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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Roper receives an interesting note from an asset, necessitating a reading of the puzzle possibilities. Syarra and Roper must now make a decision on where to go from here with a high stakes bet on their futures. 2700~ words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
It's a bright and cheery morning in the Stonetalon Mountains, which just goes to show that the weather can't always cooperate with the mood of the world. It's only been a few days since the Horde dropped a mana bomb on Theramore, although word keeps spreading, information that morphs and flickers with suspicion and paranoia, lies and fears, all carrying the truth possibly buried inside.
So, naturally, Roper is in the thick of it, picking the locks to find the morsels of truth. This outpost's "tavern" is more of a suggestion of a building than a real one, half open space that lets dryads wander in and out like curious deer, and a bar made of living wood with tendrils of branches moving at a plant's pace to better turn its leaves to the morning sun.
The death knight isn't a common feature in this place. He's been seen in the area however, and if a person had to choose a place to leave a message, this is their best bet. It is barely a few minutes after his arrival before the kaldorei bartender realized that Roper matched the identity of someone described to her to pass on a message — a simple one, two lines long.
Roper reads the note, and then folds it into a tiny paper star, vanishing it somewhere on his person. It doesn't seem to have affected him at all, as he spends an hour idling in the tavern, drinking cold coffee. When he gets up and leaves, however, there's a restless impatience to him that shows in the way he yanks a horse of shadow up into being, riding off at a full gallop back to a shallow cave in the mountain where he and Syarra have made their temporary camp.
They weren't supposed to meet again until later, so it's a wait, Roper's favorite. By the time Syarra returns, she's greeted with the image of Roper poised dangerously on the edge of a precipice, left foot propped against the side of the mountain, as he spins a coin around his fingers, flipping it heads up, then down, then up again, staring off into nothing with his hood down and unblinking eyes ablaze.
Syarra arrives with armor ashy from time in the Charred Vale, though the spines and razor-sharp decorations are frustratingly free of blood. She moves stiffly towards the cave until she is close enough to spot Roper on his perch. She freezes in place for a moment. Then removes her helm and walks over toward him quietly. She doesn't bother to announce her presence — if he's going to sit that close to a cliff, surely he's paying attention to his surroundings.
"Something's happened," Syarra says, when she's close enough for casual conversation. "Something with the war?"
Roper flips the coin back to heads — it's an old, Pre-Alliance silver Silvermoon coin that's been ruined by a deep scratch through the center, a gouge deep enough to affect the coin's weight — and holds it between his fingers.
"Yeah. Got a piece of a puzzle, and gotta find where it fits." With his other hand he flicks his wrist, and a little paper star rests in his palm before he tosses it to Syarra. "Got that this morning. Obvious who it's from. Not so obvious is if it's real, or part of a deep laid fucking game."
The rasp is strong in his voice, but there's not even a trace of drawl in the Agent Roper's voice. "Can't rely entirely on just a few years, because elves can play the longest of games. Hell, even I'd be capable of running a game just two years in the making," he says. "Which means it's in measuring fucking sincerity that makes sense on whether or not Coriene Bloodsong just got played, or if she's been playing us all this time."
Syarra catches the star and unfolds it, her fiery blue gaze tracing the simple message once. Then again.
"He wasn't ours. I didn't know," Syarra says aloud, her voice flat of emotion. She moves over to Roper's side, to stand by the precipice. "Yes. I see the context you mean. If she's saying — it's hard to believe the magisters wouldn't have been part of it, that she wouldn't have. She's asking for trust, and she has dealt fairly with us so far, but…"
Syarra's gaze drops down to the coin. "What would she stand to gain, if it were a long game? From us."
"Time," Roper answers. He moves a hand out in front of him in a spread. "Let's say you want to keep Quel'Thalas intact, long enough to rebuild its glory, through a war you know is coming, and something that's gonna happen could paint a fucking target on the city that you could see from space. In a perfect world, you'd control all the information coming out of it, never let anyone see how weak a point it is, an easy chain to break in a fucking war machine.
"But you can't do that. You know you can't because some of the people who know the state of Quel'Thalas, its population and its military, are out and no longer have a pure loyalty to a city that will just as soon see her listed anathema as ignore her, like Syarra Sunstrike. So, information's not the way.
"You might have been able to bet that an overland strike against Quel'Thalas could be prevented because first an army has to go through the fucking Plaguelands. But, ha! Here comes a possible army of undead knights who can waltz right through, straight in to raze your weakened city. You know all too fucking well how easily that can happen.
"So, now, how do you stop that? You go to the source, the death knights themselves. You find the ones making the moves out in front, looking at the long term, shaping the actions of enough others. But, not so close to the real fucking center, so that when it's time for your patsies to be thrown under the cart, they don't have the power to touch you — or so you think," he says in a dangerous midnight voice.
"We're a perfect match for exactly what she'd need to make sure none of this hits Quel'Thalas with the Ebon Blade's scattered knights offering our services to the Alliance, using the cage of old loyalties and promises to hold us back. And if we keep up her purpose, whispering words for her that Quel'Thalas isn't the real enemy, then when the time comes for the truth — that it was always a way to play us to her tune while Quel'Thalas built up enough to gain time for supremacy to crush the rest — she thinks we're fucking low enough to not matter. We'd be traitors, and all our former allies would destroy us."
Syarra lets the words sit in silence for a while before she answers. Then she says, "Possible, but risky. For one thing, if we catch on, she dies horribly. We could get to her in Silvermoon. She knows that, and she has seen death knights. I lied to her, telling her that her sister didn't suffer, but she is not unaware of what we are. She lived through the Third War, and through the Northrend campaign. And still, she sought us out as allies. If that was only to turn on us… that is a level of audacity I do not know that she possesses."
"If it's sincerity, though, then what does she have to gain?" Syarra asks, and there's a darker undercurrent to her voice as she continues. "If she is sincere, she is desperate and weak. We know she wants Quel'thalas intact — and then an ally paints a target on it."
Roper flips the coin over, the tails side that shows the damaged gouging. "Survival," he answers. "At any cost she has to pay for it. She goes to an ally who understands that, has their own neck on that guillotine if the world fucking turns on them because their numbers seem low, and she makes her bed theirs. She still has to stop that tide of death knights hitting Quel'Thalas, long enough to kill the fucking amateur hour morons painting that target. But it's to live another day long enough to maybe someday have a way out from the Horde warmachine that doesn't give a shit what it chews up as long as the orcs win.
"She's smart enough to know that no one can take anything you don't give them. She wants to keep Quel'Thalas out of the Alliance crosshairs, she has to work with the allies she can. What happened is that she missed one, a big one. She got played, by someone or someones, and if nothing else, she needs to survive long enough to get her revenge." Roper studies the coin. "I can respect that."
He turns his head to look at Syarra with that intense stare. "But asking what she has to gain isn't the right question. It's what's in it for us, and what's the risk." Oddly enough, he doesn't ask it like an actual question.
The coin flips to heads. "If she's not sincere, if someday down the line she reveals us to have been working for the enemy, we could end up losing everything we've built with our reputation. Powerful pissed off people would come for us. We could get Aszera fucking executed by association."
He flips it again to tails. "If she is sincere, we could get an in to Quel'Thalas, a permanent asset who knows what she owes. Fuck, with the information we could get, we might even someday flip the entire game of the sin'dorei back with the Alliance, and fuck the rest of the Horde. Your house, your legacy, all of it, you get back."
"High stakes," Syarra observes, but there's nothing in the words of the cold-sweat, heart-pounding feeling a living woman might have. For all the emotion in the words, she might be commenting on the weather. Her expression, however, is cold and deadly serious. "But then, all of our moves have high stakes these days, it seems. Let's say she's sincere. She sends us this — it isn't enough information to be a favor. If it falls into the wrong hands, it means nothing without context. It's just enough to cast doubt, if we were considering whether she'd been playing us. Maybe… she wants to buy time, or find a way to send us enough information to prevent her own horrible death at our hands. Was she careful in the handover? Does she have someone following us?"
Roper balances the coin on its edge between two fingers, an impressive feat given that there's a breeze around the mountains.
"Careful. Impressively so," Roper says, and it's the sort of praise that comes from a man who views extreme paranoia as the correct baseline for behavior. "Message was probably sent out days ago, and it took this long to get the right drop off to us. Only reason we were found here is we've made no fucking secret of it. Careful wording, careful drop. Whatever her fucking end game, the one she's playing now has her frightened." His words aren't so emotionless, his half-smile pulling up involuntarily with a breath taken as if he can almost scent it on the wind.
His focus snaps back to Syarra. "This is testing the waters. It's either a clever bitch's bait, or an asset's real hand. Whatever we pick now sets the cost later." He closes his fist over the coin. A yearning that makes him sound more alive fills his voice, as he drinks from an old metaphorical cup of a previous life that fuels him still. "Think of it though, Sya. Information that fucking no one else might be able to get. The kind of currency that gives us the edge. And all we'd have to do is agree to find ways to keep Quel'Thalas out of the fight."
"If it's a real hand, if she's frightened… then yes, she'll owe us," Syarra says, her eyes glowing faintly as she stares back at Roper. "And if she's playing her side well enough, then it may be worth the risk. We'll keep our eyes open, then, and any sign she's trying to be a 'clever bitch', she'll learn it was an unwise decision." She reaches out with one hand to rest on his, over the coin. "Whatever our next step, we'll have to be very careful — Aze is vulnerable on our side."
"I know," Roper says, tonguing a canine idly. "I'm watching for it. Any excuse to see her as a traitor, and she'll be on that fucking executioner's block before either of us see the pitchforks coming for us. The information we might get from Bloodsong can't filter through her either way. Too dangerous an edge to play for her. But even then, she can't sever the tie she's got to us. We go down, she goes down with us. So whatever happens, if Bloodsong's playing us, we gotta have an extraction plan for Aszera in place. That means knowing where she is, or at least a way to get some kind of instant alarm to her that means get out."
"Some kind of instant alarm she'll listen to," Syarra says, her hand tightening subtly on his. "Maybe one of those arcane devices? She's likely panicking herself now, though she would say she can handle it. You remember how she was in Northrend. Regardless, you're right — we can't use Aze to pass information. If she ever contacts anyone in Silvermoon, for whatever reason, she would need to do it with the knowledge and blessing of her Alliance handlers. To do otherwise would be too much of a risk for her."
"Yeah. So, Azsera stays out, and we find an emergency button she'll listen to if things turn." Roper rolls the coin around his palm. "There is something else, another angle to play. If Bloodsong's playing true, then the Horde is starting to split. She said it before that not everyone likes where the fucking Warchief and that fucking Banshee Bitch are taking it, kicking the Alliance hornet net hoping for blood. But there's whispers that more leaders of the Horde who spoke against that blood are dead.
"That means if we played the field against that Horde, Hellscream's Horde, we could fight to push them out, or push them back. Bring back a Horde that doesn't do the stupid conquering fighting and backstabbing shit. It does what Bloodsong wants to get power back to Quel'Thalas, keeps it from being the target. And it does what we need, which is a feeding ground ripe for the fucking harvesting," Roper says, his left brow arching up as he looks at Syarra. "We spill the right Horde blood, and we get your way back into Quel'Thalas through Bloodsong."
"We make the right part of the Horde the enemy," Syarra says, the faintest smile flickering across her face. "If we can manage that, we can keep our neutrality and still participate. There are… not enough cultists anymore. Not after the Highlands and Wyrmrest Temple. We need war, but we need a war we can fight. If we win, what remains of the Horde will be our allies, and the Alliance will surely be pleased to see the Horde splinter. We may… want to preserve the Forsaken, if we can. For the precedence of undead being allowed to exist."
She glances to the shallow cave, and back to Roper. Then she adds, with a subtle thread of wistfulness in her voice at odds with her nightmarish appearance, "My house, my legacy. Our house."
Roper stares at her for an intense silence. The wind blows his hair around his face, the white strands outnumbering the black these days, the unnatural stillness of the man turning him into an eerie statue of lifelessness but for those blue flame eyes, unblinking, unflinching, and always calculating.
"Then we bet on it," he says.
He opens his palm to her, the coin glinting coldly in the light, tails side up with the gouging, ragged split down the middle.