Tag Archives: tarren mill
The Southshore Campaign
Garrosh just couldn’t seem to have any quiet time in Grommash Hold without some new task cropping up for him. If it wasn’t Eitrigg finding things for him to do, it was someone else from among his cast of minions…
Now, granted, you can hardly blame Garrosh for being a bit startled. This was taking place during Cataclysm, after all, so evidently Sylvanas was way, way ahead of the curve with the whole talking-head thing.
So Garrosh hopped the next zeppelin and headed to Eastern Kingdoms, where Sylvanas and her entourage were there to meet him with bad news for the living and dead alike…
Because seriously, that had been going on long enough.
Next up was a trip to the Apothecarium, where Garrosh first met Sylvanas’ head researcher, Master Apothecary Faranell.
A few awkwardly scripted interactions in the next room later…
And so, as per Faranell’s recommendation, Garrosh’s search for answers continued in Hillsbrad…
After many, many frustrating rounds of exhortations and beatings — which I won’t subject you to here — Garrosh was finally able to extract some information from a panicked Helcular: years ago, while still a living human, Helcular had seen a contingent from the Knights of the Silver Hand lurking around Southshore. Given the paladin order’s eventual interest in the Scourge, Garrosh concluded that there could be a link to the anti-plague. And considering the fact that, where the Silver Hand was concerned, Garrosh had an in right there on staff…
And look. A meeting took place. Words were exchanged. Many, many words. Spirits save us, so many words. And I’m simply not cruel enough to subject you to all of them here. Suffice to say that Garrosh ended up having to deploy Dontrag and Utvoch as part of an exit strategy. The main takeaway from the meeting — other than soul-crushing exhaustion — was that the Knights of the Silver Hand did indeed meet in Southshore some ten years ago to discuss the looming threat of the Scourge. Alexandros Mograine unveiled a magic crystal that would eventually be used to forge the Ashbringer — the ultimate weapon of the Light against undeath. The crystal, however, two of the knights had convinced Mograine to let them study the crystal for their own purposes, which led Garrosh, Mokvar, and Faranell to suspect there might be a connection to the current crisis in Southshore.
The only problem is, all relevant parties were now dead, leaving what seemed to be an equally dead trail for Garrosh and company to follow…
I had really wanted to cover this whole arc in this post, but this week got away from me a bit, so rather than make a late installment that much later, let’s toss up a “TO BE CONTINUED” here and resume our goofy walk down memory lane next time…
Oh, but also, since it’s kind of tradition at this point…
Daria’s Pro Tip for Dealing with Tirion #9: If someone else catches his attention, run — do not walk — out of the room. Do not look back. Do not feel remorse. It’s a hard, cruel world out there; better them than you.
Special delivery from Southshore
I’ve got two pieces of news fresh from Cromush in Southshore, one on the state of the anti-plague and reliquary, and the other…well, it’s complicated.
The simple part first. Cromush reports that our people in Southshore have finished deploying our counter to the anti-plague magic…which is sort of a counter in itself…is there a special term for a counter-counter? I feel like there kinda should be. Anyway, from what they can tell, the effect has dissipated, and once they make one last sweep or two of the area to be safe, Helcular and his Forsaken peeps should be good to move back in from Tarren Mill.
Cromush also sent a few of his scouts to search the cellar of the Southshore inn, and they successfully recovered the reliquary that Isilien and Doan had planted there a decade ago. By all appearances, the holy magic that was bottled up inside has been dispelled, although the crystal fragment inside is still intact, and apparently not entirely spent. Like I think I mentioned before, I’ll probably let Liadrin hold it for safekeeping, once we get it safely out of Forsaken territory.
That’s not the complicated part, though. Cromush’s scouts returned with one other tidbit: while they were digging around in the cellar, they also found a small wooden box lodged into the stonework near the reliquary. Inside were three sealed letters – one addressed to me, one to Sylvanas, and one to Faranell. By all indications, the box had been there, undisturbed, for about as long as the reliquary, and the oddity of all this gets a little worse – or maybe better? – when you know who the three letters are from.
Faranell.
Here’s mine:
Hello Garrosh,
From my point of view, I only just saw you last a few hours ago, but by the time you see this note, I imagine quite a long time will have passed. As you no doubt already know, I’ve written similar letters to the Dark Lady and, well, to myself. Or rather, to the version of myself who is with you now.
So, about him.
I imagine you’ve probably already come to suspect this, but I’ll confirm it for you now: the version of me that you’ve brought with you to the future isn’t the one who traveled with you to the past. Who you have with you now is the past, younger me. The human me. This did not, however, happen as a result of any mistakes or carelessness. It was my doing. I orchestrated the events leading to your bringing him with you. I’d started planning to do so midway through our journey.
It really wasn’t difficult to manage. After finishing his work with Doan, my brother told me that with Kel’Thuzad hovering about, Doan had grown paranoid (even for Doan) about someone interfering with the reliquary; he’d placed a warding spell on the canister that would stun anyone who tampered with it, knocking them out for hours or even days. I realized that this could provide me the window I needed to do what I’d been contemplating for the previous few days.
When I left the inn the next morning, I found the child Herod playing with the frog he’d taken from Taelan. Which is to say, of course, my younger self, whom Mokvar had hexed. A quick polymorph spell took Herod out of the equation; at that point I needed only break the hex on my younger copy, pop invisibility quickly, and get away from the inn. From a distance I watched myself go back inside.
When the other me returned to his room (since, naturally, where else would he go?), he would find a letter I’d left for him, along with the chameleon shard. In the letter, I “explained” that I – that is, he – had learned that an inexplicably unhinged Kel’Thuzad, suddenly obsessed with Mograine and the rest, had planted a magic explosive in the inn’s cellar; that if detonated, it would kill anyone in the inn or nearby; that I had volunteered to have my most recent memories erased to prevent any mind-reading to reveal to Kel’Thuzad that I’d revealed his plans. That the crystal I’d left there for myself, used as directed, could deactivate the explosive before it was set off. There was more to it, further details to ensure the story would ring true, but I doubt I need to belabor it with you; if anything, I suspect the letters “TL” and “DR” are already dancing around the edges of your thoughts. Suffice to say, remembering that I had already begun to grow wary of Kel’Thuzad by this point in my life, I knew which buttons to press to convince myself.
And so I sent my past self on his way to the cellar to unknowingly attune the shard and be rendered unconscious by Doan’s warding spell. And before you ask why my younger self would trust this story left for him in a letter, much less follow its instructions, let me pose this to you: faced with gaps in your memory and uncertainty over whom to trust, how many sources would you trust above your own handwriting? I know myself, and I knew I would take the bait.
I can’t say I’ve never lied to myself, but I don’t think I’d ever done it quite so literally.
And here’s where you’re asking why I would go to all this trouble. Or, maybe you don’t need to. In the end, it’s really fairly simple. Since dying to the Scourge and reawakening in undeath, I had never given much thought to the life I had lost. I accepted my new existence fairly readily. I didn’t have particular occasion to look back at the old life I’d lost until we traveled to old Hillsbrad, and at that point, I wasn’t merely looking back on that life. I was actually living it again.
I never really missed being alive until I was reminded of what it’s like.
I want it back.
I’m far from greedy or ambitious, and my wants, in tangible terms, are simple ones. I want to look in the mirror and see my own face. I want to feel sunlight on my skin without it burning. I want to taste food again. I want to smell that food cooking and feel my mouth watering without my jaw hanging off one hinge. I want to smell baking bread and freshly cut grass.
I know that’s not in the cards for me, in the long run. I’m not naïve about the necessities of time, and I know I can’t cheat fate. My being here represents a reprieve, a brief window to literally smell roses I didn’t bother smelling while oblivious to time running out for me. Now I know I’m living on borrowed time, and I can soak it in while I can, but I understand that that’s all it is. I can’t live out my human life that might have been.
That is, this me can’t. But the one you brought with you to the future can.
And that was the real point of it all. To save myself, probably in the most indirect way imaginable.
I’ve thought through the logistics, and everything should line up. You and the others came to the past with a version of Edwin Faranell. You’ve brought one back with you. One was already here, and one continues to be here. The scales are still balanced. I still remember everything I was supposed to have done, all the events that need to happen, and I can make sure they still unfold the way they always did. I realize this raises all sort of questions along the lines of “How can I remember the events I did in the past, if my past self no longer did them?”, but from the conversations we’ve had with Nozdormu, I’m fairly sure that will simply be one of those oddities of time rewriting itself.
Meanwhile, I know that I can’t make major changes to history, or try to stop Arthas, or anything of the sort; while I won’t pretend it won’t pain me to watch some of those events happen again, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge, for instance, that the Lich King will be stopped, so history doesn’t need me to try to.
And then, soon enough, I’ll come to the end that was fated for me. History says that a human named Edwin Faranell died in Lordaeron and was risen into undeath; a human named Edwin Faranell will. As Liadrin pointed out, as long as I’m here, I literally am human again. I can die as I was meant to, continue playing my part among the Forsaken, and, when the time comes, be there again to travel back with you to Southshore.
I’ll become the closed loop, holding my own place in history, while the other, younger me will be free to live – live – his days in a wide-open future.
In the letter I will have written for him, I will explain all of this, and lay out the basic facts he will need to know about this new world. I’m sure he will be frightened by it, and rightly so. I would only ask, Garrosh, that you look out for him early on. While I have great admiration for Lady Sylvanas in a great many ways, I suspect she will be none too pleased with this turn of events, and she may not be above taking steps that would, let us say, undermine what I have sought to do here. I suspect, though, that you will understand why I’ve done this, and may even sympathize; I would only ask you not allow it to be for nothing.
I do not expect that I will see you again. Live well, Warchief. I hope I will do the same.
–Dr. Edwin Faranell
Once and future Master of the Royal Apothecary Society
Not going to lie. I don’t even really know how to respond to that.
I’m not exactly thrilled about this, for a whole bunch of reasons, but at the same time, Faranell got the job done, end to end, both when we were in Hillsbrad and before. And as twitchy as this whole switcheroo makes me, on all kinds of levels, as far as I can tell it’s not like he’s setting out to screw with the timeline or mess something up or whatever. And I have to give it to him, he’s one of the few people around this dump who’s got the brains to pull off something like this AND go forward with it without causing some kind of stupidity-fueled collateral damage. Plus, he’s just a good dude. Or was. Or, well…will be.
Faranell was right — Sylvanas was less than thrilled when she got her letter. She right off started talking about how it would be easy enough to “correct” Faranell’s condition. I didn’t like the sound of that at all, so I’ve charged Liadrin with guarding him, and had Bragor Bloodfist divert a few of his Kor’kron up to Brill to help make sure nothing fishy happens. Because here’s the thing. For all intents and purposes, for the Faranell we knew, this was a last request. And last requests that don’t bring harm to anyone, where the only thing at stake is the person making the request? They should be honored.
I think I have an idea of how. Stay tuned.
So far, so good
Quick update from Southshore – Helcular and his people at Tarren Mill have gotten the chameleon shard that we attuned in old Southshore, and after a couple days of experimenting, they think they’ve come up with a way to dispel the anti-plague effect. Not a moment too soon, too, since those purple ribbony haze lines were creeping further and further out from the town, and had almost reached the Forsaken operation over at the Sludge Fields.
Obviously, Helcular didn’t want to chance sending his own undead people down to Southshore to test out the final product, so Cromush had a small detachment of warlocks and mages from Orgrimmar head down to start applying the fix. I’m not too clear of the details of it, seeing as most of that hocus-pocus stuff is pretty much just gibberish to me.
Bottom line, though, is they started doing their thing yesterday, and the early reports are that it seems to be working. I’m told that the locks and mages are going to have to follow the haze lines out from the town and do some more casting in order to completely purge the anti-plague effect. But from the sound of it, the town itself is mostly secured now, so it looks like we’re on our way to getting everything back to normal. Or, you know, what passes for normal with those Forsaken.
While Cromush has his people in Southshore – and before Helcular gives the go-ahead for the Forsaken to head back in – I’m having him send one or two of his top people to scour the cellar of the old inn. One, to make sure they’ve completely locked this thing down at its source, but two, to locate and secure the reliquary buried there that started it all. I don’t want any extra surprises from that thing…not to mention, considering its likely source, I don’t want it floating around unaccounted for. Once we have the crystal fragment, I may have Liadrin take custody of it, seeing as she seems to know a lot about it, and has her head on straight, and, you know, actually has a brain INSIDE the head she has on straight. Unlike very many of my underlings (he said with a great sadness).
More soon.
Back to the future, part 2
Okay, looks like the blog is FINALLY caught up with the here and now, and, gotta say, it was fucking TORTURE watching those last few posts dribble on through. I would say that The Noz has to do something about the lag in his wireless network, but then again, considering I was able to get a why-fly connection from frigging ten years ago, I guess I really shouldn’t complain.
Also, watching the posts loading gradually like they were, and reading them myself, eventually I started getting this weird detachment, like I was reading something that someone ELSE had written, not events I had lived through myself. I was starting to get strangely invested – like when you re-read a book, and you find yourself rooting for things to happen one way or another even though you already KNOW what’s going to happen, you know? Which, by the way, is EXACTLY WHAT TIME TRAVEL IS LIKE.
So anyway, now I can finally start updating you guys, because hoo boy, have things been interesting since we’ve been back. Like, starting from the MINUTE we got back to our own time. Because check this out – when we took Erozion’s portal back to the Caverns of Time, we all reset back to our normal, non-human selves, right? Except…Faranell didn’t. We arrived back in our own time and place…and he still looked human.
Obviously, this was made that much more complicated by the fact that he was still unconscious – there’s a limit to how much poking and prodding anyone could do while he was out cold from a shock to the system that we still didn’t understand very well. What’s more…he’s STILL that way. Not just the human-looking thing, but the unconsciousness. He still hasn’t come around. We had him transported back to the Undercity, and Sylvanas has put her best people in charge of looking over him. After the first couple days passed with no sign of change, she moved him up to Brill, the idea being that maybe the atmosphere up above ground might be a little better for his human constitution. On top of Sylvanas’ people, Liadrin’s volunteered to stay on for a while to help take care of him. Right now, though, that’s mostly consisting of a whole lot of waiting.
Nobody really knows what to make of what’s happened. We’ve got lots of theories, but until he comes around, he’s not going to be in stable enough condition for us to do a lot of testing on him. The best we’ve come up with so far – this was Liadrin’s best guess – is that the holy magic from the bomb might have produced the anti-plague effect on Faranell and purged him of the necro-whatsis magic that’s the source of his undeath. The same as it had been doing to the Forsaken around Southshore, only in his case, since strictly speaking he was human at the time rather than undead, it didn’t kill him. At least that’s the working theory right now. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, we’ve sent the chameleon shard along to Helcular and Cromush in Tarren Mill. With any luck, they’ll be able to use it to work out a way to dispel the anti-plague effect and get things under control out there. They’ve been at it for a few days now, so one way or another I’m expecting some news soon. Updates as they come.
Durnholde Keep
After Mokvar and Faranell dropped their respective timeline bombs on us, we hashed out how best to juggle things to keep the risks to a minimum. In the middle of things, Chromie popped in just to…I don’t know…go “gee willickers” a couple times and remind us that Mokvar and Faranell absolutely must not interfere with their former selves, like we didn’t already get that. And then she blathered on about all the crap that could go wrong with the timestream if they do, and most of it pretty much just came off as “WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS BAD.”
So yeah, we’ve got to be careful about this, but the way around it seemed pretty obvious. Mokvar couldn’t run into himself at Durnholde Keep, so okay, he just wouldn’t go. He stayed back at the inn in Southshore and kept an eye out for Tirion’s people arriving while we went to Durnholde to take care of Thrall. Meanwhile, Faranell can’t interfere with his old human self, so he came with the rest of us to Durnholde – get him away from Southshore for a little while, minimize the chance for a random run in, and plus this way he could be traveling with the bunch of us at all times so we can all be giving a sort of buffer zone in case Faranell v1.0 turns up. Liadrin also had a pretty sharp idea, to have a sign/countersign for Faranell, just in case he’s ever separated from us or if anything happens where we need to make sure we’re dealing with the right Faranell. The way things tend to go for us, it’s probably a good idea not to leave anything to chance.
Side note, I’m not sure if Faranell is worried about running into his younger self, or if seeing Kel’Thuzad and Helcular just threw him or something, but he’s been acting kind of strange since he and Mokvar got back. A couple times now I’ve caught him just staring at himself in the mirror, touching his face, just seeming all kinds of distracted. Not sure what to make of that. Hopefully he’ll be able to keep his head in the game until we finish what we came for.
So anyway, I finally headed out with Faranell, Liadrin, and Utvoch, and we made our way over to Durnholde. And I’ve got to say, I don’t know WHAT was going on with that defunct Alliance group that was supposed to handle this, that they thought they needed five people to handle this job. The Noz might have been erring on the side of safety, or maybe those Alliance scrubs really do suck, but no joke, I can’t possibly exaggerate how easily we rolled over those Durnholde guards. We had to clear out the lower barracks first, where some of the orcs were being held. And then I guess one of the officers came running in, some dude named Drake, at least that’s what Liadrin tells me. I wouldn’t have thought there was anything special about the guy myself, what with how he dropped like a rock after one good chop from Gorehowl.
Anyway…at that point we were set to head into the keep proper and get Thrall. It took a few minutes to hack up the handful of guards on the way in, and then, lo and behold, there was our Warchief-to-be chilling in the basement cell. And you know, I’ve got to say, you always figure the whole time travel business is pretty straightforward as far as the do’s and don’ts, but you don’t realize how hard it can be to bite your tongue until you’re standing there with a younger version of someone you know. I had to keep stopping myself from saying things to him, not that half of what I would have to say would make any sense to him coming from my fake-ass human face.
Here’s the other thing, though. I wasn’t expecting him to be so young. I mean, I knew how old he was, it’s not hard to take now-Thrall and roll him back ten years in my head. But even beyond the ten years…he was just so YOUNG. You could see it. Even locked in a jail cell, he just seemed so…unburdened. His eyes looked so much less tired. I never even realized how much Thrall seems like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders now, until I saw what he used to be like. Anyway.
One thing that was still the same, though – past or present, credit where it’s due, Thrall’s kind of a badass any way you cut it. In fact, I think I liked past-Thrall a little more, just because he seemed a lot more unapologetic about it. Like for instance, we broke him out of his cell, and he ran up to the keep’s armory to grab some armor and a weapon for himself. And there was this armorer guy standing watch there, and he started screaming bloody murder when he saw Thrall roll in, and before you could say “open-hand bitch-slap,” well…see for yourselves.
THRALL KEEPS THE PIMP HAND STRONG.
“That’s enough from him” is right, Thrall. Roll with it, man. Hell, bottle some of that shit up and send it to yourself ten years from now, you could use it. True story.
Anyway, the stupid humans sent a bunch more guards to try to stop us on the way out, and we made hilariously short work of them, and then I guess there was some captain that we polished off without me even realizing he was supposed to be someone important because OMG SPLAT. At that point, Thrall had the bright idea that he wanted to use the captain guy’s horse to high-tail it out of there…even though the horse was barely moving faster than we were on foot. I mean, seriously, were these the best mounts the humans had available back in the day? Really? And meanwhile Thrall was looking absolutely ridiculous sitting on top of this thing, PLUS if he was moving any slower he’d be going backwards, and for real, dude, have you just not learned ghost wolf form yet? Because even that would have been faster than this reject horse.
Anyhow, you don’t need every last painful detail. We got Thrall to Tarren Mill, and killed some more humans – always a plus – and then some of those Infinite Dragonflight guys showed up, and we handed them their asses easily enough. And then out of nowhere this fog rolled in, and – you guessed it – The Noz came pimping in to check on things, and confirmed that the timeline has been secured against the Infinite Dragonflight’s interference, and that’s nice and all, dude, but how about you leave a memo for yourself not to be a frigging douche-tard down the road so we don’t have to waste time stopping your future chronies (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) from screwing around with things?
Oh and also? Just have to say – Thrall’s human friend Taretha? SPITTING IMAGE of Jaina. Seriously. Crossbow to my head, I could not tell those two apart. And you know what? Draw your own conclusions about her. I don’t even want to know.
We’re back at the Southshore inn now, and we just need to hold tight until Tirion and Alexandros Mograine and all those people show up. I’ll keep you posted on what happens. Or, you know, you can consult the nearest history book.
[Header image provided by Rioriel from Postcards From Azeroth, reproduced here with permission and many thanks. Click here to see the souped-up Postcard version!]
Spare the rod, spoil the Helcular
So Helcular wasn’t exactly the most help in the world. I’m not sure if he’s just been sort of batshit ever since he was raised as undead from the Southshore graveyard a few years back, or if he was always kind of unstable, or what, but dude could not stay on topic for all his flipping out and panicking about what had happened down at the ruins. To be fair, I suppose being at ground zero of some freakish anti-necromantic explosion that took out most of your team, and just barely escaping from having the unlife sucked clean out of you yourself, well, I guess I can see how that might freak you out. And Helcular being a mage, and kind of a bookish one at that, I can see how he might not exactly be the battle-tested kind of guy who deals with adversity well.
But DUDE, I can’t POSSIBLY overstate how much he was spazzing out over everything. Could not keep him on topic for more than thirty seconds at a time, so I spent practically the whole conversation having to slap him around to try to get him back on track. Now granted, I probably didn’t help matters when Kaal arrived with an update from Southshore, and I let him give his report in front of Helcular. Turns out, those shimmery purple lines are still expanding outward – slowly enough that you can’t notice it with the naked eye, but still moving and stretching little by little, apparently gravitating toward other centers of necromantic energy. As in, places where there are lots of undead. So eventually – slowly, but eventually – this thing is going to spread.
Which as you can imagine, is just what panicky jittery Captain Freak-Out Hercular needed to hear, and yeah, a few more beatings ensued to get him to stop fluttering about. Eventually, after enough enforced focus to make my frigging hands sore, I was able to drag this much out of him: Helcular used to live in Southshore, where he knew Kel’Thuzad back in his pre-lich days, and had studied necromancy under him. Because nothing could go wrong there, as we all know. But he couldn’t think of anything they could have done that could have had a hand in what’s happened – the training and practice he did in the vicinity of the town was all small-potatoes stuff, and from what he could remember, Kel’Thuzad kept his distance whenever he was doing anything major. He did remember one point some years back, though, when a bunch of people from the Knights of the Silver Hand were hanging around the town. They were being pretty hush-hush, but were still attracting enough attention that he could remember strangers turning up in the town and lurking around snooping on them…so there’s a fair chance they were up to something. And considering how those paladins wound up taking an interest in the Scourge, it sounds like there’s at least enough of a possible link to be worth following up on.
And again, let me just stress that pretty much every sentence of that was spread out over two of three smackings and a frustrated “Man, will you PLEASE try to pull yourself the fuck TOGETHER?”
Anyway, though, we’ve got another lead to follow, even though I’m not exactly thrilled where it’s leading. But, I’ve already had Eitrigg send a message up to Hearthglen in the Western Plaguelands, and I’m getting ready to head north. Not going to lie to you, I’m not looking forward to this at all, but it’s our best in with the Silver Hand, so I guess I’m going to need to go have a sit-down with Tirion Fordring.
Ruins of Southshore
Okay, so remember what I was saying about the Undercity smelling bad? Well I would happily spruce up the aroma of Grommash Hold with some Undercity potpourri before I took too many deep breaths around Southshore the way it is right now. Holy shit, it’s like somebody went down to the Apothecarium, put together an olfactory mix tape of their greatest hits, distilled in into some kind of glowing green porridge with a side of asparagus, force-fed eighty tons of the shit to a gang of syphilitic ettins, then locked them all in a closet for three days and let them fart it all out. Like THAT bad. That’s what it’s like down here. I seriously think this is what atrocity must smell like. A piquant blend of genocide and child abuse.
I knew Sylvanas’ people had used Southshore as a test site when I gave them the go-ahead to start up their plague research again, but even I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scope of what they had going on here. It isn’t even a town anymore so much a slimy green puddle, with these living goop thingamajigs squirming around the place. It’s actually kind of scary to imagine they were able to crank all this out so quickly in the window I’d left them to resume work. I can only figure some of the apothecaries were so fired up to be able to get back to it that they really threw themselves into it in a huge flurry of activity right off the bat.
Anyway, the bunch of us – myself, Drok, Cromush, Mokvar, and a handful of warlocks and alchemists who came with – spent some hours scouring over the place looking for any clues about where the anti-plague effect had come from. It wasn’t until some of the locks (who, by the way, actually aren’t big fans of socks – apparently we’ve got a bunch of hippie sandal-wearing warlocks these days…terrific) tried some kind of incantation spell that we started getting somewhere. They were able to make these shimmery purple ribbons visible around the town, almost like hazy purple flames. Kaal Soulreaper, one of our locks, explained to me that the haze was made up of the traces of a potent magic effect, which you could see spreading and scattering all around the town – most likely, he said, leaving those purple traces along the paths the effect took bouncing from one undead to the next. So what we were looking at was the hazy footprints of their deaths. Or re-deaths. Or whatever.
So, tracing back to where the haze was at its most dense was the most likely way to get to the starting point. That brought us to the old town inn – specifically, underground, beneath the cellar. From somewhere down there, all the purple ribbons came spreading out, up through the cellar and out of the ground along the outer walls of the building. Whatever it was exactly, it looks like it detonated there. And according to the warlocks’ best guess, the haze will continue holding the “contagion” until it dissipates. As for how long that will take, they ballparked it somewhere between hours and centuries. So, lots of help there. Really, guys, I appreciate the info so far, but couldn’t you give me a LITTLE better idea of when it’s going to be safe for the Forsaken to come back down here? Is it tomorrow or the end of time, or what?
The next question that comes to mind is, you know, how the fuck this magic doohickey got there. And since we have a fairly powerful magic-user on staff who actually has a pretty long history with Southshore, I’m thinking it’s time I had some face time with our man Helcular. He had been supervising things in Southshore before everything went kablooey, at which point he was evacuated to Tarren Mill with as many other Forsaken as they could pull out in time. I’m having Cromush and Drok continue the work down here in Southshore while I fly up to see him. More soon.
Death of the dead
I swear it’s just one damn thing after another around here. I guess when you’re Warchief there really is no rest for the awesome. I hadn’t even finished unpacking from my trip to Nagrand, when Sylvanas gives me the latest news from her neck of the woods, and it’s a doozey.
Just before I had left for Outland, Sylvanas’ people – or whatever the hell you want to call them – started running into some problems down in Hillsbrad. According to her, they started experimenting with some new strains of plague down there based on my orders…you know, when I was fuming and kind of, well, crazy. Anyway. While they were at it, though, and running some tests in Southshore, seems they set something off. Not like a bomb, that is, but for lack of a better word to describe it, it’s like they triggered some kind of anti-plague.
You know that thing in physics about how for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction? Yeah, me neither, because I wasn’t a fucking science nerd in school, but still. From the way Sylvanas tells it, it’s like this thing that hit them in Southshore was the equal and opposite reaction to their plague. Any Forsaken who were in the vicinity of the experiments got slapped back by it and…well…anti-infected. That is, it swept through those Forsaken and basically neutralized the necromantic magic that had reanimated them in the first place. So those undead got the “un” slapped clean out of them, and dropped right then and there, restored back to the forms of their original, pre-risen human and blood elf bodies. What’s more, the anti-plague has started spreading through Southshore just like a plain ol’ regular plague, which is turning the place into a growing pile of Forsaken corpses that aren’t even recognizably Forsaken anymore.
I’m having High Warlord Cromush send as many of his troops as he can spare down from Tarren Mill to try to secure the area while we work on figuring out what’s going on. In the meantime I’ll be trying to coordinate with Sylvanas’ apothecaries to figure this out. I’m guessing this might be the kind of thing some of the goblins especially might be able to sink their tinker-happy teeth into. As far as the Forsaken are concerned, Southshore is now a quarantined area.
And I know what you’re probably thinking, why am I going to knock myself out to keep this thing from taking out the undead? It’s not like I’ve ever been much of a fan of them, right? Well, for one, if you take the Forsaken out of the equation all of a sudden, now you’ve got a huge void in Horde forces in Eastern Kingdoms without orcs or tauren in place to maintain our holdings. Hell, as it stands now, even with this thing just taking out a chunk of the undead in Southshore, we’ve got worgen swarming in trying to make their move on the place already. Can you imagine what happens if it spreads up through Silverpine into fucking Tirisfal Glades? What do you think the Alliance will do if they catch wind that the Forsaken are weakened and Lordaeron is vulnerable?
So that’s one thing, the tactical side of it. And then there’s this: it’s my fault this is happening. Whatever this thing is, Sylvanas’ people set it off after I ordered her to start up her plague research again. I gave the order, she got her apothecaries going in Southshore, kaboom. By the time I came to my senses and ordered her to put a stop to it, it was already too late – news of the anti-plague was already on the way. If I hadn’t given them the go-ahead, there wouldn’t have been any plaguey business going on down there in the first place, and none of this would have happened. I basically ordered Sylvanas’ people to their (un)deaths without even knowing I was doing it. So I think I owe her on this one.
Updates to follow. I have a few meetings to get to today concerning all of this. I’ll keep you all posted on where this goes.
