The fellow many knew as Jonathan Chess felt sick to his stomach.
He had landed in Southshore to begin looking for the long-lost brother of Melissa D'Arque, following a trail which has decades old. He had been tempted to write off the whole "find my brother" bit like a bad deal from the start, make some cursory inquiries in Southshore just to have made the attempt, but during the long flight from Stormwind he had wrestled with his vestigial conscience, and lost.
Jon was convinced that his conscience was a goblin litigation specialist, kind of like Kwee Q. Peddlefeet without the bow. Instead of being shot with arrows of love, Jon's pesky little avatar of his conscience used razor-sharp knives of reason to flay Jon's soul. "Melissa is depending on you; she tried herself, but she is a mage, not an investigator!" it said. "Neither am I!" cried Jon. "Oh, Fel-farts! You're a spy and an assassin, Cheese Boy; targets don't set themselves up, y'know. Of course, you're an investigator - you find a string, and follow it and sooner or later you've ruined another sweater." Jon grumbled at the bastard all the way to Southshore; being part of his own psyche meant that it already knew the evasions Jon might try and stripped them away. "You know that most of an investigation is slow, boring footwork - now get to it!"
Resigned to many cold nights on a very stale trail, Jon hired a horse from the stables and bought fresh provisions from the inn, and started off to the beginning of the trail - the house in which the D'Arques had lived before Melissa had joined the Syndicate.
Once the easternmost city on the Alterac/Stromgarde border, Strahnbrad never really recovered from a devasting Horde raid just before the Third War. The settlement had been left almost completely defenseless, and only the intervention of the Knights of the Silver Hand, under the command of Uther the Lightbringer and Prince Arthas, prevented the entire populace from being taken as slave sacrifices.
After the fall of Alterac, what remained of Strahnbrad had become a ghost town, and used by the Syndicate has a base of operations under Gravis Slipknot during their efforts to reclaim the Alterac Mountains for themselves. By the time the Syndicate had recruited Melissa, there was not much left in the area.
The old D'Arque homestead was a one-room farmhouse; Jon cringed as he thought of living one's whole life circumscribed by these four walls and spending one's life worrying about rain and crop yields. Jon then chastised himself for taking people who performed this exercise on an ongoing basis, who devoted their lives to producing the food which allowed others to pursue their own passions - Jon Chess not the least. It was easy to take such things for granted, and Jon knelt and said a small prayer for those who continued with the hardship of life, especially with the added threats of plague or banditry.
Jon remembered that Melissa D'Arque had said that she had already checked in Hillsbrad Fields and Southshore for signs of her family, and come up empty; begging the question of how effective her questioning might have been, he decided that if the other avenues of investigation failed, he could always re-canvass those areas and see if he could find anything she might have missed.
Jon went over to a ramshackle table, which was likely more useful as firewood than furniture, and spread his own maps of the area open, using throwing daggers as weights to hold it down. "Let's see if I was a dispossessed farmer, where would I go," Jon speculated. Melissa had herself eliminated Southshore and Hillsbrad Fields; if Jon continued the circle, Amberfield, and Dalaran, and then Fenris Keep was the next suspects.
The next day brought heavy rain, and Jon and his rented horse squelched and dripped his way to the Silverpine Forest and Ambermill. Jon was uneasy, as he often was in his periodic trips to the Silverpine.
The Silverpine Forest was an enormous ancient wood that ran from the northernmost region of Gilneas, north along Lordaeron's west coast. Since Arugal, the mad Gilnean wizard, unleashed the alien Worgen, the Silverpine had grown eerily silent, dominated by animals infected by the Plague of Undeath, the undead Forsaken, and the ravening Worgen beasts. Many of the silver-barked pine trees were sickly or dying, and the landscape held many abandoned farmsteads and mines. Ambermill was an outpost of the wizards of Dalaran, and the last bastion of the humans in Lordaeron.
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| Archmage Ataeric |
Before the building of the Greymane Wall, Ambermill and Pyrewood had been part of the Kingdom of Gilneas. Ambermill had been under the direct feudal control of Duke Darius Crowley. Ambermill was taken over by Dalaran and the Kirin Tor after Gilneas abandoned their northernmost provinces. Ambermill was a community dominated by lumber harvesting, with many lumber mills. Those were now mostly empty, as many lumberjacks had fled or perished during the coming of the Forsaken. Ambermill was administered by Archmage Ataeric, a member of the Kirin Tor. Under Ataeric, The Kirin Tor was working to reactive the ley line node under Ambermill, an effort which had made him the target of Horde assassins. With the permission of the archmage, Jon spent a day showing the sketch of Damian D'Arque and asking questions, but to no avail The next day he moved to Dalaran and the Kirin Tor.
Dalaran was one of several city-states that emerged as the Arathor Empire declined. Many of the human mages wanted a place with more freedom to research and experiment in the arcane, and over generations, mages migrated there as the city became an unrivaled center of arcane study. The Kirin Tor became the city's ruling power. Dalaran was, by happy happenstance, had been built over a convergence of magical ley lines, and the careless use of the power contained therein ended with the city in ruins, inhabited by demons. Following the death of Grand Marshal Garithos at Capital City, the remaining human refugees and paladins still surviving in Tirisfal Glades started retreating to Dalaran. The surviving wizards of Dalaran returned to the ruins and constructed a vast, magical dome around the heart of their city. Some believe it was for protection from the violence of these times, others say they merely wanted solitude, to study and plot. The shield was opaque and completely impenetrable by any known means warding off any new attack while the magi slowly regained their strength. The area and ruined outskirts of their city were patrolled by the wizards and their elemental slaves, and the remaining farms of Ambermill and Hillsbrad Fields fed them. Jon was not able to gain entrance to Dalaran; no one not a member of the Kirin Tor was allowed inside their protective dome. Jon spent several days showing the sketch and asking questions, but to no effect.
Jon decided to pass on heading to the gnoll-infested Fenris Keep; if Darren D'Arque and his mother had fled there, they were likely long since dead. That left only the path also most unlikely for success; west into Andorhal and the Plaguelands.
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