Distant (Rubicon 2)

The paths that I once tread
have all but gone.
Only embers now smolder
where bridges once burned.
I feel alive and yet I fear
what may happen now.
I know I can't return.

She stood, looking across the landscape in ruin before her. How much had the land changed in this horror? She had escaped it, lost in the wilds of Outland in her pilgrimage. Now, she saw the desolation, the destruction, which had been wrought on yet another world. Her fists clenched, tightly enough to drive clawed fingers into the palms of her hands and draw blood. The pain made her jaw clench.

Anger surged in her, but not at the destruction. No, the anger was at those who had allowed it to happen, who had ignored the lessons of both her world, and their own past. In ignorance and arrogance, they let disaster strike once more. The same who had driven her away, the same who had betrayed her trust, the same who had shamed her, the same...

And yet now they asked her to return.

And I hear me say again
'oh let me not return'.
Damn the illusion of redemption
and the hopes that held me here.
I will oppose all that would befall me.
With this rage inside of me
I will defy what I would become.

No, she thought to herself. I will not return for them. I will not return for anyone but myself. This place, it is not home. But this land calls to me with its spirits the same as Draenor does. How many years had she spent alone in the wilderness, trying to make peace with this rage and shame? And even now, they burned in her.

NO! I will not return for them, she thought. No, I will return for my own goals, my own gains. She had vowed, deep in the demon torn wilderness of Outland, unable to find peace with the spirits, to find a way to regain herself. Now, she knew how. No longer would she be a puppet of the fool Earthen Ring. No longer would she bow her head to any of the Draenei elders. No longer.


The solitude and anger
that do battle inside me
will always guide me to the answers
that I know I may not see.
They are the bonds that hold me tighter.
They are the chains that weigh on me.
One day I know they will be gone.

She walked for days, avoiding roads, covering terrain as fast as her hooves would cross the ground. From the Dark Portal to where she could find passage on a boat, across the great sea, and into the lands tainted by the Scourge. Every moment, she could hear his voice in her mind, the words of the stranger she had met in Outland.

"Rage, anger, these things are power. Take this blade, take it to the Citadel of Naxxramas. Find who you are."

The great blade on her back sang to her with those words. And with those words she ran, searching. She would be free of the Naaru. She would be free of the spirits. She would be whole again.

Can I start again and erase this pain
by casting doubts into the waters,
asking judgment of the sea.
Though fortune may guide to the fools
I have no wish to be free
until I am gone.

She stands now, looking out across the world, the power and cold surging through her, where once the heat of blood pulsed. She can no longer hear the voices of the Naaru, nor the spirits of the world, but this does not matter. She is more than she was, unshackled, unbound. But she is not free: she knows this.

She has no wish to be free. She is all she wishes to be: Death Knight.