The felguards hauling on his arms paused before a door incongruously carved with owls and twining branches. One of them rapped it hard with his knuckles before pulling it open and bullying Aren and Callista inside.
Aren had steeled himself for the sight of an interrogation chamber - worn restraints and gleaming implements, the reek of stale sweat and old blood - but this room looked more like a night-elven command post than a place of torture. The ceiling was high and vaguely domed, supported by a lattice of thick polished tree roots instead of beams. Lanterns hung from them like enchanted fruit, shedding silvery light on the annotated maps of Felwood and the surrounding lands that papered the walls.
It would have been a pleasant enough chamber - except for the demon that dominated its center.
Nerothos ignored their entrance from the other side of a massive darkwood table, studying a scatter of documents written in an unfamiliar script. Even motionless, his form seemed to promise violence. His wings shaded the table's polished surface, half-spread, like a hunting hawk's, and the parchment threw his wicked claws into stark prominence.
Aren swallowed, unable to suppress the animal fear that clenched his gut as his guards marched him forward. Images from his first sight of a dreadlord rose like phantoms before his inner eye - night and the driving rain, corpses stooped over a twitching body amid the jagged stalks of last year's corn, the winged shadow directing their progress with cold amusement - he suppressed the memory with a shudder. Lordaeron was dead. But one of the lessons of its cataclysm was that demons were not as invincible as they pretended.
He forced his gaze onto Nerothos, alert to any clue to his intentions. At a glance, he looked a little like the doomguard who'd captured them. Both demons had cloven hooves, backswept horns, and leathery batlike wings, though the dreadlord was slightly less massive. But where the doomguard's features had been square and brutish, almost bestial, Nerothos' aquiline, not-quite human face was alive with intelligence.
He wished, suddenly, that he hadn't lost his temper with Callista. Angry and blindsided as he'd been - as he still felt - he should have controlled himself better. She had information that might have helped them. And, more importantly, they all needed to be on the same side to have any hope of surviving this. He'd as much as told her she was on her own, and he wondered uncomfortably what she might do now.
The felguards released his arms and withdrew to either side of the entrance, leaving him adrift in the middle of the flagstoned floor. A few chairs - shaped from living wood, in the kaldorei fashion - sat at careless angles on their side of the table's gleaming expanse, but Aren would not have taken one any more than he would have offered the dreadlord a handshake. Instead, he resisted the urge to rub where the felguards' claws had gouged, straightening his back in an effort to look unintimidated.
Nerothos perused one of his documents for a moment longer before looking up, studying the two mortals with the same merciless intensity he had the writing on the page pinned beneath his talons.
Aren had resolved not be cowed, but found he couldn't meet that burning gaze for long. Rather than drop his eyes, he looked to his right under the pretense of checking what Callista was making of all of this. He was annoyed to find her thumbing a streak of dirt from her wrist with a casualness that had to be feigned, neither acknowledging his look nor paying any attention to their captor.
"Tell me, paladin."
Aren's focus snapped nervously back to the dreadlord. Unlike that of most of the demons they'd encountered so far, Nerothos' speech was flawless, though his voice was too dark and resonant to ever be mistaken for anything human. An unnatural felfire glow lit his eyes, though the most unpleasant thing about them was their expression: coldly curious, as though Aren were some foreign trinket he hadn't discovered the use of yet and whose main diversion might still lay in its dismantling.
He smiled. "Do you imagine yourself my enemy?"
Of course you're my enemy, was the instinctive response that Aren swallowed. Callista may have been comfortable blurring the line between adversary and dangerous acquaintance with this creature, but there were some things Aren still knew to be true. You could not bargain honorably with demons. Their promises were broken before they were uttered and anything real they offered was never worth its price in misery and blood. He owed Wynda and Ander and the others still alive to do what he could to protect them. He understood, too, that life was often lived in a murky borderland much different than the black and white clarity of his faith. Even so, he'd taken other oaths and would not break them. He could never forget who the true authors of the Scourge had been. "I will not negotiate with demons. You've already killed enough of my people. I won't help you harm any more."
He braced himself for anger at his defiance, but Nerothos only tilted his horned head, gaze sharpening with interest. He'd thought the dreadlord unsettling before, but the full weight of his attention struck him with the force of a cleaver into a side of meat. There was something worse in it than the petty malice he was used to, by now, from other demons: a methodical dissection of everything from his accent to the bloodstains on his leathers, the traitorous twitch of his cheek as he struggled to keep his face impassive; as though Nerothos were reading past the surface texture of those things into what lay beneath and finding only more fuel for his scorn. "So," he said, after what felt like an age but was only the span of a few heartbeats. "You are from Lordaeron. I resided there once, myself. Though I'm sure we remember it rather differently."
Aren stiffened, his own nails digging into his palms. Of course the demon had been there. He didn't want to know what sort of atrocities he'd committed in the Scourge's wake. Better to give him as little as possible to use, only stare impassively ahead the way he'd been taught to handle interrogations and try to end this farce quickly. "What do you want?" he asked. "Where have you taken the others?"
Contempt hardened Nerothos' cruelly chiseled features, and he clucked his tongue in mock disappointment. "You haven't been paying attention." His gaze shifted to something to the right of Aren's shoulder. "Since you're still here, I assumed you would have explained this to him."
Callista glanced up from inspecting a scrape on the back of her hand, actually managing to look annoyed at being addressed. She'd been so uncharacteristically silent that Aren had almost forgotten she was in the room at all. "I did try. But he wasn't particularly interested in anything I had to say. I'm sure you can't imagine why."
Nerothos' eyes raked across Aren again, a more cursory blow than the last evisceration. "This one does have an usually poor grasp on his circumstances."
Aren knew better than to let a demon's remarks get under his skin. He still found himself stung. Not at Nerothos' words, so much as at Callista's response - instead of defending him, or even ignoring the jab, she actually drew up one corner of her mouth and shrugged.
All the feelings of betrayal he'd been trying to reason away broke over him like a wave. He didn't care how angry at him she was - for Light's sake, a forced audience with the Burning Legion was no place to be airing personal grievances. And yet there she stood - dirt and blood from this fiend's dungeon still speckling her bare arms - studying the maps on the wall with more interest than the fraught conversation going on in front of her, as though this were a stranger's affair she was only accidentally privy to and faintly embarrassed to witness.
"I understand everything I need to know about this," Aren said, biting the words off before he could stop himself.
"How distressing that I believe you mean that," Nerothos drawled. "Alas, sincerity is a less useful basis for negotiation than reality." He sneered, revealing an alarming glimpse of fangs. "The last feeble dregs of the Silver Hand pose no threat to Jaedenar. If I were to execute you now, I do not believe I would suffer any consequence at all."
Aren froze, unsure how to respond. Bravado was worthless, and he would not beg. Loathing for the creature in front of him boiled up so hard he could taste it in the back of his throat. Bad enough that he'd failed - failed in his mission, failed to keep his people alive - bad enough that he was powerless to protect the ones who were left. It was the humiliation of being toyed with that infuriated him. Nerothos had never even set out to thwart them; they'd simply dropped into his lap, and now he batted them about like a nightsaber would a wounded rabbit. Even his threats held as much mockery as genuine menace. And Callista standing there, dispassionately watching the whole thing, only made it so much worse.
What would she do, he wondered, if the demon ordered his throat cut. Would she intervene? Would she attack the guards, maybe even that smug monstrosity on the other side of the table? Or would she continue to do nothing, watch coolly like a bored noblewoman at an underwhelming art gallery as the blades were drawn?
Nerothos seemed content to wait for him to speak. Even the silvery lantern-light looked false beneath that inhuman regard. Aren's desire to curse the demon to the void and have done with it was overwhelming...but that would damn his friends as well. A nauseating glaze of unreality settled on the room as he tried to sift a miracle from his racing thoughts. More deaths to lay at his feet, to join Luciel's and so many nameless others. And yet he would not - could not - bow to the Shadow Council. He prayed for wisdom, but heard only the roaring of blood in his ears.
Movement at the corner of his eye disturbed his overwrought senses, but it was only Callista, stirring herself, finally, and darting him an alarmed sideways glance. Or perhaps he was mistaken, because she looked away almost before he could register the expression. Her face had smoothed by the time she returned to examining the dreadlord, her finely-boned features as carefully composed as an oil painting.
"Is there a point buried under all this preamble?" she said.
Nerothos pierced Aren with his gaze for a moment longer - he had the distinct sense that the demon was aware of his fear and his self-recrimination, and was amused by both - before shifting his attention, mercifully, to Callista.
"Always," he said.
Aren tensed, readying himself for the demon to try to make good on his earlier threat. But rather than motioning to the guards, Nerothos only stretched his wings before slackening them against his back, an oddly complaisant gesture. "For reasons I find increasingly mystifying, you want to keep this fool and his addled charges alive."
Callista put her head to one side and looked at him, with that particular blend of curiosity and irritation that meant she suspected he was being difficult on purpose. It was an expression Aren found intimately familiar, though jarring to see it leveled at an enemy. To his discomfort, she approached the demon to a more conversational distance, putting her hands on the gnarled back of one of the chairs. "What part of this is mystifying to you, exactly? At some point, I'd like to go home again. And how will it look if the only member of this party that returns is the warlock they conscripted."
The cruel line of Nerothos' mouth curved. "Indeed. Fortunately for you, our goals coincide. You want to find your missing companions. I am inclined to allow your search."
"And the catch is..."
"I want to know where they've been taken, and for what purpose."
The surface innocence of his demand unbalanced Aren almost as much as the abrupt thaw in his manner. "That can't be all," he said.
He'd deliberately raised his voice, suddenly realizing how Callista's new position near the table had separated him from the conversation, but the anemic way his words tumbled into the space made him wish he could snatch them back.
Even in the moment, he realized the thought was ridiculous. He hadn't spoken out of turn; there was no way he even could, in a chamber where the only other occupants were demons and a warlock of dubious allegience. And yet he still couldn't help feeling the way he once had as a young man, thoughtlessly blurting out a remark in front of a visiting delegation from Stormwind.
Nerothos swept him with his gaze almost incidentally. He rested the green coals of his eyes on him for the precise fraction of a second necessary to prove that the snub was not an accident, before returning his attention to Callista.
She didn't look at Aren at all, though the skin around her eyes tightened briefly as she leaned forward over the back of the chair. "He has a point, demon. What do you think's happened to them that's so interesting?"
Nerothos' claws clicked against the wood as he braced his hands on the table in a sinister mirror of her posture. "Nothing pleasant, I'm sure."
The dual dismissal burned. Especially from Callista, who was too sensitive to nuance not to realize that she'd cut him out. Aren knew he should say something - anything - to assert himself, but the combined weight of the dreadlord's contempt and his lover's disinterest withered the words in his throat.
Callista scoffed, either unperturbed by Nerothos' looming or confident in the dark-grained width of the table. The contrast between them should have made her look small - the demon's black-armored bulk opposite a thin human in a bedraggled tunic - but Callista had a way of holding herself that convinced an onlooker that wherever she happened to be was exactly where she belonged. Which was probably why, Aren thought with acrid frustration, she never got boxed out of arguments that were happening right in front of her.
"Fine. Let's try again," she said. "This Beltherac creature. What is he? If he's no ally of yours, what's he doing in Felwood?"
Nerothos removed his hands from the table, the blood-colored gems in his wrist-guards glinting with the movement. "Beltherac is nathrezim. And his aim is the same as all of ours' in this wretched forest: to consolidate power."
Callista scrunched up her face. "Of course it is." She walked around to the front of the chair, dropping into it and peering balefully at him around the two fingers rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Do you have any hobbies that don't involve finding the meanest creature you can lay your hands on and twisting his ears?"
A prickling heat spread through his palm, and Aren was startled to find that he'd been crossing his arms so tightly that the fingers of his left hand had gone numb. This caustic civility unnerved him even more than the dreadlord's threats.
Because, it dawned on him with anger too well-tread to hold any real fire, he was certain that Callista had been lying. Again.
Nerothos seemed to find nothing odd about his prisoner slouching on the furniture, only furthering Aren's conviction. "I fail to see the aim of your grousing. My 'hobbies' have served you well enough in the past."
The sour look she shot him between her fingers contradicted that.
Aren had no way of verifying what she'd told them about her prior dealings with Nerothos, and he probably never would. But while he found it painfully clear that he didn't know Callista as well as he'd thought, he was very sure this was not the way she'd treat a barely-tolerated adversary whose last confirmed act had been gutting one of her companions. She was not nearly wary enough of him for that.
"Would you prefer I demand the corpses of some arbitrary number of kaldorei?"
"I'm not sure," Callista said spitefully. Then she glanced at Aren, as though suddenly remembering his presence, and seemed to relent. "Alright," she said with a disgusted shake of her head. "Fine. Let's pretend for a moment I've gone utterly mad and decided to insert myself in Jaedenar politics. What do you expect me to do? Beltherac will know me for a liar after five words in his presence - or at least you always seem to."
"It is unlikely you would be able to deceive him," Nerothos agreed. "If you are wise, you'll avoid him altogether. Fortunately for you, he's acquired a number of human followers you should have no trouble insinuating yourself among."
"'Followers'?" she echoed doubtfully. She grimaced as though the word tasted foul. "Please tell me this doesn't involve chasing around some demented pack of cultists."
He inclined his head, amused at her displeasure. "They call themselves the Convocation of Souls, though their tenets appear to be taken from a schismatic branch of the Cult of Forgotten Shadow."
She muttered something under her breath.
Nerothos laughed. "And here I'd thought you'd developed a taste for the company of pious fools."
Aren only half-listened, determined to use the respite he'd gained by being ignored. If Callista was lying, did it even matter anymore? (It did, a still sore part of him insisted, it mattered intensely, and yet…) Whatever her intentions, the reality remained the same. They were prisoners of the Shadow Council.
Mad plans bloomed and burst in his head like garish soap bubbles. He could grab a weapon from the guards, try to free the others; attack the dreadlord and force Callista's hand (even now, he could not really believe she was wholly in his pocket) - but despite their wildness, a clinging lethargy numbed his thoughts. He knew his desperate fantasies for what they were. No escape was possible, now. They would either submit, or be executed. And much as Callista's arrogant amoral bartering infuriated and dismayed him, it had a seductive draw, as well. The cowardly relief of abdication...he was sick of finding himself at fault. Why not simply surrender? Let her play the dreadlord's game and do his best to temper the damage, rather than exhausting himself in a battle he could only lose. Whatever happened next would be on her head, not his. And besides...he did not want to die.
But did he truly love his own life enough to find common cause with the Burning Legion?
His revulsion at serving a demon's ends, in however small a way, even as the price of survival for him and those in his care, was so strong that it briefly flung his thoughts clear of their tangling doubts. This was how good men committed terrible sins.
Nerothos flapped his wings once, contemplatively, the sharp flutter of shadows startling Aren from his brooding. "You understand what I require of you?"
Callista made a loose circular motion with her finger. "Investigate this cult. Find out what Beltherac is up to, particularly what he's doing with the prisoners he's collected. And in return, you'll release us - all of us - and grant us safe passage out of Felwood."
"Acceptable," Nerothos said.
The demon's careless assent jolted Aren.
"I haven't agreed to anything," he said, finding his tongue.
Nerothos cut him a glance of mingled surprise and contempt. It was the exact expression he might have worn had one of the chairs sprung to life and offered a particularly stupid observation. "And why would you imagine that anyone requires that."
Callista shot the demon a venomous look, but didn't comment. Instead, she stood and turned towards Aren, settling one hand on the table. The corner of her mouth twitched sympathetically; it was the first time she'd really met his eyes since the guards dragged them in here. "This is the best choice we have," she said.
Nerothos tilted his head sardonically at that. His gaze lingered on Aren, but the remark he offered in the demon-tongue was not meant for him, voice pitched low with a derisive note that set Aren's teeth on edge.
Callista didn't respond, though the miniscule roll of her eyes seemed more a private reaction than a gesture of solidarity.
Aren suspected he was just beginning to sense the layered undercurrents warping this conversation. Even so, he interpreted this one easily enough; however the lines had been drawn when they entered this room, he was more alone than ever on his side now. "I am an officer of the Argent Dawn, Callista. I cannot make a pact with the Burning Legion. Under any circumstances. It doesn't matter what it leads to."
"No one is asking you to do that," she said. Her expression was softer than any he'd seen her wear in some time, smudged with dried blood across one cheek. It was unfair, how badly he could still want to believe her, even with an actual demon making snide comments over her shoulder. "The only one agreeing to any terms is me, and I'm not an officer of anything. If you happen to benefit from whatever I decide, I doubt your superiors will be able to fault you for it."
He shook his head. "That isn't how it works. You're still a member of my command. Everything that you do -"
"Then note your objection in your debriefing, after we survive." There was no rancor in her tone, but the finality in it chilled him.
"You don't have the authority to -"
"Are you sure? Your superiors must've suspected someone's hands would need to get dirty eventually. Or is there some other reason they strong-armed me into going with you?"
Whatever softness he thought he'd seen in her had vanished. She cocked her head, watching him with eyes like slate.
He opened his mouth and then shut it again, taken aback as much by her coldness as by the fact that she'd bring that up in front of the dreadlord. He realized, with a shock of anger, that she was less trying to convince him than to mold him into a bargaining chip. And he had no idea what to do about it. Even had they been alone, he didn't know how he would have handled her in this mood. And the dreadlord across the table only made it infinitely worse. Nerothos crossed his large pale arms, watching him like a fox waiting to see which way a cornered sparrow would dart.
"I'm not going to apologize for that again," Aren said stiffly.
Her bland gaze didn't waver, as though this were a meaningless tiff with someone she hardly knew. "I don't expect you to."
Nerothos curled his lip, baring the white point of a fang. "Is refusing to offer what no one is interested in how all Argent paladins negotiate, or is this only your personal expression of irrelevance?"
Callista flicked the dreadlord an irritated glance across her shoulder. Aren couldn't see why - the creature had taken her part. She snapped something at him, but any gratitude Aren may have felt for her intervention was destroyed by the fact that she'd done it in demonic rather than Common.
Nerothos appeared thoroughly unchastened by whatever she'd said. He flexed his leathery wings with arrogant unconcern before replying in the same tongue.
Callista's eyes narrowed, but she seemed to drop whatever that discussion had been, switching easily back to Common. "Is there anything else?"
"No," Nerothos said. He regarded Aren with a mannered solicitude that was mocking in its very correctness. "Assuming your 'captain' has no further concerns."
Supplicants of the Light were not supposed to foster hatred in their hearts. But Aren suddenly understood, in a visceral flash, why Prince Arthas might have ransomed his soul and sailed to the end of the world to murder a dreadlord.
"No," he managed to ungrit his teeth long enough to say. There was no point in dragging this out any longer.
Nerothos barely waited for his reply before trapping Callista again with his gaze. His wings spread, armor so black it seemed to swallow the light that fell on it, the veneer of amiability he'd sported gone. "I trust I needn't elaborate on the consequences of treachery, warlock."
Aren thought that in less personal circumstances, there might have been something funny about that - a demon admonishing a mortal about fair play.
Rather than flinch, Callista only turned to face him again. She laid her palms flat against the table as she looked up at him, answering his aggression with disarming simplicity. "I want to go home," she said. "That's the beginning and end of my interest in who rules in Jaedenar. Better you than Beltherac, I suppose. Or one of those jumped-up hairballs out of Satyrnaar."
Nerothos weighed that, watching her for a long moment. "The guards will see you back to your party. One of my servants will find you later with some information you may find useful."
Callista squinted in the midmorning light that filtered through the leaves. Even tainted with rot, as it invariably was in Felwood, the fitful breeze was welcome after so long underground. A few steps behind her glared the scintillating green eye of the portal that had delivered them. Despite the day's warmth, its wash of magic raised the hairs on her neck.
"Here." The one-eyed orc who'd escorted them out of the Hold spat the word at them like a curse in barely intelligible Common, and she turned in time to see his curt gesture to one of the quartet of felguards flanking him. "Take your stuff. And if you try run. We know. They kill you."
The felguard grinned, clearly enjoying the prospect, but dropped the sacks he had been carrying at his feet.
Azlia stroked her flank, pursing her lips at him in a playful moue that he pretended to ignore while watching sidelong past the edge of his helm.
Callista rolled her eyes. "Which way to the town?" she asked.
The orc's fire-scarred face crumpled into a scowl, as though she'd asked him for an unusual favor. He jabbed a finger in the direction of a gnarled old oak riven through with fungus, then shuffled around without another word, felguard escort in tow. The portal rippled as it swallowed them, irising silently closed.
Callista blinked, startled by the sudden departure.
Her series of follow-up questions - when could she expect to hear from Nerothos' contact, how would she get in touch if she happened to find anything - died on her tongue. Nevermind, then.
To her right, Aren tramped his way through the scraggly underbrush, turning out the sacks the felguard had dropped and beginning to sort their belongings into piles. He put his back to her, too rigidly for it be accidental, tossing boots and rumpled shirts to one side or the other in angry jerks.
Callista told herself she didn't care. Righteous indignation was a privilege of people who weren't broken corpses on the floor of the Shadow Hold. If someone needed to play the villain to keep him from committing pointlessly honorable suicide, she was entirely capable of doing that.
Wynda, who'd been supporting Ander with her good arm slung around his waist, eased him to the ground. She glanced at Aren's stiff motions as he inventoried their gear and then leveled a jaded look at Callista. "Well, lass, let's have it. I'm guessing that fiend didn't let us go just for old times' sake."
Callista shrugged, a one-shouldered gesture more casual than she truly felt. "He was surprisingly agreeable, actually. I'm sure we'll discover the awful reasons for that soon enough."
Azlia smiled, wetting her top lip with the tip of her tongue. "Even dreadlords can be reasonable if you ask very nicely."
Wynda shot her a distasteful look, but wisely ignored her. The yellowing bruise across her temple looked even angrier in the dappled sunlight than it had underground. "What did you promise the fiend, exactly?"
Callista hesitated. She quested outward with her magic, examining the surrounding forest, but sensed nothing out of the ordinary. The day was going to be hot; steam rose from the undergrowth, tortured by the breeze into fantastic shapes, but nothing else stirred besides leaves. She supposed Nerothos' portal wouldn't have tossed them out here if there had been any chance of witnesses.
"I told him I'd find out where Nathanial and Vorthaal have been taken, and why," she said. "The demon who captured them has been operating some cult nearby, it seems, and Nerothos wants to know what he's been up to."
"That's it?" Ander said, looking up hopefully from his seat on a log studded with venomous green toadstools. One of the paladins had tended to his leg, but the bandage was filthy and his trousers rusty with blood. Nether, they were a sorry-looking lot. "No creepy soul magic, no ritual murder...just...do the thing we were going to do anyway and send your horrifying demon friend a courtesy note?" He looked around, marking Wynda's pursed lips and Aren's tightly set jaw. "Am I missing something? Because...that doesn't sound terrible. What part of that is terrible?"
"Aye, it all seems tolerable enough on the face of it," Wynda said. "And that makes me trust this dreadlord even less. Even I know his kind is a byword for treachery. Why is he going after this other fiend? What guarantee do we have he'll keep his word when this is through?"
Aren stood, wiping his palms against his leathers. A spear of sunlight pierced the canopy, limning his hair and the firm breadth of his shoulders with gold. He was almost aggravatingly handsome, Callista thought, even with his face pinched like a magistrate's handing down an unpleasant sentence. It made it hard to maintain the frustration with him that kept more uncomfortable feelings at bay. The cynical part of her mind wondered how tempted she'd have been to dump him straight in the Shadow Council's lap, if he'd looked less like a graven image in a cathedral vestibule.
"It's not just the likelihood of betrayal, though that does worry me, too," he said. The wariness around his eyes pricked Callista's conscience harder than the subdued anger in his tone. "You've agreed to run errands for the Burning Legion. What harm are we doing by helping that monster? Do you even care? You never even tried to find out, just agreed to everything he said."
Callista wrinkled her nose in disagreement, measuring her response. Incredulity at how anyone could be so self-immolatingly single-minded mingled with her feeling that Aren deserved to get his licks in, after the way she'd used him earlier. She'd only done what was necessary, but she'd learned by now that necessity was not a word to placate him. It was almost freeing, in a way; she did not believe he would forgive her, so she no longer had to worry about tarnishing whatever illusions he'd woven to cover the holes in her moral fabric.
She sighed. "If you want to save yourself some angst, I wouldn't take too much of what was said in there at face value. You're right; a demon's word isn't generally worth much. And I haven't decided yet if mine is, either."
The browned skeleton of a leaf fluttered past Aren's face, but he ignored it, intent on watching her. "What's that supposed to mean? I thought you didn't think you could lie to him," he said.
Since he'd gathered that from a remark she'd made to Nerothos, it seemed he wasn't taking her advice too seriously. In this case, though, he wasn't wrong. "I wasn't lying to him, exactly," she said. "If I happen to find his information, I'll have no problem giving it to him. But now that we're out of the Shadow Hold, it's possible a better opportunity will present itself."
Wynda raised her ruddy brows. "By the Light, lass, you're not seriously recommending we try to double cross a dreadlord."
Callista cocked her head and shrugged. "I'm not recommending we do anything. I agree with you, for what it's worth. We don't know enough about what's happening here. Even if nothing worse is going on, Nerothos must have dozens of informants in Jaedenar. How can he not know what his supposed ally is doing on his own doorstep? There's some nasty kink to this he hasn't seen fit to mention, I'm sure."
Aren shook his head. "Then why didn't you press him, if that's what you thought?"
"What good would that have done?" she retorted. "You saw how cagey he got when I asked what he thought happened to the others. If he wanted us to know, he would have told us."
"And you're okay with that."
"Of course not," she said coolly. "I simply didn't care."
And she was exhausted and filthy and tired of being interrogated. She anticipated the spasm of outrage that stiffened his handsome face, continuing before he could start lecturing her. "We were prisoners," she said, narrowing her eyes. "No one was coming to rescue us. As far as I was concerned, Nerothos could tell us whatever tales he thought we needed to hear, as long as he freed us in the end. Better to survive, and sort the the truth out later."
Wynda grimaced, rubbing her fingers against her temple as though to stave off a headache. "Well, I can't say I approve the notion of being beholden to that bat-winged terror, but I'm not sure what else you could have done." She looked meaningfully at Aren, clearly willing him to let the matter rest.
He disregarded her stare. "We're answering to demons. You can't actually believe this will end here."
Ander glanced slowly between the two paladins, as though gradually concluding he might be the only sane man in the vicinity. Callista sympathized; her own similar suspicion was rapidly attaining the firmness of dogma. As he studied them, the careless facade he'd worn since their escape seemed to fray and finally fall away, his usually jovial face bare with anger. "Are you even listening to yourselves?"
His voice razored through the soft rustle of branches, startling Aren and Wynda into pivoting to look at him more squarely. Even Azlia, who treated all mortal concerns with contempt as a point of pride, straightened her insouciant lean against a tree trunk to stare.
"Sitting here acting all high and mighty over...what-ifs. Of course everyone in this disgusting forest has an agenda! Who cares! Are you planning to ask the dreadlord for your cell back, please?"
"Easy, lad," Wynda said, gripping his shoulder reassuringly. "That's not what we -"
"Demons have my brother!" he snarled. He shrugged her hand away angrily. "Don't you get it? That's not some...some imaginary moral test, that's real. I thought we were going to die in those cells, but we didn't, and now she tells me we have the chance to save him. But you're too busy worrying the Light's going to rap your knuckles like a bitter old schoolmarm if you put a toe out of line. Well, guess what? I don't care. I don't care about some made-up harm we may or may not be doing by rescuing my brother. Do you know where you're going?"
This last was directed at Callista, the question slow to penetrate her astonishment at his outburst. "Yes," she managed.
He nodded, face strained and pale beneath his thatch of black hair. "Good. Then let's get our stuff and get moving. You two can sit here and...pray for help, or whatever, if you don't want to come."
"I'm sorry, Ander," Aren said. His shoulders sank as his indignation faded, until he looked nearly as stricken as the sickly trees that framed him. "We haven't forgotten about your brother. Or Vorthaal."
"Yeah, whatever," Ander muttered, staring down at the clenched fists in his lap. "Come on. Just...let's go."
A/N: Once again, thanks to anyone still reading! I really do have every intention of finishing this thing, hopefully before too many more expansions have come and gone, ha. Special shout-out to Ihsan997, for providing both inspiring stories that keep me thinking about Warcraft and thoughtful conversation.
BTW, if you're wondering what Nerothos and Callista were saying in those asides in Aren's POV, some rough translations, in order, would be: 1) Nerothos suggesting Callista's best choice would have been pushing them all out of the boat over the maelstrom, but seeing as they're here... 2) Callista snapping at Nerothos that making Aren hate him would only make her job harder, to which Nerothos replies that that sounded like a personal problem.