so this ended up kind of falling apart later into the doc on account of i couldn’t figure out where to end it so it just kept going & going & going, but i dialed back to the good non-drawn-on-forever part & still like it so??? in a sense this is something like a sequel & pov-swap to this, except i wrote this first so not really but it works out that way
anyway have a shitty dk back when he was a moderately less shitty paladin featuring my much better if very sad paladin (yknow the one)
It starts with a dead boy in the road.
There's a story long before it, a prequel beginning somewhere before the boy's first breaths during the coldest months at the foot of Alterac, in a time of year when the snow comes far enough down the mountains to drape the city in white light. It tells the tale of a boy that grows to bear oxymoronic metal wings, a boy who wants to fly and lock himself up all at once. (Somewhere in time and space, they call that an airplane; burdened and walled away, yet it soars.)
But that story ends with his death in the road, at the climax of a war he's feared more and more with each passing day. It ends with the knowledge he'll never see his mother again, that his father might already be dead too—and even if he is, and his father is, and even if his mother dies too, they won't really be dead. It ends with the fear that when his eyes open again, they might be the wrong color blue, and he'll be dead but he'll still kill. It ends, and he is never the same.
But that story is for another time. This one starts with the boy dead in the road.
Kieran witnesses only the last moments of it. Ghouls have flocked to the boy like killers and vultures thereafter, and Kieran heard the screams when their source was out of sight, but they've since gone quiet. All he hears is the cackle and snarl of the geists, the rending of flesh and stealing of life.
He, too, will be dead soon—and the only thing, perhaps, that will remain true before and after is the unrelenting hatred he bears for the undead. It's why he cuts down the ghouls feasting on the dead boy, despite there being nothing to save; only vengeance to enact. Something to make the paladin feel better, because it won't be the relief of sparing a life, so it might as well be the thrill of running the anger through the killers and the vultures that benefit.
The street was gold when the last story ended. Now, at the beginning of this one, it's red with the boy's and all his vultures' blood. Red like his stained hair, like the smears in Kieran's breastplate—all also once gold. The latter spits out red, and it's a golden crack in the cobble he taints with the new color.
A bloodied city for a bloodied people. There's sentiment in there somewhere, he's sure, but he'll be dead before he knows it.
But the boy won't.
In the ringing silence of the gold-turned-red street, Kieran hears no more than a breath. Hoarse, and weak, and very afraid—but not laced with the stench of the monsters'. His head whips to the not-quite-dead boy, who reaches for his leg—
Oh, it's not pretty. It's not pretty at all.
"Hey." He's at the boy's side, but all that boy sees is the red he takes from his leg. There's more where it came from, bleeding out and covering the little smears his fingers left immediately. "Hey. Boy."
To his alarm, the only answer he receives is when the boy rubs a wrist under his wet eyes. But the dead don't cry, and the ones that do wail of warfare. He hears them coming, always coming, so he takes what he's given and hoists the boy up into his arms. He's limp—Kieran's sure all it'll take is one wrong bump against something and that leg will be gone—so he's careful by impulse more than any intention to save it. (Better to cut it off and replace it—take it from the man who did just that once himself.)
"Who are you?" he hears,
and he says, "Kieran."
He knows where the medics are, has carried survivors in far better shape to their helping hands. This is autopilot. This is anger and retribution looking for a purpose. This is a dead boy he's stubbornly trying to make live, less for that boy's sake (he's in agony, Kieran can hear it, he ought to finish him off) and more his own. Let him live and be testimony to the strength of the elves. Let him be a small wad of spit and blood on Menethil's wretched face.
"Open your eyes," he snaps. "You won't die."
The boy probably deserves better than that, but Kieran won't live to know that either.
He bursts into the clinic, dead boy in tow, and is met with the ignorance of healers rightfully focused on people they're working on; people they can really save. But he's stubborn, and in too deep, and he looks for someone willing to spit in death's face.
He doesn't find that. On the other side of the room is a priest, white robes stained anywhere from peach to crimson after how many times they've been bled on and washed and bled on again. The room is alight with holy magic, and the priest's hands are no exception. He mends the twisted and bloodied arm of a woman, hysterical, a bow perched against the wall beside her, but her tabard declares her a paladin nonetheless. Kieran can read the unheard thank-yous on her lips. A dragonhawk sits redder than she should be at her master's feet, curled and chirping worriedly.
Kieran doesn't linger, but he's caught the priest just as he's finishing up, as he stands and the archer thanks him while she holds and tests her healed arm. He nods, smiles—he's a helpful soul—and he turns and catches Kieran's eye. And then the dead boy in his arms.
He has no interest spitting in death's face. Kieran knows it in an instant, as the smile vanishes, as something heavier than life drops with the color from his face, as he forgets all else and crosses the room in one straight yet unstable line. The boy is too mangled and bloody to confirm, but Kieran doesn't have to; he knows. He knows, and as is the way with him, his selflessness is in no minor amount self-serving. He almost wants to reverse ever having taken the dead boy into his parent's sight, to spare him—not the priest, not himself, but the father.
(Which father?)
Instead, he kneels to the floor, and holds the boy out just far enough that the priest's arms fit right into place under his shoulders and knees. He hears every mournful word, every tearful whisper of names and pleas, and Kieran feels small, and sometimes he thinks he hears his daughter's name instead of the boy's.
In a moment of empathy, he commits that name to memory—Raein, Raein, Raein—and doesn't know the curse he's branding to the boy like a rune right then.
"You have to amputate it," he blurts out, not knowing a damned thing about medicine, and only marginally more about the circumstances surrounding his own artificial leg. "If you want to save him, you have t—"
"No."
His and the priest's attention fall to the boy, to Raein at once. He stares back at his father, clinging to consciousness and the front of his bloody robes, and the priest looks like he could shatter there. Like he's hanging onto something he can barely feel. Of course Kieran thinks it's because the boy is slipping away and dying, not because his father knows little of the son he holds so fast to.
"No." It's a plea, hoarse and weak and so afraid. "No..."
He'll die. He'll just die, that leg is a death sentence, it's—
The priest rises to his feet, Raein in his arms, and whirls to seek out more healers. Kieran shadows him, the pains of the rest of the injured little more than something like howling wind. It all goes ignored, and despite Raein's weak voice, Kieran hears every word. Short little sentences, most of them just single words, a broken plea that must be assembled before one realizes he's begging for the leg.
Kieran recognizes them; the whispered version of mangled screams from an unseen source. "He's delusional," he says to the priest. "He thinks the ghouls are still—"
"He doesn't want to lose his leg," his father snaps back.
"Well of course, no one wants to lose a leg," even if he'll also be the first to tell you it's not the worst thing that'll ever happen to you; "that doesn't mean he gets to keep it and live too."
He earns a scalding look, which he knows he deserves and doesn't care, and then he goes ignored entirely, which he also knows he deserves and cares quite a bit. But any further protest is lost on the priest, as he settles Raein with a few more healers and keeps the boy's head supported in his lap. His son's voice has gone incoherent, vague noises that surely mean something before his broken throat mangles them, and even his apparently oh-so intuitive father can't understand. He just shushes, and soothes, and smoothes the short hair off his face.
Had he thought of his sword, maybe Kieran would slash the wretched limb off and be done with it. Maybe that's why he's not a doctor though. There is a wholly inappropriate swell of pride when the healers agree, the leg has to go, it's ripped to pieces and even should he survive it, he mayn't walk again, ("No,") it will never heal, ("No,") it will hurt for all his life—
"I don't want to die."
They're words for his father, always his father. Never mind the paladin that might slice it off with the right tool, or the other healers actually gunning for its amputation. He speaks to his father, with terror that anchors him to the waking world when nothing else will. He reaches up, with bloody hands, and it means something to the priest, something heartbreaking; he takes those hands like one wrong touch could end it all.
"Save it," the priest says.
"He doesn't know what he's saying," Kieran grunts back at him.
"Sometimes he's the only one that does."
Idiot.
But they get to work, salvaging a mangled leg none of them are sure they can. Not the healers, certainly not Kieran—and, if that terror in his eyes indicates anything, not the priest either. Gashes close and bleeding slows down, and somewhere throughout the boy drops into unconsciousness, even as his father mends the claw lines swiping through the left side of his face. Kieran lingers, for longer than he ought to, with some cruel voice in his own head daring him to wait too long, to watch the kid's heart stop and know he was right.
It takes the doors swinging open to snap him out of it. Soldiers rush in, barking orders and urgencies. They warn of the undead advancing, that the clinic will be overrun within the hour, that some will die if they attempt to move, but they all will if they stay. Kieran jumps into action, clapping another paladin's shoulder with a cocky, "Sorry gramps," when he nearly runs into the older man. The senior paladin shrugs him off with a snarl, which only earns him a cheeky grin and half a salute before Kieran disappears into the fray for the last time.
(He dies under a runeblade cold as winter. It hisses as it's run through his hot-blooded heart.
But the dead boy lives, and one day years from now, Kieran laughs about it.)
sunstriker isn’t even that much of an improvement over ashstrider personality-wise, he’s just, not a literal fucking murderer. but i look at stuff like this—
"He's delusional," [Kieran] says to the priest. "He thinks the ghouls are still—"
"He doesn't want to lose his leg," the priest snaps back.
"Well of course, no one wants to lose a leg," even if he'll also be the first to tell you it's not the worst thing that'll ever happen to you; "that doesn't mean he gets to keep it and live too."
—and realize nothing’s changed, except, the literal fucking murderer thing
Fen abruptly awoke to the sounds of someone bagging on his door. With a moan he dug his face deeper into the plush pillows of his bed in a vain attempt to cease the assault on his long elven ears. Yet the thudding on the door continued. With a sigh, he rose to his elbows and bleakly peered around to survey his surroundings. With the dim moonlight coming through one of the ship's windows, Fen could just make out the golden hands of the cloak that sat upon his nearby desk. It was early morning, very early. Pushing himself to a sitting position, he reached up and brushed his thick raven locks away from his unshaven face, "Yeah… yeah… I hear ya." There was some muttering from a deep voice outside but was too faint for Fen to identify what was said. Glancing around he shifted his body some in his bed and noticed that he did not lay alone. Avaneya was with him. Fen blinked his eyes a few times, then rubbed at them with the knuckles of his hand. She was sound asleep, a very deep sleep by the looks. When did she get back? More knocking at the door interrupted his thoughts. "I'll be right Fel damn it!" Fen yelled back as his irritation climbed at the constant disruption. Fen wasn't what you'd call a happy morning elf. He reached out and peeled the sheets away from Avaneya, looking her over as he so often did when they had been apart for so long. The reason wasn't for admiration of her slim and tone physique, but instead to see if any bodily harm had befell her. A hissing sound erupted from his lips as he saw the new cuts and bruises all over her hands, knees, and shins. "Gathering herbs my ass… what else did you do Ava?" The forceful bang repeated itself on the Captain's door and Fen pulled the sheet back over Avaneya as he slid out from between the sheets to find his clothes. "I said I'm coming you slime incrusted murloc!" That was when the sound of a gun shot went off and challenging shouts could be heard. "Fucking Fel!" Fen said as he pulled up his pants, buckled on his weapons belt, and rushed for the door wearing nothing else.
