Old Scars at Suncrown

The vines had gotten into Suncrown Village the way rot gets into a ship’s hull: quietly at first, then all at once. They climbed the white stone of the old elven houses and threaded through the gilded railings, thick as mooring line and the wrong color for anything that grows in honest soil. Burrly stood at the edge of the square with the light of Eversong Woods coming gold through the leaves and studied the tendrils the way a Kul Tiran studies a knot somebody else tied badly.

Then he went to work.

He had come up out of Deatholme wearing a dead man’s mask and carrying a question called What’s Left. The chronicler had hoped, briefly, that the answer might require some contemplation. It did not. The answer was a village half-strangled by void-touched growth and a handful of tired elves who needed someone large to start cutting. Choking Tendrils, they called the job, with the blunt honesty of people too exhausted for poetry.

Ten minutes. That is how long the vines held out against a man who learned his trade hauling rigging in a gale. Whatever had been nesting in the growth came at him in ones and twos and left its coin behind in small, steady handfuls, the way a tide leaves driftwood. The chronicler counted the clink of each purse hitting the ground and stopped counting somewhere around the seventh. The work was not glorious. It was a man and an axe and a weed problem with ambitions. Most of the work that saves a town looks exactly like that.

When it was done, he turned in both debts in the same breath: the tendrils cut, and What’s Left answered at last. The elves of Suncrown pressed a cloak into his hands, the Suncrown Savior’s Drape, and he had it over his shoulders before anyone finished thanking him. The chronicler notes that the village named a garment “Savior” before the ink on the job was dry. Quel’Thalas has always been quick with its titles. It is slower with its trust.

Then came Premonition, which took less than half a minute to deliver. A premonition that brief is less a prophecy than a weather report. Whatever was foreseen, it pointed two directions at once: toward Old Scars, and toward something they called A Foe Unseen. Burrly took both. He did not ask which was more dangerous. Warriors rarely do, and the ones who ask tend to get the same answer anyway.

Old Scars asked him to go back out among the ruined edges of the village, where the vines had done their worst. More fighting, more coin. Among the leavings he found a parcel of Bazaar Bites, which is the kind of treasure the world coughs up when it has nothing better to offer: someone’s market-stall supper, carried into a void-blighted forest and never eaten. He also pried loose a weapon called Cre’van’s Punisher and turned it over in his hands long enough to memorize every line of it, the way warriors do with blades they would like to be seen carrying someday. He did not keep the name of Cre’van. Cre’van, presumably, is past caring.

By the time he set Old Scars to rest, his purse was a hundred and forty-odd gold heavier and he had spent not a copper of it. Twenty minutes, start to finish. The Silvermoon Court still counted him a friend. Valeera Sanguinar’s regard sat where it has sat for as long as these pages have existed, at a height that usually means either a life saved or a favor about to be called in.

He made his camp in Eversong Woods with the Drape across his shoulders and one task still unfinished in his ledger.

A Foe Unseen. The vines were the symptom. Something planted them. Something in this golden, wounded forest has been patient enough to grow a weapon one tendril at a time, and it has not shown its face. The chronicler has followed enough adventurers to know that the unseen foe is never unseen for long. It is only waiting to be sure you are worth looking at.

Burrly, it seems, has just made himself worth looking at.