Insomnia and Reflections on Light and Shadow

“You’ve become wise in a short time,” he said to me a couple nights ago, a smile of gentle pride in his voice.  “Now we just need to get you to stop worrying all the time.”

As night grew deeper over Quel’thalas, I could not help but vaguely wonder how Maras intended to accomplish such a thing.  Wisdom can grow with experience and knowledge, but the wiser I grow, the more worry I seem to acquire.  In the quiet parts of my own mind, I could not help but imagine this would be one enemy my champion would not conquer.

The week had been full of events to fuel those worries, but to be fair it had been full with moments of joy and pleasure.  Such thoughts lingered in my mind, jumbled about with various anxieties that kept me from sinking into a restful sleep.  It had ended a satisfying night, but even so I sat awake so late that even my ever-vigilant husband had passed into a deep and restful sleep.  Darkness veiled my comfortable suite, casting cushions, couches and carpets into vague silhouettes.  The gauzy silks that wafted gently in the late summer breeze of my open balcony doors parted for the seeking, silvery fingers of waning Elune, illuminating the shadows, probing until finally lingering and caressing his strong, bare shoulders.  He lay with his head turned towards me, his lashes fanning his cheeks and lips just slightly parted with each steady breath and I could not suppress the impulse to reach down and gently run the back of one finger along his strong jaw.  Just lightly, just to remind myself that he was right there, and he was mine.  He did not wake, but the corner of his lips quirked slightly, and his muscled arm reached out to wrap around my waist, pulling me slightly closer before settling back into still and steady breathing.

For a few quiet moments I sat still, my bare back against the soft squishy pillows I usually laid my head on.  I was sitting up, my face veiled by long, unruly waves of blood red hair that looked as black as Maras’ in the grayed-out moonlight.  Then the moment passed and I oh-so-carefully extricated myself from the warm comfort of his embrace and slipped out of our bed, snagging a silk robe to wrap around myself before padding slowly across the carpets towards the balcony.

Thoughts of the moonlight lightening my husband’s skin turned my thoughts back to conversations I had been in regarding the goddess of the Kaldorei throughout the week.  My gaze lifted towards her, hanging high in the sky, and the soft silhouette of the Blue Child too low in the horizon to steal from her beauty.  As an Acolyte in Lordaeron, my wayward imagination would concoct fascinating daydreams of myself instead as a Kaldorei priestess giving reverence to the moon.  The moon has Light and Shadow as well, after all – was it so foreign an idea?

Despite my private thoughts and fantasies, these imaginings did not transfer to reality.  We were Quel’dorei, now Sin’dorei, exiled from what was once our home and rebuilding from the destruction of our new home sans the care and concern of the Alliance we once strengthened and cultivated with knowledge and friendship.  At the moments when we were at our lowest, when we needed them the most, our so-called friends not only turned their backs on us but treated us with disdain and disrespect.  Then, the insult to injury, they bring the very ones who rejected and exiled us into their confidence.  The Alliance was our enemies.  The Kaldorei had been our enemies for even longer.  The concept of wearing one of their symbols, of blessing in their goddess’ name, of even entertaining a semblance of sympathy to those who had treated us so was ludicrous, abhorrent.  The idea that no one would have a problem with showing loyalty to them while maintaining a life in Silvermoon City was insanity.

As I leaned against the balcony railing and gazed up at Elune’s waning form, I could not help but wonder what complete lack of reason and logic led people to do the things they did.

The recollection of this absurdity brought me back to the events that guided me towards the ones involved in it.  A faint sigh parted my lips, quickly mingling with the night wind.  Ah, Sindrasa.  What a trial she was.  Yet to give up and abandon her would be against every teaching of the Holy Light I held to.  It bothered me greatly that the cleansing earlier in the week had no apparent effect on her, but I had done what I could.  Every time I remembered it, every time I looked back at the attempt to try and figure out what could have been done differently to succeed, I could not help but recall my own hours in the shackles not so long ago – when I had experienced for myself the absolute truth of the Holy Light as an instrument of domination and discipline as well as mercy.

There are no words for the searing agony that ripped through me.  We say words like “pain,” “torture,” even “agony,” but when one is really there, there simply are no words to adequately express the sensation.  When I was laying on a worn wooden table with my wrists and legs clasped in unyielding shackles so even the option of flight was denied to me, when my mind was torn open so effortlessly, and when divine fire was thrust into the deepest hiding places of my very soul, all I could do was scream.  I screamed and screamed, and when my voice went silent because my throat could produce no more sound, my jaw was still locked in the rictus of a shriek so unyielding it ached days later.  I screamed and yet I was so far gone in the madness of pain there was literally no room for thought in my brain.  The Light scourged it all away, leaving everything bare, leaving me nowhere within myself to escape.

Then when each session was over, the Priests would tenderly take me to another room.  They were so solicitous, so sympathetic and understanding, yet no matter how gentle they were with me I could not but hate them, hate the Light, hate myself and my House and everything that had brought me to this point.  Nevertheless, that is why I had come in the first place, and they knew that.  Thus, after each session, one day a week for months, they would allow me a few minutes to rest, but immediately after they would come and they would talk to me.  They let me yell, they let me curse and cry, but more importantly… they LET me hate.  They allowed me to be angry, to want to fight, to despise myself and the Light and everything I ever believed in.  They allowed me those moments of Shadow before they gently began to rebuild the broken parts of Aelberyn that by necessity had to be seared spotless and purified to cleanse the darker and more destructive shadow of the Scourge shard that had dug itself so deep into my mind and soul.

The fact of the matter was… I had come for it.  I had asked for the torture, that cleansing.  They had not hunt me down or sought me out:  I left my House, my Seraph, my betrothed and my people so that I could be free of this thing once and for all.  I was willing to do anything, even die, to be free of the insidious voice that had insinuated itself into my thoughts.  That had been the final catalyst in fact.  That tainted voice in my mind was indistinguishable from my own mental voice.  I could no longer tell what thoughts were my own and what thoughts were the Scourge.  The most terrifying moment for me had been an instant of self-mocking where I called myself “mommy” just like it had… and realizing that it was my OWN self-mocking, my own thought voiced in the shard’s same tone.

Sindrasa’s cleansing brought back those memories I had put behind me.  No one wants to remember pain, many people’s brain have a sort of fail-safe that blacks out such agony.  That is why women are willing to have multiple children despite the pain of labor; because they don’t remember the actual pain, only that the pain existed.  Such was the same for me, for I did not remember how the cleansing actually felt… yet I could not help but try to put into words the suffering I chose to endure.   I had to be sympathetic – like the Priests were with me.  Yet in the end it had all been for naught.  The fel taint remained for whatever reason, leaving Sindrasa twisted by its corruption.  She seemed largely unharmed by the experience, and I was vaguely glad we had not hurt her permanently in our efforts. 

Though, my lips curved in a faint smirk as I realized I was glad more that I maintained such control of the Light than that she was greatly injured.  Perhaps, as I sometimes told my husband, I was a bad person after all.  My head shook ruefully, the smirk giving way to a soft chuckle at the simple but unavoidable truth.  The greatest gift the priests had given me perhaps was not the cleansing of the corruption inside my soul.  The greatest gift were those quiet periods after, when they let me scream and hate, and then with gentle love and understanding emphasized a belief I knew in my mind but had not yet grasped in my heart.  That truth was that there WAS a balance of Light and Shadow, and that one simply could not exist without the other.  The fact of the matter was one the naaru understood well; that even a Priestess of the Holy Light who taught the power and promise of what the Light was about must accept that without Shadow the Light could not be fully illuminated.  With Tenacity and Compassion, the Priests helped me to accept the Shadow in my own heart and be free of the guilt and self-loathing that held me back and made it so easy for the Scourge shard to sink in.

Shadows and Light.  Thinking of them brought my thoughts to this very evening.  The smirk that teased my lips curved into a faint smile as I recalled the conversations with Treyon, his orc lingering so nearby.  How strong the Light was in his spirit, and yet he seemed somehow to deny its strength.  Perhaps it was simply his youth, but perhaps it was something else.  Either way, what an interesting friendship it was turning out to be.

My thoughts also went to the companionable presence who had randomly decided to attach to me for some reason.  Perhaps it was a trait of that sort to constantly seek entertainment in any available form; nevertheless it was an unexpected comfort to have a friend in the shadows once again.  For so long I lived with the knowledge that at a given time I was never really alone that I missed it more than I wanted to admit to myself.  I did hope the presence returned, often, in the future.

Ah, but it was late.  The moon was far lower in the horizon than it was when I first stepped out onto the balcony.  I turned, absently enjoying the feel of silk brushing against my bare legs, and stepped back into the shadows of my chambers.  Two steps and I stopped, immediately noticing the calm, green-blue eyes that gazed at me from features highlighted by Elune’s caress.  Of course he was awake; he was a trained warrior, how could I expect to keep from waking him with my restlessness?  He leaned up on his elbow and gazed at me intently and expressionlessly, remaining silent:  he knew me well enough to know that before long I would start to speak before he needed to say a word.  I smiled down at him gently, soothingly, hoping it conveyed that all was well.  Maras examined me intently for a moment, probing the honesty of the smile, then nodded, satisfied, holding a hand out towards me in a silent invitation back to my proper place in his arms.  Without a pause I took the hand, and my husband pulled me back into the mingled shadows and moonlight, the calm and content expression shifting instantly to a leer filled with wicked design and dark purpose.

Shadows and Light, indeed.