(2021-01-31) Oranna Finds The Flyer

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Author:	Athena
Summary:	The start of Oranna Stormbreakers' journey with Cobalt Company.
Rating:	T for Teen

Oranna was cold.

Perhaps that was not surprising, given that it was a day when the snow fell sideways, and the wind howled with unspent rage against the walls of the tavern. Every so often, the windows would rattle in an unsettling staccato beat in their casings as the tavern shook its own fist back at the storm. Even a wolf might be cold in such weather, her fur still not yet thick with her winter downy coat.

But, Oranna was a Stormbreaker. Such days were the ones her ancestors had made into family legend, howling and cackling with defiant laughter in the face of lightning, blizzards, and torrential rains. Her blood should have been proof enough against such paltry efforts from a common snow storm.

She sniffled and stuck her hands under her armpits, huddling deeper into her layers of clothing and leathers for warmth. If it made her look standoffish, that was all the better. She was alone, and not looking for company. More than that, it was best to not appear vulnerable in such a public place. A solitary dwarf at a table in an unwanted corner of the tavern could seem easy pickings for the wrong sort of folk.

By the Light, it had been years since she’d sat in a tavern. If she had any nostalgia for the old days, and she did not, it would have burned up like a cheap candle from the reality. The sound of overlapping voices changing from individuals to collective murmurs punctuated by coughs and raucous, drunken laughter was like a badly tanned leather jerkin, unexpectedly uncomfortable and prickling every one of Oranna’s nerves.

The smell of beer floated by on the air, exhaled by a large human woman with a giant bearskin cape who belched so loudly that Oranna figured it was even betting odds if the windows rattling were from the storm outside, or the one raging from the drunken warriors within. The barley scent of beer was fine. She knew that as long as she kept it to her nose, she would be steady. It was the taste…ah, the taste was a different story.

Even the thought conjured the wispy ghost of the memory. Beer flavored vomit pooling her mouth, the bitter rush of state hops on her tongue; Oranna closed her eyes to it. Once, the memory would have sent her rushing out the door to empty the contents of her stomach into the snow. The many years had worn the memory down, an old cat with blunted fangs, gnawing on her more by habit than with real malice.

“Ora, we need to go. We have to go. The gates are closing.”

The icy jolt of fear in her veins. The afterimages of the explosion still showing black spots in her vision. A pit of horror opening inside her belly, a scream she could not catch her breath long enough to cast out of her. The taste of beer and vomit.

“Ora! They’re already gone. We need to go.”

With a sigh, Oranna opened her eyes. The memory was fading. Her mind wanted to drift ahead, an old horse following a well-worn trail, to the feelings of being trapped in a small room with fourteen other souls, but she heaved it off. She had spent too long dwelling on those old roads, on her past. She was here to find her future.

Or, at least, that had been the plan.

It turned out, she mused, that finding one’s destiny was a tad more difficult than simply leaving one’s house. When she had packed her final bag, and taken one last look at the cabin, it had felt like a revelation. It was real. She was leaving. Then, she had been on her way, expecting the road’s possibilities to rise up in glorious purpose.

Instead, she had felt her momentum falling away with every footfall. Where, exactly, was she going? The thought of leaving had been so strong that she had not considered that she had no destination at all.

There were travelers on the road. Most were headed deeper into the Dun Morogh Mountains, to Ironforge no doubt, and if Oranna did not know where she was going, she did at least know where she was not going. She suspected she was not ready to see the walls of the dwarven city just yet, to smell the faint hint of sulfur and volcanic gases under the sharp notes of metal that infused the city.

The tavern just off the road had seemed a respite after the snow had picked up. It was a little place with dark, weathered floors, and there were grooves in the chairs marking the passage of many weary travelers resting their bones, but it was well-kept enough to keep the snow outside. Getting in the door, and sitting down at the table she’d found far away from the crowd that had clustered around the fire roaring in the middle of the room, had taken the last of her strength. Her will to remain in the world outside her cabin was dimming with each passing moment.

This was a mistake, Oranna thought, as she stared at the water in a clean jug, and the remains of the apple she had purchased to justify her stay in the tavern. It would be easier to think, she said to herself, if she could just get warm enough. She was so cold, and everything was so loud. It was too much. She had been wrong. She was not ready to be out here.

Well, it was not the first time she had been wrong, but at least this time no one had died, so she would take it as an even wash. A day of hunting with nothing gained and nothing lost. She could be back in her cabin by the end of the night, and she’d be walking in opposite direction of the storm. It was for the best.

With a grunt, Oranna pushed away from the table and stood. She took out a cloth covered in a light layer of beeswax to store the rest of the apple. A good hunter knew not to waste food, for there was always the possibility of an empty snare, and a plant stripped bare by a better forager who had been quicker. The water she used to top up her skein, pouring it from the jug into the wide brim with a practiced ease, and drank the rest. Her hands shook slightly from the cold even inside her rabbit fur gloves, and she scowled. Some Stormbreaker she was.

She was making her way through the haphazard maze of tables, chairs, and patrons passed out on the floor, when it caught her eye. Was it a trick of the light from the fire? The flicker at just the right moment, catching her gaze just long enough for her to register what she was seeing? She could never tell in retrospect. In her memory, it was as though the flyer had risen up from the ground and flew into her hands, like a portent from the Light itself.

Someone had tacked it to a wall at some point. There was a tear on the top of the foolscap that showed it had been ripped from its place, either by accident or malice. There were several different boot marks in various directions, and a beer (or possibly vomit) stain where some drops had landed, but it was legible.

“Adventurers of Azeroth!” it began in bold, straight letters from a hand that had been well educated in calligraphy. Oranna snorted. She was too old to be an adventurer. This was obvious not meant for her. She told herself that twice, even as she continued to read.

“Make your mark on history! Warriors, puzzle-solvers, infiltrators, healers, hunters, spellcasters, craftsmen and more sought for by Sir Elohad Ference’s honorable new mercenary band: Cobalt Company.”

A small voice, grumpy and taciturn, inside her mind said that she was a hunter. Oranna hushed herself. A hunter, yes, but a solitary one that had no business traipsing around on adventures with some honored knight. This was not for her. It was for one of those loud bunches of folks talking over each other at the table next to her, yelling insults across the sticky table full of meat and bread shared amongst them all, sloshing beer over their bracers, and talking about the glory of war.

“Led by a veteran of three wars and the former producer of Lordaeron’s famed theatre company, the Cobalt Players, Cobalt Company is poised to make its mark. Write to Elohad c/o the Bank of Stormwind to apply.”

Oranna rolled her shoulders. She should have known. Human stuff. War veterans were a copper a dozen these days after the portal. Even those like Oranna, who done a good deal more running and holding out against a siege than actual fighting, many considered a veteran of the Second War. She had a decent stain of Horde blood on her hands, but she had commanded no troops, nor been commanded by anyone more military minded than another scared and determined dwarf trying to keep the walls of Ironforge from falling in that year.

The shake in her hands after she pulled the trigger, and the shock of the gun’s kick on her shoulder nothing to the shock of seeing a spray of flesh and blood sprouting where a Horde orc’s head had been just a moment before.

She wanted no more of that life. As far as Oranna was concerned, there were no heroes or villains in war; there were only winner and losers, determined by whoever wrote the story. And with a siege, there weren’t even those. It was just survivors and the dead. No one won a siege. You just survived it. Unless you didn’t. And many had not.

Oranna looked at the flyer again. Strange though, she thought. Three wars. He must have fought in the Second as well. A prick of something like guilt flickered in the back of her mind, a quick dart of a mouse spotted by an owl. The humans had liberated Ironforge. Dwarves and gnomes had fought the Horde to a standstill, neither pushing back nor breaking, but that was all. It had been the humans, riding in like a much needed flanking attack of wolves, nipping and biting at the heels of the Horde until they had finally turned away from Ironforge long enough for the inhabitants to rally a true attack.

Once the gates had been opened, many had poured forth to give chase to the Horde, driving them from Khaz Modan. Oranna had simply left Ironforge, seeking safety in a relatively difficult to access cave in Dun Morogh, in the opposite direction of Doomhammer’s retreat. She had been unable to stomach more of the war, the sounds of people around her, the press of bodies against her own as they fought desperately. She had told herself at the time, and in the years since, that she had not run away. A dwarf like her had no business with a war like that, which needed staunch warriors and a chain of command. It had been a strategic removal from the field to leave it to others better suited.

She had never entirely convinced herself of that thought in the twenty years since.

It was not precisely a debt of honor, but it was something akin to it. She would not be standing staring at a human’s ridiculous flyer in a tavern with sticky tables if not for those brave humans who had involved themselves in a war they could have easily sat out. The Alliance had benefited them in the end, but the fact remained: they had bled for the dwarves and gnomes.

Still, she reasoned with herself, she did not owe anyone in particular her service for those human’s sacrifices. For all she knew, this Sir Elohad was a liar and a con.

“Oh, you’ve got his flyer, huh?” The voice was rough but not unkind. Oranna looked up, but not very far. A gnome was standing just outside of Oranna’s melee range, with a smile on her face. She wore well fitted leathers, and had two sheathed knives on her thighs. And she stood ever so slightly in profile to Oranna, though she looked at her straight on. “Heard him talking when he was in here, earlier this week. Nice fella, if a bit touched.”

“Touched?”

“Oh, yeah, just a bit, nothing too harmful,” the gnome replied amiably, her dark blue eyes sympathetic and condescending all at once. “He was going on about how there are no real heroes in this world, only protagonists, and he was looking for some of those.” The gnome woman sneered, ever so slightly, as if it were amusing. “Bit daft, but, well, the wars did strange things to people. I’d leave it on the floor, if it were me.” Oranna nodded absently, looking down at the flyer. The silence stretched out, and the gnome seemed to realize that Oranna was going to neither respond beyond that, nor let go of the flyer. With a shrug and a friendly wave, the gnome adjusted the straps of her pack and walked away, shaking her head and muttering about strange folks and flyers.

There was something in Oranna’s chest that was struggling like a badger stuck in a prickle bush. A feeling she could no more articulate than she could stop. Something big and powerful, an echo of the impulse that had sent her from her home into a tavern on the road.

The silence intruded on every motion. The dust in the air in the fading light, caught suspended in the deep silence. The words on the pages of the book almost illegible in the growing dark, but it did not matter, because she had not been reading them, not really. She had read it so many times that it had become almost playacting to have the book in her hands as her mind recalled the words. Year after year the stories had been a solace. Now, they had become nothing at all. Empty words on empty pages and the silence was so loud it hurt. She could not do it anymore. The thought is there and it is tight, a trigger stuck, waiting to be pulled, she needed more, she needed something she could not even say. She needed to be

“A Protagonist,” Oranna said out loud, her voice instantly lost in the din of the tavern. The flyer in her hands became blurred letters, meaningless, in the wake of the revelation.

Her mind reeled from the shot fired, but it mattered not at all, for she had memorized the words from the flyer already. Sir Elohad. C/o the Bank of Stormwind.

Quickly, she pushed to the edges of the tavern. With the furtive and economical movements of the hawk, she tore into her pack. She had stashed a stack of letter paper at the bottom, on the off chance it was needed, and a thick grease pencil somewhere.

The pencil seemed lost to the pack, and Oranna hastily removed a glove to dig in with more nimble fingers to find it by feel. She found it, half-tucked in a cotton sock, and felt a moment of triumph as she pulled the pencil out.

She stared at her ungloved hand, and it hit her. Despite the storm, despite the fact that even though in that moment a traveler had opened the door to the tavern and let in a fresh gust of frigid air, and the fire was on the other side of the room, her hand was steady. The cold was gone.

Oranna was warm.