Chapter Text
Sylvanas hated Lordaeron City.
She had hated it in life, when it was merely squalid, cramped, and overrun by rats and maggots of both the humanoid and animalistic varieties. And now she hated it when the city was as dead as her, completely void of any redeeming virtues, filled by the dead, the undead, and the mad schemes of its king.
It was this last that made her return. The chains around her soul wound tight and pulled her back, even though her last orders had not yet been completed. She came reluctantly, in one sense, because she had been given orders and she was a creature of discipline. In another, though, she came eagerly, desperately, because the orders had been to lay waste to the remnants of Quel’thalas, and that she could not bear.
The city had not improved in her absence. She moved through it quickly. One advantage to her spectral form was that she no longer needed to worry about the refuse of the streets or twisting an ankle on a cobblestone. She merely passed, incorporeal, from street to street until she reached the palace.
There were no guards on the gates, or anywhere else for that matter. Why bother? The only things within fifty miles were Scourge and they all answered to the monster that sat the throne in the palace.
Only, when she made it to the throne room, he wasn’t there.
Sylvanas received no more guidance from the bindings on her soul and stood there, processing. He wanted her here, in his throne room, where he could posture and gloat. But his orders ended with her arrival. They did not prevent her from departing again.
She returned to her eternal quest. Somewhere, her vile creator had hidden her body. If she could find it, she could possess it, and she knew already from experimentation that she was stronger once embodied. Those had been unfamiliar corpses, largely human, and she hoped that if it was hers...then she would be strong enough. Then she would be able to break free.
He hadn’t destroyed it, that she was sure of, not the least because periodically he liked to torture it and make her watch. It was here, somewhere, if only she could locate it.
Sylvanas worked through the throne room quickly—she was too often called here, he would never leave it there unattended—and then went to his private quarters.
She knew he was dead. She had this fact pounded into her for the first week of her enslavement, when no trick she tried accomplished anything. But he seemed to think that he could act out his former existence, play at being king, at being alive. He kept a suite of rooms, designated it his own, for no better reason than because that is what he would have done as King of Lordaeron, and he was constantly trying to be both that and the Legon’s weapon
First room was an antechamber. She passed through it quickly.
But there was noise coming from the second room, noise in this mausoleum, this necropolis, and she first halted, then diffused entirely to smoke.
It was not her detested commander, because he neither made those sorts of scrambling noises nor bothered to hide his presence. It was someone else, but there was no one else; Lordaeron had been abandoned by the living. Sylvanas floated to the door and—as smoke, a disconcerting sensation—looked through the crack.
Someone was ransacking the room, pulling out all drawers, emptying chests onto the ground—she had even dragged the bed to the side and was tapping on the floorboards, presumably looking for a hollow. That was surprising enough, because surely anyone to reach here, in the bowels of the beast, four days travel on foot from the nearest life, let alone anything safe—surely that person would be intelligent enough to not go straight for the mourneblade’s wielder.
The second surprise was in the individual: Young, human, alive. Sylvanas thought her adult as the humans measured things, and somehow she had been acquiring food, for she wasn’t as skeletal as most of the quel’dorei Sylvanas had seen recently. Her hair was blonde and messy, roughly pulled back with a hair tie, and she was wearing a blue linen dress—neat, no obvious stains or tears, but loose and only approximately fitted to her size.
Sylvanas let herself billow through the crack and took her proper form in the bedroom. No longer herself, only vaguely recognizable as a quel’dorei: Elongated, distorted, faintly blurred at the edges where she lost control of the shape again. Her skin purpled and bruised, her hair ashen and limp, her eyes red. “What are you doing here?”
The woman flinched, dropping the shirts in her hands, but recovered quickly. “Hello! Have you seen a seal skin?”
Whatever Sylvanas had thought to expect—the world’s stupidest thief, perhaps, or too-little too-late evidence of Alliance support—it was not this. “What?”
“A seal skin,” the woman repeated, as if this made any sense at all.
Sylvanas stared at her, before deciding this was a waste of time. Better just to kill the woman and have done with her. It would be better for the woman to die now than to wait for the demented one’s return and die instead at his request. And every minute lost here was a minute better spent looking for her body.
The woman held up both hands when she started moving. “Wait!” she said in Common, and then in passable if heavily accented Zandali, “You seeing...skin of a ocean dog?”
“Seal,” Sylvanas said in Zandali, and in Common, “I understood the question the first time.”
“Oh good,” the woman said, relaxing and lowering her hands—foolish of her, although not like her combat skills, if any, would be able to deter a Banshee. “Zandali is not my favorite. Still, the question is simple enough, if you would.”
Sylvanas stopped her advance, interested in spite of herself. “The question is insane. We are hundreds of miles from the ocean.”
For the first time, the woman looked anything other than determined and vaguely chipper. “I am well aware of that. Please—have you seen one?”
“No.” Sylvanas moved on her again, stretching one arm out. “You should not have come here, human. Did they not tell you there are monsters now in Lordaeron?”
This close, the woman’s eyes were a piercing blue, her nose small, her cheeks covered in freckles. There was a bitter cast to her smile as she said, “They did. Unfortunately I had no other choice.”
Sylvanas could sympathize, although it still wouldn’t save either of them. They were both dead and damned, and the least she could do now was make it painless.
And then the chains around her went taut again, and she curled up, choking on nothing, until the pressure relented and she could stand straight once more.
Arthas Menethil had arrived.
He looked between them both, and smiled—a disjointed thing, the muscles not responding smoothly. “I see the two of you have met. Good. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
The woman sat on the bed and put one leg over the other. “Arthas. I was hoping you might have gotten lost.” Her tone strongly implied she would prefer he dropped dead and properly this time.
“Jaina...” His expression slipped. Months of uncomfortable experience let Sylvanas read the new emotion as somewhere between disappointment and anger. “You shouldn’t speak of your husband that way.”
And Sylvanas wanted to be gone from here, dissipate into smoke and flee, because she recognized that name and she had a horrible foreboding about what was going to happen next.
This woman, who for still unexplained reasons was looking for a seal skin, was Jaina Proudmoore; apprentice to Archmage Antonidas, heir to Kul Tiras, and Arthas Menethil’s future—or apparently current—wife. Sylvanas knew enough of Arthas now, knew his whims and moods, knew his responses to the smallest slight, to know that he would not take his wife’s disdain gently.
“Banshee.” Arthas turned his cold gaze on her. “What are you doing here?”
Sylvanas could, at least, match coldness with banked rage. “Looking for you. Sire.” The consequences for using his name had been memorable, but he had yet to force her to be respectful on any level but the surface.
Jaina said, “Does she have a name, or just a species?”
“As she answers to it well enough, why bother?” Arthas turned his back on her as Sylvanas fought again, pointlessly, the bonds which kept her from slicing his throat to the bone. “She’ll be in charge of your safety shortly. I have a new mission.”
Jaina leaned forward. “And when I am supervised by one person day and night, I am not to call her by name?”
Sylvanas wanted to warn her, to tell her she was taunting someone who could work unimaginable cruelties, that there would be horrific consequences to this, but drawing attention to herself would only make the situation worse. Jaina was alive, Jaina was mortal, Jaina could bleed—but Jaina was not Sylvanas, and for some reason Arthas had, clearly, left Jaina alive.
Arthas looked down on her. “Dress off. Perform your duties.”
And Sylvanas could not leave. He had not given her permission, and she was still under orders to report to him. “Sire,” she said, a croak, her tormented voice a husk of itself. She did not want to watch this. She could not watch this.
“I did not forget you, Sylvanas,” he said, not turning around—and oh, the name was deliberate, Jaina’s head snapped up and horror twisted her expression. “You will remain and watch.”
Jaina hissed, “You keep finding new lows.”
In a flash, Arthas had her neck in his hand, yanking her off the bed. “I am the king and you will respect me!”
Jaina swung her hand at his wrist, scratching at it, but the strength disparity was too great, and her efforts went for nothing. Instead, through gritted teeth she spat, “You are not the man I fell in love with.”
Arthas threw her back on the bed. “Banshee, undress her.” He was heaving breaths he no longer needed; wiping spittle off his mouth with the back of his hand. “She needs to learn her place.”
Sylvanas could not disobey. Her form was moving without her permission, spectral fingers reaching for Jaina—who scrambled backward, lips curling back to bare dull teeth. But Jaina was human and slow, Sylvanas dead and fast, and—and—and—
Something was undoing the lacing on the dress. Something was holding Jaina down by the shoulders. Something was pulling the dress off Jaina’s resisting body. Something, which had Sylvanas’s rotten hands and Sylvanas’s unnatural strength and Sylvanas’s military precision. But it was not Sylvanas, because Sylvanas had locked herself away again, screaming silently in her mind.
While that was happening, Arthas was stripping down efficiently, letting his armor fall on the floor. “Enough, Sylvanas.”
She stopped. She drifted away, unable to focus enough to move like a living being. She stared compulsively, as if watching it happen to someone else would—what, would allow her to understand what it meant when Arthas did this to her body, not letting her approach it? She didn’t know what it meant. Sometimes she didn’t know anything.
Jaina hadn’t stopped fighting, but her dress was off—had Sylvanas done that?—her shift pulled up around her armpits, her smallclothes removed entirely. She was making low, growling noises like a dog, scrabbling at the bed, trying to get a knee up.
Arthas punched her in the gut, and Jaina doubled up, groaning. He forced her legs open and—
Sylvanas had been wrong. There was nothing to be learned here. She could gain nothing from the way Jaina collapsed completely, or how Arthas became suddenly loving, kissing the side of her neck. Watching him thrust passionately into her would not give her any strategic advantages.
But she could not leave.
So she stared at a corner, wishing she could breathe, wishing she could vomit, anything to block out knowledge of what was happening on the bed, until Arthas finally stood and began putting his armor back on.
“Keep an eye on her,” he said, the tone digging hooks into her, ensuring her obedience. “I’ll summon you when I have your next orders.”
Sylvanas gave a low, mocking bow and no reply.
He left the room, the door slamming behind him.
The woman on the bed immediately curled up, legs clenching together, arms around her own chest. She was heaving breaths in, not quite sobbing, and otherwise completely silent. It was impossible to forget that she was the only thing in the palace—perhaps the only thing in the city—still breathing. She was alive, and she was damaged from it, and Sylvanas was torn between hate and pity.
What she could not do, though, was look away.
Keep an eye on her. Ah.
Jaina Proudmoore. Sylvanas fished details out of her memory like rocks from the bottom of a stream. Despite her age and ongoing—perhaps no longer—apprenticeship, she was one of Vereesa’s friends in Dalaran. She became heir to Kul Tiras after her brother was killed in the Second War; this hadn’t stopped her from attending Dalaran and apprenticing to Antonidas. Vereesa was impressed with her, and Vereesa—for all her other flaws—was not easily impressed.
Sylvanas no longer hoped for very much, but she hoped, with every wisp that made up her being, that Vereesa was still alive.
And Jaina had become engaged to Arthas young, a love match: presumably it was no longer. Sylvanas remembered some boring invitation to some tedious event—that she had wiggled out of—and Kael’thas’s disappointment that Jaina would be enthralled by Lordaeron’s heir and not by him. One of the rare times when Kael’thas would have been the better choice.
All in all it was not much to go on.
From the bed, face tucked into a pillow, Jaina said, “Could you pretend not to stare?”
Sylvanas flinched—did not want to but did regardless. “I cannot,” she said, low and quiet. She could not do soft, not anymore, but she could at least manage to avoid overtly threatening. “I must obey his instructions.”
Jaina held very still for a moment, then looked out at Sylvanas with one eye. “You must obey,” she repeated, not doubtfully, but pondering. “But otherwise you have free will?”
“A funny way to put it.” She couldn’t keep the quip in; it seemed her self-control remained with her body, or perhaps in the dust outside Silvermoon. It was truth regardless: She was independent, she retained her intellect, but with that bastard able to give her commands with a thought, his precise phrasing capable of overriding all sense...’free will’ seemed a stretch.
Jaina sighed, deep and ragged. “I understand.”
The funny thing was that Sylvanas thought she might.
They remained in silence for a while, although it was clear that Jaina was struggling with something. Finally she said, roughly into the pillow, “I want to bathe.”
Sylvanas knew, horribly, the distinction between being nude and being naked, how laying in that bed with a dress half on was more obscene and humiliating than being completely unclothed in a bathtub. “I must watch,” she said regardless.
Jaina grunted, trying to push herself to a sitting position. Her arms trembled; she fell back into the mattress. “He kept running water to this suite. And mine.” Another attempt, this one successful. Jaina looked down at the dress, and roughly pulled it over her chest.
Some faint surprise must have showed itself in Sylvanas’s face, because Jaina said, “Of course I have my own suite.” Her tone was so exasperated it was impossible to take offense. “The queen of Lordaeron must have her own rooms, as a statement of her importance.” She swung her legs onto the floor, knees shaking. How many times had she done this alone, unaided? Sylvanas had not been back to the capital for over a month, had not seen Arthas for weeks—was it every night, or just occasionally? “But his bath is closer, and it’s not like he uses it.”
Not intentionally, Sylvanas moved to take Jaina’s hand, support her as she stood up. And if it was odd to touch the living with this form, smoke slightly bleeding into Jaina’s skin, Sylvanas profoundly aware of how easy it would be to possess her—surely it was all the odder for Jaina to touch her back, for all that she did not flinch away.
Sylvanas had never used it, but had an approximate idea where the bath was. They made their way there slowly, Jaina pausing once to cover her face with her free hand and shake unsteadily. Once in the bathroom, Jaina turned the hot water tap on full, and fell to her knees beside the tub.
“It wouldn’t’ve mattered, before, if he’d kept the water running or not,” she said to her hands.
Sylvanas was unclear if this required a response. She kept her gaze fixed on the back of Jaina’s head, not letting it dip lower.
Jaina raised a hand and laboriously drew a glyph in midair. It took a moment—Sylvanas, dead, robbed of most of her senses, could still tell that something was awry here—and then a wavering globe of water condensed from the air and splashed into the tub. Enough to fill a bucket, perhaps, and no more. “Not worthy of the Kirin Tor now, am I,” Jaina said with a dark laugh.
From the back, a safe angle, Jaina looked lean, not starved, better muscled than Sylvanas had expected from a mage—and with varicolored bruises across her shoulders and ribs. Nothing lower, nothing across the kidneys—should she be grateful?—but Arthas’s anger, it seemed, extended to his bride.
“Do you want to know a secret?” Jaina asked, looking up at Sylvanas—eyes red-rimmed, face hard and desperate. A woman looking for control, in any format, even if it was only the choice of when and how the pain would come.
Sylvanas rarely had wanted anything less. The questions Jaina raised—how had Arthas captured her, why was she remaining here, she surely had the skills to portal away—were trivial in the face of the violence enacted upon her. Sylvanas had been forced to bare her soul to an enemy. She would not do the same to another.
Jaina heaved herself upright using the tub; Sylvanas almost came forward to help her. Almost. Not quite. “Well. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but surely that didn’t apply to my betrothed. It can’t matter now, he already knows.” Another of those dark laughs, a knife Jaina was inflicting on herself.
Once, Sylvanas had had reflexive actions she could take when stuck with no appropriate response: Dig her fingers into her palms, shift weight, count her breaths. Now she had none of that, and all she could do was watch as Jaina all but fell into the tub with a splash.
For a long moment Jaina’s head remained under the water. Long—and then too long, Sylvanas counting the seconds, this was more than normal, forty, fifty seconds, possible yes, but there was something wrong—
Sylvanas lunged for her, unclear why but not willing to let Jaina die here, now, and Jaina burst from the water, laughing—laughing, not untroubled but joyous.
“Katherine Proudmoore is my land-mother,” Jaina said, wiping water from her face. Her whole bearing was lighter, younger—what was she, twenty years? If that. “The Tidemother bore me, and I cannot drown.”
Sylvanas hoped that her form, her expression showed her confusion. She had heard of the Tidemother only as a regional deity worshiped in Kul Tiras, nothing more.
Jaina ran her fingers through the water, leaving trails of steam behind. “Parlor tricks,” she said, as if this explained anything. “She came out of the water with me in her arms, a babe wrapped in seal-skin, and handed me to my father.”
Personally, Sylvanas rather suspected that Daelin Proudmoore had had some indiscretions and been startlingly successful at covering them up.
Maybe Jaina saw this in her face somehow, or perhaps she thought it a likely issue with her story, because she said, “Katherine didn’t believe him at first, until the first time I turned into a seal to get out of my crib.”
Sylvanas made a startled noise, wondering in spite of herself—because absolutely, Jaina could lie, she could tell Sylvanas absolutely anything and Sylvanas would have no way to verify it, but why. What would be the point now in making such things up?
And there were some other things: The water, the way Jaina growled, the half-feral look in her eyes as she watched Sylvanas. The desperation from the start, her need to find a seal skin, otherwise an insane quest.
“They call me daughter of the sea,” Jaina said, leaning back in the tub until the water covered her shoulders. “Some of them know it’s the truth. But only with the skin. Without it, I’m not even a very good mage.”
Sylvanas—thought. She thought how much of a coincidence it was, that they were both searching for something Arthas had stolen. She thought how fascinating it was that the story seemed designed to tug on her dead heartstrings. She thought how little she wanted to be the monster he had turned her into. She thought how much she needed an ally, someone who could move more freely around the city.
She said: “Why are you telling me this?”
Jaina stood, water streaming off her body, her eyes ocean-colored, grey-blue and varied, blue towards the pupil and grey near the white. Sylvanas hastily yanked her gaze upwards. “There is no risk,” she said calmly—tone old, dry and cynical. “I have told you nothing I have not already told Arthas. But I know what he chose to do with it.”
There was no need to speak the question. Sylvanas could hear it quite clearly, ringing in her ears, the non-existent ears, the ear-shapes she had formed from smoke and stubbornness.
What will you do with it?
Sylvanas looked her in the eyes—and hers were red, unquestionably cursed, gaping wounds that showed to all what a horror she now was. “He stole my body,” she said, losing control of her voice, the Banshee wail sneaking into it. “I could break free, if I had it.”
Jaina smiled—or bared teeth, Sylvanas didn’t know seals but she did know lynxes and wolves, and this was a threat display by an animal trapped in a corner, nothing left to lose. “How unfortunate for him.”