[WoW] Waiting -- Descant
A blood elf hunter occasionally passes by a doorway to a room where another friend, another hunter lies asleep. He glances in every so often to make sure she's okay. At least here, nobody cares she's Alliance and a dwarf and he's Horde and sin'dorei. Here, they are just Aldor, as much as he and his sister in spirit are Aldor.
He chews his lip raw. He's passed by her room too, and feels utterly powerless to do anything about the hideous nightmares now shaking her like a terrier does a rat.
He can't sleep. He tried, but the unease reached a screaming pitch the past few days. He tries to allay this by scratching his equally agitated cougar, his first pet. He also keeps rubbing at his eyes, trying to do something about the burning there that is not necessarily fatigue.
Something tells him he will never see Chieftain Bloodhoof-- the tauren that accepted him into Thunder Bluff along with his druid sister, whom he loves and respects as he never truly did his own king-- this side of life ever again.
A draenei mage also checks in on the dwarf hunter, and hopes her sister is okay. She talks with her friends, all of them, tries to comfort the gnome mage. She sees her friends on the other side of the fence, and sees them suffering. Her sanity may be shattered and broken, only pieced together briefly and with great pain, but her intellect is not. Even as she orbits between her friends, she is making plans. And she's pretty sure her sister will throttle her for even thinking them, let alone going through with them.
A dwarven paladin does what he can to heal and ease his injured cousin's pain, checking in on her every few minutes. He would like to explore Shattrath, but this takes precedence. He would have also liked to defend Ironforge against the unrelenting elemental attacks, but he is painfully aware he would be quick work for any one of them. He is no healer, but he can make some difference here.
He's a descendant of the Earthen, and could feel the land crying in pain, then accelerating into one long scream. He's terrified that Azeroth will turn into a shattered remnant like this world. And knows his king would feel it too…. and is worried what it will drive him to doing.
A large white cat curls on on the floor in the Aldor inn, trying to purr as a hunter pets her and mostly failing. While she hasn't the gift of foresight that the tauren moaning fitfully in one of the rooms does, both are druids. The kaldorei had her own terrible dreams, her own awful hunches. And she just knows Nature has opened her eyes, and all that is left for her people is to adapt or die.
In Gilneas, a hunter listens, and waits, and spends most of his energy trying to grimly hold on to the remnants of a humanity a curse is trying to strip from him. He smells death on the air, ready to crest and sweep over his battered nation.
A death knight stands guard outside the tauren's room, if standing and staring blankly into space constitutes 'guarding'. The past few days of repeated attacks on Thunder Bluff have pushed the resources of even an undead killing machine to their limit, because within that killing machine there's still a soul and a heart that can bleed and feel fatigue. The stress of the past few days was only amplified with fear for her family's fate, both that of her father and the young Forsaken rogue she loves like a younger sister, and as a result the elf's emotional and spiritual endurance is near its breaking point.
She would desperately like to be held by someone, but that is not feasible right now for multiple reasons. So she clings to discipline and duty as a former Farstrider and now Knight of the Ebon Blade, doing what little she can. Her one consolation is that she knows both her father and the rogue are safe and in Thrallmar.
An old man sits in the inn in Thrallmar, having finished with some busywork given to him by some of the personnel there, and watches two young women banter. One is sin'dorei like himself, the other trapped in an undead shell, but they are more alike than visible on the surface and he loves them both for it. He proffers a quick prayer to the Light for the safety of his other daughter and his former student and their comrades, and has a feeling he will be needed very soon in multiple ways, some of them even as a priest.
Then he decides to go out and beat the living crap out of helboars.
A young netherdrake in Shattrath's Lower Town curls up and listens silently to the first of her kind speak of how her flight came to be, where they came from. And the elf-that-is-not also speaks of slavery, and freedom, and that the Netherwing flight is not defined by the one they arose from.
The drake takes notes, and makes plans.
She doesn't realize they will have to swing in motion far sooner than expected.