Bang, bang, bang!
A burst of loud, rough knocking woke Jess.
“Jess! Jess Seso!”
“Coming!”
Jess threw on his shirt and opened the door. Outside, people were heading down the street in groups toward the city gates. Some kind of grand gathering seemed to be taking place there, judging by the noise.
A tall, tough-looking fellow who only reached Jess’s chest grabbed him by the collar.
“What are you doing, huh? Sleeping in on a day this important? You’re going to miss it!”
And “tall” was no joke. The fellow was a dwarf with a thick black beard, a broad, fleshy face, and a linen patch over his right eye. For a dwarf, he really was tall.
“So what’s happened, Gred?” Jess asked impatiently.
“Don’t you want to see Alleria Windrunner?” the dwarf exclaimed. “She’s a ranger commander from Quel’Thalas, General Turalyon’s sweetheart! If you miss her now, when are you ever going to get another chance to see an elven beauty like that?”
At the sound of Alleria Windrunner’s name, Jess felt his heart give two hard thumps.
Not because he had any particular feelings for the elven commander. It was because that familiar name had suddenly stirred memories of his previous life, memories long buried in his mind.
Yes, he had been transported into another world. He had lived here for seventeen years.
Something had felt wrong from the moment he was pulled out of his mother’s womb. His memories of his previous world remained as clear as if they had been carved in stone. Not even the rapid development of his brain between the ages of three and five had erased them.
One moment, he'd been sitting at his computer, fully focused on progressing through a World of Warcraft raid. Then a wave of drowsiness had hit him, and everything before his eyes had changed.
He was born in Lordaeron's capital. His father was a guard stationed on the city walls, and his mother was the daughter of a farmer from Brill.
His childhood had gone fairly smoothly, but when he was ten, the Dark Portal opened and the wars with the orcs broke out. Fortunately, the capital of Lordaeron had largely escaped the devastation.
Refugees from the Kingdom of Stormwind brought stories of chaos and disaster in the distant south. From those accounts, Jess realized that everything here was exactly as the game had described it.
Which meant that if he wanted to live out his life in peace, he had to leave Lordaeron and settle in Stormwind.
According to the game's story, a little over a decade from now, glorious Lordaeron would be utterly destroyed by the Scourge, and plague would ravage the entire kingdom.
The dead would not even be allowed to rest. Necromancy would drag them out of their graves and force them to fight for undead masters bent on conquering the world, until their bodies fell apart and they could no longer stand.
Stormwind, on the other hand, might have been destroyed for now, but the coming decades would be relatively peaceful, without any disasters on that scale.
Jess certainly wasn't going to sit around waiting to die. But his parents had spent their entire lives in Lordaeron and refused to move, no matter what he said. Nor could he possibly convince them of events he had learned about in another world, events that wouldn't happen for another dozen or so years.
Luckily, they didn't object to young Jess going out to seek adventure.
After Stormwind was destroyed in the war, King Terenas II of Lordaeron spent a fortune helping the Wrynn royal family rebuild their home. He recruited craftsmen and young laborers from kingdoms far and wide, even from among the dwarves.
Jess, then fifteen, took advantage of the opportunity and traveled with refugees returning to the Kingdom of Stormwind. He arrived in the city the game had called a city of hope, and which would later become the Alliance capital.
Back in the present, Gred was using his powerful body like an icebreaker, shoving his way through the spectators and dragging Jess along, laughing heartily as he went.
He made no attempt to hide his excitement. Alleria Windrunner, that legendary master of combat, was exactly the kind of woman he adored: a warrior who combined beauty with strength. And unlike those pompous elves who loved to boast, she was a true hero who could take on a hundred enemies by herself.
Jess was excited too. After all, this would be the first famous World of Warcraft figure he had ever seen with his own eyes.
For the first seventeen years of his life, he'd heard those familiar names only from his parents, from country folk and townspeople, or in news brought back from the battlefield.
He had never met any of those people. He hadn't even seen one.
Jess followed Gred through the inner gate and into the Valley of Heroes—though, of course, it wasn't called that yet.
Without its statues, the valley was a wreck. Years of war had left it devastated. The flames of demon-wielding warlocks and red dragons had reduced the once-lush, shaded riverbanks to a charred mess.
Veterans of the wars with the orcs marched in formation across the newly rebuilt bridge at the city gates. Their armor still bore scorch marks and dents from blades, and the weapons and shields they carried displayed the emblems of different kingdoms.
Their destination lay far to the southeast, far to the southeast: the Dark Portal, the passage through which the orcs had come into this world.
High General Turalyon was mustering an army at Nethergarde Keep. His plan was to cross the Dark Portal the orcs had built, strike at their homeworld of Draenor, and put an end to the Orcish Horde's threat to Azeroth once and for all.
But among the crowds watching the army depart, Jess was the only one who knew how it would end.
A few years later, the orc leader Ner'zhul would unleash magic that tore Draenor apart. To prevent the catastrophe from spreading to Azeroth, the expedition would deliberately destroy the Dark Portal from the Draenor side.
From then on, every member of the expedition would be stranded in that dying world.
To honor their sacrifice, Stormwind's king would order statues erected on this bridge in memory of the expedition's heroes—the Sons of Lothar—and name this place the Valley of Heroes.
“Where's Alleria? I want to see Alleria Windrunner!” Gred bellowed, utterly oblivious to the solemn mood around him.
Stolen story; please report.
Almost everyone there, whether a citizen of Stormwind or a member of the expedition, knew how dangerous the mission was. They had come to give the soldiers a proper send-off.
But to a dwarf like Gred, fighting to the death against an enemy capable of destroying the world was about the most romantic thing imaginable.
As he gazed at the dwarven warriors from Aerie Peak marching in the ranks, there was nothing but envy in his eyes.
“If a troll's bat hadn't blinded me in one eye and ruined my hammer throw, I'd be going through that Dark Portal with Kurdran Wildhammer myself,” he said regretfully in Dwarven-accented Common. “Then I'd be General Alleria's closest comrade-in-arms. And who knows whether your High General Turalyon or I would end up winning the beauty's heart?”
At those words, the nearby citizens quietly withdrew the irritated looks they'd been giving him.
Before the wars with the orcs, humans, dwarves, and elves had been divided by deep grievances and conflicts. They had even fought one another on several occasions.
But now everyone in Stormwind knew that if the dwarves and elves hadn't stood beside humanity in its hour of need, fighting the invaders from another world with everything they had, the people of Stormwind might never have had the chance to return home.
“Alleria has two younger sisters who are just as beautiful,” Jess said. “You've still got a chance, Gred.”
“Hah!” Gred laughed awkwardly. “I'm not interested in silly young girls. I like mature women.”
“Lady Sylvanas, the middle Windrunner sister, is said to be over six hundred years old.”
“Over six hundred?! Then her older sister must be—”
“Shh...”
Jess had spotted a golden phoenix banner with blue feathers, the standard of the high elves, approaching in the distance.
“They're coming! They're coming! Help me up onto the railing... I can't see!”
Gred muttered and complained while Jess strained with all his might to lift the barrel-shaped dwarf, who weighed almost 220 pounds, even a little.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jess saw a company of high elves marching in formation. They wore silver-white armor and carried engraved spears and silver bows. Sea-blue cloaks snapped in the wind blowing through the valley. Men and women alike were graceful and composed, in sharp contrast to the humans and dwarves.
The female elf riding a white horse at the front was probably Alleria Windrunner, the ranger captain of Silvermoon City.
She wore an emerald-green cloak, with long, pale-gold hair falling to her chest. Her eyes, glowing blue with arcane power, stood out even in the sunlight as she stared resolutely ahead.
Alleria's cheeks were startlingly gaunt. Her narrow, pointed nose and long, sharply upturned ears looked rather strange by human standards.
Jess still remembered the first time he'd seen elves from Quel'Thalas back in Lordaeron. He'd felt as though he'd encountered aliens.
They looked much the same as their counterparts in the game, only more detailed and real. Yet Jess no longer saw them the way he had when he'd been playing.
After more than a decade in another world, he suspected he'd drifted further and further from the office drone he'd once been, becoming more and more like a native of Lordaeron.
If he hadn't known for certain that the Scourge would invade in another dozen or so years, he'd never have crossed the sea and left his home behind to come to Stormwind.
Maybe it was because he had no special advantage—the kind heroes in those stories always got.
That's right. Even now, there was no old master living inside a ring, no ancient bloodline suddenly awakening, no arcane gem bursting with power, and no whispered guidance from a god or demon lord.
He was just a laborer from the north. Apart from his thick Brill accent when he spoke Common, there was nothing to distinguish him from the locals.
Other people got sent to another world. Then there was him.
If he'd started out with some kind of system that let him assign stat points, like the heroes in other stories about being sent to another world, maybe he'd already have the power to stop all this and save the world in their place.
Instead, he could barely scrape by on what he earned with his own two hands. At best, he could use his knowledge of future events to pick somewhere safe and stable and lie low.
Still, he had to earn enough to bring his aging parents from Lordaeron to Stormwind. If he couldn't save the world, he could at least take care of the people who mattered most to him.
Gred watched the expedition gradually disappear into the distance and sighed.
“Got any plans for today?”
“Check the notice board for work,” Jess replied. “Next month's rent is due soon.”
They chatted as they walked back toward the inner gate with the crowd.
“Mine too,” Gred said. “A few Bronzebeards told me Baron Lescovar's raising the rent next month. From five silver to six.”
“Why don't you move?”
“Where to? Rents are going up all over Stormwind, and every cheap place is full! What, am I supposed to move to Goldshire? I'd get my head chopped off by orcs on the road.”
“Haven't they resumed regular patrols on the road to Goldshire?”
“They have. Just last month, they found a patrolman's sword and intestines by Crystal Lake.”
“His sword and... intestines?”
“Human intestines. Not orc intestines.”
“Could've been wolves.”
“Does it matter, Jess? Wolves, orcs, murlocs—Elwynn Forest is worse than the damned Hinterlands, I'm telling you. At least Amani trolls understand a little Dwarven. You can shout, ‘Spare me!’ and they won't mistake it for ‘Stick my head on a spear!’”
“They'll stick your head on a spear anyway,” Jess said with a laugh.
“Well, that's true. But at least then it'd feel like you'd fought your enemies to the death, instead of getting eaten for no reason by some brainless animal. You know what I mean?”
Still joking, the two arrived at the notice board by the crossroads in the Trade District. A few months earlier, nearly everything posted there had been construction and repair work around the city. Now a good portion of the notices were wanted posters for bandits and wandering orc chieftains in Elwynn Forest, along with recruitment notices for jobs over in Redridge Mountains.
Stormwind's reconstruction was nearing completion. Most of the remaining, more specialized work had been taken over by the local craftsmen's guild, the Stonemasons' Guild. That meant outsiders like them would have to find some other way to make a living.
Jess rented a room on a backstreet behind the Trade District's trading hall, in one of the first buildings to go up in the new part of the city. Most of the refugees lived in the old districts. The ones willing to settle in the new quarters were usually outsiders and laborers like him.
But as the new districts grew busier and more prosperous, his rent had reached four silver a month. It would probably go up again soon. Dwarves always had good sources of information.
For someone who used to play World of Warcraft, four silver sounded like a joke. Back when he played, he always had hundreds of thousands of gold sitting in his bags and barely thought anything of it. A single trip to the auction house could mean thousands upon thousands of gold changing hands.
Here, though, plenty of people in Stormwind worked hard for an entire month and still didn't earn more than a few silver coins.
Jess remembered a man who polished veterans' armor and weapons near his home last year, charging only two or three copper coins per job. At the time, the silver mines in Westfall hadn't yet been retaken from the Blackrock orcs, and one silver coin was worth nearly two hundred copper.
The man was a Stormwind native who'd once had some connection to a noble, but he was struggling badly now. Apparently, ogres had occupied his house during the invasion, and rebuilding it had left him deep in debt.
Jess was worse off than that man. At least the fellow had a trade. Jess had nothing to offer but his strength, and the money Terenas II had paid him was almost gone.
They'd originally been promised one gold coin each. By the time the wages were actually handed out, that had become forty silver.
The noble in charge of paying them claimed that the kobolds had been driven out of the gold mines around Goldshire. Gold was cheap now, he said, and forty silver would easily buy one gold coin.
But none of those workers had seen a gold coin or a kobold since arriving in the Kingdom of Stormwind. Only Jess knew that even twenty years later, the kobolds still wouldn't have been completely cleared out of the mines. By then, even the kobold boss would have gold teeth.
Besides, if the mines were producing gold again, why not pay them in gold coins—or at least chunks of raw gold of roughly equivalent weight?
Work was getting harder to find by the day. Just last week, he'd taken a job escorting lumber from Eastvale Logging Camp to Stormwind. A pack of gray wolves had followed him and the other hired hands for two or three hours along the way. When they got back, each of them was paid a miserable thirty-five copper coins. What a joke.
And even jobs like that had crowds of out-of-towners like him fighting for them.
Just as he was worrying about his prospects, a rather unusual notice caught his eye.
“Assistant wanted. Some knowledge of history and archaeology required. Familiarity with herbs preferred. Applicants should be patient and possess other good qualities. Work location: Mage Quarter. Edan Marin.”
Edan Marin?
Jess remembered an archmage named Marin living in Stormwind's Mage Quarter. His daughter was also an accomplished mage, and more than a decade later she would take part in the northern campaign fought by the combined forces of the Alliance and Horde.
If this Edan Marin was that same Archmage Marin, wouldn't getting hired as his assistant be the perfect opportunity to become a mage?
History, archaeology, knowledge of herbs... He'd never studied history or archaeology systematically, but he figured his familiarity with this world's lore would be enough to blow most ordinary people out of the water in those subjects.
And since the mage had posted his advertisement on a board meant for migrant workers and ordinary townsfolk, he probably wasn't expecting too much from his applicants.
Once he became a mage, money wouldn't be a problem anymore... right?