Hope Yet Remains

Bridenbrad raised a hand as I came up, catching his breath. The cleansing had wrung him out; the tremor sat in his fingers now, and sweat stood on him in the cold.

Around him, the snow was blooming.

Ruby flowers, the same that came up behind the Keepers’ fire at the shrine, pushing through the crust in a rough circle with the man at its center. Her breath had not saved him. It had grown a garden around him anyway, at the edge of the world. He is dying in the middle of the only flowerbed in Icecrown.

“It was nearly as painful as it looked,” he said. “But it was as if I could feel some of the corruption being burnt away from within my body. It seems the plague is not so readily bested though.”

We had both known. The veins had slowed. They had not stopped.

“Thank you for everything that you have done. Your selfless actions have renewed my hope that there is yet great good left within this world. I can depart without fear that darkness will prevail in my absence. Go now, go with no regrets.”

No regrets. He offered me my release. It was nearly the last thing the man had left to give, so of course he gave it. I did not take it. My regrets are not his to dismiss, and they are not mine to set down either. But I clasped his arm once before I left the flowers, and he had grip left, and I will remember that.

Fordring took the report standing, as he takes everything now.

“The Scourge plague is no simple foe to defeat. Alexstrasza’s words suggest that perhaps we can yet save our Bridenbrad from the unimaginable fate of the unliving should he fall, but I will not give him up so easily. There is yet one more path of light I would like to pursue.”

Should he fall. We are no longer trying to save the man’s life. Nobody said so aloud, and I am not certain Tirion has said it to himself. We are trying to save what comes after his life from the thing that owns this glacier.

One more path of light. I was already walking.

Nature had answered and life itself had answered, and both had run out of reach, so Tirion turned to the one power he had staked his whole existence on and sent Vikstone across a broken world to test The Will of the Naaru.