Chapter Text
It wasn’t the first time Astarys’ quill had gotten her into trouble, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.
The little Sin’dorei had carried her messenger bag full of parchments and pens and random books and scrolls that inspired her up to the top of the Ember Court tower. She loved sitting up there, as high as she could climb, and watching the stone fiends fly back and forth between the parapets. From so high up, the dredgers working in the ruins below looked like little ants, and even the giant named Boot could have fit in the palm of Asta’s hand. Aside from the occasional peal of wind from Revendreth’s outer reaches, the nooks of the tower provided many quiet, relaxing spots.
She had needed the quiet -- desperately needed to write down the tangles of emotion that had so often harried her ever since arriving in this strange land. Revendreth alone would’ve been enough to give her plenty of inspiration for all her shadowy poems and gothic fairy tales. But to add him into it all… well, he was too much. Seeing him every day was too much. Talking to him every day: too much.
Everything having to do with him was simply too much.
It made Astarys feel unpleasantly lightheaded, ridiculous and nervous. She hated nervous.
But she had been forced to admit to herself over the years that unrequited emotions were sort of her thing. She’d had many crushes on noblemen and traders and warriors and poets in her day, and almost all of them had gone unmentioned; never to know what secret, sometimes-tawdry roles they played in her active imagination. She’d had actual trysts, too, but they had always been initiated by the other party. Astarys was not good at admitting out loud her feelings about what lunch had been like, let alone her yearnings for another person.
She was, however, quite good at writing those emotions out.
Sometimes (oftentimes) she burned the pages of poetry and confessions of love as a way to move on with her life. It also kept her anxieties about someone discovering her heartfelt prose to a minimum.
As she nestled herself into a crevice of broken stone atop the tower that day, Asta realized with growing worry that her latest obsession over the object of her silent, inkstained affection was getting a bit out of hand. She had so many pages of bad poems and silly little drawings, romanticized conversations they might have with one another, descriptions of what his hands might feel like on hers, of what his lips might taste like. The pleasant what-ifs, the lingering daydreams that made Astarys feel as if her head were trapped in a constant cloud. She hated it, yes… but she also loved it.
Pining after someone was familiar.
But over the last few days, the warmth of her infatuation had turned almost scalding. It was difficult for her to concentrate in the meetings she attended with the Council, and even more difficult still to actually leave the premises of Sinfall to perform her job as a Maw Walker. (One of the more unpleasant facts about being a Maw Walker: one actually had to go to the Maw. Dreadful.) Astarys felt the urge to linger after their meetings just to speak with him, to feel his warm amber eyes on her and see the corners of his lips turn up in a smile.
He was the Prince. The most important of the Venthyr, now that their twisted Sire was locked away. And she was a mortal, a rather nondescript and far-too-shy one at that.
Not to mention the obvious differences in their size… and did Venthyr even…
Her mind immediately slipped into the shadowy but delicious line of thought she’d been trying to hold back all day. There was no stopping it; this was a bad one, this infatuation, and as Astarys allowed herself to fantasize about the Prince leading her to a dark, secluded place and lifting her to him with his much-larger hands, she felt as if she’d actually turned her fire magic onto herself.
Gods, but she wanted him.
A dusty, cold wind brought her back to herself slightly. Astarys hunkered down a bit and withdrew a stack of her most recent writings, all of them drawings or Revendreth-inspired bits of poetry. The longest of them, the one she’d eventually be pained to burn the most, was a poem of confession. She’d been working on it for days, and today… maybe today she could finish it.
And then what?
Sighing, she admitted to herself that she didn’t know. But she was still stubborn enough to pull out her favorite quill and begin to compose a few more lines.
“Though mystery and pointed sin I’ve found
In every corner, dread and sadness bent
No twisted ghost or frothing, snarl-fanged hound
Would injure me as a Prince’s silence rent…
How I long to break this single-sided spell
How I long to spill my blood, my lust, my yearning
My love, my need -- all too great yet just a shell
My very skin for you is burning.”
“It’s terrible,” Asta thought to herself, but the act of writing was still a much-needed balm on her heart, and her own harsh criticism caused her to laugh. She lowered her quill toward its inkwell and was just leaning back to pen her next line, when --
The wind whipped up, striking her with a force that brought a gasp from her lips -- and then a cry of shock as her parchments were ripped from her fingers and sent spinning over the edge of the tower, dipping and fluttering in the chaos like embers of white fire.
“OH!” Asta exclaimed, struggling to her feet and reaching helplessly toward the pages. The sight of them drifting downward toward the Ember Court froze her in place -- suddenly her talented imagination was filling in all the details of what was surely about to happen to her. Someone would find them and her obsession would be the hot gossip of the court. Maybe she’d scrawled her name on one, or someone might recognize her penmanship, or, or, or, there were a hundred million different ways this was about to ruin her, and oh gods, she was going to have to leave Revendreth, it was time to choose a different covenant --
“Get ahold of yourself!” she hissed, and already she was flinging her bag across her chest and hurrying down the broken steps of the tower. The Ember Court wasn’t for another few hours and she was fairly sure dredgers couldn’t read. “Everything will be fine.”
Still, though, she felt a little like throwing up.
“How many were there? How many did I lose?”
Two she managed to find easily -- one was still being whipped around by wind eddies at the tower’s base, and the other had been caught by a spiky bush. She shoved them unceremoniously back into her bag and continued the hunt.
One she found floating in the muck pool -- it was more muck than paper anymore, and the ink was no longer legible. One of her earliest journal entries, she thought. Asta let the muck keep it.
One had plastered itself to the back of Boot’s giant leg, and Astarys had to apologize profusely as she peeled it free, shoving it into the sack with the others. The giant had no idea it had even been there, or what the tiny elf-creature was apologizing for.
One fluttered over a brazier of lit candles, caught on fire and half of it burned. She snagged the remaining half, finding with no lack of bemusement that she’d saved the half of her sketch page with the Prince’s face on it. Adding it to the other now-crunched rescues, she moved on.
And the last two she had to chase across the pathways of the Ember Court. The wind seemed to be taunting her, and Astarys found herself laughing wildly as she huffed her way up the slight incline to the shady ruins of Theotar’s usual spot. One paper caught on a rock and she gave a cry of victory as she snagged it, then darted forward to crunch the other one to the ground beneath her shoe. “Ha HA, caught you! I win!”
Asta folded down the flap of her satchel and heaved a sigh. Her heart was pounding like a drum in Orgrimmar, and her pent-up emotions finally bubbled to the surface as she began to laugh, allowing waves of relief to wash over her.
After a long moment she forced herself back to some semblance of composure. The elf turned in a slow circle, looking around to make sure none of her errant papers had been missed, and saw no more of them. “Crisis averted,” Astarys murmured. “I think that’s enough drama for today.”
What she hadn’t seen -- couldn’t have seen -- was Gubbins, who had waddled behind a stack of crates with Astarys’ poem in his hands. He looked bewildered as he rotated it back and forth, puzzling over the scribbles. She had been right -- dredgers can’t read. Or at least, this one couldn’t.
But Gubbins had a very close friend who could read very well, and he couldn’t wait for Theotar to tell him what his mysterious letter from the sky said.
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About the same time Gubbins was handing the sky-letter over to a bemused Theotar, a tired Astarys was sitting down at the small desk in her Sinfall quarters and opening her satchel… withdrawing the very-wrinkled pages and recounting them in her head to ensure they were all present.
Then a realization, creeping with slow tendrils of dread:
“The poem… where is the damned poem?!”