Flinthammer Hall

“Finally!”

Sergeant Widge Gearloose wiped the seawater from his goggles as he ducked his head back down. The group had worked hard to get their makeshift raft to look merely like a chunk of shipwreck debris, but any Iron Horde mariners wouldn’t be fooled if they saw a gnome head peeking out from between the planks.

“Land is in sight. We’ve been heading south so it’s Shadowmoon Valley, I guess. It’s hard to tell, really.”

The dwarves — Knight-Captain Ringo Flinthammer and Baelan Grimaxe — muttered dourly. Whatever this place was, it wasn’t the Outland they’d been expecting. While neither objected to fighting orcs, where they were, when they were and how they might one day get back home nagged at them.

“Almost the Feast o’ Winter Veil, too,” Ringo muttered, thumping his skull back against the sodden wood. “Ah’m the worst father e’er.”

“Cheer up,” the fourth refugee in their raft said, the gnome Vamen D’barr.

He was trying on a selection of hats he’d acquired on this side of the Dark Portal, having somehow lost his in transit.

“First, if we are in a different time, no time might have passed at all back on Azeroth. Or, you know, maybe thousands of years have passed and everyone we know is already dead. Either way, not much point in worrying about it.”

“Thank ye, that’s very comforting,” Ringo growled.

They had spent the last two weeks ducking and hiding in the jungle that occupied the place where the Hellfire Peninsula should have been. The pitched battle against the Alliance and Horde had died down almost immediately, but that was even more dangerous, as it left the Iron Horde remaining on the peninsula free to hunt down any scattered survivors. Multiple times they had heard bursts of spellfire and gunfire, followed by the screams of the dying. Those had become rarer and rarer as time went on, as the Iron Horde had found all of those who’d become separated from the Iron Vanguard invasion force.

Twice the foursome had encountered Iron Horde patrols, but had been fortunate enough the first time to have gotten the drop on the orcs. The second time, both groups had spotted each other at the same time, and while the dwarves and gnomes had prevailed, it wasn’t until after one of the orcs had fired off a flare, calling for reinforcements. They’d spent several sleepless days hiding from increased patrols before the Iron Horde appeared to give up, and they decided to build a raft and head south, toward what appeared to be a more hospitable shore than the expanse of jungle they’d seen to the northwest.

Widge lifted up the raft’s lid again.

“Get ready, we’re about to –”

…

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“One thing’s fer sure: This ain’t Hellfire Peninsula,” Knight-Captain Ringo Flinthammer growled, slapping at a biting insect on his neck. “Not sure which place Ah hate more — Hellfire or this damned jungle.”

The group of four had made a camp in a cave they’d found after rejecting the idea of setting up camp on a beach they’d found: They’d spotted an Iron Horde steamship distantly off shore and hadn’t wanted to discover if crew members were scanning the shoreline with spyglasses.

The night had been a rough one: The distant sounds of battle became less and less frequent, but common enough that the group hadn’t dared make a fire, lest it give away their location. And the buzzing sounds Ringo had once associated with iron stars seemed to now be the basis of Iron Horde engineering. Loud vehicles giving off a red glow whirred through the air and smashed their way through the jungle throughout the night, meaning even those not on watch got little sleep.

“At least the animals are right,” Ringo said, pulling his hand away from his neck, holding out a hideous dead insect. “Bloodsting wasp. These were only left in a few parts of Zangarmarsh before; the rest o’ Draenor were too dry after bein’ blown to crap at the end o’ the Second War. Ah wonder what changed.”

Sergeant Widge Gearloose started to say something, then changed his mind, digging through his toolbox.

“Where is my screwdriver? I could work wonders with a screwdriver …”

“I think it’s pretty obvious where we are,” Vamen D’barr said.

The demons the gnome warlock had summoned, one after another, had insisted the Iron Vanguard had ended up back on Draenor, which was obviously not the whole story. Ringo’s imp in a ball (“Ye thought Ah’d forgotten about ye, didn’t ye wee bastard?“) had been similarly unhelpful.

“And where’s that, then?” Baelan Grimaxe growled, his back to the group, scanning the forest for signs of Iron Horde or, barring that, something more appetizing than the grubs and berries Ringo had insisted were edible. (“Mana pudding gives me the squirts,” the dwarf had helpfully explained earlier.)

“Purgatory,” Vamen said proudly, then deflated when he saw the blank expressions staring back at him. “For crying out loud, is the Church of the Holy Light the only religion you troggs know?”

“We worship the Titans in me family,” Ringo muttered.

“Yes, yes, ‘Khaz’goroth on a cracker,'” Vamen mimicked Ringo’s booming voice. “In other religions, there’s an explicit afterlife — a place where the dead go after they die. Often, there’s several places: a ‘Heaven’ for the ‘good’ people, a ‘Hell’ for the ‘bad’ people and sometimes a ‘Purgatory’ for the people who are in-between, where they essentially serve a sort of jail term before being allowed to go to the ‘good people place.'”

Baelan snorted.

“Seems like the kind of thing intended to keep philosophers busy to me.”

“Maybe, but some of the demons I’ve spoken to confirm that there are more planes than just our own, the Twisting Nether and the Emerald Dream of the night elves,” Vamen said. “What if we’re lost in one of those? Maybe some orcish afterlife of some sort?”

Baelan considered it.

“It’s not the worst …”

“That’s not it,” Widge said, snapping his toolbox shut and holding his wand up and peering at it, as though he was using it to measure something in the air. “We’ve become unstuck in time.”

“But the Iron Horde is nae our Horde’s past,” Ringo said. “And someone would have noticed if Outland were getting put back together.”

“Guys,” Vamen asked, pausing as the sound of a distant Iron Horde war machine filled the air. “When are we?“

He opened one eye, staring upwards. Green.

He blinked the eye several times, and the green swam into focus: leaves, a jungle canopy.

Jungle?

Knight-Captain Ringo Flinthammer sat up, then wished he hadn’t: He was so dizzy, he thought he might pass out. When he took his hand away from his temple, there was blood on it.

“Khaz’goroth on a cracker, what happened?”

There was a roaring noise from somewhere nearby in the jungle, but the ringing in Ringo’s ears made it hard to determine what it was, or where it was coming from.

A wolf, a large one with an empty saddle on its back, raced by. Someone nearby called out a name.

Ringo turned his head, and wished he hadn’t — the pain was excruciating.

There was metal debris everywhere, twisted and burned. Patches of ground were burning — no, not ground, corpses.

Ringo remembered entering the red field that now filled the Dark Portal and — nothing. His memories stopped there. He slapped at a mosquito and climbed unsteadily to his feet.

A dwarf’s leg stuck out from under a pile of twisted scrap. It wasn’t moving, but it still had good color — its owner hadn’t bled out yet, might even still be alive. Feeling he ought to do something, Ringo staggered over and tried to move the debris off the dwarf.

There was that noise again. A roaring or maybe a grinding. An iron star?

“You don’t seem afraid at all,” someone nearby said. “I don’t understand that.”

Ringo nodded.

“Fear’s a funny thing,” he said, attempting to shift the metal. When he saw he might crush whoever was trapped underneath, he moved around, and tried to lift it. The other person moved to the far side, doing the same. “Ah make a choice: Ah let the fear in, let it take over, let it do it’s thing, but only fer five seconds. That’s all Ah give it. So, one, two, three, four, five.”

On “five,” he and the other person lifted the metal, revealing the prone form of Baelan Grimaxe. Of course: He’d borne the brunt of the blast when the Iron Horde …

When they crossed through the Dark Portal, the Iron Horde had been waiting for them, had unleashed guns, cannons, throwing axes and more.

“Are you OK, Ringo?” Sgt. Widge Gearloose looked concerned, lowering his half of the debris to the rich red clay beside Baelan’s body. Another gnome, Vamen D’barr, knelt beside the fallen dwarf paladin, checking for a pulse. “You’ve got a nasty head wound there.”

Before Ringo could answer, there was that noise again and a large white bear, streaked with gray smoke and blood, burst out of the forest, almost bowling Ringo over.

“Frostmaw!” Ringo clung to the bear, hugging him tightly, without embarrassment.

“Dude,” Baelan groaned, sitting slowly up. “This isn’t Hellfire Peninsula.”

“Guys,” Vamen asked, his expression a mix of confusion and frustration as he looked around the jungle here on the far side of the Dark Portal. “Where are we?“

“So,” Sgt. Widge Gearloose said, tugging on a pair of heavy gloves and slipping a pair of goggles over his eyes, “Everyone ready?”

“The Naaru know I’m not opposed to a suicide mission,” Baelan Grimaxe muttered, adjusting himself gingerly atop a rocket aimed at the Dark Portal, just visible across the red plains of the Blasted Lands, “But straddlin’ a giant bomb seems a bit much.”

“You can’t argue with the classics,” Widge said. “This worked for Khadgar once, it’ll work again.”

Knight-Captain Ringo Flinthammer finished buckling a deeply unsure Frostmaw onto another rocket. The bear looked as uncertain as Baelan did.

Ringo climbed onto the front of the rocket he shared with Frostmaw, which seemed much less unstable than Baelan’s and like it would be harder to steer.

“There’s not going to be an overt signal to tip off the Iron Horde to what we’re doing. We wait for our troops to engage the Mag’har and get them occupied. Khadgar said he thinks he can get the Horde to attack at the same time — and, there they go. Fire rockets — NOW!”

The passenger rockets thundered to life, sending out sprays of yellow, purple, blue and green sparks as their passengers raced toward the Dark Portal.

“What’s that?” Widge yelled over the roar of the rockets.

“Ah said,” Ringo yelled back, “‘Ah jus’ wish we knew why the bloody portal had turned red!'”

It had been years since Ringo had thought about the Dark Portal. The Burning Legion had tried to invade through it years ago, at the apparent behest of Illidan Stormrage and Kael’thas Sunstrider. But the Alliance — including Ringo and his wife Beli — had helped push them back through and both tyrants were eventually slain, although Kael’thas got as far as Quel’Danas before meeting his end. Before that, it had been dormant for years, ever since Khadgar’s plan had worked the first time.

The Iron Horde Mag’har the Alliance had captured hadn’t been able to explain what had happened to the portal — they had seem baffled by the question, as though they were unaware that the portal had previously been green.

“Ringo, you and Baelan have to just buy us enough time to set the charges on the far side,” Widge yelled over the wind. “We’ll have about 30 seconds after I set the timer, then we have to get back through immediately, or we’ll be stuck in Outland when the Dark Portal gets destroyed — again.”

Which, by itself, would slow the Iron Horde down by a few decades, if history was any guide. And this time, the Alliance would destroy the Dark Portal on the Azeroth side as well, once they had cut off the Iron Horde’s reinforcements and mopped up the few Mag’har who would be trapped on this side of the portal. With any luck, the Mag’har would never be able to reestablish the connection between the two worlds ever again.

The rockets were racing over the heads of the battling forces now and the glowing red portal glowed like an ember beyond them.

“Ah jus’ feel like we’re missin’ somethin’ important,” Ringo yelled. “This blasted portal must o’ turned red fer a —”

And then they passed through the portal, and out of Azeroth.

“Knight-Captain Flinthammer? Sir? Sir?”

“Step aside, soldier, I’ve got this.”

“As you wish, Sgt. Gearloose.”

In the darkness, Ringo found himself getting prodded with something, over and over again.

“Ringo, knock it off, we’ve got work to do!”

Ringo Flinthammer swatted at the poking object, then closed his hand on it.

“What the hell is this?” he snarled, propping himself up on one elbow, looking blearily at the strange weapon-thing he’d taken away from his tormentor.

“It’s a Pandaren spell-sickle,” Widge Gearloose said, snatching it back from Ringo. “It’s not important.”

“More importantly,” said a second gnome, appearing behind Widge in the blue tent, “You’re awake at last!”

Ringo’s next question what drowned out by a high-pitched whistling, a mechanical whirring and the sound of a distant explosion.

“Yes, you’re still in the Blasted Lands,” Widge nodded. “Specifically, the Alliance’s foothold, if you can call it that, on the beach.”

Ringo asked another question, which was drowned out by the sound of another iron star being launched somewhere nearby.

“We can’t,” Vamen D’barr, the second gnome, shook his head sorrowfully. “The Iron Horde has smashed Nethergarde Keep to bits.”

“Ah’m ne’er going to get one of their tabards now,” Ringo muttered sadly.

“Ye’re awake!” a dwarven voice boomed. A black-bearded dwarf on a cot on the far side of the gnomes sat up with a groan. “This time, ye’re the one unconscious longer!”

“Vamen and I were working in Nethergarde when the Iron Horde attacked. Lady Proudmoore wants to re-integrate Dalaran into the Alliance military structure, and we were here to evaluate the magical needs of Nethergarde Keep when the Dark Portal turned red.”

“And I was stationed there,” Baelan Grimaxe said. “Hadn’t gotten my tabard yet, though.”

“They really were nice tabards,” Ringo muttered, turning and putting his feet on the red sandy floor. “Haven’t see ye, Vamen and Baelan, since the war against the Lich King.”

“Nothing reunites everyone like a potential apocalypse,” Widge said, pulling Ringo to his feet. “Come on, let’s go: We’re preparing for a counter-attack on the Dark Portal. We’re going to push the Mag’har back into Outland.”