Take your character back to the weeks before crossing through the Dark Portal into AU Draenor. What was it that convinced them to go to the Dark Portal front? To face the Iron Horde? Did your character hope to get a chance to cross through the Dark Portal into the lands beyond? If so, why?
Write the moment of choice for us: to stay or to go?
[Even though this isn't something written from Kyssandrith's POV, it's certainly about her, so I decided to post it here first. <3]
“I trust you slept well.” Kalia’s smile was warm as she held the cup out in front of him.
It was an easy matter for Kelridor Shadowthorn to return her smile as he reached out his hands. She pressed the blue ceramic into them. It seared against his fingers, and the druid quickly shifted his grip to hold it delicately by its handle with the tip of his pinky curled toward the bowl.
“I did, thank you,” he said.
His distant cousin slid into the chair across from him, leaving the far ends of the dining table behind. Moonlight poured through the window behind her head, framing her turquoise hair in a silvery sheen that matched the glow of her eyes. As she lifted her arm to pour her own cup of tea, her silk gown shimmered, the colors shifting from green to blue to green with all the luminosity of a bird.
The matching blue ceramic teapot clinked softly as Kalia set it down on the table between them. She curled both hands round her cup as if the searing heat did not occur to her at all, thumbs pressed just below the lip as she pulled it close to her chest. Hot tendrils of steam caressed the tip of her chin.
To friendly silences, Kelridor was well-accustomed. And a calm quiet tea shared with a friend or relative was an utmost pleasure. But the warmth of Kalia’s smile had vanished as they sat there, something of a frown furrowing the smooth agelessness of her forehead. It yanked down the corners of her mouth.
There was nothing to do but wait. He sipped at his tea in silence. She’d drained a quarter of hers before, with a harrumph, she brought the cup down with a sharp clunk. Still-steaming tea sloshed over its edges, casting dark spots over the muted wood of the table.
“Why?”
With a sigh, he set his cup down. “Why what?”
“Why didn’t you bring her?”
A prickling tickled in the back of his head. “Kyssandrith?” Strange, how hoarse her name was on his lips.
“Yes, Kyssandrith. She’s allowed now- I thought she’d be with you. Or did you send her back?”
Kalia propped her elbows on the table and rested one hand on the other, her arms pressed close to her body. But it didn’t hide the trembling in her fingertips. Something clenched hard in Kelridor’s chest. Suddenly he couldn’t quite bring himself to meet her eyes.
“I couldn’t make her stay with me.”
“Did you even try?”
He didn’t respond, not right away. “No,” he finally said.
With a sharp tch, Kalia flung one hand up in the air and threw herself against the back of her chair. Her jaw jutted out as she jerked her head to the side, her silver eyes ice as she glared into the corner.
Kelridor folded his arms over himself and buried his gaze in the grain of the table. Smooth lines and twisting knots, carved from wisp-grown wood. It could spring back to life, likely enough, if he only tried. A simple matter, and this family heirloom could sprout into the tree it could have been. Wouldn’t that be so much better? If that was, as of now, the only sort of thing on his mind.
“Do you even know where she is now?”
Pain lashed through Kalia’s voice. It snapped the druid back to attention. He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair as his eyes refocused on her face.
“No.”
Wordlessly, Kalia reached into the folds of her gown. She yanked out a piece of folded parchment and flung it on the table between them. Its blue wax seal already broken. “Read it,” she spat.
It crinkled under his shaking fingers as he swept it off the table. The moment he flipped it open, his eyes shot to the bottom. Fernas, the postscript flourished. Not Kyssandrith. His niece didn’t send this letter. He blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, then started at the beginning.
But when the parchment slid from his fingers, falling in a heap onto the table, he was all-too aware of the rapid rise and fall of his chest.
“No,” he breathed.
“Yes,” Kalia said.
The tips of his fingers brushed against the base of his antlers as he scrubbed a nervous hand through his hair. “They- couldn’t. She couldn’t. After she’d just- no.”
He was on his feet before he even realized it. His legs yanked him across the room and back again.
“Fernas would know,” Kalia said quietly. “I’ve had him follow her now and again, just to keep track of where she was. Who she was with. I believe every word he’s written. She’s not coming back. Not this time.”
Kelridor stopped short. “No,” he intoned. “I don’t believe that.”
She barked a laugh. “Oh, really? Then would you mind telling me why?”
Like claws, his fingers seized the top of the chairback, “I don’t believe she would have gone without saying goodbye.”
“Well, think again. Because the Shadows of Argus are going through, and I have no doubt that she’ll go with them.”
The druid’s grip tightened, throwing his knuckles into pale purple. In silence, he tilted his head back, and his lips twisted in a furious scowl. An eternity passed- or so it seemed- before he drew in a sharp breath and looked down, meeting the gaze he’d only distantly been aware of.
“Excuse me,” he said.
He whipped around and stalked toward the door.
A hasty screech of chair legs against the stone floor grated behind him. “Where are you going?” Kalia called.
He didn’t respond. Out the dining room he swept. With long, determined strides, he crossed the front room and broke into the fledgling night. Cool Feralas air whipped against his face, and he rolled his shoulders forward as he prepared to reach inside himself for the bird within.
“Kelridor!” she cried.
His head snapped up. He turned to see her standing there in the doorway, one hand pressed hard against the arch. Confusion knitted between her eyebrows, almost distracting from the pain resonating behind the glow of her eyes.
“Where are you going?” she whispered.
He bowed his head. “I’m going to find her.”
Her throat bobbed as she swallowed hard and clutched her arms around herself. Kelridor turned back toward the Feralas night and stretched within. In moments, he was in the air, flapping feathered wings as hard as he could to take him up into the sky.
“Kelridor!” The faint tendrils of her voice brushed against him, and he jerked his beaked head down to peer at her as he rose. “We love you!”
An admission given, as usual, only when he’d decided to do what they wanted. The wind flows caught his wings and shot him upward. He thrummed his wings hard, shooting himself toward the face of the moon as the forest shrank beneath him. But when he looked back, just for a moment, the sharpness of his bird eyes caught Kalia, still standing there, the wind whipping her gown around her legs.
And he knew the words weren’t wrong. But he also knew the heart of what they’d actually meant.
Be careful.
Because on the Shadowthorn side of the family, they were down to two.
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