Dust in the Sun Chapter 1

Co-written with Fair Kemp.

Never had Anastrus surveyed her city and realized how fragile it was.

The gilded, ethereal spires, the filigreed fences, the ornately designed foliage, the floating platforms, the arching bridges.

The absence of anything solid.

As her boots tapped against the pristine pathways she’d traversed billions of times, loss tightened in her gut, a familiar, dreadful sensation from the past couple years. In the months since her exile, she had changed so much more than she ever had in nearly five millennia.

It was all she could do to keep steady, keep walking. The sound of her feet hitting the pavement kept her on rhythm, like a heartbeat, a reminder that she was moving. Stopping could mean death, movement meant survival.

Especially in this surreal vision. A dream fused with an uneasy feeling that tainted it slightly, as if it was on the cusp of a nightmare. Nostalgia cut with destruction.

Her armor clinked as she walked, cloth overlayed with mail and metal to protect her against close range foes. It was far less decorative than she was accustomed to, but she felt safer in it than her old robes these days. Silver mail over a deep purple, knee length tunic, cut down the middle and sides to allow her legs movement.

Pale metal plates, detailed with filigree and Nightborne designs, but pocked and marked from use covered her broad shoulders, chest, and forearms. The armor was clearly specially made for her, as she was tall and muscled, even for her kind, which were generally heads taller than most of the Horde races, even the orcs. Her boots were made of the same material, going up her legging and mail covered thighs with hinging at the knees to further provide freedom of mobility.

A helm clinked at her side, lashed there with a cord, opposite a gleaming sword, marking her as a spellblade. She held her head aloft, her long, white hair tinged with blues and purples braided tightly down her back.

Her elegant face bore a scar that bisected the left side of her jaw. The way her eyes never lingered in one place too long, forever scouting, made it clear that the visible scar was not the only remnant of her service on Argus.

It was only fitting that she return just as broken as her city.

Suramar was still under repair, and she glimpsed other races of the Horde helping to cleanse the city of its corruption and rubble. Having fought alongside them, it almost brought a smile to her face, but the prospect of her end goal tied up the little emotion she had reign over.

Her steps echoed the thud of her pulse, quick and steady. Two more turns and she would see her old home again - as it was, no glamours, no airs. Her heartbeat turned into a roar. One more turn left.

Except, before that last turn, the world stopped.

Before her stood a couple mages trying to fix a fountain. One of them bore a very, very familiar short, curvy frame.

“This is dreadful. Useless,” she heard a tall, wiry young man groan. He stood to the left of the mage she knew, wringing handfuls of his robes, glancing around almost panic stricken.

Professor Maoreaux Desmarais surveyed him with quick eyes.

“You’re overwhelmed,” she stated matter-of-factly, rolling up her sleeves. “Quite lucky we’re only on cleanup and not recalibration. If you start with the small things, it makes the larger tasks seem less daunting.”

Lifting a sure hand, she closed her eyes, mostly to help highlight the importance of calm to her student. The markings along her neck and face shimmered to life and a quick breeze of a spell spilled forth from her fingers, the electric blue haze lifting sizable pieces of debris from the fountain’s basin. They hovered with minimal disturbance and Reaux opened her eyes slowly, smiling gently at her charge.

She nodded towards the floating debris with encouragement and her student hesitantly lifted his own hand. Squeezing his eyes shut, the young man flicked his wrist out. A quick, blinding flash shone from his skin and fizzled out just as fast. The debris smashed together, crumbling in on itself into finer pebbles and settling all around the bottom of the basin again unceremoniously.

The apprentice and Reaux sighed in unison, signifying that this wasn’t the first time this had happened today. She reached up and gave him a gentle pat across the shoulders.

“Yes. Well. If you still need... time,” she lowered her voice a bit, being purposefully vague for his comfort. Reaux cleared her throat and levitated a broom and dustpan toward him. The set looked just plain foreign against this backdrop, wooden and dusty. The broom’s bristles were cobwebbed with something shimmery.

He regarded it with apparent disgust and opened his mouth to protest. Yet, before he could get a word in, she raised her eyebrows and tapped her pointer finger in the air - a harmless cantrip to press his lips shut briefly.

“Ah, ah,” she admonished him, turning on her heel in a flourish and lifting her eyes to the courtyard in pursuit of her next round. “We are in no position to turn up our noses now. Everyone must do something. NO job is unim...”

Reaux took in a sharp breath and her vision swam for a moment. She was sure that she was seeing things.

Anastrus had come to a stop without noticing it. She felt dizzy, but had experienced such a sensation enough in the past two years to steady herself by sliding a foot back.

The broom and dustpan clattered against the unwilling young mage, whose lips were still enchanted shut, causing him to fall to the ground with a muffled cry.

“...Unimportant,” Reaux finished in a shaky exhale.

Anastrus would not let anyone see her falter. Especially her. Her former teacher, her colleague, her closest friend for millenia. Another one who had forgotten her. The one that hurt the most.

Reaux stared, dumbstruck and frozen, excusing herself with an unintelligible murmur. She lifted her robes a bit as though she were going to hustle across the courtyard. Instead, the first step forward proved to be just about all of them — her eyes rolled back as she fainted unceremoniously, toppling over her student’s body.

Ana was spurred by a segment of her brain that overruled any emotional desire to stay away.

She walked toward the student and thus, the crumpled mentor, with the authority of the High Spellblade that she used to be and the battle hardened soldier she now was.

With a wave, the student’s mouth was undone, and Ana dissolved her glove to press her fingers to Reaux’s throat, feeling a pulse with a soft sigh. She lifted sharp eyes to the student.

“Is there a place nearby where she can rest more comfortably?”

Wind came rushing from the student’s mouth, almost like he forgot how to breathe through his nose. His face crumpled a bit in confusion, as if he’d seen a ghost.

“But you... you’re…”

His thought was interrupted, the apprentice a little too proud to admit he was so spindly that he couldn’t move. Grunting, he gestured with his head to the north of the courtyard.

“There’s an inn being rebuilt,” he gasped. “It’s furnished!” This was certainly not the weirdest thing he’d seen or said today.

Ana nodded and picked up the shapely elf with ease, cradling her in her thick arms and moving towards the aforementioned inn.

The apprentice noted the easy way the giant spellsword picked up his mentor and glanced at his own arms, poking their lack of muscle and sighing in resignation as he went to start sweeping.

As Ana walked into the inn, there was no one in sight, and she was thankful for it. The large swordsman found an empty room with a bed and gently laid Reaux down. She casually beckoned a chair over to the bedside with a wave and shimmer of magic.

Sitting down, she found that her hands were shaking in her lap, one gloved, the other bare. The tendons shifted under the purple tinted silver of her skin, rippling her iridescent arcane tattoos. She hastily reapplied her armored glove, staring at the glimmering metal.

There was no anticipating this.

Seeing her so suddenly, after so much had happened in such a short time. It had been what… Ana initially thought four or five years, but no, it had been around two. Two years since they’d seen each other.

Two years was a blink of an eye to their kind. But after millennia of relative safety under the protective barrier that was now gone, these two years of struggling and battle felt like so much longer.

She clasped her hands together to try and stop the quivering, only to look up toward Reaux.

The elf that Ana had grown up with looked exactly the same as she had the last time Ana saw her. Everything looked like she was a portrait of herself, from the sleek, black a-line bob hair cut, to her choice of ear cuffs, right down to the chosen color scheme of the robes she wore when she was doing more “hands-on” work. Her dark navy, dewy skin still shimmered in the right light. There wasn’t a scratch on her or a marking out of place.

Ana watched her face with a sigh. The face that had blossomed through the madness. Kept her from withering.

That face suddenly started to stir, eyelids fluttering open. Reaux rolled onto her side, pushing up on one arm. A moment of disorientation came and went before the person at her side came into focus.

She was markedly sure at this point that she didn’t need to rub her eyes. Their silvery depths shone a bit stronger as the tears welled up and spilled down her cheeks. She huffed once, more melancholy than indignant.

The older elf was more at a loss for words than she’d quite possibly ever been, but she still tried to make her mouth work and failed miserably several times.

Ana felt the pricking of tears in her own eyes, but she looked away and clenched her jaw, eyebrows knitting as she tried to blink them out of existence. The gesture only accentuated the scar on her face.

Not looking at Reaux helped the words fall from her lips, gravelly and low, lacking in any thought, as if they forced themselves from her. As if she’d thought them a million times, caged them in her mind, and they had to escape now.

“You were supposed to come for me.”