Neverdark War Chronicle draft - Encounter at Vol'jin Point
The first most of us encountered it—the first most of us could trace a first encounter—came that night at Vol’jin Point. The SOS came unexpectedly, so quiet at first that if I hadn’t been in the infirmary at our old post in Val’sharah, working on Zelrus Lightbinder’s hand, I might not have heard anything at all. The transmission was buried beneath static at first, only became more recognizable upon repeat. Even then, at the time we had a ranger in our number—Halaris Redspear—that usually used code on the comms, owing to an old injury, so more than a few wondered if it was him.
It wasn’t, of course—he was in the barracks at the time—but we didn’t know who it could be calling for help.
Looking back now, I know it was a trap laid carefully for us. It was a bid to end the threat we represented before we had any idea what it was we faced.
Before any of us who were there at the end realized what we were meant to do.
Up until then, up until that transmission, it had just been another normal day at Dawn’s Reach.
It’s always been Dawn’s Reach, too, no matter where we landed. I suppose I never thought about that piece before setting down to write this in fits and starts. Even today, I sit at a desk at Dawn’s Reach—this one, likely the last, in the Everlight, south of Dawnglory Manor and the township, west of the shore, east of the Reprieve with its chapel, settled deep in her forests. We’ve already rebuilt twice here. I hope we never have to again.
Of course, we did the same in Val’sharah, before we moved on.
The sun was already down by the time the initial call came, making that mayday even more unusual. Still, the static, the strangeness of it—that should likely have been our first clue. I’ve listened to the playback half a dozen times while readying myself to write this and I don’t know how we didn’t realize it then.
But I do know. We weren’t yet who would we would become in the months and years that followed. We didn’t know—couldn’t.
“Lieutenant General Grom'thar reporting... mayday, mayday... blue aggression from... not... w... it... repeat, all-out assault from the north...”
Blue aggression. In those days, it meant the Alliance. I remember my stomach twisting, bile rising in my throat. At heart, I was still a pacifist, still against the war, despite my position with the 194th. I think Dra’zar knew but as long as I followed orders, did my job, it didn’t matter. As long as I could put that on the shelf when he needed me to, then it was fine. Feelings be damned.
Sometimes, I wonder if he appreciated my insight all the more because of it rather than in spite of it.
“Overrun... mayday, mayday... requesting re... no hope... falling all around...”
Grom’thar had a thick accent—if he wasn’t Mag’thar, then he’d spent years in Outland, among the orcs there.
It felt wrong, but I started checking the gear, the kits. Grom’thar’s transmissions were fading in and out even as Zanrethan Sunforge reached out to Orgrimmar on Dra’zar’s orders, trying to get more details on Grom’thar and his posting, the forces under his command. That’s where El found me. The look on his face is one I still sometimes see in nightmares—eyes wide, gaze somehow knowing above and beyond anything we were hearing on the comms. It was the same knowing that knotted my guts and made my heart heavy in my chest.
“We’re going to need you tonight,” he said to me. He was already half-kitted, bow at hand, dagger in the other. That knowing in his eyes aged him a century and more. All I could do was nod.
“I have my oaths as a healer to uphold. Need to check the gear.”
And then, just like that, the knowing was gone from his face. His fingers and hands twitched, as if nerves had suddenly flooded back into where that awareness had been. “Do you, uh...do you need any help?”
I’d turned back to him, then, reached out and grasped his shoulder. Held a moment.
Maybe the next words had been a mistake.
“You’ve got your own gear to set, don’t you?”
He’d started to say something in response, then looked toward the windows. I saw the shadow come across his face and he seemed to change his mind about how he was going to respond. “Yeah. Call me if you need me, Tyr.”
I squeezed his shoulder again and started to turn before we started to hear the screams.
It was like every communicator at Vol’jin Point had suddenly tripped. All we could hear on the lines were screams and breaking glass, the sharp report of gunfire and shrill shriek like the ringing of ears after a shot passes too close. Death-howls and the screams of the dying, slowly fading under the roar of wind.
And then, one last transmission, clear as the peel of cathedral bells: "Ancestors help us all."
Then there was nothing—silence. Not a breath. Not a scream.
Dra’zar gave the order a few moments later.
“194th, we depart in one hour, given that we hear back from command regarding Grom'thar and his regiment. Prepare adequately.”
Sometimes, I still wonder if it was meant to be our garrison, not Vol’jin Point, that was hit that day. Most of the time, though, I’m more confident that it was all a trap laid for us by the enemy we would spend the balance of the following years fighting. Vol’jin Point was north and east of our position, close to the border with Highmountain, while our position was more central, deep within the primordial woodlands of Val’sharah. Close enough that we were the most likely to respond to any mayday—if the transmission itself was real.
On that count, I’m still not confident at all.
The people, though—those were real. They were real.
We would realize the horrors they went through later.
When we portaled in, no one had any reason to suspect that it was anything other than an Alliance attack—anyone other than me, anyway, and perhaps Arius. If Dra’zar suspected any different, he gave no sign, though something tells me that when we got word that there was no response from any settlements or camps in the vicinity of Vol’jin Point, either, that something was even more deeply amiss than it seemed on the surface.
The forest around us was dense and dead silent outside of Vol’jin Point—our portal dropped us short of the fort itself, just in case. Even at a distance, we could smell the smoke, see pillars of it rising above the trees. There was a crackle to the air, eerie, like the whispers of power before a terrible storm, the kind that set your hair on end.
There was enough smoke to blot out the moon and stars. Morbid as it is, the glow of the fires inside of the shattered post lit our path right to it through those primordial trees.
It smelled like a charnel house, like the pyres that burned in Northrend day and night during the height of the war there, when I was with the Argent Crusade. I remember thinking it and feeling a chill creep down my spine.
Dra’zar sent three of ours—Alodrane Falconwalk, Syche Darkarrow-Sunforge, and Corey Dawnchild—north to flank the rest of us as we headed for the remnant post from the west.
They reported devastation.
They were the first to see the bodies as they drifted down the river that flanked the post to the north, the water running thick with debris and the dead, laden with ash and hissing with embers blown by the wind. Beyond the river were shattered ramparts and scattered spent artillery mingled with blood and the bodies of the dead. The watchtowers stood shattered, silent and dark against a smoke-stained sky. And as if a mocking sentinel set over the dead, an orc’s head stood speared on a pike, sightless eyes staring off toward the road that we would approach from hours after his death.
Dora was the one who told us about the head. Syche was the one to report no movement, no sign of life—just the dead.
Just the fires still burning in a shattered fort miles from where our own post stood. A shattered fort that stood between a river to the north, mountains to the east—and us approaching from the west.
Dra’zar cursed and turned to Zanrethan Sunforge, who was his second in those days. “A river to the north and mountains to the east. No foreseeable way we're walking into an ambush, aye?”
I remember Zan taking stock of the situation and shaking his head. “Not that I can see, sir.”
I think perhaps in that moment most if not all of us knew that the situation was much more complicated and dangerous than we’d believed when we’d portaled in less than fifteen minutes earlier. I know I did.
It was that sinking of the stomach, the souring of the throat that I felt, neither of which had anything to do with the smell of death and burning. I knew something was wrong—I just didn’t know what.
Dra’zar ordered the three to rejoin us, asked Senithvia—she was one of his captains, too, in those days, leading the 194th’s spell-flingers—to give us as much invisibility as she and hers could muster. When the others rejoined us, they were in agreement—it was all staged for the benefit of whoever found the place. Corey was the one to identify it as too still, too quiet for a recent attack—especially with the fires still burning.
I suppose that’s why Dra’zar told Vigilynce Baldesion, Melania Dawnweaver, and I to weave and hold an aegis between us and Vol’jin Point for our advance on what was left of the place, then set the heavies between us and the aegis. He must have at least suspected what my gut was already screaming.
If this wasn’t a trap, it was something worse.
“One hour,” Dra’zar murmured as we’d started our advance—he was talking to Corey, though I was certainly near enough to overhear. “Surely they’d have pillaged the place.”
“Unless loot wasn’t their aim,” I said in response. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but the words came anyway.
He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “This is a declaration of war, Grimstryke. Any army, no matter how disciplined, will have its spoils.”
I didn’t say anything more, and his attention shifted as the others got into position. He turned to one of youngest among us, Parr Va’loren, a young sin’dorei piecing together druid training in fits and starts. Parr was trying to read the trees, to sense what he might be able to from the environs of the forest, and Dra’zar knew the look of it.
“Va’loren, what do you feel about us? Anything out of the ordinary, aside from the fire?”
Parr frowned. “It hurts,” he said. “But it’s hollow, too.”
It was not the first time nor the last time I saw that exact frown on Dra’zar’s face, but that moment caught and held in my memory. It was only for a moment before it shifted from it and into the usual grim countenance. “We move onward.”
On, toward the smell of burning bodies, toward the source of the acrid smoke that blotted out the stars and set eyes watering. We made the gates only to be greeted b a pile of bodies set alight with violet flames—huge, seeming more than what should have been there. All seemed to be soldiers—orcs and trolls, sin’dorei and shal’dorei, Forsaken and tauren and even goblins. At the fore was tauren’s head speared through with an Alliance standard that fluttered on the wind, its edges only now beginning to catch from the violet flames.
The ground was soaked in blood, the grass matted, flattened by boot and hoof, scattered with artillery shells that we had to tread carefully to avoid. Tension rose with each step, trepidation grew. All of us were alert, waiting for the ambush, for the other shoe to drop. Syche scanned the walls with arrow notched, Zan and Corey stood as living shields between those of us holding the aegis and anything ahead.
Most of the bodies weren’t whole—they were pieces held together by sinew and tattered clothing, parts piled together in some terrible pyre. My gaze went to that pyre even as Vigilynce’s snapped to the standard. Beyond the macabre stack, tents—densely packed, some still standing and seeming untouched while others lay collapsed or burning.
For a few seconds, there was only silence except for our breathing—Parr gagging as he pulled his collar up against the smell—and the sound of the wind and the flames. And then, Dora: “We can’t stay here.”
But we would. Dra’zar’s order brooked no argument, though the words were stiff—not as if he was shocked, but something else, something I knew I couldn’t name at the time but marked just the same.
“We search for survivors.”
Dora and Vigilynce both pointed out there probably weren’t any even as others moved to obey. Duty, Dra’zar said, bound us to at least making sure. Corey pointed out that perhaps there were some that weren’t too far gone to revive.
Dra’zar set Vigilynce and Lindrayëda Tal’enor to watch our backs while the rest of us were to set to the task of the search. I was about to begin myself when Parr’s voice stopped me.
“There’s nothing living here.”
I paused, turning to look back at him. All I could see of him were whitened knuckles where he held his cloak over his mouth and nose, wide eyes, and pale face from the cheekbones up. “Are you certain?”
There was only bleakness in his eyes—bleakness that even swallowed the fear. I squeezed his shoulder.
Before I could move away, Dra’zar asked me to hold the shield, so I stayed where I stood as the others began to search for any sign that we were not the only things still breathing within those shattered walls.
As the silence deepened around us, slowly we heard it.
It came from what must have once been the command center for Vol’jin Point, which was half reduced to rubble, the roof sundered and collapsing, supported by a single still-standing support. Dra’zar called Zan and Corey to him, had Dora and Syche cover his back. It was only later that I heard about the sight within, the source of the sound—Zan told me, voice breaking, eyes bleak, later, after it ended.
A hooded figure, he told me hours later, his voice choked with horror and fingers clutching at the mug of something steaming as we sat later in a shadowed kitchen, long after most of our brethren had retired to fitful dreams or drunken stupor. There were corpses all around in a ring—human—and that figure was kneeling in the center. Whoever it was—whoever they’d been—their shoulders were shaking, writhing. When the general pulled back to strike, that—thing looked up. No ears, just holes. Tendrils like spilled ink across its scalp, weeping black blood into a toothless maw. Not a person anymore. Something else—something other.
It would not be the last time he, or Dra’zar, or any of us would witness such a horror.
While they found that monster within the shattered command center, Vigilynce saw the trees to the south bend.
Then she saw the eyes glowing a strange and sickly gold from the trees.
Dora’s curse mingled with a gunshot.
Then the dire wolf that wasn’t emerged from the trees. Shadows bled around it, black ichor dripped from its maw as it stalked from the south toward the gate.
Toward us—those of us who hadn’t gone into the shattered command center with the general, those of us who weren’t yet facing the monster and its dead puppets they were met with inside.
As bedlam erupted, all I could do at first was weave that shield tighter and hold it—and pray. Pray that this wasn’t a mistake. Pray that we’d make it out of this alive and relatively intact.
Void bled from the command center, mingled with Light, and the sound of shouts and steel splitting bone echoed from that direction. Outside, where I still stood, Vigilynce charged the wolf before it could get too close.
Except it was already too close.
The rangers tumbled free of the command center first, firing back the way they’d come, scrambling, cursing. Lin threw herself at the wolf, too, she and Vigilynce the only things standing between it and where Senithvia and I stood—me with the shield, Seni with the invisibility spell.
Lightning cracked across the sky, thunder booming loud enough to momentarily deafen, to shake the very ground, and a moment later, the heavens opened with a deluge of ice-cold rain.
The wolf didn’t bleed—I watched as Lin’s twin blades cut deep into is flank and only saw black, ichorous smoke billow from the wounds she’d carved into its flesh, something that clung to those blades and hissed against them as she stepped back, reset.
The others boiled free of the command center, pursued by the corpses of those humans that Zan would later describe to me. Seni launched an attack of her own on them as soon as they came within sight, but all that did was draw their attention.
To us—to she and I and Parr, who stood suddenly all but defenseless but for the shield I still held. Lin and Vigilynce were still engaged with the shadow-wolf, very much occupied and utterly unaware of the sudden additional danger.
Then, suddenly one of those corpses was on top of Parr, void spiking from its hands even as it tried to sink its teeth into his neck. He tumbled back, shrieking, just beyond my reach.
The words that came from the corpses next came as many voices merged into one, in a tongue I didn’t know then but recognize now as Shath’yar. The spell they wove was one of malevolent shadow, designed to spear and bind, inky, twining tendrils snaking through the ground like vines to impale us.
It was neither an act of desperation nor anything less than a delaying tactic.
I was still taking stock of who was hit when the corpse that had been attacking Parr instead threw itself at me. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought it’d killed the boy, but even as void speared into my shoulder I realized he was still breathing, wide-eyed and bloodied, but very much alive.
The rain only grew worse. The wind whipped around us, swirling, as if trying to gather us together—to gather us in.
Light seared through the corpse and I fell back a step, heart hammering fast, too fast.
The spot where Vigilynce and Lin had ended the wolf was empty but for a bubbling puddle of void-laden smoke. The other corpses were falling dispatched by the skilled blades and fire of Blood Knights and the shots of rangers.
The places where those corpses fell held similar puddles of void—puddles of void that seemed to coalesce and solidify.
Dra’zar’s voice cracked across the space between all of us before I could fixate on what I was seeing—and what I was starting to see. “Back to the entrance—let's rendezvous with Lin and Baldesion before we're caught completely unawares. Whoever that hooded man was...”
Somehow, my voice didn’t shake. “What was that?”
As if in answer, a war horn sounded to the northwest. Bile curdled in the back of my throat and my stomach shrunk into a tight knot.
“Nevermind. It was a bloody distraction.”
Distracting us from what, I didn’t know. Wasn’t sure I wanted to.
We regrouped quickly and just as he started to order Senithvia to get us the hell out of there, an arrow shot right past Dra’zar’s ear and embedded itself, quivering, in a pile of corpses a dozen yards behind him. Even as Seni was opening that portal, a force broke through the trees, clad in Alliance colors, armed with spears and lances.
“Change of plans!” Dra’zar shouted. “Arm yourselves, form up!”
I was wrong about the distraction.
This was the distraction.
It was very nearly a rout—we were terribly outnumbered, but our enemy was not nearly so skilled as one might have expected, even in the driving rain and crackling storm.
Above us, all but unnoticed, the shadowy smoke that had drifted away from the corpses and the wolf swirled together.
The smell of gunpowder and burning flesh began to drown out anything else—the rain, the scent of magic, blood, horse, fear—all of it.
Something was very wrong.
A flash of lightning told the tale.
These forces were too clean.
They hadn’t been behind Vol’jin point.
They were the distraction.
The whole thing was a trap.
A trap for us, though it would take time to understand why.
A crack of thunder, louder than the rest, shook the whole damn world around us, set horses rearing, their eyes rolling back in terror. It took what must have seemed an eternity for their riders to pull them back under control, to form up, all of them somehow ignoring the rising electricity in the air as they did, arraying themselves opposed to where we stood.
I was already weaving a shell around us all thanks to the crackling energy I could feel in every healed break of bone in my body when Dra’zar bellowed, “Shield us!”
The others—Zan and Vigilynce and Parr—joined me in my effort. The shield held—barely—as bolts rained around us. The forces in front of us were not so lucky.
I still remember the screams in my nightmares.
Because my nightmares sometimes take the shape of what came next.
As the brightness and afterimages of the lightning began to fade, we started to see the bodies—contorted in agony, blackened, expressions locked in final, shocked pain and fear.
Dead center among them stood a hunchbacked, hooded old man with a cane, utterly untouched by the hell that had just erupted all around us. Palsied hands folded over the head of the cane as he regarded us across the gap.
The words that came next were in perfect Thalassian, no hint of accent, clear as the stars on a moonless night but trembling like a leaf on the wind. “This is certainly an inconvenience, is it not?”
He raised one of his hands, a gnarled finger pointing upward toward the clouds. They had coalesced above us into a perfectly rendered eye: lidless, its iris detailed, absolute.
Something within me curled back in on itself as I stared up at it for a few seconds, then tore my gaze away to regard the old man again.
He was smiling, coughing with laughter, and hissed the words: “The Eye sees all, young Children of Blood…the Wolf and Shepherd stand trial. Tonight's tribulation is only the first of many.”
It was not the first time we had heard those terms—the Wolf and Shepherd. But this felt different somehow.
I had not been there when Antorus of Riverstead came to us in Val’sharah. It was another thing I learned of in whispers later. But that had been the first.
Would that we had known then all we came to know later.
Dra’zar answered. “Stand down, creature. The sands have all fallen.”
The stranger’s next words came sharp, honed like a blade made of bone, “Death awaits you, all of you. The sea grows restless, children, and high tide draws near. His laughter echoes from seven maws, his damnations spill from seven tongues.”
The defiance in Dra’zar’s voice must have either been expected or galling. “We have felled worse than the likes of you. Stand down.”
And yet, somehow, the stranger simply seemed amused, though his laughter was the sort to set the teeth on edge, to set toes curling and children shrinking back into the safety of an adult at their backs. “Even your nightmares fear me, Wolf. The Eye beholds all paths, and they all end at your death. Take heed, children, that your transgressions do not end you: prove yourselves worthy tonight.”
His lips curled in a cruel smile. “N’raqi.”
For the space of one heartbeat, then another, we couldn’t see anything. As our visions faded back in, he was gone, but something terrible stood in his place: a Faceless One. It was clad in armor made of ivory sheets, a mask painted crimson settled over where a face should have been. A pair of battleaxes of some kind of black alloy were its weapons, its tentacles tasting the air as it oriented toward us with nothing short of terrible malice.
“Fuck,” I breathed, even as Dora loosed an arrow.
It skittered off the Faceless One’s mask and off to the side, lost among the twisted ruins that were once human that sprawled around it.
I still do not know how we managed to fell the thing that night. We were not what we would become and we were already battered, depleted.
But we did. We lived to tell the tale.
That was the night that Dra’zar named me a captain. I would remain such until the 194th dissolved.
I have never stopped granting him my counsel.
As I tended to the wounded, hours before I would find out what they found in the command center, Dra’zar radioed Orgrimmar to deliver the news.
As I understand it, the true fate of Vol’jin Point remains classified.