Chapter 1

Silendiel reclined, stretched out on her favorite chaise longue, yet was unable to find any semblance of rest. Within the decorated white and gold and red of her inner sanctum, more hall than living room, a place with tall windows each lit by an arcane blue orb, she should be at her safest. At her most self-indulgent. And yet, the news of a single, normally irrelevant servant leaving her employ had her upset to such an extent that she fidgeted with herself, having found and tugged at a loose fragment of one of her perfectly manicured nails, ruining it in the process.

Her majordomo had informed her that the servant girl, some commoner who had been with the house Flameborn for no more than three years, had effectively been poached. Submitted her resignation in writing, not even showing up to deliver it herself, preferring instead to remain with her new employer – the recently established kaldorei embassy in Silvermoon City.

Upon hearing the news, Silendiel had spent a long while staring out one window at the fabulously and meticulously styled and maintained garden outside, an outrageous luxury in the city, even with the population still thin and recovering from the Scourge’s onslaught. There, she had crafted a facade to show her majordomo, and any other staff that might be looking. Nothing but contained, appropriate fury. Not at losing an irrelevant servant girl, but at the manner in which she had been lost, taken, conquered, whatever one might call it. Not that slavery was permitted, but, really, what had happened was tantamount to theft. Scoffing, raising one hand to aggressively waft a lock of blonde hair out of her face, failing, and having to repeat the maneuver not once, but twice, she gathered her trembling hands across her stomach.

Upon recovering from the sheer outrage of what the kaldorei had done, encouraging an innocent servant to walk right into their clutches, Silendiel had ordered a few of her employees, those used to more subtle work outside of the mansion, to investigate the comings and goings of the kaldorei and their people. And their servants. Upon learning that the servant girl, Ennia, was not the first to fall into the claws of the night elves, it was easy enough to begin having some of her staff frequent taverns and bars to start spreading clearly false, but very believable rumors. That the kaldorei in the embassy were abducting innocent sin’dorei, that they sheltered criminals, even, after it was discovered that the seneschal of the place, another local, Liriel, was a fugitive. Someone who had tried to escape the city rather than paying her debts. And for that, the kaldorei rewarded her with a high position in their new stronghold within the walls of Silvermoon, at the heart of Quel’thalas. It proved terribly easy to tell people what they wanted to hear, and after many years of war, it seemed they wanted to hear that their old Alliance enemies could also be thought of as their current enemies.

That work going on still, Silendiel had dismissed everyone who might usually fuss around her, and take care of her every need, see to her every whim, so that she might seethe in peace. At the silly girl who had let herself fall into the hands of the kaldorei. In theory. In practice, however, her thoughts circled what her majordomo had told her of the embassy, of what seemed to go on there, and her mind wandered back to the few kaldorei she had seen when the wars still raged. Captives from one endless war or another. Her father, when he still lived, had even had one brought into the mansion. A kind of showpiece, living and feral art, which they could impress and intimidate guests with at each gathering and fete.

Just out of reach of that night elf, Silendiel had placed a chair, its back between her and the sentinel. There she had sat for many and long hours, observing the chained up, feral, purple, massive elf. Even as she grew emaciated, she did not lose the sharpness, the edge, that made one ever worry in her presence. At first, she tested the chains. Wrists and ankles wrapped in iron, secured in the wall and floor. Endless growling and tugging and snarling, trying to get within hands distance of the much smaller blood elf, Silendiel, who sat and observed. As that melted away, they talked. Silendiel brought food and drink, just a little of each, and in return, she began to learn the tongue of the kaldorei. The one which, ostensibly, her own had developed from. They became something like friends, even.

In Silendiel’s mind, at least, they had grown into an odd friendship, prisoner and naive girl, but the distance from reality of that conception of the two was proven to her when she, at long last, stepped close enough to the sentinel that the chains allowed them to meet. She spent a few hours, then, trapped and held hostage, until her father organized both several armed soldiers, a priest, and more than one arcanist. Through the efforts of those people, with magics of various sorts, they dulled the sentinel’s mind, over time, and eventually got her to release Silendiel. In that moment, as she was still stumbling into her father’s arms, the soldiers finished the friendship with finality, four crossbow bolts shot at close range at the sentinel, biting into her flesh. To her credit, to her kind’s credit, she did not die then. She did not die for a long while. But she did die, chained up and alone, hours later.

As she had grown, as the years had passed and she had had time to contemplate that supposed friendship, Silendiel quietly came to the conclusion that allowing that sentinel into their home had ruined her, romantically. Being held in the sentinel’s arms, even as a hostage, was a feeling she would not soon forget. Would perhaps never forget.

Alone, then, snapping out of her memories, lit by arcane light, she grasped her left thumb in her right hand. And then did the reverse – right thumb in left hand. Kept moving her hands and fingers, unable to find peace. The servant girl did not matter. The preposterous rumors of what the kaldorei were doing to, with, their servants inside the embassy did not matter, she told herself. Knowing that she lied, and lied badly, at that. To no one but herself, thankfully. Not a week had passed since her first, nameless kaldorei friend had been ended that she had not regretted what happened. Nor, after the shock passed, had a week passed without her recalling what it was like to be held by the large, feral night elf. The shock receded, the sensory experience remained.

Silendiel found no peace, that evening, because she was jealous. It was struggling to come to terms with that shameful revelation that kept her up, that had made her send away her every remaining servant and confidant. They should have sent for her. They should have called on her to establish connections in Silvermoon. They should have assigned her a contact, a sentinel of her very own, with whom she could coordinate efforts very closely. Who she could have lured into staying a little longer, perhaps sharing a glass of wine. Perhaps sharing a look too many, and then a touch. Clearly, if the absurd rumors were to be believed, the night elves had a taste for her kind, one perhaps stronger still than she had for theirs. But instead, they had lavished their attention on a servant.

A servant.

Fingers curled, then unfurling, face tight, she stared daggers at an unspecified spot on the floor. Extended her hand, very slowly, towards the small, rounded, white marble table near her, held up by the gilded claw of a giant lynx. Upon it, a half-full glass of wine remained. With a finger, she pushed it just a little. And then a little more, and yet more.

It tipped over the edge, and shattered. And, a moment later, an ardent and eager servant knocked on the door, and then opened it, and then rushed in.

Silendiel sighed.

Having dismissed her majordomo again, in order to read and digest the report returned to her after several days of work at undermining the reputation of the kaldorei embassy, Silendiel once more found herself in the grand room she still called her retreat. Her sanctum. On the chaise, once more, the furniture she favored the most, a richly cushioned cluster of comfortable chairs and couches in one corner, a semicircle of even deeper, softer chairs spread before the extinguished fireplace, and yet more shelves and comfortable surfaces upon which to sit or lie dotted around the place, with blood red rugs and bare, white floor space between. Room enough for many, many couples to dance, and enjoy the opulence the house was capable of producing.

That evening, Silendiel was alone. In the gentle blue light of the arcane globes, she had naught but twin, enormous flags of Quel’thalas on the interior wall for company. Both of those, at least, refrained from judging her. Less so than her majordomo might have, or her servants might have, reading what was brought to her. She had long ago ensured that she not be brought sanitized and rewritten documents, but rather was exposed to the full, raw truth, no matter its nature.

Three agents had, within a short span of time, gone missing. Each woman had been gone for but a few days, three or four, no more, but when they turned up again, they proved unwilling to work for her. Money was irrelevant, they simply no longer wanted to slander the kaldorei, or their embassy. Doubling it, even producing implied threats had seemed insufficient to convince them to take up their previous mantles of saboteur.

Each agent, it seemed, was found mid-work. Telling some version of the agreed-upon story. They were lured back to the kaldorei embassy, where it was no longer possible to track them in detail. It was known that none left for several days, and that, when they did leave, their allegiance and mood had turned. Attached to the general, more superficial report was the loose transcript of an interview conducted with one of the former agents, who seemed not to object to talking to her former paymaster, even if she would no longer take coin to do the same job she had happily performed a week before.

It was clear, even with the transcript obviously glossing over some of the more in-depth details, that the agent had been roughly handled, but in a way which she did not object to. Convinced, first, by the words of the embassy’s seneschal, Liriel, and then the deeds of a handful of sentinels, to stay around. To indulge in, to seemingly move into, the room of one such squad of kaldorei, where the agent evidently, as the report put it, found herself enjoying the attentions of the well-equipped, large elves for two full days. After which she was taken to the priestess, the ambassador, praised, and asked to cease her efforts to undermine the embassy. Which she agreed to, on the condition that she could return to the embassy at a later date, a wish which was granted.

According to the report, all three agents who had lost interest in sabotaging the reputation of the night elves had experienced something similar. As ludicrous as it was, apparently the kaldorei ambassador conducted diplomacy by having her sentinels fuck her counterparts into submission, into seeing her side of an issue. Absolutely preposterous. And not at all a sustainable way to carry out her duties in a place so refined as Silvermoon City.

Silendiel flicked the report away, the pieces of paper swerving around and through the still air until they came to a sliding stop on the marble floor. It would be difficult for the kaldorei to find any noble willing to negotiate with them, if their presence began to carry the unspoken assumption that they were fucking into the ground anyone so much as seen near them. A social deathblow, in the more refined circles.

If only the fools had come to her, first. She could have spoken to the priestess. Guided the idiots, and shielded the agents, and her servant, from their fumbling efforts. Entirely selflessly, of course. She had no desire to be near the feral, predatory creatures, and even if she did, it would be impossible. Social suicide.

Three lost agents or not, though, there were still things to try, efforts to make, employing people who would not switch sides simply at the prospect of an incredible lay. Silendiel sighed out a breath, and went over the next plan in her mind. Slowly. Examining each thought, so that it did not get away from her. So that it did not start to circle around towering, strong, purple-skinned figures, closing in around her.

A small troupe of forsaken debt collectors, four or five of them, along with a few of her remaining agents, and a handful of new hires, would incite a small riot upon encountering any of the sentinels outside the embassy. With any luck at all, that would produce more material for her efforts to destroy the embassy’s reputation. A single sentinel slipping up just one time would be enough, one night elf lashing out violently, however briefly, would do. That was all the fuel she required to begin inflaming public opinion against the people she had come to portray as invaders, foolishly let through the border, into the city, past its walls.

One mistake, that was all.

Silendiel sat in the garden when her majordomo came to her, bearing another report. On a low, white bench, inset with golden filigree portraying delicate leaves, she unfurled the piece of paper and read of how a small mob of thirty people had been gathered, growing slowly as the altercation developed. Throwing trash and insults at the kaldorei, getting up in their face, threatening, the forsaken seeming particularly interested in the seneschal. Liriel. It was her, and the Captain of the sentinels in the embassy, Tessa, along with a squad of sentinels, that had been the unlucky targets of the little riot.

Unfortunate, that. The presence of the Captain. Encouraging, perhaps, the wild and unruly sentinels to control themselves. At least, that was how Silendiel’s efforts had them portrayed. All the little circus amounted to was trash spread along a length of street, and the night elves withdrawing back to their embassy for a time. Perhaps having to wait a little longer to go and buy food. Perhaps having to cancel a meeting where they would have stolen some other hapless noblewoman’s precious servant away, to instead lead a debauched life in the once-glorious sin’dorei mansion in which the kaldorei now squatted.

Difficult to imagine cock so good, so powerful, that it would lure someone away from a steady position in the employ of an honorable, old family. But that was, seemingly, what was happening. And, despite their magical ability to convince anyone who came within their reach, and into their embassy, that working against them was a bad idea, the apparently constantly fucking kaldorei had to have some kind of weakness.