A different kind of hunt.

[Gergel]

Part 3

That which occurred between Sven and Thelarwen in Icecrown. Quite a big one, but I needed to cram over an hour's worth of RP into it.

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The undead were becoming more numerous by the minute. Sven had thought the Scourge was all but vanquished. Clearly that was not nearly the case in these Light-forsaken parts of the world. He and Tyson snuck past many, and carefully and (when possible) silently brought down those that were impossible to avoid.

It was cold. Far colder than any self-respecting part of the world had any right to be. Sholazar was only a stone's throw away (assuming the hypothetical stone-thrower was a titan or someone of the same caliber), how could this pleasant heat not leak over here? Perhaps the mile-high mountain sides were to blame...

And perhaps also the cold, spiky and menacing-looking metal walls, such as the one that Sven just had come across. No wonder the Lich King did not conquer all of Azeroth if he had wasted so many of his resources on these huge saronite walls. Sven lacked the resources to scale this wall, and because he also heard the distant sounds of battle from further ahead, he decided to follow it instead. And as it turned out, that was a most worthwhile thing to do, because that's when he found her.

The stench was sickening. The sight, more so. Countless corpses were strewn in putrid piles all around the frozen ground. Literally countless, impossible to count, each cut into far too many pieces. The word "overkill" came to mind. It should have taken quite a lot less effort to put down any of these ghouls, skeletons, abominations and the like. There was no need to cut them apart so thoroughly.

She was in the middle of it all. He had no clue where all of her opponents were coming from. They just crawled out from behind rocks and chunks of ice, wandered over from their odd decrepit structures and wagons, emerged from the ground underneath the piles of their former comrades. Again, "countless". And she cut them down tirelessly. Every swing of the almost unrecognizably gory twin-bladed sword severed limbs, heads, entire torsos. Blood and more unmentionable fluids spattered the newly-appearing Scourge, the corpses, and the butcher herself. It took a few minutes to even properly recognize the lone steel-covered fighter through the thick layer of gore and guts all over her.

"Thel!" he shouted. Found her at last. All good now. Right! Right?

The death knight did not notice. There seemed to be a small blizzard around her. A frozen aura which changed small droplets of blood into glittering rubies to scatter around and disappear within the corpse pile. Larger splashes caked into solid chunks on her body and occasionally broke off with a crack. Even through the moaning, snarling, roaring and cackling of her foes, Sven could hear her occasionally screaming wildly and incomprehensibly. No, that was not right.

An unpleasantly large group of ghouls descended upon the death knight from every direction. Sven's heart jumped with sudden terror when her quarry disappeared from view. Then one of the ghouls was pushed back, two blades of the sword emerged from its back, there was a godawful crunching sound and the sword drew a full circle through the group of ghouls. Pieces of bodies and limbs scattered everywhere and the opponents were just meat.

"Thel! What are you doing?" Sven shouted again. "This is a death trap!"

This time the death knight heard. She turned towards the hunter and charged without a second thought. Sven barely had the time to roll away from the charge, which clearly was not something that the attacker was used to, because she barreled right along and missed him entirely. She screamed incoherently and swung her sword again. Tyson was too far. He was in no position to make another dodge. The sword came... and missed barely.

Thelarwen crouched before the man in a primal stooped ape-like pose. The end of the sword was resting on the ground. Not much could be seen of her face behind the helm. Just the glow of her eyes, which had a frighteningly red tint.

"Go away, Sven!" she growled. That was not her usual calm and emotionless tone which she invariably used for every occasion, to threaten enemies, confess love and tell jokes. The voice was cold, hissing and full of rage.

"What are you doing here?" the man shouted. In retrospective, not a wise choice considering all the swarming undead around them. "You're going to get yourself killed."

A geist leaped directly at Sven, no doubt attracted by the shout. Thelarwen's sword moved in a flash and two halves of the creature landed on either side of their intended target, splattering the man with blood. The woman returned from her twirl and was now standing properly upright with her weapon pointing almost but not quite at Sven.

"GO AWAY. It is not safe for you here."

Sven grabbed Thelarwen's arm and dragged her away from the battlefield. For a brief moment he wondered if he'd just be cut in half the same way the geist had been, but by the time they reached a calmer alcove in the saronite wall, he was still alive and intact. The woman had clearly regained at least some of her senses.

"Leave me be," she growled in a very stereotypical death knight voice.

The hunter looked at Thelarwen. "No!" He pointed at the endless swarm milling around nearby. At this moment they seemed to be mindless and did not appear to be noticing the two sentients. "Look at it out there! That's madness!"

"Yeee-ee-eeessss," she hissed. "Go away, Sven. Leave me alone. This is where I need to be. This death is what I need to have around me. Just... go. I... do not want to hurt you."

"You already did..." he answered quietly. "By leaving the way you did. This is bloodlust, pure and simple. Believe me, I know what that is like. You don't need this. This raging monster isn't you, you're better than this. We can fight it and we don't give into it."

The death knight's eyeglow still possessed a red tint when he looked through the slit of her helm. He said with pathos, hoping that this would work just as well as it did in books: "Thel... It's time to come home."

There was no change in the glow.

She shook her head. "No, Sven. This time I cannot. This time I must stay here and fight through this, until that which is burning and rotting inside of me is all gone. I cannot suppress it. I can only destroy it. I am... dangerous. To you, to everyone, until I have fought enough to find peace again."

"Tell me why? What has driven you here in this way that you need to hurt everyone who knows and cares about you?"

Thelarwen drew herself up and roared wordlessly into the chill of Icecrown. "BECAUSE I AM FULL OF RAGE!" Her voice was only very slightly quieter as she continued: "BETRAYAL! I trusted her! I thought her my friend!"

Sven shook his head in bewilderment. "Lil? This is all just about Lil? That's it? That's ALL? How dare you do this to your friends? To me?! Have you even considered what this is doing to us?!"

He pulled his leather helm off. He was quite angry at this point. "Let me show you."

The man bared his teeth. And the worgen snarled angrily. The change had been so quick and sudden that it was almost unnoticeable. One moment there was a man, another, a beast. He roared at Thelarwen and leaped onto the battlefield. Sven used no bow or sword, just his teeth and claws, to shred and rip the ghouls and skeletons. Where the cuts of Thelarwen's runesword had been clean and straight, the tears Sven made were ragged, huge and brutal. For a few minutes it almost seemed like he was going to clean the place more thoroughly than Thelarwen had done. But he was no unstoppable death knight juggernaut in impermeable steel armour. A slash here, a cut there, and soon he was covered in more than just his opponents' blood.

"What are you trying to prove?" Thelarwen shouted at the bouncing deadly ball of fur, teeth and claws. "That I should stop or you will kill yourself by throwing yourself against these masses of the Scourge? I CANNOT! The rage, the hatred are not yet gone! Let me work this out by myself, and then you can have your old, calm, peaceful Thelarwen back."

The worgen suddenly changed back into Sven, just as abruptly as the first change had been. He was looking decidedly worse for wear. Blood was seeping through his chest armour as well as his arm. He staggered up to Thelarwen.

"Thel, I would never stop you doing your thing... But this isn't your thing, this is reckless, bloodthirsty and wrong."

She looked at him and said in a tone that was almost but not quite screaming, "I KNOW."

Sven stared at her quite calmly now. Perhaps that was just the blood loss. "Thel... How long have you been fighting? Have you ever rested?"

"Ever since I arrived," she replied much more quietly. "I do not need rest. When I fight and kill, the anger within me is diminished. I just... need a little more. Just another week or two. Then I will have peace. Please. Go away, Sven, it is not safe to be around me when I am like this. I lose control. I could attack you without even noticing. I could kill you."

He laughed weakly and placed his hand on her shoulder. "You say you are fighting for peace? Like this? Don't you see how stupid that is? Come home, Thel. We need you, I need you. This isn't you, this is the Lich King's Thelarwen. He is dead, and so is she."

Thelarwen lifted her sword. The tips aimed towards Sven seemed to be shaking just a little bit. "Please, Sven... For your own sake and for mine, just... go."

Sven stared up the length of the blood-and-gore-covered blade. Then he lifted a hand and pushed it aside. "Back in Ironforge, when I changed, I could have ripped your arm off without a second thought. But you reached out to me at your own risk. Well, now I have to reach out for you too."

He took a step past the sword and pulled Thelarwen into an embrace. Despite the freezingly cold armour, a week's worth of blood and gore, and the possibility of being ripped from limb to limb by an enraged death knight who was not quite in control of herself.

A moment later he was still alive. Quite cold but alive. He dared to look up.

Thelarwen was standing there like a statue. Her eyeglow had returned to its customary icy blue-white. Her arms had grown limp, the end of her sword touched the ground with a small thump.

"You don't have to come home right now," the hunter told her. "Let's just leave this place before we end up dead. Talk about things."

Her voice was quiet, dull and entirely bereft of anger. "Stop. I... will come." She looked around them. The enormous piles of corpses everywhere. Limbs, heads, guts, various unidentifiable pieces. "Did I do this?"

"Most of it."

She looked up at Sven, only then seemingly noticing his wounds. Suddenly Thelarwen was all business again. "You are injured. We need to get you somewhere safe. Tend to your wounds. Take off your armour."

Sven, despite his current unfortunate state, looked interested. Thelarwen followed up entirely unromantically by ripping strips of clothing from her supplies, doused them in what looked like holy water, and quickly produced a reasonably decent field bandage around his chest and arm. It stung a lot, but it stopped most of the bleeding.

"Do you have a mount?"

The hunter was feeling weak all of a sudden. The adrenaline was clearly wearing off. "I came on foot."

Thelarwen nodded and walked back out on the battlefield. She had never done this before, but at the moment she had no better choice. The Ebon Blade mount she could summon from the Nether was not suitable: far too slow and could not easily find a path through the cliffs of Icecrown. So the death knight held out her hand... and bones from all around her began to lift and swirl in the air. It was quite disconcerting to watch, the way these dead pieces bent to her will and formed the shape that could, with some imagination involved, be considered to be similar to a gryphon.

She led the construct to where Sven was waiting. He looked a bit better after having caught his breath.

"You should put your armour back on. I do not want your fresh wounds anywhere near the putrid substances that cover my plate. Can you hold on to me?"

Sven smirked. "Of course! You... might have to help me up," he finished a bit awkwardly.

The death knight pulled the hunter up and on the construct's back where bones were forming something of a saddle. It went against all the laws of nature, and probably a few laws of magic, but the bone gryphon-simile took flight.

The luck did not last for long. Just past Sindragosa's Fall and almost near the Argent Tournament grounds Thelarwen brought the mount down quickly. It hit the ground with an unpleasant jerk. Sven hissed with pain, but quickly saw the wisdom of his chauffeur's decision when the construct fell apart into its component bones.

They travelled to the Argent grounds on foot. Despite some of his less healthy habits, Sven was quite strong and resilient and so he was already recuperating from the blood loss.

The Argent Crusaders did not accept Thelarwen entirely without a comment. "Do go and wash yourself, Crusader, you reek." As for Sven, no one even batted an eye because of how he looked. Clearly terrible Scourge-caused wounds were not something unusual in this part of the world. Before he was carted away to be cleaned, bandaged and healed, Sven confronted Thelarwen.

"If I were to wait until you are asleep and leave again?..." she asked calmly, "You would run off to find me again?"

Sven nodded sternly. "Every time."

"How about if I asked you in a very polite manner to wait for me while I go and... do what it is I do, promising to return by nightfall?"

He smiled. "I can accept that. I meant what I said though. I'm not leaving Northrend until you are."

The death knight placed her gauntlet against the faceplate of her helm with a metallic clang. "As you wish," she responded resignedly. "Now please go and get healed."

And with that, she and her gory, sludgy, squelching armour departed from the tent.

Not the smell, though. The smell lingered...