There were several practical reasons I could have claimed for choosing this place. Old Thaurissan was already a barren ruin on account of Ragnaros, so collateral damage would be minimal. It was also the spot in the Burning Steppes that was least haunted by elemental creatures, on account of Lucifron using up all the embodied entities that had been here before. I could even make the tourist argument and say I wanted to see it up close, since last time I’d only seen the place through the scope of my rifle while sniping earth and fire manifestations with holy bullets of smiting.
But mainly I came here for two other, related reasons.
The first was that Old Thaurissan was both a vector and a valve for Ragnaros’ emanations into the rest of the Burning Steppes. My second sight could see the shattered lichtenberg patterns of what used to be a ley line nexus. This place was a magma elemental spawning pool, and not for any natural reasons. The Land’s blood, the veins that should have belonged to the long-dead land spirit of this place, they were literally molten. And like anything on fire, it had its equivalent of smoke. Smog that seeped on into the rest of the Burning Steppes like pus through the ground and unseen miasma by air.
Whether I did something amazing or something dismal here today, there was no other place in actionable distance where the state of things was so well fit to stymie whatever consequences this is going to have, for good or bad.
The second reason was that it would be a shame to poke a galactic threat where the merely planetary one couldn’t witness it, and be thereby driven to some manner of reaction. Which in turn would let me see what power Ragnaros can bring to bear remotely.
“Everyone’s in position, sir,” Aedelas told me. “Least I think that’s what those signals from the dark iron medic priest lady mean.”
I’d come all the way here on foot, but my knights and Richard had come ahorse, and the other worthies had followed as well, with decently-sized parties. I didn’t tell them to come or stay, I was ambivalent about them being here for this, but they made their own choices.
Dagran Thaurissan himself was watching from a far-off hill, the one closest to the route back to Blackrock Mountain. Despite me flipping the board so we were suddenly enemies. Or because of it, rather, he’d taken this opportunity to escape from the encirclement that Anduin had ever so ‘incidentally’ put the Dark Irons in, when he first arrived. The others had come with men of their own to make sure the Dark Irons didn’t attack me, or because they didn’t want to be left out in the case of the Bronzebeards.
Because the Light sustains commitment, the Dark Iron Priestess had pestered my Knight-Commander until he consented to let her stand nearby, while they played their yet-to-be determined role in ‘whatever new miracle I enacted this time.’ I’d just given them instructions with where to stand in a circle around me and wait for further orders. “Alright, squire mine, get to safety now.”
“As if,” the boy muttered before scampering off to where Anduin was watching from. Since all my one hundred knights would be participating in this, Aedelas didn’t have anyone of ours to attach himself to. Normally I’d send him to the dwarves, but he seemed to have struck an inter-generational friendship with Lothar’s nephew Gavin, by virtue of choosing him as the one person he wasn’t a brat with.
It took the kid several minutes to get there, during which I steadily increased the intensity of the Light’s output through me, to see just how far ‘Apocalypse’ would go to prevent my earlier cut on it from healing.
“I understand the impulse,” Kathra’natir told me with fake sympathy. His see-through, green apparition seemed to talk to me from beyond reality, but the words actually carried to my mind through the cut from the sword. “Nonetheless, I implore you: do not aspire for unfathomably instrumental roles in the grand scheme of things, you will only be disappointed by your mediocrity. Believe me, it’s not a particularly pleasant experience.”
“Because you make it hurt, right?” Come in, oh Firelight, shine, warm, burn.
“Oh come now,” the demon tutted. “Surely one of your professed wisdom should know better.”
“Better than to blame you for all the evil you do?” Brighter, stronger, more.
“Better than to blame us for the evil you mortals unleash on each other so very easily even without our goading.”
“Are you trying to goad me with such low-effort projection?” Brighter, stronger, more.
“I would never dream of presuming to warn you against the tyranny of low expectations,” the nathrezim smirked condescendingly. Even with the Light shining so bright from me as to overpower all other color until I couldn’t even see my own hand’s outline, his apparition still took up the foreground in the corner of my eye, losing none of its definition. “The more you do the right thing, the more you go with nothing to show for it.”
“There's no such thing as doing the right thing without something to gain.” Honestly, who even came up with that argument originally? “Even if I didn’t know what karma is, I still gain experience, momentum behind my will to keep living my chosen way of life, long-term commitments from whoever I help, and always an effect on the world that will make it slightly more in line with how I want the universe to work. High-trust societies are superior to all others.”
“What if you help my sort?”
It was a shame everyone had to be too far away to hear any of this, this demon was giving me some good material. “One mistake doesn’t invalidate a lifetime of good deeds.”
“And what if all you do is in service of me and my sort?”
“Then I’d not be doing the right thing, which defeats the point you’re trying to trick me into buying and is thus irrelevant to this conversation.” Bright enough, strong enough, just a little more heat... “Kind of like you’re about to become completely irrelevant.”
“By all means, then!” the dreadlord proceeded to shift goals like sore debate losers always do. “Channel all that innate thirst to discriminate against solely us. The more you stew in your self-righteousness, the sweeter it will be to watch you be torn limb from limb by those who once professed love and loyalty.”
“See, that’s why your cosmic war is doomed.” Bright enough, strong enough, output – I see the threshold. “You don’t know the difference between children and grownups.”
“There is none when the axe swings.”
“That’s just one of – many things where you’re wrong.” Slow down, pretend strain and tiredness. If you want to help others you tell them the truth, if you want to help yourself tell them what they want to hear. The best deception is one that’s almost no deception at all, this demon – is – very powerful- “There’s a big difference none of you seem to get.”
“Enlighten me then, oh Prophet.”
“A child might be fooled into feeling that discrimination in all its forms is bad.” I reached the threshold of power overwhelming. “Being an adult is applying logic and realizing that there’s a reason why it exists.” With an exertion of my full strength, the Light at last overcame the sickness and curses, and the injury I’d inflicted on myself at the start of this trip finally healed.
“Impressive,” Kathra'natir remarked, though he only sounded more satisfied. “But it’s too late, the sword has already claimed you, do you not feel the-?“
I cut myself on Apocalypse’s edge again, twice over, both hands grabbed on the blade and squeezed so tight my blood poured out like a stream, down the edges – blood down my hands, down my arms as I raised the sword high, down my shoulders and my chest and my back, down my legs without seeping into my clothing because I knew exactly where to put it.
Beneath my feet, Light gold and blue came alight in the shape of the stave I’d been inscribing with the Arcane beneath the surface ash. When my blood reached it, it became a funnel looping back on itself, on me.
Across the veil in the Twisting Nether, Kathra’natir recoiled with a balk of pain as I began to lightforge myself.
“I used to wonder – how – any inanimate object could wreak such havoc on minds and souls and-- at such scale that the greatest of your sort can’t achieve without decades of skulking – scheming.” Lightforging myself was the most glorious exercise in futility, I had reached the limit of flesh-to-light fusion months ago, but- “The answer is – this is not a sword at all.” I lightforged myself, and from there the tainted blood, then just the taint, and finally through it the sword. “It’s you.”
The mental projection superimposed over my vision blurred and rippled to nothing, cast away like the falsehood it was. I was already looking inward, following the Light as it Revealed but didn’t Purge the demonic essence that had been seeping into me all this time, from the sword that wasn’t a sword because it was the demon himself all along. What came next – until now I’d always needed to look into someone’s eyes, but that was only because I never had a medium of connection that was better and now I did because it’s all in here with me and I see you!
The Light erupted from me, bright as a star and upward like a pillar of gold to pierce the diffuse fumes that perpetually warped the sky of these steppes from blue to grey, so close to the volcano that ruined them. The purifying emanation was just the overflow from my full exertion against this enemy – it contested my will like nothing before… But it was enough.
In the distance, Blackrock Mountain began to spew up thick, black, ash-caked smoke.
“Impressive,” grunted the demon. “But it’s-“
“- I see you -”
“-not en-owgh!“
“Now see me!”
I soulgazed a demon.
The soulgaze channeled through the Apocalypse sword and impacted the demon’s mind against mine like colliding starstones. Mine ground through his with all the irresistible heat of the primordial flame. His dispersed around mine like the fog of self-centered jaundice of someone who already knew and acknowledged every truth I could ever profess, and had chosen to dedicate his entire existence to destroying the universe that made all those truths true.
This demon was the most loathsome creature I’d ever encountered, the Light should have burned his mind to smoke. It didn’t.
Kathra’natir suffered the full onslaught of my soulgaze and was undaunted. He already acknowledged everything I stood for as being in the right, and it made no difference. The nathrezim never lied to themselves about being the villains of the universe because they didn’t need to. They were the cosmos’ foremost evolutionary and spiritual dead end, and all they wanted was to destroy the rest of us who weren’t dead ends, before we surpassed them and left them behind in the dustbin of history.
As always, evil sowed the seeds of its own destruction. If they didn’t turn their entire lives to the purpose of doing harm to us, we’d have no reason to war on them at all.
“Ignorance – of the ephemeral,” panted Kathra’natir beyond the veil. “You will never stop grasping for more – always more – no matter what you run over in your greed! Our conflict was inevitable!”
“Only because – you made it – why?” My words were just as laboured, but my thoughts began to reverb in both planes. “Because we’d – eventually – achieve a state that infringes on the Twisting Nether? Where you demons live? Don’t you – boast – that it’s ever so infinite?”
The demon snarled with gold-flaked breath and eyes half-melted blind. “Ever the fools – you don’t understand even – this much! Why should I – explain the workings of creation?!”
“You mean – like the Naaru do?” No answer save the intent of harsh growling, I was grunting out words but he only experienced my feelings and thoughts, just like I did his. “They’re native – to the Nether as well, aren’t they? It’s just – their parts of it aren’t Twisting, am I right? You made yours that way!”
“Ignorance!” The demon rasped in the throes of agony. “Presumption – hubris!”
“Little wonder you go around turning yourselves into disease-ridden bats – corrupting every civilization you find into becoming monsters! For all your boasts of superiority to us creatures of flesh doomed to die, you’re worse than all of us – bunch of genocidal lunatics! You destroyed your native homeland – and now go around doing the same to everyone else’s because you’re addicted to whatever spume you snorted to turn yourselves into this!”
Abruptly Kathra’natir tried to break from the sword – tried to break himself in half and run-
-but he couldn’t because I was in him too, now, and I had only been waiting for him to do that so I could finally discern where the main him was. “Worst part is this can only be intentional. No universe shaped by the Titans would naturally produce parasites whose only purpose is its own destruction, which means you made yourselves into this! You’ve snorted corpse stench for so long that you’re addicted to it – and like with any addicting drug – the next dose must always be bigger than the last!”
“Spoken like a true tyrant.” Despite everything, Kathra’natir’s pain just made his face twist into a grin all over again. “Every preacher is a future dictator, I see you! You cannot lie! A Prophet craves no agreement but obedience! You want them to surrender their consciousness to your assertions, your edicts, your wishes, your whims – but in the end it will be your consciousness that surrenders to theirs!”
“Thank you for showing me which part of you is the main.”
“As If I’d-”
The distance between me and my knights became nothing as my eight spirits connected my mind with theirs, all one hundred and one. All as one, they received my order. All as one, they gave their Light to mine.
I let go of all restraint and unleashed the Light in the greatest onslaught I ever mustered.
Kathra’natir died before he even had time to scream. He perished like exploding glass. He was like a thousand shards of shrapnel barbed with molten envy, scoring gouges through my animus. Each was as bad as the cuts I’d inflicted on myself with the part of him that was the sword. They hurt and they burned and they tried to rot me, until all the Sacred Power I used to destroy him was free to come back and transmute him. Turn ill will to calm, sickness to health, the parts of him that skewered me began to sublimate, slowly beginning to undo themselves so that I began to become again just myself, no matter that the part of him that was the weapon in my hands still fought…
I could see its inverse potential amidst the future’s possibilities. I could see how to turn it, how to stop it be this parody of torment and defeat. Already it was no longer sapient because I’d killed him, it would no longer be evil as soon as the Light suffuses it, entering it through the parts of me it had eaten all this time from my spirit body – strength – Light – force of will – I had them, I – I was enough! A little more time and-
Blackrock Mountain erupted.
The air rumbled, the constant spew of fumes and ash from the volcano’s mouth was blown out and replaced by a plume that was bigger, blacker, hotter – the earth shook beneath my feet and a great wave of black destruction gushed out from the fiery mouth, a ground hugging gas-particle flow coming to wipe us dead because we weren’t far enough even though we should’ve been-
“NOBODY MOVE!”
The Dark Irons didn’t listen to me, but they had a shaman with them that buried them inside a dome of earth which promptly sunk beneath the ground completely. The men of Stormwind faltered in their panic, which gave Mara Fordragon the minutes she needed to cast a dome of gold around superimposed domes from Antonidas and Hugarin, and Sylvanas and her elves who were with them too. The Wildhammers didn’t listen, but their flyers formed a circle around the rest and their woad shone brilliantly as the gryphons flared out their wings, because they didn’t forget our brainstorming about such scenarios like everyone else was doing. The Bronzebeards didn’t listen either…
But they were on the other side of us from the mountain so that was fine, because my men stayed where they were instead of breaking because our minds were still connected and I said no.
The pyroclastic flow struck us like the devil’s own club, a wave of destruction with a speed of seven hundred kilometers per hour and 1,000°C temperature.
Some men fell of their feet, but we didn’t burn and we didn’t suffocate, because a hundred Light-touched warriors were an even better foundation for a Divine Shield than the painstaking circle I’d used back in Alterac Keep for the Dome of Penitence.
The catastrophe broke against our forcefield, sparing the Bronzebeards behind us of the physical impact while Arrestor and Snarldraft blunted the heat, and Terminal filtered out the ash so they could breathe. The onslaught should still have claimed lives, but Emerentius dove down from where I had him circling too high above us to see all this time, and enveloped them in a forcefield of his own.
In a dark irony, the Wildhammers fared the worst. The Field of Wind was something they practiced religiously, something they created after the Three Hammer War to nullify the shamanic attacks of the Dark Irons that wreaked the greatest havoc against them. Against the volcano it barely held the onslaught back for a minute, before Brumean had to meld with it and turn into a foot-thick wall of ice between heartbeats. He was buffeted violently and lost much of himself as flying shards of windswept ice, but lived.
Inside, the dwarves and gryphons began to collapse from sudden lack of breath, they’d exerted themselves so much that they’d pushed even the air inside the field into their defense. For a terrible minute, I genuinely thought they’d die suffocated. Almost too late Falstad Wildhammer finally realized it was me frantically knocking on his mind and latched onto me in a frenzy to let me work through him.
They all fell unconscious anyway, but the Light I channeled through Geirrvif into him kept them alive long enough for Brumean to thaw in places, through which Phaseshift began to filter breathable air inside again.
I’d wanted to goad Ragnaros into a reaction. I got it.
I now knew that he had the power to cause volcanic eruptions without earthquakes or smoke stacks or anything else that someone might see coming, until the outburst column was already falling down right on top of you.
Belatedly, I remembered Vegvisir. Hugarin was already working a similar magic to purify the air in his area, but that still left everyone else. I called on my spirits to draw it with their spiritual bodies, and on the Light to imbue the pattern they became.
The mystical cluster emerged grand and mighty in the air and the onslaught dampened. All was still dark and thick, and liable to choke you to death if you breathed it unfiltered, but its heat became slowly less boiling, and the force steadily decreased as the stave’s charge strengthened second by second, until it was a wind only strong enough to beat you down, instead of rip the skin right off your flesh.
Why didn’t I use it before? I should have used it before – from the start – I didn’t. Why did I need to use it? I shouldn’t be in this situation, how did I let it come to this?
Watching distractedly as the spirits hastened to render the air breathable again, more second thoughts came in a tide. I should have told everyone to let me come alone, the volcano had never stopped being important in my mind, the worst-case scenarios I brainstormed with everyone else easily covered this, why-?
Impossib – through Aegishjalmur? I turned my inner eye to see – parts of the stave on my front skull were replaced with Fel symbols, how? The Veldismagn on my sternum was completely gone, the evil sword had healed the etchings, unbelievable.
This is because I left out Lukkustafir, isn’t it? I’m out here looking for evil, not avoiding it, and I found it. Though – would it actually have worked, if these magics function according to my intent? I deliberately accepted a demon into myself because I chose to risk myself in a reverse decapitation gambit. The stave should work… but what if I neglected to account for it? Some things do need to be micromanaged to work their best. Kathra’natir was able to undermine my otherwise perfect defense because I didn’t discriminate enough.
Yes.
As I hastened to restore my bone-scribed protections, I thought back, reassessing all my thoughts and actions since I made the first cut in my hand. No, it started before even that, didn’t it? I hadn’t lied about having always planned to give aerogel to the Dark Irons, but I never meant to do it in such a public way, and definitely not in such an antagonistic one. I’d meant to win them over first, or just prove my sincerity.
Even if I didn’t, I would have secretly showed it to just Thaurissan if I could manage it. I’d meant it to be a secret weapon for him to scheme on that even Ragnaros didn’t know until the Dark Iron dwarves invaded the Molten Core with mass fire immunity, unless they blew the lid to him themselves…
What I ended up doing was on my list of backup plans, but no higher than F at best. I’d rationalized it all in the moment, but I would not make the same choice now.
I’ve done a fumble.
The upset Richard caused me had made a crack in my mindset, and then the infant Naaru’s final death undermined my emotional stability immediately after. The sword – even without me interacting with it through all that, even from so far away it – Kathra’natir didn’t hesitate to take advantage.
I’d only been in contact with the weapon briefly since Antonidas delivered it, while I put it in holy flame, but it had been enough to mark me. He couldn’t influence my main aims with so little, but when the opportunity arose he inflated my anger and twisted my attitude towards my secondary aims just enough. He hadn’t planned this, exactly, I was just in his head and I knew…
But eons of experience at subverting others meant he didn’t need to. It was enough to grasp the scope of my activities even in the loosest sense, to know that even a minor bad decision could ruin everything I’d worked for. The grander the acts, the greater the risks and the most painful, lethal and widespread the failure.
I’ve just been used to – Bronzebeards, Wildhammers, Dark Irons, Stormwind, Alterac, even Gnomeragan through Gelbin – I’ve just been used in a scheme to decapitate seven – eight nations if you consider Antonidas in the future, and Quel’Thalas if I counted Sylvanas-
That was more than half of all the sane civilizations on this entire continent. And it almost worked. Might still work with what I was seeing happening above in the dark cloud.
That’s it, routine Lightforging from now on, at dawn, noon, before bed, and every time I’m about to do something important-
Dammit no, it would’ve defeated the purpose of drawing the dreadlord into a false sense of security just now – this isn’t how I wanted to be reminded of that saying about perfect being the enemy of good enough-
The ground began to rumble.
Correction – Ragnaros can cause volcanic eruptions without earthquakes until he’s good and ready to let them loose to bury you alive!
The ground trembled violently and made to spit a new canyon under us.
But now the enemy was denied, because I had Holastafur too and this time I didn’t forget.
The stave was meant to ‘open hills’ but I reversed its purpose… everywhere I could channel it but around myself. While the Dark Irons weathered the shaking and Antonidas helped Mara protect those they were with, my spirits conveyed Holastafur’s power to preserve the ground beneath the dwarfs. All the while, I Revealed the Arcane with the Light all around me in a circle through the ground, and commanded that it be healed.
Continuously.
The ground shook for a whole minute, then two, then five. Ruins shifted, hills split down the middle, the huge pillar of ash where the city center had once been trembled and roiled until it was a wide, nearly flat mound. Great big cracks split the land beneath all of us before it all died down, so deep you couldn’t see the bottom.
But where it counted, the cracks never reached higher than the last full meter of surface. The soil beneath our feet stayed firm. When the earthquake was all over, there were three small and one great circle where the earth had sunk one meter below where it used to be, but was otherwise completely intact. A sunken disk surrounded by a sloped cylinder, perfectly flat.
Even so, the sky was still rumbling. The black pitch and smoke was taking a vague shape, looming like the most suffocating nimbus around red and yellow embers that were forming an outline in the cloud of darkness that even now spewed up from the volcano’s mouth, and then two bright flames appeared in place of eyes-
Thunder crackled. Lightning scoured the pitch-filled sky. The half-formed outline in the ashen cloud was blown out with an outraged roar, the dark will in them suppressed by one even worse. Distant and removed by the Arcane’s planar wall, but bigger.
I’d felt them, thunder and lightning both. On this side, and the other. Here in the real world and over there in the Twisting Nether. Fell will had thrummed in both planes, originating in the other but affecting this one, through the lingering malaise that the Apocalypse sword had inflicted on this world since arriving.
Most of all, it reached this side of the Arcane through the shifting lump of demonic matter that the Sword of Apocalypse had become with Kathra’natir’s death, and which I wasn’t even half-way done transmuting back to health. I’d had to divert all my attention to keeping everyone else from dying to my mistake, and the Enemy had used that time and then some.
“There you are,” said a voice in my head and the sky. “The gnat that this world would put forth as my nemesis,” said a Power greater than both Kathra’Natir and Ragnaros combined.
A new outline began to form in the cloud.
“Rarely am I galvanized to preach, but when else shall I deign to do so if not now, when all are present who believe that conflict can still be solved with peace?”
The voice was the crackle of a storm and the boom of a meteor strike all at once.
“Do words actually change anything? Is this the right thing? Should I keep going on like this? Is this what living is for? Who shall I give an arrogant lecture on their way of life next?”
Twin eyes burst in gouts of emerald fire while Fel magma vents ignited across the mountain and the cloud, shaping the sky-high funnel of darkness into a furnace of endless, blistering hate.
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“These are your questions, but there are none fit to answer them. Your kings and your priests claim to possess the answers, but the former can’t think past their crowns while the latter have already cowered before mine. They’ve not given up, they have not despaired, that’s what they tell you to believe.”
The Dark Titan stood colossal above us taller than the tallest mountain, with dancing flames for hair, a sweeping beard of the same, and ash and embers shaped like molten black armor that diffused outwards, from his back like great demonic wings and a pair of horns extending from his forehead.
“You want to stop, to rest, but they tell you no.”
I…
“They tell you to stand, to trudge on, they tell you that giving them anything less than your all is to burden yourself with more regret, they tell you that to lie down and rest is to sink into an unendurable nightmare.”
… I must not fear.
“Every swindler is a self-professed prophet, every prophet is secretly a swindler, and they exist only to scheme you out of the only thing you have – the choice of what to do with this life you never chose to have.”
Like the thunder brings the light and out of the light and the grumble of the fire which overflows, so is thought. Thought becomes my word and my doing, and my doing is contained in a single act – to live. All else proceeds from this.
“And so you suffer onwards, just like the world you infest suffers under the torment of the insects running around on and under its skin, all the while wailing ‘death, death, death would be better than this!’ Your preachers charge you with life, and they make you pay for it with toil while telling you the only truth is abnegation!”
Abnegation? Not hardly, those who shape the ages were always either the most dramatic or the center of the biggest dramatics. For those who wielded the Light that was twice as true. The Light is the force of Creation, that means it’s strongest where there’s the most room and need to create, whether it be where no order has been imposed or where so much chaos has been inflicted that the order – the Arcane itself is eating itself, breaks down to Fel-
“A prophet craves obedience, not agreement. He wants you to surrender your consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes and his whims. He never tells you that his consciousness is surrendered to yours in turn! He tells you to deal with him by means of faith and to use your force only in those ways he desires! Reason is the enemy he dreads and simultaneously considers precarious. And so he tells you that reason itself is deception, so that he may find security in your causeless belief and forced obedience!”
How was he doing this? The Avatar of Sargeras was destroyed and buried in the Tomb made by Aegwynn. The only tendril of him still left on this side of the Arcane was in Medivh, and he wasn’t here. But this was unmistakably Sargeras, and he appeared right as I destroyed Kathra’natir – he must be connected to all of the demons somehow, or at least the dreadlords because when I killed this one I got his attention – no, even worse-
“This thing you call prophet is a baser creature than he will ever let you discern, all he seeks is power over reality and over men's means of perceiving it, your mind, the power to interpose your will between existence and consciousness. He deludes himself that if he has you fake the reality he orders you to fake, it will actually become reality! His lust is to command, not to convince – conviction requires an act of independence and press on the absolute of an objective reality, and the only objective reality he has is one he will never confess: your gods are dead!”
The Arcane – the Arcane in this place was damaged, but the rends had long since been filled by Ragnaros and his court of corrupted emissaries, all of them beholden to a different power than this. Whatever Sargeras was doing had not set itself against that interference. It had to be the Apocalypse, then, just like before, this lump of evil that resisted all it could of my transmutation. It was failing to my onslaught, but narrowly enough that I had no mind or strength to spare for what the late nathrezim’s master was using it until now, using the dreadlord demon’s corpse for until-
“Your gods are dead! There are none left to send you prophets, and so you get this tiny bug gawping speechlessly up from the bottom of my hoofprint! Look at him, he bandied words with minions, but when he finally draws the attention of those he professes to speak for, he is mute!”
Sargeras – he’d been on the lookout since Alonsus almost defeated him with just my warning. He'd been on the lookout ever since then, lookout for me… and he took offense to me completely ignoring him this whole time, unlike Kathra’natir.
“Look at him, this parasite in spirit! Just like your kings take your material wealth for themselves, so does the spiritual parasite plunder the ideas created by others, your hopes, dreams, your beliefs! And so he falls below the level of a lunatic who creates his own distortion of reality, to the level of a parasite of lunacy who seeks a distortion created by others!”
He was using Apocalypse to do this, even as I lightforged and transmuted it into something neither it, he nor I knew what would become of it… he was using it to act on the world despite being locked out, how? Show me, let me see, feel, trace, diagnose everything, substance, energy, motion, what power is he using to do this, what spell has he woven, what states of matter, what are the forces, show yourselves to me, Arcane Reveal Thyself-
… that’s it?
“There is only one state that fulfills the longings of such a creature, the futile longing for infinity, non-causality and non-identity: death!”
As if to scoop all its wrath into one fist, Sargeras swept his hand through the pitch-dark sky and smote me with a lightning strike against which there was no defense.
CRACK-THOOM
It wasn’t lightning, it was destruction in the image of lightning, projected directly into me – teleported into me past any and all protection, by homing in and swapping all the destructive fury of the volcanic thunderstorm, with the tiny traces of demonic matter that were still stubbornly inside me from the demonblade.
I shed my mortal coil.
The attack hit.
Right there inside the impenetrable shield of Light cast by me and one hundred and one men of grace, my inter-atomic bonds were completely obliterated.
The forcefield popped like a soap bubble. As the blinding flash of light from the not-lightning strike faded, a vaguely shapeless haze of dust and vapors was revealed where my body had been, backlit in the shadowrealm by an imponderable mass of fragments of spirit freshly shattered to ten thousand pieces.
“Witness,” the image of Sargeras commanded the horrified onlookers from four different species and nine nations. “Destruction is the only end that a false prophet’s creed will ever achieve, for they never allow the ravages wrought by their acts to make them question their doctrines! Did he profess to be moved by love? Yet even tens of thousands of victims of his own countrymen were not enough to deter him. It is because the truth about his soul is worse than the obscene excuses you have allowed him, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the false hope he preaches is a means to nobler ends. The truth is that the only end is and always has been this – death! Death and – what?”
I returned to my spirit.
“What the…”
Spirit, heal thyself.
“Impossible.”
On the contrary, it wasn’t that long ago that I tore my own spirit to pieces all by myself, and this time I didn’t need to spend the motes on other people.
“This must be some jest.”
Arcane, heal thyself.
“Absurd.”
Like I once did to restore the nine spirits when they tried to merge, I commanded matter to return to what the Arcane remembered it had been a few moments ago, and restored my body.
“No one – never has – no…”
The Light is the force of creation, that’s why it’s strongest when you’re opposing great destruction – it invests itself proportional to how great the ruination you’re opposing seeks to become. For me who was trying to make a better future – a better world… Wasn’t it only logical that it would take my side the strongest when everything worthwhile was coming to ruin? The Light worked easiest when I set to fix existing things because the Arcane already knows what it should be, but the strength of the Fire was incomparable when creating new things, and now…
Now I understood how Sargeras was doing this. I’d even seen it before, it was the same thing Kil’Jaeden did on Draenor to intimidate Illidan back into service, to make him believe he was much bigger and powerful than he was, when in fact he wasn’t even there.
And thanks to Antonidas, I had all the insight and skill in manipulating the Arcane that I didn’t have before.
“Norgannon you trickster, is this your gambit?”
I spread up and outwards, through the Power he’d just thrown at me and was no longer his, because he’d turned it against itself as much as me. The last vestiges of demonic inertia that had been fighting me were no more. The transmutation of the sword-that-was-never-a-sword was complete. The power was free for the taking, here, on this side of the Arcane where only my will now held sway. I took it, and I lightforged everything it was and everything it touched.
“No, the scope doesn’t compare, only the flavor – the Keepers? Which one of you escaped, which are you?”
I spread my spirit out through the exotic substance around me that this world had seldom seen the like of before. I drew it to me and spread out through it from me, this condensed matter made up of atoms in energy states of a sort that I had only ever seen once in another life, all too briefly in a laboratory experiment. I took hold of them with my will, these particles of primordial soup each as large as two microns from edge to edge, and I chained them together in a hexagonal lattice, then two sets, then four, then sixteen, then 25, 65,536, 4,294,967,296, 1.84467440737e+19 and more, more-
“You dare!”
I wove the Arcane into the newest and oldest pattern. It sunk deep in the earth. It spread far over land. It climbed high in the air.
“It is not given to mortals to infringe on the Titans’ sovereignty!”
On the surface of a garden planet within an atmosphere of dense ionized gas that decreed it impossible, I alchemized a body made of space dust and cosmic phenomena. My alchemical paradigm was different from that of this world, but eight spirits of nature were here to lend me theirs, along with a ninth newborn-that-was-also-ancient taking shape inside the earth beneath me. My senses – weren’t. I perceived too little and too much…
But there was an angel lending me her wings in the spirit world, and then her Lord’s mind connected to ours and let me see myself as he saw me.
“To think I’d live to see even this infringed, Aman’Thul you fool, was there no line you didn’t cross?”
My spirit settled in a body made of atoms linked by high energy electrons with orbits big as blood cells. The roiling raffle of smog and powdered stone coalesced into a humanoid shape at titanic scale. Black and grey shades gave way to flares and sunbeams as I lightforged plasma and grain from the earth to the sky. The electrical storm that had been crackling and shrieking up and down particulate pathways, it settled into soft, quiet arcs that outlined my new form.
“You are not worthy.”
“Ah, Sargeras.” I told the Lord of the Burning Legion, the greatest enemy of all existence in the universe. We stood face to face and eye to eye. Taller than the tallest mountains of the world, my voice reverberated all across the steppes and the mountains. “You were so promising back in the day. Born from a worldsoul and matured within a planet in the Great Dark Beyond, you were the mightiest warrior of the Titan Pantheon. You were brave, proud, altruistic, just, and unable to conceive of pure evil, the cosmos all titled you ‘The Defender’ and ‘Noblest of All.’ You rooted out the great parasites of spume and flesh wherever you found them. When the chaotic demons of the Twisting Nether began to threaten the Pantheon's work of bringing order to the Cosmos, you went to battle them and defeated all Fel creatures you encountered with no duress or toil. You even took on a student that became like your son!
“You were the Champion of the Pantheon, you had the best power, the most straightforward job, an adorable apprentice, family, friends, even a great aesthetic! You had everything going for you, you should’ve been fantastic. But there’s only so much respect I can have for a Titan who unironically calls himself the Supreme Leader of the Burning Legion and sets his face on fire. And why? Because one day you found out there were evil forces opposing your noble goals, and for the first time since the dawn of time you failed to immediately figure out a way to permanently defeat them? Which somehow made you decide that all of us life forms more complex than dual-layered plasma balls had to be murdered horribly so that the demons couldn’t do it first… Which you decided to accomplish by turning those same demons into your army so they’d be the ones to do it anyway! It’s ridiculous!”
“How are you doing this?” Sargeras’ voice was like a furnace bellows.
“I begin each day by telling myself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of-“
“Do not play coy with me!” Roared the apparition. “Who taught you this? Who infringed on the Pantheon’s secrets?!”
“Oh come now, Rydberg matter isn’t that complicated.” Ash parted from dust, then the dust parted from vapors and floated to the ground, leaving gossamer strands of pure mist to dress me in a coat white as cumulous cloud. It covered all the bystanders down below and much further for miles. It was a grand symbolic gesture with no teeth, because this was as far as I could stretch the unique conditions enabling this. “When electrons gain energy, they move up to higher energy levels, which puts them further and further away from the atom nucleus. There’s nothing here that relies on anything more complicated than that, the energy state is merely a lot higher than usual.”
“Rydberg matter…”
“Admittedly, atoms more than one or two microns-thick are an outlier that should have long since decayed, but keeping that from happening is just an exercise in preventing electrons from escaping as photons, which anyone can do by inverting the most basic light cantrip.” On my left shoulder, Geirrvif the Valkyrie took visible shape from mist and glowing light flakes that gradually smoothed out to look like a near perfect projection. “See? This display is grandiose and all, but it’s just a hologram in the end. A fancy illusion. And you just used up the thing you were leveraging to maintain it in your attempt to kill me, while I’m all here, on this side.”
“Rydberg matter – hologram…” Sargeras muttered, staring at me with hard, unblinking, flaming eyes.
“I told Anduin you wouldn’t take the bait.” From the earth to the sky, smoke and dust came together in the vague seeming of my unremarkable staff of thorium. “You’ve made a liar out of me.”
The Titan continued to stare at me, still not a blink. “Making liars out of your sort is a favorite labor of mine.”
“Ah, so you admit even for you it takes effort.”
“Seeing your sort console yourselves all the way to the grave is something I enjoy almost as much.”
“And when you can’t?”
“It has never happened, it is only ever a matter of time.”
“The War of the Ancients says otherwise.”
“That you believe that war to be over is why you are a fool.”
“That you don’t believe that war to be over is why you were delusional enough to think you could win the Northrend War with just a golem body.”
My taunts had no effect. The Dark Titan just stood there and stared at me, and he still hadn’t blinked. “Rydberg matter…” He repeated, why-? “Only one other ever used that nonsensical name, it can’t be – it’s you!”
Pardon?
“YOU!”
“Me?”
The great apparition of flames and starmetal suddenly began laughing uproariously. “Aha-hahahaha!” he laughed and laughed and the world laughed with him for fear of what would happen if it didn’t. “Hahahahahahaha! I can’t believe it! His Tiny Sanctimony made himself a liar, and long before we even met! Not even large enough to see over measly mountains yet a self-righteousness so great as to overshadow the pride of Aman’Thul himself, you brat!”
Me what?
“You came into being preaching self-determined life, yet to prove your point you chose death! Death, even more readily than I! And why? All so you’d come back as an insect! Ahahahahahahahahaha!”
What is he talking about?
What?
Oh Odyn… I’m not him though.
the raven thought at me ruefully.
Didn’t you say you planned to summon Tyr’s soul back, now that you have his body?
What even have you been doing up in your fortress that you’re so-?
“-hahahahaha – ahaha – ah – ohhhh…” The Dark Titan finally wound down from his fit. “Alright. Alright, I’ll play your little game.”
What game?
“After all, you went so far out of your way to do all this for the sake of the most pathetic races in all the cosmos!”
I still don’t know what ‘this’ is. “The opinions of omnicidal maniacs are irrelevant.”
“The elves will not help you.” He didn’t rise to my bait. “They will sooner send their secret police to magically mind-control their own populace rather than give more than a token gesture of help to the humans.”
“Maybe.” But not that big of one, that was precisely what the king of Quel'thalas did to the leaders of the elves who protested in the streets to join the Alliance instead of the Horde, during Burning Crusade. Even before then the high elves didn’t do anything during the first war except give a few ships, and wouldn’t have done anything during the Second War either, if not for Alleria Windrunner.
“The mages will not help you, they will continue to hound your steps for as long as you exist to be a living reminder of their shame.”
“Maybe.” Dalaran’s excessive abuse of the Arcane was the only reason the Burning Legion found a way into the world again since the War of the Ancients. More, those well-intentioned like Kel’Thusad could become monstrous threats even without demonic whispering. Even if Dalaran got over itself, the rest of the world had its own, justified prejudices. From Thoradin himself to the present, the mages of Dalaran were never particularly trusted, and for good reason when you considered the things they got up to during the Magocracy days, which may or may not be returning.
Alterac and Stormwind were anomalies with their adoption of home-grown mages, but the other kingdoms would rather send all of theirs to become Dalaran’s problem rather than have them at home. In the Second War which had better not happen anymore, all the monarchies of the north were so wary of Dalaran that they did not accept mage advisors to protect their kings, which left no one to detect the mind manipulations of Deathwing during the Alterac crisis.
“The Church of this dustheap may kowtow to you for now, but even that won’t last before they sour due to your pursuit of the favor and arts of all those they hold in suspicion.”
“Maybe.”
Sargeras laughed at me again. He wasn’t entirely wrong to do so.
The Church of the Holy Light considered Dalaran and its magi as heretics for centuries, and even now they were not fond of them. At different times the Magocracy was either in a cold war with the clergy or outright excommunicated. Even after the Kirin Tor took over and the Church softened its stance to accept those who don’t practice dark magic – something that may reverse if the Kirin Tor doesn’t hold new, legitimate elections soon – the prejudice remained strong well into the old future. Even some knights of the Silver Hand showed hostility to Rhonin and all the others wizards and mages, seeing them as damned souls.
“Hahahaha – ahh…” Heat hazed around the Dark Titan’s burning mouth as he beheld me mockingly. “The Portal will open.”
“Maybe.”
“You will never find it before the time is fulfilled.”
“Maybe.”
“You will rue this dismissal you pretend, and it will be soon.”
“No it won’t.” With a motion that was as swift as a cloud could move and still lasted almost a whole minute, I swung my misty staff through Sargeras’ projection.
Both him and me dispersed at once back into smoke and memory.
I gathered myself down. I returned all of myself to my flesh. It felt like a too tight fit, but only briefly as my spirit relaxed again and my aura loosened back out like a three-dimensional limelight. Far away in all direction were voices, some mute, some shouting. All around me there was a press made up of eight spirits of flame and water and air. Beneath my feet….
Beneath my feet, Ragnaros was taking out his humiliation on the only victim in reach. The Spirit of the Land-that-Was. The Light that I had called had overflowed far beyond my hasty, improvised design. The Spirit-that-Once-Was now stirred hopelessly, ancient memories and lingering spirit motes struggling to come together again through a lifeless reflex of will resuscitated by cosmic accident.
Around me, cosmic matter was rapidly ionizing, reacting and decaying to planetary substance, but wasn’t all gone yet. Within me, my spirit had not diminished. Inside it was the Light, brighter than ever. And inside it, beyond it, I could, for the first time, glimpse the Flame itself leaning in, drawn by the potential in this moment.
I gave it all to the earth. I let the Eternal Fire pour out, even as I burned.
The Firelord recoiled from the baptism that could scour even him away. The Light sublimated the taint. Prime matter became earth and quintessence. The damaged and missing gaps in the substrate of reality gained new building material. The Arcane that had been impossible to repair was instead rebuilt wholesale.
The ley lines healed. Not everywhere, but enough. The land drew the first clean breath in two centuries. Within the earth, the long-dead spirit-that-was… reincarnated.
The miracle that Granodior had run away from all his life, a corpse had managed it with a hope and a prayer.
A newborn elemental spirit. Not of fire, water air or steam, but of earth. Its mind was new, its inheritance was the will of the old, its spirit was raw and formless, and its body was the land itself that should not be dead.
As soon as I withdrew and left this place, this nascent soul would be seized upon by the Firelord to be tormented and defiled.
I opened my eyes and beheld prima materia. In my grip, the swirling energy-matter that had been a demon in the shape of a sword was now prime matter teetering on the edge between all and nothing, waiting to become.
I sent it all down.
The End is the Beginning.
The newborn spirit flinched away from it, in pain and fear both. Its senses already weren’t its own anymore, the first thing he’d felt on birth was these vast steppes that should be neither black nor dead, and now his nascent soul was being bombarded by Ragnaros’ spiteful pettiness.
So I commanded that piece of the Untwisted Nether to become a massive totem that spanned all the space from beneath my feet to the bedrock, an all-new Pillar of the Earth.
The earth quaked with the Firelord’s last rage, but now it did nothing. He’d already spent the bulk of his gathered strength on the eruption, and this Pillar would have weathered that without harm regardless.
The Spirit of the Steppes woundedly crawled inside the Pillar. Near my feet, the hard ground grew a misshapen hand. It touched my ankle in fervent gratitude before it broke back down to dust. The spirit closed himself off, closed the Pillar off from everything else, and curled up at its center to huddle and to heal.
I sat down.
I just… I sat down for a while.
I only started thinking again when the Dark Irons furtively came out of their hole in the ground.
“Volcanic soil is one of the most fertile kinds there is.” My spirits conveyed my voice over hills and slopes, straight to Thaurissan’s ear. “Yet this entire country’s worth of prime terrain is all a blasted wasteland. Fire is a purifier, yet this doesn’t apply here. This can only mean that Ragnaros himself isn’t following his nature. Which can only happen if there was a pact included as part of his summoning, but with something else. Something inherently corrupting. Evil.”
Ragnaros was an enemy of life from very early on, it took Odyn and Tyr together to take him out of the fight. But that’s only because the Old Gods got to the world first, and he still had the nature of a fire elemental the whole time. Fire is a purifier. Including of spume from the fleshy ones that ruled him. The only explanation, then, was that he was pushing his might into everything in overdrive, so that any seeds, grains, roots, all new growth was scorched while still beneath the earth.
Now, he couldn’t do that anymore. Not everywhere, not here. The ley line nexus was healed and no longer his to control or cast through. The prime matter had been entirely transmuted to new substance, but before that it had spent millennia internalizing the qualities of a sword. Now, that legacy manifested as an invisible slice across the Burning Steppes. A boundary in the shape of a severance in the Arcane itself that affected only the will that had burned here before. On one side of the boundary was Ragnaros. On the other, not.
“Spiritual defenses should be sufficient,” I told the Dark Iron ruler. “But this place can still be damaged physically, I imagine. As long as that doesn’t happen, Ragnaros’ foul taint in the ground will be stymied, and the lands beyond this invisible line will eventually be rich and verdant again, free of his taint and sight. You can plan your war against him there… Or you can break the pillar with your digging machines and let Ragnaros twist the newborn spirit of the land to evil ends, like he’s done to all of you. The choice is up to you, but hear me – this is the last of unearned goodwill I show your people. If you harm this spirit, I will avenge myself upon you on his behalf with all the power and aid at my disposal.”
I cut my connection to the Dark Irons before I could hear a reply. I had no patience left for them right now, or much else.
For a while, I just sat there again. Not thinking at all.
But all good things come to an end.
“I need to learn how to be a druid.”
No one but the spirits were here to hear me mumble… But that reminded me. Odyn, did you foresee any of this?
Of course it wouldn’t be that easy.
I adjusted my stature back to a normal human height and called Ironband to me. The spirit of the Earthen Ancestor answered my summons with quiet reverence. I didn’t call for Forgewright but he came too anyway. “This spirit below – watch over him. Teach him, if you need to and he lets you. Be kind.”
“I will.” “We will.”
Geirrvif sent a thought to my mind, so I added: “The High One will send a valkyrie to stand guard, but everything else I entrust to you.”
“It is our honor.” “It is a privilege.”
“It’ll be another month or so before we close in on Grim Batol proper, probably longer depending on how long the last work in Uldaman takes. I’ll contact you when it’s time to go in, if you still want to.”
The two spirits bowed deeply.
The other dwarves weren’t nearly as calm when I climbed out of the basin and told them the expedition will go on as planned.
“What was that? Who was that?! Is this why you’re doing what you’re doing? There’s something coming? That’s what’s coming?! Mountain-sized giants made of metal and fire arguing over which of us to stomp on like ants?! This is madness! Insanity, what can we – what can anyone do against that?! And you just became king too! King of your own nation! You’re the king of your own country, nothing else could possibly help you better – to face whatever that thing was! You’re being called to rule, people are begging you to be their sire, you can’t – you have no stake in Grim Batol, we barely have any at this point and it’s our old home, but even after all that you still think we – you still think this is more important?!”
“Yes.”
Kurdran Wildhammer swallowed back a hot, feathery tightness and didn’t dare speak to me again for days.
What, did he think I’d come all the way out here just to pull this one last shock and awe display before leaving?
“Can you blame them?” Sylvanas asked when I voiced that thought away from the dwarves later. Her usual calm was visibly strained and the glow in her eyes half as bright as usual. “How could they know better? How can any of us? Nothing you do makes sense.”
“If you really believed that you wouldn’t be here.”
That evening around the fire, I explained to everyone what they’d just seen. I didn’t make any categorical predictions about the future, but was otherwise very thorough about Sargeras, the Burning Legion, and the various troubles headed our way. Those that Dalaran and Quel’Thalas already knew everything about, and all others I could remember.
I told them about the other continents and what could be found there. I told them of the Great Dark Beyond. I told them of other planets. I told them about the Twisting Nether. I told them about the Naaru. I told them of the Eredar and the Draenei. I told them about the Dark Portal and where it certainly wasn’t going to be anymore. I told them about the orcs. I told them about the Alliance of Lordaeron.
I even told them about the perils of necromancy and how the demons might turn it to their ends, depending on whether or not we saw the emergence of a Lich King and Frostmourne. I didn’t name names to avoid pre-crime problems, but otherwise was very graphic about what abominations of flesh might be sewn up.
I told them all the strategies the enemy might use, that I saw in my ‘visions’ of the future that no longer was. I told them what the forces of the sane might do in response or to get ahead, and what worked and didn’t.
A repeat of my feat of today was, sadly, extremely unlikely. The unique factors that came together to enact this result were probably impossible to reproduce.
I apologized for the lapse in judgment that almost got everyone killed. Everyone looked at me like I was insane.
The talk stretched late into the night, then all the way to dawn, then it continued through the rest of the next day too, until it was evening again. At some point part-way through, Gavin Lothar spontaneously developed Light powers from sheer righteous affront.
The Dark Irons never joined us despite us leaving a gap in the sentry perimeter just for them, but they didn’t run away back to Blackrock Mount either.
When we finally dispersed for rest, I didn’t sleep. I stayed with Richard and Antonidas until they teleported back to Alterac, from which only the latter would return in a day or three, and then retired to my tent to be alone and think. Sat there just turning everything over in my head until I ran out of thoughts too.
It was while I was at my desk, staring at nothing with my mind blessedly blank and silent, that Falstad Wildhammer came to me.
He didn’t speak a word. He fidgeted near the entrance, before taking a deep breath and marching over as if meeting his death. He stood before me, open and ready. When I put my hand over his eyes and made to call down Power, he pulled it off and stubbornly stared into my eyes, daring me to refuse. It was clear what he wanted.
Our soulgaze was fraught but cleansing like none before. Despite all my prior assurances, he’d thought accepting my offer would mean closing the door on his old life. He had the lowest opinion of himself of anyone, believing that he didn’t have enough inside him to do right by more than one duty. He believed he’d have to give up all his past ways, and attachments, and all the powers that he’d worked his whole life for, what a silly idea.
As soon as he grasped the true scope of things through our soulgaze, his commitment was instant and complete. The Light ignited in him so strongly that he didn’t even need an adjustment period, I was able to lightforge him on the spot. There was a knot in his spirit where a second one was tied, and I lighforged that too. Far outside the tent, Hestra the gryphon gave a loud, piercing screech as she erupted in a golden column of brightness that pierced through the night air.
I learned that Falstad’s woad tatoos were also his wind totems, so I lightforged those too. As soon as I did, the spirits of the winds of Aerie Peak zeroed in on the holy power that suddenly sated their eternal hunger, and poured through the woad lines into our midst to bask in the Aura of Vigor that I’d just woven from Falstad’s animus. They crossed time and space from half-way across the continent just to be with him. They blew my tent away so far and so wildly that it took days to find it again.
When I was finished, Falstad still didn’t know what to say. He just stood there, all wobbly and sleepy-eyed even as his hand gripped my forearm in a stone-hard grip. My Paladins – one and all they were absolutely remarkable, but this one – he was strong.
He fell asleep on his feet. I had to catch him and carry him to my bed, where he curled up to doze in a cuddle pile with the spirits of the sky of his homeland.
I shaped the earth into a bunch of privacy screens around the bed and went away to let him rest.
Not long after, I was standing around looking up where Hestra was doing brightly shining loop-de-loops in the black night air, with an ethereal copy of her saddle full of what could only be Falstad’s dreaming astral projection. He was laughing joyously, shouting orders to the other gryphons that were joining them up there, all riderless but enthusiastic as they skimmed the currents. It was quite the precious sight, really. He had no idea that it wasn’t a dream.
I was right.
Dwarves were, at the end of the day, most adorable.
Eventually, Anduin Lothar came to stand with me, and he brought Mara Fordragon with him. Just as I requested in the message I sent Aedelas over some time ago, asking to meet them at their convenience. It was late for that boy to still be up and about, actually it was late for everyone after such a loaded sleepless night. Nobody else save us and the sentries were still up.
But my squire always insisted he could keep up with the grownups, and this time I indulged him. He was now curled up under the table over yonder as a result, dead to the world.
“I’m told the Dark Irons made new overtures?” I asked Anduin.
“They did. On behalf of their Emperor, Galgann Firehammer offered to reduce their expeditionary force to a quarter below the number of Bronzebeards, and demanded no more than advisory input to strategy meetings so long as they were allowed veto on any of their own deployments.”
“Generous.”
“Especially since Thaurissan himself will be coming.”
“Expect an overwhelming preponderance of shamanic spellcasters.”
“That was my thought as well. Do we accept?”
‘We’ he said, not ‘you.’ “Yes.” My eyes dropped from the lightforged gryphon to look pointlessly at the back of my hand. “I still think they can turn around. Am I a fool?”
“I’m the worst person to ask that.” Lothar looked westward, even though the gloom of the volcano hadn’t settled enough to let him see any further than a kilometer with his normal human eyes, in the middle of the night like this. “I was a fool for wanting him drawn out.”
“No you weren’t.”
“It’s precisely because I shared that confidence that I put you and everyone here at risk.”
Well… he wasn’t strictly wrong about that, but I pulled most of the weight there by far.
“I used to think I'd never sink so low,” he admitted, though his voice wasn’t tormented like before. “Am I a hypocrite if I start to believe in that again?”
‘That’ meaning himself. “Only if you do sink so low again.”
“Never.” But his quick confidence didn’t last. “I’ll try not to, at least.”
“Don’t sound so gloomy, I’m about to give you abundant motivation to do your best.” I looked past Anduin to the fair lady he had brought along at my request. “King Anduin Lothar of Stormwind. Could I bother you to enlighten me as to the courtship customs in your realm?”
It took her a moment, but there was no way in any world that Mara Fordragon wouldn’t understand what I meant. “Oh,” she murmured, a hand over her chest. “Oh my…”
Anduin gave a short, free laugh. He looked between her and me. He turned to face me fully, standing straight and proud like a king should. He reached out his hand and clasped my forearm in a warrior’s grip.
“For the Alliance.”
I’ve overcome the worst this world could set against me, and faced the worst the rest of the cosmos soon will. I go now to walk into the monster’s stomach, and I’m not afraid.
Ultimately, Sargeras’ problem was the same as ever – he was severely lacking in imagination.
It didn’t occur to him at all that instead of everyone else turning on me out of nowhere for entirely-by-him-contrived reasons, I’d be the one tossing the first shot across the bow by going over to my allies’ capital to set the place on fire.
I turned Anduin’s hand palm-up, reached inside the top-most bag around my bandoleer, and pulled out Strom’Kar.
The King of Stormwind went rigid as a rock, so spellbound by the thing now in front of him that he couldn’t move his fingers when I laid it down. I wrapped my own hand around his and closed his fist tight shut around the hilt.
The Sword of the First Emperor, of Thoradin the First, the Warbreaker, Ender of Wars.
“For the Alliance.”
BOOK II – The Wandering
THE END