finale; a fine weapon
@ocarina-of-what @notdavidbowie @brothersemberfell @thepilgrimofwar for mentions.
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âYou are a weapon.â
The words echoed through the subterranean training yard, deep beneath the residence of the Silver Eye. Eleeria sat, young and wide-eyed, with the two other children in need of instruction. All of them had come to the assassinâs guild for various reasons -- Pielle, the taller and more athletic of the three, because she had no family. Deidral -- a scrawny child, who shook when he held a dagger -- was running from a mother who sought to sell his good looks into a profession perhaps even more dire and joyless than their own. And Eleeria...she glanced down at the training daggers in front of her, before glancing back up at the man speaking. Her father. Annâda. He had claimed her -- her, she was his child, and she was here to prove to him that she could follow in the footsteps her ancestors had laid before her. If that meant following every word he gave her, then she would.
He continued. âYou are a means to an end. Weapons are the instruments of change. The changes that happen at your hand will one day change the fate of the world. Do you understand?â He eyed the children -- none of them older than thirteen -- and they nodded, solemn and wide-eyed. âGood. Now, stand up, and letâs get to training.â
She was a weapon. Eleeria took it to heart as the years passed and she honed the edge of her killing blades. I am a weapon. A tool to be used. The words kept her motivated through everything -- she would not tire, not hunger or thirst. To her, it was the most important to prove that she was capable. That the mantle of assassin passed down from great-grandfathers to grandfathers to fathers and now to her. She was the first woman to ever receive training in the family business; she would not let them down now.
It was a mantra that was put to the test time and again. At the age of thirty-seven she broke her ankle on a mission -- a simple assassination in Lordaeron. Eleeria had made it home, holding back the pain for days; she couldnât hold it back any longer, regardless of the many prying eyes on her as she sobbed, five feet inside of the entrance to the Silver Eye. Deidral and Pielle hovered nearby; they had still remained friends of a sort, after all these years. But Eleeria was ever prideful, and neither wanted to risk her temper when she was clearly hurt. So she had been left to cry, completely alone.
Her father had been the one to stand her upright. âEleeria.â His eyes were concerned -- not for her leg, but for the impact to her reputation. Already she was someone that others knew to be wary of. Eleeria had long since declared her interest in becoming her father's Second in command. Although she was still too young, people knew her near obsessive desire for perfection was a threat to be reckoned with, when the time came. Crying now, in front of all these people, would be detrimental to that.
So she dried her tears. âAnnâda. SorryâŚâ Eleeria smiled instead, pushing the sadness from her features. âIâm okay.â She was fine. A weapon had no need for sadness; there was only determination left as an acceptable emotion, and Eleeria knew that tears marked her as weak, a liability. A few more yards would see her into the infirmary, and she could get this irritating injury fixed. Holding her head high, she pushed her father aside and walked herself to the nearest infirmary cot, holding back her tears with the words her father had taught her nearly from the cradle. Iâm a weapon. I am fine. Thereâs no room for sadness. Iâm fine.
It was the first time in Eleeriaâs life that she realized that the mantra her father had driven into their minds was not meant to be a motivator. It was to spare them the feelings that would break and crumble under the emotional toll of being an assassin. Eleeria wasnât certain if his words were a curse or a blessing, but as she laid there, biting back tears in the infirmary, she realized that they had helped her overcome her weakness. For that, they were worth holding onto.
From then on, she paved her bloody way to glory her fatherâs words at the forefront of her mind.. They were a mantra that kept her feelings safe in times where simply steeling herself for the kill wasnât enough. Her first lover fell to her own blade -- she had been forced to kill him by her father, and the feeling that she was simply a tool for a purpose greater than her own had never been more real than in that moment. Eriniusâs blood stained her hands and Eleeria refused to cry for him, or even to mourn him, for many years after the fact. Weapons didnât cry -- she was fine. She filled her head with thoughts of the gold and the glory she would get for killing him, and tried not to think of the tears that should have run through her fingers instead of the familiar currency. It was the first, and the last, time that she ever felt like the amount of gold she received wasnât worth the loss.
Other jobs were less memorable, or memorable but not quite as sad when they died. The head of a competing rogueâs guild that worked out of a small village outside of Stormwind. A noblewoman who had caused the deaths of several other nobles through mismanagement of her estates in Lordaeron. A few goblins down in Booty Bay, a few pirates off the coast. Eleeria killed the previous Second of her fatherâs guild with cold efficiency, despite the fact that he had been one of her first teachers. Anyone that stood in her way was a threat. Four hundred years of prolific assassination work took her across the continent -- the Silver Eye was far-reaching, and under her fatherâs command they managed to find more work than ever before. Eleeria discarded friendships and relationships and oriented her life around her work: she was a weapon in earnest, with no need for friends or romance. The woman pushed her own father away, just as she pushed away Pielle and Deidral. Closing herself off from others was the only safe way to ensure that the emotions didnât escape -- and make her own renown grow. The kill count was higher than she had years, in a few of her younger moments. And that was exactly the way she enjoyed it -- or it was the way she told herself she would enjoy it. Which was essentially the same thing, in her mind; she convinced herself that she was fine, every time her fingers curled around a dagger instead of a warm body or a friendly shoulder.
Deidral asked why she didnât want a lover, the night before his own wedding; he had grown up remarkably sane, all things considered. Eleeria admired that about him. While she knew that what she denied herself -- friendship, companionship, trust -- wasnât healthy, she did it because she knew the moment she trusted anyone, they could be killed in revenge. Or she would kill them. She had a bad track record of that.
âBecause I donât need anyone.â Deidral stared at her before throwing a piece of lynx meat from his sandwich at her face. âHey! Itâs true!â
âItâs -- well, never mind. Youâve never listened to me. You only listen to yourself.â He sighed, giving her a smile -- that was met with the return attack of the lynx meat.
âDamn straight! And itâs served me well so far, hm? Iâll be set for the rest of my life!â
Success carried her far -- but defeat, in the end, carried her farther. Around her four hundredth birthday, her career simply...flatlined. While she was still plenty capable of killing, the offers became sparser, even as her ego inflated. Eleeria grasped for straws -- an assassination in Stormwind here, a few trips to Booty Bay there -- but it seemed that all of them ended in mediocrity. There were no large jobs to be found anywhere on the continent.
What was happening? She was still sharp -- a clever tool, a weapon of destruction the likes of which not many had seen. But something was snagging her path to glory -- something sinister. She did not stop to unravel the mystery of it, so concerned with her ego was she. A weapon with an attitude was what she became -- and Eleeria truly was fine, happily settled in her mountains of wealth, with no one to care about. There was no emotional baggage she had to carry around because she had no one with whom she shared her thoughts. So she assumed, foolishly, that if she could not see the mistakes that she had left behind, that they did not affect her.
It was a mistake she made three times, in sequence.
They were not mistakes she made again.
She was a weapon whose edge was dulled by the explosion of a small fleet of pirate ships off the Stranglethorn coast. Her blade was dented by the assassination attempt that had been purposefully rigged for failure by an angry rival. And a weapon whose steel finally snapped in half in Orgrimmar. The loss of her hand and subsequent imprisonment was the final blow to an adage that had carried her infallibly through four hundred years; Eleeria felt her emotions breaking under the emotional strain, the weeks without sunlight and basic necessities. And as she cracked, so too did the mantras, shattering word by word over the long months spent in prison. She wasnât fine. She tried to pull the pieces of her mind back together in the places they had been before, but they didnât go together. The words that had helped her before broke in the face of such pain and devastation. She was a weapon, she was-- not a weapon any longer. Years in the dark, alone, cracked and fractured both her ego and her ability to repress everything for her own benefit. As hard as she tried over the years after she escaped that hell, she never managed to pull herself back together. It was as if the pieces of her mind had had a few go missing -- a puzzle that would never be complete. A sword with a broken tip. A dagger with no sharpness to its edge.
Still, she tried to pretend that the pieces werenât missing. Eleeria curled up on her mattress and whispered to herself, the liquor bottles piling up around her small apartment as she tried to nearly fade from time. Iâm a weapon. A tool. A means to an end. Thereâs no room here to be sad. Iâm fine. I donât need sadness -- itâs weak.
...but maybe for a few more minutes, or...a few more drinks.
She wasnât fine. Years of trying to dull the pain ruined her career and her liver in equal measure. But she pretended as hard as she could that nothing was wrong, because it was better than letting the pieces dissemble completely. To let them go -- to admit that she was broken -- was to admit defeat. And although she had been beaten, tortured and left for dead, Eleeria had not been defeated yet. The fighterâs soul in the core of her being yearned for its previous strength. She joined the Sunguard not only to appease Allegra, but also to try and find something good about her again. A place to hone the weapon she had made of herself through years and years of work.
She hadnât anticipated that the Sunguard would force her to learn to cohabitate with people again. The social situations were strange and new to her. In the Eye, everyone knew to stay well away from her. She was Eleeria Silverwing, her fatherâs fearsome Second and a woman who was known for leaving a casualty list of brutal efficiency. People who crossed her did not remain in the Eye long. Here she was...no one. A woman who didnât understand the game or the rules. Inefficient. Weak. By the time she shed her addictions and vices, by the time someone explained the rules of the social game to her, it was too late to repair her reputation. Eleeria realized that she had created the hole a moment, a breath too late to stop the digging. Her fingernails were bloodied as she clawed out of it -- but at least, she added, they had stopped to throw a second hand down to her, however unreal the prosthetic was.
She wasnât fine.
--
âYou are not fine.â It was the first time anyone had ever dared to say that to her. The words were clinical and matter-of-fact, and Eleeria -- Eldriana, was who she pretended to be in the Sunguard -- blinked, taken aback. The man across the table stared at her, golden eyes piercing even behind the thick glasses that helped him see.
âOf course I am.â Eleeria could tell that the man knew she was bluffing. Adrianal Novastorm was a mender with a particularly irritating ability to tell when she was bullshitting. The woman brushed a piece of hair out of her eyes, attempting to continue the nonchalance. But as the conversation continued, she realized, he was not going to allow her to pretend the pieces were together as they should be. She mentally faded out of the conversation, answering out of rout. She had no mechanism to deal with being accused like this. Sheâd built her life on saying she was fine; sheâd built her life on existing not as a person, but as a creature of habit and blood. When she focused back into the steady tap of Adrianalâs finger on the desk, his words disarmed her.
âStaying alive," he murmured gently, "Is much different than existing as a person, as a being of the world. Would you like to maybe find out...?"
Did she want to find out? Did she want to break down the mantras she still clung to, and learn not to be a weapon, but to be a person? Eleeria never considered what she would have been like, had she not devoted herself so ardently to her profession. She had become so adept at killing that she had shed her humanity -- and she hadnât needed it back, until now. In the aftermath of her mistakes, she couldnât shroud herself in words and pretend she was fine. She wasnât fine. Eleeria realized she was scared -- scared to trust Adrianal. Scared to trust anyone, after she had closed herself off for so many years. Scared...but the briefest flicker of curiosity sparked in her stomach. She was not a person yet. But she could be, if she wanted to. Eleeria could not imagine a world in which she could be a normal person, but perhaps Adrianal could help her become something close to normal.
She...would like that.
The dissembling was the hardest part of all. There were nights when she woke up crying, and days when she disappeared into the flames of the Firelands, screaming and furious, fire exploding from her fingertips. She still fell back on the mantras, sometimes -- it proved harder to make her stop saying them than it was to get her to start. Perhaps four hundred years of steady repetition was difficult to break. The wrong phrases set her off in ways Eleeria didnât quite understand, some subconscious reaction causing her to snap; she nearly choked Waraylon to death, nearly stabbed Ithranicus. She imploded -- but instead of the slow crack under torture, it was purposeful. Deliberate. Eleeria didnât know how to stop what was happening -- or if she should. If the path to personhood was littered with unexplainable anxiety and anger, then perhaps she shouldnât have started at all. There were so many doubts accompanied with the process of therapy, the process of dissembling, that Eleeria wondered if it was worth it.
But there were times when she enjoyed the new feelings that accompanied the slow dissembling of her being, and the building of something new. Vaelrin, standing in her kitchen, strong arms leaned against her counter as she talked. He didnât mind listening, and she had so much to say. People had taken away her voice and replaced it with silence in the depths of Lordaeron and Orgrimmar. She would not let them take it away again. Adrianal, and Talouse, and Feloâthore -- and more recently, the small curiosity that was Cassiopeia -- all watched her expectantly, helping her take her first steps into real emotions. All of them considered her a friend -- a true friend. She hadnât had a friend in so many years that the idea was fragile to her. She didnât want to break it. Sederis, perpetually understanding, as she struggled to explain how tightly she had woven her lies around herself. He didnât care. True friends.
And Waraylon...gods, she couldnât begin to explain. Every time he put up with one of her sudden, unexplainable bouts of anxiety, she fell more in love with him. Every time he patiently talked her down from disaster -- from trying to build those mantras back up again, walling her feelings away, pushing them down irreparably -- she realized that he was not going to let her push everyone away again. She wasnât a weapon any more. She may have been one, once -- the mantra had served her enough times that Eleeria had a hard time believing she could have been anything but. But she didnât have to be a weapon now. She could be anything she wanted to be. The thought terrified her, but...it was better than clinging to an adage that had long outlived its purpose.
I used to be a weapon. I used to think I was fine. But I donât have to be those things any more. So I choose...to not be fine. I choose...to be a person. I donât want to be a weapon any more.
She stopped the mantras. They wouldnât control her any longer. She would not let them dictate her emotions; she would find her own path, no matter how bumpy or angry the way she tread. Eleeria Silverwing, for the first time in her life, was free.
