Ixinane

"The future is stardust because you can dream it. The present is clay because you can mold it. But the past is stone because you can never change it."

  Our pasts are such delicate things, the passing whirl of butterflies, distant calls of ravens and shadows at the corner of our eyes.  When born to darkness it is that shadow that follows you, it whispers sweet nightmares as a sword slides against another’s neck, when frost over takes their veins or corruption blackens their skin.  One can ignore it, hide from it, but they can never escape it.  The light itself breeds shadows, and I have seen some that are a deeper black then anything spawned in the edges of night.  We live in a war glutted world, one swelled to the brim with hatred, prejudice and unearthly hungers.  A world that rises the evil as much as the good, it is a fine line, for those who chose to walk the middle.

She's exhausted finally.

  Sometimes I forget what it is to be a friend to another.  Then there comes the times the reminder is a brick wall to the very fragile parts of my face.  My doses of reality and the roles I should be playing are never kind when they see fit to remind me of my duties.

"I wander through these barren lands

Path of the bare and raw

From the frozen world within my soul

To the rocks I walk upon" - MS

  Two months had come and gone since she convinced the warlock to go north with her, the mistake in that choice still rode like a thick blanket on the air of the house.  Ixinane had been quiet about what had transpired, unlike Dante whose childishness had yet to catch up with her growing body. 

  The Undercity always held important memories to me. It was in those dank hallways, all those years ago I meet Blackmarrow for the first time and offered him the contract to end a man’s life.  Three days ago I stood in almost that exact same hallway and took an entirely different contract, this one was to save the life of someone else.

“You must be the well mentioned Ixinane.”
“Lady Stormcren.”

Where is my friend? Where is my Teufelia?

...

Where is my mother? My Ixinane?

...

Where is my sister? Where is MY Dante?

...

Where are they at? Where have they gone?

They have all gone away.

They have gone away from you.

Liar.

...

Fine, then I will go away too.

The world will burn if you don't help it.

You do it.

But I am the one holding the match.

The rush of pressure was familiar. 

Dear Blackmarrow,

  It would be determined by most to have lain to rest hope by now but despite months and no news, I still wish you well and I will never stop writing. I find tonight lonely my dear teacher, though my house is as full as ever... 

  I thumbed through a book that had far to many bent pages.  I had dog eared each one, seeing something of importance, but no such luck for my new task.  I welcomed the distraction, though it would prove challenging indeed. I hadn’t tried to teach a warlock since Wraithlynn was still alive but she was a poor excuse for a warlock to begin with.  Dante served a greater purpose in the accidental demise of her adopted sister, more then she knew and certainly more then she could remember. Her maze like mind had been ready to bury that atrocity with all the others she had suffered and I wasn’t one to dig it up.
 

Beyond me I could hear her moving about her quarters.  She wasn’t the first dead I have had in my home but this was different somehow. She will have to wait, it wasn’t time. The neatly folded letter.. that I could take care of.  It’s an odd thing when someone comes to me for help.

I can't see the dawn but I know it is coming. A pull in veins that has no other words to describe it. An ending, a beginning. Nothing will be the same for this tiny handful with no sharing bloodline. Mother is as cold as the world around us. Three came on six feet and only four are left walking. One shift, one change coming on the snowy wind with the scent of cold and copper. Cold one has become colder and mother has become frozen.

Very soon we will be going home.

So this is our chosen path. Today the cold bites worse then anytime before, today the frozen world seems to howl with the task before us. I can feel them behind me both huddled in their cloaks as deeply as I did my own. Dante and Dane my loyal and dear household I could not leave them behind despite the monolith of dread erected like a frozen creature before us.

Icecrown.

“Do not buy wyverns from a goblin, and do not follow an elf, got it?” The elf’s black eyes bored into Moshir’s, her haughty smirk tainted with a bit of concern.  It was, perhaps, his own fault; he had likely not been the first to buy that cursed beast, or the first it had left stranded and alone.  They climbed out of the ravine, the twisted remains of the fel orcs that had attacked them disappearing from view.

She had answered many of his questions and given him much wisdom as they walked through the dark, dusty paths of Hellfire.  There were many dangers, but they both were well-protected.  The troll’s guardian spirits gave him strength to weaken those who would come against them.  The elf’s magics seared the flesh of demon and orc alike.  The screams were swiftly made silent; whether cries of battle, fear, or pain, it did not matter.

I must be out of my fel ridden mind. That’s it…finally official, I am completely insane.

  Watching her was almost like watching some nightmare unfold.  One you are not expecting and the kind that creeps around in a darkness you don’t see coming until it’s already smothered you.  Subtle movements, subtle concentration she was figuring it out, not only her abilities but the world they worked in.  She was growing up and faster then I hoped.

"You're... very good at this." She was all leg, awkward, torn between indecision and fear, desire and trepidation. A challenge in her eyes, but with that challenge came tension.

"You are a mongrel dog among wolves!" Scarred snarling face glaring at me with hatred like venom dripping from his tongue, threatening, trying to bully.

"No other man makes me feel like yeh do.. like yeh're all I want." He stood in front of me, hands on either side of where I leaned back against a table, sipping mulled wine.

"He rescued the orphans from.... horrible situations. He actually didn't do anything with the cookies." I remember first seeing her, luminous eyes lowered, twisting the hem of a robe in her hands. So childlike.

"Your daughter was very lucky." Her voice a husky contralto, green eyes knowing, flush touching her cheeks, tucking that stray curl back.

((Part of an on going larger story between the two, starting with Again. ))

The ghoul collapsed and momentum dragged it forward, the piled snow crowning his head jerking the lifeless corpse to a crumpled standstill.  A goggled eye stared upwards, already calloused before he had met permanent death by the priest’s hands.  Jaw dislocated hanging to one side with a rolling purpled tongue catching snowflakes.  Meters from him Melidane drew in a breath, the whipping wind and oncoming warning of a blizzard made the simple act of breathing a burning line through her lungs.  

Je suis un homme de Cro-Magnon                                    I am a caveman
Je suis un singe ou un poisson                                        I am an ape, or a fish    
Sur la Terre en toute saison                                            On the earth, in all seasons 

"My lovely Lady Stormcren…."

  What had he called us in the letters scattered about my desk, the dried rose he had given me set atop the folded writings?  The God-touched man and the Demon- cursed lady, he was right.. what a pair we made.

((part of Tess' story Things, Lots! Time, None!))

"To describe a mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power." - MA

  It hung around my neck like fingered pressure below my throat, almost as cold as the north itself, but I wanted the reminder.  It’s hexagonal shape was a silver center of grounding for me because once he had been just that.  He saved my life, I have never forgotten it and I never will.  
 

My darling Blackmarrow,
  As always I hope to find you well in the frozen depths you stay where my fingers cannot reach you.  I trust you serve your lady well.  Though the blackening marks on the forsaken as of late have brought me to a pause.  Was this great plague what you were grooming me for? Was I to be your hand of destruction?  I trust you would answer me truthfully should you come back, and I trust you understand that this hand of yours has a mind of her own.  I am not sure whether to take this idea that perhaps this is what your long term goal was as a compliment or an insult, but either way, take to heart my love I will never serve any as I had served you and this includes your lady. 

  The hallway should have just been that.. four walls, a ceiling and a floor.  Simple, easy… hallways should not spark memories, but if the do, one is lucky they if they are good ones.  I ventured deeper into the ruin of my estate, each step taking me towards those last two doors.  This visit had been an unexpected trip down memory lane, some good… but being a Stormcren, it became more apparent that our family bred insanity like some elven families breed red heads.  I was not immune, my brother was not… and as much as they would have denied it while alive, neither were my parents.

  Returning home was like leaving the waking world, remembering a time that really was not so long ago, a few months maybe? When the world was still one piece and the flaming catalyst known as Deathwing still lay forgotten in his prisons.  The quakes had taken my family estate, the last remaining in the Stormcren line, the other estate….had been taken by fire, lit by a vengeful heart for a murdered brother.  Our mother and father burned along with it, only ashes in the wind, the same that proud home had been reduced to.  

Synnaquinn,

  Greetings darling warlock, I hope the day is finding you mending well from our bad attempt at sailing.  I hope your friend is mending as well, both body and mind; I do worry about how far the naga pushed her. 

((This story happens around the same time as Synnaquin's: Extended camping or just Slavery  and Silentfox's Ari's Traveling Journal ;) ))

I became aware of rolling, a forceful push along my skin that sent me whirling off into oblivion accompanied by swirls of blues and white. Something was wrong, but I could not grab a hold of it before I was driven back into unconsciousness.  Something… breath….I wasn’t breathing.

  Consciousness came back with the same realization only faster this time.  My lungs burned, screaming at me to pay attention to the obvious as my limbs pulled themselves uselessly through the water.  Somewhere above me was air, it was just a matter of finding out where “above” was.

Standing here on a cliff in Azshara watching the stars come out, I might feel some sense of peace.

1. Air

Such trifle things to need, the extension of life through the quickening of breaths.  When one drowns the press of life is just that much more apparent.  To fill one’s lungs with sweet promise of existing.  What better way to know you are alive, then depriving yourself of its touch.

All the old wounds in my life seemed to groan into life, I swear I could feel where Dutaee’s fist collided with my face all those years ago, it wasn’t really the case, but brew fest seemed to be like all the abuse I had ever taken rolled into one painful mess.