Jeff Grubb - The Last Guardian

Despite herself, Aegwynn put a hand over her stomach.

“Yes, Mother dear,” said the past Medivh, the flames licking at his beard, the horns forming out of smoke before his brows. He was Medivh, but Sargeras as well. “I hid in your womb, and passed into the slumbering cells of your unformed child. A cancer, a blight, a birth defect that you would never surmise. Killing you was impossible, seducing you unlikely. So I made myself your heir.”

Aegwynn shouted a curse and lurched her hands upward, her anger wrapped around words not made for human voices. A bolt of scintillating rainbow energy struck the Medivh/Sargeras creature full in the chest.

The phantom of the past staggered back one step, then two, then raised a single hand and caught the energy cast at him. The room smelled of cooking meat, and the Sargeras/Medivh snarled and spat. He invoked a spell of his own, and Aegwynn was flung across the room.

“I cannot kill you, Mother,” snapped the demonic form. “Some part of me keeps me from doing that. But I will break you. Break you and banish you, and by the time you’ve healed, by the time you’ve walked back from where I will send you, this land will be mine. This land, and the power of the Order of Tirisfal!”

In the present day, Medivh let out the howl of a lost soul, screaming to the heavens for forgiveness that will never be forthcoming.

“That’s our cue,” said Garona, pulling on Khadgar’s robe. “Let’s get while the getting is good.”

Khadgar hesitated for a moment, then followed her to the stairs.

They tumbled down the stone stairs three at a time, almost slamming into Moroes.

“Excited,” he noted calmly. “Problem?”

Garona hurdled down past the castellan, but Khadgar grabbed the older man and said, “The master has gone mad.”

“More than usual?” replied Moroes.

“It’s not a joke,” said Khadgar, then his eyes lit up. “Do you have the whistle to summon gryphons?”

The servant raised a rune-carved piece of metal. “Wish me to summon…”

“I’ll do it,” said Khadgar, grabbing the item from his hands, and hurtling after Garona. “He’ll be after us, but you had better run as well. Take Cook and flee as far as you can.”

And with that Khadgar was lost to view.

“Flee?” said Moroes to the apprentice’s retreating form; then he snorted. “Wherever would I go?”

They had made it several miles when the gryphon began to misbehave. Only a single beast had answered Khadgar’s summons, and bridled as Garona approached it. Only by sheer strength of will did the young mage get the gryphon to accept the half-orc’s presence. They could hear Medivh screaming and cursing long after they have left the circle of hills. They tilted the gryphon toward Stormwind, and Khadgar dug his heels deeply into the gryphon’s haunches.

They had made good speed, but now the gryphon bucked beneath him, trying to tear at the reins, trying to turn back toward the mountains. Khadgar tried to break the beast, to keep it to its course, but it became increasingly agitated.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Garona over his shoulder.

“Medivh is calling it back,” said Khadgar. “It wants to go back to Karazhan.”

Khadgar wrestled with the reins, even tried the whistle, but at last had to admit defeat. He brought the gryphon down on a low, bare tor, and slid from its back after Garona had climbed off. As soon as he touched ground, the gryphon was aloft again, beating its heavy wings against the darkening air, climbing to return the call of its master.

“Think he will follow?” asked Garona.

“I don’t know,” said Khadgar. “But I don’t want to be here if he does. We’ll make for Stormwind.”

They stumbled about for most of the evening and night, finding a dirt track, then following it in the general direction of Stormwind. There was no immediate pursuit nor strange lights in the sky, and before dawn the pair rested briefly, huddling beneath a great cedar.

They saw no one alive during the next day. There were houses burned to the foundations, and clumps of newly hummocked earth that marked buried families. Overturned and smashed carts were common, as were great burned circles heaped with ash. Garona noted that this was how the orcs dealt with their dead, after the bodies had been looted.

The only animals they saw were dead—disemboweled pigs by a shattered farmhouse, the skeletal remains of a horse, consumed save for the frightened, twisted head. They moved in silence through one despoiled farmstead after another.

“Your people have been thorough,” Khadgar said at last.

“They pride themselves on such matters,” said Garona, grimly.

“Pride?” said Khadgar, looking around him. “Pride in destruction? In despoiling? No human army, no human nation would burn down everything in its path, or kill animals without purpose.”

Garona nodded. “It is the orc way—do not leave enough standing that their foes could use against them. If they could not use it immediately—as fodder, as quarters, as plunder, then it should be put to the torch. The borders of orc clans are often desolate places, as each side seeks to deny the other resources.”

Khadgar shook his head. “These are not resources,” he said hotly. “These are lives. This land was once green and verdant, with fields and forests. Now it’s a wasteland. Look at this! Can there be any peace between humans and orcs?”

Garona said nothing. They continued in on silence that day, and camped in the shambles of an inn. They slept in separate rooms, he in the wreckage of the common room, she moving farther back to the kitchen. He didn’t suggest they stay together, and neither did she.

Khadgar was awakened by the growls of his stomach. They had fled the tower with little but what they had on their backs, and save for some foraged berries and ground nuts, they had not eaten in over a day.

The young mage extricated himself from the raindamp straw tic that made his bed, his joints protesting. He had not camped in the open since his arrival at Karazhan, and he felt out of shape. The fear of the previous day had ebbed entirely, and he wondered about his next move.

Stormwind was their stated target, but how would he get someone like Garona into the city? Maybe find something to disguise her. Or did she even want to come? Now that she was free of the tower, maybe it would be better for her to rejoin Gul’dan and the Stormreaver clan.

Something moved along the wrecked side of the building. Probably Garona. She had to be as hungry as Khadgar. She hadn’t complained, but he assumed from the wreckage left behind that orcs required a lot of food to keep them in top fighting form.

Khadgar stood up, shook the cobwebs from his mind, and leaned out the remains of a window to ask her if there was anything left in the kitchen.

And was faced with one edge of a huge double-bladed ax, leveled at his neck.

At the opposite end of the ax was the jade-green face of an orc. A real orc. Khadgar had not realized until now how accustomed to Garona’s face he had become, such that the heavy jaw and sloped brow were a shock to him.

The orc growled, “Wuzzat?”

Khadgar slowly raised both hands, all the while calling up in his mind the magical energy. A simple spell, enough to knock the creature aside, to get Garona and get away.

Unless Garona had brought them here, he suddenly realized.

He hesitated, and that was enough. He heard something behind him, but did not get to turn as something large and heavy came down on the back of his neck.

He could not have been out long—long enough for a half-dozen orcs to spill into the room and start pushing through the rubble with their axes. They wore green armbands. Bleeding Hollow clan, his memory told him. He stirred, and the first orc, the one with the double-bladed ax, spun on him again.