They had barely been back to Wyrmrest Temple for two hours when Alextrasza felt the wards on the Dragon Soul begin to fluctuate, half-way across the world in the other direction from the Caverns of Time they’d just come back from.

  “Damn you, Nozdormu,” Alexstrasza cursed under her breath, rushing out of her mortal form’s rooms. “Will you ever give a straight warning about anything?” It was unfair of her, she knew that, the Aspect of Time was no less impaired than her, or any of the other three Aspects since Deathwing’s betrayal sealed most of their powers into the Dragon Soul. But it was hard to accept this was coincidence when her Bronze brother was the one who sent for her for once, and at such a time! “Selistra, get Tyranastrasz at once, send him to meet me down in the Hall of the Aspects immediately!”

  Her attendant was startled but did as she asked with alacrity.

  Alextrasza transformed back to her true form as soon as she was in a place with enough room and took flight before she was fully out of the building.

  Wyrmrest Temple was an ancient titan structure located in the Dragonblight in southern Northrend, the continent at the northern pole of the world. A colossal building built before the Great Sundering, it towered above the Dragon Wastes, tier after tier of white columns and golden domes in the style of the titans. She spared thought to none of them in her haste to reach the bottom.

  Wyrmrest Temple was supposed to be the place where all the dragonflights could meet, and for a long time it was, through the Chamber of the Aspects built into its very base. The hall used to have portals to the sanctums of each dragonflight, the places where each flight laid their eggs and cared for their young.

  But Deathwing’s betrayal had caused all but the black ones, ironically, to eventually remove their portals from this hub. Precisely because the same blacks used the hub to invade their domains and steal eggs and whelps several times too many. Or worse, as they showed with the infant blues immediately after the War of the Ancients.

  The place where the Five Dragonflights could once meet and watch over Azeroth was now the red flight’s isolated home amidst cold ice and the bones of Galakrond.

  Alextrasza almost gouged rends in the floor with her landing, failing only due to the sturdiness of Titan construction. She did not change to her smaller form, instead stopping before the archway to the Ruby Sanctum to begin activating the portal, which only she, her consort, and her right hand Torastrasza could do, the majordomo to the ruling council of the Wyrmrest Accord. The place to debrief should have been the Summit at the top of the temple, but this demanded all the haste and best shortcuts they had.

  “My lady, I am here,” her consort declared upon arrival. “What has happened?”

  “The Dragon Soul may have been tampered with,” she scowled as the archway’s magic coalesced slower than she could charge it. “It’s probably just a mortal snooping around while Orastrasz is away hunting, but best to take no chances. Assemble a deep-strike wing, we must move at once!”

  “Damn the Bronzes – I will do so immediately!”

  What does it say about me that I haven’t the heart to admonish him?

  For so long she’d cautioned her flight – and most others – against assuming that the Bronzes would actively cause the rest of them harm, even for the sake of Aman’Thul’s ideal timeline. But even she sometimes found it hard to keep such accusations out of her mind. She had just returned from a meeting with Nozdormu in the Caverns of Time, a meeting he requested with her because a future version of Nozdormu had just recently contacted him. To vouch for the character of the so-called Prophet of Humanity. In person, not just through some message via the Cavern’s time-twisting ways.

  It was the most hope any of them ever had in a long time, because such a travel could only happen if Nozdormu recovered his full powers in whatever future that version came from. That could only happen if the Dragon Soul was finally destroyed, which would return all of the Aspects’ powers. The implications of such a thing were too numerous and massive to waste time imagining.

  But it also made it more difficult to believe Nozdormu wasn’t growing callous, if he called her over there and didn’t give the slightest hint that the Dragon Soul matter would begin unfolding right now. Would it have killed him to just say so? Or, if not him, would it have killed that future Nozdormu to be forthright for once? If he had all his powers back, what could he really lose?

  I’ve grown jaded, Alextrasza wryly thought to herself as the Ruby Sanctum portal began to solidify. The obvious and most logical answer is that Nozdormu didn’t warn me of anything because there is nothing to warn me of, or little enough to work as a jest. His news would have had me check on the Dragon Soul and Orastrasz soon regardless.

  What a way to teach her a lesson about procrastination, but she couldn’t argue with its effectiveness. It was a lesson about timing as well, as apparently the Bronze flight couldn’t see anything meaningful about events across the world right now. Not the Blues either. All on account of the so-called ‘divination blackout’ as future Nozdormu apparently called it. It was why present Nozdormu had called her when he did too, so that any enemies would be blind to the flights’ own activities too, for once.

  Hopefully she’d be able to say the same thing about the results.

  The portal to the Ruby Sanctum was open too long for her liking, before her Consort returned with their backup. But it gave her time to come to terms with the fact that they were using the place they laid and hatched their young as a shortcut on the way to possible battle. Which may even lead to the next in a long line of failures to uphold their mandate as life’s protectors, rather than slayers, if whoever it was proved too obstinate.

  I will do so if I must, grimly thought the Queen of Dragons. The Dragon Soul is too dangerous to risk.

  They came out the other end of the Ruby Sanctum into the Misty Hills of the Vale of Stranglethorn, the southmost-tip of the Eastern Continent. They did so through a hole that Alextrasza had to melt with her very breath through the mountain rock.

  “Tyran, take the others and go on ahead, I will catch up with you as soon as I have sealed the entrance behind us.”

  Her Consort left with the others as she ordered them, and the Life-Binder set about the tedious task of melting the new cave mouth back shut, and then using her claim over Life to grow new jungle to conceal all evidence of their passage. This was a door they almost never opened, the best defense against those who would infringe on their young was for no one to know their Sanctum was here at all. At least, this was the best defense outside of the Broodlands of the Dragon Isles, which had been lost to them since the elemental energies there were almost completely drained by the Great Sundering.

  We should have moved the Dragon Soul before this, is that what you’re telling me, Nozdormu? The Life-Binder wondered to herself as she took to the air after her kin. But what would be the point? Mortal numbers are swelling and spreading everywhere, that one of them would stumble over its hiding spot was inevitable.

  The obvious solution was to bury it deeper, but that would just make it trivial for the corrupted blacks to find it instead, stewards of the earth that they were. The other safest place for it would naturally be with one of their flights, perhaps in the Wyrmrest Temple itself, but that was not the safest place for the rest of them. Whatever Deathwing did when he created the Dragon Soul had given him a preternatural awareness of it beyond any of them, that was why Malygos had layered so many obscuring defenses. There was too much risk he could remotely act through it, as he indeed could act through the Earth itself.

  Sintharia had proven how far any of the black flight could go even without such a powerful item boosting them, using their awareness of all things on land to detect when the other Sanctums were open and least guarded.

  The Titans did not infuse me with enough hatred of the tentacled ones, they deserved far worse than we’ve been able to give them for their part in this.

  During the long Time War against the Legion that lasted more than the history mortal races believed, conflict raged on and on to grind at the Burning Legion’s numbers by resetting the world again and again. Unknown to them all, Neltharion alone retained the mounting corruption in the earth from the other enemy. Eventually, Neltharion conscripted a goblin, of all things, and his artificer-servants to create a powerful artifact fastened to a chain forged of elementium. The item looked like a golden and perfect but otherwise featureless disk, such that you would never know it was infused with the power of the Old Gods of spume and flesh.

  During the last reprise of the Time War, the one mortals remembered as the War of the Ancients of ten millennia ago, the Aspect of the Earth called a gathering at Wyrmrest Temple and convinced his fellow Aspects and their greatest kinwyrms to sacrifice a portion of their power and infuse it into the Dragon Soul. This would focus their powers and finally defeat the Burning Legion.

  Because Neltharion had spent who knew how many iterations refining his lying, they were convinced to accede, while Neltharion remained the only one who did not infuse the artifact with his power. Even Nozdormu didn’t get out of it despite being absent, as his Prime Consort Soridormi used an hourglass holding a portion of the Lord of Time's essence to infuse the artifact

  This would be revealed as the greatest collective mistake of the dragonflights, during a furious battle between the Legion and the Kaldorei Resistance. When the battle became bloodiest, Neltharion unleashed the full might of the empowered Soul, and while it certainly decimated the demons, the Aspect of the Earth then turned the weapon against his own allies, killing myriads of night elves and dragons alike. Among them was the near totality of the blue dragonflight, who might have been the ones most effective in their attempts to stop him.

  That the backlash from using all that power rent Neltharion’s body until it began to tear itself apart was little comfort, since it only made the newly named Deathwing more dangerous and thirsty for mass destruction. Most shameful of all, the Black Dragon father was able to use the Dragon Soul to seize control of all the other dragons even amidst all of that agony, including Alextrasza herself.

  I’ve grown maudlin if that’s the memory lane I’m walking, the Life-Binder thought to herself. Loss is affecting me despite all my boasts, fool Korialstrasz, why did you go so far?

  It was not in her nature to regret how well her flight took to their duty of guiding the mortal races, but she did wonder sometimes. Korialstrasz had gone above and beyond the call of duty, fighting their two greatest banes in the Black Flight after Deathwing himself. She did not blame the so-alleged human Prophet for that, but she had a much harder time not blaming him for failing to keep him alive.

  Future Nozdormu vouched for the human, but that was as much a help as added frustration, why did Krasus have to perish if their combined foresight was so formidable? Nozdormu and Rheastrasza, even Veritistrasz now claimed the human had such power over death and life as to even bring back the dead, something even the red dragons who stewarded Life could not do. Yet he couldn’t do that for Krasus?

  And for what? Because the Prophet wanted to play mind games with his fellow humans in that one castle? If so, he should have kept his future knowledge to himself instead of ‘accidentally’ revealing that Korialstrasz would have been her prime consort in the future. That knowledge had only caused added grief in her life, for it could only occur if Tyranastrasz perished. Within a single human lifetime, for the Prophet was himself just a human in the end.

  We only escaped permanent enslavement the first time – or worse – because Korialstrasz broke Neltharion’s concentration after he overexterted himself against the Blues, allowing us to counter-attack.

  Even that was no true victory, as Neltharion retreated from the field of battle, taking the artifact with him to his lair in Highmountain. The last stand of the War of the Ancients had to be won by the mortals in the end, after the dragonflights’ utter failure. Even after the war, it was the Night Elf druid Malfurion Stormrage who recovered the Dragon Soul for them, through trickery. Only for them to find out that they couldn’t destroy the weapon, never mind reclaim the power they had poured into it.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  And so they hid it in a remote corner of the world, the place now known as the Redridge Mountains, with guardians drawn on rotation from all four loyal flights, except the evermore-torpid greens. Right now it should be the ever-dutiful Orastrasz. Hopefully the fact he sent no word about this meant Nozdormu caused them unnecessary frustration as normal and it was just a false alarm-

  The skyline was rent through by a massive beam of blue energy.

  The source – that’s the location!

  Alextrasza redoubled her efforts until she was at the very limit of her speed. She nearly collided with one of the others as a result, and would have been clipped by a second beam of disintegration if a third hadn’t barreled into them both to knock them out of the sky.

  They rent a long, deep trench through the woods before they fell off the edge of the ridge they smashed through. Rocks and tree trunks buried them where they fell. Alextrasza waited for the weight above her to stop rumbling while she channeled her Eonar-given powers to heal herself and her kin of the minor damage. When the weight upon her felt stable, she transformed into her elvish form to get free, joined by the others.

  “Report!”

  Danastra, the older dragon, was too stunned to say anything coherent. It was a wonder she managed to transform to her compact bipedal form in the state she was in, but she was one of the older ones for whom it was an easy reflex. Alextrasza channeled her healing powers into her while the younger one did his best attempt, full of abject disbelief. For good reason, considering what he told her.

  The three of them were grounded here, Tyranastrasz had tried to swoop straight into the cave only to run face-first into a till-then transparent force barrier, and now Devrestrasz was the only dragon still in flight after Horakastrasz had his left leg and half his wing disintegrated. All as incidental collateral from an arcane fight between two human mages.

  Orastraz was nowhere to be seen, so either he was inside the cave, very far away, or completely annihilated like Eryna’s wing had just been.

  “Danastra!” Alextrasza barked at the dazed older dragon. “Collect yourself! Boy, Kuthul was it? How much did you spy from above? Can you lead us around the battle?”

  “I – I don’t know?”

  “I can do it,” Danastra slurred, before shaking her head as the Life-Binder’s power finally healed the last of her concussion. “Follow me.”

  Alextrasza had Kuthul fly them back above, wagering he’d be more easily missed due to his smaller size. After they changed shape back to mortals, Danastra was as good as her word, for all that was worth when a random spell flare was liable to scrape the skin off their flesh, rather than just vaporize the greenery around them.

  “They must be blacks, or blues,” the young dragon – Kuthulustrasz – muttered in increasing disbelief under his breath. “But why would Malygos turn on us?”

  “Don’t make unfounded assumptions,” Alextrasza ordered, vocalizing lower than the sound range that humans could perceive but was still received clearly by dragons, even in these forms. She was beginning to recognize one of the two magical stains in the arcane storm flares around them. “How old are you, boy?”

  “Seven hundred and thirteen, my queen.”

  That explained it, he wasn’t old enough to have been there for the Northrend War, when the master of the Burning Legion led his demons to hunt the dragonflights and drain them of their magic. He wasn’t there to see a human woman duel the Avatar of Sargeras to a standstill without help. Alextrasza and the rest of the flights tipped the scale in the final assault, but the woman had held the colossal titan avatar back all by herself for a frankly impossible stretch of time, while they rallied.

  A storm of a thousand whirling arcane bolts scoured the woods to their right, exploding tree crowns and roots alike as they barraged and deflected off of a round forcefield so thick it was almost opaque. The three dragons in elvish forms took cover, Alextrasza growing a bed of moss and humus to hide behind with nary a single leakage of wasted energy for anyone to sense. The force globe bounced to and fro, not entirely under its own power, before the barrage ended and it came to a stop in a fresh trench of upturned soil.

  The forcefield dropped to reveal an all-too familiar woman. “All these years and you still waste more power than you weave!”

  “Go back to Suramar, Mother,” a male voice came from deeper ahead, out of sight but right where Alextrasza sensed the cave to be. “This does not concern you.”

  “Anything my son is involved in concerns me!”

  “Funny, that didn’t seem to be the case for the first fourteen years of my life.”

  Another arcane exchange ensued, one that was alarmingly intense. Alextrasza weighed consequences against risks. “Kuthul,” she subvocalized amidst the chaos of the battle. “Leave. Go back the way we came and summon reinforcements.”

  “I – as you command.” Alextrasza motioned for him to wait until she felt the next great buildup of power, and timed his escape to the dust cloud that erupted, large and thick and very convenient.

  She saw us, the Life-Binder deduced, grimly pleased that she hadn’t imagined Magna Aegwynn’s brief glance in their direction. That will make this easier.

  “Where was this proactiveness in the past, mother?!” A male voice resounded over the battlefield amidst a storm of arcane lightning. “Did Sargeras still have a hold on you since he inhabited your womb for so long?”

  “Should I ask the same of you?!” Magna Aegwynn responded with a rushing wave of water that ate the lightning and toppled an elder evergreen.

  “No indeed!” The younger mage laughed bitterly. “But what else should I expect?”

  It was frankly ridiculous for dragons such as them to be sneaking around for fear of two mortals, even if they were mages. But these were the two human mages that deserved it, and Alextrasza was too old to be ruled by mere pride, never mind for such an important objective. Under the cover provided by Aegwynn’s evermore explosive and messy spell deflections and counterattacks, alongside the assisting flames of Tyranastrasz and Devrestrasz who were finally in view, the two of them managed to reach the clearing ahead of the cave.

  “Maybe you should adjust your expectations, Medivh!”

  “I have none, after all what else could it be? As soon as he lost me, who else would he go to than his second choice?” An arcane circle larger than any mortal had a right to conjure appeared above the man, rising up until it tore the world open to disgorge an enormous meteorite. “Who else could contend with the Guardian of Tirisfal but another Guardian?!”

  As if to prove him right, Magna Aegwynn responded by hurling up a powerful arcane bomb that shattered the meteor, such that it only rained destruction instead of cratering the Redridge Mountains for who knew what distance in every direction. The barrage bombarded and set fire to such a large area that they would have been caught in it just by accident if they’d been just a few meters closer.

  The sight of the human male raining arcane destruction from atop the near-dead Horakastrasz, and the roars of angry pain from Tyran, almost had Alextrasza take her full form right ten and there. Stealth would no longer avail them anyway, with him right in their path. But that was when her mind was knocked on by a spell she recognized as a blue dragon telepathic transmission.

  On accepting it, it revealed to Alextrasza that there was a blue dragon somewhere nearby that the male mage was oblivious to, one that mentally conveyed to her a plan. A plan that the blue dragon – Arcanagos, Aegwynn’s ally and companion since the Northrend War – had just put together with Aegwynn telepathically, one which would solve both their problems in a single swoop.

  The moment Alextrasza conveyed her agreement, the air was rent by a sonic boom as a wizard’s staff skewered the air faster than even her keen eye could track. It barely deflected off the male wizard’s defense enough to only gouge his side open, and utterly destroyed the forcefield blocking the cave’s mouth behind the man, before-

  “Has Aluneth finally betrayed you, mother?!“

  “▂▃▅▅▅▅▅▅ーー！！”

  “Oh, what now?!”

  Arcanagos dropped from the branches above their head and took his full dragon form right in front of them, blocking Alextrasza and Danastra from view and sight with his body, and from all hearing with his roaring thunderclap, then the fabric of the world lurched-

  Alextrasza appeared inside the cave, stumbling in place from the blink spell the blue dragon had cast on her like only blue dragons could. “Danastra!” Alextrasza barked, almost forgetting to keep it below human hearing. Outside, the magical duel intensified, the shouting indistinguishable. “Retrieve the Soul!”

  As the other dragon hastened to obey, Alextrasza turned to the front of the cave just as Tyran and Devrestrasz appeared around her in their mortal forms, one after another. The staff Aluneth hadn’t yet finished vibrating in the rock it had stuck in, when they retook their full forms. They almost couldn’t all fit in the cave, especially after Alextrasza took her true form as well, but the plan of Arcanagos and Aegwynn required it.

  The Guardian of Tirisfal teleported before them then, her robes scorched and torn and her long gold hair wild around her. “Life-Binder!” The woman shouted, though the words were only heard directly in their ears through a spell. “Arcanagos has taken my shape to distract my son, but it won’t work for long! Can you separate your purifying power from your flames?”

  “For myself and all other of my flight.”

  “Even better! When my son comes, unleash your fire upon him, all of you, no lesser distraction will occupy him! But channel your purification into me. Between myself and Aluneth, we might just scour Sargeras out of him!”

  Sargeras, here?! Inside that – what else have we missed?

  It rankled that the combined flames of her strongest flight members and herself would only amount to a distraction, but she’d seen more than enough to believe it after-

  A roar of pain came from outside, not womanly or even human, but draconic.

  “Damn, he saw through it already,” Aegwynn cursed under her breath, then her blue eyes flashed with calculation. “The plan stays the same. Aim for Aluneth!”

  Alextrazsa would dearly have appreciated a warning that the staff would vanish along with her when Magna Aegwynn turned invisible, but that was when her son, Medivh, blinked into being at the mouth of the grotto. “Lovely.” He sneered at the assembled might of three red dragons, when just one would normally send whole mortal armies fleeing. “Even more of yo-“

  “Now!” Aegwynn’s voice shouted only in their ears.

  Three great red dragons unleashed with their flame breaths upon the lone human ahead of them, even as Alextrasza diverted their purifying power into her own, and then into the – towards the staff – where was it, it was no longer there!

  “No, aim at the staff-“

  I can’t see you or it!

  A second sonic boom heralded the collision of Medivh’s forcefield with the mighty Atiesh, Aegwynn’s other staff wielded by Arcanagos, his human form bloodied and broken but still alive, though their flaming breaths wouldn't let him stay so for long!

  “Change of plans, have at him Life-Binder!”

  Twin beams of arcane energy smashed into Medivh’s defenses from both sides, from Arcanagos behind him through Atiesh, and from Aegwynn through Aluneth, finally shattering the man’s protections and leaving the way clear for Alextrasza’a purification.

  The fire of cleansing was the red dragonflight’s most sublime charge, a power that could scour as much as heal, burn as much as regenerate, that was how the red dragons possessed equal capacity for destruction, tempered only by the spring of abundant life that emerged in the wake of their cleansing fires. This human –

  The target of her cleansing was like a deep chasm full of bitter spite clogged through churning bile, it felt as if it would take all her flight’s combined powers to scour it clean… To the Dragons of Life it was given to both rejuvenate and drain life, their powers of life accompanied by power over death… She had been brought to the brink of considering necromancy a handful of times before, but never had she seen someone who was already so full of the essence of creation, except instead of the pure burning essence of her flames he was-

  “My queen!” Danastra cried in horror from behind her, where she’d been digging through the rock for the Dragon Soul this whole time. “It’s not here!” What? Impossible, she could sense its power right there- “Only the chain-!“

  “You meddling-“ Medivh snarled within the onslaught of spellfire and dragonflame. “Wretched-” their combined might was suddenly matched by a power Alextrasza had only felt once before. “ACCURSED DRAGO????N???????S????!”

  The Life-Binder barely had a moment to gape in horror before the power of the Dragon Soul unleashed upon them all. It blasted all their flames away, stole the air from their lungs with the sheer force of its explosive shockwave, and that was just the excess that the human couldn’t fit into the beam that gored Alextrasza right through from throat to spine.

  Or would have, if the invisible Aegwynn didn’t happen to be right in its path.

  The invisibility failed, revealing the Guardian of Tirisfal just barely holding back the unleashed power of the Dragon Soul, for mere seconds before Medivh roared with fury and drew from the Soul such power that he finally, utterly overpowered his mother.

  Alextrasza lurched aside at the last moment – into Tyran, no, she didn’t have room – !

  The beam that would’ve utterly annihilated her whole thoracic cavity instead only removed her right limbs and wing.

  She collapsed, vision white with sheer agony, right there amidst the stunned and defeated forms of the other dragons who’d followed her here. As she writhed on the ground, struggling to wrap her own power through her catastrophic wounds so she wouldn’t die… the Life-Binder’s vision cleared just enough to see Medivh holding the Dragon Soul half-way pointed at them. His face was completely blank as he stared at the body of his mother, whom he’d just killed by disintegrating the entire upper half of her body.

  He – didn’t see her there, Alextrasza’s mind struggled to piece together what had just happened. She was invisible – the staff went invisible with her, he – thought he was only attacking me…

  The Dragon Soul… The human – Medivh already had it. He’d had it all along, and who knew how long before this. Orastrasz – there was no trace of him left here, where was he? When had the human found him? How long ago had he been killed? How much time had the man been in possession of the Soul for, to use it with such skill? Of all the mortals – for one of the only two capable of this to find it…

  The man’s face turned to Alextrasza then, completely devoid of all feeling. As if he’d just destroyed his own heart alongside his mother’s. “Meddlesome animals.” His voice was every bit as dead as his eyes. “Alterac wasn’t enough for you. You just can’t live without doing more harm than good, even to your supposed allies…”

  Alterac – Rheastrasza –

  “I was only going to keep the blue dragon, he’ll drastically accelerate my timeline. But after this…” Suddenly his voice wasn’t dead at all. It was filled to overflowing with a bitter, black, vengeful hate. “I’m going to enjoy putting you to all the use you never seem willing to fulfill for your oh so dead masters.”

  Dead – masters – what does he-?

  The Dragon’s Soul power descended upon them then, upon their flesh, red dragons and blue both, into their bodies, on her mind, inside it to seep and fill her thoughts, displace her will like – only when Deathwing had the first time he – no, no –

  It took almost a day for Kuthulustrasz to return with reinforcements, hours of it wasted on melting a new hole into the Ruby Sanctum with his much weaker flames.

  All they found was destruction the likes they’d have attributed to the worst of the black dragonflight if not for Kuthul’s reports, and no trace of their kin for the blues to track the others. Or to bury. Mourn.

  All they knew for sure was that the Aspect of Life was still alive, otherwise the entire Red Dragonflight would have sensed it.

  It did not bring anyone reassurance.

  here.

  original story there, a cultivation story called Enlightenment Doesn't Root in Flesh. Premise is that a guy from earth is reborn in xianxialand without spirit roots or any other cheats under suspicious cosmic circumstances. He decides to reverse-engineer western mysticism from first principles and see how far it can take him.