The Precipice

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The story relates to Kestrel, and was written to flesh out the character to myself. The events are not available as IC knowledge under any circumstances.

Part One
It's easier not to be free

and measure these things by your eyes

~

Live: I Alone

The cliff rises through the dark, a craggy path through thinning trees to where earth and sky meet. The wolf trots out ahead of her, a gaunt black shape with his nose to the wind, wary for trouble or a trail. He's almost done growing now, shaggy shoulders level to her hip, but somehow he's never shaken that gangly, halfgrown puppy look. Feral or no, that makes him easy to underestimate, makes him have to prove himself where a bulkier animal could simply snap and avoid trouble. She wonders how he'll do without her to look after him. She tells herself she doesn't care. Strong wolves live, weak ones don't, simple as that. She's never put up with weak things, things that will falter if there is trouble.

Trouble -- she catches herself checking her gear reflexively, at even the thought. Armour strapped and secure, gun slung over her back loosely enough to be ready in seconds, an axe and dagger on her hip -- a miscellany of gear worn smooth and bare by hard use, much the same way that she has been worn by wearing it. Not many seams in armour that don't leave calluses, if you sleep in it long enough, and she's done so since she was a youngling. But no more. Not after tonight.

Only so long you can hold someone on a debt. The Cenarion Circle knows this, and they know she's given them more than their due. A life for a life, service for a service, favour for a favour. Honour has been satisfied. She is free.

She is finished.

The trail ends. The trees drop away abruptly, just before the ground does. The wind catches the wolf as he comes into the clear, making him slink down to keep from being shoved by it. She follows him to the precipice, heedless of the whistling air trying to pull her off the edge to the drop below. It seems like she can see all the world from here, and yet nothing that she recognises. If she tries, she can almost pretend all is as it was; that the world is still new, she is still a Huntress, and time never happened.

But it did, and she isn’t, and she has run out of ways to hide it. When she sleeps, the dream is always the same.

''The green place, long ago, and the precipice above it. Wolfsteps, an animal breathing behind her. "Go away," she snarls, without looking away from the fall. "Go back and forget. I’m going now."

In her dream, the pale wolf drops to his haunches, sheds his skin like water, and fixes her with bottomless, golden eyes. Challenging eyes. "Go ahead," he says, the first Darnassian words spoken in her presence since the world ended. "If you must. I won’t stop you. It’s a good fall. Do you think it’s long enough?"''

There used to be more to it, the dream – but that’s gone now, lost since the world ended for a second time. Now she wakes up to that, the question, and if her face is wet and cold when she does, she has stopped caring because only the wolf ever sees.

She isn't dreaming now. She stands on the precipice, leaning into the wind. This time the cliff is just a cliff: this time, the wolf is only a wolf. It doesn’t matter. The drop is the same, the one she once turned away from but once again dreams of, every night since Nordrassil was lost. All that time, all come to nothing. All her time since, just waiting to be free to revisit that step she never took.

Time passes.

When she and the wolf leave the precipice stays, with its whistling, whispering wind. She knows it's only a matter of time. For the first time in years, she does not know what to do about it.