The human turned, looking past her enchanted floating quill, Quilliam, who darted out of the way. She didn’t see anyone speaking to her, merely the cartoonish, almost mocking face of the lion crest of the Alliance staring back at her from the surface of a floating balloon. Beyond that was the undisturbed din of the Stormwind dockside. Beneath the balloon, however, and tethered to it was her boss, the gnome Tigoll M. Biddies, looking particularly stern. His normal face was intense, as he never seemed to take a moment off, but with the glowing flames of avarice providing something resembling light. Today he was different. Today he was cold and emotionless. His garb was different, too. Atop his normal cloth, and the leathers he wore in potential danger, he'd crudely strapped steel pauldrons and thigh guards.
"President Biddies! To what do--"
Verdy paused. Tigoll was always a sight, but the crowd that assembled around him a moment later was an exceptionally motley bunch as well. She recognized one of them as Sellanth, a void elf. He... wasn't all there. Not mentally, mind you. He was just translucent at the moment, a somewhat blurry void elf shape garbed in leathers, a high collar around his face, concealing features further. Echoes of shadow seemed to wash or lap at him, and occasionally a body part would 'surface' - an arm visibly whole here, a leg there. His head brightened, and something must have 'snapped' into reality as suddenly his hair was affected by the strong wind near the harbor, blowing about for a moment. When his face faded toward darkness again, the hair froze, the wind ceasing, and slowly sank back into place. When the void elves had come out of the Nether, Sellanth seemed not to have come the whole way. It didn't seem to cause him pain, and it made him VERY good at sneaking, which made him Tigoll's favorite scout.
The dwarf flanking Tigoll on the other side she didn’t recognize. He wore a bushy silver beard that was bound near his belt, draped over some fairly plain orange chainmail. A warhammer hung at his side and a shield clung to his back, but the hammer didn’t seem very dented. Verdy suspected it wasn't truly his weapon of choice. However, his eyes seemed to hide no wizard’s flame, and were in fact clouded slightly, the light haze of age over icy blue which Verdy knew not to point out - dwarves plus age comments typically meant broken jaws or blackened eyes when not couched very, very shrewdly.
The third companion was lurking behind the others, body language seeming to indicate a certain ashamedness for the group. He wore a spiked leather helm that covered most of his face, but Verdy would recognize Cottius Llewellyn anywhere, and often did even when he wore an animal shape. He’d been a companion ever since she’d first met Tigoll and started her affiliation with Moonglow, Inc, as he was the only one that could be claimed a peer in her field of agriculture and the use of magic therein. Sometimes friend, sometimes nemesis, sometimes scolding father figure she didn’t need, working with Cottius was like having been adopted by a local widower barfly and having something resembling wisdom spat at you whether you needed it or not.
She didn’t have an inclination to trade verbal barbs with him today, though. The circles beneath the man’s eyes looked like they’d sunken to... wherever the rest of Sellanth was. Heavy pauldrons of leather and bone seemed to press down upon his shoulders, and his staff was sloppily stowed upon his back. He’d clearly been sleeping as little as Tigoll typically did, but with far more deleterious effects. The Gilnean had been having what he merely brushed off as “a rough go of it” ever since the Horde attacked Ashenvale and pressed on toward Darnassus. She knew he’d been there, he’d insisted she make a portal and go look herself.
She wasn’t ready to mentally settle up with those sights. Not yet. She’d had a hard enough time hearing tales from the refugees as they streamed into Stormwind. She’d been there, holding open portals with other members of the Kirin Tor as terrified and soot-streaked night elves and Gilneans ran, crawled, and fell through the exit from Darnassus. She’d helped them through, helped conjure them food and water, and a good dozen were now boarding at her family’s farm in Elwynn in spare rooms and haylofts. Those things she’d had to deal with directly were tragic enough, and she’d shoved the sights of northwestern Kalimdor into the back of her mind, to unlock and sort through another day.
Cottius, though, had brandished that tragedy and its horrors against her like a drunk swinging a half-full stein. It was not escalation to respond. Escalation was burning a world tree. Response was justice and defense, not vengeance. And Verdy, the farmgirl turned mage who Cottius was convinced had never worked a day in her life, was no fighter, a fact he lamented aloud whenever he saw her. He sandwiched it in compliments - you’re too good a mage to spend a time like this examining dirt, he’d said. The Alliance and its soldiers, like her brother and father had once been, needed her. It was war, a real total war this time. The writing was on the wall, he'd concluded.
How would he know what was written on the wall, she’d asked. She was growing convinced Cottius was illiterate.
The wonderful look of indignance on his face at that remark had become a memory she'd always treasure. Today, though, his countenance was much darker. He was silently watching Verdy.
“Are you listening, Miss Taylor?” Tigoll’s voice continued. “Do you have a portal rune for Capital City?”
Verdy blinked. “What? No, I don’t-- why would I have one for the Undercity? If you wanted to go to the battle, you should have been here on time when the ships left.” Several of her co-workers in Moonglow had been, as had countless others she knew. She hoped they'd all return.
Tigoll’s gaze sharpened. “The ships left long before the battle. I do not have time to spend rolling on waves, Miss Taylor. I was gathering more allies, as you now see arrayed before you.”
Verdy took a moment to look at each of them again for what seemed like a proper comedic beat. The elf didn't seem thrilled to be there and was barely a fighter. The dwarf held himself confidently, but would have peripheral vision issues at the very, very least. Cottius... Cottius needed a real night’s sleep.
“I’m afraid I don’t have any portals to Lordaeron in my repertoire. I’m sorry, sir.”
Sellanth smirked like a teenager proven right, or at least relieved he wasn’t carted off to war. The dwarf slumped with what seemed like genuine patriotic guilt. Cottius had no reaction. Verdy knew he was a dreamwalk away from the Hinterlands and a shorter flight west to Lordaeron. He’d arrive sooner or later, still tired and grimly determined.
“Fine. Dalaran,” Tigoll said.
Verdy snorted. “Dalaran? It’s still parked over Suramar. I think that’s a longer trip than from here.”
Tigoll shook his head. He even did that energetically. She felt fairly certain the gnome could run circles around her even when she was still abusing mana crystals.
“Not Dalaran, Dalaran,” he said. Light, he was always doing that. This time, however, he followed up. “The lands of Dalaran, not the poorly engineered floating airbase that pompous humans and dragons have thrown together.”
Verdy blinked at this. “Oh, the crater,” she said. She decided to ignore the backhanded Dalaran comments. “I suppose I could manage that, but even so, that’s all the way across Lake Lordamere!”
At this, the dwarf smiled, and something was different. The eyes were still blue, still just a bit foggy - clear enough to have a conversation, but perhaps too foggy to trust memory at first blush. The laugh lines, though, that framed those eyes and their heavy lids weren’t typical wrinkles, Verdy noticed. They were forked like thunderbolts.
“Lake Lordamere,” the dwarf said, “will prob’ly praise those that cleanse the land and heal its poisons. I think she’ll bear us gladly.”
Something changed the moment after he spoke. The dwarf wasn’t suddenly intimidating to her or anything; Verdy had been around too many wizards, magi, priests, and very close to several paladins, so the mere presence of a spellcaster was never a revelation of shock or terror. Even when she had seen demonologists in fishing overalls, beggars revealed as anchorites, that didn't feel like this did. This seemed different. She suddenly felt crowded, like she was being watched, and some primal part of her far beyond her rational mind knew the dwarf was responsible.
“Splendid. Fire away, Miss Taylor,” Tigoll said.
The entire situation seemed like unorthodox madness, but that was typically par for the course when Tigoll Biddies was involved. She took a deep breath, lifted her arms, and began the conjuring. Before long the swiftly rotating ring bearing a scene of the Alterac mountains appeared. Tigoll had evidently fetched his mechanostrider, Connie, while she was working, and it strode forward. It.. it couldn’t be sniffing her, could it? It wasn’t a real bird! But it seemed to sort of peck toward Verdy curiously. She could read nothing in its faintly glowing red diode eyes.
“For the Alliance! For Kalimdor! For Gilneas! For Azeroth!” Tigoll cried, marching his steed through the portal, his final cries fading out as he vanished into the north. Sellanth was next, a shadowy avian form having seemingly just materialized beneath him. It flapped its wings, rising through a gentle spiral in the air, then swooping down directly through the portal. It had resembled a phoenix that had been pulled out of a vat of blue ink. The dwarf followed next, giving Verdy a very proper and respectful bow as he passed. A moment after he’d passed through, her hackles fell and the odd sense of stage fright lifted from her shoulders.
Cottius was last. He locked eyes with her as he walked forward, almost seeming to brandish the bags under his eyes in her direction. She knew how he felt, and he needed not use words. He wished she was coming along. She was too good a mage to study dirt at a time like this, remember? Never mind that she’d never been a combat mage, had no knowledge of war, no physical conditioning, no history with military discipline or terminology, no unarmed combat training, no combat magic--
It didn’t matter. She knew that fair or unfair, right or wrong, valid justification or lame excuse, he wasn’t interested in the reasons. The War of Thorns had come rather out of nowhere, and the response in Lordaeron was intentionally swift, and he’d hold it against her regardless of whether it would take time travel to suddenly be a fighter. As far as he was concerned, she’d been the one that missed the boat, even though those four had been the literal ones to do so.
Verdy’s mind wandered back and forth on things to say. Something too flippant would likely anger him for her lack of seriousness. At the same time, she feared that something too serious would seem too formal, too distant or dismissive. She opened her mouth, settling on what she'd wanted to say, but Cottius didn't break his stride and silently trod through the portal before she could do more than take a breath.
With that, the crowd around her at the dockside was emptied. Verdy could see nothing clearly through the magic pathway, but had a fanciful image in her mind - Tigoll, astride Connie, eyes fixed on Lordaeron’s capital city. Sellanth atop his shadowy dark phoenix, gliding just above the water. The mystery dwarf clinging to an exhausted stag’s mane, Cottius relentlessly galloping north. The whole crew splashing up only a few drops as elemental magic kept them on the surface of Lake Lordamere, a quartet of unexpected fighters racing toward destiny. She suppressed a chuckle. The entire thing was a farce, and Verdy was raised to be more responsible than that with her body and her magic.
And yet she recalled the looks on their faces, as she’d seen on the faces of all those she knew that had boarded the ships bound for Tirisfal. The stoic neutral faces, the kingdom and Alliance pride, the resolve that powered past lack of rest. The sense and knowledge that just standing next to someone would reassure them, comfort them, as they stared death in the face in more ways than one - that no fear need be admitted, though it was understood to be universal and nothing to be ashamed of, but merely a gap in one’s courage that camaraderie was ready to fill. She felt the sweeping romantic appeal and attractiveness in the thought of going to Lordaeron for this showdown, a sense of missing out on a notable moment in Azeroth history. But Verdy wasn’t a fighter, and wasn’t a soldier, and didn’t belong there. She was sure of those things, wasn’t she? That even with so many that she cared about in danger, she was not in a position to help them. Right? Yes. She was sure she had made the correct and responsible choice. That wavering surety, and her floating pen, Quilliam, were all that were left beside her at the harbor when the portal finally fizzled and faded out.
It was their connection to one another through the ley lines of Azeroth that gave them strength, clarity, and a bond that lifted each other up through the darkest of days.
Runemaster Sabrod Lamora and Ley Walker Verdy Taylor practicing combat stances and meditation.
Artist: Deti
Verdy Taylor stands in the waiting parlor of one of the many classrooms found in the Violet Citadel and she can hardly breathe. It wasn’t the formal robes with their heavy shoulders and ridiculous gold fringe. It wasn’t the perfume that hung in the air from the last person that was waiting for their turn to speak. It wasn’t anything but her own nerves. Damn them to hell.
She stands in front of a full body mirror, looking for any imperfections but finding none. Nails cleaned. Dirt washed off her face. Boots replaced with dress shoes. Her auburn hair was clean and styled, the flairs at the ends intentionally there. She barely recognized herself as she smooths out her starchy robes.
Never in her twenty-six years of living did Verdy think she would ever get this far. A farm girl, the first of her family to study any type of magic, a girl who grew up tending to chickens and pulling weeds and having to catch rides from local families heading to Stormwind so she could get to classes. A girl who had to borrow so much gold to move to Dalaran that she thought she would die before she ever paid it back. She was a simple girl who grew up with headaches from the magic around her and now she couldn’t imagine life without those shimmers of purples and blues. It was a part of Verdy Taylor. A part she could never deny.
Walking into the room, Verdy Taylor feels lightheaded. This is it. Oh Light, don’t throw up, Verdy. This is her life's work, spread out on a table. Pots of flowers and vegetables organized neatly next to several tomes. Maps hang on boards behind her, lines of blues and purples shimmering and flickering as they travel across the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. Is this all of it? She swears she brought more. No, no, this is all. Right? No. Yes! Her mind is racing nearly as fast as her heart. The crowd is larger than she expected. She barely has time to register that information as her gaze passes over several archmages sitting in the forefront.
Past the Council of Six she saw comfort; Her mother and father sit upfront, wearing the nicest clothing that they had which paled in comparison to even the most destitute citizens of Dalaran. Wrinkled, tan faces smiled with pride as they catch their daughter’s eye. Beyond them, scattered amongst the other mages that came to listen to the “dirt mage”, Verdy sees her friends. A one eyed man covered in scars. A bright faced Lightforged who looked out of place but her smile is genuine and curious. A young human mage with dyed white hair who is chit chatting to a man with runic tattoos scattered across his arms. A worgen sits next to a badly dressed male with bright red hair. They poke fun at the mage, laughing at his clashing outfit. A gnome speaks animatedly to a man who would appears to be must more interested in jumping off a cliff than listening to his boss. Even more friends and coworkers sitting together, supporting her with smiles.
A tall and well toned man sneaks in as she’s looking over her materials. His casual clothing a harsh contract to broadsword on his back. He beamed his perfect teeth and beamed the Light, giving her a small wave. Verdy waves back with her fingers and says a little prayer as the room grows quiet.
Light, give me the strength--
“Verdy Taylor,” Archmage Khadgar has risen from his seat, giving a bow towards her, “You’re here today to present your thesis,” The greying man peers at the paper and snorts back a laugh. “The Arcanist’s Almanac: Leying the Groundwork for Better Crops.” A hint of amusement lingers on his words and Verdy suddenly feels a bolster of confidence. Thank the Light for his love of puns.
This was it. The moment of truth. Over ten years of work had gone into this moment. Ten years of digging in the dirt, collecting samples, honing her skills. A decade of of getting stronger, getting smarter, getting ridiculed by her fellow mages. It had all lead up to this moment.
“This is correct, Archmage.” Her rural accent is gone, replaced with a much more neutral and obviously practiced tone. “I come before the esteemed Council of Six and a selection of my peers to present my findings on the innate magical properties found in the soil of Azeroth. I will describe how they reflect the power of the leylines, and how magi can use such knowledge to help further crop growth and development.” Her words flow from her lips with confidence. Ten years have lead up to this moment and she wasn’t going to let this slip by her.
“Very well, Miss Taylor. Begin when you are ready.” The Archmage sits down slowly, far too slow for Verdy’s lack of patience. A flick of his wrist brings several enchanted quills out; Where they were hidden Verdy will never know. They wait for her to begin speaking. She clears her throat.
Show time.
She points to places on her maps. She hands vials of dirt to members of the Council, ensuring she smiles brightly to each person. She shows off the magic that is part of her, wrists glowing under her robes as she pulls the magic from various pots, redirecting those sparks to another one close by. Mutters of approval from the gathered guests spur her further, confidence rising with each passing moment. She doesn’t notice that her practiced voice has pretty much dissolved, her rural accent growing with strength.
Nearly two hours pass before she leaves the classroom and walks back into the waiting parlor. She flops down on a chair and before she can even remove the heavy pauldrons, the doors fling open. Friends and family sneak in, offering words of praise. Hugs and handshakes are exchanged as Verdy does her best to hide the pure adrenaline surging through her. A scratchy cheek nuzzles against her forehead and strong arms hand graze her waist in a quiet moment that she hopes no one and everyone notices. Tiny tokens of congratulations in the form of flowers and trinkets are offered and she accepts each one with a smile. Each time she turns around, she has to find some way to wipe at her eyes. Once the greetings and well wishes are winding down, someone offers drinks to celebrate the moment. The room clears out rather suddenly as Verdy stands there, smiling like a fool. Her parents stay, however.
She says nothing to them as she tosses off her pauldrons and wraps her arms around them, pulling them close, rubbing her face into her father’s shoulder. The adrenaline of the day finally causes her to collapse in their strong and supportive arms, a flood of emotions overtaking her. Tears spill from her eyes.
“You did it, Verdy,” her father whispers just loud enough for her to barely hear over her own sobs. The three embrace one another in a tender moment, foreheads touching foreheads, a happy family Verdy owes everything to.
Verdy is an average, if not thinner and taller than average, human gal, with hair that isn’t so much styled as it is a mess that seems to flare out at the ends. She has a small gap between her two front teeth, which aren’t exactly straight to begin with. She speaks with a slight rural accent that seems to get more pronounced when she gets excited.
Her lanky, nearly curveless frame sports a rather noticeable farmer’s tan and her hands are rough, callous, and generally filthy. Her jagged and uneven fingernails have a good amount of dirt gunked under them. Her robes are cared for, but are usually covered in a thin layer of dirt. The bottom hemming is torn and covered in dry mud and the same can be said about the heavy leather boots she wears. Perhaps the faintly glowing trowel on her hip has something to do with all that dirt.
A messenger bag is normally slung across her body. Sigils and runes are stitched into the canvas bag that is usually overflowing with papers, herbs, rocks, and tomes. Magical parchment swirls around her left wrist up to her forearm, the words constantly changing as they move about. Scrolls are clipped to her belt; upon close inspection they appear to be maps of Azeroth with dozens of tiny blue lines.
Art by https://artistsnclients.com/people/Sheisketch https://artistsnclients.com/people/AntonellaLetra, @humanmalepaladinfromlordaeron @catoncoals,@artofdel @rashkah
