User:Joshmaul/Lucia Zherron

"'All things in balance. All things in time.'"
 * - Lucia Zherron

Lucia Zherron was believed to have been among the first to be killed by her own father, Eidan, when he succumbed to the curse of the worgen. She had, however, survived and transformed into a worgen herself, and was rescued and trained by the night elves, becoming a member of the Cenarion Circle and fleeing across the sea to Stormwind when Teldrassil was burned by the Forsaken. Her survival was unknown to her father until just before his death during the battle for Lordaeron, and she now fights in his memory - while making clear that she cannot, and will not, be made to be his proxy.

Biography
Lucia is the eldest of three daughters to Eidan Zherron, a former soldier in the Gilnean Army, and his wife Elmira. When the worgen overran Gilneas City, Lucia, her mother, and her younger sisters, Arabella and Mina, were holed up in their grandmother Alma's house (their grandfather, General Daril Zherron, had been killed by the Scourge after refusing to leave the Alliance) when they were attacked by a feral worgen - Eidan, himself turned by his former lieutenant Jeremiah August. All three girls, along with their mother and grandmother, were believed to have been torn to pieces in Eidan's feral rage.

But Lucia survived...and by the teeth and claws of her own father, she too was turned, and was among the thousands who were rescued and calmed by the powers of Tal'doren. While her father - who never suspected she was alive - went east to Stormwind, Lucia remained in Kalimdor, seeking to adjust to her circumstances and learn more about her night elf allies. The night elves trained her in the path of the druid, much as her father had been, and she proved to be a natural.

Her first - and as it transpired, only - encounter with her father was in the aftermath of the burning of Teldrassil; she was among the refugees who were evacuated to Stormwind, and felt herself drawn northwards to Lordaeron by a vision in the Emerald Dream. Travelling through the Dreamways to Seradane in the Hinterlands, she followed her father to Tirisfal during the siege of the Forsaken capital, and briefly greeted him before he was brutally killed in front of her by the Forsaken shadow priest Sekhesmet of Stratholme. In the aftermath of the siege, she bonded with the void elf monk Ord'taeril Ketiron, whose own father, Taeril'hane, had also been killed by Sekhesmet; they cremated the bodies of their fathers in a clearing outside Andorhal.

Lucia scattered Eidan's ashes into the Great Sea at their home village of Stormglen on Gilneas' southern coast, before returning to the fight. During the war, she served as part of the Army of the Black Moon, the combined kaldorei-worgen forces opposed to the Forsaken defilers in Darkshore - fighting as much for the memory of Teldrassil as for the memory of her father. Yet she knew Darkshore was not the only battlefield, and participated in other campaigns as well. Following the siege of Dazar'alor, Lucia narrowly escaped death when the ship carrying her home - the Alliance battleship Springhawk - was destroyed by a goblin sapper, and washed up on the shores of Drustvar in Kul Tiras. There she encountered Gabriel Underwood, a Kul Tiran druid (or Thornspeaker as they were known) and an inquisitor of the Order of Embers, the region's elite witch-hunters.

Lucia encouraged Gabriel to travel the world and study the "mainstream" druidism of the Cenarion Circle, advising him to travel to the Dreamgrove in Val'sharah to learn more. She would eventually guide other curious Thornspeakers and others who were inclined to druidism through the Dreamway as her duties permitted. With such a collection of students under her wing (figuratively speaking - though sometimes literally as well), the Cenarion Circle raised her to the rank of Archdruid; privately, however, she was incensed when the Circle member who presided over her elevation called it "taking the place" of her fallen father - a bone of contention she would also have with Genevra Stoneheardt-Nash, one of her father's old friends, who sought for Lucia to hold the same place in her life as Eidan had.

When the time came to work alongside the rebellion against Sylvanas and besiege Orgrimmar, the majority of the night elves and their allies followed the lead of High Priestess Tyrande and did not participate, refusing to fight alongside any member of the Horde for any reason. Lucia, looking at it from a much more practical standpoint, did not share in that mindview. She had attempted to convince Gabriel to join her, but he stubbornly refused, holding a similar mindset to Tyrande's followers, and claiming his duty required him to remain home. She bluntly called him a coward and severed ties with him before leaving for Durotar for the battle that would ultimately not happen - much to her relief.

When the rift opened into the Shadowlands, Lucia received a message from the death knight Nyssha Swiftblade, who had met Lucia's father when Gilneas rejoined the Alliance during the Cataclysm. Meeting with Lucia in Oribos, the great city in the center of the Shadowlands, Nyssha explained that she had had an encounter in Ardenweald, the realm where spirits of nature (and those mortals touched by it) went in death, and had been asked by a spirit there to send word to Lucia in Azeroth. Lucia traveled to Ardenweald and was escorted to the Heart of the Forest, where - much to her utter shock - she encountered her father's spirit. Eidan, or "Aydrun" as the fae named him, had taken the soulshape of a wolfhawk when he arrived, his spirit managing to arrive safely in Ardenweald before the drought began. He explained to her that he had asked Nyssha to send her to him partly because Ardenweald would need her help - and partly because, as he put it, they had "left off on the wrong foot"...