Haunting

[Darkweald]

Without opening her eyes, she knew that death surrounded her. It wrapped around her like sweat-drenched blanket, humidly clinging to her skin and entwining about her limbs. There was no need to open her eyes to see it. The all-too-familiar stench, the skin-crawling texture, but most of all, the blinding darkness of it, made clear as day in her mind.

The diseased water of the Undercity sewers lapped up against her calves, filth and ichor having long ago seeped through the cracks and openings in her boots, reducing the chained links to a useless façade of a barrier: Naturally standing firm against the blades and bites of enemies, naturally revealing true weakness against a foe that could pierce it without any effort and needed only time.

Six feet along the edge of the waterline lay a tattered pile of feathers.

Saturna sat up, turned and opened her eyes to peer at oddly-shaped debris. A long, thin plank extended nearly five feet away from the water, its textured appearance barely perceptible through the mud that had collected over and around, plating it as if fine gold. A thicker lump rocked with the rhythm of the water, in little danger of being carried away by the meager undulation, anchored by its muddied extension.

The pale, young elf swung her weight toward the object with ethereal litheness, her knees disappearing into the murky shallows to sink in the silt and bone-strewn mud which lay beneath the grimy water now sucking hungrily at her thighs. Her pallid hair was matted to a dull grayish brown, ichor dripped viscously along much of her skin, flecks of dirt and bone crushed by the ceaseless stomping of adventurers through the cobblestone sewers of the Undercity sticking randomly here and there, with no section of her unsaturated by mire, all serving to heighten the effect—or perhaps change it: no longer the spirit of a Sin’Dorei girl, she now looked for all the world as if a corpse.

The living cadaver reached out her hand and plunged it into the murk around the feathered sack, sending cockroaches and whip-bugs fleeing from the disturbance. With slow solemnity she pulled a beaked maw connected to sightless eyes from the green, polluted depths. It was her owl.

It had been her owl. Remained loyal to her side, waiting for her to wake, to stand and open her eyes and offer it a fresh piece of meat.

It had always been too picky. Unwilling to accept most types of food, wanting only the freshest, succulent portions to strip away with snaps of its beak. None of that could be found here. Flaws have a way of emerging into the circumstances of their master’s ultimate undoing.

So feisty. So anxious to swoop into battle, even when the opponent could slash it to bits. Zooming in, screeching, claws slashing. A missile of white feathers no greater than a mere annoyances as if a buzzing fly that served as a momentary distraction from the feather-fletched missiles which soon gave rest to the foe’s vexation. Death. She had nurtured these hollow bones from breaks, bound frightening wounds, allowed the heavy avian to perch upon her arm or shoulder when it was still too weak to fly. But, in the end, all must complete the journey of life when they reach the glade from which they cannot return.

“I shall miss you,” she spoke softly to the owl, the bird to whom had never been given a name. A rambunctious fowl, eager to fight, despised by many, young, harrowing but not killing enemies, loyal and true, needing only the freedom of the sky to fly true.

She stood and turned away from the ragged blot of feathers, the wet scrunch of her boots announcing each step, filthy water and ichor smattering raucously against the stones, the noise rebounding about the narrow passage. She paused, closing her eyes and turning her nose down into her shoulder. Yes, much like him. Yes, she could wait. At times like these, it seemed as if she could wait forever.

“I shall miss you, Aetherryn.”

[Darkweald]

He stumbled out of the dark passageways of the Undercity, pausing frequently to lean heavily against a wall. The small pauses did little good—banging his helm against the grimy stones might have served better to clear his head. Yet still, for those with eyes to see it, the strength that burned within him shew clearly, in contrast to this surface weakness, not through blinding brilliance or intense heat, but through unrelenting force, palpable even through the burdens wrapped about him at this time. Tempered steel sheathed in cracked leather.

Reaching the courtyard leading to the gates, he paused once more and brought his fevered brow to rest against the cool, mossy exterior of a destroyed marble column. His breath came in ragged gasps, but not from fleshly weariness.

She announced her presence by brushing up against the dead branches of a nearby shrubbery. As he turned his head slightly to look for the source of the noise, she spoke in her iconic, solemn tone.

“I had warned you to watch the path of your steps, Adept.”

Aetheril jerked his head around so violently that he unbalanced his already teetering position. The frantic movement of his limbs to regain footing prevented him from actually falling over, but not from banging his temple against the hard stone. He saw stars. Shaking his head and blinking to attempt to sweep them away, he looked up again.

There was no one to see.

No sound but the mournful cry of the wind through the ramparts.



~ * ~ * ~

[Ellsbeth]

((I love your voice. This line especially "A thicker lump rocked with the rhythm of the water, in little danger of being carried away by the meager undulation, anchored by its muddied extension." You are extremely poetic. More stories please.))

[Darkweald]

[[ Thanks, Ellsbeth. Sometimes I fear it too ponderous for enjoyable reading. ]]

[Darkweald]

Aetheril, if it were possible, looked even more haggard than his previous trials had bent his appearance. Before his lifeline had been stretched taut, but the reappearance of Saturna left it fraying at the edges. If it was Saturna.

Saturna is dead. I saw her die, he would tell himself in frustration - - only to respond in kind, And I saw her living corpse in that alley only yesterday.

Sometimes she spoke to him. Often, she did not. She hovered around the edges of his vision, flashing into focus within a glance and disappearing without a trace when his consciousness went to take a second look. She peered over the shoulder of other Knights, of Magisters, and of Securo. Once, he had awakened groggily in the middle of the night to see her standing over him. His eyes had been at her waist level, and for the first time he caught a clear view of the strange, deep darkness that gathered about the front of her abdomen, an odd discoloration that had boggled him from a distance, his subconscious noting its importance but his conscious self unable to grasp its meaning. His heart racing, he had sat bolt upright in bed, throwing the covers from himself. He spent the next two hours staring about the room dumbly, his mind racing for meaning, his body shivering even when the cold sweat had dried upon his skin.

He hated traveling through the Undercity. Though he had become accustomed to frequenting the area, it seemed that she plagued him here more than in other places. Unfortunately, circumstances—involving real issue—dictated he ignore this; he had tasks he needed to accomplish here. Tasks he wanted to accomplish.

It was becoming clear that he would have to spend the night in the area, and so he spurred his charger on to Brill at a fast clip. The Gallows’ End Tavern saw enough visitors that the rooms were kept moderately clean despite the dilapidated, rotting exterior pervasive within the Forsaken aesthetic. He paid the inn-keep, who recognized him by this point, and labored his way up the winding staircase to his room, heavy and irregular clomps of his heavy plate marking the extent of his progress.

He had just completed the arduous and ponderous task of removing and arranging his armor, then sinking into the sheets and infirm mattress, when Saturna walked into the room. She walked swiftly and silently as she had done in life, pausing not a moment to continue up and over the trunk at the foot of the bed, walking right on top of the bed to tower over him as he squirmed up against the headboard in the terror of the moment.

Aetheril opened and closed his mouth, near dumbly except for the aborted remains of words stricken by the sheer insanity of the entire situation. His wide eyes took in the form before him that looked, in all respects, to be the same woman he had seen ruthlessly killed in the Silvermoon City Inn near half a year ago. A casual glance would gauge her Forsaken. Her hair and clothes hung flatly, molded by damp and dried ichor, stained by filth to a dusky brown hue that highlighted points of her white cadaver flesh, normally pristine, but now blotched and stained with death, to the point of making her near unrecognizable. But her face, the smooth lines balanced by the sharp curves that created her girlish features, her solemn expression gazing intently at nothing—the headboard, at this moment—though in life as clean as marble, now stood over his bed sullied by cemetery soil and filth, creating a strange stir of excitement somewhere beneath the terror of it all, that such pristine beauty could be marred, yet not destroyed, instead accentuated somehow. For this was no Forsaken, stained by grave rot and decay, then preserved and embalmed with ichor and formaldehyde; this was something altogether different, the front of her blouse clearly before him once more, with blood still seeping in a spreading stain about her belly where that fiendish woman had wrenched her knife through Saturna’s viscera.

“Wh-what do you want?” Aetheril tried to demand, becoming angry with himself somewhere deep within because of the mousy pitch that escaped his lips.

“Time grows short, Adept. Winter approaches, and preparation for its harshness spurs me to action.”

“Saturna? I saw you die,” he panted, unnerved that death had brought neither more clarity nor more fogginess to her speech.

“Yes, lifting not a hand to stop it,” she replied accusatorily.

“But I— she was— how can you—” he sputtered.

“Without her interruption, you may have lifted a hand to commit it yourself,” she leveled down at him. “Surely you did not mourn such a foul end to a suspected criminal and dissident.”

“If you’ve come to avenge yourself upon me, I won’t go quietly,” he growled in reply, somewhat surprised at his own ferocity, and he began reaching toward where his sword lay propped up against the side of the bed, never taking his eyes off of the wraith hovering upon the foot of his bed.

“Would you kill me again, Adept?” she asked, unconcerned. She brought her hand up from her side, trailing it softly across her thigh and opposing hip in its ascent, and took hold of the tattered hem of her blouse. Then slowly, as if in a nightmare, Aetheril watched as she lifted the garment to reveal jagged lines of the gashes across her abdomen, vicious furrows drowned in the viscous flow of the regal mauve that bathes the deep organs. “Shall I bare my breast to you so that you might drive your sword through my heart?” she spoke, continuing the upward pull of the fabric, the cloth straining against the deep-set stains that had determined its lay across her form. “Shall I offer my wrists for you to bleed?” she inquired, releasing her hold on the blouse and flipping the underside of her wrist toward him, a motion that thankfully caused her clothing to fall and once again obscure the horrific wounds upon her stomach.

“What—what do you want from me?” asked Aetheril in shock. Though his throat managed none other than a whisper, his mind screamed the question.

She tilted to her head slightly to one side, then answered. “A good death.”

Aetheril felt the blood draining from his face. He swallowed at the lump in his throat to make way for his words. “A good what?!” Then, after a moment’s thought, another question: “Mine or yours?”

“A selfish fay wants what is impossible for him to attain, but a wise the same for others, that they might enjoy what he cannot.”

“Felfire and damnation, Saturna! The fel do you mean by this? Speak plainly for once!”

He spat the words into the room. They flew up into the atmosphere and then asphyxiated and shattered, drifting down in a pervasive silence that continued for a seeming eternity, though Aetheril estimated a count of only two hundred or so clicks ringing out from the clock down the hall. Saturna did not even blink.

Then she moved with feral fluidity across the length of the bed, one knee brought down painfully hard against his inner thigh, the other straddling his hip, pinning him in place as her hands shot forth to seize his shirt. Her left grip, low, twisting the fabric, and pressing him against the headboard and serving as a fulcrum for her right grip, high, at his collar, the blades of the fist weapon he had never seen her draw pressing coldly against his throat. Yet what sent sweat condensing and falling down his brow was not the threat of steel against his carotid, but that he looked up into her face and found her eyes staring back into his. Piercing eyes, never focused on anything, suddenly brought sharply onto a single point, as with a light and prism. Aetheril felt them burning into his spirit.

Her words dripped like blood.

“I welcome your blade and exorcism, Adept, for perhaps you can find achievement along that vain struggle. Heed my words, because you are teetering on a precipice.

“You may be a owlet from a cracked egg, but you can still fly straight and true. I shall not see you lying soiled amidst the filth and decay of so many fallen ideals, not now, not when winter approaches and the ages repeat themselves and you might soar above it all, I shall not see you brought low with shattered wing and mite-infested feathers, where stagnant maladies might crawl within your hollow flesh and bloat it outward like a bull toad’s gullet, the tepid, polluted waves of all this rocking your corpse slowly as it sinks into the mire to be forgotten for all time but by—I shall not see it, Adept.

“I shall kill you first.”

[Faelenor]

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-Robert Frost-

She came in a dream, wielding both the bow of fate and the arrow of destiny.:

“…Fey, dark weald..,” echoed around Faelenor as he walked around a lush green garden. He walked along a path leading up to a fork in the road. There he saw a sign that read “Bear,” to the right and “goat,” to the left. At the end of one of the paths he saw a shadowy figure. At the end of the other path he saw three. All four figures where unidentifiable. He could not figure which road to follow because he feared what the roads led to.

Then he saw his brother, Aetheril , walk past him and down the road marked “bear,” with the three strange figures at the end of it. Faelenor decided to follow Aetheril down the path, but as he did the other path began to disappear.

Aetheril then met up with the multiple figures. Their identities where becoming clear now. Once was Securo, a paladin that strayed from the light and slowly became a warrior for the darkness. Another was the White Knight for the morning previous, and the last was Arthas.

“Aetheril, what business do you have with all these knights?”

No answer.

“Aetheril answer me or I will kill every last one of you. “

Still no answer came.

“So be it Aetheril.”

Faelenor raised his bow and shot at Securo first, followed by the white knight, and then Arthas. Not one of the put up a fight. Instead they disappeared into thin air. They seemed to have wanted Faelenor to be alone with his brother Aetheril.

Faelenor then raised his bow and pulled an arrow from his quiver. He fletched the arrow on its string and pulled. Aetheril slowly turned to face Faelenor, but as he did he grew younger. When he fully turned to face Faelenor , Aetheril had become a small child. As the arrow itched to dig into and rip Aetheril, Aetheril began, “Release your arrow. “

Faelenor paused as he watched the young child speak to him.

“Be quick with it, I’m already dead to you.”

Faelenor froze, arrow still ready to fly out and rip the child apart. Faelenor could not bring himself to murder a child, whether or not it was his brother, the blood knight, the enemy.

With that he began to lower his bow. The strain on the bow’s string died down slowly, but before Faelenor was fully relaxed, he could feel a sharp, cold, pain in his back. Faelenor turned to find a young female elf with pale skin and white colored hair. It was Saturna, the woman he had met the day previous. As he turned another arrow found its way into Faelenor’s stomach, and another, and another. This brought back the memory of his first encounter with Bangalash, his white tiger.

With that the child ran to Saturna and embraced her. Faelenor still alive with four arrows deep inside of him could not manage to find any words to say to her. He fell to his side and watched as Saturna lifted the child up into the air, and played with him.

Finally finding the strength to speak, Faelenor asked, “Why… Saturna?”

Saturna responded:
“You should have tread your path carefully ranger. For in tracking your brother you found yourself in that fey, dark weald that has come…”

She paused as she put Aetheril down. She began again.

“… too end your life.”


“…fey, dark weald…”
“…fey, dark weald…”
“…fey…”
“…dark…”
“…weald…”

With those three words Faelenor awoke from his dream. Bangalsh lick his sweating face as he lay in the Silvermoon Inn. The pain he felt in his dream came from Bangalash’s paw lying on his stomach.

“You know you should not wake me so late at night girl.”

Bangalash pawed at Faelenor’s face in a friendly manner.

“Why do I sweat you ask.”

Bangalash cared little for Faelenor’s sweating. She wanted to go play with their new found friend, Saturna.

“You know something girl, you remind me a lot of her.” He paused for a second to picture Saturna, but instead of the young woman he had met, the only image he got was that of the assassin that had murdered him in his dream.

“How you ask girl. Well you both have white, beautiful hair. You both seem to get along, and you both have that look of deadly beauty that a hunter should keep his distance from. As if… you where one in the same.”Faelenor then laughed silently at his own thought.

Bangalash stared at Faelenor somewhat unsure of what he had said, but in a way knowing that this was a compliment. She then jumped on Faelenor and began to lick his face again.

“Stop…it… girl…I need… to…sleep.”

Faelenor knew he could no longer sleep, for he feared that he would return to the same nightmare, the same,” fey, dark weald that ended every life’s journey. “

[Faelenor]

(( I am really sorry if this has nothing to do with your topic but in my gut instinct i felt it did. Once again forgive me if i was wrong. Hope you like it. ))

[Aetheril]

(( I thought it was quite good. It fits well with the whole Saturna and Aetheril deal, from Faelenor's perspective ))

[Faelenor]

(( thanks man. ))