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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | After a surprising move to shift her allegiances from her Horde aligned homeland to the Alliance, Azsera Sunstrike visits with her family to catch up and make plans for the future on how they can best turn this new development to their mutual advantages. 5600~ words. Personal plot RP. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
The Redridge Mountains seem clear of orcs today, at least in the vicinity of a certain abandoned outpost. They are not, however, clear of elves. One is heading directly for the outpost now, riding with all the skill of someone poorly acquainted with horses. She at least does not seem in imminent danger of falling, despite the lack of grace. Aszera Sunstrike wears her usual leather armor today, and a hooded black cloak lined in red. There's the faint glow of quel'dorei eyes visible below the hood. The horse, a pale silvery-gray mare with a white mane and tail, provides a sharp contrast to the black-clad elf.
Aze draws the horse to a stop near the one building that shows signs of occupation. She dismounts and wraps the reins around a post before walking towards the door to knock. Immediately after knocking, she flips back her hood and removes the glasses that set the fake quel'dorei eye glow. Beneath that, she's blindfolded as usual, though she no longer seems to have any significant trouble seeing.
Of the two death knight occupants of similar height and energy, the one that stalks to the door with quick movements reminiscent of both another life of shadows and a continued existence with impatience can only be Roper.
"Hey," is only a confirmation of it, and there's something in his voice that suggests that tick up of a crooked half smile. The lack of sound when he moves reveals that he's dressed casually, a pair of black trousers and a black turtleneck, soft cloth gloves over his scarred hand.
"Hey," Aze echoes, and the way she smiles, the tension going out of her with relief, is probably not the reaction a pair of death knights are used to evoking. "It's been too long. I've got a lot to tell you."
Syarra is standing a few paces behind, dressed casually in soft cloth well-fitted to her undead form (Aspenwood made). There's no change in her expression at all at the sight of her little sister, but she takes a step closer to the door.
"Oh yeah?" Roper's voice is casual, as he shuts the door behind her, locking it in a twist of fingers. "Start with the bad news." He assumes there is some, of course, because the man has never had much more than a nosebleed seat’s glancing acquaintance with all happy news.
"There is no bad news, for once. Everything's great," Aze says with a smile, stepping further into the room. Now that her sister is in reach, Aze moves swiftly and catches her in a hug tight enough to be uncomfortable for a living person.
Syarra flinches, but there is no stabbing this time. Just strong emotion. And is that really better? Her hands hover awkwardly at her sides, and she looks over at Roper.
"[Just pretend you love me for once]," Aze whispers in Thalassian.
Syarra is still staring at Roper, but she closes her arms around Aze obediently and says, "[You're my sister.]"
Aze laughs and releases her, stepping back. "[Sure, close enough.]" She tilts her head at Roper and adds, "[How's your Thalassian these days?]"
Roper scoffs, as he slides over to the cushions to fold himself into a crossed leg sit, left hand resting on the table, currently unmoving. "[I know all the important things. Unless you want to talk about fucking thaumatological principles, because then I'll have to switch to Common to avoid accidentally smiting myself in some invocation in Thalassian,]" he drawls. He's amused, but his attention hops back and forth between Syarra and Azsera.
"Not likely, I'm no magistrix," Aze says with a laugh, continuing in Thalassian. She moves over to sit on a cushion without waiting for invitation. "So that means we don't need Common at all anymore. That's perfect — it's been Common Common Common ever since January, and I didn't even speak to Ally in Thalassian because I thought it might sound too Horde. And it'll probably be a lot of Common from here on out, since I'm an Alliance citizen, so I'd like to speak normally with my family."
Syarra, moving to take her usual cushion by Roper, hits a hitch in her motion at 'Alliance citizen', and then settles carefully, staring at her little sister. "What have you done, Aze?"
"Like you said, it wasn't safe for me here," Aze shrugs, tapping one hand on the table. "Now it is. Do you have any paper? Anything to write with?"
In contrast to Syarra's immediate response, there is an eerie silence from Roper — he's a difficult man to surprise, often having predicted several potential moves for everyone, ten steps out, but it appears that Aszera has actually managed it. His mouth is slack, partially open, his head tilted forward like he isn't sure his hearing hasn't been just situationally damaged, his eyebrows down low, pinching the skin over his nose bridge into deep crevices.
"You fucking what," Roper says, in Common, in a tone that isn't a question in lilt, but must be one. The words seem to snap him out of his own lock, as he exhales so hard that it's almost a cough, reaching back and over into a bag under the table, up against one of the short legs, pulling out a sheet of paper, and a sharp pointed pencil cut professionally. It's quick, deft movements, the way a man who has trained how to be fast in writing for forgery purposes does.
He punctuates it as he taps them down in front of Aze with, "[You fucking what?]" The Thalassian accent is so much like Syarra's that it sounds a bit like Syarra herself, albeit with a deeper, raspy voice.
Aze is distracted from whatever purpose she had for the paper. She turns her face towards Syarra and Roper, her brow drawing down in confusion. This was clearly not the place where she was expecting opposition to her decisions, though maybe she should have. She is, at least, not too startled by Roper's vocal similarity to Syarra — Syarra was clearly the one teaching him, after all.
"Isn't that what you both want, with all the work with Siamus on citizenship? With being here in Redridge? And besides, everyone seemed…" Aze trails off, perhaps realizing that 'everyone seemed like they wanted me to' is a terrible reason to pursue citizenship in a foreign nation.
Instead, she takes a breath, and says, "It doesn't make so much of a difference, practically — I was already avoiding Silvermoon so I wouldn't look attached to the Horde. I haven't lost anything. And I couldn't even get to you here, not safely, for almost a year."
"This was not for me," Syarra says, shaking her head. "You've left me for near a decade before. A year is nothing."
"I left you, and you fucking died," Aze says sharply, setting the pencil down on the paper with a click. "That's not happening again."
Roper, possibly caught on a thought other than the Other Syarra's death, tips his head back to laugh, dark echoes reverberating in it faintly, out of the death knight's usual grip of control. He holds both his hands up in a gesture of surrender to forestall any protest at this reaction.
"Hey, I'm only wondering if you just got some rookie spy demoted to at-the-desk-job," he says in Thalassian, a little second language awkwardness at a direct translation for a word he doesn't know the equivalent for. "Or just jump started someone's career for correctly predicting what you'd do in your dossier. Fuck, Aszera. You really know how to get them on the zig when they're expecting a zag from another angle. We ever get money hungry, remind me that we can run a fucking street scam that'll make investment bankers look poor and straight-arrow."
"Sure, as long as you cut me in on the profits," Aze says, the tension going out of her shoulders. She laughs briefly, with no dark echoes in it. "But yeah, the Aspenwood House sponsored me for it — William's really good with wine, did you know? — and I guess I'm pretty publicly connected to Fallon. I'm still staying at their house, for now. So… you're not upset?"
Aze doesn't see the way Roper's mouth forms the silent word of William after her, a dark edge in the slant of his mouth as he taps a slow, single beat on the table, but he then leans back, setting his hands behind his head.
"Why would I be?" Roper drawls. "It's not like I blame you for how the Alliance fucking works. They were always going to be a harder sell for the undead. And citizenship will only benefit me. With you Alliance, and me working on my own blue card, we can both keep Syarra safer by association. No need to prove anything with more oaths, or risks when this powder keg war finally blows. That's what we all want. Everyone stays just as dead as they are right now. No more. No less."
He tilts his head to the side, watching Aze with the unblinking eyes of a predator. "But how the fuck did you convince the Aspenwoods to go that far out onto a tree branch for you?"
"I didn't fuck any of them, if that's what you're asking," Aze says, but she sounds amused rather than insulted. As she speaks, she runs her hand over the paper Roper gave her, and gets the pencil in hand. "You know I don't do that, not for influence. So… maybe just by being trustworthy? It could've been Colson and Mordecai who convinced the rest — those two have seen me as a demon and didn't turn away. That, and probably Lady Fallon, in part. She arranged everything. Anyway, yeah, no Andorhal for you and Yara. And I'll open doors for you where I can."
Now it is Syarra's turn to glance between Roper and Aze, her face a blank mask and no effort made in mannerisms to put the living guest at ease. Finally, she says in a low voice, "You'll lose the house."
Aze shakes her head. "Yara, I'm nobody. No one will even notice. It'll just stand empty, like it did before."
"Aze, if I understand this correctly, you are publicly linked to at least two families in the House of Nobles," Syarra says, dropping her gaze to the table. "That will be noticed."
Roper practically pounces on the information Aze gives him, a starving spy who has been contenting himself purposefully on crumbs now glutting himself on stolen prime cut meats of political knowledge. He looks up from his internal chessboard at the last, and a different calculation is weighed and measured.
"She's right," Roper tells Aze. "But. There's a way around it. Syarra's too controversial to get into the Alliance. Hell, I'll barely make it in, and I was born in Stormwind and died for Stormwind." An echo chases the rasp of his natural voice in the word Stormwind, not spoken in his Thalassian accent, but his true Stormwind based one.
"Transfer the house to Syarra's name," he continues, leaning forward, resting his hands on the table, fingers motionless. "Now, while it's still ambiguous timing. We keep it in the family. I can get you documents you'd need to make it legal. And then we all keep it hush. You signing away the house would look good for you. Syarra receiving the house will look bad for her. You get me?"
"I can't go to Silvermoon," Aze says, smoothing out the paper again. She starts to sketch, bearing down with the pencil so that she can feel the lines with her fingertips. So far, she seems to be drawing connected rectangles. "You told me that much, before. But I guess if you got the paperwork, brought it here — are we counting on them not realizing she's dead, or is she good to own property now anyway?"
"I don't see why I shouldn't," Syarra says, looking up at Aze. There's a touch of calculation in her cold eyes. "I can't inherit, but the Forsaken own things. If you gave it to me…"
"I… yeah, sure. if you can get the paperwork here, I'll sign it over," Aze says, curling her shoulders a little as she leans over the drawing, which is starting to look like a floorplan, with a kind of long hallway outside the first row of rectangles. "And I won't mention it, just like I don't mention people I know in Silvermoon. Unless it looks like it'll help all of us."
Roper makes a wounded, petulant sound, spreading a hand dramatically over his chest. "If I can get the paperwork? What do you mean if. What do you take me for, a fucking amateur? I'm hurt."
As Syarra well knows, he is not, in fact, hurt. At least not in any way that could be considered suffering.
His eyes drop from Aze herself to the beginning of the floorplan. "First floor?"
Aze just raises an eyebrow at the act, with a quiet huff of a laugh.
Syarra sits back on her heels with a look of satisfaction on her face. It's not due to any pain from Roper or Aszera, so it must be due to the prospect of finally getting the family home back in her name.
"Yeah," Aze says to his last question, shifting to the next block of rooms as she runs the fingers of her other hand over the lines to keep her place. "I did say I'd get you a floor plan. I haven't gone into every room, of course, but I should be able to give you a reasonably clear picture of who lives where and everything. A lot of people live in that house."
She pauses, then adds, "I probably won't for much longer. I haven't really figured out where I'm going next yet. I thought about Shattrath, since I can take portals to and from Stormwind now. But that wouldn't help my reputation with Stormwind. I don't like the idea of living in the city, probably for the same reason you two don't."
"People turn on monsters," Syarra says, with a brief nod. "The more people, the more likely it will happen."
"It's a balancing act," Roper rasps, moving a coin from somewhere along his wrist into his fingers, walking it over his right knuckles idly, as his left hand comes to rest on the table. "Keep yourself too apart, and you're a fucking monster for being a stranger. Too close, and you're overstepping, and you're one bad day away from being run through with a pitchfork." It probably says something about Roper that he has no trouble with the word pitchfork in Thalassian. "You gotta control what they see from you. You gotta have a place to go where you're allowed to fuck up. Be less than perfect. Because a person who fucks up makes a mistake. A monster that does it is a threat."
Cheery. But, he's not exactly wrong, as Harvey could speak of from experience.
"If you did find somewhere in the city, do it with someone you trust who can be between the torches. Your shield of normal. And if you get a fuck up day, we're your backup. And vice versa. We're good at what we are, but all it takes is just the wrong day to slip on the rain wet rocks to lose everything."
Aze nods, running her hands over the lines and shifting to another block, the second floor. "If I can find a trustworthy roommate, maybe I can get a place to use for meetings and official things, and for storing my stuff. Then I could actually just live on the edges, like I did in Northrend. I won't have the same security outside Fallon House, and I don't want some enterprising assassin to kill me in my sleep. That would just be embarrassing."
Syarra frowns at her. "I did not think that was an arrangement you enjoyed."
"It was an arrangement that worked," Aze says, digging the pencil in a little harder than strictly necessary. "Anyway, I've got a group I might work with, detective stuff, controlled violence. I might be on the road for the job more often than not, anyway."
Roper's gaze sharpens, his head tilting to the side. "Detective work." For a moment his eyes glow brighter, a coiled tension in him, and then he looks at Syarra — weighing something in his mind — and he sits back with a faint tsk.
"You run into something that needs a finer touch of spy work, I can help. But only from the shadows. I stick my neck out too far, and the spymaster will put a rope around it. From there, it can only be a leash or another fucking noose." His smile is as cold as a bitter winter.
"You want to avoid dying in embarrassment from an enterprising assassin, get yourself two holy men to live next door. The Aspenwoods have to watch your back now, their hands tied in their own lawfulness. Colson and his priest are in Stormwind, and looking for a new house." How does he know — wait, this is Roper. We know how he knows.
"If I were a betting man," continues a man who frequently risks everything in an all-in bet with his existence on the line, "I'd put money they'll buy in Old Town."
Syarra watches Roper with a faint curiosity, and nods at his conclusion. Roper usually knows these things.
"So you think I should get a place in Old Town, neighbors to Colson and Mordecai," Aze pauses in her drawing, tapping the pencil against the paper. "I don't know if their kind of neighborhood is in my price range, but I'll see what I can do. These detectives, they rub elbows with the rich, but I don't think the job's mansion lucrative. It's a few Stormwind guards, and a worgen girl who likes butterflies." The butterflies may have made more of an impression than the missing leg. "Friends of Mourn, actually. And I don't want to get either of you hanged or leashed, but they are interested in meeting my dead family."
"How did you fall in with these people?" Syarra asks, resting one hand on the table in a belated attempt to do Casual Gestures. "The guards and worgen?"
"Oh, um… one of them came to this dance party?" Aze answers, and trails her hand over the blueprint to tap on the ball room. "Interesting guy, introduced me to his friends."
"Joelle Ebek, son of Sir Johann Ebek, royal guardsman to the monarchy, friend of Lathrik Dinnsfield, who was Mourn's portable paladin prison guard during his trial. He's dating Natalyah Kensington-Whit, the 'butterfly girl,' and now a fucking worgen. She helped out with a murder investigation in Westfall involving one of Cobalt's," Roper drawls, walking the coin over his fingers as smoothly as he recites the information. How…does he know all that?
"Who knew detective work was a lateral career change from [lepidopterist]." The Common word rolls of Roper's tongue, as he continues. "She rubs elbows with the rich because she used to be rich. The Elywnn Kensington-Whits were never important, but they had cash. She's now missing the family bank account, but contacts never go out of style. That's how you get into Old Town. You rent, not buy, and you use your fucking rich assets to get in."
"Yeah, uh… that's them," Aze says, startled. "I call him Elle, and… you didn't mention the other guy, Ren. Reniya Hartrim. And if you'd asked me a couple months ago, I'd have told you I know how to play that game. But it's different here."
Aze pauses, and then resumes drawing floor two. "Or maybe its just that I'm different. I don't always know what other people know about me here, or what they think. It's hard to read people, when I can't…" Aze raises a hand to her blindfold.
"Yeah, well, you should remember that it can go both ways. People can't see your eyes, one of the make-expressions parts of a face. Makes it easier for you to lie, and easier to look at things they don't think you're looking at," says the guy who wears a hood over his face most of the time for so many reasons, and who never stops finding a way to twist something to his advantage.
He taps twice on the table, slowly, as he studies Aze with sharp, unblinking eyes. "What name did you give them, when you told them about meeting me." It isn't said like a question, but it must be one.
"Yeah, I usually have to remember to turn my head, and… uh, not sure I gave a name? Just my sister and my brother-in-law," Aze shrugs. "I told some stories like that over the past few months, making you both sound heroic. Didn't even tell people you were undead unless it came up naturally, but I didn't hide it."
"It might help," Syarra says, with a slight nod. "Stories, long term." She tilts her head toward Roper, and asks, "Is there a name they would know, besides the one they might hear from Mourn?"
Roper exhales a ha laugh, flipping the coin up into the air, catching it and swapping it for a gold piece. "Yeah. Talyah knew Tibault, not well enough to catch him now with what I look like. She was just a fucking small fish in a small pond of Elwynn, but that was Tibault's base. She would remember the name Berringer, probably Tibault as well. Technically she's been around the caterer Smythe as well, but she wouldn't fucking know that. She never noticed the servers."
"Some of them are like that, in Silvermoon too," Aze says, finishing off the second floor with a bit of a flourish. "Eyes only for the important people, or at least the entertainment. I wouldn't have called her a snob now, though — I like her. Was she always missing a leg, or do you think the worgen got it?"
"Born that way. She was in a chair before, then crutches. The disowning isn't from the worgen either. She fucked off to Gilneas in Year 18, and they barely waited a day after the news came Gilneas closed off the wall before starting the paperwork. Couldn't fucking wait to get rid of her," Roper says dispassionately.
"She was always the smartest of the lot. Almost fucking became a player in the game, getting hitched to the Stormwind Kensington-Whits. The announcement of that intended engagement cost some people money in a betting pool in SI:7." The way he grins suggests that he was among the winning pot, not the losers. "Some of us were fucking paying attention though. I'll have to take a look to know if the Stormwind KWs are still worth anything, or looking at her still."
"I hope not, for her sake," Aze mutters, starting in on floor three, which seems to be a little less detailed. "Or maybe theirs? She's probably got enough going on with the cursed boyfriend and the tidesage and the… I'm not sure what I'd call Elle. Interesting. I sort of played the question-answer game with him, when we were dancing. A soft version."
Syarra's gaze sharpens. "You do remember there are some secrets you need to keep, and not trade in parlor games."
"Yeah, of course, I can keep secrets," Aze says, lifting her head. She doesn't stop drawing. "I kept yours and Roper's about the Lich King, if you're wondering — but Mourn fucking didn't. Honestly, I don't even know what secrets I have left to keep, with all the Fallons' background checking. I guess the things I haven't told anyone. The things I haven't shown anyone, or only one person." She raises a hand to touch her blindfold, curling her shoulders protectively.
Speaking of people who hoard secrets like the way some people who don't trust banks hide gold under their mattresses, Roper's expression sharpens like a blade peeking out of a sheath for one brief moment — a temptation to pry open a sealed place of possible pain from the monster inside the spy.
And then it passes, the man he was ascendant enough to instead flip the gold coin up, catch it between his index and middle fingers, and then flick it to land just so on the second story blueprint on top of Aze's guest room. A metaphor, perhaps, of concealment, as much as a tell that he knows where she is.
"You're doing good," Roper says, a dark rasp of odd reassurance, almost soft. "That's how the game is played. Sometimes you trade off the pawn secrets to catch a rook's secrets. And sometimes…you gotta give up a knight secret to get a Queen. As for Mourn, we knew he'd been flapping his face off. I said from the start, there's no way we keep this under the wrappings forever. Too many people. All we need is enough time for people to forget to think about us as a fucking problem to solve with it. If it's gonna come out, in the middle of a fucking mess of problems isn't the worst timing. Especially if it buys us something useful to trade it. We get a stay of execution while they panic about something else. And it buys us time to make them remember they want us."
Aze does not notice the monster peeking out, but Syarra does. She smiles, just slightly, and rests a hand on the table vaguely between her husband and her sister. The only part Aze notices is the coin. She taps it with one finger and laughs, before she resumes floor three.
"We've been doing that," Syarra says, her eyes still on Roper. "For anyone who will see. Showing them that we're useful, and that they want us around. I'm assisting at the Azuredown Lodge, too, as I can."
"The quel'dorei," Aze says, her lips twisting slightly, and she shakes her head. "I'll leave that one to you two, maybe. Though maybe I don't have so much room to talk on that front, not anymore. I didn't just cut and run on my people, though, I… I guess everyone thinks their reasons are the ones that matter."
"And you should be cultivating allies," Syarra says, shifting her gaze to Aze. "Not excluding them. You're still a long way from home."
Aze makes a sound of frustration, and finally says, "Yeah, I know that." She tilts her head towards Roper, and says, "If there's any allies you think I should get in particular, tell me. Or secrets to bring you. You still seem to know more about the scene than I do, for all I'm living in it."
Roper laughs, a human sound of a man who once aspired to be the second hand to the spymaster of the Alliance. He spreads his hands out in a not even remotely humble shrug. "That's what I fucking do."
He leans forward, setting his palms flat on the table again. "But what I can't do is get into that house myself. Not until someone flips Westwind enough to tolerate us. She doesn't have to like us. She's just gotta bend enough to neutral acceptance. She wasn't worth it two years ago, but now she's Fallon's, and Fallon and his wife are a coup of connection. Ralaea Westwind and Mourn are a hurdle, and you can climb over it where we stop. And you're gonna hear shit that I can't, that someone wouldn't tell me, because I can't be both the spy and the ordinary guy.
"Those guards are useful, not just for us, but you. Get them on your side, get known as an ally of them, and Stormwind City's doors open wider for you. And they'll tell you things I can't get at any other way. As for us," Roper says as he looks over at Syarra. "There's a risky party we might be able to hit. It might be time to cash in on some goodwill to buy more. You heard anything about what's happening in Mt. Hyjal?"
"Ralaea's a friend, so I'll aim to keep it that way," Aze says with a nod, finishing up floor three. "Maybe that'll… dislodge something… once she sees I'm still standing by you. She wants people to accept her marrying a death knight, so she might see the benefit in allowing other people the same. Dead family, I mean, I'm not marrying any death knights. Or anyone."
"You're still young," Syarra observes mildly.
Aze scoffs. "The guards I like, and not only because they're my best lead on making actual money. We work well together. I'll stick with them." Then Aze sets down the pencil to turn her full attention to the death knight. "Hyjal, though? It's a fucking kaldorei thing."
"Yeah, it's a fucking kaldorei thing. Kaldorei, who as a whole hate both the undead and the fel-soaked. When the dust settles, the kaldorei could be our biggest weight on the wrong side of our continued existence. Which means every kaldorei that we flip to neutral, to tolerating, takes out another loud voice against us, and gives other undecided parties a reason to pause. 'If this kaldorei will work with this abomination, maybe they're not so fucking evil and I can, too, and hey, while I'm at it, not champion the cause to destroy their existence or lock them up for 10,000 years and see if that works,'" Roper says in a voice uncannily similar to Malfurion Stormrage, if not in word choice.
Aze flinches visibly at the 'lock them up for 10,000 years'. "You got any lead that makes you think they will work with you, and not just fucking shoot you in the face with their pretty little nature-loving arrows?"
Syarra shifts on her heels. "Celaven is there. He would not."
"Celaven, yeah, and his sister, Florande as well. There's a shot of a willingness to work with us at least if we keep it over to the side where she doesn't have to look at us with their mother, Anareline. She knows how we worked with the farmers in Northrend. And I've worked with her mate Caspis, along with another druid named Lode Fire Eyes, to help the kalu'ak. We worked with Celaven's girl, Velrin Silverbloom, against the Onslaught. We've got a good working relationship with Emerine, Westwind's old bodyguard," Roper says as he ticks them off on one hand. They've been playing this game for a long time. "And that's just kaldorei. We've also got references from Cobalt Company and Fallon to back us up as legitimate."
"We're not going in blind, Aze," Syarra says. She pauses, seeming to reconsider her words, but then just shrugs slightly and continues, "We'll have allies."
Aze leans her arms on the table, curling her shoulders, and says, "Okay, it sounds like you have allies. I don't what that means for me. I'm something else entirely, and something they specifically want to see dead. I have… sort of… Celaven… he gave me your diary. He healed my arm when you broke it, Yara," there's a flicker of pain and guilt there, fading quickly. "And Velrin I've worked with a few times, but I don't think she would if she had a choice. All that to say, I don't know if building relationships there is on the table for me. It's too risky."
Roper shakes his head. "No, no, you're still thinking about them liking you as a relationship. It's not about that. It's not about them choosing to work with you, or liking you. It's about them realizing when the shit hits the fucking blades, there you are," he says.
"Our assets are your assets. You get seen as a person, not an idea, because you're someone to us, and the other way around. What they need to remember isn't what you are, it's what you've done for them lately. That tips the scales when it pushes to comes time to shove." He frowns at the phrase getting mangled. Whatever that is in Thalassian. She probably gets the gist.
Aze nods vaguely. She probably gets the gist, whatever the words. "If you say so, but they're kaldorei. This might be one you have to work, one I can't cross into. There's no Light's Hope Chapel for me. No reason for any of them to look at me and see anything but a someone who chose to be a fucking monster. And maybe that's fair. People here — some of the humans here, anyway — they see me, and maybe that can be enough."
"But… if the Watchers are mixed up in this at all, they're not exactly known for making exceptions," Aze crosses her arms over her chest. "Or for changing their minds. I'd like to think the Alliance citizenship would make a difference, but… I heard it didn't for the Highborne."
Roper snorts, a cold twist of a sound. "We're not fucking amateurs. We expect everyone to turn on us in a moment's notice. For them to take advantage of a blind spot to take an opportunity to murder us if they think they can get away with it. For nothing we do to ever be enough, not when the noose gets around our neck." It's a cheery way to live. Well. Exist.
"But we can do Mt. Hyjal. We have our in. You've got yours here that we fucking can't. Divide and conquer," Roper says, the Thalassian flowing smoothly enough that it's likely that of all the phrases he knows well by heart are military related ones.
"Divide and conquer," Aze repeats, and she forces herself to sit up straight, setting her hands on the table. "Except, you know, in a very loyal-to-the-Alliance way. I take my promises seriously."
"Good," Syarra says, watching her carefully. "And when you come to visit us, we'll make sure there's no pitchforks to be found."