Chaos. Everything in the city and forest, once in perfect order and peace, was now in chaos.
Screams of fear and agony littered the air as thick and damp as the vile stench of blood following it. Elf blood. Sylvanas Windrunner, the ranger-general of Quel'Thalas, still fought back fiercely as the smell only got worse and more sickening.
She tore an arrow from her quiver and sent it flying at a ghoul who came bounding toward her, claws outstretched and mouth wide and open, showing off how it was littered with misshapen teeth and stale spittle. The undead beast fell with a wretched scream as the arrow landed in its skull with a sickening crack, stumbling to the ground in a heap.
Sylvanas didn't know what to do. She had tried to defend the forest and city from the undead attackers, but with every ranger and warrior that fell to their relentless horde, the invader's force would swell and grow stronger. They first fell back from the first gate to the second, and then back to the city itself where they thought they would be safe. At first this seemed like the case, until their foes found the key of three moons that would allow them access, and now all hell was breaking loose.
Everything was aflame like a funeral pyre. The entire city of Quel'Thalas; the city she had protected all her life, was turning to ash before her very eyes. Warrior and innocent alike were being slaughtered like animals by the undead aberrations, who showed no mercy in their lolling eyes and limp actions.
But still Sylvanas fought. She knew, deep down in her rapidly-beating heart that it was hopeless, but still she defended those who fled. Many of her people ran to escape the carnage, and many were cut down and butchered in the process, but some managed to get away, in part due to their ranger-general and her soldier's meddling of their enemies' massacre.
A skeleton, who still had dry specks of dirt covering its bony frame, began to charge at her next. Wrapping her bow over her shoulder and pulling a shortsword from its sheath, the elf slashed it at the being's thigh, and it toppled to the ground. Gnashing its teeth, the skeleton's makeshift claws reached for Sylvanas to tear her skin, but one swift stomp from her armored boot to its skull foiled the attack, and put the wretch out of its misery.
Panting, having exerted much stamina over the entire day, Sylvanas looked around at the carnage surrounding her. She was alone. All the men and women fighting alongside her had either fallen to this scourge or escaped, leaving her behind either way. The dead, both old and new, littered the ground like a cruel mockery of fallen leaves in autumn. With the skeleton she had slain being the last of the undead to befall her immediate sight, she dropped to her knees in despair and, whilst swallowing in deep breaths of the stagnant air surrounding her, her thoughts turned to her family for some tiny, minuscule shred of comfort, especially when she remembered her beloved sister, Vereesa.
She knew Vereesa was fine and well away from this battlefield, but the knots in her stomach were full of worry. She found the feeling become drowned out by the sound of heavy hooves stomping slowly over the ground from behind, approaching her in an ominous fashion that sent a chill of frost down her spine. Lifting herself up to her feet once more, she turned around and came face-to-face the source of all this bloodshed once again.
The traitor of Lordaeron, Prince Arthas Menethil. He was astride his undead steed, whose horned visage was skeletal and deceased, but somehow full of life. While moderately long hair as white as snow dangled from Arthas's dark-armored form, what was gripped in the one hand that wasn't holding his horse's reigns was a sword with a long, rune-covered blade that reeked of evil itself.
"I salute your bravery, elf, but the chase is over," he spoke to her in a cold, emotionless voice. Sylvanas would have none of his sarcasm, and pulled her bow from her shoulder, ready for the death she knew was to come.
"Then I'll make my stand here, butcher. Anar'alah belore." She cocked her bow upward and sent an arrow directly at the death knight with blinding quick and deadly precision, aiming for his white-haired head. With an inhuman speed, Arthas brought his sword up and blocked the expertly-shot projectile, prompting Sylvanas to prepare another, reaching behind for her quiver.
She wasn't fast enough.
Arthas has spurred his horse forward, and the undead equine obeyed with a beastial snort and winny. He reared his unholy weapon back, and with a single swing it sliced cleanly through her bow, cutting it in two with barely any effort, and continued on its path of harm by cleaving its cold, supernaturally sharp blade across the she-elve's chest. Crying out in pain as bone and flesh was rent in two, crimson ichor already spilling from the wound, Sylvanas was thrust into the air from the sheer force of the blow and crashed onto her stomach a short distance away. Attempting in vain to regain her footing, she was only able to lift her face up before a fiery, yet at the same time frozen pain overtook every nerve and fiber of her being starting at her wound, and she coughed and hacked blood onto the green grass below, staining it with a red puddle.
The noise of mail armor rattling behind her told the ranger-general that the man had dismounted. Rubbing the stream of red from her chin with the back of her hand, she only barely managed to look up and stare at the death knight as he casually walked toward the front of her, looking down upon her with a lifeless glare.
"F-finish it!" she spat at him, her voice still full of the defiance she used in her ultimately futile efforts to hinder his progress. "I deserve... a c-clean death..."
Arthas smiled at her, but the look of triumph was as dead and uncaring as the rest of his minions' expressions. "After all you put me through, woman, the last thing I'll give you is the peace of death," he murmured, bring the tip of his blade down to meet her face, allowing her to examine its jagged edge.
Sylvanas knew what his words meant the moment they started to leave his mouth. Flying into a panic, the elf struggled harder than she had ever struggled before, all to resist what would come next. Trying her best to ignore the crippling, agonizing pain she felt by doing so, she tried to stand, to fight back one last time, to escape this hideous fate, but to her unbridled anguish, could not. "N-no! You wouldn't dare!" she cried out, watching helplessly as Arthas raised his sword, Frostmourne, in preparation of bringing it down. A purple glow began to radiate off of it, he sent it to his target.
And as Frostmourne pierced her, all Sylvanas could do was scream in pain. Shriek as she felt her flesh grow cold and dead. Cry out as she felt dark, alien forces and energies perturb, deform, tear and shred at her very soul, ripping her from the deserved afterlife like a leech from one's skin. And Arthas laughed as he did so, molding her metaphysical being into a dreaded banshee. He grinned malevolently as his newest servant begged for mercy like a sobbing child, begged for a return to the grave as the process neared completion.
Then, as this nightmare only just began, Sylvanas realized something else was happening through the haze. A voice was calling her. It was a guttural, low, unfamiliar voice, and it was shouting her name.
"Lady Sylvanas!"
"Lady Sylvanas," the Deathstalker repeated. As the Banshee Queen came out of her thoughts of her time back when she was still living and breathing, her vividly red eyes snapped open. Taking her head off of her idle palm, she focused on the undead before her. He was scrawny and thin-looking Deathstalker, with what little rotted flesh he exposed through his hooded form showcasing a sickly green coloration. He possessed a bare, skinless jaw that revealed bleached bone, and his blank eyes (or what was left of them) bore a faint yellow glow that was shared amongst most other Forsaken.
"Yes?" The Dark Lady's voice answered in a cold tone as unwelcomingly frigid as the average temperature of Northrend. To the troop before her, it conveyed nothing but mild annoyance at being disturbed. The loyal undead knelt on one knee and continued with his news.
"The captain of this zeppelin told me that we are nearing the designated Horde encampment," he said, still in the unintentionally grumbling voice. "We're less than five minutes from reaching it."
"I thank you for this revelation. You may go," Sylvanas obliged. Saluting her, the Deathstalker turned his hunched frame about and began to hobble off.
As soon as her servant had disappeared from the room, Sylvanas began to think back to the vision of the past she had just experienced. She lifted her hand and looked at it with a curiosity she had not shown for some time. Using the other limb to grasp at the cloth lining its bottom, she peeled it off slowly, if only to once more examine what was hiding behind it as she so very rarely did, and as it was finally removed, she could see her hand completely. The skin beneath was as smooth as an elf could have, but it was also as dead, dry, and decayed as any of the Forsaken under her command. Its complexion was as clammy and dull blue as the sea of this far land, and to her utter anguish and self-loathing, the Dark Lady came to the realization that she had nearly forgotten the peach-colored tint it once resembled.
Had she still been new to the numb lifelessness that enveloped every sense of her being, she may have let out a moan, or even sighed, but this was no surprise to her any longer. She had been cursed with undeath for a great many years now; long enough to let it become an average dealing of her existence. To let it govern every move she made, from the crack of dawn, to the darkness of dusk.
Placing the gloved gauntlet back onto her hand in a much quicker motion than when she had removed it, Sylvanas curled it into a fist, earning a squelch of the leather. She couldn't help but murmur a small chuckle at her own foolishness for reminiscing on the past as she pushed her seat back and stood up. Her cape sagging about behind her, the Dark Lady left her room using the same path as the Deathstalker before her.
Walking through the goblin airship, she witnessed all of the Forsaken undead and tech-savvy goblins working on keeping their method of travel airborne and functioning. The betrayal of Putress, the grand apothecary of the Undercity, and Varimathras, the demonic Dreadlord she had once trusted, was what originally dragged her from the war in Northrend in the first place. After unwillingly gaining the Alliance's help in quashing the pair's treacherous hides, as well as slaying any Forsaken and undead loyal to them, she boarded the first goblin zeppelin back north with only one goal back in her mind.
As she watched the ever white, near-barren landscape below, her thoughts soon turned to Arthas, as they so very often did in these perilous days. The human prince-turned-Lich King of the Icecrown Citadel and undisputed commander of the entirety of the Scourge's forces was the man - no, the fiend - that had slain her in cold blood. He did not stop there, though. After his accursed sword Frostmourne, the same sword that had callously murdered and stole the souls of hundreds of her people beforehand, had run her through, Arthas used his vile magics to tear her soul from her dying body, perverting her spirit and transforming her into an undead banshee. He wasted no time in sicking her at the remaining elven people she swore with her life to defend, all against her will, and the horror that followed was an unbearable scar on her memory. The cries of the helpless as their ears began to crack and bleed from the volume of her deadly, wailing cries. The mercy begged for by children as her phantasmal claws tore their flesh asunder like jagged knives through wet paper. The tears she, Sylvanas, a once-proud elf, had tried and failed to shed as her utter damnation for all eternity was sealed in little more than a day, and how powerless she was to stopping it.
And for added torment to suffer under, as impossible as such a feat could seem at that point, Arthas kept her original body locked inside of an iron coffin, just out of reach for her to grasp. For time immemorial, all she knew was pain without feeling. Sight without seeing. Otherworldy voices that rummaged about inside of her head, defiling what she knew was right and wrong. The only emotion she felt that she knew was real and her own was the unbridled hatred for the man that had done this to her. The man that she was on her way to help kill at this very moment.
As she thought back to how she eventually escaped the Lich King's control and retook her body, the airship finally reached its destination and landed amidst the camp. Leaving the zeppelin behind, dry, coarse dirt crunching beneath her heels, Sylvanas saw her new surroundings with an open, always-observant mind. The Horde encampment was like most other garrisons she went to, and it was filled to the brim with defensive barricades and armored troops. Lumbering orcs and gangly trolls with long tusks adorning their simple mouths walked past, some of them occasionally shifting a wary glance in her direction in realization of who she was, while massive tauren, whose bovine features had an air of venerability to them, paid very little mind to her presence. Sylvanas was about to walk further until her elf ears detected light footsteps coming from behind her, also exiting the zeppelin, and knew who made them right off.
"Follow me, and once the next detachment of warriors goes out to speak with the Argent Crusade, I'll have a word with their tacticians. Their help or not, we set my plan into motion at once," she said to the two in a firm voice that lacked any form of her usual dry wit. The pair of Dark Rangers tailing her, two fellow former high elves she had come to know as Malynas and Azyn, nodded their hooded heads in assent.