~*~ Chapter 68 ~*~
Kayas broaches a subject she wished she were able to just leave alone. It was not in her to lay back while innocence was slaughtered. Glancing down at the tabard she wonders if she may need to redefine 'innocence'.
"What about the Scarlets? Did you kill them?"
The Banshee Queen scoffs, not looking up. Her silence and the look of annoyance she bares answers the question. No one could be that agitated with someone who was freshly dead.
Alarms tears through the Druid's chest, squeezing her stomach. "You did win the battle right? I mean-"
A heavy sign accompanied the accompanied a triumphant smile as the worst of the tangles began to yield to her administrations.
"Yes, we won. Barely. I lost hundreds while the Scarlets could count their loses on one hand and not use all their fingers."
"But-!" I saw them die!
"The High Inquisitor has been a pain from the beginning. She has, how we say, great potential?" To be my pawn. "But she was pointed in the wrong direction." At me. "Now she is lose in the Plaguelands where she should be." Almost as an afterthought came what sounded almost like a guilty confession, "She resurrected the fallen Scarlet. Blasted woman."
She continued to tear at the stands of her hair hastily. It was a Quel'dorei sign of pride to have long, lose hair. The Priest's was almost to his knees; the Scout to his belt.
The Druid would have offered to trim the split ends if she knew for certain the Dark Lady's hair could grow. Could hers?
"Kingdoms are a lot of work," the Druid noted. Was it truly that the Scarlet were a bane on the Forsaken or was it that they helped keep the Scourge in check so that their own troops might be diverted to other tasks? "Why do you let the Scarlet have a hold here? Surely you can drive them out. I saw your … Angels... at work."
A feral smile ran across the Banshee Queen's face, "As much as I loath to have to share this land, it is necessary. If you tell anyone what I am about to tell you, I'll denounce you, understand?" She didn't wait for confirmation before her voice evenly stated: "Because this is their home, and I will not drive them out of it the way I was... firmly asked to leave... mine." … I'd rather be running through the forest chasing sunrise than ruling an army of eternal darkness...
"They were family once."
That though barely slows down the fingers working though the shoulder length white locks, "I make them hate each other so they don't try to live together. I am not responsible for the Scarlet corruption, however."
"Why would you do that; make them fight just to make them fight?"
This time the fingers stop. Deep sadness simmers to the surface and the pale face of the fallen High Elf slowly grows slack. Then it draws up, the eyebrows knitted together. "We did horrible things to the living when we were under Arthas control. There are many reasons to keep ourselves separated. The Plague spreads so fast, you see."
Oh, Kayas though dumbly. Somehow she had forgotten this fact. A horrifying image invaded her mind, taking over her senses: hundreds of undead migrating out of Loarderon. Somewhere in a smokey swamp camp or ice-covered Highbourne ruin some party member would pick up the wrong fork to eat and become infected with the Plague. The wasteland beyond the Bulwarks were testament to how quickly things could go terribly wrong.
Sharing Tirisfal Glades? Yes, that made sense. In some warped way who's logic was so convoluted that it barely made sense to the Druid, she understood. It was the best the Banshee Queen could do, to allow the survivors of the former empire to band together, have their weapons and their shrines and their fortified safe spots. She saw in them a reflection of her own people's attempts at surviving.
Far be it for her to attempt genocide and become another Arthas.
The Sin'dorei and Scarlet Crusade both fought under banners with emblems of their former nations stained red with blood. The difference in the Sin'dorei and the Scarlet is that the elves had their beloved Prince to guide them, and the High Elves to keep them grounded in reality. Perhaps it was even taking a lesson from the Scarlet Crusade's example which helped to ground their zealous hatred of the undead. After all, they were allied with the Horde through the Forsaken.
Through the Banshee Queen, their former Ranger General, though they did not know her true identity.
The Dark Lady waved off sentiment, going back to her grooming. "I am not a tyrant; I let them keep their lives and their fortress; what was left of it, at least. The fire did an amazing amount of damage for something that was practically alive. A mage must have set it off before they died."
A long silence stretched for quite a long moment. Kayas resisted the urge to pick at her own hair. The Banshee Queen was surprisingly open, almost easy to talk to, even if she were a walking abomination. No once had she threatened Kayas for broaching subjects she obviously did not relish discussing. Her own elders were not as accommodating to her curiosity.
"I don't remember who said it, but someone told me you are the keeper of secrets and the harbinger of revenge. Is that just a sentimentality?"
"Hardly." When no more was said Kayas began to worry. Perhaps she had been wrong in assuming she could-
"Speak, Druid. I won't bite you for your confessions. It's not my way of doing things."
Was that a jab at the Kaldorei or just at bad listeners in general?
Lowly at first and then with voice rising as her nerves frayed she blurted out, "I started the fires!"
The Dark Lady kept working at her hair but gazed at her steadily, "The fire is magic-wrought. You are not Highbourne; your colors all all wrong(2)"
Shame and upset lurched through her chest, clenching her heart till her whole body throbbed with the very beating of the organ. "Because I promised..." Saying it out loud somehow made it so much more worse than what she always knew. A secret that even her father and sisters had no known. A secret she kept from her Druid trainers. A secret she kept from Elune (3).
"Oh." The Dark Lady said, "Well isn't this something. You do fire magic? Do they know you do fire magic?"
"I don't do fire magic, it's just something I can do." An upturned palm signaled her surrender to an oncoming harsh judgment. Kaldorei had their own words for those who used magic, and an equally harsh sentence.
To her complete surprise the Banshee Queen reached over and picked half a leaf out of the young druid's black hair. "Immortal no more, young dorie(4); and yet you will live lifetimes compared to the Humans. That is a long time to be promising such things in the innocent day of youth." Her tone became very matronly, as a person doling out their centuries of wisdom to the newer generation, "It is not fair that they would make you swear it so young."
Kayas is on the verge of tears, the tightness in her chest increasing. "That is why I chose the path of the Druid." Someone needed to hear her confession and who else but the Dark Lady? Her seclusion from the rest of the world made her the perfect candidate, and did she not already have the endorsement of others who's secrets surely must be worse than hers? "I promised." she whispered while hanging her head.
"Oh, I'm sure that is what they would have you believe."
Kayas head came up again confused. No, it had defiantly been her promise.
The Dark Lady continued, "They would make you think it was your idea to become a Druid. The truth of is that even at a young age you hid your talents for magic and told no one; that you banished it from your mind and your heart and looked to Cenarius thinking he would fill you with such a feeling that in his presence you would never want to do magic again. Am I right?"
"No, I wanted-"
"You never told anyone about your abilities? Not one solitary soul?"
Her mouth worked open and closed several times before she could voice the words. The Banshee Queen was her Queen now, was she not? She had opted to give this confession; had not been prodded to do it. Why start lying now?
"Yes," she said softly, "someone knew."
"Who?"
A face glided to the surface of her memory. A younger-than-she-should-be woman with brightly glowing eyes, a wicked smile and ears that slanted at an odd angle. "My mother."
"Anyone else?"
An image of screaming children and the hairs on the back of an arm pressed over her mouth so she couldn't scream. "No."
"Did she guide you to Cenarius?"
Her mouth wouldn't speak again for a second. Finally, "Yes." Not guiding so much as dropping her off in the wilderness and making the barely old enough child find her way back home in one piece. Her mother had stuck around but just out of helping range. Kaldorei learn hard and fast when there is an impressive point to be made. Fire magic had not gotten her food; being able to call it out of the ground in tiny green shoots did. Fire had not clothed her in non-forest-threatening warmth; melding her mind to a colony of squirrels who let her nap in their branches had. Fire had not gotten her over rough waters; singing a tree over sideways so she could cross the branches had.
"We all think we make our own decisions, but in the end they are made for us. See here." The Dark Lady snapped her fingers and a tiny spark of red ember floated into the sky. A second latter a small flame flickered to life in her palm. It mirrored the red in her eyes and did not burn the glove. "My mother caught me getting lessons on magic from some boy who wandered down from the city. The next day she dropped me off at the ranger training grounds in Old City on her way to take that boy back to his parents. She was dead set that one of her daughters was going to be Ranger General someday." A rueful smile touched her lips, "Just look at us now."
The fire winked out as the gloved fingers closed over it.
The Druid shook her head, thoughts spinning around and around. Manipulation? The memories of what she saw in her dreams of the Priest came forward, teasing and reminding. They, the children of the Alliance, were all made to find what they were good at early so they may be pressed into service as soon as possible. And the thing inside him...? It had not just been her mother's lessons in the forest that taught her to love nature but also her father's lessons on why magic was evil.
"No," she said with conviction, "I am a Druid. I will not be anything else. The Priest – the Wretched - I saw it. What my people did that-that- ten thousand years latter your people still suffer for it...?" Shame and despair spiraled up from her twisting guts and outward. Would any of this have ever happened if it had not been for magic-hungry Kaldorei thousands and thousands of years ago? No Burning Legion, no Orcs, no Wretched, and certainly no Plague.
She stoped tears with the back of one hand, wiping them away. The sharp metal tips of the Dark Lady's glove finds its way under her chin and tilts her head up. "My people... are the Forsaken. Highbourne, High Elf no longer. And never again without you."
"I'm just a druid, I can't do anything! I can't cure this." She shakes her head vigorously, wisps of black hair flying everywhere, "I'm not even trained. I just want to go home. I just want to go home." Sobs escape her tight chest as both hands come up to cover her face. Did her tears carry the Plague? She bends over almost into the dirt. Where was home now? Auberdine? Feralas? The Plaguelands or Quel'Thalas?
"Oh dorie, sweet child. What do you thing we all want? We just want to go home. I too just want to go home."
~ End Notes ~
1). When this scene was written (planned in BC, outline written in early LK) the Night Elves could not be mages. Any elf who uses arcane magic will instantly become Highbourne (according to wow-wiki) and be banished from society to deal with their new-found hunger for magic. In-game, Highbourne all seem to have white hair and vivid yellow-gold eyes, though there is one small population of ghosts in Dire Maul who all have dark blue hair.
2). All elves have the ability to use magic, and so I had rolled the dice to see what kind of magic our druid would have an affinity for. It's only a coincidence that Firelands brought out flamer druids a year or so after I wrote the outline. Physics - and established game lore - say no. Blizzard whored the mechanics of their universe in order to give druids fire magic. I disagree with that on the simple grounds that elves who use elemental magic have a different class name: Mage.
3). Dorie = universal elf word meaning 'child'. Usually used in the context of "child/children of [something]", I've seen other fanfic writers use it as a term of endearment similar to "darling" or "honey" or "lover" so I carry it forward.