For perhaps the first time in his life, Lysath Starspeaker found himself wrestling with a serious moral dilemma.
It was not the thought of the oncoming battle which frightened or disturbed him; although young, Lysath was a skilled warrior and no novice when it came to combat. He knew the rules of the game, and knew them well—in war, you kill or you die. A painful truth, but an unavoidable one nonetheless. Lysath took no pleasure in killing his opponents, but his regret was mitigated by the satisfaction of knowing that he prevented them from doing evil.
But how to prevent evil when it was being done by one's own people?
Lysath gazed around at the battlefield in frustration. The Alliance had certainly gathered no shortage of warriors to combat this oncoming threat; soldiers and magicians of every race could be seen gathered in great swaths of flesh and armor across the already-desecrated Plaguelands, their banners and sigils glinting in the dull red light of a hidden sun. There were the humans, proud and aloof beneath the Stormwind lion; the dwarves, stocky and strong in their mithril and adamant plate. The gnomes were not armed for battle, but their machines certainly were, gears and gizmos spinning with a distinctly ominous humming sound.
And here, surrounding Lysath himself, were his own people, the Kaldorei, their haughty and angular faces reflecting both disgust and suspicion as they surveyed their surroundings. The night elves still had not learned to trust their allies completely, the young warrior mused, and likely they never would. Still, they had promised their aid, and against such a threat as the Scourge, every possible type of aid was necessary.
And that, thought Lysath with a shake of his head, was what brought him to his current ethical misgivings. When the night elves had promised every warrior and every druid, they had meant every warrior and every druid, down to the very last man and woman.
Almost without meaning to, he darted another glance up the rise which overshadowed the gathered Alliance troops, toward the sheltered hill where the druids of Darnassus would be preparing their powerful magic. Somewhere beneath those trees was his mate, Isalea Talonwing, six months pregnant with their first child. It was going to be a girl; Isa knew somehow, although Lysath had no idea how she could be so certain. The thought of having a daughter always brought a radiant smile to his mate's face and lit an ardent fire in her bright silver eyes. Lysath didn't much care what the child's gender was, so long as it loved its mother quite as much as Isa already loved her unborn baby.
But it may never get the chance to love her, he grimly reminded himself. Now that they have called her here to fight in their war. Who commands a pregnant woman to fight?!
The thought of his mate run through on the end of a Death Knight's runeblade made Lysath sizzle anew with rage. It was unthinkable that they should call Isa to be here, and unforgivable that Lysath should have allowed her to come. But he knew that she—and he—had had no choice in the matter. If the Scourge were allowed to overrun the Eastern Kingdoms, it would be only a matter of time before the necrotic army made its way across the sea to Darnassus, and then they would be doomed either way.
Better to finish this business before it ever gets started.
"Commander Starspeaker!" someone called to him.
Lysath turned his head to answer the call, immediately bowing at the sight of the High Priestess, Tyrande Whisperwind. She was a tall and austere-looking woman, her eyes glinting with a bright inner light which Lysath knew to be the mark of Elune. Despite her severe appearance and her intimidating war garb, however, Tyrande's smile at him was kind, and Lysath returned the smile gratefully.
"High Priestess Whisperwind," he said respectfully. "How fare you?"
Tyrande shook her head. "In truth, not well," she said quietly. "The undead march ever closer. I can feel their contamination in the air." The look on her face said quite plainly that she found it repulsive.
"Do you think we will succeed?" Lysath asked.
"We must succeed." Tyrande looked at him with a frank expression. "Otherwise, the whole of Azeroth will surely die."
Lysath bowed his head in acknowledgement of the truth of her words, though they were hard to hear from someone as influential as Tyrande. Her attitude might turn the tide of this battle; the Kaldorei followed her every word.
"And the druids?" he asked, to distract himself. "How go their preparations?"
At this, the high priestess gave him a knowing but gentle smile. "Isalea is fine," she said with a soft chuckle.
Lysath flushed slightly, but Tyrande only laughed. "I know what it is to be in love, Commander Starspeaker," she said. "I, too, had a druid for a mate once. You get used to worrying about them."
"High Priestess, she is to have a child." He found that his voice sounded suddenly desperate, almost pleading. "Is there anything…?"
Tyrande was already shaking her head sadly. "Unfortunately not," she replied, and there was sincere and honest sorrow in her tone. "I will command the druids to keep her at the rear of their lines, but she is a Druid of the Talon, and will not, I suspect, take kindly to being coddled. And we need her, Lysath."
"I know, High Priestess," Lysath sighed. "I will not take any more of your time."
"I came to give you a message," Tyrande said, inclining her head to him as she turned to go.
"What is that?" Lysath asked curiously.
"Have hope." Tyrande smiled gently, and then the smile evolved and became something else; something fierce and almost feral. "And do not let the undead get behind your lines."
She vanished as quickly as she had arrived, and Lysath turned his eyes back toward the horizon and the promised arrival of the risen hordes.
The Scourge poured over them in a sudden flood; Lysath had never seen an army like the Lich King's before in his life. Even in minor skirmishes with minions of the Legion, there had been some kind of organization, some sort of order to both sides. The demons, at least, were sentient enough to group themselves and execute strategies. The undead possessed no such gift of awareness; when they arrived, they arrived all at once, pressing en masse against the gathered Alliance defenders in a wave of bones and claws and teeth. There were ghouls and geists, wights and wraiths and banshees, ectoplasmic oozes of all disgusting varieties; huge flesh-crafted abominations, built from the remnants of corpses in every possible stage of rot, towered over the smaller creatures at the rear of the lines, belching out massive clouds of plague and infection. Behind the abominations sailed the Val'kyr, silent and foreboding on ghostly wings, and beneath them marched the Nerubians, their mandibles and pincers clicking with an eagerness audible even across the wide field which separated them from the defensive line.
"Prepare yourselves, men!" Lysath called to his gathered warriors. The Kaldorei men and women let up a fierce cry, raising swords and glaives in answer to their commander's call. Lysath bowed his head momentarily and uttered a brief but fervent prayer.
Blessed Mother Moon, please watch over my Isa. Keep her safe, and keep our daughter safe.
"They are upon us!" someone shouted from the humans' line.
And so they were.
Immediately, all of Lysath's strength and attention was engaged in keeping the undead waves from breaking through his living barrier of soldiers. All around him, shouts and screams ascended from the battlefield into the sky as living and undead warrior alike clashed and fell with the strokes of blade and claw.
Behind the lines of melee fighters, the magicians and healers worked at their own tasks; bolts of fire and ice sailed from mages' palms and wands into the pools of zombified creatures, blasting great empty holes into the undead waves where they exploded or froze. Arcane missiles glided serenely overhead to crash into the chests of the abominations, leaving eerily beautiful purple scars of magic along the things' seam-rippled bodies. The priests worked almost as one being, elf and human alike alternating between smiting ghouls with the power of the Light and sending brief bursts of magic to replenish the strength of a comrade or to patch up minor wounds.
The druids still had not made an appearance, and for that, Lysath was almost savagely glad. The longer the defenders could hold back the undead without the help of the druids, the safer that Isa would be. He drove the point of his long sword into a ghoul's ribcage, shattering the bones and sending the thing toppling to the ground; almost immediately, he was set upon by another three of the creatures, each one wrestling with the others to get at him with claws and gnashing molars. He severed their heads with contempt, not bothering to watch them as they fell.
They began, slowly, to punch a hole in the overwhelming flood; the Scourge's numbers, though large, certainly had an end somewhere. But Lysath saw more and more tired defenders beginning to fall to bites and swipes from their opponents. The living, unfortunately, had one serious disadvantage in this conflict: they could become exhausted. The dead could simply roll on forever, if they so chose.
"The druids!" one of the night elf warriors cried. "Look!"
Lysath's heart sank as he saw the first of the roots rising from the ground to ensnare a group of stumbling geists.
The druids had joined the battle at last.
Roots exploded from the earth, tangling around the feet of the marching hordes and bringing them tumbling in great masses to the ground. Bolts of green lightning and sizzling lunar fire exploded over the trapped undead, reducing them to nothing more than piles of ash. In between the weaving roots and the deadly spells darted those druids who chose to adopt different forms as they fought; massive bears and prowling cats and majestic stags—and there, diving from the sky, were the glinting feathers of the hawks and kestrels.
Isa.
Lysath could not tell, at a distance, which of the birds might be his mate in her shapeshifted form. They all looked much the same to him; brownish-grey, swooping blurs delivering deadly strikes to the heads of the Nerubians and the abominations, which were too tall for the defenders on the ground to reach. Still, his heart squeezed tightly every time one of the massive, grotesque corpse creatures reached up and swatted a bird from the sky.
And even with the druids' power, it would not be enough.
"What is that?" a Kaldorei warrior near him gasped, pointing beyond the lines of abominations and insectoid creatures to where a new group of opponents had just become visible. Unlike the shambling, shuffling ghouls, these creatures stood upright and walked with slinking, graceful confidence. They were clad head to toe in black armor which seemed to suck in the surrounding light, casting it off as an eerie blue glow. The figures came in all shapes and sizes, but the long and deadly blades swinging from every belt or hand were identical, and Lysath felt a distinct shiver run down his spine at the sight of them.
"Death Knights," he said, more to himself than in answer to his fellow soldier's question.
The Death Knights were the elite warriors of the Scourge; unlike their rotted minions, they were animated by a much more elegant and sinister necromancy, with the result being that they quite resembled what they had once been: living champions of the noble races gathered here in defense of their lands. Despite the resemblance, however, they were still utterly in the thrall of the Lich King, and they killed without mercy or hesitation.
One of the Death Knights raised a commanding hand; Lysath could not hear the order, if it was even spoken aloud, but the abominations drew back and cleared a path for the armored warriors, even as the defenders continued to hail down magic on their heads.
The same Knight gestured almost languorously toward one of the swooping druids, and in moments, the bird had been yanked from the sky by long tendrils of dark energy, its thin neck clamped securely in the Death Knight's glove. The undead soldier gave one quick jerk of his wrist, and the shapeshifted druid fell lifeless to the ground beneath him.
"Tell the druids to get down!" Lysath shouted, fear releasing a burst of adrenaline into his veins. Luckily, the druids already seemed to have taken the hint, and were soaring away from the line of Death Knights to disappear back into the glade from which they had come, presumably to take shelter. Lysath forced himself not to look at the dead kestrel on the ground.
It's not Isa. It can't be Isa.
He had very little time to think about it; the Death Knights surged forward and engaged the Alliance soldiers, their attack eerily absent of war cries or any sound at all other than the stamp of their footsteps on the earth. Lysath readied his blade again, preparing for a much bitterer and longer fight.
The Death Knights quickly broke the defenders' lines, felling the soldiers left and right. Lysath felt a stab of shame, but he tamped it down and gritted his teeth, holding his own as best he could. Slashes decorated his arms and torso, and his long, inky blue hair was matted with blood, but still, he did not fall. He could not fall; he had to keep them away from the glade.
Two of the shadowy warriors sprinted past him and up the rise, following the trail that the druids had traced toward the glade. With an anguished shout, Lysath disengaged from his own opponent and raced after them, slipping on blood-drenched grass as his exhausted legs carried him toward the stand of dead trees. The Death Knights reached the glade before he did, disappearing beneath the shadow of the tangled, interlocked branches.
"Isa!" Lysath shouted, hoping somehow to get a warning to his mate before they could reach her. "Isa, run!"
Please, my love, please run.
The glade was much deeper and darker than he had expected; although the trees were dead and leafless, their boughs had snarled together into a nearly impenetrable wall of prickly thorns and poking twigs, blotting out a good deal of the reddish sunlight. What did manage to make its way to the ground was patchy and intermittent; luckily for Lysath, he was accustomed to doing things mostly in the dark, since the Kaldorei were a generally nocturnal race. He navigated his way frantically between the twisting trunks, following the distantly fading sound of the Death Knights' footfalls.
A scream—a woman's scream—erupted from somewhere deeper within the glade, and Lysath let go his own cry of rage and fear in response. He did not know if the voice was Isa, but the Death Knights had clearly reached the druids' hiding place. Those who could not run would be slaughtered.
A gash on his side was beginning to burn, and Lysath cursed his own frailty, urging his weakening legs onward, toward the rising sounds of death. More screams resounded from the druids' camp, along with the sickening sounds of blades piercing flesh, heavy and final.
"Isa!" he screamed, hoarsely. He knew she would not hear him, whether she were alive or dead. His voice was fading with his strength.
At last, he stumbled into the camp, only to behold it—the horror of the Death Knights' savage work. Bodies littered the small clearing, some decorated with multiple wounds, others with single, slowly bleeding punctures to the chest or abdomen. They were all dead, that much was certain. The Death Knights had vanished; whether they had left for good or were just circling around to get him, Lysath neither knew nor cared. All he knew was that he had to search these faces; he had to discover if his mate lay among the slain. His heart heavy and sick, he moved into the camp and began bending down to inspect the tortured corpses, feeling both relieved and more terrified every time one of them was not Isa.
A footfall, and then another, made him look up, his hand moving instantly to the hilt of his sword. Someone was stepping out from beneath the trees—someone clad in the green-brown robe of the druids, torn and bloodied. It was a woman, unusually short for a Kaldorei, with a long braid of scarlet hair which draped heavily over one shoulder. Her head was bowed low, her hand clutching a discarded sword, which she dragged along with her.
Lysath almost fell to his knees with the staggering force of his relief.
"Isa! My love, you are safe!" He immediately moved toward her, feeling acutely the weakness in his ankles and calves. He had been running for a long time, and only now was the true exhaustion beginning to set in.
Isa did not look up at him, only continued to step forward, one foot after the other, dragging the sword behind her. It was a blood-coated scimitar, one of the Kaldorei warriors' blades, and its tip left a shallow rut in the earth as it traced a path behind the young woman's feet.
"Isa?" Lysath looked at her more closely, concern and worry creasing his brow. "Are you all right?" Her steps were unusually heavy and off-rhythm, without any of her customary grace of movement, but Lysath could not really blame her for being stunned and distressed. She had probably watched all of these druids, her closest friends, being slaughtered around her. How she had managed to escape was a miraculous mystery.
"It will be all right, my moon rose." He had reached her now, and he raised his hands to pull her to his chest in a soothing embrace. "I promise you. I will not let anything harm you."
Isa raised her head.
The shock which flooded over Lysath at the sight of her face curdled quickly into utter, chilling despair and rage. Her cheeks were marred with slashes, one lip split and gently bleeding, but he was not focused on that. Her eyes, her beautiful silver eyes, which had so many times enthralled him and captured his heart, had turned a deadly, icy blue, burning with an unearthly and almost demonic light.
"No," he whispered.
The Death Knight raised her scimitar wordlessly, and Lysath could not even think to defend himself as she plunged it deep into his abdomen.
An explosion of pain burst across his consciousness, and he collapsed, the agony and his weakness combining to incapacitate him wholly. Isa let the sword go and stood over him, staring emotionlessly down at him with those haunting, horrifying eyes. And now the other corpses around her were beginning to stand to their feet, too, sapphire light flickering to life beneath every pair of lids as they were raised anew in undeath.
She is dead. My beloved, my partner, my lifemate…I have failed her. I let her die, and our daughter with her.
Lysath's sight was flickering now, fading to darkness, but he felt the tears as they streamed from his dimming eyes.
"I am so sorry…my love," he whispered.
And Lysath Starspeaker departed then from life.