Emily Barker

Emily hated the concept of “destiny”: that certain events were inescapable matters of prophecy, that she was fated to meet the people she did, and be left by them in turn. She liked to tell herself that it was horseshit, that her mother was a lying whore, but every now and then, something would happen that was hard to swallow. Basil Thornwyck was hard to swallow. 

The man was touched by the hand of something primeval and impossibly dark. It was as if some intangible part of him had been hollowed out by it, and it was unclear to her how well he understood it. He was cunning in the way ravens were, his survival assured not by force, but by adaptation. He was utterly inscrutable - to her, and certainly to the people he surrounded himself with. How exhausting that must have been, how lonely.

When he came looking for her, she should have known it wouldn’t be for a simple job. He was in search of something incredibly rare and almost as dangerous, something found only in the one place her heart wasn’t prepared to go. She should have said no. Instead, she found herself in Kalimdor for the first time in years, in the marsh where she briefly knew peace, knew love. Oh, if only she’d known it was love. That was another thing she liked to tell herself: that if only she knew, she wouldn’t have done what she did, wouldn’t have been her mother’s daughter, for once in her godsdamned life.

Basil sent her here, and she found that her garden had been reclaimed by the marsh. Earthen pots had tipped and broken, and the beds were thick with weeds and choked by creeping vines. Her chicken coop was empty, the shack she once called “home” - Inry’s home - clearly long abandoned. When she looked inside, she found it had been left in such a state that she suspected he’d meant to come back. When Basil sent her here, she touched nothing, took nothing, as if preserving the scene meant preserving clues as to what happened.

Now, she was here of her own volition, to make sense of what she saw. She’d wanted to drag him here with her, make him draw everything exactly as it was so she couldn’t forget any details - but the rational part of her knew it would be a waste of the favor he owed her. Anything she found here wasn’t going to point to Inry.

She dragged her fingertips along the back of the wooden chair where he’d sit across from her at breakfast and she’d steal bacon from his plate. Her eyes studied the surface of the table, where he’d set out a plate for himself one day and never come back to fill it. “Where did you go?” She whispered, her voice trembling in the quiet. It was shady inside, but about as humid as outside, and without them there to maintain it, the previously manageable scents of damp and dust had taken over. 

Like a ghost tethered to the place she died, Emily drifted listlessly to the bedroom, tested her weight on the bed with her hands. The frame hadn’t rotted. The bedding didn’t look moldy, either, but she didn’t dare crawl inside it. Instead, she flopped on her back and stared at the ceiling. “Y’know what scares me the most, darlin’?” She told the darkness, her voice drier than she thought it’d be in such heavy air. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t give up to have you back. Magic, my curse, sex,” she laughed bitterly. “Sex seems so unimportant now.”

Sex was what got her here, sort of. He’d rejected her a few times, and in her youth, it felt like a rejection of her and everything she was: a witch, a Worgen, too much, not enough, wrong. It wounded her so deeply, put so much distance between them she didn’t know how to make up - so she got it somewhere else, from someone more like her. That was what Mary always said she needed: another wolf. It was only in the bittersweet clarity of hindsight that Emily realized that Inry had been wolf enough. She was the problem: too emotional, too stupid, too impulsive, too needy, too cowardly to talk to him, to work through it with him the way she reckoned partners were supposed to handle their shit. She still didn’t know much about that; she hadn’t let herself try again with anyone else, and she liked to tell herself she never would. 

If there was a destiny she wanted to believe in, it was that they were right for each other the whole time, and one day, they’d find their way back to each other again. They’d come back here, rebuild this place, and finally know a kind of peace that could last: just them and the critters in the marsh, as far away from kings as they could get. Of course, she wasn’t delusional. That’s why Basil wasn’t here filling his sketchbook for her benefit, why she hadn’t looked for Inry before and wouldn’t start looking now. 

Certain events were inescapable matters of prophecy.  She was fated to meet the people she did, and be left by them in turn.

Twenty years ago…

Like sand through an hourglass, dirt slipped through Emily’s fist to the parched earth below. The ground was pale and cracked beneath her weight where she crouched. She dusted her hand on the coarse fabric of her trousers, the lingering grit abrasive against the skin of her palm.

“Feed it,” her mother’s voice commanded.

With her left hand, Emily drew her truesilver knife from its sheath in her boot, and - without hesitation - sliced open her right palm. Blood oozed generously from the cut. She made a fist and squeezed, letting liquid crimson drip steadily onto the soil.

The cost of new life was death. Even a womb could not grow life without the meat of slaughtered animals, the flesh of produce grown in corpse-enriched soil. Emily had known this for almost as long as she’d known her own name. She could not give without taking, could not take without giving. The soil that greedily drank of her would sprout the seeds she planted there, and the vines would fruit, and the fruit would feed the people who had asked this of her.

In return, with great reluctance, the people gave her meager offerings: cast off materials, a few copper. Emily was ashamed to even accept them, but her mother’s grip on the back of her neck kept her in line. 

“Their fear is enough,” she whispered.

Late into the night, Emily wrestled with sleep. Her skin was hot to the touch and sticky with sweat, damp hair clinging to her forehead. In a fitful cycle, she kicked off the threadbare blanket to cool off until chills drove her to wrap it around her shoulders once more. Exhausted, she would succumb to sleep for a time, fragments of dreams flashing in and fading out. 

She heard the manic scrabble of stiff bristles accosting taut canvas, watched as swaths of blue and green bled across the insides of her eyelids until she could see nothing else but blending pigments that slowly formed the shape of water, inky dark and tempestuous. It was accompanied by a sense of urgency that left her mouth dry and her heart pounding in her throat. 

A distant, disembodied voice reached her ears, muffled as if by water. She could not make out any words, but the voice was unmistakably his; its cadence was that of a man who spoke to himself, and though it waxed and waned in volume and intensity, it never grew any clearer. 

Each time she stirred from sleep, the details became murkier. Emily didn’t fall ill - not like this, not since the bite - but just as the dream was lost to fever, so, too, was her cognizance of that fact. The fever itself was a transient attacker she would not remember come dawn. When she woke up feeling like shit, she would blame the drink, swear it off for a day or three. 

It was a bad habit, anyway.

@daily-writing-challenge

Sometimes, in her dreams, they were still together. They hid in some liminal space that came before she broke his heart.

In those dreams, she’d apologize to him, and he never knew why. They’d be wrapped in each other’s arms in the pale light of dawn, sometimes in a bedroll on the ground, sometimes in a bed in some rented room, always content. She’d kiss his brow, or the tip of his nose, and whisper “I’m sorry,” and he’d stir a bit and, with eyes still closed, grumble back:

“What’d you do now?”

What hadn’t she fucking done?

The first time she had that dream, she didn’t answer, she just cried in his arms and he held her without a word. The first few dreams were like that, like she was grieving the loss of his presence, the warmth and safety his body had provided her when she was bone tired, sick as a dog, secretly afraid of so many things. She was grieving the loss of his quiet companionship, his subtle strength, the taste of happiness he’d given her that she might never know again.

After maybe the third time, she still didn’t answer him, let him fall asleep while she stared at the memory of his face. It was still vivid back then, and felt so real that she’d think they were meeting in dreams, if not for the fact that the Inry in her dreams had no recollection of what a miserable whore she was.

For a long time, she lied to him. She’d kiss him again, tell him: “Nothing, love, go back to sleep.” It was incredibly self-indulgent of her, and as punishment for her sins, those dreams grew further and further apart. The memory of his face, his voice, faded just a little. Her heartache didn’t, but she got used to the hurt, let it fade into the background with so much other pain.

For years, she didn’t dream of him at all, and when she first realized she’d stopped dreaming about him, she reckoned those dreams had been part of some emotional process beyond her ken, one that must have run its course. Oh, what a dumb bitch she was.

The world kept turning, relentless and way too fast. He was long gone, somewhere, and she knew better than to look for him. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sorry - she was so fucking sorry, in fact - but what was she going to do? Track him down to tell him, four years too late? The look on his face would burn her to cinders, she was sure of it.

Even if she was brave enough, what was she supposed to do? Have him listen to all the fucked up reasons for her horrible decisions? “I was raised a certain way, conditioned to want certain things”, “I was worried you’d never accept me for what I was”, “I was so afraid of hurting you I did it anyway”, “I never learned how to love you right”.

She never really had learned how to love him, or anyone. There’d been no one before him - no one that mattered, anyway - and there’d been absolutely no one since. That was her penance: self-inflicted loneliness, forever. It was what she deserved; the first chance she’d got to prove she wasn’t a monster, she did the opposite, and to the last person in the world to deserve it. How hideous was she?

Recently, she’d started having the dream again, and to say that messed her up a little would be an understatement. She’d assumed it was over, resigned herself to never seeing his face again, and buried herself in work. She’d grown accustomed to her self-imposed isolation, taken up smoking because the smell reminded her of him and with any luck the cigarettes would kill her faster. And then, one night, for no apparent reason, there she was again: with him, in some liminal space that came before she broke his heart.

“I’m so sorry, love, I’ve done an awful, unforgivable thing,” she whispered. “We should have talked about this, should’ve seen it through while you were still here, but I was a godsdamned coward and I’m still scared now.” Then, she just cried in his arms and he held her without a word.

After that, she started writing him letters that she never sent.

She sat at the bar, mantling over pen and parchment like a hawk over a kill, the column of steam from her half-full mug of coffee shrinking by the minute as she scrawled and scratched, emotive turns of phrase angrily struck through - sometimes twice - before another attempt was made. After a time, she dropped the pen and raked a hand through her sleep tousled mane before reaching for the lukewarm coffee and chugging it down.

I was young and dumb then, she’d written. Now, she reckoned, she was just dumb. So much had changed - damn near everything, in fact. Gilneas belonged to the Greymanes once more. The stonemasons of Westfall had been issued a royal pardon. Decades worth of loss and struggle had allegedly come to an end, yet she didn’t feel like a godsdamned thing was “over”. Setting the empty mug aside, she began writing again.

The crown says the fighting's done. How about you? Have you given up your fight? Her pen hovered above the parchment then, scratching uncertainly at the air. Her draft was a mess of ink spots born of hesitation and redacted sentences, and the top right corner of the page was marred by a coffee ring. With a frustrated growl, she snatched the parchment and crumpled it.

She could write anything but what she meant. Any time she got close, she panicked and crossed it out. It’d been years since she'd last laid eyes on him. The last time they were together… hadn't been pleasant, for either of them. Her heart ached at the memory of it - the yellin’, the cussin’, the tears - it was like a wound that just wouldn’t heal, the scab sloughing off and blood welling from it every time she remembered. She'd been alone since then, had plenty of time to think - hated every minute of that.

The way he lived his life, she could have been writing letters to a ghost. Or maybe he had given up his fight. Maybe he was married. Maybe he had a farm, maybe even a kid… or maybe not. Maybe it was just him on a horse somewhere, somewhere far away from all of this. She liked the idea of that for him.

In his own way, he had always seemed at peace on the road. Carrying only what he needed, one with his horse, sketching scenery, plants, and animals in his leather-bound journal while he had his morning coffee and a cigarette. Sometimes he wrote a bit. She never saw it, never asked about it, but she'd always wondered what he wrote. Was it a record of what he saw? His thoughts, feelings? Was it poetry? Had he ever written about her?

She squeezed the crumpled parchment in her fist, trying to root herself in the present instead of picturing a beautiful, blushing dawn long past. She could almost feel the warmth of his breath against her neck, almost hear him whispering her name.

“Emily!” The barkeep barked, and she startled, eyes locking on to the tall, broad man. It was his inn she'd taken up residence in since she once again found herself in Stormwind, and if not for how well she paid him, she was certain he'd have sent her packing a fortnight ago. “Got a visitor,” he gestured with his head to her right, and she turned to see a strange man in what looked to her like a fine suit.

The stranger greeted her with the silver tongue of a man of means and the status that came with them, flashing white teeth. She knew his kind and the bargains they so liked to strike, knew that nothing good could possibly come of this, nothing but the money, money that could feed her appetite for months.

Nothing like a bit of peril to drag her from her pining, she supposed.

She'd held it together just long enough to fulfill the terms of her agreement with Lady Vane before making her escape to the harbor. Being by the sea, even in the dark of night, calmed her frayed nerves. Beyond the shadowy outlines of ships promising a means of escape was a vast black nothing, the horizon swallowed by the starry sky. Bit by bit, she matched the cadence of her breath with the waves, the pulse of the world as governed by the moon.

She read at least a dozen palms at the party, and told the guests exactly what they wanted to hear - none of those rich assholes wanted to be told about infidelity in their marriage, or that they were unlikely to marry at all - seasoned it with just enough of the truth to make them believe her. She hated every minute of it, but everything was coming up roses until… Mr. Basil Thornwyck. 

He was an artist, apparently, and a popular one among the crowd at the exhibition opening. His hand had the shape for it - a long palm and longer fingers, slender and elegant, if a bit bony - a classic presentation of a water elemental alignment and exactly what she expected of a painter. People with that hand shape were usually the sensitive, intuitive type, often drawn to creative professions (and prone to disorders of the nervous system). His hand felt a bit soft in hers, a bit cool to the touch, but not remarkably so, which was also normal for that hand type.

And then… nothing. It wasn’t that the lines and mounds of the palm weren’t there, that she couldn’t feel them. Of course they were there, beneath the seeking pad of her thumb - but there was something wrong. When her eyes tried to focus on the fine lines and grooves, it was as if they shifted and bent, almost imperceptibly blurring, just enough to make her question exactly where each line began and ended, whether or not any touched. She forced herself to speak, bullshit from start to finish, whilst discreetly, desperately searching for something, anything fixed. The length of the fingers, their bony joints remained, but each time her thumb measured the row of mounds at their base, the measure was slightly different. 

That painting. She’d stopped in her tracks to stare at it, drawn in by the razor sharp scent of copper and arsenic: a dark, gloomy, almost abstract seascape. There was no mistaking the texture of saltwater, but the lighting and perspective were somehow ambiguous; was she looking at the surface of the water from above or below? The movement… it was still, of course - a painting - but the longer Emily looked at it, the more uncertain she became of the shape taken by the shadows, the direction the water moved across the canvas. It shifted and bent, almost imperceptibly blurring… just like the painter’s hand.

Did no one else see this?

They shared a look when they parted ways, one devoid of the pretense they'd been drenched in. His eyes were a shade of brown that should have been warm, but his gaze felt sharp and dark and... empty, empty in a way she knew to be more than a little bit dangerous. The longer her eyes lingered, the more unnerved she became, until she had to look away, like a wolf of lowly rank.

She dropped her spent cigarette and crushed it beneath her boot, sucking in air, salt and seaweed on her tongue. There were only three words for this sort of thing: what the fuck? If it was magic, it was magic the likes of which she’d never experienced, not even close. If it wasn’t magic, that would be even worse - that would be her finally losing her fraying, feral mind, the beginning of a descent into the kind of madness that likely claimed her brother.

She bent her frame to retrieve her flannel and draped it over one shoulder. It was just a painting. Mr. Thornwyck was just a man, and she - she was prone to losing her grasp on the world of men. She scratched at the back of her neck, the phantom itch of a collar, and turned back towards the city. This was nothing whiskey couldn’t fix.