![](http://cobalt-company.wdfiles.com/local--resized-images/writing:2022-08-22-broken-land/style="margin:/medium.jpg) |
| Details |
| Author: | Saaron |
| Summary: | Azizia travels to Outland to see the Lost Ones ruins, ready to do something drastic. A tauren druid, Eldau, comes to speak to her about the lives of these broken draenei. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: Prompt Responses
Azizia stares at the village of Lost Ones, her hooves above the swamp water. She stays motionless, silent. And yet, thoughts and questions race through her mind, and her gaze quickly darts from one Lost One to the other. Not only her own inner voice makes it hard to think, but the voices of Draenor’s elements speak to her as if they were seeing an old friend they hadn’t seen in a while. As if that old friend knew exactly how to fix their problems. She tries to ignore them. After all, that is what they did to her back then. Ignore her requests. Pretend to not hear her call. And now, they flock to her begging for her help. There are many other Shamans they can ask for help, here, they’re not her problem anymore.
Azizia has other plans today.
Her eyes lock on a face she sees far away. Her vision flickers, but her grip tightens around the handle of her axes as she finally takes a step towards these lost Draenei’s buildings. And then another step, and another, and another, her legs trembling a little more with each step, doubt slithering its way into her mind with every second spent there. Each step gets her a little less close to her target and she feels as though her legs are about to give in when…
A deep, gravelly, unknown voice comes from behind her.
“Ah! There you are!”
She abruptly turns around, a stern look on her face and a voice that breaks. “What? Who are you?”
The tauren – tall and muscular, even for one of his race, with a light brown fur and a dark mane – walks to the edge of the water on which Azizia is standing. He raises a hand in peace. “My name is Eldau Wildmane, I work with the Cenarion Expedition.”
Azizia rolls her eyes and slightly shakes her head. “Okay. And you were looking for me because..?”
“Well,” Eldau says, sitting down. A few small, colorful flowers bloom around his hands as he touches the ground. “We’ve had, uh… issues with the Lost Ones and kidnappings of our members. When someone asks us for directions to their homes and then doesn’t come back for a while, I like to go on patrol to make sure they're fine.”
She scoffs. “Okay? Does this happen often? People who ask about Lost Ones and then go?”
“More than you’d think,” he chuckles. “I’ve seen my fair share draenei coming back from Azeroth, asking if the Lost Ones are still where they were when they left for Azeroth. I believe it’s because of some sort of… guilt for leaving some people behind.” His smile disappears for a second, and instead, Eldau raises his eyebrows inquisitively at the draenei.
“Anyway. I am standing on water so far away Lost Ones have not noticed I am here yet. Clearly, I am fine.”
“What’s your name?”
His calm tone takes her aback. It seems completely irrelevant to what she’d just said. Azizia pauses, narrowing her eyes. “… Azizia. Why?”
“Well, Azizia, I’m going to be honest. If you’ve been gone long enough for me to start worrying about your fate and what you’ve done all this time is stand on marsh water and stare at people, I’m not actually sure you’re ‘fine’.”
Azizia doesn’t answer. What do you answer to a stranger saying stuff like that? Plus, Taurens allied with the orcs, now, that’s as good a reason to just turn her head and put an end to this conversation. And that she does – she turns her head towards the Lost Ones and waits for Eldau to leave.
Which he does not.
None of them move for a little while, Azizia pretending the Tauren doesn’t exist and Eldau staring directly at her.
“Oh, well. All right. I get it. I’ll go,” He softly slaps his hands on his knees and finally, slowly gets up. “I’ll be back in around an hour. If you could manage to do anything else than just staring at them while I’m gone, that’d be… I don’t know. Make my next trip to these ruins interesting.”
The Tauren chuckles. The Draenei does not. She stays silent, her eyes still on the Lost Ones. Eldau begins walking away, letting out a short grunt, close to a sigh which sets his nose ring in motion.
“Oh, one last thing!” he says, turning around to look back at her. “Did you know that some of these ‘Lost Ones’ have turned to shamanism and druidism?”
Azizia scoffs, her voice breaking again. “Oh, great! When they are not forcing people in prisons and rolling around in muddy water, maybe they grow tiny flowers and speak to rocks.” Her water walking ends and Azizia splashes into the water. The spirit who allowed her to do that probably took this personally. She very reluctantly lowers he head just above the water’s edge, holding her hair up with her hand, trying to stay hidden from the Lost Ones.
Eldau pretends this isn’t happening. He stays up, and the few Lost Ones who heard Azizia and are looking in their direction seem to consider him to be too far away to act. “Well, I’m just saying that because clearly, you are a shaman yourself, I thought that information would be of interest to you.”
Azizia waits for a bit longer, hoping to see them turn around and go back to their Broken lives. When they do, she gets up and glares at the tauren.
“I do not care. Not little bit! Lost Ones I know, their last almost coherent thoughts were they did not like me doing shamanism. Even if I began shamanism for them!” she shakes her head, raising her voice. Water ripples around her legs as she angrily kicks the bottom of the swamp with her hoof. “And I do not care if they are doing now. They are because they are lost – it’s in the name! Elements did not care to help them before, they do not care to help them now.”
Eldau grunts again, this time it’s a softer grunt, a compassionate sound. He sits back down. “I can’t say for sure how this works on this planet or on yours, but to us taurens, it is not the Light who guides us like your people or humans.”
“I do not care about yo—”
“Please,” he says, raising his hand up to his face, his palm facing towards Azizia. “I promise this is relevant.”
She sighs and begins to make her way out of the water.
“The Earth Mother is the mother of all creatures of Azeroth, and of Azeroth itself. She’s also the one who weaves the fate of every single one of her creations.”
“Are you saying Outland breaking them is part of… Earth mother of Argus’ plan?” she growls, raising an eyebrow. She does not elaborate on who is “them”.
Eldau shakes his head. “Outland itself did not break them, is what I’m saying. What you used to call Draenor, it embraced them. It teaches them how to work with it. Perhaps, this land saw them as what they were.” He pauses, turning over and looking in the distance, where he knows Zangarmarsh ends and space begins. “Kindred spirits.”
Azizia takes a deep breath, thinking about this. He raises somewhat of a good point. Where did these Lost Ones learn to use the elements and druidism? The elements themselves came to Nobundo, but that was long before he devolved into what Azizia sees as beasts. Still, something feels wrong with what he’s saying. “If what you say is true, if… all worlds have divinities like your Earth Mother, and they make destiny of people they create, why do they create horrible destinies for some of them? Why does Azeroth’s Earth Mother make human warlock, or create evil tauren?” she pauses. “I suppose evil taurens exist.”
“I guess you could say so, yes,” he says after letting out a long-drawn sigh. “That is a good question, one which I still wonder about myself. That is why I became a druid; to understand the Earth Mother better. I will get back to you on that, if I ever find the answer.” He chuckles. “My best bet is that she does make fate, but she doesn’t know how outside forces like the Legion or the Old Gods will influence what she’s created.”
“Okay well,” Azizia says before pausing, searching for the right words. She sits down on the ground next to him. “If you are right – and I’m not saying you are because where is Light in what you’re saying? If you somehow are right, why did Earth Mother of ours decide to give such fates to them? Being Lost Ones is terrible.”
Eldau smiles. “To you, it may seem that way. But I don’t believe the Lost Ones are… lost.” The Draenei throws a look at him with eyes that scream ‘what do you mean? Look at them!’. “I’ve heard people had tried to contact some of them. They do speak and think like you and I do, that hasn’t changed.”
“They do not think like us! They attack, they lose consciousness, and leave our settlements! You said it yourself, they kidna—”
“The ones that were contacted and did respond did not wish to associate with draenei. I’m sorry. Your cities have rejected them because you feared what the warlocks did was contagious, and then most of you left for Azeroth. They are hurting.”
Azizia grows silent. She frowns. None of what the tauren is saying makes sense. Why did her parents leave if they were perfectly fine, then? They were with the Broken in Nagrand, none rejected them there. They just… left. She gets up, clenching her fists. “You do not know what you are talking about. You do not know what Draenei had to do to survive, or how much suffering happened! We draenei are stronger than you seem to think. We would not see it as abandon like that! Them…” she points at the Lost Ones. “They are mutated monsters who cannot think properly like they used to! Maybe they can still talk, but they have blurry thoughts, and that is why they attack and kidnap instead of work together with us to maybe get away from dying planet or to stop Legion and orcs who really hurt them! We did not hurt them!”
Eldau gets up, towering over Azizia from his 9’3. Every muscle in his arms seems tense. They stand just a few feet away from each other. They stare each other down in a silent battle for a while. He wrinkles his nose, slightly revealing his cat-like fangs. The tauren grunts once again, before taking a deep breath, releasing all the tension in his body. He takes a few steps back “Perhaps I’m wrong, yes. But if, as you said, I am right, what you think is savagery is only a reaction to the hurt of a world that is like them, broken, and has welcomed them when no one else did, not even their own people. Their Draenor is in pain. Wouldn’t you be a little aggressive too, if what you loved most was hurting?”
“You really are fucking stupid if you think all this is true,” she says, using one of the many swears she’s learned on Azeroth.
Eldau laughs. “Yes, I must be.” He walks back to stand just right in front of her again and lowers himself to have this face-to-face on equal footing. He extends his arm right past her shoulder. “So go. Go kill these people you’ve lost, completely unprovoked, because that is what you think is better for them. I choose to believe that if anyone can heal this land, it’s not the Cenarion Expedition – it’s them. They understand it better than any of us.”
Azizia’s arm twitches and just a second later, the Tauren is holding his hands to his snout as blood begins pouring out, while Azizia breathes heavily, her fist still clenched. She clears her throat and wipes her hand on her soaked armor, before up-nodding the tauren, challenging him. As Eldau realizes what has just happened, he has to fight the urge to fight back. His breathing slows down, his gaze becomes icy cold, his face expressionless. He’s analyzing the situation, weighing the pros and cons of such a fight. Observing her, the weak points of her armor, the places where he could tear into her flesh and swiftly end this fight. He shakes his head, realizing that this isn’t even worth it. They’d notice the blue blood on his clothes, he couldn’t even say it was his own blood. All it would do would make him lie to the Cenarion Expedition, and potentially create tension with them, even have him potentially thrown out for attacking an innocent.
“Well, I’ll still come back here to check on you. You can punch me all you want, that won’t stop me.”
“No need,” she answers, cracking her knuckles. “I am leaving.”
“Good. I’ll safely escort you back to the Cenarion Refuge, then,” he answers, smiling kindly.
“No need either. I am going to Telredor.”
“Doesn’t matter, you still have to go to the refu—wait where are you going?” Azizia begins crossing through the marsh’s waters. “There’s a Horde town, nagas, and wild beasts on the way there. You can’t make your way over there like this! This is dangerous!”
Azizia, from where she’s standing, turns around to look at him and raises both her arms, extending her neck towards him, as if challenging him once more. Calmly, she says: “Watch me.”
She turns around, makes her way through the marsh, and soon disappears into the wilderness.
Eldau sighs, pressing a hand against his bleeding snout. “Well. That didn’t go as well as it usually does.”