Jemiah's Thoughts: She Sells Snails

Jemiah reached down, picking a snail up by it's shell as it slid through the mud and shoving it into the small silk bag that was tied around her hip. Much like her body, the bag tried to float towards the surface of Brightwater Lake. She anchored herself by hanging onto the weeds growing at the bottom of the shallow body of water. She had moved to collect the snails by grasping at different weeds and pulling herself across the ground. Were she on the surface, it would look much like she was walking on her hands. "That's the last of them." She thought to herself. One of the chefs in the Undercity was paying for the snails, apparently they were an ingredient in a meal the Orcish guards considered to be more palatable than 'a diet of mushrooms and old corpses', as the chef had phrased it.

Twisting herself awkwardly, Jemiah moved her weed-clenching hands behind her and brought both her legs down, so they stuck out straight in front of her rather than floating over her head. The remains of the tattered dress she wore billowed out in front of her, swaying gently in the water. She looked up and saw the cloud dulled sunbeams of Tirisfall Glades fruitlessly trying to pierce though the lake water. She tried to exhale, missing the sight of dozens of small bubbles rushing out from her mouth to greet the air outside of the water. Nothing happened. She didn't breathe anymore, which is why she was able to spend the afternoon underwater gathering snails.


Now instead of bubbles she was seeing bits of her rotten flesh flake off and drift towards the surface, along with the odd maggot or worm that escaped her bloated corpse. Like small banners waving in the breeze, her tiny dead companions floated away from her. Jemiah frowned, her dark cropped locks moving around her face as she contemplated. Being in the water felt purifying for her, everything else that was alive inside her had died, so why not finish the job with the bugs feeding on her corpse too? When she first waded into the lake she saw some of the small beatles that had taken up residence in her body fly away; apparently they didn't want to drown.

What would happen to her if she stayed here, she wondered? When she was first-risen she had fallen to her knees and tried to weep, claiming she was an abomination that shouldn't be alive. A knife was thrown at her feet and she was told to either end it herself, or stand up and learn more about her fate. Shakily, she had stood and learned more about the Forsaken, and why she was brought into existence. She didn't have the courage to slice herself open and kill herself right then and there, but slowly breaking apart piece by piece while drifting in clear lake water didn't sound like such a horrible fate. She closed her eyes and contemplated the idea.

As quickly as they had closed, her eyes opened again and she shook her head. Why were life and death so intertwined? When she was living she had seen it all wrong; life had seemed like a long stretch of road with death a barely visible speck on the distant horizon, something that was so far away she didn't see the need to contemplate it. Jemiah chided her ignorance, she knew better now. Life and death were two sides of the same coin, and each step, each choice she had made throughout her life had been a flip of that coin with her life hanging in the balance. When death came for her it was brutal, sudden, and unexplained.

Just the same, she couldn't think about being dead without remembering how wonderful it was to be alive. When she was living, she couldn't think about how wonderful it was to be alive without the reminder that one day it was all going to end. Hanging her head dejectedly, Jemiah reasoned that was why the Forsaken were all so embittered and angry. Their state of undeath was a constant reminder of everything they missed about being alive, she was sure. Her lower lip trembled and she looked up to the surface of the water pleadingly. Maybe it was better to die here in the lake than become some twisted, angry monster. The injustice of it all struck her then. Why should she have to consider such terrible choices? In life things had been so easy, so black and white. She was sure she had thought more in her five days out of the grave then her entire time alive.

Lately she had been trying to decide if being risen meant she was reborn, or if it was refining her, and making her more like the person she was always meant to be. Someone had told her that undeath was steadily improving her, and that by accepting her fate and continuing on she was being true to herself. Jemiah had compared it to how the waves make stones on the beach look smooth and polished over time. She wasn't sure if she believed that. After all, undeath had altered her greatly. What's more, she couldn't be the person she was meant to be if she was dead. Accepting that meant something positive would come from her suffering, which didn't seem right to her.

But had death altered her enough that she was something completely different? Her hands twisted in the weeds she was gripping, and her eyebrows kitted together. She had heard some Forsaken say: "In death, we are reborn." She wasn't sure that was true either. Jemiah remembered who she was in life. She had a clear picture in her mind of a tall, curveless woman with straw coloured hair, freckles and a big mouth. This woman would make candles in the cathedral, drink strawberry milk, and take long walks through Stormwind while admiring her reflection in the canal waters and dreaming of the day she would marry. Jemiah still desperately wanted to be that woman, so undeath couldn't have made her into something else.

Resisting the urge to groan with frustration she let go of the weeds anchoring her and drifted away from the ground – breaking the surface with an audible pantomime of a gasp. Shaking her hair out of her eyes, she swam towards the edge of the lake. That was enough thinking for now, she had some snails to sell.