Kharris (& Khaeris)

There was a mild disappointment in Wenne to receive no reception from the Ranger General of the Silver Covenant, herself. Several small parcels awaited them instead, and a contract of requests for immediate delivery. A fitting task for a Courier outfit, though somewhat morbid - deliveries to next of kin, 20 some years too late.

“Well,” Safrona unrolled the official request handed over by a now retreating High Elf contact that had met them. “It's not so much a signature as a crest. But it is something, yes?” The Courier treated such a task as any other delivery to be assigned, machine focused as she absorbed the details of the belongings and those addresses meant to inherit them. A fluid movement of fingers called a herd of imps to assist (the less pyromaniac sort, for as Wenne could tell, she hoped).

“A few of these are in Silvermoon themselves. Old House names, businesses…” Safrona pitched a glance toward Wenne in that moment. Not only younger and fresher of face with her delicate little spectacles, the Void had less of a dramatic affect on her sister's features. Safrona had wondered if her sister’s joining of the Ren’dorei was simply an aesthetic choice in their sibling reunion from time to time, but it was not a line of questioning she felt too eager to follow. “You’re the more… fitting of us to deliver to the more patriotic of Silvermoon, should we say? You take the city addresses and I handle the more long range?”

Wennefer sighed, adjusting her spectacles. Her fingers jutted toward the contracted lockboxes, and some mere sacks containing literal bonemeal. “You’re not bothered by any of this? Not at all ?” 

Safrona only stared down at the gesturing hands, then at the obviously annoyed expression on the mage’s face. “I think it’s all fairly written out for us. Easy delivery…?”

“No, Saf…come on now! Read over the contract again. What these are? It’s the lost, from damn Dalaran!”

Safrona squinted a moment, then blinked at the contract another, softened only by a mild confusion and the many questions that filled her mind. “You mean last year…?”

“No, no.” Wennefer shook her head, black hair flying loose from her delicate adornments. “And may those so recently lost by that day find their way but Saaaf! These are the remains of those during the Culling. When that bitch Proudmoore and the Covenant did what they did!” A dissent was afire in the mage that lit her eyes, an angry dragon’s fire that never was quite put out in the Dawnsinger line. The arcanist had separated herself from the name, but she could never so fully cut herself from the House that birthed her, and the pride they bred in her veins. “You thought I wanted Vereesa Windrunner’s signature? Sure, sister - I wanted her to stand here, sign off these belongings she’s kept for how long now? And then apologize!”

It was Safrona’s time to shake her head with quiet admonishing, eyes moving back to the contract to read it’s first lines. “The apology is in writing, for the families it is meant for. As well as the promise of a plaque in memory of who was lost. It will be enough for th–”

“But it’s not enough! Boxes and some ink on paper and bone dust is not enough. I thought you’d understand more than anyone!” A vindictiveness had arisen in Wennefer, words echoing after her own, even as tears streaked down from the edges of her eyes. “She should have been here, breathing prayers into their bones, begging for forgiveness! She should know that cold, evil pain in her heart over and over like I do! Shattering again and again and again–”

“Tch, Wenne, calm yourself,” Safrona’s voice lowered as she wrenched her hands forward, focusing in more than a simple anger, outrage. It was twofold. Her hands clawed inward, pulling on the spirit that had so very subtly possessed her sister. A transference like water from the dead’s belongings, the warlock realized, bridged easily by her sister’s already fluctuating emotions. “Your words are being twisted.” 

Wenne gasped deeply as the cold pit of anger was dragged out of what felt to be her spine, so deeply it had twined itself with her physicality, her bottled anguish. The mage retaliated as was habit, quick to aid her sister in containing the sudden threat.

The ray of frost penetrated ephemeral essence, cutting the tortured wailing of the spirit into silence as it dissipated, no longer able to hold form. The supernatural threat had faded for the moment, but even as a slow chirp returned to the Eversong canopy, Wenne still carried a haunted look, staring with unblinking disbelief at her sister. The wailing spirit, forced into aperating, was dragged into an awaiting crystal prison at the warlock’s hands.

The devouring of a doomed soul was a simple impetus of ending the threat for the warlock and gleaning some strain of knowledge in those moments it flooded her. But in other eyes such an act was a heresy.

“We…we were asked to put them to rest, Saf," the mage argued, even still having fallen victim to the spirit. Her compassion ran deep as her outrage. "Not, just…take them. What are you thinking?”

Safrona avoided her sister's boggling, invasive stare. She stared only at the space the spirit once haunted. Somehow it followed the guilt of its murderer Vereesa to the homeland. The icy spikes embedded through the cavity of its chest had been a persistent torment in its state.  A brutal strike of pain, followed by an eternity of hopeless numbness, the ambitions of a life stopped cold.

“Instinct,” Safrona commented then just beneath an iced over breath, nearly sounding introspective with her turn of phrasing. “It is what I do.”

—--

That night, far from her sister’s questions and a bottle of wine later, Safrona gave herself over to a bath, alone, deep into the late hours. Sleep did not arrive so easily, the spirit’s last memory of cold outrage encircling her thoughts fresh, until she could find a place for it too within the mind’s labyrinth of those taken before it.

She dried, took to another ritual of hair brushing and oiling at an elegant bedroom vanity, letting the long hair drape fetchingly to frame her face before committing it to the usual smooth braid. She forced her eyes on the flesh in the mirror, the silvery trail of scarring that rounded her chest. Impaled by an icy javelin with a violent conviction. She was sure the heart had been half ripped from its organic tethers. It had been a nasty way to go. But the flesh and organ had survived by ritualistic means. A gift by greedy hands and hungry will. A taboo truth that Safrona Shadowsun had only confessed to a very select few, not even to the sister that cherished the skin she wore. She doubted the little mage would ever come to hear that confession. The Dawnsinger flame was strong in that one, and so often blinded by its own light when roused. A light that could only understand itself.

Safrona redressed slowly, watching her reflection all the while. There had been a time when she could not face the sight in mirrors, when she required a demon's hands to dress her in part. A time of guilt that sloughed away with time, with connection, with each request for the Courier to fulfill a need. She had purpose, invested friends who cared for her, a tightly bound love.

The name sacrificed for her becoming had to be put to rest. She had thought a renaming would eventually disassociate herself with the one who died to Proudmore's wrath those years ago, but like the ghost she had to claim for the Harvest today, they lingered in their own way. 

She knew nothing so deep about ghosts other than weaponization in the Art, but Safrona considered that Wennefer Dawnsinger was even more haunted by the past than she was.