Through the Gates of Zul’Aman

The Gates of Zul’Aman have kept elves out for longer than most kingdoms have kept anything. That evening they opened for a Kul Tiran who smelled of tar and salt, and the trolls on the other side were not sure whether to thank him or count their silverware.

It began at the Amani Pass, where Lady Liadrin and her Blood Knights hold the road between Eversong and the troll lands. The Amani had surrendered the lightwood they took from the elves, but Zul’jan, who led that raid, never went home. He lingered at the gates with his warriors, and Liadrin, who had run out of patience with him, sent Burrly to try diplomacy instead. The talk was cut short when a Void beast came howling out of the shadows, and the matter of who was angrier at whom was set aside so everyone could kill it. Burrly helped. When the dust settled, the elves learned that Zul’jan does not lead the Amani at all. His sister does. Her name is Zul’jarra, granddaughter of Zul’jin himself, and Liadrin said, with an elf’s gift for understatement, that this might be worse.

Liadrin meant to talk her way through the gate, and told him to follow her lead. Before that was settled, Burrly went down. On the western edge of Zul’Aman lies a second Atal’Aman, a delve, where the Delvers send their braver and less sensible recruits. Valeera Sanguinar walked beside him, the same quiet blade from the Darkway and the Plaza. Somewhere in the dark he took up the Delvers’ call for this place. He gathered small blessings off the fallen, as is his habit: a Boon of Possibilities, a Boon of Potency, a Boon of Power. At one point he fell a very long way and got up again, which a man should be allowed to brag about.

At the bottom waited the Disciple of Vashnik, a priest of the serpent-cult that calls itself the Children of Ula’tek, who spits venom and calls slimes out of the floor. The chronicler was not down there and will not invent the blows. The record says only that the Disciple fell, and Burrly walked out with a Hex Loop on one finger and a Depleted Voidshard Ring on the other. A man in a troll city wearing a hex ring. Bold. Valeera left at the surface, as she always does, without farewell.

Liadrin got her passage. Zul’jarra let the two of them through, though not the Blood Knights, and the reason was plain enough: the Twilight’s Blade had come for Atal’Aman, the old temple city, under a general named Mor’duun, and the Amani had nobody else to ask. Liadrin admitted that no one from Eversong had set foot on that side of the border in years, then told Burrly not to turn his back on his hosts. The Amani, presumably, were telling each other the same thing. Somewhere in that crossing he felt it again, the slow thickening of arm and back that comes from surviving one more thing that meant to kill him. Another rung. The ladder does not care which side of the border you stand on.

Then up into the city proper, where the drums are. Zul’jarra had asked him to find Atal’Aman’s great war drums and beat them, to call the Witherbark, the Revantusk and the Shadowpine to the fight, and to tell the civilians to fall back to the Altar of Malacrass. Liadrin, meanwhile, wanted the Amani to see how efficiently outsiders can kill shadows. So Burrly did both. He sounded the drums and cut down the Void-things in the streets, and Zul’jarra noticed. The Amani paid him in a pair of Twilightbreaker’s Gauntlets, which he buckled on before the troll finished speaking.

Then he did a strange thing. He left. A call came from the far side of the world, from the ruined coast of Gilneas, where Alliance and Horde have been fighting over mines and lighthouses since the Wall fell. He answered it. It went badly. A hunter called Marylou put him in the dirt at the Mines, then again at the Waterworks, then a third time on the Gilnean Coast. A mage called Coujaa did it twice more near the end, the last time at the Lighthouse. By the chronicler’s count he died ten times in a quarter of an hour, and the Horde carried the day. War is a ledger, and that night the Kul Tiran’s column was red.

He came back to Zul’Aman and stood at the Altar of Malacrass, where the Amani have been told to gather, with Swiftclaw Terrace still full of Twilight soldiers and three Amani elders still somewhere in the city who have not answered the drums. Zul’jarra wants them found. One of them is her uncle, an old loa speaker who, she warns, may need special persuasion to leave.

The chronicler has known a few old men like that. They usually stay until the roof comes down.