Every morning brought fog, thick, white, low lying. On the seventh morning after my arrival in Hillsbrad, it was tinted yellow and bore a sickly sweet smell. It also reeked of magic, a rising tempest of panic that reminded me all too plainly of Tirisfal immediately after the Plague. The chain of reason that had kept me sane snapped at that moment, and I moved from the foothills back to the farm.
"Out." I snapped at Barnabas, ignoring his greeting. "Go to Southshore. Now."
"Clair… What?"
No time. There was no time… I stared into his eyes and shamelessly exploited the powers that Arthas had given me. "Leave now." I whispered, throwing the weight of my death behind the words. "Do not return until I tell you so." He did so, hitching the sounder of the two oxen to the wagon and loading the children on. I watched until they were out of sight, before I spun on the farm. I drank the remaining oxen's blood until I was sated, killed it, and burned the buildings to the ground. And I rode…. West… into Lordaeron.
And it was empty. Just a few miles into Lordaeron, beyond the border, there was nothing. Nothing but death. There were giant red winged bats, tangled on the ground, dead. Gray plaguehounds, strewn across the wiry grass, dead. I rode on, turning north, a journey I had yearned to take but had kept myself from, deep into the heart of Silverpine, headed for Lordaeron's capital.
Just a few miles into Silverpine, my horse began to sicken, his strides shortening. When I let him stop, he dropped his head, his chest heaving like a bellows. He then collapsed, his knees buckling under him, and died. I stood there; staring in fascination, waiting for what I felt was the inevitable. And it was, less than an hour later, his hooves began to wave again, and he struggled to his feet.
"Arthas!" I howled into the empty air, and I felt the snap of his immediate attention.
"What?"
"My horse just died." I stated inanely, and I felt him look through my eyes at it. It stood, ears pinned back, eyes rimmed with reddish tinged whites. "The fog is yellow, it smells, and things are dying…" I was babbling, unconcerned when he exerted more control over me to move me to one of the bats. One of my hands reached out to grasp it, and dragged it a foot along the ground. It remained…dead. Still.
"Ride north." He ordered, and it was that, no suggestion. I remounted the gelding, closing my mind to the fact that it was no longer alive, and rode as directed, north towards Lordaeron City.
"I should warn the Order." I finally managed to complain, still heading resolutely north.
"I have already informed Baudoin." Arthas stated, his voice distracted. There were other people in the same room as he was now. Some of my brethren, his death knights, stood at the Throne before him.
I rode through the day, and still saw nothing living. The sky was empty. The trees pressing in over the road, empty, and the only thing that moved besides me and the dead horse was the fog, hanging heavy in my chest. A village along the way, empty. I stopped there, by Arthas's volition. It was abandoned, desolate, unlike the way before, free of any corpses. No bats. None of the hounds.
"This was a Forsaken outpost as recently as when you came to gather the children."
"There is nothing here now."
"I see that. Go."
I rode on, as the shadows spawned from the trees grew longer. New corpses, bears and black worgen, scattered the landscape, and I turned, again at Arthas's will, into a farm yard. The hayricks in the fields had rotted, collapsed, but there was still a hint of plow ridges, shining with parallel lines of water. A new stench hung here, rotting flesh, and there were bodies dropped randomly across the field. I rode up to one, surveying it. It had been human, before the original Plague, and had persisted the nine years since as a ghoul, Arthas's. Now it rotted, motionless.
