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| Details |
| Author: | Mishell |
| Summary: | The 6th EU scouts out the Caverns of Time. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Arc: The Silithus Front
Chain: Breaching Ahn'Qiraj
Eventually, Captain Tyrrell noticed that the two new gals were straggling. Sgt. Slipshank saw him stop halfway to the horizon and turn back; she could almost feel his irritation rippling like a heat mirage over the sand.
Slipshank wasn’t normally a huge fan of warlocks, and would never have guessed one would be captain of a 7th Legion unit, but Tyrrell commanded respect as a veteran of Hyjal and a longtime friend of the High Commander himself. Tyrrell had been a mage during the third war, but after seeing firsthand the power that the warlocks of the Legion had wielded, he’d decided to fight felfire with felfire, as it were.
Zath Tyrrell was the kind of guy who made you feel like if he drew a circle you might just hop into it and do his bidding, and you might feel pretty okay about the whole thing. He had eyes like shards from a blue glacier, cheekbones like… sharper and whiter pieces of the same glacier. His close-shorn jet-black hair boasted one silver patch above his left eye, because he wasn’t already dramatic enough, possibly? His disapproval was withering, his compliments rare but potent. Slipshank had to admit he already had her pretty well wrapped around his little finger. She was pretty sure Master Sergeant Hall was wrapped around something else of his — which was wildly against regulations — but if so, the two were remarkably discreet about it.
“Splendid of you to join us,” Captain Tyrrell said. His Lordaeron-accented voice was like dark velvet rimed with frost.
Slipshank saluted breathlessly. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Tyrrell turned away, presenting his elegant profile as he gazed across the sand at the massive, craggy outcropping ahead. “That is where Baristolth told us we would find the dragonflight,” he said. “A cavern whose entrance is hidden somewhere among those rocks.”
“And I assume you want me to scout ahead.” Slipshank leaned her hands on her thighs for a moment to catch her breath.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Tyrrell. He murmured an incantation under his breath, and a sickly green sphere appeared beside him, hovering.
“What the fel is that?” said Slipshank.
“An Eye of Kilrogg,” he answered.
“Who’s Kilrogg?”
“An orc chieftain,” he said. “The first person the Alliance military saw using this spell. It can slip unseen past enemy lines, and I can see whatever it sees.”
Slipshank frowned. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
“Granted.”
“Isn’t that sort of my job? Whatcha need an Eye of Kilrogg for when you’ve got the Eye of Tyrrell right here? Or have I just lost my job to some creepy orc spell?”
“In situations where hands are needed, yours are the ones I trust to slip in quietly,” he said. Lieutenant Boles made an unladylike snorting sound, but quickly covered her mouth when the captain glanced over at her. “In this case,” he continued, “I only need visual confirmation. There is no sense in risking you.”
“Permission to speak freely. Again.”
This time he turned his cold blue gaze on her directly. A muscle in his jaw worked. “Granted,” he said. “Again.”
“I’d say sending in a blob of warlock magic might be more of a risk, if our whole idea here is to seem friendly.”
“She has a point,” said Snowdrop. “With permission, sir?”
“Granted,” Tyrrell said from between clenched teeth.
“The first war in which the dragonflights came to our aid was against the Burning Legion, and it nearly destroyed our world. I believe that Sergeant Slipshank, if spotted, would be more likely to escape unharmed than we would if the dragonflight caught us using fel magic in their presence.”
Captain Tyrell considered for a moment, then gave a single crisp nod. “Go on then,” he said to Slipshank. “Try to outwit the son of a Dragon Aspect, whenever you’re ready.”
How did one get ready for such a thing?
As she headed off across the blistering sand, Slipshank convinced herself it was just another scouting mission, nothing unusual. Just observe and report, never mind all that stuff Snowdrop had said earlier about angry dragons hurling her a thousand years away.
The moment Slipshank rounded the edge of the crescent-shaped outcropping and caught a glimpse of what was sheltered within it, she knew she’d found something all right.
There were buildings inside. Not a town, not functioning buildings, just a strange collection of ruins. Collection was the right word; it looked as though someone of incredible size and improbable means had somehow gathered up abandoned buildings from all over the world, from various time periods and locales, and warehoused them in no particular order. A Kaldorei tower from before the War of the Ancients leaned to one side behind the stodgy square battlements of a Lordaeron-style curtain wall. Nearby, a leather-and-bone orc hut was half sunk into the sand.
It was all so disorienting that it took Slipshank a moment to even see the dragons. It wasn’t until one of them shifted position, spreading its great golden-brown wings, that Slipshank fully realized they weren’t just part of the scenery. They were alive, and they were huge. Luckily none of them seemed to have noticed her yet.
None of them quite fit the description Baristolth had given. His instructions had been long and rambling and poetic, but she remembered he’d said green eyes. Same color as hers! Also, as large as these blue-eyed specimens were, they didn’t seem quite as tremendous and awe-inspiring as the dragon he’d described. She could just barely glimpse the mouth of a cave, with strange lights flickering inside. That seemed a promising place for the son of time to be hanging out. Carefully, she crept closer, taking care to stay in the shadows of the broken and toppled towers and well out of earshot of the creatures patrolling them.
The closer she got to the cave entrance, though, the stranger she felt. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck and arms seemed to stand straight at attention, and her heart rate accelerated for reasons she couldn’t understand. Of course she had a healthy respect for anything with teeth the size of her hand, but that wasn’t it. There was something deeper than mere self-preservation nagging at her. The very air around her felt more and more unstable the closer she got to the cave.
Her mind was starting to feel a bit less than stable, too, now that she mentioned it.
This she wasn’t prepared for. Just a month before her 7th Legion assessment she’d had a near-complete mental breakdown, and this feeling reminded her too much of it: not being completely sure what was real or whether or not she was alone. She was just starting to consider turning back and telling the captain he could go ahead and send his creepy green eyeball in when a huge shadow fell over her from behind.
Shit, she mouthed quietly, but did not say aloud. Just in case she still had the element of surprise on whatever it was. Slowly, carefully, she turned.
There stood a pair of clawed forelegs like the trunks of redwoods. Her gaze slowly climbed them up the scaled breast of the largest dragon she’d ever seen. Its cold green gaze had seen right through her attempts at stealth. Slipshank opened her mouth, intending to humbly apologize for trespassing — dragons could understand speech, right? — but she found that words completely deserted her.
That emerald gaze pinned her like a butterfly on a board. Judged her, weighed her, and clearly found her so staggeringly insignificant that it set her trembling with shame.
And then she was looking into the ice-blue eyes of Captain Tyrrell.
“Go on then,” he said. “Try to outwit the son of a Dragon Aspect, whenever you’re ready.”
She blinked. Stared at her captain. At Snowdrop, and the others in her unit. She swiveled around a full three hundred sixty degrees in her confusion, found herself once again looking from a distance at the outcroppings that hid the entrance to the caverns. All the things she’d seen behind those rocks still hovered in her memory, but there was no set of tracks marking the path she’d walked.
It hadn’t been a daydream, she knew that much. She only daydreamed about one thing, and it wasn’t dragons. Also? Tyrrell rationed out his words carefully. He would not have said the exact same thing to her twice.
She shifted her weight, looking up at Tyrrell uncertainly. “Hey, so… turns out that won’t be necessary. He’s definitely there. Anachronos.”
Tyrrell raised a single jet-black brow. “And how do you know this?”
“Because I already scouted for you, and the fucker just sent me back in time to before I went in there.”
Siege Engineer Blackale threw back her head and laughed. “Ach! Tha’s a good one!”
“I wish I were joking,” Slipshank said. She laced her four-fingered hands together in front of her to stop them from shaking.
Tyrrell studied her solemnly. “Look at her. A moment ago she was flushed from the heat; now she’s as pale as the dead. I believe she’s telling the truth. How very curious.”
“Describe him,” said Snowdrop. “The dragon you saw.”
“Green eyes, but Baristolth told us that. What else… his horns were darker than the others. Longer. There were other dragons in there, a little smaller. And all kinds of weird ruins, jumbled together like history’s unkempt closet or something.” She turned to Tyrrell. “Please, sir, don’t send me back in there.”
Captain Tyrrell looked at her for a moment longer. “No need,” he said then, turning away. “You’ve given us no reason to doubt you before. Baristolth has what he asked for: confirmation that this is indeed the lair of the bronze dragonflight, and that Anachronos is among them. We may return to Cenarion Hold and report.”
Slipshank exhaled heavily, her bones going all watery from relief. It would be a long trek back, but at least she’d only have to do it once.