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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Oranna writes Thalstan from the relative peace of The Lazy Turnip inn, about stories, books, experiences, expectations, adventures, and alarmingly large bugs that are totally fine now. 5k~ words. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Chain: Orastan
Dear Thalstan,
I’m writing to you from a place called “The Lazy Turnip,” in a town called Halfhill, and it was already called that afore we were here, not because it’s been destroyed into half a hill, and both are still standing well and fine. I meant that to sound more comforting than it did once it was all down on paper. What I mean to say is that we’re resting now, Blue and White Squad both. Yesterday was something of a doozy of a day, and today I’m letting both Befound and meself be lazy as turnips.
I wish I could write a smile like a font. I suppose I could draw you one, but I’m not much of a lifelike artist, so it’d only be a representation, which is about the same as writing that I’m smiling. Maybe it tells you something if I say that when I first read your letter after getting it, I thought I might have been dreaming it up, making up a perfect letter from a bunch of memories of stories and newsletters. I realized pretty quickly I wasn’t though. Truth be told, I rarely dream, and usually don’t remember them at all, and I’ve heard you can’t read in dreams. But that sense was there.
So, you see, I’ve been smiling a lot since I got it. I’ve read a lot of stories with speeches and big confessions, but it doesn’t matter if it’s original in the words or if you come up with whole new things. It’s original because it’s to me, from you, and that’s always different. Even if all you did was quote things, they’d be quotes you picked out, and which ones you did would matter. It was something Elo said once was how stories are that for us, why we like them, because we need to know that someone else put a feeling out that we understand. Maybe everything we say has been said afore, but it still means something when we say them. And reality will always be better than a story to me.
You remember how I told you I have with me the first Cobalt Blade book? I’ve read them all. I have the first box set entire. I know they’re fiction, even if they’re not all fiction. I suppose to some extent, I’ve never even really thought of you as that Thalstan, any more than I think of Lord Springblade as that Tadget. It’s a story version of you, which isn’t you, and while I like you both for your own ways, the only one I like that way is you, the real one.
You see, I have a system for my bags, of what I keep and where, and when Jo told me to pack for a long trip, I packed the first book of Cobalt Blade. I’d bought it at this nice little charity auction at a pretty house of some humans who were throwing a gala for supporting soldiers and families. I put the book with all the things I was bringing for comfort, such as my favorite socks and my softest nightgown and packets of powdered hot cocoa and completely waterproof firing powder, those sorts of things. Because that Thalstan on the cover isn’t [a small word is crossed out] you Thalstan, but he reminds me of you. The books make me smile, and I like them.
But I like the real Thalstan Stouthammer, the man in the real world, as he is. I like that story, complicated and paced as chaotically as a real life is, with the messy dangling threads and things that happen for no real reason.
I do like a lot of books, though. Maybe I’m more like someone with bakery cookies with books? It’s hard to make me not like a book. I’ve heard people talk about “trashy” novels or “guilty pleasures” or things poorly written or dry, but maybe I come to the books differently.
Every book, to me, is simply what it is. They’re a bit similar to people, sort of. People aren’t badly made or poorly written or boring or dry or trashy. They are who they are, and every one of them’s an individual that if you come to them willing to see them as who they are, not who you expect them to be, you’ll get to really know them, and appreciate that for what it is and what you learn of who they are. Don’t come to a book about farming rotations expecting a thriller, and don’t expect a poetic contemplation of the mortal experience in a book about a hunter with a dozen new powers and abilities for every situation of a fantasy of how one man can always win the day. So they make me smile and laugh, and I like them for what they are, as they are. I like learning new things, and I like reading about things.
Aye, it’s true that if I’m reading a gun manual as an authority on the subject, and it’s got all manner of mistakes, well maybe that’s a bad book, and I’d not be smiling, but that sort of thing has nothing to do with why Arnathorn’s firing off guns when he does or what they’re doing on the cover of the book. That’s about him having a tool to use to save the day and get the girl. Could be him firing tigers out of double barrel cannons for all that matters. (If that’s in the next one, I’m going to regret not dating my letters, I bet.)
Although, sometimes you find things in stories you weren’t expecting, maybe even things the author didn’t mean to write. Good and bad both. And sometimes it’s easy to make the mistake of treating books as how-to manuals when they aren’t meant that way at all, and I’ve made that one myself. For a long time, I thought maybe there was something wrong with me, because I didn’t fit the romantic feelings of how people are in books, not at all. It read as fantastical and so unlike my experience as the riding sharks and firing two rifles per hand did. It was Niris who told me that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. That those were stories, written for a reason, and aye, sometimes they spoke to a person’s experiences, but they weren’t every story of every person’s way of being, and they weren’t meant for a how-to. And she’d know, you know.
I mean, I expect you know. You do know, right? If you don’t know, pretend I didn’t write anything.
What I was trying to say though was that I’ve never really found myself in a story of a book, not as a romance anyway. People don’t really seem to write about people like me, assuming there’s more than one of me out there. I suppose some of it is that it’s not as interesting having a romance where you have a lead who takes so much time to realize she likes the man. So, what I’m getting at is that you can treat me like a story, or write me into one in a way, or write to me like a story. It’d be nice.
It’s strange sometimes what will set off grief. You would have liked Bargrimm. I’m sure he’d have liked you. It hurts knowing he’ll never meet you. I think you know that sort of grief, from your father. It’s like that with anyone that we carry with us who aren’t here anymore. We see things that they might have or could have known or seen or liked, but never will, and it can hurt. Back when it was fresh, I saw Mordecai as a counselor, like the newsletters offer, and we talked about it often. Lireen did a lot to try to help me find peace with seeing new things and experiencing new places and feeling new wonders that would be these sorts of new things that I’d know that he never would. I’ve gotten better at it these past years, but every so often it will hit me afresh.
I really do appreciate that respect you have for what I had afore with Bargrimm. Sometimes, I will talk about him. Sometimes, it might even be a bit like he’s there, too, a bit of a ghost I carry around. I hear him in my head still. I wish he was the only ghost I have rattling around in here, but he’s not, so I might as well say it. Sometimes I hear my mother, or my brothers, or my cousin, or the man who taught me how to shoot to kill people in the siege. That might make me sound a bit daft, but it’s just how my head works with what it keeps.
Bargrimm’s one of the only voices who is a good voice. I’d understand if sometimes that might be hard for you, too, if there’s something like jealousy. I don’t expect you to be perfect. I don’t remember him as perfect, either, I should say. He could get moody, clam up and close off. He’d go off to his workshop and pretend things didn’t bother him, brush off attempts to talk about things. He’d avoid subjects and he could be set in his ways, and sometimes he’d lie to keep me from worrying. I don’t have him as a saint that no living person could ever be like. He was just a person, like you, like me.
Dane says I’m being brave, chasing new feelings after a loss of what was supposed to be a forever. I don’t know that I’d call myself that. I will say I’m not a good enough liar to pretend I don’t feel a thing when I do. I almost wonder if it’s a different sort of cowardice that it’d hurt more to avoid you and ignore you, and I’ve never been good with pain head on like that, so I don’t have much of a choice of it, to be honest.
That’s something else that stories have taught me, even though some tried to say the opposite, which is that forever isn’t real. I’ve read the stories with the forevers and those are lovely fantasies, but the ones that I needed are the ones with the second chances and the come-around-agains like “The Truest Knight” by Elanor Steelbloom. Even Arnathorn Firststone with the silly new “forever girl” in every book, ridiculous as it is, ends up a reminder that there’s more than forever.
I was scared of it at first, with Bargrimm. Years ago, Bargrimm promised me that sort of forever, and I knew he was lying, but I wanted to believe it, and I knew he wanted it to be true. Maybe I should say that now that I’m a terrible liar, but I’m also hard to lie to, not that you would for a real one, but even the well meaning lies that a person tells for comfort, “It’ll be okay,” or “I’ll never leave you alone.” When the worst happened, I guess some part of me was expecting it. Some part of me is probably already expecting disaster of all this, somewhen, somehow, someone. Maybe I’m a little brave after all, then, because I don’t intend to let it stop me. It might have, five year ago, but not now.
I do want to hear more about your own romanced people sometime, the good and the bad both. Maybe that sounds a bit odd or prying. I guess it’s like any other type of person you knew afore who left a mark? People who had a meaning for you in a way that mattered are part of your story. I have two of my own not-quite-romance that I should talk to you about. They’re a bit hard to write down on my own. I get a way when I talk about them that I’d prefer it if you were here, a hug away, that sort of thing. They’re not happy stories. I hope none of yours are like that.
They still tell me about you, and sometimes those things that you mentioned of ways people accidentally hurt each other in figuring out what they do and don’t want to leave things behind. Some of them might be the sort of things that might make a person worry that it’s repeating if he sees them, and if I know them, then I know not to do them, or I know to tell you afore it gets to something you worry about.
Or there’s little things that sometimes people leave behind with us. Nicknames and endearments and special things that take on a meaning with a person. My family called me ‘Ora,’ and I’d rather not have anyone use it. Bargrimm called me ‘Sunbeam,’ and I don’t think I could have another person call me it. He made me fireworks. It was one of those early things. I still have a few, and they still make me happy, but fireworks come with complicated other things too now. So, if there’s things like that in yours from memories, I’d like to know them, so I can avoid any hurting, even small ones. It doesn’t have to be big grief to be worth not tripping over.
Although on the matter of experience, this might be a good time to warn you that I’m not necessarily as experienced as you might expect, given everything. In terms of a romance novel, I’m about a second act? Bargrimm and I were taking things slow past a certain point, some of it because of things that happened in those stories I should tell you about. In the one and only time it’s ever been applicable, I’m what you might call a wee bit gun shy. I don’t know if I should make a list or something of things I would like to do that are good that aren’t gun shy. [There’s a sizeable blot of ink.] I guess I’ll say for now that I’d like to kiss you. And leave the rest for another time.
I do also feel some responsibility in warning you that it is a lot of hair, and heavier than you might expect, so while drowning isn’t possible, suffocation is sort of on the table. That’s also true for [there is part of a line thoroughly scratched out] other things that I’m sure you’ll be able to handle. I mean that you’ve been through Azeroth and Outland and have represented your name well across the years of being stout and some lass won’t take you down unexpectedly (or expectedly?) with accidental suffocation. [Another line has been thoroughly crossed out.]
Which is of course why I’m not surprised to hear that things have been turning for the better in Outland. I’m glad that you were able to reach some of Savar’s people to reconsider what they were doing. It’s real heroics to turn a person away from what they’ve convinced themselves is the only thing they can do. It’s another way to save people, and protect them. I’m really proud of you and the team.
I worry a lot about what’s happening here with the Horde for the same reason of that Savar and his followers. There’s something very wrong with the Horde, and has been ever since Thrall left as Warchief. It’s like they’re so afraid of something. I’ve seen it afore. It’s what they looked like with Doomhammer at the front, but even more with Deadeye when he took over the siege of Ironforge. The orcs have always had a problem of making themselves believe they have no exits once they start a thing. They put all these rules about it with weakness and battle honor. But lately it’s like there’s something in them, and it’s spread to all the others.
We fought a whole lot of scouting parties of them trying to take the beaches around here, and I could tell there’s something wrong. It’s hard to put it into words. They just seemed so afraid, even the ones who were angry, like the orcs, were scared, too. I don’t know if it’s sha, or made worse by sha, but it’s as if they believe deep down they have no where to run. Like their only options are to fight and die then and there, and if they run back, they’ll be killed for having run away.
Normally, I’d be more worried about continuing the cycle of violence with vengeance. Dane’s struggled with that one for years. He remembers the fall of Stormwind and the Second War, and the battle of Theramore in the Third, and he can’t get past that anger to find a way to forgive for peace. But right now, I’m not sure the Horde would let anyone seek peace. I worry that if something comes along that needs us all again, the way it has afore, that Garrosh Hellscream won’t do it.
I can understand people seeking vengeance in an intellectual way. I’ve just never felt it. I’m not sure I can say that I’ve ever seen it be something good, either, for the person or for anything that they’ve done it for. I hope that Vesyllah finds a measure of peace, however she can, and that maybe someday she has something else driving her enough that she has another nickname. I know you’ll help her fight her demon, and, well, her demons, if it comes to that. Or her demon flesh and metal construct rune engine demons. This metaphor is definitely getting away from me.
You don’t have to worry about me, I’m pretty sure. The colossal mantid that threatened all of Pandaria died in the same hole that it broke open in the giant wall holding back the masses of a bug army so for now it’s pretty much the same as being an intact wall. That sounded more reassuring in my head.
Maybe I’ll try telling it from the beginning, or maybe from the middle parts. Since Jo mentioned it in the newsletter, I can tell you now that Ian is Prince Anduin of the Stormwind Kingdom. He’s missing, yet again. Shine’s friend Fallon, who’s an Admiral and the person who took some of us out on a boat to fight the Horde after they bombed Theramore, has some people out looking for the prince, and I worry that Fallon’s not been having a good time. He was also supposed to have a harbor, but the beaches were full of Horde, like I mentioned.
I did my own reconnaissance for the prince, but the jungle’s too easy for a small human to disappear into. We’re at the point where the best options are to spread out and sweep an area. Bran’s upset something fierce about it. Maybe he sees it as a failure of someone to remind the lad that he’s a mortal, and a young human not yet an adult, acting like nothing bad will happen to him. I don’t disagree exactly, but I think I understand a bit why. Some years back, the human King Varian went missing, and so they put the crown on the little boy. He’s fifteen now, so he’d have been around ten at the time. And they had him making decisions and officiating, like he was an adult, because someone had to be the king, and age didn’t matter.
His father did come back to be the king again, but even after, the way he talks about his son is like someone wise beyond his years, someone whose words have changed even the king’s own mind. So, if you treat a person like that, is it any wonder that he acts the way he does, like he’s an authority of the king and as mature and wise and stable minded as an adult? You tell a person who they are long enough, and they’ll believe it. I worry that the only way to convince him that he’s young and untried and impulsive is if somewhere in all this something truly terrible happens to him, and I’d rather have the boy safe and unhurt and believe we’re all wrong than learn a lesson. Bran probably feels the same way.
Dane, though, seems to feel that there’s something about Anduin that’s special, that the fifteen-year-old boy who had to be king afore he can even legally join the army has a destiny here that he’s meant to find. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic in things like destiny, or too worried about how easy it is for someone to go from being a hero to a ghost someone grieves. But, he’s Dane’s prince, and at the end of the day, I have to at least give Dane a chance to work with his prince the way he believes is right. Light knows he and Ben have had to work with our Brann enough times as squad leaders to earn some credit for us to do what a human thinks is best for the human prince.
All I know is, we’ll try to find him, and next time, stick with him when we do. If we do.
Besides, there’s probably been enough terrible lessons of children and parents out here. That Fountain of Youth chasing kaldorei group ended up in a mess with the mogu. They’re doing something with capturing people of both the Horde and the Alliance as slaves and transporting them somewhere. They had these arcane portals unlike anything I’ve seen afore. Shine pointed out that they were weirdly opaque. Normally, you know, you can kind of see the place a portal opens up to, in a wobbly sort of way. These ones, nothing. We didn’t go through any of them, of course, because we’re not those kinds of adventurers and there’s not enough hazard pay in the wide worlds. We did what we could to shut it all down, and save who we could, but one of the kaldorei researcher’s daughter was caught, and killed.
So the father used the waters to transfer the remainder of his life to her. He loved her more than he loved immorality, and if that’s all that’s known about him it’s not a small thing. It worked, but it’s a terrible burden to [there’s a small word crossed out] carry with a person. Florande took it especially poorly. I think something must have happened to her, a ghost she has with her, a father thing maybe. She turned into a bear, literally. Could be that it’s a way of coping for her. Mostly it’s a hunch. She was back to herself by yesterday, but might be that it’s something she just has learned to carry with her. She’s young enough that it’s still a thing in flux, but it’s also something that might be a thing that becomes a part of who she is.
The mogu weren’t the only things out in the jungle being strange though. We came across these bug things called “mantids.” I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s possible that they’re somewhat related to the silithids, mostly because of size, not likely because of any Old God ties. They’re huge for bugs, and sentient like. I’m not much of an artist, but maybe I’ll try to get you a doodle of it enough to put it in mind. They have this strange cycle with the pandaren of every thousand years they come up, like big raider cicadas, and go about stealing and warring, and then go back to taking another thousand year nap. The pandaren have set up a wall to block them off and prepare.
But they’re not due right now. All that we’ve been talking about with things being stirred up in Pandaria, this is another one. Something’s called them up out of that cycle. We thought they were bad enough just in numbers but then this truly enormous one burst through the wall. It was the size of a very large hill, big enough that it’d not have fit through the gates of Ironforge even if it’d ducked its head. Of course it had the teeniest tiniest eyes though, which didn’t stop Dane from telling me to aim for them, of course, but that was later.
The smaller ones, which had until that point been the bigger ones, were sha-infested. We were able to use Ken-Ken’s mask to wrestle some of them out. This wasn’t a sha we’ve faced afore though, not Doubt or Despair. We think it was Fear. Something got into the mantids and made them afraid, made them come out early. But what we don’t know is if this is the sha’s doing, or if there’s something or someone behind that, who got the sha to go. I keep thinking about what you said about the sha maybe needing us as masks to do something. There’s something in the thought that I can almost feel in my head as a piece of a pattern, but I can’t quite articulate it. But I think you’re onto something big, that there’s something about the sha and its tie to people that matters, something about how the pandaren kept it away, and something about why all this is happening now.
Those kinds of things are more speculation for now that we’re resting in The Lazy Turnip. At the time, we were more concerned with whether or not we even had a fighting chance at all with the numbers we had. We’d rallied most of the Valley, and they were fighting with everything they had, farmers and children and every person with the slightest amount of fighting skill.
With something that huge, we had to evaluate if the best plan wasn’t to pull out, but with it having already tipped through the wall, the only real option was for us to find a way to penetrate it in full. Out of nowhere, this pandaren came up and said the same thing, that nothing is ever too hard, and that we just had to be harder. So, that’s what we did.
I have a setting on my gun for these sorts of things, but it forces me to spread out the tripod legs and stay put to use it. Dane, Shine, Befound, Bran, Florande, and Bun went in hard, ground level, to take on as many openings as they could. Shine got in the back with his dual daggers, and Dane took the front with his huge sword, and Florande went beast on its face. I haven’t taken on anything that large since last year with all the mess of Twilight’s Hammer, and not with so few people since Northrend. It was a rough ride. But, as soon as they had the thing squirting and oozing, I knew that we could finish it off. Anything that starts leaking that much, that fast as it did can’t hold out long in my experience, and I had more bullets than it had soft parts to shoot through. I was right, and it went down before I ran out of my first spray. I never even had to dig in for my big loads.
So, that’s why as I said, we’re safe and sound enough and the wall’s plugged up. We still have a problem, but nothing more we can do today or tomorrow about it.
I’ve been talking to some of the people around since. Some of those folks that turned up to fight knew of Cobalt Company, but not by Blue Squad. They were those people that Jo mentioned in the newsletters that White Squad had been helping, the turnip farmers, and Chen and LiLi Stormstout, and a brewer by the name of Mudmug who I can’t tell if it’s a nickname or his real name and I’m definitely too afraid to ask by this point. I don’t know what would have happened to us yesterday if not for those people.
By the way, the cook here’s a hozen by the name of Den-Den. He’s been great. I’ve had mushrooms and rice made seven different ways in two days. I also learned that hozen in general don’t live much past twenty years old, which is both terribly sad and also maybe explains a lot about them, and some of their impulsive ways. Befound would take issue with it, but I’d remind her that even if her lifespan isn’t all that much greater, she was mentored by someone near a hundred. I don’t think there are any of those sorts among the hozen at all, and the people of the Horde must seem like wise ancients to the hozen.
I think as long as the mantids don’t get any worse than they are, we might call our work to a halt for a time. We’re due a break. I know I need one. I’ll be staying here a bit longer, mostly to try to help find Prince Anduin. Finding missing people is a specialty of mine, especially when they’ve been missing as long as he has. I’d like to see you soon though. For the stories, the hugs, and also the kissing.
I’m still terrible at ending these things.
Also yours truly,
Oranna
PS: About the picture, I thought maybe I could sort of combine everything of me smiling like I said, and also give you some scope of the mantids and the colossus, and it’s only now that I realize it’s kind of a strange bit of energy. I wasn’t smiling like that on the field shooting for our lives. I guess I’m smiling now though, so fair enough.
This is Fine