Larkspur Plagueheart

A runeblade was the seat of a death knight's soul, more than the rotting meat that bore his name when he was raised and bound to the Scourge. It made only sense to Larkspur to bequeath Terminus Est to Krenyn on the event of his second death; whether or not there'd been plans and oaths and orders otherwise, he knew which of them would die first--because while the idea of the Lord-Commander Bloodflame all alone was hideous and heart-tearingly awful, it was possible, while a Larkspur-without-Krenyn was monstrous and impossible and beyond thinking of.

He just wished dying wasn't so hard.

Krenyn found him collapsed in their garden, curled on himself like a crushed insect as his body ate itself from within. Decaying muscle and tendon wouldn't even allow him the decency of crawling off alone to die like the sick animal he was. He couldn't even lift his head at the sound of footsteps approaching, couldn't raise an arm to hide the shame that burned through him. It wasn't supposed to end like this. He should have died years ago in battle, not through years of slow decline from one shameful, worthless death to another--

"Larkspur."

There was no pity in the lord-commander's voice; but nor was there remonstrance or anger. (Though they had long ago lost an audience to play to they'd kept up the act of master and servant, commander and knight, for their own amusement and perhaps because it was how each had learned the other man's needs. Now all that pretense was brushed aside.) Krenyn's tone was one of sorrow, deep and knowing. He'd expected this would happen and it undid Larkspur completely as he felt himself being gathered up onto his partner's lap and held close to the stolen heat of the larger man's body.

"I'm s, sorry Kren," he sobbed, scarcely able to shape the sounds. "'m so, s-sorry, sorry, so--sorry, f'r being worthless a, and lea-eaving y, you--" Words stuck in his throat and he coughed, choking on blood and froth and what had once been his lungs. It couldn't end like this and for a moment he fought being held, desperate and weeping, but a moment was all he had strength for before collapsing again.

Warm fingers stroked through his hair heedless of the fact clumps of it came out at a touch, tracing down to stroke the line of his jaw without shying from the spots where flesh had peeled from the bone beneath. "Hush, beloved," Krenyn soothed, pressing his hand to his partner's lips and letting the warmth of living Blood flow down Lark's throat, relieving the pain but making it no easier to talk. "You should not apologize to me."

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. "'S w, worthless, never, never good--never l, loyal t-to you, like you, deserved."

"I don't regret a moment of our time together," and a string of kisses interrupted the flow of self-recrimination, "but that we did not have more of that time. Hush, Lark, and rest; I'm very proud of you.

"I always will be proud of you."

They lay together for long hours in the rays of the westering sun, one blind and ignorant of the dying light, the other too concerned with his dying lover to care. Krenyn stroked Larkspur's hair and spoke to him in low tones, telling him the story of a quel'dorei mage who lived and died and lived again for the sake of his family and received more love than he had thought to deserve in the bargain.

He held the smaller death knight as Lark shuddered and screeched and wept with terror in the presence of things that existed only in his decaying mind, hallucinations he was too weak to fight or flee.

At last, as the sun slid below the horizon, the lord-commander sat with his partner's head cradled in his lap, fingertips resting against the death rune imprinted into skin and broken bone. They had run out of easy words to say; that did not mean they were without language of touch and contact and posture, though a companionable silence that hung thick with grief lay between them.

Until a whisper broke it:

"Kren."

"Lark?"

"Think I, I sh--should sleep, n, now."

"Sleep, then, beloved. I will watch over you until you wake."

"D, don't know. Know. If I'll, w--wake up."

"Even if you do not, I will be with you, in this world or the next."

A stifled noise escaped Larkspur's throat: the beginning of another sob, even as he turned his head to press his face against one of Krenyn's hands. "Love you," he breathed, and, "thank you."

"Rest," Krenyn said again, the sorrow raw in his voice.

And this time when he drew on the death pact between them, unravelling Larkspur's essence through the death rune, there was no pain.

"Duty before self." -- Motto of House Dawnherald

He tells the living and the dead alike he doesn't dream when he sleeps--that "sleeping" isn't the proper term for it anyhow; he's awake to what's around him, insensible as he might seem--that the apparatus of dreaming long-ago decayed along with his sight and his reason and the other useful parts of his brain; and like everything he's invented and re-invented about himself since being dragged half-blind into the twilight realm of undeath, that isn't strictly true.

The aftermath of terror stirs the muddied waters of his consciousness like a prowling shark, sending rotting fingerlings of half-digested memory skirling in its wake. They aren't important--most aren't important--and more than anything after a shock to his system so severe (he lied and i believed him gullible fool my fault m y  f a u l t  stupid stupid slut) he wants to let exhaustion take its course--decorum be damned--and let him sleep.

But Memory's awakened, and Memory stirs, and puts on a pretty, green-eyed face, and Larkspur dreams:

"I should have strangled you at birth, for all the use you've been to me!"

She is beautiful and fierce and perfect, even standing outside the bars of his cell, saying things that aren't--that can't possibly be--true. Hair so wheat-pale as to be nearly white, fine of feature and delicate of frame in a way that hides deceptive strength, Dionaea Sunwatcher is beautiful and no one watching the two of them could mistake the lines of heredity that tie the pair together.

"--or never let the old fool sire you on me in the first place! Ridding myself of him was the best thing I've done for our House! And now this!"

She is beautiful and absolutely insane and he is in love with her, a gaping fool for her, exactly as she planned it.

"Larkspur!"

She slaps the bars in front of his face and he shies back like a startled horse.

"You stupid, filthy little traitor. Do you know how much this has cost me, you little ingrate? Do you understand what you've done to me?"

Somehow in the midst of the shock of revelation--(she killed Father?)--and the sheer inside-out, upside-down madness of the entire scene he finds his voice and finds it calm: "This wasn't for you, Mother. This was for Silvermoon."

He isn't sure what's worse: The look of utter incomprehesion she fixes him with, or the words that follow:

"Silvermoon? You stupid little fool, I raised you to be loyal to me, not some faceless fucking city!"

"Mother--"

"Shut. Up. You're useless to me, Larkspur."

"I would be lying if I said it is not a bitter pill to swallow. Everyone wants to be first sometimes. To not always feel like second best. Or third. Or fourth."

i Don't know that i shld be writing this down but hes gone now &

there's some things I can't talk to Krenyn about & some things I shldn't talk to Meri Mero Meri FUCK IT Merosiel about & if he didnt tell khaavren & Ori about ti i shldnt be the oen one to tell them again he's gone

& besides i dont think i can put up with Khaavren being hateful

not that it's not his right

no fuck dont write about that, stupid larkspur

what i should be writing is that kae is gone

&

I dont' know if he will be back at all or back alive

if he does come back because he's gone to the scryers now saying that they used to be Sunfury once as if that means they'd be safer than throwing hm himself on the socalled fucking mercy ha ha of the fucking conclave in Silvermoon & really if he thought about it he'd realize that the scryers hate us MORE for not going with them because it means now they have to kill us over the prince's madness & one stupid fucking decision is all thats between old friends and family and lovers and shieldmates

& i asked

if He was going out there to die & he said no of course not that's why he'd been running in the first place

& then i cried on him b/c i'm a stupid fucking failure of a knight & a friend & a sunfury & a traitor & a man

but he wasnt afraid anymore & he wasn't running & he wasnt even Kae anymore he was Al'arien

& that is why I don't know if he will come back because Al'arien has nothing to lose

. ... .. . .. . .. .. . .. . ............ . . . . . . .. .. . .. .. .. .. . . .... .. &

noone will see this while im still around

which is why its okay to be writing all of this with Real Names

so while i'm doing that I want to set the record straight on smthg

b/c if He dies out there & i die before i tell anyone this someone needs to know even if no one really cares what i think

i APOLOGIZED for everything i called him to his face BUT i said a lot of things behind his back because i am a bad friend & knight & everything

& stupid

& Jiel asked me once why if Kae was such a bad person why we didnt just kill him

never mind we don't go around killing people just for saying stupid shit to other people and making them want to die though maybe the world would be a better place if we did

& & i didnt

look i didn't say wat what i meant right because Jiel still doesnt understand but what

i meant

to explain is that whats bad in kae is what is bad in all men & few of them choose to restrain

and what is good in kae is what is good in all men & few of them choose to display

& he gave me back a part of myself the LIVING me that would have been gone forever & i'm not the only one he helped that way even if he was just being selfish or pretended he was to get by like most of us do

& now he made the choice to be more than his fear which almost NO ONE ever does

And

I'm afraid

i dared him

to his death & he's out there alone

and going to die the way i did

for the people he loves

& if there were only one wish i could have now it would be to take back every time i called him a selfish fuck because i was angry.

. . .

walk in the Light, Al'arien Dawnstrike. wherever you are.

& come home. I love you & i'm not the only one.

It started to rain as Auroran walked away with his eyes, the sounds of the priest's crying dissolving into the plash of raindrops hitting the waves.

The boardwalk overhead wasn't watertight and afforded ill protection from the wet. Drops rancid with dust and the day's refuse pattered against his skull, washed the sea-salt from his hair, trickled down his ears and the back of his neck and curves of his battered face. It stung where it seeped into the Light-burns, igniting anew the pain of ruined flesh trying to knit itself back together only to fall apart again. Some of it began to pool where his eyes had been and this wasn't nearly so painful, just strange and unwelcome.

He tried to blink, as futile and stupid a reflex as breathing.

It was so dark.

A moth refolded its wings with a velveteen rustle in the dry haven beneath his discarded breastplate. Around him a thousand raindrops raced toward the sea, each dribbling and dropping and plinking along its own path in a fluid cacophony. Across the bay a captain yelled at his clumsy deckhand; in the rooms above, a pimp at his clumsy whore; somewhere, a woman dropped her last precious teacup and burst into tears over the pathetic wreckage. Metal ground against metal as he shifted his bound hands enough to pull Terminus Est closer to him and lay his face against her haft, skin-covered bone against leather-wrapped metal.

He could taste the monstrous remains of himself bound into the runeblade. Fever and fear and righteous indignation of the unsleeping paladin in the apartment above trickled down with the rain. There were goblin-smells, living-smells, jungle-smells saturating the air besides: Blood and breath and sex and food, heartbeats and viscera, green and growing things.

He should have gotten up. He had his 'blade and his wits and needed nothing more to free himself. There was no reason to linger and wait for the Kamil to take a second blood-price and drive a blade between his unprotected shoulders.

It was so dark.

Now there were no colors, no glimpses of motion at the edge of vision. No familiar smears of red and black, smelling like Krenyn or smelling like Kae. No blue--green--when, if, ifwhen he could bring himself to stand in Merosiel's presence again.

'Sorry,' he had said to Auroran, 'sorry, sorry, sorry,' an avalanche of apologies, piling on each other; once he'd begun he found he couldn't stop his traitor tongue from spilling the words. 'Sorry,' as if it could be an anodyne for the terrible scent of grief and shock the priest wore like a dead woman's blood ingrained into his slept-in clothing. 'Sorry,' even after the deed was done, and Auroran wasn't the one losing the eyes.

At least he wasn't so stupid as to say what he was sorry for; the awful, evil trick that they had played. It was wrong and nothing would convince him otherwise. Nothing would convince him it wasn't necessary, either, not when the paladin denied outright ever harming Merosiel in his madness and his bitch-jailor smelled of glee at the news and spoke of whores and objects.

He had told Auroran to smile. Be magnanimous in victory. The priest enjoyed exacting his blood-price; it came as no surprise, though, that all Merosiel's friends were predators.

Even maimed, stupid predators who would likely be dead by morning.

(He had promised Krenyn he would be alive when Krenyn found him.)

If he would know when morning came, robbed of light.

(Krenyn would surely be here before morning.)

Campion shows up in the same full armour Lark saw him in the FIRST time they clashed. He tugs on a gauntlet and eyes the death knight.

"Merosiel!"

He's had the fleeting, mad thought before that if he could scream loud enough--if he could kill enough people, if he could make a large enough disturbance--he could call the dead and the lost back to him by force of will alone.

"MEROSIEL!"

It's the madness of a diseased mind; the insanity of a rotting brain. There's no bringing them back when they're really gone. No amount of spilled blood, no number of shattered limbs, split skulls, silenced voices will absolve him of failing them when they needed him most, of not being there just as Meros is not here. Driven from house to house in a crush of armored bodies, wailing like a mourner, he finds neither hide nor hair of what he's looking for; no indication the faithless jailors have kept their promise, no sign his friend still lives.

"Where are you?!"

The mêlée spills out onto the streets, guards falling to the cobbles as he weaves among them with all the lewd grace of one of the Scourge. Here one trips over his own guts and falls in a groaning, dying heap; there another froths and shakes and collapses like an unstrung puppet as plague eats her from within, and he should take joy in the carnage but he can't. (Another guard drops from a heavy backhand blow; finishing her with a headsman's stroke from Terminus Est, he kicks the body into the canal.)

He can't, because something has happened to Meros, something has happened to Merosiel, because--he mounts up the steps of a bridge, not caring he's being chased to the heart of the city--his friend isn't answering him, and something has happened there are blood and terror in the air tonight that are not because of his rampage.

"Meros! Answer me! What have they done to you?!"

They can hear him calling, screaming himself hoarse, and each respite he gets is shorter than the last. This time they bring a paladin--a fucking, Light-sucking paladin; why aren't they looking for MEROS?--and he calls the lately dead back to their feet to aid him against their once-allies. All is fair in love and war and where is he they promised they promised they wouldn't kill him--

"CAMPION, YOU CHILD-MURDERING SCARLET SON-OF-A-BITCH! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MEROSIEL?!"

---
Our Lady Peace -- "Denied", Taproot -- "Lost In the Woods"