I've wanted to put together an origin story for Linna for quite a while now, so when I began Winter's Veil and the Light as a Christmas story things seemed to fit into place. Unlike the average Hallmark Christmas Movie (tm), I wanted a Christmas story that didn't have romance involved. Okay, yes, there's a few references here and there to romances, but it isn't the focus of the story at all.
It's also quite easy to forget that Linna's actually older than Card by about a year or so, because Card left home ahead of her. I felt that Card being the catalyst for Linna's departure is one thing, but there had to be more to it than that. I've done my share of volunteer work and I know people who chose professions that aren't very lucrative but serve a critical function in society* because they feel the call to serve. To me, the Paladin is an extension of that call to serve, despite in WoW lore the Silver Hand was seen as a path to the nobility. Obviously, people will join an organization for any number of reasons, yet I wanted Linna's desire to help out to manifest in a pretty obvious way. That doesn't mean that she's an overgrown Girl Scout or something, because I once described her as the least serious Paladin in the world. I can easily see her as being an annoyance in the side of Lord Shadowbreaker because she simply will not act with the gravitas as befits her status as a Knight.
The path of a Paladin in World of Warcraft is more than simply based on the historical military religious orders of the Crusades**, given that the members of the Knights of the Silver Hand could marry and have children. The AD&D version of the Paladin (the O.G. Paladin, to be honest) had a very restrictive set of ability requirements for the class, and in the old days of "what you roll on your ability score is what you get", Paladins were quite rare.*** Therefore, I made some extrapolations based on what I knew in-game of the WoW version of the Paladin and came up with the requirement for two sponsors for acceptance into the Order.
But how the initiation would progress kind of stumped me.
Okay, I knew about Arthas' initiation in
Arthas: Rise of the Lich King by Christie Golden, and I thought it might work with some heavy editing, but I cast about for information on how it was interpreted in a roleplaying scenario. It took some searching, but I came across
this post on the
Argent Archives website, which provides a full RP induction ceremony into the Knights of the Silver Hand.
 |
| From argentarchives.org as of July 1st, 2025. |
As you can tell, I adapted it to use in the story in the same way that they adapted it from Christie Golden's work. I thought there was too much in the ceremony to simply copy it verbatim, so I trimmed here and there to speed up the story a bit, as well as to add the sponsorship portion. I also thought it appropriate to give the Priesthood more authority over the entire ceremony by cutting out the Silver Hand's direct participation in some of the initiation, reflecting the Catholic Church's authority over the military religious orders in the Middle Ages. Azeroth has too little population --compared to Medieval Europe prior to the Black Death-- to simply let whatever Priest happens to be around to administer the induction ceremony. Sure, one of the Bishops could have run the show, but since the High Priestess is actually there in the Cathedral in-game, it made sense to use her instead.
***
Okay, confession time: for the longest time I had absolutely no idea who Linna's second sponsor would be. Only now in retrospect it seems obvious, but I wrote up several basic outlines for various people who would be Linna's second sponsor, and at various times I tried them all out:
- Elsharin
- Evelyn
- Mona
- Sloan****
- Mathias
- Some Faction Lead/Bigwig
The last two I discarded very quickly, because Mathias wants to stay in the background as much as possible despite Mona's past ties to SI:7, and also because I wanted this to maintain more of a "common people" focus than fall into the same "faction lead-focused" trap that Blizzard has with their own Retail story. Still, I knew that in order for Linna to be inducted, there had to be some nobility or higher up involvement (the High Priestess, Lord Shadowbreaker, etc.) but I didn't want that to be the focus of the story. All of the others in the list I deliberately brought up and discarded in the story itself because the story actually provided the TL;DR of why I decided not to use any of them. I also really didn't want to choose Azshandra, because she'd never agree to that. I know her well enough --she lives rent-free in my head, you know-- and she'd have shut that down before I could even put her on the list.
I wanted the second sponsor to be someone that Linna has interacted with, and could potentially represent a larger organization that may or may not be well received by either the nobility or the clergy. To my mind, that meant either a semi-renegade (such as Balthan) or a member of an organization not based in Stormwind: the Cenarion Circle, the Argent Dawn, or the Explorer's League. Of those, the Cenarion Circle made the most sense since Linna has interacted with them before. And it was then that I went "Duh!!" and smacked my forehead. I contacted Ancient, who readily agreed to let me borrow Kitwynn again, and that was that.
***
There was one last loose end I had to clear up, and that was a technical matter. I didn't want to write about Honey Bread without actually having experience in how the damn thing tastes. Yes, I could have just rolled with it and come up with a description based on what I knew of the bread, but I wanted to ground my writing in my own impressions of what it tasted like. Of course, the problem here is that a fictional food isn't something you could readily taste.
Or could you?
 |
| I still have the apron, btw. |
And tucked within it's pages, there was this:
So... I had a recipe to try.
I need not bore you with the details about my testing the recipe out*****, and I did have to make an adaptation to accommodate my low-salt diet, but this was the result:
 |
That's after brushing it with melted butter
once it came out of the oven. |
If you want to know how it tastes, well... 'absolutely awesome' kind of covers it. It reminds me a lot of
challah bread, given that the ingredients are similar, but the recipes of challah I've used have granulated sugar instead of honey.
Before you ask, 1/12th of Chelsea's recipe comes out to about ~34 grams of carbs, so it's well within my carb budget on a per meal basis. Believe me, I kept an eye on my blood sugar after eating it, and I had no issues with a sudden spike in my numbers.
My wife really likes the recipe, so I think I might have to put this into regular rotation. Next, I ought to try Chelsea's Mulgore Spiced Bread recipe, which apparently gets rave reviews on Reddit and other websites.
***
So there you have it. A story that I originally thought I could belt out in a month or so took over seven months and had me bashing my head against a wall for a good while. I have other stories I'm working on in various states of completion, and I'm not sure which one will appear next. I ought to start posting on Azeroth After Dark rather than letting that blog sit there, unused, but we'll see. Based on my pageview data, I know that my fiction doesn't get a lot of eyeballs, but I wanted to get this out there instead of holding onto it.
*Aside from the military, there's teaching, firefighting, police, local journalism, libraries, community outreach (such as senior centers and support), park administration, and religious orders (no, televangelists don't count).
**The Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon (Templars) and The Knights of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem (The Hospitallers) are the most well known among the military religious orders, but there's also other Crusades througout Europe that generated military religious orders. Among them are the Teutonic Knights, the Order of Calatrava, the Order of Santiago, and the Order of Montesa. All of these military religious orders mixed a monastic life with military service. Unlike their non-religious chivalric counterparts, the adherents of the military religious orders eschewed worldly possessions and maintained celibacy in the name of service. While those requirements may have held up for individual members, some of the military religious orders became very rich from donations by the nobility throughout Europe (looking at you, Templars).
***Or you had to keep rolling until you got the right combination. I tried that once, and it took me hours before I finally got a Paladin on rolls alone. That minimum score of 17 out of 3d6 for your Charisma is a real bitch.
****You can find Sloan as an NPC vendor in SI:7, and I adapted her in another unfinished story into someone Card interacts with when she finally arrives at SI:7 with Mona's letter of warning to Mathias. That letter of warning is referenced in One Final Lesson,
Part 5 and
Part 6.
*****If people want to see the details, I can make another post about that later.
