"It's beautiful ..."

Quiet words, spoken beneath a forever night. The blue gray stone, the whisps of fuschia drifting upwards and then shimmering in fragile filaments of light. Stars, so unfamiliar, broken and scattered, a touch of chaas still new enough in memory that constellations had not yet been drawn forth, no stories and heroes written in the arc of the netherstorm zenith.

Quiet, the little gnome rubbed the cuffs of her dark over-tunic. It's edges were frayed, worn, a comfortable friend having seen so much together. Not at all like the fanciness that she had seen, watching others pass through the crowded by ways of Shattrath's lowest circles.

Once, when she was resting, sitting back against the cast stone, as she tying up her tossled hair with a pair of light leather bands a passing warlock in his fancy robes and glittering sword dropped a handful of coins in her hat and then was gone before she could even blink in protest.

And too poor to turn the coin aside.

"I know, Mezzy ... "

She swallowed, quiet, hugging herself.

They were alone, just the two of them. Their only company the shadows cast by otherworld stars.

"It's beautiful ..."

"And it's broken."

Crouching down, for a moment, for two, she gathered up a handful of pebbles, stones and crystal shivers, a microcosm of the shattering of the Outlands; each realm but a jagged splinter of a world, a fragment of what once was.

"It's like a pretty vase that's been smashed, maybe not even any one's fault, I guess. Holdin' somethin' treasured. Now, now you can take horse-glue and string and put the vase back together again, find all the missing pieces and put them in place in a careful jigsaw.

"But ... but can it ever be the same?"

A tremor rippled through her small frame, her expression hidden beneath the wide band of her warlock's hat.

"I don't know Mezzy, I don't know.

"I mean ..."

She turned her head to face her oldest friend, shivering as if it were midnight of a Kharanos winter.

"Among all the other broken shards and splintered dreams, I now have someone, once a dear and respected friend, who now won't even speak to me any more, who sees me and walks on by, walks on by and out, to be anywhere except where I am.

"What sort of glue can mend that manner of fracture, Mezzy?"

Looking down again, she considers the bits and pieces of broken world held in her hands.

"It's hard to say, it's hard to explain, the right words never come easy, and it's as if to even speak them is to simply be accused of being the fault of it, and thus discounted and set apart."

"Especially to someone who can't see it because they are on the other side of the shop window"

She spread her fingers, watching the dusty remmnants sift through, blown away upon a mana heavy breeze.

"I know what he said, and his words are real, the way things are, so much very much so ...

"I doubt even he realizes how right they are deep they cut, how cold they slice, that sword of truth."

Soft eyes closed, teeth pressed upon her lower lip, hard enough to turn rose lips white.

"Remember how it was, when we first strove and explore the world about us ...

"That's what he said, to look back to those times."

On the empty plains of of broken stone and shattered crystals, the quiet haunted.

"But ...

"But I do ... I do remember ..."

Shoulders rose, they fell, a slow philosophic gesture.

"Wonderin' what it was like to belong. Wonderin' what it was like to sit at the table with other folks and not hoping for a chance leftover, what it would be like to have a setting of one's own and not simply offered when the chair's proper occupant was off upon some unspoken endeavor.

"Hating the asking and asking and asking ... feeling each twist of the stomach when having no choice but to beg ... how heavy the emptiness tolls when even those requests return but silence.

"Trying so hard not to seem ungrateful or dependent on those whose paths ours did cross, and did help when things became hard.

"Being told by those who did travel in those lucky circles that all was well and we should be happy."

The empty stone plains echoed, as the dark voidwalker bared his talons, firce, protective, his feral roar fierce.

"No, Mezzy, it's not a thing you can protect me from with talons and magics."

"Maybe they are right, Mezzy, and maybe I am wrong. I don't know ... I don't know anything anymore, it seems."

She hugged herself even tighter, stepping into the voidwalkers shelter. One she knew she could always find.

"Except, Mezzy, that it is so true.

"That it is the same as it used to be ...

"It is so true it hurts."

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ...

That may be true ...

The question put forth, are those who those who do remember the past also condemned to repeat it?