Fireflies. They were the eyes of the forest when it was dark; the swirls and patterns of stars beneath the canopy of dense trees that covered all but the chilly banks of Drustvar. They hovered around gas lamps along the road, winking in and out, undisturbed, as if nothing at all had happened.
Raethian sat in the middle of the western road, one leg stretched out in front of her. The cobblestone had been blown to hell, leaving scars of dirt and carnage strewn across the once quiet route. Broken corpses, trolls and orcs and goblins, jutted out from the shadows like bramble bushes and old trees, tugging at the edges of her vision.
Don’t look. Focus.
Her leg throbbed despite the mist. Her leathers, burnt and torn by fire and shrapnel, clung to her like a second skin. Dried blood and dirt mingled together beneath her hands; beneath the water she poured over top. Paint on a tattered canvas.
She ran a thumb over the radio at her side, checking to be sure it was on and functioning, as she’d done a dozen times over the past hour. The wounded were stable, the dead tended to. Cinn had long since gone to check on her mechanical children. Out there, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, it seemed only she and the fireflies were awake.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours. It was hard to see the moon through the trees, and the quiet reverie of the forest stretched time out before her in a thick, uncomfortable tension. Scenes from the battle played themselves out in her head like nightmare. Fal reaching for his gun, his body bent and bloody. Serena collapsing behind the forge, too far to reach. Zeyad falling in the road as the bombs went off behind him. Lady Raysse’s voice booming over the din of battle.
She was pulled from her thoughts by a rustle in the wood not far from her. She placed a protective hand over her radio, still silent, and clambored to her feet. It was harder than it should have been, and she winced, sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth.
Focus.
The man who stumbled out of the woods was barely recognizable. His face and sandy hair were caked in mud and blood, ash and grease from goblin engines. His shirt was torn in several places and she could see, by the silhouette from the gas lamp, that several pieces of armor were missing.
“Love.” His voice was rough and and low, warm and tired all at once. He stepped onto the road and Rae rushed to greet him, falling into his arms with a cry of relief.
“Malrek! You made it!”
He held her close, letting the cool of her skin mingle with his own, the familiar smell of good dirt and jasmine almost overpowering as he buried his face in her hair. “Of course I did.” He mumbled, planting a kiss above her ear. “I’m home.”
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All the Stewards under the House of Da’Kien had gathered in Vigil Hill to watch the road to Drustvar. Raysse, the queenly wife of the Lord Steward, was there. The younger Lady Kien and her consort Kale were there, and Lisana Cloudgaze and the old bear by her side. There was Rellisa Thrum and her younger cousin, and the mage Danielle who watched him lovingly, and Cinn the Tinker, who took care of many things, and Acinovath and Falerelan at the back of the crowd, and many more.
They found lot of work for themselves while they waited for the Lord Steward, and entertained themselves with drinks and stories and patrols until he returned. Many of them were good times, but some were not.
Lorthanil was small compared to the other Ancients, not being quite an Ancient yet himself, and surrounded by others who were unlike him. His mother, as he knew her, was a medic for these Stewards, and confined to bed with injuries quite often. Lorthanil would stand at the side of her bed and show her flowers, quietly, even when her eyes were closed.
His father, as he knew him, was a giant man with a greatsword at his back and a patch covering his right eye. He was gone from them more often than not, but when he was home he would sit the little Ancient on his knee, and ask him questions he couldn’t answer and tell him stories of the world outside.
One day, early in the morning before the sun was up, Lorthanil saw his father readying his armor for a long journey. He saw the dried meat, the cheese, the hard bread wrapped and stored safely in his leather bag. He saw the beaten chestplate polished and repaired, strapped across father’s chest. He saw the sword oiled and sharpened.
His father was quiet. He heard his mother say his name in her sleep, but it was not in the old language, and meant nothing of acorns and seasons and the budding leaves, so Lorthanil forgot it frequently.
He followed his father into the breaking dawn. “I’m going to be gone for a little while.” he said, in his quiet voice. “You have to look after Rae for me until I get back.”
This was how it usually went. His father would leave before the sun was truly up, his mother would wake, and sigh, and the two of them would take to the Hill and look after the other Stewards and each other until his adventure was done and he returned home.
But it was spring now, thought Lorthantil, looking around their home. The ground was wet from rain, the earliest flowers had already begun to bloom, and the trees that stood tall against the sky opened their eyes and groaned and creaked and shook the snow from their branches.
It was time for an Ancient to have adventures too.
Lorthanil followed his father into the mountain, many paces behind so he would not be seen. When his father grew suspicious and turned to look, he would freeze, and raise his branches to the sun, and bloom with delicate spring blossoms to fit in with the other trees. His father must not have noticed, because he kept going and did not say anything at all.
Their way was through a pass in the mountain, where the snow was still thick and the wind cut through to the bone. They had been walking for many hours, and Lorthanil saw his father stoop with hunger and weariness. It was then that they came upon the cave of a hill ettin, sitting on a rock outside of his home by a meager fire.
“My name is Malrek,” said his father, “I’ve come a very long way from Vigil Hill and am tired, and hungry after so many miles. Could you spare me a seat, and some of the food you’re cooking at your fire?”
The ettin told him he could sit by his fire and enjoy his company, but the broth he was cooking was too thin, and there was not enough meat to share with human travelers who wandered up into the mountain.
Lorthanil sat by a bramble off the path from them, resting his limbs and drinking in the sunlight that dipped below the mountain tops and cast long shadows along the snow and rock. He listened to them speak of many things. He listened to the ettin speak of things he understood: The change of the rivers at the turn of the seasons; of the newness of the elk and kits and bear cubs that took their first steps; of birds returning to the island from the mainland to the south. He listened to his father talk of blood and battle and the rolling tide; of his woman back home and the days stretched out before them like a woodland path.
He watched the ettin watch his father, and stir his pot of too-thin broth, and marveled at the size of his limbs and brow, not much smaller than an Ancient’s.
The two of them sat and talked until the sun went down completely, and the ettin climbed to his feet and stretched his arms over his head. “You have been very good company, Malrek of Vigil Hill, but my soup is not yet done, and I have no other meat to keep my belly full. You are unfortunate in that there are many dangers in the mountain, and when I am done eating you, there will be no bones or flesh to find.”
The ettin reached for his club, but Malrek was much faster. He had his greatsword in his hand before he was on his feet; a gleam of steel under the growing moonlight. Lorthanil watched between his branches as the two circled one another, his father dancing out of the way at the ettin’s heavy swings.
It was hardly more than a moment, it seemed, that the ettin stumbled, and turned too late, and his father drove his blade into the giant’s eye. The mountains echoed with its howling cry, and the rumble of earth and rock as it fell to its knees in pain and defeat.
“Don’t kill me!” The ettin begged. “Take your blade from my eye and leave me. I have nothing to offer you, but if you let me live you may travel unhindered, and the mountain will be good to you, and bother you no longer.”
Lorthanil knew there was good in this. The mountain had many dangers, those visible to humans and not. The snows and trees could bury his father forever if they wanted to, he knew. But a promise of safety from the ettins of the mountain could let him rest for awhile, and regain his strength, and be bothered no longer.
His father saw this too, for he was wise about these things. When he pulled his blade from the ettin, its eye came with it, glittering and black like ice.
Lorthanil watched as his father hurled it high into the sky and looked up, and saw, at the very same time, what looked like a shooting star.
Alcohol, needles, catgut stitches, clean linen bandages. Fading light filtered through the lodge’s solitary western window, mingling with the glow of the lamp by the door. There were enough supplies for several emergency packs they could carry about, and the rest was good for storage. If they could find a place that didn’t leak and mold to hell, anyway.
Four leather packs, oiled and cured, sat empty at the edge of the table. They looked more expensive than they should have been; flourished and stamped and dyed to match the colours of the House of Stewards, but as long as they kept the water out she wouldn’t dwell too much on it.
She had her own, of course. The pack around her back held enough supplies for her and a couple others, plus her own additional fancies. A sea stalk flower. A pipe. A leather portfolio lined with bloodthistle. The little pink potions she’d been experimenting with. The new packs wouldn’t need all that.
“Rae?” Quiet, soft, thick with sleep. Malrek shuffled up behind her, resting a calloused hand on her hip.
“You’re up.” She smiled, busying herself with the packs. He’d come in with the ships that morning, when dawn’s rosy fingers stretched out across the harbour and paved the streets with new light. He stank of tar and sweat and brine.
Malrek cleared his throat. “Any coffee?” He slipped away from her, crossing the floor to paw through their food stores by the hearth. “And what are you doing?”
The drawback of a wayward man. He’d left on some salvaging mission before she was awake nearly a week earlier; hunting down rumors off the coast of Kul Tiras aboard a schooner he’d talked his way onto. The Lady’s Piety, or something like that. A privateer vessel bought out by a merchant several years before. The name, no doubt, was a shabby attempt at currying the favor of the tidesages, upon whose blessings a crew would gladly sail.
The Inquisitor had missed a lot sailing with the jacks, and more than that acting as a forward scout in Zuldazar the week before. And skulking around Stormwind in beggar’s clothes the week before that. A litany of felt absences that picked away at her, flickering in and out like the radio static that kept them connected.
“We’re trying a new approach, shona.” She heard him hum behind her, smiling at the familiar nickname. “One for Dave, one for Raysse, two extras for anyone who wants one. Maybe Acinovath? He’s my new boss, you know.”
Two mugs set on the table. A kettle by the fire. “I’m your boss.”
“One of many.”
“Don’t be crabby, babe.” His tone was almost playful.
“I’m not being crabby!” Rae tilted her head to the side, a little pout growing on her lips. “I’m just worried.”
“About what?” Malrek’s became serious. He was at her back again, arms around her waist, planting kisses along the nape of her neck.
“About this.”
She tied the first pack off with a leather cord, setting it aside at the other end of the table. It occurred to her that she could stitch names into each of them if she really wanted. Your name, your pack. Don’t lose it. No exceptions.
“We can’t let another patrol like that happen again.” she said, “We have to be more careful.”
“We will be.” Kisses on the back of her neck. “I’ll be there.”
“Yeah?”
“Mhm.”
“You promise?”
He stopped, looking over her carefully organized supplies. The empty, expensive bags. The kettle was boiling behind them, two lonesome mugs waiting on the counter. The basin out back she’d insisted he wash in as soon as he got there.
Orange and red, sunset rays like summer roses, cast a warm glow over her skin. He pulled her closer.
There was dirt under his fingernails, and little white scars along his knuckles like a boxer that could hardly be seen through years of sun and weather. She could see by the flickering light of the campfire outside a small burn between his thumb and forefinger, the light hair on his arm, the colour of an old tattoo. She kissed his thumb, his first finger, his second. He did not wake.
Their tent was a two person set up; almost too small to sit up in at the middle and lined with just enough blankets to make the sand and the clay of Nazmir mildly comfortable. When she slept it was with her head on his shoulder, or his arm around her middle and his nose buried in her hair. He snored a little, but it was alright.
Last night she had a dream. Her brother in his knight’s armor, auburn hair tied at the back of his neck. He was standing on the shores of Northrend; so cold the icicles clung to his nose and eyelashes. She saw his sword in his hand, shield gone. His left arm hung limp at his side. The great dark figure that tore through the ice towards him was fiercely hungry, and its roars like an avalanche echoed off the white cliffs.
She yelled for him to run, but her voice never reached him. He crumpled like a doll into the sand, stained red, a cry for home caught in his throat.
Did they see it the way she had? She wondered. The way her brother had? Sequestered in the safety of Eversong, her greatest threat the dwindling Shadowpine tribe to the south of the city. The twisting curling spread of red-gold fingers above fair tree trunks. The bleed into deep green, into sickly blue, into the gate that forbade them from traveling into the Plaguelands.
Did they see the elves that fought beside them in Northrend? At the gates of Icecrown where fathers and sons, orcs and humans, were no different from one another in the bulwark they formed against cruelty and death? Or did they just see the banner of the Horde, black on red, snapping in the icy wind?
If what they said was true, those sturdy and steadfast soldiers of the Alliance, they could not have seen it more differently. Wistful dreams of revenge against their most hated enemies, even those who stood shoulder to shoulder with them in another time. “They hurt you,” she heard in his voice, “and they hurt me too.” Their nightmare both did and did not include her, then and now, and it was hard not to feel it settling in her chest.
A low murmur pulled her back to reality; to the ragged outpost at the northern point of the swamp. To the damp ground and the hum of bugs above the water, the spit of wood in a fire, to the muffled chatter of the night watch.
Malrek mumbled something in his sleep, some nonsense, and ran his hand down her side before letting it fall, without ceremony, back into the mess of blankets. A strand of sandy blonde hair obscured the spider web of scars across his eye; an empty socket where the other was brilliant blue, and as familiar to her as her own skin. She brushed it out of the way.
Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t. The ties she had back home, all but severed. The dead lain still in their graves, unable to protest or approve. The willowy spectre of battles seared into the minds of those who lived through them, unable to recall exactly whose faces looked back from across the field.
Eventually they’d all have to come to terms with the damage done by others, to themselves, to the world they lived in. Eventually more ties would have to be cut and remade, wounds healed, memories recognized as just that. It was inevitable, she thought, and necessary. For their past; for their future. But not right now.
Rae settled down in the blankets, safe in a pair of arms that pulled her closer.
The bay at Nazmir's crown was crowded, not with ships or sails, but with sand bars that stretched long across the water. A thick grove of trees grew from the bay itself; their roots holding trunks above the waves like spider legs. Thick, stubborn grass grew throughout, and in between the brush were flocks of sea birds, their mouths filled with seaweed and the muscles that clung to it. The place stank of salt and decay.
Redfield's Watch had been erected rather recently, along the edge of the mouth of the Shattered River. It was, all things considered, a pathetic camp. The barest skeleton of a contingent had been sent there, presumably to monitor activity beyond reasonable safety, and the loss of that safety meant they seldom saw visitors, or supplies, or relief. It was also where the shadows had been stationed.
Raethian was knee deep in the river. It was no deeper than that the length across, she thought, but the bottom was entirely silt and made for a slower trip. The bugs that nipped at her exposed ears and cheeks only made the pace more frustrating.
The temple that lay at the other side was a ruin of what it once was; squat and sprawling with crumbling towers, and the stonework of the black road half swallowed by the swamp. It pulsated with energy she wasn’t familiar with. Cold, quiet. A warning to those who crept too close. This place wasn’t meant for the living.
She could see the river of souls pass over the walls of the necropolis, some more defined than others. Some were sad, some were not. Some were angry, some were at peace. All knew exactly where they were going. Little ghosts that drifted like fireflies above the grass and stone; winking in and out like stars in the clear night sky.
Fingertips on the stone, wet with dew. She hoisted herself up over the wall where it was low; worn away with time and lack of care, and landed beside a stone basin filled with soot and sand. Her instinct was to stay low, scout the area in case she was seen, but there was no need: The temple was as still and dead as the trolls that rested beneath it.
The cries of squabbling birds had melted away into a stifling silence. Even the sun seemed lost behind a canopy of trees that loomed and bent overhead, reaching out to temple’s main rise with fingers dripping in hanging moss. As far as she could tell, she was the only soul alive within the walls.
A crackle from her communicator broke the eerie silence and she quickly reached to turn it off. The chances of it being for her were low, and even if it was, someone from the watch would come and find her here. It wasn’t far, even if the air and the light and the feeling in her chest made it seem like a different world.
Raethian stood at the lip of a ruined stair, hands on her hips, looking over the temple square. An identical set of stairs lie maybe one hundred meters in front of her on the other side, with two larger, longer ones coming from the main road. The door to the temple’s main chamber yawned beneath a decorative skull, flanked on either side by constructs that weren’t, or didn’t seem to be, active at all.
She’d seen the skull peppered across the swamp, in ruins and in camps, sunk into the swamp and standing proudly before altars freshly used. The Loa of Death resided deep in the ground here, and this, she had to assume, was where the dead came when it was time to wander home.
A stream of them like mist floated by her, whispering nothings to one another that made her ears twitch and her skin tingle. It reminded her of something she heard long ago, about the knights squirreled away in Acherus. But this seemed peaceful, accepting. Comfortable. She wondered if all spirits were like this when they died.
“Rae?”
She spun around, planting one foot behind her, hands out front in the familiar crane stance. She knew that voice like the back of her hand, though she hadn’t heard him approach. And when she turned to look, only the wall greeted her.
“Raethian!”
She turned again, to the temple’s open mouth. The burning eyes above the door seemed brighter; the sky darker. They seemed to watch her. A cold fear trickled down her chest and into her gut. There was no one there. Not even spirits.
“Mal?” She called out into the swamp, her voice small and wavering. No answer. Not even an echo. Only the eyes of the Loa of Death, high above her, boring holes into her heart. Brilliant and blinding, purple and white. She shielded her eyes and felt the weight of them only grow stronger.
The voice called to her again, laced with urgency. It was further still, and even as she stepped forward she felt a tug at her legs, at her chest, at her soul. Come closer, it beckoned, into the temple. Come find me. Come see what I have for you.
Raethian stopped short of the step. The voice pleaded with her, deep within the yawning mouth beneath the skull. Her ears twitched. She dug her fingers into the palms of her hands, nails leaving crescents in the skin.
“It’s not real.” She said. It sounded like him. It needed her, very badly, to go into the temple and find him, but it wasn’t him.
She turned away through sheer force, pulling her scarf up around her ears. The voice that called out to her again was hungry, demanding. A wolf chasing down a deer. She hopped the crumbling wall and slid down the bank to the Shattered River, wading back across the silt to the eastern bank, to the watch, where she hoped someone was waiting for her.
The river of souls continued behind her; a silverly ribbon against an inky sky. Its hushed whispers filled the temple court like the hum of insects, the prayers and curses of the departed, spiraling towards an open mouth and the burning eyes of the Loa of Death.
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