#heart of thorns | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

i-mybrunettelady · 2 months

Text

scenes of an arson site

Summary: Pact airships go down, taken by Mordremoth's vines. Elandrin is on one of them. Content warnings: mentions of violence and all around bad times. Spoilers: HoT

It starts with a headache.

Then there’s screaming. Thorns, so much fucking screaming.

And then the airships go down.

It takes him a minute to realize he’s conscious again. His eyes refuse to see clearly, so he closes them. He’s not in this primordial darkness anymore - there’s light, so much light around him, flashes of color, sounds he can’t parse out. His mind feels heavy.

A thud of footsteps. A person comes close. “Is he awake?” He can’t say who asks the question. It’s all a jumbled mess.

“Looks like it. He isn’t still anymore.”

“Maybe he lost his marbles, like the rest of them.”

“Spirits, no! Shut it! Arcanist Elandrin, are you with us? Can you hear me?”

Elandrin.. Elandrin.. That’s a cool name. He opens his mouth to speak, but no words come out. He squints at the all-consuming daylight and mouths the name again. Elandrin.. Elandrin..

Something in his mind tugs as realization sharply comes. Elandrin screams as he’s suddenly thrown back into his body that lays in his own sap, his ribs burn, and the tug holds for a bit until there’s a hand on his forehead and he slumps down again, panting like a sylvan hound.

“Told you he’s with us,” a norn woman voices. Elandrin looks at her. She has blood on her face. “Here, drink some water.” She makes a face. “Plants need water, don’t they?”

He swallows the cold liquid greedily and loudly. A bird screams above him. It smells like ash, blood, fire, and cooked meat. His hands scramble to get a hold of the flask as he downs the rest of it.

“What the fuck happened?” he croaks and frowns at how wretched his voice sounds. He’s covered in a blanket; he feels the remaining pieces of his torn homegrown clothes tickle his bare bark. He assumes the blanket is more for modesty than for warmth. Have these people never seen a dick before? He dares not laugh at their moral constraints, if only because he knows it’ll sound like he’s choking.

“Oh! You’re awake!” a human woman in Vigil gear turns with a disapproving face. “Are you one of them?”

“One of who, for fuck’s sake?”

“You planty fuckers all went insane on that ship and almost killed us all!” the human all but yells and Elandrin snickers.

“I am not fucking insane, you dimwit. I have no idea what’s going on, but I do know that my ribs hurt and that I need a mender.” He looks around and sees he’s the only sylvari in the camp. Aside from the yelling bitch, there’s a norn woman who gave him the flask, a bald asura with yellow eyes, and another norn, who’s cradling a broken arm.

“Go find one yourself, you wretched Mordrem,” she adds and Elandrin sits up harshly, only to bend forward as the sharp pain pierces his ribs. His mind aches with a new weight he knows hasn’t been there before. Part of him wants to be afraid, but he’s too offended to care about it.

Him, a Mordrem? Him, a sylvari, a Dreamer, secondborn of the Pale Tree, to serve Mordremoth of all things?! Him, an ugly monster?

“Juliana, stop,” the norn woman says wearily and extends her hands to help him lay down. He shakes his head and groans his way onto the ground. “He isn’t a Mordrem. He’s one of us. If he was, he would’ve killed us right away.” She laughs nervously. “Wouldn’t be an issue for an elementalist of his caliber.”

“What’s your name?” Elandrin asks the norn woman.

“Skadi. Skadi Runarskin.”

“Mm, and which order?”

“Priory, Arcanist. I.. I attended your classes on fire elemental magic techniques before the airships sailed.” He looks at her, and her big, wide eyes and the dark circles under them. Brown hair sticks to her forehead. Her face is utterly unmemorable.

“And where are the airships now?”

Skadi waves her hands. “Gone,” she says with a gravel in her voice. “Vines came from the sky and dragged us down. Sylvari on board, they.. They started screaming and attacking people. I don’t remember much.”

Neither does he. All he remembers is the falling and the screaming. “Huh,” he says. “Unless Juliana shuts her mouth up like a good little girl, I will start attacking too.”

Juliana growls. “If I ever see a sign, I’m killing you.”

“Just try.”

Oh, but his body’s tired. He lies back, feels his ribs throb, and blinks at the sun.

I can make it stop hurting.

The fact the voice isn’t his own should scare him. But he’s too tired to be scared. The tug lessens and he falls into a temporary, dreamless sleep.

III

The man with the broken hand is the first to go. His death was quick, or so Elandrin saw. They’d attracted a Mordrem ambush; thankfully, there were so few of them, now ashes on the sparkly, green grass, but they got the guy well before they could become so. All it took was one swing and he was gone.

He had no chances anyways.

They’re making a burial for him. Elandrin never really understood burials, the same way he doesn’t understand namedays or marriage. Or surnames. He chooses to sit while they recite some meaningless words for his soul, Skadi, Juliana and the asura, and watch. The dead norn’s gear is so ill-fitted that Elandrin can only steal the shirt that reaches his knees, but it’s solid gear. As solid as gear comes when you’re lost in the jungle, anyways.

“Raven guide your spirit, my friend,” Skadi whispers. Elandrin wonders why she’s sad. She hardly knew him. And even if she did, he’s a casualty of war. Grief has no place here. He thinks of Trahearne, and swallows a lump in his throat.

Where is his friend, anyway?

“They will find us here,” he says. Juliana looks at him. She looks like she wants to throw her helmet at him.

“This was our second ambush in a week,” she snaps. “You’re attracting them. You’re sending out pheromones, or whatever the fuck you plants have. They’re sensing you like a fucking dog.”

“Sylvari don’t have pheromones, not like you people do,” he replies and presses his hand on the ground to get up. His ribs haven’t stopped hurting, but he’ll be damned if he lets them see that. “Maybe they’re hunting you.”

I can make it stop hurting. Come to me.

The voice has been a constant, too. It came after the tug; he feels like it eats parts of his mind in morsels, like pieces of Elandrin-shaped fruit, a darkness he can’t shake off, no matter how hard he tries. It sends terror down his spine at night, when his glow is the only thing keeping him away from the darkness around him. It makes him curl in on himself, in spite of the pain, and breathe in the grass and the leaves and the blood to keep him from giving into it.

The voice promises freedom from that, too. But it doesn’t feel like his own, so he doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust Juliana, or Skadi, or the little armored rat. He doesn’t trust anything but the pain in his ribs, the pressure in his gut, the ache in his body, and what remains of his mind.

Get away from me, he says to the voice.

Then it roars and he has to bite down his hand to stop from screaming.

Mine, mine, mine, it roars, and he cries into the grass and the leaves and the grave of a dead norn.

“Go fuck yourself,” Juliana says.

I can kill her for you, if you’d let me.

Skadi cries later. Elandrin watches the light catch on her tears and feels the urge to lick them off her face. Does her blood taste sweet? His tastes like honey; his is a desert. Norn blood probably tastes like licking metal.

Be mine, Elandrin, and you won’t have to cry anymore. The world will be yours to burn.

He resists, and cries anyway.

The asura disappears next. Dead, alive, Elandrin doesn’t know; the fucking jungle wants to kill them, and they’re running for their lives, and his concentration is shamefully weak as is, so he’s too focused on the magical warmth on his fingertips to notice where small things are. It’s like a bug. He never bothered to learn their name either - asura names make him snarl as he’s saying them.

They’re irrelevant, just as the leaves he’s crunching beneath his feet are irrelevant. It’s getting harder to tell the difference anyways.

“We should go back for them,” Skadi says. Her voice sounds distorted, high, and her words are hard to make out. He’s squinting, trying to catch the features of her face. It reminds him of a tree - brown on brown on brown, like a sylvari he once knew. “They could need our help!”

“It’s no use,” Elandrin says. His voice sounds off to his own ears; he blinks himself awake from a stupor. Skadi’s face is long and scarred, she has overgrown eyebrows and dark circles around her bloodshot eyes. “The jungle has them already.”

“How do you know it, Arcanist?” Skadi cries, hitting her fist on the ground. “Eissa’s research isn’t yet finished! They studied dwarven magic. They had siblings back in Rata Sum. How are we supposed to go back to them and tell them Eissa is dead?”

Eissa can be reunited with their siblings when all is returned to me.

Elandrin digs his fingers in his ribs. The bark is dark, sensitive to touch and he growls - in pain, at the voice, he doesn’t know.

Go fuck yourself, I’m not becoming one of yours. He vaguely recalls that sylvari can become Mordrem. His chest tightens and he looks up at the sky, the clouds, the all powerful sun, and the endless expanse of tall trees and breathes.

He almost fits there. Those leaves up above look better than his foliage does now, decaying, half pulled out, struggling to glow the way it did. He wants to be a tree, he wants to not think, he wants to have beautiful leaves again. He catches sight of one half singed leaf and breathes out.

He wants to have beautiful leaves again.

“The same way we were supposed to go back to our siblings in the Grove and tell them our bodies are now their live experiment,” he says darkly. “They have to pay for that.”

Skadi swallows. Juliana sighs and pulls out a gun.

“I should shoot you,” she says. “You’re destroying yourself. You’re obviously deranged. Soon enough, you’ll be one of the Mordrem.”

Elandrin snarls. “Just try it.”

The asura can pay. Juliana can pay. Let me in, and they can all pay.

Elandrin gasps. Night spreads around them, big and tight and oppressive. His head feels like it’s about to burst. His mind feels like a half-eaten apple that’s home to a couple of worms. He bites his hand and cries when the pressure tightens and holds, and between the two sensations, he falls back into the refreshing pool of darkness beneath.

When he mercifully wakes up, he runs.

The jungle burns around him. The jungle burns, and his eyes prickle, and his skin feels like it’s on fire. He doesn’t know where he is, or what he’s doing; he watches the miserable, half-dead leaves on his head dangle before his eyes.

The struggle and the pain can stop, little one. All you have to do is let me in.

He roars and digs his nails into the ground. They break and he digs even harder, yells until his throat hurts, hurls sounds in the air as the dead remains of his enemies burn around him in a half-circle. Mordremoth screams, but Elandrin screams harder.

He’ll scream himself to death if he has to.

The ground shakes as someone approaches. Fire doesn’t seem to hurt them. There’s a hand on his face, and claws that don’t tear, and Elandrin stops screaming. His throat burns as he cries, and writhes in the corner, in the ashes of those that wanted to kill him, and he smells sap around him and is just aware enough to know it’s his own.

“Master has been looking for you,” the person says. “You’re still struggling.” They sound gentle and Elandrin sobs harder with as much breath as he has left.

“Please,” he rasps out. It all hurts. His head, his mind, his body, it’s all one big point of pain.

The person kneels down. Elandrin looks at them. Hands hold their face, and they’re big. It’s blurry, but it’s as if the fingers part and reveal the soft browns of what’s a sylvari eye.

“It can stop, the pain,” the person says softly. “Just let go.” And then, in a voice he thought long gone, “I hate seeing you in pain even now, El.”

He doesn’t know what it is. One last punch comes from deep within, from the memories he tries so hard to bury down, hazy in the smoke. He grasps it and holds onto it. The figure then leans in, licks his tears with his forked tongue, and presses his petal-soft lips to Elandrin’s forehead.

“Adryn,” Elandrin croaks. His whole body shakes. He loved Adryn, once. He loved their nights together. He loved the way Adryn laughed. He loved holding Adryn’s hand and making him fire constellations. He loved the way Adryn’s bark felt against his own, naked, his lips on Elandrin’s face, and the way he held him close, and he can almost hear himself laugh again the same way he did then. The sound comes distorted, off, and he can hear his own angry words and the tremble in Adryn’s voice.

He loved Adryn, once. But as he loves all things, himself included, that too ended up in flames.

“All you have to do is let go,” Adryn says.

Elandrin stares at the night sky, caught between death and life. The fire can’t catch him, but he hopes it will.

With one last push, he wishes the jungle would burn down with him.

“Arcanist Elandrin! We found him!”

“Is he dead?”

“Don’t think so! Come on, I need a hand over here! Hurry up! Do we have menders on the squad? I repeat, do we have menders on the squad?”

There are voices. Steps. Rustle of leaves. Pants of worry, and hurt. Metal against metal. Clinking of armor.

“Elandrin, are you with me?”

He struggles to locate the voice. His eyes might as well be sealed shut.

“I’m here. For fuck’s sake. Just listen to my voice, okay? I know you’re with us. Just listen to my voice, yeah. Good. Like that. I’m here. We have menders on the squad. We’ll get you up in no time. It’s just some healing magic. Feels a little invasive. Not much I can do about it. I’m sure you people have a better word for it.” There’s a hand on his face. He sighs as it guides him. The pain subsides. “Elandrin? Yeah, knew you were with us. Dwayna have fucking mercy on you. Who fucked you up like that?”

His eyes open slowly. There are claws on his face, but the face that greets him isn’t monstrous, nor the eye familiar. The face is pale, human, with bright, purple eyes.

“It’s me, Alysannyra. I know I’m not your favorite person, but who fucking cares right now. I’m healing you until the menders come. You’re not dying on me - you hear me? You’re not dying on the Pact. You’ll want to singe my eyebrows off later, but I’m not letting you die, you hear me?”

Alysannyra..?

“You’re coming to. Great. Glad to see you’re as destructive when you’re unconscious as you are when you’re awake. All this ash is very becoming of you.”

He raises a hand. It shakes but he holds it up. Alysannyra.. He can’t recall a single good thing about her, but right now, her body feels soft and safe. He touches her nose and his hand drops down again.

“Not a mordrem,” he says weakly, when someone else kneels down beside them.

“Good to hear. Thought I’d have to put you down if you suddenly go all monstrous on us.”

He shakes his head.

He made it. He’s alive. He could cry, if his body willed it.

Not a mordrem, he thinks to himself one last time before darkness takes him again.

But this time, the hands he falls into are safe.

#gw2 #inspo birb has come to town #elandrin aien #vague alysannyra #gw2 writing #gw2 fic #guild wars 2 #gw2 hot #heart of thorns #gw2 sylvari #gw2 mordrem #IT'S OUT IT'S OUTTT

32 notes · View notes