(2025-06-25) The Survivor's Account of the Fall of Northwatch

Details

Author:	Mishell
Summary:	On June 26th, year 29, six days after the Horde massacre at Northwatch, this article appears in the Stormwind Herald. Newsboys shout that General Mattingly's daughter saw it all! Read all about it! You can tell by their faces which ones have read it, because they don't smile when they shout it.
Rating:	T for Teen

Chain: Northwatch

THE SURVIVOR'S ACCOUNT OF THE FALL OF NORTHWATCH
By Janice Mattingly

Living at Northwatch, you thought you'd seen the worst the Horde could do. The atrocities of the Rageroar clan in particular were so constant you'd see men stepping over scalped bodies on their way back to the fort, not even looking down anymore. You'd see women too exhausted to wipe the red spatter off their faces, crumpling onto a cot in hopes of a fifteen minute blackout before the horns blared again.

Every time, the Alliance pushed the orcs back and held, and so you stopped counting, stopped marking it. The tide washed in green and washed out red. You stopped thinking of orcs as people; it was all you could do to think of yourself that way. You built gray stone walls around a heart under siege, because this was the worst war could get, you thought.

Now the twentieth of June arrives. Already hot as felfire three hours past sunrise, but besides that you don't feel anything different in the air. You're no prophet. You're a golem who sees and hears nothing but orders.

You get word that a bigger force is coming. Not just orcs: tauren, trolls. You think for a moment, This might be interesting, at least. Different, at least, and different is good. It's the last optimistic thought you'll have this summer. Maybe for the rest of your life.

This time, they bring their shamans. It seems they all have shamans - orcs, trolls, and tauren - and even though some hang back and some charge forward you can spot the shamans because balls of lightning revolve around them and strange totems spring up at their feet, like the draenei's but coarse, made of wood and stone and bone. Until now it's been melee, gunfire, catapults and cannons: mundane and bloody. But now the very elements are fighting you.

A riflewoman you had breakfast with takes aim, and a wind takes her off her feet like she's made of paper, dashes her against a stone wall. She falls with her head turned wrong. A priest's robe bursts into flames out of nowhere. The screaming orange blaze of him runs blindly into a troll spear. Tauren stamp their massive hooves and the earth trembles, but only people in white tabards buckle and fall. Orcs close in on them, grinning and slashing.

By now the orcs know the Hold almost as well as you do. They know just where to go, just where to lay down planks for makeshift bridges, where to catapult huge boulders into the stream so they can jump on them to cross. The bottom drops out of your gut as you realize that everything you've mindlessly endured, every orc your people have slaughtered thinking you were winning, it's all been nothing but reconnaissance for them. Acceptable losses leading to this.

You think, This is it. After all this, they're taking Northwatch from us. Someone will yell RETREAT, and we'll leave behind the towers we built and rebuilt stone by stone and pile into ships waiting at the coast. We'll slink to Theramore with tails tucked, all our sacrifices for nothing.

And then you hear cannon fire from the sea, from the direction you'd thought to retreat.

You realize with a sudden cold calm, like the eye of a storm, that you are going to die today. You are all going to die today.

You run. Not away from the shamans, because that's toward the cannonfire. Vaguely southward, the only direction from which you don't hear death coming.

You aren't fleeing. You're repositioning. You're trying to get somewhere you can think, where you can look at the situation and figure out what to do, because no one is yelling orders that make any sense. "HOLD THE LINE!" makes no sense. There is no line, and the dwarf woman who just yelled that is now crumpling with an orcish axe buried in the side of her neck. Blood is soaking into her yellow hair.

You have just enough time to glance at the red-clouded stream, which is no longer even a minor barrier, and think where did they get all these boulders? before the boulders suddenly shudder, contort as though in pain, and begin to stand up. Melting and shuddering, great screaming mouths appearing in them. Hellishly glowing giants from the earth itself, full of mindless rage.

Even the enemy looks stunned. Orcs stare in awe, but they look perversely enchanted. The tauren, though - they surprise you. They back away, slamming into each other in obvious shock, and then at a deep-voiced shout in a foreign tongue they fully retreat.

It doesn't matter. The orcs don't need the tauren now. These new hulks of rock and rage and magma are bigger than they are, and they burn and shatter everything they assault. They are not here to take the fort. They are here to annihilate it and everyone in it, turn it all to rubble and ash.

Some of the orcs are making a horrible wild coughing roar that you suddenly realize is laughter.

Now you are fleeing. Even before you hear the retreat order. Retreat to where? You see some people headed from the southern end of the keep toward the hills, but that's so obvious a place to flee that you can almost see through the sun baked crags to the orcs waiting there, ready to wear your teeth like pearls.

Instead you make for a promontory south of the keep outside the Horde lines where you sat once with a friend and forgot the war for an hour, smelling the sea and monologuing about how it touched every shore at once. You weren't sure you wanted your friend to kiss you, but two days later an orc took their head off, so you're glad now that you allowed it.

You're heading there not because you think it's safe. The walls you built around your heart collapse, because you did enjoy living after all, despite everything. You run toward the spot where you had your last kiss because it's where you have chosen to die.

There are footsteps behind you. You glance over your shoulder and see white tabards splattered with blood, but you don't have time to tell them that you don't have some secret path to safety; that they're following a madwoman. Even as you look, blue-white lightning forks between three of them; one of the trio falls dead, her corpse smoking, and the others stagger.

You stop looking back. You run like you were shot out of a cannon.

Two dozen pounding steps, two dozen pounding heartbeats, and then you see a blue flare out on the ocean, almost directly in the line of your lung-burning sprint. An Alliance ship.

Your every-man-for-himself plan collapses like the Admiral's tower. You glance back and scream FOLLOW ME! A few people do, and you feel like a hero as you dive into the water. The sea feels as warm as blood, which is very wrong, but you don't care. You keep swimming.

The water itself seems alive, slapping you, fighting with you. Salt stings your mouth and eyes. You breathe when you can, which isn't often. You keep almost blacking out and then drag air into your starved lungs, ignoring the compulsion to cough out the water that sprays in with it. You're fairly sure you just kicked the head of someone trying to swim behind you. You are too busy not drowning to think about it much.

You swim with all your might for minutes, hours, days, weeks, forever. You are the sea now. You are flailing limbs and water and salt, and that's all you've ever been.

Suddenly your knuckles scrape wood, and rough hands haul the dripping briny wreck of you into the longboat. You're shaking so hard your elbow hits one of your rescuers in the eye.

You twist your spine, reach toward the water to try to help others.

There are no others. You go still. Uncaring sea stretches out in your wake. A few of them are face down in it, white tabards swaying with the swells. Some are sprawled smoldering on the now-distant sand. Behind them, Northwatch is flames and rubble against a brown sky.

You are alive, for no particular reason.

There is a moment of smothering silence as you stare at the scene on the shore. All you hear through your water-warped ears is the sea slapping against the hull of the longboat.

Then a horn blares from the ship, and the longboat retreats toward it, away from the bodies floating in the water. Some of them might not be dead yet. You're not sure you could speak even if you tried. You do not try.

You are alive.

So are the people rowing the longboat, but this detached vantage is as close as they got to the obliteration of what was, this morning, a sort of town. A bloody one, and a bloody-minded one, where everyone dressed alike, but a town full of people nonetheless, eating and talking and sleeping, making repairs and petty little plans.

All you can think, as the oars hit the water in their orderly cadence, making everything you saw get smaller and smaller, is that you might be the only one who saw it who still has breath to tell.

---

Janice Mattingly, former supply officer of the Northwatch Expeditionary Unit, is the daughter of Major Garry Mattingly. Under the byline Matt Janus her work has previously appeared in this publication as well as in such publications as the Goldshire Times, the Westbrook Report, Lakeshire Weekly, and Raven's Cry.