Reunion

Part II

The sun was barely peeking over the Khaz Mountains surrounding Dun Morogh, giving a distinct orange tint to any snow that wasn't covered with jagged-edged shadows. The frigid skies were clear, save for a lone gryphon with a small occupant approaching a large gate capped with a stone etching of an anvil.

Calsh felt the sudden warming of the surrounding air as his gryphon flew through the main gates of the city of Ironforge and allowed himself to relax a little. He was no stranger to the bitter cold of Dun Morogh, but the wind rushing past him as his ride flew towards the great mountain city had chilled him considerably, and the sun hadn't been up long enough to help warm the air at all. As such, Calsh had spent the final leg of his journey holding himself as close to the beast as possible, trying to shield his face from the wind, and wincing at the pain the cold caused when he wasn't completely successful at this task. He didn't normally travel by gryphon — the loads he carried were generally too large for that — but speed was of the essence this time, and he was unladen.

The interior of the forge-warmed city was normally a welcome, familiar sight. In his adolescence, it had been a wondrous place to visit on errands, and as an adult it represented the destination and origin of a great many of his trips. He could always find somebody in Ironforge who needed something brought somewhere else and was willing to pay his fee to do so.

This time, though, the only load he was responsible for was now in the capable hands of his friend Balkrin. Calsh had insisted that the dwarf take the full amount of the payment for the remainder of the delivery; in return, Balkrin had insisted on paying Calsh for the cart and mule. Conducting business with such a close friend had been awkward, but it had been necessary, as neither was willing to let the other come out at the unfair end of a bargain. The route Balkrin had accepted from Calsh was the tail end of a delivery circuit that had kept Calsh away from home for nearly a year, but it was also one of the more lucrative portions, and Balkrin stood to profit rather well from the deal.

Calsh dismounted the gryphon on the balcony overlooking the Great Forge, giving a nod of thanks to the gryphon master as the solemn-faced dwarf listed a few locations where the refugees had been congregating in the city. The list was given quickly and seemingly without much thought; Calsh realized that he obviously wasn't the first visitor to the city with a mission like his, and the bespectacled dwarf, who'd introduced himself simply as Gryth, had probably been giving the response to the same inquiry a few dozen times a day.

He only had four people in particular that he was looking for: his parents, and his younger sister and brother. His immediate family wasn't any bigger than that, and as far as he knew his extended family wasn't very large either, although he'd barely met any of them throughout his childhood — his parents tended to keep to themselves. The major problem was going to be finding four gnomes in particular in a city that was housing a good deal of evacuees, when he wasn't even certain that those four were here in the first place. And yet, although the dwarven city was more crowded than usual, it was significantly less crowded than he'd hoped. Balkrin had said that many didn't make it, but Calsh was only just beginning to appreciate both the accuracy of Balkrin's assessment and the magnitude of the loss of the city. If only this many were able to make it to Ironforge, then the city must have fallen fast, and the majority of the population must have perished. His nervousness transformed itself into a bitter sense of dread.

Surely, his family could have been part of the small percentage who escaped the apparently self-induced massacre, but if that many healthy gnomes didn't get out in time, what were the odds that his younger siblings, weak enough that they had difficulty traveling much away from their home on a good day, had managed to leave? And there was no way his parents would abandon Rissh and Heacha.

The odds were surely stacked against his family's survival, but dwelling on it wasn't helping the situation. He was in Ironforge now, and there was still a small chance that they could be. His only reasonable course of action was to go around giving the descriptions of his family members to anybody willing to listen in hopes that someone remembered seeing them.

((Posted 3 March 2008))