My voice rang out across the cove "I want everyone who can manipulate even the barest hint of mana on that ship within the next hour."
In an instant the scatterred researchers and workers ran off, grabbing whatever supplies they deemed necessary for the trip.
I stopped a blood mage as he frantically gathered some notes.
"Send a golem to Sentinel hill with a message that I'm departing to Quel'Thalas on a diplomatic mission. Add something about gaining better standing with the Horde."
I stepped off the ship, making my way to the tunnels, and for the room we had cleared for the whelp I had captured.
It was a large, open chamber with ritualistic symbols carves into the walls, floors, and ceiling. The chamber itself was around a third of the size of the cove.
Inside Nyssa Stormheart and two bloodmages channeled healing magic into the slumbering form of my whelp.
However it wasn't a whelp anymore.
In the relatively short few weeks since we acquired it, the whelp had grown into a particularly large drake.
Its hide was covered in several glowing sigils of varying colors, each thrumming with power.
The drake was dangerously thin for its size, and the scarring covering it had hinted at the abuse we had committed upon it.
Most notably the flesh along the right side of its face was torn away in large sections, and several jagged teeth shown through the ruins of its cheek.
It was nowhere near completion, but even still I could feel the sheer magnitude of magic it exuded. A dragons natural strength in magic enhanced several times over.
I held the rotten hand of my original body in front of my face. It was strange to have grown this far from what I was.
This would be the last time I found myself in this body. In any flesh other than that of the creature just in front of me.
Assuming my plan was a success of course.
The flesh of the drake would rot off in a manner not dissimilar from how my original body had, if I failed.
That wouldn't happen though. I had put too much resources into seeing this through, too much of my studies into building the creature in front of me.
I had only really just begun.
I kneeled in front of my new body, before releasing myself from the undead form I had possessed. Black smoke poured from my flesh, and soon I was looking at myself kneeling before the drake.
Without the protective covering of flesh I felt the magic of the room whirling around me, pouring into the drake.
A dragon was naturally a creature of magic, and a creature of will. I had increased ones power, and in the process tortured it for weeks now.
The few times it had been conscious it was filled with rage and pain. This was why I hadn't possessed it already. In a way I was afraid of what would happen.
By mortal standards I was strong willed, but dragons where not mortal. There was a reason no banshee or specter had attempted to possess one before.
Possessing something was a struggle of pure willpower, it was suppressing the mind of a creature and stealing its body for your own.
Dragons where conscious and ever living whirlwinds of power.
That was why I was here. That was why I had decided I would be doing more than possessing it.
Like possession, rituals and magic were expressions of will. In magic I was willing my mana to take a particular form and shape, manipulating different energies for different effects.
In the kind of rituals I would soon be undertaking it would be the same, but far, far worse. I needed the kind of will a dragon would have.
I was not possessing this dragon.
The blackened smoke that took up my undead form flowed into the dragons mouth just as its eyes opened for the first time in days.
Once I was inside its mind, the first thing I noticed was agony. Pain on such a scale even I, a specter who made a pastime of self torture, nearly screamed at.
Every inch of the dragon's being was burning as the magic and Trolls blood elixir barely kept it together.
Every portion of my body felt as if it was being torn apart and bathed in acid.
The second thing I noticed was a mental blow unlike anything I had felt before.
Whenever I was in another beings mind I was almost always on the attack, but from the instant I entered its conscious I was on the defensive.
I was almost immediately suppressed under the dragons almost infinite rage and pain, pushed back just like my victims often were.
It fought me even as it weakly rose up, readying to attack my slaves.
My counter attack was the only thing that kept it from burning them all alive. Instead of trying to suppress the dragon like it had me I dove into its mind, pulling its soul into my own.
A thousand instincts I didn't recognize flowed through me in an instant, and six months of memories filled my mind.
From when I first became aware within my egg, to the day my disappointed and saddened mother sent me away to die inside that swamp, sickly and with only my brothers and sisters to keep me company.
I remember when I was captured, when some mage took me away and tortured me for reasons I was only now beginning to understand. Power.
Power that I now had. Power that I had captured the whelp I once was for. I felt the chaos of three souls slowly coming together into one being.
I managed to sluggishly drag myself to the ship, my reeling soul and mind barely coming around to formulate a unified thought.
Sleep took me moments later.