Part 3: Hard Learned Lessons8th of July
A home is not a home until it has been someone else's first. This was one of the first things I was taught as a young pup in the Warsong camps back in the Old World. We drank deep in the challenge of conquest, found glory in the expansion of our domain and hunting grounds. Every Warsong was taught that home was not a place, but a people. And a true people takes what they are owed. There were times when this resulted in great victories. At other times, in death. A necessary price for upholding the clan's time-honoured ways. And a price each of us would gladly give in homage to the clan we were born into. Our family.
There is another wisdom my family passed on to me, however. Like the grasses on the plains of Nagrand we were raised upon, we Warsong may bend with the wind, but never do we break. We adapt to where we venture. To time, to circumstances, to the lands and to our enemies. But with the founding of the Horde, we have found ourselves adapting to our allies as well. First to the other clans. Next to the ogres and to the trolls. And finally to even the Sin'dorei and the Forsaken. It has proven a necessary side-effect to our enduring survival in the New World. Had we clung to our elders' ways of antagonising every people out here, it is likely this world of enemies would have driven us to extinction more than we have thus far been already. And so we adapted, as our clan's wisdom has taught us. Perhaps not in the manner it had primitively intended, but for the same end goal.
But not the Kaldorei we face here. The Night Elves have had the luxury of isolation. They may have only recently joined forces with the Alliance, but the better part of them still remember well their own ways. Their traditions. Their culture. And their art of war. They know millennia of fighting experience. A part of me wonders if they may have made a valuable ally once, had circumstances taken a different turn following the Battle of Mount Hyjal. That knowledge, too, is a burden I now carry upon myself, having followed Chieftain Hellscream willingly into these forests. It was our incursion into this place that first led to the awakening of the elves' fury. Hence the very first day I set foot here many years past under the leadership of my old Chieftain, we thought it haunted. Strange spirits shimmered through the trees and mirthful voices would keep us awake at night, as though they were mocking us. We believed the first orcs who did not come back from the forests were spirited away by the vengeful spirits of this new, mysterious continent. Little did we know that our newfound adversaries had the talent to strike and disappear with the same swiftness as vindictive shadows do. When we found out they were not spirits, but warrior women, we knew we had made ourselves a worthy enemy.
Little did we know our worthy enemy would cost us so many lives. It is in these cursed forests that I have lost the last of of my old brothers who were bound to me in blood from my childhood village. Still I am reminded of this when I walk underneath the dense roof of this forest, impenetrated by the sun's light. Still I can see the leaves and the branches moving, as if stirred by an unseen force. Still I can hear the ghosts of my brothers howl their songs of war through the forests. And still I can see their lifeless husks cover the forest ground, pinned with the arrows of an enemy they did not see coming.
It is a fate I would see avoided for my new brothers and sisters. My new family. Hard-learned were the lessons when I made my first, foolish steps into this forest. But like my ancestors, I have bent to circumstance. For all the Night Elves' millennia of fighting experience, I have made myself conversant with their ways. I may not have learned of their ways as an ally as I might have preferred, but I have learned of them as an enemy. An enemy that now slowly sees them driven out of their homeland. Our fist has tightened over their last bastion in the eastern forest, Silverwing Grove. With the aid of the Frozen Paw clan and the collective of the Shattered Shield, we have culled it from our enemies' existence. The forest east of the Falfarren River now lies secured, laying the foundations for caravans and more war machines of the Horde to be sent westward. As such, the clan has now paved the way with the first caravan from Mor'shan, supplying the Silverwind Refuge and Hellscream's Watch.
Now, we find ourselves awaiting further orders at Hellscream's Watch as our conflict here in Ashenvale draws to a close. With even more of the Horde's forces advancing further west, it is but a matter of time before the Alliance is forced to withdraw. Their home shall soon be ours, as my people's ways have taught me... and yet, there is but little rejoice within my Warsong heart. There is only a cry for survival, for I know full well that the fighting shall only grow headier the further we make it into the heartlands of the Kaldorei territory. After decades of ceaseless warfare, that is how
I have chosen to bend to the wind.