Jaina thinks she’s not getting paid nearly enough to pick up this ‘special package’ from the awful grey expanse that’s the superhell of the known universe. Full access to the Silvermoon library, Lor’themar promised with a knowing look. Of course Jaina countered quickly with a condition of her own - that she would not have to be the one facing Tyrande’s inevitable fury once she finds out. The combined allure of the knowledge jealously guarded within elven tomes and the pinched looks on both Lor’themar and Thalyssra’s faces upon hearing that would have made the trip almost worth it. Almost.
And so it was after much pleading from Vereesa in the form of heartfelt words and delicious elven pastries that Jaina could never seem to say no to that she regretfully found herself agreeing to this veritably insane idea. Well – perhaps a smidge of well-placed flattery was also involved, and far be it for her to fake humility at this point in her life. She’s a damn capable archmage who definitely doesn’t have any qualms about returning to this dreadful place. Quick in and out. She won’t even have to talk to her quarry.
Another thing she’s gotten good at over the years is lying to herself.
She curses these damnable elves under her breath. Her life would have been so much easier without them. The thought of Pained is quickly followed by the thought of Kinndy, and Jaina grips her staff just a bit tighter. No, easy is not the right word.
Perhaps she should amend that thought from ‘damnable elves’ to ‘damnable high elves’. Quel'Thalas is, after all, the reason she’s here in the first place.
Her mind wanders instead to Kael’thas’s promises that he’d always been too busy to keep. Another time Jaina , he’d say with a regretful smile on his boyishly handsome face. She’d nodded her understanding and excused his excuses until one day she’d woken up to a bloodstained missive on her desk penned in a messy, shaky scrawl that she’d just barely recognized as Vereesa’s handwriting, every word dark with despair and heavy with grief.
Painful. Her life would’ve been less painful without elves.
The memory of Arthas flashes to the front of her mind unbidden and with it, the memory of the remnant of his soul fading into nothingness.
Maybe their lives would’ve been less painful if you’d stopped him.
She ignores the feeling crawling down the back of her neck just as she ignores the looming tower behind her that once held her prisoner. Even outside of Torghast she can feel the unique capability of this Tides-forsaken place to draw out her very long list of failures and regrets. She grips her staff a little tighter still when she recognizes the familiar guilt settling deep and vows to wring at least two more favours out of Lor’themar and maybe a lifetime’s supply of pastries out of Vereesa.
“Lady Proudmoore.”
Jaina barely suppresses her jump. An embarrassing habit from her younger days spent with her nose buried tomes and oblivious to the world around her – and something that she hasn’t done in decades. She scowls at the woman who, much like this place, apparently has an uniquely annoying ability to sneak up on her.
Sylvanas Windrunner stands in front of her clad in scratched armour and brown leathers, holding a simple wooden bow. Tyrande’s owl sentinel is perched on one of her pauldrons, tilting its head and narrowing its eyes in a way that makes Jaina feel oddly self-conscious. She flicks her eyes away from the strangely judgmental gaze and studies Sylvanas instead.
She seems smaller than Jaina remembered, no longer ensconced by the frankly oversized pauldrons she used to wear during the Fourth War nor any of the spiked grey armour she wore while serving the Jailer. The drab blues and purples of this new armour seem at odds with the elven design, though fitting in the way they reflect the depressing nature of this place. She meets Sylvanas’s eyes, a new curious bright blue that’s not quite high elven. If anything it reminds Jaina of the glow her own eyes take when using powerful magic. In any case, it’s a fascinating side effect of her receiving the other half of her soul back. How many times has Vereesa told her about Sylvanas’s coveted grey-blue eyes? Enough times that Jaina actually feels a little disappointed that she’ll never get to see it.
She realizes at this moment that she has yet to say a single word.
Sylvanas, to her credit, has been waiting patiently, stance so relaxed it puts Jaina on edge. She displays none of the sense of urgency from before her imprisonment, content to watch silently with a neutral expression as Jaina catalogues her current appearance – calm, centered, and strangely placid in a way that makes Jaina envious. How dare Sylvanas Windrunner find peace after all she’d done? How could she find it in the Maw of all places even as Jaina shifts on her feet and tries her best to ignore the ever-growing whispers of memories that haunt her every waking moment?
Sylvanas tilts her head in a motion not unlike the way the owl tilted its head earlier. She opens her mouth to speak and Jaina tenses, still incredibly aware that she never responded to the greeting from earlier.
“Like what you see?”
Jaina blinks. The growing irritation and the urge to snap vanish at the unexpected statement and the light, almost teasing tone of delivery. She files that away for analysis later and can’t help but wonder how Tyrande might feel about this development. It doesn’t really seem like Sylvanas is suffering quite as much as Tyrande would’ve wanted her to. It would almost be funny if it hadn’t caught Jaina off guard, and she doesn’t like being caught off guard – especially not by Sylvanas. The irritation from earlier returns at full force.
She resists the urge to bite something out that would skirt dangerously close to flirting back, because yes, Sylvanas just flirted with her and she could not have prepared for even the slightest possibility of that happening – seeing as they’d quite literally never had an actual conversation of any sort before her banishment to the Maw. Exchanging barbs and insults? Snide remarks? Even facing a wildly repentant and thoroughly humbled version of her? She’d prepared for all of that before arriving. Whatever this is – Vereesa did not prepare her for this.
Damnable elves.
“Your presence has been requested in Quel'Thalas.” She says instead with a tone far less cordial than she would’ve preferred. She could almost hear her mother’s disapproving tsk and the accompanying Proudmoores are many things, Jaina, but never impolite.
In my defense, mother, it’s not like she doesn’t deserve all of it and more.
The small smirk playing around Sylvanas’s lips vanish almost as quickly as her irritation had earlier, and Jaina would be lying if she said it doesn’t bring her some vicious satisfaction to see it happen. Blue eyes dart across her face and there’s an almost-imperceptible tightening to Sylvanas’s jaw. Jaina would not have recognized it were it not for the days she spent standing in front of the mirror practicing how to school her expressions and body language – a good queen should never wear her anger visibly. She’d taken that training with her to Theramore, and when all that effort had been for naught, when all diplomacy and niceties had turned to ash like the bodies of her friends, she’d turned to doing just that.
She used to wear it like a second skin. It’s something that comes to her as naturally as magic. It’s efficient, brutal, and the results are effective. There’s no denying that she has come a long way from her days of almost drowning Orgrimmar. In the aftermath of Dalaran being destroyed and the subsequent restructuring of the Kirin Tor, Jaina thinks she can finally lay the Purge to rest. The familiar way it simmers under her skin even now feels safe, and she remembers the last time she let it boil over. The consequence of that is Queen Talanji refusing till this day to attend any diplomatic meetings where Jaina is present.
She watches as Sylvanas relaxes her jaw. Shifts her weight.
“What happened?” She asks in a voice a little too casual and conversational, the type of tone one would expect when talking about the weather in Boralus.
Jaina glances at her hand. The strange pale blue of her skin is white at the knuckles from where she’s gripping her bow. Jaina almost flexes her own hand around her staff sympathetically. Has a crazy thought for a moment that she’s staring into a mirror still, noting all the little details to fix, to hide. Wonders if Sylvanas has ever done the same.
“The Void is after the Sunwell.”
Her deal was to portal Sylvanas back to Azeroth, nothing more. She’s already said too much. But as she stands here she finds herself fascinated by the way Sylvanas swallows hard – just once. Her hand is now gripping the wood of her bow so tightly that Jaina thinks it might splinter. Her ears flick in an indecipherable way, likely conveying something important that Jaina can’t understand. Up for happy, droopy for sad, pinning back is likely anger, the flick can mean a lot of things, she remembers Vereesa telling her. Like Kael’thas, Vereesa never got around to teaching her the more subtle elven body language before her world was turned upside down by her husband’s death. And after that they never seemed to have enough time to talk. Jaina should really bring it up again.
“I haven’t finished my task.” Her words are strained with something that takes a moment for Jaina to place. She recognizes it because she used to speak of Kul Tiras in the same way before the Fourth War – full of repressed emotion and an underlying indescribable grief that’s impossible to understand if you weren’t an exile from your homeland.
She suddenly thinks it’s a little too coincidental that she’s ‘the only person who can do this’. The strange glances Vereesa would send her way when she thought Jaina wasn’t looking are starting to become suspicious rather than just a passing oddity about her friend that she could write off. She has a feeling that Vereesa might owe her more than a lifetime supply of pastries after this.
She looks pointedly at the owl perched on Sylvanas’s shoulder with an expression that hopefully conveys we can’t exactly talk in front of your warden. Sylvanas mutters something under her breath to the owl, to which the owl hoots slightly and takes off, to Jaina’s surprise. It flies off out of earshot, and Jaina makes a note to herself to never mention this to anyone lest Tyrande finds out. In fact, it would be smart of her to entirely avoid anywhere where Tyrande might be when she returns to Azeroth. She hadn’t made up her mind about the elves between juggling Kirin Tor and Lord Admiral duties when Vereesa approached her, but maybe she could plan a ‘vacation’. Not that she would put it past Tyrande to storm her way up to Quel'Thalas uninvited when word gets out.
She sighs.
“Your aid in helping defend Quel'Thalas has been specifically requested by the Regent Lord,” she hesitates “and your sisters.”
Well. It’s not entirely true. Jaina doesn’t know what Alleria would think about this. She doesn’t even know if Vereesa would have said anything to her. Alleria doesn’t stop to chat, as it were – too single mindedly driven by the pursuit of Xal’atath. Jaina doubts she thinks she needs anyone’s help, let alone help from Sylvanas.
“Forgive me if I find that somewhat hard to believe. My track record of defending Quel'Thalas hasn’t exactly been stellar.” Sylvanas says with all the airy self-deprecation of someone who truly believes the crap they’re saying.
The mirror reflects Sylvanas back at her. It taunts her. Mocks her. Remember that time you submitted yourself to the mercy of Kul Tiras’s judgement because you believed your actions gave them a carte blanche for any punishment?
Those times had been simpler if anything. Facing her mother felt easier when she let her guilt weigh her down like an anchor. Let the waves drown her and the currents wash away her sins – bury the shattered pieces of her past at the bottom of the ocean so that she will never have to pick them back up. Time and again she’d done that, picked up the shards and tried to make something new, but Kul Tiras was a wound so deep she would rather have accepted death over fixing something so broken.
Now she has tea with her mother and brothers regularly in Proudmoore Keep. Now those jagged shards have been pieced together with help. Now she thinks she might remember some of that optimism from her youth.
She considers her next words carefully. She doubts calling Sylvanas a coward would work in her favour in this situation, but all she sees is a woman buried under a mountain of guilt hiding from the world. She sees someone who has grown comfortable in her isolation, someone who has convinced herself this is the best and only outcome for her crimes.
Maybe Tyrande thought this would be the ultimate punishment – to lock Sylvanas away forever with an insurmountable task.
Jaina disagrees.
“None of us can change the past, but I wake up every day striving for a better future.” She says. “Everyone deserves a chance to atone. This may be your penance, but do you ever plan to make amends with the people you’ve hurt?” People like me?
She bites her tongue before she can blurt that part out. She needs to get out of this place before it drags any more truths out of her.
“They’re better off–”
“Stop.” Jaina snaps. Sylvanas looks taken aback at this, and Jaina presses a hand to her forehead and tries to tamp down the anger that still swells too easily.
Fucking elves – mm. Not quite. Fuck this one elf in particular. Leave it to Sylvanas Windrunner to undo all the hard work she’d put into being less reactionary.
“I don’t care what you think about yourself. You can rot down here for all eternity if that’s what you want. I certainly won’t mind after you tossed me into that hellhole of a tower. This is me trying to be nice. This is me doing favours for people that trust me to come through for them. And for some Tides-forsaken reason they think you’ll come through for them too. So decide, or I’m deciding for you.”
The wide-eyed look on Sylvanas’s face might have actually made her laugh if she weren’t so pissed off.
The owl chooses this moment to alert them to its presence again. It lands on Sylvanas’s shoulder and looks at her in a way that suggests it knows what’s about to happen. Sylvanas looks back at it.
“Should I go, Dori’thur?” She actually asks the owl. The owl trills once – a bright sound that echoes faintly through the dark rocks of the barren landscape.
“You think so? Your mistress won’t be mad at me? At you?”
Dori’thur trills again –a sound of disapproval – and cuffs Sylvanas on the back of her head with a large wing. Sylvana’s ears flick again. She looks at the owl, looks at Jaina, then at the owl again, then sighs.
“I’ll go.” She says with a glumness that makes Jaina want to roll her eyes. She releases the tension in her shoulders with a long exhale and imagines she’s blowing out her irritation with it. It only sort of works, but well enough for her to nod back, draw her hand through the air, and mutter the incantations that would take Sylvanas home.
A brilliant blue portal with a shimmering view of Quel'Thalas blinks into existence.
Sylvanas strides up to the portal. Dori’thur the owl chirps and ruffles its feathers.
She hesitates. Turns back to Jaina.
“Thank you.”
With that, the armoured figure disappears into the portal. Jaina mutters a quick prayer to the Tidemother that she did the right thing this time before stepping through, ready to face whatever consequences the universe might hurl at her for unleashing Sylvanas Windrunner on the world once more.