#deathseeker

The sands went on and on. Now and again she would check their progress with spilled blood, and alter their course accordingly. Eventually, though, she felt the weight of living.

Slowing her steps, she huffed. “I have to stop.” Elleynah glanced at him side long. “I know you could keep going until the stars burned out, but unfortunately I’m still… alive here, and that means I get tired.” Her tone was almost defensive, as though she expected chastening. “Can we make a short camp?”

“I… Forgot about that.” He said sheepishly as Elleynah admitted her limitations. As sheepish as a dead man could sound. “Of course we could make camp. I could probably help with that as well.”

He upturned Zin’jang, stabbing in deep into the sands beneath him and from its hilt sprouted leaves of blackness, draping downwards. Like sheets of a pavilion. They were not perfect, nor did they serve much purposes in a windless wasteland in these dunes. But they would trap heat from any fire- and most importantly, would feel like shelter.

She watched him use the magic of death as easily as wielding his spear, and Elleynah looked away, worrying her lower lip with her teeth until she tasted copper. Ignoring herself, she rubbed her lip, smudging the red, turned her attention to her pack, thumbing through her deck idly. In death, the mundane was often turned complex and inscrutable-- the difficult however, became commonplace. Under the leaves of the summoned pavilion, she laid out a small bag. When she opened it, the scent of ash and dry wood and lightning storms emerged; and with a quick dribble of blood, fire bloomed from it in a small but warm makeshift hearth.

Elleynah breathed in the smell, but it did little to relax the tenseness of her shoulders. “It’s absolutely insane how much power living blood has here. It’s little wonder all those dark campfire tales involve creatures seeking living flesh and blood. Just a drop of it and…” She motioned to the flame, and the sand, and the darkness beyond.

Sederis nodded. “It is plied by those of intelligence here, like currency. I suppose it is why Lady Death had me spill and have had me spill so much of it in her name. It turned a simple idea- an ideological seed- into a God- and all her realm.” Sederis joined her by the fire, snapping away the armor pieces that made his silhouette. Was this how he acted in times of rest? He had been relentless in his hunt until now. It felt good, he supposed, just to stop.

“I theorise that is the reason why I walk here with such powers. There is a blood price hanging above my head, paid for in the thousands. Every life taken, every death given in offering, every life that was ended in my name. Just as I had in life- in my own way- I now carry them all within me in death. Their memories and names etched into my mind’s eye.” He gave a thoughtful look and considered the rules of this realm. “If I have a mind- I’m not entirely sure if I do in this place. I’m not even sure how much of me I’m made of- Or if I’m actually mostly made of everyone else.” The Deathseeker implied, and made sense in the same way riddles did.

Elleynah frowned, raising a hand to the flame. “I was told too that it’s catalyst, in a world that hungers. Blood can be so many different things; inside you its vital, outside its grisly. Blue blood, noble blood, innocent blood. It’s all the same, to a mender. Magic seems to operate outside of theoretical similarities.” She let the light burn through her flesh, rendering her hand red to her eyes. “Every culture I know assigns some value to it. So, little wonder in death it’s a precious as gold is above, or more so.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest, looking into the fire. “You aren’t the same, Sederis. I don’t know if it’s your Lady or the world here or the blood and souls you carry but you’re different.” Her voice goes small. “Everything here is alike-but-not-the-same as things above. It’s maddening and terrifying. I was so sure if I called upon the Hanged Man he would have your face and now I wonder what he’s doing, bereft so of one to Patron.” She snorts. “He will find another, but… to me, it should have always been you. And now it’s not. And you’re not. You’re dead. Lirelle is dead, but she’s not even here she’s up there and I’m down here.” The words tumble from her in a deluge of exhaustion, and only now in the relative safety of the pavilion can he see the desperation in her. “Death means change, I’ve always known that, but I hate what it’s done. I hate it so much I could rip the card apart even knowing who he Patrons and what it might mean because I am so angry.”

She has been hunted for months, unable to trust in any familiar thing. The weight on her shoulders has taxed even her steel-spined resolve, and Elleynah the Oracle is closer now to Little Leyna than she has been in decades; the wide eyed, fractured girl child who only ever meant to fix the broken things around her.

Sederis kneeled opposite her as she pulled her knees to her chest, and after a moment of deliberation, he wrapped Elleynah in his arms. Pressing the nape of her neck to his shoulder, he encouraged her to cry, if she needed to.

He was cold to the touch, barely material, but the warmth of the embrace remained. He didn’t know if he had the right words for his friend, but knew it in his being that it was the right thing to do.

“You’re right. I am not the same. At the end of everything, I knew, at last, what it all had meant. The meaning of sacrifice. To be reborn. To see death in a whole new light. That my life of war, had been a search for my own peace,” he spoke softly, letting the words hum through his shadowed form. “ In death I grew past what he was, and he can’t be my patron when I no longer need him.”

Death, in a way, had made him whole and he spoke of his patron as if he were a guardian angel. Keeping him from straying but the one path he was always meant to take.

“Change is… Inevitable. Nothing remains the same. Not even in death. But if there’s one thing to tell you, one thing I’ve learned after all the time I’ve spent in this place, is this:

Whenever you despair about those golden days in the sun, lost to time- stolen by death- as I once did. Do it well. Mourn their passing. Honor it with all your heart. But be glad for them too. Be glad that they happened. Be glad that they gave you memories that are worthy of weeping over. Then when the tears are done, hold them close to your heart where the march of time cannot touch them.”

Perhaps this was the secret of his form. Why he hadn’t too become a blood hungering beast of the shadowlands. Perhaps it was because he cherished the life he lived. All the pain. All the joy. He cherished it all so much till madness and death held no hold over any of it.

Anger like she had never known gripped her; caught her in coils of heat so intense it felt like flame, and whether she knew it or not they whipped off of her like solar flares, visible in the sands of death because of their vitality. He wrapped her in his arms and she gripped him, tight enough her nails broke, tight enough he would have bled if he had yet lived.

She remembered--

Tossing cards off the edge of a floating city, and how she had thought that moment would be the beginning of forever and the end of her history and how she had failed everyone. Everyone. Dying was supposed to be an escape from this weight but she found it was even harder to bear when faced with the plain, unglossed consequence of her failure to be good enough.

She grit her teeth to keep the primal scream in her throat, and she swallowed it down with her tears and her admissions and everything she had held inside for years. Years she had born these sorrows and years she had carried the guilt and she never allowed herself to mourn because--

“I can’t let go of what was never really--” It escapes and she lifts a hand to her mouth, pressing her knuckles into her lips as she swallows her own blood from bitten lips. 

It hurt him. Not in the way that claws and teeth did as they tore into his new form. But deeper, sharper. In ways that were beyond what mere damage could do. But he held her, tighter still, receiving her fury and taking it away to the places beyond it.

“Hold them to your heart too. All of them. Things undone, things unsaid. Things that never could be. Though it makes reality harder to bear, there is merit to fantasies- Of what could have been- Of doing things left undone- it is what keeps us going. They inform us of what things could still be,” Sederis speaks from the depths within himself. His own failures rising to the surface. Things unsaid. People unsaved. Frozen bodies of refugees in Light’s Hope. Lazing on a sunny afternoon upon a couch in their Dalaran apartment. “Hold them to your heart. And when the fires die and the tears are spent- Use them to build a better future.”

Like he had. In the form of a manor, and a beach that waited for Lirelle across the gap.

Everything felt too close. He was Sederis and he wasn’t and she was Elleynah and she wasn’t really, was she? Not anymore, not the way she had been. Things changed by time and trauma; double time, double duty she had sworn back on a ship and it had put muscle on her and years around the lines by her mouth. Elleynah was a girl swearing an oath-- Elleynah was a novice mender bearing too much weight on freckled shoulders-- Elleynah was a sister who faltered and a friend who failed and a lover who had been too scared to love until it was almost too late. 

She sucked in a breath and the tears that spilled on her were hot with anger and disappointment and frustration. Her arms wrapped around herself, through Sederis because in this land of ash and smoke and memory, she was alive and real and he was made up of nothing but what-ifs and promises fulfilled. She had never ever once been enough and--

Her fingers brushed the leather pack where her cards lie, and something ripped through her in a current. Gasping aloud, she sat up straight, fingers scrambling for purchase on the leather.

“My-- my deck--” She hissed through clenched teeth. “Somethings--” Her hand seemed to struggle against the effort of opening the pouch. Gritting her teeth she finally forced it open, and like a cloud of locusts, the cards erupted around them in a flury of painted paper and magic. Threads of blood seemed to connect them in a web, pulsing around the pair and overcoming the pavilion in a flood.

Elleynah’s frame stiffened in his arms-- she looked at the cards, and they had all changed to share a single form, a single card thronging them where it should have been the whole of the deck.

A heart, with three blades piercing it, a storm brewing under it, blood seeping from the metal into a pool of black. The Three of Swords. 

In words like buzzing, it spoke.

You have called on the useful, the necessary, but not the needed little Oracle. The cards swirled around them, and Elleynah remembered. She had bitten her lip, and it had bled, and she had reached for the deck and--

Unsummoned, the Three of Swords pulsed.

You would call on Illusion and you would call upon Will, but not on Truths? You have Spoken for us, but always inside you nurse the Hope that we may be undone. The Devil. The Tower. The Swords. You use us but do not listen; will not ask for the fate for yourself for fear of incurring the Blood Debt. You will Listen now and Feel all that you have Denied.

Elleynah grabbed for Sederis’ hand, her other crept over the sand, towards the fire he had made, surreptitious. 

“At my signal, run.”

-

Image: Sandar Desert by Karen Haller