Beginnings
Dedicated to nhani, who inspired me to reach much deeper, and Marakith, who always listens carefully...
My Father always said that beginnings were delicate times. He was more accurate than he could possibly have known. I miss him deeply, and Mother too.
Our farmstead was a peaceful place, set as it was on the borders of the Hillsbrad Foothills and Dalaran. In these desperate and troubled times, that seems like an eternity ago, in a different world; yet before that awful day of blood and terrible battle, our lives hade been peaceful. The land was fertile, and bountiful, and the growing things of the world surrounded our simple home.
The seasons turned in order, the spring lambs, the wheat and the harvest, the berries and nuts in September, the bitter frost and icy cold of Winter and we were happy in our hardworking and simple lives.
And then, they came, shattering our world, our tranquillity and our very way of life.
It began innocuously enough, with a dark-skinned traveller visiting our village. I remember looking at the strange markings on his wrists and cheeks. My mother reminded me not to stare, but this man was of such unusual countenance that even now that glimpse of him is still sharp and vivid in my mind. His stern face was craggy, weathered and scarred in many places. I dared not speak, but his gaze bored into mine, and I recall feeling a lethargy creeping into my limbs, as well as a subtle thrill of fear.
His eyes turned away, and passed across my mother’s face without lingering. She and I hurried to finish our errand to the local blacksmith, and we did not speak of the man again, almost as if we both knew he was the harbinger of bad events.
Later that evening, I lay awake, listening to father and mother talking about the stranger and what his purpose was in such a small, out-of-the-way place as Greenvale.
I remember my Father muttering that he was doubtless up to no good. Sometimes I think my father had a touch of second sight.
Three nights later, the stranger returned, in the company of several others and some other … thing. A creature whose presence seemed to extinguish all joy, hope and life from the very air around it. My father named it “A Voidwalker”.
He bundled my mother and I into the cellar, and told us to be quiet. I remember clinging to her side, terrified as I had never been before. The man and creature seemed to exude an aura of sheer menace that almost robbed me of the ability to think. And then the man spoke.
“Ah, Carrelon, I have found you at last. The time has come for you to repay your debt to me, old friend. Tell me, where is the wyrdstone? I need it now, and Azazelith calls for the vessel that will store his essence.”
“I put that behind me along time ago, Maleazir. You know well the fate of the accursed stone, for your minion saw me cast it into the western bay, in the deepwater. I told it then I would have nothing more to do with such things.”
I watched through the crack in the cellar trapdoor, and saw the face of the swarthy man twist into a mask of rage and hatred. Before I could so much as start, roiling shadow had filled the space between his hands, and a bolt of power had streaked towards my father’s face.
Mother grabbed me, clamped her hand over my mouth and dragged us back into the darkness at the far end of the cellar. But she could not stop my ears to the terrible screams, and the clash of blades, nor the final searing sound of fire and agony as terrible energies engulfed the room above our heads.
Yet so much louder, and more fearful, was the silence after, and the voice of the stranger.
“Search everywhere! Find it!”
For an endless time we waited in the dark for magic to blast us, or swords to strike, as they ransacked our home from top to bottom, in a great chorus of smashing pots, and overturned chests and cupboards.
“Master Maleazir, it is not here. We can find no trace of it. It must be as he said.”
I heard the sound of fist striking flesh.
“Dolt! There must be somewhere we have overlooked.”
The sounds of ransack continued, until then the voice of the stranger spoke up at length.
“Very well. We will take our search elsewhere. Come!”
With that, my father’s killer left our house. We listened to his footsteps march away, and the thunder of hooves passed into the distance. My mother bade me stay in the cellar, and opened the trapdoor.
She did not scream. That always struck me, when I think on it later, as the worst thing of all. She simply collapsed at the feet of my father’s crumpled, seared and blade-cleft body and wept. I crawled out of the cellar, and discovered that my throat, too, was closed into silence. I held my mother close and jammed my small fist into my mouth, and bit down. My left hand still carries the scars to this day.
Tears came, then, for both our worlds had ended in the same moment.
It was the good Friar of the nearby chapel that found us the next day, paralysed by our grief and pain. He lifted my mother up, and led us both away, me still holding my mothers hand. She seemed… empty. I was too young to understand then, that her sanity had been shattered.
I missed my father greatly, of course, but I was young enough to recover quite quickly. My mother, however, seemed to … draw away from me, and everyone.
Although the Friar and his brothers were goodly, and very kind, they could not save my mother from the misery that gradually eroded her away inside. She had gone to a place where even I, at my happiest moments, could not reach her. The shadow of that day never left her, even in the sunniest mornings.
One day, in the spring of the second following year, she rose up at dawn, smiled for the first time in months, and kissed me on the forehead.
“Be good for me, Varangese. I am going to fetch the water from the well.”
She never returned. I later learned that she had been seen wandering northwards into the mountains, home to a host of terrible creatures. No one, even after frantic searching, was able to find trace of her, neither the village Hunter, nor the good Friar, or any of the brave folk who agreed to search. It was as if the earth had swallowed her whole.
I remember being almost inconsolable, yet at the same time I felt as if I had lost her along with my father that evil day.
Time passed. I grew, and refused to give in to the same despair. The good brothers taught me both to read, and to write. I began to read the history of the world, and the teachings of the light. I discovered of the machinations of the Burning Legion and finally I found the meaning of the markings upon the wrists and face of my father’s murderer.
Felsworn. A demon follower, their avowed servants on Azeroth. Not simply a conjurer and controller of these beings, but their willing allies in their second effort for the destruction of our world.
On midsummer’s day, at the age of thirteen, I was finally accepted as a novice of the brother’s order, the Crimson Heart. My hatred for my father’s killer burned only slowly in my soul, gentled by the desire to see that others not suffer my fate, or that of my father.
But warlike ways seemed to run in my blood, and not for me the peaceful path of quiet contemplation. In the end, the good Friar almost despaired of me, but he had the great fortune to know someone to whom I might be of greatest service.
Thus he sent me to the great abbey at Northshire, to be trained there by brother Anselm of the militant arm of our order. I learned the ways of sword and shield, as well as the ways of prayer and devotion, and of courage, and sacrifice. Not simply to stand by and heal the injured, nor cure the sick, but to take up arms and strike down those who would slay the weak, or hold them in their power as slaves.
I became a Paladin on the first day of May, in the year of the Griffon, having spent that night before in prayer and vigil in the abbey Chapel. Upon that morning, brother Anselm dubbed my shoulders with his shining blade, and bade me rise up, born a second time as a Soldier of the Light, and Battle-Sister of the Crimson Heart.