The Long Road Through Tor’Watha

The unseen foe lasted about a minute.

Burrly came back to Eversong Woods among the ruined troll stones of Tor’Watha, where yesterday’s question had been waiting for him all night like a creditor on the doorstep. A Foe Unseen, the elves had called it. The chronicler had braced for a long hunt through the gold-leafed undergrowth. Instead the Kul Tiran walked into the clearing, settled the matter, and collected his fee before the ink on yesterday’s page had properly dried. Whatever had been planting those vines is a foe seen now, and that is generally the last thing such a creature gets to be.

That should have been the end of it. In Quel’Thalas, nothing is ever the end of it.

Following the Root took him deeper, because roots go somewhere and somebody always wants to know where. Gods Before Us came next, and the name alone should have warned him. The Amani raised Tor’Watha for gods who were here before the elves arrived and fully intend to be here after they leave. Burrly walked among their broken altars with the careful manners of a man who knows how little the dead care for manners. An Impasse followed, then Beat of Blood, each one a door opening onto a narrower hallway.

He changed his clothes on the way, as warriors do, without ceremony and without a mirror. The Burnt Watha’nan Breastplate went over his chest, scorched black along the edges by some fire the chronicler would rather not know the origin of. A Puzzling Crypt Relic went into his belt pouch, a trinket so named because no one, least of all Burrly, can say what it is for. And into his hands went an Enchanted Crypt Greatsword. The chronicler notes that he has spent a week in Eversong dressing himself out of the tombs of the dead. At some point the dead will want their things back.

He also found, once again, a parcel of Bazaar Bites. Two nights running now. Someone in Silvermoon is losing a great many suppers in this forest, and the chronicler is beginning to suspect it is the same someone.

Light Guide Us carried him up into Amani Pass, where the trolls once held the road against all comers and the stones still remember it. That one was a proper fight, long and grinding, the kind that leaves a man breathing hard and leaning on his sword. He came out of it changed. Not wiser, exactly. Stronger, the way the body grows stronger when it keeps surviving things it had no business surviving. An Eversong Defender’s Helm came out of the pass with him, and he set it on his head in place of the dead man’s mask he had worn out of Deatholme. The chronicler counts that a small mercy. Past Redemption was done in the same breath, and then a task called Fractured, which is how most of Quel’Thalas would describe itself if anyone thought to ask.

Then trouble on two legs found him.

The name was Urdaru, out of Wyrmrest Accord. Eversong was quiet one moment and not the next. A Blackout Kick landed like a falling mast, and the Kul Tiran met the dirt of the pass face first. The forest, which has watched elves and trolls kill each other here for four thousand years, did not look up.

So he went where the killing is at least organized.

Silvershard Mines, with a borrowed company of strangers. A hunter named Thedüde, out of Tichondrius, put an arrow in him twice, once in passing and once with real intent. Delphias added a third. Burrly kept getting up. Somewhere between the second death and the third, he and his fellows rode a mine cart from its rails all the way to the depot without ever losing their grip on it, which sounds small until you have tried it under hunter fire. The Alliance carried the field. He walked out with a fuller purse and his dignity roughly where he had left it.

He made one stop in Silvermoon City to settle accounts. Fractured, closed. The Delver’s Call for the Shadow Enclave, closed at last, with nearly four hundred gold for the trouble he and Valeera had seen down there. And a new road written into his ledger: The Gates of Zul’Aman.

Then Warsong Gulch, because a man killed four times in one evening is clearly owed a fifth and a sixth. Hidenseekk of Stormscale put a pistol ball in him in the Silverwing Flag Room. Apacolyptic of Bleeding Hollow followed with something called Reap the Storm, which a Kul Tiran of all people ought to have seen coming. The Horde took the flag and the field. Nine minutes, start to finish. The Gulch does not do long goodbyes.

He came home to the Bazaar with two more Delver’s Calls in his pocket, Parhelion Plaza and The Darkway, and two new names in the stable ledger: a Ghastly Charger and the Headless Horseman’s own Hallowed Charger. The chronicler asked no questions. It is October in Azeroth. Ghost horses turn up.

Six deaths. Close to eight hundred gold earned and not a copper spent. A new helm, a burnt breastplate, a sword out of a crypt, and one more rung on a ladder that never ends.

And north of Eversong, the Gates of Zul’Aman. The trolls built that road, too. They have been waiting a long time for someone to walk up it.