Prologue: Ghostlit Reading
Mortals were such confusing creatures.
It was a popular thought that roiled in her mind.
Here, in the middle of her little graveyard, Manatesh had enough quiet to think things through once more. It was never truly quiet around the living. Someone, somewhere was breathing. Waking up. Cooking breakfast. Celebrating. Crying. It all melted together inside the eggshell of a fortress. Yet from here, it was indeed quiet enough for her to think.
The demons had come again. She could just faintly remember the last time. They swarmed the mount. The corpses squirmed along the stones and snows on the path. Beyond that things were a blur; but the elf remembered a feeling of pride. Manatesh supposed it was pride anyway. Of fear and and anger, she remember most, but the notion of pride was… fleeting. In a field of blue it was point of yellow by contrast.
That broken world was up in the sky. It was closer than the moon, it felt like. As heretical as it felt to think such things, she couldn't help that think it fit the world. Her kin, her shuffling dead, waged war all across Azeroth to fend off these demons again. Yet something in her… couldn't quite lift the blade with the rest. That notion, that promise of the Lich King moving again in the world was a dangerous poison that sucked deep in old wounds and refused to let up.
Now here she was among mortals for the first time in a long time.
Well. As close as she felt comfortable doing so.
The death knight had found 'work' among this mercenary band. They took contracts, as many as could be done, for as much as they could make. The mortals asked few questions. It helped in the long run. It allowed her to pick up the lesser contracts, and roam the region while others focused on the big bounties. These confusing mortals… were frustrating… in their own light.
It wasn't necessarily what they did.
It was what they evoked.
Out in Northrend she hadn't thought about such things. There was always the Scourge to fight. Always the next to put down. Time again in the icy north. The constant hunger kept her moving, as they were poor sport for her sustenance. It was a simple existence of anger and forgetting. Somewhere in there she found a way to get comfortably numb about the things she had lost.
Things were sticky here. Conversations would form, but without askance she would simply remain. Logically, conversation formed cohesion among mortals. They bonded, forged unit cohesion, and functioned better as a group over shared experiences. In conversation, these mortals were attempting to connect. That is where the problems really began, Manatesh mused. Taking was such an inconvenient thing.
To converse, you would have to respond. Responding meant paying attention, inferring on prior experiences, and applying the appropriate action to the stimuli provided. In the short of it - she had to remember. She had to feel. An old wound rubbed wrong with each conversation, particularly when every smile called what she cognitively understood as the wrong response.
Insulting them for kindness was wrong, or the small talk was wrong. Ignoring such was counterproductive to the objective of cohesion, but was the most efficient measure. So to that end she tried to pull on memories without the dangling strings attached. Of course it never worked. Now here she was with a book by candlelight. The journal of another's attempts to save the damned. The journal of some Light wielding fanatic that brought the undead to life.
The journal had so many conflicting entries.
From some paladin, consumed with the need to redeem someone.
To try and bring someone back from the dead completely.
Yet this too was useless, the process of it.
However, her analysis on the state of the dead, the weariness of the soul, were of note. The inflicted state gave her information of one of the more difficult processes yet to do. The restoration of her soul. The journal noted the flayed essence bound by dark magic. The hungering for the suffering of others was a balm to the anima that anchored soul to body. The Light hurt the death knight because it attacked that link.
When approached willingly, the process was not nearly as painful. It is theorized that a life of continual communal with the Light would reunite the splinters. This was referenced with priests of the Forsaken that recorded such sensations. Willingness was not the state of being possible however, for a death knight, not normally. A good number of emotions were stripped from them by force with their original making. Redemption was as paradoxical as peace.
To crawl out of this hole however… to make the memories stop, it would seem worth it.
It was enough reading.
It was enough trying.
Just.. for a moment to remember.
The real reason she never slept, was because of the dreams she held.
Perhaps this night they would be different. Perhaps this night, the dream would change.