Raging Tauren part 2

Xasxas walked out into the night breeze that blew across elder rise. The moons were full…a hunter’s moon is old da’ used to call them. As looked out across the waving grass of Mulgore he saw the small stand of trees where he used to play as a child. His mind drifted back across the decades…back to the time his old da’, a fourth generation druid, told him about being able to shapeshift into a lion…protecting the plains of Mulgore…

…Being an lion was about patience; and Xasxas had infinite patience. He carefully watched his quarry, studying its habits…where it went, what it did. Xasxas the lion waited, planned, he bided his time. Waiting for the precise moment guaranteed success, without bring danger to himself and his tribe. Xasxas was a druid, tutored carefully in the ways of the Earth Mother.

Now he had traced his quarry to their dig site; a mine they had driven into the very bowls of the Earth Mother. There were five Dark Iron Dwarves and only one of him. Not good odds for a druid such as himself… “Perhaps they should go find some more friends,” he chuckled to himself. The smell of his quarry’s filth, lingered in his sensitive nostrils.

Xasxas the Lion prowled carefully through the tall grass near the edge of the Dwarve’s dig site. Even druids, no matter how skilled, cannot prowl entirely without risk leaving a trace of their passing. He followed a small gully that ran up the side of the mountain ridge to the area just above the mines. It had once been a small creek, no run dry as if somehow in reaction to the evil that lay within the corruption of the Earth Mother.

He lay in wait, hidden by tall prairie grass, at the top of the ridge. Hesitating, the mighty lion slowly crept out of the edge of the tall grass and peered over the ledge and looked down into the gaping pit the dwarves had dug into the Earth. It seemed to Xasxas as if it where a gaping wound.

The open wound horrified Xasxas. The ore they gouged from the Earth Mother seemed as if it where huge gaping lumps of her flesh. It made him retch, spewing the contents of his stomach into a nearby patch of weeds. He crawled slowly edged back to the safety of his hiding place, afraid that the noise he made might have alerted the dwarves.