I still cannot bear to think of what happened the day I reached Silvermoon with the others. Sylvanas had allowed us to escape, and we'd managed to get some more people to come with us from Fairbreeze Village, so that almost fifty of us reached the majestic elven city.

But that evening, my world fell apart as the Scourge reached us. I knew when I saw them that Sylvanas had perished. I knew I'd never see her again, knew that it was all over. A chasm opened inside my heart, the pain so unbelievably strong that I couldn't move for a time, and people had to carry me away from the city gates as scores of undead poured in.

It was a guard who carried me, a man by the name of Fenir, and he held me throughout the ordeal that followed.

Arthas marched into the main city square, where most of us were assembled, and next to him was a tall ghostly figure. I moved closer, into the open, to see.

A scream escaped me as the figure turned its head to look directly at me.

"Sylvanas!"

He had raised her. She was an undead. My love, my beautiful love was now a member of the Scourge.

Without a thought, I launched myself at Arthas, but someone leapt on top of me.

"No, Faith! You mustn't!"

It was Fenir, seeming absolutely shocked at seeing Sylvanas there. I remembered now, dimly, that he had known my brothers, which explained why he was holding me back. But I didn't care. Sylvanas was dead. That monster had killed her, and I would be the one to end his life, such as it was. I struggled against him.

"Faith, she's dead! She's… she's gone. Sylvanas is gone."

"NO!" That word was ripped out of me in such a way that everyone, including Arthas, turned to look at me. I didn't know what to think. I didn't want to hear anything. All I saw was Sylvanas, a ghost, and memories flooded me of her and I together, our kiss, my giving her my ring… I screamed again, and again, and again, unable to stop. Fenir just held me tightly, and I felt someone else behind me, some person who had left camp with me, trying to comfort me as it all ended.

Arthas began to laugh. Several of his minions laughed with him, but Sylvanas didn't.

"That would be the fire mage who has given us so much trouble!" he said. "I'm sorry." He pulled something from the pile of corpses that was heaped on a wagon. "Was she your lover?" He flung a body at me, and it landed near my feet.

My heart shattered. Sylvanas's body. Dead, broken, bloody, bruised, bearing signs of obvious torture and violation, it was unmistakably her. This was what she had died for, to shield me from that fate.

Oh, my love! You died for us, you died to save us! What am I supposed to do without you now? How am I supposed to go on?

But I had promised her. I looked from her body to the insubstantial thing in front of me and remembered having promised her to keep going, that she would love me no matter what. Doing the only thing I could think of, I used an invisible spell to shield Sylvanas's body from further decomposition and the ghost, if it was a ghost, looked at me, as though knowing what I'd done.

"Sylvanas," said Arthas suddenly. "Kill her. The rest of you, you know what to do."

People began to scream. I scrambled away from Sylvanas's body as her ghostly form came towards me. I felt dark magic coming towards me, and countered it, sending black fire in every direction, catching several fiends at once. Fenir stepped in front of me.

"Run, Faith!" he cried.

I didn't run but took the time to set more fires. The Scourge couldn't have the city if it was ashes. Sylvanas killed Fenir, I couldn't figure out how, but as he fell, I cast the most powerful bit of magic I knew.

Buildings began to burn everywhere, the square going up in flames. I hated to do it, but what choice did we have? Sylvanas was dead, I couldn't see our leaders anywhere, and we had to get out.

"To the harbor!" I cried, setting a wall of fire between me and Sylvanas.

I ran and felt several people running with me. Prince, Sylvanas's horse, somehow remained by my side as we ran. I caught the hand of a child and pulled her along as someone who was obviously her mother fell to the ground, dead. As I passed more corpses, whether moving or not, I burned them. I was already growing tired, but I couldn't think of stopping. I was too numb to feel the grief, a grief that I knew would last decades, if not longer, and the numbness allowed me to keep my mind clear for the time being.

I don't know how long it took us to reach the harbor. Several thousands of us were there, getting on the boats as quickly as we could, and I handed the little girl to a guard, who immediately boarded with her while I stayed behind and kept the Scourge at bay. Three boats were already underway, and I prayed that no Undead was amongst the people there, or it would have all been for nothing.

Twenty minutes later, it was over. I knew that we wouldn't be able to save anyone else.

"Go, Miss, go!" screamed a guard. "Take the last boat!"

"You can make it!" I cried back.

But he shook his head. A second later, he stopped running and faced the undead coming towards him. I couldn't look to see what his fate was, but I grabbed Prince's bridle, and together, we boarded the last boat out of Silvermoon City. As the boat left, I sent out fireballs to incinerate whatever corpses were on the harbor, and trailed the fire back to the city, which, seconds later, erupted in red and black flames.

"You're burning the city," said someone quietly.

I only nodded.

Gargoyles pursued us, but I made quick work of them, stopping them from landing on our boat.

"Why did they come here?" asked a woman who was cradling a small child in her arms.

"Someone said they were after the Sunwell."

I turned my head, "Excuse me?"

"Look!"

The flames at the harbor were frozen. Even from a distance, I could see that Arthas was freezing the seawater so as to permit his creatures and the Scourge machines to pass to the Isle of Quel'Danas.

"Should we help them?" asked the guard.

I was torn. I wanted to protect the Sunwell, but I knew for a fact there was nothing I could do to save King Anasterian, who was there.

"Do you honestly think we have a chance against them? We got less than half of the citizens of Silvermoon out of the city alive. Sylvanas Windrunner is dead and risen… I don't know by what miracle we would be able to help anybody. Our duty now is to protect the ones we have here."

"But –."

"Sylvanas Windrunner sacrificed her life to save us! We wouldn't do her justice if we went to the Sunwell to get slaughtered!" I swallowed my tears, "But we can't leave them, can we?" No, we couldn't leave the people defending the Sunwell to die like that. I called to the boat closest to us.

"What do you want to do?" asked one of the guards there.

"Guards, come over here. If anyone knows any fire magic, please come here as well. We're going to try and evacuate them as best we can."

We ended up transferring every passenger, save for two mages and a hunter to the other boat, and picked up six additional guards.

"How are we supposed to help anyone with just twenty-two of us?" asked the hunter, a man by the name of Velien.

"If we can get anybody off that island alive, it'll all be worth it. Let's go."

I shielded the ship with invisible magic so that we could approach Quel'Danas undetected by the Scourge. Judging by the sounds coming from there, the killing was already underway, although the warriors there were putting up one hell of a flight. Slowly, we killed as many undead as we could.

Suddenly, an unearthly shriek reached us, threatening to render us all absolutely deaf.

"What is that?" cried someone.

I didn't answer, busy trying to counter the sound in any way I could. I knew it was Sylvanas, I recognized her voice, and didn't need anyone to tell me that King Anasterian had been killed: we all understood what had happened.

There was nothing we could do. A couple of soldiers lay dying in the harbor, and we picked them up, bringing them to the boat to heal them as best we could, but everyone else had been killed. Quickly, I turned the bodies to ash, also dispatching a few corpses that were beginning to rise. We were about to leave when the unthinkable happened.

I felt evil coursing through me so suddenly that it felt as though I'd been plunged into it.

By the gods… what have they done?

"The Sunwell!" cried someone from inside one of the buildings. "They've corrupted the Sunwell!"

I ran towards that voice, recognizing it as Lor'themar Theron's. I'd known him for a long while because he had been second-in-command to Sylvanas and had worked with my brothers.

I found him just outside a building, surrounded by guards.

"Lor'themar!" I gasped. He was injured, but he seemed to pay no attention to the gash that had split his eye and face. He looked as shocked as I felt, struggling against the corruption around us. "We have a boat ready to evacuate you all."

Lor'themar stared at me. It seemed to take him a while to recognize me, "Everstone… what the hell are you doing here?"

"We don't have time. Unless you want to be killed as well, we have to go. Now!"

Evidently, he agreed with me that there wasn't anything else anybody could do for the Sunwell.

"Very well. We'll leave for now, and come back once we've regrouped."

We all ran back for the ship, Lor'themar carrying someone who seemed to have been badly hurt, and left Quel'Danas with scarcely enough people to count for anything. As we left, we saw the Scourge come towards us, and hastened our retreat knowing that we wouldn't be able to fight anyone in our condition.

They didn't catch us, although I was certain that Sylvanas had seen me.

For three days and three nights, we sailed, gathering survivors and settling on a small island that had been untouched by the Scourge. The island, named Quel'Ariel, was a pretty one, and was far enough from everything for us to hope that nobody would bother us while we tried to figure out what in the world had happened to us.

I tried to help people as best I could, attempting to put the week's horrors behind me.

I promised her I would move on, that I would be okay. I promised…

"Sylvanas is dead…" I whispered one day.

A pain unlike anything I'd ever felt before hit me, and I collapsed to the ground. Tears coursed down my face, and for a moment, the only thing I could think of was ending my life. I didn't want to live in a world where Sylvanas wasn't alive and well, where she wasn't with me, and where I couldn't love her.

"Faith!" A guard ran to me and picked me up as I began to cry in a way I'd never cried before. I didn't want to believe it. Sylvanas was dead. Gone. Turned into something atrocious that didn't resemble her in the slightest. How was I supposed to go on living now? I had nobody left. I was alone in the world, with nobody to love now.

I don't know how long the tears lasted for. I vaguely remember several people coming to me and trying to comfort me to no avail. Lor'themar sat with me for a short while, rubbing my back, and I suspect, crying as well for the ones he had lost. But finally, after what could have been days of despondency, I got out of the tent again. I was a mess, and hadn't eaten for days, so I was completely useless to anybody, but I felt calmer. Velien, the hunter, assigned himself to be my bodyguard, and didn't leave my side as I attempted to recover. He had found an abandoned white lynx on the island and was raising it to be his companion, and often left it with me so that I could play with it.

"Here you go, Faith," he said gently, handing me a bowl of perfumed rice and sauce. "You need to eat something." He sat down next to me and watched me to make sure I took a few bites of food. "I was wrong about you."

"In what sense?"

"When you dissolved like that, I thought it was because you were weak."

I shrugged, "I am."

"No, you're not. I didn't know how much you'd lost. I wasn't aware that the general had been your lover."

A spike of pain entered my heart. "She… she wasn't." My hands started to shake, so I put the plate of food down, "We might have become lovers had we had more time but… we loved each other, that's all."

"I'm so sorry," he said. "You have no idea how sorry I am."

I could only nod as tears started flowing again. They weren't as intense as they'd been, but they were there. The lynx, sensing I was sad, came to me and put its paws on my chest to lick my face.

"What are you going to do now?"

"I… I don't… I don't know." I wiped my eyes and started eating again. I really had no idea what I was going to do now. We had heard, by now, of the destruction of Dalaran, and with the Sunwell gone, I didn't think that I'd be able to study magic any longer, not where I was. I dimly thought of seeking out Vereesa, Sylvanas's sister, but I couldn't bear the thought of having to tell her what had happened, so I abandoned that plan immediately.

Several days later, Lor'themar stated that he was sending some people to Kalimdor to help fight the Burning Legion there.

"Rest assured, this will be no easy thing. I don't know whether it's easier to fight the Burning Legion than the Scourge, but it needs to be done. The rest of us will stay here to fight the Scourge. I leave you all the choice to stay or leave."

Stay or leave? The Scourge or the Burning Legion? They were one and the same, really, the Scourge being nothing more than a branch of the Burning Legion. But I knew that I wouldn't be able to fight Arthas and Sylvanas, no matter how hard I tried to. However, I thought I'd be able to hold my own against the demons of the Burning Legion. I volunteered to go.

We left for Kalimdor during a clear and beautiful day. Velien came with us along with his lynx and several other people.

The journey wasn't easy. We battled storms that were most certainly demonic in nature, and hoped that we'd be able to reach the western continent of Azeroth in time to make a difference.

We were met by some strange cow-like creatures when we reached Kalimdor. I'd never encountered one before, but I knew that the tauren were an ancient people who were generally nomadic. But they had settled in on the plains of Mulgore, getting rid of the centaurs who were plaguing them, with the help of the orcs.

I was still fragile when we reached Kalimdor, so the idea of working with anyone who was friends with orcs, after everything they had done to us in the Second War, was repugnant to me. But the first orc I met was an elderly male by the name of Lamek who fussed over me as though I were his own child. Velien told him and the tauren what had happened to us in Quel'Thalas, and the group immediately took me aside for a funerary ritual.

"We do this when the ones we love go walk with the spirits," said a tauren by the name of Hamu Raincaller.

I didn't have the strength to refuse to attend the ritual, and therefore sat there, watching the orc and tauren chanting old songs to invoke the peaceful passing of spirits who had died violently. It was a soothing ritual, geared to helping the people who had lost loved ones, and most of us from Quel'Thalas were present for it.

"Thank you," I told them once it was over. "That was really lovely."

"Come," said Hamu. "We have a camp nearby where you can rest after your long journey."

The camp was much bigger than I'd ever anticipated. It wasn't just because of the sheer size of the tauren, who were indeed enormous, but because of how many of them were actually there, along with orcs. I counted over two-hundred people there, and more of them seemed to be coming.

We were shown to a large tent where we put our things. I hadn't brought much with me. I had my axe, which was the only thing I had left from home except for my robes, which had been so badly ruined that I'd thrown them away. I also had my picture of Sylvanas, and Prince, who didn't leave my side. Other than that, I had nothing worthwhile, as anything else fit into the saddle bag.

"That's a beautiful horse," said Hamu.

"Thank you." I stroked Prince's neck. He was a beautiful horse. Purely white, he had dark blue eyes – a rarity – and had been given to Sylvanas a couple of years previously by a soldier of the Alliance of Lordaeron. "He belonged to my… he was General Sylvanas's horse."

Prince neighed at the sound of his mistress's name, and nudged my hand gently. He had seen her corpse in Silvermoon City, but I hadn't been sure whether he'd understood what it had meant.

"Evidently, he knows that he's yours now," said Hamu.

"She gave him to me when she had me escape to our capital. I keep wondering if she would have made it had I stayed with her." My chin trembled, and I knew I was going to burst into tears again, so I wrapped my arms around Prince and waited for it to pass.

"You cannot know that she would have survived, and you might have been one of the numerous casualties there. I think that this general of yours loved you very much if she sacrificed herself to keep you safe." He put a gentle hand on my back, "You need to honor that sacrifice and keep living on in the memory of the person she used to be. Would she want you miserable like this?"

I shook my head. No, Sylvanas had made me promise to move on with my life. "I honestly don't know what to do."

"That is all right. You will fight with us now until the Burning Legion is gone, then we can all figure this out, one step at a time. The spirits will guide you in your choices."

The next few weeks were hellish. The orcs of the Warsong Clan, having been corrupted by the blood of Mannoroth, had retreated into the forests of Ashenvale, far from Mulgore. The orcs who had been with us at the camp elected to help Thrall against them, and therefore left us. Not really knowing where to go, we stayed with the tauren, deciding to help them push back the few demons who regularly attacked us.

The third week after we'd arrived in Kalimdor, it was decided that we would go and help the orcs fight the demons who held the Warsong Clan captive. Leaving one hundred people at the camp, we rode day and night to reach the place where horrendous fighting was going on.

I had never seen so many demons in my life. Indeed, the first time I'd even seen an infernal outside of a book had been when they had attacked our camp, so I was shocked by how many of them there were.

"By the Sunwell…" whispered Velien. "How are we… what do we do with these?"

"Just fight them the way you'd fight anything else," I told him, remembering something Sylvanas had said to me once. "If they're alive, it means that they can die."

"Necromancers!" cried an elf behind me, staring at a point ahead.

A chill ran through me. Necromancers? Creatures who raised the dead? The same thing that they did in the Scourge? Hatred boiled through me, threatening to rip me in half. Without giving a thought to what I was doing, I broke away from the group and began to attack the creature I saw, who had been busy raising a corpse. The creature, whom I found out later to be an Eredar, seemed confused by my attack, but wasn't wholly unprepared for it. He countered each and every one of my moves, actually forcing me to my knees as I cast spell after spell to try and destabilize him. Evidently, the necromancers of the Scourge were inferior to this one, because I'd managed to kill several of them back home.

"Hold on, child!" cried a voice.

I nearly stopped casting at the sight of Jaina Proudmoore as she joined me to help me bring the necromancer down. Even we in Quel'Thalas had heard that Lady Proudmoore and Arthas Menethil had been lovers.

"You'll never manage him on your own, but he's getting tired, good work."

The necromancer fought like I'd never seen anyone fight before. He summoned several demons to his aid, and we were forced to call upon reinforcements to help us. Shaman and tauren druids began casting their own spells to give us the strength of the elements, which, combined with our own magic, finally killed the vile creature.

"That wasn't an ordinary Eredar you fought, child," said Jaina, looking at me and helping me to my feet. "Not even a simple necromancer. That was Gradar, one of the most powerful necromancers of the Burning Legion."

Had he been? "Had I known that, I wouldn't have attacked him so rashly."

"It's a good thing that you did. We've been trying to kill him for days. But I'm afraid that this is all the fighting you'll be able to do for now. You're completely drained."

It was true. I could barely walk. I went back to the small camp that had been erected on the other side of the ridge where the fighting was taking place and promptly went to sleep.

The fight against the Burning Legion went on for weeks. Every couple of days, we gained an advantage, and moved the camp forward, only to have to fall back a day later when the demons got the upper hand. It seemed that no matter how many of them we killed, more took their place, and for some time, I felt horribly depressed about the fact that we weren't going to manage it.

I wasn't there when Thrall and Jaina managed to cleanse Grom Hellscream from the corruption, but I heard about it after the fact, as I'd been busy chasing after several demons who had ventured further info the land to try and kill those who weren't fighting.

Once that was done, things began to take a turn for the better for all of us fighting for our home. The night elves came forth, creatures that we had long thought extinct, and helped us fight the demons. I heard of Mannoroth and Archimonde having been killed and realized, after several months, that maybe it would be possible for us to have a semblance of life again after the horrors of this war.