Firstly, thank you everyone for the wonderful feedback on Volume 1! Such positive comments! Feedback of any kind is what motivates me to write more, so without further ado, here is Volume 2. And I promise, I’m all out of Night Elves.

Sisters of Light and Shadow

In the verdant plains of Nagrand in a village named Telaar, two young draenei sisters played among the fields. The eldest was named Aeonaar, and she was often seen scurrying after her mischievous younger sister, Dionaar. They were too young to know of Argus or of the army of demons hunting their people, but they would learn soon enough.

The sisters were often schooled on the ways of the Light in Telaar, and soon enough the sisters had grown from children into studious young women. Dionaar grew out of her mischievous ways, and despite being the younger of the two sisters, she became the more promising pupil of the Light. She was awestruck by the benevolence and healing properties of the Light, and whilst Aeonaar was no novice, it was Dionaar who advanced through their class in leaps and strides whilst her elder sister struggled to keep up.

As the sisters grew, so too did orcish aggression against their people. The orcs had been corrupted by the Legion in one of their many attempts to break into Azeroth, and as a side effect, the draenei were being hunted in alarmingly high numbers. The sisters quickly found themselves becoming wartime medics, using the Light to heal their injured friends as they stood their ground against the orcs. During these times, Aeonaar found herself motivated by her younger sister’s talent and sheer determination to right the wrongs of the world.

Eventually, an orc by the name of Ner’Zhul would bring catacylsmic destruction to Draenor after ripping the fabric of the world apart too often with his portals. The world buckled, and parts of Nagrand exploded into the sky as the apocalypse wrought its toll on the ancient land. The draenei sisters held each other close as they waited for the end, but after many days and nights, the rumbling stopped. Cautiously, they emerged from their broken village to find that the world as they knew it was gone. The sky had been replaced with the chaotic energies of the Twisting Nether; the seas had fallen away into the abyss; the mountains remained stationary in the air, defying gravity. Draenor was dead. This new land would come to be known as Outland.

Aeonaar despaired, but Dionaar told her that it was a miracle of the Light that life still persisted on this broken shelf. Talbuk still roamed, and Elekk still thundered through the grassy plains. Nevertheless, what remained of Telaar was not safe. Dionaar had received a vision urging them to journey to a region that would come to be known as Zangarmarsh, where Prophet Velen was amassing their people. The sisters rallied as many of the surviving villagers as they could, and began the long journey. They would join with his band and journey with him for many years thereafter. During this time they would make the journey to Shattrath city, and discover the naaru that awaited them there, a being of pure Light which had come to them from the cosmos. Aeonaar was enamoured with the benevolence of this being, and she felt her connection to the Light grow stronger after spending time in its presence. As for Dionaar, she had met a handsome draenei leatherworker named Dalren in Shattrath, and despite her best interests to refrain from becoming distracted from her holy mission, fell completely in love with him.

Eventually, a plan was formed to venture to the Netherstorm and take control of an interdimensional craft named the Exodar, so that they might journey to Azeroth. Aeonaar, Dionaar and Dalren all volunteered to join the expedition, and they reached the Exodar with little opposition. As they assaulted Tempest Keep in order to seize control of the Exodar, however, they met resistence from the blood elves, and a stray arrow struck Dalren in the throat, and felled him.

Aeonaar had never heard her sister scream in such a way. Not even during the destruction of Draenor.

As they boarded the Exodar, the sisters dragged Dalren with them, begging the Light to heal his wounds, to undo the hole in his throat and restore his ability to breathe. As benevolent as the Light was, however, there were limits to its powers, and Dalren had already passed beyond the mortal veil. Aeonaar knew that their attempts were hopeless, but would not give up, for the sake of her sister. Eventually, however, it appeared that there were blood elves on board the Exodar, and that they had sabotaged the ship; Aeonaar’s attention was demanded elsewhere. Dionaar refused to leave Dalren’s side, even as the Exodar shuddered and began hurtling out of control towards Azeroth through the Twisting Nether. Before they crashed, Dionaar’s eyes found the stars, and she found herself fixating on the darkness between them.

When at last they crashed on Azuremyst Isle and began making an account of the survivors, Dionaar was nowhere to be found.

Aeonaar, Lightforged Draenei Holy Priest

Aeonaar was deeply disturbed by the disappearance of her sister. She wished to search the island, and indeed search parties were sent out to look for her and others. But her expertise with the Light was needed here, to save as many of the injured as she could. It was agonising for her to refrain from joining the search for Dionaar, but she believed in the sanctity of life above all else. She couldn’t allow those around her to perish due to her own selfish needs.

She would never find her sister in those coming months and years. Her grief ran deep, but she never felt that she had erred in her decision to serve the holy Light and heal as many survivors as she could that day. Instead, she dedicated herself to the needs of her people and the peoples of the Alliance, who had provided her people with aid when they needed it most. Over the next decade she followed armies back into Outland to slay the traitor Illidan; she journeyed with them to Northrend to end the threat of the Lich King; she travelled the world as a healer after an all-too familiar cataclysm wrought tragedy across the world; she healed the casualties of the Alliance and, secretly, the Horde during their conflicts in Pandaria. She kept herself busy, all the while keeping an ear to the ground regarding the whereabouts of her sister. After the siege of Orgrimmar, Aeonaar decided to take some time and scour the globe in search of her sister, in an attempt to put her mind at ease once and for all.

She found nothing. If Dionaar was out there, she did not wish to be found.

Aeonaar might have had time to despair, had her people’s hunters not chosen that moment to finally break into Azeroth and launch an all-out invasion. She found herself called back into the line of duty, and as events unfolded she was given the opportunity to march upon Argus, her ancestral homeland, to bring an end to the Legion once and for all.

Many draenei, upon setting hoof on Argus for the first time in their lives or in millennia, found themselves overcome with sorrow. What had once been a jewel of a civilisation had crumbled to ash, to fel rock and hatred. Instead, Aeonaar found hope. The very fact that they were able to land here and take the fight to the Legion was a testament to the determination of the mortal races and their desire to bring peace to the world. Furthermore, they met with the Army of the Light, largely composed of a sect of Lightforged Draenei who were even more attuned to the Light than she and her fellow priests were. And it was with the power of this Light that they were able to fight and to keep their allies fighting, until they finally assaulted the Burning Throne and removed the Legion’s threat once and for all.

After the celebrations, Aeonaar received a summons from High Exarch Turalyon of the Army of the Light. He was looking for new recruits, strong in the ways of the Light, to join his golden army. He explained that the Legion was not the only threat to Azeroth, or to the other worlds of the Great Dark Beyond. The greatest threat was that of the Void, a direct antithesis to the Light that would devour everything in its path until darkness enveloped reality. To fight it, he would need all the help he could get.

During the trial to become Lightforged, a draenei was confronted with their darkest, most personal fears and regrets. In Aeonaar’s trial, Dionaar appeared, blaming her for the death of Dalren and scorning her for not searching the island for her sister before it was too late. Aeonaar nearly withered before her sister’s accusations… but eventually, her rational side won out. She reaffirmed her faith in the Light and its cause, and emerged from her trial changed. Her attunement to the Light was stronger than ever before. She had become Lightforged.

Dionaar, Draenei Shadow Priest

When the Exodar crashed, Dionaar came to her senses before many others. As she got up, she heard a moaning coming from the far side of the room. Stumbling towards the murmuring, she found a dying engineer. Shaking off her dizziness, Dionaar knelt and did what came naturally to her: she called upon the holy Light to help her heal this injured soul.

The Light did not answer her.

Dalren’s dying face flashed in her mind, and she froze. She’d been unable to save him. Did that mean that the Light had now forsaken her? But that was cruel. She had tried her best. It wasn’t her fault.

Shaken, Dionaar tried once more to heal the dying draenei, pleading the Light to help her, begging it to. But it refused to answer her call. The Light was content to let this innocent person die because it no longer believed in her as a worthy conduit.

Years of learning from the Light, of putting faith in it and revelling in its benevolence, died then and there. Dionaar would never wield the Light again. She stormed from the Exodar and did not return.

What she did not know, would never know, was that the Light knew her faith had been shaken when her lover had died in her arms. It had denied her call in order to test her, to see if she would do anything to help the dying draenei on her own. When she did not, the Light decided she was lost, and roused another nearby priest so that they may help instead.

Dionaar fled to the edge of Azuremyst Isle and found an abandoned rowboat which she used to reach Darkshore. Knowing nothing of Azeroth, Dionaar was frightened to be alone in this alien land, but knew that she couldn’t face her sister or her people again, not after the Light had forsaken her. She forged a crude dagger and hunted herself a rabbit for food. She slept beneath the stars that night, plagued by memories of Dalren dying in her arms, waking up intermittently. Once, she awoke to the clear sky and found herself gazing into the void between stars, finding beauty for the first time in the darkness. She remembered the energies of the Twisting Nether in the skies back home, how they’d frightened her. It seemed foolish now. There was a beauty in that chaos. She’d simply been too afraid of a life without the Light to dare think it.

The next morning, she awoke to an ambush. Two figures, tall and with long ears and pale blue skin, assaulted her with blasts of holy Light. Alarmed, Dionaar swept up her hunting dagger, dodged the blasts of Light and threw it in desperation. It found the throat of one of the creatures. The other wailed, and fled into the early morning mists.

Dionaar had been assaulted by a pair of night elf priests who knew nothing of the draenei as a race, but had fought the demonic eredar in the third war, the draenei of Argus that had become demons. Dionaar knew nothing of this. She just knew that she’d been assaulted by a pair of native creatures wielding the holy Light against her. For the first time, it crossed her mind that the Light may not be entirely benevolent after all, if it was sending people to assassinate her. Flinching at the sight of the dagger in the night elf’s throat – her first kill – she retrieved her makeshift weapon and dried it off, before turning and heading south.

Eventually, Dionaar came across a roaming band of people of many races. They wore purple robes and introduced themselves as the Twilight’s Hammer, a group of people who wanted to make the world a better place using forbidden magics. A week ago, Dionaar would have turned her nose up at them, but since crash landing on Azeroth, her view of the Light had been changed somewhat. The prospect of wielding forbidden powers – perhaps more powerful than the Light – to do good was a path that seemed fitting for her. After some reluctance and much thought, she agreed to be tutored in the ways of shadow magic.

Over the next few years, Dionaar would slowly be converted into a willing participant of the Twilight’s Hammer cult. After years of a subtle warping of her mind, she grew to believe that the Hour of Twilight would indeed be a desirable outcome. No more life, no more love, no more grief. The Twilight’s Hammer took hold of her grief and expanded it, exaggerated it, turning Dalren from a lover into her sole reason to be, something the Light had wrenched from her. She would have continued down this dark path had she not run into her sister.

Aeonaar was in Loch Modan, seeing to the wounds of some warriors who had just clashed with Twilight’s Hammer cultists. Dionaar’s orders were to destroy this retreating band of fighters, and at this point, she had no objection – after all, before long all life was going to be eradicated. She didn’t know her sister was amongst them. But as she crested the ridge, she saw Aeonaar gazing down at the soldier she was healing. A look of intense care was on her face, a benevolence shattered when she looked up in alarm. Surveying the fighters, Aeonaar stared right at Dionaar.

Due to Dionaar’s Twilight robes and concealing hood, her sister didn’t even recognise her.

In that moment it was like a spell had broken in Dionaar’s mind. In a literal sense, the Twilight’s Hammer had been magically altering her perceptions and her way of thinking, and this had now been undone by the surge of love Dionaar felt for her sister. In another sense, Dionaar herself now realised that she’d been a fool. She immediately turned on her band and asphyxiated them with shadow magic. Taken unawares, they couldn’t do anything but struggle feebly as they suffocated.

When Dionaar had dealt with the cultists, she turned to her sister, only to find that she had fled. Dionaar didn’t think it wise to follow.

Over the next few years, Dionaar would travel alone and help the Alliance from the shadows, saving lives with her forbidden magic in a much less direct way than she used to, when she could wield the Light. Perhaps she could never make amends for what she’d done, but she could at least bring some good into the world before she would inevitably be captured and executed for her past crimes. She felt like this was a fate she deserved, and resolved not to fight against her captors were it to ever happen.

When events on Argus reached their peak and Alleria Windrunner embraced void magic, however, those who used forbidden magics came to be seen as antiheroes more than criminals. After some consideration, a lonely Dionaar gingerly crept into the capital of Stormwind and sought out the new void elves of the Alliance. With them, she found a place in which she could control her powers and be accepted for who she truly was. It was the first time she’d felt at peace with herself since leaving Outland.

Author’s notes: The story of Aeonaar and Dionaar is a little more fleshed out and extensive than most of my other characters, so I felt the need to do something a little different for their story. This is why their story begins not as a focus on one character or the other, but as their journey as sisters.

Coming next: Various heroes of the Alliance