Wildfire Riders

He had rode out from the shadow of the necropolis with nary a farewell, with the creak of armor and the automaton thunder of hooves. His departure had the haste and precision of cold rage, but under his visor is a face smooth as ivory, hollow as bird bones. Clutching the reins, bent to the neck-bones of the husk of a horse, he'd rode into winter's clutching fingers, looking for the blocky shadows of the fortress he knows is out there. When his mount, following the well-worn tracks of its own routine, had carried him there, he'd dismounted and planted iron-shod feet on the outskirts of the keep.

A charge is too impersonal. He has to see their faces.

He hasn't been waiting long when he glimpses them advancing steadily through the blinding snow. There are four, detatched from some watchtower or barracks to attend to the intruder. They will make no attempt to identify him, to question, to solve this incident with anything besides steel and fire. Northrend, everyone knows, is a place of many questions and very few answers. He wills all his muscles to relaxation, feels the weight of the sword at his hip and the great axe dangling from one hand, the cold shelter of cobalt iron about his body, and the four shapes grow and coalesce from silver-tipped blurs to human forms. Three men and a woman, in the red and white of their doomed order, fighting the war their fathers lost for them.

The stylized L on the lead man's surcoat digs at his memory with rodent claws. "Jakob Balthasar," he murmurs to himself experimentally. The words are lost in the snow, settle across him with his armor. Yes. They fan out, the lead man and his female counterpart with sword and shield, a bulky man carefully loading a crossbow behind them, a smaller one in the rear with a small golden sun spinning about his polished staff. They are in no hurry to come to grips with him.

"Jak," he says to himself this time, and another voice echoes it. "Jak." Empty eyes, a slight waist, an air of ruin. Not what he is looking for, but all of a sudden he is in a hurry. As the flankers come closer, Jakob Balthasar plants his feet, lowers his shoulder, and rushes through the snow sweeping his axe low and across. It crunches into the woman's hastily raised shield, and her return stroke glances off his pauldron. He's close enough now to speak in the voice that slavery left him, calling the name of a jagged rune that writes the story of winter. He can see her eyes widen, the blood drain from her face as the cold sickness enters her.

The swordsman rushes his side, screaming the name of a dead kingdom, but the man has no footing in the snow, no grace to his steps. Jakob, heavy iron sentry that he is, opens the gallery of his soul and lets the winter in, and it embraces him and guides his feet. He turns and glides to the side, and whispers another ancient word, and the snow opens where he stood and swallows the Crusader's ankles. Crusaders. Fanatics. What they took from me. He whirls and slices at the swordswoman as she warily approaches, and this time when she raises her shield the blade shatters oak and iron and the arm beneath. She shrieks in pain, but doesn't drop her sword. Hair like autumn, stubborn tenacity even in the face of damnation. Where is she now?

The air thrums a warning, and he ducks his head just a slight inch. It's enough, but he still feels the concussion as the barbed tip of a crossbow bolt strikes and spins off at a mad angle from the smooth curve of his helm. The woman is coming for him as her companion reloads, flickers of golden light playing about her features and restoring the color to her face and the strength to her arm - but not stripping the fear. That was Her tool, the Lady of Shadows. The only one He left her. Jakob speaks the name of the north wind, and it comes howling at his call, with force to strip the flesh - more than enough force to knock the swordswoman to her back in the snow, to spoil the second man's shot, to steal the sanctified smile from the priest in the back. It won't last, though he knows - the swordsman is freeing himself, the surprise is over. The priest calls out from the back, words he could not hear through the chill wind even if he cared, but their meaning is obvious. Spare none the blade.

So he speaks another rune, and feels the knotting of his limbs and the seething agony of his face as he lets Hell in.

Yammering faces, hot with coward blood. The rage is evident, but the words are silent beneath the all-consuming roar of his erstwhile Master's Voice. The towering resentment, the black bile, the tyrannical wrath, all echo through the cavern of his mind. "You will be Mine again," He promises. "Every step brings you closer. Every faltering smile is a weak lie in the shadow of My barren truth. End them, and come to Me."

For some reason, he sees that hated face reflected in the Crusaders, in their blind determination to shape the world to the arc of their petty terrors. So he goes to the culling with the will only the damned can muster, with steps as light as snow, with blows as heavy as condemnation. The dread axe, torn from his Master's house, whirls about him and seperates blades from hilts, limbs from bodies, souls from meat. And in the masks of their dying agony, he sees faces he remembers. The wind whispers names to him - Eloim, Shukir. Bloodcrow, Bittertongue. And the rest.

When he is done, three are dead, in gobbets and ruins on the snow. Only the woman remains, one of her legs bloody gristle. Her sword is still in her hand. He approaches, the Voice still hissing and roaring and barking from the shadow at his back. His axe is buried in the priest's spine, so he draws his own sword, and with his other hand lifts his visor and lets her see the face of the last son of Balthasar. "Pretty, eh?" he croaks with a voice rusted through by snow. But she is too far gone for fear, and in the porcelain beauty of her face prepared for death, he glimpses his salvation, whose love is ice and fire and wind...

He thrusts the sword down between neck and shoulder, crunching collarbone and cutting to the proud heart, and as he does so he spits Hell out. The flesh creeps back onto his frame, the lids slough back onto his eyes. The voice of the Traitor whirls away into the wind that heralded it, and-

- Jakob pulls his sword from the woman's body with a hot gush of blood, staggering back, weak as a kitten for a moment. His side is stitched agony - one of them got him through his armor and the embrace of winter. There's a twist of scarlet on the dead woman's sword, echoing the carnage about them, and he goes to his knees with his hair hanging into his face, willing himself not to vomit. Blood has long since ceased to bother him, but the vertigo of restitching his name onto the tattered banner of his soul will never get any easier.

"Yva," he whispers, and a smile splits his pale face like the faintest edge of the rising sun. "Yva Darrows." Jak lets the shakes subside and then gets to his feet, collecting his axe, cleaning his weapons, probing the wound in his side and plugging a makeshift bandage through the rent in his armor. He leaves the bodies where they fell - after all, the condors must eat too - and makes for where he left his horse. In half an hour he is at Wintergarde Keep, exchanging mismatched coin for the reins of a lean, fierce gryphon, and less than an hour from that he is in the streets of Dalaran, his youthful face nearly twitching from all the memories that buzz and whirl beneath it. The armorer who services his torn plate wonders how this lad, who looks barely twenty when he smiles, could bear the many-scarred armor that he does.

She is asleep when he gets home, a dim presence in the winding sheets of their bed. Loath to wake her, shame and fear roiling up from his guts, he instead kneels by the bed and takes her cool hand. Pressing it to his forehead, he whispers her name again, and closes his eyes to better see the great cold distance between them.

It had happened again, and from what he'd said, it would happen again, and again, and again.

And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The man that walked into the battle – her Jakob, the one who wore the wry smile when he was happy - was not the man that walked out. She knew why, she knew it was the lich-granted powers of the Ebon Hand changing him. Arthas's taint was a parasite; it fed off of every emotion, every memory like a starving sow at a trough, until all that was left of Balthasar was a metal covered husk. The automaton had a sole purpose now, to rend flesh from bone, to cut a swath through whatever stood in his way until nothing stood in his way. It was his function, his purpose, and she could not change that.

When he turned to look at her, his eyes passed through her. It was the most disconcerting thing she'd seen in a long time, and she'd seen many, many disconcerting things of late.

Arthas has taken so much from me, and now he takes him, too. No one said life was fair.

The last time Jak became the hollow man, he'd gone away for most of the night. He'd filled his void with the blood of those deserving to die. Tonight, though, tonight he wanted to go home with her. She couldn't tell if it was a blessing or a curse. He sat at their table, watching her move as she ladled stew into a pot on the stove. A part of her wanted to fuss over him, to smother him with affection to see if it would help, but what was the point? If he couldn't feel, anything she felt, anything she did would be meaningless to him, too.

You can't fix this for him, Darrows. He has to fix it himself.

The soup began to boil, and she crumbled a packet of herbs into it, watching the parsley float up to the top.

“It's almost ready,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron.

“It smells excellent.” She winced at his voice. How could it sound completely lackluster AND like he was trying too hard all at the same time? He'd added inflection at least, which was more than she'd gotten from him last time, but the problem was it was feigned - the tone was crafted because he recognized he sounded empty. Nothing was natural, and that made it all together worse.

“I think it'll do. Naxxramus is nothing if not cold.”

“Aye.”

The bowls were above the stove, in cabinets too high up for her, and she motioned at them with a flick of her wrist. “Can you grab those for . . . “ her voice trailed. He was staring at her. It wasn't looking, it was staring, like he was trying to memorize her movements, her build, her everything.

No, remember them. Remember why he likes those movements, more like.

“Of course.” He rose, brushed past her to retrieve the bowls, his hand hovering mid-air. “Dear,” he said suddenly. “Of course, Dear.”

“Yes. Dear.”

His smile was a strange twist of the lips.

They ate in an oddly silent kitchen. Every once in a while he'd say something about Naxxramus, trying to engage her in conversation about this abomination or that, but she couldn't do it. She tried, for him she tried, but the last thing she wanted was to listen to a voice that wasn't his coming from his mouth. Her answers were anemic at best, and sooner rather than later he realized she was nearly as gone from him as he was from her. The last of their dinner was wordless.

Her spoon clanged against the side of the bowl.

“Sleep,” she announced, keeping her eyes downcast. She cleaned up her dish, moving aside when he joined her at the sink. His elbow brushed hers, and she winced away. She was so shattered at what was happening to him she couldn't bear the simplest touch, and it made her nauseous. “I'm sorry. I'm trying. I . . . “ She cut herself off. “I'll see you in the bedroom.”

She felt his eyes on her back, but she wouldn't turn around. She slid her robes off and her nightgown on. Still he peered at her, and still she avoided that assessing gaze, her gut churning at the idea that even this couldn't stir him. She climbed beneath their blankets and smeared her face into the pillow. When the mattress creaked beneath his weight, she clamped her eyes closed, suppressing a whimper.

It's not his fault. Don't make this more difficult than it has to be.

She knew what she was doing to him – to them, really - wasn't right, and so she forced herself to roll over, to close the distance she'd put between them. Her face settled into the crook of his neck, breathed him, and his arms instinctively wrapped around her. He was warm to the touch. The skin smelled like him. Everything was as it should be.

It. Still. Felt. Wrong.

He wasn't here, hadn't been here for hours, and she was essentially abed with a stranger.

“Damn it!”

Anger now, hard and fast, and she shoved away from him, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress.

“Have I done something?”

“No, of course you bloody haven't. He has. He's done this, and . . . “ Her fingers shredded through her hair, pulling her bun apart until black waves fell about her shoulders. “Oh gods, never /mind/, Jak.”

She stomped from the bedroom, snagging her robe from the peg on the wall before opening the terrace doors to look down at the Dalaran night. The streetlights flickered like a carnival, the people there laughed - she could hear the echoes of their voices even from this great height – but nothing helped. Not the beauty of the evening, not the smell of cherry blossoms on the air.

I want him back. I need him back the way he was. That's the only thing that will right this, and he can't give it to me.

“You're angry,” he said from somewhere behind her.

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry?” She shook her head, her fingers clenching on the railing in front of her. Ice drizzled down the irons. It spread across the terrace and over to the wall, climbing the building side like a perverse, magical ivy. “No, you can't be sorry, can you? Because you can't feel it right now. And that's not your fault, it's the Bastard King's fault. I'm the one who should be sorry. And I'm not. I'm angry, and I'm scared, but I'm not sorry.“

He placed a hand on her shoulder. “I understand it. I do.”

“DON'T!” She whirled on him then, slapping his fingers away from her. She wanted him to look stricken, hurt, but he didn't, and it fueled her rage. “Don't understand it! Don't grant me some misguided absolution. I don't want it.”

There was a flinch, a small one.

Good. Let me hurt you. Let me hurt you because hurt is better than nothing, and maybe, just maybe . . .

“What happens when you don't come back, Jak? One day, when you go so far that the nothingness stays? What happens when you don't care for me anymore because the lich has taken the capacity away? Do you just linger here like a phantom, wishing you remembered what loving me felt like?” He turned his face away and she moved so she was directly in his line of sight, she was blocking his escape by standing between the terrace and the living room. “Is that it, then? You'd stay in hopes of recapturing what you lost? And how long do I wait? Because if he's still doing this to you, if he still has this power over you, I know of no bloody way to break that. I can put you in a ritual circle like your sister. I can kill myself trying to break the scourge tie, but then what? I've given it back to you at what cost? “

She breathed hard, nearly choking on the air filling her lungs. “And the worst part,” she said, her voice nearly shattering. “The worst part is I would do it. I would put myself through that again to fix you, because I love you. And what does that say about me?”

Her hand flew to her mouth to stop the laughter threatening to spill from her lips. It wasn't good laughter. It wasn't cruel laughter. It was near hysterical and quickly spiraling towards out of control, and she wouldn't go there now. She couldn't make it worse for both of them. She already felt sick at the things she'd said, and there would be no solace in madness, only more pain. Instead she bent over at the waist, holding her stomach, her eyes stinging with shame.

The pregnant pause felt like an eternity.

“It's all right,” he said quietly. “It's all right, Yva.” And for the first time since he'd walked into their home that evening, the words felt rich and full, and her name on his tongue was as right as it should have been.

Gods be praised, thank you.