The Collected Writings of Dunkleosteus

Two years ago

The turn of the world brought dawn sooner than she wanted. Hushed wind kissed the eternal leaves of Eversong, filtered through verdant boughs and brushed an admonishing farewell against the weathered cheek of the paladin. She was alone, framed between the blushing dawn and the retreating night, atop a solitary rise that overlooked the Elrendar.

Contemplative silence hung about her like an old, well-worn and much-loved blanket. It was a familiar silence, wrought of cold memory and weary thoughts. She wrapped herself in it, clung to it like a child in the quiet cold.

Life is more than the sum of its parts, my love.

Her father’s voice echoed from beyond the grave, risen in her memory. Cool, soothing bass tones tinged with familiar comfort. Prematurely grey hair. The scent of smoke. A lopsided smile, gold-capped and gap-toothed. Perpetually stubbly face with skin like old leather.

Zimraphel filled her lungs with sweet air and pushed it back out again. Her father’s ghost let go its temporary hold on her soul, slipping away as the river of her mind meandered in tune with the one below.

I refuse to regret the only life I’ve had.

The last words of her sister, her idol, her protector, her antagonist. The woman Zimraphel had once considered the most world-wise, the most grounded; a murderer, a mother, a wife, a traitor, a thrice-damned bitch. Izosia had been lost, like everyone else, but she always painted a different picture for her little sister. Blonde hair the color of moonlight, obscuring eyes that burned with addiction. Black leather and their father’s beloved blades at home on her hips. Jocular, wry, brutally broken by the weight of her many mistakes. Selfish. Coward. Gone.

Sisterly idolatry slipped away, crushed under the burden of rising bitterness. Zimraphel let those feelings go with a practiced mastery and began the trek that would take her back to the ivory and wine cobbled streets, away from this golden forest and silver river so steeped in the mists of memory.

You will always measure up to my love, Zim.

She paused beneath a tree covered in flowering morning glories, their vines twisted over each other a melee of life. She reached up to pluck one blossom, violet fading into cream. It was a momentary pause, a reflection for the ebon-haired woman who had had so little role her life until the end. Without her, she would not be alive; without her, she would not have survived the devastation that had once threatened this brilliant place.

Her mother, a paladin more devout than she would ever be, might have seen this forest in a different light: familiar, peaceful, comforting in its solid reality, not for the shadows of what it had once been. Here, in the present, in the dawn-limned beauty, was a place for mourning as well as solace. Zimraphel let the flower fall through open fingers, offering up a prayer for the souls of her family in the stillness of the glade.

A soft sense of peace began to scrub out the bitterness that came before the dawn.

Planar leaves of grass parted company and swayed in the wake of her passing. Steel-clad, numbed to the world, her feet gathered morning dew with each step. Two weeks home, she mused.

Her thoughts turned to the events of those two weeks; botched jobs, arguments with idiot mercenaries, meeting old comrades, crippling nostalgia, insomnia, and a general… listlessness. She was a soldier, wasn’t she? Did she not serve the Light, in her own way?

Who does a soldier fight in her own home? What faith does a paladin defend if not her own?

Golden light cast a haze in the misty air. Zimraphel’s amber eyes wandered left, right, with the vigilance of her identity. She didn’t see the rising spires of the city until she had all but left the crowded trunks and boughs behind. By the time the she had crossed the ornate threshold of the gates she had abandoned all melancholic thoughts. She was home. Unhurt. Alone.

“What’d he do?”

“What are you, fresh or somethin’?” The pot-bellied man drawled the words, his red, splotched face a study of contempt as he looked the woman in patchwork leather and platemail over again. “Look, if you need someone to hold your hand through this—”

“I need to know I’m not wading into a pool of shit. Or if I am,” Cereta added, taking another step forward into the tiny office.

The aged plate sabaton screeched a soft note against the floorboard, which conveniently creaked. Luck sometimes allowed for ominous things to happen, things that worked in her favor as often as they did not. This job looked to be one of them. A decent sum for a quick intimidation job. Never pleasant, never quick, but relatively simple, and no one had to die. This last fact she kept circling back to, justifying it to herself perhaps more than was healthy. No one had to die.

“The guy robbed the girlfriend of a local fella. The local fella is involved in... let’s say some inadvisable employment, if we look at it long term, and he’s had a lot of attention on him lately. That’s where you and me come in. I offer my services to contract out a little tender love for this fuckwad, and you provide the lovin’.”

That explanation was accompanied by a less than pleasant leer. He looked the part of a rogue, albeit rounded by age, gluttony, and spending more time with his feet propped up on a desk than on the ground. He continued, using the folded corner of some mouldering parchment to pick his teeth as he spoke:

“That and he doesn’t like the girl that much, but he needs her around for some leverage. Not worth risking his own lads or freedom on it, push comes to shove.”

“Give me the details. I’ll do it.”

“Excellent. Fella by the name of Tom Lackland, goes by Tommy Lack. Hangs out around Old Town some days, more often down by the harbor or in some alleyway. Likes the Bruised Rose. You know it?”

“Aye. I know it. Terms?” Cereta kept her voice clipped, terse in mercenary professionalism.

“Half now, half after.” Standard. She grunted her agreement.

“Listen, uh... if you could make sure his face is real clearly the target, that’d be great. Seems some folks think he’s a looker and uh...” He let the thought trail off into a smile as sinister as it was apologetic, a bizarre combination she felt disgusted to understand.

“Got it.”

“Oh, and uh, wear protection, huh, babe?” A riotous, gurgling laugh echoed around the closed walls of the room.

Brokenboot forced herself to laugh along, managing a few peals that sounded almost amused. Again the floorboard creaked as she stepped closer, one metal-clad hand closing in on the scraggly, greying mass of the man’s beard. She yanked hard, cutting off his laughter in a yelp of alarm as he rose from his raggedly cushioned chair and leaned across the parchment-strewn table between them to lessen the hurt.

“Last thing, babe,” she sneered, pressing her weathered face close to his and noting with a savage pride she hated the tiniest glint of panic on his features.

“Screw me on this in any way, gold, information, any of it, and I will gut you. No matter how long that would take,” she added with a crass laugh of her own.

She patted the stretched leather that covered his belly and released him. Whatever fear he’d felt faded quickly from his blotched face; he did not seem surprised or taken aback by her threat. Instead, he settled back into his chair, making a show of righting the papers on his desk as though they had been ordered before he was dragged halfway across them.

“Good to know you aren’t as fresh as you act, lady,” he growled as he heaved a leather-bound tome decorated with grime from the larger of the two drawers built into the desk.

“And lucky for you I like to be handled a little. You watch yourself, you hear? Those big, plated feet of yours might walk into a world of hurt one day.” He began leafing through the uneven pages as he spoke, each one marked with columns, names, dates, and prices. He found that day’s entry and scrawled in a few notes, coded but neatly written.

“Original threat. Do you hire out for writers, too?” she retorted, layering as much sarcasm onto her disdain as she could.

She held out a hand, and there was a moment between the two; aging rogue looked at aging warrior, a tale as old as time playing out between them. Whatever insults had been offered were, though annoying, part of the ritual, each having just cause should the other turn. She hated it. But she understood it. It was a game she could forget for a while after this, and easier to reconcile than starving on the docks for another season.

He took her hand, shook it once, and finished his writing. He rummaged in the small drawer of the desk and held out a modest stack of coins in silver and gold. He had the good grace to watch patiently as she counted them.

“Always a pleasure, Perry,” she grunted without feeling, stomping her way to the small door of the small room.

“Don’t choke and die, huh?” he rejoined idly, already refocused on the moldering tome that kept track of his spindly empire of criminal crumbs.

The night was not cold. That was a blessing, since the plate kept out the cold about as well as it kept out the heat. Still, Cereta was glad of the quilted gambeson beneath the heavy riveted armor, more cushion that insulation. While the night was warm, it was long, and by choice she stood on a partially exposed balcony.

Guard duty was not new or intriguing to her; long hours of her life had been spent in that attitude, the heavy axe-head of her halberd resting against one spiked shoulder. She doubted its use would be necessary, but one never knew. Better to be ready than dead.

The events of the day meandered the space of her thoughts, not quite reaching the level of distraction necessary for her to pull her attention away from them. The fur-trimmed woman, primal in attire but so... vital. Kind. Flattering. She tore her thoughts from that infectious grin and the memory of watching her frustration, the joy of altering the stranger’s casual demands. Confusion warred with a blossoming joy inside her, the entire experience relived with a kind of nascent fear.

What would she have done differently, had Felix not waited at some familiar haunt in the city?

Thoughts like this never used to bother her. Something had changed on this latest return to the white-hewn stone of Stormwind, some... hangup that existed in her soul when she thought of him. It irked her as much as it terrified her, this urge to preserve and to please. She had not felt it for nearly twenty years, and even now, alone outside of a warehouse guarding a door no one was interested in for less gold than the effort was worth, she avoided naming that feeling.

Left unnamed, it had no power over her, she told herself firmly. A second thought was shoved back, unacknowledged, to the inner recesses of her mind.

Avoiding the truth does not make it untrue.

Silence, incomplete. A land once fertile and green. The forest corrupted, a shadow of perished joy. Another shadow lurked. Seeped into psyche, Gnawed at the marrow of souls.

Her ears heard phantom echoes alongside the hushed scraping of plate against packed earth: writhing screams of terror and the simmering fear of the void unleashed. Each step brought sensation with sounds, both real and remembered. Raw pain found her as the rends in her arm and leg reopened, but she dared not linger with the others in the ichor-stained glade. She did not want to break in the midst of joyous reunions and hard-won relief. The break was coming. Better, then, to be alone when it came. Or at least in the open under the stars if she could find them.

She had weathered storms, hadn’t she? Suffered agony, given home to plentitudes of hurt that she still carried as scars. Pain was as frightening to her as the certainty of death; expected and accepted.

Yet she’d never seen the equal of what she’d witnessed that night. That was beyond her days as a simple soldier.

As the warrior walked, she banished momentarily thoughts of oozing dark and festering pain with reflection on who she had been. A soldier. A marine. Twice homeless, once broken, but never in the tangle of darkness that she’d found herself in that night. Many of her colleagues had taken it in stride, it seemed, and though she kept a brave enough facade, she was far from right as rain.

She wondered, telling her more confident self it was an honest question, if she was worthy of the challenge. One of the fold? Or the newest and weakest link? Her thoughts danced merrily to this tune of self-doubt, keeping rhythm with the throbbing pain.

Dark shapes floated on the periphery of the forest; here a house, there a storehouse. The town materialized from the gloom, lit only by the night’s sentinels. It seemed a lifetime before she crested the small hill where the gryphon master kept the beasts. Plate met woodgrain in a hollow knock against the makeshift desk that guarded the roosts.

“Out late.” It was a statement, hurled like an accusation from a bleary gryphon handler who appeared eyes-first from his clandestine nap ‘neath the desk.

“Sure am,” she retorted, mustering the requisite cheer to sound as close to normal as she could. “I promise I come only in search of a swift ride to the city. You’ll get no trouble from me.”

“You don’t look like trouble,” he grunted. “You look like shit.”

The cadence of pain and worry skipped a beat. She felt a wry smile stir in the lines that hemmed her mouth.

“A thousand thanks for the compliment,” she said, fighting a snort of laughter as his shoulders rose and fell in a weary, indifferent shrug.

Coins changed hands and the belabored man, grey and long-suffering in his night post, rose to shuffle one of the gryphons from a roost. By the time she’d hoisted herself into the leather saddle, the man was back in his own roost, muttering about bloodied travelers in the night.