Part 4 of the The World Can’t Wait series

UG had every intention of going to see Alonsus Faol. He’d even got as far as putting his boots on, which for UG constituted a serious and considered act of commitment.

Then he’d spotted the book.

It had been sitting on the end of the table for a week, borrowed from somewhere, lent by someone, the details were fuzzy, with a battered cover and a title stamped across the front in serious lettering: Blood Ties. UG had picked it up meaning only to move it out of the way of his tea. He had not put it down since.

“Just a chapter,” he told Tangkresh, who did not care, being a Voidwalker. “Get a feel for it. Context. You can’t just walk in on a man like Alonsus Faol without knowing what’s what. Be rude, that would.”

The book, as it turned out, had rather a lot of what’s what in it. It told the story of Turalyon and Alleria Windrunner, gone from Azeroth in what felt to everyone back home like a handful of decades, off through the Dark Portal and out into places with names UG had to read twice. What nobody at home had understood, and what UG now understood with the particular intensity of a man three cups of tea deep into someone else’s war, was that on the other side of that portal, a handful of decades had stretched into a thousand years of fighting the Burning Legion, an endless demonic army with no apparent interest in ever going home either.

UG read about their son, Arator the Redeemer, grown to a man in the years his parents missed, finally reunited with them and folding himself, paladin’s oath and all, into the fight at their side. He read about the three of them descending together into Felsoul Hold, out on the Broken Shore, a place UG pictured as considerably worse than its name suggested, all cracked stone and the low permanent hum of something ancient and unhappy. He read about demons pouring out of the dark in numbers that seemed less like an army and more like weather, and Turalyon holding a line that should not have held, and Alleria doing whatever it was Alleria did that made demons reconsider their choices, and Arator somewhere in the middle of it discovering that being a paladin apparently involved a great deal more standing in front of falling architecture than he’d been led to expect. UG found himself gripping the book rather harder than a piece of furniture strictly required.

But it was the part after the fighting that really got him.

Because after a thousand years of demons and cracked earth and a boy who’d grown into a man without them, there was, apparently, going to be a wedding. Turalyon and Alleria’s wedding. And UG, who had spent the better part of a fortnight failing to defeat a patch of fungus with barrels, found this almost unbearably moving.

“A wedding,” he said to Tangkresh, setting the book face down on his knee, appalled at himself for having to pause. “After all that. A thousand years of demons and Fel and whatever Felsoul Hold actually smells like, and they’re going to stop and have a wedding.” He said the word again, slower, like it deserved the extra space. “A wedding.”

He tried, briefly, to imagine the guest list. Tried to imagine what you served at a wedding for two people who had spent a millennium eating whatever survives on a battlefield. Tried to imagine the vows, and got no further than assuming they’d probably include a line about promising not to vanish through any more portals, which struck him as both extremely reasonable and extremely funny.

He picked the book back up.

“I’ll go and see Alonsus Faol tomorrow,” he said, not looking up. “Definitely tomorrow. I just want to see how they do the flowers.”

Tangkresh said nothing, having no opinion on flowers, and UG read on, happily and thoroughly sidetracked, while somewhere else the war he’d been sent to think about carried on being fought by people who had, unlike him, actually shown up.

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More in the The World Can’t Wait series

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