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Consider this another request for reviews, please.

Also, predictably enough, I do not own World of Warcraft, and claiming I did would be lunacy.

I think this is longer and better than the first chapter, so enjoy. I also sketched a draft of the next chapter; it will occur in the past. Just an FYI.

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A considerable distance South of the Latrielle cottage was the forest known as Duskwood. Within Northern Duskwood was an abandoned ghost town known as Raven Hill. East of Raven Hill was the mountain border of the Twilight Grove. The space between the two was simply forest; trees, shrubs, birds, spiders, and the other usual inhabitants. There were sounds – wolves growling at the moon, birds singing into the night, spiders skittering across rocks and foliage, leaves rustling in the wind.

Not tonight.

Tonight it was silent.

Tonight, if an observer with particularly sharp eyes had been present between Raven Hill and the Twilight Grove, they might have noticed that amidst all the black of night in the forest, one patch of black looked wrong.

If you looked close enough, it was moving.

It – or rather she, for it was a woman – moved silently through the forest, her pitch black robes swirling around her. Her footsteps made no sound, her breathe was muffled by the black hood over her face. The rocky terrain didn't seem to slow her. She moved purposefully, steadily, quickly.

And then, upon arriving at a nondescript clearing in the middle of the forest, she stopped.

She waited silently and without moving. Her wait continued for over an hour, until a man walked into the far side of the clearing. He was tall, thin, wearing similar black robes but with no hood obscuring his face. As he walked closer to her, she could see the purple bags deep under his eyes, and the purple scars covering his bald head. The dark of night obscured them, and had she not known they were there in advance, she very well could have missed them.

His lack of a hood is brazen, she thought to herself, but to question is not my place. She said nothing.

He regarded her for several moments until he spoke. His words were very slow, very deliberate. The voice was dry.

"You have... severed... your ties?"

She bowed to him. "Yes, master. The strongest of them." As she spoke, her mind flashed back to his early training of her, and the first lessons he had imparted. Remember, girl, the strongest power is anger. Nothing in this world, nothing in the nether, and nothing in between can affect you like anger.

He was pleased, and gave her what was a smile by his standards. This meant his mouth crooked upwards almost imperceptibly for a fraction of a second, and then returned to a flat line.

"Good. You will... walk South. Let your... senses... guide you. I have left you... a present. You will... know... how to find it. Once you have... acquired it, proceed South... to the Bay. The Booty Bay... as it is called. I will leave... instructions."

She bowed once again. "I understand, Master."

He smiled his cold and minuscule smile once more before turning to leave. "Good girl. I am proud of you... Cathery."

Cathery Latrielle waited until he had left, and then turned to the South.

Although she wasn't consciously aware of it, some small part of her knew that she had been feeling less alive every day for the last five years.

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Gavren stood in the cottage, watching Edelia, who was seated on one of the chairs that had been vacated when the guard removed the surviving members of the family. She had taken the news of the liquid-corpse-puddle on the floor much better than he had expected. She had been surprised, certainly, and a little shocked, but it quickly turned to intense concentration as she sat on the chair and wracked her mind for any knowledge of what could have happened. This was surprising to Gavren, since he'd heard from a friend that Night Elves were squeamish and and soft creatures by nature, and more or less believed it, since he'd never really 'met' one. Gavren had encountered them in passing, certainly, but never held a conversation. A memory came to his mind of Cathery teasing him about being a racist when he had called Orcs smelly, back when they were both thirteen. He wondered briefly what she would've made of his belief in Night Elf squeamishness. Gavren couldn't seem to stop memories of her from popping into his mind every minute or so. He believed the Lady Latrielle, believed the look on her face and the tone of her voice... but the thought of Cathery, his Cathery, his best friend for sixteen years, doing whatever had been done here – and to her father, no less – was appalling. His mind wasn't sure how to deal with it, and so it simply chose not to.

Gavren refocused his attention on Edelia. She was still concentrating, her softly glowing eyes staring intently at the puddle on the floor, eyebrows furrowed in thought, head resting in her hands, lips pursed in a slight frown. He had to admit, even when it was wrapped in consternation, she had a very pretty face. Her face, like the rest of her, was thin, but not unpleasantly so. The irises of her eyes – at least, the portion visible around the glowing light in the center – were light blue. Her skin was light purple, perfectly smooth and flawless. Her lips were a dark shade of purple, and she had markings painted under her eyes in a shade of purple slightly darker than her skin, markings that looked to Gavren like two large and symmetrical eagle wings. Her azure hair, slightly longer than shoulder length, was messy and unkempt – understandable, at this hour – and strands fell over her face.

As soon as thoughts of her features entered his head, Gavren chastised himself. I am a paladin. I am investigating the murder of a man I knew, and I may very well know the murderer also. What am I doing contemplating a Night Elf's face? He chalked his thoughts up to curiosity at his first real meeting with one, and felt slightly better.

Eventually, Edelia looked up at him and he raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. She shook her head in response. "I have no idea what could have happened. I've never seen anything close to this either. Both the decay of the body occurring before I arrived that you described to me, and this current state of... liquidation." She paused, shaking her head slowly. "Such things do not happen in nature," she finished, looking pensive.

Gavren nodded. "I sent for more help, a priest and a shaman. If the Light is with us, they'll be here soon."

Edelia nodded slowly again, still thinking. "Do you have any idea how this happened? Who could have done it? You mentioned his family was in here, did you see anything?"

He delayed before answering, and his face flushed slightly. She couldn't possibly have known that he delayed because he was sheltering a former friend, but Gavren's unduly nervous side was nonetheless worried that was how she would perceive his pause. Finally, he spoke. "The family... might have seen something. They're not sure. Why do you ask?"

"Well, I wonder about sending for a priest and a shaman... I think perhaps you should send for a mage instead. Like I said, this doesn't happen in nature, and unless there are parts of human religious doctrine I am woefully unaware of, I don't think the Light has ever come close to this either. My intuition is that whatever happened here was a different type of magic. Something arcane, perhaps." Her fingers were roaming absentmindedly up and down her cheek as she contemplated the puddle.

Gavren kicked himself mentally. Arcane magic. Of course he should have investigated the possibility. It hadn't occurred to him, because Cathery had never shown any aptitude with magic in the sixteen years he had known her. But then again, she wasn't much of a priest, or shaman, or druid. He had turned to them because he felt close to them – their arts bordered on a religion, much like his own. But a mage made sense. And even if Cathery had never been magically inclined when he had known her, it was abundantly clear that things had changed.

"You're right. I'll ask my lieutenant about finding someone from the Sanctum who can help us in the morning. She's gone home to bed."

Edelia rose from her chair. Gavren noticed she was short for a night elf, roughly the same height as himself. She turned to him. "Perhaps we should do the same and get some sleep, so we can work in the morning. If the others you called for don't appear to be showing themselves, it's possible they are simply waiting as well."

Gavren frowned. "I'm not sure about leaving the body... or what's left of it... here by itself. Over the course of an hour it turned into that – what if it's completely gone tomorrow?"

Edelia shrugged. "There's not much more it could deteriorate honestly, but I understand. We should find a way to preserve it. Perhaps you and your men can find a bottle in the inn we can use to take some."

She walked over to the puddle and knelt down next to it. Gavren noticed as he looked down at her that the black shirt she wore was undoubtedly flattering and stylish, but also fairly revealing from the top. He quickly looked away, chastening himself again. An interesting choice for her to wear to a late night murder investigation. Maybe it's a druid thing.

She reached out, and before he knew what she was doing, had stuck her fingers in the puddle. She quickly gasped and pulled them back. Gavren knelt next to her, worried.

"Are you alright, Edelia?"

She turned to him, looking extremely discontented. "Yes, I'm fine. It's just... that liquid, it feels... wrong. I'm not sure what it is, exactly. But something about it is unpleasant." She stood up, rising above him. "When you go to find a bottle, see if you can find a glove also. I'm not scooping that stuff up with my bare hands." She was rubbing her hand vigorously on her more modest leather work pants, trying to remove all last traces of the goo.

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Twenty minutes later, Gavren and Edelia were standing in Goldshire, outside the cottage. Edelia held a bottle full of the corpse goo, sealed shut with wax. The best Gavren had been able to find at this hour was an old ale bottle, and Edelia was privately worried that the residual alcohol would destroy their sample's worth, but she didn't say it.

She yawned and leaned back, stretching her tired body, running a hand through her hair. This motion brought her shoulder back and stretched out her shirt slightly in the corner of Gavren's eye, revealing – For the love of the Light, man. Control your thoughts. I'm a paladin, and I am working! That's the third time in less than an hour!

He looked up to her, forcing his mind back to their present situation. "I think you were right, I don't think the others I sent for will be arriving tonight. If they were, they would have by now. We can have someone from the Temple track them down tomorrow. So that said, we should get some rest, but if you don't mind continuing to help me, I'd like to meet early tomorrow and talk about this."

She nodded her consent. "I'm staying at the Blue Recluse. There's a decent breakfast around ten in the morning. I'll meet you in the common room downstairs?"

He nodded. "That's fine."

"Okay. I'll hold onto this - " she looked pointedly at the bottle of goo "for tonight. There's a friend of mine I'd like to see it, I'll run it over to him first thing tomorrow before breakfast." She paused, and shook her head, smiling softly. She had a very pretty smile, but in these particular circumstances, its presence was confusing Gavren.

"What is it?"

"It's just... an hour and a half ago, I was wondering what on Azeroth could be so important as to wake someone up this late. A few possibilities ran through my mind, but none of them even came close to this." She looked up and stared at Gavren for a few moments, grinning playfully. "You sure know how to show a girl an interesting time, Gavren Tuldor."

With that, she turned and left, leaving Gavren staring after her. He sent a quick prayer to the light that her back was turned to him, and she couldn't see his stare. Gavren wasn't sure exactly why he was staring – but her last comment had taken him off his balance in a very sudden and definite way.

Something must be wrong with me tonight. Perhaps it's the stress.