Partners

I realized that I still had some work to finish up in the Ghostlands, so first thing this morning I pulled on my new guild tabard, strapped my ranseur to my back, and headed out. 

My room here is pretty barren, I realized.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a place to put my stuff, so naturally I haven’t really been collecting a lot.  Maybe I should at least keep around a change of clothes.  I am, after all, I’m supposed to be respectable now.  I’ll need to find a tailor first, though.

Anyway, I made it to the Ghostlands and spent a good amount of time milling around Tranquillien chatting with the provisions vendor (I guess I wasn’t really all that eager to work, after all).  

It was there that I met another Bloodknight, a girl named Chrysalis.  She was obviously impressed by my enormous pokeystick (as Ysabelle called it) and I’m pretty sure I saw her eyeing my tabard, too.  I’m sure she recognized the crest of the Silverguard on it.  Anyway, being the nice guy that I am, I offered to help her out with what she was working on.  It didn’t hurt that she was kinda cute, too.

The two of us tore through the catacombs and, later on, Deatholme.  Chrysalis seemed a little too sweet to be chopping the limbs off of trolls as well as she was, but she was good company.  We agreed that we made a good team and that we should work together more often.  She mentioned the loneliness that Bloodknights feel, which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.  I mean – yes, there are people that avoid us like the plague, but I guess because I’ve been working alone for so long now it hadn’t really bothered me.

Having a partner was a nice change. 

Detour

Before getting on the zepplin to Orgrimmar, I stopped in to the Undercity’s Royal Quarter to take care of an errand I had nearly forgotten about.  That errand being, simply, to update Lady Sylvanas on everything that I had done in the Ghostlands – namely going into Deatholme and putting down (however briefly) Dar’Khan, the Scourge leader in the area.  

It took me about half the day just to find the Royal Quarter – I just kept walking around in circles in that place.  Why do they call the areas of the city ‘quarters’ when there are five of them?  Honestly, I swear they’re just trying to confuse the tourists.

Anyway, Lady Sylvanas (who is ridiculously tall by the way), thought that I should go report to Thrall what I’ve done.

So, then I take the other half of the day just trying to find my way OUT of the city.  At one point I found myself at the end of this sewer line (full of this putrid green sludge – I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t want to ask) staring out at a forest, but I knew that couldn’t be right.  Eventually I found my way back up the elevator and made my way to the zepplin, which took it’s in time arriving.  I didn’t way to say anything, though, those little goblins looked tough.

The Second Trial

So, the whole thing where Bloodvalor sent me into the cave and into an ambush- he called that the first trial.  You can imagine my delight when I was told that I was ready for the second trial.  I was to seek out Master Kelerun Bloodmourn outside the ruins of Silvermoon.  Easy enough, right? When I arrived he congratulated me on making it that far and then proceeded to tell me that I need to kill four other Blood Knights who are about to come at me.  At this point, I didn’t get too hung up on the fact that I was really killing these people – I know that they can be easily enough brought back to life so long as we act quickly to do so.  Even so, these trials have me questioning my expected lifespan. 

Anyway, I do the deed and am sent back to Bloodvalor in Silvermoon.  Apparently there’s more to this trial.  There was a fleeting moment where I had mused about calling it quits right then and there, but the rewards promised by Bloodvalor should I live through this trial - status as a Blood Knight Adept and a weapon far superior to any I have ever owned – were very convincing.  Besides how bad could it be? 

My first task was to gather the crest from a fallen Blood Knight, one that would become my own providing I didn’t meet the same fate as it’s previous owner.   This required a trip back to Deatholme, where the body of a knight – the leader of a failed assault on the Scourge base - would be found.  Deatholme and I are old friends – I had been in and out of there more times than I cared to think about during the past several days.  I was not eager to return, but at least now I knew my way around.  Finding the body was no problem.

My next assignment was to gather three items necessary to forge a Blood-Tempered Ranseur – the weapon that was to be awarded to me as a symbol of my status as a Blood Knight.  Apparently a ranseur is another word for ridiculously huge giant pokeystick, something I had no idea how to spell (I had to ask a passing apprentice mage how to spell it for this journal) let alone wield. 

This task would be quite a bit more difficult than the last, as it involved a good deal of travel to places I had been unfamiliar with - places I kind of wish I hadn’t become familiar with.

  

Taking a break

Okay. So in the last couple weeks since I left Eversong I’ve somehow managed to cut the head off of a Scourge leader, cross the Great Sea on a goblin zepplin, met with Thrall, and killed some demons in this sweltering cave underneath Orgrimmar itself. Now that my life has apparently become a whole lot more interesting, I thought it might be a good time to catch my breath and start a record of all that’s been going on.

The troubles facing Quel’Thalas have been well documented, so I won’t linger too much on the jobs I took there. To put it simply- there’s a lot more to be done there, but the place seems to be in good hands with all manner of elves itching to make their mark on the world and pitching in wherever necessary. The Farstriders seem to have a good handle on the situation, as good as can be expected, at least.

I do want to go on the record and say that the Blood Knights are a bit more… intense than I had expected. After I did a bit of work in Eversong, I apparently caught the attention of some of the trainers and was given a task to test my mettle, so to speak. Knight-Lord Bloodvalor wanted me to go over to this place called the Isle of Tribulations, find a cave, and light a brazier located inside. So I find the island, kill a couple of overgrown spiders along the way and make my way to the back of this cave. “Easy enough,” I think, so I light the brazier and expect some floating magical head to congratulate me on a job well done or something like that. But no, instead a crazed Blood Knight charges into the cave after me and starts swinging a sword at my head! I barely managed to dodge that blow, and once I got over the initial shock of the whole thing I was able to put him down.

So, with no floating head in sight, I decided to just trek back to Silvermoon and let the Knights know that one of their members had turned to one of the Wretched or the plagued or was just plain nuts. Imagine my surprise when Bloodvalor tells me that he sent this guy in there to kill me, but it’s all okay because I’m alive. What’s more, he sends me to one of the trainers who gives me a device to resurrect this guy that I just killed… who had apparently been hauled back to Silvermoon just after I left the cave. It was all very confusing.

Long story short, I take this trinket from the trainer and bring the poor guy back to life. He wasn’t really all the grateful, in fact he seemed a bit disgruntled at the whole situation. I’ll have to remember to think twice before I agree to do Bloodvalor any favors. At least I learned the ability to resurrect those recently fallen, a good skill to have to be sure, so in the end I suppose the ordeal was well worth it.

More to follow after breakfast… I should cook up some of these crunchy spider legs before they go bad.