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“Wait. What did you say your name was again?”
Keleria stares at the quel’dorei aspirant, an imposing, stern woman who seems at odds with the Kyrian establishment and their vaunted path, if her stubborn refusal to give it even an ounce of her attention is anything to go by. Not that any of them are trying to change her mind anymore when a single glare from her sends most of them running in seconds.
“Did your ears fail you?”
Keleria shakes her head. “No, no. I simply wished to make sure I heard you.”
“Lireesa Windrunner.”
“Right.”
“Well? Spit it out.”
“Pardon?”
Lireesa levels an unimpressed look at her, knocking a solid ten-thousand years off Keleria’s age along with all her ability to skirt around the issue at hand.
Clearing her throat, Keleria asks, “What does the name Sylvanas mean to you?”
“She’s my daughter. What has she done now?”
“Alright. Okay. So, you might not believe me but…”
Torghast wasn’t the absolute worst locale he’d ever been but with each circuitous lecture and conversation about life and death Anduin was steadily bumping it up to first place.
“Look,” he says, interrupting Sylvanas’s latest entreaty, “if you just let me go I’m sure we can work out some kind of arrangement that doesn’t end up with you dead by raiding party.”
“Bold of you to assume there’s anything that can be done for me at this point,” she drawls, looking thoroughly unconvinced.
Anduin crosses his arms, shrugging. “Well, political marriages seem to fix everything these days,” he says drily, eyeing her. “I know you and Jaina are seeing each other in secret. That could work.”
The Banshee startles, ears splayed out. “How the fu—”
The intelligent response is interrupted by a bellow of Sylvanas’s name that echoes throughout the halls like the bells of a funeral, and Anduin watches as Sylvanas’s whole demeanour shifts to something he never thought to see.
She looks pale, well, paler, and starts to fidget, ears flicking back and forth like she can’t quite decide where to focus her attention.
Unsure, he asks, “What was that?”
Her response is blunt. “My mother.”
Ah. That explains a lot, but not everything. “Your mother?” he asks, cocking his head. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
She hisses, lifting her hands as if to throttle him but stopping just short of the circle keeping him entrapped. “Little Lion, I would strangle you for that war crime of a pun if I had the time!” she snaps, turning away to search the room.
Of course, there’s really only one way in and out of his holding cell, so he watches in a growing mix of amusement and fear at the spectacle of the Banshee Queen desperately looking for somewhere to hide only to find sweet fuck all to hide with. It was a barren prison cell that didn’t even have a decorative cage, or an ostentatiously gothic candelabrum, or a pile of skulls. Weren’t places like this always meant to have the odd pile of skulls?
Perhaps all this death and mayhem had killed all the evil interior decorators.
Anduin glances anxiously at the door, listening to the sounds of some absolutely hellish fighting echo through the endless halls outside. It was getting louder with worrying speed, as if a force of nature was making its way right for them. “Surely you should be… delighted?” he struggles.
Sylvanas glares at him. “Does that sound as if I should be delighted?”
No. No it did not; in fact, the voice that had just bellowed her name had bellowed it with the tone many a child knew, that tone that said ‘you’ll be lucky if you aren’t grounded into old age.’
Something heavy collides with the door and they both jump.
Anduin swallows. “Let me out.”
Another heavy bang and the door shudders.
He looks at her nervously. “I’ll blind her and we can run.”
She looks at him, somewhere between incredulity and fear.
Another heavy impact. The door begins to buckle.
Anduin gestures emphatically at the rune circle, sweating bullets now. “Sylvanas!” he hisses.
Without breaking eye contact, Sylvanas waves her hand and breaks the circle just as the door flies off its hinges. Bent metal clangs across the floor, scraping to a halt just short of his little circle as it fizzles out.
Standing in the cold light is a tall, stern quel’dorei woman with blue skin, silver hair and white eyes. Her armour and sword are bloody, and trailing behind her is a long line of thoroughly dead Mawsworn. She doesn’t look even remotely drained by the effort and Anduin attributes it to the unique power of an angry mother.
Lireesa Windrunner looks right at him and he feels his soul try to leave his body. Before she can even say anything, he turns and binds Sylvanas with chains of light. “She’s all yours,” he squeaks, quietly praying that she completely overlooks him in favour of her wayward daughter.
Sylvanas barely has the time to react to this grave act of betrayal as Lireesa stalks towards her. “Minn’da, so good to see you,” she strains, her ears down in a look that says no, it is very much the opposite of good.
Lireesa does not yell, or growl, or say anything at all, and the silence is far worse than anything Anduin has ever experienced as the Windrunner Matriarch grabs Sylvanas by the cloak and about faces, dragging her daughter from the chamber with all the grace of a sack of grain.
Waiting until he can’t see the glow of the chains to breathe again, Anduin gingerly follows after them once it feels like his heart isn’t trying to escape out his stomach, carefully picking his way through the throngs of dead Mawsworn.
First place, it was most certainly in first place now.
It did not take him long at all to find his Aunt Jaina, Baine, and Thrall in Oribos, gratefully embracing each of them in a starved-for-contact bear hug with varying levels of awkwardness.
“You wouldn’t believe how bored stiff I’ve been!” he laments, holding Jaina by the shoulders, “the talks, endless, circular, ham-fisted, badly written!”
“What?” Jaina looks at him curiously.
Anduin shakes his head. “Nevermind, it’s over, I never have to think about it again.”
Jaina arches a brow. “How did you even get out? Was it the maw walkers?”
He swiftly recounts with a healthy mix of respect and fear what happened, that Sylvanas’s own mother stormed the place, killing hundreds if not thousands on the way, and dragging Sylvanas out like a bagged cat.
For a moment he stares into the middle-distance. “The Jailer even tried to stop her,” he says, shivering, “I thought he would turn to stone when she looked at him.”
Shaking off the memory, he notes the way Jaina is looking at him and coughs. “I don’t know where exactly Lireesa dragged her off to but I imagine somewhere in Bastion.”
“I see.”
“…”
“…”
“You’re going after her aren’t you?”
Jaina’s answer was to disappear in a teleportation spell.
Anduin groans and slides down the wall next to Thrall. “I don’t understand those two. Is this entire mess just a very elaborate courtship ritual? Have I been kept out of the loop?”
“You’re asking me?” Thrall asks him incredulously.
“Fair point.”
Asking around proves fruitful, as she eventually finds Lireesa and Sylvanas in a quiet part of Bastion, the former standing sternly with her arms crossed while the latter sits miserably on a bench by the road, ears in a very chastised droop.
She doesn’t approach immediately, trying hedge her options and consider what to say, watching them from the safety of arcane invisibility.
Maw walkers come by every now and then, dutifully handing over a variety of items, anima containers, materials for alchemy, weapon maintenance and the like, or proof of particularly dangerous kills, all of which Lireesa promptly hands off to a like-minded Kyrian.
“Minn’da,” Sylvanas groans, “how long do you intend to keep me here?”
“That really depends on your ‘loyalists’ now doesn’t it?”
“You cannot be serious!”
“I am very serious. You’re going to sit here and think about what you’ve done until I decide otherwise.”
Lireesa then looks directly at Jaina despite the invisibility she’s using. “Stop lurking, mage.”
Jaina very nearly throws herself into an ice block on instinct. Was she psychic, how the fuck could this woman tell she was there?
Sylvanas’s ears perk a little, and perk up completely when Jaina drops the invisibility. She tries to stand only for Lireesa to immediately, with one hand, push her back down on the bench.
Sylvanas grumbles and crosses her arms, ears flattening.
Lireesa gives her a strict look. “And who are you?”
“Jaina Proudmoore,” she blurts out her name as if she were a schoolgirl trying to avoid someone else’s drama.
The look softens ever so slightly. “Ah.”
Jaina raises a brow. “Ah?”
Sylvanas sinks her head into her hands, muttering, “oh no.”
Lireesa crosses her arms. “Well, I’d be lying if I said I was surprised, she’s always had a taste for mages. What exactly were you planning on doing here, Proudmoore?”
The way Lireesa enunciates her name almost exactly like Sylvanas used to is uncanny and Jaina finds herself feeling thoroughly off-balance. “Wh-what are you implying?”
“I’m implying nothing, I’m asking, what are your intentions with my daughter?”
Sylvanas lets out a mortified, “minn’da!”
Jaina flushes bright red. “I wanted to see and check on her,” she says, hoping the short and honest truth would end this sooner. “I was worried this plan would get her killed.”
“You were in on it were you?”
“A little bit.”
“A little bit.”
Lireesa narrows her eyes.
Jaina swallows. “Okay, a lot, and it might have gone off the rails but we didn’t expect the helm to tear a hole in the fucking sky! No one could have known it would do that! Bolvar didn’t know that! Not even the dreadlords who made it knew that, who are apparently Light’s damned liars about making the damn thing, by the way! And then everyone was quite angry about the hole in the sky so she had to flee somewhere and now we’re all here and it’s… a mess.”
“This isn’t a mess, Proudmoore, this is a shit show.”
“Believe me, I’m aware of that.”
Sighing, Lireesa rolls her eyes in a slow, exasperated sweep, before subtly nodding her head towards Sylvanas.
Taking the show of mercy for what it was, Jaina steps passed her and throws her arms around Sylvanas, hugging the Banshee tight.
Sylvanas hugs her back, relaxing a little at the contact. “Thank you,” she murmurs.
Jaina mutters back, “Disappear on me like that again and the only place you’ll have to hide is an ice block in Proudmoore Keep.”
“I will gladly take that over sitting here for months while these fools build favour with minn’da.”
“I somehow doubt your mother would let me do that.”
Sylvanas lets out a long groan of lamentation.
She was going to be here a while.
At least it was better than being raid fodder.