#lesbian revisionist Warcraft fanfiction

[marxalittle]

I woke up and this was in my notes app

Sylvanas stepped down into the Scar, trying her best not to focus too much on any one detail, aware in every fiber of her being of what lay just beneath the blighted earth. She closed her eyes and concentrated, humming quietly, reaching out for what she needed. They came at her call, the lilt of the cavalry song familiar to them, and she gathered them close: three chargers, spirits faint but bright, like distant stars. A wave of her hand and they surged out of the ground, alicorns broken but heads proud, jostling for position and knocking ragged barding against each other as they mustered. She reached out to take one under the chin, almost smiling as it tossed its head and ducked into her palm.

"What are you doing?" Alleria's voice was flat.

"It is a long way to walk, and dangerous to linger." So was hers.

"You mean us to ride--" the disgust in her older sister's voice was suddenly too much to bear; the numbness which had descended over Sylvanas abruptly evaporated, leaving her raw and anguished.

"Stop it!" She was aware that she was screaming-- not wailing, screaming-- but she didn't care. The horses shifted their weight, but didn't shy away. "Don't treat them like they're filth!" Sylvanas could feel her eyes burning brighter, the tear tracks on her cheeks smoking, as she rounded on her sisters. They stood a few feet back from the Scar itself, just as they always held themselves slightly apart from her. As if it would corrupt them if they deigned to touch it. As if she were contagious.

"How dare you," her voice was low now, growling, the banshee echo dark with rage, "How dare you turn away from them. These horses charged into the teeth of hell, fearless and faithful, for Quel'Thalas. Their horns broke and their hooves split upon the armies of her enemies, and every blow bought another life escaped from Silvermoon. Here they fought and here they fell for Quel'Thalas, horses and riders both, at my order, and even still," she looked back at the horses, watching them a moment.

Sylvanas raised her hand in an old familiar gesture, and the three chargers dropped their forelegs, ready for their riders, "Still they serve." It came out in a whisper. "At my order."

Vereesa hiccuped. She heard Alleria shift her stance again, the creaking of her boots and the rustle of her cloak; she imagined she could hear her older sister's jaw clench, too.

"Do not you dare to stand before those who did what you did not, and be revolted by what their sacrifice made of them." She turned her back on the both of them, ready to leave them there and carry on with this folly alone, ready for a knife between her shoulders, "Don't treat them like they're beneath you."

Don't treat me like I'm beneath you. The words would never cross her lips; she did not doubt that Vereesa, at least, heard them anyway. Her horse rose and settled under her as she swung into the saddle, still parade-perfect as an elven warhorse should be, and she flexed elbows and knees until they faced the distant Spire.

"Turn back now, if you cannot bear to face what survival cost your people. Return to your ignorance. Your comfortable superiority. Or come and see the empty grave of the quel'dorei, but take care. The shame of what happened here is not theirs to bear."

[marxalittle]

To begin with, it's important to acknowledge that the issue with Warcraft/World of Warcraft, from my perspective and for many who seek to write stories in the setting, is that war is the name of the game (literally). The whole edifice rests on the necessity of constant open armed warfare, in a way which is completely and entirely impossible for a world with, just for instance, an economy or recognizable forms of government. Of course, the Legion can wage wars like this because they are demons and summon unending numbers and arms from the hateful will of the fallen Titan Sargeras; no one else possibly could, so all the factional and internecine strife would eventually either dry up, shift into proxy wars, result in weird deadlocks and standoffs, or form some other state of semi-stability for a few decades. However, since an MMORPG requires fresh content and resource and unit building strategy games are games no matter how many tie in novels are written desperately attempting to embroider a setting which is doomed not by the narrative but by the structure of wargames, the actual canon will only ever get more complicated as the conflict escalates, changes venues, switches midstream, travels back in time, and does all sorts of other loops in order to keep going. That's not even going into how elite unit tactical games being backwritten into stories make for totally implausible military and government structures. Like, no, that is not how anything works and it never has been, no not even with magic involved.

Therefore when one wishes to explore, as I always do, the human-sized spaces in a setting which functionally doesn't have "ordinary life," sometimes you just have to make your own. Besides, tell me this isn't a perfect setup for the distinctly sapphic genre of Gothic haunted house horror/romance: a family estrangement, an ancestral home harboring a dark secret, an old friend in need of a place to go, with a long and terrible war finally ended behind it all. A stranger to the area arrives to find a family tragedy already in progress. I'm always more interested in what war does to people than in war itself, and so I've ended this one in order to see its effects more clearly. Also there's seaweed involved.

More terror from the depths of my notes app (ie, story ideas half-framed and hardly fleshed out, growing more deeply embroidered without ever getting properly written), this time a Gothic romance featuring lighthouse keeper ex-sailor exile Jaina and haunting-her-own-manor ghost/banshee Sylvanas, with bonus dark rangers running a bar and Vereesa who knows very well who's in the locked west tower doing the accounts and seeing to the estate and refuses to come home until her sister is willing to leave her room and be civil.

It was definitely a mage tower. The maps of the area and all the local records called it a lighthouse, and to be sure, that was its function; but even before she'd moved into it, it had been a mage tower. An elven mage tower, at that: elegant and refined, to her eyes too delicate for the rugged coast it oversaw, but older and more powerful than it looked. Folded full of functional spaces-- rooms with workbenches and pigeonhole shelves, rooms with reinforced walls and ceilings-- the tower had been stripped bare when she'd arrived. When the last keeper had gone for the war, they had left nothing behind.

The great lamp and lens at the top were mundane enough, though the way her fingers itched at the feeling of old arcane magic she doubted that had always been the case. Two levels down, the room beneath the lamp's machinery housed only the spiral stair and the still-operational magical apparatus: a communication system, tied into a net of wards and leylines and humming with power, if badly in need of maintenance. Maps covered the walls, marked and marked over in different hands, different colors; the fading lines told stories of old emergencies, storms past, battles long forgotten.

A watchtower.

A watchtower at the end of the world, as far as the fallen kingdom it had served had been concerned; and as far as Jaina Proudmoore was concerned as well. It suited her. There was a certain symmetry to it.

What was one to do when one's world had ended? Travel to the end of the world, perhaps.