The Romancer Opalbane

Episode Thirty: A death demon comes for Benactus

In the end, He will be slain by a demon with many heads. The exact number is unclear, but there will be one head for every misdeed that must be righted, and each head will also stand for every land and place that was betrayed by Him. The man who disregards his mind, body, soul, and family for the dark powers only invites the demon in. It—named for no petty fear but the very name of fear itself—will come into that last place and gorge itself on His injustice if He does not change his ways.

Again, listen to what I say! If He does not repent, the demon with many heads and named of fear will destroy Azeroth in every possible way.

Priest Benactus sat staring at his open book of Draenei prophecy. He wasn't reading, just staring. The black words that described the coming of a demon with many heads hovered over the white page, a constant vestige of his consciousness. How many times had he read that passage in the last month? The remainder of the page was filled with a detailed interpretation of Velen's most mysterious prophecy. For generations, Draenei scholars argued over whom 'He' was… the author of this book was sure 'He' referred to Azeroth itself, the place where the last battle with the Burning Legion was most likely to occur. If one took it that way, the demon was just a symbol for all the evil forces of the Burning Legion and the warnings were meant for people of all races to take seriously. Moral corruption bred weakness, everyone knew that. However, Benactus had taken the passage very personally after Opalbane was stolen from him a month ago. Each day Benactus felt more sure that the prophecy was talking about him. And the demon, with a head for every place he'd done wrong, and every misdeed he'd done in those places, could be no one other than the man who'd singlehandedly ruined Benactus' life in every conceivable way: the rogue Alessandre.

"He married her. Married Opalbane…" Benactus mumbled to himself over and over.

How had Alessandre learned the secret stipulations to high priesthood within the Twilight's Hammer Cult? And, as if that weren't enough, Alessandre found a way to extricate Opalbane from the cult permanently, by allowing the ex-cultist to fixate worship on him as her husband.

"Brilliant!" Benactus mumbled to himself, eyes wild. "But how did he even know it would work… how could he be that powerful?"

Locked up in his office for the last few days without any food or water, and hardly any human contact before he'd barricaded himself against the inevitable Stormwind Guard, Benactus considered the possibility that he'd simply gone mad.

Priest Benactus gently pushed the holy book aside and drew the parchment he was working on nearer. Beyond the furniture he'd piled over his bolted door, guards were pounding on the wood, and shouted to be granted entry.

"You are under arrest, for crimes against the Cathedral of Light and Darnassus. And, we know you are a cultist, Benactus! Give yourself up."

He'd made the decision to meet the nameless demon two days ago when it became clear that his life was falling apart. The cultists were furious and rejected him for hiding Opalbane from Zar'teaus. They'd threatened his life. The Cathedral of Light got suspicious when an official from Darnassus—Alessandre—felt the need to kidnap Priestess Opalbane to safety. Today, their investigation into Benactus' secret doings finally revealed how he'd corrupted and turned many brilliant students of the Light into shadowpriests, or worse, into cultists. Benactus only recently heard whispers that Alessandre was an assassin with the Kaldorei Rogue Network. And the people who provided him with such information were disappearing fast… Stormwind Guard found bodies of key individuals in seats of power all over Stormwind next to documentation that proved they were Twilight Cultists. It was like his own family was being taken out, one by one. Finally, Benactus' actual family in Westfall had found out about his dark life and turned against him. Everything was falling apart because of Alessandre. Benactus felt like the prophecy said, that he was being destroyed in every possible way. For all Benactus' careful planning for Opalbane over decades, just one man had unraveled everything. But how? How could one man be capable of doing so much harm?

Follow the path traveled by few, the Naaru say.

Or is it the Draenei who worship them?

Even the prophet Velen was once a demon thousands of years ago, I hear.

And what of men?

Benactus didn't consider himself a poet, but sometimes, in the worst of times, he needed to write and organize his thoughts, to keep from losing his mind.

A monster named Alessandre, with three heads.

One in Westfall where I guessed his name comes from, one in Darnassus.

The third in my daughter's room in Stormwind.

How can that be? How can he know all, see all?

And he is coming for me now, a fourth head for me.

Just for me, lucky death set aside for the old man at last.

The old shadowpriest didn't like his second poem as much. His inspiration was failing him, the will to finally face the man who singlehandedly ruined his life fading. Benactus sensed that he was the last one of the cultists in Stormwind to die. He'd considered just letting the Stormwind Guard take him. What did they do to cultists in the Stockades? Benactus did not want to know. Even the cult had made a threat on his life, turned against him because of Alessandre. Benactus now saw himself as a twisted, aged, unholy man with no clear convictions. He'd forsaken the Light and clung to the shadow and Old Gods. Even the Old Gods would have nothing to do with him for harboring the escaped High Priestess Opalbane.

How ironic that only the shadow remains for me now at the end of time.

I loved her once, worshipped her,

But from that very darkness comes a rogue,

A monster named Alessandre with four heads: one in Westfall, one in Darnassus, one in Stormwind, and now a fourth in the shadow, waiting for me.

I want to look him in the face. I want to face death like a man.

"That doesn't rhyme!" Benactus finally became frustrated with himself. The pounding on his door outside got louder. Benactus took a deep breath and lay down his stylus. The sloppy ink pooled over the paper and seeped through, like a stain of rich dark blood. He got up and walked to the chair he'd placed in the center of the room, eyed the rope fastened to a beam above his head and the noose at the end of that.

"Alessandre is a monster with five heads. One in Westfall, one in Darnassus. One in Stormwind, a fourth in the shadow, waiting for me. And the fifth… the fifth is in my mind." Benactus shuddered. The fear was consuming him now. He couldn't stay it with his writing any longer. Believing in strange prophecies had to be madness. No man would come now at the end of his life and comfort him in even that small way. Benactus would have to die without the answers, but at least he could go with dignity. He climbed up on the chair, and lowered the noose around his neck. Then, Benactus carefully brought his foot around to the open back of the chair and steadied it. He could kick it aside when he wanted to, when he was ready.

"You took her, my only daughter." Benactus wept. "I wanted to see you and ask you why… I can't wait any longer, you five-headed monster. I can't see you anymore in my head. Get out! Get out I say!" Benactus started shouting. And then, using the power of his voice as a way to distract himself from the horrible deed, Benactus kicked the chair below him aside. The noose tightened around his neck. The chair twisted under him gracefully, teetered on one leg, and should have crashed to the floor…

It should have crashed. It did not because someone caught it.

Alessandre materialized out of the shadow, swearing. He set the chair right, and grabbed Benactus by his knees. He held up the choking man and cut him free of the rope with his dagger.

"Damn you, Benactus! You can't die that way, you coward." Alessandre set Benactus in the chair and roughly forced him to sit upright when the old man's face turned red and he began to gag.

"You… saved me? Why?"

Alessandre narrowed his glowing yellow eyes at the shadowpriest. "Do you really think that I will let death come so easily to one of my victims? No, Benactus. I have plans for you first, then I will kill you."

"Haha!" Benactus cheered, delirious. It forced him to catch his breath again. "The five-headed monster has come for me at last, at the end of time! I have so much I wish to ask you, so much I need to tell you… you sonofabitch." Benactus couldn't help it. He gave into his recent obsession over the rogue.

Alessandre half glanced over his shoulder. The noise of the Stormwind Guard pounding down Benactus' door did not seem to bother the old shadowpriest but it made the rogue nervous.

"First, how did you get in here? And before, when you learned about Faltheriel… how did you spy on us? Can you walk through walls, you demon monster?"

Alessandre looked at Benactus sideways. Little did Benactus know that this was the look one madman was giving another. The only difference was, Alessandre's form of insanity had been sanctioned by Darnassus. Alessandre drew his weapons and glanced from Benactus to the door. He seemed to make up his mind about something, then sheathed his sword and dagger. Alessandre leaned across the delirious shadowpriest and used the severed rope to tie Benactus to the chair.

"I came down the chimney." Alessandre changed his tactic quickly once he realized he had more time. "What's this?" he pointed at the poems on Benactus' desk. "Are you a writing about me?" he tried to keep his voice calm.

Benactus' eyes widened. "The chimney! You are too big for that. You are a specter, a demon of death… which are you? How many heads have you, rogue?"

Alessandre worked quickly, shuffling through papers on Benactus' desk to make sure there wasn't any more written about him. He attempted to shake the eerie death poetry dry then stuffed it into his pocket.

"Why did you take my Opalbane? When I lost her, my entire world fell apart."

"I love her." Alessandre said simply.

"It took me so long to figure it all out…" Benactus rambled on. He rocked himself back and forth in the chair while Alessandre stalked about the room positioning papers and furniture. "Look at me! Don't you care that I'm talking to you?" Benactus asked Alessandre.

Shouts to retrieve a battering ram came through the door. Alessandre flinched at that and changed his course of action. He began tearing books and papers off the shelves.

"I care. Tell me what it is you want to say, old man." Clearly, Alessandre wanted to keep Benactus busy for the time being.

"First was the chalk. Faltheriel gave it to me, gave it to all of us. He said that demonic runes were good for spying on people. But I didn't know that it would put me in a trance… refreshing the demonic rune under Opalbane's bed was the thing. It was a ritual I did in Faltheriel's name, though I didn't know it. The rune itself was unimportant though he tricked all of us into believing that we could use it to spy on people. Using the powerful fel magic made all of us more susceptible to his kind of suggestion. That is how he ascended our ranks so quickly, and got me to help him, with his powerful demon magic."

"Are you saying that Faltheriel was mind controlling you somehow?" Alessandre paused in the middle of ripping a book of scripture apart. He put the book back and read titles to himself before pulling a different book off the shelf. It was a book on the nature of fel energy.

"Yes, yes! You are smart, aren't you?" Benactus rubbed his sore neck and became more animated. "He works for the Burning Legion. Did you know that? No, I think you knew that, you knew everything. You aren't just a rogue are you, you must have a very dark entity trapped inside… but it was the chalk. When I came into the room on that day and saw you there when Opalbane disappeared… do you remember Alessandre? That is when the chalk broke and I snapped out of it. When the chalk broke I realized what he was doing to me, to all of us. But I was too terrified to act. There was nothing I could do alone, and I did not want to contact the others because then you would find them."

"I already know about the other fifty or so Twilight Cultists in Stormwind." Alessandre admitted. Now, he began to pitch certain books and scrolls across the room. He kicked in an old chair and tossed the splintered pieces about the floor. "Most of them are dead now. I had to get them first. The death of someone as important as yourself would sound a kind of alarm. Benactus, one of the last."

"What are you doing? Why are you leaving certain things ruined and others not?"

Alessandre finished and came to stand before Benactus. "Many people think that being an assassin is about the killing. It isn't. People who hire assassins are more concerned with how targets are eliminated. It's all about ending a threat, setting things right for the client, or even igniting chaos with the kind of evidence that is left behind at a murder scene. It all depends on how it is done, Benactus." Then, Alessandre seized the sides of Benactus' chair and dragged it over to his desk. He turned it slightly, as if Benactus had scooted out from behind the desk to greet someone.

Benactus finally became quiet. His cheeks were hollow. His black hair was more sparse than it had appeared before. However evil Alessandre knew the man had been to imprison and torment Opalbane, and turn many of Stormwind's capable priests into cultists, Benactus still looked like a defenseless old man.

"I thought you were just a scoundrel, going after Opalbane's honor." Benactus said in a small voice.

Alessandre took off his black leather gloves and stuffed them into his belt. "I thought you were just a kindly old man that my Opalbane loved like a father."

Benactus blinked. "Did she? Did she really love me the way that I loved her, my daughter?" for some reason, Benactus was desperate to know the answer to this.

Alessandre hesitated. "Yes."

Benactus smiled wickedly. "I understand. You see me for who I am, a man who protected and guided Opalbane when she was lost. You are afraid that I truly am like her father and that killing me will drive a wedge between you two."

Outside the door, the feminine murmur of an agitated crowd of priestesses swelled. The rhythmic clank of returning armored soldiers in file carried up the hallway.

Alessandre's jaw tightened. He stared at the ceiling, at the hastily severed noose and shook his head.

"I told her many times that you were no good for her, but she loves you like a father." Alessandre confessed. "If I…" Alessandre covered his mouth for a moment, struggling with the offer. "If you were to live, where would you go?"

Benactus laughed cruelly. "I would go get your wife and drag her back to Silithus."

Alessandre put his gloves back on. He'd heard enough.

"Do you really think that she is safe with you? Once a cultist, always a cultist. That is why I recruited her so carefully ten years ago. We plant that loyalty very deep, so that once the ceremony is completed it is done forever. Why would we give her our secrets, only to let her walk free? Maybe she loves you now, but it is only a substitute for Zar'teaus. If he were only to ask again—"

"Shut up old man!" Alessandre shouted over the crash of the battering ram against the wooden door behind him. The furniture Benactus had piled against it rattled.

"She only loves you because she has been able to convince herself that you are more dangerous than even Zar'teaus. What will she think when she finds out you are just a man, hmm? You're hurting her, by keeping her from what she truly wants. She wants to bow down before an orange stone in Silithus! She wants to lay under an old god and make the vows real! She wants to be a High Priestess, better than Tyrande in all her glory. Opalbane is ambitious. I know she will kill for it, she will burn everyone in her path who stands in her way, even you if you try to prevent that great destiny she feels she is owed! I know Opalbane!"

With a roar, Alessandre shifted into his nightsaber form. He growled low and angry, then shook his neat purple jowls at the shadowpriest.

Benactus truly lost it then. "Six heads! The monster has six heads! One in Westfall, the second in Darnassus. The third was in my daughter's room watching me in Stormwind, the fourth waited in the shadows that I loved. The fifth in my mind… and the sixth…" Benactus tossed his head back. He half screamed, half rejoiced. "The sixth is like the Draenei books. They have a record of all the demons on the Exodar, and there is one they say will come at the end of the world, with six heads. The prophecy is true! The sixth is the head of a MURDERER!" Benactus shouted angrily at Alessandre. He wasn't making any sense. "Now I finally know how you did it, you demon bastard!"

"I'm not a demon." Alessandre said growled carefully in his cat form. "You've gone crazy with all the pressure on you… but I'll give you this, you're on the right track about me at least. I am deeply disturbed… in fact, I'm insane."

"A murderer has married my daughter!" Benactus started yelling. "You were touching my things to frame me for the murders in Stormwind, and keep it from her. I won't let you! I am going to live… I choose to live now so that you can die. I won't let you lie to her and destroy her!" Benactus' shadowform began to flare up. It was the most powerful manifestation of shadowpower Alessandre had ever seen. It wafted up from the old man and filled the room like thick black smoke. It licked the wooden floor like fire as it traveled outward. It burned up along the walls. The bluish purple shadow transformed the old man and he began to speak in tongues the way Opalbane had. Alessandre could see in the dark. He watched the shadow armor singe, then burn through the meager rope lashed across Benactus' chest.

"You… will live to regret it… you will die knowing that you have sinned… I will make you pay, Alessandre…" the soulless echo was otherworldly. The fur on the back of Alessandre's neck stood on end.

The Night Elf rogue and druid stealthed. A moment later, he reappeared behind Benactus. His shimmering moonlit claws raked at the man, caused him to double over, incapacitated by the pain. Though Benactus could do nothing, the shadow armor still burned the purple nightsaber. It made the air thick and filled his nose. Alessandre felt his own life fading with every slash of his claws. Benactus straightened, and raised a hand, ready to cast one devastating spell. Alessandre saw and gave over to his instinct completely. He bared long white fangs and sank them into the old man's neck. It was simple and effective, the way nightsabers took lives in the wild, killed for the sake of survival.

Alessandre could taste Benactus' jugular vein, split wide open in his mouth. Normally the hot blood was salty-sweet, but the blood of this man was spoiled and sour, the flesh and the soul gone bad years ago when the man's conscience died.

"Velen was right…" he breathed at last. "You are the one, come to end Azeroth for me… I cared not to repent, and now I am destroyed in every way."

Benactus died, clutching at his throat. His face frozen in an eternal expression of mute agony, he fell out of the chair and rolled onto his side.

"Heave!" the blonde guard captain shouted to the soldiers outside the door. The anxious priestesses cried when they broke through into Benactus' office with a final thrust of the heavy metal battering ram. The men picked up swords and shields. They charged in shouting. When the dark smoky shades of the netherworld diffused they were able to make sense of the murder scene at last. Clearly, the druid murderer had come in and destroyed the place. Claw marks were everywhere, books on mind control and fel energy scattered on the floor. Characteristic bite marks pierced the old man's flesh and blood oozed into a pool under him.

"What's this?" the guard captain picked up a sealed note on the desk.

It was written in Benactus' hand.

A confession by Priest Benactus of the Cathedral of Light it read.

"A druid, my puppet…That's the first line. What does that mean?" another Stormwind Guard asked from where he read over his captain's shoulder.

Their leader sighed. "I thought we ended this riot last week and that damn druid is on the loose again, this time killing Twilight Cultists." He griped.

"But, it looks like it wasn't the druid's fault." The guard observed as he read on. They took some time ushering the frightened priestesses away from the scene and gathering more evidence before moving on.

Alessandre sat on the roof outside near the chimney, listening. He shifted out of his catform and hugged his knees to his chest. Then, he bowed his head.

"Just one more… then I can go home to Opalbane. No one will ever know… this is going to work." He consoled himself. But, where no one could see, Alessandre grimaced at what he'd done. When he was younger, about one thousand years ago, it felt good to skirt justice. Defecting from the Darnassian army and going to rescue Arianna had given him such a rush. And even years later, when he started the murders… but it was different now. Alessandre got the acute feeling that justice was more than getting caught and tried for one's crimes. It was knowing that the people you hurt were healed at last, and that the people who loved you could finally look on you with pride.

When he was done in Stormwind, Opalbane would be robbed of justice forever, because she could never look on him with pride, or feel healed by Alessandre's actions if she knew the real monster she'd married. But Opalbane would be safe and at least Alessandre would have her. He was willing to lie and kill to keep it that way. That was the other reason Alessandre had wanted to come back to Stormwind, to cover his tracks. Now, only one more person stood in the way of finally having the woman he loved.

Faltheriel dies…