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| - There was no meaning in this place. He had no fingertips with which to touch and no eyes with which to see. His mind was full of meaningless noise, sounds that chilled his essence and wreathed his nerves in flame. He had no throat to voice the scream that rose up from his terrified heart. There was fear here. And hate. So much hate. He began preparing himself for this moment decades ago. When the Legion’s fire grew dim in his veins and the smell of conquest eluded his senses, he resigned himself to his guilt. When the lethargy overtook him, he nearly took his own life to silence the voices that plagued him; the voices of the slain draenei on the homeworld. He feared them. And he hated them. He hated them. He was amongst strangers. These were not his clanmates. Where was the one-eyed chieftain? Where was the Bleeding Hollow? The thoughts echoed strangely in his head, barely distinguishable from the cries of the dead. The trees were strange here, on this alien world. Tall and straight. Not like home. Not like Terokkar. A calloused hand clasped his shoulder and a hoarse voice told him to get up. Where am I? Warsong. These were his new brothers. His saviours. An axe was thrust into his hand. Its wooden haft was poorly made. It took him weeks to work the splinters from the rough wood, but he was grateful. Grateful for the chance to survive, grateful for the chance to drown the voices in the blood of the new enemy. Lordaeron, they called it. It was nothing like home. Hailmane gave birth to five pups. They all died, save one. Hailmane didn’t survive the night. He wept. He wept bitter tears into her dark fur and buried her and her pups where no one would go. No human would dare tread near her resting place. They wouldn’t ever-- They can’t-- He cradled the surviving pup in his scarred hands. Hands that broke necks like twigs and that smashed heads against rocks. He would nurture this little one. She would grow. She would be strong. Just like her mother was. She suckled from the other wolves, the wolves that his new brothers bore into battle. He suspected it was pity, but he didn’t care. As she grew, he shared the scraps they plundered from human caravans. She was like his daughter. Not like daughter whose life he had ended. Not like the sons whose throats he had slit. She would survive. He was making things right. Surely. Fifteen years. For fifteen years he lived with the Warsongs in Lordaeron, surviving from the dregs of human civilisation. He remembered the war, and how they had lost. He remembered how proud his people once were. Fear was still there. But so was hate. Hate. He couldn’t look at things the way he used to. His hands were once the colour of autumn. They used to make beautiful things. His father taught him how to make bows. He taught him how to select the correct wood and how to fashion bowstrings from the hair of clefthooves. He taught him how to make use of every part of a slain animal, and how it benefited the clan as a whole. Now the back of his hands were crisscrossed by battlescars, discoloured green by the deceit of demons. When he drank water, he tasted only the hot copper of blood. His new brothers, they respected him. Or feared him. He was skilled in battle, this he knew. But with every fibre of his being, he wished he wasn’t. But he was. New pups were growing. They looked up to him as their elder, as a warrior they thought they could live up to. How dare they? What did they know of war? What did they know of loss? What did they know of regret? He tolerated them, though. He had to. The wolf pup was big enough, now, to bear a saddle and ride to war. Darkgale, he named her. She had black fur, like her mother’s. She wrestled with the young ones, but his manner was cold and dark. He took to smoking a pipe, a habit which gave him a barking cough. There had to be more to life than this. But then a new warchief rose to power. Thrall’s Horde should have brought him joy and hope. But the fear was still there, and so was the hate. They warred constantly, in his head, a perpetual stalemate. He knew what awaited him in the beyond. He girded himself. He would meet it head on, he decided. He had no choice. When he was named a sergeant, he nearly vomited. Sergeant. That was what they used to call him. Back when-- This can’t be-- Why is this-- He was a hard leader. His men knew their bounds, and they seldom overstepped the mark. Their assignments took them far. Through steaming jungles, across barren wastes, they fought on every front. The similarities to the past made his heart quail every time his mind tread upon those dark times. But long gone were the days of the Bastard. Now they called him something else. He had earned a new name. A dragon, he slew. Its scales were the colour of obsidian and its bellows shook the heavens. It spoke to them in their sleep for four nights before it showed itself. Three men it took, before he buried his axe in the creature’s eye. It gave him a lasting reminder before it finally died, with a venom laced claw. A mottled gouge across his chest which healed poorly. Blackscar. He felt brief elation, but fear and hate resumed their war. Five years trudged by, and the Horde was strong on all of its fronts. He was old now. The dragon’s venom never truly went away, and his barking cough turned into a phlegm laced grunt. He fought on, knowing of no other way to live, wishing he could find a way to redeem himself. He knew how. Nazthril wasn’t old enough to walk when he last saw the pup. The child was sheltered in his mothers arms, and he loomed over them both with murder in his eyes. He recalled saying that the newborn was a threat to his legacy and that Nazthril would only try and supplant him when he grew big enough. He said the same about all of his children. They had all died. Nazthril had to go too. He now understood the fear and hatred in his mate’s eyes at that moment, the moment before she raked her fingernails across his eyes and fled. And he thanked every deity he could name that she did. He would watch. He dared not get close. He knew his blood, and he knew the violence it was capable of. To Durotar he travelled, and he made his home in the Warrior City. He made frequent trips to the Valley of Trials under the baking sun, to watch Nazthril. To watch his son. He was strong and able. Nazthril the Keen, they called him. His eyes were the colour of the South Seas and his nature was kind, like the orcs of old. But it was during his stay in Orgrimmar that his life took on a new, better purpose. Gremkarc of Orgrimmar. The shaman was young, and his words reached deep into the old orc’s mind. Maybe the youth of the Horde did understand. Maybe they knew what it was like. Deep down, he knew it wasn’t so. Resentment bubbled up from a crack in his spirit every time his old eyes looked upon the fresh, unblemished face of a young grunt. But he continued on. He fought under the banner of the Dagger and the Totem. He told no one. Nazthril was his closely guarded secret. He couldn’t know what his father was. When the clan convened in Razor Hill, he would slip off unnoticed afterwards, to the Valley of Trials. He sat and watched the young ones live their lives, and cursed himself for the resentment that wouldn’t go away. Until, at last, madness took him. Saronite; the blood of an Old God so they said. He clad himself in the stuff, and made war in the frozen north. Wounds that never healed were torn open, and he fled. He fled from everything , and despaired when he could not flee from himself. He never realised that he was fleeing from the very thing he had vowed to stand and face down. Xeldrek’s dagger glinted in the half-light. The troll hailed from Zul’drak. He couldn’t believe his luck when he happened upon the half-dead interloper from the south. It took only one thrust of the poison-tipped blade to end the orc’s life, and the cry of terror made him laugh like a madman. He was dead. And now he was in this place. If he had a heart, it would be thundering against his ribcage. The crushing weight of death engulfed his spirit in a black torrent, and he writhed in futile resistance. He had been expecting the voices. For all of his long years, he had waited for them to become tangible, to become more than just echoes inside his skull. Still, the dread he felt as their presence circled like vultures above him would soak even an overlord‘s breeches. But for all his terror, for all of his dreadful fear, it was not this that drove him to lash out. It was his hate. Such a terrible hate gnawed at his mind. For a moment he thought that he had become what the Legion made of him on the homeworld. The bizarre thought that the Pit Lord’s blood still filled his veins flickered on the edge of conscious thought for a moment, but it was banished all too quickly. The Bastard had returned. Like a demon, he rose from his stupor in a frenzy of animalistic hatred, a speck of violent fury on the bleak backdrop of the Beyond. The voices of the spectres that hounded him turned into fearful wails. He thought he could see them, pale faces twisted into a rictus of fear. It was just like back then, back when the blueskins were torn apart by a violent tide of green and red. He thought he could feel their necks snapping in his very hands, and the wash of their blue blood setting his taste buds ablaze. He thought this, and he enjoyed it. There were a great many of them, he guessed. Savage delight flared at the thought, and he relished the opportunity to make them pay for the lifetime of guilt and regret they had caused him. He couldn’t begin to fathom how time passed in this place, only that the world around him stood on the fringe of where time flowed. There were places where it swirled and lapped, but elsewhere it would be stagnant and unmoving. He couldn’t say how long he had been there before the first tug began. “Junka Blackscar.” The voice boomed all around and inside him. He felt his very essence being tugged in every direction. The pain cut through his hate like a berserker’s axe. His prey, the spectres, vanished beyond his senses. Fleeing, he supposed. A second tug, and the pain doubled. He began to feel as if he had bones again, and it felt like they were soaked in acid. His muscles defined themselves in a ripple of spasms throughout his body and as he took in a gulp of icy needles his lungs protested vehemently. The roar that tore from his throat deafened even himself. And then the world resolved itself around him. He was alive. ~ If it wasn’t for the disorientating hate driving his heart into a frenzy, he would have been stricken dumb by the sheer cold. If felt as if frost had settled on his bones, but hate, bright and fiery, got him to his feet. His skin felt stretched, and every scar upon his body stung fiercely. He saw two figures in front of him, his stricken vision rendering them as silhouettes, shadows on a white backdrop. Spectres. A breeze breathed past them, sending goosebumps racing across the surface of his bare, mottled green hide. He couldn’t feel his calloused hands yet, nor his feet. His eyes stung, milky, blind orbs. They were still glazed over, still half-dead from the sightless hours of death. His pupils dilated and contracted rapidly as he tried to blink life back into them. His hearing became greatly exaggerated, and the heavy, low-end thuds of footsteps pounded against his eardrums. His breathing sounded deafening, and his lungs screamed with every sharp breath of ice. He saw the figure falter for a moment. It took only this for him to identify the kill, to identify prey. His lips drew back across his blunt teeth and his previously parched mouth filled with sweet saliva. He could see the silhouette’s eyes now, wide and fearful. His hands balled into scarred fists and a deep, reverberating growl escaped the back of his throat. He saw a sharp movement, a hand reaching for a concealed weapon, and instinct took over. He struck. The rush of wind in his ears was bliss. His legs pumped furiously, covering the ground between predator and prey in moments. The prey’s breath, a frantic mist in the cold air, made a wordless roar erupt from his chest. He leapt, one hand reaching for an outstretched arm, the other for the throat. They collided, and he heard the wind being knocked from the victim’s lungs, a pained grunt, as they hit the cold, stone ground. He found that he had no control, and was surprised that he didn’t care. His clawing, large fingers wrapped around the prey’s head and he slammed it into the ground as hard as he could. One hand pinned down an arm, the arm that bore a glinting weapon. Fear. It was someone else’s turn to fear. Hate coursed through his veins, and when the victim could only bellow his despair to the skies, laughter, mad and vicious, boomed in his chest. Again he slammed the spectre’s head into the ground, and the jarring impact thundered up his arm. He heard the eggshell crunch of bone breaking, and slammed again. The screaming stopped, but still he drove the steadily fracturing skull into the ground again and again and again. Blood, hot and steaming in the cold, drenched his hand and flecked his arms and chest, defining parts of his numb body. He could feel the victim’s legs thrashing underneath him, and finally the rank odour of emptied bowels told him that his job was done. He breathed deeply, gulping in lungfulls of delicious air. His hate was spent, and his body shuddered in exhaustion. What just happened? Nausea turned his stomach to led, and he leaned forward to vomit a torrent of cold sick onto the disfigured mockery of his victims‘ bloody features. Tears ran their course over the scars that rendered his face monstrous, soaking his beard with bitter water, though he couldn’t guess why. His eyes, bleary and bloodshot, looked down at his handiwork, seeing but not truly understanding. A calloused hand clasped his shoulder. “Get up.” ~ Skargul’s ground-eating stride made it hard for his companion to keep up. This made him smile, a smile that refused to reach his sharp eyes. A headdress of bone and feathers sat upon his brow like a crown, and a kilt of worn kodohide billowed around his bare feet like a robe of silk. The grey pelt he wrapped around his shoulders was almost too big, but he wore it with fierce pride. The beast had been troublesome, skulking from the shadows of the forest and taking a yelping child with it every night for two weeks. He tracked the nightsaber himself, and returned with its lifeless body the next day. The pelt was the finest he’d seen, and it had lost none of its lustre to this day. The staff that he clutched between his gnarled fingers had been worked from the timber harvested near Kargathia Keep. Claw-branches sprouted naturally from its head, from which fetishes danced upon the wind. His chest was bare, sporting slabs of hard muscle that rippled underneath his autumn-green skin. His hair was the colour of night, streaked with shafts of white, betraying the shaman’s advancing years. The orc he travelled with stopped frequently, claiming Skargul’s pace was too demanding, and that his parched mouth demanded two whole skins of water a day. This annoyed him greatly, and were it someone else he would have left them behind days ago. But the spirits insisted that this orc was important. His unwavering faith in their wisdom kept his patience in check, and so he watched on in silence as the fool squandered his water and food supply needlessly over the coming days. But when the spirits told Skargul of the orc’s real motive, his manner turned iron hard. Servant of the chained god. Bide your time. He did this, but he was wary. He saw how the orc was clueless in how to use the impressive looking battleaxe he carried with him, and he learned of the concealed dagger he kept under his leathers. “How far are we? Is he still alive?” The orc would ask, his voice a petulant whine. Skargul would fix him in a cold stare, careful not to focus on the unseen spirits coiling around him like a serpent. “He lives. Soon.” He spoke dismissively, like a father brushing off a foolish pup. The spirits did not share with Skargul the intentions of the orc, but he could easily guess. When Skargul had first spoken to him of his wish to find Blackscar, his eyes glinted with greed and malice. An aspiring acolyte of the Old God, looking to earn his name by slitting Blackscar’s throat to impress his cult, no doubt. Skargul was careful to hide his power from the burden he bore. They travelled the bleak wastes of Dragonblight for a week, covering their tracks and staving off minor ghoul skirmishes with relative ease, ever watchful of the skies and the sound of black wings. He would play himself off as a traveller with little connection to the elements, lies rolling from his tongue with satisfying ease. When they crossed the Dragonspine Tributary into the Grizzly Hills, he noticed that the cultist talked in his sleep. He spoke nonsense words, words that the spirits said were a response to the presence of the Old God inside his head. He kept a wary vigil, his hand itching to offer the whoreson’s body to the furious elements. But he was patient. This orc would be useful. It was when they climbed the vast stair of Drak’atal Passage that Junka Blackscar’s spirit was torn from his body. “Blackscar is dead.” He announced, keeping his pace steady and his gaze fixed upon the ominous clouds that awaited beyond the top of the stair. It was then he realised the orc’s purpose. He kept his smile hidden. His companion stopped in his tracks, his next words coloured by the dismay painted upon his face. “Then why do we continue?” A sense of alarm made him tense briefly, and his mind’s eye saw the orc’s hand reach for the concealed knife. He spoke quickly. “I will claw his spirit back into his bones. His axe will fall in union with the Horde’s once more. His hatred, bright and pure, will run through his veins again.” He spoke, in a voice that thundered with authority. He stopped, looking back down the stair at where his companion stood. “I will enter a trance,” he lied, “and when he lives again, it will fall to you to ensure we come to no harm. Do this, and I will reward you.” It was half true. He would be powerless after coaxing the spirit back into the body, but he could use this. He smiled again, this time making sure it was seen. “We have little time. Come. We walk fast.” It was a four hour journey to the Argent Stand, one they made in three. Events were moving fast, the spirits told him. Junka’s body was moving, borne on the back of a dead horse. The name Gladsworth came unbidden to his mind, and he knew that the body had been discovered by friends. As the grey structure of the occupied troll keep came into view, he quickened his pace. The cultist had to trot to keep up. The road they walked upon was a cracked ruin, and his bare feet slapped upon dull stone. His expression was dark as he sensed the upheaval of this fracturing land. The earth groaned for help, and the flickering bale-fires that illuminated the road writhed in pain. He could feel glee radiating from the orc tottering behind him like heat. Sharp pain arced up the back of his skull. A premonition of things soon to be. The spirits smiled, and so did he. They approached the heavily guarded southern entrance of the Drakkari ruin with their weapons sheathed and their right palms exposed in greeting. The guards, clad in pearl-white plate, trimmed with gleaming silver, bid them pass with little trouble. The keep was modest, and humming with activity, both physical and spiritual. A battle raged on the western front, a courtyard strewn with bloated corpses and dying crusaders. This would be simple. His lips parted in a wide grin, revealing all of his dagger-teeth. When he turned to the cultist, his expression was blank. “Inform the watch captain that we have come to claim his body. We burn it, by the request of a brother. Do this now.” He had already turned before he finished his sentence, seeking out Blackscar’s resting place. A drop of rain spattered across his cheek. The heavens would open soon. They were poised, ready to wash away the filth of the cultist’s existence. He took this omen with a nod to the skies, and began to walk amongst the dead. The stench here was foul, the reek of mortification and decay. Many of the bodies here had lain for days, the cold doing nothing to halt the rot slowly claiming their flesh. Where he stepped, flocks of ravens squawked loudly and took flight in a flurry of black feathers and morbid shrieks. A great feast was laid out for them here, but they would have to wait. He had work to do. As his gaze trailed across the charnel scene, his heart skipped a beat in response to the spirits’ recognition of Junka’s still body. A single raven tore at the body’s stomach, but a swift kick sent the scavenger on its way. A critical stare drank in every detail. His flesh was stone cold, and his joints were frozen stiff. This would be difficult. Very difficult. The voice behind him almost took him by surprise. “We have their blessing. His body is mine.” “Ours.” Skargul corrected, the aggression in his voice making the cultist take a step back. “We take him away from here. If I am seen bringing back the dead, they will break my bones. Drag him. Now.” The orc obeyed, his eagerness almost feverish. Skargul’s eye was upon him at all times as he dragged Junka’s stiff corpse from the fortress. They had a little trouble leaving with the body, but the look in Skargul’s eye made the weary defenders concede his point. Fifteen minutes passed, and they left the road. They set Junka down behind a thorny shrub. They were alone. “I begin my work. My spirit shall be elsewhere, and will not return for some minutes after the deed is done,” He lied, enjoying the look of contented malice that settled upon the cultist’s face. Junka’s body was naked save for a meagre loincloth and some sodden bandages wrapped across his chest. He smelled of piss and death, but Skargul could already feel violent energy rippling across the spirit world. He frowned at the expression on the dead orc’s frozen face, a rictus of fear and pain. He could sense the strength in the stretched muscles of his arms, and the violence they could unleash. There was very little of Junka’s body that wasn’t lined by old scars. His eye was drawn to the single, mottled scar that ran across his chest, from collarbone to abdomen, his namesake. He closed his eyes, clearing his mind, making a show of relaxing his muscles and settling down. But the spirits around him were watchful, and their gaze was fixed upon the hungry face of the cultist. The spirit world he reached was alive with violent fury. A roar, distant but clear, reached his attention. Junka Blackscar, he noted, had made war upon the beyond. His consciousness expanded, and elation flooded his being as the familiarity of the other realm claimed him once more. Reaching forward with his mind, he grabbed a hold of Junka’s thrashing essence. “Junka Blackscar,” He boomed. And then he tugged. One tug was enough. The spectres around him fled and Junka’s spirit began its painful descent into the living world. It was a very brief thing. Skargul quickly returned to his own body, the weight of the physical realm quickly being processed and dealt with by his practiced mind. Awareness was instant, and one eye opened to observe the events about to take place. Junka was on his feet in seconds, shuddering and barking with barely contained violence. His eyes, wide with mad rage, fixed upon the slowly approaching cultist. In moments the two crashed to the ground, and Junka was slamming the bastard’s head into the ground again and again, his yelps drowned out by the mad orc’s roars. The screams soon died, only to be replaced by the sound of wet bone striking stone. As the orc thrashed in his death throes, Junka’s disorientation passed. He vomited into his victim’s face and growled in bone-deep agony. Skargul smiled. He walked over and placed a gnarled hand on his shoulder. “Get up,”
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