When Thorwin's eyes fluttered open, the world greeted him not with light, but with suffocating dread. The air was thick and foul, carrying the stench of smoke, sweat, and iron. A dull ache pulsed through his head, and for a moment, he could not tell if he was still dreaming—if this ruin around him was but the lingering shadow of a nightmare. But then the groans and murmurs reached him, the muffled cries of men and women, and reality struck harder than any blow.
He blinked, his vision slowly sharpening, and what he saw twisted his stomach. All around him, bodies pressed close—men, women, even children—crowded together within the confines of a crude cage made of splintered wood and rusted iron. It was massive, perhaps large enough to hold dozens, yet it felt impossibly small. Every movement was met with another's elbow, another's shudder, another's sob.
Panic gripped him before thought could. His breathing grew shallow as he turned his head frantically, searching the faces—ashen, hollow, smeared with blood and soot. He called out softly at first, then louder, his voice cracking with desperation. "Mother… Mother!"
The others barely stirred, some too weak to care, some too frightened to speak. The light that filtered through the gaps in the cage revealed their defeat—bound hands, bruised faces, hopeless eyes.
Then, faint and trembling, a voice called for him amidst the murmurs. "Thorwin."
His head snapped toward it, and his heart leapt to his throat. There she was—his mother, Adriana—sitting by the bars of the cage. Her once-elegant gown was torn and stained, her golden hair dulled by ash, yet her presence was the only familiar thing in this waking nightmare. She leaned weakly against the bars, her complexion pale, her breathing shallow, but when their eyes met, she managed a faint smile—fragile and beautiful, as though she had been waiting for that one look to find her strength again.
"Mother…"
Her name left his lips as scarcely more than a breath—fragile, trembling, yet desperate. Thorwin crawled toward her through the cramped press of bodies, hands scraping against splintered wood and cold earth. Every movement sent a lance of pain through his ribs and shoulders, but still he pushed onward. With each inch gained, the fear within him grew—fear of what had become of them, fear of what lay outside this hellish cage, fear that even this brief reunion might be all he would ever have left.
When he reached her, he collapsed into her waiting arms, burying his face into her shoulder as if the act alone could shut out the screams beyond the bars. She held him tightly—tightly enough that for a moment he could pretend they were not prisoners surrounded by blood and death. His tears spilled freely, hot tracks of grief and terror slipping down his cheeks and disappearing into the torn fabric of her gown. Hope, once a blazing fire within him, now flickered like a dying ember in the wind.
"Don't cry, my child," she whispered, and her voice, though hoarse, carried the warmth of summers long past—of sea breeze and laughter and candlelight in peaceful halls. "We will make it past this, as we always have. I am here. I am with you."
He lifted his head, gazing into her eyes. There it was—resolve, unbroken and unshaken, shining like steel beneath the soot that dulled her skin. But he saw something else too, something small and sharp beneath the strength: pain. A trembling hidden behind her calm, fear tucked away so carefully a child might have missed it—yet Thorwin did not. He was still young, but not blind.
Her hand brushed across his cheek, warm despite the cold around them. "For now," she murmured, as if her words alone could build walls around them and keep the horrors at bay, "rest."
And he wanted to—wanted to sink into the safety of her voice and pretend none of this was real. So Thorwin closed his eyes, pressing closer to her as though he could anchor himself to the sound of her heartbeat. And there, amidst the agony of the wounded, the broken sobs of the hopeless, and the guttural roars of orcs beyond the wooden bars, Adriana began to hum.
A soft tune—familiar, gentle. A lullaby she used to sing beside the hearth in the nights of old.
The world around them was chaos.
Yet in her arms, for a fleeting moment, there was peace.
…
A month had crawled by like a wounded beast—slow, agonizing, and merciless. Thirty days without word from Stormwind. Thirty long nights of silence where sleep eluded Caspian Stormsong, haunted by thoughts of Adriana and young Thorwin. Each sunrise brought no answers, only the same hollow ache gnawing deeper into his chest.
He told himself he must remain steadfast—for his house, for his people, for the tides themselves. A lord could not tremble. A tidesage must not waver. And so, before the priests and sailors who looked to him for guidance, he wore his composure like armor. When they asked of his family, he answered with calm words, steady voice, and a distant, practiced smile. Yet beneath that mask lay the truth: his heart was breaking, splintering with each passing hour of uncertainty.
This morning, he found himself once again before the tall arched window of his office, overlooking the great harbor of Boralus. The sea churning below was a mirror of his soul—unsettled, restless, full of storm. He stood with hands clasped behind his back, eyes fixed on the horizon with a desperation he would not confess. If he stared long enough, if he prayed fiercely enough, perhaps he might glimpse a ship sailing home with his wife aboard, his son at her side.
But the vessel that emerged from the fog was no proud Kul Tiran warship, nor a sleek merchant galley bearing foreign silk and spice. It was a Stormwind ship—tattered, broken, its sails torn to ragged strips that snapped weakly in the wind. Its hull was scarred with blackened burn marks, as though it had sailed through fire itself. The sight struck him like a blow.
His breath faltered. Hope turned to dread as the ship limped into port, groaning like a dying beast. Men shouted along the docks, ropes were thrown, and healers rushed to meet the wounded staggering onto planks slick with seawater and blood.
Still Caspian did not move. He only stared, heart pounding like war drums in his chest.
Half an hour later, the quiet of Caspian's study shattered beneath a rapid, urgent knocking. It was not the uncertain tapping of a frightened messenger—no, this was deliberate, heavy, filled with purpose. Only one man in the Shrine would dare knock like that.
"Enter," Caspian called, though tension coiled through every syllable.
The door opened and Steward Faelan Tideborn stepped inside, robes still damp with sea mist, embroidered threads clinging to him like the ocean's mark. Faelan was a man of unshakable calm, known for unbending poise even during tempests, yet the expression he wore now was grim—ashen, aged in a matter of days rather than years. His hands tightened around a scroll like a man gripping a lifeline.
"My lord…" Faelan bowed, deeper than protocol asked—a sign already that something was wrong. Terribly wrong. "A ship has reached our harbor, battered beyond recognition. Its captain brings grave tidings." A steadying breath, then: "Stormwind has fallen."
Caspian stilled.
The room around him—books, maps, tomes of Tidefather lore—blurred into nothingness. The ocean wind beyond the window seemed to stop. Stormwind… the shining bastion of the east… fallen. He felt the floor tilt beneath him like a deck caught in a violent swell.
His voice, when it came, was strained and tight, forced through grief that had yet to fully break.
"And my family, Faelan… Adriana and Thorwin?"
Faelan's jaw tensed—barely, but enough for Caspian to see it. "They were not among those who fled with Sir Lothar to Lordaeron. A survivor claims they saw young Thorwin running toward the royal keep in the final chaos." He lowered his gaze. "No further sight of them has been reported."
The world roared in Caspian's ears. His heart hammered like thunder beneath his ribs. He should have fallen—any normal man would have—but he forced himself to remain upright, back rigid. Rage, anguish, regret—each surged like a tide, threatening to swallow reason whole.
He wanted to call upon the sea, to demand it return what was his.
He wanted to sail for Stormwind this very moment, consequences be damned.
But a lord could not drown in grief.
"Summon the Tideguard commander to my chambers at once," he said, each word weighed in steel, not sorrow.
Faelan bowed. "It shall be done."
"And—" Caspian looked southward, toward distant waves that carried the phantom image of a burning city. His voice lowered, sharpened to a blade. "Prepare a carriage to Boralus. I will meet Lord Daelin."
Only when Faelan left and the echo of his footsteps faded did Caspian allow his body to fold—slowly, painfully—into his chair. His hands trembled. His breath faltered.
A lone tear slid down his cheek, but it was not the tear of defeat.
It carried grief, yes. But beneath it simmered fury deep as the abyss.
Gazing through his window, where the sea stretched endless and merciless toward Stormwind's ashes, Caspian Stormsong whispered—not to Faelan, not to his council, but to the tides themselves:
"They shall answer for this."
The air hummed, faint and resonant. The sea outside stirred like something waking.
…
Jaina Proudmoore had always been comfortable in silence—no, more than comfortable. She thrived in it. The quiet was a soft companion, broken only by the rustle of pages and the gentle scratch of quill on parchment. Books had been her world for as long as she could remember, their pages full of knowledge far older and wiser than she. They taught her history, magic, kingdoms, tragedies—yet none of them were quite as dear as her family, though many in court whispered otherwise. Rumor painted her as the girl who preferred paper to people, tomes to playmates, words to warmth. They never asked. They never knew how she cherished her father and mother, how she admired her brothers, how she laughed when the sea wind tangled her hair.
And they certainly did not know that she had a friend across the sea.
Thorwin. She murmured his name like a secret kept beneath her heart.
A visit to a lord's child had been, at first, nothing but duty—another lesson in courtesy, another moment to smile when expected. But she had found more than formality in Stormsong Valley. She had found a boy with storm-touched eyes and curious questions, one who didn't mind when she rambled about arcane theory, one who made her feel seen rather than studied. She treasured that brief meeting far more than she'd ever admit.
But when she asked to return—to ride the winds back to Stormsong, to speak of tides and magic and the world—her mother's answer had been disappointment wrapped in gentleness. Thorwin and Lady Adriana were no longer in Kul Tiras, she said. They had traveled north to visit his grandfather. No return date. No certainty.
At first Jaina told herself it was fine. She would wait. He would write.
He didn't.
Days became weeks, then into months and still no letter bore his hand. She checked every courier, every docked ship, every passing soldier with hopeful eyes until hope soured into something warmer, sharper, more childish.
"He ought to write more," she muttered to her books, pouting into her pages.
The silence, once beloved, felt too still.
And so she brooded, chin propped against a delicate hand as the candlelight flickered across parchment. Thoughts of Thorwin—of his silence, of the letters he owed her—had wound through her mind like tides pulling at a shore. She had sworn to give him a piece of her mind when he finally returned to Kul Tiras, if only for leaving her waiting by the window with quill in hand far too many evenings.
Then—abruptly—the quiet fractured.
Raised voices echoed from down the corridor, sharp and heated, like steel scraping against flint. At first she thought she imagined it, but then came the unmistakable sound of chairs striking marble, followed by a bellow:
"Stormwind has already fallen! And you would send our forces for what—more corpses on foreign stone?"
Jaina blinked. Fallen? Stormwind? Her heart stalled like a ship against rock.
Another voice answered, deep and commanding—familiar, painfully so.
"You wound me, Lord Ashvane. This is no whim nor reckless plea. My heir—my son—needs our aid."
The words carried through the hall like a wave crashing upon cliffside stone. "I come to ask not for fleets, only support. One ship, one regiment, even grain and powder. Whatever you can spare. Help me, and I will repay every debt upon his safe return."
Jaina crept closer, pressing her ear to the sliver of space between door and frame, heart hammering so fiercely she feared it would give her away.
"And if all you find is ghosts, Lord Stormsong?"
A breath—ragged, barely contained.
"Then I shall grieve, and honour every promise still. In the tide's will."
The chamber fell quiet, but inside her, silence was impossible. A cold realization slowly washed through her like winter tidewater.
Thorwin.
Stormwind had fallen.
A grim tale conjured.
Her knees weakened as though the world pitched beneath her, and she clasped trembling fingers over her mouth to stifle the sharp gasp that clawed up her throat. Thorwin—her friend, her equal in lessons and laughter—was now somewhere amidst ruin and ash.
The doors swung open with force.
Caspian Stormsong emerged first, cloak billowing like a storm-swollen sail, fury etched deep into every line of his face. A man driven by grief and desperation, by the ache only a father knows. His icy gaze swept the hall, sharp as drawn steel, then softened for one fleeting moment when it fell upon her—Jaina, wide-eyed and shaken.
He said nothing. Only dipped his head a fraction, a gesture akin to apology or acknowledgement—she could not tell which—and strode past, boots striking stone in a thunderous rhythm. A man going to war alone.
"Jaina," came her father's voice from behind, calm yet edged with disappointment. "A lady should not eavesdrop."
She did not trust herself to turn—her heart was still at Caspian's heels, chasing after him like a child chasing tide foam. She swallowed, nodding faintly, though her mind roared with fear and a question she could not speak aloud.