Illidan

26

Ash crunched beneath Illidan’s hooves as he landed outside the broken gates of Auchindoun. Over him the walls of the mausoleum city towered. They were gray like the surrounding wastes. In the distance, a huge carrion-eating bonelasher flapped across the sky. A decrepit clefthoof, its massive strength all but gone, staggered through the waste. The chill wind stirred the dust, sending sandy rivulets trickling.

The city looked as if it had once been a massive dome, like the helmet of some titan, but it had been smashed to fragments, scattered across the dry, dead land behind him.

He sensed the distant pulse of magic thrumming between the spirit towers that loomed over the Bone Wastes. What purpose did they serve? He was not quite certain, and that disturbed him. He had spent a long lifetime mastering magic, and there were still gaps in his knowledge.

Even the fel orcs of the Shadowmoon clan, normally the most fearless and aggressive of creatures, shifted uneasily. There was something about this dead place that penetrated even their rage-filled minds and caused a feeling like dread. That in itself was disturbing, for of all the orcish clans in his service, the Shadowmoon was the most accustomed to necromancy and dark sorcery. Their captain, Grimbak Shadowrage, grunted encouragement at them, and they settled down to await his commands.

Illidan’s mouth felt dry and his throat constricted. He tasted and smelled something odd, as if tiny particles of bone had infiltrated his nostrils and tickled his tongue. He felt as if bits of all the skeletons buried in the dust had found their way into the air. He ignored the sensation and studied the ruins.

Some dreadful disaster had struck the city. That much was clear. Huge gratings of tortured metal emerged from broken stonework, like ribs showing through the rotting flesh of a corpse.

According to Akama, this was a holy site where the bones of dead draenei had been interred. Something had gone wrong, though. There were many and conflicting rumors: that a dark ritual had unleashed the dead; that the orcs had tampered with something best left undisturbed and released forces of great evil; that the Burning Legion had tested some terrible weapon on the place, and the resulting evil energies had warped everything within it.

Illidan knew the truth. He had inherited it from Gul’dan’s memories when he consumed the power in his skull. The old schemer had dispatched a group of warlocks to the city in search of artifacts buried there. The survivors had told him that something had gone wrong and they had summoned a strange entity. It had shattered Auchindoun, smashing the great dome, scattering the remains of countless dead across a huge area of the desert.

Illidan gave the signal to advance. The fel orcs roared a challenge and marched under the shadow of the dead city’s gates. The heavy tread of their feet seemed like a desecration of the ancient quiet. In the shadows, old and hungry things watched and waited. It seemed as if a thousand eyes observed them unseen.

The dust crunched as they passed beneath a huge arch. It had piled up in drifts that made walking hard for the fel orcs, although he could move across the surface by keeping himself aloft with a simple beat of his wings.

The city had been built in concentric rings. Illidan’s forces had no sooner passed through the arch than they found themselves confronted by the shattered remains of another wall. Stairs rose ahead. To both right and left, what once must have been a huge street curved away. In the outer walls were many openings that told of ways into the tombs and mausoleums within.

Everything had a tumbledown, forlorn look. The wind moaned as it caressed his skin and bulged his wings.

He led the fel orcs up worn stairs and passed under all that was left of a triumphal arch. Once through it, they looked down from the top of a wall as wide as a road into another ring of ruins within.

Like the rings within a tree, Illidan thought. From where he stood he had a fine view clear across the center of the dead metropolis. The city once must have been built on multiple levels, and this had been one of them. Perhaps it had all been one huge building with many chambers and halls. Now whole floors had tumbled in, to lie on the ground below. It was perplexing. This place had been built for unknowable reasons to please the alien sensibilities of the draenei. He wanted to reach the very center of the city, but there was going to be no easy way of doing so.

He could fly down to the lower level of the central area, but the fel orcs could not go with him, nor could the bearers of the huge casket containing the soul siphon. He pulled his wings tight around him like a cloak against the wind. It felt like a mistake to come here. Nothing good could come of this.

One of the scouts returned. A grin of triumph spread across his face. “We have found a way into the crypts, Lord!”

Strange braziers flanked the archway, illuminating banners containing odd runes. A decomposed skeleton lay near. The air smelled of ancient incense and old bones. Everywhere hung the sick, sweet scents of putrefaction. The throat-tingling itch of corpse dust entered through Illidan’s nostrils.

As he crossed the threshold of the underground vault, things immediately felt different, as if Illidan had gone through a barrier into some other dimension. The stone braziers glowed a fel green, and ahead the shimmering, near-translucent figure of a draenei spirit stalked forward, empty eyes gazing into oblivion. It looked more sad than frightening, and yet there was something about it that was deeply unsettling. The fel orcs growled threateningly but made no move to attack.

What are these ghosts, really? the sorcerer in Illidan wondered. Were they the disembodied spirits of the dead left to wander the world? If so, why did they not remember things and act under their own free will as his spirit did when it moved through the Twisting Nether?

The ghost moved backward and forward in a predictable pattern, like some mad, broken thing. Perhaps it was diseased or crazed or had lost something. Perhaps the magic that had turned the mausoleum city into a place of the restless dead had caused this, too. Such speculation would have to wait. It was time to move on.

Illidan’s force pushed on deeper into a labyrinth of corridors and vaults. Auchindoun was vast and ancient, and the city below was many times larger than that which lay aboveground.

Cobwebs of spectral energy latticed the ceilings. More fel braziers illuminated piles of bones. They lay in great heaps, as if some insane collector had gathered them and tossed them into a jumble.

Here and there, shattered paving stones revealed pits in the rock beneath the crypts. In some, nuggets of raw adamantite gleamed. The only living things visible were the fist-sized spiders that scuttled from one shadow to another.

Illidan and his troops passed over strange bridges and by huge stone coffins. As they entered a massive chamber, lined by gigantic sarcophagi, Illidan sensed an eerie presence.

What had been only an empty archway contained a glowing form resembling that of a draenei. It radiated a cold, life-sucking force. Illidan unleashed a bolt of energy, and the thing disintegrated in the face of his power.

As if that were a signal, shimmering figures emerged from the shadows, suddenly just there. They fell upon the fel orcs and were cut to shimmers of ectoplasm by runic weapons and powerful spells.

A massive pile of bones sprang up as they passed, knitting themselves together into animated skeletons, their fleshless fingers clutching weapons that perhaps they had borne in life.

On ledges around the walls of the vault, robed draenei wove dark magic. Their power connected with unlife, but the ones tapping it were living. Their necromancy drew the dead to life. Illidan dispatched fel orcs to cut them down.

Slowly they fought their way into the center of the crypt. As they did so, the silvery, haunting call of horns rang out. It echoed away through the endless corridors. No doubt a warning was being spread. More defenders were being summoned.

Good, Illidan thought. All the more to feed to the soul siphon.

Illidan’s forces continued fighting. Tides of strange spirits roared over them. More and more of the fel orcs went down.

It was a pity. Illidan had not yet had time to set up the soul siphon and make their deaths count in the great scheme of things.

Here was the place he wanted, though, deep below the city, beneath its endless halls of interred corpses.

The fel orcs drew up in ranks around the palanquin containing the soul siphon. It lay in an elf-sized sarcophagus of brass, fel iron, and truesilver. Illidan sprang into the air, felt a chill wind surge beneath his wings, and landed atop the container. He spoke a word of power and the casket sprang open, revealing the soul siphon.

Power pulsed through the fel iron piping, channeled by the runes inscribed in the artifact’s side. He was proud of his sorcery. He had managed to re-create some of the magical effects of the ritual used to suck in the souls of the dead and the dying when he opened the portal to Nathreza. When activated, the siphon would sweep the restless spirits haunting Auchindoun into its vortex, disassemble them, and store their power. Three teardrop-like gems lay in the center of the device. Right now the gems were dull and black, but as the siphon filled, they would blaze. When all of them burned, he would have enough power to open the gateway to Argus.

He invoked the artifact’s might, creating a psychic link between himself and the device. He felt the presence of it in his mind, a yawning abyss, a thing thirsty for power, hungry to devour whatever it encountered. The siphon held a fierce, primitive sentience. The moment he made contact, it began vampirically to drain the life from him.

He wove spells of protection and then mastery, binding the entity to his will as he would a demon.

More robed draenei arrived, heading companies of walking skeletons. They directed their forces to attack. The fel orcs formed up around Illidan.

“Hold them for a few minutes, and triumph will be ours.”

The fel orcs closed ranks and raised their weapons. Wave after wave of the walking dead threw themselves forward. Individually they were no match for the fel orcs, but they came on in seemingly endless numbers. As they distracted the fel orcs, bolts of shadow magic flew from the necromancers.

Worst of all were the spirits. They slithered through unseen, their cold, spectral hands grasping fel orc bodies and sucking the life out of them, leaving chilled corpses to drop to the ground.

Illidan continued to wake the soul siphon to its full power. He forced himself to concentrate, knowing that he did not have much time. The fel orcs could not hold up under this pressure for long. Already a few of their corpses responded to sly necromantic sorcery and sprang up to attack their former comrades.

The siphon resisted him. Something about his surroundings aided it, lending power to that which fought against him. He gritted his teeth and howled the words of the spell. Skeletons disintegrated, particles of shadow flowing from them into the maw of the siphon. At first the fel orcs cheered, and then they were too busy fighting for their lives to notice that their spirits were also, upon death, consumed by the magical engine.

The tidal wave of oncoming ghosts was sucked in, like water gurgling into a sewer. The siphon exerted its tremendous power, its dark magical energy drawing souls to it like filings to a magnet.

The first of the gems on the siphon glowed bright as a demonic sun. A quick glance showed Illidan that almost half of his bodyguards were down. Without his magic to aid them, they were losing the battle. He wanted to join them but he could not; he needed to concentrate on the soul siphon lest it run out of control. If that happened, it might explode, killing them all.

He increased the rate of intake, hoping to destroy more of the spirits and gather their power swiftly enough that he could complete the ritual and turn the tide of the battle. Souls screamed into the siphon. The pain of holding the spell was agonizing.

Finally the necromancers realized what he was doing. They concentrated their attacks on him. A bolt of magical energy lanced into Illidan’s side. Agony so intense that he almost lost control of the siphon smashed through him. He gritted his teeth and forced himself to hold the binding spell in place. The siphon fought against him again. Illidan felt part of his own spirit being drawn into the device.

Illidan forced his mind into a warding pattern, resisting the attack, slowing down the drain on his life force. As he did so, he felt his control over the siphon’s binding spell begin to slip. The second gem glowed brightly now. Sparks of soul energy surrounded him like a blizzard of black snow. The power roared in, thick and fast. If he could only hold on for a few more moments.

His fel orcs were down to a third of their original number now. Grimbak Shadowrage roared encouragement at those remaining. He turned to Illidan, and just for a moment, hope, belief, and entreaty raced across his face before it became once more a snarling warlike mask for the benefit of his soldiers.

Illidan considered trying a counterspell against the necromancers but realized it was impossible. He could not hold the soul siphon, protect himself, and launch an attack at the same time. Even he was not so powerful a magician.

Illidan’s legs felt rubbery and his head spun. Strength drained out of him faster and faster, and it was all he could do to restrain the growing power of the soul siphon.

He had not foreseen this. He had never imagined falling in this dark place. He was going to die here, and all his schemes would come to naught. The best thing to do was simply to release control of the spell restraining the soul siphon, and let its energies explode outward, killing everything around him. At least this way he would have vengeance on his killers.

No. He was not going to die. He still had work to do. His destiny must be fulfilled. The Burning Legion must be opposed. He drew on his last reserves of will to keep the soul siphon functioning. He fell to his knees as the life drained out of him. Slowly, the last gem filled.

Hold on. Hold on. Agony racked Illidan’s body as bolts of dark energy lashed him. Grimbak Shadowrage tumbled to the ground beside him. A few of his bodyguards had made a fighting retreat alongside their captain and shielded him with their own bodies as the walking dead and their sorcerer masters closed in.

The final gem was full. Illidan spoke the words that tied off the flow of energy and imprisoned it. He raised himself slowly to his hooves as the last of the fel orcs went down. He gathered what strength was left in him and opened a portal back to the Black Temple. The last thing he heard was the enraged shouting of the necromancers as he and the soul siphon vanished.

Chest heaving, he settled himself on the cold stone of his sanctum. Sweat dripped down his brow. He could barely breathe. The room swirled around him and consciousness slipped away.