Life moved on slowly like this until the morning dew in Goldshire was replaced with a crisp coat of frost, and both Horde and Alliance alike were cooling in their animosity towards each other to stock up for the winter. Shia's assignments became fewer and fewer, and his thoughts began to stray back to Ashenvale and Astranaar. It was probably beautiful at that time of year, with the entire forest blazing with fall colors and the ground carpeted with a palate of crisp leaves. He wondered how young Relara was doing, and Whitemoon too. And the furblogs. They had been so desperate even in the summer, what would they do to survive the coming winter?
Shiawase had a leave of absence coming to him, and he resolved to spend it in Astranaar. No matter that the townsfolk could drive him crazy at times. He enjoyed their company when they weren't obsessed with war, and the forest calmed his nerves in any case. So as the last leaves of fall were falling and the winter winds were picking up, Shia decided to return to the western continent.
When he broke the news at the Crimson Jewel everyone groaned.
"You're going on a trip again? You know, there's nice places around here to take a vacation. You don't need to travel across the world."
I know Cole, but I have friends to visit.
"Can't you send them a letter?"
"I don't think they'd take that very well. And besides, I'm only staying for a few months. I'll be back before winter is over."
"Well, stay safe." Kitra took Shiawase's hands. "Don't forget your friends here while you're out in the forest."
Shiawase laughed. "How could I abandon you all? You're more my family than all the Elves put together."
Olmag growled and stomped on Shia's foot with a steel plated boot. "I ain't yer family fleabag! Get it through yer head!"
The rest of the night was sent in drunken merrymaking. The Dwarves took turns pushing ale on to Shiawase, who for his part sat on Olmag as a bear for fifteen minutes before the Dwarf would say, "pretty please." As it became harder and harder to tell Dagar from his pet wolf, Shia decided to retreat from the partying and curl up in front of his favorite fireplace for a decent night's sleep.
He was in a forest. The leaves of the trees were a brilliant lime green, and the bark seemed to glow with an inner fire, so that they were not brown but crimson. The moss under Shiawase's feet was as soft as feathers, and as he padded lightly through it he twitched his feline nose and inhaled the sweet scent of morning dew. The racket of birds chattering at each other filled the canopy, and occasionally an alien, musical howl would ring out from the distance. Shia approached a small stream. It bubbled and danced around roots and rocks, and a lone frog peaked his head out from the surface, considering Shiawase's presence. Shiawase took a drink. The water was sweeter and more refreshing than any ale he had ever tasted. The life of it seemed to spread about his body the moment it touched his tongue.
The Druid tiptoed across by a small fallen log. There were no paths here, only miles and miles of serene, untouched forest. There was no smoke in the air, not a single clang of metal, no whiff of a kitchen fire. There was only the plants, the animals and peace.
Shia meandered about, sniffing the trees, following the trails of the deer, batting at the fish that darted about in the sparkling water. There was nothing he needed to do, nowhere he needed to go. The calm of being beholden to nothing but his instincts spread in his mind.
Shia had made it through the forest to the base of a steep hill. Through the trees the sky stretched out before him like a sheet of pure blue, completely cloudless. What would the forest look like from up this hill, Shia wondered, and he began to climb.
The path took a turn inward, into a rocky notch, and Shia found himself enveloped in shade as tall stone engulfed him. Only a small slit of sky remained hanging just above him. A cold wind blew through the passage. Shiawase shivered as his hair stood on end.
Something was off. The warning bells in Shiawase's head started ringing, like they would if some predator was stalking him for an afternoon meal. But he could smell no one, and he could see nothing out of the ordinary. He turned to inspect the path that he had come from. The rock tunnel ended just at the level of the treetops, and Shia could see their branches rustling in time with the wind. He looked up. The sky was its usual crystal blue. Not an enemy was to be seen. The path in front continued on in the narrow space between the sheer rock walls and seemed to make another turn. Shia waited for his hair to settle before starting to move again.
He had made it not more than a few steps before the cold wind blew again and the uneasy feeling returned. Shia spun around with a snarl. There was something there. There -was- something there. All the nerves in his body was telling him there was something there. But where was it?
“Druid” The word came from nowhere. It bubbled up in his mind, breathy and urgent. Shia snarled and perked his ears.
“Druid, the rebirth of Azeroth is at hand. Swear yourself to me, and the waking world shall become as it is in the Dream.”
The path wasn't safe. Shia began to trot back out the way he came. He had a horrible urge to get away from this confining space and back into the open safety of the forest. Before he had made it back to the side of the hill the gust of wind returned, but instead of blowing by in a quick burst it pushed against Shia violently and persistently. The sound of the wind whistling through the narrow stone ravine grew louder and louder. Shia planted his feet on the ground, tucked his ears back, and tried to push forward, but a sudden bouncing gust caught him in the side and slammed him into the rock wall.
“DRUID!”
Shiawase tried to growl, but with the wind pushing into his face breathing was his first priority. That and getting out of that damn wind tunnel! And shutting out the screaming of the wind! The sound was growing louder and louder and higher. Shia shut his eyes against the gusts and tried again to push out of the tunnel. The screaming was growing sharper, until it no longer sounded like wind at all, but some sort of creature, or mad soul, howling wildly with such a pitch that Shia was forced to switch back to his elf form for the sole purpose of covering his ears with his hands.
The freezing wind no longer seemed to be throwing itself at him with the force of a gnomish tram, but he remained frozen in place. Or had the air frozen around him, like some icy cast? It was so cold it burned his skin and numbed his legs from the knees down. Shia tried to open his eyes again and found that he couldn't. He was engulfed in absolute darkness. Not even the warm rays of the sun, shining in the flawless sky, could reach him.
Assailed by an otherworldly wail, blind, frozen in place, struggling to breathe, struggling even to keep the blood running through his body as the cold began to clutch as his heart, Shia's rational mind shut down completely and in instinctual panic he tried to flail about in every direction, summoning the last of his energy to morph into a bear and break the grip of whatever it was that had gotten a hold of him.
As Shia changed he could feel himself move. He flailed out with his still morphing paws and again attempted to open his eyes.
The solid, freezing mass that had been engulfing him evaporated. Shia found himself in a freefall into blackness. No, not blackness, there was something down there. And the screaming would not -stop-! Shia covered his ears again and concentrated on the glint of something that was careening towards him, or that he was falling towards, or that was falling towards him. Where was up again?
The small speck of form in a sea of pitch dark exploded into a swirling chasm of green smoke. It seemed to spin out like a pinwheel, engulfing Shia as if he was shooting into an ethereal tunnel. The Druid tried to get his bearings, to find a point of gravity, a way to stand upright, but no matter how much he twisted and turned he couldn't find any direction. And the SCREAMING!
The spinning smoke shooting by Shiawase began to spread, and at the same time it congealed, as shapes began to form inside of it. At first they looked like nothing but sickly, writhing masses, but legs and arms began to sprout from the swirling smoke. And then heads appeared. It was a swarm of spinning, vague bodies, all of them featureless save for holes half the size of their heads, from which screams recalling death, torture and pain rang out. The swirling tunnel seemed to collapse and shatter. The malformed bodies of what Shia could barely make out to be races of Azeroth collapsed as one and tumbled past him. Shiawase wanted to close his eyes and hide his head from it all, but he found himself transfixed. He doubted to himself whether he even had eyelids in whatever nightmare this was he had fallen into.
Beyond the raining bodies of screaming cloud people, a new form seemed to remove itself from the black. The gigantic outline of a child of Cenarius stepped forward slowly. Its stag legs were the first to appear. At least, they resembled stag legs. But the meat seemed rotted from some disease, and on the exposed bone clung clusters of something pulsing and maggoty. And the chest too; the flesh was warped and almost dripping away. Shia could see some sort of innards hanging out of the body's side.
The perverted form of a Cenarion seemed to duck forward, away from the darkness. The glow of the bodies that continued to whirl around Shiawase cast a dull green light onto it. Where it may have once had eyes, two sunken holes sat on its face. Not even a hint of light penetrated them as they sucked in the weak glow that hovered in the air. The nose likewise was gone. Its lips had rotted off to reveal a jagged row of brown teeth. One jutted out of the monstrosity's cheek. What should have been a thick head of hair was a stringy, oily mat that dangled limp from the creature's shoulders. And its antlers, or what should have been its antlers, were swaying, no, writhing, plump black worms atop its head.
The Cenarion, if it could even be called a Cenarion, floated forward. Shiawase could not measure distance in the middle of the void he was trapped in, and it seemed as if the rotting monster in front of him was only growing bigger and bigger and bigger, until Shia's entire height only made it to one of its knees. With a slow, mechanical motion, the Cenarion opened his mouth to reveal a chasm as dark and magnetic as its eyes. It tipped its head back as it continued to open its maw, wider than any natural mouth could ever gape, until suddenly from the void behind its rotted teeth a tongue shot forward. Shia tried to duck, but there was no gravity, and nothing for him to throw himself against. He ended up doing nothing but flailing wildly sideways as the tongue shot past him and wrapped itself around the flying green figure of what could have been a Troll, or an Elf.
There was a pause. A wave of freezing cold swept over Shia from the direction of the tongue held in suspension next to him. It was steaming, and some sort of thick black liquid was dripping off of it. And then the entire disgusting muscle snapped back into the hole from whence it came, dragging the smoking, screaming soul with it. The gaping maw of the Cenarion snapped shut. Its tooth stabbed a new hole through its cheek, just below its black hole of an eye. And the screaming continued.
Shia was next. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew. He knew those eyeless sockets were staring right at him. That the mouth was yawning open for him, that soon a black, poisonous tongue would have itself wrapped around him, and with a jerk that would snap his neck he'd be sucked into the creature's mouth and he'd be dead. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do. The blizzard of bodies continued to obstruct Shia's view of the thing in front of him, but he could see the tongue emerging from its hole, like a snake coiling for a strike. Shiawase opened his mouth to scream, but he was either voiceless or the cacophony around him engulfed his frail shout before it had even left his mouth.
There was no time between when the tongue struck and when Shia found himself wrapped in its crushing grip. His entire body seemed instantly sucked of all heat and he screamed again, this time soundlessly, he knew, as his heart was frozen to a stop and the air in his lungs crystallized. It felt as if his eyes would pop out of his head and blood would spurt from his ears. And then that rotting head was zooming closer, closer, closer closer closer until it in itself was as large as Shia, and then larger. It was a gaping tunnel and Shia was flying down it and the wind was back, blasting him with a freezing chill, and the screams were careening off into the distance and the smell of rotting flesh exploded in Shiawase's nose and a brightness flashed behind his eyes and -
Shia woke up yowling and leapt high enough to get his claws into the tavern ceiling. There he hung, taking in gulps of breath as large as his lungs would allow and darting his eyes about wildly for danger. The tavern kitchen was empty. The fire had been blown out, and all along the walls and floor were signs of nature damage from concentrated Druid magic. A chair had been smashed apart and lay in splinters on the floor. Shiawase concentrated on steadying his breathing.
"What the 'ell?"
Olmag crashed into the kitchen from the main tavern room and stopped dead as he saw the damage that had been done. "What the 'ell?" He repeated.
Shia dropped back to the ground and resumed his Elf form, sending Olmag jumping back and clutching his chest.
"Damnit cat! Whatter you doin' up thar?"
"Just hanging out." Shia noted self-consciously that his words came out winded.
"And what'd you do ta tha kitchen? It look like ya exploded in fairy dust!"
"That's a possibility."
"This ain't funny yer flea bittin mongrel. Tha whole tavern shook!"
Shia froze and looked down at Olmag. "It did?"
Grimnar stuck his head into the kitchen. "What the 'ell happened? You alright furball?"
"I'm fine. The tavern shook you say?"
"Sure as ‘ell it did. You jerked Dagar right off the table 'e was snoozin on, hah! It was you, wasn' it?"
"I'm not sure."
"Well, that was one 'ellova sneeze, I say." Olmag hit Shia on the back roughly. "Don' do it again."
"An git back to sleep," Grimnar added. The two the Dwarves stepped back out of the kitchen, mumbling under their breath.
For the rest of the night Shiawase lay in front of the dead fire, his eyes closed, reciting the old exercise his elders had taught him that spoke of peace and beauty and the gentle perfection of nature. It had been a nightmare. It had –not- been the Dream. It was that damn Dwarven ale that did it. Yes, it had to have been the ale, and Cole’s cooking. Shia squeezed his eyes shut. Imagine you are in a dark tunnel… But his thoughts would not settle, and he was forced to spend the rest of his night awake beside the cold hearth.
