[Story] A Promise Kept.

[Hunter Angellis]

It has been weeks, to Jinjai's best estimation, since she left the dangers of Aldu'thar. She wore the guise of being of the the damned and her venture into the cultists dominion was rewarded. Her answers lead Solivar towards finding more clues from his past. Like most things, such gain does not come without a price. Solivar had entrusted Jinjai with a ring that he felt a link to. As she promised, she took it to the location of its discovery and implored the spirits. She had to remain conspicuous while scrying or all would be lost at the hands of enraged cultists. It was not a spirit who answered. But one who had the knowledge she sought. Within her connection to this other being another presence crept through but did not make itself known. Something dark and malicious but no features could be made. Through Jinjai, some unknown force spoke but to this day, Jinjai could not recall what words were unwillingly uttered. Through concentration she was able to regain control and push the shadow back. Jinjai assumed it was one of the tortured spirits, for there were many, that was locked to this place. Perhaps, it was simply wishing only to make a temporary vessel of Jinjai so it could once again know the feeling of being alive, but retreated in anguish for the undead troll could offer no such comforts. The lighter being feared the worst and pleaded for Jinjai to flee. Before an action could be taken, Jinjai was thrown backwards by an unseen force and it took no more provocation. Some cultists turned their ghostly gaze upon her as she walked at a quickened pace, pulling the cowl low over her. She made it out of the shadowed halls and soon heard Solivar in her thoughts, his voice on the edge of panic, questioning her safety. Jinjai answered in kind and she also shared the secrets unraveled around the mystery of the curious bauble.

Recalling those weeks past, the troll held the tarnished but delicate ring in the palm of her hand. She had strung it through a silk cord she wore around her neck. She did not understand why she admired it so. What did she need with such frippery? The flames emblazoned on the face of the ring danced at her. Solivar questioned her intentions and she was amazed with herself, unable to give her own brother in arms a suitable answer. Even more disturbing was an awareness that despite her brothers urges to return his possession, she felt she needed to keep it if only for a while longer. Something was calling to her, she felt it intensely through the ring. She admired the detailed craftwork a moment longer but felt overwhelmed by a surprising chill that she had not felt since she was of the living. And there was this strange feeling as though someone else was admiring the ring from behind her own eyes.

[Dharkoth]

((Awesome, so glad to see you rping))

[Arronic]

(( I have had to taper my creative juices. They've been trying to flow, and I am rather focused on the Lich King right now. >.> Mrrr... as dayari might say ))

[Solivar]

Catlali Mooncaller opened his eyes to the near-utter darkness of Icecrown's unending night.

For a moment, the world swam before him, a slow clockwise revolution of his tent and everything in it, disorienting and vaguely sickening. He pressed his hands into the nest of furs in which he sat and lowered his head, staring fixedly at a point on the waxed canvas floor of his tent until his skull, and the world, ceased to spin. He did not know, for certain, how long he had sat unmoving since the call had reached him -- his sense of time and its passing had been askew since Light's Promise had crossed the border into Zul'Drak months before, and the passage of sun and moon across the heavens had ceased, the vault of the sky above had become more obscured than not, so even the courses of the stars meant little. He could, however, guess it was no short time, as every cold-stiffened muscle in his back and legs and shoulders objected to even the slightest motion, his mouth and throat aching dry. The mug of tea he brought back to the tent had sat cold and undisturbed long enough for a thin crust of ice to form on its surface, its contents an icy balm on his tongue, and the coals in his brazier little more than incense-rich ash. Even the long-burning hour candle had guttered in its own wax, the only source of light the dimly glowing spirit lamp above his head and the pale luminescence of the totem-staves that marked the boundaries of his working circle. Unfolding his legs was a trial of endurance, pins of ice and needles of fire running their length as his movements restored circulation, taking more minutes than he liked to be able to stand. Outside the circle his clothing lay in a crumpled heap, and it took genuine effort to make his stiff fingers grasp all the ties and toggles and laces of the fleece-lined wool and quilted felt and heavy leather garments, one he was grateful of once their warmth enfolded him. The simple rituals of rising and drinking, clothing himself and warming himself, made him feel more strongly bound to his own flesh, especially after walking with the spirits for so long in the darkness of Northrend, where souls came to die.

The call had come strongly upon him in a moment of weariness, as he had crouched next to one of the fires they had lit in defiance of both the darkness and the cold, exhausted by long hours in the field hospital, singing down healing rain and soothing winds, giving renewed life to those whose bodies were not too broken to accept it, swift and painless release to those whose flesh could no longer hold them.

The Wilds did not often come to any shaman unbidden. The spirit-essence of all life was a vast thing, too immense by its very nature to be comprehended by any singular being, and those it chose to touch of its own desire were few and far between. As a younger man he had felt its touch beneath the rain-wet canopy of Zandalar's deep forest and that single, incandescent instant had changed his life forever, for good and for ill, had brought him to the path he walked yet. He felt it again, sitting at the fireside, a mug of hot tea in his hands: a warm breath against his face, the scent of rain and flowers, a summons he could not deny, and so he had followed it -- away from the fire and from his concerned comrades, out of his body and out into the unending winter darkness of Icecrown, where the spirit of life had been so long absent that even the vanishingly few things that lived there barely knew it at all. He had run as the ghost-wolf past beings whose mastery of death had almost allowed them to see him, almost allowed them to touch him, guided by a curl of rain-scent and warmth, until they had come together to the wall of Aldur'thar.

He had been there some weeks before -- in mind if not in flesh or in spirit -- caught by another's calling as he sat restoring himself, the voice of a woman of his own people: Jinjai of the Ebon Blade. He thought it not a coincidence that he should come there again, given what had passed between them, though he sensed no trace of her now. Or, rather, no recent trace, and it was not those traces that he felt compelled to follow. His little curl of warmth spiralled upwards, toward the icy heights of the Desolation Gate's defensive towers, and he followed as best he was able, bounding from crag to escarpment to embrasure, spirit-talons finding ready purchase in stone and metal carved from the blood of a dying, imprisoned god. It was there, high above the Desolation Gate, the spirit halted its reckless upward flight and waited, swirling about the ankles of a thing he first took to be a statue, so unmoving was it. But statues rarely wore garments that fluttered in an unseen-spirit breeze, or had eyes that burned from within, or started slightly, as though hearing a faraway sound when a spirit antithetical to its own being swirled about its face, stirring long, frost-white hair. It was not aware of their presence, or did not seem to be, lost in its own call -- a sound that Catlali himself could not hear, just as it could not hear the voice of life, so close to its long, canted ears.

Jinjai.

He heard it, then, and there was something of fear, and something of desperation, in that call.

Jinjai. Where are you, my sister?

A knight of the Blade, then, and a ghost-talker in its own right, in its own way. He edged closer, confident that it would not see him, and sampled its spirit-scent, that he would know it if they met again, bracing himself for the mind-searing bite of corruption that always accompanied such efforts, the sick-sweetness of rot that did not cling to the flesh but the soul. And it was there -- deep and thick and skin-crawlingly impure. Beneath it, though...

Beneath that, it smelled bright. Bright as the first rays of dawn falling across the snow on a cold winter morning, bright as the sun emerging in the midst of a fierce storm, turning the rain into drops of silver-golden fire, bright as a lonely candle burning in a darkened place.

It felt familiar and it was that familiarity, as much as his body's deepening discomfort and exhaustion, that had finally forced Catlali to return to his cold, aching, hungry flesh, flesh that was now less cold and less aching but still hungered, the taste of dawn, stormlit rain, shining in the darkness lingering on his tongue and in his mind. He knew that scent, that taste from somewhere, and the sensation nagged and lingered and itched, aggravating put unplaceable. He parted the defenses woven into the fabric of his work-room and slipped through the flap that separated it from the sleeping-chamber, feet sinking ankle-deep into the thick-piled furs and blankets on the other side. The sound of slow, deep breathing met his ears and he crossed the room on hands and knees to check on the pavilion's other occupant. Keldris Pellegrin was, for a change, sleeping the sleep of genuinely, righteously exhausted, and did not even so much as stir when Catlali rested a gentle hand on his shoulder, despite the reflexes born of over a decade living in the Plaguelands, where sleeping lightly and armed enough to repel an attacker at a split-second's notice was a standard long-term survival tactic. The paladin did, in fact, have the hilt of a short-blade under his hand in the sleep-furs, Catlali noted with passing amusement, and tugged the weapon gently from beneath his slack fingers.

A shock ran the length of Catlali's arm, hard enough to set his head spinning, half-sprawling backwards from the force of it. The inside of his skull went light, and bright, and for a moment all he could do was lay perfectly still again while the sensation filled and surrounded him, cold winter dawn, stormlight and rain-scent, golden warmth in the smothering darkness, real and there and as present as it had been on the heights of Aldur'thar. It faded, slowly, and moving carefully he crossed again to Keldris' side, touched his hand.

Keldris was wearing the ring -- a thing he rarely did, a certain sign of danger. He kept it with him, always, was never parted from it willingly, but mostly kept it around his neck on a chord of braided leather and silk to keep it safe from the possibility of accidental damage or loss -- it could not, after all, be replaced, for the hands that had made it and had given it were gone. It was, Catlali had realized from almost their first meeting, a totem of a sort, the relic of another's spirit in gold-chased khorium and jade, etched flames and carved leaves. One of two -- oath-rings, Ophila had called them, though it had taken him some time to realize what that meant, for Keldris rarely spoke of it and his own people did not exchange ring-tokens between mates, had only known that the other half of the pair had been lost with its owner. It was only over months that had stretched into years of companionship and trust that he had learned more, and in that time he had only found the oath-ring that his lover had given him on Keldris' hand twice.

This was only the third...and Catlali felt it stirring, thrumming with a call he could not quite hear.

Silently, he rose and slipped out into the night that lay in the shadow of the Lich King's citadel, thinking of Jinjai of the Ebon Blade to whom the spirits still came, and lights that burned where there should be none, and the linkages of lives and deaths and vows. He needed to speak with Krivulka.