I. The Trail#
Two weeks after the Reckoning.
Brasskeese finds the thread on a Tuesday. Not a literal thread — an expense report. Three silver paid to a Stormwind fence for “information regarding arcane chain composition, shadow-silk variety, recent manufacture.” The fence gave her a name: Markov, a retired Kirin Tor enchanter who identified the chain residue as Haranir-origin fel-weaving.
Haranir. That’s rare. That’s specific. That’s a breadcrumb.
Brass (at the warband’s temporary camp, surrounded by papers): “The chains that held Yreneese weren’t standard. Haranir crafting — nature-rooted magic corrupted with fel. Someone with deep knowledge of both natural and demonic systems. That narrows our pool significantly.”
Zyneese (sharp): “Haranir don’t usually deal in fel. Their entire culture resists corruption.”
Brass: “Which means whoever this is went against their nature. Deliberately. That’s not a hired thug — that’s a believer.”
The second breadcrumb: residue. The arcane chains dissolved, but they left traces — a specific magical signature that Zyneese can track. Faint, fading, but it leads east. Through the Trade District. Into the slums. Down, down, down — toward the eastern quarter where the market used to be.
Toward a basement.
Reyneese (standing before the warband, silver hair unwashed, eyes that haven’t rested since the Reckoning): “How sure are you?”
Brass: “Eighty percent. The residue trail leads to the eastern slums. Stops at a basement entrance. Either she’s there or she was there.”
Reyneese: “Then we go. Now.”
Avel: “We should have a plan—”
Everyone: “…”
Avel (removes gauntlets, puts them back on): “Fine. We go now.”
II. The Basement Door#
Six women. One street. A basement entrance that looks like nothing — weathered door, stone steps leading down, the faintest smell of mold.
Brass runs point. Studies the door. No traps. No wards. Just a door.
Brass: “Either they’re confident or stupid. No protection.”
Zyneese (glasses adjustment, reading auras): “There’s someone inside. Multiple presences. One is — " (pauses) “Death knight.”
Avel (hand on sword): “Hostile?”
Zyneese: “I can’t tell. The death aura drowns out finer readings. But there’s something else — a child. And…” (frowns) “Fel. Demon hunter signature. Faint but present.”
Reyneese (stepping forward): “She’s here.”
She reaches for the door.
It opens before she touches it.
Giselle stands in the doorway.
Seven feet of worgen death knight in tattered leather armor, rusted sword drawn, ice-blue eyes blazing in the dim stairwell. Frost crawls from her hands up the blade. Behind her: the basement. The charter on the wall. The sketch of white flowers. And two figures — a girl on a cot, sitting up with wide eyes, and a woman on the floor wrapped in blankets, blindfolded, still.
Five armed warband members face one death knight in a doorway.
Giselle (low, steady, the voice of someone who has died twice and is not interested in a third time): “This is Shadowlily. Nobody enters without my permission. Nobody takes anyone from here.”
Reyneese (looking past Giselle, seeing the blanket-wrapped figure on the floor, the white-blonde hair, the blindfold): “That’s my sister.”
Giselle: “That’s my resident.”
III. The Standoff#
The warband and the death knight regard each other across a threshold.
Avelreese’s hand is on her sword. Vyrneese has shifted her weight to her front foot — combat stance, unconscious, twenty thousand years of muscle memory. Zyneese’s fingers frost with pre-cast energy. Lulureese — who shouldn’t be here, who said she wouldn’t go into the dark — stands at the back of the group, Cinder on her shoulder, face unreadable.
Brasskeese counts exits. One door. Basement windows too small. Bad tactical ground. “Nobody do anything stupid,” she murmurs.
Reyneese steps forward. Not aggressively — with the particular patience of ten thousand years.
Reyneese: “I’m not here to take her. I’m here because she’s my sister and someone kidnapped her and left her—” (looks at the basement) “—here?”
Giselle: “Left her on my doorstep. Middle of the night. Chained. Beaten. Barefoot.”
Reyneese (flinches): “And you…”
Giselle: “Cut the chains. Treated the wounds. Fed her. Gave her a blanket.” (dead eyes, steady voice) “That’s what Shadowlily does.”
Reyneese: “I need to see her.”
Giselle doesn’t move. She studies Reyneese — the silver hair, the luminous eyes, the ancient bearing. Ten thousand years of something looking back at her through a face that’s too tired to be wise.
Giselle: “You’re the priestess. From the market. The one with the golden machine.”
Reyneese: “How do you—”
Giselle: “Everyone in the eastern quarter knows. A pit lord in a civilian market isn’t subtle. Neither is a twenty-foot flying robot.” (pause) “Your fight destroyed half a district. The people I’m sheltering are here because of your war.”
Reyneese absorbs this. The guilt lands visibly — a slight narrowing of the eyes, the shoulders drawing in. Maren, on the cot behind Giselle, is watching with the particular attention of a twelve-year-old who lost her home to exactly the event Giselle is describing.
Reyneese (quietly): “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Giselle: “Sorry doesn’t rebuild a candle shop.”
Zyneese (from behind Reyneese, cutting through): “Can we do the guilt later? The demon hunter — is she stable?”
Giselle (looks at Zyneese — reads the glasses, the earrings, the precision, the concealed concern): “Stable. Healing. She sleeps eighteen hours a day. When she’s awake, she’s…” (hesitates) “Present. But something’s off.”
Zyneese: “Off how?”
Giselle: “Headaches. Bad ones. She grips her skull like something’s trying to get out. And she mutters in a language I don’t recognize — not Thalassian, not Demonic. Something older.”
Zyneese and Reyneese exchange a look.
The void whispers: Something was planted in her. During the captivity. You can feel it — the wrongness beneath the fel. Not demon. Not shadow. Something else. Something patient.
Zyneese doesn’t relay this. Not yet. But she adjusts her glasses the way she does when she’s scared.
IV. Inside#
Giselle steps aside. Not fully — she stands at the bottom of the stairs, sword sheathed but hand near the hilt, positioned between the warband and Maren’s cot. The message is clear: you may see the demon hunter. You may not touch the child.
Reyneese descends into the basement. The warband follows single-file. The space is small — twenty by fifteen feet, stone walls, one barrel of water, two cots, a makeshift table, the charter on the wall.
Yreneese is on the floor. Blankets. Bandaged arms. Bandaged feet. The shadow-silk blindfold she keeps by choice, though Giselle offered to remove it. She’s sitting up — she heard the voices, felt the auras, and her spectral sight is doing what it does: reading the room in colors the living can’t see.
She sees Reyneese before Reyneese sees her properly.
Yreneese (voice like gravel and grief): “Rey.”
Reyneese (kneeling, tears immediate, hands reaching): “Yre. Oh, Yre. I’m here. I’m—”
Yreneese (pulls back — not hostility, not rejection, just the flinch of someone who’s been grabbed too many times recently): “Don’t. I’m — I can’t be touched right now.”
Reyneese stops. Hands hovering. The distance between sisters: eighteen inches and ten thousand years.
Reyneese: “I’ve been looking for you. Every day. Brass sent messages—”
Yreneese: “I know.”
Reyneese: “Who took you? The figure — the chains — who—”
Yreneese: “I don’t know. Hooded. Controlled. Smelled like jasmine and ash.” (she frowns — the headache, surfacing) “They asked questions. About you. About the warband. About the market. Then they stopped asking and just… kept me. For days. And then one night they dragged me through the city and left me here.”
Reyneese: “Left you at Shadowlily. Specifically.”
Yreneese: “Yes.”
Giselle (from the stairs, listening): “They knew the address. Didn’t hesitate. Whoever it was had been here before — or watched it.”
Reyneese looks at Giselle. Looks at the charter. Looks at the sketch of white flowers.
Reyneese: “They wanted her found. By you.”
Giselle: “I’m starting to believe that.”
V. What Zyneese Sees#
While Reyneese and Yreneese negotiate the geography of a ten-thousand-year-old wound, Zyneese stands against the far wall and watches.
Not with her eyes. With everything else.
The void whispers are louder down here. The basement concentrates magical auras — stone walls, low ceiling, no dissipation. Every presence is vivid. Reyneese’s dual aura: Light and Shadow woven together, luminous. Giselle’s death-frost: cold, steady, the particular blue-white of conviction held past mortality. Maren: warm amber, child-bright, scared but growing.
And Yreneese.
Yreneese’s aura is wrong.
Not wrong like corruption — Zyneese knows corruption; she chose the void, she lives with whispers daily. Not wrong like possession — that has a different signature, a doubling of presence.
This is wrong like something installed. A hairline fracture in the demon hunter’s fel-pattern, too precise to be natural damage, too deep to be surface manipulation. Something was placed inside Yreneese during the captivity. Not a curse. Not a spell. A trigger. Dormant. Waiting.
The void whispers: It’s listening. Whatever it is — it’s not active. It’s waiting for a signal. An activation phrase. A magical frequency. Something external.
Zyneese adjusts her glasses. Keeps her face neutral. She’s the only one in the room who can sense this, and she knows — with the cold clarity she’s trusted her whole life — that saying it out loud, here, now, in front of Yreneese, would be catastrophic.
You don’t tell the bomb it’s a bomb.
She catches Brass’s eye. Brass reads the glasses-adjustment, reads the particular stillness of Zyneese’s mouth, and understands: something bad. Not now. Later.
Brass nods. Imperceptible.
VI. The Question of Staying#
The warband and Shadowlily circle the obvious question for twenty minutes before Avelreese — who can’t stand unresolved logistics — breaks.
Avel: “She should come with us. We have camp. Resources. Protection.”
Giselle: “She said she’s staying.”
Avel: “With respect, you’re a death knight in a basement with twelve copper and a rusted sword. We’re a warband with a Titan-forged mechsuit.”
Giselle (unmoved): “The mechsuit that almost exploded. The warband that couldn’t stop a pit lord. The camp that can’t find one hooded figure in two weeks.”
Avel opens her mouth. Closes it. Removes her gauntlets.
Vyrneese (from the corner, where she’s been studying the charter with fascination): “The flowers on this wall. The white ones. I’ve seen them.”
Everyone turns.
Vyrneese: “Shadowmoon Valley. Before the corruption — before it was Shadowmoon. In my time. Twenty thousand years ago. Those flowers grew where…” (she pauses, searching memories older than civilization) “Where the earth was thinnest. Where something beneath pushed up. The Earth-Warder — Neltharion — told me to avoid those places. He said the soil there was ’too full.'”
Giselle: “Too full of what?”
Vyrneese (frowns): “He never said. He just said the flowers were a warning. Beautiful, but a warning.”
Silence.
Nobody knows what to do with twenty-thousand-year-old botanical intelligence from a woman who takes everything literally and has never been wrong about the ancient world.
Lulureese (who has been silent the entire time — which is terrifying for everyone who knows her): “Giselle.”
Giselle looks at the troll. Recognizes her. The braid is still in Giselle’s hair. The wooden bead clicks.
Giselle: “Lulureese.”
Lulureese (not smiling — the warband notices; Brass makes a mental note): “You said if I was needed, I’d come. I came.”
Giselle: “You said you wouldn’t go into the dark.”
Lulureese (looking at Yreneese, at Maren, at the basement): “This isn’t what I expected the dark to look like. It looks like a girl with a blanket and a woman who can’t be touched and a death knight who won’t move from the stairs.”
Giselle: “And?”
Lulureese: “And I still can’t join your guild. But I can sit on these stairs and be sunshine for a while. If you’ll let me.”
Giselle stares at her. The troll who said no. Who braided a flower into a death knight’s hair and walked into the forest singing.
Giselle: “The stairs are free.”
VII. The Night Watch#
The warband doesn’t leave.
Not because they agreed to stay — because Reyneese sat down next to Yreneese and didn’t stand back up. And where Reyneese stays, the warband stays. That’s just physics at this point.
Brass runs logistics. They can’t all sleep in the basement — five warband members, a death knight, a child, and a demon hunter in twenty by fifteen feet of mold. She negotiates a compromise: the warband camps in the alley above. Two on watch at all times. Rotating.
Maren watches all of this with enormous eyes.
Maren (to Giselle, whispered): “Are they… soldiers?”
Giselle: “Family. Different kind of army.”
Maren: “That troll is tall.”
Giselle: “She’s the shortest thing about her.”
Maren doesn’t understand this. But she accepts it the way children accept things: fully, without analysis.
Night. The basement is dark except for Maren’s candle. Reyneese sits against the wall opposite Yreneese — close enough to feel, far enough not to crowd. The distance of ten thousand years measured in basement floor.
Yreneese (in the dark, quiet): “The headaches are getting worse.”
Reyneese: “Since when?”
Yreneese: “Since the captivity. They start here—” (touches the base of her skull) “—and spread forward. Like something trying to unfold.”
Reyneese: “The hooded figure. They did something to you.”
Yreneese: “Maybe. I don’t remember everything. There were gaps. Hours I can’t account for. They’d speak in a language I almost recognized — Haranir, maybe, but twisted. Older. And then I’d… lose time.”
Reyneese’s hands glow faintly — Light, instinctive, the healer reaching for the wound.
Yreneese: “Don’t.”
Reyneese: “I just want to check—”
Yreneese (sharp): “The last time you tried to ‘help’ me with Light, I woke up still dead inside and you woke up crying. Don’t. Not yet.”
Reyneese lets the glow die.
In the silence, Yreneese grips her own skull. The headache pulses. Behind the blindfold, her spectral sight flickers — green, then something darker, a flash of violet-black that shouldn’t be there.
Her inner demon stirs.
Run. Something is wrong. Something is IN us. Run. RUN.
For once, Yreneese almost listens.
VIII. Above — The Conversation#
On the street above the basement, Zyneese and Brasskeese stand watch. Midnight. The city sleeps.
Zyneese (voice low, precise): “There’s something inside her.”
Brass: “I figured. Your glasses told me that much.”
Zyneese: “Not a curse. Not a possession. It’s — " (searches for words) “It’s like someone planted a seed in her magical framework. Dormant. Waiting for specific conditions to bloom.”
Brass: “A trigger.”
Zyneese: “Yes.”
Brass: “Can you remove it?”
Zyneese: “Not without knowing what activates it. If I probe too aggressively, it might interpret that as the signal. Whoever built this was precise. Haranir fel-weaving — nature magic corrupted, turned surgical. This isn’t a warlock throwing spells. This is a gardener planting a bomb.”
Brass (quiet for a long time): “A gardener.”
Zyneese: “The metaphor isn’t accidental. The hooded figure — Haranir origin, Giselle said jasmine and ash — they think in natural patterns. Growth. Seasons. Cultivation. They’ve been growing this situation. Shadowlily, Yreneese, the warband finding her here — none of this is accident.”
Brass: “So we’re being played.”
Zyneese: “We’ve been played since the pit lord. Maybe before.”
Brass stares at the basement door. The moldy wood. The stone steps. A twelve-year-old and a demon hunter and a death knight sleeping under a sketch of white flowers.
Brass: “What do we do?”
Zyneese (adjusts glasses — not from fear this time, from the focused intensity of someone who has decided to fight): “We watch. We wait. And when the trigger comes — and it will come — we need to be ready to hold her down without killing her.”
Brass: “Can we?”
Zyneese (the void whispers something she doesn’t share): “I don’t know.”
The stars watch. Vyrneese, on the rooftop, watching them back. Still wrong. Still moved.
But the fire is close. The family is gathered. And somewhere beneath a demon hunter’s skull, something dormant dreams of unfolding.
Tomorrow.
Or the day after.
Or whenever the gardener decides the season is right.
Author’s Note#
The fifth Chronicle brings all the threads together in one basement. Reyneese finds her sister. The warband meets Shadowlily. And Zyneese discovers the truth nobody’s ready for: Yreneese isn’t just rescued. She’s been delivered. With something inside her.
The standoff between Giselle and the warband isn’t about good vs bad. It’s about two kinds of protection: the death knight who guards broken girls from a world that broke them, and the warband who guards family from a threat they can’t see. Both are right. Neither has enough information.
Vyrneese’s memory of the Shadowmoon flowers is the first thread of something much larger — something that connects the flowers, the soil, and a power that predates the corruption everyone assumed was the cause. The flowers aren’t growing despite the poison. They’re growing because of what’s beneath it.
The gardener planted a seed. The season is turning.
Continues in: Chronicles of Six #6 — The Rampant
Content Warning: This story contains themes of family reunion under duress, surveillance, magical violation of bodily autonomy, and a twelve-year-old who is handling this better than most adults.