Chapter 46 – The Orc’s Command

All that night, Jace had been transcribing the writing on the orcish scrolls.

There were fifty-one orcish symbols in all, and he had to make sure that he transcribed them to an exacting standard; the curvature of every fold, the position of every dot, the thickness of every stroke, he had to mimic all of them in place, and it took quite a bit of ink and pencil to do so, but luckily the ink and pencil could be counted on Eden Marin.

The reason it had to be done so finely was because Jace didn’t know if the thickness of these strokes or whatever would make the same difference in semantics or pronunciation.

It took almost four or five hours to make sure it was almost exactly the same before he went to sleep.

The scroll itself could never be brought into the Sorcerer’s Sanctuary, he didn’t know what kind of magical power this scroll carried, and in case what he couldn’t perceive was sensed by the mages in the Sorcerer’s Sanctuary, he would get into unnecessary trouble.

The next day after finishing his work and getting off work, Jace immediately ran into the library with the copied paper and found the orc language research area according to the location Marin had told him.

The books here could be seen to be very thin, new books, many of them even freshly copied transcripts with magic.

There was no one nearby to read, so he took several books at once and laid them on the ground, including “A Primer on Orcish Runic Literature”, “Basic Styles of Orcish Runic Combinations”, “Orcish Runic – Common Language Cross-Reference Compendium”, “A Primer on Learning Orcish”, “Teaching Orcish for Dummies”, and so on.

Then it was time to start checking the reels, only to run into difficulties with the first symbol.

How can it be so hard to find the beginning of a normal essay, which by definition is usually a common word like some connectives?

However, he had been rummaging through various cross-references for an hour without a clue.

At that point, the possibility occurred to him that it might be a personal name.

If this scroll is a letter, then the beginning is likely to be a name, or a person’s name to be right, generally speaking people’s names, even if they have a specific meaning, all need to go back to a very ancient language source, so it must be very difficult to find the meaning of a person’s name in a popular modern language.

So he decided to change his mindset, each word is fixed for a time, if you can not find it, then jump to the next one, first all roughly find once, guess the overall meaning, and then find time to combine the context of the detailed translation.

In this way he soon found the meaning of the third word, servant, or follower, which was not difficult to understand, and the person writing the letter was probably the officer and head of the recipient, which meant that it was a letter of command.

And the hard one to decipher is the fourth word – mace.

What’s this?

If the letter had something to do with Gul’dan, then the staff, in all likelihood, referred to the legendary Scepter of Sargeras.

He immediately shuddered at this association, that broken thing in his room couldn’t be the Scepter of Sargeras – of course it couldn’t be.

Even if he had somehow had the luck to get the staff as a traveler with a protagonist halo golden finger added (which he didn’t), what made that orc able to cross the Twilight Forest with the Scepter of Sargeras?

And he’s dead.

Was the person who gave him the scepter out of his mind? Such an artifact, nowadays the tribe’s great chief, Neojo, could not wait to find an entire legion to escort it.

Knowing that it was impossible for the Horde to take Azeroth anymore, and that Draenor had long since been turned into a vast wasteland under the poison of all kinds of dark energies and demonic forces, Neojo planned to take the remnants of the Horde’s presence in Draenor to other worlds and find a new home after learning that the Alliance army was preparing to invade Draenor.

To open a portal for the remnant tribes to pass through, the Scepter of Sargeras is one of the necessary artifacts.

It was created for the purpose that the Dark Titan Sargeras wanted to use it to cast his doppelganger to Azeroth, only in the end this casting didn’t go very well, and the scepter ended up in the hands of Naiozu after hundreds of years of chance and coincidence.

The translation continued until the last phrase, “for the sake of the tribe,” was translated, and Jace was pretty sure it was a letter.

The general idea of the letter was that the master told his servant of three important things …… the direction of the Dark Gate – that a man was dead, and that a certain man was a chief, going from world to world for the sake of the tribe.

Jace was very familiar with this period of history, so even with quite a bit of important information missing, he had been able to basically guess the entire letter in its entirety.

The three important things represent the Scepter of Sargeras, the Eye of Dalaran, and the Book of Medivine, all artifacts that Neojo wanted to find for the New World.

Before the Dark Gate was completely destroyed, Neojo had posed a favor to Gul’dan’s most trusted member of the Shadow Council and the world’s first Death Knight, Talon Bloodmage, to travel across the Dark Gate to Azeroth in search of these three artifacts to save the Horde.

After the defeat of the incarnation of Sargeras hundreds of years ago, Madivan’s mother, Egwene, who by then was the Guardian of Tirisfa, buried his remains and the fallen Sargeras Scepter in the Tomb of Sargeras.

Gul’dan had wanted to gain access to this artifact and the mana of Sargeras’ incarnation, but was inadvertently backfired by the demonic power within it and died a horrible death.

The Eye of Dalaran was collected by the Dalaran treasury, and the Book of Medivine was under the control of the Pirinod family, the kings of the kingdom of Outlander, which had betrayed the Alliance in the Orc wars, and the king had been imprisoned as a result, and the Alliance took over the rule of the kingdom, so the Blood Demon had simply led the Black Dragons and the Orcs in an attack on Outlander, and snatched up the Book of Medivine.

Eventually the Blood Devils managed to take the three artifacts with the help of the Black Dragon Legion and returned to Draenor to give them to Neojo, who used them to open the portal, which is known as going from one world to another.

One man dies and one man becomes a chieftain, which should refer to the fact that Gul’dan, who became the de facto ruler of the Horde during the Orc Wars, died at the Tomb of Sargeras, and Nai’ozu will become a chieftain.

Since the Horde on this side of Azeroth had not yet been informed of this news, it meant that this letter was from those who had been informed to tell those on this side about the situation on the other side of the Dark Portal and to inform them of their return to the Dark Portal to travel with the Horde to the New World.

By the time comprehension had reached this point, it was dark outside the window, but Jace was still pleased with his results; he hadn’t expected the letter deciphering to go so well.

There’s just one question at the moment, and that’s what the first line actually means, and what that staff actually refers to.

After a deeper understanding of the Orcish language, in describing the three artifacts, the letter writer used a salutation symbol to express how important and sacred these three artifacts were.

But this modifier symbol is not seen on the runes on that staff, meaning that the staff to which the rune points is indeed not the Sargeras Scepter.

Is that necessarily the same stick that Jace is holding? Not necessarily, that stick could very well be this messenger’s own staff, and the symbol means something else.

This time, Jace found a copy of Exploring the Rules of Orcish Symbol Pronunciation and a copy of Teaching Orcish Pronunciation on the bookshelf, and was going to try to pronounce the letter.

He was thinking that if he could read it, he might be able to find a connection between the name and the name of a famous person in his memory.

The pronunciation of the Orcish language was not considered regular, perhaps because the Orcish words had a large number of foreign words from Ogre and Eredar that contaminated the original pronunciation rules, but Jace still relied on the vague pronunciation to roughly locate the names Gul’dan and Naiozhu in the epigraph.

Gul’dan is dead, and Neojo becomes chief.

Ah …… The thrill of deciphering letters is almost like doing math.

Despite the fact that it was already dark, Jace was completely sleepless because the first word he still hadn’t associated with any famous person.

“Angol.”

He pronounced the pronunciation and searched his memory carefully, but couldn’t follow any similar name.

Slow down …… Since Gul’dan is dead and Neozu has become a chieftain, who is the letter writer?

In fact the answer was already crying out to be answered; the letter writer was probably Talon Bloodmage himself, the only one who knew the latest progress in collecting the three artifacts, and the recipient was probably one of his servants left behind in Azeroth – another servant of the Shadow Council, or more accurately, a Death Knight.

It was already getting light outside the window, but Jess felt more refreshed than last night.

He glanced behind the bookshelves, a number of earnest and hard-working apprentices or apprentice mages were still sticking to their books, and the arcane lamps within the Wizard’s Sanctuary were still lit for them, he wasn’t the most solidly in the spotlight.

Jace was going to find a way to translate these phrases after Angol, and after the staff, which was the first paragraph of the letter.

He went through the orcish cross-references he hadn’t been very familiar with at the very beginning again, based on the rules of orcish linguistics he had already mastered, and some of the grammar he had learned in the process of translating the letter, and finally found a phrase that was perfect for planting after the word mace, and also looked very close to the string of symbols on the letter.

That’s a paragraph from inside another letter that Blackhand, then the tribe’s great chief, wrote to his son, in which Blackhand used a battle flag representing the Blackstone clan to represent his majesty, expressing that seeing the flag was like seeing Blackhand himself.

It’s this expression of seeing the flag as if it were a person that is much like this string of runes on the back of the staff, which is a post hoc usage, which means that the phrase means, see the staff as if it were a person.

If this is Talon Bloodmage’s own letter, doesn’t that mean the staff is Bloodmage’s scepter if you see the staff as a person?

However, Jace remembers clearly that in the game Talon Blood Demon’s weapon looked like a long, hollow, multi-page hammer with a dark magic stone enchanting his weapon in the center of the hammer pages.

The stick he had hidden in his house was long and thin, it didn’t look like a battle scepter for a warrior of great strength by any stretch of the imagination, but it was not bad for a stretcher.

And so on.

Originally an orcish warlock, Talon Bloodmage’s soul was channeled by Gul’dan into the corpse of a human knight after his death to take on the appearance of what would later become the Death Knight.

Could that staff be the staff he used when he was an orc warlock and still living in Draenor under the name of Talongor, left behind as a command token of sorts after he became a Death Knight?

Brainstorming to this point, Jace felt like he no longer had any definitive proof and it was becoming purely a blind guess.

And it was getting to be early in the morning, and even though he was still full of energy, it was already obvious that his mind was slowing down a bit; after all, he was still hurting from the injuries he had sustained.

It was still early, far too early for Marin to go to the study. He set up the books he had taken off the shelves, one by one, in their original categorized rows, collected the letters he had transcribed and came out to the library.

On his way to Marin’s study, he saw the staff store down the road.