Bright Lantern, Cold Stars (Vale)

So, I've written this to explain my few weeks' absence from the game. I know it's a little surreal, but hopefully it is not a complete hodgepodge of confusion. If anything is unclear, just ask - I'd be glad to know, and happy to explain. I hope you enjoy the reading!

To set the scene: Vale Caan escaped the Cataclysm with the aid and companionship of Garthen Raelas. Ending up in Dalaran, she made some tentative plans to stay, but before she was able to establish herself in the life of the city, she went into labour and had her baby (Adrian) in a Dalaran inn. It was a difficult birth and now Vale is lingering between life and death, pursued by fever dreams and very little aware of her surroundings. The following story is one of her few moments of lucidity.

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Bright Lantern, Cold Stars

Deep at the heart of of her dreaming, Valerias Caan ran. A chorus of voices howled at her back, at once closing in and then the next moment seeming snatched away on some foul gust only to reappear as a choking whisper at her neck. And so, fleeing, her feet flew across heaps of broken red stone, her hair trailing like a comet behind her as she leapt across the jagged slabs, skirting the windblown detritus that snagged around the rockfall.

The desert she faced was none she had ever seen, yet all at once it was every wasteland that she had ever crossed. Each desiccating expanse of sand, each thirst raging at her throat, each tangled wood and each wolf – man or beast – that had ever snarled and leapt to tear apart her limbs: all these murmured from the crevices in the dead land, and all these echoed within the driving winds.

The red dust rose around her, and as the white-hot of the sun's glare began to fade into a sickly ochre, a sudden tremor gripped her chest. It wasn't the memories from which she ran. The light itself was broken; the sun was not setting but withering, and the sundered rock surrounding her was not that of a world already ravaged, as Draenor once had been, but that of a world that was in the last throes of its dying.

Cracks split the mesa as she ran, stumbling now when the earth heaved under her, the blood from her hands and knees disappearing into the rust of the earth– She lurched forward again, racing across the vast expanse like a cheap alehouse drunk on her last legs, while behind her the skies strained, pale green splitting across the yellow clouds like an infection, and a few seconds behind, as a spreading rot across the whole of the sky—a vast, swollen wave of darkness.

Her lungs were aflame with the warmth of all life remaining to the world, and still she ran from the empty skies, flinging herself across the rock to cross those last futile meters before the death of all things caught at her heels–


The eerie cry of a curlew, winging white-breasted across a golden sky, drew her from the unravelling skein of her dreams. For a moment she hung in the grasp of the shattered world, and then, clawing aside the shroud that wraps the spirit in its sleeping, Vale awoke, her lungs quivering and a dull fire burning in the region between her hips. A grimace stretched the corners of her wan mouth, and with what remained of her courage, she opened her eyes to a vaulted chamber from which the reluctant footsteps of the winter sun had only just stolen away.

She had dreamed these dreams so often of late that she was unsure how to measure the passage of days, or even of hours. As she looked up, her lungs stretched for breath.

The graceful window opposite her couch gave way to views not of a wasteland, but to the outline of an ethereal city, and rising from its midst – blurred soft like the strokes of a watercolour painting – an indigo tower.

It rose into the wisps of cloud above the skyline until its proud spire reached forth to brush the roof of the world. Below, eaves and balconies too elegant and too fragile to thrust themselves forward into prominence clung to the shadows around the tower's base.

She knew that tower, had stood at its crest, had once leaped in impossible safety from its heights... With such fragments of memory, Vale's eyes flitted across the apparition, fast fading with the departure of dusk. And then as night embraced the city, a light sparked all at once somewhere among the grey archways – a solitary firefly – and then the lanterns of Dalaran began to flicker into wakefulness, floating upward to join the first of their brave and glowing kin.

For one unearthly moment it seemed to Vale as though she had somehow fallen into the vast expanse of the sky – that she had become transfixed among the cold stars, flung forever gasping into the wake of their clockwork dance. She watched the pinpoints of light as they glittered against the darkened blue city, and for a second moment, she was a moth beating her wings against the silken tapestry of Fate in a beautiful gesture of futility.

What air is left to breathe beneath such ancient skies, she wondered—and what dreams remain that are not already long since dreamed?

With a weird sense of unease wriggling along the curve of her spine, Vale thrust back the persistent ache inside her and bent herself upward against her elbow. She turned a glance toward the door, and the solid stones of the chamber flickered before her like a mirage. A heavy breath. Perhaps, she thought, there was no longer a knife-twist in the dark reserved for her, payment for her crimes; but only the darkness itself. Perhaps, now, there was no lingering chance for life beneath the shade of her eyelids—life! Her arm shook with the violence of the notion. Had she not brought forth life, or had that blood and pain also been of the fabric of dreams? She snatched a hand from wrappings of the sheet, brought it to her stomach:

'My child!' she cried.

The twinkling lanterns spun giddily past; she lifted her head. She was of the Caans, of the sap and sinew of the forest– she would not give way–

Her limbs folded beneath her weight and the coverlets, pale cream and pearl beneath the light of a thumbnail moon, rippled and sighed around her.

'But what's to be done about the wee one?'

'Och, aye, the poor little lamb. And with the sweet lass all a-fever – can't think that she's havin' many days left.'

The cadence of voices rose and fell, gossiping crickets murmuring in a cold corridor.

'What about the young man, the one who's been lookin' in, always with his hands in his pockets and his eyes all full o' worry?'

'Oh, aye, but he's hardly said a word, least when I've had an eye on 'im. Dinnae think he's the wee lad's father, or if he is he's a right shy one. Hardly had a glance to spare for the little man–'

A shifting of skirts and the soles of shoes, and then an exhaling of breath like all of the wind going from a wooden instrument.

'Look at him– oo, ach, what a pair of lungs! Hush there now m'little love, hush-aby now. Oh sure someone will take him if the poor lass dies... if you'll just be lookin' in on her, Dari, she might be needin' another draught of th'poppy...'

The whispering of warm voices died away down the tangle of paths and passageways beyond Vale's door, but even amidst the haze that had wrapped itself with all the strength of spider's gossamer around her weary thoughts, she still heard the echoes of a child, crying.

'Adrian Caan,' her lips formed, but so dry was her throat that her words rose no further than to the sympathy of the winter air that draughted between the chiselled stones. 'Flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood! You who bear my curse, and who yet bear the promise of life!'

Her body heaved, aflame from ribcage to thigh, as she, still fighting, closed her eyes and thus laid herself bare before the embrace of the shadows. She thought of the son she had birthed but not yet clasped to her breast and claimed; she thought of the men she had loved and still loved, and of her ragged kin, who one by one had met their deserved knife-blades in dark and unforgiving streets. There was so little left to her that had not been racked by Fortune's cruel wheel, and yet she still had those few reasons for which she wanted to live!

When Dari slipped into the chamber, she found her patient asleep. The woman lay with a white arm atop the coverlets, her face flushed and shining with fever, and she muttered meaningless syllables in her uneasy rest. Yet strangely, as she fell silent again, the corners of her mouth had turned in what might almost have seemed, had Dari not been a practical sort of nurse with no time for idle speculation, the ghostly echo of a smirk. As Dari mixed the draught, she shook her head and, then as she crossed the room, the window caught her eye for a single moment.

In the streets beyond, the last defining lines of an indigo tower faded into the night behind the flickering of distant lanterns. And as the nurse turned back to her task oblivious to the dreams of the woman she tended, midnight settled over Dalaran, and the city and its slumbering inhabitants burned darkly beneath the cold scrutiny of the stars.