Heresy

"Bring them in here." Vishas laughed and beckoned the guards to bring Andro, Veti, and Sihmm into the torture chambers.

Pairs of guards dragged them in, one by one; the eldest, Sihmm, half-elven, was the tallest. A tribal leader, he bore his fate with a certain calm resolve. He had always been a proud man...quiet, serene. He had handsome, finely-carved feaures; human, but graced with that certain elven quality: high cheekbones, a narrow, chiseled nose, slanted eyes. His ears were slightly elongated; and his hair, even in some age, was impossibly full and gloriously silver, pulled back in a ponytail that reached to his hips. His face was tattooed in a delicate blue pattern that resembled two flaring bird's wings.

Veti was not long behind, naked to the waist, the rogueish one, with glaring amber eyes and a short, spiky crop of blonde hair. His nickname was Ko'gu - which meant "little bear" - so named for his small stature and strong frame, compact and muscular. He snarled and swung his fists violently at his captors, landing one sharp, hard blow to the belly of one guard before being knocked cold by the hilt of the another one's sword.

And then last....the girl.

Andro struggled against their grasp furiously, her chainmail shifting and clanking as she did so, her green eyes blazing with hate and fear. From her throat escaped a sound that was part scream and part growl.

And then they were all present; three captured Ma'lanth hunters, far from their territorial lands, in this strange Monastery in the heart of Tirisfal.

"I'm so sorry..."Sihmm's eyes were mournful as he cast a glance back to the younger hunters. Andro could feel his words in her head, his regret at bringing them here, to try and find their brethren in Silverpine that had gone missing some time past. Rumours of the plague and war swept the lands. On their arrival, the search had been fruitless; it was assumed all were dead; they were certainly missing.

And of course, it had taken weeks to even get here; consigned to pay their way with labour on the ships, every tale they heard along the journey seemed laced with sheer oblivion; terror beyond their imaginations....of a world utterly lost, utterly gone mad - a world into which they had now been thrown.

She nodded back at him gently, trying to tell him she knew it wasn't his fault....they had to come, what choice did they have? And surely they would get out somehow.

"Let me go, you sons of whores..." Veti had suddenly regained consciousness and snarled, kicking back against the guard with blind fury, lashing out with his body.

Vishas spun smoothly on the stone floor, and faced the rebellious man. The Interrogator was heavily perfumed; sickeningly so. He could have been handsome, but he wasn't. His features were strange and soft, his flesh pallid, glowing eyes slightly puffed and swollen beneath a thatch of oiled, black hair.

"Oh so the wild man does know the tounge of the civilised! How convenient, so that you will understand that you will be first, hunter - since you are so very restless for a change to your circumstances..."

Vishas' voice was sharp and cold, impatient, but his eyes glowed with what seemed to be an almost hungry delight...lustful....

"My gods..", Andro thought with despair.."what pleasure he takes from this...."

The Inquisitor snapped his fingers and curtly gestured to the guards.

They threw Veti on the rack, and wrapped his wrists and ankles in the thick ropes...stretching his form to its limits slowly, with each crank of the wheel. The body was extended, then it began to break...and then the screams began, first of animalistic rage, then of despair, and finally, screams of pain beyond anything Andro had heard in her short life...wailing, howling, as if he were some demon from the Void, brought to his very end by the most horrific means.

"Confess, heathen!" The interrogator chuckled and nodded to the guards..twist the wheel...more pressure...pull his soul from his very bones...

"I have..nothing...to confess...!" croaked Veti in defiance....

"Let the impurity of your earthmother's ways be driven from your flesh and may you find deliverance...." Vishas' ramblings continued on, but the words were foggy to him now, Veti's consciousness being pulled to the breaking point.

"Sinner....there is still time, release your dirty animal's secrets to us and find your salvation....!"

Veti threw his head back and forth, grunting, his strong, tanned body thrashing desperately, straining against the cords....awful...sickening snapping...limbs from their sockets....skin from itself...

The sound! The scent of it....the sheer horror....the grunts became gasps....gasps became liquid-filled gurgles....

And then........there was silence..the awful squishing silence of a living being releasing itself unto death, and Veti was no more...

"Oops"....snickered Vishas darkly, stroking his chin. "He was a bit too slow to confess, my brothers. They are not so clever, these little hunters, hmm?"

Vishas ran a finger along the length of the dead man's form.

Veti, clad in his hunter's breeches and boots...the little bear, who could take down ogres with his hands....Veti Ghrom Ma'lanth...how old had he been? 28? 29 at the most?

Sihmm began to feel the bile rise in his throat. His body desperately tried to wretch; he convulsed, his stomach twisting like a coiling serpent against what he witnessed.

And still, the female, Andro, glowered fiercely and openly at Veti's torn and unmoving form, then back to Vishas..to the doorways....her mind cranking like a frantically spinning wheel...there must be some way out..some escape.

There wasn't.

Sihmm had recovered himself, and bore his fate with the same calm dignity that he always had...his noble head raised, cool blue eyes barely gave away the knowledge that lay behind them; that he too, would soon meet his fate.

He glanced back at Andro. She was twenty-six just that past winter. Blazing green eyes and dark auburn hair, small and curvaceous, stubborn and proud. She was a fierce creature, almost violent. Fast with a bow, and with an uncanny instinct for the hunt. She adored her frostsaber, the elegantly dangerous Garalyll. He was constantly by her side, her closest and most devoted companion...the Scarlets had already taken him away, it was only there that real sorrow crossed Andro's features, for he had walked with her since he'd been a cub, and had been the best friend of her youth. People made little sense to her; animals made far more, in their innocent honesty, their unintentional sincerity, just being...what they were. Beasts. She envied them.

In every way, Sihmm realised, she was the very portrait of her mother, the one she would never know.

For a moment, he desired to tell her..tell her the secret he bore...that Shaana Ma'Lanth had been her mother, and he - Sihmm Ma'Lanth, son of the wayward elf Tormus Windwalker, was her father.

No normal Ma'Lanth ever knew their parentage, though Sihmm had been an exception. So much easier this way, so much easier to raise them in the pure, functional environment of the school, and then the wilderness, in their small bands. Everyone shared in the responsibility, everyone always had a family. There was no identity outside of their place in the hunt - nothing else mattered. Andro was Andro, Sihmm was Sihmm. Shaana had died long ago; crushed in a landslide near Desolace, climbing to a roc's nest high among the cliffs.

"You could never tell that woman anything", Sihmm recollected silently, but with fondness. She was too independent, too willful..it cost her, in the end. Her bouncing, bright-eyed curious child would hopefully not repeat the same mistakes.

The curious child was now the enraged woman, not twenty feet away...facing her impending death with all the fury and defiance of the frostsabers she so loved, her bow still strapped to her back, her finely-crafted but simple chainmail, her twin rapiers. Her entire identity outlined there, in those humble trappings. Bow. Beast. Sword.

Ma'Lanth to the end.

And yet in that moment, as he looked at his fierce but utterly innocent daughter, as he considered what she would never see, or know, he regretted all of it.

His thoughts were brought back to the present by the commanding voice of the Interrogator.

"Who among us has not sinned, brothers?" Vishas' mad voice boomed out again, arms outstretched in a grand gesture, his words resonant against the stone walls of his chamber. Of course he was met with silence, his guards and assistants numb with fear, numb with the blind passion of their cause. In a moment of clarity, Sihmm mused that there was probably not one sane mind between all of them combined. And yet, the Crusade was doing well; the spoils of their victories and domination displayed for all to see in this fine, dark Monastery that thrived even as the Lich King's forces swept the land. Such was their force and fervour.

He had nothing to lose, though. He had to try.

"Take me, and do as you wish. But let her go."

The half-elf's voice, so gentle and patient. Disciplined, restrained. Keeper of a thousand secrets, Sihmm had led their band to Feralas, then..fatefully..to Tirisfal.

"Oh we shall take you both, halfbreed, and extract from you the very soul you waste on your pathetic and primitive existence! Look at him...." Vishas cruelly lifted the elder man's face and displayed him like a prize bull...

"......look at this fine example! Indeed, brothers, the peasant's chainmail! The unkempt hair, the stench of the heathen upon him...and did he not almost regurgitate like a scared girl with the death of his companion over there? Imperfect, devil's spawn!"

The interrogator leaned close, his hot, horrible breath grazing Sihmm's face. "Are you even sure you're a man, halfbreed?"

Sihmm grunted painfully as Vishas grabbed the most intimate part of him violently and jerked upward with force.

The Crusader smirked darkly and released him.

"Well well! He's a man, after all. Take him to Doan. I think he might enjoy a taste of this elf-human's last moments in this world."

Sihmm straightened his shoulders, then turned his noble head to Andro and spoke quietly to her.

"Adon'arla, Andro. Until we next meet."

"Adon'arla....Sihmm...." her voice faded to a whisper as she stared at him. It was goodbye....

She looked back at him once more - the retreating figure of the father she didn't know - before they led him out of the room.

She would never see him again.

Hopeless....Veti is dead, Sihmm will follow..... And what is to become of me...and where is my beloved Gara....I will kill these men, so help me, one hand free, one second, one mistake.....I'll...I'll eat you! I'll rip your heart out and eat you like a hare!!....but before I do, I'll make you taste it yourself, taste your own sick flesh, for what you do. Somehow, Vishas......I will return for you....

Something in the woman is born. It blinks its eyes and turns its head to stare at its captor.

The beast is awake. It's watching you, Crusader. And it never forgets.

Vishas turned as if he had heard a voice, and looked back at Andro. For a moment, a fraction of time, he felt a strange, gripping anxiety as his eyes met hers. A fleeting chill flew over him like a cloud's shadow, then dissapeared. He shrugged it off and looked at her, smiling his cruel, white-toothed, perfect smile once again.

"Take her bow and swords.", he commanded.

Andro kicked like a wild creature, roaring at him, nearly mindless with hate as the guards ripped away her weapons.

Shaana had said, many years past, as she walked full and pregnant with the unborn girl, that she carried the fire of the beast in her belly. Shortly before her birth, the medicine-wife had rested her hands on the mother's broad abdomen and nodded solemly, chanting in the small house as a fire crackled in the hearth, and looking at her with a mixture of excitement and concern. And from far too early, Shaana felt the child in her womb, punching and squirming against the restraint of her mother's body, striving to escape, to be free, to breathe and live. Even as Andro's rebellious and premature baby kicks caused her to grunt with discomfort, she secretly felt proud that this future Ma'Lanth was destined to have the same relentless will as her own.

"That is it, my child. Fight. You will be born Ma'Lanth...you will live Ma'Lanth...but you have the heart of the beast! It will set you free someday."

It would not, however, be today.

Vishas nodded curtly to the guards to bring her forward to the rack. He enjoyed torturing women especially; seeing them twist beneath his knives and chains, the ultimate sinners, for what they made him think and feel, they should forever be punished, they should all burn.....and how this one burned before him, pale-skinned, panting and wild, teeth bared like a feral cat.......

A beast that needed taming...he thought, and his calm, cold gaze slid over her frame.

"Not the table....." he said, quietly, and cracked his knuckles.

The guards stopped in their tracks, the shackles lifted and ready to apply to her wrists and ankles.

"Take her to my quarters."

"Your will, milord." The remaining guards bowed deeply.

He smiled indulgently as they began to drag her away.

Something unfamiliar, a sick, twisted knot of fear gnawed at her belly. Whatever this was, it was not better; Vishas' face was a mask of hunger and violence, a loaded crossbow, aimed between her eyes.

Thrown into his room, she was then strapped against some strange ornate frame, she had moments to survey it....frantically...windows? No.....nothing..acres of thick tapestry, and..laid out in careful fashion against
the finest black satin fabric, a macabre collection of ...knives....so many knives...funny curled blades, strange, ragged-edged metal tubes, leather straps, siphons, troughs...razors.....

I'm going to die here.

"Like it?" he said, entering the room through a blood-red curtain, laced with gold brocade. His voice was utterly casual. "You should be flattered, little hunter. I rarely...indulge my own sins anymore..."

She spat at him in response.

He laughed wildly a moment, then his face stilled like a stormcloud....he slapped her hard with the back of his hand, before lifting a dagger to her throat.

He pressed....just enough..the tip indented the skin. Any more and its surface would be breached...any more, the blood would flow.

She cringed and lifted her head, trying to avoid its razor tip, never taking her eyes off of him.

"Oh no..." he smiled. "I won't cut that pretty face...not at first, my dear. I would have you watch! You are born a sinner, girl, and you will die a sinner. Did you know..? They make you this way..just for this purpose..."

He pulled the dagger away from her face.

A slight pause......

Then she felt its gentle pressure against her belt, slicing through the leather.

Some part of her knew what was coming, even if she had no idea what it was called.

Vishas took her innocence, and then her life.

She bore it all, staring straight up into his eyes...never crying out, never whimpering, never blinking, even as the sweat slipped from his forehead and dropped upon her, even as the overly-perfumed stench of him assaulted her mind, even as pink and fleshy hands assaulted the rest of her.

In the darkest, deepest corner of her soul....she took a picture of the face of her tormentor, and uttered one last sentence in a hissing, gasping breath as his dagger found first one eye, and then the other.

"If there be a netherworld, Vishas, I shall see you there. And when I do, you will see my eyes again, and you will remember me. And then.....then, interrogator..you will die a thousand times...."

The blood streamed down her sightless face.

She lost consciousness after that.

Andro Dubh Ma'Lanth, 26, born of Tarren Mill, and raised in the wilds of Winterspring and Feralas, was cast out into the woods near the Scarlet Monastery graveyard. She would die soon enough, they had little question of it, her body brutalised and used so badly, her wild green eyes gouged out, laying next to the body of her dead frostsaber, a raw, bloodied corpse, skinned for his magnificent pelt. She had simply been thrown away, like an unwanted ragdoll.

But she was wanted, as it turned out.

Seeker Nahr rode in silence, the scavenger, ever the hunter for his Queen. He sniffed the air.

Blood. Fresh...and clinging to life.

However mutilated, the human's body had once been young and strong. The bones...its all about the bones....waste not, want not...

We have beaten the Lich King to this one, it seems. Let her taste our new plague, then she will serve our Lady's great cause.

Yes.

One more for the war.



He dismounted and lifted the lifeless form of the young hunter and slung her across the back of his haggard, undead mare and made his way to Deathknell.

Sylvanas would be pleased.

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"I wrote the story myself. It's about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it." - Mae West
Fireflower's Words of Wisdom: http://i200.photobucket.com/albums/a...ompilation.jpg