Fox Trap

The Light forgives all things. Mortal hearts are a different matter. Starring Liadrin, the Great Uncategorized Heroine; set between TBC and WotLK.

Liadrin first found the gardens shortly after her return to Shattrath.

It's a surprise, completely, that the city can still surprise her. No one told her about the place, though that's hardly unexpected. Popularity isn't something she can count amongst her strengths at the moment, and even the other elves avert their eyes as she walks past, as if they're seeing a ghost, or a living memory of a time they'd sooner forget.

In truth, shrubbery wasn't highly placed amidst her concerns. She was trying to locate a hiding place where she could recover from duty and whispers and eyes, so many eyes and all of them on her and not one gaze that might belong to a friend. The Scryers' Tier is a fish tank. Which she shouldn't be visiting anyway (it is favouritism and not diplomatic and this is supposed to be a time of reconciled differences–all of her keepers are tired of telling her this), but it isn't as if the Aldor are falling over ass-over-tit to offer her a room and a hot meal. And even in the Lower City there are plenty who would love to see her bed down with a dagger in her throat.

Forgiven by A'dal. She can't quite bring herself to call it a joke, because it isn't untrue and it isn't funny, and she takes it seriously enough, but she's not yet become so great a fool as to think that anyone else shares his clemency. Even the best heart is mortal, fallible, all edges and iron and glass. She knows this better than anyone.

She goes to the grounds now, taking the long route around the Seer's Library to where it's tucked into a hollow in the hills. Past the marble walls the light takes on a watery quality, as if filtered and diluted through trees. She's finally escaped from a particularly painful discussion of reparations with a complement of Aldor Vindicators. She and her Honour Guard sat opposite them at a table hewn from violet crystal as they verbally flayed her, peeled back her skin to reveal numberless corruptions lurking beneath. Xi'ri had hung over her shoulder and tinkled like a wind chime, a presence as charming and about as helpful. She took it in silence.

Reparations. As if she can repay and repair. As if the money will mean anything.

Finding this place has been a great stroke of luck, unlooked-for and unexpected. She quite literally wandered into it the first time; one moment she'd been standing at the back entrance to the Seer's library and the next she'd been walking through an arcade of trees and statues, colonnades swarming with nets of climbing-lily, the sounds of Shattrath a hush behind its walls. The garden is small—which is why it's a garden, not a park—maybe the size of a middling nobleman's city grounds, but what it lacks in breadth its makes up in richness. She recognises all the flowers and trees of home, bursts of bloodrose in a tangle of moss like a gash in a maiden's breast, the acid-yellow leaves of elven oaks shadowing shoots of devil-may-care. She remembers picking it as a child; she remembers the startling sourness of its roots.

A forest home away from home. That's why they would have built it, she knows: to forget they were here, in a wasteland fighting a wasted war. This was the last sight of Quel'Thalas for some. The thought makes her angry, and it makes her sad with a sadness that is nine-tenths weariness.

She comes here often. Beneath the mesh of branches and vines she can sit in the near-darkness and breathe in the damp, cool air, all loam and the memory of rain, of rivers. It is not Eversong, nothing will be Eversong—not even Eversong anymore—but it suffices.

She would like to take off her armour and let the night air cool her, but she does not. She's not that stupid and suicidal. Even in the stifling sealed darkness of the inn peeling off her breastplate comes like a revelation. It feels as if she's baring her breast to unseen assassins. Take me, take me, again, and it strikes her as funny and appropriate that you talk to a murderer the way you'd talk to a lover. Not that she's had one in a long, long time.

Still, she doesn't mind so much; watchfulness is old and comfortable. She's found her refuge. She is also looking for absolution, but that's proved a bit harder to track down.

When the war was fought and done there came the business of rebuilding the city. In Liadrin's case, there came the business of rebuilding herself.

Perhaps at the time she would have called herself 'shattered', but now she thinks that's not quite right. She was intact. Dazed, inverted, drowning, but whole. It was her future that was disconnected, once obvious if ugly and now, suddenly, dislocated, as if she'd simply misplaced it in the night. I cannot breathe, she would think sometimes, standing in the breadlines of Sunwing Square, but she was breathing, walking, she felt her legs and her body, the pangs of hunger, the pleas of her muscles as she trained. She could breathe, but beneath her breathing-nothing. She'd become a monster of ice, watching herself wreck upon endless snowy beaches.

She went back to the tomb of Uther the Lightbringer, a second trip lost in the memory of the first. When she'd visited as a priest her oaths had been unbroken, and she saw that phantom Liadrin casting shadows of gold against the walls. The Lightbringer knows no darkness, and even his ghosts are clad in mantles of pure light. That second time, beneath his great statue, in the vault of sunlight and space, she stood and stared and stared, gaping not at his likeness but at the place above her where the arches met in a clash of angles and air. It was meant to ring of infinity. She thought rather of mortality. I will pay for what I have done, she thought, and if I do not do it in this life, it will be the next.

Perhaps it will still be the next.

Outside the shrine, two of her men were waiting for her, and they were silent at her side. The path leading to the tomb was grey stone; it cracked and slid beneath her greaves, and she had had the impression that the world was sliding away from beneath her, that something was trying to dislodge her from reality and toss her into space.

It is a magnificent evening, the sky violet-black and strewn with a net of stars so thick it seems glazed with light. But someone else has found her place.

He is sitting on one of the benches overlooking the water-garden, white hair moon-bright and brilliant. Liadrin rages silently about this for a moment and is preparing to creep away when she turns back, recognising his robes. Voren'thal the Seer: old and delicate as fine porcelain, or like some lily pressed between the pages of a book and found unexpectedly. He fairly glows in the gloaming darkness. Liadrin is mud-streaked and sweaty and definitely not glowing. She looks down at her plate, and it does not even have the courtesy to twinkle.

She creeps up the path, not wanting to startle him—he's old enough that calling him 'ancient' would be rude but fair. He remains immersed in his reading, even as a twitch of his ear tells her that he's heard her footsteps. (His ears are beautiful as well, long and delicate with a sharp tip that is not fashionable but that pleases her nonetheless. But those thoughts are presumptuous, and anyway she has given up on men, like she has given up on fine linens and rich foods and anything that gives life colour and flavour and pleasure. It is a small sacrifice, and not enough.)

"Seer Voren'thal," she calls when she's within speaking distance. He looks up without surprise from the book in his lap. She has a moment of grace before her recognises her, before his forehead creases and his lip curls in dislike.

"Matriarch," he says as she approaches. His tone is polite, but there is no mistaking the strain in it. "What a surprise."

"A pleasure," she says. There is an extended silence. Clearly the feeling is not mutual.

"I see you've found our little refuge," he says.

"By chance." And then, perhaps because she has gone so long without having a conversation that does not involve silk supplies or the transport of marble or the capacity of the infirmary or her multifarious crimes, she is gushing. "It's absolutely breathtaking here. The water-weeds, the birds, the pavilions, it even has a stone garden. It's like a plot of Quel'Thalas lifted whole and transplanted in Outland. Was this all brought from Azeroth? When?"

He blinks at her, startled—they've never spoken much beyond military necessity. "During the hostilities. There was quite a bit of back-and-forth with Silvermoon. It took a while to construct, but the result has been worth it."

"It must have been costly."

"It was necessary for morale. My men are gifted, Matriarch, but some were scarcely grown, and Outland can be a horror to those who aren't accustomed to it."

And to some who are. She bows to him, pressing her hand to her breast, above her heart. "Liadrin. Call me Liadrin."

"Thank you. Liadrin." He rises, the long coil of his hair falling across his shoulder. He hefts the book under his arm; it looks heavy enough to topple him. She is willing to bet a great sum of gold that no force in the universe could compel her to read past the first page. "I should be returning. All my sitters will fret if I'm not in bed at a reasonable hour."

"I'll escort you," she says, too quickly.

A flash of annoyance crosses his face, though he is quick to conceal it. "Thank you, but I assure you these are hardly the mean streets of Murder Row. I will be fine."

"It's no imposition," she says, and, having reached the bounds of polite objection, he relents and falls silent.

She can easily match his pace—they're of a height, and he walks slowly, almost shuffling. She notices that he favours his left leg and stores the information away in case she ever has to disarm him. He doesn't offer his arm or ask for hers, which is rude but not outrageously so. She can hardly blame him if he doesn't want to touch her. She's technically not supposed to be touching strange men, anyway (and despite what people think, of all her oaths, this is the easiest one to maintain, in part because she took it of her own accord. It's the parts about love and forgiveness that trip her up).

He makes no effort to speak to her, and for her part Liadrin is grateful for the silence, grateful to have company that does not want to demand or accuse. His hair catches all the light that her disobedient, battered plate misses, and he has the face of a doll or a child or a demon, so smooth and so open it seems almost blank. She watches him flash his interested eyes at a horned toad, or flash a frown at an intruding Draenish moth.

At the end of the garden, where the wild roses gave way to the flora of Terokkar and the sky opens and lowers without its brace of trees, they part.

"Thank you for the escort," he says. "I'm sure everyone will be most grateful when I tell them what a competent babysitter I had."

She can't quite hide her smile. His dignity has been wounded. Even old men are still men, and even a Matriarch is still a woman. "We all get old and sick. There is no shame in it."

Voren'thal doesn't appreciate her kindness, if kindness is what it is. "I hope that one day some young elf is standing before you saying that," he says. "And I hope that on that day, you think of me, and you are overcome with shame at your lack of discretion. 'Old and sick.'"

She offers a flourishing bow. "Old and sick you may be, but it was lovely to walk with you." And then, a little shyly (or is that slyly? She doesn't know her own heart, sometimes) she leans in, and adds: "I've never seen you outside the library before. Do you go there often?"

Voren'thal looks at her and puts his nose in the air. "Good night, Matriarch," he says in a voice of pure ice, and he shuffles inside with his staff and his robes and his nobility. The glow of the library's windows falls briefly over him before he is lost in shadows, invisible.

She goes back to her spot amidst the trees when he is gone, and she sits under the cold glow of an arcane crystal, watching ripples form and break and reform on the face of the pond. When the water stills she can see the image of the sky, the whorls of clouds and light splattered across the surface in wild patterns, a message in living brilliance too subtle for her to read. Ecstatic and electric light. A breath of wind stirs the water and the colours are blurred, the lights dimmed and distorted, and she is ignorant, and not exalted, and here. And still here.

In Shattrath she has nightmares.

With everything she's done she should, by rights, be attended at all times by a contingent of vengeful ghosts who rattle their chains and moan in her ears, but she's somehow dodged that bullet. Instead she has dreams that descend in tangled scraps of grey and red, as pestilent as scourge soil, the same foul sepia. They tremble and contort and stun her with their raw brutality. She can never remember them in whole, though sometimes they wake her, leaving her gasping, never screaming, just repeating: It was a only a dream it was only a dream it was only a dream.

Tonight she dreams of a man she killed. He'd surprised her and two of her knights while they were camping at the border between Quel'Thalas and the Plaguelands. It was him against a trio of blood knights with the training and the willingness to do real harm, and he carried a dirk with a blunt and rusted blade. He'd had a broad, uncultivated face, innocent and guileless and stupid, his hair cropped short in bristles. An ugly human, and he did not belong so far from home.

She was cutting wood for their camp, wearing only her leathers and wielding only a woodsman's axe. There was no contest. She struck him in the face six times before the axe broke, but by that time he was dead.

She dreams of a forest murky with haze and the stink of loam and grave worms, but she knows he is there. And he is, lying on his back in the dirt, and there is so little blood she is surprised, but the long seeping gashes have left his face a distorted landscape. One of the blows split him from chin to cheek bone, crushing all the small angles of his jaw, and it gapes like a second mouth grown up in the wrong place.

She wakes up to the sound of her own strangled sob. She is in her bed, in Shattrath, and she is alone. It was only—

But it was not only a dream. It wasn't.

In spite of her impertinence Voren'thal has not taken due precautions to avoid her presence. He is in the same place, at the same time. It is the same time because she has rearranged her entire schedule to make it so.

"Matriarch, I see you've returned," he says as she approaches. He doesn't sound surprised, but he also doesn't sound happy.

"I was hoping to see you again," she says, "but I was not thinking to have the pleasure so soon."

Voren'thal is too old for trickery. He doesn't tell her to shut up, but his look is not welcoming. "I was just about to head back to my apartments, unfortunately."

"Hm." She lets the silence grow long and uncomfortable, then says, "A Seer should not tell lies."

Voren'thal is known for being gentle and kind and wise, but even he has his limits. He draws himself up to his full height, which would be more impressive if he weren't sitting on a bench in a field of buttercups. "Liadrin, please, be sensible. I don't know what you're after, but this is quite enough. It isn't appropriate for us to be friendly."

"You're right," she agrees, "it isn't. Which is why it's fortunate that you're so damnably surly."

He eyes her warily. "I'd have thought you'd had enough of surly."

"I have." She sits down beside him without waiting to be invited. "You could try being charming and polite. I've seen you do it. I know you can."

"Are you talking about the young Scryers? They were like children when they got here. How could they know what this place is like? I have to be gentle with them."

"And not gentle with me?"

"I've seen how you respond to gentleness." He rises, pulling his robes away from the ground with one hand and leaning on his staff with the other. "Am I wrong? Are you going to tell me I've judged you too quickly? Are there hidden depths to the Matriarch that you will encourage me to plumb? Or are you truly as they say?"

She forces a smile that feels hollow, so saccharine it makes her teeth ache. Or maybe that's her cheeks, tired from many such smiles. "No, Seer. You are not wrong. I am what they say."

"Is that so?" He watches her without smiling, but he does wait for her to rise, and if he doesn't lean on her arm he also doesn't tell her to go away.

When they reach a broad but shallow stream traversed by stepping stones Liadrin slows, waiting for him. The flow is lazy enough but the bed and the bridge are wet rock, treacherous and shining as ice. Voren'thal steps past her without a glance and begins to make his way across.

"Here," she says, offering her arm, but he ignores her, pointedly looking at his feet and his staff instead.

"I am fine, thank you."

"Old man," Liadrin says, "you are never going to get across here by yourself, and you know it."

"Be quiet." He shoos her away with his staff, startling a flock of starlings from a nearby bush. They rise in a tangle of wings and cries. "I am fine, and you—you're distracting me."

"You'll slip and break your hip." She watches him totter, wincing. "Your legs are going to give out. Let me help you."

"These legs could crush the head of a bull and still have energy left for other pursuits."

Liadrin has never made bedroom eyes in her life, but she suspects the face she makes is a fair approximation. Voren'thal must agree, because he gives up attempting to balance and splashes through the brackish water towards her, huffing and affronted.

"Impudent."

"You started it with that talk about 'other pursuits'."

"I was referring to polo, not bedroom sports. Clear your mind from that gutter, Matriarch, and you a servant of the Light."

You a servant of the Light. Evidently Voren'thal doesn't think every-fucking-thing else she's done is enough to get her kicked out of the Light Club. It's all so ludicrous that Liadrin laughs in spite of herself, in spite of everything, long and loud and in Voren'thal's now-red face. It's the first time she's laughed in a long time, and it's bitter and raucous and not at all pleasurable. A servant of the Light. More a servant of herself.

"Hmph," he says. "Are you quite done? Or would you like an encore?"

"I'm sorry," she says, blinking away tears. She is not entirely sure they are from laughing. "Forgive me, Seer, I meant no offense. Humour me, and let me help you."

"Humour yourself," he says, and in a blink he crossing again, the hem of his robes dripping mud as he lifts it but otherwise unharmed. She follows behind him, chastened. "I have a son your age, you know."

"That's nice. I have a father your age."

"Well," says Voren'thal, very prim as he picks his way between lily pads and stones and a layer of grime she considers unmentionable, "he should have spanked you more as a child. I might have words with him on that matter."

"You might, but he's dead."

He glances back at her, but she lifts a shoulder, as if it doesn't matter. He does not press the issue.

She wants to ask about his son, but something makes her fear the same response, and she's learned to listen to her instincts. "You have children," she says. "Does that mean you're married?"

"By the gracious Light, Liadrin," is all he says, this time not even looking back, "get some blasted delicacy."

"I'm going to take that as a 'no.'"

"You're as subtle as a herd of elekks on a cymbal, you know."

She snorts. "Yes, I know. But in this case I was only making polite conversation." He stumbles a little and she tenses, ready to grab him, but he regains his footing without her assistance. "What happened to her? She's not... dead, is she?"

She refuses to use that horrible euphemism elves love, beyond, like the dead have simply traipsed off to a grand vacation, or are drinking and living it up at a private party behind heavily-guarded walls.

But Voren'thal shakes his silver head. "No, no, she's alive and well. We no longer speak. It does happen, though it's very sad."

He doesn't sound sad. He sounds annoyed. Liadrin points this out to him.

"Subtle and perceptive both. My lady's charms know no bounds."

She is surprised to feel herself smile—it must be real because she cannot repress it. "The Seer flatters me."

Then he's safely across. He lets the base of his staff hit the rocky shore with a smack and turns to watch her. He smiles; she blushes. Oh, how the mighty have crumbled. Liadrin has made more graceful motions: right now she's tumbling from rock to rock, desperately trying to keep her armour out of the water.

"Perhaps I should have assisted you," he says when she's reached him. "You seemed to have more difficulty."

"I lived. More than can be said for this plate, no doubt."

He purses his lips. "You might have removed it, you know." And then, realising what he's said, adds: "It's idiotic to wear it around."

"I know what you meant, old man. The damage is done. And I a servant of the Light."

He does manage a thin-lipped smile at that. "My regrets and apologies, then."

"If you're truly sorry, you should kiss my hand," she says, "and call me 'my lady.'"

"I will call you as you've told me. And as for that hand business—well." She's not quite sure, but she thinks he might be rolling his eyes. He might also be smiling. It is hard to tell in the moonlight-dappled shadows beneath the trees, and the old mage has always been inscrutable, as mages and men always are.

In Stormwind, in Ironforge, even (and she is honest with herself, here) in Thunder Bluff, she has many names. Not one is the sort you would say to her face, but she knows them anyway.

Amongst these is 'The Bloody Vixen.' She likes this one the least.

Her father had been what the humans call a 'gentleman,' what the elves called a descended noble back when there were still nobles, a boy from a denobled noble family. That was disgrace, but Liadrin did not feel it then and she does not feel it now. Perhaps because her father never seemed to feel it either.

Her childhood was blissfully happy, a blur of sunlight and water and great Northern Firs welcoming her with broad trunks and branches meant for climbing, as if they'd grown up out of the ground for her and her only. Her father had not raised her to be a lady, because she was not a lady, and so she played freely: chase and riding and fishing and climbing and building dams in the river and hunting with her father.

These were boys' games. Later she would play men's games.

Her father bought her a little silver hawkstrider, barely beyond chickhood, small enough for her to control but old enough to bear her weight. It was her greatest love, her greatest joy for years. Together they would mount up and ride through the forest, whispers of light in a pool of drab green. She would stay seated on her mount while her father set his traps, traps with gaping mouths of steel and nets of wire and edges that clung to her fingers if she was foolish enough to touch them. Liadrin had never asked why, though she supposes now that he was trying to keep predators and pests off their property.

One morning they were riding together with no destination in mind. Her father still had lands in those days, though it was nothing to bring him pride—a brief ride from one end of the property to another. They'd neared the end of their jaunt when she heard the noise first: a cry on the air, shrill, cracking the immaculate morning stillness. The scream brought her to a cold halt; beneath her her hawkstrider reared and spread its wings. "What is it?" she whispered.

Her father paused alongside her and placed a gentle hand on her back. "We caught something. Come."

It was a fox, dark red like her hair, one of its back legs caught in a trap they'd set. The iron teeth bit through flesh and muscle to bone, the skin flayed away where the edges gripped it. Its shrieking was a living thing in the forest, bright and raw and so wrong, like its blood stark against the steel and the way its entire hip bent, the joint bulging through the fur.

Liadrin was a child of the woods, but she had never seen death like this. Animals fought for mates, predators devoured prey: that she knew. That was the law of the forest and it was the secret life of all things, struggle and blood and danger. But this was different. There was no sport to this, no honour. It was not inevitable, not natural. The fox's movements were shuddering, jerking, as if mechanical.

"Ann'da, it's dying, it's dying."

Her father turned to face her. "No," he said. "Simply suffering. We must take it out of its misery. Come here."

They dismounted and approached. It was near-unconscious with pain, and it did not notice them until they were nearly on it; only then did it snarl and scramble back, its leg twisting in the trap. She looked closer, then looked away. The wound was not smooth but tattered, its mouth and teeth bloody. It was chewing off its leg.

Her father had his hunting knife out, the blade still sheathed. He looked at her. He must have seen her eyes, the paleness of her face. And still he handed it to her, hilt first, and said, "You do it, my girl."

She took it. Her hands were shaking and each step was an eternity, an eternity that took too long and was not hers to suffer. Even as she pulled the blade from its sheathe and brought it to the fox's neck it was writhing and snapping at her fingers. I am trying to free you, she wanted to shout, not hurt you.

But the lie was huge and gross in her mouth, because she did hurt it. Badly. That was her first lesson in necessity. There were to be many more.

And still now, now that she has taken other lives, lives that she knows involved thinking and feeling, terror and memory, still she remembers that morning with its mirror-sharp colours of crimson and lime green and brown, and she remembers the way the fox looked at her, its pupils dilating and contracting, its mouth frothing red and white. It bit at her, it bit at her knife. She knows the feeling. Screaming, screaming, blind with pain, lashing out without seeing what she struck: yes. The Bloody Vixen, indeed.

An icy reception has never been enough to stop Liadrin, and it doesn't stop her now. The hour is the same, but already the light is lingering longer in the west, turning the sky a rich purple-red like the blood of a king (only she's seen a king die, a prince and a king, and she knows they bleed like any other men when you pierce their breasts with a sword). She winds her way to the interior of the gardens, now with practiced feet, and when she doesn't see him at the original spot she isn't perturbed. It's a small area. He won't be far.

He isn't far, though he's tucked out of the way, somewhat off the path and not seated at a bench but on the ground, barefoot in the moss.

"You'll get a chill, going around like that," she says.

He looks up. Then that pause. Only then do his eyes darken with displeasure.

"Surprised to see me?" she asks, sitting next to him. As she predicted the ground is cool, even through her armour, and she winces at the slight dampness. She'll need to oil her plate to keep off the rust after this.

Voren'thal makes no attempt to feign gallantry.

"Liadrin Lack-Heart they call you," he says. "Maybe they should call you Liadrin Lack-Wit. Why did you come?"

That cuts her, not because 'they' say it, but because he says it and very probably thinks it merited, though she knows she deserves to be struck harder, pierced deeper. "They call me that? 'Lack-Heart'?"

"That's what your dear elven admirers call you. I won't tell you what the draenei say. It's a bit much, even for me."

"Why are you telling me this?"

He eyes her. They are face-to-face, and she notices that his eyebrows are not as pale as his hair, closer to high platinum than white. "You didn't know? You must have suspected."

"And do you think that's fair?"

"I don't think much of it," he says.

"That's rather evasive."

"I apologise," he says, "but I truly haven't considered it. I haven't considered you, child, as a person. Not yet."

"I'm glad you haven't," she says. A shiver runs through her, and she longs for her fur-lined coat, then is glad she has to suffer the damp. "No. Don't think of me as a person."

"How melodramatic," he says, but his tone is soft, gentle, perhaps the first time he has spoken to her gently. They stay there in silence for a long time, and the last light has died completely in the sky when he stands, brushing off his robes.

"My respite from my duties is at an end, then. I'm returning to my quarters. I suppose you'll ask to escort me again, and press the issue until I relent."

She stands, feeling acutely uncomfortable, like a scolded school-girl. "Yes, because it's dark and you'll slip."

"You know, Liadrin, you begin to say that with some relish."

She doesn't answer, just keeps offering her hand, looking not at him but at the lights glowing blue along the trail.

He looks down at her arm with obvious distaste, but he does consent to being led across the bridge, and he does not protest when she continues to hold his hand all the way to the border of the artificial woods. His skin is dry and warm against her own clammy nervousness, though why, precisely, she is nervous she could not begin to say.

That night, she has no nightmares.

She dreams of him instead, searing dreams of sugar-white. She leans over him and kisses the spate of his silvered hair and his eyes and his hands, feeling muscles coil beneath his skin, feeling more than hearing the words he is sighing to her. In her dream they are not in Outland, and the sky outside her window is the pale blossom-pink of Azerothian dawn. His skin is bare and soft and it burns against her, and he is slim and willowy, a scholar, not a warrior.

His age doesn't occur to her until she wakes up. When she does she is drenched in sweat and her body aches, though not quite as badly as her head. She has a vile taste in her mouth and the heat thickens the air until it seems unbreathable.

Her icy shower is normally a privation, but today it is a blessing. The chill strips away her thoughts, at least temporarily. She'd told him he's old enough to be her father, but that's not quite true—he's closer to her grandfather's age. Maybe older. It's bizarre and perhaps a little objectionable and certainly disrespectful but not unpleasant. She's used to these sudden infatuations; they mean nothing, will go away if she doesn't prod them. Love is startling and sudden and it ultimately means very little. She's a little in love with Voren'thal. She's been a little in love with every great man, and some great women too. She's also learned a little something about her oaths, and she intends to keep them this time around. It makes her sad, but it's a minor sadness, and it can be borne.

She tries to remember what he whispered to her in the dream, during their lovemaking. Whatever a Seer says in the throes of passion is of such value that it ought to be inscribed upon tablets, sealed within vaults, written in the stars. His words are deep and important and meaningful. But they are also gone.

She goes back to the garden in spite of her best intentions; her feet bring her there, and she tells herself that it isn't her fault because it's her body, not her mind, that's making her do these things. That she has the power to object isn't something she troubles herself with.

"I came at a different time to avoid you," he says when they meet, "and yet you found me anyway."

"You were avoiding me?" She tries not to be hurt by this. Their walks are inappropriate, politically and socially, and he is wise to defer, but wisdom feels a million miles away from her right now. Wise women do not have racy dreams about problematic allies.

"Should you not be in a meeting?"

"We rescheduled. The anchorites had better things to do than pick my brain for once. There was an influx of refugees from the east." Not that Outland has a magnetic north—it's a mass of shattered rock, and compasses spin wildly here.

"And should you not be helping?" He frowns.

"I believe so, but my help was rebuffed." She makes her tone light, but actually the refusal stings more than any insult or blow. Shadows lie deep in men's hearts; her presence must be a constant reminder of this. She remembers the contempt with which the Vindicators stared her down at the gates to the city, eyes unreadable and studiously blank. She felt rather than recognised their hatred.

"And so here you are."

They stroll along the path in silence, and very probably they look like a father and daughter enjoying each other's company. She's shy now, and she reflects that it's funny how the wanderings of her dreaming mind can produce such a change in her. But if he notices a difference, he says nothing.

"Did they give you a reason for their refusal?"

"Do they have to?"

He's quiet for the space of a breath. "You've apologised. I recall that."

"Apologies are not sufficient."

He bristles, though she only feels sad, not resentful. "And you are surprised by that? Perhaps they were not sure whether you'd help the refugees or transform them into hostages. It takes more than pretty promises to know the difference between right and wrong."

She had not intended to start an argument or bemoan her lot, and his ungenerous interpretation of her words is maddening. But this time, she has her swords sharpened and ready, edges keen. She wants to spar.

"You served Kael'thas," she says, "and you have the gall to speak to me of 'right and wrong'? Don't be so smug, Voren'thal. You're not guiltless yourself."

He is as startled by the acid in her tone as she'd expected, but the little glance of surprise and offense he gives her affords no pleasure.

"The traitor-prince will not be nominated for sainthood anytime soon, I'll concede, but to my knowledge he's not burned down any churches. That gives him something on you, in my books."

She ducks her head. "Ah. Yes. You heard of that."

"Everyone has heard of that. What madness came over you, Liadrin?"

What do you say to something like that? Try this: "I was having a bad day."

"My lady. Such levity. You defiled the memory of Uther the Lightbringer."

"It was... more of a bad decade, really." She pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers. Top ten topics she doesn't want to discuss, and the old Seer can hit them all. What she is thinking is: please drop this issue, I don't want to talk about it, there are some things I can't apologise for and speaking does nothing. The words sit in her gullet, thick and sickening.

But Voren'thal is content to make her squirm. "I should say so," he says, and with that he has won their match. Not much contest.

"May I ask you a question?"

"You may," he says, as if it's a reflex.

"They say you are amongst the oldest and wisest of our kind," she says. "And this is what I want to know. I truly don't have the answer. Do you think there's forgiveness for evil-doers who repent, if their hearts are pure? No matter how evil?"

"I think I am the wrong one to ask."

"That's what the Church of Light says."

He is quiet for a long time. "I will not be your father, for you to cry on my shoulder and beg for my blessing." His look makes her heart ache, such contempt is there in his face. Beautiful as first snow and just as cold. "You are a woman grown, Liadrin, and I've burdens enough of my own."

"I don't want you to be my father." This is the part where another woman would kiss him and weep and kiss him, confessing her love between sobs. But she is the Lady Knight, the Bloody Vixen, Liadrin Lack-Heart of the iron bear-trap snatch, and she keeps her arms fixed at her sides and her eyes fixed on the mountains. She will hold and hold and hold her vows until they break for the pressure of it, and she will never relent, even though she is as brittle as cold glass.

"Then what is it you want?" She can't see him, but he's grown wary of her and her sudden moods. Poor old man. He should be beyond woman's caprices now.

"What do I want?" So many things and she'll never voice them all, so why begin in the first place? "I want to talk, and I want someone to listen."

He doesn't say anything encouraging, like, "Go on," or, "I will hear you." But he doesn't tell her to get out of his sight or call her a murderess either. That's something. She takes a breath to steady herself, braces an arm against a tree. Her fingers slip into a knothole, hand remembering the bark and what it was like to look for handholds as she climbed, when she was a child and the world was as small as a garden.

"I used to take confessions," she says. "I was a priest. Did you know that?" She waits until he gives a small nod. "I loved the Light because I felt that it was love made real in the world, the way nature is the elements made real. Rivers and streams and oceans of love." She is looking at the gap between the trees where the sky and its smoky lights vaults overhead. "I mentioned my father. I was very young when he died. That was the first break, though my faith might have survived it if that had been all."

All around them she can hear only the stillness of the sky, and, faintly, the creak of the earth as if the land is straining beneath them, straining to hold itself together and to tear itself apart.

"Quel'Thalas fell only a little later. That was what destroyed me." She shakes her head. "No, that's wrong. I... I was the one who did the destroying. I went to the shrine of Uther the Lightbringer, and all the Churches of the Light I could gain access to. I disguised myself as an old woman and a pilgrim and I went crawling into Stormwind and Ironforge, and the only thing I could ask, again and again, was, 'Will you forgive me for however it was I sinned? Will you love me and accept me and give me meaning, even after everything?'" She turns to Voren'thal, watches him until he looks at her. "And what do you think the Light said?"

He shakes his head, staring at her, wordless.

"Nothing. It was silent. The Light does not do evil, Voren'thal, it doesn't know evil. We do. I did. I was wrong and I will suffer." And I don't care. "I realised that if the Light was an ocean then it was as also impersonal as trees or rivers or sunlight, as powerful and as uncaring. What was I to it, or it to me? And I hated it, the way you can hate nature for everything it does, not although but because it's so vacant and unthinking, brute force and yet hostile. I was a priest and I kept my oaths and I lost everything anyway." Her voice has gone crazy, shaking and unmodulated, and she falls silent, listening to her own unsteady shameful gasping. "I loved my father more than anything. That was love made real. More real than the fucking Light."

"That's enough." His grip is surprisingly strong around her wrist, just as his voice is surprisingly gentle. "You are no theologian, Liadrin, to torture yourself with this. And I—I do not want to see it."

"Even if I deserve it."

"Yes. Even then."

He releases her hand. It is too much, all of it: the wind, the fake forest around them, the air that is cool and bright and yet also tainted with something foul, the foul taste in her mouth, and the foulness inside her, the growing, gnawing darkness, and him, bright as the veins of stars overhead and just as distant. Silently, wordlessly, for the first time in years, she does the one thing that can still shame her: she starts to cry.

He doesn't try to comfort her, or tell her not to. He watches her cry, and she cries the more for being watched, and also because she never wept, not yet, even though she has wanted to, and finally she has been broken. Not with hammers and justice but with silence and stars, just as the Light in all its frozen brilliance would will it.

"Are you alright?" he asks, when she is done.

"Yes, I... You were kind to me, even though I don't deserve it." He doesn't deny either statement, and she brushes the tears from her jaw. "I would not break my vows for you, though."

"And I," he said, "had no intention of asking it."

"I know." She wipes her snotty face with the back of her sleeve, lets out a laugh that's half a fox's bark. "You're a Seer. Did you have visions of me?"

"Any Seer who did not would not be much of a Seer. I—"

"No," she says, "no. I don't want to know. Don't—don't tell me what they were." She forces a grin and shakes her head. "Forgive me. That was undignified. I can't tell a joke anymore without it striking like an arrow. Pretend I didn't say it."

Light, what is happening to her? Pretend I didn't say it. She was never like this before, every word she spoke heavy with promises and meaning and threats. Now she babbles like a kettle boiling over. Nothing she says is real. Nothing feels real, not the garden, not the sprinkling of light and rain, not him or her.

But then...

She takes off one of her gauntlets and places it beside her on the ground. Her hand is rough, the skin chapped raw, her nails kept short and square. There is nothing elegant about these hands: they've held swords, buckled leather straps, hefted a shield, and they look the part. But if he finds them repulsive he does not say, even as she raises them to his face and brushes the high arc of his cheek, the gap at the corners of his lips, tracing the shadows that fall above his jaw. And yes, his skin is like old paper, so thin and so fine. Just as the dream promised. She brings her fingers to the hollow behind his ear, let's the wind carry his hair across her palm, her wrist, her forearm.

And for a moment the world is very quiet, as if even the frogs know to stop their croaking, the birds their crying, the leaves their whispering. She watches his silver face and his silver hair, waiting for the moment of revulsion and horror. It does not come. She removes her hand and lets it fall by her side.

He sighs, a sigh of sadness and relief. "You ask for very little, Liadrin."

"I deserve less. Thank you."

What she does not say is: and I want more. She wants kisses, caresses, the graze of hair across her face so faint it feels like spider webbing. She wants a love that isn't as vast and inhospitable as the sea, but a love that engulfs her like a father's arms. The Light loves you, evil as you are. But you cannot build a home in the Light. You dip your hands in it, you anoint yourself, you sip out of the loving cup. For Liadrin that has never been enough. She wants to glut herself on it, on the Light, on love, to be filled until there is nothing left: no self, no thought, no memory. She wants to be annihilated, drowned, shattered.

But most of all, she wants to get in out of the cold. "Come," he says, as if reading her mind. And she takes his hand, and this one wish, at least, is granted her.

The End

Author's Note: I love Liadrin—she's one of the few female characters who hasn't gone the "purely ornamental" route—and I've always been drawn to her story of redemption. Still, I found her sudden heel-face turn a little bit of a stretch, even given the absolute goodness of Velen and the sacrifice of M'uru. Considering just how horrible some of the things she'd done were, I can't imagine that suddenly everyone loved her and was, oh, so happy to have her around Just Because. This was my attempt to trace a line between the Liadrin we leave at the end of the Burning Crusade and the Liadrin we meet at the Sunwell in WotLK—a woman who's broken and wracked with guilt, but beginning to live again.