There was an old Alteraci proverb that said that the lightest step could leave the greatest print, it was just one of a million old sayings repeated ad nauseum by old women, but as Corun Salvaine stood at his place at the wall, and looked at the few other guards alongside him, he couldn't help but feel that maybe it might hold a bit of truth.

They were all that remained of the once mighty Kingdom of Lordaeron. He had been but a boy when Lordaeron fell. Corun had seen his nation destroyed through their own Prince's betrayal, he had seen his village burn and his people slaughtered, he had seen the need to take up the sword, joining the resistance that fought against death itself, and he had seen death win.

Farm after farm, village after village, stronghold after stronghold, they had been pushed back to the edges of their kingdom. Hearthglen and Mardenholde, Sollidens and the Monastery, the Crusaders Square, Tyr's Hand and the Enclave, as well as a few scattered camps and outposts in the Tirisfal Glades and Plaguelands.

Many of their heroes had fallen. Ashbringer was lost. Even still, they had been determined. They had strong men and women, almost every living human north of Strahnbrad united in Scarlet. They had righteous Lordaeronian paladins, powerful Dalaranian mages, swaggering Tirasian sailors, crafty Alteraci rogues, ingenious Gilnean engineers, brave Stormwind knights and stout Stromic warriors.

Men and women from every kingdom. It had seemed like all of humanity was at arms, rumours constantly flew that soon, soon the Alliance would come for them. Volunteers would arrive by foot or boat all the time, sent by Scarlet recruiters.

For years they had defended their strongholds from the dead. They had even made some progress, expanding their holdings and fortifying the western glades, destroying hordes of the enemy.

As time went on though, the flood of volunteers had turned to a trickle, and then dried up completely. Nobody spoke of Alliance armies just over the horizon coming to liberate them. They were betrayed, their allies to the south never did arrive in force to aid them, instead small groups of adventurers would arrive and attack the Crusade, seeking to take for themselves what was left of the Lordaeronian treasury.

And the Crusade had splintered. Raymond George and Maxwell Tyrosus, two of their greatest Paladins had led a group away, claiming the Crusade had been corrupted. And as much as it pained Corun to admit it, they had been right. Many had been driven mad by their experiences, many had turned to dark magic, consorting with demons and death.

Grand Inquisitor Isilien had murdered Taelan Fordring, sending his father into the hands of the Argent Dawn. Tirion Fording led a bloody war against the Crusade, and it was a war in which the only winner was the dead. Hearthglen, Mardenholde and Northridge had been sacked, every crusader captured was put to the sword by the vengeful Highlord. Only a handful had escaped, fleeing through the mountains to the safety of the monastery.

The Enclave had been destroyed as well, ravaged by the Traitor King himself and his army of the dead. The last true sanctuary, the last peaceful, green section of Lordaeron had been annihilated. The farmers and miners of Havenshire, the townspeople of New Avalon, the sailors at Light's Point and King's Harbour, they were all dead, and not all were lucky enough to lie still.

Tyr's Hand had held out in the end, and the Lich King was defeated by the Argent bastards in the Plaguelands, but the bulk of the surviving Crusade had attempted to storm Northrend once again, and once again they had met with ruin. A single ship had limped back to Lordaeron, grounding itself on the Whispering Shore, it's passengers and crew desperate and half-starved seeking refuge at the Pallisade.

As the war against the dead continued, the Great Corrupter revealed himself. Grand Crusader Saidan Dathrohan had been possessed by the Dreadlord Balnazzar all along, and the dread beast's fel powers were used to turn the proud crusaders into undead slaves. A few haunted looking, ragged survivors had made it to the Glades, all of them terrified at what they had seen.

The purest hearted priests and most powerful paladins had not been spared. In a single night, most of the living men and women of Lordaeron were replaced by shuffling corpses, who mindlessly fell upon their comrades lucky enough to escape the curse. It was a massacre.

Moral had crumbled over the years as the Crusade had been ruined, piece by piece. None knew why they had been saved from the same fate as the others, but through the iron hand of Inquisitor Whitemane and her captains the forces had done their duty.

From Solliden's farmstead in the west and the four scattered towers, to the Monastery itself, the Scarlet Crusaders of the Tirisfal Glades had tried. Tried in vain. Their numbers were lower than ever, their warriors often but scared children with rusted blades, their leaders were mostly dead, and they had no hope of victory.

But they had tried.

It took the dead years more to crush the last of them. The outposts had seen great and valiant deeds, brave men and women fighting side by side, until they were forced to fight back to back, and finally one against a horde. The names of the last heroes were known only to the light.

After the outposts had fallen, they had all expected Solliden's and the Pallisade to be the next to go. They had not expected the vile enemy to penetrate the monastery itself and assassinate their leaders and massacre the soldiers. Those that escaped swore that they had seen human faces among the mercenary foes, lead by a shadowy dead woman.

Solliden's farmstead, actually a cluster of farms surrounding a tiny hamlet, and the Pallisade the farmers and crusaders took shelter in when raided by the enemy, had been the last bastions of the Crusade.

The last banner had flown from the Pallisade's walls. The once proud, blue, noble L, for Lordaeron had long since been changed to a bright scarlet to symbolise the blood of the living. For so long as there was a living human in Lordaeron, the fight would continue. The banner was old, dirty and torn, the Pallisade's walls were uneven and hastily thrown together, it's defenders were the survivors of seven kingdoms and the veterans of dozens of battlefields.

It was there that they had started to come up with their plan. Among the surviving crusaders were two mages, Dalaranians who had picked up a bit of arcane knowledge in their past lives, and the daughter of the local peasant leader who had shown some promise in the area. Before the Crusade had really begun to disintegrate rumours had reached them of a place known as the Caverns of Time, far away in mythical Kalimdor, where supposedly adventurers were able to travel to ages past.

After the defeat of a small band of undead adventurers who had tried to finish them off at the Pallisade, they had been shocked to find a number of spellbooks and other tomes on one of the corpses. The dead's journal had described it's adventures to the caverns in great detail, and it had even visited Lordaeron before the Scourge!

In parts of the journal, strange writings and diagrams beyond Corun's ken had been scrawled that had set a flame of excitement under the Crusade's last surviving mages, a Dalaranian wizard named Meryn Lobos lead the trio, and his accomplices were a woman battlemage from the same city named Thea Peronne, and the more recent apprentice Erin Solliden.

They had been excused from all duties, and devoted all their waking hours to solving the puzzle of time travel. Thank the Light, the dead had taken to merely toying with the Crusaders and penning them in to the area, Corun hadn't known why they hadn't sent more than a few token attacks against them in recent months, but he had been grateful.

Sir Castred Wicken was older than any of the other surviving crusaders by many years, he had been a soldier in the first wars against the orcs so long ago. He had commanded squadrons of heavily armed and overly polished knights, he had marched in the triumph as Stormwind was liberated from the Horde, and he had gone home to his village expecting to live a nice quiet life.

Several decades, and wars, later he was the commander of barely more than a platoon of starved, traumatised fanatics, less than two dozen initiates, all of them the sons and daughters of Solliden's farmers who were old enough to hold a weapon, and a few dozen civilians, many of them too young or too old to fight, and the rest just half-trained and ill-equipped skirmishers.

For weeks now, the few of his men and women blessed with arcane knowledge had been attempting to discover the secrets of time travel. They had decided to return to Lordaeron's past, in order to save it's future. Some had wanted to go back only a few years to the start of the Crusade, and warn the leaders of Dathrohan's corruption and Isilien's madness, others wanted to go back further and save the Ashbringer. Yet more argued that they could return to a time before the Traitor Prince's treachery, and save Lordaeron from destruction; or that they could go to the distant past and simply live in peace.

Where Lordaeron had fallen and the Crusade had failed, they, if their plan was successful, had a hope of changing everything. With the recent death of one of the more elderly civilians, they were down to just 128 in all. It was a tragic number. Lordaeron before the fall had a population in the millions.

Though it was many years ago now since he took them, he had not yet forgotten the vows he had taken when he joined the Knights of the Silver Hand. He had 127 men, women and children under his protection, and he would protect them with his life if it came to it.

They had elected to return to the year before the start of the First War, so that the Seven Kingdoms could be warned of the impending danger and prepare a stronger defense. If the orcs were never allowed to get beyond their damned portal, none of what had happened would come to pass, Prince Arthas would never be corrupted, the human kingdoms would survive, and the world would be peaceful.

Sir Castred personally thought that the plan was a bit optimistic, but he prayed that it worked. He had done a lot of praying in his life, and he was often interrupted. Yesterday Meryn Lobos and his two apprentices had burst into the small chapel in Solliden's hamlet where the Crusaders who still had any faith made use of it.

"We've got it! By the Light we did it!" Meryn was a middle aged man, unhealthily thin and pale like the rest of them, and wearing ragged maroon robes. His usually dead looking brown eyes were alive with excitement "We figured it out!"

Now, only one day later, the plan was to be put into action. He hadn't understood a word the damned wizards said about the ritual, but Meryn was sure it would work. When the farmers' work was done for the day and everyone had gathered in the Pallisade with all their tools and supplies (apparently the ritual had a limited effect radius), the old knight looked at the remnants of a proud kingdom and felt his own voice coming before he heard it.

"Brothers, sisters; humans... We have been in the darkness for so long, but now thanks to Meryn, Thea and Erin over there, a ray of Light shines down upon us lighting a pathway none ever thought open..." somehow, after years of suffering, after seeing their friends and families turned into soulless monsters and destroying everything they had once known, after being forced to flee in ever shrinking bands from one stronghold to another as devastation followed them, the survivors of Lordaeron looked at him with a slight spark in their eyes.

"Most of you... nearly all of you, have never known the world as it was before the First War. It was peaceful then, the land was green and beautiful, and it's people were alive and well. There were no wars, there was no Horde, there was no Scourge, there were no demons" a wistful look had appeared on the face of Solliden, one of the only others old enough to remember the good times.

"But now you will get a chance to experience things as they once were. Through the Light all things are possible." he nodded to Meryn and the man began the ritual. It looked simple enough, scratching some lines in the ground and saying the right combination of unintelligible gibberish syllables, then with a final exclamation a bright light began to pour from the lines drawn in the dirt.

The light turned into a sort of bubble, which spread, and within seconds had grown to cover the entire Pallisade. Was it working? They could see everything else in the bubble, albeit with a slight blue tint, but view of the outside world was blocked by pure arcane energy that made Sir Castred and the other holy magic users twitch nervously.

It was probably only minutes, but felt like hours that they all stood there in the bubble, nobody daring to move or speak. One of the veteran warriors, Saryl Waud's face was going as blue as the bubble as the man held his breath. Finally the bubble seemed to burst and collapse in on itself, and Sir Castred chuckled as he heard Saryl and several others begin to suck in as much air as they could.

As soon as the bubble was gone and their field of vision was opened once more, Sir Castred looked at the sky in wonder. It was a bright, light blue, free from the tainted black clouds that had hung over Lordaeron for so long... Free from any clouds at all. The air was a bit crisp, and a gust of wind blew a chill onto the gathered humans.

"It worked!" someone shouted, and the Crusaders began to cheer. They had escaped death. They were finally safe. Sir Castred joined them with a hurrah. He wondered if there was another, much younger version of himself running around in the South right now.

Executor Bile Yarran almost wished that he could still feel his rotten face, he was sure he was smiling at the news that one of his underlings had just brought in. The last blot on the map of the Tirisfal Glades had just willingly removed itself, with no loss of Horde troops in the process!

Oh he was definitely going to get promoted for this.

If he ever saw that Blood Elf warlock that had forged those notes about a "time travel" spell for him again, he would make sure to buy the breather a year's supply of good Elvish wines. The death of the Forsaken that he had volunteered to take the journal to the Red Bastards had been a sacrifice that Bile was very much prepared to make.

Those damned green farms that Solliden had defended for years would go black and rot at last, and the Pallisade that had now disappeared in it's entirety along with it's defenders would not hinder them at all.

He laughed again at the ease of it. To think, all that it took to get rid of the last of the breathing bastards who had defied the Forsaken for so long was to trick them with an obscure teleportation ritual.