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Chapter 31: Damned if You Don't
I genuinely thought that I'd die. I longed to.
But Alessandre realized after a day in that purple tent together, or was it two? Three? The Sentinels could not help me. So he sent away for a real priestess. Like a priestess of Elune, Tyrande maybe… the kind of noble holy woman two Stormrages had fought over for thousands of years. I'd heard good things.
But then, I guess it was some more days later because I was in a fog, Alessandre lets this pale-as-death woman into my room and she's in this spooky black cloak. She took it off and her robes were even worse. I panicked and sweated all over again. I assumed I had an infection. I knew, in my side, my right side, I'd been stabbed. I don't how Meydiri did it but she must have done it. Only she could have been the one. My Mey…
Well. I thought Alessandre had let some watered-down, horrifying Night Elf version of Lady Sylvanas in.
"Stay calm. This is my wife, Opal."
"NO!" I lashed out, but then I couldn't keep it up. I was already so exhausted, "That is a—some kind of monster!"
Opal raised her star-white eyebrows. She was pale and beautiful, yet somehow had this aura of malevolence. Compared to her, Alessandre and his dark looks were all color and sunshine. I don't get why some people are attracted to each other. Those two must have been insane.
"Oh, Al… I like him."
And then Opal grabbed my hand. She sort of wrestled my whole arm back down, hooked hers round mine, and leaned on it. Only then did she stroke the back of my hand, the way a kindly healer not intent on ripping your soul from your living body would have.
Alessandre hovered nearby, making it clear he would end me if I tried to hurt his wife. Even if I was going crazy with an infection and suffering. Opal mostly ignored her husband Al though. In fact, she was smiling, she was excited, thrilled to have me at last. The infamous Turaho Runestalker, who had botched her husband's mission back in Ashenvale. And that made me feel worse, that she didn't need Al really, and me being near-death was a fun time for her.
"Damned weird… Elves… uuugh…"
Opal locked eyes with me at that angle, leaning on my arm. She mouthed in her spooky way, "I am going to help you."
Glad to have that finally confirmed because you don't look it, act like it, or talk like it!
"…The problem is, Runestalker, that they've been healing you."
"Oh, you don't say."
Then what the fel are you about to do crazy woman!
"Feeding your flesh, restoring it with the Light. But this is not a normal affliction. It wants more flesh, more health and life to feed off of. The stronger you become, the more it has to gorge upon and poison." Her eyes were bright and she flashed a jubilant smile with plenty of pretty pearl teeth, "But now that I am here, we are no longer going to feed the leeches."
"What else… then?"
"We drive them out. We make your body an inhospitable environment for the vile magic that's cursed your wound, so that they leave if they won't be burned."
"Burned?"
"With shadow. With the void… with whatever I have in my arsenal that hurts the most. But don't worry. It will hurt. It will weaken you, but I am powerful enough to lend you my strength as well, so that you survive it."
"Oh crap! You're one of those dark-side-of the moon priestesses? Did you do that whole Night Warrior ritual thing? That shit's scary as fel!"
I freaked out. Opal shook her head at my despair and smiled lustfully, really craving the chance to use her powers on me. In a let's say legitimate situation, I bet.
Why, Mu'usha, why? I almost wanted Kael'thas' company instead of all this!
Then, Opal started without asking me if I was ready. I'm sure that I screamed.
"Al, HOLD him!"
"…Yes, mistress."
That made me freak out even more. What the fel—
Alessandre put a hand on the thin mattress then sort of hopped to the other side of me on the rickety camp bed, the way you swing your legs over a horse to mount up. But he landed with a knee in the middle of my chest. He slammed me back down. Then he grabbed my other hand as his wife was doing, pinned it back, painfully.
Opal's shadow magic seared through me. I swear it made me see all my sins at once, and I repented then and there for all the terrible things I'd done or thought I would ever do. I screamed madness, I'm sure.
When I hollered, nobody came to stop these two craven Night Elf idiots or to help me. Supposedly, this was already helping me. I made a hasty mental note never to be captured for questioning by the Kal'dorei Rogue Network, if this was friggin' helping me.
When I stopped resisting and fuzzy dark spotted shapes became people again, I saw my so-called healer giving Alessandre the worst look. Opal mouthed something else to him that made him shrink down right away and apologize. That at last aroused some humor in me, someone finally taking that mook to task.
What was it? I was barely myself. It was something a wife would say…
"This is so not the time for that, Al."
Good gods. So there was a right time for that—torture and screaming and calling people 'mistress'-between the two of them? I gave up. I still wanted to die, anyway.
Other than that dark thought, all I could think right then was, if I did not wake up fully clothed and with all my fur lying flat the way it was supposed to by the time I was well, there would be hell to pay.
Hell… Hell to…
I blacked out.
I don't know how long it took for me to recover from this treatment of hers, but when I opened my eyes, it was light outside. Opal's Bane, the terrifying entity that Alessandre calls his wife, was thin, somehow elegant though she was scary. I sensed something wretched with this woman, something deeply troubled. And yet, she was managed to be so beautiful while she sat there at the edge of my bed, looking down at a Tauren of all things, with true compassion.
Her perfect dark-painted lips went, "Good morning."
I moved my mouth. No words came out. I ended up sort of tasting my tongue, the medicine they'd given me over the last few days, the chicken broth the Night Elves had fed me.
"Yes, you're on the other side of the faction-divide now. Al brought you over to the secret Alliance war camp way out here, in the mists." She nearly smiled. Yes, Opal reminded me of someone else. Someone… I knew who.
"But you're not a prisoner here, Turaho. Don't worry about any of it, just get well." She raised a very pale hand to clasp her cloak together at her neck. She was cold. I wondered at how moon-white she was, when Al himself was colored so dark. It just… played so much with my mind, the aesthetic of those two as a couple. She must of utterly entranced him when they first met. The beautiful priestess, the rapscallion rogue. But then she turned out to be as craven as he was. Next, sparks. Something like that.
"Mey! Did she—?"
"She's dead."
My whole head started to pound. It hurt to cry. I shut my eyes against it all.
"You killed her, clean shot. But then Al tried to get you away from the scene, because you two men needed to outrun the cultists. You tried to fight Al next, in your grief. So then, Al stabbed you a few times I think."
I raised my eyebrows.
Opal's brow knight trying to think through at all. "But not in a lethal way, because he still needs you, all of us do. And who knows how far an Elf can even drag a Tauren body?"
"How frequently do you Elves think about that? I've gotten that twice so far this mission."
Opal had raised her cloak up to her face, to try and warm her cheeks. She dropped it now and laughed. She looked very much like a girl, doing that. Any of my girl cousins. I missed home, so, so much. The simplicity of Mulgore before this nightmare.
"Well. Al somehow got you to run halfway here to the Alliance camp, I'd say. It was when the Sentinels arrived to assist, that your other wound was discovered. Mey—your partner. She must have stabbed you during the struggle, before you shot her in the heart."
"Please stop saying that."
"Why? It's what you did. You should face it. Turaho, this wound she gave you would have killed you in time. It took someone like me to heal it. Do you think the Twilight Cultists would have been so kind? You made the decision to save your life, practically, after you were already dead. Meydiri had already marked you for death. It likely surprised Meydiri that you saw her stab your dog. That you saw her true guile. And that shamed her. Like she said, a cut with the actual blade would have been kinder. Meydiri was ready to blast you with the knife's full power, burn you up to cinders in the end."
I wasn't sure what to think.
"She was hoping to have enough of a carcass to prove it was you, to the cultists. Like a trophy. It might have earned her place back. Might. But none of that matters if she's the one who's dead. So." Opal swaddled herself in the cape again. "Again, as she said. You were the last, most powerful piece she had to play. She did not intend to lose."
I lay there, feeling nothing. Then, one thing pricked me a bit. My old curiosity.
"You. You were a cultist once? In the Twilight Hammer Cult?"
Opal nodded, yes.
"And Al saved you. Is that how you met?"
"I tried to kill him before he saved me. But, yes. And the woman Al was with before me, maybe eons ago, thousands of years hence—"
"He's that old! He doesn't look it, damn him."
More deeply satisfied laughter. "Oh, you're fun. Getting distracted by the best things, even in a dark moment like this. But Al fell in love with two cultists in his long life. The first time, his woman, like yours, she tried to kill him. She almost did. The second time, I guess you could say he saw it coming. Sort of, weaved out of the way in a sense. Greatfather Winter helped us. Did Al tell you that?"
"I think he was trying to, once." I recalled the strange, inspiring conversation he and I had at the campfire. After he, annoyingly, came back from the dead.
"That old magical Dwarf means so much to many people. I owe him a great debt." She was quiet for a time. "A great debt that amounted to Al stripping his pants off for the holiday and bringing me a whole keg of beer while I was a bedridden invalid! Haha… how wonderful. You'll hear the whole story sometime, I'm sure. And after that, and me attempting to destroy him with shadow magic once in a bar? Al, he stuck it out with me."
Opal took my hand, "Turaho. There is no amount of sticking it out that you could have done with Meydiri. She was too far gone. And you will not want to hear this either, but she chose it. Every moment of every day, there is something to resist, some whisper, some dark influence. Trust me, I know. She continued to say 'yes', 'yes', 'yes' each time she was seduced by the power. That was in her nature, her true character. Not that I judge. It took a great miracle, a miracle from Greatfather Winter himself, to get me to say 'no' at a critical moment. My family had got me safe and away from the wilderness and the horrid cultist camps. I was in a cathedral in Stormwind, supposedly safe, watched over by a league of priests. But none of that was enough. I still wanted to go back with them, rejoin their ranks and worship the old god I was bound to, Zar—" she stopped, caught up in the spell of it again. And she had been smiling like it was an old, wonderful lover she remembered. Opalbane worked to calm herself, shut her eyes. "In the end, it was down to me, totally. I was the one who had to choose a different path.
"Turaho, from what I've read in you, your last conversations with her, and in the last dregs of her menacing power in your wounds? You gave Meydiri a very good offer. It might have totally corrupted you, but who knows? Perhaps Kael'thas and his Blood Knights might have come to some resolution to both free Greatfather Winter and help her get over her past? Well, it would have been a very Horde solution."
"Wait, why do you say that?"
"Because she had also killed so many of my people. Her and her cultists. There would have been a war between you and Al over that. I and the rest of the KRN too, well, I'm not really one of them. But trust me when I say Darnassus would have come after both of you. Malfurion and Tyrande would have become personally involved. Not to speak of Kael'thas covering up cultist activity, a terrorist organization, in his own backyard." Her tone went sharp, "Unacceptable."
"Malfurion and Tyrande? You all are on speaking terms? That close?"
"Unlike the Horde, ours tend to be caring leaders. If it matters enough, the shan'do and the high priestess will come if they're called."
"So damned if I do, damned if I don't—" I couldn't really finish. I cried. I mourned for Meydiri, the horrible mess we'd found ourselves in, the future I thought we had, that I'd obliterated, with my own hands, my own gun.
"Tell me." Opal spoke over me losing it, with her eerie, calm voice, "What would you have done, Turaho? If Al had killed Meydiri. If he had been the one."
"Then I would have killed him." Though I couldn't meet his wife's eyes, saying so.
"And you would have lost one of your best friends. One of your closest allies right now, anyways. As well as losing your mind to grief."
She stood and properly swaddled herself with the cloak she was wearing, held it tightly closed the way she wanted. I waited for the final blessing, the kindly nod of the head or a prayer in another language meant to soothe. She blinked, looking at nothing. "There's that at least." And then Opal left.
Okay, so I hated her after that. Her and him. Both of them! Some very cold, very strange advice from her, what kind of help did this Opal's Bane actually give me? But it did match the woman, I guess.
When I was much better the next morning, and I noticed it was a fine one through the narrow opening in the tent, I decided that I was going to walk out of that bed on my own, at least. Something interesting was happening outside too, I could hear it. So I loped out of the tent, past an old hollowed out tree that had been Al's lodging I guess, over the last few days. Then I saw them, or I almost did. My salvation.
A few vigilant Night Elf Sentinels were arguing and facing down what looked like a squadron of Goblins and Bonnie's tiny troop of girlfriends from back at The Fitz, dressed for a big adventure. What a relief!
Alessandre nodded toward them, his brow furrowed with worry. "Something got lost in translation, here. I told them you still needed to rest, but they wouldn't have it. They wanted to rescue you right way. It seemed fair enough. I can't exactly go and leave you on Kael'thas' doorstep, myself. You're too big for a baby basket."
"Bonnie!" I smiled.
Never thought I'd say this but, thank Mu'usha for Goblins.
