I. Two Women Wake (And One Doesn’t)#
The basement. Before dawn.
Tomorrow came.
Giselle wakes on the floor of the Shadowlily guildhall—a rented basement, forty silver monthly, moldy and hers. Death knights don’t need sleep, but the body remembers habits the soul forgot. Last night she pinned the charter to the wall and stared at it until the candle gutted itself, then sat against the stone and simply… stopped.
She opens her eyes. The charter hangs in pre-dawn grey. Five signatures. White flowers sketched beneath: For the girls who bloom in poisoned soil.
Twelve copper. Two blankets. One rusted sword. And a promise she made in the dark: Starting tomorrow. Find the first girl who needs saving.
Tomorrow is here.
The camp. Three miles outside the walls.
Tomorrow came for Reyneese too. She doesn’t want it.
She lies in her cot with the blanket pulled to her chin, silver-white hair splayed across the pillow like something drowned. Oil stains on her left hand from the Chariot. Bandaged right shoulder where her sister’s warglaive caught her. Between them, a body that has survived ten thousand years and currently cannot survive the idea of standing up.
Move. The warband needs you. Yreneese is captured. Someone is pulling strings—
She rolls over. Pulls the blanket higher.
Five more minutes.
The sun climbs. Birds sing. Somewhere in camp, something crashes.
Reyneese does not move.
II. The Camp Stirs#
The void whispers before sunrise: Wake up. Everyone is doomed. Your glasses are on the left.
Zyneese opens one eye. Pale lavender irises catch pre-dawn light. Glasses—correct. The void is occasionally useful.
She brushes her hair—chestnut with purple sheen, forty-five strokes minimum—because when pit lords tear through market squares and twenty-foot mechsuits rocket through the dark, you control what you can control. Eyeliner next. Sharp wings. Precise. A statement that says: I survived a demon lord and my hands don’t shake. They shake slightly. She compensates. Nobody will ever know.
She clips on the gold hoop earrings—the large ones, the I have survived worse than you set. Inspects the cracked mirror. The Ice Queen looks back. Armor intact.
First one out. The OC-91 Chariot stands at the perimeter in low-power mode, twenty feet of golden proof that yesterday happened. She rebuilds the campfire—frost mage making flames, the irony not lost—and does the thing she’ll deny forever: puts Reyneese’s kettle on.
That’s almost kind.
“It’s practical. A caffeinated priestess is less insufferable than a tired one.”
You love her.
“I tolerate her. Aggressively. Shut up, void.”
Avelreese has been awake since 5:30 with a list. WARBAND RECOVERY PLAN—POST-RECKONING. Perfect calligraphy. Numbered. Color-coded. Eight items from injury assessment to meal planning.
She stares at it. They won’t follow it. She knows. But the plan isn’t for them—it’s for her. The illusion of control in a world that dropped a pit lord into a civilian market.
She finds Zyneese at the fire.
“I’ve prepared a recovery schedule. If we begin with—”
“How many of your plans have worked?”
Avel removes her gauntlets. Puts them back on. The nervous habit she can’t shake.
“Zy, we almost died yesterday.”
Zyneese stops. Looks at her. No sarcasm. “I know.”
“I need the plan. I know nobody follows it. I need it anyway.”
Pause. Fire crackle.
“Then make the plan. I’ll pretend to read it.”
Edge of camp. Vyrneese sits cross-legged on a boulder, crimson ponytail bouncing in the wind, counting the last stars as dawn bleaches them away. The constellations she memorized twenty thousand years ago in the Forbidden Reach have drifted. Some stars she knew are dead. The sky is a stranger wearing a familiar face.
Lulureese thumps down beside her. Emerald hair catching the light. Tusks gleaming. Flower crown woven from yesterday’s wreckage—because of course there were flowers in the rubble, and of course Lulureese found them.
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Watching the stars leave.”
“Dey not leavin’! Dey just hidin’. Behind da sun.”
“The ones I knew won’t come back.”
“Den ya gonna meet new ones!” Lulu hugs Vyrneese’s arm. Vyrneese doesn’t flinch—she’s learning.
“The stars are still wrong.”
“But da flowers be right.” Lulu places a small ring of wildflowers on Vyrneese’s head. Vyrneese touches them. Doesn’t remove them.
At 8:15, Lulureese finds a cat.
In the rubble at the city outskirts—where the warband went for damage reports—behind a collapsed fruit stall, trembling in scorched cloth: patchy grey fur, one torn ear, a small burn on its flank from pit lord hellfire.
She drops to her knees. The cat hisses, swipes, draws blood. Lulureese doesn’t blink. She shifts into cat form—small, non-threatening, belly low. The market cat freezes. Sniffs. Same. Kin. Not-threat. Collapses against Lulureese’s side.
She shifts back to troll form, the grey cat cradled in her arms. Wraps the burn in a poultice from her satchel—always prepared for animal emergencies, never prepared for anything else.
“I’m callin’ ya Cinder. ‘Cause ya survived.”
Back at camp, Zyneese sees her first.
“No.”
“Dis be Cinder! She got HURT in da fire from da demon dat attacked US.”
“We’re not adopting market cats while on the run from whatever wore that grey hood.”
Lulureese holds the cat up, huge amber eyes meeting pale lavender. “Look at her FACE, Zy.”
“…Fine. It stays out of my tent.”
“Cinder, dat means she like ya!”
The void whispers: You absolutely said that.
“Shut UP, void.”
Brasskeese processes yesterday through numbers. Short, compact, green-skinned, goggles on her forehead, grease welded into her fingernails. She sits at a plank desk surrounded by schematics and does the math.
Chariot fuel cells: 15%. Structural integrity: 67%. Shoulder rockets: 2 of 6. Estimated repair: 847 gold.
Warband funds: 212 gold. Outstanding debts: 340. Total deficit: negative 975.
Not a budget. A punchline.
She flips to a new page. PRIORITIES—REALISTIC. Chariot repairs. Warband equipment. Intelligence on the grey-hooded figure. Supplies.
INCOME OPTIONS: Quest contracts. Engineering commissions. Alchemy—IF REY WAKES UP. Sell the Chariot—ABSOLUTELY NOT.
She underlines it three times.
Avel appears with her calligraphy list. “Brass, I’ve prepared—”
“How much does recovery cost?”
“It’s not about—”
“Everything is about cost. We’re 975 gold in the hole. Your plan costs money. My repairs cost money. Finding that grey-hooded wraith costs money.” She takes a pull from her mug. “First, we let Rey sleep. She carried us out—her and the Chariot and the engineering I taught her. Second, I fix what I can. Third, we take contracts.”
“That’s actually a plan.”
“Difference between yours and mine? Mine assume everything goes wrong.”
“That’s pessimistic.”
“That’s goblin.”
III. The Smoke#
Giselle stands. Frost crackles from her joints—cold lives in her now, leaking from dead muscle and frozen marrow. She flexes blackened fingers. Pulls on leather armor that’s seen better centuries. Straps the rusted sword. Climbs the stairs into Stormwind’s pre-dawn grey.
She feels it before she sees it.
Not smell—dead sinuses. But the air is wrong. Heavy. Charged with something acrid that even dead lungs register as not right. Fel residue. She’s tasted enough—Outland, Northrend, the spaces between living and not—to recognize the signature.
Something demonic happened in this city.
The streets confirm it. Too empty for dawn. Closed shutters. Barricaded doors. Guard patrols doubled. A guard sees her, stiffens, hand on sword.
“Death Knight. State your business.”
“Walking.”
“Eastern market district is closed. City order.”
“What happened?”
He decides she’s not worth lying to. “Demon. Pit lord. Tore through the market yesterday evening. Half the district’s gone. Some warband fought it—a priestess, a golden machine twenty feet tall. Flew away before the thing leveled the whole quarter.”
“Casualties?”
“Civilian—dozens injured. People lost everything. We’ve got displaced families at the cathedral steps.” He hesitates. Lowers his voice. “Witnesses say someone else was there. Grey hood, face covered. Opened a second portal mid-fight—not the demon’s. Colder. Took one of the warband’s own and vanished.”
Giselle stares east. A pit lord. Displaced families. Lost homes.
Girls who bloom in poisoned soil.
She walks past the guard. He doesn’t stop her.
IV. The Market That Was#
The eastern market square looks like Shadowmoon Valley.
Not Nagrand’s floating rocks. The other Outland. Hellfire Peninsula. The parts where fel corruption turned earth into scab.
Cobblestones cracked in radial patterns, split from below by impossible heat. Buildings that framed the square—bakery, tailor, merchant stalls, a small inn—hollowed out. Walls standing, interiors gutted. A sign hangs by one hinge: Millicent’s Morning Rolls. Paint blistered to nothing.
Fel residue clings to the wreckage. Green-black sheen, oily and wrong, fading—demon magic doesn’t linger in consecrated cities—but death knight eyes see corruption the way living eyes see sunlight.
And there, in the center: two massive impact craters. Hoofprints. Six feet across.
Pit lord stood here.
She kneels. Presses her palm to scorched stone. Cold. The fel heat burned out hours ago, leaving dead ground. Corrupted soil. Where nothing should grow.
She thinks of the draenei girl in Shadowmoon Valley, humming as she picked white flowers from blighted rock.
What if broken places could still grow beautiful things?
She stands.
V. The Cathedral Steps#
The guard was right. Three dozen people camped at the cathedral. Families with children sitting on bundled possessions. An old woman clutching a ledger—shop accounts, the only thing she grabbed. Two dwarven merchants arguing with a priest about compensation.
And a human girl, maybe twelve, sitting alone on the bottom step. Arms around her knees. Staring at nothing.
Priests distribute blankets. Paladins offer healing. The geometry of people being managed rather than held. Giselle knows this geometry. She’s seen it before—Gilneas when the wall fell, Northrend when the Scourge marched.
Nobody is sitting with the girl.
Giselle approaches. Her armor creaks—frost, old leather. People flinch. A woman pulls her children behind her skirt. A man mutters death knight like a curse.
She’s used to it. The dead are always the first ones blamed.
She ignores them. Sits on the step.
Silence. A minute.
“I’m not going to ask if you’re okay.”
The girl glances. Glowing blue eyes. Frost-black hands. Too numb for fear.
“Good. I’m tired of people asking.”
“What was in the market? For you.”
“My mum’s stall. Candles. She made candles.”
“And now?”
“Now we sit here and wait for someone to tell us where to go.”
Twelve years old. Soot on her face. A bandaged burn on her forearm. Eyes dry—the kind of dry that comes after crying stops and something harder sets in.
“Got a place. Not much. Basement. Two blankets. Moldy ceiling.” She pauses. “But it’s warm. It’s mine. Nobody tells you where to go.”
The girl studies the death knight’s face. Undead pallor. Frost hands. Rusted sword.
“You’re dead.”
“Twice.”
“And you’re offering me a basement.”
“Offering a choice. Stay here. Wait. Or come with me and build something.” Her voice shifts—still rough, but steadier. Almost careful. “A place for girls who lost everything to something they didn’t deserve. Called Shadowlily.”
“That’s a weird name.”
“It’s named after flowers that grow in fel-corrupted soil. Shadowmoon Valley. Nothing should survive there. They bloomed anyway.”
The girl considers this. Twelve-year-olds don’t process metaphor the way adults do. But she processes the important part: someone sat down. Someone isn’t asking if she’s okay. Someone is offering a door instead of a blanket.
“Is it really moldy?”
“Extremely.”
“Fine.”
VI. The Priestess Rises#
11:47 AM. The kettle Zyneese put on has boiled, cooled, and been reboiled twice.
Reyneese opens her eyes.
The world is too bright, too loud, too present. She hears voices, clanking, something that sounds like Lulureese introducing a cat to Vyrneese. She sits up. Everything hurts—not the shoulder wound, that’s healing. This is deeper. Soul-tired. The exhaustion of channeling ten thousand years into a fight that wasn’t enough, then trusting a machine built with shaking hands, then watching your sister get dragged screaming through a portal.
She makes it out of the tent seventeen minutes later. Hair unwashed. Robes wrinkled. Oil stains uncleaned. Reyneese at her worst is still 6'2" of statuesque night elf with luminous eyes—but today the aura says I have seen civilizations fall and currently would like to fall back into bed.
She shuffles—shuffles, the priestess who usually glides—toward the campfire.
“REY! Ya up!” Lulureese holds up Cinder. “I found a cat! Are ya—ya look…”
“Terrible,” says Zyneese.
“I was gonna say tired.”
“I said what I said.”
Reyneese sits by the fire. Not in her usual composed pose—knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. Small. Tired. Not wise. Not ancient. Just a woman who barely survived yesterday.
“I’ve been the anchor so long. The one who says I’ve seen worse.” She stares into the flames. “Yesterday, I’m not sure I have.”
Nobody speaks.
“Someone used my sister as bait. Summoned a pit lord into a civilian market. My magic failed. And the only thing that saved us was goblin engineering.”
“Best damn engineering,” Brass says, gentle for once.
“I woke up and couldn’t move. Not injury. Heaviness. Like every year of ten thousand settled on my chest at once.”
Lulureese puts Cinder down. Walks over. Sits next to Reyneese. Doesn’t hug—for once, reads the moment. Just sits close. Shoulder to shoulder.
Zyneese refills the kettle. Says nothing.
Avel folds her plan. Sits.
Vyrneese comes down from the boulder. Sits.
Brass closes the ledger. Stands behind them.
Five women around a fire. The sixth, dragging.
“Ya don’t gotta be da anchor today,” Lulureese says quietly. “We be ya anchor.”
“What she said,” Zyneese murmurs, adjusting her glasses.
Reyneese looks at them. The ice queen who built a fire and made tea she’ll deny. The knight who makes plans nobody follows because the making is the point. The ancient weapon wearing a flower crown. The sunshine girl with the burnt cat. The goblin who counts everything because counting means controlling.
Her family. Holding her up when she can’t stand.
Tears form. She doesn’t hide them.
“Thank you.”
She takes the cup. Drinks cold tea. It’s terrible.
It’s the best she’s ever had.
VII. Two Doors#
The basement.
The Shadowlily guildhall welcomes its first resident.
Giselle gives the girl the second blanket. Lights the one candle—then catches herself. Candle-maker’s daughter. The girl stares at the flame like it’s a ghost.
“I can put it out.”
“No. Mum would—” She stops. “Leave it.”
Giselle pins parchment to the wall next to the charter. Scratching death knight handwriting: First bloom.
The girl is already asleep. Exhaustion—the real kind, when the body shuts down because the mind can’t process anymore. Twelve years old and her world burned yesterday.
Giselle sits against the wall. Watches the candle, the charter, the sleeping girl. Thinks about hoofprints and a priestess with a golden machine and a grey-hooded figure who opened a portal that wasn’t the demon’s.
Tomorrow came. It brought a pit lord’s wreckage and a candle-maker’s daughter and a war she didn’t know she was walking into.
Five signatures. One basement. One death knight. One girl who lost her mother’s shop to someone else’s war.
It’s not much.
It’s a start.
The camp.
The stars come out. Vyrneese looks up. Still wrong. Still shifted.
But the fire is warm. The cat is sleeping. The plan is ignored. The glasses are fixed. The numbers are bad but the people are good.
Reyneese speaks at sunset:
“Tomorrow, we start looking for my sister.”
“We start looking tonight,” Brass says. “I already sent three messages.”
Reyneese stares at her.
“You slept. We worked. That’s what family does.”
Three miles apart, two doors close. A death knight watches a candle burn in a basement, a twelve-year-old curled under a borrowed blanket, a charter on the wall that says she’s just getting started. A priestess sits by a fire surrounded by five impossible people who held her up when she couldn’t stand.
Two tomorrows. Two kinds of wreckage. Two women deciding: something grows from this.
Tomorrow came.
And it wasn’t done yet.
Author’s Note#
This is the first entry in the Chronicles of Six—a series that expands beyond the warband to explore the people and stories orbiting the Starveil Weavers. While Reyneese and her sisters recover from the Reckoning, a death knight walks through the wreckage they left behind and finds exactly what she promised herself she’d find.
Giselleese doesn’t know the warband. Doesn’t know Reyneese. She only sees broken ground, displaced people, and a twelve-year-old who needs a door, not a blanket. The warband doesn’t know that someone else is picking up the pieces they left behind.
Two stories. Three miles apart. One tomorrow.
Read the first arc: Reyneese Chronicles #1-6 | Meet the Warband | Giselleese and the Shadowlily Charter
Content Warning: This story contains themes of exhaustion, displacement, aftermath of violence, found family, undeath, and one adopted cat.