I do not own Warcraft or its sequels. Blizzard does.
Thanks to Shinkicker for editing.
Chapter published 10/20/15.
Sara
Sara's eyes widened as all at once, everyone in the Twilight's Hammer attacked. They whirled around and lashed out at whoever was closest to them and, since there wassomething keeping magic down, almost everyone was overwhelmed at once. Then Fardol stormed by her, no different than usual but still seeming as bright as the sun, and tackled one of the cultists with his full plate armor.
She didn't get to notice anything else, because Higris himself charged at her with a dagger as long as her forearm aimed at her throat. She gasped and jerked herself to the side so hard she swore her spine snapped in half, and punched the high elf in the back as his momentum carried him past her.
He stumbled and fell into the sand, and she took the chance to grimace in pain. Punching him had hurt her hand pretty badly, so she took the chance to shake off the pain and blast him with a shadow bolt -
- except her magic didn't answer her. Couldn't answer her. Panic began to blossom within her chest as she realized that for the first time in her entire life she was without her powers. She stumbled away from the high elf as, quick as a whip, he got up and charged her again. He got to her before she could react and stabbed forward, but luckily Sara's time in the Mage Quarter Dueling Club paid off. She dodged into his guard and grabbed his weapon arm with both hands, struggling to disarm him.
With his free arm, he punched her in the face.
Her nose didn't break, thank goodness, but she fell flat on her ass and brought her hands up to clutch her cheek. She almost didn't realize Higris coming at her with his dagger poised to kill. Still sitting, she brought her legs in and kicked upwards at his hand. He veered around, but it was too late. With a solid thunk her feet made contact and knocked the dagger from his hands and down the long stairs, clittering and clattering as it tumbled down.
"No!" he shouted as he ran after it, hurrying down the steps. Sara got up and grinned wickedly.
He'd turned his back to her.
She screamed and jumped at him, grabbing him from behind and shoving him onto the steps. Sadly, before she could grind his face into the stone he caught himself on his hands. Then the elf lifted his legs and flipped himself over with her attached, crushing her against the stairs instead. She struggled to push him off, but then a sharp pain flared in the side of her head as he elbowed her and got off.
With a weak groan she collapsed limply into the stairs, gasping for breath. She vaguely heard Fardol shout some nonsense about how 'the Light could not be silenced' followed by a surge of yellow light, but most of her attention was on Higris running down and reclaiming his dagger, then running up to her confidently.
"Not so tough without your magic now are you?" he asked as he got close, raising his weapon.
She lifted a leg and kicked him in the crotch.
With an almost comical noise he doubled over and dropped his dagger again, keeling over. Sara fought through the pounding in her head and got to her feet, tackling the incapacitated cult leader a second time. This time she had more success, knocking him off the stairs and onto a flat section of road right beneath it. He brought his hands up to fight her off, but thanks to her crippling shot she had no trouble balling up her hands and whacking him in the face several times, including one glancing blow to his throat that left him nearly choking. Getting off of him, Sara flipped the elf over onto his stomach and held his squirming hands behind his back as he kept coughing. She rifled through his pockets, searching for...
There! She felt something hard in his left pocket and pulled out what looked like a blue wedding ring, covered in inscriptions. It was a magic suppressor, made of cobalt instead of steel.
She prepared to crush it - the runes made it fragile - but Higris suddenly thrashed and dislodged her, sending the ring flying out of her grip and into a nearby sand dune where it rested in a tiny crater. This time Higris pinned her and delivered a solid punch to Sara's gut, forcing the breath out of her. With one hand he grabbed her left wrist and pummeled the other into her face, snapping her head into the sand with a splatter of blood from her now broken nose.
Sara had never been hurt so badly. Whenever she fought she had her shadowy barrier active, and in Stormwind the duels never got so physical. She felt like she was suffocating from having the wind driven out of her lungs, and her face felt like it was peeling off, melting from the inside and dribbling out of whatever holes it could find. She glanced back up as Higris prepared another punch, but then a blast of golden light so close it felt as though it blistered her skin struck and threw him off of her like a rag doll. Sara gasped and rolled over onto her stomach, pushing herself up with shaking hands. Blood pounded in her head and dripped onto the desert sands, but she forced herself onto two feet.
Ignoring the screams of people fighting and getting hurt and a faint buzzing in the air, she grabbed the magic inhibitor and threw it to the ground. She lifted her foot then stomped it once, twice, and a third time to shatter it.
The crushing weight on her soul lifted and she cackled, summoning a shadowy barrier around herself.
Her magic was back. Oh she would never take it for granted again. Her exhilaration was such that she barely felt the nervous energy of Silithus inside her gut, or the blood slowly flowing from her nose. She fixed a recovering and approaching Higris with a wicked sneer and lit up her hands, ready to blast him into pieces. She brought up her left hand as shadow energy turned necrotic green around her hands, the magic scraping and bashing against her bones as she over channeled but she didn't care because now he was too close to dodge her shadow bolt, too close to do anything, and -
Higris's hands lit up with arcane light and Sara's shadow bolt dissolved. Her magic slipped away like a bar of soap and her attempts to reclaim it were about as successful as grabbing a cloud. The dark magic around her hands was gone, and all that was left were the trails of dark mist her magic always left behind. She reeled back as the blue light of the counterspell finished condensing on her, but at the very least her defenses were up.
The elf scooped up his dagger and finished closing the distance, stabbing at her shields. The barrier held strong and the recoil wrenched the weapon out of his hands. The cultist swore, but Sara turned away from him. The others were still fighting. Leira was still fighting! Leira might be hurt!
She charged up the steps as fast as she could in her injured state, the rush of blood deafening in her ears. Now that the suppressor was destroyed she saw that the people she'd brought stood a chance. Maria stood at range, clutching a gash in her side as she and her imp launched fire magic. Fardol had tackled someone to the ground and was beating them to a pulp with Light-enshrouded fists. Leira had disarmed someone and, using her newly acquired dagger, fought two cultists at once. There were several other skirmishes going on, kicking up sand with fists, weapons and spells. Someone near her feet gasped weakly, dying from a bloody hole in their chest.
Maybe she'd revive him later.
The priority was helping Leira. She couldn't use her magic and, being inside a bubble of magic, nor could she punch and kick. But she could always just... run them over.
Pushing her legs, Sara zeroed in on Leira's fight and then suddenly a puff of smoke enveloped her. Sara's mouth opened in a startled shout - no, a startled bleat as everything seemed to grow tremendously. She fell to the ground and fell forward onto all fours, looking around. A quick glance down at her arms left her confused. Stubby, thin, dark, ending in a solid hoof. It took her a moment to realize she'd been polymorphed.
Sara whipped around and, unused to four legs, fell clumsily to the side within her barrier. The arcane light faded from Higris's hands and was replaced by crackling ruby flames as he aimed a spell at someone else. She had to stop him! Sara got up and charged him, only to fall with an angry baa halfway there. By then, he'd shot his fireball at Fardol and knocked the dwarf off his feet.
Three more failed attempts at charging him later, another puff of smoke engulfed her and the fading spell returned her to an upright position on its own. Her nose had ceased bleeding, her head was clear, it was like she hadn't been hurt at all. Even better Sara could feel the counterspell's effects wearing off. That was it. Higris had used his counterspell so it'd be a while before he could cast it again, and it would be minutes before any other polymorphic magics could touch her. He'd kept her and her faceless magic out of the fight long enough, but now! Now blazing emerald power pooled in her fists, casting a faint shadow on the land as she took aim and - !
She didn't even feel the impact.
One moment she was preparing to turn Higris inside out, and the next she was flying through the air. Then her flight came to an abrupt end, burying her and her magic shell inside a sand dune. Once her head stopped spinning, she turned around to see what had just happened.
Oh come on! she thought.
The impact that had knocked her through the air was from a creature landing. It resembled a sphinx, standing a good fifteen yards tall. Every inch of its body seemed to be made of jagged, craggy black stone, reflecting the sun in all directions. A lion body extended backwards with two golden bracelets around its forepaws, and a pair of enormous wings sprouted from the sides of the creature with a barbed tail swishing behind it. Except instead of proper flesh and blood, the wings were made of rocky feathers that turned from dark blue to sun-bleached bronze at the tips. Its upper body was vaguely humanoid, but also made of stone. Clawed hands clenched at its side, lightly touching a golden waistband. Its head appeared to be a skull, colored brilliant tan with glinting green emeralds for eyes as it stared her down, casting a shadow upon the rest of the fight.
Needless to say, everyone stopped fighting to take in the appearance of the monster.
Then the other monsters came. From over the mountains and walls surrounding them crawled a swarm of dog-sized silithid scarabs, and from the hexagonal door they'd been approaching came a handful of qiraji.
At first she thought they were human women, but they only resembled her race in passing. They wore light blue blouses and baggy pants of the same color, and a veil over their faces revealed only glowing green eyes and tufts of black hair. Their helmets - or perhaps those were also part of their bodies - were green to the side and patterned like a compound eye, and the rest of the helmet was black save for the two silver horns sticking straight up. Green sickle claws the size of Sara's forearm sprouted from their shoulders and their feet were almost birdlike with their gray talons, to say nothing of the four insect wings buzzing and humming at their backs or the green stingers they had in place of hands.
Silithid, qiraji, and if memory served the construct was an obsidian destroyer.
Snarling, Sara quickly formed the spell matrix for a shadow bolt and loaded it with murderous power. Within seconds she shot the laughing magic skull at the obsidian destroyer's head. It looked her way and with eerie calm, lifted its left hand into the shadow bolt's path. The skull froze in place and dark violet magic flowed from it into the obsidian destroyer's hand until, within a second, the shadow bolt was no more.
Sara blinked at the display of anti-magic. "Oh boy," she said weakly. Then the qiraji and silithid attacked.
From her position in the sand dunes beside the stairs none of them attacked her, but everyone else was besieged. Leira fought against two of the feminine qiraji while Fardol slammed a fist into the ground. The ground beneath him cracked with yellow light, holy energy billowing out from him to ten yards away. It forced the scarabs to skitter away, lest they tread on the consecrated land. To her satisfaction, she noticed that the qiraji and silithid weren't leaving the cultists unmolested.
Then the obsidian destroyer blasted her with lightning.
She yelped and jumped, but thankfully the electric magic deflected across her barrier. Then the corrupted construct leaped into the air, far higher than anything made of stone should've been capable of, and landed on top of her shadowy defenses. It knocked her away like a playing ball and she nearly ended up tumbling down the stairs before she found her footing. Sara gasped when she inspected the damage; there was a tiny crack in her green shield. It could damage her shields!
She repaired the crack and prepared another shadow bolt, finishing the spell within a second and launching it at the obsidian destroyer. Like before it held out a hand and disassembled the spell, but in that time Sara began casting a corruptive spell to eat away at its very being. The spell was simple, but she didn't use it often so it took some time to recall it, though when she was done faint black clouds began to buzz around the destroyer. For a moment at least, because then it balled its hands into fists and slammed them into each other. Where they collided a blue sphere burst outwards, curving back around its form. The light engulfed the construct and dispelled her corruption spell.
Her eye twitched.
Alright, no more Ms. Nice Sara. As it ran at her she reached deeper into her mana pool and began forming another spell. It was a personal creation of hers, operating on the reverse principle of her resurrection spells. Wicked green mist formed a ball in front of her chest, and then she held out both hands at the rapidly approaching obsidian destroyer. From her orb of death energy a twisting beam of emerald lightning blasted out, seeking the construct's very life essence. And it missed.
With impossible dexterity the stone sphinx dodged to the side, then its own hands lit up with arcane power. It held its left hand up and made a throwing motion at her, sending a blast of ball lightning at her. Like before it deflected off her shield, and as it stood there contemplating its failure to damage her barrier, Sara successfully nailed it in the chest with a fully powered shadow bolt. The magic projectile splashed harmlessly off its glossy skin. Then it seemed to figure out what it was going to go and held its right hand at her.
A sphere of arcane runes materialized around Sara and, before she could react, they vanished, taking her shield with them. Her first thought was that the obsidian destroyer had dispelled her shield, but when she looked up at it and saw a gleaming green sphere around its form, she realized it had spellstolen it!
She was already casting a shadow bolt and it was too late to stop, so she watched as the blast was effortlessly absorbed by her own magics. Then the obsidian destroyer was right in front of her, whipping around with its impossible agility. The length of its tail came flying at her, piercing through her stolen shield as though it wasn't even there, and Sara tried to jump back to avoid it.
Too late.
The tail cracked along her legs and sent her flying with a choked off scream. She expected to land on the hard stone of the stairs, but instead she hit something soft and cushioned. Fighting through the pain, Sara looked over to see who'd she hit, and found herself staring into the compound eyes of a qiraji battleguard.
The feminine creature's eyes went wide and it backed away from her in a hurry. "I-I'm sorry," it stammered in accented Common. "I didn't mean to - " But Sara hardly heard it over her pain and instead cut it off with a desperate blast of unrefined shadow magic that left it without a torso, the body slumping to the ground.
She looked back as the obsidian destroyer glided towards her like a snake, placing itself right on top of her and raising an enormous, stony paw. Sara gasped in panic and summoned another shadowy barrier. The paw came down with a thunderous crash, but left no visible mark in her shield. With the time she had, Sara glanced downwards to see what the damage was. She wished she hadn't. Both of her legs were broken, the stark white bone sticking through the thigh in both of them and... and was that her blood sinking into the sand? That wasn't good. That wasn't good. What was she going to do?!
SLAM! SLAM! The obsidian destroyer hammered away at her shadowy barrier a few more times before relenting. Then it paused, and Sara took the opportunity to look to the left at the rest of the fight.
It was actually going quite well. The Twilight's Hammer was in full retreat. The cultists were being chased by the qiraji down the stairs and out of sight, bringing their dead and wounded with them, leaving her own group to deal with the rest of the attackers. Leira and Fardol were cleaning up the qiraji and the steady stream of silithid scarabs was held at bay by her mages and warlocks. A few bodies dotted the ground here and there, but that was nothing she couldn't fix...
SLAM!
... provided neither the blood loss nor the construct killed her first.
Sara looked up and aimed a shadow bolt right into the creature's underbelly, but its stolen shadow shell absorbed the spell. It paused its next slam, and Sara gasped in fear when it dispelled her defenses a second time right before bringing the massive stone paw down. She summoned another barrier just in time to intercept it, but the limb came so close the SLAM made her teeth rattle. A silithid scarab came over the wall and began charging at her, but she didn't have the time to blast it because the obsidian destroyer lifted its leg again, dispelling her shield.
She winced as the leg came down again, throwing up another hasty shadowy barrier to absorb it. How was she going to kill the damned thing?!
Her barrier was dispelled again and, as she was busy reforming it, she noticed the scarab charging her veer around her as if she were an obstacle, throwing itself at a summoned voidwalker. Then the leg came down again, once more too close for comfort.
"Hey! I could use some help!" she shouted while frantically conjuring her barriers over and over as the obsidian destroyer stomped at her in a frenzy. She was totally impotent, able to do nothing more but channel magic into her defenses and if she slipped up for even a second...
Luckily, her friend killed the last of the qiraji by running it through the chest with a dagger and then everyone turned their attention to the obsidian destroyer, including Fardol.
"Hey!" Leira shouted as she charged it, knocking aside dead scarabs as she did. "Hey you! Focus on me!" It glanced her way. "Betcha you're pretty worried about facing someone who doesn't use magic aren't ya?!" That seemed to get its attention, and Sara dimly realized why. The obsidian destroyer was built for anti-magic. It would consider someone who wasn't a spell caster a much bigger threat than someone who was, like little old her, laying there and bleeding into the sand. It got off her and roared and Leira, charging at the draenei. Sara winced when it tried to step on her, but Leira danced out of the way and chipped it lightly with her dagger.
Come on Sara, she told herself. Do something! Spells began to pelt the rock construct's shield to no effect, until one of the mages successfully dispelled Sara's stolen barrier from the construct. Even then though, the spells smashing into it were useless beyond a distraction.
It swiped at Leira, this time leaning down its upper body and lashing out with stony claws. Again, Leira dodged the swipe and struck a gash into it. Sara pushed her upper body up and aimed a shaking hand at the destroyer, summoning her vast shadow magic. Surely, if she really put her back into it she'd be able to hurt it at least a little, right? Her arms burned as she over channeled again, also causing the bones sticking from her legs to sear her flesh, but she ignored it despite how the pain made her vision blur and fired a thin ray of violet shadow magic at the back of the obsidian destroyer's head.
To her surprise, she actually managed to make it stumble and chip a small but noticeable fragment of its body off. It looked her way, and Sara gulped. Oops.
It turned around fully to try and stomp her, forcing her to throw up another dark barrier. But she noticed something behind it. Leira had grabbed onto its tail and hoisted herself up onto the obsidian destroyer's body. Then the draenei ran up the construct, keeping her balance even as it thrashed, and wrapped herself around its head to begin slashing indiscriminately with her weapon. It reared back from Sara with a roar of frustration, and then Fardol came in with glowing gauntlets and smashed into one of its hind legs, the dwarf starting to pummel away at it.
Sara released another focused beam of magic but her aim was off, so she only succeeded in chipping off the tip of one of its wings. Meanwhile it reached up with its clawed hands to throw Leira off from it and probably into the mountains. Sara gasped. What could she do? She didn't know how to cast her barriers around other people so -
"Not on my watch!" Fardol roared, summoning more of the Holy Light. A chime filled the air as a winged crown appeared above Leira, shrouding her in a transparent gray orb as she kept attacking the construct's head. Its hands scrabbled at the holy barrier, but to no avail.
By this point, everyone still standing aimed their spells at its legs, hoping to topple the construct. The scarabs had ceased to swarm without their qiraji masters to guide them, so Sara joined Fardol in the others in trying to topple the construct from the ground up while Leira began to accumulate damage on its head, her face the epitome of ferocity.
The obsidian destroyer stopped what it was doing and lifted its left hand into the air. Arcane light glinted around its hand and Sara felt another effect grab hold of her soul. Unlike the magic suppressor, which was crushing, this one was pulling. Out of her body, and the bodies of everyone else casting spells and even Fardol, streams of pulsating blue-white energy drained out and swirled around the construct's hand, flowing into its body in a steady stream of mana.
"No!" Fardol shouted. "Take it down, take it down now!" A bone-shattering punch from him finally snapped its left hind leg, but it continued to stand on three and channel the mana spell.
Sara put her back into it, blasting it more and more even as she began to grow dizzy from blood loss. She wasn't sure, but she could've sworn she saw light beginning to glisten between the cracks of its stone skin and a deep hum resonated in the air. And then...
Crack! Its other hind leg shattered in two and its lower body fell down. Surprised, the obsidian destroyer interrupted its own channel to inspect the damage, and in that time Leira drove the dagger into its left eye like a pickaxe. She hammered it in with one fist as the construct roared, flinging itself about, but then the dagger went deeper still and the obsidian destroyer froze.
Slowly at first, it listed to the side and fell. Leira left the dagger where it was and leaped off once it crashed into the ground, motionless. The light inside of it faded and the humming went away, and Sara's magic's mist was already blowing away.
All was quiet.
"We... we did it," Sara whispered.
The draenei ran over to her while Fardol collected everyone else and started healing them with the Light. She crouched over Sara and gasped. "Holy shit Sara, are you okay?"
"Do I look okay?" she groused, glancing down at her broken legs and increasingly bloody pants. "Ah, shit..."
"Hold still, I'll help." Leira held her hands over the wound and narrowed her eyes. The blue light seemed to grow intense, and an azure naaru sigil appeared over her forehead.
"Wait, what are you - " Then she began to scream. At least she thought she did, because all she felt was her throat vibrating air and all she heard was her own frantic heartbeat. It was molten lead poured onto her body. It was a tanker of salt water dumped upon her wounds. It was needles stuck inside her flesh and thrust sideways. Sara thrashed and surely she was screaming because Leira was holding her down, her eyes wide and trying to speak something but she couldn't hear her, could barely see through all the red, couldn't feel anything besides the hands of Ragnaros the Firelord massaging her legs.
Then it ended and Sara went limp, breathing heavily. The sigil over Leira's head was gone, but her jaw hung wide open. To the side, everyone else stared at her. "By the Light Sara, what was that?!"
"I hate you," she wheezed. "I hate you so much. What did you do to me?" Sara demanded.
"I healed you. Look at your legs. Think you can stand?"
"Healed?" She glanced down. Sure enough, the shattered bones jutting from her thighs were gone and while the blood she'd lost remained, she felt none of the symptoms of blood loss and wasn't losing any more of the vital fluid. "Healed. Thanks I, I owe you one. Just help me up."
"No problem, here." Leira reached out a hand and Sara accepted the help. She stumbled once, then found her balance and limped over to one of the corpses, phantom pain still lingering about her calves.
"What are you doing?" Leira hissed.
"Reviving him," she groaned. "We've still got a little journey ahead of us and this fight took up too much time as it is. Especially since half our people just vanished." It irked her that the Hammer had gotten away in the chaos of the qiraji attack. They'd even took their dead, so interrogating the fallen wasn't a possibility. They could've been preparing for a counter attack. Though then again... maybe not. Hopefully the qiraji would keep them busy.
"You sure? I mean, we just got attacked by the qiraji and we're barely inside! Maybe you should call it quits."
She snapped her head over to glare at Leira. "Not. An. Option," she ground out. "Please let me focus. Let me resurrect them and we can go from there."
Looking over the body of the man, Sara nodded to herself. He was one of their warlocks, a tall and muscled man with blonde hair afflicted by male pattern baldness despite his youth. She let her faceless magic flow, reaching out and grasping his soul to begin dragging it back. It was just as difficult as it had been with the Twilight cultist in her bedroom over a month ago, but all the same the slash across his neck healed up and with a flash of green light, the warlock sputtered back to life. His eyes darted back and forth, confused. "What... where? How did I?"
"Leira, can you explain it to him? I have to get to the other four." Leaving the draenei to explain to the man what had happened, Sara dragged herself to the other body. It was a little gnome woman, and she breathed out a sigh of relief. Gnomes. Gnomes were small, so she'd probably be easier to resurrect than the man had been.
Maria walked next to her, a thin scar across her forehead. "Holy shit, you can actually do it?" she asked.
"Yes," Sara grunted. It was easier to resurrect the gnome, but it still took some effort. After about ten seconds of casting she was done, and the woman sputtered back to life now that she no longer lacked a large chunk of her intestines. "Fardol!" she shouted. The paladin looked her way. "Is everyone healed up?"
"Aye they are, Sara. Ya really bringin' them back to life?"
"I am. Two down, three to go." She walked over to the next corpse, but someone else got in her way.
She grabbed her shoulders and pulled herself far too close for comfort. "Please! It's Alendin, he's, he's dead! Please, you said you can revive him right? Please you have to hurry!"
"But - " Sara tried to push forward but the teary eyed mage stayed in her way. "Fine! Is he that one?" she asked, pointing at a body slumped on the side of the stairs. The woman, a hair trigger away from sobbing, nodded mutely. "Fine. I'll do him next." Sara didn't even approach him, casting the resurrection spell from where she stood. Like it always did, emerald magic shone from her hands and scraped along her bones - especially her legs - and then he was alive again.
"Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you!" The woman ran over to him and began fussing over the confused man, leaving Sara to resurrect the last two people in peace. Once the last woman was back, Sara slumped down onto the ground and breathed out heavily. Her head spun and her breaths came in ragged breaths. She still had quite a bit of mana left, but she'd never in her life spent so much magic in a single sitting, or over channeled for so long.
While she rested, one of the people she'd revived - the gnome - approached her. "Sara, did you really - ?" Sara nodded. The gnome bowed her head, blue pigtails bouncing. "Thank you. Light bless you, Sara."
Light bless her. Ha. Speaking of the Light, what had Leira done to her? Sure she had faceless magic, but that didn't mean holy healing spells would burn her. Did it?
Eventually, everyone was gathered and Sara stood to face them and speak. "Alright, it appears that - "
Fardol interrupted her. "They already know, Sara. I told 'em on the way here about what to expect. Though sure wasn't countin' on the qiraji attackin' us too."
"Why not? We're in Ahn'Qiraj, it's always been a possibility." He'd told them. He'd told them?! She told him that she would handle it and he went around doing it anyway?! Never mind that she didn't actually handle it, but he had the nerve to circumvent her authority?! "It doesn't matter. We're all healed up and now that those leeches are gone, we can make some progress. Sun's going down, so - "
"Hang on!" a man shouted. "You can't be serious can you? We all almost died! We should head back while we still can!" Murmurs of agreement filled the air. "This was a fool's errand!"
"A fool's errand?! We beat the shit out of them!" she challenged. "Even when they got the drop on us with that magic suppressor, where are we and where are they huh? They're being chased into a corner by the qiraji and here we are no worse for the wear! We even killed an obsidian destroyer! We spent so long coming here, so much money coming here, and you want to call it quits just because we got into a little fight? When you signed up KNOWING that was a possibility?!"
"Fighting the Twilight's Hammer was never part of the agreement!" he challenged. "And where were you huh? Fardol told us all about how you weren't doing anything about them, and he had to do all the heavy lifting!" Sara's eyes widened, then narrowed in anger. She exhaled through her nose. "You clearly don't care about any of us! 'Oh, a doomsday cult is using us to get to C'Thun? Who cares?' Why should we stick around when - "
Sara crossed her arms and rapidly uncrossed them, lashing at the sand and stairs with a miniature shadow nova. "SHUT UP!" she roared, then lowered her voice dangerously. "I don't know if any even remember why you're here. No, clearly you don't. We're here because sooner or later the Liberality Confederacy is going to find the last Old God and kill it!And guess what happens then? That's right, the entire planet gets destroyed! We absolutely have to identify their parasitic spell and have a counterspell up and running by the time that happens, but do you know who's working on it? US! Everyone else is going around saying 'Oh, we'll do it later. Oh, it's someone else's problem.' Well guess what? We're that 'someone else'! So unless you want to go and say that you'd rather have the entire damn planet get destroyed than roll up your sleeves and get a little dirty, we're continuing and that is FINAL!" she roared, heart hammering in her chest.
"Any questions?" she growled. Nobody spoke. "Good. Pick up the shit they left behind and let's go. We're behind schedule as it is." Sara turned around and they all started picking their stuff back up. Luckily nothing had been damaged in the fight: the expedition could continue as planned, and without the dead weight.
Sara was almost glad Higris had attacked. It was certainly the most exciting thing to happen on the trip and had caught her off guard. She'd been so certain she had him wrapped around her finger with the whole 'faceless magic' routine. If it hadn't caused her so much damn pain and almost ruined everything she had worked so hard to achieve and pitted everyone against her, she could've forgiven him. As it was he had broken her nose, trapped her magic, gotten her legs broken, and burned by the Holy Light. She was going to kill him. Slowly. Maybe she'd give him a Heart Murmur.
Burned by the Holy Light...
Pushing the thought from her head, she continued leading the trek into the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj. They stopped for food and water, and took a few more measurements in stark silence. The sun went beneath the horizon, but they reached the caverns before the cold could do much harm. The entrance was concealed behind a massive set of stairs, with crumbling stone pillars and an enormous replica of the Scarab Gong standing tall and proud between them. It was behind the structure that the majority of Ahn'Qiraj's subterranean structure was located, and it was there that they took shelter from the cold.
The caves were enormous and silent. The sand gave way to moist, packed dirt, and rotting purple tissue clung to the walls. Dimly glowing sacks hung from the ceiling, providing a minuscule amount of light. Scattered around like trash were dozens of empty insect exoskeletons. They ranged from the size of a large dog to nearly twice the size of the obsidian destroyer.
Sara led them through the tunnels, heading to the left and spiraling downwards into the lukewarm earth. The caverns were malformed in shape, like flowing water except for the places where they opened up into enormous caverns, with roofs arching high above, so high Sara wondered how they didn't poke through the surface. In each of the larger caverns they went through she had them stop and take more readings. In each of the caverns, they approached C'Thun and her nerves threatened to make her start jumping and squealing like a child on a sugar high.
Her group finished up another set of readings in a chamber that housed the corpse of an enormous sand reaver, and continued to plummet. Sara's gaze wandered up to the ceiling, and her skin itched nervously. It wasn't enough that she'd been attacked by the cultists, an anti-magic constructs, and the qiraji, but now she had to be underground as well with so many tons of soil and stone ready to plummet upon her?
... actually, now that she thought of it neither the qiraji nor the silithid had attacked her. She was tempted to chalk that up to her faceless powers, but it was foolish of her to just suddenly write off everything unusual that happened as a result of her powers. There had to be something she was missing.
I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to -
But what?
A hand suddenly grasped her left shoulder and she snapped her head over to glare at whoever had snuck up on her. "WHAT?!" Leira jerked away from her, eyes wide. Sara winced and relaxed. "Sorry," she muttered. "It's just, you know, everything that's happened. What do you need?"
"Do you want to talk about what happened back there? You know, when I healed you?"
A shiver gently crawled down her spine on spider legs. "Not really but... okay hang on." She flashed a bit of magic into Leira's mind, connecting the right strings to her own, and nodded.
'Okay,' Sara sent. 'I guess I owe you this much. So um, you know how I have my powers.'
'Duh. Anything new?'
'Well, I'd gotten my Magister title. Two years ahead of schedule too, not exactly record breaking but pretty damn impressive if I do say so myself,' she said confidently. 'So I figured hey, why settled for that? Why not just go for broke and shoot for Archmage? Problem is I had no idea what to do my dissertation on. I needed something big, something unexplored, but also something within my abilities. And then I realized hey, my shadow magic's been pretty unusual all my life. Maybe I could use that. So... I did. I got my hands on my magic signature.' Leira didn't need to know how she'd mind controlled someone. Sara didn't want to hear how disappointed the warrior would be. 'It didn't look like... anything like a human's magic signature should be, Leira. I went to compare it to other magical signatures and the only one it resembled was... it was... '
'Easy, take a deep breath. It can't be that bad.'
She did. The air was warm and while not exactly humid, it wasn't as achingly dry as above ground. 'Alright. It resembled the magic signature of a faceless one. I have the same magic they do, Leira, so from there I got the idea to research the Old Gods and here we are.'
The draenei's eyes went wide and she released a slow breath. 'Oh... wow. That really explains a lot actually.' Leira took a step away from Sara, drawing a wince from her. 'So... are you okay?'
'I guess. I know the 'what' of my powers now, but I still need to know the how and why. And then you used the Light to heal my legs. Thanks for that by the way, it'd really suck if I couldn't walk.'
'... and the Light didn't really agree with your magic. Sara could you please, um, break the link? I need to think a little.'
'I... ' Sara looked away from her friend. 'I, sure.' A flicker of shadow magic and the telepathy was over. There, it was done. Leira knew the story now, and judging by how she was putting distance between the two of them she wasn't exactly keen on staying close to her. And why would she? The power of the faceless was all-corruptive, foul and wicked; it had to be quarantined didn't it?
They took readings from two more chambers. One was a regular cave, but the other was made of dark bricks and shaped like a colossal triangle, with two podiums complete with stairs. Two incredibly large hunks of chitin resided at the top of each podium, most likely the deceased twin emperors of the qiraji. The ambient magic was certainly changing so close to the body of C'Thun, but even the hum of power surging through the land and up into Sara couldn't overshadow her unease at being so precariously beneath the ground. How structurally sound were these caverns? How long had it been since anything came by to perform maintenance on them?
After a quick stop for food and water they continued on, deeper and deeper, and then the soil and organic structures gave way again to stone, patterned in rectangles and strange interlocking puzzle-piece bricks. Light now came only from the oil lanterns they had brought, peeling away the pitch black with flickering orange light. Then they came to a sort of loop; the hallway split to the left and right, then conjoined on the far end. On the far end however was a single passage towards the inside of the 'loop', down a relatively puny flight of stairs. And down that flight of stairs was the final chamber. Sara led them to the stairwell, and all of them beheld the sight of their destination.
It was absolutely enormous, maybe half the size of the Trade District in Stormwind but without buildings and stalls in the way. Its sheer scale was absolutely imposing even within the weak lantern light. The shape was as though someone had taken a circle, elongated it, and cut off the resulting oval at the halfway point. The entry stairs were at the edge of the rounded portion, and on the far side was a raised platform with two rusty gongs on them, each emblazoned with the image of a scarab. Pillars surrounded the edge of the rounded portions, with long dead torches affixed to the wall between each. The brick pattern of the floor was in complete disrepair, sometimes broken by a line of greenish squares snaking around the floor. Craters the size of Sara, craters the size of of a drake had been punched in the floor complete with rubble strewn about haphazardly. In the center of it all was the corpse of the terrible Old God, C'Thun.
There was no creature on the planet Sara could've ever hoped to compare C'Thun with, but if she had to try her first choice would have been an octopus. The tentacles, and indeed the entire body, were pale tan as if made to camouflage in the desert. The tentacles were covered in armor plating with white spines the size of a tauren bull sticking off from them. The eight tentacles sank beneath the soil and trailed off to places unknown.
That was where any comparison to an octopus ended. Measuring from where one cottage-thick tentacle vanished beneath the land and the opposite side, C'Thun's head took up roughly three quarters of the space. It was as tall as it was wide, somewhat rounded. Between the places where its gigantic tentacles merged with its body were its mouths, sideways and slammed shut with the white fangs sticking into itself. All along its skin were burns and bruises, cuts surrounded by dry, black blood and arrow holes. Above each of the eight maws was an enormous purple eye, rolled back into its socket so as to hide any evidence of a pupil.
And that was just the bottom half of its head. The top half was occupied with countless smaller, similarly dead eyes of which a good number had their lids closed over them and limp tendrils which, while not as gargantuan as the eight primaries, were three times Sara's height and ended in wickedly sharp points. To complete the image of the Old God, at the top of its head was a series of sandy spikes standing tall and proud, angled inward towards the head as if to protect something vital, the spikes nearly doubling the height of C'Thun's head as they rested upon it like a crown.
Behind her, Leira threw up.
"Alright, here we are. Remember the safety instructions I gave earlier?" she said, trying her hardest to keep her excitement out of her voice. "Well quadruple it here. Watch your step and for the love of all that we hold dear don't touch anything! You all know what to do, so let's get to it. Fardol, Leira, try to stay back."
Carefully and quietly, everyone proceeded down the steps. They fanned out around Sara, whispering as if afraid that making too much noise would rouse the giant. As they approached, the light from their lanterns made C'Thun look all the more sinister. Sara took out her detection wand and nervously took the reading of the surroundings. As she suspected, the latent magic in the air was heavily altered. She took a few steps towards C'Thun and took another reading, then another step towards it, writing down how the magic changed as she grew closer and closer to the Old God.
Once she was closer to its head than the tips of its tentacles, she surrounded herself in a barrier. Ten yards from C'Thun's skin. Five yards. One yard, and she dared go no closer. She hopped back and shuddered, happy to not have to look at its limp, dead eyes. Just the sight of them made her feel like her own eyes were rolling back in their sockets.
Everyone worked diligently, eager to get away from the monster, but this was also where there was the most data to collect, especially to see if there was any hint of the spell that linked the Old Gods to Azeroth's integrity. People regularly went back up the stairs to Fardol and Leira to have the former use the Holy Light on them, just in case. Except for Sara given her... adverse reaction to the Light, but luckily shouting at everyone earlier had put that out of their memory.
Leira wouldn't look at her though.
Ten minutes. Thirty minutes. One hour. The air was warm and smelled like dust, not death and decay like she'd expected and indeed, C'Thun's body was completely untouched by any decomposition. They attempted to scrape slime off the walls to culture, but there was nothing alive in the entire chamber except for them. The entire time Sara would have even felt welcome in the chamber, if it wasn't for the way C'Thun's eyes had rolled back in its head or the tons of dirt hanging above them, poised to implode at the slightest disturbance.
Another shiver graced her spine with its presence.
She did some modifications on the detection wand. Analyzing the latent magic was all well and good, but she needed C'Thun's own magic signature. She again approached the Old God, and lightly tapped the surface of its skin, shielded and bracing for the worst.
Nothing happened. The detection wand's transparent shards filled up with horrible, inky purple magic that gave her flashbacks to when her own magical signature was taken. It had been the same color, hadn't it?
The instant the detection wand had enough magic she pulled it away and gingerly retreated, writing down the numbers it had. She didn't have the time to arrange it into a proper signature graph, but just by looking at it Sara had the uneasy feeling that it was the same sawtooth pattern that the faceless had, that she had. Maybe even more similar to hers than the faceless one's signature had been.
After an hour and a half, they were done. There were just two more things left to do and they could leave. She returned to the stairs and handed Fardol the detection wand. "Burn the magic out of it," she said. "If you think you there's any left at all, keep burning it. If you're not sure if you burned it enough, keep burning it."
"Roger," he said as he took it in his hands, which began to glow. Next to him, Leira was still green at the gills and pointedly avoiding looking at Sara.
That churning in Sara's stomach was surely just the presence of C'Thun, right?
She climbed back down the stairs, grabbed a simple wooden staff, and raised her voice. "Alright! Everyone gather around!" Several people jumped, but began to approach. "Alright, that's all the data we need from the instruments. The next step is the two spells I need to cast personally. Relax, I'm not going to bring it back from the dead or anything." She rolled her eyes. "Was hard enough doing that for you lot," she said, successfully getting a good natured chuckle. "Just in case though, if I say to stop me, or you suspect I absolutely need to stop, then counterspell the shit out of me. Now clear a path!" she bellowed, and they formed a clear shot between Sara and C'Thun. She fixed the dead deity with a glare, and raised the staff in her right hand.
Deathly green magic flared around her hands and flowed along the shaft of wood as she directed her powers at C'Thun. She hadn't been lying, she wasn't going to revive C'Thun, but there was another use for her resurrection powers. Determining the state of the eldritch monster's soul.
When a body died, the soul began to drift and it left a 'path' through the nether. Her magic had always been able to follow this path, even when she was young and hadn't known what she was actually doing. The further a soul drifted the harder it was for her magic to reach it, and harder for her to pull it all the way back to its body. Larger souls were also 'heavier' in magical terms, but all souls drifted at the same rate and even the slightest touch of her resurrection magic had always been able to tell her how far a soul had drifted into the afterlife.
She didn't know how far C'Thun's soul had drifted.
It was like having a flashlight and shining it into a long dark tunnel, trying but failing to see where it ended. So cautiously, she began to extend her magic through the massive path C'Thun's soul had left upon its death, searching for how far it drifted. Sara extended her magic as far as it could go, further and further, but with absolutely no success and soon she was forced to withdraw it. When she was done she fell to the ground and the staff clattered to the stone.
The crowd of mages and warlocks gasped, and Maria approached her, but Sara held up a hand. "I'm fine, I'm fine. Just pushed myself a little far." There was no reason for C'Thun's soul to have gotten so far from its body. Even having been dead for thirty years, she should've been able to at least find it if not revive it. The only explanation was that C'Thun had actively driven its soul impossibly far from its body. What did that mean?
She had a few guesses. The most likely one was that C'Thun was going to try and find some other world to torment, that it decided Azeroth was too much trouble, wasn't worth it, and so was off to find another planet entirely. If that was the case Sara didn't really know the Old God's fate. Whether its spirit haunted a new innocent world, or the Twisting Nether had torn the weakened Old God's ghost apart, it didn't matter.
As far as Azeroth was concerned, C'Thun was gone for good.
"I'm fine," she insisted again. "Thalnek, Alrinn, come here. I need your help to set up an array. You too, Fardol. Your part is the last after these two are done."
The high elf and gnome approached her, and she began to describe the magical array she needed set up around herself. It took the two mages a half hour of spell casting to get it done, but when they were finished a multifaceted negative feedback ritual circle had been conjured around her, its purple glow piercing the gloom of the Old God's lightless grave.
"Excellent. Fardol, I need you to consecrate the land between one and two and a half yards around me. Can you do that?"
"Oddly specific, but I can try," he admitted as he approached the ritual. Standing at its edge, he lifted a fist and enshrouded it with golden power, then slammed it to the ground after a short pause. Sara winced as a cloud of holy power blew outwards from him, but like she'd requested it didn't approach more than a yard to her. There. The ritual, combined with the holy ground, would keep anything horrible from getting to her from this next spell. She was ready.
Sara reached out her mental magic to C'Thun's brain.
The first thing she noticed was that the Old God's mind was absolutely gargantuan. Nothing else was expected, really, but holy shit that was a giant brain. There was no spark of life in it, but the lack of decay meant the veritable rain forest of mind links were as intact as they were on the day the Liberality Confederacy killed C'Thun. She had absolutely no idea where to even begin. With humanoids, animals, there was a pattern. Their brains all worked more or less the same way. Brain stem, cortex, different locations for different processes. But an Old God? All Sara could do was guess, so guess she did. She reached out blindly, created a tentative mind reading link between her mind and -
Dead soil.
Sands.
Mortals inside.
Red skies.
Blood rivers.
Mortals fighting inside.
Injured inside.
Shattered aqir.
Oceanic depths.
Screams.
Mortal before it.
Walking mountains.
Clashing storms.
Darkness.
Metal skin.
Mortal with magic.
The smell of its own burning flesh.
Its first cast of an eye beam.
Mortals surrounding it.
Surrounding it.
Surrounding.
Abandon.
Try.
Mortal with magic.
Familiar magic.
Fly blown plains.
Very familiar magic.
World's roof.
Horrified screams laughing on the wind.
Snow mountains.
Prison of the usurpers.
Elaborate.
Giant.
Flawed.
Barely flawed.
Battling metal creatures from beyond.
Metal structures all around.
Metal soldiers guarding one.
Metal watchers guarding one.
Guarding one deep inside.
Guarding one inmate.
Inside.
Familiar magic.
Usurper prison.
The mortal has magic.
Familiar magic.
Usurper prison in the north.
Mortals killing it.
Black empires worshiping it.
Torturing in its name.
Mortal before it.
Mortal with -
"SARA, STOP!" someone shouted. She gasped and felt her magic fly away as a counterspell collapsed around her. She almost made to stumble, but caught herself as she returned to reality. She was still in Ahn'Qiraj, with miles of stone perched above her. Blinking the visions out of her mind, she looked around.
"Oh shit," she whispered. The arcane runes around her sparked and popped, and the yellow cracks in the stone signifying consecrated land had turned bruise-purple. "What happened?"
"My consecration started ta turn desecrated, we stopped ya as quick as we could but they had some trouble gettin' a counterspell to stick with the ritual around ya."
"That's good, that's good. If it turned corrupted then it did its purpose. Better the magic go into the consecration than me." Swinging her arms back, Sara jumped out and over the defiled land and backed away from it, still holding her head. "I'm fine, I'm fine. It was a bit intense is all. Showed me a sort of slide show of... I don't really know. Went by so fast." That was a lie. It had gone by at a perfect rate for her to understand. She remembered every single vision that C'Thun's dead brain had shown her, even if they left her a little weak in the knees. "That's all our business in Ahn'Qiraj done. Katherine, please open us a portal back to Stormwind so we can start prepping for a visit to the Maelstrom."
The mage nodded. "Right away."
While the mage began casting, Sara collected all the data they'd collected and stored it in her pack. It must've been past midnight, but so close to C'Thun she felt like she could run a marathon. Within seconds Katherine finished opening the portal, carving a spherical tear in space-time to the Wizard's Sanctum. Everyone began to vanish into it one by one, until Sara was alone with Leira, Fardol, and C'Thun.
"So," she said.
"I have my own hearthstone," Fardol said as he took out a small white rock engraved with a blue swirl. "It's been a pleasure keepin' ya safe Miss Smithers, but do try ta keep caution whenever ya end up goin' to the other Old Gods. Ya saw what almost happened here, after all." He started rubbing the hearthstone, which immediately began to glow green. After exactly ten seconds he vanished with a clap of thunder, leaving only a series of blue spheres in the air that faded as soon as she saw them.
"I have a hearthstone too," Leira said, taking it out. "I have to get back to the Chimes, tell them about the Hammer. Probably go fight the Legion too, heh. Show those demons who's boss."
"Yeah," Sara said, glancing at the hungry portal behind her. "Leira are... we okay?" she asked hesitantly, bowing her head in fear of the answer.
The draenei sighed. "I don't know Sara. This is a lot to take in. I mean it's... faceless magic. Talk to you later, I just need to think about this." The warrior began to rub her own hearthstone and promptly vanished, leaving Sara alone with the monster.
"Yeah," she whispered to herself. "I guess it is a lot." She turned to the portal. "Well, here goes nothing." She began walking to it, replaying C'Thun's visions in her mind. A lot of it was a jumbled mess of its time ruling Azeroth and its time imprisoned, but something stuck out to her. The usurper prison in the north, with a single inmate. There was only one place that could be, and it didn't fit with the rest of its dim memories.
C'Thun had shown her Ulduar.
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