Chapter Text
Everyone had gone.
Only Jaina was left, lingering here.
She should have been going home hours before. Probably.
She just couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t bring herself to do anything at all it seemed.
She only watched. She watched the unyielding snow batter against the equally unyielding walls of the citadel. Their contest raged on even if the one of the warlike, angry and – in the grand scheme of things – seemingly less significant factions of Azeroth had ebbed slightly.
She watched her own thoughts and memories as they drifted and floated before her. She didn’t want to disturb them, she only wanted a small moment of peace and quiet. As quiet as it got with this kind of weather outside. She would settle for a moment of peace. So she carefully and respectfully watched them from a distance.
She watched her own long, long bearing of the never healed and always – at some level – festering and painful wound of betrayal, with the faintest hope of seeing a sliver of the man that had been before he picked up Frostmourne hidden inside that wound.
She watched the echoing, reverberating, crushing finality of seeing that hope fade and crumble and wither with only cold blue flame and deathly malice left in a hollow shell of what was one time Jaina’s love and joy.
She watched herself staring mutely at the locket given to her by a champion of the Alliance who she could not even recall just now. The locket with her faded and cracked but still very visible portrait that he had apparently carried on him all these years of malevolence and at the very least not thrown away or used for some sort of ritual or taunting.
And she knew not what to think about it.
So she just watched her thoughts from a distance as they raced and floated before her.
And she rose to her feet.
Icecrown Citadel should have echoed but it was as if the desolation lay thick enough over it to muffle even sound, or maybe there were drifts of snow or dust forming all along the labyrinthine structure that would dampen the voices or steps of whoever choose to come and stalk it’s dark halls. Not one door was left unbroken, not a single corner of the fortress left undisturbed. Jaina stepped quietly and carefully through the halls and the archways, sweeping noiselessly over the floors like a ghost of her own. She let her light feet carry her as they willed. Perhaps they would carry her toward the Hall of Reflection, but no, they decided on taking another turn. Perhaps they would carry her toward the Lich Kings private quarters. And though she ascended stair after stair, step after step, it was not her destination. Slowly but surely Jaina's feet tiptoed, almost, up and up and up toward the highest spire of the citadel and the now vacant Frozen Throne itself.
Maybe it took an hour to climb the stairs. Maybe a day. Time seemed such a strange concept at the moment. But what was a moment, really?
She would see his body, she knew that. She had done so already. A frozen, hollow shell of something that had long since ceased to be alive. Or so she would tell herself, maybe.
Because it was easier. Far easier than to go back to being torn between loathing and rage on one side and anguish and doubt on the other.
Easier than to risk regretting things.
That was a thought best watched from a distance.
The storm turned all things hazy.
The throne was a large block of murky dark behind the curtain of wind and snow. It was truly mostly a pillar of ice, the topmost tower of the citadel and crowning spire of eternal ice of the whole frozen fortress. Ice-coated steps led up to the throne, veiled in it’s frozen shell. It…looked distorted behind it’s coating. As if it was larger and more rounded out in the middle. The contours were straight lines as expected, yet…
A trick of the dim light. Nothing more. She should not dwell on it.
She should not be too caught up in any line of thought. Besides, she should come across the body any step now. It would be a block of ice like everything else. Up here things did not become part of the earth from which they had in some way once sprung. They became part of the ice.
But there was something else. There were lights in the mist, on the other side of the throne. Lights floating in the haze. What did it mean?
What were they?
Her feet took her closer, without stumbling on anything on the tower’s roof.
Val’kyr?
She knew little about them. The Alliance knew very little about them. They were apparently not inherently hostile but that was just about what anyone could say for sure about them or their purpose.
And that they could fly, or hover or whatever, and that they were quite tall of course.
The val’kyr were gathered around something. Something dark in their midst.
What was it?
She walked closer. She had a…not a purpose, but an interest, now.
It was a figure much smaller than the val’kyr. Lithe. Thinner than Jaina too or perhaps just without the bulk of flowing mage robes or the kind of warm clothes that Jaina did not need so long as she had mana inside her.
She could make out smooth pieces of garments. Armour pieces. Some sort of plume of feather things by the shoulders. A hood, with ears that pierced it. Slitted to accommodate the long ears.
Dark red lacquering, almost like wine. And even in the murk of fading light and hazy weather Jaina was sure those ears truly matched the colour of the ice around them.
Sylvanas Windrunner.
Apparently Jaina was not the only one drawn to this dreary rooftop.
She should keep her distance, at the very least. Sylvanas, if anyone, was entitled to being left undisturbed at a time like this. Jaina could hardly think of anyone more tormented by Arthas and the Scourge. Maybe Uther or Terenas, forced to watch what their squire and son did, with their own souls chained to Frostmourne. Jaina hoped she would never get to know which fate was the worst.
Sylvanas was looking out at the storm. She had not noticed Jaina, or she did not care about her presence or did not bother acknowledging it.
There was something about her that tugged at Jaina’s conscience. She could not say exactly what. Sylvanas was standing still, seemingly indifferent as far as it was possible to tell from behind. Casually.
Casually?
Sylvanas Windrunner was never casual.
Jaina had not seen much of the enigmatic Banshee Queen but she had seen that much. Sylvanas harboured rage enough for a hundred vengeful elves, all-encompassing determination to carve out the piece of Azeroth’s revenge against the Scourge that belonged to her and her Forsaken. She had been fuming, acidic, dauntless, icily cold and bitter when Jaina had seen her or heard people speak of her.
Never how she appeared to be right now.
And why were her quiver and arrows scattered on the ground?
Where was her bow?
Something was…out of place…
Something was…wrong!
WRONG!
Tides-damned bloody NO!
The smallest of shrugs, and Sylvanas took a step forward and disappeared over the edge.
Jaina would have ran if she was swift as an elven ranger. She would have thrown herself forward if she was trained to react quickly and had a warriors reflexes. But Jaina Proudmoore was an archmage, and her instinct was to teleport. A mere thought took her to the edge, before her conscious mind even registered what she was doing.
The loneliest of leaves was falling far below her, buffeted and hurled by the wind, but falling so, so fast still. Jaina reached with her mind and grabbed the wind, grabbed the whirling snow, and pulled it to her. Anything at hand that could halt the free fall.
It was not enough. Jaina knew how to shape ice and water into what she needed, but the winds were not her ally like they were to the shaman and the druid. She forced them and coerced them into a hastily chosen direction, she did not control them. The small dark dot was hurled this way and that, ever continuing to fall, never caught.
Jaina had to do something else.
Something else was instinctively ice.
Every mage could shape the arcane into something that was not there before and would never be there on it’s own accord. That was the great wonder of magic in general. Fire in the midst of cold, ice and a cool breeze on a scorching summer day. Healing what would remain broken if left alone, moving what would remain unmoved.
But there was a price for everything. A skilled mage could shape reality to her liking with great effort. A wise mage knew how to work effectively with what she had at hand.
Jaina willed snow and ice to coalesce into a shelf that jutted out from the mountain side. The dark dot smashed right through it’s edge, tossed aside by the impact like a ragdoll someone had thrown.
Again. Sylvanas crashed into it, but slid off. In her haste Jaina had no way of shaping what she conjured. For all she knew she could have formed a round tree branch of ice rather than a shape to catch and hold someone.
Jaina reached for her mana to try a third time, but the lonely leaf had disappeared into the snowy mists below.
***
A sea. A sea of snow and fog spread out beneath her.
It was too risky to teleport blindly down into it. She had no way of knowing where she would end up and the bottom would be anything but smooth and even.
Jaina had to keep herself safe to be of any use to someone else. She had to find a better way down. She had to think.
Down was out of the question. Even if there were balconies or parapets on the citadel’s side, which she wasn’t sure of, there was no guarantee that they would offer a safe passage all the way down.
But a mage was not necessarily confined by distance, at lest not in the usual ways. A mage needed to be able to look further at times, sometimes very literally.
On the other side, or at least a good distance away, of the mist beneath her were frozen cliffs. A mountain, or a ridge. That would be her ladder down.
Jaina focused on a flatter spot and teleported over, taking her next step on the snow several hundred steps from the citadel. She looked down, and noted with some satisfaction that the cliff side here was not a flat wall but far more broken. Another teleport took her further down to a lower stand. She wouldn’t have relished climbing anywhere even remotely similar to here, but a small step from one reasonably flat surface to another would be something even a well-documented bookworm like herself could be expected to pull off.
Step by step, cliff to cliff, she descended and finally stood on the ground, or what passed for the ground in this torn landscape of broken glaciers and jagged saronite rock. Jaina squinted against the wind, and realised that she had lost her orientation in her haste to get down.
Where had Sylvanas fallen? It was close to the citadel wall of course, but the wall was enormous. Tossed aside as she had been by Jaina’s ice shelves and maybe the odd spire or balcony on the citadel itself. Jaina couldn’t see enough from ground level either to be certain how this side of the structure was shaped.
She had to search methodically. You always had to, whether in snow or fog or forest. No panicked running around in fear of being too late.
Easier said than done, of course.
She made her way to the portion she believed would be closest to where Sylvanas had been. She shivered at the sight of the saronite spikes that jutted out like spines on some ancient Nerubian creature’s carapace. What if Sylvanas had hit one? What if she had intended…no, Jaina couldn’t afford to think of that now.
She left a mage light to mark her starting position, then turned to the side and started walking to leave another ten steps away. A common squared search pattern it would be. Simple and easy to work with.
The Banshee Queen was strong. Jaina had blown her off course and at the very least slowed her fall down considerably. It could be enough. She wanted it to be enough.
Yes, Jaina dearly wanted it to be enough!
The realisation hit her with full force. She had acted without really thinking things through so far, the same way she would have thrown a rope and cried out for a longboat if she saw someone fall off a ship. Because…because you just did that! Because she hated to waste her arcane powers on something so inherently meaningless as warfare and destruction. All Jaina ever wanted was to study, and do something sensible with what she had.
But she knew who it was she was throwing this rope to, and taken aback by how much she now wanted that person to catch it. Sylvanas Windrunner was a terrifying, and at the very least morally ambiguous Horde leader that made seasoned veterans tremble. But she was not a monster. She was not beyond caring for others. Jaina had seen her pain firsthand when Arthas had impaled one of her dark rangers – Loralen? – before her eyes during their frantic retreat from the Halls of Reflection. The thought that Sylvanas would jump to her death now, after everything she must have suffered, endured and achieved, alone in this desolate place, was too heart-wrenching to bear. It was too heart-wrenching to be allowed to come true!
Her own lethargy from earlier had gone up in smoke. Jaina cared.
To the seas bottom with her own brooding! She could mope over dusty old trinkets another time.
Jaina had a Banshee Queen to save.
She conjured another arcane flare to mark the current spot. It would last a while.
But this was taking too long. She was reasonably certain that she had not missed anything in her path so far but how long until this blasted snow buried every track and every sign that one of the countless mounds of shapeless white was Sylvanas and not just another drift of snow?
For the love of mana, Jaina was an archmage!
She reached out with her mind, reached out for magic. Sylvanas was a banshee herself after all, not just a queen of banshees, or so it was said. An immensely powerful undead creature in any case, and that meant she should be brimming with necromantic energy.
Jaina had been around when Kel’Thuzad had been exposed and expelled from Dalaran and the city had been on edge for any potential leads of further practice of the same dark art. She had fought enough necromancers of the Scourge, and banshees too for that matter, to know what to look for.
Nothing.
Jaina conjured another pair of flares. Another two squares covered of her grid. Control. She had to keep her focus up.
She was getting closer to the wall now. It was getting darker. She could summon light for herself but it would not matter much against the night of Northrend. And if searching through the small forest of saronite pillars was hard even without the shadows cast from a magical lantern of hers…
She closed her eyes, closing out the snow and wind. They did not matter. They were not important. They were not…
They were not…
They were not a weak, flickering bundle of necromantic magics that tugged on her awareness. A candle of black, dark red and dark purple flame that appeared terribly close to being snuffed out for good.
Jaina opened her eyes. She had a bearing.
Her arcane flares forgotten, she leapt around a tall and foreboding saronite formation in two teleports. It brought her right to the base of the citadel wall. And there, almost covered by the snow, forgotten and alone, lay the crushed and broken form of Sylvanas.