Alleria, sister, I come.

She met the deadly blade head-on, striking it with her own weapons, which shattered upon impact. And then the runeblade had pierced her. Cold, so cold it was, slicing through her as if it was made of ice itself.

Arthas leaned in to her, his gaze locked with hers. Sylvanas coughed, fine droplets of blood spattering his bone-pale face. Was it her imagination, or was there a hint of regret on his still-fine features?

He tugged back his weapon and she fell, blood gushing out of her. Sylvanas shivered on the cold stone floor, the movement causing agony to rip through her. One hand fluttered, foolishly, to the gaping wound in her abdomen, as if her hands could close on it and stop the flood.

“Finish it,” she whispered. “I deserve…a clean death.”

His voice floated to her from somewhere as her eyes closed. “After all you’ve put me through, woman, the last thing I’ll give you is the peace of death.”

Fear spiked in her for a heartbeat, then faded as everything else was beginning to. He would raise her, as one of those grotesque shambling things?

“No,” she murmured, her voice sounding as if it came from a long way off. “You wouldn’t…dare….”

And then it went away. It all went away. The coldness, the stench, the searing pain. It was soft and warm and dark and calm and comforting, and Sylvanas permitted herself to sink into the welcoming darkness. At last she could rest, could lay down the arms she had borne for so long in service to her people.

And then—

Agony shot through her, agony such as she had never known, and Sylvanas suddenly knew that no physical pain she had ever endured could hold a pale candle to this torment. This was an agony of the spirit, of her soul leaving her lifeless form and being trapped. Of a…ripping, tearing, yanking back from that warm sanctuary of silence and stillness. The violence of the act added to the exquisite torment, and Sylvanas felt a scream welling up, forcing its way from deep inside, past lips that somehow she knew were no longer physical, a deep keening wail of a suffering that was not hers alone, that froze blood and stopped hearts.

The blackness faded from her vision, but colors did not return. She did not need reds or blues or yellows to see him, though, her tormentor; he was white and gray and black even in a world with color. The runeblade that had taken her life, had taken and consumed her soul, glittered and gleamed, and Arthas’s free hand was lifted in a beckoning gesture as he ripped her from the soothing embrace of death.

“Banshee,” he told her. “Thus I have made you. You can give voice to your pain, Sylvanas. I will give you that much. It is more than the others get. And in so doing, you shall cause pain to others. So now you, troublesome ranger, shall serve.”

Terrified beyond reason, Sylvanas hovered over her bloodied, broken corpse, gazing into her own staring eyes, then back at Arthas.

“No,” she said, her voice hollow and eerie, yet still recognizably hers. “I will never serve you, butcher.”

He gestured. It was the merest thing, a twitch of a gauntleted finger. Her back arched in agony and another scream was torn from her, and she realized with a racking, raging sense of grief that she was utterly powerless before him. She was his tool, as the rotting corpses and the pale, reeking abominations were his tools.

“Your rangers serve as well,” he said. “They are now in my army.” He hesitated, and there was genuine regret in his voice when he said, “It did not have to be this way. Know that your fate, theirs, and that of your people, rests upon your choices. But I must press on to the Sunwell. And you will assist me.”

The hate grew inside Sylvanas like a living thing in her incorporeal body. She floated beside him, his shiny new toy, her body gathered up and flung on one of the meat wagons to who knew what sick end Arthas could devise. As if there was a thread that bound her to him, she never was more than a few feet away from the death knight.

And she was beginning to hear the whispers.

At first, Sylvanas wondered if she was insane in this new, abhorrent incarnation. But it soon became apparent that even the refuge of the mad was denied her. The voice in her mind was unintelligible at first, and in her wretched state she did not wish to hear. But soon she understood to whom it belonged.

Arthas kept giving her sidelong glances as he continued his inexorable march to Silvermoon and beyond, watching her closely. At one point, as this army of which she was a captive part surged forward, destroying the land as it passed, she heard it very clearly.

For my glory, you will serve, Sylvanas. For the dead, you will toil. For obedience, you will hunger. Arthas is the first and most beloved of my death knights; he will command you forever, and you will find it joyous.

Arthas saw her shiver, and he smiled.

If she had thought she despised him when she first beheld him outside the gates of Quel’Thalas, when the wondrous land within was still clean and pure and had not known the killing touch; if she had thought she hated him as his minions slew her people and raised them to become lifeless puppets, and when he impaled her in a single, savage blow with the monstrous runeblade—it was as nothing to what she felt now. A candle to a sun, a whisper to a banshee’s scream.

Never, she told the voice in her head. He directs my actions, but Arthas cannot break my will.

The only answer was hollow, cold laughter.

On they pushed, past Fairbreeze Village and the East Sanctum. At the gates of Silvermoon itself they halted. Arthas’s voice should not have carried as it did, but Sylvanas knew that it was heard in every corner of the city as he stood in front of the gates.

“Citizens of Silvermoon! I have given you ample opportunities to surrender, but you have stubbornly refused. Know that today, your entire race and your ancient heritage will end! Death itself has come to claim the high home of the elves!”

She, Ranger-General Sylvanas Windrunner, was paraded in front of her people as an example of what would happen to them if they did not surrender. They did not, and she loved them fiercely for it even as she was pressed into service by her dark master.

And so it fell, the shining, beautiful city of magic, its glories shattered and reduced to rubble as the army of undead—the Scourge, she heard Arthas call them, twisted affection in his voice—pressed on. As he had before, Arthas raised the fallen to serve, and if Sylvanas had still possessed a heart, it would have broken at the sight of so many friends and loved ones shambling beside her, mindlessly obedient. On through the city they marched, cleaving it in twain with the vile purple-black scar, its citizens lurching to their feet with wounds that had smashed skulls, or trailing viscera behind them as they shambled forward.

She had hoped the channel between Silvermoon and Quel’Danas would prove an impassable barrier, and for a moment that hope seemed realized. Arthas drew rein, staring at the blue water glinting in the sun, and frowned. For a moment he sat atop his unnatural steed, his white brows knitted together. “You cannot fill this channel with corpses, Arthas,” Sylvanas had gloated. “Not even the whole city would be enough. You are stopped here, and your failure is sweet.” And then the being who had once been human, who had once by all accounts been a good man, turned and grinned at her blistering words of defiance, sending her into a paroxysm of agony and wrenching another soul-splitting scream from her incorporeal lips.

He had found a solution.

He cast Frostmourne toward the shore, watching it almost rapturously as it flipped end over end to land with its tip impaled in the sand.

“Frostmourne speaks….”

Sylvanas heard it, too, the voice of the Lich King emanating from the unholy weapon as before her shocked gaze the water lapping at its rune-inscribed blade began to turn to ice. Ice that his weapons, and his warriors, could cross.