The black rose drawn near the signature dripped a steady stream of ebon ink into the frothy pool of plaguestuff some few spans below Khorvis's dangling feet. He sighed once more before ripping his eye from the words upon the page and staring out again at the cacophony of screaming souls that wandered across the sickly plane of Maldraxxus.Greetings,
I sincerely hope my letter finds you in an agreeable state. I stumbled across an old advertisement of your guild nailed to a stone wall in the Undercity and am writing to humbly ask for your consideration of inclusion.
I am or was once known during my human life as Meriette LeFey. Once an aspiring and talented young mage and believer in The Light, I fell victim to the Plague of Undeath during the early years of Lordaeron's demise. Like so may others, I was taken by scourge invaders, ultimately becoming bound into slavery. My daughter Abigail, only a child of 9 years was stripped from me and subjected to similar tortures.
Upon my "rebirth" as Forsaken my existence has been nothing less than a fog of confusion and rage. I wandered for many years searching for any sign the my Abby might still live. It is commonly known that children are too frail to endure the transformation to living death. The process is beyond my understanding but perhaps it is a small mercy, after all.
And so it was I finally discovered her, my Abigail. She had not survived as I dared to hope. She exists now only in spirit, a lost soul found wandering near our old ancestral home in the town of Brill.
Although re-united, we cannot continue like this. I need to forge a new life; to find some way to channel this destructive anger that I've held for so damned long into something that has meaning.
The reputation of your group precedes itself and I hope I might find that new life I so desperately seek with you all. If accepted, it would be my great honor to aid in your future endeavors, however devious or dark they may be.
Yours in Death,
Meriette
The juxtaposition of singular loss contained inside Meriette's letter with the cosmic scale of undeath that assaulted the orc's very eyes would harden the least of cynics - were it not for the intimacy with which the woman wrote to the Inquisition. The Mandate sustained itself upon the numberless dead. Those casualties were the receipt of Grim incursions against the Alliance and other nameless horrors, but they always seemed divorced from the spirits that delivered them.
Khorvis lifted the letter again to see the words more clearly in the sickly green light. An aura of undeath ringed the black rose in vermillion. Images assaulted the High Inquisitor in tandem horror: in one eye of flesh he witnessed his own brother, Wren, wandering the desolate wastes of the Blackrock slopes. In the other, eldritch magicks translating the pangs of grief upon the parchment, he glimpsed fleeting memories of a young woman lost among the burnt out shell of Brill.
He set the page down for a final time before devoting the limited vocabulary of his orcish to invite the aspirant to the Inquisition:
The letter is sealed with an emblem of the Blackrock Mountain crossed with Grim daggers. The ink is borrowed from Meriette's own.LeFay,
War bleeds all of us. Some more quickly than others, but we all do lose pieces of ourselves so long as we do be forced into battle. From your letter, it do be clear that you know loss - but do you know scale?
We Grim can show you an avalanche of death that could bury any loss you might wish to forget. It will cost you dearly, but you would not have reached through the Nether to us were you not aware.
Seek out the Inquisition this coming night in Maldraxxus near Plague Watch.
Peace through Annihilation
High Inquisitor Bloodstar
