Silithus was a wound.
I had known it would be bad. The fragments, the old text, the chasm in Tanaris — they had prepared me for something terrible. But knowing is not the same as standing in it.
The air was dry and thin. The ground was cracked, bleached, dead. And the hives — the hives rose from the desert like tumours, dark and pulsing, surrounded by a haze of movement that never stopped.
There were thousands of them.
I stood at the edge of the Cenarion Circle's camp — a cluster of tents and hastily erected barricades — and watched the horizon. Radomir was behind me, speaking with a night elf who carried herself with the authority of someone who had seen war before. I caught fragments of their conversation: supply lines, scout routes, the northern ridge.
I stopped listening.
The wind carried the sound of the hives. A low, constant hum, like the earth itself was vibrating. It was not a sound I could ignore. It was not a sound I was meant to ignore.
The Circle was right to build a foothold here. But a foothold would not be enough. I could feel it in the ground beneath my feet — the same way I had felt the silence in Feralas, the same way I had felt the wrongness in the forest.
This was not an incursion. This was a beginning.
I turned away from the horizon and walked into the camp. There was work to do. The land could not heal itself. Not this time.