Spoiler: Isaera's Journey Home
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Past the tavern, Janene’s, where this jagged opportunity fell into your lap; past the rows of short, squat houses that smell like fish affable poverty; past the tower district, where the houses grade up into respectable and even luxurious by human standards; past the mage tower, in which the Lady Proudmoore and her cadre of Kirin Tor affiliate wizards did their research, and gazed from its high windows over the city. It’s almost embarrassing to call it a tower. Like their revealing garb, human wizard towers typically ape elven precedence even if they miss much of the architectural subtlety; but this tower is build in the alliance military format: taller than most buildings, but not so tall it could be broken with cannon fire at the middle of its shaft too easily. Pudgy, almost. Past the tower, past the fine houses as they slope back down into unimpressiveness and finally, at the border of where real estate can be considered respectable and where respect becomes an unaffordable commodity, you come to the Runescribe residence. It’s a one-and-a half story house, wedged between a two story house on the north side towards the tower, and a one story house on the south towards the southern city wall. One and a half, because much, even most, of the upper story is completed. The shingles carefully removed, frame for the second story layer and timbered and the new roof frame constructed from the old. But a full third of it is just the bare frame; the fullness of the project abandoned at a time when funds ran particularly dry and the family elected to sell off the remaining building supplies just for now. Canvas sheets have been nailed over the frame to prevent rain from getting too freely into the structure, but it’s a haphazard solution at best. But the completed sections of the upper floor, like every other other room, are needed for storage, and bedrooms; and weather penetrable though they may be, they serve their rough purpose.
You remember the day you and your family fled from Windrunner Village, with your aunts Jaana and Reyna and their young children in tow. There had been a full ten of those young cousins, then; none of them older than fifteen, still shy of physical maturity and well shy of being considered an elven adult. That was the second war; but it was the third, and the coming of the scourge, that put its scythe most deeply in your family. Your father and your aunt Reyna were both killed in the failed defence of Silvermoon. Your oldest brother Kaleneus survived and carried on in service before setting off to the battle of Mount Hyjal against the Archdemon Archimonde, from which he never returned. And your aunt Jaana took her five children to flee with a different group, tearfully reasoning with your mother that, splitting up, they had a better chance of survival. This was darkly prophetic advice: while your mother and family broke off from with a splinter group of refugees taking their chances in the troll-filled forests, Jaana and her children fled under the cover of a defence from the Farstriders - the battle in which, distant observers would later report, the undead brutally overran defenders and refugees alike, their terrible leader striking the soul of the ranger general Sylvannas Windrunner clear from her body, raising her then and there as a wailing spirit. Your family does not talk about Jaana and her children, these days; though their names are all carved into the wall by the blackened pot-belly stove that serves as a fireplace for your home.
All in all, you are considered lucky by elven standards. For every ten high elves, nine were killed by the Traitor Arthas Menethil’s hordes, and the calamitous circumstances through which the refugees were forced to strive. To have only lost half your family is, by that standard, enviable; but you do not often feel flushed with fortune. Of your cousins, the three girls - Dalana, Eira and Jasylla - are all apprenticing magecraft at the tower, in the grand tradition of your family. The boys - Aerdithane, and Rayadel - have taken labour work, to finance the petty supplies their sisters need for their studies, expecting some day to learn the arcane craft as well. This arrangement, like so many others, is just for now. Aerdithane and Rayadel are responsible for the partial construction of the second floor of the house, a decent enough job before it ran out of resource. They’re good lads, as close as brothers can be; and you almost never detect in them a trace of resentment that they are performing work with their hands that elves for so many generations before have done by gesturing at enchanted implements.
Your cousins are at work, and at study, when you arrive home; though you know your sister and brother and mother are all home before you reach the door. You can hear them from the stoop outside.
“...-how everyone is coping now, mother! It’s not a big deal.” Your brother, Tarien, his voice raised with a tone of reluctance to for having done so.
“What is ‘big deal’? Why do you always talk in these human expressions? We don’t do that in this house!” Your mother Aunara, less retrained, going a notch above Tarien’s volume to browbeat him, which usually works.
“Don’t yell at him! It’s not about him. It’s about you refusing to accept where we are now, and what life is like now!” Your sister Aleeana, by the sounds of it as much defending Tarien as taking an opening to antagonize your mother.
As you approach the door, it cracks open before you. Aleisha, the young daughter - perhaps ten years old - of the humans who live next to you in the two story house sneaks out, dustpan and brush in her hands, looking up at you with a faint smile but awkward apology glancing up from the tops of her eyes. Your mother pays her coppers to do jobs around the house; a vice that your family can’t afford but everyone tolerates, because it is silently agreed upon that the day Aunara Runescribe does housework is the day her spirit just abandons her body in final, mortal disgust. The ability to compel someone else to do the dusting and mopping may well comprise a significant part of her remaining pride as an elven woman of the last generation of elves to live the Quel’Thalassian dream, for as long as she did.
Aleisha is hard working, and uncomplaining, and she knows when to make an excuse and go home and come back tomorrow to finish working, and this is one of those times; so she hustles past you back to her house.
Inside, the fight is happening in the kitchen - or rather, the kitchen and living room, with the potbelly stove in one corner that warms the house in winter, and the two tables and ten chairs that get pushed to the side of the room in the evening so Aerdithane and Rayadel can lay out their fold up cots, just for now, until the upstairs is complete. Your mother is pacing, one hand raking back through her raven black locks in frustration, the other squeezing the stem of a carved wooden goblet, thankfully empty and in no danger of spilling in her angry motions. On the other side of the table, Tarien leans against the wall with his arms tightly folded like a bunker for his impressionable heart. But Aleeana stands on that side too, close enough to the table to be leaning over it, as if almost ready to jump over it, both hands before her clenching in the air like she’s trying to physically capture her point which her mother obviously cannot grasp herself. Unlike Tarien, Aleeana looks packed, and ready to leave. A cloak rests well on her shoulders, the hood back and tucked beneath her quiver and bow.
Aleeana might have been the most gifted of all your siblings, but she suffered from a lack of discipline that undercuts so many talents. Yet she learned easily enough magic to excel as a Farstrider Spellbow, and this is not the first time she has dressed up and threatened to be running off to become just that. That, your insight suggests, was the start of this conflict; but it’s migrated to a new topic which seems to have developed in your absence:
Both Tarien’s and Aleeana’s eyes are a bright, Fel-fire green.