Work Text:
Sight
Lylythe
She could see, if she concentrated. The famed Will of the Forsaken took care of that, if she adjusted the riveted straps that covered her face. She knew because she had tried, just the once, so long ago in Deathknell. She’d been handed a mirror—“go show Lillian (poor, cowering Lillian; see where her bravery had gotten her) that she’s not a monster”—and she’d held the mirror up to her own face for a moment, willing her eyes to work. She’d nearly dropped the mirror. Not at the sight of her death-blue skin or her matted, shaggy, death-blue hair, the two wisps curled at her temples all that was left of her bangs, but at what those two wisps framed: the dark holes where her eyes had once been. They had been useless eyes, since the illness, but—
She’d kept the straps over her empty sockets ever since. If she needed to, she could tug at the straps just so, and will herself to see, but she rarely had. She found it disorienting. She was used to getting around by instinct, by touch and smell and sound. And yet—more and more often she found herself squinting blindly, looking for guidance to fill the void left by the Light’s absence within her. She’d begun to use taste to identify things these days. After all, what was a bit of poison to the dead? What was a bit of anything to the dead? Perhaps it was time to start using sight as well.
Bending her head low over the table in the corner of Ratchet’s inn, she distracted herself by concentrating on the flow of her hand drawing pen over parchment. She’d been a scribe since she’d been old enough to be apprenticed, long before her illness took her sight. The practiced strokes came easily, naturally. As long as she had parchment, she could trace the patterns of glyphs and scrolls she had memorized long ago. It was quiet, familiar work, and it centered her. It took her away from pointless, bitter, existential thinking.
She stiffened as heavy footsteps crossed deliberately slowly behind her. She caught a whiff of sweaty orc, and relaxed, picking up the flow of the next curved line of the paladin’s glyph on which she was working. Just Hargash, making his rounds. Though Ratchet was a neutral goblin town, its proximity to both Orgrimmar and Theramore guaranteed that both factions kept permanent “soldiers” in town to watch what the other was doing. Hargash, and one of the humans, had kept a close eye on her in the weeks she had been in Ratchet to make sure she wasn’t doing anything suspicious. It was the price she, as one of the Forsaken, paid to be part of the world.
She should have been in Lordaeron (or what was left of it, the part of her mind that remembered green woods and clear lakes and majestic cities thought), advancing the will of Sylvanas. But the Banshee Queen (foolishly, thought a new, oft suppressed, rebellious corner of her mind) allowed her subjects free will—to question and to choose. Lately, she had chosen the heat of sunlight and the fresh smell of dry grass. The weight of artificial gloom and the stench of corruption had made Tirisfal as unbearable as her room in the old abbey had been in the last few days of her natural life.
Her pen stilled as she completed the paladin’s glyph. She set it aside with the other two she had completed that afternoon, her mind returning to the problems she was running away from. Running, because she had realized that Sylvanas demanded unwavering support and courage from her subjects and—Lily, as she had been in life— Lily had always been a terrible coward. She had completely missed the wars that raged in Lordaeron, locked in her room in the old abbey with pens and inks and parchment. One of the other priestesses had brought Lily meals in exchange for her work, and so the world—light and love and friendship—had passed her as unknowingly and uncaringly as the war. She had used her illness and her consequent blindness as an excuse to lock herself away without ever admitting her terror of life, of all the things most humans crave.
She knew nothing of the Plague either until it had crept through the chinks in the old abbey’s walls, and even then she had no name for the terror. Food stopped coming, but she did not dare venture out of her room. She could hear the screams, though she did not know what caused them. So she sat in the dark and prayed for starvation to take her first.
She did not remember dying. Waking up, on the other hand…
She shuddered, and carefully pulled another piece of parchment onto the table in front of her, measuring it with stiff hands. When her mind was clear, and she was sure of the parchment’s dimensions, she began to draw the next paladin’s glyph in the sequence she had memorized, idly thinking of nothing more uncomfortable than the auctions in Silvermoon and perhaps beginning to save some money for a better horse. Her ragged, skeletal mount was, to put it delicately, fraying at the seams.
She automatically catalogued the sound of booted steps entering the inn, soft and quick, the lingering smell of cheap poison, the guttural voices of two orcs conferring quietly. A young rogue, then, seeking Hargash the watcher. Her pen continued to move by rote as she listened.
“What are they doing here?” The rough voice asked in as close to a whisper as most orcs ever managed.
Behind and to her left, Sashya, the only other Forsaken in Ratchet and an Apothecary one misstep away from getting herself executed for treason against the Warchief, hissed under her breath. The young orc must have gestured to her and Sashya then. She wondered what Hargash would say.
He disappointed her, stating clearly enough for any goblin bruisers to hear, “This is neutral ground, rogue. Anyone is welcome here.” There was a heavy emphasis on “anyone” that Hargash normally reserved for humans. The rogue grunted, clearly as dissatisfied with the answer as she was, though probably for a different reason. She took a deliberate breath and let it out in a miserable sigh. The Forsaken were certainly a “part” of the Horde. Didn’t she have as much right, since she was here, to be here as anyone else?
Footsteps clanked in, accompanied by a gust of drunken chatter that halted all other conversation among the Horde-dominated clientele. Two humans, with big, confident voices and strong, arrogant steps, called a greeting to the innkeeper, and demanded their drinks of choice. They didn’t seem to notice that they were the only ones still talking; and they didn’t bother to hide their contempt for their enemy, the Horde. Hargash was grinding his teeth, a restraining hand thumping against the young rogue’s arm to stop him from rising angrily. She assumed they were responding to tone and certain, choice phrases—while she remembered Common well enough to cringe at the insults, she doubted the orcs knew much of the other language.
The humans’ conversation stopped as they received their drinks; the only sound other than their gulping was the scratch of her pen, finishing the paladin’s glyph. They rose, focusing on the sound, and sauntered over to where she was sitting. They stood for a long moment, apparently staring at the four completed glyphs drying on the table.
“What’s it doing?” one of the humans asked.
The human watcher’s familiar voice shrugged. “Nothing. She’s harmless.” She smiled humorlessly to herself at the discrepancy in pronouns.
“No such thing,” the other stranger said. A gauntleted hand roughly grabbed her shoulder, dragging her around. She could feel him staring, unnerved, at her sightless face. Not one member of the Horde—that proud organization she was a part of—not even Sashya, a fellow Forsaken, stepped in to stop him. She could smell the alcohol he had been drinking, cheap but potent. When he spoke, it was with belligerence, meant to provoke a fight.
“These,” and the hand not holding her rustled the parchment, “are paladin’s glyphs. What’s scum like you doing with them?”
Instead of rising to the fight, she cowered. “I sell them,” she said quietly, tongue clumsy with long-unused syllables.
“I don’t think the undead need them,” her captor’s voice sneered.
“No,” his companion said. “The Light’s forsaken them.” He laughed at his own malicious pun. Only the undead ever acknowledged their self-bestowed title, that they were Forsaken and not merely Scourged monsters.
“But we can,” her captor said, voice suddenly mock-thoughtful. “Can’t we?”
“Why, yes,” the other said. “I was at the auction house the other day. The going rate’s, what, 200 gold?”
“Oh, closer to 250, I think, for this kind of quality.”
She made a blind grab for her glyphs, but a swift rustle told her they’d been whisked out of her reach.
Her captor, one hand still holding her in place, reached his other hand into what sounded like a fat, jingling purse. “Here.” There was a small clatter at her feet, and then the pressure on her shoulder released and the two humans, laughing uproariously, clanked away. She was left, the uncomfortable feeling of shame pricking in her bloodless cheeks and behind her tearless eyes, to stiffly reach for the worthless handful of coppers on the dirty floor.
The next thing she knew, heavy hands, broader, this time, and gloved in toughened leather, gripped her, propelling her to her feet. She consented to walk rather than be dragged. Terror rang again in her ears and gummed her mouth. She tried to concentrate on staying on her feet, her overactive imagination certain that her abused arm would simply come off in her captor’s grip if she fell. After what felt like an eternity, she was pushed back against a hot wall, the sun beating against her hair as she ducked her head, trying to be small and insignificant.
“What was on those papers?” the young orc rogue’s voice growled.
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“What information did you just sell those humans?” Again, the handful of coppers was thrown at her feet, this time in accusation.
“N-n-nothing,” she managed to stammer. “They stole—” Her throat closed, shame mingling with the terror.
The rogue grunted in disbelief. “A clever show.”
He released her, and she cowered back against the wall. She could hear him rifling through her things, jars of ink clinking, parchments rustling, her few gold coins jangling. She cringed as one of the ink jars smashed. The rogue cursed. He grunted again after another minute’s rustling as she waited, trembling.
“Glyphs,” he grumbled. “Just glyphs. Who are you?” he snapped suddenly.
“N-n-no one,” she gasped.
He shook her roughly. “Who are you?” he repeated, the words grinding out dangerously.
She swallowed dryly. She knew now what she was not. She was no longer a child of this world, neither Alliance nor Horde. She was no Light-blessed scribe, no cloistered hermit. And by acknowledging all that she was not, she could now see what she was, abandoned and alone. She was a blind priestess, lost in the dark.
Slowly, as the realization dawned on her, she drew herself as close to upright as she could, adjusted the straps across her eyes, and willed herself to see. A young orc, his green face and suspicious red eyes just inches from her cold, blue face, was glowering at her. She smiled grimly at him, and wreathed herself in shadow.
“I am Lylythe, a shadow priest of Tirisfal,” she said quietly, steadily, all traces of terror gone. “And any information I possess belongs to the Dark Lady, and of course,” she sneered the last two words, “the Warchief.”
The orc’s eyes widened at her sudden change, his mind immediately returning to his threat about clever shows. “I…see,” he said slowly. “Go play your games somewhere else,” he spat. And he thrust her bags at her, then turned and walked away as quickly as dignity would allow.
Lylythe looked up at the bright porcelain sky of the Barrens, and, quite suddenly and acutely, felt for the first time the desire to see the world. Frowning slightly, she turned back towards Orgrimmar and the promise of some quest-giver offering direction…guidance, as it were, to somewhere she had never been. She felt a bit rushed; she knew she had to hurry—Sylvanas shared far too much with her free-willed subjects—and Lylythe knew now that she wanted to see everything before Sylvanas’s vision blighted all. But until then, Lylythe had a lot of ground to cover. She sharpened her vision until the path before her was crystal clear in anticipation of all the sights she would see.