Future

[[Author's Note: This is set a thousand years in the future. The Exodar has been long gone, in search of Argus. Shadows is still in operation - though the draenei are clearly outliving all the other races. Lena and her mate Krastos had been captured by the Stormwind Underground, tortured, and Krastos was killed and Lena's magic was drained. ]]

Lena stood at the crater where the Exodar once stood, where it had crashed all those many years ago, arms outstretched and looking up at the purple skies of Azuremyst Isle. She was screaming. Her voice and throat were raw, lungs and head burning, feeling as if her insides were about to burst out of her at any moment. When breathing became an issue, she collapsed to her knees, body shaking with her sobs, where, eventually, her insides did come out, bent over the grown-over grass, retching until there was nothing left. She fell over, narrowly missing her own sick and continued to sob. Her body ached and itched, the wounds, she had thought, were not enough to kill her, but never enough to feel any worse than she did right now. She felt every one of her bones and muscles, grinding against each other. The tender socket where her once caring and cautious left eye had been not long ago throbbed around the empty space there. For once in her more than thirty thousand years, she felt old.

They killed him.

Thuleos stood a short distance behind her. The hunter, Kras’s nephew, had none of his usual trademarks. No cocky grin, no sarcastic, sardonic, depreciating attitude. He had been silent and stony-faced, his joking, manipulative demeanor replaced with a fierce grimness that took over his entire countenance. Arloth and Maeorra stood even further back, seeming to have a conversation with their eyes, keeping careful watch on the drained mage, weapons at the ready in their unsteady hands. Lena had no more magic. Her torturers had somehow siphoned it from her. She had come back babbling incoherently, as if they had taken the very parts of her mind that held the arcane. She couldn’t even summon her arcane familiar.

They killed him.

Her beloved shaman, her fierce, tough, true-heart-of-a-warrior shaman. Her mate for thousands of years, so long that they had long stopped counting. Her heart. Her shaman. They killed him. For thousands of years, they knew a day like this could come. Would come, eventually. But nothing prepared her for what had actually happened.