The silence of Shattrath was deafening after the constant roar of battle that had been Antorus.
Though everyone else had returned to Orgrimmar, Ithise hadn’t been able to take the portal. Not yet. She’s bribed a mage for one instead to Shattrath, and it was there that she stepped into, the hairs on her arms bristling with the arcane energy as she crossed from one world to the next.
It felt like she could hear every beat of her heart, every breath she took as she tread wearily toward the Scryer’s Library. Even in a city still crawling with so many refugees, it was always so quiet compared to everywhere else she’d ever been. The remains of the world were dying, always dying, but in a quiet and deserted fashion.
She allowed herself a long look into the woods of Terrokar beyond. She could barely pick up the sound of the kaliris calling to each other in the trees, and her heart twinged just a bit.
She’d tamed hers here, and she’d lost him to the Iron Horde.
Her wolves prowled loyally behind her, Rake right on her heels, while Ripper hung back a bit, her constant watchful shadow. She received a few dirty looks from the Scryers as she padded up the plush red carpet to the library, but she didn’t care.
She was tired.
She’d never been so tired in her life. Bone tired, exhausted, even, and that had to be the reason she was here. She hadn’t wanted to go back to Eversong, its bright woods always singing with life and thrumming with magic. She hadn’t wanted to pay her first visit to the Tower, where she’d long since been promised rooms in exchange for her service in the Second. She merely wanted silence after so long trapped in a hellish, screaming maw.
The socket where her eye had been still pulsed dully in pain, a burning she didn’t think would ever cease.
Balustan Goldmyst didn’t look up as his lone descendant slunk into the library, Scryers scuttling out of her way. She had bid her wolves remain outside, but as usual, Rake hadn’t listened. He lingered beside her, pressing against her leg with every step, nearly threatening to trip her. He was only this clingy in cities, and for that Ithise was thankful.
It was in crowds that she yearned for his protection the most.
When she dropped her longbow on her father’s workstation, he finally spared her an upward glance, brow raised in inquiry. He looked as confused as she felt to be in his presence.
“You’re alive,” he observed, his glassy blind eye nearly winking in the low light. “Good to know.” He gave her a cursory once-over before resuming his work.
We match now, Ithise caught herself thinking as she considered her father’s dead eye. Father and daughter both had now lost their left eyes. Between the two of them, they had a whole pair.
Balustan’s white streak of hair, the streak that every Goldmyst bore, had gotten wider since she had last seen him. When had that been? Two years? Three? It felt like more. It was probably more. Time held little meaning to Ithise. She measured her life not in years or chapters but in wars. It was the only way she knew how.
When she said nothing and made no other move, Balustan looked up at her again, hands stilling on the Legion artifact he held. “Sit before you fall,” he commented, nodding to the chaise nearby.
It was more suggestion that command. Balustan had learned very early on that his daughter did not take orders from him, especially not once she’d joined the military and knew true authority. But she did take his advice, sinking onto the chaise with a thankful sigh that rattled through her hollowly. She felt herself deflate and float even further into her true exhaustion. It seemed to her that she hadn’t come to a stop in months.
As she made no move to make conversation, Balu let her be for a while longer. He tinkered with his toys, organized them, set them aside for further study or archiving. Always the mad collector of useless junk, the war on Argus had been the ultimate Winter’s Veil gift for him. Crates and barrels of things sat nearby, and acolytes and apprentices scurried around with arms full of more.
But, feeling the pressure to at least attempt to be a parent, Balustan cleared his throat and turned his full attention to his wayward daughter before she could slip into unconsciousness on his chaise. “How are you doing?”
She scowled. She was always scowling, always wearing deeper and deeper lines into her face with it, but it darkened at his words. “Don’t do that,” she hissed.
“Do what?”
“Act like you care. It doesn’t suit you.”
Balustan rolled his eyes, the scarred and blind one adding to the effect dramatically. “It’s a simple question, Ithise. Mere conversation. You can choose to answer it or not, it doesn’t matter. I’m just being polite.”
Polite. Ithise loathed that word. That’s what everyone was always trying to do. She didn’t think anyone really succeeded, which was why she had done away with such pretenses long ago, much to her father’s horror. Balustan Goldmyst never would get over the animal his child had become.
He was now eyeing the literal animal she had brought in with her, curled up on the floor beside the chaise, watching him with hard amber eyes. Rake snarled and snapped at everyone who came near Ithise except for her family, and unfortunately, that included her father. She wished he’d give Balustan his usual frothing routine, but the beast could always somehow sense who was and wasn’t her blood.
After a while, he tried again. “How is your sister?”
No part of Eronais was Balustan’s to claim. Ithise was his only link to her, the half sister that may as well have been her twin. Ithise suspected that he only asked to be polite, as half the time he could barely remember her name correctly, but she knew he did it also for her own peace of mind.
“Temporary leave, like me. Probably going down a different path from me, though,” replied Ithise as she allowed her eye to slip shut. She wouldn’t sleep, she told herself stubbornly. Not yet.
Balustan took that information with a simple nod and stood, his bad leg cracking and complaining with the motion. Ithise almost wanted to help him, but she just couldn’t bring herself to. He’d wanted too much from her, shown too much disappointment for her to allow herself such sympathies for him now.
But Ithise had taken losing her mother very hard.
Perhaps that was why she had come here, after a brutal and bloody war of attrition. Perhaps she sought the familiarity of her father, his stern silence a welcome reprieve from the shouts and dying screams of battle and having her eye burned and scraped out of her skull.
Perhaps it was why she allowed herself to fall completely and totally asleep on his chaise, in a library full of elves, whom she didn’t trust as far as she could throw any of them, too far gone to even notice when Balustan draped a wrap over her and blew out the candles overhead.