Rise of the Horde

2

I remember when we first encountered the tauren. I remember Cairne Bloodhoof’s deep voice and calm face. I remember sitting on the ground in a tent that could be broken down and erected with startling speed, and feeling oddly at home. We smoked pipes, shared food and drink, felt the drumming in our bones, and talked. The tauren seemed to me bestial at first, but there was wisdom and humor in them, and by the time the first round of negotiations had been conducted, I knew that the orcs had a rare ally in these half-bovine beings.

Night had fallen while we spoke, a soft night befitting this beautiful land. We left the tent and gazed up at stars too numerous too count, a sweet wind caressing our faces. I turned to Drek’Thar, to ask for his wisdom. To my astonishment I saw tears on his face, glinting in the moon’s light.

“This is how we used to be, my chieftain,” he said in a broken voice. He lifted his arms and tilted his head back, calling the wind to embrace him and dry the tears on his strong green face. “Close to the earth. Close to the spirits. Strong in the hunt, gentle with the younglings, knowing our place in the world to be right and just. Understanding the balance of taking and giving. The only magic the tauren practice is the good, clean magic of the earth, and the land reflects that, the way Draenor once reflected our connection.”

I thought of the tauren’s request for aid infighting their enemy, the vile, filthy centaur.

“Yes … I feel for them. It will be good to be able to help them,” I said.

Drek’Thar laughed, turning his blind eyes to me and seeing me more clearly than anyone with sight could.

“Oh, my young Thrall,” he said, chuckling still, “you do not yet understand. They will help us.”

Durotan ran as fast as his powerful young legs could carry him. His breath came fast, and sweat dappled his reddish-brown skin, but he forced himself to keep going. It was summer, and his large, flat feet were bare. The grass was soft beneath him as he ran, and occasionally he would step on the bright purple blossom of a dassanflower. The scent from the bruised plant traditionally cultivated for healing wafted up like a blessing, inspiring him to run even farther, even faster.

Now he was on the fringe of the Terokkar forest, pushing forward into its cool, gray-green depths. He had to watch out for the twining roots of the elegant trees lest he trip over them, and his pace perforce slowed. Soft lights glowed in the green heart of this forest, and the calm it exuded was at sharp odds with Durotan’s need for triumph. He increased his pace, leaping over fallen tree trunks covered with moss, ducking under low-slung branches with the grace of a talbuk. His black hair, long and thick and spilling all the way to the middle of his back, flew behind him. His lungs burned and his legs cried out for him to cease, but he ground his teeth and ignored the pleas from his body. He was a Frostwolf, the heir to clan chieftaincy, and no Blackrock would possibly—

Durotan heard a fair approximation of a war cry behind him and his heart sank. Orgrim’s voice, like Durotan’s, was still sinking toward the deep bellow that marked an adult male, but even Durotan had to admit it was already impressive. He willed his legs to pump even harder, but they felt as heavy and unmoving as if they had been carved of stone. He watched in dismay out of the corner of his eye as Orgrim came into his field of vision and then, with a final spurt of energy, raced past him.

The Blackrock orc extended his arm and lunged, managing to hit the tree trunk in the clearing that they had decided represented the goal of the race right before Durotan did. Orgrim kept going for several more strides, as if his powerful legs, once put into motion, were reluctant to stop. Durotan’s legs had no such problems, and the heir to the Frostwolf clan fell forward, barely catching himself. He lay facedown in the cool, sweet-smelling mossy earth, gasping for air, knowing he should sit up, knowing he should challenge Orgrim again, but too exhausted to do anything other than lie on the forest floor and recover.

Beside him, he heard Orgrim doing likewise, and then the other orc youth rolled over on his back and began to laugh. Durotan joined in. The birds and small animals that inhabited the Terokkar forest were silent as two orcs uttered sounds of mirth that, Durotan thought as his lips curled past his still-forming tusks, probably sounded more than a little like the fierce war cries that presaged a hunt.

“Ha,” grunted Orgrim, sitting up and punching Durotan in a playful manner. “It is little effort to beat a stripling like you. Durotan.”

“You have so much muscle your brain is starved,” Durotan retorted. “Skill is as important as power. But the Blackrock clan wouldn’t know about such things.”

There was no malice in their banter. Their clans had been troubled at first by the friendship between the two youths, but Durotan’s stubborn argument—that just because something had never been done before did not mean it could not be done—amused and impressed the leaders of both clans. It helped that both the Frostwolves and the Blackrocks were both traditionally even-tempered orc clans. Had Durotan proposed such a friendship with a Warsong clan member or a Bonechewer, for example, known for their intense clan pride and distrust of others, the little flame of friendship would have died quickly. So the elders watched, and waited for the novelty to fade and for each youth to return to his rightful place and keep the familiar order that had been established for … as long as anyone could recall.

They were disappointed.

The frost of late winter had given way to spring and now the full blowsy warmth of summer, and the friendship continued. Durotan knew that they were watched, but as long as no one interfered, he did not object.

Durotan closed his eyes and let his fingers spread over the moss. The shaman said that all things had a life, a power, a spirit. They were deeply involved with the spirits of the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and the Spirit of the Wilds—and claimed they could sense the life force in earth and even seemingly dead stone. All Durotan could feel was the cool, slightly moist sensation of moss and soil beneath his palms.

The earth shuddered. His eyes snapped open.

He bolted upright, his hand automatically going for the spiked club that he constantly carried. Orgrim preferred a heavy metal and wood hammer, the traditional weapon of the Blackrocks and a simplified version of the legendary hammer that would one day come to him. The two boys exchanged glances. They did not need to speak to communicate. Was the thing that made the earth shake so an enormous clefthoof, with its shaggy pelt that made magnificent blankets and rich red flesh that could feed almost the whole clan, or was it something more dangerous?

What did live in the Terokkar forest, anyway? They had been here only once before ….

They got to their feet in unison, their small dark eyes peering into the now ominous-seeming dark corners of the close-growing trees, searching for whatever had made the noise.

Boom. The earth shuddered again. Durotan’s heart started to beat faster. If it was a small clefthoof, maybe they could take it down together and share the spoils with both clans. He glanced over at Orgrim and saw the other’s eyes gleam with excitement.

Boom.

Boom.

Crash.

Both youths gasped and then retreated as the noise came closer. A tree only a few yards away from them seemed to splinter before their eyes. The thing that had made the noise and so casually dispatched an ancient tree suddenly came into view.

It was enormous, it carried a club as big as they were, and it was most definitely not a clefthoof.

And it had seen them.

It opened its mouth and bellowed something that was vaguely intelligible, but Durotan wasn’t about to waste time figuring out what it had said.

Their thoughts as one, the two boys turned and fled.

Now Durotan wished desperately that they had not decided to challenge one another to a race earlier, for his legs had not hilly recovered. Yet still they moved when he asked it of them, the need for survival lending him energy.

How had they wandered so far into ogre territory? And where were the gronn? Durotan imagined one of the ogre’s masters forcing its way through the trees as the ogre had—towering over ordinary ogres as ogres towered over the orcs, even more hideous than an ogre, more of the earth than of flesh and yet so terribly wrong, its one eye bloodshot and staring as it pointed at Durotan and Orgrim and directed the ogre toward it.

He and Orgrim were not yet of the season where they would be initiated into adulthood and permitted to go with the warriors of the clans to hunt the ogres and, on rare occasions, the gronn themselves. They had gone on hunts that their clans had perceived as less dangerous, for talbuk and other easy prey, but Durotan had always yearned for the day when he would be allowed to tackle these fearsome creatures, winning honor for himself and his clan.

Now, he wasn’t so sure. The earth continued to tremble, and the shouts of the ogre were coming more clearly now.

“Crush little orcs! Me smash!” The roar that followed this almost made his ears bleed.

The thing was gaining on them. Despite his brain’s panicked orders to his body to run faster, faster curse you, he could not put any distance between him and the monstrous being that loomed so close that its vast shadow almost blotted out what little light filtered through the tree branches.

The trees thinned and the light grew brighter. They were close to the edge of the forest now. Durotan kept running and burst into the open space of the meadow, his feet falling again on soft grass, Orgrim was ahead of him, but not by much. Despair washed through Durotan, followed hard by a black wave of fury.

They were not yet adults! They had not gone on their first real hunt, they had not danced by the fire with the females, they had not bathed their faces in the steaming blood of their first solo kills. There was so much they had not done. To die a glorious death in battle was one thing, but They were so overpowered by the hideous creature as to make their deaths humorous rather than honorable.

Knowing it could cost him precious seconds, but unable to resist the impulse, Durotan turned his head to scream a curse at the ogre before it smashed him as flat as a graincake with its club.

What he saw made his jaw drop.

Their rescuers did not utter a sound. They moved in silence, a quiet tide of blue and white and silver that seemingly sprang out of the very air. Durotan heard the familiar whine of arrows shrieking through the air and a heartbeat later the ogre’s cries were tinged not with rage but with pain. Dozens of arrows, tiny things on that massive pale body, sprouted from it, and it halted its deadly progress. It yelled and tried to brush the irritations from its skin.

A clear voice rang out. Even though he did not understand the language, Durotan recognized words of power when he heard them, and his skin prickled. Suddenly the sky was filled with lightning. But this was unlike any lightning Durotan had seen invoked by a shaman. Blue and white and silver energy crackled around the ogre, swirling about it and closing in on it like a net. The monster bellowed again and fell. The earth shook.

Now the draenei, their bodies covered in some sort of metallic plating that reflected the cool hues of the magical energies in a display that dazzled Durotan’s eyes, dismounted and descended upon the fallen ogre. Blades flashed, more words of power and command were uttered, and Durotan was forced to shut his eyes or be driven mad by the display.

At last silence fell. Durotan opened his eyes again to see that the ogre was dead. Its eyes still stared, its tongue protruded from its parted lips, and its body was covered with red blood and black burn marks.

So great was the silence that Durotan could hear his own ragged breathing and that of Orgrim. The two looked at each other, stunned by what they had just witnessed.

Both had seen the draenei before, of course, but only at a distance. They came now and then to each clan, ready to trade their carefully crafted tools and weapons and decorative pieces of carved stone in exchange for the thick pelts of the forest animals, brightly woven blankets, and raw materials the orcs culled from land and stone. It had always been an occasion of interest in the clans, but the exchanges only lasted a few hours. The draenei—blue-skinned, soft-spoken, eerily arresting—did not invite closeness, and no clan leader had ever asked them to stay and share their hospitality. Relationships were cordial but aloof, and everyone involved seemed to want it that way.

Now the leader of the group that had arrived so unexpectedly strode over to Durotan. From his position on the earth, Durotan saw what he had never noticed when he had regarded the draenei from a distance.

Their legs did not go straight from their torsos to the earth. They curved backward, like … like a talbuk’s, and ended in cloven hooves that were encased in metal from the shiny blue hoof upward. And … yes, it was most definitely a thick, hairless tail that swished back and forth. Now their owner was bending over him, offering a strong blue hand. Durotan blinked, staring a moment longer at the unexpected shape of the draenei’s feet and the reptilian tail, then got to his feet unaided. He looked into a face that bore strange plating on its head, like armor that had grown there. Black hair and a beard flowed over a colorful tabard, and the piercing, glowing eyes were the color of a winter lake. “You are injured?” the draenei asked in halting common Orcish, his tongue obviously having trouble wrapping itself around the guttural syllables.

“Only my pride,” Durotan heard Orgrim mutter in his clan dialect. He, too, was somewhat stung. The draenei had obviously saved both their lives, and he was grateful of course. But they had seen two proud orc youths running from danger. Granted, that danger had been very real—one blow from that gigantic club would have squashed him and Orgrim into two small, crumpled piles—but still.

The draenei may or may not have heard or understood Orgrim; Durotan thought he saw the lips curve in a smile. The draenei glanced skyward, and to his dismay, Durotan realized that the sun was low on the horizon.

“You two have wandered far from home, and the sun settles to sleep,” he said. “Which clan do you hail from?”

“I am Durotan, of the Frostwolf clan, and this is Orgrim of the Blackrock clan.”

The draenei looked startled. “Two different clans? Were you challenging one another, that you wandered so far from your respective homes?”

Durotan and Orgrim exchanged glances. “Yes … and no,” Durotan said. “We are friends.”

The draenei’s eyes widened. “Friends … from two different clans?”

Orgrim nodded. “Yes.” He added, somewhat defensively, “It is not traditional, but it is not forbidden.”

The draenei nodded, but he still looked surprised. He regarded both of them for a moment, then turned to two of his companions and murmured something in his native tongue. Durotan thought the language profoundly musical, like the sound of a stream meandering over stones, or a bird’s call. The other two draenei listened intently, then nodded. One took a waterskin from his belt, drank deeply, and then began to run with a gait nearly as smooth and swift as a talbuk’s, heading southwest where the Frostwolf lands were. The second raced toward the cast, to the Blackrock clan.

The draenei who had been speaking with them turned. “They will notify your families that you are well and safe. You will return home tomorrow. In the meantime, I am happy to offer you the hospitality of the draenei. My name is Restalaan. I am the leader of the guards of Telmor, the town with which both your clans regularly trade. I regret to say I do not remember either of you, but then, the orc younglings seem a bit leery of us when We come to your territory.”

Orgrim bristled. “I am afraid of no one and nothing.”

Restalaan smiled a bit. “You ran from the ogre.”

Orgrim’s brown face darkened and his eyes glinted angrily. Durotan lowered his head slightly. As he had feared, Restalaan and the others had borne witness to their shame, and now they would be mocked.

“That,” Restalaan continued calmly, as if he had not noticed the effect his words had had on the two. “is wisdom. If you had not fled, we would be sending two corpses home to your families tomorrow instead of two healthy, strong orc youths. There is no shame in fear, Orgrim and Durotan. Only in letting fear prevent you from doing the right thing. And in your case, running was definitely the right thing.”

Durotan stuck out his chin. “One day, we will be strong and our full size. Then, it will be the ogres who fear us.”

Restalaan turned a mild face to him, and to Durotan’s surprise, he nodded. “I completely agree,” he said. “Ores are powerful hunters.”

Orgrim narrowed his eyes, looking for the taunt, but there was none.

“Come,” Restalaan said. “There are dangers in the Terokkar forest at night that not even the guards of Telmor would willingly face. Let us go.”

Though exhausted, Durotan found the strength to keep up a steady running pace; he would not twice be shamed in one day. They ran for some time, and the sun eventually dipped below the horizon in a glorious display of crimson, gold, and finally purple. He glanced up now and then, trying not to appear rude, but curious indeed at seeing these strangers at more than several yards’ distance. He kept waiting for the signs of a city—roads made by countless feet traveling the same path, fire cairns lighting a path, the shadows of buildings against the darkening sky. He saw nothing. And as they continued, he felt a quick stab of fear.

What if the draenei were not planning to help him and Orgrim after all? What if they were going to capture them, to hold them for ransom? What if they were going to do something worse—sacrifice them to some dark god, or—

“Here we are,” Restalaan said. He dismounted and knelt on the ground, moving aside some leaves and pine needles. Orgrim and Durotan exchanged confused glances. They were still in the middle of a forest. No city, no roads, nothing at all. Both orcs gathered themselves. They were severely outnumbered, but they would not die without a fight.

Still kneeling on the pine-needle carpet, Restalaan uncovered a beautiful green crystal. It had been carefully hidden beneath the everyday detritus of the forest. Durotan stared, enraptured at the beauty of the thing. It would fit into die palm of his hand, and he ached to touch it, to feel that smoothness, that strange pulsing, against his skin. Somehow he knew it would exude a calm the likes of which he had never experienced. Restalaan uttered a string of syllables that branded themselves on Durotan’s brain.

“Kehla men samir, solay lamaa kahl.”

The forest began to shimmer as if it were a reflection caught by a once-still lake into which a stone had been tossed. Despite himself, Durotan gasped. The shimmering increased, and then suddenly there was no forest, no trees, only a large, paved road that led up the side of the mountains to a place that contained images Durotan had never even conceived.

“We are in the heart of ogre country, though it was not so when die city was built so long ago,” Restalaan said, rising. “If the ogres cannot see us, they cannot attack us.”

Durotan found his tongue. “But … how?”

“A simple illusion, nothing more. A trick of … the light.”

There was something in the way he said this that made Durotan’s skin prickle. Seeing the orc’s confused expression, Restalaan continued. “The eye cannot always be trusted. We think what we see is always real, that the light always reveals what is there the same way at all times. But light and shadow can be manipulated, directed, by those that understand it. In the speaking of these words and the touching of the crystal, I have altered how the light falls on the rocks, the trees, the landscape. And so your eye perceives something entirely different from what you thought was there.”

Durotan knew he still stared stupidly. Restalaan chuckled slightly. “Come, my new friends. Come where none of your people have ever been before. Walk down the roads of my home.”