Grim Views

Chapter one: The rise and fall of the Greyseer Caravan.

(( Beautiful ))

Gramps left the fire of the Grim gathering with a furrowed brow. Was that the boisterous group of horde heroes the triplets were constantly bragging on? The silence had seemed empty compared to the power he expected.
Hollow. He turned the carving over in his knotted hands. One for three. No matter what the triplets claimed they'd seen with their spore addled visions. He held the proof in his hands. Still, there wasn't much time. He had to gather his people and go.
Hau would let the world explode before he would let his grand-daughters destroy themselves.


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The Greyseer triplets sat their lazy butts on the back of their grandfather's wagon and smoked a huge roll of felweed. "This is the life." Nehau commented hazily and leaned back on lime green elbows, breathing crooked rings toward the sunset.
Their identical purple-orange eyes were flecked with sleep, their joints still stiff from the ground. "That was a wicked partay last night, my sibs." Dehau breezed as she flicked ash to one side.
"Where the biff is everyone gone?" Tehau pondered and cough-laughed. It was odd, the caravan abandoned. It wasn't odd enough to worry them but it was odd enough to wonder briefly before the drowsy pudding settled thick in her skull.
"Dunno." one of them cackled and then flipped backwards off the gate to get a better view of the first stars. It was Nehau and she hit the earth like a sack of flour, no bouncing back.
It struck Dehau as so funny she laughed to herself way after darkness fully descended and the other stars joined the dance.
"Are we back in time?" Tehau ventured, half wondering, half asleep.
"Frikka time dragons." Nehau said in such a way that her sisters agreed loudly in their heads. Time dragons annoyed them. The entire guilt trippy panicky process of fixing the past so the future could stay the same. Lame.

"Why not make a better future?" Tehau had asked.
"You are only to preserve the continuum." the pinker had answered.

"Too much pinker helping." Tehau thought.
"Totes." her sisters thought back.

And none of them even noticed they hadn't spoken aloud and the world spun the stars away until they woke up with sunburns. Still the caravan was empty.

"You think they came and went?" Dehau ignored a brief flash of wrongness.
"Any kinda note?" Tehau asked.
"Uhhh..." Nehau's expression was blended pain and surprise. "Lemme check." she grumbled, rubbing the bruise that tealed her orcish back.

There was a note. "It is time for a spirit walk." was all their grandfather had scrawled in his feathery old man pen. Four economy sized bottles pinned down each corner of the parchment.
"Is that brew?" Dehau wondered hopefully.
"One way to find out." Tehau replied with a bright eyed grin.
Nehau nodded her grumpy agreement and found their empty cups.
"Split it three ways." Tehau bossed.
"Duh." Nehau replied.
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"I can't believe anyone would frikka willingly eat a pinker." Dehau said randomly at their breakfast fire as she  cracked open a raptor egg the size of her head. The yolk inside was slightly green from time and overcooking. She frowned before taking a massive bite and avoided the drink in her hand. It was the last of the food Gramps had left and it was going bad already.
"Yeah I know, right?" Tehau stirred her third of the oily glowing liquid and tried not to be sick. Green, red, blue and clear, the colors wouldn't blend. "This is prolly gonna be the best thing we ever drank."
"It's gonna explode!" Dehau randomized again, her eyes on her own portion. She always predicted explosions though they rarely happened to her specifications.
Nehau lazily looked over, crumbs spilling down the front of her hated robes. "Nah. It'll be fine." she claimed with a wave of her hand. "So we gonna do this or what?"

Three sets of eyes met over the last embers of the last wood left in the caravan. "Hex yes!" They chugged and carefully breathed through their noses after each disgusting gulp. It ran cold down their throats, it ran hot. It ran wet and it ran so dry they felt like they'd never drank anything at all.

"Gob dang I'm thirsty." Nehau gasped.
"Gotta get water someplace. None left." Tehau wheezed.
"Aw yeah." Dehau agreed weakly.

"And we gotta find gramps." They all said at once.

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"Hey Keekster, what's up?" Nehau leaned sloppily on the counter at Kalimdor Airlines and picked ale basted rib meat from her teeth.
"When ya comin' back ta da village?" he asked, lazing back and crossing lanky arms behind his painted head.
"Soon, real soon buddo. But we're gonna need you to hook us up with another flight." Tehau mooched drunkenly.
He smiled knowingly and lowered his voice to a whisper. "Ya tree fly fo' free anytime."
"Yeah we know." Dehau slurred ungratefully. "Any word on Gramps yet?"
"No mon." he shook his entire frame in a worried negative.
"Gotcha. Three to Kargath then." Nehau spoke slowly, an inebriated attempt at precision. "Oh. And do you got any of that airline wine?"
"Buzz wearing off?" he chatted as he hooked them up.
"We gottadea." Dehau shrugged.
"Yup." her sisters agreed.
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They stood in Kargath and stretched their stocky legs, digging bare feet into red dirt. "Leave one of them here." Neh instructed, referring to a keg of airline wine upon which they'd pasted a picture of their gramps from the super snapper FX. The keg itself was empty.
"Ima puke. That crud peeled the yellow off my tusks." Dehau complained half heartedly. Everything was half hearted with Gramps missing. They walked past scrub plants and rocks until the town was nothing behind them and the view was mountains in front of them. Everywhere the elements beckoned them, whispering, frowning, inviting and disapproving.

The view shimmered all around. "Yeah. Ima need to puke too." Nehau admitted and rubbed her bare arms.

"Try this." Tehau pressed a shriveled white mushroom into her sisters' hands. She was always prescribing medicine from her various alchemical experiments. "Don't chew it. They're bitter as hellfire. Just pop it on the back of your tongue and spit slide it down." She promptly did so herself and grinned with a wince.

"There's gotta be a way to make this taste better." Nehau cackled and made a retching noise until the thing was gone, someplace in the acid of her stomach where it burbled like a forsaken cauldron filled with plague.

Dehau shook her head and stuck out her tongue, wiping away the taste on the front of her shirt. "Yeah there does. I'll add it to the list." She scribbled sloppily, her eyes crossing and uncrossing as she tried to focus.

It hit them like a full Warsong pre-made. Dehau flopped backwards onto the sand, expecting it would be soft. It was not. She lay perfectly still, entranced by the feeling of all her breath gone. Air knocked out on impact. "So true." she answered herself out loud and felt the rain falling where there was no rain. "So frikka true."

The desert shifted as the rain came down. All around her flowers wormed up from beneath the crust, spiraling their way to drink more, eat more, fill the world with new.

"What the frick is that noise?" Tehau's voice boomed over all of Azeroth and dripped to fill the cracks between flowers.

Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. The noise was rhythmic and determined. If they'd been in their right minds they would have made a beat to it. A war beat. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk.

The Revvies would make one anyway, right mind or not. The Revvies made beats with gnome jaws. It was sick, totes sick. Sick in a good way. Beautiful. Hinterlands beautiful. Snapper soup beautiful.

Dehau's hair grew out, grew long, impossibly long, long as a tauren tail. It fell down all around her and over her and over her cut off leggings, and scrap battle harness. So much hair, more hair than a moonie would know what to do with. Grey hair, Greyseer hair, purple still at the ends where she'd dyed it.

Did deathknights grow hair still? Fingernails that curled over the tips of their rune reaching fingers? Toenails? Dehau wiggled her toes, they tangled in the hair, white as winterspring.

"What the frick is that noise?" Tehau asked again.

Chuk. Chuk. Chuk.

Her teeth rattled from far far away. No more shamanism for Dehau. The world would explode. She'd told them all what she'd seen over a year ago and they'd listened. No more casting that lightning, no more Flame Shock sisters. No more molten treasures.

What was the big deal? Maybe they should let the world explode. Let the world explode. She had been the healer. Now she was the vanguard. She'd grow it back again. Grow it back like all this hair.

She was shrinking now, the plants grinding as they grew around her. Skyward reaching, she was sinking. Chuk. Chuk. Chuk. It would make a wicked beat all on its own.

"If we could figure out what that is." Tehau's thought interrupted her own, as loud as her own, as clear as her own.

It was hot in the desert's jungle. Hotter than hellfire. So hot she could see her heartbeat under a brew binge gut and a warrior's abs. "Sick." she thought.

"Totes nasty." Nehau agreed, peering down from the top of a tree flower.

It really was nasty, the heat. An oppressive heat. This was a heat cooked deep in a jungle pit and it steamed them like a darkclaw lobster. "I could fry an egg in my armpit." Nehau grunted irritably and pushed a pestering elemental off the edge of her perch. It fell like a falling star and disappeared in the undergrowth.

"Dangness. I'm starving." Tehau shimmied down the trunk of a huge bramble. "Not enough to eat pit eggs, but almost." she quickly added and wiped her hands on her shorts.

"This is gotta be Razorfen. Is this Razorfen?" Dehau asked the little fire creature that wiggled through slimy thorns big enough to impale an orca. "Hey. Have you seen our Gramps?" she asked hopefully.

The land was shifting again. Bright sand, ocean breezes. Palm trees swaying.

"Durotar." it hissed before sputtering out in the water as salty waves rushed all around them.

Dehau churned the sea around her, relieved to find that her hair had returned to normal. "Bad trip my sibs."