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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Parts 1-3 of the formative experiences of Oranna Stormbreaker.: 1. Oranna remembers her first trip to Ironforge. 2. Oranna leaves her childhood home for the relative comfort of her great-aunt's farm. 3. Oranna and the battle of will to not become a warrior. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Oranna Stormbreaker stared at the giant red and gold stone pillars that lead to the library in the Hall of Exploration in Ironforge, and tried very, very hard not to vomit.
She could only just see the bony wings of the prized pteradon skeleton recovered from Un’Goro crater that was suspended above the circular library like some sort of physical manifestation of the great clawed thing within her stomach that was trying to tear her apart from the inside. Oranna closed her eyes and tried to settle herself, phantom pains threatening to burst into actual pain prickling across her scalp, her wrist, and her shoulders.
Carefully, so as not to alarm the red haired dwarf staring at her with mounting concern, she turned away from the library and made her way back towards Tinker Town, her eyes on the ground.
Thank the Light she had not taken Gerhold with her. The thought of explaining to him why she simply could not go any farther, especially after the trip on the tram, would have been excruciating. The young human mage was kind to her, but she had already cried in front of him once. That had been plenty of times, a whole lifetime worth really, as far as she was concerned.
“Have ye no’ been tae th’Explorer’s League in Ironforge?” Bargrimm had asked. She had barely caught her memories in time, catching them quickly in a box before they could spill over. His sharp eyes behind those peculiar goggles were too quick, and she had known there was no way to play off the shake in her voice when she’d tried to say that she had been, once, a long time ago.
Oranna walked faster towards the inn. She needed to get into her room before she lost her grip on the memories right there in front of everyone.
“Breathe, lass.”
“Not now, Khaz,” Oranna muttered under her breath as she pushed her legs harder. Almost there. A quick nod to Firebrew, and then up the stairs, through the hallway, to the fourth door on the left. She fumbled with the key, just briefly, scraping it along the edges of the lock, and she could feel something like a sob building. Just a little more, she thought. The lock turned, and she threw herself forward into the room, shutting the door behind her and sliding down to the ground.
“Get up!”
Irona Stormbreakers voice was so loud in her ears that Oranna covered them, trying to hold the ghost of her mother inside her head.
It did not work.
It never had. There had never been an escape from Irona.
Oranna had not thought of it in so long. She could barely even remember most of that day: the day she first visited Ironforge.
The Library
When Irona Stormbreaker had been raising her sons, the family had remained mostly at the odd two and a half story cottage on the far outskirts of the mountains of Khaz Modan in a place most of the locals knew as the Dun Loch, for the large lake that was a resting place of several rivers that flowed down through the mountains. Once the Stormbreakers had raised those sons, however, they had wandered through the areas in a circuit, doing work that needed strong warriors, in a predictable pattern. When Oranna had been born, Irona had opted not to go back to their stationary life. They had grown too dependent on the money. For the first 18 years of Oranna’s life, they had gone from house to house to house, staying only a few weeks in each place owned by one of the other clan members of the Tuberholds and the remains of the Thundermars that had intermarried half a dozen times with the Stormbreakers.
When she was sixteen they had gone to Ironforge.
Some big contract Irona had negotiated had needed her to make the trip all the way up to the mountain city. Oranna’s brothers and father had been out south or north working with some humans. It had been Irona and Oranna, just the two of them.
The gates seemed immense to her then, looming like eternal guardians to the testament of dwarven power. There had been no sense of foreboding, or premonition of what those doors would someday mean to her; they were only impressively large doors that had briefly and distantly made her rather proud to be a dwarf.
She could not remember what they did, or where they went. The details blurred forever after. All Oranna could remember was the impression of how loud and orange everything was, the Great Forge’s light shining across almost everything. Oranna remembered her mother warning her to stay put. Or perhaps she only imagined that she remembered it still. She knew she must have spotted a sign or seen a tiny bit of skeleton or ancient remains of an egg, and wandered over. It was then that she would have seen the books of the library.
Her memory wavered every time, trying to remember what it had looked like the first time she had seen it, but no, it was always gone, every time she looked for it.
But, she remembered how it looked when Irona had grabbed her by her hair so hard it had felt like a blow, and yanked it backwards. Oranna knew then that she was in serious trouble. Her hair was a point of contention between them. Irona wanted it too short to grab. Oranna always let it grow just a little too long. Irona would use it in skirmishes, when she was particularly angry with Oranna, and to prove her point that Oranna should never let it grow so long to be a weakness.
The sight of the books spinning above her as her neck bent at an angle it was not designed to bend always rose up, obediently, for her perusal in future years, the only thing she remembered of the great library. Her eyes watered immediately at the pain, one hand coming up reflexively to her head, and her mother catching it in her mailed fist, crushing her fingers, bruising the fine bones. The way Irona had leaned down to whisper with pure venom into her ear, the words so harsh that they felt like tiny knives.
“How dare you disobey me?”
Did Oranna try to explain herself? Try to say that she was only there for the books? All memory of it was lost, lost to the feeling of Irona pulling so hard on her hair that clumps of the short cropped hair pulled free.
“I told ye, these things are rottin’ ye from the inside. But, if yer so sure ye know better than me, then prove it.”
Irona had dragged Oranna out of the gates of Ironforge by her hair, shoving and pulling. Had anyone seen? Noticed? If they had, they had likely assumed it was a family affair, none of their business. It was what always seemed to happen. Averted glances the second they saw the clear family resemblance.
“Yer the spittin’ image of yer mum.”
Irona threw Oranna with enough force that she lost more hair to her mother’s grip, and fell onto the snow near the entrance.
The snow was packed hard, and she slipped as she tried to catch herself on her hands, sprawling on the ground. In those days, there were no guards of Ironforge always manning the gate. They had no reason to believe anyone was coming to invade them, not anymore, since the trouble with the Dark Irons had been resolved.
“Get up.” Oranna tried, and Irona closed the distance in that almost unnaturally fast way she had when she fought, and aimed a kick at her daughter with a metal boot.
Oranna, as always, was too slow to block it. It hit her in her unflexed abdomen, knocking the wind out of her, and almost flipping her onto her back. The pain was intense, and the urge to vomit fought with the need to breathe.
She tried to move, she remembered that. She remembered trying to use her training, to think of the right moves, but it was too late. Irona delivered a punishing drop kick, hitting her deliberately on the shoulder in a way designed to come close to but not quite break her collarbone.
“Pathethic. Ye still won’t dodge, or block, or anythin’, but ye think ye know better than me.”
Irona reached down a hand, and grabbed Oranna’s wrist so hard a bone fractured a little, and pulled the shorter dwarf up to her feet, still gasping, dangling, her feet not quite on the ground. Too fast, Irona slammed her fist into Oranna’s stomach once more, and then again, and again.
“Tighten yer damn muscles! Stop flinchin’ from the pain, and do somethin’ about it.”
Too many hits. Oranna had been able to feel herself losing consciousness, unable to catch her breath, and Irona growled something in response.
Then, there had been a hit to her head so fast, so hard, that Oranna saw nothing at all.
She woke up ten, maybe fifteen minute later, in the snow, on her back. Her head hurt so badly she thought for a terrible moment that she was dying, and she could not stop her body from the urge to vomit. Irona Stormbreaker was there, rolling her to the side, so she would not choke on it.
“Fool girl. I tell ye what ta do, an’ all ye hafta do is jus’ listen. If ye would jus’ listen ta me, none o’ this would happen.”
The concussion had lasted for days.
Irona had maintained it had been Oranna’s own fault, for falling badly to the ground after the blow. She had simply agreed with her mother, unwilling to argue, and her memory too unstable to truly defend herself.
Oranna had barely been able to walk, and was so dizzy upon waking and sleeping that she vomited each time for two nights in a row.
Her memories blurred in a terrible smear of half remembered things, of Irona wrapping her wrist, and reminding her to not move her arm until her collarbone healed. Camp fire was too bright, and her head pounding so hard she cried, only to have her mother slap her for crying, and losing whatever came after to a blank gap of memory. The rest of the trip was nothing but a dark smear of pain and the lesson to never, ever wander off again.
It was ten years until the next time she saw Ironforge, and when she had tried to go to the library, smugly now that her mother could not stop her, her feet had unequivocally refused to move. When she tried, she could feel the remnants of nausea threatening to rise. Her head pounded in remembered pain, and she felt dizzy just looking at the pillars. In self-defense, she had mentally exorcised the existence of the library there from her memory, as much as she could. She did not think of it, ever.
Now, there it stood, just waiting. Filled with knowledge she could have. All she had to do was walk inside.
Irona Stormbreaker would never stop her again. Never again would she drag Oranna out by her hair to remind her that books were for those who finished their warrior training. It had been nearly a century since that day. And, yet, she still could not go in, could barely even look at the pillars without feeling sick.
“It’s not goin’ anywhere, trust me. No rush,” Bargrimm had said, his voice warm, and surprisingly gentle. “Go with someone, if ye need. Take yer time.”
Oranna had been too afraid to ask if he would come with her. That was the last thing she needed. Show another person just how broken she was, as if it wasn’t enough that at least most of Cobalt Company had to know by now that there was something wrong with Oranna.
The worst part was that she suspected Bargrimm already knew, at least some. His eyes were too keen, and flashed with an intimidating intelligence that made her feel even more terrified that she would say something horrible and he’d never want to speak to her again, washing his hands of the strange dwarven woman who couldn’t even explain why she was afraid of a library.
She curled into herself on the floor of the Stonefire Inn, sighing.
It had been nice, though, to talk to another dwarf. She had missed it, the camaraderie that came from feeling as though she were on even level with another person. Bargrimm was taller than her, taller in fact than many dwarves she’d known, but not as tall as any of the humans, let alone the gigantic Kal-Dorei. Her neck sent her thanks, for that if nothing else.
She could trust that he was not some young man, about to claim that he was old at forty (Light, she still could not get past that, as if she would not trade her best leathers to be back in forties, before anything could hurt just because she slept wrong).
There was weathering in Bargrimm’s face, some that might have come from living life on the rougher side but the rest she suspected was age. Maybe in his two hundreds, if she had to guess. There was some comfort in not feeling so out of her depth, not being sure what might give offense, or making an assumption that would lead to another human spraying beer all over the table, as Ivri had.
“Well, but yer…yer wee, aren’t ye? For a human?” Oranna had paused and tried to think of what might a reasonable age for a young human. Her gut had said it still might be too high, but she’d felt relatively confident about it. “Ten? Eleven?”
Ivrianna had spewed her ale and then nearly choked on the rest of her drink as Oranna had stumbled her way through a hasty apology. She had been off by an entire decade. It had taken several long minutes before Ivrianna had been able to speak again, and then she gave Oranna a stern talking to about human ages. Oranna had vowed to never guess another human age again.
Talking to humans and Kal Dorei was fascinating, and invigorating, and for the first time in her life when she asked people questions, they answered them, often with visible excitement that she was asking about it at all. There was a constant, low burning fear that she would one day hit upon a question and be met with a sneer and a scorn filled declaration that everyone knew about that, how could she not know about it, what was she, some sort of uneducated backwater country bumpkin who had never learned about that?
“Befound says you are very smart,” Galadhel had said with unshakeable confidence in his oddly deep voice, his Common still accented oddly to her ears, but grown pleasant with familiarity. “She would know. You are good in here,” he had said as he tapped Oranna’s forehead. “And here,” he had said as he’d pointed to just beneath her neckline.
So, naturally, she had ruined it by asking if he had been talking about what was under her shirt.
He had, of course, meant her heart.
Talking to Gerhold was filled with similar unexpected traps, little places where she knew her lack of knowledge was showing. It was not all bad though. He always patiently explained, using simple language to start, and whenever she was able to follow along, would simply move onwards, as though it was the most reasonable thing that Oranna would understand what he was speaking about. The relief of it was immense.
Dwarves were easier. She wished that she could talk to Cassea more. And yet, she knew that sometimes she avoided talking to the warrior, because she could not help but see how perfect Cassea was, how much Irona would have wanted a daughter exactly like that. Unflinching. Brave. Competent. Steadier than the gates of Ironforge itself. No enemy could ever break that dwarven woman. She would stand against the Void itself.
Everything Oranna had been supposed to be, and was not, never had been, and never would be.
Befound padded over to Oranna, still curled against herself in a ball, and made a faint chirping sound in the back of her throat.
“I don’t know, lass. I think I still need some space,” she said, without lifting her head. Sometimes it felt good to have the leopard sit beside her, gently leaning into her, but there were times it felt as though if even just one single person touched her, she would burst into tears. She hated crying, even though she knew that sometimes it was unavoidable.
Tears fall down her face, her arm bone showing from the break, the shield block gone terribly wrong.
Her mother backhanding her, so hard her mouth filled with blood instantly.
“A warrior doesna e’er let anyone see her cry.”
Oranna tightened her grip on her legs, and waited for the tight sensation to pass.
Befound huffed out a sigh, and moved away from the hunter again. Oranna knew that the leopard was still watching her, but at least she would give her hunter some time.
“Pathetic. Yer better than this. Yer a Stormbreaker, for ancestor’s sake. Act like it.”
How many times had her family told her that becoming a proper warrior was just around the corner? That if she would just try a little harder, listen a little more, and do a little better, everything would start to come together? It was just her unwillingness that held her back. Being a warrior, a Stormbreaker, was who she was meant to become. Always, always, they insisted. Another year.
Oranna was the first one to lose hope, and the when the day came that great-aunt Nettie sent her a letter, asking for Oranna to come to her farm, to help the older woman out in her twilight years, it finally created the path out, away from that life. And Oranna leapt for the lifeline it was, and held on dearly as she pulled herself out from the vision of her mother's goals.
The day she packed her bags to leave her family’s home in Dun Morogh, purchased years ago now that the contracts came to them, their wandering years over, her father had to try to talk to her once more about it.
He had come into the room, without knocking, the door still open from how her mother had left it, moments before. Her face burned with pain from the blow she had received earlier. Oranna clenched her jaw, ignoring the way it intensified the pain, and continued packing, refusing to acknowledge his presence. It was a few more shirts carefully folded and placed in the leather bag before her father said anything.
“She just wants what’s best for ye,” he said, and Oranna fought back a scream. Her breath went fast with the rush of anger, and she forced it to calm. Yelling at her father only meant one of her brothers would hear about it, and they’d come after her on the road if they had to, to punish her for the "disrespect." She said nothing, as usual, just continued working, making choices about what to take and what to leave.
“Ah, lass, this is nae tha way. Ye jus’ need ta give it more time. Focus more on yer trainin’.”
She shoved another book that she had bought on the sly and hid under her mattress for years into her bag.
“Yer mother loves ye, lass. She jus’ wants ye ta reach yer full potential. She’s trained hundreds of warriors. Her way is hard, yes, but it’s worth the end result. Look a’ yer brothers. Worth a squadron o’ human soldiers, they are.”
Oranna looked up briefly, her lips held so tight to not say how she would trade a hundred humans for her four brothers in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, her father took it as encouragement, closing in and saying in a softer voice, the bargaining voice he used on his wife when he was trying to talk her down from killing someone.
“I’ve ne’er seen yer mother happier than the day ye were born, lass. She loved the boys, but I’d always known she’d wanted a daughter more than anythin’. First day we met, when she came ta the trainin’ yard lookin’ fer the best warrior ta put down in his place,” he chuckled there, as that had been him. Oranna’s fists clenched. It was a story she had heard too many times. “I was twice her size, an’ I thought myself more than twice as good as her. I still remember the surprise I felt when she put me into tha dirt, and stood o’er me, sayin’ — “
“’Men will ne’er be as good as any woman. Men think they’re good a’ it, because they use their rage. Women, they know pain, and they will ne’er flinch a’ it. An’ in the end, it’s no’ jus’ how hard ye hit, it’s how ye stand yer ground against anythin’ tha’ comes yer way.’” She glared hard at her father. “I know.”
“Aye, lass,” he acknowledged, still wheedling, still trying. “An’ yer almost there. Ye jus’ need ta get better a’ takin’ tha’ first hit, and standin’ unflinchin’ — “
Oranna interrupted him again with a dark, cold laugh.
“Ye’ve been sayin’ tha’ to me since I was twelve, da. I’m thirty years old. I’m no’ a child anymore. I’m a grown woman. An’ it is time e’eryone accepted it’s ne’er goin’ ta happen. I am ne’er going ta be a warrior.”
Her father took a sharp intake of breath at the words, and she saw the flash of rage in his eyes, but he closed them for a moment, mastering himself. “Ye say tha’ because ye’re still young, lass. When ye get ta my age, ye’ll see tha’ thirty is no’ so old, no’ so experienced tha’ ye can know somethin’ like tha’ about yerself. Ye need ta trust us. Trust yer mother. Ye ha’ so much potential, lass. So much. Ye jus’ need a push.”
She had stared at him, shaking her head, a thousand things she wanted to say going through her head. She said none of them. There was no point. He wouldn’t hear any of it. He never had.
Great-aunt Nettie’s farm had been a balm the way that going from a frozen, wet cave into a hot desert would feel a relief in comparison. There was quiet on the farm, and the work was repetitive, and constant, but there were no more mornings of having water dumped on her and being dragged out to the training yard to take blow after blow on her shield while her mother growled orders correcting her technique.
It was just that there was so much to do, and there was nothing to do all at once. Great-Aunt Nettie had never been the same after The Incident, the one that no one in the family spoke about, but what Oranna had understood to be something terrible enough that Great-aunt Nettie could no longer bear to be around anyone for very long. She would drift away if you tried to stay, going somewhere in her head, and would stop talking for days after. Her daughter, Topa, had been raised by Oranna’s second cousins once removed who were of an age with Great-aunt Nettie.
Sometimes they spoke, briefly, but mostly they communicated in notes. Great-aunt Nettie would leave Oranna a note on the kitchen table about any changes to their routine, like when it was time to cull the older, or sickly goats for meat to sell to the neighbors in exchange for candle wax, cooking oil, and other sundries. Oranna would write notes and leave them on the chair that great-aunt Nettie used to knit and sew. It worked as a system.
Time passed, and at some point Oranna realized that some knot in her stomach that had been so long a part of her she had not even noticed she carried it, had finally begun to unfurl. She found herself humming bits of great-aunt Nettie’s song, wildly off key, but not afraid that she would be caught singing and punished. She no longer flinched when the wind slammed against the door to the chicken’s coop too hard and it sounded too like the sound of a blow landing.
Then, one day, almost thirty years to the day that Oranna had arrived, great-aunt Nettie had not come out to eat. She was always up before Oranna, except that one year when she’d gotten some sort of illness that had left her coughing for weeks. At first, Oranna had thought that she had just missed the other woman in passing. There were weeks here and there that she never actually saw great-aunt Nettie, just knew she was there from the notes.
But, then the sun began to set, and no smell of bread baking came from the kitchen.
That had never happened before.
In her mind, she felt as though somehow she must have already known. She had spent the day on an edge of nervousness, as if she knew that something was gone that should have been there. She had knocked on the door to great-aunt Nettie’s room, the room she was never allowed to go in, and when she called out and heard no response, she shut her eyes and opened the door.
The smell of death greeted her, caressing her cheek in the light touch that sometimes, very rarely, great-aunt Nettie would give her when she could. Great-aunt Nettie was still in bed, her eyes closed, and it was nothing at all like she was sleeping. She was too still, her body the wrong color, and Oranna knew.
The two weeks that came after were blurred together into four horrible days.
The first day, when she realized she would need to deal with the body. How it had felt so wrong to try to pick up the dead woman. How she had cried, trying to wrap the body in the sheets. How she had been forced to drag her out through their home to the table in the shed that would serve as a place to lay out the body.
The second day when she had to venture off the farm to let the proper officials know of the death. How she had cried when they asked her how she died and she realized, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, and how they had questioned her hard, suspicious now, until it had come out that great-aunt Nettie had been nearly 500 years old. And a dwarven medic had confirmed it was natural causes.
The ninth day when the lawyer came to finalize the documents, and Oranna learned that great-aunt Nettie had left everything to her, including the little cabin in the Dun Morogh mountains.
The fourteenth day when her brother Silvano came for the first time to convince her to come back with him, back to the Stormbreaker’s home.
“Ye can’t possibly think ta stay now,” he said. “Ye said before tha’ ye weren’t runnin’ away, jus’ here ta help Garnetta. Well, she’s gone now, lass. It’s time ta come home.”
“It’s no’ my home,” Oranna had said, her voice low, but her jaw tight. He had argued more, but she had ignored him, going about her chores with such deep indifference and silence that he had been forced to throw his hands in the air and leave her alone.
At first, she thought it would be all right. She would rise to the occasion. Until the first day she ran out of chicken feed. She had not noticed the stores were low until the day she went to scoop some up, and came up empty. She set them out to the nearby field, nervously watching, hoping they would eat enough.
Then the problems came one after the other, in never ending stream of responsibilities that swept her up and crashed her against one thing and then the next.
The management of the farm.
The goats.
The potatoes.
The laundry.
The house.
The food.
She tried to boil some potatoes, and burned the pan after she’d wandered away because she’d realized she hadn’t latched the goats’ pen after all, and they were grazing out too close to her neighbor’s side of the fence.
She had not known how much great-aunt Nettie had hid from her about the incredible effort it took to keep the simple farm running. It was overwhelming, and Oranna had felt as though she did nothing more than run from one disaster to the next. She mistimed the potato harvest by likely a week, and already some had been pulled up by animals, or possibly the goats themselves from one of the many times she’d failed to latch the pen properly, and they’d pushed back out into the farm. She had spent an entire day trying to harvest extra, pulling up potatoes that had been under watered, and were not fit to be traded to the community.
Silvano had come back the next day, with that uncanny, terrible timing he seemed to possess, a trait of their mother’s.
“Ora, come on. It’s been months. Ye look like ye havenae slept in weeks.”
She had gritted her teeth, because she could not entirely dispute it. She had been working twice as long as she had before, waking before the sun rose, and falling into bed at night, knowing she would need to be up again in just a handful of hours, to do it all again.
“I’m fine,” she spat back. He sighed.
“Yer still a terrible liar.”
“I. Am. Fine,” she repeated through clenched teeth. She went to go out of the house, to go pull the laundry off the line, and Silvano stepped into her path. Oranna took a breath at it, and met his silver gray eyes. “Get out o’ my way.”
Silvano tilted his head to one side, and raised his brows, his face deceptively calm as he crossed his arms over his broad chest.
“Or what, Ora?” He seemed to loom in the space, growing taller, and Oranna could feel the tiny hairs on the back of her neck rising from the sense of the threat. She pressed her lips together hard, and curled her hands into fists, but said nothing. He shook his head. “Still, after all this, ye still can’t jus’ go fer it. Come on, Ora. Ye want me out o’ yer way. Do it.” He spread his arms wide.
Oranna just looked at him, her head moving back and forth in the tiniest shake, meeting his eyes and holding them. Whatever it was that was in her eyes, whether it was some unknown strength, or simply the presence of such weakness that would never challenge her brother the way he wanted, the result was the same. Silvano threw his hands into the air with a sound of exasperation, and moved out of her way.
When she came back in with the laundry, he was gone.
It was only after she was trying to fold the sheets from the bed that she realized that she had missed the day to meet great-aunt Nettie’s contact at the town to sell the slaughter goats at the market. Without that money, she wouldn’t have enough to repair the well handle that had broken, and fix up the gate of the goat’s pen that she’d closed wrong twice now. It was too late, and only if she got the meat done tonight would she still have enough time to get it to the market in time for it sell to the people who had reserved the orders for it, out of respect to her great-aunt.
The first goat she knew she needed to kill was the oldest, who had been sleeping more and more recently, and over a year older than what great-aunt Nettie usually preferred to cull. The meat might be going stringy, and would not sell for as high. Oranna swallowed hard and picked up the knife she had to use when she needed to slaughter the chickens. It was sharp. She could do it, she told herself. It was just like the chickens.
It was not just like the chickens.
She botched the first one, her hand slipping as she tried to get a clean cut, her other arm wrapped around the goat’s body, which bucked her off immediately. The knife went in wrong, slicing across the goat’s tough hide deep enough to be a mortal blow, but not quite enough to make it quick. When she tried to adjust, the goat had kicked out at her, knocking her back.
She sprawled onto the mud, and dropped the knife. In the growing gloom of the fading day, it was hard to see the brown handle. As she frantically tried to look for the metal, the goat screamed, in pain, trying to get back up. “No, wait,” she said helplessly.
She had tried to recover, watching the poor creature die slowly from her inefficient cut. She was still trying to get close enough when it began to flag, slowly dropping into the mud, weak from the blood loss. Its eyes looked up at hers with what Oranna saw as accusation, an indictment, and for a brief flitting moment, it was as if Irona Stormbreaker looked out at them at Oranna.
You’re too weak. You couldn’t even kill a goat right, because you flinched.
Oranna didn’t know what to do. She knelt next to the goat, reached over and gently laid its head onto her lap. She held its head in her hands, as its life bled out, and she cried, apologizing to the goat for being the wrong person, for doing it wrong, for not being good enough to do it right.
The other goats had fled to the other side of the pen. She didn’t know how long she sat there, with the dead goat in her lap, but it was long enough that when she stood up, her legs went wobbly with pins and needles. She brushed the tears off her face with bloodstained muddy hands, and went back inside.
She could not do this.
She had failed. This was not what she was meant to be.
Oranna was sitting on the small porch of the farm house when Irona Stormbreaker walked up to her the next day. Oranna’s eyes were on the ground, and the moment she heard the steps coming up the dirt path she knew who it was. Only one person’s footfalls sounded like that. Oranna spared a thought to wonder how much of her mother’s visit was pure coincidental perfect timing, or if her mother had been paying off the neighbors to spy on Oranna and inform her the moment it seemed like she’d finally broken. With Irona, truly, both could have been true.
Irona approached and stopped, just short of melee distance, from her daughter. Oranna didn’t move, merely waited for the inevitable.
“It’s time ta come home,” Irona had said, and Oranna sighed, biting back the words that said it may be the house where her family lived, but it was not home, not to her. “Ye know tha’ this, this is no’ wha’ yer meant ta be. Yer a Stormbreaker. We aren’t farmers. It’s time fer ye ta realize ye can’t run from yer destiny, Oranna. Yer a warrior.”
Oranna felt the words falling on her like a dozen serpents, slowly wrapping around her and squeezing, cutting off the flow of blood to her limbs. She breathed out again. Her bag was already packed. She had known what would happen. She said nothing as her mother moved around to the side, to Oranna’s left, her weaker side, and got into melee range. Irona took a deep breath, and scoffed as she examined her daughter.
“Can already see ye’ve let yerself go a bit. Well, I expected tha’. It’s fine. We’ll start ye back at the basics, get ye back into form, an’ then we’ll see if ye are finally ready ta—“ She did not get any further, as Oranna suddenly burst into motion, standing up and facing her mother.
“No.” Oranna felt the word slam out of her, as neat and clean as a perfectly executed shield bash. Irona looked stunned for a moment, her iron gray eyes wide, before she lowered her brows and tucked her chin even farther down.
“Wha’ did ye say?” Irona’s voice was the scary quiet, the one that warned of a blow about to land, but Oranna pulled her shoulders back and stared the warrior down.
“I said, no.” She felt as though she were invincible, as though no matter what her mother did to her next, she was never going to back down, never give in. “I’ll come back wi’ ye. I’ll come back…home, but I won’t go back ta tha’. I won’t train.”
Irona shook her head, looking at Oranna as though her daughter had sprouted giant monkey arms out of her ears and was waving a sword in each. Then she snorted, and titled her head to the side, her voice filled with cold scorn. “An’ wha’ are ye goin’ ta do then, hm? Jus’ sit around? Look pretty? You, Oranna? Yer no’ enough o’ a looker ta e’en bring in a good warrior foolish enough ta fall fer a pretty face, an’ I won’t have some freeloader in my house.”
Oranna felt her eyes start to drop, out of habit, and forced them to stay on her mother’s face. “I know tha’ ye’ve been tryin’ ta trim the funds tha family spends. I can work a garden. Take down the food expense. An’ I can work the books, like before, keepin’ track o’ the money. Ye know I was good a’ it.” She knew, even then, that it would not be enough. That her mother would never let her stay in those roles, never truly accept that Oranna would never go back to training.
But, Oranna knew that Irona would assume that at some point, she would convince her daughter to go back to it. Irona would wait her out.
“Fine. We’ll start there,” Irona said, with such ease that it made Oranna panic. Perhaps her mother had already known that Oranna would say no, and had already assumed that she would make the counter offer? No, no, there had been genuine surprise in her eyes when Oranna had said no. Her mother was just good at that—knowing already what she would and would not accept before she went into the deal. So, even that contingency, that unexpected possibility that Oranna would refuse, had been factored already, and the price agreed upon.
Once again, Oranna felt the sensation of having walked into her mother’s trap, the jaws of the iron clamp closing around her. Inside, where her mother couldn’t see it, Oranna wept.
The Battle of Wills
The first few months it was as though they were locked in a battle of wills, while they pretended that nothing was wrong. Oranna set up the small family garden, and returned to the management of the contracts the family completed. Irona did not wake her up with buckets of water and drag her to the training yard, or slam into her in the hallways to test Oranna’s skill at dodging and blocking, or come up from behind and put Oranna into a chokehold to break.
But, it felt to Oranna as though any minute, it would begin again.
Then, the family left on a bounty contract, something to do with some human squabble up north, a Stromgarde or Alterac skirmish, or whatever nonsense they got up to up there, and they left Oranna alone at home.
And that was not terrible. That had not been terrible at all.
They were gone for three months. By the time they came back, Oranna had settled in. She had gone out, collected books from vendors, and squirreled them away in her room, finding hiding places even her mother or brothers would not dare snoop for risk of being caught. Her confidence had grown, exponentially, that she might actually be able to outlast the indomitable Irona Stormbreaker.
Her mother came back to find that Oranna’s will was, for the first time, unlikely to bend so quickly. She had narrowed her eyes at her daughter, casually reading a book, a book of fiction nonetheless, at the table, as she polished some of the family’s arsenal. But, she had said nothing, merely added the family’s pack to the table, and told Oranna she expected the weapons cleaned and put back by the end of the day, and that was all.
Irona was a patient woman. She had outlasted countless opponents in battle purely through her endurance, her ability to take a blow, and her determination to simply never back down. Oranna knew that at some point, her mother would win, in the end. She would begin her training once more, or she would leave. But, at the least, she would make her mother work for it. If she wanted Oranna for her legacy, then Oranna was going to make her mother buy that legacy in decades. That was Oranna’s price.
An entire eight years passed before anything happened on that front. They had been locked in the dance they had set the steps to, Irona acting as though Oranna could go on forever as nothing more than a gardener and a bookkeeper, and Oranna acting as though it was all she ever wanted to do for the rest of her life, just garden and manage the books.
It started with the dwarven man who had come to help the Hammerstones, apprenticing to them as a blacksmith, after their only daughter had passed away from some accident down in the south. Oranna had been sitting in the small field next the forest, reading a book as she worked on trying to sew a straight line into her shirt where a hole had formed, when he first approached her, asking what she was reading. He had introduced himself as Rhadam Goldenhandle, and had acted surprised and delighted to hear she was one of the Stormbreakers.
She had not wanted the company, but it had seemed rude to send him away, so she had talked to him, and let him talk to her. It was clear from the start he much preferred talking at her, while all she needed to do was nod along occasionally, and repeat back things he said as a question, while her actual attention went to her work. He started to come to the Stormbreaker house, and talk to her while she worked in the garden, talk to her while she did the laundry, talk to her while she walked to the mail box.
She tried not saying anything at all for a while, but Rhadam was not a man who was deterred by silence. If anything, it seemed to encourage him even more, while he praised how good of a listener she was, and how much he enjoyed talking with her.
Then, the day came where as she stood next to the house, trying to check on the squashes she was trying to grow on the trellis, he had tried to kiss her. Oranna had stumbled back at the brush of his lips on hers, bringing her arms up in front of her. “Wha’ are ye doin’?” She managed to catch her balance before she fell, but almost tripped again when she saw the thunderous look on Rhadam’s face.
“Wha’ do ye mean, wha’ am I doin’? Wha’ ye’ve been practically beggin’ I do, all these months? Wha’ ye think ye can jus’ lead a man on, battin’ yer eyes a’ him like some little coquette an’ jus’ expect him ta ne’er act like a man?”
Oranna had felt baffled, as though he’d begun speaking in some unknown tongue, unable to follow the logic of his words. What had she down except let him invade her space, take up her silence with his constant flow of endless chatter, and not simply asked him to leave? She wasn’t even sure she could bat her eyelashes if she wanted to.
“I didnae, I wasn’t, I — “ she shook her head as she tried to find a way to say what needed to be said, but was lost on where to begin. Rhadam closed the distance between them, his face tight with anger as he grabbed her wrist, viper quick, and pulled her back to him. “I-I’m sorry, if I made ye think tha’ I…that I wanted…” Rhadam squeezed and Oranna tried not to wince from the pain, not to flinch in the face of the dwarven man nearly twice her width, with biceps larger than her thighs.
“No one leads me on, Ora. An’ don’t think yer such a catch. I know yer older. Yer wha’, in yer 70s? Still havenae found a man. Yer no’ gettin’ a better offer, lass, no’ wi’ tha’ face o’ yers. I’m the only one who’s gonna offer fer ye before yer no’ worth anythin’.”
Her eyes filled with tears, although if it was from his vile words or the pain in her wrist, it was unclear even to her. She couldn’t think through the pain, the fear of what might happen, and then, it was as though he’d simply ceased to exist.
It took Oranna a moment for her brain to catch up, to place everything in order.
Irona Stormbreaker had come in, using that uncanny speed she had, and barreled into the dwarven man with nothing but her arm as a shield, and it had ripped his grip off Oranna’s wrist, and flung him several feet away to the ground. The dwarven woman had not even paused as she lifted him off the ground, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard a few tiles above them shook a little loose.
Irona had placed her arm crosswise against the dwarven man’s throat, and held him pinned to the wall, his feet dangling just a few precious hairs above the ground, but enough that he couldn’t find purchase on the ground to fight back. He had brought his arms up to try to clear her arm away, but the mail she wore at all times simply repelled his efforts, as he slowly choked.
“I’m goin’ ta keep this simple. If ye e’er come here again, e’er e’en look at my daughter again, let alone touch her, I will kill ye. I’ll give ye one hour ta leave the area, an’ if I see ye again, ye are facin’ me in battle, an’ I will kill ye, an’ I’ll do it slow, and I’ll do it painfully. Am I understood?”
Rhadam had glared at Irona, but it was clear from the ease with which she held him, suspended off the ground, with one arm, that he was out matched. His face was red, and the veins in his eyes had begun to show, but he nodded once. She dropped him, stepping back out of his easy reach, but he did not even make the attempt. Just looked once up at the dwarven warrior’s face, spit on the ground by her feet, and then picked himself up and left without even a single glance in Oranna’s direction.
Oranna had watched with something between confusion and relief, and had turned back to her mother, to thank her, maybe, but, before she could, the backhanded blow caught her squarely on the face.
She dropped to the ground, her vision fading in and out from the blow.
“Ye fool, fool girl. Wha’ ha’ I been sayin’? Wha’ do ye think would ha’ happened if I hadn’t intervened, huh?” Irona reached over and dragged Oranna up by her shirt, pulling her to her feet, the older woman’s face a mask of cold rage. “If ye would jus’ do wha’ I’ve told ye, this wouldna ha’ happened. Yer weak. Ye let yerself stay weak. This really who ye wan’ ta be, Oranna? Someone who can’t do anythin’ but stand there, cryin’, waitin’ fer someone ta rescue her? Is tha’ who yer meant ta be? Or are ye finally goin’ ta start actin’ like the Stormbreaker ye are?”
Irona hadn’t waited for answer, just turned around and left Oranna there in the garden, her lip bleeding from the blow, looking at the ruined trellis of the squashes trampled in the dirt from where Rhadam had landed in them.
The next day, she had showed up to the training yard. The battle of wills was over. Oranna had lost.
Who knows what might have happened, if not for the orcs.
Less than two years after Oranna had once again begun basic training, the word came. There were things called orcs. They had invaded the human lands and Stormwind had fallen. They were coming for the rest of Azeroth. All dwarves were to be ready to defend themselves, and to fall back to Ironforge rather than try to stand individually against the oncoming army.
When they got the word from the forward scouts that the orcs had been spotted in Khaz Modan, Irona had seized control of the evacuation. She had herded people with a skill formed over centuries of practice, getting both fighters and non-combatants to the places they needed to be. They were coordinated to understand the goal: make the orcs pay more than they thought they’d needed to get to Ironforge. Whittle down the forces for the final stand. They would lead the orcs into areas they knew well, exploit the landscape, and set traps along the way: landslides, burned bridges, collapsed tunnels, leading trails into marshlands with warning signs removed as traps for their wagons of food and supplies.
It had been going so well. By day they hassled the orcs from afar, trapping the oncoming army with cleverness and ploys. By night, resting and readying the next trap. They had seemed to be playing an easy game, one that the orcs were destined to lose.
Right up until the day that Orgrim Doomhammer had decided he’d had enough of playing by the dwarven rules.
The dwarves and gnomes had collapsed a pass that would take more than a day to clear at a reasonable pace of excavation or send the orcs nearly three days around to the next closes pass, which already some gnomes had been dispatched to collapse. They had then set out miles away, before they camped for the night. The mood was cheerful, pleased. Oranna drank her fill of the good beer that had been saved for such a victory, and then drank someone else’s fill as well, until she collapsed into bed pleased, feeling as though the dwarves would never fall to such pitiful creatures like the orcs. In the battle of wills with Irona Stormbreaker, the orcs could not possibly stand a chance.
In the years to come, Oranna did not like to think what the orcs must have done to do it. How many must have worked to clear the pass until they passed out from exhaustion, and then had been left behind, possibly to die? How hard the forced march through the night must have been, as they pushed on at a brutal pace, to catch up to the dwarves?
The dwarves and gnomes had barely had warning. The watch scouts, put out by habit rather than presumed need, had sent back a cry that the orcs were coming, they were nearly upon the camp, before the dawn had even crested over the mountain peaks.
Chaos had erupted.
There was no time to collect the camp, to do more than grab whatever could be carried, and run. They were nearly a dozen miles out from the gates of Ironforge, and there would be no way to get word to the city they were even in trouble. They were on their own.
Oranna had been so hung over, she could barely stand without help, and running made her dizzy as the adrenaline pumped through her like hot venom in her veins. But, she had tried to keep up, pausing occasionally to vomit to the side of the trees, and then going back to running.
Irona had organized as much as she could, calling out orders, separating out the civilians and the warriors. The civilians were put to the front, and lead at punishing pace. The warriors behind. Irona had calculated the needs, the odds, the numbers and the speed, and had left Silvano and Oranna’s father and their troop of eight men and women warriors to hold at the camp. They would perish, but it would give the rest of the group more time.
Oranna had not even know it had happened until Nikhail had told her to run faster, or Silvano and Father had died for nothing. The tears had burned in her eyes as she had forced her legs to run faster, trying to breathe through past the crushing lump in her throat.
They had only had one advantage over the orcs, and it was that for the most part, they were rested, while the orcs had to have been exhausted. While many knew the landscape, some were not from around the area, the gnomes and dwarves from other places who had never been this way before, and some were simply unused to a near sprint for mile after mile with no rest. They managed to pull ahead enough, just enough, that they weren’t constantly falling to the orcs’ ranged weapons, and had created enough space between their fastest runners, and the warriors bringing up the rear, to consider that the might be able to get inside the gates at least slightly before most of the orcs. But, the hope that they could outrun the horde was futile. At least some orcs would make it inside, might even be able to hold the gates open that much longer, and the army would pour into Ironforge.
Once again, Irona had calculated the odds. Asked herself, what was she willing to pay? And then, like everything else, she had accepted the price.
She called over several of the gnome engineers and asked, them, as they ran, how fast they could make enough explosives to blow the overpass bridge to Ironforge. It was not a large bridge, just one that had been made that facilitated the trip over the mountains from the east, an old route that bypassed the steep climb up to the gates of Ironforge, and one they could divert to, still, leading the orcs that way. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the gnomes with bright pink hair had confessed that she was already carrying enough explosives on her to take down the bridge and then maybe another bridge, and well, if she was pressed, possibly a third bridge, although those were really her very favorite explosive powders she was saving for a special occasion, and well, okay, maybe this counted after all.
The gnomes had been asked to bear with the indignity of being carried, and Irona had conscripted three warriors to sprint with the gnomes as far as they could, and then they would sprint the rest of the way, to give them time to rig the bridge, maximizing their time and strength. The civilians would cross, and the warriors would hold on the other side, giving them time to get inside the gates of Ironforge before the orc horde overran them, and all the civilians across the bridge before they blew it up.
Oranna had prepared to stand, to die, another warrior lost in the fight.
And then they had arrived to the bridge, and Irona had put her with the civilians. Coperun had shoved Oranna into Topa’s arm, and told her to get Oranna to Ironforge.
Then the Stormbreakers had died. Some in the first crush as the orcs closed, others as they fought to try to keep the orcs occupied as Doomhammer recovered from the loss of the bridge, rapidly changing course to send the orcs down the mountain, and back up the steep hill to Ironforge.
The last Stormbreaker watched numbly, helplessly, as she was dragged into the gates of Ironforge.
Oranna had never been able to determine why. Why had her mother saved her, why had her brother pushed her away?
Had it been out of love?
Had it been out of disgust?
Had she been deemed unworthy of standing with her family?
Or had Irona still believed, after all that time, that with just a little more time, Oranna would finally become who she had always believed her daughter was meant to be?
There were no answers in the mountains, after the Siege, as much as she tried to look for them, in the silence that followed the constant noise of the past year since the last time she saw the Stormbreakers.
The questions had turned endlessly in her mind, a roundelay, her mind replaying the moments a hundred thousand times, changing things in desperation, and trying to make an answer form out of the air. This time, Irona’s eyes were softer, filled with faith and love in her daughter. This time, they were filled with scorn, harder than diamond, shoving her away with the rest of the useless civilians. Neither was true, neither was wrong, and as her memories wore away gently with time, she knew that she would never truly know, not anymore. The only ones who could tell her for sure were dead, and the ghosts she carried of them told both stories to her, changing sometimes so quickly from one to the other, Oranna felt her head about to split in two.
Mywill had brought a new life to the dwarven woman, a purpose. Books about dwarven hunters who saved the day, got the girls, and lived happily ever after with seventeen animals filled her bookshelves. Slowly, she began to see a path out of her own mind.
The years passed, and Oranna studied, almost in secret from her own mind. She wasn’t reading books on tracking because she was a hunter, no, it was just curiosity. She wasn’t practicing coordinating with Mywill in fighting because she was a hunter, no, they were just enriching their bond. She wasn’t working on her gun firing because she was a hunter, she was just ensuring that the skills she’d broken for weren’t lost. And so on, until one day, the truth was inescapable: Oranna was never going to be a warrior. She was a Hunter. She would forge her own way of being a Stormbreaker.
She would be who she was meant to be.