When Keeper Albagorm had arrived in the Emerald Dream, he had planned to find one of his brothers to replace him in Azeroth and spend his time recouperating from his time away from the world of his birth. The uneasy dreams and waking anxiety that he had felt while guarding Stonetalon peak he had attributied to fatigue and a prologued separation from the dream, but when he arrived he realized that this was not the case. A war had begun to boil between the creatures of the Dream and an unknown force that had begun to taint parts of the dream and throw itself upon those who came upon it in the form of nightmares and hallucinations. Many creatures, druids and Cenarions alike, stumbled upon patches of the infestation and were unprepared for such a malicious attack to their spirits. They where easily corrupted and began to walk the land with the single minded purpose of finding others, catching them, and destroying their minds in the same way.

At first this corruption seemed to bubble up in the Dream like boils. Small sections of the Dream sould suddently wilt and decay, and the contained areas of corruption spread out like untended infections, spread by the creatures that had been caught in the inital invasion. Who was behind everything Albagorm could not say. He knew only that something ancient and powerful had stirred and set its sight on the Emerald Dream, that the corruption had a single source and that that source was dangerous enough for the great powers of the dream, the druid Malfurion Stormrage and Cenarius himself to mobalize and perpare for a great catasrophe, out of which the Dream could be either Shattered or restored.

The enemies that the druids would be facing where corrupted by the darkness. They had succombed to the dark whipserings of the blackend land and warped into perversions of what they had once been. Every creature was being effected differently. Some were simply physically dangerous, and others could send men and Keeper alike into madness by a single glance. The druids had emerged into the dream at the edge of one of the epicenters of this corruption, and the dark, voilent clouds that were streaking through the forest indicated the path of those who had been trapped by the corruptions spread and were now acting as its agents.

But there was some hope. The keepers had come together and managed to fight their way to the very middle of one of these boils of the land, and there they came across a dark, bulbus, seedlike stone embedded into the land. When the seed was destroyed the choke hold of evil in the area dissapated, and a number of corrupted druids were recovered from the aftermath of the battle. The Keepers had gathered to attempt another such frontal assault on the node of corruption in front of them, but their numbers had suffered a great blow from the previous battle, and the corruption of this node had spread further than the other. Their chance of success was slim, but if they could make it to the epicenter and destory the node, their casualties would be worth it.

Albagorm produced a number of daggars. "These have been cleansed in the Well of Eternity. You must make your way through the darkness, past the mad, corrupted creatures and plants, and dig these daggars deep into the seed of the madness. And once you have done so you must run for you life, because the violence of the reacation will kill you if you remain close."

The rumble of thunder was slowly approaching. "The darkness knows we are here, and that we are preparing to attack," Keeper Albagorm said. "We must move quickly if we are to prevent being flanked by the corrupted ones who are away from the epicenter." The elves Druids prepared themselves, summoned upon each other the various protections of the forest, cleared their minds, and joined the force of a hundred or so Keepers, aided by a few dozen other Druids, Tauren and elf alike. They nodded to the addition to their force solomnly. The Tauren druid who had follwed them had slipped into the crowed, beside a number of others of his race. As Shiawase and the other druids made their way to the main force, he realized that the entire area of the forest, steer, wolves, bears, Griffons, even a small number of humaniod races who must have become trapped in the Dream at some point were there, waiting to attack. Shiawase suddenly thought of little Relara. Could it be that she was somewhere nearby, close to the madness inducing storm?

He had no time to consider searching her out. Albagorm looked about him in a quick check, raised his arm, and began the charge. The entire forest en masse began to make it's way towards the growing blackness.

The trees grew darker as they pushed forward, in that their very coloring had faded and grown sick. Soon the vibrant green glow that seemed to permiate all of the Emerald Dream had dissapeared and been replaced with a cold, sickly mist. The smell of disease and rot began to assail Shiawase's nostrils, but the young druid simply ducked his head and ran harder. There was a scream at the head of the the line and the ground shook from under them as a solid wall of black, jagged roots shot up into the sky. The druids as one extended their hands and dragged out every inch of energy they could from the black land. A volly of hot green Wraths flew over the charging forces and crashed against the roots, which seemed to shatter and rain down like black hail. From behind the wall emerged a force that seemed a perverted mirror of the offensive. Druids, plants, and animals alike stood before Albagorm and the druids, but their bodies were warped and the life had been sucked out of them. As one the defensive force let out a scream that recalled the hazy figures of Shia's nightmare, and charged headlong into the opposing forces.

The entire forest seemed to explode into an orgy of death and chaos. The air itself cracked with friction as Druids from both sides struggled to control the conditions of the battle. The trees writhed and twisted, and burst with with black limbs that propigated like cancer. The corrupted druids lashed out with their power as if they had lost all control. Their black wrath's vollied into the crowd without pause, and animate corpses for animals poured through the ranks, throwing themselves against anything and everything that breathed. At Shia's side Stormrage was blasting a path forward with a relentles attack of Starfires. The other three druids stuck close to his side, destroying anthing that attacked their frontman, and lending their own energy to his power. The elder druid's face was soaked in sweat and his face was contorted in concentration, but the path forward remained clear of nightmares.

The land moved again, the forest ahead had become so dark that it was impossible to see more than a few feet in. The black clouds were directly overhead, hiding the sun completely, and deep in the black wood something rumbled and moaned. A gust of air colder than the coldest peak in Azeroth swept throught the battlefield with enough strength to pick some off the animals straight off the ground and send them crashing through the trees. Shiawase planted his feet on the ground and concentrated on staying upright.

From the same spot in the darkness there was a sucking sound and the wind reversed direction. Keeper Albagorm ran through the forces, shouting, "Prepare yourselves! The nightmare is coming!" Shiawase entered his bear form and dug his paws into the earth. For a moment the forest seemed to pause from its mad twisting.

And then the scream returned, riding a gust of wind that knocked the breath clear out of Shiawase and sending him flying through the trees. He struggled to regain a foothold somewhere but he couldn't find the ground, and he couldn't see the trees, and his very thoughts were drowned out by that damn SCREAMING!

Shiawase stopped trying to land gracefully and clasped his hands to his ears, to no effect. He looked around himself for something to stuff into his ears but realized there was nothing. Literally nothing. The other druids had dissapeared. The forest had dissapeared. He was careening through pitch blackness, through a vortex of ice and unearthly noise.

From a point in the distance Shiawase spotted a pale green light. He was falling towards it. Trying to ignore the screaming that felt like knives digging into his brain, Shia tried make sense of his orientation, but there was no sense of gravity or distance, there was only the screaming and the feeling of frozen air flying past his face and that one, single spot in the distance. And then the light had exploded into a whirling tunnel green smoke, and Shiawase was flying through it. He knew what was at the end of this tunnel, he had seen it before. Shia looked around himself desperately. There had to be away to escape. There had to be a way to fight back. He tried to close his eyes and grab hold of some sort of presence, anything, that might bring him out of his nightmare and back to the Dream, but the image of the tunnel did not dissapear from his mind when he closed his eyes, and his mind could find nothing past the sharp pain of the screaming. As the green smoke began to warp and congeal in the humanoid shapes, Shiawase steeled himself for the image he knew was coming. The vague humanoid clouds streched and pulled and began to separate from each other, and on their featureless heads gigantic, mawl like holes apeared, and as a chorus the entire body of spectres, all the thousands and thousands of them, began to scream.

The presure in his head was too much. Shia screamed himself and began to tear at his ears. He need to stop the sound, he would rather go deaf than suffer it anymore. His nails dug into his flesh and with a violent tug he had pulled his right ear straight off in a shower of blood. But even as his hot lifeforce dripped into what was left of his ear, the sound of screaming in his mind was not altered. Shia would have to dig deeper. With his index finger he stabbed his bloody ear as deep as he could, hooked it, and pulled, ripping off more skin and crushing the organs of his ear. But the screaming didn't stop.

Suddenly Shia's entire body was engulfed in a chill that froze his entire body still. His chest burned with the pain of the sudden stop of his heart, and through the blizzard of screaming green figures Shia saw the glint of an emerging figure.

When it appeared Shiawase tried to prepare himself for the revulsion, but he could not help but shake with nausea as the fetid form of a former Son of Cenarius emerged from the endless shadow. The body was just as Shia had remembered it. Down to its spilling, steaming organs, to it's black pits for eyes, to it jagged, brown, overgrown teeth. The Nightmare's jaw disconnected and it began to open it's gaping mouth. Shiawase was frozen, staring at it. He did not know if he was breathing. He could not feel the blood and ear fluid trickling down his face. He only knew that the pain he had felt until then would be nothing compared to what he was about to face.

Like lightning the Nightmare's tonge shot out and wrapped itself around Shia's body. The druid opened his mouth to scream but he was dragged forward with such speed that he could not get the air out of his throat. The Nightmare was zooming closer and closer towards him, until it seemed to tower like a mountain, it's mouth was a tunnel, and as shia shot through it the screaming began to fade into the distance and the cold was taking hold of his mind, making him tired, making him sleep...

"Come my child. Wake and serve your new god."

A deep, mellow voice whispered through shia's conciousness. Shia could feel nothing, see nothing, he could not even determine whether or not he had a body. All he knew was that something, or someone, had taken his very soul and was now speaking to it.

"Become an avatar of the new world. Rise and serve me."

The darkness all around dissapated and Shia was standing in Ashenvale, in the Lumber Camp, in the middle of a crowd of peons grunting and sweating as the downed the great trees of the forest. No, he wasn't standing. He had no body. He had no eyes, no ears. He was merely a conciousness, floating in awareness.

"Look at what they have done to our world child. Look at what they have done to the trees. See how the orcs rape the land. See how the elves are too weak to stop them. We will stop them druid. We will wipe the world of the Titan's influence and recreate it as it was meant to be."

A tree fell with a groan and a crack. The peons fell upon it and began to break it up in to managable logs. Shia looked past them, there was the road west, to Astranaar.

The voice seemed to rumble. "Listen to me child, feel the pain of the forest. Give yourself to your anger. Obey the command of your god and rise to serve that which you have sworn to serve."

The snow had melted from the the ground, and amungst the muck and mud of the logging opperation and new generation of hearty forest grass had begun to push itself up from the ground in small patches. Flowers would be blooming soon. The leaves on the trees would be returning. Whitemoon would be starting to gather ingredients for his spring recepies. And the Retribution, the tavern would be bustling at this time of year.

The scene in Shia's mind was wiped away and replaced with the suffocating darkness. "DRUID." The whisper had become a below. At the sound of it Shia felt himself pushed to the brink of unconciousness. "DRUID. WHAT IS YOUR OATH?"

"I fight when the fight is brought to me. I protect
that which I hold dear and I obey the sanctity of nature." He replied.

Silence, and then the whisper returned. "And it is the balance that you hold dear. It is your sacred nature. Pledge yourself to me and together we will eradicate the unnatural stagnation of the world and bring about a new balance."

Shia tried to shake a head that didn't exist. "My oath is to the balance, but my love and loyalty is to the mortal races."

"THEN YOU WILL DIE WITH THEM!"

From nowhere the thousands of screaming forms grabbed on to Shiawase, who found his bleeding, frozen body had been returned to him, and as one pulled on him from every direction. Shia felt his arms begin to rip from their sockets, and then, a new scream seemed to rise above the rest, and the pulling stopped, and Shia was falling again and the bodies were falling with him, and below him was the ground, barrelling towards him hard and fast, and he was about to crash into it and break every bone in his body.


And then he was slowing down, and down and down and down until he was positively drifting towards the ground. Shiawase looked up. A gigantic brown eagle had caught onto him and was floating down to the ground. The ground which was not black and sick but a light brown, and covered with inviting moss, and surrounded by friendly trees with lush green canopies. And it was like this for as far as Shiawase could see. Close to where they were landing a crater the size of a large lake sat. Keeper Albagorms army stood in the middle of it, surrounding something round and glowing.

The eagle, Stormrage, set Shiawase down at the edge of the crowed and returned to his druidic form before bending down and inspecting the younger druid for his wounds. Shia was too stunned and exhausted to do anything besides lie with his back to the ground and concentrate on his breathing, which was shallow and ragged. He was vaguely aware that he was deaf in his right ear. What had happened to him? Where had he gone? What had he done? And why had he ended up high in the sky? It didn't matter. He was alive and breathing, and the screaming was done, and there was nothing whispering in his hear to follow it and destroy the world in righteous fury.

"Brother, can you see me? Shiawase, do you know who I am?"

Shiawase nodded slowly. To move his head sent shots of pain throughout his entire body.

"Can you move anything?"

Shiawase let his inert state speak for itself. He wasn't about to attempt to speak. It occoured to him that people were cheering somewhere in the distance. Stormrage smiled and knelt to pat Shiawase lightly on the shoulder.

"We've won the battle brother. Rest yourself."

Shiawase nodded again, slowly. They had won. And he had won. He smiled to himself. Perhaps he would be able to go home and see his friends again after all.