Chapter Text
Prologue: Present Day
Celebration, or Snapshots through the Years
A carefully collected cluster of pictures in various forms was stacked in the attic of a small home in Darnassus. The inhabitants were in the process of moving somewhere bigger, somewhere a little less hemmed in by the city surrounding them. The youngest of them had made it her solemn duty to catalog all the bits and pieces that were being moved. So far, she had found a stack of blacksmith's notes, a box of diaries decorated with pressed flowers, and these pictures. She dropped to her knees, pulling each out and examining it, before carefully describing it in her own notebook and setting it in the big box she had brought up to collect odds and ends.
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[Fey's notes: Attic/Box #4]
1. An old, faded portrait, the hair, clothes, and some background gold accents glimmering brighter with a touch of magic to the paint, found in a druid’s home in Val’sharah: Three couples. First, the back of a blue-haired man stepping lightly to the side of a woman with violet hair and a small smile. Second, the back of a midnight-blue-haired woman, dress much less conservatively cut than the other two, ending a spin with a deep-emerald-haired man smiling in obvious delight. Third, the back of a light-green-haired woman dancing close to a ruby-haired woman, mid-laugh. The pavilion behind them is decorated to suggest the Lunar festival.
2. A folded picture, once kept in the bottom of a jewelry box in a small building near Nordrassil: A family. On one side of the fold, a mother and father watch proudly. On the other, a very young girl, teal-haired, crowned with flowers slipping down around her ears, dances barefoot beneath festival fireworks.
3. A crayon drawing, clearly a child’s work, though the child was old enough to line reasonable approximations of her subjects, and show the raw beginnings of true talent, once hung in a forge in Darnassus: A deep-green haired woman stands tall, next to a blue-haired child. The rest of the page is decorated with festival foods and bursts of color that denote fireworks. Scrawled across the bottom are the words “First Lunar Festival Together!!”
4. A S.E.L.F.I.E. snap slightly mangled, folded inside a short missive, found on the commander’s desk in the Alliance garrison on Draenor: Two young women. The short-white-haired woman has an arm around the blue-haired camera holder. Both are making silly faces. The site of the Moonglade festival is seen obliquely behind them. The missive reads, “Writing this by the light of the fireworks. Wish you guys were here!”
5. A photograph of a family, taken through the window of an inn in Dalaran by a faded-pink-haired death knight—The second couple from the portrait, the woman who once danced beneath the fireworks, her partner the blacksmith who rescued a child, the young woman that child became, and the young huntress who found her way to them. A note left with it claims she meant to save the photograph to present at next year’s Lunar Festival. After all, with the Legion’s defeat, there would be no reason for them to be separated in one year’s time. They could make this a tradition.