"No. The answer before was no. The answer now is no."

"But you're going !" He'd argued all the way from the Castle, through the packed city streets and up to the guardpost at the main gate. "And if you, as Lord Commander can go, I don't see why…"

Anduin came to a stop so abruptly that Khadgar ran into him. He turned and lifted a finger. "That's right. I'm the Lord Commander. I can go where I like. I can take who I like. And I'm not taking you, so stop asking." He blew out an annoyed breath and glared into the brown eyes looking up at him. "We need to travel fast and light. It's soldiers work." His voice softened as he placed a hand on Khadgar's shoulder. "Stay here. You're too valuable to risk out there. Protect the city."

Only a week – is it only a week? – had passed since King Llane's death and the Kingdom was still in disarray. He needed information on numbers and location of the Orc advance to draw up defense plans. Scouts on gryphons were fairly useless in the short term; the forests around Stormwind could hide large numbers from view from above. The only sure way was to send ground parties. But that was risky work, for anyone – especially a young man with little fieldlore and no armour to protect him.

In retrospect, he realised his lack of experience in dealing with mages had been the cause. He expected those under his command to obey him without question. Dealing with mages, it seemed, was a specialist skill. And Khadgar was too used to getting his own way by any means he thought he could get away with. Which Anduin discovered an hour later when one of his officers rode up from the rear to where the Commander led the point squad. "Sir. He's following us."

The lieutenant didn't have to clarify who 'he' was. Very few of the city's defenders didn't know of Khadgar, and what he had done with their Commander. They might be soldiers who respected strength and skill at arms, but they understood how powerful a mage could be, and this particular mage especially. Anduin ground his teeth and swore softly. "Take the lead. I'll deal with this."

He rode into the trees to the side of the road and waited, smoothing one hand down his horse's neck to quiet him. Sure enough, a few minutes after the last of the party had passed, he heard the sound of a horse's hooves on the road. Anduin spurred his horse forward and practically knocked Khadgar's mare sideways.

The young mage yelped and jerked back on the reins as his mount shied and half-reared.

"Surprise! I'm an Orc, and you're dead!" He glared across the short distance between them. "My brain may be weak from injury and drink, but I could have sworn I told you to stay. In. Stormwind!"

Khadgar blushed, looking all of his seventeen years. "I know you did. But I thought you might change your mind after you thought about it for a bit."

Anduin slapped a gloved hand on his thigh. "You're enough to test the patience of a priest. If I send you back with an escort it will waste half the afternoon. And you'd probably be stubborn enough to keep trying."

"Well no. I'm not that bad. " He shrugged and sighed. "But I really do want to come along. And I promise not to be a burden."

"Famous last words. Fine, come along then. But I hope you get a bad case of saddle sore and live to regret it."

The pleased grin that spread over Khadgar's face did little to soften Anduin's temper. Lately he seemed to be living on nerves and anger. It had been a bad week, and he'd needed to get away from the cloud of misery that hung around the royal court. His sister was deep in mourning for her husband, her children were miserably missing their father, the court and the various ambassadors drifted between mourning a king and arguing about how to combat the Orc army moving somewhere out beyond the walls of Stormwind. He'd taken it for as long as he could. Perhaps killing a few Orcs will make me feel better…..

They rode through the afternoon, taking side trips north and south of the main road to check for Orc sign. The farms were quiet and deserted; herds and sheep and cattle moved untended across the fields. As far as the river to the south and the hills to the north of Elwynn, only wildlife stirred among the trees. All the human inhabitants had fled to the safety of the city. And of the Orcs there was no sign.

He gave his riding companion a sideways glance. The young mage had found the countryside interesting enough for the first hour, but it wasn't long before a book came out of his saddlebag. He'd salvaged a number of tomes from the Kharazan library and set them onto shelves in his room in the inn, turning it into a small, untidy mages quarters. That reminded Anduin of something, and he spoke without taking his attention from the countryside.

"Why are you still at the Inn? You could have a number of rooms at the castle, you know. Plenty of room for your books."

Khadgar placed a bookmark made of twisted cloth on the page and tucked the book away. "I know I could, but I prefer to stay where I am. I can come and go when I want without some guard asking me what I'm doing or where I'm going. They act like I'm six years old and can't find my way to the privvy."

Anduin's lips lifted in a half-smile. He'd put orders in place to keep an eye on his friend, for his own protection. There were still a few places in the city with a rough reputation where a seventeen year old in robes would look like an easy mark. Despite his abilities, naivety clung to Khadgar like a cloak. "Light forbid that we might think you couldn't find your way around a city you hardly know. But stay there if you want. Might do you good to get your pocket picked. Teach you to pay attention to your surroundings." Anduin stretched his back muscles, easing himself in the saddle. "Just watch out for small tails and teeth in the beef stew. I hear it isn't always beef, if you get my meaning."

"Yech. Thanks for that, you could have told me earlier." Khadgar squinted in thought. "Talking of which, I wonder if I could talk to you about a loan. They keep asking me to pay my room bill….."

They reached the guard post beyond the deserted Eastvale logging camp at the edge of Elwynn Forest by nightfall. It seemed a good place to rest, so Anduin had the camp set up in the central clearing and guards posted around the approaches. No fires were lit, which would give away their position, but Khadgar supplied a magically heated pot of Silverleaf Tea. They supped on a simple meal of tough beef strips and damper cakes laced with dried fruit.

The only light came from the moon overhead, and a light wind rustled the trees and sighed through the grass. Khadgar lay on his back on his wolfskin wrap staring up at the stars. "I wonder what they are."

With his back against a fencepost, Anduin paused in the task of sharpening his already needlesharp sword. "What?"

"Stars. Are they all suns like ours, only very far away so they look small? Or are some of them magical fires or something else?"

Anduin snorted a laugh as he put the honing stone away. "Why not just look at the sky for its beauty?"

"I do that but when something is so obvious, well, the obvious isn't always the truth."

Sliding the sword back into its sheath, Anduin took the boomstick from its holder and started cleaning the barrel. "So tell me about yourself, about your life."

"What do you want to know?"

"I know nothing of mages – beyond the obvious that is. What was your life like, growing up in Dalaran?"

Khadgar stretched out and rested his hands beneath his head. "As I told you, I went to live there when I was six years old. Mage children aren't taught magic at that age, they're much too young for it and you don't have a lot of power then anyhow. We spend the next six or so years on normal schooling; reading, writing, numbers, that sort of thing. Also playing various sports games to keep fit, as well as learning to cook, to mend and tend our clothes and gear, to make potions and draughts of various kinds, to make and illustrate spellbooks. History, geography, languages. There was a lot of learning, it kept me busy."

"I imagine it did. Were you good at it?"

Khadgar grinned. "Not all of it. I'm a terrible cook and my potions are very average. But I loved the books, loved learning new things. And then when I hit puberty, it all changed of course."

"Bits of your anatomy woke up and you started growing that scraggly beard?"

Laughing, Khadgar rolled over onto his stomach. "Yes, and its not scraggly, it's a work in progress. But there was also the magic. It was like…like a light turning on, only it's inside you. Before it was hardly there and then it exploded. It ran through me, into my mind, so powerful it was almost too much. It felt…" His gaze went unfocused. "…wonderful. As if I'd seen the world before in only one colour, and suddenly I had them all."

"Sounds impressive. How did you end up being the Guardian Novitiate? Wasn't there already one?"

"There had been, a young woman. But she came down with a wasting disease that none of the healers could fix and she died when I was fourteen. So the Council had to find a replacement."

Anduin put the boomstick away and settled back, arms behind his head, interested despite himself. "Couldn't one of them just step into the job?"

"None of them could, even if they'd wanted to. Either they were too old, or they weren't suited for it. They needed to find a new Novitiate, so they began testing the students. They eventually chose me. I was inducted as the Guardian Novitiate when I was fifteen."

Anduin tried to imagine what it must have been like for Khadgar; still a child, suddenly picked to be the most important mage in the world. "Bet that came as a shock. They must have thought you were good."

"You could say that." His voice became pensive. "One of the Masters told me that I showed the potential to be even stronger than Medivh."

In the night it was hard to read body language and expression, but Anduin sensed a hint of pride. Warranted pride, he suspected. "Did your head swell up and make you float above the ground because you were so special?"

Khadgar chuckled. "Yes, sort of. Until my friends started playing tricks on me. Pricking the bubble, they called it." His voice grew serious. "But they were an intense couple of years. Before I'd just studied. After the selection, I was pushed even harder than before. Some of the Masters weren't too pleased with me being chosen, though Archmage Antonidas defended me. A few thought I was reckless and too impulsive."

"That's about right." Anduin grinned. "You certainly proved it by running away."

"That was the hardest decision I ever had to make, to throw away eleven years of training, to give up everything I'd ever wanted in life." His voice was low and regretful. "But I sensed something was wrong, very wrong. I was having dreams, bad ones, but I knew they were more than dreams. And that sense of wrong. It was like…" He waved a hand, "like when you bite into an apple that's sweet and tart, but there's that faint taste of corruption, of the apple turning bad." He sat up and hugged his knees. "I tried to explain, tried to get them to believe me, but they wouldn't listen. Said they felt nothing, that I was imagining it. When I insisted, they finally asked the Guardian."

Anduin snorted. "And he said he felt nothing wrong."

"Exactly. With that, I lost all hope of being believed. But it didn't stop, it started getting worse. And I knew I had to go and find out what it was."

"Why do you think you had this sense of wrong, and no one else did?"

"There is a probable reason – but I can't explain it to you, I'm sorry. It has to do with a Kirin Tor matter that I'm sworn not to discuss. Let's just say, I think I was … told … because of my unique position. And maybe because the source of the warning believed I had the best chance of doing something about it."

"But why…."

The night's quiet was shattered by roaring as huge figures thundered out from the treeline. Anduin was on his feet even as the guards sounded the alert, spinning towards the pair of Orcs heading towards him. Khadgar struggled up, his legs momentarily caught in the fur wrap, and ran behind Anduin without being told. One of the two Orcs headed for him and he flung it backwards with a burst of blue-white fire. The second one leapt for Anduin, raising a spiked club as big as Khadgar's arm.

It was impossible to see how many of them there were, but the soldiers were responding well. The night erupted in flashes and bangs as their boomsticks fired and Orcs fell, roaring. Anduin dodged a club strike that would have shattered his skull, rolled to the side and sliced off the Orc's weapon arm with one downward blow. As it stumbled and screamed he thrust the sword through its side, killing it instantly.

Khadgar was busy as well. A pair of Orcs had tried to reach him over the nearby fence; he'd set the fence alight with a fire spell that caught both of them and their clothing alight. Infuriated by the pain they came for him, weapons raised, stinking of burnt flesh. The young mage dodged their strikes, blasted one backwards and onto a shattered spike of fence, impaling it.

But even as the mage turned to try and face the second Orc, it went to its knees, raised its spear, and thrust it into Khadgar's back.

Anduin saw the strike just as it happened; he pulled out his own boomstick and blasted the Orc as it struck Khadgar. The shot threw the Orc backwards, still holding the spear, which was jerked from Khadgar's body.

The young mage stood for a moment, his face white in the moonlight. Then he collapsed.