Forgotten

[Zack Fair]

Baldur grunted in annoyance for the hundredth time. Brooke had promised the Goron exciting adventures in lands with beautiful oceans and forests, or within great cities of old and new technology. Yet, somehow he now found himself standing in a place that was even more destitute than the lava filled wasteland he had once called home. He had traded blackened, ash covered skies for a gloomy and seemingly eternally cloudy sky. Dragons were merely replaced by decayed and ravenous humans, with the occasional other species mixed in. Even more, sometimes there were monsters that he was not nearly creative enough to dream up in even his wildest nightmares.

Brooke was getting tired of Baldur’s passive aggressive grunting. She had already explained that they didn’t pick where their jobs would take them. After all, that’s how the mercenary ended up in the Ashen Steppes and recruited the increasingly cheery Goron in the first place. She dismissed his murmurs, and continued with her work.

They were in a small clearing near a river that would allow ample opportunity to see an attack coming from any direction, theoretically. They had been ambushed by creatures rising from the ground before, after all. While Baldur scanned the area for threats, Brooke was huddled over a small fire and stove, boiling a pot of noodles. Baldur didn’t like eating anything other than rocks, but his fears that even the rocks were diseased in this cursed plane of reality overrode his typical appetite, so he was willing to settle for something a little more exotic to him.

Brooke brushed her blonde locks behind her ears as she stirred the pot, and adjusted her hat so that it would help hold her hair from her face. This trek was exhausting, and they hadn’t even begun their assignment. They had been traveling through this disgusting verse for days now, searching for an abandoned village. A mage from Dalaran had contracted the bounty hunter and her new Goron partner to recover an item of great value from one of the buildings in the deserted town. All she had was a loosely drawn map and a rough description of the object. Baldur had not been interested in the details, so she didn’t bother forcing them on him. The trek to the deserted town alone was explanation enough as to why hiring outside help for this recovery was needed, so the massive Goron was content. Somewhat.

“This is the worst,” Baldur decided to vocalize the obvious, and it was Brooke’s turn to groan in frustration.

“I know, Baldur,” the girl calmly replied, though she was clearly at the limits of her patience.

She’d traveled the Omniverse quite a bit, but never had she wandered this far into the Pale Moors. In fact, she actively avoided this verse due to the horrors that inhabited it, and the fact that there was absolutely no safety net. If you got in trouble in the Moors, the only thing coming to get you was more trouble. It remained to be seen if she had grown too overconfident were her new Goron friend in tow.

“Food’s up,” Brooke announced to her Goron compatriot. One crisis at a time.

Baldur stomped his way over to his human companion. The clinking of his metallic leg guards could be heard for quite a way through the open terrain, but he’d given up on trying to keep quiet. The terrors of this realm were coming for them, regardless of how stealthy they tried to be. He sat across the fire, and tentatively accepted the bowl she handed him. It was tiny in his massive palms.

Brooke sat back and began to work on her own lunch. Baldur was slightly hesitant, but one thing that would not go unanswered was his own hunger. He tentatively slurped up a bit of the noodles, the Brooke’s personal amusement. Baldur frowned, but pressed onwards. It was no slab of limestone, but it was nourishment, and that was a lot to ask of the Pale Moors.

“We should be in the town by the evening,” Brooke announced, now that the situation had been lightened just a little bit. Besides, they still barely knew each other. A little small talk couldn't hurt.

“Great,” Baldur laughed, admittedly not at Brooke, but at their luck in general. “Just in time for dusk in this hellscape.”

Brooke chuckled at his fear. She didn't have the same hesitance,  having heard tales of worse places than this or the Steppes within the Omniverse. The way she understood it, though, you had to really piss someone off to end up there. Baldur didn’t know it, yet, but she had a definitive way of preventing herself from making enemies. It was a discussion for another time.

For now, she could only laugh and offer a weak toast with her bowl of noodles. After all, he was right. She just prayed for a quick and easy mission. Yet, somehow, she had a feeling wouldn’t be that simple.

[Zack Fair]

It wasn’t easy to tell when the sun was setting in the Pale Moors, with its perpetually dark and ominous skyline. Baldur was able to identify it right away, however. If there was one thing that the Pale Moors shared with the Goron’s home verse, it was the uninviting sky above. Brooke seemed either unaware or uncaring. Either invited its own share of concerns into the stone man’s heart, but he followed her up the last hill anyways.

At the crest of their final ascent, they found themselves at the entrance to a dilapidated town. Broken windows, collapsed roofs, and debris filling the street were only sights to take in. The village’s ideal position atop a hill was reinforced by eroded fortifications that clearly hadn’t seen maintenance of any sort since the battle for the Black Gate. There was a distinctive howling as the wind ripped through the deteriorated town that sent a chill down both travelers’ spines.

Then, they heard what sounded a lot like a door slamming somewhere within the town limits.

“Nope,” Baldur immediately announced, turning on a heel and marching right back the way they’d come from.

“Baldur!” Brooke protested, grabbing one of his arms to try and stop him. The Goron barely felt her, and ended up dragging her several feet without even noticing, even despite her surprised screams. “Hey, whoa, Baldur!”

The Goron finally stopped and looked down at his human companion. “I am not going in there.”

“It's the wind. Will you just trust me, you big wuss?” Brooke implored her giant friend, though admittedly with little to back up her own words. Brooke suppressed a shudder when she remembered how close the forgotten village was to the Black Gate. There was no telling what monstrosities from the legendary battle were still lurking in the area.

“This is a land where ghost stories are just stories, and we’re supposed to wander into a place like this?” Baldur scoffed incredulously.

Brooke rolled her eyes, but all the same, she drew her revolver from its holster in what was perhaps the biggest indication she knew Baldur was right.

“It’s just a quick in and out,” Brooke reminded him, simultaneously opening the map in her other hand. “We made it this far, right?”

Baldur hesitantly nodded in agreement, after a moment of reflection on that point. “We just have to be careful. This far in, we’ll run into the most dangerous monsters of all.”

“No arguing with that,” Brooke admitted.

The two slowly advanced down the empty streets. Brooke kept her handgun aimed forward to deal with any threats that might suddenly arise, while Baldur followed at the rear. The Goron seemed to be on a swivel as he walked, continuously turning and watching every single corner of the ghost town that he was able to lay eyes on. Brooke trusted Baldur’s nearly crippling paranoia well enough, so she simply worried about the map and reaching their destination.

To the Goron’s displeasure, they followed several ruined roads and turned many times, effectively making Baldur lose his sense of direction. He didn’t like that, but he was more than prepared to blitz straight in any direction, buildings or other obstacles be damned. He would get out of here if he needed to.

Brooke looked up from the map as they entered a wide-open area within the town. It appeared to be some sort of depraved, paganistic town center. There were stone tables, unlit torches, a hangman’s noose, and many torture devices that looked like they belonged in the deepest depths of a medieval dungeon. Perhaps the most horrifying part of all was that none of this was on the map. It was all supposed to be another block of houses.

“Wh-what the hell!?” Baldur gasped as he looked at the sight before them.

Brooke rolled her eyes at Baldur’s instinctive fear of the unknown. Like the guy couldn’t tear free of any of these devices in under a second, should he somehow find himself locked in them. Admittedly, it was quite an unsettling sight to her, but she knew she needed to press through and be done with this disturbing place. Deciding not to poke her companion’s insecurities, she decided to leave out that this little community area was a recent addition. She just hoped that the object they were searching for wasn’t in one of the leveled houses.

They made their way through the demonic clearing, looking at everything a bit closer as they passed. A horrible stench lingered in the air. The Pale Moors in general smelled like death, but here the stench was close and intimate. She looked down and saw ash lying on the ground by the torches, not yet swept away by the wind. Her own heart pounded. This place had seen use very recently. It was entirely possible that they were not the only ones in the supposedly deserted village at that given moment.

Upon leaving the strange, ritualistic area, they moved down another small street. At the end of it was the house they were seeking, but they both noticed the same thing about it.

“There’s a light in there,” Brooke whispered, watching the soft glow that came from the window.

The words barely escaped her lips before there was a loud sound to the side closest to the human member of their duo. Brooke raised an arm to shield her eyes from the splinters that erupted from the building beside her. This defensive maneuver prevented her from seeing anything else,  particularly the object that struck her head and plunged her into unconsciousness.

[Zack Fair]

Baldur rose to his feet, dazed from the explosion. How long had he been out? He looked behind him to see that an entire portion of the wooden wall was gone, as if something had burst outwards. The only catch was that he was the only one there. That’s when it clicked. Brooke was gone. He looked in every direction in a state of total panic, but saw no sign of his human companion. Even the revolver she had been carrying had vanished from the ground.

His heart pounded inside his stone chest. He could hear voices chanting odd hymns from every direction. He creeped forward, looking for his lost friend.

“Brooke! Brooke where are you!?” Baldur called out, scanning the area rapidly, though with such tight tunnel vision that it wasn’t doing him much good.

What he did see, however, was three figures in black robes that rounded the corner to face him. Baldur froze as he locked eyes on them, but then heard footsteps behind himself. The Goron quickly turned, only to observe that he had been flanked by three more people.

“It’s alive,” one of the individuals said, with a low but distinctly human voice.

“Take it, too,” another man ordered.

The figures all began to walk forward at the same time, closing the area around the rock man. More came around the corner, and soon he was in the middle of a sea of black robed people. He didn’t know what they were doing here in the wild of the Pale Moors, where they’d taken Brooke, or what they intended to do with him.

He just knew they’d probably never seen a scared Goron.

Baldur let out a screeching war cry that was equal parts adamant defiance and unbridled terror. To their credit, the eerie figures never once broke stride or slowed their pace, obviously used to fear induced reactions from their previous visitors. What they weren’t prepared for was when Baldur tucked his shoulder low and charged forwards blindly.

Torches, knives, and swords were suddenly in the villagers’ hands, ready to combat the stone monster before them. Baldur connected with a villager head on, lifting the man off the ground as he charged. The villager was stuck to him by the velocity, and others in the way were thrown in all directions like bowling pins as the Goron cleared a path.

He entered the odd, ritualistic area they’d visited anywhere from seconds to minutes earlier, depending on how long he’d been out. Already, someone had relit all the torches, just adding to the spooky atmosphere. With some breathing room and freedom of movement, Baldur stopped his sprint, allowing the inertia to throw his victim several feet away from him. He looked around again, able to see a little more clearly now. Villagers were flooding into this place from all directions. This would just like fighting dragon spawn on Death Mountain, except this time they bled a little easier, in exchange for being so pants-shittingly terrifying. He could deal with that tradeoff.

Baldur grabbed a large stone table, just about seven feet long and caked in dried blood. For a being made of rock in such an unfamiliar and unwelcoming land, this improvised weapon was a warm sight, and a little touch of home. It was just imperative that these insane freaks didn’t turn him into the next table.

He swung wildly, hearing the sickening sound of shattering bones and guts squishing as the table struck them with far more power than the human body was designed to handle. Bodies were thrown in every direction, and Baldur was able to hold his ground well enough. The occasional person would get in close enough, but their flimsy blades weren’t too much use against his rock skin.

Finally, the assault stopped. Baldur set the table down, winded from so thoroughly slaughtering this depraved village. One man stood at the front of the crowd, facing Baldur directly. The Goron stood confidently, now, unafraid of the horde that surrounded him. He was in his element, finally, and that was the middle of a fight.

“Where’s the girl?” Baldur demanded of the leader of the pack.

The man did not answer, instead merely waving his left hand. The others began backing up, but Baldur didn’t falter. They continued to make fierce eye contact, which became that much more personal when the leader removed his hood.

Before Baldur could repeat his question, a crack formed on the skin of the man’s face, as if his skin was nothing more than dried glue stretched to its limit. There was no blood to go with it, but it still made the Goron recoil backwards. More and more fractures formed until his skin was merely unconnected squares.

Once more Baldur went to say something, but the villager let out an otherworldly screech as a four headed beast erupted from his skin. The robes and flesh were cast aside as the monster grew to tower above the eroded homes, each head roaring in anger as saliva poured from their fangs. Four powerful legs slammed onto the ground to support to the thick body that connected these heads, and a massive tail began to swing freely. Baldur was speechless by the development, except for one word that had never left his mind since he first arrived in this twisted town.

Nope.

Baldur turned and fled into another alleyway, once more hitting a line of people that dared to block his path and hurling them like ragdolls. This time he heard shouting and screaming from behind him, as he’d clearly pushed the village to their limits. The monster’s roars echoed through the streets and rang in his ears. He couldn’t flee into the open countryside, now. That thing would run him down, and he didn’t need to be its lunch.

More importantly, through all of this, Brooke was still missing. He had to find her and escape this madness. Nothing more. Figuring out what the hell was going on in this town might have been a priority to some, but to Baldur, it was at the very bottom of his to-do list. He just wanted to live.

[Zack Fair]

Brooke groaned as her eyes slowly opened. One second she’d been on the city streets dealing with her scared companion, and now she was… certainly not on the street.

She was lying on the floor in some dark room, with lit candles in at least five directions. Beyond that small bit of light, she couldn’t see anything in the darkness around her. It was then that she noticed her wrists were bound together with a rope that extended up to the ceiling and was connected to a pulley system. Her jacket, hat, and weapons were nowhere to be seen. Oh, this was not good at all.

The adventurer rocked herself to her knees, and looked down at her wrist bindings. Before she could begin to try and work her way out of them, a small group of individuals in black robes emerged from the shadows, surrounding her.

“Um… hi?” Brooke didn’t know what else to say to this peculiar group. “Look, whatever this is, I’m really not into-”

One of the nefarious goons violently ripped downwards on the rope connected to the opposite side of the pulley. As a result, an involuntary scream escaped Brooke’s mouth as her bound wrists were torn upwards and she was violently dragged to a standing position. Stuck in the middle of this freak show with her arms suspended overhead, she felt true terror, but she refused to let it show. She kept a determined and confident expression, even as she silently tested her bindings.

“Where is the golem?” the apparent leader of her captors demanded in a detached tone.

Brooke recognized that they were talking about Baldur instantly. Who else could it be? If he was raising the hell she had brought him along for, then she had a lot more confidence in her situation.

“They prefer the term Goron, these days,” Brooke sarcastically corrected the man. “Try not to be so insensitive.”

Another involuntary scream erupted from her lungs when the ringleader of this troupe of terror punched her in the gut, and she was unable to bring her arms down to defend herself, or even grasp her stomach to help soothe the pain. She lost her footing for a second, but the pain from hanging by her arms quickly got her to stand back up to relieve some of the pressure. She coughed and shook her head. With fire in her eyes, she glared at her apparent interrogator. She needed to find some sort of advantage if she was going to get out of this mess, and quickly.

The stairs rattled, and yet another robed individual barged into the circle. He certainly took some of the creepiness from the whole procession, with his panicked urgency. The others turned to him, as did their prisoner. Brooke prayed this was something she could utilize to her advantage.

“The rock monster!” the new arrival shouted, his voice echoing through the mostly empty room. “He’s loose, and causing chaos in the town!”

“What?” the interrogator asked, turning to face the news bearer.

“You’re gonna get it now,” Brooke snickered, finding humor despite her predicament. After all, what were the odds that these primitive cultists new anything about dealing with a rampaging, frightened Goron?

“Silence!” the ringleader shouted, punching Brooke in the gut again to emphasize his point. She recoiled and struggled to collect herself. While she swung on her toes and tried to pull herself together again, the man turned his back to her to issue orders to the crowd. “Go. Help contain it. I will prepare the woman, and we will sacrifice them both at the same time.”

His orders were clearly received and well respected. There was not a drop of protest as the crowd stormed out of the room, leaving just the leader and his helpless prisoner. The man chuckled just a little bit. These two adventurers had no idea what they’d encountered when they crossed into this village. But every clueless individual that made it this far into the Moors had to understand that this was the price to pay. They had captured one, and no individual could stop their group’s power. Not this close to the Black Gate.

Suddenly Brooke’s legs wrapped around the leader’s neck. He grabbed her knees with his hands, but could already feel the air draining from his lungs within her grasp. He did all he could to pull away, but behind him Brooke was focusing all her strength into strangling the man in this admittedly unconventional manner. The strain on her arms was painful, but she was getting some relief by shifting her weight onto the man she was choking. Luckily, that was a win-win situation for her.

With a last ditch, desperate display of strength the leader pried Brooke’s legs off his neck and threw her backwards. While he hunched over and grasped his neck to catch his breath, Brooke was stopped by the ropes that bound her wrists. Just as quickly as she was launched backwards, swung right back at her opponent. She swung her right leg up as she approach and placed a powerful kick, assisted by inertia, into the man’s head.

When the man was thrown backwards, Brooke instantly began struggling with her wrist bindings with a vigor she didn’t know she was capable of. Luckily, they hadn’t secured her too well, and she dropped to the floor after a little bit of effort.

The head cultist began to climb to his feet, but Brooke had bounced to hers even quicker. She knew her boots carried a much heavier punch than her bare fists, so she stepped into the strongest kick she could muster, sending the man back to the floor in a disoriented heap.

The blonde adventurer scanned the dark room for just a second, confirming that they were really the only two people present. She couldn’t be completely sure in the darkness, but she felt confident enough with the lack of what she saw and heard to move in. She grabbed the man by his collar, taking full control of the situation and capitalizing on the reversal of power.

A snarl appeared across the girl’s face as she began her own interrogation. “Tell me, right now, what the hell is- you’re unconscious.”

Disappointed, Brooke dropped the the body to the ground, and decided not to waste any time trying to rouse him. Any questions she had were pretty irrelevant anyway. She didn’t know much about this place, but she knew what she was here for and the way back out. That was enough. She ran through the darkness towards where she had heard the others descend and ascend the stairs. She found the exit to this creepy basement, along with her discarded gear in a haphazard pile.

After taking a second to re-equip herself, Brooke ran up the stairs with her revolver in hand. She flung the exit door open to see two robed cultists standing in the room before her. Without a second of hesitation she raised her firearm and dropped the men with well placed shots into their chests.

She was back to full swing, and now she just had to find Baldur. If he was making all of the commotion he was known for, it wouldn’t be hard. Screams reached her ears from outside the building, and that was enough of a clue for her. She ran into the streets in full sprint.

[Zack Fair]

The source of the ruckus in the village wasn’t hard to track. As expected, there was a section of the settlement engulfed in noise, most notably loudly voiced orders and responding confusion. Brooke trusted that was exactly what would happen when you backed a homesick rock monster into a corner. She rounded the final corner into the town square with a grin plastered on her face. She couldn’t deal with a quarter of the foes a rampaging Baldur could, but she was more interested in the three quarters she wouldn’t have to deal with once she was back near him.

What she saw was not what she expected, however. A four headed, four legged beast with a mighty tail lurked in the town center, surrounded by cultists. There was no sign of her Goron friend, but that made sense because there was about to be no sign of her, either. Brooke’s advance immediately halted, but as she had brazenly charged into the village square, if wasn’t hard to miss her.

A moment of silence fell over her, the villagers, and even the horrifying beast. She was more that happy to break it by snapping her revolver up and shooting the nearest cultist in the chest. She didn’t stay to continue the fight, but instead stormed right back out the way she came with more strength than she was even aware her legs were capable of. Wherever the hell Baldur was, it had better not be there because she was certainly no good to him if she got devoured by whatever the hell that thing was. She ducked into a vacant store and crouched down. The feet of the abomination stomped by, along with several normal humans she’d managed to outrun. Slowly, she exited the storefront and watched the monstrosity stomp over the houses and structures before her. She noted the care that it took in making sure it didn’t ruin the homes beneath it. She also noted that it had no idea where she was, which worked well with her plan of getting what she came for then getting the hell out of here.

Brooke pulled her poorly drawn map from her pocket and moved through the town’s vacant streets, though she never trusted them to be in that state. Every corner was cleared with her finger firmly clutched on the trigger of her revolver, threatening to pull it with the slightest provocation. This strategy served her well right up until she encountered another living being. She popped around one of the last corners, face to chest with a massive rock monster who’s identity she didn’t have time to ascertain. She pulled the trigger instantly.

Baldur looked unimpressed as the revolver round bounced off of his stone chest, but then seemed concerned about the sounds the gun had let out.

“…You shot me,” Baldur accused his companion, a little indignant about that very fact. He clutched his unharmed chest in delayed surprise.

“Probably good to know that doesn’t work,” Brooke recovered almost instantaneously, holstering her gun and marching past her friend. “Glad you’re alright.”

“You too,” Baldur slowly admitted, following after her but not letting his questions linger in his mind. “What is this place?”

“I really don’t know,” Brooke admitted as she hurriedly walked down the path. “Probably influenced by the Underverse, this close to the Black Gate.”

“By what?!” Baldur snapped. “That’s all a myth, there’s no such thing!”

“According to anyone that got here after all that shit at the Black Gate broke out,” Brooke corrected him as she stopped by a door and pocketed her map. “You have to trust me, Baldur. I’ve been around, you haven’t. Some grade-A shit has happened in the Omniverse. A lot of it came from right around here.”

Baldur was unresponsive to that comment. What could he say? After all, he came into this partnership aware of how much less he knew than his teammate. The main, burning question at this point was what in the world could be so valuable it was worth coming to this hellscape for? He just shook his head and let Brooke scan the building uninterrupted.

Brooke, for her far more feeble frame, simply brought her right foot up to her chest and shoved it forward with all the strength she could muster. The door’s hinges instantly shattered to splinters, mostly as a result of their age instead of her strength. Regardless, Brooke stomped into the room slightly stunned by her ease of entrance. She didn’t waste a second of time, however, and moved into the bedroom past the living room she initially arrived in. Baldur was confused, but followed her anyway.

The room clearly once belonged to a young girl, with pink walls and all sorts of childlike decorations on the bed’s comforter, though their color was faded with time. As Baldur ducked under the doorframe, he noticed how devoid it was of toys or other decorations. It was certainly a room belonging to a well loved child by parents with little means. Sitting on the bed was the only toy, a small stuffed bear whose color was faded just like everything else in this long abandoned house.

Brooke marched right over to the stuffed animal and scooped it up. For as brash and gruff as she had been with everything else, she was exceedingly delicate with this toy. She turned it over and looked it over to see there there was no damage to it. It had sat here untouched for years upon years, and survived intact. Admittedly, it wasn’t because it was highly durable, mystically powered, or fated to see a legendary encounter in the distant future. It was simply irrelevant to the grand scheme, so it sat aside as the world changed around it. It survived only because it was forgotten. Brooke could sympathize.

“…That’s what we’re here for?” Baldur sounded utterly dumbfounded. “Your buyer sent us into this hellhole for a worthless doll!?

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Brooke softly muttered, while gently putting the doll in a deep jacket pocket. “Besides, remember what I told you before? You’d be amazed what a scavenger would fight for.”

Baldur shook his head rapidly in disbelief. “But just for some little girl’s toy!?”

“The girl’s dead, Baldur,” Brooke said while turning to her companion. “Died when this village turned into…this. This doll was the only comfort she had, and her father in Camelot wants it back.”

“Then…why send us now?” Baldur asked. “Its been this way for years.”

“We’re just the first ones to make it,” Brooke winked, her mellowed attitude washing away as her cocky demeanor resurfaced.

There was a deep growl that seemed to echo through the city streets.

“Still haven’t,” Brooke reminded herself out loud. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Yea, how are we going to deal with that monster?” Baldur asked. No sense in lamenting over Brooke’s choice in jobs. They just had to get out, now.

It was Brooke’s turn to look dumbfounded. “We’re…we’re not.”

“What?” Baldur frowned.

“That thing would eat us both for lunch,” Brooke pointedly reminded him. “We’re going to haul ass the other direction and forget this town just like everyone else in the Omniverse.”

Baldur looked a little confused, almost disappointed, but on a stronger note he was absolutely thrilled to not have to try to fight that horror. It was a league above him, as much as he hated to admit it. It was eye opening to see how vast the different powers outside of the Ashen Steppes really were.

Bearing the initial encounter in mind, he followed Brooke back out of the house and into the town. It wasn’t long before they disappeared down into the Pale Moors once again, leaving the haunted town behind just like the rest of the world had, as promised.