Cannibalism in Feralas
Editor’s Note: This was sent into us under unusual conditions. We publish it here while not endorsing its contents.
I’d wandered into Thalanaar for the strange. Thalanaar is a strange place. You stand there on a moonless night chewing bloodthistle and you can see the endless desert hit the wildest jungle. Silence hits you in one ear, verdant noise in the next. Death and life come together and attempt to murder each other, or copulate with each other. Or maybe both, in either order. The bloodthistle hits you with its power magic violence urge high and makes you feel like the master of all creation. This explains the dead night elf at my feet. He’d started yelling abuse at me after Ragnaros handed his hammer to me and explained that I was now the lord of flame. I’d had to exert my domain. And dirt doesn’t burn. Maybe the elf had been trying to explain to me how I could make the dirt burn, but his tone didn’t suggest that. While I’d have liked to know his name first, I don’t speak elvish.
In the right light, all actions look defensible.
There’d been a rumor that the trolls down near the Dire Maul were going to be roasting a lad, and so I, in the interest of honest journalism, set about heading down that way. My filthy assistant was no-where to be found, though. A ragged little man, a gnome whose name really doesn’t matter. Finding him was a simple matter – You merely had to jam your hand into the nearest bush to pull him out, naked, and with some equally filthy woman. Shameless debauchery. Sickens me. Should be a law against it. After hurrying off the half-naked elf woman back to Thalanaar’s buildings, I tossed the gnome down the road and instructed him to keep ahead of me.
You never know what these areas are like. There could be fifty traps ahead of me on these roads, where the air is dark, thick and mysterious. No matter how much the gnome complained, he stayed ahead of me. I’d trained him well, and he remembered the horrors I could inflict if I felt like it. We encountered spikes dug in pits on the road, trees covered with invisible beetles that stung you if you so much as urinated on the trunk, and horrible claw trap designs that swung like pendulums from above branches, snapping you up and leaving you hanging there forever. I rescued my gnome from this last one myself. Good help is hard to find.
As we approached the Dire Maul, a screaming, crazed barbarian with green skin and tribal markings rushed us; a spear in his hand and gibberish in his mouth. The gnome screamed and dove for cover, landing in a nearby bush. This was far from the worst I’d seen, however. My lips parted to utter the word of a single horrific deity, forgotten by most of Azeroth, and the trollish madman stopped in his tracks, clutching his head for the pain. Screaming an ancient dwarvish war-cry, I hurled myself forward and pulverized every last bone in his scrawny body.
The hammer fell silent and shadows fell upon me. More trolls, big, sick, hideous things, loomed over me. I spoke no trollish, but there is a language between races. With a little effort, anything can be understood. It turned out, I’d just beaten into inedible chunks the lad they were meant to be roasting. As such, these menacing brutes were not happy with me. This was a challenge of diplomacy, but nothing my fine journalistic instincts had not been trained to handle.
I reached into the nearby bush, yanking my gnomish colleague out and shooing the trollish lass back to Dire Maul. The path behind us was clear, and I could see a branch that could be easily chopped off its supports and hinder pursuit.
But, instead, dinner with the trolls was delicious. They slathered the body with liferoot and wrapped it in a blood red vine I’d never seen before before hauling it onto burning coals and letting it cook there. The flavors were trapped inside and allowed to broil.
Running had always been an option, but then I’d not have gotten the story. Besides, his name really didn’t matter, and I had a professional job to do.
This Gnome servant of yours; does he have siblings? I could use a reliable servant with reputable references.
#13 – I would think it fitting that we refer to the Gnome in the past tense now, wouldn’t you? After all, his name really didn’t matter.
Nice read.
Perhaps, one of the best articles here.
I am just speechless.
I need to go write a speech about the horrors written of in this “article.”