Chapter 7: Finding Work
The morning after wasn’t awkward. That was the first thing Alex noticed, and it felt like a minor miracle. Sunlight, strong and hot, cut through the dusty window, painting a bright square on the floorboards. The sounds of Ratchet were already in full swing: the distant clang of a blacksmith, the raucous cry of gull and merchant, the creak of ships. Alyna was a warm line of heat against his back, her breath soft on his shoulder. When he stirred, she just mumbled something incoherent and tightened her arm around his waist.
They lay there for a while, soaking in the quiet. The peace was a fragile, tangible thing in the little room.
“We should find work,” Alyna said finally, her voice scratchy with sleep. “Before the coin runs out.”
He agreed.
Ratchet’s job board was a massive, splintered slab of timber nailed to the side of the goblin-run bank, plastered with a chaotic collage of parchment notes. They pushed through a small crowd of hopefuls—a tauren with a broken horn, a dejected-looking human in salt-stained clothes, a pair of arguing gnomes.
Alex scanned the offers, his hunter’s eye parsing the details. Most were dock work: brute-force loading, net-mending, crate-hauling. It was honest, but it paid in coppers. Then he saw it, tucked near the bottom. The parchment was coarse, the ink a deep, earthy brown.
Seeking hides. Quality only. Crocolisk from the Southfury, scales intact. Kodo, prime bull, hide without bullet holes or axe scars. Raptor, alpha, crest feathers attached. Payment in gold, commensurate with quality. Ask for Zik’tik at ‘Zik’tik’s Superior Leathers’ in the bazaar.
The payment mentioned was, indeed, extraordinary. It was also a death sentence for a fool. Hunting a kodo bull alone was suicide. A raptor alpha moved faster than thought. And crocolisks… he’d heard stories of them dragging full-grown orcs into the murk.
“That one,” he said, pointing.
Alyna leaned over his shoulder, reading. Her sharp intake of breath tickled his ear. “Alex. That’s not a job, it’s a suicide note with a gold bonus.”
“I’m a good hunter,” he said, more to himself than her. The boy from Winterspring, who’d tracked snow leopards in whiteouts, stirred inside him. This was his arena. “I’m careful. I don’t take stupid risks.”
She studied his face, her green eyes searching for doubt. She must have seen only a stubborn set to his jaw. “Fine. But we find mine first.”
Her own search was quicker. Her gaze, used to scanning for threats and opportunities, went straight to a notice stamped with an official-looking wax seal—the badge of the Ratchet Guard. It was simpler.
Instructor required. Close-quarters combat, dirty fighting, neutralization techniques. Must demonstrate competence. Substantial remuneration. Report to Captain Grizzleknot at the barracks.
“‘Substantial remuneration’,” she read aloud, a sly grin touching her lips. “Goblin for ‘desperately paying through the nose.’ Let’s go see how desperate.”
Captain Grizzleknot was a grizzled old orc with one tusk broken short and a scar that pulled the corner of his mouth into a permanent frown. His office smelled of old sweat, oiled steel, and cheap tobacco. He looked Alyna up and down, his gaze lingering not on her ears or her features, but on her posture, the way she stood balanced on the balls of her feet, the casual drape of her hands near where her daggers would be.
“Sin’dorei,” he grunted. “You read the notice. ‘Demonstrate competence.’ Means you fight. My three best. Right now.”
“Rules?” Alyna asked, her voice cool.
“No killing. No permanent maiming. Otherwise, impress me.”
The barracks yard was a dusty, hard-packed circle surrounded by a rough fence. A crowd of off-duty guards—orcs, trolls, a few goblins—gathered quickly, murmuring. The three chosen were exactly what Alex would have feared: a massive orc with knuckle-dusters, a lanky troll who spun a wooden staff with blurring speed, and a wiry goblin whose fingers twitched near a bandolier of corked vials.
Alyna walked to the center, rolling her shoulders. She wore only her travel clothes, no armor. She drew her two practice daggers, their edges blunted with leather wrappings. She looked exposed. She looked like a promise.
Captain Grizzleknot didn’t bother with a signal. He just nodded.
The three attacked at once.
The orc charged, a bull of muscle and rage. The troll’s staff whipped toward her knees. The goblin flung a vial that shattered at her feet, releasing a cloud of glittering, irritating dust.
Alyna wasn’t there.
She flowed sideways, the staff missing her by an inch. She used the orc’s own momentum, her hand slapping against his charging shoulder not to hurt him, but to vault herself clear over the cloud of dust. She landed in a crouch behind the goblin, her practice blade tapping lightly on the back of his neck before he could turn. “You’re bleeding out,” she said softly.
Then she was moving again. The troll recovered, his staff a humming arc. She didn’t block. She stepped inside the arc, so close he couldn’t leverage the weapon. Her elbow snapped up into his diaphragm. The air left him in a choked gasp. As he folded, she swept his legs, dropping him to the dust.
The orc roared, turning. He was smarter now, cautious. He advanced, fists raised. Alyna feinted low. He dropped his guard. It was all she needed. She sprang, not away, but directly at him. Her foot planted on his thigh, she used it as a step to launch herself up, her other knee driving into his chest. Not hard enough to break ribs, but enough to stagger him. As she dropped, her hand slapped the side of his head, fingers curled near his eye. “Throat, eye, groin. You’re dead three times.”
It was over in maybe twenty seconds.
Silence hung over the yard, broken only by the troll’s wheezing and the orc’s deep, shocked coughs.
Alyna stood in the center, dust settling around her. She wasn’t even breathing hard. She looked at Captain Grizzleknot. “Competent enough?”
A slow, grim smile spread across the orc’s scarred face. It was the scariest, most approving thing Alex had ever seen. “Training starts at dawn tomorrow. You’ll teach them that. The ‘dirty’ part especially. Pay is as stated.” He tossed a small, heavy pouch to her. She caught it without looking. “Advance.”
Back at the job board, the reality of Alex’s task settled over them both, the excitement of Alyna’s victory cooling.
“Zik’tik’s,” Alex said, trying to sound sure.
The shop was a dark, fragrant cave in the bazaar, walls hung with stunning leatherwork: supple armor, intricate pouches, tooled boots. Zik’tik himself was a troll of few words, his long fingers inspecting a hide with a reverence that bordered on erotic. He looked Alex over with dismissive yellow eyes.
“You read my notice. You look like a strong wind would break you. The beasts, they will not care about your good intentions.”
“I’m not selling intentions,” Alex said, forcing his voice steady. “I’m selling hides. I’ll bring them.”
Zik’tik’s gaze flickered to Alyna, who loomed behind Alex, her arms crossed. Something in her expression, the cool confidence of someone who had just dismantled three guards, made him reconsider. He grunted. “The crocolisk first. The old bull in the muddy bend south of the river fork. His hide is thick, scarred. Perfect. You bring that to me, we talk about kodo.”
It was a test. A lethal one.
The walk back to the Rusty Anchor was quiet. The weight of the coming separation, the danger, pressed between them. In their room, Alyna emptied the advance pay onto the bed. It was a small pile of gold coins, more money than Alex had ever seen at once. She split it neatly in two, pushing half toward him.
“For supplies. Good arrows. Strong rope. The best skinning knives you can find. Don’t cheap out.”
“Alyna, you earned that.”
“And we’re sharing it.” Her tone brooked no argument. “This isn’t Winterspring. You can’t just walk out there with a bow and hope. This is the Barrens. It wants you dead.”
He bought the supplies that afternoon with a grim focus. He selected each broadhead arrow, tested the edge on the skinning knife, bought a coil of stout rope and a lightweight tarp for packing the hide. He felt Alyna’s eyes on him the whole time, her silent approval more valuable than the gold.
That night, they didn’t talk much. They lay together, but the easy languor of the previous night was gone, replaced by a different kind of intensity. Her touches were firmer, more possessive, as if she could imprint a layer of protection onto his skin. His were slower, more memorizing. It was less about discovery now, and more about a silent, desperate claim.
Before dawn, as grey light crept into the room, she helped him pack. She tightened straps, checked his water skins, her movements efficient. When he was ready, she grabbed the front of his jerkin and pulled him into a kiss that was hard and lingering. “You come back,” she said against his mouth, her voice raw. It wasn’t a request.
“I will.”
He slipped out into the cool, pre-dawn gloom of Ratchet. The dock sounds were softer now, just the lap of water and the groan of mooring lines. He passed the barracks, and from within the fence, he heard the sharp, authoritative sound of Alyna’s voice already drilling the guards.
“Again! Your opponent is not a training post! He will not wait for you to be ready!”
Alex adjusted the pack on his shoulders and turned south, toward the river, the dust, and the old crocolisk bull. The two sounds—the rhythmic clash of training from behind him, and the vast, waiting silence of the Barrens ahead—seemed to pull at him from both sides, stretching the new, fragile tether between them taut. He walked into the rising heat, each step taking him further from the salt-smell of safety, deeper into the dry, golden wild where the only law was tooth and claw.
The Barrens swallowed him whole. The towering mesas were ancient, rust-colored sentinels under a blistering sun that leached the color from everything. It was a silence so profound it hummed in his ears, broken only by the skitter of pebbles or the distant, lonely cry of a buzzard. He missed the deep, forgiving cold of Winterspring instantly.
Alyna’s voice seemed to echo in his head, a guide. Move like the heat shimmer. Don’t fight the land, use it.
He found the muddy bend south of the river fork by midday. The air here was thick with the smell of wet earth, rotting vegetation, and something else—a musky, reptilian odor. He crouched behind a cluster of brittle, sun-bleached reeds, his breathing shallow. The old bull was a living piece of the landscape itself, a mound of knotted, mossy armor half-submerged in the brown water, only its eyes and nostrils breaking the surface like driftwood.
It was perfect. And it was terrifying.
Back at the Ratchet barracks yard, dust hung in the still air like taunting ghosts. A dozen guards, a mix of orc, troll, and goblin, stood sweating and scowling. The massive orc from the demonstration, Gor’dun, rubbed his sternum where Alyna’s knee had connected.
“This is nonsense,” he grumbled, not quietly. “Close-quarters, we know. We brawl. What is this ‘neutralization’? Sounds like fancy elf words for a stab in the back.”
Alyna leaned against the fence, peeling an apple with the point of her dagger. “Your last brawl, Gor’dun. How’d it end?”
“I won.”
“Yeah? Show me your left side.”
With a confused frown, he lifted his arm. A thick, poorly healed scar ran from his ribcage down to his hip. “Axe swipe. So?”
“So you won, but you spent three months pissing into a bucket while your guts tried to fall out.” She took a crisp bite of the apple. “My way, you win and you walk to the latrine by yourself the next morning. But hey, maybe you enjoy the bucket.”
A few of the others snorted, quickly disguising it as coughs. The mood shifted, just a fraction.
Alex nocked an arrow, the fletching cool against his cheek. The crocolisk’s eye, a yellow sliver of pure predation, was fixed on nothing. He calculated the wind, the drop, the thickness of the hide at the neck joint. His father’s lessons came back. Patience is a sharper blade. He exhaled, half of the world falling away until there was only the arc of the shot.
The string thrummed.
The arrow vanished into the narrow gap just behind the skull, sinking to its fletching. The bull erupted from the water in a thunderclap of spray and rage, its tail whipping with enough force to shatter a small tree. It crashed, writhed, and then settled, the water slowly staining a darker hue. It had died without ever seeing him.
The silence returned, heavier now.
“Again,” Alyna said, her voice cutting through the yard. “This time, the goblin is drunk and has a broken bottle. The troll is trying to rob you. Gor’dun, you’re just trying to get to the other side of the street. Go.”
They moved, clumsy at first, trapped in old habits of frontal assault. She stopped them relentlessly. “Why are you trading punches? Disable and move! A thumb in the eye isn’t honorable? Good. Neither is a knife in your kidney.”
She walked among them, adjusting a grip here, redirecting a foot there. Her touches were clinical, professional. “You’re not soldiers on a battlefield. You’re guards in a port town full of thieves, drunks, and things that crawl out of the sea. Your job isn’t glory. It’s to go home.”
By the fourth repetition, the complaints had dried up, replaced by grunts of effort and sharp, focused breathing. The recruits started to see the geometry of it—the efficient lines, the preserved energy, the brutal simplicity. A flicker of understanding, grudging but real, passed through the group. This wasn't elf nonsense. This was the arithmetic of survival.
Alex’s hands were steady as he worked. The skinning was a ritual, a careful, respectful dissection. His new knife parted the tough hide from the muscle with satisfying precision. He kept the hide wet, rolling it in the treated tarp. It was flawless, scarred and thick, exactly what Zik’tik wanted.
As he cleaned his tools in the river, a shadow stirred in a deeper pool twenty yards upstream. Another set of nostrils bubbled. Slightly smaller, but its hide was a pristine, dark olive. A gift. He repeated the process, patient as stone, and was rewarded with a second, unblemished hide.
The walk back to Ratchet was long, the two heavy rolls digging into his shoulders. He was sunburned, caked in dry mud and blood, and he’d never felt more competent in his life.
He dumped the first hide on Zik’tik’s counter. The troll said nothing for a full minute, his long fingers tracing the seams between the scales, probing the arrow hole, which was clean and small. He examined the second hide with an almost religious intensity.
“You killed the old bull. And you took his… cousin?” Zik’tik finally looked at Alex, his yellow eyes gleaming in the shop’s gloom. “No axe marks. No spear tears. One shot each?”
“Yes.”
Zik’tik’s stern face cracked into a wide, needle-filled grin. “Ha! The wind does not break you after all!” He pulled a heavy cloth bag from under the counter, the clink of coins inside unmistakable. He paid the amount promised, and then added five extra gold on top. “You bring me more like this. We have an agreement. The kodo bull next, when you are ready.”
The coin purse felt like a anchor of pure possibility in Alex’s hand.
He found Alyna just outside the barracks, wiping her neck with a cloth. She looked tired in a deep, satisfied way. Her recruits were trudging off, groaning about sore muscles but arguing good-naturedly about the best place to jam a thumb.
She saw him, saw the look on his face and the blood on his pants, and her own expression softened into a proud, radiant smile. “So you didn’t become lizard food.”
“He was surprisingly polite about it,” Alex said, the relief of seeing her making him lightheaded.
He showed her the purse. Her eyebrows shot up. “Zik’tik was happy?”
“Ecstatic. There’s a kodo bull with my name on it, apparently.”
She looped an arm around his muddy shoulders, pulling him close. “Later. First, we wash. Then, we spend. I know a place.”
The restaurant was a grilled-meat stall with a real wooden roof and actual tables, perched at the end of a pier. It was the closest thing to fine dining Ratchet offered. They ate spiced roast raptor and surprisingly tender kodo ribs, the sauce sweet and smoky, watching the sun set over the water in a riot of orange and purple.
“Gor’dun asked me today if all blood elves fight like they’re trying to end a fight before their hair gets messed,” Alyna said, tearing a piece of flatbread.
“What’d you say?”
“I told him it’s a primary tactical concern.” She grinned, kicking his boot under the table. “You should’ve seen their faces when I showed them how to break a nose with the pommel of your own dagger. It was like I’d revealed a secret of the universe.”
He laughed, the sound feeling strange and good. “Zik’tik grinned. It was terrifying.”
They ate in comfortable silence for a while, the day’s brutal work softening into a warm, shared exhaustion. The future, for the first time since the snows of Winterspring, didn’t feel like a vast, frightening unknown. It felt like a path, rough but walkable, and they were on it together.
Alyna nudged the last rib toward him with her knife. “So. Kodo bull.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Or the day after.”
She nodded, watching the lantern lights begin to flicker on across the darkening water, their new life reflected in the gentle, black waves.
The half-year that followed was a blur of dust, coin, and gradual, hard-won comfort. The kodo bull nearly ended Alex on a cracked, sun-bleached plain, its charge shattering the air before a carefully placed arrow finally pierced a lung. He brought the immense, weathered hide to Zik’tik, who clapped him on the back hard enough to bruise. Alyna’s guards stopped scowling and started listening, their efficiency cutting brawl-related injuries in the port by a third. Captain Grizzleknot gave her a raise without her even asking.
They moved from the room at the Rusty Anchor to a small, clean apartment above a chandlery. It had a real window and a door that locked. They bought a sturdy bed and didn’t tell each other why that felt like such a victory.
The money piled up. It was a strange, quiet shock to realize they could walk past the job board without a twinge of anxiety.
“Zik’tik mentioned a place,” Alex said one evening, the humid air finally cooling. He was mending a tear in his hunting leathers. “New. Serves Pandaren food. Thought we could try it.”
Alyna looked up from honing her blades, a curious tilt to her head. “Food that isn’t charred, spiced, or salted to last a sea voyage? Sounds dangerous.”
“We live dangerously.”
The restaurant was nestled in a quieter lane where the buildings were whitewashed and flower boxes hung under the windows. The smell hit them first—ginger, star anise, fresh steam, and a sweet, savory aroma they couldn’t name. It was utterly alien. A friendly Pandaren matron ushered them to a low table, her demeanor warm and utterly unconcerned with Alex’s human features or Alyna’s elongated ears.
The food was a revelation. Dumplings with skins so thin they shimmered, filled with fragrant pork and spring onion. A slow-braised beef in a dark, complex sauce that melted on the tongue. Stir-fried vegetables that still held a crisp, bright snap. They ate mostly in silence, exchanging wide-eyed glances after each new dish, their usual world of tough meat and hardtack completely erased.
“This is… I didn’t know,” Alyna finally said, her voice soft with genuine awe. She swiped a last bit of sauce with a fluffy steamed bun.
Alex put his chopsticks down, the warmth of the meal and the safe, quiet room settling in his chest. He’d practiced the words for days, but now they felt too big for his mouth. He took a slow breath.
“I think our life here is good,” he started, his fingers tracing the grain of the polished wood table. “We’re wealthy now, and Ratchet has given us a lot. A real start.”
He saw her watching him, her green eyes patient, but with a slight wariness in them. She was always braced for the other shoe to drop.
“But maybe we won’t stay here forever.” He met her gaze. “What about going to Pandaria? They need adventurers, and the presence of Horde and Alliance there is weak. It’s not like here. Zik’tik says the society is quite tolerant and open.” He paused, his heart a drum against his ribs. “We could find out if there is a life for both of us there. Maybe build a home. We could even think about adopted children, if we wanted.”
The silence that followed was total. The clatter from the kitchen seemed to mute. Alyna’s expression didn’t change at first, then it did, in minute increments. The confident mask, the cheeky humor, it all seeped away, leaving something raw and unbearably vulnerable underneath. Her hand, resting on the table, tightened into a fist, then slowly relaxed.
He’d mentioned children. He’d laid a dream directly over the deepest, most hidden wound she carried—the one shaped by prejudice, humiliation, and her own unique biology that she believed made the very idea impossible.
“A home,” she repeated, the word unfamiliar on her tongue. She looked down at her empty plate, then out the window at the strange, flowers. “You mean that. Not just a place to sleep.”
“I mean a place that’s ours. Where no one knows what we were. Where they might not care.” His voice was low, urgent. “We have the gold. We have the skill. We could just… go.”
Alyna looked back at him, and for a flash, he saw the half-frozen elf in the Winterspring snow, all defiance and desperate survival. Then it was gone, replaced by the woman who had fought three guards without breaking a sweat, who had carved a place for them here with sheer will.
A slow, genuine smile touched her lips, tentative but real. “Adopted children, huh? You’ve thought about this.”
“I have.”
She leaned back, exhaling a long breath that seemed to carry six months of exhaustion and tension away with it. “Ratchet’s dust is in my teeth. I can taste it in my sleep.” She nodded, once, decisive. “Okay. Let’s go see about Pandaria.”
The relief was a physical warmth flooding his veins. He didn’t reach for her hand, not here, but the connection between them tightened, a promise woven into the fragrant steam rising from their empty plates. It was no longer just about surviving the next day, the next job, the next lurking prejudice. It was a horizon, vast and unknown and entirely theirs to walk toward, together.