All good things must come to a beginning

Greetings, traveler.  My name is Matosawitko, the owner and chief editor here.  I thought it would be wise at the beginning to fill you in on the characters you will encounter here as the story continues.

• Matosawitko - that's me!  My name means "Crazy red bear".  I am a Tauren druid, specializing in feral damage.  You will find more information on my history and abilities later in the story.
• Lith'atal - my adopted daughter.  She's really the primary focus of this journal.  She is a young Troll that I rescued from the Orgrimmar orphanage during an elemental invasion, and subsequently adopted.  Since then I have been training her in the druidic arts.

There may be some additional individuals that pop up from time to time, and I will attempt to introduce them properly as appropriate.

For the Horde!

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Author's note: Welcome, and thanks for reading this.  As noted in the sidebar, this is the continuation of a roleplay thread in my World of Warcraft guild forum.  (Browncoats represent!)  Unless noted otherwise, all major characters are my own.  In at least one case, a character was invented specifically for the story and does not represent an actual in-game character.

The first four journal entries were written originally for guild RP.  However, there may be minor variations from the previously published versions in order to allow them to stand on their own.  This will be most notable when Matosawitko and Lith'atal reach Thunder Bluff, since that story was originally part of a much larger RP thread and assumes quite a bit of knowledge about other events that were occurring at the time.

The journal is structured in such a way that larger-scope stories are told in third-person form and published by Matosawitko, while more personal "conversational" stories are in first-person form from Lith'atal.

A final note regarding my writing process - I usually start out with a really rough idea of the character's location and situation, and then let the story develop from there as I write it.  Therefore, the end result is usually completely unexpected.  This was how I discovered and adopted Lith in the first place.  Sometimes I have a slightly more structured framework, but the best stories seem to be the ones that I discover, not the ones where I had an agenda.