The Wildfire Riders – Tarquin by *JRinaldi on deviantART

Once or twice a day, WTT:RP gets a hit with the following key words, “Tarquin, Wildfire Riders, Feathermoon.” Tarquin is the Thief-in-Chief of the Wildfire Riders. He’s a conman, a bloke with a sharp knife and a witty bastard. While Tarquin’s main ICly posts occur later, Tarquin’s player wrote most of the Wrathgate posts that anchored the Wildfire Riders Wrathgate Writing. In this post, Tarquin paints the picture of the Riders camp and how the guild’s reputation was perceived–and challenged.

Also: There will be no Wrathgate Wednesday next week. We’ll be showing off some entries from our Midsummer Writing Contest

Even in Northrend, the moons looked down. It was a source of some comfort to the Seventh Legion, to the lords and captains who had led them there, and to the stragglers and mercenaries that had answered the raising of their banners. Here at the end of the world, in a white waste checkered with the corpses of beasts whose names had been forgotten before ever men took up iron, the White Lady and the Blue Child looked down from a hard, bright sky and reminded them of the permanence of their world.

It was, perhaps, all they had.

The ten soldiers puffing their along a winding track between hills likely took some comfort from that, and as well from the routine irritation of their task. Delivering three ballistae, in the black of evening, to the encampment of a company their own leader had referred to as “criminal scum” was something they could piss and moan about, as soldiers did, and so keep a loose grasp on the lives they’d sworn into. The Commander did not rebuke them, lost in his own bitter thoughts. He’d always thought too much for a good soldier, the men knew. Even for an officer.

Around and around they went, weaving a path through the scattered camps of the hundred small companies who had answered Lord Bolvar’s call to join the great battle of their time, past banner after banner until they reached the high hill that would be marked, to those with the eyes to see it in the dark of night, by two flags – black and red, white and gold, with the same slogan scrawled across each. The blessed moons did not provide enough light for that, but Fyodor Galliwick found them all the same.

They were challenged as they approached, by a smoke-screened Kaldorei whose amused smile smacked of the sort of humor that animated cats pawing at the squeaking of terrified rodents. He waved them on with a few words, louging back into a nesting coccoon of blankets that did not quite conceal the metal-spitting dwarven construction at his side. The path had been cleared by a hundred feet, hooves, claws, and perhaps stranger things – the makeshift stable, hurriedly thrown up around the shelter of an overhanging shelf, could have belonged to a circus. And so, too, thought Galliwick, the performers.

There was music – the sharp howl of a fiddle, the insistent thrumming of lute and guitar, the wail of high north pipes. The men of Stormwind trod on, their familiar complaints dying to be replaced by a real and surly anger. They met the looks of the mercenaries with cold black walls, and privately wondered at how such a freak-show could function. A horribly maimed elfwoman thrumming with sullen rage, a flint-faced old knight with a welter of scar on his neck, a red-haired man with snow flecking the shoulders of his rich robes taking time from his furious argument with someone inside a tent to sneer at their passage. These were fighters?

In the lee of the wind was their great fire, and around it was the source of the music; maybe twenty of the Wildfire Riders, warmed by soup and wine and merriment, smiling as if the world had blessed them to be here this day, while a blond-haired woman’s lovely voice carried over the sparse collection of instruments -

With blood as old as Stromgarde’s stones,
Would you let this lord of bones
Claim our white walls for his home?
Ride out and teach him manners!

And they sang back, in voices as thick as Darrowmere fog and bright as Elwynn sun; as deep as the bones of Grim Batol and as clear as the air atop the summit of Mount Hyjal, and soon the soldiers came to realize what sort of fighters had come to Fordragon’s call under the twin banners.

Curse and swear, Rivendare
The North will do whate’er we dare
Now Thuzadim, have a care
Crawl into your rat-holes
With blade and spell and all our might
On we’ll go for by the Light
Fordring’s called us to the fight
Follow me up to Stratholme!

It was an old song, given new words and new life by some clever bard in the advent of the Argent Dawn’s new Crusade, and some of them had heard it before. But these voices, in this time, laid bare the facts of their erstwhile allies. Everything the Wildfire Riders had, they had seized, with the instinctual avarice of predators – and like predators, they would rend the world about them bare to defend what was theirs. And they would laugh while they did it, and revel in every moment that they had with the fruits of their labors.

It crossed the minds, then, of a few of the Seventh Legion’s loyal lads, that in the right light – the light of two moons in a friendless sky, and a campfire at the ends of the earth – some of them looked like soldiers. Maybe even like heroes.

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