Always the fool

“Always the mindless fool, eh? You just never learned to pay attention to the little details, and now look at you.”

The battered tauren slowly raised his head up to face his harassers. Blood streamed down his face in gouts, his left eye swelled near shut, and where his right once was, only an empty socket remained.

“As you can see darling” she said mockingly, holding his missing eye before him. “I want a divorce”

“She’s found herself a real man.” The orc sneered. “And some two bit country boy hick like you just doesn’t have a place in this world.” The orc’s boot brought unconciousness to him.

“You got yourself beat up real good.” He heard in his sleep, a cold wet cloth pressed to his forehead. Slowly his eyes opened. “If ah didn’t know any bettah, I’d think someone wanted you dead.” Her voice was sweet, her face pretty, for a troll that is.

”Where am I?”

“You’re in mah home, ah found you lying in the middle of nowhere. Good news is you’re alive, bad news is you’re even uglier than when you were born.” She giggled. A look in the mirror she held confirmed what she said. The fur of his face was broken by a large jagged scar across his snout, his missing eye was sewn shut, a decorative eye patch placed over it. He poked at his scars and wounds, a feeling of bitterness and depression sinking in. “So, if you don’t mind me askin’, what exactly did you do to merit such a beating?”

“I fell in love with the wrong kind of woman…” He said with a stone cold indignation. Throwing off the blankets he rose out of bed and began dressing in his armor. “She found herself a new man and decided to get rid of the old one.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked

“Revenge” was all he said.

“You goin’ after them all alone?” she asked.

“My wife of five years betrayed me and had me beaten and left for dead. At this point I’d say I don’t have much to live for to let petty details get in my way.”

“Fair enough Ah suppose. You be needin company?”

“What do you care?”

“Ah spent the last 4 days keeping you alive, Ah don’t want to see my work lost in vain!” she smiled.

“Fair enough I suppose.” He mocked. “You have any useful skills? Aside from sewing up empty eye sockets?”

“Maybe. Ah ain’t too bad a shot with this..” she held up a rifle. “And I got a friend with some sharp claws if we need a 3rd.” She pointed towards a hammock in the corner, a heavy mass inside could only be what he assumed was her pet. “They call me Sarella by the way.”

“Buck.” He said.

“Feragar! Get your lazy bones outta there! We’re leavin!” The hammock shifted and a raptor hit the floor, his nails clacking on the floor as he walked towards his mistress. “So where do we start?”

“Orgrimmar…”

“I swear I don’t know!” The undead rogue choked out, his feet dangling above the ground as Buck held him aloft by his throat.

“You have ten seconds to tell me where she is Abner, after that I start removing limbs.”

“Please! I don’t know a thing! C’mon Buck, why would I hold out on you?!”

“This is your last chance… so for your sake you better stop FUCKING with me! I don’t think anyone in this bar would say a word or care if I killed you here and now.”

“Ok! Ok! She took off with him 3 days ago! They were heading off somewhere! She said something about Stranglethorn!”

He let the gasping Forsaken fall to the floor with a heavy thud.

“You sure know how to show a lady a good time Buck.” Sarella giggled from the bar.

“Get your stuff, we’re leaving.”

“Where we off to now?”

“Stranglethorn”

“Bah, s’too hot there!”

Buck stood on the deck of the zeppelin, staring off into space. Sarella quietly approached him from behind.

“Tell me about her.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How you met, why you got married, why she left you. Ah Never heard of someone getting bludgeoned to near death simply because their marriage wasn’t working out.”

“We met when I was inducted into our guild. We were both warriors, they said I was a match for her skills, maybe better, but I’m not so sure. At first she showed a dislike for me, maybe because I was a ‘threat’ to her spot as the guild’s premier warrior. I guess I wore her down with my ‘country charm’, she warmed up to me eventually, got to hanging around with me and my friends. Afterwards we started to talk more alone, talking lead to foolin’ about, and before I know it we’re telling each other we love one another. She was a mess back then too, always drinkin’ braggin’ about her sexual prowess, just livin’ for all the wrong reasons. I guess you could say I ‘tamed’ Natalya. It was such an odd relationship lookin’ back. I was always there for her, to support her and tell her she was a good person when not even she would see it that way, but all she ever had for me was insults and ridicule. She loved to make fun of my upbringin’ always callin me stupid. It was like she wanted me to think I wasn’t good enough, but yet there she was, clingin to me like a leaf on a branch in a summer wind, never lettin’ me get far from her sights.

I suppose we had been together for a year or so before I asked her to marry me. She was hesitant at first, saying it was because an orc and a tauren ought not be together, it would be frowned upon by her family, but I persisted. Finally she gave in, I guess she liked the idea of some stability in her life. We were happy for a good three, four years. I thought we’d be that way forever, spendin’ our days fighting the world together, and our nights huddled up in each other’s arms. She smelled so good, I can still smell her like she’s right here beside me.” Buck seemed to get choked up, his eye hazed a little, but he swallowed hard and his face returned to the cold scowl Sarella had known since she met him.

“Anyway, it was about a year ago she started getting mean again. She’d sometimes yell at me for the most inane things, like the smallest thing would upset her. I felt like I was on eggshells around her. She’d yelled at me once for three hours for forgetting to buy her a loaf of bread at the market once, telling me I didn’t care about her and never listened to a word she said. It’s disheartening to hear that from someone you pour your heart and soul into. She was the light of my life and she KNEW that, but still she’d play the victim all the time, never took responsibility for what she did, was always sayin’ ‘This is how I am, why can’t you accept that?!’. Like I was supposed to just accept her being nasty to me and like it.

It all changed about a month ago. She stopped being nasty, stopped yelling, I thought things had finally gotten better. But I started to suspect something about 2 weeks ago. She was coming home later and later, would just come to bed and not say a word, just huddle up on her side and go to sleep, wouldn’t even touch me. I had confronted her about it and she threw it back in my face, saying what she did was her business, that I wouldn’t have anything to worry about if I treated her right. A couple days later I come home to her and a rogue from my guild, Jaggen in my bed. I lost my temper and dragged him out of my house and started beating him from pillar to post when she hit me from behind. I forgot how hard she can hit, she’s deceptively powerful like that. So next thing I know I wake up in the middle of nowhere, tied up with the two of them standing over me like a pair of buzzards. She says something to him about ‘finishing the job’ and they commenced to beating me with anything they could find. It was her who cut my eye out, she had such a frenzied look in her eyes, chilled me to my bones. After that her boyfriend kicked me in the head and I suppose you found me after that.”

Sarella shuddered, it was such a terrible story.

“I see what you meant about ‘the wrong kind of woman’. Sounds like the spoiled princess type to me. Those types never learn to value what they got, least of all men. They treat ‘em like toys, use em up and cast em aside when they’re bored with em.”

“Yeah, I guess I had to learn about that the hard way. I tend to learn most things the hard way. I just wish I wasn’t so dumb sometimes, I get played so easy because of how I was brought up. I trust too much and leave my heart out for all to see. I can’t say I’ll ever trust someone like that again, it hurts too much.”

“You can’t go through life alone Buck.”

“Why not? You don’t seem to be having any trouble with it. I didn’t see any sign of a man in your life.”

“That’s because he died about six years ago.” Sarella said. “Ah loved Melloy with all mah heart and he loved me, he was a good, strong, quiet man like you. Was a good hunter and took care of me like a real man should. He taught me how to use guns and bows, how to track things like he did, we were inseperable.”

“So what happened?”

“We were hunting in Ashenvale when we were ambushed by some nightelves, we’d ventured too close to Silverwing Refuge tracking some deer and they attacked. We ran for our lives and managed to lose them, but Melloy was gravely wounded. I tried to get him to help as fast as I could, he died in my arms before I could reach Splintertree. I can remember his last words, the last ‘I love you’.” She sniffled a bit, the memory getting to her.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“What’re you gonna do when you finally find her?”

“I’m not sure. There’s a part of me that wants to kill her, a burnin’ rage that just screams to be released. But there’s still a part of me that’s stuck on her, I just don’t know what I did to deserve what happened to me.”

“Buck, from what you tell me, you didn’t do anythin’ but love her. Some women are just rotten to the core, not unlike men, we have our dark sides too. She just used you for her own enjoyment, for the attention, I doubt she ever really loved you, just the idea of being loved by someone.” Sarella placed a hand on Buck’s back, stroking him gently.

“You all have agendas, every one of you is lookin’ for a man to use in some way.” Buck said coldly, pulling away from Sarella to walk down into the galley of the air ship.

Sarella bit her lip and turned to her raptor. “She really did a number on that poor bull Feragar.” The raptor cocked its head at her before making a whistling sound. She patted it on the head.