Honor Above All Else

Tirion called me over before I had found anywhere to stand.

“Long has been the path to our salvation, young night elf. We have fought across continents, worlds even, to reach this point. Now we face our greatest challenge: the destruction of the Lich King and his Scourge.”

Young. He is somewhere past sixty. Nobody up here has guessed right about me yet and I have stopped correcting them.

“Alas, we fight this battle divided. The Horde and Alliance are in the throes of war and will lend us no support. We must remain unyielding in our cause! For what choice have we to do otherwise?”

He asked that one as though it were rhetoric. The next one wasn’t.

“Do you join the cause?”

I said yes. It was not a decision. I have not made one of those since Elwynn.

Entari was at his post below the ledge, and he did not dress it up.

“Where both the Alliance and the Horde failed, the Argent Crusade succeeded. The success, however, was short lived. Our breach into Icecrown was quickly, and with force, rebuffed. The Lich King’s retaliatory strike was immediate and brutal. Now we are on the defensive.”

They got in. Nobody else has. And the wounded lying under the torn banners behind me were what it cost to do better than everyone else had done.

Unyielding, Fordring called it. I have another word for holding ground you are not permitted to leave.

Entari did not ask whether Vikstone wanted the work, he simply started listing it, and the first thing on that list was the question of how a dead army learns, because something down in the Valley of Echoes had been teaching the Scourge to fight better and the Crusade needed to know what in Scourge Tactics.