Halodante

 My world had filtered down to somethin less than gold and red edged in a depth that promised oblivion.

 Violence is so much like a storm, twisting upwards and rolling into the air mixing with all the other violence until it breeds something that never stops.  Escalation put to the music of so much suffering.  Smoke adds its flavor and a fire’s heat only curls in unison, as a perfect mate.

 Tonight is ablaze with every music note I want heard.

I hate Northrend; more specifically I really hate Icecrown.

There is a cold satisfaction in freedom, is that what this chill is? The icy grip of fingers guiding their own rules, marking their own paths.  It’s supposed to be a warm thing for most I imagine, but I was not created to be most.  Out here there is no Harpy wings to shadow me, no protection from my Mother bear, here I have my senses… and my rogue.

 It has been enough.

  “All what evil aspired to be wrapped in a fairy tale princess with all the lines and flowing hair for sonnets and each poet’s head lovingly arranged on spikes. Snow white with a twisted edge from a black abyss.  How did everything go so wrong?” –Ixinane

Three days ago, I dreamt.

  I do not see so you can imagine just how drowning the experience can be.  My dreams come in sound, and touch and smell, screams and whispers and feelings crawling across skin others refer to as pale.  I do not know if I am pale, I simply trust that the others do not lie.

“Five minuets back to the outside world and you come home covered in burns.”  The voice was sweet enough. Doting.. concerned…motherly even in its even light soprano.

  “It was necessary.”

Blood on the wind

And cruelty on his breath

Such a man to want to teach me

((It is a strange idea, it came to me today so I ran with it... this may not happen.. who knows! 15 year challenge of strangeness accepted! ))

 I could see her past the mess she had created.  The ground kissed with scorch marks and burned to a blackened, beaten husk.  What was left of the tree climbed upward in skeletal remains of frozen fingers, stabbing angrily at an overcast, smoky atmosphere.  This place screamed of violence, its natural voice taken over by the cries of the dead and poisoned by the thoughts of the dying.

  It’s in the absolute still that the shattered can find a small measure of peace, it’s in the quiet when all the jumbled pieces stop their bickering and settled into a fragile semblance of solidity.  That still draws inward, a mother quieting a bawling child.  Loving in its own way, moving through blood and memory until there is only one where there were many.  These are few and far between but the voices can collect in what is for me, an unnatural state.  A time when we are no longer “we” and I am simply… I.

Babysitting, all the things I could be doing and I was reduced to a babysitter.  Hell I wasn’t even allowed to drink with my drugged companions, I wasn’t allowed to touch them except to administer the drugs and I wasn’t allowed to stab them full of holes.  I have never been so bored in my life.  Not to mention this place gives me the creeps.

Zalinara Brightwind sipped her morning tea and looked out the window at the garden. Her room, her new room, at the Dawnfire estate looked over one of the interior courtyards of the sprawling house bright with spring flowers. Behind her, her servants bustled about, tidying the room and laying out her clothes for the day.

“I could get used to this, again.” She thought.

Everything you have will be taken away …

Then I shall enjoy it while it lasts.

She glanced at the door in one wall, that door that led to Darroc’s rooms.  Her new situation was the result of the … arrangement she had negotiated with Lord Dawnfire. Not a mistress, that was Embraelle’s role, but an advisor, ally, and occasional lover.

Negotiated on your back, you mean …

  Mother had duties to attend to, responsibilities to her heart and she had become so quiet with the thoughts that moved inside her black branded mind.  She had taken me with her.  I had things to sort through and so did she, so we hunted together and let the dead voices become part of the frozen winds.  This is my second trip to Icecrown.

  Harpy and Little Monster together.

Greetings Kethryverris,

  I am Free and I am writing on behalf of my Lady Halodante.  As you can probably guess her sight makes it difficult to communicate through letters so she has chosen me to copy what she says. 

These are my Lady’s words:

Zalinara Brightwind paced the confines of her room; in the course of the night she had gone from upset to angry to furious. That ghost, that spirit, that nether-damned THING Silent had shown up to spoil a perfectly nice evening. It had looked like her, been dressed like her, and had been spouting things she would barely admit to herself. And in public!

She couldn’t have that damned creature spouting her secrets in the middle of Silvermoon. And more warnings about Halodante. If that little tart spoiled her plans …

You’ll do what?

Destroy her, of course.

I am tired.

To the outside eye Darroc Bastion Dawnfire is a Bastard. Indulgent. Strong. Ruthless. Manipulative. Selfish. Arrogant. Cruel. A Womanizer. In short, your perfect example of a Sind'orei Noble. The truth of it is I like to chase the line till I hit the end. Because there, just behind the veil of motivations, the composition of such a creature as myself rests in the welcoming bosom of my family; and the finer extensions beyond. Not dissimilar to a comet or a tumbling asteroid, I rip through my life and goals with a blinding and destructive intensity that leaves those I contact with a sense of traumatic imbalance.

((Takes place after Halodante's http://www.rp-haven.com/blog/halodante/our_melodies ))

My desk had become a vast alien world with mountains of piled paper and seas of writing thick enough to drown in.  Too many projects, too many things to look into, to study… welcome back to Azeroth Harpy.

  One pile, stacked as neatly as mounds of folders and toppling scroll could be was my past written in stark black and white with my father’s scrawling brining back enough memories to blot out the present.

 I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole
Till there's nothing left inside my soul
As empty as that beating drum
But the song has just begun

Mother’s presence was always a comforting thing, strength of will and a thrumming purr of power tucked inside a vessel of fragile flesh and bone.  Twisted and contained, Mother would never admit it but the demon home had been good for her. Mother was approaching completion, her madness accepted; violence harnessed and pulled into a sweet drumming melody.  She had been the first voice I heard after Father had created me, she had been the one to chase shadows from the forefront of my mind. Mother loved me, accepted…completed. 

Her workroom lay deep beneath one of the University’s lesser outbuildings, an obscure and inconvenient location, undesirable for higher-ranking scholars and discouraging of unexpected or uninvited visitors. The University authorities would have been annoyed to find that their master keys no longer opened the two heavy doors that barred access and more than annoyed to stumble across the wards she had placed.

She stopped to examine the complex rune that was taking shape on the floor, glancing up at the similar diagram that covered one wall for reference. It was taking shape nicely, she thought.

They drink your fear: it is the blood of life …

And if I have no fear, what then?

You are not strong enough …

  Breaths came in a labored melody, a shuttering whisper perhaps with secrets locked in its harsh rhythm.

 Mother told me once if I was to be dangerous then the world should never know just how much.  A lesson learned when I met Gardener, oh how I do like her but her madness goes deep and it has no anchor of rebirth as mine does.  She had been broken, but never remade.  
 She has no qualms of flaunting what she and I are, what we share and only those who are born again like us understand...everyone calls us mad, no one actually knows the Darkness we face, not really.

Dear Miss Silversong,

It grieves me to inform you that your father has been killed on the Molten Front. He died serving honorably, and has left his lands to his only remaining blood. The package that accompanies this letter contains all of the paperwork necessary to move things forward.

Charisma sat on her bed, staring at the letter long after she'd finished the words. At the beginning of the war against the Lich King she'd lost her mother and came to Silvermoon, begging and pleading with the magisters until she was finally allowed to roam the city and learn from the mages at the Spire. Even now she had days that her heart felt like a piece was missing, when she smelled fresh baked sweets or the way a summer breeze blew.

This time was different. There was no mourning, no feeling of loss. How could you lose something you never had in the first place?

((Today has been spent listening to too much Rob Zombie and Florence and the Machines, apparently that’s good art music for a sleep deprived individual.  So! of course they are not actually colored... because I never get around to coloring anything :) ))

She didn’t understand why a crowd gathered at this one bakery. The cupcakes were good, but there were plenty of other bakeries in Silvermoon. Still, it was a treat she could afford and the most interesting people showed up and she could practice talking to them.

There were the two baker ladies,the troll and the elf; the nice man in the hat, Teithio, or something like that, who did something boring for the government. It was a pleasant conversation until Teitho mistook something she said.

“Oh, you’re a magister, then?” He asked politely, trying to interest the pretty blonde girl sitting nearby.

He knows, kill him.

No.

“No, no.  Nothing like that.” She fought to keep the panic out of her voice. “I’m a field researcher.”

Kill him.

Not here, not now.

He made another innocuous remark and she stumbled over her answer.

“Free! Freeeeeee!” The cry was desperate behind closed doors. “I’m dying!”

“You’re not dying.”  The rogue pushed the double doors to the original Lady Stormcren’s room with a hip, hands full with a wood carved tray laden with everything from spiced tea and black coffee to rolled bread and honeyed oats. “You’re hung over.”

  Shadows, I am heartbroken you have betrayed me.  You are my shield, my weapon and my comfort in a world I cannot see.  You are my colors, my tether and when I needed you most you fled from me.

  In any other house it might be considered a strange sight, a girl sitting on the floor surrounded by leaves of paper a mile long.  Crumpled and crinkled about her legs and tangled around one arm.  

  She should have been as pale as the moonlight that leaked through the high window, she sat directly in its grace, but Small Lady was neck deep in one of her moods and shadows as unnatural as half the things she said moved over her like a second skin.  

The harpy relief starred at him, bronze sightless eyes seemed to threaten, to promise death without so much as a word.  Vormon shoved his glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose with boney fingers and diverted his eyes.  He preferred the old crest, the cranes backlit with a storm not this beast with wings outspread and the old storm still raging behind it.  He fiddled with his glasses again, in his current risen state he really didn’t need the small lenses rimmed in gold, but they had become a thing of comfort.  A shield between his unsettled nerves and the outside entities that set him on edge.  This crest, this house, this family had always been one of them.