Full Circle

*The Dark Portal. The push against the Iron Horde.*

For years, decades even she had wandered. She had roamed distant lands, separated from her people, from their customs, from her own haunted thoughts of the past. She had lived as a nomad might, traveling where the whispering winds lead her, scavenging what supplies or equipment she needed along the way. Always an exile even amongst a people composed of exiles, Mariskka had known only solitude and the precious touch of the elements except on the rare occasion her path crossed with that of another soul.

Perhaps that solitude was what she had needed to grow beyond what she had once been. The decades younger Draenei would not have recognized herself, the arcane researcher and crystal artificer would have taken one look at the ragged, fetish-wearing shaman and wondered if she were perhaps a lost Rangari scout. She had walked many paths in the intervening years, seen many things both horrible and fantastic, and learned of the elements and the natural world.

It was because of this growth, because of what she had become in the intervening years since her losses on Draenor and her fading connection to the Light, that Mariskka found herself drawn to the conflict at the Dark Portal. Always one for peace, even she could not ignore the portents and dire warnings that the elements whispered to her. Every fortune she told bespoke of disaster, every echo of the elements cried out in pain from the damage the portal did to the very land around it, and possibly worst of all; every time she closed her eyes the spirits writhed in torment in her dreams and in the waking world around her. Her memories bubbled to the surface, screaming at her of the consequences of inaction, of letting this Iron Horde invade these new lands her people had made a home and in the quietest parts of her mind telling her that she could change what befell her people the first time if she was there to make a difference.

And so she stood on the scorched red plains as the combined might of the Alliance and the Horde pushed the invaders back to their beachhead. She stood amongst their ranks as the greatest heroes of the realms battered aside the Iron Horde spearhead and wrested control of the Dark Portal on Azeroth's side. And when they plunged through the portal on what would certainly be a suicide mission, Mariskka was there, her hooves clattering loudly on the ancient stones, the blue glow of her eyes affixed ahead of her as she stepped forward, knowing she left nothing and no one behind to mourn her loss.

The battle beyond was chaos, with thousands upon thousands of orcs hurtling towards the portal, attempting to force the attacking heroes of Azeroth aside. Mariskka found herself caught in the swirl of battle, knowing that she and the others had to buy enough time for the portal to be shut down. She stood shoulder to shoulder with soldiers of the Alliance, her mismatched armor setting her apart and proclaiming her as something slightly different. To the orcs it mattered little; all they saw were targets to be slaughtered, and the situation was all so very familiar to Mariskka as memories flowed back into her mind.

In a half-daze she moved, her mace coming down on a foe here, her shield moving to block an attack there, while all the while her mind raced, recalling the orcish cleansing of her village, her home. A thousand faces flashed through her mind, her husband and children staring lifelessly up at her. Her neighbors, friends, relatives, everything that made up her life destroyed by the unbelievable aggression and hatred of a people the Draenei had lived alongside for so long.

A spear thrust forward through the swirling melee and Mariskka narrowly avoided being impaled as she brought her shield into alignment at the last possible moment. The force of the blow drove her backwards, her hooves slipping on the now blood-slicked stones before the portal as she lost her balance. Around her other Alliance soldiers were cut down, the orcs pushing forward and slowly destroying the vanguard. From her place on the ground, she looked up in horror as a huge, brutish orc loomed large over her.

He stared down at her, his eyes filled with bloodlust and primitive markings covering his mostly naked flesh. He grinned down at her, his spear coming up over his head as his gaze locked with hers.

In that moment, Mariskka's life came full circle. All of the emotions, all of the terror she had experienced back on the original Draenor burned away in the flames of her anger. She remembered Argus, remembered the first family she'd lost, remembered the eons of fleeing, fighting, and dying that her people had done just to escape into another massacre, another battle. In that moment, something within her surged to life, and the fiery will that had forced her to live even after the fall of Shattrath burned through her veins.

Smoldering fury gazed back up at the orc, giving him pause. His weapon halted, raised above his head and glinting in the smoke filled light of Draenor's sun. In the distance, thunder rumbled ominously, the elements of Draenor hearing the call of a shaman's rage. Although the world was alien to much of the Alliance, to Mariskka it was just one of the many homes that she had found and lost, and she could feel the seething molten core of the world, feel the wind whipping through her hair as the storm came to her, feel the moisture off the sea lingering as a threat in the clouds above, and feel the strength of the stones beneath her.

The orc saw the shift in her gaze, saw her hands clench tight against the haft of her mace, and he brought his spear higher, ready to destroy the threat. Lightning arced down from seemingly nowhere, pouring through his raised spear and burning him as it flowed through the weapon and out. It struck Mariskka, flowing across the metal of her armor, never touching her flesh as it found its release in the stones beneath her, the ear-splitting reverberation of its thunderclap deafening those nearby and throwing the charred orc into his companions on the stone stairs below.

Mariskka rose from the ground, smoldering steam rising from the stones around her, and a space cleared for her. Alliance soldiers surged forward on her flanks, but her gaze remained affixed to the orcs on the steps below her as they looked up at her in awe and fear.

No longer was she the wanderer, the traveler. No longer was she the simple fortune teller that she'd been for so many years. In her gaze they saw her as she truly was and had always been. They saw the Draenei that had loved and lost so many times that it had become an endless cycle of life to her. They saw the woman who had nearly given her life so that the innocent could flee from Shattrath, and in her words, they heard their doom spoken.

"Never again, for as long as I shall live," Mariskka murmured under her breath in Draenei.

Her hands came up, and lightning flared, another wicked thunderclap booming out all around her. The electricity slashed into the orcs below her, hopping from one to another and making them jump and shudder as it passed through them. Where they fell, more stood to take their place, and more lightning came to greet them.

She would hold her ground there until the very end, until the portal itself was destroyed from the Draenor side, and her allies grabbed her and hauled her back, forced to carry her as she refused to give up her ground. And as she was lifted by a large worgen and dragged away from the conflict, she saw the ground passing beneath her, the memory of the flowing water of the swamps near the Zangar Sea passing beneath her as she was carried away with a mortal wound in another time and place staying with her, leaving her in a daze where past and present conspired to become one and the same.

She had finally come back to the place which had broken her, and this time had shown that she was stronger than the earth itself. Everything would be different now, and a new Cycle would begin here on this strange version of Draenor.