(2022-02-15) A Nightingale's Song

Details

Author:	Jessa
Summary:	For the prompt, what Mizzy misses that isn't a person. Well, not JUST a person. She misses singing lullabyes to the man she loves.
Rating:	T for Teen

Chain: Bizzy

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Some Gore

Mizzy rode out from Nethergard Keep without much hope. Most of the soldiers were rotating shifts down at the portal now, and the Keep itself was busy with organizing supplies and bivouacs for the increasing number of troops pouring in. So far, no one had come back through. Not even demons.

She probably shouldn't be depressed about that. She probably should be at Ironforge, where she'd told everyone she would be. But an update on the portal would be a good thing to share with everyone, right? So she should also check at the portal itself because if there was news it'd be there first! Unless there was no news, which everyone already knew, so then this whole trip would be a waste and she was probably neglecting the Company, which Ben wouldn't be proud of and then whoever came looking for Mizzy would go to Niris instead which really wouldn't make Ben happy and probably not Niris or Lord Ference either and oh dear.

She slumped lower in her saddle but loneliness kept her riding forward. Ben wouldn't be at the gate, but she couldn't stop thinking about going through to join him as she'd promised she would. Even though the guards wouldn't let her go through yet. It felt better, somehow, to be this much closer to him.

She dismounted, leaving Abbey loosely tied to a post by the wall left of the gate, then made her way back to the command tents and hovered near them but not so near that they had to acknowledge her because intruding would really be terribly rude of her even though as the temporary leader of Cobalt Company – not that anyone would believe that to look at her, she was simply too young and too… too priestessly (although people would definitely believe it of Niris, but then no one would ever really compare her to Niris because that was just laughable) – she had a right to be here.

Pretending to look at something else – oh look, a tent, so fascinating – she edged closer. Eavesdropping was also rude but it's not like she was invisible or something, therefore it was perfectly fine.

"Be easier if I didn't feel like I had to keep an eye on the damn Horde too," someone in armor grumbled.

"Easier?" a robed figure answered him, likely a mage, Mizzy thought.

"Easier," the armored one repeated. "Easier in mind and just plain easier."

"They're watching us too," noted the mage. "With all of us keeping one eye on the portal and one eye on each other, that adds up to two whole eyes on the portal. It works out."

"Demons!"

The cry comes not from the gate, but from a rider pounding over the edge of the crater, into the camp. "Demons!" he shouts repeatedly as his horse's hooves skid through dirt. "From the west, an army of them!"

Soldiers ran from tents, confusion carried around the camps as word spread from one to another. The leaders barked orders and disarray shuffled into gradual order.

"How far?"

"Not far," the courier said grimly. "Reinforcements from the Keep are-"

The rim of the crater shuddered, then was lost under a wash of demonic forms.

Mizzy shook her head rapidly and ran for the healing tents. No front-line fighter, she. Her duty lie behind the lines, healing the fallen, though at need she could defend.

For a few minutes.

Ben would say a few minutes might make all the difference.

She barely had time to garble out an explanation for her presence when the first casualties were dropped in front of her and the other priests, some staggering under their own power, some carried to be dumped by colleagues who, their burden disposed of, sprinted back to the fight.

They came and went too fast for her to truly see them; there were only wounds and blood, bared muscle and pulsing intestines. She yanked arrows out of limbs, a brush of her hands healed battered skulls, and every soldier that rose was replaced by another one that fell. Some of the skin that passed under her hands was green or blue or deepest purple. Horde and Alliance, together they fought the demons and she fought for them.

Please, she begged silently, help me help them. They hurt and bleed and I cannot help them without you.

The Light answered, serene and sure, pouring into her and out of her and into them. She spared a thought of gratitude for her recent trials in Blackrock, in the Scarlet Monastery, in Azshara that had taught her to heal only enough to tend the harm, rationing her strength because it would, without doubt, be needed.

Then, just as the sounds of fighting were dying away, as the assurances of victory rose, the next body in front of her was a corpse.

Not that she realized it, not at first. Her hand dropped into the sloppy mess of bone and blood and pieces of heart and lung, but the golden shimmer of healing went no farther than her fingertips. And, she realized, the blood was cooling.

Startled, she looked at his face. It was unmarred. That seemed unfair, somehow. Poignant, maybe. His dark eyes stared up, beginning to haze. Brown hair, a bit too long and shaggy for a soldier's precision, was rumpled, dusty, and tangled with sweat.

Ben. He looked like Ben.

Her courage, her detachment slipped away. She stroked his face, the fine stubble beneath sweat and dirt. Her fingers left trails of gummy, clotted blood behind. That offended her more than his wound did, and she lifted the hem of her healer's robes to wipe at the mess.

"Don't go," she whispered. "Not yet." Tears spilled one at a time onto his tanned face as it grew pale. It wasn't Ben. It wasn't. But she couldn't think of any prayer, any plea. When she opened her mouth, it was for a faltering song, voice cracked through sorrow and pain.

She whispered a song of a man wooing a woman, coaxing her to walk into a valley where the nightingales sang. Once, she had crept on a stage in front of Cobalt mercenaries to sing the lilting melody. Since then, she had sung it privately, just for Ben, sometimes on the nights when he spoke absently and just stared into the fire. Sometimes when she felt him next to her, tense and sleepless, awake in a night turned silent and cold, heavy with memories he wouldn't confide.

As she did for Ben, she rested the unknown soldier's head in her lap, her fingers stroking through his hair, looking down at the wrong brown eyes but so nearly the right ones.

"Nevermore she's afraid to walk in the shade or to walk in the valley below, or to lie in the valley below where to hear the fond tale of the sweet nightingale as she sings in the valley below," she sang on, husky voiced with yearning for another man's head in her lap, another set of warm brown eyes, another smile….

Smile?

She blinked.

"Don't stop," the soldier said, looking up at her. "If this is what the Shadowlands is like, I'll never want to leave."

Blushing furiously, Mizzy pushed his head away and rose quickly to her feet. "Well, I suppose you're just fine now," she said. "You should… go. Away. Out." Her hand flapped toward the camp proper.

He grinned and propped himself up on one elbow. "Fighting's over, from the sound of it," he noted. "Besides, I think my head still hurts a little."

A snort from the wide opening of the canvas that marked the temporary healers' area. "More'n your head'll hurt in a moment, lad, if yer not at yer gear an' ready t'march."

The man rose and tapped a jaunty salute at the officer in dented but fine plate. "Sorry, Cap. Can't blame a man for trying."

His captain grabbed his shoulder and, in a gesture both rough and tender, shoved him out into the brighter sunlight. "Beg pardon, miss," he said, nodding his head at her. "Some've 'em is no better'n they oughtter be, fine fighters though they are."

"It's all right," she said to his back as he marched off.

Someone handed her a warm cloth, an acolyte she realized, one she offered a smile to as she cleaned her hands, her face.

Another priest, a senior one to judge by his robes and the wrinkles on his kind face, handed her a tall mug. "You're not assigned here," he noted, "though you were certainly Light-sent."

"No," she said, sipping the sparkling juice that was more than just juice. It send energy tingling through her as she drank. "I'm with Cobalt Company."

"Ah," he said as though he understood all the nuance and hidden meaning. Perhaps he did, for he said, "I'm afraid they've not returned."

"No," Ismene replied, looking down at her mug.

"Might you join them?" he asked, nudging the mug from the bottom.

Taking the hint, she drank again. "I couldn't possibly," she said after an obedient sip. "I've responsibilities, tasks…"

"Mm. Well, I'm sure you know better than I, but it seems to me there is no task more important to Azeroth than the battle going on across that cursed portal." He looked around at the mess of the tent, at collapsed priests, even a shaman or two, and a paladin just now getting his own broken arm tended. "I'd imagine it's much like this brief skirmish, only somehow never ending. Poor bastards," he sighed, then wandered off.

She stepped out of the tent and looked toward the portal, ignoring the bonfires blazing with demon bodies. In her head, she heard again the sounds of battle but it was Cobalt she pictured in the midst of it. Cressidha and Colson back to back, Nilunelle bounding in and out of the line of battle, striking here and healing there. Auralind's calm reserve sending arrow after arrow. Gausanders flinging corrupted magic at the corrupted, setting demon upon demon. Jocoza, running too far to the front to summon frost and fire while Dane Atley bashed and felled foe after foe with brute strength and hate.

And Ben. Ben at the front with sword and shield and rage.

With them, two unknowns, two people she didn't know how to trust with these precious people, with this family.

But she had responsibilities, and, squaring her shoulders, she turned away from friends, family, and Ben, to meet them.

But not, she swore, for much longer.