I am a Rose: A Visual Story

There is a little house in Val’sharah with a story to tell. Tucked away under a corrupted tree, this house appears to be like any other unfortunate structure caught in the Nightmare – hastily abandoned and then ransacked. Except… in this house, the previous inhabitants left notes.

This is one of those things that I think is far cooler to experience in game rather than read about later, so I’d highly recommend you guys check this structure and the surrounding areas out for yourself! I unfortunately don’t have the exact coordinates, but it is located across the bridge from Starsong Refuge and to the left once you reach the branching of the trail. However, if you want to know the story now, keep reading after the cut!

There’s about five notes in total, scattered about the front of the structure, leading towards the house itself. All of the notes in the front appear to say the same thing over and over and over, although if you play any non night elf race, the message is a whole bunch of gobbly gook. If you happen to play a Kaldorei though… the note is even more haunting.

Once you enter the house proper, there is only one note in here, sitting right in the center of the floor. All around, the furniture has been mangled and crushed, nightmare vines creeping through everything (there’s also a chest, but I don’t think this is so important to the story since it only drops the typical AP items). The note has changed, but as before, only night elves can read it’s true message.

All on it’s own, the whole area is very eerie. The Nightmare is known for driving insane those who get caught in it’s path. It’s very likely that whoever wrote these notes original was driven mad, a poor soul caught in the crossfire of Xavius’s war. The vagueness of the notes, too, makes them downright frightening. “Every rose has it’s thorns”, well that’s relatively straightforward – even beautiful things have problems. But why the transition to “I am a rose”; is the author admitting they’re flawed too? Or do they realize, at least on some level, that they’re being corrupted? The fact that the message is scrawled over and over again only heightens suspense.

After discovering the notes, I kept snooping around in and outside of the house. When I rounded to the back, I discovered something that made the notes pale in comparison.

In what might have been a shallow grave at the back of the house is a pile of skeletons. Other, bodiless skulls rest on books or inside a nearby box. But the most horrifying part? Almost every skeleton has a rose growing out of the skull.

Stuff like this is what I live for in game. As far as I can tell, there’s no quest tie-in to this little visual story, and no greater purpose to it beyond being downright hair-raising. But this story, potentially because of it’s ambiguity, is one of the most memorable and haunting parts of Val’sharah. We’ll never know what happened here, but given the context, the stories we can imagine are endless.

Thank you Blizzard for one of the creepiest stories in game!

And thank you Alunaria for reminding me of this!