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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Oranna Stormbreaker has found her new home in the library of Stormwind, and her mind turns to considering the memory of her mother, and the human priestess Niris Hazan. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
The library smelled of that peculiar scent older books had: some ineffable bridge between musk and decay that brought to mind the sweet comfort of slowly dying paper with words caught upon their pages, suspended over that chasm of eventual death for the moment, long enough at least for Oranna Stormbreaker to read them.
She was never going to leave the library. This was her home now. She'd sleep under the tables. Live in the stacks.
Or at least until the human librarians shooed her out, which she expected would happen soon. It would be for the best, as the tram at night was a bit of a frightful thing, all dark edges and unseen steps in the gloom of the tunnels. It did not help that Oranna had been reading as she walked down the now familiar roads of Stormwind.
For now, at least, she could probably get one more book started, or note the title to check out later.
She stood up from the table and stretched as high up as she could to extend her back muscles as much as possible. They rarely hurt these days, only a little stiffness from time to time if she sat too long, especially in the chairs made for humans almost two feet taller than her, but the pain of the early days was gone. She felt as though she were not a day over sixty these days. She wasn't sure if it was just that she was becoming more accustomed to the Company's physical demands, or if being around so much youth had somehow brought back some measure of her own youth by unknown means.
Well, she tried to reason with herself, not all of them so young, not for humans, despite how it seemed every time they told Oranna their age, as though forty conjured up any other sense to the dwarf than your best youthful years.
Niris had explicitly said she expected herself to be around the middle of her life, half done as it was. Oranna still was unsure what number that meant, precisely, but Sir Elohad had stressed repeatedly that to live beyond 80 was difficult, and many humans never made it that far, even without accounting for giant conquering forces from other worlds or mystical plagues spread by something as simple as poisoned grain.
Oranna walked to the bookshelf, perusing the covers, looking for something to jump out at her — figuratively, for a change. A book with a symbol Oranna had seen often associated with the night elves caught her eye, and she pulled it free, gently placing a little scrap of paper between the neighboring books to hold the place.
A book like the others she'd found: we sailed and found the dark elves, they are tall and very pretty, their eyes glow, blah blah blah. Nothing on their culture or anything about Elune. Maybe Gerhold would know what book she should try. Or perhaps it would be best to simply continue fumbling her way through with the night elves themselves, hoping they would not see her ignorance as an insult. They would at least be a better first hand authority.
Oranna closed the book with a roll of her eyes at the fifth sentence she'd read that described how "lithe and beautiful" the night elf women were without any mention of what the significance of the different facial tattoos was or how to tell the difference between a Druid and a Hunter in their society, and returned it to its proper place, thinking first of Galadhel, then of Auralind, and quite unexpectedly once more of Niris.
Although the two Kal Dorei seemed to count their ages in centuries and millenia, neither seemed quite as timeless, as permanent a fixture as Niris Hazan. No one did, not even steady Elohad. There was something unshakeable about the priestess, something that would remain, eternal, in the world long after she returned to the dust and earth of the world.
Oranna stroked a finger along the spine of a book with a brown cover that at some point in its life might have been called golden. She had seen it: that at some point Niris had once shone with a brighter light. Something had fractured it — no, shattered it.
A shadow of unimaginable pain, of heavy ghosts to carry, had sunk its fangs in deep, sprouting some terrible choking vine that twined and twisted around that unbreakable core, dimming its Light. It was so much a part of her now that there would be no way to uproot it without pain.
Oranna knew that the priestess would have seen into her own eyes and caught an echo of that shadow, of broken parts held together by sheer force of will; seen the mirror of the fear that one day, they might find their grip slipping, and their broken parts would spill out across the ground, crashing to their feet for the world to see.
Oranna felt her thumb begin to tap out a beat on the cover the book, and stilled it, pulling her hand away and crossing her arms. She stared out at the books without seeing them, her mind on another day.
The way the human woman's voice had changed when she'd spoken to Befound, in a lilt Oranna didn't quite recognize, had haunted the hunter. It was the voice of a mother, spoken in a cadence of someone else's voice, a voice that said "love" to Niris.
Oranna turned and leaned against the sturdy bookshelf, listening to the faint, ever present sounds of the guards shifting along the keep's hallways. There was never a time where they were not on guard, in their city of deep walls and narrow streets, a city built to combat a conquering force, and force them to fight at a significant disadvantage. The humans of Stormwind would never be taken by surprise again, not as they had in those first years after the Dark Portal.
The First War. She could hardly fathom it, even though she had been alive at the time. The humans had sent the message out as soon as they had been able — they would not allow anyone else to suffer as they had, facing an enemy out of something beyond their nightmares. But, no one had warned them. Someone had needed to be the first.
What must have it been like, to have been there, when it all began, when the orcs came from out of nowhere, an army like nothing ever before seen by the humans of Stormwind? To have been caught in that, to have lost everything in that; Oranna could barely stand to imagine it, the horror of it, the confirmation that there were monsters in the dark, the terrors of your mother's cautionary tales, and yes, they had come for you.
Niris had said she had been there, when they lost everything. When she had lost everything.
Oranna looked down at the floor, fighting the sorrow welling inside her at the thought, trying to hold her own ghosts at bay, as they scented the wind of her sadness.
The bridge over the mountain pass explodes in several flashes of light, spraying rock and powder into the depths below. The sound ricochets across the mountains walls, inside her head, inside her chest. She screams, adding to the cacophony. Two gnomes too close to the edge, the ones who had to be there to press the crude switches of the hastily made explosives, wobble on the edge. There is a horrible moment when it seems clear they will fall, another casualty of their mad dash to the gates, but three dwarves rush forward, grabbing the gnomes by their hands.
She just stands there, watching, helplessly. Uselessly.
Her mother's voice calls across the canyon over the sound.
"We hold! Get to Ironforge!"
Oranna gently nudged the mule of the memory back into its stall. Too old now to do more than complain, biting and kicking with ire but no real force. The last time she had ever heard her mother's voice. Her mother had never been something to Oranna as simple as love, but until that day, she had never considered how somehow there would be a world without Irona Stormbreaker in it. Even now, it felt to Oranna as though she clung to the name Stormbreaker as some way to keep her mother there, anchored in the world. Oranna, as her child, was proof that Irona Stormbreaker had lived in the world.
She wondered if her mother would have wanted to be remembered that way, to be reduced to her motherhood. Oranna suspected not, but it was all she had left to offer the dwarven woman's ghost.
The first time they had gone out as a Company, Oranna had noticed the human priestess' mothering way, and how she had called them all her ducklings with an air of someone not quite hiding the affection within the safer confines of exasperation.
It had been easy to concoct a reason why: one of those poor folks who had never found a mate, but had always wanted children, perhaps even obsessed over the thought, and yet had never managed to get them. Now, past that time of her life, she would force everyone to be a surrogate child, no matter their age or skill.
Oranna had not enjoyed it, precisely — she was not a child, and it had seemed particularly condescending coming from an unusually tall human woman — but she had not minded it terribly, as she had thought it came from kindness, however misplaced. It had been strange as well, to see the older woman as a mother, despite having nothing in common with Oranna’s actual mother.
She had seen it as a harmless affectation, of mothering those of the Company to fill some unknown hole. There had been some pity there, and some fear that Oranna was staring at her own future; Niris had seemed a cautionary tale of missed opportunities.
Oranna did not think that was what happened to Niris, not anymore.
No, she suspected they were all too alike, two opposite sides of a coin: two figures staring across a chasm of identities, bridged by a shared loss. On her side, Oranna was a child without a mother. On the other side, Niris stood, a mother without a child.
Oranna could not be sure, but she believed that at some point there had indeed been a child, and that the orcs had taken that promise, that — oh, how had Sir Elohad put it? That start of a story, and cut it short. Just a few chapters, left forever unfinished.
And yet, the mother had never been lost. Not just the life of the woman, but the aspect of motherhood itself, grafted eternally somehow into a pillar of self in that inner core, the one that would never break, never truly surrender itself to the Light. She had forged it strong enough to forever preserve what had been lost, to carry those ghosts with her into eternity itself.
In the far distance, the bells rang, only the faintest sound this deep inside the keep.
Oranna frowned in thought, picturing the Cathedral in her mind. Niris had said the Light had not come easy to her. It had been something she chose, a path she walked uphill (presumably in the snow), against the will of her family, against even her own natural inclination.
The strength it would have taken to work twice as hard for half the results of those who had been naturally talented would have been immense. Perhaps it was what now made the priestess so sure now, so grounded in her own abilities: they had not been given as an unearned blessing, and could not be taken away on the whim of some vast arcane force. She had earned them. And if the Light wanted them back, it would have to pry them out of Niris' clenched fist, and Oranna did not think even the Light would dare.
Oranna admired that with every bone in her body.
For so long, Irona had been the stick Oranna had measured herself against, failing at every turn. Not strong enough. Not brave enough. Not good enough.
Not enough.
Yet, as she stood there in the human library, when Oranna thought who she wanted to be, who it was that she wanted to become, it was not Irona and her hard as steel gray eyes, her square jaw clenched in harnessed anger, her hands ever ready to reach for her sword.
No, Oranna saw soft gold eyes, filled with compassion and the steady warmth of an ever burning hearth.
It was strange to think it of someone who had likely been born when Oranna was close to her first half-century, but she hoped with all her heart that she would be like Niris Hazan when she finished growing up.
"The library is closing, young one." Oranna looked up at the voice, a human man with the white hair of age, his eyebrows so overgrown Oranna could not see his eyes, in the robes of the library's keepers, stood looking down the rows of books at her. He had said it kindly, and the light was dim, and so Oranna let the label of assumed youth pass unchallenged.
"Of course, sir."
"Can I check anything out for you, young lady?" He asked with a smile. Oranna returned the smile with her own, but shook her head.
"No, thank you. I've been told I'm already a' the maximum." The older man chuckled in response. "Jus' here for the…" She trailed off, unsure how to say that she just wanted to keep inhaling the book air as she read.
"Ambiance?" He supplied with a knowing grin, as though he had heard her unspoken words after all. "Well, I still have a few things to tidy and sort. You're welcome to stay until I've done." She couldn't tell because of the brows, but she could have sworn he winked as he spoke, before turning and walking away from the shelves.
She wondered if Niris had ever been to the library. Maybe when the priestess had returned from her trip, Oranna would ask. She walked away from the shelves of books, moving towards the wide door, and smiled as she passed by the librarian, giving him a broad wave.
Perhaps they could see if the library ever held readings for the children of Stormwind, and could use a kind, steady voice to read the words with her golden eyes. Perhaps they would let a dwarven woman join her.