Illidan

14

Illidan took nine paces across the floor of his chamber, turned, and took nine paces back. He felt calmer now. His thoughts returned to Akama. That the Broken had conspired with Maiev Shadowsong had almost cost the Ashtongue leader his life. Maiev, of all elves! Illidan would have rewarded his treachery with death, but he still needed Akama and his people, so he had devised another and better punishment. That thought gave him considerable satisfaction. He had ensured the Broken would never betray him again. Not only that, but he had found a way to get Akama to deliver Maiev into his hands. And he had fit it all into his scheme to strike back against the Burning Legion. Now he had only one more problem to solve, and he was close to doing that.

Illidan looked down at the massive oaken desk. On it lay a number of maps and charts, held down by the Skull of Gul’dan. The patterns inscribed on them in demon blood were written in a notation that he had created himself and that only he understood completely. The geometric runes mapped the flows of energy between the portals of Outland and their terminus points in parts of the Twisting Nether.

He rubbed his brow and concentrated. He was on the edge of a breakthrough. It was so close he could almost taste it. He had spent years accumulating this information, plundering it from libraries and wizards’ collections all over Outland. He had visited every location marked on the map and used geomantic sorcery to chart the outflows of power into the Twisting Nether.

He had interrogated thousands of demons, listened for clues in the speech of Magtheridon and a dozen of the nathrezim, the so-called dreadlords. He had used spells to follow the trace energies of a thousand summonings. He had tortured and devoured imps and overmastered succubi. He had spent years putting together clues, and finally he was ready.

He had been goaded by the half-recalled memories he had acquired from Gul’dan when he had absorbed the power of the orc warlock’s skull. Gul’dan’s visions had hinted at a way to achieve his wildest dreams. He had seen things that no other mortal had, and the recollections haunted Illidan.

Excitement grew within him. Finally, at long last, he saw the pattern. The old warlock had been right. There were complex weaves of power. A mesh that fed upon itself and drew energy from the land and air around it. It held the portals open against the natural inclination of reality to force them shut. It opened pathways among dozens of worlds. Some of the arcs were incomplete. He knew they must go somewhere. Given what he knew about the forces involved, he could work out their eventual termination points with complex astronomical calculations.

He could finally create the divination spell that could search through those portals and find what he was looking for.

He needed to act soon, before word leaked and one of the nathrezim worked out what he was doing. The dreadlords were too damnably clever, and if they acted to forestall him, all his years of sacrifice, all the decades of planning, would be in vain.

Wearily, but filled with growing excitement, he inscribed the syllables of the great spell. When it was done, he laid down his pen atop the sheet of parchment with a sense of profound satisfaction. He was as ready as he was ever going to be. It was time to act.

Illidan walked deeper into the great circular chamber. On the floor, inscribed in the blood of demons and elves and draenei, pulsed a duplicate of the patterns on his charts, written a hundred times larger. Glowing runes clustered around the edges, shaping the cataracts of fel energy flowing into the chamber.

He walked around the edge, muttering spells of warding and shielding. He wanted no prying eyes witnessing what he did here, no possible intrusions to disturb his concentration. He spoke a word of power and all the doors closed. The seals were so tight that eventually the air would turn poisonous with the effusions of his own breath. If he remained lost in the ritual too long, this place would become his tomb.

He walked through a gap in the huge pattern and followed it to the middle of the chamber, careful not to step on any of the lines. The slightest break would be fatal.

At the exact center of the chamber, he spread his wings, let them beat once, and hovered in the air. He pulled his legs up underneath him into the lotus position and invoked magic that let him remain hovering above the ground. He spoke another word of power, and the braziers set at each point of the compass burst into flames, igniting the aromatic essences they contained. Clouds of hallucinogenic smoke flowed through the air. Tendrils of burning incense slithered through the pattern until they reached his nostrils.

He took three deep breaths, and each of them drove the vapor deeper into his lungs. He closed his mouth and held it in, until he felt as if he had absorbed every last fraction of the power it contained.

Long practice in alchemy let him identify the individual components. Doomguard bone, ground with a mortar and pestle carved from the skeleton of a dragon; powdered felhound blood; distilled essence of felweed; a thousand different items. All chosen to activate key sections of his sorcerer’s mind and free his soul.

Ancient hungers tugged, tempting him to bathe in those evil energies. His skin tingled. The hair on his scalp rose. His tongue felt thick. Power flowed into him. So much power. He felt like a god, as if he had only to will something to happen in order to make it so.

He held the energy for a moment, just letting it stay within him, enjoying the sensation of being on the brink. Of his last moment of calm. After this, everything would change.

Slowly, delicately, as if he were taking a scalpel to a butterfly’s wing, he invoked the last stages of the spell. A sensation of lightness struck him as his spirit dissociated from his body. He looked down upon his empty shell, hovering in the air below him. He felt a moment of vertigo, a sharp stab of fear.

At this moment his spirit was vulnerable. If anything happened to him here, he would die. A silver thread, so thin as to be almost invisible, connected him to the husk beneath him. If that was separated, his spirit would wander forever, unable to return to his body.

He felt the absence of so many things. No heartbeat. No blood flowing in his veins. No air rasping into his lungs. No tug of gravity on flesh and bone and muscle.

Ever since Sargeras had taken his eyes, back when Illidan had first joined the Legion, he had been able to see into the Twisting Nether. It had taken him centuries to realize what he could do with this power. For decades dreadful dreams had blasted his sanity and driven him screaming from sleep. It had been one of the worst torments of his long imprisonment.

He doubted anyone else could have endured what he had in order to harness this power to their will. Anyone who had not mastered sorcery as he had would have been incapable of the feat.

It had been necessary, though. It had given him the ability to send his soul out into the Twisting Nether and the Great Dark Beyond, to see other worlds, other universes. It had given him terrifying insight into the plans and goals of the Burning Legion. Now he needed to stretch himself farther than he had ever done before, reach deeper into the infinite abyss in search of his ultimate goal.

The fel power channeled by the great pattern roared around him. He studied it, knowing it to be both a map and a key that would open the way to where he had to go.

He molded the flows of magic slowly, lacking the physical cues he normally took for granted. Air did not caress his limbs. Words did not cause his diaphragm to vibrate. The power moved sluggishly in response to his will. He shaped it, channeling it through the pattern, aiming it toward the chink in the wards he had created. Like water flowing down a ravine, the spell surged through the tiny opening, creating a gap in the fabric of reality that opened out into somewhere else.

Illidan focused his attention on that space. If something waited on the other side, it would attack as soon as the chink was wide enough to pass through. At this moment, he was very vulnerable. His strength was not what it was when anchored by his corporeal form. He waited, hoping against hope that there was nothing there. He could ill afford the distraction or the time or the energy it would take to defend himself.

Nothing happened. He allowed his spirit to go with the flow of energy and pass through the opening between worlds and out into the Twisting Nether. It exploded into being around him.

There were a thousand ways to perceive this place. Every voyager saw it differently, depending on circumstance and form and state of mind. For him it was a black, airless void in which a billion stars twinkled. Behind and beneath him blazed the world from which he had come. Through the void trailed the snake of energy he had summoned, guiding him outward into infinity. It represented the flows of energy of the portals the Burning Legion used to get to Outland.

With an effort of will, he sent himself flashing along the trail, faster than light, quick as thought, until he found the first connecting portal. He descended from the Nether and flashed over a world. He looked upon a desert where once fields had grown, cemetery cities where unburied bodies clogged the streets. Eerie green energy flickered from disrupted portals. Amid the ruins imps frolicked and shouted obscenities. One or two sensed his proximity and peered about them as if nearsighted. In the distance an infernal lumbered, all blazing skin and burning rock for limbs.

He flashed from place to place, finding no sign of life, witnessing only destruction. He flowed past bunkers where the skeletons of creatures smaller than elves lay beside the alien weapons that had not saved them. He flashed past suits of corroded mirrored armor and the wreckage of burned-out battle machines.

War had blasted the landscape, slicing off the tops of hills, turning fertile plains to sheets of glass. The mad ghosts of a sad people keened songs of defeat and despair. Nothing lived save a few demons that had been stranded when the Burning Legion moved on to its next conquest, or had been left to stand guard over the waypoints of the Legion’s march.

Mountains had been carved to resemble dreadlords. A moat of bones surrounded the corpse of a city the size of a nation. A giant animated skeleton rose from the ossuary sea and clawed its way over a mountain of ribs and skulls and thighbones, until its spark of necromantic energy faded and it tumbled back into the mass from which it had emerged.

He followed the trail of his spell through another portal and emerged onto a different world. Water had once covered its surface, but now the ocean was red as blood, filled with poisons that had killed the whale-sized inhabitants. Massive rafts woven from dead kelp rotted on the surface. The corpses of merfolk were entwined around them. The cadavers of creatures the size of cities decomposed on the ocean floor, surrounded by the skeletons of the aquatic armies that had once guarded them. Nothing lived, not even the smallest particle of plankton. The air itself was turning poisonous without plants to purify it and keep it alive. He passed through another portal.

A world of deserts and fire. Here and there he came upon the bones of wandering tribespeople and their pack animals. The wells of every oasis had been poisoned. The sun blazed down on an empty landscape of shifting dunes, to which only the wind gave animation. Sometimes they crumbled to reveal the skeletons of great armored worms or the acid-pitted ruins of brass skyscrapers.

On and on his spirit flashed, passing through dead world after dead world, monuments to the eternal malice of the Burning Legion. Everywhere lay ruin. This would be the fate of Azeroth and Outland and the few remaining living worlds once the Burning Legion attacked. He searched for traces of life and found nothing, not even a cockroach or a rat. Sargeras’s army had set out to cleanse these places of every living thing and it had succeeded.

Illidan had known what to expect and still it appalled him, this senseless, monstrous violence, this hatred of all life, this wanton murder of world after world after world. He had been a fighter all his days. He had fought and killed and hated, but still he struggled to imagine what drove the Burning Legion to this.

Here and there he came upon hubs where the ways split and the paths of conquest led onward across multiple routes to multiple worlds. Always his spell guided him, his spirit questing through infinite worlds, seeking, seeking, seeking…

He lost all track of time. He had no idea whether a hundred seconds or a hundred years had passed back upon the world where his body waited. Perhaps he was already dead and his spirit was doomed to wander these infinite wastelands, a spectral witness to the doom of countless worlds.

He passed through another gate, despairing, hopeless, certain that he had miscalculated. This one was an odd place, a collection of rocks imbued with potent magic, floating amid the infinite void of the Twisting Nether. A tiny sun orbited it every few minutes. Dozens of miniature glowing moons followed it. Bits of rock floated in the air, held aloft by the power of magic. Potent energies saturated this place, were sunk into the very fabric of the world, and they were not the only thing here. In the distance, amid the rocks, he sensed the presence of demons of a very specific sort: nathrezim.

Was it possible he had finally found what he was looking for: Nathreza, the home of the dreadlords?

Hundreds of dreadlords were certainly here, and thousands of their servants. Cautiously he advanced. The nathrezim were creatures of power, with a near-unparalleled capacity for working magic. They would have no difficulty detecting his spirit form unless he was very, very careful. Even now Illidan thought he sensed something watching. He froze. Nothing happened. The dreadlords did not respond to his presence. Perhaps it was nothing, merely his own too-wary mind.

His bodiless state prevented him from feeling any of the physical expressions of excitement. His heart did not race. His mouth did not go dry. A cold feeling of triumph filled him. He had found it. The place he had always suspected existed was here.

Do not be too certain, he cautioned himself. You do not know that yet. You need confirmation. He drifted closer to the presence of the dreadlords, following the lay of the land and the pattern of the rocks, weaving spells of concealment and misdirection around himself. His spirit was strong but not as strong as it was when it occupied his body. There were beings here who could end his existence if they spotted him.

He searched for any spells that might alert the inhabitants to his presence. A city of basalt towers lit by the flare of green fel lanterns stood before him. Disks of basalt rose up the sides of buildings. Huge dreadlords flapped across the skies. It was odd to see so many sentient beings after passing across so many dead worlds.

He saw palaces where nathrezim planned the destruction of worlds, the enslavement of civilizations, where the end of all existence was plotted by beings sworn to the service of Sargeras. Servitors guided odd machines on unguessable errands. In the center of it all stood one gigantic windowless tower amid a grid of energy flows. Baleful green runes lit up its sides. Legions of servitors came and went. No doubt about it; he had found what he sought. Gul’dan’s visions had not lied.

He made careful calculations of the position and pattern of the gates that had carried him here, studying the astrological significance of the stars that glittered in the sky; then, when he was certain he had fixed in his mind all the information he had come here to find, he terminated the spell of spirit walking. The silver cord tightened and drew him with unimaginable speed back to his body.

Heavy flesh and dense bone imprisoned him once more. Air thundered back into his lungs. He stretched, reveling in the feel of muscles answering the commands of his will. He took a deep breath, identifying the scents. A smile flickered across his face.

Now he would take the war to the Burning Legion. Now he would make his enemies pay. All of them.