Beginnings can be painful.

Lohengrin Sunstorm woke to the sound of a rushing river. Somewhere nearby water cascaded past and the world around him gathered its moisture. His ears rang terribly, a constant, high-pitched wail overtaken only by the waterfall and the dank sound of condensation dripping in the near distance.

He opened his eyes as a water droplet surprised him, splashing against his forehead. His prison was a cavern filled with blue light glowing from the fungai lining the walls. Cold, terribly cold, he could see his breath streaming out of his mouth in white tendrils. Left sandwiched between two old pillars of ice covered stone, no one stood guard anywhere near him. An odd prison, indeed.

He remembered, then, Alterac Valley, the battle that clashed near Stonehearth as the Horde valiantly tried to push Alliance back to their base in the north. They were outnumbered and despite lasting far longer than he ever thought they might, eventually Alliance cut them down, one by one.

They didn't take prisoners, he had been warned. Alliance sent Horde forces back south after stripping them of what they were worth, where sometimes you were resurrected if there was enough of your body to raise. Else, a brief ceremony would see you interred into the ground at Frostwolf, mourned for a moment before the drums of war renewed their relentless beat and more soldiers stepped up to take the places of the fallen.

An unwinnable war, Taliesin had said and Fawa nodded in solemn agreement. Lohengrin ignored the call for as long as he could until at last his will waivered and he traveled to the valley to volunteer. He could pictures Taliesin's face even now, sighing at him and shaking his head. And Fawa, with her patient stare. She would wish him luck no matter what kind of fool's errand he ran.

It was the memory of him that drove him to attempt getting up. And the pain in his leg that brought him back down just as swiftly. He tried to reach for the light, the holy source of the paladin, the Blood Knight. Yet even reaching for it, he could feel it so far away. Too far. No mana, not even a bit of it. Surely he had time to regenerate it after being unconcious for so long.

The light pulsated and he realized then what tampered with his powers. The fungi covering the walls granted light in the darkness, and drained his mana continually to do so. He sighed and sank back against the damp furs. With his leg certainly broken and no ability to use any of his light granted powers, there would be no escape for him and he knew it.

But why would the Alliance keep him a prisoner? Why not slay him as well and send him south with the rest of the rank and file who failed to take Stonehearth? And why would they leave him in a cavern somewhere rather than keep him prisoner at their stronghold?

Unless they knew who his father was. A diplomat, now, in a world bereft of nearly all the Blood Elves. Necessity had plucked him out of his lowly birth as a rank and file guardsman and lifted him into a loftier position within Quel'thalas. A soldier scarred by battle now going soft attending functions and trading politics within the Horde's inner structures of leadership.

If they knew this, any of it, that would be more than enough incentive to keep him alive, use him toward political ends. They couldn't possibly have known him. He'd gone to such trouble to keep his family a secret. Never to speak the name of his father, nor had he risen to great heights within the Horde army. He served them when necessary, and otherwise only really stayed with his longtime companions.

Surely they couldn't know who he was. Surely.

This thought he repeated until blacking out again. He waded the darkness, falling in and out of conciousness after that, sometimes hearing voices murmuring in the distance. Dwarven and night elf and a human occasionally. Someone brought him water and helped him prop himself up to drink it. Female hands, cool thanks to the air in the cavern, but gentle.

Eventually, he woke to hear the heated words of an argument.

"--till we hear from Blackbramble and that's it."

"He can't make any decision without getting Mistral's approval fist and she can take forever when she wants to. In the meanwhile what do we do here? This blood elf won't last much longer, you heard Saranda's assessment, his fever's spiking and if we don't allow someone to tend to his wounds, he's going to die before we get a single bit of information out of him."

He had a fever? He hadn't even realized it. It all made perfect sense, now, as did the darkness coming up to swallow him again.