Vol'jin: Shadows of the Horde

9

It surprised Vol’jin that Tyrathan was already up and out of bed by the time he arrived with a jihui board and pieces. The man had made it all the way over to the window and leaned against it, much as Vol’jin himself had done. The troll noticed that the man’s cane remained at the foot of the bed.

Tyrathan looked back over his shoulder. “Can barely see any signs of the storm now. They say you never see the arrow that will kill you. I didn’t see that storm. Not at all.”

“Taran Zhu said such storms be unusual but not rare.” Vol’jin set the board down on the side table. “The later they come, the more savage they be.”

The man nodded. “Can’t see anything, but can still feel it. There is a chill in the air.”

“You should not be barefoot.”

“Nor you.” Tyrathan turned, a bit unsteadily, then hooked his elbows on the casement. “You’ve taken to adapting yourself to the cold. Up before dawn, standing in the snows on the south side, the snows sheltered in shadow during the day. Admirable but foolish. I do not recommend it.”

Vol’jin snorted. “Calling a troll foolish be most unwise.”

“I hope you will learn from my folly.” The man levered himself away from the wall and staggered toward the bed. The limp had almost vanished, despite his weakness. Vol’jin turned toward him but made no move to aid him. Tyrathan smiled, catching himself on the footboard for a rest. It was part of the game they played.

The man lowered himself to the edge of the bed. “You’re late. Do they have you doing my chores?”

Vol’jin waved the question away as he dragged the side table over, then fetched a chair. “It speeds my recovery.”

“Now you come to take care of me.”

The troll’s head came up. “Trolls be not without a sense of obligation.”

Tyrathan laughed. “I know trolls well enough to know that.”

Vol’jin centered the board on the table. “Do you?”

“Do you remember when you commented on my troll accent? You said Stranglethorn.”

“You ignored me.”

“I chose not to respond.” Tyrathan accepted a canister, poured out the black pieces, and arranged them in sets of six. “Do you want to know how I learned?”

Vol’jin shrugged, not because he didn’t want to know but because he knew the man would tell him regardless.

“You’re right. It was Stranglethorn. I found a troll. I paid him very well for a year. He told himself he was my guide. He performed his duties well. I picked up his language—at first without him knowing I was listening, then in conversation. I have a facility for that.”

“I be believing that.”

“Tracking is a language. I would track him. Every day I would go back to a patch of ground to watch how his footprints deteriorated. In the hot season, after the rain. I learned the language that told me how long before he had passed, how quickly he’d gone, how tall he was.”

“Did you kill him after?”

Tyrathan scooped the black troops back into the canister. “Not him. I’ve killed other trolls.”

“I be not fearing you.”

“I know. And I have killed men, as have you.” The man set his canister on the table. “This troll, Keren’dal he called himself, would pray. That’s what I thought, and I mentioned it. He said he was speaking to the spirits. I forget what he called them.”

Vol’jin shook his head. “There would be no forgetting. He never told you. Secrets be secrets.”

“Times he would be irritable, like you. Those were times when he spoke to them but got no answers.”

“Does your Holy Light answer you, manthing?”

“I’ve long since stopped believing in it.”

“Which be why it abandoned you.”

Tyrathan laughed. “I know why I am abandoned. For the same reason as you.”

Vol’jin locked his face into a neutral mask but knew that by that very act, he had betrayed himself. The fact was that since he had tracked through Tyrathan’s memories, since he had seen the world through the man’s eyes, the loa had been distant and quiet. It felt as if the storm that had raged around the monastery still raged in the spirit realm. He could see Bwonsamdi and Hir’eek and Shirvallah, but only in dim, gray silhouettes that vanished in waves of white.

Vol’jin still believed in the loa, in their leadership and gifts, in the necessity of their worship. He was a shadow hunter. He could read tracks with the same facility as Tyrathan, and just as easily he could commune with the loa. Yet in the storm, tracks vanished and swirling winds stole words.

He’d tried to reach them. His latest attempt had been, in fact, what made him late to meet Tyrathan. Vol’jin had composed himself in his cell, had moved beyond awareness of his surroundings, but could not breach the storm’s barrier. It seemed as if the cold and the distance from his home and even his having walked inside the human’s flesh had distracted him. He could not focus to punch through and bridge the distance between himself and the loa.

It was as if once Bwonsamdi had relinquished his claim on Vol’jin, the loa had lost interest.

The troll’s head came up. “Why be you abandoned?”

“Fear.”

“I be not afraid.”

“But you are.” Tyrathan tapped his own temple with a finger. “I can still feel you in my mind, Vol’jin. Being inside my skin terrified you. Not because you found it repulsive—not just because you find it repulsive—but because you found me so fragile. Oh, yes, that sense remains with me. Bitter, oily, it will never go away. It’s an insight I shall value, I am sure, but you miss its import to you.”

Vol’jin nodded once, though he did not want to.

“My being so easily breakable reminded you how close you were to death. There I was, leg broken, trapped, unable to escape, knowing I would die. And you knew the same thing when they tried to kill you. Can you remember what happened after?”

“Chen found me. Brought me here.”

“No, no, that you’ve been told.” The man shook his head. “What do you remember, Vol’jin?”

“When I be walking in your skin, be you living in mine?”

“No. Nor would I do that on a bet. Worse than you knowing how vulnerable I am would be my knowing how invulnerable you feel. But to the point. Do you remember what happened after? Do you know how you got to where Chen found you? Do you even know why you’re alive now?”

“I live, manthing, because I refused to die.”

The little bug of a man laughed arrogantly. “So you tell yourself. But this is what you’re afraid of. You don’t know. The link in the chain of experiences between who you were and who you are now has been severed. You can look back at who you were, and you can wonder if that’s still you, but there’s a void. You can’t be sure.”

Vol’jin growled. “And you be sure?”

“Who I am?” Tyrathan laughed again, but the timbre shifted. Melancholy and a hint of madness ran through it. “You saw what you saw. Do you wish to know the rest of it? What you didn’t see?”

Vol’jin again agreed with a nod, wanting to avoid assessing the man’s words.

“I stopped being Tyrathan Khort. I crawled from that place. Not a man, a beast. Perhaps I saw myself as a troll would see me. Wounded, pathetic, driven by thirst, by hunger. I, a man who had dined with lords and princes, eating the finest flesh that I had placed on the table, I was reduced to prying grubs from dying wood. I ate roots I hoped would finish me or heal me but often found those that just made me sicker. I covered myself with mud to keep vermin away. I wove twigs and leaves into my hair so I could hide from hunters on both sides. I shied from anything and anyone until happened upon by a pandaren gathering herbs, humming happily to himself.”

“Why hadn’t you summoned your companion?”

That stopped Tyrathan. He looked down, remaining silent. He swallowed hard and his voice grew tighter and small. “My companion had bound himself to the man I had been. I would not dishonor him by having him see me as I was.”

“And now?”

The man shook his head. “I am no longer Tyrathan Khort. My companion no longer answers me.”

“Be this because you fear death?”

“No, I fear other things.” The man looked up, his eyes glistening emerald. “You fear death.”

“Dying not be scaring me.”

“It was more than your death to which I referred.”

The man’s comment sank a blade to the hilt in Vol’jin’s breast. He had seen the wisdom of the chain analogy, though he hated it. Clearly the Vol’jin he had been had made mistakes that resulted in his almost being murdered. Yet he lived and had learned, so he would not make the same mistake again. But something in his mind twisted that notion such that it made who he had once been somehow wrong, inferior. While Vol’jin rejected that concept and accepted that he was capable of error, he could not reject the idea that his changed circumstances meant he could not be the troll he had been.

The chain be severed. The links be gone.

With that loss, however, came new perspective on the greater picture. Vol’jin was not just a troll. He was a shadow hunter. He was the leader of the Darkspears. He was a leader within the Horde. The troll nearly had died. Did the distance from the loa signal the death of the shadow hunter? And did his death mean the Darkspears would die and the Horde would die?

Does this mean my father’s dream be dying? If his dream died, would it then mock the battle to free the Echo Isles from Zalazane? All the blood that had been shed would be for nought, all the pain meaningless. Event after event, everything in his life and beyond it, trailing back into troll history, all of it crumbled.

Do I fear that my failure, my death, be leading to the deaths of the Darkspears, of the Horde, of trolls themselves? He visualized the black chasm between lying in a pool of blood in a dark cave and waking up in the monastery. Will that void be swallowing everything?

The man’s voice barely rose above a whisper. “Do you want to know the truly cruel thing, Vol’jin?”

“Tell me.”

“You and I, we have died. We are not who we were.” Tyrathan looked down at his empty hands. “What we must do now is create ourselves—not re-create, but create. This is why it is cruel. When we first did this, we had all the energy of youth. We did not know that attaining our dreams would be impossible—we just went out and got them. Innocence shielded us. Enthusiasm and unflagging confidence got us through. But now we have none of that. Now we are old, wiser, tired.”

“Our burden be lighter.”

The man smirked. “True. I think this is why the simplicity of the monastery appeals to me. It is spare. Duties are defined. The chance to excel is present.”

The troll’s eyes tightened. “You shoot well. You watch the archers. Why don’t you shoot?”

“I haven’t decided if that is part of me.” Tyrathan looked up and opened his mouth, then shut it abruptly.

Vol’jin cocked his head. “You had a question.”

“Having a question doesn’t mean it deserves an answer.”

“Ask.”

“Will we get past our fear?”

“I be not knowing.” Vol’jin’s lips pressed together in a grim line. “If I find an answer, it be yours.”

That night, as Vol’jin lay down and sleep swept the waking world away, the loa proved they had not completely abandoned him. He found himself one of thousands of bats, flapping through the night. He was not with Hir’eek, but he certainly was a bat by the loa’s grace. So he flew with the others, reading the echoes of their screams piercing the darkness in a world rendered colorless in sound.

It made sense to Vol’jin that he could contact the loa, because being a shadow hunter had been so much of himself. That void, though he could not see into it, could only have been breached by a shadow hunter. All he had learned, all he had endured, surely those were what had kept him alive long enough to escape the cave.

And the bats in that cave, they witnessed the void, the time I be forgetting. Vol’jin hoped that perhaps this vision, even rendered in the bat’s sound-sight, would show him the void. He hoped the chain could be reforged, yet deep down knew it could not be reforged easily.

Hir’eek instead, in his wisdom, brought Vol’jin to another place and another time. Crisp edges on stone buildings marked these as new construction, not ruins. He guessed he’d been taken back to when the Zandalari had spawned many troll tribes, and trolls were at the height of their power. The bats circled, then roosted high in towers surrounding a central courtyard, where legions of trolls hemmed in a jostling crowd of insectoid aqiri captives.

Amani, forest trolls, fresh from their wars with the aqir. Vol’jin knew the history well, but suspected Hir’eek wished to remind him of more than the glory days of the Amani empire.

The vision did just that. Trolls drove aqir up stone steps at spearpoint, to where priests waited. Acolytes would hoist the aqir onto stone altars slick with ichor, bellies exposed; then the celebrant would raise a knife. The blade and the hilt were worked with symbols, one for each loa. Sound-sight let him image the pommel and see Hir’eek’s face there, a heartbeat before the blade plunged down and ripped the sacrifice open.

Then, there, above the altar, Hir’eek himself manifested. The aqir’s spirit rose as ethereal steam from the corpse, and the bat god breathed it in. With subtle motions of gentle wings he pulled more of it to himself, glowing brightly, becoming more sharply defined.

Sound-sight did not communicate that to Vol’jin. That he saw with his own inner sight—something he’d refined and learned to trust as a shadow hunter. Hir’eek showed him the proper way to worship, the true glory and honor the loa were due.

A voice sounded in Vol’jin’s head—a high, piping voice. You have labored to preserve the Darkspears so there be trolls to worship us. This labor, it be withdrawing you from us. Your body heals but your soul cannot. Won’t heal, unless you be returning to the true ways. Abandon your history, and the chasm grows.

“But will returning make the chasm shrink, Hir’eek?” Vol’jin sat upright, speaking to darkness. He waited. He listened.

No reply came, and he took that as a fel omen.