I mean you have to understand I never really cared that much about the whole scene. Is that the word? That's pretty much what everyone in the SMO thought about it anyway. 'Kid stuff'.
The only mages who volunteered for the guilds didn't exactly shine compared to the real ones is what we always told ourselves, and we had proof to back it up. All the dead ones, for a start, and that kid who went into Kara and never came out. We thought we were doing them a service, like when you're a kid and your mother tells you stories to keep you away from doing bad stuff. You can't understand it when you're young so they make up tall tales; "make sure you wash every morning or the Dirt-Goblins will smell you out and kidnap you", only for us it was "if you join a guild and go outside the walls you'll die a miserable death". Admittedly our language was a little harsher, but then the students were older. Still didn't stop them though. Out of every fifty we'd lose a dozen or so, in dribs and drabs, when they thought they could make something of themselves with the guilds. We'd write them off and talk about lost potential and when they turned up dead or worse we wouldn't say anything, just make sure the kids knew so-and-so had gone off with big dreams and come back in a pine box. If they came back covered in wealth and riches we just kept quiet and hoped no-one noticed.
Of course of course, I'm getting there. Just some background you understand. Comes from being a lecturer I suppose, the urge is always to follow my job description. Please bear with me, tidying up this little study is hard enough with only a single set of fingers.
-xx-
It had to have been ten or so years ago, but I remember it clearly. This was after the Temple of the Naaru was recovered and the guilds brought back – and sold – the artefacts the Draeni had let them haul off. They had opened it up for any academic or pilgrim who wanted to make the journey but of course I'd never considered even leaving the city, let alone Azeroth, no matter how much traffic went through that portal. I don't trust them. I stayed in the Mage Tower and wrote my reports, and I suppose one of them caught someone's eye because a few weeks later I was…conscripted? Hired is too mercenary a word I feel. Recruited, there.
Again you have to understand, we never really felt the rivalry – yes of course maybe too light a word for it, but that was how it was for us – the rivalry between the Alliance and the Kalimdor races. We had regular exchanges of information and the portals were direct, no need to have…unfortunate incidents from them travelling through the city. I remember it was old Talen Lightweave who approached me. He was quite direct, I find most males of his species are. He wanted some of us to come on an expedition to the north and he was willing to pay in artefacts and other miscellanea of the profession. I hesitated because Talen had a…reputation, but he was quite persuasive. A small force of soldiers backing up a research and reclamation cadre. He said he was researching elven arcane magic. He didn't tell me what he was reclaiming it from, however.
Of course now I know why he was going. The poor man, I fear revenge was a higher priority for him at that point than his thirst for knowledge. I looked into the matter when we returned from the…from the plateu. History does tend to miss us here in the Tower I feel, but some small items recovered from the Eye had passed through my hands without my knowing where they had come from. I wonder whether any of them had been hers.
Unfortunately back then I wasn't nearly as thorough in my investigations. Now that I'm missing a hand I find the other turns far more pages than it had before. I met the man on Stormwind's dock a week later. From there we travelled north, to meet up with the rest of the gang he had hired, and I had my first surprise of the voyage.
First of many.
-xx-
It was a rude awakening and I will admit not my finest hour. I was not the only mage recruited by Lightweave but I will admit to being the least-capable, and please do not tell the Archmage I said that or I'll never hear the end of it. I was last from the boat when we made landfall and realised what the 'reclamation' part of the man's contract meant.
We were recovering it from the Legion. The Legion itself! I've studied more demons than most know exist and even then I've never seen creatures like that, and in such numbers. Talen was only one of many it seemed who had been hiring and our boat was met with a dozen, two dozen others when we came onto the Isle. There was no subtlety there, we simply ran the ships as far aground as we could as fast as we could, and rushed off into the chaos. Back then I flattered myself that I was a student of the Higher magics, my spells the most powerful and intrinsic of the SMO, but here there were children barely half my age doing things with mana I'd never seen. The dwarves say that war is the father of invention and my lords they were correct. A girl who couldn't have been in her second decade cut through elves with some enchantment I could barely see, another weaved in and out of sight, teleporting around blades and spells like they weren't even there. Talen was in the forefront and I saw him burning demons dow, demons themselves already shrouded in green flame, his fires hotter than theirs. I was amazed, and humiliated.
I'll skip ahead shall I? To the Plateu itself? You know that the battle for the Isle was no quick in-and-out operation. The elves poured every piece of gold they had into reclaiming Quel'danas, and borrowed as much from the goblins I hear.
The prize though…Sometimes my hand still itches from the touch of it.
-xx-
It had been maybe two months? Two months and I had learned more in sixty days than the last five years of the council. All of us did. There was Freja, who when we landed could barely cast a simple ball of flame and by our departure could conjure it with barely a raised hand. Simons who could transport himself halfway across the island, instantly. Talen became a monster. We still talked every night, looking through the recoveries from the newest reclaimed house, and looking back I think with every new facet he learned he was weighing it against the man up there. I wasn't on the team that went into the terrace, but I was there when they came out, and the old sindorei was…different afterwards. An old ghost put to rest, or at least temporarily silenced. I assumed we would leave after that, but the man insisted on staying, even after half of the horde and almost all of the Alliance forces had left. He had bigger dreams, though, and darker I fear.
-xx-
They guarded it like madmen, and no wonder. From the moment I stepped across that small archway I could feel it all around us, like a thick mist, or water. I know I wasn't his first choice to accompany the team – in all honesty probably would not have gone otherwise – but we were down a member while Zinlan recovered from his wounds. I know it is not exactly…right…to say it, but I'm glad in the end, if his injury meant I had the chance to see that light.
Even filled with evil there were wonders inside, and there was evil in there. I know my history but I had never expected to come face to face with so much of it. The Sunwell had been the pilgrimage of mages from times past and now I was stepping through its gardens, and I wondered who else had stepped there before me. I had little time to wonder however. Talen had spent every last part of his family's fortune to retain the best of the guilds, and they earned their keep. Dozens of them assaulted us with every cloister; demons protecting their lord's ascension, and poor twisted elves, the final forces of the mad prince who were sucking arcane power from the air and knew we were here to take it from them. And the voice all around us.
I shook with fear I won't deny it. To hear that voice was to know the name behind it, and I almost turned and ran. Only my colleagues – and dare I say it friends – by my side kept me moving forward. I think it watched us as we made our way up, past the gardens and to the great dragon. If I was afraid of the beast I was in awe of the dragon though, and I will always count it my proudest moment that he called me by name after our battle and clapped me on the shoulder. I hear he is the new Aspect, or will be soon, and I think I may call in the favour he owes, if we should meet after his ascension.
Oh? I see. No, it's a good question. I have been an academic for most of my life, but yes it is strange that my fondest memories seen to be of combat. I was enthralled, I will admit. I fought side-by-side with heroes as we felled things I'd only heard about in stories. We slew a pit-lord taller than any house in Stormwind in a battle that was over in the blink of an eye, enough magic flying through the air to annihilate a battalion of soldiers and all of it just barely enough to bring down the thing, and even then we lost people to the green fire it spat. Feadril fell there, and even while he burned he begged Talen to be buried there, in the soil below the centre of all that power.
We could have called ourselves dragonslayers by the final week of the assault, if the circumstances had not been so rotten. We fought demons and devils that I don't even care to remember now, and by the end hardly saw. The farther we went in the fiercer they became, and the more stops and pauses we took to recover and resupply, just trying to stop from being overwhelmed. I could see the enthusiasm in the faces of Talen and the other elves the closer we got the centre of the citadel. The death of Kael'thas only spurned them on I think. As if having cleanse their souls of that betrayer they wanted to recover everything they had lost. When the voice came down from above I think they welcomed it even. After the demon-lord's boastful announcement that his ascension was at hand there were no more breaks, no more stops. We burned through everything in our path like a tempest. Everything I'd learned in the last months of staying on the Isle of Quel'Danas I threw out like my life depended on it. I had arrived on the island as a neophyte, I see that now, but by the final assault on the core of the Sunwell I believe I could have matched wits and power with the Archmages and won. Not that it matters now. My arrogance was short-lived, and I carry this stump to remind me of it. We were exalted with ourselves as we punched through into the final sactum, and that was our undoing. If we had stopped and thought, or if we had been prepared better, things may have been different when we met with the god.
-xx-
I've seen the pictures of the Naaru who lives in Shattrath City and I wasn't prepared for what we found inside those walls. Freja saved us all when she called us back. Fast enough to stop that black wall of death falling on us, not fast enough to go back through, before the barriers came up. Then we were fighting for our lives. Our souls, as the battle went on. Naaru were the gods of light, but they had shadows of pure darkness and this one's shadow was very close. Close enough to reach out and touch, and certainly close enough for it to reach back, and it did, my lords it did. We were fifty when we made it into the citadel and we were barely thirty when we left, battered and bruised or worse from the mad god. I can't even say for sure whether it had died. It was a black shape, more of a symbol than a living thing, that just floated there in the room while elves and demons and nether-things came out of the walls and killed us. I…I'm sorry. I fought as well as I could but I just…so many people lost to that thing, and not even bodies to return to the family. When the ghosts vanished into the walls and the god of darkness was a core of nothing on the floor, that darkness took our fallen comrades with it. I only hope they followed the Naaru into the light.
The light, the light. I know you're not know you say you are. This is what you wanted to know isn't it? This useless stump twitches whenever I think about it and I'd swear it twitches whenever someone else is too, and it's been twitching since you arrived. But the talking helps, I seem to find, so I will continue, and then the men outside my chambers can escort you out, after we get an explanation.
I've studied devils and hellspawn. In the two months I was on that island I saw and killed even more. But that demon lord was magnificent. Yes, magnificent. Terrifying, awe-inspiring and horrible to behold, but it was a majestic, royal terror. Sometimes at night I wonder what else is out there in the nether. If the stories are true and Kil'Jaeden is only a lieutenant of the entity we call the Legion, how terrible must his master be? Standing there as the sunwell threw out black corrupted energy and with that beast clawing out of it I could only wonder how he affected the others who stood with me. I stared up into the face of hell and I was entranced. It was the power. It radiated from him like…I can't, there's no metaphor I can use. He threw hellfire and energy at us like he had an infinite supply, like we were a momentary distraction as he crawled out of that inferno. Freja died from it, I think, before a single lick of flame ever touched her. It seeped into her pores and burned away her mind from inside, the poor woman.
I won't relive that battle, it isn't important, to me or to you. We fought and we fought for what seemed like hours. We fought the beast and the shadows of ourselves he sent out and we fought fire itself and we triumphed. That's what all the stories say, but it isn't what was important.
The Sunwell. The word describes it perfectly and yet not at all. All my life I had sought power in books and suddenly there it was right in front of me, blazing away into the air. I could hear the talking around me, the grand speech being given, but I didn't have the sense to listen. I was across from them when it was lit and hidden from them, and maybe that's why I did it. I wanted to taste power, the level of power only given to gods and titans. I reached my hand into the Sunwell and touched that flowing energy and I was punished for it. But I won't regret it. For that second everything was laid bare to me. The past, the future, all of time and space and the knowledge of the cosmos itself. Because power is timeless.
A second was all I got, was all I could stand, before I had to withdraw. I didn't even notice it was a stump at first, the nerves themselves had been burned away so there was no pain. I lied to the others and told them I had lost it fighting the Burning Legion's commander, but I think Talon suspected. Even if he did we were closer friends by then and he forgave me my arrogance.
So, what is it you are here for? I look through you and I see no life, only an imitation. A perfect imitation but an imitation none the less. Indulge an old man soon to be at his final rest.
…
My word.
I…what are you?
I see.
From the north, of course. If the heart of the world is anywhere it will be there. What would you ask of me?
…I only wish I could help you, little clockwork emissary. But the Sunwell's power stays with the Sunwell, and the visions of the future I saw stayed there also. I see why you came to me now but I am no help, I regret to say. Maybe Talen would know. His species is so much longer-lived than ours, and he may have what you seek. I will only offer you this one piece of advice, if you will go to him. Avenging his daughter has not brought Talen Lightweave peace. I would swear that mine was not the only hand that brushed the font of power on the day of our victory, and the lessons of humility and acceptance I brought from it are not the same as his. I fear whatever he saw has made him a desperate man. I've heard of his new choice of study. I think he's running from something, and dares not stop to think or it will catch him.
For it's a sin to touch the mind of god.
-xx-
RPRT:27 SNDR:FRJ4B(ML) LC:STRMWND
report failure human male no memory infestation vaccine
request attempt contact with elf hope locate cure failing cure workable weapon
-xx-
RPLY:27 SNDR:MMRN1A LC:LDR
confirm report
continue
hurry
situation deteriorating rapidly