Beyond the Horizon

That morning, her younger sister had been watching the preparations for the first skycutter bound for Azeroth with an expression Neptua had learned to recognize over the past eighteen years. She had told Akiri no. Quite firmly, in fact.

Apparently, that had not been sufficient. Neptua closed her eyes and exhaled.

Four hundred and twenty-two years of life, and somehow the most demanding responsibility she'd ever taken on was being an older sister.

She began packing. A few changes of clothing, provisions, and a small collection of prepared remedies went into her traveling bag. Finding her sister was another matter.

She knew where the first skycutter was going. The delegation had been sent to establish contact with the Kirin Tor in Dalaran. Assuming Akiri had managed to sneak aboard, that was where she would be.

Securing passage proved more difficult than she anticipated.

The skycutter carrying the delegation had been the first to make the journey. There were no established passenger arrangements, no regular crossings, and no one who could tell her with any certainty when another vessel might depart.

Neptua spent the day explaining her situation and trying to find someone preparing another crossing. Her account of an eighteen-year-old who might have stowed away aboard the delegation's skycutter attracted considerable concern.

Eventually, she found passage aboard a vessel being prepared for the next day.

Neptua was grateful. She was considerably less pleased that Akiri had managed to travel to an entirely different world without asking permission, while she herself had spent an entire day obtaining it.

By sunrise, she was aboard. The captain and crew were familiar with their skycutter, but the destination was new to everyone. They had instructions for reaching Dalaran, and assurances that the first vessel had successfully made the crossing.

Neptua watched the island grow smaller, feeling a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Somewhere ahead was Azeroth. And somewhere on Azeroth was Akiri. She hoped her sister had at least found something sensible to eat.

Dalaran was magnificent. She would have liked to explore. Unfortunately, she had a sister to find. Her inquiries confirmed her suspicions almost immediately. A young Skyborne woman with red hair had indeed arrived aboard the first skycutter. She had apparently made quite a spectacle of herself, leaping from the vessel and floating down to the grass below while shouting something about being free while running south. Of course she had. Neptua thanked them and set off.

Akiri had a head start, certainly, but there were roads to follow, people to ask, and only so many places her sister could have reached. She would find her.

The forests of Azeroth were extraordinary. Neptua had imagined them many times, drawing upon ancient accounts and illustrations, but the living reality was something else entirely.

The trees were familiar in shape yet different in their growth. The soil smelled richer in some places, the air carried unfamiliar scents, and the birds sang songs she had never heard.

She stopped to examine flowers growing beside the road. Some resembled plants she knew from Zephras Isle, while others were entirely new to her. She collected a few herbs she recognized. There were animals she'd only heard or read about. Woodland stretched across the countryside in broad, uninterrupted expanses to the east. Neptua was delighted. She had spent centuries studying and tending the natural world, and here was an abundance of unfamiliar life waiting to be understood. She could have spent weeks studying it all. Instead, she continued down the road.

At first, the journey was pleasant. She walked across the open countryside, asking travelers whether they had seen a young elf with red hair and an unusually enthusiastic disposition.

Occasionally, someone had. One traveler remembered her running down the road, blinking forward every few seconds while eating an apple. She had stopping long enough to gawk at his ears. He couldn’t understand the language she was rambling in.

Neptua followed the trail as best she could. But the road kept going. She passed farms and hills before arriving in the small port town they called Southshore.

She had known Azeroth was large. But she'd never had to think about what those distances actually meant. There was no understanding of the scale without seeing it. The landscape never seemed to end. But Southshore brought another surprise; the ocean.

She had seen illustrations of oceans, naturally, and heard descriptions of their enormous size. She understood that Azeroth possessed great bodies of water separating its lands.

But standing on the docks, looking out across the surface, she realized that she had never properly imagined one.

Water stretched away from the docks beneath the open sky. Far to the south, she could make out another shoreline. She stared for a moment. On Zephras Isle, she had fished in streams and pools and tended the living things that flourished around them. She was perfectly comfortable with water.

"Excuse me," she asked a dockworker. "Have you seen a young girl with too much energy pass through here? Pale, red hair, blue eyes."

The dockworker shook his head, but another man nearby looked up.

"Little one? Talks fast in that elven language? Couldn’t get any common out of her, but she seemed excited about the boats."

Neptua nodded. "Yes. That’s her."

"She took a boat to Menethil late yesterday."

Neptua thanked him and waited at the end of the dock for the next boat. Of course Akiri had wanted to know what was on the other side. She always wanted to know what was on the other side.

The boat was fascinating… at first. The deck shifted gently beneath Neptua's feet, and she found herself adjusting her balance with each movement of the vessel. The air smelled of salt and damp wood, and seabirds passed overhead.

She stood by the railing and watched the water slide past the hull. Then she looked west. There was nothing there; only water. Neptua stared.

She could see the shoreline behind them, already growing smaller, and the distant land toward which they were traveling. But to the west, the water stretched outward until it disappeared where it met the sky.

A strange uneasiness stirred in her stomach. She'd spent her whole life on an island suspended in Skywall, surrounded by vast open air. She was no stranger to looking out across an empty expanse. But this was different.

Beyond the edge of Zephras Isle, there had been nothing to walk upon. The island was the entirety of the land she knew. Its boundaries were real, familiar, and fixed. The scale of what she was observing made her head swim. "First time at sea?"

Neptua turned.

A sailor stood nearby, smiling.

"First time for many things," she admitted.

He followed her gaze toward the west.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

"It is." She hesitated. "That direction is the land you call Kalimdor? I cannot see it."

"Correct, it’s well beyond the horizon. But it’s over there."

She looked at him. Then she squinted into the distance like she’d be able to make it out in the distance if she tried hard enough.

He chuckled and went back to his duties.

Menethil Harbor was bustling when she stepped off the boat. Solid ground felt reassuring beneath her feet.

She began asking after Akiri. Several people remembered seeing her. None were able to understand what she was saying, but they all picked up on her excitement and wonder with the world.

Their accounts conflicted on where she should look next. Ironforge, Auberdine, Theramore, Arathi. The locations she could have gone to from here were piling up. There were places beyond those places. Ashenvale, Barrens, Blasted Lands, Searing Gorge, Stormwind, Stranglethorn Vale.

She regarded the mountains to the south. They were enormous. Their slopes climbed far above the surrounding country, their distant summits disappearing into clouds.

She looked toward the western horizon. Somewhere beyond that water was another continent.

She turned north, thinking of the road from Southshore. She had walked all that way from Dalaran and taken a boat. The realization of the sheer scale of this world had been slowly sinking in. And then, quite suddenly, it became overwhelming.

Neptua found a bench near the docks and sat down. She hadn't intended to stop for long. She only needed a moment to collect her thoughts.

People moved past her, busy with their own affairs. Everything was perfectly ordinary. That was perhaps the strangest part. No one else seemed troubled by what they were describing.

They spoke of sailing across oceans as though it were no more remarkable than crossing a stream. They discussed journeys through mountain ranges, across kingdoms, and between continents as casual matters of travel.

For four centuries, she had known the boundaries of her world. Zephras Isle was not small to those who lived upon it. It held forests and settlements, waterways and wilderness, places to explore and places to avoid. She had spent a lifetime learning its natural rhythms.

But it had an edge. There was always an edge. A place where the ground ended and Skywall began. Everything she knew existed within those boundaries. Here, there were no such boundaries.

Every road went somewhere else. Every mountain concealed more land beyond it. Even the water, which she had initially thought might mark the edge of something, merely separated one enormous expanse of land from another.

She tried to imagine Azeroth in its entirety. She couldn't. The more she attempted it, the more distant everything seemed to become. Her heart was beating faster than it ought to have been. Neptua took a slow breath.

There was no danger here. She was surrounded by people going about their business. Nothing threatened her. Yet she felt an unfamiliar urge to find somewhere enclosed, somewhere with walls and a roof, somewhere she wouldn't have to look toward another horizon.

And then she thought of Akiri. Delighted by every new discovery, always eager to see what lay beyond the next hill.

Neptua remembered her staring at the skycutter that morning, trying very hard to pretend she wasn't considering something foolish. She remembered telling her no. She remembered the attempted innocent expression Akiri had worn in response. And now she could be anywhere.

The thought struck with such force that Neptua felt briefly breathless. Akiri might have boarded a ship to Kalimdor. She might have taken the road toward Ironforge. She might have headed south toward Stormwind or wandered into some wilderness that neither of them had ever heard of. There was no way to know.

Neptua had come to Azeroth believing she would find her sister in Dalaran, or perhaps somewhere in the surrounding countryside. But, the world was impossibly large. On Zephras Isle, Akiri could wander, but there was only so far she could go.

There were familiar people, familiar paths, and an entire community that knew the type of trouble she would get into.

Here, she couldn’t speak the language since she never cared to pay attention to learning it. She could disappear into forests larger than their entire homeland. She could sail beyond the horizon. For the first time, she understood that she might not find her sister quickly.

Neptua stood and adjusted her traveling bag. Her uneasiness had not disappeared. The sight of the ocean still made her uncomfortable. She tried to keep her eyes and mind only on what was right in front of her so she didn’t lose herself to the vastness of the world again.

She continued her search.