Seekers of the Epitaph: World of Azeroth

by Xarmar13

Trial of Mercy

“I thank you for your assistance in this matter,” Rexxar said as he collected the sack behind the gronn’s corpse. “I wish that I could aid you further on your journey, but I have other matters to attend to. My associate is expecting this sack and I cannot be away from Thunderlord Stronghold for too long.”

The group was a little disappointed that the mok’nathal wasn’t able to help them with the remaining gronn but they would find another way to fight them.

“We thank you for assisting us with our quest to vanquish the Sons of Gruul,” Lokosh said. “Before we move on, we need to get to Scalewing Shelf and begin our hunt for Maggoc. Can you lead us there?”

Rexxar nodded. He silently went back the way they came and led them back to Thunderlord Stronghold. From there they left the town and walked down the road they originally traveled, except at the last fork in the road he pointed toward an eastern road that led upward. “Scalewing Shelf is through that pass. Be warned that the wildlife up there is ferocious and there is a gnomish outpost whose occupants are hostile to Horde races, avoid it at all costs.”

With the warning given, the group proceeded up the pass, walking past a broken robot and into what appeared to be a barren wasteland. From the top of the pass they could see some things around them. The wildlife consisted mainly of ravagers and the gnomish outpost could be seen in the distance. To their right they could almost make out what appeared to be crystals and more of those strange dragons like the one Feloma tamed earlier.

It seemed unlikely that Maggoc would be to the south since the dragons were there and gronn like to hunt their kind so they decided to head north, keeping a wide berth from the gnomish outpost and allowing Feloma to cause a few of the nearby ravagers to fight each other for her entertainment.

It wasn’t long before the ravagers became sparse around them as a species of spiky raptors with dark brown scales and an underbelly of yellow and red scales became more common.

“So where do we start looking for this gronn?” Feloma asked. “I’m starting to get bored of watching ravagers fight.”

Nobody could really say where Maggoc was. A massive gronn should be easy to spot but the place they were wandering was even larger. They would have to search all over the place to find him.

Just as that reality began to set in for the group, Autumn’s ears perked as she heard something faint in the distance. A growl caught the group’s attention. “Do you hear something?” Feloma asked. The lynx then ran toward the sound which prompted the others to follow.

They followed the lynx for a few minutes which was enough time for them to hear the sounds of battle in the distance which was followed by a loud roar. They hoped that it was the sound of a gronn so they wouldn’t have to be in the wasteland for any longer than necessary.

Their hopes paid off as they spotted who could only be Maggoc battling a group of who appeared to be brown skinned orcs but seemed to carry Rexxar’s build. However, it appeared that the gronn was slowly gaining the upper hand while the mok’nathal were on the defensive.

Seeing their chance, the group ran in to assist the beleaguered hybrids. Feloma got the gronn’s attention when she struck him in his right ear with an arrow. Farra’jin called on his fire and earth elementals to assault Maggoc while Talia called on her demons to assist.

Seeing the timely assistance by the newcomers, the mok’nathal hunting party fought with renewed vigor as their morale was restored. Their blades and arrows pierced the gronn’s thick hide and left deep cuts into his legs. Lokosh was able to cut deeper thanks to the assistance of their new allies and his experience from fighting gronn.

With Maggoc weakened, Groun was able to tie down the gronn with strong vines and pulled him to the ground where one member of the hunting party delivered a powerful chop that managed to sever the gronn’s head.

With the battle over, the mok’nathal hunting party cheered as a dangerous threat to their village was finally vanquished.

“Lok-tar strangers,” one of them addressed. “We thank you for your timely aid as we would have surely fallen to this gronn otherwise. Come with us, our leader would like to know of the saviors who aided us in slaying this beast.”

The party looked at each other as they began a psychic conversation. “Should we follow them? We do have other things to do,” Misty said.

“They may be hybrids, but they likely have traditions where we would earn their ire if we refuse,” Steel warned.

“Yeah, but on the bright side, free food.” Greenpeace offered.

“Ugh, another detour… Fine, let’s get this over with,” Crystal reluctantly accepted.

Desert had nothing to add so the five of them simply followed the mok’nathal to their village where they ended up spending a night while eating free food and telling a few tales of their adventures on Azeroth.

---

While they were resting up at the inn on Aldor Rise at the invitation of the priesthood, Stella called for a meeting to discuss what they were going to do next.

“Alright, the two trials we have to complete will require attacking the Shattered Halls of Hellfire Citadel and the Arcatraz. However, based on what we’ve been told, neither location is accessible without special keys.” She looked at Raida. “Raida, you said there is a way into these places, can you elaborate?”

“Getting into the Arcatraz is going to require attacking the other two satellite ships around Tempest Keep: the Botanica and the Mechanar. One half of the key is in the boughs of an arcane-twisted ancient called Warp Splinter. I don’t know if we can convince him to not attack us since the latest reports stated that the ancient was pretty addled. The other half is in the hands of one of Kael’thas’ advisors, Pathaleon the Calculator. He’s not parting with that fragment without a fight.”

“So we have a plan to get into the Arcatraz, but what about the Shattered Halls?” Bella asked. “You said that Kargath Bladefist isn’t leaving his sanctum for any reason so how do we get through the door without brute force?”

Raida pulled out a small stone block that had a hole in it. Pulling it apart revealed that it was evenly split in two which revealed an indent of a key.

“A key mold?!” Bella gasped. “Where did you get that?”

“One of the blacksmiths around the temple grounds had one. I convinced him to part with it.”

“But how do we know that it’s for the gate?” Flutashe asked.

“For one, this mold has the symbol of the Shattered Hand Clan on it, the clan that Kargath hails from. Also, Hellfire Citadel is the only place that clan operates from and there are no other locked gates or doors in that place.”

“In that case, I believe that it is time to turn this over to our blacksmith friend,” Stella said, looking at Bella.

“Hmm…” Bella hummed as she examined the key mold for a few minutes, examining every detail she could. She then sighed with some annoyance. “Say what you will about the orcs’ barbaric ways, but they are really good smiths. This key mold is designed to only work with iron, but it can’t be ordinary iron or the key will be too brittle to use. It would have to be high purity iron or the structure of the iron would have to be magically strengthened.”

“What about fel iron?” Raida offered.

“Pardon?”

“Hellfire Peninsula is lousy with deposits of the stuff. It used to be something called true iron and some egghead blacksmith said that the stuff was more pure than anything you would find on Azeroth. Of course, that stuff isn’t around anymore ever since Draenor shattered and the continent was exposed to nether energies which corrupted the remaining mineral deposits with fel energies.”

“That could work, but I would feel better if I had something to further strengthen the integrity of the key. Magical dust would probably do the trick.”

“Got it right here,” Mena said as she reached into her hair and pulled out several ingots of a green metal and a bag of dust. Nobody questioned where she got that.

Seeing a new kind of metal before her, Bella quickly grabbed one and began analyzing it. She found that the metal felt warm to the touch which she attributed to the fel energies. Her frown deepened when she realized the implications.

“It seems there is another problem, forging the key won’t be a problem, but properly tempering this kind of metal will require a source of heat hotter than a conventional forge. I can’t begin to imagine where we would find a source of heat like that.”

“What about felfire?” Raida offered. “I’ve heard that the Legion’s fel reavers run on the stuff and the heat it generates puts any forge to shame.”

“That could work…” Bella slowly said. “But we lack the means to extract the key mold from the furnace safely. Even going near such a furnace would be hazardous, let alone extracting something from it.”

Flutashe looked at Raida, “Maybe you could-” The demon hunter made silencing motions to shut her up, reminding her sister that her powers were supposed to be kept secret beyond their group and there were too many potential eavesdroppers around at the moment.

“I think we should go ahead and head to Honor Hold,” Stella offered. “We can work out the rest of the issues there.” She opened a portal and the group soon found themselves in the damaged Alliance base once again.

Bella took the key mold and the materials before heading to the blacksmith where she got to work adding the powder inside the mold before she melted the fel iron with the forge and poured it into the mold through a funnel. With that done, now all they needed was the extreme heat source to temper the metal.

The group left Honor Hold and made sure nobody else was nearby before they continued their earlier discussion.

“I know what you’re about to say and I can’t say if I can create that much heat with my fel magic,” Raida said. “If I absorbed the soul of a pit lord it would be a different matter.”

“What about the pit lord in Hellfire Citadel?” Mena offered.

“I have a feeling that we will need our Horde allies for that fight and they are still on their gronn hunting mission,” Stella said.

As the group thought about alternatives, Mena suddenly had another idea. “Ooh! I know! What about that pit lord who’s trying to attack the Dark Portal?”

“Might work,” Raida said. “It doesn’t have to be Magtheridon, just an annihilan powerful enough to allow me to breathe felfire when I claim his soul.

With their plan of action decided, Stella opened a portal to the Dark Portal where the defenders were still dealing with waves of demons, though their numbers were much more manageable since the portals were all destroyed, leaving the pit lord to summon reinforcements on his own power.

The party quickly moved in to attack the demon while the Alliance and Horde soldiers focused on the pit lord’s minions. The demon saw the group coming and moved to step on them but they dodged and moved behind him, causing the annihilan to turn around.

The demon swung his sword down which was met with only dirt. He soon realized that his foes were using their size difference against him since their small size made them hard to hit.

Meanwhile, Raida drew her warglaives and began jumping on the demon and delivering powerful slashes across his body with a black eye beam to his face which blinded him with black crystals. While the pit lord was busy wiping crystals from his face, Raida delivered heavy slashes to his right arm and weakened his grip on his sword followed by an Eye Blast to the open wounds and a Chaos Blast to detonate the crystals that formed. The pit lord dropped his sword as his arm went limp.

Before the pit lord could react to the enemy running around him, Raida cut open his chest which caused felfire to leak from it.

Annihilans had one dangerous feature that made surviving a fight with one even more difficult. When they die, they tend to explode in a burst of felfire. However, Raida began to absorb the leaking energy from his body while using the spell her master taught her to rip a demon’s soul from his body. The pit lord’s power was far from the likes of Magtheridon, let alone the lord of all annihilans, Mannoroth, so his soul was easier to absorb.

Once Raida had the soul drained, the pit lord began to self-destruct. Stella quickly opened a portal to safety which everyone quickly entered. She closed the portal just in time before the explosion could make it through the rift.

They soon found themselves where they were earlier and away from Honor Hold. As they regained their composure, Raida tested her breath to see if she did gain that power. A small burst of green fire exited her mouth as she exhaled, confirming that she did. She would need to control when she did that.

In the meantime, Stella placed the key mold on the ground while everyone took a few steps back. Raida took a deep breath before letting it all out as a torrent of green fire burst from her mouth in draconic proportions and engulfed the mold. It wasn’t the most efficient method since she had to take several breaths to finish the job but after her fifth breath, Bella called for her to stop. The demon hunter stepped back while panting from the exhaustion from using that new ability.

The stone from the key mold was now charred black. Bella pulled out her blacksmithing hammer and tapped the mold until the two halves split to reveal the contents. She then pulled out a pair of tongs to extract the glowing hot key before she allowed the air around them to cool it slowly. After about ten minutes of handling the key like that and a few more to cut off any extra bits of metal she finally grabbed it in her hand. “Alright darlings, I do believe that the key is ready to be tested.”

Wasting no time, the group walked along the ramparts of Hellfire Citadel while dealing with the few guards there. They soon came across a locked portcullis with a keyhole. Bella inserted the key into the hole and with a click, Flutashe was able to lift the gate so they could proceed inside the citadel.

As they entered the interior, they heard a voice not far ahead, “I heard the gate open, to arms! Form ranks and make the intruders pay!”

The moment they entered the party came under attack by a few fel orcs who each received a blow to the head by Bella’s light hammers. Flutashe mangled a few of the orcs while Mena seared a few more with her light magic.

“Reinforcements, quickly!” one of the orcs yelled. This one wore black and red plate mail with lots of spikes on the shoulders and a neck guard in place of a helmet. Each time the party killed one of the orcs, that orc called in more allies. Raida quickly shut the noisy orc up by appearing behind him faster that he could react before running her warglaive through his back and out his chest.

Once the vocal orc was eliminated, the party had no issue with mopping up the rest, giving them some breathing room now that they had taken their first steps into the Shattered Halls.

“The fel orcs here are more organized than the ones on the Ramparts or in the Blood Furnace,” Raida informed. “The Shattered Hand Clan is the most powerful orc clan in Outland which is why Kargath Bladefist is warchief of the Fel Horde. The majority of his commanding officers guard these halls and they aren’t afraid to keep calling in reinforcements.”

“So we have to deal with the ones in plate armor as soon as possible to stem the flow of reinforcements?” Flutashe asked.

“Yeah, now that they know we’re here, we will have to deal with them in squads.”

The group turned a corner and were faced against two more orcs who were defeated quickly. However, Bella took note of the strange weapons they were wielding. “What kind of axes are these? They look like they welded an ax to a gauntlet.”

“It’s more gruesome than you think, Bella,” Raida said. “That’s the symbol of the Shattered Hand. It has something to do with Kargath once being a slave to ogres before he sacrificed one of his hands to free himself and take his vengeance on his oppressors. He later grafted a blade onto the stub where his hand used to be.”

“So that’s why he’s called ‘Bladefist’?” Mena asked.

“Yeah, his example inspired the other slaves to rise up against their oppressors and they formed the Shattered Hand Clan. They ended up creating a tradition where they cut off one of their hands as a show of loyalty to their chieftain.”

“How utterly barbaric!” Bella reeled in disgust.

“Some of them got so zealous with the tradition that they ended up cutting off both hands. Kargath actually did that at some point.”

“How would he be able to grab things without fingers?” Mena asked.

“Don’t know, don’t wanna know.”

The room they entered had a number of weapons and supplies lined up along the walls along with a few fur rugs on the floor. There were also a couple of braziers hanging from thick chains. Bella counted nine orcs in the room plus two more behind them guarding a long hallway. One of the orcs in the room was walking around the room conversing with the others and he was armored like the one who was barking for reinforcements earlier.

“Take out that legionnaire so we won’t have to worry about reinforcements,” Raida said.

The party ran into the room and gained the attention of the large group of orcs. Flutashe used her bear form and assisted Bella with the pressure from the attackers. Surprise took control of the legionnaire and used him to cut down a few of the distracted fighters and with his mind bound, he was unable to call in reinforcements. This allowed the party to quickly defeat the other orcs before Surprise had the legionnaire running down the hall screaming that the invaders were too strong. Another legionnaire did the controlled legionnaire a mercy by grabbing his face and sliding his sword past his neck guard and into his throat, calling him a coward.

Of course, this ended up creating a ruckus in the hall as several more squads showed up. Some of them were armed with rifles and each one was led by a legionnaire.

The party had little trouble with the squads as Bella blocked the shots from the riflemen and Surprise puppeted each legionnaire in turn. Strong as they were, these orcs were lacking in terms of mental resistance. Flutashe mangled some orcs while Stella incinerated or froze more. One squad was burned to cinders when Raida breathed felfire on them.

At the end of the hall the party came across what appeared to be sleeping quarters. The legionnaire in charge of the room tried to shout to rouse any slumbering orcs but Surprise was quicker on the mind control spell. The rest of the squad moved to attack the intruders while Surprise used her latest puppet to murder the rest of the orcs in their sleep.

Unexpectedly, there was a houndmaster in the room as well along with a pair of armored wolves. However, the moment they laid eyes on Flutashe, their training proved insufficient to resist her aura and they ended up turning on their master.

Beyond the sleeping quarters the party came across a locked door. They also noticed what appeared to be an opening that led into a sewage pipe. As they were considering the pipe however, Mena pulled out something from her hair and stuck it to the door.

“Wait, that substance…” Stella noted. “That isn’t seaforium, is it?”

“Yeppers,” Mena said as she attached a fuse to it and lit the other end while the others moved around the corner. “I made some in case I needed to throw a really flashy emergency party, but opening a locked door works too.”

Seaforium was a highly volatile, yet controlled, substance used in high explosives and often used to infiltrate sealed locations by damaging the lock. Once the fuse reached the seaforium bomb, a loud boom rang through the halls followed by a few seconds of rattling chains.

As the sounds of destruction calmed down, the group looked around the corner and saw that the door was being lifted up by a pair of chains. They also spotted a quartet of fel orcs who were wondering what was going on.

However, it wasn’t the orcs or the party who spoke first after that event, but the particularly sinister voice of another orc, “Who dares disturb my fun? Well, no matter, I was getting bored anyway.”

“I recognize that voice…” Raida frowned before she entered the chamber with her hood down. The others quickly followed.

The evil orc quickly spotted the intruder and his eyes widened. “What? Lady Raida? What are you doing here?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Nethekurse, I know that you and your warchief have been planning on defecting to the Legion like Kael’thas did.”

“Why, whatever do you mean, Lady Raida, I have no idea what you are talking about,” Nethekurse said coyly.

Raida’s frown deepened. “You think that Lord Illidan isn’t aware of the missing demon hunters, the very ones who were assigned to perform a routine check on your operations? And before you go blaming Honor Hold or Thrallmar, I already know that they are unaware of any demon hunters and the Legion’s grip in this region is too weak for our demon hunters to be incapable of handling them. The only way they would go missing is if you and Kargath ordered your orcs to capture them.”

Nethekurse had no coy response left to Raida’s accusations so he shrugged. “Do you honestly think some elves who are in over their heads could hope to stand against the Legion? It would take a mind more twisted than my own to even conceive such a notion. The Illidari have no hope of victory. They are outnumbered multitudes to one. Not only that but they are led by the Dark Titan. Why do you fight the inevitable when you can join them and be powerful beyond your wildest imaginations?”

Raida had heard this rhetoric before from the Legion’s minions, so often that she gave him a mocking look while mouthing his lines back at him. “Can we get on with the fighting? I have better things to do than watching a brainless mouthpiece blow hot air.”

Nethekurse growled before he took that anger out on the four other orcs in the room, killing them all with a wave of dark energy. He then unsheathed his sword and launched a dark skull at Raida which was deflected by Bella and her shield.

Seeing as this was going to be a five on one fight, Nethekurse began planting shadowy energies all over the area which erupted into dark fissures. Raida had no trouble dodging them as she struck the warlock hard with both blades and sent him back to a far wall. Bella proceeded to consecrate the floor to close the dark fissures.

The warlock then tried to assault their minds with his dark magic but that only ended up with him being strangled by a strange black tentacle that came out of nowhere. As the warlock realized that using that spell was a very bad idea, the tentacle let him go and vanished.

In one last act of desperation, Nethekurse began to spin around while wildly launching dark bolts all over the place. It wasn’t the most efficient technique, but at least they couldn’t get near him without getting hurt…or at least that’s what he thought before a blast of frost froze him in place. This was followed by the elf, who transformed into some sort of dragon-like creature, stomping the ground and a spire of rock erupted from beneath him, shattering his icy prison and impaling him.

“Glad that guy’s gone,” Raida said. “This world is already in bad enough shape without sadists like him going around making things worse.”

“Raida, why didn’t you say that your fellow demon hunters were in danger?” Flutashe asked.

“The matter of the demon hunters is an Illidari matter,” Raida answered. “Don’t forget that my loyalty is to Lord Illidan so I’m not at liberty to give away everything related to our organization. Besides, we were coming here anyway for several reasons, there’s not much sense adding the prisoners to that list when we are already motivated enough to get rid of Kargath.”

The group was unsure whether they wanted to argue that point right now so they proceeded onward.

Before they continued deeper into the Shattered Halls, Stella noticed a strange book sitting on Nethekurse’s throne. She had a strange feeling that the book might come in handy later so she placed it in a bag alongside the book she found in Sethekk Halls.

As they ascended a ramp up to the next hallway, a voice rang through the halls, likely enhanced by magic. “So, Illidan’s little wench has come this far into my fortress? She even brought a few Alliance dogs to assist her. I’m in a generous mood so bring out the Illidari, Honor Hold and Thrallmar prisoners and call for the executioner. I will show everyone what happens when they face the might of the Legion.”

“Who was that?” Stella asked. “Was that Kargath?”

Raida grit her teeth when she heard that announcement. “Looks like we can’t afford to dawdle now that he’s getting ready to execute the prisoners. Let’s move!” The others nodded in agreement and reached the top of the ramp and into another hallway, one lined with giant statues of orcs, some of them partially shattered.

They were quickly spotted by an orc who began running down the hall yelling that the invaders had breached the defenses. Flutashe shifted into her cat form and leaped over any guards who tried to protect the runner while Raida decapitated the guards in an instant before running after her sister. The rest followed as best as they could.

The runner was fast, but Flutashe was faster and she was able to pounce on the runner by the time he was halfway down the hall. The druid broke his neck. Raida joined her a couple of seconds later along with the rest, via Stella’s group teleport.

“There’s probably a large group of them at the end of this hallway,” Raida figured. “With the runner down we have the element of surprise on our side.”

Stella smirked as an idea came to mind. “In that case…” She concentrated on the end of the hall, looking for a safe spot to teleport to. She easily found one and teleported into the middle of the group of orcs. By the time they registered what was happening, the mage unleashed a huge explosion of arcane energy that sent the orcs flying into the walls. The ambush allowed the group to quickly finish off the orcs in the room before they knew what hit them. The commanding officer, who Raida recognized as Blood Guard Porung, was among the first to be killed in the blitzkrieg.

Not wasting any time, they prepared to face whatever came next which involved another squad led by a legionnaire along with two groups of fel orcs in alcoves who were sparring with one another. Behind the squad were a few orcs who were practicing on training dummies.

“Looks like we found the training area,” Stella said.

The party took to their usual strategy of Surprise taking control of the legionnaire while the others fought the rest of the squad. However, the groups in the alcoves also became involved while the orcs fighting the dummies were so focused on the fake enemy in front of them that they weren’t paying attention to the chaos nearby.

The sparring orcs proved trivial to defeat because they were currently exhausted from their sparring matches and were in no shape to fight the intruders. By the time the orcs fighting the dummies noticed that something was wrong, it was too late to assist and the few of them were quickly overpowered by Flutashe slamming them into the walls and Raida incinerating them in felfire.

The next room was more of the same and soon they entered a hallway guarded by a pair of tough-looking orcs in armor that Bella could tell from a distance appeared to be of decent quality. There was also a houndmaster and his wolves patrolling the hallway.

Flutashe quickly disposed of the houndmaster by turning his wolves against him before she and Bella faced the armored orcs. The orcs traded blows with the paladin and druid but the orcs were unable to get past their enemies’ defenses. However, since the party didn’t have time to waste on watching the battle unfold, Raida had Truth and Heartswell stab them in the back with their swords.

Another pair of the armored guards protected the other end of the hallway. This time Stella froze one of them solid while Surprise controlled the other into ripping his own armor off and doing a backflip into what appeared to be a pit in the next room where he landed on his head and snapped his neck. A Chaos Bolt from Raida shattered the frozen warrior.

Laughter from a deep voice could be heard from the next room. From the sound of it, it sounded like an ogre’s since their voices sound similar to each other’s. Sure enough, the party peered into the next room to find that it was a ring of stairs to make the center of the room a pit with a two-headed ogre standing in the center with an orange warmace shaped like a cube with spikes coming out of five of the six sides. The ogre had bluish gray skin and wore a red loincloth with a red sash. The left head wore a red hood.

“Dat was really funny. (Meh, me seen better.)”

Raida groaned, “Ugh, this guy…O’mrogg’s heads can’t agree on anything and one head has next to no attention span.”

“Hey, dat not nice! (But it true,)” O’mrogg said.

Flutashe charged in and began swiping away at the ogre while dodging or enduring the blows while Bella chose to heal the druid this time.

At first, O’mrogg fought like a warrior by trying to beat her with his mace, but he also proved that he was an ogre mage by imbuing his mace with fire which Stella prevented him from using by disrupting the fire magic with ice magic.

“Me bored. (Finish dem off first.)” Not listening to who appeared to be the smarter head, O’mrogg decided to chase after Mena instead. Of course, this left him open to Flutashe shifting into her cat form and working with Raida to deliver many deep cuts to the ogre’s back. Despite the pain he was in, the ogre continued chasing the gnome.

Meanwhile, Mena dodged each of O’mrogg’s attacks in ways that the ogre thought impossible. Strangely, the variety of methods Mena used to dodge seemed to captivate one of the heads to where he continued attacking her just to see how she would dodge next while the other head was a captive audience to the sideshow.

Another strange thing was that despite all the attacks that the party was throwing at O’mrogg, One head was in agony while the other was giggling like their attacks were tickling. It seemed that neither agreed to how much pain they were feeling, even as Stella pelted the ogre’s back with ice shards in the wounds caused by Flutashe and Raida.

Of course, despite their disagreements, one fact couldn’t be disputed: the ogre’s body had to give with how much damage he was taking. The fun-having head soon felt his consciousness fade for some reason before he angrily looked at his other head. “Why…you no…kill dem? (Me…hate…you…so much…)” The ogre finally succumbed to his wounds.

The party had no time to contemplate the ogre’s contrary nature as they were sure that Kargath was ready to execute the prisoners. They proceeded to eliminate the two armored warriors who watched the spectacle instead of helping before entering another hall that was suspiciously empty save for a houndmaster and his two wolves.

“I can smell Kargath’s fel stench just beyond this hall,” Raida said.

“If their warchief is close, wouldn’t he have more defenders than a few orcs and a couple of wolves?” Mena asked.

“Either he’s confident in his own abilities or there's more to this hall than meets the eye,” Flutashe said.

Not wanting to take anything to chance, Raida focused her vision using her fel magic. She quickly found that Mena and Flutashe’s concerns were vindicated as her Spectral Sight picked up on a number of fel orc rogues sneaking around the hall. “Yep, there’s quite a few rogues roaming the hallway.”

Bella sent a wave of light down the hallway which caused the rogues to yelp in pain as the light burned their feet and blew their cover. Mena burned several rogues in holy fire as the houndmaster turned the corner to investigate the painful light hurting him and his hounds. He only got to see what was happening for a few seconds before Flutashe’s alpha aura made the wolves rip out their master’s throat before attacking the rogues.

Bella repeatedly consecrated the hallway to flush out more rogues as they made their way through. Flutashe and Raida each took out an armored warrior who guarded the end of the hallway.

Once Raida finished her opponent, she spread her wings and leaped into what appeared to be a small arena with a grated floor over a pit of fire. Standing on it was a fel orc with dark red skin and dark armor. Both of his hands were replaced by weapons.

Raida glared at the treacherous orc warchief before her. “We meet again, old orc.”

“I may be old, but I’m more than a match for a whippersnapper like you,” Kargath shot back.

“So tell me, what possessed you to forsake Lord Illidan and side with the Legion? Did we not offer enough felblood?”

“As if you could ever hope to match the Legion’s offer. Sooner or later, Magtheridon will break free and only by the graces of the Legion would we be spared his wrath. You and your allies saw to that when you slew Keli’dan.

“We fel orcs once served the Legion under the guidance of Gul’dan and Lord Mannoroth. Though both were slain at some point, the latter by that coward Grommash, Lord Mannoroth will eventually return to lead us to conquest once more and we will march over the corpse of Illidan Stormrage.

“We, the Fel Horde, the True Horde, will become conquerors of countless realms once we earn the favor of the Legion once again…

“...And it shall start with my display of supremacy as my executioner now slaughters every Alliance, Horde and Illidari prisoner behind me!” Kargath shouted, ordering his executioner to begin.

That never happened.

Instead, Kargath was slammed in the back by a flying block of ice the size of an orc and sent sprawling on the floor. Raida blasted the ice block to shatter it and put the unfortunate orc inside out of his misery.

Kargath got up to his knees before looking behind him to find Flutashe and Stella with the prisoners while the druid was holding up the executioner’s ax.

“How did you get past me?” Kargath demanded.

Stella smirked, “A simple group invisibility spell was all I needed since you were too busy monologuing to notice anything.”

Now enraged, Kargath got to his feet and roared before rushing toward Stella with his blades raised. Before the mage had time to react, his blades came down on her and sliced her in three pieces. The pieces vanished with a poof.

Before the warchief could register what happened, Flutashe grabbed him and threw him back into the arena before a Disintegration Beam from the real Stella struck him in the back. His armor took most of the hit but became greatly damaged in return.

While Kargath tried to get up again, Raida used her warglaives to cut off both of the orc’s forearms, just above the elbows. This left the orc without his weapons and left with only his head and feet to fight with. He never got to use either as he became engulfed in felfire. The warchief screamed in pain as the flames entered the gaps in his armor and licked off his flesh.

As the flames ate away at his body, Kargath cried out that the True Horde would prevail in the end before his form was completely lost in the green blaze.

The party looked at the fire before Raida shook her head. “Fool, you sold your honor for power. I may not know much about orc culture, but even I know that real orcs would never forsake honor.”

“Well, we got the ax and that weird book that Stella picked up,” Mena offered. “It’s about time we get out of here.”

Silently, Stella opened a portal to Shattrath. She saw the disappointed look on Raida’s face but said nothing. One of the leaders of the Illidari had fallen. Then again, it seemed apparent that Kargath had fallen long before his life was ended.

With the Trial of Mercy concluded, they would need to make a long journey to the northern reaches of Outland to reach the next trial.