Katahn
Joined: 10 Dec 2008
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re: The Life and Death of Taemar Dawnflame
 by Katahn on 2008/12/29 10:07 am
The Life and Death of Taemar Dawnflame
Sunwell Destroyed -2 years
“And do you, Sir Taemar Dawnflame, take this woman, Arlista Daystar, to be your wife, till death do you part?” The words of the priest carried cleanly through the early spring morning air. All around them were their respective families and friends.
Arlista was radiant in a traditional white wedding gown, and Taemar couldn’t recall being ever happier than he was at that moment.
“I do.”
Sunwell Destroyed -1 year
The horse was trotting quickly as Taemar rode for home. His patrol of Eversong Woods was finished, and while largely a formality since the lands of the high elves were magically secured against any threat, he was still required to do this duty. The home he shared with his wife was a small affair, but it was theirs and he took pride in that fact.
Nearby the township of Tranquillien held the market that Arlista would shop at, and where she would go to train in magic. It was not until after he had tied his horse up and walked in through the front door to see Arlista about to throw her spellbook into the fire that he realized precisely how badly things were going.
“Darling,” he cried out, “what are you doing?”
“This… fel-spawned….” She was clearly a bit more than “slightly agitated”, “I can’t do this Taemar… I just can’t! This freaking magic stuff just doesn’t make sense to me!” Instead of throwing the book onto the hearthstone fire though, she dropped it on the table and slumped down onto the chair.
Taemar took a seat next to her, “So why not just go ahead and apply to the rangers? You’re a natural with a bow, and I never see you happier than when you and I are out hiking.”
Arlista shook her head sadly, “You know both of our families would disown me if I did that. Your father, the archmage, nearly disowned you for becoming a paladin and my parents…” her voice trailed off. Her parents were powerful merchants, and in their eyes the rangers were little better than barely-trained hillbillies.
Taemar placed a hand on Arlista’s shoulder, “You know I don’t care about that. So long as I have you, and the Light, anything else just doesn’t matter.”
“It might not matter to you,” Arlista muttered, “but the rest of us have to live in the real world beloved.”
Sunwell Destroyed -1 day
The Scourge was breaking through the protective rune barriers surrounding Quel’thelas and would soon be upon them. People were, for the most part, frantically trying to gather up their belongings and retreat to Silvermoon City. All were in a sort of shock, a few so severe they refused to believe it was true.
Taemar was not one of those people. He had a few of their most treasured belongings packed up and was helping Arlista up onto the back of a hawkstrider, a giant riding bird favored by the majority of the high elves. “Don’t go to Silvermoon love,” he told her, “I bet the Scourge army will make a beeline for it, and if we can’t hold the line here then Silvermoon will be the last place anyone wants to be.”
“Taemar, come with me!” Arlista repeated her plea, she had a disastrously bad feeling about this.
“You know I can’t,” he repeated for the umpteenth time. “I and the other knights are going to buy you and the rest of our people as much time as we can. Please, just stay alive ok? Even if I die, promise me you’ll stay alive.”
“I promise,” Arlista whispered as she kissed him. “You promise you’ll come back to me, promise me that!”
“I promise.”
Sunwell Destroyed
The Scourge had broken through. It was such a simple sentence. Quick, to the point.
It utterly failed to convey the actual experience.
To Taemar and the other paladins, warriors, battle-mages, priests, and rangers of Quel’thelas it was as if Hell itself had opened up and coughed up an endless sea of death.
Wave after wave of undead came crashing down upon a thin wall of defenders who fought bravely… and died bravely.
“So this is my death,” Taemar thought with an odd detachment as he saw the corrupted spear of a ghoul come through his chest from behind; piercing his heart in the process.
“Arlista….” He gurgled as he collapsed and darkness took him. His last mortal thought was “My love… forgive me for breaking my promise.”
Sunwell Destroyed + 2 weeks
Arlista Dawnflame never received official word of Taemar’s death, she didn’t need it. She felt a heavy weight in her chest the same moment that the spear ended her husband’s life. Her world, once full of bright colors and hope fell into blackness and gray. She abandoned her people, what tattered remnants were left of them, and set out in search of a new life.
The past two weeks had been filled with running from the Scourge, surviving against the elements, hostile Amani trolls, and even against her fellow elves. The loss of the Sunwell struck most of them like the blow of an orcish warhammer to the chest. Arlista thanked whatever spirits of nature watched over her that she seemingly lacked the same kind of connection, dependency even, on the Sunwell as her fellow elves did.
They’d arrived at a place of relative safety near the western coastline of Lordaeron and she looked around. Everyone she knew was dead, nothing was stopping her from going wherever her feet took her… so she let them.
Interlude Arlista – Years Pass
Years passed in the land of the living. Arlista journeyed far and wide across the lands of Azeroth, doing her best to stay away from everyone else. Her only companions were the animals she found it effortless to befriend. She avoided the lands of humans and night elves, she wanted nothing to do with either race. Humans had betrayed her people, and their betrayal likely was the biggest factor in the death of her beloved husband, and the night elves and the former high elves, now blood elves, had very little love between them.
So when she needed supplies it was from horde settlements, a fact that led to her picking up enough orcish to negotiate and haggle with. It wasn’t until her feet fell upon the verdant fields of Mulgore, the new homeland of the tauren, that she felt as if she were “home”.
She mourned, she trained, she hunted. When the day arrived that her people formally joined the horde she allowed herself to feel moderately vindicated. She cried when she learned of the reborn order of paladins whose powers were a stolen blasphemy of what Taemar once held dear. She gloated when Kael’thas was proven a traitor and the blasphemous blood knights were forced to turn to the Light in a more genuine fashion.
Still, she remained aloof, an outsider. The wilds of Kalimdor called to her, and she was reluctant to leave them…
Interlude Taemar
Taemar remembered dying, then he remembered a dark voice whispering in his mind, “Do you want to live?” His thoughts went to Arlista, his promise, he needed to return to her. “Swear allegiance to me and you will live,” the dark voice whispered seductively.
“Who are you?” It was hard to think. It was as if his thoughts were traveling through thick, cold, mud.
“I am someone who can give you a chance to see your wife again.” The power in that voice was incredible, alluring beyond words. Taemar sensed a darkness to it, but all he wanted was to see his beloved wife again, to not break his promise.
“Swear to me I can see her again…” he pleaded.
“I swear nothing,” the dark voice chided. “Whether you see her again will be up to chance and fate, but if you refuse me then you will definitely never see her again.”
“I…” his thoughts choked. “I swear loyalty.”
The dark voice chuckled as another death knight was born.
Taemar Reborn +2 days
Havenshire was in flames and all around him Taemar could here the cries of the fallen of the Scarlet Crusade. Their pain and fear brought warm pleasure to his cold heart. His master would be pleased at how this latest cadre of death knights had performed in the field.
“Taemar!” A field commander barked his name and the undead elf turned and saluted at attention. “You have performed well, and I have decided to reward to you before you return to our base in the old inn. Go into that building and dispatch one of the prisoners.”
“Yes sir!” Taemar promptly turned and with his assigned “squire”, a risen ghoul under his command, in tow and strode purposefully towards the ramshackle building the Scourge had filled with prisoners.
Cold eyes swept over the prisoners and rested on the slight form of a female blood elf with strawberry blonde hair. He glanced at her, the hair seemed familiar, it reminded him of… someone…
The elf looked up at him and groggily took to her feet. “You’ll look me in the eyes before you kill me monst… Taemar? Taemar is that you?”
Taemar studied the elf in front of him. He felt as if he knew her, once, in another life. Of course even if she was someone he knew before, it mattered nothing now, his existence was devoted to service to the Lich King, his master.
“Taemar, it’s me, Lady Eoynis, we fought in the battle of Eversong together. You were a paladin once Taemar, do you remember?” Her voice was low, but her eyes were earnest.
She was wearing the tattered uniform of the Argent Dawn. “So the Dawn is helping the fools in the Crusade eh?” His dark voice hissed.
“Taemar! Snap out of it! Fight! The Lich King has you under a spell! Don’t let him control you!” She pleaded with him.
He laughed, “The Lich King is my master, my former life, whatever it was, is irrelevant!” It should be irrelevant, but the hair… this elf’s hair reminded him of something… someone…
Eoynis sensed something wavering inside of him. “Taemar, remember who you were. Remember your oaths. Remember your family!”
Family. That was it. Family. Someone he knew once had that color hair, someone important to him… but who?
“Taemar! What’s taking so long? Kill that wretch and get back here!” The bellowed shout of the field commander brought an abrupt, if temporary, end to his inner conflict.
“I exist only to serve my master!” He cried as a single slash with his mighty two-handed runeblade ended the red-haired elf’s life. There was a battle to fight and honor to gain in the service of his king, thoughts of his past would wait until that was done.
He was three steps outside the makeshift prison when his thoughts returned to the color of her hair, and a half-remembered face without a name.
Taemar Reborn +3 days
The final battle against the forces at Light’s Hope Chapel would take place the next day. The Knights of the Ebon Blade had proven an unstoppable force on the battlefield and the time had come for the Highlord himself to lead them in battle against that bastion of the Light.
Taemar longed for the rush of battle to calm his whirling thoughts. The Lich King was so focused on his other plans that he was devoting less direct effort to hold the knights close to his will, and with nothing to do but wait, and little direct supervision from his master, Taemar’s thoughts kept going back to that unknown red-haired woman.
There were fragments of memories of his former life, and nothing more, but that face was in most of them. At least she was in ones that he dispassionately observed were laced with emotions completely foreign to what he was. They were filled with love.
Furtively he glanced around and saw a few of his fellow knights looking similarly pensive, but most slept. Could they be half-remembering like he was? Taemar couldn’t be sure, and dared not ask.
He wanted to drop these thoughts, these memories, like the unwelcome burden they were, but they refused to be disposed of. The more he struggled, the more he felt almost as if that red-haired face was stalking him.
In far distant Kalimdor, that red-haired elf was in the throws of a nightmare. Her dreams ever since she heard about the dark citadel of Acherus hovering near her old homeland centered on visions of her dead husband trapped within it. She would wake up screaming, her black lion companion “Maxwell” looking at her worriedly, and then her trying to tell herself, and Maxwell, “it was just a dream.”
Arlista’s dreaming nightmares were mirrored by Taemar’s waking ones. She returned to a fitful sleep, and dreamed she shot an arrow at a darkly armored man and it somehow miraculously pierced his thick armor. The figure fell backwards, losing his helmet in the process, revealing to Arlista the twisted, undead face of her husband. She woke screaming.
Taemar Reborn +4 days, Battle at Light’s Hope
Taemar scowled under his masked helm. Last night he felt as if something had pierced his heart as a wave of his former memories came crashing down upon him. He remembered the name of the red-haired elf… Arlista, his wife. Somehow he knew she lived, but at the moment there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
He was trapped in the middle of a detachment of death knights, waiting for the order to attack. “How strange it is,” he thought, “to be on the other side of a conflict of Light and Shadow.” He prayed, not really believing the Light would hear or grant his prayer, that this battle would turn out differently. “This time, let the Light win,” he silently pleaded. Assuming his beloved was still alive, her only hope for that to continue to be the case would be for the Scourge to be defeated and destroyed.
Battle at Light’s Hope +6 hours
Taemar lay on the ground in agony, yet a smile was on his face. The Lich King had failed. He and the other death knights were sent into a trap to draw out Tirion Fordring so Arthas could slay him, and the mighty Lich King failed and was forced to retreat. His body was miserable with agony, and he felt as if he were at a fork in the road.
On the left, a peaceful death. On the right, a chance to continue to battle the undead legions of the Scourge, to protect all living, and especially his wife, from their depredations. “I should say former wife,” he laughed quietly to himself, “till death do us part… I did die…”
Live as a death knight, or slip into peaceful death? The question tormented him almost as much as the physical pain he felt did.
“You promise you’ll come back to me, promise me that!” The memory of Arlista’s last words to him stood resolute in his mind.
He chose life. Even if she would spurn the abomination, the monster, he had become, he would finally honor his last promise and, if a monster like him could love, he would never stop loving her.
_________________ Zaovin - Wandering Monk from the Wandering Isle
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