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Thassarian scoured the gathered crowds of Oribos.
They had come in droves to witness the judgment of Lady Sylvanas Windrunner, the Banshee Queen – living and dead alike, drawn shoulder to shoulder in the Ring of Fates by the need to see things finally finished, finally put to rest. The whole of the place swelled with an uneasy murmur of sound, a palpable quiet fury vibrating on the very air itself. Thassarian found it almost poetic that so many souls of all shapes, both flesh-bound and free, sought closure for the Banshee Queen’s crimes on both sides of the veil.
He had thought he would find Koltira among them, but his companion was nowhere to be found.
Foolish, Thassarian thought. He’d had it backwards. He should have known.
Instead, he found Koltira sitting at the edge of Oribos’ outer ring, staring out into the infinite with a large bottle of ale in his hand. He looked small: Thassarian’s companion was a pale wisp against the swirling shadow-blue beyond him, and he had taken off most of his armor. Perhaps today of all days, he felt the weight of heavy things more keenly.
“You know how much of that stuff it takes to even begin to affect us,” Thassarian said, as cheerful as he could manage.
Koltira knew him by his voice. He did not have to look back. “Yes. And I plan to drink all that is required and more.”
Thassarian came up beside him, his own armor clanking. “You’ll be in steep competition. There are plenty of other folks who will be looking to drown their sorrows within the hour. Plenty just as deserving of its mercies as you, Koltira.”
He sat down beside the elf and smiled, but Koltira did not match his attempt at mirth. He scoffed and threw the empty bottle into the void with a stubborn grunt. Bewildered, Thassarian watched it fall until it vanished into the spiraling dark below. He could not help but imagine it landing atop the head of a mawsworn.
“Well thrown,” Thassarian said. “Do you feel better?”
“No. I’m getting another.”
Koltira slapped his hands onto his knees and began to push himself up, but Thassarian took a gentle hold of his arm, his armor-plated fingers gentle against Koltira’s cold skin. “Don’t,” he said. “Stay.”
He hesitated, his scowl deepening.
“Stay here with me for a moment," Thassarian said. “You’ve already put so much of this behind you. Why let the wounds reopen?”
“We don’t bleed, Thassarian.”
Koltira loved to be spiteful when he was upset. It had earned him a reputation with the rest of the Ebon Blade: difficult, even for a death knight. Thassarian found it paradoxically charming, and had often wondered if the elf had been the same in life and worn a smirk atop his cutting tongue, or if his bitter wit had emerged only in death.
He chose, of course, to believe the latter – that Koltira in death was something beyond what he had been before. Something new.
Something his.
They dangled their legs over the dizzying expanse that surrounded Oribos like children on a bridge. It did not frighten Thassarian. Koltira, though, despite throwing the bottle, despite his sour look, did not look down.
He could still hear the sounds from inside. The impatient, angry jeers grew louder, more vicious. It would begin soon.
Murderer.
Butcher.
Hands stained with the blood of thousands.
Thassarian felt nothing for Sylvanas Windrunner. It was for Koltira’s hands that he worried, curled into his lap and knit together, his knuckles tight.
“I need to know that you’re alright,” Thassarian said.
Sylvanas Windrunner’s cruelty had reached Koltira in a way that he carried with him, a way that had left deep wounds – all of them invisible. He spoke of it little. Thassarian himself had pulled him from the dark depths to which the Banshee Queen had confined him. He’d broken the chains around his wrists. Held his weight when he couldn’t hold it himself. Thassarian had carried him from the bowels of the earth itself up, up, up and out until they felt the warmth of day on their cold, dead skin: a sunrise over the Undercity.
“I don’t know,” Koltira replied after a long silence. He fell to those often – quiet stillnesses – but Thassarian did not mind waiting for him. “We feel so little. And yet this, I still–”
Murderer.
Butcher.
The shouts from the Ring of Fates grew louder, a cacophony of hatred, of pain and unanswered suffering. Oribos, with its great towering spaces and open arches, amplified the sound and made it impossible to ignore. It thundered through the very foundations of the place, beneath their bodies, into every bit of them.
Koltira’s expression twitched.
“You can join them, if that is your wish,” Thassarian offered gently. “No one would think less of you.”
I would not think less of you, he thought, but did not say.
“A thousand tongues are lashing her to a second death in there. Mine is of no consequence.”
“Don’t think so little of yourself, Koltira. Yours is a lash she deserves–”
“Thassarian. Please.”
Koltira tensed, all of him. Thassarian looked him up and down. If he still drew breath, it would have caught in his throat. He was so used to seeing Koltira’s body in heavy armor, immovable and strong, a veritable bulwark of the Ebon Blade. Beneath it, though, was a fragile body – a fragile corpse – that strained with pain.
The living often spoke ill of the undead. That they felt nothing, that they did not bleed, did not die, and therefore must not hurt.
They were wrong.
Thassarian slipped the cold plate gloves from his own hands and set them aside. He, too, had begun to feel heavy.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still smiling. “You’re out here because you do not want to be in there. You’re not asking me to change your mind. What do you need, love?”
“A distraction,” Koltira said.
“Well,” Thassarian raised his eyebrows. “If we act quickly, you can drink the whole bar dry before the crowd settles in. Perhaps that will be enough for you to feel it–”
“No,” he said. “I need – you.”
Thassarian softened. Koltira often found it difficult to be so blunt, so open. He was sorry he had not offered sooner.
“Anything.”
“That night. When you pulled me from her – prison, beneath the Undercity–” Koltira murmured through his teeth, his voice slipping into a snarl. “--after everything, at Acherus, do you remember?”
“Yes,” Thassarian said.
He remembered moonlight, silver and cold, spilling over Koltira’s pale shoulders. Koltira had not spoken, not for hours, and Thassarian did not ask him to. He searched him gently for bruises. For marks. Anything to tell the tale of what Sylvanas had done to him.
Of course, he found nothing, for dead bodies did not bruise like the living, and the Banshee Queen’s surgeons had learned much about how to stitch dead flesh without scarring.
Thassarian found – traces, at best. Grey lines in Koltira’s skin that might’ve been gashes, once. Dead veins like spiders where he might’ve been stricken. Nothing raw, nothing new, nothing he could soothe with his own hands.
It had infuriated him.
He balled his fists at his knees at the memory of it. Koltira peered at him, his cold eyes softening, pleading.
“I hardly did anything,” Thassarian shook his head, confused.
“You did,” Koltira said, rigid. “You know you did.”
Thassarian met his eyes, and understood. “Look at me.”
Koltira pulled himself from Oribos’ edge. Thassarian did the same. They faced each other, cross-legged. It took Thassarian a long moment to stop simply staring at him. Then, he brushed a strand of silver-white hair behind Koltira’s ear, grazing his cheek.
He took his hands in his own, fingers slipping to Koltira’s wrists. He passed his thumbs along Koltira’s palms.
“You are free,” he told him.
Koltira shut his eyes.
Thassarian leaned forward, his fingers trailing along Koltira’s arms, pressing gently as though to search for something broken, something sore – something tender.
“You are safe.”
Koltira shivered, just barely, beneath his touch. Thassarian’s hands reached his neck, where he brought them to rest at the curve of his jaw, cupping his face. He stroked his thumbs along Koltira’s cheeks as though to wipe away tears he could not shed.
“I am here,” Thassarian whispered. “I’m with you.”
He kissed him, bringing their lips together as gently as he could. Koltira – bitter, rigid Koltira Deathweaver, whose scowl turned the blood of the living cold, who snapped at Ebon Blade initiates for an unwanted glance, who so fervently loathed the company of others – leaned into him.
The shouts and clamor still roared from deep within Oribos, and within it he could hear her name again and again. Thassarian knew Koltira could hear it, too, and he knew it hurt.
Thassarian kissed him until Koltira made a sound and simply sank onto his shoulder, quiet. He would stay that way for some time. Thassarian did not mind.
He held him.
“You are free of her,” Thassarian murmured. “Now the rest can be, too.”