A Baying of Hounds (Amirah)

This will be a story in two parts surrounding Amirah Andural's homecoming. It takes place somewhere around now in terms of the flow of RP. Comments welcome! Oh and thanks to Geldar for some aid in thinking through titles!

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A Baying of Hounds

Of that which was lost and broken


She stood at the crest of the hill, the night rolling in around her like a dark tide as the last soft glimmers of twilight faded from the western sky. The mountains of Alterac surrounded her like kings of old, their heads thrust back proudly, perpetual ice forming a crown upon each brow. Below, the grassy swathe of the Uplands, opalescent grey in the rising moonlight, unfurled like a pennant in the wind; the fertile soil lay overgrown and untilled, the farms fallow and the manors burned or abandoned, but the Uplands were still the cradle of life in those mountains. Across the silver thread of the river Renwythe, which was more stream than river except in the spring when the snowmelt rushed churning and frothing from the mountains, lay the valley that had once been the holdfast of the Andurals.

Some weeks ago, Lord Élegost Dawnweaver had brought her to the rocky crag that reared its head above the Dwyrel valley; before that day, it had been twenty-two years since Amirah had laid eyes on her own lands. They had reined in their horses that day, and Lord Dawnweaver had dismounted to look out across the crescent of the Uplands, pointing out places of strategic importance: winding mountain paths by which attacks could be mounted against the wary knots of Syndicate who remained in Alterac, hills and narrows which could later be defended, farm fields that could surely be retaken and resown and resettled.

Amirah had followed him through his planning, had given confirmation or correction based on her limited knowledge of the land, had offered advice in the careful, laconic way that was typical of the people of Alterac. Yet even though she had steeled herself for this moment since the morning, when she had seen the path Lord Dawnweaver had chosen through the hills, she had eyes only for the dell at the far side of the valley and for the huddled grey shape that stood at the base of the mountain. And then, in the midst of gesturing with a gauntleted hand toward the little river Renwythe and asking the merits of its ford, Lord Dawnweaver had paused, looked at her, and asked in a quieter tone if those were her lands. And Amirah had nodded.

This evening, beneath a gentle sky the colour of a ripe damson, Amirah stood amongst the dry hillgrass, muttering a brief curse at the injured leg that was still stiff after all these weeks, and settled herself to think.

More than half a year ago, when a ragged Alteracian household led by a woman claiming to be Lady Elydrian, last heir of the house of Lyons, had petitioned Stormwind for succour, the muttering in the streets had started again. Amirah was familiar with it; such muttering had dogged her steps in the city of Lordaeron when she had been a girl and her own household had fled there; such muttering had pained her soft-eyed mother, who was of the blood of Lordaeron herself, and had carved wrinkles into her father's already careworn face. She had not blamed the people of Stormwind for their distrust or for the way they spit into the dirt when they thought you weren't watching, no more than she had blamed those of Lordaeron. She did blame Ironforge.

The dwarves of Ironforge, whipped into a frenzy by a grasping war-senator, had used the appearance of the exiles and their request for aid in retaking Alteracian land as an excuse to march upon the snow-crested mountains of Alterac and to mount an assault to take it for their own. That was the day that Amirah had offered her sword to Lord Élegost Dawnweaver, the single commander of the Alliance who swore to oppose Ironforge's designs with military force. And the man was an Arathorian; the irony had bit into Amirah as keenly as any blade's edge ever had.

They had lost their fight: the ragtag Alteracian house with the quiet lady who was not a warrior at their head, and the Arathorian knight who had had the strange honour to defend a kingdom that was not his own, a kingdom that his own brothers-in-arms had once sacked and ravaged. Amirah had very nearly lost her life at the hands of Ironforge's armies, and yet somehow she had recovered from the axe wounds and from the musket ball that had ripped through her leg.

Along with the mending of her bones came a slow and grudging respect for Élegost Dawnweaver, Arathorian though he was. He knew good horses and how to manage hounds, and men followed him. And when she had been carried broken and nigh unconscious from the field of battle among the crumbled and frozen stones of Alterac, she had cried out for her sword, and Élegost, though hurt and bloodied himself, had gone back to find the grey blade and had placed it in her arms as she lay in fitful, feverish sleep amongst the bitter stench of blood and the screams of the dying.

In Amirah's eyes, defending Alterac had won Lord Dawnweaver redemption for the sin of his birth. And yet what was it that he had defended?

She looked out over the dark valley rolling away before her, to the sheltering hills that surrounded it, and the sudden hush of a latesummer breeze rippling through the tall grass came back to her as the sound of her childhood. She had given all of this up when she was a girl, when her family had fled to Lordaeron, when Stromgarde had marched their rough-handed armies to burn out a nest of traitors, and in doing so had destroyed everything she had ever loved. And then, when Lordaeron had fallen – Lordaeron that had never really been her home – she had given up her nobility, her honour, even her name.

And yet here she was. And for a moment Amirah knew that she understood why her brother Dorian had abandoned both hearth and kin, had even abandoned her, to stay in these lands even after they had been broken and destroyed and to bind himself forever to their ill fortune. Perhaps that had made him a traitor, but by Owain's shining spear, at least he had never forgotten where he belonged.

Amirah smiled, a smile that might have been chiselled from stone, and setting alight the oil-soaked torch that had hung at her side, she began to walk down into the Dwyrel valley and set foot on the soil that had once belonged to her house.

Right, I lied, this is actually going to be a story in three parts, as it's as yet nowhere near finished. Here is the second, with hopes that it's interesting!

Also, disclaimer. I am very fond of Alterac; it's my favourite kingdom in the WoW universe. As such I've made up a great deal -- old sayings, traditions, cultural references, geography and the like. Obviously they are merely that, made up by me, but I hope they may flesh out the place and make the story more interesting, as they've made roleplaying an Alteracian more interesting for me.

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Of the seeds that are planted anew

It is an old saying in Alterac that memory is the soil in which the seeds of grandeur flourish. The thought came to Amirah as she stood at the ford at the river Renwythe, the reedy shallows at her feet suddenly murmuring of the dozens of times that she had crossed them. The little river trickled through the middle of the valley, its path carved long ago by snowmelt from the white-crested peaks. The Andural lands had run on both sides of the river, and its waters had been a thing almost sacred to her in her childhood; the Renwythe, the waters which gave life to the dry fields, whose thawing in the spring was a thing of joy and vigour. In the mountains, the growing season was so short that every drop of water was precious, as was every day that the sun shone warm enough stir the crops into reaching toward the sky.

Amirah closed her eyes. It was the start of the harvest; a good year, with golden waves of grain stirring in the fields, and she was a mere child perched on a shaggy pony alongside George, the house's steward, riding to have a look at her father's farms. The peasants in the fields stopped and tipped their hats to her, mumbling their respects and calling her 'the little lady.' She didn't know most of their faces, browned and wrinkled like leather, nor those of the women who stood in doorways with distaffs in their strong hands and children clinging to their skirts. She had asked George about all of them, and he explained that every lord in Alterac had men who worked their lands, and then as he squinted across the ripened fields, he added that her father was one of the few who knew how to be a proper lord, for he went himself among the humble houses at harvest time, and knew some of the men by name.

And then it was April; frost still clung to the hard mountain soil and spun patterns on the shivering trees during the night, but the sun had grown a little less cold, and whispers of spring arrived in the form of frequent gusts of rain. A girl leaned over the neck of her first horse, a little dun mare that her father had given her on her ninth name day, despite her mother's soft murmurs of concern. The shaggy pony belonged to the world of children, and she was no longer a child, and she would ride away and see all the kingdoms of men! She spurred the mare across the shallows, stirring the sluggish water into a spray that flew like diamonds in their wake.

As she watched the soft grey stream murmuring away before her, Amirah laughed, the dry and almost soundless laughter that comes easily to the throat of those who refuse to laugh for joy. There was no grandeur left in the house of Andural, but if these were the memories in which she could sow the seeds of survival, it would be enough. The name was not yet dead while she lived, and the land would remember her and whisper at her coming. She set a boot in the shallow water and crossed the river.

It was nearly midnight when she reached the manor. The sky that had been soft with dusk when she had first come to stand at the head of the valley, the horizon coloured in muted purples and ambers like an old bruise, had grown stark and clear. The stars burned brighter in the mountains, each point glinting white against the velvet sky. Tonight was cloudless and it was cold for September, but to Amirah, it was a good kind of cold. She had been too long away from these hills.

She paused some distance from the manor house, lifting the torch that had burned low in the course of her walking. Even without the weak flicker of its light, she could tell that the stones were blackened by fire. The work of the Arathorians, she thought with a short stab of internal laughter. She had seen nothing, that night the Andural household had fled for their lives, but she had heard the men muttering curses afterwards, and had learned that they had seen the dancing torches of an army (a mob, one had said, spitting) marching across the fields they had abandoned.

And now she was to marry an Arathorian. A bitter twist came to her mouth as she stepped closer to what had been her home. Blackened it was, and the timberwork would have gone from the inside, but the bulk of the walls and the foundations still stood proud and cold beneath the stars. Élegost had been right; they could rebuild. And if Élegost was Arathorian, what, in the end, did it matter? She was the last of the Andurals, and beggars, as it was often said, could not be choosers.

Unexpectedly, then, Amirah's thoughts drifted to her youth again, when she had been thirteen and overheard her parents discussing the prospect of her betrothal. Her father said he would prefer the son of an Alteracian lord, though he also added that it was early yet to decide, but her mother suggested they look among her kin, the Aislinghalls of Lordaeron; Verdan's son Gerard was not much older than Amirah, surely that would be a prudent match. Amirah, with her ear against the heavy door, had barely contained a horsey snort: she had met her cousin Gerard when she had gone with her father to Andorhal to the annual livestock market, and she had not liked him at all. He was a hawk-nosed boy who knew nothing about horses or hunting and talked about Alterac like it was some backwater lord's holding.

And then, the year after, the betrayal had come, and Stromgarde's armies, and their disgrace. There had been no more talk of the sons of Alterac, of course, but her uncle Verdan from Andorhal had also become curiously cool, and there was no more talk of his son, either. For the next two years Amirah had been allowed to cultivate her own pursuits; there had been only the occasional suggestion of betrothals, but her father had always said 'when the time is right' in a weary way that had stilled even her mother's persistence. And then, at sixteen, she had chosen the path of a lightwielder. Although her father had forbidden her to take an oath like her uncle Cedric, who had sworn to take duty as his bride and to give his love to all the world in the stead of a wife, Amirah had the thought that her path would be the same.

She had thought so for a long time, even when she had left honour aside and the Light had abandoned her. Yet Élegost Dawnweaver had changed her mind, for despite his blood, he had not spoken of Alterac as if it were some backwater lord's holding, nor either as if it were simply the ruined kingdom of traitors. She had been thirty-six years in the world, and yet now she was to marry; she who had almost forgotten good manners and whose body was covered by old sword-wounds as sure as any veteran of the Lordaeron wars. And for a moment, she wondered what her noble husband would say when confronted with the extent of her scars, and a bitter, rusty laugh rippled in her throat.

Amirah raised the torch again, moving carefully among the tangled grass that had grown to cover the rubble of what had been the manor's outbuildings. Here, there was an overground mound where the stable had stood; there, a few stones that had once been part of the smithy wall. Despite herself she shivered, and it was not with cold; this was the ground of her ancestors, and she wondered how many disquiet ghosts kept watch over these stones. Well, she would ease them as she could; she would bring life to the desecrated soil and give whatever shreds of honour remained in her power to their name once again. And perhaps one day a son of hers would be lord over the Dwyrel valley again, while his elder brother safeguarded the Dawnweaver lands in the Eastfields of Arathor. Though it surprised her, the thought was enough to bring a faint smile to the tired corners of her mouth.

The third and final part! The hound, if you end up wondering, is the symbol of the Andural family; if you're curious why, that tale can be found here. And as always, my deep thanks for taking the time to read one of my stories <3 If you have anything to say about it, whether of good or ill, I'd be grateful.

==

Of the blood which courses through her veins

As Amirah paused before the proud ruin of the Andural manor, that which she had been expecting ever since she crossed the Renwythe at last happened.

The shadows flickered around her, dancing before her torch and receding into the cover of the night, rippling over the thin hillgrass and settling beside the night-crickets that sang of the ending of summer. And in the darkness behind her, something stirred.

'Who's that there?' came a gruff voice, still some distance away.

Amirah bent to extinguish her spluttering torch in the dirt. A twinge of pain moved through the old wound in her leg, but she ignored it, keeping her back to the voice and unhooking the small crossbow that hung at her belt. It was a poor weapon for war, but when travelling, it was a fair complement to her blade. Much to her sorrow, a sword was at times not enough to stay either brigands or wolves.

'I might ask you the same,' she said, fitting a bolt as soundlessly as she could, letting the darkness settle around her like a comfortable old cloak as her eyes adjusted to the delicate moon and starlight.

'I'm askin' the questions,' came the voice again, and Amirah heard footsteps drawing nearer, the pace quick to match the sureness in the tone, yet still careful. 'A woman, and you don't sound like one o' the hilldwellers from up the crags. So tell me sweetheart, who's walkin' on Eidrin Varryn's lands?'

Varryn. Amirah knew the name, as she had known the names of all the noble houses of Alterac. A mouse of a man, her father had said, on the days when he came back angry from the council of nobles in the city; the sort of man who never showed his hand until the course of an argument had already become clear, and then supported the winner with glib words.

A cold smile flitted across her face. It was a strange and bitter thing that Varryn, of all noblemen, should now claim the lands that her father had once held and protected and, in truth, loved. It was a knife-twist of irony that Varryn still held any ground, that he had not been washed away in the tide of ill fortune and entangled in the net of lies that had brought Alterac writhing to its knees. And yet perhaps his cowardice had saved him, given him time to escape and return to claim his scavenger's share: Varryn the vulture, the perfect figure to be still pecking at the corpse of the country, at the corpse of her own holdings. A sour taste rose in the back of Amirah's throat, and she turned around to face her questioner.

'Oh these are Lord Varryn's lands? Please accept my deepest apologies.' She loosed the bolt.

Her sword was in her hand a moment later as she leaped forward to cross the distance between them. The man had dropped whatever weapon he was holding to clutch both hands to his shattered side; he was still gasping with the impact as Amirah helped him to the ground with a kick. He slumped to his knees, and even in the cold, pale moonlight Amirah could see that his side and his hands were awash with blood.

'Don't kill me,' he said, his voice thick with pain. 'Just doin'... my job.'

Amirah looked down the length of her blade at him. He had Alterac in his appearance, a shock of dark hair, the slightness of build that distinguished the ancient blood of the mountain-dwellers from the bold, fair men of nearby Lordaeron. He was no peasant, from his apparent job as a ranger, but neither was he a figure of importance. He was of the viper's brood that men now called the Syndicate, to be sure, but that was all.

And suddenly the bitter taste was gone from her mouth; this man was no spectre, no threat. He was only a pawn in a great game of chess, and his master was only old rat-faced Varryn, at whose name men used to smile behind his back.

'I know,' she said, resting the point of her grey blade against his chest. 'If I had wanted to kill you, my bolt would have caught your heart.'

'Then what do you want, and who–' A wracking cough tore from the man's lungs and he slumped forward somewhat only to force himself upright again, for the swordpoint at his collarbone didn't move. 'Who are you?'

Amirah's eyes swept for a moment over the land before her: the tumbled ruins of the buildings that had once surrounded and serviced her family's manor, among which she had scrambled and ridden, played and practised; the little glen in which the manor rested, surrounded by swaying stands of aspens, their silvery bark bright beneath the moonlight and their leaves, which in the sunlight would be as bright as spun gold, their leaves whispering of the life that had once filled the dell before them; the overgrown track that wound like a grass-snake down the mouth of the glen toward the river and toward the gentle slopes of the Dwyrel valley. All this was who she was; it was hers to safeguard again, as it had been her father's before her and as it would have been her brother's had he lived.

She looked at the man kneeling before her, his mouth tight with fear or pain or both, and slowly she drew back her blade.

'I am Amirah Andural, last of that name, daughter of Medryn who men once called the wise, granddaughter of Arvidan the Ironhanded, of the line of Owain of the Shining Spear.' Her voice glinted as coldly as the stars, rising slowly to wrap itself around the two of them, to reach outward toward the aspens in answer their murmuring, to carry all the way to the river Renwythe and to be swept forth on its rippling waters.

'I want you to crawl back to your master, and I want you to tell him– ' She stepped back, raising her sword to draw it across the starspattered sky, encompassing the whole valley in the arc of her steel. 'Tell him that the Hound has returned to its hunting grounds.'