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Physical need means nothing to Sylvanas Windrunner, the Queen of the Forsaken. Her body, though preserved by the very strongest magic and alchemy of an undead nation, has been far too long a corpse for even the memory of any natural biological processes to stir in her flesh. Her heart does not beat, her blood does not pulse, she neither hungers nor thirsts. And yet...
And yet the curse of undeath leaves a deeper hunger, a lack that can never be filled. The soul deeply feels the loss of all those messy bodily needs whose myriad expressions and fulfillments make up so much of life for the living. To a simple-minded ghoul or abomination, that gaping void seems like a literal need for food, driving them to gorge themselves on the flesh of the living, but more intelligent undead quickly come to learn that there is no true relief to be found that way, no matter how much one consumes. The soul's need is greater and more enduring.
For the first decade of her undeath, hatred was Sylvanas's solace, her one all-consuming answer to all of her hungers. Under forced servitude to the Lich King, her loathing of Arthas was all that seemed to remain of the proud Ranger-General she once was, and with her freedom from his control that loathing evolved into a burning lust for vengeance. Fomenting rebellion, founding a nation, leading a people... all she did was toward the goal of bringing the Champion of the Scourge to a painful end. That was everything to her, and it was enough.
But then the Lich King fell, and Sylvanas lost her way. It wasn't until she glimpsed the grim afterlife that awaits her after final death that she found a new purpose, and self-preservation, while certainly motivating, is a very base purpose to build a life, or unlife, around. Any animal can selfishly cling to life. Even an abomination will fight for its wretched existence. That isn't enough for her. She longs for more. And that unfulfilled longing twists itself into...
But she has so little time for herself. She has too many responsibilities, and too few allies she can genuinely trust. Varimathras's coup, Garrosh's tyranny, her precious sister's betrayal, and now, with Vol'jin's death, her appointment as Warchief of the entire Horde... all that has happened in recent years has both increased her burdens and made it all the more imperative for her not to show any strain under their weight. For the sake of her people, her peoples, she must always be the Dark Lady, cold and collected. She cannot afford any display of vulnerability, of compassion, of... desire.
And so tonight, in the dead of winter, when snow lies heavy on the ground and the cold, though not half as bleak as Northrend's climes, is bitter enough that even she can feel it as a dull ache in her bones, she has ridden alone, far from her proud city, cloying advisors, dogged guards. Having been slain by Frostmourne itself, the pain of her undeath is always worst in winter, and tonight she just can't bear it. She can't bear to be a perfect queen, a perfect warchief, a perfect figurehead. She needs to ride, and hunt, and kill, and cry, and, above all, feel. Her soul aches to feel.
And her body is so numb.
~*~
Hunting was once a sacred undertaking for Sylvanas, in the druidic tradition of the elven rangers, but now it is a colder and harsher task. She still has the skill to spot and track an animal's spoor, and shadows answer to cloak her passing, but she can no longer feel the life in the forest's barren trees, or speak to wood and wind. She is shut out of the rich web of nature, able to feel its warmth and vibrancy only as it fades, as hot blood spills.
Even inhibited as she is, hunting through snow seems almost too easy. The track is clear, the leaves are thin, and the shade of night is no obstacle to her vision. Swift, careful steps carry her ghostlike toward her quarry. Her tattered cloak is dark as the night, her corpse body is cold as the snow, and she keeps the silence of the grave.
At the end of the chase she finds two deer grazing on lichen from a fallen tree, oblivious to her approach. Softly, carefully, she draws two black shafts from her quiver, slipping them both into her bow hand. She'll have to fire as quickly as she can to fell both animals. At this range, and with her poison coating the arrows' points, speed will count for more than the strength of her draw. She breathes a cold draft into her dead lungs to steady herself, a reflex from life which she has never managed to shake, despite its pointlessness, and in one smooth motion, plucks an arrow from her bow hand, nocks it, draws it, and fires. The first arrow is still airborne when she, inhumanly fast, grabs the second, pulls it to the string, pulls the string back, adjusts her aim... she lets the second loose at the moment the first shaft strikes, and the dull brain of the second deer is only just spurring it into motion when the point finds its flank. Both animals take perhaps a single staggering step, or two, before they topple together into the snow.
Sylvanas grasps both deer by the neck and distantly feels their pulse throbbing against her thumbs, slowed by her paralytic poison, but steady. She begins dragging them roughly through the snow, abandoning her earlier light-footed stealth in favor of simply hastening to her destination. Though both deer are full-grown, she strains only slightly to drag their weight. The packed snow eases her passage, and the strength in her slim arms is a strength of spirit as much as it is flesh. She trudges on with them until she reaches the clearing that is her destination.
A few ancient, jagged stumps jutting up here and there from the snow, blasted and rotted almost beyond recognition, are the only scars visible above the blanket of white to suggest that this was once a battlefield. She did not fight here, and she has forgotten the details of the struggle, but she knows powerful magic was unleashed. The bodies in the ground lie deep enough, broken enough, rotted enough that even her Valkyr could not raise Forsaken from this earth. And yet that is why she chose this site. It should serve her purposes nicely.
Three deer already lay in the clearing, panting in pain, frozen by her poison, from earlier hunts. Five should be enough. She arranges them all into a rough circle, laying each one's head onto the hindquarters of the one before it with a care that would seem gentle were it not for her macabre purpose. When the circle is complete, she steps within it, draws a barbed dagger, and slits each deer's throat in turn, softly muttering words of power as their lifeblood spills onto the snow and seeps into the earth.
When she is finished with the deer, she draws herself up to her full height and lets her unfeeling body go. Its strings cut, it topples down to lie with the animals' corpses in a careless tangle of stiffened limbs. It has been a long while since the last time she let her body go and assumed her true banshee form. For most purposes, she is far stronger joined with it as a dark ranger, able to take advantage of her remaining physical gifts along with her supernatural power, but it would be useless for what is to come.
The battle here was so long ago that she has to wait some time for her summons to take effect. While she waits, she focuses on herself. For this to work, to achieve the catharsis for which she aches, she must let go of so much more than simply her corpse. Sylvanas, Warchief of the Horde; Sylvanas, Dark Lady of the Forsaken; Sylvanas, the Banshee Queen; even Sylvanas, Ranger-General of Silvermoon, she must let go of all her grand titles, all the many years of proud reserve she has built up to shield herself, to make herself a leader. She must strip away all her pretensions and defenses.
Her spirit stands naked, figuratively and literally. Though it aches, though it hurts so much to remember, she has shaped her ghost to resemble, as much as it can, the way she looked the last time she allowed herself to experience a careless lust. She remembers standing with her back to her bedroom window, framed in golden sunlight, with her dress pooled at her feet, and smirking at the expression on the face of the young hunter she had summoned on some flimsy pretense. She was so vain then, and confident. And so naïve. Still ignorant of the threat of the Scourge. Still ignorant of how much suffering a person can endure and survive.
An unearthly groaning alerts her to the fact that her ritual is bearing fruit. From the frozen ground of the ancient battlefield, warped shades begin to rise. They are broken spirits, shattered by violent deaths and the relentless passage of time. They were probably human, or perhaps high elven or possibly even vrykul, but they have forgotten most of what they were, and, with their identities, they have forgotten their proper forms. Some of them even lack individual shape, blending together into a distorted mass. They are the least form of ghost imaginable.
But still they have what she shares, what all undead share. Still they have that sense of lack. Still they have that hunger.
She glides forward, stepping on air, and opens her arms.
“I offer myself to you.”
She says that as if she is giving them a gift, but what she's doing is entirely selfish, and she knows it. She has shirked her responsibilities, sacrificed the lives of five animals, desecrated the site of soldiers' graves, and perverted the natural order, all with the goal of using near-mindless shades to sate herself. This is a hideous way to find release. But it's the only way for her. All safe and sane paths are closed to her. And her want bites deeper than the icy breeze.
The most fully-formed shade is the first to step closer, better remembering his earthly desires. His face is not exactly what would be called handsome, but it bears an open, honest masculinity that is sufficient to her current needs. This isn't romance, she can't afford even a single night of romance, this is about drives and impulses. Eagerly she reaches for him, and delights in the feel of spectral flesh beneath her spectral touch. It isn't true feeling, not like she once had, and she can feel the simple hurt and emptiness of the ghost bleed into her from first contact, answered only by her own lack, but it's better than being numb, and it's better than being alone. At least she can share her pain, and share it with those who can best understand.
When her lips mash against his own, and her tongue teases at the smoke-filled cavity that stands in place of his mouth, she finds her simple wanting answered and echoed. The shade's fingers find her shoulders, kneading them, sinking into the memory of pliant flesh, and she presses herself closer to him, hugging his body to hers as she kisses his mouth, his cheek, his neck. She lets her feet dissolve into light and mist for a moment to mix with his own spectral tail, and a flash of memory jumps from him to her, and she sees him, young and randy, laying a farm girl back against the straw, lifting her breasts from her bodice...
She thrusts her own chest out, offering it up to him, and when he hesitates in taking the hint, she pulls his head down, pressing him to her bosom until his tongue and lips begin to work. As he gums and suckles at her left nipple, she reaches for his wrist, but he anticipates her desire and takes her right breast into his hand, kneading it with delicious vigor. She is raking her nails softly down his chest, intending to reward him for his attentions, when a chill alerts her to another presence, and then a hand gooses her ass. The shock of the sudden contact makes her jump, and the ghost chortles a phlegmy laugh, and then hot flashes of shame and anger surge through her as she smarts at that lapse in dignity. She has to fight to remind herself that she's here to shed that very dignity, to let everything go, to let herself go.
She reaches back behind herself and snares the back of the handsy spectre's neck with a blind grope. If he wants to have his fun with her, fine. She'll make him serve. Her nails bite into the spectre's neck, and as they do they sharpen from elven nails to banshee claws. She relishes the thrill of fear she senses from him in response, and pulls him in closer, bringing his head alongside hers.
“If you like what you see,” she snarls, “treat it with respect. Worship it. And if you fail to please me, there are plenty of wretches here who could replace you.”
She releases him, and his hand returns to her ass, but gently now, just a delicate touch skimming feather-soft over her skin.
“I said please me, not coddle me,” she snorts. “Treat me like your lover, not your child.”
His grip firms, and she feels his wet mouth on her back, at her shoulderblade and dipping lower. She smiles, and allows herself to look about. The circle of ghosts has come closer, grown tighter, but only the two have come close enough to touch.
“Good,” she affirms her lovers, while directing the mouth of the one in front of her to her other breast, and then she turns her attention back to the rest of the throng, her eyes flashing red.
“More,” she demands.
A tall ghost with a sagging, half-melted face strides forward suddenly, and boldly grabs her face to kiss her. In his kiss she feels his mournfulness: she reminds him of his long-lost wife. Her lips curl into a smile as she bites his lower lip, and her hand snakes into the thin wisps of his hair.
“What would you do to her?” she purrs against his mouth, and she can feel his sorrow warring with his lust. Unfortunately, the sorrow seems to be winning, so she reaches down and grabs his crotch, where his cock flickers in and out of being with his uncertainty.
“I can make you whole again, for one last night. Be the first to fuck me.”
That causes the ghost at her breast to lift his head and look up at her, quizzically, so she gives him a quick, forceful kiss.
“You'll have your turn.”
The sorrowful widower reaches a decision and produces his cock, and she guides it into her folds, moaning at the weight of the loss pushing into her. His isn't even an especially tragic story, from the fragments she can gather as he thrusts against her, but he feels it so deeply. The wife he left at home when he went to war might as well be the eternal springtime of the Eversong Forest, for all he mourns her passing. It's beautiful, and it spurs her to fold him in her arms and thrust herself against him faster, impaling herself on his girthy cock and whispering to him her own sorrows, all the beauties she has seen ruined. The magnitude of the suffering she has witnessed overwhelms him, and ectoplasmic tears weep from his cock. So quickly spent, she pushes him away.
She feels something like a tongue now lapping at her asshole, as hands spread her cheeks, but still, with her pussy just vacated, she feels empty and unfulfilled.
“More!” she demands again, and snares a nearby spectator by the shoulder, forcing the ill-formed shade to what in life would've been its knees. It licks at the excess spunk that oozes from her cunt as the breast man's cock enters her. And now the ring of phantoms closes in. Hands grasp at her spectral flesh, and a ragged, misshapen mouth kisses and suckles at the fingers of her right hand.
She stands awash in a sea of sensations, pounding and grasping and groping and licking and suckling, and, with it, a storm of emotions. The ghosts are too many, and too fragmented, to draw any distinct memories out of them, but instead she is assailed by momentary impressions. A throb of ancient lust with each thrust of the cock within her cunt, a pang of sorrow in the tongue at her breast, loss in the lips that kiss her ear, ecstasy in the fingers that rub her clit, a blind hunger in the teeth at her neck... and behind all those fleeting sensations, towering above them all, is that eternal burning emptiness, rising with the inevitability of the tide. Joined by that inchoate need more than by the intertwinement of their ephemeral bodies, the orgiastic spectres' passions mount higher, ever higher, feeding on each other, building toward a crescendo.
Then the amorphous, writhing tendril of a ghost bent far from its proper shape forces its way past the ring of her asshole, and the agony it brings with it, tearing straight into her guts, carries her over the edge.
The Banshee Queen's orgasm is marked by an awful, transcendent scream, a release of all her pent up frustrations and desires. It rips through the ranks of her summoned lovers, overwhelms them, rends them apart. One moment she is buoyed up on a wave of pure emotion, held up by the groping, throbbing, wanting bodies of an amorous mob, and the next, after a heartbeat of beautiful catharsis, she is left panting and aching and alone, alone to fall, unsupported, into the snow.
The living warmth of the deer Sylvanas sacrificed has all bled out, and immediately she feels the cold leeching into her soul, stealing away the fire of her passion. She pours herself back into her body, but it is still a corpse, and provides no insulation. Try as she might to hold on to any spark of it, the perverse sense of fulfillment she so recently felt in her union with the shades fades away, slips through her fingers, and is lost to the biting wind. But, for the moment, it does not leave her wanting.
It leaves her numb.
The Warchief of the Horde rises on nerveless legs, dusts snow from her imperishable body, and listens. She listens until she is sure that her heart does not beat, that her blood does not pulse, that her stomach does not groan.
She is satisfied to find herself unfeeling.
She mounts and rides for home.