The debt was paid. Those were the words she whispered to the pyre blazing high up on the sea-battered cliffs. A battle for a battle. The ocean winds tore at her braids and for a moment she imagined herself back in Nagrand, on the plateau where she had sat and listened to the endless lessons of her great grandmother. Perhaps she would never see that place again. She set another log on the pyre and poured a drop of summer blazegrease onto the flames, watching them brighten up the night. Perhaps she would never see her whelps again either. Rokiara fought her inner demons of abandonment in the only way she knew, the one that had been passed down to her from a lineage of flamebenders stretching further than recorded history. Perfect stillness of mind. The flames answered her, as they always did, by lending their heat and light to her strictly seated form.

She meditated on the battle that had been joined only hours earlier. In her mind’s eye she could still see the faces of her adversaries and the vivid fear shining through their eyes. She forced herself to relieve the memories of young children and old greybeards being cut down for sport. The flames could not guide her to finding honour in it, to finding a purpose of survival in murdering the families of her supposed enemies. When the cursed Light came with the Draenei, she had been fighting for the lives of her people and to preserve the old ways. She had watched in horror as her lifemate was taken from her to be forcibly turned into an empty husk ready to be filled with a harsh light so foreign from the comforting heat of the flames. The battle she had fought that day had been just. The lives she had taken had been to avenge him, to save her whelps from the same fate. Had she come to this world just to become what the Draenei of Draenor were?

Battered by the winds, the heat of the flames washed over her. She focused on the fate of her parents who had died not so that she could live, but because they were deceived. All her life she had been told that the assault force gave their life for the survival of the clan, but the runes etched in the heavy flamebender tome she had inherited from her great grandmother told a different story. Pawns of demonic forces. That had been their fate. She did not know if her parents even remembered her when they died. Her perfect stillness of mind was broken in a maelstrom of rage-tinted sorrow. She forced herself to breathe, to focus only on the movement of the flame. The cycle must be broken. She refused to be a pawn of a woman that set her warriors to murder the young and the old for sport.

Slowly, Rokiara reached for a doll she had found in the aftermath. The toy was mud-stained and bloody, but her face was still smiling gently. Someone had loved that doll dearly. She rose to douse it in winter blazegrease to let it burn slowly and with dignity before giving it to the flames. A decision had been made. Rokiara would no longer be party to the murder of whelps. She would forge her own path in the hope that one day it would lead her back to her son and daughter. If they lived as themselves she would cherish them, but if the cursed Light had turned them she would give them mercy. The pyre crackled and shot a stream of fire up into the night sky as the doll was devoured. Rokiara sat with it until dawn was breaking and the pyre naught but ashes. She steered her feet away from the noise of the waking army camp far below. Her choice was made.