The Wound in the World

Kamalia barely had time to notice the ground heaving underneath her, throwing her off of her feet, before the pain overtook her. White-hot, blinding, like a blade had been shoved through her — worse, so much worse than when Garrosh had dumped the Heart of Y’Shaarj into the pools of the Vale of Eternal Blossoms — it consumed all her senses. Dimly, she heard herself screaming. Dimly, she felt herself rolling across the hard rock floor of the Heart of Azeroth as the ground continued to quake violently.

After some unknown interval, the quaking and the pain began to subside.

A hand was gently shaking her shoulder. A voice was calling, “Farseer? Farseer?”
A woman’s voice with a foreign inflection, repeating “Farseer, can you hear me?”
A Draenei’s voice… Earthcaller Yevaa.

Kamalia opened her eyes and looked up at Yevaa. Slowly, she uncurled herself from the fetal ball she had been lying in and, gratefully accepting Yevaa’s proffered hand, rose on trembling legs. She didn’t notice until she was fully standing that she had one hand pressed to her side as if covering a wound. Looking down, she half expected to see her hand and armor caked with blood, and fresh blood still oozing around her fingers. But she was only muddy and scraped and scratched from sliding across the floor, and no blood rushed forth as she tentatively pulled her hand away from her side.

“The Earthmother,” Kamalia gasped, “The Earthmother suffers. She is — ” the phantom wound in her side throbbed as the floor quivered with another small earthquake “– she is wounded.”

Yevaa was looking at her with complete incomprehension, and Kamalia realized that she had been speaking in Taurahe.

“The Earthmother is wounded,” Kamalia repeated, this time in Common.

Other members of the Earthen Ring were gathering around Kamalia and Yevaa. All were trembling and shaky from the earthquakes, but some, including Muln Earthfury, Stormcaller Mylra, and a few others, seemed weaker than the rest.

“You are the last to recover, young Farseer,” said Magatha Grimtotem. “For a while there, I wasn’t sure if you were going to wake up again. Your contact with those Artifacts seems to have given you a deeper attunement to the Earthmother than the rest of us.” Her tone held a slightly mocking note, as if she thought that what she had just said was what others might say about Kamalia’s collapse — but she herself merely thought Kamalia to be weak.

“Was I…?” Kamalia began.

“You were not the only one to be totally overcome,” grunted Muln. “I was also, and Mylra, and others. The Earthmother is wounded, certainly gravely. We must find where, and do all we can to save her. If we can save her?” There was a hint of a question in the senior Farseer’s voice, and he looked toward Nobundo and Aggra.

Nobundo shook his head. “I feel that this world is in distress and terror, but I do not think I felt what you felt, my friends. As for your question… I cannot answer that. We were just learning to become Shaman when Ner’zhul’s portals began to tear Draenor apart, and Draenor was not host to a world-soul. I did not know enough then to be able to compare what I felt from Draenor’s elements, then, to what I feel from Azeroth’s elements, now.”

“I was only a child, and had not yet begun my training, when my world broke,” said Aggra. “When my teacher told me about it, she said that she felt the elements’ distress and knew that the world was falling to pieces, but she didn’t describe being physically affected in the way that you were just now. And I… I can feel that this world is now in terrible pain. Greater pain, deeper pain than the surface burns and scars inflicted by the Legion on the Broken Isles. But I do not know if it will be fatal.” She nodded toward Muln. “We must find the place, and go there, and do all we can to prevent it from being fatal.”

There was a sudden clamor from the portal to Dalaran. The delegation of Earthen Ring Shaman whom Kamalia had sent to Argus, who had been out of contact for several weeks following their reports of the initial forays by the Army of the Light and the Legionfall Concordance into the seat of the Burning Legion — Antorus, the Burning Throne — burst through, running, shouting.

Seeing the toppled totems and other items, the rockslides, and the other members of the Earthen Ring crowded around the inner circle of Farseers who were all looking pale and some of whom were holding hands to their sides, the returning champions faltered to a halt and their shouts began to quiet even before Muln held up a hand.

“You already know,” one of them, a well-respected Troll man, said.

“Perhaps,” said Muln. “We know that Azeroth is gravely wounded, but we do not yet know where, or how, or why. It seems that you may know these things. Tell us what happened in Antorus.”

The champions began telling what they had seen and experienced in the Burning Throne. At first, they spoke in turns, but soon a Pandaren woman named Cinder became the main storyteller, with the others occasionally chiming in to provide additional details.

“…as the Pantheon’s power pulled Sargeras into their prison, he turned and plunged his sword into Azeroth! We weren’t able to see exactly where it struck, but we know it was somewhere in southern Kalimdor. If we take the portal to Ramkahen from the Earthshrines and fan out from there, we should be able to find it very quickly — that thing is immense!”

From Ramkahen, the location of the Sword of Sargeras* was instantly obvious: Silithus.

The Earthen Ring group landed on the ridge above the Oasis of Vir’sar and looked down on a horrifying sight.

The incomprehensibly large weapon appeared to have pierced Azeroth right at Cenarion Hold — all the valiant kaldorei warriors and Cenarion Circle druids who’d lived there, obliterated instantaneously. A new wave of pain and grief washed over Kamalia, bringing her to to her knees. She fought down a surge of nausea.

The sands of the whole Silithus valley had been turned to buckled slabs of slag. Around the edges of the weapon itself, white flames flickered and curled, looking eerily like Sha fumes. Elsewhere, the cracks glowed a strange color, neither the orange-red of lava nor the blue-violet of a ley line, but an unsettling golden yellow.

“This is not going to be as easy as blasting out the ‘thorn’ and throwing down some enchanted seeds, the way we healed Shen-zin Su,” Wavespeaker Adelee commented wryly from behind Kamalia. Adelee’s voice dropped to a despairing whisper. “Oh, Eonar, what do we do?”

~*~*~

* Of course, to actually see the Sword of Sargeras, I had to run through Antorus LFR with Kamalia. While I was there, of course I had to take a selfie with Argus, to get the filter — because I wasn’t sure if I’d ever come back there.

This story is still Kamalia’s canonical experience of the event, though — running the LFR was game mechanics.
Though reports from the PTR showed the Sword being visible from as far away as Thunder Bluff, I couldn’t see it from there. I could only see it from the edges of Mulgore, near or just over the borders with Feralas.