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Jaina struggled to think of what Highlord Darion Mograine reminded her of as he stood before her in her foyer.

Derek had been struggling with his new status, adapting fairly poorly to everything now that he was back home and stuck with constant reminders of what life had been, not to mention whatever Sylvanas Windrunner had done to him. It was not something Jaina had much experience with, though she had heard tales of some of those freed from the Scourge going mad and losing their minds from what they’ve done. It was enough to push her increasing concern towards a fever pitch and, doing what she believed any good sister would do, she penned a letter to one of the only people who she could ask about this.

I know we haven’t spoken since we had a common enemy in the Lich King, but today I’m in need of your insights. You owe me nothing, but if you would come to Boralus to speak with me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Jaina had sent the letter this morning. She had expected a response within the week, perhaps him visiting within a few days if he thought it must have been urgent. Instead, he had shown up on her doorstep at dusk, rainwater dripping from his saronite armor, the guards flanking him looking like they were hiding back their fear from this man that was so short he looked to be a child in comparison to them. “Highlord, I thank you for your… prompt arrival. I hadn’t even heard that you had arrived in Boralus, or I would’ve given you a proper welcome. You’ll have to forgive me.”

Darion was stiff. “Lady Proudmoore,” he greeted in return, then paused. “Lord Admiral,” he amended. “There’s no need for that. You didn’t say what the problem was, I thought it might be something of import.”

“It’s not world ending concerns. I need the expertise of someone… versed in your methods.”

Did he seem like a wet cat, maybe? Standoffish and aloof, not pleased with anything that was happening, though that didn’t seem apt enough. Annoyed cats had their tails swish to show their displeasure. Death knights didn’t budge at all. And Darion didn’t do so now. He only continued to stand in the foyer, as still as a night in the Sound. Jaina wished he could read him, even if only in the broadest strokes. “Come with me, will you?” she asked.

The Highlord bowed his head and headed up the large staircase to join her up at the top. The guards at the door looked to Jaina questioningly, and she waved them off. She wouldn’t need an escort with them. Tirion Fordring had always held Darion in high regard and insisted on his honor. More than that, Darion hadn’t done anything that made her question his honor, so she would treat him as a guest, and not a threat. She looked to his approach again and realized he was tracking mud with every step. By the tides, it was caked up to his knees. What had he been doing before this?

Darion caught her gaze as he made it to the top. She looked at him in silent question. “I thought it was something important,” he reiterated. Did he sound… strained? Or was that her imagination?

“It’s fine,” Jaina assured, though she was already imagining the contempt that would be radiating from the lead serving woman when she heard of this. Perhaps if this was wrapped up quickly, she could clean it herself before it was noticed. “Come with me.”

Darion was deathly silent beside her as she led him through Proudmoore Keep, not asking for any more information, the only sound being his shifting metal armor and the mild slopping sound of mud squishing onto the rug beneath them. Jaina mulled over her comparisons again, trying to wrack her brain over what he reminded her of. She spent so long wrapped up in empty thoughts that she hadn’t realized that she had said nothing until her feet automatically stopped in front of Derek’s door. That was unbecoming.

“I don’t know how much you’ve been following the war,” Jaina started, pausing for Darion to reply. He stayed silent, only staring at her. Jaina continued, “But there’s been some… strange developments in this war.”

“I’m not fighting in your war,” Darion said in firm rebuke.

That hadn’t been where Jaina was going with this, but it reminded her of past conversations with Khadgar, and she bristled before she could stop herself. She took a moment to regain her composure and assured, “I don’t wish to try and convince you to turn from your neutrality. This is more of personal matter; Sylvanas Windrunner has been raising people, one of which is my brother.”

Jaina could feel that she had Darion’s attention at the mention of raising people, his interest piqued. It felt as if she had a ray of light on her skin, but through a magnifying glass, amplifying the sun’s rays and burning her. “Tandred?” he ventured.

“Derek,” she corrected. “My older brother. He died during the Second War.”

Hesitation. “Windrunner raised a man that has been dead since the Second War?”

“Yes.”

There was an intelligent mind at work behind the helm. Jaina thought of the war against the Lich King, where the enigmatic Highlord didn’t personally show up until the gates into the citadel were finally broken down, with plans to make a weapon of equal terribleness to Frostmourne itself, fighting fire with fire. It was a nasty gambit, and against all odds, it was one that had worked. From what she knew, Darion had died a couple years before Arthas had awaken, and by the time he was active again, Darion was the best of what he had in terms of strategy and battle. He had been sent to claim the Eastern Kingdoms entirely for the Lich King, and he could’ve done it, too, but Tirion had somehow convinced him otherwise.

A steady mind and a strong hand, he was probably the smartest man in forbidden strategy and magic that would be willing to have a conversation with Jaina, except for perhaps that unnamed young man that acted in his stead during the Northrend Expedition, who had acted during meetings like a sharp-tongued encyclopedia on Scourge tactics and, on occasion, as an ultimatum: either the Horde and Alliance generals could work together, or the death knight would start killing generals until he found two that could cooperate. She didn’t know why Tirion hadn’t demanded a different knight from Darion—

Tides, Jaina could be dense sometimes. It probably didn’t help that she had spent that entire year distracted.

“What is it?” Darion asked, noticing her revelation.

“An unrelated realization. It’s unimportant,” Jaina assured. “We’ve recovered my brother, and he’s… not doing well.”

“I’d imagine not, with so many years of soul and body unjoined. Did you call me here with a psyche evaluation?” Darion’s tone change was a heel turn; in the first sentence, he was musing, and in the second, he was peeved, as if he had something better to do. From the mud caking his armor, he might have.

But this was Derek, the brother Jaina had lost as a child. She would not falter because Darion was annoyed. With her voice pitched low, she said, “I want to ensure my brother isn’t going mad, and you’re the most knowledgeable in this sort of thing.”

“And if he is going mad?” Darion asked, cruelty in his voice.

Jaina’s grip on her staff tightened, but she cooled herself. “I… trust your discretion.”

That seemed to catch Darion off guard. At the very least, he had been expecting a fight with those words, and with receiving none, he backed off. Seeing where the lines were, maybe? Anduin did that, on occasion, though with far less cruelty. Usually. Great, now she was thinking about how he was slowly gaining a jaded edge to his outlook. It was the slowest sink of a ship, and there was nothing she could do about it.

One tragedy at a time, Jaina.

With that, Jaina put a hand on the ornate doorknob and turned it, pushing it open. It was Father’s old study, left untouched by all except the industry of the stewards. Derek was sitting in a large armchair, paging through an old and weathered leatherbound journal. It was an old sea log, from one of their Father’s trips; he had always saved them, just in case. Tandred had told Derek about their father, neither Jaina nor their mother could. Jaina hated herself for it. She pushed that feeling out of her as Derek looked up at their entrance.

“Highlord, this is my brother, Derek Proudmoore,” she said to Darion as they entered. Looking to Derek, she continued, “Derek, this is Darion Mograine, Highlord of the Ebon Blade.”

Derek nodded. “Hello,” he said in greeting.

Darion said nothing, and Jaina felt all his attention now on Derek, feeling a mild relief now that the intensity was no longer persecuting her. The relief is short lived as the silence stretched, becoming awkward as Darion continued to say nothing and just stand in the doorway. Derek glanced to Jaina, askance. She glanced to Darion, impossible to read under his helm. Orc generals had withered from the gaze under that helm, she remembered now, delivered by a face that was young enough for even orcs to recognize. What a bizarre man.

“Is this… a joke?” Darion hazarded.

“Pardon?” Jaina asked.

Darion didn’t respond. Just stared at Derek. Derek was trying desperately not to wilt like a flower in a drought, she could see it. Then Darion was crossing the room to Derek, dragging mud through her father’s study, and standing right at Derek’s feet, looming over the sitting man. His behavior was so jarring that Jaina felt a spell at the tip of her tongue, her fingers cooling in anticipation. It was a long, still moment, no one moving, only her breathing. In an instant, Darion broke the stillness, tearing off his helmet before bending and openly scrutinizing Derek, who shrank back a fraction but otherwise held his ground. “Are you kidding me?” Darion asked, mostly to himself. He took one of Derek’s wrists and pulled it from the book, examining the hand. “How’s your fine motor control?” Darion’s question was edging to the fervor of demand.

“Uh, normal?” Derek replied. He flexed his fingers quickly as if to demonstrate this.

“Are you kidding me?” Darion replied.

“No.”

“I’m not talking to you.” Darion threw Derek’s hand back in his lap and turned to Jaina.

She was momentarily taken aback by his blazing blue eyes, and she swallowed, fear soon gripping her heart. “What’s wrong?”

Darion rolled his eyes, viciously annoyed that they were not actually on the same page as he assumed. “He’s fine, that’s the problem.”

Now Jaina was confused. “How is that a problem?”

Darion was already turned back to Derek, however. “What was your raising like?”

“What?”

“Your raising. When you woke up undead, what was it like?”

Derek seemed confused by the question. “I… I don’t remember. It had been a lot, and—”

Darion cut Derek off with a curse, and Jaina was getting sick of this. She crossed the room to Darion’s side and asked, “Darion, what the hell is going on?”

His eyes snapped to her’s, and he raised to his full height, which still required him to tilt his head up to look her in the eye. She had forgotten how young he looked, with his beard not fully grown in. “Sylvanas couldn’t have done this,” he said, as if it was a simple truth.

“She had done this.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you; I’m saying she doesn’t have the skills required to do this.”

Jaina understood. She took a moment to collect her thoughts. “She’s raised people before, we know this.”

“How much do you understand of necromancy?”

“I’ve never studied it.”

“Well then, I’ll keep this simple.” Darion shifted his helm from one hand to the other, tucking it underneath his arm. “Necromancy can be used as a cudgel or a scalpel. A delicate, careful hand can join body and soul as close to possible together again, though it takes time and effort. A sloppy, uncaring one can raise more at a faster rate, but there’s a higher margin of error, people go insane from being raised, that sort of thing. Sylvanas uses necromancy as a cudgel.” Darion pointed an accusing finger at Derek without looking at him. “She’s not capable of this.”

“She did it with the Blightcaller, did she not?” Jaina asked. The Banshee Queen’s champion had recently… how did one put it? Get a new body? He now looked like a well-preserved corpse rather than a shambling ghoul, and it had surprised everyone.

Darion’s laugh was ice shattering beneath one’s feet. It made Jaina’s skin crawl. “A banshee isn’t capable of raising the dead. They possess the living, and that’s it. She had no innate skills with necromancy, and she never bothered to learn it since she gained the Valkyr after the Lich King’s death. The Valkyr are just slapping souls into meat vessels at the end of the day. Anything more complex, and it costs them. I doubt that the Valkyr that did whatever it was with Blightcaller survived, and besides, from what I can tell, that was with…” he cleared his throat, seeming to find some social propriety. “Organic materials aiding the process.”

Someone had died to make Blightcaller what he was. Jaina’s stomach turned with that. She loathed necromancy to her core.

“I think it might’ve been a family member,” Darion said, an idle thought.

“I get the picture,” Jaina said.

“It wouldn’t have worked as well otherwise. Even then, it was a bit of a hack job.”

“Highlord,” Jaina said, exasperated.

“I’m thinking aloud,” he said by way of apology. “Actually, if you’re missing any family members, that might explain some things.”

“I… no one immediate. I haven’t heard of anyone going missing, though I suppose I’ll send out letters to extended family.”

“It would be smart,” Darion said. “Otherwise, I would start worrying.”

“Otherwise?” she asked. At this point, Jaina was convinced Darion was, generously put, very rusty with his social and language skills. “Don’t you mean, if so, and not otherwise?”

Darion shook his head. “Lord Admiral, a third-rate necromancer somehow was able to flawlessly raise your brother that has been dead since before I was born. She couldn’t even do that for the man she cared for in life. Your brother has skin after, what was it? Being at the bottom of the ocean for thirty years? Do you know how hard that is to do?”

Darion was born after the Second War? Hadn’t he died just a scant couple years before the war against the Lich King? Doing the quick math, Darion couldn’t have been older than, what, twenty when he died? And that was a generous estimate? She had known he was young, but that young? By the tides, was the man responsible for the death of the Lich King a mere teenager? And the man she cared for in life? Was the Blightcaller an exploitable point for Sylvanas? How did Darion know that, anyway?

Darion’s attention was back to Derek, investigating him once more. “Light blind me, this is impossible,” he muttered again. “How did you die? Did you have something protecting you, maybe?”

Derek stiffened. It had been the reason why Jaina had sought Darion’s insight. Every night was a night Derek spent in anguish, reliving his death over and over again. It was killing Jaina to see her older brother like that. She didn’t know exactly how or why the forsaken lost themselves to madness, but certainly this could’ve been a path. She wasn’t willing to risk it. “I was burned to death by one of the Horde’s dragons.”

“Burned to death?” Darion repeated.

“Yes.”

“Was it a red dragon?” There was a weird shake to Darion’s voice, and Jaina looked to him.

“Yes, it was.”

Darion was doing that thing when people were trying to avoid laughing, pressing their lips thin against each other. Darion thought this was hilarious. Derek was quicker to call him out than Jaina was, saying, “Are you laughing at me?”

“No,” Darion replied. “Not at you. I know a man that is— er,” he faltered for a moment, and the amusement on his face faltered with it. “I know someone that was burned by a red dragon and then was raised, and he did not get his skin back. I can… picture his frustration over hearing this.”

Bolvar. Jaina felt her stomach drop. It had been so long since she had heard anything of him, and it was delivered to her in the form of a teenage boy trying not to burst out laughing over his misfortune. Was he still doing well, under the helm? Was he watching this conversation, with the helm’s omnipresence? Darion’s inappropriate laughter would make sense, then, with the presence of the Lich King looming in the back of his mind. “How is he?” Jaina asked. It felt forbidden to say his name now, and so she refrained.

Darion shot her a look, his good humor gone, replaced with a warning expression. There was a weariness he couldn’t hide behind it. “Serving the purpose he was made for until he breaks in the pursuit, just like the rest of us.” His expression and vague words both made his point clear: they would not speak of this any further.

Jaina nodded. The corner of Darion’s mouth twitched, and he looked briefly frustrated before he schooled his expression again, as if he were hearing someone’s scolding and took a heartbeat to decide that he would not bother to listen. Derek glanced between Jaina and Darion, trying to read the context off their faces and failing miserably. “You keep saying I’m an impossibility, but you don’t look too different from me,” Derek said.

“I’m a different type of undead from you. Bad joints on one like me makes one useless to their purpose. I was also raised with the power of the Lich King himself, who is a far more capable hand in this sort of thing. It’s going to drive me crazy until I figure out how she did this.”

“Maybe the Tidemother had preserved me.”

“If it makes you feel better believing that your god saved your body so you could be cursed in undeath, then by all means, go ahead. At least your curse is a resistible one.” Darion then furrowed his brow, realizing something. He looked to Jaina. “If he has a different curse from the ones ghouls have, you should inform me immediately. You know what that is, right?”

Jaina swallowed the thickness in her throat. “Yes.”

“It’s resistible,” he reiterated. “And he might not even have it.”

“Highlord.”

Darion didn’t take notice. “Don’t encourage it and it should be fine.”

“Highlord,” Jaina repeated, echoing her exasperation.

Darion blinked. Did he really not realize what he was doing? Perhaps he was just so use to the ideas of necromancy and cannibalism that he had forgotten that they were taboo. “Well, thank you for the mystery, Lady Proudmoore. I’d wish you well in your war, but I don’t play favorites, and also, I don’t care.” He then turned and promptly left the study, leaving Jaina and Derek and his muddy footprints. Jaina was stunned by his abruptness, and when she glanced to Derek, he gave her a look that showed his utter confusion over this bizarre encounter.

“I don’t know what that was supposed to achieve,” Derek said quietly. “But I think I feel a little better about myself.”

Then Jaina remembered that she had summoned Darion for a reason, and she was out the door after him. “Highlord!” she called, and Darion turned to look at her, confused and more than a little annoyed. Lowering her voice, she said, “I summoned you here to help my brother, not just yell about his condition.”

Darion’s face twisted. Insulted, maybe? Jaina wasn’t entirely sure the long dead knight knew how to even properly show emotions anymore. “Your brother is in better condition than nearly all my knights. What are you expecting of me?”

“Physically, sure, but emotionally? My brother’s been—”

“His soul and body are joined well enough where the mental effects are negligible at best, past the initial horror of being raised. Sudden deaths do that. He’ll get over it in time, just keep an eye on him for a couple months.”

“That’s it?” Jaina asked.

“The dead and the living both need time to get over traumas, Lord Admiral.”

“I just wish there was something that I could do to alleviate his suffering.”

The disdain that crossed Darion’s face was unmistakable, eyebrows lifted as he examined her and found her lacking. “If you wished to do that, you would’ve struck him down at first sight.”

It was a shot across the bow, one delivered in such a cold and matter of fact way, and Jaina felt a sudden anger welling up inside her. Without thinking, she asked, “Should I offer you the same mercy, then? Since that’s what you believe is the right course of action?”

“I never said anything of the sort,” Darion said coolly, a savage grin crossing his face, all ego and daring her to give him an excuse. “But by all means, if you believe that you can do what the Light failed to do twice, then go ahead.”

They stared each other down in the hallway for a long time. The urge to freeze him solid was much more powerful than she would’ve liked to believe, and here he was, giving her an open chance to do so. One arm still held his helm, and he couldn’t draw a sword and charge her before she could stop him entirely.

No, Jaina was better than that. He was doing what he did best, just as he did back during the Northrend Expedition; he was playing the monster, and from his smile, he reveled in doing so, if only it was to provoke and unsettle. She would not fall for his game, and more than that, she would not blast an invited guest that had just given her some useful information that could be utilized in the war.

Seeing Jaina back away from the edge of striking Darion down, the knight put his helm back on. “By your leave, Lord Admiral.” Any sort of glee he had in his voice was gone now, returning to his stoic calm.

Jaina let out a heavy sigh, accepting the small feeling of pride in herself for clamping down on her anger. Darion reminded Jaina of herself, she realized now, and not the version of herself she liked to reflect on. It was one she still fought with, from time to time, and she would not let it win over her again, not today. “Highlord,” she said in acknowledgement.

Darion tracked mud all the way out of the keep.