Falcon Watch has a board.
Not a mission briefing, not a command structure issuing orders down a chain — a physical board, outside the main building, with notices posted on it. Wanted: arakkoa spellcasters operating near the ruins. Wanted: gan'arg engineers sabotaging the western approaches. Wanted: confirmation that the Sha'naar contamination has not spread past the perimeter.
The board does not say please. It does not explain the broader strategic context. It lists problems and implies that someone capable of solving them will read the list and act accordingly.
I have done this before, the internal log notes. In Durotar, in the Valley of Trials, in the first week when nobody had explained the system yet. You read the board. You go. You come back with evidence.
The difference is that in Durotar the board had boar tusks and scorpid tails. Here it has arakkoa.
The arakkoa are not demons.
This requires noting because on Hellfire Peninsula everything that is not actively allied with the Horde registers as a potential threat, and the categories blur after enough sessions in the red dust. But the arakkoa are their own thing — birdlike, ancient, operating out of ruins that predate the Legion's involvement with Draenor, conducting rituals that have nothing to do with fel corruption and everything to do with their own specific relationship to shadow and starlight.
They are here because this was their world too, the internal log notes. The Legion didn't bring them. They survived the same destruction everyone else survived. They have reasons for what they're doing that nobody at Falcon Watch has bothered to ask about.
Jezarman does not ask either. The board said wanted and the board has been read and the board will be satisfied. But the arakkoa mages fall with a specific dignity — no corruption visible in their deaths, no fel green bleeding into the dust. Just old magic stopping because the body that carried it stopped.
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Witcher work, the internal log files it. Someone posts a contract. You take the contract. You don't write the contract.
The escort assignment does not announce itself as an escort assignment.
The escort assignment does not come with a name.
She is a Blood Elf priestess and she is going into the Sha'naar ruins regardless of whether anyone accompanies her. This is stated as information, not as a request. She has business there — demonic contamination to assess, Light-based countermeasures to test — and the ruins are not safe, and if a shaman happened to be walking in the same direction, she would not object to the company.
Jezarman walks in the same direction.
What follows is the specific dynamic of escorting someone who refuses to behave like they are being escorted. Thiah moves through the ruins at a pace that suggests she has already calculated acceptable casualty ratios and has placed herself outside them. When demons appear she does not wait for Jezarman's rotation to initialize — she is already casting, already repositioning, already three tactical decisions ahead of the situation.
She is not in danger, the internal log recalibrates. I am in her radius. She is keeping me alive as a side effect of her own survival.
The ruins of Sha'naar are what Falcon Watch is afraid of becoming. The contamination here is visible — not just in the fel green pools but in the architecture, in the way the stone has changed color and texture under sustained demonic exposure, in the specific smell of something that used to be consecrated and isn't anymore.
She walks through it like someone doing an inspection of a building they own and are not happy with the maintenance report.
Lady Rambo Balboa, the internal log designates her. Threat assessment: ally. Recommended operational posture: keep up and don't get in the way.
They emerge from the ruins. The assessment is complete. She thanks him once, briefly, already moving toward her next objective.
Jezarman returns to the board. The arakkoa contracts are done. The contamination perimeter is confirmed.
The board has more notices on it.
?? PARTIAL LOG — SESSION 010a
- Level: 16 → 19 (across full session)
- Location: Falcon Watch / Sha'naar ruins
- Key Completions: Arakkoa contracts, Sha'naar perimeter assessment, escort: Thiah Redmane
- DPS Breakdown: Lava Burst 46% / Earth Shock 34% / Chain Lightning 19.4% / Lightning Bolt 19.1%
- DPS vs S008: Lava Burst +5.8% | Earth Shock +11.4% | Chain Lightning returns | Lightning Bolt holds
- Note: Earth Shock surging — more single hard targets, less crowd management
Continued in Chapter 11: Twinkle's Dinner