We’re now coming to the conclusion (at least for now) of my project to do at least one piece of fan fiction exploring all of my favourite World of Warcraft characters.

Ironically, despite her being my most played character by far and my mascot in the digital realm, Mai the rogue was the hardest to come up with something for. As much as I love her, she is frankly not the most exciting character. She loves her country, and she’s good at her job, and there’s just not much else to say about her.

But in the end I did manage to scrounge together a little something that should give you a bit of insight into what makes this master assassin tick.

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Infinite Paths

Above her, the sky roiled and twisted, reality eating itself alive before her very eyes.

Mai yawned.

She pulled her thick salt and pepper hair free from its pony tail and laid back in her bedroll, which lay upon hard rock in a Ren’dorei camp within the Voidstorm. Bedtime was one of the few times she ever let her hair down, in any sense of the term. She was a forty-something woman with a fit build and red-brown eyes that were always darting about, on the search for danger… or targets. Her massive swords lay on the ground next to her.

It had been a long day of scouting the surrounding landscape, the tedium broken only by a brief and violent encounter with an unlucky Domanaar. She felt the long miles of walking in her aching soles and tired bones, and unwelcoming though it was, this still wasn’t the worst place she’d camped in her time. In moments, she was asleep.

* * *

She awoke sometime later to the sound of a child’s laughter. She sat up, scanning the camp. It appeared almost emptied of people, the Ren’dorei guards nowhere in sight. The only other soul in sight was a raven-haired little girl, maybe seven years old, who ran off out of sight.

Mai narrowed her eyes. That wasn’t any little girl. That was her, or something that looked like her, as she would have appeared a little under forty years ago.

She was dreaming, of course, and giving her current location there was a pretty significant chance this was no ordinary dream, but the attempt by some malicious entity to influence her thoughts. Such things were one of the many hazards she’d been trained to combat, and that training had been put to use before.

Her efforts to will herself to wakefulness proved fruitless, though, and while Mai was a very cautious woman, she wouldn’t have ended up in her line of work if she didn’t also have a curious streak, so she decided to play along, for now. She slid out of her bedroll, put her boots back on, and strapped on her swords. She wasn’t sure if such things would be of any use in the dreamscape, but habits were habits. At least she didn’t feel so tired now she was asleep.

She looked around, and couldn’t find the girl wearing her face. That wasn’t entirely surprising. She had always been a little too good at hide and seek back in the day.

If I were me, where I would be hiding? In one of the tents? No, too obvious. There, that cluster of rocks. There was just enough space between them for a little girl to slip in.

Mai crept up to the stones in question and peered into the gap between them. A little girl with red-brown eyes smiled up at her, then darted off into a nearby canyon, giggling merrily.

The girl moved faster than should have been possible, and Mai lost sight of her again. No choice but to follow her into the canyon. She noted it was an ideal spot for an ambush, but if something was already in her head, why would it need to physically corner her? She trudged off, her mind on long ago games of hide and seek.

It had been a while since she had given much thought to her childhood in Elwynn Forest. “Idyllic” would not have been an exaggeration. Those first ten years or so had been well after the Second War, but before the Third, and life had been quite peaceful.

She had grown up in an immigrant family, her mother a paladin of Lordaeron and her father a humble carpenter from Gilneas, and they had always impressed upon her how lucky they were that the people of Stormwind had welcomed them so warmly, a lesson that hit home all too hard when the Third War broke out and Lordaeron fell to the Scourge, taking many of their relatives with it. While she was proud of her heritage, Mai had always considered herself a citizen of Stormwind first, and with the fierce of love her country that only a migrant can possess, she had chosen to serve it as soon as she had been old enough to enlist.

Almost immediately her instructors had noticed she was special. Mai still wasn’t entirely convinced her mother hadn’t given them secret instructions to keep an eye on her. There had always been questions about how Mai was able to hide so well, even when she was little.

There had been tests, exams. She had been determined to possess a talent for magic. Its strength was not enough that sending her off to train as a mage would have made sense, but it could be honed in other ways. She could meld with the shadows, walk without leaving tracks, sense a blow before it fell, and move faster than a normal person should. Before long she had ceased training with the standard cadets and begun more specialized instruction under the auspices of Stormwind Intelligence, an agency she served to this day.

The canyon fanned out into many small, twisting, winding forks. Mai looked down one to her right and saw herself again, but older now. This Mai was a young adult, practising sword forms with other recruits. This would have been before her transfer to SI:7.

The grinding of a saw caught her attention, and she turned to her left. That fork of the canyon showed another vision of her teenage self, but this one was in her father’s workshop, helping him to craft a set of cabinets. Instead of a sword, she held a saw.

She frowned. That wasn’t right. This vision had never happened. She’d loved her father, but she had never taken any interest in his work. She certainly hadn’t become his apprentice.

She crept on, passing more of the narrow canyons, each containing its own vision. There was one she recognized; a training exchange program where she’d received unarmed combat instruction from a Night Elf woman named Nisa Oakfist. But the others were unfamiliar once more.

She saw herself picnicking beneath a tree with a handsome young man. She blinked, and they were standing in Northshire Abby, being married. Blinked again, and the man was watching over two raven-haired young children in a cozy living room while Mai carried in a freshly baked pie.

Another vision showed Mai training in the blade once more, but not with soldiers in the barracks. She was outside the Cathedral of the Light in Stormwind, wearing a tabard of the Silver Hand. Blink, and now this version of her was striding across the battlefield on a radiant charger, the legendary Ashbringer in her hand. Blink again, and the paladin Mai knelt before the Sunwell, sweating in pain as she channelled Light to combat the Voidstorm.

The visions kept coming. She saw herself a cultist of the Twilight’s Blade, bringing a dagger down into the chest of a terrified prisoner. She saw herself on a gilded throne atop a pile of gold, red-masked members of the Defias Brotherhood kneeling at her feet. She saw herself as a toothless drunk, singing without tune but smiling all the same.

She remembered something she’d heard one of the Void Elves say. “The Light sees only one path, and views all else as lies. The Void sees every possible path, and believes they are all equally true.”

That was what Mai was seeing, she realized. She was being confronted with all the equally valid things she could have been if she had not become the person she was. The sinner, the saint, the mother, the lover, the harlot, the beggar, the hero, the villain.

This was the Void’s attempt to influence her, but it was not trying to hijack her mind with force. It was simply trying to undermine her resolve by showing her all the experience she had missed out on by being so devout in her duty to Stormwind.

The frustrating thing was that it was working. It was true that she had missed out an incredible amount of her life. She had spent nearly every day travelling to far off lands, sneaking through forbidden places, and fighting horrifying creatures. She’d had almost no opportunity for intimate relationships, barely even friendships. She had no family of her own, no chance to recreate the warmth and comfort she’d known in childhood. She had seen multiple worlds and done wondrous things most people had never dreamed of, but she also couldn’t remember the last time she’d had an apple pie. She had hardly ever let herself simply be a person; she was merely a weapon to be wielded by her superiors.

She wouldn’t change it. She would not abandon her duty now, nor would she choose a different path if some reckless Bronze Dragon were to appear and give her the opportunity.

But now, having seen firsthand all the other things that might have been, she could not honestly say she had no regrets.

She awoke, for real this time, upon whatever passed for morning in the shadowy hellscape of the Voidstorm. She strapped on her boots and her blades – for real this time – and prepared for another day of serving king and country.

She was so very tired.

Ever since I wrote that fan fic about my warlock back in Legion, I’ve had the vague idea of doing fics about all my World of Warcraft characters. Well, not all of them all of them, because I have dozens and that would be insane, but the ones I play the most, those that are nearest and dearest to my heart. In the current day, I would say that’s mainly my warlock, rogue, monk, and the new paladin from Pandaria Remix.

I covered my monk aways back, and revisited the warlock, and now I’ve finally gotten around to writing fics for the other two. Mai’s story will wait for another day, but today we’ll be exploring the life of my Blood Elf paladin (I still feel the need to distinguish her from the human paladin who was my Cata main, even though I don’t play that one anymore). If you look closely, you might notice an appearance by one of my other recent characters as well…

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In Love with Grief

The leaves of Eversong Woods sighed in the wind, like the whispers of ghosts.

Or so it felt to Bera Hearthflame, at least, as she moved silently through the brush of one of the forest’s wilder sections. This was a place heavy with memory for her.

She had lived for well over two hundred and fifty years, and most of that time had been spent marching the wilds of Eversong, a history writ upon her tanned skin and sunbleached hair. For many, many decades, she had patrolled the forests as a ranger, a Farstrider, making the wilds her home.

For a long time, it had been a relatively peaceful life. There had been occasional clashes with the Amani, as there had been for millennia, but most of the time the life of a Farstrider had been more that of a gamekeeper than a soldier, maintaining a magical realm enchanted to the eternal bounty of springtime.

She remembered late night bonfires full of song and cheer. Her fellow rangers had become her friends, then her family, and in one case even more. A face flashed in her mind, a girl with close-cropped golden hair and a shy smile.

The image sent a wave of grief twisting her gut, and Bera forced herself back to the present. She wasn’t a Farstrider anymore, but Eversong was still in her blood. She could see the tracks that no one without decades of knowledge would see, the bent blade of grass here, the tiny shift to the soil there. They were fresh tracks; her quarry was near.

With a movement as smooth as flowing water, she knocked an arrow to her bow, the wood smooth and the string coarse beneath her calloused fingers. It felt good, familiar as an old friend. She didn’t get to use her bow much anymore. She missed it.

The forest had changed since her days as a Farstrider, of course. It was still Eversong, just as she was still Bera Hearthflame, but both were forever changed by the scars of the past.

First had come the Horde. The Orcs had done great harm to the forest, and Bera had known the horrors of true war for the first time. She had been grateful to make it to the other side of the conflict with only one or two friends to mourn.

But then a few short decades later the Scourge had come. Her hand tightened on her bow, and her throat tightened as the memory of those terrible days rose up to consume her again.

It had all happened so fast. She and her fellow rangers – her friends, her family – had been held in reserve. Word had come that the unthinkable had happened, the Elfgates had fallen, and they had been called to the front. Bera had been sent to scout ahead, and been set upon by unliving monsters. She had barely escaped with her life, but by then the forest was drowning in the dead, killing, tainting, corrupting anything.

She had never seen anyone else from her squad alive again. Some, she had found the bodies. Some had risen, and she had fought for her life through blinding tears. Some she had never found dead or alive, but after weeks of fruitless searching, she had been forced to conclude they were lost, including the one person she had loved the most in the world.

Vay. I miss you so much.

In a day, she had lost everyone she had ever cared about, and the catastrophes had continued from there. The forest poisoned. Silvermoon decimated. The Sunwell tainted. Everything she had sworn to defend laid to waste. She had failed. The Farstriders had failed.

She had deserted, no one left from her chain of command to even notice. For long, dark months she had haunted the ruins of Silvermoon like a ghost, wracked by grief and arcane withdrawal; tortured in mind, body, and soul; drinking herself to death with wine stolen from the dead.

Then Rommath had returned from Outland, bearing gifts from Prince Sunstrider. New sources of magic. New ways to sustain themselves, and begin rebuilding their home. And one treasure greater than any other, the chained Naaru, M’uru.

If strength of arms had failed, perhaps stolen Light could keep their people safe. When the Blood Knights began recruiting, Bera had seen a way to serve her people again. She had put aside her drink and replaced it with arms and armour.

She had known it was wrong, even then. They all had, whether they admitted it or not. The soft song of the Naaru had echoed through the silent moments in the Blood Knights’ halls, and with each passing month it would grow softer, more sorrowful, more pained. They had tortured this being to death, bleeding away its Light to feed their own power.

But it had felt good. M’uru’s Light was not the sustaining power of the Sunwell, but it had taken the edge off the withdrawals, and more importantly, it had given Bera power, purpose, and the ability to make a difference again. She had been able to heal the sick, to smite the Scourge, to buy time for her people to rebuild.

Silvermoon had risen from the ashes. Eversong had been reborn, but changed. Where once it had embodied eternal spring, in its new incarnation the magisters had shaped it into an image of eternal autumn, the leaves red as blood and the air always just a little too cool to be comfortable. A picture of loss echoing the fading nature of its people – Shindu Sin’dorei, Failing Children of Blood.

The Sunwell had been restored, purified by the last sacrifice of M’uru, a selfless gift to the people who had never shown him anything but cruelty. Bera had never directly interacted with the Naaru, but the grief of his loss was almost as great as that of her former loved ones, for she knew she’d had a hand in it. Even now she felt his Light running through her veins, forever bound to the power of the Sunwell that sustained her people. Its warmth was a constant comfort, yet also constant reminder of the debt she and her fellow Blood Knights would spend the rest of the centuries of life trying to repay.

It was a hard road, but one she would walk, now until the end of her long days.

Such was the fate of the Sin’dorei. All of them had lost so many they had once loved. All of them had done desperate and terrible things to survive. It was a legacy of blood reflected in the crimson leaves of ever-fading Eversong, the forest itself a monument to a people forever in love with their own grief. It was what defined them as a people, what bound them together, the one thing that no one could ever take from them.

There was noise ahead, a crashing in the brush, and Bera crouched low, fading into the leaves like she was an extension of the forest.

Danger had come to Eversong again. The sky above roiled with the lightless fury of the Voidstorm, and twisted agents of the Twilight’s Blade lurked in the wilderness. It was them she had tracked to this distant stretch of forest.

Now, it seemed, they came to her. Several cultists in dark robes burst from the trees ahead, running all out. She didn’t hesitate. One, two, three arrows loosed. One, two, three lives ended.

They kept running toward her, and they came too close for her bow. She dropped it and drew the curved sword at her belt. One swift swing struck down one assailant, the blood lost among the crimson leaves. A wild-eyed man lunged at her with a knife, and the warmth of M’uru’s legacy filled her, conjuring a shield of golden Light upon her left arm. She deflected the blow, and then brought up her sword to cut the man down.

Three cultists left. She flung out her left arm, and the shield of Light soared through the air to strike the cultists, bouncing between them, leaving smouldering rifts in their bodies. They fell with soft cries, and spoke no more.

Silence descended on the forest, broken only by that haunting, sighing wind.

One more battle won, one more tiny step toward her redemption. It would take centuries to make up for her failure to defend her home, for what she had and her comrades had done to M’uru, but this was the blessing of her people. She had time. The life of an Elf was long, and maybe one day, it would be enough.

Bera frowned. She ran through the battle in her mind; something wasn’t right. She was more than a match for a cultist rabble like this, but even so, the fight should not have been that easy. Most of them hadn’t even had weapons drawn when they charged her.

She ran through the events again. Their wide eyes, their disorganized formation. They hadn’t been charging her. They had been running from something, and only happened upon her by accident.

An enemy of the Twilight’s Blade should mean an ally, but still, caution was wise. She cleaned and sheathed her blade, collected her bow, and crept ahead silently, eyes and ears alert.

Their trail was easy to follow. The original track that had taken them into the forest – the one she had followed to find them – was now mostly overwritten by the very obvious trail of their panicked flight. In just a few minutes, she crested a low rise and entered a shadowed glade full of the dead.

Bodies of cultists were strewn everywhere. Most of them were frozen solid, some rotten away by unnatural disease. The foul magics that had claimed the cultists had also ruined much of the surrounding plantlife, leaves and petals wilting under hoarfrost or rotting before her eyes. It was a horrifingly familiar sight, and Bera’s heart seized with the memory of the worst day of her life.

In the middle of the carnage stood a single figure, feminine in shape. Wearing dark armour, a tattered cloak, and deep hood, the stranger loomed over a supine cultist, whom Bera realized was still alive. Even as she watched, the dark figure held out one of her twin swords, flickering with icy blue light, and the cultist died a horrible, gurgling death as his blood froze from the inside out.

Bera knocked an arrow and aimed, pulse pounding as the terrible memories swirled in her memory. Scourge!

But no. She recognized those markings. Scourge once, but no more. This was a Dark Ranger, one of her former comrades raised into undeath, now free and fighting in defence of Silvermoon, if never truly welcomed back into Elven society.

The Dark Ranger turned to her, only now noticing Bera’s presence. Her body stiffened, a barely perceptible reaction but one that spoke loudly from one so far removed from the vibrancy of the living.

A harsh, dry, but terribly familiar voice spoke. “Bear?”

The arrow fell from Bera’s fingers, embedding itself in the soil. Her eyes stung, and her vision blurred. She could just barely glimpse the face in the Dark Ranger’s hood, and it was wasted with the ravages of the grave: the skin pale, the lips dry and cracked, the teeth rotted. But the familiar lines of a face she had known better than her own were still there.

It took three tries before her dry throat could form the name. “Vay?”

For a very long moment, the two former lovers just watched each other across the dark glade. The wind whispered in the leaves.

“You’re…” Bera almost said “alive,” but that would be terribly wrong. She settled on, “Here.”

It was such a painful wait for Vay to respond. “I was never sure if you’d lived,” the Dark Ranger finally said.

Bera took a shaky step forward. Vay stepped back. “I searched so long for you,” Bera said, her voice quavering. “I thought… I thought…”

“You thought right,” Vay said, harshly.

“But you’re not gone,” Bera said. “We can… we can…” She trailed off. Could they, really? With what Vay had become?

“You should go,” Vay said. “What you want is impossible. The ability to feel what we once had was one of the first things they took from me.” The Dark Ranger hung her head, and after another heavy pause she added. “I… I remember enough to wish you had not found me like this. Better you had grieved and moved on.”

“But we have found each other!” Bera said, pleading. “There has to be… there must be… there’s got to be some meaning to this! I can’t say goodbye to you again! Do you know how many nights I lay awake thinking I would give anything to see you again? To hold you even just once more? We’re not… I won’t give up.”

“Give up on what? A rotten corpse? The twisted echo of what you once had? The woman you loved is dead. I’m dead!”

“But you’re still you,” Bera insisted, taking another step forward. “Yes, what they did to you is horrific, and you’re… not the same… and maybe we can’t just pick up where we left off, but you’re here, we’re talking, and whether you want to admit it or not I can see that some part of you still cares. Maybe we can’t be together now, but after everything that’s happened, after all we’ve seen, can you truly say that there’s no chance that one day we might find a way to bring you all the way back?”

Tears dripped down onto the dying grass. “Shouldn’t we at least keep the hope for that alive, Vay?”

In the deep shadows of her hood, Vay’s emaciated face was unreadable.

Eventually, the Dark Ranger sheathed her blades. “Suffer well, Bear.” She turned and walked out of the glade.

Bera thought about going after her, but she knew it would be fruitless.

* * *

It wasn’t until some time later that Bera started retracing her steps back toward Silvermoon. The tears had eventually stopped, and duty drove her on once more.

The pain was still fresh and raw inside her, but she was no stranger to it. In the crimson shadows of Eversong Woods, the reminders of all that her people had lost were everywhere. It was what defined her people, an identity they did shy away from. Their obsession with their own grief, writ large across the ever-dying forest, was their sickness and their sustenance. It was what made them who they were, and each of them had found their own way to navigate that.

For Bera Hearthflame, it was to keep striving. To atone for what she had done, to honor the memory of those she had lost.

And now, at least, there was the faint and desperate hope that one of them need not be lost forever. The person she loved more than she had ever loved anything was still out there somewhere, and even if they could not be together now, the life of an Elf was long, and maybe one day, centuries from now, there would be a way to give Vay back what the Scourge had taken from her.

It was a hard road, but one she would walk, now until she could hold Vay again.

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Only belated did I realize the irony of a gay woman having “Bear” as a nickname. Not an intentional joke, but amusing regardless.