Epilogue
The axe slammed into the man low on his shoulder. It tore into the armor, but more damage was done when the man’s back slammed into the rocky ground with a force that seemed to shatter his entire body. The impact shook the ground, staggering those nearby. Hirrus ripped the axe out of the warped armor of the corpse beneath him, turning the motion into a swing that decapitated another cultist. The warrior planted one foot ahead of himself, and whirled in a practiced motion, letting his axe cleave through everything within reach. He lunged as it came around to the direction of his momentum and buried it in the chest of whoever had been stupid enough to stay in his way. A swift kick sent the bleeding corpse flying into the crowd, toppling a group of them with the force of the flailing body.
He howled his rage up at the sky, the roar of primal emotion filling the air, and the sound made the surrounding cultists flinch away. If it flinched - if it felt fear- it was prey. A feral instinct enveloped his mind. he was not a lone warrior making a doomed last stand. He was a predator loose in the herd.
As if to confirm the instinct, he flailed the axe around in a wild arc. Those who didn’t fall over themselves trying to run away from him were cut down like wheat before the scythe. These weren’t combatants. They were unarmored and unarmed. they were here for a celebration not a battle. They may as well have lined up and waited for their turn under his axe instead of all the running around in panic.
Meanwhile, Hirrus felt the blade sing in his hands. His whole life, he’d wielded mass-produced weapons. It was all store bought or salvage. He had never wielded a weapon specifically smithed for him, custom-made to his height, weight, and strength. It felt like it was crafted with his exact measurements in mind. The length felt natural. In the thrill of battle, he’d often felt that his weapon was an extension of himself. But every time before had been a faint echo of the current sensation running through his arms. This axe was made for him. Literally.
He felt flames crash against his armor, and snarled as the heat tingled his flesh. He whirled towards the source and his red-rimmed vision narrowed to a tunnel with a pair of terrified eyes at the other end. He didn’t feel it happen physically, it was all instinct as the axe flew from his grip, his entire body arching into the motion. It felt instantaneous as the axe left his hands and split a skull in two twenty feet away at the same time.
He sprinted after the axe, feeling rather than seeing as the mob tried to close in around him. Seeing him disarmed seemed to be emboldening them. One of them moved to block his path, but a gauntleted fist shoved the cartilage and bones in their nose up into their forebrain. His hand closed around the haft of his axe before that corpse hit the ground.
The head of his axe traced a wide, red arc through a wall of cultists. The rage overtaking his mind was warping his perceptions; there was no one enemy, there was a swarm surrounding him. An orb of shadow energy glanced off of his arm, and he charged at the source, his shoulder shoving apart the packed bodies to let him reach the caster. A small part of him was aware that his axe was splitting open the skull of an individual, and that one person was being killed by it, but in his mind’s eye, he was striking at a nebulous mass of cultists, disabling an appendage that had struck him.
The world was falling away from him. His body was moving faster and faster, but his mind was slowing. His movements became too fast for his mind to follow. The world became a fuzz of noise. Distantly, he felt warm flesh rolling down his throat. He felt the haft of the axe slide under his hands. There was a strange spinning stretching sensation, and he was aware that he was whirling in circles, his blade hacking wildly in every direction in a storm of cuts, slashes, and parries. There was a continuous rippling sensation in his chest and throat. He assumed it was impact against his armor, but it was so precise and rhythmic. Was he screaming? Laughing? Crying?
Body parts, gouts of blood, and shrieking faces whirled passed his vision, not just tinged in red, but bathed in it. He felt ribbons of skin and flesh slap against his face and hair. Splashes of fire accompanied by abrupt changes of direction. That rhythmic ripple through his torso. His whole being exalted in slaughter, more rage than man. And it still wasn’t enough. He felt like he was in a small boat swept along in a flood, and he was furiously paddling trying to go faster, roaring encouragement into the storm. More. More. MORE. MORE MORE MORE MOREMOREMOREMOREMOREMOREMOREMORE.
His arms burned as fatigue began to take its toll. When was the last time he was tired? More than that, when was the last time he was tired with a weapon in his hand? He was vaguely aware of fighting someone with a weapon. A guard in armor? He was also aware of the familiar feeling of his clawlike fingertips sinking into living eyesockets, so it seemed to be under control. Somewhere far away, it was being handled.
Far away.
Time passed.
Where was he?
He tried to shake his head to clear it, but it didn’t seem to be under his control. There was a distant sensation of having a physical body, but he didn’t know how to operate it. He shook his head again, aware that it was a purely mental gesture. The burning rage within him began to mellow. Senses began to bleed back in. His vision was still a featureless field of red. There was a disgusting slurping sound coming from nearby. He felt wet. He shook his head again, forcing his physical body to respond. He marshalled his will, hardening his focus. Reality came flooding back in.
He was on his knees in a pile of bodies. He was coated in blood. His axe was buried to the eye in a corpse to his right. His body reported a cacophony of burns and abrasions, along with the deep ache of coming to a physical stop after having worked too hard for too long. He looked down at his hands to find that he had been shredding the corpses below him with his claws. Rounded furrows taken out of the eviscerated mess marked where he had slammed his face down into the pile of flesh and made a scooping motion to maximize how much of it was pushed down his throat. He wondered how long he’d been feeding.
He looked around. There was carnage everywhere. He tried to trace a path through it to track what had happened, but it looked like one big continuous mess. He couldn’t even tell the order in which the other piles of gore had been fed upon.
His axe was stained red. He was mildly irritated by the prospect of cleaning it. But it had served him well; it surely deserved the attention. He didn’t want to look down at his armor, knowing by feel that repairs would be expensive and time-consuming. He could feel the places where the plates dug into wounds where they had been punctured. And that was without the shrieking of nerve endings where the armor rubbed against burned flesh. The plating in those areas would be blackened and warped, with the padding below entirely burned away.
Hirrus stood slowly, picking up his axe. He couldn’t see another living thing in the area. Just bodies. Pieces of bodies. Puddles of red where even the thirsty ground of Shadowmoon Valley had drank its fill. The farthest edge of the gore was about a hundred yards away, stretching back towards the camp. But it was a continuous smear of red across the ground from there all the way back to the stage. The fight must have circled back to the stage, because it was littered with bodies and stained as red as his axe.
He whirled his axe once, flicking the blood off the edge. Patches of blood across the cheeks of the axe were already dried. The formerly smooth handle felt rough in his hands from the gore caked along it. The sky was starting to redden. Dawn was approaching. He had been fighting all night long.
Hirrus focused on trying to recall the events of the previous night to see if he could find any specifics, but all his brain reported was a blur of blood and violence. Even just remembering it gave him an unwanted thrill of pleasure as a pulse of adrenaline soothed his aches.
He surveyed the field of battle, planning his next move. There was some movement down by the stage. Hirrus felt his muscles try to tense, but there wasn’t quite enough strength left in them for it. It took him a moment to marshall his will and force his body to take a slow, confident step. Battle was about allocation of resources. His rage was burned out, his body was spent, and his will was almost entirely occupied by not falling over. If he needed to fight again, the biggest resource he had at his disposal was the gore spread around him on all sides. Intimidation was the only way he’d come out of any serious conflict.
“Yes, the, ah, the energy is dissipating now. Things are going to be, uh, a little weird around here for a bit, but after- once the energy spreads out naturally, it won’t pool like that again.”
“Well done. See what we can accomplish if we learn to set aside our differences. Sort of a parallel to the global political situation, eh?”
“I’ve done what needed to be done. If I never see you again, I’ll consider mine a life well lived.”
A robed face peeked around the corner of the stage as he approached the altar behind it. A long eyebrow arched slightly as she watched him approach.
“Hm.”
“Ah! The noble hero approaches!” Malthus noted as he came into view when Hirrus rounded the corner of the stage. “That was quite a display back there. I’m not sure what impressed me more, the bravery or the violence!”
Orinthal was already glaring at Malthus as he came into view, but was unable to maintain it as his attention homed in on Hirrus. “Uh.” Orinthal said.
“We’ve, ah, disabled the altar.” Baemadis cut in. “You were- It seemed like a better idea not to, um, approach you until you were, er, done.”
“That was probably wise.” Hirrus nodded. He looked to Teliise and arched an eyebrow, trying not to let the anxiety show on his face.
She nodded and he felt himself relax. She jerked her chin to the side, and he caught sight of another figure in cultists robes, huddled up behind the stage, hands clutching her pregnant belly as she snored softly. Hirrus gave Teliise a grateful nod.
A feeling swelled in his chest, right next to the new pulse of the Light within him. Pride. Joy. Satisfaction. He did the right thing, and didn’t just survive, but succeeded.
“Uh.” Orinthal began to step around the altar.
“If I see you again,” Hirrus looked up, glanced at Orinthal before locking his gaze back to Malthus. “I may decide to kill you.”
Malthus chuckled. “You know what, friend? That’s more than fair. You’re not the only one I have such an arrangement with.” His chuckle became slightly nervous as he glanced back over the carnage Hirrus had wrought of the cultists. “Though I admit, I feel a lot less confident about my odds with you, eh?”
“That said,” Hirrus looked around to address the whole group. “We’ve completed our mission. I assume that there won’t be many guards in the camp if you all wished to raid the cultits’ library. There might be a handful of gold to be had if you have the patience to dig through a few hundred blood-soaked pockets…” He waved out at the killing field behind him. “Go about your own business; once our objective was completed, our group was disbanded. Good job everyone, and goodbye.” He turned and began to walk away, stomping heedlessly over the body parts scattered over the ground.
“Hey, wait!”
Hirrus didn’t slow down, but had to fight down the urge to speed up.
“Brother!” Orinthal’s hand touched Hirrus’s shoulder.
“WHAT?” The warrior whirled. He’d thought his rage had burned out when he’d run out of cultists to murder, but he was mistaken. “WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY TO ME? WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY HAVE TO SAY?” He grabbed the front of Orinthal’s robe with his free hand, pulling him in close. “You want to tell me that I have a right to despise our father? You want to tell me he hasn’t changed? You want to tell me whatever lies he’s told about me? You want to tell me who claims to have been my friend now? Which people I grew up with are living or dead now? There’s nothing you could say to me that I don’t already know, or don’t care to know.” He shoved the priest away. Orinthal stumbled over a corpse and fell to the blood-soaked ground. “I don’t want to hear it. Father’s deal with Sylvanas is keeping you alive right now. If I see your face again, I’m going to rip it off your skull and eat it.” He turned away and resumed storming off.
“But I saved your-” Orinthal began. But Hirrus didn’t stop. “What should I tell Father?” That stopped him.
“If you’re smart,” He didn’t turn around. “You’ll tell him you’re not a piece to be pushed around the chessboard. That you’re your own man with your own ambitions and dreams, and that you want to live your own life.” He turned his head slightly. “But you won’t do that. Neither did I. Just tell him what he wants to hear. Whatever keeps him happy.” He struggled to keep a waver out of his voice. “Just like usual.”
“I meant-” Orinthal stammered. “I meant about you. Should I tell him you’re… That you exist?”
Hirrus was silent for a long moment. “If I tell you not to,” He turned around slowly and looked Orinthal in the eye. “Would you lie to him?” His tone was grave, but held a sparkle of genuine curiosity.
They stared at each other. It felt like hours were passing between them.
“You’re my brother.” Orinthal whispered. “If there’s anyone I could lie to him for, it would be you.”
Hirrus broke eye contact, looking away with a flinch.
“I’m…” Hirrus trailed off for a moment. “Thank you.”
He turned and walked away. He didn’t stop walking as he entered the cultist camp. He knocked over tents and kicked aside campsites as he kept walking. He paused to retrieve his belongings from where the party had camped, and grabbed the reins of his horse. He kept walking, leading his horse back towards Terokkar.
His mind was wrestling with a difficult problem. He’d put it on hold, but now it needed to be dealt with.
Having a brother.
How do you have a brother? What do you do? How do you feel? What does it mean?
He kept walking. It didn’t help him think, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop.
The moons were rising again as he stood on the edge of Blade’s Edge mountains, staring out over the pointed rocks and into the dust-reddened darkness of the void. He had no more answers than he’d had when he started walking.
A small voice within himself said he should turn around and start back the other way, but he knew that wouldn’t get him any closer to a solution. It would just be more mechanical motion. Not even a distraction, just something to do to occupy his body while his thoughts rolled around hoping to find something to grasp onto that he already knew wasn’t there.
But a solution to the problem of Orinthal wasn’t the most pressing matter. He could brood on the problem of a sibling for months - perhaps years - and not be presented with a situation that required him to have his thoughts in order on that score. There was something else that he could not delay considering. He turned his thoughts away from Orinthal, and directed them inwards.
That small alien spark of the Light burned within him. It was strange and foreign, but at the same time, reassuring. It represented a moment in time. The man who died at Stratholme was reborn in that moment. Hirrus was himself in a way he had not been in a very long time. His true self had not just punched through the blocks of death and undeath, but had used the opening his rage had cleared to step past his discipline and into the front of his mind. And more than that, it was a version of himself that had been shoved down again and again by the oppressive hand of his father. While he would die before embracing the light, the idea of that spark winking back out was equally repulsive. It represented an idealization of himself. He would not turn his back on trying to be the man he was born to be.
Hirrus found himself in an awkward situation. He was unsure if he could return to the service of the Dark Lady. Returning to the Scythe with his newfound perspective on the subjects of morality and restraint would likely result in a bloodbath. While those who deserved it would find True Death on the edge of his axe, what about the ones who didn’t? To dispense justice was not reason enough to do wrong by others. Evallei, Hedva, Invar, and whoever else happened to be present for his return did not need to be forced to put themselves between him and the various monsters he sought.
At the same time, he knew his father would be looking over the reports on the mission Orinthal returned from. He anticipated that Forsaken Command would do what they felt was necessary to protect the identity of their agents - and likely whatever they felt they could get away with to chagrin a highly-ranked church official. But if anything identified him? While he felt he could trust Orinthal’s word that he would say nothing, Hirrus knew their father too well. To lie by omission was one thing. To lie convincingly to a direct question? There was no way. Even if Orinthal found the strength to lie, their father would see through it.
Even if Forsaken Command didn’t sell him out to his father, what was to say that they wouldn’t be displeased with his newfound sense of justice? Whether out of fear or principle, they might decide he needed to be removed. And if they did, Lesh was far from the most competent Deathstalker, and she was capable of finding him and getting within stabbing distance almost at will. A truly dedicated assassin could likely have his head on a plate before it started missing his neck. And what if they sent the Scythe instead? Well, in that case his odds of survival might be higher, but the cost of surviving might not be one he’d want to pay.
He needed time to reconsider the path his life had taken, plan his next course of action, and stay off the radar of anyone who might be trying to find him. While his mind had lingered over the idea of confronting his former allies or being confronted by his father, it did not erase the possibility that actual enemies would strike at him. He’d just enraged a displaced dreadlord after announcing his name to a valley full of his fanatical cultists. And he’d been approached once by an Infinite Dragon who was circumventing the attention of the Bronze Dragonflight by coming after him for his axe now rather than at the moment when it would be relevant to the course of history. How long before she approached again? How long before she approached with violence instead?
Hm.
His only option was to lay low. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the contacts or skills to know how. The best he could think was to go where no one would try to look for him. This, naturally, made Pandaria-
There was the sound of a footfall behind him.
He didn’t move at first. Whatever it was had the drop on him. If they meant him harm they would likely be able to strike faster than he could turn around. From his location, it wouldn’t even take a weapon. A strong push would send him tumbling against the jagged rocks of the Blade’s Edge, and if he didn’t become wedged somewhere where he could be dealt with at his assailant’s leisure, he would fall into the Twisting Nether.
“Hm.” He remarked after a long moment without a murderous shove. “If you’re not here to kill me, you probably want to speak with me.” He thought for a moment. “That seems to happen to me quite frequently. Am I easy to sneak up on, or am I just the sort of person who attracts the attention of stealthy individuals?” Another long moment passed with no response. “Perhaps I’m just speaking to myself.” After another silent moment, a rhythmic tapping began behind him. He dared to move, his first motion to brace his feet for a push or strike, but when nothing came, he turned around.
It seemed somewhat obvious, after the fact, that Teliise would not want to approach close enough to startle him, but would be more or less unable to communicate her presence. She was patiently tapping her foot. An eyebrow arched slowly. A question.
“I was just considering my next move.” A silent moment passed. Teliise waved her hand slightly, urging him to continue. “I think I need to lay low for a while. Spend some time thinking where I won’t be interrupted by cultists, assassins, or priests.”
Teliise tilted her head slightly and pulled out a small journal. She wrote something quickly and then turned the page. Her eyes darted up, squinting at him before scribbling something on the other side of the same page. She flipped the page back and held up the first thing she’d written.
“Where will you hide?”
“Hm. Pandaria, I suppose. It’s the last place anyone would think to look for me.”
She rolled her eyes so hard it was almost audible. She shifted her grip on the book and the page fell, revealing the second thing she’d written.
“Pandaria is the first place they’ll look for you.”
Hirrus blinked a few times. Teliise started writing again as he recovered from the surprise. She stepped closer so that he could read the smaller writing.
“Anyone who knows you will know you hate Pandaria, and that you’ll think no one would expect you to go there willingly. Anyone who doesn’t will only know that the last place you were before you came here was a monastery there.”
“Hm.” He furrowed his brow. “That is… A good point. I’m not sure if I trust my judgement on a second guess, then. Where would you suggest?”
She smiled as she returned to writing. Hirrus waited patiently for her to finish. He briefly considered getting a pad and pen of his own for the occasions where his garbled speech made him difficult to understand.
“Anyone searching for you who knows you will think you are not clever enough to hide in plain sight. They will scour the ends of the earth to find you before they look in your own backyard. Anyone searching for you who has only intelligence reports to work from will begin their search with every location where you have been previously sent or stationed. They would turn Northrend inside out before even glancing at a major city you’ve never stayed the night in.”
Hirrus nodded, waiting as she flipped the page and began writing again as she developed her self-satisfied smirk.
“A major city where you, as a Forsaken, can blend in. A place no one would think of when thinking of you. Inhabited by a race of people for whom you feel contempt, but never outright anger. A place you’ve never been in for longer than the ride through. A city of bright lights and colors, right in your own backyard. A city where you know someone looking for a sparring partner she can trust to be discreet.”
She smiled as she scribbled the name at the bottom of the page.
“Silvermoon.”