#juneday72026

@daily-writing-challenge

When military types have difficult interpersonal matters on their mind before a decisive mission, there are two kinds. Some bury the personal to concentrate on the matter at hand and not render their comrades unable to act, even if it means compromising their own attention and judgment for the cloud still hanging over them. Others insist on clearing the air beforehand so as to have their full focus ready for the mission, even if it means compromising the others with what they’d just dropped on them.

With the Darkwell threatening to swallow up Silvermoon and then the rest, Arthas and I tried to hold to the former. We should have calculated in Arator. We had seen he was the latter type, repeatedly. And now, troops gathering for a concentrated assault, he wore that look when we saw him, the one that said he knew whose spirit was living with me. We were coming to recognise it on people.

@daily-writing-challenge

( TW for execution and death )

( If anyone is curious about what Sybil keeps dipping into! I like to use Gaelic as an inspiration for old Drust / Old Common. It is a genuinely beautiful language that I’ve been putting in effort into learning as well! )

The crowd thickened near the Ashvane yard, pushing toward the harbor square like a tide with nowhere else to go. Dockhands, fishwives, and children balanced on their fathers' shoulders gathered together, all craning necks to see the timber scaffold where three nooses swung in the salt laced wind, heavy and patient. Three pirates from a crew that had been raiding merchant ships now stood there, stripped of their coats and boots with their hands bound behind their backs with tar-stiffened rope. Merrick walked ahead, broad-shouldered and easy in the press of bodies, parting the crowd with nothing more than the way he carried himself. "Oi, look at that." He jerked his chin toward the gallows, where the hangman was adjusting the length of the first noose. "Sloppy rigging, that is. Rope's too long by 'alf. Bloke'll bounce like a fish on a line 'fore 'e goes." He laughed, a short, barking thing, and elbowed Ridley's arm. "Bet you five silver the fat one pisses 'imself.” Ridley didn't answer. He was walking a half-step behind to the left, his usual position. His pale gray eyes swept the crowd out of habit—counting exits, noting the pair of guards flanking the gallows, and cataloguing the pickpockets working the edges of the mob. A boy no older than eight was lifting a merchant's coin purse near the fish stalls. Ridley watched him palm it and vanish between legs like a rat through a drain grate. Dampwick-born, he had to be. Merrick was still talking. "Should charge admission, they should. Only free entertainment this city gives, an' they don't even do it proper—" The first pirate was shoved forward and the crowd roared. Somewhere behind Ridley, a woman cheered and a man threw a half-rotten cabbage that struck the condemned man's shoulder with a wet thwack. Ridley glanced back, and he saw that Sybil had stopped walking. She stood three paces behind them, small and still in the press of bodies, her shawl pulled tight around her narrow shoulders. The crowd jostled around her as though she were a stone in a river, and she did not move, she didn’t even blink. Her mismatched eyes were focused not on the pirates, but the nooses. The hangman pulled the lever and the trapdoor dropped with a bang that cracked across the square like a pistol shot and the crowd erupted. Sybil flinched as if she'd been struck across the face. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. Her fingers, poking from the frayed ends of her shawl, had gone white at the knuckles. Ridley saw it happen in pieces. The way her breathing changed—shallow and rabbit-fast, her chest barely moving under the wool. The way her eyes went glassy and distant, fixed on something that wasn't the pirate jerking at the end of his rope but something older, something further away, something strung up in a village square in Drustvar where the trees grew crooked and the fog never fully lifted. "Oi, Rid!" Merrick was grinning, his full attention on the spectacle. "Told you—fat one's next, watch 'is face, 'e's already gone green—"

The second trapdoor banged open and  Sybil made a sound that was so small, it was barely one at all—it was more like the air was being pressed from her lungs by a hand she couldn't see. Her knees buckled, just slightly, just enough that she swayed, and her lips began moving in fragmented whispers that were lost under the crowd’s jeering. "—mo dheartháiríní, Rowan, Thane, a stóirín, don't be lookin', don't be—" Her hand came up to her own throat and pressed against the collar as if she could feel a different rope there entirely.

Ridley moved without thinking about it. He didn't glance at Merrick for permission, his body simply turned and closed the distance between them in two strides, his long dark coat cutting through the crowd like a curtain being drawn. He stepped directly in front of her and blocked the gallows from her sight as completely as a wall. "Oi." His voice was low, barely above a murmur. "Don't look. Yeah? Eyes on me. Right 'ere."

She didn't seem to hear him. Her gaze was somewhere past his chest, past the fur-trimmed collar of his coat, past Boralus entirely. Her lips were still moving—names, fragments, old Drust prayers tangled with Common like briars through a fence. "—Da were first, they took Da first, an' Mam were screamin', Bran were cryin', he were only—an' Alaric, Alaric had the blood comin' out of 'im, out of his belly, an' they dragged him up anyways, they dragged him up with the—"

"Sybil." Ridley's gloved hand came up and hovered near her shoulder without touching. His jaw was clenched so tight the muscle twitched. He could hear the third trapdoor bang behind him and the crowd screamed approval. 

Sybil's whole body jerked like a marionette whose strings had been yanked. "Máthair," she whispered. "Máthair, tá brón orm, ní raibh mé in ann—"

Something hot and ugly twisted in Ridley's chest. He'd seen people die. He'd watched Merrick break fingers, burn ledgers, and put a knife through a man's hand for shorting them on a shipment. None of it had felt like this—like watching someone drown in air, standing right in front of him, small enough that his shadow swallowed her whole. He took her by the shoulders gently—more gently than his hands knew how to be, the leather of his gloves creaking with the effort of not gripping too hard. He turned her bodily, steering her away from the gallows, away from the crowd, away from the roaring and the creak of taut rope and the wet gurgling sounds a man makes when the drop doesn't break his neck clean. "Come on," he muttered. "Come on, we're goin'. We're walkin'. That's it." He kept himself between her and the spectacle, one hand on her shoulder, the other hovering at her back without quite landing. He guided her down a side alley between a chandler's shop and a sail-maker's, where the crowd thinned and the noise dulled to a muffled roar, and the air smelled like tallow and old canvas instead of sweat and harbor brine. Sybil's legs gave out halfway down the alley but she didn’t fall because Ridley caught her, his arm hooking around her waist before her knees hit the cobblestones. She weighed almost nothing, it was like catching a bundle of sticks wrapped in wool. He lowered her against the chandler's wall, crouching in front of her. Her breathing was wrong. Too fast, too shallow, catching in her throat like hiccups. A thin line of blood had started from her left nostril—bright, and startling red against her freckled skin, and her hands were shaking so badly that the tremor traveled up her wrists and into her forearms. "'Ey. 'Ey, look at me." Ridley's voice had gone even quieter. He pulled off one glove with his teeth and, after a beat of hesitation that cost him visibly, pressed the back of his bare hand against her cheek. Her skin was ice-cold. "You're in Boralus. Yeah? Boralus. Not—wherever you were. You're 'ere. Alley smells like shit, seagull's screamin' up there like it's bein' murdered, an' there's a drunk bloke asleep in that doorway. See 'im? That's Boralus. That's now."

Sybil's eyes slowly focused. The lavender one first, then the brown, dragging back from wherever her memory had taken her. "They didn't—" Her voice cracked, thin as thread. "They didn't drop clean, Ridley. None of them dropped clean. Alaric were already dyin' from the shot an' they hung him anyways an' he—hhh—" A sob hitched in her chest but didn't fully form. Her hand came up and gripped the front of his coat, fingers twisting in the dark fabric as the blood from her nose reached her upper lip.

Ridley fished a rag from one of his belt pouches. It wasn’t exactly clean, but it was at least cleaner than the street—and pressed it to her face with a clumsiness that betrayed how unused his hands were to gentleness. "'Old that there. Tilt your 'ead forward, not back. Forward. There you go."

Sybil obeyed, but her grip on his coat didn't loosen. If anything, her fingers tightened, as if he were the only solid thing in a world that had suddenly gone liquid and dark. Her breathing was still ragged, but slowing. The tremors came in waves now instead of one continuous shudder. "I ran," she whispered into the rag. "I ran an' I left them. I were a doe an' I ran through the trees an' I didn't stop an' when I came back they were—still up there. Still hangin'. The crows were already—"

"Sybil."

"—already at Bran's—"

"Sybil." His free hand found the back of her head, rough fingers sliding through the choppy sandy hair, and he held her there, holding her at a fixed point. An anchor dropped in a storm she couldn't swim out of alone. "You was one girl against a whole village gone mad. You'd 'ave died with 'em.”

Sybil's face crumpled and the sound she made was barely human—it was a thin, keening thing, muffled against his knuckles and the rag. Her shoulders curled inward until she was folded almost in half. Ridley stayed exactly where he was. Crouched on the wet cobblestones, knees aching, with one hand on the back of her head and the other holding the rag to her bleeding nose. He didn't speak. He didn't move. He barely breathed. Behind them, muffled by brick and canvas, Merrick's laugh rang out over the crowd like a bell. Ridley's jaw tightened and he shifted his weight, putting his back more fully to the alley's mouth, and let his shadow fall over Sybil like something he could give her when he had nothing else.

She cried for a long time. Quiet, airless sobs that shook her frame and left dark spots on his coat where her tears soaked through. At some point her whispers slid entirely into Drust—a Athainne, glac aire díobh, coinnigh solas orthu, tá siad beag, tá siad chomh beag. Ridley understood none of the words but sat with them anyway, steady and silent and unmovable, until the shaking finally slowed and her grip on his coat loosened from a death-clutch to something merely desperate. "M'sorry," she breathed at last. Her voice was raw and small. "M'sorry, I didn't mean to, I just heard the—an' I were back there an'—"

"Don't." He pulled the rag away and checked the bleeding, seeing it had stopped and so he tucked it back in his pouch. "Don't apologize for that. Not to me. Not to anyone." He said it with the same gruffness he said everything, but something underneath it had shifted. Something he didn't have a name for and wouldn't have admitted to under torture.

Sybil looked up at him. Her face was blotched and swollen, her mismatched eyes red-rimmed, and her nose pink with a drying smear of blood still on her upper lip he'd missed. She looked wrecked and very young and very old at the same time, the way only grief can make a person look. "You see things too, so," she said quietly. "Don't you. Things you can't unfind in your head."

Ridley's expression shuttered. He stood, offering her his hand—bare, scarred across the knuckles, and rough-palmed. "Can you walk?"

She took it. Her fingers were still cold, still trembling faintly, but they wrapped around his hand and held on. "Aye," she said. "If you stay atween me an' the noise."

[Iɴ ᴀ ғᴏʟᴅᴇᴅ ᴘᴀʀᴄʜᴍᴇɴᴛ, ʙᴏᴜɴᴅ ᴍᴇssɪʟʏ ɪɴ ᴛᴡɪɴᴇ, sᴇᴛ ᴀᴛᴏᴘ ᴀ ᴅᴜsᴛʏ ᴄʜᴇsᴛ ᴏғ ᴅʀᴀᴡᴇʀs, ᴡʜɪᴄʜ ʀᴇsɪᴅᴇs ɪɴ ᴀ ᴡᴏʀɴ-ᴅᴏᴡɴ ʀᴇsɪᴅᴇɴᴄᴇ ɪɴ Bᴏᴏᴛʏ Bᴀʏ. Hᴇʀᴇ sɪᴛs ᴀ ʟᴇᴛᴛᴇʀ, ᴡɪᴛʜᴏᴜᴛ ᴀᴅᴅʀᴇss, ɪɴ ᴘʀᴇᴛᴛʏ ɪғ ɴᴏᴛ ᴀᴡᴋᴡᴀʀᴅ sᴄʀɪᴘᴛɪɴɢ. Dᴇsᴘɪᴛᴇ ʜᴏᴡ ᴀᴘᴘᴇᴀʀᴀɴᴄᴇs ᴍᴀʏ sᴇᴇᴍ, ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴇᴛᴛᴇʀ's ᴡᴏʀᴅɪɴɢ ɪs ᴄᴏɴғɪᴅᴇɴᴛ ᴀɴᴅ sᴜʀᴇ.]

The mood in the study was thick with tension. There was an undeniable sort of static in the air from Ilvisar’s barely-contained temper, and Marne had taken extra care to give him a bit of a wider berth in the days following the loss of his ward. Truthfully, keeping the distance had served the Forsaken just fine; while he’d do the jobs he was paid to do, there was an increasing sense of unease in the back of his mind. As long as he got what he was promised, though, conscience was a frightfully easy thing to ignore.

Ilvisar summoned him after a few days of simmering and sulking, and while calm had settled, the glass ashtray that Ilvisar had hurled against the wall was still in shattered fragments on the ground. Housekeeping wasn’t something Marne was paid to do. It crunched under his heavy, steel-toed boot as he stood before the elf.

“What is it?” He asked in his typical gravely flange.

Ilvisar looked up at Marne from steepled fingers. The enchantment was once more over his eyes, shading them fel green instead of Void violet. He let the question hang for a moment.

“I have been thinking of next steps,” He replied. Marne offered no reply, and Ilvisar continued after a tired sigh. He wasn’t exhausted, but it was exhausting having to explain everything to a man who clearly had no interest in filling in the blanks himself.

“I’ll admit, I didn’t account for the doctor, or his skills. I expected her to self-sabotage. Perhaps she still might.. but I can’t count on it.” His fingers separated, and one hand drummed fingertips along a file folder; the other hand became a casual rest for his chin.

“Not having the ward is a nuisance. It means you’ll need to put some more hours in.” He looked to Marne, who offered no shift in expression.

“You know my rates.”

“Yes, I do.”

“How close am I getting?”

Ilvisar shrugged a shoulder. “Not so close that she’ll be aware of you. She’d recognize you from K’aresh, and I doubt she’d be keen on making friends. Besides, look at you. You’d horrify her,” Ilvisar remarked on the man’s rotting face as if stating something as simple as his hair color. Not that Altherei hadn’t already seen him (and been horrified), but still. Marne’s eyelid twitched slightly. He didn’t have to be that blunt. Not that Marne truly cared.

“No, observe her in public spaces where you can, as you have been.. if you happen to learn more about any of those friends of hers- or that doctor beau- I’d be interested to know that, as well. Contact none of them, of course. But any loose threads you learn of are threads I can pull later as needed.” He mused. Any friend could become leverage- any loved one could become bait. He just needed the right one.

“Consider it done,” Marne replied dryly, then let his curiosity take the reins for a moment with an nod of his head to the folder. “What’s that?”

Ilvisar’s lips slowly pulled into a quietly sadistic grin. “This.. is what will put her back up against the wall.” He slid the folder toward Marne, and encouraged him to peruse its contents with a nod.

The undead did so, and a brow arched briefly. “I’m not following.”

Ilvisar rolled his eyes and pushed himself back from the desk, but remained seated. “I knew Sylvanas would never waste a good soldier, and I was correct. His last known whereabouts are in that file, and I would very much appreciate it if you could bring him to me. Alive– well. Unalive, as it were.”

Marne looked to Ilvisar, then back down to the file. “I see.”

Ilvisar’s smile widened enough to render the Forsaken unnerved, as if he was starting to realize he may be in too deep himself. “I’ve been looking for him for years…”

Marne looked back to the name on the file and its attached photo: Eldwin Darkwind.

A brief chuckle escaped the Dae’menel patriarch. “And now.. I’ve found him.”