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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | In the culmination of the world's combined elite armies to destroy Arthas Menethil, the Lich King, one unusual family fights at the front, but not alone and not without help. Combat RP of the ICC Raid. Contains details from Lana'thel, Sindragosa, Putricide, and the aftermath of the final fight's consequences. 10,400~ words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: Icecrown Citadel
Lana'Thel
The sides are unbalanced in this dark, red-tapestried room, with a small army against one undead woman. Even so, the Blood Queen Lana'thel does not seem outmatched. A dark power permeates the room, gnawing at the attackers, while Lana'thel herself moves quickly, felling attackers with slashes of her blade as well as bursts of shadow magic.
Aze, usually herself relegated to the shadows, wields the blessed blade Quel'delar and is among those leading the attack against a woman she once counted as a friend. Aze matches her speed, but relies only on her own combat skill, with no leakage of fel around the legendary weapon. Still, her own skill is considerable.
Roper fights along the edges, guarding Aze's back from attack, ignoring the shadow damage sent his way with an almost dismissively employed anti-magic shell. His armor drips with blood with every step, what still remains of the slaughter of the Blood Halls, and what he carves out anew to fuel his own healing.
Syarra, her own armor as gory as her husbands, fights along by his side. For now she has only one ghoul and a gargoyle following her direction, but she keeps her eyes on her sister.
Syarra isn't paying attention to the pink-haired gnomish mage who shimmers with fire and then lays into Lana'thel with reckless abandon, the roaring of the fireballs almost covering up his gleeful giggle. It doesn't last long, though, as Lana'thel moves to him in a flash, and instead he cries in pain as her teeth sink into his flesh. Syarra grits her teeth and keeps her attention away from the injured soldier, so she doesn't see what happens next.
Roper's helm moves enough to make it obvious he's noticed the san'layn's attack on the mage, but that seems like that's someone else's problem. Roper's got his own, dealing with the queen's minions.
Aze seems to have decided it's her problem, as she dashing after Lana'thel unnaturally fast, leaving just the faintest trace of fel. Darkness falls around her, obscuring her from view, before she launches herself into Lana'thel blade first. It's a strike, but not a kill. The san'layn makes a sound of rage and turns her attention back to Aze.
In the meantime, the pink-haired mage grins, heedless of the blood dripping down his neck. His fire has grown only more powerful, maybe like the bite has given him a sudden second wind.
Surely nothing bad could be happening. Maybe Lana'thel is a nice person providing nice buffs to people trying to kill her. It could be true.
Seems unlikely, and Roper is too paranoid to ever believe it. "Fuck," he mutters, as he puts on his own burst of speed reminiscent of another life and another skill set, pushing towards Aze and the gnome mage, his attention more on the bitten victim now than the san'layn herself. She did something to the guy, and if he's still standing, and not dying painfully, Roper wants to know why.
The mage is having a good day, a very good day! Right up until he is suddenly not. His eyes sharpen with a sudden frenzy. Without hesitation, he launches himself at one of the front-line paladins, a woman who also followed Lana'thel in her movement across the room. His tiny teeth sink into flesh at a joint in the armor behind the paladin's knee, and she shouts in bewildered pain as she shakes him loose.
Syarra is still some distance away, but she frowns and sends her ghoul and gargoyle in to assist.
Roper is not surprised at this turn of events, but only because he assumes the worst all the time.
"Fuck! Don't let her bite you!" He shouts it loud enough to be overheard by those nearby, but the warning is only partially correct. It's no longer just Lana'thel they need to worry about.
As the mage recovers from his sudden extreme craving, dazed for the fraction of a second that a gnome can be surprised at anything before they assimilate this new data, he resumes his fireball onslaught. Ha ha! Maybe he just needed to get it out of his system!
Roper focuses on keeping himself between Aze and anything trying for her flank while she dances with Lana'thel, watching both the paladin and the mage now.
Meanwhile, the paladin with the tiny gnome bite teeth marks in her leg grits her teeth and employs her will power, even as time goes on, and those stirrings begin. She will not succumb to this temptation!
And she is correct. When she doesn't give into that urge to bite, she doesn't succumb to that hunger; she succumbs to Lana'thel herself, as her will is leashed to the san'layn. She turns on her former comrades, not to bite them now, but to wield the full range of her skills of the Light against them.
Across the room, blinked to safe positioning, the gnome fire mage doesn't bother with will power. He gets the urge to bite, he bites. And, importantly, he retains his sanity.
"The fuck," Roper mutters, as he tries to parse the pattern through the chaos of the fight.
Aze is entirely focused on Lana'thel, weaving to dodge her attacks and striking at her when she can. Those afflicted by the bite continue to spread, until one of the human mages blinks to Aze's side and leans in for a ravenous bite. Aze is not expecting an attack from an ally, and she reacts a moment too late, shoving the man away. He mumbles an apology and stumbles away, returning to the fight.
Lana'thel laughs at the look on Aze's face, and then she spins away to focus on other attackers, content to wait for Aze to fall under her control. Aze raises a hand to her shallow wound, confused. She mouths, poison?
Roper pauses only to swap a runeblade out of his hand long enough to claw his helm off, dropped to the ground. It exposes enough of his neck to form a vulnerability in his armor.
"Fuck," he says, with enough emphasis to contort his expression. "You need to bite someone. If you don't, she has you. Anyone who keeps biting, stays sane. It's not instant. I just don't know how much time you have!" He shouts the last, as he swaps his sword back just barely in time to catch a former ally's strike coming at him. The young human man dressed in light cloth gets a punishing kick to the abdomen that forces him to double over long enough for chains of black ice to swarm upwards from the shadows and hold him fast.
"Fucking san'layn," Aze snarls, but she seems to take Roper at his word. Uncertain of the timing, she falls back toward Roper, leaving others to fully occupy her former acquaintance's attention. Syarra starts to move over toward the two of them, watching to see what will happen.
A moment later, a rather harried looking gnomish mage with twin hair buns blinks to the group. "I heard. Bit?" Jo Sparkwire glances over Roper and Aze and nods. "It's one minute. One minute and then be ready to pass it on."
Roper looks at Jo, and something relaxes slightly in the snarled tension on his face. Information, sweet, sweet information. Roper loves information. Information is how you control a situation. "One minute." A beat. "Thanks." He sweeps the room with a look.
"Shit. How far has it spread? Every minute, every person a bite, or a fucking tool." The human man he caught in the chains struggles free, while Roper tries to gauge how many have been bitten. There's too much chaos to be sure, but Roper has never needed an exact number to make a leap. "We're running out of time."
"Further than I'd like," Jo says, taking a step back and making a quick gesture. The turned ally in the ice chains is suddenly a little pig, oinking in confusion. "There should be less tools, now the the word's been spread."
"We need to kill her quickly," Aze says, touching a hand to her wound again.
"Next you'll tell me it needs to be painless," Roper drawls, but the attempt at a joke seems to be a reflexive response to the crisis more than an actual death knight awfulness. His expression is tense, and he turns to launch an ice dart of disease at Lana'thel, trying to burrow into her flesh long enough to infect her, slow her down.
Jo eyes the two death knights and bites her lip. Then she adds, "Just be careful. We could really do without your kind turning on us. I mean, getting turned… you know what I mean."
"Yeah, they've got it," Aze snaps irritably, and then flinches. Her voice takes on a faint shade of fear when she then says, "Right, so that's… that's one minute. I can't… Roper?"
Syarra glances at them, decides the three of them have it under control, and sets a roiling puddle of death and decay beneath Lana'thel.
"Yeah. Do it." Roper deliberately tilts his neck, exposing it fully. "If we don't get her down in time, I'll get Syarra, and you'll get…" Roper looks down at Jo, his eyes unblinking and glowing with a burning blue flame. "Someone." There's an implied option there. He isn't ordering the Captain of Cobalt Company to stay, but he's warning her that if she does, she'll be in the line of succession of the bite while they try to kill the san'layn in time.
Jo glances to the two of them, to the little pig, and then she nods. She backs away only a few paces and turns her attention back to Lana'thel as fire shimmers over her form again.
Aze doesn't hesitate any longer - one minute, sure, but who can say how long it takes to lose yourself after that. She also doesn't bother to try to be nice about it, just sinks her teeth into the dead flesh, and then pulls away, her fear replaced with a faint look of revulsion.
"No offense," Aze mutters, "But you're my brother-in-law, and I'm not really into biting."
"No offense, but you're my sister-in-law, and your bite game is fucking weak compared to your sister's," Roper drawls back, as the ice rolls over him, encasing him in a defensive protection, and the burn of his eyes grows. He wastes a second or two looking down at his runeswords. They have started to smoke, as if they're on fire, and he laughs a harsh ha of a sound. "Well, fucking look at that. It does something. Power. Use it."
There's an accompanying howl of a shrieking wind of black shards of ice that crashes into Lana'thel and her minions.
"Don't have to tell me twice," Aze says with a grin, flush with vampiric power, the ever-present fel, and quel'delar. As she turns to launch back into the fight, she adds, as a reminder for him, her or both of them. "One minute!"
Lana'thel glances sharply back at Aze as she strikes at her again, with renewed force. There is recognition there, but no sign of fondness. This Lana'thel has no real interest in Aze except as a creature to dominate.
Roper pulls a minion to him, impaling the creature on a runeblade, and there's a death rattling exhale from the death knight as the disease spreads out, a virulent strain of ice born on the air.
In that minute, it becomes clearer that the united forces are starting to win, as more and more focus their powers onto Lana'thel.
But then it ebbs again as the controlled break free to attack their allies, and precious time is lost restraining them all once more. A single minute won't be long enough to take down the san'layn queen.
When it's time for the biting to happen again, it's obvious. It's simultaneous over the battlefield. Syarra has never been one to miss the obvious. She draws off her own helm the moment before it hits everyone. She doesn't go to help her sister, though. She goes to Roper, stepping into his personal space in clear invitation, though she doesn't speak.
Roper doesn't immediately stop what he's doing, like he can't for a second or two, precious time ticking down, caught up in the battlemania, but he does. He's panting, like a man who needs to breathe, and his eyes are wild, frost covering him. There's a moment where Syarra can see him trying to keep control — and then it's gone, as he grabs onto her, his gauntlet's sharp points piercing the skin of her scalp as he fists her hair, jerks her head to the side, and strikes in with a bite.
It's much too hard, enough to make a crunching sound as his jaws snap down with undead strength.
Syarra grits her teeth against crying out from the pain, and strikes at his center of mass with one armored knee. For a moment, it looks like she might try to twist him off balance, ripping his teeth out of her flesh and raking the saronite across her scalp, but then her reason recovers enough for her to stay still and let him react.
Roper pulls off her neck, and lets her hair go in the same motion, doubling over. He breathes out, eyes half closing in a soft, strangely dreamy expression before he sharpens again. The look in his eyes as he drags them to Syarra's is almost an apology. "One minute," he rasps.
Syarra's wounds are already starting to heal, the sharp, sweet sense of pain fading as the magic takes hold and strengthens her. She starts to reach one hand towards Roper with a cold smile, and then grits her teeth and turns back towards Lana'thel instead. She nods and repeats, "One minute. If we haven't killed her yet, I'll find someone."
She stalks back towards the Blood Queen.
At the same time this is happening, Aze realizes her own minute of power is up. She vaults back from Lana'thel, turning to try to find that tiny mage who seemed friendly. There are… a lot of people. It is not easy to tell who's been bitten and who hasn't.
Mordecai comes rushing forward, surrounded by a shield of shimmering Light that he dismisses once he gets close enough to touch. He's counting, loudly. "Eleven. Ten. Nine. Aze. Seven. Six." He fumbles with the sleeve of his robe, pulling it back, and offers his arm out to her. "Five."
"Mordecai?" Aze asks, taking a step back. "No. You're a healer, I'm supposed to protec…" And then time is up. Aze grits her teeth against sudden urge to bite.
Mordecai shoves his arm at Aze's face, yelling, "Four! Three!" He looks frantic.
"For fuck's sake, Aze! Bite him! You're not her fucking tool!" Roper shouts, echoes in his voice, shadows gathering around him.
That's enough to push her over the edge. She grabs his wrist and sinks her teeth into his forearm, drawing blood. Then the relief sets in and she lets him go, wiping the blood off lips that tighten with obvious guilt. "Did I hurt you?"
Mordecai winces, but the wound has already begun to heal, courtesy of a renewing spell that is already active on him. "Much less than you would have as her puppet," he says with a weak smile. "Focus, Aze. I'll be fine. Fifty-three. Count. Fifty-one."
"Focus," Aze repeats, and she moves back into a fighting position, Quel'delar at the ready. There are enough different sources of power flowing through her at the moment that focus might be difficult to achieve. She aims for ferocity, instead, and leaps back into the fray.
Mordecai quickly disappears back into the crowd.
The seconds tick down another minute, and the fight against Lana'thel continues.
The fight is starting to turn against the combined fighters, as those who must bite fail to find an unbitten target in time, causing more and more to turn under Lana'thel's power.
Roper's chains of ice hold one such person, caught and slowed, and the death knight curses, loudly and emphatically. Around them are at most two that he is reasonably certain are unbitten. He points at one. "Syarra — that one!" He shifts his runeblade point to Jo. And this time, he doesn't ask permission, and he doesn't warn. "Captain — to her!" He directs the runeblade to Aze. He doesn't wait for confirmation or agreement.
He doesn't even remember to say please, gosh.
And then Roper leaves his position, searching through the crowd with a death knight's senses, looking for someone, anyone, who doesn't seem to be in pain, and even better, someone he knows who probably won't kill him for biting him.
Lena Coit is standing near the back, avoiding the worst of the blood queen's attacks while she weaves fel fire and shadow into the air and sends them her way. Shadow shimmers around her, the workings of a ward of protection.
Roper's attention zeroes in on her. She has no pain to her, which means she's both been very lucky so far, and that her luck has now run out. He sprints at her, an alarming movement of a charge. Given how many former allies have suddenly turned, it is not the best battlefield tactical choice.
Lena notices the charge, and she pauses in her next weaving of shadow and twists it a different way, shifting to aim it at Roper. He has maybe a second to clarify he's not a blood queen minion.
"I'm not one of her tools!" He shouts, his hands coming up in that gesture he makes, of surrender. It's automatic, and would be probably more effective if he wasn't still holding his runeblades, but it might still get the job done. "I need to bite someone, and you're unbitten," he says, his words quick and clipped.
Lena huffs a low sigh and the shadow dissipates. "There's a lot of other someones around here."
"But how many will let someone like me bite them, and not fucking use it against me later, not trust that I'm not doing it because I want to?" Roper counters, stepping in closer, dropping down his weapons. "I have about fifteen seconds left, maybe less. Aze has hers. Syarra has hers. And now I'm by you, and I gotta get someone. If I turn here, I'm right by you and a bunch of people without armor, and neither you or me want me trying to kill you or them."
Lena clenches her fist, glancing over at the other casters nearby, and then reluctantly nods.
"If she's not dead in a minute and I lose my mind, you might not think this was such a great idea," Lena says, but she does step closer and raises her hands in front of her chest. She doesn't seem exactly sure what body part to offer.
"If she's not dead in a minute, we're both fucked and fucking people up," Roper counters.
Luckily for Lena, she's not wearing plate armor, and there's a lot of options. In this case, Roper's choice is to swap a runeblade to hold in his other hand, reach out to grab her arm, and extend it out. He doesn't go for the wrist — he goes for a meaty part of her forearm, one of the least painful places to get a puncture wound. He's learned his lesson from Syarra about both waiting too long, and biting too hard. This is not as severe a bite, even if it's a full a one, a clenching down on the muscle of her arm.
It still hurts, and Roper does not immediately release her.
Lena lets him take her arm, and makes a small kind of mmph sound of pain when the bite happens. Then she inhales as the power flows in.
"Okay, let's kill her. I better not regret this," Lena says, trying to pull her arm away.
Roper unclenches his jaw, and without his helm, she can see the fight on his face. A part of him that wants to keep biting, who wants to do worse harm, break her arm, anything for more pain.
But there's still another part of him. "You and me both," he says, and there's echoes, but he lets her go. "5 gold says she's down in 45 seconds or less, just because we're that pissed off."
"Why not?" Lena says, watching him warily as she curls her injured arm in at her chest. "5 gold, I'll take it. 45 to 60 seconds I win, more than 60 we all lose."
"Fuck, I hate gambling," Roper drawls, with a strange, off-kilter sort of humor. But it seems to steady him, refocus him away from Lena's pain, and that might be all that matters in the end. Sometimes, you just have to take the bet.
In the end, Roper loses his 5g, but Lana'thel loses her existence, so in some ways they're all winners. Lena just slightly more than most, and 5g richer.
Sindragosa
The fight against the risen once-consort of the Aspect of the Blue Dragonflight is not going well by any standard.
There are more than a few bodies on the ground, many of them mages, lost to their own power turned against them in backlash, and others lost to the freezing breath.
One of those bodies still upright because honestly, the cold doesn't bother him anyway, is Roper, finding himself unable to be of much use against the giant bone dragon. Sure, he isn't freezing to death, but his ice attacks aren't exactly doing much damage to the dragon either. At least he's learned the lesson of the tail.
Lena Coit is there as well, with the Cobalt contingent. She flinches now every time she flings a bolt of fire or shadow, uncertain as to whether this time, it will blow back on her. Her hair is straggling out of its battle bun, and her face is pale from exhaustion and repeated injury and healing. She is running low on soul shards, having had to pull Traajhom back from the Nether several times, as well as create a number of healthstones.
Then Sindragosa takes to the air, and Lena makes a sound of frustration as she draws out of range.
No hands of shadows reach out to try to pull her back down into range — it has been tried, by more than just Roper, to no avail.
The death knight, like many of his order, makes attempts at tossing out twisting shadows, but few land at all, and Roper's is not one of them.
Sindragosa has limited maneuverability, and limited time she can remain aloft, but the beating of her wings blow heroes back, and she breathes out concentrated freezing ice.
Lena glances at the mages clustered near her, but they don't seem to have the range to get at the dragon either. Before she turns back to the dragon, the ice hits. Lena is frozen in solid ice, and this time it splashes to freeze the others near her. At first, her expression is something like not this again, but a moment later it shifts to panic. This time, she can't breathe.
Sindragosa's breath rolls out in a dangerous blasting mist, and Roper has learned his lesson on this chill — he might not feel the damage of the cold, but his corpse can still get frozen to things, and the metal of his armor only resists the freeze so far before the enchantment cannot halt it any further.
Roper skids across the ice to one of the others near Lena, a sickly green magic shell pulsing around him as he waits out the blast, in the relative cover of the frozen living. His helm is still gone — lost in the chaos of the san'layn queen — and his jaw is clenched hard.
The seconds tick by.
The ice remains in place.
It takes Roper only a few seconds to realize what is happening, the sense of fear and pain, and his attention goes to Lena's ice cube.
Lena would explain what's happening, but she can't move or speak. She tenses, trying to push against the ice, but it only hastens the suffocation.
The people around Roper are starting to run out of time. They're freezing to death and suffocating within the ice. Lena is not the closest one to him — in fact, she's on the farther side.
And so it is obvious when Roper weighs it, and chooses: he sprints to Lena's iceblock. A howling blast chips away at the ice while the death knight uses his runeblades against it with undead strength. The saronite blades hold out against the ice, although the edges start to dull.
One of the others in the ice dies behind Roper, succumbing to the ice.
Roper keeps at Lena's block. The ice is thinning, and breaking, loosening. The death knight knows his blocks; he knows when to stop hitting it with his swords, and kicks it instead, a hard front strike that dislodges the last of the ice from its constrictor hold on Lena.
The ice shatters. Lena draws in a deep, shuddering breath, tumbling towards Roper. Given his spiky saronite armor, this is very much not a good idea. Lena realizes this more quickly than she can physically react. She's still holding her right hand towards the death knight as if to catch herself when her knees buckle beneath her.
In a reversal, ice snaps over Roper — but this is intentional, and under his control, forming over the spikes of his gauntled hands, as he steps into Lena, catching her right hand in his left, and the other under the opposite arm, his runeblades clattering temporarily to the icy floor at his feet. His hands are freezing cold — though how different that feels after the ice tomb is possibly relative — but oddly steadying. He knows what her balance should be, and he rights her to hold her up with that same undead strength.
"If you wanted to go dancing, you just had to ask," Roper drawls, that sharpness in his eyes, the twist in his smile. The positioning is oddly similar to a dance, with Roper as the lead.
It takes a few heartbeats for Lena to find her breath and her balance. Then she pulls her hand from his, and steps back. The shiver that runs through her might seem like a reaction against Roper, but then again she was just encased in ice. There's a moment when she draws herself up, her usual composure flowing over the panic and the fear, and she smiles, though there's still a wariness in her eyes.
"Maybe sometime when a frostwyrm isn't trying to kill us all," Lena says dryly. "The music doesn't really work, and the rhythm's not regular."
Then she looks over at the other mages, one dead in the ice, and the others freed by other allies. Her gaze follows for a moment the route Roper took, a sign that she did notice certain things, even as she was dying of suffocation. She turns back to Roper, and says simply, "Thanks."
Roper lets go of Lena, and pulls his runeblades back into his hands. He glances behind him, before looking back to Lena. "Yeah, well. You got my back, I got yours." A personal philosophy, perhaps, of someone who balances the scales, who is driven by a hierarchy of priority based on his own relationship with the person.
And then he's running back into the fight, leaving both Lena and the dead behind him, focused on the dragon slowly whittling down their forces, who has to die for other allies to rise back up again.
Putricide
The assault team has been fighting an entirely too cheerful alchemist in a laboratory with decorative skull-carved paving stones, slick now with slime, for long enough that the cracks in their coordination are beginning to show. Combatants occasionally cast wary glances at the green and orange slime pipes, fearful that they might start flowing in earnest and overwhelm everyone.
The slime pipes may be the least of the present worries. The Professor Putricide is tossing out random bits of goo and vials that splash in deadly chemicals on the ground, while he laughs merrily. Allies also eye the misshapen abomination who was once an Argent Crusader. He still seems alive, and also to be on our side, but who can tell how long that will last, or if whatever was done to them is reversible?
Celaven Evensong is starting to show the strain, though his hands still shine as he forms shields and sends out flickers of healing Light, trying to protect the living from the constant splashing of deeply unsavory liquids and goo and slime. His gaze tracks to the dark figure in saronite, pursued by a relentless orange slime. This one, he doesn't touch with the Light.
Which is for the best, given that attempts to heal him from other well meaning healers has lead only to loud cursing and no healing done at all, as some part of him resists it fully. Roper has learned the lesson of another who let another orange slime close in on him with a resulting deadly explosion, the bodies of which remain on the floor of the laboratory as obstacles (and not to be used as ghoul fodder unless absolutely necessary, another warning from their allies). Dark chains of ice and shadow keep the slime slowed, as Roper uses more magic than swords to destroy it, its acid eating through his skin in painful lesions. The death knight has taken enough damage that it is starting to affect his ability to fight, but he seems unconcerned, holding out against the slime with an equally unrelenting focus.
By the time Roper has started to resemble more of a decomposed Forsaken than a Death Knight, there is a pulse of a deep, deadly cold that freezes the slime in place one more time, and a wind shatters it — finally. He is breathing hard, perhaps in old habit of stress, as he lowers his swords to the ground, tilting his head up for a moment before he begins to summon the shadows to him, pulling on a nearby table of a skull with enough of something left within it to force a ghoul to manifest, slowly. Ah, the good old suck out a ghoul's shadow to heal himself trick. Classic.
That's just the moment when the Professor Putricide tosses a new vial on the ground, causing some kind of chemical reaction that releases a gas throughout the space, immobilizing everyone.
Putricide scurries over to his laboratory table and downs a vial, and then calls out happily, "Tastes like… cherry!" His form becomes larger and even more monstrous. "OH! Excuse me!"
The effects of the immobilizing gas fade and Celaven quickly starts taking stock of his allies' well-being.
What had been the start of a ghoul is now a bubbling oozing black stain dripping down, where it had begun to rise and then lost the necromantic connection. Whatever shadow soul it possessed is gone.
Roper's hand is clawed around his runeblade, as he makes a gesture like he's trying to pull something up from an invisible cord, but nothing happens. His expression is a rictus of rage and pain, teeth bared in an increasingly skull like face. "Fuck," he growls out, a discordant high-pitched buzzing of an echo on the word. Maybe he could ride it out, just wait long enough.
Or maybe he could have before there's an explosion of a choking gas right by him, the toxins in the air harsh enough to damage the lungs of even the dead.
This is going to be a problem.
There are dead bodies, but they are allies, and at least one paladin with an Argent Crusade tabard stands over several, just waiting for a break in the fighting to be able to concentrate and attempt to resurrect them. There are also living bodies, allies with blood and life, ripe for the taking. And there it is in the death knight's face: he's thinking about it. He's weighing the options, the benefits and the drawbacks, here and now vs long term.
His choice becomes apparent as he closes his hands tighter around his runeblades, gritting his teeth together, and forces himself to focus back on Putricide. Even like this, his body becoming barely a shell to house his soul, existing on a bet that he will find a way to survive this, he chooses the long game. As more of his flesh sags under the effects of the vile slimes, he pushes forward deeper into the fray around the mad Forsaken alchemist, howling winds freezing and slowing slimes attacking his allies.
Celaven has protected himself in the chaos with shields of light and inner fire, and with a suppression of pain that would make him slightly less appealing of a target to any death knights nearby. Still, he is at his limit, gauging the battlefield, sending pulses of Light only to those who look on the verge of falling to preserve his strength for whatever else Putricide throws at them.
That's when he notices the death knight Roper is not fine anymore. There's a moment of distraction, where he very nearly sends a pulse of penance into the sagging form, then he absorbs it back into himself. There's a calculation to make, and it's visible in Celaven's glowing silver eyes - how much of the death knight's mind is left, and is it enough to endure the Light. For precious seconds Celaven could have been tending others, he watches Roper turn away from the wounded living and focus on the violent undead.
Whatever he sees in Roper's behavior causes the indecision to pass, and Celaven's face takes on a determined cast. He closes his eyes, and the Light flickers out at his hands. In fact, the very air around him seems to darken, and when he opens his eyes again they swirl with tendrils of shadow. He focuses his attention on Professor Putricide, and now instead of healing dark, killing magic erupts from his hands.
As the shadow hits Putricide, though, it leeches some of the life force of his reanimated body, distributing it among those present. The Argents, the other soldiers… and the death knights. He turns his darkened gaze to Roper, assessing. Is this enough?
The shadows find purchase in the death knight where the Light has not, as wounds close and undead flesh reknits, the worst of the damage receding more than enough to prevent the collapse of the body. Roper's head swivels, looking for the source. His gaze goes first to a red headed priest healing a paladin — no, not that one, the other one — a Confessor with a voice that carries in song, but these particular shadows this time are not from him. Who then?
It takes him just another moment to search, a distraction of split focus needing to answer this question before he can return to his primary mission. His battlefield sense is not nearly as keen on details, but he is aware of where his assets are, and eventually he looks over at Celaven, the shadows shifting slowly over the lesions of the plague.
Celaven is staring at him, his expression calm and unreadable. Then he nods, and he lets go of the shadow.
There's a moment before the darkness in his eyes clears, accompanied by a brief fracture in his composure, but then it passes. It is not as easy for some to switch between light and shadow than it is for others, it appears.
Roper stares intently at Celaven for a second or two, the look of a man examining a complex puzzle and realizing he had the piece that fit there after all. Then he nods before his full attention returns to the fight at hand with renewed strength, and setting the knowledge on some internal forever balancing scale.
The Lich King, aftermath
The Lich King is dead. The allied combatants stand before his fallen body, staggered and weary from the arduous campaign, as well as from nearly falling under the Lich King's sway. After he had slain the army, it was only the spirit of his father, King Terenas, that defied his will, raising his victims to life. Or to unlife, as the case may be.
Then in that moment of relief and victory, Bolvar Fordragon, still smoldering from the dragon's breath, stepped forward to take the Helm of Domination and sit on the Frozen Throne, ruler of the Scourge. It was with the intent of holding them back, preventing more harm to the living, but he will still be a Lich King. The Lich King is Dead, Long live the Lich King.
The living seemed at least resigned to allow this to happen, but for the undead present, the Ebon Blade and the Forsaken, the change of crown is a much more personal transition. The Scourge are a threat, yes, but what does this mean for the free undead?
Syarra Sunstrike watches impassively as Bolvar takes the crown and places it on his own head and settles onto the throne. There is nothing she can do. None of this is her choice. Then, as the magic takes hold, her composure breaks. Her eyes blaze with fury and her hands clench into fists, but there's something underneath the anger, something closer to fear. Or maybe despair.
She turns away from the throne, but keeps her hand on her sword hilt. This is the moment, their vengeance finally achieved. If there will be any further betrayal, it would happen soon.
Roper shakes his head like a dog trying to rid himself of water, a palm coming up to his forehead and pressing hard. He breathes like a living man in the throes of panic, and then visibly grabs himself in it — his sharp gauntleted nails digging into his face and scalp.
His expression bleeds away, and he lowers his hand, cutting down faint lines that start healing immediately, and he stares blankly up at the frozen throne. Never has he looked more like a corpse, an empty vessel, than now, and only the fact that he is upright seems to suggest he has not spontaneously truly died once more.
Without any care for what it must look like, he hits the ground to his knees, arms limp at his sides, just staring at the throne.
Syarra stares in the opposite direction of the throne, taking no notice of Roper's distress at first. She is too lost in her own darkness. Then the sound of his knees hitting the frozen ground seems to reach her.
She spins back towards the throne, eyes blazing, already drawing her runeblade to fight whoever has moved against them. But no one is attacking Roper. No one is even paying that much attention to them. Why would they? The moment of possible betrayal came, and it was averted by Bolvar Fordragon. The undead here are controlled. All of them.
Most of the living are still focused on the spectacle of the throne, though some are already starting to move off in twos and threes. Syarra watches the living with a sudden flash of hatred in her eyes, but she doesn't move to attack. It is possible she can't. Or maybe she is simply too afraid to find out if that is the case.
Instead, she moves to Roper's side.
"Get up. Listen to me. Only to me." Syarra says harshly, and it sounds like an order, but something in the underlying echoes of her voice sounds like a plea.
Roper's eyelids flicker, and he slowly drags his attention from the frozen throne to Syarra in small increments — first his head, then his gaze straight ahead, and finally lifted up to hers.
"He's in my head, Sya," Roper says, his voice quiet, strangely echoing whispers, his words overlapping together. He seems to understand her words only belatedly, and he reaches out a hand to her, either to pull himself up or pull her down to him it isn't clear at first, until finally he moves his legs to get back up to a stand.
Syarra reaches her hand to clasp his, but makes no other move to assist. If Roper will stand, he'll stand on his own power. She gave him an order, after all.
"No," Syarra says in a low voice, holding his gaze, though it's clear her denial means nothing. "No, you are not his. You are mine. You made a vow."
Roper stares at Syarra uncomprehending for a few seconds, as he rises to his feet.
Then a blink. Another. A sharpening of his gaze, and a flooding back in of his expressions, the flatness of the corpse swept away as whatever Roper is —the man he was and the man he is and the monster he has become - reasserts itself.
"I made a vow," he repeats, and although the echoes are stronger, his own true voice shows through. His face contorts in what looks like pain, but he isn't in any worse pain than he was before. "Sya. I'm…I'm still yours. I'm not his." He's either reassuring her, or he's affirming it to himself.
"And I'm yours," Syarra says in a hoarse whisper, and there's something in her face that makes it a question. "You'll never let me go."
Roper immediately shakes his head, reaches out to grab her, both hands at the back of her neck, heedless of the danger of the gauntlets. "Never. Never." A dark command fills him with it, and he presses his forehead against Syarra's, his eyes twisting with blue flame, as he looks back to the new Lich King. For a moment, there's something very dangerous in his eyes — he's weighing it, in that moment, of killing this new one, of keeping anyone from taking the crown, of risking the world overrun with Scourge, against keeping Syarra free of something that could take her from him.
The moment stretches. And then his eyes narrow. "He's not doing anything. I can't — fuck, it doesn't feel like he's doing anything. I can think it. I can think about killing him right here, right now. I can think about leaving." He pulls his attention back to Syarra, searching her face.
"Then let's leave," Syarra says, her gaze fixed on his face. She spares no glances for the new immolated king on his throne. There's rage laced through her words, though she pitches them not to carry. "Leave right now. Let's go home. And leave him to sit on his fucking throne and suffer." A thread of uncertainty enters as she adds, "Let him try to stop us."
Will he?
Syarra finally does look away from Roper, to see the relief in the eyes and manner of the victorious living. Reveling in their precious lives, returned to them by a miracle. She clenches her hand tight, scraping the embedded wedding ring against bone in a sudden flash of pain, and then she starts to draw Roper away. "There's nothing for us here."
Roper sweeps his own assessment over the battlefield, noting the things that the spy finds important, his gaze lingering for a long beat on a certain golden-haired paladin, standing in front of a dark haired man wearing a terrible, desperate hope expression on his face, holding the dead-limp body of a young woman. Colson's hands are glowing brightly with the Light — one that does not seem to be mirrored in the dead woman.
Roper's attention jumps across, not far from the tableau of the attempted resurrection, to a brown haired warrior, still staring at the body of the fallen Arthas Lich King, and then to the bloodied death knight with stark white hair watching her. There's a twitch of Roper's lip into the suggestion of a sneer at the sight, before he jumps to the next, looking for his assets.
A 7th Legion kaldorei priest stands near the edge of the citadel platform, searching desperately for something below, until he turns back to his unit with hollow, defeated eyes.
A blond warlock stands alone, looking at the Lich King's body, no emotion in her face. Then Lena murmurs something inaudible, and makes her way over towards her squad leader.
Captain Sparkwire is a blinking gnomish rocket across the battlefield, tears in her eyes as she barrels toward Colson and the body his companion holds.
Aze is at the outskirts of the group. She turns towards Roper and Syarra and raises her head in acknowledgement. For a moment she looks like she might come over to them, but then something seems to warn her off. She moves away, searching for anyone from her own team in the chaos.
Roper's jaw moves at Aze's movement, and then he turns his full attention back to Syarra, turning into her movement. "Yeah. There's nothing more for us here right now."
In Kaskala
Roper lands his reanimated gryphon practically on top of the entrance to the yurt, the snow scattering in the strange vibrations of the boned wings. The gryphon shudders and collapses back into dust, sinking into the shadow cast by the death knight. He pauses, head tilted like he's listening for something. He's been doing it periodically on and off through the journey from Icecrown.
Syarra is not listening for anything, very intentionally. She keeps her focus in front of her, not looking to the left or the right as she moves directly for the yurt. She doesn't look at Roper, and doesn't wait for him, just unlocks the door and strides down into their darkened home.
Roper is right behind her, a shadow slipping into the yurt, and locking the door behind him. There's that same chill as before, a seeking hungering cold looking for anything alive to leech heat from, that finds nothing, and the cold dims once more.
Clink, clink is the ineffective sounds of Roper trying to light his gnomish lighter with a gauntlet still on.
Syarra doesn't try to light any candles. She moves with confidence in the blackness of the familiar space, and there's a clinking as she starts to take off her armor.
"It was a good try, neutrality," Syarra says with a calmness resting on top of banked fury. "I assume we will pretend in public, but all of us will know the truth. He's the former regent of Stormwind." There's a clanking as she sets her armor down too hard on the stand. "At least it is a secret, so I can still claim I have a choice."
"It's not gonna stay fucking secret," Roper says, and there's the sound of a gauntlet hitting the edge of his armor stand, and then the clink and bright spark of fire in the gloom. "There's no fucking way. Too many people there. It's gonna leak out in bits and pieces. There's a reason SI:7 doesn't try to pretend it doesn't have spies, that Matthias Shaw isn't at the head of it. You just can't keep some things from being know, all you can do is fucking control how it is, and if you don't do that, then when it shows up in the worst fucking way, that's your own fucking fault."
Syarra sighs, turning toward Roper in the gloom of the single flame. She's still taking her armor off, piece by piece. "So we get ahead of it. I'll quit the Crimson Coterie. Tie myself closer to the Alliance. Then, when the truth comes out, there's no one I will have betrayed. And in the meantime, there's no one he would make me betray."
Roper stares down at the flame. "If it comes to that…would he even let us fight against the Alliance? Could the Horde even get us into their ranks? Fuck, he could just stop us right in our fucking tracks at any moment, and let any of them slaughter us. Fuck." The echoes are overlapping again, and he hovers his other hand — still in the saronite gauntlet — over the flame in a slight echo of Syarra's years ago.
"We kill him now, and someone else takes his throne and is worse, and we don't get a third chance." He moves his hand closer to the flame. "We kill him now, and let the Scourge take over the world, guard the crown, and all it will take is one weak link, one person to get through us and put on that crown, and we'll have proven ourselves to be untrustworthy; we'll be enslaved for the good of the 'world.'" Roper's gauntlet, the leather side, is starting to smoke against the heat of the flame. "Tirion won't unchain us, not with his trusted paladin on the throne, not until he's turned against the world like Arthas. There's no way out."
"No way out," Syarra echoes in a bleak voice, hollow with echoes, as she pulls off her breastplate. She makes no move to keep Roper from burning his leather - she probably understands the feeling. "We do as we think he would want, and we're effectively enslaved. We do as we think he would not want, and we may be actually enslaved. There's no other…" Syarra grits her teeth. "I can feel it. But we still exist. We've endured through worse, and we can continue through this. Until we find another way."
Roper tips his head back, and finally moves his hand away from the flame. "We were already gonna move harder on the Alliance. We decided that before him, so we can trust that it's real. He's not making it seem better." Roper's voice has the harsher rasp, and it clashes worse with the pervasive echo. "So we follow that plan. We buy enough time, and we wait for something to change, something we can use that we don't have right now. And we make sure we have enough bodies between us and the living who might go all crusade on us, with a fucking Lich King that might order us to stand there and let us get destroyed."
Syarra doesn't answer for a moment, her attention shifting to removing greaves and sabatons. Then she says in a low, dark tone, "You're right. Anything we decided before, it's real. From here on out, I don't know how to tell what might be real and what might not. It didn't feel like control before, but it was. Control so complete I never questioned it."
She breathes slowly, in and out, unnecessary here where there are no living to set at ease. "My sister would not let anyone destroy us. Nor would Alaisa. And there are others, I think, who would at least object. We've done well, building up our living assets. We'll need to continue that - we can't stay here in Northrend."
Roper's attention catches on a word in there — Alaisa — and he stops entirely, staring at the flame in frozen silence.
"Mistake," he whispers into the darkness. Does he mean that staying there would be a mistake? They're about to make one? Extremely unclear.
Syarra looks over at him sharply, dropping her last sabaton to the ground. His unusual manner is enough to distract her from the doom hanging over both their heads, and she watches him watch the flame. She takes a step toward Roper, and then stops.
"What?" Syarra asks. It's the opposite of a precise question, but they're not playing a game right now.
Roper doesn't respond immediately, he seems to be trying to place the world back to rights, slowly moving his head, frowning hard enough that he looks more and more like a living man, expressive in some confusion or anger or both.
"I remember her," he finally says. "Alaisa. All of it. I can…I can remember years. It's everywhere. I can remember how we met. The name I gave her then, what my real one actually fucking was." His eyes dart from the fire to Syarra's, a sharp edge of dark suspicion in his face and voice. "I don't know if it's real."
Syarra doesn't react visibly right away, just keeps staring at him. Then she moves to his side, reaching out with one bare hand to touch the side of his face.
"How? Was it… him? Fordragon? If so, it may just be what he thinks will keep you docile, but…" Syarra frowns. "I don't know your history. I can't help. But Alaisa, if she would help you cross-reference…" Syarra trails off, and then adds, in more of a demand than a question. "Tell me what your name was."
"Evander Favre. I had…more family but. I can't remember…all of it. Bits and pieces just gone, but things I know I burned out, it's like they're back," Roper rasps, his gaze going far before he blinks and returns it back to Syarra. "I went by Shale with a gang, the Vultures, that's what the scar on my back is from. I killed one of the members back before Light's Hope, someone I gave a shit about, that I'd burned out of me. If this is a trick by Fordragon, then it's a real fucking good one."
"Evander Favre," Syarra repeats, scanning his face. "Shale. And now you're Roper Sunstrike. Unless you want…" she doesn't finish the question, and instead adds, "An odd thing to allow you, yes, if it's to make you docile. Unless he thought a reminder of what we can be made to do would be useful."
Roper shakes his head, slightly and then harder. "It doesn't matter. I can't trust it until I can know." He sets his free hand against Syarra's neck, drawing her closer both to him and the flame held between them. "And it doesn't fucking matter if I remember who I was or not. I know who I am. That's Roper Sunstrike, husband of Syarra Sunstrike. The others aren't me."
Syarra yields to the touch, moving close to him. Like she did once, over a year ago now, she reaches out her free hand and moves her fingers through the edge of the flame. Not enough to hurt, not for now.
"And I don't want you to be anyone else but that," Syarra says, her voice low and faintly echoing. "But if you want to know who you… who he was, I'll help you. Like you did, with my journal."
Roper's lips tug to the side, the start of a smile, and he leans in closer. "Right now, it doesn't fucking matter. I'm keeping it to the side, until I know. You never go off any information you don't know is good. But if it is," Roper says and his grin shows up, and he makes a sound close to amusement. "Then I remember my assets. All of them. I remember who they think I should be. If Fordragon did this, thinking it'd chain me, then he's about to learn a lot more about what being a spy really means."
"Anything I should keep in mind, for those we both know now?" Syarra asks, her own lips curving slightly. "Not to trust, but to keep in mind, to see if it measures up to the assets we have now, in reality."
Roper laughs, and brushes his cheek against hers, a light scraping of the stubble on her smoother skin. "It's a lot. Information on Theris, on the entire Lysander family. Some more things on Fallon's sister, and his wife — not touching either one of those with a fifty yard pole."
Roper pauses, shifts his head a little, and tongues a tooth. "A lot on Lena, the warlock." His voice has a strangely carefully neutral tone to it. "Fuck." His expression twitches repeatedly, and he starts to move away, his brows drawing down in a vague attempt at anger that is more a way to hide his actual feelings than a genuine one.
Syarra frowns and shifts to move after him, reaching to catch his pauldron in a way that will avoid slicing her fingers open.
"The Fallons, that information might matter for Aze, too, but…" Syarra tries to catch his gaze. "What? Did she betray you?"
"No," Roper says, and he purposefully tilts his head back to let her see him. There's conflicting expressions trying to find a place, something to settle into, flashes here and there. "She really would have made a good spy." The Highest Compliment.
"The Other Roper, he thought about it, of after the mission, having SI:7 make her an offer. He liked her. It made it easier to not have to fake it, as Reynold's. She was part of Reynold's cover. She knows things about me most people wouldn't. Never mentioned them. And I know things about her she didn't want to tell me. So we're even." He pauses, shrugs in a strange mirror of Syarra's own shrug. "If this is real."
There's a flicker of jealousy on Syarra's face, but she forces her face to neutrality and shakes her head. "That was the Other Roper. But you still think she's a good asset, don't you?" She draws in a breath and her jaw tenses, but she doesn't look away from Roper. "That could be usable. If you know her secrets, then that might be another handle to find out if this is real. Not to trust her, obviously, but to get a confirmation."
"Yeah, at the cost of revealing that I have my memory back," Roper drawls. "Everything's got a price." He tips his head back and forth. "If this is real, then yeah, she's a good asset. Smart, good at playing a part, reads people easily. If it's not real, she might be able to fool me that it is if she can figure out what I think is real…" He frowns, shakes his head again. "I can't tell if I'd think it before, or I think it now because of the memories."
There's a flash of panic, brief and startling. "They're getting all mixed up together, the pieces. Fuck. Fuck, I can't — I gotta keep it separate. Separate me."
"Maybe you can try to think of it like I do," Syarra says, leaning forward to nearly touch her forehead to his. "Try to remember it, but as a thing that happened to somebody else. Or… is that how you would have done it before, with your personas?"
Roper closes the distance — he is dangerously cold to the touch, enough to be felt. He closes his eyes, drops his hands to his sides. The light goes out, dropping them both into darkness lit only by the faint glow of Syarra's eyes.
"Yeah, sorta. Identities go into their own places. It's like keeping two sets of notes. You know what you think, and you know what they think, and you keep yours in your box, and theirs in their own. Even if there's overlap, you always write two sets. It's always two puzzles. You never mix them." Roper's eyes open again, and he breathes in and out unnecessarily.
"I have a split between me and him, the one who was alive, and me who came after, but it's…now it's splitting what I knew before, and what I know now between what I figured out, what he knew, and what I now think he knew. And it's…a mess, because there are things I figured out, put enough around to see the puzzle, and I got some of it wrong, or I got it right but for the wrong reasons, and now I can fix it…" He trails off into silence. "But I can't. I gotta leave it, until I know. I don't know if it'll work, to try to keep the two sets apart, or if this has already tainted everything, influencing what I'll think might be true, because it all fits."
Syarra rests her forehead against his, listening to him speak with a faint, thoughtful frown.
"If it all fits, if you find out that it is true, then… do you need it to be separate?" Syarra asks. "How you describe it, it reminds me a little of how things were after Light's Hope Chapel for me. I remembered me but also not me, and I couldn't see the picture the puzzle was supposed to make for either of us. And I think I still don't quite have all the pieces. For me, keeping myself separate helps me to see what is missing. But I'm not you. If that part of you is still part of you, then maybe it's impossible to separate."
"If it's real, it's just useful information. If it isn't, then it's all lies, and figuring out which puzzle pieces don't fit, not seeing them there again, will be…" Roper trails off, shaking his head faintly. "But if it is all lies, and he has done something to fuck with my head, then he's more dangerous than Arthas ever was. A madman twisting things to get us to stop trusting our own minds is the kind of evil chaos of the fucking Burning Legion. So, even if it fucks with me to know that it's all wrong, we still learn something else. All information is worth having."
"All information is worth having," Syarra echoes, still resting against him in the darkness. "I don't… think… he would do that. But I don't know if that's his doing as well. But…" she draws in a breath, lets it out. "…maybe if I can question it, it means that my thoughts are my own. Still, you need to find out if you can trust it, before things get too hopelessly tangled."
"Arthas wanted control, so that's what he did. If Fordragon wants chaos, if he wants us to destroy ourselves from within…" Roper laughs bitterly. "It'd be a way to fucking do it. Get us until we can't trust ourselves, jump at every shadow, wonder who we even are. Domination through shadows and doubt. Or he's some sort of benevolent absent god, bestowing gifts no one asked for, and staying back to let the chips fall where they may. No way to know until we get more information, and proof."
Roper moves a hand into a bag at his side, the sound of cloth and items rustling. "And for that we need time, and allies. So, I guess, despite fucking everything, nothing has changed." He scoffs, and pulls out a candle. There's a clink as his lighter bursts back into life, and he tilts it to light the wick.
His voice drops into that drawl, of a young man who grew up on the streets of Stormwind. "How do you feel about Tuesdays for contemplating my tragic past?"
"By candlelight, naturally," Syarra says, tilting her head back, with a faint curve of a smile to her lips. "I'll put it on my calendar."