The Second War

I had written this many months before, but the dramatic wording of it caused me to not post it until I could go back and edit the tone down a little. Months later, the tone isn’t edited down by more than a few word changes, but I’m calling it good enough to post despite my misgivings.

Though not an exhaustive look at the Sunwalkers’ doings during the Second War of the Warcraft universe, this hits the major happenings: Keelath’s death, Evelos’ departure south to join the Alliance, and Mirium’s downward spiral into losing her Light magic.

Author’s Note

Evelos tossed and turned. The grief was still too raw, sharp edged, and his mind fled from it, burrowing into other worries and inflating them, as if to make them seem bigger and more important than the loss that threatened to overwhelm him. It didn’t much help. The grief was too strong for that. Too far-reaching…

His father was dead. It had seemed like the knight could never die. Keelath had been hale and hearty for an elf of his age, a compact bundle of energy and will, striding through battle and domestic life alike like a proud flagship cutting through waves. Evelos had seen him saddened and shaken before, of course, and once beaten, but never broken. Never lifeless and empty, lids covering eyes that would otherwise stare without recognition up at his family, never again to see the sun riding in the sky behind them…

Dead. Evelos flung his covers off, setting his feet to the floor and willing the cold shock of the stone to bring him back to reality. But what reality? he chided himself a moment later. The reality was just as harsh and cold; the reality was his father was dead, and the flagstones only reminded him of that.

He had always wondered how the humans coped with such losses, with their little short lives that seemed to end every day. Now he knew. There wasn’t any coping with something like this.

Evelos flipped himself back in the bed, shoving his face in the pillow, trying to shut out the cold reality. Instead he just succeeded in robbing himself of breath for a few heartbeats. The soft choking sobs robbed him of a few more.

Dead.

“Oh, father. How could you.”