~*~ Author's Notes ~*~

I'm not satisfied with the wording of this chapter, but I got the concept down on paper at least

Additional notes at the end of the chapter.

~*~ Chapter 18 ~*~

Kayas lay in the little room crying for hours. She was heartsick and emotionally worn down and at her wits end to boot. The panther licked her back and neck and arms. Every form she turned into, expecting the great feline to reject her didn't matter; he nudged and licked and pawed away as if she were perfectly normal. His acceptance soothed her torment.

Sometime latter when the outside room had quieted down and she assumed the Priest had gone to bed, she crept over to the wardrobe to have a look. The wooden cabinet was tall, the dominant piece in the room. Opening the creaking door she discovered the nail on which the mirror had once hung.

In the bottom were ratty old clothing belonging to a man and a woman. Pictures had been laid facedown under the pile. Lots of them. The Priest had gone threw the house and gathered up all the photos and put them in the cabinet, then took the clothing off the hangers and lay them on top.

She didn't want to see them or know who had once owned the house. In this era, one did not have a house taken from you – you were taken from the house. The people in the pictures were not coming back; their dwelling was frozen in time.

Kayas turned her attention to the clothing on the hangers. A black silk dress more suited for a high-end housewife, a white woolen dress matching the one she had been wearing, and a leather top and matching skirt.

Without thinking she reached for the top and skirt. The bodice was plain green dyed leather and matched the skirt but it was leather and she missed the feel of it on her skin. The laces were brown and thick with little bells on the end. The outfit was snug and fit very well, if not a bit revealing about the midriff. Which was fine with her since no one saw her armor in her feral forms anyway.

Wishing she hadn't broke the mirror; she looked down at herself trying to get a view of what she looked like. What she saw sickened her. The ashen gray skin clinging too tightly to her bones yielded the look of a walking corpse. One would mistake her for the undead had she not the ears of a kaldorie, and the height.

Stalking out of the room on all furry four, the Druid headed strait over to the cookpot. The Priest had gone to bed hungry judging by how full the pot was. Kayas didn't know why – the stew was delicious! She finished it off and was licking out the inside of the pot when the smell of the bread caught her attention. One side was burned but it didn't stop her finishing it off as well. And the jug of water.

Glancing around the room she finally found the Priest. He blended into the drab despair of this place. Fast asleep under an old mat under the broken down table. Nary a thing about his person that would let you know he wielded any sort of power.

The Druid walked up, watched for a moment. Long dark blue hair was turning white at the roots and splashed across his bare chest. Kayas wondered if it was a stress thing, same as with Humans. There were lines in his face where he dreamed of something awful. Long dark blue eyebrows twitched, ears folded over. He was crying in his sleep. Cocking her head she wondered why their ears folded and hers did not. It was such an unusual characteristic of their race – and adorable when it wasn't displaying sincere pain.

She was furious with him, stamping down the part of her teachings that preached forgiveness. His nightmares were well deserved, she told herself, though the pity welled up to spite her. First thing in the morning she would be demanding her release. Her debt to him was repaid with him letting that thing anywhere near her.

Padding back to her room she leapt up on the bed and settled down to sleep. The panther folded into her, warm and comforting. She forgave him for being so intrusive earlier. Something alive in this darkened place full of someone else's memories was such a comfort. She'd have to thank whoever let him in here.

Kayas dreamed.

She was standing outside the house. There were black and gray woods all around her. The feeling of emptiness of the location was suffocating. Not a living thing, just a full moon overhead. The house was completely alone, tiny.

Flashes of light erupting inside showing threw windows and cracks in the walls. Smashing sounds, thrown furniture, struggles and cries of despair were heard from inside.

"No-nono!" Someone moaned over and over. Kayas rushed to the door but found it locked on both the outside and in. Whoever was suffering she could feel it to her core. Like the hunger of the flesh, but this was hunger of the soul. And it was killing its victim. But who else was helping?

A moan of pain, thrashing around the inside of the house, "Please, not now. She's not back yet… please-!" He was pleading with the other, begging reprieve.

Kayas mouth fell open. The Priest! What was going on? Did he mean her? I'm right outside! She tried to call to him, "I'm here! I'm right outside! Let me help you!" Her small fists banged on the dry rotted wood of the door.

"No! Blaze, no -! You shouldn't have come here – "His words were laced with a heartsick anguish, a fear that he was going to kill someone he cared about very much. His mind was splitting apart; if he lost this fight his sanity was forfeit.

Something deep inside the Druid spoke "I never left. I've always been with you. You just never noticed me before." For a moment she wondered who Blaze was, then discarded it.

Gathering the powers of the moonlight, she aimed a bolt of energy at the lock and blasted it off the door. Unfortunately when she tried the door she found the inside locks still in place.

"Let me in!" She banged on the door with both hands, "Let me-"

It was quiet. No thrashing, no blinding flashes of light. Just stillness.

She jumped and ran from the house when the entire wall the door was on shook. Someone else was speaking now, "The power, I felt the power." The door shook, dust flying away from the house.

Kayas was scared now. What power? What was in there?

"I need iiiit!" the voice shrieked loud enough to shake the wood around her. Kayas cover her ears to drown it out. What being makes a noise like that?

Fear sang in her heart, she turned from the house and ran on two legs, unable to remember how to shift into her Dishu form. There was more banging and more screaming. The further she got away the worse it was.

"Come back!" the thing shrieked, "I'll die! Do you want me to die?"

Yes, she though, I want you to die, whatever in fel you are.

"I'll take him with me." It hissed malevolently, seeming to be all around her and still locked in the house at once.

She stopped. The Priest. He was going to kill the Priest? Her heart and her mind warred. On the one hand he had left her at the mercy of the Dark Lady… on the other he had not done it on purpose… Should he die? Should she leave him to die?

Turning back, she resolved that, no, it wasn't right to leave him with whatever monster was in there and hurting him. He had come back for her after all, even if he was unable to fix everything the Plague did to her. He tried. And so would she.

"That's a good girl. That's my Blaze." The voice coaxed her back to the door. It was inches away on the other side.

Again, the voice inside Kayas rose up to speak for her, "Bring me your peace and I will heal your soul."

"I don't need you!" The being inside the cabin shouted, "I don't need you; you were never the source!"

There was more banging on the door, more dust flying, the entire house shaking, and explosions of blue-white light. Screaming. The Priest was screaming.

Kayas fell to the grass with the sound of it, the feel of it. His soul was being consumed in the agony. He fought it, but he was losing his mind. "Please," the little Druid begged to anyone who would listen, eyes closed, "Elune, Cenarius, Ysera… help me. Tell me what to do!"

It was a long moment before she noticed the quite again. She opened her eyes – and screamed.

A clawed hand latched around her wrist, dragging her towards an alien face with huge glowing blue eyes and it's black, drooling mouth. Eyes bigger than anything's eye had a right to be. It was bald and brown skinned like a demon, moist from its fight inside the house. It hunched over, chest deeply sucked in, long and thin ears jutted up into the air. All over its skin were blue glowing pustules.

She screamed again when it attacked the source of her power; her connections to the natural world. It felt like her mind was being ravaged; her will taken away. It was maddening to feel the emptiness left behind. It lasted only for an instant, before she was flung violently to the ground.

"I told you not to come here!" The Priest screamed at her, pushing her away, urging her to flee.

She pleaded with him, "What was that? Please, let me help you."

"There is nothing you can do for me. Nothing. I cannot hold it for long; it knows there is a source here now and it will fight me stronger than ever."

"I can't leave you alone with that thing!"

Looking down at her where she begged him from the ground he said, "I have fought the beast inside me since I was an infant in the womb, child. I can hold him."

Kayas gasped, stood quickly, "Inside you?"

Closing his eyes against the waves of soul-sucking hunger, the Priest begged, "Not now- now is not the time. She's not here. The source is gone."

Kayas jumped out of reach as his eyes snapped open – a vivid blue – and he reached for her again. From his mouth came the same voice as the monster, "Just a little. It won't hurt much, I'll just take a little! I must feeeed…"

Kayas ran. Behind her she knew the creature followed. Glancing back only once to see how close it was she almost tripped her own two feet. "Priest, stop! Why do you do this? What is this thing?"

The voice, which had formerly been inside her, was now outside and ahead. She followed its words to the clearing, "He speaks the truth, young Druid of the Wild. He can fight the beast inside him, but he cannot keep it under control forever. He needs to feed or he will descend into madness. He will become it."

There was a clearing, not unlike the dappled woods of her homeland. A shrine of some kind. "I don't understand. Please help me understand." She fell to her knees in great sobs, hating the feeling of being powerless. Feeling this way was not why she chose the path of the Druid!

"Look now, I will protect you."

She turned. There was a softly glowing purple field over the shrine. Outside the field the Priest stood. His hair was disheveled, sticking to the sweat of his face and bear arms. He wore only the linen shirt and breeches. His blazing blue eyes* pierced her to the core, staring directly at what it wanted from her, what the monster inside him had tried to feed from.

The source of her arcane power.

"He cannot help what he is," the voice came from nowhere and everywhere, "he tries as they all do to find a way to free themselves. This is what the Highbourn did to them. This is what Queen Azshara did to them. He is not to blame."

The Priest fell to his knees, one hand braced against the shield and another on the ground, panting. Lose hair fell to curl on the ground around him. He wept for his sanity. "Not now, she's not here right now…" he prayed to himself over and over.

"Can you not help him? Can I not?"

"If he were to feed from you, child, he would destroy your connection to your source and you would become like him; always hungering for magic. And so the disease can spread among any race capable of wielding that power**."

Kayas was crying now too. She didn't like to see people suffer. "Why is this happening to him? What did he do to deserve this?"

"He was born, child. That is all." After a pause the voice went on, sensing this was not enough explanation, "Queen Azshara bred her Highbourn mages to create stronger offspring, able to wield greater and greater amounts of power.

The power they wielded from the Well of Eternity warped them on a physical level. They became beings infused with it, relying on it for their very existence. They are driven into madness without a source to feed from."

The Druid didn't know that. She always assumed, from the way people talked, that the reason the Blood Elves sought sources of power was because they wanted it for it's own sake. None of her elders mentioned addiction or physical need.

She betted, bitterly, that none of them had ever felt their minds tearing apart as she had felt when Jetadiah fought it inside the house. Her elders had some explaining to do if she ever saw home again.

"He was born into the survivors of that race. His people fed from the Sunwell. But like the Highbourn and kaldorie before them, the sin'dorie was nearly wiped out for the power they possessed.

When the Sunwell was destroyed it plunged the sin'dorie into madness. 90% of their race was wiped out."

Kayas gasped at this, having no idea the casualties had been that high.

"He was there to watch the Scourge march threw Qual'thalas. He felt the Sunwell grow tainted, unusable and watched the majority of the remainder of his people go insane and turn on each other. Half of the sin'dorie home city is still overrun with the Wretched and more continue to descend."

Her brow furrowed. Her elders had never mentioned Wretched, had never said anything about a hunger that would literally drive a person insane. This shocked and dismayed her, wondering if she were susceptible to this same fate were she to use too much of the arcane arts as well. "He's a Priest, is the Light he wields not enough?"

Softly, someone was singing. Behind the voice of the power that protected her and under the sound of the gentle sobs from the half-broken Blood Elf rose the same voice she had heard singing on the beach the night before.

"As one of the few survivors who have not succumb to the ranks of the Wretched, he turned to the Light as a source***. He would have remained with the High Elves but for the one thing that could draw him to the Horde."

"What?"

The words to the song grew louder and louder but she still couldn't understand them.

"Her."

Behind the struggling Blood Elf stood a figure. The emotions that clouded her face as she watched him broke the Druid's heart. Flowing white hair and blue eyes: it was the woman who had pulled Kayas out of the dream world the night before. It was the same woman whose soul now resided inside the Warlock.

She gasped, "Corrosa?"

"Yes. He needs her as she needs him."

"He became Horde for her?" I would never, ever do that for someone. Ever.

"Yes. The Blood Elves are convinced they can find a new source. They refuse to give up on magic. He does not agree with them. Yet he lied to them and befouled his body with demonic energies and joined their ranks in order to remain with her."

Demonic energies?She couldn't picture the Priest doing such a thing… In the background she could make out a few words of the song now.

"He in turn is helping look for a way to undo the Forsaken curse, that she may live again. The soul you seen is pure and uncorrupted and the by-product of the first failed attempt to reverse the Plague. But the soul cannot remain long inside a corrupted shell lest it become corrupted itself."

The pieces snapped into place. Kayas understood. She had figured it out in Qual'thalas actually; she just didn't understand the depths of it till now.

"They feed each other…"

"Yes. She is the Shadow that feeds his body and he is Light that feeds her soul."

The voice sang, loud and strong now:

"Where once they had Elune there

Forsook her for the Sunwell

The Scourge bore down the light;

Sun children plunged into the night."

~*~ End Notes ~*~

* Wretched and hungering Blood Elves have blue eyes for reasons so don't fuss at me!

** Every elven race is capable of becoming Wretched. Becoming a Wretched is instantaneous the moment an elf yields to the craving for arcane magic. It can also be undone if the elf's will is strong enough, though there is only one example of an elf reversing the transformation (excluding Kayas' dream).

*** Since the Sunwells destruction there are actually few Priest/esses amongst the Blood Elves. The ones that remain are former High Elves still loyal to the Light they followed as members of the Alliance.

Aug/10/2012 – Nov/24/2013

Author's Note added 10/29/15: An anon guest left a review for me saying they didn't know brown skin was a demonic trait. According to Blizzard every skintone is demonic. Their villains come in a wide range of colors and so do the villains I've written about. To answer the implied question of why the priest has brown skin when he morphs into Wretched (if I'm not implying dark skin means you're evil) is because Blizzard chose that color to physically illustrate what a "burning out" "crack elf" looks like; one who has binged on so much mana they are about to become Wretched. See Selin FIreheart in Magister's Terrace for the best in-game model showing both the dark skin tones and horns of someone who has ingested so much fel mana they are about to become a full fledged demon. I'd love to say I was that creative in my skin-tone reasoning but I am not. All rights go to Blizzard.