He wiped at the remnants of ale on his lips, finishing the one and only drink he would allow himself, and felt the guilt swell again. The door banged open near him, a trio of young soldiers rushing in, bringing with them a blast of fresh air. They had already hit some other pub, clearly, weaving into the tavern with their arms locked, all of them fresh-faced as Goldshire dairy maids, not a whisker or scar between them. The one closest to him had a thatch of shiny red hair and a lopsided nose, the middle one was tallest, a young woman with hooped blonde braids framing her ears. The third was another young man, the shortest of the trio, though he had the stocky frame of a seasoned farm boy. They were in the middle of a song, though their many ales had muddled the words.
Before Anduin could glance away, he saw all three of them whirl in his direction. He ducked down, but too late.
“Aha! Another stalwart recruit,” the redhead hiccuped. “Join us in a song, brother.”
“Plenty of room at your table,” the young woman added, dropping into the seat across from him. Anduin went rigid with alarm, tugging nervously at the edge of his hood and keeping his eyes low.
“I…I prefer to drink alone,” Anduin murmured.
“Nonsense, friend!” The stocky one clapped him hard on the shoulder and then fell down next to him, landing on the bench and making it sag. “Another round, Amalia, for the nervous one here! We’ll have him singin’ and dancin’ in no time!”
“You’re here to be a soldier, are you not?” the young woman asked. “To enlist? I can spot a fighter at twenty paces!”
“She can, she can,” the redhead giggled.
“Chin up, brother,” the boy beside him said with a nudge. “There’s ale to be had and glory to savor. Glory in the name of our king! My father died fighting for us, died holding the line against N’Zoth’s fiends in Orsis, in the shadow of a great…a great, um, temple. I think. Or oblerisk. And I vowed to take up his sword and carry it myself.”
The words came out deeply slurred, but Anduin untangled them with a wince. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure your father was a brave man.”
Amalia returned, setting down four fresh tankards. The redhead gulped his in one. “The field of battle…That’s…” He lost his train of thought briefly. “That’s where I belong. Where we all belong. Shnampins all!”
“Champions, you drunk halfwit,” the girl giggled. She noticed Anduin wasn’t drinking. “Don’t fret, stranger. You look healthy enough, I’m sure you’ll have a long and storied career.”
“Surely.” Anduin sighed, taking up his tankard to evade further suspicion. They lapsed into song, forgetting all about their new “friend.” But Anduin wouldn’t soon forget them. He looked at each of their faces in turn, memorizing them, wondering how long it would take until they too turned up on a freezing slab beneath the Cathedral of Light, innocent lambs before the slaughter.
Soldiers. His soldiers. And he would command them, and tell them to fight, for that was a king’s right and duty. They wanted glory, hungered for it, but did not know what it was or what it cost. Anduin opened his mouth to warn them, to tell them to be serious, to really think hard before they took the blue and gold, but a fiddler started up near the counter, and his new friends scattered, taking their drinks and leaving behind only puddles of ale.
The drink in his stomach began to sour. He needed to leave before he felt well and truly ill. And more, he felt eyes boring into him. Real ones, this time, not just the thousand pairs of dead and haunting eyes that seemed to follow him, accusingly, everywhere he went.
Anduin searched the bar, eyes rolling over a dozen unfamiliar faces, until at last he noticed the clean, white-robed woman in the corner near the stairs, her face in view of everyone, her white brows drawn down in confusion, her lips slightly parted around what he could only assume was a curse.
Jaina.
Her eyes flared wide. Anduin slapped another coin down on the table and shoved himself out of the chair, around the corner, and out the door, gasping as if struck when the warm, body-damp air shifted from hot to cold.
More cold was soon to follow. Anduin looped around to the back of the inn, forgetting it was soggy and marshy there and grunting as his boots were nearly sucked off his feet. The ground beneath him grew suddenly slick and hard, and his arms pinwheeled as he managed to catch himself just before the humiliating fall.
“Hello, Jerek.”
“I can explain—”
“You’re the king, you do not have to explain.” Jaina’s voice dropped to a steely whisper, and she took him by the arm, spinning him away from the ice she had shimmered across the ground. They stood together huddled under the narrow overhang of the roof, crickets and frogs blissfully unaware of who had just interrupted their song.
“What did you do to your hair?” She drew back, laughing.
“Boot polish,” he muttered, pulling the hood down hard and avoiding her gaze. “And I suppose Jerek is a very stupid name.”
“No, I think it’s great. Really suits you.” Jaina had the grace to cover her next guffaw with her fingertips. “It’s all right, Anduin. Your secret is safe with me.”
His eyes blew wide. “Jaina…Listen, I know we quarreled. I know we don’t always see eye to eye but…but surely you can understand.” Sighing, he leaned back against the inn. “Sometimes I need this. Sometimes I need to be a boy again. I think about all the soldiers giving their life to serve the Alliance, and I think: How? How can they be so young? Those three brave souls inside, they think they’re ready to die. Ready to die for me. It isn’t fair. It…it should make everything stop. The whole world should stop and point at that, but it doesn’t. Everything just rolls on, the world forgets, and I have to pretend like their sacrifice isn’t a cruel, heartbreaking joke.”
Another coin dropped into his satchel of worries. The last one, the heaviest one. He covered his face with his hands, and felt Jaina touch his wrists lightly, pulling his arms down again. Her eyes were glossy, her mocking smile gone. She ducked her head a little, bringing them face-to-face.
“You’re young, too, Anduin, and if you need Jerek to help you remember that, then yes, I understand.” Jaina let go and took a small step back. “I was here tonight, too, right? Red-handed.”
“At least you can show your face,” Anduin said. “I just…can’t. Part of why I need this is because it means I’m not me for a while. I’m dumb, sloppy, probably a shit-shoveler Jerek.”
Jaina nodded and gestured to the end of the wall, where it gave way to the stables. “I’ll find another doorstep to darken. Go back inside, Jerek. You’ve had a long day.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dazar’alor
They left Zekhan behind in the Zocalo with Talanji’s personal physicians, the priests and shaman who tended to any member of her family or the Zanchuli Council. Bwonsamdi could make his own way to the palace, but Talanji urged her ravasaur, Tze’na, to her greatest speed. The beast took the stairs four at a time, carrying the queen to her chambers with Gonk’s own swiftness.
Night would soon give way to dawn, but Talanji felt no closer to victory. In fact, she only felt closer to death, which meant closer to the Maw. Bwonsamdi had said it cost him dearly to keep troll souls from the Maw, and it cost her dearly just to walk now, every step a chore. Her heavy heart did nothing to ease the pain surging through her body—they had lost too many trying to protect the final shrines. Dark rangers had helped lay the traps that defeated her warriors. And her old, dear friend had been spotted among the Widow’s Bite. No, not just among them, leading them.
“We saw a witch with the rebels,” one of the surviving Rastari guards reported while the healers covered poor, burned Zekhan in salve. “She was misshapen with injury and wore strange garb, but I have seen her face in the palace countless times before, my queen. It was Apari, I would know the look of her anywhere.”
Apari.
Talanji reached her chambers and decreed to the guards she would be taking no visitors. One would arrive, of course, but he did not need a door.
While she waited for Bwonsamdi to appear Talanji drifted to the bed, wishing she could simply sleep and dream and try to forget the horrors that seemed to multiply by the hour. Once, she considered Sylvanas an ally, and now the Banshee Queen’s forces emboldened rebels trying to tear down Talanji’s rule. That stung, but Apari’s betrayal…Talanji sighed, sitting heavily on the mattress and removing her crown. She rubbed at her aching forehead with both hands.
As girls they had been a couple of pests, running wild in the halls of the Great Seal, causing trouble wherever and whenever they wanted. They had perfect immunity, Talanji’s princess status granting them more power than any child should have. They played pranks in the gardens, splashed in the pools, stayed up late every night, and lay on their backs staring up at the stars, spinning prophecies for each other. When they were grown, Apari’s loyalty never wavered, though she had every right to be jealous of Talanji’s status and riches.
“Even Yazma,” Talanji murmured. “Even after all of that…”
Apari’s mother—high priestess of the loa Shadra, the crown’s own spymistress—had fomented rebellion, too, conspiring with Zul to overthrow Rastakhan and end his line. But Apari stood by Talanji. She disowned her own mother and chose the crown’s side. So what changed? What drove her to this?
Her last image of Apari was one of paralyzing pain. It was the day King Rastakhan died at the hands of the Alliance. Gnomish siege weapons assaulted the Great Seal, walls crumbling, ceilings caving in…Reports had come that her father was facing the Alliance himself, hopelessly outnumbered, and Talanji had raced to aid him, pelting through the halls, dodging debris and danger as she tried to save her father.
That was when she last saw Apari. Her friend had been pinned under a fallen pillar, blood trailing from her lips, her eyes bugging from her skull as she strained to push the stones off her lower body. Her mouth seemed to move on its own, as if in prayer. Her voice was hoarse as her weak gaze found Talanji.
“Help me, Tali! Help! I…I can’t move!”
Talanji had only paused for a moment, weighing impossible scales. Her best friend or her father. I am a princess, she had thought. My first duty is to my family and to our rule.
She left Apari there, choosing Rastakhan.
“I will send someone for you, Apari!” Talanji had shouted as she ran. “Hold on!”
Then the memory collapsed, time distorted, the experience of finding her father’s nearly lifeless body corrupting what came before and after. She remembered screaming and pointing at a royal guard at one point, but had it been for Apari? Had she forgotten, in all the chaos, to help her dying friend?
“I’ve failed so many,” she whispered.
“Ah, but my queen, there is still time to protect me and ya kingdom.”
Bwonsamdi. Talanji lifted her head slowly, finding him there by the door, all but a ghost, the golden columns behind him perfectly visible. Just raising her head took monumental strength, as if her skull were now made of lead. Her neck ached, her back splintered in agony in four places. His power was fading. Fading, because she had rashly sent her troops to defend the shrines without a plan.
And now her power faded, too, her life intertwined with his by no wish or action of her own. It would take too much energy to hate him.
“Please,” she murmured. “I am…I feel so lost. Please let me see my father. He would know what to do. I promised to protect you, but I…I cannot do it alone. Summon his spirit, Bwonsamdi.”
He floated closer, a grim frown etched across his face, and Talanji dreaded his refusal. Shuffling to the balcony, she beheld her crumbling kingdom. Would Thrall even return? Perhaps if word reached him that his ambassador had nearly been killed in the shrine assault, he would reconsider his offer to bring support. If that was so, they were truly lost. She gripped the railing, digging her nails into the soft gold. The nail on her middle finger cracked, blood oozing through the gap.
And of course, Bwonsamdi followed, lingering behind her, emitting his bleak aura of decay.
“Ya need to find ya own strength,” he rasped, his voice as weak as his image. “Ya own way.”
“The Zandalari way?” Talanji scoffed. “It failed. I failed.”
Like I failed my father. Like I failed Apari and Zekhan…
“It might sound strange comin’ from the loa of graves, but there is always hope, ya majesty.” Bwonsamdi joined her, his eyes glowing faintly behind his bone mask. “Death brings life. The great wheel turns, slowly, yes, over eons, but it turns. Bodies decay and new life springs from it, all things that seem eternal end, then rise to find new purpose…”
Talanji gazed up at him, her heart beating faster. “Then my father—”
“Sh-hh. Ya not listening, child. Ya only hearin’ what you want to. There is a harmony to things. A way and a flow. Ancient ones, spirits, loa…In time, we, too, must embrace the end, the long, deep slumber. And without us? Eh, our followers find strength in other things, in themselves, or new beliefs. They grieve, they grow—just like you. And when the veil of dreaming lifts, the eternal and great beings climb on the wheel once more, bound to it, and slowly, ever so slowly, the wheel spins.” He paused, waiting until she locked eyes with him. “In that way, the ancient and powerful things of this world are eternal, ya majesty.”
“Zandalar,” she breathed. The fires burned in the jungle. Smoke rose above the trees. Out there, hidden in the shadows, the dark rangers and Apari with her Widow’s Bite fanatics plotted their next move. “It is not lost.”
It is never lost.
The loa nodded, his frown at last dissolving into a familiar smirk. “I am weak, but not gone. They will try to take the Necropolis now, my place of power. Stop them there, and I will help ya rebuild this land.”
“But I cannot do it alone,” Talanji whispered, frail. How she wished she could speak to her father, just for a moment. But Rastakhan himself had failed many times, his complacency and neglect bringing about the darkest times of their rule. It brought her no joy to think ill of her father, and so instead she chose to think better of something else.
The ancient and powerful things of this world are eternal.
And so was hope.
“The Horde will come,” Talanji murmured, turning away from Bwonsamdi to survey her lands. They burned, they struggled, and she would worry every moment until they were safe, but they were hers. A queen’s to protect. A queen’s to honor.
“Once,” she said softly, “I left my home, desperate to save this place. I risked my pride and my life, but I turned to the Horde and they answered my call. They did not let Zandalar stand alone. Tonight, the Horde ambassador did not let my people stand alone; he nearly gave his life to save our children. I have to risk my pride and my life once more, I have to believe the Horde will stand with us again, to fight this darkness, to raise a light together and banish the shadows from Zuldazar forever.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nazmir
“Did you have your fun?”
Sira Moonwarden pushed off from the damp, crooked tree trunk and snorted. Fun? She had lost the meaning of the word when she rose anew in undeath. In the shallow clearing off the road, the Widow’s Bite leader spoke in low tones to her followers. They were in a celebratory mood. The shrines had fallen. More had come to join the Widow’s Bite in the wake of their campaign, their numbers swelling to more than forty trolls and twenty dark rangers. Apari did not have armaments for them all, but the dark rangers provided daggers and bows. Their blades were sharp, their spirit undeniable. All that remained was the final assault on the Necropolis, and then they could finally leave wretched Zandalar for Sylvanas Windrunner’s side, their task complete.
Victory made her bold. She ignored Nathanos.
“Those theatrics with the children,” Nathanos clarified, stepping deliberately in front of her, blocking her path. “I trust it sated your bloodlust for the moment?”
Behind him, a blood-red dawn broke, bathing the Necropolis in a crimson glow. Swarms of flies thick enough to eat a man whole gathered above the quaggy water separating them from the Zo’bal Ruins. The combined dark ranger and Widow’s Bite contingencies avoided the direct road, wary of alerting any remaining Rastari enforcers of their whereabouts.
“I never took you for a man with a weak stomach, Blightcaller.”
Nathanos rolled his eyes, one hand resting on a dagger tucked in his belt, the other fiddling with the feathers of an arrow sticking out from his hip quiver. “You risk galvanizing the Zandalari to greater purpose. Our plans have proceeded nicely because the queen is isolated. Grant her a few orc battalions and our odds change significantly.”
“They have lost,” she replied bluntly. “The storms will cut off any reinforcements by sea, and our traps will slow any soldiers arriving by land.” To punctuate her point, she shrugged and removed her helmet, rotting fragrantly inside the clammy metal dome.
“Hmph.” Nathanos took a few steps toward the dusty path leading to the Zo’bal Ruins. They had already sent scouts ahead; now they waited on a reply.
“Is this not the hell our queen seeks to correct? Is this not the hell she will save us from? Teldrassil burned. Darkshore burned. I assure you far more than two screaming brats were killed.”
“Indeed, Sira, you have made your point. Ah. Here is Visrynn.”
Their forward party returned, Visrynn and Lelyias emerging from the shadows with their hoods drawn up high over their heads. Visrynn’s wrist was held together with a tight bandage. Removing her hood, she pointed back the way they had come. Mist hugged the ground, partially obscuring the mire and the fragments of stone littering the path to the Necropolis. There was only one safe approach—to secure the Zo’bal Ruins and use the passable bridge through the murky water to get at the temple itself. Among the mist, Sira spied what looked like paler wisps, ghosts or spirits, echoes of Bwonsamdi’s followers drawn to his seat of power.
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