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Book Three — Chapter One
The Dark Portal and Hellfire Peninsula
Vegetaone took one step into the green light.
For a moment, he was nowhere.
There was no stone beneath his boots, no wind against his face, not even the familiar weight of the axe strapped across his back. The light was everywhere, yet he could not see his own hands. Something vast and unseen pulled at him from several directions at once. His stomach rose. A sound like a thousand banners tearing in the same storm filled his ears.
He had time for one thought.
This was a terrible idea.
Then Outland threw him onto the ground.
He landed on one knee, followed immediately by the other. His hand slapped against rough stone and his axe banged against his shoulder. The air smelled of scorched iron and something sweet beneath the smoke, a smell that turned his stomach before he knew why.
Somewhere close, a horn sounded three short notes.
A voice shouted, "Move!"
Vegetaone lifted a finger without looking up. "In a moment."
"MOVE!"
Something exploded behind him.
He seized his axe and hurled himself sideways. Green fire splashed across the stones where he had been kneeling. The blast rolled past him in a wave of heat, burning the hair along his forearm.
He came up with his weapon raised, feet braced, and found himself staring into a sky that had no business existing.
It was red. Not the red of sunset or desert dust, but a vast wounded color streaked with unnatural light. Distant fragments of land hung suspended in empty air. Beyond the broken platform stretched a country of black ridges, ravines, and iron-red earth, and far across it stood a fortress so enormous that it seemed to be holding the horizon in place.
A shadow passed overhead. Winged creatures wheeled around a burning siege engine. One vanished behind a ridge trailing sparks. The sound of its impact came several heartbeats later.
Vegetaone had crossed the Dark Portal expecting danger. He had not expected to arrive in the middle of a war.
A spear hissed past his face.
He ducked.
"Right," he muttered. "The war."
The Portal loomed behind him, framed by stone that looked older and more cruel on this side. Its green center churned as travelers stumbled out of Azeroth. Horde soldiers struggled to move wounded down the shattered steps while Alliance troops defended a separate stretch of the platform. Neither force had much attention to spare for its old enemies.
They had enough new ones.
A horned demon hauled itself over the edge of the upper causeway. Its shoulders were broad enough to block the stairs, and green fire burned in the cracks of its hide. An orc soldier rushed it with a spear. The creature seized the shaft, broke it, and struck the orc hard enough to send him tumbling across the stone.
Vegetaone started forward, then checked himself.
He had been trained to watch before charging. The lesson had been beaten into him by teachers and enemies in roughly equal measure. A few months earlier, he would have forgotten it at the first sign of someone needing help.
Now he saw the demon's dragging right leg, the longer reach of its left arm, and the split across the armor beneath its ribs. It turned to finish the fallen soldier.
Vegetaone ran.
Three steps. Axe low. One sharp change in direction when the demon swung at him. The claw tore through the place where he had been. He drove the axe into the fractured armor, felt the faint enchantment on the blade flare, and twisted free before the demon could seize him.
The creature roared. Two Horde soldiers struck it from the side. Their spears drew its attention long enough for another to thrust beneath its jaw. The demon sagged to its knees, clawed once at the stones, and collapsed.
Vegetaone stood over it breathing hard. The heat rising from its corpse singed the dust around his boots.
One of the soldiers looked him over.
"First day?"
Vegetaone glanced at the Portal. "I've been here less than a minute."
"That explains the expression."
"What expression?"
"The one everyone has when they get here."
"And what does it look like?"
"Like you want to go home."
Vegetaone looked back at the green light. Somewhere on the other side were Durotar, the Barrens, Orgrimmar, and every road that had brought him to this impossible place.
Then he looked at the red sky.
"No," he said.
The soldier smiled wearily. "That usually comes later."
The fallen orc groaned.
Vegetaone turned from the conversation at once. "He's alive."
"For now," the soldier replied. "Help me get him down."
They lifted the wounded man between them and carried him off the upper steps.
A makeshift aid station stood behind a barricade of broken timber and stone. Canvas shelters flapped in the hot wind. Healers hurried among rows of wounded, and soldiers carrying fresh casualties squeezed past others carrying bandages, water, and whatever medicines had survived the journey through the Portal.
Vegetaone saw a troll healer tending an Alliance soldier. Another worker was trying to staunch the bleeding of a wounded dwarf. No one seemed concerned about which banner the patient had fought beneath before arriving on the blanket.
That surprised him, though not because he wanted Alliance soldiers left to die. He had seen enough fighting to understand the cost of a body on the ground. It was simply strange to see old rivalries put aside without speeches, bargains, or arguments.
Outland, he suspected, made some arguments seem smaller.
He lowered the orc onto a blanket. The troll healer knelt at once, knife flashing as he cut through ruined armor.
"Hold him," the healer ordered.
Vegetaone did. The wounded man's shoulders tightened beneath his hands.
"You're the new one," the orc muttered.
"Apparently everyone knows."
"Came through alone?"
"Yes."
The man gave a weak laugh. "Of course you did."
"Why does everyone say it like that?"
The healer shoved Vegetaone's arm out of the way to reach a wound. "Because you're still talking. Stop distracting him."
Vegetaone fell silent. That lasted until the bandage was tied and the healer gestured toward the northern road.
"Thrallmar," he said.
"What about it?"
"If you're Horde and don't know where you're going, go there. They might find something useful for you to do."
"Does that happen often?"
"People arriving without knowing where to go? Constantly."
Vegetaone nodded. "Good."
The troll squinted at him. "Why good?"
"Means I'm not the first idiot."
The wounded orc laughed, winced, and immediately regretted it. The healer glared at both of them.
Vegetaone left before he was given another job involving silence.
His bag had survived the crossing. He checked it beneath the barricade, where the sound of fighting was faint enough that he could hear his own thoughts.
Food. Water. Bandages. Thread and needles. A sharpening stone. Enchanting dust and the small rod he had learned to use carefully. Everything was in place. At the bottom of the new bag lay the old one, folded flat and wrapped in cloth.
He touched the worn leather.
It had been patched so many times that almost none of the original stitching showed. The old bag had accompanied him through Durotar and across the Barrens, along roads he had once been too eager to follow and others he had been afraid to leave.
He had kept it when it stopped being useful, not because he needed another bag, but because forgetting the old one felt too much like forgetting how he had arrived here.
Vegetaone shut the pack and pulled the strap taut. His latest stitching held.
"Good," he said.
A dwarf sitting nearby looked over from the buckle he was repairing.
"Talking to your bag?"
"Yes."
"Fair enough."
The dwarf returned to his work.
Vegetaone decided he might like Outland's standards, provided he lived long enough to learn them.
The road away from the Dark Portal was impossible to miss.
At first Vegetaone thought it had been paved with pale rock. Then he saw the shapes beneath the dust: ribs, long bones, skulls turned upward or crushed into the road surface. They ran in an uneven white band across the red earth, disappearing toward the distant fortress.
He stopped walking.
A Horde soldier behind him muttered for him to keep moving and not stray from the marked route. Vegetaone hardly heard him.
He crouched near the edge of the track. One skull had a narrow face and a long, unfamiliar shape. Another rested beside it, partly buried beneath a strip of blackened leather. Neither was orcish. Neither looked like any human he knew.
The stones had not fallen that way. These people had not simply died beside a road. Someone had laid them into it.
"Who did this?" Vegetaone asked.
The soldier glanced at the bones. "Old war."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I've got time for."
He went on.
Vegetaone stayed crouched a moment longer. He had heard stories about the Horde's old wars, told around cooking fires by people who admired strength and by people who feared what strength could become. Those stories had always sounded like distant things, half legend, half warning.
Here was the part nobody had described well enough.
A road built from the dead.
He stood and stepped around the nearest bones rather than on them. A wagon driver called for the way to be cleared, and Vegetaone moved to the edge of the track. He watched the wagon pass, its wheels grinding over the white line.
Outland did not merely look broken. It remembered being broken. The thought followed him as he continued north.
The road toward Thrallmar carried an entire camp in motion. There were supply wagons, mounted messengers, engineers with strange tools, healers leading tired pack animals, and soldiers walking with their shields across their backs. Some people moved like they had crossed the peninsula a hundred times. Others kept staring up at the sky.
Vegetaone recognized the second group easily.
He stopped staring after walking into a wagon.
The driver leaned over the side. "Enjoying the view?"
Vegetaone rubbed his shoulder. "Not especially."
"Then watch the road."
The wagon creaked on.
Vegetaone watched the road, mostly. It was difficult to ignore ravines that opened without warning, chunks of rock drifting in empty air, or a faraway shape moving against the sky that might have been a creature or a machine. A younger Vegetaone would have gone to investigate all three.
He almost missed being that certain about everything.
Almost.
Near midday, the column slowed. A supply wagon had stopped at the foot of a narrow rise. Its driver was leaning from his seat while two armed escorts watched the ridge above them.
Vegetaone followed their gaze.
Three orcs stood among the rocks.
He relaxed for a heartbeat, then saw their skin. They were red, deeply and unnaturally red, and their armor was blackened by heat. The largest carried an axe broad enough to cut down a tree. Another wore heavy chain around one forearm. The third had dark symbols cut across his exposed chest.
One of the escorts swore.
"Fel orcs!"
Vegetaone drew his axe. He knew the word, but not enough about the people it described. The expressions on the two soldiers' faces told him plenty.
The raiders charged down the slope.
One came straight for Vegetaone. Its axe slammed into his own with enough force to drive him backward. He caught the second blow at an angle, felt the shock run up his arms, and stepped away from the third before it could land.
The red orc grinned. His teeth were broken in places. His eyes shone with a feverish light.
Vegetaone struck his wrist, once, then again. The weapon fell. The attacker barely reacted. A fist like a hammer smashed into Vegetaone's chest and drove him into the side of the wagon.
For an instant, he could not breathe.
The fel orc advanced.
Vegetaone forced air back into his lungs. He could not match the man's strength. He had already established that. He glanced past the attacker to the wagon's rear wheel, stuck deep in a rut, and to the thick rope securing three large crates above it.
He had fixed enough wagons to know exactly what would happen if that rope failed.
Vegetaone rolled aside, caught the fastening with the edge of his axe, and cut it.
The cargo shifted with a crack of timber. The first crate struck the raider behind the knee. The second slammed into his shoulder. The third knocked him beneath the wagon, where his head struck the axle.
The fel orc tried to rise.
Vegetaone stepped in and brought his axe down once. The movement ended.
He remained there for a heartbeat, breathing hard. The dead raider's face was unmistakably orcish. Whatever had happened to him, he was not a demon wearing an orc's shape.
A cry from the other side of the wagon pulled Vegetaone back. One escort had taken a cut across the shoulder. The third fel orc was backing toward the ridge, covering the retreat of the second.
"They're running!" a soldier shouted. "We can catch them!"
He started after the raiders.
Vegetaone caught his arm.
"Wait."
"Let go."
Vegetaone pointed to the driver, who was slumped against the side rail with blood running from his scalp. To the wounded escort. To the crates scattered along the road. And to the front wheel, which had cracked when the load shifted.
"We fix this first."
The soldier stared at him, angry and impatient. Then he looked at his bleeding companion and sheathed his sword.
"Fine."
The word surprised Vegetaone almost as much as his own decision had.
There had been a time when he would have chased the enemy simply because they were still moving. Now it seemed more important to make sure everyone on this road could keep moving too.
The wounded escort needed bandages. The driver needed someone to examine his head wound and make sure he was thinking clearly. After the bleeding slowed, they turned to the wagon.
The crack ran nearly through the wheel's hub. Vegetaone crouched beside it, traced the damaged wood with his fingers, and knew immediately that a proper repair would require a new wheel.
They were far from a workshop. They needed the wagon at Thrallmar, and the supplies were too important to leave in the dust.
"Can't be fixed here," the driver said.
"Not properly," Vegetaone agreed.
"Then we're stuck."
Vegetaone examined the scrap timber from the fallen crates. He had leather straps in his bag, a coil of cord, and enough nails to make a brace if the wood would hold.
"How far does it need to last?" he asked.
"Thrallmar."
"Then we make it last that far."
He fitted a split block along the hub, wrapped the damaged section tightly, and hammered a thin wedge where the wood had opened. The escort who had wanted to chase the raiders helped lift the wagon while Vegetaone tightened the final binding.
The first turn made an ugly creaking sound.
The second was better.
By the third, the wheel was rolling, though it listed slightly toward the left.
The driver studied Vegetaone. "Carpenter?"
"No."
"Wheelwright?"
"No."
"Engineer?"
"No."
The driver folded his arms. "Then what are you?"
Vegetaone tightened the strap on his bag. He had been asked that question more than once during his travels and still had not found an answer that seemed to fit.
"Still deciding."
The driver snorted and climbed into his seat.
They started forward together. The wheel held. Each turn was a small victory, and Vegetaone watched it until he was certain it would survive the next slope.
Thrallmar appeared late in the afternoon. Vegetaone saw the towers first, then the outer barricades and the Horde banners snapping in the hot wind. The settlement looked less like a city than an answer to a difficult question: how much shelter could be built before another attack arrived?
Smiths worked among stacks of weapons. Messengers ran between rough-walled command buildings. Injured soldiers slept wherever there was enough ground to lie down. Armor hung from racks beside the smithy, waiting for repair, and every wagon that entered was followed by another that wanted to leave.
The damaged supply cart creaked through the gate.
A guard stopped Vegetaone just behind it.
"Name?"
"Vegetaone."
"Unit?"
"None."
"Orders?"
"None."
The guard lowered his slate. "You crossed the Portal without orders?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Vegetaone glanced back toward the road. Until the day before, the answer had been easy. The road was there; he had wanted to see what came after. But now he had seen a road made of bones, demons fighting across the threshold of another world, and men who wore orcish faces beneath red skin.
"I wanted to see what was on the other side," he said.
"And?"
"I've seen some of it."
"That bad?"
"Yes."
The guard's expression softened into something close to amusement. "Welcome to Outland. Don't wander outside the walls tonight unless you're assigned to a patrol."
Vegetaone nodded. That sounded sensible enough that he intended to follow it.
He found a space beneath a canvas awning near the outer wall. Someone had left an empty crate there. Vegetaone sat on it, and the crate promptly collapsed beneath him.
He landed in the dirt with an undignified thump.
A tauren soldier standing nearby looked down at him.
"Long journey?"
Vegetaone inspected the broken wood around his legs. "Apparently."
The tauren offered a hand. Vegetaone took it and stood. He could see how the crate had failed: a rotten joint, two missing nails, one split board. With a scrap of timber and half an hour's work, he could have made it useful again.
His hand was already moving toward his bag when he stopped.
All around him were shields in need of patching, torn harnesses, buckled armor, and wagons waiting for attention. Beyond the walls lay a world damaged on a scale he could barely imagine.
He looked at the crate again.
"You can stay broken," he told it.
The tauren laughed. "Wise choice."
Vegetaone sat on the ground instead. It seemed more reliable.
Night did not make Outland properly dark.
The red sky darkened without ever turning black. Unfamiliar lights passed overhead, and far to the north the immense fortress glowed with fires that were too green and too numerous to belong to ordinary campfires.
Vegetaone ate beside a cooking fire with a bowl in his hands. The stew tasted like someone had boiled leather, regretted the decision, and served it anyway. He finished it because he was hungry and because he had learned not to insult the person who had kept him fed.
Around him soldiers argued quietly about patrol routes. A wounded orc snored beneath an awning. A smith's hammer rang against iron, paused, and rang again.
The sound carried him back to the Valley of Trials for a moment. He remembered Gornek, Zuro, Gadrin, Jorn, Harvek, Borak. He remembered every teacher, companion, and stranger who had helped him find his way—or shown him what happened when he failed to think before choosing a road.
His old bag lay folded inside the new one. It had endured because he kept repairing it. But this place was not a bag, a broken axe haft, or a wagon wheel. He could not stitch a world back together.
He was beginning to understand that discovering what lay beyond the next hill was only the first part of traveling. The harder part was learning what had happened there and deciding what it required of him.
A horn sounded beyond the walls.
Three short notes.
The voices around the fire stopped. Soldiers rose, reaching for weapons. The tauren from earlier strode past Vegetaone toward the gate.
"Welcome to Outland," he said.
Vegetaone stood with his bowl still in one hand. "You already said that."
The tauren glanced back. "No. Now I mean it."
A second horn sounded before the first had finished echoing.
Vegetaone set down the bowl, seized his axe, and followed.
A cloud of red dust advanced toward the gate against the wind. Shapes moved inside it: small, quick creatures on too many limbs, and something tall behind them, walking with the confidence of a hunter that expected its prey to run.
The tauren barked orders to the archers on the wall. A team of soldiers was struggling with the gate's right hinge, which had been damaged earlier in the day. A runner was still outside, staggering uphill with a dispatch case beating against his hip.
"What's the order?" Vegetaone asked.
"Hold the gate until the runner and the wounded are clear. Then shut it."
"That's not much of a plan."
"It's the part of the plan we get."
The first small demon sprang out of the dust after the runner. Vegetaone met it halfway down the slope. He caught its forelimb with his axe, felt the weight of the blow twist through his shoulder, and stepped into a second strike beneath its jaw.
The creature fell. Another was already moving.
"Left!" someone shouted.
Vegetaone ducked. An arrow passed over his shoulder and took the second demon in the throat. He glanced toward the wall. A troll archer raised two fingers in acknowledgment and drew again.
The runner reached the gate and collapsed into waiting hands. Beyond him the tall figure raised an arm. Green fire gathered around its fingers, illuminating an angular face and armor decorated with bones.
The tauren saw the spell. "Down!"
Vegetaone looked toward the gate. Three soldiers were still bracing the damaged hinge. If the spell struck them, the doors might never close.
He could not reach the caster in time. He could not pull all three soldiers away. But a heavy iron shield lay half buried beside the road, left behind during the earlier fighting.
Vegetaone seized it, caught the battered handle, and threw himself between the green flame and the hinge crew.
The spell struck.
Heat exploded across the iron. Vegetaone's knees slammed into the dirt. The shield buckled inward, and the leather grip seared the skin of his palm. For a heartbeat, he thought the iron would fold around him, melt, or turn him into another heap of bones on the road.
Then something hissed over his shoulder.
A spear struck the spellcaster in the chest. The creature staggered. Its concentration broke, and the green fire guttered. The archers on the wall loosed together, driving the attacker back into the dust.
"Back!" the tauren shouted. "Now!"
Vegetaone rose with difficulty. He could barely feel his right hand. Two soldiers grabbed his shoulders and pulled him backward while the hinge crew dragged the gate into place.
The doors slammed shut.
From the battlements came the sound of arrows striking flesh and wood. Outside, the demons shrieked. Inside, the wounded runner was being carried toward the healers, dispatch case still clutched against his chest.
Vegetaone looked at the shield. Its face had twisted into a shallow bowl, and one edge glowed dull red.
The tauren looked down at it.
"Planning to keep that?"
"It kept me," Vegetaone said.
"Not for much longer."
Vegetaone let the ruined shield fall. The iron hit the ground with a heavy clang. His palm burned, and he realized he had been gripping the handle tightly enough to tear the skin.
The tauren called for a healer. Vegetaone wanted to say he did not need one, but the words died when he tried to close his hand.
Above them, the archers shifted position to answer another attack. The gates trembled beneath a distant impact. No one celebrated. No one claimed they had won anything more than a little time.
A few hours earlier Vegetaone had believed that surviving the crossing was the great challenge of his first day in Outland. Now he understood that crossing was only the beginning.
He had not stopped the enemy alone. He had held a shield while another warrior threw a spear, archers fired from the wall, and three soldiers closed a gate. Together, they had saved people he would never have been able to reach by himself.
He looked up at the red, impossible sky.
There were things here to fight. There were things here to learn. And there were people whose lives depended on how well he learned to do both.
Tomorrow would be another day in a broken world.
If he was lucky, he would still be there to see it.
End of Chapter One