World of Warcraft

by Steve Danuser

  Even as she listened and rejoiced in her daughter’s presence, the Lady knew the Child would again grow restless one day and again leave her side. But now the Lady also knew her child would always return when she was ready. And so the Lady let her beloved daughter leave when that restlessness began to surface, bidding her farewell with a smile full of love.

  And so it is, O my dearest, O my loves, that most of us will never see the White Lady embrace her Blue Child … because like those of us on sweet Azeroth, the Blue Child is full of wonder and yearns for adventure. But when they reunite, the sky is luminous with their joy. And while the Child is away, her mother, every night, stands shining with benevolence upon us, lighting our paths and our own children’s paths for safe travels.

  n the oldest days of Boralus, the spit at the mouth of the river led out into very deep sea with nothing to protect it, and even the narrows were many fathoms deep, indeed so deep at their center that a lead plummet would fall forever, with no length of rope long enough to sound the strait. This was back when “Boralus” was so new that almost nobody even thought of themselves as “Kul Tiran,” and when the old folk talked of “home” it was understood they were still thinking of the peninsula.

  Rocky Boralus was just that—a rock, with little to protect its houses from the wind and waves. Its citizens counted themselves fishers and shipwrights and sailors and pearl-divers, people who spent more hours on water than between walls, and none of them lived easy lives. Yes, the broad escarpments of Tiragarde sheltered it from the south, and the gales from the Frozen Sea were softened by the time they rolled over the green range to its north. To its west even the most fragile skiff could find protected anchorage in the bight: the inward delta where all three islands huddled like men with their backs to the wind. The cruelty was in the east, where the Great Sea ruled unchallenged, all the way to Baradin Bay.

  In its best moods the Great Sea was tender and even, the blue of steel, only softer. In its worst it lashed out against Boralus like a drunkard wanting a fight: violent, capricious, and colored so deeply blue as to look like a bruise. No murmur of the Tidemother could reach anyone’s ears when the Great Sea was in a frenzy. The rocks upon which Boralus was built could withstand this treatment, but the houses could not. Each passing storm sent huts, ships, and racks down to the bottom of the harbor together and dashed men, women, and children to death on the rocks, or pulled them down to accompany the ships. Each passing year produced at least one storm that threatened to wipe the rocks clean of Boralus for good, and in the morning they said the drowned bodies bobbed so thick in the harbor that the living would just cover them with weighted nets and sink them down to the seafloor.

  Of course, a seawall would have saved them when the Tidemother could not. But the dark-blue waters between the spit were so deep that tossing in a thousand rocks each day for a thousand years would have done nothing, and the work of repairing the mounding wall after a storm would claim as many lives as it saved. The people of Boralus reckoned that if they were to live, it would have to be by their wits and bravery alone. This is how it is and was for Kul Tiras: the Light rewards conviction, but the ocean demands activity.

  So the sailors who lived in hard Boralus back then were so stout of heart and so quick of mind that they would be right to laugh nowadays at our bragging navvies and marines. On a fair day, it was wonderful to see the long ships go into the harbor with their bright flags flying and the pilots rowing to guide them out and in. And it was a terrible sight during a storm, when on land all the people could do was watch the unfortunate boats breaking up before they ever made it past the spit, all the while shoring up their own walls as the waters rose, only hoping that the men and women on the water drowned quickly. For on the sea and on the shore, when a storm hit Boralus, nobody was safe but the mermaids.

  Mermaids lived openly near Boralus then. They made their homes in deep caves along the coastline, deeper still than any cable had ever reached, beyond any mortal woman or man’s ability to dive. Some pearldivers said they had seen their houses, and claimed they looked like palaces or temples, piled high with treasure from scuttled ships. The people of Boralus, like most people who are fearless and hardened to disaster, had no guile and loved to believe in these tales. They had all seen the mermaids and knew they were as real as sirens or murlocs; they had humanlike arms and heads and bodies, except that their hands had webs between the fingers like a seabird’s feet, and their bodies, not having legs, ended in a fish’s tail. They had beautiful faces and long curly hair, and that skin and that hair were tinted all the shades found in seaweed and coral. Mermaids were not too shy to sit on the rocks and watch the ships, which was how most of Boralus had seen them. And it was reliable knowledge that the worst storms were always presaged by the sight of mermaids clinging to the rocks, and the worst winters came when they were seen on the crackling plates of sea ice outside the harbor, plaiting their long hair.

  Fishing went badly if the fishers glimpsed a mermaid in the water, and soon sailors began to say that just seeing one in the harbor meant the weather would turn. This made it simple to believe that mermaids brought the storms—rather than simply portending them—and that a mermaid sighted on the first day of a voyage doomed the entire journey to failure. The sailors swore blind that they had seen mermaids lifting rocks from the seafloor to scuttle ships where there had been no rocks before, or becalming the waters or making them choppy, whichever one the sailors hadn’t wanted at the time. And then the whole of Boralus talked of luckless women, bringing home the day’s catch, dragged down into the deep by things that looked like girls; or of men in pilot boats coming alone and friendless back to the harbor, overturned in the dark by green-haired mermaids who laughed to watch them drown.

  Each mermaid had been allotted a certain amount of the Mother’s power from birth, and the moment that power got used up the mermaid went—pop—like a bubble and died.

  The sea priests were meant to warn against these superstitions, and they did, but only to a point. Back then the monastery across from the harbor was nothing more than huts and a cloister for the tidesages to live in. Without the tidesages, of course, very few ships would have made the crossing at all. Each ship from Boralus that wanted to go in and out of the harbor carried a sea priest if the sailors wanted their journey to end anywhere above the water. Many sea priests followed their vessels straight down to the salt arms of the Tidemother in extremity, as they were the first to board and the last to disembark. And Boralus’s harbor was the grave for many pious men and women who, determined to save as many as possible, kept the waters from dragging sailors down with their perishing vessel. In those days, those who walked the stormy path often walked it beginning to end when they were still young, and for all that the sea priests were dearly beloved, fathers still wept when their children heard the whispers and were sent to the sages in the valley.

  Perhaps it was because they rarely made it to a wise old age that sea priests did not warn the people off superstition as they should have done, and often did not chide a sailor for tossing rocks off the bow at the flash of a mermaid’s tail. Certainly none of them could have imagined that, far from laughing, at least one mermaid wept when she watched them drown.

  Halia was this mermaid, full-grown from the egg, who lived in a deep-sea cave decorated not with the spoils of sunken ships but with the prettiest shark bones picked clean by crabs. Mermaids did live in the dim and forgotten buildings and temples of those long since gone from Kul Tiras—or those thankfully prevented from returning—but they favored wreaths and hangings of brightly colored kelp, and their only wealth was pearls, which they considered little better than pebbles. Mermaids had no idea of the ire they had gained from sailors and were hurt by their attacks, if they knew of them at all. They clung to the long rocks before a storm in order to hunt huge boils of fish coming into the harbor for safety, and they knew to sit on sea ice only when it was frozen solid and could bear their weight. It was true that mermaids had great power o
ver the rocks and the water, but they did not like to use it lightly. Each mermaid had been allotted a certain amount of the Mother’s power from birth, and the moment that power got used up the mermaid went—pop!—like a bubble and died. Therefore, mermaids, being naturally selfish, did not make mages of themselves. A thrifty mermaid might live five hundred years, but once she passed there would be no trace of her.

  Unfortunately, it was also true that mermaids often halved a fisherman’s catch, since they shared the same ground for catching in and were ignorant or contemptuous of the fishers. And it was true that mermaids, from foolishness, had sent some to their deaths—but rarely from malice. Mermaids were not sirens and did not seek to enthrall humans: they considered sirens lazy and murlocs deplorable.

  Halia was regarded as flighty and rather stupid by her sisters (who numbered in the dozens), and very pretty, but not enough to remedy her flaws. She was their youngest sister, and this is often the lot of the baby. She had beautiful scales like coral, and her curls were the deep dead green of algae, the kind that is nearly blue from growing so far away from the light. Her besetting sin was a love of watching the ships go by; she thrilled to see their flags fluttering in the eastern wind. She could watch these for hours and had done so from when Boralus was first built. And though young, she knew enough, and heard enough, to be deeply grieved by the sailors’ ill regard.

  Her sisters said she was a fool and a child to keep playing in the wakes of those ships, knowing the sailors hated her, to which she said, “Ah, but I must watch over them that live on Boralus, for their lives are so hard and their legs so ungainly. Who knows when I could help them?”

  When the sailors swore at her and cast their lanterns into the water after her, and her sisters argued with her twice as much, she said, “I must be even more watchful and help them if I can. For now I know they don’t like me, and it will be better in the end if I can help them and will mean more.”

  “Kill fish out of hunger, and kill pirates to defend yourselves,” she said, “but I won’t suffer you to kill a mermaid out of chickenheartedness.”

  Then her sisters cursed her for a martyr as well as a fool. This did not stop her following the ships, and in her foolish love of bright things and beauty she made her favorite the two-master Windward, which had some of the brightest flags of all, with the most daredevil of sailor boys and girls for a crew, and its sea priest was the tidesage Ery. And Halia adored Ery.

  Ery was loved very deeply by the people of Boralus, and not simply because she had vouchsafed Windward and its cargo over many journeys, from the peninsular kingdoms and much farther beyond. They loved her because they loved bravery and quickness, and Ery was as quick and brave as any Boralus could boast of. The sun had burned her brown, and the duty made her mouth unsmiling, and she was pensive and thoughtful in her ways. She thought unflaggingly of duty, which made the Windward’s captain and bosun fond of her, but she was no haughty scholar or conceited of her status: she had been born on Boralus in a gutter’s hut. How lovely Halia thought her, in her vestments, hoodless, with her strange brown hair the color of the mainmast itself! Halia loved to watch it flutter in the sea breeze, so lustrous and unlikely in hue, and she naively let herself follow quite close in the boat’s wake, the better to look at Ery’s lovely hair and mourn her poor ponderous legs.

  The sailors were beside themselves each time they saw her head break the water and begged the captain to let them scare her off, or even kill her. But Ery would have none of it.

  “Kill fish out of hunger, and kill pirates to defend yourselves,” she said, “but I won’t suffer you to kill a mermaid out of chickenheartedness.”

  And because Ery was as much respected as she was admired, the sailors were ashamed and forced to let Halia be.

  How Halia loved to swim alongside the Windward as it left the harbor on sunny days with the gulls crying. She watched anxiously when it was due back in Boralus, and she was so delighted at its return that she left her hair half-combed. And just as Ery asked for the Tidemother’s blessings or thanked her for those given, she never failed to give the mermaid a salute when the Windward arrived or bid her a solemn goodbye when the Windward left. If new men and women on board tried to jeer at their tidesage for making a mascot out of an accursed mermaid, they soon learned not to, for as well as being popular with the crew, Ery had hard fists. In the old days of Boralus the tidesages were not above a sharp blow to the irreverent, and Ery was not too devout to issue them.

  When the Windward was anchored in the deep blue Boralus Harbor, giddy and grateful Halia would ply Ery with her choicest gifts. When Ery tied up her long brown hair and plunged into the harbor for her morning swim, she would come back to her clothes to find dainty parcels of kelp-wrapped fish or eels, so fresh as to not even be all the way dead, or fresh clams wrapped the same way, kept damp and alive by means of clever knots in the seaweed to make it watertight. When the fishing was poor Halia could offer only pearls, and so Ery found handfuls of tiny seed pearls in such a rainbow of colors as humans have never seen, or enormous white pearls that could have graced the crowns of queens in Lordaeron. Because Ery was as sensible as she was serious, she dumped this impossible wealth back into the water weeds, and Halia grew to assume that humans thought as little of pearls as mermaids did. This is why there is so much bubble seaweed in Boralus Harbor: it is all of Halia’s discarded pearls.

  Halia was still too shy to ever address herself to the human woman, but in observing her Halia grew more familiar with her ways than she had when the tidesage was only a wonderful figure on the deck of the Windward—more familiar, though she did not know this, than was anyone else with Ery’s ways and moods, for Ery did not seek company in anything other than prayer, and though widely respected, she was held in awe more than she was sought for festivity. Halia had unthinkingly disrupted her loneliness. Halia thought nothing of this, but only how much she liked to watch Ery’s strong-armed stroke cutting through the water, and to admire how she swam like a dolphin despite the piteous drawback of those long brown legs, and to long to see her smile. Halia, in her hundred years’ youth, laughed easily, but how old sometimes did Ery seem!

  And indeed at first Ery was solemn over the mermaid’s offerings, and then she was touched by them, and then over a long while she was amused by them in her own way, being slow to humor. She spent a whole voyage wondering how to return a gift to the fair mermaid—for Ery, though a human, was not too austere to admire Halia’s lovely face and form, nor her profusion of kelp-green curls, nor even her coral-colored tail—and she thought she would seem a churl not to give a gift in return. She spent that voyage sharpening Halia a cunning little gut-hook knife, as Boralus women suffered from an excess of practicality, and on returning to the harbor walked into the shallows and called for the mermaid.

  “Don’t you know that if you waited until dawn and slit your poor feet from the toes to the heels until the water turned red with your blood, then walked into the harbor, that the Mother would take pity on you?”

  This was their first real meeting, with the tidesage standing waist-deep in the clear green waters of the harbor, and with the mermaid approaching, too shy to look Ery directly in the eyes. She was forced to take Ery’s hand when the tidesage pressed the knife into it, and if Halia’s lips could not be eloquent her eyes were. In that moment they both found each other enchanting. Halia was thrilled and knew only joy; Ery was grave and deeply moved.

  When they had kissed, and confirmed the other felt likewise, and called each other by name and said tender things to each other, Halia said to Ery, “Say you’ll stay with me and live with me for always in the harbor!”

  “Even a tidesage cannot live underwater,” said Ery.

  Halia laughed at her beloved’s ignorance and said, “Don’t you know that if you waited until dawn and slit your poor feet from the toes to the heels until the water turned red with your blood, then walked into the harbor, that the Mother would take pity on you? She would make your legs fall of
f and make a tail grow there instead so that you could become a mermaid and live with me. Take the pretty knife you just gave me and do it.”

  Ery shook her head.

  “In another life I would, but not this one. I have walked the path and pledged what I am to the Tidemother, and ships cannot move through firth or fjord without me. There are not enough tidesages that I could throw off my duty and live with you, Halia.”

  “Then live with me anyhow, and I will forgive you the legs,” said Halia, who was growing increasingly desperate. “Let me swim beside your ship when you leave harbor, and make yourself a house by the shore, and if you cannot keep house for me then I will keep yours. And if anyone else asks you to be their sweetheart, you can say ‘No’ and point at me.”

  Ery grew more serious than ever, for she did not bandy around much with dissembling or untruth, but she said, “I must never tell anyone of my love for you, Halia, or they’ll never take me willingly on the Windward again, and it will be the death of them.”

  At this Halia cried, as mermaids cry very easily. Ery did not, as tidesages grudge tears just as much. But Halia loved Boralus and loved the Windward, and thinking of all the pretty ships and the jaunty Windward as so much old wood at the bottom of the sea, she was hard-pressed, so she agreed that their love must be a secret.

  From that time on, mermaid and sea priest met in quiet coves and waterways, and as they kept their troth they became more dear to the other. But Ery’s resolve, though it wavered, held fast, and although Halia sometimes thought her heart would break, she steeled herself and did not stoop to beg Ery to cut those feet and join her down in the deep waters of the harbor. And whenever Ery joined the Windward and set sail, Halia did not join her, but pined for her until her sisters were quite alarmed.