Death had always been both foreign and familiar to Jaina Proudmoore—an idea she encountered only within the safe walls of storybooks, ink-bound and distant. She had read of queens whose crowns were stained with tragedy, of valiant knights who fell beneath banners of glory, of families undone by blade and betrayal. Through their pages she had known grief, but only as a lesson—never as a wound.
To her, death was a word meant for tales, for histories, for the distant past. Not for the hearth she sat beside, not for the laughter of her brothers, nor for the warmth of her parents' embrace. Never for the few precious friends she cherished beyond the page.
Yet now that same word, once confined to fiction, tugged mercilessly at the edges of her dreams. It slithered into her mind like a cold draft beneath a locked door—unwelcome, unbidden. And though she wished with all her heart to deny it, something deep and instinctive told her it was no longer a specter of imagination, but a shadow creeping closer to her waking world.
Thorwin…
His name echoed like a whisper in her waking mind before the dream swallowed her whole.
She found herself in a valley of scorched earth—ashen, ruined, unrecognizable. The sky sagged with smoke, thick enough to choke, and the air reeked of death and burnt soil. Screams tore through the dark like ghosts searching for flesh, each one twisting her heart tighter. Bones lay scattered across the wasted ground: some human, others belonging to creatures she could not name—twisted shapes and shattered skulls that had never belonged to neither beasts nor men.
Jaina stood unmoving, weightless, a phantom imprisoned inside her own dream. She could neither intervene nor run. She could only witness.
And then she saw him.
Thorwin—bruised, bloodied, gaunt, yet still standing. He held himself with a rigid, unbowed pride. His eyes, though dimmed by hardship, remained unbroken. They burned with the last defiant spark of a dying torch.
Two men circled him like wolves, hunger in their stares, violence in their posture. Predators. And Thorwin—the boy she knew—looked impossibly small between them, yet something in his stance whispered danger.
Jaina's voice clawed up her throat.
"Thorwin!"
But the sound was useless. He didn't turn. He didn't hear.
The first man lunged.
Thorwin moved with grim precision, not like a boy, but like one who had learned the cost of hesitation. He locked an arm around his attacker's throat, twisting him into the path of the second assailant. A fist meant for Thorwin crushed bone instead—there was a sickening crunch, the kind a book never captured well enough to understand.
Thorwin drove his elbow into the man he held, merciless, unflinching. The body crumpled. Before the second could recover, Thorwin advanced—one swift, brutal strike to the ribs, enough force behind it to drop a grown man to his knees.
Jaina watched in stunned stillness as her childhood friend ended two lives with bare hands, with hardened resolve, with no flicker of remorse.
The battlefield fell silent.
And Thorwin turned. Slowly. Purposefully.
His eyes met hers—eyes cold, haunted, no longer belonging to the boy she knew.
"No!"
Jaina felt her breath tear from her lungs.
The light faded like a candle starved of air, and with a sharp gasp Jaina lurched awake, fingers clutching the sheets as though she had been drowning. Her chamber ceiling swam above her, familiar yet distant, as if she were still half-caught in the tides of her dream. It was only that, she whispered to herself. Just a dream. But reassurance was feeble comfort—the ache in her chest remained like a bruise beneath the skin. No matter how many times she repeated the words, sleep refused to return.
She lay still for a moment, listening to her own uneven breathing, before surrendering to wakefulness. Quietly she rose, feet brushing the cold marble floor. The castle was silent at this hour, its corridors asleep, its servants dream-bound. Only the wind and the sea spoke beyond her window.
Jaina crossed the room and, with slow fingers, drew back the heavy curtains. Moonlight spilled through the glass in a pale silver sheet, washing her face in cold glow. Tides shimmered in the distance—calm, indifferent—as though the world itself had not trembled only hours before.
She sat before her desk, expecting—out of habit—to lose herself in the comfort of ink and knowledge. But the books that lined her table lay untouched. Instead her eyes fell upon a lone sheet of parchment, blank as fresh snow, waiting. A quill rested beside it like a question unasked.
For a long moment she only stared, the feather trembling slightly between her fingers, as thoughts she could not escape crept back like dark waves returning to shore.
…
Her life did not stop simply because her heart wished it to.
Jaina understood this—painfully, intimately.
And so she lived as she must.
She sat among her family in the grand dining hall of Proudmoore Keep, surrounded by the things she had always known as normal: polished silver, Kul Tiran delicacies steaming on ornate platters, the low murmur of servants, and her brothers' laughter brazen enough to rattle the chandeliers. Her father presided at the head of the table like a looming cliff of weathered stone, watching his sons with sharp, commanding eyes. Such was the rhythm of her days.
She knew herself blessed by the tides. Blessed with warmth, with love, with safety. Yet beneath that abundance lay something heavy, something she carried alone. A guilt quietly anchored in her chest, waiting for the moment it could break the surface and drown her whole.
It came out in a whisper she hadn't meant to form.
"When will you be back?"
The words were soft, thoughtless, almost lost beneath the clatter of cutlery. But Derek heard them. He always did.
"Jaina…"
The gentle warning in her brother's tone brushed against her like a tide pulling at shore. She turned to him.
Derek's face—usually flush with laughter and boyish confidence—held something different tonight. Concern softened his features, and the candlelight caught in his eyes like sparks floating on dark water. He leaned closer, lowering his voice so only she could hear.
"I'll have my men search for the boy once we set sail," he said. "Stormwind, or the seas between—no matter where he's gone, we will look."
Her breath trembled.
"Brother…"
His hand found hers beneath the table, calloused fingers warm and steady—an anchor against the ache in her chest.
"I promise," Derek said, and there was no room for doubt in that voice. No hesitation.
Just truth.
"Thank you."
The words scraped against the lump rising in her throat. Tears pushed, desperate to break free, but she held them back with all the discipline her mother had ever taught her. A Proudmoore did not break at table. A lady did not weep before witnesses.
…
Aegwynn was a name Jaina carried like a spark in her chest—a legend she measured herself against.
In stories, the Guardian of Tirisfal strode across the world like a storm made flesh, bending magic to her will with the confidence of a queen and the heart of a warrior. To Jaina, she was everything a woman could be: wise, powerful, untamed by expectation or fear. Aegwynn was who she wanted to become.
And so the young Proudmoore drowned herself in parchment and ink.
She sat curled in one of the castle's towering library windows, moonlight scattering across her open book like brushed silver. The shelves around her seemed endless, filled with chronicles of war, lore of the seas, and—her favorite of all—tales of mages and spells that shaped the world. Her eyes devoured each page greedily, though she knew every word of this particular volume by memory already. It was the second time she had read it cover to cover this month, not for knowledge, but to chase the same wonder it first gave her. To feel, even briefly, like the world was full of possibilities rather than fear.
She longed for books of real arcane study—not heroic recountings or dense theory, but tomes that taught. Grimoires that walked step by step through incantation and will-shaping, that whispered how magic might bloom from the hands of those bold enough to grasp it. Yet those books remained locked behind duty, expectation, and a mother's stern refusal.
"Not until you're older," her mother had decreed.
And with her father and Derek at sea, Katherine Proudmoore's voice ruled the household as absolute as the tides.
So Jaina turned another page—slowly, reluctantly—her small fingers brushing worn parchment as though hoping touch alone might spark some new revelation she had missed. The library was quiet save for the whisper of paper, yet her thoughts wandered far beyond these walls.
She remembered the harbor.
The day she stood beside her mother at the Boralus pier, watching the Proudmoore flagship sit heavy and proud in the water as war banners snapped in the wind. The sea smelled of salt and impending storm; cannons gleamed like cold eyes along the hull. Her father stood at the rail with Derek at his side, both tall and steady beneath Kul Tiran blue. She had waved until her arm ached—until ships became specks swallowed by mist—and still she had not wanted to stop.
It was not only the memory of her brother boarding the Proudmoore flagship that lingered in Jaina's thoughts, but the promise embedded in his departing words. I'll find the boy. I'll bring him home.
Often, when she sat alone with her books, her mind drifted to that promise. She pictured Thorwin standing on the deck of Derek's ship, wind tangling his hair, laughing with the sailors as though he had always belonged among them. In Jaina's daydreams they returned together—bruised perhaps, weary perhaps, but alive. They would walk the streets of Boralus, explore markets, even find adventure beyond the manicured gardens of the manor. No tutors, no chiding mothers, no silent waiting. Just freedom, laughter, and friendship unbroken by tide or distance.
The thought—sweet and bright as sunlight—pulled a small smile to her lips every time it came.
And she prayed for it.
Every night.
Softly to the tides, to the winds, to whatever listened.
But prayers are fragile things.
A shriek—sharp, tearing, unmistakable—splintered the castle's quiet and dragged Jaina violently from her dreaming. It was a sound she had never heard from her mother before. Something raw. Something wounded.
Her book fell forgotten onto the cushions as she bolted to her feet.
The corridors blurred around her as she ran—past polished armor stands, past servant girls startled from their tasks, past portraits of old Proudmoores glaring down in solemn judgment. Her heart beat like a frantic drum against her ribs, dread climbing her throat like bile. She followed the sound through turn after turn until at last she found the source.
Katherine Proudmoore—the unshakable lady of Kul Tiras, a woman carved from dignity and storm-forged resolve—sat collapsed in a chair, a parchment crushed in her trembling hand. Her immaculate composure was gone, replaced by a hollow devastation that made Jaina's blood run cold. Tears streamed down her mother's face, silent but unending, and her breath came as if torn from her lungs.
"Mama?" Jaina's voice was barely a whisper.
Her mother looked up, eyes red and shining like cracked glass.
"He's dead," she choked. "Derek's dead."
The world fell out from beneath Jaina.
The room spun, sound drowned beneath a rushing roar like waves collapsing over her head. Tears she hadn't felt coming spilled hot and fast, dripping onto the carpet in dark, blooming stains. She stumbled forward and collapsed into her mother's arms. Katherine clutched her fiercely—two broken pieces trying to hold each other whole.
Together, they wept.
For Derek.
For the sea that swallowed him.
For promises left unfulfilled.