You suppose that one day, you will be a mage.

For now, you are still an orc, still Daimd. Still so sensitive a creature as to wear a sword on your hip. You run your smooth, dry fingers over its hilt—no longer hard with caluses as they once were—and keep your self-adjudication to yourself; you practice an identity whole, complete, and unquestionable. But as you wake, before the sun's reach extends into the sky, and move through the practices that mark you as one with violent arcane potential, you wonder.

You wonder what, not if, they will take from you. You wonder how many of their demands you will find distasteful, the same way you find the warchief's Orgrimmar distasteful. You wonder, wonder, wonder if they will assume themselves the right to kill you.

When you are a mage, you wonder if you will remain his, or become something else entirely.

You wonder if you'll ever say it.

You don't know the words you might use. They all meld together in your mind, and the harder you try to focus on pulling them apart, the more tightly they cling together. What would you even attempt to say? Can you define yourself? Are there words that exist what could explain what you are? Who you are? How you are?

Are there words in any of the languages that describe what he is to you? He whispers in Thalassian, and you wonder if the ancestors might give you some words of your own in a tongue he doesn't speak that might work the same way. Words that might convey how much he is. How bright a beacon, and how like the sun.

You want him to keep you. You want him to mark you as his, and only his, for all of time. Oh, you want—