The Bronze Dragon looks like a garden gnome that someone gave too much authority.
Chromie — technically Chronormu, technically a being of immeasurable temporal power who has watched every possible version of every possible timeline and personally chosen which ones survive — stands in the Orgrimmar Embassy at roughly knee height and radiates the specific energy of someone who has been waiting for you to arrive and has decided to find your tardiness amusing rather than problematic.
Barbie for the vertically ungifted, Jezarman thinks, looking down at her. But she's friendly. Points for friendly.
The voice in his head — the frequency that has been bleeding through the elemental static since the Valley of Trials — belongs to this. To her. To whatever she represents.
She tells him the same thing the voice has been saying, but now with eye contact and a gentle smile and a gesture toward the portals that surround her like a catalog of broken worlds: to understand where you are, you have to see where it came from. Go back. Go through. The present is a consequence of the past and the past is still accessible if you know the right gnome.
Jezarman looks at the portals.
He picks Outland.
The Mage in the Portal Room sends him through without ceremony.
There is a brief flash, the smell of something burning that isn't quite fire, and then Hellfire Peninsula arrives all at once.
Durotar was red. This is different.
Durotar was alive red — the red of iron-rich earth that still grew things, still supported scorpids and boars and hyenas who had strong opinions about personal space. The red of a land that Deathwing hurt but couldn't kill. Angry red. Recovering red.
This is dead red. This is what red looks like after a planet decides it no longer participates in the concept of soil. The Hellfire Peninsula stretches in every direction like something that used to be a world and then stopped — rock and ash and a sky that doesn't so much have clouds as it has smoke that has given up moving. In the distance, enormous chunks of terrain float for no reason except that the forces that once held them down no longer exist.
Mars, Jezarman registers. I'm on Mars. Chromie sent me to Mars.
General Karakork receives the new arrival at the Stair of Destiny with the enthusiasm of a middle manager who has been told to process intake forms for the rest of his career.
He has a report. He needs it delivered to Nazgrel. He does not explain what's in it, why it matters, or why a Level 10 Orc Shaman who has just arrived on a dead planet via interdimensional portal needs to carry paperwork for the first twenty minutes of his Outland deployment.
I am a Shaman, Jezarman thinks, taking the report. I have called lightning from the sky. I can throw fire. I once spent twenty minutes in a cave full of cultists retrieving someone's pickaxe. And now I am a courier.
Nazgrel is better. Nazgrel is a veteran of the Frostwolf clan, a former advisor to Thrall, a man who has fought in more campaigns than most orcs have had coherent nights of sleep. He looks at Jezarman, sees something useful, and points him toward the Sergeant.
The Sergeant has actual work.
There are demons, the Sergeant says. Kill them.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
That, Jezarman responds, feeling the lightning sharpen at his fingertips, I can do.
The Burning Legion, up close, is exactly as organized as its reputation suggests and exactly as flammable as its name implies.
The imps are the worst — not because they're dangerous but because they're everywhere and they move with the chaotic energy of something that was never taught to stand still. They scatter. They regroup. They throw small fireballs that individually don't hurt much but collectively add up to the kind of sustained irritation that makes a person genuinely reconsider their career choices.
Chain Lightning solves this. One bolt, three targets, and suddenly the scatter doesn't matter because the lightning follows them regardless.
Poetry of murder, Jezarman thinks, watching the arc jump. He means it.
The Dreadcaller goes down harder — a proper eredar lieutenant with armor and doctrine and the specific resistance of something that has killed many people and believes it will kill many more. Two applications of Flame Shock and a sustained Chain Lightning later, it no longer believes anything.
Someone in Thrallmar named their fortification after a real person. Jezarman files this as a data point about how seriously the Horde takes Outland: when you name your camp after your Warchief, you're not planning to leave.
The wyvern bombing missions deserve their own entry in the operational log.
The assignment is straightforward: fly out on a wind rider, drop explosive charges on Legion structures below, return. The simplicity of the framing obscures what is, functionally, a precision aerial strike package being executed by a single shaman with no formal air force training and a lot of conviction.
What country are we, Jezarman thinks, holding the detonator while Tawny Wind Rider — his wyvern, his Roach, loyal and low-maintenance — circles over the Gates of the Legion. What kind of country are we that this is our solution?
The gates fall. Shadraz and Murketh, reduced to architectural memory. The Abyssal Shelf bombardment follows, and by the third run the pattern has normalized into something that no longer feels unusual, which is itself a data point worth examining. The escalation of normal. Things become acceptable because you do them once and survive and then do them again.
The Fel Reaver nearly ends the philosophical reflection.
It appears from behind a ridge without warning — enormous, mechanical, powered by a green fire that the earth here cannot contain — and the sound it makes when it moves is the sound of something that was engineered to be the last thing you hear. Jezarman moves fast. The Reaver passes close enough that the ground beneath it transmits through his boots.
That, he notes, once his heartbeat has resumed normal operations, is a different category of problem.
Earth Shock arrives at Level 11 like a clause in a contract finally coming due.
Jezarman places his hand on the ground and the ground answers — not with the screaming static of Azeroth post-Cataclysm, not with the dead silence of this burned planet, but with something that cuts through both. A pulse. An impact. The element of earth on a world that has almost no earth left, offering what it still has.
Three, he thinks. Lightning for the ones at distance. Fire for the ones who get close. Earth for the ones who think they can run.
The Doomwhisperer had six hands. Three pairs, wielding blades that moved in overlapping arcs designed to prevent any gap in the coverage. Jezarman had Lightning, Lava, and a newly acquired Earth Shock that dropped her mid-incantation, and the coverage collapsed.
The peons died last — not warriors, not officers, just the labor pool that keeps Legion infrastructure operational, the ones maintaining the forges and hauling the supplies and doing the unglamorous logistics work that nobody documents until it stops happening.
I love the smell of bombed peons at midnight, Jezarman thinks, watching the smoke rise.
It's not noble. But it's honest.
?? END OF LOG — SESSION STATS
- Time Played: 3h 13m 09s
- Level: 10 → 11
- Gold: 3g 17s → 6g 47s
- Zone: Hellfire Peninsula — Thrallmar / Forge Camps / Abyssal Shelf
- Key Completions: Mission: No Mercy, Mission: Boom, Mission: Infiltration, Abyssal Shelf Bombing Run
- New Ability: Earth Shock (the ground still listens)
- Reputation: Thrallmar — Neutral (1935) | Orgrimmar — Honored
- Unit Status: Three elements active. Operational. Slightly rattled by the Reaver.
Next log: The forge camps don't build themselves — someone has to burn them down.