Chapter 4: The First of Many Times
The deep, animal warmth of the sleeping bag was a universe. Within it, time lost its meaning. Dawn came, a pale intrusion at the slit-window, but they ignored it. They dozed, woke, explored each other with a lazy, stunned curiosity. The frantic need of the night had burned away, leaving embers that glowed with a steady, comforting heat.
Alex learned the topography of her in the grey light. The scar, thin and white, along her ribcage—a dagger in Stranglethorn. The calluses on her palms from blades and lockpicks. He kissed each one. She, in turn, traced the old frostbite marks on his toes, the lean muscle of his shoulders built by hauling traps and game. Her touch was proprietary, but soft.
“You’re staring,” she murmured, her head pillowed on his arm.
“Can’t help it.”
“See anything you like?”
“Everything.” The word was simple, devastating in its truth.
He rolled toward her, their bodies slotting together naturally. This time, there was no discussion, no anxious request. He simply turned, presenting his back to her, and felt her immediate, understanding shift behind him. She kissed the nape of his neck, her hand sliding over his hip. The oil was within reach. Her preparation was even more tender than before, knowing now exactly how he reacted, where he shuddered.
When she entered him this time, it was a slow, deep claiming. No burn, just a profound, stretching fullness that made him gasp into the pelt. She wrapped an arm around his chest, holding him tight against her as she moved in a gentle, rocking rhythm. This wasn’t about conquest or frantic release. It was connection. She was everywhere around him, inside him, her breath hot against his ear.
“You feel like home,” she whispered, the words so quiet he wasn’t sure he’d heard them right.
It shattered him. His climax built not from friction alone, but from the overwhelming rightness of it—her words, her body, the safety of her arms. He came with a quiet, helpless groan, spilling over her hand. The sensation of him tightening around her tipped her over the edge mere seconds later. She buried a cry in his shoulder, her body pulsing deeply within his as she spent herself.
They lay like that, still joined, for a long time. The cabin grew brighter. Reality, with its cold and its consequences, began to seep back in around the edges of their sanctuary.
Her voice, when it came, was rough with sleep and emotion. “My wonderful human,” she said, echoing his words from the night. “My brave man.”
Eventually, hunger and the demanding chill of the cabin floor forced them to move. Relighting the fire was a shared, wordless task. They reheated the last of the stew, a meager portion each. The practicalities were a cold splash of water.
“The gems,” Alex said, staring into his bowl.
“Yeah.” Alyna’s tone was all business, the rogue reasserting herself. She fetched the packs, upending them onto the rough-hewn table. The treasure glittered in the firelight—a vulgar, beautiful fortune. “We need to get these to a fence. Someone who doesn’t ask questions. Which means leaving.”
The words hung in the air, heavier than the yeti had been.
“Winterspring’s not safe for a blood elf alone,” Alex said, not looking up. “Or for a human carrying that much crystal.”
“Agreed.” She began sorting the gems by color and cut, her jeweler’s eye assessing. “Together, we’re a target. But we’re also a better defense.” She glanced at him. “You know this land. I know the shadows of cities. It’s a start.”
“A start to what?” The question was out before he could stop it. It was the fear talking—the fear of this being just a strange, blizzard-induced dream.
She stopped sorting. Placed a particularly brilliant sapphire down carefully. “You asked for ‘many times,’” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “I’m operating under the assumption you meant it. Unless you were just being poetic in the afterglow.”
“I meant it.” He said it too quickly, too loudly. He forced himself to meet her gaze. “I just… don’t know what that looks like. Out there.” He jerked his chin toward the wall, toward the world.
“Neither do I.” She shrugged, a fluid roll of her shoulders. “We make it up. We go to Gadgetzan. The goblins there only care about coin. We sell these, get rooms, figure out the next step. Maybe find work. Bodyguard detail. Bounty hunting. I’m flexible.”
“Gadgetzan.” It was a thousand miles of dangerous, contested land. A daunting prospect. But it was a plan. A shared direction. A thread of hope.
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay?” A smirk touched her lips. “That’s it? No detailed itinerary? No list of provisions?”
“We have my gear. Your knives. A dead yeti to butcher for travel meat. And each other.” He managed a small smile. “It’s a start.”
Her smirk softened into something real. “It’s a start.”
The next hours were a blur of purposeful activity. The yeti carcass, frozen solid, was a grisly but valuable resource. Alex worked on it outside with his hunting knives, stripping long strips of meat to be smoked over the fire. Alyna took inventory of their combined gear, mending a strap on his pack with clever, invisible stitches. The silence between them was comfortable, filled with the sounds of work: the scrape of blade on hide, the crackle of the fire, the hiss of fat dripping onto coals.
As the short day began to wane, they packed. The gems were divided and sewn into hidden linings of their clothing and packs. Travel rations, water skins, bedrolls. Alex’s rifle, cleaned and oiled. Alyna’s array of concealed blades, each checked with a deadly, familiar grace.
Standing in the center of the cabin, surrounded by their preparations, the reality of departure settled on them. This hutch of logs had been a crucible. It had almost been a tomb. Now it felt like a sacred place they were leaving behind.
“We should go at first light,” Alex said, his voice echoing slightly in the stripped-room.
“Agreed. Travel in the cold, sleep in the relative warmth of the day.” Alyna walked to the window, peering out at the deepening blue twilight. “Storm’s cleared. Sky’s full of stars. Good traveling weather.” She turned, leaning back against the wall. “One more night.”
He knew what she meant. Not just sleep.
They didn’t bother with the sleeping bag. They spread the white yeti pelt before the fire, its thick fur a luxury. There was no urgency this time, only a slow, savoring reverence. He worshipped her with his mouth until she was trembling and pleading. She then laid him back and took him into her body with a slow, undulating rhythm that felt less like sex and more like a vow, her eyes locked on his the entire time. Afterward, she pulled him atop her, guiding him to ride her, his body sheathed around her as he moved with a confidence that was entirely new, born from her trust. They found their release in a shared, shuddering silence, breaths mingling, fingers laced so tightly it hurt.
Exhausted, sated, they curled together on the fur. The fire painted their skin in gold.
“In Gadgetzan,” Alex whispered into her hair, “we’ll get a room with a real bed. And a lock.”
She chuckled, a low, warm sound. “First, we get a bath. A long, scalding one. Together.”
“That sounds… perfect.”
He felt her smile against his chest. For a moment, the future wasn’t a terrifying blank. It was a steaming bath, a locked door, a shared bed. It was enough.
Sleep pulled at him. Just before he slipped under, he felt her stir. She kissed his sternum, a soft, fleeting press.
“Thank you,” she whispered, words meant only for the fire and the dark. “For not making me leave.”
He held her tighter, an answer without words. Outside, under a canopy of icy stars, Winterspring held its breath. The tracks they would make at first light would point south, toward desert and chaos and possibility. But here, in the last moments of stillness, they were already home.
First light was a knife’s edge of grey. They moved through the cabin’s final chores with a silent, coordinated efficiency, the yeti pelt rolled and strapped to Alex’s pack. He doused the fire, scattering the embers with a twist of his boot. Alyna checked the door’s latch three times, her rogue’s habits deeply ingrained. They stepped out into air so cold it felt like glass in the lungs.
The plan was south. Always south.
They’d travelled for two hours, the silence between them a comfortable thing, when Alyna simply stopped. Her breath plumed in a long, thoughtful stream. “This is stupid.”
Alex halted, turning. “What is?”
“Carrying a king’s ransom in raw gems through contested territory.” She slapped her pack’s side where the hidden pockets bulged slightly. “We’re not just targets. We’re a walking retirement fund for every bandit and quilboar between here and Tanaris.”
He shifted his rifle on his shoulder. “The fence in Gadgetzan—”
“Is days away. Through zones crawling with things that want to eat us or rob us. Or both, in that order.” She shook her head, her ponytail catching a shard of sunlight. “We need a pivot. Everlook.”
“The goblin town? It’s a half-day west.”
“Exactly. Goblin banks.” A grim, knowing smile touched her lips. “Their religion is money. What’s deposited in their vaults might as well be in a holy sanctum. It’s the one thing you can trust them with. They’d sooner incinerate their own schematics than violate a deposit box.”
The logic was irrefutable, cold and sharp as the ice underfoot. The risk of the journey instantly felt reckless, a product of their desperate, forward momentum. “We’d still have travel costs. The portal to Gadgetzan, if we can even get one...”
“We’ll have it. For a reasonable price.” Her green eyes gleamed. “A ‘reasonable price’ is a language goblins understand perfectly. We deposit the bulk, keep a few smaller stones for liquidity. We travel light. We breathe.”
He looked back the way they had come, then west toward the jagged peaks that hid Everlook. The plan they’d built in the warm cabin dissolved, replaced by something harder, smarter. Something she’d built. “Lead the way.”
Everlook wasn’t a town; it was a frantic, steaming boil of industry grafted onto the tundra. The air reeked of coal smoke, hot metal, and deep-fried mystery meat. Gnomish and goblin engineers shouted over the scream of sawmills and the percussive thump of piston-driven hammers. Alyna moved through the chaos like a shadow, her hood up, her posture unconsciously tightening. Alex stuck close, feeling every human eye on them, real or imagined.
The bank was a fortress of polished brass and riveted iron. The goblin teller, named Grizzwald according to his polished nameplate, didn’t blink at a blood elf and a human opening a shared security deposit box. He only cared about the valuation. His eyes, magnified by thick lenses, went wide and avaricious as Alyna produced the gems from their hidden pockets on the polished counter.
“Substantial. Very substantial,” he hissed, his tiny fingers darting over a counting frame with terrifying speed. “Risk mitigation fee is two percent of appraised value. Annual storage is one-half percent. Insurance against arcane calamity, draconic incursion, or unforeseen tectonic activity is highly recommended for an additional...”
“Just the storage,” Alyna cut in, her voice flat. “The basic box.”
They watched as their fortune, the physical weight of it, was placed into a small, heavy strongbox and wheeled away through a vault door thicker than Alex was tall. A peculiar relief settled over him. The anxiety of carrying that weight, the phantom itch between his shoulder blades, simply vanished. They were poorer, in a sense, but also infinitely lighter.
“Now the portal,” Alyna said, turning from the bank with a new spring in her step.
They found the Master Engineer in a workshop that violated several known laws of physics. Sprockets whirred in mid-air. Tubules of glowing green liquid pulsed. The goblin, Zapnabber, wiped his hands on an oily rag. “Gadgetzan? Direct? Possible. The coordinates are... finicky. Sometimes you arrive a little damp. Or slightly on fire. The important parts usually make it.”
“‘Usually’?” Alex asked.
Zapnabber shrugged. “No refunds. Price is fifty gold. Each.”
Alyna haggled him down to seventy-five for the pair with the ruthless efficiency of someone who’d bargained for her life before. She paid from their small purse of kept-back stones. Zapnabber grinned, revealing filed, silver-capped teeth, and began throwing levers.
The portal shimmered into existence with a sound like tearing silk and a smell of ozone and sulfur. The view through the rippling energy was a blur of yellow sand and dizzying heat haze.
“Remember,” Zapnabber yelled over the rising hum, “step through, don’t look! Momentum is key!”
Alyna grabbed Alex’s hand. Her grip was fierce. “Ready?”
“For anything.”
They stepped through together.
The transition was not smooth. It felt like being sucked through a straw lined with sandpaper, then spat out into a wall of dry, blistering heat. Alex stumbled, his boots sinking into loose sand. Alyna caught him, her own balance perfect.
The cacophony of Winterspring was gone. Replaced by the busy, abrasive din of Gadgetzan. The air was thick with the scent of salt, spices, and the pervasive, fishy odor of the Southsea. Goblin merchants hawked dubious wares from rickety stalls. A ragged cart pulled by a sullen kodo beast trundled past.
They stood there for a full minute, just breathing it in. The cold was a memory. The cabin, a dream. The conflicts, the deadliness of the frost, the weight of the past—all of it was behind them, separated by thousands of miles and a violently unreliable portal.
Alyna let out a long, slow breath. She pushed back her hood, letting the desert sun gild her blonde hair. “Well,” she said, a genuine, unguarded smile breaking across her face. “This doesn’t smell like pine.”
Alex laughed, the sound strange and free in his own ears. He looked around at the chaotic, ugly, wonderfully anonymous goblin city. It felt like freedom. It felt like a future they could actually touch.
“First,” he said, squeezing her hand. “That bath.”