Daughter of the Sea (lord_admiral) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2019-10-02 02:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, jaina proudmoore |
There’s only me and my decisions, and my responsibility for those corpses back there.
Who: Jaina
What: Dreams of destruction and magical nukes
Where: Neena's place
Status: Complete
Rating: PG-13
Theramore held the might of the Horde at bay, until they were forced to retreat, and Jaina was consumed with relief. Casualties had been remarkably light on both side and try as they might the Horde couldn’t break through her defenses. With Vereesa and Shandris harrying the Horde out in the swamp, it looked like Garrosh’s plan had failed.
And then, as they’d tended their wounded amid a subdued sense of victory, Kalec had told her he’d sensed the Focusing Iris headed for Theramore.
Everything happened quickly after that. Kalec shifted into his dragon form and took off to try to intercept the Iris, the Goblin Sky Galleons approached at a rapid pace, carrying the biggest Mana Bomb anyone had ever seen. A bomb powered by the Focusing Iris, one of the most powerful magical relics in the world.
Rhonin, her friend and the leader of the mage order of the Kirin Tor, redirected the portal she’d created to evacuate as many people as they could. Only that hadn’t been Kalec’s plan.
Kalec’s plan had been to evacuate Jaina.
As the bomb fell, Jaina felt herself pulled towards the portal entrance. She struggled against it, turning away in time to see the world go white.
Her Tower shattered.
Rhonin’s body, standing tall with arms outstretched as if to accept his fate, turned purple, frozen in time for a heartbeat.
And then he exploded into a cloud of lavender ash.
As the portal drew her farther and farther away, Jaina could see an ocean of arcane energy wash over Theramore and the depthless cries of terror deafened her.
When she came to, every muscle, even the blood in her veins felt like cold fire. The pain throbbed through her as she opened her eyes and sat up. For just a second, she was cognizant enough to realize she didn’t want to remember what had happened.
A wind blew her hair in front of her face, and she froze when she lifted a hand to brush it back. Once the hue of sunshine, her hair was now the color of moonlight.
She stood upon the edge of recollection, suddenly, desperately not wanting to know, and then toppled over that edge.
Jaina realized she was alone, and slowly she stood, and slowly she turned around. The sky was ripped asunder, stars visible through the tears. Arcane anomalies winked in and out of existence. The colors, looking to her tear-filled eyes like open wounds and ugly bruises, mockingly danced above the ruins of what had once been a proud city.
They’d won, they’d won but it was all gone. And Rhonin had saved her over himself, and worse, over her people. She dimly sense Kalec there, all but collapsing in his arms. And when she decided to go to Theramore, to find if someone, anyone was alive, he told her it wasn’t safe.
Something inside her snapped, the thin emotional tether between them cut with a flash of her eyes.
We can go back when it’s safer--
There is no we.
She welcomed the pain the hurt on his face caused her, feeling as if her own suffering could ease her survivor’s guilt.
“There’s only me and my decisions, and my responsibility for those corpses back there. I’m going to see if there is anything I can do, any single life I can save. And I’m going to do it alone, as I’ve always done.”
But Jaina wasn’t prepared for what she’d see when she teleported home. Her tower was gone. Death was in the line of the listing buildings, not a single one intact. The sky above was cacophonous and erratic. And there where the bodies, all laying where they had fallen. Healers with the injured still in their arms. The air crackled around her, making her white hair float around her head as she moved through the ruination of her life.
Over there were the leaves of a book, there a fork, across the way a severed foot floating listlessly.
Search as she might, she could find no signs of life. Even the rats had perished. She found Pained, fallen over the body of an orc she’d slain. Pained had died like the warrior she was, defending Jaina and Theramore.
She knelt beside her, brushing at her beautiful blue hair. The strands shattered like spun glass. For the first time since the bomb, Jaina felt the hurt like a wound in her chest.
And she found others. Friends who’d stayed to defend the city when they’d evacuated the civilians, the soldiers and warriors who’d responded to her call for aid.
And then she found Kinndy, her apprentice. The gnome lay face down in a puddle of her own blood. Jaina fell to her knees and when she touched the young woman Kinndy’s body crumbled into crystalline violet dust.
And with Kinndy shattered Jaina’s heart, the dust sifting through her fingers like the last shreds of her sanity as she desperately tried to hold on to Kinndy, sobs wracking her body.
The orc patrol who found her kneeling there died slowly. Peace had been all she’d wanted, peace had always been the answer, until in one cowardly, terrible act, the Horde had crossed a line that could never be uncrossed.
Jaina found the Focusing Iris in the crater. With arcane energy coursing through her veins and her mind addled by power and grief, she made a resolution.
Orgrimmar would be next. She would drown the city and every orc that lived there. Blood for blood.
She woke screaming, eyes glowing like the sun and moonwhite hair fluttering in a strange breeze, only a single stripe of blonde witch’s lock to mark her original coloring.
There was no Orgrimmar to attack, nothing to focus her grief and her rage on even as her power started to overload, arcane lightning crackling throughout the bedroom, shorting out electronics and causing the lights to spark. Neena stirred next to her and as she felt her energy reach a plateau, she did the only thing she could to protect her; she shielded her and the cat sleeping on her pillow.
And Neena’s home shattered into violet dust just as Jaina teleported away.