“-. May 03, Year 581 of the King’s Calendar .-“

  Desert nights were cold, even when we’d barely entered the region earlier that day. It didn’t bother me any, even without the spirits warming the air around me. Not the dwarves either. But it was kind of fun to see the elves on guard actively suppressing their shivers, on our first night camped in the Badlands.

  I was in charge of the overall operation – I’d single-handedly set everything and everyone in motion after all – but three out of the other four highest-ranking people here were literal royalty. Highest royalty in the case of the Wildhammers, it wasn’t just Falstad but Kurdran Wildhammer himself that chose to come on the expedition.

  “No comfort enchantments?” I asked Sylvanas when she joined the rest of the expedition leaders for dinner that evening. “I know there’s a limit of one arcane attachment per equipment.” On top of the inherent properties emergent from material and construction process, which could come up to half a dozen in the extreme cases I recalled from the future. “But I thought you’d spare a bracer or pendant at least.”

  “Comfort breeds complacency,” Sylvanas replied. “Ranger equipment is as form fitting and breathable as possible for obvious reasons, but there is a difference between that and literal coddling.”

  Form fitting indeed, and not just fantasy art direction. Elven women were every bit as voluptuous as advertised. Also, the ranger armor actually did leave the midriff bare, though they had a very fine hose mesh there too, like the stockings back on earth. The priority seemed to be heat management rather than protection, which made sense in warm, damp forest environs where you were always crouched above or beyond a branch, which incidentally protected your center area just by being there. “You’re saving the best environmental protection equipment for active combat then? Best equipment in general, even.”

  “With the exception of the outriders actually out on patrol, of course.”

  “You’re using regular activity as training,” Kurdran Wildhammer said this time, since I got distracted by one of my various feelings that something had changed in the world.

  “Quite so.”

  Flashes of lost opportunity were happening on and off, now that the divination blackout was beginning to settle, if not dissipate. Which I took to mean that I’d missed a moment in time when it would have been possible to look into the future, but someone else hadn’t. Glimpses of it, anyway.

  “What if you don’t get time to change?” Brann Bronzebeard asked Sylvanas this time.

  “First and foremost, we are scouts. If something somehow sneaks past our perimeter to strike at our camp, we have already failed in our foremost specialty.”

  I shook off the feeling. “And the ones competent enough to do so would be competent enough to get around or overcome your best protections anyway, if you’d had time to put them on.” Or wear them all the time.

  “Quite so.”

  Fair enough.

  “That said, we are no more immune to the change in scenery than anyone,” Sylvanas admitted as she finished her skewer of boar with a bite of elvish waybread. “We are best suited for the forest. In this barren flatland, though line of sight stretches much further, the lack of vegetation also reduces our stealth capabilities considerably, and makes our mark and messaging methods problematic.”

  “Can’t just use owl hoots to signal each other, eh?” Falstad grunted as he tossed another log into the fire. “Would just call ’em coyotes ‘n buzzards down on ye, sure ‘nough. Starvin’ sods are always lookin’ fer prey”

  “I’ve dispatched some of my rangers to stalk local fauna to learn their calls and habits, but they will not master such tricks in a single night.”

  “You can’t range as far as you could up to now, is what you’re saying,” I hummed.

  “We could, but it would be much risk for little gain. That is…” Sylvana looked at me meaningfully. “Unless the great Prophet has reconsidered the urgency of getting eyes in the Lethlor Ravine?”

  “No. And if I did, the gryphon riders would probably do better there, both reaching in and getting out too, no offense.”

  “None taken, insofar as matters are concerned aboveground. When an aerial view is no longer enough, however…”

  “Believe me, Ranger-Captain, if ever we need to go spelunking into dragon’s lairs, I’ll be the first one in.”

  “Hopefully first one out also,” Sylvanas said idly. “Not that I’d accuse anyone of willfully delaying and otherwise putting our forces at risk, but the tendency of Light wielders to martyr themselves is well known.”

  Claws out today? I could get behind hating escort missions but I’d hardly be the one being escorted if-

  “Speak fer yerself, elf,” Falstad grumbled on my behalf. “I’ll be plenty glad if big ole’ Pretty Boy here brings up the rear, do ye not see the size of ‘im? Much more filling bites, them drakk appetites are no joke.”

  Well gee.

  “Oh we Elves know that quite well,” Sylvanas said airly. “The fact there aren’t any black dragons left anywhere in Quel’Thalas certainly didn’t come about peacefully.”

  That you know of.

  “What about you?” I nudged Blindi with my shoulder when the others got deep enough in a talk between themselves. He was still as sourly quiet as ever, but I – and the dwarves now, little by little – made sure he always had a reason to snap out of it. “Everyone else has a joke at my expense tonight, go on, let me have it.”

  “Your request is hopeless,” the titan’s avatar told me between beers. “I’ll always choose you over them.”

  That… hit me right in the soul, but also worried me since it was closer to emotional dependence than love. From the corner of my eye, I saw Sylvanas’ ear discreetly turn in our direction, so I silently bid Foamgust to contain our sounds. “Got anything from Tyr’s body yet?”

  “Much of what I’d dreaded, too little of what I’d hoped. Zakajs didn’t taint him quite enough that the body cannot serve a soul summoning anchor, but after so long of them laying on top of each other, it is enough that the precision is beyond my skill. Without calling on my other eye at least.” Blindi eyed me somberly. “Looking through it got me nowhere, save grounds I’d treaded in the past. When I outright channeled my power into it, I couldn’t see anything but shadow. So I had Eyir conduct a sympathetic ritual instead, using myself as the anchor point. The spell pointed nowhere, but even the magic of the greatest prodigies eventually runs into reality’s hard limits. Eyir and I discerned enough to know the interference came from this plane instead of the next.”

  Odyn had sacrificed his eye to the Loa Mueh'zala, to get a permanent view of the Afterlife. There weren’t many candidates for who could have gotten it back, if it was back here. “Helya has it after all?”

  “Everything else you speculated about her holds true also. Her halls are right below mine you know, under the sea.”

  “But then if you still see afterlife things through it – is she a master of illusions too?”

  “Not to that extent. I suspect she merely invoked the eye’s past experiences in the Otherworld, and has it relive them over and over to fool me.”

  Like a camera put on loop.

  There truly was nothing new, no matter the sun. “Well, if Tyr’s body isn’t enough to get a lock, maybe his brain scan will.”

  “I can but trust your hope.”

  Because you have none of your own?

  I pat Blindi’s shoulder a couple of times and rose from my seat to go do my rounds through the rest of camp. For better or worse, I’d never been more than a military grunt in my prior life, and didn’t get deployed on foreign soil either, so I didn’t have meaningful experience with leading troops. Even as the one being led.

  But I’d learned some while watching Richard, and getting Odyn to teach me what I lacked had gone a long way to keep him invested in events, and distracted from his depression.

  It had been a bit awkward at first, with the Widhammer dwarves, Ironforge dwarves, and Farstrider Elves all looking to their own chain of command first. Their own kind. They were also skittish of me after knowledge of Emerentius’ true nature finally reached us through Brann. But no one had the authority – or power – to forbid me from going everywhere and talking to everyone, and I was a much more approachable target than the Titan avatar everyone was really interested in, so eventually I broke the ice. All of it, from every direction.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  After I checked in with Sir Magroth and our own men, I stopped near the quartermaster’s tent and watched one of the smaller long-term dramas that I’d averted with my contractually-mandated nosiness. There, near a glowstone set up as out of the way as possible while still being inside the camp, was Aedelas Blackmoore with his new friend, one Thadius Grimshade. Overcoming the tension between me and Falstad Wildhammer was actually a side benefit of looking into his situation.

  I’d only had the vaguest notion of relevance about the young dwarf before Falstad decided to trust me with him. After later Reflection, I recalled that he was a Wildhammer diviner in the future, possibly the best of them. You needed to travel all the way to Nethergarde Keep to find him, in the Blasted Lands that right now were still part of the Swamp of Sorrows. This was because he’d left Aerie Peak ‘years ago’ to ‘pursue darker knowledge.’

  With some very pointed questions to the older dwarves involved in the bullying, we found out the reason – the current crop of diviners had foreseen that future, however vaguely. Aiming to prevent one of their future elites from going bad, they’d gone for the ‘pressure him to quit early’ strategy. If he was of no consequence, it wouldn’t matter if he turned bad. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d successfully invalidated future visions before, so it wasn’t necessarily a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I still didn’t approve though, and neither did Falstad who bluntly ordered them to lay off the lad before he had to get nasty. Half of them didn’t even resent it much, some were even relieved. Telling them what I knew of Thadius’ future mollified them even more.

  It was disheartening to see even here the seeds of a rot so similar to the one I’d had to break my home country over, but at least they’d all been reluctant.

  Thadius jumped to his feet when he saw me coming. “Yer Saintship!”

  “How are you two doing?”

  “Terribly,” Aedelas grumbled, yanking the star-struck dwarf back down on the log with an eyeroll. “I understand everything he’s explaining to me, I just can’t make any of it work.”

  “Not much hope without the initiation rite,” Thadius mumbled, glancing between me and him timidly. “I told ye, there’s abouts ten people that dwarf history bothered recording that broke through into magic without the Mead. Elder Strazi isn’t as uptight as everyone else, if ye just-“

  “No,” Aedelas flatly shut down his new friend. “Not doing it. Already told you why.”

  Aedelas Blackmoore was determined to make me soulgaze him, as nothing less would convince him that I considered him worthy enough for… well, anything. He refused any other form of ‘initiation’ until I agreed to traumatize him, even if he had to wait until he’s an adult. I’d even offered to Lightforge him to skip all that drama, but he refused that too.

  He was a willful thing, my squire. “Do you intend to keep trying anyway?” I asked.

  “Obviously.”

  I shrugged. “Just so long as it doesn’t interfere with your training. I’ll see you at morning exercises.”

  “Why do you even do those anymore? You don’t need them.”

  “Because you need to see me willing to go through all the same trouble I’m putting you through.”

  Aedelas reddened, though you could barely see it in the glowstone light. “Whatever.”

  I continued my rounds, but there was no big problem that needed my immediate attention, so I ended up just exchanging pleasantries with whoever was still out and about, before I went to do some night-time farsight scrying for a few hours.

  The Badlands were a desert, but a rocky one. There were various rocks and ridges scattered about, including the rare incline that completely hid you from sight in every direction other than the climb up. The top of that ledge was where I headed now.

  “Holy One,” the wrinkled, white-haired Strazi Redcloak greeted me when I joined him on the promontory. Besides Mastran, he was the only dwarf in the entire Wildhammer kindred old enough to have been alive during the War of the Three Hammers, almost three hundred years ago. “Will you stay awhile with me tonight?”

  “Thought I may as well.” I sat down cross-legged and began to look through my spirits’ eyes. “We were in friendly territory until now, I could get away with just scrying randomly during the day. Can’t half-ass it anymore though.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Without the slightest fluttering breeze, my sight flew off faster than the wind.

  The Badlands were a cracked desert of dry earth, scattered boulders, and winding canyons, but otherwise not as horrible as they would be in thirty years if the original history had its way. There were no ogres, for one, because they’re a Draenor species just like the orcs. There was some Dark Iron dwarf presence in a cavern system to the far southern edge of the desert, which my spirits had scouted out some, but only enough to have minor eyes in the region just in case. Angor Fortress didn’t exist.

  Similarly, neither Aerie Peak nor Ironforge had any more of a presence than that, in the Northern and Western mountains respectively, and even those not permanent.

  One reason for this was that Uldaman wasn’t even a concept in dwarven minds before I came along. Without knowing about Uldaman, there was no swarm of Ironforge prospectors searching the Badlands for Titan artefacts. Instead, their efforts were concentrated in the archaeological dig site in Loch Modan to the North, which we passed by on the way over. Through the Explorer’s League, that was as far as the Wildhammers had cast their eyes for the past couple of decades as well.

  According to Brann, it was an issue of infrastructure conflict as much as workload – there was a possibility that the ancient structure might extend under the Loch. The dwarves were currently concentrating their prospecting and tunneling efforts to settle that question before anything else. If it came to a choice between stopping the dig or draining the Stonewrought Dam some, the Explorer’s League could finally look elsewhere while King Magni Bronzebeard came to a decision.

  Draining the dam would mess up the Wetlands, since they were completely submerged before its construction, but the only permanent settlement there that wasn’t some gnoll or other murlock camp was a dwarf fortress. Since Dun Algaz was far and high enough from the floor of the Wetlands themselves that it wouldn’t be affected, the ‘to open or not to open the floodgates’ was something the dwarves could actually consider seriously, unlike in the future after the construction of Menethil Harbor.

  I personally didn’t think the Ironband ruins in Loch Modan extended any further north or west. Based on my memories from the other life, it was more likely that Ironband’s site was Uldaman’s own north-most end.

  But who knew? The local earth spirits had been slow and uninterested in cooperation on the way here. The one here in the Badlands outright rebuffed my entreaties for whatever reason. Since black dragons like Emerentius needed a fair bit of time stationary to tune into large-scale geological footprints, I’d had to ask him to go ahead alone and do just that, to see if he could speed up our timeline.

  A certain game’s areas didn’t scale up at all properly. It wasn’t enough to know that Uldaman was somewhere to the right after you came down the Loch Modan pass. It could be anywhere from hours to days away, and maybe not even this far North. Worse, we could be right on top of the place and not know it, the caves full of troggs and Dark Irons were all artificially dug, and didn’t exist yet.

  The last reason why dwarves had thus far steered clear of the Badlands, other than its general inhospitability, was the Lethlor Ravine. This region to the far east was heavily inhabited by black dragon spawn. Seeing as even black whelps were dangerous to adult humanoids, keeping away was certainly a wise choice. Doubly so since, again, there were no Ogres on Azeroth yet, which meant that their encampments from the second and third wars didn’t exist here. That left those canyons and caverns free to be inhabited by native creatures, such as more adult members of the black dragonflight.

  “I used to come this way to satisfy some of my dark urges,” Emerentius told me when I had Phaseshift manifest a mirage of me next to where he was nestled, in the largest cave to our west. He’d liberated from the biggest pack of gnolls in the area, after culling all the others on the way, which should cut down on the raids on the neighboring dwarf realms for the next few years. “I’d ‘visit’ my kin every decade or two. It wasn’t quite coming up on that time when you saved me, but it’s been some fifteen years now.”

  Do you want me to cull them too, was the unspoken question hanging in the air.

  “Let them be,” I spoke through the mirage. “Unless they attack us.” Despite saying that, I wondered at the logistics of saving the Black Dragonflight one whelp at a time-

  “Put it out of your mind,” Blindi told me through Arrestor, cutting into our conversation from where he’d gone to brood alone on the far side of camp. I always kept at least one spirit suffused through my vicinity for just this kind of utility. And self-defense of course. “While I myself am still stunned that you achieved this miracle to begin with, lightforging the black dragonflight one by one is a task even more impossible than clearing Alterac’s taint by yourself.”

  “The surface area hardly measures up,” I said just for the sake of it, since I already suspected what he’d reply.

  “But the active opposition more than makes up for it. You’d need an army of priests at least on Angevin’s level doing nothing else, and it would still take decades. Centuries, if they scatter and go into hiding.”

  Decades or centuries during which they wouldn’t be doing more productive and varied things with far superior and grand long-term effects, since the black dragons would viciously resist and fight back the whole while.

  Reluctantly, I decided not for the first time against poking that particular hornet’s nest. “Not something we can risk anyway, with Deathwing still a hazard. It would be enough if just one escapes to kick the news up the chain.” I’d nuked Alterac Castle specifically to prevent Onyxia or Syntharia from doing just that, I didn’t need others to talk me out of ruining everything I’d worked for. But the added confirmation was nice.

  I made my distant mirror image over in Emerentius’ cave turn around to look in the direction of the unfamiliar Valkyrie keeping watch over my gold dragon. No doubt it was through her eyes that Blindi had known what we were talking about, never mind barge into our conversation at that precise moment. “What is your name, fair lady?”

  “I am Aerylia, Prophet.”

  “Is this a permanent arrangement, or only while Emerentius is alone?”

  “You could’ve just asked me,” Blindi groused from his spot back in camp. “Any time today.”

  “And you could’ve told me ahead of time too,” I sent through Arrestor, the eight spirits were getting quite good at conveying my tone.

  “I would like an answer as well,” Emerentius said without opening his eyes, still focusing most of his attention on the geological scan. It would be faster if he were asleep, and most of the past few days he had been, but periodic wake-ups were the best security when he was otherwise alone and defenseless. He’d refused to entertain the idea of watchmen or guards, even though both lurdran and Sylvanas had offered.

  “I am here less for him and more for you, Prophet,” Aerylia replied. “Should the worst occur, you will be able to work through me remotely to restore him.”

  Seems I’ll remain the only one capable of resurrecting people for a while yet. “Well Emerentius, guess Odyn doesn’t trust in you as much as I do, alas.”

  “It is for the best,” the dragon told me, surprising all of us. “I would be forced to refuse, or at least defer. It would be unsightly for someone like me to be granted such grace before my senior.”

  “Oh fine,” Blindi harrumphed over in his corner, startling some curious dwarves into chickening out of their plan to approach him. “I’ll send one his way, not that he needs it when all he does is smite fools and sign papers. Make me waste my angels why don’t you, it’s not like he’ll be charging head-first into hell like some people.”

  “I’m coming back,” I spoke in both places. “Keep up the good work, Emerentius.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d rather go without the company for once,” Blindi groused. “Don’t make me get a ladder.”

  I blinked awake a bit too soon for comfort. “For what?”

  “So you can get off my back.”

  Ack, that line! Where had he even heard it? It couldn’t possibly have been in those memories of mine he made a point not to look through, it was too random to have been among them.

  Wasn’t it?