The Man Who Fell to Quel’Thalas

The Kul Tiran hit the ground before he saw the ground. One moment Burrly was crossing into Quel’Thalas; the next, the autumn-gold grass of Eversong Woods was introducing itself to his face with an enthusiasm he had not requested. The chronicler has watched many arrivals in this ancient land. Few have been quite so horizontal.

Death, here, is a formality. Burrly picked himself up, brushed the loam from his pauldrons, and walked into Tranquillien as though he had meant to do that. Warriors of Kul Tiras are not easily embarrassed, which is fortunate, because the blood elf guards at the gate absolutely saw the whole thing.

Tranquillien is a town with a name that promises peace and a reality that delivers something closer to organized desperation. Burrly arrived to find it teetering. The void has fingers in Eversong now, long and patient, and those fingers were curling around the town’s throat. Five quests fell to him in fifteen minutes: a pace that suggests either extraordinary competence or the kind of urgency that makes quest-givers stop checking credentials. The chronicler suspects both.

He cut through “Appeal to the Void” and “Rational Explanation” with the efficiency of a man who has learned that void cultists are like cockroaches: the first one you see means there are fifty more you have not found yet. A ransacked laboratory yielded an Eversong Chain for his neck and a Girdle of Herbicide for his waist. These are not subtle names. The blood elves were growing something in that lab, and the belt’s very existence suggests it went poorly.

The chronicler notes the factions that took notice. Valeera Sanguinar already holds Burrly in regard that words like “Exalted” only begin to describe; whatever he did for her, the debt runs deep. Six more factions declared themselves Friendly in the span of a breath: the Silvermoon Court, the Amani Tribe, the Hara’ti, the Ritual Sites, and one that calls itself The Singularity. In the politics of Quel’Thalas, “Friendly” means they have decided not to shoot him on sight. The Singularity’s name alone suggests the courtesy may not survive the week.

And then there was Umbric’s Channeling Focus, a trinket pulled from the wreckage. Umbric’s name carries weight in these parts: the void-etched, gravity-bending kind that makes sensible people walk the other way. Burrly strapped it on without hesitation. Kul Tirans and sensible people have never been the same circle on the diagram. He also pocketed an Oathsworn Ring of Might, which is the sort of name that suggests whoever swore the oath is no longer around to collect on it. Burrly did not ask. Warriors rarely do.

His gathering skills ticked upward between battles. Herbalism at four, Mining at six. The man stops to pick flowers and chip ore in the middle of a void incursion. There is either something admirable or something deeply wrong about that. The chronicler has stopped trying to decide which.

By the time he accepted “The Battle for Tranquillien” and its grim companions, “The Traitors of Tranquillien” and “The Heart of Tranquillien,” his purse had grown heavier by over a hundred and seventy gold and the town had placed its fate in the hands of a stranger who arrived by falling on his face. The innkeeper took his coin for a room. The chronicler took his notes.

Three battles remain on his ledger. A town waits. The void, patient as rot, waits too. And somewhere in the Silvermoon Court, Valeera Sanguinar is keeping a tally that has already reached Exalted, which in this world means one of two things: he saved her life, or he is about to be asked to.