"Loralen."
Jaina twitched. She had been transfixed by the sight of the dark ranger, the other dark ranger, and had attention left neither for hearing Anya approach nor being relieved that she was with her.
"Anya." Loralen offered a smile, but it was a false smile laced with cold. "How generous of you to grace us with your presence, sister."
Jaina felt rather than saw how Anya had her bow drawn behind her.
"I am touched by your welcoming too, Loralen. Can we lower our bows?"
"But of course." Loralen smiled even wider yet it only gave Jaina shivers. She was desperately sure that she needed to be ready, but for what she could not quite say.
Could she fight against a dark ranger?
Loralen flippantly put both bow and arrow away though, and apparently Anya was doing the same.
"Happier now? We would so hate to make our delicate living guests uncomfortable." Loralen whispered with mocking sweetness. "Oh, that is right…you are not alive any more, are you, Anya?"
Loralen had tilted her head, and on another day and on another person her expression may have looked cute instead of terrifying.
"You are dead, Anya." she hissed malevolently.
"Thank you, it must have eluded me." Anya answered with a little grain of defiance that Jaina was instantly proud of. It made Loralen's gaze harden.
"Poor you, safe back in Silvermoon and yet still you were just as unable as the rest of us to escape your fate, hm? How ironic, would you not say?"
Anya had stepped up to Jaina's side now, and Jaina could see the minute traces of tension on her features that told her that the words hit something deep.
"I would gladly have joined you. And traded places with you, or Lyana, or Denyelle, or anyone else at the Outer Gate."
"Yet you didn't, did you? You left us all to die under Lyana's command instead while you were singing lullabies."
"You never needed me to tell you what to do before. And she told me Areiel commanded until the end anyway."
"Oh, you have met her, have you? Has she also made herself a pawn of the living?"
"Lyana serves Sylvanas, like I do! And we are free!"
Loralen cast a telling and venomous look at Jaina, as if to point out who it looked like Anya was serving at the moment.
"She is neither elf nor dead. By what right does she trespass in this place?"
"Jaina is here on my invitation. She is our ally and our sister-in-arms. She is one of my rangers." When Anya said the last thing her voice trembled with pride.
"Ally? The living haunts us, Anya. They will never suffer our kind to remain in their world."
"SHUT UP! I grow SICK of hearing such things! If you can not tell friend from foe then that is your curse, Loralen, not mine. And I will not waste time defending myself before someone who will not even listen to me."
"Friend? The dead do not make friends with the living. The dead are used, used and discarded and buried." Loralen's face had drawn into a spiteful grimace as contempt overtook her. "We are dead, and you would be wiser to accept it. Oh, I have heard the whispers. You would call yourselves Forsaken, yet I think it is you who have forsaken the rest of us the way you so eagerly fight the battles of your living masters."
"That is not the case!" Anya replied in shock.
"No? Prove me wrong then, and tell me exactly how many living who have died to preserve one of you." Loralen gestured at Jaina.
Anya remained silent.
"I thought so. And how many of you have fallen to preserve the lives of the living?"
"Far too many." Jaina interrupted. Her throat felt hoarse and dry from her long and tense silence. "And I will keep and honour their memory for the rest of my days."
"I am sure it is of great comfort to them." Loralen snarled at her.
"I am done listening to you." Anya said, and her defiance could not hide her sadness. "Step out of the way. We are leaving, and I have no desire to hurt you"
"A little late for such considerations… If you will not speak to me, then how about them?" Loralen hissed it between her tightly clenched lips.
Jaina had not noticed it until now. An eerie, otherwordly light that did not have a source to emanate from. Not the way a lamp or torch looked in any case. Silvery, pale light that flickered through the windows and doorways to other rooms.
Silvery, pale shapes.
Jaina's breath hitched.
She had never seen a banshee up close in this manner. Let alone so many of them. Sylvanas, when Jaina had watched her Wail in battle, had been more like a dark cloak of mist when seen from behind.
These were something else. Full banshees, indeed. Stauesque and elegant in a way, and broken and torn in their appearance like many ghostly tatters and threads that swirled around them like a torn dress, almost. Mesmerising, and frightening. Alluring, and repelling.
The air was filling with whispers and echoes, like the way Sylvanas echoed when she raised her voice, but lower and more drawn out. Whispers in the wind, Jaina thought she would describe it as. Both musical and threatening.
"Sisters, do not fight each other…"
"…one of us is back…"
"…she is lost…"
"…mislead…"
"…what has brought you here, living one?"
The whispers had sharpened into a hiss. The kind of hiss you could expect to hear when a serpent rose from its coils to scare off whoever had disturbed it.
"G-greetings? My n-name is Jaina Proudmoore –" Jaina stammered. She at once felt unnaturally cold, in palpable danger and like she had just trackled mud across a distinguished lady's pristine floors.
"She is my ranger and my friend." Anya cut her off.
"…does not belong here…"
"You belong with us, Anya Eversong…"
"…come to us…"
"…one of us…"
"Leave, if you have nothing kinder to say."
"…not like us…"
"…treacherous…"
"She will betray you…"
"…she is living…"
"Leave us alone!"
The whispers only grew louder and more insistent.
"…where do you truly have to go…"
"…where do you belong if not with your sisters, Anya?"
"What are you if not one of us?"
"…what are you…"
"…what are you…"
"HEEEEEERS!" Anya screamed and her scream grew and grew into something more and something worse as she jumped upon Jaina and clutched her ears so that Jaina felt like her skull would crack at any moment from the pressure and the horrible sound that split bone and mind and soul alike apart.
Time seemed to slow when every impossibly shrill tone, or simply every discernible part of the same sound, stabbed against her eardrums and against her innermost self. Only black writhing smoke in the vague shape of Anya was around her but something solid, something relentless, still clamped down upon Jaina's ears and turned her head away form the sight and the sound. Jaina knew instinctively that the Wail was directed and that she was not in its intended path. Anya was keeping her down and turned as far away from it as possible in the same manner she might keep an infant Jaina shielded from a nightmarish sight.
Awareness of the flow of things returned one or three small steps at a time.
The pounding hammer-strokes upon her hearing lessened and lessened as the echoes of the Wail died down. A monotone, thin sound replaced them and would not stop.
The pressure on her ears disappeared and dull physical pain started to spread as Jaina's senses allowed themselves to reawaken.
The other banshees and Loralen were gone. In front of her Jaina saw Anya kneeling and moving her mouth. She made no sound at all that altered the constantly echoing tone in Jaina's ears. She had never been good at reading people's lips and only looked confused when Anya probably repeated herself. The dark ranger reached down to pick a healing potion from her belt and insistently handed it over to Jaina. That sort of sign language was at least universally understandable and as Jaina gulped it down the pain in her head receded and the monotone sound abated.
"…hear me?"
"Yes, it's better now. Thank you, Anya."
"We need to go. Quickly. They will come back. Do you have the strength to make us a portal from here?"
"I…" Jaina blinked and tried to shake herself back to the present. "Yes, I think so. I haven't used up all that much of my mana at all actually. Tides, I didn't know what to do at all –"
"Let's go home first. We'll talk later."
Finding your way back to well-known locations was never nearly as hard as feeling your way to a foreign one. Within a minute Jaina and Anya stepped back through her portal onto Lordaeronian ground, wild-eyed and shocked but at least in one piece.
A queen could command anyone and anything under her. That was as much true among the Forsaken as in most other realms. Rarer was the sight of a queen who genuinely asked for help.
Sylvanas had been a rare queen this day.
She had asked Areiel, as a friend and not a Banshee Queen, for help. Then she had asked Clea and Kitala, also as a friend. Then another. And another.
Sylvanas was not used to the idea of having friends like this on a personal level. Or no, that was not quite right. She had forgotten – or nearly forgotten – how to be just friends, on a personal level without the ever-present shadow of her own position and duty hanging over herself and everyone else. To be Sylvanas, without an unspoken prefix in front.
Being the way she could allow herself to be during short, stolen moments with Anya and short, undeserved moments with her mage.
Being free.
Today at least Sylvanas gave it a damn good try. Which meant that she was working as hard as she could.
For royal libraries did not renovate themselves.
Being the least damaged part of the keep did not equate undamaged and if they would want the majority of the books to be anything but rotting mush of smeared papers when the next summer came it was high time to do something about it. Also, if an archmage was ever to be able to read in peace without having to call upon a fire spell for her own warmth every other minute, then these broken windows and holes in the roof were unacceptable. A mage like Proudmoore could not be treated to that. A mage like Proudmoore deserved a hundred times better.
Sylvanas and Areiel were hauling stones and broken masonry from the ruins outside, since they were the strongest along with Clea and since Areiel insisted that it was safest for all future occupants if she kept her distance from the actual construction.
They were not out of able hands to make use of the raw materials. Kitala had run off to fetch the Loras family, and when she leaked that they were building a warm lair for the funny living ranger mage – and that the work was taking place outside – the children had apparently vanished in the blink of an eye to fetch half a neighbourhood's worth of families.
Families who were not rangers or soldiers, but craftsmen.
Sylvanas knew professional pride when she saw it. The gruelling, thankless and graceless digging and hacking of tunnels they had consigned themselves to, out of the sheer necessity of making room for everyone within the safety of the Undercity, was not where their talents lay. The mason's ingenuity may be put to test to make the most out of what they had below, but the art of his craft did not blossom into what it could be in such conditions.
Rebuilding a castle just because they could, that was more like it.
Sylvanas' very humble idea had grown out of all proportions into a gathering, into a fair or a festival of the oddest sort. Forsaken stood taller than in a long time in broad daylight absent the stifling worry of Scourge or Scarlet invaders, and even allowing themselves to bicker and disagree about the optimal way of solving an architectural problem, the way engaged professionals in every field do from time to time.
Kitala had even braved the chimney to clear out the soot and inspect the masonry, but after she got stuck and had to be dragged out by Clea the latter had taken over the task and haunted the chimney in her banshee form. Areiel was quick to make a suitably annoying comment about the various kinds of dark smoke and a quickly gathered part of the smaller children kept watch expectantly, if someone would appear out of the fireplace to bring them something interesting.
Sylvanas could not care less. So long as she got her library made for her mage she would put up with any amount of inane…with any amount of dark ranger-like playfulness that she would not begrudge anyone.
Late in the day, the castle actually had a library worthy of being called so. A little haphazard, a little odd, but when the first fire in nearly two years was lit in the fireplace it was warm. The floor was swept reasonably clean and there were frayed and tattered rugs to cover most of it. And Proudmoore would think it was enough.
Sylvanas had not had a very clear idea of how she should present the gift to her mage. For a fleeting moment she had contemplated asking everyone to leave but a look at the content mass of people for once able to gather together and be warm in front of a hearth made her reconsider. It was their keep too and there would be time to speak alone with her mage later. Proudmoore was the last kind of person who would want Sylvanas to expel them.
"Well done." Areiel whispered next to her. "Should we go and find our ranger mage?"
"Yes…" Sylvanas suddenly realised that she didn't know where Proudmoore were. Nor Anya. It was a very likely guess that they would be in the same place but for once Sylvanas had no idea where. "You wouldn't happen to know where she could be?"
Having to ask like that, it shamed her. How unthinkable it would have been just a week ago.
"I sent Lyana to look for them a while ago." Now Areiel was frowning. "That is actually odd of Anya not to notify anyone."
Sylvanas signed to Areiel to come with her. They went out into the corridor outside, through the adjoining archives and the rooms that Anya's squadron had furnished into living quarters for their mage. There was no sign of anyone.
"Go and ask Clea and Kitala if they know something." Sylvanas said and kept walking through the keep towards the general direction of the throne room. The floors above were too broken to be of much use, unless Anya had been at them of course. Sylvanas sprinted and climbed up the remains of the stairs and walked briskly across deserted halls and torn walls. It was more nothing than something in these parts of the keep. Still Anya had found a secluded spot for them to draw Sylvanas a bath that one time.
She stepped inside that room too, in fact one of the more intact, but it was deserted.
The bathtub was left where she had last seen it. Except that it was broken. Like if something had hit it, like a stone or a huge club.
Or a very hard foot for that matter.
Poor Anya, how you must have toiled just to make me feel better. You had every right to be angry.
She had to find something she could do for Anya too.
She had to find both of them.
Now.
Because something was not right.
Sylvanas could feel it.
She hurried out of the room, taking the path down in longer and longer strides and nearly jumping down back to the main floor where she was coming almost face to face with Lyana.
"Dark Lady! Anya and Jaina are gone."
Anya and Jaina had just sunk down on a piece of rubble in a hidden nook in the Undercity. Anya had an excellent sense for nooks.
Jaina felt slightly wobbly, now that the rush of excitement and danger was fading. She was not physically exhausted but mentally she felt overwhelmed. There was so much she was going to wonder about but for now the best possible thing was to sit leaning against Anya and think of as little as possible.
"In retrospect this wasn't maybe the best idea…" Jaina mumbled. "I put you in terrible danger for my sake. I'm so sorry for that."
"I put myself in danger! I choose to come with you." Anya did not snap but she said it uncommonly sternly, which sounded almost harsh coming from her.
"No, I didn't mean it like that! Not like Loralen…just… You could have been killed! Coming there for me. That's all…"
"You would not have let me. And I will not let you come to harm." Anya said sullenly. "Not ever."
"I know. I know. You kept me safe when I couldn't think of what to do. I don't quite know what came over me, I guess…I just find it hard to imagine myself fighting a banshee nowadays… Wasn't much of an archmage out there."
"You did cast something. I could feel it. Around you, and us."
"It…it was improvised. I couldn't make a shield without pushing you away or possibly harming you so I must have formed the magic into a…buffer? Maybe? I don't quite know what to call it."
They sat in silence for a while. It would be completely dark outside by now, late in the day. Late in the evening, perhaps.
They should probably go find Sylvanas any minute, yet Jaina knew enough of her dark ranger to recognize that something bothered Anya tremendously, and she had a pretty good idea of what.
"I…I said a bad word when we were in the spire…" Anya whispered. It was like she was afraid of even talking about it.
Jaina could ask one of the hundred of questions she wanted to some time ask about banshees and their Wails. She could burst out into the spirited tirade in Anya's defence against every possible depreciative thought that was never far under the surface in her mind.
And she could let those things wait because the only proper thing to do right now was to cup Anya's face in her hands and press her lips tenderly against the cheekbone just beneath those frightened eyes that threatened to break into tears.
"I have learned that sometimes, when a banshee gets really, really angry, she can do that. Or when she gets really, really afraid."
"Not…not all of it… That's not all of it… I…choose to…" The choked way the dark ranger forced out the words was akin to a confession of a heinous crime that Jaina was refusing to understand the magnitude of.
"Sometimes you just need to say a bad word." Jaina had removed her lips just enough to speak. "When other people are being mean."
Anya nodded hesitantly.
"The other dark ranger, who was that?"
"Loralen and Denyelle were part of my old squadron. So was Lyana. They perished early during the Scourge invasion when the Outer Gate fell." This was news to Jaina. She had just always assumed that Clea and Kitala had been with Anya even when they had been alive, but perhaps that was not the case. "I was not there, as she said. But I never…no one thought…"
"Anya… No sane person would think you would ever have left your squadron to face something like the Scourge without you. No one. Loralen was talking crap."
"You are kind to say so." Anya was looking down. There was a lot of fight that had gone out of her.
"You were so brave." Jaina touched her chin. She wanted Anya to look up at her. "And I understand that you did something very hard for you out there for my sake. Thank you, Anya. For saving me."
"Always."
How big her red eyes looked right now. You could lose yourself in them if you weren't careful.
"I…hrm…" Jaina struggled to find the right words, or any words in fact. "I did not find any suitable item when I searched. It seems our adventure left us with empty hands."
A slow and content smile spread across Anya's face. Her fangs peeked out over her lower lip in a way that made her look very mischievous. It was completely adorable, Jaina realised. Did only Anya do that or had she missed the trait completely with every other elf she had met?
"I think not…" Anya slowly and carefully fished out a thin golden chain from inside her chest armour.
It was a necklace. It shimmered, a remarkable piece of jewellery that didn't seem to succumb to the gloom that permeated these parts of the Undercity.
To Sylvanas from Alleria.
The inscription read clearly, in thin, elegant Thalassian engraving. Given the inscription, and where they had found it, it certainly had to be a lost property of Dark Lady Sylvanas Windrunner herself.
"Anya, that's extraordinary! A gift to Sylvanas from her big sister?!"
"Sylvanas, she…always looked up to Alleria. She was someone she could turn to no matter what, even when they were at odds and when Alleria refused to follow tradition and such. Maybe – hopefully – it could be a reminder of those who cared for Sylvanas. They wouldn't want her to be miserable." Anya mumbled.
Jaina swallowed. It was a thing of gravity she held in her hand. Who among the Forsaken had at all experienced the blessing of the smallest touch of home, of something so unbroken from the lives they had lived?
A lot hinged on this conversation.
"I need to report these news to Areiel, about Loralen and those others. Good luck now." Before Jaina had time to react, Anya had kissed her on the cheek, and was gone.
Sylvanas watched herself go mad.
There was no other way to put it. No less drastic expression did justice to the feeling of nearly being able to watch, as the threads keeping her soul and sanity together unravelled and how the coherence of her thoughts slipped by her the way water slipped through spread out fingers.
She had roused – by angry shouting – every ranger at hand above the surface and sent them running in each and all directions on the off chance that Anya and Jaina were simply by themselves in the vicinity. She had ran along herself, unthinking and in truth randomly, until the thought had struck her that they may just as well have gotten themselves lost somewhere below if that was what they would have been feeling up to.
The Undercity was not a safe place at the best of times.
Dreadful images of collapsed shafts leapt at her one after the other, ramshackle beams giving way and shoddy supports caving in under the pressure of innumerable tons of rock and earth above. Weight that could crush even such resilient creatures as the strongest undead into pieces. What happened when a banshee was trapped in her own body? Was it possible for her to cease possessing it at will and save herself in her spiritual form? It was an incorporeal form, not invincible.
And the living. Who needed to breathe air, who bled and suffocated and were so terribly, terribly fragile in the end and who – in the worst case – would only need a single hard hit to be rendered unconscious and helpless in the face of sliding rocks or just plain dirty water.
How sure was she about Jaina's standing with her people, again? It had taken ludicrously little to tip her own scales against her mage and if Sylvanas' mistakes had resulted in her shameful actions, then what might be expected from a wholly malicious mind? What was there to say the danger was over and none had – right or wrong – decided to blame the Dark Lady's mage for the leniency towards alleged traitors after all, just like they had feared?
Damned be what she felt, damned be what had befallen them.
How could she have been such a colossal fool to let Jaina out of her sight?
How could she let her anywhere near someone like Varimathras?
At that point Sylvanas had broken off and rushed heedlessly for the closest entrance, half in banshee form and more than halfway to drawing her daggers. If that wretched demon had so much as thought about…
He had not. Or in the case he had masked every sign of foul play when Sylvanas charged inside to turn her chancellor's and indeed the entire City Council's quarters inside out, followed by whatever city guards she had collected in her frantic rampage through the streets to get there.
Sylvanas then turned her attention to the canals. She hated them right then and there. What good were they, when they brought neither clean water for living allies nor kept Scourge at bay? They should dam up the entire sewer system properly and make use of the reclaimed space instead! She would scour the entire length and breadth of this stinking capital of hers until it spat her best mage and ranger back up and no one and nothing would so much as whisper a word in refusal right now!
If not the canals, then the mines. The volatile new caverns and winding passages dug out with improvised tools and methods by eager and fanatically hard-working laymen – they were practically begging for something to go dreadfully wrong – under the constant pressure of time before who knew which enemy would attack again. Why would Anya and Jaina have gone there?
Why would they not?
Why would they not have come up with a brilliant and absurdly dangerous idea to improve the lot of the Forsaken in some completely reckless and irresponsible manner that put themselves at stupefying risks?
The Banshee Queen haunted those mines. She ran, jumped, glided through pitch black darkness and dim light alike, the latter after she had snatched up a lantern. Tracking skills sufficed little against bare rock and gravel upon which one shoddy boot's imprint was as good as the next. Darkness was everywhere. The physical mirror of the visions she would see, or imagine herself seeing, when black nothingness opened up to swallow her, a maw of endless void and insatiable hunger. An abyss she could not stop herself from falling into, only watch from a corner of her own mind.
It had been…some time since these waking nightmares had come. Months to be precise.
Ever since she brought a human mage onboard the Banshee's Wail, a mage that now every pile of earth and every stack of stone and rubble took the appearance of.
Sylvanas must not Wail. She could not afford it. Not now.
My little mage, where have you gone? Anya, where are you?
It would be too late. Of course it would be too late. Too late for the likes of Sylvanas Windrunner for whom only a true death and the Lich King's laughter were what the future held in store. Fate, circumstance, misfortune – called whatever name that elf or human could think of but it would not allow her more than a cruel glimpse of what could have been, not for real. Twist and turn herself she may but at the end of the day, or night as would be more apt, she was still a banshee whose soul blackened by the blood of hundreds could expect no lenience.
She walked without noticing anything in particular back to her dreary lair in the depths of this…this tomb of a city.
Her walls closed around her until she blinked and they were plain grey stone again. They rose into towering mountainsides as Sylvanas sank down into her chair by her desk.
Then the door opened and Jaina stepped inside.
If Sylvanas had held anything in her hands she would have dropped it. She stared.
Are you a phantom image come to mock me? Jaina?
"Sylvanas? May I…speak to you for a while? Please?"
Speak to me? After…after all you have – where have you had the gall to have been?! Speaking is the least you will do, you – my – unthinking, careless, foolhardy, insane mage!
Sylvanas gestured mutely at the chair in front of her while she struggled to keep herself from exploding.
"I – that is, me and Anya – we have a gift for you. That we brought. Or more correctly returned to its owner."
Something golden shimmered in Jaina's hand. It was so unexpected, so completely out of place here and now, that to Sylvanas it was just another nuisance when all she wanted was to somehow make sure that Jaina was indeed Jaina somehow sitting right in front of her, with her hair in tangles that begged to be combed out and her ranger cloak hanging down too much on the left.
"What's that you have there? That necklace looks somehow familiar. Give it here!"
The harsh words came out so wrong but Sylvanas could not stop them. She knew it was the last thing she wanted to say, should say, needed to say, but she no longer had the strength to steer the maelstrom of emotion inside, only to keep it from erupting into something even worse. She could only watch her thoughts running rampant.
Jaina was putting the necklace down on the table. She was being so careful with it.
"We visited Windrunner Spire and came across this."
I know this jewellery down to the smallest dent in the third link. I know the difference between the light cast when the sun shines on the stone from the right and from the left. I know how it feels against every inch of my throat. And I know that I left it in a box for years and has not thought of ever seeing it again. And now you have it here right before my eyes and –
"It can't be! After all this time, I thought it was lost forever."
"Not any more." Jaina's eyes twinkled. Of all things. Now.
Is this a game to you?! Do you have any idea what you caused by disappearing without a single trace, let alone telling anyone what you were going to do and where? I am inches from screaming at you for it! Have you the slightest idea of what was going on here in the meantime, or what could have happened? What if we had been attacked? Have you completely forgotten how we are at war and how many people that have come to depend on your presence? And you sit before like nothing has happened and –
"You thought this would amuse me?"
"We wanted to give you a gift. And a gift that would be something important, so that was why we visited your old home. It wasn't supposed to take so long but the thing is, we encountered a lot of banshees there…"
Banshees. Scourge banshees, presumably? You rush headlong into the deepest of the blighted parts of Quel'thalas where if not the Scourge would get you then an elven patrol could have, and they do not stop to ask questions any more I can tell you! Were you TRYING to get yourselves killed?! How can you even think of something like this?! Is it not enough that I have hurt you so deeply already but must you and Anya court your true deaths in this manner on top of everything? For a…gilded TRINKET! What do I care for relics of the past when put against your life?!
"Do you think I long for a time before I was the queen of the Forsaken?"
That I long for it so much that I would not be bothered sending mine to their deaths to retrieve mementos on a whim? Is that what you think of me?
"Uh, no – yes – I – we – we just thought it would be something you would like to have. That it would mean something, hopefully mean a lot…"
Jaina looked so unsure of herself. Belore, this wasn't what Sylvanas wanted! But this, all of this, it was so overwhelmingly insane, that she could just keep herself from bursting apart in a Wail. Her thoughts spun so fast that it was only with the greatest difficulty she could catch one of them and put it into words and even so a dozen more passed her by as she spoke, faster and faster and faster.
Jaina, how could you ever think that anyone could care more for a piece of metal than for you? How can you risk yourself for dead gold that is nothing more than dirt next to that in your locks? What gems can compare to those two that look upon me? Have I done this to you? Did I drive you to this reckless thing? It is not the gifts of those closest to me that hold meaning, it is they themselves.
"Like you…" Sylvanas whispered.
"Like…me?"
Like you. My little mage. I would take it all back if I could. I would rather have it that I was taken unawares when someone proved false for real than to have hurt you like I did over falseness imagined. Damn any traitorous prisoners! Damn any malcontents I could not care less about! Damn this entire rotten city!
"It means nothing to me." Sylvanas vaguely gestured around them. "And Alleria Windrunner is a long dead memory!"
She is nothing in comparison for she is gone, and you are not! And Alleria would personally GUT me if she saw me putting her memory ahead of my ranger sisters who were still with me! She would be ashamed to call herself Windrunner if she saw me do that!
Jaina's face fell. She blinked, crestfallen and unbelieving and her eyes were turning misty.
"How can you…say that…? How can…" The mage sniffed, and she became hard and rigid and brittle, so very brittle that it was like shards sharp enough to cut yourself upon. "Well then! If – if that is all there is to it then I shall not take up more of the Dark Lady's valuable time! I hope it is acceptable that I now remove myself from her distinguished presence!"
What have I said? Something dreadfully wrong that I can not even grasp. Even a civil conversation is a feat beyond me as of now. All I attempt today fail before it can even begin. Go, Jaina. Before you are hurt even more by this poison that I am. I do not even know how to say that in a way you will not misunderstand.
Instead Sylvanas just echoed the words Jaina had spoken.
"You may now remove yourself from my presence, Ranger Mage."
Her mage slammed the door shut after her so that dust trickled from the ceiling.
Sylvanas sank with her head into her palms. What had she really done and said? Why would her wild thoughts not quiet? Begone! All of them!
She beat at her own forehead in frustration. What had she really said? Words, thoughts, sentences, there was no telling one from the other!
Start from the beginning.
Follow your thoughts. Retrace and observe them without forcing anything. Like she had once instructed Jaina to on the road back from Hearthglen.
How easy it was to tell someone else to do it.
What of that she had thought had she managed to put into actual words for Jaina?
Oh, no…
What have I really said to her?
Sylvanas leapt for the door.
"Jaina… Jaina, wait… Please…"
Jaina stumbled forward. She was blind to where she went.
How could she?
How could she?
After all she had tried, after all she had done, after she had torn her heart out and laid it bare before her rangers and...
Did Jaina even know the Banshee Queen anymore?
Why are you like this, why, why, why? I look upon you and I don't recognize you anymore.
Had she ever?
Had it all been a lie, or a pastime for Sylvanas, a faint facade of something else than what Sylvanas Windrunner truly was?
Jaina couldn't do this anymore. She had nothing left to give. She could not bear this crushing existence of death and horror and despair everywhere around her. She was physically suffocating, she needed air, and now! She couldn't stand the weight of this endless agony where every smile hid a boiling scream of terror and no laugh could be laughed without its twisted twin of torment being ever so close at hand.
She could no longer help Sylvanas.
The realisation hit Jaina with crushing finality.
I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home to Theramore. To Dalaran.
To Pained.
Pained!
Tears flowed like rivers and covered the world in their mist. Jaina looked past them, past, past everything and everything, into the depths of Azeroth's flowing magic, into the leylines and arcane currents that would rip a careless soul to shreds if she did not know exactly what she was doing, past, past it all, unto the glimmering spark on the other side of the world that Jaina knew was home.
She trembled when her portal took shape, a portal stretching beyond all sense and reason, and it flickered and flashed in and out of existence – and it was gone and Jaina with it, and she fell forward on the hard tiles of her own wooden floor in the cramped little bedroom and study in the tower that was home.
Jaina whimpered as she struggled to her feet, in sorrow or in hurt or in both. The staff had fallen out of her hands. She almost did not catch the footsteps nearing her.
"My… Lady Jaina?!"
The last vestiges of Jaina's composure broke down and she fell into Pained's arms and cried without end.
Anya had finally finished her report to Areiel and hurried through the streets back towards Sylvanas' quarters. Areiel had been hard to find and apparently half the city was in some kind of ruckus because the Dark Lady had been turning it upside down in search of something she refused to divulge, but Anya had a very distinct idea of what that might be even before Areiel had begun to shout her ears off.
The news that Jaina had already gone to see Sylvanas and that they had met Loralen put a quick stop to the ranger captain's talking-to though, and she had listened intently to Anya's hurried report of what they had discovered at Windrunner Spire even if it did not stop her form shaking her head at the idea of leaving for so long without notice. Intended surprise or not.
They would have to talk more about the issue, and plan. Was Loralen and those other banshees still part of the Scourge but able to act independently? Were they their own but actively choosing to avoid the Forsaken? And could they be set free, or become allies, in those cases?
But all that would be for later. Jaina and Sylvanas would have talked quite a deal by now and with just a little luck they would still be talking, and on their way to be friends with each other again.
And if they weren't, then Anya would tie them together with a rope until they hugged and made up. Because there had to be an end to this now.
She didn't really dare to. But she'd do it anyway. If that was what it took.
The first thing that she noticed when she silently approached Sylvanas' part of the military quarters was that it was deserted. Why was it so? Shouldn't there be at least some grouchy deathguard here or there?
No door was shut. As if no one cared whether they were.
Anya hurried inside.
Sylvanas was sitting slumped against the wall with the golden necklace lying in the dust on the floor in front of her. The way she stared hollowly ahead into nothing told more than enough.
No.
No.
She couldn't. They couldn't.
No!
Anya strode ahead and jerked Sylvanas to her feet with a tight grip of the shoulder straps of her armour.
"Where is Jaina?"
It did not take a beating heart to make your voice tremble at a time like this.
"She is gone."
Anya slammed the Dark Lady into the wall while icy cold dread rose to grasp her still heart in its clutch.
"Gone? Gone? What…" Anya started to shake her head unconsciously in denial, defiance, warning, anything. "No, Sylvanas… No…no… What have you… WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"
There was no answer. There was no need for an answer.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"
Anya screamed and screamed and she hammered viciously and then futilely against Sylvanas' chest as the undeniable and inevitable fact washed away all other thoughts.
Jaina was, finally and truly, gone.