Immolation

Immolation, Part I

Oblivion. Murky bleakness eclipsing the sunshine of her immortal soul. No day. No night. No morning, afternoon, or evening. Time hemorrhaged.

The druid's eyes cracked open. They were crusted and shot with crimson veins, rheumy eyes that looked out and saw only darkness. Lids with too heavy a burden to remain open, they closed again as another convulsive sob wracked her frame.

Unmoored, adrift. Not in the Dream, not out of the Dream. Nightmares of her own design far worse than those that dwelled in Emerald. Twisted tentacles grasping, clutching, clawing, digging, dragging, rending. Invasive, persuasive, pernicious things skittering and crawling like smoky black threads of foreordination through the atrophying grey matter.

Her throat constricted uselessly. Her tongue was swollen and dry and the engorged muscle was stuck to the hard palate. Her teeth bore the fuzzy grunge of sleep and days without cleaning. How many days has it been? A week? A month? Too long but not long enough. She still breathed.

Breathing, a Herculean effort. Still as mausoleum stone. Thunderous aching from the roots of her mane to that now quiescent place of id. Inky vast universe with no suns, no stars, no life. Dominating. Devouring. Destroying.

Her nose was jammed full of thick green mucus and the turbinates inflamed and bloated from the constant crying. She couldn't smell a thing which was probably a boon given her current state. Her leathers hung limply on a frame suffering malnourishment. Her springy, silky pelt had become listless and matted like a mangy wolf. She didn't bother opening her eyes anymore to cast her lackluster view upon a world painted in cinereous hues.

Two tiny dragon whelps, one blue, one green, mortal "frenemies" to the last, had joined forces to further their cause - that of rousting their druid keeper out of her bed. Said bed was currently a vast tree limb high above the robust floor of Feralas' forests. Having finally escaped the overworked stable master, they followed her trail here and found a sodden, misshapen lump that even they had trouble identifying. After a bit of squabbling, which might have looked very much like a "no, you go first" argument, they each gripped a corner of a tattered blanket stained with sweat and the stench of bereavement and tugged on it with all their might. A feral growl erupted from beneath the contaminated wool hermitage as the bright sun lanced with bittersweet, unforgiving agony through her skull. The inside of her eyelids were striated starbursts of color from the infusion of heat and radiant light. The druid's hand clamped over the edge and roughly yanked the cover back up over her horns.

"Go away. Can't you see I'm busy moping and dying inside?" Runeclaw scolded them in a voice without enthusiasm. It echoed hollowly even to her own ears and sounded as foreign as a Forsaken's jawless guttering.

The dragons exchanged glances and seemed to have another entirely silent dialogue before they both inhaled deeply and then let loose a combined jet of sparking blue-green fiery vapor at the woman's head. The wool smoked and sizzled and popped as the dense weave fought ignition but began to smolder. Acrid plumes of smoke fueled by her own filth trashed the pure rays of the hours just past dawn with their swarthy impurities.

"What the fel!" she cried as she whipped the blanket off and began beating it thoroughly to extinguish the dragons' exhalations. While she may have been passively content to lie there and wither into extinction, she still had enough instinctual self-preservation to avoid being burnt to a crisp in the process. The minor effort left her drained and utterly exhausted, her breath whistling alarmingly through her tight throat and arid mouth.

Couldn't they see she didn't want to be disturbed? Didn't they understand that she wanted to sit here in her tree and brood herself into nothingness? Her brother and tribe were probably dead and now her dragons were trying to set her on fire, maybe even all of Feralas. She had been a terrible role model for the young whelps. Maybe she should return them to their places of origin and just be all alone. She was practically all alone anyway. Who cares if she lost what few friends she had left. They were all just animals.

"You're supposed...to be at...the stables," she wheezed. Every word rolled off her tongue like a boulder being pushed up a mountain. Trying to piece together a sentence seemed an insurmountable task. Twin pairs of eyes gazed at her hopefully as she tried to scowl at the whelps. Her fists gouged at her eyes as she tried to clear the cobwebs from her sight and her mind. Her stomach knotted and rumbled alarmingly, but her abused body lacked the energy to complete the dry heaving it so desperately desired. The duo fluttered a bit closer, and with a sigh, she scooped them into arms that trembled like a newborn giraffe's legs. It could hardly be called a hug since she didn't have the fortitude required to apply the slight pressure that a hug necessitated, but she gathered them closer regardless.

They may be just animals but they were still all she had anymore. "Something is always better than nothing," Elder Thal's words echoed through distant memories.

She shoved the memories down, swallowed them like a bitter pill, buried them under six feet of metaphorical earth, and then drowned it all in an ocean of icy-hot tears.

Immolation, Part II

Runeclaw stood on the deck of Hellscream's Fist. She was one of many who were making the journey today and the ship was overflowing to the brim with Horde. The wind at this height was fierce and buoyed by the engines of the monstrous dirigible. It whipped her braids into a frenzy that stung her face and forced her to squint against the onslaught of both air and mane. She would have rather been flying on her own wings, but she was still too weak to manage the form properly. She had cleaned herself up, as much as she ever cleaned up, and with the use of some clever strapping had managed to keep her armor from shifting and bunching in all the wrong spots on her lankier frame. She was eating again but only out of necessity to keep her body moving and responding to the commands she gave it. She no longer indulged in sweet treats and fizzy beverages for the sheer pleasure of feeling them on her tongue and sliding down her throat.

Nazgrim was shouting something again. He was always shouting. Runeclaw had been considering putting her spiky little horns straight through his gaping, yammering maw for the last half hour. Self-important snot, like the world revolves around his and Hellscream's petty squabbling with the Alliance. She was irritable and itching for a fight. She had been ever since her whelps had dragged her sorry carcass out of Feralas. They were back in the stables again, much to their displeasure, until she could decide what to do with them. The Cenarion had been sending letters from Mount Hyjal during her leave of absence, and she had burned every single one without opening them. She had no intention of going back there, back to them. Instead, she was moving on to cleaner waters. Opportunity was to be had in Pandaria if the stories could be believed, and she was unlikely to run into anyone she knew there. A derisive snort whistled from her nares as she folded her arms across her chest and leaned against a mast. As if I have anyone left to run into anyway.

The boom of cannon fire barely registered, so ensconced was she in her own brooding and internal kvetching. It took the third rocketing blast assaulting the airship to finally gain her attention and only then because her feet nearly went out from under her. She grabbed one of the lines to steady herself as her eyes narrowed at the hurry-scurry of the others aboard ship. Fellow Horde were running below decks to man more cannons at the general's urging bellow, and the captain was fighting for control of his crew and the zeppelin. The ship was sliding sideways in the sky and they were clearly losing altitude. The rate at which they were descending was increasing with each successive blast that buffeted the flying machine.

"You know what to do, Tauren. Get below decks and man those guns! Show these scum that they're in OUR line of fire!" Nazgrim shouted and pointed at her and then at the stairs leading below deck.

Instead of obeying, she thumbed her nose at the green-skinned orc and sneered. "Man your own blasted cannons, Nazgrim!" Runeclaw's grin was all feral fang but there was a bemused tilt to her eyes as she thought her retorting pun quite clever. She wasn't very schooled at "devil may care" attitudes, but she felt she was improving. It wasn't as hard as she thought to act grumpy when things well and truly sucked.

What's he going to do? Report me to Hellscream? She had a few choice words for him too if he wanted to get off his gilded, jewel-encrusted pedestal and lend an ear. She leaned over the rail of the wounded bird and peered at the ground. The heat of another blast blew her mane backward and assaulted her face with heat and smoke. Her chest spasmed with a cough as soot infiltrated her lungs. Too far to jump. She flexed her shoulders while considering an aerial descent but ceded herself to probably plummeting to her death if she tried. She wasn't a good flier even on an ideal day. Some Druid of the Talon I am. Grabbing one of the coiled ropes secured to the deck, she wrapped it around a leather-clad palm, slung it under her hips, and braced the dangling end in her opposite hand.

"Tally-ho!" she cried as she leaped off the edge and went rappelling toward the chaotic fray beneath them. Anyone could see that ship was going down. She had no intention of going down with it. She was neither captain nor crew and wasn't about to give her meager little life for a lost cause. About 100 feet from the ground, another concussive blast sent her swinging wildly through the air and she got tangled up in her own rope while struggling to keep a grip on it at all. She found herself hanging upside down while uselessly shaking her left hoof and subsequently causing the noose to become tighter with each jostle.

"Blethering fel," she muttered while patting herself down for something useful. Why did she insist on carrying a big stick when a dagger would be infinitely more useful on most days? She tried smacking at her hoof and sawing at the rope with her gardening spade to no effect. "Blethering FEL!" she shouted more emphatically. On the bright side, she was only about 50 feet from the ground now and it was rushing up fast to excitedly meet and greet her as the ship belched smoke and wheezed its life out of the air. Truth to be told, she felt like she was on the worst carnival ride of her life as she flew higgledy-piggledy through the air. Bile rose in the back of her throat. "No, no, no. No time for that now," she swallowed hard to send it back to her stomach where it belonged. She didn't even want to envision the mess of vomiting at this speed in these conditions.

Mere seconds before hitting the ground with catastrophic force, she metamorphosed to the form of her storm crow. The small talon easily slipped free of the binding.  Triumphantly, she spread her wings and immediately felt a wrenching pop through the head of her humerus as powerful winds mercilessly bushwhacked fragile feathered appendages. There was a moment of futile struggle for control of the sky, one wing dangling uselessly and the other fluttering like a drunken hummingbird, before she just sank like a stone. Hitting the ground flat on her back like a sack of bricks, the impact fortuitously jammed her shoulder back into its socket. A pained squawk shrieked through the smoky, fire-filled air as she slid across grass and mud to come to a head-hammering stop against the trunk of a tree. A large jade turtle lifted its head to contemplate the upside-down crow while chewing placidly on duckweed from a nearby pond.

Runeclaw let loose a gusty sigh as the crow shivered from her body like a spent fever and left only a road-worn Tauren behind. Guess I won't be flying again anytime soon. She winced and groaned softly as she worked to right herself, picking leaves and flowers from her hair with half-hearted gestures. Suddenly, she stopped and peered at one closely, sniffed it twice, and then nibbled the edge of the green tea leaf thoughtfully. "Not bad," she remarked to the turtle that only blinked languidly in response.

She could still hear Nazgrim booming across the glade but had no idea where he happened to be located. More the better, let him think I'm dead. He probably won't even notice I'm gone, just one more body. She stood up slowly, taking the time to evaluate her bones and joints were still in working order, and then looked around with wide eyes. Gunfire and cannons exploded across the pond, and she could see Alliance rushing to clash with the Horde who had survived. Shaking her head a little sadly, she turned her back on the spectacle and spied a little village nestled in the hill to the north. Tucking the tea leaf into her herb pouch, she set off purposely in that direction to see who or what she might find.