[Story] Said the Spider to the Fly

[Darren Tereos]

After a long night of collecting pustules, nodules, and glands from the murlocs and other creatures inhabiting Lordamere Lake, one of the many Forsaken inhabitants of Undercity walked slowly into the city's gates, water still dripping from his rotted flesh. He disliked water thoroughly, from the wet footprints it left on the paved stones, the bloating of his dead flesh from the immersion, to the small collection of dank water filling the hollow formed by his permanently dislocated jaw. But Apothecary Renferrel had ordered work to be done, collecting tissue samples from the twisted denizens of the lake.

Though much of Azeroth had been ripped asunder by the dragon aspect Deathwing, the undead stronghold of the Undercity remained much as it had been. This suited Dayari Antarios, inadvertent Forsaken adventurer. Sameness was definitely better for one whose memory was fleeting and understanding of the grand changes across Azeroth limited by the unnerving feeling that something was different.

Dayari paced above a spread of scrolls, each placed carefully on the cobblestones to dry. Earlier today he had found himself nearly submerged in what used to be a desert, but had apparently become an ocean. While none of his writings had been damaged, stored carefully as they were, the wetness had permeated some of the pages. In his pacing about the slowly drying papers, Dayari stared at the words written on them. While the Forsaken's handwriting looked as if a spider had crawled across the page, it was perfectly legible to him.

The stories were almost entirely of his past as a still-breathing citizen of Lordaeron. A few documented some of his activities as a Forsaken, but the majority were of his life before death. Dayari rarely looked at any of the things he wrote down. While what he wrote was to remember, he had generally little stock in the activity of doing so. But his compatriots tended to think Dayari should be in the business of remembering and so he simply listened to their urgings to write things down so that he could better recall the seemingly unending stream of questions others asked of him for which he had no answers. As the pages dried, Dayari read them, most for the first time since their writing. As Dayari read, he began to notice connections and from fragments of his own memory, seemed to be able to draw together the order in which these fragmented memories occurred.

Something had changed since the fall of the Lich King. For all Azeroth, but especially for the Forsaken. Even though Dayari had never heard the whisperings of their former tyrant, many had and their freedom from him had been rendered all the more solid by his end. While his head was still clouded by the rot of death, Dayari remembered fragments with greater regularity and greater accuracy. But, fragments were all he had and they were like grains of sand running through his rotted fingers, perennially out of reach.

Memory was a difficult thing for Dayari. As far as he understood the concept, time moved forward in a generally orderly fashion. But then there had been those dragons in the cave that had managed to change all that, sending Dayari and his comrades backwards in time to things he hadn't even seen on when they had actually happened. Or, had they actually happened when he had seen them as well? These questions gave further credence to Dayari's belief that memory was overrated. But, now the lines seemed to fit together. Dayari pulled from his thieves' tools a thin strand of spider silk, not particularly sticky, but terribly strong and unlikely to break through the entering into a building unawares and without permission. Dayari stared at a particular page, reading the words while his rotten jaw moved loosely with his reading. After finishing the document, something about a father going away to fight the Orcs, Dayari's eyes became unfocused, staring intently through the paper, through the wall, back into the archive of his memory. Granted the archive had no labeling system and instead of bookshelves it was more of loose pile blowing in the wind, but even the worst library has books in it. Satisfied with whatever he found there, Dayari moved into action, tying the start of the spider silk to the first document, then moving about the fan of pages, attempting to tack each page into an order, from what appeared to be his childhood, to his death alone and unnoticed, from his resurrection and beyond. Soon the spider silk resembled a spider web, but instead of food caught in the web, were memories, each attached firmly, with the line of the silk passing along with the current of history. His task complete, Dayari stood fully, letting his hand rest limply at his sides.

There was a gap. A hole from which the silk connected no memories and the pages revealed no history. Dayari stared downward, gazing at the cobblestones, finding small cracks and long neglected dust covering the ground. Something should have happened during the space from his death until his rebirth as a Forsaken. From reading, Dayari knew of the terrible Scourge, from which the Forsaken had been freed. And, from this knowledge, Dayari was fairly certain that he had been one of them. But, not a single glimmer of remembrance granted any insight into that span of time. Shrugging, Dayari moved to shift the papers and their threads of connection to close the gap.

And before him was the lifespan of a man, whom he had been. And the undead that had risen from that man, as a member of the Forsaken was also there. While the Forsaken had been named Dayari Antarios, as he stood and stared at the spiderweb of history, it occurred to Dayari that there had been another name, another one that had been given to him long ago. He had been Darren Tereos, and though no gravestone had ever marked his passing, that he had been the farmer, former conscript into the Second War, and victim of the Plague of Undeath was beyond his doubt. Dayari had been a construction, a name garbled by the broken language of Gutterspeak and adopted by Darren when nothing of his identity would come to him. Now, enough of that past yielded to him one of many things lost to him: his name.

Darren carefully began to place the assembled mass of scraps and scrolls in as near to sequential order as he could. Like a new piece of armor on a battle-hardened veteran, the name did not sit fully well with him. But in time, all things rotted and decayed. Soon the name would be as familiar to him as his ever-present blades. The history he had assembled, complete with bloodshed and death, might take a little longer.

((Finally got Darren name change, so figured there needed to be an accompanying story to go along))