#ereish

K’ure misses her parents – the opportunity to have grown up and known her parents in that “child becoming an adult” way. She wishes she had a decent life so she could’ve probably given them grandkids, and she would’ve been just fine as a blacksmith, with her kids growing up in the ash and fire of the smithy. (But now she’s convinced herself that children equals tragic death, and refuses to have any. :c)

Bhoj’ir misses his siblings. He aches when he thinks about their sacrifices to save the draenei, and yet disaster falls on their people anyway. He hates they sacrificed their lives for a people that are doomed to die off anyway, and would much rather his siblings all be alive and safe rather than dead.

Ereish misses her parents, too. Had her father not died, her mother wouldn’t have become sick with heartache and married someone else. Ereish wouldn’t have had an abusive step-father, wouldn’t have killed him in self-defense, and wouldn’t be a criminal.

She’d never been to this part of the forgotten city before.

As she wandered through the ancient city’s ruins, the blood elf wondered why the palace wasn’t ever used; she knew of the lore, of Arthas’s betrayal and of Sylvanas’ rise to glory, but the keep held great potential if used properly.

Perhaps one day, it would be.

Ereish had been here for only an hour, and saw no signs of life – no scorpions, no insects, no skeletons of any sort – nor did she see any of the Forsaken that littered the sewers. Every ruined city she’d passed through had some sort of something going on, but not Lordaeron. It was… empty.

It almost scared her to continue into the castle’s inner chambers.

But, she did anyway.

Undercity was a completely different city than this one: while it reeked of death and blood with evil creatures crawling in its streets, this place was filled with a void. Even spirits did not grace her with their presence, whereas every other battlefield and tomb she’d crept into allowed her some reaction from the dead.

Lordaeron, though, held nothing.

From the corner of her eye she saw someone – did she recognize him? – but once the rogue turned to face the movement she saw nothing.

Ereish continued forward carefully through the broken city, her presence utterly alone.

Aura radiated from everything in this city, but nothing felt alive. It seemed… older than any entity she’d ever come into contact with, but it was so different, too. Inviting, almost.

Yet again she saw the movement as she entered the throne room, and swung around to face its direction quickly, calling out unsteadily, “Face me!” She flipped her daggers out of their holders on her hips, looking around the ruined room with a frenzied look on her face.

It took Ereish a few moments to realize her mind was simply playing tricks on her.

The dead had that effect on her.

She stumbled almost drunkenly to the throne and sat on it wearily, hunched over her knees as she struggled to make sense of what was happening to her. The rogue felt her senses slipping from her, time becoming nothingness.

She became another little piece of nothing in this void, and it almost felt peaceful.

Perfect.

Another presence suddenly filled the room, and Ereish leaped to her feet to face the new entity, daggers long forgotten as her mind struggled to work against the heavy aura trying to overtake her. Unease spread over her mind as a sudden dizzy spell overcame her, nearly knocking her back onto the floor. Grasping her head as she lowered to her knees, a low moan escaped her throat as her heart pounded like sludge in her chest.

Nothing felt right, and it terrified her for a moment as she began to see spots in her vision.

A voice whispered across the corridor to her in her confusion, causing the blood elf to freeze in her kneeling position before the throne: “Errrisshhhh…”

She choked on air as she attempted to protest to the voice, her gaze lifting to stare up at the ghost of the man she had hoped to never see again.

He is dead. Ereish could barely get a single thought across, her mind becoming too befouled with fear. This place… must be…making me hallucinate, what else could this be…?

Stalking closer to the fear-stricken rogue with his beautiful golden cape sweeping at his heels, the ghost stopped not even a meter before her and crouched to her level, a sinister grin on his face. Tutting, the male purred, cupping Ereish’s cheek with a cold, mail-covered hand, “My sssssweet, unsussssspecting daughter. How naïve and foolish you have always been.” His breath sucked the air from her like a crypt being broken open, the rush pushing her back to seeing stars once again.

Horrified but still doubting her own eyes, Ereish refused to believe her stepfather stood before her. The entity before her held a nothingness to it, but those eyes that bore into her belonged to no other creature than him.

“Ohhhh, believe me,” he continued on in her silence, chuckling quietly. His gaze brightened, the hollow death knight-like eyes narrowing with laughter. “No other would ssssstand before you now but I.” He held his hands up as if to allow her to revel in his disgusting presence. “I serve a new master, and he allowsssss all that I ask. And what I ask is you.”

Whispers and echoes reached Ereishkigall as the entity stood above her, uncertainty consuming her mind.

This is what she deserved. This had to be Hell for the crimes she committed.

The creature continued to hum lowly, almost triumphantly, as the sinister whispers invading her mind began to lull her into submission. His eyes lowered to her hand suddenly, changing from its sickly pale green to a lifeless void as he growled angrily, jumping away from Ereish.

The voices in her head grew angry and shrill, but she couldn’t understand why. The vision before her wavered, turning smokey for a moment before completely dissipating altogether, along with all of Lordaeron.

She flung herself from her bed suddenly, hitting the floor with a hard thud. The warm drip from her nose was unnoticeable from the numbness the nightmare had given her, absolute terror seizing her body. Her body tingled as if she had been burned by fel fire, igniting every sense of hers to an overwhelming extent.

Looking around the room slowly, blood dripping down her cheek, it took Ereish minutes to remember where she was: an inn in the Valley of the Four Winds, an entire world away from Lordaeron. A little protection trinket was tucked within her tight grasp.

I am safe, she told herself as a mantra as she fingered the tassels on the trinket, looking it over carefully. Living or dead, he’s nowhere near me.

This experience only solidified the fact that she never wanted to go anywhere near Undercity for as long as Azeroth existed.

Ereish has such a bad a sweet tooth, it’s insane. Totality will find candy wrappers everywhere, but no idea how she stores all that candy. She swears that for an entire year she survived only on saltwater taffy while stuck on a boat with some goblins. (When she was going around the Echo Isles, she had a bag, and her teeth, hexed by a troll shaman to make it so she can hold an insane amount of candy/so that her teeth won’t rot out of her face from the sugar. She never elaborates on the “boat” story, however.) So for the most part, it’s “candy wrappers” that she collects, aha.

With nearly as many demons as there are cushions in the Black Temple, Nezzrra isn’t the one usually seen as being artsy or even feminine beyond the poison she’d slip your drink; however, scrapbooking is her guilty pleasure. She usually likes grabbing an extra herb or a leaf here and there to make a collection of Azeroth and enjoy its beauty. “For research,” she always says in defense, pointing to the ‘ritualistic’ herbs and ‘offerings’ of the saliva on the stamps. But others (Sungrisk and her little imp) know differently.

More out of personal pride than anything else, K’ure refuses to tell anyone that: 1, she was quite disappointed when she begged her parents for a sibling {ortwenty} and instead got a magical lantern as a pet; 2, after she got the lantern-pet, she unearthed an addiction to collecting the cutest, ugliest, and rarest pets she could, leaving her with an unhealthy addiction similar to Ty-Beanie Babies. She wants every mount and pet she can afford.

As a baseline, I try to make these characters mean something to me, whether it’s me going through something, wanting to explore, or that I need something to distract myself with. A lot of my earlier characters (K’ure/Ereish) were examples of what I was going through at the time I made them 4+ years ago, and grew within the situations I put them through since then and have blossomed into something else. Other characters (Nezzrra/Hjörrdís/Rohinii) that I may have had but didn’t start putting thought into until a short 2+ years ago have gone through situations that were relevant for the game at the time and I kept pushing them through that, and they ended up becoming more than “just my ocs.”

At the same time, I try to put basics into every single character, things that either I wish I had or that started off as this glob of an idea that I want to see molded into something else.

K’ure, at her core, is brave and selfless, to a fault. She pushed through the campaigns, rose through the ranks, and became a champion of Azeroth time and again. At first, before crashing in Azeroth’s dimension, she and Bhoj’ir were this power couple that decimated the Legion and protected their people, leaving no one behind and putting only victories under their belts; once they arrived and integrated into the Alliance, however, they started getting thrown issues (Bhoj’ir being his need for more power to protect people so he turned to the void and nearly became consumed by it; K’ure, she internalized all of her rage, growing stronger from it the longer she held onto it, but didn’t see how it was slowly killing her). I may have once considered another analogy for K’ure when she (and I) was younger, but all I can really describe her as is a fire: warm, strong, comforting, but when she loses control she’s an inferno that is unbiased in what she destroys. (Bhoj’ir, on the other hand, would be the feeling when you’re at the beach bobbing carefully on the waves, until you’re sucked under and can’t find your way up.)

Rohinii wishes there was some way to talk to the person she was before becoming a death knight, to gather some insight on who she was and who she should try to become. She feels like asking her previous self these “meaning of life” questions will help her find herself in undeath. (She uses the Highborne Soul Mirror in the meantime…)

Hjörrdís used to wish that the Sundering had never happened, or that she had grown up in another universe so she wouldn’t have had to see her world ripped apart at the seams. (She settles for wishing there were more flavors of ice cream, because fel breath leaves a nasty, hot feeling in the back of your throat as if you’ve been sick for a thousand years, and dairy products seem to help.)

Ahilyah wishes there were grooming shops for worgen as there are for animals because the barbers (gods bless their souls) always seem to make her fur look ratty, and her nails could use a trim every once in a while…

Singlar wishes that food delivery services existed in Azeroth. He tends to crave Pandaren food in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, and no one’s willing to deliver to Silithus.

Sungrisk, more than anything, wishes that he could remove his old tattoos without having to replace the skin the artwork is on. (He was a young and stupid troll, and has more than a handful of tattoos he wished he’d thought twice about before getting. Too bad laser removal is nearly impossible on death knights.)

Nezzrra wishes there was like a doggy day-care for demons. She’s basically a hoarding Ty-Beanie Baby collector, but of demons. She needs help.

K’ure wishes her parents survived at least in one of the alternative worlds, just so in one of them maybe she lived a happier life with her family. (They don’t. They’re dead in basically all of them; the ones that they’re alive, she’s dead. So :c)

Bhoj’ir wishes that there was a service on Azeroth for draenei to get their horns (and jewelry) polished, hair cared for, and hooves cleaned without having to go all of the way to Draenor to get it done. Nowhere else in their connected universes do draenei have the ability to get themselves cleansed in the Light and their old eredar ways, leaving them to do the services by themselves in most cases.

Totality wishes he could abandon the paladin Order without having to face any consequences, and just become a farmer with Ereish (or maybe just keep her out of trouble while they Robin Hood across the Eastern Kingdoms).