Broken

( This is a bit sadistic though...)


We're safe. There's a bounty on your head in STW. SC spies all around. Watch your back.

As she drank a second glass of wine, huddled in a dark corner of the tavern, the hood of her cloak pulled down to her eyes, Daria mentally reviewed the contents of the short message she had sent earlier to Booty Bay.

If Ei'an would have enough mind to take that route, she thought.

Well, nothing more she could do.

The wine was good and she tasted each sip as she drank, listening to the whispered conversations around herself.

Going to have a drink at the inn with a bounty placed upon your head by the Guard of Stormwind and the Scarlet Crusade at the same time was an unnecessary risk. Yet, she loved the crowd, the noise, the voices, to sit and observe the people around. Test her strength. The alternative would have been a lonely night in hiding, listening to the howling of the wind through the dead trees.

Well, Scourge or human, Daria shrugged, they would have taken equal pleasure in killing her.

She had, during the last month, been forced to escape thrice from people tracking her down.

Stabbed one to death. Injured two others. That much for being a nice girl.

Yet she enjoyed the noisy atmosphere in the inn. The excitement. The risk. The wave of adrenaline that kept her alert.

She had kind of lost her interest in man, recently, she mused to herself. Not after all that happened, after Scarlet Monastery and seeing Ei'an so...so...

Broken.

He'd always be the strong one. The shoulder to cry on, when things got too tough. The one to come searching for her in taverns and inns and dark places and pull her out, sometimes not really aware of herself.

Take her home, give her a bath, patch up her wounds, hold her tight, until pain went away.

And she kept running away and picking the worst men of all.

Call it "survivor guilt" if you wanted. But why did the Scourge spare her alone of her entire family? Death didn't want her. Neither did life though.

Maybe that made her taste so much her own suffering. Not that it brought any pleasure, it just quenched some of the other pain..to be still alive when everyone else has fallen. She would end up with men that despised her, humiliated her , even beat her into unconsciousness, until tears meddled with blood and it still wasn't enough...

The last time it had been a guy from northern Hillsbrad. She had remained with him nearly a month, period in which he had turned her into a bloody mess.
Oh, there were many such men, attracted to darkness as butterflies to a lamp. Ready to succumb to the most hidden urges of their souls, to torture and enjoy this as the most delightful pleasure. The war had brought forth a wave of corruption and sadism that nothing could stave off.

That was it, Daria thought, feeling the side of her neck from some not-properly healed scars. It always lasted until Erieannan discovered where she was. Then he would drag her back from the edge of the precipice and into the bitter fight for survival...

...and she clang to him desperately, knowing that, without him, she would be lost.

So good to know he was fine...

Daria's fingers twitched on the fragile glass she held into her hands.

Yet it was hard to live in his absence.

Hard to pretend anymore she was whole.

No, she was just a wretched-broken-shred into pieces-thing, unable to live or even to die properly...

The glass crumbled into her palm and she felt the shards digging into her flesh, as tears flowed down her face. She dropped the remains to the floor and wrapped her hand into the folds of her cloak, glad that no one around seemed yet to have noticed her behavior.