Theryl

Sitting target
Sitting waiting
Anticipating
Nothing
Nothing

The coffee teases my nostrils, whispering of bitter, heady things.

Such things of late.

In the end, we each do what we must.

Ythgar asked for someone who deserves death. So that he may feed his hunger on someone...who deserves the punishment.

But how does one simply...obtain a criminal? By that time, Ythgar might have lost himself completely. And if that occurs...I am the best equipped one to...to...to put him down.

"Shoulder back, Whitedawn. You're leaning off center. STEPHAN! BRING THAT SWORD TIP UP, BOY!"

Lilliana glances at me and her face scrunches slightly in a frown of concentration in the morning light. But she re-adjusts her posture. My grandson at the other pell huffs, squares his jaw and brings his training sword correctly to guard.

The treatise was of passing interest to me after the cases of the day.

Learning to match the beat of the Old World man
Learning to catch the heat of the Third World man

He's got to make his own mistakes
And learn to mend the mess he makes
He's old enough to know what's right
But young enough not to choose it
He's noble enough to win the world
But weak enough to lose it --

The wood of the ship's railing was wet with salt spray under my grip and the swells of the heaving gray-green ocean made me strangely calm. Being on a ship is a place between. Between time, and between places. One is simply in transit. Time to think, to pause.

Her fingers raked through my hair, almost rough in her need.

I fly to her as often as I can. It enrages Svartja, but the feelings of my mount are of very little relative importance to me.

The sun was only peeping over the horizon when sleep loosed her hold upon my mind, and I came to myself.

The clouds had piled into a bruised mass high over the Throndroril Mountain range, as if increasingly sullen at the continued defiance of the untamed and rugged mountains, which stood in silent majesty for all the battering of the storm upon them. It was one of the strange moments of stillness, where the late afternoon sun shone along the rocks and crags and velvet-dark trees, turning grey into gold, and dark green into emerald. Against that extraordinary beauty, the purple-black looming storm was contrast, comparison - a waiting violence to be unleashed in waves of veiling grey. Nestled by a bend in the river, Marzheim stood in solitary splendour above a huddled village, and bathed in the rich bronzing of the pre-tempest light.

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

The three men did not speak of what had taken place in the high mountain groves as the young summer sun shone down to make their faces glow.

The twisted pines which clung to the granite rocks did not spring to life and dance before the Summer Lord, nor the old lord of Winter, as the three had seen. They were merely trees, adorned with wreaths of spiky green leaves, watching silently as the retinue descended through the pass, brilliant in the warmth. High above, an eagle spiralled on a rising current of hot air. Lining the rocks pass, straight pines defied the memory of winter, reminding watchers of the straight pole wrapped with ribbons which had stood in the square of the larger village beneath the oak grove.

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 eyes drifted over the chessboard and didn't really consider them beyond a brief assessment of the end of last night's game.

I still enjoyed playing chess with Hugh, though I do wish that his excellent solution to my ailment hadn't involved letting some damned heathen entity reshape me to its liking. I'd won the game. I generally do. The image of Ythfas's first effort to best me suddenly arose, and I banished it with a snarl which tugged at my face and urged it to lengthen, to grow bestial. My second son and murderer. His head was not yet in my hands, my vengeance not yet accomplished to my knowledge. That still rankled.

I focused on the names of the intricate moves, and the urge eased.

They urged me to do it. To trust her. Daenyra, Aelberyn.. elves. What do elves know about human hearts and fears? Rather a lot, as it turned out.

The flows of time shifted like hawsers whipping and slashing through history, severed by forces unmentionable and unnameable.

Heaved this way, ripped that, time shuddered like an intricate web laced with bound steel.

A future man stood speaking knowledgably with Shu'halo, another man beside him with dark skin and tribal tattoos, yet sharing a similarity showing their blood kinship. The men both wore the garb of Argent Crusaders, righteous and just, yet the darker skinned man's attire bore painted symbols not unlike the sigils of the Tauren.

Another future man, along a different timestream, stood near the ruins of his father's Tower, screaming demonic, hideous words ripped from the Twisting Nether, his eyes flaring with power as hatred boiled out in visible lashing waves from him. Screaming of inconsolable loss and outrage.

I woke with a pounding headache which even my Theryl's touch could not truly drive away.

As if my skull were being split from within.

Were I truly living, this might not have been of much concern.. but I am not. A life fashioned through necromancy, Light and fel together woven through my murdered corpse, making it.. and me.. feel as if we lived. And yet I do not. 'Death' is agony, yet it does not kill me. I require mending, or the stolen vitality which my sword conveys. The Light sent racing through me is searing... blinding.. but cleansing strangely. As if the evil I draw from my sword were held at a standstill by the holy power which floods my poor ravaged body as priests and paladins heal me alongside my runeblade's strength in the depths of battle.

Against such grandiose tug of wars between death, undeath and the Light, headaches are a trifle strange.

We've only arrived home from our weekend holiday early this morning, but I decided to come in to the office as some sort of show of support. I can't say it's a strong one, really. Mostly I'm a warm body and the lanterns are glowing, but I'm useless to any sort of actual work. Ace is in the lobby and there's tea and coffee brewing while she tackles the bulk of everything I'm not doing. There's all sorts of letters and scrolls on me desk to go through, and an unusual parcel wrapped in brown paper addressed to me from one Ixinane Stormcren. I'm avoiding that one.

The rain outside is keeping the office a bit chilly. I watch it come down sideways in thin, icy sheets of grey needles. The docks outside the window are slippery and miserable and most the veteran workers 'ave good enough mind to stand under Port Authority awnings an' nibble on hot fried sausages or chips until the dark, angry clouds pass over.

I pull me mechano-guitar into me lap and lean over briefly to flip on the amp. An electric pop fizzes to life and fills the quiet office with a low, expectant hum. Leaning back into the comfortable leather of me captain's chair, I cross me boots at the ankle on the windowsill and adjust the guitar to a lazy angle in me lap. Me fingers slide along the metal strings and pluck out a few tentative notes I've been putting to a song I've been writing off and on while my mind wanders away from the work I'm avoiding.

I was brought to with a flash of hot light.  Voices that spoke in words I know I should speak, the touch of a paladin’s hand.  I know I writhed, trapped in something that was not mine.  This mass of pain, charcoaled skin and body seared through, this wasn’t mine, this alien thing that betrayed me, failed me again past the paladin’s attempts.  This couldn’t have been me.

I had just returned home when I found yet another of those irksome pieces of post which no man in his right mind cares to be handed. I'd aided in escorting the priestess Lirriel Meterein to the wilds of Feralas to there save from certain death one Melidane, a human in the employ of my own vassal Lady Ixinane Stormcren.

Such formal thoughts.

Yet as well to consider formality with all things considered. My dear Theryl and I guided Lirriel to the destroyed home - the demon Xannivard had evidently attempted to take some sort of asinine vengeance for Ixinane's research into his own grimoire - a gift from me to her. In the process I finally met the elusive Blackmarrow, who had the astonishingly silly name 'Pukebile'. I must take him up his offer to discern more of his past than that. I privately promise myself that I will never address him by that silly and repulsive epithet.

I was cantering a young gelding toward the portal up from Crystalsong when I spotted them. Shyly peeking their heads up from the roots of a gnarled tree, four violets nodded, stems swaying in the chill northern breeze. I reined my mount in, taking care not to use too much force. better to sit deep and bring him from his rolling canter to a halt than to merely yank on the bit.

I am a horseman, after all.

I kicked my feet from the stirrups, eyes fixed on those blossoms. Driven by an impulse which for those few heartbeats bore no name or reason. I would swing out of the saddle, one hand on the reins, reach to pluck them, and take them -

The memory, delayed by the summer's pale sunlight, struck.

I feel cheated. Utterly cheated.

Imagine if you will- we've all felt it! - seeing some delectable cake. It smells divine. It looks like paradise made into something most palatable indeed. You pay your coin, you take your share, and settle down, looking thoroughly forward to how you KNOW it will taste. And you are betrayed. Chalky icing. Dry, barely swallowable stuff. How bitterly you curse the facade that led you to fancy and anticipate the sweet victory. You damn yourself in that moment for weakness, for wanting what could not be.

Better take care
Think I better go, better get a room
Better take care of me
Again and again

The courtyard of Stormwind Keep rang with the clash of steel on steel. It was something less than a duel, something more than simple sparring, as Colonel the Earl  of Huxston and General Lord Belmont faced each other before their peers. I watched with professional interest, I might have to fight one or both of them someday. Most of the court watched with the same interest. After a generation of warfare, Stormwind's nobility was mostly jumped up soldiers of one flavor or another. The old nobility had lead from the front, and died in droves. Those who were left had either been too young to fight or were a hard and hardened lot. Those who replaced them were of the same breed.

"The ambiance of a sergeants' mess." Vinguld had remarked once, comparing Stormwind's court to Lordaeron's. Somehow though, I suspected Stormwind's court of iron and steel might be less deadly to the likes of me than Lordaeron's court of silk and velvet.

Your face appears again, I see the beauty there
But I see danger, stranger beware
A circumstance in your naked dreams
Your affection is not what it seems

My fantasy has turned to madness
All my goodness has turned to badness
My need to possess you has consumed my soul
My life is trembling, I have no control

I will have you, yes I will have you
I will find a way and I will have you
Like a butterfly, a wild butterfly
I will collect you and capture you

-Animotion

The letter sat half open on my desk when I left. I'd considered crumpling it. Burning it. I decided those reactions would be childish, no matter how I felt about its author. The servants would attend to our bed before I returned home. I'd needed my Theryl's warm arms. I'd needed her kisses. Her love. When one goes to face the demons of one's darkest memory, one ought to go girded with armour. I kept my mind firmly centred on my love's body, the way she tasted, the sounds she made, the scent of her curling red hair. Call it armour if you like.

It performed the same function as I walked, feeling a ball of icy hatred burning deep in my gut. Protecting me from my own rage. I had many things to rage about, after all.

My body moved like a machine as the recorders trilled, mind spinning and whirling. I touched wrist to wrist, met eyes, and let my feet shift and slide, the steps of the elaborate dance requiring little actual thought. The body remembers. My partners, all highborn Stormwind noble women, giggled and flirted, and I replied in kind, barely noting what sly subtle teasings I rumbled, shaping my voice deep and commanding, so used to these fine simple dances of word and glance and body that in truth, I needed no great conscious effort and could permit my mind to work away at recent events beneath the whine of women and the deeper rhythm of my own comments.

Dame Theryl Miller-Duskwind

As per request of one Corporal Devereaux,