Aldric Holt · human · Alliance · Elwynn Forest
EU · Roleplay PvP
I am writing this in Stormwind, at the foot of a statue in the Valley of Heroes. My ears are still full of wind, and my coat smells of dust. Both are new.
The night before, in the trees, a paladin said: coem kill bear. I went with him. We killed wolves, then the bear he wanted. He had a head to carry to Goldshire. So did I. Good fight, I said. Thanks, he said.
Later, the lake, and a hunter called Strom. One wolf between us and little talk. At the moon I said safe travels and went first, the way I do.
At Eastvale I finished the day's business. The guard on the bridge had a bounty on murlocs and let me pick from his rack. I took a knife, plain, no mark on it, and turned it twice before the old one went in the bag.
Before I slept I gave the bear a name. Flint. We seem to have become friends, which was not the plan. I say his name out loud now. Three days ago I did not.
In the morning I woke at the foot of the tower at Azora. The grass was wet to the knees. Goldshire first: Elmpaw's head to Helene Peltskinner, and she did not look at it long. Then south, past the vineyards, to the landing.
Defias men on the docks, and a murloc in the shallows behind them. This one came out of the water and did not stop. I put arrows in him. One of the dock men put a knife in the bear's back. Flint went down first. I was on one knee in the shallows and the water came over my boot. This is a stupid place to end. Then it was quiet.
I counted my arrows. Not many. I have been dead three times. Twice it was fire. This was water, and it did not take me. I do not know if that is a change or a joke.
Flint was dead on the grass. I did not leave. He came back the way I came back, without asking me first, and then he was hungry.
Then a priest came down the shore. Asagi. We killed murlocs until the sun was over the trees. There was a big murloc there called Croaky. I took his head to the tower at Ridgepoint and the guard there paid me for it.
In the woods at Forest's Edge there is a poster with a gnoll's face on it. Hogger. The poster says the army could not take him. I took Flint and looked for him in the trees. I shot him from the grass and then I put the knife in, and his claw is worth a bounty. The marshal paid me and did not ask what it took.
There was a fire in Goldshire when I came back, and people around it. A woman called Kari said it was cozy. I said well met, and then my name. Anything hot? I asked. Someone said a mana well was coming up. I did not know what that was and did not ask. I ate my bread in front of the marshal and laughed at him. Bread and salt, I said, and a man called Wolok asked if fire was hot, and if this was some kind of word game. Then he asked what cold was. I said the road was waiting. To the road, then.
South of Elwynn it is another country. No rain has come here for a long time. The fields are the colour of old straw, the ditches are dry, and the ground under the grass is dust that the wind takes. Only the trees in the far fields are still green. That is how you know the rain has stopped coming.
At the Jansen stead an old man and his wife sat by a wagon that will not roll. Behind them the farm was full of other men. They have lost more than a harvest. He asked me for a watch left in a wardrobe. She asked me for oats for a horse. I took both.
The oats were in the fields, between the machines. I killed them one by one and between them I picked up oats, eight times, with my hands. They are rusty, and they walk where the wheat should be. The watch is in a house to the west. I did the oats.
I brought her the oats. She gave me a blanket for the horse and a pouch for its feed, and I put them in the bag. The recipe went to Salma Saldean, the letter to Gryan Stoutmantle on Sentinel Hill. Gryan wants fifteen trappers and fifteen smugglers dead. He says the price of peace is often blood. Out here a lot of people are short of hands. I did not say yes. I did not say no.
The gryphon master at Sentinel Hill is called Thor. He took my coin and put me on the bird, and the bird went up. I have read the ground all my life: tracks, water, which way a man walked and how heavy he was. From up there the country is one page and I read all of it at once. The dry patch where I had been walking. The dark bank of Duskwood under the wings. Elwynn, green all the way to the walls of Stormwind.
Nobody told me about the cold in the air, or how the bird leans, or the sound of my own blood in my ears.
The gryphon put me down in the Valley of Heroes and went back for someone else. So: half of a dry country in my coat, a horse blanket in my bag, and no horse. I will not sell the blanket. In a country like that one somebody will need it before I do. Tonight it goes under my back, because the stone in this city is cold.