But the memory remains.
This place was home, once.
For a hundred years this gleaming jewel, this miracle of a city, was the only thing I knew. I loved her spires, the stained glass that glittered in the ever-present lights, the pristine streets, the endless springtime. I loved her gardens and her fountains. I loved her citizens' beauty and the deadly games we played.
How long has it been now...?
In the earliest time after the Betrayal I wandered the woods, lost and aching. The first time I laid eyes on the swath of black, dead earth littered with the corpses of my people - some cursed to still wander, just as lost and aching - I doubled over and retched up bile from an empty stomach. The Dead Scar, they called it. I followed it back to the walls of my home to find them smashed into rubble.
But it was not abandoned, as was the case of so many homesteads and estates I'd passed in my wandering. There were people up there. Living elves. A crowd of them, standing or kneeling, staring at the Scar with eyes as dead as the ground, and faintly green where they should have been blue. Lost and aching, but more than that: they were as broken as the city walls.
I'd called to them and no one answered. The first living quel'dorei I'd seen since landfall and only a handful of that disheveled crowd so much as turned towards my voice. I wept again and kept moving, thinking them no more than ghosts.
Perhaps they were. I saw them again, through my training in these despicable arts, after I'd been found. We were sin'dorei now. But every day there was a gathering of the silent, broken people staring at the Dead Scar with their dead eyes as if waiting for something or someone.
No one spoke of them in the city that was once my home.
Not the ambassadors who plead on our behalf to Thrall. Not my company, we proud and bitter expatriates who pledged ourselves to the Dark Lady. Not even the man with chestnut hair and the jester's smile that never reached his eyes.
And now they're gone. Not one soul remains. The stone beneath my feet bears no sign of their presence. Perhaps their numbers dwindled over the years that I've been so rapidly avoiding this place. One my one, succumb to hunger, disease, or Scourge. Joined the ranks of the Wretched. Picked off by Alliance. Light, who knows.
I'll bet no one even noticed. And now, it's as if they never existed.
I think, standing here where they used to gather, that I was right all along. They were only ghosts.
And I was so close to becoming one of them.
...I...I don't even know why I've come here, but I know I don't belong.
For a hundred years this gleaming jewel, this miracle of a city, was the only thing I knew. I loved her spires, the stained glass that glittered in the ever-present lights, the pristine streets, the endless springtime. I loved her gardens and her fountains. I loved her citizens' beauty and the deadly games we played.
How long has it been now...?
In the earliest time after the Betrayal I wandered the woods, lost and aching. The first time I laid eyes on the swath of black, dead earth littered with the corpses of my people - some cursed to still wander, just as lost and aching - I doubled over and retched up bile from an empty stomach. The Dead Scar, they called it. I followed it back to the walls of my home to find them smashed into rubble.
But it was not abandoned, as was the case of so many homesteads and estates I'd passed in my wandering. There were people up there. Living elves. A crowd of them, standing or kneeling, staring at the Scar with eyes as dead as the ground, and faintly green where they should have been blue. Lost and aching, but more than that: they were as broken as the city walls.
I'd called to them and no one answered. The first living quel'dorei I'd seen since landfall and only a handful of that disheveled crowd so much as turned towards my voice. I wept again and kept moving, thinking them no more than ghosts.
Perhaps they were. I saw them again, through my training in these despicable arts, after I'd been found. We were sin'dorei now. But every day there was a gathering of the silent, broken people staring at the Dead Scar with their dead eyes as if waiting for something or someone.
No one spoke of them in the city that was once my home.
Not the ambassadors who plead on our behalf to Thrall. Not my company, we proud and bitter expatriates who pledged ourselves to the Dark Lady. Not even the man with chestnut hair and the jester's smile that never reached his eyes.
And now they're gone. Not one soul remains. The stone beneath my feet bears no sign of their presence. Perhaps their numbers dwindled over the years that I've been so rapidly avoiding this place. One my one, succumb to hunger, disease, or Scourge. Joined the ranks of the Wretched. Picked off by Alliance. Light, who knows.
I'll bet no one even noticed. And now, it's as if they never existed.
I think, standing here where they used to gather, that I was right all along. They were only ghosts.
And I was so close to becoming one of them.
...I...I don't even know why I've come here, but I know I don't belong.