Rag’Nok tried his best to settle into the worn out mattress of his room at the Gallow’s End Tavern. The Orc mercenary normally avoided traveling to Tirisfall Glades and the Undercity but this was one of those times where the money was too good to say no. He had caught the last zepplin out of Orggrimar in pursuit of a contract last seen in the Eastern Kingdom. Although the Forsaken were now part of the horde, Rag’Nok still considered the undead to be unnatural and regarded them with suspicion. Still, a bed was a bed, and it beat sleeping rough out in the woods with whatever might be lurking.
Rag’Nok closed his eyes and tried to forget his surroundings. The grizzled warrior had fought many battles and knew he needed rest if he was to catch his quarry. He sighed and tried to drown out the sounds of the patrons voices coming from below and the steady tick tock tick tock of the antiquated clock on the wall opposite his bed.
Suddenly, the orc became aware of an uneasy feeling, as if he wasn’t alone in the room. He knew it was ridiculous, but he couldn’t shake the sensation he was being watched. The ticking clock had gone silent, as had the voices of the tavern patrons below him. The warrior opened his eyes and scanned the room, dimly illuminated by moonlight from the window and saw that of course it was empty apart from himself. He let out a deep breath and realized he could see it escaping his lips in a cloud of condensation as he became aware the air around him was suddenly heavy and freezing cold.
The orc shivered and pulled his blankets closer around himself while cursing the forsaken and their insensitivity to temperature. As Rag’Nok shivered and shut his eyes tight, trying to sleep, the deafining silence and sensation of a presence in the room seemed to grow unbearable as if he were gasping for air beneath a crushing weight of dread. He finally opened his eyes and to his horror he saw a sinister black figure sitting on the end of his bed staring at him with eyes that burned red like the fires of hell itself.
Rag’Nok threw the blankets off of himself in a panic and jumped out of bed, but the figure had vanished. He found himself standing in the middle of the moonlit room, racing to catch his breath, blankets crumpled at his feet. The temperature in the room had returned to “normal” and he could hear the clock ticking away and the voices of the tavern patrons down below.
Had he imagined the whole thing? Was it just a nightmare? Still, as he got back into bed, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched and the memory of those burning read eyes in the darkness. No he thought, regaining his composure, he was weary from a long Zepplin flight across the vast ocean, and the forsaken and these unsettling surroundings were getting to his head. Surely his mind was playing tricks on him. Rag’Nok settled back into bed and slowly drifted off to sleep.
Rag’Nok woke with a start, the sweat clinging to his body like beads of ice. He was out of breath and aware that once again, the was exhaling clouds of condensation into the frigid night. The silence was deafening. The clock had stopped, the tavern patrons had long since retired. He began to get out of the bed when a book flew off of the shelf next to his bed and crashed loudly to the floor. Rag’Nok stared in disbelief as the blook opened on the floor and the pages began turning furiously as if driven by a violent wind.
Rag’Nok tried to flee the room but found the door stuck shut in it’s frame. He desperately turned the handle and pounded on the door, calling for someone, anyone to let him out as a sinister dark figure with burning red eyes drew nearer and nearer, and just as the figure descended upon him, the door popped open and the orc scrambled down the stairs and out the door of the tavern.
As the terrified warrior fled from the haunted tavern through the streets of brill, he could feel the dark entity nipping at his heels. He soon found himself in the town’s graveyard where he saw the faces of the dead swirling in the mists among the tombstones. The orc became disoriented and found himself at the edge of a lake, confused, terrified, and desperate. Suddenly the figure of a human woman with pale waxy skin, burning red eyes, and ligature marks on her neck leapt from the water and pulled Rag’Nok into the frigid depths in an unholy embrace, the surface of the lake briefly rippling from his mortal struggle before growing still as the ghostly fog glided silently over the surface.
A few days later Rag’Nok’s body would be pulled from the reeds at the edge of the lake by a deathgaurd on routine patrol. It was assumed that the foreigner had a few too many to drink and became disoriented in the fog, eventually falling into the lake and succumbing to the effects of hypothermia and drowning. His body was shipped back to Orggrimar and the case was labled closed. The room at the Gallow’s End was cleaned, prepared for guests, and later that week a troll checked in on his travels through the region. He didn’t trust the forsaken but a bed beat sleeping rough in the woods with whatever was lurking out there. He sighed a cloud of condensation and closed his eyes as he tried to ignore the sound of the tavern patrons below and the tick tock tick tock of the clock on the wall opposite the bed…