World of Warcraft: The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm Page 0,97

eating fruit and drinking wine, was the hated Aedelas Blackmoore. The man who had taken him as an infant and turned him into a gladiator. Anger burned in him, even as he watched his younger self fighting a huge bear.

“Fire,” Aggra said. “It was the first of the elements to choose you, Go’el. It gave you the anger, the outrage, to fight fiercely. It gave you the passion to fight well, for the right causes, as soon as you could do so. It burns deep within you, sustaining you even in your dark moments.”

Thrall listened, watching himself, surprised at just how strong and graceful and, yes, impassioned he was when he was in the ring. Knowing that he had taken those skills and used them to free his people, to protect them.

This was not what he had expected to see, but he nodded to Aggra’s words. Fire had indeed come to him as a youth, and he thought back to the concern that burned high in him even now to aid his world. He smiled, with perhaps just a touch of understandable pride, as his younger self defeated his opponents and raised his arms in victory.

The mist crept back into the scene, swirling about the shouting, victorious younger Thrall until it obscured him completely. Thrall waited, curious as to what other unexpected visions he would see in this strange journey.

The mist cleared. The arena, with its brightness and noise, was gone. In its stead was a forested nightscape, the only sounds the soft ones of wind and insects. Thrall again saw himself, but this time he looked wary. Hunted. He stood before a stone formation that, viewed from the right angle, resembled a dragon standing guard over the woodlands. The younger Thrall turned his head, regarding the dark oval mouth of a nearby cave, and Now-Thrall suddenly knew, with a jolt of deep, old pain and a new spike of torment, what was about to happen.

Nightmares. He had been at war with them. The whole world had.

“Must I watch this?” he asked quietly, knowing the answer even as he voiced the question.

“If you wish to understand, to become a true shaman, then yes,” Aggra said implacably.

Younger Thrall entered the cave, and both incarnations of himself beheld a young human woman named Taretha Foxton. Tari … Blackmoore’s mistress, Thrall’s “sister” of the spirit. Who had risked everything to free him, and who would eventually lose her life for that act. But she was alive, now, alive and vibrant and so beautiful. His nightmare had been about her—about trying, repeatedly, to save her. Again and again he had tried, in the dream coming up with a new idea in which she would live, laugh, love, as she should have. And each time he had failed and been forced to experience her death over and over and over. …

But she was not dying, not now, not here. She leaned against the wall, waiting for him, and when he spoke her name, she gasped, then laughed. Her face was lovely, all the more appealing for the genuine warmth of affection lighting it.

“You startled me! I did not know you moved so quietly!” She moved toward him, stretching out her hands. Slowly, Younger Thrall folded them in his own.

“It still hurts,” Now-Thrall said to Aggra. She did not chide him, not this time, but merely nodded her ghostly wolf’s head.

“That hurting, and the healing of the hurting, is the gift of Water,” she said. “Deep emotion. Love. The heart wide open, to joy and pain both. It is why we weep … water is moving with and through us.”

He listened quietly, remembering the words he and Taretha had shared at this, their first true meeting, as he heard them again. She gave him a map and some supplies, urging him to go find his people—the orcs. They spoke of Blackmoore. Now-Thrall, knowing what was to come, wanted to turn away but found he could not.

“What is happening to your eyes?” Younger Thrall asked.

“Oh, Thrall … these are called tears,” Taretha said quietly, her voice thick as she wiped at her eyes. “They come when we are so sad, so soul sick, that it’s as if our hearts are so full of pain there’s no place else for it to go.”

And even though he was traveling in the spirit world and had no physical body, Now-Thrall felt tears welling in his own eyes.

“Taretha understood,” Aggra said, her own voice soft with understanding. “She knew pain and