The Far Bank

It was on the Zoram Strand, where the sea comes up grey against Ashenvale, that Cassidy Darkstar first saw her. He had come down to the water for Wrathtail heads and nothing else. She stood on the far side of the inlet, where the rocks go dark, and she did not belong there, or anywhere he had walked: taller than the naga, hair the colour of the fire scar, and behind her two wings, blue and green, half-folded, as a hawk folds them when it has decided not to leave yet.

She spoke. The words came across the water whole and meant nothing to him. He answered, and knew as he spoke that his own words reached her the same way, as sound without a door in it. So neither of them said anything more. She raised one hand, and after a moment he raised his, and that was the whole of it.

Then she went up into the air as though the air were a stair, and was gone over the trees toward the Barrens. The game had shown him her name above her head, the way it shows every name, and he found that he had kept it: Axilla Interstellar. He stood at the water a while longer than the Wrathtails required.

Set down by the same hand. The two roads did not meet; they came within a river of it.