A Savage Nature (Warcraft)

As she and her sisters rush out of the forest, firing arrows at the largest demon Shandris has laid eyes on in ten thousand years, she has to admit… she’s a little afraid. The monster is massive, absolutely hulking as it towers over all of their heads with its equally massive weapon spinning this way and that. But at the same time… the orcs that she and her fellow Sentinels have been following do not falter.
 
No, they roar in defiance, their courage only bolstered by the Night Elves’ presence. Truthfully, Shandris doesn’t doubt that the orcs would have fought the demon either way. He certainly sounded as though he intended to slaughter them all for daring to reject his ‘gift’. And oh what a ‘gift’ it was. Watching from the shadows as the druid leader and his orc warriors had dealt with the Satyr, Shandris had been worried.
 
She’d also been shocked. To see the orc druid utilize astral magic with a level of raw power that only the High Priestess had ever displayed had stunned Shandris and left her speechless at the time. The orc didn’t have nearly the same level of skill or experience with wielding the power of the stars as Tyrande did, but he definitely had some serious talent, more than making up for his lack of knowledge.
 
The Starfall he’d called down upon the pool had done the work of destroying the corrupted liquid, though it had taken some time. Time in which some of the orcs seemed almost driven to try and reach the pool, forcibly held back by other orcs until the last droplet of blood was gone. Shandris wouldn’t lie. She’d had an arrow drawn about halfway through the spectacle, ready to put down any orc that got too close to the pool. It might not have been the right call, but she wouldn’t let them fall under the sway of the demons. They were dangerous enough as is.
 
Luckily, she hadn’t been forced to loose a single arrow on the orcs. Instead, the arrow she had drawn had been the first to thud into the hulking demon’s chest when she and her sisters had finally made themselves known. Now, despite inflicting the first blow upon the creature, Shandris and her fellow Sentinels found themselves taking a supporting role, firing from the backline as the orcs put themselves front and center, harrying the huge demonic lizard from every angle.
 
Among them is their leader. The orc druid fights with just as much ferocity as his warriors, wielding the axe of his predecessor in one hand and the Forest’s Will in the other. Nature answers his call despite him wielding a crudely made weapon, and he stands tall, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his kin against the demon.
 
Of course, the battle is not without casualties. Every swing of the demon’s glaive threatens to wipe out entire groups of orcs. Many of them dodge, some of them block… and some perish. But they do not falter. They do not turn and flee. They fight like nothing else, and Shandris feels her respect for the orcs rising more and more by the moment.
 
“GRAAAAH! GNATS!”
 
The demon suddenly lets out a singularly impressive roar, causing the ground itself to quake as he stomps his huge clawed feet in something of a temper tantrum. But his temper tantrum is enough to cause many of her sisters to almost lose their balance, and he does in fact send several of the orcs toppling over onto their backsides.
 
As for the druid… the demon swings at him in particular, causing Shandris’ eyes to widen and her mouth to open in an abortive cry of dismay. But just before the blow can land, the druid brings up his arms in front of him, and shimmering nature magic forms a cocoon around him. The cocoon is not complete when the demon’s glaive tears through it and sends him flying, but it does its job all the same. Much of the damage is mitigated, and even after what looks to be an incredibly rough landing, the orc druid is up on his feet again, already regenerating with flickers of nature energy all over his torn-up body.
 
It's then that Cenarius calls out to him in the language of the druids. Shandris can’t help the way her ear twitches in their direction, even as the orc’s head snaps towards the Lord of the Forest. She keeps the majority of her attention on the demon along with the rest of her sisters, the battle with the huge creature continuing unabated as the Night Elves pepper his hide with arrows and the orcs slice into him with their axes.
 
Meanwhile, the druid makes his way over to Lord Cenarius, and the two speak for a moment. Shandris wishes she could know what they’re saying, but instead all she can do is keep an eye on them. Finally, Lord Cenarius holds out one of his hands, made of long, powerful branches. In response, the orc druid reaches up and lays the axe he took off of his predecessor’s body in the Demigod’s palm.
 
Closing his eyes, the Lord of the Forest breathes in deeply, with massive amounts of nature energy immediately coalescing around him. Shandris can’t help herself. She turns more of her attention in Lord Cenarius’ direction, her eyes widening as she watches him cast a Blessing of the Forest upon the orc druid’s axe.
 
This too, is something she’s only heard about in stories. The Axe of Cenarius was said to have been a magical, wholly wooden axe that was crafted by Malfurion Stormrage himself with Cenarius’ guidance. Together, the two of them made the weapon for the only orc that Shandris had even known of before today, Broxigar the Red. Tyrande had spoken just as much about the Axe as she had about Broxigar himself, calling it one of Malfurion’s greatest works.
 

Unfortunately, the Axe of Cenarius was lost shortly after the War of the Ancients. Tyrande couldn’t say where it had gone, only that it hadn’t been lost to the Legion as Broxigar had but had made its way back to their world… and then vanished soon after.
 
This was not the Axe of Cenarius. Shandris knew this to be true immediately. But it might grow to become something just as special, she couldn’t help but think. She could feel it in her bones that this wasn’t just some temporary improvement. No, what Lord Cenarius had just done was a permanent boon to the orc druid’s weapon, and as he hands it back, the druid takes it with eyes wide with wonder.
 
Hefting it for a moment, a particularly savage grin forms on the orc’s face, and he turns back to the battle at hand. Shandris, to her surprise, feels her heart beat slightly out of rhythm at that grin, and the next arrow she fires is the first one that she’s let loose that proceeded to miss the hulking demon they were fighting.
 
Face flushing in embarrassment, feeling the eyes of more than a few of her sisters land upon her as they notice the arrow go flying into the distance over the demon’s shoulder, Shandris focuses her attention back on the fight and the enemy at hand. Honestly, it wasn’t even her fault! It was Lord Cenarius who was doing crazy things like giving Nature-Blessed Weapons to people that they’d literally just met a few hours ago!
 
Still, with his newly blessed axe in hand, the orc druid charges back into the fray. With a roar, he swings the axe right into one of the demon’s legs… and instead of making a shallow gash as the majority of blows from his fellow orcs had so far, he cuts straight through the appendage, rending the entire foot off of the demon’s body.
 
Another roar leaves the hulking monster of a demon, as he almost topples from the sudden state of imbalance. Blood pours from the wound, only to immediately burn up as the Blessing of the Forest annihilates that which is anathema to it, destroying the demon blood before it can even splatter across the ground and release its toxicity any further into Ashenvale Forest.
 
“YOU! YOU DARE TO WOUND THE GREAT MANNOROTH?! I SHALL TEAR YOU LIMB FROM LIMB! I SHALL RIP YOU AND YOURS TO PIECES!”
 
The demon Mannoroth sounds MUCH angrier now than he did before. Oh, he was angry before, but it was more of a disappointed anger. He was furious that the orcs had refused to fall for his trap, and disgusted that he would have to lower himself to slaughtering the lot of them. Even when Shandris and her Sentinels stepped up to keep the orcs from being massacred, the demon had not been particularly aggrieved, more exasperated than anything.
 
But now… now his anger has evolved. It’s grown desperate. A toothy grin spreads across Shandris’ face as the orc druid hoists his axe into the air yet again, the whole thing glowing with verdant green power. She still can’t understand him, but she doesn’t need to know his words to know the impact they and his actions have on his people. The other orcs have seen what his new weapon can do… and with roars of their own that reverberate through the forest, they redouble their attack on Mannoroth.
 
Seeing this, Shandris calls out to her fellow Sentinels, laughing as she pulls another arrow from her quiver.
 
“Sisters! The demon bleeds! And if it bleeds…”
 
“””… WE CAN KILL IT!”””
 
The call and response fills Shandris with warmth, even as the battle continues. In all seriousness, it doesn’t end then and there just because of the Blessed Axe. But that is the moment where the tide turns. Or perhaps it’s the moment when the orc druid catches Mannoroth’s hulking glaive on his axe for the first time, not just surviving the blow, but outright blocking it and forcing the demon’s weapon away. Or perhaps it’s the moment when Lord Cenarius finally makes his presence truly known, massive roots and vines coming up from the ground and down from the trees above, grappling with the demon and slowing his movement so that they can deal more and more damage to him.
 
Either way, in the end it doesn’t matter. In the end… the battle is won. Not without casualties, not without death, but it IS won. Shandris watches, her breath catching in her throat and her eyes wide as the orc druid lets out a particularly savage roar that almost seems to evolve as he transforms. He turns into an animal, but it’s unlike any animal she’s seen before, one with long humanoid arms bulging with muscles and opposable thumbs.
 
It takes Shandris a second to realize just what she’s seeing. He’s become a furbolg. Bigger and more savage than any furbolg she’s ever seen, but ultimately that’s what he is. A primal, more bestial form of a furbolg. She barely has time to process this realization as he pushes off the ground with them, the transformed druid leaps high into the air, higher than she’s ever seen him leap before. With the Nature-Blessed Axe in both hands, he brings it down upon a beleaguered, injured Mannoroth. The massive demon barely has time to register what’s coming before it hits, letting out a loud howl.
 
“YOU-!”
 
THUNK!
 
The axe embeds itself deeply between the demon’s eyes, cutting so deep that it goes straight through the skull into the brain. Or so Shandris assumes, given the way Mannoroth is cut off mid-word, the hulking demon dying right there on the spot. Still in his strange wild shape, the orc druid plants his clawed feet in the lower lip of the dead demon, pulling his axe out with a sharp tug… and then slamming it down again.
 
Eyes glowing with verdant green light, he continues to do this until Mannoroth’s skull is nothing but pulp, the blessing on his weapon making sure that the demon’s blood and other secretions burns up. By the time the druid is done, Mannoroth’s entire body is slowly beginning to flake away, the power of the axe having passed through all of it. Nature itself rejects the demon’s remains as wholly unnatural, cleansing them on the spot and keeping Mannoroth’s body from corrupting the forest around him.
 
Shandris hadn’t even stopped to consider what would happen if they’d killed the demon without such a thing. They might have succeeded in slaying the monster, but still doomed this area of Ashenvale as a whole to decades upon decades of darkness and corruption after the fact.
 
A shuddering breath leaves Shandris’ lips as she realizes the arrow they just dodged. As it all comes to a close, the battle done and over with, she finds her heart beating rapidly in her chest as she studies their savior all the more closely. The orc couldn’t have done it without them, of course. He couldn’t have done it without Lord Cenarius either.
 
… But the druid had still dealt the finishing blow. He had still led his people to the pool in the first place, cleansing it at great danger to them and himself. Shandris finds herself studying his musculature and biting her lower lip as she does, surprised to feel a heat in her loins that she wasn’t expecting to experience today.
 
After a moment, she begins to feel self-conscious and breaks her gaze, glancing around to see if any of her sisters had noticed her… lapse. However, she quickly realizes that none of them had. Mostly because THEY were all staring at the other orcs and those same orcs were in turn staring at them. The Night Elves were not a single-gendered species by any means… but the Sentinels were. And the majority of Night Elf men who were worth a Sentinel’s time tended to become druids and then spend most of THEIR time slumbering in the Emerald Dream for centuries upon centuries.
 
Suddenly, Lord Cenarius’ voice echoes out through the clearing, drawing the eyes of every Night Elf Sentinel to him.
 
“Sentinels! These orcs have proven themselves allies of the Forest and potential allies of the Night Elf people as well! We shall make camp with them this evening and celebrate our victory over the demon Mannoroth! Remember, you represent not just yourselves, but also your people in this first… diplomatic meeting between the Night Elves and the Orcs.”
 
Shandris swallows hard at that, licking her lips again, this time more nervously. She can’t deny her interest… just as she can’t deny the interest she sees growing in her sisters’ eyes.
 
Of course, as the leader of this particular group of Sentinels, she doesn’t even have to say it. She has immediate dibs on the orc leader, if she wants it. That’s why none of her sisters are looking in his direction now, though a couple throw wistful glances his way before turning their gaze elsewhere. Ah… was she really thinking about this? Was she really going to go there?
 
… Yes. Yes she was. She would take advantage of her unique position. As soon as night falls… she was going to pay the orc druid a visit and get his measure. First though, she would need to go to Lord Cenarius for his blessing, to make sure that she wasn’t screwing anything up. Oh, and there was one other thing she would ask of Lord Cenarius, while she was at it.

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