A/N – I'll be switching points of view every once in a while throughout the story.
She was here. No matter what I told myself, she was here. With me. Faith Everstone.
I knew she'd escaped Silvermoon City. Despite having fought Arthas every step of the way after he'd turned me into a banshee, I'd been unable to stop myself from trying to go after her. I would have killed her had I gotten anywhere near her.
I watched as she walked over, clearly unsure of what to do. Nobody was here yet, so there was nothing for her to do, but part of me stirred at seeing her here early. She'd cleaned up, and the dress she wore was definitely better than whatever else she'd been wearing. I nearly smiled at how quickly she'd fallen back into old habits.
"I expect you to be here at all court functions," I said to her, knowing that she'd be able to hear me from anywhere in the room. She'd always been very in tune to me, and that hadn't changed just because I was dead. "Being as I'm the leader of Undercity, people want to talk to me almost exclusively, or to Varimathras, but I'd rather some of them come to you as well."
Faith winced at the mention of Varimathras. Whatever else I had done in my undeath, she thought me crazy for trusting one of the Nathrezim. She didn't tell me this, of course, but I saw it when she had first laid eyes on him. "You want me to report back to you?" she asked.
"Yes." I didn't say anything else, although she looked at me for more instructions. I had no doubt that she'd be able to handle this position, although before all hell had broken loose, the idea would have been laughable.
I had loved this girl. I clearly remembered that. I remembered exactly how I had felt when I'd kissed her goodbye. But those days were gone. I could never love again, and whatever Faith thought she felt for me now, it wasn't love. She loved the part of me that was gone, and I wasn't going to have her dredge this up every single day.
She was standing close enough for me to smell her, a combination of honey, jasmine, and lavender, which I realized at that moment had always been magical in nature. She had tears in her eyes, and I looked at her in exasperation. She looked back at me and blinked. One tear fell, but she kept the rest at bay.
People began to arrive. I was able to speak to the first two, and Varimathras took care of someone else, but Faith had to pick up the slack eventually. Out of the corner of my eyes, I watched as she spoke haltingly at first, then with more confidence as my people came to her with problems she could fix.
The main topic on everyone's tongue, of course, was the Scourge. They breached our borders constantly, and it was all I could do to keep them at bay.
"They're multiplying faster than we can kill them," said someone to me.
"Then kill them faster!" I cried.
The room went silent. Faith looked at me and excused herself to the person she was talking to.
"Are you all right?" she whispered to me.
"Fine," I snapped. "Get back to work."
Her hand twitched, and I knew she wanted to touch me, but it would have been a bad idea. "Might I make a suggestion, my Lady?"
"Not now."
"Increase the capacity of the First Magi Corps. Ask for volunteers who would report to us for training. That way, we'll have more people to combat the Scourge."
"Not enough fire mages." I muttered.
"They don't have to be versed in fire magic. And if that's what you want, I'll train them myself." She backed away from me, wisely leaving the decision up to me.
It was a good suggestion, one I'd considered myself. But even though I'd amassed a considerable force when I'd come here, it wasn't enough to take on the entire Scourge. That was why I wanted to join the Horde. We needed allies to combat these fiends.
"You really think that you'll be able to train mages to use your black fire?" I asked Faith later.
"Not my black fire, no. But, Sylvanas, you and the Forsaken know more about the Scourge than I ever could. Killing them shouldn't be difficult for you."
"Except that I was a member of the Scourge, remember?"
She paled considerably, "I don't think that I'll ever be able to forget that," she said in a low voice.
"Then you'll understand why some of them have problems killing them."
"They're under the control of the Lich King, Sylvanas, it's different. Don't you dare tell me that they can't help it."
I rounded on her, "Dare?" I cried. "Do you think for one second I wanted to obey Arthas after what he did to me?"
Faith backed away but I grabbed her hand and pulled her to me.
"Do you?!"
She looked stricken. "That was different," she whispered.
"So help me, Faith, if you start crying again, I will kill you this instant."
She swallowed, visibly trying to get herself under control, "I'm just saying that Arthas bound you to him, didn't he? You wouldn't have acted the way you did if he hadn't done that. You would have killed the Scourge, wouldn't you? Like you're doing now?" She came closer, and I was aware she meant to kiss me only half a second before her lips touched my cheek.
"Of course I would have killed them," I said through gritted teeth. Although, truth be told, I had been so disoriented and in such an unbelievable amount of pain when Arthas had brought me back that I hadn't had the slightest idea about what to do.
"And you…" she didn't finish her question, but I read it on her face.
"I'm going to say this once. I died. The woman you love, the woman who loved you, is dead, and she won't ever come back. Whatever I felt when I was alive, that's gone. I only want one thing now, and that's to see Arthas killed and the Scourge eradicated." Dull fury coursed through my veins, and had Faith been anybody else, I would have probably ripped her head from her shoulders.
"Then I'm your girl," she told me. "I'll do everything I can to make sure that the Scourge is gone. As for Arthas, I'll make it my personal mission to kill him." Her voice was shaking, and she looked ill, but she sounded determined. And I knew that no matter how hard I tried to dissuade her, she was going to keep loving me, no matter how detrimental it would be to her.
"Thank you," I told her. I hadn't said those words since before I'd died. I released her hand, noticing that it was already beginning to bruise, but she didn't seem to be paying it any attention. "Go."
She did so, leaving me alone in the throne room. I stayed there awhile before deciding to go see the leader of the First Magi Corps to begin implementing Faith's suggestion.
Several volunteers came forward after the general announcement was made in Undercity. All of them were mages of some sort, but their magic didn't hold a candle to Faith's. Still, she was willing to train them, and within a month, she'd whipped them into shape. I didn't really think they would do much good, and was therefore surprised one day when Faith told me that the new recruits had cleared out parts of Tirisfal Glades.
"The Scourge will come back, they always do, but it's good practice for the corps to be able to kill them here before we tackle bigger problems."
Despite my misgivings, I was impressed. I thanked her for her work, then told her that she would be coming with me to Orgrimmar the following week.
"Orgrimmar, my general?"
I'd tried to break her of that habit, but she still called me that on occasion. I found that I didn't mind it as much as before.
"Thrall has agreed to let us join the Horde. I'll be taking a delegation there to the official induction ceremony, whatever that is. In return, we'll bring back a few people who want to help us clear out the Scourge." I looked at her, and knew immediately that she was happy about the prospect of leaving Undercity with me. I could have decided to leave her in charge, but Varimathras wouldn't have been happy about that, and I was certain that the Forsaken wouldn't take orders from a living elf, even if she'd really worked hard in the corps.
She began to get ready right away, but there wasn't much for her to take care of. She packed her clothes and would have been ready to leave immediately had there not been a slight issue with the construction of the village, which we'd called Brill.
Some people were hollering about a statue that they wanted to put in the village's square, which they'd wanted to dedicate to King Terenas Menethil, while others were adamant about the statue being of me. Faith made a swift decision, stating that we already had a memorial to King Terenas in the Ruins of Lordaeron. And so it was that I found my likeness being built for the central square in Brill.
"You shouldn't have left that decision up to me," Faith told me mutinously.
Maybe not, but it had been amusing to see her arguing with the builders about it, even though it had been a waste of time.
We left on a chilly day where the sun was valiantly trying to poke through the clouds and warm the tainted land. Faith was going to be staying in the cabin that had been set aside for me, for the simple reason that it was the only one with a bed, and she was the only one out of all of us who needed to sleep.
The sea was rough on the first day of our voyage, but Faith, who had been prone to seasickness when I had known her, handled it just fine. I realized then just how much she had changed since the last time she and I had been together, before the Scourge had turned our world inside out. She'd grown into a remarkable person, one capable of making hard decisions with very little information at her disposal. She did cry more often than I remembered her doing, and while this got on my nerves every single time, there wasn't anything I could do about it. Comforting her was not an option.
"You are aware that she still cares for you," said one of my advisors, who was called Rotvine. A lot of the Forsaken had kept their original names upon rebirth, but some of them had changed them completely, wanting to sever ties to the world of the living.
"It's hard to miss," I told him. Faith was watching us from the bow of the ship, although she was pretending to look out at the sea. After a while, she went below deck.
"And you don't care for her at all anymore?"
"I'm dead," I told him.
"So am I, my Lady, but I still love my wife."
His wife, as far as I recalled, had been killed when the plague had arrived in Lordaeron, and had stayed dead. He had told me about it one day.
"Don't you just find it a little disturbing that she loves a dead woman?"
"You're hardly dead."
I glared at him. "I'm an animated corpse."
"Yes, so are we all. And we still have feelings. So do you, except that you just hate everything now. You didn't, not when you first became a banshee."
"You ought to know. You were there when he raised me." I closed my eyes. The memory of Arthas killing me was still the most painful one I had, along with the look on Faith's face when she'd seen my dead body.
Even now, thinking about how she'd reacted to my death left a hollow place inside me. She would have been devastated any day of the week about it, but this soon after losing her entire family… she had been destroyed. I'd fought Arthas then, having wanted to go to her. But I hadn't been corporeal. What could I have done to help her in my state? And Arthas had only unleashed me after giving me the command to kill her.
To kill her.
Fury, I felt fury. A scream welled up inside me and I released it into the sea air. Everything and everyone around me reacted to that sound. Rotvine stepped back, wincing, the few carrion birds who had been circling us disappeared in a hurry, and Faith, Faith came running over to me, her face a mask of shock. Of course, she was the one most affected by my scream, because she was alive, and the sound of it must have been seriously hurting her ears.
But she didn't care. She ran to me and put her arms around me, holding me. My first instinct was to shove her away, except that would have landed her in the frozen water. I didn't want to be soothed, I wanted to scream and scream again.
"Shh, baby…" she said.
Baby? I wouldn't have permitted her to use that endearment even if I had been alive.
"Do not call me that," I snapped at her, my voice returning to normal. "And let me go, I'm fine." I disengaged myself violently enough so that she staggered backwards. But as unbelievable as it was, Faith had accomplished her goal. By coming to me and holding me, she had calmed me down, although I guessed it was her taking the unbelievable liberty of touching me that had snapped me out of my fury.
A particularly violent wave nearly caused Faith to go overboard, and I reacted instinctively, lashing out a hand to hold her and make sure she didn't fall. She looked at me, nodded, then backed away. "I didn't mean to upset you." There was more behind her words, something about how she didn't want to see me in pain and how she needed to be near me.
"You're only one of the reasons I'm upset, Faith," I told her. "Get back inside before you fall overboard. You'd drown before we'd be able to get you back onto the ship."
"All right. If you need me for anything…"
"I know where you are. Go."
I was dead. Was I still supposed to feel sadness? Rotvine seemed to sense my question, because he answered it for me.
"I think that we feel sadness because we've had the most abominable thing done to us. I used to be a priest, Your Majesty, before the arcane arts began calling to me, and I never believed that corpses should ever be brought back to life. I'm sure you felt the same thing when you were alive."
I remembered. I'd been horrified to see the Scourge composed of shambling corpses, and had felt even worse when my own fallen soldiers had been raised and added to Arthas's army. I had died to keep Faith from suffering that same indignity. And now, I was the one raising corpses to replenish her army.
"What we feel is stronger than other races, when it comes to sadness, anger, and despair. But that doesn't mean that we can't feel good emotions too. At least, I do."
Good emotions? Such as what? They weren't going to help me get rid of the Scourge, and so far, what I'd felt had worked for us, not against us. But I knew what he was talking about. Except that I wasn't about to embark on a relationship with Faith. I was dead. She was alive. The thought of her kissing a corpse would have made me feel sick with horror.
We should have done all of this when I'd been alive. Maybe now we'd have no regrets over what we had lost. The promise of tomorrow.