Kivrinne at the Wall (5/5)

Kivrinne packed up her notes, her samples, her equipment, and returned to Undercity. Although the city as a whole had been restored to some semblance of normalcy and order by the time she arrived, the space that had been her workroom in the Apothecarium was trashed. It took her several days to get her files reorganized and to determine which records were missing and what work would have to be re-done. Since she had been away for several months, other Junior Apothecaries would naturally have been set to the routine tasks she had been doing before she left. She was not surprised, therefore, to find that most of the equipment she had left behind had been carried off to other workrooms, nor that her stock of reagents was severely depleted. Fortunately, her private cache of special samples and most important notes remained intact.

Recollecting the missing reagents meant yet another trip to Silverpine. The haunted forest seemed to exert a magnetic pull on Kivrinne, drawing her back into its shadows again and again. Despite her best intentions of reagent collecting, Kivrinne spent much of this outing using her somewhat neglected magical skills to assist Dalar Dawnweaver’s investigations of the Moonrage Worgen.

She ultimately participated in clearing out Shadowfang Keep and defeating the hapless Arugal. She did not count this time spent as a loss, however, because the Worgen, like the Amani Trolls, exhibited an intriguing resistance to the effects of the Plague creeping across the land.

While Kivrinne had previously dismissed the Tauren woman who camped near the Sepulcher as a naive and idealistic fool, it now occurred to her that the druid’s work to heal the land might intersect with her own research. She spent several hours discussing with Mura the outcomes of her experiments in Thunder Bluff. Though Kivrinne’s tale was one of generally unmitigated failure, the Tauren remained stubbornly optimistic that eventually she would figure out what to do with Silverpine.

So it was that one day Kivrinne and Mura were out searching for a particularly rare herb to test another of Mura’s ideas. As they moved from one hollow to the next, slaying ghouls, dodging Worgen, and avoiding Dalaran wizards as they went, they did not realize just how far south they had traveled until the trees thinned and they found themselves staring at the Greymane Wall.

“How odd,” said Mura, “Kivrinne, do you know why this wall is here, and what lies behind it?”
“The King of Gilneas built it,” she began, slowly, “starting about five years before the Plague, when he decided the Alliance wasn’t worth the trouble.”
Another flash of memory. This Wall was why her Pa had taken all those trips, each autumn and spring, down through Silverpine and back again.
“It made my Ma terribly angry at first,” Kivrinne remembered, “because we’d just sent my eldest sister to be apprenticed there.”
“Look,” said Mura, pointing, “There are people camped there by the wall. They look like they are starving, ill, miserable. Why doesn’t the King let them in?”
“I guess he wants to keep the Plague out, and the Worgen,” Kivrinne replied. “My Pa went to visit my sister twice a year while they were building the Wall, even took my Ma with him a few times, made them all happy. After it was finished, though, the guards didn’t open the gate for anyone. That made my Ma mad all over again, but I suppose it was just in time, for them, because that winter, the Plague came.”
“Why didn’t your sister come home when you knew the wall was almost finished?”
“We didn’t know that the King was going to be quite so hard-nosed about it.” Kivrinne shrugged. “Besides, her apprenticeship wasn’t finished yet, and it was with one of the most well-known craftsmen in the city. She couldn’t exactly skip out on it early. And… I think… there might have been a young man involved.”
“Aaah,” said Mura, in that way Tauren women have of infusing a single syllable with great depths of wisdom.
“I wish we could do something to help those suffering people,” she said after a moment, “but alas, they would let neither you nor I approach them.”

Kivrinne still could not remember very much of her life before the Plague, but it made her feel less alone, somehow, to think that somewhere behind the Greymane Wall, she still had a sister. And maybe, just maybe, someday, she would meet that sister… Kymberlea… again.