Across the broad plains of Mulgore, there was a bed of straw in a tent in a village in the valley. A bulky figure lay on the bed beneath a burlap blanket. The hot morning sun shone directly through the tent's opening, and onto the figure... It's a Tauren with light brown hide and long ivory horns... a girl. It was Doriin!
Doriin is the only child to two loving tauren parents living in the quaint village of Bloodhoof, in Mulgore. Her village is quite detached from the affairs out the world outside the village. And why should they venture to find out? All they've known is this land, and it's treated them well. A slow but peaceful life. In this land, even the wolves go about their business quite unbothered, and the most savage parts of the plains still coexist with the Tauren. As if the whole world was in stasis.
And Doriin, the young and bashful tauren girl, watched it go by from the fields. Her parents are bakers, and own the village granary. So Doriin picks wild grass. Every day. In her long, flowing light blue dress.
If you had asked her, she probably wouldn't say that she looked forward to it. But it was life. She had been doing it nearly every day for as long as she could remember. As she worked the plains, she watched from afar the unoccupied tauren her age occupy their days with idle mischief. Before, they asked her to come with, but she would always decline. Why would she run off into aimless antics if she could pick the fields, like her father and mother taught her to? She knew better than to disobey the family profession. She loved her father, and she loved her mother, not that you would have to ask her. Unlike the others, she was quite rambunctious at home with her parents. There was never a dull moment with them around, whether excitedly helping out at dinner or aweing at the stars together at night from the inside of their modest home.
So every day she picked and watched the world go by.
It was a hot day without a cloud in the sunny sky. Doriin was working.
"You do it!"
"No, you do it!", snickered two voices that caught her attention.
The teenagers were up to no good again. Two boys and a girl perched behind the side of a tree overlooking a Plainstrider nest. The presumed mother was nowhere to be seen. Doriin stopped and stared blankly, brushing the wind-waved hair away from her face. They were arguing over which one would be daring enough to steal a plainstrider egg. One of them finally started to one, which was soon followed by a loud, shrill "Squak!" Everyone, even our spectator Doriin gasped as the mother appeared out of apperently nowhere. The teen was tackled and pecked incessantly, and the others made their escape. He yelled and thrashed on the ground, and he looked back at his friends who were now gone. He glanced amidst the chaos and saw our Doriin, frozen solid. The plainstrider pierced the thick developing hide of the teen, he cried out to her for help.
She was still as a statue, but panic boiled inside. What was she to do? She dropped her grain basket and ran back to the village. "Wait, help me!!" The boy cried for his life. She ran, as much as you could in a dress, back to the mill in a fritz. Her dad met her with a heavy pant and tears in her eyes. "What happened?" He asked, worried. She stammered in a nervous panic, barely able to get the words out. Her dad immediately stood to, dropping his rope and knife on the hard ground. Doriin, still shaken, stifled a weep as her mother paced over to comfort her.
A dejected Doriin and her mother sat around the rug in front of a still-hot dinner, father absent. He, being a skilled shaman alongside a baker, would have to tend to the boy overnight to make sure he was in stable condition. Doriin's mother sensed her deep distress and decided to stay home for the rest of the day. Seeing that Doriin could only manage a few scraps for the night, her mother rose and reassured her before heading out to bring her father a portion. She sat there, with her palms on her thighs, thinking about everything that had transpired today, disappointed in herself. But she will not ask herself why she didn't act, because she already knows the answer. She's not cut out for it. It's not in her nature.
Quiet fell for the first time in a long time in Doriin's family's homestead. When she woke up in the morning, her father was still not back. She decided she would venture to do something good after her inaction yesterday. She went to her father's workbench, rope and knife still lying on the floor. She picked up her father's knife. Although she generally did not care to touch sharp tools or weapons, she felt confident that it was the key to righting a wrong. When she got a good look at it, she was quite observant of it. It was a peculiar knife, she hadn't seen anything like it before. It was hefty and stout, and was rounded at the tip but had a perfectly flat-shaped edge. She noticed there was a large chip in the edge, presumably from when he had dropped it.
Determined, she grasped it by the handle and grabbed a small loaf of bread. She paced out of the teepee and looked around the village, which seemed to be unusually empty. She quietly walked over to the blacksmith. The blacksmith's wife was there, and she did not seem to notice Doriin until she meekly grabbed her attention. The wife seemed to reel a little bit before readjusting herself and adopting a dismissive tone towards Doriin. Doriin stammered still, trying to ask if she could have the knife repaired and re-sharpened and showed it to her. The wife, starting to get upset now, interrupted her and loudly told her off. She stumbled out of the smithy with a defeated confusion. Had she really deserved that? All she wanted was her father's knife to be fixed. Was it something she did, or said? Could she do anything right, she wondered?
She returned to the teepee and placed the knife on a stool, before retrieving her grain basket and heading back out to the fields.
After a long day of hard work, it almost seemed like everything was back to normal. Peace descended back on the village once again, and Doriin was out doing what she knew best. Back at the mill, she heaved a sigh of nervous relief as she set the basket down, now bursting with grain. Just as she sat down to have a rest, her tranquility was slashed by a commotion in the village square. She rushed out to see another Plainstrider clubbing the smith's wife with its bloodied beak. The panic she felt the day before came rushing back. However, her body moved, and she started towards the animal. But then she froze. Again.
The husband, the blacksmith, came out and saw the commotion. His instincts kicked in and he rushed the foul animal to the ground. But as if it were possessed, it got right back up as if nothing happened and charged at the man beakfirst. It sent the man flying across the village and resumed its relentless attack on the woman. Everything went black as she closed her eyes and accepted her fate.
She winced as she heard multiple fleshy impacts, but she felt no pain to accompany it. She hesitantly opened her eyes to see tauren girl in a bloodsoaked dress, knife in hand dripping with blood. A shadow was cast as Doriin stood over her. Paralyzed with fear, the smith's wife glanced down and her eyes found the mangled corpse of an adult Plainstrider. Doriin extended her hand so as to help her stand up. She let out a shrill scream, crawling desperately backwards across the ground, thrashing her legs and kicking up the dry Mulgore dust. "You... you killer...!" the wife muttered, trembling.
Doriin remained expressionless and sank her hand back to her side. Knife still in hand, she slowly walked back to the granary. The smith's wife sobbed in a state of shock as her husband comforted her.