He should've let her burn them.
The thought kept circling through Aren's mind as he pulled shut the door to his quarters, shield clanking against the back of his cuirass. He should've argued harder, shouldn't have been so eager to avoid conflict. He could've stopped all of this. One cleansing blanket of flame laid down across the waves, and all of those people – Luciel – would still be alive.
He shook his head violently to dislodge the thought. Well, it was too late for that now. He'd made a mistake, and now there was nothing to do but stop anyone else from suffering because of it.
Vorthaal and the Redbranches waited midway down the corridor. The planks were free of gore and mangled corpses at this end, and their array of plate and chainmail and unsheathed weapons jarred with the inn-like surroundings.
Ander leaned against a red-painted door, inspecting the blades of his short poleaxe, but looked up with a grin at his approach. "There he is! Let's hurry before our warlock lights them all up without us again." His tone was flippant, but there was something savage in his eyes. For all he played the silly fop, Ander was a dangerous fighter, and he'd been fond of Luciel.
"I wish she would," Nathanial muttered, pulling tight the strap of one of his gauntlets. He'd never shared his brother's bloodlust, even before he had a wife to return home to, and Aren sometimes wondered if he'd stay on with the Dawn after his enlistment was up. He loved his brother, but soldiering wouldn't provide the kind of life he knew he wanted for his family.
Vorthaal, even more a cipher than usual behind the ornate grill of his mask, silently stepped aside to let Aren pass and then fell in behind.
Aren loosened his sword in his scabbard, comforted by the familiar roughness of the grip. Someone had lit the lanterns hanging from hooks hammered into the bulkheads, and it took effort not to jump as every roll of the waves made the shadows jerk.
A shriek echoed from the main corridor.
His sword leapt into his hand before he realized he'd drawn it, and he was dimly aware of Ander's answering roar behind him as he broke into a sprint, blood pounding in his ears. This was all too familiar. The moldy smell of flesh arrested in its decay, the cries of defenseless people being slaughtered – that scream didn't belong to any of his company. Had ghouls broken into one of the rooms?
An unearthly growl halted him in his tracks as he barreled around the corner into the main corridor. Blunt scaled head, mouthful of pointed teeth, twin spines arcing over the shoulders...the felhound stopped snarling at the door and spun to face him, long hackles rising.
He'd fought these before, too. Hillsbrad, after Dalaran fell. A corpse-choked ford and the green glare of infernals overhead, the body beside him – Sir Conrad – rising again with head hanging crookedly and no light in its eyes. The cruel laugh of a creature with bloodied claws.
He swung his shield from his back and held it low to deter a lunge at his knees, sword poised to lash out.
"Heel, Jhormug!"
Jhormug? He flinched at the voice. Callista. Warlock, his warlock. A ship, not a battlefield; a human woman, not a dreadlord. This wasn't an enemy, it was a pet.
The felhound backed up slowly, a barely-audible growl rumbling in its throat as its tentacles quested in his direction.
He waited for Callista to grab a handful of the long spikes on the thing's shoulders before slinging his shield onto his back again, lowering his sword. "We heard screaming," he said, flicking his eyes from the felhound to the door it had been nosing.
Callista shrugged. "Someone thought it was a good idea to stick her head out."
"So you set a demon on her?"
"Oh, Jhormug wasn't going to bite. Unlike a ghoul."
That made a twisted kind of sense, and though he had the nagging feeling it violated some core principle of the Argent Dawn, he couldn't quite seem to pin down which one. He raised a brow at Wynda, who shrugged plate-clad shoulders laconically. "It keeps them inside, lad."
He supposed it did at that. He shook his head. "What about your scrying?"
The warlock's amused expression soured as her brow wrinkled, and the felhound shifted restlessly as her fingers tightened on its spines. "There's something in the hold, and it's not a ghoul. It recognized my Eye."
Aren frowned. "You couldn't see what it was?"
"No. I didn't even get close. A ghoul broke the enchantment as soon as my Eye left the stairwell. Something had to be directing it – most undead won't attack anything that doesn't smell alive."
That was true, and Aren knew it better than most. Her news, though unwelcome, was not entirely unexpected. If those ghouls had been masterless they would've immediately started breaking down doors, not slinking around the passenger deck like thieves. "No sign of the crew?"
"None." She hesitated, yanking at her minion's spines as it nosed in the direction of the yellow-robed mage. "There was a lot of blood upstairs."
In the silence that followed, the uncomfortable creak of armor behind him seemed loud as a dirge.
"So, who here can rig a sail?" Ander wondered.
"None of that, lad," Wynda said, casting a meaningful glance at the closed doors around them. "They may just be barricaded in somewhere."
"Without their blood?"
"Ander."
"Alright," Aren cut in before the argument could escalate. "Nathanial, Vorthaal and Ander. Look for the crew. Start on the top deck and work your way downwards, and stay out of the hold until you've tried everywhere else. The rest of you…"
Wynda swung her hammer onto her shoulder at his regard, its inscriptions still glimmering with faint golden light. Callista cocked her head, while the beast at her side sank into a crouch and snarled, reaction made more alarming by the fact the felhound didn't even have eyes to watch him with.
"That thing can track magic," he said, studying it warily. "How well?"
"More than well enough to find what's down there." Her gaze slid to the nervous-looking mage pressed up against one of the crimson doors. "Once we're away from distractions."
Magister Sabrice fidgeted with the sleeve of his robe and scowled at the felhound. "Don't worry, girl, I won't be anywhere near when you let that creature go. One word of caution before I vanish: whatever dispelled your Eye has discovered there's a warlock aboard. This won't be as easy as you think."
She snorted, eyeing the mage with clear distaste. "Unless it has a Legion houndmaster down there, this will be exactly as easy as I think."
"And how easy is that?" Ander piped up.
She shrugged her shoulders skeptically. The warlock had forgone the spikes and skulls favored by many of her brethren, but the red runes picked out across her robes twisted in ways strongly suggestive of chains. "Probably difficult and unpleasant."
Vorthaal's thick tail cleaved the air and his eyes glowed impatiently beneath his helm as he looked towards the stairwell. "We should leave."
"Yes, you should," Magister Sabrice agreed. He turned to pound a fist against the door he'd been leaning on. "Dinah and Claire! Come outside!"
After a brief delay the door creaked open and a mousy-brown head poked out. The girl looked around nervously before slipping into the corridor, a taller black-haired girl following at her heels.
"Once you're gone we'll lay wards," the magister explained. "Dinah! Come over here. Start tracing frost runes along these walls."
The brown-haired girl edged to the section of bulkhead he pointed to, though her eyes remained fastened to Callista's felhound. Its tentacles waved towards her with desultory interest, but at least the beast didn't growl the way it had at him. Aren didn't blame her for her caution. He'd seen felhounds eat mages, sucking them dry of all magical potential before ripping their bodies to shreds, and though this one was under control, its instincts were no different from those of the fiends that had swarmed the countryside after the wrack of Dalaran. The sooner they were away from here, the better.
"Come on," he said, motioning towards the stairwell with a gauntleted hand.
Callista released her grip on the felhound's spines and it bounded ahead, pausing only to snuffle at the limp corpse of a ghoul whose head appeared to have burst outward. Ichor and bone fragments spattered the planks from floor to ceiling, and it licked curiously at them with a thick black tongue before loping onwards.
Aren grimaced as he strode through the mess. Battle magic – fel, arcane or otherwise – may have been efficient, but in the end it was no cleaner or more merciful than a sword-thrust. That it so often allowed its practitioners to kill from a distance without sullying their hands or looking their enemies in the eye, he wasn't sure he considered a blessing.
They all paused on the landing, arms sliding into shield braces and swords hissing from scabbards.
"Good hunting," Nathanial said with a wan smile.
Ander tested the weight of his crescent-blade tipped poleaxe with a feral grin. "Last one back to the galley buys first round."
Aren slung his own kite shield down from his back, slipping his arm through the brace and feeling a comforting warmth flow over him as the blessing inscribed into the metal flared to life. The corner of his mouth quirked tolerantly at Ander's posturing and he raised a brow. "Light go with you…but watch your backs like it won't."
Callista had been lifting down one of the lanterns dangling from hooks in the wall, and he noted the way she paused and flung a sidelong glance at him from the corner of his eye. The fact he'd managed to say something that surprised her filled him with an odd kind of satisfaction.
Vorthaal must have noticed her look, too, because he smiled behind the protective grill of his helm. "It is sometimes wise to temper faith with practicality…and vice-versa, yes?" He met Aren's eyes and dipped his helmed head in acknowledgement before turning. "Naaru guide your path." Leading the two Redbranch brothers, he climbed up into the rectangle of star-studded night above.
"Sure you can manage that, lass?" Wynda asked, watching as Callista slid down all but one of the lantern's shutters. Light flickered from the open side in a bright wedge.
"It'll be fine." She shifted the lantern to her left hand and angled it to illuminate the dark stairs sinking into the hold. Her felhound had bounded halfway down and stopped to wait, but it snarled impatiently as the light fell on it, spiny hackles up and eyeless head tracking some invisible motion below. It crouched awkwardly on its haunches, the stairwell much too cramped for a creature the size of a large wolf. "Most of the hand-waving is just a focusing aid. Or for show, but zombies are notoriously hard to impress."
The dwarf snorted. "I always knew the lot of you might as well have been making hand puppets."
"I'll go first and Wynda, you take rear," Aren said, unsettled by the way the felhound seemed to be fixated on something no one else could see. "Callista, try to stay between us. Unless you have any skill with a weapon?"
"On a good day, I drop them on my enemy's toes, and on an excellent day they fall point down." She moved up to stand behind his right shoulder, a bright glitter of lamplight in her eyes. "But don't worry, they rarely get close enough to find that out."
Aren laughed quietly, but he hoped that wasn't just bluster. The warlock had said she wasn't a mercenary, and he realized he had no idea if she'd ever seen a true battle at all. Reading a spell from a grimoire in a quiet study was one thing, but summoning the concentration to cast it in a fight while claws and blades flew at your throat was something entirely different. Then again, she'd clearly caused the demise of that ghoul with the burst skull, and she didn't look frightened now.
"There's something hiding at the bottom of the stairs, by the way," she murmured. "Let Jhormug go first."
He nodded and moved onto the first step, following the wobbly beam of lantern-light. The felhound waited until they were almost on top of it and then took the remaining stairs in a leap, planks creaking in protest. It vanished from the pool of light and an unearthly howl shivered back in its wake, quickly joined by the dry snarls of the undead.
Aren ran down the stairwell, jumping the last step and landing with sword out and shield angled defensively towards the noise. Outside of the lantern's yellow glow the darkness yawned like an abyss, and he stared blindly, trying to pivot to cover his flanks and waiting for Callista to arrive with the light.
She didn't.
Wynda's yell echoed above him and the sickly smack of metal striking rotten flesh followed. The beam of light arced wildly as Callista spun to face the attack, flashing briefly across his face, and that moment squashed any intention of retreating to help as it lit the gaping mouth of the ghoul springing for his throat with lurid fireglare.
He thrust upward with his shield, catching the corpse across the chin with the scalloped top and flinging it away. He lunged after it as he strained his eyes against the dark, stumbling over its thrashing legs and then chopping down once, twice, severing thigh muscles in a spray of cool blood before slamming his armored boot down on its chest.
Bony claws scrabbled at his greaves but couldn't find purchase, the ghoul's eyes glowing with empty light as it tried to crane its head around to bite.
Sickened, Aren raised his sword to drive the point down through one of those ghostlit sockets, but the blow went wild as a heavy weight crashed into his back and clung there.
He stumbled, lank hair that reeked of salt water and rot whipping across his cheek as a ghoul raked claws across his breastplate, seeking the soft flesh between the joins. Jamming his shield against the planks to catch his fall, he stabbed backwards with the pommel of his sword, feeling the snap of bones as the leather-wrapped steel connected.
A feral growl close to his ear. Sudden hot pain as a claw raked across his lip and cheek, scoring deep gouges, then his arm was jarred as the edge of his sword connected with something solid. He'd reached the wall. Spinning around, he threw himself backwards against the planks, feeling the sudden give as the ghoul's ribs cracked between the bulkhead and his heavy armor.
He dropped his shield and tasted the coppery heat of blood as he reached back and grabbed the ghoul's rotten shoulder, yanking it around and throwing it to the floor as it groaned and lashed at his face.
His sword point darted down, through one glowing eye and twist, and the clawing limbs jerked and went still. The blessings on the blade sizzled with white light as they burned through cursed flesh.
Sudden brightness; he squinted and blinked in the lantern glare as Callista and Wynda appeared around the side of the stairs.
Black gore smeared the other paladin's warhammer and armor, but none of it was her own and her green eyes swept over him with concern. "You alright, lad? Your face is a mess."
Aren prodded the inside of his cheek with his tongue, and though it stung horribly the scratches didn't seem to go all the way through. "I'm just trying not to think about what was on those claws."
"Hopefully nothing worse than cobwebs. They were hiding under the stairs." Wynda closed her eyes as her lips moved silently, the glyphs on her hammer waxing brighter as she reached out to the Light.
"Under the stairs? You're kidding. Light, all of my childhood fears were true." His torn cheek tingled not unpleasantly as her blessing knitted the broken flesh, and he wiped the blood away with the back of his gauntlet.
A loud snap caught his attention. He turned his head to see the felhound lying at Callista's feet, gnawing on something that on (somewhat regrettable) closer inspection turned out to be a mangled torso, still leaking black ichor. The demon had the entire hunk of flesh between its jaws and was biting down slowly, applying gradual pressure so the ribs cracked one by one.
He grimaced as another one snapped like a rifleshot. "Demons," he muttered.
Callista had been staring down the dark alley between stacked crates, but she looked over at him at that, and the irritation in her expression startled him. "I get that you're the avenging wrath of the Light and all, but next time could you try to wait for the felhound? I know that makes it harder to smite the undead heathens, but it also makes it harder to bleed all over the cargo."
Caught off-guard, he opened his mouth to snap something back, realized he couldn't think of anything to say (besides "but I only bled on myself," which sounded stupid even in his head) and shut it again. He didn't like the way she was looking at him, and he especially didn't like the knack she seemed to have for reducing him to a stammering idiot. Under the guise of a commander's calm detachment, he braced a boot against the shoulder of the slain ghoul still at his feet and yanked his sword free. The tip had gone all the way through the skull and lodged in the wood beneath. "Are you finished?" he finally managed neutrally.
Her only answer was an annoyed narrowing of her eyes. He took that as a "no."
Well, maybe she wasn't, but he was.
He stooped to pick up his shield, looking around at the space revealed by the flickering glare of the lantern. The hold was wide and quite deep – not surprising, since this ship had been contracted from the goblin cartels – and lashed-down crates and barrels were piled almost to the ceiling three man-heights overhead. Narrow passages had been left between them to allow access to the cargo, but like many goblin endeavors, the job had been done haphazardly; the result was a sprawling maze of stacked goods, probably all of which they'd have to explore to root out the undead.
Aren blew out air in a quiet sigh, then squinted as he noticed something glistening midway up one of the towers of crates. Ghoul blood. How had it gotten up there? Looking around for the cause, he noticed with a start that the entire area around the stairwell was splattered with ichor and ragged hunks of flesh. In the dark he hadn't been able to see it. "It ripped them apart," he muttered, somewhere between impressed and disgusted. And she'd been complaining about his blood everywhere.
"Ghouls are magical constructs, and felhunters eat magic," Callista pointed out coolly. Her eyes swept over the crates piled around them, and she opened another panel on the lantern to brighten the light. "He only got three of them anyway."
He was about to ask how she could tell, then he noticed the chewed-off heads, rotted faces frozen with mouths still gaping to bite, tumbled up against a barrel.
"One Sir Aren stabbed, three we killed outside our room, two just now on the stairwell, those three heads – that's disgusting, by the way, lass…" Wynda squinted into the shadows outside their circle of light. "That's a lot of corpses to sneak over the rails with no one noticing."
"There was an enchantment over the ship before," Callista said. The runes on her robes had begun to glow faintly, the color of hot coals against the black. "Fear magic, probably meant to keep everyone inside. Maybe no one was watching."
"Aye, that would do it. No wonder my nerves were crawling."
There'd been a spell on the ship? Aren hadn't known that. If the warlock had sensed it, no wonder the two women had been the first out of their rooms. It galled him to think they'd all been in danger and he'd been about to sleep through it, but he was thoroughly awake now.
He rolled his shoulders under his armor and raised his shield back into a ready position. "We should clear the ghouls out as best we can before we go hunting for…whatever's down here. I don't want to get attacked from behind." He hesitated, glancing at the felhound as it sprang to its feet and licked gore from the coarse fur beneath its jaw. "Send your demon in first."
Callista's mouth quirked at the corner, but she didn't comment on his decision. Instead she jerked her chin at one of the dark lanes between crates, and the felhound bounded from the circle of lantern-light with an eager snarl. Its horn-topped shoulders scraped the barrels on either side as it wriggled through, and he wondered if the beast would have trouble turning to fight. He had no doubt it would manage in the end, but he wondered how much other people's property it would maul in the process.
He shook his head. This time he waited, giving the felhound several heartbeats' head start before striding after it into the gap. His shadow stretched long and black ahead of him, slithering up boxes and over barrels as Callista followed with the lantern. He could hear her soft breathing and the clink of Wynda's armor behind in the silence.
A low growl and the crack of wood splintering sounded from somewhere up ahead. His instinct – born of a time when duty meant drawing danger away from those more helpless than himself – was to run towards the battle, but he held himself in check. There were no wounded or weary villagers behind him now, just a pair of colleagues who could look after themselves. That demon didn't need his help either.
A chorus of snarls, one bestial and the rest ragged with undeath, another loud snap and something shattered like glass.
"Oooh, that sounded expensive," Callista observed.
"Should we go after it?" he wondered, grimacing as the growls and glass-like crunching continued.
She laughed. "To help Jhormug? Absolutely not. What's the Light's take on letting merchants die of apoplexy?"
Aren knew he shouldn't encourage her. He was sure the proper response was a humorless remark on holy doctrine, but he and so many of his order had lived under a pall of old guilt for so long that something about her gleeful unrepentance was catching. He smiled involuntarily in the dark, and the words were out before better judgment caught up with his mouth. "Blessed are the poor?"
Her genuine chortle of surprised laughter was worth Wynda's disbelieving snort.
He stepped around a twist in the passage, kicking aside a coil of rope the felhound had tangled in its headlong rush. Lantern-light glittered iridescent from the smashed remnants of what looked to have been wine decanters, smeared with black gore. A pair of mangled corpses lay in the middle of the decimated crate, but the demon appeared to have taken its rampage elsewhere.
"Quel'thalas," Wynda grunted, flipping one of the larger splinters over with her boot to read the markings.
"Told you it sounded expensive," Callista said. She looked subtly amused at the mess, running her sole over the broken glass so it tinkled like chimes.
Wynda shoved the most jagged pieces aside disapprovingly with the head of her hammer. "Blasted goblins shouldn't be ferrying Horde goods on a ship chartered by Stormwind anyway."
Aren brushed past Callista on his way back into the lead, ears pricked for more sounds of fighting from up ahead, then flinched as an eerie howl rose to fill the whole hull. Light, that demon could make some awful sounds. He probably would've ignored it as another of its quirks, but he was close enough to the warlock to see her face pale a shade beneath the lantern's glow.
"Uh-oh," she muttered.
"It found it, didn't it?" he asked quietly, not needing to see her nod to know it was true.
The screech of tearing wood, something metal clattered and tumbled down to the planks and more unearthly baying rose from the felhound, though the noise seemed to be moving away.
Callista narrowed her eyes as she focused on something distant, closing the shutters on the lantern so only a sliver of light bled through. "Jhormug will try to lead it away, but eventually it will corner him or turn. What do you want to – "
Creaks and thumps echoed from behind them, as though some thing or things had stumbled down the stairs at a run.
"Twisting Nether!" she breathed vehemently.
Wynda turned, dipping one armored shoulder back the way they'd come, and the first ghoul to scrabble though the narrow gap between crates met a powerful blow of her warhammer with its head. It crumpled to a black-stained pile of carrion and didn't move again.
Light blazed from the head of her hammer, dimming the lantern's weak fire and burning away shadows as more ghouls crowded into the passage, clawing each other in their frenzy to tear flesh.
Aren was sickened by the sight. These weren't the desiccated and salt-streaked corpses from that poor doomed relic of Lordaeron, these bodies were fresh; their flesh was still plump and mostly whole and red blood soaked damp into their clothes. It made the blind hunger in their gnashing teeth even more terrible, and he tried not to look at the faces for fear he'd recognize the twisted visage of someone he'd once smiled at in the galley.
Wynda met the charge without faltering, the force of her Light-touched swings snapping bones and sinew and driving the ghouls back, aided in no small part by the fact the gap was too small to allow more than two to squeeze through at a time. Unfortunately, it was also too small to allow Aren or Callista to lend her much help.
Aren winced as another howl split the air.
"I've got this lot!" Wynda panted between hammer blows. A corpse stumbled over the wreck of one of its fellows, and she used the pause to crush the neck of another felled ghoul with her plated boot heel. "Go find that fiend before its yelping turns my head to pudding."
Callista barked a laugh, then looked at the shuttered lantern in her hand before setting it down onto a crate. "I'm leaving you the light. Follow when you can."
Aren glanced once back at Wynda – still standing firmly as stone – then instinctively reached out to grab Callista's arm as she pressed past him. "Wait!"
He didn't notice her palm against his breastplate until she shoved gently, and then he was suddenly surprised by how tall she was – even this close, she only had to tilt her head a little to meet his eyes.
"You can't go first if you don't know where we're going," she pointed out, sliding her fingers beneath his gauntleted ones to pry his hand off her arm.
That was true, and he was sure she was better able to track her own familiar than he was, but sending an unarmored woman first through a maze stalked by ravenous monsters still sat ill with him. He released her reluctantly. "Just be – "
The howl this time was different. Not a warning, but something dark and pleased and vicious, the fel-tainted ancestor of every wolf-cry that ever drove fear into the night.
Some old half-buried instinct urged Aren to cower, while another, fresher, told him to get up and run with the hunt. He didn't realize he'd bared his teeth until Callista's laugh broke the spell.
A fist-sized ball of orange flame hovered near her shoulder, and though it illuminated the amusement in her smile, beneath it was something darker. Veiled savagery lit her eyes, and what ties did demon-pacts bind to their makers, anyway?
"Felhounds don't like to flee," she said, flicking her gaze towards the sound with fierce satisfaction. "They'd rather hunt."
He suspected they weren't the only ones.
The ball of fire danced before them as they slipped between piles of cargo, Callista in the lead and Aren almost treading on her heels as he tried to stay close enough to yank her behind his shield in case of an attack. Sweat from his earlier exertions dried cool against his skin, and he fought a shiver, as much from the chill as the fading sounds of combat behind them. Wynda was good, but that didn't mean he wasn't concerned. He wondered how Vorthaal and the twins were doing looking for the crew. Hopefully their disturbance in the hold had drawn most of their enemies downward and away from the search.
The felhound hadn't made another sound since that last blood-stirring howl, but Callista seemed sure of her route, squeezing around crates that protruded from the stacks easily without bulky armor to impede her. Her floating fireball didn't illuminate very far around the twists in the passage, and he wished she'd slow down a little. They'd never notice any ghouls until they were right on top of –
Callista's alarmed hiss jolted him, and he reacted on instinct, shouldering past her and angling his shield across the gap as he felt something fiery cold sear along the edge of his gauntlet. He flinched, and only long training kept him from dropping his sword at the sudden pain. He leveled the tip at where he'd caught a glimpse of the white-lit eyes of a ghoul, then lowered it in surprise as the fireball's bobbing light allowed him a better look at it. Or rather, what was left of it. Half its head had been burned away as though dipped in acid, decayed flesh still smoking around the blasted hole where its face should have been.
"Are you insane?"
He turned sheepishly at Callista's expostulation, flexing his stinging fingers to confirm there was no real damage. "Maybe." He hesitated, looking again at the corroded mess that had once been a ghoul's head, and repressed a shiver as he pictured his own flesh in its place. "Sorry. I never served much with mages, not even in...not even before. It...takes some getting used to."
She scowled at him, the chains of runes on her robes pulsing brighter after the sudden flare of magic. "Just because I'm not wearing half an armory doesn't mean I need to be rescued." She jabbed a finger at the sizzling wreck of the ghoul's skull. "That could've been you!"
The ring and pinky fingers of his right gauntlet had been etched black by her spell (thank the Light the blessings had held), and he tried surreptitiously to rotate his hand so she wouldn't notice how close a call he'd actually had.
It was a mistake; the movement only drew her gaze. "Twisting Nether, doesn't that hurt? I hope it – no, never mind, I hope it does," she said, narrowing her eyes on the dark burn.
Aren wasn't sure if he should be offended by that or not. On the one hand, it was a rather harsh thing to say to someone who had, after all, been acting in good faith, but on the other he thought he actually sensed a flicker of concern beneath her scolding. Then again, maybe her only concern was not facing a court-martial for striking her commanding officer from behind if he leaped in front of another of her spells. "It doesn't," he said mulishly, "but it won't happen again."
"Good." She seemed satisfied with that, turning and picking her way carefully around the mutilated corpse. "Come on, and for Light's sake, stop stepping on my heels."
So, she'd noticed that too. Repressing another sheepish look, he followed at a more prudent distance, flattening himself out against a crate to navigate a particularly tight corner.
He jumped as something cracked like a river in a flash freeze, and the felhound's growl rumbled from ahead just as a protruding nail snagged one of the joins in his breastplate. He muttered an oath as it jerked him up short then screeched free of the wood after a moment's sharp tugging.
Even that brief delay was enough to allow Callista to vanish from sight around a turn. He jogged faster to catch up, hairs on his neck rising as the felhound's snarls became more insistent and a tense frisson of magic surged in the air.
The red glimmer of runes caught his eye as he contorted around a turn, and he pulled up just as Callista's arm shot out across his chest to stop him.
She held a finger to her lips for silence, then jerked her head farther down the passage.
Aren nodded and edged carefully past her to take a look, crouching behind a pyramid of lashed-together kegs to lower his profile. What he saw on its other side drew a disgusted grimace.
The cargo had been cleared up ahead in a crooked circle, gaps that led to the rest of the hold winding from it like the spokes of a deformed wheel. Callista's felhound growled near the entrance roughly across, teeth bared and muscles bunched as though gathering for a leap, but it was trapped in its spring by a block of glistening ice that sheathed its entire hindquarters. There was nothing it could do but snap and snarl hatefully at its tormentor, visible to Aren only as a hunched, thin figure in tattered purple robes. The Eye of Dalaran, smudged and spotted with mold, stared at him from its back.
All this was revealed by the sickly violet light that arced from the necromancer's hands. It struck the felhound in its exposed chest and forelegs, scouring its flesh away in a welter of blood and pitted bone before the demon's natural affinity for magic kicked in, draining the power to rebuild its decayed flesh only to have it ripped away again. One of its forelegs collapsed as death magic overwhelmed demonic regeneration, and it pitched forward, only to stagger up again with a baleful growl as its tendons reknitted.
Aren had never had any love for demons, but the sight made him ill anyway. He backed up quietly to where Callista waited and moved close to her ear to whisper. "Hit it with whatever you have and I'll move in after. If it's still alive, use any openings you see."
Her eyes were grey and hard as flint as she looked at him. "Alright. But if I tell you to get out of the way…"
The anger lacing her voice didn't actually appear to be directed at him, and Aren was struck by a sudden thought: that demon was bound to her. Could she feel what was happening to it? The idea was horrifying. He lifted his gauntlet to show her the black scorch mark. "Once was enough."
She nodded, and her mouth twitched in a faint smile. She let him go first this time, slipping in behind him and dimming her floating fireball to a bright spark.
It wasn't necessary anyway, the glow of spell-light bright enough to throw tortured shadows from the cargo around them.
A staticky shiver ran across his skin as Callista began gathering whatever magic she meant to unleash, and Aren reflexively tightened his fingers around the pommel of his sword. He'd never liked mage battles. Those few he'd seen counted as some of his worst memories of war, cowering in the muddy crater of an infernal strike with a handful of frightened people as the world shook around them and the sky rained fire. Whether the combatants were true mages or the demonic warlocks of the Burning Legion made small difference in the end; the forces they loosed on the battlefield couldn't be fought by anyone without magical or divine assistance, and ranks of common soldiers, no matter how experienced or well-trained, became little more than collateral damage.
He ducked back down behind the roped pile of kegs as Callista slipped to one side of it, shadows with the toxic sheen of oil twisting around her arms.
Purple light still flared from the necromancer's spell. Aren stared at the stained sigil of the Eye on his robes and felt cold anger well up within him. Once of Dalaran and now a servant of the undead – those refugees would've been so relieved to find a mage of the Violet Citadel on board, when he'd probably loaded that plagued grain into the hold himself.
A roar like the howl of a firestorm assaulted his ears, but there was no light. Aren flinched and crouched down farther as shadow that danced and clawed like flame engulfed the robed figure and obliterated the purple glow.
The necromancer gave a hoarse yell that quickly burbled off, and after that there was nothing but silence and blackness as Aren shoved away from the barrels with sword bared and sprang for where he'd seen him fall. Dark blinded him, but it didn't matter; he raised his blade, and suddenly light blazed as Callista's fireball rose to hover near the ceiling like a miniature sun.
His sword swept down towards the neck of the crumpled figure just as it turned its head to reveal the washed-out glow of ghostlight in its eyes. "Paladin," it sneered as it raised a tattered hand.
Something struck Aren in the chest like a giant mailed fist, and he flew backwards to crash into a crate in a flurry of splinters, disoriented and struggling to draw air into his bruised lungs. He coughed and choked as he groped for his sword, watching in growing horror as the necromancer lurched to his feet.
The warlock's spell had flayed away all the flesh on his right side and jaw, leaving nothing but bile-stained bone and the white gleam of teeth. That same spell still had hold of him, and shadow like dark fire clung to his chest as it ate away skin and the frayed fabric of his robes. The rank smell of seared and rotten meat fouled the air and made Aren's coughing worse.
"Ah, a colleague," the necromancer said, pulling the remaining flesh of his face up into a ghastly smile. A hoarse whistling accompanied his speech, and Aren realized with disgust that the demon-spell had vaporized his right lung.
"Absolutely not," Callista sneered. She stood to Aren's right near the gap they'd entered from, the glyphs on her robes smoldering. As he watched, she clenched her fist and the shadowy fire flickering from the necromancer's chest leapt hungrily, drawing another choked gurgle.
Her eyes widened in alarm as, instead of falling, he gave a raspy laugh. "Not very civil."
He waved a ravaged hand and an icy gale swept into the room, freezing Aren's breaths into white clouds as frost grew like shimmering mold from the necromancer's bones. The shadows devouring him ebbed and died as though smothered.
Callista uttered a sharp curse in a harsh language, and the necromancer laughed at her again. "Your demon-speech won't give me pause, warlock. The Scourge no longer kneels to the Legion."
Breathing finally stabilized, Aren gained his feet and shook splinters from his shield. Anger at being so easily flung aside steeled him, dulling the pain in his bruised muscles. "No one wants to see you kneel."
He made it within two sword-lengths of the necromancer before lambent dead eyes swept over him dismissively. "Oh. You again."
He caught movement at the edge of his vision and spun. His blade caught the ghoul across its throat, the blessed steel slicing through its neck far more easily than it would've uncorrupted flesh, and the ghoul's head toppled as momentum caused its body to slam into Aren's knees.
He barely kept from stumbling, and it was good he did because ghouls began boiling into the cleared space from one of the gaps between crates, scraping bloodless chunks of their own flesh off against the sides in their eagerness to devour. Hoarse moans tore from their throats as they reached for him.
The best way to keep from being overwhelmed by a charge was to push back even harder; this was why Aren favored the sword and shield over the two-handed warhammer wielded by many of his fellows. He leaned back on his heels, waiting until the grasping corpses were almost on top of him before surging forward while slamming upward with his shield.
The impact jarred through his arm to rattle his teeth painfully. The ghouls, too mindless to brace themselves for the blow, were thrown sprawling back a step, a step Aren quickly closed as he hacked down with his sword and used the edge of his shield as a bludgeon, shattering bones and severing vital muscle. This was another difference between fighting living enemies versus the Scourge: mortals bled out, went into shock, took losses so heavy they surrendered, but every battle with undead was decided only by attrition. And the only way to destroy them was to break their skulls or dismember them so thoroughly they could no longer fight.
He thrust out again with his shield, forearm going numb as a ghoul crashed into the metal and was flung outwards. It tumbled over the planks until it skidded into the still-imprisoned felhound, which bit down on its head and shoulder and shook, ripping it in two across the collarbone.
Aren noticed in a brief flash before he spun away that both the felhound's tentacles were fastened to the ice that held it, which was looking more and more insubstantial as the demon's wounds healed.
One of the ghouls he'd crippled in his first charge latched onto his greave, driving bony fingers into the gap behind his knee and trying to pry the armor apart. Aren kicked backwards with his plated boot, snapping its fingers and knocking it away as another leapt and met the point of his sword through one glowing eye.
The light flickered and changed hue crazily, magic sizzling the air as the warlock and necromancer exchanged spells behind him. Hard pressed as he was, Aren could only watch in confusing glimpses – swaths of shadowflame parting neatly around the mangled undead, dark energy ricocheting off a felfire-shot shield to crumble a barrel as though it'd been rotting for a hundred years – he leapt back with a cry as green flames roared in pincer-like arcs to converge on the necromancer, heat searing his face and incinerating the legs of the ghoul whose claws he'd been parrying.
He scuttled instinctively backwards away from the blaze, then toppled hard to the deck as desiccated arms latched around his knees and shoved. The impact tore his sword from his grasp and he kicked wildly, trying to dislodge the ghoul pinning him and barely avoiding the rank jaws of the one lunging for his face. Broken teeth and breath like rotting meat – he lashed out with both gauntleted hands, seizing the decayed head between them and twisting sharply. As the ghoul tumbled from his vision, he noticed three things – the felhound was gone, Callista's felfire had burned through the planks to the glimmering bligewater beneath, and the necromancer was still standing, indifferent to the flames that seared the last of his flesh from his bones in charred curls.
"Fool," he said, voice clear and contemptuous despite the lack of throat. Cold steam issued from his jaws to boil into nothing against the green pillar of flame that raged around him. "The dreadlord Dalvengyr himself chained me to this life. The flesh was just a temporary conceit."
Dalvengyr? Aren knew that name. The clash of steel, horses screaming in pain. Mud and broken stalks of corn, the hitched breathing of the injured man leaning on his shoulder, rain streaming past his face. They'd been routed. The Scourge had been joined by demons, they'd torn open Sir Conrad's leg and the tourniquet was loose and they needed to get back to the others, oh, Light, the ones they'd left... Blinking back rain, he half-dragged the man at his side through the muddy graveyard that had once been a cornfield. Jagged stalks reached up to trip them, and he grabbed for his sword with his free hand as heard voices up ahead. Human voices. He dropped his hand from his hilt and almost called out, but his relief turned to bile as he registered their words.
Cultists.
"They've started burning their dead, and it's thinning our ranks. Lord Dalvengyr won't be pleased – "
A searing pain in the soft flesh behind his knee wrenched him back to the present. He kicked hard and felt his boot connect with something solid that snapped on impact. The crushing force shackling his leg faltered and he flopped over onto his back, slicing downward with the edge of his shield to hammer back the broken-armed ghoul crouched over him.
Callista laughed behind him, but the defiance in it was strained and she breathed heavily in her pauses. "Dalvengyr? The Alliance kicked his carcass back to the Nether in pieces. I think it's time you joined him…"
"Your little campfire barely warms my bones." Ice-laden wind shrieked between the towers of crates, and a shard laid open Aren's cheek with a burst of agonizing cold as the green felfire glare blew out like a snuffed candle. "Kneel, mortal, and maybe I'll leave some fragment of your mind intact when I turn you."
The words chilled him. Was she all right? He couldn't tell, she sounded pressed but he didn't have time to look – Aren struck downwards again with the edge of his shield as he sat up, the bottom crushing through the undead's sparsely-haired skull in a spray of black blood. He scrambled to his feet and whirled, looking for his dropped sword, then backpedaled in dismay as the ghoul crouched over the weapon let out a ragged growl.
Callista scoffed.
Aren was facing her now, and drew a sharp breath at the way one of her arms hung limp at her side, blood trickling down her temple where she'd failed to deflect an ice shard.
She edged slowly back towards a gap in the crates, and despite the fitful guttering of the felfire around her working hand, she still managed a convincing sneer. "I've heard better."
Maybe she had, but Aren could tell in a glance that she was finished.
Another pack of ghouls emerged from the shadows, deeper now that Callista's illuminating fireball had begun to wane with her strength, and spread out to circle him like hungry wolves. Aren swung his shield around, trying to keep as many of them as possible on his protected side, but the effort was useless. Their jerky movements were coordinated, deliberate, obviously directed by the necromancer that was advancing on Callista even now, and why would he hurry? He would kill her and turn them both, then overwhelm anyone left alive upstairs…
Fury roared up in him at the thought, its violence surprising even himself as his already ragged breaths came faster and his fingers clenched inside his gauntlet. He'd failed before, let this happen to others, but no, not now, not ever again – the ghouls rushed at him as one and he struck out savagely with his shield and his fist. Bones snapped and rancid flesh tore beneath his blows, but there were too many this time. Their cool rotten weight bore him down and he slammed to the planks, nose filled with the scent of blood and decay and armor ringing under the assault of bony claws. He lashed out, trying to fling them loose, but they were too strong and the angle was bad. Ragged teeth snapped at his face, wafting cold breath across his cheek, and in desperate rage, he reached out for the Light.
Not the humble plea of a healer this time – this was a prayer that bordered on a demand, and the power that blazed forth in answer was not gentle.
Golden shafts of Light speared up through the planks around him, drowning the weak flicker of the fireball and searing through undead flesh like avenging flame. Ghouls writhed and died for the final time, bodies dissolving into bright dust as the fel magic that shackled them was purged and left nothing in its wake.
The hands grasping at him withered away and Aren stumbled to his feet, ethereal chimes both sweet and terrible echoing in his ears as the wrath of the Light poured through him. He could feel his grip on it faltering (and how could it not, its judgment was so pure and his own faith so flawed), and the golden radiance died as his will buckled under its torrent.
For one long breath, nothing moved.
Callista stared at him, then at the scoured scatter of bones that had once been a pack of ghouls, then back again as though he'd grown a collection of extra heads.
The necromancer had backed away from the purifying radiance, but now he advanced on Aren. An icy glow suffused the empty holes of his eyes as he moved to the nearest of the gaps Callista's flame had seared in the planks and gazed across it. The blackened strips of flesh still clinging to his skull made the sight even more ghastly than a true skeleton would've been, and the gristle around his mouth twisted in a gruesome shadow of a sneer. "Perhaps I'll end you first after all."
Aren's hands shook, beneath his armor his leathers were drenched with sweat and his head felt light. His sword…he needed to pick it up, but he could never reach it before the necromancer cast whatever twisted spell he had in mind, and if he had to die here he would do it on his feet.
Black energies swirled in the necromancer's skeletal hands, and the temperature of the hold dropped abruptly, a bitter, oily cold that rimed Aren's armor with frost. He raised his shield, inscriptions shining brightly against the chill of unholy magic, but when he reached out towards the Light once more for protection his will faltered, exhausted, and the weak glow he'd managed faded as his vision swam.
He bowed his head behind his shield and breathed one last prayer for forgiveness.
Braced for blistering pain, Aren found himself flinching as a warm gust of wind brushed his face like a benediction and the necromancer howled with rage.
He lowered his shield, startled, and gaped in amazement as the necromancer struggled with his own black skeins of power, now clearly out of control. They cracked through the air like livid whips, one winding up his bony arm and leaving pitted bone and spars of ice in its wake, and the temperature fluctuated wildly as death magic ebbed and surged.
A ball of green fire crackled through the air. It burst against the frozen and spell-decayed bones, shattering the necromancer's arm below the elbow, and he howled again, waving his remaining hand frantically to quell his wayward spell.
Callista. He didn't know what she'd done, but she'd fouled his magic somehow and now he was distracted.
Aren lunged, finally, for his dropped sword, collapsing to his knees as his hand closed around the hilt. He braced his shield against the planks and used it as a crutch to rise again, arm shaking with weariness as he leveled the blade at his enemy.
The necromancer teetered perilously close to one of the blackened holes in the deck, the glitter of dark bilgewater below broken only by the massive wooden beam that formed the spine of the hold, and Aren framed a silent prayer of thanks that it hadn't burned through and crumpled the entire ship like a paper toy.
Callista bared her teeth savagely, another fireball already growing in the palm of her working hand, and though her other arm still hung limp at her side, the exhaustion that had burdened her posture earlier had vanished. It occurred to him in a moment of surprised clarity that the woman had been faking.
The fireball exploded against the back of the necromancer's skull and clung there, green flame eating down along the vertebrae, and Aren used the distraction to draw his sword back and edge closer, trying to steady his trembling muscles enough to strike at the blue glow in the monster's ribcage.
A rope of black energy snapped at his face, and he stumbled back, raising his shield.
The dark vortex of the necromancer's loose spell dissipated as he recovered control. He whirled immediately on Callista, the blue lights in his eyes flaring with rage, and an icy bolt of arcane magic rocketed from his hand even before he'd spun all the way around. "Legion bitch!" he snarled.
He'd been toying with them before, reveling in his power over what he'd thought to be helpless adversaries, but now he was furious. Ice re-glazed his fingers even before his first spell had struck its target, spinning into a sapphire-hearted ball even larger than the one before.
Callista barely deflected the first bolt with an iridescent net of shadow. Several of its skeins vaporized on impact, and even as it writhed around to catch the next blow, Aren knew it wouldn't hold.
He raised his sword and crouched to leap over the charred hole in the planks, but his legs still trembled with exhaustion and he knew he couldn't make it in time, the pounding of his heart in his ears was unbearable –
Something metallic clanked in time with the throbbing, and he realized with a start that it wasn't his heart at all.
Wynda sprinted past him in a rush of red hair and silver armor, plated boots hammering the deck as she roared something incomprehensible in Dwarven and leapt the gap to barrel into the necromancer in a flying tackle.
His spell went wild, sheathing a roped cask with ice, and he slammed to the deck beneath a furious burden of dwarf and metal. Wynda's hammer was nowhere in sight and so she simply pummeled him with her gauntleted fists, still bellowing what Aren was sure was a litany of curses in her native tongue as they rolled across the deck.
The necromancer had been taken wholly by surprise, skidding helplessly beneath her in a tangle of flesh-streaked bones, but as their slide scraped to a halt a dangerous blue glow began coursing around him once again.
Callista cupped her uninjured hand around her mouth to yell as they finally ground to rest directly above the massive crossbeam that supported the hold, Wynda still pounding her fists against the corpse's frost-crusted bones. "Wynda! Get away from him! Now, Wynda, move!"
Aren wasn't sure if she was heeding Callista's shout or if she'd simply noticed the ice beginning to layer ominously across the metal of her gauntlets, but she rolled off the thrashing necromancer and onto her feet, leaping back over the gap in the planks to land at Aren's side, panting heavily.
She barely made it – wood rasped and screeched above their heads, and just as the necromancer scrabbled up with a murderous howl, a steel-banded crate plummeted from the stacks overhead. Its reinforced edge crashed through his ribcage and pinned him against the deck in a welter of splinters. The felhound tumbled down on top of it, twisting in the air to land on its horned paws and lunging immediately for the necromancer's free arm.
The undead was down but not destroyed, and his teeth ground furiously as the air froze once again and blades of ice began whirling in gusts. The felhound bit down, wrenching the arm off with a snap, but the deadly storm continued to build.
"Twisting Nether, cut its head off already!" Callista yelled, the runes on her robes blazing furiously as she stamped her foot in agitation.
Her voice cut through Aren's numb shock, and he jumped the gap clumsily with sword raised, jamming his shield against the planks to keep from toppling backwards. The skin of his face immediately froze, breath coming in white gasps as he looked into the necromancer's empty blue eyes.
The monster laughed, and even though his face was too ravaged to show emotion he could hear the sneer in his voice. "You lost your kingdom because you were weak –"
His sword whistled down, inscriptions flaring as it severed his neck beneath the first vertebra. The unearthly cold faded with the glow in the necromancer's eyes, but Aren kept swinging his blade even as feeling began stinging back into his face, ignoring the fatigued burn of his muscles until the skull was no more than a pile of chipped bone. He might've kept swinging it forever, until the bones were dust and the planks hacked to splinters and the fire in his arms seared away the things he never wanted to remember so cleanly even his own conscience couldn't find them, but after one last blow his legs finally buckled under him.
He fell to his knees with a clatter of armor, resting his forehead against the hilt of his sword and drawing breath in choked gasps.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
"Everyone alright?" Wynda finally asked from behind him.
Aren took one last deep breath and exhaled it slowly. He nodded against the rough leather of his hilt, squeezing his eyes shut before opening them again. The necromancer was dead, and so was everything that had gone before. They would all be alright. "Just a few bruises." He winced at the hoarseness of his voice, suddenly embarrassed at his own lapse in self-control. "I'll be fine."
Callista answered next, and this time he didn't think the tired dullness in her words was feigned. "My shoulder's dislocated. Nothing fatal, though."
Wynda clucked her tongue disapprovingly. "For Light's sake, lass, sit down. You look like you're about to keel over. And quit poking at that arm!"
Someone settled heavily to the planks at his side, and Aren lifted his head to see Callista, legs sprawled towards the splintered bones of the necromancer and arm still held at that awkward angle. One side of her face was smeared with blood where it had run down from the cut in her forehead, but it was already scabbing over and that kind of wound always looked worse than it was. She arched a brow dryly at his inspection.
"You planned that," he said with just a touch of accusation, jerking his chin at the crate pinning the lifeless bones. He didn't know whether to be impressed, or annoyed at her for leaving him in the dark.
She laughed. "Not very well. I couldn't get it to walk over that wretched beam."
Aren looked at the way the metal edge of the crate had torn up the planks into a bristle of long splinters. If it had hit anywhere else, it probably would've dragged its target straight through to the bilge, with the battle following swiftly after. "Lucky," he muttered.
"One of my better traits." She leaned her cheek to the side to try to smear some of the blood off against the pauldron of her robes, then winced as the movement jarred her injured shoulder.
"I can set that for you," he said. He laid his sword down carefully to one side, then slipped off his shield and put that down too. His arms felt very light afterwards, contrasting oddly with the exhausted heaviness he felt everywhere else. Adrenaline had carried him through the end of the fight, but his muscles were sore and bruised from abuse, and the blaze of the Light through his body had left him feeling hollow and out of touch. He thought if he were to lie down on the planks now, he might not wake up until they reached Auberdine.
"Lend me your sword, lad," Wynda said. "I want to take a poke around, and I don't trust that those brutes are all dead."
Her words stirred him from his tired haze. That twisted mage was destroyed, but this wasn't over. The blood on the decks upstairs. Everything trapped behind that ice wall the magister raised. And what had become of the rest of his company? Concern rippled through him, and he struggled not to show how much the thought of more fighting wearied him. "You're right." He tugged off one of his gauntlets and dropped it with a clank, rubbing the heel of his palm against his eye. "The others. The twins and Vorthaal." He hesitated. "And Luciel. We have to go find them."
"Ach, oh no you don't," Wynda said, green eyes sharp with concern as she watched him attempt to stumble to his feet. "I'll go after them. You sit down. I've seen pails of new milk less white than you."
Aren hefted his sword by the hilt, tempted to take her offer and toss it to her across the gap, but he hesitated. "Are you sure you're alright?"
She snorted, crossing her plate-clad arms. Her armor was smeared with blood, but none of it was the right color to be hers, and the worst wound he could see was a nasty red bruise below her left eye. She still, he suspected, looked a great deal healthier than he did. "I'm fine. And if either of you stands up again, I'll prove it by jumping on you even harder than I did that bony fiend."
He winced at the thought of her armor smacking into his sore body. "I don't think that will be necessary." Light, he'd been too stunned to think much of it at the time, but the woman had tackled a necromancer who was practically a lich and tried to beat him senseless with nothing but her fists. Wynda was usually as level-headed a second in command as one could ask for, but she was a true dwarven juggernaut when her blood was up.
Still feeling a nagging sense of guilt for not going with her but too drained to pursue the argument much longer, he tossed the sword so it clattered to the planks near her boots. "If you find any trouble…"
"Jhormug will go with you," Callista said. "If anything goes wrong we'll hear the howls."
"Aye, I daresay they'd hear that fiend in Alterac," she grumbled, eyeing the felhound as it leapt the gap to land lightly on the other side. "Well, get on with you, you Nether-spawned menace."
Aren wasn't sure how smart the demon was, if it understood her words or was just sensitive to tone, but it chose that moment to snarl at her, raising its long spiked hackles then bounding away as Callista narrowed her eyes at it.
Wynda shook her head disapprovingly after it. "This shouldn't be long. Look after yourselves." Picking up Aren's sword, she followed in the felhound's wake, soon vanishing among the shadowy piles of cargo.
The click of bone pieces caught Aren's attention, and he looked to the side to see Callista prodding the remains of the necromancer with her boot. Something glittered among the fragments, and as she toed the bauble close enough to her good hand to pick up, he identified it as a signet ring set with a large violet stone.
"Dalaran," she said as she turned the ring in her fingers, thumbing away the last dust of powdered bone. "They always think it's about who has the biggest fireball."
Aren managed a tired smile at that. Arcane inter-scholastic rivalries died hard, it seemed, even when one of the parties was Scourge and the other had been expelled years ago. He shook his head at himself as he noticed the way she grimaced as some small movement jogged her injured shoulder. "I can look at your arm now if you want. Fair warning: it's going to hurt, but the longer we leave it the worse it will be."
She eyed him suspiciously for a moment, but then began undoing the thin straps that held her pauldron in place with her other hand. The runes that curled along its embellishments had already begun to lose their crimson glow. "You can't just use some cantrip on it?"
"That might help the soreness, but it won't pop your shoulder back in."
She wrinkled her nose unhappily at the word 'pop.' "Ugh, Twisting Nether, this will hurt, won't it." She slid around to face him more squarely, providing better access to the injury. "Alright. Let's get it over with."
Aren removed his other gauntlet and began prodding gently around the joint of her shoulder, checking for any tears or chipped bone fragments that would make this more complicated. The fabric of her robes was smooth as silk beneath his touch, but far more resilient and with none of the shine. Every now and then his fingertips would tingle not-quite-unpleasantly as he brushed one of the runes, and he realized with a tinge of misgiving that many of them were demonic. Not that he really had any right to be surprised by that. Even so, he wasn't sure any of his blessings would've passed through these enchantments even if he hadn't been so drained.
She hissed and shot him an irritated look as he touched a particularly sore spot.
"All of your bones and tendons seem to be intact, which is good," he offered by way of explanation. "Here, make a fist."
The corner of her mouth twitched skeptically, but she did as he asked, and Aren closed his fingers firmly around her wrist.
"I'm going to rotate your arm. It will probably be painful, but once your shoulder pops back in, you'll know."
"Ugh, sounds pleasant."
He guided her wrist until her elbow was at a right angle, then began to push her fist carefully towards her chest. "You went to the Stormwind Academy, didn't you?" he asked, simply to distract her from the discomfort.
She nodded, watching his hand on her wrist closely. "Mmmm. School of Fire. But don't look for my name on the graduate rolls."
No, Aren knew better than that. The details of her expulsion had been included in the parchments the Dawn had given him on her, along with a smattering of other information. Actually, thinking of which… "If you don't mind my asking," he said, only half paying attention to his words as he pressed her fist into her chest and then began to pull it slowly back outwards again, "what in the Light possessed you to let an imp loose on the Academy grounds?"
She laughed, but it turned into a wince halfway through. "I think saying I let it is giving me too much cred– " She bit the word off halfway through, and for a moment Aren thought she was simply in too much pain to continue, but then he noticed the suspicious narrowing of her grey eyes. "How did you know about – ow! – about that?"
Aren frowned sheepishly at himself, rotating her arm as far to the side as it would go and then gently pressing it towards her chest again. He'd forgotten she'd never actually mentioned that to him – perhaps he hadn't chosen the best topic. "It was in the dossier the Argent Dawn gave me on you. There wasn't much," he added hastily as her glare sharpened. "Just name, occupation, references, and any evidence of, er…mischief."
She snorted at that, squeezing her eyes shut as he pulled her arm steadily outward once again. "Mischief? Please. Go on, call it what it is. They were looking for treason. Nice to know my city – ow – doesn't think I've joined the Legion after all." She hissed through her teeth, half in pain and half in relief, as Aren felt her arm slip back into place.
"Try to move it now," he said, bringing his fingers back to her shoulder and pressing firmly against the joint.
"Who were my references?" she wondered as she rolled her shoulder against his palm with a disgruntled expression. "I certainly didn't ask for any."
Her muscles and tendons all seemed to be pulling smoothly beneath his fingers, and she didn't look to be in any more pain. His brow creased as he tried to remember the names he'd read, none of which had been familiar to him at the time. "Lord Windsor, Lord Duncan, Lord and Lady Devereux…"
"Oh, plaguing hells!"
Her sudden curse startled him, and he glanced from her shoulder back to her face. In the short time they'd known each other, Aren had found the warlock's features to be remarkably expressive, and her current look of contempt was withering.
"It would be her, wouldn't it," she muttered. "Crocolisk-faced witch."
"Not a friend of yours?" Aren tried cautiously, dropping his hand from her shoulder.
"Not even close. Ugh, sorry," she said, dulling some of the edge in her voice. "I'm not angry at you." She reached up a hand to scratch absently at her face, felt the dried blood that flaked away beneath her fingernails and wrinkled her nose, scrubbing at her cheek in irritation.
"It's alright," Aren said. He still felt sore and a little lightheaded, and was relieved she didn't want to pursue an argument with him. He found, to his own mild surprise, that he actually enjoyed her company when she wasn't turning every conversation into a verbal fencing match. "I know you didn't want any part of any of this."
"Well, it's amazing how little what I want sometimes has to do with what I get into," she muttered resignedly. She finally stopped rubbing at her scabbed cheek and wiped her hand off against her robes, apparently satisfied that the worst of the mess was gone.
She'd almost gotten it all, but not quite. Aren registered the streaked red fingerprint still on her face and reached out automatically to smear it off for her. He didn't think more fully about what he was doing until his thumb brushed her jaw and he felt her head turn beneath his touch.
Her eyes flicked from his face to his hand, and though he couldn't quite place her expression (if he was forced to describe it, he would've put it somewhere between surprised and skeptical), he still suddenly felt intensely awkward. Why in Uther's name had he believed that that was appropriate? At least she didn't look angry.
He pulled his hand away sheepishly, turning it to show her his thumb. "Ah, you had blood on your face."
She raised a brow, expression shifting more towards the skeptical by the moment, and looked at him as though trying to decide if he was mad or just ridiculous. "More than you do?"
He touched his face, feeling the crust that had dried between his skin and his cheekguard, and felt, if possible, even more embarrassed. "Probably not."
She looked at him a moment longer and then laughed, rubbing the heels of her hands briefly against her eyes. When she glanced up at him again, her smile held nothing more unpleasant than amusement, and maybe something he could almost believe, in a wry, sideways sort of way, was affectionate.
Aren decided he had no regrets after all.
A/N: Whew, finally got this one out. Action scenes are always harder for me to write than other stuff, which is why it took so long (also, this chapter is about twice as long as the others, hah). Anyway, I just wanted to add a brief note on my (admittedly amateur) theories of writing relationships that I hope will reassure the people who expressed reservations about the "romance" (please note the quotations;-)) aspect of this fic. Firstly, I don't really believe in soulmates, i.e., that there is one and only one person that someone can ever be truly happy with, so a character being in one relatively good relationship doesn't necessarily invalidate all others. Secondly, I believe that the way characters relate to each other can (and should!) change as the characters change and learn more about one another. So just because a relationship is established to be one way in chapter three does not mean it will still fit the same description in chapter twelve (though, of course, it might). Thirdly, I absolutely hate it when characters who already have strong personalities turn into mushy pod-people as soon as they find a love interest, so if you ever see that happening here, feel free to smack me with something heavy (though I'll do my best to make sure you never have to:p). And lastly, this is fanfiction, so anything goes! I really wouldn't call anything a hopeless bet at this point, and there are lots of chapters left.