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| Details |
| Author: | Aly |
| Summary: | Jenzelle finally meets with Kaela Mondragon, the death knight who ordered her capture. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
The room was warm enough. K had made sure there was a fire in the hearth, and furs on the chair. The vrykul did not drink tea, so the table was set with milk instead. Goat milk. K couldn’t remember the difference. It would have to do. She had hung herbs in bundles around the room for a more comforting scent, but all she could smell was the ashes from the fire. For the living it was different, she had been told.
In the chair opposite the fur covered one, posture straight, hands folded in her lap, K sat. In a moment she would have to let everything in again. She would have to be Kaela Mondragon.
The vrykul who brought Jenzelle was rougher than she would have liked. The larger woman all but shoved the tiny priestess into the room, fleeing before K’s eyes could linger too long on her. Wise. K no longer had the patience for people mistreating her guests.
Jenzelle stood in the middle of the room with her back turned, unmoving. The spice of her fear overpowered even the ashen scent of the fire, and her hands trembled at her sides. But K made no moves towards her. Doing so would make it worse. She reached instead for her pack, within which was a hand-drawn map she had been working on. A map of Lordaeron, before the Scourging.
Never forget. It was almost an instinct, something strong and fierce that defied the empty chill of the day to day. The forests, the villages, the rivers and streams. She drew them in from memory, as if some part of her couldn’t bear to be without them. K allowed her attention to pull away from Jenzelle. The vrykul would catch her if she fled, and K could intercept any spells she cast.
As she traced along a certain valley, K’s hand froze over the village of Pine. How much blood had stained her hands that day? She recalled the screams which had haunted her nights, and the tears that morning brought. But Kaela had told only one person of those. And that person…
“Are you going to kill me?” Jenzelle finally spoke, turning just enough to make tentative eye contact as K looked up from her map.
“I imagine we both have some questions,” Kaela said, in a voice smooth, cold, and echoing in undeath. K hated that voice. “Have a seat?”
Jenzelle drew closer, haltingly. She didn’t want to sit, but she did. The look she wore was accusing, and K suspected she knew at least partly why she was here.
“There is milk, if you would like.” Kaela nodded to the pitcher and mug on the table closest Jenzelle. There was no need to comment on its safety. They both knew poison was not how K would kill her.
“What do you want, Kaela?” Jenzelle ignored the milk, her expression an anxious frown. “If you’re going to do something terrible, just do it already, but let Bren go! Or at least… At least let me heal him.”
“Bren?” That’s right. The report from A had mentioned a companion captured with her. “Is that short for Brendol?” That name was familiar. She had heard it on Mourn’s lips while they were serving the Lich King. Brendol was the one who had escaped with Jenzelle the night Harvey Morningdew died.
Jenzelle clamped her mouth shut defiantly.
“Very well, I will not press,” Kaela said. It was meant to sound soothing, but K no longer knew what that sounded like. Jenzelle had every right to be angry. To hate her.
Such thoughts stirred the memory of an abandoned barn deep in the Plaguelands. Kaela had chosen that location to avoid the wandering dead as she initiated her newest recruit into the Scarlet Crusade, but everything had gone so terribly wrong. Velrin. The distraught elf had called her human allies, and one of them, Evanlyn, had been out for blood.
K remembered the cold shard of ice sinking into her neck, and the words of seething hatred whispered into her ear as she struggled to breathe. That moment, that barn, had been her end. The cause of so much hatred was unknown to Kaela, but the last thing she saw as the light left her eyes was Pine. Finally. Someone killed her. For Pine.
“But,” Kaela continued, “I would like to know why I’m here.”
Guilt passed over Jenzelle’s face. “I don’t know,” she said. “Believe me, I don’t. Rae found your body, and we took you back with us to Tyr’s Hand for…for burning. I was so sure they did it. Maybe the Cult of the Damned interfered? I know there were cultists about. Alver ended up on the team trying to…” She paused. “Find them.”
Alver. A. They were broken, K knew. T, A, M, J, and herself, K. But A had been broken the worst. He was a twisted shell of the man he had been, clinging to her words as if she held his salvation.
“Now your turn. Why am I here?” Jenzelle looked ready to withdraw. To run. She didn’t want the answer, not really, but the only way to leave her nightmare was to ask and get it over with. K could almost feel her trembling as she stared defiantly at her perceived doom.
K reached into her pack again, her fingers closing around an insignia similar to the one she herself wore. Mevlin Evonshire. M. The first of them to achieve true death. It was quieter without him. She slid the insignia across the table to Jenzelle, who simply stared at it. Painful feelings constricted the priestess, and it was some time before she moved to pick it up.
“He has died again. His insignia belongs with you.” It was said in K’s best estimation of gentle, but from the horror on Jenzelle’s face, she determined it sounded nothing of the sort.
”Why?” Jenzelle asked, her voice cracking into a shrill screech. “Why did you kill them? Why did you raise them?”
“I could resist the call of the Lich King no more than any other raised in his service. My actions were not entirely my own. You must have heard about the Battle for Light’s Hope?”
“And you’re free now?” Jenzelle asked, tears springing into her eyes. “Then why aren’t you with the Ebon Blade? Why are you still working with the Scourge? The Kaela I know would never side with the Scourge.”
“The Kaela you knew would fight for Lordaeron,” Kaela said, calm despite the escalating tension. K knew she was starting to lose control of the situation. She needed a subject change. “And that is what I intend to do. But first, I have one more question.”
Jenzelle wiped her eyes on her sleeve, glaring at her. “What?”
“Our nightly meetings. Did you tell anyone about them?” K did not expect the reaction that followed.
“Are you joking? This is why I’m really here, isn’t it? You…you attacked me, you hurt someone special to me, you almost got a civilian involved, and all because of your stupid insecurities?” Jenzelle stood up quickly. Too quickly, as it happened. Her wrist hit the pitcher of milk as she rose, throwing it over onto the table in an avalanche of white.
Kaela wanted to beg forgiveness. To fall at her feet and explain the plan, her thoughts, her struggles, everything, just like she used to. But the milk spilled across the table, nothing free from its cleansing wrath, and K could only stare as the hand drawn map of Lordaeron soaked through, the ink lifting and blurring and running together into a mess of chaos, until nothing of Lordaeron remained.
“Oh no, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean for…” Jenzelle hurried over to it, and watched as even the paper fell apart in K’s hands. Hands stained like Pine. A great empty void filled K’s chest. Lordaeron would never forget. Lordaeron would never forgive.
“Kaela, I’m so, so sorry. I haven’t told anyone about the meetings, not after you died, or even after I found out you were a death knight.” Jenzelle tightly gripped her robes, feeling as sweetly guilty as if she’d just struck someone.
K stood up, and for just an instant she felt the ice mask slip away into a chasm of both pleasure and aching despair. She shook the milk and paper off her hands with a couple light flicks and slid the mask back on over the top. “If I should die again, it will be a true death,” she said. “Then, and only then, that information is free to disclose.”
Two taps on the door signaled the vrykul back in, and while Jenzelle was dragged back to her place of holding, K slipped away into the forests of the Grizzly Hills.
It was time to kill something.