moonshadows

“Illidan.”

Arms elbow-deep in a complex arcane structure, I ignored him.

“Illidan.”

How long had he been standing there?

“Illidan.”

Not long enough; I kept working.

“Illidan.”

You’d think being ignored would be enough of a hint, but you’d be wrong.

“Illidan.”

He was getting louder. Maybe he thought I was just too immersed to hear him?

“Illidan.”

This was starting to grate on my nerves. I wondered what it would take to make him go away.

“Illidan!”

Gritting my teeth, I tried my best to focus on the tricky bit…

“Illidan!”

…and it all collapsed. Disgusted and annoyed, I let the entire structure dissipate and turned with an irritated exhalation to face my so-called twin. “What do you want, Furion?”

“Your forgiveness,” he said, as calmly as if he’d informed me that lunch was ready.

“No.”

“Why not?”

I turned my back to him and began rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. If he thought he was going to keep me from getting this done, he was sorely mistaken. “Because you haven’t done anything to deserve it.”

By going slowly and inserting holding pins into the matrix at every stage, I managed to get the foundation rebuilt before he said, “I was wrong.”

Align this with… “Yes,” I agreed easily. “You were.” …and affix the lynchpin into that subsection to hold it for the…

“I tried to change you.”

Almost back to where I was. Spread the arrays and… “Yes, you did.”

“An aspen will never be an oak.”

“And now you’ve proven you can recite one of the first lessons your shan’do gave us. Did you want a pat on the back? I’m busy.”

“This is important, Illidan.”

From the sound of his self-righteous huff, I was starting to annoy him. Good. “So is this.”

“Your people are suffering.”

Back to the tricky bit; I placed several pins and began the construction. “They’re not my people. They’re yours. My people have been walking the day for thousands of years now.”

“My people are suffering,” he corrected himself, teeth audibly clenched.

“Mine aren’t.” The core slipped neatly into its socket, and I began attaching everything.

With gratifying frustration, he snapped, “What do you want me to do, Illidan?”

“You could leave me alone while I’m working – oh, but that requires basic decency.”

“What can I do,” he said slowly, every syllable enunciated and ground out slowly, “to earn your forgiveness?”

“You can start by convincing me you actually want it.”

“What makes you think I don’t?”

The connections were all finished, but I didn’t take the pins out. He wouldn’t know whether or not I was done, and I rather liked having my back to him. “You’re not begging, you’re not groveling, and you haven’t once said you’re sorry.” I ran a superfluous scan-and-check just to make it look like I was doing something. “Are you?”

“Am I what?” he asked crossly.

I turned to look, arms smugly crossed as behind me, the scan made my project light up. “Are you sorry?”

He half-glared at me, arms also crossed. It was like looking into a warped mirror. My indigo hair was pulled neatly back, cascading down to my shoulderblades; his forest-green hair was an unkempt mane. My beard was neatly trimmed, just long enough to look good and be easy to care for; his was a bush. My forehead sported two curved black horns that gleamed softly and attracted a surprising amount of female curiosity; he bore a rack of antlers. Ten points, or maybe twelve. I wondered how he managed to sleep with those. For all of those differences, our lips, our cheeks, our noses, our eyes were identical. Of course, mine were golden with the burden of destiny and his merely stained from constant exposure to Cenarius.

“No, you’re not sorry,” I said once the silence had stretched enough. “You still think what you did was somehow justified. You’re here asking for my forgiveness because that’s what your people need you to do, but you don’t actually want it because you don’t think you did anything that requires being forgiven.”

“You should have been a druid,” he said softly, and I rolled my eyes.

“No, Furion. That was never my path, and the only one who didn’t see it was you. You wanted me to be a druid. Cenarius knew from the start that it was your dream, not mine. If I’d continued to follow that path, I would have been utterly miserable.”

“We would have been together,” he insisted. “You wouldn’t have been twisted by demonic magic.”

“Right. Instead, Gul’dan would have run rampant and done stars-know-what with Sargeras’s power and we would be napping in Ashenvale somewhere, blissfully unaware that the demons were coming back. I’m not afraid of bearing a little suffering for the good of the world, Furion.”

“Your eyes-”

“My eyes,” I interrupted angrily, “mean that I have a responsibility to the world, to my people, to be the one who stands up and faces down the things they cannot.”

“And instead, you wallowed in the corruption and iniquity of the Highborne,” he shot back just as angrily. “You hid your name and your face under a pair of breasts, hid from who you were meant to be!”

“I became who I was meant to be! I am Solaria as much as I am Illidan; no one forced me into it! Are you somehow blaming me for not being born as two people? Are you jealous?”

“I have Tyrande; there’s no reason for me to be jealous of your strings of shallow affairs and meaningless lovers. I have had the same woman at my side for ten thousand years, shared love and pain with her. What have you had?”

“Aside from more sex?” I asked dryly. “I’ve had a family who stood by me and shared love and pain. I had a mother who embraced me as the daughter she’d lost, who praised and encouraged me, who showed me how to be a woman and urged me to not surrender my independence to anyone or anything. I had an older brother who taught me what to do with a sword or a dagger, how to defend myself and dispatch attackers, who designed armor that would accommodate both of my forms. I cried when I lost them, and I remember them every Winter Veil. Did you ever cry for me, Furion?”

He looked uncomfortable.

“That’s what I thought. I cried for you, you know, and Mother held me to her breast and comforted me. I had a father who taught me magic and couldn’t have been any more proud of me if I’d been his lost daughter. He was a good father, a good leader, and a good king. I have an older brother who taught me politics as he learned them, who was as good a king as our father was and who asked for and listened to my opinion often. I have an older brother who was the best friend you should have been. We talked, laughed, played, and learned together. We were there for each other. And when he was sent into neverending sleep by an unlucky blow to the head, I turned him into an aspen so he could thrive in his sleep rather than wither.” I smiled tightly. “I believe you’ve met him; he’s a splendid forest now, and we still talk and laugh together.

I may not have a husband or wife to share my days and nights with, I may not lead my people, but I wouldn’t trade my family for anything. My nephew was a good king, and I gave him advice when he asked for it. My grand-nephew is shaping up to do his father proud, and he’s not afraid to ask for or listen to advice. I don’t want the throne; I don’t need that kind of responsibility tying my hands. When something comes up that threatens my people and the world in general, I have to be able to drop everything and take care of it. You have nothing for me to envy, Furion.”

“I only wanted what was best for you,” he said finally.

“You wanted what you thought was best for me.” If my words sounded a little bitter, well, they were. “You never cared what I wanted. You still don’t. Furion, you’re only asking for my forgiveness because somehow, it’s what your people need. I’m disappointed in myself that that hurts, even after ten thousand years.”

“Do you think it didn’t hurt when you left?” he burst out with sudden vehemence. “Because it did, okay? I did everything for you, and you never appreciated it. You left without even saying ‘thank you’ and I had to carry on by myself while you got to lounge around eating your…fancy food and wearing your fancy clothes and pretending to be a girl.”

I let the ‘pretending’ part slide for the moment. “Oh, so now it’s all about you, is it? Poor, neglected Malfurion?” My lip curled up into a sneer. “You didn’t shed a single tear for me. If you were hurt, you sure hid it well. You could have come with me, you know. If you’d been appreciative of the effort I put forth in letting you know I was alive, well, and thinking of you, there would have been more packages. Perhaps even an invitation or a commission to put your nature magic to use and be well paid. Maybe if you’d bothered to admit that you missed me, I wouldn’t have left the door closed. Did you keep me in that cage hoping that I would thank you for your consideration in ‘saving’ me from what I was meant to do? No, Malfurion, you made this bed yourself. ‘I’m sorry you hurt me’ is not an acceptable apology.”

“So that’s it, then?” He gestured angrily, face like a thundercloud. “You’re going to let my people continue to suffer because of your foolish pride?”

“No, Furion. You’re going to let them suffer because of your foolish pride.” Almost cheerfully, I turned back to my work and started removing the pins, letting the structure come to life in stages. “I told you once: you need me, but I don’t need you. If you don’t care about me enough to feel genuine remorse over the way you treated me, and you don’t care enough about your people to put aside your pride and beg my forgiveness or even choke out an apology you don’t mean, then I have no obligation to care enough to give you anything but my refusal.”

“I thought you didn’t object to a little suffering for the world, Illidan. Yet here you are, letting innocents suffer.”

“They’re your people,” I practically chirped. Really, the project was looking fabulous. Splendid, for a prototype. “I don’t have to care about them. Unless, of course, they want to start walking the day and being my people.” When Furion made no comment, I glanced over my shoulder at him and the discomfort on his face made me laugh. “So that’s it, hmm? Hoping to forestall a racial split? To stem the northward bleeding of your best and brightest with a bandage made of hollow words?” Very pleased, and not just with the project, I turned back to him with my hands sassily on my hips. It made me look like a man who favored men, but…eh, that wasn’t entirely inaccurate. “No, Malfurion. I do not forgive you. You are a pompous, arrogant ass and I am under no obligation to compromise my personal integrity in order to help you convince your own people that your way of life – your stagnant, hidebound, primitive way of life – is better than the abundant food, the physical comfort, and the elegant culture my way of life provides. I mean, really…just because you had to eat simple, tasteless food and camp in the woods, you believe everyone should have to live the same way? It’s not their fault you were orphaned, and were too stiff-necked to actually work for a living.”

“I don’t see where you worked for the lap of luxury you sat in,” he countered.

“That’s because you don’t see magic as work. Did you know that if I had been exposed, Queen Azshara would have killed me? I worked very hard indeed to master the spell that let me take Sapphire’s form, and worked even harder to adjust it so that it fit me. I won’t say that learning to be Highborne didn’t have its comforts, but it had its dangers, too.”

“Dangers you brought upon yourself.”

“Like the danger of starving or freezing” I asked sweetly. “You brought those on yourself, you know. The embargos will remain in place.”

“And now you’re making a sweeping political decision. I thought you didn’t want the throne, Illidan.”

For a long minute, I just stared at him. “I don’t. Stars, you really have no idea how this ‘caring about family’ thing works, do you? Kael’thas upheld his father’s ruling on trade with the night elf people: that there would be none as long as the fundamental rift between our peoples, the shunning of arcane magic, remained in place. The key provision of that ruling being rescinded was that you earn my forgiveness for the crimes of imprisonment, slander – did you not read the declaration? Did Tyrande not tell you about this?”

“I fail to see what our history has to do with no longer shunning arcane magic.”

In other words, he either hadn’t known or hadn’t cared.

“Because unlike you,” I growled, “my family cares about me and they’re quite offended by the things you did to me. So long as you lead even a fraction of your people, they will be denied everything we can deny them until you have paid for the pain you put me through. You told me once that I owed you nothing; well, the reverse is not true. You owe me, Malfurion. You owe me your life twice, you owe me centuries spent underground in a cage with no privacy and no basic comforts, and you owe me for spreading lies about what happened during the War of the Ancients. The Highborne could have helped rebuild night elf society, but you couldn’t see past your own nose enough to admit it, and your followers shunned us blindly. So now they, and their descendants, get to pay the price. Either they can forsake you and your precious Tyrande and follow in my father’s footsteps, or they can cling to your foolish and misguided notions and live in the ruins of what might have been, eating the scraps of what they could have had.”

“Why do you punish them like this,” he returned hotly, “when it would cost you so little to have pity on them?”

“My father once said I should remember that I am better than you, and have pity,” I said slowly. “But he also taught me that the best revenge was to rise above and overshadow. So that’s what I’m doing.” One last touch to the prototype, and I casually opened a portal behind me. “If any of your people forsake your ways for ours, we take pity on them. When you deserve my pity, you’ll know it because you’ll see me as the light lifting you out of darkness and despair. In the meantime…” I smiled nastily. “…enjoy being in my shadow.”

One step backwards; the portal closed, leaving me in my bedroom laughing at my reflection.