Ode to Abner

Was it hard growing up, with no lower jaw?
I remember the undead children, the way they ridiculed you.
They called you Waggy Tongue and Licky.
How much were they laughing on the day,
after you had spent your life training
in the ways of the warrior,
in the method of the blade,
in the three sacred stances of battle,
when you brought the honed edge of your axe to their necks and relieved them of their jeering heads?

You precocious fool.
We would no sooner be conversed in the trade of unrefined ore,
than I would hear tales of you slapping your sword on the ass of a dragon ten times your hunched stature.
Fozruk himself,
contented daily in his peaceful walks through the highlands of Arathi with his friendly guild of three bumbling kobolds,
was not safe from your unbiased aggression.
Nor were hundreds of bright-eyed Alliance champions,
low in level but high in ambition,
whom you felled with your ranged weapon,
a murderous method meant to teach them humility.

And how could I neglect to mention
our journeys through the gloomy, wet subways of Ironforge and Stormwind.
I learned all I ever needed to know about the perils of a leap to and from a speeding train,
by your side.

If I should speak for someone whose voice is not heard in this ode,
it would have to be the scores of piteous fools who watched in disbelief,
and confusion,
and frustration,
as you carried their blue banner across the bloody gulch of the Warsong Woods,
you alone without a healer,
and them stricken with a petrifying fear
as you showed them what their insides looked like
and spit on their fresh corpses
and rubbed the cloth bearing their alliance symbol on your rotting crotch,
in a gesture of mockery.

The halls of Blackwing Lair will forever ring with your name.
The searing lava flowing through Molten Core will illuminate the faces of adventurers who will follow in your path but never truly embrace it.
C'thun will continue to sow his whispering seeds of subversion in every soldier of fortune who enters his ancient temples to steal his treasures,
but as he tires of his routine over the ages,
he will glance over at his nightstand from time to time,
where, to this day, he displays a picture of you,
stabbing his kidneys from the inside.
"There's Abner, the most able warrior who ever stabbed my kidneys," he will say, and then he'll shed a giant tear of remorse from his huge eye.

And etched in my memory,
like grooves on a record,
are the sounds of your mad, cackling laughter
as dozens of Darkshire night watchmen,
under your provocation,
pursue me through the haunted forests of Duskwood
as I run, screaming your cursed name, and helplessly watch you ride into the sunset.

Through it all, these things remained true:
You are a warrior among warriors.
You are my oldest companion.
I will miss you.