#patch 7.2.0

By the time the felhunter died, she was past slicing and was just bludgeoning the thing.

It took the crackling crunch of the carapace failing and the seething, bilious vapor of its fel blood hitting the air to bring her back to where she actually was. There were dead demons along the beach, up into the rocks that led up the cliff to the rally point. Some were killed with deft strikes, eviscerated or decapitated. As the trail got closer to where she was now, she saw the carnage intensify--bodies blasted apart, or ripped in half, and finally the last few just brutalized. Crushed and mangled by sheer force.

She took several deep breaths and wallowed in the smell of them. Acrid, with traces of rot and sulfurous fumes and the blasted reek of flame that burned even the soil around them. Dead, they poisoned the ground around their remains. She lifted one of her glaives to her mouth and licked the blade, feeling it burn her. Fury in every twitch of strained muscle.

Up the hill, she saw Azri ripping the head off a Doomguard. The tall night elf woman spoke little, and Karanath knew her only from moments like these, when they each reveled in their bloodlust in their own way. The dusk sky nearly matched Azri's skin, the glowing green of her tattoos trailing from her chest up her neck to frame the veil over her eyes, twin pools of green flame hidden poorly behind cloth. Knowing her own were the same, she wondered what she looked like to Azri.

"Are you rutting?" Azri cackled as she dragged the head through the sand. "I'd love a roll with you, if you're hungry."

"I'd hurt you."

"I hope so." Azri laughed again. Karanath felt something in the air, a sensation familiar and unpleasant. Further along the beach there was still fighting going on. She shook her head, slowly.

"More of them. I'm going to go see."

"It's just some Kirin Tor. Let them clean up their own messes." Azri cocked her head to the side, her hand on her hip. She was grace and rage, her wings only emphasizing the lean beauty of her etched abdomen, each muscle lit by the glow of her markings. "It's time to play."

"Not yet." Karanath stepped closer and bit Azri on the cheek. "But I'll come find you."

"Tease." Another laugh, and the Doomguard's head flew up in the air. "Call if you need me. Either way."

Karanath stalked away, evading a swipe of the claws that was more playful than serious. They were family, Illidari, they'd lost or sacrificed everything together. Azri could be trusted...at least until she lost the fight, or Karanath did, and then one of them would put the other down.

It was what they were. It was how it had to be, what she'd chosen. She could feel the marks on her skin, once a sun-kissed bronze, now sickly with trails of green fire climbing up her torso. The world was edged in flames, the same color as the blood on her blades and the fire that seethed where her eyes had been. Everything around her was marked by what she could see now, the world the way the demons saw it.

She passed cooling bodies in the surf and came to a knot of demons ringing their would-be prey. Kirin Tor mages lacked subtlety, often going for the biggest, flashiest spells they could. Once, when she'd been someone else, she felt them a trifle awkward. The years of her training both in Silvermoon and Dalaran still lingered and she could recognize craft, could see that someone on the other side of the crush of bodies was an expert. Not subtle, but precise, weaving together callings as tongues of fire rained down from the sky and seared them to ashes. Even so, more and more demons came, rushing from a rift just out of the range of the casters. The press of bodies was overwhelming them.

They'll be dead soon. This wasn't Karanath's problem. The Illidari had offered their expertise and the Kirin Tor had told them they'd be fine without it. But her hatred of demons was so very much stronger than any bitterness she might have indulged in towards the Kirin Tor or the life she'd been forced to leave behind. The spellwork looked familiar, like a tracing of fingernails along her spine on a spring day underneath Dalaran's minarets, the sun shimmering around her.

She let the hate loose, let her body distort and her wings grow, felt impossibly huge and powerful and flung herself towards the rift. She covered the distance in one bound, crashed down in an explosion of flames and felt the fire behind her eyes. She shook with the giddy, bubbling eruption of it as it burst forth from her, twin jets of fel that blasted the demons apart all the way to the rift itself. They lanced into it, shattering the enchantments bound into the gateway and it fell apart in a howling sound while she danced and slashed and kicked, most of the fury spent but self-preservation taking over. She'd stopped their reinforcements, but there were still dozens of them around her.

Idiot. Now you'll die, and for what? A memory? A place that never wanted you, people who never cared what you did? The Kirin Tor are nothing to you now. She couldn't tell if it was her voice or the demon's, but she knew it was true regardless. More and more of them were swarming her, determined to kill her for interference in their attack. By the time Azri or any of the others noticed, she'd be a blasted corpse with her intestines feeding a felstalker. The thought brought a tight grin to her face. Dinner time.

She'd forgotten for a moment about whoever the weaver of fire was. So had the demons, so intent on taking her life, they slackened off their assault on the Kirin Tor encampment. Through her new eyes, she could see the magic move in ways she never had when she'd actually been a mage, could see it layer and build and fold and coil in the air. She was so caught up in the sight that she took a polearm to the shoulder, dropped down to her knees in the burning blood of the imps she'd just slaughtered, and looked up into the smirking face of the Wrathguard that had hit her. She raised her twinblades, crossing them in front of her face as the demon’s polearm, dripping with her blood, pushed them towards her with all his strength.

"Now..." He swung the weapon up above his head. "You die."

Then he exploded. All around her the very air was replaced with flames, a sheet of fire made up of twisting tongues erupting from below. Karanath hated to admit it, but some lingering part of her was impressed. She couldn't do magic like this anymore... If she were honest, she'd never been this good, but now the Fel in her blood, the demon at her heart made it impossible to touch the arcane. But she still knew spellcraft, and a conflagration like this took years to learn and master.

The few remaining demons tried to flee and were brought down by arcane missiles or a few frost spells. Karanath managed to salvage a little pride by slashing a Mo'arg's throat open as it tried to run by before pulling herself to her feet. She could feel a nick on one of her horns where the sheath had been slashed open, and her shoulder was a ruin, but she'd heal.

The mages were tending to their wounded, or their dead. Karanath deliberately didn't look. She didn't want to know if she recognized any of them. She'd only left Dalaran just before the Third War. Called home. "It's time to marry Darameth and take over the shop.” Her father's voice. That almost made her laugh. The shop. The shop had been in the part of Silvermoon that was gone now, the part torn in half by a legion of walking corpses. Darameth had been decent enough – she hadn't loved him, but he'd been understanding, hadn't pushed. It was her mother and father who'd pushed. "You have to think of the future.”

She sheathed her glaives. She'd go up, find Azri. They could distract each other. She turned to leave and the faint voice reached her.

"Wait!" Someone was riding towards her on a bird made of fire. Despite every reason to ignore it, the part of her that remembered nights spent looking over tomes recognized it as an elemental creature, something from the Firelands. The idea that someone could ride one... She found herself standing there as the creature drew closer, the wet sand sending jets of steam in its tread.

There was a tearing sensation as she finally saw the face of the woman on its back. A human. Of course it's you. She'd never known another mage as utterly bound to fire. The woman's eyes were open, her expression one of curiosity.

"What do you want?" Karanath hoped her voice sounded different enough, that the black cloth over her eyes obscured her features.

"I..." Even etched in the demonic flames that were her sight now, Karanath could see recognition as it dawned. The moment was dragged out between them, until she was sure she'd scream at the mage. Get it over with. "Karan?"

"Once."

"You died." Anthai was much like all humans. She had barely lived long enough to understand her own feelings, so it was ridiculous for Karanath to expect her to understand those of anyone else. They'd argued often about it, once. She remembered the day she'd told the woman in front of her she was leaving for Silvermoon. “But how can...you don't love him, why would you go back and marry him? Why would you give up everything?”

"Yes." She felt Ranath twist her features into a sneer and let the demon have rein for just a moment before reaching deep into herself and twisting the creature into a ball, bearing down on it. Try that again and I'll make you suffer for days. "I did. With them."

She stepped back when Anthai reached out a hand, the same way she had that last day. Had it only been thirteen years?

"Don't touch me."

"I..." That hateful hand dropped to her side. "I went, I looked for you, I..."

Karanath didn't say any of the things she was thinking. She didn't let herself remember that last day, the look on Anthai's face. She hated that she felt anything, that the look on her face now meant something to her. She didn't want it to. Karan is dead. Karan died in a pit with her sister and her mother and her father and her foolish fiancé and I'm what crawled out, I'm what followed the prince to Outland, I'm what Illidan gave me. Freedom from memory. Freedom from regret. Freedom from this, from you trying to make me that weak little thing crawling back to Silvermoon all over again. She tried very hard not to hate the woman standing in front of her.

She just waited, letting it stretch out between them.

"Well." Anthai mastered herself, that way she always had of just pushing everything aside. It was a lovely act. Karanath admired it, even now. "Thank you. I couldn't protect the others and get to that gate without losing them all."

"No." The demon hunter agreed, her horns feeling new and strange, memories of being a slim girl on a spring day making her feel alien again like she had the first time she felt the spasms start. After she'd eaten Ranath's heart. "You all would have died."

"I wouldn't have."

Karanath just stared at her. Anthai stared back, even faced with the green flames for eyes. Why would that cow her? She was a master of fire. There was nothing to say and everything to say and she hated that she couldn't make herself leave worst of all.

"If you like." She turned and stepped up, snapping her wings and gliding up into the air. She drifted away, feeling eyes on her the whole time until she managed to bound over a hill and arrive where the Illidari were camped, bodies already writhing against one another.

Azri was between two, a lithe Blood Elf named Kaecilian and another Night Elf woman, Saharel. She knew she could join them--peel the few garments from her body, let them worship her markings and find release in theirs for a while.

Instead she stared down the hill at the camp on the beach and watched a woman with a bird made of fire and hated that she couldn't stop.