A/N: Certain imagery in this chapter may seem familiar if you played through or investigated the Blades of the Fallen Prince artifact weapon quests in the death knight Order Hall storyline in Legion. ;D
In which Arthas does his best to patch Jaina up, checks in with some high-level Scourge leadership in the name of pretending all is normal, and takes a side trip.
Into the Frozen Maze
His awareness of the outside world receded. Once, in the beginning of Kel'Thuzad's tutelage, he'd described this icy dais he envisioned to the archlich and thus had learned that it resembled the Frozen Throne — the very seat of their master's power; the endpoint of Kel'Thuzad's famous pilgrimage, and the tale of which he regaled newly sealed Cult acolytes as part of the onboarding process. It also housed the souls of everyone the blade had touched, himself included. In rare fits of irresistible rumination, he wondered vaguely why he never encountered his own soul.
Other souls felt less shy about letting him know precisely whom they blamed for how the war had removed them from the respective fields of battle. These had no power even to touch him, no matter how angry. They inevitably turned to their only recourse, a tired method wherein they screamed at him in a great incomprehensible chorus so that no single shade's words could be made out, a practice which he had learned to find soothing in its similarity to dominating a battlefield. All this noise, all this furor for nothing: he hunted for a singular soul and none other would find a way to distract him, let alone escape.
He rated all other souls here beneath his notice, that practice having become second nature as the well-learned lessons of his childhood regarding displaying his innermost emotions to the untrustworthy had taught him to do.
Rather than corridors, the space like the image of the dais far above within Frostmourne presented itself as a hedge maze which, to an undiscerning eye, looked as if a capricious hand had sculpted all and sundry from ice. And though the runeblade bent itself to his will in the physical realm, here it fought like a half-starved wolf denied its kill. Arthas stalked these ice-briar lined paths with the focus required of participants in deadly arena bouts. Frostmourne sensed he felt the press of time keenly but played cat-and-mouse games with him regardless. When he at last received his due from the Lich King, he would show this stubborn inanimate weapon who was in charge. Granted, it had devoured his soul, but he didn't think it necessarily sought his life as well.
Once he began to suspect his search would prove fruitless, it stoked the fires of his anger to legendary proportions. A true pity Frostmourne had no soul of its own for him to purge.
Nor did he have Frostmourne to hand, which felt unnatural. Arthas tried not to think about what it meant that he was inside the blade while simultaneously outside, inhabiting his body. Pieces of his soul, split off from one another, with just enough of a sliver to continue animating his body while he, as master of the dread runeblade, somehow switched his focus enough to interact with what was within? Metaphysical implications like this gave him a headache.
The layout of the maze changed each time he trespassed here to claim a soul. Nevertheless, he had done it often enough by now that he could sense when he had drawn close to the end, which didn't bode well for sparing Jaina's life. Frostmourne probably thought it was doing him a favor. Sparing him further anguish, like dispatching a horse with shattered forelegs. He didn't recall electing it to the role of wrangling his emotions.
A rather nasty idea bled into his consciousness at this point: people craved hierarchies and having someone in charge to blame for their misfortunes, as the Cult of the Damned had demonstrated again and again when new recruits came crying to Kel'Thuzad's lieutenants for intervention over the most banal of interpersonal conflict. Why shouldn't the souls imprisoned here attempt to do the same? They tried to escape by holding to the tattered edges of his cape when he exited and he already knew they overheard much, if not all, of what went on in the outside world. Plotting to hide the newest soul to have joined them — he wouldn't put it past their intractable stubbornness.
Even with this conclusion burning away inside, he continued to the center of the maze as if he sensed nothing amiss. Mind over matter: one of the intriguing rules here that he had learned to exploit. The focal point of the center of the maze usually took the form of a statue like those specially carved in ice for summertime festivities, almost always some grisly reminder of what heights of passion Arthas had attained in getting what he wanted from a wholly recalcitrant world.
Intellectually, he knew full well its reasons for poking him in his sorest points; he didn't have to enjoy its chosen means of paring down his weaknesses. This time, he found an exquisitely detailed piece of imaginary ice in the shape of a human figure lying prostrate as if struck down in an attempt to flee. He didn't need to circle it and peer into the carven face to know who it was meant to represent. That he did so anyway stood as testament to the very real need for him to undergo this painful process. Burning away all human sentiment left him in a better position to achieve completion of his quest.
"Very funny," Arthas said aloud when he finished looking upon Jaina's face etched in a tortured configuration. He turned his back upon it and sent himself back to what he thought of as the main chamber of Frostmourne's psychic space. Again the ghosts of the past assailed him, demanding his surrender, his death, and again he ignored their cacophonous cries. Now that he had conceived of the idea, it did seem that they huddled together more than usual in a nonchalant effort to hide … yes. There, at the center.
Unlike ghosts out in the real world, these never lost their unique conformation; his father and Uther still appeared as grizzled old men; women whose lengthy hair had clearly been their prime feature in life still sported long, translucent locks. And on the subject of long-haired women: they could no more hide that blonde head of hair from him now that he knew what to look for than they could prevent him reaching out and nabbing her.
The actual process involved far more complex considerations than reaching out and grabbing at an untouchable something that barely stirred the air. Again, with time the strange practice had become rote and hardly needed his direct attention to succeed. He poured on the intent regardless, in part as a means to stick it to the formless howling windstorm that tried uselessly to prevent or pervert anything he attempted in here. Holding to a non-physical object while preparing for his exit with a bright, flickering soul in tow held certain similarities to the practice of wielding the Light of yesteryear and therefore probably aided him in the speed with which he dispatched his duty.
Arthas seemed a touch breathless, but then again he had no need to breathe outside his body. His intangible grip on Jaina's soul remained strong out here, even if it left the latter nearly unseen: the physical manifestation of an unbodied soul took the form of a slight visual disturbance in the air that he wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't practiced and experimented in here for countless hours without Kel'Thuzad's dubious encouragement. And its naked survivability rate was greatly foreshortened outside of the runeblade; already he could see tiny wisps of color detaching and floating away like the heat mirage above a campfire.
Here in the vicinity of its customary locus, the soul brightened up considerably with what he thought of as excitement. Magnetic attraction to where it felt it belonged. This sort of observation might be hidden away in Kel'Thuzad's research notes but for just a moment Arthas let himself feel in response to the indelible maelstrom of thoughts within.
With the same unhurried precision as a battlefield medic, a role he had played second to Uther more than once, Arthas brought the fragile soul down to within kissing distance of his patient and held it there for the space of a breath, as counted by watching her — his patient's, damnit — chest rise and fall in sequence. Then he plunged a hand down with enough bruising force that to an outsider it might appear that he tried to strike through her, through the floor, all the way down to the untouched earth under the wrecked homestead. At the same time, he drew on shadowy energies coursing within his very veins and attached soul to body with those bonds, if only so that the soul didn't flit off and escape to the Twisting Nether where the task of retrieval for necromantic purposes devolved into a far more grueling one.
The reattachment process self-terminated, as it was meant to. She continued to breathe and, if he had learned to judge the line between life and death, her color looked a little less pale and washed out.
But she did not awaken.
Arthas frowned, the rumblings of his anger growing less distant on the horizon. Why wasn't it working? This was a textbook soul-bond reanimation that he'd successfully completed in front of Kel'Thuzad's exacting eyes hundreds of times to date.
He groaned. Clearly he needed to ask for Kel'Thuzad's expertise and that never went well. Undergoing that trial while also concealing the true facts of the case from him? Arthas would need to dissemble as he had never done in his life.
He took Frostmourne back roughly from his assistant and ordered in an equally ragged voice, "Stay here, keep watch on her, and don't let anything happen to her."
"Master, I have no weapons. What if—?"
Arthas made a production of rolling his eyes (because, seriously, what mage couldn't defend a fellow mage in defense of the other's life when just an hour ago they'd been ready to fling spells at the likes of a death knight of his stature?) and pulled a token out of a pouch of them that Kel'Thuzad had furnished him with and he'd never had use for until now. Strange times and strange bedfellows for certain. "Use this to notify me if you're unable to protect her."
The newly resurrected one took it from him with an awe that bordered on obscene; he knew Jaina had carried the like during her apprentice years as an emergency measure. Kel'Thuzad had merely spearheaded their use for high-ranking cultists and key operatives like Arthas himself.
It wouldn't do for his convert to witness him having to grovel to Kel'Thuzad, so Arthas went outside, sweeping a few irritated glances into the post-twilight gloom to ensure no wayward monstrosities attacked him. That had happened before and doubtless would again. He fished out his own token, kept separate from his store of them since it represented a direct channel to Kel'Thuzad. Unclenching his teeth, which always ground together when he had cause to speak to the majordomo to the Lich King, took several moments of strain. Unlikely that he would ever have the chance to bludgeon the archlich to death with the flat of his blade, no matter how tempting he found the image.
"Kel'Thuzad, master of the plagued reaches, I beg of thee: give me your counsel," he intoned. Humiliating! Utterly and completely.
Silent moments passed on with only the wind soughing onward. Then: "Who calls for the lichlord of Naxxramas?" Kel'Thuzad asked.
The exaggerated false formality set Arthas's teeth back on edge. He knew damn well who was calling him! "It's Arthas."
"What's the password?" asked the archlich, sounding bored.
The fact that Kel'Thuzad sometimes acted as if running the Cult of the Damned and now the Scourge were the same as games of mock espionage played by children … Arthas seethed in silence, taking control of himself only with difficulty.
"The password is 'constant revolution' and you know it—"
"The counter-sign is 'through war we achieve peace.' Now then, Arthas. What can I do for you?" Arthas could perfectly picture the archlich lacing his finger bones together like a storyteller beside a warm fireplace preparing to dispense tales and wisdom. If, of course, he didn't have the seeming of a fifteen foot tall skeleton in robes bedecked with gems and chains and a headdress that would fit the funerary needs of a troll warlord. Oh, and the bony horns growing off the side of his mandible. Growing? Conjured? The terminology concerning liches had yet to be canonized, despite Kel'Thuzad's best efforts.
Deep breath and don't let it out as a sigh, Arthas instructed himself silently. Then he added aloud, "Resurrection question."
"Do go on," Kel'Thuzad purred with sudden interest.
Arthas described Jaina's state without using names or identifying characteristics. He couldn't have; his throat seemed to close up every time he thought of her in enough detail to see her levitating gently above the upper floor. Given his history of trouble with putting necromantic concepts into words, he thought it unlikely that Kel'Thuzad noticed anything amiss.
"Oh, Arthas. Arthas, Arthas, Arthas, Arthas. Are you getting yourself into trouble?" Kel'Thuzad asked like the world's most unnerving doting grandfather.
"Who, me? No, not at all," Arthas stammered.
But the archlich went on without hearing his protest. "Your first secret experiment, how exciting. I would give you a … hug, or a pat on the back were you here before me. Why—"
"Kel'Thuzad."
"—my dear boy, my treasured apprentice, you're like a man after my own heart — figuratively speaking, of course—"
"KEL'THUZAD." Arthas hoped the far-speaking spell failed to transmit the edge of terror in his voice.
"Ah. Eternity waits for no man, does it? Well. Your secret project sounds like a case of—" Arthas immediately lost track of the polysyllabic description Kel'Thuzad launched into: housing and metallurgical soul destabilization and so on.
"Great, so what do I do with it?"
Her, his faithless heart corrected.
"Do?" Kel'Thuzad echoed in confusion, as if the question would never have occurred to his high-and-mighty self. "I suppose you could use the subject as a meat puppet to gain a better handle on your possession skills. Would you like me to send the Ashbringer to assist you?"
"No," Arthas said shortly, "keep that scrawny lickspittle out of my hair."
"A pity; he idolizes you so."
Arthas pictured the undersized former teenage boy who drove him to distraction whenever they stood within melee range of one another. And Kel'Thuzad doted on him almost as sickeningly as he did that mangy cat which didn't even have the decency to die of the plague like it was supposed to. If this set of nuisances was anything like having younger siblings, well, then he was glad he'd made himself an orphan and even now had every intention of remedying the only child status in short order.
"Well … good for him," Arthas said awkwardly. "I need to get back to my, uh, 'secret experiment.'"
"Yes, yes, make the magic happen. Call me again if you run into more questions," Kel'Thuzad said. The archlich put on airs like other people put on clothing. Make the magic happen indeed. The connection was terminated.
A meat puppet, he'd said. Arthas thought about that disgustingly apt name for a time. The sweltering night around him was now full of both rustlings and suspiciously regular but wholly unnatural noises — but Arthas barely minded them. He wasn't sure he remembered the spells to take control of an undead creature's physical being and bend it to his will.
He had learned to his sorrow that there was no such thing as successfully serving two masters simultaneously but maybe he could instead serve his own purposes, Kel'Thuzad's, and Jaina's. Three was ever so much more eminently doable than two, wasn't it?
That quandary temporarily set aside, he rushed back within the domicile and up the stairs to notify Jaina's former assistant that it would need to continue standing watch for a time while Arthas wracked his brains for the information he needed. A pity that questioning the former mage wouldn't lead anywhere; if ever there was a time for Arthas to have need of the Lich King's necromantic experience, it was indeed now.
As it turned out, however, vaguely referencing and then discussing the spell with the newly undead mage proved fruitful, for he did have an idea of how it worked and that meant that Arthas could try making an informed attempt at this utter lunacy. When you got right down to it, the Silver Hand training came in somewhat handy in that he hadn't needed to spend time learning how to meditate in the name of mastering spellwork. After that, it had devolved into mumbo-jumbo that he'd never really had much luck remembering because memorizing weird chants actually made less sense than outright praying to the Light. But with this mage on his side, he had cut out Kel'Thuzad as the middleman and didn't have to endure the archlich's crowing over his every failure. The former mage fed him the lines and he performed the spell.
It was like waking up to a different world. There were sounds and sensations that he distantly recognized: heartbeat, gurgling stomach, and the like. He couldn't have said that her body felt out of proportion to him because inhabiting a body, as his hindbrain insisted, was its natural state.
Of course, the body he was borrowing was still floating above a lot of sharp bits of wood and this body in particular was a lot less impervious to pain. And pain was not something Arthas relished.
First things first, though. Transference like this never quite worked exactly as advertised — something always went wrong. It was the whole reason the Cult of the Damned and the Scourge had taken the particular turns in their offensive doings that they had: learning a lesson from the failures of the Second War in which dead human soldiers' bodies were repurposed to house the souls of orcish necromancers so long as the dead men's hands clutched special scepters, to abandoning outright the idea of long-term possession in favor of spiritual domination by a single entity had enabled them to win all of the victories that they had thus far, as Kel'Thuzad recounted it. Bottom line, Arthas was taking the body of his former affianced for a test run.
Questions of morality no longer hampered him, though he did have some lingering feeling that he wanted excised the next time Kel'Thuzad made it impossible for him to avoid examination by the junior reanimators. It should have been permanently washed away by his ascension to the highest echelons of the Cult of the Damned but that dream was … currently deferred. Only until he redeemed himself in the eyes of Kel'Thuzad and the Lich King, he had promised himself.
He opened his eyes. Blinked and, following the regimen Kel'Thuzad had developed for recent resurrectees, focused them on the eager face of his new minion then the rafters above.
"Pupillary response is normal," volunteered the mage.
Pulling against the levitation spell to sit up took some straining, then he broke free of it or the mage ended it so that he stood quite literally in Jaina's shoes. Head to toe was the next test, not that he could believe that he remembered these annoying little details so well at this point. Her jaw and tongue moved, her nose and ears could twitch minutely, head pivoting on the neck. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers checked out. Drawing breath and heartbeat were so long done away with as to command his attention for a few extra seconds of wonder, and lower locomotion checked out at hips, knees, and ankles. Each time, his assistant pronounced her body in working order. Where was the catch?
Arthas argued with himself about overdoing it when he already had so little experience with the spell, not to mention the burgeoning paranoia that Kel'Thuzad would disregard his request and send Mograine to check up on him, only to learn of the deception. Everything else could wait until he had a proper set of wards spelled up and had hashed out emergency procedures with the assistant. Barring the armies of the Undercity, the Lordaeron Resistance, and the Scarlet Crusade banding together to come at them, he foresaw no danger to the plan.
He hoped.
The mage was only too willing to remain and protect his former mistress at Arthas's bidding. In the meantime, Arthas had supposedly genuine Scourge business to take care of but he promised to return as soon as he could.
With the situation reversed, he didn't find it odd to stand in his body once more.
"Meat puppet" as a phrase niggled unendingly at Arthas. Kel'Thuzad had a habit of naming things in direct contravention to the mores of the prior regime he'd sought to replace, and usually Arthas felt neither one way nor the other about the lichlord's little quirks; as he was so fond of saying, the Cult of the Damned was his creation and he would shepherd it as he pleased. And yet … "meat puppet." An evocative name, true, which was one of Kel'Thuzad's criteria for naming conventions in the first place. Even so … even so, it bothered Arthas, a ceaseless nagging. He wanted to chalk it up to the unexcised goody-two-shoes paladin propaganda he'd unwittingly swallowed in his previous life, since that was inevitably where such reservations came from.
He gave Invincible his lead and let the quiet clopping of hooves on various substances from stone to bone warn off lesser concerns so he could think through his concerns slowly, logically. Mortal bodies were composed of meat. Using necromancy to directly have a body do his bidding counted as puppetry. There was no reason under the — under the blood-red sky and luridly glowing sun for him to find it offensive.
The pieces clicked into place: it offended him because such words should never have applied to the likes of Jaina Proudmoore (and wasn't that rich, as Kel'Thuzad would laugh himself silly to hear of it: the Scourge's great champion in the war, offended by a most unobjectionable phrase). Hers was a spirit of adventure and freedom, of halcyon days and ancient memories that he locked away deep within his heart where his Scourge handlers had yet to dig them out.
But dig them out they would, and should. In fact, Arthas ought to march himself right to the transporter pad that would send him shooting up to Naxxramas with a bird's-eye view of the indelibly marked countryside, then right into the Construct Quarter to let the ghoulish reanimators excavate these things out of him. It was only right. It was exactly what would begin to redeem him in Kel'Thuzad's eyes and, more importantly, the Lich King's.
Curiously, he did no such thing. He had his place prepared for him, he knew his role within the new world order … yet all he could do was argue with himself. First and foremost, he longed to return to Jaina's side, even an injured and unconscious Jaina who under no circumstances could be assumed to hear him if he spoke to her. Confessing his sins to her as if she were a priest of the Light would do as much good as if he crossed into the glades near the ruined Balnir farm and let the zealots who'd taken up arms within the hilltop monastery lay their hands on him. An interesting question of how fast they would try to destroy him, if he felt particularly nihilistic about his lot.
…not that he enjoyed pain or wanted to be resurrected by Kel'Thuzad's less savory spells. What kind of death wish was that? Was he not Arthas, rightful king of Lordaeron, the first death knight of his generation, and specially chosen out for the purpose by the Lich King?
Well, maybe not the latter two, not anymore. Not since his unintended tumble out of the Lich King's good graces. If he could stand to be honest with himself, he would admit that the idea of using Jaina's plight to remove himself from this situation and be lauded a hero once more was more tempting than anything the Light had presented to date.
He kept going in circles. Mentally, not physically: Invincible continued on without having noticed his master's hesitation. The Scourge couldn't love him as his people had loved him; what was left of his people would never trust him again and certainly never would think of him in a positive manner, even if by some miracle of the Light he managed to call down enough of its power to scour the Plaguelands from the map. He would have to destroy himself in the process for them to cease calling for his head, as his sister's strange alliance with some of the freed and not yet recaptured undead had demanded when they delivered a set of terms of surrender. Even Kel'Thuzad seemed daunted by the last living Menethil, or else he would have ordered more than the periodic incursion into the territory around the glades to test their response time.
It rankled, as it was meant to do, that Arthas had suffered to have his role reduced from first among the Lich King's legion of death knights to a mere foot soldier after the Forsaken Alliance had overrun Capital City and driven out the Scourge. Railing against his place also failed spectacularly, as Kel'Thuzad wouldn't know human sympathy if it was distilled into physical form and left in an indisputably labeled flagon on his work bench.
Part and parcel with the Lich King's rebuke was "reviewing the troops" on a weekly basis, as if they needed it: none of the zombified remains or Kel'Thuzad's newest creations had any will of their own, so asking Arthas to check them against his inner sense of military appropriateness drove him into a useless fury. Most weeks, he would show up late and wore only his padded undergarments, leaving his armor behind; for what did he have to fear within the heart of Scourge territory? With Frostmourne in hand, he would pace like the battlefield commanders of his youth and end up in such a snarling frenzy that afterwards he would be forced to go find something animate to spar with.
Like young Mograine, called the Ashbringer, who had had most of his willpower left intact by Kel'Thuzad's own design, but would follow Arthas about like a lost puppy if given half the chance. Had Arthas not known for a fact that the Mograine family showed up on the Lordaeron tax rolls and the first to earn the moniker "Ashbringer" had served under no less than Uther and the other paladins of the Silver Hand during the First and Second Wars, he would have thought the height-starved death knight a magical construct copied from Arthas himself. Another paladin turned to the Scourge's purposes, who had garnered acclaim as other hopefuls did bruises, nevertheless laying all his successes at Arthas's feet. Preposterous, but another of the constant reminders of how far he had fallen.
Even without his armor, Arthas could easily best Mograine without needing to be sewn up later.
Naturally the snot-riddled child was waiting for him when he reached what even Kel'Thuzad snidely referred to as "the parade ground." That night had fallen and visibility was poor mattered not at all with the Scourge's frankly profligate use of exceedingly conspicuous magics for lighting and warding off any incursions of the living. "Highlord" Mograine saluted Arthas, his eyes glowing the same glacial blue as Arthas's, his armor patterned in matching designs that would look smart and militaristic on the battlefield — though only until blood and chunks of flesh began to fly about.
"Sir," Mograine said. By all rights, it should have been "Your Highness." It should have been "Your Majesty" or "sire" or anything beyond a simple military-styled greeting. Arthas seethed and dreamed of the day he could take Mograine's head clean off his shoulders.
"What are we reviewing today?" Arthas asked, his tone ineffably bored. He did not return the salute and Mograine incorrectly let his arm drop. Rank amateur display of knowledge that the other ought to have internalized by now.
"The lichlord's newest creations: gargoyles."
As there was overwhelming evidence of the recurring issue of tongue rot in ghouls, Arthas could only surmise that the likes of Mograine suffered from brain rot. One day he would split this nuisance's skull open to check. Perhaps even with Kel'Thuzad looking on in offended disbelief which then gave way to dawning comprehension. Naturally there would be no apology for not having believed Arthas's suppositions.
"We already have gargoyles…" Arthas murmured.
"Sir, this is a new version that uses arcane pockets to allow the constructs to leave most of their mass behind so they're less likely to stop flying in mid-air," Mograine explained. Bad enough that he fawned endlessly over Arthas but he also spent far too much time in Kel'Thuzad's company, and it showed. A total shock the precious Ashbringer hadn't been chosen as the vessel for the Lich King's full power, passed on to his chosen successor, except that Arthas knew in life the former paladin hadn't had the temperament for it. Unlike Arthas himself. It was one of the few places where he felt Mograine's personality was given credit for qualities that were of absolutely no use to the Scourge.
Arthas waved a dismissive hand through the air. Even with the explanation having been dumbed down for him, he wouldn't completely understand it. Ridiculousness, like all the other wasteful, ostentatious displays Kel'Thuzad engaged in. The archlich hadn't retaken Capital City from the Forsaken Alliance either but he still received pats on the head for every little thing.
At the far end of the parade ground, as pointed out by Mograine, the gargoyles flew and Arthas needed to feign no indifference or boredom. Mograine seemed entirely taken with the things; no surprise, with how he played the lapdog for Kel'Thuzad. The latest iteration of gargoyles wheeling through the smoky skies under Naxxramas held no pleasure for the likes of Arthas. At last, they regrouped and flew through a predesignated hole in the necropolis.
Whatever.
"Lichlord Kel'Thuzad said that you're experimenting with the arcane," Mograine said off-handedly.
"You gossip like a farmwife at the market," Arthas snapped.
The boy subsided, though the heat of his anger was palpable. As it turned out, the Ashbringer was one of the few things in the world that could stand up to Frostmourne, though its bearer held on to an unfortunate tendency to play fair in a fight. Even the long-lost likes of Muradin would have been disgusted at that. Were Arthas the type to carry tales, he would have whispered about that in the ears of Kel'Thuzad's reanimators so they could make adjustments to the boy's personality — but that would harness Arthas to a true rival. He would not tolerate that. Sabotaging one's fellows among the Cult of the Damned was acceptable, so long as it didn't attract the master's attention or foil a plan; so long as Kel'Thuzad didn't misdiagnose it as poor sportsmanship.
"Are we done here?" Arthas asked at the earliest possible moment, as he did each and every time.
"We're done here," Mograine agreed. He performed a perfunctory salute, his every motion sullen, and turned his back on Arthas to head for the teleportation pad.
He ought to yell something after Mograine to keep the anger boiling but nothing appropriate came to mind. He turned his thoughts back to retracing Jaina's steps and, perhaps, interfering with Archimonde's plans to rip the whole of Azeroth asunder. If he hurried, he could use some of the daylight on the western side of the world to reconnoiter among whoever her allies were. Arthas shifted his seat on Invincible's saddle then urged his steed into a ground-eating gallop before he'd gotten out of his minders' sight.
Arthas made his way back to the Marris homestead in record time, with Jaina's assertion that there wasn't much time to stop Archimonde from breaking the world as the Legion had done to worlds beyond conceiving very much on his mind. He didn't feel ready to puppet Jaina's body long-term but what other choice did he have?
Fidelity assured in undeath, his assistant awaited him by Jaina's unmoving form.
The initial spelling went faster, although with no sense even now that her consciousness lurked within. And standing next to his own body, left seated against the wall in a corner facing the stairs to reserve all his focus for the out of body exercise, gave him further pause.
All too soon the dead mage ported him to Mount Hyjal and Arthas stared up and up at the biggest tree ever. Oh, sure, Kel'Thuzad had added the topic of night elven history to his lectures, so Arthas knew something of the World Tree, since that afforded the archlich another chance to show off his knowledge. Standing under its dwarfing majesty in person, however….
As soon as someone approached to ask questions, he could stealthily draw his Scourgestone and get advice from the mage watching over him from afar. In the meantime, this camp presented a prime opportunity to gather valuable intel on those who would still struggle to resist the Scourge's advance.
In the foreground outside the shade of the unimaginably massive tree, the cobbled road snaked through valleys whose surrounding cusps reared up like blunted teeth in a detached bottom jaw. He didn't let himself ruminate on a top jaw slamming down from above like an enormous trap.
Jaina's allies had set up camp in a flattish meadow not far from the pass where the road slipped out of sight downhill before the humpy hilltops occluded that pathway. For the most part, those scurrying by or loitering uneasily were all Eastern Kingdoms stock: humans predominated, but here and there dwarves bustled industriously and gnomes bobbed along to the beat of some internal cadence. Strangely missing were the promised night elves and the orcs. Had Jaina lied to him?
The shadow of the World Tree slowly drew across the morning's activities. It seemed an omen, though whether good or ill Arthas couldn't say. The morning air on the mountaintop felt crisp and fresh, and in spite of himself Arthas shivered when the cold pebbled his skin.
"There you are, Jaina," called an unfamiliar voice.