The prompt: Retrace your steps.
- Oblique Strategies (over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas), Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt

"Why do you call yourself Dawnforge?" Orannis asked her, catching the knight by surprise. Arienne Songblade looked up from her Eredun documents, surveying the Farstrider wordlessly.
"Isn't that a personal question?" the Blood Knight retorted, lips turning downward in a scowl at his intrusion.
"So let's get personal." He planted his hands on the corners of her desk, leaning in to catch her gaze once more. His long, unbound hair spilled over his shoulders, squinting at her as if he was confused.
"I'm a Blood Knight, Whiteglade." She looked back down at her orders, signed in her Prince's own hand: incontrovertible proof of his betrayal. "You're a Farstrider." She didn't need to say more; her order had taken over the rangers' training grounds and sparked a rivalry so fierce, her earliest assignments had been keeping the other adepts from the jaws of death, mending their wounds and setting broken bones.
"We're a long way from Silvermoon, Arienne." She'd opened her mouth to speak over him, but froze as he addressed her. To him -- to all of them -- she'd always been Dawnforge.
"Get out." She lifted a hand, pointing back toward Shattrath. Orannis just stared at her a long moment, contemplating the growl in her voice. "Out," she said again, much more quietly, but the way she glared at him conveyed her serious intentions. He straightened, turning to go with his pale blonde hair fluttering behind him. But his question lingered in the air: When had she become Dawnforge, and why?

She had not been Dawnforge at her governess' knee, playing idly in the sun. Nor when her brother Valendar had bleached his hair and taken up the title Spellbreaker. Later, he had become the prince's royal guard and disappeared into Outland. Nor had she been Dawnforge when her elder sister Archana had begun an apprenticeship in Dalaran that lasted until the city was destroyed. Had she been Dawnforge, after the city was destroyed, when she'd told the woman betrothed to her brother that he couldn't afford to marry a woman with no title? Had she been Dawnforge in the throes of her magic addiction, waking in a cold sweat?

Perhaps she had only begun to be Dawnforge, she decided, in her training as a priestess in Tarren Mill. In that place, not far from where Thrall had been held prisoner, she had dedicated herself to the Holy Light. In the next town over, men of all causes had missioned themselves to protect Lordaeron's borders from the rising threat. Perhaps the first time she had been Dawnforge was when she had knelt before Highlord Mograine and pledged her service to his Scarlet Crusade.

In the halls of the Monastery there was a word, whispered across corridors from mouth to ear: Ashbringer. The Scourge were as nothing to him, and Arienne recalled trembling hands weaving a spell to close his wounds as their undead forces fell before him at their gates. At his side fought Dathrohan. Days later they had rode, along with the Ashbringer's son and the mage Fairbanks. Renault Mograine was the only one to return from Stratholme.
She never saw the Ashbringer again.

Better that she didn't, she had decided when a shambling corpse had pounded on the doors to their monastery, screaming that he was Fairbanks: that he was what was left of Fairbanks, what had become of Fairbanks. That the Ashbringer's own son killed his father with the blade that bore his name. That Dathrohan was not what he seemed.
Nobody believed him. Renault Mograine exorcised the ghoul himself, named himself commander.
She saw Fairbanks again, years on. She was already Dawnforge then, though she didn't know it, having deserted the Crusade to return to the ruins of Quel'thalas. The Ashbringer had fallen and the Crusade had failed.

Arienne had walked the Dead Scar from Lordaeron north, through the scorched forests of Eversong, the defunct runestones dotting the landscape at a day's interval. When she arrived at the ruined elfgates, her hands were shaking and there were hollows beneath her eyes. None of the creature comforts of her family's estates were offered to her; Arienne buried Archana and mourned the missing Valendar.

A dark-haired, vaguely familiar nurse had tended to her when she finally collapsed, and bore to her the news that their Prince had surely saved them all. The woman, probably twice Arienne's own age, showed her how to drain mana from her foes, told her of the fate of the Sunwell, and finally revealed herself as the magister Valendar had been arranged to marry.

Arienne would have none of it, dissolving the contract on the grounds of the woman's loss of title and her brother's disappearance, although Averill remained convinced that he had caught up with the Prince's caravan somehow.

It was only a matter of weeks before Liadrin and Magister Bloodsworn were petitioning the newly-dubbed Blood Elves to join their cause. Arienne was only one of hundreds of priests in the ruins of Quel'thalas to be confronted, and one of fewer to accept.

When she saw Fairbanks again, there was a heavy, two-handed sword in her hands, aimed to strike at him.
At her back were a blood elf rogue with silvery hair in a ponytail and a foul-tempered warlock girl who'd tailed her ever since her initiation on Sunstrider Isle.
She could swear up and down he thanked her for his release, though the younger Mograine was nowhere near as composed.

Ascilia Shadowhand had deserted her at the Dark Portal, tossing aside her Argent Dawn commission and her Horde insignia to chase the demonic pipe dreams of a prince Arienne couldn't convince her had gone mad. And so it was the warlock left her service and she hired on Logan.

And she was alive, at Manaforge Duro. Arienne knew that much. But the documents she'd been reading when that damn tree-hugging ranger had interrupted her detailed the movements of someone they called, in Eredun, Naztheros. Naz. Theros. The cry of blades.

They didn't have a word for "song" in Eredun.