#tombReader

[requiem-wra]

Draenya Drabble

Just Getting into Character with a short drabble. Drae’s a Draenei monk.  Miss Sinerea and Master Steelblossom are both too kind. Draenya wanders away from their home two books heavier with an excellent cookie in hand and tries to puzzle out what she might do for them to return their kindnesses. Drae does two things well; punching and research. Sometimes both at the same time. Unfortunately, she thinks Master Steelblossom has all the necessary punching well in hand, and Miss Sinerea the research. She’s so lost in her musings that she makes it halfway to the Inn in Old Town before she realizes she never took out any appropriations to stay there.  

She has the money she took out for the books, but that money is specifically budgeted for books, and not an inn. She can’t justify misusing it; especially not while she’s acting head of the library. A misstep like that, and no one will ever listen to her about misuse of appropriations again.  

She hasn’t caught more than a quick nap in three days, so she doesn’t think heading home in the dark makes for the best idea. Certainly, the spirit meditation that allows them to translocate to the isle is useful, but it also drains the user and she knows that right now she can’t manage the kind of deep focus such a thing takes.  

Draenya stuffs the last of the cookie in her mouth, recognizing with a distant sense of alarm that it’s the first thing she’s eaten in a day or two. She’s always had issues keeping track of time with a project in her hands, but somehow this slip seems worse than usual. She should rest and reset, get herself back on track before she returns to the mess she left at her library.  

Well. No inn, no bed, but Stormwind affords guards and safety and the summer breeze blows warm against her face. She meanders on unsteady legs back toward the lake, trying to remember when she started to feel so very tired. The park or the Cathedral might serve as safe enough spaces to rest in public, but the sheer volume of foot traffic makes her wary of lingering long. She follows an instinct long ingrained, trailing through the cemetery with prayers for those resting within spilling halting and half-forgotten from her lips. 

It doesn’t matter. The cemetery rings with silence, and Draenya has no discomfort with the dead. She finds a tree with a wide trunk near the walls of Stormwind to shelter under and lies down beneath its boughs. On her side, she nestles into the roots and stares out at the stone silhouettes jutting up from the earth nearby. The sky is a deep, steel grey behind them, clouds lit by the lights of the city. She has no idea what hour of the night she’s impressed herself upon Miss Sinerea and Master Steelblossom, but she hopes not too late.  

Research notes and the Thalassian books she can’t read press uncomfortably into her sides, but she dares not remove her bags. She shuffles positions instead, wondering when it was she last spent a night in the open. Surely it can’t have been all that long ago, but for some reason she can only recall the days just after the Exodar’s crash. The sky had shone steel grey with smoke then too, the land foreign and hostile. She’d been weak and defenseless, herded along with the other civilians like children, sleeping restless nights on the hard, damp ground as the vindicators stood guard in shifts. They’d slept outside for weeks or months, either in trying to reach the Exodar from their crash sites or waiting for it to be livable again. She’d hated every minute then, still busy lamenting the loss of the temple—the loss of the only life she’d known.  

Draenya closes her eyes, breathes deep, shakes the memory away. She is not that person any longer. Her armor hangs heavy on her form, a reminder that she no longer needs anyone’s protection. What she needs is to sleep—she needs to get back to the antiquities collection still unsorted and the diaries of ShaoHao still without transcription. She slips into dreaming and watches the rows of tombs arrange themselves like a shelf of books, an endless library of the untold stories of the dead. 

[requiem-wra]

Just a Dream (Draenya)

Not a nightmare, but, well-- A followup on some RP with a friend.  Warnings for low-level suicidal ideation and weird dream logic. 

She didn't wait long enough.

Maeve pushed her too early, she gave in too soon, because the dreams are there, scattered between waves of unconsciousness. She can tell--can taste it in the false air and in the way her limbs don't move quite right--in the way her Chi won't respond as it should. The realm of dreams has found her again, and the very thought pulses anxiety through every nerve of her being. Fear usually works as a weapon to free her from sleep, but-- Not so this time. Something blocks her path to awareness... she grits her teeth and watches the dream tick on.  

At first, she can bear it easily. She has a few recurring dreams she can stand--those fantasies where nothing fantastic happens at all. Where she does nothing but sit at her desk, alphabetizing an endless stack of files while the room shifts and changes around her. The work never ends, the context is meaningless, and she wakes from those dreams feeling empty and quiet. Maybe she should take them as a comment on her ultimately useless existence, but she's never thought of them that way. They are... pleasant noise. Busy work for the sleeping mind.

It's only too bad the scene can't last. She falls to the sub-conscious shift between one imagined breath and the next--blinks and finds herself aware again in the humming engine room of the Exodar.

There's a hammer in her hand where she expects to see paper, fingers folded over an old handle she hasn't seen since the thing crashed years ago, but she knows its heft. The engine hums in the silent vacuum of space and she knows instinctively that they haven't reached Azeroth yet, even though in the dream she still wears her Kul-Tiran clothes.

There's someone nearby—a pair of hooves just visible in her periphery somewhere near the entrance... She doesn't look up. She knows well enough what face she'll find.

"Again, Draenya?"  he calls, voice dripping with disapproval. She pries at the loose panel over the engine's electrical interface and doesn't answer. "I know you're smarter than this. Who do you think you're helping, carrying on like you do? You only make more work for the healers." "Yes, well... make more work for them either way, I assume. 'Least this way someone on the ship gets some sleep." The panel falls away and disappears before it hits the ground—lost in the logic of the dream. Draenya doesn't notice. She reaches forward and starts changing the blown fuse.

"..It's the fuse for a display screen." He drawls, voice drier than the desert. "By no means is this any kind of urgent."

"How would you know?" She finds herself mumbling back to the apparition despite her better instincts. "You never used to watch dad work." Her hands move in ways she scarcely remembers—still feels somehow in the way her arms ache.

"Draenya," he harps again—so damn familiar. "You need sleep."

"Sleep when I'm dead," she grouches. She can feel his exasperation like a physical force.

"Avoiding the former only hastens the latter—"

"Perhaps that's the point, The'uul." The room freezes. All sound stops. The engine melts away beneath her finger tips and all she can do is watch it go—dripping down between through the grate that makes up the floor. The'uul’s image floods her vision, inescapable.

"I did not save you only to watch you die to your own stupidity." He's taller than he should be, she thinks. He takes up too much space in the strangely silent room. Draenya tries to stand and meet him, only to find that her limbs don't remember how. She's left scattered on the floor, staring up into his face.

"Then perhaps you should leave me to my useless tasks, or watch death find me all the faster."

"Draenya—"

"You're not here, The’uul."  He frowns thunderously, but—he isn't. He's nowhere, gone even in the dream. Draenya is left behind, staring up at the inky black sky of Nazmir. The loamy earth of the swamp cradles her form with damp, and she is alone.

Alone. It’s easier that way, isn’t it? Quieter. Less painful. More painful? She doesn’t know—

She fights to get upright against the pull of the swamp. The blood troll’s knife from last week sits at home in her side, though she finds no blood. And she is... tired. Too tired to last through more dreaming. Her fingers find the knife. She twists—pulls—

She wakes up.

[requiem-wra]

On Homes (Draenya)

It’s surreal, walking through Stormwind these days. The streets are full to bursting with concerned citizens ready to aid the war effort. Droves of Priests and Paladins run a tireless, rotating shift of healers out of the Cathedral. The Farms just outside the city house refugees from Darnassus, and people everywhere are commiserating and demonstrating compassion and searching for hope….

“It’s so terrible to think of all these people driven from their homes,” She overhears a pair of mages gossiping in the library by the Stockades, one human to another, and the phrase echoes in her mind all day.

Driven from their homes, she thinks, and tries to remember what that feels like, exactly. She should know. She’s lost a few.

The house she shared with her father went first. Small, and filled with the whirring of tiny gears and crystalline mechanisms. The Workshop ate up more space than the kitchen and bedroom combined, but she hadn’t known anything else. Besides, the forest outside was wide enough to run in, and she didn’t need much space to sit beside her father and watch him work.

All of it fell to the wayside and she never really learned why. She remembers those days like distant reflections of sunlight on water—warm, too blinding and too frenetic to discern, flashes of something that leave nothing but dancing blots of darkness in their wake. It all ends with loneliness and terror—the dark of the woods encroaching through the windows and suffocating her as she hides beneath her father’s workbench. The’uul’s face so unfamiliar when he’d come for her that she’d screamed at the sight of him.

…The’uul… Her brother is… not someone she knows how to think about. But he took her to Auchindoun.

Auchindoun was home too, for a time. Until it became apparent as she got older that she’d never be able to wield or properly serve the light, and after that—

If she’s honest with herself, the great temple that housed the Draenei dead had been lost to her before it was ever destroyed. Nothing there ever felt right or true. She hadn’t belonged. Not really. Maybe she could have eventually, but… now she’d never get the chance to know. The lost potential hurts more than the lost reality, she thinks. Maybe.

Or maybe she’s full of shit and just trying to lessen the hurt she feels inside by cheapening the past.

After that, It was… She doesn’t even know. Camp after camp. Settlement after settlement. None of that ever felt sedentary enough to be “home.”

There were a scarce few moments, between violence and flight, when she thought maybe she’d found it; in the smile of a stranger offering comfort, in the warmth of a new friend, huddled close in the cold of night under the bleak sky…. But none of these homes ever lasted. Smiles grew thin and faded, people died. In the end, they all ran from any chance of home, tried to make the Exodar their new ark and left Draenor burning behind. How strange it was to realize she could be homesick for a planet… She’d started to understand why all the elders spun never ending tales of their own Argus.

By the Naaru it had never ended, had it? Place to place-- the Exodar, Pandaria, the fall of the Peak of Serenity when the Legion came, her frantic scramble to save what she could of the library— home was a book that burned, a friend that died, a memory lost, over and over again until nothing and no one felt safe.

Maybe Draenya doesn’t know what home is any more. Maybe she needs to get over herself and get back to work. Losing homes might not make sense, but loss does. Grief does. There are a camps’ worth of refugees left in Stormwind tonight, all that’s left of a whole city. She can’t heal and she can’t bring back the dead, but she can write and she knows how bureaucracy works. She hides in the library and joins the grim faced-few checking their lists of refugees against any records of Darnassus’s citizenry.