[SPOILERS] Kyan: Warchief of The Horde.

[RefSteel]

Quick OOC note

Thanks for the updates & story, Kyan! I'm hoping to read them in detail (and hopefully even post something) this sometime over the weekend (health permitting). If my at-a-glance read is correct, congrats on landing Buddhism - and congrats to the Burning Dawn Vets for wreaking vengeful havoc like the good orcs they are!

[Kyan]

Game is done in my opinion.

[Ceiliazul]

I fear it may have already been built by the Dwarves!
Haha. No, that is merely Dwarves playing with stones. What's new there? I mean something far more impressive, an Oracle.

I love the style! I guess I was bound to be the dwarves then?

You cannot risk the fate of The Horde on a 71% battle!

QFT! It's interesting that you and Commodore both took good-but-not-great odds by choice. How the game could have been different if the results were reversed!

[RefSteel]

OOC NOTE:

What a let-down of an ending! I don't mean the whole somebody-else-winning thing - I mean the updates just sort of trailing off at the end. Let's see if I can do something about that, shall we? In three or four parts because I'm crazy....

[img][Image lost][/img]

Lyrasin watched the Horde's last remaining defenders charge down the hillside toward the enemy. She bit her lip, but watched with pride and pleasure. "This is why Kyan is warchief," she told herself. "Even were Refstele Firstblood able to lead those beyond the shadows, he might not have had the courage for this. He takes into account that which lies beyond the shadows themselves. Even if he loses, the warchief will die with the knowledge that he made the right decision for the Horde." Still, her hands betrayed her nervousness, and as she stared after the war band, she hardly dared to draw breath. Though convinced the attack had been the right move, Lyrasin was well aware that the Horde's very survival depended on a roll of the dice.

She watched as the forces met, and saw the battle-weary elves decimated, struck down by stone axes and wooden clubs, amid the vengeful orcish warcries of the Burning Dawn. She smiled grimly. "We shall not fall this day. There is yet hope for all our peoples..." but her smile faded as she went on, "...even if my own voice is never heard again among them."

...

Deep in human lands - or furbolg lands according to some, with "some" mainly defined as "Viaseri" - veterans of the Burning Dawn clan marched down into the deer-rich valley below the Enclave of the Bear. The veterans sang and joked among themselves about the defenseless enclave and their expectations of immediate triumph. Lyrasin twisted her namesake, the bloodbow of her line, between her hands. "How can they be so blind? The shadows may conceal the lands north of their enclave, but I can see the road heading northeast from this very hill! Whatever may lie that way, we may be sure that they'll have forces gathered there just out of our view - we know they've trained at least two more bands of warriors already - and though these veterans are more than a match for any one enemy war band, losing one band will be a small sacrifice for the enemy if the second wins! How can they fail to see the trap?"

Even as she spoke, something seemed to whip past through the shadows: Something from the human lands, strange and shapeless, traveling fast. She moved to try to stop it, and it slowed, then stopped before her. "What are you?" she demanded. "Can you see me? Do you know I'm here?" And it took form.

"What...?" But before she could speak another word, the phantom was moving again. It passed, too fast to intercept, and soon was gone. Lyrasin looked after it for a moment in confusion, then suddenly remembering the plight of the veteran orcs, she turned her sorrowing eyes upon the valley below.

She watched, helpless, as the veterans made their camp on the valley floor ... and just as she predicted, the humans marched up the Enclave road, over the hill where the city stood, and descended upon the veterans of the Burning Dawn. Wave after wave rolled down upon the orcs: No less than three human divisions, shouting and waving their clubs. The veterans responded with their furious battle cry, and clubs clashed, stone axes split human skulls, and again and again the humans were driven back, only to descend the hill with still more reinforcements. The orcs tired; many of their clubs lay broken upon the valley floor, alongside human bodies and their own dead and injured. Unfazed, the orcs took up burning brands from their watchfires, and fought with all the might and cunning that the Burning Dawn could muster. They fought, and humans died, and orcs fell dead beside them, and still the tide of human warriors did not abate. Dust, smoke, and the fall of twilight hid the last hours of the battle even from Lyrasin's gaze, until true night at last revealed the torches of marching orcs approaching, climbing the hill on which she stood, their throaty songs of victory echoing across the valley and the lake. By the lights still shining in the Enclave of the Bear, she could see a final division of warriors just gathering, collecting clubs and crude stone axes assembled by slaves who were worked to death under the whip. The combat-hardened veterans of the Burning Dawn could not match even such hastily-mustered troops in their very homes, but they still could sing their victory, winning against three times their numbers, at near-impossible odds.

Staring, agape, all Lyrasin could say was, "Sometimes, I admit, it feels really good to be wrong." That night though, strange scenes from afar troubled her dreams.

I think it may have been Lyrasin. Well, rather, Lyrasin echoing the words of another...

In the dream, Rione spoke, strange words that held little meaning to Lyrasin's ears. All that she could understand was that they were supposed to come from the humans' war leader: Their Commodore. "I know nothing of this Commodore," Lyrasin whispered in her dream. "I've never heard those words before. And what can they mean? What do they tell us that we don't already know?"

Hmm, if that is the Furbolg leader, then we must assume that the Dwarves, their other neighbours, are involved. They have probably destroyed their other settlement! Their workers must be either dead or fleeing!

Lyrasin's eyes boggled. "What?! How do those words mean anything of the kind? Why must they speak of anything more or other than our own forces? Why should we imagine that their other settlement is destroyed, or that their ... Furbolgs? ... aren't hard at work, or even that they have no other warriors beyond our view? What am I missing? What's going on?!" She paused, and then her eyes grew wide. "The spirit that passed me on the eve of the battle! It took my form! You must have seen it! Don't trust it! We know not whence it comes!" But even in her dream, it seemed no one could hear her.

[RefSteel]

OOC NOTE:

Okay, so it appears the following scene is impossible. But I wrote the first version of this scene before I learned about the events described below, and I modified the scene's end before finding out the timing. In the actual game, the veterans were long gone by the time of the events described, but let's pretend they were hanging out on the mountaintop from which our borders could see the action or something. Or that they'd moved back to that one grassland hill. At this point, after all, does it really make a difference?

"Found grass! Lots of grass! Gotta go tell the boss!"

Grigmal Rocktooth, captain of the veteran war band, moves his head a quarter-inch, and three grunts stop Jim in his tracks. With a growl of exasperation, Grigmal demands, "What's all this about grass, Jim? Why were you sent here?"

Jim scratches his head, displacing one of the bandages. "Find grass! The boss said check somebody's grass. Don't member whose grass. But when I asked about the grass, the boss said to go find grass far away. Farther better! And now I'm really far!"

Girgmal stifles a chuckle, then spends a moment pondering. "This guy with the grass," he asks Jim finally, "... his name wasn't Prog, was it?"

Jim's eyes light up at once. "That's it! Boss said to check Prog grass!"

With a groan, Captain Rocktooth turns away. "Tell him ... tell him..." His left hand slowly curls into a fist, and he grits his powerful teeth, his eyes shut tight. In a moment, he lifts his gaze once more and looks out across the lake. With a massive sigh, he relaxes his hand and lets it drop to his side. His eyes find the grass at his feet as he softly answers Jim'rohk. "Tell him all is lost." The wind shifts, carrying the smell of smoke and blood across the lake: The blood of men too slow to flee or to surrender; the smoke of dwarvish fires as they raised their mighty axes in celebration of their victory. The Enclave of the Bear had fallen, and not to the orcs. The humans - those who lived - had all been enslaved, and the momentum of the dwarven host could be withstood by none in the new-made world. The fall of both gnomes and night elves would be inevitable, and so in due course would be the end of the Horde.

[RefSteel]

[img][Viaseri Image Lost][/img][img][Kyan Image Lost][/img][img][Shaman Image Lost][/img]

"We can't just give up!" Rione paces back and forth in a fury. "The power of the light is endless! It can save us even now!"

"And think you it is the only power in the world?" The shaman regards her gravely. "Or think you that none else can wield it? Perhaps the dwarves too have their paladins ... paladins, perhaps, whose oaths of chastity..."

"How dare you?!" Rione demands. "How dare you imply that..."

"Silence! Both of you!" The warchief's bellow rings from the throneroom walls. "I will not send my men to die and serve as slaves beneath the steel-shod boots of the dwarves. This is no time for insults or for boasting. The survival of all our races is in the balance. What can we do if we would not be enslaved, and would not die?"

An eager voice pipes up with a suggestion: "I can go find more grass!"

Viaseri rolls his eyes. "Shut up, Jim," he says quite casually. Then, smiling at the warchief, he says, "I know you better than that. You already have a plan."

"Does he look like he has a plan? Does he sound like it?" Rione spins on the warchief. "You don't believe in the power of the light, perhaps, but in spite of this shaman's blasphemous insults, it does have the power to aid us! At least my own people will stand with me. Indeed ... with all of us here, perhaps it's time that all of us be truly united!" She spins and fixes her gaze upon the darkest corner of the throne room. "Come out, Lyrasin! Your wisdom - call it what the others may - is badly needed, and more urgently than you can offer from mere dreams! I know not of what you spoke before, but I gave you the power to stand before us once, and I shall give you that power again!" With a wave of her hands and a deep incantation, Rione gathers a vast ball of light between her outstretched palms, and taking all the power of light she can muster into her grasp, offers it to the unseen blood elf Lyrasin.

"A true offer," Lyrasin whispers to herself, watching in awe as the light moves toward her. "Yet I am forsworn. Even if I accept it, how could I ever..." Her eyes light up, though none can see. For suddenly, she understands.

Brilliant light fills the throneroom, illuminating even its darkest corners, and shining out so all the horde may see it upon the hill of Orgrimmar. Even in accepting the offered light, Lyrasin takes it not unto herself, and does not manifest, but shines it back into the world, to be seen by all. "To embrace the darkness," she whispers, "but give of light and hope and knowledge; to love life but hold no fear of death...." She smiles at the ancient words, rising from the heart of her own deep faith. "My oath was for my magic to take nothing from the world but of myself - of the blood and strength and solidity that are mine. And now at least, at last, I have returned to the world that light which I falsely took when Rione meant only to pierce the shadows." She sighs at last with contentment ... and all in the throne room hear her.

"Lyrasin," Rione proclaims, "it is well that you are here. We need your advice more than ever. Had you been present to advise us against that trap the Commodore set for us, he would not have lost three warrior divisions in failing to slay our veterans. The humans might have held against their dwarven neighbors, and we might still have won the war!"

"No," another voice answered. "It was impossible. The ranks of the dwarves had already been swollen by the Humans' recklessness. Where the Warchief gambled for a 70% chance of a real hope for victory against 30% of utter defeat, the Commodore gambled, against a 30% chance of certain but drawn out defeat, for a 70% chance of ... gaining a single march of production in his next city? But even that wouldn't explain keeping all his workers on the same hill. At all events, his recklessness provided the dwarves with so many slaves - a larger workforce acquired in a single battle than the Horde at yet even begun to produce by that time - that their victory was assured before our veterans even reached the human borders."

"Who...?"

The shaman chuckles. "The spirit, I think, who brought you the news of the dwarves invading human lands. I offered him the power to speak here, that he might repudiate you. It is one of our warchief's ancestors, I believe. The spirits move in mysterious ways."

Kyan Doomfist agrees with a little smirk, "My grandfather certainly moved in mysterious ways when he got into the spirits. Or the ale, for that matter. Mostly, his mysterious ways ended face-down on the floor."

"You see?" Viaseri beams, having never apparently heard of gallows humor. "The warchief wouldn't jest like that if he didn't have a plan!"

Rione glares at all of them, and spins to face Lyrasin, barely visible, an indistinct shadow among the shadows of the throne room. "You see what we're reduced to! What do you advise?"

Lyrasin looks out over the icy sea, at the edges of the indomitable dwarven empire, and answers, her voice barely a whisper in the throne room, hardly there. "Return," she urges softly, "...to Azeroth."

"Um, I hate to point out the obvious, but that's completely impossible."

"The Titan said that unless we won the war here, all our people who were in Azeroth would be lost forever!"

Again the shaman chuckles to himself. "Pssssh. Titans! They think they're the only power in the world! And you think he can just do that? You who believe your light is limitless? Ha! I believe that something can be done." He glares at Lyrasin's shade. "You are no ancestral spirit though - I can't give you voice as I can that other. What are you then?"

"I am ... the emissary."

Wrinkling his brow, the shaman demands, "But from whom? And what does that mean?"

Kyan growls, "Ask later if at all! If history is any lesson, her time here is limited, and we can't afford to waste any ourselves. Lyrasin, how can we return to Azeroth?"

"There may ... be a way..." she answers, "...through the shadows."

"There may be," Kyan echoes. "Then find out! I do have a plan, Viaseri, but the odds are long. The dwarves may be able to conquer this disgusting excuse for a world, but even they have reason to loathe the one who forced them here. As for us, what do we have to lose?" He grins. "Even by picking his pockets? We might as well try it as not. I am famed for my diplomacy - then let me play the diplomat. I intend to lead all the races now alive, even to the human slaves lately taken, against the titan himself!"

Viaseri cheers, but Kyan looks to Lyrasin. "Go find your path among the shadows if you can," he urges her. "We may need it before long."

[RefSteel]

"Kestrel Bloodshadow? Can you hear me? I..."

"Yeah - we've been able to hear you all along, actually. I'm guessing now you can hear us though, which is definitely an improvement."

"You're there! You're really there!"

"Yeah, we're...
...
... Seriously?

Antenna ears and day-glo green eyes? Do we really have to dress up in these ridiculous things?"

"... I don't know; it's never bothered me. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you'd look good in them!"

"Look, we'd better cut to the chase. You guys need an armed convoy service through the shadows, I take it?"

"Well, I don't think it strictly needs to be armed...

Kestrel Bloodshadow shrugs. "Maybe not, but it's way more fun that way!"

"But ... but I fear it may not be possible. I was told that I was the only one of our people who had retained enough of her physical being to interact with..."

"Sure, but the game's over. We don't have time for your whole backstory right now. Let's just establish that I'm pretty good at moving people through the shadows and leave it at that, okay?"

"But your whole heart-rending history; the tales of..."

"No. Later, maybe. Have some sympathy for our readers! They're falling asleep as we speak!"

"Our read... whaaaaaaat?!"

"Don't worry; she's just breaking the fourth wall again. Or going around it or something. Kestrel's always liked that sort of thing."

With a gasp, Lyrasin cries out, "Refstele?! Refstele Firstblood? And ... and maybe even Kapetin Firstblood?! Can he be here too?!"

"You bet! You've returned to the gathering place! Have a look!"

A joyous reunion results, which unfortunately we do not have space to detail at this time because Kestrel is going to kidnap my computer and make me stop writing this stuff unless she can lose the stupid ear prosthetics and day-glo sunglasses ASAP. Suffice to say that it involves singing and dancing and music that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, and more importantly involves lots of imaginary cookies, which are delicious. (Generally even more delicious than the real variety.)

But do our heroes return to Azeroth? Is the Titan defeated?

"Yeah, they'll make it back. One way or the other, even if I have to see to it myself, they'll make it. As for the titan though? Well ... I guess we'll have to see!"

[Kyan]

[COLOR="Silver"]Ref- you're awesome mate. I loved reading these. I am sorry that the roleplay dropped off so suddenly. Basically, when I realised I had zero chance of winning after investing so much time, I just got really fed up. I figured it was better for no post rather than me trying to write stories in such a mood.

As always, you've pulled me through a tough scrape and I appreciate it![/COLOR]