The Arena

First blood

Alera sighed. She struggled all these years to finally accept her fate, but everything was starting to crumble down in front of her at a frightening speed. She felt weak, partially due to her panic attack and breakdown and partially to her memories. She didn't suppress them, she just chose to concentrate on today and tomorrow rather than yesterday or last week and in time it became easy. What good would it do to remember the loneliness that creeped at her with every passing day? Or remember the face of the last life she took? It was useless information. Now, survival...this was another story. This was important, so she focused on this. How could she get the guards to leave her alone? How could she get food to avoid starvation? How could she win Baruing’s favor and how could she kill more efficiently? Everything revolved around her survival: kill or be killed, accept fate or be killed, forget the previous life or be killed.

But over the last few days, almost everything changed. The wall she spent so many years building around her was crumbling, brick by brick, stone by stone and the world assaulted her with full force.

Seeing the young Mi’lune, she couldn't help but see herself, all those years back. She remembered her parents. How they tried to defend her and her brother from Baruing’s men. How they lay in a puddle of blood in front of them, their souls no longer present, but their eyes still begging her and her brother to run as fast as they could. She remembered how her brother tried to buy her even a few seconds, but couldn't, as his body was tossed aside after being cruelly stabbed. How she cried and begged as they got her and locked her in that tiny, dirty cage.

As they took her away and left her house a smoldering ruin, she kept her eyes on the home she was forced to leave behind. It felt unreal to her, like a never-ending nightmare. The yellow and orange leaves fell from the white trees in a calm manner and with each one landing, realisation sank a little more inside her mind: no one is coming, no one will save her, no one will know what happened and the trees will keep this secret until they rot away.

She remembered entering the gloomy forest of Ghostlands, the last place she knew that belonged to Quel’thalas, the blood elves’ land but, after that, a whole new world came before her eyes. As they passed the Thalassian Pass, the difference was astonishing.

She saw dead woods crawling with bats and the biggest and scariest wild dogs ever. The atmosphere was so grim and depressing, even her capturers felt uneasy. The sky was colored in a sickly orange, and the smoke only allowed a diffuse light to pass. It was nearly dusk and the pale rays stained the high trees’ peaks in a tangerine orange, while the ground became a dark amber. Every spec of vegetation, be it trees or grass seemed tainted. It was like whatever swept through these lands, corrupted everything that it came in contact with and left a static view behind. The trees didn’t even shed their leaves, but it wasn’t clear if it was due to their will to cling to the last drops of life that remained in their dark bark or if the evil that made its home here came so swiftly and was so deadly that the land didn’t even know it was dead.

Later, she found out those were the Eastern Plaguelands, a land taken by the undead on their way to conquer the world a few years back. They have been lucky enough to not meet any, even though they walked the unmarked roads. The brave men and women of the Argent Dawn fought day and night to eradicate the undead threat, but that was not an easy or a fast task, thus, there were places still occupied by the Scourge.

She fell asleep at some point after they passed a small ravine and the green trees completely replaced the dead landscape of the Plaguelands, as they entered the Hinterlands. She woke up just in time to see the Thandol Span, the bridge that united the two halves of the Eastern Kingdoms, between Arathi Highlands and the Wetlands.

As they got closer, she could see it clearly. The Thandol Span was actually composed of two separate bridges with a wide gap between them, but now only one was still being used, since the other one had been destroyed. But it was hard to tell for how long one could still walk on it: a large fissure right in the middle of it was threatening to demolish the whole bridge right beneath their feet.