The Sapta
Yichimet - December 9, 2005
*the list passed to Snowfeather's hands, in shaky Taurahe*
• Bundles (20) of swiftthistle, liferoot and purple lotus
• A kodo tooth to grind them
• Several (five) green dragonscales to make skins for the
ceremonial medicine
• Medicines of dreamless sleep and dream vision
• Several (five) eagles eyes, and several (five) owl claws
(wicked claws) to mix with the medicines
• The blood of an owl of the Great Tree
Hidua put his hand on Yichimet’s forehead. The secrets the old
bull had kept from his pupil and friend seemed to push up from
his lungs to his throat, where they made a knot. Yichimet’s milky
eyes made a brief, darting appearance as the young Shu’halo
mumbled in Grimtotem and another language that Hidua did not
recognize. He touched Yichimet’s sweat-spotted snout and then
pushed aside the tent flaps to walk into the thrashing wind of
the Needles.
His braids whipped his face. The list he had assembled from the
parchment and kodo hide replies of his elders was hidden in his
robe. The thought of its contents turned his heart stone-gray for
a moment.
Swallows Rats Whole had taken the message that Hidua was ready to
Snowfeather’s hands, and she had gathered the Grim, that much he
could see from this distance. The faces of orcs and trolls and
Forsaken and Shu’halo, almost all in the black and red tabard,
all turned to him as he walked up. He heard Mohan say, “Here is
the one who can answer the questions.”
Many, many faces he didn’t recognize. But he would take time to
know their names later. For now, he explained why they were
assembled and quickly moved on to the list. He looked at the list
in his hands and blinked his eyes rapidly. He was an old bull,
but he was still strong, and he would not show this weakness.
“I am not hopeful,” he said to Yichimet’s brothers and sisters.
“Look around you, old one,” someone said. “This is all the hope
you need.”
It is true, he thought. “It is true,” he smiled weakly at them.
“From my elders I have gathered this list. But I must explain
some things first.
“As some of you already know, Yichimet and I share a totem
animal. In some of our first ceremonies together, we bound
ourselves to the wisdom of the owls and then bound our wisdom to
each other. I don’t know where Yichimet’s owl has flown to, and
so we must search for him as his owl would.
“First, we are to make a medicine that will bind Yichimet’s
spirit in place. It should calm his fever and allow him to rest
easier,” he explained. I will not tell them that it also locks
his spirit in a cage. “We will need large bundles of the plant
you call swiftthistle, liferoot and the purple lotus flower. To
grind them, I need a dulled kodo tooth. With that we will mix the
medicine.
“But that is the easiest part. I am afraid the rest…” Murmurs
filled the crowd: Mohan and Snowfeather encouraging him, another
large Shu’halo looking confused and worried, many of the Forsaken
ones watching him.
“The next part involves a ceremony, and for that we must gather
more for the sapta we will mix for ourselves.
“Yichimet is lost, as you know. He is lost because of me, but now
that does not matter. My elders say he must be somewhere in
Nightmare. His spirit is in a broken piece of the Great Dream,
and it will take much to bring him back to us.
“First, we must fashion a pouch to hold the sapta large enough
for all of us, and it needs to be sewn from the scales of green
dragons. Once that is pieced together, we must mix medicines of
dreamless sleep and dream vision with the eyes of eagles and the
claws of elder owls. After that is done, we must perform the
ceremony.”
“Then there’s hope,” someone said from the crowd. Eelai shouted
about knowing where to find the eyes; Pincus began discussing his
laboratory and where to clip the freshest lotus; Ashreva called
out the name of some swamp where dragons could be found.
“Hold,” said Hidua, softly but forcefully. “I have not finished.”
The faces turned to him. So many faces were here. More had shown
while he talked. There were near thirty of them. His heart pumped
with love of these Braves, and then failed again when he thought
how impossible their task was.
“For the ceremony, we will need the blood of an owl of the World
Tree,” he said. Gasping and cursing erupted from the crowd. “And
it must come to me fresh. It must be killed during the ceremony,”
he choked out. Ceryna swore. “Because his sickness is tied to the
Tree, because the Vision hunt that made him sick was to seek out
answers about the Tree, it must be this way. The owl will help us
find him.”
One of the Forsaken he had not met before looked at him coldly.
“And we are to do all this to save one who can’t even save
himself?” the dead man said.
“It is too much to ask, I know,” Hidua began before the Forsaken
cut him off.
“And why should the weak be saved by the strong?” he said,
crossing his arms over his poke-bone chest.
Murmurs from the crowd erupted and Snowfeather shouted, “Be
quiet, Abric, or I will quiet you.” Mohan yelled a threat across
the crowd at Abric, and love and fear for the hunter welled in
Hidua’s chest. Abric’s eyes narrowed.
“Know this, dead one. If I were younger, I would be using your
fingers as toothpicks right now,” Hidua said. Blood flushed
Hidua’s skin and his ears hammered, drowning out what Abric
replied, but he watched as the Forsaken ducked stealthily out of
the back of the crowd.
“Also, before any of this can be done, I must get to the
wildlands of Feralas,” Hidua finished when the crowd was staring
at him again.
“Why Feralas?” someone asked.
“The Grimtotem,” Snowfeather muttered, and Hidua nodded at her.
Groups split to gather the medicines. Pincus took Apachrune the
shaman to collect herbs after a young warlock named Nomas had
offered a small amount of swiftthistle to Hidua. Ceryna and a
large, shaggy shu’halo Trilok flew as fast as possible to the
swamp to gather dragon scales. Eelai and Gluush, a thickly-plated
and thickly-skulled orc, went to gather the eyes and claws.
Ashreva and several younger Grims went to gather the tooth from
the kodo.
After they all left, several of the Grim stayed behind to escort
Hidua to the wildlands. His heart performed the same dance it had
been all night: flush with courage and hope, dead with
desperation.
* * *
The group walked into Camp Mojache more numerous than when they
left, and Hidua gathered the herbs that Pincus and Apachrune had
brought along the way. Slowly, all the Grim were trickling in
with their gathered things, and still no one spoke anything but
brave words about heading in to Teldrassil. Hidua could see,
though, that some were not as steeled as they claimed.
Slowly the others trickled in with their assigned tasks finished.
They all stood around him, watching, most anxious or curious,
some disdainful or apathetic. He turned to the hearth oven and
put the herbs in a bowl, then placed the kodo tooth into the
oven. While it warmed in the fire, he sung a rhyme in Taurahe
from his childhood. It seemed appropriate—it had to do with
finding another’s “spirit” in a game—and it calmed him for the
next step. He placed some of the eagle eyes into the bowl and
reached into the oven for the tooth. It seared his fingers and
palm, and he gritted his teeth as he mashed the herbs, flowers
and eyes together into a paste. He spit in the bowl when the
medicine was ground to his satisfaction, and then he cupped the
bowl with his hands and walked to Mohan.
“Please, spit in the bowl,” Hidua said, and Mohan took the bowl
and spat in it. When Hidua took the bowl into his hands again, he
walked to Snowfeather, who repeated the act. He walked around the
circle, asking each of the assembled to spit in the bowl. Several
of the undeads’ ichor made Hidua’s gag reflex rise, but he
stifled it and continued around the circle, hoping that nothing
of the plague remained in their fluids.
He ground the paste with the spittle and fluids and passed it to
Mohan. “You are like his brother, Mohan. Run this to him, put it
in his mouth and on his forehead. He should calm.”
Others volunteered to ride with Mohan, and they set off, urging
their mounts to run as fast as they could. They disappeared into
the trees very quickly.
“What do we do now?” asked Ceryna, who was the first to find his
son wandering in the Kaldorei lands.
“Now, we must plan our next step. We will think about how to get
an owl of the World Tree. But tonight I am tired.” Hidua’s hand
ached, and he knew that no small spell of healing would help the
feeling. Again, worried glances passed around the circle. Hidua
didn’t know if they were worried for him, or about him, but they
were worried. And so was he.
[Daala]
Typically, I hold a truism that, in its time, has served me
reliably and faithfully. "Do not partake of any ritual involving
blood without clear knowledge of intent and consequence." Never
before have I been so thoroughly reacquainted with the wisdom of
that statement.
At the previous moon, Snowfeather asked me to the proceedings,
though I'd no inkling as to their nature. Were I to make a set
prediction, it wouldn't have been accurate at all. So, instead of
the practical course of action, a full day's rest and
preparation, prior to ceremony I served against the Scourge in
southern Kalimdor. There, I encountered a lich, - the first I've
seen since serving under one at Dalaran, and the meeting left me
exhausted and feeling quite strangely. I passed it off as shock;
even now, I don't discount that possibility. But then, I'm
rambling, and committing that most grievous of sins: warranting
or justifying a thing before its mention.
The moment I tasted that potion, septa, was it?, a shooting pain
lanced through my skull. Only it wasn't my skull, it was deeper
than that, but shallower than my mind...and it wasn't a lancing
pain, so much as the coming of several dozen spiders, each taking
a single bite before being on their merry way, a cascading
torrent of the juice of hot peppers quite completely saturating
the fresh wounds. Again, I exhibited great stupidity in not
saying anything; I'm not entirely sure why. There's an eerie
sensation that at the moment of that pain, I lost awareness of
all external concepts. But this is all speculation, who has the
time?
Too many stories need telling, but no time...no time...
There were three hooded gentlemen waiting for me when I fell to
that strange world of ephemeral visions. One by one, they added
bits and pieces to the same train of thought; collectively, it
made one long, coherent sentence. It was spoken neutrally, with
that well-honed undercurrent of rote. Then, something very
strange occurred...
Their voices faded exponentially, and seemed to slow down at an
alarming rate. One of the men, on the right, if I recall,
suddenly radiated an acute sense of a gleeful grin, and I could
swear there was some crazed, sadistic gleam in that hazy cowl
where an eye or two would be. A voice, so much louder than the
others...terribly, horridly loud...with a magnificently pure
clarity of diction.
"It's just you and me now, lass..."
Then, the flow of things returned to normal, and some quiet
intuition told me that things had been normal all along, that
what just happened occurred in my mind, but did not spring from
any source of my own.
Without warning, colors reversed in polarity, lines shifting,
blurring, vanishing altogether, tints and tones following suit.
It was not unlike the swirling of every paint of an artist's
pallete. One of the voices, not the one that had spoken to me a
moment ago, cried out with great alarm and fervent emotion.
"This is -"
FLASH
Alys and I were sitting, my arm around her shoulder, her's,
around my waist, watching the sun set from our balcony. Our cozy
cottage was built in the Duskwood, one of the few places in the
East that hadn't been lost to the blighted sprawling of Sylvanas'
new settlements, ever since the last humans, barring the breeding
stock, succumbed to that dreadful contagion of hers. I've always
felt safe with her, like I've still got a pulse. My angel, my
Goddess, the light of my life. Suddenly, her grip around me
tightens violently; I look to see what's the matter, and her
powerful jaws rip into my right breast. Tearing a dripping,
ragged strip of flesh away, I shriek, pushing her away. Suddenly,
an epiphany rocks me; peering over the edge, I spy something that
would've rendered me immobilized, if I hadn't so desperately
needed the facilities of my legs. A large, very large, carrion
beetle, a distinctive calling card of the Crypt Lords of the
Scourge. Alys had been enslaved again, the Scourge were
returning...we didn't stand a chance. I stood there, motionless,
as she tore into my back, ripping pieces of me away, as I do
nothing to stop her, unable to bear the thought of hurting her,
my sweet Alys...I pray that I'll be taken by her new master
before there's nothing left of me. Alys...my angel, my Goddess,
the light of my life...I love you, Alys...
Before she severs the last stray tendon holding my head to my
chest, I hear that voice that spoke to me, moments before...
"Inevitability..."
'...wait...a voice? What voice? I've been here, in Elwynn...why
is it so familiar? Why-'
Darkness.
FLASH
The alarmed voice again. What just happened?
"- not right! Something -"
FLASH
It was only a matter of time before Thrall paid heed to that
disquieting feeling in the back of his head, and the Horde
retracted all diplomatic ties with the Forsaken. Alys and I ran
away when it happened, two years ago; those not in hiding would
be slaughtered by the wolves. We had some living friends, of
course, but couldn't stay long with any; a few weeks here, a
month there...it really wasn't so bad of a life. That's when one
day, we started hearing news of our old brothers and
sisters...Something was causing the Forsaken to suddenly wither
away, to lose their life essence. It would appear that without
Ner'zhul, we didn't have all that long, on Azeroth. So many, so
terribly many, defected to the Lich King, prostrating themselves
for a few extra years. Soon, our time came. Alys departed first,
during a monsoon in the mud of Stranglethorn...unable to
recognize my face, my touch, my voice. I couldn't make her wait
for me...I followed, hot on her heels. As the knife fell from my
hands....a voice...
"Inevitability."
FLASH
"-has gone wrong!"
FLASH
FLASH
FLASH
FLASH
FLASH
FLASH
I see hundreds of lives, and just as many deaths. The
constants...Alys, and that damnable voice...in the last one, I
tore my teeth out of my gums, undrained blood streaming from my
mouth as I dashed about, crying and shrieking.
That voice...was it the Lich I killed earlier? Some fiend that
I've yet to commune with? Probably just my own brain. Don't know.
Don't really give a damn. I never remembered anything, in any of
the lives. When I wake, it might just be another one. That
voice...
It hides in the holes in my memory. Now isn't the time for that
story. Suffice it to say that as I served in the Scourge,
sometimes I deigned to pay notice to how Ner'zhul strung my
movements along, but most of the time I ignored my senses. I
missed something very important, in doing that, I fear. Now, that
voice hides in what I cannot see.
He is taunting me, torturing me...never take blood. Never, ever,
drink blood...
I love you, Alys.