Chapter 4: The Last Evening
The room in the Frozen Hearse felt different in the dark. The fire had died to embers, leaving the coffin-shaped chamber in deep, icy shadow. The frost on the walls gleamed with a faint, sickly phosphorescence, like the bones of the world showing through. Alex was aware of every inch of her skin against his, the warmth a fleeting victory over the permanent chill of the place.
He thought she was asleep. Her breathing was slow, her body heavy against him. Then her hand, which had been resting on his stomach, slid lower. Her touch wasn’t an invitation. It was a statement.
“I’m not done,” she murmured into the hollow of his throat. Her voice was rough, devoid of its usual playful edge.
Before he could reply, she moved. It was the rogue again, all efficient, predatory motion. She rolled him onto his stomach with surprising strength, pinning his shoulders with a knee. The cold of the fur-lined bier seeped into his chest. He heard the click of the salve pot, the wet sound of her slicking herself. There was no preparation for him this time. No gentle yielding.
She entered him in one brutal, driving thrust.
He cried out, a sharp gasp muffled by the bedding. It burned, a stunning, full stretch that bordered on pain. She didn’t pause, didn’t check in. She set a punishing, frantic rhythm, each slam of her hips jolting him forward on the bed. Her hands gripped his shoulders, nails biting. This wasn’t intimacy. This was a purge. A claiming. She was fucking the dawn, the inevitable separation, the entire damned, unfair world out of her system, and using his body to do it.
“Alyna—” he grunted.
“Quiet,” she hissed, her breath hot against his ear. Her pace intensified, becoming ragged, desperate. The bedframe groaned in protest against the ice-walled niche. He let his body go limp, accepting the assault, turning his head to the side to breathe. The pain bled into a strange, cathartic numbness. He could feel the wild, frantic energy coursing through her, a tempest contained in muscle and sinew. He took it. For her, he took it.
Her control snapped. A guttural, choked sound tore from her, part sob, part snarl. She buried herself to the hilt and held there, shuddering as she spilled into him, a hot, urgent pulse that seemed to go on forever. She collapsed onto his back, her weight pressing him down, her face buried in his shoulder. Her entire body trembled.
For long minutes, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the drip of melting frost. Slowly, the tension bled from her limbs. She softened, slipped out, and rolled off him. She didn’t pull him close. They lay side by side on their backs in the dark, not touching, staring up at the faint, glacial glow of the ceiling.
The silence was a physical thing, thick and suffocating.
“I have to leave at first light,” she said, her voice flat. “The report…”
“I know.”
More silence. The distance between their shoulders on the bed felt like a canyon.
“This was never supposed to happen,” she said, almost to herself.
“What part?” Alex asked, staring at the shadows. “The storm? The cave? Or… this?”
“Any of it. All of it.” She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. In the weak light, her green eyes were dark pools. “You’re a human. A boy. I’m a… I’m what I am. This is a temporary insanity. A proximity fuse.”
Her words were meant to push him away, to re-establish the walls. He heard the fracture beneath them.
“It didn’t feel insane in the cave,” he said quietly. “When we cried. That felt like the sanest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
She flinched as if struck. She looked away, back at the ceiling. A single, treacherous tear tracked from the corner of her eye into her hairline. She didn’t wipe it.
“I’m not a boy,” he added, the words finding a strength he didn’t know he had. “And you’re not a ‘what’. You’re Alyna. Who saves smug hunters from yetis. Who cries when she comes. Who hates congealed hare stew.”
A shaky breath escaped her. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make it real. It’s easier if it’s just… bodies. Heat. A transaction.”
“Was that a transaction?” He gestured vaguely at his backside, a dull ache already settling in. “Felt like a fucking exorcism.”
A surprised, wet laugh hiccuped from her. She swiped at her face angrily. “It was. Sorry.”
“I’m not.” He finally turned onto his side, facing her. “I’d let you exorcise whatever you need. Anytime.”
She looked at him then, truly looked. Her mask was in fragments on the pillow between them. The confidence, the cheekiness, the dominance—all stripped away. What remained was raw, terrified, and yearning. “Why?” The question was a whisper.
He reached out, tracing the elegant point of her ear. It twitched under his touch. “Because when you’re not pretending to be this unbreakable thing… you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”
Her composure shattered. A sob broke from her chest, harsh and ugly. She curled into him, her face pressing against his neck. “I can’t,” she wept, the words muffled against his skin. “I can’t have this. They’ll never… my people, your people… I’m a freak, Alex. Even among my own. This… thing… it’s all anyone will ever see. It’s all I am to them.”
He held her tight, his own eyes burning. “That’s not all you are to me. It’s a part of you. A shocking, incredible, beautiful part. But it’s not you. You’re the one who shared your fire. You’re the one who teaches me about goblin pricing. You’re the one whose tears taste like salt and snow.” He kissed her forehead. “You’re Alyna. And I…”
He couldn’t say it. The word was too big, too doomed.
She pulled back just enough to look at him, her face blotchy, her eyes searching his. She heard the unspoken word hanging in the frozen air. She saw it shining, stupid and hopeful, in his eyes.
Instead of answering, she kissed him. It was a desperate, hungry, tasting kiss, full of salt and surrender. Then she pushed him onto his back again. This time, her movements weren’t frantic. They were deliberate, intense, focused.
She sheathed herself inside him with a slow, claiming pressure that made him arch off the bed. She set a deep, relentless pace, her eyes locked on his. This wasn’t a purge. This was a sacrament. Every thrust was a punctuation to the unsaid.
She leaned down, her lips brushing his ear as she moved. Her voice was a raw, broken thread of sound, meant for him alone, a secret in the glacial dark.
“I love you, you stupid human boy,” she whispered, the words trembling. “I love you and it’s going to ruin everything.”
The confession, woven into the brutal, perfect rhythm of their joining, shattered him. He came with a silent, wrenching intensity, his body convulsing under hers. She followed, stifling her cry against his shoulder, her release a hot, claiming flood. She collapsed, but immediately rolled, pulling him with her, tucking him against her front, his back to her chest, her arms locked around him like bands of iron. She held him as if the dawn itself would try to pry him away.
They lay in the aftermath, wrecked. The truth was out, hanging between them like a sword.
“It doesn’t have to ruin it,” he whispered into the dark.
“It does,” she said, her voice thick with exhausted certainty. “You go to your gnomes. I go to my Spire. This… this is a folktale. A ‘how I spent the winter storm’ story you’ll tell when you’re old. It has to be.”
“I don’t accept that.”
“You have to.” Her arms tightened. “I won’t be your secret. Your shameful, exotic mistake. And I won’t watch you become mine. The world isn’t a cave, Alex. It’s cold, and it’s cruel, and it doesn’t make exceptions for… for whatever this is.”
He had no answer. The truth of her words was as cold as the walls. The fragile peace was just that—fragile. A blood elf and a human? A scandal. A blood elf like her and anyone? A grotesque curiosity. The warmth they’d built would not survive outside this room.
He turned in her arms, facing her. He kissed her, softly, slowly, trying to memorize the shape of her mouth, the taste of her. She kissed him back with a heartbreaking tenderness.
When they finally pulled apart, a faint, grey light was seeping around the edges of the shuttered window. First light.
Neither of them moved.
Neither of them moved. The grey light grew, etching the lines of the frost-locked door, the grain of the wooden ceiling. It was a verdict. Alex listened to her breathe behind him, each inhalation a controlled, steady thing. He could feel the coiled readiness in her limbs, the rogue poised to vanish at first sound.
A heavy thump against their door made them both jerk.
Fenrir’s whine, high and impatient, sliced through the silence. Then a frantic scratching of claws on timber. Someone in the hallway cursed. “Control your beast or I’ll sell it for glue!”
The spell broke. The world, noisy and demanding, crashed back in.
Alyna’s arms unlocked from around him. The bed dipped as she sat up. He rolled over to look at her. Her back was to him, a tense landscape of muscle and scar. The dawn light painted her skin in shades of cold marble.
“I have to feed him,” Alex said, his voice rusted from disuse.
“I know.”
She didn’t turn. He dressed slowly, the wool of his clothes abrasive against his sensitized skin. Every movement felt final. He pulled on his boots, the laces tangling in his fingers. He walked to the door, hand on the latch.
“Alyna.”
“Just go.”
He opened the door. Fenrir nearly bowled him over, shoving his cold nose into Alex’s hand. The hallway stank of boiled cabbage and tallow. He stepped out, the wolf at his heels, and pulled the door shut behind him. The click of the latch was the loudest sound he’d ever heard.
Down in the common room, he bought a stringy haunch of frostboar from the innkeeper for Fenrir. The wolf crunched it under a table. Alex ordered black tea, staring into the murky liquid as the room stirred to life around him. A gnome argued with a goblin over a shipment of heated stones. Two dwarves played a grim, silent game of cards. It was all so brutally ordinary.
Every creak of the floorboards above made his heart lurch. Was that her packing? The sound of her pulling on her leathers, checking her daggers, becoming the messenger again? He saw her walking out the front gate, back straight, disappearing into the white without a glance. The image was a physical pain.
He couldn’t just sit here. He left a coin on the table, whistled softly to Fenrir, and climbed the stairs. Their room. He had to see it empty. He had to make it real.
The door was slightly ajar.
He pushed it open. She was there. Not packed. Not gone. She stood by the window, fully dressed in her rogue’s leathers, her pack at her feet. She was staring out at the busy, muddy street below, one hand resting on the frost-rimed pane.
She didn’t turn. “You were supposed to let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“No.” He stepped inside, shutting the door on the hallway’s noise. Fenrir settled by the hearth with a sigh. “I don’t accept your folktale. I won’t tell it when I’m old. Because it’s not over.”
She laughed, a dry, hollow sound. “What’s your plan, hunter? Follow me to Silvermoon? They’d peel the skin from your bones for sport. Or should I come with you to Stormwind? I’d last an hour before someone tried to put me in a traveling carnival. ‘See the freak elf!’”
Her words were meant to wound, to push. He walked over to her, standing close enough to feel the chill radiating from the window glass. “Then we don’t go to Silvermoon or Stormwind.”
“Oh, brilliant. We’ll live in a cave. Eat congealed hare forever.”
“Maybe.” He reached out, not touching her, just letting his hand hover near her arm. “There are other places. Neutral places. Wetlands outposts. Booty Bay. The world is bigger than our capitols.”
She finally turned her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, fiercely bright. “You’re naïve. It will find us. The prejudice. The stares. The whispers. It will wear on you. It will wear on us. You’ll look at me one day and just see the problem.”
He met her gaze. “You said I wasn’t a boy. Don’t treat me like one now. I know what I’m seeing. I’m seeing the woman who dragged my half-frozen ass into a cave. The woman who cried in my arms. The woman I love. The rest is just… details the world needs to catch up on.”
Her composure cracked. A single tear escaped, tracking through the dust on her cheek. She swiped at it angrily. “It’s a terrible plan. It’s no plan at all.”
“It’s the only plan that starts with us together. We figure the rest out as we go. Like we figured out the storm.” He dared to touch her then, his fingers closing gently around her wrist. Her pulse hammered against his thumb. “Stay. With me. Not for two days. Just… stay.”
She looked down at his hand on her wrist. She looked at her pack, waiting by the door. The report for her superiors was inside, already two days late. A lifetime of duty, of being the weapon, the tool, the oddity, tugged at her. It was a familiar weight, easier to carry than this terrifying, fragile hope.
She pulled her wrist from his grasp. His heart plummeted.
Then she kicked her pack. It skidded across the icy floor, slamming into the far wall with a thud. The sound was tremendously final.
She turned fully to face him, crossing her arms over her chest. Her expression was defiant, scared, and utterly resolute.
“Fine,” she said, the word leaving her like a surrender and a challenge all at once. “But you’re carrying my bag. And if we’re going to be fugitives from common sense, we’re getting a better map. And real breakfast. Not this slop.”
A laugh burst out of him, half relief, half sheer disbelief. He grabbed her, pulling her into a crushing hug. She stiffened for a second, then melted, her arms wrapping around him, her face pressing into his shoulder.
“Okay,” he mumbled into her hair, breathing in the scent of leather and her. “Okay.”
She stayed with him.
He felt the truth of it in the way her body settled against his, the way her fingers clenched in the fabric of his shirt. She was choosing the unknown, the difficult, the scandalous. She was choosing him.
After a long moment, she pushed back, her usual smirk attempting a return. It wavered at the edges. “This is a mistake.”
“Probably.”
“A huge one.”
“The biggest.”
She nodded, as if accepting a grim mission. “Alright then.” She stepped away, retrieving her pack from where it had hit the wall. She didn’t sling it over her shoulder. She handed it to him. “First, food. Then, we steal a better map from that gnome downstairs. He cheats at cards.”
Alex took the pack, the weight of it a promise. “Lead the way.”
She opened the door and walked out into the hallway, not looking back to see if he followed. He did, Fenrir trotting between them. They descended into the noisy, smelling, living world together. The frost on the walls didn’t matter. The stares that would come didn’t matter yet.
She stayed. They pushed through the inn’s main door, emerging into the brilliant, cruel morning light of Winterspring. The snow glared, the air bit. Alyna squinted, surveying the muddy track that led south, away from Felwood, away from her duty, into something else entirely.
She glanced at him, a wild, uncertain gleam in her green eyes. “So. Which way to where we’re going?”
He bumped his shoulder against hers. “You’re the navigator.”
She shook her head, a genuine smile breaking through. She pointed south, toward the pass that would eventually lead to the steppes. “That way. For now.”
For now.” She said it like a challenge thrown at the mountains themselves.
They bought supplies with the last of Alex’s silver—hard cheese, dried venison, a water skin that wouldn’t freeze solid. The gnome at the map stall glared at Alyna, but she flipped a gold coin between her knuckles with a look that promised painful consequences for any complaint. They got the map. Back on the street, the wind snapped at them, a reminder that the respite was over.
Alyna studied the parchment, her brow furrowed. The playful facade from the room was gone, replaced by a tactical focus. She traced a route with a calloused finger. “South, through the pass. Then we turn west, skirt the dragonshrine. Avoid the troll villages.” She glanced at him, her green eyes calculating. “It adds two days. But fewer questions.”
“Fewer questions is good,” Alex said, hoisting her pack higher on his shoulder. The weight was unfamiliar. Fenrir sniffed the air, uneasy with the crowding goblin carts.
“Fewer questions is survival.” She rolled the map tightly, tucking it inside her leathers. “My people have outposts near the shrine. Your people have scouts in the foothills. I’d rather not explain us to either.”
The word ‘us’ hung between them, fragile and new. He just nodded.
They walked. The packed snow of Everlook’s outskirts gave way to the deep, untouched powder of the wilderness. Their world shrank again to the crunch of boots, the pant of the wolf, the vast white silence. But it was a different silence now. The desperate, frozen tension of the storm was replaced by something taut with intention. They had a destination. It was mad, but it was theirs.
By midday, the pass narrowed into a knife-cut gorge shadowed by leaning pines. The air grew still and colder. Alyna moved ahead, her steps silent, her ears twitching at every unseen skitter of ice. She was in her element here, a predator scanning for threat. Alex watched the shift in her posture, the way her hand rested near the hilt of her dagger. It was a vibration of readiness he was starting to recognize.
“Hold up,” she murmured, freezing mid-step.
Fenrir let out a low growl, the fur on his spine rising. Alex unslung his bow, nocking an arrow on instinct. “What is it?”
“Not sure.” Her eyes scanned the high ridges. “Too quiet. Even for this.”
A shadow detached itself from the rock face fifty yards ahead. Then another. Shaggy, bipedal forms clad in crude furs and wickedly hooked axes. Wendigo. Their eyes glowed a sickly yellow in the gloom. One sniffed the air, its muzzle cracking into a snarl. It pointed a claw directly at them.
“Shit,” Alyna breathed. “Pack hunters. They’ve been tracking us.”
“How many?”
“More than two.” She backed up slowly, putting herself beside him. “We run, we lead them into the open where they can flank. We fight here.”
The lead wendigo charged, a guttural roar echoing in the gorge. Its companion loped to the side, trying to circle. Alex’s arrow took the charger in the throat, a lucky shot that sent it sprawling in a gurgling heap. The second was on him before he could nock another.
He swung his bow like a staff, catching the beast across the snout. It reeled back, enraged. A blur of green and brown shot past his shoulder. Alyna moved like spilled mercury. She ducked under a wild axe swing, her own dagger flashing upward. It opened the wendigo’s flank from hip to ribcage. The creature howled, stumbling.
Two more emerged from the rocks behind them.
They were surrounded. The cold air burned in Alex’s lungs. He fumbled for his hunting knife, the bow useless at this range. He and Fenrir stood back-to-back with Alyna, a small, desperate circle in the snow. The wendigo stalked closer, saliva dripping onto the ice.
“Nice of them to welcome us to the neighborhood,” Alyna quipped, but her voice was tight. She held a dagger in each hand now, her body a coiled spring.
“Got any clever rogue tricks for this?” Alex asked, his knuckles white on his knife.
“One.” She feinted left, then spun right, her movement a distraction. “Don’t die.”
The beasts lunged. Chaos erupted. Fenrir leaped, his jaws closing on a furry arm with a sickening crunch. Alex slashed wildly, feeling his blade bite into muscle. The stench of wet fur and blood filled his nose. A claw raked across his parka, tearing through the padding. He kicked out, connecting with a knee.
He saw Alyna move. Not to kill, but to maim. She hamstrung one creature with a vicious slice behind its knee, sending it crashing. She used its falling body as a shield against the other, plunging her dagger into its eye. It was brutal, efficient, and terrifyingly beautiful.
The last wendigo, the one Fenrir had maimed, turned to flee. Alyna’s throwing dagger sprouted from the base of its skull. It dropped without a sound.
Silence crashed back, heavier than before. The only sounds were their ragged breaths and Fenrir’s low whine. The coppery stink of blood was overwhelming, steaming in the cold. Alex’s hands were shaking. He looked at the four corpses staining the snow. He’d never killed anything that walked on two legs before.
Alyna was already retrieving her daggers, wiping them clean on a wendigo’s pelt. Her expression was unreadable. “They would have called more,” she said, her voice flat. “They always do.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked, his own voice strange in his ears.
She shook her head, then her eyes focused on his torn parka. “You are.”
He looked down. The claw had caught his upper arm. It stung, but it was shallow. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s blood. It’s a scent.” She strode over, pulling a roll of clean linen from her own pack. “Sit.”
He sat on a nearby rock. She knelt in front of him, tearing his sleeve away with a brisk efficiency that brooked no argument. Her fingers were deft as she cleaned the wound with a stinging antiseptic from a small vial. She bound it tightly. Her touch was clinical, but her proximity, the focused line of her mouth, felt more intimate than anything in the warm bed.
“You fight well,” she said quietly, not looking up from her work. “For a hunter of rabbits.”
“You fight like… I don’t even have a word for it.”
“Survival.” She tied off the bandage and finally met his eyes. The adrenaline was fading from her gaze, leaving something raw and unsettled. “It’s just survival, Alex. This,” she gestured at the carnage around them, “is what the world is, most of the time. Not caves. Not inns. This. You sure you want to travel it with a target on your back just for being next to me?”
He put his hand over hers, still resting on his bandaged arm. Her skin was cold. “I’m sure. Besides, you just said I fight well. I’m improving your odds.”
A faint, weary smile touched her lips. She stood, pulling him up with her. “Come on. We need to put distance between us and this blood before the scavengers arrive. And the smell is ruining my appetite.”
They pushed on, faster now, the encounter a cold splash of reality. The gorge opened up onto a high, wind-scoured plateau. The view was staggering. To the south, the endless white peaks of Winterspring marched away. To the west, the land fell into a vast, forested valley, but the green was wrong—it was tinged with a swirling, toxic-looking violet. The air here tasted different, carrying a faint, acrid tang.
Alyna stopped at the plateau’s edge, staring at that corrupted forest. Her playful grin from the inn was utterly gone. This was the face of the woman who carried secret reports.
“Alex,” she said, her voice steady and clear. “Our goal is Ratchet.”
He moved to stand beside her, following her gaze to the sickly forest. “Ratchet? That’s on the other side of the continent.”
“I know the geography,” she said, a hint of her old sharpness returning. She pointed. “We will cross the corrupted Felwood.” Her finger traced an invisible line through the violet haze. “Then Ashenvale. I hope the night elf sentinels won’t kill me on sight.” Her hand moved again, over the map in her mind. “Then the Barrens, where everything that moves wants to eat us. In Ratchet we decide if we stay there for a while or head to another place. It’s a goblin port. Mercenaries, refugees, smugglers. At least there's no Horde or Alliance military patrols breathing down your neck.”
She turned to him then, and the grin that spread across her face was pure, mischievous trouble. It was the grin from the gully, from the inn room. It promised chaos and life. “And your cute ass belongs to me.” She poked his chest. “I’ll fuck it whenever I want.”
The abrupt, crude declaration, after the violence and the grim journey plan, was so perfectly her. A hot blush rushed up his neck and flooded his cheeks, burning in the cold air.
She watched it happen, her grin softening into something warmer, more possessive. She loved his adorable blush. She reached out, her cool fingers tilting his chin up. “That’s the deal. A road that wants us dead, and a bed whenever I decide. Still in?”
He looked from her fierce, beautiful face, down to the poisonous green expanse of Felwood, and back to her eyes. The path was insanity. The company was everything. He captured her hand, kissing her palm, right there in the open wind.
“Whenever you want,” he said, the blush still warming his face.
She laughed, a real sound that chased the shadow of the wendigo away. “Good.” She slung her own pack over her shoulder, leaving him with the lighter one. “Then let’s go. Felwood by nightfall. I want to be under the big, sickly trees before dark. More cover.”
She started down the steep slope toward the corrupted treeline without a backward glance, confident he would follow.
He took one last look at the pristine, deadly snows of Winterspring at their backs—the cave, the storm, the tears, the beginning of it all. Then he turned toward the poisoned green, toward the unknown, toward her. Fenrir nudged his hand.
He followed.