Suicide Cave

“Oy! Revil! Hurry yer arse before I leave yeh here!”
Throm just couldn’t figure it out. Only a week ago it; seven of his closest friends and him had been around a camp fire in Un’goro Valley, planning how their full group of fifteen would continue their adventure.  Five days ago they found themselves on the borders of Sithilus, ready to find untold riches hidden among the rusty sand below their feet. But now it was him and Revil; a scrawny teenager from Stormwind that had only gotten into their company because he happened to be apprentice to one of Throm’s friends! Out of all the people that Throm could be stuck with, it was a damned child!  The old dwarf would prefer a blasted tauren over the brat! Yet no matter how many times he turned it in his head he couldn’t come to a conclusion on HOW this had happened.
	Now, Throm was normally a friendly dwarf, but when it came to this human? Well that was a different story, as Throm’s interest in the teenager had dried up weeks ago.  When their group was still passing through the northern most portion of Stranglethorn, trying to barter with the local jungle trolls Throm had run across the human attempting to sneak a troll tiger fetish underneath his tabard, trying his hardest to rob the very trolls they were trading with. From that moment onward, Throm swore he would have nothing to do with the teenager. In his eyes no idiot was worth dying over let alone an idiot who saw a gold piece or two as more important than his entire party’s lives.
	But when the Sithilid came down upon them two nights ago, even the cold hearted dwarf couldn’t leave Revil to die. As the rest of the party fought their attackers, driving sword through skull and warhammer to gut; Revil curled into a ball of his own piss and fear! So needless to say, when one of the bastard bugs advanced on Revil, there was no fight to be had from the child. In the blink of an eye Throm turned his blunderbuss on the creature and domed it without a second thought. Revil however, never repaid the kindness to Throm. Handing the boy an axe, Throm yelled at Revil to go back up his pet bear, which was mauling sithilid after sithilid in a mad fury of claws, teeth, and fur.
	Half an hour later the sand lay stained with crimson lifeblood of both sithilid and humanoid alike. Throm’s loyal bear Misuka lay dead, a sithilid stinger lodged deep in his eye socket, another in his right flank. Expecting to find Revil beside the bear, dead as well…he instead found the boy inside one of the ruined tents, shaking like a new born, war axe clutched in his fingers with a death grip.
	Rage filled Throm, bubbling with heat through his body, for instead of paying back the dwarf’s valor, Revil had left Throm’s very best friend to die a painful death! The dwarf’s screams of rage lasted for countless ages, his deep rocky voice echoing through the nearby canyons as he let out his unfathomable anguish.  In the end, he realized that no amount of screaming could ever bring Misuka back from the dead, nor would leaving the child to die alone in the desert resurrect his friend.
	With a deep breath Throm would toss his backpack to Revil, his thick beard hiding the devastated look upon his face. “Come on.” Fighting now to keep sobs from his voice “Come on boy, the damned bugs will be on us any moment. Do you think they only travel in small groups!? They’re like the blasted undead!  They’ll just keep coming until they’re sure we’re all dead!” And that was how the last two days started, how he got trapped out in the middle of nowhere, lost among an endless sea of rock layered with rusted sand.
	Unbeknownst to Throm however, his mercy was not appreciated. Although he followed the dwarf for the last few days, Revil felt no loyalty or thanks, merely hate for the stout man. “Throm.” He gasped out, pulling himself up the cliff face after the dwarf. “Where are we even going!? Do you honestly expect we’ll be able to make it to Feralas through these mountains!? Two days and all we’ve had to eat is the little bit of meat you could cut from your dead bear as we fled the silithid! We won’t’ SURVIVE that trip!”

“Oh shut it.” Retorted Throm. “If I wanted to hear from the peanut gallery I would have asked the bloody peanut gallery for its blasted opinion! As for where we’re going, no, we are not headed to Feralas, do I really look so daft that I’d think we could make it through weeks of mountain and cliff side on a single day of meat? No! Boy, we’re going to the way-caves!”
“The what?”
“The way-caves you bloody idiot! What, did you ignore your grand-ma when you were still sucking on your mother’s teet? Your people discovered the damned things! Told about them for countless generations you all have, about the magical Way-caves that saved entire armies from decimation! Hell, during the gnomish rebellion it even saved the entire population of Windfir-”
“During the WHAT? Saved the population of what city? There isn’t any Wind- anything-“

“Not anymore! What, you think that Goldshire and Stormwind have been around since humans existed?  I suppose you think that the undead have ALWAYS been undead and that the Undercity was ALWAYS a nightmare infested shithole!  Best that you think everything is static huh? NO! You bloody mentally incapacitated fool! The Gnomish Rebellion was one two wars from hundreds of years ago, it split the continent in two and almost resulted in the destruction of the entire gnomish race! Towards the end of the war they destroyed the entire city of Windfire, but not a single casualty was had!”
	Pulling himself up another rock, Thorn groaned happily, squeezing his eyes shut before opening them again. Before the two of them lay a gaping maw of stone, a cold dry air pushing out from the hole, with no apparent source in the short cave. Only a moment later another burst of air came forth, damp and scalding hot, the smell of stranglethorn ferns wafting along. Seconds later yet another blast, burning and dry with a smell of sulfur. “We’re here lad!”
	Leaping back to his feet the excited dwarf charged forward into the cave, smacking into its back wall as if it was an old lover, holding close to it for a brief moment. Revil? Well, he just looked at the dwarf as if he was crazy. “It’s a cave that shoots out magic air, how is this useful at all!? We’re still going to STARVE out here Thron!”
“No!” Thorn cheered out “We won’t! Listen, these here lay caves connect to caves ALL over Azeroth! From the forests of Elywnn to the corrupted Plaguelands.  This here lay-cave is our ticket HOME boy! A quick offering to the cave and it’ll whisk us away! You can hug your ma and pa and go back to being the thieving little bastard you were before! I can go home and never see this horrid land again! Isn’t it great laddie!?”
	Revil didn’t know what to think, he not in the slightest. Throm was dancing around the cave, jumping up and down and cheering as if they had just found a long lost treasure. But all Revil saw was a smelly cave, only twenty five feet deep with random bursts of air shooting from its depths. “Ok Throm- we’re at your cave, your magical Lay-cave. So…what in the hell is the offering we’re supposed to make.”
“Our BLOOD lad!”
	Revil felt his blood run cold as Throm began to giggle, now sitting down on the cave floor with his blunderbuss in his hands. “You see Revil, all we have to do is kill ourselves! We just have to real quick, no pain, kill ourselves, and we’ll wake up wherever we want in Azeroth! Or at least the closest cave TO it!  Here! You go first; it won’t work if we get killed so you need to do it before the Sithilid catch up! You have to take your own life, that’s the rules!”
	Still giggling, Throm would place the blunderbuss underneath his eye, peering down the sights as he waited on Revil. “Well come on Revil! If you don’t go I’m just gonna do it! I don’t want to think you didn’t make it. So come on, quickly, just use that dagger you carry around.”
	Shaking his head, Revil’s mind raced, trying to come up with an excuse to tell the dwarf. There was no way Throm was right, now way in hell that anything he was saying was true. Kill yourself in a cave, appear across the world? No, this dwarf was way off his rocker, he had seen his best friends die, and his oldest companion, the guy was bonkers.  “Listen Throm, you need to stop this. You’re still upset over the bear, and I understand that!  But killing yourself won’t solve anything! I mean- we can just find a way back to an Alliance camp anyway right? No way the sithilid are still after us. They can’t be chasing us after two entire days!”
	With a deep breath, Throm would lower the gun, before looking up to his companion. “I see, is that really how you feel Revil? Nah, I don’t think that’s at ALL how you feel. I think you’re just a tad bit afraid, which is UNDERSTANDABLE! Tell yeh what, how about after I go, you can use my gun? Would THAT make it a bit easier? “
“Throm it-“

“It would be great! You just, put the powder in, then the shot, and stuff it!” Without a warning, he’d flip the gun around towards his own face, grinning at Revil. “See yeh on the other side lad!”
In eighteen years of life, Revil had never actually SEEN death. He had heard stories, his family had been involved in the various wars, but he had never encountered any violence himself. But in a split second, he saw the different layers of the skull splattered around the cave, he saw the various portions of the brain scattered on the walls like a grotesque painting. Then he saw his own blood, spilling from his belly as a sithilid drove its stinger straight through his back and out his front. It turned out that Throm WAS right, they WERE still being followed.
It turned out Throm was also right about one other thing…

You don’t resurrect in another cave, if someone else kills you.