Three Roads to the Rest

The Telling

Regulars at Greybear's Rest learn fast that the man pulling their pints wasn't always behind a bar. Ask him about the scar on his forearm, or why he goes quiet near portal-light, and he'll change the subject. The stories get told anyway — by travelers passing through who swear they crossed paths with a Kaldor Greybear somewhere else entirely, in a world that wasn't this one.

The Azeroth one is still out there. Somewhere between the Eastern Kingdoms and wherever the war has most recently dragged the Horde and the Alliance, a Fury Warrior answering to the same name is doing what he's always done — hit first, hit twice, let the rage sort out the rest. He's never once set foot in this tavern, and as far as anyone here can tell, has no plans to. Whether he's the same man who tends bar in Denar, or just wears the name the same way a lot of soldiers wear a lucky one, is a question nobody at the Rest has settled. Most stopped trying a while ago.

The Cairn one made it home. He fought through the Aetherial invasion as a Cabalist, came out the other side of it in one piece, and decided that was enough campaigning for one lifetime. The axes he carried through Ugdenbog and the Steps of Torment hang over the mantel now, close enough to grab if he ever needed them again. He hasn't. Not once. He still won't sell them, either.

The Dereth one is the one nobody brings up on a slow night. He went through a portal chasing something — nobody left at the Rest quite remembers what — and it sealed behind him before he came back through. No second doorway ever opened in its place. Whether he's dead, lost, or just very far from home is the kind of question this tavern learned not to ask twice. There's a chair at the end of the bar nobody else sits in, all the same.

It's not that Greybear's Rest sits at the center of anything — the Quillwisp would be the first to say the maps don't work that way. But enough travelers pass through with a story that starts “there was a man in my world with your name,” and pull up a chair to tell it, that it's stopped feeling like coincidence. Every one of those stories gets written down here. Call it habit. Call it hoping one of them turns out to be a door back, for the one who never got to walk through his.