ii.

pre-wow timeline.

[ Year 20. ]

• with the scourge's invasion, arthas menethil commands the fall of silvermoon city.
• a 9-ish year old riley watches her aunt and youngest cousin get eaten by a rampaging abomination in their own home while hiding in a pantry. she loses all five of her older spellbreaker cousins as they fail to defend the city.
• she presumes her uncle has fled; in actuality, mel'oran was going to untether his old boat out of the sunsail anchorage to sail his family to freedom; mal'arbane has beaten him to it to recover their logbook in the ship's figurehead that contained the location of the shardvault, and the brothers' largest heists and hauls. mal'arbane doesn't even remember that riley exists.

• the brothers fight; mal'arbane throws mel'oran to his death on a dock full of ghouls and sails away.

• riley is found in the wreckage of her uncle's home in the sunshard holdings; she is sent to dalaran as a diasporic refugee ward of the state to train in the schools of frost magic. she's not very good at it.

• when arthas menethil and the scourge invade dalaran, riley flees with the other survivors to kalimdor, where she briefly stays in theramore.

• dalaran is then destroyed by archimonde the defilier.

iii.

world of warcraft.

[ year 25. ]

• a 14-ish year old riley rimeshard has been shuttered all over the place due to the events of the third war. she takes refuge in pyrewood village with other dalarani refugees until surviving wizards encase the ruins in a magical dome and begin its rebuild. being a ward of dalaran and an apprentice magi, riley is allowed in.

iv.

wrath of the lich king.

[ year 27. ]

• a 16ish year old riley doesn't agree with the horde being accepted into dalaran; she doesn't trust the blood elves, following what she's heard transpire during the events of the burning crusade's timeline.

• she's more interested in the holy light but is continually steered back to the arcane by well-meaning elders, including Zaedel Somberlight, a stoic blood elven mage-priestess assigned to riley as a guardian.

• zaedel is slain by the azure dragonflight while trying to defend the violet hold from its first intrusion.

• riley remains in dalaran as a citizen during most of the events of wrath of the lich king's timeline, but develops an aversion and distrust of the holy light for not saving her begrudgingly-respected guardian.

v.

cataclysm.

mists of
pandaria.

[ years
28 - 31. ]

• from ages 17 to 20, a somber rilennia remains in dalaran, lackluster care given to her arcane studies. she's failed her sanctum exit exams three times already, and has refused every mentor assigned to her.

she's already forged a re-entry to the sanctum's academy with a falsified name and illusion spell [under raegil rimeshard]. her illusion spells remain sub-par, however, and due to her 'tragic circumstances' riley is given some leniency - BUT she's threatened with expulsion from dalaran unless she can have an accomplished dalaranian magi vouch for her skills in the arcane.

riley can't perform an arcane blink, can't make a portal, can barely conjure edible mana-food; her abjuration is her strongest suit, and even then, due to poor reception to training, her shielding ability is weak, at best.

vi.

legion.

[ years
31 - 32. ]

• in her search to become a deputized battlemagi apprentice, 21ish-year old riley latches onto the enigmatic taldarick reynolds as a potential candidate as mentor. she corners him in stormwind city and insists that he train her. begrudgingly, he agrees, as it helps fulfill his community service requirements after being released from the violet hold [for siding with the azure dragonflight and its rogue mages in the nexus war; he had slain his own brother romulus reynolds, who had sided with the kirin tor.].

• a 22ish-year-old riley becomes a fully fledged battlemagi apprentice with the kirin tor; specifically, the silver covenant, with taldarick as a sponsored guardian. she is deployed to the broken shore to extinguish fel fires with what little ice magic she knows (mainly conjuring blueberry-flavored slushes), and becomes a caretaker in one of the experimental 'divination chicken' projects attempted by the kirin tor to combat the demons of the burning legion. it doesn't go anywhere. she now has one (x1) magical chicken that uses tarot cards to communicate portents.

• riley and taldarick are deployed with the rest of the highguard, a military branch of the silver covenant to ensure the deposition of the grand magistrix elisande as a vested high elven interest to establish relations with the nightborne.

• riley also develops a vested high elven interest to establish relations with taldarick. it's very will-they-won't-they for a long time. eventually, he admits reciprocation, and they become the legal guardians of a younger stormwindian teenage orphan, nicolette galahad; the three share his dalaran apartment space and work to send a gifted nico to the arcane sanctum's academy.

• her divination chicken alectryo ends up being a polymorphed mage that had been cursed by a magical hat; Alectryo is then stabbed by a slighted would-be suitor of riley's, and the inflicted damage unpolymorphs him. Taldarick promptly replaces Alectryo I with Alectryo II; having dunked its unhatched egg in runoff from the nightwell, Alectryo is given magical tarot reading powers, and nobody in the silver covenant is the wiser for the swap.

• taldarick then goes missing on deployment near the apex of the clash against the burning legion, having been sent to one of their satellite worlds without return; his disappearance off-world irrevocably fractures riley and nico's relationship. nico vanishes, and contact is lost.

• after the closure of the gateway to argus, riley spirals into a deep depression from the loss of her found family. she is discharged from active duty in the silver covenant.

• riley buries herself in her work and is stationed as a dalaran guardsman for a brief period of time.

• she is then deployed to the alterac crater, the former home of dalaran, to keep an eye on its magical signatures, with the appearance of the ren'dorei in case of any potential 'interference'.

• a 23ish-year-old riley ends up stationed on neutral diplomatic directive with the alteraci order the citrine eagle, due to their capital city of talongrab's proximity to the crater. she doesn't make any friends, due to her insistence on stringent rule enforcement as laid down by the kirin tor regarding the eagles' own arcane sanctum and their members' magic deregulation in comparison to dalaran's (given that it's what's kept her alive this entire time, she's endeared to the kirin tor).

vii.

battle
for azeroth.

[ year 33. ]

• despite being a relative nuisance to the eagles, during the events of the siege of tirisfal riley readily betrays her neutral stance with the kirin tor and gambles her own life to rescue their captive commanding officer and several other alliance citizens. she illusions herself as the head apothecary of the hand of vengeance, who served as the warden for the horde's makeshift prison camp, and attempted to sneak out as many of the captured as possible; riley was found out by the head apothecary's husband, who could tell she wasn't his beloved wife. riley was then accosted by stationed horde soldiers and slain; one of the aggressors was arthalden lightshard, a former ally that ironically used a ranseur smithed by a commanding officer of the citrine eagle,sir shindo malphur, to shatter her crystalsong shardwood shoulder pauldron.

• immediately following her death, riley is risen into undeath by the head apothecary to serve as a drudge and a warning to those that would cross her; riley is then freed when alliance reinforcements storm the makeshift prison to rescue those still left behind. riley is sent to acherus, the stronghold of the knights of the ebon blade to work out her newfound undead neutrality to remain with the alliance; she is assigned to dame oktavia altostrati, a frost-magics-wielding nightborne.

• riley returns to talongrab in alterac, as she has nowhere else to go. she's given a couple of medals for the sacrificial manner of her death, and some never-referenced post-nominals.

• pre-resurrection, while dead, riley gets a glimpse of the maw; determined to rescue taldarick from where she believes he might have been sent, riley sets off on a course to track down through nefarious means and countless darker-darker-yet-darker curio-vendor contacts a representative of cartel x. she believes they can provide a means of soul insurance that can be immediately redeemed to rescue taldarick from the maw, should that be where he's sent.

• riley's ploy with soul insurance unsurprisingly doesn't work, and now she's in deep with a cartel that doesn't take gold or jewels as payment; riley turns to a life of back-alley vendoring to scalp precious emotions, memories and soulshards from her customers to send to cartel x. they know the location of her undead aunt (a ghoul, trapped in the pantry of the sunshard holdings in eversong forest) and threatens to send her soul to the maw should riley not comply.

• while on deployment with the eagles, riley learns that one of her 'brothers' in the ebon blade has murdered two innocent children. during their burial, riley furtively calls on the holy light to sanctify their burial plot, and reawakens her long, long-lost desire for connection; following this, she insists on training in the holy light with the members of hath's stand, the paladin order within the eagles; primarily, their resident justicar, sir shindo malphur. he agrees.

viii.

battle for
azeroth.

[ years
34 - 35. ]

• an undead mage-priest-in-training riley is dispatched to uldum with the citrine eagle in their war against the forces of the old gods alongside an active coalition of horde and alliance members, citing a need to go to gadgetzan anyway for an outstanding client 'payment collection'.

• she runs into the same disgraced ebon brother that murdered the kids and was disbarred from the eagles, and rips two of his grafted-on spider-legs off. ultimately she loses the honor duel, but a leg's a leg.

• while deployed to uldum under the command of the eagles, riley's brain is infected with an aqir parasite. while feeding on her brains, it scrambles some of her earliest memories. the parasite threatens to hatch into a hive queen larvae before it's obliterated by the coalition she's traveling with, including wey-chung brokenarrow, a long-time ally.

• riley is able to call in a ton of purloined back-alley ebon-centric favors, garnered over a few years of market racketeering, and summons a trio of frostbrood dragons to assist with the coalition's uldum campaign at its apex.

• riley assists the denizens of the allied order of the hinterlands' alpine hollow with preventing a herald of the old gods from emerging through a void rift. during this time, she's entrusted with a faceplate by shindo malphur for her holy-light training, and enlists his help through meditation and concentration; with gradual exposure therapy, riley goes from not being able to call on the light to instead wield it with fervor and reckless indifference to her own undead state.

• shindo malphur also bequeaths riley with his old silver hand-era warhammer, the thunderbolt, to use in battle. it's one of the very few items riley refuses to sell to cartel x. he still won't make her a paladin, though.

• after this, riley slinks back to acherus for a time, hiding out and assisting with acquisitions of artifacts in which the ebon blade shows interest.

ix.

shadowlands.

[ year 36. ]

• a still-undead riley, stationed in acherus, sees the ebon blade mobilizing towards the shadowlands beyond the now-broken veil, and slinks off to the maw with a small deployment of ebon soldiers to begin the arduous hunt for taldarick's soul herself. this leads to her getting two ebon soldiers picked off by mawsworn, and riley herself court-martialed. her soul is stripped from her body from where it was previously anchored, and is kept in a soulcage that is anchored to her back, to ensure it doesn't break loose and serve zovaal, the jailer, in the interim.

[it wasn't our riley that orchestrated this deployment, but an alternate version of riley that split off from a doomed timeline controlling our unconscious riley through a process known as shatterwalking. following taldarick's disappearance, this riley turned to the void for answers and bargained power. she's been wreaking havoc across other rileys' timelines ever since.]

• after learning of the dangers in which the shadowlands have been driven to, riley returns to alterac and attempts to convey to their justicar shindo malphur what awaits them beyond the veil, given his ardent faith in the light and position of leadership. it's not really clear how much of her frantic, fearful explanation stuck.

• riley, shindo and another member of the eagles, daniel morsin, all return to taldarick's since-abandoned dalarani apartment to check for pieces of riley's old life for closure. she's able to find taldarick's machine- a chronological/necromantic mishmash abnormality designed to yank parts and pieces from doomed versions of timelines in which his brother dies anyway, in an effort to resurrect him. riley knew about the machine and was actively helping taldarick construct it, but didn't know the specifics of how it worked; unbeknownst to riley at the time, taldarick had used riley herself as a guinea pig for the machine, and it had been whirring away all these years, yanking parts and pieces of doomed rileys to stitch together. there's now a complete copy of riley's body in the machine. yanking herself out of the ebon blade's soulcage splinters riley's soul, and shindo and daniel have to fight the negative portions of what remains; destroying it allows riley to take possession of the living but soulless body created by the machine, effectively resurrecting herself, with shindo's encouragement.

• afterwards, the machine is destroyed and sent to the bottom of the boralus harbor in pieces to ensure that nobody nefarious can get their hands on it.

• despite the armistice between the horde and alliance established years prior, the annual dance of the dead is declared by the forsaken, and lordaeronian criminals are given bounties to be hunted down and turned in to be subjected to fighting for their lives as punishment. riley is listed as wanted for tax evasion and neutrality-abuse, but narrowly avoids capture. given that for once riley is not in love with her direct superior [yet], she is visibly agitated when accused by a fellow alteraci commander of being too clingy when concerned for the justicar's safety in protecting other wanted alliance 'criminals', especially after he remains behind to thwart an assassination attempt against a member of the stormwindian house of nobles.

• concerned for her well-being and the resources needed to rescue her, should riley be captured by the forsaken, shindo then insists that riley stay in morku, the capital city in his presided-over lands of owlhearth, while the threat of the dance of the dead is imminent. she ends up not leaving.

x.

still
shadowlands.

[ year 37+. ]

• riley has managed to worm her way into running a ton of morku and owlhearth in general under shindo's faceplate, despite his continual insistence on not needing a steward.

• in her efforts to bolster morku's economy, she's accidentally created the frozen stryth through the crab canal project [abandoned], accidentally created the feldspar caverns through alterac granite mining near shindo's foundry [condemned] and helped keep owlhearth as a whole flourishing through her loophole-finding, law-bending vendor gremlin antics.

• at some point, riley's dealings with cartel x come back to bite her, as she hasn't been making her 'soul insurance' payments. they come to collect by way of attempting to collect her soul, and when she resists and defends herself, their representative splinters her allies in the eagles' souls along with hers; among others, sir malphur is forced to confront the violence he's committed without being blinded by his wrath, and riley is forced to confront the results of her greed-driven actions [as her avarice was a symptom of her unending undead hunger, instead of the typical bloodlust experienced by second- and third-generation death knights]. the eagles are able to venture to the shadowlands to defeat cartel x and restore their souls to 'working order'.

• at another point, shindo is spirited away to the shadowlands again, this time in bastion, where's he's forced to confront the portion of himself that was/is the dredgen hangman; a violent vigilante defender of his homelands that riley had been trying to capture for years to impress the wayward, war-weary justicar. riley is not there to witness the revelation that shindo had been the dredgen the entire time; she had also been captured by rilennia ireshard, the alternate timeline, void-tainted version of herself.

• while stashed away in the sublunary asylum, a pocket dimension between timelines, and siphoned for her insane amount of chronomatic potential energy, our riley is replaced by another, complicit au version of herself that runs things as normal, quietly and out of the way; shindo doesn't suspect anything strange or out of order due to riley's lack of attention-grabbing antics and the smoothness with which owlhearth has grown and thrived.

xi.

dragonflight.

[ year 40. ]

• a 30ish-year-old riley has been trapped in the sublunary asylum for an unknown period of time. she's kept locked down in a chronochamber that utilizes the same technology in which the nightborne keep their arcwine; keeping what's inside either in stasis or hyper-aging it. she's essentially held in stasis for the internal equivalent of seventy five years, judging by the tallymarks on her cell walls; she hasn't aged visibly, though. half-elf genes.

• the not-riley is found out by her allies, and chased through a portal to the sublunary asylum. several alternate versions of riley are freed from their own chronocells and are defeated, and our riley is finally found and freed, with shindo escorting her back to morku. turns out he'd been keeping an eye on her flower shop (started by bakuzan burlycloud, taldarick's former employer, who had since retired to halfhill in the valley of the four winds).

• riley is returned to her home in morku to recover. she takes up the surname shattershard following the revelation of her broken timelines, in accordance with her family tendency to change surnames based on circumstance, skill or proclivity.

• briefly afterwards, she and other allies venture to bruinholdt in the alteraci bearlands in attempt to retrieve from his own stasis a former commander in their former order of the citrine eagle. during the fight to do so, riley's faceplate is shattered and blinds her in one eye, and she's impaled on an unholy runeblade. she spends a considerable amount of time recovering at malphur manor (or manor malphur, depending on your preference). shindo likes having her there, and finds more and more reasons to return home, instead of sleeping in his office in the foundry like usual.

• after a venture to try and track down the missing crabs in the abandoned crab-canal project, riley and shindo discover an older former ally of shindo's, forged during his active duty with the silver hand in icecrown against the lich king; she has sworn revenge on him for interfering with her saboteur work for the cult of the damned. in the midst of tracking her down, riley accidentally breaks the thunderbolt, bequeathed to her years ago by shindo. it remains in pieces on her chatelaine.

• a trip to the isle of thunder to reforge the thunderbolt into her truesilver chain's length results in mutual affection expressed between shindo and riley; following her recovery from the wounds incurred in bruinholdt, the latter has moved into the former's manor permanently.

• during a venture to recover relics and sell them back to one of riley's contacts, ku'rowl, a broker from cartel ku in the shadowlands, alectryo ii is slain in the storm peaks.

• shindo and riley each gift the other eggs of unknown bird species; they hatch into tama (an azure-hued lightning phoenix) and chikuwa (a crimson-tinged descendent of ohn’ahra). while in the egg, tama is imbued with alectryo II's arcane signature; its effects are yet unknown.

• shindo and riley become engaged; later they're privately married by a kul tiran ship captain.

xii.

war within.

[ year ??? ]

• [ tbd. ]

xiii.

midnight.

[ year ??? ]

• [ tbd. ]

xiv.

the last titan.

[ year ??? ]

• [ tbd. ]