Then the Lich King appeared and everything went to hell. This is how the Riders fled the battle of Wrathgate.

Varenna

The Wildfire Riders – Varenna by *JRinaldi on deviantART

Surrounded by the sickly green mists of the Forsaken, The Bloody Prince faltered. Briefly. His legions, from reanimated skeletons to the vargul runecasters, howled with His fury. Even the Vrykul who fought at the line held by the Wildfire Riders screamed and bellowed in sympathy with his pain. Their Lord’s pain only served to fuel their anger. As Arthas disappeared back into his citadel, His discipline, the control he held over the Vrykul broke. The primitive tactics they had shown, the formations they had held fled. There was no finesse in their attack, no graceful sword play to distract and impress opponents. They sang no war songs, but they screamed with His anger. They swung their heavy axes, swords and maces with a single purpose: To shatter those before them.

Varenna Sungale held the line. Both arms burned with fatigue. Her shield arm ached from the swarm of Vrykul that landed blow after blow. Her sword grew heavier with each parry, thrust and riposte. The Light came to her, easing her fatigue. The Light flowed through her sword arm, giving her the speed to not just riposte, but to counter attack. She pushed through the Vyrkul who stood before her, taunting them to close with her. She became a beacon of brilliance, holding the line against the Bloody Prince’s monsters. Down the line, she could hear Jolstraer scream and curse at the the Vyrkul swarming him. Between them, Linedan stood toe to toe with the Vyrkul, exchanging blow for blow. Where Jolstraer screamed, Linedan was silent. His axe spoke volumes.

But the Vyrkul kept coming. One would falter, or die, and two more would fill his fallen comrade’s place. Even those who suffered terrible wounds at the hands of any of the Riders–or Linedan–would claw their way back to the front, ready to die for the Lich King. Fighting them was as pointless as fighting the rising tides.

The three stood, and fought, but the tide of Vrykul was too much. Varenna, Jolstraer and Linedan were islands in a sea of berserking Vrykul. The line broke, and the tide of Vyrkul rushed up the hill. Jolstraer and Linedan rallied, pulling some of the Vyrkul back to fight. Varenna started to call upon the light to do the same when she saw Illithias, axes draw, rushing over the corpses of nerubians, Vyrkul and unlucky irregulars. Varenna saw the young elf leap into the scourge, swinging her axes in the same fashion as the Vyrkul that surrounded her: wildly,with abandon and to die in battle. Varenna looked back towards the hill, watching the vrykul rush towards her friends. She said a quick prayer for them before she called on the Light, and chased after Illithias.

Bricu

The Wildfire Riders – Bricu by *JRinaldi on deviantART

From their spot on the hill, Bricu could see the disaster unfold. The plague mists filled the valley to the north. Worse still, the Vyrkul pushing past the line. It looked like Jolly and the Bull were attempting to rally, but Sunshine was headed into the melee below. Her wonky idea not withstanding, Bricu still had to get enough control of the hill to organize a retreat. He started to bark an order to Beltar and Ulthanon, “Clear the path,” but the he found himself face first in snows. His axe was knocked clear from his hand, spinning into debris of the He had heard the arcane explosions behind him, at the witches tent, as Genise, Darrows and Stonemantle each responded to some an attack, but, for a moment, he thought it came from the Bloody Princes gargolyes. The weight on his back, the impossibly strong hands around his neck, told him otherwise. Geists. Where there was one close, a legion would be nearby. In that instant, Bricu knew they were broken. There could not be an orderly retreat. They would have to abandon their posts and flee. One thought burned brighter than the others: Threnn had to escape.

Cursing under his breath, Bricu called up on the light. The geist, dazed but not defeated, fell to its back. Pushing himself up as fast as he could, Bricu squared himself in front of the scourgling and slammed his gauntlet where the geists nose should be. It crumpled to the ground, but he knew it would not belong before it was crawling after him. He scanned the battlefield, his eyes rested on the ballistae perch. The geists swarmed ever aspect of the field. There were four more geists around him, all dazed. He couldn’t see Tarquin or Balthazar. Steam, smoke and debris launched from the Witches Tent. Threnn was beset by five geists. One was already crumpled at her feet, but neither she nor the bastards had noticed. Threnn swung her sword at each geist, pushing them back with each solid hit, but she was slowing down with each successive swing. The geists did not tire.

Bricu scrambled back to his axe. He shouted, “OI!” as he stood up, calling the giests around Threnn to him. Bricu looked past the all of the geists and watched as Threnn struck the head off a second geist. He held the axe with both hands, and waited for them to rush to him.

He didn’t wait long. The giests lept towards him, landing all around him. Bricu swung out, connecting with one’s chest. He brought his axe down on the head of one that landed in front of him. He pulled his axe up to block the talons of the others, but he was not fast enough to block each and every swipe they made. There was no swordplay here, no delicate parries or ripostes. His axework was functional, life–or undead–ending work. Every word uttered was one part prayer, one part curse, calling upon the light to shield him from their claws, to guide his axe to end their unnatural existence or to keep the giests blood thirsty attention on him. One giest lept at him, trying to land on his back. Bricu stepped quickly to the right, letting the geist land where he was. The gore from its sackcloth covered body stained his tabard. Through the melee, Bricu glimpsed his wife. Threnn was surrounded by a soft golden halo as she was channeling the light into him, healing his wounds as he received then. The Light dimmed only when she took a breath to say another prayer. Bricu kept hacking away at the giests, carving a path back to his wife. The geists pushed back, fighting as a pack. They pushed, pulled, clawed and snapped at Bricu from all directions. One by one, the geists fell. As he spun on the last giest, he watched the Light from Threnn’s prayers burn the giest into cinders. The path cleared, the two ran down the path to the rest of the Riders.

*Some of the last posts will be combined into one big post.

Pill

The moment she saw him, heard him, Pill turned her face away. Most of her gibbered with fear. Whispers and whispers of whispers crowded her. “Don’t look, Elena. Don’t you look.” She hissed to herself as she crept, low to the ground. “You don’t need to see.”

She had left Rashona some place in the snow and bodies. The druidess would be okay, the mage told herself. Rashona was a practical cow, stolid. She wasn’t Raga to turn to booze. She would be okay. Lies! Arguing with herself, she must be crazy.Coward, creeping off, scared.

“Course, I’m scared. You’re scared too!” And crazy. Crazy mage arguing with cowardly little girl. Cowardly little girl that wanted to go hide in a corner. But Pill wasn’t looking for a corner, even as she gave a whimper.

The blood and snow stained everything, would have chilled her skin had she still be alive. The battlefield had grown deathly still, with only HIS demanding, commanding voice to echo over it all. Despite it all, cowardly in her fear, she did not turn to look where she saw all the faces around her looking. She cowered, back to the one who stood outside his horrible gate. Instead she looked at the people who did not see her at all. All of them, eyes wide with horror.

I should be mocking them. Only now seeing what there really is there.

“Oh you hush, Elena. You was scared too. Scared when momma fell asleep, scared more when she woke up.” She passed by rider after rider, transfixed with horror, as they should be. She was scared with them, for them.

We should have looked for him harder in the army. Golden armor, shining ever in the sun, even in the dim sun of plagued lands. Stupid little girl dreams. She didn’t need them any more. She had let him go, let him slip back in with the living, with a blessing. A fond farewell. It was time to let that go. Papa, Jest she corrected herself ever so quickly, could not save her then, he would not have kept the fear away now. Look at all the shiny light wielders here. Faithful and not, brave and not. All were afraid. Darkness, she was afraid, hearing his voice, feeling his voice. Whispers, always.

She contined creeping, keep low and she would escape notice. No one paid attentionto Pill. Silly crazy little mage. No one important. She heard a voice, familiar in sound, though the sobs were not so familiar.

“No, we have who we need.”

Davien was right there in front of her, crying. Davien was scared too and that made it easier to bear. With a strangled cry, Pill curled herself around Davien’s legs. She still didn’t look , didn’t dare look. But she would hold Davien up. The smallest act of defiance against the dark, made out of pure cowardice.

Italics

It was almost a wonder no one heard the creaking and clanking of their slow-moving carts, packed in tight with barrels of liquid death. Liquid, of course, for a short time only. Once the catapults that lumbered behind the carts were in place, they’d let the vats fly, and the valley below would be filled with clouds of Putress’ plague as the fragile glass shattered and sent its contents splashing up and out.

Apothecary Seemah smiled to herself beneath her heavy mask. The glory of it! The sheer exultation! The choked-off screams of the dying would be the sweetest dirge.

And in the distance, beneath the chattering of the walking corpses and the screams of the dying, came the beating of leathery wings.

Jak and Yva: Kicking ass and taking Names.

Yva
Dead, dragging herself from a mass tomb where a name was a faded memory sewn into the tapestry that was a human life. Her tapestry had unraveled, its seams splitting apart. The faces were distorted and cracked, the dyes had run black. The scenes left upon the loom were twisted and wrong and so very sad.

You didn’t know fear then.

Mad, hunting a man that loved her across the world as his songs bought him nights in inns, nights of sweat and the musty stink of love with other daughters of other men. Finding him in Southshore, singing HER song to a girl with dewdrop eyes and a cherry mouth. The guards came, tried to hurt her, tried to kill that which had already suffered the indignities of a plagued death.

You didn’t know fear then.

Free, allowing herself to love again, finding solace from madness in the arms of a tall man with a black hat. Hearing promises and soft words to sooth her troubled mind. Forever, he’d said, but then the morning came where he was gone. Waiting until dust settled on her shoulders, until cobwebs rested upon her hair like a bride’s veil. Such a fool, Yva Darrows. Realization, understanding, and sorrow that forever had come and gone, she fell into the deep waters of the northern oceans, allowing the abyss to take her.

You didn’t know fear then.

Awake, crawling to the shores, stumbling to Winterspring with nothing but her song and her ice, having men and killing them for the sin of making her acquaintance. Forgetting much but remembering a child, one given to her by a man who wanted to hurt her. She reclaimed the babe, the babe and more, and ushered them back to her home beneath the snows. And then the hunt began. They came for her in droves, trying to discover her ice laden kingdom, to shatter it, but it was Wueten who unearthed her, who took her children but would not take her life.

You didn’t know fear then.

Reborn, repaying her debts to humankind by clearing their streets of unsavories, marking the passage of time by the corpses left in her wake. Befriending the Riders, aiding them as best she can, all the while stomaching their distrust and fear. Jakob Balthasar seeking her, asking her to the north on a mission too convoluted to succeed. Friends then, and only friends until that one fateful night, but then he was taken, taken and dismantled by the lich, his identity ripped apart and remolded in Arthas’s fashion. She’d returned to Azeroth alone but undeterred. She would not abandon another to death when she had the power to stop it.

You didn’t know fear then.

Content, discovering Jak alive and well, a solid comfort by her side. Wrestling his sister away from the twisting path and nearly dying in the process, her own ice magics used to split her chest apart. Worth it, some said, when Mara walked free of her bindings. The wounds healed, Threnn had seen to that, and Jak had stayed by her side even when Mara had wandered away. She swallowed her excuses and allowed him into her heart, trying once again for that elusive happiness. She believed his promises, ones so like Melciah’s that it was almost eerie at times, and she knew she was either fortune’s own child or an utter fool.

You didn’t know fear then.

Exhausted, dismantling the droves of undead before her thanks to a magical tie so tight, it constricted her chest and held her voice hostage. Feeling them, Stonemantle and Crownsilver, feeling their burning and pulsing and throbbing as if it were her own, magic soaring inside of her until it would pour from her eyes and ears in a sparkling wash of power. Ice and shadows flickering over her skin, sweeping over the land like a swarm of angry stinging bees with the singular purpose of destruction. Success then at this dark hour, until He’d arrived. The gates opened, the dark lord stepped through and surveyed the carnage before him, his glowing eyes coming to rest upon the women mid field, the armies surrounding them, and the people on the ballistae. He raised his sword and the dead screeched their adoration, their voices a horrific orgy of sound that echoed through the valley and over the snow capped hills.

Tired, drained of her magics and their terrible potential, she fell to her knees, her hands splaying before her in the snow.

Now, now you know fear.

Haemon

Haemon had never minded the cold. He was born to it, and from playing King of Snow Mountain in his skivvies to swimming for crabs in Northrend’s gray waters, he couldn’t once remember truly feeling a chill at his core. So it was something of a surprise to find that he had actually never known what Cold was, not until his body took it for his own.

Sap froze from beneath the surface of the druid’s wooden flesh, the crystallization cruelly creeping inch by inch down his trunk from the perforations that poured it forth. His branches, previously unhindered by the frigid air, succumbed to Arthas’s cold without much of a fight at all. What was the point of fighting? The bleak stillness of the grave was an inevitability, even to his kind. Maybe Arthas, and Uthas in his image, were just setting right the mistakes of nature. Granting true eternity.

The thought was foreign, thrust into his mind behind the spearpoint of the icy eyes that saw him from half a mile away. Like the gaze of an omnipotent god, it judged him at once as individual and servant. As your mother before you, it instructed, you will be mine. Your Nature will betray you, and you it. You will bend knee to Me and foul this land in My Name. There is no escape.

There is no escape.

In one last strained independent effort, the tree tore his eyes from his doom to seek to prove the thoughts wrong. But amongst the high, sheer cliffs lined with fresh scourge creations, he could find no safe haven. The thick, sharpened pikes that lined the Alliance fortifications no longer seemed to be protections, but rather pointed directly at him. We have placed ourselves in a smooth glass bowl, and built barricades against our own escape. We have gathered the finest armies on Azeroth, and presented them to the Lich King on an icy platter.

Cold had reached his roots, fastening him securely in place. It was all right. He wasn’t going to try to run. They’d been foolish to even consider facing the might of the Scourge, and they deserved their punishment for falling directly into His trap. This would be the beginning of the end. He would go, sent out as a new minion of his master. He would go, and he would find Fells, and he would tear the children from her womb with his bare hands and devour them–

Haemon had also never minded the darkness. He was grateful when it overtook him entirely.