"My parents were adventurers too. Maybe that's why I decided to stick to patrolling cities and not really venturing out: so I won't end up like they did."

Astariel, chatty as ever, led the way as Navarion listened to her prattle on about the city and her family background. It helped to pass the time, and at least provided him with a measure of narration about the city that had slowly become home for both him and Zhenya. It only distracted slightly from the natural beauty of the forest.

Similarly to the top of the battlements at the city walls, patrolling the inner forests were a dream assignment for those on guard duty. Huge swathes of the area enclosed by the New Nendis city walls were undeveloped forests, empty save from wisps and the wildlife. It didn't take more than two units to cover it, and after having not seen Astariel for at least another month, it at least provided him a chance to catch up with a new friend.

The separation was better. It made it difficult for any sort of attachment to grow, and things remained strictly platonic. Given all the fighting between him and Zhenya that never seemed to end, almost always caused by her manic hot and cold act, it was the preferred setup for his friendship with Astariel. Whether it was maturity or guilt from mistakes past, he'd pledged himself to taming the self styled but secretly sensitive draenei. The last thing he needed was an object for his wandering eyes to fixate on.

As it was, Astariel also happened to be a great conversational partner, which helped him to think with his brain more than something else.

"Can you believe that my parents actually got engaged before the Sundering even happened?" she asked rhetorically while they both tried to squeeze in between two trees in the wood, her hips and his shoulders once again proving troublesome. "My mom actually waited for him when the men all went to sleep for the first time. He woke up around the time of the Satyr War and they got married at the end, just before he slept again."

"And they didn't have any other kids being together so long?" Navarion asked near absentmindedly. It's not that he was disinterested in the discussion; he had just fallen into the habit of asking since she was more talkitive than him.

She laughed heartily, letting her hood almost slip off as the little ear holes lost their grip on her slender ears. "You know what elven birth rates are like; that, and the fact that dad was always asleep, meant that I'm the first and only." Taking care to hold a tree branch for him, she continued to lead him in the dense undergrowth. "The old fountain is just around the bend, by the way."

"So this...fountain, is it? Your mother told you it had been here at Nendis since the time of the old world?"

At that comment, her eyes lit up; she could possibly be a tour guide were she not a surprisingly competent archer, seeing as how she appeared to be a scholar of the region's history. "Yes, she did! Even in the times when the highborne reigned supreme, the health fountain was there. She relocated here when immortality started and would spend a lot of time here. After immortality when she and my father were finally together again, she used to bring him here sometimes."

An ominous feeling settled in, and Navarion noticed how far they were from any other people. The sheer size of New Nendis was daunting, as large as the legal limits of any other busy transnational port, but less than half of the area was actually inhabited. Because the inhabited parts consisted of hollowed out, livable trees anyway save the few traditional meeting lodges for the huntresses, much of New Nendis just looked like a gigantic, fenced in forest. The serene calm suddenly felt a bit too quiet for him.

"It's a shame we weren't able to bring the others," he surmised out loud as he let her gain more ground than him, pretending to stumble on a rock. "Calil and Thresha would certainly enjoy seeing it, and Zhenya might appreciate it too."

A part of him felt rather presumptuous, arrogant even, to assume there was a hidden meaning to Astariel's words. He detested the paranoia he'd developed after a few bad experiences when joining parties including rogues. The Sentinels employed none, however, as even the nightblades were honor bound, and Astariel was not one of them anyway. When she passed over the comment involving Zhenya without bristling, he almost felt a pang of guilt for jumping to conclusions.

"Oh, I'm sure anybody would. It's a lovely place, isn't it?"

"Huh?" He did a double take when she stopped ahead of him, not having noticed the shimmering light brighter than that given off by the wisps. "Oh, we're here!"

Much of the masonry around the base of the fountain had eroded. In the old world, as his mother had told him, construction was done by hand like the other races did in the modern world. Since Nendis hadn't been rebuilt until now, nobody had repaired a lonely fountain of health in the woods. The water still flowed, however, and he could sense the natural, non-arcane Magic radiating from it. So closely had the undergrowth inched up to the forgotten fountain that there wasn't even a clearing around it; they both had to straddle the trees and the canopy enclosed it entirely from the starlight.

Light blue from the fountain reflected onto Astariel's face, mixing with the silver of her eyes to cast a metallic glow on her bare cheeks; like all women of the post-immortality generation, she hadn't received any facial tattoos; those had to be earned, typically around the first century of a woman's life as part of her coming of age ceremony. Glee flitted across her face as she gazed into the fountain, perhaps remembering some memory of her parents. How lucky he was that his were still alive...if only he visited home more than every few years.

"Do you have any coins?" she asked innocently and without pretense.

Navarion bristled. Women and money were not two things he had good memories of when they were mixed. Paranoia once again taking over, he fought one of many internal battles he found himself involved in when he was around both Astariel and Zhenya, his conscience telling him to entertain her friendly question and something darker whispering to him memories of having been used just as he'd used others.

He felt his coin purse, having correctly guessed that movement would rip him away from horrible introspection. It jingled, and a smile devoid of greed spread across her face. "I have some copper coins I brought with me from Everlook," he admitted, trying not to sound suspicious. If she took offense, she didn't show it. "I guess I don't really need them here, seeing as how the Sentinels use paper money."

Holding her hand out, she should have looked presumptuous yet he could see nothing but a friend borrowing something bearing a significance other than monetary. He took a pile of copper between his scrunched up fingers, which ended filling the palm of her much smaller hand. Although she grew up during a time when the night elves were still part of the Alliance and ostensibly had seen metallic money as a child, she would have grown used to paper money considering the fact that switching to that format was part and parcel of her people once again striking out on their own some time later, just as they always had been. She flexed her palm and watched the coins slide around in her hand as if she'd never seen it before, viewing them more like toys than currency. In her free hand, she took the first of the copper coins and flicked it into the water of the fountain with a limp wrist. It made a plunking sound as it broke the surface and sank fast, reflecting more of the starlight before it hit the bottom.

Grinning like a giddy child, she offered him one of his own coins back in the same dainty, limp wristed fashion. "Be careful what you wish for!" she snickered in an attempt to intentionally sound ominous.

Grinning back at the sheer silliness of it, he wondered how anybody else would react were they to see the two of them flicking coins into a fountain in the middle of the woods, but he didn't actually make a wish. They took turns until he had become twenty three copper pieces poorer, but had found the ridiculous endeavor rather relaxing.

"What did you wish for?" he asked.

"What? Don't ask me, if I tell then it won't come true!" she exclaimed, raising her voice in mock surprise.

"It must be something important, then," he joked. "I wished for new socks."

"No socks for you! And yes, I wished for the most important thing!"

"Which is?"

"No," she laughed, shaking her head. "Not telling."

"Okay, don't," he laughed right back, and she actually huffed in anger when he gave up on pestering her so easily. "Have you told any of the priestesses about this place? So they can restore it?"

Pensive for a moment, she shook her head again. "Eventually they will, but in a way I feel like it will become less special. There's something nice about it only being for the special people in my life."

"Like your mom?" Navarion asked nervously. Her demeanor was plain and not suggestive, but her wording made him uncomfortable again.

Her eyes widened and this time, she was the one caught off guard. "Goddess light her path," Astariel prayed, ever mindful to wish her parents rest in peace. When she continued to stare in the fountain, he realized that he might have made her feel bad in an attempt to reduce his own discomfort, and then he felt bad, too.

"Goddess light both their paths," he invoked. Even if he wasn't practicing the faith of Elune nor the Loa, he still had a certain level of built-in guilt his aunt Unelia's had instilled in him to automatically pray for the dead.

Astariel pursed her lips, obviously trying to hold quite a bit back. "It's been almost forty years since they were taken from me, and I still remember it like yesterday," she murmured into the fountain; he got the distinct feeling that she might have only been vaguely aware of his presence.

"Aw, look, I'm sorry that I menti-"

"You can never really get over it, you know? The generation of our people born before immortality have already mostly died of old age. I should have expected them to pass away before I was ready, but not the way they did. It was so sudden...so..."

When her voice trailed off and she shut her eyes, he got the feeling that she wanted him to finish the sentence for her. Torn between supporting his friend, letting things grow just a little too close between them and falling into a guilt trip of his own for not visiting home enough, he tried to be a supportive friend and comrade.

"It felt so unfair, but you feel spoiled for calling it that because other people also lost their parents while young so you feel guilty for feeling sad?" Technically, Navarion cheated by listening to the spirits; he couldn't claim to naturally be that empathetic or perceptive to the feelings of others, yet another dependency created by the advantages of voodoo.

If her jaw had dropped any more, it would have fallen right off of her skull. It was almost over the top, but the spirits talked to him once more and told him she was sincere. "I...oh...it's..." She began shaking her head for a third time, obviously distraught, and he could already feel the waterworks coming, voodoo or no. "It's not fair!"

She pinched the bridge of her nose at first, fighting to contain herself even as the tears started to trickle down cheeks that looked cute no matter what sort of mood she was in. Her back didn't heave and her breathing sounded normal, but she was tense and unable to speak out loud in the beginning.

Not knowing of any other appropriate action, especially for a friend, he put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her a little closer. She turned into him and hugged his chainmail, letting her forehead rest against his chest. Muffled, choked sobs rang against him as he gripped a tree in his free hand, pretending he needed it for balance. The natural instincts he had to comfort a crying female clashed with his guilty attraction to her and he tried to balance both an appropriate sympathy for her feelings against reminders of how hard he'd worked to convince Zhenya to calm down and stop trying to intentionally piss him off with stories of her past relationships due to her constant, near schizophrenic suspicion about his fidelity all the time. All the while, the beast inside urged him to hold her a little closer, whisper his condolences into her long, slender ear, and...other thoughts he refused to entertain.

"I wish I had the right words to say, but...maybe there aren't always exactly right words for the loss of parents," he started out loud, sincerely at a loss for how to console an orphan who retained mental scars into adulthood. "The best I can say is that everything happens for a reason...that divine wisdom, or whatever flavor of belief one wants to call it, is incomprehensible to us...if it weren't, and we could understand it, then it wouldn't be divine. There could be remifications we couldn't even imagine if things had unfolded any differently." She continued to cry into his chest, and he tried to find the right words to make her feel better, for himself as much as for her. "But if your parents could see you now, I'm sure they'd be happy at how far you've come, and how you're fighting to preserve the heritage of your people after they spent so many millennia defending it."

Sniffling into his chest, she still felt soft and limp in his arms but he could sense the tense sorrow begin to dissipate. "T-they say that...when heroes die...they join their predecessors as stars in the night sky above. They shine more brightly on some nights, adding to the celestial bodies we can see." Talking about Kaldorei religious beliefs seemed to calm her down, giving her something objective and academic to focus on. "For a one time I doubted, but I find that when I stand near the ocean...I can see them. I know it's them."

His own passion waning as hers did, he felt a little safer actually engaging her. "You mentioned that they passed away at Hyjal, shortly after the Cataclysm. That's very far away from the ocean."

"I know; it seems silly, right?" she chortled into the chainmail covering his chest. "But that's the only time I can see them. It makes patrolling New Nendis all the better for me."

A soft hand, firm from gripping her bow but feminine in a strong way, pressed against the side of Navarion's torso. He tensed in fear and in preparation for pushing his crestfallen friend away in her moment of sorrow for Zhenya's sake, but to his relief Astariel was only pushing off of him to stand up straight. So thick was the underbrush that she literally didn't have anything else to grip and their unsure footing in the tangle of roots and stones made it more acceptable.

"It isn't silly," he retorted as she followed his lead in pulling back and searching for another branch to balance against. "Perhaps the significance will make sense to you at a later time; a lot of these signs can be cryptic at first."

"I guess they can be." She looked back at him over her shoulder while leading him out of the woods, an expression on her face that didn't make him uncomfortable but that he still couldn't read. Over high jutting roots and under low hanging branches, they loped like lemurs in order to reach their proper patrol route again before being caught socializing while on duty. "You're so lucky, you know. Your mother is from a rare breed these days."

This time, his discomfort wasn't due to Astariel per se so much as her touching on a sensitive topic for him. "Yeah...mom is...really great. It's like having a moving library for a parent," he joked half heartedly.

"I think I've heard about her before, you know."

Surprise took him before releasing its grip; indeed, Cecilia Hearthglen had become well known in their immediate area, at least, due to the resource many night elves saw in her vast life experience. "Did your mom know my mom?"

"No, I don't think so. They were both pre-Sundering so they probably fought alongside each other, but not enough to remember each other if they did. Their service to nature was so long..." They broke out from the forest at that point, walking along its perimeter and surveying the narrow, naturally paved road weaving a path in between the trees. "So was she really responsible for helping our people to clandestinely open a consulate in Ratchet before we even dropped out of the Alliance, or is that just an urban legend?"

"One hundred percent fact," he said while grinning softly. Now that topic, he could enjoy. "She and my dad were both responsible. It was from a plan they hatched along with Keeper Ordanus of Raynewood, Goddess light his path, the first time my dad visited Ashenvale as a legal guest. Most of what you've heard is probably true."

Dumbstruck, she slowed down to walk side by side with him and stared ahead in awe. "Wow...it's like a piece of history in your household. Your parents helped contribute to the start of our independence from the blue and gold," she remarked in amazement.

"You could say that. Our household was always full of visitors from the Sentinels when we were growing up. Some of them came on official business and others just wanted to ask her a hundred and one questions about everything she's seen over the millennia. But we always just viewed her as mom."

The two of them walked in silence, stunned on her part and melancholy on his, as they rounded another bend on the patrol route they'd decided to share in the inner city forest. Are a few moments, she spoke candidly and probably without pretense as she always did. "I hope I can meet your mother one day," Astariel sighed wistfully.

The muscle in the back of Navarion's neck tensed slightly, and he wondered how Zhenya would react were she to have been spying on the exchange. And knowing her, she would spy if she could. "The doors of the Hearthglen estate are always open for visitors from the Sentinels, during the twilight hours at least."

Thankfully, Astariel said little else as they finished their rounds for the night. Were she to push even further, he might just find himself wishing he'd been assigned to clean up silithid mounds instead.

"No more patrol duty for the next few days," Captain Soraya practically grunted at him. "We'll be cleaning up more silithid mounds like this instead."

Stealth conscious as always, she'd shoved Navarion into a bush while she, Thresha and Calil shadowmelded and observed the movements of the silithid workers carrying out a process of corrupting the once grassy coastal plain half a day's travel from the city. Soldiers, their carapaces jagged and heavy, stood watch, vaguely sensing the six amassed units of night elven infantry surrounding them. It was almost hypnotic to watch them buzz as they carried out their work of desecrating nature. How foolish were so many who thought only humans and orcs could destroy the environment so recklessly...

"Great fun," Navarion quipped from his hiding spot, always the odd man out given his inability to shadowmeld and the Sentinels' strong preference for sneak attacks and assassinations.

"Shush!" Soraya hissed at him. Her voice and face didn't bear spite so much as seriousness; the silithids already looked agitated as it was.

Just like the rest of his unit, the other five units held back; the strike force was in territory which hadn't been surveyed since the latest silithid infestation. It was no coincidence that on a mission where the army wasn't sure what they'd be facing, they sent units that included mercenaries when none had been sent out before. Each of the five other units included once irregular soldier like Navarion, and the only two from the six who could shadowmeld were the reformed satyr and the highborne Mage. The Mage in particular appeared disgruntled; the night elven practitioners of arcane magic were allowed back in to Darnassus when their people were still a part of the Alliance. Ever since the Sentinels had separate as their own faction again, the mages were once more the victims of discrimination, and the man found himself unable to properly enlist. Even the satyr was less standoffish and taciturn.

The three draenei - Zhenya, Dmitri and Tammie - all crouched in the bushes much in the way Navarion had. Lambs offered up for the slaughter, as Tammie had claimed. Thankfully, none of their commanding officers forced them out front before the others struck; at least on the ground, they were treated fairly.

Loudly, Soraya - the highest ranking officer among officers who had been assigned irregulars in their units - whistled in a frequency too low for the silithids to hear. Their primitive nature made the big bugs easy to take out unless they had overwhelming numbers on their side. And of that, the silithids found themselves in no shortage.

In tandem, Navarion began to fire and then reload his gun at the same time the highborne Mage rained arcane blasts onto the very furthest ranks of silithids in order to scare them forward into the slaughter. The soldiers charged first, and Navarion began planting his wards while reloading. Even the drones moved forward, too afraid to move backward into the rain of arcane missiles and perhaps sensing that the two men would be easy prey once the soldier silithids fell and paved the way.

The night elven infantry flanked the silithids shortly thereafter, throwing the insectoids into complete disarray as their heaviest soldiers were struck down by glaives first. The three draenei charged head on after that, driving the frightened drones back into the rain of arcane blasts, their numbers being cut to a handful by the infantry all along the way. The entire skirmish was over in less than five minutes, and not a single silithid escaped.

After the fact, Navarion collected his wards while the group's resident balance Druid, Pontus, took a slow walk with Soraya and two of her fellow officers up and down the mounds which hadn't already been blown to bit by the Mage or hammered down like pegs by Zhenya just because. The others either secured the perimeter or waited for Navarion to heal them from the few injuries they'd incurred.

The whole plain was bordered by forest on two sides, ocean on one and mountains on the last. The pollution that lingered over the southern peninsula of Azshara was absent there in the north, and a swell of pride filled the half elf's heart as he stood next to Thresha, Calil and Zhenya. It was a beautiful scene, so breathtaking aside from the bug mounds that Navarion's mood didn't even deflate when Zhenya pulled her hand away from his attempt to hold it.

"It's amazing, isn't it?" Navarion asked rhetorically while briefly counting the stars over the open field.

Not understanding what he was talking about, Zhenya pretended like nothing had just happened between them and nodded toward all the dead silithids. "Not to me. You shouldn't doubt my prowess."

His wistful stargazing was temporarily interrupted by her strange comment. "I'm sorry, what?"

"I think you'd better recognize." As always, Zhenya's tone was flat and her expression was hidden behind her helmet. There was no way to tell whether she intended it as a joke or something else.

"Recognize what?"

"I destroyed the highest number of their mounds," the paladin beamed. She slung her big warhammer over her shoulder instead of simply leaving it attached to the weightless carrying mechanism on the back of her body armor, as if she wanted to show off. "The mounds are where they keep their eggs so they can reproduce. I made sure that they can't do that."

Not upset but a tad bit ornery, Navarion decided to take revenge for her having yanked her hand away from him. He'd spent most of their weird, label-defying relationship being the mature side; he felt he could take a little jab. "You require validation of your actions by others in order to have a sense of self worth," he quipped quietly into the side of her helmet.

In a flash, she rotated her head to stare daggers at him and he could tell that she had both been stung by the comment and shocked that he would even make one like it in the first place. Two golden eyes a similar color to her armor and warhammer glared up at him, the gears turning inside of the paladin's mind. She'd been caught off guard, and he liked it.

The two of them stood next to Thresha and Calil a little while longer as the officers examined the remains of the battlefield. The two pureblooded night elves were engrossed in a low conversation about the best points to strike silithids for quick kills, getting along together without any of the discomfort Calil had displayed in private. Maybe the younger man had actually taken Navarion's advice and spoken from his heart, the half night elf thought.

The bump on his wrist as Zhenya actually inched closer to him alerted him to her reaction. Rather than huffing and puffing away in anger, she almost seemed to have been temporarily subdued. "Don't talk to me like that," she whispered in a pleading rather than demanding voice.

"I'm sorry," he whispered back. This time, she didn't pull away when he reached for her hand. He went back to staring into the stars again as she looked at him, and instead of feeling guilty Navarion merely wondered as to why they both responded to each other the most passionately when they treated each other poorly.

"You always look to the same part of the sky when you're not around a large number of people. Why?"

This time he was the one who rotated his head to the side quickly. Zhenya wasn't stupid, but she certainly wasn't deep, nor introspective. Her eyes had the look of sincerity, inasmuch as eyes of a single solid color could evoke an emotion. "When night elves die, they believe that those who distinguished themselves as heroines or heroes in life join the constellations as new celestial bodies," he explained softly, letting his guard down in reaction to her own softening. "In some cases only their loved ones can see it; in other cases, only their comrades. A few are claimed to be visible to all. But they're there."

Zhenya had made her faith in the Light, the religion of draenei, humans and high elves clear to him, and given the fact that Navarion had been raised by two parents coming from two different religious backgrounds that neither of them practiced regularly, he was hardly a devout person himself. Regardless, he was sensitive to criticism of either the Loa or Elune and braced himself for one of Zhenya's typically brash, thoughtless comments. Instead, he was treated to an indifference that by her standards was polite.

"You must see someone who you like in that part of the sky with the stars that look like a giant onion," she said flatly without laughing or mocking.

It was probably the best realistic reaction he could have hoped for, and he even felt a little disappointed when she finally let go of his hand. The conversation among the desecrated mounds appeared to be winding down, and Thresha and Calil both quieted down rather quickly.

Conferring for a few moments, the officers returned to their units for a series of short meetings and Zhenya joined Pontus and their unit's captain a few yards away. Soraya looked winded when she faced her three troops, but not from the battle itself.

"Captain?" Thresha asked curiously. Worry laced both her and Calil's faces.

"These mounds are no more than a week old, apparently," Soraya explained. "The silithids are expanding at an alarming rate and ripping up the landscape while they do it. It will take Pontus at least two days here at this spot to regrow the soil and vegetation without the help of a priestess and wisps."

Calil looked down, his elven, environmentalist heart saddened. "It probably took them that amount of time just to dig in and start breeding."

Their captain only nodded slowly, wiping mound dirt from her cheek. "These aren't just predatory swarms looking for traveling merchants to eat," she sighed in exasperation. "The silithids are expanding into new territory. We have to corroborate this with other reports Commander Lamia has received, and none of you are to repeat this, but...we might be looking at a full scale invasion."

Only the pinch to his ass from Zhenya broke Navarion out of his stupor. This wasn't going to be the simple city patrol job he'd expected it to be.