~*~ Author's Notes ~*~
This story is set shortly after the fall of Quel'Thalas, the razing of Silvermoon and the blackening of the Sunwell. The High Elves, between going insane at being cut off from the Sunwell and trying to reclaim Silvermoon from the Scourge, are a shadow of their former selves.
"And as the bridges burned
Another hard, hard lesson learned
As in the ashes passion slowly dies."
Foolish Pride, Travis Tritt
~*~ The Story of a Child ~*~
She had never been to Elwyn before. Long ago, before the wars and the fighting she had heard stories of how beautiful it was. The farms that dotted the misty rolling hills and forests, the white wolves almost mellow enough to touch, and of course the Human capital city of Stormwind perched like a crowning jewel right at the top.
She floated like an ethereal wraith down the road. Carts of goods and warriors mounted on their thickly armored warhorses passed. Most smiled to see her, a child of about six with flowing white hair and fair complexion, and tipped their hat as they passed. The child had smiled back; even tipped a curtsey in her long apprentice wizard's robes of white and blue if someone of obvious status happened along.
The difference between here and home was amazing. How long had it been since the child she once was had seen anything but the destruction of war? At home you had to watch out for things that went bump in broad daylight – let alone what prowled in the after hours - but here… here an elfin child of six could walk the length and breath of the countryside without a care in the world.
The little map she had had been hastily scratched into the back of a book. What book it had been eluded her for all she had was that cover, thick and hard, her most precious possession in the world. The journey had been long and perilous from the wreckage of Quel'Thalas all the way to Elwyn Forest, and worth every danger met and overcome along the way.
Stopping at a crossroads she looked at the map once more. Yes, this was the right way. All the way up that road ahead and strait into the heart of Stormwind. There she would find the end of her journey; there she would find the people who had been missing from her life for far too long now.
The gates of Stormwind were impressive stone structures strong and thick enough to hold back the entire Horde army for months if need be. No doubt there were farms and wells inside the city so that the populace could sustain long-term siege.
Once this city had been burned to the ground. As the child passed threw the gates she felt an odd and strange sense of coming home. After all, she knew what it meant to have your city burned and it's population and prince scattered to the four winds. Her people, the High Elves of Quel'Thalas, took heart in the Human's ability to be stubborn. Once they got it into their head to survive then nothing on this world – or threw the Dark Portal! – could change their minds.
The guards saluted as the child passed. Long ears that rose several inches above her heads, and the thin, long limbs bespoke her as an elfin ally in the war. News of how their city, beautiful and most powerful city in the entire world had been reduced to ash and rubble, had reached the four corners of the globe overnight. The High Elves, once the most powerful beings in the whole of Azeroth, had been slaughtered without mercy and reduced to begging for bread and shelter from anyone who could spare it.
Though she had no skill in the magic of fire, hers lying instead in the frigid arts of water and frost magic, the little book cover took to the conjured flames easily and fell into the unused signal fire brazier. Standing with a bowed head the girl watched it burn. It had brought her far, that little map, it deserved a respectful send-off.
The city was enormous, with five districts in total, not counting the prisons and gated sections of the city citizens were not allowed to cross into. Nothing remained of the old Stormwind, the one the Orcish Horde had burned to the ground and sacked so thorough that not a loaf of bread remained for anyone who survived.
There are certainly worse things, she mused, than not being able to feed the survivors Crossing a bridge over the damp moat that lead out of the Trade District she went. There was the reality of no survivors as her people had to content with.
Going back to Silvermoon had been a mistake. At first her people had though to reclaim the Sunwell and rescue the survivors. And yes, there had been forms and figures wandering around the decimated city, but there were no survivors. The ones who had not succumbed to the Plague had succumbed to the Hunter. Wretched and Scourge battled for dominance of the city. After the initial reports the rescue parties were never heard from again.
The Park District was beautiful. She paused a moment to admire the purple-roofed architecture and creeping green vines. There was much appreciation for whoever tended the fragrant plants and carefully trimmed hedge rows.
Reaching up to the old stones she felt the texture of the vines. Long ago similar plants had traveled from the Nigh Elf homelands to the Eastern Kingdoms along with the banished quel'dorie. Their decedents, tinted red and white with arcane magic, adorned the halls and walls of the similarly color schemed Highbourn city. Even today there were statues of Elune decorating the halls, though her people had long since turned towards other Sources for comfort in times of hardship.
The child's delicate white eyebrows drew together in grief. In her heart she felt fear. Her people had overcome much. First they broke from the insane Azshara. Then they were banished from their ancestral homelands by the ignorant kaldorie. Once they finally found a place to settle Forest Trolls, of all lowly beasts, had almost eradicated them! And after they had found allies in the Humans of Arathi these same Humans latter turned around and betrayed them.
Then HE came, sweeping threw the entire country and leaving only death and sorry in his wake. Vengeance, as they say, would not be enough for all the grief he had wrought. The Ranger General, Sylvannas Windrunner, who's task it had been to protect Quel'Thalas was still unaccounted for. Many think she has betrayed them for power, as many others had done. What could temp a Ranger General to betray her people though? And why?
She kept going, being pulled to her destination by grief and anger. There were tiny tears forming in the corners of her eyes at the though of what was to come. Lifting one side of the pair of delicately wrought engineering goggles she swiped a delicate finger against the thin eyelids and the tears were gone. Flowing hair hid the runed bands of goggles that had long ago lost all power.
It is here, in this place, that she would find whom she had sought all these long months of travel. Crossing the last bridge into the Cathedral District, the little child stopped for a moment to gaze up, up and up at the enormous Cathedral. The tiled roof, hundreds of years old and original to the city, was the only thing that had not been replaced or rebuilt when the original city fell. The scars of fire could still be seen across the clay slabs: a testament to the power of the Light.
Chest lifting and falling in a very familiar pattern she stepped forward and was swallowed in the air of Holy energy that emanated from the very stones of the courtyard. The large trees, most of them healed from the scars of war, shaded the entire expanse. A fountain in the center of the square supported the praying statue of a long-dead Paladin.
Before the statue knelt a man, a fellow Paladin perhaps praying. She passed him quickly, not wishing to be stalled in her quest now that she was so close to what was needed. He glanced up briefly as she passed, followed the small form as she ascended the steps of the Cathedral itself, and went back to his prayers.
Upon entering the sanctuary one got the sense of the immense power of the Light and of those who wielded it. Healer or defender mattered not. Whatever capacity you chose to allow the Light to work threw you was acceptable so long as your heart and your intentions were pure. The Light was everything in this place and everything was the Light.
A Priest, dressed neck to deck in fine linen robes of white and black smiled and inclined his head as she entered. "Welcome to the Cathedral of the Light, child. Please enjoy yourself within our sanctuary. Nothing can harm you here."
You are wrong, she though, everything here can harm me. I am not a child of the Light as my mother, but a child of frost as my father and his before him.
The pale pink of her delicate mouth smiled back, "I'm looking for someone. Perhaps you might help me, Father."
"Yes, of course. Whom do you seek."
The world went still for a second. It was hard to speak the words, to say the name of the woman who had given her up at birth. To make the connection to a being she had only ever heard stories of as a child from a man who had never allowed her to know the woman as anything but a name.
"A woman, a Paladin. Esandri Loralane."
The old man's eyes rose. "Esandri. Loralane? You seek a woman who has… been dead for these last seven years almost."
Regret and pain shot into her heart, her head tilted down so that the flow of hair obscured her face till she could compose herself. Dead! All these years and that man who raised her had never even told her! But again… she had come to accept that this might be the case.
Straitening again, resolving to see this threw, she whispered, "Where is she? That I might say what I have come so far to say to her."
Nodding he motioned her to follow. Threw the sanctuary and down into an old room. Then downward more, threw several winding corridors and even longer rooms. Torches fed with arcane magic never extinguished.
The catacombs were enormous and must run the length and breath of the entire Cathedral Square. Hundred – thousands perhaps! – of Paladins buried here in this place. Each carefully wrapped and lay out on their shields with their swords held firmly in their hands.
Oh, if the Plague ever got in here, what an army that evil prince of Loarderon would have! But… the Plague could not cross onto sacred ground. These remains perhaps were the safest of all remains in all of Azeroth.
The maze wound on and on, long enough for her to become lost.
"What is here?" she asked, seeing other bodies sometimes with those of the Paladins. They were not decorated in armor and were without shield or weapon.
"These are the spouses of those who's wife or husband was interred here long before. The Light decreed that when a man and a woman are joined in marriage that they will remain so for all of eternity and so we lay them together here." After a pause he looked at her with knowing face, "You look like her. I remember, long ago, how she struggled to find her way. The path of the Priest or the path of the Paladin. It was him, your father I suppose, who finally made her decide that she would fight instead of heal."
The child had not known that. Her father, having raised her from an infant as a High Elf, had told her only the name of the woman and nothing else. To think that her conception may not have been a night of lust or … worse. To think that they may have loved… lived together? To hope, even for a moment that they could have known happiness.
The High Elves do not take kindly to half-breeds. Her kind is seen as inferior, unable to master the arcane as well as the purebloods and not near as resilient as the fighters. The facts of the matter were why her father had never told anyone of her true mother, instead making up stories about the war and a woman he had know on his travels…
Finally the Priest came to stop by a nich in the wall. It was on the bottom, so the child could see it without needing a stepping stool.
"I'll leave you to it and wait for you by the door. Sometimes when we see someone come down here we never see them come out again. We do not know what becomes of them, but I should suffer great grief if you shared the same fate." With that he left, robes sweeping the floor as he went.
The child gazed at the bodies in the nook. Two of them. One lay on a shield of red and gold, clasping a sword in her wrapped hands, the other draped in blue and white, clutching a staff topped with a tapped dimly glowing mana crystal.
Somehow, some way, he had found his way here first. To be with her mother again and forever: he had loved her?
Sinking to her knees, robes pooling around her, she wept for the woman she had never know and for the man who could never be made to tell her more than just a name.
"Father. I'm sorry," she sobbed, not bothering to remove the goggles that covered her eyes – her last gift from him – "I should have stayed in Andorhal. I should not have been weak and needing you so badly-" Her small body collapsed against the stone of the nook and she curled her knees in and shook.
Anger filled her then, and she stood, beating on the stiff wrappings of his form, "You wouldn't even tell me where to find her! You never even told me what she looks like!" A ragged intake of air, "And yet here you are. Buried beside her as if you actually cared. As if you didn't take me away and for what? To stop the other parents from looking at you in disgust?"
Beating the corpse of a dead man did nothing for grief. Everything about them that would never be known because neither of them was alive to tell… it ate at her heart.
"And even when you were alive," her voice cracked, "what did you do for me? Magic school and horse riding lessons? Nice dresses and a maid? But without a mother what good is any of that? Didn't you know how much I would need her? There are so many things you can't teach a girl!"
The anger subsided into grief, "I needed her. You took me." No answers were forthcoming.
She turned instead to the woman's body, "Or was it you who didn't want me? Was I hideous with white hair and ears like his? Did I not look enough like you? I don't even know what you looked like! Or perhaps you sensed the arcane in me instead of the Light?"
Nothing. A delicate white hand traced the edge of the shield, drawing back when it pulsed with still present Holy power. The sword answered in kind; two weapons of a true Paladin, both extensions of the woman herself. Serving her in life and following her into death.
"Or perhaps," a voice from behind her said, "They did it to save you."
Gasping back in surprised, she whirled to see the Paladin from the fountain standing there. She had known he followed her into the Cathedral and down into the crypt. Glancing at the doorway to this room she saw the Priest nowhere in sight. The man had sent him away.
"Save me?" Her small frame trembled slightly.
The Paladin nodded, black hair shimmering in the torchlight. "Save you from this, perhaps. I've been around long enough to see what happens when half-mortal children start asking questions. It never ends well."
Shaking her head vigorously, white hair flying in the darkeness, she spoke with utter conviction, "I loved him – I even loved her – but I never knew them. I wanted so much to know them and all he did was hide everything from me!"
The man's kind face wrinkled in understanding, "You do not speak with a Thellassian tongue, child. You were raised in Andorhal then?"
She knodded. As the only High Elf child amongst so many mortal children she had been a freak and a fascination for them. Though she was taller and stronger than them all they had always looked down on her. Different. Just too different.
"You said you left Andorhal to find him?"
The small head knodded, "When Silvermoon fell-" the words choked in her throat "- he went back. I only lived there with him for a short while before we left. I don't remember it very well; I was so small…"
His hand reached out to touch her face but she drew back, gazing up at him threw the rose tinted goggles. "Tell me why you came here." He said, "What did you hope to accomplish?"
"I need to know why. I need to know why he left me and went back. I tried to follow him. I hid in the supply wagon-" A hard shutter over took her body, sending a quiver from head to toe.
"That was a very foolish thing to do." The Paladin said.
The little girl cried, "I know. I understand that now, but I didn't know then. He was leaving me all alone. He has never left me alone. I just want to know why." She turned back to the still bodies in the nook as if they would tell her if she pleaded hard enough.
"I was waiting for you." He said.
"I know," she replied. "How did you know I would come?"
"She said you would come. An elfin child with long white hair like her father but eyes like her mothers."
The girl shivered, "That is not why I wear these goggles. My father made them for me. Charged them to always show me the truth of things."
"Did he? And how have they worked so far?"
"I saw the truth in Quel'Thalas. The truth of the power of the Scourge and the might of the Lich King. I saw the truth of death and the lies of the living. I saw the fall of one nation birthing the rise of another. I saw fire consume the moon. I saw the truth of the magic addiction in my people mirrored in the face of the Wretched."
"Where would you go? You arnt a High Elf and you arnt a Human. This is the crypt where your mother was buried and where your father lies beside her. You came here to ask questions of the dead who cannot be made to answer. What," he asked again, "did you hope to accomplish?"
Quietly she took in everything that he said and just as quietly she responded, "I want to say good-bye. I want only to lie down with my mother and my father by my side and be as the family we should have been all along."
"Only the dead lay in crypts, child."
"I'm aware." Looking up at him with small tears rolling down her cheeks she bade, "I wish to join them."
Pain of so many emotions pulsed threw the Paladin's body, "You have traveled long and hard to get here, only to ask for your existence to be ended." His tone bespoke his wish that she not ask for this.
Smiling wryly she asked, "What existence? I pretend not to hear the call but I cannot pretend forever."
"Never in all my travels have I met a being such as you." He unsheathed his sword. "I hope that there are others like you and that someday we might work together for our common goals."
Wiping tears from her face she asked, "Why did you let me here when you knew the truth of things?"
The tip of his sword rested on the ground before him, both hands clasping the pommel. The child before him had seen this before in statues decorating the Human kingdoms; "I let you here because the Light did, otherwise I would have ended you quickly. I felt you coming, even outside the gate." His golden marked sword pulsed in the darkness, lighting up her fair form and his armor. The blue lion adorning his tabard stood out.
"Don't let my secrets die with you paladin. I am not alone in my sentient-ness and others are sure to come after I and for the same reasons."
Taking a ragged breath against what he knew he had to do the Paladin raised his sward, "I wish there were another way."
Glancing at the still form of her mother and father's body in the crypt she sighted, "As do I." Silently, slowly, she removed the goggles. Soft white ghost light of her eyes glowed in the darkness, the only mark of her affliction that she could not hide with pretense.
He brought the sword down with a prayer to the Light. Her tiny form evaporated, burned to dust by the Light he wielded even as the sword sliced the air. In the end there was nothing left but a lone, weeping Paladin. Carefully he gathered the handfuls of dust and scattered them over the remains in the niche.
There he remained for a long time, praying for a soul that had long since gone before the mortal shell.