Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The dream was the same. It never changed, and neither did Jaina have any power to change it. She could try to rouse herself with every ounce of the tangential awareness she kept within the dream, but it would do no good. She could only watch. She could only feel and drift in and out of the same mixture of memories and fiction. Though each time she had the dream, it became harder to tell what parts of it her brain fabricated and what parts had been real. Perhaps it was easier to accept it all, or deny it. Jaina often chose the latter.

Because while the dream tormented her across the years, it had proven itself correct in many ways. And that was what made it so abhorrent.

At first, she’d relished this first part as a cherished moment. An escape. A respite. But as time went on, it became the worst part of all.

Jaina hated the lie it told. The safety it promised. The feelings she knew would twist and turn and fade into nothing but a hollow pit within her gut. Something of shame and guilt. Something of regret. Something, maybe, of an anger she never allowed herself to feel in its fullest form.

But the dream didn’t care. It began as it always did, fading into a scene of sunlit Quel’thalas. Perfect and unruined. Golden and glorious.

There, Jaina stood in the loose embrace of her soulmate, lingering. They were saying goodbye. It was all too soon. They’d only met a week ago, when Sylvanas had arranged for her to visit the land of the elves. Her sister had met Jaina in Dalaran, and had noticed how the soulmark on her hand so closely resembled her sister’s. From there, it had been a whirlwind. A thing Jaina didn’t think she would ever find, found and then given so freely, so wonderfully.

Her mark was on the back of her hand. It glowed fiercely as she cradled Sylvanas’ jaw with it--a bright and brilliant blue. They’d only just met, but already their bond had been forged so deeply that the glow was brighter even than Jaina remembered her parents’ being. It had only been a few days since they’d decided to seal it with the kiss. Sylvanas had been so sweet, so hesitant with her at first, and so cavalier as she took Jaina’s hand in hers and placed her lips on the swirling pattern that graced the back of it.

And Jaina had been so eager to return her own kiss to the inside of Sylvanas’ wrist, where her mark was. The inverse of her own--negative space to her positive--in a shape that Jaina always thought of as a moon. A crescent moon with symmetrical, geometric shapes that Jaina interpreted as snowflakes. How she’d laughed when she learned that Sylvanas’ family had a nickname for her because of that mark--how they called her Lady Moon.

“I don’t want to go,” Jaina would hear herself say each time. Her voice was so young. Only twenty-three, golden-haired, brave, and optimistic. That felt like it was eons ago.

“But you must,” Sylvanas answered, as she always did. She smiled into Jaina’s hand, turning just slightly to press her lips to the palm of it.

Her own voice was different, of course. She was alive. Her skin was warm. She had a bit of the high, nasal accent of the elves, but beneath that, the scratchy timbre of a soldier who shouted over battlefields. A Ranger General.

An archer with broad shoulders and whose bare back had been a sight that took Jaina’s breath away not too long before this. Her arms were strong and confident as they held Jaina around her waist.

She was nothing like Jaina had imagined her soulmate would be. She assumed it would be a man, for one, despite the fact that she found herself attracted to both men and women. She assumed he’d be human, like her. Kul Tiran, even. As a child, she would draw him as a hearty, rosy-cheeked sea captain, or a shy, bearded Tidesage who grinned at her from beneath the cowl of his robes.

But no, her soulmate was an elf of Quel’thalas. A beautiful and important woman, whose duty called her away just the same as Jaina’s did. She was stern and steady in the public eye, but mischievous with her younger sister and her favorite Rangers. She had confessed to years and years of loneliness in the comfort of Jaina’s arms, and went on and on about how glad she was to have finally found her. Jaina had waited twenty-three years for her, but Sylvanas was nearly two-hundred.

And now that Jaina had her, she knew she wouldn’t have it any other way. Sylvanas was perfect for her. She was determined to be just as perfect for her as well.

“I know,” Jaina lamented, thumbing her cheek again as Sylvanas turned her head back. “I suppose this will be our reality and I need to accept it.”

“I suppose,” Sylvanas offered in somber agreement. “But it won’t be forever.”

“When can I see you again?” Jaina asked.

She knew that Sylvanas didn’t know. She didn’t either. The Kirin Tor had called her to investigate this new plague that had been tearing through northern Lordaeron. Master Antondias had requested her specifically, and stated in his letter that it was a mission he only trusted to her, his brightest of pupils. Sylvanas, for her part, was due to meet with some other military leaders of the Alliance to organize a relief effort to the affected communities, and to oversee the contribution from Quel’thalas of highly trained elven priests.

It was a responsibility that would cut short their visit. They hadn’t even gotten to talking much about the future--how they would live and where. Jaina assumed she would have to spend much of her days in Quel’thalas from then on, but she hardly minded. Sylvanas’ Rangers had been wonderful and welcoming to her, and assured her they would take good care of their beloved Ranger General’s soulmate when she was busy in the field.

“Soon,” was Sylvanas’ answer.

And that was where the dream twisted--on the lie. It had been a lie even then. A lie they told themselves and each other. A lie that Jaina hated. A lie that haunted her now--over a decade later, nearly every night as she tried to rest. But it would never let her rest.

She watched now, pulling back from her younger self, becoming a ghostly spectator as she watched her own face contort in horror. Jaina watched as Sylvanas’ face melted in her hands--warm, sunkissed skin falling away to reveal a face pallid and cold. Her eyes melted too, then ran down her face in a streak of black tears, until they were replaced with glaring, angry red. And then she screamed. She screamed the horrifying, impossibly loud and piercing scream of a banshee.

It rent through Jaina and her younger self. It cracked the very fabric of this scene. The trees and their golden leaves withered and died. The sky and the golden sun cracked as if they were made of glass--shattering into a million, million jagged pieces. Twisting spires toppled and broke into rubble as if they were made of toy blocks.

And when everything faded away, there was Jaina, watching her younger self again. Months later, they didn’t meet again. The undead were razing both of their nations and there was no time. Soon was a thing that would never be. Because here, Jaina was kneeling on the streets of Dalaran, clutching her chest and screaming, unable to tell anyone who ran up to her what was wrong.

Because Jaina had just found out what it felt like to die.

Because she knew that there was something wrong after. The pain was sudden and terrible and brief, but then it lingered and lingered, throbbing--a heartbeat going out slowly. But after, there was an awful, awful pull. A wrenching that was beyond physical. That was all the words Jaina had for it still. And then there was nothing.

And then there was her, shaking, retching, gasping for breath on the street. Reaching out with a shaking hand that no longer bore a mark that glowed, but one that was fading, settling into a silvery sheen.

A memorial. That’s what people called them to be nice about it. But there was nothing nice about it. Jaina screamed again, because this meant that Sylvanas was dead.

And nearly a year later, on the shores of another continent, when she would learn that the woman she planned to love for all of her life still walked this world, the mark remained silver. It never glowed again. Because Sylvanas was undead.

Because one cannot have a soulmate that doesn’t have a soul.

It was only after she felt that death again that Jaina was ever allowed to wake from the dream’s clutches. Sometimes, it would be so cruel as to let her watch herself weep on the street for hours upon hours. Tonight, it was kind enough to release her.

Jaina woke with a gasp, clutching silken sheets to her chest. But she didn’t feel the pain of a sword threatening to rend her in two and ripping out her soul. She was fine. She was right where she’d fallen asleep--in her room in Boralus.

Though that was new enough that it took her a moment to remind herself of that fact. So much that she felt a need to say something to the darkness that shrouded her--a variation on a mantra she often had to repeat after this dream. “It’s only a dream. You always have this dream. You’re Jaina Proudmoore. You’re now the Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras. This is your bedroom.”

She was still sleeping in her childhood quarters. Her mother had insisted on moving out of the Lord Admiral’s suite, but Jaina told her to take her time. She wasn’t in a rush. She just needed a bed to sleep in.

Or not sleep in. Exhaustion had been her constant companion thanks to this damn dream. Thanks to the same silvery mark that glinted on her hand in the moonlight. Of course, the moonlight. How poetic and awful that was.

Jaina tossed the blankets back and rose from her bed. She went to stand near her desk--the same one where she’d drawn the pictures of burly sailors and kind Tidesages--never an elven General. She leaned against the polished wood and looked out at the moon.

It was only a waning sliver. Tomorrow, there would be no moon, or maybe the next night. Maybe the dream would leave her alone and let her sleep. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe the woman who wore the face of the one she’d been meant to love would finally invade her city and they could end this prolonged suffering, this thirteen year long funeral march.

Jaina didn’t really want it, if she were to think of this all in her right mind. But for tonight, she would look at the moon and wonder how it might end--with Sylvanas’ arrow through her eye or her ice piercing that cold, dead heart of hers.

---

Shaw was a good man. Jaina valued his intelligence and his thoroughness. He was endlessly loyal to the Alliance as well.

But today, she didn’t particularly want to hear another word from him.

Still, Shaw went on, leaning over the war table toward her in his impassioned plea, “I know it’s a bit soon, but if we can just have you pledge the fleet to protect our attack--”

“Absolutely not,” Jaina cut him off, pushing the tokens that represented her ships back away from the shores of Zuldazar and its proud harbor of Dazar'alor. “We just got that fleet back, if you recall.”

“And the Alliance needs it,” Shaw insisted.

“And Kul Tiras has not yet pledged to the Alliance, if you recall,” Jaina reminded him.

“But you--”

“Must do what is right for my people? Very astute of you to point out, Shaw,” Jaina declared, pushing the tokens further, all the way to their home port in Boralus. “And since the Alliance was so kind as to continue the aggression in Zuldazar while I was imprisoned, and attempt to kill a great many of the Horde’s ranking members in the process--including Trade Prince Gallywix, whom you did not kill, mind you--then I believe the safest place for the fleet to be is guarding this very harbor.”

This, at least, stunned Shaw into silence for a moment. A blessed moment. Even more blessed by the fact that Valeera Sanguinar audibly laughed loud enough that it carried from across the deck of the ship, where she stood with arms crossed at the cabin door.

Even more blessedly so as Anduin joined her with a chuckle of his own, placing a hand on Shaw’s shoulder and offering him a consolation pat as he agreed, “Jaina has every right to be concerned, and every right to refuse.”

“You’re supposed to be helping me to convince her, my king,” Shaw muttered.

“I would be remiss to make Auntie Jaina do anything she didn’t want to do,” Anduin told him. “And a fool. If she doesn’t think it’s time to strike at the Horde, and that the risk to Kul Tiras is too great for them to aid us, then I would say we should consider waiting. Jaina is merely advising that this is too risky a move now, not necessarily later.”

“The risk of a swift offensive is far less than any you might take with waiting for them to attack,” Alleria Windrunner chimed in.

Her voice was clipped and stern--deeper than either of her sisters. She glared at Jaina with blue eyes that swirled with the void. Nothing like the soft grey that Sylvanas’ had once been. A streak of blue tattoo covered one, while a silvery mark that resembled a sun with an arrow piercing it covered another. Jaina knew that Alleria had never met her soulmate. They had died before she could meet them. Alleria never knew the pain of that death, or the loss of anything but possibility. Her mark only spoke of what could have been, and her husband didn’t seem to mind it, as he bore a similar mark from a person he too had never known.

Wars had taken the opportunity from many people, lest Jaina forget. Wars that happened thousands of years before she was born, even. But at least Alleria never had to see the matching mark to hers on the face of her enemy.

And yet, she always had a special glare for Jaina, and always made it known she was watching her with it every time they met. She seemed to be searching for weakness, hesitance. And Jaina would look back at her hard, trying to convey that no one in this room hated what Sylvanas had become more than her. Though Alleria probably was a close second. She’d give her that.

“Alleria has a point,” Shandris noted. She was slumped against the table, looking deeply exhausted. No doubt due to the early hour that was an affront to her nocturnal nature, and the fact that she had worked tirelessly to ensure the Horde was weak enough for this attack to be possible. “We don’t know what they’re capable of. Well, at the very least, Jaina hasn’t seen their latest tactics.”

“Jaina is well aware,” Jaina answered for herself, taking a moment to rub her temples. In public, she always wore gloves, so that her mark was not on display. These days, she wore another layer on top of it, a golden gauntlet on only the marked hand.

If asked by anyone who wasn’t aware, she would say it was to protect her casting hand. In reality, it was just another piece of armor to protect not from what was outside, but what was within it. A shame. A rot that would spread through her heart if she thought about it long enough, or caught herself looking at the silvery mark.

“All I’m saying is that attacking them is a better option than just sitting here, and we’re not going to be able to do it without your ships,” Alleria protested, reaching out to the command table to flick over the figurine of a Kul Tiran frigate.

Overhead, the gulls chattered. Jaina disliked having a tactical meeting aboard the open deck of a ship, but apparently this was what the Alliance had chosen as their command post while they curried favor with her mother and attempted to rescue her. She’d have a chat with them about moving this kind of meeting indoors, where it belonged, when they were not trying to get her to turn around and immediately bring the nation she’d just been handed into a war in any official capacity.

Because, like it or not, their actions had already brought Kul Tiras into this war, and extended it upon their own eternal conflict with the Zandalari. And apparently, asking to take a week’s respite to get started on governing her nation and recuperating from her time in Thros was too long for Jaina to absent in their efforts to drag her further into all of it.

Alleria’s jaw clenched in the relative silence. The harbor was never silent, and though no one spoke, they were surrounded by the noise and liveliness of a busy port. Waves crashing. Sailors laughing. Cargo being loaded and unloaded. The docks creaking and sails straining against their lines.

All sounds familiar and foreign to Jaina at once. No wonder she’d had the dream every night for a week. Things were quite stressful. Well, things were always quite stressful for her. Enough that she often wondered why she’d bothered to come back from her self-imposed exile during the battle against the Burning Legion.

The elder Windrunner sister couldn’t take it anymore, though, and burst out with, “Think about what good sitting and waiting has done you before. How well did it work at Theramore?”

White hot anger seared through every bit of Jaina’s nerves, setting them alight. She was certain that Alleria could feel the gathering of mana, the ice that wanted very much to form at her fingertips. But Jaina didn’t let it. She banished it.

“I think I’ve heard enough,” she hissed through clenched teeth, clinging onto civility.

But she had no other choice but civility. Because as much as she wanted to slice Alleria’s head clean off with a blade of ice for that remark, it wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t fix anything. It wouldn’t let her rest. It wouldn’t keep Kul Tiras safe, or the Alliance satisfied. It wouldn’t stop the Horde from attacking.

It would only be more loss and blood. More grief. And Jaina had had enough of those things to fill many lifetimes--even one as long as Alleria Windrunner’s.

“Alleria,” Anduin whispered, reaching over to take her arm. “That was uncalled for.”

“Jaina’s cowardice is uncalled for,” Shandris offered, standing up straight and moving toward the other side of Alleria.

“Please,” Anduin tried, reaching out his free hand to Shandris.

His mark was also on the back of his hand, not too far off from where Jaina’s was on her own hand. It was still unchanged from when he was a boy--just a slightly darker patch of skin, not unlike a birthmark. Anduin had not yet met his soulmate. He still had time--the grace of potential.

Shandris batted it away, taller and stronger than her High King enough to make it seem a foolish gesture to begin with, and turned back to Jaina. “Do you want history to write Kul Tiras into its annals as the cowards that stood in the way of the defeat of the Horde? To stand in the way of the vengeance my people deserve? Do you want all of my work to be for nothing?”

“I want none of those things,” Jaina assured her, willing the bile in her throat back to where it came from. Trying with every ounce of control she had to be the calm that Anduin needed. If nothing else, she could be that. “I want time. I do not want to lead the charge as an aggressor when we have done just as--”

“Just as much?” Shandris spit. “Tell me, Jaina. Did we burn their people? Did we set flame to all they loved, all they cherished?”

No. They had not. But Jaina had seen Sylvanas’ eyes, that day she took her ship to defend Anduin and his army at Lordaeron. She’d seen something in them--a bitter shame she felt gnawing at the edge of every waking moment, echoed behind bright red rage.

She’d known then that losing the Undercity was as grievous a blow as it was meant to be. She knew then that she would rather be anywhere but there, and that facing other past crimes in Kul Tiras was far preferable than casting another look in the direction of that cursed place and the shade of the woman who she’d run off from it.

Jaina clenched a gauntleted fist, but said nothing. There was no correct response. That was the whole problem with what was being asked of her this morning.

“It’s as Alleria says,” Shandris needled even as Anduin reached for her again, still pleading. “You are unwilling to attack their Warchief directly. You won’t touch Sylvanas.”

“Shandris!” Anduin shouted this time. “Please! Is this what you call diplomacy? Jaina is our ally, and our friend! Remember that, please!”

The boy king cast a worried look at Jaina. No doubt he saw the glow of arcane pooling in her eyes, threatening to whiten them out. She could blow this ship up. She could level these docks. She wanted to. A part of her wanted to. A part of her always longed for an end. Anything final, not always death, but something.

But not today. Not today. Jaina’s will was iron. Her heart was not, but she tried her best.

“Why would either of you worry about what I will or will not do with Sylvanas?” Jaina asked her, voice quiet and low. “After all, Shandris, one cannot have a soulmate that has no soul. She hasn’t been anything to me since she died. Of anyone here, it would be the greatest relief to me to put an end to the banshee who wears her face.”

No one aboard the ship had anything to offer in reply to that. And why would they? Who would challenge her, the greatest Archmage of her age, eyes burning with unspent arcane as they’d burned with unshed tears all these years. They all knew. It was no secret. No, Jaina’s shame and grief had always been a public affair. That was precisely what she’d hated the most about all of it.

“As I said before, I've heard enough for today. We can discuss this again tomorrow,” Jaina told them. “Inside the keep. I will have my mother prepare an appropriate room for your command post. As much as we enjoy ships here in Kul Tiras, such sensitive matters of state are best discussed behind closed doors and not on the deck of one.”

---

That evening, Jaina had hoped that only darkness would greet her from the night sky. But still, a sliver of the moon lingered, mocking her from the window of her bedchamber. The larger one, of course. Azeroth's second, dimmer moon rose later in the night, and never seemed so mocking as its sister.

Her mother promised to be finished moving out tomorrow. Jaina cautioned her to take her time still. While the Lord Admiral’s quarters were rightfully hers now, it felt odd to steal her parents’ bedroom from her mother. So many things felt odd about this place. Boralus was so like what she remembered, and yet also so very different.

Time could change a lot. Jaina reminded herself of this every day. Time was said to heal all wounds. And it healed some. She’d done her best to forget, even as her dreams reminded her over and over. She’d had her share of lovers over the years, those who either had already lost their own soulmate or hadn’t found them yet or just didn’t care. She’d watched the marks of others wink out and silver as her own had. She’d held Sylvanas’ younger sister through her grief at the loss of her own soulmate at Theramore, and watched the tears fall onto the silver mark that now occupied Vereesa’s cheek.

But she’d spent most of her nights alone. Even when she entertained suitors, she would make excuses not to spend the night. She’d tired of explaining why she tossed and turned at night, or would wake at odd hours to distract herself with a book or some paperwork.

Jaina changed into her nightdress, hoping for a reprieve. Even just a few hours. Just a little rest. She needed it so badly.

And she needed to be thinking of anything but Sylvanas right now.

She’d given up praying years ago, or she’d try that too. Whatever gods there were would not be so cruel to her if they were as supposedly benevolent as their advocates insisted. The Tides, the Light, and all of their subsidiaries didn’t seem to carry the same weight to her. At least, not when Jaina knew they never seemed to answer any of her prayers.

So instead, she just hoped. Hope was all she had. She was all she had. And she knew she could be a better version of herself for tomorrow’s meeting if she just got some goddamn sleep.

But still, she looked at the moon. That damn moon. Maybe she ought to pray to Elune. She’d given Tyrande the strength to take her vengeance. Maybe she’d grant Jaina the strength to find that end she was looking for.

And maybe then, she could rest.

Jaina turned her back on the crescent moon--the sliver of silver that hung in the night sky. She dimmed her magelight lamp with a snap of her fingers, and crawled into bed.

She pulled the covers over herself. Silk, deep green. Kul Tiran colors. She wondered how long it would take her to get used to waking wrapped in green. How many more times would she have to remind herself where she was?

It was better than Thros. Anything was. Where every regret played out endlessly for her, every failure. There, she was damned to wrap herself in an eternal comfort of the worst days of her life. At least she was back now to just having the dream. It was vivid, but far less so than all those things she’d repressed, all the sweet memories of Sylvanas laughing with her Rangers, of how good her warm skin felt against Jaina’s, of the equally warm sensation of her growing love and fondness for her, shared across their bond so that Jaina could feel it too.

No. Jaina promised herself that she would bury those things again. And she could. She knew she could.

She counted, as she often did. Backwards from one-hundred. Then two-hundred. Then three-hundred. Some nights, she’d get all the way through one-thousand and still not be asleep.

But she tried. Every day, every night, she just tried, knowing that it was very likely the same thing awaited her, the same dream, the same pain.

And when she started the four-hundred count, pain was exactly what Jaina felt. A dull throb in her shoulder, to be exact. Not unheard of, of course. She was thirty-six now. Things were starting to hurt. Her mother had joked with her that it didn’t get more fun in her sixties, so she should enjoy the fact that her pains were only occasional. But it was a little odd.

The mattress was soft and piled with pillows. It had been comfortable and hadn’t bothered Jaina any other night she’d slept on it. She shifted from lying on her back to her side in an effort to banish the pain.

But the throb remained. If anything, it began to slowly intensify. Jaina lost count in the four-hundreds and sighed, reaching up to rub her shoulder to no avail. Great, yet another thing to keep her up at night. Just what she needed.

And then it became bad enough for her to let out a grunt. Jaina kept rubbing at the offending shoulder and cursed, sitting up. She draped her legs over the side of the bed, bare feet touching the cool stone of the floor. She ought to get a rug--autumn was just about here and would be cold in Boralus.

And then it was white hot and searing, a flash of sensation that Jaina wasn’t at all prepared for. A flash of burning pain that certainly was not like anyone had described any sort of familial arthritis or anything like that to be.

With it, and after it, came a flood like a dam breaking. A rush of adrenaline that caused her to start panting as if she’d just run a marathon. Confusion beyond measure. Fear too. Wave after wave of all of these, crashing into her.

Was it another dream? A new terror for her to enjoy?

But no, Jaina was pretty sure she was awake and aware and in control.

So she started her nightly mantra in the middle, just to be sure, “You’re Jaina Proudmoore. You’re the Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras. This is your bedroom.”

It was. She was. The moon peered into her window, as if watching her and laughing. Always watching.

Jaina dug her fingers into her shoulder, trying to dispel whatever this was. Maybe it was her end. Maybe she wouldn’t lose to an arrow in her skull, but to the madness she was most afraid of. The stress of it all was too much. She was so tired. And she was so tired of trying.

But the pain remained. The emotions washed over her again and again. Relief joined them. Exhaustion was somewhere too. Oddly enough, a giddy sense of victory as well. Dread was chief among them, though, as if she’d just seen a vision of the very world’s end.

And as Jaina squinted against the pain again, her eyes opened just a bit. Just enough to see that the hand she held her shoulder with was glowing a dim, but distinct blue.

A blue moon, beset with snowflakes, was glowing on her hand for the first time in thirteen years.

It was only then, when she saw it, that Jaina screamed.

Chapter Text

Anger had been Sylvanas’ constant companion through the years. The only thing, in fact, that did remain constant. Its target often shifted, but she was always angry.

Tonight was no exception. No, none at all as she stared down at the corpse that had been placed for her inspection in the captain’s cabin of the Banshee’s Wail. Tonight, she was angry at many people and many things, but mostly at the circumstances that had brought the body of Derek Proudmoore upon her table. And those that had brought the decision about what to do with it to rest on her shoulders.

She knew her orders. One of her remaining val’kyr, Signe, had brought them to her the night before on ghostly wings, just as many of Sylvanas’ orders came these days. Yet she had not followed them. She did not intend to follow them.

And therein lay the problem. The Jailer, Zovaal, whatever she chose to call that being to whom she had bound herself in servitude towards his vague plan to free the universe from death, wanted her to raise Derek Proudmoore to unlife, willing or not. Sylvanas had done many awful things, but had never raised unwilling undead. And certainly never with the intent to turn them against their own families and bend their will.

There were many lines she had sworn not to cross, but had crossed anyway in pursuit of his goal. Why it was this one that she hesitated at, she couldn’t say.

Derek was a water-logged, leathery thing, recognizable only from his dog tags. A bag of skin and bones with a mop of blonde hair and a blonde beard still clinging to him--along with the tatters of a fine greatcoat, made from tight woven broadcloth now turned to soggy rags, but once grand enough to be befitting of the Lord Admiral’s son. He’d been dead years longer than Sylvanas herself, and the condition of his body reflected every one of those years.

A hollowness in her twisted at the sight of him, not so dissimilar to the one that jerked at her from deep within her chest and stomach as she watched Teldrassil burn.

It was easier to assure herself it was all worth it, dripping with righteous anger--boiling with the knowledge that it was Saurfang’s failure that forced her hand that day, even as she knew the Jailer would be quite pleased with the more destructive outcome of her victory.

But here, alone in the night--a corpse staring at a corpse and wondering truly, if she were any different than him--the anger didn’t blind her, nor did she let it. Here, alone, she could count what and who it was that she was angry at. Nathanos, for one, for dragging Proudmoore’s body up onto this table and presenting it with glee, as if it were a cake at the world’s worst surprise party. The Horde champion, secondly, for apparently having been the one to have the bright idea to bring it up from the bottom of the sea along with their original target.

And chiefly at herself, as always, for bringing this decision upon herself. Sylvanas was no fool. She knew she had signed herself away, what little freedom she had. And sometimes, she felt as if it was worth it. It would be worth it.

But not tonight.

She felt more than heard Signe appear next to her. While eventually, the flapping of her wings grew corporeal enough to disturb the air and bring sound to Sylvanas’ ears, there was sense about her first--a looming, frigid thing. A weight. A burden.

Signe’s booming voice was somber as she reported, “He’s waiting.”

“I know,” Sylvanas answered.

He had given her saviors and turned them into his messengers. His parrots. The val’kyr liked her better, though, and meant every loyalty they’d sworn to her. She didn’t ask much of them. She didn’t want much from them. She kept her responses brief and her use of their powers as minimal as she could get away with. While they had been a blessing in their ability to raise the willing dead, Sylvanas only had a need for so many soldiers. And now with the whole of the Horde at her command, what was one more corpse, one more brittle and broken body, and one more spirit disturbed from slumber?

It was one too many.

“Take me to him. I wish to speak with him directly,” she commanded of Signe.

Sylvanas knew such a thing was possible. Zovaal had seen to it that his chosen agent among the living world was able to cross the plane of death, even if he was not. The Shadowlands, it seemed, didn’t mind her passing through. After all, Sylvanas stank enough of death to be at home there. Surely nothing and no one noticed her passings back and forth into the Maw, or at least not enough to object to them.

But she did. She hated that place. She hated Zovaal. She hated the things he had her do. She hated what he was making her, and hated the knowledge that it was ultimately him that had forged the tools to make her into this abomination to begin with.

Yet he also held the key to her salvation, and took great joy in taunting her with that fact, in his own way.

Signe understood the request. She likely offered a nod, but Sylvanas didn’t see it. She kept her blood red eyes on Derek’s body, then closed them as she listened for the sound. A rush of silence, if it could be called anything. A lack of the familiar sounds of her flagship--of wood creaking and the footsteps of her Dark Rangers patrolling above deck. They faded into nothing, into a void that Sylvanas slipped past as Signe’s arms wrapped around her, and she carried them into the land of the dead.

Tonight, Zovaal was in Torghast, as he often was. The silence broke into the sounds of distant screams of torment--the eternal torture of the irredeemable. A real hell, somehow worse than the ones any mythology promised. He’d boasted to her before about the infinite, twisting nature of his tower, and how it offered floor after floor after floor of punishment. Sylvanas wasn’t here to discuss the architecture of torture, though.

“Where are your sisters?” Sylvanas asked of Signe as she let her go, dropping to her feet onto the tile of Zovaal’s throne room, shifted and twisted and slightly different from last time, as was to be expected.

“Brynja and Kyra await your call not far from here, Dark Lady,” Signe answered.

There were only three of them left. As much as Sylvanas found that cause for concern, Zovaal did not. He assured her he could send her more, but never did.

“I’m feeling foolish tonight,” Sylvanas told her. “Have them come here and wait with you.”

“What do you mean by that? Foolish?” Signe asked.

Sylvanas had not been prepared for the frank question. Her val’kyr were the type to just take orders and not ask about them.

Nor did she have an answer to give. “I don’t know yet. Have them wait.”

“Yes, Dark Lady.”

Sylvanas did know a part of the answer. She was going to tell Zovaal no. She just didn’t know what that would mean for her. All she could think as she strode toward his throne was that she should have said no much, much earlier.

But hindsight was a thing she could reserve for her anger at herself. Tonight, she needed to focus on Zovaal.

“Have you come to explain yourself? Or to argue, as you so often do?” he asked her as he sighted her.

He was a massive hulk of a creature. A god? A demon? A titan of some sort? Something that had come before them all? Sylvanas wasn’t sure. This realm defied so much of regular logic, so many of the things she thought she once knew with abject certainty, that it was tough to compare it or its denizens with any of that. She wished she could forget it, but the promise of her freedom from its clutches was the only thing driving her to continue on these days, lest she forget. And she never forgot.

Sylvanas looked up at him, a bald-headed figure of stone, otherwise dull, but alighted with blue runes in some sense of sick irony. The gaping hole in his chest had been what had made her feel there was a kinship between them once--an understanding of sorts. They were both missing so much. But over the years, Sylvanas surmised that Zovaal deserved to be missing what he was. And now she knew that he was the one keeping her from being whole.

Another matter to be discussed, certainly.

“Neither,” was all Sylvanas answered as her boots clapped over the tile of the floors. The pattern it formed seemed to twist and transform even as she walked across it. The entire tower was a writing, slithering thing.

The spikes and jagged piles of debris that formed Zovaal’s throne were subject to the rate of subtle change. If she looked away long enough, or focused on one feature only, then those around it would change. It was maddening. Terrifying.

And yet Sylvanas kept walking toward it.

“Our work is only beginning, Sylvanas,” Zovaal told her. He was relaxed between the jagged arms, well, as relaxed as a statue of animated hatred could be. “And yet you delay it.”

“You asked for Marshall Valentine. I have him too. Why bother with Proudmoore?” she asked as she finally stopped short of him, closer than she normally dared.

His size often shifted, just like everything else about him and his tower. Today, Zovaal was about three times her size. Who knows what he’d be tomorrow. But as usual, she had to crane her neck to look up at him.

“You know why,” Zovaal answered. Always cryptic--his stone face unmoving, but something about it still betraying a hint of sick delight.

“To rattle the Kul Tirans? Sailors don’t play mind games,” Sylvanas informed him.

“You have always been so unwilling to strike at her,” Zovaal noted. “I am offering you the opportunity to have someone else do it for you.”

Her. Of course, her. Jaina Proudmoore had the nagging habit of making herself a constant target--of getting in the way. Sylvanas hazarded a look down at her wrist. Her gauntlet covered the silvery mark there that had once bound them together--in life. But she’d been dead thirteen years. She was a broken and butchered thing. Unlovable and unwanted for all things but war. And Zovall knew that all too well.

“You’re so unwilling to speak a mortal woman’s name? Jaina Proudmoore knows nothing of you, Jailer. Regardless, she is too stubborn to die. Not for lack of trying, believe me,” Sylvanas answered.

“I don’t,” he replied. “Your world was always such a curious one. So tangled and interwoven. Separating souls from it was like picking a thread from a fine weave--tedious and treacherous. I will be happy to see it gone.”

“To what end?” Sylvanas asked--a question she had asked before, but Zovaal had never answered with any certainty. “All this destruction and chaos. You promised me much and have given me nothing for all of it. Now you ask for more. Don’t I deserve the same?”

“Loyalty is its own reward,” Zovaal assured her, leaning deeper into his throne as he reached somewhere behind him. “Or is that not what you tell your soldiers when they wonder at the atrocities you continue to commit?”

Sylvanas wished she could say it was into some pouch or pocket. Some container she could understand or plan to steal. But it was always into nothingness, and then something. From nothing, he produced the very thing that had made her cross every other line. The very thing that she had given up everything for.

Zovaal twirled the glowing blue gem in his massive hand. It was so small, so faint against the cold, grey expanse of him. “Lest you forget,” he said as he pointed it toward her. “Where exactly your loyalty lies.”

In her years of arguing and bargaining, Sylvanas had learned exactly what that gem contained. A half of her soul--more or less--torn from her by Frostmourne. All of it orchestrated by this being, this devil in his tessellating hell. Her army, her kingdom, her world, and her everything, lost in order to make her a willing pawn for a chance to be whole again. And what’s worse was that she did exactly that. She was exactly that.

But not tonight.

“If you give me what’s mine, then I’ll come to an understanding about raising Proudmoore and what you mean to have me do to him,” Sylvanas offered.

It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to bargain for her very soul. What else did she have anyway? She was half herself, but enough to be aware of it. A being of rage and logic and cunning. Joys were lost on her, ringing hollow in a place inside of her that was a black, gaping void. Sylvanas thought it was just a part of undeath at first, but her Forsaken were not like her. Not all of them, at least. They laughed and meant it, they still sang and danced and loved. Sylvanas had only ever surprised herself once, with a song of grief over Alleria’s necklace--the one sentiment she still felt purely being loss, of course.

Even her soulmate, the stubborn and beautiful Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras--or so crowned not but a week ago--was a thing lost to her. Jaina could not fix what was broken. She didn’t deserve a soulmate with half a soul, not even enough left to her to make the mark of their bond shine as it should, bound to a pact of destruction she made in an effort to rid this world of her wrongness, only to find out that what lay beyond was far, far worse.

No, Sylvanas knew there would be no rest, no end for her until she was whole. Until the part of her the Jailer held between his very fingers was hers again.

Until then, the sacrifices she made to get it would just have to be worth it.

“No,” was the Jailer’s answer. “It’s not yet time.”

“Give me another’s then, as proof that things are as you say. I know you have more,” Sylvanas offered.

And he did. She’d made a note of mapping out the other hollowed ones like herself--those that died directly to the cursed blade. Some of her own Dark Rangers were among them, of course. Plenty of other Forsaken who had fallen in Arthas’ path as well. If she could just see how it affected them, just understand that there was hope, that might be enough.

For Proudmoore, at least.

“So altruistic you are. Or at least you pretend to be,” Zovaal taunted, flipping the crystal between his fingers. “I know you’re not. There’s nothing wrong with being selfish, Sylvanas. And when the time is right, you will be the first I restore. As a reward for your obedience.”

But she wasn’t selfish. After she’d learned of her own soul’s fate, she’d instructed her val’kyr to seek out more information. All she knew came from them, and they had the terrible habit of being just as cryptic as their former master, but the benefit of being completely loyal to her. But neither did they know where the gems went when Zovaal did not summon them to torment her. Nor did they know the mechanisms for keeping soul fragments in these gems, or how it was possible to forge a sword that stole them. In fact, they knew and had found out precious little, but it was all Sylvanas had.

“I won’t be your monster without reason, Jailer,” Sylvanas hissed. “Think of those reasons what you will.”

“I think you’ll find you’re better off without this,” Zovaal said as he tossed the gem up, catching it tightly in his huge fist. “You currently enjoy your existence free from distraction. Why would you want it back?”

Because she had to fix what was broken. To mend what was torn. To clean what was stained. The compulsion was so great. Every part of her raged against what she was. She hated it. She had died again for it, only to find her wrongness in death compounded. Anything was worth this price. And for a moment, the clawing emptiness within her begged her to just comply. Just do this one more thing. And one more. And another. Then and only then would he let her have herself back.

What would the Horde say, if they knew the truth behind their proud Banshee Queen of a Warchief? If they knew that she was bowing to the feet of some unholy god in secret, begging for her very soul, and had been for years?

If they knew that she’d had enough? That for some reason, the thought of waking Derek Proudmoore from his eternal sleep because of just how deeply that would hurt his sister, was too much, even echoing in the hollow recess where those feelings for her once lived? There were lines she did not cross. There were things Sylvanas would not do, even for all the souls in this hell, and not just her own.

And while Lady Jaina was always a great inconvenience to the Banshee Queen, she’d never hurt her. Never directly. Not even once.

“What an interesting little weakness you have,” Zovaal muttered as he splayed the gem across the tops of his fingers again. “Again with that strange and frustrating way the souls of Azeroth tie one another together. You still feel obligated to it, even when its force no longer binds you. When there is not enough soul left in you to require it. Do you see now? The freedom your current condition offers?”

“You lie and you know it,” Sylvanas spat back. “It’s my bondage to you that you desire, and to this plan you won’t speak plainly to me. Say it like it is.”

“Kill the Lord Admiral then,” Zovaal said with the hint of a laugh. “Send her soul to me in exchange for yours, and then we’ll see if the time is right.”

One life for the wholeness of another. It was so small a price to pay. So easy. Right now, Jaina was likely still recovering. She was weak. Her fleet was still patching up from their battle with Ashvane. The Zandalari were enraged by their latest losses and all but ready to pledge to the Horde. It would be so easy. So very easy.

As easy as a thousand night elves, screaming while their home burned around them. As easy as the terror in the eyes of her Rangers, who had known her in life and beyond it into death, watching and waiting for what awful things she would command them to do next. As easy as blighting her own city, and watching the vengeful soldiers rise again to form a wave of bones and horror, only to die the second, cursed deaths she knew they would face. Only to lose.

Only to always lose something for nothing.

Sylvanas was tired of losing. “No,” she muttered.

“Fair is fair,” the Jailer offered again, stretching out his arm, holding the gem between his thumb and forefinger, just out of her reach. “Don’t you think so?”

“Fair is never fair. Not with you,” Sylvanas said.

And then she screamed. She wasn’t sure what it would do, or if it would even surprise him. Here, in his lair, he did not dictate her thoughts. He did not dominate her to his will. Why would he? She was trapped here in his shifting, slithering hell.

Well, at least she was, until she could make it back to the val’kyr. Her loyal guardians and lifeline. The only beings that seemed capable of moving in and out of this plane, at least for now.

But it was enough. He wasn’t expecting the ear-shattering screech of a banshee’s wail. It didn’t seem to affect Zovaal so much as confuse him. She’d always argued with him, but never fought him.

He hesitated. Long enough for her to draw her swords and leap up to cut away his fingers.

And somehow, she did. She’d long suspected he wasn’t quite made of stone, but something else like this twisting tower of his. Something changing and fragile, but not quite living or dead, organic or manufactured. Something that could be cut. Something that could suffer. Something that would yield, for once, to her will.

His hands were so large that she could only manage to sever the very tip of his thumb and forefinger with one swift and scissoring strike from both swords. But that was enough. It was enough for him to drop the gem. Enough for her to reach out and catch it as it fell, forgetting her swords and letting them fall in favor of cradling her salvation.

Enough for her to feel the warmth of it in her hands, already threatening to overwhelm her. Memories of home and happiness were calling to her as if just beyond a thin pane of glass. Memories of herself. Who she really was. Whole and complete. Not a starving animal, desperate for anything that satisfied for a time.

But she couldn’t think about that now. She couldn’t lose herself in what might be. Because she had to run.

A good Ranger General knew when to make a tactical retreat, and snatching their fate back from the hands of some god of death himself was as good a time as any.

Zovaal let out a grunt that may have been as much surprise and annoyance as pain, and moved to clutch at his hand. That’s when Sylvanas turned and ran.

She dissolved herself into her incorporeal form, managing to keep the soul gem locked in her spectral hand all the same. She was faster this way, but hated how it made her feel--bodiless and defenseless, like the half a year she spent as a banshee at Arthas’ side, razing her own homeland and powerless over herself and her actions.

Never again. Never again would she kneel or beg. Even if she died here, running. It was worth it. Anything was worth this chance.

But Zovaal was something powerful and terrible and older than time. He was an arrogant devil with a throne of lies, but he was no fool. He just expected obedience. Sylvanas was never very good at giving that.

He cried out after her. A scream of utter rage, deep and shattering. The shifting tiles of Torghast rattled with it. But Sylvanas sped on through the air, carrying her salvation clutched tightly in her ghostly fist.

“You will not defy me!” Zovaal roared after her.

He’d said as much before. The words themselves had a power that Sylvanas was infinitely familiar with, and one that he used gently on her for that reason. She knew domination. She had lived it. She understood it. She knew she was powerless against it.

She knew if the magic caught her, it would bind her limbs like a puppet’s frame. Everything about her would be his to command. Her thoughts, her words, her actions.

And though the wave of sound that came with those words reached her, domination never did. Something about the object she held shielded her, calling for a greater power before she would bend. The longing for her very soul throbbed within her, like some sort of terrific power of its own, like magnetized iron calling for its partner. North to south. Banshee to whatever there was of her that had been missing.

“Signe!” Sylvanas called out ahead of her as she approached where the val’kyr waited. Alone. Why was she alone?

Signe turned to her call, and to the shouts of the Jailer behind her, watching as they failed to affect her. Sylvanas could hear the tiles shaking differently now, no doubt with his heavy steps and with the dark power he wielded, lashing out toward her.

A whip of that energy reached for her. A chain. Always a chain. Sylvanas tried to dodge it, but the magic followed her, and latched onto her shoulder. It somehow managed to bind her, biting into flesh that wasn’t flesh, into a form that arrows and axes had flown through before. But this chain was for her. It didn’t know the difference.

She lurched to a halt, so near to Signe yet so far. She dropped her banshee form, but not her soul gem as she fell to the ground. The chain bit into her flesh as it reformed around it, rippling through her body with a searing pain.

And then, it pulled. It tugged from within her flesh, drawing her backward, away from freedom. Away from wholeness.

And Sylvanas tried to fight it. She tried with every ounce of her own rage. Every bit of defiance she had. Every shred of will. She fought and pulled, but it wasn’t enough. The chain began to drag her across those shifting tiles.

“You will not defy me!” rang out again behind her. “It’s useless to run. I will catch you. I will find you. I will make you my puppet, for I only need your face, Sylvanas. I do not need you.”

She’d lost. She’d tried and lost again. All for nothing. All for a glimpse of victory, only to have it snatched away. So close. She was so close.

At least, until she heard new shouts join the fray. Deep, but feminine. Metal on metal, but neither were metal at all. Kyra’s glowing form flashed behind her as she swung her spectral sword at the dark chain that bound her. And it broke. Somehow it broke.

“Go, Dark Lady,” was all she could say before she had to turn to deflect another chain with her shield.

Next to her, Brynja landed, already entangled and wrestling with a chain that was binding her wings. The domination that the Jailer shouted didn’t seem to affect them either, perhaps because they were his creatures, or creatures made in the same way as him. Sylvanas didn’t have time to speculate.

Because just ahead of her was Signe flying toward her, arms open.

Sylvanas jumped into them, and then watched as the tower melted away around them, until it reformed into the darkened cabin of the Banshee’s Wail.

Until the soul gem was somehow still in her hands as Signe set her back gently on the ground. It warmed them to facsimile of life, glowing softly in sharp-edged gauntlets that were meant to frighten and intimidate. And to hide.

Her shoulder hurt. It hurt beyond hurting. Sylvanas could feel the thick black ichor dripping from it and onto the floorboards of the cabin. But she could ignore that for now. Pain had been her reality for so long. Pain and emptiness. But she could end it. She could end it right now.

“What do I do?” she whispered, looking up to Signe.

“I’m not certain, Dark Lady. I have never seen Zovaal restore a soul kept in such an artifact before,” Signe answered.

She didn’t offer anything else, and Sylvanas knew why. Her sisters were gone. She could feel it too, the fading of their binding to her as the land of death reclaimed them in whatever capacity it did. She still had so many questions and so few answers. She knew more about how the machine of death worked than any other creature that had walked the face of Azeroth, but still almost nothing at all.

But the gem seemed to answer her question itself. Its warmth demanded cradling. Sylvanas only wanted to feel it spread through her. So she held it to her chest--to the very wound its absence had left behind. The gaping slash from navel to sternum she still bore, ugly and twisted and never quite healed. Even beneath her armor, its presence plagued her and reminded her of her darkest days, or at least made her question what and when those truly were.

It happened so fast. Too fast. The warmth flooded through her, coursing out of the gem like a raging river and into Froustmorne’s scar.

It was everything. It was her father’s laugh. Her mother’s hard-earned praise. Vereesa, as a little girl, looking up at her as if she were the most important person in the world. Baby Lirath reaching out to be picked up. Alleria hugging her goodbye before another deployment. Her most trusted Rangers, dressed down and drunk, singing trail songs as loud as they could around a campfire at night. Jaina in bed next to her in her room in the Spire, golden hair shining in the morning sun, love in her heavy-lidded eyes, just as it was meant to be.

It was just as Zovaal said. The connection of it all. The intermingling of souls. That was what had been taken from her. Not joy, not laughter. No, the ability to share it with others. With the world that had borne her, and had woven her very being into its grand tapestry.

And now, it was weaving her thread back in. A miracle. Sylvanas knew it was nothing short of a miracle, one that she would certainly pay a dear price for, if Zovaal got his way.

She breathed. She laughed a heady, foggy laugh. It was all too much for her. The pain in her shoulder somehow hurt more.

She knew Signe was calling to her, trying to rouse her from this stupor, but Sylvanas let it take her. This, her greatest of victories, she would savor as she pleased until the very moment it became too much for her body to handle.

And as she collapsed onto the floor, she began to dream. For the first time in thirteen years, she dreamt as she slept. And she dreamt a memory she’d been trying so hard to forget for all this time, but had never truly banished from her mind.

In bed next to her, Jaina was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She’d told her as much over the course of that week, several times, but that hadn’t diminished the truth. While Sylvanas had been surprised with her soulmate, she was nothing but pleased with her. No, that wasn’t enough. She loved her. She already loved her.

And Jaina felt very much the same, though distinctly different in some ways. Her affection was more of a creeping thing, ever-present and then brightening like the sun peeking through the leaves at times--when Sylvanas said something funny or endearing, or touched her, or did just about anything. It was so odd to feel what someone else felt, to experience the world as they did, even if her bond to Jaina only brought a fraction of that feeling over to her. It was interesting. Endlessly interesting. Not unlike the woman it came from.

“I don’t want to get out of bed,” Jaina protested, laughing as she sprawled back out across the pillows, naked and unafraid of it. What was flesh, even, to someone with whom you shared your soul?

It made sense. As much as Sylvanas enjoyed that flesh, and having it on display in her bed in the morning sun. She loved Jaina for everything else that her soft skin contained.

But that didn’t mean Sylvanas couldn’t run a hand over it, drawing a shiver from her beloved as she ran her fingertips from across Jaina’s belly and up between her breasts.

“So don’t,” Sylvanas offered as her wisdom. “We have nowhere to go today. No one to see. Nothing to do. Stay here, and I’ll have the cook bring us breakfast. Lunch. Maybe even dinner.”

Jaina turned toward her, coaxing that hand to make good on its promises, but Sylvanas skirted around her breasts, laughing as Jaina pouted, and went to grab her hand. The one that bore the mark that now glowed a brilliant blue. Sylvanas still couldn’t believe how fast this had all happened, and how quickly she’d fallen for her. She liked to remind herself it was all real, very real, and in doing so, ran her thumb over the mark that was the inverse of her own--a moon. A blue crescent moon dotted with patterns that Jaina insisted were meant to be snowflakes.

Her bond told her that this was just as agreeable to Jaina, as a more temperate pleasure thrummed over it. Jaina turned her hand in Sylvanas’ grip to run her own thumb over the mark on Sylvanas’ wrist, just as radiant as her own.

“You’re sure about that?” Jaina asked as she smiled, no doubt feeling the same sentiment coming from Sylvanas. “That you don’t have some distant cousin who needs to approve of me, or whatever.”

Sylvanas laughed. Jaina had expressed that elven rituals and customs regarding soulmates were quite intense, and Sylvanas supposed they were. But still, it was important for one’s friends and family to meet the person you were meant to love. Though for Jaina’s sake, she’d see about keeping any other visitors away for a while.

“I’m sure,” Sylvanas assured her. “For today, you are all mine and only mine.”

She flipped Jaina’s hand in hers again and brought it to her lips, recreating the kiss that had set it alight, just as she planned to do every day for the rest of her life. For as long as they both still lived.

Chapter Text

“Well, this is fucking depressing.”

Jaina turned to the voice that should not have been there. Well, not that she wanted anyone to be there at all, witnessing her crumpled, knees to chest on the side of her bed, crying and staring at her hand.

Nor did she expect to look up to find Valeera Sanguinar, of all people, making such a declaration as she faded back in from the shadows. The elven rogue stood with her arms crossed in front of Jaina’s open bedroom door, which had been locked previously, though was no doubt hardly a challenge for Valeera.

Valeera, who had no reason to be here in Proudmoore Keep. While she had been present at the meeting in the harbor that morning, she had declined an invitation to be housed at the keep while further Alliance meetings were moved there--citing her efforts to maintain neutrality on behalf of the Uncrowned.

Yet here she was, in Jaina’s room in the middle of the night, looking down at her as she did her best to stop the tears and get herself together. She knew Valeera hated crying.

“Are you aware that no guards are coming?” Valeera asked with a quick glance behind her to assure herself of that fact.

“I certainly hope not,” Jaina groaned as she tried to reign herself in and have a conversation she didn’t want to have in any way shape or form.

Valeera tsked, shutting the door behind her after once again confirming the hallway was empty. “It’s just that, you know, their Lord Admiral is screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night and sobbing,” she noted.

Jaina supposed that Valeera’s initial comment was on the state of her security and not on her, though maybe a little of both. Subterfuge had always been the rogue’s specialty, rather than empathy, but perhaps for that very reason, it was good that she would be the one to find Jaina like this, rather than some poor guardsman.

“We shifted them to cover our guests,” Jaina explained. “Besides, I’m an Archmage, Valeera. I don’t need a guard.”

“You look like you need a drink,” Valeera noted.

Jaina looked up to find her glowing green eyes trained on the mark that was still radiating soft blue light from the back of her hand. She knew that there would be no hiding such a detail from anyone, but especially from the trained eyes of a spy.

A spy who wasn’t supposed to be in her keep.

“Why are you here?” Jaina asked, mostly to delay the inevitable.

“Anduin,” was Valeera’s answer.

“Not going to tell me more?” Jaina prodded.

She wiped her face with the hand that hadn’t just shattered her perception of reality itself. Taking stock of the situation, she realized the pain in her shoulder had dulled back to ignorable at best. A sense of calm and serenity that most certainly did not belong to her was itching at the back of her skull. It was familiar. So familiar.

Right, she remembered. This was what it felt like when Sylvanas was sleeping.

Why the hell was she sleeping?

“You so graciously offered him a room at your keep and I needed to talk to him before I left Boralus,” Valeera explained. “I simply saw myself in, had a lovely chat with him, and was on my way towards seeing myself out.”

“You could just request audiences and allow people to know where you are, like a normal person,” Jaina told her, knowing full well Valeera would never be caught dead doing such a thing.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Valeera asked.

As they spoke, those green eyes took in the room. Jaina knew they were sketching out every detail of it to memory. Every weakness, every bit of interest. She had no doubt she could ask Valeera which of her pillows was slightly ajar a week from now and she’d still remember. Behind that facade of a devil-may-care attitude, Jaina knew one of the brightest minds in all of Azeroth whirred like a gnomish gearbox, constantly ready to process any sort of new information.

And unfortunately, the most pertinent information of the hour was glowing like a beacon on the back of Jaina’s hand.

“You were right before,” Jaina told her, patting the bed next to her. “I do need a drink.”

Valeera finally laughed and relented to the invitation when Jaina reached over and pulled out a flask from the drawer in her nightstand.

She took Jaina’s cue to sit, her armor an odd crimson against the deep Kul Tiran green of the bedspread. Valeera was small and slight, even for an elf. Jaina knew her to be young but not young enough for that smallness not to be a permanent factor in her life. And from what she knew of this woman, she could guess at its origins--a childhood spent an orphan and then being starved in the pits to toughen her up for gladiatorial combat. Valeera never got enough of anything, and thus was small for it. Small and always hungry, for information or magic or anything she didn’t really need to have or be seeking.

And while Jaina remembered the nights she spent at her bedside in Theramore, worrying at what they would do to temper and control those cravings, she also knew that sometimes, a little indulgence worked better. Controlled indulgence, that was.

Either way, it was better that Valeera hear this from her than anyone else. So Jaina popped the cap of the flask and took a swig of the mana-infused whiskey inside of it, then passed it to Valeera.

Valeera laughed her deep, throaty laugh again, sniffing the flask first before she too downed some of its contents. Jaina could still smell the fire of the whiskey on her breath when she asked, “So, when are you going to tell me why your fucking hand is glowing all of the sudden?”

“You’ll be disappointed to know that I don’t really know why,” Jaina told her as she claimed the flask back. She intended to take another draught of it to make explaining this easier, but just ended up fiddling with the cap while she thought out what the reason truly could be. “It just started as you so happened to be sneaking through my keep.”

“But that means something has changed with--”

“--Her. Yes.”

Sylvanas. Jaina had made a habit of not saying the name when she could avoid it. Some of her friends and acquaintances had picked up on it and joined her in not saying it around her. And that suited Jaina just fine. She already had a mark on her body to remind her of what she’d lost. And then the fact that the woman who bore that name still somehow walked the world despite that loss. And in the last year or so, she had managed to become the fucking Warchief of the Horde of all things, so that meant Jaina heard the name enough.

And old habits, while they served no real purpose and helped nothing and no one, died hard.

Jaina took another swig of the whiskey. It was smokey and smooth, but still whiskey. The mana bit back as a sharp, yet somewhat metallic tang, as arcane often did. Jaina winced both sensations as they mingled on her palette before adding, “But I don’t know what.”

“I mean, I have no idea how these things work besides all the lovey dovey crap that people say about it, but can’t you tell?” Valeera asked.

Valeera’s aversion to the subject of soulmates was distinctly un-elven of her. Another feature telling of her distance from her people and their culture and the love that should have come with it for her. Her own soulmark was not on display, despite how little of her body was even covered by that armor, and Jaina couldn’t recall ever having seen it in the past. To anyone else, having it be present somewhere hidden and possibly salacious would be a scandal that would haunt them through their entire life. But for Valeera, it was fitting. There was nothing about her that wasn’t hidden or salacious or somehow both.

Jaina shrugged, turning her head a little to regard Valeera as she explained, “No, I can’t. I only know that I can feel her again. She’s injured on her shoulder. And she’s sleeping right now.”

“I thought undead didn’t sleep,” Valeera said.

“So did I,” Jaina agreed.

“What the fuck was she doing?” Valeera asked, probably of herself, and reached for the flask again.

“I don’t know.”

To be perfectly honest with herself, Jaina tried not to know. She tried to stay out of it. The world often didn’t let her. She often longed for a reality in which she truly could separate herself from any kingdom or faction or the goings-on between any of them, but try as she might, she simply could not do so with good conscience. Whether it was her magic or the people she’d come to love, duty would call on them one way or another, and thus would call on Jaina to follow. And she’d tried to resist the call. She had. Even during the fight against the Legion, she’d managed it, taking out her rage at Khadgar’s casual possession of Dalaran in her own way, on her own time. For once, alone.

But it didn’t last. It never lasted. Once the surge of emotion was gone, and the sting it left behind, Jaina would feel empty. And she had long ago realized that feeling overburdened suited her far more than feeling empty.

Valeera kicked back a hearty swig of the flask--enough to make a true Kul Tiran sailor blush. She sighed out the taste of the whiskey and offered no further wisdom aside from, “This would go great in some coffee. Or even tea.”

“Too cold for you here in Boralus?” Jaina asked, welcoming the option to talk about something with any degree of certainty to it.

Valeera shook her head, passing the flask back again. “I’m leaving, so it doesn’t matter. Also I don’t have the occasion to be drinking straight whiskey like you, though I do appreciate you sharing. Both the occasion and the whiskey, that is.”

“I’d offer to bring some mixers up from the kitchen, but--”

“You were just sobbing alone for ten minutes while I debated whether or not to come in and I hate to say it, but you look like it,” Valeera finished for her. “On that thought, are you going to hide it?”

“What?”

“The mark.”

Jaina hadn’t thought that far ahead. She very well could. The glow would not show through the usual leather of her gloves and especially not through the armored gauntlet she usually wore in public. Fabric would be another thing, but truth be told, no one would ever have to see her in anything less than her full battle dress. No one did, really. Not anymore.

She tried to think of what the others might say, if she were to let them see. No doubt they’d try to use her as some sort of intelligence device--to use this bond to feed their war without taking into account that whatever had changed about it might be a means to end it. She could see it now, how Greymane would snarl and ask her what the Banshee was doing, even though he would know exactly how little she could tell him. His own mark shown bright blue even when he was fully a worgen, turning the fur that sprouted from it into the same glowing blue. Such was the ferocity of his love for his wife, and no doubt the love for their son--and with it the hatred for the woman who’d slain him.

Yes, he would remind Jaina of that, definitely.

Jaina came to her answer. “For now? Probably.”

“Until when?” Valeera wondered aloud.

“Until I know why this has happened,” Jaina told her.

Jaina’s head was running wild with theories already. Truth be told, it had been from the moment Valeera revealed herself from the shadows, both out of a need to explain and a want to know.

But indeed, the problem was that her soulmate was Sylvanas Windrunner--burner of Teldrassil, murderer of Liam Greymane, Warchief of the Horde, enemy of the Alliance, and defacto enemy of the neutral state of Kul Tiras it was once again courting. Her soulmate, sleeping soundly still, was a woman who Jaina had loved so much and then had come to hate along with everyone else. It had been easy to say that the bond between them was so irrevocably broken by what had been done to her that nothing of the Sylvanas she had loved remained. It had been Jaina’s ever-present excuse--one that no one would dare to challenge. Sylvanas’ soul was gone or dead or something to the point where she wasn’t herself. It was written on Jaina’s skin.

Or at least, it had been.

Jaina finally took a moment to look at her hand fully without the veil of tears standing in her eyes. The mark was very much blue, but dimmer than it ever had been when it was ignited many years before--when it had burned so immediately bright that all of Sylvanas’ friends and family beamed at her during that week, knowing full well that meant the love between them was already so strong.

And now it was just a flicker of a candle flame, threatening to wink out. Jaina felt it might be easier if it did, and she could just call this some fluke. And then a pang of guilt followed that thought that felt so strange and wrong and overwhelming that she had to take another swig of the whiskey. Enough to make her cheeks flush.

But not enough to give her any sense of direction. “I swear to you, it just happened,” Jaina repeated. “And I don’t know why.”

“It’s not like I don’t believe you,” Valeera told her. “And I don’t know why either. You’ve had a memorial mark since I’ve known you. Those things don’t change, but you have to admit your circumstances are different than most.”

“I’m well aware,” Jaina noted. “But I don’t think anyone quite understands to what degree. Much less me.”

Valeera shrugged at that, her eyes still darting around the room. She stuck out a gloved hand, pointing one red finger at Jaina. “Well, let’s think through it. You love thinking through things. One, obviously something has changed. Probably about Syl--her. Sorry. Her.”

Valeera was one of few people who seemed to remember this need of Jaina’s to avoid the name, and never questioned it despite the fact that it didn’t make much sense. She was a good friend, though Jaina could never really tell her that to her face. She ought to talk more with her, but well, years and responsibilities had their way of getting in the way--even for someone who tried to avoid them as much as Valeera did.

Valeera counted off on another red finger, “Two, something has changed about her soul. Which, you know, I also think no one quite understands either. I know that some undead keep their bonds through their undeath, others don't. She obviously wasn’t one of them.”

“Obviously,” Jaina agreed. “And it’s been a subject of much debate and research ever since the Third War. I remember finding notes Kinndy would make about it all the time. She kept a journal. I think she meant to talk to me about what she found one day, but she never did. Wait. I bet you read that journal when you were staying with us.”

“You know I did,” Valeera replied with a smirk. “You had lots of interesting books and people in Theramore in those days. And I won’t say anything beyond that because I don’t need you bursting into tears actively while I’m here. I’m not a crying person, Jaina. I don’t know what to do about, around, or for crying.”

“I know.”

She did know. Jaina knew that Valeera didn’t even have the emotional capacity for herself, let alone someone else, so it was all the more touching, or possibly concerning, that she came into this room at all. Perhaps she felt she owed a debt for the times that Jaina had seen her in tears herself--unbidden and unwelcome all the same--and had held her through them.

In Theramore, Jaina had held so many people through so many tears. She’d been a rock--no, an anchor. An anchor can still hold fast while it sinks.

“Good,” Valeera noted, then held up a third finger. “Moving on. Three, whatever it is that happened literally just happened. So, it’s not like anyone really knows besides you and her and whoever is with her right now.”

Which was its own unsettling thought. Who even was with her? Sylvanas, even in death, really only kept select company. Her Rangers, probably, the same as ever. Only they were as dead as she was. Jaina had been dealing with reports of Nathanos Marris stalking the countryside of Kul Tiras during her week of learning to assume the Lord Admiral’s duties. Though now apparently he called himself Nathanos Blightcaller and was particularly keen on small acts of terrorism. He still clung to Sylvanas like a flea, just as he had in his living days. Jaina knew the names of others too. Anya Eversong. Vorel Daystrike. Velonara Dawnsea. Clea Goldenpath.

All names and faces she remembered, laughing and welcoming her. Faces that had changed so much since--now all ashen skin and red eyes and Horde banners. Did the elven women she remembered give themselves new names too? Did they forsake their legacies when they took on the banner for the Forsaken?

Jaina didn’t know. She didn’t know so much. Once, it had felt pertinent to avoid those details for sanity’s sake, but now she cursed herself, wishing she’d kept up. Though, to be fair, she certainly didn’t ever think that she’d be facing the problem she was now.

Jaina looked at her hand again as Valeera seemed to struggle with a fourth detail to ground them in.

“What do you think happened?” Jaina asked as she stared at the blue moon that was etched into her skin.

“I don’t know,” Valeera said with an incredulous wave of that hand before her reasonings vanished with it. “Maybe she sacrificed a baby about it? Who knows?”

It was so easy to believe something ridiculous like that. So easy to just push the divide further apart by saying that Sylvanas was on the bad side and Jaina was on the good. And while she had burned world trees and waged war and done awful things, Jaina knew, deep down, that both sides of the war were as guilty as each other. She longed for a commitment to neutrality like Valeera had created for herself, but even then, Valeera herself had just said she was on her way to do something for Anduin, and therefore something for the Alliance. No one could really escape it.

But for every Theramore, there was a purge of Dalaran. Jaina had learned to stop counting losses long ago, before she’d even begun to stop herself from saying Sylvanas’ name aloud. Trying to add up tit for tat only left one with a headache and a feeling of being owed. War didn’t owe anything to anyone. It just was.

All the same, she knew Sylvanas probably didn’t sacrifice a baby about it. No, Sylvanas Windrunner, known war criminal, was usually a great deal more shrewd and subtle than that, even when it was easy to say she was a soulless husk of undeath and misery. At least she was in the opinion of one Jaina Proudmoore, also known war criminal.

“Where were you going after this, Valeera?” Jaina thought to ask.

“I see what you’re about to do and I shouldn’t like it,” Valeera told her. “But the answer is none of your business.”

“Is it Dazar’alor?”

It was a good guess that made sense, to Jaina’s credit. Anduin was very concerned about the Horde attacking Boralus, but also respectful enough of Jaina’s choice to continue waiting to see what would happen next before offering her navy. He would be quite concerned about what they were planning. And if they were planning an assault, it would come from the port of the very neutral naval faction that they were courting, and the one who would be very happy to wipe out any remaining Kul Tiran dominance on the seas.

“And if it is?” Valeera asked.

It was. It had to be. The way she was glaring at Jaina, with a little smirk as she gestured for the flask again.

Jaina handed it to her. “I’m just saying, Anduin might want to know what’s going on with her. On her ship. If it’s still in the harbor, that is.”

“I suppose if I were to trip over the Banshee’s Wail, the very flagship of the Horde fleet, that I could let you know what was going on around her decks,” Valeera offered without really offering before she took one more big swig of the whiskey. Probably too big of one for someone about to go on an espionage mission, but Jaina wasn’t here to judge or tell her how to do her job--or who to do it for, for that matter.

“If you choose to do so, then please be careful,” Jaina requested, holding her hand out for the flask.

Valeera handed it back one last time as she pushed herself off the bed and onto her feet with an acrobatic flourish she didn’t need to add, but did anyway. “If I choose to do anything, you know that you really don’t have a choice in the matter. But, if I see her, I’ll try to figure out what’s happened.”

“Only because you’re curious yourself, of course,” Jaina offered as an excuse before taking her own sip of whiskey.

“Of course,” Valeera said with a red-lipped smirk that her shoulder and hood almost hid. Almost.

She began to walk away, and Jaina almost thought to call her back, rather than watch her fade into the shadows again. But Valeera stopped. She didn’t fade.

Instead, she asked, “Did you love her, Jaina?”

“Before?” was ever the question.

“What other time was there?”

“Not much. But yes, I loved her,” Jaina said.

Jaina had known that from the moment she first saw her--grinning and golden as she waited at the portal. Vibrant and a little cocky--her smile lopsided and her hair obnoxiously perfect. She was tall and broad-shouldered, stiff-backed but with laughter that rang first in her eyes. Soft grey eyes that were gone now, replaced by sinister crimson. Sun-kissed skin with a tiny smattering of freckles, and that too was gone--now cold and ashen.

Loved was the right tense. Jaina didn’t know this Sylvanas, this woman who stood on the other side of the battlefield--who normally wouldn’t even look at her when they were close enough to share a glance. Only once, really, did she. It had been so recent and so chilling that Jaina couldn’t yet banish the memory.

She couldn’t quite forget how she’d caught Sylvanas’ eyes in the throne room at Lordaeron, and watched for a moment as they flickered from rage and mocking and fear and then to her, and to a brief moment of something else. A softness that was not at home amidst red fury. An apology. A plea. A wail that she wouldn’t let out. A moment that only they shared.

A weakness, Jaina had told herself. A weakness for them both, she reminded herself.

“She was the best thing to ever happen to me, and then the worst,” Jaina went on. “And if you’re asking me how I feel right now, I don’t have an answer. I feel everything and nothing, and I don’t know enough to feel either.”

That was one way to put it, at least. The whiskey wasn’t the only thing turning Jaina’s stomach. She honestly had no idea what to do or what was happening. And for everything, the lack of control over the situation was probably the worst thing of all.

“And people wonder why I’m not obsessed with looking for my one true love,” Valeera said, affecting a silly voice for the last bit. “No thank you. I’d rather not ever be in your shoes. Or really ever have to care that much about anyone but me.”

“You’re a good friend, Valeera,” Jaina told her, despite the fact that being free of any attachment sounded very good and very logical right now.

“That’s it, I’m leaving,” Valeera stated as she whipped her cloak around with a bit more drama than was warranted.

“Be safe,” Jaina warned all the same.

“I’m always safe,” Valeera told her. “You’re the one who is in danger of being something else besides safe right now. Go to bed and sleep off that whiskey, Lord Admiral. Hopefully by the time you wake, some kind rogue will have left a bit of helpful information at your doorstep.”

Valeera faded into the night, melting into the shadows of Jaina’s doorway as she let herself out. The door closed on what seemed like nothing by a breeze in the darkness, rustling curtains with it as it went.

From the window, the moon still peered inside. Dim and listless as the crescent on Jaina’s hand. Waning.

Maybe it was tired of its constant vigil. Jaina knew she certainly was.

Valeera’s advice was good, and Jaina knew she should follow it. She put the flask back into the bedside drawer, nearly empty now, and made a note to top it off later. And while she did feel some of the buzz of the whiskey warming her thoughts and trying to coax them away from her worries, Jaina didn’t think she’d sleep again that night. Even as she laid back down, her mind raced with what all this could mean. What she would do. What the morning would bring.

But then at the back of it, that slow and serene warmth started to creep in. Sylvanas slept soundly and peacefully somewhere in this world. She always had back in life. Jaina had used that thread of a connection to lull herself to sleep many times. She’d even written Sylvanas a few letters thanking her for that fact. And even the night before she died, she’d slept like a rock, and Jaina had tumbled after that feeling, wanting to believe everything would be all right, even as she knew that Arthas was besieging the Elf Gates with everything he had.

So it was only natural that Jaina did find her sleep in that old comfort. In the lie and strangeness of it. Because it was a guilty pleasure only she would know of and reach for and understand. It might be her only chance to have it again tonight, after all. Or maybe this too was some cruel dream.

It was hard to say.

Just as it was hard to say where the line between dream and memory was for her. Because sleep immediately put her into one that was both. But not the same one. This was new but old. A perfectly rendered scene of a day long past. And through her shred of self-awareness, Jaina could only wonder how it would twist into wrongness again.

She watched as Sylvanas turned to grin at her, shutting the door to her room in Windrunner Spire behind her. She wore nothing but a robe that would be considered scandalously short by human standards, but Jaina certainly didn’t mind the view it gave of her long, toned legs. Definitely not at all, from where she lay on the bed, naked but for the silken sheets that only covered a very small portion of her.

“Breakfast, lunch, and dinner ordered. The cook will drop them at the door,” Sylvanas declared proudly. “I realize now that I don’t even know what you like to eat for either and probably should have asked.”

“I’m not picky,” Jaina said with a laugh. “But I also don’t know what’s common for breakfast in a noble house in Quel’thalas.”

“We still have so much to learn,” Sylvanas said, the delight at that notion plain and beautiful on her face.

“We’ll get there,” Jaina encouraged her, beckoning her grinning elf over toward the bed again.

Sylvanas was all too-happy to oblige that request, and even undid the sash of her robe as she strode over, giving Jaina a very nice view of the front of her before she laid beside her. The silk of the robe draped them both like a waterfall. It was a deep cobalt blue, edged with gold, as all of Sylvanas’ things seemed to be.

Jaina slid her hand beneath it, pulling Sylvanas close as she told her, “I like elven coffee, for one, so if breakfast has that, it’s already a win in my book.”

“Of course it does,” Sylvanas told her. “In an enchanted carafe that won’t get cold, should you be distracted from breakfast. And we like pastries here in Quel’thalas. So probably some of those. And fruit. Lots of fruit.”

“Who doesn’t like pastries, coffee, and fruit?” Jaina asked with a laugh. “But the distraction sounds like a threat.”

“Mmm, it is. Truly a monstrous threat,” Sylvanas joked even as she made good on that threat, reaching out to pull her closer as well.

She buried her face in Jaina’s neck, growling playfully as she kissed along it. Jaina could feel her smile into the skin as she no doubt felt the echo of Jaina’s own shiver of pleasure at the act. This shared sensation was new and addicting, especially when combined with sex. Jaina was quite certain that an entire day would not be enough. They would probably need months to get over this, if the night before had been any indication.

Not that she was in a hurry to. Especially as that surge of confidence radiated back to her and started a loop she knew would carry them through long after breakfast had been delivered. She only hoped the cook didn’t have very good hearing. Though he was an elf, so likely not.

And Jaina didn’t care. She stopped caring the moment Sylvanas’ lips whispered across her clavicle and into the hollow of her throat. She’d lost all sense of space and time and what could or would or should be appropriate when Sylvanas tugged her closer and closer until there was only skin touching skin touching skin and a little silk of the robe inbetween and the echoing of it through one another. This was so unlike anything Jaina had ever felt and so very much worth days being spent introducing herself to three dozen odd Rangers and officers and magisters and nobles and Windrunner cousins.

But they didn’t exist now. Not anymore. The world was only them. It was only Sylvanas’ satisfaction in her growing arousal, and Jaina’s bliss in those strong arms she already knew could do so much for her, but was about to learn would do more.

As if Sylvanas understood that without it being said, she used those strong arms to flip them, laughing as she did, until they were both sitting on the soft mattress, and the sheets had fallen away. Then Sylvanas guided Jaina into her lap, and had her kneel there.

“Let me see you in the morning sun,” Sylvanas pleaded, her voice soft and low. Her grey eyes shone with wicked promises.

Jaina could feel a twinge of importance in this request. Maybe it was something cultural, or just the desires of her new lover to watch her this way. Either way, she knew Sylvanas felt the shiver of the request run through her.

Still, she answered, “You can see all of me, whenever you like.”

Sylvanas seemed satisfied at this, though that was an understatement for what Jaina felt across the bond. A bit of surprise. A fair bit of heady attraction. And love. Certainly love.

Sylvanas placed a sweet kiss to the center of her chest, right at the apex of her sternum, then drew her closer and finally touched Jaina where she very much needed to be touched. She watched her as she rubbed slow circles over her clit, and Jaina could feel the delight in how wet she was for her reverberating on top of her own pleasure. It was exhilarating and inebriating at the same time. She was drunk on Sylvanas and the way she made her feel, and how that made her feel in turn.

This was the part of the soulmate bond no one ever talked about, and honestly, Jaina didn’t quite know how she’d even venture to explain it herself. Suffice to say, the sex was insane. And she had a lifetime of it to look forward to.

And if Sylvanas had any complaints about their using this sacred bond so that she could feel how it felt to ride her own fingers once she added them to the mix, then she certainly wasn’t complaining. Nor was Jaina at the reflection of the sensation of herself tightening around them. And not at all when Sylvanas was gasping at the echoes of Jaina’s pleasure into her ear as she came.

The dream never turned. It kept to the memory as Jaina knew it, as she never let herself experience it in her waking hours. It stayed a morning in which she became quite grateful for the enchanted carafe, as the coffee would have long been cold by the time they remembered it. It played out just the same even as Sylvanas finally poured her a steaming cup of it--her hair a mess and eyes wild and grin bigger than ever. The robe was still on her somehow, clinging only to one shoulder. Jaina watched herself, happiest that she’d ever been, debate with her lover about whether they should have a nap or a bath after they ate, like it was the only important decision they’d ever have to make.

And she envied them. She envied the lie they lived in that moment. The old, golden moment.

Chapter Text

She dreamed. She remembered. Sylvanas knew it was both but wished to acknowledge neither. She wished reality and timeliness into the way Jaina’s languid body felt against hers. She wished for a sunlit and perfect morning in Quel’thalas--in her bed at the Spire. Their legs tangled together in the silken sheets. The smell of coffee on Jaina’s breath as she sighed and dozed.

It had been real, once. It had been a thing she rejected for a long time. An experience that no longer applied to her--to a wretched being with a broken soul. A dead thing. A shattered piece of fine porcelain, never to be called fine again. Only a thing that should have been buried and forgotten. The dead do not love. They do not long. They are only dead.

But she had been so alive then, in these moments. So alive even as her fingers ghosted over her lover’s soft skin, and her thoughts were as simple as whether or not they should stick to the promise of the bath, or if she should let Jaina sleep and then rouse her again for it later. Maybe with her mouth. Maybe with her hand. If only to see the sleepiness turn to surprise and delight at what either might do for her, and a reminder of what they had a lifetime left to explore.

In that moment, as she had many others in their short time together, Sylvanas found herself drawn to Jaina’s hand. She reached across her to take it in hers, thumbing the glowing mark that bound them. A crescent moon.

“Mm, will you ever tire of touching it?” Jaina asked, inches away from sleep. Her voice carried the weight of that impending nap in an adorable way--soft but scratchy.

“I don’t think so,” Sylvanas told her.

Their mark was like any other, but it was theirs. It was made up of swirling lines and patterns they formed, unique as a fingerprint and just as organic in its construction.

Sylvanas was often curious about her mark as a child. Most elves wore theirs somewhere on their face. Old tradition favored kissing one’s partner on or near the eye. Indeed, her parents had both worn their matching marks across their eyes, just as Alleria did. Old custom suggested to tattoo across the other eye, just as Alleria did. But Sylvanas had been born with a mark on her wrist, and had endured the teasing cries of “Lady Moon” from her friends and family since.

Yet she would not change it. Not for anything. Not for the world. The moment that Jaina had set it alight was so sweet and perfect. So uniquely her--or them. And even as Sylvanas held her body to her own, it felt very much as if thereafter, it would be them. Always them.

And while it was strange to consider that, it was also lovely to know she wouldn’t be alone. Not anymore.

“Sleep, love,” she bade Jaina. “We have all day.”

But the room was hot. Too hot, even, for a summer in Quel’thalas. And summers at the Spire smelled of flowers and greenery and the sea--not of smoke.

Jaina roused. In the dream she roused. In reality, she had slept. Sylvanas knew this, yet watched as her soulmate slid from the silk of the sheets to look out the window.

“Don’t look,” were the words that whispered from her own mouth.

Jaina--perfect in every way--her hair golden as the sun, freckled skin, soft curves belying a surprising, lithe strength, lifted herself from the bed and toward the window.

“Please, don’t look,” Sylvanas begged, reaching for her.

Jaina held up her hand to the glass of the great window in Sylvanas’ room. It was large and picturesque, framed in swirling gold. It should have looked out over the forest below, over a sea of golden leaves trapped in an endless and perfect picture of autumn.

But instead, the blue moon on Jaina’s hand shown in stark contrast to a view of Teldrassil, burning. Just beside the splay of her fingers, Sylvanas could see figures--tiny in the distance, but not small enough that they could not be distinguished. She picked out herself, standing over the dying Delaryn Summermoon, mocking her.

“Please. Don’t see me.”

Sylvanas awoke to the taste of regret and bile in her mouth. Instinctively, she sputtered black liquid. A hand reached with a rag to wipe from her chin.

“What do you mean? She’s been like this for hours and you didn’t think to alert us?” a voice demanded from behind her ear.

“The Dark Lady did not wish anyone to know of our dealings,” a deeper voice replied from somewhere above her. “Her orders are clear to me.”

Signe. Sylvanas took a moment to recognize it, but was certain that her val’kyr spoke to whoever was holding her up.

She took stock of her body, of a dull pain in her shoulder and another from the awkward position in which she was held, clearly dragged hastily from the floor.

“Damn her orders!” another voice shouted from in front of her--unmistakably Nathanos from the bravado alone. “What happened to her?”

“She is well,” Signe assured whoever else was present.

The room felt full. Sylvanas knew this without even opening her eyes. The captain’s cabin was well-appointed, but small. The sounds of the voices didn’t echo right. They bounced off of huddled bodies, not wood and furniture.

“Bullshit,” the voice behind her noted.

Clea. Yes, it had to be Clea. Her field medic of old. Of course she would be the one to be wiping the ichor form Sylvanas’ chin, and holding her steady so she didn’t choke on it.

Clea continued to note the current state of her. “She’s bleeding, Signe. I’m not sure how significant you consider that, but to us, blood is rather important.”

It was debatable, Sylvanas noted in the parts of her mind that were waking up. She bled when injured, yes, but her blood was thick and black. Her heart did not beat for the use of it. What good could it possibly do her? How necessary could it be?

Signe offered no response to this. She simply hovered, wings flapping soundlessly. Her presence was a thin tie to Sylvanas’ being--a small and steadfast thing.

“Help me with her armor,” Clea bade someone who knelt beside her.

“I’m fine,” Sylvanas finally barked out, startled for a moment by the duality of her voice. In the dream, it had been normal. It had felt so real.

“Oh good, she’s awake then,” Clea snorted, ignoring the proclamation and continuing to try to undo the straps to Sylvanas’ pauldron, along with another pair of hands.

“Leave me be,” Sylvanas groaned, swatting at them both. “Don’t make me make that an order.”

“There are more of us and only one of you,” Clea reminded her as the pauldron clattered to the floor. “And your shoulder has been run through. What were you doing, Sylvanas?”

Medics. They all ought to be hung from insubordination. Traitors and liars and torturers, all of them.

“I’ve had worse, Ranger. Leave me,” Sylvanas commanded, not really expecting it would change much.

She just wanted to sleep. She was so tired. So deeply, bone tired. Sleep called to her from the back of her mind, demanding satiation for an exhaustion that knew no end.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Clea told her, forcefully attentive as ever. “Were you injured elsewhere? And what in Belore’s name were you doing? Vorel, go get some fresh bandages. Velonara, post up and make sure no one else enters this chamber. Nathanos, I’d ask you to do something, but you seem like you have something to say.”

“Just treat her,” Nathanos spat. “What she’s done to earn such a wound isn’t your business.”

It should have been. They knew so little. Sylvanas kept most of them in the dark about her plans these days. Once, she had told these people everything. They were like family to her, when she had no family other than distant Vereesa to turn to. Her Rangers. Her battlefield kin. She’d lied to them by omission so many times now.

Funny, how that fact had never stung so much before. The cold logic of it had been a comfort. Now it was edged with shame.

“I was being foolish,” was the only answer Sylvanas could think to give them.

“Open your eyes then, fool,” Clea requested as she shifted around her, leaving Sylvanas to sit up on her own once she felt assured she could and then going to kneel in front of her. “I need to be sure you haven’t concussed yourself as well.”

Sylvanas did as instructed, knowing Clea wouldn’t leave her alone until she did. Her vision was filled with the other woman--her Dark Ranger in dark leathers. Clea’s hair had been a brilliant butter blonde in life, but had faded into near white in death, when she’d cut it short, perhaps out of a desire to forget that. Her eyes were a piercing crimson, and her pale brows furrowed almost comically for their length.

At least they did, until they flew up in surprise.

“What--what happened?” Clea demanded, then turned upward to ask, “Signe, what did you do to her?”

“Our Dark Lady has done this to herself,” Signe offered, floating into the frame of Sylvanas’ vision. “She has freed herself.”

“What does that mean?” Marrah, who was busy working at Sylvanas’ other pauldron now, demanded from beside her as she too took on a look of shock.

Clea didn’t keep her surprise long, as it furrowed back to concern before she reached out to trace Sylvanas’ cheek, just beneath her eye. “Why are they blue? Her eyes were never blue.”

“What?” was all Sylvanas could manage to say to that. “Speak plain Clea.”

“You speak plain,” Clea spat back, poking dangerously close to her eye now. “What did you do to make your eyes blue? Where did you go? What the hell did you free yourself from?”

Hell itself was the answer. Maybe. She’d never been certain. She’d only known that death brought her to darkness, to Zovaal’s feet, begging for a better fate. Begging for rest, not torment. Begging for a thing she did not understand then that she lacked.

The gem that held her soul fragments had been a bright, glowing blue. Like Clea’s eyes had been in life. Like Alleria’s. Like Father’s. Like her soulmark and the spires of old Silvermoon, before it was ruined.

Sylvanas laughed. It burst from her unbidden--a joyful sound that bubbled up and then closed off just as quickly. A victory followed by the bittersweet of reality.

She was whole again, and that was terrifying.

“Why are they blue, Signe?” Sylvanas asked quietly.

She looked around the room, waiting on the val’kyr to answer. Of her Rangers, only Marrah, Clea, and Nathanos remained. Velonara had followed the order to guard the door. Vorel had run off for those bandages. Anya was in the field, as were several others with her.

Areiel…Areiel was dead now. Killed by the Alliance last week. But she had never been hollow. Sylvanas could only hope that was enough to keep her spirit away from the twisting torture that was Torghast, and Zovaal’s wretched realm.

“I do not know,” the val’kyr finally replied. She floated near the table where Derek Proudmoore’s body still lay. “Perhaps to mark your victory, Dark Lady. Perhaps to let others know you have been restored.”

“Restored how? Will someone answer me?” Clea demanded, looking between both Sylvanas and Signe.

Sylvanas would not. Not yet, at least. Because a more pressing thought had occurred to her in that moment.

The memory of another shade of glowing blue haunted her like the strange sensation of sleepiness that still lingered on the edge of her mind. The exhaustion of it all, so faint yet so profound.

Sylvanas began tearing at her gauntlet, trying to unfasten it as fast as she possibly could.

“What are you doing now? Did you fuck up your hand too? Gods, Sylvanas. You’re going to make me call in the apothecaries,” Clea went on.

“Don’t you dare,” Sylvanas told her, struggling with the last strap. “Not yet. Not now.”

Not now indeed, for what would they say if they saw what she saw when the gauntlet finally fell away? When her hand was free, flexing, clenching into a fist beneath a soulmark that burned blue for the first time in thirteen years.

The sight of it caused Marrah to drop her pauldron and scramble backwards a few feet. Clea, however, was steadfast and just as angry, if not more.

“What the fuck. What the absolute fuck,” she stammered. “Will you tell us? Please, will you tell us what happened?”

Jaina was asleep, Sylvanas realized. Jaina was exhausted. She ached. She pushed herself so hard. She slept just as hard.

And Sylvanas was so sure that she would hate to find out what had happened to her too, when she woke. A groan escaped her lips, as unbidden as the laugh had been.

Her mind flashed to images of Jaina looking at the tree as it burned and burned and burned. Watching the scene play from afar, but somehow too close, as if it had been rendered for her in some grotesque miniature. Sylvanas had woken before she could turn to look back at her. Would she do so with pity in her eyes, or rage?

Rage, Sylvanas decided. Rage deserved. Now that she had her salvation, she wasn’t sure it was worth the price.

“Leave me,” she commanded again, barely a whisper.

“Fat chance,” Clea replied. “Tell us what happened.”

“Clea, you are out of line,” Nathanos butted in.

“No one asked you, Nathanos! Will you ever stop sucking up and think for yourself for a moment?” Clea snapped back at him, then turned to Sylvanas, gathering her now bare shoulders in her hands. “Please, Sylvanas. Please tell us something.”

Her hands were still cold. Cold on cold. Sylvanas’ eyes must have changed, but the rest of her had not. She was still dead. Still pale and wretched. Her heart did not beat. Black blood ran down her arm like tar and stained the corners of her mouth.

Sylvanas spared a glance at Signe, and finding no answer in the val’kyr’s covered face, attempted her own. “I have told you of the master I serve, who offers freedom from the cruelty of our deaths. Well, I do not serve him now, or at least I suspect he will not want me to. Not after I’ve refused him and taken back what is mine.”

“You’ve told us little of this master, save that he deals in extremes,” Clea replied, squeezing at Sylvanas’ shoulders a bit. “And death. What did he have of yours?”

“Guess, Clea,” Sylvanas bade her, looking her straight in the eye.

She could see it now, the blue reflecting in the red of Clea’s eyes. Wrong and unnatural, even for an elf. But different. It was different than before.

“Your soul?” Clea ventured, looking between the blue eyes and the blue moon on Sylvanas’ wrist. “Your fucking soul?”

“Hands of a healer, mind of a magister, mouth of a sailor, and yet you chose to be a Ranger,” Sylvanas laughed. She brought up her hands to gather Cleas, holding them for a moment.

She’d been young when she’d joined up with them, only in her sixties. Just as foul-mouthed then too. Aeriel often referred to her as the prettiest little thing with the ugliest little mouth. She’d once popped Anya’s elbow back into the socket after a less than successful surprise scrimmage with the Amani. Sylvanas could still remember the sound it made. How everyone in camp had winced from it. But not Clea. She’d laughed and told Anya to quit screaming about it.

Clea’s hands squeezed back at hers. “What the fuck,” she said, softer now.

“An explanation is in order,” Sylvanas noted, dropping Clea’s hands to inspect herself and the damage to her shoulder a little more. “But in due time when I can gather what I know to share with you. It is not as much as I’d like, but--”

“Wait,” Marrah said, stopping her as she finally regained herself and got into a kneeling position. “Your mark. Does that mean…”

Sylvanas looked between the two Rangers on the floor with her, Nathanos scowling above them, and Signe floating off towards the corpse on the table.

“It means what it means,” Sylvanas replied.

“It means Jaina Proudmoore now knows where you are and what you are doing,” Nathanos scowled.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Clea clapped back at him.

Her own soulmark was a silvery memorial at her temple. A swirling pattern that resembled a flame, one she’d shared for a good century with her magistrix wife, before the war and the Lich King took them both, and left only Clea to return from death’s embrace. How she’d screamed when she’d returned to her body, only to find the mark having turned. Clea was not hollow, but she was alone where she had not always been.

“It means many things, but Clea is correct,” Sylvanas told him. “But it means I should go to her.”

“Are you insane?” Clea asked. “Did getting your soul back from some dark lord knock your marbles loose? Sylvanas, Jaina is our enemy. She’s the Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras now, and about to pledge them to the Alliance.”

The truth hurt, though it was true. It stung with a ferocity that was new to Sylvanas. A chill touch that gripped her from the inside, turning a stomach that didn’t eat and a heart that didn’t beat, sinking claws into organs that were questionably vital now, but just as visceral. The hurt of it was overwhelming after years of what she understood to be emotional numbness. Not the absence, no, but the dulling of those feelings of connection.

And now she felt them abound as fierce as they had ever been. A love for her Rangers. A gratefulness for their loyalty.

But mostly regret. So much regret.

“Dark Lady,” Nathanos said, his gruff voice going quiet, and usual smug sneer dropping to the point where much of his lips were hidden beneath his beard as he spoke. “You are injured. Much has happened. Let’s think on this first.”

Marrah scooted closer, laying one hand on Sylvanas’ shoulder. “I’d imagine you want nothing more than to see her and…figure this out. But they’re right. Whatever has changed about you will not mend what has been done.”

What has been done. No, what she had done.

Sylvanas closed her eyes for a moment, and all she could see behind them was Jaina looking out over Teldrassil as it burned.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to wail in only the way she could--no doubt shattering the eardrums of half the occupants of the great harbor of Dazar’alor. Anger had never been a thing hidden from her or dulled, but anger at herself wasn’t something she’d felt for a long time.

Without all this, burning the tree had made sense. Blighting the Undercity. Raising new undead to her service. Standing by as Garrosh bombed Theramore. Watching Vol’jin slip away as he whispered her name as the next to lead, knowing that he would never have made that choice of his own will. Crimes of action and inaction. Zovaal’s grand plan and all it had promised her. Freedom. When there was nothing else left, the promise of freedom from it all seemed to be enough to motivate her to do anything.

Now that she had herself--her whole self and not just that righteous anger--she’d rather spend her eternity in chains than do it again.

And the burden of having done those things would be her chains. Each action, each plot, each time she looked the other way a link after a link. Fitting, then, that even escaping from Zovaal and his control and manipulation would keep her chained.

“No, it will not,” Sylvanas agreed.

But today. Today she could start anew. Through the stained-glass windows of the cabin, she could see the sun beginning to rise above the shimmering sea.

Sylvanas turned a bit to face it, despite the protests of her injured shoulder. The green glass had begun to alight with a sickly glow, casting Derek Proudmoore’s shriveled body into the image of how it had rested for so many years--beneath the depths in seaweed and wreckage.

“Nathanos,” Sylvanas said.

“Yes, Dark Lady?” he replied, ever faithful, if a bit too enthusiastic.

“Prepare this corpse for transport. A coffin of sorts would be preferred. Something respectful,” Sylvanas ordered.

“Weren’t you going to raise him?” Nathanos questioned. “I was so pleased when our champion located his body. He was perfect for your plan to--”

“The plan has changed,” Sylvanas cut him off.

While Nathanos seemed to offer confusion in return for this answer, or at least his silence spoke of that much, Sylvanas heard Marrah sigh with relief, and even caught her doing so visibly out of the corner of her eye.

“I fear what you see in my eyes now may have come at a grave price,” Sylvanas continued, turning back fully to face her Rangers again. “We can no longer afford to poke at the Alliance as if they were a nest of hornets. It doesn’t matter if Kul Tiras joins them or the Zandalari join us. Not anymore.”

“But, our efforts to disrupt--” Nathanos protested, huffing through his mustache.

“They don’t matter. I will explain in time,” Sylvanas assured him. “Horde and Alliance alike are nothing compared to the threat we’ll face if my thinking is right.”

Her thinking was dread. Pure dread. Her soul was hers, and her mind was her own, free from domination and manipulation, free from the guiding hand that saw her burning cities and killing innocents. But for that freedom, she would pay in more than just her regrets. Zovaal would not allow her otherwise, and though his reach didn’t extend far into the realm of the living, that didn’t mean he would not find a way to make that happen. It was only a matter of time.

Sylvanas had seen his minions. Mawsworn that looked like her val’kyr, only twisted and wrong. Huge constructs of metal and bone. Undead terrors that made her recall all too vividly her time in Arthas’ service. Vast armies of lost, wailing souls that would, just as she did, do anything to end their torment. Anything at all.

“I don’t know how much time we have, only that we must use it wisely,” Sylvanas said, once again scanning the room to address them all. “So Nathanos, you are going to package up Derek Proudmoore here, dead as he shall remain. You will deliver him to Boralus with a note I will draft, asking to meet the Alliance to negotiate a ceasefire, and with it, a discussion on our mutual disarmament of Azerite weaponry.”

“You want me…to bring a coffin to Proudmoore with her dead brother in it and ask for peace?” Nathanos asked, gesturing to his chest with wild, incredulous crimson in his eyes.

“Derek goes to the Alliance. If she so happens to be there to receive him, wonderful. To Jaina, I will draft another message. And as for you, bring a Horde champion with you when you go. At least the Alliance won’t shoot one of them on sight,” Sylvanas explained, then turned to where Marrah still gripped at her good shoulder. “Marrah, do you know where I might find some elven coffee? Good quality, from Silvermoon.”

“Lady Liadrin might have some with her in the city here,” Marrah offered. “She’s been known to drink gallons of the stuff.”

“Find her or find some elsewise,” Sylvanas requested, adding a nod to tell Marrah she was dismissed with the intent to do so right away.

Marrah needed no further prompting, and was quickly on her feet and out the door.

“Try to banish me, I dare you,” Clea said, turning her attentions to the wound running through Sylvanas’ shoulder again.

“I know better,” Sylvanas said. “Though you will leave me once this is seen to so that I might write those missives.”

“I suppose,” Clea offered.

Even Nathanos took this as his cue to stop questioning or complaining and strode behind them to heft Derek Proudmoore’s body over his shoulder. He was out the door soon enough as well.

“Signe,” Sylvanas said, addressing the silent val’kyr.

“Yes, Dark Lady?”

That steadfast presence of hers was once one of nine. Sylvanas watched as her sisters had fallen away, taking her place amidst the torment of the Maw so that she might continue on from death once again to fulfill Zovaal’s wishes in Azeroth. She wondered if they took pieces of her with them each time, stripping more and more of her away until what had been left was only a rotten core.

Now only Signe remained tied to her this way. What had happened to the other two that had fought the Jailer with her was hard to say. Sylvanas did not think these beings could die as mortals did. But she did think that whatever freedoms they had been offered in their binding of service to her were now gone.

“I don’t suppose you are able to safely traverse the planes anymore,” Sylvanas wondered aloud.

“If it is your will, I may,” Signe offered resolutely. “But he would not welcome my return.”

Sylvanas winced, both from Clea’s prodding at her shoulder and Signe’s reluctance to even use the Jailer’s name. “Then you shall remain in this one from now on, understood?”

“Yes, Dark Lady.”

“See to it then that Nathanos is following my instructions,” Sylvanas ordered her, mostly to clear the room.

Signe obeyed without question, gliding through the door without opening it to make way, her form as willingly spectral and corporeal as needed, not unlike a banshee.

Sylvanas shuddered briefly at the thought.

Vorel followed her, briefly delivering the bandages Clea had requested earlier before she sent her off for something else.

That was for the best. Vorel was one of the hollow ones. Sylvanas had seen her die at the tip of Frostmourne’s blade, not even a minute before she did herself. Her brave effort to stand before her Ranger General and the monster that would ruin them all had left her without her whole soul. She was not prone to anger as Sylvanas was, but a sullen silence. They’d maybe exchanged a dozen words in just as many years since she was raised again in undeath, whereas Vorel before was known for her jokes and her long, mostly exaggerated and outrageous stories.

Where then, did the Jailer keep her soul? The pieces of her that Arthas had so long ago stolen. The love and the laughter? Did it glow blue as Sylvanas’ had?

And more importantly, would there be a way for her to win them back?

Sylvanas’ mind raced with these questions. Worrying about other people and ordering them around had always made for good distractions. Easier to face than the prospect for what she must do now.

She watched as Clea bandaged her shoulder, tsking over the ragged state of the hole the chain had left behind. Both of them knew that undead flesh healed differently, and Sylvanas’ differently still. She would not rot or fester or suffer infection. Whatever magic had preserved her corpse for Arthas’ amusement still remained, and served to bring her to wholeness when and where it could. She would see that wound restored within a day or so, all thanks to a petty man and his petty desire to parade her body in front of the spirit he had ripped from it.

And so, so much more. So much worse.

“Sylvanas?” Clea asked as she fastened the ends of the bandage together.

“Yes?”

With her Rangers, she’d always bade them to call her by name. Those close to her, at least. Dark Lady or Ranger General alike were titles and honorifics to be reserved only for the presence of others and formal occasions. Among themselves, Sylvanas had asked them to consider her a friend and a comrade, nothing more.

Only a few of them seemed to remember this long standing request. Clea never forgot it.

“Whatever happened, however you explain it to us, which I hope you do, I’m glad it’s happened. It’s good to have you back.”

Clea had meant the words to soothe as her hands so often did. Like a balm or salve or any other temporary measure set in place to staunch bleeding and injury before a priest could see the wound properly closed and fully healed.

But they stung. They stung with a fervor Sylvanas didn’t know how to navigate. Not anymore, at least. They tugged on a guilt that was raw and new. Unprecedented.

Sylvanas nodded to them, but couldn’t say anything. She was not back. She would never be back. She would never be that shining Ranger General again. She might give orders like her, or speak her words, but that was no longer her.

Nor was she the Banshee Queen. The mean, spitting cornered animal, willing to bite at anyone who stood between her and a way out. Oh, how she had bitten. How she had hurt, injured, and killed. That ruthlessness no longer belonged to her, as it was a thing of a creature unbound.

And Sylvanas was once again bound. Whole, but bound. Different, but the same. Neither nor. Either or.

And if she had to say what she was, all she could think to say in that moment was that she was sorry. So very sorry.

But what choices had she been given, really? The old anger was still there, the bile that bit at her throat and demanded her to scream her rage like the banshee she was. It told her that her victories were deserved and their cost irrelevant. It demanded justice.

And Sylvanas knew that for the sake of their continued survival, for the sake of the living and the unliving among them, that the future would have to see no justice. For her or for those she had wronged. So much would remain unresolved and unpaid for. It would have to.

“Relay my order,” Sylvanas noted, finding her voice again. “For the Rangers in the field. I want them withdrawn from their current missions and to return here by this evening.”

Clea nodded her understanding. She seemed to have lost her own words, but perhaps that was due to the tremble in Sylvanas’ dual-toned voice that had not been there before. The edge which it was clear she was about to fall over.

And the implication that she wished to do so alone.

Clea left her, but not before helping her to stand and mumbling something about sending someone to clean the black blood off the floor and the mess left behind from Nathanos’ gleeful dumping of Derek Proudmoore’s body on the table. Sylvanas could still smell it--the rot and salt and seaweed.

And thus, she had to resort to sitting on the bed to write her missives on the nightstand. A bed for a woman who did not sleep, though Jaina’s restful state and deep exhaustion tingling at the back of her skull made it suddenly seem very appealing.

Sylvanas remembered her to be a fitful sleeper in her youth, so this was somewhat strange. There had been many a night watch she’d taken to find the sudden stirring in her mind as Jaina roused, busied herself with something for an hour, then slept again. Sylvanas had welcomed this restlessness more than once, as it made her feel less alone in the night to know that Jaina was reading something that she found silly somewhere in Dalaran, or enjoying a midnight snack.

They had written to one another often in those months between their meeting and the end that wasn’t really an end. Sylvanas had fallen for her all the more from her letters. Even as she fought in her last, grueling few days of true life, she thought that she might still live to see Jaina again if she just pushed a little harder, or planned a little smarter. The agony of her death was echoed a second time as she regained her body, only to find the mark on her wrist had silvered.

And a third, when she later learned that Jaina Proudmoore was alive and well, having escaped across the sea. That it was her who was dead and wrong and no longer fit to be the soulmate to Jaina’s bright and beautiful soul.

The first missive was easy enough to scratch out, even as she dwelled on those memories. Sylvanas had written enough diplomatic messages in her varied lifetimes to do so without thinking much.

To the leaders of the Alliance and the free nation of Kul Tiras,

I return to you a brave soldier who once fought under both of your banners, and died in the line of service to each. His remains were found by my agents as they searched for assets to use against you in this war. However, things have since changed. Derek Proudmoore must now serve a greater purpose for us both, which is to show you that my intentions in the following request are true and honest; I must ask that you consider a ceasefire.

I have been made aware of a greater threat that faces us both. It is a doom that even I struggle to comprehend. For this, I must ask that we put aside our conflicts and consider working to save Azeroth from a greater threat, as we have before.

I know there are many wrongs left to right. I know there is no justice in this request. But I also know the stakes are dire. They are dire enough that I am willing to discuss a mutual disarmament of Azerite weaponry, or perhaps a pooling of those resources in order to fight this new foe.

It is necessary for us to discuss further details in person. Name a time and a place, and I will ensure the leaders of the Horde are briefed and ready to meet with you.

- Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner

Warchief. It was never a thing she wanted. Never a title she thought she’d hold. Her concern had only ever been for her Forsaken, and then increasingly herself. She’d justified it then as being the same, that whatever she did to free herself would free them too, as it had before. But now, Sylvanas was left with her quill spent of ink, staring at the page, knowing that she was the one who brought this threat on her very heels.

Her desire to mend the brokeness of herself might be the end of them all. That victory, while new and fresh and wonderful in so many ways, was a tainted one. The Jailer would come for her. He would not let her go. And in coming for her, he would take Azeroth with her. Sylvanas knew enough to know that was what he did. He conquered and subjugated. He sought his revenge. He was as hollow and angry as the hollow and angry things he made. As he had so worked to make her.

And she had set him on a trail that would lead right back to this world.

Was it any worse than Teldrassil? Than knowing she had to stand aside as Garrosh attacked Theramore? Than being called Warchief, when she never acted in the interest of the Horde, only of herself and the being she served out of a desire to be liberated from all of it?

Her list of crimes was too long to count or tally. Even if she had all the time in the world to right those wrongs, there would never be enough good she could do to balance the bad. No amount of restitution of gold or blood or anything else would pay that price. Even freed of her chains as she was now, she was bound to this forever.

It had been easy to justify that when she wanted nothing more than to be free of any bonds. But as Sylvanas looked at her wrist again, at the soft blue glow of the crescent moon on the inside of it, she knew she now wanted anything but that.

She wanted to fight with everything she had left to keep herself bound to this place, this world, and everything she had done to it. That, she decided, would be her penance. That she would fight again, that she would stand against another endless army of death. And that she would hope, this time, that she did not lose herself in defeat.

Azeroth was not perfect. Death was flawed. Sylvanas had seen the souls separated into realities not of their choosing, but by the will of some omnipotent arbiter, who deemed them to go where they would be useful in their eternal rest. She had once wanted to serve nothing, and saw this afterlife of servitude as yet another form of the bondage she had endured at Arthas’ hands.

But Sylvanas now knew that her existence and this reality were one and the same. Flawed. Broken. Yes, definitely. But worth saving? Worth serving? Maybe.

She started another letter. This one easily fit on only half of one sheet. Because what else could she say? She needed to see her. She needed to see what Jaina thought of her now.

Lord Admiral Jaina Proudmoore,

I have no doubt you’ve noticed a change in yourself as of this past night. Though I trust you are shrewd enough to draw your own conclusions, I’d ask that you give me a chance to explain.

Can we meet? Alone? You may tell me when and where.

I wonder, do you still like elven coffee?

- Sylvanas

Sylvanas needed to know. Would Jaina turn to her with eyes of rage or longing? Would she too have given up on everything and twisted all she held dear to have her back, or to have nothing at all?

She had to remind herself too, that Jaina was not the same as the girl in her dream. She was no longer as youthful or as idealistic. She too wore the scars of years of war and unimaginable horrors. Sylvanas wasn’t sure if that would change how she felt, or how she looked at her.

Sylvanas knew she would soon find out, and wasn’t sure if she dreaded that more than what the Jailer would have in store for her. The sun was rising over the sea. She sealed her letters in red wax with the stamp of the Horde, feeling strange about doing that, especially with the second one. Her fingers lingered over the paper for a moment, as she wondered what Jaina would think, when she woke to their newly re-shared reality.

She took a shaky breath she did not need, and put the letters in a satchel for Nathanos.

Chapter Text

Should’ve known, got too close, betraying what I knew.
Spiting cost, I forgot what made me fall for you.
For so long we’d withdrawn from mortality but,
I had loved you because you were nothing like me.

“Is everything alright, dear?”

Everything was not alright. And Jaina was certainly not her mother’s ‘dear’ anymore, despite her recent forgiveness. The term of endearment was easy enough to ignore on most days. But this morning it had been all she could do not to cancel this little family breakfast Katherine had been so insistent on having since she’d returned. It was all Jaina could do to wash up and make sure she wore her thickest gloves, and that no blue glow shone through them.

She didn’t usually wear gloves to breakfast, but neither her brother or mother had yet bothered to comment, so that was something. But clearly, the charade was not enough.

Because both Katherine and Tandred were staring at her as she cradled a cup of tea in hands too shielded from it to feel its warmth.

There were many reasons not to be alright, though. For one, all of this wasn’t a dream. Jaina woke to a blue moon on her hand and a gnawing anxiety at the back of her mind that told her Sylvanas was awake and likely aware of the same. There was some relief that it wasn’t some sort of triumphant mind cackle, but with all that Jaina didn’t know, the anxiety echoing alongside hers didn’t help.

Another was that there was no note from Valeera, no sign she had returned as of yet. That could be both bad and good. And honestly, her timeline was not Jaina’s business. It wasn’t Alliance business. It was only ever Valeera’s business. She’d return with what she felt like gathering when she felt like coming back. And while Jaina was quite certain that would happen eventually, the fact that it hadn’t already was at least mildly concerning.

And the last of her concerns, or at least the major ones, would have to be the strangely vivid dreams of the night before. And how they’d eventually turned--so pleasant and true to memory for a while, but then eventually just showing her worse and worse versions of the hardest moments of her life. But at each of those moments, in each of those visions, Jaina would turn to find red eyes watching her. Always watching her.

So no, Jaina was not alright. She wasn’t quite fine. But she had a job to do, a day to tackle, and the Alliance to fend off for yet another day.

“I’m good,” she lied, then stuffed a sweet roll into her mouth to prevent further explanation from being on the table.

“You ought to sleep more,” Katherine noted, shaking her head minutely as she gave up on her motherly glare and continued lathered jam onto a crumpet. “I know you’re a grown woman and can do what you like, but the guards say you’re up at all hours. It isn’t healthy.”

“Come off it, mum,” Tandred said as speared another sausage. His fifth, to be precise. His accent was notably thicker than hers, and spoke of his time at sea. “We’ve just given her a damn country to run. You wouldn’t be sleeping either, if it were you.”

“Need I remind you that I ran this nation for the last dozen years?” Katherine protested, waving the jam knife at him.

Fine silver. The same breakfast set they used when Jaina was a child. Likely that her grandparents or great grandparents had used. Mother still ate raspberry jam on her crumpets, shoving the marmalade aside like it was poison. Tandred still ate like a horse, but a much larger horse now, with father’s thick beard and mother’s golden blonde hair.

Even this was too much. This routine that had continued so long without her, but resumed as if nothing happened. As if they never sent her away to Dalaran, and to court Prince Arthas. As if she’d never stood aside and let her father die. As if she had never fallen so deeply in love only to feel as the very soul of that love was ripped from her.

She’d never talked about Sylvanas with her mother. They’d traded letters about it, before everything. Katherine had been more excited at the diplomatic benefits of a marriage of state between the heir to the Admiralty and the patrimonial head of Silvermoon’s military than she was about her daughter finding the person she was meant to love.

“Hardly, mum,” Tandred assured her.

Jaina looked at the breakfast spread. It was all so familiar yet unfamiliar. Crumpets and kippers and boiled eggs. Sausages for Tandred. Butter and jam and the untouched marmalade. The sweet rolls weren’t even from the Keep’s kitchens, but had been a gift from the Alliance delegation. And the only thing Jaina ate that morning.

She was used to continental food. Sweet pastries and fruit--of elven tradition. Hearty breads and cheese spreads. Dwarven oatmeal, thick with cream and honey.

She’d kill a man for a proper cinnamon roll, at this point. Or some coffee. To think she used to miss good, strong Kul Tiran tea. This morning, it was proving too much for her stomach.

Or maybe it was the dual-layered anxiety. Sylvanas needed to hurry up and get gleefully evil already.

“Well, either way Jaina, I do think we ought to invite the leaders of the Alliance to breakfast tomorrow at the very least. I would very much like to get to know this High King of yours, if we are to be working under him,” Katherine stated as she slathered yet more jam onto her crumpet. It looked like it had suffered a tragic accident at this point, for all the goopy red substance that coated it.

“We’re not--” Jaina tried to get out, but found that her massive defensive bite of sweet roll was backfiring on her, gluing her mouth together.

“Get the old cook to fire them up a proper Kul Tiran breakfast!” Tandred suggested with enthusiasm, mid-bite of sausage. “Black pudding and all the good stuff!”

If anything could turn Jaina’s stomach more at that moment, it would be the mention of black pudding. No, there would be no black pudding.

“As culturally enlightening as that would be for them, I hardly think our continental friends would enjoy it,” Katherine pointed out. “Jaina knows what they like. Don’t you?”

Katherine was pointedly glaring at her empty plate, then the sweet roll in her gloved hand. Only then did her eyebrow quirk.

Damn, that woman missed nothing. Sharp as a knife, even as she approached seventy.

Still able to make Jaina feel inadequate over something as mundane as breakfast. Oh well, at least that was easier to deal with than all the other things she had on her mind.

Jaina swallowed the sticky bite of bread. Sugar glaze and flaked almonds. Oh, how she’d missed this, yet couldn’t stop to savor it. “The High King is fond of apples,” was all she had to offer.

Not that it was something they mutually enjoyed. Not that she’d once cut the fruit up for him into little wedges when he was still a boy. Not that he’d smiled at her like the sun itself. Not that she felt bad about all of this--denying him, denying herself. No, none of that.

“Apple tarts it is,” Katherine concluded.

“But mother,” Jaina cautioned. “I am firm in what I told them yesterday. I don’t believe we should lend them the fleet as of yet, or declare our allegiance. Breakfast or no.”

“Wasn’t that why you came here?” Katherine asked, blatantly and fearlessly--holding her bloody crumpet like a threat.

It would be a lie to say no. It was why she’d come here. One of many reasons. All of them seemed foolish now.

“A lot has changed,” was the excuse she could muster up.

And it was an excuse. Her hesitation was selfish, if multi-faceted, just as her reasons for coming to Kul Tiras had been in the first place. Even more so now. She had to understand what had changed most recently first. Why her mark had begun to glow again, and the bond between her and Sylvanas had returned. That was priority number one.

Matters of state and obligation could wait a day or two. Or at least until Valeera felt like returning, or the Horde revealed this to all be part of some heinous plan.

And even if breakfasts with what remained of her family were strange and awkward beyond belief, Jaina was quite sure she had to prepare herself for the worst. She would not let Boralus be another Theramore. She would not lose, not again. Not when this last legacy of hers was at stake. This last thing she had managed to save from being tainted by her failures.

Katherine only offered her a lingering glance before she finally took a bite of her overloaded crumpet. She immediately had to dab her mouth with a dark green napkin, but didn’t leave a single speck of red on her lips for it.

Before Tandred could reach for yet another sausage, the doors to the small parlor they were eating in burst open.

“Lord Admiral,” a massive Kul Tiran guard panted from beneath the brim of his kettle helmet. “Lady Proudmoore, Captain Proudmoore.”

It took a moment of Jaina to register that Lady Proudmoore was her mother, in this context. That caused her to hesitate for one, then two of the guard’s heavy breaths before she asked, “What’s the problem, sailor?”

“Horde at the gates--”

Jaina could feel the rage take over her like a wave. All these years. All this time. She tried to contain it. She tried to be better. She tried to maintain the optimism that people expected from her. Even after the outburst that saw her leave Dalaran, and the brush with insanity that saw her purge it earlier, she resolved to be better. She resolved to be ashamed of that anger.

Jaina Proudmoore was a peacemaker, after all. She was the voice of reason. And she had to act like it.

But even those few words were enough to set cold mana running through her blood, gathering at her fingertips, ready to fight for her life. Maintaining control of that caused her to miss a sentence or two of what this poor man had to say, for all the sudden swell of ringing in her ears.

“--a diplomatic message. Actually it’s just the Banshee Queen’s champion, that Blightcaller fellow, and one of them cow things.”

“They’re called tauren, Lieutenant Armstrong,” Katherine corrected him. “But it’s only those two?”

Of course her mother knew all of them by name. She hadn’t failed once to remember a sailor, soldier, cook, or stable boy. A mind like a steel trap. Father always used to say that.

Jaina calmed herself, willing her magic to settle back to her core, and willing Sylvanas not to have been paying attention to that spike of emotion. “What did the tauren look like?” she asked, willing her voice to its usual, authoritative deep evenness.

“Eh um, big? It had horns of its own but was wearing antlers. Wearing lots of animal skins and leaves too,” the guard recounted, starting to regain his breath.

“A druid then,” Jaina turned to her mother as she explained. “One of the Horde’s champions.”

“The dead man shouted up that he had a message for you and the Alliance folk, Lord Admiral. And the weirdest thing. They were carrying a coffin with them. A big black coffin,” the guard reported.

Was Sylvanas waiting for that register of shock to twinge across their restored bond? Jaina didn’t give her the satisfaction if she was. No, instead she was determined to let her feel cold, seething rage. And that very determination too. Whatever this was, whatever scheme, Jaina would get to the bottom of it. And she would let her know that.

“A coffin?” Katherine questioned. “Whatever would they bring a coffin with them for?”

She looked mostly to Jaina for an answer. At least Katherine was willing to acknowledge that her nation’s relative isolation led to some gaps in knowledge.

But Jaina didn’t really have an answer other than the roiling anger and suspicion that ran through her. “Whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“The dead man wouldn’t say more than that, Lord Admiral. He requested to speak with you or King Anduin, or ah what did he say,” Captain Armstrong coughed before attempting his best impression of Nathanos’ accent--an odd lilt of a Northern Lordaeron twang and a hint of someone who spent a lot of time around elves and speaking Thalassian, “‘Preferably both of them, or anyone important, for that matter.’”

Jaina’s jaw was beginning to hurt from the tension with which she held it. Between this and breakfast and the night before and the glowing mark on her hand, she felt like a rope pulled too taut for too long, its very fibers beginning to fray with the stress of holding and holding. Still, she managed a reply, “Go then, and report this to King Anduin and the others. Have them meet us as soon as possible. We’ll go to receive this message together.”

---

There was a part of Jaina that didn’t trust anyone. And there was a part of her that wanted to trust everyone.

Mostly, there was a part of her that wanted life to be simple. There was a part of her that wanted nothing to do with this. With the Alliance, the Horde, or anything.

And certainly nothing to do with Sylvanas. At least, not now.

Time was a luxury Jaina was so rarely afforded these days. All she wanted was time to think and evaluate and deal with this. She wouldn’t get it. She never did. The Alliance couldn’t even give her a week to recover, and the Horde cared little for her convalescence from an attack that ultimately benefited them.

All in all, it made her think again on her time during the Legion’s invasion, alone and wrestling with her own thoughts, just as much as she did her solitary part in battling the demonic presence throughout Azeroth. Time had hardly been enough then either, and it was a year. An entire year.

So no, time didn’t mean anything. Not now. Not ever. It would not fix anything. But still, Jaina wished for a moment to breathe.

Instead, she stood at the portcullis, staring across a field of Kul Tiran green from the mass of guards that stood between her and Nathanos Marris--no, Blightcaller--on the other side of the gate.

He’d been uglier in life, somehow. Though now in his undeath, he sneered at her with the same smug satisfaction, just playing on gaunt features that complimented him, if strangely so. Sure enough, a large black coffin obscured his feet, being placed directly in front of him, like a dog offering his bone back to his master.

Even in his uglier, living days, he’d been Sylvanas’ dog. Sylvanas had explained to Jaina once that she enjoyed his company because he didn’t try very hard at anything, except to please. He was crass and mannerless and honestly a terrible conversationalist, but he would do anything he was asked.

The same held true now, so it seemed.

The tauren behind him coughed into her three-fingered hand, breaking the uneasy silence. She seemed to be the most uncomfortable person in the vicinity, as she kept her distance, but still loomed massively over her charge. Nine feet tall was still nine feet tall from far away.

Nathanos took that cough as his cue to ask, “Is that all of you then?”

Jaina cast a glance to either side of her. It was, indeed, all of them.

Genn Greymane was audibly growling next to her. A dog feeling threatened by another dog, though Jaina had a fondness for him that she did not and never had for Nathanos. He was still another dog all the same.

Anduin stood beside him, clearly nervous and clearly trying not to be. Jaina waited for him to start the conversation, though Nathanos was looking at her.

The rest were a field of familiar faces and colors. Alleria scowled toward one flank of the group, bow drawn and arrow knocked. Jaina watched her mother fight off a sneeze while Tandred seemed to want to be back at sea and not at all involved in this. Shaw stared Nathanos down, and while Jaina knew he likely had agents watching from the shadows, she very much wished that Valeera was among them and not off on whatever errand had kept her overlong in Dazar’alor.

She wished too that Tyrande was here, as she had once been--that is to say, a calm and steadying and logical presence amidst the Alliance’s usual hot-headed and self-righteous indignation. But that Tyrande was gone, replaced by the Night Warrior, who reportedly rampaged through Horde forces leftover in Darkshore, slaying any unsuspecting soldier left alone in the dark of the moonless night with terrifying brutality.

No, it was for the best then that she wasn’t here.

Anduin finally answered after too long a pause, “I believe it is.”

“I assure you,” Nathanos began, throwing his empty hands up for all to see, “That nothing of this visit and what I bring to you is meant to harm. I have missives from the Warchief to hand to you directly. I can’t very well do that with three dozen of your guards between us.”

“You have to understand our caution, Blightcaller. It was only last week that you were terrorizing the countryside here,” Anduin pointed out.

“All good things must one day come to an end,” Nathanos said with a smirk. “Lucky for you, and the lovely countryside of Tiragarde Sound, I am under orders to be on my best behavior.”

Anduin, of course, looked to Jaina for a decision on what to do next. Not only as Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras, but as a friend. As a person he trusted. As his Auntie Jaina.

He was still so young. Jaina remembered him still as just a boy, whose hair she used to ruffle, and whose gangliness she would tease after. That was only a few years ago. So few years.

It didn’t bother her to answer for him, even if she shouldn’t. Jaina stepped forward as she did, bidding the guards between her and Nathanos to part. “If they truly meant harm, they would not have come alone. Let me through and open the gates,” she commanded.

The stirring anxiety at the back of her skull made sense in a different light now. Worry. Worry for Nathanos. Worry for what was to come. Worry for what had been.

And a deep, tar black bit of something. A sinking feeling in the gut. No, not sinking but already sunk. A feeling that Jaina knew as she looked at Anduin and wished he could still be just a boy--a boy who wasn’t beholden to make lofty decisions or negotiate with the enemy. Regret. Regret in spades.

The guards parted, half in awe and half in fear of their new Lord Admiral. They did not know her. She did not know their names as her mother did. But they would soon learn that Jaina Proudmoore was a force all her own, and that an undead Ranger Lord and a nervous druid were hardly enough to take her on alone.

Jaina stopped just short of the iron as it raised, leaving nothing between her and Nathanos. Only once it was above them both, and out of sight, did she reach out her hand. Clawed and gauntleted. Covered.

All the same, she watched to see if Nathanos looked at it.

He only looked her in the eyes, grinning as he set an envelope into her hand. With a subtle flick of his wrist, he twisted the envelope before he left it with her, revealing a smaller one beneath in a drab shade of blue that stood out over the black of the coffin below. The trick left Jaina staring at her hand, not him, with the understanding that the second letter was meant for no one to see but her.

Nathanos nudged the coffin with his boot, with the thump on the wood telling Jaina it was certainly not empty. “This goes with the letter.”

“Why a coffin?” Jaina asked him.

“Why indeed,” Nathanos answered with another grin.

It was only then that Anduin joined them, offering his decree while the rest of the leaders followed close behind. “If you mean us no harm then, stay while we see what your Warchief has for us.”

A wise choice, made quickly. Jaina was proud of him. Proud and at the same time, dreading what was in the coffin, and in the blue letter that she quickly stowed within coat sleeve as she handed the larger letter over to Anduin to open.

But Nathanos did not balk. He shrugged at the suggestion. “By all means. I have nothing to fear. The worst you could do is kill me again.”

And while Jaina noted that the silent tauren still looked rather nervous, it was no more nervous than she had before. Nor did she look at the coffin. No doubt, she’d been chosen to transport the thing more so than anything else. Jaina almost wished she was there to see their arrival. Nathanos and a coffin strapped to a big shambling bear or stag or whatever form the druid might favor.

Anduin took a moment to stare him down before he took the envelope from Jaina, and tore it open.

And Jaina took this as her cue to stand back, looking as if she was letting the High King take the lead, but really just affording herself time to tear the seal on her own letter with her thumbnail, still hidden in her coat sleeve.

Anduin took long enough reading the letter to allow her to slip her own out. A small scrap of parchment. Not even a full page.

Sylvanas’ handwriting had not changed in her death. Jaina knew as much to be true, but the thought still assaulted her as she feigned a motion of shielding her eyes from the morning sun to read the paper she’d palmed.

And while the handwriting hadn’t changed, Sylvanas was certainly less verbose in death than she had been in life. And she was very lucky that Jaina had kept up on her Thalassian and had no trouble in reading the foreign characters, scrawled out onto the page with military precision.

Lord Admiral Jaina Proudmoore,

I have no doubt you’ve noticed a change in yourself as of this past night. Though I trust you are shrewd enough to draw your own conclusions, I’d ask that you give me a chance to explain.

Can we meet? Alone? You may tell me when and where.

I wonder, do you still like elven coffee?

- Sylvanas

Before Jaina had even a scrap of time to process those words, she noticed Anduin turn to her mother, and say, “Lady Proudmoore. I…you should read this.”

Katherine snatched the letter, and in a matter of moments later, screamed out a wail unlike anything Jaina had ever heard before. A raw, guttural sound, followed by one word that explained everything, and reminded Jaina that she was wrong. She had, in fact, heard that sound before.

“Derek!”

Katherine tossed the letter into the mud, any further diplomacy within it forgotten.

The last thing Jaina expected to see that morning was her mother lunging at a black coffin, trying to pry it open with her bare hands. But that was what she saw.

She watched mutely as others reacted. Tandred dove after her, trying to calm her. Anduin snatched the letter out of the mud, then bade the others to give her space and told them he would explain. Alleria kept her arrow knocked.

Jaina felt like she’d been turned to stone. It was all too much. Too much at once. The only thing that kept her grounded in reality was the gnawing anxiety at the back of her skull.

The fear, not that a nefarious plan wouldn’t go on as it needed to, but that kind words and kind gestures and requests for peace would fall on deaf ears. Because they were not expected. They were unprecedented. And mark or no mark, the evidence on her very skin didn’t help Jaina to understand any of it.

As Katherine screamed again and again, sobbing into ebony wood, Nathanos found his way over to Jaina, and slipped a small sack out of one of his belt pouches for her. He grinned as he offered it, seemingly delighted by the chaos, or perhaps the cover it provided for this action.

And Jaina instantly knew from the smell, that what he was trying to hand her was a small bag of elven coffee.

For the life of her, she wasn’t sure why she took it from him.

---

Hours later, a lifetime seemed to have passed Jaina by. If her hair was not already mostly white, surely it would have gone as steely grey as her mother’s in the course of a day.

A day in which she had seen the shriveled body of her brother--water-logged and burnt all the same, revealed by the somber force of Kul Tiran guards who were eventually tasked with opening the casket to confirm. He still wore the tattered remains of his greatcoat--deep green woolen broadcloth long leeched of life and color by the sea.

Jaina remembered how she could barely reach the highest pocket of it, that day he left to go to war, and how she’d been so proud of her ability to do so. She’d put a handful of candy into it for him, and Derek laughed as he caught her in her reverse thievery, and told her he’d be back soon.

A funeral of sorts was being arranged. A memorial. A vigil. Jaina wasn’t sure what to call it--save that there was a wave of grief and relief that washed over Boralus all at once as the city learned that its favored son had been returned to it, still as dead as he had been for well over two decades.

The valet coughed, reminding Jaina that somehow the day held yet further business for her.

Right, the tour.

“I trust everything is to your liking, Lord Admiral?” the man asked, sliding his glasses back up his nose for the umpteenth time.

She hardly needed a tour of the Lord Admiral’s suite. Yet here she was, at the end of one. She’d grown up being read to in that window nook, jumping on that massive bed, and hiding under the great writing desk that sat before the picture window nearly every time she would play hide and seek. Derek always knew where to find her, but she never changed hiding spots because she liked how he would laugh and tease her when he found her, time and time again.

The valet claimed that Katherine had requested the suite be “freshened up” as she gifted it to her daughter, but Jaina could still only see her parents’ quarters in it for how little it had been changed.

“Everything is perfect,” she lied. “Please tell the staff they have my thanks for their hard work.”

“Of course,” the valet said.

She did not know his name yet. He was younger than the average crusty butler type, maybe her age. He would have been a boy when she left. Well, when she was made to leave. When she was shipped away, kept from her mother’s alternating fits of tears and coldness and nothing in-between, and a father who didn’t know what to do with a daughter who had inherited a wild magic that scared him. A father who missed his son, and wouldn’t look at her for all the pain in his eyes when he saw she wasn’t Derek.

She wondered then, if this nameless man ever had to look up at his father at the tender age of ten, and try to think of a way to apologize for not being what he wanted. If he ever had to beg to stay, and not be sent off to the continent to court a future king that would go on to ruin the world instead of ruling it, and study a magic that everyone he’d ever known had treated with equal parts fear and reverence, but mostly the former.

“That will be all,” Jaina said, not wanting to ask.

She also wanted him gone for other reasons, namely that she was tired of carrying around a bag of coffee in her coat and needed to be rid of it, lest she stink like a Thalassian cafe for the rest of the afternoon.

The valet nodded, finally taking his leave. He’d left Jaina by the picture window, overlooking the harbor, standing beside her father’s desk.

It was there she finally relieved herself of the coffee. After all these hours. She tossed the bag onto the polished mahogany, just missing the desk calendar that had, indeed, been refreshed. It was empty, at least. It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

“I don’t understand,” she said to the sea below.

It didn’t say anything back.

Her skull still vibrated with an anxiety that was not hers. Perhaps because a response had not been returned to it. Not from Jaina or the Alliance. Not yet.

But Jaina still didn’t understand.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

She asked it of a memory that wafted on the smell of coffee throughout the day. Of a woman who was as gone as Derek, as dead as him, yet now had chosen to stir to life and ask for understanding, ask for forgiveness.

Jaina had neither to give. The realization of it hit her as she watched the guards pry the lid off of that black coffin earlier. Sylvanas had sought out Derek’s body. She’d had it for a reason.

The reason had likely not been to broker a ceasefire. Jaina knew then, as she saw her brother’s corpse, that Sylvanas had likely meant to raise him. To make him fight his family, just as she had been made to fight hers.

But something had changed. Everything had changed.

And all Jaina had to go off of was the smell of coffee that still lingered in her coat, and a request she couldn’t even fathom entertaining.

A knock stirred Jaina from further questions and pondering at their answers. Because this day could just not allow her to have a singular moment of peace. No one could allow her to just…think.

“Enter,” was all she could manage to say without it dissolving into a groan of frustration.

She’d expected another staff member or guardsman or messenger, not the soft click of her mother’s boot heels on the floor of the room she’d given up not just that morning.

“I see you’ve made it up here,” Katherine noted as Jaina turned to face her, finding her cold composure back in place and ready to be questioned on whether it had slipped at all.

“I did. I just got the tour from…” Jaina started, then realized she’d never asked the valet’s name even to forget it.

“Barnbury,” Katherine answered for her. “Albert Barnbury. His father sailed with yours for decades, but Albert is much more inclined to his books than to the sea.”

“Thank you,” Jaina replied. She did not remember Albert or his father.

“You still have no head for names, I see,” Katherine remarked.

“I’m afraid not,” Jaina confirmed. Rather than stewing in yet another inadequacy, she turned back to face the harbor and said, “You didn’t have to give me the suite.”

“It was the proper thing to do,” Katherine told her.

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“It matters to me.”

There was a finality in Katherine’s statement that made the matter done and settled there and then. Not that it already wasn’t. Jaina’s belongings were in trunks on the floor, after all. All that she still kept with her, and felt she could bring home the Kul Tiras fit in two sea chests--mostly full of clothes. The rest she could conjure, portal back to, or have made new for her. Such was the life of an Archmage.

No, a Lord Admiral now, lest she forget.

Katherine’s heels clicked a few times more, until she was up at the desk, just behind Jaina.

“What’s this?”

Jaina turned to find her mother holding the bag of coffee grounds, puzzling over the strange letters on it. It occurred to her then that as sharp as her mother was, she could not read Thalassian, and had no such use for the language of the elves. She did not learn magic from them. She did not write love letters to an elf. She did not, after all those things, feel the need to keep herself sharp in their ways in order to intercept any intelligence from a once-ally, now enemy faction.

“A gift,” Jaina answered, because it wasn’t a lie, and that was easier somehow.

Katherine’s steely eyes pried for more as she looked away from the label.

“From Alleria,” Jaina lied, because that was as good as she could come up with.

Alleria, who was not allowed into Silvermoon, when the bag plainly read “Silvermoon Special Reserve Roast” for anyone who could read it to see. Alleria, who did not like coffee. Alleria, who did not like Jaina very much either, and had eyed her with distrust from the moment she set foot back in Stormwind, no doubt having been prepared by her sister to understand what Jaina was to her, and was not again, in the time she had been gone from this world.

“She sent it to apologize for yesterday,” Jaina continued.

Alleria, who did not apologize for anything. Jaina needed to just stop talking.

“I see,” Katherine said. “Elven coffee? I’ve never had it.”

“I’ll make you some,” Jaina offered, taking the bag, and cursing her mother’s demanding eyes and her own mouth.

Cursing still as she watched her wince when Jaina lit the fireplace with a snap of her fingers, and set a kettle over it. The same kettle, probably, that Katherine had brewed her very first cup of tea in, for all its well-worn brass glory. Jaina wasn’t so sure it was the magic that made her mother’s composure falter, or the profaning of Kul Tiran tradition.

But still, Jaina’s hands went nervously to work as Katherine gathered herself again.

“I understand the High King wishes to meet with you regarding the Alliance’s response to the ceasefire,” Katherine noted, her voice still resounding through the vast room in a way that told Jaina she had not moved from the desk.

She turned to find her with one hand on the dark wood. Anchored there like a ship in a storm, needing something to hold fast to.

Jaina felt even worse about taking the room, despite her lack of choice in the matter. “He does.”

“And you told him you’d speak to him tomorrow,” Katherine said.

“I did.”

Jaina turned back and conjured herself some coffee filters of the elven variety--little paper cones for each cup, which the grounds would go into, and wait patiently for hot water to be poured over them. No doubt such things did not exist in Kul Tiras, and could not be asked for otherwise.

She’d told Anduin tomorrow because she needed time to think today. She needed Valeera to come back. She needed Katherine to leave her alone for once. She needed to have a good long cry about Derek where no one could see her. And damn, she needed some whiskey with this coffee, but she was pretty sure that she and Valeera had just about drained her flask from the night before.

“You are stalling,” Katherine said blatantly.

Jaina turned to find her unmoved, staring at her.

“And why would you say that?” Jaina asked.

“This Windrunner woman. Their Warchief. I…we’ve never talked--no,” Katherine grip on the desk tightened, and no doubt her knuckles would have been stark white if Jaina could have seen them up close. “That’s not correct. You never told me much of her.”

“There is nothing to tell,” Jaina said.

“You loved her,” Katherine pointed out. “Very much. That’s all I remember of your letters from that time.”

“Yes, that time. A long time ago, mother,” Jaina pointed out, turning back as the kettle began to whine from the accelerated blaze she had set beneath it.

She moved to find a spoon in the little sideboard near the hearth--same drawer as they’d always been in, and began to measure out coffee into the filters she’d set into two mugs on the same sideboard. “A very long time ago,” Jaina said to the lingering silence.

“Yes, of course,” Katherine replied after another breath, a moment or two of hissing coffee grains sliding over paper. “She died. Then she wasn’t dead. Now she leads the same Horde we have fought for over thirty years and continued to fight. That Derek died fighting. That your father died fighting.”

“What do you mean to ask, mother?” Jaina said. “I know all of these things. I know them as deeply and painfully as you do. Don’t forget that I have you to thank for being made to relive them all quite recently.”

“Why does he ask you, then, what to do? This king? This boy?” Katherine questioned.

Jaina didn’t know the answer. She wanted to think of it as being a diplomatic stage that Anduin knew she would field better than he could. And while that was all true and good, these days, he wanted peace far more than she did. He did not need her help in asking for it.

So Jaina decided to tell her mother the truth. Or at least, what she thought might be the truth. “They think I know her still, that I know why she’s changed her tactics. That I know what she means to do.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

The word left her lips numb. It rocked a wave of frustration that crashed against Sylvanas’ anxiety in the back of her mind. But the anxiety did not waver or buckle from it. Instead, it seemed to grow stronger.

Jaina had maybe, once, known what her cocky Ranger General would do or say. She’d come to understand her quite well for how little time they were able to spend together. They’d made up for it in letters, and in their quiet but undeniable presence in one another’s minds and deeper feelings.

Jaina had loved the way Sylvanas was full of life and emotion back then. Even if her face didn’t always show it. She wore decorum as her mask like any elf of high station, but was funny and quirky beneath it. A woman full of corny jokes and wide smiles and fiddling hands that always seemed to be busy with some made up task. Like making coffee.

She’d been so different from her, but so much the same. So irrevocably intertwined despite it all that Jaina caught herself tapping the spoon on the edge of the mug to clean off the last of the grounds just like she’d learned from Sylvanas all those years ago, with hands that longed to find something to do because she couldn’t find the words to define this moment, this tension that coiled in her like a bowstring, ready to snap.

An anxiety that was not her own, but had molded and shaped hers, like it once had, years and years ago.

“And what will you tell him, then, tomorrow?” Katherine asked.

The kettle hissed and hissed. Water spat out onto the stacked logs that Jaina had unnaturally ignited into a too hot blaze. The coffee grounds she hovered over smelled bitter and wonderful at the same time. Nostalgia mixing with dread. Uncertainty battling against the known.

“I don’t know,” Jaina said.

Chapter Text

Grief has made me blind,
Cruel, quick, hungry.
Who could blame? For I had held,
The sunlight in my arms.

The captain’s cabin was richly appointed, small as it was, but Sylvanas had never spent much time there or intended to spend much time there. Certainly not an entire day.

The ship rocked and rocked, accompanied by a steady rhythm of creaks and groans and the whipping of ropes and fabric, accented by the drum of the boots on the aft deck. Though the latter was lessened now as the storm had worsened in the afternoon. All of Dazar’alor’s grand harbor had bunkered down, and Sylvanas, while she was grateful for her Forsaken flagship, thought that perhaps the fat, shallow-keeled barges of the Zandalari no doubt fared better in this storm than she did.

Though she would not be so welcome to hide in their cabins.

And it was just that, hiding. She’d told her rangers she would remain here and wait for word of the Alliance’s reaction. Her reasons for doing so were many. First, of course, was the excuse it gave her to get Clea off her back--that she was resting her injury. The hole in her shoulder was closed now, and no longer seeping black ichor, but the skin still bit tight around where the chain had pierced her when she moved. A not so subtle reminder of how close she had been to losing it all in her impulsive gamble.

Second, of course, was because what had happened was written plainly on her face for all to see. Sylvanas believed her Horde deserved an explanation, and she wished to deliver it to them with a ceasefire. A promise. An atonement. Blue eyes with a purpose.

Lastly, she needed time to think. She had done little of the thinking she’d wanted to do, though.

Mostly, her thoughts were cyclical. Her half-written notes for a speech lay on the desk that had been blessedly cleaned by Marrah upon her return with the requested coffee. Sylvanas had watched her do so with a strange appreciation. How many messes had she cleaned up after? How many had been more vile even than a corpse lain on a table?

That had started the thought that kept bringing her away from the speech--the reason it lay half-finished.

Even this very ship was a testament to loyalty she wasn’t sure she’d ever rightly earned, and certainly didn’t deserve to maintain. The sun tried its best to light up the green glass of the window at the aft of the ship again for her, but the storm had darkened the afternoon to the point where the craftsmanship of the window could hardly be appreciated in its full glory. Her Forsaken had built her a wonderful ship, which she didn’t care to be on or take time to appreciate, and for that, she had blighted their city in a spiteful rage. Her city. A city she had once fought so hard to allow them all to reclaim.

And yet, she knew the shambling survivors of that very city still sang her praises from ramshackle tents and the disused corners of Orgrimmar that they now were forced to inhabit. They still rasped out, “Dark Lady watch over you,” as if she had watched over anything lately.

Sylvanas decided that things had been much easier when she was not fully herself. When all she had was that raw anger, that undying rage that had been left to her, it was easier to be cold and callous and to justify the means to the end. Her soul, their souls, their freedom from death itself, were worth everything--every loss, every slight, every trail of fire left in her wake.

But she had not thought she would feel any differently once it was over. She had not thought she would feel much of anything. She supposed that she assumed it would be like Arthas’ demise, where she’d be made to watch from afar, and to know that justice was done by another’s hand, not hers. Such was the fate of a General, though it had always irked her. Instead of watching champions strike down a monster, though, she thought she would lead another monster toward rewriting creation itself with justice in mind.

Justice, Sylvanas knew now, was too subjective to be trusted. Justice was not written in the tight fittings of the floorboards of this cabin. It was not written in the rolls of fine maps stashed in a scroll cabinet. It would not be written in a half-finished speech, either. Justice did not exist, and would never. At least not for her, not for all she had done and had yet to do. And not for those who sought justice for her actions either. There would be no satisfaction. No mercy. No end.

Sylvanas knew now that this was the way of things, and knew with great certainty just how painful it was for all involved.

As if on cue to save her from further contemplation, the door to the cabin opened, letting in both wind and rain and a good portion of Velonara’s black cloak. She’d remained on guard all day, despite the storm, and turned away any that would seek an audience with the Warchief with a variety of excuses. But after those things, Nathanos’ broad frame filled the door as he muttered and shut it behind himself.

As much as she both dreaded and hoped dearly at what news he brought, Sylvanas mostly decided it was better that she wasn’t left alone any longer. In life, death, and whatever this was that came after, she had always been prone to brooding.

“Report, Ranger,” she offered.

He expected sternness and coolness from her. A part of her knew he worked best under such conditions, prone to mischief as any elf if his orders were left too open-ended. A part of her too, wanted to think of some way to thank him for staying with her. For his loyalty. For whatever it was that kept him tied to her even when she was so clearly broken.

But then again, death hadn’t been kind to Nathanos either. She supposed that they were all a little bit broken in their own ways. Him, maybe a bit more so than others.

Nathanos slicked the water off his coat with his hands, onto the fine floor made by finer men who showed their loyalty to her in how level and smooth it was. Nathanos showed it by tracking in mud.

“Dark Lady,” he offered with a bow. “I am pleased to inform you that the Alliance allowed me to leave intact.”

He spoke Thalassian as clearly and as haughtily as any elf. While many found him boorish and just plain difficult to be around, Sylvanas had always found his sarcasm amusing in a way.

It nearly made her smile. She suppressed the urge, unsure about what to do with it. The Dark Lady certainly did not smile while listening to reports.

“What did they have to say about our proposition?” Sylvanas asked flatly instead.

Nathanos reached into a deep pocket of his coat, and pulled a letter from within it. Just one, but dry and safely kept.

It passed with ease from his stubbed gloved fingers to her slender, ungloved ones, sliding between them as her upturned wrist exposed the glowing moon symbol with the action. But, disappointingly for her and that blue moon, the seal of the letter was bright blue wax, with the lion symbol of House Wrynn, and the neat handwriting of the young king.

Jaina, in her youth, had silly, loopy handwriting that Sylvanas found incredibly endearing. She couldn’t help but wonder if she still wrote that way, like a young girl who would hide hearts in the characters that spelled out the name of her beloved.

Sylvanas suppressed another smile. This was getting harder.

Thankfully, Nathanos decided to continue his report, “I’m afraid you won’t find much in the way of decisions in that letter, just to set your expectations. I am sure the boy king is asking you within it for time to discuss with his allies. The other delivery caused quite a stir.”

“I thought I instructed you to give the Lord Admiral her letter privately, if possible?” Sylvanas asked.

“I did,” Nathanos assured her. “And she still has no appreciation for good sleight of hand--some magician she is. It was the other delivery that caused the problem. Lady Katherine was present, and became quite emotional.”

“Ah,” was all Sylvanas could offer to that. She did not know Katherine Proudmoore, save for Jaina’s brief descriptions of her from their time together, and letters where she lamented how distant she’d grown from her family since coming to live in Lordaeron as a young girl.

Too young, Sylvanas had once felt. And with the intent for her to court a man who was clearly not her soulmate? Despicable. She understood that humans did not value those bonds as deeply as elves, feeling as though they had to make the best of the short time they had, as they did not have a near eternity to find the one they were meant to love. Still, it rang wrong to Sylvanas in a deep way that she could never have forgiven the woman for, even without knowing her.

So yes, she had not thought about what Katherine Proudmoore would think upon seeing the body of her son.

“Jaina took your letter, though. And the coffee. And afterwards made as swift an exit from the scene as was diplomatically possible,” Nathanos continued.

“You did not hear back from her then?” Sylvanas prodded.

“I stayed within range of Boralus for an hour or so, as you instructed. She could have found me if she wished. But she did not,” Nathanos offered with a shrug. “I suspect that she will answer you on her own terms, if she wishes to.”

“I suspect you are right about that,” Sylvanas said with a nod.

He was a surly dog of a man, not so pretty to look at, even after his restoration, and not so inviting to be around--but damn anyone who didn’t give him credit. Nathanos was smarter than he let on, and loyal to a fault. She was lucky to have him still, after all this time, after all these failures and follies.

“Nevertheless, I thank you for a highly entertaining morning,” Nathanos said with another nodding bow.

He was also a chaotic man, prone to laughing both in the face of danger and at the stupidity of just about anything or anyone else. If left to his own devices, he was prone to causing more havoc than harm, and delighted in vexing her other rangers with riddles and puzzles that they had very little patience to entertain.

A complex creature, that is for certain.

“And I thank you for your service, Champion,” Sylvanas offered in return, trying again to be the best impression of the passive, cold leader that he expected.

But again, that was no longer who she was. A smile did not threaten to tug at the Banshee Queen’s lips quite so often. Fond memories never lingered in the edges of her mind. And neither too, did the anxiety that buzzed at the back of her thoughts, mirroring her own, but unlike her own entirely.

What was making Jaina anxious this evening? Her letter? Her mother? Memories of her brother? The moon that no doubt glowed through a mirror image on the back of her hand? The fitful combination of restlessness and deep sleep that she had wrestled with the night before?

Many things, Sylvanas concluded. She had many things to be anxious about. And as much as it grieved her, she could not blame Jaina for failing to reply.

She knew this would take time. She knew that she could not be forgiven for all that she’d done. She knew that Jaina was least likely to forgive her, or to try to understand. But, all the same, the longing that Sylvanas felt for her was nigh unbearable.

Even before she had been restored, it had been there. At first, an empty wrongness that confronted her as part of her undeath--a curse among curses. Then, when she became aware of what she lacked, a nagging itch that demanded to be scratched. A hole to be filled. A hunger no sustenance could satisfy.

Now, knowing and understanding and feeling everything again--Sylvanas still could not have what she wanted. Nor would she force it. No. She wanted Jaina so badly, just to be near her again, but she would have to wait.

Nathanos was right. Jaina Proudmoore was never one to do anything outside of her own terms, and gods help anyone who tried to make her.

“Am I to understand that I’m dismissed then, Dark Lady?” Nathanos said as he came up from his bow.

“With new orders, yes,” Sylvanas said, shaking her thoughts away to more present concerns. She waved the letter at him. “I’ll read this and prepare to brief the Horde on what we plan to do about it. Hopefully they find the conditions amenable. Gather the leaders and have them attend me on the ship tonight at sunset. On the decks if the weather breaks. In this cabin if not.”

“On the decks?” Nathanos wondered. “With Marrah reporting she’s caught wind of Alliance spies watching the ship?”

“I mean to make those spies our allies,” Sylvanas reminded him. “Though your concern is noted and appreciated, I care not if they know what I say to the Horde.”

Nathanos grumbled. There was no more elegant word for it. The man was a grumbler. In many ways like a toddler refused a favorite snack. Even his face was no different, save the beard.

Sylvanas couldn’t help the puff of air that hit the back of her teeth as she looked up at him. A short, percussive laugh. A genuine laugh at his pouting.

She watched as Nathanos’ red eyes took her in, bushy brows furrowing in thought. He said nothing, but obviously contemplated the laugh--the break in a character she wasn’t sure she should bother trying to keep up anymore.

“You are dismissed, Champion,” Sylvanas told him. “Report back when you have informed the Horde, and tell me of their reactions.”

And with that, Nathanos grumbled off into the rain again, and Sylvanas smiled as soon as the door was closed behind him.

Anduin’s letter was brief and polite, as expected. Nathanos was indeed correct in that it asked for time to consider her proposition. It also promised to honor a ceasefire until any decisions were made and to withdraw any aggression from Horde territories or those belonging to the Zandalari until such decisions were reached. In a slightly more surprisingly bold and shrewd move, it invited her to share specifically with him, any information she might care to divulge on the larger threat at hand, so that he might better understand the need for cooperation between the factions on a personal level, rather than explaining to his Alliance that they must just trust in what she had to say.

His diplomacy reeked of Jaina, who no doubt had schooled him in this, and in his want for peace.

Sylvanas smiled again as she put his letter aside, in spite of herself, and in spite of the middling news it offered.

Not a moment later did the door open again, without so much as a knock or announcement, as Clea barged in with more strength and seeming rage than her small form should have offered.

“You let Nathanos in before me?” she demanded as she flipped back her hood, slicking the rain off of it onto Nathanos’ mud tracks as damning evidence.

“You didn’t seem to have any problem getting in,” Sylvanas noted as she gestured to the door that Velonara had been forced to shut back behind her.

“I’ve never been more offended in my life, death, or beyond,” Clea spat, making a grand show of removing her sodden cloak before hanging it on a peg by the door, and yet still managing to make less of a mess of the doorway than the man before her had.

“I love that we have to invent new phrases like that,” Sylvanas drolled back at her, feeling no need to keep character. Indeed, with her long-standing Rangers, she had always been a bit more playful, even at her most severe.

Perhaps it was the human in Nathanos that drove their communications to be more polite and formal. Elves were never really that way with one another. When one lived for thousands and thousands of years, one tended to lose patience for pleasantries pretty quickly.

“I can’t say I enjoy it,” Clea offered as she turned and stared Sylvanas down.

Those red eyes made her feel instantly exposed. And to Clea’s credit, she was. She’d kept her armor off after being stripped of it, and was dressed in new leathers, but nothing else. It had been quite some time since she’d spent this long out of armor. She’d left her arms exposed with a sleeveless top, mostly to allow Clea to come scold and tisk over her shoulder as she knew she would. She had discarded the bandage on it some time ago, seeing no need for the thing now that the wound had closed. Her state of relative undress had also left her wrist exposed for her to toy at tracing the outlines of the faintly glowing moon on her skin, but no one but her needed to know about that.

And while she had contemplated redonning her armor many times over the course of the day despite these things, that didn’t feel correct either. The skulls and spikes of the Banshee Queen no longer suited her. No, that would have to change somehow, as she had. Perhaps she could find something that fit how she felt--stuck in-between.

But there would be time enough for that later.

As expected, Clea’s gaze focused mostly on her shoulder, and narrowed in further as the Ranger approached.

“I have rested and am mostly healed,” Sylvanas assured her.

Clea offered no initial comment as she poked at Sylvanas’ shoulder, and made none further as she flinched slightly from the remaining tenderness of the wound.

“Mostly,” Sylvanas hissed.

Only then did Clea offer her opinion, “But not completely. Doctor’s orders are that you continue to refrain from exercise until dawn tomorrow, and also that you tell the fucking doctor what did this to you.”

“The doctor will hear all in due time,” Sylvanas noted, reaching out to gently push Clea’s hand away from her.

Clea sighed out her disappointment, but at least did not prod the wound again. “What is the point in all these secrets anymore?” she asked. “You’ve run from this dark master of yours. Or stole your soul back from him. Or what-the-fuck-ever is going on. You can at least tell us.”

“There will be no more secrets after tonight,” Sylvanas told her, gesturing down at her half-written speech. Clea didn’t need to know it wasn’t even written to the point of explaining Zovaal quite yet. “So I meant what I said. The doctor will hear all she wishes to hear soon enough.”

Clea’s gaze drifted between Sylvanas’ shoulder and her newly blue eyes before finally settling on the moon on her wrist. Only then did Clea seem to remember another purpose of her barging in.

“The remaining Rangers have all returned from their recall,” she reported. “None of our forces remain in Kul Tiras, save those maintaining the garrisons and outposts there.”

“Thank you,” Sylvanas said in reply. “No trouble with the extractions then?”

“We wouldn’t be your Rangers if there was trouble, well, except for Nathanos,” Clea offered.

This time the smile came easily to Sylvanas’ lips, and she let it. The Dark Lady, the Banshee Queen, the Warchief of the Horde may have occasionally allowed the bantering and subordination that her Rangers so loved, but never encouraged it. She had no time for games, after all.

But a part of Sylvanas has always treasured their little petty innerworkings and pranks and jabs. It was what made them people, after all. People she knew and loved and worried about, and not soldiers in a field, numbers in a ledger. Arrows in her quiver, even, as she remembered saying.

No, she reminded herself, these were her friends.

She could smile around them. Especially at Nathanos’ expense.

Clea, however, was busy looking elsewhere, and didn’t seem to notice, for all the thought that went into it. She stared out the green window at the storm beyond and asked, “You truly think then, that this lord of yours will come to take his vengeance?”

“I am not certain how he will do so, but yes,” Sylvanas answered honestly. “It is only a matter of time.”

“And is that why you ordered us to send some champions over to the Temple of Bwonswamdi?” Clea wondered.

“It is the place nearest to here that is associated with death, so yes,” Sylvanas told her. “I know far less than I wish to about how this works, how he might reach across the planes to exact some sort of revenge. However, I can tell you that I’m quite certain he was behind the Scourge.”

Clea hummed low and monotone. A pensive sound. What else could one do when faced with the prospect of another Scourge?

They both knew well enough what the Scourge had done, how the plague of undeath had rent both their bodies and their homeland and damaged them beyond comprehension. The place where they had fallen still remained a scar on the land--a strip of death and decay in a forest that was otherwise full of life and magic for as long as they had ever known it. Sylvanas had watched, on that same strip of blighted land, as Clea fell near her, finally overwhelmed by dozens and dozens of ghouls.

She’d never felt so powerless as she did in those final moments. Until then, she had felt there was a chance, however small, that she could stop the march of death itself upon Quel’thalas. That she could just try something new, fight longer, fight harder, outwit that foolish prince one more time, and it would be over. But the dead kept coming. He kept bringing more and more monsters to bear. And for all her cunning, all her fighting, all her trying, there were just too many of them and too few of her and her Rangers.

In the end, it had just been her left, cornered and alone. When Sylvanas had died on Frostmourne’s jagged blade, she only thought of Jaina. How terrible this must be for her. How awful it would be to know she was truly alone. Death, as terrible as it was when Sylvanas faced it, was nothing compared to living each day knowing that you’d never be with the one you were meant to be again. That you couldn’t. That your very soul was forever isolated from the thing that had made it whole again, made it shine and sing.

She wondered how Jaina felt when she discovered that this was still true, even though the woman she once loved still stalked the pine forests of Lordaeron, hunting down the living that dared to reclaim the land now haunted by the free undead.

Sylvanas shook her head. Now was not the time to remember those days.

“For that reason,” she continued on, “I think I am justified in my caution, and in my request that we cooperate with the Alliance to prepare.”

Clea had little to say to that, her normally barbed tongue going still. She stood sideways now, searching the stained glass of the window for answers. Sylvanas wanted to ensure her there were none there, as she’d already looked.

“Times are strange, and likely dire,” Sylvanas told her.

“They have been for fucking decades,” Clea finally lamented.

“Wouldn’t it be nice, then, if this was our last battle to fight for a while?” Sylvanas asked, more of fate itself than anything else. “If after this, we could settle with the Alliance. We could just be.”

“Your fancy new eyes are making you too optimistic. What happened to death to the living?” Clea asked.

“I never said that one,” Sylvanas told her. “Though I understand it was popular in the Undercity.”

“Not even about Garithos?”

Sylvanas smiled again. “Maybe a time or two about Garithos.”

This time, Clea caught the smile, then shared it and didn’t seem to know what to do about it. She blinked, red eyes peering into blue, and didn’t seem to be able to process what had just happened.

“I--Sorry. This is weird. You’re still you, but--” she tried to explain as she looked away again.

“I’m like I was before, but still willing to joke about wanting to murder that conceited fuck, and enjoying the fact that we did, in fact, murder him?” Sylvanas finished for her. “Believe me, I’ve been wrestling with it all day. If there were a manual for how to deal with having one’s soul returned to wholeness, I’d love to read it. But, I think that I’m once again a singular case.”

When Clea looked at her again, a flash of sympathy made its way over her features. It was doubtless in the slight droop of her ears, the furrow of long brows, and the brewing concern beneath the red glow of her eyes. In life, Sylvanas remembered them glowing a vibrant blue, hinting at the warmth of gold in some ways--shining and brilliant like Quel’thalas had been.

Had been.

What would Lor’themar have to say to the notion that she still considered it less than restored?

Sylvanas decided that having her entire soul back was overall a very distracting experience.

“Either way, I will tell you what I know, after I’ve had a chance to tell the Horde in a formal sense. Let them have the long and short of it, and I will give you and the rest of my Rangers the entirety of what details I do know, and have Signe share what she knows as well. Perhaps the lot of you can make sense of things where I cannot,” Sylvanas offered.

In truth, the secret keeping of the last few years had worn on her. She did rely on her Rangers for their intelligence, and had done so throughout the course of her life and unlife. It had been difficult to have information she either felt she could not share with them, or that she could not begin to explain. But there was no use in that now. She needed all the help she could get.

All of Azeroth, it seemed, might need all the help she could muster, if she was right.

“I do love a good briefing,” Clea answered with a genuine grin. “And I have missed them.”

“A briefing you shall have, then,” Sylvanas stated. “After the speech. Find Nathanos and make sure he’s doing as I asked in the meantime.”

“Why am I on babysitting duty?” Clea asked with another long sigh.

“Because we both know someone has to be,” Sylvanas told her. “Or he’ll be off making friends with every dog in the city the second his task is done.”

“The Zandalari don’t have dogs,” Clea reported. “They have dinosaurs.”

“The last thing we need is for Nathanos to somehow obtain a dinosaur.”

“On that, I suppose we can agree,” Clea said, relenting and offering a Ranger salute as she turned to don her cloak and leave.

Just as Sylvanas found herself smiling at the image of Nathanos playing fetch with one of the Zandanalari’s great reptilian beasts.

---

The rain was gone by sunset, but left the deck Sylvanas stood upon still wet and smelling of sea and sky. The ship no longer rocked and rocked, and saw no deterioration from the storm. It was still a fine, fine ship, and still one she was happy to take leave of. Still one she was not sure she deserved to have built in her name.

She stood at the railing of the aft deck, looking below as the leaders of the Horde gathered around the lower deck, some not even daring to stray too far from the ramp back to the quay. Each of them had looked up at her with puzzled expressions as they came aboard, then gone to whispering to one another.

Saurfang, the stubborn old bastard of an orc, never took his eyes off her, though, and stared even then as Rokhan whispered something in his ear.

He had no reason to trust her. No reason to trust this change wasn’t another trick or feint. She didn’t blame him. She couldn’t. She couldn’t blame any of them.

Baine Bloodhoof shuffled his massive frame aboard, second to last to attend, and didn’t so much as gawk at her as he just took her in with those big, sorrowful eyes. He always seemed as if he was in mourning for something. Maybe his father. Maybe his friendship with the Alliance. Maybe peace itself.

Sylvanas looked back at him, wishing she could convey some sort of sincerity by just an expression alone. But she knew that he didn’t have that expectation of her either. He shouldn’t, at least.

None of them should.

It was finally the sound of raucous laughter and the exchanging of coins that distracted Baine as he lumbered across the deck, and straight into the back of Gallywix. The Trade Prince was already making bets, and Sylvanas supposed she should take that as a sign he was no worse for the wear after his brush with the Alliance. He didn’t seem to mind his brush with Baine’s hooves either, as he merely turned around, scolded him loudly enough for all to hear, then tried to get the chieftain in on whatever bet he had going with Gazlowe.

An unlikely gamble, but an admirable effort nonetheless.

Lor’themar, of course, was the last to arrive--fashionably late as always. He was flanked by a rather exhausted-looking Lady Liadrin and the perfectly quaffed black hair of Magister Rommath--no, Grand Magister Rommath, lest Sylvanas forget. It was always strange to deal with them now, these people whom she had considered friends in life, who now looked upon her as the others did, with caution and delicacy--the deserved reservation of those who questioned the motives of their leader.

Lor’themar had never looked at her that way when he’d been just another of her Ranger Lords. When he would limp into the infirmary to be scolded by Liadrin, still wearing her priestess robes and not a paladin’s heavy armor. When he’d try to excuse himself early from giving a report, while Rommath waited outside, and insisted that no, he was not late for a date. When he’d come to her office as she worked into the evenings, uniform coat unbuttoned, a bottle of her favorite mana wine in his hands, and remind her that she should, and could, relax once in a while too.

Sylvanas realized then that she missed him and his company with an incredible force that threatened to topple her from her perch on the aft deck. Lor’themar had been her friend. He was her comrade. Someone she trusted with her Rangers and her very life.

And even he gawked up at her with his one good eye like he expected her to drop a barrel of Blight on them. As if she would give up the lives of every critical member of the Horde without batting an eye, all for some scheme, some plan for vengeance that would never come.

And yet, Sylvanas couldn’t blame him.

Nor could she blame the hard scrutiny of Liadrin’s eyes--all holy gold peering from deep, dark bags below. What had her so busy? She had only recently returned from Arathi, and had been otherwise commanded to maintain a defense of Dazar’alor and the Horde forces stationed there in the event of an Alliance invasion. But that was cakewalk for Liadin, surely not enough to keep her up at night.

Or had she been crying?

Another question Sylvanas had no right to ask, and an odd feeling about wondering the answer to. She’d given up that right long ago.

Though the judgment Liadrin threatened had nothing on a much taller figure she ended up standing next to. The imposing Zandalari heiress, Talanji, stood nearly as tall as Baine, and stared harder than Saurfang ever could. She had been suspicious of Sylvanas from day one, and yet they had not yet met in-person. Sylvanas had trusted her advisors and representatives to handle Talanji, and knew better than to face her directly. Talanji was a woman of action and quick decisions, and would have not stood for any deception or vague promises in her dealings with the Horde.

So it was in Sylvanas’ best interest to let this first direct address be as truthful as possible.

Luckily for her, that was the plan. The plan. Right. Time to get to it.

She hadn’t been nervous about addressing a crowd in over a decade. Funny, how much harder some things were, full of tension and regret and unchecked emotions.

Or maybe that was just Jaina, still gnawing at the back of her skull with her own anxiety raging on and on. How Sylvanas wished she was projecting her constant stream of youthful optimism of old, as she so often did when last they were tied. Gods know she could use some of it.

Sylvanas adjusted her armor one last time, still feeling out of place in the skull motifs, but having no alternative. There were many reasons to feel out of place. The eyes on her. The fact that she was the Warchief of the Horde, somehow.

All of it, really.

But now was not the time.

She summoned up a facade that she once used long ago, not clouded by a passive, simmering rage, but projecting confidence she both did and did not have. The mask of the Ranger General, which she’d seen her mother wear long before she’d ever worn it, was both physical and not physical. It was a stance, a face, but also a projection of an image within. An image Sylvanas felt she didn’t deserve to embody, but at the same time, needed very badly to inhabit once again.

“Champions, leaders, valued members of the Horde, and our esteemed Zandalari hosts,” she began, using near the full power of her dual-toned voice to resound over both the ship and into the harbor beyond. “While I am certain you have been left wondering more often than not these days, and have wondered why I have called you all here, I can assure you that today, you will not leave this ship wondering anymore.”

The truth had been such a lonely place. Sylvanas was familiar with that loneliness. She felt it when she’d gone nearly two hundred years without finding her soulmate. She felt it when it had been Nathanos, and not Vereesa or Alleria, who had been the first to come to her after mother’s death. She felt it again when Vereesa sent her the letter after she’d botched their plans at Garrosh’s trial, and told her that she was too broken to mend, too dead to be worth living with. She felt it even before she understood her emptiness, when Jaina wouldn’t look at her in the throne room of the Undercity, even as Varian threatened to end her for all she had done, all he had seen in the supposed rescue the Alliance had come to provide.

“I am sure you have noticed that I am changed. How exactly, I am still attempting to understand. I will not lie to you, not anymore. I have been attempting to bring this about for many years. I have worked not in your interests, but in my own, in seeking what I wanted. I have no doubt you’ve found my recent actions extreme. I have no doubt that many of you disagree with the direction I have moved the Horde in over this last year. Well, I will tell you that I did so for myself, for my very soul.”

Her soul. A flighty thing, full of emotion and chief among those, regret. Regret that she didn’t attempt to snatch it away sooner. Regret that she had at all, for the doom it would now bring upon this world. Regret, too, that she did not understand the entire capacity of what that was, or what Zovaal might do to seek his vengeance against her.

But it was hers again. And it should never have been taken from her. In that, at least, Sylvanas could feel justified.

“I will brief you on the details of what I know later, but know this; I have been working at the behest of a lord of death. A keeper, it would seem, of hell itself, whom I met when I sought to end myself at Icecrown, and found out exactly what horrors await the dead. I have since found out that this lord holds hostage the souls of Forsaken such as I, who were slain directly by Frostmourne. Last night, I was able to free my soul from him, and stand before you made whole again.”

Whole, but dead. A soul in a body that still didn’t feel right. A ghost made manifest on will and rage and cunning, and ultimately, a desire for control. Sylvanas had all the control she could want now, and it hadn’t made anything better, only more complicated.

“I stand before you whole and full of regret. There is no better way to say it. There is no way to atone for what I have done to you, and ordered you to do to others who did not deserve it. I wish there were time for me to humble myself and explain, to beg you to understand and forgive. My actions warrant none of those things, but I also know that we don’t have time for them.”

Sylvanas looked down, watching the sea of faces below bound from confusion to outrage, then back again. She saw Saurfang’s lips working, as if he were about to accuse her of some trickery, and decided she couldn’t afford to pause again.

“I have asked the Alliance to entertain a ceasefire. What I did for myself, and hoped to do for the rest of my Forsaken, has no doubt caused the master I once served great anger. He will come for me, for Azeroth. His goal, as I understood it, was to gain the power to remake reality itself in the image of his choosing. He knows no mercy, and cares not for what he destroys or consumes in the wake of moving toward his intention, which I have now disrupted in my disobedience to him. No doubt this sounds familiar to you. I realize such a course was one I once shared. Well, not anymore.”

Sylvanas’ Orcish still wasn’t the best after all this time, but she appreciated the language for its directness. There were fewer flowery words or complex expressions to trip over. Ideal, honestly, for a speech she struggled to give. There was so much to say. So much to speculate on. But this was not the venue for uncertainties.

Sylvanas had to ask them directly for what she, and the rest of their world needed.

“I ask that you work with me, and work with the Alliance, to help fortify our world against this new threat. The armies of death itself will march upon us, perhaps not unlike they did in the Third War, or perhaps in new and terrifying ways. I know again that I do not deserve it, but I ask you for your understanding and your cooperation in these efforts. Please. For Azeroth.”

A din erupted below, but out of all of them, Lor’themar’s reaction was the first she heard.

“Fuck, a ceasefire?” he shouted back in Thalassian, half at her and half at the rest of his delegation. “Sun bless it. What is she saying?”

Somewhere below his hip, Gallywix and Gazlowe stood, coins in hand, not sure how to go about exchanging them. Clearly the result was unexpected, enough to make even the Trade Prince reconsider the legitimacy of his bets.

“Sylvanas, what is the meaning of this?” Lor’themar asked in Orcish for all in attendance to understand. “Are you saying that your eyes have changed, and obviously your mind, because you’ve regained your soul, that apparently you didn’t have?”

“To make a very long story short, yes,” Sylvanas answered.

“Pardon my language, but what the fuck?” Lor’themar shouted back. “Where has it been?”

“In hell,” Sylvanas answered, again, truthfully.

“What do you mean, hell? What trickery is this now?” Talanji was the one to ask this time.

“I can see there’s going to be a lot of questions. I will answer what I can. Let’s be orderly about this,” Sylvanas cautioned as more voices rose above the clamor.

“How can we believe you, you banshee witch!” Saurfang finally snorted through his tusks. “After all you’ve done, all you’ve killed and left to fester in your wake.”

Perhaps the speech wasn’t what she should have dreaded. “Nathanos,” Sylvanas said, calling him forth from where he stood guard behind her on the aft deck. “See if you can find some refreshments for our guests. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long evening.”

While what she said was meant only for Nathanos, Sylvanas doubted anyone could hear it anyway. At least not over the shouting, and the loud, thunderous sigh of relief that Baine Bloodhoof was letting out.

---

“I must say, though, sun above is it to good to have you back,” Lor’themar went on, despite the fact that Sylvanas had gently reminded him not once, but twice already that she was, not, in fact, back.

No, it was very clear that she was not who she once was in any aspect of her life before, or undeath after. Her eyes might glow a different color, her full spectrum of emotions and the judgment that came with them may have returned to her, as did her connection to the very souls of Azeroth and her inhabitants, but Sylvanas Windrunner was still very much the same woman who had burned Teldrassil and blighted the Undercity, and would not be easily forgiven for either, least of all by herself.

And while Lor’themar’s trust might have returned easily enough for him to linger in the captain’s cabin as he once had in her office in Silvermoon, the rest of the Horde had still been quite cautious of her, even after what seemed like hours and hours of questions she did her best to answer as wholly and truthfully as she could.

She’d even taken time to plan out the course of their ceasefire and cooperative efforts with the Alliance with the other leaders, should they accept. At the very least, the rest of the Horde were eager for the ceasefire, though remained a bit suspicious of one endorsed by her. It was only Gallywix and his war profiteering, who seemed at all disappointed by the prospect. He showed no signs of stopping in his quest to make money off of the war and Azerite, despite his recent brush with death.

Oh, and Talanji, who seemed quite annoyed that the Horde wanted to treat with Kul Tiras, rather than wipe them off the map in Zandalar’s name, as she had been promised.

She threatened that her father would not welcome this news, but Sylvanas felt the troll king would. He had a healthy fear of death about him, that much was certain. A war was a risk he did not take lightly, and he lacked his daughter’s bloodthirst for it.

All the same, Talanji seemed to see more reason after Sylvanas told her of her suspicions of Bwonswamdi. Of how she’d come to hold the title of Warchief, and how Zovaal had been so pleased with himself for the effort. Talanji went deadly silent after Sylvanas remarked that she cared little for who held the title at all, so long as they would listen and keep the peace.

It was all such a tangled mess--these last few years, so interconnected and rotten all the same.

Sylvanas didn’t feel she could swear by the sun anymore. Belore no longer answered her call, but still, she smiled up at Lor’themar from her desk genuinely. That would have to be enough.

“Take heart however you will. I am who I am and what I am,” Sylvanas finally answered. “But I am glad to have your help. You are content then, to deploy some regiments to watch the remainder of the old Scourge sites in Lordaeron?”

Lor’themar grinned to the point it bent the soulmark on his cheek, a glowing thing that he said represented a flaming arrow. Sylvanas always felt it was far more abstract in shape, but let him have his fun. Rommath wearing its opposite along the top of his ear was scandalous enough already.

“Of course!” he answered. “You said you believe the wall between worlds to be the weakest in places where death was settled before?”

“Or where it calls home now, yes,” Sylvanas offered. “I mean to send a contingent to Icecrown Citadel as well.”

“Smart,” Lor’themar concluded.

“You can stop grinning at me like a well-fed cat, you know,” Sylvanas reminded him.

“Sorry, it’s just--This feels like old times. Better times,” Lor’themar offered.

“I fear that ‘better’ is hardly a word I’d use to describe what we face,” Sylvanas said with some degree of certainty.

Only some, of course. She didn’t know how Zovaal would go about his revenge. What she did know was that he had reached into Azeroth before, and could do so again. Like she would with any enemy breaching walls, Sylvanas only knew it was a safe bet to watch the cracks.

It took far more time and conversation than she wanted to shoo him from the cabin, but Lor’themar did eventually see himself out. The door opening ahead of him revealed the great harbor had darkened into a clear, crisp veil of night. A blanket of stars shone overhead, absent a moon. It would be dark tonight, and newly reborn tomorrow.

A strange feeling that Sylvanas could sympathize with, surely.

Alone again for a fleeting moment, she wondered if the exhaustion she was beginning to feel was hers or Jaina’s. No doubt it was late for living things that needed to sleep.

It was stranger still, that Sylvanas found herself wishing the Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras would get a good night’s rest.

“Signe,” she said to nothing.

And from that, the val’kyr formed before her. Signe no longer traveled between the planes of life and death, but she also didn’t seem to be particularly bound by the rules of physics either. She was where she was needed, corporeal or incorporeal when it concerned her to be either, but always came when called.

“Yes, Dark Lady,” Signe answered, forming the wholeness of her spectral form, and nearly filling the small cabin with it.

“I have two tasks for you tonight,” Sylvanas told her. “But first a question. Are you able to get to Kul Tiras tonight?”

“It would not take me long,” Signe answered. “I will fly swift and true.”

“Are you able to do so unseen?” Sylvanas questioned further.

“If that is your will.”

Her will. She wanted nothing to be for her will anymore. Will was what had kept her going. It had kept her cruel and decisive. It had seen her defy and overcome.

But Sylvanas was tired of being willful.

“Carry this then,” she said as she offered up an envelope. “To Lord Admiral Jaina Proudmoore. You know her, yes? You know from me what she looks like, where she might be?”

Her connection to the val’kyr seemed to impart some of her knowledge to them. Sylvanas didn’t want to think what that might mean for those the Jailer had reclaimed. But for now, it was helpful not to have to brief yet one more person.

Signe nodded to this.

“Make sure you are not seen. By her as well, if it can be helped,” Sylvanas instructed.

“It will be done,” Signe assured her, reaching out for the letter.

The letter was perhaps a bit foolish. A bit awkward, certainly. Sylvanas merely wanted one thing, and that was a reply. Any sort of reply.

Even Anduin had told her to wait. She could take that from Jaina. She would wait.

But the lack of acknowledgement was grating on her. She needed to know. She needed to know if this was all worth it. If her soul could truly be whole again. If there was any chance.

So yes, she was sending her last remaining val’kyr to Jaina Proudmoore with what some might call a sappy love letter. And it was ridiculous and foolish and perhaps a waste of her time. And it was equally ridiculous that she might be using said val’kyr for this task, because she was certain any Ranger given the job would tell her exactly how foolish it was.

But Sylvanas had to know.

“Return safely from this, and then I will ask your next task of you. You will brief my Rangers on what you know of the realms of death, and of your former master’s plans,” Sylvanas ordered.

“I have shared what I know with you already, Dark Lady,” Signe replied.

“And I have no desire to keep it to myself, not anymore,” Sylvanas told her. “You will brief them all tonight, so we might rely on their counsel for the days to come.”

Signe nodded slowly to this. Perhaps it was an odd notion for her to accept, a ruler who asked and checked, rather than just imposing their will.

Sylvanas knew, after all, with both portions of deadly certainty and gnawing uncertainty, what awaited this world. But it was only her place to warn and prepare. Not impose.

She had a feeling that any who thought her mad would soon be proven wrong either way. She only hoped that somewhere, where Jaina was still stirring in this moonless night, still buzzing with anxiety, that she wouldn’t wait to find out. That she could believe, as Sylvanas herself was also struggling to believe, that some things could change for the better.

Chapter Text

Days pull you down just like a sinking ship
Floating is getting harder
But tread the water, child, and know that meanwhile
Rises the moon

Anduin’s most polite smile always had a way of conveying its own underlying current of constant worry. His youthful eyes--unmarred as Jaina knew her own were by crow’s feet and the more outward signs of worry--swirled beneath their blue with an ever-present maelstrom. Such was the weight of being High King, she supposed, or rather, a lad who had no one to guide him save the torrent voices around him that all pushed one agenda or another.

She did not count herself any different from them.

Still, he took the time to smile. He took the time to be polite. Anduin took the time to let her know he appreciated her, even if he had to know she had her own reasons for advising him. “Thank you for agreeing to meet on such short notice.”

“It’s no problem,” Jaina assured him.

Short notice had been a muttered request upon exiting their breakfast with the other Proudmoores that morning. A plea for a few minutes more of her time, in private. Jaina made a show of catching her mother’s eyes as she led the young king back to the Lord Admiral’s suite. She didn’t know why.

Maybe she wanted some approval. Some respect. Some acknowledgement that her life on the continents, lived so far away and so separate from her island home, had some meaning. Some good to be done, something worthwhile learned and earned from all the suffering.

Or maybe it was a shallower pettiness. Maybe all Jaina wanted was some acknowledgement that Anduin didn’t touch anything but that damn apple tart, just as she thought. Only Genn Greymane had been brave enough for the black pudding, and regaled poor Tandred with tales of his old Kul Tiran friends even after the youngest Proudmoore had informed him that most of those men had died long before he was even born. The living Windrunner sister, she knew, might have been brave enough to try as well, but thankfully both had begged off some excuse and were not in attendance.

But Katherine’s reaction had left nothing for her to go off of. There had only been the flat line of her mouth, and the effort it took for Jaina not to balk at her suggestion that she make the High King some of that strange coffee she’d made for them the night before.

No, Jaina had only been left wondering how much her mother might have truthfully researched about Quel’thalas, in all those years since she found out her only daughter’s destined love was an elf.

Anduin’s polite smile remained as he made a show of looking around the Lord Admiral’s suite. He fixated for a moment on a mounted map of the south seas, still smiling before he turned to where Jaina had taken up residence at the desk. Standing next to it, of course. She still wasn’t sure about sitting in the chair. That was her father’s chair. Not hers.

“No Alliance King has been in this room since my grandfather,” he noted.

Jaina laughed, despite it all. “No, they have not. I’d have ushered you to a meeting room or something, but I don’t quite remember where they are. At this point, I’m afraid to ask.”

“It’s not a misstep,” Anduin assured her. “It’s an honor. From one person who suddenly found themselves with a new and even more daunting title to another, it’s an honor, Lord Admiral.”

“You must truly want a favor to flatter me, Anduin,” Jaina told him.

“I’m not flattering. Just being a stranger in a strange land. Was it, um, was it fine that I didn’t eat the fish? Or whatever that black stuff was? Genn kept giving me eyes, but fish for breakfast? I can’t, Auntie. I just can’t,” he said, finally taking on the character of a young man again as his shoulders hunched a little bit beneath the lion regalia.

Jaina laughed again. “I didn’t eat it either, for what it’s worth,” she told him. “If you ask my mother, I’m sure she’ll tell you my taste buds have been ruined by being away so long. Truth be told, I’ve never liked fish for breakfast.”

If it made her a terrible Kul Tiran, so be it. She was. She loved the sea and winds, but swore more by the Light than the Tides, and never had a taste for fish. Shrimp cocktail, sure, but that was a favorite at parties in Dalaran. A proper Kul Tiran only ate his shrimp in beer batter, with tartar sauce, and even then would joke about it not being a proper fish, merely a palatable sea bug.

Anduin closed the distance to the imposing desk, taking a moment on the walk over to reach into his jacket to produce a rolled piece of parchment from a pocket within. “Truth be told, Auntie, I’ve come seeking advice, as usual. I have a draft of a ceasefire that could use a peacemaker’s eyes on it.”

A former peacemaker, she almost wanted to correct him. Jaina felt as if she had only been responsible for contributing to more and more conflict as of late. Late, that was rich. Years, it had well and truly been, since she could call herself a peacemaker. And even then, at what cost?

Still, Anduin set down a contract that would unite the forces of the Horde and Alliance yet again on a desk that still stank of Daelin Proudmoore in every way but the actual tar and salt smell of him, hater of orcs, man of many judgements and little reason.

And some part of Jaina felt she betrayed him again and again, each time she offered kindness when she should have fired every cannon in his arsenal.

“It sounds like you’re being more than just tentative on this idea?” Jaina questioned as her eyes followed the thread of words unraveling on the page, not really reading them or having the capability to read them in that moment.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a range of emotions dashing across the young king’s face. Anduin was no good at wearing a mask. He was young and ill-practiced in the art.

Jaina was neither of those things. She felt much, but stood still, staring at the words on the page, willing them to make sense. Willing anything in this world to make sense.

“I…Sorry. I’m just surprised to see that you are?” he asked of her.

Was she? Truly? Jaina still didn’t quite know. The banner of the Horde seemed to be placed collectively on all her problems, all of her sorrows. It had been so easy to leave behind her past calls for forgiveness and choose violence instead. Some days, she even cursed Thrall and Kalec for daring to temper her at the height of her fury. Some days, it seemed that the world would have been better if she had let that rage explode, drowning Orgrimmar, maybe even drowning herself in the process.

A violent end to violent means seemed to be most fitting. And yet, Anduin still came to her to ask about making peace.

He rallied against her silence, as if him talking more would open some floodgate. Jaina wished it would. “I just--with the news that the Horde have come to an agreement on the matter as of last night, I had hoped you would be excited to hear it. You’ve been stalling on committing Kul Tiras to war. I thought you had reason to hope for such an ending?” Anduin asked.

She had been stalling. That much, Jaina could be true to herself on. She would still not admit that it had anything to do with attacking Sylvanas directly. No, she might never admit to that. But yes, she had been stalling.

Anduin cleared his throat, sighing with a sound too gentle for his broad-shouldered frame. Every day, he looked more and more like Varian, yet acted less and less like his hot-headed, willful father. “Listen, Auntie. I know. I know what’s happened, and I know it must affect you in some way. I’m not asking for anything related to…that, but know that I understand it must be hard.”

Jaina could feel her neck jerk, muscles tight, snapping beneath the skin. How she must have looked like something wild and fierce--an animal cornered and without options. Or at least, the way that Anduin’s eyes went wide as she looked into them told her as much.

“What do you mean?” she asked through grit teeth.

The mask had slipped. Caution was gone, thrown to the wind. Her fingers tingled with frost again, and Jaina felt equal parts fury and shame, and shame for her fury. But it couldn’t be helped. These last few days had her so on edge that it was inevitable. Last few months. Last few years. Decades.

No wonder she was so ready to burst, her seams constantly stretching, ripping only in the privacy of her room. But this wasn’t her room, it never would be, and it didn’t feel right to cry here.

It was all Jaina could do not to scream.

But Anduin kept his composure as well as he could. He raised a hand out of instinct, but still responded as calmly as he could, “SI:7 has reported to me that Sylvanas is…changed. Her eyes are blue now, not red. One of my operatives has reported the soulmark on her wrist glows again. I don’t mean to intrude but--”

“Who? Valeera?” Jaina asked, turning her anger to the elven rogue, who had all but promised to deliver the news to her first and to keep Jaina’s suspicions secret. Yet she’d seen neither hide nor hair of her since that night. She’d been worried about her, and this was how she was to be repaid for it?

“What? No,” Anduin said with a shake of his head. “As much as I’d like to count her among SI:7’s numbers, she’d gut me if I did, and has told me as much directly to my face. I have given her a separate task as of late, but I honestly have no idea where she is or what she’s doing right now. This comes from one of Shaw’s agents.”

All of the sudden it seemed so futile. Her anger felt both impotent and infantile. Word was bound to get out. Things were already well beyond her control. Like it or not, if Anduin knew, others knew.

And now she knew. Something really had happened. Something really had changed. And Sylvanas wanted desperately to talk to her about it.

After all these years. All this pain. All the confusion. There might be some end in sight. But Jaina wasn’t sure if she wanted it all the same.

Jaina sighed away the last bit of her anger. It did no one any good, least of all her. She looked away from Anduin, back down to the peace agreement he’d laid on her father’s desk. It was there she left her golden gauntlet as she stripped it off, and the thick leather glove on top of it. Her hand looked a small and delicate thing without its usual armor, but she flexed it all the same. Enough, at least, to enjoy the moment of freedom, and for Anduin to see the mark that blazed blue again on her skin.

“I have been waiting to confirm some things,” Jaina explained. “But, this began the night before last. I…don’t understand. I don’t pretend to understand any of it, Anduin. But--”

“You don’t have to explain yourself or your reasoning to me,” he told her, not letting her go on further about it. “The matter of what you do with what’s happened is your business and your business alone, Jaina. I’m not asking for it to be the business of the Alliance. I want you to know that before you say anything else.”

He was a good lad. A bit too empathetic, but Jaina loved him all the more for that. It was not a fitting trait for a king, but she found herself glad of it in that moment. Any other ruler would have tried to use her turmoil to some strategic advantage. But she knew she could trust Anduin to care, rather than to plot.

Still, she had to qualify that further, “I’d rather this stays between us, or at least as few people as possible for now.”

She saw him nod out of the corner of her eye. “It will, but I don’t think I can hold to that promise for long, especially if Syl--sorry--if she ah, is so open with the change.”

She didn’t realize Anduin knew her rule. Jaina expected it of her older compatriots, who had known her longer. But she supposed that it made sense. The boy king had grown up amongst those people, hiding behind their legs in meeting rooms and doing silly little impressions of them to make Jaina smile through said meetings.

“I suppose you can’t,” Jaina relented, finding that her eyes, as they had in her rare private moments these last few days, drifted back to the blue moon on the back of her hand.

“Especially not if we meet with the Horde tomorrow to discuss this agreement,” Anduin pointed out.

“Tomorrow?” Jaina asked.

Anduin nodded again. “Yes. The call to urgency seems to be well-understood among the Horde. I received a letter from the Warchief herself, as well as one from your friend Baine Bloodhoof, urging me to bring about negotiations speedily. Our spies too have noted strange movements of Horde troops, away from us, and toward odd places. They are preparing to fight something, just as we were warned of, but there’s yet to be any sign of a threat.”

“You drafted a ceasefire over the course of a night?” Jaina questioned, finally daring to look at the page below her again and willing the words beneath her gauntlet to make sense.

“I’ve had one drafted for months,” Anduin beamed. “Tyrande would be ready to skin me alive if she heard that, but you and I both know we can ill-afford this war. Justice and reparations are important, but making sure our people don’t starve and don’t face some greater threat alone are the most important things we can do for them now.”

As Jaina read, the agreement was indeed of a mostly generic flavor, with some mentions of more recent events and concerns filled in. She moved aside her gauntlet to read on, mentally taking note of some areas that were too lenient. Most of it was.

Again, while she loved him for it as a person, Anduin sometimes had too gentle a soul for a king. She wondered how he could still so easily forget and forgive, after everything. After what Garrosh had done to him. After watching him stand trial, and for there to be any debate at the horrors he had inflicted upon them both. After watching the chaos of the end of that farce, holding Jaina in his then scrawny arms, pleading as she choked on her own blood, shot by some nameless assassin, or simple accident. They never found out. She would never know.

It always ended like that. Every attempt to cooperate. Every time she seemed to be in the same room with Sylvanas. She would never even look at her. Those blazing red eyes would always be cast firmly toward the ground, the sky, anywhere but her. In the Undercity, as Jaina summoned all her strength to whisk Varian and his men away before they could renege on their promise. At the trial, when all Jaina wanted was some confirmation that Sylvanas didn’t cooperate and condone the tragedy she had allowed to befall her former soulmate and little sister. Even in the throne room of Lordaeron, echoing among the ghosts of the past that haunted both of them still, Sylvanas did not look at Jaina as she mocked the Alliance, and screeched like an animal, cornered and scared.

Jaina knew the feeling. She knew it well. She hated to be a part of it. Flying that ship to the rescue had been the right thing to do, but it had so nearly broken her. And for all of that, Sylvanas still couldn’t even look at her. And that time, Jaina didn’t even want to look at her either.

So how could it possibly be any different this time? Why would it be?

“Do you mind if I take some time to look this over and provide notes?” Jaina asked as the words started to blur together again.

Anduin grinned back at her, “I was hoping you would.”

Jaina found herself giving him a ghost of a smile in return. The stress of it all was too much, but he was still so infectious in his optimism. It reminded her of herself, honestly, in her younger years. Even after the Third War. Even after losing her lover and her father in the worst of ways. She had still hoped and hoped for better and brighter days.

Had she really stopped hoping? Had she really become jaded enough to believe that things couldn’t change? Or was it just easier to assume the worst?

Hope took work. Change took even more work. It was work Anduin was willing to put in. And Jaina felt guilty for not immediately wanting to do the same.

“I’m afraid I do have one more favor to ask of you, though,” Anduin continued. He was still smiling at her, but the weariness was back in his eyes. The worry. The storm to come.

“You want me at the meeting with the Horde,” Jaina concluded without needing him to ask.

Anduin sighed, nodding at this. “I should have known I was that transparent about it, but yes. I’d like to have you there to represent Kul Tiras as part of this treaty--I assure you for no other reason than that.”

“I am guessing the Horde will bring Zandalar to their table? And you wish to make a similar showing?” Jaina questioned.

“Yes. Princess Talanji will be negotiating on behalf of her father. It is important that we have our naval ally in--”

Jaina didn’t let him go on. She knew. She understood. There was no more to be said. There was no debate. Whatever reasons he would try to give were correct. For this to work, truly and completely work, Kul Tiras would have to represent the Alliance in peace, or if not, would be forced to do so at war.

“I will attend. I will support you, but know that I cannot speak for how effective I will be. These last few days have been, well, a lot. They have been a lot of things,” Jaina told him.

“I’m merely asking for your presence, nothing else,” Anduin assured her. “You don’t have to speak to her or do anything you’re uncomfortable with. I just need to show them that Kul Tiras stands with us. That is, if it does. If you do.”

“It does. I do,” Jaina said.

Despite the glow on the back of her hand. Despite the still roiling anxiety that wasn’t the same as her own. Despite Anduin’s optimism, Jaina had her doubts. She would never not have them. She’d seen too much, been through too much, and had always come out disappointed and broken down by a world that just didn’t seem to be capable of anything but violence. But, she knew that there would be no end to it without continuing to work toward what seemed like a futile goal. Perhaps, whatever had changed within Sylvanas would be enough to drive the world to change. Perhaps it would not.

But for now, it would save her from a war she did not have it in her to fight. It would save her from the end she both wanted and didn’t want for herself, and for Sylvanas. The end that she was so sure other attempts would lead to, yet they hadn’t. There had only ever been cold red eyes, staring at the ground, rather than to give away what lay beneath them. What was truly left of the woman she had once loved.

Though the last thing Jaina expected to interrupt her from her musings were two brawny arms, much larger now than the small ones that had held her in the Temple of the White Tiger, wrapping her in a fierce hug. Yet there they were.

“Thank you,” Anduin mumbled into the crown of her head. When had he gotten so tall, the little rat?

Jaina found herself returning the hug despite it all. She’d been on the receiving end of so many of these lately, but few had felt as genuine as Anduin’s. She could feel the tension in him still, the relief threatening to overtake it within the very muscles that held her close. He’d been afraid to ask this of her.

And she’d nearly proven him correct.

“No need to thank me,” Jaina told him. “We both know this is the right thing to do.”

“That still doesn’t make it easy,” Anduin replied.

“It never does.”

She stood in the warmth of his embrace a moment longer. An odd thought occurred to her then, intrusive and errant as any. She wondered what it might be like to hug someone cold, instead of warm. Someone who had no body heat to call their own, no heart beating faster for stress and worry, no heavy beats sighed out of the lungs. A body animated by cruelty’s will only, and kept so for a vengeance it had never been allowed to take.

And that was a bridge too far. A wandering over an edge Jaina could not allow herself to cross. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

She pulled away suddenly, perhaps too much so. “I will send a message in a few hours with my notes?”

“That would be great. Thank you again, Auntie,” Anduin said as he gracefully took that as a dismissal and pulled away himself.

Jaina looked about the expanse of the Lord Admiral’s quarters, all in all mostly just one sprawling room divided into sections with screens and hangings and pillars. It occurred to her then that this meeting had not met any of the standards of decorum it should have. Not that they mattered, to her or to Anduin, but as he’d said, there was something historic about him being here at all.

Yet what came out of her mouth was, “I should have made you coffee or tea or something. Sorry. I--”

“I don’t particularly care for elven coffee,” Anduin told her. “Too bitter. Though your mother couldn’t seem to stop talking about it at breakfast.”

She did, indeed, speak highly of the coffee and talk far too much about it for Jaina’s taste, and for her lie about where it came from to hold up.

“Kul Tiran tea is better, but still a bit on the strong side,” Anduin continued.

“You’re meant to drink it with milk,” Jaina noted.

Anduin made a very unkingly face at that suggestion. “I’d rather have fish for breakfast. No thank you.”

He made his way to the door with only a few more stops to say his goodbyes. Only a few.

And while Jaina wanted desperately for some time to think and process everything that had happened in these last few days, even in these last few hours, the silence that followed him was deafening. It blanketed the chamber like new-fallen snow, forcing a reverent quiet that Jaina was not quite prepared to face. For having to be alone with her thoughts for the first time in a while meant that she was, well, alone with her thoughts.

The evening before had been dominated by a private funeral held for Derek. It mostly consisted of her and Tandred standing back awkwardly with the honor guard as Katherine wept over a fresh grave. Jaina had asked her living brother if he even quite remembered the dead one. Tandred shook his head. He’d been only a toddler, after all. Too young and too much of a baby still to bear the weight of being not-Derek. No, that had only ever fallen on Jaina’s shoulders, and had been a cloud that hung over her last memories of this place before she left it for Lordaeron.

She and Tandred had a whiskey about it back at the Keep. Jaina went to bed exhausted, tipsy, and feeling as though she did not know her younger brother at all.

But thankfully, she had been exhausted enough to fall asleep quickly. And better yet, when she slept, she did not dream.

She’d woken early for a full gun salute for Derek before breakfast, and had let her mother lead the ceremony. Lord Admiral she might be, but she didn’t yet feel equipped to tell her sailors to fire for a man they likely didn’t remember. For who was Derek Proudmoore to anyone anymore? A lad who’d died at sea in a war people had tried to forget. No one remembered the boy whose smile lit up the docks with much greater regularity than the fickle Kul Tiran sun, save the mother that mourned him and the sister that couldn’t decide.

Jaina thought it might be better if he’d stayed with the Tides, forgotten.

But that, she decided, was enough of that train of thought. She’d promised Anduin notes. She was going to make them.

She found his agreement on the desk again, and with it her glove and gauntlet. She put these back on as she read over the document, not wanting to have some guard or butler see what she’d so readily revealed to the young king. Anduin, at least, she knew could keep a secret.

Despite best efforts to focus otherwise, Jaina’s eyes kept wandering to the blank desk calendar beneath the document. The emptiness of it stared back at her, demanding filling--demanding reconciliation with the busyness of her thoughts. Her head was full of worry, but her schedule didn’t reflect it. A guilt gnawed at Jaina from within, honed true by decades of overwork.

No, this would not do. She knew, at least, that she’d be busy tomorrow.

She grabbed a pen and scratched out a space on that date as “Ceasefire meeting”. She hadn’t even asked for the time or the location before agreeing to this. That was foolish of her, wasn’t it?

Jaina turned toward the door again, thinking of going after Anduin to ask for these details, or if he’d been gone too long that she’d be better off sending a runner. Only then did she catch the flash of bright red amongst the otherwise drab and dark colors of the very Kul Tiran room.

“Finally,” drawled a husky voice from the screened off portion of the room that acted as the bedchamber, where only Valeera’s crimson boots were visible, just hanging off the bed she must have otherwise been sprawled on. “I thought you were going to stare at that fucking desk all day.”

“Finally yourself,” Jaina said as she set the pen down and made her way across the room. “Where have you been?”

“Considering you sent me to a specific location to obtain a specific bit of information, I’d hope you would remember that,” Valeera noted as she sat up, coming into full view as Jaina both rounded the screens and she rose from the deep green quilt--an odd contrast to her red.

“Are you alright?”

It was Jaina’s first instinct to ask that question not because it had been longer than expected, or because she had reason to doubt Valeera’s skills, but because the elven rogue looked tired. Beyond tired. Exhausted, even was not the word for it, as familiar as Jaina was with the concept.

But there were bags under Valeera’s eyes that would cost her a pretty penny to ship back to Stormwind for their weight. Within them, beyond the fel green overglow, swirled a mess of thoughts that could rival Jaina’s own in their knotted glory. Her usually resplendent mane of golden hair was haphazardly shoved into its usual ponytail. Her makeup wasn’t quite right. The lipstick was too pale, bold mascara mostly gone, remaining only in bits of smudged grey beneath her lower lids.

“I look that much like shit, huh?” Valeera asked back.

Jaina didn’t know how to respond to that, but thankfully Valeera didn’t give her much time to think about it.

“Whatever. I assure you that Dazar’alor is lovely this time of year, Lord Admiral. You’re not the only one who’s been having a shitty week, you know. But if you’re wondering how shitty the Warchief’s has been, I might have some news,” Valeera offered.

“Have you been crying?” Jaina asked.

“That’s not the question I’m here to answer,” Valeera snapped back, her sharp elven features quickly deepening into a scowl.

“I suppose not,” Jaina relented. She felt her heels click back onto the floor, not even realizing she had leaned forward, or reached out a little toward her friend.

Valeera pulled the legs that had been dangling over the bed up, crossing them beneath her and looking smaller than ever. Without the boldness of her makeup, she looked younger too. Though Jaina guessed that in numbers, they were nearly of an age, that still made Valeera quite young for an elf.

“Shall I report to you then, Lord Admiral? What a treat, I don’t get to report to anyone much these days,” Valeera went on, still easily sliding into her usual snideness.

“Can I, as a friend and not the Lord Admiral, offer you something first? Tea, water? I have coffee too,” Jaina started, at least attempting to be a gracious host for this second off the books meeting of the morning.

“I hope you enjoyed that fucking coffee,” Valeera spat with a particular level of venom that Jaina didn’t quite understand.

“Wha--”

“Anyway,” Valeera went on, flicking a stray strand of blonde hair out of her eyes as if she didn’t just stare daggers through Jaina a moment before. “You didn’t tell me Sylvanas’ eyes were such a pretty bright blue in life.”

“They weren’t. They were grey,” Jaina corrected. She’d meant to tell Anduin before.

“Well, they’re fucking blue now,” Valeera told her. “Also I know you hate when people say her name around you and I try to respect where I can, but it’s going to come up. Sorry.”

“She’s not alive, though?” Jaina knew the answer to this question before she asked it. Somehow, she would know. Something had changed, but not enough.

“No. She still otherwise looks the same,” Valeera reported. “And is the same, undead and all. Doesn’t really breathe unless she speaks. Ashen skin. Spooky voice. All that shit. Her eyes are just blue and her wrist blazes with a matching blue moon to yours. But don’t ask me how or why. She wasn’t even telling her Rangers, from what I could hear. They were rather annoyed about that.”

“You were that close?” Jaina asked.

“I’m very good at what I do, Jaina,” Valeera assured her. “Plus, she has a very pretty ship there, anchored in that harbor. I wanted to take a tour and so generously gave myself one.”

“For two days,” Jaina pondered.

“I told you I had other business,” Valeera deferred with a wave of her hand. “Do you want to hear what else I’ve seen or not?”

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” Jaina said, finally relenting enough to sit on the edge of the bed next to her.

“She was injured,” Valeera went on. “As you said. One of her Rangers tended her, a foul-mouthed thing with a cute little bob cut. Shame I didn’t follow her instead.”

“You followed one of them?” Jaina asked. “For two days?”

“I hope you liked that fucking coffee, Jaina,” Valeera said with a wince. “This room even stinks of it. Ugh. I really fucking hope you liked it.”

Jaina tried her best to piece together how Valeera could have been connected to that bag of coffee. She herself was beginning to get sick of hearing about it now, but couldn’t puzzle it out. “And if I asked you as a friend, perhaps, to explain that to me?” she ventured.

“I’d rather die,” Valeera stated as a matter of fact. “Frankly, I’d rather go back to my apartment and pass out if you’re going to keep hounding me about how long it’s been.”

“I’ll stop, I promise,” Jaina said, resisting the urge to reach out and take Valeera’s hand.

No doubt the kind gesture would have fallen on deaf ears, long ears that sunk into a posture that told Jaina there was a lot more to that coffee comment than she’d ever know. Something had happened. Something not all together good, but not bad enough to warrant asking for help with--though Valeera’s sense of what she might need help with had never been the best.

Still, it was enough for Valeera to sink past her threat, groaning for a moment as she buried her head in her hands and carried on her report in slightly muffled tones, “She spoke to her Rangers of that coffin stunt I’ve already heard so much about, and one of her Val’kyr. You ever see one of those things up close? They’re insane-looking. But there was only the one. I don’t know where the rest were. But she genuinely wants this peace. Her people are as confused as we are.”

“What do you mean?”

It had been so much easier to believe it was all orchestrated. That this was just another plan after a plan, another ruse, another lie. Another attempt to smash the hopes of the Alliance, to grind down those that dared to fight in Azeroth’s name, rather than for some darker goal. Though Jaina, for all her conspiracies, could never truly come up with a motive for Sylvanas’ actions throughout her years of undeath, and certainly not lately.

It had been impossible, honestly, to understand what, if anything, motivated her beyond the death of Arthas.

“Nathanos Blightcaller seemed quite annoyed that his efforts to destabilize Kul Tiras were being put to an end,” Valeera explained between the gaps in her crimson-clad fingers. “Her other Rangers were confused as well, but far more helpful than him. But relieved. Definitely relieved. The Horde as a whole seems to be.”

“You of all people should know that our intelligence said that they did not have the resources to withstand this war for long--”

“--without the Zandalari. Yes, yes I know,” Valeera told her. “But the Zandalari will negotiate with them on this peace. They had to be convinced for war, but as bloodthirsty as Talanji is, Rastakhan is an old man, and thankfully he sees no need to bet at war.”

It was so easy to forget how whip smart and informed Valeera was. For all her flirtiness and posturing and youth, she probably knew as much, if not more, than the whole of SI:7 on the state of the world, from all its various sides and viewpoints. Jaina at times envied her and other times pitied her. Sometimes it was better not to know.

And sometimes it was worse.

“I don’t understand it,” was all Jaina could say.

“I don’t either,” Valeera said, lifting her head again to look at Jaina. “Not completely. No one seems to. But, you do realize that you have the best chance to do so out of anyone, right? Sylvanas wants very much to speak with you. I heard her say it herself, and give directions for correspondence to be sent to you directly.”

“I very much do not want to speak to her,” Jaina answered to that, though her curiosity alone was eating at the truth of that statement.

“Well,” Valeera said as she stood, walking toward the massive window that overlooked the harbor, her own green-tinted gaze lost toward the western horizon. “That’s your choice, I guess. Funny things, choices. Very funny things.”

“Are you sure you’re alright, Valeera?” Jaina had to ask again.

“I’ll be fine,” she answered, gaze still distant. “Just…admiring the view. I need to sleep, bathe, and drink something very strong. Maybe in that order. Maybe not. I don’t have anything else to tell you about what I saw that you don’t already know.”

“Do you want a room here at the keep? A portal to Stormwind?” Jaina offered.

“Nope. No, I’d like to make some more bad choices first,” Valeera replied. “I’ll see myself out. You know how to find me if you want me.”

“I don’t.”

“Exactly,” Valeera said, turning to Jaina with the ghost of her usual grin, lips a too natural pink instead of salacious red, and then promptly disappeared into thin air.

---

It was noon before Jaina managed to finish her notes for Anduin and fill out a small portion of her expected meetings and appointments on the calendar. She still hadn’t sat in the desk chair, opting instead to spread her mess on the dining set for the most part. It was closer to a hearth, she told herself. The day was proving chill and dreary--very typical for Boralus. She was just looking after her health by staying warm and dry by the fire.

An excuse that crumbled into dust as she set out into the rain that afternoon in a cloak not quite fit for this amount of rain, and with as few of her honor guard as she could manage. She’d talked them down to only two, large gruff men whose names she’d already forgotten and who smelled of fish and salt and whose dark beards and brawny frames reminded her too much of her father beneath their kettle helmets and weathered breastplates.

She’d only agreed to bring them to distract them from informing her mother of this errand. No, for once, Jaina wanted some semblance of being alone. She wanted some time to think for herself.

“You may stand watch at the gate to the cemetery,” she suggested as they approached the top of the hill.

The guard to her left grunted at this, clearly displeased by the suggestion.

“As a favor to your Lord Admiral,” Jaina reminded him. “Who would like to have some words in private with her deceased brother, hmm?”

The right guard grunted to this in a more affirmative tone, and this seemed to be enough to placate lefty.

Jaina was really going to have to try a little harder with names, wasn’t she?

Even so, she nodded to them as they took up a place at either side of the cemetery gates, following her orders without further grunting in either the complaint or compliant categories.

The Proudmoore’s private cemetery was not large. No good Kul Tiran great house’s was. The children of the Tides were meant to die at sea, not sick in bed or bedeviled by land wars in foreign kingdoms. Jaina had always wondered if she’d meet such a shameful fate. If her mother would tisk and shake her head, saying it wasn’t proper. It wasn’t good.

As if death ever could be.

Derek’s grave was still as fresh as it had been that morning. It was clustered between Daelin’s and distant uncle. No one any closer in blood. No, Jaina had shamed her father to lie here, and could only blame herself for the fact that her brother now did as well. But at least she had been kind enough to have Daelin’s body sent back.

They never listened to her. Derek too. She would always be their daughter and their little sister. Too young and too precious to know anything.

But she knew more than she’d ever wanted to.

Jaina made a point of avoiding Daelin’s grave, leaning over Derek’s only as she placed a bundle of flowers on it. They were rather sorry looking things. Some later summer daisies and lupines that were shabby when she bought them on the way out of the city, and had only drooped further for the walk. Jaina didn’t know if her brother had a favorite flower. She’d only been a little girl when he died, after all.

A little girl that was not him, and never would be him. Never would be enough to replace what had been lost.

There was so much she wanted to say, but no words came to her.

What good would they do anyway? Would she rail at him, scream out the frustrations of a girl long dead herself, replaced with a jaded woman of thirty-six years that never got what she wanted and couldn’t even accept a historic request for peace? Would she blame him for this? For her life? For her losses?

No. It wasn’t his fault. It never had been. He had just been gone and easy to blame.

“I lost my elder sister too,” Sylvanas had once told her, as she lay in her arms at the Spire, and said all these words she wanted to say and more against the warmth of her skin. “Alleria left me behind to pick up her mess--to take the honor that should have been hers, though we both knew she never wanted it. And at first, I hated her for it. I hated her with such burning, seething anger. But it took me years to recognize that for what it was. It was grief. Grief wearing an ugly mask.”

“All of you just--” Jaina finally spoke into the rain. “You just leave me. You promise so much, and then you leave.”

The words fell as listlessly as the rain--more like a mist with gravity. Just enough to make one wet and cold and uncomfortable, but not enough to instill fear at the power of some great storm.

It was all so pointless. The rain. Her words. Her sentiment.

She couldn’t stop them from leaving her. Father, Derek, Sylvanas. Fuck, include all of them, all of the disappointments and promises old and new--Arthas, Uther, Antonidas. Rhonin, Kinndy, Pained. She could list name after name, and maybe that was why she could never remember any new ones without practice. Her head was too full of the names of the dead, of those she had survived only to cry bitter tears in the rain and not be able to give a reason for them.

“You are alone,” a voice sounded across the empty hilltop.

Jaina turned to the source of it, rain whipping off of her hood and the exposed tail of her braid. She readied her magic, fingertips crusting with frost at the unfamiliar sound.

Only to be met by the form of a graveyard angel. A figure that would be out of place in a proper Kul Tiran graveyard, whom would have no meaning to a people that prayed to the Tides and not the Light. But where she should have been made of stone, this angel’s flesh shimmered a faint ethereal blue, made of both something and nothing. The white feathers of her wings caught the dim light of the afternoon, then shifted to black as they beat, then white again--unable to decide what color they truly were. Her face was covered by a strange winged helmet that matched scant pieces of armor that otherwise covered her.

A Val’kyr. Valeera was right. They were a sight up close. Jaina had only ever seen them as distant glows across a battlefield.

“I mean you no harm, Jaina Proudmoore,” the Val’kyr said, her voice strangely accented and booming. “You have either been surrounded by your allies or sleeping this past day. I was told to meet you only if I could do so discreetly.”

“What do you want?” Jaina asked of her. “I’d ask who sent you, but I know.”

“Indeed you do,” the strange creature agreed. “I am Signe. I serve Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, bound to her soul much as you are. And I come bearing a message for you.”

“I…I don’t want another message,” Jaina told her.

Signe extended an arm regardless. She was massive, so much so that her arm was nearly as wide as Jaina’s entire body. The letter she held in her hand looked comically small. “I have been tasked with delivering this and will not return until I see it done. I made many attempts to get your attention otherwise, but you have been distracted. Your allies never leave you alone.”

“They don’t, but I don’t want your message,” Jaina tried again.

Signe regarded her for a moment, though how Jaina could tell she was doing so was a mystery to her. The Val’kyr didn’t move except to flap her ever-changing wings and keep herself aloft.

“She never left you,” were not the words she expected to come from the creature’s mouth next.

“What?”

“Take the letter,” Signe requested again.

“How do you--”

“Take it.”

Jaina reached out. She took it. The back of her gloved hand brushed Signe’s fingers. The contact made her skull buzz. Like going through an unfamiliar portal. Like arcane overload threatening her after Theramore. Like waking from a nap, disoriented and groggier than when she’d fallen asleep. Like stepping between worlds, a peek into the void between.

She didn’t like it.

The wind stirred. The rain made a brief show of force, pattering against her cloak. Behind her, the flowers blew off of Derek’s grave and rolled onto Great Uncle Henry’s, but Jaina wouldn’t notice them.

“Good,” Signe offered. “My mistress wants a reply, but does not expect one. I must return to her.”

“What do you mean she never left me?” Jaina finally managed to ask.

“She is still here. She was not always, not truly. But she is now,” Signe offered before her wings beat hard, lifting her off into the rain before Jaina could ask again.

She was still too stunned to scream after her, for all she wanted to. All she could do was slip yet another blue envelope with her name written on it in perfectly constructed Thalassian characters into her pocket for the second day in a row.

Jaina would think about whether or not she’d read it on the walk back. First, she had to ask herself why she took it at all.

Chapter Text

When the wind bends the branch to softly touch me,
When the band plays your song,
I feel strong enough to keep dreaming,
Even when I'm all alone,
Our love goes on and on.

Sylvanas decided that there was no worse idea ever had than that of trying to host a luncheon across the span of two ships tethered to one another. And as painful as the creaking of rope and wood and canvas against one another was to her elven ears, the fact that Jaina was just a gangplank away from her, and had been this entire time, yet still would not look at her, was far worse.

Otherwise, the summit was going well. As well as could be imagined, really. Horde and Alliance alike were enjoying tea and finger sandwiches on a sunny day in the harbor of an offshore island deemed too far away from Dazar’alor to pose a threat. Both of them were digesting Sylvanas’ words with their food, her explanation of the threat that faced them all, and the price she feared the world would pay for the theft of her soul.

Her selfish dooming of Azeroth. Nothing unusual, really. Old news before it was even news.

Just as the situation was with Jaina. The only time she’d looked into her eyes in over a decade was across the throne room in Lordaeron—when Jaina had come to save the Alliance’s bid to take her city from her.

And succeeded.

She was powerful, a ball of stress that was honestly only more beautiful for it. She looked incredible in her Kul Tiran uniform, even today, sulking with a greatcoat draped over her shoulders, unbuttoned otherwise for the heat of the Zandalari sun.

Just because she wouldn’t look at Sylvanas didn’t mean Sylvanas couldn’t look at her.

And honestly, over the years, in the scant times that they’d shared space since, all she could ever do was look at her. To look at her, going on, changing, becoming something without her. In the absence of her.

Sylvanas wondered if the emptiness had gnawed at her? The lack of what once was? Their connection, bone deep, severed even as Sylvanas still walked this world. Maybe it was the years of having had time to process it properly, as Sylvanas didn’t, that had hardened Jaina to her. To this need.

It was a need. Like the living needed water and air and food and shelter. Sylvanas was dead, still, and needed none of these. But she needed Jaina. She needed her like withered elves needed mana. Like—

“Warchief, a moment of your time?”

Anduin Wrynn. A lad of annoying height that he’d only gained in the last few years, loomed over her in his ceremonial lion armor, a polite smile tugging at the corner of his beardless lips. Last she’d seen him wear that armor, it was when she’d run from him, defeated at Lordaeron, wondering after the apology that seemed to echo in Jaina’s eyes.

Still too broken to understand it, but questioning all the same.

“By all means, High King,” she said with a nod.

In all her life and thereafter, Sylvanas had never imagined she would be nodding to a king. A boy king besides that, but even so, she had thought she would remain nothing more than a General, still giving a full bow to Anestarian, hoping he’d hold on a few more centuries and spare her from doing the same to Kael’thas.

Anduin came to stand with her on the aft deck of the Banshee’s Wail, mounting the stairs with a plate of tiny sandwiches still in hand.

“I have to admit I was rather fascinated by your tales of the Shadowlands,” he told her. “And what you’d experienced there. I was hoping you might answer some questions for me, about the nature of death.”

He would be disappointed to know how little she knew. How little she cared to know. Sylvanas could tell him exactly what death was. Unfair. Broken. A thing that ground one down, bones to dust. Souls to anima. A transformation to smaller parts, in which, along the way, the whole was lost forever.

A thing that made the decay and disgust of decomposition seem kind.

But instead, she said to him, “You may ask what you wish. I will share what I know, but I would hardly call my knowledge of the Shadowlands encyclopedic.”

“You mentioned there being other realms of death, besides the place you called the Maw. I was wondering…”

Wonder away, she almost wanted to tell him. Sylvanas herself had only seen glimpses of them as the Jailer’s servants had escorted her through a tour of the unfairness of death—the great separation and unending that awaited all living things.

Beautiful Bastion, its angelic embrace a front for a great lie—consuming the souls of heroes to turn them into willing servants and ferriers of yet even more souls. Malevolent Maldraxxus, where the souls of the warlike could play at war for the rest eternity, never satisfied with an end to their violence. Repentant Revendreth, whose aesthetic honestly didn’t miss, but otherwise enslaved the souls of the evil to extract from them in exchange for the slim hope at a better fate.

There was no better fate. Not even in Ardenweald, among the eternal forest, caring for slumbering gods. The Jailer had taunted her, telling her this was where she’d been headed before Arthas had rent her soul in twain and damned her to undeath and her eventual bargain. But even in her kindest end, Sylvanas now knew she would have become nothing more than a nymph of the woods that did not remember herself.

Or Jaina.

Or Lirath. Or Mother and father. Their souls too, were already lost in this machine of death. One that still very much deserved to be broken.

But not at the costs she had already paid.

Sylvanas waited for him to seem to finish his question, though she did not truly listen to the rest of it. “I’m afraid I’ve seen little outside of the Maw.”

She lied through simplicity. Much as she wished Anduin to enjoy his little sandwiches and hear out her request for peace, she was not here for him.

She was here for the woman who wouldn’t so much as set foot on the Horde side of the ships, and had all the reasons in the world to stay where she was. The Alliance side was made up of one of her ships, actually. Her flagship was larger, but sat lower in the water overall to the point where such side by side anchorage was possible for them. Still, it made Sylvanas nervous. All canons and teeth.

Jaina had a right to every one of those guns.

“I just wondered if you might know where my father went. Where a man like him would go to his eternal rest?” Anduin asked.

The porcelain plate in his hands reflected sunlight dully up at her amidst an array of cucumber, mayonnaise, and white bread. King Wrynn could not look her in the eye as he asked.

Bastion? Perhaps. Varian was a hero, certainly, and Sylvanas remembered well the time they fought side by side, deck to deck on different ships in the sky and not at sea. The way it made her thick black blood seem to race again to fight beside a warrior of equal skill, despite their opposite factions. It was only recent, very recent to one with both an elf and an undead’s lengthy perception of time. She would not soon forget the feeling.

But Varian was headstrong. Willful in the way Alliance men seemed to excel at. A warrior through and through. Perhaps he fought in the endless battles of Maldraxxus.

But death was infinite and terrible. Its realms expanded on and on, like the twisting tower of Torghast. It was not for mortal comprehension. It was not meant to make sense, or to be fair.

“I’m afraid I don’t know,” was the most honest answer she could give him. “But, as you do, I would hope he rests peacefully, and remains as such. I cannot recommend the alternative.”

Anduin Wrynn had never heard her make a joke before. That occurred to her as he stared at her, one bushy blonde eyebrow cocked in disbelief.

Not many people from the other ship had heard her make a joke before, actually. Or even on her side of the gangplank.

Among the many disservices of her death and the loss of her whole soul was that the world had forgotten she was funny.

She used to be very funny.

“Right,” Anduin eventually said, catching the gape that his mouth was starting to form and closing his teeth with an audible click. “Perhaps I might draft up a letter with a list of questions, or put you in contact with a scholar to chronicle your knowledge.”

“No doubt many will be interested. I’ve already been approached by the Reliquary and my own Apothecaries since my announcement to the Horde,” Sylvanas informed him.

She had no doubt that she would be made to recount her singular experiences a hundred times over. If Azeroth survived to care about them, that is.

“But,” she continued. “My priorities at the moment are ensuring that we work together to protect the world of the living and my people alike from that which may threaten us.”

Diplomacy never felt right to her. Even as successful as she had been at it here and there. She was a creature of trails and trees, not of contracts and meetings.

Or graves and the ink darkness of night. Lingering fog and dripping horrors. Teeth gnashing at rotting flesh.

Reconciling the two was still too difficult to keep in the forefront of her mind. Both parts of her had known a life of duty and objectivity coming first. That, at least, Sylvanas could focus on.

Even as her eyes tracked the deep blue of Jaina’s greatcoat from across the deck.

“Right,” Anduin said again, nodding along and picking up a tiny sandwich in meaty hands that must have come from his father. “If you want to discuss anything in specific about the draft agreement I’ve put forth, before we bring it to the table here, let me know.”

It was good, for a draft. Sylvanas had nothing to bring up. She knew that the other leaders of the Horde would be happy to squabble about the particulars and pick it apart. She was only concerned with setting a limit on the time they could do so. Dread and anxiety were her constant companions, even as she didn’t settle her thoughts on her disparate existence. Time, she felt, was a borrowed luxury they did not have to throw around, though she could not say why exactly.

She hadn’t bothered to go into descriptions of the Jailer’s forces to great degrees. “The Scourge, but worse,” was approximately what she had told the Alliance to watch out for. But her vision had been clouded by the black feathers of Mawsworn. The dull gray metal of armored constructs. The sharp bone of skeletal horrors.

“It is a fine agreement for the time being,” Sylvanas told him. “One that I will work to ensure the Horde honors as we face this threat.”

“I will tell you there is some skepticism on my side that there is a threat at all,” Anduin said, still holding the sandwich. “Not from my part. You are quite obviously changed to my eyes, if you don’t mind me saying so. Something has happened to cause that, and I believe you there. But others aren’t so quick to trust.”

No, they would not be. Not Genn Greymane, his silvered fur bristled as he stalked the deck of Jaina’s ship, one of the many not to leave it. In fact, the only ones to cross the gangplank thus far were Anduin and Baine.

As Sylvanas’ eyes flitted briefly away from Jaina, they noted her sisters were nowhere to be found on the Alliance ship. Neither, it seemed, had the courage to face her, or represent their factions of stolen elves. Stolen names.

“I honestly hope that I’m wrong, Wyrnn,” she told him. “I hope that nothing happens. But I fear that we will feel the Jailer’s wrath and fear we will feel it soon. My promise remains regardless of whether that happens or not, though. Azeroth has spent too long at war, and I no longer wish to be the cause of it.”

“What changed your mind?”

Sylvanas was hardly prepared for the question.

A dead body, dripping salt water on her table in the cabin just below them, was the root of the answer. But Derek Proudmoore’s rotted corpse was mostly a symbol. A message to her from her. From beyond her.

You are better than this. You are better than a pawn in someone else’s game.

Sylvanas knew what she wanted, and knew then, as she stared down a decision she did not want to make, that it wasn’t that. She wished she made this long ago, honestly. At the peak of Icecrown Citadel. Over Vol’jin’s dying, fel-ridden body. Before the flames were launched at Teldrassil.

Early as she could go back, honestly, but it would never be enough.

Her hands were already stained with blood from the moment they’d become her own again. From the first flex of spectral fingers that was her will and hers alone, after her death. But before then, they’d been used to rip the faces off of elven children. To rend the land that had birthed her so deeply that it was still scarred to this day. Bodiless, monstrous, and broken beyond repair—she had been irredeemable from the very start of her unlife.

Even now, soul restored to wholeness, hands corporeal but still stained with that blood and so much more, there was no fixing it. There was no forgiveness. No justice. No redemption to be sought.

There never would be.

Sylvanas’ eyes still tracked the blue greatcoat across the deck of the Kul Tiran ship. No doubt it was hot, but Jaina kept herself beneath it as if it were a shield that protected her from the foulness of the very air.

Foul, perhaps, because of who it was shared with. Truly, all Sylvanas could get from her over their renewed bond since the ships both docked was a feeling of general annoyance bordering on aversion. It pulled at the bottom of her stomach and tightened her chest.

Only then, as he waited for an answer, did Anduin’s eyes follow hers and land on the real answer to his question.

How could she explain that to the boy king? That even in her undeath, her brokenness, her grief over her own life, she could not violate the bond that had once tied her to Jaina. She could not bring herself to attack her directly. The thought had repelled her, like one magnetic pole to another of the same charge. It was never an option.

And even Jaina, in all her disgust, had looked sorry at Lordaeron for being willing to do what she was not.

A memory stirred in Sylvanas’ mind, so vivid now with her newfound ability to connect to the fullness of its emotions. Once, she and Jaina had sat on the beach outside of Windrunner Spire, an outing prompted after their recounting of similar childhoods spent by the seashore. The beach outside the Spire was mostly rocky, and only had a small strip of smooth sand on which they’d laid out a little picnic.

It had been the day before they had to leave one another. Jaina laughed and teased and loved her. She smelled of mana wine and pomegranates and honey pastries. She leaned in for a kiss, on that perfect afternoon, and asked as she pulled away, “But where will we live?”

The question was a loaded one. No answer was correct. The first difficult to navigate strait in the sea of their union. Sylvanas wanted to answer that here at the Spire was good. But Jaina was an agent of the Kirin Tor, based in Dalaran. Sylvanas hated Dalaran, and was the Ranger General of Quel’thalas. But Jaina was also technically heir to the Kul Tiran admiralty, and would presumably need to return there or name her younger brother heir instead some day. Back then, her father still lived and was still young enough to the point it wasn’t the forethought on anyone’s mind, save maybe Sylvanas’ as she worried for them. And then there was the Alliance, based in Lordaeron and not Stormwind back then, that called to the loyalties of both of them.

Sylvanas had listed all of these in a panicked tirade of sorts, wanting to find the answer.

It was Jaina who had arrived at the real answer with a smile, “Don’t worry so much. We’ll figure it out.”

They never got to even try.

“I see,” Anduin started. “Well if—”

“You wretched beast!” A Thalassian screech came from just below them, causing both Anduin and Sylvanas to lean over the railing to see the source.

That happened to be Velonara shaking an offending pest off of her boot. The offending pest being a small pink dinosaur that was clinging onto the black leather, gnawing at the laces.

Nathanos ran over from where he’d been entertaining Gallywix and his goblins, prying the creature off with a desperate whisper of, “How did you get out?” before carrying it back into the aft cabin with a huff.

He was successful in that at least, despite the creature’s protesting squawk and sharp little teeth that no doubt left a few tiny holes in his gloves.

“Fascinating wildlife here in Zandalar,” Anduin noted as distraction was removed.

“Yes, fascinating,” Sylvanas agreed dryly.

She’d have a talk with Nathanos about smuggling his newest pets onto diplomatic missions later.

Thankfully, as Anduin seemed to be following her gaze across to the other ship again, another distraction was provided in the form of red hair and golden armor. Lady Liadrin stood on the last step up to the aft deck, seemingly waiting to be invited to join them.

Still a stickler for decorum, after all these years. Sylvanas hadn’t spoken to her since, save to grant orders. Once, she had considered her a friend.

They even went on a terrible date once, centuries ago. Absolutely awful. Liadrin had tried to order for her at the restaurant, and it had only gotten worse from there. And now here she was, waiting to be acknowledged. It must have physically pained the control freak that Sylvanas knew lay beneath all that armor.

“Matriarch,” Sylvanas said with a nod in her direction.

Liadrin still looked like shit. Like she’d been run over by a goblin trike and left in the streets of Orgrimmar to die for it. She did her best to hold it together and bowed gracefully and appropriately to Sylvanas and Anduin, but the signs were there. Something was wrong. Deeply wrong.

And Sylvanas was struggling with wanting to actually ask what that was, when she was owed no such answer.

“Warchief, High King,” Liadrin said as she rose.

Anduin was respectful in his own nod to her, offering a greeting, “Bal’a dash, Lady Liadrin.”

His pronunciation was not terrible, for all it was worth. And while Sylvanas expected Liadrin not to have any interest in his attempt, her golden eyes only settled on the young king. A question burned in them. A question she did not ask.

Her gaze instead flitted around the boy king, left, then right, then back to him. Searching for something.

There was nothing up here but Sylvanas, Anduin, and the ship’s wheel. Maybe it was some Light thing? That, at least, Sylvanas had never understood in any of her lives. Nor had she cared to. Especially now. Religion was not the realm of the dead.

“It’s no rush,” Liadrin began, finally, “but I was hoping I might borrow a moment of your time before we reconvene, King Wrynn.”

“Certainly. We have not spoken since the Legion’s invasion, and I treasure any opportunity to speak to a sister in the Light,” was Anduin’s very warm and seemingly genuine answer.

Only he didn’t get to continue on to the point of turning Sylvanas’ undead stomach with his religious drivel.

The afternoon sun flickered strangely out of the corner of her eye. Sylvanas banished the thought, just another vision of dread. Another fantasy of what could come for her, for all of them. The price she would pay for the faint blue glow of the moon she kept hidden on her wrist beneath her clawed gauntlets, matching that which would be similarly hidden by the golden gauntlet on Jaina’s casting hand.

The price she’d paid to be ignored and shunned yet again. Sylvanas was coming to the conclusion that she did indeed deserve it. Her best hope was this peace, and buying herself a few years of good behavior, of attempted redemption where there could truly be none, just to be heard. To be seen. To be looked at, even, with anything other than pity or silent apology.

But then the sun flickered again, this time catching the hard gold of Liadrin’s eyes enough to rouse them from the dark bags that sunk beneath them. Enough for Sylvanas to follow her gaze to the west.

“Mawsworn!” she shouted.

No one but her knew the meaning of the word, of the dark silhouettes that flocked toward them, shading out the sun with a mass of black feathers. They looked not too dissimilar from her Val’kyr, but larger. Fiercer. Intent. Whereas the Val’kyr waited on orders, inert but for the occasional flap of wings, Sylvanas had never seen a Mawsworn that didn’t have some terrible mission on their mind, always flying toward something.

And now they were flying toward her, and her peace summit.

Deathwhisper was in her hands in an instant. No Thas’dorah, certainly, but she could make it work. No doubt things would be better if she’d accepted the Jailer’s gifts, the chained arrows he’d promised in exchange for more and more dirty deeds.

Only now did she regret not taking him up on the offer.

“That’s what they look like? I don’t under—”

Anduin was cut off from his confusion by Liadrin drawing her sword and standing between him and the western sky.

“Arm yourself!” she ordered someone she had no business ordering, gruff voice grated even deeper by her apparent exhaustion.

That was enough to shake Anduin out of his questioning, though he muttered, “They look like angels,” as he drew his father’s famed sword.

They were not angels. Angels lived in Bastion and forgot themselves. Angels carried the dead into the machine to chop them up at the behest of yet even more masters. Nowhere could anyone be free, even in death.

Not, at least, if they didn’t fight.

Sylvanas knocked an arrow and looked to the combined forces of Horde and Alliance leadership on the decks below her, scrambling to her warning call. Satisfied that the Horde ship had a suitable amount of Dark Rangers with bows drawn as she had, even Nathanos, and plenty of Orcish axes and Tauren totems alike joining them, she cast a look over to the Alliance ship.

And to a blue coat beneath which hands were forming to host an icy spell. Jaina’s eyes glowed with arcane, visible even from this far away, as she stood between most of her own people and the new threat.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!” Sylvanas shouted over the water and wood. “Watch for their chains!”

And then they were upon them. So fast did their black wings carry them across Azeroth’s sky that it was seemingly unnatural. No time to think of where they could have come from or how or why. Well, the why Sylvanas was certain of, at least.

They’d come for her.

She fired the first shot, an arrow that ripped through the black feathers of the winged skeleton, slicing just the corner of its dark cloak. Wide and misaimed.

The product of fear. A deep fear that Sylvanas had not felt in years. A fear not for herself, but for those around her. For Anduin. Liadrin. Even traitorous Baine, who didn’t think she’d known of his dealings with the Alliance. And Jaina.

Of course, Jaina. But she shot second, and her ice lance hit true, striking a Mawsworn from the air and into the ocean with the force of it.

Truly, what an honor it was to be destined for such a powerful woman, who had only grown into that power and beauty over these last hard years. What a privilege, even if she wouldn’t deign to look at the broken creature that was Sylvanas Windrunner.

Sylvanas knocked another arrow. She fired. She hit deep into an eye socket this time, causing another Mawsworn to fall. She listened as Liadrin and Anduin whispered blessings under their breath, laying hands on one another to trade them.

She knocked a third arrow, but didn’t get a chance to fire before a chain shot out toward her.

Liadrin dutifully deflected this with her shield, offering Sylvanas cover to fire behind. The fear dissipated, and suddenly her dead heart was full of a feeling of ancient camaraderie. Of memories of Liadrin when she still wielded the mace of a priestess, and was no less fearsome in her white robes than she was in her golden and crimson armor. Of times when she’d done this before, standing between Sylvanas and an Amani troll. An Alliance footman. A shambling undead horror. A massive, horned demon.

This was just another enemy. Another in the unending chain of threats that Azeroth seemed to face. And as shaped by war as Sylvanas was like no one else, she had to remind herself that she was not the only one so molded. Maybe not to such a degree, but she wasn’t about to debate that with Liadrin.

She was grateful, she realized, as she fired over her shoulder with a little smirk on her face.

“Ready yourselves!” Sylvanas delivered one last final warning as she made a fifth shot over Liadrin’s red ponytail.

The decks became crowded with black feathers and magical chains. They were just as soon filled with broken bones and battered pieces of dull gray armor. While she didn’t like being caught off guard, the place to do so was certainly around the best and brightest that each faction had to offer, as it seemed none of them had a problem with this initial onslaught.

Nathanos had hopped up on the aft deck to join them, and flashed her a grin as he buried one of his axes into a screaming skull. Midship, Saurfang headbutted another skull with such force that it cracked loudly enough to draw her attention a moment later. She caught sight of Genn Greymane with a fibula in his wolven mouth. Maybe an ulna. The area around Jaina was just coated in ice, several Mawsworn either frozen within it or shattered by it.

They were many, but they were fragile. They were not meant to be here in the living world, and it seemed to be a weakness to them. Their bones were brittle, Sylvanas realized as she cleaved yet another skull near in two with a close range shot.

This was a battle that could be easily won.

Even Anduin was holding up next to her, green boy that he obviously was. He’d made a good run of it at Lordaeron, and had shown courage then, but his heart was not in it. That much was clear to Sylvanas. He didn’t have that streak of joy in the kill to him. She doubted he’d even enjoy a good hunt, and would weep instead for the animals.

But, he still cut clean through a ribcage. A leg. An arm. A haze of black feathers.

And somehow missed the chain that wrapped around him.

His grunt of surprise was what alerted her as he was lifted into the air. The Mawsworn that had tangled him made haste to fly up, up, and then off.

They weren’t here to fight. They were here to take. Zovaal didn’t care how many of his abominations he lost in the process. He only needed to rob Sylvanas of one of her allies, or her own freedom, to prove that his vengeance was not to be trifled with.

And she wasn’t about to let him win another battle. Never again.

She rolled out of the cloud of Mawsworn that had descended on the aft deck, up to the rail that stood between her and the sea. She took aim, willing the necromantic magic that bound her to unlife into her arrow until it swirled with darkness, hoping that would be enough. She fired at the chain that held Anduin aloft, slowly raising upward to bring him into the embrace of the Mawsworn that was carrying him off.

Her shot hit true, determined as she was that it would. It snapped the chain, but left the boy king falling rapidly toward the ocean.

Sylvanas didn’t hesitate. Much as she hated her banshee form, and the memories she still carried of those days where she watched its clawed hands move against her will to aid Arthas in destroying Silvermoon, she slipped into it without lingering on those thoughts. There was no time for it.

She shot forward at speed that almost matched that of unnatural Mawsworn, managing to catch him just before he hit the waves. He would have hit them hard, covered in that ridiculous plate, and sunk below them immediately. There was no other choice.

Even though he shied away from her and the scream that echoed from her spectral mouth unbidden as it must when she was this way.

Sylvanas wanted to warn him to cover his ears, but she couldn’t speak when she was like this. She could only scream.

No wonder Jaina wouldn’t look at her. She was still dead. Broken. Monstrous. A war criminal on her best day. An abomination no different than those that attacked them at her worst.

As she soared back upward to the aft deck with him in her arms, Sylvanas couldn’t help but notice the blue glow on the wrist that curled around Anduin. Even temporarily banishing her physical body, and the mark that contained that fire, she was not without it.

But she didn’t have time to contemplate that either. She surged upward with one last blast of a scream, reminding herself to beg forgiveness from Anduin later, and summoned her corporeal form once she had him dumped safely onto the deck once more.

A little bit unceremoniously, perhaps. A little rougher than necessary, surely.

For the Undercity, Sylvanas thought to herself as she took up Deathwhisper again, and went back to filling Mawsworn with arrows. For the Undercity indeed, she stood over Anduin as he got to his feet and got ready to continue the fight. She made sure to turn around at her earliest opportunity, and shoot down the one that was coming back from the sea, having realized its prize had been stolen from it.

As easily as they fell, their numbers were so great. So much so that Sylvanas lost count of how many she’d downed quickly. She was also busy keeping her eyes on the sky to ensure that no one else was being taken, but it seemed only Anduin had been caught unaware by the chains thus far. She’d dodged more than a few of her own, grabbing him by his tabard to drag him with her up to the railing overlooking the lower deck. Large as he was, she was stronger. Yet another point for undeath today.

What she saw there was nothing short of disappointing. Most of the Mawsworn were clustered on the aft deck of her ship, and between her, Anduin, Liadrin, and Nathanos, had mostly been dispatched. The Horde below had dealt with nearly all that assailed them already.

But the Alliance ship didn’t fare as well. Only Jaina seemed to be a deadly force enough to leave her icy corner of the Kul Tiran flagship fully clear. Otherwise, it was still a haze of black feathers and battle cries.

“Horde, what are you doing?” Sylvanas questioned of idle axes and swords, arcane and Light alike. “Protect our allies! We must work together!”

With one last quick check to make sure that Nathanos and Liadrin had a handle on the remaining Mawsworn on the aft deck, Sylvanas turned to Anduin and told him, “I’m afraid your little papers must wait. Allow me to prove the truth of my words. Fight with me.”

“I didn’t doubt you in the first place!” Anduin protested as she led the way across the gangplank to the deck of the Kul Tiran ship.

The Kul Tiran ship, where it seemed the Mawsworn had realized who was to be feared there. Who was to be prioritized. Or perhaps, who the Jailer had sent to target.

Whose capture and subsequent torture in the bowels of hell itself would hurt Sylvanas most.

The remainder of them were closing in on Jaina, chains lashing out only to meet wave after wave of ice, shattering them each time. Impressive as it was, Sylvanas knew she couldn’t keep it up forever. Mana was a thing in limited quantities, even for one of Azeroth’s most powerful mages.

Certainly its most beautiful, eyes aglow with magic, greatcoat forgotten and frozen to the deck beside her, white braid whipping in the wind.

As much as Sylvanas enjoyed looking at her soulmate in her battle fury, she was here to help her, wanted or not. She took aim and fired at a Mawsworn that was getting too close, and nodded to Anduin as he ran to assist the woman he apparently would refer to as his aunt, despite their lack of blood relation.

Bones clattered to the polished wood of the deck, darker and slicker than that of her own ship. Ice smashed and shattered into crystalline explosions that tingled Sylvanas’ sensitive elven ears. A dwarf threw a thunder-laden hammer that whizzed past her. Genn was snarling off to her left, but at the Mawsworn he was biting at and not her. And finally, the Horde followed. Saurfang crashed into a skeletal figure that was flanking her right. A spectral dinosaur came across the gangplank, summoned by the muttered words of Talanji to assist. A goblin rocket was aimed with surprising care and managed to hit only a pack of Mawsworn that were cutting off the aft deck of the Alliance ship from the rest of the fight.

In her efforts to get to Jaina and help, Sylvanas hadn’t realized how close they were. Suddenly, it seemed, they were nearly back to back—Sylvanas facing west to keep an eye on the sky, and Jaina facing east to blast the last big group of Mawsworn with a cone of ice wind, freezing them in place for the coming rush of melee fighters to smash to bits.

Only when she heard the panting breaths of Jaina thrumming against her ears, did she realize this was the closest she’d been to her in over a decade. The last time she’d heard her this winded, this close, it had been for much better reasons. Much more pleasant, at least.

Sylvanas turned to the east to see if there were anymore enemies, but was only met with blue eyes.

Blue eyes, looking at her for the second time in all these years. This time not begging for an apology Jaina would not give. Could not give.

This time, they were regarding her as if she’d never seen her before. Curiously. Cautiously.

Almost like the first time Sylvanas ever saw them, when Jaina came through the portal with Vereesa in tow, chattering to her about how excited she was to have potentially found her sister’s soulmate for her.

How beautiful she’d been then too. Young, but knowing. Her hair shining gold to match the leaves of the forests of Quel’thalas. She’d been a vision in the purple and white livery of the Kirin Tor. With her curious blue eyes, and the smile she’d given her after that first cautious look.

Sylvanas hadn’t been what she expected. Jaina hadn’t been what she’d expected either. But somehow, they’d been perfect for each other.

But this time—thirteen years and countless tragedies later, Jaina did not smile. She turned away, searching for Anduin before asking him, “Anduin, are you all right?”

He wasn’t in the best shape. Sylvanas could see blood dripping from one of his ears, likely the fault of her banshee wail. The foul magic of the chains that had wrapped him had left a nasty red mark in their pattern across his cheek. He was far more winded than Jaina, even, but was able to give her a nod.

Still, she checked him over, pushed at his breastplate to stand him up straight so she could confirm he was otherwise unhurt.

“Sylvanas saved me,” he blurted out when he managed to catch his breath.

“I saw,” Jaina told him, speaking under her breath, but not quiet enough to avoid being heard by an elf.

Sylvanas watched as she flexed her casting hand, and the other one briefly came to touch it, shaking. She turned and looked at Sylvanas again, still seeming to be undecided.

But across their bond, weak as it was, Sylvanas felt a tug. A pull. Magnetic in the opposite way she’d been thinking of before. A draw that demanded they be together. The very laws of physics itself would not allow for anything else.

The deck was soon awash with activity that swept Jaina from her vision before they could connect. Leaders gathering, now all on the Kul Tiran ship for the first time—examining remains of their enemies, wondering at the suddenness of the attack, the strange chains, the purpose of it all. Some mutters, too, of how convenient it was that this had come just after Sylvanas had warned them. Of how it could be another one of her tricks.

Again, she’d not given them reason to suspect otherwise. It would not take one battle, one rescue of an enemy leader, to prove her intentions.

Sylvanas knew this would take years, if she was lucky. Restoring even the smallest amount of trust in her among the rest of Azeroth would be a near impossible feat. But, at least they would all understand what to watch out for now, if nothing else.

She was about to look for Nathanos or one of her Rangers to ask for a report from them when a hand reached for her upper arm. A gap between her pauldrons and gauntlets that all Ranger armor had, to allow for the movement of one’s arms. A gap one would only reach for if one was familiar with it, and looking to make contact with skin.

A gap where Jaina Proudmoore’s hand started a feedback loop that Sylvanas hadn’t felt in thirteen years. Even through the cloth of her glove, Sylvanas could feel her feeling her feeling her feeling her. The coldness of her skin. The curiosity. The hesitation. But still, she was touching her. Trying to get her attention in only the way she could.

Sylvanas turned to face her, wordless, only feeling. Only feeling her and Jaina’s sensations of one another mingle and merge until they were indistinguishable. Was that her shock or Jaina’s? Was the cloth on her skin or Jaina’s? Was she surprised at herself and how she reacted, how much this took the wind out of her sails, or was that Jaina’s Kul Tiran expression leaking through her thoughts.

It was too much and not enough at once. Sylvanas wanted to run. She wanted to pull away. She wanted to pull Jaina to her, cover her skin with hers, regardless of how cold and dead it might be, and lose herself in this heady feeling. She wanted the true completeness of her soul that was only found in her arms. She wanted to rewind time itself, and forget all these sins that had kept them apart, had kept her desperate enough to commit them in the name of the hope of this.

“Tomorrow, Theramore,” Jaina whispered to her, hand still on her skin. “I will meet you. We can talk. I…”

Sylvanas’ eyes traced down from Jaina’s own blue eyes to her lips. Lips she could still remember kissing. Lips that she remembered setting alight the mark on her wrist with the sweetest kiss anyone could ever receive.

The kiss that marked a life that would no longer have to be lived alone. That meant she would have a partner, forever. For as long as this chaotic world of theirs would let them both live, at least.

And perhaps beyond that.

She watched as those lips mouthed a word, seemingly running out of breath and will to speak it.

A world Sylvanas had taught her.

“Rea’anath,” she’d said once, cradled in Sylvanas’ arms in her bedroom at the Spire.

“Bonded soul,” Sylvanas had translated for her. “In case you hear anyone call you that in reference to me.”

“Should I call you that?” Jaina had asked.

“You can if you’d like,” Sylvanas had told her before leaning in to kiss the word out of her mouth before she could say it again.

But now, on the deck of her ship, surrounded by shattered bones and ice, Sylvanas could only stare after her as Jaina’s hand left her arm, and she ran to catch Anduin again as he surveyed the damage. She could only chase after the echo of their looped feelings. Of a touch she didn’t deserve and wasn’t ready for, even if it was what she’d wanted most, killed and died again and again to get back. Of a word she was so certain she’d never hear her say again, not fully voiced, but still attempted.

A bond renewed. A flame fed to roaring. A longing that consumed her as emptiness once had.

Chapter Text

Do you know the ache, how the bitterness tastes to me?
It makes my heart run cold
But when I hear your name I get lost in the memory
Of the kingdom that we built before

Vereesa Windrunner, unlike her sisters, was petite and always put-together, lacking that air of wildness about her. But, that certainly didn’t mean she had any less of a temper.

Her shrill query of, “You agreed to what?” could be heard throughout the vaunted halls of Proudmoore Keep, and certainly so in the Lord Admiral’s chambers.

“Vereesa, please,” Jaina offered, all the more tired of being the continued voice of reason. “You haven’t let me finish explaining.”

“And you haven’t listened to anything I’ve told you about her,” Vereesa went on.

She paced before the great hearth, having abandoned the seat besides Jaina’s and in front of a roaring fire that sought to stave off the chill of yet another dreary day in Boralus. The rocks glass and the two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey within it lay untouched on the armrest of the empty leather armchair, not having been allowed to serve its purpose of tempering this conversation.

Vereesa herself was still clad in the regalia of the Ranger General, though not of Silvermoon or any place at all. Her Silver Covenant were homeless in that regard, so small in number, so scattered in a world where their people had suddenly split into three peoples within a matter of a decade. A blink of an eye for an elf.

Jaina had given little thought to how jarring that might be. Until now, at least.

And it was even more jarring to consider a fourth people among those that were once High Elves--the undead ones.

“That corpse is not my sister,” Vereesa went on in emphasis of this. “I’ve told you myself what I saw when Alleria and I attempted to reunite with her. And now you want to meet her alone?”

Jaina had not intended to share this fact, but it seemed wrong not to. She had assumed that Vereesa came calling to discuss the nature of this new ceasefire, and had been informed as to much of the goings on regarding it. But now, seeing her tread a trench into the floorboards, Jaina wasn’t sure her worry came from ignorance or a greater wisdom.

The third Windrunner sister to be called any sort of General had been on a mission to scout deep in the interior of Zandalar, in a desert region known as Vol’dun. She’d only arrived back in Boralus that morning, and apparently had been quite confused at her troops being recalled from enemy territory due to a ceasefire agreement.

And to say she was incensed about Jaina’s plan to meet with Sylvanas that evening was an understatement.

“Things have changed,” was all Jaina could offer to that.

Because she still wasn’t sure what had changed. Mechanically, yes, Sylvanas had the whole of her soul back and it had changed her dramatically. She’d stolen herself back from death, and in doing so had brought an army of winged skeletons upon the newly combined forces of the Horde and Alliance. She had warned them. She had explained for the whole of the Alliance to hear.

But it still didn’t quite register. Even as Jaina watched those newly blue eyes track her across the deck of the joined ships, before, during, and after the battle against the things she had named Mawsworn. Even as Jaina reached out to her, touching skin that was as cold as she’d thought it to be, and reeling from the feedback loop caused by their renewed soulmate bond, she didn’t understand it all.

It had been easier to say to herself that Sylvanas was dead. Her soulmate was gone. The woman who walked the world in her place was indeed a cruel apparition, a taunting symbol of failure, a banshee wailing for a loss she could no longer comprehend.

The reality, it seemed, was far more complicated. And Jaina felt she deserved a chance to know it. That was why she agreed to speak to her, to attempt this understanding.

Or at least that was how she rationalized it to herself.

Explaining that to the short, burning fuse that was Sylvanas’ younger sister, however, was another matter.

At least it wasn’t the older one.

“And you believe her? You believe what she of all people is telling you?” Vereesa accosted, still making laps around the fireplace.

Now that was a tougher question to answer. The glowing mark on Jaina’s hand told her the obvious, and should have made it as simple as that. But it wasn’t. It never would be.

“You have to understand--” Jaina started, though she didn’t herself.

“She was going to have Alleria and I killed!” Vereesa reminded her.

Jaina knew her version of the story well enough. Her old friend had come to her the night before Teldrassil had burned with a tearful confession. A tale of three sisters, none of whom seemed to be able to see eye to eye, meeting with a common goal to rid their ancestral home of the undead. Or, well, the undead not in control of their actions, as it were.

Vereesa had only wanted some measure of peace, some closure from this meeting. What she got instead was a view of the true faces of her elder sisters, or so she claimed, and a fear of both of them. With tears staining the silvery memorial mark of her own great loss so plain on her face, she had told Jaina she felt both were lost to her.

The accusations of attempted murder had come from a sighting of Dark Rangers, bows drawing and waiting, and Sylvanas’ hand signal to call them off of those shots.

Jaina wasn’t about to make excuses for that. No, Sylvanas would have to explain herself, to her sisters, her soulmate, and anyone else who might care to listen.

Her silence was perhaps what finally made Vereesa stop pacing. She looked up from her feet beneath a curtain of silvery hair to find Jaina starting back at her, and stopped dead in her tracks.

“I’m worried for you, you know,” Vereesa said, hands coming to rest behind her back, shoulders straight as she collected herself. Still every bit as militant as her sisters despite it all. “With what I’ve heard--I can’t imagine how you must feel. If Rhonin were to…”

Ah yes, the great river between them that was Rhonin. Rhonin, who was instrumental in all of this, really. Rhonin, who had worked with Jaina in Dalaran when she was still an apprentice. Rhonin, who managed to finally introduce Jaina to his mysterious elven wife and soulmate, who was usually too busy or too distant to make it to social gatherings in the city of mages. Rhonin, who grinned along with Vereesa as she shook Jaina’s casting hand, turned it over, still held in her own, and remarked that she’d seen that mark before, or at least one strikingly similar, and that she knew someone Jaina just had to meet as soon as she possibly could.

Rhonin, who had died with one last spell on his lips, protecting Jaina with that final incantation. Rhonin, whose ghost was a silvery mark on Vereesa’s cheek for her tears to well in, a constant reminder of loss. Rhonin, who would never stalk the world as an undead abomination for thirteen years, only to come back fully to himself out of the blue and blaze that mark alight again with wild accusations about the cruel nature of death, and paranoia about some cosmic Jailer that were apparently all proving true.

Jaina watched the words fall from Vereesa’s lips, unspoken. Her understanding too, came in silence. If somehow, someway, the same had happened with Rhonin, she would go. She would meet him. She would ask her questions. Even if he had done it all. Even if he had burned Teldrassil, and had his Rangers’ bows trained at his own family. She would go.

Jaina lifted her own rocks glass, draining the remainder of the contents. Two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey weren’t going to help her, or help this, but they certainly couldn’t hurt it.

“I’m worried about me too, Vereesa,” she started, setting her glass down and reaching for Vereesa’s to hold it out to her in one of many of this week’s peace offerings. “But I have to go to her. I have to know. Now please, sit down and talk to me about it.”

---

Jaina wondered at whose bright idea it was to build a city on what was essentially a graveyard of a battle where it seemed no one really won.

But, it had been hers. All of it. The city, the battle, the losses. The look in her father’s eyes as she sat idly by, betraying him with inaction. The panic in Rhonin’s as he shoved her through the portal, away from the destruction that would mark the end of the brief existence of the city she’d named Theramore.

And now it was nothing but a ruin, so poisoned with an excess of arcane that even she couldn’t venture far into its remains. Instead, Jaina waited on a rise overlooking the destruction of her own ambitions. She waited to be destroyed again, perhaps.

Those early days in Kalimdor were like fever dream to her still. Bright and hazy and punctuated with the roiling current of emotions she kept at bay with work and duty. After all, one couldn’t get lost in mourning one’s soulmate if one was too busy trying to keep the survivors of multiple ruined nations fed and sheltered in a strange land, right?

As awful as it was, that would have been easier. The finality of knowing that Sylvanas was gone and there was nothing she could do about it was easier to accept. People died. Wars ruined everything. It was simply a fact of life in Azeroth, one Jaina had already known well in her parent’s mourning of Derek.

But she remembered too, and vividly so, the day she found out that her situation wasn’t so clear cut or perhaps so final.

Jaina looked across the debris at the remains of her tower, once a place bustling with people she’d never see again, and memories so evocative they clung to the very stones, crumbled and toppled though they were.

The news had come in a missive from Stormwind, a report of Alliance forces who had held out in Lordaeron, attempting to reclaim the capital of the infested nation from the undead. It was a letter meant to inform of military failure, nothing more. It seemed that Grand Marshall Garithos was poised to retake the city from the demons and undead who controlled it, but had been betrayed by the free undead he allied with at the last moments. Leading them, along with the effort to betray Garithos? Sylvanas Windrunner, of course--now a banshee, but apparently still as cunning as she had been in life, and very much opposed to giving control of the city back to the living.

Jaina could remember the moment she read that name. She could remember the polished wood of her desk, the warmth of the fire crackling in her hearth and the smell of its smoke. Wet wood from the marshlands always gave off much in the way of smoke. She could remember hearing Pained shuffle outside the door to her chambers, booted feet on stone. She could remember the tears that welled in her eyes, the confusion at which she looked through them to her hand, and saw the mark on it was still silver. But the name was there.

Sylvanas Windrunner still existed, in some part, but not any that was meant to love her. And this, Jaina knew even then, was far worse than her just being gone.

She’d searched for every scrap of news from Lordaeron thereafter. Anything she could hear or find or send someone to know on her behalf. From the rumors of sailors--though no Kul Tirans would dock at her port--or the tall tales of neutral goblin merchants; all were equal in value to her, as the truth came in so few trickles those days.

But that truth rang the same every time. Sylvanas Windrunner was out there, undead and angry, rightfully so, but in the wrong way. She fought to keep the living out of Lordaeron. She would eventually come to ally with the Horde. She would be central to bringing the newly dubbed Blood Elves in with her and her Forsaken undead.

And Jaina was always left to wonder what might have happened if, instead of hanging on to scraps of news from others, she had reached out herself.

Though Sylvanas hadn’t reached out for her either.

Their separation across the continents was quite symbolic, really. They would not meet again until the Undercity was attacked. Even then, it was a pained look across the room, one that Sylvanas refused to acknowledge. From then on, Jaina would do the same for her.

That had told Jaina what she already knew. Her love was dead. Their bond was a thing of the past. There was nothing there to be saved, no threads to sew together again.

It seemed as though everything of hers was doomed to end in such bitter emptiness. No, that wasn’t the right word. Just as it was with Theramore here, silent save for the hum of excess arcane and the distant crash of waves, as no birds could brave the damaging magic of the area--Jaina was always left staring out over a ruin of her failures, and they would not look back.

No wonder she didn’t know what to do now that blue eyes stared back at her with a longing she had long since banished in herself.

The sun was setting behind the mountains that separated the wetlands of Dustwallow marsh from the high plains of the Barrens. It painted the waters of the swamp and sea alike a glowing orange--a strange contrast to the pulsing purple of arcane that still clouded the ruins. Jaina herself had taken part in the calculations, along with her fellow members of the Kirin Tor at the time, and she knew exactly how long it would be this way. Centuries was the answer. Far longer than the brief existence of her sanctuary city. This refuge of refugees would be a glowing, dangerous ruin long after any that remembered it as anything else were gone.

A hole in her heart. Another scar upon a world already scarred so deeply, so violently, so quickly.

The Dark Portal had opened when Jaina was three years old. She was busy chasing seagulls on the docks of Boralus then, and had no concept of the changes it would bring to her life. She had no idea how it would bring cities to topple, or dragonfire to rend rifts in the very land, or a giant sword to pierce its heart. She had no idea then, a little blur of blonde hair and energy, that she would never know a life of peace because of it.

And even now that another tentative peace was on the table, and a scar waiting to potentially be healed, she was too wary to trust either.

“You were just another ruin for me,” Jaina said to nothing and no one, for that was all that was left of Theramore.

And the person she’d truly meant the words for hadn’t arrived yet.

Once, in her tower here, Kinndy had touched her mark, sliding tiny fingers over the silvery skin. Gnomes were like elves, and honestly most of Azeroth’s longer-lived races, in their deep respect for the binding of soulmates. Kinndy was young, her own mark still dull and untested--neither bereft of her chance to meet the one she was meant to love, nor yet ready to.

Still she had understood.

“You don’t have to act like nothing’s wrong all the time, you know?” she’d told Jaina that evening, alone with her in the tower.

What had spurred the comment was anyone’s guess. Jaina couldn’t remember the context. Maybe she’d looked especially tired that day. Maybe she’d let herself doze into the spell tome they were going over together. Maybe she’d let the distance she felt from herself catch up to her eyes.

“What do you mean?” had been her question.

Kinndy had patted the silver skin of her hand, the dull shine of the moon. “You have to be sad. I mean, I know you are. It’s okay to be sad sometimes, especially when you have reason to be.”

Reason after reason after reason would pile onto Jaina. She attracted them like a magnet did iron. Like honey for flies. And now the bright spark of a girl and her pink pigtails and goofy little smile were another thing for Jaina to mourn. Another memory she felt could never be given the justice it deserved.

Tears, even, that Jaina could not shed. For if she cried for Kinndy, then it was wrong she didn’t cry for Pained. For Rhonin. For papa. For the soldiers that had looked to her as their hero, their savior. For the kind vendor that always tossed an apple at her from his cart, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when she tried to pay for it.

Tears she couldn’t even reserve for Theramore, lest they should belong to the people who died in the effort to stop Archimonde in the battle to save this very continent. Even before that, for those who died in the wake of Arthas and his arrogance. Years after that, for those who died with Horde axes in their backs and blood red banners shoved into their skulls. For the Sunreavers she’d slaughtered in her rage at the Purge of Dalaran. For those people on both sides she’d failed during her inaction at the Legion’s invasion, still so deep in that anger that it drove her, for once, to simply do nothing.

What she’d told Kinndy that day had remained true, even after all this time.

“I am sad,” Jaina had said once. “But just because I’m not crying about it doesn’t mean I’m not sad. Life has to go on, even when we lose people in it. It’s our duty to them to carry on. So yes, I’m still very sad, I suppose. But I carry on.”

Jaina Proudmoore always carried on, even as the world crumbled around her, bit by bit. It was the only thing she had left to do.

Her resolve to continue that settled in, only to be shaken by the sound of distant wingbeats, heavy and solitary.

The whiskey she’d downed in her efforts to temper Vereesa did nothing to prepare her for the arrival of her older sister. Sylvanas was a distant speck in the sky, seated atop a giant bat, flying in from the north, from Orgrimmar.

How dramatic. She couldn’t have just had someone portal her in, like a civilized person, could she?

Though Jaina supposed she might have wanted her own time to think, as such a flight might afford. Orgrimmar was not that far to the north, and the bat was fast in its approach. A small measure of time alone was likely as much a luxury for Sylvanas as it was for Jaina. She could not begrudge her for wanting it.

But yes, the bat was very dramatic. Even as the creature landed--sending swirls of dust into the air with one last lazy flap of wings that seemed both too heavy and too small to keep such a creature aloft--there was no lack of drama about it.

Not even in the way that Sylvanas hopped from its back, landing on the ground with graceful ease, then took one step forward, and stopped.

She was about a hundred feet off toward the north, away from the edge of the cliff. Close enough where Jaina could still meet the searching blue of her eyes. The face that was both different and too similar to how it had been in life, now that it wasn’t set in an angry scowl.

No, she looked on in question. She was asking permission, but lacking for the words.

Sylvanas didn’t know what to say to her.

“You might as well come here,” was what Jaina told her for her silence.

In life and in death, there was no doubting Sylvanas was an incredibly beautiful woman. Jaina had not spared her a glance in these thirteen years and the handful of times within them that they’d been in the same room. Her once-lover was a fleeting shadow on the edge of her vision, a ghost in eyes purposely darted away from an abomination that should not be. But now, looking upon her again, really looking, for the second time in as many days, there was no denying she was still beautiful. A beautiful woman from a beautiful family born of a beautiful people.

Not the same way that her sisters were, though. Not rugged and honed as Alleria was, like savage power of the tooth and fang of a great beast. Not petite, organized, and spritely as Vereesa was, her pixie nose up-turned further even in her anger that afternoon, a child’s toy marching in her pacing. No, Sylvanas was in-between them, just as she had been in birth. Neither feral nor fae, yet a little of both. Tall for an elf, but just a hair shorter than Jaina, though she’d say they were of a height if asked. Or she did, back when she laughed and joked with her Rangers.

Back when that skin was golden, dotted with errant freckles from the eternal summer sun of Quel’thalas. Now it was ashen, almost purple in hue. And cold. She had been so cold when Jaina touched her.

But she was still beautiful. In a different way, perhaps. Militant in her march toward Jaina, in her purple armor and its silver skulls. In the wine color of her cape, floating behind her in the wind and the dust that still hadn’t settled from her landing. In the creaking leather of the rest of her kit, clean and shining, no longer splattered with gore and broken feathers from battle.

Such a formal gait could mean only one thing. Jaina felt it loop back from Sylvanas in an anxious, chest-deep confirmation.

She was nervous.

Nervous as she had been the first time Jaina met her. Before she could feel the echo of her tension. She’d read it on her face then. The subtle twitch of long ears. The straining of a striking jawline.

Jaina too, had been nervous, but the feeling had washed away when she’d seen how beautiful the elf who shared her soul mark was. How lucky she was to have her.

And now, ruin for ruin, white hair and bags beneath her eyes, staring out over the closing distance at this pallid, undead version of that nervous woman she’d first met not so long ago, Jaina could not help but think that perhaps undeath didn’t suit anyone so much as it did Sylvanas Windrunner. She was a beautiful ghost. A ruin, but at least one that was striking to behold.

“I had it in my head that you wouldn’t come,” was what Sylvanas finally found the courage to say as she came within arm’s length of Jaina, then stopped again. “That I would fly around and not see you and give up for the dark. But you came.”

“I said I would.”

Truth be told, the resolve to follow through on her word had taken another two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey after Vereesa had left. It had taken the tears of Sylvanas’ younger sister, and an unasked for pep talk from her mother that Jaina was already trying to forget. It had taken an hour of staring out over the ruins of Theramore, deciding to stay--deciding that she too was a thing broken, and that a chance to be mended in some small way, was worth taking, even if it was difficult.

Sylvanas reached out a hand, absent its gauntlet. A hand with a wrist beneath it that glowed a brilliant blue in the shape of a moon beset with snowflakes. Yes, Jaina had decided the pattern was snowflakes. She had to have something of it for herself.

She snatched it back. She looked at Jaina, herself a painting of foreign colors. No longer gold, but fiery orange from the setting sun, lavender in her bloodless skin, and blue eyes, not grey.

Changed, scarred, another creature so ruined by Azeroth’s slow spiral, but still beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” was the second thing Sylvanas said to her, as they stood alone on the cliffs over what was once Theramore.

“For what?”

The words sounded so accusatory. Perhaps they should have. For the mana bomb Sylvanas might have stopped from destroying this place. For Teldrassil. For dying. For still being here, despite dying. For dying again after that. She should be sorry.

But Jaina hadn’t meant them like that. She didn’t know how she meant them. Maybe just to know. Maybe just to reconcile the feelings that roiled over their bond. A boiling sense of shame, bubbling up in the throat. A longing that hurt as it gripped the chest. A fear, a subtle thing weighing heavy in the pit of the stomach.

“Everything,” was Sylvanas’ answer.

But that would not be enough. Jaina wasn’t certain what could or would be. There was no apologizing, really. If anything, Azeroth owed them both apologies. Perhaps Medivh for opening the portal. Perhaps Gul’dan for building it. Perhaps Sargeras, for the legion. Perhaps Azshara, for making him aware of this world and its treasures in the first place.

Still, Sylvanas wanted to talk. She wanted to give an apology. She felt so much and so deeply that it bled into Jaina like a dye leeching into wash water. It stained her black.

“I don’t think you came here to list the things you should be sorry for,” Jaina told her.

Sylvanas had not. Perhaps she’d had a plan for what she’d wanted to say. How she’d wanted to say it. When and where. Jaina, it seemed, threw a wrench into these.

Sylvanas reached out again, and let her hand fall empty again.

“I can start, if you like,” she offered.

Jaina didn’t want that. She didn’t wanted a bulleted list, much as she loved organizing such things. She didn’t need boxes checked. She wanted so much from this conversation, but knew she might not get any of it.

Mostly, she wanted to understand why she felt guilty for not reaching for that empty hand. She wanted to know if Sylvanas felt that from her. If she had an answer for it.

Jaina wanted anything to make sense. She was comfortable with ruin and devastation. She knew them well. She understood them. She was an expert at working through grief.

What she didn’t know how to do, though, was rebuild.

“I don’t need that from you,” she told Sylvanas. “But I do want to know what it is you wanted to tell me. Why it is you wanted to meet.”

Jaina supposed she owed it to herself. For Theramore. For Teldrassil. For the sword in the side of Azeroth. For the grief she didn’t have time to feel. For whatever reason. She supposed she owed it to Sylvanas too. Not an apology, as there was no apologizing to be done.

No, she owed her a chance. She owed herself a chance. A chance to do something different, for once. A chance to take the ruins apart brick by brick, and build them up into a new tower.

Chapter Text

Change for better or for worse
Move much deeper to immerse
Drape your spirit in the words
Some kind of ghoul
Small exception to the rule

It was hard to express what she felt in words. Sylvanas was always a woman of action. Her state of being was one of action. She preferred to show her love rather than tell of it. She enjoyed fussing over finding and then giving the perfect gift. She found herself addicted to the light that would kindle in Jaina’s eyes when she showed her something new or interesting—not to mention the hitch of her breath, the keening whine that would slip past her teeth as Sylvanas showed her new pleasures in bed.

Sylvanas was simply not meant for writing flowery letters, sealed with pressed flowers and perfume, in lieu of all that. If Jaina expected as much for her, she would be sorely disappointed. Her writing skills were better utilized in direct and concise military reports. Those she could easily churn out.

Yet a letter to her soulmate was a struggle.

Clea sat swinging her legs upon the great gilded mahogany desk of the Ranger General, offering little in the way of helpful advice. “You’re quite lucky she’s stuck with you, you know.”

“Your confidence in me is truly inspiring,” Sylvanas drawled back at her.

Even her famous wit and verbal stings were a thing that needed playing off of. If Jaina were here, she could easily have her laughing her pretty little laugh within minutes, and watch as her eyes widened and an intrigued smirk formed on her lips at the continuous, rapid pace of their banter. But Jaina was not here. Her soulmate was off playing nice with the arrogant fop that was Prince Arthas Menethil, somewhere in the great pine forests of Lordaeron.

And Sylvanas was stuck here in her offices in Silvermoon, trying to write a love letter in between mountains of other paperwork. But, when all was said and done, she was quite terrible at saying how she felt. She would much rather show it.

In fact, if Jaina were here, Clea would be politely asked to leave the room so she could show it in the way she truly wanted.

Instead of pouring forth her very soul through her quill, Sylvanas was left to look toward the wrist of the arm that held it instead—to the soft glow of the soulmark that Jaina had lit for her. In her mind, Jaina was there too, a quiet presence of focused intensity. She was thinking about something. She was often thinking like this. Imagining what puzzled her today always brought a smile to Sylvanas’ face, sometimes when one wasn’t necessarily warranted from a woman who had earned a reputation as a stern but fair General.

It was then that Velonara walked in with a stack of even more reports for her, and Sylvanas knew that with her, all hope of getting her thoughts out onto paper today had left the room.

“Good afternoon Ranger General, Ranger Clea,” Velonara said with a mocking air of formality that disappeared as she slapped the stack of paper onto what little surface area of the desk remained uninhabited by other work or Clea’s backside. “Pray tell, what requires so much of your rapt attention on this fine afternoon?”

“I caught her writing to her pretty mage and decided to help,” Clea announced before Sylvanas could even try to think of an excuse. “It’s not going well.”

“Tell her she has nice tits,” was Velonara’s sage advice.

“That’s the first thing I said,” Clea informed her.

It had, indeed, been the first piece of advice Clea had given. And while true, it did not help.

---

What seemed like entire lifetimes later, Sylvanas stood upon the cliffs above the twisting wreckage of stone and mana that was once Theramore, once again lacking for words.

The space between her and Jaina might as well have been filled with such cursed rubble itself. It felt just as tainted and impenetrable. A canyon miles wide—a distance too far and too treacherous to be crossed, or to even consider crossing.

But Sylvanas was here. She was here and she was whole again but dead. She was here to offer the crumbling remains of what she once was back to a woman who had become so much more than she could have ever imagined in these intervening years. Jaina was an Archmage. She was a leader of nations three times over. She had conquered and defended. She had both lost and won so much and lived to tell the tale.

All the while, Sylvanas had been dead. Walking, talking, but dead. How could she explain it all, when back in those happier times, without war and apocalypse threatening at every turn, she couldn’t even express her budding love for her pretty Kirin Tor apprentice?

Now, to the Lord Admiral of Kul Tiras, she stood like a stone, unable to speak, unable even to begin to go through the list of things she’d thought to speak on, the apologies she prepared, the explanations that had been so clear to her when she’d muttered them as she paced through the Warchief’s chambers in Orgrimmar, hours before.

“I’m—”

“If you’re about to say you’re sorry again, save it,” Jaina stopped her before the second word could even enter into existence.

Only she was very sorry. It was hard to be anything but sorry. Surely, Jaina could feel it thrumming along their bond. If Sylvanas’ heart still beat, she would likely feel that too—the panic, the deep, twisting guilt.

Even Theramore was something she could blame herself for, though it was Garrosh who used the bomb. Still, she had not stopped him. She had not risked it all to defy him. And though strategically, it would have been utterly foolish to attempt it, standing here, watching the arcane scar upon the land that was once a bustling settlement twist and rot all the more, Sylvanas felt as though she should have tried.

Had Jaina thought of that, when she chose this venue for their meeting? Had she wanted to rend more grief from her, more guilt?

It was hard for Sylvanas to say. The woman who she had once loved was just as much a thing of the past as the cocky Ranger General of Silvermoon. Jaina was just as changed by her losses, just as scarred, and just as hard to read for all of it. The setting sun and the swirling arcane mixed their glows in the white of her hair—violet and orange. She looked aflame for it, and her eyes burned too, demanding.

So Sylvanas had to think of something to answer them. Some words, though none would ever be good enough. She started with a question, “You wanted to know why I wished to meet?”

It took a moment for Jaina to offer a simple nod in return, as though she considered leaving just then, finding all this unsatisfactory. But, her feelings as they traveled over their bond spoke a different story. Sylvanas focused on these instead, taking every ounce, every fiber of the intrigue, the hesitancy, the worry, and that little shred that might be wanting.

That, she could certainly understand. She wanted nothing more than to reach out to Jaina. To hold her to her chest. To breathe in the fire of sun and magic that played on the soft white of her hair. Even her gold had been stolen from her.

“I need you, Jaina,” Sylvanas explained. “I need your support. I need you to understand that I am truthful in what I say about the Jailer, the realms of death, and that I have everything to lose for it if I’m wrong. We all do.”

She watched Jaina stiffen at this. The words took their time in washing over her, and Jaina let them echo beyond her into the wreckage, and into the sea beyond before she deigned to respond. “Surely you did not retrieve your very soul from hell then, so you say, to ask for an alliance?”

“No,” the word echoes hollow. Putting that into words does it no justice. Yes, Sylvanas sliced her soul free from the very fingers of the being who kept it prisoner. She did it for so many reasons. She did it for her freedom. She did it because she was missing a part of herself. She did it, too, for love.

But Jaina did not look at her with love. Her eyes were hard, crystalline. They too sparkled with flecks of dying sun and untamed magic.

“I did it for myself,” Sylvanas answered honestly. “And for Azeroth. The things the Jailer asked of me seemed cunning and clever in the beginning. He had a plan. He offered me what I wanted, what I needed, and did not ask for much. It all seemed so clear in the beginning. Death is a cruel and broken thing, and he would free us from it.”

That too, was difficult to explain. What could she tell Jaina of that first death of hers? Of leaping from Icecrown hoping for release—hoping for an end to the mockery of life that still preserved her, only to find terrifying nothingness, then Zovaal, looming. He showed her the unfairness of it—the loss of self, the lack of rest.

Worst of all was when she asked, pleaded, begged him to see her family again—mother, father, Lirath—to know that they were resting safely somewhere would bring her the most peace she’d known since she was alive with Jaina in her arms, listening to her bare her burdens, her loneliness since their loss. But there were no such people left for her to meet. No, Zovaal had told her, what remained of the souls that were once half of her immediate family would not know her anymore. They would not judge her for all she’d done. They would not welcome her to run with them in the great hunt, as elven mythos would often picture the afterlife. No, they were perhaps an angel with blue skin, a trickster faun, a plotting vampiric courtier, a proud gladiator, a thousand other things, or even just loose, aimless anima. The person they had once been was gone. They would not know or remember her, for better or for worse, ever again.

Anything, it had seemed, was better than enduring the cruelty of that fact, and to bear the idea that it was the same for every soul that had ever been willed into existence. To be tied so deeply to others in life—only to lose them forever in the eternity of death? It was beyond cruel. And worst of all, that part was entirely true and real, and not just one of Zovaal’s lies.

It had been easy to dwell on that. Even missing half of her soul, it had been hard to follow the agenda to put an end to it when it dragged on and on, seeming just as cruel.

It had been impossible for her to follow it any longer as it directed her to hurt Jaina.

“No doubt you heard what I explained yesterday aboard our ships. No peace awaits us in death. He had promised me a way out. His domination magic made it seem so convincing, so clear. But I began to have my doubts that it was possible, that such a solution was even what he was driving me toward. Those doubts were solidified when he asked me to raise your brother, willing or not, and turn him against you,” Sylvanas explained.

Those words, it seemed, hit home. Jaina’s eyes widened at the truth Sylvanas had otherwise not revealed.

Yes, she was her tipping point, and yes, she should know that.

“You defied this master of yours then, for Derek?” Jaina asked.

“For you,” Sylvanas told her.

The sun clung to one last sliver of the horizon, lighting the western sky to brilliance in orange and gold. Belore would abandon them soon, but perhaps it was for the best. No doubt Jaina would struggle to look upon her as she did now. Devotion and apologies alike meant little if they came from such a wretched creature as she. Her beautiful apprentice turned Archmage deserved better than a mournful corpse.

“If you’ve known all this for so long, why not come to me earlier? That’s what I don’t understand, Sylvanas,” Jaina said, seeming confused at the end by the name that fell so readily from her lips.

The words met her along with a softening in the back of her mind. It was not what Sylvanas expected, not what she rehearsed for. She prepared for Jaina to be stony-faced, civil, but enraged. She prepared for eyes that would not meet hers, not these that stared, and danced with flame and fire and want and this bone-deep desire for an understanding.

Sylvanas held up her hands, bare for the occasion, glowing soulmark on display on her wrist. “Would you have believed me? Would you have even as I explained all these things yesterday, if not for the attack that came after? You wouldn’t have, and I have given you little reason to. I doubt it would have been any different had I sailed here straight from Lordaeron, Grand Marshall Garithos’ blood still wet on my hands.”

“You don’t know that,” Jaina told her. “I grieved for you. For so long, I mourned you. You didn’t even tell me you were—” she trailed off, lacking the correct words to finish that sentence.

“Still alive? Because I wasn’t. I’m a monster. An abomination. An affront to the gods themselves. I still am, even with my soul intact,” Sylvanas reminded her. “Back then, the Alliance saw my people as nothing more than mindless zombies, temporarily bending their feeble wills away from the Lich King’s control, soon to be consumed by it once again and be made to betray them yet another time. You mean to tell me you would have thought any differently?”

“How can I answer that if you didn’t let me try?” Jaina immediately snapped back, her frustration boiling through, both in the movement of her hands and like a pot of boiling oil in the base of Sylvanas’ skull. “If you had come to me, if you had—”

“If I counted back the hours to you I have wasted, dwelling on the past, one by one, we would be here all night and another day,” Sylvanas told her. “I don’t know how you would have reacted. When, where, or why. It doesn’t matter. Could have and would have do not help us now. They do not help the people of Azeroth.”

“They did not help the people of Teldrassil either.”

Ah, there it was. Sylvanas had speculated she would have to answer for her greatest of crimes here. Really, letting the Jailer in had been the greatest, but if it were not through her, then surely it would have been some other pawn that would have taken his power to Azeroth. She just had her anger, her reasons, her vulnerability in having only half a soul to judge by.

“It was not supposed to end that way,” Sylvanas told her frankly, voice low, finding for the first time she could not look into Jaina’s eyes as the dying sun behind her was too close to the memory of the roaring flames. “And while I know it sounds no worse to say this, only one key person was meant to die that day. I left the job to Saurfang, but his odd new sense of honor let Malfurion escape. The strategy to burn the tree was the extreme alternative I was driven to, though no doubt it is what the Jailer wanted all along. That is often how it worked. I would plan something sensible, direct and discreet, it would fail, and then I would be driven to the mad answer, every time.”

The silence stretched on long enough for Sylvanas to have to look up to gauge Jaina’s reaction. She wondered if SI:7 had heard of her original plans for the invasion of Darkshore. But what did it matter? They were doomed. All of these failures, time after time, all this falling back and having to rely on desperate measures—it had all been him. The taunting hand that had held a piece of her soul had pointed her in the wrong direction only to watch her damn ever more souls to his hell in her attempts to make it right again.

The fact that Jaina seemed to be thinking on it still, her mind grinding the words down to powder, as the sun flashed one last brilliant ray behind her, sinking below the horizon, was not lost on Sylvanas. It meant that she did not know. It meant that she was trying to understand.

“Tyrande would have killed you for it all the same,” was what she finally said.

“Perhaps I may yet welcome the mercy of her blade,” was all Sylvanas could say in reply.

There was another silence, but this one ended with a bitter, short laugh against the coming dark of night. “I don’t wish to feel what it’s like to die with you again, so let’s avoid that,” Jaina offered.

There. That was something. Just as the tension dropped on the edge of her spine. In the night, Sylvanas’ wrist glowed like a guiding star. There had to be something left of this, something worth saving. Even if all she had to offer Jaina was to share her life with a dead, bitter war criminal, who had been manipulated into some of what she’d done, and had gladly chosen other transgressions without so much as an ounce of that evil influence.

“I cannot say that Zovaal is to blame for everything I’ve done. I cannot draw an exact line for you of where he ends and I began. That, I think, is the worst part of it. The terrifying part. It all made sense in some way, because that was what he wanted. I wasn’t able to see it so clearly until the day I clutched my soul in my hands. His chains did not hold me then,” Sylvanas went on.

Feeling welled up in her along with the word. Bright and bold, crisp as the cold air of winter, burning as the summer sun. The extremes of emotion save that of anger had been a foreign thing, and still were to her. She felt too raw, too new, her skin newly shed.

“If I were thinking as clearly then, or any time, as I am now, I think I would have come to you,” Sylvanas told her.

She wanted to cry. Not in the screaming, raging way she’d cried for her death and the constant struggle that followed. No, she wanted to cry because this was all just awful. She wanted to cry because it was all like a bandage ripped from a scabbing wound that would not and could not heal. The world itself was even scarred—she had seen the tip of the great hilt of the sword stuck in its side even on her flight over here.

Jaina didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve planet-sized swords and magic-sundered cities. Only the purple of Theramore’s arcane painted her now, and she was beautiful in it. A stunning woman if ever there was one, powerful and stern in the way she stood and thought about those words.

She deserved a lonely Ranger General, whose life she had brought light back into just by existing. She deserved warm, languid mornings in a bed draped with the finest Quel’thalan silk. She deserved to laugh and smile easily, without worrying if she could or should for the state of things. She deserved the smile that even Sylvanas could feel a thousand miles away when she read her terrible attempts at love letters. She deserved the life they were supposed to have together.

But Sylvanas supposed it was not for her to say what Jaina deserved. White-haired and once-dead herself, her heart still beat, but she knew what it was to fail, what it was to have it all come crumbling down, and to be the one picking up the pieces yet again.

All Sylvanas wanted was a chance to be a brick in that new foundation they might both build together. Anything else, well, she would just have to see.

“I don’t know how I could have helped, but I would have tried,” Jaina told her.

“I know. I should have known,” Sylvanas told her. “And I know now it’s too little too late.”

Jaina reached for her, and just as Sylvanas had done when she’d first arrived, let her hand drop empty. It was covered still by the clawed gauntlet, hiding the mark that Sylvanas knew burned beneath it. Jaina was clearly not ready to divest herself of such armor around her, nor did she blame her for such caution.

Still, she reached.

“I can’t say I didn’t wish you did this all of this much sooner, but if you were manipulated as you say, I understand how hard it must have been to do at all,” Jaina said, looking down at that hand before clenching it, the metal of the gauntlet creaking. “But know that I don’t accept that as an excuse.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Sylvanas told her. “Or anyone. I deserve far worse than Tyrande’s blade at my neck, which I’ve no doubt she still wants to deliver to me.”

Tyrande’s absence on the ships was noteworthy. Even though the ceasefire had caused all Horde forces to be removed from Darkshore, she had pursued them to the last—apparently culling them from the boat ramps and swinging ladders hanging from hovering zeppelins. When Sylvanas had posed the question of where she was to Anduin at the beginning of the summit, he’d simply shaken his head.

“I only ask that if I am to be punished, that I do so after we have defeated Zovaal, at least in some measure,” Sylvanas went on. “I will be of no use rectifying my crimes if I am to be in chains once again.”

“I fail to see how that helps any of us,” Jaina concluded. “There is no doubt in anyone’s mind you have been truthful about this, you know. Not even mine. You were correct before in saying you had everything to lose if you weren’t.”

“Delivering oneself into the hands of one's enemies spouting madness they cannot prove is not the strategy of a woman with secrets left to keep,” Sylvanas noted. “I am done with secrets. Truly. Ask of me what you want, what you need to know and I will answer. I owe you at least that, for coming to hear me out.”

Sylvanas watched as Jaina’s lips wrapped around a question, then held it in, like a sigh she did not want to allow to escape. A prayer, maybe. A complaint, perhaps. There was so much to talk about, but the moon was rising, following her ardent and fruitless pursuit of the sun. Tonight, it was only a small crescent, still regaining its form and power. But, it was waxing, not waning.

And while Jaina seemed to debate what question she should ask first, she was asking.

Her pause left Sylvanas enough time to wonder what she would ask, if Jaina were to open herself up this way.

That answer was as simple as it was impossible, really. “Did you love me?” would be what she wanted to know. Ever, at all, still? It didn’t matter. But it wasn’t a question she’d been invited to ask, or one she could give voice to even if she was. Not now, at least. Perhaps not ever.

Perhaps she might never know. Perhaps, she might have to be content with her soulmate standing at arm’s length from her, struggling to find the right words, offering only distant hope of a truce, an alliance of needs, and nothing more.

But loved or not, Sylvanas supposed that was better than the alternative. Still, Jaina was here. She’d listened.

She opened her mouth again to speak.

“Can we maybe sit a while and just, well, talk?” Jaina asked. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to hear more about this Zovaal and the Maw.”

It was something. Anything at all.

“We can talk, yes,” Sylvanas answered, as she watched Jaina sweep aside her skirts, and sit upon a nearby boulder.

She gestured to the same rock, where a flat place was left empty just beside her, waiting, inviting.

It was the closest Sylvanas had been to her—no. That wasn’t right. Jaina had reached out to her the day before, touched her skin, asked for her to meet. No more melodramatics, no more comparisons of the years and years she’d lost to death and dominance, the wrong and the right of it. These would not serve Sylvanas in her goals, her atonements. Her actions would.

Sylvanas sat next to her soulmate, and though she desperately wanted to reach out to touch her again, she held her bare hands still in her lap. She would tell Jaina everything she wanted to know, everything she was willing to hear. Sincere words were never her forte, but as a career soldier, she could report like no one’s business. If Jaina wanted a report, she’d get the report of her lifetime, so long as she was willing to listen.

And Jaina, it seemed—sitting beside her, back straight, arcane fire dancing still in her eyes and on the strands of her hair—was still listening.

---

Another day, another lifetime ago, and Clea had once again perched herself on the edge of the Ranger General’s desk, legs swinging, without invitation.

“What has you grinning with your ears pointing straight to Belore like that?” she asked as she unceremoniously took up her favorite seat in all of Silvermoon.

“Would you believe me if I told you it was a report from Vereesa on supply lines?” Sylvanas offered, not looking up from the letter that was decidedly not that.

“No. Well, wait, it depends on the type of supply lines. I know you love a good artillery shipment, but maybe not that much,” Clea said.

Sylvanas huffed a laugh. While she would indeed be delighted to get some new ballistas requisitioned for the weaker points of their defensive lines on the Amani front, the likelihood of King Anasterian prioritizing that was far lower than her chances of even finding her once in a lifetime soulmate, whose letter she was actually smiling over.

Clea took this opportunity to peek for her answer and snorted her own response, “Well, I doubt Vereesa writes to you in Common, so I’d say you’re drooling over a letter from your pretty mage instead.”

“I don’t drool,” Sylvanas retorted. “But I also don’t wish to waste time lying to you. Now, Ranger, was there a purpose to your visit other than to pester me about my love life?”

“You love her then?”

Sylvanas knew that the question was meant to be teasing in nature. It was hardly meant as the existential blow that it felt like, a slap across the face that reality must be answered to.

Of course she loved Jaina. That much she knew. The truth of it was so odd though. She’d met the woman for only a week, and still knew precious little about her. Fate had decided to place them in each other’s hearts, forever bound by their souls, and while Sylvanas had relished in the idea of no longer being alone in this world, she had not done so with love in mind. Odd as it was to say, she sought her soulmate for wholeness’ sake as much as anything else really. It was a thing one did, a lifelong pursuit in the long life of an elf, one she was lucky to fulfill in her relative youth.

But yes, the answer was easy. She loved her. She loved Jaina with every fiber of her being, every steady beat of her heart, every calming reminder of their bond as Jaina’s thoughts and feelings leaked so subtly into her mind across the vast distance that separated them, and likely would for much of their lives. They were still figuring out where they would live, where they might even meet for the next time, once Jaina was finished with this silly little jaunt around Lordaeron.

She wanted Sylvanas to come to Dalaran, of course. That was the topic of this letter, apparently sent just before she left the city of mages to accompany Prince Arthas.

Sylvanas hated Dalaran, but for Jaina, she could try. That, she supposed, was what love really was, at least to her—a willingness to put all aside, grievances and gratitudes alike, just to be with someone. Even if that meant dealing with an entire city full of snooty magisters. Jaina deserved that much from her—to do as Sylvanas had done with her in Quel’thalas, and take her to meet her friends, to eat at her favorite restaurants, to see the things and people and places that were important to her.

It was all so strange how this worked with soulmates. It felt like doing love in reverse. The deep, unfathomable bond was there already, but Sylvanas didn’t know what wine Jaina liked best yet, or what she would do to cheer herself up or clear her mind when she was feeling weary of the world and its trials. She didn’t know her favorite color. She didn’t know what animal she’d most often pretend to be when playing make-believe growing up.

Sylvanas, of course, had been a fearsome lynx in her childhood games. What animals were even so prevalent in Kul Tiras for Jaina to assume their imaginary form in her play? Sylvanas didn’t know. She almost jotted down a note to herself to find a natural atlas of the island nation to familiarize herself with the possibilities, but remembered that Clea was there, now looking strangely at her as Sylvanas hadn’t responded in her musing.

“Of course I do,” she answered.

Because she did. She loved Jaina Proudmoore, and was looking forward to spending the rest of whatever time the gods might allow them to have together to get to know her, however and whenever she could.