astraves

[astraves]

Quiet Comfort

“An’da, look!”

It goes without saying that Volseth is a busy man.

Busy with the Ministry’s affairs. Busy with Suramar’s problems.

The world’s problems. The Horde’s problems.

His own, especially.

For several days, however, they don’t bother him. They won’t.

A heavy heart and bothered dreams elude him, and the burdens of it all dissolve in the days he spends with his little son. Valente and his father make up for lost summer hours exploring the shores, browsing the shallows of the sea.

Zuldazar, Stranglethorn, Durotar and Feralas. Azsuna, Iskaara and Moa’ki Harbor... Especially Pandaria, where the boys could find purchase. Portals ease their passage, but Valente says it’s cheating. Of course, his father muses, and always with a smile. Your son won’t be a magic man. Not like you.

He wants the dirt beneath his nails. The wind in his hair. Eyes to the horizon.

Maps and scrolls, buckles and backpacks, a trusty bow, a storied sword. He won’t look behind the curtains of all that IS, like you have.

He wants to experience this world yet, and know the beauty of it. It’s already his Reason and Purpose. The gearworks of science and the marvel of artifice.

Astraves doesn’t consider notions of legacy or bloodline. His family pushes onward and outward. His House stands for the people, their strength and structure. It always has, likely it always will, for as long as it can stand.

He considers instead the dragonflies his son points out in the shallows, the fingerlings darting near to shore about rocks and wreckage, in the way nature engulfs the ravages of wars passed.

History lessons, grim as they are, and as the two had surveyed so many countless worlds lost to war and overgrown in their attempts to beautifully forget the civilizations that died there, here it’s a notion closer to home.

Azeroth and her natural element work to grow beyond the wars that scarred her.

The bones of Orc and Man and Troll and Elf gather moss and leech their minerals into the water and earth alike to feed it. To validate their lives, their growth, their deaths, in some way. Any way.

The corals and barnacles roosting on them make it so. The little fish and tiny hermit crabs seeking grace in their hollows comfort the torment of the ghosts within.

They catch their bounty and feast, time and again resolving purity from poison in the fish. Savoring the exotic, taking time to visit the small towns and villages along the way.

And on each day, as the sun sets, the son settles. Camped beneath the stars, or comfortable in the inns, his father tells him stories of olden times. Elven mythology, lores older than lore, and so the child’s eyes drift shut as his mind turns to dreaming.

Volseth watches his sleeping boy. Notes his face and expression, the placid visage concealing the adventures behind closed eyes unfolding as he brushes the raucous hair away from them.

The child was the fingerling, swimming through his shattered braincase. The starfish crawling across his arm bones, and the thriving tidepool stirred up and dredged out about his ribs, where small things waiting to get bigger thrived in the shelter of his remains.

A living ghost, gazing down upon all that his life and its suffering are host to.

This child, his own, validating each moment for this one.

He’d take every knife to his heart and his back all over again to make it so.

[astraves]

Sessions in Ink - Postscript

A letter came to me, by post.

I had abandoned Ouvedhe’s office when he brandished the blade at me, and made his request.

His approach and candor were uncharacteristic, and his sudden turn to show the mended hand scythe and explain the state of its make admittedly staggered me. Ten thousand some-odd years after the fact and my first reaction is anger before reason.

He’s capable of his own dirty work. That entire attempt at our discussion was... odd, like he was trying to carry on the talks until someone hounded into his ear that it was time to play his hand.

Bear in mind, our discussions were his idea. I’ve never been under the impression that he’d abandon them or fuck it up, and yet here he was, doing both.

He requested to see me in Suramar again. I told him to come to Dazar’alor instead.

Valente and I have made a vacation of it. He plays with the other children here, sits in for lessons on old legends and all the rest. I’ve had to bribe more than one instructor, but times are changing.

Suramar, Dazar’alor, the Horde... They acknowledge that he’s an elf. He acknowledges that they’re trolls. The children don’t care until we tell them to.

So I don’t tell them to. He seems to like their culture just fine, and they like him.

These people are well aware of history. They’re living embodiments of it, not unlike us, but the trade-off for shorter lifespans is the capacity to always be current. In the moment.

Zandalar’s tribe, and really the others that would have us at least, are like exercises in mindfulness.

For my part and his, we’re trying not to be the sorcerous bogeymen and godless, baby-eating night monsters their legends claim. I’ve already had a man throw bones at me and claim that I’m weaker in the day, powerless without the moon.

I explained that it’s because I’m nocturnal, and that noon is still the middle of my night in comparison.

I was offered coffee and asked, very kindly at that, not to curse him and his children, which I didn’t. So he asked if I could bless him and his instead, or curse a rival angler with my “elfin witchcraft.”

When he learned I couldn’t (or wouldn’t), I was deigned useless and left alone.

The coffee was good though.

I’m left to sit by the harbor, waiting. Nursing this brew in the sun with the golden glare of the temple behind me and the ocean breeze howling between the ziggurats.

“Volseth,” a voice called out amid the bustle of the docks. Ouvedhe’s, by any measure. 

Astraves sat on his crossed legs like a gull taking roost atop the lamp posts leading up in their procession to the higher tiers behind him.

Clutched between his hands is a clay cup, simply made without a handle and just enough of a glaze to seal the earthenware. He nursed the dark, bitter brew within and watched the tide.

“You got my letter,” he says quietly.

“Which only went to prove that you received mine,” the elder offered as he folded his hands behind his back. “We need to speak.”

Volseth took a drink of his coffee and kept to his silence.

“What was that, at our last discussion?”

“Certain entities wanted proof,” the director started. “I was hoping to make it an easier process, smoother. More readily transitioning, but...”

“They rushed your hand and told you it was now or never, right there. You couldn’t get me into position, got flustered. Threw your hand on the table and lost the game.”

“On the contrary,” Ouvedhe began, “I won. Consequently,” he added as he settled in on the wall beside Volseth, “so did you.”

“The original argument when Geillais presented her evidence was that you were either psychologically broken, beyond all repair and remediation, or that you were some kind of psychotic fiend - that you yourself would’ve easily been another one of your victims, were it not for your justifications.” “They thought you were sick,” he went on, “and that there was no cause or effect for you. That you killed animals as a boy, hurt girls in your adolescence and took your stifled frustrations and powerlessness out on society as a man. But they wanted to corner you, isolate you, and have you dead to rights before disturbing the social fabric of things.” Volseth sighed through his nostrils and took another drink. “They wanted you, the alienist, to substantiate her report.”

“Yes. And I could, in some ways. Largely, though, I could not, when it was coupled with our conversations. By your own confession, you did have a spell of powerlessness. Frustration. Your father’s death was the breaking point of that, but it was well into a century before you started taking lives for it.”

Astraves nodded and straightened his back out with a grimace.

“And as you’re quick to point out, deserving ones... The man I told you about last time, he’d been quietly arrested and resolved while you were away from the world. You wouldn’t have known, I suppose.”

“Elsewise, you... Love animals in the way that you decidedly don’t keep them, preferring to let them be in their natural element... You’ve never expressed violence toward the disenfranchised or impoverished, never... flexed your muscles as it were upon any you deign beneath you...”

Volseth raised a hand and waved it on.

Ouvedhe went quiet and cleared his throat.

“It’s as close to an exoneration as you can get for killing at least five hundred people. Documented cases, at that. You are as cleared as I can make you, Lord Astraves. I know, though. They know. Some shadow of that will always loom over you, and no small degree of threat. What’s to stop you from snapping and cleaning house again, hm?”

“The presence of air in my lungs,” he answered quietly. “Maybe if our peers and superiors can keep their fucking noses clean, they won’t have that problem.”

“Ah... That’s the Interior Ministry’s problem,” Ouvedhe mused with a grin. “Not ours.”

“It’s my problem if we falter again. We built Suramar. I’m not perfect, but I occupy the history and position that I do because I have standards, Temeril. Standards keep the towers aloft. People fed and educated. Lives and livelihoods in order.”

“As a predator, then, you’ll know that you’ll starve,” Ouvedhe remarked, “unless you’ve resolved best practice for eating elephants.”

“Protecting territory to one is another’s stewardship. Both have the same outcome. I’d like to think you want to help me see to these outcomes though. You have a stake in it as well, and we can do this legitimately.”

“Or you can take that tool you had recast and do what you need to. I’m done.”

“Truly?”

Volseth shook his head. “I can simply leave. If Suramar falls, I live somewhere else. If Azeroth falls, there are other worlds... Being married to something and unable to walk away doesn’t work so well with me, Ouvedhe. Staying for it, fighting for it... That’s just going to get me killed, and almost has in the past. I have things now that I’d rather live for.”

Temeril Ouvedhe took in the din of the shipyard as Volseth went quiet and emptied his cup with a grunt. Both men watched the seabirds, the ships trundling in and away. Crewmen barking at one another, priests blessing ships, children playing chase... “I’d say this is worth killing for,” the elder thought aloud. “So is home.”

He stood and plodded a weathered hand on Volseth’s shoulder before turning to walk away.

“One man to another, you could use an anchor. I mean it in the best possible way... You’ve got a new assignment as well, on the Isles.”

“What is it?” Volseth asked tiredly.

“Time,” Temeril said as he walked away. “Namely, its disruption... Fel won’t help you. Call your lightspark and get out there, Volseth.”

[astraves]

Sessions in Ink - Opportunity

“Take your time, Volseth. It’s been more than a moment since our last session.”

“It has,” Astraves answered quietly. He leaned back into the Divan of Disquieting Self-Revelation and crossed an ankle over his knee, hands braced against his lower leg as his eyes roamed from Director Ouvedhe’s hauntingly placid wrinkles to the leaf-eclipsed glass panels far overhead. “When we last spoke, you... explained the method by which you made your executions,” Ouvedhe tip-toed, seeming entirely too pensive that night. “How you disposed of the bodies, entombed the... unsavory memories of your victims. Darker legacies, for future readers even to ruminate over. To remember, perhaps in hopes of prevention, or realization so that they could potentially address these tendencies, should they ever arise.”

“Not like I had, no,” Volseth corrected calmly, seeming altogether despondent. “More that they could remember that people like this exist, and have existed. They can do what they will with the information, though... Yes, there’s a hope that they’d find some actionable parcel in all of it.” “In the sense of wanting the killings to continue?” Ouvedhe asked. Volseth watched him as he sat stylus and tablet aside to adjust his sleeves, pinching the rolls and folding them up at angles to rest just under his elbows. “Not for any aspiration of legacy,” he answered. “Not even in my method, or with any notion of myself in the effort. My books are illuminated manuscripts host to monsters, Ouvedhe. If would-be hunters, slayers or even just concerned people like us-...” The Director raised a pale, feathery eyebrow. Astraves sighed and rolled his eyes. “I didn’t approach this with powers, in mind, or power. In fact, if you recall I started doing all of this out of an abject loss of control for anything. These people ran rampant, their corruption took my father, countless friends...” “What would you do for the sort of cancer that could only be cut out, Temeril?”

Ouvedhe clenched his jaw for a moment and looked away. “Really, think about it. Nothing else works. For everyone you’ve sent to the law, they buy their way out before they even stand before the Arbiters, threaten the system or slink away conveniently in the night after, what, maybe a single week behind barriers?” Volseth pressed his point and leaned forward, gazing over at the Director inquisitively. “Due process failed me in spectacular ways, when I was doing this. And I assure you - you can ask Geillais herself if she ever deigned to see the shade of night again, I fed her and her officers far more than I ever killed. Set them up to fall perfectly.” “You tried to do right by your instinct,” Ouvedhe said, doing more to explain it all aloud to himself. “A genuine attempt was made to resolve your rage in more productive ways.”

Astraves nodded tiredly. As the silence grew, he uncrossed his leg and leaned forward, elbows on knees, and ran his face against his palms before steepling his fingers beneath his nose. Temeril Ouvedhe shifted uncomfortably in his chair, favoring to tuck one leg beneath himself and leaning with a twist in his back - an oddity, for his age, but betraying ability despite his millennia. The snore of a sleeping dragon, perhaps, echoing through the rocks to quake the village built far above its cavern. “I’m done, regardless.” “Done with-... These talks? You can leave whenever you like.”

“No... The killings, it’s done with. I can’t wash my hands of it, but I have things to hope for. Things to aspire toward. All of this strikes as some self-destruction at the end. I have my son, though. I’m... considering relationships, again. Friends. Family. Possible love interests, or trying again with the boy’s mother. Learning, growing - fuck, living.”

“You didn’t expect to survive Suramar,” Ouvedhe asks in a flat hush.

“No,” Volseth answers as he looks up into the elder’s gaze. “I almost didn’t.”

“I’m glad you endured, for what it’s worth.”

Volseth nodded in a few absent bobs as he sat up straight and folded his hands together to hang low. “I am too, or we wouldn’t have Valente. Possibly a thousand other things... I don’t see the merit of the air in my lungs for myself, it’s always... Others. What my presence does for others.”

“Not you.”

“That’s selfish,” Astraves remarked.

“Have you thought about being selfish, Volseth? Would it be wrong?”

“Entirely.”

“Do you think you could be so? For yourself? It might... lend some perspective or capability to those non-selfish pursuits that consume so much of your time.”

“This isn’t leading into a departmentally-mandated pat on the back sort of vacation, is it?” Astraves asked in a low rasp.

“No,” Ouvedhe said quickly, “absolutely not - Volseth, we need you to be actively doing your work out there, and right now there are things in motion that-... I meant more in your time away. When you go home at dawn, or on the days of rest, when you do take them.”

Astraves lofted his brows in surprise for a moment and sat up straight. Baffled, he looked from a planter to the Director and shrugged.

“It wouldn’t kill me. My son has his lessons, my family’s set to their tasks, I don’t-...”

He shook his head. “I don’t really have much, outside of them.”

“Take the time to expand your circle. Sidle with some group or another, convince them you’re some slap-shod adventurer doing whatever. Seeking purpose, friends. Gold and glory.”

Ouvedhe made a final note on his tablet and grunted. “Go to a brothel, for gods sakes.”

“I can’t think that would reflect well on my House.”

“Bloody nobles - then get yourself some blushing courtesan to shadow you.” “I liked my librarian, when she liked me back,” he said with a faint smile and an absent stare. “I’m not entirely without prospects though, at least.”

Ouvedhe threw his hands up in exasperation and stood.

“Go live, Volseth. Whatever you do, however you do it, whomever you do it with, just go do life things when we aren’t having you do death things, does that sound fair? Make another one of your fucking towers-” “Ouvedhe-” “-open it to the people. Start a bloody restaurant- it literally does not matter. Just go do it.” Astraves slowly stood. Both men regarded one another from across their narrow spaces, one confused, the other at some sort of sudden wits’ end. Ouvedhe ran his fingers over his forehead, as if scarcely able to muster the strength for his palm while his touch daubed at the wrinkles to check for bleeding or the sweat of crossed gentility. “My apologies,” he remarked distantly. “No, I... admittedly am often beside myself, with these encounters. And how avoidable some of these nagging woes are, for you. Or would likely be, if you put the effort to watering your garden instead of becoming homicidal when you see the plants beginning to wilt.”

“What I did was highly contextual,” Volseth offered with a raised hand, reaching for Ouvedhe lazily as if the old man needed saving. “It’s not my focus. Or my care. There’s plenty of death. And has been, and likely will be. I’m just ready for life.” “That isn’t... what, wrong, is it?” Volseth asked.

Temeril composed himself with a sigh and folded his hands together, one palm against the other as his fingers splayed and writhed to vacantly adjust his rings. “It’s not wrong, no. I confess, I expected more. The deep, flayed nerve of a shattered psyche. Schizophrenia, maybe. Something more complicated.”

“Just a boy mourning his father with six centuries of blood,” Astraves said in his quiet gravel. “Watching his world collapse and his friends and loved ones all die or change. Betray him. Realizing the old man wouldn’t want that. Not forever. Just long enough to take out the trash.”

Ouvedhe paced back to his desk as Volseth went on. 

“That’s enough to break anyone, isn’t it? It’s a good thing to realize all of this too, right?”

“Suramar still has problems,” Ouvedhe said, away from the point entirely as he opened the widest drawer in the center of his console and drew out a curved thing wrapped in embroidered, violet silk. He undressed the item as if peeling the cloth from a lover’s body and held it forward. Purest leystone, the metal honed to a razor’s edge on either side of its crescent, and set into a twisting ebony grip long enough to accommodate a hand and a half. It bore no engravings or decor. Stunningly beautiful for its simplicity. “What is this,” Volseth shot with a cruel rasp.

“The leystone... becomes impressed, by the energy it contacts, emotions among it. Justice, vengeance, rage. And so much death, Volseth. I disassembled your killing blade and reforged it. Suffused in your victims still, yet anew.” “Why?” Astraves asked, stunned and glaring at the thing.

“What does this do, for you?”

“What does this- My God, right now it looks like a fucking hand scythe,” he said as he bladed a palm toward the vicious tool. “What were you expecting, or- or hoping for, even? What’s this doing for YOU?”

“You are an agent of Suramar,” Ouvedhe began as he lowered the blade. “An agent under my direction, but my guidance pales in comparison to your willingness to be Her Left Hand.” “Temeril-” “A sentinel in the dark, Astraves,” Ouvedhe pressed urgently, voice quivering, “a shadow too deep and hungry for that dark to hide in again. You can’t walk away from it so readily. And you can’t wash your hands of it, because the stain of so much has become part of you.” Volseth raised his hand and cast the sickle in an arcane sheen, then swiped it away in a backhanded blow through the air. The blade did as bade and shot from the Director’s grasp to sink into the woodwork of a bookshelf.

Ouvedhe tumbled back and braced himself against the desk with one hand, the other raised defensively as his face went wide-eyed and slack-jawed from the startle.  “My pain is not a bottled thing to be uncorked and put on loan, to you or anyone. What the fuck is wrong with you? What does any of this have to do with our conversations? The sessions? You just completely derailed-”

“Ebrethil Kalthaes,” he murmured quietly. “Your niece’s tormenter,” Astraves grunted angrily. “What of him?”

“His-... His apprentice, Mavonde... He’s-... shadowing her, in the offices they share. She remembers him, from then. She hasn’t left her home in weeks, and she doesn’t respond to calls, and-...” “You want Mavonde to go away,” Volseth asked flatly.

“That’s the start,” Ouvedhe whispered. “And I don’t express such with thrill or... Eagerness. But time is passing. People in power are-... They’re forgetting, and those that slipped through the cracks are... They’re slithering out and daring the light again, Volseth.” “We need you,” Temeril began again as Astraves paced across the room toward the assaulted shelf, his eyes following unerringly. “And I-... I’ll protect you, completely. I swear it on my wife’s tomb. On the graves of my children.”

Long, teal fingers lashed out. With bitter, pale knuckles, they grabbed onto the handle of the hand scythe, thumb braced against the grip as its pried out of the elaborate engravings of the shelf. So keen is it that the metal sang for a time, filling the office with its high, palid drone. Astraves forcibly tucked the grip into Ouvedhe’s hand and squeezed his fingers around the elder’s. “I can’t be accountable for every shitbag that skulks out of the arcway to find place and purpose again,” Volseth told him quietly. “You can give an agent of the Interior a Writ of Mortal Sanction and five strong sentinels to hold the prick down, or you can go treat him to lunch and do it yourself.”

”Good fucking talk.”

Ouvedhe’s hand trembled around the blade as Volseth turned away and stormed toward the teleportation platform.

[astraves]

Red Petals

It wasn’t far from the Tavern in the Mists.

That was a fairly isolated place, all things considered. Nestled high in the mountain passes of Pandaria, it had an exclusive sort of singularity to itself, but it wasn’t the only one of its like if you knew where to look, and The Tavern wasn’t the lowest point one could strike in the throws of a true and proper downward spiral.

One had to go to a place like the Languid Blossom.

Similarly, one had to meet the Languid Blossom.

Volseth’s magic shot him across a fold. A strand, between time and space, uncomfortable and rapid in the shift of mass to energy and back. What was physical took its pattern, sent screaming across the Nether out and around in a great arc onto the world again. His breath caught in his throat as he stumbled forward from a tear that knit itself shut readily, Reality itself overjoyed that the ordeal was well and truly over, for now. 

His imps didn’t join him in the jaunt. His clothing changed from the severe armors of his sorcery to local-styled robes in blood reds, near-black midnight blues and bone-white embroidery that hearkened to the calligraphic names of a thousand devils. Astraves was left to his own devices, looking up through the prevailing haze to see the dim, drab woodwork of the place stretching up three stories, nestled against a cliffside. All across the flat planes of the pandaren-styled architecture were motifs of poppies, coiling clouds and waves.

Red paint had long-since peeled and flecked to bare, graying wood. The only color the place held was in the red lanterns draped along its eaves and awnings, all bobbing like ghastly spirits with every stale wind that came through the place.

Even the bronze windchimes were clad in a dull, grey-green layer that made their intonations dull and half-hearted, their patinated bodies doing more to rattle than sing.

The nightborne hooked his thumbs into his belt and took in the sad details of the place as his head bobbed in nods of mock appraisal.

“I was starting to miss this shit-hole,” he muttered.

---- -  -    - Yong-lan Hua-Kai paid himself in the opulence he couldn’t afford to splurge on the establishment or the people working there, and he spent his days marveling at the way he’d been able to cash out his chips.

Outsiders came to Pandaria and brought their war with them. His family had fields of herbs, crimson and pale violet flowers as far as the eye could see, in the valley. Medicine and color, vibrant blooms for the bees.

They also had their apothecaries, all spinning their plants into gold.

It was a shame, he’d ruminate, how the war dragged them in. He was forced to make the hard transition from farmhand to soldier, and it reflected in his physique.

Shame that it killed his brothers and sisters. Parents... Cousins, second-cousins... His right eye, especially, and his name, all buried in mourning.

It was easier to identify as a euphemism, an embodiment of the red and pale violet blooms that flourished in his family’s valley, but as the doors of Yong-lan’s heart came shut like the final sealing of a mausoleum’s gates, another swung open and shined with all the brightness of the sun.

Cash Money.

And so he profited, and after the money had dried, he sold. 

The sum total of his family’s pharmaceutical empire had become the plush throne he sprawled across, set within the lavish interior of the smoke-clad den, with its wan carvings and tarnished golds, the lacquered woodwork tacky to the touch.

His appearance followed suit, though his patterned, copper fur was far more vibrant than the layered silks hanging from him, or the filigree and colors of the tea set on the low-set table in front of him.

All another day as the listless bodies downstairs stirred absently in their stupors. Some were asleep. Others were very likely dead.

But they paid. Somehow. He didn’t care where the money came from. The days of caring about such things were over. He had his bottom-line to worry about, and the savings were certainly diminished anymore. With a good portion of the money remaining, he wondered about putting a few trolls to work on revitalizing several mostly-intact golems, or cobbling together new ones to replace the few bouncers in the place.

He wouldn’t have to pay or feed those, at least.

Thoughts of today and those troubled, gold-clad yesterdays passed through his mind as he counted his coins. His fangs tightened about the stem of a long, straight pipe balanced precariously between his ursine lips, bobbing as he hummed an idle melancholy tune to himself. Gold, silver and a few desperate coppers from half a dozen nations sat in tidy stacks on his table, next to his tea set and a neglected game of jihui.

The den bore a vague translation of his new namesake, and though the eponymous establishment was certainly languid (wilting, withering, dying), the Master was no flower. Yong-lan’s last good eye was a vibrant, jadefire green made moreso by the fur surrounding it. The other was hidden tastefully behind a black silk patch, lost and buried within a nest of gnarled, ravaged scars. The tidy bun of his longer hair was less-than, with loose strands spilling out down the back of his neck and in front of his face. The strength he built during the war, of which there was a profound lot, had since faded into the lifestyle of comfort and barked orders that he adopted after the fact. It did nothing to diminish his size, and somehow the union of fat and muscle on his frame was more imposing with negotiations these days.

His claws clinked a final coin atop the stack of silver when he heard bouncers stirring downstairs, and the groaning roll of the round door swinging on worn, dry iron hinges.

“Master Hua-Kai,” one of the burly louts called out from below in their native tongue, “Master Hua-Kai! We might have trouble!”

The floorboards creaked as he rose and stomped over to the rail, pipe fuming like a furnace to an overdriven steam engine. He snapped his wrist and spread a fan in his left hand to flap it angrily. The right adjusted his robes indignantly, hitching his sash and jostling his bulk into place beneath it.

“Don’t yell, you fucking idiot,” he growled in a deep, husky voice. “You’re going to wake the dragon-chasers... What’s the problem?”

“It’s-”

--- -   -      -

Volseth’s boots clicked against the flagstones of the first floor. A crisp leather sole shot in metal made dull and sharp clacks as he went, heel to toe, through the entryway and all of its tacky, tasteless decoration.

“This place looks like it was made for fucking tourists anymore,” he mused as he looked to the bronze statuettes and bonsais arranged tastefully in their philosophical displays.

He noted the planters and their greenery were looking less than healthy anymore, and that the podium up front which once allowed one of Yong-lan’s pretty girls to post up in a very low cut robe and welcome you to the incapacitating ride of your life was no longer occupied.

Further inside, a pair of bouncers made a futile effort of acknowledging him. Half-high themselves, he had been a regular customer, even a business partner, and they did little to greet him beyond grunts and nods.

The main parlor welcomed him with silence and the flutter of Yong-lan’s fanning from the smoke-shrouded balcony above. The red light of the lanterns changed hues inside, the paper coming now in thin oranges and blues to join all that faded crimson in a show that must’ve just been spectacular to the bodies propped up in heaps of pillows around him. Men, women, young and old... pandaren mostly, but the odd human or orc languished in their haze. The beauty from up front was their only attendant, and the wear of her work was clear. Ash stains marked her silk robes and fur, the pins were missing from her hair and the weight of sleepless days and nights blurring together lingered in her eyes.

At the sight of the nightborne, she bowed her head and scooted off to a corner.

Yong-lan loomed above and raised his chin just so.

“Vol Astraves,” he started in more common parlance. “You arrive unexpected.”

“I do,” he called up to him, ignoring the stupor of the customers. “How’s business, and where did the greeter go?” “She has moved on to other ventures, I’m afraid,” Yong-lan said as he began to pace beside the railing.

“I see you kept her robes though,” he pointed out.

Yong-lan went silent, and among his people, that spoke volumes. Volseth watched him walk toward the stairs “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he finally asked. “Have you come for business, or something else?” “I need your choice madak today,” he explained calmly. “I gave the last of mine away.”

Yong-lan tisked as he rounded the stairs and paced toward him. “Astral Lotus is at a premium... Spirit’s Wilting Sorrow is more abundant. I am trying to be rid of the stock, before it expires.”

He came over to stand before the nightborne, looking up just slightly, though he was able to do this by holding the angle of his chin. Regal and arrogant, he smiled and inclined his head in a faint bow.

Volseth bowed his head in kind. He wasn’t much taller than him, but the stature afforded no position in bargaining here.

“I have to insist on my usual, unless the ‘investor’s benefit’ no longer exists?”

Yong-lan’s eye narrowed. Several patrons around him groaned, and the attendant made her rounds in rolling them over or relighting their pipes.

“It does for investors,” he mused coldly.

“The vine I kindled happened to dry up,” Astraves said calmly. “And if the vine doesn’t bear fruit, Yong-lan, you should know from your upbringing that it also brings no gold... And two-hundred thousand is a lot to go dry, I think.”

You squandered my fucking money was inscribed deeply in the complete absence of expression on his face. And you know that I know you did.

Yong-lan let the words settle before he smiled, snickered and bowed his head. “So it does, Lord Vol. But... I would like to show you something. Ongoing efforts, if you would follow me?”

“Astral Lotus,” he answered quietly.

Yong-lan slowed as he turned from him and made way for a far door with sliding panels. “Yes. We will get to your account very soon... But, if this will perhaps balm your temperament toward our agriculture, then I would be honored for you to see what we have been working toward.”

Honor. It bore weight here. Tit for tat in lighter affairs, a social insistence that, when transgressed, slandered both the offended and offending parties alike in the gravity of its denial.

Volseth’s son had been exposed to the triple-dog dare. Dropping honor in any fashion was like that, he reasoned, or that the dare was much like honor here.

Neither Vol Astraves nor Yong-lan Hua-Kai were anyone’s dishonorable bitch, though it was a low motion for him to play the tile on the board in such a way.

He knew it.

“Lead on,” he said simply, his hand gesturing toward the door as he followed behind.

Yong-lan grinned as he continued toward the door. As he did his sequenced knocks and exchanged a brief, insistent conversation in Pandaren with the doorman on the other side, Volseth’s eyes wandered to more of the decor, and how much of it was absent in this hall beneath the stairs.

A lack of anything eye-catching was just as much a deterrent for social grace. Off-limits without the audacity of signage to say so explicity.

Tumblers caught and latches gave, however, and Yong-lan ushered Volseth through the door before his man locked it up tight again, into a narrow passage that went back into the cliffside. The floor was laid with tight wood planks, worn and bowed, but the walls and ceiling were native stone, all roughly hewn.

Further in, the clinking of glass and the rustle of leaves trundled along the corridor. It caused the nightborne’s ears to loft in their curiosity as the two resumed their pace to find her workshop.

Dimly lit overall, but illuminated well in the workspaces, ten pandaren busied themselves with assigned tasks. 

Cutting and rendering the plants, measuring them, brewing and cooking them down into a variety of methods one could consume, either by their whole element or in more distilled properties, and packaging.

“You’re neglecting your front to become a drug lord,” he mused.

Yong-lan’s eye went half-lidded as a smug grin crept across his face. “You mentioned my upbringing, Lord Vol. We farmed, yes, but we made medicine. This tradition continues... There are three other workshops like this one, tucked away from prying eyes or nagging jurisdictions.”

“Where are the others?” he asked.

“Stranglethorn Vale hosts our exotics, tobacco and purple lotus, other things... The other is in Feralas.”

“Quite a lot of ground to cover,” he started, “for securities and the like.”

“I have my connections. I also have my investors, of course, but there is always room for growth.”

“As long as your investors are native-born,” he remarked coldly as he watched the apothecaries quietly work. “I’ve heard stories of the great Racist Yong-lan and hid ill regard for foreigners, to whom you owe every sorrow and bounty in your life these days.”

His claw tightened about the grip of his fan as he fluttered it by his jawline.

“With which there is no equivalence, Lord Vol,” he remarked lowly. “One yet far outweighs the other, and the other lends no relief to the former, in my defense.”

“The bottom line is that I gave you an obscene amount of money and not only was the investment completely lost, somehow, into something, you can’t even give me a product I’ve been buying consistently for years now?”

“There was a lapse for a little over half of a decade, Lord Vol,” he said, his tone rising with the Master’s.

“And I call bullshit.”

The firm hostility of his words made the quiet room go silent. Yong-lan froze, then snapped a glare at his workers as he pointed his fan toward the door.

“Out,” he barked.

They stared. 

“Out, all of you!” he boomed in the imperial tongue.

Volseth stood with that empty expression as the apothecaries funneled by him, each one muttering an apology and hurriedly bumping into him to make way. Even the doorman left.

Yong-lan’s single eye burned in its socket as he threw his fan aside, hitched his sash again and slammed his hands onto his hips as if he was about to beat the elf with a slipper.

“Who the fuck do you think you are, barging into my den and making demands, eh?” he howled. “You bought product for a few years, sure. Then you up and vanished? Now you’re back, ‘oooh Yong-lan, where’s my money? Where’s my medicine?’”

“Tch,” he scoffed. “Fuck you, that’s where.”

“Fat bitch,” he hissed back in Pandaren and stalked toward him, finger raised to point bitterly, “I was set to give you the city-”

He flapped his arms out to either side. “Who fucking wants Suramar? A city full of fucking drunks? Please, you people think you’re the center of the god-damned world and barely half of you are sober enough to-”

“THERE!” he roared. “THERE IT IS, RACIST YONG-LAN! ADMIT IT!”

“What-”

“ADMIT IT!” he howled again as he closed in, finger jabbing into Yong-lan’s chest.

He stamped his foot into the floor and screamed, arms shooting down on either side of him as he doubled over. The roar went so far as to make the glass rattle on the tables.

The two paused and stared at one another, chests heaving in all the yelling and furor.

“We went too far,” the pandaren said quietly after a moment of silence. “We need to stop.”

Volseth drew a slow breath and nodded.

They both felt it. 

The echo of the breath, stirring in the deep places. The threat was gone, but the stain lingered all the same, and in a place such as this, the stain slithered and writhed in the subconscious beneath an icy surface of narcotic indifference.

“I want satisfaction,” he said calmly as the two cast their eyes toward the corners of the cavern workspace, watching for manifestations. 

“I want our plan to move, I want the line of madak I helped you formulate, and I want momentum on my investment, Yong-lan. You’re a reasonable man, you know that’s a lot of gold to waste.”

“I didn’t waste it,” he told him in a measured tone. “My efforts to spread beyond a den and into this are the fruit of your gold.”

“Then I want my claim to it,” he started. “Fifty percent from the gross, not before your overhead, until I’m paid back, and twenty percent after that.”

“That’s outrageous,” he answered calmly as he backpedaled toward Volseth.

The lanterns in the workshop dimmed. What color there was started to fade, and soon their very breaths twisted out to shroud their words in fog as if winter settled into the cave.

“You could have just given me my Astral Lotus.”

Yong-lan shot a glance over to him and sighed.

“Forty percent,” he murmured, “before overhead. This costs money to maintain, let alone grow.”

“Thirty-five before,” he told him. “Rights to the Isles, my medicine and the twenty percent thereafter.”

He bristled and spat a glare. “Rights to the- are you fucking serious right now?”

As anger swelled at the fringe of his incredulous pang, the growing gloom responded in kind. The air went frigid, the stones began to whisper. He saw what he was doing, and the only way to stop it was to remain absolutely...

Completely...

Calm.

“You’re screwing me over,” Yong-lan said placidly.

“I’m only returning the favor,” he responded in kind as a shadow writhed from one dark corner of the cave to another.

“I need to evacuate my den,” he told him next.

“You need to restore a harmonious state, otherwise the fear will just add to this.”

“I know that,” he bit quickly. “This is Sha, it’s our thing. Not yours. We- I know how it works.”

“You’re a poppy farmer turned drug peddler,” he shot back as the two made way for the door, stepping one foot behind the other with eyes fixated on the room.

“...You’re a proud man and you’ve got a shrewd mind for business in the moment,” he told him. “But this deal of ours is too complicated to simply agree to.”

“Nice try,” Volseth grunted. “Send for your notary.”

“Not even a little game of jihui, Lord Vol?” he asked with a smirk.

“I hate jihui,” he answered.

“You refuse a peacemaker’s game but prefer to play with fire in caves.”

“I like immediate results.”

“And where is that tempered, ten-thousand year wisdom I hear so much of, from the elves?”

“Context is everything,” he told the Master. “In this instance, ten thousand years teaches you that you either get results when you press for them, or go from a different angle until you do. Delays and that sad illusion of patience are all just wasted time.”

The two left the cavern and eased the door shut behind them. At its edges, the wood groaned and split, fading as an unnatural gray rot slowly twisted around the barrier and stopped.

All ten apothecaries, the doorman, several bouncers and the attendant all huddled in the parlor. Many of the patrons, even, were upright and worried.

A paunchy, middle-aged fellow, one of the physics, quietly paced up to Volseth and offered a small, lacquered wooden box with a bow of his head.

Astraves took it and rolled the latch aside. The aroma struck him immediately as he looked upon the madak, already pinched and parceled into tidy pills ready for the pipe.

“You did the work,” he remarked with a bow of his head.

The apothecary bowed his head lower. “Yes. The tobacco and the lotus, all milled to a fine dust and blended evenly with the paste, and portioned to your taste.”

Volseth looked to Yong-lan and raised a brow. “He gets a promotion, as well.”

“But of course, Lord Vol,” he responded with a strained smile.

Volseth pocketed the box and surveyed the parlor for a time. As he turned to leave, he paused and looked over his shoulder at his host for a moment.

“Please consider our deal,” he told the vast fellow, “you know how hot it can get in these mountain passes, and we’re right in the midst of summer.”

“But of course, Lord Vol,” he echoed again, his smile fading with any of the forced warmth in his expression.

With that, he took his leave.

Yong-lan was poised to make bank, if these ventures took flight. Now a third of his bank would go to Astraves, and then a fifth.

And if he didn’t, it would all be ash.

They would all be ash.

--- -  -   -      -

In Jihui, the ideal outcome is a balanced stalemate. 

Force matches force, and both sides leave the battle. One can even concede to a superior play, or acknowledge a numeric upper hand, without the compromise of honor.

Or one can take the came to an extreme that is deigned both heavy-handed, barbaric and simply rude.

One can obliterate their opponent from the board completely.

There again, in the maneuvers of honor, one has a decision; If offered the honorable path, and one’s honor is intact, taking this presented route sustains the standing of both parties in the end.

But if the offer is given, and not taken, then it is a slander. A dishonor. Backhanding the game board from the table in a fit, in lieu of accepting defeat and the chance to concede on the high ground.

The move was made. He could capitulate, do his business, and make the necessary amends and move forward, all with Volseth’s custom...

Or he would be removed from this and every game.

A third option prevailed however, as jihui is as much an impulsive game as it is thoughtful. And though it was a gamble, the inkling of chance lingered at his horizon as a beacon of hope, worth the risk under threat of life given this game’s extremes.

The pieces roll like dice, and he contemplated as much as he sat with every frayed, fried nerve upon his loft again to go through his books and count the coins. Time and again, his eye wandered to one stray piece that he plucked up and tumbled between his claws in absent consideration.

Yong-lan’s attendant padded up quietly to refill the Master’s tea.

He watched his worker with idle boredom, then regarded the piece again.

He couldn’t help but notice it was the fireship, able to destroy anything on the board, but ruinous to itself in the process.

“Jian,” he started, not daring to look at his girl, “send for my notary, and transcribe a letter to Lord Vol for me. I will dictate it later.”

Jian, the attendant, stood and bowed at the waist. “I will prepare the ink and seals. Is there anything else, Master Hua-Kai?”

“An audience with Kamu-Ha. Send for him,” he ordered with a calm sternness.

“Tell no one.”

[astraves]

Fresh as Your Wound

Bleed on a bench among bright lights and warm colors.

The heart, ran through the hook of a crescent moon, beats deafening still.

The body slumped is draped sweetly in season’s blooms in offering to gods of sun and summer, pose poetic, nigh-ebon flesh framed in a writhing dark that only grants embellishment to dread gloom and bright gloam alike.

You won’t die. 

But you did this to yourself.

Devils sit beside you, crushing the signs of an apparition between needle fangs and lashing tongues. First the food, then the paper, fresh as they’ve gone. Fresh as...

The larger takes the wine and guzzles it, the smaller eats the cork.

Together they grind the glass and bleed from their mouths to send it down to sustain their wretched engines, burning hot like the weeping hearts of all those stars above.

They unveiled as you spoke to your fleeting ghost, haunted in turn by hers. And you sat so, and spoke so. Comfortably, easily, openly.

To an equal, in all the ways equivalence matters. True to self.

You’ve probably been replaced and forgotten ten times over.

You left, after all, and it’s been five long, long years.

Bodies never had to match, you realized. Eyes filled with wonder, and she made you feel like God, and you aspired to live that feeling.

Even then, you could always be real around this one, and she ate you up.

She’s where you got the idea for your house, after all.

You still remember the way to flick your tongue and make her leg twitch.

Maybe she recalls the tricks she did with her own?

You did this to yourself.

Consigned yourself to nightmares to banish hers. Sharp teeth that graze and tug, s m o o t h p a s s e s o v e r t h e l o n g - s t a n d i n g a c h e s a n d f i n a l l y s o m e t h i n g s h e s a y s s h e c o u l d s i n k h e r m o l a r s i n t o

“अमेध्य!”

The imps, eating the broken wine bottle and supping at the drops and tiny pools of wine still resting in the curved shards paused with a start and looked up, wide-eyed and fearful.

That was bad -

Eat, one said. He did say eat.

- And he never told us when to stop, no.

Volseth’s eyes narrowed to white slivers against the gloom beneath his brow and the lowering night in Silvermoon. At his bellowed curse, one of the city guards stopped in her route and gave the man a worried, sidelong glance.

He ignored the guard and looked between his feasting demons, hands raised in frustration. 

“Why in hell did you let me do that!?”

“...do wot?” Zaraat asked.

“Was we ta stop ya?” the other Zaraat asked as glass crunched at its back teeth.

The guard came up then, polite and professional, leaning on her twinblade like a quarterstaff with her shield lowered. “Sir?”

Astraves sighed and ran a hand down his face, fingers threading into his beard as he looked to the stars overhead for guidance, grace, or a timely end.

“I gave something away,” he mused quietly.

Magic enveloped the flagstones around his feet at first, quickly spreading into a grim rune of dancing conflicts - arcane and shadow, fel and fire, hues scintillating in all of their confused winds.

“Are you looking to report a theft-”

She grimaced and clenched her eyes as the power about the ground engulfed him in a flash. He was gone. All that remained were the imps, leering up at her as they fetched stray bits of glass from the ground.

“Gotsta keeps it clean,” the smaller hummed.

“Tidy tidy for the mastuuuuuuuuuuh,” the taller sang back. The guard took a step back from the imps and raised her shield as they began to eat the shards and stare at her. Their fangs weren’t meant for the work, and their mouths pulled wide and bled black into the road, their fel ichor sizzling and discorporating as soon as it met the earth. “By the Sun,” she started, and as soon as she raised her blade, one imp did a backflip and vanished, joined by the other.

This wasn’t about the madak he parted with.

Something with that potency was about all that could patch the gaping hole torn open between his ribs.

[astraves]

Session in Ink - Means

A week and some days, Ouvedhe said.

Let yourself rest for a week and some days, and we’ll come back to this.

A week and some days have passed, and here I sit again, this time with fewer guards, though I’m sure there’s a brigade waiting for me down in his lobby.

Salivating.

The Duskwatch, and really the whole of the Sanctum of Order, took quite a hit after the revolution. They were, after all, the bulk of the force opposing us. And it was their job - and your job, after ten thousand years or so, becomes the purpose of your life.

Why you draw breath. Why you bother to eat.

Why you fuck to keep the line going.

Order was their make, their bread and wine. I, the Trespasser, the transgressor of that social contract and order, and any other of us that defied them in that time, went against every fiber of their psychology and being in doing so.

I can only imagine the extents they’d go to, in an effort to redeem their House.

I’m sitting in it now, part and parcel to its redemption.

And the irony isn’t lost on me, rubbing shoulders with cops.

I’d rather be with a gorgeous woman, summoning demons. Beating them into submission, and eating dinner under the stars afterward, with the old Ouroboros as our mutual dessert before we get to any impassioned conversations our hips need to have.

And if you don’t know what the ouroboros is, in terms of coital maneuvers, I pity you.

And if I realize how far I’ve fallen in my solitude to bother sitting and ruminating on these things, I’ll only disappoint myself further. A man well into ten thousand years can still succumb to his needs. Even his wants.

You are trying desperately not to fall. You really don’t want to explain mistresses to your son, or beneficial friendships; doxies, sugar babies, kept women...

Nonetheless, Ouvedhe begins the first cut with a razor-honed scalpel.

You killed to avenge your father. Your family and people. You remember days when Kalimdor was free and lives flourished, and the brunt of that theft was in his suicide. The final weight of it that broke you.

Yes.

If it can be so easily summarized.

How did you execute your desires, Volseth?

That’s a story.

My first killing was a noblewoman in a belfry, a daughter of others. She was Duskwatch vicariously; pertaining to the administration of keeping order, never dirtying her hands herself.

Getting close to her wasn’t difficult. We had already been, and she was... Suitress Number Three, as I recall. We had dinners, and nights together. Fleeting moments of holding hands and carousing.

Lips to earlobes. Nothing more.

Before us nobles get to the tedium of sex, which is solely for procreation unless it is the most amoral, deviant fucking thing you can think of, there’s a lot of idle teasing and flirtation.

But Ydraele Veurronte was pretty. And she was cruel beyond reason.

To her workers, to others... If you weren’t a rung on her ladder, if you weren’t a goal to achieve before climbing ever higher, you were flesh to her. Disposable, nameless and fit to exploit and demean.

The reality of our situation had long-since set in. This was the world, this was life. Death and everything, contained here beneath our comfortable veil forever more.

And by the time this night was upon us, it had been five decades since my father’s death. I had already been running wine under their noses with Roseaux, Herand and Tomille. For the record, I didn’t name my accomplices. Ouvedhe can do his own damned work, and I’m not a rat.

I was already spending my money, and then our money, on as much distracting philanthropy as possible. Deronthel hated it. Asurei romanticized it. The people loved getting aid on two fronts from the same source.

To me, it was one facilitating the other. Admittedly I loved helping them, though.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Ydraele was due to accept her position formally, however. She had invited me to the grounds of her estate one night so that she could formally accept a position over the balcony in front of me.

I didn’t want to, but I was only going to get out of the situation if I complied.

As I went to enter the belfry however, I saw one of her laborers tending to the roses ringing the tower, making choice cuts with a large hand scythe. 

I could tell the woman was exhausted, and that she’d been beaten, in her task of refreshing all the bouquets in the estate. Bruises about her face, a black eye... Even her hands were worn raw from where the thorns had torn her.

Gloves weren’t provided. I can hear Ydraele tell her people to not touch the thorns and to stop being idiots. And I can hear this because she had actually said it in the past, uncaring that I was there to hear it.

I asked her name. Lyvaene, she said.

I knelt beside Lyvaene and offered my flask, and asked if I could borrow her tool for a moment. She gulped down the arcwine and acquiesced, thinking it a kinder sort of demand from a superior.

She wouldn’t make eye contact with me, but her smile was genuine.

Her sickle was laden with her own dried blood about the grip. The blade, leysteel, was still fiendishly sharp.

That’s when the idea came to me, to cull Suramar’s roses. To make my bouquet.

Stalking up the stairs, I kept it low and hidden. To no surprise, Ydraele waited for me, her hands on the rail, her face cocked out to the artificial twilight of the veil as she surveyed her gardens. She caught me out of the corner of her eye and grinned.

In profile, I realized I hated her face. Impish and porcine, childlike.

She flicked her likeness away and beckoned me over, her neck craning just so. A request for breath. Lips. A graze of teeth. Ever the diligent man, I walked up behind her.

She didn’t realize the edge of the blade wasn’t my fingernail easing a stray hair or two away. She even yelped and giggled when I pulled her hair for leverage.

The rest was a blur. My heart raced.

I pulled the blade from her collarbone back, kicked her forward, and held on as I bore my weight into her spine. When the sickle hit bone, I stopped and wrenched back as if I’d ripped the cork from a bottle of champagne. Her body’s response made the metaphor complete.

In my life, I had never heard such sounds as I heard growling and wheezing from her opened throat. Every hole was bared before me beneath the river pouring out of the stump and every quivering muscle read itself aloud like a live review of an anatomy chart.

It was the longest five minutes of my life, subduing that evil wretch and ensuring she was well and truly dead. I had damned-near decapitated her with a gardening tool, and it felt right.

Poetic, and moreso just.

And I realized then that there was now a corpse and a belfry absolutely painted in blood, and my own state was just as colorful in wrestling her head over to touch her spine.

Lyvaene heard it all and came running up. She saw me standing there, silent, with the hand scythe dripping from her Ladyship’s scarlet insides as the woman writhed about in a pool of it below me, still holding on and clawing uselessly at the floorboards.

I remember telling the gardener that this wasn’t over. That I wasn’t done, and that Ydraele wasn’t the worst of them.

She asked if I was going to kill her - and I stowed the blade inside of my coat, then raised my hands. Whether this was my first body or the last tonight, I’d have done what I meant to do.

It only continued out of dissatisfaction. 

There were thousands of other Lyvaenes throughout Suramar. There were hundreds of other Ydraeles.

One or five hundred, it wasn’t enough.

She lead me down through the belfry, to a manhole that lead into the Arcway just outside. I told her about our wine-runners, and that we always needed good people.

This was, of course, said with a warm corpse in my arms.

Her agreement was rushed. I told her who to find, how and where, and made off into the depths.

The Arcway wasn’t safe. We had heard stories, of course, about the things lurking within it. I remember in my youth that the Moon Guard would actually go through a rite of passage to navigate the place for weeks on end.

I remember wanting to be one, even.

I suppose this was as good a time as any for me to have proven myself, and I made my rounds briskly. I didn’t know how appetizing I was, but I know that a dead body made for an easy meal.

An hour after I started, I was actually calling for them to come take her. I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want some noisome children or down-and-outs chancing across her bloated corpse and bringing word of it to the surface.

I’m not sure how my solution came to me, really. There was an alcove with a flue that I found. I had to stuff her limbs over one another to fold her into it, but eventually she fit.

It looked like a fireplace almost, and so her dead, lifeless stare watched me as I made her into kindling by arcane fire. At this point, I reasoned, anything can come skulking out and take her.

I wouldn’t fight it.

Left to my own devices, I waited until the bones crumbled softly in their cremation. That’s when I noticed the soot caked up above her ashes.

It reminded me of making lampblack ink. Scour the roof of a lantern, crush the remnant to a fine power and mix it with water, and now your pens can happily drink.

It was a godsend in the field, when we could still leave and get lost in the forests.

Nobody would know. And this wasn’t sufficient enough to simply erase the woman - no, there had to be some memory. A crypt to bury her wickedness in, so that anyone visiting in the future would know.

They’d know the sort of people that flourished in Suramar, once. They’d know what sins they committed, and the names of those they wronged.

It was justice for those who suffered under them. It’s too easy for the upper echelons to duck their heads and wash their hands when we simply say “those corrupt nobles.”

No, this had to be a call-out. Names were going to be named. Shame would be catalogued like a biography tonight, I told myself.

Some poor nightfallen had chanced along and watched me carve the soot from the flue with the hand scythe. He didn’t say a word at first, and politely kept his distance before approaching.

And I remember he asked in the most... Embarrassed, fearful way if I had any wine, or a mana crystal. And that his bones hurt, and he wouldn’t bother me, and that he was sorry for the interruption.

He said he hadn’t seen anything, when I asked. Only that I was scraping something from the wall.

And so I asked, that if he sees me in the Arcway again, no matter what I’m doing, if he’d keep quiet about it. And that if he kept quiet about it, I’d give him what he needed, a cask at a time, for him and the others.

This part wasn’t philanthropic, I confess.

He nodded eagerly as I gave him my flask and took my soot before leaving for the surface half a mile down the street.

And the rest?

The rest... I made her remnants into ink and filled a book that I’d made myself. I spared no expense in them - the finest tooled leather, the purest silver. Cabochons with flawless clarity and color, and vellum with perfect texture and tooth to hold her color.

Each of my books was, and is, a mausoleum. 

A work of art. 

I savored the hunt, the screams, the fight and the blood and gore up to my fucking elbows and the bite of that blade through their flesh because they deserved every last second, and that was when the real work began.

You memorialized their evil.

I memorialized their fall, and I hold them to account. 

If I had any glory or stake in their deeds, I wouldn’t have killed them. But the world forgets their horror. Suramar does, at least, and all-too-readily.

If anything, I regarded my books as gifts to the people. And if you’ve ever read any of them, you’d know that the tone I take it far from any apologist’s in terms of how I present my grotesques.

And a gift to the people should be embellished and beautiful, because what we give to our people, we give to our society. What we give to society, we give unto provenance and posterity alike for the whole of our civlization.

My books are memorials dedicated to anguish, and every stroke of my pen was put down in the names of those who suffered and lost the most.

So it began to play into this delusion of vigilantism you enkindled throughout the period of your murders.

The difference between delusion and affecting actual results is just that. Unless avenging your flesh and blood was simply a momentary psychotic episode from a delusional killer, for all that man did to her.

Which, again, I’ve been thanked for by my very inquisitor.

This... All of these were my means. I carried on for six centuries, and five hundred bodies. By hollow seductions and empty friendships, or stalking them in the dark the way a nightsaber goes to cull sickly deer.

I cut the crown from the stem, and made my colors from the flower before putting them to paper, so readers could know that the monster was well and truly dead by the time they hit the back cover. 

Five hundred of this city’s powerful, influential and demented sociopaths, men and women all collected and arranged in my books. 

My bouquet and love letter to Suramar.

And I do love you, darling. 

                  Still, and always will, 

       Heartless bitch that you can be.

   Please take mine instead, 

           With the flourish of my pen.

 No city or people can compare.

[astraves]

Sessions in Ink - Motive

“Why did you start killing?”

Ouvedhe’s question lingered in my mind, for how point-blank and unceremonious it was. Maybe this will surmise our conversation more readily.

It’s odd that he mentioned Ravalta’s demise.

Just like I did to the magister, the old man put his palm to my chest and blew a hole through it with such an alacrity that the meat and blood were still sizzling in a quivering gap from one side of my ribcage through the other.

Sanathas didn’t look down at what I did to him, though. He was well aware.

I, on the other hand, am supposed to stare into my wound and recite my observations of twitching, half-cauterized viscera to the Director here before I slump over onto the deck.

No different than a lover looking to pry into my life and peel back thousands of years worth of layers to know the real me. 

That obfuscation goes for both parties though; after a certain amount of time, the memories become just as inaccessible and dormant in their specificity to my vantage as well.

You only know that something is. You easily forget how it came to be, after a century or more. Likely a defense mechanism of the mind. 

That’s what I try to explain to people with shorter lifespans.

I, and likely several others, remember that it happened, and we remember that it is. Very rarely do we recall how, and why, and what the weather was, and where we were, all except for the most profound events.

You can only imagine how jarring it is when something that reaches “is” status suddenly changes. It’s like a background din swelling to a symphonic focus all over again.

The mind can only handle so much time, and so over the course of so many decades folding into each other, we remember isolated instances. Destinations. The voyage between each moment through those years is... Null and insufficient.

I have so many pinpoints across the nocturnal tapestry of my father’s life in mine, though. A night sky of love and pride, honor. I don’t feel honor, not anymore.

I felt it with him, though. Every day.

Every day.

Salevor Havadiel Astraves-d’Astravar inspired my every waking moment, when I was a boy. 

And, yes, we are cousin-kindred to the harborfolk. My grandfather was insistent on taking our familial branch in a new direction, a momentum my father maintained and politically could only be realized through my siblings and I.

It’s complicated. You’d be bored if I tried to explain. 

Aunt Aurore and young Ailen are doing well enough, though.

But, it was rare to have a time that he wasn’t trying to teach me something; about magic, about artifice - the intricate arcane circuitries both tangible and ephemeral that surrounded us, and about life.

What it is to be a father, to have a family. How to deal with and get along with people. How to bring them together. Because that’s why we were in Suramar, he’d tell me.

We were brought together to defend our home and keep our people.

And that was never lost on me, no matter how hard I’ve tried to distance myself from Suramar and the elves living in it, as odd as that sounds now.

And this isn’t to say I didn’t love my mother, or value her, or learn from her. No, her presence was, and is, just as vital.

She did, after all, teach me how to navigate women, money, weapons...

My God, she could kill a hundred sentinels in full-kit, in her prime. I saw her fight five at once, one night, just sparring. Testing the veterans...

I bet she could still cut someone to ribbons today, feeble as she seems.

               Our Holy Mother of the Mourning Razor

My father though, was the mind and will. The heart of our family, and she was his. I learned love from the way he spoke to my mother, the way he treated her and how they worked so perfectly together.

That’s a cruel standard to hold myself to, but I can’t avoid it.

I decide that I’m not good enough to hold myself to that and leave. Fucking up and failing dismally. And I don’t expect the other to understand.

I just expect her to be better off in my absence...

                                                   Focus, please.

Yes... He was everything to me, all that I wanted to be, even if I was a horrible student at times, and more prone to take in the world around us than to recuse myself of it in towers.

The irony of which, is, absolutely delicious, but go on.

When Suramar took to its isolation, demonfire raged in the streets from the war. The world shook as the Sundering swallowed everything around us in this... Wall of crashing blue. In the moment, you could gaze skyward and see the flight of demons.

Then the silhouettes of whales and whorls of kelp and strange beasts thrown shocked and oblivious with the force, in the water.

We were all in the streets fighting when the tide came.

                  THE Tide.

             The mother of all ocean views.

After that, we were lost to the years. Then the decades, and centuries. Millennia followed, and in all of it was this urgency my father had to keep people sane and level. To maintain a peace.

In doing that, our family and the ones closest to us were able to uphold their order and hand in the overall social contract. Supplies ran out, though.

Food, most prominently. As any good host, though, wine was shared.

It wasn't until the century or so before his death that I truly saw the burden that Suramar's circumstances took on him. The erosion.

Fear, growing panic. In-fighting and backstabbing. Politics, power plays and all of it... There was no world at large to blunt our culture against itself.

No overarching threat or hope of growth for him to stand against or overcome.

There was wine, and statutory exploitation. Death and isolation. And so much...

Fear. 

So much blood, hiding beneath the masks and colors.

He lost his hope, over the thousands of years that followed that day.

We lost our light with it.

I continued to study under his wing, knowing full well he was grooming me to take his place eventually. It was a matter of course - father to son, master to apprentice. What I know now, I gleaned as his understudy, and once it was seen fit for me to continue on, I made my tours of Suramar’s remaining academies before returning to his side. It would’ve taken longer, perhaps, but most had been subsumed beneath the waves and destroyed.

In my time away, he tried to bring himself around. Asurei’s writing amused him, and he encouraged the historical aspects of it. Deronthel was every bit our mother’s son. I had gone off to learn, he had gone to the Sanctum of Order, to find rank among the First Blade’s armed forces.

Largely, however, my father focused on his days with my mother. Without me there, and with my siblings disinterested, he began to share his work with her in earnest, and before long she was working beside him. I’d come home to see the two fabricating the networks of arcane channels within sentinel golems. Resolving the layouts and connections of roads and street lights, signage and all else.

So much that I’d gotten used to it. The comfort of them, as if they’d retired from the world. My father had become prone to brooding, though, more and more. His moods were stormy.

Abject rancor would be unleashed in his study. His attempts at connection were backfiring. People were becoming more insular, more... combative and controlling. 

More ready to make lines between the haves and the have-nots, nobility and those in the city that labored beneath them, and the stratifications of orders.

We all knew it was consuming him. Stifling his work, increasingly, and not simply in a matter of days, but... Again. Decades. Centuries, all compounding on one another.

There was no crescendo or final moment. What had become worse had become standard. On a chance dusk, as any other, I had returned to the estate to check in on our parents.

My mother sent me for him. She, herself, had become mournful in his wake.

He never raised a hand to her, or directed his rages at us. It was him and his study, dragging and heaving the Beast that Suramar had become in his endless struggle to subdue it, reckon or reason with it. Anything.

I opened the door and found him, that day. Six hundred and seven years ago.

He sat in his chair, at his desk. There were letters on it, never folded or sealed.

My father had taken a letter opener to his own throat, across the collarbone to stifle his own voice. Intent to suffer in silence, I approached and found the light snuffed from his eyes. Faded and glossed, his blood cold and clotted across the woodwork and his own hands.

And yet he sat, palms on the armrests, head hanging as though he’d fallen asleep.

Don’t tell them how you screamed.

But his eyes knew. They stared out at the letters.

Don’t tell them how you ran to his side and wept. Sobbed. Wracking, snot running, praying to an uncaring god and begging that he didn’t do this.

Rejections. Warnings. Threats. Dismissals of good intentions, political back-biting and underhanded deals.

Don’t tell them how you wailed and made his rage your own. 

How the only satisfaction you could find was grinding your knuckles to bloody pulp, blow after blow. How you broke shelves and glass and all else with your own fists.

Among them, he left letters for all four of us, each stained in the color of his wound. He didn’t mean it.

This wasn’t him, and this wasn’t for us.

Don’t tell them how you cradled your father’s corpse against your chest.

How they had to pry you away.

How you were covered in his cold blood, and how the scent still lingers in your lungs.

That was my breaking point. The city killed my father, poisoning him over the centuries, a slow and steady rot that anchored into his soul and began to eat him. 

As they took his body from us, my logic, the... motive, you’re looking for in all of this was simple enough at the time.

I would find a way to kill the city back.

[astraves]

Sessions in Ink

“This is an element of your utilization, Lord Astraves. You understand.”

Director Ouvedhe’s words weren’t any comfort. 

For what furniture there was within the vaulted labyrinth of an office, the arrangement of end tables and a single divan with a low-sunken armchair across from it proved little comfort.

The older elf was flanked on either side by solidly built men, both Duskwatch Sentinels, serving in a sort of interdepartmental overlap to provide security for the evening. Armored in their maroon silks and silver filigrees, shimmering midnight cabochons and sorcerous displays of whirling branches and feathers, their only armaments were scepters honed from hilts and floating plates endowed to manifest arcana into a problematic mass.

Compliance isn’t like you. It was a silent brow-beating.

But, message received.

Volseth returned to Suramar to deliver a field-report in person, his arms and armor bloodied and singed. The man’s body ached as he lowered himself to sit on the edge of the divan, and Ouvedhe mirrored his motion in settling into the chair across from him. The guards took a few coordinated steps back and watched, exchanging glances as Astraves’s body wilted with a sigh.

Tired eyes and dry, cracked lips betrayed the arcanist’s will to rest, but the Director assured them both that there was a prevailing danger in these audiences.

“Do they have to be here?” he asked with a low, trilling croak.

Ouvedhe was silent as he reached for a tablet and stylus. The writing surface was as substantial as the glowing holograms on the sentinels’ armor, framed in leysteel. As he touched the stylus to the shining, translucent panel, letters inscribed as if penned in light in lieu of ink as he wrote.

“If you can assure me that you won’t snap at my questions and turn me into one of your books, Lord Astraves,” he mused in a calm, flat tone. “I am old, after all, and feeble. Tired and wanting for physical fellows to strong-arm and beat anyone looking to end what’s left of my life.”

Volseth lofted his brows at the forthright confession. He shifted his weight and pitched forward slightly on the divan, shoulders rolling as he worked the aches more through his body than out of it.

“I have no intention of killing you,” he said tiredly.

“Good,” Ouvedhe replied.

With a glance between the guards, he simply nodded, and the two began pacing away from the Director and his subordinate. Astraves watched them go from beneath the shadow of his brow in a shunning glower that eased once they stepped onto the teleportation beacon.

The arcanist braced his weight onto his palms and eased himself further back onto the divan, rasping. “Ask your questions.”

Ouvedhe nodded once.

“We’re going to go back,” he started. “Beginning with more recent events, and then further... Just as before, what I ask will be uncomfortable. When you can no longer tolerate my inquiry, we’ll finish this session.”

Volseth nodded. He reached up to run a finger across his lip, tasting blood at the tip of his tongue. “You know everything and I’ve still my freedom. I have no reason to lie, if that’s any comfort.”

“It is,” Ouvedhe said matter-of-factly with a faint smile. “With that understanding between us... Sanathas Ravalta.”

High Magister Sanathas Ravalta.

Once an accomplished man of his office in Quel’Thalas, he was among the first Blood Magi. Hideously powerful, but not for his magic.

“His was a poor situation turned worse, what of him?” Volseth asked.

The man who’s ribcage you blew a hole through.

                       So much for power, hm?

“From the records we have of his case, he was delivered to our custody - I believe we had you on loan from the Ministry of the Interior, at the time, and the Thalassian parallels of our organizations needed information from him to seize a variety of... Assets and properties, yes?”

Volseth nodded and reaches up to brace his temple against his palm, fingers splaying into his long, sweat-clotted hair. “Yes. I was assigned to serve as an alienist.”

“Elaborate, please. For my sake,” Ouvedhe said.

Astraves remained silent. He shifted to rest his elbows against his thighs and steepled his hands in front of him.

“The mind...”

He shook his head. Ouvedhe leaned in and canted his head just so, brow raised inquisitively. “Go on, Volseth.”

“The mind is a chaotic tangle. Memories feed senses, senses feed memories. Stimuli and the like all twist and route together in this constant, self-referential web... I don’t know how the mind works, Ouvedhe, but I know how the mechanisms of our magic work to navigate it. To peel back the layers and find the truths in memories.”

“Truly? I thought you would’ve capitalized on that by now.”

“Maybe someday... it’s uncomfortable. I witness it, I relive it all. It isn’t magic I’m accustomed to, but for some reason I was entrusted to the task.”

“Perhaps the darkened element of the situation?” Ouvedhe mused aloud. “You are... admittedly a tragic study, Volseth Astraves, and a horrifying one.”

“So was he.”

“Hence our choice. What happened, in your experiences with him?”

Volseth sighed and looked up at the Director. His eyes were tired and drained, but the knowing in them uncomforted the elder.

“The magic compels the witness to both observe and experience the memory simultaneously. I’m able to maintain my separation, but the senses, the sights... It’s almost entirely from the person reliving the memory. Even their thoughts, if the connection is strong enough.”

“And so in the investigation, you became him, in tapping into those memories?”

“It was the only way I could pull the knowledge out of his thoughts as to motive, location and everything else... Once I had everything, I informed the Ministry, who informed their Thalassian counterparts... He was a rogue agent of theirs.”

“Power became him, and consumed him, if I recall,” Ouvedhe remarked.

“Yes,” Volseth answered, “and he allowed outside influences to direct him toward dark paths. He’d have been a powerful ally, but... His affairs and politics consumed him, and everyone around him, until all that remained of his dynasty was ash.”

“And soon, as I recall, all that remained of him became the same... Did he incite your urge, Volseth? To kill?”

Astraves mouthed a curse under his breath and wrung his hands together. He looked away with a sigh and ran his fingers back into his hair again, shaking his head.

“I wouldn’t call it an urge, Ouvedhe.”

The director silently made his notations and nodded. “He was one of your killings though... Did you make your opportunity to end his life, or was it... circumstantial?”

“Howso?”

“You were dispatched on the ferry with a contingent of guards, along with Ravalta, en route to Quel’Thalas. Only you came out of it, and the ship never left our harbor.”

“His restraints were too weak,” Volseth said quietly. “Ravalta broke free, and began incinerating our sentinels, blasting them apart. I was only able to ward myself with the haste he acted in, and...”

“And so you killed him.”

“After his long-winded, heartfelt confessional of regret,” Volseth started with a rising anger, “yes. More than he afforded the people on that boat.” 

“I would’ve taken the crescent blade to his throat and braced my foot against the back of his head. Made it slow, and agonizing. And that’s the least that fucking pig deserved for what he did to all of those people. Made sure he had time to really fucking think about his life choices up to that point-”

“Volseth,” Ouvedhe shot, his calmness becoming a stern, even address.

Astraves had a woven stance, without even realizing he was off the divan. His hand was clenched at his sides, fingernails biting into his palms with an accusing finger jabbed at the director.

“...I am not your enemy,” Ouvedhe began as he slowly rose from the chair. “Nor will I be. What you tell me is in utmost confidence. What I know is already known. But you must control this darkness, and it is deep. And it consumes you still.”

“Why doesn’t any of this shit bother other people, then?!” Volseth shouted with a slap at the air. 

“Why wasn’t Sanathas killed like the fucking animal he was the moment the opportunity presented itself?”

“Have a seat, Volseth. Please.”

The arcanist threw his hands up into the air in frustration, cloth and armor rattling as he flopped back against the divan.

“Answer my question. I can bide my time. I can hunt my mark, but I cannot in... any capacity stay my hand forever, Ouvedhe. I can’t. And you let these things, these... monsters in mortal flesh parade about, until it’s convenient. Until you’ve exhausted your use of them, and then they disappear. They vanish comfortably and leave agony in their wake. Families, friends...” The elder eased back into his chair and shot his cuffs before taking up the tablet again. Covering a backlog, he began to write fervently as he spoke. “I know. Justice isn’t just, Volseth-”

“No shit.”

“...It’s an imperfect system, and as tragic as it seems, we try to utilize as many assets as we can for better outcomes... Even these sessions, as you know.”

“What could you get from me?” he asked.

“Your... compulsion is unique, Volseth, but the mechanisms by which it manifests we’ve seen all to often. Even if you cite a perspective of vigilantism, it doesn’t change the fact that you... have killed, tremendously, and in ways that mirror the acts of less scrupulous individuals.”

“...She came back, you know. Geillais. Showing me the papers you sent her. Said ‘it was over’... She’s called me a monster before. Told me I’m no better than the people in those books now.”

“She also spent six centuries in your shadow, Volseth, and was unable to bring you to justice through a system she devoted her life to. And this is the only justice she’ll know of it. My case in point; though it’s unfair to her pursuit, perhaps, it isn’t about fairness in the end. It’s about stopping it.” “Stopping me.”

“You’ve stopped yourself by agreeing to these sessions and this service.”

Ouvedhe leaned forward. His expression was tired, but there was a sincerity in the old elf’s eyes as he lowered his head to meet Volseth’s gaze with his own.

“...I thanked you,” Ouvedhe started in a hush, “for what you did. For my benefit, and my family’s, in that work. I don’t glorify you, Astraves, but what you’ve done I don’t believe defines you completely. What you do now will, though.”

“Then what?”

“Grab your demons by their horns and look them in the eye,” the director told him in an earnest growl flaring toward the end of his words, almost talking through his teeth. 

“You’ll never be rid of the shadows that haunt you. But you can know them, and control them, and show us how to best those monsters who’ve given up on this struggle and let it consume them. That’s our best outcome, Volseth.”

The director leaned away and sighed, hands folded in his lap. He neglected the tablet and the stylus to simply speak. “Now that you’ve a child, it’s our only outcome.”

Volseth nodded slowly. His gaze drifted from the director to the floor and back as skepticism raced through his mind with a current strong enough to manifest on the surface.

“You play a good head-game, Ouvedhe,” he said as he crossed his arms.

“There’s nothing I’m playing at,” the elder stated. “You’re too valuable to... all of us, alive and free. I think you’ve earned as much, but... Five hundred books, Volseth.”

“Yes.”

“Five hundred lives. Five hundred bodies.”

“Less than one a year, for the time I did it.”

Ouvedhe wasn’t amused. His brow furrowed in thought as he looked dead into Volseth’s eyes.

“It begs to wonder how many didn’t find their way into a book. Surely not everyone that met your hand scythe was significant enough to cremate and entomb with your pen.”

The two men stared holes into one another across the space between them, barely more than arm’s length.

“You’re a killer catching killers, Volseth. You have been for some time - whether in your direct experience or in the reflection of what brought you to this, your work isn’t changing. How it’s done, however, is. Try to derive your satisfaction from that, and the knowledge that we will render judgment and justice in a way that satisfies society as a whole, not just ourselves.”

“You haven’t in the past.”

“That’s because this city was ruled by a disconnected tyrant,” Ouvedhe stated brusquely. “The regime under the First Arcanist is a polar opposite, and we are intent to do better.”

Ouvedhe’s conviction faded with his expression, wilting into a sort of sincere resignation as he looked at Volseth.

“All of us... need to do better.”

Six centuries of blood, of ink and running wine to the broken, the dissident and downtrodden.

Astraves clenched his jaw and stared at the elder, grimacing as the sentiment was pressed even further. He leaned forward and braced his elbows against his knees again as if to wall himself off.

                        All for him.

Ouvedhe’s bottom lip stirred into a line of unintelligible words, and he broke eye contact at last, half-shaking his head as he returned to flicking out his notes onto the tablet.

He wouldn’t want that in the end, though.

There were times for comeuppance, certainly, but that was never enough. He was always repairing things. Bonds, harrowed alliances and weary agreements... Mending and fusing the best in people as deftly as any work of artifice or sorcery.

It won’t close the slit he made in his own throat, or the day you found him at his desk.

                 No, but it would make you feel right.

It won’t fill his veins with blood again or wreathe his bones in living flesh.

                No, but you’d show them. The soul-cancer that killed him...

It won’t spare your mother another day in the mausoleum, weeping at his sarcophagus until she falls asleep against the relief of his silhouette.

“Ouvedhe,” Volseth started, “you’re right. We do. But not everyone knows where to start.” “Where would you suggest, then?” the director asked quietly as he finished his notations and sat his tablet aside once more.

But maybe something else could be more true to his memory than those thousands of nights of blood and terror.

                                                             LISTEN.

Astraves nodded. “In my case, and in... the basis of others, if I’m to be your guiding light in the dark, then you have to understand how it begins. Motive. The spark that sets it all alight.”

No, that path was a failure.

We need to begin again.

                                        For him.

“So,” he trailed off. “Let me tell you mine.”

Ouvedhe leaned forward and reached for his tablet once more.

[astraves]

Counsel

Volseth lost count of the times he woke from reliving his arrest.

His body jolts, and his eyes tear open beneath the pile of blankets and sheets he’s mounded atop himself, elsewise bare as birth. Even then, he feels his skin swimming in cold, his hair a great tangled gnarl like the covers atop him. Two slits of pale white, pinprick pupils darting from one corner of the library to the other. That’s all the man had to his demesne. No boudoir, and a far cry from any den of sexual intrigue. Two dressers, a chair, an armoire, and an oval bed, all of Suramar’s make. All of it rests atop a railed, circular loft eight feet from the floor beneath it, itself suspended by more bookshelves that make a tiny, round nook underneath.

The mattress cradles him and the piles of pillows and bedclothes he’s heaped onto it, sinking just so like a bowl toward the center. The only luxury to it all save for the fact that it’s all high thread-count silk are the colors. The wood on the head- and footboards is at even height, carved to look as though it scrolls around to the back. Nothing to secure a tie to. Nothing fun. Or, what used to be at least. The whole room from its floor to ceiling some stories up swims in teals, violets, dusky blues and silver. Now and again a dash of red or orange breaks the scheme, and with the man’s fondness for candlelight, illusory points of these elements dot the walls and spaces between shelves like stars in the dusk. He scowls and timidly rolls the covers back until his torso clears the air. Sitting in a hunch, he looks around to every darkened loft and corner and shakes his head. “Why is this coming back,” he asks himself quietly as his fingers thread into his hair and tousle it out. Astraves shakes his head. He looks over to the nightstand and reaches into it, fingers delving about into the contents. He finds a pipe near the length of his forearm and rests it in his lap, then a small, lacquered wooden box. The lustre of his markings and the glow in his fingertips fades with a long sigh, shimmering motes of arcana drifting up from his body and fading into the air like embers cast from a bonfire.

This is why you go to Pandaria. His darkened fingers fumble open a packet of embossed wax paper from the box, twist and pinch a little lump of dusky madak into the pipe itself and pack the lot of it away.

It’s not the food you’re hungry for.

Volseth cradles the silver-chased pipe in his palm. The other hand eases forward, fingers snapping to set it alight. Muscles tense and ribs swell as he takes the first draw, lingering in the plunge.

Purple Lotus and tobacco, opium and sweet spices. The dreams, every recollection and agony become ethereal as his body wilts and shoulders drag.

Candy dancing across your tongue and down between your ribs to give you that sweet, dreamless sleep at last.

They leave his mind for now, drifting like the poisoned air in his lungs in twisting ribbons of violet slithering from his nose and mouth to join the chorus of dim lights and fading night above him. He sets the pipe aside after the peace of its contents settle in. Untended, it dwindles to a silent state, leaving the arcanist to his thoughts.

Come dusk, he’s due for another meeting.

For now, the last wisp curls from his dead pipe. 

Volseth shuts his eyes, and for once in what feels like an eternity, nothing waits to greet him.

[astraves]

Restraint

People bicker about what to do with your body.

Not in ways to dispose of it, no.

A plot like that is too straightforward and concise for you.

How to use it, though? How to own it.

No silver linings. Just the drawing of lines into your flesh.

Exclusive rights. 

And they plot... 

...Oh, gods and hells they plot.

They plotted when they kissed you that night ten years ago,

Slammed your head into the stone,

Shod your wrists into those cuffs that carved you, 

Left your fingers mute,

Your mind dull.

They plotted when they marched you to the engine,

Thinking it poetry to use Her as your psychopomp,

Leading you to oblivion with a sway of hips you’d never forget.

Poisoning your ears with those plump plums of lips, you know,

The ones that would kiss you and twist into a grin,

With that little scar just off to the right.

Just next to that single beauty mark.

And they plotted against you,

When your friend saw you as prey,

And when you saw her, staring into the dark,

Into what you became,

Not knowing that beyond the edges of those shadows,

You both watched together as the world spun from you,

Knives in hand, hate burning in your hearts,

Your fire dead before it started,

And all the rage of it burning in your veins.

And they plotted more, when they sent Her,

That sweet peach of a thing,

With its rotted core,

And its howling devils,

And they plotted more, when they told you,

Peace is an illusion,

Your love is dead.

And they plot every time a woman touches you,

Puts her lips to your scars to soothe them,

Puts her lust to yours out of want,

And all you can feel is the metal and the stone,

Biting your wrists and skull apart,

And all you can hear is the betrayal,

When her breath heaves against your ear,

And all you can know is the slow rot,

The agony of Withering,

What will happen to you again, if you take the bait?

Take the bait.

You’ll wake up screaming.

You are broken.

Refuse one and we’ll send another.

Refuse another, and we’ll send back the one.

A third. A fourth.

However many it takes,

Authors, Librarians, 

To erode you,

Tourists into your magic,

To cut you apart.

Take the agony that stains every kiss.

Every embrace, every touch.

Old flames and new,

It’s not enough to want you dead.

They want you under glass.

Their glass.

Arms and legs and head and ribs,

Hacked, cracked, snapped and tied.

Shriveling and bled,

Dry in the sun.

Take the Plot.

[astraves]

“Squiddly-things”

Chance encounters leave the mind racing.

Burning.

Nerves fire from a million severed endings, cut bridges where separated throngs scream across the chasm at one another.

                  We’re alive!

Over here!

The mind translates its excitement to pain. There should be a bridge there, after all. Now there isn’t. Something is wrong. 

The body builds itself with blood, rushing out of the cut to clot and forming the lattice to become flesh and bone again. Teams of frenzied guards armed with hunger seize onto and devour anything, psychotic androphages frothing gore about their mouths as they howl triumphant into the gaping wounds of their foes, of which there are untold thousands.

Engineers and directors, morale officers and trundling observers all parse the course of flesh and vein inflamed along those marred, tattered edges to make sense of it all and get to work.

Collagen, stern and brittle in its striations, becomes the memorial shrine that covers the gap and recalls what used to be.

Those without purpose, those too traumatized to continue and those whose purpose has been exhausted in the chaos are all given a single command by the directors.

Without hesitation, they obey. 

Their bodies are vivisected and dispersed, reabsorbed to become the cobblestone below, the masonry in the walls, or to be compiled together again into new incarnations of the old.

Yet, the battle is not over. There are still untold thousands more.

Volseth stands in his laboratory. It’s three in the morning, and countless small works of artifice buzz and thrum with churning arcana flitting between themselves in complex relays all attuned to their precise signals.

Though the moons above stream through the domed, vaulted ceiling far overhead in pale blue and silver hues through passing, fluffly clouds, his eyes are obscured by a visor - one that doesn’t allow him to see the world before him, but instead the world below. His brows loft in surprise as he watches the events unfold in a small, precise cut on the back of his left hand. A sort of stylus held in the right carries paired apertures at the tip that act as his eyes into the world around them.

Toys from Aberrus. Stolen, retrofitted, reverse-engineered and all else to suit his designs. Artifice of another world almost, yet fabricated there just under their noses in the deep places of Azeroth.

All the works of a mind too brilliant, too horrified and driven to unleash the expressions of terror it knew upon those around it - for what else could the maker do but scream into those forgotten hollows below the earth with every begotten iteration?

His thumb eases back to roll across a knurled disc of a knob, granting precision and scale to his vision. Time and again, his observations dance between the components of his make and the rough folds and chasms that define the landscape of his own form. “Incredible,” he mutters.

Though obscured in part, his expression pulls no punches in wavering between fascination, disgust, and both in tandem. His thumb reels the wheel forward just slightly. Crags and furrows give way to a closer view. Closer.

Astraves scowls against the visor. The way it presses against his face makes his expression all the more severe for its binding.

Closer.

His lips part slowly, a sneer at first, fang bared and lip curled.

His thumb twitches just slightly on the dial.

“Merciful GOD IN- 

HELL- WHATTHESHITISTHAT?!”

He throws the stylus onto a desk nearby, a panicked, frantic groan escaping his lungs in all haste and terror as he wrenches the mask from his face and bolts. The clamor startles his familiar, the imp itself screaming as glass clatters and metal clangs.

Fuck. Volseth’s legs piston the man’s unbalanced body onward, staggering and sliding into stairways and rails. He bounds down, skipping steps and risking life itself with eyes flared in horror only the Old could inspire.

           Fuck.

Dutifully, the devil comes bounding after him, darting and scrabbling like a cat across the floors, sliding and slamming into adjacent walls as it struggles for traction.

My son.

                              MY SON.

“VALENTE!” he howls from the stairs as he darts into the front room, hands grasping desperately for the railing.

The boy looks up, his mop of unruly, black hair wobbling in the sudden bounce with terrified eyes as if he’d done something awful.

“An’da?” he murmurs warily.

The father slips and slides sidelong down the stairs, his robes catching and twisting under him. Clumsily, he bounds to his feet and slams shoulder-first into a bookshelf.

Gasping for air, Volseth holds out a hand like some psychic power can stop whatever madness unfolded. He plods forward, hip screaming in pain as his fingers curl to point at the child.

“BOY! Did you eat yet?!”

“...No?”

“Ohthankgod...” Volseth doubles over and plods his hands on his knees with a pained groan.

“What’s wrong?”

“Go wash your hands,” his father says in a winded rush to the floor.

“But they aren’t dirt-”

“Valente, just... Go wash your hands. Please. Do it for An’da, it’ll...”

He raises a hand and rolls his wrist in thought. He had no idea how to explain it to the boy.

“It’ll make me happy, if you do... Use the soap.”

Silently, the child stands and walks up to his father. His little chubby hand reaches out to gently pat the man on the back with a knowing nod.

“Don’t be sad, An’da. I’ll wash my hands.”

Volseth gives the boy a few pats back and nods. “Good man.”

“No you’re the man,” Valente tells him in sing-song as he toddles off to the kitchen basin. His father chuckles breathlessly and looks up, then around.

“Zaraat,” he calls. A cold command.

“Ye wot,” the imp chirps flatly. “We’ll die ‘fore water touches us.”

“Your filth... transcends anything soap could cleanse,” Astraves tells it. “We need to...” Volseth curses under his breath with a huff, finally bothering to straighten himself out with a grunt. “We need to get all the sweepers going.” “Why? Like... We will-... race them down the stairs-like an’ make 'em fight each other, yeah, but we’ll turn them all on. All at once, everywhere. As master calls.”

“This place is filthy,” the arcanist tells his familiar, hands on his hips like there’s work to be done. “Absolutely disgusting, crawling with... Things, I don’t even know what to call them.” Zaraat sits down on its back haunches. “We see where this’s goin’. What’dja see?” “Tiny... Things, squiggling... writhing parasites? Everywhere, on everything. On my... fffffucking skin, it’s disgusting-” The imp raises a claw and shakes its head. “They’s everywhere.” “What-” “By design, no less.”

“How is this by design?!” The imp draws a deep breath and sighs. It scrabbles up toward the stairway and slithers along a rail to roost at the crown of it, head tilted and eyes smoldering with a nonchalant expression. “Everythin’s made a little bits. Little bits react. Little bits make biggah bits. But those biggah bits is still made a little bits. Them little bits a life eat bits from the biggah bits an’ them biggah bits eat the little bits. Everythin’ wot exists is little bits.” Volseth stared wide-eyed at the thing. Slowly, his brow collapsed above his nosebridge in a furrow hearkening to a churning sea in its stormy depths. “What the fuck are you on about, creature.”

Zaraat hunches forward and smacks its palm with its knuckles. “Look. When we gets summoned, we start little bits first. Everythin’ is little bits, you an’ me an’ ya dead cat an’ yer mumsy-nan an’ yer boy? Little bits. We’s just gigantic-like, made a little bits. No’ body-limbs like armses an’ toes an’ shit but... Them little bits.” “...I should choke you.” “ ‘s true! Swear it so on our little black ‘eart,” it explained as it signed an X across its chest. “Yer little bits is made a little bits an’ those little bits is made a more little bits, an’ there’s things wot eat the little bits a little bits. Wot’s great’s echoed in wot’s small, an’ wot’s small is echoed in wot’s great!” The imp waggles both hands, fingers splayed in a show of spirit and whimsy. “Thought’cha was inta tha’ cosmic shit. Mackeycosms an’ macrogasms an’ all... Eekey-systems.” “We’re host to worlds, then.” “Everythin’s a world. Ousside. Inside... No’ jus’ them squiddly-bits only. The little bits wot make you. They’s alive. Like a buncha people stacked up-like atop on each other t’ make like one huge person.” “I think you got into my drugs again,” Volseth remarks absently. “All’s we’re sayin’ is... Go back ta watchin’. Study an’... do them note-things ya take.” Volseth runs a hand through his hair and scratches absently at the stubble on the side of his head. His expression shifts from frustration to confusion easily, all in the eyes and ears. “Zaraat, how do you know all of this?”

As soon as the imp attempts speech, Valente trundles out with his hands raised, fingers wide.

“An’da I washed up, look!”

The imp takes its interruption with a huff and a curse under its breath before bounding off. Volseth looks down at his son with a smile and picks him up under his arms. The boy lets out a hoot and throws his arms around his father. “Where are we going?” “There’s something amazing you should see,” he tells his child as he carries him toward the stairs. “We’ll look together.”

“Is it stars, ‘da?”

“No. We’re going to look inward at some things, tonight.”

[astraves]

How long will it be?

Your gravity proves itself relentless.

Something far more hungry than coincidence can fathom.

              The crescent knife’s weight itches,

While you liken that abrupt and complete departure,

to chewing your own limbs, 

             Your phantom limb,

a desperate bid to stay alive,

perhaps it’s a kindness that you didn’t leave a trail to follow,

deep into the woods,

             You’ll fight against your own force,

to the den of a monster that is never sated.

Far worse than any wolf.

A black hole among so many stars,

             For the grace of forgetting the beauty,

ever hungry,

obliterating anything near it, 

in so much pressure and atomic flame,

             Of one well-earned scarlet stroke.

not even light would remain.

[astraves]

Inertia Versus Obstacle

Pretend, for a moment.

We only see the back of his head as he walks.

Bloodied and beaten, his plates rustling and robes fluttering. Fires and screams rage all around him in that expansive network of caverns - once otherworldly and curious, now hellish in their presentation of fire and ruin.

Here, where mortals play part in the politicking of dragonkind and forgotten horrors are dredged up to torment the world once more.

But that’s a day in the life, for him.

The last scaled foe standing against them falls, and onlookers watch as Volseth takes account and begins to write on the good half of a broken crate. The frontline advances. Soldiers rally.

Ironically, it’s his own soot and blood that Astraves swipes on the parchment this time around as he finishes his report.

He takes a ragged breath as onlookers talk amongst themselves.

What the hell is he doing?

Eyerolling and comments about mages follow after. He vanishes in a twist of arcana, clumsily signing the portal with one hand and opening the spaces between This and That, directly into an office.

Really, THE office.

There isn’t much of a chance to look inside. They wouldn’t understand what’s on the other end of the portal anyway.

He’s still rustling and fluttering with a slight limp as he steps through into Suramar, into Director Ouvedhe’s office without any prior consultation or warning.

The old Shal’dorei sputters and drops his tea at the sudden roar of magic opening up next to his desk. He kicks back in the chair and staggers to his feet, hands raised.

“Vo- ...Astraves?! But the wards-”

“Outdated software,” we hear from the back of Volseth’s head as he drops the report onto Ouvedhe’s desk. “Trespasser, right?”

“Ugh! Go- Get the hell out of my office, damn you! This was not authorized!”

“Good morning, Director.”

Volseth offers a half-hearted wave. Ouvedhe throws his tea cup at his agent and curses through his teeth. When it hits his shoulder, he lets out a mock cry of pain and sways. The swaying, hamming it up, almost actually sent him to the ground with that poor footing and the tweak in his knee now. He slouches as he limps along, another portal. Another tower. The architecture changes to something more whimsical, and yet somehow less auspicious. The fixtures - cabinets and counters, the furniture that doesn’t move, seems wrought from the same living stone as the rest of the circular room, pale and blue with striations of arcane flecks like gold in more terrestrial marbles. Cabinets and hutches grow from the ceiling down. Counters from the floor up. Impeccably masoned - perhaps something beyond masonry, all as one solid piece. A nightborne woman in layered, black robes looks up from a divan, book in hand. She looks like him, but less battered, and doesn’t linger long on his condition.

Or maybe he looks like her? - No, he’s older. Squatter’s rights.

None of this was new to her. Similarly, another day in the life.

“Brother,” she muses quietly.

“Sue,” he remarks in response.

He can’t get his boots off. The sides and tongues of them all flap as he undoes the buckles and ties running up the inside of his leg, and the lot of it collapses from about his knees to drag around his ankles.

“Val went to sleep an hour ago,” she tells him.

Easier now to kick them off as he drags himself up the stairs. Once, he falls, and the dragging is more literal for a moment until he stands again.

Around in circles, to the second floor. Downstairs, he hears the low thud of the vast, round front door leading into his house that barely gets used.

Toys and books are strewn around. Volseth lets out a hoarse, low chuckle through his weak breath and hobbles over to the tiny form curled up on a vast, tall cushion beneath layers of blankets. It takes all his strength to kneel down before the little lord. Despite the cuts and drying blood on his fingers, he reaches out to brush the boy’s hair away from his face with all the tenderness he can muster.

Father kisses son on his forehead.

The dryness of his lips cause them to crack when he smiles.

Standing is a struggle, but he manages. The boy is lost to his dreams, the father is almost lost to gravity again.

The third floor returns him to the excuse for a bedroom the man maintains.

A ceiling to the stratosphere, and walls lined up with bookshelves. Shelves all cluttered in relics and tomes, odd finds and curiosities not meant for outside access. Tools and tables, telescopes and scrying circles.

All the toys a government agent could ask for and more.

These are all dead to him, as he himself is dead to the world once he hits that round, raised dais of a bed. It’ll be like diving into silk, he thinks.

It’ll be like collapsing into a giant breast with a tit big enough to be a pillow, he thinks.

One foot in front of the other.

Maybe not like a giant breast with a giant tit, maybe more like...

...Maybe just my fucking bed after a day like today, good gods above why do I do this to myself?

I miss all the other parts.

I miss...

                                                    Company?

...Maybe.

His head remains still. The world around us spins as he falls face-first into the covers, not even bothering to remove anything on his person.

He lays there, face against the pillow and motionless, limbs splaying however they landed.

His chest swells from the back as he draws in a breath...

And he screams into that great, comfortable bed until he doesn’t.

[astraves]

Valente

Your mother is a librarian, at a temple.

And there are a thousand reasons for why she isn’t here.

For why we had our time together and parted ways.

She wasn’t ready for you, or this life. Not for the work I have to do.

But she wanted the best for you. And she does love you, as best she can, in the ways she does.

It’s complicated, and I’ll try to explain, but if you don’t understand that’s alright.

She wanted to name you Malathar.

Malathar Astraves.

It does sound like a bad guy name, doesn’t it?

The boy does his best imitation of a cackling madman. He says that the whole world will be covered in imps that eat dogs and cats and birds and that people will have to kick the imps, but two more will just pop out of the ground.

Because that’s where imps come from, right?

Gospel truth, dad.

I looked into your eyes, when you were a baby. Just a little thing.

Right, a little blue potato. But you didn’t come from the ground.

You’re not an imp.

Though sometimes...

No, you had a kindness in your eyes. An explorer’s wonder. Hope.

Every hope I’ve had and lost, I thought you got them instead.

And you didn’t cry much. Sometimes I wonder if you’re a little old man, coming back for a second round. You got bored, being away, even if you’ve seen this before.

You act like you’ve seen it before. Or maybe, you were just brave.

The bravest.

Or the smartest child ever. Born knowing everything.

All the things.

Maybe it’s just the way you are, though? Something down to your soul. It just is, and you just are.

That’s why your name isn’t Malathar.

And no, you can’t grow up to be the bad guy anyway. Or any bad guy.

[astraves]

Hands Running Circles

THIS CORRESPONDENCE TO BE DESTROYED UPON REVIEW

Ouvedhe,

In the months since my arrival to the region cartographers are calling the Dragon Isles, what I have witnessed is not beyond words, though the concerns here are myriad for the unkempt condition of the landscape.

As more public sources have likely documented, thus rendering the bulk of my report redundant save for the Ministry’s own records, dragons present from all known flights count themselves among the island’s residents - including the oft-ill regarded Black, and the vastly-diminished Blue.

The dragons have, among themselves, ongoing politics to resolve between themselves and their ongoing roles, not only within the world abroad but also among their own endeavors. Largely, there is cooperation, though as one can expect there is little presence from the Blue flight, and internal contentions within Neltharion’s (i.e. Deathwing’s) brood hinder their ability to provide a more cohesive advance.

The greatest threat to the isles stems from a group calling themselves the Primalists - cultists of a variety of dragon caught halfway between their original state as elemental creatures and something akin to proto-drakes. This has brought with it the attached documents, many of which were carried among the cultists themselves, regarding the nature of the Titanic Ordering of Azeroth as a whole.

Not only is the validity of such an action in question, but it also brings to the fore several points of historical concern such as the reasoning for the Ordering, the state and function of the Black Empire, and the conditions of the world prior to actions more readily theorized about to date.

The lot of it reads like conspiracy, and can be dismissed as propagandized nonsense.

I would recommend that any proliferation of these documents be halted within Suramar, and that those above you are informed of the nature of these articles so that their dissemination in the Horde (and perhaps the world) abroad be prevented.

If the Primalists bear any semblance to the Twilight’s Hammer and its satellite covens, they would only salivate at the chance to reach out to civilian populations in order to begin recruiting.

We simply cannot afford the gross loss of bodies, as I can assure you from personal experience that there is only a “Join or Die” mentality among them, and there is no shortage of death.

Localized problems endure among the isles as a result - smaller groups align themselves with the greater Primalist collective, ranging from burning giants to rogue centaur tribes, and thankfully the Primalists remain a centralized issue.

This issue is actively being dealt with. There is little mystery afoot.

There are beings - dragons, spearheading the Primalists’ efforts. They appear to be such elemental proto-dragons as mentioned before. The first, Raszageth, was felled by a collective endeavor of acting parties throughout the Isles. There is a second now, named Fyrrak. It is, perhaps, more imposing, but these creatures can be killed. The concern for this one in particular comes by delving into Neltharion’s bygone facilities below ground, and the utilization of an amalgamated force known as Shadowflame.

Where the elements rage, the Old Gods have proven to never be far behind.

Should conditions worsen, I will inform you and advise from the field as to what our next motions should be. For now, there are enough third parties from Suramar as well as one of the Duskwatch’s more well-funded cavalry batallions providing a face for our city and people in the fray.

There are similar representations among the Horde’s federated states, and of the Alliance, as well as your given mercenary operations.

I will continue to lend my abilities toward resolving these obstacles. If the reported situations change in any direction, your offices will be informed. - E.O.R.

[astraves]

As You’re Told

Now that we’ve covered that...

Volseth was flanked by guards to either side of him the moment he crossed the estate’s threshold.

The little parlor trick of vanishing from the room his mother and son were in was just that. He made the mistake of not actually going anywhere, and now he had company - a man and a woman, full arms and armor.

They had the gall to play this stunt in broad moonlight.

They made no move for shackles or any attempt to strike. Simply standing at attention, chins raised just so.

“Tacit telemetry tells the Trespasser’s trapsing,” the woman said robotically.

Volseth’s hands clenched slightly at his sides. His jaw was harder as his gaze passed from one to the other.

“Are you-... No. I’m going to the market-” “Tales told to titles try to take the tenacious to them,” answered the man.

“-for dinner for my mother and my son. Fuck’s sakes, you people...”

The Duskwatch officers held formation as two others moved in. They turned to face him, all of them moving like clockwork to isolate him from the path ahead. “You know I can just move past you all, right? With a spell?”

The woman snapped out of her trained stasis and looked to Astraves.

“You’ve been called, my Lord. Best’n’t make a scene.”

“Agency comes with periodic discomfort. We were told you wouldn’t-”

“Comply? No. You made contact with me a day ago in bloody Shattrath of all places. What, do you just have people waiting for us to wander by?”

The two were silent.

A resounding Yes, now Come With Us.

Volseth returned the quiet, brow furrowed as his stare shot from one to the other.

“You can’t just wait for me to come by like normal people?”

He looked up to see spotters on the parapets and domes of nearby manors and spires. It was enough of an implication to simply cast a bag over his head and beat him until he was out.

That would’ve almost been preferrable.

Time and again, he looked back to the estate, vanishing behind the squared formation of the heavily armed and armored. One would mutter something unintelligible beneath their breath. Across the group, another would respond uncannily.

Volseth forced a stone-faced expression and looked ahead.

Away from people, they closed in on him and all but pushed him toward a translocation hall down a causeway and across the water, into a nondescript tower that seemed to see little use.

As if retracing his steps, he distanced himself from the man and woman on either side of him, the two still whispering at their collars. Rehearsed a thousand times, it seemed, he began to head for the last pad on the left.

A plated hand seized his elbow. He looked back to see the man on his right half-shake his head.

“Central platform on the southern wall,” he said quietly. “Keep moving, please.”

Volseth glared and shrugged his arm away.

“Please,” the guard insisted.

Astraves did as bade and stepped onto the platform. Astral maths coalesced about him, calculating the destination requested of his pattern. In a heartbeat, the magic thrummed to life.

Just like that, his ward spirited away in a flourish of directed arcana. The guard’s colleague took a step back from the scene and made way for the door. The others moved with their same rehearsed precision, this time to disperse into the streets and causeways.

:·

Volseth hobbled a step as he was spat out into a long room. Whoever held the office didn’t care for velocity inhibitors or didn’t see to bother with them. Perhaps they preferred having everyone on their back foot the second they arrived. Tiered and without corners, barely lit save for planters stuffed to the brim with glowing flowers on the staggered ledges, the walls were covered in bookshelves twenty feet high.

On the verge of spilling over with tomes tightly arranged and flawlessly organized, every stack was interrupted by relics and curios beneath crystal domes, each isolated in time. Other rows were host to decorative flasks or pieces of time-worn artifice, well beyond any point of function.

The roof arched overhead in darkened glass of a lush sea green that bathed the pill-shaped room in its dim glow, cascading with more plants and errant tomes darting back and forth from the higher shelves of their own accord.

Beyond the pages fluttering above, no other sound rang out in the echoing hall save for his footfalls on dry leaves as he drew closer to a single, curved desk made of violet, lacquered wood and chrome fixtures.

It didn’t face the walkway, however. The occupant had his back turned.

He was aged, and dressed in simple, high-collar robes of silver and indigo, chased in sorcerous, pale blue filigrees that stood like subtle holograms from the cloth. Gaunt and worn, his hair was white as Mother Moon and wreathed his face in a dusting of tenacious stubble, made paler with thin lips stained in wine and flushed with blood.

Crowning his head was a utilitarian bun that did no favors for his waning hairline, nor did it seem to bother the man. He sat, writing, clearing his throat once and again.

“Lord Astraves,” he began peacefully, “take a seat, please... There is wine, as well. Figs and olives too, all cultivated naturally in Azsuna.”

“I’d prefer to stand,” Volseth said coldly.

The elder didn’t bother to look up at his guest yet.

“Unless this wasn’t worth the urgency,” Volseth added.

A quiet “Ah,” broke the silence again. The elder sat his quill into a well and rose with a fluid slowness, one hand braced and splayed against his chest as the other settled at the small of his back.

“I am Director Ouvedhe. Your former... provisioner and delegator has since retired, for reasons you understand I believe.”

“And you’re his replacement?” Volseth mused.

“No. No, no... Your situation, which has advanced, has graduated to my desk, I’m afraid. He was internal Sovereign Affairs, and I am external. One of-”

“-many,” both men finished in tandem.

Volseth nodded slowly. “What do you want from me?”

“Tell me,” Ouvedhe began, “have you had time to see your mother yet? It’s been... what, five years now? Almost six. Perhaps your sister, Asurei?”

“Before I left,” Astraves admitted with crossed arms. “I’m wondering why I was brought here under armed escort.”

The old man looked up at him and placidly raised his arms to either side. “Is your presence, let alone a promotion, not an urgent matter? Something worthy of rush, hush and push?”

Volseth went quiet as he looked around the hall. It was familiar, hideously so, to his director’s before. Taller, perhaps. More serene, and overtaken with nature.

                     More sober, curiously enough.

“Five years, Astraves. The world faced dark times, in your absence, and you absconded with your sole heir into hiding - wherever in Elune’s name you went - waiting for the shadow to pass.”

“I did,” he admitted quietly. “I was hoping to be forgotten, I suppose.”

“Forgotten?” the elder asked in disbelief with a raised brow. “Perish the thought.”

Director Ouvedhe slid one of the drawers open on his desk, jars and tomes alike jostling lightly with the force of the motion. He drew out a long item wrapped in lavender silk and threw it onto an open spot in the woodwork.

He pointed to it.

Volseth took the item up and tested the weight in his hand. A chill passed through him as he quickly tossed the corners of the cloth open to find a worn hand scythe, the blade broken just before the curve.

“Gods’ blood-”  Astraves dropped the tool with a shouted curse and backed away.

Ouvedhe advanced and took it up with a calm, wordless tenderness.

“Nobody has forgotten what you’ve done for the State, Astraves, in that nobody’s forgotten the nature of your work... Thanks to the efforts of one particular retired Duskwatch officer, however, we have a fuller understand of who it was we’ve been... Encountering, for so many millenia.”

Ouvedhe raised a spindly finger.

“This is not an apprehension-”

“Then WHAT?!” Astraves screamed as he threw the cloth aside.

The Director waited for the echoes to stop before answering. He patted the air with his palm and craned his head back in a gesture of cool control as the other wove his stance and hunkered forward like a cornered animal.

Which, in fairness, he very much was.

“...This is not an apprehension, as I said. First,” he mused, “we received a disturbing body of evidence that pointed, in every capacity and respect, to you. To your work with the Dusk Lilies, and providing the disenfranchised with wines and the like. A treason, to be sure, but patriotic with the treasonous in power, hm? But you did more.”

Hackles raised, the arcanist froze in his tracks, his mind shuttered to this outcome as his body coiled defensively.

“Yes,” Volseth answered, his voice a low, trembling trill. “All of it and more.”

“How many?” Ouvedhe asked calmly.

“Hundreds,” Astraves answered between his teeth. Fangs bared, he stalked toward the elder and loomed over him, a finger jabbed accusingly toward his face.

“I opened their throats and bled them like swine. With that. A laborer’s tool. An instrument that becomes a key to a very personal sort of justice.”

He backed away, torso turned sidelong as he bladed a hand toward Ouvedhe. “Was I wrong? Were any of us?”

“The evidence, for which there is a literal book, Lord Astraves, says you burnt them and scraped the soot of their fat and flesh to make ink. Penned their sins into librams... That’s less wetwork for the people and more a... Curious fascination. All of your own initiative.”

Volseth turned to face him directly and held out his wrists, still scarred from the shackles he’d been put in during the occupation. With a waiting expectation, he let out a slow breath.

“Have me in the shackles then. Shunt the mana from me, make me wither.”

“You truly don’t see the error in what you’ve done?” Ouvedhe asked as he closed the distance between them and placed his palm on Volseth’s arm to lower it.

“I didn’t kill innocents,” Volseth said with a quick, flat curtness as he took a step back. “I did my research.”

“I should hope... In those admittedly grisly books you made, you’ve known pederasts and rapists, abbettors and traitors, felbloods and abusers and unspeakable corruptions from all walks that we had to humor because many were informants.”

Astraves narrowed his eyes and began to pace in a slow stalk. Ouvedhe simply watched and folded his hands just beneath his waist.

“This-... mmn. This retiree, mentioned your situation finding justice. You have killed a tremendous number of people in six centuries, Volseth, likely all of them deserving. You also ran wine, illegally. You were shackled already, made an example of to the public under glass in a mana vacuum, and nearly hurled into the soul engines.”

Ouvedhe explained all of this without so much as drawing a breath. Volseth simply stared at him and nodded. The director calmly extended a hand toward him and took on the faintest hint of a smile.

“Arch Telemancer Jourrethe was one of your victims,” he said.  “He was also a survivor of Elisande’s regime that offered to aid the new. Jourrethe’s apprentice was my neice... She had nearly taken her own life two years ago. Couldn’t live with the shame of what he’d done, and then... She found out he was dead. Killed, moreso, some time after the rebellion.”

Volseth scowled at the man. “...And?” he asked impatiently.

Ouvedhe raised a finger and looked at him squarely. “That knowledge was enough to talk her away from it. There will be years with the alienists, for certain, but... Inadvertently, your work saved a life. Perhaps it saved others, as well?”

“That wasn’t the point,” Volseth said in disbelief. “Not-... That’s...”

“You did something good, in the long run, for as horrible as your methods are.”

The elder watched as Astraves stepped over to a pillar between the bookshelves and slid his back down its length to huddle on the floor, entirely beside himself. Ouvedhe let him marinate in the realization of others knowing his deeds before moving to take his turn looming.

“Justice is a fulcrum of mediation between the aggrieved and the aggressor,” Ouvedhe mused. “It is to remain impartial, and fair, in the dispensation of its punitive disciplines and recompense to those wronged, or their survivors, to the satisfaction of the society within which this justice functions.”

Volseth looked up at him and squinted an eye. “My sentence, then.”

“How many people did you put to the blade?”

“I can’t remember,” he said in a low, breathless drone.

“We had lost count after the third full bookshelf, ourselves... Have you ever been wrong, in a killing?”

“I only struck when every sign and proof pointed to them for their misdeeds. Often I witnessed them myself... I wouldn’t...”

Astraves glowered at the marble inlays in the floor and stray, dry leaves that had fallen from overhead. “...I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, honestly.”

“Just as some are wrongfully incarcerated, even executed. Justice is an imperfect science that we depend heavily upon to sustain civilized life...”

The director took a long, slow breath and stepped away from Volseth. He unfolded his hands and gestured to the man on the floor, his voice raising for the distance.

“...Why, though? Why did you do this? We had all suffered under Elisande, her paranoia and ruinous regime. But what compelled you to act the way you have?”

Volseth leaned forward and looked Ouvedhe in the eye with a resigned expression. “Honestly?” he asked quietly.

“Honestly,” Ouvedhe nodded once.

“...The city’s corruption became a cancer. The wine, the... abuses, the haves and have-nots, and all the inequalities... The sheer number of people that wound up exiled over the years... My father saw it, and he felt powerless. He decided the grave was better than going on.”

The elder nodded again, his expression somewhat sympathetic. “That was when it all started, your killings?”

“Yes,” Astraves answered simply in a defeated hush.

The director soaked this in for a time. Both men were silent as leaves popped from their stems overhead, some trundling down one and two at a time to the floor.

“The city killed your father. So you deigned to kill the city.”

“In a sense,” Volseth droned quietly. “I love what Suramar used to be. There’s some thrill at the prospect of what it can become. That our people have never fallen - even in our darkest hour there were even just a scant handful of us willing to bear a light in the dark.”

“The cancer, then.”

Volseth bobbed his head in a few heavy nods. “That, I could carve out with a knife.”

Ouvedhe moved to stand before him and offered a hand.  “The cancer is gone, Volseth. If we find tumors, we’ll extract them ourselves from now on, and do so cleanly. Your hand in it, as you’ve employed it so, is over.”

Astraves looked up. He ignored the hand at first, simply staring at the director.

“What becomes of me, then.”

“You have work to do, in the official and unspoken sort. We do need you for that. But you can’t keep on as you have. The killings must stop.”

“I haven’t-...”

Volseth waved a hand. “They’ve stopped. They’ll remain stopped.”

“You give me your word on this? Absolutely no more. If we find wrongdoings, we investigate, prosecute, and allow the courts to do their due diligence. Yes? If you take up your pruning knives again, I won’t intercede on your behalf. Nobody will.” Ouvedhe went on, sticking his hand out a little further. “And if this is a case where you’ve a malady of the mind, and you simply found a convenient outlet for it, I cannot help you in this either. Time will prove, hm?”

“Why are you letting me get away with it?”

“I’m not. This is your moment of reckoning. What the informant delivered to us paints a clear picture of who, and when, and how, and the picture is damning, but not beyond remedy.” 

Astraves took his wrist, at last, and allowed himself to be helped up to his feet.

“Why, in most cases, is a blatant inference from what we could gather through evidence and a few survivor accounts. What you did was wrong, Volseth, but why you did it was... From what we can tell, perhaps a noble endeavor to some.”

Ouvedhe locked eyes with his young counterpart, head canting like a watchful hawk.  “Times have changed, and you must change with them. I won’t guarantee your safety or freedom, and I cannot speak to the welfare of your family, if you take the law into your own hands again. This is the one grace I will offer, and in turn, Suramar has need of you.”

“Work for freedom,” Volseth remarked flatly.

“If you want to see it in that context,” Ouvedhe told him. “I can’t argue your experience or expertise in other ventures. You’ll be working above the Sanctums, still within the Ministry of Sovereign Affairs, and... We are the exterior. The interior is in good hands. More... action, on our end, less diplomacy.”

“You’re trying to keep me away from internal problems.”

“Among other things. You’re good at solving them in any case. Suramar has more problems outside of itself than within, these days. You’d be better out there, fixing the world around us. Less of a chance for you to get lost in things here, as well.”

Volseth narrowed his eyes and adjusted his cuffs, staring off into the distance.

“Did this informant drop all of this into your lap and subsequently fuck off into nowhere?”

Ouvedhe nearly choked on his own air at the profanity and quickly gathered himself. “Mmn. Hm. Possibly. I should think, given that any capacity they entertained as Duskwatch formally ended after the city’s liberation.”

“Good,” Volseth said curtly.

“So,” the director started. “...Do you accept these terms? Else we can pull you out of a cell whenever we need something done. Once again, my only and final grace to you, Volseth Astraves. No more isolation. You’re a son of Suramar, now it’s time to be one in broad moonlight, even if your work becomes covert.”

“As you like.”

Ouvedhe bowed his head once. “Then it will be so, as soon as the ink dries and the seals are pressed... Do you remember your call sign, Agent?”

“Trespasser,” Volseth told him.

The director stepped toward his desk then, footfalls crisp on the stonework below. “You’ll receive your first assignment soon. I can tell you that you’ll be headed to some newly-discovered islands, so... Entrust your child, resolve your loose ends and prepare to sail to the northeast.”

Volseth followed in his wake. Ouvedhe already busied himself with the paperwork.

“...You’re free to attach yourself to any mercenary company you see fitting, otherwise other field agents, explorers and the like will accompany you sporadically through your work. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” Volseth told him. “I’ll scrape off the rust and prepare.”

Ouvedhe nodded and brought down a heavy brass seal onto the first document with a dull thud to emboss the paper.

“Then you are dismissed, Agent.”

[astraves]

Arrhythmia

If a life is an autopsy, stop for a minute. Review the viscera.

A certain individual compiled the body,

From leftover soot and blood on the walls,

This person dug out bones, you see,

And found the heart beneath the floor,

One that did more to tell than ask,

And this person, let’s say, watched him over the years,

Didn’t know, but envied, and beyond all reason,

loved loved loved loved loved loved loved                                                               loved loved loved loved loved loved loved                                                               loved loved loved loved loved loved loved                                                        loved loved    V+G4E    loved loved loved                                                               loved loved loved loved loved loved loved                                                               loved loved loved loved loved loved loved

every breath he drew,

Every swipe of his sickle,

When this person knew,

That the parts were found strewn from here to hell and back ten-fold,

This person had him dead to rights,

And kissed the ground he walked on.

So this person made a book, like him,

Put together an autopsy,

Of every last body he took apart,

Of every bit of ink he spilled,

Of every name before he rendered it down, the fat and all,

Into his library of Deserving Parties,

And while they were deserving,

Abusers and pederasts, the corrupt and salacious,

The ones that sold their friends in chains to the devils,

This person made an ode to him,

And brought it to be read by those who’d see dearly to its contents,

Because when this person knew that he knew,

And he knew this person knew in turn,

They had each other, dead to rights,

Fucking in the ashes left behind them,

And after fucking her over for six hundred years,

She left her orgasm on his keeper’s desk,

Awaiting a time when the corruption she hated,

And the corruption he murdered,

Was dead enough to render justice.