The sun was setting over Hearthglen, but she knew at least one person who would still be up. The evening shift guards at the gates of Mardenholde Keep barely spared her a second glance as she strode in, soft-soled shoes scuffing on the stone. They didn’t notice the way she shivered.
Lunathiel should have been placed in the barracks with the other soldiers. Instead, he’d been given a room to himself at the end of a corridor. It made her grimace as she approached. Poor guy. But they won’t forget about him here, not if I have anything to say about it.
She made sure to knock first. “Sir Embermirth?”
After a moment, the door opened and the sin’dorei death knight blinked down at her, ears twitching. His brown hair stuck up in the back where his hair tie had proved to be looser than needed, and his lichfire-blue eyes showed clear bafflement.
She tried not to think about what lay beneath the high collar of his shirt. She’d seen it once and it wasn’t pretty. “Can I come in? I need your advice about…a thing.”
He made a quiet sound and stepped back to let her in. There wasn’t much to his room—a barely-rumbled bed, a few stands for sets of armor that had more than their fair share of skulls and spikes, a long trunk she instinctively knew she didn’t want to get near—and a desk. A desk piled high with stacks of paper. As she perched nervously at the edge of the bed, he settled himself on the chair next to her and picked up a pencil.
She cleared her throat. “Um. Okay. So I just got back from…um. From a funeral. For a friend of mine. And I found out that the deceased…” She squeezed her eyes shut. Viletta. Beautiful, funny Viletta, gone cold and strange and those glowing eyes—right. Deep breath, Tan. “The deceased was a death knight.” Lunath made a sound; she barely heard him. “A—Sir Embermirth, I just saw her a month ago! And she was alive, she was smiling, she didn’t look good but she said she had healers, I thought—“ I should’ve helped, I thought it was none of my business, I could’ve talked her out of it— “I don’t know what to do.”
Lunath rasped, all but throwing the paper he wrote on at her. His handwriting must have been fine once, but now it was slightly lopsided—whoever had sewn his fingers back on hadn’t done the best job. ‘Please do not cry. I will help.’
She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of a hand. “Sorry. Sorry. But…I knew she was sick, she said she was getting help…” She sucked in a deep, slightly shaky breath. “And then I find out that ‘sick’ meant she was fucking dying and ‘help’ meant ‘oh, I’m just going to get someone to kill me and raise me as a sadistic walking corpse.’ And she threw. A. Fucking. Party. To celebrate her undeath. I thought I was being invited to a funeral.”
The death knight looked at her, stricken, before bending his head to the next scrap of paper. For a long time, there was only the scratch of his pencil before he handed it over. ‘I would never have chosen this state myself. But then, I was young and hearty when I was slain. You say your friend was dying?’
Tanryn nodded, handing it back. “She didn’t tell me exactly what, but—I got the impression it wasn’t curable.” There was a dingy painting hung on the opposite wall and she fixed her gaze on it, studying the identical somber expressions on the two brown-haired boys and the proud gleams in their parents’ eyes. It was better than looking at Lunath. “…I would have tried. I would’ve tried, but…if she was right…” She took a breath. “She has two young sons. At least now—hey, at least now she’ll live to see them grow up, huh?”
He grunted softly, ears laying back against his skull for a moment before returning the paper with slightly more forceful handwriting. ‘She will suffer. Being a death knight is not fun unless you are already a very twisted sort of person. But … unlife is better than no life at all. Your compassion does you credit, L—‘
She gave him a dirty look. “Hey, what’d I tell you about the ‘lady’ stuff? It’s just Tanryn to you. Or Bubbles if you feel like giving Aethan a heart attack.” She paused. “…Besides. Between you and Crusader Bladesworn, who am I to judge the living-impaired?”
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Bubbles?’
“Bubbles. See, because I was a priest before I was a paladin, and shields are my specialty, so…yeah.”
He nodded; when he handed her the paper again, the words written on it made her blink. ‘It is good you do not judge. Are you planning to find the people who raised her and slay them as they deserve?’
Oh. Oh, I hadn’t considered… A shudder ran through her. Just as quickly, the Light within her surged, a faint prickling of her flesh and heat gathering under her skin. I should. Necromancy is wrong, it goes against everything the Light teaches…but… “She wanted to be…raised. As a death knight. And her husband is a death knight too, he says he’ll help her deal with the whole…thing. So…really, they almost did a good thing? Because otherwise, either she’d…die slowly—“ An image flashed into her mind—Viletta wasting away, coughing her lungs out on white sheets and bruising under skin gone ashy with pain. She rubbed her arms. “Or she’d go find someone else to bring her back. And then probably I’d never even see her again.” Or she’d wind up something even worse than a death knight.
Lunathiel reached out and laid a cool, comforting hand on her forearm. The contact barely lasted a second before they both jerked away—him with a rasping croak and her with a panicked yelp. “Sorry! I’m sorry, I forgot to warn you—are you alright? I didn’t burn you, did I?”
He frowned at his palm, poking at it experimentally for a bit before shaking his head and snatching up the pencil again. ‘I am alright. But are you alright?’
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I’m gonna head back to the rectory now, thanks.”
The door swung shut behind her with a soft click, and she made her way back home.
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