I wrote this a little while ago but figured I should throw it up here too with 9.2 given a release date and marking an end to this… experience.
“Shattered Legacies” bothered me the more I thought about it, because it framed the character we’ve known this whole time as some evil she-demon looming over the poor Ranger Barbie crying over war when Sylvanas in life was an experienced soldier and the damn Ranger-General. You’re telling me she never did anything brutal or questionable to the Amani in defence of Quel’thalas? Sure, Jan.
Anyway, I wanted it to focus on her two halves reconciling of their own accord rather than have Uther Kramer’ing into it to be the voice of reason.
She stands in front of the burning tree, a frozen blaze on a still night, the air hot and stifling around her. The screams of dying kaldorei echo everywhere but remain distant somehow, muffled, and the moon hangs full and baleful in the sky, wreathed by smoke and embers.
An immovable weight presses down on her.
Sylvanas closes her eyes against the inferno as if that will banish it from existence, like a child hiding under blankets from their nightmares.
“You cannot hide from this.”
The voice holds no ghostly echo, no vicious edge, only exhaustion and disappointment, and a ragged, bone-deep sense of loss she knows all too well, just as she knows the voice itself all too well.
Sylvanas cannot bring herself to respond. The words rise in her throat and catch like fishhooks, digging and tearing and rinsing out every retort in ichor.
There is nothing she can say.
The voice bitterly hisses, “you cannot hide from me, either. Look at me, butcher!”
Sylvanas turns sharply, heel digging into the dry, ash-laden earth.
Storm grey eyes stare at her, faintly glowing with the Sunwell’s energy and filled with grief and rage and disappointment—it’s the last she feels most keenly. She feels it as if it was her own emotion, and in a way it is, because the woman standing in front of her, golden and alive, so full of breath and motion and spark, is a reflection.
A missing piece she never thought to reclaim.
The lost part of her soul looks at her with a tired sort of rage, a nearly doused fire stoked back to a facsimile of life. It gutters painfully, straining to be seen, and Sylvanas remembers with discomforting clarity that she was the walking dead back then in all but reality, weighed down by a mantle that wasn’t hers to bear, by an empty house filled with nothing but ghosts and memories.
The Ranger General stands with deep shadows under her eyes, trembling with barely risen fury. “This?” she rasps. “This is what we came to?”
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The words won’t come.She had been so sure, so desperately, terribly confident that it wouldn’t matter in the end because the machinery of death would be put to rights, and everything would be worth it, eventually.
It had to be.
It had to be, or all of this…
The General shakes her head. “Why did we become him?”
“Don’t,” Sylvanas hisses, jolting from her paralysis. “Do not compare us to him.”
“How can I not? How do you not see it? Or do you refuse to see it because it sickens you as much as me?”
The General points at Teldrassil. “You slaughtered them in their home!”
Wind tears around them, briefly deafening as Darkshore scatters like sand, and a dim, familiar chamber in Torghast takes its place.
Sylvanas clenches her jaw at the sight of herself holding that accursed sword to Anduin’s chest, and a burning, icy pain flares just below her breastbone, in the soft space between her ribs and her belly. It burns and violates, pressing deep into her body and tearing at her soul like a starving ghoul with unwelcome intimacy.
She struggles not to reach for the scar, suppresses the urge to buckle and curl up into a protective ball on the ground.
The General points at Anduin. “You did to that boy what that monster did to us!”
Something frantic snaps inside her chest, and Sylvanas bares her fangs, snarling. “I had to, or we would all be lost! There is no peace for us in death, no freedom! We are fodder for the afterlife, to be chained to a duty we did not choose and have our minds eroded or reduced to batteries, drained and disposed of like chaff!”
There was no other choice, not with what she believed at the time, and it still sends a squirming sensation through her gut to remember the prickling cold of that blade in her hand. She didn’t want to be near the thing, let alone wield it, it brought everything rushing back to the surface, and she barely restraints the wail in her throat just thinking about it.
Arthas and Frostmourne could not matter. What he and that wretched blade did to her could not matter. None of it could matter with all they had yet to accomplish, all that needed to be fixed if anyone was to be free of this horrifying carnival of an afterlife.
The Forsaken did not deserve to be condemned to the Maw and all its agonies for the crime of being murdered and forced to slaughter their own kin. To punish the victim of a violation so great was cruelty so absolute it could not be tolerated, and if the price to set that right was a hundred thousand lives and her own sanity, she would pay it.
She had to.
A new wave of exhaustion washes over the General’s features. “But he lied to us,” she murmurs, “it was all for a lie.”
Torghast melts away to the blight riddled and pockmarked battlegrounds of Gilneas. Clods of bloodied dirt spray through the air with limbs rotten and fresh, bestial and human, clouds of corrosive plague skulking in pockets, and all frozen as if time stopped.
Sylvanas shakes her head. “No, Gilneas was necessary. Garrosh would have led our people to their final deaths without a single care for their preservation! I did what I had to for them!”
“And when did it stop being for them?”
“It never did.”
The General raises a brow, doubt and suspicion radiating off her, and Sylvanas wonders if the emotional resonance is only one way if this part of her is so horrified and closed off that she refuses to feel both ways.
But Sylvanas is used to that. She is used to being seen that way, from the very first moment of her undeath to now, all anyone ever saw was a monster, abomination, a bad memory to be burned from existence and wiped away to make space for the living once more.
Even her sisters saw that. Even Alleria, with no other context but what Vereesa chose to give her, wrote her off as a monster unworthy of effort within the space of an afternoon.
Still, it wouldn’t do to be so at odds with herself. Even if this fragment of her had the luxury of dying, of not being forced to murder her own people and be a prisoner in her body, her every thought and memory laid bare to that bastard Prince, unable to fight him off until that first blessed moment of creeping freedom.
Sylvanas fights back a sneer that this naïve woman would dare to judge her. “My desire to protect the Forsaken never wavered,” she says icily, “but when I realised what I needed to do, I knew I had to sever the link between us. Bringing them with me would have destroyed them. Many would have followed, others would not, but all would be branded. I could not allow that.”
They had to believe she abandoned them, for what she had to do was for her shoulders and her shoulders alone to bear. At least this way, most of her people will survive and even learn to live without relying on the image they built around her.
It would divide them in other ways, but none so devastating as following her down this path because now this path is broken, and her feet do not know which way to carry her.
Something in the General softens, and Sylvanas feels the connection between them strength. She almost wishes it wouldn’t, her throat tries to close around a fresh glut of sorrow, and she clenches it between her teeth instead.
She’s too familiar with stifling such things to let it break through now. The vulnerable didn’t get to survive, not without others to protect them, and she never was. Always, she was the protector of her little sister, of her mother after all the deaths in their family, of her country, and finally of the Forsaken.
That implacable mask is a heavy, gruelling weight to bear, and Sylvanas wonders if it didn’t kill her in other ways over the years.
Where does it end, and where does she begin?
How much of what she did all these years was her own desire? How much was a sense of duty, desperately grasping for some way to make up for all her failures? If she just fixed things on a cosmic scale…
The General murmurs, “but it was a lie.”
The weight presses harder on her chest, and Sylvanas closes her eyes. “Yes, it was.”
“Did you never think about finding mother here?”
“Why, so she might castigate us? Weep at the horrors we inflicted? She deserves rest more than anyone in our cursed family.”
She opens her eyes and the General looks at her. “Maybe, but she would know what to do going forward.”
Sylvanas scoffs. “I do not remember being so naïve in life,” she says, turning to stare at her counterpart in disbelief. “You cannot possibly think there is any way out of this.”
“No. There will be a reckoning. There is no escaping that.”
“Then what, precisely, are you suggesting, Ranger-General?”
At that, the General takes a breath and squares her shoulders, finally finding the steel that made her such an infuriating opponent for the Prince who butchered them. “That we don’t just lie down and rot. We owe the world an effort. Rangers fix their mistakes, and we may have become many things, but we never stopped being a Ranger. So I suggest we wake up, help them bring Zovaal down, and just maybe pave the way for a little healing to take place.”
“You know they will not accept that as restitution. Our hands are too bloody.”
“Maybe so, but we were never good at surrender, were we?”
Sylvanas smiles bitterly. “No. Not even when it would have been better for everyone.”
The blood-soaked damp of Gilneas drains from her vision, and sunlight spills through. Hills of green and gold-leafed trees replace the war-torn landscape, and elegant winged spires of blue pierce the horizon.
Something delicate and afraid clenches inside her, and Sylvanas releases a stale, rattling breath, her knees finally losing strength. She sinks back and finds a fallen log waiting for her, realising with a start that this is the same hill she sat on countless times when the mantle of Ranger-General became too much, and she needed somewhere far from everyone to think.
The General sits beside her, leaning heavily on her knees, head low, ears lax. “Zovaal has no interest in making it right,” she says, “he used us. We cannot let that stand, and we cannot let him win, but just because he won’t fix the machinery of death does not mean we can’t.”
“You think they will listen to anything we have to say that does not explicitly apply to stopping him?”
“You’re a Ranger. Give chase, track our quarry, and find the opening you need to get this done. You were not wrong to seek change. I only wish he was sincere and that the price was not so horrific.”
The kind of change she sought rarely happened without bloodshed or sacrifice, and Sylvanas did not expect to survive this journey nor be forgiven if it worked. There was no forgiveness in her for Arthas, so she didn’t even entertain the possibility with Tyrande.
There would be a reckoning. Sylvanas only hoped it came after all was said and done.
Movement catches the corner of her eye, and she turns her head to see the General holding out a hand. “I’m sorry you were alone all this time. I’m sorry you went through all that. You didn’t deserve it. We never did,” she murmurs.
Sylvanas swallows hard against an ugly tangle in her throat and looks away.
After so long without, acknowledgement hurts worse than any wound. She has grown so accustomed to ignoring it, to burying it over and over again with the frantic insistence of a rabid animal. She was the Banshee Queen. There was no space for vulnerability, sorrow, or pain—she was immovable or she perished under the weight of her agonies.
And now—now she is no Queen. She is no Ranger-General.
With unbearable kindness, the General murmurs, “we are always a Windrunner.”
Sylvanas clenches her teeth. “For whatever that is worth now,” she mutters back and clasps the offered hand tight.
The sensation of being anchored ripples up her arm, and Sylvanas swallows, keeping her eyes on her home. She knows it’s nothing more than a memory, that the hill back home is blackened and dead, strewn with a thousand desecrated skeletons of their best soldiers because Arthas could not resist spitefully ruining all that comforted her. So she stares and allows herself a brief, childish moment of pretending it never happened as the sunlight begins to brighten and blur out all the details until there is nothing but light.
The hand in hers tightens, and right before her mind slips free, she hears the Ranger General say, “May the Sun guide your arrows, child of Quel’thalas.”