Josla (Part 2 of 5?)

A couple of weeks later, Harod disappeared. He just wasn't there one morning. No one in the village seemed particularly concerned, but Hedy made it her goal to find him. We traipsed all over the surrounding countryside but couldn't find a trace of him. A couple of weeks later we received another letter from Harika informing us that, to her surprise, she'd crossed paths with him. He had apparently become quite good friends with Lyla, and when she left to continue her studies elsewhere, he decided to go with. That incident with the mule had left him a little. . .damaged. . .but Harika said that he seemed to have recovered his gregarious nature and had taken up with a band of adventurers calling themselves Le Chat Noir.

In a letter a few months later, Harika wrote that she hadn't seen him in a while but she'd heard rumors of a strange swordsmaster teaching raw recruits willing to present him with a black cat. I wasn't sure what that meant, but Hedy said it meant that Harod had found his place in life.

It must have been a year after Harika first went to Northshire that the Argent Dawn recruiters started coming through town with tales that the Dark Portal had re-opened and demons were pouring through. Hedy and I both felt obligated to stay and help our mothers, but we secretly admitted to each other that the call of adventure was very tempting. It must be so exciting, we agreed, to be on the front line defending the land from the Burning Legion. The letters from Harika didn't help matters much. She'd been traveling with their cousin Allyriel and a friendly mage they'd encountered named Erigone. The three of them took to calling themselves Sisters of the Cloth and were working with leaders in the surrounding provinces looking for ways to aid the Alliance. We were so jealous of her adventures.

We tried to keep busy to keep our minds off events transpiring outside of our little village. There were of course still the classes from Friar Lynn and Hedy made life as miserable as ever for him. It seemed he could hardly finish propounding the benefits of Discipline before she was questioning his reasoning. I suppose that's what finally caused him to pack up and leave the village, but it hardly seemed fair for the rest of the town to blame Marlee. I mean, if anyone besides Hedy was to blame, it was her father. He was the one who really encouraged that sort of behavior; I often heard her mother chide her for not treating the friar with more respect. Of course no one wants to make a man no one has seen in five years or more a scapegoat when his wife is a much more available target for scorn.

Hedy didn't take it lying down. She tried to defend her mother when she heard people speak poorly of her, but it just seemed to make things worse. Finally, she wrote to Harika asking for help.

About this time, Benjamin became very ill and Momma didn't have as much time to take care of things around the house, so Hedy and I cut down on our adventuring to spend more time with our families. And what with no classes being held, we had that much more time to keep things running as best we could at both our homes. Even with everything going on, we still managed to hear the rumor that the Night Elves had found a new ally to aid us against the incursions of the Horde and the Burning Legion. It's only in looking back that I realize there's nothing we could have done differently. We didn't know what the Draenei looked like, and by the time Harika and Allyriel sent Ryatka our way, Benjamin was in desperate need of a priest anyway.