In the name of the all compassionate all merciful Light,
(recommended listening while you read: youtube com/watch?v=o8GM2JjM30c )
I set my foot upon Darnassus
The wind stilled in silence
Trees called out “One of us”
Before my eyes floated a leaf
Written upon it was my name
a name that I see written
upon the surface of the waters
A gnomish mage opened a portal for me in the mystic quarter of Ironforge above the waters, and as I stepped through the portal I set my foot upon the temple of Elune. Immediately as I put my other foot through the portal, before I could touch the earth with it, elven sentinels appeared from the shadows with their glaives ready at my throat.
“Remove your cowl, elf”, they commanded. I therefore removed my cowl from my head. “Now show us your ears that you hide behind your hair” they commanded again. I slowly and calmy brought my hair behind my pointed ears with both hands.
“Now open your eyes and look at me.” commanded a voice as clear as the light of the moon, commanding as the Light to the darkness, and soft as the whispers of the wind. I opened my eyes and before me was Tyrande Whisperwind.
“You are a human. Speak, Human.” Tyrande Whisperwind said.
“I am Muhammadah.”, I spoke.
“You are wise to come here.” Tyrande replied.
“I am here to know who I am.”, I stated.
“You are here to practice your religion and to learn ours. You are forbidden from practicing all but one of our rites of worship.”, Tyrande spoke as more and more Kaldorei emerged from the shadows.
“What rite of worship am I allowed”, I asked.
“To say the name.”, permitted Tyrande.
I spoke the word, “Elune”
In this moment when I spoke the name of their goddess a revelry of dance and ecstasy overcame all but one elf in Darnassus. What I witnessed was of such celebration that I can not write it in words. Yet I can tell you that the Kaldorei know to party.
As I was whirling with their priestesses in seclusion from the men, Tyrande grabbed me by the hand and said, “Quel’dorei” whisking me away to the highest branch of the tree.
While the Kaldorei revelled in the night below, we gazed at the crescent moon that was rising from the southwest of Kalimdor, above Ahn’Qiraj. Tyrande looked at me and cried. “How are you a human?”, she desperately asked for an answer that the goddess would not answer her.
For what seemed like eternity my eyes welled and poured tears from my eyes that Tyrande watched drop like golden pearls of lost memories to the earth to water it in hope that one day out of a millenia one would remember all the blessings of mercy given to grow a tree.
“I-”, I sobbed and barely could speak as no air was left in my lungs to produce a sound. With a deep breath a crystalline memory shook me and I was transported in spirit across time and space.
In the Black Temple I was wielding a blackish purple blade with two orbitting spheres around it. Standing before Illidan the Betrayer, using the force of the light, I was throwing boulders at him that he would cut into pieces with his glaives as he flew in a counter-clockwise circle.
“Kill me!” I shouted in a voice that begged for the end.
At this point he disappeared and total darkness enveloped my sense of sight. There was no light. There was only darkness. A voice spoke to me, “In the name of the light, the all compassionate, the all merciful” and from behind the veil of total darkness I found myself lifted high above Outland as the wings of the Betrayer opened like a cocoon. I saw many worlds in one moment. Yet as my eyes peered into eternity all I saw at the end was darkness.
“Where is the light?”, I silently asked myself as I was suspended above the worlds in the hands of the Betrayer.
“You are the darkness which you see.” stated Illidan, “you are that which you fight” he continued, “the greatest struggle of light and dark is against your very self”, he taught, “Yet I shall give you a light you shall always have, it is a memento to Tyrande.”
In that moment I was again cocooned into the thick black demonic wings of the betrayer, and like an eagle descends above water and reaches its feet into the surface to bring forth its prey, he instead catapulted me with a tremendous force through The Dark Portal.
As I entered The Dark Portal I was transported through a tunnel of light, I witnessed geometries, numbers, letters, and a single phrase written upon all things; “There is no Light but the Light…” and the name of one similar to mine. I entered what felt like a comatose state until I awakened in a completely blank white space with no dimension with a gigantic black door whose face was covered in a tree’s geometry shut behind me.
As the door shut there was no one. I was naked. I was alone. I was with myself and I was with the Light. Then I heard a voice recite in elvish, “In the name of the Light, the all merciful the all compassionate…” all of the verses I had ever read, written, and memorized of that book I had found in Quel’Thalas so many thousands of years ago.
Being a Quel’dorei warlock I had consumed and devoured the darkest deepest magics. What I had done was I had even made the Old Gods remember something that they had forgotten, but was the first thing that they knew. That there was no light. I was a woman who commanded the name of a man, yet when I appeared you found the most seductive and enticing beauty that had walked the worlds. Yet the moment I saw something I wanted from you I did not wait for you to offer it to me or my servants, rather I took it before you realized that you had it. It is your soul.
In battle I was a woman who could speak the sweetest and most prophetic of words about your own eternal suffering at my service, most would die, and if you survived that my demons would eat you alive, and yet when I ran out of mana, even with full taps already reserved I would stab you with a dagger of the Black Temple.
However as I watched Sylvanas’s kingdom, or whatever it was to us, fall to Arthas I shrieked. I poured through the entire library I had, and yet still could not find any thing to suffice against the Lich King. I watched the sunwell become tainted and the Lich Kel’Thuzad arise from it and my family all become servants to the Scourge.
As I mourned the loss, C’thun whispered to me, “Why do you never invoke or pray to any deity?” in a legitimately intriguededly curious non-inquisitive manner of the highest respect.
“You KNOW!” I shouted back in whisper to all of the Old Gods who elected C’thun to be the one to ask me.
“Nothing. C’thun knows nothing.” stated Medivh the Last Guardian who just appeared before me from the form of the raven that frequently inhabited my study.
“What have you come for, to say that you are right, Medivh?! You are dead, and yet you live. You are a coward and there will surely come another guardian after you who will show you something.” I said in complete contempt and distate for the sight of him as man.
“I only leave you something from someone who loves you very much and gives you the greeting of “As-Salaam Alaik”” he informed me as he placed a book I had never seen before on the empty pedestal in my study. I withheld my tears and stood up on my feet. In the streets of Quel’Thalas the sound of my dying family that I had known for thousands of years echoed across the streets, yet did not pierce my mind that had become stilled by the chance of reading a new book.
I gazed upon its first two pages written upon a soft, yet dark, blue with gold upon its leaves, written with a white ink. It read in pure elvish upon its second page:
“In the name of the Light, the All Compassionate , The All Merciful. A.L.M. This is the book, no doubt in it. It guides to the righteous conscience. Those who believe in the unseen and establish prayer and from what we provide from them spend, and those who believe what is sent down to you and believe in what is sent before you and in the hereafter; it is those who upon guidance from their lord, and they are the sucessful.”
As the screams of undeath rang out across Quel’Thalas, my mind was so enraptured in love by the beauty of these words and the words of the book that I stood there reading and memorizing each and every word of that book without regard for my own life. I suppose that when one has lived for thousands of years they learn what is worth losing their life over. As I finished the book, I stepped out from my study with just this book, leaving behind all of my previous lives, took on the robes of a paladin of the Light, and all of the Horde would come to know me as Muhammadah.
High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind held my hand during my out of body travel through space and time. She witnessed it all. In the final moments of this “vision” where I left Quel’thalas to depart for Sunstrider Island as a paladin, she too was given a vision of her own and lost her hold on me. I slept off the highest branch of Teldrassil and as I fell Malfurion Stormrage, riding a Hippogryph, caught me and brought me back to that place I was sitting with Tyrande. As we arrived Tyrande was recovering from her vision. After relating to us what she saw, Malfurion and I began to speak as Tyrande observed silently.
“What does your vision mean?”, Malfurion asked rhetorically.
“It is the answer to who I am.”, I answered.
“Who are you?”, asked Malfurion sincerely.
“I am the orphan found in Deadwind Pass at the end of the Second War.”, I explained, “The orphan who was found wandering Deadwind Pass outside of Kharazan speaking only one word “Muhammadah” and unable to speak the human language.”
“Who found you?”, asked Malfurion.
“The paladins who fought to the Dark Portal.”, I replied.
“What did they find had crossed the portal?”, Malfurion continued.
“They found me.”, I stated.
“So your vision explains that you crossed the portal, travelled through time, and shapeshifted permanently into a child only to grow and live your life one more time.”, clarified Malfurion.
I expanded, “It explains to me that I am a human after all. It explains to me that I am Quel’dorei before all. It explains to me that I am a monotheist after all. It explains that I truly believe in nothing before the light. It explains to me that I am a paladin after all. It explains to me why I was raised in the cathedral of light. It explains to me that I am a member of the alliance.”
Leaping to her feet upon hearing the last sentence I spoke, Tyrande cried from the top of Teldrassil below to all Kaldorei, “Elune Adore!”
“For the Alliance!”, proclaimed the Kaldorei.
Malfurion had already disappeared into another form that I could not discern from the other forms above, below, and around me. However, Tyrande turned to me and looked into my green lumiscent eyes and spoke, “We shall show the humans who and what a paladin is, woman. Goddess be with you.”
I have now begun my wandering amongst through Azeroth amongst the Kaldorei hoping that I shall learn of their religion and of their goddess. I am hopeful that perhaps one day I can bring to light new understanding of the light in its feminine nature so that our men may be strong, our women may be victorious, and that our families may be whole. Humanity, in order to survive, desperately needs to understand the balance of nature, and I have taken it upon myself to learn from those who revere Elune.
Light be with you.
This is also a request to engage in RP with people who are devotees of Elune so that I may learn from them.