#nick’s a bitter bitch. and a privileged one.

[vessels-for-good-intent]

“Even though he [Nick] insists he is not carelessly violent like Tom or Dasy, the young understand that Nick is as much a product of his social class as Tom, that its backwardness and insularity marks him as much as it does Tom and Daisy.”

- Jesmyn Ward

[terezascania]

what would completely break your character?

“Come on. Move.” The guard roughly shoved Terez out into the bright midday sun. Almost immediately she shrunk away from the overbearing sunlight, her eyes burning after having spent months locked away in the deepest dungeon of Stormwind Keep. Sudden pain or not, Terez was allowed no reprieve as the jailer roughly dragged her by her shackles. How long had she been in prison? Had it really been months? Was it weeks or days? She couldn’t really tell, isolated as she had been from the outside world after the Great Revolution had begun in earnest. The remnants of the King’s Army had fought until the bitter end, but even they eventually fell to the onslaught - and Terez with them.

The streets from the keep to the gallows were thick with onlookers and Terez could barely hear herself over the screaming jeers of the newly proclaimed Citizenry of the First Stormwind Republic.

“Tyrant!”

“Bitch!”

“Whore!”

The insults were varied and many, some more creative than others. There had been a time when that sort of verbal berating would have made her shrink, but by now it phased her relatively little. It was just too hard to care anymore. They had taken everything from her. They had taken her prisoner along with the rest of the Kingdom’s nobility - those few that were lucky enough not to be slaughtered like dogs in the street. They had also shorn off all of her hair to humiliate her, and as final insult to injury they had forced her into sackcloth and a pair of partially ruined trousers before carting her out into the street. So far removed was she from how she normally looked that she resembled a stable boy more than a proper lady - a punishment that was itself uniquely agonizing in a manner most would never understand.

“Kill her!”

“KILL HER!”

The venomous screams of the citizens grew more rabid the closer Terez was dragged towards the executioner’s block that now dominated Stormwind City. King Wrynn’s memorial had been destroyed at the onset of the revolution, the entirety of the memorial and empty coffin shoved by rioters into the sea below. In its place stood the high wooden platform that housed “the Equalizer,” the nick name for the guillotine that had claimed the heads of hundreds of Stormwind’s once privileged upper class.

The final drag up the platform was especially gruesome, and the unfamiliar faces of the commoners gave way to the more familiar faces of the Republic’s ruling council. Whitaker, Bohannon, Duskbinder, Rose, and many others. Fane was one of them too. He had turned coat early in the Revolution, and his defection had been especially painful - even if expected. Terez had drank and dined with many of them at some point or another, shared laughs and good times even, but those days were long gone. King Anduin’s treason had been the last straw that broke the monarchy’s back, and with it the power of his nobility.

As Terez ascended the steps she noticed the severed heads skewered on pikes of many people she once knew. Lord Graves, Harrowmire, Greywell - even Bishop Prismspark - and a few others she guessed she knew but couldn’t quite be sure of on account of the decay. One of the heads stood out though, and as Terez waited her turn in the guillotine she reached out to gently stroke the pale and somewhat bloated cheek of Gideon Northgate’s severed head - his mouth stuffed with golden coins.

“Oh Mr. Northgate...” Her voice trembled, tears carving small paths down her dirty cheeks. She had been able to hold back the tears until then, but seeing Gideon like that was too much. He had been as a brother to her, and she had prayed he would escape the violent reprisals of the Revolutions fiercest adherents. Obviously, he had not.

Mercifully, she didn’t have to wait long to be dragged away from Gideon and up onto the platform. Without fanfare she was roughly shoved into the guillotine, her neck exposed to blade above. She was permitted no grand speeches. No moment of dignity before death. No grandiosity. Just execution. Distantly she could hear First Citizen Whitaker preaching to his choir, riling them up into a foaming and blood thirsty mob.

Instead of listening to the madman’s words she looked up at her executioner. Terez could barely make out the robed figure as female, but most everything else was impossible to discern. In that moment before death took her Terez had imagined that she would think of pleasant things: taking tea with friends, riding her horse through the woods on a warm day, lounging on the city walls at sunset. Instead all she could see were the familiar burgundy eyes staring back at her from beneath the executioner’s hood, and something deep in Terez’s chest suddenly snapped.

It was in that moment, in the split second before the Equalizer’s blade kissed the back of her neck, Terez Ascania truly broke inside.

(Also asked by @foxglovethings !)