A Deserter's Tale: Memories

Though her alabaster face betrayed no emotion, the young night elf's eyes flashed with mischievous glee as she busied herself with the grim task of stitching the burial shroud around the dwarf laid out on the blood-soaked table just outside of the Argent Coliseum.

Working methodically and with proficiency gained in excessive repetition she did allow the briefest of pauses to steal one last look at the deeply-chiseled face of the dwarf before tugging the canvas up and over his head. The face was still, she couldn't remember it ever being still before - couldn't recall the last time it wasn't busy in the act of providing a torrent of words, most of them crude or cynical or worse. It doesn't become him, she thought, dropping the cover over his head and proceeding to finish the task of stitching him inside the shroud.

Her grim task complete she called for the aspirants milling nearby to fetch the body, which they did, loading it into a cart before lifting the next one onto the table. The Tournament had been busy today, there were many corpses to tend to. As she waited for the dead-eyed youths to prepare her next customer she clutched her cloak tight against the Icecrown chill and watching the body of her only friend carried away, she thought of the first time they'd met.

---

Icecrown is cold. That was the first thing she'd realized as she stood, shivering outside of the Sergeant's tent.

"Who sent you?" he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"Archdruid Lilliandra, sir, I was told that your unit had need of one with my particular talents." the young elf replied meekly.

The pudgy human quartermaster squinted through drunken eyes as he took in the sight before him. The elf had a certain ridiculous quality to her, like a child in a grownup's clothes. Her slight frame and impish, motionless face juxtaposed on the bulky, battle scarred outlander's armor she wore made for an odd package.

"You the new medic?" he managed at last.

"If that is to be my task then I shall do my duty in that role." she replied sternly.

"From the looks of you, you might be used to a bit more action than you'll get here. This lot's more likely to drink themselves to death than get massacred by the Scourge."

"I am sure the Archdruid chose me for this posting with full confidence and purpose. I doubt my experience will be wasted and I doubt your assessment of the relative risks is entirely without grim understatement." the young druid noted the nearby stack of fresh nerubian corpses and the tattered walls of the palisade.

"Well, let's get you settled in, then. What's your name, elf?" the sergeant asked, wobbling to his feet and turning to lead her into the supply train's camp.

"What be all that caterwaullin' out there!" Came a gravelly shout from a neighboring tent before she could answer the question. "A dwarf can't get any sleep on this blasted glacier!"

---

The elf winced visibly as the valiants dropped the dwarf's body into the wagon. "I forget," she said nervously to a nearby squire, "that they don't feel anything anymore."

"Even the live ones don't feel much." the squire replied, his teeth chattering. "Not in this cold."

Nodding in agreement, she went back to her stitching, her nimble fingers had grown accustomed to such tasks - and to the cold - over the last year.

---

"Silithus, eh Caterwaul?" Barleystone asked as he dropped a bag of grain off of the back of the wagon. No one had bothered to learn her real name, the dwarf had taken care of that.

"Yes, and Outlands after that." the druid replied, watching him suspiciously as he hefted another bag of grain from their cargo.

"Yer not old enough to 'ave fought in three wars, lass." he huffed back at her.

"And despite your age, I have yet to see you fight in one." she quipped.

Life in the supply train had been quite different than what she had expected when she sailed for Northrend. The Crusade's disorganization and incoherence were a stark contrast to the purposefulness she had grown accustomed to among the Cenarian forces with which she had previously served. The war against Arthas was a frenetic, unfocused disaster with men and machines laying in heaps throughout the land. Its leaders were charismatic but not strategic and the army marched ahead on fervor rather than tactics.

Except in the back. There was no fervor in the back. There were no champions of the light in the supply train. There were only professional soldiers, professional thieves, and professional scoundrels. Barleystone was easily all three.

"Well, at least ya finally wised up." he cracked, dropping another bag of grain on the roadside.

"I don't know what you mean by that." she replied.

"Ya got yerself off the front lines, got yerself a nice job back here, a pay packet, and a bit of perks. Good on ya lass, ya earned it, then."

"I didn't ask for this posting. I was placed here by the Archdruid." Caterwaul replied, increasingly concerned with why the dwarf was tossing most of their cargo, which they were supposed to deliver to the fighters at the Argent Stand, out of the wagon.

"The ye should thank 'er." he shot back, straightening his stiff back and turning to study the elf holding the reins. "She prolly saved yer life, after all."

The elf shook her head, dismissing his remark. It pained her that she had been left out of the main action of the war against Arthas and the Scourge. As futile and unfocused as the Crusade was, it was a cause which had to be fought, and a war that had to be won. She was frustrated and impotent driving wagons to and fro.

"On your guard!" she shouted at the dwarf, the snap of a twig in the roadside brush pulling her from her self-pity reverie. She crouched low behind the sidewall, ready to pounce. The dwarf did nothing.

"Don't worry yer pretty 'ead, then, it's just me mate." he said, and with that a shifty-eyed goblin materialized from the shadows, his head on a swivel, expecting trouble.

"You're late, Barls." the goblin hissed.

"You're still here." the dwarf shot back with a shrug. "What's the difference. Damn 'orses are laggards, this army needs rams I tell ya."

"This it?" the goblin interjected, dissappointedly sizing up the stack of grain sacks.

"That's what I got." the dwarf replied. "Maybe more next week. I got an army to feed, ya know."

"What's the army pay you for it?" the goblin asked, standing on his tip toes to take stock of the remaining foodstuffs in the wagon.

"I don't 'ave ta sell ye any of it, ya greasy bugger." Barleystone barked.

"But you will." The goblin said, and they both quickly broke into huge, knowing grins.

As the wagon got underway a few minutes later, a few sacks lighter still, Caterwaul sat fuming.

"I can't believe you're selling the army's supplies!"

"I kinna believe yer not." He replied.

"I should skin you where you sit."

"I'd make a fine 'at, ya know." the dwarf said with a leer.

Caterwaul simply roared in frustration and whipped the horses to go faster, an instruction they refused.

"Look, lass, no bugger buys food who isn't hungry."

She shot him a sideways glance, gritting her teeth.

"And no bugger sells it who is." he said, counting his gold.

---

Her stitching done for the day, Caterwaul rode on the back of the wagon as it drove up the hillside to one of the makeshift tombs scratched into the face of the glacier. The Tournament grounds stretching before her filled her with anger and that anger at least kept her warm.

---

"This is madness!" she said, incredulously.

"This is business." the dwarf replied, resigned.

The two sat on the hillside watching the work crews as they scurried about, busily constructing the Coliseum.

"Arthas sits a stone's throw away, amassing power. Our troops are dying all around us. The scourge grows daily. Yet here we are building a damned fair!"

"We're running short a supplies lass, we got ta do something."

"Maybe we wouldn't be running low on food if you weren't selling it all!" she shouted at him, pointing an accusing finger.

"A wee drop in a vast bucket, lass. Nothing compared ta the stores that Wrynn and Thrall 'ave at their beck and call."

"We shouldn't have to entertain them to get their help. This is a war for the very survival of Azeroth!"

"I don't see Staghelm sending much other'n idealistic kids up 'ere."

Caterwaul sank to her knees in the snow, her head hung in defeat.

"It is what it is, lass. It's the only chance we got. Nutters ain't gonna win this war. The light ain't dropping food and armor and soldiers out of the sky either. We weren't ready fer this, not fer a war this big, not fer a war against this kinna enemy. Wrynn and Thrall, Jaina and Garrosh and Rhonin they all got they're own problems and we're up 'ere keeping the scourge at least mainly up 'ere, fer now anyway. They're forgetting about this war getting ready for the next one. If the Crusade's gotta put on a little gnome and pony show ta get some attention so we don't get shoved off this iceberg in little boxes, well, that's what it is."

The wind ripped around them and the sun sank below the broken mountains to the west and neither of them said anything for a time. The dwarf eventually extended a rough, gloved hand and gave the elf a tweak to her nigh-frostbitten ear.

"Come on kid, I gotta line on some firewood we can appropriate."

"I hate this place." she muttered.

"If ya ever don't, I'll shoot ya." he replied, entirely in earnest.

---

The moon struggled to pierce the clouds over Icecrown as midnight came and went. At the edge of the graveyard a shadowy figure emerged from the shadows, a sleek, lustrous cat with flashing eyes which paused only long enough to magically reform as a slight elf maiden in tattered fur armor and a blood-stained Crusade tabbard.

"Why don't you go spend a little time by the fire, soldier." she called to the shivering orc standing guard over the dead. In Icecrown, you protected the living from the dead, rather than the other way around. "This bunch doesn't seem to be going anywhere tonight."

"Feh. Fine by me." he grunted and trudged off.

"Feckless to the last, those pitiful creatures." Caterwaul muttered to herself once the orc was out of earshot. Once certain no one remained to observe her, she gracefully shifted to the form of a mighty bear and set her shoulder to the door of the tomb, slowly wrestling it open.

"Yer late." the dwarf said, squeezing through the opening, pulling a line of rattling sacks behind him.

"You're still here." she replied, assuming elf form to help him gather together the repurposed burial shrouds filled with weapons and armor stripped from the bodies inside the tomb. By the morning it would be back in the racks of the Argent Vanguard, ready to hand out to the next wave of recruits.

"That." The dwarf replied, watching warily the foot of the hill for witnesses to their technically reprehensible, but entirely urgent method of resupply, "is the problem, isn't it?"