There is a man — an orc — sitting outside a building in Durotar with a grief that has nowhere to go.
His son went hunting a year ago. He didn't come back. This happens. The wilderness around Orgrimmar is not a gentle environment; it is a landscape actively trying to kill everything in it, and sometimes it succeeds. The orcs of this generation are the children of warriors who survived things that should have been unsurvivable, and they have built a culture around absorbing loss without being broken by it.
But a father is a father. The grief is still there, a year later, looking for a container.
The container he's chosen is a necklace. Crocodile teeth, to be specific — crocolisk teeth pulled from the jaws of the animals that hunt along the Southfury River. He wants them set into a cord. He wants to hold something that connects to the place where his son was last. He wants the danger that took his boy to become something he can wear and carry and eventually, maybe, come to terms with.
He cannot do this himself. His hands shake too much.
Jezarman takes the assignment.
The crocolisks at the river's edge are not subtle about their intentions.
They lurk in the shallows with the specific patience of predators that have no reason to rush because everything in their environment eventually comes to the water. They are armored and territorial and equipped with the kind of jaw structure that engineering students would describe as mechanically optimal.
They are also, at level nine, not actually a serious threat to a Shaman who has been burning military installations and executing cultists for the past several hours.
But this operation is not about threat assessment. It's about something else.
This is what the lightning is for, Jezarman thinks, moving into the water. Not the Kul Tiras soldiers. Not the Burning Blade heretics. Not Raggaran's perpetual operational anger problem. Those are tasks. This is — different. This is the work that doesn't get logged in official records, the work that matters in ways that don't translate into reputation points.
The crocolisks die one by one. The teeth are extracted carefully. The cord is assembled.
Somewhere along the Southfury River, a year ago, a young orc went hunting and didn't come back. Somewhere along the same river today, Jezarman stands ankle-deep in muddy water with a handful of teeth, and the grief has a container now.
He carries it back without comment.
Raggaran hates Quillboars.
This is not a subtle emotional state. Raggaran's hatred for the spined humanoids that have colonized the outskirts of the settlement is immediate, visible, and apparently total. He communicates this hatred to Jezarman with the directness of someone who has been waiting for a qualified listener.
The natural follow-up question is: And?
And I need you to go kill them, Raggaran explains, because that is always the answer and everyone in this world knows it.
Why you? the internal log asks, which is the question every person in every organization has asked at least once. You are here, you have skills, someone else has a problem, and somehow the Venn diagram of those three facts has created a circle labeled your responsibility now.
Because Raggaran is not, evidently, going to go do it himself. He has the problem and the emotional investment, but he lacks either the capability or the willingness to personally act on it. This is not a moral failing — it's organizational structure. Not everyone can fix everything. Some people identify problems. Some people solve them. The people who solve them get sent into the thorn bushes.
The Quillboars are not interesting adversaries. They are territorial and aggressive and unpleasantly spiky in a literal physical sense, but they lack the organized doctrine of the Kul Tiras garrison or the magical threat of the Burning Blade. They are, in the operational vocabulary that Jezarman has been developing over the past several hours, clearing work. The kind of thing that needs to happen before the more important things can happen.
He clears them with professional detachment.
When he returns, Raggaran is calmer. Measurably, observably calmer. The specific tension that the presence of nearby Quillboars had apparently been maintaining in his system has been resolved through external intervention.
Stolen story; please report.
I'm a therapist, Jezarman concludes. This whole time, I've been a therapist. The methodology is unusual, but the outcome is the same: people come to me with things they cannot carry, and I go handle the source of the problem, and they feel better afterward.
The necklace. The Quillboars. The ships on the beach that needed burning. In each case, someone had something they couldn't resolve alone, and the resolution required going somewhere difficult and doing something uncomfortable and returning with evidence that the situation had changed.
This is what the lightning is for.
Level ten arrives between one moment and the next.
There's no ceremony to it. The experience bar fills, the number changes, and the system presents a new question: Who do you want to be?
Three paths. Three interpretations of the same foundational power set.
Elemental: Distance, magnitude, precision. Call the storm from afar and let it fall on what needs to fall.
Enhancement: Contact, force, immediacy. Bring the lightning to your hands and deliver it personally.
Restoration: Healing, sustaining, supporting. Keep the people who matter alive so they can continue doing what they do.
Jezarman looks at the options for a long moment.
He has spent the past hours playing all three roles without the framework to describe them. The crocolisk teeth were restoration work — returning something broken to function. The Quillboar clearance was enhancement work — direct application of force to a direct problem. The Tiragarde operation was elemental work — systematic removal of an entrenched position from a safe enough distance to be methodical about it.
He chooses Elemental. Because the lightning from afar is what he keeps reaching for when the situation gets complicated. Because distance is not cowardice — it's perspective. Because the problem-solver who can see the whole battlefield is more useful than the one who can only see what's directly in front of them.
The talent tree opens.
The world becomes slightly larger.
The voice in his head has been there for a while.
It started as interference — a frequency underneath the chaos of the post-Cataclysm world, something that didn't quite fit the pattern of wind and earth and fire. It speaks in a register that isn't quite any of the elements. It sounds like something that has been watching for a very long time from a very unusual angle.
Chromie.
Not juju. Not the toxic preparation from the Darkspear ritualists that Jezarman very deliberately avoided ingesting at multiple points during the Sen'jin operations. This is something else: the specific mental signature of a Bronze Dragon who has taken the form of a small gnome and has opinions about where he should be.
He finds her near the Embassy in Orgrimmar.
She is, as advertised, small. She is, as suspected, a smug. She has the energy of someone who has watched every iteration of every possible timeline and has personally chosen to find this one amusing.
You're late, she says, or something to that effect.
I was busy, Jezarman responds internally, taking in the display of time portals that surrounds her like a catalog of possible pasts. Also I didn't know where you were. Also someone needed teeth.
The portals show different eras of Azeroth's history — times Jezarman has no direct memory of, events he's only context-aware of in the way you're context-aware of things that happened before you existed. The Third War. The Burning Crusade. The Lich King. The Cataclysm he's currently standing in the aftermath of.
The thing about the present, Chromie explains in whatever way Bronze Dragons explain things, is that you can't understand it without understanding what built it.
This is the reason the voice has been getting louder. Not because Jezarman is losing his mind. Because he's been building capacity, here in Durotar, to do something that requires more than level nine. He's been practicing. The boars, the cultists, the crocolisks, the Quillboars — not busywork. Calibration.
You want to understand this world? Chromie asks, gesturing at the portals. Go back to where it started. See what it looked like before the fractures. See what people were fighting for before the Cataclysm gave everyone new problems.
Outside Orgrimmar, the sun is setting over Durotar. The red earth turns darker. Somewhere along the Southfury River, a father has a necklace and slightly less unresolved grief than he had this morning.
Jezarman looks at the portals.
He picks one.
?? END OF LOG — SESSION 004 / DUROTAR COMPLETE
- Time Played: 2h 12m 52s (total)
- Level: 1 → 10 (Specialization unlocked: Elemental)
- Gold: 0 → 3g 17s 16c
- Zones Cleared: Valley of Trials, Sen'jin Village coastline, Tiragarde Keep, Razor Hill, Orgrimmar (initial)
- Reputation: Orgrimmar — Honored | Darkspear Trolls — Friendly
- Personal Objectives: Crocodile teeth recovered and delivered. Raggaran's operational anxiety resolved. One father's grief given a container.
- Next Destination: Through Chromie's portal. Into the past. Into the Burning Crusade.
The Dark Portal opens in the next log.
End of Durotar Arc. Next Chapter: Through the Dark Portal — the Outland awaits.