#thinariel

Thinariel does not dwell earnestly upon much of the politics at play, here; she is a scholar turned fighter, brilliant chemist turned magical pioneer and combatant and impromptu medic, out on the rotted fields of the Ghostlands. The proud house she’d inherited once is in an abandoned district of Tranquillien, too prone to infestation to be safe. She misses it.

She pushes it from her mind, and applies herself here, there; Magister Lathar’s lessons are harsh and brutal, and leisure is spent reading, or soothing her fellow trainees with ointment and bandage for their burns while others sulk. Dame Auriferous allows the lessons, because Hellfire is a potent weapon against the Scourge. Lathar’s cohort of pyromancers endure for the good of their people.

Still, what glory when they at last manage to sack Deatholme; what glory when they rebuke the Scourge, and for a time earn a few motes of peace. Peace is a currency they spend, to revisit Silvermoon, purchase one of a dozen vintages that traded hands from dead vintner houses to caravaneers and opportunists. Thinariel is tipsy and laughing when the news comes: we go to Outland. To a promised land of plenty, a paradise for the people, a safe-haven and refuge where they will again be above reproach — where they will again be beyond the base craving of addiction.

She is one pilgrim of many, and they are hopeful. She brews plenty of decoctions to prepare, packs her whole life into a pack she can comfortably settle on her back. They set off through salvaged and re-purposed portal networks, built by the Magisters to take the aspiring few to the Blasted Lands, where they travel through the Dark Portal when fighting ceases long enough to be safe.

Of course it is strange, to be on another world. It is not the one promised. They are reassured of this, when they land in Thrallmar and given rest and provisions by Tor’seldori and the sentinels of Falcon’s Watch. The road ahead is long and perilous, but worth it. The promised land’s bounty is so plentiful that one may breathe mana from the very air, siphon tendrils of it from glorious bands of color in the sky.

Later, when they camp off the traveled path on their way to the outpost, Thinariel lays awake to stare up at the sky. It is the black of night, the sun’s light constant but distant, the space dominated by Outland’s sister planets amid a backdrop of so many stars. Coruscating streams of energy paint the sky like an artist’s abstraction, and she imagines herself reaching up, dipping her hands through it and drinking from it like a stream.

It keeps her mind from the barren wasteland of Hellfire Peninsula, where the earth is cracked rock prone to fissuring and volcanism and every creature seems designed for bloody contest. She fares better at least than the mother and her two children, or the lean-wasting brothers, who feel the magic of this place and feel fever instead of power, the crawling itch of the fel curdling in one’s stomach. Thinariel feels power. It is the same that Lathar taught them to reach for, to burn for, and in the moments she is not occupied she revels in possibility.

They subsist off of hope, as well as the rations they’d packed, the meager hunting that yields small insects and lizards and on one occasion the meat of a felled hellboar, which they boil and cook and feast upon. One of the mother’s boys grows sick and poisoned from it, until he can no longer walk and must stay in the wagon. He lasts a day.

The event makes them grim, and part of Thinariel aches in sympathy at the loss of a son. She does not speak to the mother.

Days drag on, their pace hard and uncompromising because Falcon’s Watch is a week’s travel away, and they must not delay. Fel Orcs roam the wastes, as do Alliance scouts. They encounter neither, but the anxiety haunts them doggedly.

One hunt brings back some kind of foraged herb, and they are given to Thinariel because she is the alchemist, and she marvels at them with something like wonder. She does what tests she can, with the meager tools in her alchemy box. When they are in the promised land, she will assert herself as an authority on the chemistry of their new home, she decides. Rebuild her practice, create wonders of magic, learn all she can of the fel and how best to help her people with it.

She confides this in Cahlen, who is another pilgrim in their party. He is weary as her and all the rest, but he is charming, and does not ask her what caused the burns that has her rubbing ointment into her hands and bandaging them every night. He’s sweet, tentatively and haltingly for fear of rebuke. She is made to feel young and girlish again, even though she is neither.

He wants to become a ranger, he tells her; he has his father’s bow but had never considered earning the skill to use it, until he was.. well. They’ve all lost people. He’s considered asking their lone protector, the Falcon’s Watch sentinel charting their path and seeing to their protection, and eagerly she encourages him. He is rebuffed, but gently. Perhaps he can learn when they are at the outpost, and can rest safely. It is alright.

The days go by a little easier.

Cahlen becomes sick, when he catches the sting of some shale-backed scorpion, too camouflaged to see. The fever has him sweating and vomiting up all his fluids, which will be lethal before they can make the two days’ rush to Falcon’s Watch.

She is the chemist, and his friend, so she devotes herself to this as fiercely as she can. She has learned of the fel already for months, and has a stock of local herbs — something she can transmute, or mix, something to negate the venom wreaking havoc in his body. The scorpion’s little corpse. Antivenom, she can make antivenom; take of her own, and teach Cahlen’s body how to resist it. She can resist the fel herself, and she can fix this; she can fix him. She has been an alchemist for two hundred years. She can make it better.

He can get better. They’ll get to Falcon’s Watch together.

She is hopeful, when she pours the elixir down his throat and he does not throw it up.

It does not take much for her to believe them anyhow, because her faith in the Prince was the shield she used to endure this place, and it was the first thing to erode and crack. It weighs heavy on her, and she is not sad to relinquish it and be shepherded to the City of Light, where she will earnestly, truly be safe.

She and her other pilgrims — who had stuck to her, fiercely, after their sentinel had died to ravagers and she had protected them with fire — are taught about the city and its brief history, and where they may stay. The Lower City is not any kind of grandeur, and parts of it languish just above-but-not-quite poverty and squalor, but they are welcomed by an old Broken they learn to call Kahesta, and given space to set up their tents in the overhang of a massive bridge.

Here, every manner of folk lives in company because they were all made refugees by Outland and its wars, and so Thinariel is surprised to make a living alongside humans and orcs and krokuul and an ogre. Some cling to wounds of the past, and on the occasion that she brushes coldly past a High Elf in ruined leathers, she knows that war seeps into this refuge all the same.

It seems petty and small and far-away to her, though. So, she rebuilds. Kahesta teaches her the basics of herbs in this world, and she spends a time learning the rest before she makes a name for herself mixing potions and chemicals for the people of the Lower City — tanning compounds or smithing flux, pigment for paint and dye. Useful things, but simple things. She never thought that Outland would make a simple tradeswoman of her, but she’s too pragmatic now for it to hurt her pride.

It’s a haggard man, scarred and grey-haired, who eventually suggests she see A’dal.

She puts it from her mind, because it is unnecessary. Everybody can see the colossal pillar of Light rooted in the heart of the city, and everybody’s heard the stories about how the Sha’tar reclaimed this city for all mortal peoples. That’s enough, for her.

With the newfound safety, her curiosity turns again towards magic and lore.

The Ethereals are a curiosity, and she barters with them when Veira’s child falls ill for lack of mana (she has since learned their names, the mother and child who lost family to Hellfire. Ceryn was his name. They build a grave for him, finally, and the Lower City mourns with her). She provokes some interest from them, though blood elves are not new to them — but she is a curiosity all the same, for even if the craft is subtle in her, she is a warlock. Outland floats on colossal currents and eddies of magic and energy and Nether, and she finds ways to extract tiny motes of that from herbs and metals. It funds her magic in no small part, and she trades it for pieces of lore and rumor, maps and books that she stows away for a day when she is braver and more daring.

She makes friends with an Arakkoa named Ressca, when the mottle-plumed birdwoman asks after a chemist who can help prepare an incense for burning, when none of Rilak’s flock remember the mixture. The process provokes conversation, and she learns of Skettis, and the lost memories of Arak, and the incomparable delight of Skethyl berrywine, which they both get very, very drunk on. Ressca tells stories and shares what lore she may. She was a historian, once; a keeper of culture, cast down into the pits of cursed Sethe for protest. Thinariel thinks of her as brave, and grows to admire her deeply.

She learns of loss, too. So much loss have the Arakkoa endured, outcast twice over. History is a cruel thing, says Ressca, and Thinariel agrees. We’ve got a new start here, though, don’t we? Thinariel remembers that her homeland was not cast into the shredding chaos of the Nether, before she asks as much. The outcasts of Skettis treat this place as a temporary refuge with the potential for embassy, because their home festers with madmen.

There is some common ground they find, because the Scryers’ campaign against the Mad Prince is well-known. It makes her wonder about how much she cares. She’s long-since dismissed the promise of paradise, when she made some effort to learn Outland’s geography; not even Nagrand is a stable place, as lush as it is. There is a life here in Shattrath for her, but she’s grown restless. Does she intend to leave, to be killed by hostile monsters and wildlife? No. But..

She has maps, and rumors. She has spells that have fought and defended her in the past. Oh, Outland is a terrible place to catch wanderlust.

She goes to the Scryers, and they meet her amicably and excitedly; kinship is a rare thing, here. Truly, she is an alchemist with some skill? She should’ve come sooner, and they would’ve instated her as chemist and retainer in no time. No, Thinariel says. No, I’m a warlock, and I wish to travel and learn by your blessing.

That changes things too, though it is not an awfully strange thing, either. Most Scryers charged with traveling outside the city were military, or military staff, and so a pilgrim is dubious. She insists nonetheless, and once she assures them that she does indeed have experience fighting, they acquiesce.

She is given access to a handful of items and spells, to ease her journey. She gains a bag that is larger on the inside than out, a short focusing stave of hewn black wood, and the recipes to a few potions that are useful for traversing and enduring the hostile elements of Outland. Summoner Durael spends a week with her to gauge her skill in spells and casting, and judges her worthy of a summoning ritual and a counterspell schema, which she adds to her weathered pittance of a grimoire.

She will leave Shattrath, on agreement that she return intermittently with her findings (she won’t, when it matters).