“-. Antonidas d’Ambrosio, Dalaran .-“

  Knowledge, Wisdom, Excellence.

  A brilliant motto on the surface, but not so much when you were given cause to ask ‘what.’

  What does knowledge take precedence over? If you were a member of the Kirin Tor, the answer was ‘everything except what we deem too dangerous in hands other than our own.’

  What is wisdom? Clearly not the ability to acknowledge that people other than the Kirin Tor were entitled to accomplishments greater than their own.

  And excellence! What excellence does the City of Mages even value? Certainly not excellence of character, or they wouldn’t be censuring Antonidas for having seen Alterac through to the end, instead of running home like a coward to pretend blindness about the most horrendous crisis of their age!

  “That’s not the reason, Antonidas,” Sathera told him on one of those evenings that he’d reserved to pretend to be social, just to keep up the appearance that he hadn’t practically moved out weeks ago. “And you know it.”

  “On the contrary, I clearly don’t know the will of the Council at all, or I’d not have acted so divergent from it.”

  “The Council doesn’t retroactively punish things that weren’t crimes at the time.”

  “But they are crimes now?”

  “Did you see any legal amendments published in the paper?”

  “No indeed, I’m sure they’re waiting until the neighborhood is properly full with Violet Guards before they give the order to run me down.” They’d already ‘graciously loaned’ him a pair to ‘guard’ his house.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, the Kirin Tor is better than that.”

  “Are you sure that matters?” The Council was supposed to exercise the Kirin Tor’s will instead of the other way around, but if this was the result then the Kirin Tor itself was rotten instead of merely feckless. How else would things swing so far towards Altarac’s ‘model of rule’ in such a short time? “If my faith can be misplaced, so can yours.”

  “It wasn’t misplaced, you’ll see.”

  I wish you were right.

  Sathera, however, read more than he meant from his silence. “Nobody blames you for following policy.”

  How was a high elf so much more willfully blind than him? A human with less than three decades lived? “Only for ‘creatively interpreting’ it, yes?”

  “Nobody blames you for not recognizing Krasus for what he was either.”

  Antonidas stilled, before he went back to pretending that his telekinetic manipulation of his own extracted sinew was just a string of yarn in a harmless game of cat’s cradle. As conflicted as he was over his mentor’s hidden nature, it was clear now that he was also the only member of the Council whose nobility was actually proven. It was easy to be noble when you had the most power, but Krasus had stayed that way through his entire fall from grace all the way to his death.

  “Have I done something to earn this silent treatment?” Sathera asked.

  “I merely have nothing to say.” Because you’re just here talking without saying anything.

  “Well, you better think about something, maybe a lot of somethings. The moratorium on talking about the events in Alterac isn’t just there to give the Council time to go through all the intelligence, it’s also to protect you.”

  “Protect. Me. From what?”

  “Everyone who’s been looking forward to see you brought down a peg.”

  What a patronizing insult, but did he have a leg to stand on when it was also the only thing that still helped him get away with some things? “An excellent plan,” Antonidas sneered, redoubling his focus on his ‘game’ of handless cat’s cradle. “They’d ‘spare’ me from fighting my own battles by making me the loser of one I can’t fight at all. My appreciation for the new Council is boundless.”

  “… Don’t you hear yourself, Antonidas? Since when is it about battles and war with you? This is exactly why-“

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I caught that. I could have sworn I just heard a nigh-immortal high elf pretend that Quel’Thalas doesn’t constantly cull the trolls because they’re afraid of another war with them even thousands of years later, and that Dalaran doesn’t literally sell itself to other kingdoms as being the only sure defense against hostile action.”

  Sathera rubbed her face with a groan, outright misunderstanding his underlying point this time. “I’m not here as anyone’s apologist, Antonidas, I’m here as your friend.”

  If only. “That makes one of you.”

  Sathera huffed in frustration. “Kael’Thas is a member of the Council-“ is he really, still? “-and the prince of our entire kingdom besides. If he’s not visiting you, then clearly he has more important things to do, on your behalf I might add.”

  ‘Other things’ like what? Divided loyalties? As fond as Antonidas was of Kael’Thas, for Dalaran to let citizens of other countries into their senate was a nightmare of split loyalties, and to let a foreign prince into their highest ruling body was vassalage in all but name. He’d not cared enough to think about it before Wayland, but Prophets had a way to open peoples’ minds. “Is that information, or more faith?”

  “Can’t it be both?”

  “Not when both of you have chosen policy over sense.” Like the rest of the bureaucrats.

  Sathera pinched her nose. “As personal friends and past confidants of yours, we’ve both had to recuse ourselves from every deliberation about you, you know that. The last thing you want us to lose is our veneer of neutrality.”

  “No,” Antonidas said flatly. “The last thing I want to lose is my friends.” Right there next to his life and his dignity.

  “… You’re not losing us, Antonidas.”

  Only because I’ve already lost you both.

  ‘Veneer’ indeed, ‘neutrality’ indeed, since when were elves unable to tell the difference between neutral and fair? Didn’t they come to the Eastern Continent precisely because their kin lost sight of that same difference?

  Then again, I’m not supposed to know that. Does she herself know that about her own people?

  Did the High Elves talk about where they came from, even among themselves? The western continent? The Night Elves? Teldrassil?

  The War of the Ancients?

  “I can see that I’ve lost you again,” Sathera huffed. “I’ll be by again tomorrow with that tea you like.”

  Translation: don’t thumb your nose at the Council or they’ll do worse than forbidding you to leave the city.

  As he watched Sathera leave, Antonidas seriously considered calling her back, just to tell her all the terrible truths he now knew that she didn’t. The Titans, the Demon King, the Burning Legion, the Old Gods of Spume and Flesh, and everything else he learned while being around Wayland, told or inferred.

  Instead, he waited until Sathera was outside casual sensing range, waited a bit longer, was relieved when the guards ‘graciously posted by the Council around his home for his protection’ got turned into sheep by a raving runaway gnome, then stormed out of his house all in a snit.

  “What the devil is going on out here?!”

  “Baah!” “Baah?”

  “What on earth? Who did this?!” When his dispel attempt didn’t achieve anything because he’d done his best to make it the best-ever looking deliberate failure, he spun around in a rage. “Who did this?!” Almost on queue, the gnome’s deranged cackling sounded one last time in the distance. “Of all the – are none of you people with grudges brave enough to face me personally!?” This outburst wasn’t entirely faked, unlike the rest. Antonidas looked back at the sheep. “Stay here, I’ll catch him and make him reverse this!”

  “Baah?” “Baah!”

  Trying to keep up with a knee-tall hyperactive illusionist savant was a futile hope despite gnomes’ pitifully slow speed on land, but that was never the point. Maybe on horseback he might have caught up, but the point was to be as inconspicuous as possible, not less.

  Fortunately, the initial surprise was enough to carry Antonidas all the way to the first roofed alley before anyone understood what was happening.

  After that, he turned in a completely different direction, disguised by a drab robe and wooden mask both enchanted to obscure his features, while a simulacrum continued the chase.

  He used a disguise orb to change appearances every time he passed under another roofed alley for the next ten turns. He reached his destination just a few minutes after he felt his simulacrum get turned into a sheep too, half-way across the city.

  Antonidas was assured the spell could last for many hours, and even defy external attempts to undo it if the subject – himself – added his will to it. With everything that had been happening, he’d had plenty of time to practice with the mental link to his magical doubles.

  To hell with the Council and their travel restrictions, and to hell with their moratorium too. He didn’t care how they sold it, it wasn’t to prevent ‘misinformation’, it was to control information about that terrible war-ending power resurfacing in other hands than theirs.

  The way they went about it was a real mask off moment too. Ironic, considering that the Council of Six had taken all pains to pretend the opposite. They’d barely taken the minimum amount of time before they started tightening the noose around Antonidas, the only one who knew the full truth. And more.

  Krasus was dead, and thus unavailable to defend himself from whatever the Kirin Tor ‘unearthed’ during their ‘investigation.’ Kael’Thas had recused himself on grounds of being ‘too close to the matter,’ the Elvish Prince’s propensity for befriending young human talent had been turned back on him. Not long after, Modera had also recused herself, after some pressure over having been Antonidas’ most enthusiastic sponsor after Krasus himself.

  With the council cut down to half, there had been ample pretext to institute wartime measures, and so hasty re-elections were done by the Kirin Tor in absolute secrecy. Elections which Antonidas had been excluded from, despite being a member himself.

  That secrecy had now been extended to the regular operations of the Council of Six, as it hadn’t been since the old days when the Magocracy of Dalaran was still at odds with the Church.

  Magocracy, if only! Antonides sneered at the thought. More like bureaucracy.

  To think he’d live to see the day when magical might and experience took a distant fourth and fifth place after ‘policy’ and ‘procedure,’ all to serve the rank cowardice of people who never experienced true hardship in their lives! It wasn’t this bad even during the plague years, where had that wise and proactive Kirin Tor gone?

  Huddled behind Dalaran’s forcefields, that’s where, filling out paperwork.

  It wasn’t just the new Council of Six either, it was everyone who ever envied Antonidas for having a star that shone brighter than theirs. Theirs and all their brothers, sisters, uncles and cousins whose nepotism failed in the face of Antonidas’ relentless superiority.

  Not for nothing was the whole of Dalaran so easily convinced that the latest attack on ‘his’ guards was just another cheap shot from a resentful rival, taking their chance now that Antonidas had finally fallen from grace.

  The new Council had done everything it could, to slow down the spread of the terrible truths revealed in Alterac. It was to the point of even using the realms-shaking tragedy of Stormwind as a distraction. If not for his dubious contacts in the Dalaran underground where he was going right now, even Antonidas wouldn’t know what really happened there!

  As a result, most of Dalaran still didn’t know Krasus had been a dragon. Because of that, everyone was happy to denounce his ignoble fate, and blame Antonidas for both Krasus’ dismissal from the Council and subsequent death to malicious actors far from home.

  Conversely, the new Council had very unfortunately ‘leaked’ that Antonidas had been personally involved in the Alterac business from start to finish, even staying there against the orders of Krasus and the rest. Never mind that he’d have been free to go back and do whatever he wanted anyway, after he was recalled and turned in the results!

  Truly, the one thing worse than a coward was a competent coward.

  It wouldn’t be so galling if the rest of Dalaran didn’t follow along like drones. For people who lived in an ostensible meritocracy without serfs, slavery or conscription, the mages of Dalaran were damned keen to persecute those who didn’t obey the Council like mindless slaves! The only ones they treated worse were those who failed to actively conform their whole identity around anticipating their whims!

  Or, in this case, the whims of the Council that ended up replacing the one that was actually in power when the events took place.

  Wasn’t the entire role of the Council of Six to execute the interests of the Kirin Tor, instead of rule? The Kirin Tor that Antonidas was himself a member of?! A place he’d earned all for himself too, unlike so many others! Many more than he’d thought before this, even!

  Where were the naysayers with nothing better to do than to constantly hold the Council accountable? Where were the flying pamphlets and caricatures? Where was the Kirin Tor’s eternal rivalry with the last remnants of the old Magocrats? Where were the calls to finally change the entire country’s name so that they’d abandon the old regime’s legacy for good?

  Truly, little exposes someone’s rotten character better than using unfortunate events to justify their own, prior prejudice!

  The most infuriating thing was that it wasn’t just everyone else to blame. Antonidas himself had been ignorant to the ill feelings he’d instilled in others, he hadn’t known he had near as many detractors. If only he’d actually done something to deserve it!

  But no, he was just too much better than everyone else. He must have been up to no good, they decided, how else could he have done so well so quickly? Dark contacts, forbidden magics, something, surely the new Council wouldn’t censure him if that wasn’t true! Wasn’t it even rumored he was involved in shady business? What if he’s even part of the Underbelly?

  Besides, he’d only gotten where he did because he was propped up by the great Archmage Krasus, and look how he turned out! Killed on account of his own protégé, did Antonidas cause it through mere stupidity, or was it malice aforethought?

  Inferior gnats.

  “Scowl any harder and you’ll split the ground into a whole new cave! Ehehehe!”

  Antonidas pinched his nose and took a few deep breaths to master himself. He’d been seething so hotly through his march through the Dalaran Underbelly that he’d completely lost track of time. And his surroundings too! Considering that he’d had to polymorph into three different animals and even a fish once, to get past all the grates and sewer tunnels to the real secret galleries, that wasn’t any mere slip of situational awareness, it was a literal indictment.

  “Oh I’m sorry, was it something I said?”

  “Minigob-”

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  “That’s Manabonk to you, Manabonk the Inestimably Estimable! Ehehehe!”

  Antonidas groaned but forced himself to oblige the mad gnome’s words. “Manabonk. An excellent job back there-“

  “Of course it was, was there ever any doubt?”

  “-but do you need to keep tossing stinging bolts at my double?”

  “Need? Of course not! The only thing the Inestimably Estimable wants from you is what we agreed upon! Now where are they?”

  Antonidas closed off his expression. “Since you cut into my path, I don’t have them yet. You’ll have to wait in our usual spot.”

  “Trying to weasel out of our deal?”

  “No more than you’re trying to find out my secret lair, I’m sure. You’ll get your payment, in the usual spot, as previously agreed.”

  Gnomes were tiny and fidgety, but they could still put on tough airs when the situation called for it. They didn’t sell it without wearing the strangest goggles, usually, but it worked for them.

  Antonidas crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. After kings, dragons, the spirit of an entire country, and the second of only two true Prophets that human history had ever known, the stare of a crazy gnome was nothing.

  Finally, Manabonk bounced back on his heels with a giggle. It was nowhere as lighthearted as it sounded, but Antonidas consoled himself with the fact that it took the gnome less time to back down every time. “Fine, fine! Let it never be said that Minigob Manabonk goes against his word! What does the Underbelly run on, if not the honor system?”

  Blatant lies is what.

  Antonidas still took a false path, one that was explicitly designed to take him through the more infamous hangouts of the Underbelly’s denizens. Some were surfacers like himself, who were only here on shady business. Others were mutants, either from exposure to magical phenomena in the womb, or from their own experiments that made life on the surface impossible or undesirable.

  Antonidas had never told Wayland the details, but those odd requests for mutant fish had led him down a very strange path, before he got fed up and brute-forced the issue with ritual summons.

  There were actual cave-dwelling creatures as well. Some were the sort that people knew about, like yetis and kobolds, the latter of whom jealously guarded the little caves they still held. Much of the Underbelly had been their warren, before Dalaran’s more unsavory residents moved in.

  There were other creatures down here too. Some, Antonidas was sure, were known to more people than himself in upper Dalaran – the Council itself probably knew about the Goblin cartel traders, for example. Others were creatures never heard of by most surfacers, like pigmies and niffen.

  The latter were small, mole-like humanoids with limited sight that relied on their smelling senses to get around, and their ‘brightly simple-minded’ attitude made them something of a mascot for the Underbelly’s ‘society’, if the term even applied.

  The people down here liked to bet about their nature and origins, with possibilities ranging all over the place. The most popular theory was ‘homunculus experiment gone horribly right’ by the renegade Alchemists that plied their trade here, in defiance of the rivalry Dalran had with the rest of their kind. But after some off-hand remarks that Wayland made once or twice, Antonidas was fairly sure the niffen were their own species, maybe even had a society of their own, deeper down underground.

  Much deeper.

  Antonidas walked like he belonged, avoided eye contact with everyone that was going somewhere or other, interacted only with the people loitering around the extremely suspiciously aglow alehouses – Dalaran’s sewers discharged many potions gone wrong down here, and some that went too right as well – and finally ‘escaped’ into his own slice of ‘territory’ in the broader cave network where lighting was scarce enough to give the illusion of privacy.

  He still did all he could to make sure no one was following him, and he was reasonably sure he succeeded.

  Even so, he was glad the entire trip was a red herring from almost all the way back to the start.

  Since the moment he’d gone through the sewer grate that was this week’s portal access, a second simulacrum of himself had ghosted down the true path to his secret laboratory, as an invisible mosquito. He couldn’t take such small forms himself, his limit was a cat and only for a few minutes at a time, his talents lay in other areas (and Wayland was clearly not a normal human). But magical clones had different limits, some tighter and some looser.

  Antonidas’ double had finished its journey for almost ten minutes when he himself finally reached the place, where the rest of the Underbelly’s dubious denizens believed the entrance to his secret lair was. There, he made sure to check one last time that nobody had followed him, and mentally signaled the clone to briefly pause the ward around his teleportation circle.

  On precisely the twenty-seventh of the thirty seconds of the ward being inactive, he teleported from one end of the Underbelly to the other.

  Despite knowing better, he was braced to defend himself from attack. The habit had been beaten, burned, drenched, and scalded into him over months of magical ambushes by mixed-nature elementals.

  Fortunately, things were still stable. They’d been stable for a little over a week. Which was far less time than he liked to invest in stress-testing, but he had to take what he could in the present circumstances.

  There, in front of him, on the lower level of this decommissioned maintenance bunker, under a force dome that hadn’t been eroded by a horde of spirit-hungry elementals as during the first months of his travel interdiction, stood the thickest and strongest force dome he’d ever devised. One he couldn’t have made self-sustaining before Wayland shared his runic language.

  The security measures were not overkill, because the thing they were containing was. Antonidas could surely have limited himself to just the steam engine, but he preferred to be thorough. A ‘train’ head car.

  A locomotive.

  The reality did not live up to its promise – the locomotive was as pretty as it was faulty. Antonidas was neither a blacksmith nor an engineer. He’d had to shape the whole thing by magic, and he still wouldn’t dare suggest that someone try and actually get it moving, on rails or not. But moving it was not the point, as indeed it wasn’t for the steam engine either.

  No, the point was to see if his magic took, on both the core element and the thing it was meant to be used in.

  Antonidas would accept nothing less than his solution working for both the device and its applications, when he went to Wayland and told him that he’d completed his invention.

  Two weeks in, still no elementals, Antonidas thought as he very carefully scoured his entire laboratory with mage sight. No evidence of a break-in either.

  In the background, the steam engine continued whistling, as it hadn’t stopped doing for the past five days.

  After a few moments to bask in relief, Antonidas went and retrieved one of the bags full of elemental cores. Many had accumulated from all the fire, wind and steam elementals that his past failures had conjured, all of which he’d been forced to destroy. It was perhaps callous, but he didn’t have the inclination or constitution to feed ravenous elemental forces his spiritual energy. He didn’t have Light to make up for it either.

  Not for the last time, Antonidas lamented the cowardice that had made him avoid Wayland’s eyes.

  Not for the first time, he was relieved that he’d had so many failures of design, before this. He would have easily managed to stage a few controlled failures if he had to, to get Manabonk his payment, but he’d have felt bad throughout all of it. Completing Wayland’s world-changing project took precedence over the lives of a few feral, sub-sapient wisps, but feeding the greed of a mad renegade gnome arcanist did not.

  Knowing better than to expect the gnome to treat simulacra with respect, Antonidas went to the rendezvous point in person.

  He didn’t skimp on payment or make any complaints, though, even though Manabonk was among the more dogged about stalking people to get his fingers in their pies. The gnome had come through after all, with a most able distraction.

  Soon enough, Antonidas was back in his secret laboratory, this time working on his side-project – communication stones.

  Wayland’s dismissive attitude towards this miracle of communication had rather stumped Antonidas in the beginning. Not for nothing could they be afforded only by royalty and individuals of similarly high wealth and influence. Antonidas hadn’t wanted to believe it at the time, but Wayland really was ignorant about their rarity. He definitely didn’t know that nobody knew how to make new ones.

  The real ones, anyway.

  Antonidas wasn’t sure Wayland was even aware of their extremely nebulous and varying distance limit, or that it only worked between linked pairs. The pair Antonidas had used wasn’t even his, it had been a loaner from Krasus.

  On the one hand, it spoke well of Dalaran’s ability to hide the true shortcomings behind the image of competence it liked to project. On the other hand, it showed that Wayland’s prophetic powers had some very strange blind spots.

  The creator of the transmission stones had been someone who’d mysteriously vanished just after she made the first batch, without any time to pass on the method. Her research, too, had vanished with her.

  Knowing what he did now, Antonidas suspected she had been one of the Guardians of Tirisfal, and somehow the demons had gotten to her. The stones didn’t allow for communication across any distance, but they did enable it across vast distances nevertheless, and in real time too. The ‘Burning Legion’ would clearly not want such a strategic asset to become commonplace.

  Many had tried to recreate communications stones, to various degrees of failure. The closest anyone got was actually more recent than Antonidas’ own failed attempt. A sorceress somehow made communication crystals that somewhat worked – for a while – but only over modest distances of a hundred kilometers or two, and not if anything bigger than a hill got in the way.

  The woman in question had logged her discovery and then promptly given up on the whole thing when she failed to find buyers for most of them.

  Actually, didn’t she only find one buyer? One from Alterac even, because it was the only country where the landscape didn’t render the stones almost completely useless.

  Come to think of it, didn’t Wayland’s merchant friend waste half his revenue buying them, just before things went sour? Is that why Wayland thought they were ubiquitous?

  The merchant got on the wrong side of the Alterac king, but the stones’ functionality had long since been proven by then.

  So when Antonidas comes home, what should he find out during his ‘don’t leave the city’ ‘certainly-not-an-arrest’?

  The sorceress had died in a laboratory accident while he was away. Coincidence? The research should have since been added by the Kirin Tor to the archives, but Antonidas had looked for it and not found it. Definitely not coincidence.

  Who had done it? Why? How? Under everyone’s nose?

  Those questions had all fallen by the wayside, because scapegoating Antonidas for everything else that happened in Alterac last year was far more important now.

  Never waste a crisis, Antonidas thought darkly, as he moved over to his section of the lab where his newest attempt at recreating the original stones waited for completion.

  Truth be told, if not for the woman making her breakthrough after his own attempt, he might still believe the originals had been a one-of-a-kind fluke. It wasn’t even arrogance speaking, ‘stones cut from a single piece of uniquely magically charged ore’ remained the most popular hypothesis to this day. In theory, it should also have been possible to overcome all the limitations through a precise enough application of the similarity principle, but that just never seemed to work out.

  But Antonidas wasn’t the same as back then, especially since he got hired by Wayland to teach arcane magic. He’d accepted mostly to assuage his own guilt over the attack on the farm, would have done it even without the coin. But the trove of knowledge he got access to in return was varying degrees of otherworldly.

  Much of it was critical military intelligence that Antonidas wasn’t enough on his own to act on, which added a whole can of fuel to his resentment against the new Council of Six.

  But there was a lot of trivia that Wayland had mentioned now and then, and even more in his little booklets and primers that he consented to share.

  Thus, for this, the completed runic language and Wayland’s notes on ‘radio waves’ would have to suffice.

  Thinking about the new Council’s actions made it very hard for Antonidas to not tremble with sheer rage, but being in the middle of a very sensitive crystal cutting process gave Antonidas ample reason to control himself. Especially since he also had to actively sustain the unitary nature of the enchantment, instead of letting it split to match the resulting, separate stones. Or dissipate entirely.

  Finally, the galena crystal was severed.

  Under Antonidas’ mage sight, the Arcane shimmered around the two halves of the pair, but did not disentangle from its paranormal formation.

  Could it be?

  When Antonidas picked up on and activated the connection component, the only enchantment so far imbued into the stones, the aetheric plane rippled in promisingly familiar ways. Both around the one he held, and the other one.

  Testing it from all over his laboratory, the effect seemed to persist regardless of distance. Some substances seemed to block connection, but only if the stones were entirely wrapped in a thick layer.

  I did it?

  No, best not get his hopes up. He’d add the rest of the enchantments, the ones that actually translated the signal into image and voice, and make some real tests across proper distances before he got ahead of himself.

  That could wait though. Before that, there was one more thing he wanted to check. It was something that perhaps infringed on the bounds of forbidden knowledge – which was to say, necromancy – but it really was just an application of the similarity principle at the end of the day.

  On a table near the corner, right next to the miniature part-by-part recreation of the real locomotive, was a life-like, miniature lookalike of Antonidas himself.

  Carefully, he telekinetically manipulated the extracted sinew he’d been imbuing with his spiritual energy all day, and inserted it through the pre-shaped channels inside the figurine. It took some patient fiddly work, but eventually it was quite properly blended with the other components he’d previously blended into the doll – the skin layer, a replica of his cardio-vascular system, even a facsimile of a small brain and nervous system he’d woven from his pinky toe nerves, all of which he’d harvested from himself.

  Fleshcrafting wasn’t his specialty either, and he still hoped he could skip all the way to spiritual imbuement for the next attempt, but science went through many imperfect steps on the way to breakthrough.

  That’s the doll done.

  The theory for this had actually been designed around a painted portrait, but the original creator gave up on it in favor of going all-in on necromancy, creating a phylactery and becoming a lich that was eventually destroyed. Nobody picked his idea up after that, and for good reason – this holistic approach was completely incompatible with the patchwork nature of the arcane lore Dalaran used to work its craft, especially the disparate symbology of uncertain multitudinous provenance.

  Now that he had a complete, unified language explicitly designed to accommodate this, Antonidas could build on what everyone else had missed. And he had.

  Maybe.

  He picked up his miniature and placed it at the center of the ritual array he’d previously used for the miniature steam engine. Antonidas himself took the central spot in the larger array, the one he’d last used for the real steam engine.

  After double checking that no parts of the drawing or writings had deteriorated, Antonidas spoke the activation phrase and… waited to see what would happen.

  The experience was strange, then surreal as he felt himself stretching between the doll and back, then terrifying as he thought himself trapped inside the doll for a long, dreadful moment, before the experience seemed to repeat itself.

  When the glow from the ritual dimmed, Antonidas felt oddly confined in his own body. It took him some time to distinguish that as the feeling projecting back to him from the doll, or rather the fragment of his spirit inside the doll.

  After some tense walking all over this laboratory, the sensation eventually settled into something… not quite comfortable, but not entirely uncomfortable either. It was definitely something that would take getting used to, but was more strange than unpleasant. He told himself that it wasn’t necessarily bad to be aware of the figurine at all times.

  Telling himself he could undergo the reverse ritual at any time wasn’t the nerve settler he hoped for, so he decided to stop procrastinating and move on to the next stage – testing.

  First, he made a small scratch into the skin of the doll with an entirely mundane blade. It didn’t transfer over. That should mean that if his doll was somehow damaged or destroyed, he’d be unaffected. The sympathetic connection, so far at least, did not work both ways.

  Next, he began to slowly pass his palm over a candle flame, lingering over the fire longer and longer each time. To his amazement, the result was everything he’d hoped – there was no harm, and no pain. The damage that fire should have inflicted on his skin didn’t happen because the doll remained undamaged.

  I’m invulnerable, Antonidas thought with a positively embarrassing lack of scientific aplomb. As long as the doll is unharmed, so am I? I… did it?

  Standing there with his palm over the fire, Antonidas felt a thin, vicious smile form over his lips. The low-key disquiet he’d wrestled with about what was in store for him when the Council finally summoned him before them…

  It didn’t vanish, but it did transform. Transform into something almost the same as vengefulness.

  The course of action he’d fantasized about but ultimately dismissed as too brazen had just become completely viable.

  That was when an alarm blared in his mind so insistently that all thoughts of further experiments were banished.

  Someone’s back at the house! No perimeter breach alarm, but intruder already inside?! Stealth that trumps my detectors but he’s standing in the parlor instead of breaking in, familiar signature, who…? That’s not Sathera with the tea – oh. Oh!

  In three strides, Antonidas had activated the temporary hole in the wards and was stepping into his teleportation circle.

  Recall!

  Moments later, he materialized back in his home’s basement. All Dalaran mages had a ritual space below ground specifically designed for chthonic rituals, so it wouldn’t be strange if it took a while to answer the door. Others liked to assign the meet and greet to their unseen servants, which often doubled as the standard ‘make them wait’ power play, but Antonidas had never made a secret of his contempt for such things, as indeed he disdained most niceties as well.

  None of which mattered when the intruder had already let himself in.

  Ordinarily, Antonidas would descend upon such a one in a hail of lightning and forceblasts, but luring rash rivals into a trap was why he deliberately left his home defenses on ‘normal’ mode when he was secretly away.

  Also, he had a different sort of bad feeling about this.

  “Sorry about letting myself in unannounced,” Kael’Thas Sunstrider said the moment Antonidas stepped into the room. “But I assumed you’d prefer me over somebody else.”

  Translation: the Council no longer acknowledges my right to private property. “I’ll not offer refreshments then.” Or guest right.

  “You know I’ve been visiting home, yes?”

  “You had to ‘recuse’ yourself, yes.” Antonidas made no secret of his feelings on the matter.

  “I had a very interesting encounter there,” the elvish prince said as if unbothered. “The Windrunner sisters have been on the trail of your runaway student. The younger missed him, but the oldest has made contact.” Antonidas felt his heart… do something. “Did you know?”

  Translation: have you had contact with the outside? “I did not.”

  The fair-haired elf affected a most surprised mien. “Truly? I suppose the transmission stones Krasus left you must have been of the more worn down sort, the Hinterlands should still have been in range… Unless your wonder student has cut you off like everyone else?”

  Hinterlands. Wayland was in the Hinterlands, why – the dwarves! He went to the dwarves? To Aerie Peak? Thinking back, didn’t he mention it once? That he’d planned to go there long before, but the Alterac mess scuttled those plans – wait! “I wouldn’t know,” Antonidas watched the elf carefully. “I left my half of the pair in Alterac.”

  “Come now, Antonidas, if you want people to buy into your ignorant act you can’t pretend it about everything, and certainly not expect just anyone to play along.”

  The silence was unnaturally loud.

  Before leaving his half of the transmission pair with Richard, Antonidas had conspired with him to embed a hex into the connection element, which would make the magic break down if anyone other than him tried to activate it. Or otherwise affect that component of the enchantment. In other words, if someone stole it.

  Kael’Thas had all but told him, just now, that the Council had sent someone to do just that. That the theft had been a success. And that the Council – or someone in their confidence – had also tried to use it from this end, no doubt to attempt a trace. At which point Antonidas’ hex activated and the world became one communication stone poorer.

  “Do they know?” Antonidas asked, mind racing. “About your news?”

  “I’ve only just returned, and only because the new Council is finally going to convene in Full for the first time. Nobody wants me to miss that, even for all the youth of the High Elf voice on the Council. The time to play at objectivity has passed, for everyone.”

  The Council was more new faces than old, Quel’Thalas’ representative had been replaced by some young upstart, all said in a way that allowed for the possibility that Kael’Thas still had influence without outright implying it.

  Antonidas glanced out the window. It was just before dawn. Kael’Thas had snuck into his home in the middle of the night to deliberately lose at his own word games. “Thank you for the information.” Thank you for your friendship being true after all. “I’m afraid I can’t give anything worthwhile in return.”

  ‘Can’t give’ not ‘I don’t have any.’

  By the look on his face, Kael’Thas had not missed the difference. “It is no matter, I must make haste myself. I just came here to make sure.”

  That I wasn’t in contact with anyone, or that I’d know where Wayland is one way or another, after this?

  Kael’Thas left as discreetly as he’d come.

  Thankful that his backup double down in the Underbelly laboratory hadn’t expired yet, Antonidas teleported to it and back several times, packing what he could fit in his bags of holding and thoroughly disposing of what was too large.

  One hour after Kael’Thas had left, two Violet Guards showed up at the gate with a summon writ.

  The new Council of Six was finally convening that very morning, and Antonidas was first on the docket.