Hello everyone. This is Pognut, your friendly neighborhood fanfic writer and nerd. This is my first fanfic, a little idea I had while bored during winter break. I'm still not the best writer, so please be gentle. Reviews are appreciated greatly.

Prologue

As the dragon Deathwing burst from his resting place deep within Azeroth, he forever changed the face of the world. His emergence rent the land asunder, made the seas heaved, and nearly collapsed the elemental place of earth. The devastation re-ignited war between the weary peoples of Azeroth, and ushered in new leaders. These were the changes that were seen, and fought over. Some changes, though, took a little more time to manifest...

28 ADP

Tol Barad, The Eastern Kingdoms

Pogsson Wildbeard, dwarf paladin and proud member of the Alliance, brought his mace down on the undead doing its best to disembowel him. The weapon, a gift from the Earthen of Deepholm imbued with the energies of the Holy Light, smashed through the foul beast's arms and into its body. The zombie shuddered and fell as the cleansing power of the Light severed the bonds of unholy magic animating it, just as the heavy mace head crushed its' spine. Around him, his allies cleaned up the remnants of the pack of zombies they had been tasked with clearing from Farson hold on the island of Tol Barad. The Baradin wardens, the prison guards turned army who had watched over the prison island in days past, wanted to try and clear out the hold and use it as a secondary base. Before that, the undead had to be killed, again, and that was where Pogsson and his friends came in. He looked over to where his good friend Pogsson Frostflame, a gnome mage, was freezing a group of undead solid before setting them all on fire. Pogsson sighed; his diminutive friend liked to go overboard with displays like that, but the mage had the skill in pyromancy and cryomancy to pull it off. Elsewhere, he saw the group's rogue, an enigmatic Night Elf woman known only as Lep the Killer, buried her daggers in a zombie's back, before bringing them up and ripping off the monstrosity's head.

"Plaga, stop with that!" barked Pogsson, turning to the fourth member of his band. "These are tha bodies of Alliance soldiers! I won't have ye desecrating them to raise a new ghoul when there be plenty of Horde carcasses to use." The Death Knight, his eyes glowing icy blue, turned to face the dwarf, while his newly risen ghoul rushed off to happily eviscerate a zombie. "The Horde corpses are out there, and I'm in here," the death knight remarked casually, his voice reverberating with the power granted to him by his undead state. "Besides, I doubt anymore will miss them."

"That's not the point and you know it you damned fool! These people deserve better than that!"

"They aren't people anymore and you know it, you blind follower of a dead religion," countered the former human, his voice growing colder than normal.

"Why you little demonspawn! I'll teach ye to insult the Holy Light," shouted Pogsson, bringing his axe to bear. The death knight readied his own blade, and the two started to advance toward each other before the dwarf was restrained by the final member of their group, a Draeni shaman known only as Dasmykon. "Calm yourself my friends. This fighting serves none of us, and I have enough work patching you all up normally," he quipped, his rich voice rolling with his accent. "Come, Pogsson the Lesser has finished having his fun with the last of the undead. We should depart for the base camp and claim our reward."

"I told you not to call me Lesser," yelled Pogsson from where he was roasting undead, referring to the title Dasmykon used to distinguish him from Pogsson the paladin.

"I apologize my friend, and my point remains. Let us retire back to Stormwind for the day, our work is...Pogsson, watch out for that shelf!"

"Wait, me or the Palad..OOF!" The mage, not watching where he was going, had smacked into a shelf of old magical equipment, one of which blew up in his face.

"I'm all right, I'm all right! I had my shields up!"

His companions came over to assess the damage, while Dasmykos used his bond with the spirits of water to heal the minor wounds Pogsson had received from the explosion.

"You're one lucky little guy. If you hadn't had your defenses up we would have been having roast gnome," quipped Lep, a smile on her face.

"Did I hear little again!"

"No, of course not. Must have been your ears. I know not every race can have hearing as superb as that of the Kaldorei, especially with such small ears."

"Very funny. And you're right, not all of us have ears the size of arrows, so sorry for the flaws of my species. Now hush up and let me see if there are any devices on this shelf we can salvage."

"They're not arrowed sized," countered Lep, still smiling, "more like javelin sized."

"All right lass, quit yer quippin'. Stay here with Pogs while we head out. Meet us back up at tha camp."

"All right. Anything interesting?" the rogue asked, turning to her friend.

"Junk, junk, shiny junk, junk, horrific and powerful but unimaginative death beam, junk, junk, green junk, junk, no wait a minute, not junk. Potentially revolutionary experimental portal device. This should be interesting. Wait, no it's broken," sighed the gnome, tossing the junk over his shoulder.

"Doesn't it seem like the coolest toys always are? C'mon, lets head back. I don't want them drinking all the ale."

"Fine, fine. Stupid undead. I could've fixed that. Well, Pogsson could have, and I could have taken the credit."

The pair walked out of the room, the gnome muttering under his breath and the night elf smiling under her hood.

Unbeknownst to them, the portal device was functional, and Pogs' toss had reactivated it and set it to random. It's arcane mind scanned the area, determined that it's owner was not around, and proceeded to carry its last programmed instructions.

"Current program: random test portal. Scanning for safe location. Safe location found. Arathi Highlands. Executing test portal. Warning, extreme Nether instability detected. Cause: Massive shifts in magnetic and magical field of Azeroth. Portal destination unknown. Stabilizing portal. Stabilization complete."