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Sylvanas jerked to wakefulness, thrashing and screaming. Or she would have, if not for the thick gag in her mouth and the chains that arrested her movement. She was on her knees in some small, dimly lit, and barren room, arms secured behind her back, and multiple chains bolted to the floor all around her, connected to shackles and a collar.
She tried to stand and couldn’t even make it halfway before the chains stopped her.
Blinking the disorientation away, she settled on her knees again.
The last thing she remembered was a field of tulips and the smell of rot and blood. No, a tower—a portal? Her memories felt jagged and broken, shifting details like oil on water.
Cold. She felt cold.
The gag bit into her flesh. It was so obstructive she couldn’t even close her mouth, and the chains were excessive. She was strong, but it was a setup she expected for an orc or troll.
Where was she? Why was she being held? Her room was an eight-sided cell, geometric patterns on the floor, and the ‘door’ was a curtain of translucent blue energy. A guard stood outside wearing armour she was completely unfamiliar with.
Her surroundings certainly didn’t look like what she expected of Arthas and his wretched undead.
A burning, icy pain cleaved the centre of her chest like an axe, and she nearly seized up from it, gasping for breath. It flashed through her, his shadow falling over her, a long-haired rider, cursed blade lifted for the killing blow—she reeled back, rattling her chains again.
She remembered it, the blade plunging into her chest and the indescribable agony that followed.
Her soul—something happened to her soul. Ripped from her body—ripped in half?
But she was here. Present.
The strange-looking guard outside her cell finally noticed she was awake and left, presumably to fetch someone.
Sylvanas tried to force calm on herself, falling back on her training to assess her situation and remain level-headed.
She was clearly held captive by an unknown party, either for information or because she had some other value to them. Perhaps she was to be a prisoner of war to trade or taunt her people with, and the shame of the latter thought boiled in her gut.
Looking down at herself revealed armour that wasn’t hers. It wasn’t armour made by quel’dorei, let alone the armour of the Ranger-General. She couldn’t tell where it was from, but it looked wicked, ghoulish, and the longer she stared, the more she realised it was similar to that bastard prince. Why was she wearing it?
It didn’t take much longer for the guard to return, and Sylvanas braced herself at the approaching footfalls, only to be greeted with a sight she hadn’t expected.
The curtain split open only long enough to let none other than Jaina Proudmoore step inside, and Sylvanas almost felt relief because if Jaina was here, that had to mean she was soon to be released, or rescued, something.
But it readily struck her that something wasn’t quite right, something was wrong, different, and the details hit her all at once. The hair, the cold look on Jaina’s face, the tiredness, that steely and uncompromising air, the… was Jaina older? She looked older, lifetimes older in some ways.
Still, everything was confusing at that moment, and Jaina, different though she was, was familiar enough that Sylvanas tried to feel at least a small measure of relief in the presence of her lover. So, she relaxed, trying to impart that relief with her expression.
Jaina looked immediately suspicious, frowning, eyes narrowed, lip curling.
A leaden weight pressed down on her heart. Why would Jaina look at her like that?
After a moment, Jaina finally spoke, and her voice was like chilled iron, a promise of merciless response, nothing like Sylvanas had ever heard from her before.
“I’m going to remove your gag so you can answer my questions, and you will answer them, Banshee, if you ever want to leave this cell.”
Jaina speaking to her like that felt like a dagger to the heart, but her thoughts caught on what Jaina called her—Banshee. What was she talking about?
Before Sylvanas could contemplate that any further, Jaina waved her hand and ice spines jutted from the floor, surrounding her like blades pointed directly at her throat that forced her to sit higher on her knees to keep the soft underside of her jaw from dragging on their points. It sent her thoughts racing like a startled rabbit.
It wasn’t right. Why was Jaina treating her this way, as if she were a hated enemy? And again, Jaina looked at her suspiciously for reacting with wide eyes and frightened breathing, as if her response wasn’t expected or entirely normal when one’s lover threatened them with violence.
Jaina wasn’t like that, never, not once—she was kind and thoughtful and gentle. It didn’t make any sense.
Pain festered in her heart, and even with her rising panic at a situation she did not fucking understand, Sylvanas resolved to keep her head. She had to learn what her situation was if she wanted to escape it.
She forced her breathing to calm down and stayed still, looking up at Jaina.
After a moment, Jaina reached down and loosened the gag, pulling it off.
Sylvanas flexed her jaw and couldn’t stop herself from trying to ask.
“Kim’dal, what is going on?”
Jaina flinched at the term and glared with such outrage that her eyes lit up.
Sylvanas shrank back, wincing as the ice dug against her flesh. Why? Why did Jaina look at her like that?
After a long, tense moment, Jaina exhaled a deep breath through her nose. “Now you decide to call me that as if it mattered?” she asked quietly. “All these years, you barely looked at me, like you couldn’t stand to be reminded, and now you—Tides, I knew this was a mistake.”
Sylvanas frowned. “Years…?”
Jaina raised an unimpressed brow and opened her mouth.
Sylvanas interrupted her, “what do you mean, ‘years?’”
“Do you take me for a fool, Banshee?”
“And why are you calling me that?”
Jaina frowned, watching her closely, scrutinising and guarded, and it made Sylvanas’s skin crawl. “Why are you calling me that?” she pressed. “K—Jaina, please, I don’t understand. Have I upset you?”
When Jaina only continued to watch her with a dissecting stare, Sylvanas shifted restlessly and kept talking. “Why am I here?” she tried. “Did we push him back? Is… is the city safe? Is the Sunwell? Did we stop him?”
Uncertainty bloomed on Jaina’s face, though the scrutiny was still there. “Stop who, Sylvanas?” she asked slowly.
She frowned, confused. “Arthas.”
Jaina’s expression smoothed into an impassive mask, and that was worse, so much worse.
Fear gripped her heart. “What happened?”
Slowly reaching into the pouch on her hip, Jaina pulled out a palm mirror and held it up, revealing her face.
Sylvanas flinched from her reflection, a dead and ashen spectre in place of pale golden hair and sun-kissed skin, reflexively hissing at it. But she watched the reflection do the same, watched dark lips pull back over fangs, brows drawn together in a look of horrified confusion. Her eyes were blue, at least, not some bilious yellow or hateful crimson as she'd seen in some of the undead.
Her breath caught in her throat, and she clenched her teeth in a silent snarl, her thoughts reeling. Then she noticed how hollow her breathing felt, as if it wasn’t really something she needed so much as empty memory, a reflex.
The icy pain burned anew in her chest, flickering, snapshot memory of that hideous moment rising to the fore and forcing her eyes shut with the weight of it.
“Serve.”
Two voices, both deep, cruel, masculine—she shuddered.
Opening her eyes, she looked up at Jaina, horrible realisation sitting heavy in her gut. “I died,” she breathed.
A flicker of pain crossed Jaina’s face. “Yes.”
She slowly shook her head. “I don’t understand. Why am I here? What happened?”
The uncertainty remained, and Jaina hesitated to answer, which only made the fear bubbling away in her gut fester even more.
Wetting her lips, she asked, “What did you mean by ‘years,’ Jaina?”
Jaina exhaled shortly and conjured a stool to sit in front of her. “Tell me what you last remember,” she commanded, neutral but firm. “And I really want you to think about it. Please.”
Tamping down on her fears, Sylvanas swallowed and did her best to try and remember what she was doing last. Of course, Arthas and the fields outside Silvermoon came to mind first, but the broken edges of those memories intersected with darker ones, colder, cutting thoughts that felt as alien as they were familiar.
A tower, she was on a tower, fighting a small army with everything she had, and she’d felt powerful, more powerful than she ever remembered being, with abilities and magic she had no memory of wielding before.
She remembered the echoing wails of some terrible creature and realised with a cold sting of certainty that she had been the one making them.
Sylvanas frowned. “I was attempting to stop their advance,” she said slowly, “to buy him time.”
A man who claimed to be like her, to understand betrayal, grief, and torment as she did—he had the answer, he could fix everything—he lied.
She clenched her teeth. “Zovaal,” she ground out the name like venom on her tongue. “I remember him telling me that he understood, that what was done to us was wrong, that there was a way to fix it if I just…” she trailed off, her vision tunnelling.
The smell of smoke and burning flesh flooded her senses, a terrible pyre, a burning crown, the canopy of a tree, so immense its blaze drowned out all other light.
The screams drowned out everything else.
She shuddered, heart lurching in her chest as she physically recoiled. The ice cut into her flesh, drawing blood—whatever passed for blood in this awful mockery of a body.
Sylvanas gave Jaina a pleading look. “What have I done?” she muttered.
Jaina watched her closely, eyes inscrutable.
Swallowing thickly, Sylvanas tried to recall that burning memory again, of mercies denied, a people nearly wiped out, and certainty, the cold, immovable certainty that none of it would matter in the long run, that the end goal was all that mattered.
“Burn it!”
A sick feeling slid through her belly, weighing down her heart in a frozen press—her voice. Distorted and echoing, but hers nonetheless, she gave an order and tens of thousands died.
She hated this feeling, like a void opening in her chest, a bottomless pit of cruelty and anger, and a terror unlike any she had felt before. Avoidance, she was afraid of something, of going somewhere—returning?
Sylvanas shook her head. “I’ve done something terrible,” she said, reedy, “I’ve hurt people. I cannot recall details, but I remember a fire and that I ordered it.”
Jaina leaned on her knees, hands clasped. “You did. Countless innocents have died because of you. The Horde and the Alliance went to war over it.”
That made her frown. “What did my actions have to do with them?”
“You were the Horde’s Warchief.”
“What?”
Jaina did not answer her stunned exhale, only watching her reaction, measuring it.
A sick feeling rose in her throat. “No, that cannot be right,” she said.
When Jaina did not elaborate, the fear and confusion snapped into rage, and she tilted forward, ignoring the dig of sharp ice against the base of her throat. “Why in the Light would I be Warchief to those monsters?” she snarled, “They killed at least half of my family!”
Jaina’s impassive mask broke slightly, letting through a softer, sadder look. It was gone the next moment, and she looked away. “The Horde were the only ones who would take you and the other free-thinking undead after you were killed and raised by Arthas. The Alliance refused to see you as anything but monsters to be wiped out.”
Her anger fizzled out at that, flashes of memory flickering through her like a picture book, torn and stained with blood. Her death, breaking free of him, bringing together others like her—a queen. She made herself the queen of a damned and broken people, held them up on her shoulders and protected them from a world that did not want them to exist.
Her heart ached for them, then all but tore in two as the realisation washed over her, thick and suffocating, like being forced to swallow tar.
Her eyes stung, and she sank back on her haunches, ears falling limp. “I didn’t stop him,” she whispered, “He made me kill them, he made me kill my people, and I could not stop him.”
Frigid, prickling tears slipped down her cheeks and dripped off her chin, staring into the middle distance as the memory of tearing fleeing civilians apart with her talons played havoc with her sense of self.
The ice faded at a wave of her hand, and Jaina slipped off the stool to kneel, close enough to reach out and wipe the tears off her face.
Sylvanas twitched at the contact, blinking the fog from her mind, and she didn’t know what to say or do. She didn’t know what Jaina expected of her. She almost expected Jaina to kill her if any of these barely remembered atrocities were even half that bad.
The question burned on the way out. “Have I hurt you?”
Jaina blinked, surprised, and her brows pinched.
Sylvanas felt her heart wrench. “Have I?” she pressed.
Jaina quickly shook her head. “No,” she said, “no, you didn’t hurt me, darling.”
The endearment struck her particularly hard after Jaina’s harshness before, and she leaned closer, desperately seeking comfort.
Warm arms wrapped tight around her shoulders, and a hand at the back of her head encouraged her to lower it until it was ducked against Jaina’s neck. She did not move from that spot until she felt drained, smearing salty black into the blue and white of Jaina’s robes.
When her tears stopped flowing, Sylvanas barely found her voice. “What now?” she asked, thin and rasping. “What I’ve done, there must be many who wish me dead.”
Jaina smoothed a hand over her hair, as ashen and brittle as the rest of her. “Tell me who you are, your name and rank.”
Sylvanas blinked, confused, but answered anyway in as firm a voice as she could manage. “I am Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Quel’thalas.”
With a deep breath, Jaina pulled back enough to look her in the eye. “Then you have to help us stop the Jailer from accomplishing his goals. You must tell us everything you remember. There's no other choice, because yes, most people want you dead, but if you help us stop this, maybe it can be a beginning. Not forgiveness or redemption, but atonement, perhaps.”
That wasn’t a sure thing, either. Sylvanas knew the damage she'd done was almost undoubtedly irreparable. But Rangers owned up to their mistakes. They took responsibility for their actions and did the work to fix them. Even if fixing it was impossible, it was the principle of the thing.
And she was terrified still, struggling to keep her thoughts in order because her mind felt a box of broken glass reflecting countless horrible, fractious memories. She wanted to chew on it all and choke on the blood as disgust, horror, and shame mixed heavily in her gut, but resolve flattened it all out.
She still had that; her strength of will was intact.
She had to help. She had to make it right, somehow, someway.
Looking at Jaina, her throat thickened. “Can you stay with me?” she asked, subdued. “I will do everything you ask, Kim…” the endearment caught in her throat again.
Jaina brushed a thumb against her cheek. “You can say it,” she assured. “And I need to talk with my allies here, but I think I can figure something out. Keeper, Warden, something to that effect, I believe I’d be trusted to watch you while we deal with this situation.”
The thought of Jaina guarding her was both strange and comforting. She was so used to being the protective one—or she was once. Years ago.
She steeled herself. “How long has it been?”
Jaina sighed. “Seventeen years.”
The answer hit like a kick to the stomach, and she sucked in a breath. So many years, so much time to maul the world she called home and break her beloved’s heart. Jaina may have said Sylvanas didn’t hurt her, but the anger came from somewhere, and hurt did not have to be physical or direct.
She swallowed thickly. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I know it’s not enough, and I do not expect anything from you. I am sorry for all that I’ve put you through, Jaina.”
Jaina stared at her a moment, sighed, and leant their brows together. “I know you are. We’ll figure this out, alright?”
She nodded, savouring the warmth of Jaina’s skin against hers and the faint smell of heather.
A resolute look crossed Jaina’s face. “I won’t let you fall, not this time,” she said firmly. “I could have stopped Arthas before he became your butcher. I could have reached out to the Forsaken when I learned you were the one leading them. But both times, I was afraid, and I didn’t act.”
“My monstrosity is not your doing, Jaina.”
“Not directly, no, but if Arthas were stopped before he took up Frostmourne, you never would have become this.”
Jaina leaned back, and Sylvanas tried not to follow, the warmth fading instantly from her body and leaving her bereft.
With her jaw set and her shoulders squared, Jaina nodded firmly and got to her feet. “I’ll discuss the situation with my allies and come back as soon as I can,” she said, “try to remember anything you can about Zovaal and what he’s planning. We need everything we could possibly use against him.”
Sylvanas nodded back. “I will try. You have my word.”
For the first time since she entered the cell, Jaina finally smiled at her, and the weight on her heart lifted ever so slightly. “Welcome back, Ranger-General.”