Why… Why did they both have to be so damn prideful? Why couldn't they just straighten over their words and come to an accord?
Aranya had thought this to herself ever since she left the gala.
Halenvar had gotten less humble than he should have about his crew and his ship when Kurel had told him to mind that if there were gun-ports on it, they were to be closed while entering the bay. The scorpid king had not reacted so jovially to the valarjar's response, and things had wound into disarray, insults, and both men storming away while Aranya tried to keep the peace.
She was going to have to talk to both of them.
Halenvar could perhaps be cajoled towards some humility, but it wasn't going to be easy. The circumstances by which the valarjar and the arcanist had met, and gradually come to mean so much to each other, showed that well enough. It was possible it would take more than one go at speaking with him, for no matter how Halenvar regarded Aranya, he was not a man who could just be bent.
Kurel could be persuaded, Aranya had done so before, but there would always be his snapping of claws and brandishing of stinger first, and whenever he came around it was always with terms and conditions of his own. Such was the way of a man who would be torn apart in the deepest hell of the Nether before he ever bowed to anyone. Such was the way of a king.
Yet, for all his pride, the Tanari was not a fool, he had sense. Aranya sometimes suspected that one of the reasons he continued to respect her, was for the fact that she wasn't frighted away by any amount of his growling or harshness, but persisted in finding the right thing to say to him, to illuminate reason or some situation to him. She also suspected that sometimes he delighted in it, presenting a challenge to her, seeing what she was made of, and watching how she didn't disappoint. It had seemed to become the nature of many - though by no means all - of their dealings.
Aranya needed to sleep on the whole matter. This was not going to be pretty, when both men were going to be all growls and scowls to start with.
Warped skies shimmered and glittered above her. The air felt charged, raised a tingle over the blood elf's skin. Wasted land and geysers of fire surrounded her for miles…
There was a sense of troubling familiarity creeping through Aranya. Not from this place, but from this feeling that itched in her veins. A familiar sense of hunger, physical and unyielding. A hunger that had driven another appetite to emerge from within the deepest parts of her nature, and fostered it into something that she kept on a leash for the past several years.
The physical hunger and addiction to magic, which had revealed the true predator that she was.
I'm dreaming… This is a dream…
There was someone behind the sin'dorei sorceress. She knew it without needing any sign of it, and she felt who it was before her dream-form even turned around.
Dreadlord by CrazyTaco93
Tezzakel…
The nathrezim smirked as recognition and disdain played over the fair features of his killer.
Aranya's first reaction was to stay still where she was, wary, yet sensing no aggression from the massive demon. "You're dead," she vocalized, deadpan.
A rumbling chuckle rose from the dreadlord's chest, low and dark, "Oh, come come, surely you know that I am not."
"I killed you," said Aranya, glaring, stepping cautiously as the demon inched slightly forward and then to the side, mirroring his steps as the two began to circle each other.
"You did more than kill me, troublesome elf," replied Tezzakel in a deadly voice that was something of a mix between a deep murmur and a purr, the edges of his mouth still playing upwards at the corners.
"You're a dream," sneered Aranya, fel-washed eyes emitting tiny sparks with scorn.
"Am I?" Tezzakel in a mild tone of voice with a smile, the many points of his teeth gleaming just behind his lips.
"I feasted on your power, as you lay choking on your own blood," retorted the Thalassian woman, her fair, refined chin jutting forward. "I felt it singing in my blood for hours upon hours after I had watched the life drain from your eyes under my hand."
"Oh, you did that," admitted the demon in a low growl. "In this world, so saturated by the Nether-" he swept his thickly muscled arms outwards, gesturing about them "- you had me right where you could have wanted me…" A bitter note entered his voice then. "Ironic, how you turned the tables on me, when I was hunting you." His hooves stopped their circling pace, and Aranya did the same. "You crippled me. Irrevocably," he admitted. Then a slow, thoroughly unpleasant smile crept over his sharp features. "But you did not destroy me. We both know that this region of this shattered, wretched world was not so far into the Nether for you to have done that."
"Is this your circumspect way of making threats?" Aranya snapped, losing patience. "Warning me that you'll return for vengeance? Is that what you want?"
"Oh, I want more than vengeance, elf," growled the nathrezim, his smile disappearing into a hard-eyed glare. "Much more!"
Tezzakel launched a blistering ball of fel at Aranya, and she dashed out of its path in barely enough time. Flame and arcane flew at the massive, evasive winged demon, as felfire and shadow rained and erupted around the blinking, elusive sin'dorei. For what could have been a minute or an eternity they carried on in this way, as if they were bent on blasting each other apart.
Until one ill-timed blink brought Aranya within Tezzakel's grasp. The dreadlord slammed his large hand into her comparatively diminutive chest, knocking her on her back as he pinned her to the ground. He brought his face down, right next to hers, his sizable horns making no sound, though they must have scraped the ground.
The nathrezim's lips just barely touched her, brushing the side of her face as he spoke. "I want vengeance, yes, but killing you would not satisfy me," he said in a smoldering whisper. "I could tear you apart - piece by bloody piece - a thousand times, and the music of your screams would be nowhere near enough to gratify me."
Aranya turned her face to the side, away from him, but he persisted.
"You watched the life in me bleed away, as you took all the best of me," growled the demon. "But I was watching you, too. I saw the hunt-lust and the triumphant ecstasy in you. I saw what truly lies in the very making of your soul." He smiled as he taunted, "Your hunger has always gone so much deeper than your blood, hasn't it? You are more like myself and the demons that you have fed on than you will ever admit." Tezzakel chuckled, low and dark in his throat. "What I want, little 'phoenix,' is to watch," he continued, his clawed hand gripping her a little harder. "Watch as that hunger you think you can hide as you please completely consumes you. To watch you break under the burning in your blood…" His mouth was right by her long, pointed ear as he said, "Until you go up in flames, and there is nothing left you. Only when I have seen that, will vengeance be mine."
It was eerie, how he called her "phoenix" as everyone did, and then swore to see her go up in flames in such a way.
"I don't think so," said Aranya, eyes narrowed.
Blink!
The sorceress got free of the demon's hand with magic, but now all around her was new terrain. A fel-storm shrouded the sky, the ground was blackened sickeningly, and demons wandered and flew about a structure that dominated the landscape, with a pillar of pure magic emanating towards the clouds. It was the Broken Shore.
"Oh, no?" Tezzakel laughed in reply to the elf arcanist. "Look around! Don't think that because you doomed me to be diminished that I am entirely limited," he admonished, gesturing to the Tomb of Sargeras, the font of the Legion's power in Azeroth. "The game has changed, in ways you did not anticipate."
Suddenly, a hand reached from behind Aranya, grabbing her by the throat and dangling her over an infinite void that appeared beneath her feet. She clutched at the hand, momentarily dazed… until she saw exactly whose hand it was that had hold of her.
The mage's jaw went slack in an amazement and horror. Kurel stared impassively as his grip never lessened around her neck. "No," she gasped. "No… Kurel…"
A chuckle rose from the blind man's throat, but it was not the oddly reassuring, gravelly voice of the man whom Aranya liked and respected. It was Tezzakel's sinister voice.
And just like that, he dropped her, screaming, into the void.
Aranya awoke with a start. Sweat soaked her raven hair, her heart raced and her breath came in gasps.
"A dream… It was a dream… It was a dream…" she repeated, over and over.
It still didn't shake the overwhelming feeling of anxiousness and dread that gripped her now.
If it wasn't a dream…? What did that mean?
Kurel had confided the nature of his resurrection to Aranya, he trusted her enough to tell her that, and knew by now that she would not betray that. The arcanist had not been serious when she quipped about Tezzakel possibly being one of the demons whose essence had brought the blind, horned captain back from the dead.
… But… if he was…?
Tezzakel would have been weak enough at the time, for certain, to be bound by any number of things, it was possible. If he tried to assert himself within Kurel, assume control or outright kill him…
"BASTARD!"
The demon was luring her into a no-win game. He wanted to watch her suffer, see her become the monster she once was and then some, and watch it tear her apart. He was willing to harm those she cared about to corner her into it.
So what if she could save Kurel by draining the last vestiges of Tezzakel's power from him? It would glut her with the demon's magic, she would go into withdrawal not long after and begin to hunt again. And if Kurel could not be saved in such a way and was instead outright killed? There was no knowing what Aranya would have to do if Tezzakel re-manifested and confronted her anyway.
And this was assuming Kurel was even the dreadlord's first target. It was possible Tezzakel was not even bound to the Tanari elf at all.
The whole nathrezim race were cunning schemers, there was no saying or knowing what Tezzakel would do or who he would go after to get what he wanted.
Aranya reached down over the side of her bed into the cuff of one of her boots, withdrawing the ivory scarab that Kurel had given her.
She held the precious thing awhile in her palm, her thumb stroking over it's carved wing-covers, the red stone on the chain bracelet that Halenvar had given her gleaming just beneath it.
Please, let it only have been a dream.
Aranya couldn't help herself, her fingers closed around the smooth token and brought it up in a fist close to her mouth. The red mana inked beneath her skin in the armband design given to her by the Kabal pulsed with her emotions, flaring with power, and she found herself reaching out as she only did when urgent to her horned friend. "Something's happened," she whispered, her distress evident in her shaky breath. "Something's going to happen."
Not really trusting herself in this state, she withdrew and said nothing else.