“I went for a look around the Mage Quarter,” Jess answered Gred, tearing off another bite of bread.
His rented room was right up ahead. If Gred wanted to drag him out for a night of drinking, there was no way he could agree.
In fact, he didn't want to agree to anything or even talk to Gred. All he wanted was to rush into his shabby little room and sleep. After what he'd been through, he felt like he could pass out at any second if he didn't lie down soon.
Gred looked him up and down. “The Mage Quarter? You look like somebody sucked you dry. Anyone who didn't know better would think you'd been down to Old Town.”
Jess poked Gred in the chest with his half-eaten loaf of bread. “I'm not like you. Come on, what do you want?”
Gred glanced at the workers lying nearby and lowered his voice. “Work, obviously.”
“Can't. Can't do it.” Jess waved him away. “I'm not doing another thing today.”
“Tomorrow. One trip to Westbrook Garrison and back. One silver and thirty copper. You in or not? You don't even have to walk. We'll ride in a wagon. You can take a nap on the way.”
“Escorting food?”
“Army rations. Coming from Moonbrook, bound for Lakeshire. The expeditionary forces at Nethergarde Keep need them... Things at the Dark Portal sound complicated. Looks like fighting's about to start. But we're only escorting them as far as Goldshire on our leg, and we'll have soldiers with us. No need to worry about safety.”
“What if orcs attack us? You'd risk your life for one silver?”
“Orcs? At Westbrook Garrison? Let the fellows on the next leg worry about that!” The dwarf climbed the steps. “The orcs all come from Redridge. Westfall and Moonbrook are safer than here, little brother. And with soldiers alongside us, it's free money!”
“That doesn't sound bad.”
Jess gave a tired laugh. Add that silver coin and his rent would be covered for sure.
At noon the next day, the two signed in and joined the caravan heading for Westbrook Garrison.
Just as Gred had said, they encountered nothing on the way there. No wolves, murlocs, kobolds, or orcs. Nothing at all. Elwynn Forest was calm and peaceful.
The food wagons, though, were supposed to reach the garrison at around three in the afternoon, and they ended up running several hours late.
At dusk, red sunlight filtered through the trees onto the tents pitched beside Westbrook Garrison. The camp by the river looked like a row of freshly baked pudding cakes.
The wagons finally arrived. The quartermaster spoke with the soldiers, and it sounded as though they'd run into some trouble near Sentinel Hill.
They couldn't wait any longer. The hired guards and soldiers put on their armor and picked up their weapons. It was already late. They had to get going as quickly as possible.
Six fully armed soldiers were escorting the caravan. They carried longswords and shields bearing Stormwind's lion crest, and wore intimidating full helmets with nose guards and blue plumes. The equipment looked expensive enough to hurt.
Add the twenty or so armed militiamen hired like Jess and Gred, and no band of stragglers with any sense would dare fight them head-on for a few wagons of grain.
But the wagons on the return trip were empty, and the soldiers had to walk back. Everyone had grown a bit careless.
Several recruits on their first escort job talked about the gray wolves and bears in the forest, and how starving animals might go mad and attack a caravan. Jess had faced down a few wolves while hauling timber from Eastvale Logging Camp, but he'd never been in a real fight.
Listening to them made him uneasy whenever he looked toward the forest.
Before this, his mind had been filled with the Curse of Agony he'd suffered beneath the Slaughtered Lamb. He hadn't even thought about what the name Westbrook Garrison meant.
Just then, a lone wolf howled deep in the woods. The quartermaster in charge of the grain blew a sharp whistle to tell everyone to get ready to leave.
That howl suddenly brought back Jess's memories from more than ten years ago.
Wait... Wasn't Westbrook Garrison the place overrun by gnolls?
Gnolls were humanoid monsters found throughout the Kingdom of Stormwind. Many young people couldn't tell them apart from kobolds.
If kobolds were rotten little thieves, gnolls were bloodthirsty bandits. Their size, fighting ability, and viciousness were on entirely different levels.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Several gnoll tribes had once joined forces and fought conflicts against Stormwind on the scale of a war.
They'd eventually lost to the regular human army and fled. Nearly wiped out in Elwynn Forest, they scattered into the nearby mountains and wildlands. But after decades of recovery, these savage, barely intelligent creatures had returned, crossing rivers and bridges to slip into Elwynn Forest from every direction.
Westbrook Garrison was still being rebuilt after the orc wars, but in another decade or so it would become an outpost against the Riverpaw tribe living in Westfall.
Jess trotted up beside a Stormwind guard. “Have gnolls attacked food wagons before?”
The guard tilted his head. “Gnolls? When the orc Horde attacked Westfall a few years back, they killed one of the Riverpaw tribe's leaders. The Riverpaws don't have a chief now. They can't organize themselves well enough to bother us. Still, don't go wandering along the riverbank on your own. It's dangerous there.”
The Riverpaws didn't have a leader?
Jess nodded and slowly returned to his place. Looking at the growing shadows beneath the trees, he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong.
If the Riverpaws had no leader, when did Hogger show up?
In World of Warcraft, that gnoll chief had terrified countless new Alliance players and beaten back Stormwind's attempts to capture him time and again.
Had he even been born yet? If so, how old was he? Was he fully grown?
A cool breeze passed through. It was a rare bit of relief on a hot summer day. Gred gave a satisfied hiss and scratched his neck.
The wind moved on through the trees, rustling the leaves. The air felt damp.
Jess thought he heard metal scraping together. Gnolls?
It didn't sound like the steady footsteps of armored soldiers. The noises were messy and hurried, as though something was chasing something else. But as the wind died down, everything fell quiet again.
The aftereffects of the Curse of Agony still hadn't entirely gone away, even after a night's sleep. His ears were ringing and he still felt sick. Jess didn't dare decide there were enemies nearby based on that alone.
Besides, gnolls had barely attacked humans since the war. What were the odds they'd choose the one escort job he happened to join?
He was taking a deep breath to fight down the urge to vomit when a sudden thud came from the other side of the wagon.
Something had struck it.
“What was that?” the quartermaster at the front asked, turning around.
Whoosh...
Thud!
Whoosh... Thunk!
“Ah!”
Whoosh...
“By the Light... Orc crossbow bolts! Orc attack!” Shouts rose from the front and rear of the line.
“Orcs?!” Gred gripped his logging axe in both hands and looked around. “Where are the orcs? Didn't you say there weren't any here?”
“Ha! Lalalalala!”
“Alalalala!”
“Wadadada!”
Strange howls burst out of the dark woods. Twisting black shapes came stumbling and rolling from behind trees, bushes, boulders, and fences.
One militiaman was running with a hand pressed to his neck, where a crossbow bolt had struck him. A dark figure met him head-on and chopped off his head with a blade. His body even took a few more steps before falling.
“Damn it, those aren't orcs! They're gnolls!” Gred leaned against the wagon and muttered something in Dwarven. Then he climbed up, stood on the grain sacks, and raised his axe. “Come at me, you half-headed mongrels!”
The gnolls seemed to understand Common. Three or four of them heard the dwarf's insults and came shouting toward him.
They wore ragged armor of unknown make and carried all kinds of weapons stolen from orcs and humans. Their fighting was chaotic, but utterly wild. They held nothing back. While the Stormwind guards fought in groups of two or three, backing each other up, most of the militiamen were scattered almost at once.
A gnoll climbed onto the grain wagon. Gred split its head with one blow, and it shuddered and slid off. But the dwarf lost his grip on his axe, and it fell off with the gnoll, still buried in its skull.
Another gnoll climbed up at the same time and swung a small hammer at him. Gred caught its wrist with his bare hand, and the two locked into a contest of brute strength.
The frenzied gnoll was a little taller than the dwarf, yet neither could overpower the other. Gred yelled at the top of his lungs, completely missing a smaller gnoll climbing onto the wagon behind him with a meat cleaver.
“Behind you, Gred!” Jess rushed around and drove his sword into the smaller gnoll's waist. The creature howled and kept scrambling on all fours to get away. The wound barely slowed it down.
Jess swung again, but only caught one of its clawed legs. It lost its footing and Gred kicked it off the wagon into the muddy water.
By now the rain was pouring down. Jess wiped the hair plastered across his forehead and eyes away with his arm, walked over, and pointed his sword at the smaller gnoll's chest.
“If I don't kill you, you'll kill me...” he muttered, then drove the sword in hard.
The gnoll, stabbed straight through the chest, suddenly sprang up like a mad dog and ran coughing violently toward the river. Jess nearly jumped out of his skin. He hadn't expected something stabbed in the chest to be that lively.
“Jess, hurry! Get my axe back! I can't hold him much longer!”
Gred was still wrestling the taller gnoll on the wagon. Jess dropped everything else and ran to the gnoll with the split skull. He planted a foot on its neck and pulled the axe free with all his strength. There was a sharp crack as the force bent the gnoll's head out of place.
“Catch!”
Jess threw the axe up onto the wagon. Without even looking, Gred caught it in midair and smashed the handle into the gnoll's eye socket.
Howling, the gnoll stumbled back two steps and fell off the wagon. Gred roared and jumped after it. There came a jumble of flesh striking metal, then silence.
Jess held his sword and started looking around for anyone else who needed help. Before he'd seen much, a Stormwind helmet with a head still inside came flying out of nowhere and struck the wagon wheel in front of him. Blood spattered across his face.
What was going on?
He looked in the direction the head had come from. Through the curtain of rain, an enormous figure stood on a headless corpse, bringing a huge iron axe down again and again on a Stormwind guard. The guard's helmet was already full of blood. He couldn't have much strength left.
Jess didn't think. He threw his sword straight at the monster. The battered, slightly bent blade spun once, struck the creature's absurdly huge orcish shoulder armor, bounced off, and stuck in the dirt.
The giant gnoll turned its head. Jess could finally make out what it looked like.
Calling its expression vicious would have been a stretch. It looked more like a complete idiot. But the sheer threat of its size was more than enough to make up for those stupid-looking eyes.
Jess's heart hammered so hard it felt ready to burst out of his chest. All the discomfort left over from the Curse of Agony vanished.
Just then, the gnoll gave a cold laugh and muttered one word.
“Hogger.”