“-. .-“

  “Presenting His Royal Majesty, Sir Anduin Lothar, of the Kingdom of Stormwind and all its territories King, Knight Champion of Stormwind, Lord Commander of the Brotherhood of the Horse, Demon Foe, Demon Chaser, Lion of Stormwind, the Risen, the Resurrected!”

  Anduin Lothar was a tall, muscular man with dark blue eyes, ample blond hair, a full beard that was beginning to give way to white, cheeks and forehead just beginning to show more stress lines than laughter ones, and a voice that made itself heard even over the heavy rainstorm that broke out just an hour before they finally arrived.

  The eight spirits were keeping a nice circular perimeter where the rain didn’t fall, but he and everyone in their convoy were well and truly drenched.

  A very big convoy, there was not enough ground space in Morgan’s Vigil to fit even half of the army he brought.

  The King of Stormwind dismounted and came to stand before me. He carried a great sword, he wore a crown of bronze and gemstones, and he was wearing his iconic armor with the massive lion-faced pauldron and blue tabard over plate mail.

  “Prophet. At last we meet.”

  “King Anduin Lothar,” I nodded, but didn’t bow or kneel, which he didn’t take offense to. I was keeping to a regular human size for a while, so we were about the same height. “Please be known to Brann Bronzebeard, Prince of Ironforge and the one who won the drinking contest to decide who gets introduced first today. Next to him are Kurdran the Brave, High Thane of the Wildhammer dwarf kindred who wield lightning in the sky on gryphon back, and his cousin, Falstad Skycutter.”

  Falstad glowered at the back of my head. I was using magical 360-degree vision just so I didn’t miss it. It was petty, but I was going to introduce him with a made-up title every time until he stopped faffing about coming to me about his Light talent.

  Lord Harthal stepped forward and knelt. He’d returned over a week ago but hadn’t warned us who would be coming, and it quickly became obvious why. “Your Majesty, if I’d known you were coming in person I would have set up the pavilion somewhere with more space.”

  “You are a credit to your line, Mormaer Morgan, but I will not settle separately from my men. The royal pavilion will be set up down here, with the main camp.”

  I glanced at my knight-commander. “Magroth, see that they find a good spot.”

  “Aye, Your Radiance. Forlorn, Agamand, see to it.”

  Falstad wasn’t the only one collecting titles. Harthal had called me that just the once, but the Prophet’s Guard had run with it.

  “Gavin, go settle the men,” Anduin commanded the youngest of the people who’d approached alongside him, and the only one who hadn’t dismounted.

  “Yes, uncle. Men, form up! Aaand march!”

  Uncle?

  I studied the man as he rode past us. He was older than I looked now, closer to thirty than twenty, but was only slightly less stocky than Anduin, had the same blue eyes, and was a shade darker blond. I got a faint sense of familiarity from his armor, blue surcoat over scale mail with pauldrons, gauntlets and boots made of some unfamiliar leather. They shone with the inherent magic of whatever beast the skin came from, and the ritual empowerments of masterwork craftsmanship on top of those.

  Not as potent as Anduin’s Armor of the Lion or the High Blade of the Lion, the elf-crafted greatsword Quel'Zaram, but closer than everyone else in his retinue.

  This wasn’t any random relative he brought with him. He was someone important, someone who would have been important to the future I’d destroyed, but who? I knew of a few Gavins, but none of them had been important. There was a Gavinrad from Stormwind, who became one of the first five Paladins of the Silver hand, but he was a brunet.

  It was a few more moments before it came to me.

  Don’t tell me that’s the Defender of the Crown?

  The Ligh sounded like I’d just hit a gong with a bat.

  The leader of the human campaign in the First War, that’s him?

  Later lore retconned his exploits to split them between Gavinrad the Dire and Anduin Lothar himself. Considering that the player character of the orc campaign turned out to be a single character called Orgrim Doomhammer, I had reason to call bullshit… but Stormwind lost. Which a certain game implied wouldn’t have happened if the Defender of the Crown had been in charge for the whole thing.

  Lothar was captive in the Deadmines for twenty months, which overlapped the entire first third of the human campaign, while Gavinrad was given the defense of Stormwind when Lothar and Khadgar went to confront Medivh, but was otherwise attached to Lothar’s cavalry for the rest of it.

  Both of those men would have outranked someone who was still so low on the totem pole mid-way through the First War as to start out by building farms.

  “Am I witnessing the Prophet’s infamous foresight?” Lothar drew me out of my memories.

  “It’s more hindsight at this point.” I turned my eyes back on the king. “Just in case, though – if that nephew of yours ever ends up leading a desperate resistance against an unending onslaught of big, bloodthirsty green monster-men like this world has never seen before? Make sure he gets to stay in charge for the whole thing, instead of having to step down in favor of the next highest rank at whatever points.”

  With me were Sir Magroth, Aedelas Blackmoore and the dwarf royals. With Anduin were two knights playing bodyguard, an attendant, and a Northshire monk. Aside from us were Harthal Morgan, Mara Fordragon and squire Troteman.

  All of them stared at me.

  Finally, Lothar spoke. “I would speak with you in private.”

  “When? My tent or yours?”

  “Any place that gives us total privacy. Immediately, if possible.”

  I was about to say yes when I felt the brush of slowly approaching death by shadow assault enter my casual sensing range. I turned my eyes towards the only carriage in the baggage train that was for people instead of supplies. A carriage that Lothar wasn’t using for himself. “The topics you want to bring up wouldn’t happen to include whoever’s in there, would it?” The spirits twined their beings to let me see through the windows and sense what was inside as if I was right there. “Who is that? He’s dying. He’s been dying, for months.”

  “Remarkable,” Lothar murmured, eyeing me with completely different eyes. “You are correct. That is Grand Conjurer Hugarin, the only other survivor of Medivh’s – of the Demon’s massacre. To think you can sense him from so far away – does that mean you can help him?”

  Hugarin, Grand Conjurer of the kingdom of Stormwind and member of the Council of Tirisfal. What a world. “Let’s find out.”

  I could, indeed, help him. He was worse off than Antonidas, but not beyond help. Medivh had failed to rip all of his spirit out when he did his mass death spell, but he still got most of it. The Clerics of Northshire had done all they could for his body, and some of their Light had even soothed the worst of the spiritual wounds. But that was as far as it went for a Power that sided with the will of the target over that of the caster every time, if not persuaded otherwise.

  Hugarin was still in there somewhere, but locked in and defensive, mind shut down as a way to defend against an otherwise unbeatable attack.

  I was able to weave the tatters of his animus into the runescript for my aura of vigor, though aimed inward instead of out. The man didn’t wake up right away, but I walked around his sickbed and wrote a channeling script into the ground, which would keep the spell powered for however long it took. Now it was a matter of days at most, instead of the months or years that he was looking at before.

  “Not even an hour and I am already in your debt,” Lothar told me later, when we finally got that privacy he’d asked. I served some Lordaeron wine while he decided what he wanted to say. “It was a mad hope that made me bring him all this way, the journey was not kind to him especially on the last stretch.”

  “Was there no one who could teleport him? Or me, I could have gone there and back.”

  “Whatever the demon did to power that last spell, it left the leylines around Stormwind too unstable for portals, or so I was told. Any conjurers who could have found a different spot and cast the requisite spells are unavailable. I scattered them throughout the kingdom after my Coronation, in small teams with soldiers, priests and assassins to try and sniff out where Medivh might have gone.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  That didn’t add up. “Pardon me for saying this, but I can’t believe you somehow didn’t include ways to contact and recall them. And doesn’t Stormwind’s court include a Court Conjurer position?” I suppose the last one could’ve been kept in reserve for when Hugarin recovered, but that didn’t explain everything else missing from his explanation.

  Lothar looked up from his glass and grimaced. “Medivh was the foremost of our mages. With Huglar dead, Hugarin is the only one I can be sure was not a traitor like him. The manhunt for Medivh is as much to find him as to investigate the mages themselves, to figure out who else among the Conjurers’ ranks might have been subverted or, worse, possessed like him.”

  Paranoia. In Anduin Lothar. Shit.

  Where even was Magna Aegwynn in all this?

  This was extremely bad.

  And…

  … Even with all that, it still didn’t add up.

  “I can see you are displeased,” the man said stiffly. “Perhaps that will make a difference to my request.” The King of Stormwind stood up. “Before he left, the thing the Archbishop most lamented was that he did not subject Medivh and the rest of the King’s Court to the Soulgaze, a skill he said he learned from you. None of our priests have managed to attain the ability. What will it take for you to come south with me and vet my court?”

  Maybe it wasn’t just seer inflation that was impeding foresight. “You’d entrust such a monumental responsibility to me? A stranger?”

  “A stranger who humbles dragons, walks with gods and brings back the dead, is there anyone else worth considering?”

  He wasn’t exactly wrong, but all the best arguments in the world won’t stop a rat from smelling. “You’re only asking this to see what I’ll say. I understand that you have extenuating circumstances, I feel enough responsibility over being the ultimate inciting incident for the demon lord’s exposure. Nevertheless, I did not come down here to be tested. I’m going to teach all I can regardless, to those Northshire monks you conveniently brought with you. But only insofar as it does not delay my mission, and I can’t guarantee there won’t be mass unrest in Stormwind as the skill disseminates.”

  “Few things worth doing are ever easy,” Lothar grunted, gazing at me more respectfully. “I will not apologize for wanting to take your measure, but I also did not premeditate any insult.”

  “I’m not insulted, I’m baffled. The Archbishop seemed to think you enjoyed universal popular support from all the realm’s estates and were even better regarded than the Llanes.”

  “Regard and loyalty are not the same. It took me until March just to assemble a new court, and my own troops and staff were never going to be numerous enough to handle the needs of the Royal Palace, never mind the capital. There are very few I can trust among them as of now. And what do either count for, when they are no shield against your enemies?”

  Not much.

  “The demon made mockery of the Royal keep’s mystical wards, our two best mages are either dead or dying, and they had been little challenge against Medivh anyway. Then, when I was finally too weary to care anymore, that the demon could suddenly appear in my bedroom whenever he wanted, the news from Alterac filters down. Now I have the all-new worry that my court could well be made up entirely of dragons and I’d never know.”

  Well… not entirely made of dragons, but just the one would have been enough if not for me.

  “Empty night,” Lothar rubbed his forehead when he saw the look on my face. “They’re already there, aren’t they?”

  “The one that would’ve undermined House Llane is dead, but I imagine that’s cold comfort when they’re also dead. I don’t have a clear view of how things have changed, there might be some, there might be none.” The Light didn’t say either way, whether someone other than Onyxia would – or already did – insinuate themselves in Lothar’s court. But that was an answer in itself, wasn’t it? “… It sounds to me,” I said carefully, “that the one who really needs to learn the Soulgaze is you.”

  Lothar dropped his hands on the table and looked at the wine bottle without actually seeing it. “I attempted the rites,” he admitted. “The Light never stayed.”

  “There’s a lot I could say to that, bad and good. Give me a few minutes.” I Reflected on the matter while Lothar slowly sipped his wine, looking between me and the firepit where Roilbroth was busy making soup. Which looked like the ingredients were chopping themselves and jumping into the pot unaided, while the pot was also stirring itself. “The Light tells me to follow my gut instinct.”

  “And what does your gut instinct say?”

  “That I should leave this problem for later because we’re soon going to have a very particular sort of company.”

  “The Dark Iron dwarves.”

  “Or a group among them, they’re even more fractious than Alterac was, though their ruler is more competent. And sane.”

  “Hell of a thing, that,” said Lothar. “Harthal put some truly outlandish things in his report, I’d be interested to know what all was exaggeration and what wasn’t.”

  The answer turned out to be nothing. Harthal had been blunt and precise about everything. I was ready for skepticism and demands to prove my reputation, but Lothar levied neither. If anything, Anduin Lothar seemed reassured that I was really… well, real. Reassured and conflicted about feeling reassured.

  At some point we both fell quiet and just sat there, nursing our wine glasses. The bottle wasn’t empty yet. I was missing my afternoon game time with Aedelas but I didn’t mention it. I cast my mind’s eye away to see how Antonidas was doing, but he was as well as a bedridden man could be. Lothar should’ve gone to inspect his men and do everything else a military leader does when establishing a forward camp, but he didn’t mention it either.

  The Light reflected the significance of the moment.

  “Tell me about Stormwind,” I asked on a whim. “I know some things, but I don’t know what all has been exaggerated or downplayed. Did you know there was a time when I seriously considered sailing here to make my fortune in your army?”

  “Truly?”

  “Two decades of service in exchange for fair pay and a guaranteed plot of land that I would completely own and bequeath to my heirs in perpetuity, even a minor noble title if I made the cut for the Brotherhood of the Horse. Is that really how you do things, or was it just more of the ‘grass is greener on the other side’ type of thing?”

  “Foreigners do need to pass through a few additional hoops,” Lothar replied, the look in his eyes having changed once again. “But we would have been privileged to have you.”

  Lothar gladly told me of his homeland. Its lands, its people, and its history that I only had the tales of murderers and my own haphazard deductions to piece together before.

  When the Last Prince came to settle his new country, he was already resigned to the mistake his father made in sending him away, and the consequences of it. When the summons arrived to attend his father’s funeral, he sent the messenger back with a letter to the Assassin’s Guild that it was not their place to summon the lowliest of worms, never mind the rightful liege lord of united humanity.

  He declined the ‘invitation’ and promised to kill any who came south to cause him grief. He didn’t return to Arathor, the assassins didn’t come south because they were too busy reaping what they sowed, and the rest was history.

  It was a history Lothar was very proud of. The First King of Stormwind had been determined to turn his new country into an even greater nation than the Empire had been, to keep everything they got right and get right everything they got wrong. He hadn’t succeeded, but his heirs eventually succeeded for him, at which point the Arathi Bloodline retired from rule in order to enjoy the fruits of their long labor without responsibilities.

  Now, Stormwind was about as large as any three of the Old Kingdoms combined, even disregarding the land claims here in the Burning Steppes. They were the only human kingdom that broke the mold of Dalaran's monopoly on mages. Even the Northshire Monks kept somewhat separate from the greater Church, and their powers were no weaker for it, even as their conscience was cleaner.

  Lothar expected their convictions to be sorely challenged soon, now that the power earned through a lifetime of pacifism was less than what the Knights of the Prophet’s Guard could do after a mere few months of training under me.

  For all that he loved his country, though, the Brotherhood of the Horse was where Anduin Lothar’s fondest memories were.

  Despite all that, during most of the storytelling the prevailing emotions in Lothar’s voice were the dark ones, though he tried to be stoic. Hindsight had turned every good memory into proof of ignorance, every worthy act into a failure to do things that actually counted, all the triumphs of his life were now the foolishness of the willfully blind, to him. Medivh had ruined this man.

  Even his merry and heartfelt stories of how he rose through the ranks of the Brotherhood of the horse after entering it under false name, even those were tainted by his failure to notice everything about Medivh that was all wrong, in hindsight.

  Now, here, him telling me all of this, even this was steeped in pain. In shame. Anduin Lothar had just told me his entire life’s story, but he didn’t do it because he thought my random question about his country was a good opportunity to strike up a friendship, he was giving me his confession.

  “Medivh never lied to you,” I told him. It was night now, and the atmosphere in my tent was only heavier for it. “For most of his life Sargeras was more of a tagalong parasite than an influence. At most your friend suffered blackouts when the demon temporarily overwhelmed him. From the sounds of it, he still reasserted himself at the end, when he heard your voice.”

  “Like it matters now,” Lothar said bitterly. “Even if you speak the truth that he was accomplice to none of it, what difference does it make? Llane is dead, Taria is dead, the child they might have had will never be born, Huglar is dead, all the hundreds of people in the Royal Keep at the time are dead, the demon only needs to overwhelm Medivh for a moment and the tragedy will just repeat, there is no coming back from this.”

  I said nothing. What could I? Everything he said was true.

  “I am not here in good faith,” Lothar said then, trying and failing for the first time to meet my eyes.

  The Light alone gave me the strength of will not to react overtly. First Antonidas almost dies to bring me that sword, and now comes this. There was nothing to laugh about in any of this, so why did Odyn talk that way? What else was coming? What could possibly overshadow all this?

  “I’ll arbitrate the Council like you asked,” Lothar promised. “I won’t sabotage it. I’ll be as neutral and fair as I can be. I’ll even pledge what troops I can spare to your campaign, if you can stomach their presence after this.”

  “But that’s not why you’re here.”

  “No.”

  “You’re here because of me, the attention I might draw when you’re right there next to me.”

  “I am.”

  “You knew from Harthal how quickly I could travel, you knew I could have gone to Stormwind City and back on my own to heal that poor comatose mage, if you but asked. But you still chose to bring him here in that state.”

  “I did.”

  “You brought him here because now it makes three. You, me, and the only living proof that the demon is capable of failure.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re here to use us as bait to draw Medivh out.”

  “Yes.”

  The wine had long since finished. The soup was cold and untouched. Mere embers remained in the firepit now, outlining Lothar’s face. With his sunken eyes and tired soul that was barely a step away from falling in the void of self-loathing recrimination, he looked to my eyes like a corpse that forgot to rot.

  It was good that I came this far south. “I forgive you.”

  Anduin Lothar took a slow breath. It shook going in. It shook just as much coming out.

  I watched the man. I thought about what Odyn said to me. I had no doubts whatsoever that, whatever he considered entertaining, nothing about Sargeras fell in that category.

  Which could mean only one thing. “It won’t work.”

  Lothar clenched his fists. And his teeth.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do better by you.”

  “Keep your apologies, Prophet.” Anduin Lothar said hollowly, looking down at his hands. “I deserve none of them, not after this.”

  “What good fortune for you, then, that it’s not up to you to decide that.”

  Medivh had truly ruined this man.

  But even here, at his lowest, the worst thing Anduin Lothar did was not ask for my personal preference as to how he should help, when he came to ally with me against the true enemy. Of his own initiative.

  This was Azeroth’s minimum standard of nobility. This is what passes for moral failure here. This is Azeroth’s humanity.

  This world is truly wonderful.

  here.