The Blood Elf Problem

Burrly returned to Eversong Woods with the weary familiarity of a man who knows the blood elves have a problem and that he, for reasons that escape him, has been designated the solution. He is a Kul Tiran warrior, built like a ship’s mast and carrying three hundred and thirty thousand gold, which in the economy of Azeroth means he could buy the problem and the blood elves along with it. He solves their problems anyway. Old habits.

The problem this time was Lightbloom Ath’Ran, a stretch of sacred ground where the flora had gone mad with some unnamed corruption. The blood elves, being blood elves, had not investigated it themselves. The blood elves, being blood elves, had instead waited for a large human to show up and do the investigating for them. Burrly trimmed their lightbloom. Burrly cultivated their curiosities. Burrly sought their truths and delivered their findings to Silvermoon, each step of the chain rewarding him with exactly three hundred nine thousand, eight hundred copper plus whatever small change the game felt like adding. The chronicler stopped counting the gold after the first two payouts. The chronicler has learned that wealth at Burrly’s level is a number that increases for reasons even the player does not fully track.

The silvermoon magister was wayward. The blood elves needed an appeal to the void, which sounded alarming until you realized they meant it literally and had paperwork for it. Burrly accepted every quest put before him with the expression of a man who stopped reading quest text somewhere around level forty and now just clicks “accept” on reflex. The chronicler respects this. There comes a point in every veteran’s career where the story is no longer what the quest-giver says. The story is what happens.

What happened was this: Burrly equipped a Ring of Overgrowth, which the chronicler notes purely because it replaced something he was wearing before and is therefore an upgrade, which in the endgame economy of Azeroth is the only currency that still matters. A green ring. Item level one-twenty. The kind of drop that would make a lesser adventurer weep with joy and made Burrly nod once and move on.

And then came the Cenarion Circle. Or rather, two druids from the Cenarion Circle server who had decided, correctly, that a large Kul Tiran in Eversong Woods was an opportunity for target practice. Morphmious opened with Twin Claw, twenty-six thousand damage in a single blow that left Burrly’s corpse crumpled among the lightbloom like an offering the plants declined to accept. Zalbinoo followed up with Fury of Elune, a spell whose name suggests divine wrath and whose execution suggested someone who had been waiting for this moment all day. Burrly died again. Three thousand six hundred damage. The chronicler notes the numbers because numbers at this level mean something: Morphmious hit like a collapsing cathedral; Zalbinoo finished what was left.

The third death was not PvP. The third death was gravity. Burrly fell in Tranquillien, seventy-five thousand damage from an opponent that has never lost a fight. The chronicler has seen veteran adventurers die to the environment more times than to raid bosses. The ground is undefeated and always will be.

He logged out with eight new faction standings discovered, because at level eighty the game apparently decided he needed to know his reputation with the Ritual Sites, the Hara’ti, the Amani Tribe, the Singularity, the Silvermoon Court, and the Slayer’s Duellum, all of which he discovered by existing in their general vicinity. Valeera Sanguinar, at least, was Exalted. The chronicler does not know what Burrly did to earn Valeera Sanguinar’s eternal devotion and suspects Burrly does not know either.

The quest chain hung unfinished. Appeal to the Void. Rational Explanation. Two threads dangling from a journal that has seen more completed quests than most adventurers will ever accept. He will be back. The blood elves will have another problem. They always do.