Welcome to Fel

An ocean and beach made of sand, even the water, all pastel pink and blue and green and then inside-out like a negative image and a steady back beat that’s faster than a heart has any right to be and twelve inches too high and three inches too far back and free and bound at the same time there’s a face that’s looking at me but it has no features only dead fish eyes and white and it’s gone.

It’s gone.

I need to make my way across so I crawl because that’s what I do and that’s all there is to do because they said (Who said? What did they say?) so and I know even now that things aren’t going to be the same that things aren’t going to be alright that the bell has tolled and now everything’s shifting and I have to crawl.

The bottom falls out from under me and my heart jumps up into my throat like I missed a step and now it’s beating as fast as the steady back beat and they’re playing off each other but the world is opening its mouth on the horizon and down its throat it’s just white and black and moving back and forth.

I open my eyes (oh god it hurts to breathe oh my god oh) for real this time and blink the grogginess out of them. I’m in a black room, the walls, ceiling and floor all a high-gloss black with no furniture, doors or windows. I sit, slouched in the corner and stare at my face on the reflective surface of the wall, feeling like I’m somehow watching myself do this from far away.

My reflection smiles grimly from the other side of the wall and addresses me. Its voice is muffled, as though my ears are full of cotton batting and all I can really hear is the constant whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of fluid pounding in my temples. I try to say something, but my jaw is slack and I only succeed in letting out a sloppy rasp. My reflection shakes its head in resignation and the room grows darker, no longer affording me the ability to see the glossy sheen of the walls.

I go back to the ocean.

An impossibly tall and thin man with skin that has the texture and colour of tightly coiled copper wire and no discernable facial features is kneeling by a table. Noting my presence, he beckons me over with a finger at the end of an arm that can nearly touch me through the five yards that separate us. I oblige him, crawling fist over fist until I reach his table. He splays his hands out, revealing two cards laying face-up on the table and an empty outline where a third card should go. He scoops the card to my left in his long, willowy fingers and rolls his wrist, holding it out in front of my face.

“The Pawn of Traitors”

On the card is a man tied to a rack, wrists and ankles bound in iron. A small man with a savagely cynical smile, a woman wrapped in a deep purple shroud showing only her seductively smouldering eyes, a fat, piggish man dressed in silk fineries and a broad man in full plate armour each have control of one of the handles and ratchets in place to stretch the bound man. A voice like scraping steel pierces my skull and simply states, “What you were.”

The wire man curls his fingers around the card and crushes it, and I watch the dust spill out and blow into the rest of the sand around us. He sweeps his hand along the table and picks up the second card, holding it between his index and middle fingers.

“The Forgotten”

The second card’s picture shows a child’s wood-block doll, slouched in a corner and broken in several places. The doll’s face has been sanded away, leaving only vaguely human (or Forsaken) features. Looking down at myself, I realize that in every place the doll is broken, I’ve also sustained an injury. I narrow my eyes at the wire man, but he only cocks his head at me and states, “What you are.”

He places his hand, palm down, over the outline where the third card is meant to go and leans forward, his face stopping inches away from mine. I smell copper, but my mind thinks blood. I keep my gaze level with the wire man for a moment, and then he speaks again,

“You aren’t what we want, Joseph, but that isn’t to say we wouldn’t keep you if it suited us. We just think that you can be put to more use up there than you ever could here, so I offer you a chance at redemption. You will be returned to the plane you know as Azeroth. If you spill Desmodena’s blood before your existence on that plane ends, you will be left to whatever afterlife you were due. Otherwise, upon your passing, you will become ours. And, to make this sporting, we’ll be withholding your memories of everyone who has betrayed you to this point. The choice is yours…do you think you can figure it out?”

The sound of his voice has caused my ears to bleed and my eyes to screw shut, but I nod my head lightly and through clenched teeth I offer him two words,

“I do.”

Opening my eyes, I see the wire man is leaning back on his own side of the table again and that he has procured a third card.

“The Fel Angel”

The final card shows me, dressed in immaculate black armour wielding a long, two-handed Falx. My face is spattered with blood and my eyes hold a malevolent red glow to them instead of the yellow to which I’d grown accustomed. I recognize the look on my face as the same look my reflection had given me in the black room, and as I turn to speak to the wire man, I’m pulled through the beach and sit bolt upright, blinking haze out of my eyes and slowly coming to recognize the small pool by the Valley of Honour in Orgrimmar.

Looking across the pool to the bank on the other side, I see a Forsaken man and a young Forsaken girl watching me with interest. Slowly rising to my feet (and feeling as though I’ve fallen from a great height), I approach the two.