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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | Oranna writes to Thalstan to tell him two stories about the sha, and two stories about Oranna, as well as a confusing metaphor about cookies. 4k~ words. Blue Squad season 17 and 18 plots, but please see Content Warnings for sensitive topics. |
| Rating: | T for Teen |
Chain: Orastan
Thalstan,
A letter might not be much of a hug, but it’s something still for a good thing to hold onto. I didn’t use to write many letters growing up. I didn’t have anyone to write to, no point or reason, but I kept a journal for a long time as a place to write my thoughts and get everything to straighten out in front of me from a jumble in my head, and I think sometimes that’s just what I do in letters, and it takes a lot for me to write that way to someone who isn’t me.
Hearing what you’re up to in Outland makes me grateful that you’re out there on top of it, and that the challenges seem to only harden your resolve. It seems a bit odd to me that a person might find someone or something like the san’layn attractive, but that’s more me than the elves themselves. A few years ago, Ivri explained that to her the world looks like a whole display of cookies in a window of a bakery, and that while she might not go and buy all the cookies, they still look very hot and tasty. I’ve never been like that. It’s not easy for me to see a cookie, but once I see it, I do want to [the rest of the line is crossed out very thoroughly]. Cookies are nice. It’s a metaphor, obviously, but also true. I don’t browse or see cookies everywhere, but a special cookie has the same appeal that Ivri described. It probably needs to be homemade, and just for me, though. [Another line is crossed out to the point of illegibility.]
Well, I don’t know if you have seen any cookies in Outland, but it sounds like a lot of your work is with elves doing bad things, so that might affect the dough. I think this metaphor’s getting away from me, so anyway. I’m glad to hear Zaara’s less haunted by her ghosts. I have a few of my own, time to time, fighting the orcs out in the world. I think it’s not all bad though. Erixa’s got hers, like Zaara, but she’s using it for a good thing. She’s staying behind with the jin’yu village, now that they’ve lost some of their best fighters, and I reckon it’s from taking pain of loss and turning it to defending someone else, for what you can’t have saved afore.
Lord Springblade and Shine are aye, a little different in personality. Truthfully, probably the only thing they have in common is being good with knives. Shine’s an introspective lad, who keeps a lot of things in his head, and if you want to catch his opinion, you’ve got to fish for it, but even if he doesn’t say anything, he’s always thinking about it. Lord Springblade doesn’t often hold back her opinion, and she won’t hesitate to lay it out on the table for everyone to see, even if it’s a bit sharpish. Some time ago, we met up when I was looking for an opportunity, and she told me fairly that I wasn’t right for it, not to be unkind, but to be kind by being honest so I didn’t fail, just never got started.
I was really glad to get the pear bread from your ma, and I made sure to write a thank you for it. One of the best things about the pandaren is that they have a lot of not-meat options, but it’s still unusual food, and sometimes it’s nice to have something familiar in such an unfamiliar place.
Last week was a bit hard on all of us. That Temple of the Jade Serpent was badly affected by the breaking of the statue, and the sha erupting out of the ground. The sha got into the temple, and took over a whole lot of things and people. All that trouble trying not to blow my ammo at the books in the library, only to need to do so because the sha got into the stories themselves. If you think you’re not entirely sure how the sha works, you’ll be right cozy in our rapidly growing club of it, because we’re here on the ground with them and as soon as I think I get it, they go and make it stranger.
When I say the sha got into the stories, I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean literally. They thrust straight into the scrolls and into the book cracks, and shot out the stories into the real world. We had to fight a fish spouting poetry, and then a trio of what felt like a fable of a hozen, a tiger, and a beetle (large), and then a whole historical story about a real person and five suns. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel like you’re in one of those satirical plays about morality and meta story telling.
But, it wasn’t a good story. We had to kill the peoples who had been taken over by the sha, including their water prophet Wise Mari, and the temple priestess Liu Flameheart. We didn’t know any other way, and it wasn’t just us that didn’t know. There were pandaren who saw what had happened, and they weren’t sure what to do either, and sent us in to help with our guns and swords and knives. I know it’s probably not their fault for not knowing, because they’ve been living clean of it all for so long, but I wish they’d done more reading afore all this. I guess that’s one thing worrying is good for, to make you look ahead and plan for it. The pandaren don’t worry much. But, I’m here, and I can worry enough for two or three, maybe even four if I’m really on my top game.
It’s the doubting that I worry I can also do for more than just myself. I felt awful after the temple, even though we did manage to take down the big sha that had come up from the big gash. I didn’t try another drink, though. I don’t think it’d really help me be less like I am, and if it set my mind to certain things worse, I’d probably be more likely to suck in a sha than blow it off.
I haven’t told the whole story of why I don’t drink in writing afore, but I’ve told it a few times enough that it doesn’t have so many sharp edges. It’s old now, too. I don’t know if you remember much back afore the Second War Siege began, but out in the citadels and towns outside Ironforge, the humans got a message out warning us of the Horde coming. We weren’t taken unaware, and at first, it went very well. My family came from the edges, and though we knew we were pulling back into Ironforge for the best defense, we laid down explosives and ambushes on their forward scouts, and when we got closer to Ironforge, we picked up a good many gnomes who added to the sabotaging. We were winning.
We were so flush with victory after one particularly crushing day, that night we celebrated harder, thinking we were so far ahead of the Horde we’d never need to worry about them. I drank and drank, like the rest of the others. If I think about it too long, I can still taste the beers and liquors in my mouth.
That morning, afore it was even really morning, we were woken up by alarms and shouts. The Horde had caught up to us, had marched through the night to surprise us, we were caught with our bums out in the wind so to speak. I was so hungover I could hardly run. We were chased over the mountain passes, and we weren’t baiting them anymore so much as scrambling for our lives to get into Ironforge. There used to be a high bridge up near the entrance to the mountain, and that was the route we took. We weren’t going to make it, though, or worse, when they tried to open the doors, we’d have brought the Horde in with us.
So, my mother made the call. The Stormbreakers have been warriors for generations, and proud fighters. All of them but me. My mother kept the whole of my family back on one side, sent the rest of the civilians – me included in it – over the bridge, and had the gnomes blow the bridge when the Horde followed us up there, afore they could split to take the lower route. My family died on the other side keeping the Horde busy, while me and a cousin from the other side of the family made it into Ironforge. The whole time I could taste the alcohol from the night afore in my mouth, and the way it flooded up from my throat as I watched them fall under the axes of the Horde.
I haven’t had a drop since. Even the smell can pull up the old ghosts like a fishing string with better bait, though it isn’t as strong as it once was. During the Siege, the smell of the beers could send me running for a bin. Now, I just get ghosts of adrenaline, the fear and the shouting. For a long time, that moment loomed real large in my head. It made me doubt myself as a Stormbreaker, and it made me wonder why I’d been the one to survive. It’s why I don’t think drinking would even help me get around Doubt. I think I’d just remember that part of it, and it’d open me up, not close me off.
I guess if I’m telling that part, I might as well tell some of the rest after those last beers, because of what happened this past Sunday for why it wasn’t such an easy job for me. Having done what we could for the area in immediate help, we went on deeper into the continent, and we met with some of the pandaren who had been having trouble on a farm. There were some travelers headed near the same way, explorers, but I think they explore at a pandaren’s pace.
The trouble wasn’t sha, at least, just vermin. But, vermin can destroy a crop faster than you’d blink, though I haven’t seen creatures exactly like these afore. A bit like kobolds, but more rabbit and rat both, and huge. They sort of have an understanding of farming, if not the why, because they’d tried taking wheelbarrows and planting them to get more wheelbarrows. It sounds silly, and it is, but I imagine the first person to take something like carrot tops and think, ‘I want another carrot, so I’ll put this part back in the ground and maybe it’ll make me another carrot somehow’ also probably sounded a bit daft.
While we were finishing up, some pandaren wandered by looking for a “Hidden Master” and they split up to find them, including one going south, and Dane took us along that route, while White Squad headed up to the nearby farm which is in some direction not south to help the farmers.
South turned out to be a village caught under an unnatural rain, and nearly every pandaren there had been infected by the sha, something that caused despair and listlessness. It might be hard for you to imagine if you haven’t really seen a pandaren looking so peely wally, but maybe think of a ploppy bear. It was hard to see them so downtrodden, in part because they’re usually so cheery, and in part because it was all too familiar.
It was dreich as anything, and the rain cold and unpleasant, as we tried to get to the root of the cause. At least one pandaren hadn’t been sucked down into the wet hole, but she didn’t know what to do about the rest. The longer we were there, the heavier and wetter we all got. We have a druid with us now, name of Florande, and I had the thought about if she might be able to help bring the place back into balance, if we couldn't find a source. She's a bit soft-spoken, and real comfortable with her other forms, but I get the feeling she's youngish. She reminds me of Nilunelle a bit, one of Cobalt's original few members. Still, while being an older druid means experienced, usually, a newer druid might be more flexible, or try something different. Zhu's Watch might need that something different.
Dane and Shine seemed fair well off to keep off the drizzle from their minds, but Bran ended up getting a whole ride-along sha that twisted all his curiosity and momentum astray, and made him quiet and uninterested in the world around him, and bitter about not being listened to. He even stopped sketching, and he almost never stops sketching, unless it's for concentrating on people's safety. I don’t think this sha's much of what he usually is bothered by, but he said some what about it being a bad day for it. I’ve a mind to ask him about it later. Bran’s good at not letting things stick to him, so I’m not as worried now that he’s not getting sprayed on by the rain.
Don’t worry though that we had to do something drastic to Bran like we did with the temple folk, because strange as it might sound for a solution, a good hozen named Ken-Ken helped us out in finding an ancient cure he said was from afore even his grandma’s time, meant for this sort of deep sickness of sadness. It’s a certain type of mask made with ink and teeth (not ours), that drew out the sha, and so he was fine in the end, and so was I, having picked up a small rider myself. [Added in afterwards, along a margin, squeezed onto the side: (I’m fine now!)] I don’t think it's a coincidence though that for a mask that could take away the sha, when we confronted people in the temple who’d been twisted by the sha, they were wearing strange masks. There’s some sort of magic mask at play here that I don’t quite understand, but I think I’m starting to see a shape of it here and there.
It was a hard thing being in that village, speaking to all the pandaren who were too depressed to even get out of bed. One got out too close to the cliffs to do himself a harm, and only the deeper despair dragging him down physically kept him from doing himself any worse. His aunt was the only one still up, Mei, and he’d used to be the captain of the wardens of the village. We couldn’t even convince him to get up. We had to roll him down the hill back to his village, and all the while he kept encouraging these thunderbirds waiting to eat him to do better. We fended them off, of course.
The reason it was so hard, for me, was that I’ve been like it afore, not because of the sha, but because of the Siege and my own heaviness. And that’s the next part of the story after the why I don’t drink beer, so here’s the rest of that story.
Once we were inside Ironforge, I learned how to shoot in the Siege. I kept it up every day fighting to keep the Horde at bay, and I spent the nights crammed in with a whole lot of others. I still don’t sleep well if I can hear a lot of people around me, even just quiet breathing. When the humans came and broke the Siege, it was chaos down there with the open doors, and I broke.
To put myself back together, I left. I went into the mountains and I hid for an honest word of it. At first the quiet was good. And then it wasn’t. I don’t remember exactly when it started, how long it had been. Two years or three, maybe. I don’t know what was the first bad sign. Maybe when I stopped going down to the closest village for the supplies I couldn’t make myself. I mostly lived off the land, and simple, but I stopped going at all. Then, I stopped cleaning as often. I’d wear the same clothes for weeks, then months. I stopped bathing regular, stopped brushing my hair out. I didn’t wash bowls or plates long enough that they started getting reclaimed by nature with fungus and molds. I’d eat from my hands, sit on the floor or the bed to not have to be bothered to move the things off the table. When the winter came, I didn’t light any fires because they were piled high with the old ashes and wood I hadn’t cleaned out, and so I shivered under blankets, not caring how uncomfortable it was, because it was another reason to stay abed.
Then, I started to go out less and less even for the usual reasons you’d want to go outside for even a short trip. In Zhu’s Watch, on Sunday, Ken-Ken the good hozen tried a cure for the pandaren to get them out of the house to use a bush, if you take my meaning, but I could have told him it doesn’t work. I know it didn’t help me much. If anything, the trouble of it made me want to eat and drink less. I skipped meals because I couldn’t be bothered gathering or eating or anything. I was so tired all the time, and I slept more and more. And I don’t know if I’d have snapped out of it on my own eventually, or if I’d have just let it eat away at me, alone there in my cabin. My great-aunt was dead, my family was gone, and I’d made no friends. No one was there to find me and roll me down the mountain back to people.
But, that’s not how the story ended. Because I did get up again at least the once more, the most important time, after having spent almost the whole day afore in bed. I was weak, but I was out, and that’s what mattered, because I heard a strange sound out in the woods. It was a snow leopard cub, still too young to be without a mother, but she’d lost both mother and the rest of the litter. Something had happened, and this wee one was the only survivor, trying her best to hold on to life.
I took her back with me to the cabin. She was so weak and needed so much care that the only way I was going to save her was if I also survived. I went out for supplies for her, and I cleaned up the house for her. Afore I knew it, she was strong enough to start coming out with me, and following me around, and I wasn’t alone anymore, and I had a reason outside myself to keep going. My great-aunt Nettie had her superstitions about how if you name an animal after a person, with the way souls can gather back into bodies, that they could get confused on the call, and be called back into an animal. Like I’ve said afore, I don’t really believe it, but it’s a convention I’ve kept up in her memory. I called the snow leopard “My Will to Live,” or “Mywill,” and she was. For sixteen years, she kept me going. And when she passed, and the silence crept back in again, louder, it was me that rolled myself down the mountain and into a tavern where Elo had left a flyer for Cobalt Company.
That’s the story of the framing of those chapters of my story, from the last beer to the first day of Cobalt Company.
I thought that would be harder to write, truth told. Maybe another time, I'll tell you the chapter in between, about how I became a girl with a gun. I guess it’s easier to admit to you than another person I don't know why that village was so hard, how many little cracks I had open for the sha to poke its fingers into. You don’t have to worry about me though. Befound isn’t Mywill, but she knows her work much the same, and I’m not alone anymore. I have people who check on me, and they wouldn’t ignore me slipping away. Even more than that, I’m not sure I could go back to that sort of life, alone in the mountains, not now that I’ve been out in the world proper. Having survived coming up that close to the edge, I’ve seen the trail and the path, and when I put my feet down on it, I know where it leads, and I know better than to follow it. Better still, I know if something’s put me on it, how to track my way back home.
To be sure, though, I stayed a bit longer in Zhu’s Watch to help make some more of the masks. There wasn’t much to be made though, with the ingredients being what they were (the teeth were from local panthers, and I worry about upsetting the balance of the predators out here, especially with the virmen up north), but it was enough that I have one with me in my bag, to put on if I think I might be letting the sha back in. I’m more on guard against it now anyway. Five years ago, I’d have probably been too much of a liability to the squad to stay on it between doubt and despair, but I’m not that person anymore to be ruled by them. I know they’re there, and that’s half the battle to resist against them.
Some of what happened to get a sha a handhold in my head was that I was more worried about Bran than myself out there afore. But, since I knew how it felt after that time, I set my traps in my head for the wee nibbling thoughts, and made sure I kept my exit clear for how I’d get out of the unnatural rain afore I’d gotten too wet to think clearly. When I left the village for the inn and put on the mask, not even a puff of smoke came out.
I don’t know if such a story sounds very heroic, but maybe this one’s one of those stories behind the scenes, atween the cracks of the pages, a quiet resistance to the pull of gloom.
Might make me sound a bit daft myself though if I say that you’re here in those pages. I mean metaphorically and book-a-phorically. I brought along the first book of the Cobalt Blade series. I won it in an auction a time back. When we got the message to pack for this job, Jo said to pack for “a long journey” so I took it with me, because of [several words heavily scratched out] reasons.
Well I’ve blethered on long enough I think, so I’ll end it here, as usual though, hoping that you stay safe.
- Oranna
PS: I don’t know that Befound’s really thought at all about kittens, but since she really has sort of adopted Shine’s wee tanuki as some sort of apprentice, maybe it is time to start really thinking about it and planning for it. She’ll be in a mood for seeing sorts of options as cookies come this winter, so I’ve got a few months to think about if this year’s the year for it. I’d probably take some time off Squad once she got near the end of it, but that’s not always a bad thing for me to take a break.
PPS: [There is, despite the post-post-script note, nothing but two heavily scratched out lines.] Never you mind, sorry, nothing important, just a wondering that got away from me. I’ll ask another time. But I’ll keep in mind what your ma said about perfect time and never.