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| Details |
| Author: | Athena |
| Summary: | The day before Hallow's End, and the festival Paws for Pumpkins, Roper and Syarra both make their way through Elwynn Forest, encountering different types of predators within. The death knights have been good little monsters, lurking on the edges, biding their time as they pursue their long-term goals. But, who are they to say no when a little trick-or-treating comes to them? 9700~ words. Death Knight story+RP. Please see CWs. |
| Rating: | A for Adults Only 18+ |
Roper: The Hanging Man
Roper watches as the hanging man kicks his feet, swaying wildly with each motion, back arched and tense trying to find purchase in the air. Or maybe it's a desperate attempt to find the right way to break his neck. His hands twist against the ropes holding them, grinding bone and rubbing skin raw. It’s amazing what the body will do to fight against the inevitable. Or towards it. Control. It’s always about control, taking it back, or slamming it forward – fucking control.
There’s so much pain in hanging. He remembers it. The way he’d prayed his neck would break on the way down, and the way he wanted to scream when it didn’t. You can’t scream when you’re hanging. Can’t make a sound. Can’t take a breath except through the smallest crack, and it’s not a mercy. It only makes it take longer.
Roped. Roper.
Fucking hell, the way a slow hanging man could feed him now. The agony of the body, and the anguish of the mind screaming and screaming silently, begging for death, thrashing against the inevitable. He could drink down the –
“It’s, um, it’s a little ghoulish, isn’t it?” The voice is a high-pitched gnomish voice, and it comes from the right height for it, somewhere around Roper’s hip. “All the little hanging ghosts get to me, too.”
Roper exhales a huff of a laugh, the cold air a brief visible cloud. The vision – the fucking Hunger fantasy – dissipates even quicker. Only the gods damned hanging ghosts of Hallow’s End.
“I think they’re funny,” Roper drawls in his living Stormwind voice, careful to keep the tilt of his head angled just so, letting the shadows of his hood and the line of his jaw hide the tell-tale glow of his eyes from the gnome. “Of all things that could actually be hanged, and we pick an undead without a body. What’s the ghost gonna do? Suffocate in memory?”
The gnome gives an uneasy giggle, and Roper can practically smell the fear starting to build up. He’s not dressed like a death knight in his soft dark leathers, his hands and face covered, and his frost contained. But these days, even when he wears a person suit over the whole, the longer the living are around him, the more they pick up on something they can’t explain.
They know, even if they don’t know.
“Maybe it’s meant to be scary another way. What if you had to spend an unknown eternity trapped like that, always hanging?”
Roper laughs outright, and there’s some echo in it, on the edges.
“Yeah. What a fucking nightmare,” he says as he slinks away from the gnome with nothing more than a passing swipe of his hand to stand for some social ceremony, leaving her wondering if she heard what she thought she heard.
He has places to be. Stormwind City on the cusp of Hallow’s End still has its ghosts to give up to the spy, if nothing to feed the death knight.
The shitty tavern run by a local gang using it more as a front for passing illegal shit than anything meant to tempt foot traffic is his last stop of the day. He always has to wait for this one. He almost fucked it up when he first went in three months ago, and only by the grace of the dead’s own luck did he see SI:7’s agent before he saw Roper. Flit had been a low level spy when Roper was at his peak, capable but with zero ambition.
Something had changed. Flit had a sharper glint to his eyes, a harder jaw, and a scar that ran through his ear and tore half it off. A marker like that made his options limited for undercover work. Not as limited as Roper’s, but whose fucking was. Flit was undercover within the gang, and he worked the tavern’s floor through the morning to the late afternoon, visible through a catty corner window with barely a sliver of range where Roper could see Flit and stay out of the other spy’s line of sight.
But, every so often, in a good pattern close enough to random that Roper hadn’t cracked the impetus of it yet, Flit stayed overnight.
Today is one of those fucking days. Roper slams his spyglass shut with a curse. He’d wanted one more soak in the ambient gossip of Stormwind, what people on the criminal edge were thinking of doing with Pandaria and its portal restrictions now that another week had gone by with no change.
It’d have to wait until two more days. Tomorrow, Roper has other plans. Fuck, he hates waiting.
Syarra: The Woods Are Lovely, Dark, And Deep
The forest of Elwynn is nothing like the Eversong Woods. The trunks are thicker, the color of the bark darker. The leaves are a bushy green that shrivel yellow-brown in the autumn, then dry and crunch like bones underfoot on the winter ground. The shapes and silhouettes are wilder, unlike the cultivated and carefully-ordered forever-spring trees of home.
It’s better this way.
The irregular shadows and density of the trees provide cover for predators. Foxes, wolves… and more deadly things.
The elvish death knight, Syarra, sticks to these shadows, moving as an unseen menace through the forest. A dark-hooded cloak obscures her form, runeblade, and glowing eyes. She is permitted to be here, but it is a tolerance she does not want to press. Especially not these days, as she slowly starves to death.
“I am not starving to death,” Syarra tells herself in a low voice, cutting off that train of thought immediately. Another crest of eternal hunger rises, and she pauses a moment to wait for her thoughts to settle. The pain doesn’t settle, it only ever rises – unless she can give it to someone or something else. “I am in control. I would not choose to be out here alone, otherwise.”
It was easier when she was hunting stray cultists, killing orcs in the mountains, fighting on battlefields in the north. She longs for those times now, here in this place with so little conflict. But she and her husband Roper are here for a reason. Looking for a path. A good future. If they can find that, then it is worth all of the suffering.
“There is a place for us,” Syarra repeats to herself quietly, in a rote tone that makes it sound like a mantra. “Good can come from darkness.”
Syarra is a darkness incarnate, a black form beneath the trees, moving quietly in her soft clothing. She doesn’t need her nightmarish plate armor, not here. No wild creature she would find in these woods offers enough danger to require it, and she has no need today to inspire horror. She would prefer not to inspire anything at all.
They would tell the wrong story, as Roper would say. There are many ways a person might describe their experience of meeting a death knight in the forest, and nearly all of them would not suit her purposes. She is not here to create stories in the minds of anyone, not today. She is only here as a predator, seeking other predators.
To that end, she has worked her way towards a region of farms with livestock, which tend to attract hungry carnivores. This is where she has been finding her pain, and it is both useful and good. It protects the investments of the living farmers, and it allows the prey animals to live in peace. She usually tells herself this, afterward, when she’s cleaning the blood off her hands.
There are pawprints in the damp forest earth. Something – wolf or worgen, and she sincerely hopes it’s the former – has been stalking this field of fluffy white innocent sheep. She creeps closer, to the treeline, keeping silent. All of the prey animals blur together in her senses, an expanse of peaceful living creatures. They could be so easily broken, if she were not good.
Syarra freezes in her tracks at the sound of voices, in conversation. Now that is a very different kind of prey. Three humans, lounging by the edge of the sheep pen. Syarra pulls herself back against the tree’s trunk, into the darker shadow. She could go to another field, look for more paw prints. Instead, she watches and she listens.
“Oh, I am definitely going to the festival tomorrow,” says a young woman with a giggle. Her face is bordered by little blond ringlet curls, and there’s red paint inexpertly applied to her lips. A farmer’s daughter who imagines herself a lady. She sits on the fencing in a way she might think is alluring, and continues, “There’s going to be bears and wolves, did you hear?”
“Pandaren and worgen, Molly,” corrects a second girl, brown hair crowned in blossoming weeds. Syarra can only see her back, with the way she’s leaning against the inside of the fence. There’s a faint and pleasant frisson of irritation in her tone as she continues, “They aren’t monsters, you know. You’re not going to make a very good impression if you don’t at least learn that much.”
Molly pouts and reaches out to lean against the shoulder of a sturdy young man, dark-haired. “We’ll make a good impression. I’ll bring… something in wool to give people? Do they even need wool in winter, with all the fur?”
“They aren’t furry all the time,” the man answers with a brief laugh, looking at her with uninteresting affection. “The worgen aren’t, anyway…”
The chattering continues, and Syarra closes her eyes, letting it fade into background noise. There is no scenario in which it’s a good idea to go and speak to those people. Not when she’s this hungry. Perhaps not at all. Silly, harmless little sheep, in their safe, painless world.
A death knight could teach them suffering. They were isolated, and wolves did roam these forests. It would be so easy. No one would ever know. They wouldn’t even be able to fight her – such soft targets…
Syarra raises her hands to her face, a curiously living gesture, and waits for her thoughts to settle. That is a choice she will not make. Not the innocent. There is wanting and there is wanting, and she does not want to harm these people. The intrusive thoughts, the desires, she cannot control, but she can control her actions.
When she feels more balanced, she is surprised to find that there is something else beneath the hunger. Another ache in the cold of her heart. It isn’t happy, and so it doesn’t fade. She sits there in silence, examining her thoughts. It is an unrealized desire, oriented towards others, but without the goal of killing. It is a yearning towards warmth and laughter, simply wanting them for what they are.
A feeling… loneliness?
Syarra frowns. Surely she is not that sentimental. She shakes her head in irritation, now that she has identified the problem, and returns her focus to exterior matters. The three humans have left, likely going to prepare for the festival Syarra will not attend. The little feeling arises with that thought, too, and Syarra pushes it away.
The very idea of it is ridiculous. She has Roper – they share laughter, though possibly sometimes at things the living would view with horror. For warmth, there are Aszera and Alaisa, though it’s true she has visited neither in some time. The same could be said of the hunting lodge, and that naive little noble Tennerow priestess. And others… Celaven, Kitharian, Fallon. Depending on what Roper learns tomorrow, maybe it is time to actively cultivate those ties again, to reach back towards the living.
Or maybe this loneliness is simply an after-effect of prolonged near-deprivation. Yes, pain is what she needs, surely, and all of this will go away. Syarra returns to the matter at hand: paw prints, and stalking wolves who are stalking sheep.
It does not take very long.
The wolf she finds is as hungry as she is, but far weaker. It is too early when she slips and ends the creature’s life, but at least it takes the edge off of her hunger for another day. It is not enough to remove the pain completely, but if there is one thing Syarra knows how to do, it is to suffer well.
Roper: The Five
Elwynn forest gets deep dark in places this time of year, especially off the main roads. He remembered it when he was alive as being cold, but in a good crisp way, like each breath cleared your sinuses and washed clean your lungs, even as it bit away at your ears and nose. He feels nothing now, the cold too faint to reach inside him and make a mark.
Roper hears them first. A branch crack. A shuffle of the last leaves on a low hanging tree. A sniffle. He senses them second. One has a healing broken nose that whistles with the wind and stings with each breath. Someone has some internal complaint, a headache maybe. Another is so hungry that it’s a cramping pain in his stomach spreading out.
“You and me both, pal,” Roper mutters.
He slows and then stops. The moonlight can barely touch him this deep in the woods, just enough to glance off his shoulders.
“Hey. You know where you went wrong?” He says it loud enough to carry. “Sure, I’m a small guy. And I don’t look armed. I’m out here, alone, in the dark. I’ll give you those. But, you should have paid attention to the fucking details. I’m alone, but I’m off the fucking road. Maybe I’m taking a dumbass shortcut, right? But I’ve got no light. No torch, nothing. And I’m walking through these woods like I know where I’m going, like I can see just fine. That tells you everything you needed to fucking know. I’m not a mark, you fucking morons.”
The leader, has to be, steps closer, but still out of Roper’s longest reach, and the moon kisses the knife extended. Fuck, sometimes he really misses his knives.
A shot of phantom pain cracks the ice in his mind.
He doesn’t miss anything.
“What the fuck are you talking about? No, you – If you want to live, you’ll give us everything you own,” the leader grinds out. Roper can hear the hesitation. He’s thrown the guy off script. Hasn’t been doing it long enough to improvise. The others stir closer, a menacing lopsided circle around Roper. Five of them. The Hunger reaches out with scrabbling claws in Roper’s head. Gods, it’s been so long since he drank deep from that well.
But he’s in Elwynn. You never know who might be setting up some shit like this on purpose to trap Roper into attacking citizens without real provocation. A threat of robbery doesn’t carry a death sentence, let alone a death fucking knight sentence.
“I told you, I fucking get it. My clothes are well made. Alone.” Roper spreads out his hands. “But, I’m telling you you got it fucking wrong, and you should have known it. I’m giving you one chance to walk away. Learn something. Grow into a better highway robbery brigade. I’m generous like that.”
The leader looks to the girl who must be his second in command, or his fuck buddy. They’re wearing bandanas, which means they probably would leave Roper alive. Thieves who hide their faces are just fucking thieves. It’s the bare faced ones who you know will kill you.
The thief scoffs and grips his knife weapon tighter. “Are you hearing this shit?”
“Just stab him already, Tom. He’s bluffing,” the girl says.
Roper tilts his head. Amateur hour. Can’t size up a mark, can’t remember to use fucking code names. “I’m just wondering, what the fuck is the point of wearing a mask if you’re going to call a guy by his name?”
“What?”
The broken nose person brushes a hand or something over it, a brief shot of extra pain, and Roper inhales it like a fresh waft of bread from a bakery.
“This is your last chance. Tuck your fucking pricks back in your sheathes, fuck off, and see sunrise. I’ve been more than fair,” Roper warns. He shifts his cloak off his shoulders, revealing the dual hilts of his swords. “Don’t make me your problem. ‘Cause I will be the last problem you ever have.”
“Shit, he’s armed – “ says someone behind Roper’s right shoulder, high pitched. The one with a headache.
“He’s one guy! What the hell is wrong with you all?” The girl snarls. Roper might have liked her in another life, but in death, all he can smell is how hard she’d fight back when he slices her open. She will would be a screamer.
“Claire’s right – fuck,” Tom says. What an idiot.
“Don’t do it,” Roper mutters. Do it, the Hunger sing songs. Roper is only pretty sure it wasn’t out loud.
Tom, the amateur hour moron, ignores Roper’s advice. “Kill him. Watch the cloak. I want it,” he orders, stupidly announcing his intentions before he charges.
“Dibs on the swords!” shouts the guy with hunger gnawing through him. Roper grins and he feels the ice surging in his belly. Hey, who is he to ignore the ancient fucking rights of dibs?
Roper slides his right sword free in one smooth pull from behind his waist as he reaches with his left for the shadows to crush around the hungry man’s throat. His feet dig furrows in the soft ground as he’s yanked into Roper’s sword. The runes blaze as Roper feeds the man’s empty belly with the saronite steel.
The hungry man gasps, chokes. Roper twists the sword, yanks it upward. Inhales. Sweet, sweet relief. Blood soaks into his mageweave gloves.
The others are frozen in shock. Too fast. Too slow.
“Ah - ah.” The hungry man tries to put his hands on the sword. His brain is firing madly. Fix this. Something is wrong. Scream for help. Pull it out. Do something. “H - he –”
“Oh, shit, you’re right. You called dibs on swords. Plural,” Roper purrs. “My bad.” He can hear the metal singing with the speed that he pulls it free, cutting into the back of the hungry man’s neck, half cutting into the spine, before Roper saws both blades free. The man pirouettes like a dancer slipping on a pool of blood, crashing limply to the ground. Not yet dead. It’s going to take him minutes to die there. “At least it’s not fucking raining.” Roper laughs, letting the pain surge through him.
“Colm!”
“Shit, shit, he’s – shit!”
Roper can feel the panic surging beyond a line. Fear. He tilts his head up to let the hood fall back. The wind howls around him, brushing strands with frost. He knows his eyes must be glowing like twin blue moons now.
“Holy fucking Light – he’s one those things! A death knight!” screams Claire.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Roper croons, stepping around gloriously bleeding, dying Colm.
Tom scrambles back, his knife held out like a holy talisman. And then, he says what Roper’s been asking for all along. Do it.
“Run!”
Roper laughs, the echoes bouncing off the moonlight.
Chains of ice rip out of the ground, catching Broken Nose’s ankles. The ghostly links spread upwards, metal vines with jagged ice thorns. He has enough time to scream. The frost shatters glass through his veins, and Roper sets the living blood aflame.
“Hey, at least now you can’t feel your broken nose. You’re welcome,” Roper purrs. He brings his runeblade down through the broken nose, slicing open the man’s face to the bone. The skin parts, flayed from the skull, a moment’s pristine white. Roper reverses the sword back through the man’s open mouth, tearing across the cheeks. Blood floods the man’s throat. Pain explodes. He hits the ground, twitching like a hooked trout. Feet kick, kick, kick. His hands scramble to his face. Hold it. Try to control the pain. Struggle against the inevitable.
“Shh, shh, shh.” Roper feeds, licking his own blood flecked lips. He can’t taste the blood, but he can taste the pain.
Headache is slower than either Claire or Tom. Pain fatigues, and so he’s going to die sooner. Roper swings his blade through the air, and the wind howls and screams as icicles rip through Headache’s retreating back. It tears through a soft spot, hits that crucial point, a gut shot. He trips, falls. Signs his death with a face full of rotting leaves. It’s the scrambling in the dirt, digging in, scraping through the cold, cold ground, the desperation. Roper remembers that desperation. He remembers trying to get just a little farther, bleeding through his fingers, the bullet ricocheted inside him, tearing through his body, everything getting colder. The dirt under the nails. The disgusting pressure.
Whatever ruined thing can be called Roper’s soul shudders in the ecstasy of alleviation of absence as the Hunger feeds, teeth scraping along the sweet agony as Headache’s entire world becomes this shard of ice tearing him apart.
“Go,” Roper encourages. “Maybe you’ll make it. Maybe he’s waiting for you. In the wrong direction. Twenty minutes early. Maybe he’s figured it out.”
Headache rolls over, shaking his head at Roper. The words don’t make any sense, and somehow that scares the man even more.
It takes so few strides to close the distance, and the runeblade carves up into Headache’s betraying tripping foot, his death sentence, flaying the skin off the muscle so fast it's a line before it’s a trench of blood and a scream. The open jaw exposes the tongue, and Roper doesn’t need a knife to flick through the soft tissue, to pin Headache like a delicacy to be sauced in butter with mushrooms and onions and broth, and the screaming becomes gurgling and choking that melts in Roper’s mouth.
He’ll die, painfully and slowly, and it will give Roper time for the last two. Those two lovers, the one with names, who think they’re going to make it. He sheathes his swords.
Claire’s faster. Roper can see it in how she moves. She could outpace Tom. She doesn’t. Branches break against them, snap, snap, snap. Bursts of pain that Roper can sense but can’t taste, like smelling fresh ground peppercorns. The forest eats up their footfalls in the mulch of decaying leaves, and then – the burn of ice and death as it grabs at the soles of their boots. Claire screams, and Tom falters.
They run faster and Roper pushes his dead body even more. They are adrenaline and fear. He doesn’t even breathe, doesn’t bother. Unholy energy pushes him beyond a limit that tears muscles and strains tendons in seconds. It doesn’t matter.
Too easy. That’s the worst of it. It’s just so easy.
Roper catches Claire with a ribbon of shadow. Snatches her first, because he wants to see what Tom does.
Hesitates, that’s what Tom does. Thinks about running, Roper guesses. If Tom had been faster, if he’d been further ahead, Roper would bet that Tom would have run. He would have left Claire to Roper, let her buy him time. Claire doesn’t know it. Roper pulls Claire up against his body, her jaw crushed in a grip of fingers that cracks a tooth in her mouth. She tastes like over churned butter and old tin, an aftertaste of bitterness. “He’d let you die if he could,” he tells her, a whisper in her ear. “He’s not running only because he’s too close. He’s too fucking slow.”
It twists something inside her. A secret little fear. She fights harder. Strikes against his instep. Reaches back and rakes her hand against his wrist to break his hold on her. She screams. He knew she would.
Roper lets her go with a laugh.
She thinks she broke his hold on her, thinks she did it. She sets her jaw, takes up a position with Tom.
Tom holds his knife like it matters. She draws her own like it matters.
Roper spreads out his open hands, showing them his empty hands for a second before he draws his runeblades again. “Knives, you fucking idiots. Do you have any idea what knives are even fucking for?” he says as he circles them. “It’s an ambush weapon. You draw it to kill, upclose, personal. It doesn’t matter how you get there. Maybe you talk your way up. Maybe you sneak your way up. But you’re either a flash in the dark or a trick up your sleeve. You know what you fucking aren’t? You’re not a threat. You’re not a fight. You don’t take a knife up against something. Not a shield or a polearm. Not a fucking sword.”
They don’t get it. They’re nothing but weak, trembling living flesh. Claire’s dripping butter chewing on the cracked tooth, and Tom’s he can only start to taste, something like stolen curry bread left to get stale and brought into the sun too long, hard and chewy, something you can keep biting and biting long before you finally swallow it down.
Claire lunges stupidly at Roper, with her short reach and her knife, and Roper bats it out of the air with barely enough force to knock the strike from anything. Tom, the opportunist, takes his own shot. Roper doesn’t have to even reset his guard – he knocks Tom’s attempt off.
The two of them train together. Claire should be better, but she’s spent so much time playing to Tom’s ego that she keeps letting him take the lead. And he doesn’t have the speed to pull it off. Roper watches them fight, learning nothing from it. They have nothing. Roper starts to take tiny pieces. He cuts Claire’s fingers so she doubts herself a little more. He slices off some of Tom’s confidence around his thighs so he knows he can’t run off and leave her.
While he’s dancing, Tom flips something in his wrist, injects it in, and Roper’s steady stream of pain lessens. Interesting. Tom’s got at least some tricks up his sleeves after all.
“Trick-or-treat,” Roper says, and he cuts a line up Tom’s arm where the injection hit. Red drips down, along with something milky white as the moonlight. Tom curses, clamps a hand down on it, and the pain swims wildly back and forth.
Claire guards him while the injection takes hold.
Headache finally dies.
Roper lets it spur him on to carve open a gashing hole in Tom’s thigh, the frost fever burning behind. It deliberately leaves an opening for Claire, because Roper wants to see what she does. Claire sees it. Lunges. It might save Tom from a death in seconds, but it will kill her.
The ice covers Roper so fast that the crack of it sounds simultaneous with the hit of the knife on his arm.
“Hey, I like this outfit,” Roper scolds Claire, his breath a deeper white cloud around his face.
Tom is close enough that he could do something. He’s wounded, but Claire is overextended. Roper twists slowly, telegraphs the strike.
Tom doesn’t stop it; he reaches for a potion, in a pocket. And Claire’s surprised. It’s a deep one, and it cuts something inside her even before Roper’s blade. She didn’t know he had it. She doesn’t have one herself. The injection, that was Tom’s thing. But a potion? She could have done one. But, no.
Tom’s too busy drinking it to even cry out when she’s hit – the pain he feels at her death is enough to feed Roper a bite, but it hurt him more to get that hole in his leg.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. So much for true fucking love.
Roper’s sword glides into her soft body, up through that broken heart. It’s probably a relief, the cold saronite steel, compared to the breaking.
“See? That’s not love,” Roper tells her, as she stops struggling. Burnt butter and dead hopes are sweet bitter notes on his tongue.
Tom’s knife flashes out against the last of the frost on Roper’s back, but Roper’s not there anymore for it to touch the leather.
At last, it is only Tom, who planned to be the one who lived. Roper pulls him in, and crushes a line of a tendon in Tom’s shoulder, listening to the way he screams.
“You’re not going to die today.”
“I – I’m not?”
“No. No, you’re a fighter. You could stay alive for, fuck. Ten? Twelve? Hells, if we pace your potions right, maybe even fourteen hours. My wife, oh, fuck, she can keep this going, string you out just enough, so you can feel yourself dying, but you’re not really dying all the way, it’s beautiful. She’ll be glowing with it like you won’t even believe. And she fucking deserves it. That’s what really matters. And I get to bring you home to her.”
“No. No, you can’t –”
Roper doesn’t let him finish the sentence, as he shoves the piece of Headache’s shirt into Tom’s mouth, and wraps the rope around, a gag that chokes him, forcing Tom to breathe through his nose if he wants to live. Oh, Tom wants to live. Tears crowd up and stream out, carving through the muck on his face, revealing the delicate freckles visible in the pale moonlight and muted glow of Roper’s runelight.
The ropes go around Tom’s hands and legs, and while Tom struggles like a worm in the dirt, Roper’s nightmare of a horse rises out of the shadow world, catching them both on its back.
In their wake, four bodies stir, jerking and twitching, bones cracking as the shadows fill them. Tom’s breathing speeds up in something – hope? No. Fear. Roper licks it up like a glaze, sucking it off his fingers, as the ghouls claw upwards, moving towards their master. Roper lets it go on longer, for Tom, lets the creatures lunge and lurch, churning, snaps of sinew echoing off the lick wet carrion where Roper’s blade left empty places the shadows didn’t fill.
When Tom begins to sob, Roper inhales, and pulls the shadows back into himself, cutting the strings of the puppets, one by one – there goes Hungry, then Nose, then Headache, then Claire. He makes sure Tom sees Claire turn into corpse dust in a shaft of moonlight, nothing that Tom will ever be able to touch again. It sends a stab of wretched heartbreak through the man that Roper laps up. He’ll have to tell Sya about it so she can twist it later.
Roper and Syarra: The Dead Don’t Give Up Anything
It’s a pathetic piece of shit. That’s why it was empty. Even when it was built, it wasn’t a wanted place, it was something that had to be made, a necessity that someone hammered each board with resentment and nailed in with spite. Then the people who hated this building on the water with its off centered stairs and sagging front window and too deep root cellar were brutally murdered by greedy, self-righteous local terrorists who claimed it was for the people’s revolution. The ghosts that came out of it were the Defias’ own fucking fault.
The angry poltergeists of rage made the single story, two room hut uninhabitable, and eventually, unusable. Every year it sunk a little deeper into the shit around it, damp and mildew and mold destroying what weren’t even good bones, and even the desperate overlooked it.
But the dead?
The dead don’t give up fucking anything.
Roper has scrubbed the place down until the wood has screamed and bared under the layers of worn down life walked by the living for the dead. It didn’t matter that he was breaking it, ruining it for the long term, tearing through it so far to get to the mold, the filth. They aren’t staying. It lasts for now. The broken furniture was tossed or burned, leaving an empty space behind.
What may be truly disturbing is that they have brought in personal effects, enough to claim it as somewhere they stay as theirs for as long as they remain in it. Strangely comfortable and luxuriously red cushions surround a well made table with a pot of cold coffee and a terrifying carved nightmare statue placed next to it, with black candles burning steadily, revealing their expensive nature. Their bed with lush and immaculate sheets, draped above with red silks and tulles, in a corner with two armor stands, one of which holds Roper’s new dangerous armor set glowing faintly icy blue from the enchantments, visible from even across the room. The kitchen has neatly stacked bowls and a large, clearly fresh and well kept jar of honey.
The ghosts don’t fucking dare to touch a single thing. They know their place.
Its domesticity only highlights the incongruity of it all, this strange fucked up place and the undead monsters that inhabit it, and it’s there in the moment of the brutality of how Roper dismounts from his nightmare of a horse, pulling the rope taut upwards as he does, to force the taller man into a better position to hoist him up over his shoulder. The man fights it, weakly, but the chains of ice slide over his limbs once more, as Roper laughs and tuts.
“Not yet. Save it for her,” Roper scolds, patting the man’s thigh, as he approaches the dilapidated piece of shit house, and reaches out a hand to test if it’s locked.
It isn't.
Maybe it would be soon, from the paranoia of an elvish death knight who doesn't trust wholly to poltergeists and bad reputation for keeping her temporary home safe, but she's only gotten back shortly before Roper.
Inside, Syarra Sunstrike leans against one of the scoured, sanded wood of the sagging wall, staring at nothing with eyes that are just a little too dull for safety. Her runeblade is propped next to her. She's in her utilitarian clothes today, rather than armor — that is, for a certain kind of death knight utility. Her dark hair is bound back in a braid and her dead, pale skin contrasts with her black boots, pants, shirt, and dark cloak to cover her elvishness, hood now thrown back carelessly. There's recently-dried blood on her hands, on the cuffs of her sleeves, but not enough. Not enough.
As Roper approaches, her dead expression animates with something on the axis of hope and hunger. She drops a hand to her runeblade, as the rickety door-handle turns.
There's no way to disguise what Roper has with him, like an already popped bottle of champagne, bright and sparkly, a mix of pain and relief of someone who has been hurt and healed. Roper has gagged him, with an effective rag and rope, allowing barely a hint of a scream to emerge as the duo come through the door, which glides smoothly over the floor now that Roper's sanded off so much that it doesn't stick.
Roper's lopsided grin is visible first, and he tosses his hood back as he kicks the door shut behind him.
"Hey." She already can read some form of a story — he's fed, deeply. He's drenched in dark blood, some still slick enough to glisten in the candlelight. But more than that, he's electrified — animated in a way he hasn't been since they left the richer bloody shores of Kalimdor for the richer gossip of Stormwind with poorer hunting grounds. There's something alive about him, and when he speaks, he reaches that affection that seems realer, closer to something of a living man he once was. "I saw something that made me think of you, baby, and I just knew you had to have it."
He says it the way a man would talk about seeing a diamond necklace in a window; he's carrying a living person: a man in his early 30s, maybe, with sandy brown hair and gray eyes, tear tracks down his freckled cheeks, blood splattered along his face, and terror making him shake in Roper's hold.
Syarra breathes in, leaving her runeblade against the wall as she comes towards him, a deep yearning in her eyes even if she can't reach that place of genuine affection, not right now. She reaches out, as if to touch the slick blood on his clothing, and then she smiles. The coldness of the smile, perhaps, demonstrates why she does not usually do so any longer, in living company.
"Hey," Syarra echoes, and then her attention is on the champagne, the diamond necklace. The sapient body capable of feeling so much pain, of taking away her own. "You found… he's safe?" That might sound a little too relieving for the man, until she continues, her eyes alight with hope, "Safe for us?"
"He and his band of merry fucken morons tried to murder me in cold blood," Roper says. Haha, get it, because he's dead. "Highway robbers, clearly not their first time. Had a bunch of stolen shit on them. They're all dead, bodies handled, but this guy." He shakes the body, and lets it drop to the floor. "Tom." Tom, the man, tries to move away, achingly slowed by the chains of ice Roper has caught him in, as well as the prosaic ropes that bind his hands and legs. But, oh, he tries. Some part of him just won't give up, not even with so little hope. He wriggles for something in his sleeve. "Had a lot of tricks up his little sleeves, and some potions, that his other friends didn't. He's a real fucking survivor, Tom."
Roper crouches down, reaching out a hand to brush back some of Tom's hair from his face, in a gesture that would seem soothing if not for the menace in the death knight's unblinking eyes. The gag comes off, and Tom sucks in gasps of air, spittle flying out between chilled lips.
"I told him he wouldn't be dying today." Roper looks back up at Syarra with that crooked grin as he catches a hand at that sleeve Tom keeps trying to wriggle, pressing hard on it, and Tom makes a strangled sound; blood from a fresh cut of something sharp drips slowly down to their scoured floor. "You've got hours until tomorrow."
"A murderer," Syarra says, with the same kind of appreciation one might express for an especially tender steak. She kneels down by his side, her expression softening at the cut in a way that might look like sympathy. Her blood-encrusted hands tremble as she reaches out, taking his arm in a surprisingly gentle hold, as she says, "Tom, is it? You're going to have to help me out here, because I… I don't know if I can…"
Tom tries to pull away from that gentle hold, and it becomes a vice. "Please, just let me go. You don't have to do this."
"Shh, shh, " Syarra says with a widening smile, rising and pulling the man roughly to his feet. She twists his arm as she does so, and sighs happily at the resulting cry of pain. Looking at Roper, instead of her prey, she says, "I have an idea. If you're alive tomorrow at noon, I will set you free."
From the dark intensity of her gaze meeting Roper's, there is no credible chance of that happening.
Tom's eyes are wide, frantic as he stares at Roper, a pained, choked laugh coughing upwards of disbelief that the monster that hunted down the others will let him go even if the beautiful elf might.
Roper, however, spreads his hands out magnanimously, arms open, brows raised. "Hey, she's the boss," he says, a twisted echo in his voice, but it's worse somehow for being true and ringing for it. "She says you can go free if you're still alive, I swear, I'll let you go."
Oh, but the cut of his smile, the cold, burning death in his bright eyes. Another truth in them, something Roper knows, and isn't saying.
Tom flinches. Whimpers. Pants in short, panicky breaths as he turns his head to try to get a better look at Syarra. She seems softer, maybe. A woman, an elf. "You will? I… I don't want to die. Please."
Roper sidles up behind Syarra, a shadow pressing in dangerously close to her, whispering in her ear, a low rasp of his true voice, filled with the death echoes. "You deserve this. You've been patient and perfect. Fucking wolves and strays, because you're strong and you know what's at stake. This is your reward, baby. You've earned this. You've been so fucking good. No more wolf tonight. Have a little rabbit."
Syarra closes her eyes briefly at the whisper, not losing her grip on the prey, and her smile softens into something that does look like affection, here after the first tastes of pain. She whispers back, barely audible, "I choose where I eat. And I've been so… so… thank you, love."
And then she turns back to the prey, and her tense posture loosens, a self-control lever released. She might seem soft now, a slight-framed elvish woman, except for the unnatural pallor of her skin, the dull blue flame of her eyes.
"Let's start with your fingers, I think," Syarra says, closing her other hand over Tom's. "No more tricks up your sleeves."
Her grip tightens slowly but inexorably, with strength enhanced by undeath. Tom tries to pull away, but there is no pulling away, not anymore. He had his chance long before now, and he squandered it. When the first bone snaps, he screams.
Roper stalks slowly around in a half circle behind, a moving shadow on the wall, and unbuttons his cloak as he watches, tonguing a canine tooth. He sways the cloak into Tom's line of sight.
"Hey, hey, hey, focus on something else besides how it feels, the broken bone. It's a technique, yeah? Remember this? You wanted it. You make it to noon, you walk free, you can have it. It's nice, right?" Roper twirls it, his voice hypnotic, smooth and echoless, and — then strange, slipping into something unfamiliar to Syarra but familiar to Tom. A woman's voice. "Just stab them already, Tom."
Tom cries out, a surge of fear and pain that has nothing to do with a broken finger, and his head swivels around, looking for someone who isn't there, but he is terrified might be.
Roper throws his head back and laughs.
"Haunted by ghosts already?" Syarra asks mildly, loosing his mangled hand. She glances up towards Roper, some of the animation of life is already coming back into her features, and then at some flickering shadow in the candlelight. Her voice is almost gentle, coaxing, as she says, "Maybe they're here with us, waiting to see if you'll join them. You'll have to endure, Tom, if you don't want to."
Tom curls up, whimpering, cradling his bound hands against his stomach. He doesn't have any answer.
Syarra doesn't require one. Instead, slides her own knife out of its sheath and tests the blade with her finger. "Where were you going to stab my husband, I wonder?"
Roper puts a dramatic hand to his chest. "Right in the heart," he says, but then he slides behind Syarra, bright eyes unblinking. "Or, oh, Tom. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Don't tell me you'd have gone for a gut wound? How cruel." The candles flicker in a strange howling wind, and the echoes in Roper's voice have a pull to them for a second.
"You — you fucking killed Colm like that you — " Tom grinds out around clenched teeth, sweating and rocking as he tries to protect his hands from further abuse. The frost fever has finally faded off enough that he's lost the slowness of before the pain is a new type of debilitating effect.
"He called dibs on my swords. It was only fair," Roper rasps.
"You would have stabbed my husband in the heart?" Syarra says, in feigned horror. There would have been a lot of unfeigned horror, and not on Syarra's part, if they had succeeded in any such thing. Then again, there likely has been anyway. There's dark silk in her own voice as she says, "How barbaric."
Then she notices the fever fading, and she grabs him by the shoulder, shoving him so hard against the wall that the wood trembles. "Why don't we let you and Colm match — if you live long enough, you can find a healer." And with that she slides the knife into his stomach. It's obviously a carefully aimed stab, but whether that's to minimize or maximize damage is likely lost on Tom.
What does happen, though, with the touch of the blade, is that a coil of dark energy forms around Syarra's hand and flows into the wound. The pain of the blade is intensified by the diseases that flow into his body — a new strain of the now-familiar frost fever, and the pulsing burn of blood plague traveling through his veins.
Tom makes a wheezing sound that ends on a groan. His tied feet make him awkward as he struggles against her pinning, but instinct tells him to try to get away from the knife — and there's nowhere for him to go.
Roper molds himself in close behind Syarra, an arm around her waist, and his left hand twining around a lock of her hair, frost crackling over it like a strange lingering kiss.
"Or we could get you another potion. You have more, don't you? Pocket, was it?" Roper drawls. "That was a surprise. Not for me. For her. Claire. She had no idea you had those. You were fucking, right?" It's not a question, not a real one.
"I love — " A pained sob, half wail. "Loved her." He shudders, wheezes again on the inhale. Physical pain collides with emotional pain as Roper twists a different knife in counterpoint to Syarra's.
Roper makes a rolling sound of disgust, and twists Syarra's hair around his left hand. "No. You didn't like it when I killed her. I'll give you that. But you had time. You had means. You could have put yourself between her and my blade when that moment came. You fucking didn't. You drank your fucking potion she didn't know you had. You weren't hers." He rubs at the base of his ring finger, frost coating his leather glove.
"Love isn't a feeling," Syarra says gently, letting go of the knife in his abdomen to cover the back of Roper's gloved hand with hers. "Feelings come and go. Love is a choice. A choice it sounds like you didn't make."
A death knight's reflections on love are probably not very useful to the tied-up man with a mangled hand and a gut wound. Tom tries to reach for his pocket, and then cries out again in a flash of white hot pain as his broken fingers move.
She shifts the hand on his shoulder, a faint motion like a soothing pet until she finds the nerve she's looking for and digs her fingers in. For a few moments, Tom probably doesn't think about Colm or Claire or anything but pain. Syarra inhales, a faint, relieved smile on her lips, as she leans her head back, her cheek touching Roper.
"Maybe we should untie him," Syarra says softly. "Let him have his potions. A good, sporting chance."
Roper's crooked smile moves his lips, as his eyes stay fixed on Tom. "That's true, baby. See, Tom. We may be abominations in the eyes of the Light of the restless unholy dead, but fair is fair. I let you run earlier, didn't I? You might have made it."
Somehow, maybe with the way the temperature in the room is slowly dropping, or maybe just the memory of how the death knight hunted the others down, one by one, unrelenting in his single minded focus, Tom might have a distinct impression that none of them could have ever run fast or far enough. Hope wavers in the living man.
Syarra leans forward, pulling the knife out of his stomach and cutting through the bonds on his hands with the blood-slicked blade.
"Fair is fair, Tom," Syarra says, as the man scrabbles desperately in his pocket with his good hand. As his own blood spatters to the floor, and the injury and disease wracks him with pain, he might doubt the fairness of this proposition. Still, there's nothing but sincerity in the death knight woman's expression as she adds, "Please, I want you to try."
Time Passes
Tom tried.
He never saw noon. No more than Roper saw Colson's Light, or Syarra saw the dawn.
Whatever was left of his soul didn't join the restless dead of the piece of shit house, and the body became nothing more than another corpse dust thrown out to sink into the mud.
Roper stretches out on the bed, left leg up and right leg out, dressed in his pristine clean clothes, black and soft, all traces of blood and death wiped fastidiously away, his hair brushed back from his face. The Hunger is already creeping back at the edges, from just that brief period of time taken to clean, but it is sated enough that he is animated and as relaxed as he ever gets — which means he's flipping his gnomish lighter in his right hand, flicking it on and off with distinct clinks. But he's not pacing for once in this dilapidated hut, and it's been a long time since he's stopped and laid down like this for no reason.
Syarra is kind of pacing, but it is more of a languid, sated movement, as she pulls on a clean red blouse. Her hair is loose, and she looks as relaxed as she ever has, here in this place.
Smoothing the shirt, she comes over to sit next to Roper on the bed with a contented sigh. "I needed that. Thank you."
Roper reaches out to her hair, winding it over his palm, and forcing her closer. "Don't thank me. Thank the fucking stupidity of petty thieves. I tried to convince them to fuck off. Told them they had the wrong guy. They pushed, and made me their problem. If I'd planned it, I'd have brought them all to you fresh, with fucking bows on top. But. Tom made good on it at least." He inspects her, unblinking, and there's an edge to it, anger at something that isn't her. "Bought us another good week."
"A good reminder of what it's like, not to suffer," Syarra says, yielding easily to his pull and lying down next to him, resting her head on his shoulder. For the moment, the deprivation of recent weeks has been washed away in the flush of pain dealt. They both know it will creep back in, and soon. Even now, in this moment of peace, there's an undercurrent of something darker in her expression. "Every so often, I forget. Light forbid we ever have a world without stupid criminals, without war. I'm glad they pushed, but… they probably made you rush it, didn't they?"
"They ran," Roper says in his midnight voice, examining the threads of her hair on his hand. "Had to hunt them down. Couldn't have them scattering off screaming 'killer death knight.' They'd have lied. Wasn't going be another fucking Mourn." Frost creeps over the black curls with a ha. "And now, tomorrow is going to be almost too easy."
"They would have made you the villain," Syarra says in quiet assent. "Even Tom, it would not have been a story of mercy, if we had been merciful. So we cover our tracks. And now… you could be close enough to hear them, maybe, at the festival?"
"If I can stay upwind, I could probably convince someone to give me a fucking day job at this point," Roper brags, flicking the lighter on and off. "Or at least look so close to the part, that I make them see it. They'd just assume. Could be worth it."
"To be there, work in the setup, the tear down?" Syarra hesitates, and then looks up at the ceiling. "I couldn't be close enough, in case things went wrong. It's not even the hunger, I can handle it like this, just…"
Roper shakes his head. "You don't move right. Someone would clock you as an elf if nothing else, and all it would take it one fucking catch," Roper says, and his hand tightens on her hair dangerously for a second before he stops himself. "I got a hundred ways out, and the gods damned nets to tie them up in, Sya. They can't get me. Not just for being there. And now? I know I can't slip up."
"Get as close as you can safely, then," Syarra says, letting her body fall slack against his, like a cut-string marionette, "It isn't only survival. We'll… You'll have to make sure they see the right story. Hearing what's happening is worth some risk, I agree."
Roper feigns taking offense. "What do you take me for, a fucking amateur?" he scoffs. "They'll see whatever I fucking tell them to." He moves the lighter across his hand. "It's worth the risk. They have something we need. The fucking leverage. There's gotta be something. The pandaren have something. It's there, I just can't — " He clenches his fist over the lighter. "We need to know what they need a monster for. We get that, we're in. All it takes is hearing the right thing, at the right time."
It's a spy's philosophy, not a death knight's, but sometimes that is what he is.
"The right thing at the right time," Syarra repeats, still staring towards the ceiling, but not really seeing anything. "We've been waiting long enough. There must be something. We must be needed somewhere. There is just so little I can do to help you find it. The pandaren, at least, have no emotional history with the undead."
"They're fucking getting one, this side. Mourn's been lurking by the gods damned portal with all his usual paladin hammer subtlety," Roper says, a brief genuine scathing before it burns out. "He's not being an asshole at least. Polite, for now. Doesn't seem to be doing anything one way or the other, so it's not our problem. But, if he keeps it up past a point, I'll make it one. On the other side, though. It's fresh. If we could get in. It's like the fucking Sunwell all over again."
"They're not letting him over?" Syarra says with a frown. "That could be a problem, but then again, the portal was always a gamble for us anyway. I do not have Mourn's charm." There's a faint flicker of amusement in her tone that dies out quickly. "It still might be worth the risk eventually — today is good, but I don't know how long I can…"
Roper shakes his head. "No. We go over to Outland if we get fucking blocked out here. We could find those people who fall through the cracks. People no one would miss, because no one is looking." He clicks the lighter, watches the flame burn. "Besides, Fallon is over there in Pandaria. The smart plan is to go in with our leverage in fucking hand. We prove we know what we're useful for. But, better to ask and get in than wait until we're down to the bone. Desperate makes for stupid." He snaps the light off with an annoyed sound. "And it'll have to be something good for enough of us. Mourn getting to his own fucking limit, or the others, can fuck us both no matter how good you and I play our cards."
"If we could work together with Mourn," Syarra says, and for a moment her gaze is more present, but then it falls back into a blank stare. She reaches over to rest one hand on Roper, less of a gesture of affection than of possession. "I suspect he would not."
"I have very few cards, so I may lose no matter how I play. My assets are irrelevant, until someone does something about Hellscream." Syarra pauses, and then adds, "Do you think Fallon still values us, as weapons? If we had a target in mind, he might approve our travel."
"Fallon knows what he invested in. If he saw something he could point us at to his benefit, he'd contact us. That he hasn't means he doesn't have one. Which also means if we come to him with it, we prove what we do. That we're useful. Resourceful." Roper clinks the lighter. "And with the way things are going, could be that down that line, those someones doing something about fucking Hellscream is us. It's a fucking razor line. But, if enough of the Horde turned…" He shrugs, a rolling of his body. "Right now, they're doing something in Pandaria. That's all the rumors are coming in, and have been for weeks. Hellscream pulling pages from fucking Doomhammer's playbook, trying to win favor with conquest. No way to tell if it's working, not this side. Not from here."
"If that's where this is playing out, then it's where we need to be," Syarra says quietly. "We can't sway things in either direction at such a distance, and I would love to be the blade going through Hellscream's throat. We'll show Fallon — we're a weapon that can be trusted to self-direct."
Syarra taps Roper with one finger, the same pattern as the lighter clinks. "On the other side, no more word from Bloodsong, which either means people in the Horde are falling in line, or that she has no use for us yet. Or there's just no way to get word through safely. If we were in Pandaria, maybe we could fix that."
"So. Then, tomorrow, another ear to the fucking ground. And another step closer than it might have been otherwise." Roper smiles crookedly, burning blue eyes heavy lidded, and voice dark as a moonless midnight as he leans in close, brushing cold lips across Syarra's pale cheek. "Thanks, Tom and Crew."
Because they may be undead abominations who feed off the pain and torment of others, but they're grateful dead.