Not for the first time, the prince of the Sin'Dorei, the children of the blood, fell to his knees as a storm of magic fell upon him, and not for the first time he weathered a torrent of energies holy, natural, and unholy alike, each spell cast by a mage of experience and no small amount of power. Kael'Thas Sunstrider grit his teeth as his mana dipped ever lower, his senses telling him the air was being drained of any ambient mana far faster than he could drag it away himself. His servants had reported the growth responsible for the theft only minutes before his personal battle began.
In that time his personal advisors, his guards, each and every one a stalwart servant who marched with him through that frozen hell called Northrend, were butchered by a haggard group of traitors intermixed with lesser peoples that dared to call themselves heroes. They never should have come this close. He had never expected them to arrive so quickly, never expected so many traps and wards to simply fall away, drained of energy before their targets even arrived. He had never thought that so many different layers of protection could be stripped away in the blink of an eye.
It was nonsensical, it was demeaning, and it was a slap to the face in light of all he had worked for. Months of effort in magical research on the generation of magic and the eventual cure or at least satiation of his peoples hunger thrown back into his face with the use of his own temporary solution. They were tapping into his own sources of mana and draining them dry. What's worse was that fact made it all the more likely that it was one of his own people who came up with the idea. It was- Kael'Thas groaned in pain as he felt the first layer of his barrier break, and heard the approaching footsteps of the other half of this assault.
The warriors, the rogues, the hunters, each armed with enchanted and enhanced magical weaponry, each searching for a weakness in his shielding, a chink in his armor, struck at once. Half a hundred maces, swords, and axes bounced off of his hastily erected barrier, what felt like a thousand arrows, bolts, and town weapons embedded themselves in the slowly cracking shield around him. With every attack they landed on the shell of energy encasing his form, his view of the world darkened and blurred. His nose bled, his eyes watered, and his mind screamed.
Pride kept him standing when his power dwindled to a level that was low even for one of the pathetic excuses for mages that invaded his fortress. His own disgust at the idea of falling to a gaggle of primitives and savages, bleating away in lesser tongues their battle cries and insults, encouraging their tainted allies and half-witted magic users to finish off a prince among the highborne. Like they had any understanding of what real power was. They wanted him dead because he had lost the stomach to look into their eyes and call them equals, because he had sided with an army led by a titan. They called him "traitor."
Like they had any inkling in their barely sentient minds what that word even meant. Had he not been betrayed first? Had he not been in Dalaran when the scourge came, when his father was murdered by the very same human prince she chose over him? His people had suffered through slight after slight, insult after insult, and what came of the "unity" the alliance preached? Imprisonment and death.
The thought brought back the rage he had been carrying ever since the day Kael'Thas Sunstrider, prince of the Sin'Dorei, realized he was a failure. Would his people find once again that in their hour of greatest need, their prince had once more abandoned them? No, No. They wouldn't. He couldn't allow that. Not as long as he drew breath.
"Never again." He whispered "Never again!" He yelled, his vision finally snapping back into focus. "NEVER AGAIN!" He roared. In an instant he was moving, with a half mad sob the prince splayed his hands, his shield pulsing and exploding outward into flame, sending the killers arrayed against him flying. Orcs and men, traitor elves and low borne trash alike were sent careening across the room, crashing into their allies and onto his walls, generating distance but likely not killing any of them, but it bought him time, and an opportunity. The plan came together in the blink of an eye.
Of the nearly three dozen magic users that had slithered and writhed into his bridge, only four where distracted enough to let down their defenses and look away from the burst of bright light accompanying his attack, and happened to be close enough for him to take advantage. It was more than he needed.
They died before their comrades had even touched the ground, exploding into ash and dust as their lifeforce and mana coalesced into pure arcane energy, before being drawn away into his body. By the time the rest of the magic users could react, throwing out another wave of curses and bolts, hexes and smites, he was ready.
He was an Arch-mage! He had been crafting works of magic the world had never seen while their grandparents wallowed around in whatever mud-pit they had been born in!
And he would show them.
Kael'Thas began with the healers, the stinking druids and the so called "faithful" priests, creating frost from all angles, summoning a flurry of sharpened ice of all shapes and sizes from every conceivable direction. With the accompanying sound of shattering glass and howling winds the most annoying thorn in his side was ,temporarily at least, removed from his side, their judging, despicable gazes switching to a much more palatable look of fear.
The fools were intelligent enough to keep their distance and spread themselves out, but they were too distant from the real casters, too far back to be anything but support, and too distracted by keeping their allies alive to defend themselves. A human female screamed as she was impaled from several angles, a troll bedecked in some tribal wear he could smell even from that considerable distance gurgled as he was nailed to the far wall by his throat. One of the low borne's cries of terror cut off, her head sent flying from her malformed body by a particularly thin piece of ice.
He danced around the twinned efforts of a Human paladin and an Orcish warrior, before a slew of weapons once scattered around the floor rose up without so much as a sound. The warrior managed to catch sight of the glinting metal at his periphery, barely parrying four different attacks before jumping out of the way of fourteen more. The human was not so lucky, only managing a half mumbled groan as a spear flew into the back of his head, almost perfectly emerging from his right eye.
The nuisances he couldn't recognize or be certain of were met with flame. Druids, shamans, casters of magics he was unfamiliar with. He sent out nothing but quick bursts and he batted away spell after spell, countering an onslaught of foreign spells with his shields, and letting even more simply slide over his robes, enchanted with millennia of glyphs and symbols. Half of which he created himself, half made by the life's work of entire lines of magisters hoping to gain the royal families favor. To their credit in many places the cloth tore, coming apart in patches as the overcharged spells detonated.
One of his blades, a pale imitation of his family sword, flew up from the ground and met his waiting palm just as he span past a forsaken priest smelling of void taint. The undead's rotten, now headless corpse collapsed to the ground as he used all but the barest trickle of his mana to blink away from the crowd that had seconds before nearly stolen away his life.
He smirked at the wave of magic that found him the moment he appeared across the room. Felfire, several barrages of arcane bullets, a hail of firebolts, curses designed to draw agony from his frame, each and every one a deathknell to anyone else, but one absent of magic he didn't recognize, hadn't already mastered himself a thousand times over.
The thin, translucent wall of energy that he drew up to meet it was designed for siege warfare. It was called Dorei Ama noral'arkhana. The elf saved by magic. It was made for large area of effect attacks powered with enough mana to kill any single, average mage. His people had made it as an answer to dragons, had they ever decided to strike out at the children of noble birth, or the concentrated effort of a group of mages on overcharging a single spell to force it to power several orders of magnitude above what it should be capable of.
It's effect was simple, it tore apart the spell that met it at the seams, leaving nothing but ambient and easily absorbed mana. It was only in practice when the mastery one needed over magic to succeed at such a spell showed itself. The single spell it defended against had to be retroactively undone midflight, after it had already been cast. A task which any mage would describe as similar to solving an equation while you where upside down, and it was backward, all inside a fraction of a second.
It was that very same spell that had earned him the distinction of arch-mage, something he was once endlessly prideful of.
The deluge of power that forced itself in his direction was well cast, well formulated, and done with speed he'd have been impressed by a century ago. Every individual spell faltered and died the instant it touched his barrier, with all that remained nothing more than a particularly refreshing wave of power rushing through his blood. When he dropped his hands he found that, temporarily at least, he didn't need to defend himself.
Every caster capable of looking could do nothing more than gape at the prince as his tongue flickered along the line of blood gathering at the top of his lip. He took a moment to catch his breath, watching as they gathered themselves, before he stood straight, his furious whisper impossibly managing to carry past the still burning fires all around them, and the cacophony of pained groans from those who had managed to survive this long.
"You are, all of you, useless. Nothing but a pack of barely evolved monkeys and worms." He nearly hissed. "The future I have planned will not be jeopardized by you!" Fire pooled in his hands, and he took satisfaction in the knowledge that the act made each and every one of them flinch. This was over.
The fire in his palms brightened, and then dimmed at the sound of hundreds of plated bootsteps. From both sets of doors imperiously standing at either side of the bridge, emerged an army of Gnolls of all things. Easily notable as undead and each bedecked in clearly enchanted plate. At the head of the lines two of the creatures carried a platform with a massive, yet somewhat unusually small skull set atop it. He sensed at least three different kinds of dark magics holding the constructs together as they set the object on the ground. It was the skull of what looked to be a lesser pit-lord, embossed in demon-steel and marked with thousands of small but immediately distinct symbols. Necromatic ritual signs, troll imprisonment seals, and even a number of the demon imprisonment sigils he himself had designed. His smirk faded.
The prince of the children of the blood felt his shoulders slump as the pieces of the puzzle came together. It became clear as surely as the sun rose over Azeroth every day. This was a trap, a ploy to leave him weakened and exposed within his own fortress.
Not a soul moved, only staring at the creatures now surrounding them all, the brandished swords and axes, their weapons alight with the very same runes that kept them active and alive.
Not long after that another sound graced their ears, the light bootsteps of a single human dressed in demon-steel armor. He emerged casually, a contemplative expression on his face. The pale, blackhaired human seemed both annoyed, and eager. Those remaining of the forces that attacked his fortress looked on in confused recognition as he spoke.
His lips smacked as he looked coldly over the room. "I've cut off every exit, all means of communication, and now any chance of escape for any soul that doesn't belong to me. If any of you among the raiding force wish to live to see tommorow you'll stay out of my way, and listen to my offer." The king of Westfall pointed to the prince of Silvermoon. "-As for you, I'm sure you're aware by now what my plan is, so I'll give you the last mercy you'll ever know. You can die fighting, knowing that one of your kind orchestrated your end."
The ever growing feeling of magic being torn away from him increased tenfold as the creature ahead of him drew a sword. Kael'Thas Sunstrider took a breath, before standing straight and raising his own blade.
"Get on with it."
"...Die a king worth remembering."
