“Ridiculous. I’m not leading shit.” Eleeria’s voice echoes through the empty space, the sudden sharpness of her tone reverberating with a harsh ring. The person standing in front of her, all gaunt shadows and strange angles beneath her cowl, smiles and says nothing in turn. Nothing needs to be said, really.
So it was ordained, so it shall be.
“I’m not. I know you made some sort of deal with my wife -- but my wife isn’t me. You can’t just -- hold me accountable for it.”
“Then I suppose you wouldn’t mind if we took away the blessing we bestowed upon you.”
At last, the litany of complaints and frustration pauses.
And it pauses for a long moment.
“I could see without it. I would find a way.”
“Perhaps. But not for a long, long while.” The hooded figure’s smile turns sharp. She knows how much fighting means to Eleeria; she doesn’t have to say it, to show that she knows it. It bothers Eleeria to know she’s so transparent -- without her eyes, she is nothing. There is nothing for her. No battlefield would let her lead from the front, half-blind even with the thickest of spectacles. She needs this magic. The song of war thrums in her veins, and even though she hates it, she accepts that she is addicted to it. Lost without it.
“...I don’t know how to lead you.”
The deal is struck; the words drop into the space between them like ripples into a deep pond. The hooded figure finally looks up, her cowl falling back slightly. The tall woman’s eerie green eyes stare into Eleeria’s own.
“That is why I am here. I am the Teacher, and I will show you the way.”
This time, when she holds out her hand, Eleeria takes it, and follows her into the dark.
Perpetual autumn did not stop the latest sniffles, sneezes, and ailments from making their way around Quel’thalas. Though it had been several years since they had joined the Horde, it seemed their long-lived immune systems, cloistered as most of their people were before the fall, did not appreciate the sudden sensations of the sickness of other races.
This year, it was some sort of respiratory illness. Only serious if people neglected to get help for it; fairly trivial if they did. Eleeria had seen so many of these types of things; before she had had the Light, she had gotten sick quite often. This, that, the other -- all either ignored or weathered through on the couch with a bowl of soup. Now, with the Sunwell pulsing through her magical veins like a beacon, it was rare she got anything more serious than a small cold.
The only medic’s shop in Murder Row was crowded today, as Eleeria pushed into the front door and headed up towards the counter. The waiting room was full of people coughing and hacking -- signs that many of these people had waited at least some time since getting sick to receive medical care. Eleeria couldn’t blame them, really; the wait at the small, run-down shop was long, and the prices for magical treatment were sometimes bordering on extortion. She wasn’t sure if such was the case after the Fall, but there had been many times before it she had decided that convalescing for weeks in her rundown apartment was better than finding hundreds of gold in some tucked away pocket to afford the treatment of one of the only priests who would bother to see a Row rat.
“Hey Eleeria.” The tired apothecary behind the counter was very familiar with the former assassin. Though possessing no magical healing powers, her knowledge of the arcane combined with herbalism made her a valuable commodity for alchemical solutions. That, alongside a healthy dose of first aid skills, made her the best person to talk to in town when it came to curing illness or injury -- if you had no money for something magical.
“Hey Miare.” Eleeria propped her chin up on the counter -- always, Eleeria wondered why sin’dorei were always taller than she -- and smiled at the other woman. “Do you need help today?”
“Oh? You finally have a day off from that trash pile they call a military?” Miare raised her eyebrow in suspicion, noting that as Eleeria stepped back, she was not dressed in formal armor, but rather a simple tunic, pants, and boots. “I suppose you do. All I’ve seen of you lately is you prancing around like you’re too good for us.”
“That’s not true. I joined to help people, you know.”
“Aye well, ain’t seen any of them Knights help anyone but their own selves and their pocketbooks.” Miare dusted off her hands on her apron with a resigned sigh. Eleeria knew better than to push the issue; they had had this conversation before, and it never went anywhere. Eleeria wasn’t even certain she was wrong, after recent events.
“But if you wanna help, come on; we could use some of that magic today.” She waved Eleeria around the counter, the small woman scrambling after her.
“You’re not charging me anything, right?”
“Help. People.” Eleeria accentuated each word with a gesture of her hands.
“Good. Let’s get to work.”
It was tireless work, really. Eleeria had magic to spare, but as word got around, she had increasingly more patients to handle. Still, she worked without complaint, until finally the day was over, the medic’s shop closed with no patients left to cure or treat.
Miare learned against the wall, looking Eleeria over. “Your talents are wasted on them hack jobs.”
“They’re not hack jobs.”
“They are, and you know it. Their purpose is to look as fancy as possible while not giving a shit about us or ours. Why you bothered to join in the first place, I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s hard to just wander around yelling that I’m a Knight without some sort of authority behind it.”
“Oh please. You’re a rogue, Eleeria. A rogue you were, and are, and no matter how much fancy stuff you pile on you’ll always be a shapeshifting, pickpocketing louse. Just now you know some sparkly magic--” she points at Eleeria’s hands, “--but that doesn’t change who you are.”
Eleeria glanced down at her hands for a long moment, allowing her light magic to glow at her fingertips.
Anara visited Blackheart, and being able to hear Alexander’s absolutely atrocious turns of phrase was....new. Unsettling. I don’t know if I like this -- now it’s as if, having heard it once, I hear it all the time. Whenever I use my magic to see, it’s an assault of sound and noise. Screams, pleads, simple conversations...I can’t keep it all straight in my head.
Three years ago I thought I would go insane from paranoia. Now I know I’ll go insane surrounded by the noises of the dead.
Lyctora says it’s something I can learn to ignore. When? How? I’m so tired of turning my head to search for something that’s not there. I already know my talents don’t revolve around speaking to the dead -- surely that’s best left for Yathiel, channeling spirits, reading tarot. I tried my hand at Haera’s deck, and all that came out was meaningless gibberish.
I wish it would go away. I wish it would all go away.
But I don’t want to turn into some invalid, unable to do anything but talk about the weather and what the next door neighbor is teaching her children. One dinner date with Boen and his friends was enough to tell me that the simple concerns of civilians are not for me.
I do miss Boen, though.
I’ll ask Lyctora about it again. This needs to be fixed now, not in eight hundred years, or I’ll be a blathering idiot unable to listen to my own thoughts without eight hundred others chiming in.
@daily-writing-challenge and @mourne for brief Alexander mention. ))
She felt the heavy helm settle over her head, the uncomfortable stillness as it blocked out her measly sight from her injured eyes following swiftly after. Eleeria took a deep breath, trying not to let her anxiety get the better of her. She was not in the dark, alone; she was standing in the Cove, Ismene standing a few feet away from her. The older woman’s arms were crossed, her expression severe -- or they had been, before she placed the suffocating contraption of leather and magic over Eleeria’s head and taken a step back.
Eleeria didn’t quite understand why Ismene had shown up in the Cove. She rarely understood what the older woman did on a good day -- like a feral cat, she seemed to keep her own company. Weleria often joked that the two of them were much the same: solitary creatures, moving through life at their own speed, stopping for only those that they deigned excellent enough to speak to. Eleeria didn’t think the comparison was terribly fair, but then, she acknowledged that she too often disappeared without warning.
I am here to help you embrace what is yours by birthright.
That was all she had said. Eleeria couldn’t help her conflicting feelings about her mother, if she could even be called that. Showing up like a maelstrom of void and secrets the year prior, she had inserted herself forcefully into Eleeria’s life without a second thought for how she had been so very absent the four hundred years prior. It was a bittersweet feeling, as the woman who had abandoned her to die now showed back up on her doorstep, and Eleeria had kept a distance between them ever since their first encounter. But she couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief at the idea that Ismene may be able to help her control her strange and uncomfortable new magic. Lyctora’s teachings were instructive, but sparse -- some difficulty with the Shadowlands, was all Eleeria managed to gather. It had been some months since their last contact, and dead silence was all she received when she tried to contact the mysterious woman.
“Let go of the idea that your eyes are for seeing.” Ismene’s voice was sharp and instructive. Eleeria’s ears flicked back as she heard -- nothing. Her mother was as quiet as the dead when she moved, and the long hall in which they stood for fighting practice echoed enough that it was hard for her to pinpoint her direction. Eleeria swiveled her head, and stumbled -- a sharp prick of her mother’s dagger finding her shoulder.
“No.”
“Motherfuck.”
“I don’t fuck my own daughter. Pay attention. Your eyes are a farce now. You do not need your eyes to see. By layering your magic in front of your eyes, you’re limiting yourself. Relax, and let the magic and your other senses inform you of what’s around you.”
Ah. That was the reason that she’d put the overly large helm on her head. The leather sat completely over her eyes, preventing her from using her eyes as a medium with which she perceived the world. Though Eleeria was, by all acounts, very nearly blind, more than once she found herself trying to see with her eyes rather than with her magic. And in some ways, she realized she had limited herself in such a way. Magic did not need to settle in front of her eyes to see. Magic could go anywhere.
Ah, shit. She’s right-- right beside me.
Eleeria clumsily dodged the dagger headed towards her face, stumbling back. She moved on instinct, letting her ears and -- slowly, cautiously -- her death magic inform her mother’s movements. The chill that came with her new magic filled the room with a sudden rush, and Eleeria swore she could hear her mother’s huff of approval.
“Perfect.” Ismene’s whisper held small traces, for the first time, of absolute pride.
Seeing really was a farce. Had she ever needed to see, in order to be so...present?
By letting her magic channel a visual plane into the Shadowlands beyond, much like a death knight traversing through reality into eternity in the visual sense, Eleeria could sense the things around her. The difficult part was telling the specters from the physical; by letting her magic expand naturally, rather than keeping it reigned in, it became much easier to tell who was a denizen of the land beyond and who was firmly moored in mortality. If anything, it was as if she straddled two very different places that happened to be focused on top of one another.
Briefly, she wondered if she might be able to use that to her advantage one day; Eleeria didn’t stop to consider it however, as another swipe of her mother’s daggers had her hastily drawing her own. The next slash, she parried with the sharp sound of steel.
Eleeria didn’t even notice the physical changes: the lessening of her breath, the chill of her skin, kept only ambient by the persistent connection to the Sunwell nestled deep in her chest. She didn’t even bother to turn to Ismene as she held her daggers at the ready.
The tears are waterworks today. The five year old is absolutely inconsolable; Eleeria picks her up, letting the tears stream down her shirt as she holds her daughter close.
“But I wanna color!”
“Honey, you can’t color on those. I need those for work.”
“NO!”
The small girl kicks and punches at her mother’s shoulder. Eleeria lets out a soft noise as she holds Lairen away from her body. Strong enough to hold the girl aloft while she screams and kicks, she seems particularly unable to handle the magnitude of tantrum today.The floor is wet at this point; Eleeria’s not sure how one small elf can produce so many tears.
“I WANNA!”
“Well, Lairen, you can’t. That’s just how it works.” She sits the little girl down...and the toddler proceeds, in full five year old fashion, to throw herself down on the ground. Little fists beat the ground as little legs kick.
Eleeria simply puts her hands up into the air and resolves to wait.
Of course she would. What a silly question that would be.
Weleria wanted to come back to life. What a reasonable thing to want.
The interplay of draenic soul magic and death magic could do that. Would she be breaking any laws? No. Moral laws perhaps. But when had Eleeria Silverwing ever cared about morality?
As her joint magics worked together, carefully healing her wife’s soul and ever so gently transferring it from her old and broken body into a beautiful, new one, Eleeria couldn’t help but marvel at the power of it all.
Lyctora had told her that the First was generally a master of resurrection. Others may have more spiritual skills; the First was typically a necromancer in all traditional definitions of the word. The raiser of the dead. Perhaps she hadn’t meant like this, though. This was a marvel -- a breakthrough, Norassel had called it, after the first two trial runs were remarkably successful. She could use this power for so many things. But Eleeria would ever be her own person, first and foremost; she owed her skills to no one but herself. And as she delicately released the body’s previous occupant from her mortal coil, allowing her wife to steal the body in turn, she felt...
A little bit like a god.
(Perhaps she could get used to being the one in charge of life and death again.)
-
Warmaster,
I am pleased to report that Weleria's leave of absence for scientific research was successful. She should be back to work in a month or two, though anticipate some...differences.
