Considering the Culling

It was only after he knew the other three had gone that Hodges let his head fall into his hands. For some reason, he did not feel like sobbing uncontrollably. Everything else fell into place: the heavy breathing, the violent images running through his mind, and the shaking of his legs, but there was no outburst of tears. Perhaps those never came back to you, no matter where you went.
His vision cut short by fingers with full flesh and skin, Hodges was shielded from the sight of Cult of the Damned wagons, cages and tents. But his ears could still hear the bubbling of The Plague of Undeath. That thing. The most hateful thing.
He’d been loyal to his clan. He’d even overseen The Apothecarium for a while. That had been no easy task, considering the overwhelming majority of its members hated his guts. But he had done it both to please The Banshee Queen, and to please his green-skinned masters in Orgrimmar. He had been sensible, subservient, and polite.
And they had rewarded him by practically forcing the Forsaken Warrior to take part in the Culling of Stratholme. And through this he had seen that the old separations were still very much there, and he was still no better, in their eyes, than an Apothecary. No wonder the Orcs, Trolls and Tauren were so often plotted against. They were so cruel, so callous, and so unaccommodating. True, he had been a very, very poor soldier tonight, and had given Sergeant Nelai enough lip to last until Winter Veil, but since fear and bewilderment were not traits often found on Forsaken, couldn’t they tell the sheer magnitude of what they were asking him to do? Or did they simply not care?
Only He could bring out this in Hodges. Only He could reduce him to a slobbering wreck. And what made it worse, was that Hodges knew the bastard had won. Because what he had just been through, culminating in Arthas’s pronouncement that he was off to Northrend… that was the last time the Forsaken would see his former Prince. Triumphant. And, somehow, not even showing a modicum of regret at killing so many of his own people.
Because the “peasants” were always there for the royalty to abuse and exploit. They laboured all day every day for their noble or royal masters, and when it came down to it, they got nothing. The self-importance that Arthas had shown, going as far as to disband the Silver Hand, was something that had had Hodges seething like a rabid dog, kept away from its evening meal.
And Hodges had been forced to hack through those same peasants, and only a portion of them had been transformed into their undead states. The majority had been slain in their beds, or at their front doors. And it was all completely okay, according to the three who had accompanied him. This was all work that had to be done, preferably with a smile on your face, because otherwise, far worse things would happen.
Of course, those far worse things would have to compete with all the blood (and there had been a lot of it), and all the dead faces of disbelief. Those far worse things would have to match the unblinking horror of opening the door of a room, only to find that the inside walls were colourful, and had stars and sheep on them, and having to kill the occupant anyway. Hodges did not believe that that could be topped, and he was almost willing to find out.
But no. It was done. It had been done quickly. Every kill had been followed up by another less than a second later. And Hodges had never let his eyes drift onto the fallen. Only onto the falling.
That wasn’t strictly true, of course. He had spent more than enough time staring at the corpses of the Infinite Dragons. He was trying to fathom how much he hated them. “A damn lot” would be an acceptable answer, but it wouldn’t sum up the burning in his bones that was urging him to kill more of them. He wanted to find more, and he wanted to slay more. Because this here… this had been a clever plan. Sabotage the timeline of an event that some wouldn’t dare tread. An event that doomed a kingdom. An event that splattered blood upon all the places that blood should never go. Orphanages. Pubs. Post Offices. Even kennels.
It was masterly. But it was also something that could never be forgiven. The Infinites, Hodges decided, had to be duly punished for this. They had tried to break his mind, and the minds of all the other Forsaken, and yes, humans, in order for their victory to be assured.
Hodges’ need to kill had not diminished since the Lich King had been slain. And though he would try to hide it, he was, to put it mildly, gutted. He, and his people, had always figured that slaying Arthas would yield some kind of redemption. Something would happen, they thought, that would make things just a little better. But it hadn’t. Here they were, with revenge, their reason for existing, already carried out. What now?
For Hodges, he had an idea. As he stood up, and looked around at Crusaders’ Square, he desperately wished for another Infinite Dragon to pop up into view, for him to slash and hack and stab and garrote and impale and destroy. They had tortured his mind, and thus out of him they had made a demented enemy, who would only consider his job done when none of them remained. The leader of the ones who had fiddled with this particular timeline had been slaughtered, and Hodges had chiseled victory into stone by biting and chewing into the dragon’s black flesh. There was a tastelessness to it that permeated through all the food that Hodges ate, and that was down to his half-a-tongue rather than the texture of his snacks.
He couldn’t bear to walk through the city again. Even now, after battle had been won, and his allies had departed, it still felt unreal. He was seeing the thing that he thought he’d never see. He’d only ever wondered about the true details of what had gone on, and the answer that his own thoughts had always gone for was “It was dark, it was nasty, and people died.” The difference between that and the truth he had seen enacted here tonight was like the difference between a puddle and the North Sea.
As that sense of disbelief grabbed at him with both claws, he sagged back down onto the steps. He didn’t particularly want to see his clan for a good few hours yet. He didn’t want to see the Bronze, either. They’d nod at him, he bet, and make other gestures that endeavoured to suggest that they understood the emotional pain that had been inflicted upon him, and that he had done the right thing. But they didn’t, and he hadn’t. They didn’t understand a Forsaken at all. They saw him as a freak of nature, and he knew that. They certainly tried to hide it, but dragons were dragons. If it didn’t have a pulse, they didn’t want to know.
He just wanted to rage. He wanted to bite someone’s lungs right out of their chest. But that would damn him even further down into the ranks currently occupied by The Apothecaries and The Warlocks. And his performance tonight, all refusals and swears, was bound to get him talked about in distinctly negative terms. He could not win. He knew this. And it made him absolutely bitter.
Just in case, he began looking into the far corner of the Square, hoping to see an Infinite lurking about, just asking to be slain. No such luck. And that only intensified his hunger.