AN: Hello and welcome to the 9th chapter of Untold Stories. This is another 'Worst Case Scenario' with Amara and Isvia. Indirectly, this is a sequel to the very first chapter of this series "Words we wished we'd said" And an even further sequel to "Home of the Howling Wind". Weeh!

Anatomy of a loss

Isvia wanders the shattered remnants of her life like she's sleepwalking. Her eyes are open and her legs carry her onwards, but she is blind and deaf and numb to the world.

She had just learned to feel again, look at the world and think that maybe, in time, she could come to enjoy it. Both of them had been so broken that they thought they would die, their life seeping through the cracks and staining their souls as it dripped away. Amara had restlessly searched for some intangible purpose and Isvia had grasped and scrabbled at fading threads of memory, desperate for just a glimpse of what it had been like to be alive.

They'd been broken beyond repair and their meeting saved both their lives, because they'd both been on the verge of collapse.

They'd been broken and they'd used parts of themselves to patch each other, sew shut and stuff the cracks, stem the bleeding and glue pieces together, one day, one lingering gaze and one akward embrace at a time. They weren't whole, but together there were missing at least a little bit less of themselves than if they were alone. It had been enough. Certainly more than either of them had anticipated.

Isvia wanders the shattered remnants of what has become her life and tries to remember what came before. She comes up with nothing but intangible whisps of moments gone by, faded sepia like an old photograph.

They'd danced a delicate dance, the two of them, a slow, at times intimate waltz on the edge of madness. Sometimes, one of them leaned out over the abyss and the other would act as a counterweight. They took each other's fear and filled the leftover space with a thousand moments together, stolen touches and given kisses and the looks shared in the breathless exitement after surviving another impossible battle.

They'd become something greater than themselves, an entity with two bodies, who were so different, yet the same. Isvia&Amara. Two sides of the same coin, two names for the same being. They'd been as whole as they's ever be, in this state of merged existence.

She'd taught Amara how to fight, and she had taught Isvia how to feel. The Warrior would trace all the scars on the Death Knight's body like they were beautifull and looked upon the monster that she was with awe and adortaion.

Isvia wanders the shattered remnants of what had once been her life and blinks at the blood on her gauntlet - rubbing off in sticky flakes and stubbornly seeking refuge in the creases of the leather and etchings of the metal – incomprehending as to how it got there. She can't remember who's it is, only that it isn't hers. Her axe weighs heavy in her hand, dripping blood and there's just so much that she's forgotten. She blinks her eyes over and over again and the world goes by in a rapid series of snapshots, different every time she lifts her eyelids and gone the next instant and every image is stained with blood.

Sometimes she snaps awake and regards the mutilated body at her feet with something almost resembling curiosity, wondering how it, how she got here. In these flashes she almost remembers that she has lost something, the feeling in her chest not at all like having her heart cut out, because she did that and this feels worse and she can't remember, doesn't know where this pain she shouldn't be able to feel comes from.

Amara. Amara. Amara.. Amara.. Amara..."

A name keeps playing in her head and she knows that it should mean something from the way it makes every dead nerve ending ache, twists like a knife in her chest. So she wanders the world, dead and numb and at the same time alive and in agony, in search of just a glimpse, an idea of why this name makes her feel like it does. Because this name must be important, and she wishes she'd just remember, because maybe then she could finally sleep.