The list of creative projects I want to get around to is staggeringly long. The list of creative projects I actually get around to finishing is… uh… let’s not go there.
But once in a blue moon I do get a flash of inspiration and actually make something. Today, it’s one of my rare forays into fan fiction. I’ve been wanting to explore the character of my monk from World of Warcraft for a while, and I put together this little slice of life piece for that purpose.
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Out of Time and Out of Place
Dawn broke over Dornogal, and Nisa Oakfist began her day.
First came breakfast. The Earthen who ran the inn didn’t know how to cook food for more fleshly creatures, so a helpful Pandaren had set up shop to fill the gap. He served Nissa a bowl of steaming hot noodles in a sweet sauce.
It was delicious, and she enjoyed it not at all. It was too strange, too different. It tasted nothing like the noodles she had eaten as a child, in a small town she was fairly sure no other living being even remembered the name of.
Then she headed into the city. She wore only simple pants, sandals, a beaded necklace, and a cloth wrapping around her breasts, leaving most of her pale violet skin and the crimson tattoos upon it exposed. Her long ears poked out from the hair – a deeper violet than her skin – that she kept cut at shoulder length. The night’s chill was fading, and the sun was just barely peaking over the tops of the great towers erected by the Earthen.
The light stung her eyes, and its heat weighed oppressively against her skin. She felt tired; this was no hour for a Night Elf to be waking. The rising of the sun should mean a time for sleep, for rest.
This was just one of many discomforts she had learned to endure as she increasingly found herself working with members of other races, who mostly worked by day and slept by night. The “Alliance,” the “Horde” – she had scars older than both factions combined, but somehow the entire world was now shaped by their actions.
Already the city was buzzing with activity. As the hunt for Xal’atath had come here, to Khaz Algar, the peoples of the world had descended upon this once isolated place, and now representatives of virtually every known race walked the stone terraces.
Nisa looked upon them and found mostly alien faces staring back at her. There was a human, their face lined with age yet their entire species younger than Nisa. There was an Orc, a creature from another world now marooned on Azeroth. There was a Blood Elf, their visage so like Nisa’s own and yet so different. She spotted a Troll, and was almost comforted. Though their people and hers had been bitter enemies for eons, at least there was a people who had existed when Nisa had been born, though she reminded herself this particular Troll was still twelve thousand years her junior.
It was lonely. The world had become so strange she could hardly reconcile it with the world of her youth.
She passed the native Earthen, as well, and they at least were as old as her, or perhaps even older, though most of them had lost their memories of anything from more than a few thousand years ago. Perhaps she had even fought alongside some of them in the War of the Ancients, though she had yet to recognize any familiar faces here in Dornogal.
Still, she struggled to feel any kinship with them, even if they were more familiar than most people she encountered. Their ways were simply too different, driven by rigid edicts handed down by the Titans in an age long past. Their ways were of stone and steel, not shadow and leaf.
Even when she encountered her own people, Nisa often struggled to relate these days. Those who were old enough to remember life from before the Sundering had scattered origins from across the old empire. Each remembered the old world, but a different slice of it. Most of them were islands, alone in a changed world. Nisa had no surviving family, and the last of her comrades from the War of the Ancients had died at the gates of Ahn’Qiraj a thousand years ago.
She made her way quickly across the city, arriving at the grand courtyard of the Contender’s Gate. There had been a lull in the fighting since the battle in Hallowfall where the Dark Heart had been shattered, but everyone knew that was a temporary state of affairs, and Nisa knew that better than most. As she had for the last ten thousand years, she filled the time between battles by preparing for the next one.
She found a target dummy, a crude figure of wood adorned with a beat-up old metal breastplate, and she settled into a fighting stance.
She had learned some new techniques during her time in Pandaria, but by and large she had practiced the same way for ten millennia. She had not earned her last name idly; unarmed fighting was her specialty.
She warmed up by slowly moving through some fighting postures. She kept her breathing slow and steady, and her face calm. To the outside observer, she would have seemed the picture of serenity.
Then, she began to strike. Her fists and kicks rang off the dummy’s breastplate like the beat of a drum, harsh and steady. She felt no pain, even as the metal shivered under her blows. Her body had been hardened by centuries of such practice.
The hated sun rose higher in the sky. Her eyes watered, and sweat shone upon her skin.
Others arrived in the court and began their own training. A pair of humans clashed with their swords, and Nisa remembered watching one of her fellow Sentinels die at the point of a human blade just a few decades ago. An Orc strung her bow, and Nisa remembered seeing her favourite meditation glade torn down by Warsong axes. A Goblin conjured flame from his hands, and Nisa remembered the fires that had rained from the sky.
She pushed herself harder in the hopes exhausting her body would empty her mind, but so rote was the routine that her mind began to wander, to remember, and twelve thousand years of memories rose up to swallow her.
The gardens of Zin’Azshari where she’d had her first kiss – consumed in emerald flame. The moonlit fields where she’d learned to ride her first nightsaber – drowned beneath the Great Sea. The glades of Felwood where she and her sisters had spent long centuries training for the Legion’s return – poisoned beyond recognition. Zarissa’s face – wracked with pain as the Qiraji cut her down.
Everyone she had ever loved, gone. The world she had known, gone. Forced to live under this burning sun for the comfort of child races who played with the flame of magics her people had mastered and then rejected millennia before. Twelve thousands years of loss and grief and pain and rage that had left her an alien in her own world, surrounded by people she could never possibly understand.
For a moment, it was too much. For just one single moment, she lost control.
Her wordless shout rang off the walls of the Contender’s Gate, and she struck the dummy with her full force. Its wooden frame shattered into splinters, its steel breastplate crumpling like paper. What was left of the dummy crashed into the wall behind it with thunderous force, kicking up a small cloud of dust.
All eyes turned to her. She lowered her hands, breathing heavily. Her lungs burned. Her fists still felt no pain.
The other adventurers gradually got back to their training. Once it became clear Nisa wasn’t going to break anything else, a few of the Earthen who maintained this part of Dornogal got to work removing the dummy’s wreckage and assembling a new one, their movements rote and mechanical.
The Earthen were perhaps not so different from her after all, she realized. Both of them bound to ancient duties. That was what kept her going. Not altruism, not heroism. Simply habit.
It was not that she no longer believed there were things in the world worth fighting for. She did, mostly. There were still moments, when the moon was high and the cold wind of night kissed her face, that her heart swelled with love for the beauty of all that Elune had wrought.
But that wasn’t really what kept her fighting these days. It was simply that being a soldier was who she was – what she was. It was the one constant, the only thing thing that the march of time had not been able to steal from her.
Just like the Earthen, she was a relic of a lost age, out of time and out of place, with only her duty to guide her. This was her edict: to stand watch, to be a Sentinel.
She moved to another dummy, settled into a fighting stance, and began once more to train.
Superior Realities 