The prompt: Write about Valentine's Day without mentioning these words: Valentine's Day, Cupid, love, roses, flowers, hearts, February
- Prompt #65, Creative Writing Prompts

What Arienne had discovered was this: the sickness that had spread throughout Azeroth was the doing of a single man. She didn't want to know what he'd put in his perfume to make the stalwart soldiers of the Horde weak in the knees. Nor did she want to admit that perhaps, for a moment, she'd fallen under it's spell.

"Put this on," the orcish windrider said, handing her a familiar violet-and-green tabard, then tossing one to Damien. Arienne obediently stripped out of her guild tabard and pulled on the Illidari standard. Aside from the lingering scent of felfire, Arienne didn't seem to notice any change. She gave the windrider a skeptical look, but he lifted a hand to point over her shoulder at the Forsaken warrior. Only that when she turned she was greeted by a trim, muscular sin'dorei. Arienne could only stop and stare for a long few moments, the sound of beating wings alerting her to the departure of their Kor'kron commander. Beauty ran deep in the Duskwhisper line, she decided.
"Let's get to work," Arienne said, trying to shake herself out of it. The pair of them strode across the tainted soil of the Eclipsion fields, toward the settlement of giants there. It was their mission to sunder the alliance between the Illidari blood elves and these colossi, and the easiest way -- in Orcish eyes -- was to slaughter them while in disguise. Arienne couldn't say she disagreed. Maybe the giants would even retaliate against Eclipse Point.
The colossi seemed as nothing before the blood knight now, too used to trying her steel against the lieutenants of Kael'thas himself. It meant Arienne had time to steal glances at the disguised warrior, his silken coal-black hair and kind face a direct counterpoint to the Damien she was used to seeing. His movements were halting at first, as if the body were unfamiliar to him, but in time they became more fluid. More Thalassian, more like his brother's. It was only then that she noticed the fields were quiet, its inhabitants strewn across the soil as so many boulders.
He turned to look at her, and Arienne was shocked by what she saw in his eyes. She held his gaze for only a moment, then broke it, whistling for Shekinah.
"Let's get the fel out of here," she said in Orcish, then added, in Thalassian, "before I start to like you."

The prompt: Use this line anywhere in your story: "Behind her, the noise escalated."
- Prompt #137, Creative Writing Prompts

They'd come back to Shattrath, as Arienne had wanted, defeated. Though they bore a new head on their pike of victories, it wasn't that of the Coilfang matron. The blood knight decided she could live with that.

They were - every last one of them - bruised and broken and bloody. Some of them came to the Scryers' tier; others filtering off to be tended by the Aldor anchorites. And despite all her attempts to leave her roots in her past, Arienne Songblade was still, in her heart, a combat medic. So she mended them, those that she could, and half-listened to the story of how Leotheras the Blind had fallen before them. And every day in Shattrath, there was a new face that wanted to join them.

Maybe Logan was right: maybe this really was an army that they were building, even if it hadn't seemed that way to her before.
"Next time," a bruised blue shaman promised, in between hacking coughs, "we be bringin' you." Arienne only nodded at Zaniya, not really sure she believed it.


"The time is now!" a garbled female voice cried. Zaniya had been as good as her word. "Leave none standing!"
In the center of her dais, Vashj was cocooned an a shroud of steam. For a moment, the lot of them stood there as if unsure what to do with themselves.
Then they heard splashing from the moat beneath them.
"Kalimar!" one of the shamans cried out. Elementals.
"You, and you. With me." Arienne pointed in turn at an orcish hunter they called Longrifle and a Forsaken rogue named Nexic, waving her arm in a grand gesture as they ran back toward the steps.
Water elementals were already bubbling up from the surface, advancing toward their mistress. Sword drawn, Arienne laid waste to them: they were fragile things, their bond to the world tenuous at the best of times.
Behind her the noise escalated.
The was a bellowing shu'halo voice behind her: "Myrmidons!" and from the roiling surface of the reservoir's water, an honor guard of male naga slithered, one from each point of the compass.
They were stupid, but strong: one charged directly for Arienne, and she brought her shield up to knock the wind from him, but the blow resounded through Arienne's own body and she knew she wasn't a match in single combat.
But Roka was. Her fellow blood knight wore thicker plate and carried a heavier shield, bending the Light to redirect the myrmidon's attention to himself.
"Keep yourself up!" he instructed Arienne in harsh Thalassian, and she nodded, tipping back a shot of blue liquid that took the edge off her acute thirst for mana.
But she wasn't priority number one: something had beaten up her comrades badly, and her stolen Light went to them first to close their wounds. Orc and Forsaken fought on tirelessly, the growing swarm of elementals cut down on the stairs before her.
Somewhere behind her there was the scuffle of feet, and she glanced over her shoulder to note one of the Farstriders strafing along the rim of the dais.
In pursuit was one of the hugest fen striders she'd ever seen, picking its way after him on spindly legs. The elf threw a net around his pursuer, but the thing nimbly picked its way out of the weave of cloth.
An overwhelming panic coursed through Arienne's veins and before the strider, she and her companions scattered and ran.
Something spit poison in her eyes, and the blood knight passed out.

She knew the touch of stolen Light when she felt it: Roka had been the one to return her to consciousness, but it was Nexic who knelt over her, a vague look of concern on his face.
His wounds were still bleeding. She said a single word in Thalassian, a shock of healing energy suffusing the Forsaken as he offered her his hand to get up.
When she took it, it was warm, as if he were living.
"Vashj?" she asked in a hoarse voice.
"Escaped," he sighed, displeased. "Dove into the water. Looks like we're making our escape too." He nodded toward a troll mage who'd torn a portal to Shattrath and was fixing to jump through it.
Arienne let the rogue's hand go, shooting him an almost-stern look.
"We'll be back."
"Oh, of course," he said evenly, his voice as quiet as death and as soft as fresh-turned soil. "Once we muster our strength again, her life is forfeit."
Arienne shot him one last, long look, and stepped through to the Terrace of Light and the almost-comforting presence of A'dal.
It wasn't over yet.

The prompt: Write about something that really bothered you this week.
- Prompt #110, Creative Writing Prompts

"They went without me!" Arienne fumed, stamping her heel against the hewn stone of her floor.
"You mentioned that." The rogue looked nonplussed, sitting on the edge of a chaise in his mistress' dimly lit salon.
"Yes, but --!" She broke off, stalking across the room, lifting the gauzy curtain to look out the window at Shattrath's lower city. "They went. To Serpentshrine Cavern. Without me." The light coming through the thin slit of a window fell across Arienne's face, bisecting her left eye and her furrowed brow above it. "When you join an expeditionary force, it's with some expectation of sticking with it," she fumed. "I was good enough for Medivh's little tower; I was good enough for Gruul the Dragonkiller. They'd have been lost without me in Tempest Keep! Nobody knows Thalassian tactics like I do! But I'm not good enough to slaughter the Coilfang?" She whirled back around to face the silver haired rogue, curtain fluttering back down into place. He didn't look up from his work, delicately polishing a few freshly cut gems.
"You are good enough, Arienne," he said evenly. "It's obvious you have talent. The Scryers see it, A'dal sees it, and every dead foe you've left in your wake has seen it."
"So why leave me behind?"
"Because," he said, slowly seeming to grow frustrated. "We're building an army, Arienne." He paused, looking up to meet her glaring gaze. He was still wearing her livery. "Milady," he amended, then continued. "We're building an army to stand against the Legion, and that means every blade we can muster needs to be brought to bear. Every combatant needs to try his strength on something more substantial than helboars."
Arienne just looked annoyed. "But I want to contribute to that effort!"
"And sometimes that means standing back and letting those in command do their job."
The blood knight huffed. "I hope they come back to Shattrath licking their wounds."

The prompt: Freewrite for three minutes on this cliché: "ice water in her veins."
- Prompt #152, Creative Writing Prompts

I've never had a frost mage so it's never literally been true. All of my females can be said to have chilly dispositions under certain circumstances: Aurélia to those who've wronged her, Ocelot to those who aren't worth her time, Arienne to anyone but Logan ... Still the character who sprung to my mind was Aléri Lenchantin, half-elf necromancer. Her full name is Aléri pèr-Vaelis mèr-Lenchantin dês-Denaria, and she is the eldest daughter of the exiled son of a high elven emperor.
IE a princess in exile. And in a death cult. She will inform Arienne as a character a lot during her descent into Death Knighthood.
Why is she cold?
She lost the one person who could have redeemed her, then was forced to eat his remains.
That'd chill anyone's blood.