6. Elves of the Moon

I stood gazing at my prey–a deer–and, subsequently, the family dinner. Then, I began dragging it out of the water, where I wrestled and killed it.

Tracking it had been an uncomplicated matter. It was the beginning of the mating season, and young adult bucks such as this one tended to forgo any measure of safety. The hunt had not been much harder; I pursued my prey till the river, bit its neck hard, and shook it.

Unclenching my jaw, I licked the warm blood clean off my chops, the taste of scarlet liquid pleasant to my tongue. Foods with my current lifestyle tended to be on the raw side, particularly fresh organs such as livers and brains, though there was an equal amount of berries and plants—the joy of an omnivorous body.

My ears twitched as I sensed something.

'Huh, what a surprise, a dumb kitty cat…' I mused, not needing to look around to realize that a panther was sneakily approaching, its smell protected by the winds, its body camouflaged, and its step silent.

Tragically, it was a tad bit harder for the feline to hide your life force; gleaming information from it, such as the species, sex, and size, was easy, so I faked ignorance of its presence with this information. I didn't have to wait long for the cat to take the bait. Exposing my nape spurred the feline to jump at the opportunity in earnest; otherwise, I would have tangled it in roots and beat it to death. I wasn't going to wait hours on end for the panther to decide whether yes or not it wanted to die.

It was a grave mistake, one I wanted it to commit and the big cat's last. I spun around and delivered a forceful swipe of my left claw to its charging head, its jaws wide open, displaying saber-like teeth, shutting the first shut and forcing the second to dig in the dirt. My right paw followed on the first, slapping the cat downward, cutting through skin, and scraping on bone as my would-be killer momentum was killed on its tracks. However, it didn't die when its head impacted the root below, snapping its jaws shut.

The panther was only mildly stunned.

I was strong but not THAT strong; it didn't matter that it was relatively small and thin, a sign of malnourishment. I was still a cub of seven years of age, something probably comparable to the largest breed of dog on steroids, and it was a panther. Also, I couldn't hit with my full strength.

But in this scenario, there wasn't any difference. My other paw followed right after the first and, with even more strength, hammered down on the overconfident kitty's head, breaking the skull and jaw with the morbidly satisfying sound of bones snapping.

Yet I wasn't done. I could give the finishing bite, but that wasn't smart, as shown four months ago when my throat nearly got ripped out by such a scenario. My head was one of my greatest strengths but one of my greatest weaknesses.

You don't relent and change a tactic that works, so I only stopped when the skull gained a few dozen new funny angles. Nothing to turn it into an unrecognizable bloody pulp, but enough that anything short of necromancy would make the panther attack me ever again.

Anyway… Now, onto bringing the bodies to the village, I couldn't carry them both. Not because I wasn't strong enough but because I wasn't big enough to do so effectively without dragging them.

Being able to shape plants in any way I desired helped that department. The same was true for everything, but that heavily depended on the days and goals.

I didn't use magic for hunting since Miel didn't want me to, though only for now until I got good enough. It was logical. Better not to fumble or be hyper-dependent on it; still, I would use it if necessary or annoyed. It wasn't forbidden, and I loved to use my mana.

However, the fight was over, and it was time for magic to be a solution to my problem.

I placed a glowing, if bloodied, paw on the grass. Roots busted out of the ground and formed a contraption of living wood shaped like a triangular container two feet below and with a solid wheel at the front. The final touch was a pair of handles for me to wield.

It was a wheelbarrow, 'my invention,' at least within the Greenweald tribe and surrounding furbolg groups—a handy and straightforward tool for carrying and transporting goods. While we didn't have many tools in those domains, such designs were easy to implement, even for someone like me who wasn't an engineer.

Optimizing the soil with composting and fertilizers was one of the things I have invented. It was nothing alien in concepts, but I pushed their understanding above what it was.

These kinds of 'inventions' or 'discoveries' were few and far between; I wasn't all-knowing or a super genius. And we weren't primitive cavemen, far from it, but nothing significantly more advanced either, and we had magic which killed the need for many civilizational cornerstones. It was why I was limited; this type of thing took time to settle.

On a similar line of thought, with my knowledge, particularly of the future, I wouldn't go and scream a demon apocalypse is coming. It was moronic on every point for my safety and would undoubtedly fail. I couldn't publically play the prophet and hope to live to tell the tale; for now, at least, without power, I couldn't be that reckless.

Instead, I had a rough draft of a plan on what to reveal and to whom. It would be someone I could trust, for he was benevolent and wise, related to my current existence, and likely already knew of my uniqueness compared to the common furbolg. Also, he was powerful, respected, and trusted. He was alive as his brother wasn't, and the recounted histories of furbolg and kaldorei were crystal clear.

And I had proof to show I wasn't saying nonsense or was malicious. From then, I hoped it would go reasonably smoothly, but it was Azeroth, and my hopes weren't very high.

Lifting the deer carcass first, I placed it on the wheelbarrow, and the panther followed right after and began my way back, stopping at a crystal clear river to rid myself of the blood on my paws.

I paused briefly on my face, the once human one no more than a vague alien sensation with ever-changing features and random blanks compared to what I was currently seeing. It was a strange sensation but not a bad one. I wasn't a Homo sapiens anymore, and this fact was accepted.

My face was that of a bear with dark, shiny fur. The shade was of pure black coal beside the lighter brown around my muzzle, a thick v-shape on my collar, and above my eyes, rectangular splotches of this fur shade almost mimicking eyebrows. Feathers and various beads adorning my head relating to my age, place in the tribe, and accomplishments.

But the most striking feature was my eyes reflecting my mana—no lazy eye this time around, too. They were glowing yellowish gold, almost like purified honey, but that was merely an illusion, a literal trick of light with colored light mixing.

The center of my pupils was black with brilliant vermillion red streaks, organically shifting to the rest of the pupils. The irises were very light brown with similar streaks but of an emerald of a softer intensity but no lesser in brightness, giving my eyes their bright yellow hue at first glance.

Their perceived colors were unique in the tribe, but the glow of the irises and pupils was ordinary. It depended on how much mana a furbolg had in their system, so it was just far dimmer on ones with low mana in their systems.

I liked it. My new appearance was good, my features mixing well together, but there was no point in wasting time looking at myself, and I began to move again.

The rest of the walk to the village was short, half an hour at best. Life was absurd in its abundance here, and I didn't have to walk for hours to find potential food. For bigger things, that was another story. Miel and his fellow ursa totemics kept our territory clean of truly dangerous creatures by fighting and eating them, creating a breeding ground for everything else.

"Big brother!" My ears swiveled at two happy, squeaky voices, which were the first things that greeted me; they were from a pair of twin, less than one-year-old cubs of a lighter shade of fur than mine. They were my baby brother and sister, and behind them, glaring with murder in his like he was a stuffy grandpa, was Groot; his size has not changed much since his creation.

"Yes, it's me." I chuckled, lifting one of the two twins, Karhu, and licked his snoot before nuzzling him. Hukar left on the ground, was whining in displeasure at being left out, and began cutely pawing at my leg, prompting me to scratch the back of her ears. I understand that this was a very relaxing action, having personally experienced it.

My attention shifted from the cubs to my mother walking out of the house hurriedly, which was more of a massive hollowed trunk than anything fancy.

"Blessing of the Twin Bears, you're in good health…" She said, taking Karhu before nuzzling and sniffing me and checking up for any would-be injuries. Why I couldn't fathom, I could heal myself, and if the injuries were so deep I couldn't heal myself, I wouldn't be here. Okay, I could be reckless, but come on!

But I let her do her little ritual.

"Ma, as you can see, I'm perfectly fine." I whined like a cub my age, then prompted her to look at my hoist with a grin, "See what I brought instead! There won't be any bedding problems for the two furballs… for five or six days. I don't know how Pa does it to keep up with these two's destructive frenzy."

At that, her worry diffused into pride as she laughed, and we shortly began to take care of the corpses, from bleeding, skinning, and butchering them, with my father helping at the end. Little was to be wasted.

As to the bedding? There wasn't any other bedroom or room in our abode besides a burrow where food and stuff were stored, and having two little balls of claws and teeth tearing everything apart tended to damage the only sleeping place. That I did that at their ages was not of the matter.

And as I said, father was the one taking care of that, but I could help and would. After that, I ate and went to sleep.

But halfway into it, I was stirred awake by the presence of non-furbolg life forces at the heart of the village. Nothing to worry about; they were night elves, kaldorei, and I knew them.

They were a small caravan of merchants with an equally diminutive number of guards on their way to Astranaar, and they passed by the Greenpaw Village to recuperate and trade goods.

Delicately moving Kahru and Hukar off my body so as not to wake them up, I slipped out of my mother bear hug with the ease only years of experience would give and dressed myself up. Which wasn't much: a well-crafted loincloth, my feathers necklace, and a few other trinkets.

Then, I began casting a translation spell.

While I was taught Darnasian, both written and orally, with Oakpaw and other shamans, it wasn't a focus, so I kind of sucked at it pronunciation-wise, thanks to my muzzle. It didn't help that it was hard, too. I wasn't a language maestro in my past life, with only French and English as the language in which I was fluent.

Well, a spell was a big word. Still, it essentially spiritually shared my eyes, ears, and vocal cords with the spirits of the ancestors, making them a shamanic version of Google Translate. However, there was a weakness, if I might call it that. If my ancestors don't know a language, they can't help me.

It was common sense, but it meant I would have to in the future possess a certain level of proficiency in many languages—a pain in the ass, in my opinion.

After a hot minute of calling for the spirits' help, I was ready. Hastings myself, I walked out, Groot following me earnestly with his little feet, passing by furbolgs until he grabbed my leg and climbed on my shoulder.

On the 'plaza' was an elegantly crafted caravan surrounded by a small crowd of night elves and furbolg. I called the name of someone, and the man in question came rushing with a bright smile.

"Good night, Vandel," I exclaimed with a sleepy yawn to the man in question, stopping a few steps before him and standing close to eye level, showing how our two species' size differences were when I wasn't even in the budding stage of puberty. My voice with the spell had a distinct echoing quality.

It didn't matter that he wasn't a fighter nor that he wasn't the tallest of kaldorei. He remained a night elf; night elves were not small or thin; they descended from trolls, and it showed both negative and positive. How tiny would humans be in comparison? The first contact will be something…

"Oh! Ishnu-alah Ohto, on this beautiful night, Elune has blessed us. Wait, here I got what you asked for." Vandel answered in a soft, measured tone, then his long ears perked up, and he immediately went to fiddle through his backpack on the ground.

Taking one sizable leathery scroll, he handed it to me with a slight frown of discontentment.

"This is a map of Kalimdor, and here is the Greenpaw Village and the World Tree, Nordrassil, but I must inform you that sadly, outside of Northern Kalimdor, it's a bit outdated in some areas…" He let out in embarrassment as the map unfolded, and he pointed at various points ending on an immense green area at the left from the center of the continent below a yellowish mountain range with a pictogram of pine trees, the Stonetalon Mountains.

'Yeah, a tad bit outdated… Just a tad.' I thought sarcastically. At least our territory, Northern Kalimdor, seemed correct from what I remembered if, in a far better state, there weren't any invaders fucking everything up or the scars brought by an insane dragon.

"I'm no historian or geologist, so don't take my words for it, but you can see this area isn't a grey rocky desert as it is now. It's a lush plain. Apparently, it was the sacred land of some mortal race." He explained thoughtlessly. The use of 'some mortal race,' in addition to his general tones of voice, earned a snort from me. He didn't react to it, either missing it or not understanding my body language. I would bet on both.

And he was one the most humble.

Honestly, I found night elves insufferable at times, at least the few I have met. It was both subtle and flagrant, and it wasn't on purpose. Their arrogance was a feature, a racial perk. They weren't objectively bad-mannered to us, the opposite; they were just stuck so far up their asses they could see the moonlight of their goddess from the other end.

It wasn't entirely unfounded or surprising, but it affected how they treated us, even when there was no reason to. There was no malice, but it was still noticeable and quite annoying. We were fully trusted and on amicable terms; we worked and fought together, but they instinctively saw themselves as above and us as lesser, and I felt it.

To my dismay, it didn't help that most furbolgs weren't the smartest around; the majority were simple-minded as befitted our primal lifestyle–not stupid, a big difference–even shamans—one of the big reasons behind how the kaldorei interacted with us. They didn't pick up the many social cues as a former human I could. It was why probably most elves– outside of us being reclusive–think we were silly stuffed cuddly bear people if we were seen people at all. They saw us as teddy bears, not that we were aggressive or missed in fluffiness, but that was a very naïve and rose-tinted view of us.

In addition to that, we furbolgs lacked drive and disliked most change, which was a bit harsh to say when the night elves weren't that much better. Well, they were far worse with their nonsensical society segregated by sex, but that was a different matter.

A softer way of putting it would be that my species preferred an uncomplicated life of relaxation, habit, and comfort. It was reasonable, and I agreed, wanting it to stay this way, but it was unfit for the future.

It was also why so few became shamans and druids–the two with similar roles beyond one focusing on the wilds and the other the elements–even with our inborn affinity toward these paths.

With that in mind, I was still the only one in the tribe; not even the chieftain, my martial teacher, or the other shamans seemed to have noticed this behavior toward us. Or to perceive it this way, at least.

This type of discreet, unaware condescendence in a packet of goodwill wasn't one I hadn't witnessed. But experiencing it firsthand to such intensity was irksome.

Their culture was different, and it was clear that shamans saw a lot of what night elves did and thought as foolish and arrogant regarding their view of themselves. But it was just that, an observation I wasn't in whole disagreement with.

But how they saw us still wasn't acceptable... It might just be the human sensitivity I inherited from my past life in a modern society, but still. Ultimately, I knew this behavior would change in due time with the war.

I would try to bear it until then, even if it won't be easy, just not to snap when a dumbass push my buttons too much. Well, with Vandel, it was a moot point–he was an honest and good guy if a bit ignorant–but in the future, with others, not so much.

"You aren't wrong, Vandel, but not correct either. It's called Desolace, which used to be Mashan'she in their language. Yes, it was and still is one of the taurens' most sacred land, the race you mentioned. It's a territory several clans and tribes contest with the centaurs currently inhabiting it after they drove them out." I corrected him, and he happily nodded with a bright smile.

As for my knowledge, it wasn't explicitly from my past life. I didn't know much about taurens besides the basics, some important characters, and contexts like how some tribes deeper South were dying out and, overall, their species wasn't in a good spot.

Most of the rest was taught to me. The Greenpaw Village, while it wasn't one of the closest furbolgs settlements to the Stonetalon Mountains–we were around the middle of Ashenvale–remained one of the largest. So it was to be expected from me to know this much about our fellow beast-folks neighbors beyond the mountains, more so when we weren't on bad terms with the tribes and clans of the area. Even if we very rarely interacted due to our ecological niche and because they weren't exactly welcomed by the kaldorei in our forest.

"Oh… Fascinating, you are truly marvelously intelligent. I can hardly believe you are so young. My horizon expands with every discussion we have." He said, unaware of how patronizing he sounded even if he was genuine, "And you don't have to worry about paying me."

I nodded with a slight smile on my snout, "That's great. Thank you, Vandel. I won't forget your goodwill."

With that map, countless possibilities opened, even if I would have to update it and mark points of importance I remembered. It was part of a greater whole. A big grin was on my muzzle.

Ah, the power of knowledge was in the palm of my paws! Well, a bit of knowledge, but that was a part of a whole.

*

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