#kalyste wildlight

[chenria]

Commission/birthday present for the amazing @highexarchs of their gorgeous Kalyste Wildlight (void elf warrior) with Halford Wyrmbane - in their timeline they get married ♥

And I really enjoyed working on this pictures and I hope I did @highexarchs‘s darlings justice :3  @highexarchs, happy (late) birthday to you - and congratulations to the wedding to Kalyste and Halford ;)

[chorusfic]

ill tidings--

N’Zoth rises, and Halford hates himself for watching Kalyste more closely.

He knows, as a military commander, that she might be a risk now, or at the very least susceptible to the Old God’s influence. As a military commander, Halford knows it is a necessary, regrettable measure to take against a dedicated, honorable warrior for the sake of the greater good.

As someone who loves Kalyste Wildlight for the woman she is, though, Halford is terrified, not of what she might do, but of what she is suffering.

For a time, it had seemed as though Kalyste’s typical discipline was holding firm. Occasionally her attention would drift and she would lose focus for a few seconds before either shaking herself out of it or being drawn back into the conversation by someone else, and she went to sleep slightly later and woke up slightly earlier, but altogether those things were far from alarming. Halford had somewhat reluctantly chalked it up to the sudden urgency of their situation, of needing to be ready to strike when N’Zoth’s forces struck.

It wasn’t until a week after Kalyste returned from Nazjatar, a week after the fall of the Eternal Palace, that she awoke screaming just past midnight.

That night, it had been relatively quiet as they’d caught up with all their daily tasks earlier than normal--partly credited to the fact they rose earlier than they had even during the original war effort--and both of them had been looking forward to an earlier night’s rest.

Halford’s first indicator that something is amiss comes when Kalyste’s arm lands heavy across his chest, waking him, and he has only a split second to realize she’d accidentally struck him in her restless sleep, tossing and turning, before she screams.

The sound reaches deep into Halford’s own chest and yanks his pounding heart into his throat as he flips onto his side and rests one hand on Kalyste’s face, the other on her shoulder. “Kalyste--Kalyste, look at me--”

Her hands seize his shoulders so sharply and so suddenly that Halford has to resist the urge to break the lock and pin her entirely, and her eyes open, but they’re unfocused as her pupils dart frantically around all corners of the room, seeing something invisible to him. Her body writhes under his hands, frantic with terror, and it’s all he can do to hold her still enough she doesn’t hurt herself with her thrashing. Halford can just feel a shadow of her pulse in her neck where his hand rests on her face, so fast he’s moments from waking her more forcefully, risks of injury be damned, when Kalyste gasps, and her eyes abruptly launch back into focus. “Halford--”

“I’m here.” he tries to hide the worst of his fear, but he takes one of her shaking hands in his, wrapping their fingers together, and knows she’ll be able to feel the matching tremors. “Ka--”

“Where’s Briony?” Kalyste manages to blurt out, voice unsteady and thick in her throat like she’s on the verge of breaking down into complete, hysterical sobbing, half-choking on her words. “I need to see Briony’s all right.”

“Kalyste, I--” Halford’s mind races as he processes the abrupt question, but answers, “...Briony was quite well when I saw her this evening. If I remember correctly she was planning on beating Miss Frey’s record for arm-wrestling victories against the Snug Harbor’s travelers.” Halford takes in Kalyste’s uneasy expression and makes a compromise. “We’ll go at first light to check on her, but nothing has happened tonight. She’s safe. I’m safe.”

He wants to say so are you, but that is a promise he cannot make, a battle he cannot fight for her, and Kalyste seems to know it. Her breath, when she releases it, shivers in her chest, and her usual volume is stolen by her exhaustion as she says, “Very well.” Running a hand over her face, Kalyste pulls it away with disgust. “I feel filthy.”

Halford rests the back of one hand against her forehead and feels the stickiness of half-dried sweat. “You should take a bath,” he says, already swinging his legs over the side of the bed in search of Kalyste’s robe. “It might help you feel better.”

Kalyste hasn’t moved by the time Halford’s located her robe, draped over a chair in the corner, and she shakes her head slowly as he hands it to her. With careful hands, she drapes her robe over her shoulders as she says, “It’s late--I shouldn’t keep you up even later. I can get it myself.”

Her movements are slower, more painstaking, but Halford waits until Kalyste balances her hands at the edge of the bed, struggling to push herself up on shaking arms, before saying, “Kalyste.”

With a huff of frustration, Kalyste lets her weight slump again, and Halford goes to where she sits, holding her face in her hands, shaking her head. This time, Kalyste doesn’t protest as Halford slides one arm under her legs, the other cradling her shoulders, and, with a faint noise of effort, carries her away. She releases another sigh, a longer, heavier one, and with it, the rest of the steel in her bones drains away, as she slumps against him.

Downstairs, Halford nudges the washroom door open with one foot, moving to set Kalyste down in the nearby chair, and she leans her weight heavily on her knees as Halford begins to draw water, checking the heat. He tries in vain not to keep looking over one shoulder, checking to see if Kalyste is getting worse, but her attention is drifting again, her gaze distant and unfocused, until he gets up to rest a hand on her shoulder. With a shake of her head, Kalyste looks back up at him. “I wasn’t hearing the whispers that time.”

“What were you thinking about?” he asks as Kalyste moves his hand away, to slip the robe off her shoulders. With one hand on her hip and the other holding her free hand, Halford carefully helps Kalyste sit herself down in the full tub until everything below her shoulders is submerged, and he pulls the chair she’d been sitting in a moment ago up to the edge, lacing the fingers of one hand with hers.

She waits until he’s settled, watching her with an even, steely-gray gaze, before responding. “I don’t see how we emerge victorious from this.”

Halford’s heart drops into his feet, but he restrains the reaction to a tightening of fingers around Kalyste’s own, cold in his grasp. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t know how to respond, and Kalyste continues, “I have fought in more battles, against more foes, than I care to remember. They have never been black-and-white, as nothing is, but there were constants: ways to defend, ways to attack, strategies to counter and weaknesses to exploit.” Kalyste’s gaze flickers away for a heartbeat before returning. “There is no defense against this. Against something that reaches into your very mind and rearranges things to its liking. I would never say this to our people, not to anyone, and I would fight to my last to see that victory done, but...” Kalyste’s voice breaks again, and a piece of Halford’s heart breaks with it, “...I don’t know how to fight this..”

“Everything has a weakness, Kalyste. Everything.”

“If you could see what I have seen...” Kalyste shakes her head, but her grip against his hand tightens, ever so slightly.

Halford has been a soldier since the early days of the Second War, has seen victory and defeat, morale at its highest and lowest. He has been the hope brought to others, and the hopelessness in the deepest pit of his chest that he hasn’t dared to acknowledge since this started, while it’s reared its ugly head. Kalyste, far older with quel’dorei blood running in her veins, corrupted by the void, has assuredly seen the same, and far more.

This is not a battle he can fight for her, and she does not know how to fight it herself. A situation he suspects neither of them ever prepared for.

It is for that reason Halford thinks long about his response, and Kalyste seems unhurried, but her gaze remains in focus. If the whispers pull at her, she is exerting the last of her energy to pay them no heed. “It will only show you what it wants you to see,” he finally produces a response, unsure of its direction, but Kalyste straightens almost imperceptibly, and he gains momentum, “and it is an attack that we cannot repel with the methods we are both familiar with. That doesn’t mean they do not exist.”

“You misunderstand.” Kalyste straightens again, but he can see her fatigue in the shadows under her eyes, lit in sharp relief in the room’s dim candlelight. “I don’t doubt that such methods exist. I doubt that we have the time to find them.”

That, Halford has no satisfying response to, and so they sit in somber silence for a long moment, candlelight flickering against the walls.

“I need you...” Kalyste pauses, gathering herself as her voice breaks, “...I need you to promise me something. I need you to promise you’ll...you’ll do what’s necessary to stop me.”

“Kalyste,” he can’t help leaning back in shock that time, but Kalyste follows, her free hand clamping down on his wrist in an iron grip. “That won’t be necessary, you--”

“We don’t know that. No one does.” Her eyes are sharper than he can remember seeing them all week, and it’s that, more than anything, that convinces him she’s serious. “Anyone touched by the void--priests who utilize its power, warlocks, the void elves--is susceptible. Three thousand years ago my father left behind a legacy of betrayal and death by slaying someone who saw him as a trusted ally, and I refuse to follow in his footsteps. I will not be a weapon in the hands of our enemy. Do you understand?”

Halford contemplates, for a split second, drawing his weapon and striking Kalyste down. He imagines her face, twisted into a vicious snarl as she unleashes her full breadth of skill and hard-won training upon him, seeing him only as her enemy. They know she can best him in a sparring match, but a real fight, with both of them trying their utmost to strike the other down?

It knocks the breath from him, but in the part of him that knows duty must remain separate from attachment, he knows in the end that he would do it.

He would hate himself for the rest of his days, but he would do it.

“I promise,” he says, voice considerably more ragged than a few moments before, and he has to look away for a few moments to compose himself before he can face her again. “I will do what I must, should it become necessary.”

“I’m well aware it’s no small thing to ask.” Kalyste relaxes her grip on his wrist, instead placing her free hand atop their joined ones. “I have known the pain of being forced to kill someone I loved, and I don’t ask it lightly.”

“I know.”

They let the quiet sit for a long beat before Kalyste shifts in the rapidly-cooling water, disentangling her hands from his to comb her fingers through her hair, dipping them into the water and brushing them out. “I don’t think I can stay awake long enough for a proper wash, but this did help. Pass me that cloth, would you?”

Halford does so, and Kalyste rises shakily to her feet, drying off before reaching for her robe, which he already has in hand. “Can you make it back upstairs?” he asks.

Kalyste pauses, considering. “Slowly.” she finally admits, handing him the damp drying cloth and taking his proffered free hand. While her steps are careful, placed very deliberately, she moves on her own steam, until they reach the bedroom again. Just outside the window, dawn threatens to touch the horizon, but both Kalyste and Halford pointedly ignore it, settling themselves for whatever sleep they will manage to snatch from the time remaining.

With his face buried into the crook of Kalyste’s neck, smelling of the soap she uses on her hair, body curled around hers, still Halford waits until the gradual evening out of Kalyste’s breathing tells him she’s fallen back into sleep before releasing a long breath.

He strongly suspects the worst of the battles they will have to fight are yet to come.

[chenria]

And another set of ko-fi sketches for the lovely @highexarchs of their amazing belf death knight Tyracel and High Exarch Turalyon. 

The two were a lot of fun to draw and I hope I did them justice.

And with that post I close commissions until January 2020.

[chorusfic]

first steps--

Kalyste has never shared space with anyone before.

Certainly, she has been called away from her quarters before--there had been times she might have gone weeks in between seeing her own bed in Sunfury Spire--but they were still irrevocably hers, and it was a privilege she had been loath to give up when so many other things occupied her time and attention. A quiet room to come home to was the most ideal way to spend what little free time had been available to her in those days.

Since that day on the Wind’s Redemption, though, things had begun to change, as Kalyste had suspected they would. It had been a risk, but she thought of the ways Halford had taken on some of her burdens, despite the fact he certainly had many of his own to carry, and knew that it would be worth it.

Still, there were adjustments. There had to be designated places for their armor to be organized, lest smaller pieces get mixed up between them. There had to be new routines worked out among them, because occupying any space alone for so long had left Kalyste woefully unprepared for sharing it with another. There had been a learning curve where boundaries were tested, discussed, and laid down.

It had been less than a week since that day on the Redemption that Kalyste had offered to let Halford share the home she had been loaned by a Kul Tiran merchant family for the duration of their mission in Kul Tiras, a surprisingly easy gesture that Halford had seemed surprised at--perhaps he knew her better than she sometimes gave him credit for.

One of the first boundaries they had discussed were sleeping arrangements. Kalyste was not accustomed to sharing a bed with anyone, a fact she had freely admitted, and Halford had confessed much of the same. They had agreed to simply try and see if it was an arrangement that needed tweaking.

The first morning, Kalyste had awoken on her stomach, with Halford draped mostly over her body, his breath ghosting against her neck while he snored. Kalyste was rarely a soft woman, but she would be lying if she said the idea of waking up like that more often didn’t appeal to her.

Another easy step to take came early one morning, with dawn just starting to peek over the horizon, when banging on the door and the familiar sound of Briony’s voice woke both Kalyste and Halford from much-needed sleep. Kalyste, however, had been asleep far less time that night, having only come to bed a few hours before, having returned late from a mission on the coasts of Nazmir. They both groaned near-simultaneously, Kalyste on her side with her arm curled under her pillow and Halford with one arm curled around her, face buried in the curve of her neck.

“Your protege is knocking.” he mumbled into her tangled, ash-gray hair.

Kalyste felt a grin tug at her lips as she told him in return, “Before dawn, she’s your protege.”

Turning over her shoulder, Kalyste met a baleful and sleepy Halford’s gaze and felt the moment he acquiesced to her, withdrawing as he sighed and rolled to his feet. Kalyste buried her face back into her pillow, fatigue burning at her still-closed eyes, and she had barely descended back into dozing when the bed dipped and Halford’s warmth returned.

“What was the emergency?” Kalyste asked without opening her eyes, muffled by her pillow.

“A fire in the Proudmoore barracks kitchen.” Halford told her as he wrapped himself around her again. “Miss Lockwood was rather surprised to see me at your door instead of you, I think.”

“And what made her think we would have the solution to such an incident?”

“It’s been resolved. She simply wanted to inform us--well, you, I suppose--before someone else, and I quote, ‘Filled your head with some far-fetched story’.”

“Hmm.” Kalyste managed, already half asleep again, when another question hit her. “What was Briony attempting to make in the Proudmoore barracks kitchen?”

“I did not ask,” Halford replied, sounding nearly asleep himself, “nor did I particularly want to know. I believe we should simply be grateful she was not coming to report the kitchen burned down.”

She didn’t have the energy to laugh, but a grin twitched at Kalyste’s lip as she replied, “Fair point, I suppose."