Dralosa trembled slightly as she read the missive. From afar, Naevia watched the Lorekeeper’s old, slender hands finally slump to the desk, the note carelessly falling away.

“Mistress, is it bad news?”

Silence at first. Naevia swallowed hard. It had taken her a few moments to summon the words at all. She’d agonized as to whether it were appropriate to deluge her with questions.

“Yes.” came the tired, matter-of-fact response. “It is bad news, if it is to be true, Naevia. Not yet made official to me, but, the High Commander is rumored to be ill, and has passed leadership of the League of Lordaeron to Tahilia Veron.”

Naevia frowned in sympathy, then wrinkled her brow and stammered. “B-but did you and the Consul not see him just the other day? Was he not well and in high spirits, Lorekeeper?”

Dralosa looked away from Naevia, embarrassed. It was so harmless a question, but the implication of the answer shamed Dralosa to her core. How had she not noticed? So determined was she in acquiring information, on partaking in politics, that she had not noticed her quiet friend ageing and suffering with more humility than she’d acquired in over thirty thousand years.

“Go, Naevia. Leave me.” she quipped, doing all she could to hide the frustration in her voice. After her younger Handmaiden had left the room, Dralosa found herself faced with her own acrimonious and all too punishing inner dialogue.

“How had I failed to notice?“

In the privacy of the now silent room, Dralosa wept at the absurdity of the Draeneic reality on Azeroth. For some time now, she had preached to her Order about the dangers of exclusion, of beng insular. She reminded them of how easily the Orcs came to fear and mistrust the Draenei, veritable strangers in their homeland. This strangeness was exacerbated by her people’s insistence on a segregated existence outside of errant trading. She urged her constituents to seek out the races of Azeroth for friendship, to engage them as fully as possible, to avoid such fearful hatred from ever perpetuating again.

And now, she felt quite clearly the bitter sting of this advice. The former High Commander was ill, and ageing. He would likely not live for another hundred years, which was to her mind almost the blink of an eye. Yet the camaraderie she’d shared with him would live vividly in her mind for thousands more years than that, long after he’d perish.

If her heartache had a sound, it was thunderous.