Koak was falling. He tumbled endlessly through countless leagues of clouds and rain, the earth below him forever just beyond his sight. All around him flew the dragons, with scales as red as blood and eyes of molten gold, crimson phantoms in an eternal storm. Koak could feel their seething hatred buffeting his orcish body.
He raised a fist toward the dragons and shouted with the authority of the Dragonmaw clan. "Obey me!" he commanded, but his voice was tainted by fear and doubt.
"NO!" they roared in unison. Their myriad shadows melded into one, larger than the sky itself. Lightning flashed, and Koak caught a glimpse of Grim Batol in the distance, a smoking ruin he had once called home.
"Koak!" someone shouted.
The dragons' breath birthed a conflagration, and the heavens were set ablaze. Koak howled in pain as the storm clouds were burned away and his world was consumed by fire. His descent accelerated, suddenly and without warning, and the unforgiving ground came rushing up to meet him...
"KOAK!"
He awoke abruptly at the point of impact, with the echo of an explosion ringing in his ears. Beneath him was a deck of sanded and polished wood; above him was the bulbous balloon of a goblin zeppelin. The ship itself was a blazing inferno, and its crew was frantically fighting to keep it in the air.
"Abandon ship!" the captain screamed.
Koak rose unsteadily to his feet, blood from an open gash trickling down his brow. "The Alliance..." he said groggily. Looking over the edge of the hull, he saw a retreating gunship vanish into the clouds high above the Jade Forest.
With a squeal of twisting metal, the zeppelin ponderously lurched to its side. Koak scrambled to grab hold of something—anything—as the waters of the Mistveil Sea came into view over the starboard bow. Then another explosion knocked him off his feet and sent him sailing over the edge into the open air, the captain's cries for help dying on the ocean breeze.
***
A light rain was falling and the coastal winds were whispering in his ear when Koak washed ashore. His leg throbbed with relentless pain; it had taken the brunt of the blow when the currents had smashed him against the rocks. As he lay broken and bleeding on the sand, he wondered whether this was what Hellscream had in mind when he ordered them to paint the continent red.
He was on a small island, a single stone spire rising up from the center and into the clouds high above. All around him, pieces of the zeppelin's flaming wreckage trailed away from the shoreline and toward the spire, jetsam that had fallen off during the ship's final descent. The rest of it floated atop the ocean waters, along with the charred corpses of his former crewmates.
For the Horde, he thought bitterly. There was a time when those words had meant something to Koak. The pain in his leg flared as he made to stand.
Leaning on a makeshift crutch, Koak hobbled inland among the ship's scattered remains to search for survivors. Acrid smoke from the ship's ruptured fuel tanks stung his eyes and seared his lungs. He nearly choked on the fumes as he rounded a section of the zeppelin's demolished hull.
Before him loomed a monstrous cloud serpent, its scarlet scales shining wet with blood.
Koak gasped and stumbled backward, his mauled leg giving out beneath him. The serpent was lying in a nest of flattened stone at the base of the spire, its body a patchwork of burns and bruises. It raised its enormous head and stared directly into Koak's eyes.
"Easy..." whispered Koak in his most placating tone. The serpent was thirty feet of solid muscle, with claws so large that they could easily curl around Koak's torso and crush his ribs while the creature's massive jaws tore him in half. But it made no move to attack him, and Koak realized that it was dying. He took in the twisted metal and scorched wood that surrounded the nest.
We did this, he thought. He suddenly felt sick.
Slowly, as if it meant to show him something, the serpent uncoiled itself. In the center of its nest was a single egg the size of Koak's chest, pristine and undamaged, its shell shining like polished garnet. The serpent coddled it gently, her tenderness at odds with her ferocious appearance. She could have escaped her fate but instead had stayed to protect her egg. For some reason, that filled Koak with anger.
"You sacrificed yourself in vain," he growled under his breath. "Your whelp will still die, abandoned and alone." He grimaced as another bolt of pain shot mercilessly through his leg. Blood was flowing from it like a river, staining the soil beneath his feet. And I will likely die with it.
The serpent raised her tail and wrapped it around Koak's wrist, insistently pulling him toward the nest. She crawled to his side and nudged him from behind, and he found himself before the egg.
She wants me to care for it? Me?
***
"No," Koak protested, but he was unable to look away.
He stretched his hand toward the egg. The space between them felt thick and heavy, like the calm before a storm. When he touched it, a stinging shock snaked its way along his arm. Koak could feel the egg trembling beneath his palm subtly at first, but soon it began to shake so forcefully that Koak backed away in apprehension.
All at once the top of the egg exploded, showering Koak with fragments of shattered shell. A bright halo of red smoke billowed out from the fissure and rolled across the ground like a bank of fog. From within arose a glistening newborn cloud serpent with ruby scales and eyes of sapphire, eyes so deep and fluid that looking into them was like trying to mark the bottom of the sea.
The hatchling met Koak's gaze and held it. Koak reached out his hand; the hatchling snaked forward and closed its tiny jaws around the meat of his palm. He did not flinch, bearing the pain until the young serpent came to be at ease, curling its body around his arm.
Koak saw its mother watching them, sorrow written plainly upon her face. She fixed a final look upon Koak, and he withered under her unblinking stare. She closed her eyes, and her body rose and fell with one last labored breath; then she lay still. The hatchling saw her, and from its anguished cries Koak knew it understood what had happened. He watched in stoic silence as the serpent sidled up to its departed mother, longingly nuzzling her and curling up within her shadow.
In the days that followed, Koak struggled to keep himself and the hatchling alive as he waited for a rescue party that he suspected General Nazgrim wouldn't send. And why should he? The life of one orc was of no concern to Hellscream, no more than the life of one dragon would have been a concern to the Dragonmaw. Koak was on his own.
The rain provided them with only limited fresh water, and no matter how many sugar minnows he caught, the serpent's ravenous appetite was never sated. His leg tormented him incessantly, as did the question of what to do with the hatchling.
On the fifth day, the rains stopped. As Koak's hopes of salvation dwindled into dust and the serpent sat shivering in the cold, they spotted two figures in the clearing skies. A pair of cloud serpents, fully grown, flitted effortlessly between the other spires across the sea, each with a pandaren rider astride its back. They circled deftly around the mountain peaks and returned to the cliffs of the Jade Forest with breathtaking speed. A story he had heard weeks ago from one of the natives echoed in Koak's mind.
The Order of the Cloud Serpent.
***
The windswept cliffs of the Jade Forest rose tall and sheer over the Mistveil Sea. Koak and the hatchling had crossed the water in a raft he had cobbled together from the zeppelin's broken hull, and were arduously making their way along a steep and narrow path toward the forest proper. Koak's leg pained him unceasingly, beset by dull aches and sharp pangs. It didn't help that the serpent fought him with every excruciating step, struggling against the frayed length of rope with which Koak had leashed it.
"Calm down," Koak huffed, exhaustion seeping into his voice. "We'll be there soon enough, and then you'll be the order's problem."
The Horde's advance forces had only recently arrived on the shores of Pandaria, but Koak had already heard much of the Order of the Cloud Serpent. Mighty warriors who rode on the backs of the ferocious beasts, the serpent riders were said to swoop into battle as swiftly as the wind itself, striking with the strength of storm and sky. Koak had been harboring a secret desire to meet them, to witness their power and stack it against that of the Dragonmaw.
Of course, there wasn't much Koak knew about the Dragonmaw. He was only a child when the red dragonflight destroyed Grim Batol, and was one of the few too weak to evade capture by the Alliance when the rest of the clan escaped into the Twilight Highlands. What he knew of his clan he had learned from stories recounted by veterans of the Second War, and from the dreams that plagued his restless nights. He had never bent a dragon to his will; the stubborn serpent hatchling he was dragging up the hill was proving to be enough of a handful.
The Order of the Cloud Serpent must be fearsome indeed, Koak pondered, to tame such willful beasts.
When they reached the top, Koak thought for a moment that they had scaled the wrong cliff. He had expected a fortress of steel and iron, a mighty citadel encircled by patrolling serpents adorned in armor and ready for war. What he saw instead were a humble cottage and an airy gazebo, both hewn of simple wood and stone, surrounded by wallows of mud and bales of hay.
"This can't be the right place," he mumbled to himself. But as he led the hatchling around the corner of the cottage and into the area beyond, Koak was greeted with the sight of cloud serpents of every size and color. Some lounged in open pens while being attended with brushes and bags of feed. Others floated calmly beside their companions as they strolled through the grounds on an afternoon walk. A few hatchlings sat coiled and placid in the laps of pandaren meditating peacefully by a tranquil stream.
