In all the millennia that the Shadows of Argus had been in operation, the draenei who had formed the order watched, pained, as their fellow comrades of other races fell to old age, disease, or occasionally, the sword. For thousands of years, they had faced all the challenges of a long-lived race in a world that was constantly changing.
The Exodar had taken off for good a few hundred years after it was repaired fully. Those draenei who left with it were going in hopes of finding Argus, finding their true home, even if few of them knew what that home was, even before the legion. Shadows stayed on Azeroth. Arloth, Maeorra, Nhadiya, and Lena were the central force of the order, always recruiting, training, seeing that their recruits were prepared for whatever came. About 40 years after that fateful day when they struck out on their own, they all mourned the loss of their beloved human ambassador, Isadori. But even that hadn’t prepared them for something like this.
Lena sat, mute, on the bed where they had placed her days ago, after her breakdown at the Exodar site. After tersely whispered conversations about whether wise to move her, Maeorra finally decreed that the order move temporarily into Darnassus. Nhadiya had been called to attend to her wounds, and Lena tolerated the poking and prodding, the washing and bathing, the smell of the healing salves, and the sometimes searing pain of healing a wound directly with the Light. Her missing eye was now covered with a patch tied around her head with a leather, and her other eye stared blankly ahead. Whether she was looking at a wall or a person or anything at all was up for anyone’s guess.
Nhadiya had just left, wrapping the mage in heavy blankets and leaving her sitting there, upright, unsleeping, refusing to eat the broth left at her bedside every day, refusing to speak, unable to make eye contact. The Consul’s eyes were worried as she tended the wounds once more, and she seemed to be blinking back tears as she dimmed the lanterns in the room and pulled the door shut quietly.
Lena was numb. Her body ached and burned, her eye socket throbbing still, but she was numb. There would be scars to come later, her once fairly beautiful face now ruined with jagged wounds that still seeped blood. Her nose had been broken. Several of her back teeth were missing. Her jaw had been dislocated. The rings in her ears torn out, leaving gaping holes in the lobes. The rings on her tail and tentacles smashed and embedded deep into the skin. Her horns were broken off. Her remaining good eye blinked slowly as she seemed to sway, feeling it burn from sleeplessness. Her breaths were shallow and slow.
Her magic was gone. And so was Krastos. The two most important things to her, and they had both been ripped from her all in one day.
She barely moved when the door slid open again some time later. Time had no meaning anymore. Whether it had been minutes, hours, or days, she didn’t care. But she recognized a vaguely familiar scent through her still bloodied nose and heavy hoofsteps in the room approaching her.
“Lena.” It was Thuleos. Kras’s nephew. He spoke tersely, but she didn’t respond. “Lena, you have to do something.” His words were barely registering in her brain, and her face remained impassive. “Are you going to let them win?” When she made no response, he sighed and pulled a chair closer to the edge of the bed and collapsed rather ungainly into it. “Krastos knew those bastards were looking for him. He always told me to stay out of the Underground. Once you get in, you can never leave…” He trailed off and sighed, resting his elbows on his knees and covering his face with his palms. “Don’t let them win, Lena.”
She dragged her one good eye toward him and blinked. Her voice, unused for days, other than the screaming and crying that happened when they found her, rasped determinedly, “They won’t.”
Thuleos looked up, obviously relieved that she wasn’t a lost cause, that she was looking him in the eye. He fumbled for one of her hands and squeezed it under the blankets, then reached for the broth Nhadiya had left. It was still warm.
She never took her eye off of him as she allowed him to feed her.
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