“-. Mara Fordragon, Ruins of Thaurissan, Burning Steppes .-“

  ~ He cannot be defeated ~ whispered a tormented voice as the stone totem burned to nothing. The memories it held were now her own. They were fragmented things, unclear but intense in feeling.

  Their small force had been sent North to ascertain the likelihood of Medivh – of the demon that slew the Wrynn dynasty to have fled this way. They were just one of many taskforces assigned such a task, on orders of King Anduin Lothar who wanted no stone left unturned, not only inside the Kingdom of Stormwind but as far outside of it as could be managed as well.

  Whatever that was worth when your quarry could teleport across countries.

  ~ Your existence is acknowledged ~ whispered a second relic she found. She didn’t know if it was the same voice, it had been almost half a turn of the hourglass since the first one.

  The search was neither easy nor quick. For all that the Burning Steppes were the only accessible land passage to Khaz Modan and the Legacy Kingdoms to the North, they were nothing like the rest of the Redridge Mountains. Perhaps they had been, a long time ago when the Kingdom of Stormwind still held them, but an unknown calamity two centuries prior saw it broken and twisted into the fiery wasteland of now.

  ~ Help us, outsider ~ the third relic begged, oh how her heart urged her to do just that, but how could she help? Whom would she be helping? Was someone or something talking to her through these totems, or were they just memories seared in stone?

  According to the commander of their force – who was also Lord of the last remnants of the family who once held these lands for Stormwind, and who bullheadedly tried to reclaim them even now – several mountains in this range were no longer here anymore. They had melted in the initial disaster, and their leftovers were covered by the lava from the great volcano in the epicenter. The landscape had remained scarred ever since, and was only matched in its hellish nature by the Searing Gorge to the north and Blackrock Mountain itself.

  The fourth relic, when she found it, crumbled to dust with a silence that felt rebellious, and in her mind was left a vision of eight squat, shadowy forms performing some sort of ritual.

  Were those dwarves?

  She gazed around the ruins with eyes half-closed, allowing the vision to superimpose over the scraps of stonework that endured amidst the barren, fiery landscape. These remnants were walls and roofs, not foundation. This city had been entirely underground, and then destroyed by a being not of this world. If she didn’t already know how much farther back this destruction dated than the Kingslaying, that alone might have been enough to call the capital’s main expeditionary force.

  She found the fifth relic in what might have been a courtyard, and couldn’t tell if it pleaded or seethed. ~ Leave this place ~ She saw a dwarf surrounded by seven corpses and kneeling before a monolith of flame, then the relic spewed out a white-hot arc of flame as it disintegrated.

  She had barely touched the sixth relic when the tormented voice keened in the wind. ~ Defiler... you will be punished for this incursion. ~ A symbol of flame radiated from the relic before it crumbled to the earth.

  She should have stopped at six. She now knew enough to be sure that whatever the relics bewailed, it wasn’t to do with the demon that had slain the Wrynn dynasty. This all had happened far too long ago to be him, as they’d already known.

  But she needed to know, she told herself, she had to know who or what the visions were building to, they had to know if there was yet another threat that Stormwind was oblivious to.

  So she kept looking, even as the air became dryer and hotter. Even as her search took her deeper into the shadow of Blackrock Mountain, even as the sky darkened with the ash and soot that it was constantly spitting out, she kept tracing the direction where the suffering imprinted into these ruins was the worst.

  When she finally found the seventh relic, she was engulfed by a blinding flash of light.

  ~ You will not taint these ruins, mortal! ~

  The torment in it was the same, the way it crumbled was the same, but her head throbbed with newfound wisdom as she saw the city and mountain around her split down the middle, the two halves shoved apart by a colossal creature made wholly of flame leaving nothing to stand on-

  “Priestess!”

  The arms of Lord Harthal Morgan caught her before she could fall all the way, and his voice snapped her out of her waking nightmare to a world that wasn’t much better.

  “Back to the horses, quickly!”

  She ran without thinking twice, as fast as she could, stumbling repeatedly as smog stole her breath and the ground shook. She could barely gasp, she could barely see due to the unnaturally dark clouds now overhead, and the ash and dust in the air. She called on the Light to shine a path as the sky grew even darker and the soles of her feet began to burn.

  The horses had nearly broken their reins when they reached them. The Light awoke their courage at her behest, but she failed to make the first leap into the saddle because a tremor made her fall at the worst time.

  “No, up you get Milady, foot in the stirrup now – good, up you go!”

  It was shameful to need such help, but she was coughing too much to say so as Lord Harthal practically threw her on her horse, or say anything at all as they rode off to his whipcracks and barking calls to- “Hya, hya, hya!”

  Their ride was erratic, almost disastrous if not for Harthal grabbing her horse’s reins to drag her in his wake, she – she kept expecting – kept seeing fire and brimstone rain upon them from an eruption that wasn’t there now, but had been in the past!

  Worse, where the darkened sky failed to impede their way, the ground didn’t. The black paths caked in ash and dust were no longer fallow, they rumbled and shifted, began to spout molten rock and flame in their path, bleeding the elements into monstrous forms as they tried to escape, a lava elemental even burst up right in their way-

  “Stormwind!”

  -and barely missed her only because a second knight charged into it from the side, a horse with blinders on, rider and mount both aglow with the aura of fire-resistance potions, they toppled the creature before it could solidify its form.

  “Stormwind!” “For Wrynn!” “For Lothar!”

  The rest of Harthal’s handpicked squad converged upon them from where they’d been keeping perimeter, but even with all nine of them and Mara’s protective spells, and words of healing and bravery for the steeds as fast as her lungs could cough them out, even with all that they barely made it out.

  When they finally escaped the old ruins, they realized in dread that they should’ve thought twice. Without the crumbling walls, mounds of ashen dirt and buried totems to muffle them, living fire and ash devils now swarmed in their path. The biggest of them abruptly exploded with a bright flare that rent a massive rip in its mass before any of them even realized what happened-

  BOOM

  The thundering blast belatedly caught up with the sudden destruction that cleared their way, and Lord Harthal was just about to impale another golem-like thing on his lance when the creature -

  BOOM

  - also exploded just before Harthal’s charge might have stalled and Mara would’ve become responsible for the death of a second Knight-Protector.

  They escaped the ambush by a bewilderingly wide breadth, but that almost didn’t matter because the fire protection brews faded before they could smash out of the wider encirclement. If not for Mara’s priestly magics, the horses would have panicked. Despite her magics, the fire and lava almost killed them anyway, the last rider in their line-

  BOOM

  - only made it out with them because the hot wind inexplicably swirled around him, buffeting a fire elemental away and then the mysterious thunder-

  BOOM BOOM

  - sounded two more –

  BOOM BOOM

  - four more times, each one splintering or crippling the largest of the magma shamblers.

  The right, Mara thought as their mad dash finally broke out into daylight again. The invisible blasts, they make the elementals explode leftward from sheer momentum, but there’s nothing to our right for kilometers-

  BOOM

  - all the way to the mountains, they’re coming down, don’t tell me –

  BOOM

  - it’s coming from the peaks?

  How? So far away, to be able to launch anything across such a distance, never mind hit, and with such destructive power! She didn’t know if it was a miracle or madness!

  They galloped away until there were no more elementals in their path, then further until the thundering blasts ceased too, then further still until their horses foamed with sweat. Only when their steeds began to stumble did Lord Harthal call halt for a brief rest.

  Mara turned her horse around and looked behind. Above the place where the ruins of that ancient city lay, the sky was black with the most ominous cumulonimbus she’d ever witnessed. Not the biggest or tallest, but impossibly thick and dark. It was like a giant chunk of coal lay suspended above the ruins, as if it had been perfectly cut around the edges so that it hung over the ancient city perfectly up to its outer borders, but no further.

  No, that’s not true it’s-

  “Light and Darkness,” Harthal muttered. “Those things were just hiding underground? And the lava river?”

  “Look at the size of some of them,” said another of the knights.

  “How are there so many?” “Where were they hiding?” “Those things just spring out of the ground?” “Are they anywhere else?”

  “With all respect, Priestess,” Harthal said. “We’ll be ceasing these exploration missions. At least until we have a way to find out ahead of time if the ground we’re walking on is real ground instead of – that!”

  “It’s moving,” Mara said, staring up at the blackened sky. “The cloud, it’s moving. Spreading.”

  The knight blinked, stared up with wide eyes, then looked back down at the elemental creatures that were slowly advancing towards them and swore viciously. “Back to the Vigil! Full speed, we’ve kicked up a hornet’s nest and then some! Onward, hya-HYA!”

  Mara gave the horses what blessed vigor she could muster and they charged off again, at the fastest gallop they could reach.

  They outran the cloud by almost two hours, but that didn’t settle anyone’s nerves at all. Not only was it still chasing them after half a day’s gallop, the thing had outright turned from a cloud into an ash storm as terrible as any the Burning Steppes had ever seen. Worse, it kept coming despite the fact that the mountain wind currents should have turned it around by now. The ash storm even looked fit to crawl up the mountain after them, all the way up there in the hollow!

  “Dammit,” Lord Harthal cursed as they dismounted at the stables, shielding his eyes with a hand against the devil winds. “Of all the times the weather decided to grow a personality, it had to be when the Conjurer’s gone! He didn’t even have time to finish me that escape tunnel!”

  “That might not be a good idea in this case,” Mara said.

  “You reckon they’ll bury and suffocate us in our own soil if we do what we usually do?” Harthal asked darkly. “And here I hoped I was just paranoid.”

  Despite how ash storms didn’t usually reach so high up, some still did from time to time, and that was a reality that the Morgans had clearly taken to heart and then some. Morgan’s Vigil was a normal hamlet on the surface, with stables, a couple of shop, the basic workshops, and homes spreading downslope from the foot of a thick but simple drum tower.

  The fort used to be a wizard’s tower, but had long since been repurposed and reinforced to act as the residence of the Morgan family, after the calamity of two centuries ago dispossessed them. Several tents had also been erected for the additional platoon of soldiers to live in during this mission.

  But that all was just for the good days. On bad days, fake cave mouths and trap doors flipped open to let everyone retreat into underground bunkers and supply tunnels.

  All of which would be a death sentence against elementals of earth. Especially molten earth.

  “The storm,” Mara told Lord Harthal when she caught up with him again. “It’s unnatural, I sense an evil will, it’s driving the winds and stirring up more and more elementals, they mean to destroy this place along with us.”

  “Like there’s much left to wreck,” Harthal muttered in a rare moment of weakness. “What the hell did we wake up back there?”

  Something vast and terrible. Mara bit her lip. “’We’ didn’t wake anything back there, the blame is all mine.”

  “And the Guardian’s for turning out to be a worthless traitor, and the King’s too for ordering that you look for any clues in whatever ways you can, right?” Harthal snorted, but his humor was neither good nor long. “At least the wife and our little girl aren’t here.”

  “Don’t give up hope yet,” Mara said firmly, ignoring the jab at King Lothar’s expense because it was not her place to argue with a host about the decisions of their new king, and she knew the spirit it was said in. “Nothing is finished until it’s finished.”

  “Or maybe my forebears and me were all fools and we were never going to succeed in taming this land again.” The man turned to her then. “As a lord, my duty is with my people, few as they are, and as a knight my first priority is to your safety, Lady Clerist-“

  “I am not leaving!”

  “-but despite all that, I’ve not the strength to send you away. I won’t stop you from leaving – you still have time to flee with an escort before we’re cut off – but we don’t have time to evacuate everyone else. If we’ve to have any hope of outlasting whatever this is, we need the Light.”

  “And you’ll have it,” she said firmly. “Stand firm, Sir Knight. The Fire of Creation is eternal, and so is its shine.” Most importantly, the Revelations of a certain Prophet were with the Light’s Church too, now.

  Light, let me get this right!

  She started at the center of the village first, drawing runes into the ground in deep gouges and grooves with a borrowed drill hoe.

  “Everyone useless in battle, get inside the keep!” Harthal started barking orders while she began her work. “Everyone else, man your posts! Check your arms and armor, hand out the potions, get those horses into the closed enclosures on the double!”

  When she judged the ritual anchor to be as close as she could get it to the diagram she’d drawn in her notebook, she hurried to the second part of this spell which she’d based on what she’d seen back in Alterac.

  “You – less polishing, more carrying sandbags for the buffer! We’re not going on a fucking parade! You lot – why aren’t those horses inside their enclosures yet?! Get them in, and toss the wool blankets over the building! If it burns down, we won’t live long enough to enjoy all the horse roast!”

  Mara hastened to scratch script in a circle as wide as she could hope to power. She was no divinely-ordained Prophet but she should at least manage a small village center.

  “You – form a squad and get water! You, you and you, the same, help him with the wells! Fill as many buckets as you can, the barrels too, all of them if you can, and any flasks and waterskins too, anything you can think of, on the double!”

  She scratched the ground as deep as she could make the lines, trying to get as close as she could to a proper circle around the tower fort. Or three quarters of circle, Morgan’s Vigil was in an extremely defensible position, but that also meant the back of the tower fort was partially dug into the mountain face. Conversely, the singular path leading up from the steppes could swiftly be turned into a trap, as had now become the case.

  She ended up having to go in and out of the tower at several points to continue her rough circle through it.

  Finally, she knelt in the center of her ward and prayed for strength.

  The Light flowed into her, and out of her into the writing in the dirt. One by one, then in two and threes, then in a chain as she watched, the runes all gained their own golden glow.

  That was as far as the good news went. The anchor was powered, but the script she’d laid down in a bid to channel her power to the outer ring had failed, she’d done something wrong. She ended up having to walk the outer circle line again, pouring the Light down into the perimeter runes step by step.

  She almost sank from relief when the dome finally emerged around the village center, just in time to ward off a massive plume of ashen wind that tried to ravage them.

  “Light be praised!” Harthal muttered from where he and his best had taken bodyguard duty around her.

  Praised or not, this wasn’t easy. The breathlessness and sweat from running around and chanting were a trial on every part of her that was flesh. The fury of the ash storm was a faint pressure on every part of her that wasn’t.

  Somehow, she endured it. Even as the pressure grew and their visibility didn’t, the ash storm concealing everything farther in than ten meters, she endured the unnatural storm.

  “I apologize, Milady, but I didn’t dare hope you could actually do it.”

  She didn’t blame him, no Priest had ever achieved a feat like this before, even mages needed groups to shield one building. What a difference it made to have a complete runescript, if only they’d-!

  The torches along the frontline erupted like massive bonfires, burning several soldiers to death before anyone realized what happened.

  “Damnations!” Harthal swore. “We need to put out the fires, all the fires! You, that’s your new job! Get to it, now!”

  “Yes sir!” The soldier ran off to spread the word, leaving Mara alone with the man to pray through her shame, she’d been so proud of her spell when all along it was useless against so much-

  “Priestess, can we still retaliate through this?”

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  He’d debriefed her on what she could contribute well before this, a few more days and the masons might have even managed to produce pre-scribed slates so she wouldn’t need to write the ritual from scratch. But could she blame his doubt now? “I have to split my focus, I can only do it for moments at a time, you’ll have to call it.”

  “Alright, Troteman – where’s that blasted squire – there you are, get over here boy! Take this flag and go to the Captain. When they’re all loaded, raise the flag. When I raise mine, tell them to shoot their bows – only bows for now, get me? Use the flinthead arrows! When I raise this other one, come running back.”

  “Shoot where?”

  “Downhill through the pass, where else? Whatever those things are, they’re still landbound. Shoot everywhere enough and we’ll hit something. Go!”

  The squire ran to do as he was told.

  “My word, ‘shoot where’ indeed! It’s just one path flanked by ramparts, we’re lucky enough to have such a narrow field of fire and he still asks stupid questions, I know we’re blind as moles but I won’t have us wait to be roasted like chickens! That’s the signal. Three, two, one – now Priestess!” Harthal raised the flag.

  She didn’t make the switch fast enough, more than half the arrow volley stopped against her shield.

  “Better than I thought, can you go again?”

  The shame burned her even more than before, how much will he lower the standards he held her to? Or was he just so empty of hope? “Yes.”

  “Alright, we just have to wait… they’re ready, three, two, one, now!”

  This time she was faster, and the next two times were even better. The ominous glows behind the ashen haze pulsed, and two even went out.

  “Maybe we’re not completely screwed.” Harthal called another volley, then quickly raised his other flag.

  The Troteman boy came running back.

  “Run to the backline and tell them to ready the catapult. Climb up on the platform to see me, same signals as before.”

  Mara stood in her ritual anchor, channeling the Light with her steadiest will.

  “Priestess, now!”

  The catapult’s payload soared over the hamlet, passed through the forcefield and disappeared into the ashen haze. The ash storm was like an impassable curtain by this point, it swallowed the flying rock completely, but the rumbling crack from inside was louder, and the bright flash of flame even brighter as the rock collided with something solid that screamed.

  “Again!”

  The second drew a second scream, more of rage this time, but the third didn’t.

  Instead, heaps of lava and boulders started raining on them, and there was nothing faint about the pressure on Mara’s soul anymore.

  Somehow, she endured that too.

  In response, the barrage of destruction shifted targets.

  “No!” Harthal cried in dismay. “My keep!”

  Mara winced as one of the bigger boulders smashed a third of the uppermost battlements to bits.

  “What even is their range?! And uphill too, that’s farther than our catapult!” The man was so red with rage Mara thought he might burst a blood vessel. “Well fine then! Change the forcefield priestess, just one second!” Mara almost didn’t realize the request, but she did as he asked and the debris from the drum tower fell through the Light, down to crush the attached smithy, thankfully vacant now. “If they want my wall, they can have it!”

  The relief from the added pressure almost left her drunk, how had she not noticed how bad it had grown?

  She had no time to wonder because the mutual bombardment only became worse, the siege barrage more furious. The arrow volleys became more punishing as Lord Harthal pushed her timing along with that of the soldiers, and the catapult kept shooting the stone that had been his keep’s ramparts before.

  The assault continued for almost an hour before it finally tapered off, allowing them to catch their breath.

  Everyone but her, the ash storm didn’t abate for a second even after the flying boulders did, just as violent and hazy as before. She had to endure. She would endure, nothing lasted forever, even this couldn’t, it couldn’t or they were all doomed, she had to see this through, see them through, the Light would see them through.

  “Milady,” came the voice of the Troteman boy. “Would you like some water?”

  Mara’s whispered prayers came to a halting end, she didn’t remember when she started. “Yes, please.” Shamefully, she couldn’t drink by herself, the moment she diverted even that attention the Light dome flickered dangerously, if she was asked to make it permeable again she wasn’t sure she’d succeed.

  The relief from thirst almost ended her spell right then and there, if only she’d had more time! Enough time to figure out more permanent anchors to these wards, perhaps some way to make them self-sustaining – but even the Prophet hadn’t done that, it took a dragon to power his-

  With a roaring crack, the earth split.

  The only reason she didn’t fall was because she was already kneeling. She didn’t know how she kept the forcefield intact through the sudden earthquake, but it didn’t matter. The ground shook, many fell off their feet, all stumbled-

  The earth at the mouth of the village burst up and apart as if something massive had punched up through it, finally destroying her ward and burying half the first line of defenders alive.

  There was no backlash from the broken spell, but sudden freedom from its burden sent Mara reeling regardless. She fell on her side. Her struggles to get up were reflexive and wild, her eyes were locked on the site downhill where the ash began to belch forward a dozen elemental creatures of stone and fire-

  “Fuck,” Harthal grunted where he’d somehow kept his feet next to her, hauling her up along with the Troteman boy, shoving her behind him, towards- “That’s enough to take on a whole knight battalion, we have to-“

  The ash storm slammed into them with breath-stealing, eye-watering fury, and force enough to blast them off their feet.

  In that moment when all her physical senses were overwhelmed, Mara experienced her first time seeing the world without eyes.

  The pain was distant, her exhaustion was like a dream, she could see in all directions, people were less shape than the light of their spirits, lights that were pulsing frantically around her, other lights were weakening beneath mounds of debris down ahead, laying bare even deeper lights…

  The souls glimmered as they broke loose of the spirits that had been enveloping them until then, left the bounds of life, of flesh, up through the ground to be jolted by the swirls of ashen death on the way up, the ash that was still there but she could see through, now, all the way into the core of the storm where a score of lumbering elementals were being driven forth by a giant salamander with a cleaver -

  A golden star fell down from heaven with such force that it blew a hole into the ashstorm, blasting the choking haze and flying rocks and lava missiles away from the entire settlement. The golden energy that came with it healed the earth as if it had not broken at all, recreated the script on the ground and reignited the spell that Mara had failed to maintain.

  The star wasn’t done, pouring even more of itself outward, not aimlessly but into the fallen men, and upward too, into the glorious shape of an angel descending down from Heaven, sword in hand and floating on great feathery wings.

  With spellbound fascination no less than the first time she witnessed this same miracle, Mara watched as the Light revitalized the buried spirits, restored the slain souls to their bodies, and condensed into small shells around the bodies of the fallen, shells that began to expand upwards.

  Mara’s senses returned to her then, and she got to watch the piles of debris be shifted aside, the Light beaming up from the top of the mounds, first thin, then wider and wider until the people who should have – who had died buried began to dig their way back out. Even those that had burned before.

  As if in response to its stolen prey, the ground began to shake everywhere, faintly but steadily, and she could feel the malice in it, aimed not at them but behind, at the keep? No, even further behind and up, whatever spell the enemy was using was aimed to shake the mountains themselves, what foul magic could work on such a scale-?

  “No,” came the voice from the glowing star – the man- “You’ve driven the poor land spirit more than mad enough for one day.”

  Where the star had impacted, there was a man standing inside a beam of sunlight. The Light had scoured the ash storm all the way up to the blue sky. He was massive, taller than the last time she’d seen him by a fair margin, broad-shouldered and solid, and he held some sort of metal pipe under his arm, which he hosted over his shoulder a he turned around and-

  CRACK-THOOM

  - something shot from its mouth with a bang, passed unimpeded through the new dome of Light, and flew whistling through the ash curtain towards where Mara vaguely recalled to have seen the big salamander.

  The explosion on impact was so loud and bright as to completely overpower the scream of pain that Mara perceived through her fading astral perception. In that brief time window, the Prophet – for that was who he was – sent a great pulse of Light into the earth, not calm or soothing but punishing.

  “You’re weak, spirit,” she heard him murmur, though she shouldn’t have been able to at that distance, especially through all the noise, the shouts- “Don’t make me corporealize and kill you, you don’t want to end up in the Elemental Plane as a slave to the ones who reduced you to this.”

  The tremors faded.

  It’s a miracle.

  Unfortunately, the giant salamander had used three of its five closest magma elemental bodyguards as a shield and survived the explosion. Not unscathed, but its pain was only followed by the fury of wounded pride. Everyone heard the creature’s voice then, hissing commands and curses. She didn’t understand it, but the angry malice was plain even before the elementals began to literally throw themselves at the forcefield.

  With speed borne of berserk fury and their command over rock and soil, the stone and magma creatures were soon well on the way to burying them outright. Above them, the ash storm once more filled the sky. If not for the shine of the forcefield, they’d have nothing to see by at all.

  Wayland the Prophet looked up at the piling elementals with a frown on his face. He stuffed his pipe-weapon into one of the bags along his bandolier and reached into a different one, only to pause as if listening to something unseen.

  No, not unseen.

  Her second sight wasn’t all gone. There was something around the Prophet, more than one something, indistinct shapes that made the world around him seem like it was made in different shades, colors slanted towards their next brightest tones, it was almost imperceptible because of how vast they were, these presences, but they were there.

  “You sure?” the prophet asked the air. “Alright, I suppose we can try.”

  He held a palm-up.

  The air seemed to compress above it in the shape of a blurry face with two angry eyes, and then Wayland gave it the Light.

  The Elemental Spirit erupted in size, growing from the size of a melon to taller than Wayland, then bigger, taller and vaster, bigger still when the water in the buckets, barrels, even the well itself began to boil all around the place. The steam billowed up, scouring the air and them with nigh-scalding harshness, cleaning all dust from their garb and their skin, all the grime from their lungs and their noses and throats, and all dust and smog in the air too, on the way to joining the living funnel of water and flame.

  Through it all, the Light poured into the creature like liquid sunrays, infusing its form with holy solidity, rising as it rose, blending with its surface like a second skin, skin which grew gleaming, shining folds, points and edges.

  When the elemental being finally stopped growing, it stood as tall as the keep behind them, and looked like the Light itself had taken the form of a swirling funnel with fulminating eyes, and golden arms and armor of flaming radiance.

  “Alright you lot,” Wayland said in the awestruck silence. “Clear the air for your brother.”

  The other off-tone presences – there were more than one! – blended together in a film that overlayed Mara’s sight everywhere she could see, and then the air compressed and exploded away with such force that the ash storm was blown away, all the way down to the foot of the mount.

  Suddenly exposed, the attacking elementals and lone salamander-thing had just moments to wonder what happened, before the Light-fused spirit shot out of the forcefield and descended on them in a frenzy.

  Mara Fordragon watched numbly as the insurmountable force of elemental fury descended into a chaotic, uncoordinated, manic brawl.

  Wayland turned away from the rampaging elements and approached. He was no longer a boy but a man, tall and imposing in his white surcoat under golden doublet and armlets and greaves. He had a firm straight nose and a square jaw, and looked rugged and powerful with sun-kissed hair and beard, straight-backed, dignified and handsome, Mara Fordragon was completely entranced.

  “Lord Prophet,” Lord Harthal Morgan breathed from next to her, hurriedly stepping forward with nervous energy enough to make him shake, to kneel, hands clasped in prayed in front of his bowed head. “Most Radiant Holiness, you are most welcome here!”

  “Don’t speak too soon, Sir Knight.” Even his voice had changed, “I am neither to blame nor responsible for what is happening here, but I am the reason.”

  “Nay!” The knight denied, looking up with zeal in his voice and fervent eyes. “Impossible! I will abide no slander against the savior of our realm, even from himself!”

  “I wouldn’t call dynastic erasure ‘saving.’”

  “As opposed to becoming the pawns of the Demon King who would use us for who knows what atrocities? Nay, the Archbishop himself, King Anduin Lothar himself, both are in agreement on this!”

  “You speak for your King, then? And get up please, if I want someone to kneel, I’ll make them.”

  “I repeat only the words of his Coronation speech,” Harthal declared, standing up – standing at attention. “The people of Stormwind, and its army, the Order of Conjurers, myself and my fellows in the Brotherhood of the Horse, all of us, our standing orders are to welcome you, host you, honor you, and assist you to our best ability, whatever your mission may be.”

  Wayland… why was he so surprised? “Then I appreciate it, Sir…?”

  The knight did a double take and took off his helmet to bow his head, “Harthal, my name is Harthal Morgan, Holiness.”

  “Harthal, really? Harthal Truesight? Though not yet, I suppose.” He recognized the name? Truesight, what did he mean? “Yes, Harthal did hail from Stormwind, didn’t he? Never imagined you’d be from here though.”

  “You know of me – of us?”

  “Like many others, you had some role to play in the future. Don’t worry about it, it is all moot now.”

  How could he possibly say that?!

  With the air of someone who didn’t feel like elaborating, or maybe awkward from all the praise – how could that be? – Wayland finally turned to Mara then. “Lady Fordragon. It is a mixed surprise to find you here.”

  “Mixed?” She said before she could think better of it, heart racing in her breast.

  “Yours is never a displeasing sight of course, but seeing a woman in direct line of mortal danger will never not drive men to distraction. We alone are the expendable ones as far as nature is concerned, for better or worse.” He held out a hand. “I know you don’t fit the mould in that regard, but still.”

  “I’m not sure what makes you think so,” Mara allowed him to bring her hand to his lips, thankful she had the steam to blame for her red cheeks. “After today I’m ready to throw all my lot in with chivalry, I’ve hardly covered myself in glory.”

  “I beg to differ, the only thing you don’t have yet is whatever feats of valor earn you that giant memorial stone statue where you brandish a sword. Fortunately, that ugly future is well and truly broken now, so you don’t need to spend yourself in war if you don’t want to.”

  He knows her future? What was she saying, of course he-

  With a loud crash and rumble, one of the hillsides of the pass down below collapsed.

  “Curses, the battle!” Harthal blurted. “We have to – should we counterattack? If we can-“

  “No need,” Wayland said. “The air force is almost here.”

  The what?

  “I spoke truly before, I’m afraid. I am almost certainly the reason for this. The creature back there is a flamewalker called Lucifron, an elemental being that is one of the four captains of Ragnaros, the supreme lord of elemental incarnates of fire. The calamity that ruined this land two centuries ago was the summoning of that very being, from the Elemental Plane into this one.”

  “You know what happened-?” Harthal thinned his lips. “Apologies, of course you would, knowing things is your whole business. So then…?”

  “Hundreds of years ago, the great city of Thaurissan lay proudly beneath the lush expanse of land that is now this. Your family once held territory in these parts, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wayland motioned for the knight to continue, seemingly uninterested in the crackling explosions of rock and fire from downhill, and the flares of gold that made it over the crests.

  “All our records were lost, but some word-of-mouth endures, so I know my ancestors did have some sightings, even dealings with short, skulky folk. Enough for the soldiery and commoners alike to know not to go up certain passes, not to settle certain areas or block certain rivers and the like. I thought they’d be some manner of fey?”

  “No. Thaurissan was home to the nation of Dark Iron dwarves and, at the time, was also in the midst of a civil war among the dwarven nation at large. They came to establish a new home here after their clan was exiled from Ironforge, the original Capital of all dwarf clans. Your kings at the time treated with them to establish sovereignty and the like. That it was not widely disclosed likely means the talks stalled, and then the disaster struck and it was all moot.”

  Wait, just how many dwarves were there? How large was their nation? Or nations, because it sounded they had more than one, how? Did they, too, have an empire that fractured, like Arathor?

  “In an effort to summon elemental minions to aid his people in a war with the Bronzebeard and Wildhammer clans, the Sorcerer-Thane Thaurissan inadvertently summoned Firelord Ragnaros, who was previously banished by the Titans. It was his arrival that melted the mountains in this range, and forged that great volcano over there. Then, too, he and his growing influence is why the landscape has remained lifeless ever since. That’s why-”

  A strange crackle pierced their hearing, and then ball lightning started to rain from clear blue sky.

  Mara looked up and saw a flight of griffons sweeping down from above, all of which had a rider that was throwing lightning balls down like sky’s own rage. The thunderballs rained down on the rampaging elementals, exploding against them, exploding with them with shrieking crackles of electricity like she’d not seen even mages produce before. It might just be her limited experience, but-

  Down in the steppe plateau, the leftover ash storm was cut through by a funnel of wind. Through it, an entire company of knights charged forward, riders and horses clad in masterwork plate armors, all enveloped in golden coronas that trailed behind the riders like start trails in their charge.

  They crashed into the backline of the monsters just as the creatures broke into a last berserk rage, smashing stone both hard and molten on their lances, maces and flails with euphoric cries of battle on their lips.

  Amidst the bedlam, Wayland’s Light-fused summon brawled its way through the last of the resistance and wrapped itself around the salamander-like thing, just before a sort of flaming vortex would have claimed it, just as it might have otherwise escaped.

  “Seems we can get my verification from the devil’s own mouth, as it were.”

  Mara and Harthal followed Wayland down to the plateau proper.

  By the time they arrived, the melee was finally over, only one of the magma elementals and two fire ones were still left. It only made them the lone targets of the gryphon riders’ concentrated fire, gryphon riders, where had he found such a force?

  Finally, Mara recalled passing mentions while training up in Lordaeron, rare lessons and city gossip that had completely slipped her mind since, and the short history account that Wayland had just given.

  The dwarves of the Hinterlands, that’s who they must be! The ‘air force’ Wayland called them, she had no idea they could actually attack from on high. Does anyone else?

  What formidable allies he found, in such a short time too.

  And those knights! All of them wielding the Light to a man, for battle, even mortal combat rather than mere healing. Even after the Archbishop’s new Dispensations, Mara had only explored ways to use it in defense up to now. What a difference to the ways of Northshire Abbey this was, and even the Lordaeron Church!

  Her mind went to the words that Wayland had just said to her, about her future that would never be. Dare she cross this line herself? Dare she believe?

  When they finally descended from the mountain, the earth was hot under their feet, more so than even before. There were patches of lava here and there, and flames that burned seemingly without fuel but were actually the scraps of elemental bodies still dissipating.

  All of them bent away from them as Wayland walked up to the thrashing, hissing, spitting salamander-thing that his summon held in its grip.

  The spirit was transparent again, Mara belatedly realized. Whatever Wayland had done to empower it, it had been temporary, the Light was faint about it now, the solid-looking armor gone entirely.

  Through either her faint extrasensory perception or just instinct, Mara thought that it wasn’t alone anymore, in keeping the monster immobilized. The other spirits – there were others, the spirits that had pushed the ash storm away, that had blown the corridor for the new knights to charge through, they were with this one now. Helping it.

  Wayland stopped before the salamander creature that had sought their deaths.

  It spoke something, the creature, hissing and snarling in its strange, hot, crackling tongue that… didn’t actually sound all that reptilian up close. It kept speaking, or ranting, or cursing, up until the Prophet looked it in the eyes. Then it screamed and thrashed as if in a seizure.

  Wayland pulled some strange thing from his bag, something the length of his whole arm, with a wooden handle and two, long pipes that it pointed at the creature’s face with a ch-chkt -

  BANG

  Mara flinched and covered her ears.

  The salamander-thing went slack, cleaver dropping from nerveless fingers.

  The spirit dissipated back into the air in which it lived.

  Wayland put his deadly weapon back in his bag and turned to face Harthal and her. “I was right, though not quite how I thought. This thing did indeed know I was coming down to this region, and riled the elementals against you just as I arrived. It was not a coincidence. He hoped that it would force me off my quest to help you instead. I was wrong about how high the plot went, though. He didn’t come here on orders, he came of its own initiative because he wanted to gain favor with the Firelord by dealing with me.”

  Mara… didn’t like the dark dread that the words instilled in her. Finding out that there was a region-destroying threat just… sitting under that volcano was already bad enough, but this? And this hierarchy, lords, captains, did elemental forces have human-like hierarchy? Social classes? Nobility?

  “He thought that if I got delayed long enough, his rivals would have to give him face by assisting his tactics, just so the Firelord wouldn’t only reward him when I got bogged down defending you long-term. Maybe I’d even be defeated, and captured or killed before I could go and make good on my plans to ruin the day of the Firelord’s own master. Unfortunately for him, I’ve actually been looking for an opportunity like this for a while, to practice our combat doctrine. Also, he vastly overestimated himself and underestimated pretty much everyone else.”

  The Firelord’s what? Unless Wayland had been exaggerating, this ‘Ragnaros’ was responsible for the destruction of several mountains and the existence of the volcano that melted all this landscape, and that was just the side-effect of his summoning! What kind of creature was this? What kind of being like that even had a master? What would it take to dominate over a monster such as that?

  … What kind of person did you have to be to declare enmity against that master?

  She didn’t get to ask any of her questions.

  Wayland raised a hand and made a circular motion.

  The victorious knights trotted over to form ranks around one side of them, while the gryphon riders landed on the other side in perfect formation.

  Mystic knights and dwarves flying on gryphons, all gathered for a mission to cause grief to the master of the most terrifying entity Mara had even learned of, short of perhaps the demon Medivh himself.

  The future had felt ominous before, but this was far beyond that. Now it felt glorious.

  Beside her, Harthal Morgan inspected the gathered, sizable force with utterly focused eyes. “I am Harthal Morgan, Keeper of the Vigil on the Rampart. By my honor, be welcome on my lands, black and blasted as they are.”

  “My thanks for the welcome,” Wayland replied, before gesturing at the dwarfs. “Please be known to Kurdran the Brave, High Thane of the Wildhammer Dwarf Kindred who wield lightning in the sky on gryphon back, and his cousin, Falstad Windrider.”

  The second dwarf gave Wayland the stink eye, why-? Wait, High Thane, wasn’t that-?

  “It seems we will be hosting personages of highest status,” Harthal said stoutly. “We will strive to make your stay worthwhile.”

  The chief dwarf pat his mount on the neck. “Don’t worry about us none, long as we get some food and some ale, we’ll be fine. Our birds can get by hunting for a day, even here.”

  “Nay, we will find something suitable for them.”

  “If ye like.”

  “To my right,” Wayland said, motioning at his knights. “The Chivalrous Order of the Prophet’s Guard – they insisted – led by Lord Commander Magroth the Defender, who served as wardens of Zakajz’ tomb and keeper of Tyr’s body, until its last journey up to Odyn’s halls.”

  “Lofty titles,” Harthal was striving not to look like he was comparing himself and his men to them. Mara wondered if he recognized all the names, the Gospel of Odyn hadn’t circulated that far yet. “I will be most glad to learn how they were earned. Perhaps this evening? Once I have taken account of my forces, if haste does not drive you too harshly, I would have you join my people and I for a feast to celebrate this unexpected victory.”

  … When was the last time she ate? This morning? It felt like days ago.

  “We do need to reunite with the rest of our company, but one day’s rest will not go amiss. On behalf of myself and my men, I accept.” Wayland looked at the dwarfs. “What say you, Kurdran? Falstad?”

  They were on first-name basis?

  “Aye, a party sounds just about right after this scuffle.”

  Harthal stepped aside and motioned with his arm towards the Vigil. “I will show you to where you can dismount, if you’ll follow me?”

  Neither the knights or the dwarves started moving until Wayland motioned that it was fine. Even after they did, the Prophet himself waited until they were the only two left.

  “Lady Mara Fordragon.” Wayland Hywel stepped forward and offered her his arm. “Will you do me the honor of being my companion for the evening?”

  … Is this really happening?

  Daintily, with all the dignity she could conjure from her many lessons in protocol, Mara accepted his arm and pretended the day’s ordeal hadn’t left her a sweaty, dirty, singed and tattered mess. “Only if you do me the honor of regaling me with the tale of your exploits.”

  “Operational security makes that impossible to do in full, but I’m sure I can find something to interest you.”