Timeframe: Mid-autumn, when the Nexus begins pulling heroes into the storm. After Garrosh Hellscream's deposition and escape from trial, and before the Iron Horde breaches the Dark Portal. Before Debts and Favors and leading up to Informed Opinions.
Valéria is five years old.
Swirling embers of light kindled and clustered in the space of the lofty study in Silvermoon City, coalescing... and then dispersing from the newly-appeared form of the Thalassian woman who claimed ownership of these chambers.
A shimmering mana wyrm uncoiled itself from around Aranya's arm, slithering off to reacquaint itself with the familiar rooms of its mistress, while the first thing that the arcanist herself did was take note of the hour on this world by looking up through the round skywindow in the dome of her study's ceiling, at once discerning from the angles of the light that it was mid-afternoon. Sliding a satchel from her slender shoulder and discarding it upon a chair near a work table, she strode over to her desk to see if any correspondences had arrived for her, having informed some of her contacts that she would be in Quel'thalas for a while and asking them to direct such things to her here for the time being.
There was a letter bearing the Consortium's seal, from Gezhe, detailing the state of some trade deals that she held a stake in and the expected gross total of her percentage at this time. Another letter was from the venerated sin'dorei seer, Voren'thal, informing her of his plans to make his own visit to Quel'thalas and that he hoped to see her - preferably not at one of Lord Saltheril's parties - and she smiled reading the last few lines.
The last letter was from one of the lords of House Sunstriker, offering to personally take "dear, charming Valéria" under his wing for training in the ways of the paladin with the Blood Knights. Aranya groaned, shoulders slumping and her hands dropping to her sides, still holding her letters. Her head bowed and her eyes closed as she lifted one hand to rub at her forehead and temple with the tips of her fingers and thumb. This really was not a subject that she had wanted to be reminded of just now.
It was true that Valéria had a very curious and helpful nature, and though she still understood little of the world, she was adamant about standing for was she thought was right. She had even come up with her own battlecry more than a year ago, though it didn't sound so fearsome being shouted by a small girl. But nothing had been formally decided yet with regards to her training and education. It was a decision that Aranya did not want to rush or consider lightly.
Lifting her head, she regarded the letter again...
It felt likely to her that she would be penning a very polite reply to the Blood Knight lord, along the lines of "honored, flattered, and thank you, but no."
A sudden low clacking sound had her turning around in the direction of the chair where she had left her satchel. The mana wyrm had managed to force the bag wide open and was now chewing on one of the items that had been inside, a crystalline object commonly used by the Auchenai, called a soul mirror.
"Hey now! Stop that!"
The translucent creature retreated with a squeak, dropping the thing from its angular jaws and ducking to coil around one of the legs underneath the chair, its head poking tentatively out and upwards, like an eel. Slanting a narrow-eyed look at the mana wyrm with a wry twist of her mouth, the elf retrieved her satchel and its contents. Closing the bag, she took it over to another work table that stood close to a stand of shelves that was pushed up against the wall, with various bags, bottles, vials, boxes, and assorted other things lining them. Still holding the soul mirror in one hand, she opened a closed cabinet that was next to the shelves... and laughed out loud with surprise at being greeted with the sight of a blue, stuffed dragon doll with shimmering horns and wings, sitting on one of the interior shelves.
It belonged to Valéria. It must have been left there by accident the last time the little girl had joined Aranya in this study.
Grinning and chuckling, the arcanist set the soul mirror on one of the cabinet's shelves, and then reached for the dragon doll. She would put it in her satchel to be returned to its owner. But as she lifted the doll, she noticed a familiar small black box that had been resting just behind the fanciful toy. Her expression changed immediately.
It's here? How on Azeroth could I have forgotten that I left it here?
Aranya set the doll down on the table behind her, and then carefully, reverently grasped the box that was in the cabinet and opened it. Inside rested a ring made of gold. It boasted a single garnet gem of deepest red, cut in the shape of a teardrop, flanked by two golden wings, spread wide over the band, and crowned with a golden star. The Ver'Sarn signet ring. Passed down since the earliest days of Quel'thalas and the founding of the first Sunwell.
Aranya closed her eyes, carefully bringing the box in close to her chest. Somehow she had forgotten that this was where she had left it. She had thought that she had left it in her family's old villa by the sea, or the house she'd acquired long ago for herself on the fringes of troll country - which she had lately been considering selling. Her father, Valtheras, had given the ring to her... when he formally forfeited everything of the Ver'Sarn estate to her a handful of years ago.
She had lost count of how many times she replayed that day in her mind. Dorogan had been - and still was - vociferously disgusted with the old quel'dorei for what he saw as abandoning her. For never coming home to kin and kingdom, for never really owning up to what burdens his child had to carry in his stead. Aranya had told him to let it go, it wasn't his business, and it wasn't worth it to her to have to bear what she would live without if she never forgave a father that she had ever and always loved, adored, and missed so much.
Unconsciously, Aranya pulled the ringbox even closer to her, and it brushed against the pendant of the necklace that Rhovin had given to her for her birthday.
Her eyes suddenly flew open with the realization that neither Dorogan nor her father knew about her and Rhovin. The orc knew that he existed, she had told him that much, but he didn't know yet of how things were between the two elves. Knowing what the proud son of the Bleeding Hollow clan would undoubtedly say when she saw him again, Aranya couldn't help smiling. "About damn time, woman!" And then he would want to congratulate the crafty son of a goat that had finally gotten hold of her attention and tell him to "never let this impossible girl out of your sight."
Pity for Dorogan that the man in question could be every bit as delightfully "impossible" as she herself was, thought Aranya with a grin.
And Father?
A softer gleam took hold in the fel-saturated eyes of the Ver'Sarn heiress. Her mother had tried in the past to arrange her into some sort of match that would secure prestige and influence, but her father had made it clear on no uncertain terms that he didn't care if his only child ran off with a southsea deckhand, so long as he made her the happiest woman in all Azeroth.
Closing the box, Aranya returned the ring to where it had sat inside the cabinet, and spared one last glance at the soul mirror before closing the cabinet up again. The mage had theories, ideas about the draenei-crafted object. She knew that it was used by the Auchenai priesthood to commune with spirits, but given all the strange trans-dimensional phenomena that she and some of her associates had been involved with over the past few months, she wondered if it could be safely made use of as an active focus for magic across the barriers of space and time. Gaining any ground with those ideas, however, required knowledge, going to the source, and so she'd tracked down what information she could collect on Auchenai soul magic - the scrolls were in the satchel that she had brought with her. Friends and colleagues alike were curious about what her findings might yield, but she would not attempt any experimentation with the soul mirror until she had a better understanding of what she could be dealing with.
She had only gone over some of the scrolls briefly. The older texts talked of things like bringing solace to the departed and seeing to the peace of their rest. The newer ones contrasted sharply in philosophy by dwelling on the call of the Void, speaking with chilling tones of justification with regards to things such as violating the sanctity of another's soul. But the clues were all there. The true task was in sorting through the mindset of the authors and their spiritually-focused perspective. At face value, the works of the Auchenai were far more of a thing for priests than scholars.
Unbidden, the face of one priest in particular flashed across her mind, one who could make the breath in her chest turn cold, and the arcanist shuddered with the unwanted recollection of Lutero Thorne.
If there was anyone she knew of that could be so completely devoid of remorse for things such as the Auchenai fell to, it was he. She didn't doubt that he might even relish it. Granted, Aranya was no hypocrite. She was well aware of how she had preyed on other beings and creatures herself in the past, in the days when she had gloried in the gifts of the Betrayer, but even then, she'd had her limits. Lutero seemed disinclined to honestly having any.
Just as Aranya was gathering the scrolls out of her satchel to stow away on a Thalassian-made bookshelf that magically hovered and rotated in the air, a clink-clink noise, followed by a soft thump was heard from somewhere above and slightly behind her, and then in the next instant that followed, a small bag of arcane dust came flying from one of the shelves along the wall and landed smack on top of her head. A cry of surprise and angry annoyance escaped the elf woman, and she whirled around to see the culprit slithering down from where it had been nosing about on her shelves. "Thank you so much for that," she growled through gritted teeth, irritated sarcasm dripping off of every syllable. The mana wyrm cocked its head in an upside-down twist curiously at its mistress, who was now covered in a mess of scintillating dust.
Aranya stormed off to the door of her balcony, not even bothering with the dust that had fallen to the floor. The enchanted broom and other objects that maintained this study would take care of it quickly enough. Once outside, she brushed the dust from her shoulders and clothes, and furiously tried to get it out of her hair, but there was far too much of it that had gotten caught in the night-dark strands, so try as she might, she still could not rid herself of the starry specks of dust that clung to her tresses. Letting out a long, exasperated exhale, she turned to glare at the mana wyrm, who had decided to follow her outside.
The mage snapped out a hand to grasp it by the snout once it had slithered close enough. Not hard enough to hurt it, but firmly enough to make a point.
"This," she said, lifting up a section of her hair to draw attention to its be-glittered state, "is going to take a couple of hours to wash out. Not to mention I'll have to find a replacement amount for what you've just cost me in an arcane resource, you thoughtless little miscreant." With a downward tug, she released the mana wyrm. The shimmering creature shook its head rapidly from side to side, seeming to recover quite quickly, and became once again no more or less perturbed than it was five minutes ago in all of two seconds. The wyrm slithered down and forward to nose at one of the pouches on Aranya's belt, chittered softly as it coiled around her waist, rubbing its head and elongated back against her, and then looked up at her expectantly.
"You have got to be kidding me," said Aranya, eyes narrowed and one eyebrow quirked in disbelief. "You actually expect that after that I'm going to reward you? No!" The wyrm slid up under her chin, gliding slowly through the air, and then bending its head back to brush against her shoulder before chittering again, a little more plaintively this time.
Aranya tried very hard to maintain a glower at this point. "No!" she repeated. "Now stop it!"
Now the wyrm got right up in her face, just looking at her for a handful of seconds, and then slid back under her chin again.
Aranya couldn't help it.
"Alright," she acquiesced, breaking into a smile. "But for the record, I am seriously displeased with you." She reached into the belt pouch that the devious little creature had been nosing at and pulled out a sugar cube, muttering to herself all the while about being a pushover. She tossed it into the air and the mana wyrm caught it, crunching it between its jaws relishingly. It swallowed and then did some coiling turns in the air, eager for another one. Aranya rolled her eyes as she obliged the little sugarfiend. After finishing its second treat, the mana wyrm just hovered in the air, holding still, looking at her expectantly again.
"One more," she told it. "But that's it." So saying, she reached into her pouch for a third sugar cube, and tossed it. The mana wyrm snapped at it once, but missed, and the sugar cube sailed over the side of the balcony to the streets below. The wyrm dove after it and Aranya dashed to the edge to of the balcony, looking on.
Someone - a man - passed under the archway that ran under Aranya's study just then, emerging into view right as the sugar cube was falling a few inches from his face. The mana wyrm snatched it up with a loud crunch, right by the side of his head, and he pulled back, not having expected this sudden turn of events at all.
"Nice save," called Aranya to the mana wyrm, as it slithered back up to her level.
The man's head snapped up at the sound of her voice, and upon seeing that his handsome face belonged to a particular someone that she knew, Aranya's heart skipped a beat.
Rhovin Thorne smiled broadly up at her, as pleasantly surprised to see her as she was to see him. "Playing games today, huh?" he called up to her.
Aranya laughed. "So it would seem," she replied, smiling brightly back at him.
The warrior squinted his eyes and tilted his head to one side, regarding her for a bit. "Your hair is glittering," he observed.
"Uh-huh," the mage admitted. "Blame this feckless creature," she said, reaching out and giving the mana wyrm a brief, gentle tug by the snout, with a not-at-all-sincere scowl that was made even less serious by her wry smile. "Knocking arcane dust into my hair." The mock-scowl stayed on her pretty face even as the creature in question affectionately coiled up the arm of the hand that had just given its glabrous, angular muzzle a tweak.
"Oh?" Rhovin quirked a whiskery black brow. "Sounds like your games got a little out of hand, then."
"Perhaps," she said, her scowl dissolving into a smile again as she looked back down at him.
He just stood there, smiling warmly up at her for a moment, then with a meaningful nudge of his head he beckoned her to come down.
Aranya's smile widened, and she held up one finger, silently telling him to wait just a moment. Rushing back into her study, she quickly set the Auchenai scrolls where she wanted them on her bookshelf, stuffed the dragon doll still sitting on the work table into her satchel, looped the bag over her shoulder, ran back out to the balcony...
... and kept on running, right over the edge of it.
Anyone who ever thought that Aranya Ver'Sarn would actually take the opportunity to use stairs or lifts as a first resort either didn't know her very well or was just an idiot.
The arcanist grinned as the atmosphere took her, breath catching, spine tingling, senses alert to everything, and muscles tensing, anticipating the right moment, as she dropped towards the red and gold streets below her.
The world's understanding of magic had evolved to where magic-users like Aranya no longer needed to carry things like light feathers in their pockets in order to invoke the powers that would bend space and time to slow themselves should someone fall. The elf woman saw her moment, lifted her arms in a gesture that set glimmers flashing around her hands to match the stellar particles that were caught in her hair, and began slowly descending the last two yards of her fall.
But hardly half a second had passed after her spell, when she was snatched out of the air and spun around by Rhovin.
Aranya laughed, arms still raised in the air like a dancer as she was whirled around and around. Her plan had been to land safely beside the general, but it seemed that his plan was letting her toes be anywhere but solid ground for the time being. Around and around he spun with her. Her arms came down to hold onto him around his neck. Inevitably, she began to feel dizzy, and she let her head fall against his shoulder, closing her eyes and pulling closer into him to let his body take her weight, which he didn't seem to mind. It was something that she did with Etherfang, whenever the dear netherdrake got a little too exuberant in his flight.
It occurred to Aranya that the idea of finding similarities between a netherborne dragon and a man that she had come to feel so much and so deeply for was a rather amusing thought to her. Particularly since which one could be termed more dangerous at any given moment was entirely up for debate, in her estimation.
Rhovin slowed and eventually stopped, and though her body was still resting heavily against his, Aranya managed to slide down so that her booted toes could finally meet the ground while he kept his arms around her, holding her steady. She lifted her head to look him in the eyes, their faces very close.
"Thank you for holding me up," she breathed, with a flushed smile, eyes bright. "I don't think gravity's quite decided what to do with me yet." They both laughed. "I was actually about to call on you, I just had some things to leave in my st-" He didn't let her finish. His mouth was on hers and all she managed was a muffled noise before she completely forgot whatever it was she had been saying, or even thinking about.
Aranya's fel-touched eyes burned hotly and then closed. Her hands slid from Rhovin's shoulders up the sides of his neck, her fingers threaded into his hair, and she leaned into him again while his strong arms pulled her closer, holding her there. Her senses, physical and otherwise, became hyper-aware of him, and she could only too easily feel the latent power within his blood that he never used. She couldn't resist reaching for it with her own, brushing softly at it, coiling with it, and thrumming with gratification when she felt it spark faintly in response to her touch. She didn't care if he didn't know how to reciprocate, at least in that way, it was enough for her that he held her all the more closely, practically flush against himself, and kissed her all the more deeply. His lips brushed down from her mouth to her throat, and he seemed quite satisfied to catch the sight of how her eyes blazed and the sound of her gasping as he did so. She turned her head to find his mouth with hers again, greedy for another taste of him - and he let her.
But it soon became too much. She had to breathe.
Aranya pulled back, carefully re-orienting herself, trying to slow herself down with deep, even breaths. She looked up at the man who had shamelessly stolen what breath she had, and saw him smirk once her eyes met his.
"Did you catch all the stars of Outland in your eyes just for me?"
If Aranya didn't know him better, she would have marveled at how smug he could sound even in a moment like this. There was a time when she might have replied with, "Don't let it go to your head," but it was far too late for that. Besides, she did know him better by now, and she knew the intentions of his heart better than a simple outside observer would to hear him say such words as he did. So instead of opening her mouth to say something blithe and witty, she simply replied with a sly smirk of her own and said, "Yes." Then she leaned in closer to murmur right by his ear, "And I'll gladly take you to the stars later on, if you desire."
Rhovin gave her such a grin that it made her heart lurch into her spine and her insides feel light.
Oh yes, gravity was being very indecisive with her today.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
The thought that wouldn't leave me alone for this was one that I'd had quite a while back, when I suddenly wondered exactly how many times in his life Rhovin might have wished for a pretty girl to fall out of the sky right into his , with Aranya, things like that actually happen, so ta-da! Wish granted! ;D
And this was the first-ever "kiss" that I've ever written because I actually wanted to do it. The other times before this that I'd written such moments between two characters had always been because someone else really wanted to see me write it, or see how I could make it work if the pairing was an unlikely one. It was nice to finally break out of that. Writing things like that for everyone but yourself seems like a pretty sad way to spend one's life as a writer.
I was really glad that Rhovin's creator liked this.