[Story] Interlude: Lover's Heart

[Solivar]

The Undercity was not, in general, a place that lent itself gracefully to joy or laughter, song or dance, fireworks or ridiculously messy festival foods, the lightheartedness that characterized the holiday celebrations of other domains who claimed brotherhood with the Horde. The civic fetes most beloved to the unbeating hearts of the Forsaken were by turns morbid and savage, the harvest-home that counted among its bounties the hot blood of the living, the days set aside to honor the dead with offerings of perfumed smoke and succulent foods, paper effigies of grave-goods and bright, beautifully dying flowers. Oh, certainly, for the rest they hung the brightly colored lights, the wreaths of wintergreen and spring flowers and the lacy trappings so dear to lover's hearts, permitted the goblins to set up their booths and hawk their wares, but those were matters of commerce, for most of the undead still conducted their business in the language of hard coin, and the bare minimal gestures of solidarity toward their Horde brethren, who were frequently, infuriatingly preoccupied with the frivolities of life and living. The Forsaken admitted few such weaknesses, or even the desire for them, and the only song or singing that ever echoed through the city's unpleasantly dark and silent halls was the aching grief of the Dark Lady herself, the keening dirges of her banshee sisters.

When a papery, somewhat nasal tenor strolled through the city's echo-prone byways singing a love-ballad last popular in Lordaeron some years before nearly everyone died of either the plague or the sword it therefore attracted some attention.

'She was in a flowery garden when first she caught my eye,
And I but a marching soldier, she smiled as I passed by...
The flowers she held were fresh and fair, her lips were full and red,
And as I passed that shady bower these words to me she said:'

Memories stirred among those who heard that voice, that song. Marshlight eyes dimmed and untiring hands stilled at their tasks.

'Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part.
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover's heart.'

That voice, that song, recalled golden afternoons in springtime orchards heavy with apple-blossom and the city's well-groomed pleasure gardens alike, the simple beauties of the life before, before plague, before treachery and anguish and loss.

'She was by the shore in the evening, when next I saw my dear.
Running barefoot by the waterside, she called as I drew near...
The sunlight glanced at the water's edge making fire of her auburn hair,
My young heart danced at her parting words that hung in the evening air:'

That voice, that song, recalled sweet summer evenings on the shores of Lordamere, stealing kisses and caresses in the starlight as the night-birds sang and the waves lapped on the rocks and it seemed impossible that life and love should ever end.

'Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part.
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover's heart.'

Many who heard that voice, that song, rose from their places to seek its source, parting dusty curtains and peering around corners, half in anger, half in the desire to hear more.

'She was on the strand in the morning when orders came to sail.
And as we slipped our ropes away I watched her from the rail...
Oh, damn, I can't remember the next two stanzas,
Something something something with roses, I think?

Oh, well, perhaps I will ask him if he remembers
The next time we me ~ et!'

Morholt offered a sheepish rictus grin to the blank-eyed faces that lined the route, shrugging slightly. "My apologies, everyone, it's been quite some time since I sang that one. I can do The Firebird of Sweet Quel'Thalas, if you like?"

No one, apparently, wished to hear a lugubrious tragic ballad about doomed Quel'dorei lovers separated by fate and their incessantly quarreling families. Morholt nodded apologetically, again, to the departing backs of his fellow citizens and continued on his way, still humming that particular tune deep in his throat, lacking as he did the mobility in what remained of his lips to successfully whistle. A minor, petty cruelty, but a satisfying one for all that, to see the happy, human memories flickering in their eyes and then to douse that flame. One took one's pleasures where the opportunity arose and he took this one in the anticipation of much, much greater things to come, an actual honest-to-the-Shadow spring in his step as he made his way home. He continued his personal musical accompaniment even as he entered the modest crypt he called his own, closing the door, locking it, and arming that traps that would make certain any who attempted to test their skills against his security precautions were making the last mistake of their existence. He burst full-throatedly back into song as he went about his preparations, extracting the items he required from his small chest of possessions, setting the mirror of polished stone blacker than moonless midnight just so, placing the arcanely carven candle in its shallow dish, offering the spines adorning the mirror's frame a taste of the thick, not-quite-liquid substance that served him for blood and igniting the wick of the candle, its flame burning a sickly greenish hue.

The mirror's surface flickered, lightened, and from somewhere far away, he heard the sounds of sea-birds raucously calling, the rumble of waves crashing against a breakwater. He continued to sing.

'She was on the strand in the morning when orders came to sail.
And as we slipped our ropes away, I watched her from the rail.
She threw me a rose that fell between us, and floated on the bay,
And as our ship pulled from the shore, I heard her call and say:

Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part.
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover's heart.

Now the soldier's life won't suit me, sweet music is my trade.
For I'd rather melt the hardest heart than pierce it with a blade.
Let the time be short till I return to my home in the mountains high,
And the loving girl who stole my heart with these words as I passed by:

Last night we spoke of love, now we're forced to part.
You leave to the sound of a marching drum and the beat of a lover's heart.' *

"A serenade, Morholt? To what do I owe the honor?" The voice that emerged from the mirror's surface was rich and smooth, with the barest hint of accent, a living voice, and Morholt smiled with bright, fierce hate to hear it.

"You will never believe whom I happened to meet, purely by chance mind you, today in the Undercity. Go ahead -- guess." He could not quite keep his amusement entirely contained, and it showed.

"A serenade and a children's game. My cup runneth over." His interlocutor, on the other hand, was clearly not entertained at all. "Tell me."

"A death knight, who gave his name to High Overseer Bauhaus as Mercy, but whom you and I both know somewhat better as Solivar Eventide." Morholt bit off each word with savage precision.

For a long moment, silence prevailed in the wake of this announcement, broken only by the far away rumble of waves, the distant screeching of gulls. Then, "Like the needle to true north. What was his purpose?"

"He could have just come to get his hair cut, you know, it's been years." And when that achieved no reaction, "He caused a minor stir when he asked to see some of the old records pertaining to Deathknell, then he consulted the Census. He is searching for two of our old comrades -- Keldris Pellegrin and Talia Delaine. At the moment, I know for a certainty, he is in Brill preparing to take ship to Northrend , where the last of Talia's kin is spending his time in service to the Apothecaries. That is, unless you want me to make certain no one ever finds his body. I'm willing, you know."

"Yes, I know." A certain wry amusement touched those words. "And while your offer is tempting, I fear that it might also be...somewhat premature. He may yet be of use, in his own way."

"Letting him run about unsupervised is hardly the height of wisdom. Who knows what trouble he'll get into without a firm hand on him?"Morholt grinned, sharp teeth glinting in the candlelight. "I could do that, too."

"I suspect that Radiance would accomplish that task even more efficiently than you, dear Morholt."

Morholt resisted the urge to spit. "That bloodthirsty lunatic? Even more likely to behead him and have done with it than I."

"Radiance's obsessions are not the same as your own in that regard." Dryly. "And I have another task in mind for you. These comrades. Tell me of them."

"You should have written him more when he was living here -- you'd know this already." Morholt hissed. "Talia was the daughter of some high muckety family in Dalaran -- not a drop of talent in her but important enough as her father's only heir to be a chess piece when her parents died. Ran away here and pretended to be a boy, rather successfully, for years during our novitiate with the Church.Keldris was the brat of a baron from Stormwind -- sent north in disgrace for some idiotic thing he did back home. They were all three joined at the hip."

"If they live, find them. Use your Watchers to keep them under surveillance." A pause. "If they do not live...inform me, and I will ascertain what can be done to rectify that."

"As my lord wishes," Morholt replied, tone freighted with false humility.

"Your forbearance on this issue is noted." The surface of the mirror flickered, faded, darkened back to polished stone and nothing more.

Silence.

"Find them." Morholt muttered to himself, and doused the candle between the tips of two bony fingers. "Find them. What does he think I am, an amateur?"

He gathered away the mirror, the candle, wrapped them in a cloth whose substance crawled with arcane embroidery, sigils of containment and concealment, and returned them to their place, extracting as he did so a many-chambered wooden casket. The Order of the Silver Hand was greatly, sorrowfully diminished, reduced from a brotherhood that numbered in the hundreds to a bare handful of survivors scattered across the face of the world. Oh, certainly, after the fall of Lordaeron, the Church in Stormwind had continued to mint paladins and call them Knights of the Silver Hand -- but none of them so-called had learned their path at the knees of Uther Lightbringer or Alexandros Mograine or any of the others who first wore the mantle, the ones who had fallen with their homeland. As a matter of professional competence, he employed a vast profusion of useful idiots to maintain a general knowledge of where most of those who had were at any given time, and entirely specific knowledge of where some where at all times, should the Dark Lady or one of his other masters decide that the pathetic remnants require elimination. Some were easier than others --Tirion Fordring, for example, made little secret of his comings and goings, though reaching the new Ashbringer long enough to stick a knife in him would be a challenge worthy of the talents of every lightslayer in the Undercity, as well as the product of Fortune's brightest smile.

Keldris Pellegrin and Talia Delaine were no Lightbringers-in-waiting, but they were among the last students of that first generation, among the last to be inducted into the Order of the Silver Hand before the fall ofLordaeron, and their master had been Alexandros Mograine, before he had acquired the name by which he was still known: Ashbringer, hammer of the Scourge. And, unlike their mentor, unlike Tirion Fordring , they were nominally within his reach. His old friends. His fellow students. Still touched by the grace of the Light. Sometimes it took all the patience and discipline he'd ever had not to go where they dwelt and invite them to a touching reunion with knives in the dark.

Around his neck, on a silken lanyard, hung a whistle. It was carved, he was assured, from bone, though it looked and felt like no bone he had ever seen, lightless black and covered over in an oil-slick sheen, and it tasted strange on his tongue, making no sound audible to his ears when it was blown. Something heard, though, and that something slithered soundlessly from the darkest corners of his ill-lit abode, liquid darkness that spooled up from the floor in a slender, writhing column of no fixed shape, its contortions disturbing even to his own dead eyes.

"Make yourself two," Morholt commanded it curtly, and the darkness twisted, tightened, parted in a stretching of midnight strands of being and substance.

From his little box with its many small drawers he took two objects: half an ivory comb, its broken spine carved in a delicate likeness of a sunseeker vine thick with flowers, several long strands of black hair still tangled about the tines; a scrap of black cloth no larger than his hand, its edge still lined in frayed, tarnished silver thread, stiffened with the dried blood of the man it had belonged to. He tossed one object to each Watcher, tentacular filaments reaching out to catch, caress, subsume into the creature's own substance.

"Stormwind. Light's Promise. Watch them close -- but not too closely. Do nothing else unless I command it."

The Watchers folded in on themselves, collapsed downward and slithered away with eye-disturbing speed. In the wake of their departure, Morholt sat perfectly still for a long moment, eyes half-lidded as he thought of many things, many things he had no desire to think of again, memories welling up unbidden. He reached into one of the several interior pockets of the simple dark jerkin he wore and withdrew the object he had lifted, ever so carefully, from the unguarded back of its owner as he had bent over a sheaf of mission reports half a decade old, not recognizing his own neat handwriting. He drew the long strand of frost-white hair out between his fingers, touched it to the tip of his tongue, savored the taste.

Oh, little brother, I think we will meet again, sooner rather than late. And who knows? Perhaps when we do, I'll have your lover's heart in hand for you.


* Lover's Heart is a traditional ballad, original author unknown at least to me, usually a cheerful, up-tempo sort of love song. A slower, somewhat more melancholy version can be heard here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZgQKpWrchw

[Darren Tereos]

Very nice.

[Solivar]

Dayari wrote:

Very nice.

Into every story, some antagonists must fall. ^_^