage the two unseen hosts.  And nearly two dozen giant skeletons collapsed into dust.

Both Seekers danced around the two constructs and even the other flesh golems as they began to turn, killing as they went, before Nealu jumped up onto the chest of one of the giant constructs. There, Nealu flipped himself up and over the head of the abomination, landing on the back platform. The shaman there stabbed forward with the edge of her staff, but Nealu ducked under it, hacking at her leg, forcing the female troll to back away, but that proved to be a deadly mistake as Nealu’s second moon glaive came up and into a slashing motion that caught her across the jugular.

She fell, the wound already healing, but defenseless for a second, and Nealu’s next blow completely removed her head like a shuttlecock, the edge of his moon glaive slicing through bone and flesh alike.

Nealu was then forced to leap away as the fist of the last remaining giant construct with a troll shaman on it slammed into where he had been a second ago. However, that was an inattentive moment on Davo, who whirled under a hacking slash from one of the green-skinned trolls.  Fending off two more with his war staff in one hand, Davo flipped a dropped hatchet up into his other hand. With a grunt of effort, he hurled it into the side of the last troll shaman, who fell screaming.

The two unseen members were too busy with the green-skinned troll warriors for a few moments to finish him off, but one of the sentinels still firing into the battle saw this and followed up quickly. An arrow flashed in, coming in just over the protective shell of the carrier, hammering into and through the heart of the troll shaman as he made to stand up again.

With the last of the troll shamans dead, nearly all of the giant skeletons collapsed. Tyrande later supposed those hadn’t been part of the other groups that had entered the corrupted zone and been imbued with more necrotic energy.

At that moment, however, something more serious was going on. Because unlike before, with the last of the shamans who had been leading them dead, the column didn’t instantly try to simply shift forward. Instead, they stayed and fought. For just a second, Tyrande, hacking into the leg of one of the monstrosities, then ducking under a blow from it, wondered why.

Then a harsh, desperate call from above came. Not the typical five crow calls of a report of danger coming. Rather, this was simply a harsh cry of distress and worry, with no real thought behind it.

Faelitha was the only officer in a position to pull away from the battle. She did so now, shifting back from the wall and racing away. Once away from the wall and in the open beyond it, she called out several times, the cooing call meant to ask a Druid of the Talon to her, to explain what they had seen. 

A moment later, a Druid of the Talon responded, practically crashing as the druid, currently in the body of an owl, flew down out of the sky like an arrow.  He stumbled as he hit the snow, blood visible on his wings, then on his arm as he transformed. The older druid’s eyes were wild, his ears pointing straight out to the sides in a sign of pure shock, his face slack with worry. “Sound the retreat! Sound the retreat! We’ve got another enemy host incoming! By Cenarius’ cloven hooves, they’re coming on quick!”

The troll shaman commanding the corrupted forces had been doing even more learning than Tyrande and her advisors had figured. He had figured out somehow that the host he’d sent Northeast had been ambushed on its way back, that his enemies could attack his forces at any time, coming or going and would hit them at their weakest. Thus, he had prepared accordingly.  He had pushed out the Druids of the Talon from the sky over the corrupted area, then moved a large host to the nearest point in the corrupted area. 

One of the spells that the lesser shamans had used had been a communication spell. It was another one based on what Harry would call ‘voodoo,’ which the kaldorei had only a bare idea of.  Even the Unseen Path didn’t have records of troll magic that detailed. The instant the lead shaman in the attack force saw the makeshift wall and the vrykul, he sent that signal. 

Now, that army came on, imbued with literally unholy energy to enhance their speed. The vast majority of the remaining spider abominations were fast, moving over the ice and snow as nimbly as their far smaller brethren, something the vrykul-based abominations could not boast. Skeletal warriors of all kinds, hurrying forward, several thousand strong. Having the magic of their creation touched up by the lead troll shaman, these would not collapse without his death.

Giant abominations, forty more of them from those that had made their way back to the corrupted zone. Nearly three dozen green-skinned trolls, several hundred grey-skinned trolls and a single shaman. Sitting in a specially made container held between four vrykul-based abominations, shouted and gesticulated from his heavily armored carrier, peering out thin slits in the heavy stone slabs surrounding him.

The troll shaman had indeed been concentrating on Tyrande and her expedition. The problem was, he hadn’t been thinking of instant retaliation or simply fighting the expedition. He had been planning to wipe them out with extreme prejudice in time, while also pursuing his other goals.

This host was now coming at the back of the Vrykul formation, and only Faelitha was in any position to even try to get in its way.  Quickly, she and several of her sentinels fired special noisemaking arrows into the air, a signal to, in Davo’s words, “Retreat instantly, do not pass go, by Mother Musha’s blessed biceps, break contact right now.” 

However, signaling such a thing, as the original call from the hastily retreating Druids of the Talon had, was one thing. Doing it was another matter.  The nature of the battlefield, and the number of abominations they were still dealing with, meant that even trying to pull back was a recipe for disaster.  Perhaps if the sentinels and druids fought as a cohesive unit, if they had kept strict battle lines, it might have been possible. But given the enemy's nature and the combat style both kaldorei groups followed, they couldn't break off quickly once close combat was joined. 

Only the sentinels on the other three sides of the ambush were able to break off, but they didn’t do so, knowing their fire was making the difference between life and death for their fellows. As for the leaders of the expedition, only Tyrande was able to get a brief reprieve to try and find out what was going on.

She did so by jumping up off an abomination’s knee onto another abomination’s shoulder, its head having just been removed from the mortal realm by an arrow imbued with an Astral Kindling spell.  From this height she could see the original front of the battle, where Mordreek continued to lead his fellows, roaring war cries, but she could not see past them into the distance.

Looking around for a moment, even as she ducked to the side of a hurled hatchet, Tyrande saw the majority of the Druids of the Claw were now past the area where the company had created traps, making it even harder to pull back.  Elsewhere, Nealu and Davo were still fighting in the center of the enemy host, despite that host closing in on them like a giant fist.

For a moment, she simply looked, a consummate warrior acknowledging two others at their craft.

Ice and fire magic raged from Davo’s war staff, the massive axe head slamming into and through any opponent that came near, proving just as deadly to everything else Davo hit as it had already done to the troll shamans he had slain. There was no wild swinging, no loss of control in favor of raw power. Each strike was swift and certain; his defense well-crafted, his movements, reaction time and awareness incredible for a tauren with their limited lifespans.

Meanwhile, Nealu danced around his larger, more powerful companion. The Seeker guarded his fellow’s weak spots, watching his back, letting Davo do most of the killing, but making certain neither took more than brief clanging cuts as they shifted through though the host despite their best efforts of the green-skinned trolls and the flesh golems around them.  Even the remaining abominations were only slightly more dangerous; the pair could dodge and attack with equal proficiency against even the massive monstrosities.

Then Tyrande was forced to leap off her momentary resting spot as a massive fist smashed into the equally massive shoulder she’d been standing on.  It crumpled the dead flesh, missing her utterly as she lashed out with her moon glaives, cutting down two furbolg-based flesh golems. The light of her Elune-blessed blades sliced in, cutting not just meat but also into the saronite that was giving them the foul imitation of life, destroying the foul magic within.  Whatever is going on out there, we need to finish this fight before we can pull back.

Fearing that might be the case, Faelitha didn’t spend much time trying to order a retreat.  The instant the noise arrows were in the air, she finished pulling the rest of her sentinels off the wall and rushed them west, with the harried, bloody Druid of the Talon, Cyraeth Owlgaze, with them.  Soon, far sooner than she had wanted to believe possible, they reached bow range of the head of the massive force coming to relieve their equally corrupted fellows.  

They couldn’t slow it much with just arrows, though, despite Cyraeth giving their arrows an added punch via Astral Kindling. Even as they fired, small groups of the enemy’s flesh golems shifted, racing in their direction now while the rest of them actually shifted course to flow around them to the left.  Faelitha was forced to direct her troops against the spider abominations and flesh golems that were closing with them, and the rest continued towards the back of the wall, where Mordreek and his folk were still bellowing in fury.  All of them were lost in some berserker rage as they fought the abominations to their front, and unaware of the danger to their rear.

As the new host pushed past her position, Faelitha ordered her own people to start pulling back as they ran out of arrows, urging them further south.  Even as she did so, Faelitha felt real despair. There was no way, absolutely none, that the new host wouldn’t overcome the vrykul on the wall, wouldn’t smash into the fighting already going on, turning the tide against the rest of her expedition. Against Lady Whisperwind, the high priestess of Elune, leader of her people. But I can’t stop it, I can’t! she wailed internally.

However, her earlier warning arrows had been heard, and not just by Tyrande and the others who couldn’t do anything about it, embroiled as they were in the battle already going on. No, several others were winging their way towards the stump of Vordrassil from the southeast and heard the noisemaking arrows as well.

“Hmmpf, seven from here. I can sense the magic within that stump, how unbalanced it is. No wonder Yogg-Saron was able to infect it so.”

“Truly. While I might not agree with everything that Malygos has decreed since the War of the Ancients, he is still right that magic can often lead the mortal races astray, even if they are using it with the best of intentions.”

“You speak truly, sister mine. Father, it looks as though some of the kaldorei are in trouble over there, along with… my word, have they made common cause with the primitives?”

“If so, it shows remarkable perspicacity on both their parts. The idea of a troll taking over the territory around Vordrassil is dangerous enough to make very strange bedfellows. Your mother and I will continue on our way and take the measure of this enemy that those persistent fellows of the Unseen Path warned us of. If you think the kaldorei need your help on that front, you may see to them.”

With a glance over at his sister and a nod sent back his way, the young, not even a decade into his full-size, blue Dragon Baldegos twisted to the side and down, his wings beating strongly.

Behind him, his smaller sister followed, and within moments, they had crossed the leagues between. Not ten minutes after Faelitha’s sentinels ran out of arrows and began to retreat away from their fellows, the two blue dragons appeared from out of the cloudy nighttime sky.

As they closed in, flames flickered from their maws, drawing several eyes from the battlefield for a few moments among the kaldorei.  Ironically, this cost two of the Druids of the Talon nasty hits from the undead, but it also served to clear away dozens of flying undead constructs, a sight that caused both dragons to snarl in fury. 

Moments later, they were close enough to the ground and tongues of flame slammed down, the two dragons performing a coordinated attack on the incoming enemy host. Baldegos from the front, his sister, Kylygosa, from the back. They raked the whole host front to back, incinerating hundreds of undead, including several of the abominations and even a few of the trolls, turning them into so much ash on the wind.

The monstrosities didn’t break. The flesh golems did not know fear. They only knew what their creator had granted them, along with, deeply buried within the saronite that had been used to give them unholy life, a hatred for Elune that had the remnants of the first host pushing in hard against Tyrande even as their fellow host died in fire nearby.

The vrykul, on the other hand, heard the whooshing of flames and the crackling of bones and flesh set alight behind them.  This was enough to break several from their berserk fury, and they looked over their shoulders only for their eyes to widen in surprise.

Two of them had died already in this fight, and two more were grievously injured. The enemy abominations were monstrously strong, and had pulled the two dead fellows off the wall to be hammered into mush at the foot of it.  Most of the long spears they had started the fight with were gone now.  The clubs, thicker-shafted, were lasting better, but the undead abominations had reached their own weapons range several times, climbing the wall as easily as a squirrel could a tree.

Seeing fire from on high hitting an enemy force in their rear, one they hadn’t even realized was there, caused a cheer to erupt.  A glance in the sky only added to it. “Drak, the drak! Blue Drak have come to help us!” screamed the lone woman among the vrykul. 

This won cheers and howls from the vrykul, and they continued to hammer down into the giant monstrosities across from them with even greater vigor.

The two young blue dragons did three more strafing runs, wiping out the force sent out to wipe out the kaldorei on this front. Chuckling in amusement at the conflagration that consumed the enemy shaman in his stone hut, they then banked away to where they could circle the battlefield, idly talking to one another about the battle going on below but making no further move to join it.

Tyrande, looking up from where she had just beheaded a gray-skinned troll and stabbed a green-skinned one through the heart, cut her moon glaive up and out of his collar, removing his head almost idly with the backswing as she wondered aloud, “Is it a skill issue that keeps them from joining this aspect of the battle? Or is there more trouble on the horizon?”

“Probably ego,” Davo stated bluntly. He and Nealu had fought their way through the entire enemy host, a feat that no warrior of the kaldorei, Talon, Claw, or sentinel could have done save perhaps Shandris, Fandral and Tyrande. Such was the training that the Unseen Path offered and the knowledge that they had of facing opponents of all sorts, including ones that dwarfed them in size. 

“Those are blue dragons out there, and I will remember Purde and Narvae mentioning something about them being far more arrogant than green dragons normally,” the tauren continued, his war staff never ceasing its movements. “This family group might be living away from the rest of the Blue Flight, but I doubt that doing so has made them any less dismissive of us landbound folk than the rest.”

Above, Kylygosa twisted around, staring into the distance as a green bolt of energy appeared, slashing up into the sky. From here, she could see both the bolt of energy and its target, and watched her parents suddenly veer away from their own burning mission.  “Oh my word, it looks as if this issue will not be solved by a simple application of fire or force.”

A second passed, and her magical core flexed.

Blue dragons were the Flight of dragons that had the most knowledge and innate skill with magic.  Their cores were reactive, a muscle they could use almost as soon as blue Draklings could form coherent thought. Indeed, most creches or families had a series of exercises for their Draklings that built up the awareness of their magical core, similar to how other races had leg exercises.

The spell she had been using to peer towards Vordrassil bloomed into the visible spectrum around her eyes, and she watched as her father dove down again, only to seemingly hiss in fury as that energy bolt came too close, sending him nearly into a tumble. He righted himself and whirled his way up deeper into the air, while another series of dark green energy bolts followed him and Mother.  “Well now, did you see that, brother? More and more, I think I am beginning to agree with Great Malygos on magic. It should not be in the hands of the lesser races, regardless of what they are attempting to use it for.”

“Well, from what the Unseen Path members told us, sister, this troll, and do recall that part, is particularly insane. Reaching to the powers of the Old One to capture and drain one of their own wild psychopomps?” Baldegos theatrically shivered, although how much of that was a real reaction she couldn’t say. “What a horrific thought. Still…”

A second passed, and his eyes lit up as Kylygosa’s had. “Oooh, that one was close… and that one hit mother!” he cried aloud, so loud the fighting below was buried by the noise for a second.

“Hush, momma’s boy. She’s fine,” Kylygosa said, also watching with some worry as their mother began to gain altitude, far slower than she normally would have moved.

They both fell silent, flying around in circles, their necks flexing to let them continue to watch the events near the root of the massive tree stump in the distance. “It looks as if this won’t be as easy as father and mother hoped,” Baldegos grunted.

“Good. They can be the ones to speak to the kaldorei. Even if Whisperwind and Stormrage are respected among the flights, I have no wish to bandy words with her or any other kaldorei,” Kylygosa grumbled.

“Dear sister, you don’t even want to bandy words with me! I don’t think you have ever, in point of fact, bandied words with anyone.” Both siblings laughed at that, watching as their parents dove down once more only to pull up abruptly due to something they could not see from here.

“You do not have to be their friends to hold discourse with our new, admittedly lesser, allies,” Baldegos went on, glancing downward. “They look as if they’re nearly done down there. I’m going to go pluck that one monstrosity up, get a closer look at what saronite corruption can do when directed by what passes for a mind among the trolls. Bellow out if either of our parents take further hits of that green energy, please.”

With that, the young dragon dove down and proceeded to do precisely what he had said he would. Near the edge of the battle, one of the Druids of the Claw, currently in the form of a bear, had just been smashed off of his feet by an abomination. One of the last few remaining outside those fighting the vrykul near the front of the battle or around Tyrande.

The deep-seated need to erase Elune’s light from the world had gripped the majority of the host despite the best efforts of their troll handlers. That had allowed the kaldorei to retain what little cohesion they needed, and with Nealu and Davo there, Tyrande was in no danger.

Even as the abomination raised its massive hand to bring it down to shatter the bear’s skull, it found itself plucked up off of the ground by its shoulders.  Lifted into the air, the Abomination dangled as Baldegos shifted his neck forward and down, examining the creature not just with his physical eyes, but with his magical sight, the earlier spell fading as another took its place.

What he saw filled him with revulsion, and Baldegos quickly released the creature, hitting it with a blast of flame midair even as it tumbled away.  “Disgusting abhorrent filth!”

That his tongue of flame continued down into the ground and nearly seared several of the combatants below didn’t really register, nor would it have mattered. Such things should not exist in this world. They reeked of the same corruption that had gripped the Black Dragon Flight, that had caused such horror and loss among the dragons.  All young Blues, even those like them who lived apart from the Flight, had been taught what to look for in such cases. Fel or Corrupted, neither was welcome in Azeroth.

Tyrande, on the other hand, saw this, and allowed a scowl to appear on her face even as she dodged around a troll hatchet, her moon glaive scything into the troll woman’s head from behind, cutting half of her brain away while the ice side of Davo’s war staff crashed into her chest, freezing and shattering it.  “Joy, a dragon who doesn’t know the first rule of using their flame.”

“Wait, dragons have rules on how they use their fire?” Davo grunted, blocking several strikes in an instant. Stepping back, he dared the trolls to close in, and one paid the price as Nealu dodged around and below the larger tauren’s arms, his moon glaive stabbing forward. 

While Tyrande made use of all three of her moon glaive’s blades equally, Nealu preferred to use the stabbing point directly jutting forward of his grip. Now, the troll yelled in fury as his foot came off right at the ankle, opening him up for a rising strike that took him through the chin upward into his brain.

A kick from Davo caught the dead troll’s body, flinging him into two more, who both died to his war staff a second later while Tyrande replied, jumping over a grey-skinned troll’s spear, her leg lashing out in a kick.  “Yes. Fire has no friends, and if you don’t realize your allies are on the other side of your target, soon neither will you.”

With the power of Elune inside her, that strike snapped the troll’s neck for a moment and sent him sprawling to the ground, where Davo stamped his head into paste. “Where did that come from? It sounded like a quote.”  Now that they were in no danger of being overwhelmed and new allies had appeared, he was feeling quite relieved and became almost chatty.

Tyrande allowed a real smile to cross her face, one of the few times she had done so when her daughter wasn’t around and involved in the reason for the expression since this expedition began. “Lady Alexstrasza herself, actually.  We talked for quite some time after a… certain event soon after the migration into Ashenvale ended.” 

The high priestess of Elune wasn’t about to mention the blessings placed on the Well of Eternity here in the open.  She trusted her immediate companions, but there was no reason to fall into bad habits. 

“Ah.” To that, Davo had no reply, and the three superlative warriors continued their grisly work of finishing off the flesh golems and the grey-skinned trolls around them, the last of the abominations falling to a fusillade of sentinel Astral Kindling-enhanced arrows in front of them. I still don’t know what was done to these trolls to make them so much less than they should be, but I suppose I should be thankful there are so many more of them than the green-skinned ones.  Enemies who can think and work together willingly are far more dangerous than enemies who are shackled and forced to obey without their full faculties. 

The battle began to ebb away, aided further by the return of Faelitha’s forces, all of whom, with empty quivers, launched themselves into the fight over the wall with the few surviving vrykul.  She had lost control of her team earlier as they kept fleeing from the small groups of undead sent after them, but doing so let them string them along. This allowed the blue dragons to destroy them. It then took Faelitha a bit to bring her squad back together before reengaging.

While the surviving vrykul warriors also went over the wall now, Mordreek was not with them.  He had fallen to one of the abominations, a blade-arm through the throat, although he took his killer with him. His club had shattered the monster’s chest so hard it looked like it exploded, joining the other seven vrykul-based Abominations he had already slain. 

“Davo, if you would mind taking command of the cleanup? I think it’s time for some diplomacy,” Tyrande suggested politely, cleaning her moon glaives on the snow around them.  Very little of that snow was white any longer. Indeed, most was stained black or red with gore, but it still worked.

Done with that, Tyrande lifted her gaze, staring up at the crescent moon, whispering a brief, silent prayer to Elune for their survival. Yet to her surprise, the white energy around her didn’t fade.  Blinking, Tyrande looked down at herself for a second, then shrugged.   Well, if my goddess thinks my night’s work is not yet done, who am I to argue?

“Make certain the wounded get healed, make certain all the flesh golems are destroyed, the trolls dead, and pull our forces away from the battlefield,” Davo counted on the fingers of one hand as his other hand put his war staff into a holster on his back. He then smirked, shaking his large, bovine head for a moment. “And far better you and Nealu than me, Lady Whisperwind. A diplomat, I am not”

“…I see what you just did. I will remember this, my friend,” Nealu grumbled, shaking his head, before looking at Tyrande seriously, understanding the importance of the task despite his dislike for it. “Remember what I said about Blues, High Priestess. They have no love for our folk, not after the events of Crystalsong, and no one has had any contact with them, formal or otherwise, since then. To say that will have left relations poor is a gross understatement.”

Tyrande nodded, her ears barely twitching in the equivalent of a wince.  “Understood.”

With that, Tyrande shifted away from the battleground to an open area of snow, where the dragon had settled down onto his haunches, peering imperiously around himself. How Tyrande could tell it was a male rather than a female dragon, she wasn’t quite certain. She certainly hadn’t spent that much time around any of the green dragons she had made the acquaintance of, let alone any of the others, to pick out gender at a glance. But something about the way this one looked and moved told her he was both young and male. 

“Good dragon, who do I have the pleasure of addressing?” She began formally.

“Good dragon? Is that how you folk address us? Well, it will do, I suppose, although lord or Master would be better. My name is Baldegos; my sister, Kylygosa, is the one above us right now. We are the sons and daughters of Salgregos and Varnecgosa. As you were about to be slaughtered like pigs, my sister and I decided to do what we could to help here, while our parents ventured deeper into the corrupted area around that rather large problem you all caused thousands of years ago. Much like every other problem in this world, you can find a ground crawler at the bottom of it,” Baldegos sneered.

Instead of taking umbrage at the tone or the implications, or even at how the dragon was painting her entire race with the same brush, uncaring of any distinction between them, Tyrande simply nodded. “We thank you for your aid.”

Her simple, unequivocal thanks seemed to take the dragon aback, and a tiny bit of his arrogance seemed to leave him. Just a tiny bit, though. “Just so long as you know that we are not here for you specifically. We are here to help deal with this problem. Feltstep and Pinefrost begged for our aid, but after describing it sufficiently, the idea of Yogg-Saron gaining influence was enough to get us to move on your behalf. But that does not mean we are under your command.”

“That is perfectly understandable. I would never consider myself able to give orders to someone who can fly and breathe fire, let alone who probably knows more about magic than myself. But will you be willing to work alongside us? And might I ask if the four of you brought along the two members of the Unseen Path who made the journey to your home to request your aid?” Tyrande kept her tone polite as she continued.

“Those two? HAHA, we obviously left them behind,” Baldegos chortled. “They have no wings to keep up with us, and any dragon would prefer to die rather than allow someone from you landbound races on our back. Carrying them this whole way in our talons would also have been somewhat annoying.”

Tyrande’s ears twitched a little bit in irritation at that, but she said nothing.  “Again, that is perfectly understandable, although I had hoped to have two more translators on hand for further meetings with the vrykul. Will your parents be able to deal with the troll shaman who is at the center of this problem on their own? That would certainly make things easier for us.”

“No doubt having someone else clean up after your problems would be very beneficial to you all,” the dragon snorted, before peering upwards as his sister darted away towards the west for a moment in the direction of the distant stump. He then turned his attention back to Tyrande, his reptilian eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the fact that she was glowing. For a moment, his eyes gleamed as well with all the colors of the rainbow as he took her in, before he frowned pensively.   “That is an… unusual kind of magic. I’ve never seen it before. Almost… clean? Odd, certainly light-based, and cleansing in a way, but definitely not Nature Magic, and it doesn’t ”

For a moment, it looked as if the typical blue dragon’s arrogance when it came to magic was warring with curiosity, and again, Tyrande got the impression that this dragon was quite young. She didn’t allow that observation to show her face, though, simply nodding, gesturing down to herself.  “This is a sign of my goddess’s favor. I am uncertain just yet why it has yet to dissipate from me, as it normally would after the event I called upon her for heat has passed. I don’t suppose you saw any further trouble coming our way out there, did you?”

“Hmmm, not before I landed. My sister might have, although I would have assumed she was meeting our parents.” For a moment, the younger dragon looked around, his tone suddenly becoming wary. As magnificent as dragons were in the air, on the ground, they could be fought. Tyrande had proven that alongside Harry and the Highmountain tribes before he joined the Unseen Path. It looked as if this dragon at least knew enough to be wary of being caught on the ground.

Before that wariness could turn into suspicion of Tyrande, though, a call sounded from above and to the west. A loud roar of sound, a trumpet-like announcement.

Baldegos jerked his head that way, then nodded.  “Father and Mother will be here momentarily. I presume they will probably take over talking to you all and telling you what will need to be done going forward.”

With that, and without any further fanfare, Baldegos surged to his feet, flapping his wings several times, before lifting into the air with some difficulty. Even with magic doing a lot of the lifting, going from a standing start to being able to fly off level ground was quite hard, especially for something as heavy as a dragon.  He still didn’t say anything as he zoomed away, having perhaps said everything he meant to.

Yet another sign of the young, Tyrande thought with some amusement. He’s probably actually younger than I am for his race by a good margin. It takes, what, a few thousand years or so for dragons to change from an egg to fully mature? Certainly, I doubt he was around during the War of the Ancients. And… telling us what will need to be done? Well, I was warned they would be arrogant.

In the sky above, the one dragon shifted West, but was quickly turning back, having been joined by three others. Two were larger than the other two even from the ground, although one of those was trailing behind the other three, looking as if he or she were wounded in some fashion, or exhausted? Regardless, that dragon and the other larger dragon began to make their way down to the ground, circling around the battlefield, then settling down well away from it, and well away from Tyrande.

Tyrande knew a power play when she saw one, but she ignored it. At the moment, after all, the difference in power here was very apparent. She moved towards them again, shifting further away from her folk, but was unsurprised when Nealu moved to join her. He had retained some distance as she addressed the young blue dragon, not wanting to interfere.  “They left Narve and Purde behind.  That is frustrating.”

“True, and you were right.  These dragons are arrogant, and these blues have a certain disdain towards us as well.” Tyrande stared into the sky, frowning. “I believe that one dragon looks injured. What do you think?”

Nealu fell silent as he examined one of the two dragons now coming towards them. They didn't match the size of the first two and were clearly new, though the smaller of the pair trailed, its wingbeats faltering.  “I’ll get one of the druids over here. Healing or banishing whatever fugue that dragon’s dealing with would be a great gesture of goodwill.”

Soon, three kaldorei stood in front of two dragons, practically disappearing into their shadow. Or they would have, if not for the fact that Elune’s blessing still shimmered around Tyrande’s skin.  This drew the eyes of both dragons, wounded and not wounded alike, and the male, the larger of the two, who was sitting somewhat protectively just a little bit ahead of the other one, scowled in annoyance. 

“Greetings, dragons. I am Tyrande Whisperwind, a follower of Elune.  Who am I addressing?”

Tyrande’s simple, humble greeting threw off the two dragons, and they exchanged a glance before their serpentine necks twisted around to look at Tyrande and her companions again. “We are Salgregos and Varnecgosa, as I am certain our son told you. Do not insult our intelligence again.  We might respect the Unseen Path, but just because your race finished that schism of yours does not mean we have forgotten the horror of the Crystalsong Forest.”

“I understand, and empathize with your losses then.  It was something of a final straw for my folk and the Highborne, but I know that is scant comfort,” Tyrande answered, bowing her head in regret.

The dragons both made some noise deep in their throats, but when Salgregos spoke, he had changed the subject, his eyes flicking with a spell of some kind as he peered at Tyrande. “Religious magic is it? I haven't studied that particular school; I always thought it was simply another form of shamanism, reaching out to a local psychopomp, what you would call Wild Gods and the trolls' loa. Even Cenarius and those of his power level are still generally classified as such, although I have never personally met that one, unlike Ysera and the greens. Yet from the feel of it and the fact that Feltstep mentioned a vision from her sent you here, perhaps I was mistaken in its scope.”

This Tyrande probably would have lost her temper about if not for the aforementioned glow of her goddess on her.  It was one thing to belittle and disdain Tyrande or even her race. After all, she couldn’t argue that the Highborne and kaldorei alike had made numerous mistakes, and some had been horrendously large. To belittle Elune in front of her was another matter entirely, and calling the Moon Goddess a mere psychopomp, like the loa, was more than insulting.

Instead, she simply stated, “I do not ask, I do not beg or bargain with Elune. I pray to her and give of my faith, actions and soul to keep to her tenets and follow her edicts. If she sees fit to empower me in turn on this physical coil, that is her prerogative. Just as it was Elune’s prerogative to send us warnings of what was going on up here.”

The blue dragon grumbled a little, but subsided, and some of the arrogance leached out of him as he glanced up over at his mate. He even lowered his head a little to talk more easily with the three kaldorei. Neither blue transformed, as Versera had, and Tyrande could instantly tell it was probably demeaning to him, but at least he seemed to treat them with a bit more respect.

“Precognition like that is something that we blue dragons cannot do. It’s too much of a purview of the Bronze Flight. However, we understand its importance and why your goddess warned you about this problem: A troll becoming an avatar of the Old One by building upon yet another problem that your race created centuries ago.”

There was yet another dig there, but it was a justified one, and Tyrande idly wondered what would happen if Fandral met these dragons, and if they could somehow discern that he was the one who had been behind the spreading of the world tree project. “I notice your mate is… looking somewhat debilitated. We have a druid with us right here, who can use Nature Magic to dispel whatever has been done to her.”

Both dragons stared hard, but eventually, the female nodded.  “I was too close to some kind of entropic energy blast. It drained my vitality to the point I nearly fell out of the sky. The shamans then put up some kind of boundary field within the air directly above their position and the world tree’s stump. It, it came from the corrupted ground and spread quickly, forcing us away. It is… A magnificent working, in a way, just like a ceremonial dagger destined to take thousands of lives is an amazing show of the blacksmith’s art,” she stated.

“So there’s not going to be a quick solution, no fiery retribution from the sky?” Nealu snorted, shaking his head, having little desire to hold his tongue as Tyrande did.  “I suppose that should have been assumed.”

“Keep your attempts at humor to yourself, kaldorei, lest I decide you will be quite tasty once you are set on fire,” Salgregos snarled, before reluctantly shaking his head.  “Yet you are correct. We need to deal with this problem before it can get any worse. A troll shaman, one who willingly began to use what you call saronite and was so powerful he could then bind one of their own loa and drain him to gain necrotic power? Yes, we must stop it before that creature turns into what we all fear.”

“My companion snuck into the area recently and did not see any sign that the shaman was being overcome by saronite corruption,” Nealu stated as the druid moved forward, his hands lighting up with the green of Nature Magic.

The female dragon glared at him, but allowed him to touch one of her foreclaws, and as the healing magic of Rejuvenation spread over her, she instantly began to perk up. A moment later, Varnecgosa waved him off, and the same spell began to appear around her, the dragon using her own inner energies to power it now that she understood the form of the healing spell. Such was the mastery that blue dragons had of their own magical cores.

“I am supposed to trust the word of one of you on such a matter?” Salgregos snorted, rolling his eyes in a manner that seemed to transcend species. “Regardless, so long as the shaman is on guard, my family won’t be able to get close. Not without taking losses.”

It looked as if that cost the haughty dragon physical pain, but Tyrande said nothing, simply nodding.

“Initially, he only had some kind of bolt of entropic energy.  But as we closed, the shaman started to create a field of it.  So vast and so quick, he pushed away from the world tree’s stump,” Varnecgosa added, sounding a bit friendlier than her mate. “The first we were able to dodge. The second, I could not.  Nor could I think of a shield to combat it.”

“Did you take notice of anything else on the ground beyond the shaman and his attacks on you?” Tyrande inquired.

Varnecgosa shook her head. “We did not.  We saw thousands of skeletons and undead, but that’s hardly new information.  We tried to light a fire to the remnants of Vordrassil, I think you call it? Well, that didn’t work either.  We even tried to use other breath attacks, and a few magical spells, but the magical resistance of a world tree, especially one corrupted like that, is hard to overcome.”

“I don’t suppose your goddess could do something about such an anti-life field? Salgregos demanded archly, a draconic sneer on his face.

 “I believe I could, yes. It would take time and effort, but it is possible,” Tyrande said, as she finally felt her goddess's eyes slowly leaving her, the power she had been granted fading, the goddess's light disappearing from around her body. She said another brief mental prayer to Elune for her aid once more, and received a feeling of a hand resting on her shoulder almost, before it was gone.  “However, it would not last for very long, and considering the undead we’d have to fight off at the same time, I don’t know how long my efforts would last.”

“The old furbolg city, the vrykul that have apparently joined their tribes and so forth, yes. Well, my family and I can make sure your cordon becomes a reality from now on. We will spread out, fly around the corruption and create a firewall around the area. Saronite flesh-crafted abomination, skeleton, or living folk like you and the trolls. Nothing can stand up to our fire. That will at least buy us time to figure out how to overcome that field.”

To that, Tyrande could only nod, hoping that would indeed be the case, yet fearing it would not.  This campaign had already become far, far worse than she had ever wished, and she knew it was going to continue to get worse before it got better.

End Chapter

I had two small Harry segments, but reading through them, I didn’t think I gave them enough weight. I wanted to show more of Harry experimenting with how to speed their way, and at the very least, his meeting with Cenarius and his family, but neither scene was good enough.  Thus, we have a chapter without Harry in it at all.  Sorry, guys and gals.