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The Light is with you, strong and true as it has ever been. You throw yourself open and let it in unrestrained, give yourself over completely to the holy power that sweeps through you in low, churning waves like the shudder of uneasy earth. The chiming of the wordless hymn grows so loud in your ears that it drowns out the groaning of the wounded and the silence of the dying; so loud that you cannot hear your own heartbeat or the low pulsing hum of the mountain that echoes it.
You sing until your voice gives out, until you stagger on the solid, even stones, every bit of your strength gone into your prayer and leaving you hollowed out and translucent in a way no dwarf should be. But you do not fall, because your husband catches you, lifting you up gently into his arms. He's alive, then, you think, and for a brief moment you let the relief take you in a similar blinding rush, closing your eyes against tears that must remain unshed.
"Moira," he says, and again, when you don't answer right away, a note of horror threading through his voice: "Moira!"
You open your eyes again. "I'm all right," you say-- try to say. The words catch in your dry throat, emerging as a rasping croak that is rather less reassuring than you meant.
Dagran carries you to an alcove at the end of the hall, past the wreckage of his court. Your father's assassins smashed straight through the knots of courtiers; the flagstones they fought across are shattered and crazed in places, smeared thick with ash and blood. The tapestries hang in shreds from the walls, some still smoldering. But the medics have come at last; you catch a glimpse of Priestess Beyla kneeling beside a still form, the Light coming golden to her hands as it had to yours.
When Dagran sets you gently atop a cushioned bench and holds a flask to your lips, you drink gratefully: water, pure and crystalline, the best thing you have ever tasted. You swallow, breathe, swallow again. "I'm all right," you say again, easier now, and see some of the tension ease from him.
"I swear I never meant this," he mutters. "I truly thought you would be safe-- that Magni would never move against me while you were here beside me."
How shaken he is, you think, watching him pass a hand over his face, then swig from the flask himself before offering it to you again. He isn't even truly trying to hide his fear from you, not even after your father's men nearly cut him down in his own courtroom; he trusts you with it, instead. As he trusted you to know your own might, when you gave yourself over to healing his wounded councilors and senators. As your father never did.
"I know," you say, reaching up to lay your hand against Dagran's slate cheek, along the rough, smoke-marred edge of his beard.
He cups your hand in his, silently kissing the ash and blood from your fingertips, and it strikes you, with a sudden forceful whimsy, that the beautiful silk dress you're wearing--it had been a wedding present--is utterly ruined. You want to laugh at the ridiculousness of how much you care about a dress Dagran could replace ten thousand times over; it is only long training that holds it back. This is shock. You know the symptoms; you have treated it in battle-worn mountaineers. Feeling it yourself is... unpleasant.
Dagran murmurs something again; you hear the sound and miss the sense of it. You drag yourself forcefully back to your senses.
"We cannot let this go unanswered," he says, bowing his head over your hands until his braids tumble over the rents in the skirt of your gown. You set your hands in his hair, smoothing it as you think.
The chief problem is that he doesn't have the forces for all-out war. It's why he took you for a hostage in the first place, those long months ago, to use you as a shield for the mountain so that he could commit the whole of his army to a single strike against Ironforge. That plan has come to nothing, as you always thought it might; you know your father better than Dagran ever did. Magni Bronzebeard never thought much of you, ever since you had the poor taste to be born a girl, but his grip on the things that belong to him, however worthless, is forged of thorium and truesilver.
"Let me speak to the other leaders of the Alliance," you say, at last, as he stiffens under your hands. You do not know them well, but you know of them. Fordragon is a paladin of the Light; Whisperwind and Proudmoore both fellow women, with such sensibilities as that may bring. The body that so disappointed your father can even yet be a weapon in your hands. "When I tell them that my father tried to kill me and my unborn child, perhaps they will--"
Dagran lifts his head, eyes gone wide and startled as a newborn lamb. It could be comical, in his grim, serious face, but laughter is the farthest thing from your mind, now. "Your child?"
It wasn't how you meant to tell him; you had had a strategy, carefully worked out from the moment you realized the changes in yourself. But you don't care about that; you can't, not with the way his lips part, the way he looks up at you, searching your face with such love and hope in the midst of the destruction that followed you to his home. You wind your hands into his braids and pull him up onto the stone bench with you, pressing your forehead up against his. The dark iron of his crown is cool against your skin. "Our child," you say.