#soaswc

It was in this alcove where her uncle stood.

She drew still when she saw him. Facing away from the forest path and turned toward the pond, with his hands clasped behind his back. The wind yanked at the ends of her Shan’do’s thick deep blue hair, throwing it around the antlers on his brow. He stood there in the stillest of silences, and for a moment it was almost as if his body had become the trunk and the antlers his boughs- as if he would stand beside that lake forever as an Ancient of the forest- but… when she began to creep closer, the leaves crunched beneath her feet. And on one heel, he turned.

His amber eyes shone like lamps in the night. “You’re late,” he said.

There was no response she could give she hadn’t already voiced before. Kyssandrith bowed her head.

“Your face is bruised.” He said it so easily, as if he’d just pointed out that plants had roots or the sky was blue.

“I got in a fight,” she murmured.

“So that’s your excuse this time? Fight today, fight tomorrow, doesn’t really matter with you. You’re still late. Again.”

The apologies that once sprang to her lips, the prostrated pentinence for her transgression as she begged him not to be angry- right now, none of that came. Toward a single blade of grass on the ground, she stared, and she said nothing.

The soft swishing of his robes drifted to her ears. “Have you nothing to say for yourself?”

“I don’t want anyone to know.” Shandreya’s terrified pleas. “You can’t tell them.” Her pupils dilated so wide in the center of her glowing silver eyes. “Please.” While Endalen painted a legacy of bruises across her body.

Kyssandrith’s breath shuddered in her chest.

At the top of her vision, her uncle’s dark leather shoes pushed into sight. But she only looked further down as he drew closer. And her head shrank further and further into her chest until at last he stopped right in front of her and she could recoil no more.

“Kyssandrith,” he rumbled, “I am weary of your antics.”

A twitch ran up her ears. “My… what?”

She jerked her head up just enough to look into his face and- the dark set of his brows caught her breath in her chest.

He rolled his lips and tossed his head with a disgruntled growl. Slowly, he began to pace before her. “When I first took you on as my student, I believed those who reassured me that you’d changed from your younger self. So what am I to think when I hear of your so-called exploits every other day?.Getting in arguments in front of the Temple. Shouting at Wardens. Picking fights with other druids.” His eyes lashed toward the bruises lingering below her eye. “Not to mention the things people are saying about you.” Kelridor stopped short. His narrow nostrils flared as he breathed in. “Who did you possibly piss off this much?”

“I still love him.” Words Shandreya said, so many times. “He needs help.” Help. A funny phrase. Kyssandrith swallowed back the lump in her throat as she forced herself to meet her uncle’s eyes. Like so many kaldorei of his years, Kelridor’s face was smooth, yet mature in a way not quite definable, telegraphing him as far more than a child, but still covered with a veneer seemingly untouched by the ravages of time.

The long blue strokes of his mustache twitched. “Well?” he said.

“You can’t tell him.” It’s what Shandreya would say. “You can’t tell anyone.”

I love you.

I’m sorry.

She averted her gaze to the ground.

“Endalen Embertree,” Kyssandrith murmured.

A pause. “What?”

She forced down the hot coil of irritation in her stomach. “Endalen Embertree,” Kyssandrith repeated. “He’s… the one. He’s been doing all of this.”

There was a rush of air as her uncle stepped back. “You’re trying to tell me you made enemies of the Embertrees?”

Kyssandrith cringed. “I- I didn’t mean to- you see-”

“Kyssandrith,” he uttered her name like the crack of a whip. “What did you do?”

Slowly, she dragged her eyes back to stare directly into his face.

“What did you say?”

He shook his head back and forth with a fevered rhythm as a hand rose to tug at one of his long eyebrows. “To make enemies of a powerful family like the Embertrees is-”

“No.” Her legs drove her forward. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

Kelridor stared. Slowly, his hand fell back to his side. “I asked you what you did.”

Her chin jutted out as she drew herself up. As she closed the gap between them, as she stepped up the gentle upward curve of the hill, her head drew above his. “I did nothing. Absolutely not one fel-cursed thing, and this is what he’s done to me. How dare you ask me that? How dare you accuse me of inviting everything he’s put me through? The only thing I’ve done is try to protect someone I love!”

His brows knit together. “Kyssandrith-” he murmured.

She fell back clutching a hand to her forehead. Her heart pounded in her chest. She could feel her. She could feel the anger, the rage, the betrayal just on that precipice. “You can’t tell anyone.” Shandreya’s neverending plea. “We have to help him.”

A sudden vice around her wrist. Kelridor clutched at her, concern written into the furrows of his forehead. “Kyssandrith, what happened?”

But when she looked at him, she saw the look in his eyes… the worry shone through but besides that. There was disbelief. There was anger. A hardness she had seen in so many faces these days. Even as she let him draw her hands down, a new rages prang hot through her veins. And as she drew in a deep breath, her nostrils flared. On her wrists, his fingers hesitated.

“I love you, too.”

Kyssandrith spat into his face.

She jerked away from the sharp hiss of his breath, broke from his recoiling hands, twisted her body away and down the hill. Inside of herself she reached- she pulled on the spirit of the bird bound to her body. The transformation flooded over her, and she flapped as hard as she could until the wind cupped under her wings and tore her away from the ground and into the air. She thrummed faster and faster until she shot away like an arrow, leaving her Shan’do behind.

She didn’t stop until she crashed into the low open balcony just outside her room in Darnassus.

As she righted herself and stepped through her door as a kaldorei again, her breaths rasped quick and ragged through her chest. Her ankle hurt still but the pain was so far away as she stumbled around. Grab this trinket. Grab that timepiece. Around the room she stalked, shoving items together on the center table before she even really realized what she was doing. But as the smaller things all sat together in a heap and her legs turned her toward her closet, she stopped. And the gravity of what she was doing crashed over her.

She was leaving.

After the moment’s hesitation, she charged forward and swept her things from the hangers. On the table they went. From the back of the closet, she seized a sack, and she shoveled her belongings into it with a fervor like never before.

She strode out onto the balcony with the effects she’d collected over the last few years slung over her shoulder. In her head, she saw it all- she would jump down. She would run to the roosts. And she’d take a hippogryph away from here. But… there she paused, with one foot poised on the edge.

Across the city, her eyes dragged.

She couldn’t see it from here. But she knew where it was. Shandreya’s home. She might be there, right now. Tucked away in her room with a canvas and her brushes. Painting the world with no more than a few pools of ink. She was so talented. So beautiful. So dear.

I will protect you.

But who protected her?

Kyssandrith pushed off. And as she straightened up after the jump, she turned her feet toward the only destination she knew to go.

Auberdine.