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redisaid · 4 months

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Beneath the Blue Moon - Chapter 9

Gibbous

Oh hi. Happy 2024. Yes, I'm still working on this. Let's play sad lore retrospective with Jaina for a bit.

4643 Words

Read it on Ao3!

Do you know the ache, how the bitterness tastes to me? It makes my heart run cold But when I hear your name I get lost in the memory Of the kingdom that we built before

Vereesa Windrunner, unlike her sisters, was petite and always put-together, lacking that air of wildness about her. But, that certainly didn’t mean she had any less of a temper.

Her shrill query of, “You agreed to what?” could be heard throughout the vaunted halls of Proudmoore Keep, and certainly so in the Lord Admiral’s chambers.

“Vereesa, please,” Jaina offered, all the more tired of being the continued voice of reason. “You haven’t let me finish explaining.”

“And you haven’t listened to anything I’ve told you about her,” Vereesa went on.

She paced before the great hearth, having abandoned the seat besides Jaina’s and in front of a roaring fire that sought to stave off the chill of yet another dreary day in Boralus. The rocks glass and the two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey within it lay untouched on the armrest of the empty leather armchair, not having been allowed to serve its purpose of tempering this conversation.

Vereesa herself was still clad in the regalia of the Ranger General, though not of Silvermoon or any place at all. Her Silver Covenant were homeless in that regard, so small in number, so scattered in a world where their people had suddenly split into three peoples within a matter of a decade. A blink of an eye for an elf.

Jaina had given little thought to how jarring that might be. Until now, at least.

And it was even more jarring to consider a fourth people among those that were once High Elves--the undead ones.

“That corpse is not my sister,” Vereesa went on in emphasis of this. “I’ve told you myself what I saw when Alleria and I attempted to reunite with her. And now you want to meet her alone?”

Jaina had not intended to share this fact, but it seemed wrong not to. She had assumed that Vereesa came calling to discuss the nature of this new ceasefire, and had been informed as to much of the goings on regarding it. But now, seeing her tread a trench into the floorboards, Jaina wasn’t sure her worry came from ignorance or a greater wisdom.

The third Windrunner sister to be called any sort of General had been on a mission to scout deep in the interior of Zandalar, in a desert region known as Vol’dun. She’d only arrived back in Boralus that morning, and apparently had been quite confused at her troops being recalled from enemy territory due to a ceasefire agreement.

And to say she was incensed about Jaina’s plan to meet with Sylvanas that evening was an understatement.

“Things have changed,” was all Jaina could offer to that.

Because she still wasn’t sure what had changed. Mechanically, yes, Sylvanas had the whole of her soul back and it had changed her dramatically. She’d stolen herself back from death, and in doing so had brought an army of winged skeletons upon the newly combined forces of the Horde and Alliance. She had warned them. She had explained for the whole of the Alliance to hear.

But it still didn’t quite register. Even as Jaina watched those newly blue eyes track her across the deck of the joined ships, before, during, and after the battle against the things she had named Mawsworn. Even as Jaina reached out to her, touching skin that was as cold as she’d thought it to be, and reeling from the feedback loop caused by their renewed soulmate bond, she didn’t understand it all.

It had been easier to say to herself that Sylvanas was dead. Her soulmate was gone. The woman who walked the world in her place was indeed a cruel apparition, a taunting symbol of failure, a banshee wailing for a loss she could no longer comprehend.

The reality, it seemed, was far more complicated. And Jaina felt she deserved a chance to know it. That was why she agreed to speak to her, to attempt this understanding.

Or at least that was how she rationalized it to herself.

Explaining that to the short, burning fuse that was Sylvanas’ younger sister, however, was another matter.

At least it wasn’t the older one.

“And you believe her? You believe what she of all people is telling you?” Vereesa accosted, still making laps around the fireplace.

Now that was a tougher question to answer. The glowing mark on Jaina’s hand told her the obvious, and should have made it as simple as that. But it wasn’t. It never would be.

“You have to understand--” Jaina started, though she didn’t herself.

“She was going to have Alleria and I killed!” Vereesa reminded her.

Jaina knew her version of the story well enough. Her old friend had come to her the night before Teldrassil had burned with a tearful confession. A tale of three sisters, none of whom seemed to be able to see eye to eye, meeting with a common goal to rid their ancestral home of the undead. Or, well, the undead not in control of their actions, as it were.

Vereesa had only wanted some measure of peace, some closure from this meeting. What she got instead was a view of the true faces of her elder sisters, or so she claimed, and a fear of both of them. With tears staining the silvery memorial mark of her own great loss so plain on her face, she had told Jaina she felt both were lost to her.

The accusations of attempted murder had come from a sighting of Dark Rangers, bows drawing and waiting, and Sylvanas’ hand signal to call them off of those shots.

Jaina wasn’t about to make excuses for that. No, Sylvanas would have to explain herself, to her sisters, her soulmate, and anyone else who might care to listen.

Her silence was perhaps what finally made Vereesa stop pacing. She looked up from her feet beneath a curtain of silvery hair to find Jaina starting back at her, and stopped dead in her tracks.

“I’m worried for you, you know,” Vereesa said, hands coming to rest behind her back, shoulders straight as she collected herself. Still every bit as militant as her sisters despite it all. “With what I’ve heard--I can’t imagine how you must feel. If Rhonin were to…”

Ah yes, the great river between them that was Rhonin. Rhonin, who was instrumental in all of this, really. Rhonin, who had worked with Jaina in Dalaran when she was still an apprentice. Rhonin, who managed to finally introduce Jaina to his mysterious elven wife and soulmate, who was usually too busy or too distant to make it to social gatherings in the city of mages. Rhonin, who grinned along with Vereesa as she shook Jaina’s casting hand, turned it over, still held in her own, and remarked that she’d seen that mark before, or at least one strikingly similar, and that she knew someone Jaina just had to meet as soon as she possibly could.

Rhonin, who had died with one last spell on his lips, protecting Jaina with that final incantation. Rhonin, whose ghost was a silvery mark on Vereesa’s cheek for her tears to well in, a constant reminder of loss. Rhonin, who would never stalk the world as an undead abomination for thirteen years, only to come back fully to himself out of the blue and blaze that mark alight again with wild accusations about the cruel nature of death, and paranoia about some cosmic Jailer that were apparently all proving true.

Jaina watched the words fall from Vereesa’s lips, unspoken. Her understanding too, came in silence. If somehow, someway, the same had happened with Rhonin, she would go. She would meet him. She would ask her questions. Even if he had done it all. Even if he had burned Teldrassil, and had his Rangers’ bows trained at his own family. She would go.

Jaina lifted her own rocks glass, draining the remainder of the contents. Two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey weren’t going to help her, or help this, but they certainly couldn’t hurt it.

“I’m worried about me too, Vereesa,” she started, setting her glass down and reaching for Vereesa’s to hold it out to her in one of many of this week’s peace offerings. “But I have to go to her. I have to know. Now please, sit down and talk to me about it.”

---

Jaina wondered at whose bright idea it was to build a city on what was essentially a graveyard of a battle where it seemed no one really won.

But, it had been hers. All of it. The city, the battle, the losses. The look in her father’s eyes as she sat idly by, betraying him with inaction. The panic in Rhonin’s as he shoved her through the portal, away from the destruction that would mark the end of the brief existence of the city she’d named Theramore.

And now it was nothing but a ruin, so poisoned with an excess of arcane that even she couldn’t venture far into its remains. Instead, Jaina waited on a rise overlooking the destruction of her own ambitions. She waited to be destroyed again, perhaps.

Those early days in Kalimdor were like fever dream to her still. Bright and hazy and punctuated with the roiling current of emotions she kept at bay with work and duty. After all, one couldn’t get lost in mourning one’s soulmate if one was too busy trying to keep the survivors of multiple ruined nations fed and sheltered in a strange land, right?

As awful as it was, that would have been easier. The finality of knowing that Sylvanas was gone and there was nothing she could do about it was easier to accept. People died. Wars ruined everything. It was simply a fact of life in Azeroth, one Jaina had already known well in her parent’s mourning of Derek.

But she remembered too, and vividly so, the day she found out that her situation wasn’t so clear cut or perhaps so final.

Jaina looked across the debris at the remains of her tower, once a place bustling with people she’d never see again, and memories so evocative they clung to the very stones, crumbled and toppled though they were.

The news had come in a missive from Stormwind, a report of Alliance forces who had held out in Lordaeron, attempting to reclaim the capital of the infested nation from the undead. It was a letter meant to inform of military failure, nothing more. It seemed that Grand Marshall Garithos was poised to retake the city from the demons and undead who controlled it, but had been betrayed by the free undead he allied with at the last moments. Leading them, along with the effort to betray Garithos? Sylvanas Windrunner, of course--now a banshee, but apparently still as cunning as she had been in life, and very much opposed to giving control of the city back to the living.

Jaina could remember the moment she read that name. She could remember the polished wood of her desk, the warmth of the fire crackling in her hearth and the smell of its smoke. Wet wood from the marshlands always gave off much in the way of smoke. She could remember hearing Pained shuffle outside the door to her chambers, booted feet on stone. She could remember the tears that welled in her eyes, the confusion at which she looked through them to her hand, and saw the mark on it was still silver. But the name was there.

Sylvanas Windrunner still existed, in some part, but not any that was meant to love her. And this, Jaina knew even then, was far worse than her just being gone.

She’d searched for every scrap of news from Lordaeron thereafter. Anything she could hear or find or send someone to know on her behalf. From the rumors of sailors--though no Kul Tirans would dock at her port--or the tall tales of neutral goblin merchants; all were equal in value to her, as the truth came in so few trickles those days.

But that truth rang the same every time. Sylvanas Windrunner was out there, undead and angry, rightfully so, but in the wrong way. She fought to keep the living out of Lordaeron. She would eventually come to ally with the Horde. She would be central to bringing the newly dubbed Blood Elves in with her and her Forsaken undead.

And Jaina was always left to wonder what might have happened if, instead of hanging on to scraps of news from others, she had reached out herself.

Though Sylvanas hadn’t reached out for her either.

Their separation across the continents was quite symbolic, really. They would not meet again until the Undercity was attacked. Even then, it was a pained look across the room, one that Sylvanas refused to acknowledge. From then on, Jaina would do the same for her.

That had told Jaina what she already knew. Her love was dead. Their bond was a thing of the past. There was nothing there to be saved, no threads to sew together again.

It seemed as though everything of hers was doomed to end in such bitter emptiness. No, that wasn’t the right word. Just as it was with Theramore here, silent save for the hum of excess arcane and the distant crash of waves, as no birds could brave the damaging magic of the area--Jaina was always left staring out over a ruin of her failures, and they would not look back.

No wonder she didn’t know what to do now that blue eyes stared back at her with a longing she had long since banished in herself.

The sun was setting behind the mountains that separated the wetlands of Dustwallow marsh from the high plains of the Barrens. It painted the waters of the swamp and sea alike a glowing orange--a strange contrast to the pulsing purple of arcane that still clouded the ruins. Jaina herself had taken part in the calculations, along with her fellow members of the Kirin Tor at the time, and she knew exactly how long it would be this way. Centuries was the answer. Far longer than the brief existence of her sanctuary city. This refuge of refugees would be a glowing, dangerous ruin long after any that remembered it as anything else were gone.

A hole in her heart. Another scar upon a world already scarred so deeply, so violently, so quickly.

The Dark Portal had opened when Jaina was three years old. She was busy chasing seagulls on the docks of Boralus then, and had no concept of the changes it would bring to her life. She had no idea how it would bring cities to topple, or dragonfire to rend rifts in the very land, or a giant sword to pierce its heart. She had no idea then, a little blur of blonde hair and energy, that she would never know a life of peace because of it.

And even now that another tentative peace was on the table, and a scar waiting to potentially be healed, she was too wary to trust either.

“You were just another ruin for me,” Jaina said to nothing and no one, for that was all that was left of Theramore.

And the person she’d truly meant the words for hadn’t arrived yet.

Once, in her tower here, Kinndy had touched her mark, sliding tiny fingers over the silvery skin. Gnomes were like elves, and honestly most of Azeroth’s longer-lived races, in their deep respect for the binding of soulmates. Kinndy was young, her own mark still dull and untested--neither bereft of her chance to meet the one she was meant to love, nor yet ready to.

Still she had understood.

“You don’t have to act like nothing’s wrong all the time, you know?” she’d told Jaina that evening, alone with her in the tower.

What had spurred the comment was anyone’s guess. Jaina couldn’t remember the context. Maybe she’d looked especially tired that day. Maybe she’d let herself doze into the spell tome they were going over together. Maybe she’d let the distance she felt from herself catch up to her eyes.

“What do you mean?” had been her question.

Kinndy had patted the silver skin of her hand, the dull shine of the moon. “You have to be sad. I mean, I know you are. It’s okay to be sad sometimes, especially when you have reason to be.”

Reason after reason after reason would pile onto Jaina. She attracted them like a magnet did iron. Like honey for flies. And now the bright spark of a girl and her pink pigtails and goofy little smile were another thing for Jaina to mourn. Another memory she felt could never be given the justice it deserved.

Tears, even, that Jaina could not shed. For if she cried for Kinndy, then it was wrong she didn’t cry for Pained. For Rhonin. For papa. For the soldiers that had looked to her as their hero, their savior. For the kind vendor that always tossed an apple at her from his cart, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when she tried to pay for it.

Tears she couldn’t even reserve for Theramore, lest they should belong to the people who died in the effort to stop Archimonde in the battle to save this very continent. Even before that, for those who died in the wake of Arthas and his arrogance. Years after that, for those who died with Horde axes in their backs and blood red banners shoved into their skulls. For the Sunreavers she’d slaughtered in her rage at the Purge of Dalaran. For those people on both sides she’d failed during her inaction at the Legion’s invasion, still so deep in that anger that it drove her, for once, to simply do nothing.

What she’d told Kinndy that day had remained true, even after all this time.

“I am sad,” Jaina had said once. “But just because I’m not crying about it doesn’t mean I’m not sad. Life has to go on, even when we lose people in it. It’s our duty to them to carry on. So yes, I’m still very sad, I suppose. But I carry on.”

Jaina Proudmoore always carried on, even as the world crumbled around her, bit by bit. It was the only thing she had left to do.

Her resolve to continue that settled in, only to be shaken by the sound of distant wingbeats, heavy and solitary.

The whiskey she’d downed in her efforts to temper Vereesa did nothing to prepare her for the arrival of her older sister. Sylvanas was a distant speck in the sky, seated atop a giant bat, flying in from the north, from Orgrimmar.

How dramatic. She couldn’t have just had someone portal her in, like a civilized person, could she?

Though Jaina supposed she might have wanted her own time to think, as such a flight might afford. Orgrimmar was not that far to the north, and the bat was fast in its approach. A small measure of time alone was likely as much a luxury for Sylvanas as it was for Jaina. She could not begrudge her for wanting it.

But yes, the bat was very dramatic. Even as the creature landed--sending swirls of dust into the air with one last lazy flap of wings that seemed both too heavy and too small to keep such a creature aloft--there was no lack of drama about it.

Not even in the way that Sylvanas hopped from its back, landing on the ground with graceful ease, then took one step forward, and stopped.

She was about a hundred feet off toward the north, away from the edge of the cliff. Close enough where Jaina could still meet the searching blue of her eyes. The face that was both different and too similar to how it had been in life, now that it wasn’t set in an angry scowl.

No, she looked on in question. She was asking permission, but lacking for the words.

Sylvanas didn’t know what to say to her.

“You might as well come here,” was what Jaina told her for her silence.

In life and in death, there was no doubting Sylvanas was an incredibly beautiful woman. Jaina had not spared her a glance in these thirteen years and the handful of times within them that they’d been in the same room. Her once-lover was a fleeting shadow on the edge of her vision, a ghost in eyes purposely darted away from an abomination that should not be. But now, looking upon her again, really looking, for the second time in as many days, there was no denying she was still beautiful. A beautiful woman from a beautiful family born of a beautiful people.

Not the same way that her sisters were, though. Not rugged and honed as Alleria was, like savage power of the tooth and fang of a great beast. Not petite, organized, and spritely as Vereesa was, her pixie nose up-turned further even in her anger that afternoon, a child’s toy marching in her pacing. No, Sylvanas was in-between them, just as she had been in birth. Neither feral nor fae, yet a little of both. Tall for an elf, but just a hair shorter than Jaina, though she’d say they were of a height if asked. Or she did, back when she laughed and joked with her Rangers.

Back when that skin was golden, dotted with errant freckles from the eternal summer sun of Quel’thalas. Now it was ashen, almost purple in hue. And cold. She had been so cold when Jaina touched her.

But she was still beautiful. In a different way, perhaps. Militant in her march toward Jaina, in her purple armor and its silver skulls. In the wine color of her cape, floating behind her in the wind and the dust that still hadn’t settled from her landing. In the creaking leather of the rest of her kit, clean and shining, no longer splattered with gore and broken feathers from battle.

Such a formal gait could mean only one thing. Jaina felt it loop back from Sylvanas in an anxious, chest-deep confirmation.

She was nervous.

Nervous as she had been the first time Jaina met her. Before she could feel the echo of her tension. She’d read it on her face then. The subtle twitch of long ears. The straining of a striking jawline.

Jaina too, had been nervous, but the feeling had washed away when she’d seen how beautiful the elf who shared her soul mark was. How lucky she was to have her.

And now, ruin for ruin, white hair and bags beneath her eyes, staring out over the closing distance at this pallid, undead version of that nervous woman she’d first met not so long ago, Jaina could not help but think that perhaps undeath didn’t suit anyone so much as it did Sylvanas Windrunner. She was a beautiful ghost. A ruin, but at least one that was striking to behold.

“I had it in my head that you wouldn’t come,” was what Sylvanas finally found the courage to say as she came within arm’s length of Jaina, then stopped again. “That I would fly around and not see you and give up for the dark. But you came.”

“I said I would.”

Truth be told, the resolve to follow through on her word had taken another two fingers of good Kul Tiran whiskey after Vereesa had left. It had taken the tears of Sylvanas’ younger sister, and an unasked for pep talk from her mother that Jaina was already trying to forget. It had taken an hour of staring out over the ruins of Theramore, deciding to stay--deciding that she too was a thing broken, and that a chance to be mended in some small way, was worth taking, even if it was difficult.

Sylvanas reached out a hand, absent its gauntlet. A hand with a wrist beneath it that glowed a brilliant blue in the shape of a moon beset with snowflakes. Yes, Jaina had decided the pattern was snowflakes. She had to have something of it for herself.

She snatched it back. She looked at Jaina, herself a painting of foreign colors. No longer gold, but fiery orange from the setting sun, lavender in her bloodless skin, and blue eyes, not grey.

Changed, scarred, another creature so ruined by Azeroth’s slow spiral, but still beautiful.

“I’m sorry,” was the second thing Sylvanas said to her, as they stood alone on the cliffs over what was once Theramore.

“For what?”

The words sounded so accusatory. Perhaps they should have. For the mana bomb Sylvanas might have stopped from destroying this place. For Teldrassil. For dying. For still being here, despite dying. For dying again after that. She should be sorry.

But Jaina hadn’t meant them like that. She didn’t know how she meant them. Maybe just to know. Maybe just to reconcile the feelings that roiled over their bond. A boiling sense of shame, bubbling up in the throat. A longing that hurt as it gripped the chest. A fear, a subtle thing weighing heavy in the pit of the stomach.

“Everything,” was Sylvanas’ answer.

But that would not be enough. Jaina wasn’t certain what could or would be. There was no apologizing, really. If anything, Azeroth owed them both apologies. Perhaps Medivh for opening the portal. Perhaps Gul’dan for building it. Perhaps Sargeras, for the legion. Perhaps Azshara, for making him aware of this world and its treasures in the first place.

Still, Sylvanas wanted to talk. She wanted to give an apology. She felt so much and so deeply that it bled into Jaina like a dye leeching into wash water. It stained her black.

“I don’t think you came here to list the things you should be sorry for,” Jaina told her.

Sylvanas had not. Perhaps she’d had a plan for what she’d wanted to say. How she’d wanted to say it. When and where. Jaina, it seemed, threw a wrench into these.

Sylvanas reached out again, and let her hand fall empty again.

“I can start, if you like,” she offered.

Jaina didn’t want that. She didn’t wanted a bulleted list, much as she loved organizing such things. She didn’t need boxes checked. She wanted so much from this conversation, but knew she might not get any of it.

Mostly, she wanted to understand why she felt guilty for not reaching for that empty hand. She wanted to know if Sylvanas felt that from her. If she had an answer for it.

Jaina wanted anything to make sense. She was comfortable with ruin and devastation. She knew them well. She understood them. She was an expert at working through grief.

What she didn’t know how to do, though, was rebuild.

“I don’t need that from you,” she told Sylvanas. “But I do want to know what it is you wanted to tell me. Why it is you wanted to meet.”

Jaina supposed she owed it to herself. For Theramore. For Teldrassil. For the sword in the side of Azeroth. For the grief she didn’t have time to feel. For whatever reason. She supposed she owed it to Sylvanas too. Not an apology, as there was no apologizing to be done.

No, she owed her a chance. She owed herself a chance. A chance to do something different, for once. A chance to take the ruins apart brick by brick, and build them up into a new tower.

#sylvanas windrunner #jaina proudmoore #sylvaina #fanfic #beneath the blue moon #this fic takes me forever to write because i have to jam so much lore into it #but that's also fun sometimes #hopefully chapter 10 soon

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