/SET LOCATION; LORDAERON, 20 YEARS AGO

When the third Warden Andy died and word spread that his very-young son had all intentions of taking over, Sihner assumed he would not like the sort of idealistic young boy who thought he could take over a massive prison at 15.

Unexpectedly, Jacob Andy turned out to be a practical young man who treated the older guards much like a council of regency until his early 20s, when he'd learned and grown enough to command with authority. His natural disposition was one that bent instead of breaking, even under the extreme pressure that the combination of his home and work lives was capable of exerting.

Still, lengthy shifts in an underground prison and the usual coping methods—mainly cigars and liquor—took a toll on his health. When a prison riot erupted, he could disperse it with titanic strength. Normal conversations or brief strolls, however, were usually interrupted by an awful hacking cough and his skin was so pallid underneath a thick black mustache and varying degrees of stubble everywhere else that no one thought Jacob would outlive his father.

Perpetually sick, he'd already stopped once to vomit in the grass before wiping his mouth and continuing on. This wasn't unusual or surprising—this was just part of going anywhere with Jacob Andy.

"You're kidding, right? You're something like fifty years outside of drafting range, yeah? Seriously, man, don't go," he stopped to take a swig from a brown bottle, purely to remove the taste from his mouth, that he spit out to the side.

"Fifteen," Sihner lifted an eyebrow.

"Whatever. You're way too old is the point. Light, I just said this to my father-in-law last night. He didn't listen to me either. Well, it's good news, I guess. Leland wanted to go."

"Why not let him go?"

"I might honestly consider it, but Phasilica would lose her fucking mind. Anyway, we're already at 18 hour shifts. Prisons still have to run during conflicts. He can't go now. We can't spare more guards, and it's only going to get worse. Several trials and executions have been delayed—such as that redheaded trouble maker you're so interested in, light knows why. Maybe she'll still be here when you get back. And that building my wife was working on was torn up for lumber. I don't know what the fuss is any-fucking-way. Khaz Modan was ballsy but the orcs won't march on Lordaeron."

"Stormwind is the next likely target."

"Horseshit," he paused, covering his mouth with a handkerchief as he coughed up something unpleasant.

"You'll see."

Jacob cleared his throat. "You leave tomorrow?"

Sihner stopped and nodded, and Jacob sent him off with a wave. Usually their paths converged much later, but on this particular day Jacob left his youngest in the care of a different nanny. She was really a retired midwife, but also all he could find on such short notice as many parents left abruptly to participate in the conflict.

The old woman lived a bit out-of-his-way, beyond the walls of Lordaeron and on the other side of the giant lake, opposite of Brill. The sun set quickly on his journey, and in the darkness he strained a bit to confirm what he thought he was seeing. Instead of old Miss Wilkeshire, Jaqlyn was holding Mason's hand.

The young boy peered into a small hole, barely large enough for an adult to crawl though, that apparently twisted deep underneath the lake. Normally so trusting, he hesitated. "...I... I don't know, gramma Jaqlyn..." He pulled backwards and tried to free his wrist from her hand, but she yanked him violently forward again.

"Don't be scared. I have a candle to give you so it won't be so dark. You want your toy sword back, don't you? I can't crawl in there for you. I thought you wanted to be a brave paladin?"

Jacob dropped the bottle in his hand, the grass muffling the crash and shatter, but not so much that it escaped Jaqlyn's ears. She turned with a sweet smile as her son-in-law sprinted toward them. Mason yanked his hand free finally, and she let him go.

"Dad!" he almost squeaked, hurrying to meet him half way.

Jacob slowed and bent, lifting the boy onto his hip effortlessly as his terrified son nearly jumped the distance himself. "Hey, buddy," he cleared his throat. "What, ah... what happened to Miss Wilkeshire?"

Mason hesitated. "... she said I can call her Emily..." he mumbled finally, then quickly hid his face as Jaqlyn approached.

"Miss Wilkeshire," Jaqlyn glanced briefly toward the near-by cottage, then back to Jacob with the same tight smile, "received some bad news about relatives in Stormwind and had to leave suddenly. I was nearest-by, so..."

"Where's my wife?" Jacob insisted, rubbing the back of his son's head comfortingly.

The witch feigned surprise. "You don't even know where your wife is? Oh, my..."

"Look, lady, I think we've been over this before," the warden leaned forward, a deep scowl on his face. "I. Don't. Trust. You. Phasilica doesn't want you around either, so stay out of our lives like you promised."

"I'm sorry you feel that way," Jaqlyn turned to leave, never losing her poise.

"Yeah, yeah, go fuck off as hard as you can," Jacob waved her on before turning himself, back toward home.

Over his shoulder, Mason reached out toward the burrow, remembering his sword, then thought better of it and retreated back behind the safety of his father's body.

/Set Location: The Acherus

Tearle continued her quest to learn anything and everything about the Acherus and its inhabitants. If she stopped collecting information for even a second, her mind wandered, sprinted even, to the uncertainty of her fate. Panic would work against her, that was truer here than anywhere else. She was fortunate in that there wasplenty to keep her busy.

Angelina was an interesting woman who Tearle would have found more interesting as a child, before her family was murdered and she gave up on gilded dreams of the rich and famous. Angelina was very easily and completely described in one word: socialite. A person could bear their soul to her after a brief introduction and feel better for it instead of exposed—unless, of course, Angelina wanted them to feel that way.

Tearle was a bit wary of her initially; the last thing she wanted was a necromancer picking apart her brain or trying to toss her in a pit of drama. But Angelina showed no interest in dissecting the human priestess, and as far as Tearle could tell, she was always sincere with her. Eventually, Tearle relaxed and was no more cautious around her than she was anyone else, although occasionally she worried that might be all apart of her plan.

What surprised Tearle the most about the Acherus as a whole was that there was even a use for such talents in a necropolis. She never took time to really think about it, but if she had, she would have imagined that the Acherus was a place where the Scourge either slept all day or wrung their hands menacingly until called upon for some dastardly deed, at which point they would pour out in a massive black army of scary.

This could not be further from the truth. There were family members and lovers within the Acherus, or split up by it. The undead fought and had sex. Some drank and smoked, although "it's just not the same" was a common complaint. There were even pseudo-social classes; in Stormwind, paladins usually walked the streets in full plate, even off-duty, to differentiate themselves as paladins, and the same was true of death knights. It was a big faux pas to be mistaken for a necromancer, and Tearle even witnessed a fight break out over it.

Angelina made it her business to know about everything—the class differences, who knew who and who was fighting with who, and wielded this knowledge like a weapon with astonishing success. Tearle found it petty, at first, but came to be impressed after witnessing the potency of such an art over and over, even in a place like the Acherus. If Angelina was frivolous, she was also clever, and not wholly unkind. The human surmised that Angelina had died very young, although she did not look it, and she could not always be blamed for her instigative nature.

Furthermore, Angelina always seemed to know what was going on and was eager to explain it to Tearle, which made this confusing, backwards world less unnerving. Memory experiments were rampant, especially among the death knights, and Angelina prided herself on knowingwhat the subjects of her gossip did not.

"He doesn't remember it, but they used to be married. She probably seems familiar, that's why he looks so hesitant," Angelina explained during an incident a while back, where a dark soldier dragged a Scarlet warrior through the doorway to the geist pit. Once Tearle understood everything in terms of latent natural emotions, even the Acherus seemed a little familiar; it was sad, but not so frighteningly foreign.

Angelina herself was the twin sister of Phasilica, the cold woman Tearle met once already, and the two still looked frighteningly similar in spite of dying nearly thirty years apart. Stranger still, Angelina defied the often-true stereotype of twins striving for their own identities; she even responded without pause to her sister's name if mistaken for her. In fact, according to Abby, Phasilica nearly took over Angelina's life when she died, marrying her sister's fiance and raising her son, but that was a story—the only story—that Tearle could never get out of Angelina herself.

The man who'd brought her to this place originally was Sihner Xanthic, who Angelina explained was from a fanatically religious family that gave all of their children 'humbling' names. He was a friend of Angelina's father for three decades and she had infinite stories to tell about him, however she was not particularly fond of him, and she tinted most tales with bias.

He was educated, but did not speak Thalassian in any capacity which was a rarity among educated humans in Lordaeron. He was never a noble like Angelina, but he had never experienced the peasant life either, a common placement for an otherwise unremarkable family with a long history of service to the crown in wartime. He was well-off and old enough that everyone except Jaqlyn referred to him formally as Mr. Xanthic, even his apparent girlfriend, although she commonly shortened it to simply 'Mister.'

As far as she knew, his interests boiled down to two subjects: women and all-things-fighting: dueling, 'tanking', complex military operations, and so on. The former he didn't speak of openly and Tearle wouldn't want to hear about it anyway, but it took little prompting to get him started on the latter. On the rare occasion that she was left alone with him, she could avoid awkward—and sometimes scary—silence with a simple quip, sometimes completely fictional, about how she could never get tactic 'x' to work with a healer or shieldman of type 'y'.

Sometimes it took him a moment, but he had the solution for nearly every situation with every class of every personality, although sometimes said solution involved bringing plenty of priests for resurrection purposes. Battle plans were not Tearle's forte and she normally would not find them particularly interesting; however, any subject could be mildly amusing when learned from a master with decades of experience. If Tearle ever happened to pass him in the halls with his daughter, they were usually discussing the most minute details of strategies or positioning or class weakness—sometimes disagreeing, but never really arguing. This was something, perhaps the only thing, he enjoyed discussing at great length.

Otherwise, he mostly kept to himself. If he had to speak, he would cut subjects or verbs if the sentiment could be understood without specifying. He stretched the bounds of etiquette for an educated man, so much that Tearle originally assumed he was from Stormwind, which had been regarded as more friendly and relaxed than Lordaeron in the past.

This habit of conveying only the simplest thoughts in the simplest terms made him seem mysterious at first, but later Tearle concluded that he was, in fact, just simple. She never had to guess at his motivations—which usually related to one of his only two interests—and he wasn't particularly intelligent; he never complained or acted dramatically, and he refused to participate in Angelina's mind games. He would not have been particularly memorable except for two things—his voice and a colorful family history.

According to Angelina, Sihner was the oldest son of notoriously ruthless warlord and his first wife, another successful warrior from a peasant family. When Sihner was very young, he'd somehow broken an antique spear, a war-trophy of sorts belonging to his mother. She allegedly cut his throat with it. The boy survived, obviously, but spent nearly five years completely mute, and went uneducated because of it, leaving him with no way to communicate. His mother died in prison before he could tell anyone that the injury was an accidental self-infliction, and she was innocent.

This development drove his father crazy—or crazier, depending on who a person asked—and the late Warlord Xanthic's next three wives disappeared.

"What's really mysterious is that there was no struggle," Angelina explained one evening while dolling Tearle up to look like a cultist, not because Tearle wanted to look like a cultist, but because it would help her to blend in.

"Mal Xanthic was already pretty old when Sihner was born, and Sihner had to be in his 20s when the warlord married for the last time, since Abby was old enough to remember the wedding. Around the same time, like within weeks, my Aunt Maria married into the Xanthics—awful decision if you ask me—and engaged in a heated argument with her father-in-law about how to name her children. She literally threw Mal out of her house."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Tearle asked, recoiling as Angelina pulled the human's wet hair in an effort to straighten it.

"The Xanthics were all about making soldiers, and they only ever married other warriors, or rarely a paladin, with brilliant service histories—and Mal's last wife had to be at least thirty years younger than he was. She was easily as strong as Maria, anyway. The late warlord could have murdered his second, and maybe his third wife himself, but not the forth. It's completely impossible."

"He could have hired someone," Tearle suggested, pushing Angelina away at the shoulders. "Sorry. If I have to be the first cultist without pin-straight hair, so be it."

"Suit yourself, but the other necromancers will tease you," Angelina retrieved a soft poof and began to cake the human's face with an unusual white powder. "I think Jaqlyn was involved somehow."

That was a phrase Tearle had heard a hundred times already: I think Jaqlyn was involved. The priestess meant to ask her about it then, but instead she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and nearly dissolved into tears. She barely recognized herself, even with her disguise only half-completed, and her dark appearance was so unsettling that she forgot temporarily that she had consented to this experiment. The feeling faded as soon as she turned away, logic took over again, and their conversation returned to something mundane.

The other half of Sihner's unusual family history was Abby, who Tearle could not form a solid opinion of, but still enjoyed conversing with very much. She struck Tearle as a very self-centered, greedy person, which the human did not much like, but with an occasional streak of humanity that the priestess approved of. Abby was good friends with Angelina, who Tearle shared quarters with, and would pop in frequently.

Except that Abby almost never smiled—even if one tricked her into laughing—she looked nothing like her father. In fact, Tearle doubted she was even human, or all-human, from the very start. Abby was easily as tall as her father was, incredibly unusual for a human female, had two too many eyeteeth, and a very subtle point at the tops of her ears. Tearle did not even realize they were related until Abby mentioned "my dad" in a casual conversation, and his identity was obvious within the context. After that, Tearle noticed them together often, either discussing the past or, more likely, the most precise details of all-things-fighting, and it seemed perfectly obvious. They certainly behaved similarly.

Corroborating Tearle's suspicions that Abby was not completely human, the priestess learned, again through the knight's conversations with Angelina, that Abby ran away from home very young to join a small tribe of orcs hiding in the Alterac Mountains. She said that she wasn't popular, but her knowledge of human language, tactics, and general mentality made her extremely useful to them, and that her mother had once served the same function. This lead Tearle to believe that Abby's mother was likely a half-orc, although she never specified.

This unique past also made her very interesting to Tearle, and allowed her to tolerate an attitude that she would otherwise find despicable at times. Tearle had studied orcs and even knew their language, but an orcish source was always biased in favor of orcs and a human source was always biased in favor of humans. Tearle herself suffered a strong bias that she was well-aware of. But Abby sat firmly on the fence, jaded by humanity at a young age and booted from two different orcish tribes for dishonorable conduct. At best, she wasn't loyal to either camp, but only to herself.

Furthermore, she knew the little tidbits that a person couldn't learn in a book or that someone else might assume Tearle wasn't interested in; she regularly spouted little cultural quips like Anyorc who tells you that the Frostwolves are noble either is one or shacked-up with one; they all know it takes the Warsong clan to get fucking anything done... Hair is every-fucking-thing. You think the clothie bitches downstairs are cruel because your hair is a little wavy? Hah! Go to war with some orcish shieldwomen with the wrong side of your head shaved.

Tearle adored these little knowledge scraps, seemingly meaningless pieces of information that she couldn't learn anywhere else, and even begun to write them down. They would only ever be of interest to someone as deeply concerned with varying world cultures as her, so, they would only ever be useful to her. Nonetheless, she did not want to forget anything, and she often had nothing else to do.

Eventually, Angelina would incidentally reveal a little morsel of human interest, but that only manifests itself in Lordaeron, and Tearle thought she might as well write it down, too. Before she knew it, she was also scribbling down things that Mr. Xanthic said. Her first night writing in this quasi-journal, she had ten pages of everything-soup in shorthand.

hair is everything to fem. orcs (mem. ask is it ritual?)

orcs u/t drown infants if deform or weak, outlawed by f.w. Tribe

elf-human marriage common in lordaeron, halfies better tolerated

human shieldmen are usl. large but size unimportant, is "center-of-gravity" thing; women have lower c-o-g; most human shieldmen male, most orcs have shieldwomen

And finally, notes about the people themselves began to creep in because the collective culture of undeath was fascinating itself, and completely different for the Scourge versus the Forsaken. These people were an ecclesiastic mix of complicated convulutedness that left an observant girl like Tearle with plenty to observe.

Tearle met Saiynt last, after she already had pages and pages of notes from and about everyone else. The same night the priestess wouldn't sleep at all, compelled by a quirky need for "evenness" in her notes to jot down at least as much about Saiynt as she had about Jaqlyn, but her task was complicated by the inability to pin Saiynt's appearance, history, or personality down with any word other than "unstable." Saiynt Cisneros wasn't the type of woman someone could describe to someone else—she was the type about which a polite person whispered, "I need to warn you about, well, you'll see," to a soon-to-be-mutual acquaintance, and said acquaintance's most fanciful imaginings were never disappointed.

Like Abby, Tearle had trouble forming a solid opinion on Saiynt in many areas, except that the priestess had high respect for her gall from the beginning.

The human was standing in what she assumed was Mr. Xanthic's quarters with Angelina. The death knight barracks were all the same—a ten-by-ten, if that, room of nothing save for a short raised platform of stone against the left and right walls, which Tearle assumed were supposed to be used as beds by the way Sihner was lounging on one when they came in, although it was far too short for even herself; Sihner's legs hung off the edge at the knees.

Angelina knocked but did not ask permission, which was just her way—the necromancer did what she wanted whenever and to whomever she wanted—although she apparently wasn't expecting the death knight to be in.

"Jaqlyn still hasn't sent you after Lisys?" she asked, taken aback.

Mr. Xanthic sat up as soon as she opened the door, but slid back and leaned against the wall after verifying his visitor. "What are you doing here? … Who is that?"

"Hah! You didn't even recognize her. This is the same girl you dragged here from Tirisfal Glades, remember? I did her makeup to be less conspicuous. Isn't she cute?" Angelina turned to Tearle, who was mindlessly examining the plain stone walls. She set a hand on the priestess's arm and said, "Believe it or not, at the height of the Scourge's power the death knights were four-to-one in these rooms," as if she could read Tearle's mind. In fact, sometimes, whenever she felt paranoid, Tearle wondered if she really could.

The necromancer turned back to Sihner, who'd put his arms behind his head as far as Tearle could tell. Once the heavy door shut behind them, the only light was what could escape the hall underneath it and two sets of undead eyes. "She didn't send Abby, did she?"

"No. There was a confrontation this morning; she's been moving bodies all day."

Angelina reached out to take Tearle's arm, a habit she established after Tearle tripped once and nearly took a nasty spill down a set of spiral stairs in another low-light situation. There wasn't much room for error here, but the priestess was accident-prone and Angelina resolved not to take chances in any area likely too dark for human eyes. "... all day?"

"Yes. Was a massive confrontation."

Tearle came to learn that moving bodies in this place meant sorting through the corpses of fallen soldiers for those memorable faces that could make worthy death knights, then dragging them to the necromancers. This was low-level work for a team of supervised ghouls usually; if command was short enough that they required help from sentient death knights like Abby, the conflict was certainly massive. This step-up in recruitmentwas troubling.

"Well... we have bigger problems," Angelina tapped her foot nervously. "Besides being very bad for Lisys, rebuilding Nadia would be..."

Sihner didn't respond, which troubled Angelina greatly. She squeezed Tearle's arm until the priestess pulled away, and she could hear the necromancer's heavy breath for a hot minute. She regained herself with a swallow.

"I don't know what to do except take this to Phasilica," she said finally. "But I don't like that option."

At that moment, the door exploded open and Tearle caught herself gawking at the sudden influx of light and an acid-blue-haired stranger in the entryway. Her mostly-exposed breasts rose and fell with effort and her eyes narrowed.

"You son-of-a-bitch, how could you?!" she howled in a high-pitched voice that Tearle almost suspected she was faking. "Just because you was mad at me? You're dead, motherfucker!"

"No, Saiynt, it wasn't—!" Angelina scurried to intervene but was shoved violently aside with a scream as the petite woman lunged right at Sihner. She had unworldly strength for her size, cracking a hole in his chest plate with a definitive crunch before he'd even drawn his hands out from behind his head.

He sat up, still apparently taken off-guard, but she shoved his shoulders back against the wall and straddled him, reaching wildly for the sword on her back as the door closed and darkness choked out Tearle's view again. The human flattened herself against the nearest wall, possibly as terrified as her first day in the Acherus. She heard a slice and Mr. Xanthic shout, muddling Angelina's pleas for Saiynt to calm down while Tearle begged her eyes to adjust. She could nearly make out dim shapes again when Angelina jumped on her with another scream, both girls narrowly missing a hard impact with Saiynt's plated body as Sihner shoved the smaller knight back, got his foot on her chest, and kicked her powerfully across the small room.

He stood immediately, but Saiynt's smaller stature allowed her to recover much more quickly and she darted forward again like a suicide-fighter, staggering him before he'd fully regained his feet.

The two dark-haired priestesses scrambled over each other and their own robes, crying out as they tripped and fell and struggled for at least two full revolutions around the room, narrowly avoiding the very real possibility of being cut or crushed to death many times.

"Saiynt, stop!" Angelina begged continuously, sometimes hardly whispering as she panted and scrambled, pulling poor Tearle, who could barely see, up off the stone floor just in time over and over again.

Finally, Mr. Xanthic pinned her successfully on the floor with his foot between her shoulder blades. She was flexible enough to grab his ankle, but could not muster enough strength to throw him off, her legs were too short to reach his other foot on the ground without turning, and her armor was not smooth enough to allow her to move at all beneath his foot. The pressure required to hold her this way was immense, and as soon as Angelina realized it was safe to approach she hustled over to explain on all fours.

"Jaqlyn was going to disassemble you instead, it wasn't out of spite, he was just stalling, we're trying to come up with something else right now," the necromancer spat breathily at a million miles a minute.

Saiynt stopped struggling, and Sihner removed his foot. Tearle thought she heard every bone pop, something that would have made her sick once upon a time.

"I was never mad at you." Sihner added tonelessly, bending to help Saiynt stand.

"You was too!" she spat, coughing up a dark liquid. "You walked away awl like," she lowered and flattened her voice, making a very convincing impression, "You should have told me about Abby."

"I was annoyed... for ten minutes, if that. You disappeared for three weeks."

"Well, stop bein' so hard to read alla-mother-fucking-time! Always like I don't care. I could take it or leave it. I hope I broke your fucking nose! How ya feel about'at, huh? Anythin'? You're so damn... n... yeah, stupid too... prick... hell." Saiynt's speech, if one could call it that, descended further into mumbles, wrapping her arms around his waist, which was about all she could reach, and rubbing her small face against his armor, pausing to spit out a tooth.

These constant, bizarre ups-and-downs were all part of living in the Acherus, and Tearle had long since learned to quit puzzling over them and count her graces that she'd survived another down.

The door swung open again, prompting Tearle to scramble away from it and onto the "bed" to her right, where she huddled in the corner. She hoped that Angelina would take her back up to the much quieter necromancer quarter again very soon; she'd had about enough death knight already for one day.

Abby glanced around the room quickly at Tearle, balled up in a corner, and a very disheveled Angelina, then to Saiynt and her father. Scraps of clothing, strands of hair, and even cultist makeup was everywhere—on the floor, smeared on the stone walls, all over the four tousled individuals themselves.

Abby was not amused. "Dad... gross."

"That's not funny, Abby," Sihner frowned.

"I thought it was," Saiynt sat back on the opposite stone platform from Tearle. Her face was covered in dried blood. Tearle thought it was funny, too, in the light-headed, morbid I-almost-died sort of way.

"And she's back... fantastic," Abby hissed, turning to leave, but Angelina stopped her.

"Wait! Abby, come sit. We really need to talk about our next move." The necromancer sat beside Tearle and patted the place beside her. Sihner sat beside Saiynt, across from them.

Abby hesitated, but sat across from Saiynt with a scoff. "What the hell happened?"

"Mommy and daddy were fighting," Saiynt answered, high voice mock-sweet.

Abby started to get up, causing Tearle to squirm further into her corner, but Angelina put a hand on the death knight's shoulder.

"Abby! Please, no more fighting. Poor Tearle is shaking like a leaf."

"She's just doing that to piss me off!" Abby hissed, turning angrily back to Saiynt. "I'm older than you, you dumb tart!"

Sihner stood and scooted Saiynt to the other side, across from Tearle instead. The human priestess's curiosity relaxed her, and she studied the new death knight for a minute. This girl wasn't bright, or she was brave, or both; Sihner was a man Tearle would hesitate to slap if he pinched her butt and she had two bottles of liquid courage in her. This woman, a good several inches shorter than herself, attacked him in a tiny space where size dictated she had no chance, even with the element of surprise on her side. But she survived... only to taunt Abby. Tearle's mind reeled.

"Well, I own't wan' her tearing apart my girlfriend so, what're we gonna do?" Saiynt crossed her legs, resting her elbow on her knee and her face in her plate and chain glove.

"Your...? But I thought you were...?" Tearle asked without thinking, pointing between Saiynt and Mr. Xanthic.

"Don't even bother asking; you don't want to know." Angelina gently nudged Tearle's hand down. "As I was saying... All I can think of is to bring this to Phasilica."

"So what? So she and that paladin can keep an eye on her?" Abby scoffed. "That might buy us a week if Jaqlyn is dumb enough to send us out one at a time again. If she sends all four of us, and she will eventually, it wouldn't fucking matter."

"The elf makes stupid decisions where Phasilica is involved," Sihner nodded his head toward Tearle. "I could take Lisys the same way if I caught them outside the city. Inside, Abby or Saiynt could hold off the guard on her own."

"But you're huge," Tearle interjected suddenly, more strongly than she meant to. She sunk down in her chair a little when she realized that all eyes were on her, but this question had been building up inside of her for so long that it was almost erupting out of her mouth autonomously. "I mean, you stepped on her a minute ago," the priestess gestured weakly at Saiynt, "and even half that pressure would grind Jaqlyn's tiny bones to a powder, right? Why not... just... isn't it obvious to anyone else?!"

Half way through Tearle's desperate plea for logic, Saiynt and Angelina began giggling.

"Okay, okay, firs' of all, Jaqlyn is tougher'en she looks. Second, it just ain' work that way around here. Baby, we are in a giant floating... like... thing of individuals who is still loyal to the Lich King. While some back-stabbin' goes on, 'specially in the lower levels, Jaqlyn is def'nilly untouchable by'a likes of us."

"Third, it just doesn't work that way here," Abby repeated seriously. "We do not have complete mastery of ourselves. The same necromancy that holds us together so much better than the lower-level Scourge acts as a charm. We could attack her, but at half-strength. If we managed to kill her, there's no real guarantee she wouldn't just come back. It's even difficult for us to kill one another," Abby shot Saiynt a nasty look, then turned her eyes back to Tearle. ".. and then there's Nadia."

"Nadia is what you're talking about right now?" Tearle asked.

Angelina nodded. "Yes. At the end of the day... Nadia is what really keeps us here. There are still people I care about out there, and that sentiment is repeated all around this room."

Tearle drummed her fingers on her knee, suddenly nervous, although she didn't know why. "So, who, or what... is Nadia?"

Saiynt giggled again, a grating sound, wagging her pointer finger in the air. "Y'know, y'know! I helped move Nadia twice now... so, we always gotta move'er in pieces, righ? So it takes two of us. So I got this ridiculous torso with all 'ese teeth stickin' out the neck, and it's all chain' up and heavy as hell, okay? And it was such a funny sit'iation, 'cuz they tol' me it was alive, but it never moved or nothin', and it certinly idn't look alive. But somehow, I know that the chains is useless, like, for show maybe? Or 'cuz it made whoever work wit'er feel better? Shit, Ionno, but I coul' tell it was like, somethin' about the bag she was in, just restin' on my back. I ain' know a ton about magic.

"So, it was a long trip, 'cross the whole fuckin' Eastern Kingdoms, an we had to keep the pieces so far apart, yeah? So it was borin', and I was startin' to think just like you, y'know? I thought, what'a hell even is this thing? An so, because she idn't seem that scary and because I'm fuckin' stupid, I just said aloud, like to myself sorta, what the hell are ya, anyway? An' Mistah Xanthic is way behin' me and is yellin at me not to say nothin' to it, but he cain' stop me or come any closer, an' he's always too cautious, so I ignored 'im.

"So, I'm laughin' again because this whole thing is stupid, and this thing answers me in my head. She says, I'm the end of all things. Jus' like that, you know? Casual-like, just answerin' an honest question. Now, I consider myself pretty ballsy... or maybe I idn't believe it was really her, Ionno, but I answer, jus' to be a pain-in-the-ass, I say, Nawh, that's me. I'm the end of all things."

Saiynt looked down at her knees, wetting her thick lips. "The rest of the way, Mistah Xanthic is tryin' to yell somethin' at me, but he cain' yell good and I cain hear him, an I cain' slow down or stop. I never felt it move, but when we got there an' the necromancer took her off my back, her hand was wriggled out the top an' squeezing a han'full of my hair between white knuckles. I axe Mistah what he was yellin an'... He said he ain' remember.

"So... I was careful after that. The only thing she's scairt of is the dark, an she won' even move if it's dark... pitch dark, even are eyes is too bright. So we had to cover our eyes an go through this cave, several miles in the groun'... where someone else a'ready brought her food... some of these people amount to a hundred times'a four of us put together... an I dump her torso an walk back... Mistah gets the hard job," she turned to look at Sihner very seriously, then back to Tearle. "He dumps the other half and lights the torch. Once they's any light down there an the pieces are close, we own't have long to get out. But she likes living targets over dead ones."

Abby took over. "The torch will go out before she's done eating and then we have to go find her. Sometimes we have to pull her back apart, sometimes we don't. Even in one piece, she doesn't really resemble a human anymore. She looks like... I don't know, nothing, I guess. Something you might find dead on the road side, so you go look at it, but you can't tell, so you walk away. Something like that. I've never seen her move, but I don't think she can walk on two legs. So that's Nadia. A zombie or a creature or the end of all things or something. We just call her Nadia."

"I... see," Tearle leaned back, rubbing her arms. The way they talked about Nadia was more frightening than the story itself. As a young woman, Tearle's strong father was made mortal by a band of Scourge and a rusty blade. Having come to terms with the frailty of life, everyone seemed temporary until she met these people.

Her opinion of them was exaggerated; they held complete power over her life that they took for granted so much that the frivolous Angelina dressed her up like a toy. She had enough insight to know that she was incapable of thinking realistically about these people, but was still unable to adjust her outlook accordingly and gave up long ago. If these people—Sihner especially, because he was usually very practical—saw something to worry over in Nadia, then Tearle would worry, too. Tearle would worry a lot.

"What do you know about her?" Tearle gave Angelina a sidelong glance, thinking a necromancer could shed more light than the death knights.

"Nadia's power comes from the same place Jaqlyn's does, a curse. She mixed what she could salvage of Nadia with animal parts to make her more primal, but the mixture was too heavy on one end or the other, so the monster wasn't perfect. Avarett and Maria Crysis—"

"Maria Crysis?" Abby interrupted, nudging her father's shin with her foot.

Sihner's tone remained flat, but he still managed to seem irritated. "Are you going to ask me that every time?"

She nudged him again. "Not even just to spite your brother?"

"No, that would be like fucking Avarett."

Saiynt erupted into giggles again. This time, it was a relief to lighten the air instead of an annoyance. "Yeah! Jus put a little beard on'er, heehee... it's that shit-eatin' grin, 's'what it is."

When Tearle finally looked back to Angelina, the necromancer was still casting off a few giggles herself. "Abby! Shame on you, this is serious."

Tearle forced a laugh just to fit in. These people never let her forget how unstable they were, even for a minute.

Angelina turned and took Tearle's hands in her own. Picking at or re-arranging Tearle's clothes or features was almost a nervous habit for her. "My father and my aunt managed to wound Nadia, opening a hole where an infectious rot got in. Eventually, Nadia will disintegrate on her own. Jaqlyn could rebuild her with pieces of anyone, really, but she doesn't want to, because every piece of the original cursed individual that is removed will dilute her strength.

"From Jaqlyn's point of view, Lisys is the ideal source of replacement pieces, but until recently," Angelina shot quite the nasty look Sihner's way, "Jaqlyn did not know Lisys was still walking around. I would be next, except that Jaqlyn has an agreement to provide a tactician, something my sister and I studied heavily once upon a time... So long as Phasilica is inaccessible, I am off-limits. Saiynt isn't cursed, but happens to have suffered enough for minor patchwork... and here we are."

"Cursed?" Tearle furrowed her brow, watching Angelina pick carefully at her cuticles.

"It's a horseshit old wives' tale for another time," Abby answered.

Angelina laughed ironically. "Abby and Mister Xanthic don't believe in it. I didn't used to, either."

"I always fuckin' new it was real." Saiynt scoffed, resting her head against Sihner's arm.

"But anyway... that's all I can tell you. I haven't seen her for myself, yet." Angelina finished, taking a moment to inspect her work on Tearle's nails. "We ought to blacken these..."

"Yet?" Abby asked like a challenge.

The necromancer released Tearle's hands, heaving a sigh. "I need to know how quickly Nadia is rotting."

Sihner sat perfectly upright, suddenly more interested in the conversation, a common reaction from him whenever Angelina said something so over-the-moon-absurd that he needed to confirm she was serious. Tearle squirmed partway behind Angelina slowly, subconsciously, as tension in the room rose again.

"She's rotting pretty damn fast," Abby answered in the most finite way.

Tearle only knew that Angelina technically outranked the death knights because she had told the priestess so point-blank. The frequency that Abby and Sihner grudgingly gave in to her whining demands seemed uncanny before that, but the young necromancer never ordered them around like an authority figure, perhaps because their judgments were usually better and she knew it.

Angelina shook her head stubbornly. "That could mean anything to you—weeks or years. I need to see her so we know how practical it is to wait it out at this point."

"Look, Angie, norm'lly I'd agree with you, these two is way too fuckin' cautious," Saiynt pointed at Sihner and Abby with her thumbs, "but this is differn'. Really, you should... you should let this one go, yeah? We all still have people somewhere we care about, and... well, shit, we all used to make a livin' gettin' beat up and hit inn'a head and we'll defn'illy need you for all the scheming and shit later on."

"What do you think I'm trying to do? If Jaqlyn can fix Nadia before she dies, it's over. Jaqlyn will either dispatch us or let us wait around for the last shred of humanity in Arthas to die. He'll have more than enough tools to ruin everything in this one damned monster," Angelina crossed her arms, frowning. "Abby, we only stayed after Sylvanas broke away to prevent this. The last five years are pointless if we can't figure our next move."

Abby sighed. "How close do you have to get?"

"I have to see her heart."

"No." Sihner said, leaning forward with a paternal sternness.

"She can smell mana 'r somethin'." Saiynt sounded more sympathetic than forebidding. "An' she could just grab you an... like that," Saiynt snapped. "We couldn' help you against her."

Angelina gestured urgently with her hands. "She isn't as dangerous in pieces, right? Just pull her apart in the dark and bring her chest to me."

"We've never pulled her apart, that's always done by a necromancer a thousand times more powerful than you are. Besides, once above ground, Nadia has to stay in the bag until we're below again." Abby sounded exasperated. "If she gets dropped or anything goes wrong, all hell could break loose or... hell, I don't even know."

"I don't care if I die!" Angelina burst, balling her fists. "Take me to her. I just need enough time to tell you how long she has. After that, all three of you go to Phasillica immediately. She will know what to do next, but all of this needs to happen before Jaqlyn sends us after Lisys."

"Unless we all git killed," Saiynt scoffed. "Girl, I am tryin'a tell you that a secret visit to Jaqlyn's pet monster ain' a good fuckin' idea."

Abby lifted an eyebrow. "Why hasn't Jaqlyn sent us after Lisys, anyway? A day ago it seemed like she was done pissing around."

"That's an easy answer. Jaqlyn's in hot water over letting Nadia fall into such disrepair and is probably losing her pissing around privileges. That said, to her we're all like trophies or chips or," Angelina twirled her finger in the air thoughtfully, "fun little toys, powerless against her manipulation. She's even reluctant to give up Tearle. It will be difficult for her to convince the archnecromancer to let her bring another dead girl in here without letting go of someone else... but I assume she's wiling to spend a few more days looking for the way."

"Then you have time to come up with something," Abby said. The other two nodded in agreement, but Tearle knew better. Angelina hadn't failed in getting her way once yet.

That night, the young priestess was still awake when the deep plummet in temperature told her that it was really early morning, but most undead had erratic sleep schedules in this plague-infested, smoggy piece of former Lordaeron. For convenience, Tearle called whenever Angelina slept "night time," and tried to mirror her rhythm, but this night she had lots of catching up to do.

She furiously scribbled more disorganized facts she'd learned about the Old Horde from Abby earlier in the week, but had neglected to put down, and then began her analysis of Saiynt. Tearle was finally ready to start a whole chapter on Nadia, but when she turned the page she was disappointed to find there weren't any more. She cursed, because this leather bound book had been so difficult to come by—the majority of death knight population in the Acherus simply did not see the value in writing any thing down, and necromancers did not part with their own books—and she could not imagine finding another.

However, on that choice word, she noticed for the first time that she could see her breath, so she grudgingly stood to bury herself under the giant pile of fur next to the sleeping Angelina, a duvet like what one would expect on a queen's bed, lest she freeze to death. Crossing the room, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, and she stopped there until her feet and shins were numb.

It wasn't shocking to see herself in the guise of a cultist anymore; it was normal, necessary. She'd finally relented and allowed Angelina to pull her hair straight, mostly because it had stopped hurting, and it was perfectly sculpted back into a severe bun that contrasted heavily with her smeared makeup. This was the flawless picture of a damned woman—just the right blend of control and savagery.

Tearle thought about what she was soon to do: curl up next to an unashamed necromancer and fall asleep. She suspected that tonight, for the first time, she would rest just fine, or at least no worse than in a strange place surrounded by the Argent Dawn. Really, besides Jaqlyn, Saiynt was the only acquaintance she did not trust not to kill her in her sleep, but they had only just met and Saiynt was sort of a special case.

She did not feel as if she was being absorbed into this lifestyle, and she had learned and reinforced the lesson that her quasi-comrades did not want to be here themselves. But somehow all the same, she'd become tentatively comfortable here. She wanted to be worried by this discovery, but she simply couldn't force it. So she put it out of her mind and climbed into bed, rubbing her limbs furiously.

Angelina rolled over, yellow lights flickering very much like candles as she fluttered her eyelashes. "Tearle, dear, you weren't writing in that silly book this whole time... were you?" she yawned.

"It's not silly. I know a hundred Argent Crusaders off the top of my head who would give their fingers for this sort of look inside the Scourge... Actually, I could probably become a millionaire off of that book's entertainment value alone."

Angelina laughed sleepily. "Don't put down anything embarrassing, please? I would just die if... ahh..." she paused to yawn again, "if anyone knew I sometimes snort when I laugh."