It was in the eight thousand and ninety-third year of the Naga calendar that the tablets we now call the Murloc Writings were discovered in the Deeps of Ter’athul. I, Zjaden Foamdancer, was just beginning the fifth year of my Prelacy of the First Shrine of Azshara when the tablets were brought to me for inspection. Of course, I could not read them, but the script bore some similarity to the ancient writings of the Mur’gul. This was enough to intrigue me, and I spent the next twelve years working to translating the writings. There were many setbacks, and many times when my wits failed me, and the text seemed as impenetrable as the slate on which the runic letters were carved. Now, at last, it is over. The Murloc Writings have been translated into the Common Tongue of Naga, Elf, and Man. Here, then, is the account of an ancient race driven from their homes; a race whose cousins we have long enslaved and belittled. It will make unsettling reading for many, but I believe that it is right for these writings to be brought into the light of the shallows. Perhaps they will help to correct our perception of the Murlocs’ inferiority, or perhaps that is merely the dream of an old siren who wishes to see her name remembered in the hallows of the ocean. Be that as it may, I have a feeling that this voice from our murky past may stir up a maelstrom of debate… if it is not silenced altogether.
Note that where Murloc place names are given, I have attempted to replace them with the names by which we know those places now. With personal names, I have been more liberal – lacking any reference upon which to base my transliterations, I have chosen what I believe to be appropriate names, often without any particular reference to the runic text itself.
The Account of Amalulgur, High Chieftain of the Murkwatch Deep:
Of the fall of the Murkwatch, and the Great Flight of the Murloc people
I write these words in fear and trepidation, with dread in my gills and my heart beating cold with grief. The Murkwatch is no more; the ancient sentinels have failed. My own pride was, in part, to blame for our failure – this I acknowledge with humility and regret – but before I begin the Journey of Atonement, I wish to record the tale of my downfall. It is not hubris that drives me to write this, but a desire to warn those who follow in my wake. Heed me well – we are no longer the masters of the deeps.
It began in the twenty-seventh tidecycle of the Eighty-first Watch. At first, we had only omens, but I know them now to be harbingers of what was to come. Evil portents appeared around the Deeps of Ter’athul, and the Wavetasters of the Murkwatch scented blood on the currents, like the foul taste of death borne to us by the shifting tendrils of the ocean. It soon became clear that something was corrupting the dark places, beneath the sunlit upper sea, where the fish swim blindly through the inky waters, and nameless things lurk in shadow. So it was, that the Elders of the Murkwatch resolved to send a shoal of Tiderunners to scent out the Deeps, and to bring back what news they could of this spreading corruption.
The shoal was dispatched at moonrise, on the fifteenth day of the tidecycle, and returned to us on the twentieth with devastating tidings. Two of their number were dead – taken by something of which the survivors would not speak – and the remainder cowered in horror whenever the Elders questioned them, refusing even to relate what had befallen them. It was clear that something terrible stirred in the chasms of Ter’athul, but even the ancient records of the Murkwatch were silent on what dwelt within that stygian abyss.
Feeling it best to await knowledge, rather than to pay for it with the lives of my people, I bided my time. That, in the end, was my undoing, or at least the spawning of it. My people began to murmur in the caverns and corridors of the Deephold; rumours spread like blood, fouling the waters of our home, until the Chieftains of the Five Clans began to call for a Grand Council of the Murkwatch, to decide what was to be done. Soon their cries became too loud to ignore, and the mutterings of my people grew to a strident clamour. A Council was duly convened. Many Elders spoke that day, to remind me of my sacred duty as High Chieftain of the Deep, and their words were as bubbles of steam to me, scalding my skin as they harangued and berated. They advised action, though my instincts cried for caution; they accused me of weakness, decrying my patience as the folly of a pale-bellied coward.
So it was, like a tempter-shark on the hunt, that the Elders of the Murkwatch goaded me into rash action. At my order, the armies of the Deephold girded themselves in their armour of coral, and took up their razorspine blades, seeking to destroy the source of this foulness that polluted the deeps. Four thousands of Murlocs went forth from the ’hold, proud-finned and warlike; for nine days they journeyed into darkness.
Of the seven hundreds who returned, only a few were able to describe what they saw. Those who were spoke of tentacles of shadow rising from the depths; of hideous, malformed creatures rotting as they swam; of the scattered bones of whale and fish littering the seabed. They talked in anguished tones of an unspeakable creature ascending from the murky chasms, baleful and vicious, without mercy and implacable in its hunger for death. On that day, its ravenous maw claimed more than three thousands of my people.
In a stroke, the might of the Murkwatch was shattered. Slain were Berad, Bralth and Belagul, Golgor the Mighty and Thulugel Silverspine; Arigol, Veralath and the five sons of Furugun also met their doom that day. Their blood stained the waters, mingling with that of so many others that the taste of it reached even to the very gates of the Deephold. May their souls be remembered forever, until the Last Night is ended, and the moon quenches her flame in the ocean.
The Murkwatch was broken, and those few who survived brought back such tales of horror that those who remained shivered in abject fear. A new terror stalked our dreams, and its name was Kraken. Yes, Kraken – that fiend that we believed to be a myth; that tenebrous corrupter of the deep, whose very shadow is death and whose eyes burn crimson with hunger. Something had awakened our nightmares, stirring them into dreadful life in the black depths of Ter’athul.
Without the Murkwatch to protect them, the other Clans were sore afraid. One by one, they fled, abandoning the deeps, and seeking the bright places of the shallows, where the sunlight banished memories of the night-shadowed depths. The Deephold became empty and silent, its great halls darkened and its hallowed caverns bereft of life. The Great Flight, we call it now, but greatness is not something I would ascribe to it. No – it was an ignominious retreat, as we scurried in terror from our ancestral home, abandoning the sacrosanct duty laid upon our race in the very beginning of the world. That is my great shame – not the failure of the Murkwatch, so much as the breaking of the ancient vow. A pact was made, between our ancestors and the Great Builders, the Shapers of the Seas who formed the very chasms and mountains of deeps. Now we have betrayed them, and I fear that we will not find another realm to call our home.
Already there are rumours that something else stirs in the ocean’s swirling heart – tales of a long-forgotten race awakening in the hidden places where even the Murkwatch did not venture. I do not know whether or not these are true. Rumours do not concern me now, only the survival of my people. I shall make the Journey of Atonement, onto dry land and into the aching heat of the unveiled sun. I shall bare my skin to that terrible flame – and I will return to my people, bearing the scars that I deserve. I will be outcast, a High Chieftain no more. This message, therefore, I give to all those who read my words. The deep places of the ocean are no longer ours.