Chapter 5: In Defense of the Spider Kingdom.
"Cin'donia, are you there?" Lily called from outside of Ranilok's house as she knocked on the door.
Lily considered Cin'donia a friend now. Ranilok had always been just an employer that belonged to a perceived 'higher class' of blood elves to her. Unlike any of the shopkeepers in Silvermoon, Cin'donia would have a conversation with Lily, as limited as the creation's knowledge of the blood elf world was.
"Yes? Is that you Lily?" Cin'donia came to the door without opening it.
"Of course it is! Who else would be standing here with food?" Lily spoke cheerily as she waited to be let in.
Cin'donia quickly opened the door and once Lily had set the packages down, Nia offered her a hug; a gesture that Lily had shown Cin'donia in the past weeks. After Lily had a moment to catch her breath, she looked towards the bed and jumped in shock.
"Oh! He's here." Lily exclaimed and then whispered.
"He'll keep sleeping unless you shake him. He always does." Cin'donia explained the situation.
Lily was astounded at what was going on "But he's actually here. How long has he been back?"
"Only a day. You remember that I wanted him to tell me his story?" Nia cheerfully asked her friend to remember a previous conversation.
"Did he finally tell it to you? I've wanted to know about him too." Lily sat down at the table and questioned innocently.
Cin'donia smiled and sat down across from Lily. "He did. I pity him, but I think he may be getting better. I don't know how he will finally turn around, but that is up to him."
"That's good. I'd love to hear his story sometime too." Lily expressed her interested and then sighed.
"What was that noise for?" Cin'donia asked, slightly startled by it.
Lily was confused again by her friend. Although they had spoken a lot about the world and Cin'donia seemed to have extreme intelligence, the woman had no practical knowledge. Although it was perfectly obvious to anyone who knew Nia's nature, Lily was left to wonder about why her friend had so many problems remembering basic things about life.
"You mean a sigh?" Lily sighed again. "That noise?"
Hearing it again, Nia spoke up. "Yes, yes, that one!"
"It's something you do when you're overwhelmed I guess." Lily didn't quite know how to explain something so natural.
"Well what has overwhelmed you? Were you in danger?" Cin'donia adopted a protective tone towards Lily.
"No, I'm fine now. It's just that earlier this week when I was picking up some metal pieces in Silvermoon for one of my employers, something tried to escape from one of the buildings and killed a few guards." Lily opened up to Cin'donia and told her what the troubles were.
"You speak of your… our capital. I've never looked highly upon imprisonment for my own reasons. What tried to escape?" Nia pushed Lily on to finish the story.
Slightly unsure of continuing because Nia seemed a bit on edge, Lily spoke slowly. "I don't really know. Farstriders square is full of mystery, the blood knights keep it that way. Rumors say that there is some sort of beast captured in the depths of the city. I've only heard its name before from the guards yelling it as they fought. They called it M'uru."
Immediately standing up in indignation, Cin'donia walked across the room and threw her hands down to her sides. "I feel… I feel something that I am not accustomed to. You said that M'uru is captured beneath your capital city?"
Lily jumped from her seat and back towards the door, thinking that she had angered her friend. "You're angry? You act like you know the one that they speak of as a beast."
"Anger… that is it… anger. I've not had a reason to feel this before. This is something I shouldn't feel." Cin'donia paused and looked towards Lily. "Please, don't ever call M'uru a beast again."
Not wanting to make her friend more displeased, Lily tried to apologize. "I'm sorry. I'm really so sorry! I didn't know it would offend you. I really don't know much about it."
"Him… about him." Cin'donia corrected her and then sighed, realizing how the expression was used. "I'm sorry too. I'm not used to feeling such things. I've felt so many new things over the past weeks I just can't explain them all. So who would know more about it?"
"Ranilok might. He worked as a researcher in Silvermoon before they asked him to leave the city; before he came out here." Lily suggested innocently, still not realizing the weight of what she said.
"Lily, please go outside and wait for me there." Cin'donia frowned and went to open the door for her.
"Why? I thought you'd want to stay here and meet me next week like always." Lily favored the normalcy of getting to see her friend and have some relief from her work.
"I don't know. Go, please. You do not need to hear this." Cin'donia showed Lily out and closed the door behind her, turning to Ranilok.
"Ranilok, wake up." Cin'donia sat on the bed and shook the elf as she had other times.
"Hrm? Nia? Why are you waking me up? Am I hurt again?" Ranilok mumbled as he slowly opened his eyes and then noticed the displeased look on his caretaker's face. "What's wrong?"
"You knew, didn't you?" Cin'donia interrogated him harshly.
"Knew what? You sound angry. Please don't be angry." Ranilok shifted about, wanting to sleep again.
Realizing that she was letting this emotion overcome her, Nia tried to suppress it. "You knew about what I was… you knew from M'uru." The woman remembered how Ranilok had paused in their previous conversations, as if he was about to mention something.
Waking up fully on something that intense being mentioned, Ranilok sat up and held his head, still slightly dizzy. "M'uru? You mean the naaru in Silvermoon?"
"You did know! Why didn't you tell me about him?" Nia was completely indignant about it, seeming more like a true elf than ever before.
"I didn't want you to go and chase after him." Ranilok tried to look up with care at her.
"You said you were trying to get better from your greed and you do something like this?" Cin'donia shook her head sadly at him. "You lied to me to try and keep me here for yourself!"
"No… it's not greed. Really it isn't!" Ranilok looked up, his mind clear of pain but gripped by the terror that he might lose Cin'donia.
"I won't hear it." The woman rose from the bed and walked for the door. "I'm leaving. I wanted to help you, but you seem set on making yourself into a lost cause."
Pulling himself up to a kneeling position on the bed, reaching for her, Ranilok called out. "No please! Stay with me!" the elf started crying and then looked at his hand, noticing that it was phasing out of reality. "Damn it!"
"Maybe they'll be able to help you more than I could." Nia left the house and closed the door behind her as Ranilok faded away, weeping and still wanting to convince her to stay.
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"No! No!" Ranilok phased into the cold caverns of Nerub'Itjahz, kneeling at the feet of Neru'Rekan.
Neru'Rekan looked down at Ranilok and then over to the rest of the guards that stood around. "Tears. Look closely all of you; this is how humanoids show sorrow. You can know from this that you've truly said or done something that damages their mind." The spider made a lesson out of the crying elf. "Scourge cannot cry, but they do not deserve the conversation to cause sorrow."
All of the spiders took a turn leaning in and looking down upon the elf, each breathing rancid breath upon him as they observed his state. Many of them laughed as they pulled away from him and returned to the crowd. Ranilok tried to control his sorrow, but he couldn't; he had just lost the only being who valued him. For him, the worst part was the motivation. Initially, Ranilok had not told her because he didn't want her to leave. After he had realized his wrongs, he didn't tell her for her own safety.
"When do I stop being the end of the joke?" Ranilok tried to sniff away his tears again.
"Take him. He's useless right now. I'll explain the mission to Graaghun." Neru'Rekan ordered as two guards closed in to pick up Ranilok.
"Hold!" The elf stood up adamantly and held his arms out as if to stop his captors.
"You're telling us to hold? You can't fight us. What do you plan to do?" The spider-warlock was intrigued by Ranilok's change in behavior. This was the first thing the elf had done aside from whining or expiring since he had been brought back.
"I just want you all to know." The elf started quietly. "She left. She left, damn it." He called out loudly. "She left because I wanted to protect her and all she saw was my greed!"
"You are presuming that we care. You are still foolish, elf." Neru'Rekan reminded Ranilok of his place.
"I know you don't care. I care that it has gotten this bad." He looked to them defiantly. "I'll do it." The elf walked towards the infernal shell and began to climb into it, making a short speech from the chamber in the chest. "I'll fight them all until I've beaten them. I will stand in defense of the spider kingdom so that maybe in this life or whatever life comes next, I'll be able to show myself, her, and this world that there's more to me than greed."
"I still don't trust you, elf. You wouldn't know how to serve anyone if you were beaten upside the head with the instructions for eternity." Neru'Rekan approached to close the chamber that Ranilok had fit himself into. "You and Graaghun will be leading the final push to the upper kingdom gates in preparation for a siege on one of the lost colonies. Do not fail us."
The headpiece slowly lowered over Ranilok as Graaghun wormed his way into the elf's mind. Ranilok was calm this time, not fighting the demon; only watching. The elf accepted that they all hated him, but he knew that he would be able to prove his worth to them somehow.
"Are you even in this body anymore?" The demon prodded as it took control of Ranilok's actions.
"I'm here." The elf spoke calmly this time, trying to relax despite his helplessness.
"You're boring me. Why aren't you struggling? Aren't you going to resist me?" Graaghun called into the elf's mind.
Entertained that the demon was irked by his actions, Ranilok continued. "There's no point in it. Let's just go."
"You'll pay for this someday." The demon swore, annoyed that he could not enjoy his work this time by causing pain to the elf.
It was a long transit from Nerub'Itjahz to where the fighting would take place. The colony of Nerub'Itjahz was a small nearly self-contained colony that only had a few deep connections through the ground to the main upper kingdom. While Nerub'Itjahz seemed enormous to Ranilok and even to some of the younger nerubians within it, Azjol-Nerub dwarfed any nerubian colony in existence.
After the infernal had left, one of the lesser warlocks approached Neru'Rekan. "Are we to allow him to speak in that manner to us, master?"
"Yes, he's beginning to learn. I still do not trust him, but we shall see if he succeeds. I cannot kill him, but if he dies from his own failure it is not my fault." Neru'Rekan laughed at the idea.
"Why can you not kill him, master? Despite his service to us, his death would still be more than fitting." The apprentice questioned and reminded his master of the laws of the colony.
Holding a scroll up from his robes, Neru'Rekan spoke of it. "This scroll is a pact, which I will not speak further about. There are other ways for his debt to be repaid in our society, and he will use them."
"I see, my master." The initiate turned and headed back from the infernal's cave into the main colony as his master followed him shortly after.
Several days passed as the infernal shell headed north through the abandoned tunnels under Northrend. No scourge were in the tunnels any longer; Graaghun had seen to their destruction using Ranilok's powers. The elf watched what Graaghun did to move the great shell and tried to learn how to do it on the chance that he could take control from the demon. Ranilok was on a mission now to redeem himself and cast aside the greed and cowardice that had defined his life since he had become a blood elf. He despised his greed now, recognizing that Arisia and Mithelidan had been put off by it even as early as they first time they had come to the nerubian colony. As Ranilok had proven before, there was no stopping him when he got on a mission.
"Are you asleep?" Graaghun yelled into Ranilok's mind as the infernal stopped.
Waking up and looking at his surroundings through the same eyes that Graaghun saw, Ranilok made a shocked comment. "Now that's a sight not easily forgotten."
Their surroundings were epic, the stuff of historic paintings. Around them, a cavern of immense height rose with an enormous door on the far side. The door had a long and wide stairway before it that was hewn from the cave floor. Also before the door, rank and file of every type of scourge imaginable stood and glared at the nerubians and Ranilok. The nerubian side was quickly filling in with the spiders that flooded from the tunnel behind the infernal shell.
The door on the far side opened as a behemoth as tall as the infernal walked out. Each rank stepped aside in an ordered fashion and then closed again as the behemoth passed through. Whispers went through the nerubian ranks mentioning the beast's name. It was Anub'Ikthil, an ancient spider-lord that had been resurrected to become one of the murderous crypt lords. The lord was covered in bandages that floated with dark magic and hardened shells that covered most of his body. Offensively, he had two bladed claws and an enormous horn on his head.
"Has your confidence wavered yet?" Graaghun prodded at Ranilok's mind. "I knew it would. This is too hard a battle for you."
"No, actually. I have nothing to lose now… he will die and be forgotten, just as I would be if I was a coward in this battle." Ranilok looked towards the thousands of scourge.
"You!" The crypt lord silenced the muttering and moaning of the opposite ranks. "You have driven us back from these tunnels with your weak living lackeys. You are a fool to stand against our might; I will halt your advance single-handedly. Come and face me! My might cannot be matched!" the crypt lord challenged.
"So be it!" Graaghun answered and charged into the fray, lighting the shell into flames as he dove for the crypt lord.
"He's too overconfident, we've slain armies. He knows something." Ranilok spoke in his mind as he thought about the situation.
"Shutup, elf! I'm busy!" Graaghun began to try and beat the crypt lord over the head with the fat rocky ends of the infernal's arms.
The ranks of the scourge and Nerubians opened up to give them space as they watched, each army ready to overtake the other army under their leader; if their leader won. The scythe-like claws raked harmlessly across the firey crystal body as the ends of the infernal's hands bounced off of the hard shell on top of Anub'Ikthil's head. The battle wore on for some time before Ranilok spoke out again.
"You're the fool this time! You'll never beat him in melee with a shell like that. See how he lowers his head to protect his face each time?" Ranilok called up to the demon.
"Never call me a fool, elf! I will extract my own punishment upon you once I've won." Graaghun continued to beat the hard shell of the crypt lord.
As Graaghun paused to answer Ranilok, the crypt lord pounded the ground and several spikes shot up, piercing the leg and arm crystals of the infernal. Ikthil walked up and laughed triumphantly as he spoke to the infernal shell.
"My master can see you, demon! He has shown me the way." the spider raised his pincer and brought it down heavily on the firey head of the infernal.
The caverns shook with the cracking noise as Graaghun yelled along with it. The demon seeped out of the headpiece and out of Ranilok's mind as the fire faded on the crystal and Anub'Ikthil looked past his enemy.
"Take them! Chase them back to whatever death forsaken colony they came from and destroy it." The undead spider lord ordered.
"You can't really say that yet." Ranilok called from the infernal as he pulled himself off of the spikes and looked at his enemy.
"You're not dead??" The behemoth turned back to the infernal irately. "How many demons are in there?"
"No demons left, just me." Ranilok stepped backwards around the spikes to the far side of the circle. "I will burn my suffering into your soul!" the elf lit the shell up with flame again.
"You can't get away! Face my locusts!" The crypt lord called a swarm of bugs at the golem to try and drain its energy.
"I'm not impressed!" Ranilok concentrated and the firey aura of the shell blew outwards, incinerating the insects. "Anything better?"
"I'll just kill you like last time!" Ikthil yelled irately and began to shoot more spikes from the ground as Ranilok jumped around to dodge them.
The infernal shell was very powerful, but it was weighty on the arms and legs and no use against such a hardened enemy as the crypt lord. Ranilok knew that a more agile body would be useful, but he couldn't think of a way to get the nerubians to make him a new infernal shell on such short notice.
"I need a hand! How do infernals cause so much death without any hands?!" he thought to himself as he continued to dodge spikes. "Wait… I made a woman out of these things I can at least give myself a hand!"
Dodging to the opposite edge of the ring, Ranilok stopped the flames so he could see. The crypt lord pulled himself towards the unlit shell as Ranilok looked down at his arms from the head of the infernal. Concentrating on the powers and spells he had used to shape Cin'donia's body, he noticed they too were amplified by the crystals around him.
In response to his wish to have a hand, the crystals stretched and reconfigured instantly into a long rocky arm and hand. Looking to the other arm, Ranilok changed it into a blade and then stretched his legs out so that he was much taller than the spikes. Quickly lighting back up, Ranilok stepped over and around the spikes as he used his free arm to balance himself on the ceiling of the enormous cavern.
"You betray your own people and slaughter then in the name of the undead? You're worse than I ever was!" Ranilok lunged forwards at the crypt lord and took a powerful hold of the horn on the beast's head.
"I am not a traitor! I am a visionary!" Anub'Ikthil struggled against the grip.
The crypt lord wiggled in the construct's grasp, unable to unbalance the long-legged structure and also unable to hit its body due to the length of the arm. Lighting up the fire white hot, Ranilok swung the blade back and forth across the crypt lord's face, marring and burning it beyond recognition. Finally, the lord wiggled enough to snap his own horn off, but Ranilok was ready for this. With the absence of the horn, nothing on the beast's head could deflect the blade. The elf brought the blade straight down in the center of the hard shell, making the blade as long as his enemy's body and razor thin. The weapon smartly cleaved the bug in half, cauterizing the inside of the body as it passed through.
Anub'Ikthil had no time to scream and the ranks of scourge had no time to retreat or get in a first attack. Ranilok immediately spun around low and to the side, cleaving the front ranks of the scourge army in half horizontally and then piling into the rest of organized formations. "No mercy for them! Charge!" the elf called for the nerubian army to move in as he continued to cut through the enemies.
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Hours later, once the scourge at the gate were obliterated, Ranilok sat in the golem and breathed heavily, trying to regain his strength from what he had just done.
"We've won. Send report to Anub'Jegavith and set up a base camp here. Bar the door until we have finished the camp." The spider in command of the troops approached the stretched and blade handed golem. "You've done all free nerubians a service today, elf. This will not be forgotten."
Feeling pulled, Ranilok looked around and noticed that he had been summoned along with the infernal back to Nerub'Itjahz. As soon as he had appeared, several of the nerubian mages approached to look at what he had done with the infernal shell. The mages were thoroughly intrigued with what he had been able to do to their construct. Ranilok quickly exited the shell and walked down the leg, actually looking around the enormous hall that he was in rather than passing out and appearing back in his bed as he had for weeks.
"Elf! Come over here." Neru'Rekan addressed Ranilok.
"Yes?" The elf answered the warlock's call.
Trying to bait the elf, Neru'Rekan spoke in a scornful tone. "I suppose you think that you deserve something now; a reward for today's victory?"
"I'm still in your debt until you release me from it, so I deserve nothing. I am just glad that I was able to do it myself this time. I didn't think I could at first, but after I was able to change the shell Anub'Ikthil died easily." Ranilok described the fight in short. "I wish that I had realized that I needed to do this myself earlier."
"Come with me. Our lord wishes for you to join us at the feast for this victory." Neru'Rekan stated plainly.
"I don't deserve such a gift. I've still so much to repay." Ranilok tried to be humble about it, knowing that if he was greedy about anything the sin might pull him back down.
"Do not question our generosity. You are in my master's kingdom, so you deserve what he says you deserve." Neru'Rekan warned Ranilok and started to head across the cavern that they were in, motioning for Ranilok to follow.
"I only did what I had to do." The elf caught up and tried to make his point again.
Cautioning the elf again, Neru'Rekan stopped and held a claw in front of Ranilok. "Say no more on this. You try my patience. You are also in my domain as a servant, you will call me master."
"Yes, Master." Ranilok willingly complied; he thought perhaps he truly needed a master at a time like this, whether it was this spider or Cin'donia.
"Do you realize that since you found such ways to modify the infernal shell and win the battle, you will fight all future battles without the aid of that demon?" Ranilok's 'Master' questioned.
"Yes, I know. That might have bothered me before, but not anymore. It's my wish to finish this now, so that maybe I'll be worth Cin'donia's time… and the time of the friends I left behind. I will find a way to repay you in full." Ranilok stopped and dropped to one knee before the spider, pledging his will to the beast's orders.
"I believe you will elf… I believe you will." Neru'Rekan nodded and motioned for Ranilok to rise and follow as they headed deeper into Nerub'Itjahz.