The Last Guardian

5 Sands in an Hourglass

“I’ve seen them before,” said Khadgar.

It was seven days after the battle in the swamp. With their return to the tower (and a day of recovery on Khadgar’s part), the young mage’s apprenticeship had begun in earnest. The first hour of the day, before breakfast, Khadgar practiced his spells under Medivh’s tutelage. From breakfast until lunch and through lunch until supper, Khadgar would assist the master mage with various tasks. These consisted of making notes as Medivh read off numbers, running down to the library to recover this book or that, or merely holding a collection of tools as the Magus worked.

Which was what he was doing at this particular moment, when he finally felt comfortable enough with the older mage to tell him what he knew about the ambush.

“Seen who before?” replied his mentor, peering through a great lens at his current experiment. On his fingers the master mage wore small pointed thimbles ending in infinitely-thin needles. He was tuning something that looked like a mechanical bumblebee, which flexed its heavy wings as his needles probed it.

“The orcs,” said Khadgar. “I’ve seen the orcs we fought before.”

“You didn’t mention them when you first arrived,” said Medivh absentmindedly, his fingers dancing in odd precision, lancing the needles into and out of the device. “I remember asking you about other races. There was no mention. Where have you seen them?”

“In a vision. Soon after I arrived here,” Khadgar said.

“Ah. You had a vision. Well, many get them here, you know. Moroes probably told you. He’s a bit of a blabbermouth, you know.”

“I’ve had one, maybe two. The one I am sure about was on a battlefield, and these creature, these orcs, were there. Attacking us. I mean, attacking the humans I was with.”

“Hmmm,” said Medivh, the tip of his tongue appearing beneath his moustache as he moved the needles delicately along the bumblebee’s copper thorax.

“And I wasn’t here,” continued Khadgar. “Not in Azeroth, or Lordaeron. Wherever I was, the sky was red as blood.”

Medivh bristled as if struck by an electric shock. The intricate device beneath his tools flashed brightly as the wrong parts were touched, then screamed, and then died.

“Red skies?” he said, turning away form the workbench and looking sharply at Khadgar. Energy, intense and uncaring, seemed to dance along the older man’s dark brows, and the Magus’s eyes were the green of a storm-tossed sea.

“Red. Like blood,” said Khadgar. The young man had thought he was becoming used to Medivh’s sudden and mercurial moods, but this struck him with the force of a blow.

The older mage let out a hiss. “Tell me about it. The world, the orcs, the skies,” commanded Medivh, his voice like stone. “Tell me everything.”

Khadgar recounted the vision of his first night there, mentioning everything he could remember. Medivh interrupted constantly—what were the orcs wearing, what was the world like. What was in the sky, on the horizon. Were there any banners among the orcs. Khadgar felt his thoughts were being dissected and examined. Medivh pulled the information from Khadgar effortlessly. Khadgar told him everything.

Everything except the strange, familiar eyes of the warrior-mage commander. He did not feel right mentioning that, and Medivh’s questions seemed to concentrate more on the red-skied world and the orcs than the human defenders. As he described the vision, the older mage seemed to calm down, but the choppy sea still remained beneath his bushy brows. Khadgar saw no need to upset the Magus further.

“Curious,” said Medivh, slowly and thoughtfully, after Khadgar had finished. The master mage leaned back in his chair and tapped a needle-tipped finger to his lips. There was a silence that hung over the room like a shroud. At last he said, “That is a new one. A very new one indeed.”

“Sir,” began Khadgar.

“Medivh,” reminded the master mage.

“Medivh, sir,” began Khadgar again. “Where do these visions come from? Are they hauntings of some past or portents of the future?”

“Both,” said Medivh, leaning back in his chair. “And neither. Go fetch an ewer of wine from the kitchen. My work is done for the day, I’m afraid, its nearly time for supper, and this may take some explaining.”

When Khadgar returned, Medivh had started a fire in the hearth and was already settling into one of the larger chairs. He held out a pair of mugs. Khadgar poured, the sweet smell of the red wine mixing with the cedar smoke.

“You do drink?” asked Medivh as an afterthought.

“A bit,” said Khadgar. “It is customary to serve wine with dinner in the Violet Citadel.”

“Yes,” said Medivh. “You wouldn’t need to if you just got rid of the lead lining for your aqueduct. Now, you were asking about visions.”

“Yes, I saw what I described to you, and Moroes…” Khadgar hesitated for a moment, hoping not to further blacken the castellan’s reputation for gossip, then decided to press on. “Moroes said that I was not alone. That people saw things like that all the time.”

“Moroes is right,” said Medivh, taking a long pull from the wine and smacking his lips. “A late harvest vintage, not bad at all. That this tower is a place of power should not surprise you. Mages gravitate toward such places. Such places are often where the universe wears thin, allowing it to double back on itself, or perhaps even allowing entry to the Twisting Nether and to other worlds entirely.”

“Was that what I saw, then,” interrupted Khadgar, “another world?”

Medivh held up a hand to hush the younger man. “I am just saying that there are places of power, which for one reason or another, become the seats of great power. One such location is here, in the Redridge Mountains. Once long ago something powerful exploded here, carving out the valley and weakening the reality around it.”

“And that’s why you sought it out,” prompted Khadgar.

Medivh shook his head, but instead said, “That’s one theory.”

“You said there was an explosion long ago that created this place, and it made it a place of magical power. You then came….”

“Yes,” said Medivh. “That’s all true, if you look at it in a linear fashion. But what happens if the explosion occurred because I would eventually come here and the place needed to be ready for me?”

Khadgar’s face knitted. “But things don’t happen like that.”

“In the normal world, no, they do not,” said Medivh. “But magic is the art of circumventing the normal. That’s why the philosophical debates in the halls of the Kirin Tor are so much buffle and blow. They seek to place rationality upon the world, and regulate its motions. The stars march in order across the sky, the seasons fall one after the other with lockstepped regularity, and men and women live and die. If that does not happen, it’s magic, the first warping of the universe, a few floorboards that are bent out of shape, waiting for industrious hands to pry them up.”

“But for that to happen to the area to be prepared for you…” started Khadgar.

“The world would have to be very different than it seems,” answered Medivh, “which it truly is, after all. How does time work?”

Khadgar was not thrown as much by Medivh’s apparent change of topic. “Time?”

“We use it, trust it, measure by it, but what is it?” Medivh was smiling over the top of his cup.

“Time is a regular progression of instants. Like sands through an hourglass,” said Khadgar.

“Excellent analogy,” said Medivh. “One I was going to use myself, and then compare the hourglass with the mechanical clock. You see the difference between the two?”

Khadgar shook his head slowly as Medivh sipped on his wine.

Eventually, the mage spoke, “No, you’re not daft, boy. It’s a hard concept to wrap your brain around. The clock is a mechanical simulation of time, each beat controlled by a turning of the gears. You can look at a clock and know that everything advances by one tic of the wheel, one slip of the gears. You know what is coming next, because the original clockmaker built it that way.”

“All right,” said Khadgar. “Time is a clock.”

“Ah, but time is also an hourglass,” said the older Mage, reaching for one planted on the mantel and flipping it over. Khadgar looked at the timepiece, and tried to remember if it was there before he had brought up the wine, or even before Medivh reached for it.

“The hourglass also measures time, true?” said Medivh. “Yet here you never know which particle of sand will move from the upper half to the lower half at any instant. Were you to number the sands, the order would be slightly different each time. But the end result is always the same—all the sand has moved from the top to the bottom. What order it happens in does not matter.” The old man’s eyes brightened for a moment. “So?” he asked.

“So,” said Khadgar. “You’re saying that it may not matter if you set up your tower here because an explosion created this valley and warped the nature of reality around it, or that the explosion occurred because you would eventually be come here, and the nature of the universe needed to give you the tools you wanted to stay.”

“Close enough,” said Medivh.

“So what these visions are, then, are bits of sand?” said Khadgar. Medivh frowned slightly but the youth pressed on. “If the tower is an hourglass, and not a clock, then there are bits of sand, of time itself, that are moving though it at any time. These are unstuck, or overlap each other, so that we can see them, but not clearly. Some of it is parts of the past. Some of it is parts of the future. Could some of it be of other worlds as well?”

Medivh now was thinking deeply himself. “It is possible. Full marks. Well thought out. The big thing to remember is that these visions are just that. Visions. They waft in and out. Were the tower a clock, they would move regularly and be easily explained. But since the tower is an hourglass, then they don’t. They move at their own speed, and defy us to explain their chaotic nature.” Medivh leaned back in his chair. “Which I, for one, am quite comfortable with. I could never really favor an orderly, well-planned universe.”

Khadgar added, “But have you ever sought out a particular vision? Wouldn’t there be a way to discover a certain future, and then make sure it happened?”

Medivh’s mood darkened. “Or make sure it never comes to pass,” he said. “No, there are some things that even a master mage respects and stays clear of. This is one of them.”

“But…”

“No buts,” said Medivh, rising and setting his empty mug on the mantelpiece. “Now that you’ve had a bit of wine—let’s see how that affects your magical control. Levitate my mug.”

Khadgar furrowed his brow, and realized that his voice had been slightly slurred. “But we’ve been drinking.”

“Exactly,” said the master mage. “You will never know what sands the universe will throw in your face. You can either plan to be eternally vigilant and ready, eschewing life as we know it, or be willing to enjoy life and pay the price. Now try to levitate the mug.”

Khadgar didn’t realize until this moment how much he had drunk, and tried to clear the mushiness from his mind and lift the heavy ceramic mug from the mantel.

A few moments later, he was heading for the kitchen, looking for a broom and a pan.

In the evenings, Khadgar’s time was his own, to practice and research, as Medivh dealt with other matters. Khadgar wondered what the other matters were, but assumed they included correspondence, for twice a week a dwarf on gryphon-back arrived at the topmost tower with a satchel, and left with a larger satchel.

Medivh gave the young man free license in the library to research as he saw fit, including the myriad questions that his former masters in the Violet Citadel had requested.

“My only demand,” said Medivh with a smile, “is that you show me what you write before you send it to them.” Khadgar must have shown his embarrassment, because Medivh added, “Not because I fear you’ll keep something from me, Young Trust, but because I’d hate for them to know something that I had forgotten about.”

So Khadgar plunged into the books. For Guzbah he found an ancient, well-read scroll with an epic poem, its numbered stanzas precisely detailing a battle between Medivh’s mother Aegwynn and an unnamed demon. For Lady Delth he made a listing of the moldering elven tomes in the library. And for Alonda he plunged through those bestiaries he could read, but could not push the number of troll species past four.

Khadgar also spent his free time with his lock picks and his personal opening spells. He still sought to master those books that foiled his earlier attempts to crack them open. These tomes had strong magics on them, and he could spend an evening among his divinations before getting even the first hint what style of spell protected its contents.

Lastly, there was the subject of the Guardian. Medivh had mentioned it, and Lord Lothar had assumed that the Magus had confided in it to the young man, and backed off quickly when the King’s Champion had found it not to be the case.

The Guardian, it seemed, was a phantom, no more or no less real than the time-skewed visions that seemed to move through the tower. There was a mention in passing of a Guardian (always capitalized) in this elven tome, a reference in the Azeroth’s royal histories of a Guardian attending this wedding or that funeral, or being in the vanguard of some attack. Always present, but never identified. Was this Guardian a position, or, like Medivh’s supposed near-immortal mother, a single being?

There were other phantoms that orbited this Guardian as well. An order of some sort, an organization—was the Guardian a holy knight? And the word “Tirisfal” was written in the margins of one grimoire, and then erased, such that only Khadgar’s skill at examination told him what was once written there by the carving the pen had done in the parchment. A name of a particular Guardian, or the organization, or something else entirely?

It was the evening that Khadgar found this word, four days after the incident with the mug, that the young man fell into a new vision. Or rather, a vision snuck up on him and surrounded him, swallowing him whole.

It was the smell that came to him first, a soft vegetable warmth among the moldering texts, a fragrance that slowly rose into the room. The heat rose in the room, not uncomfortably, but as a warm damp blanket. The walls darkened and turned green, and vines trellised up the sides of the bookcases, passing through and replacing the volumes that were there and spreading wide, flat leaves. Large pale moonflowers and crimson star orchids sprouted among the stacked scrolls.

Khadgar took a deep breath, but more from anticipation than fear. This was not the world of harsh land and orc armies that he had seen before. This was something different. This was a jungle, but it was a jungle on this world. The thought comforted him.

And the table disappeared, and the book, and Khadgar was left sitting at a campfire with three other young men. They seemed to be about his age, and were on some sort of expedition. Sleeping rolls had been laid out, and the stewpot, empty and already cleaned, was drying by the fire. All three were dressed for riding, but their clothes were well tailored and of good quality.

The three men were laughing and joking, though, as before, Khadgar could not make out the exact words. The blond one in the middle was in the midst of telling a story, and from his hand motions, one involving a nicely apportioned young woman.

The one on his right laughed and slapped a knee as the blond one continued his tale. This one ran his fingers through his hair, and Khadgar noticed that his dark hair was already receding. That was when he realized he was looking at Lord Lothar. The eyes and nose were his, and the smile just the same, but the flesh was not yet weathered and his beard was not graying. But it was him.

Khadgar looked at the third man, and knew at once it had to be Medivh. This one was dressed in a dark green hunter’s garb, his hood pulled back to reveal a young, mirthful face. His eyes were burnished jade in the light of the campfire, and he favored the blond one’s story with an embarrassed smile.

The blond one in the center made a point and motioned to the young Medivh, who shrugged, clearly embarrassed. The blond one’s story apparently involved the future Magus as well.

The blond one had to be Llane, now King Llane of Azeroth. Yes, the early stories of the three of them had found their way even into the Violet Citadel’s archives. The three of them often wandered through the borders of the kingdom, exploring and putting down all manner of raiders and monsters.

Llane concluded his story and Lothar nearly fell back over the log he was sitting upon, roaring with laughter. Medivh suppressed a laugh himself into his curled hand, looking like he was merely clearing his throat.

Lothar’s laughter subsided, and Medivh said something, opening his palms upward to make a point. Lothar did pitch backward now, and Llane himself put his face in his hand, his body heaving in amusement. Apparently whatever Medivh said topped Llane’s story entirely.

Then something moved in the surrounding jungle. The three stopped their revelry at once—they must have heard it. Khadgar, the ghost at this gathering, more felt it instead; something malevolent lurking at the borders of the campfire.

Lothar rose slowly and reached for a great, wide-bladed sword laying in its sheath at his feet. Llane stood up, reaching behind his log to pull out a double-headed ax, and motioned for Lothar to go one way, Medivh to go the other. Medivh had risen as well by this point, and though his hands were empty he, even at this age, was the most powerful of the three.

Llane with his broadax loped forward to one side of the campsite. He might have imagined himself as stealthy, but Khadgar saw him move with firm-footed deliberation. He wanted whatever was there at the edge to reveal itself.

The thing obliged, bursting from its place of concealment. It was half again as tall as any of the young men, and for one instant he thought it was some gigantic orc.

Then he recognized it from bestiaries that Alonda had him peruse. It was a troll, one of the jungle breed, its blue-hued skin pale in the moonlight, its long gray hair lacquered upright into a crest that ran from its forehead back to the nape of the neck. Like the orcs, it had fangs jutting from its lower jaw, but these were rounded, peglike tusks, thicker than the sharp teeth of the orcs. Its ears and nose were elongated, parodies of human flesh. It was dressed in skins, and chains made of human finger bones danced on its bare chest.

The troll let out a battle roar, baring its teeth and its chest in rage, and feinted with its spear. Llane swung at the outthrust weapon, but his blow went wide. Lothar charged from one side, and Medivh came up as well, eldritch energy dancing off his fingertips.

The troll sidestepped Lothar’s greatsword, and danced back another step when Llane shredded the air with his huge ax. Each step covered more than a yard, and the two warriors pressed the troll each time it retreated. It used the spear more as a shield than a weapon, holding the haft two-handed and knocking aside the blow.

Khadgar realized the creature wasn’t fighting to kill the humans, not yet. It was trying to pull them into position.

In the vision, the young Medivh must have realized the same thing, because he shouted something to the others.

But by this time it was too late, for two other trolls chose that moment to leap from their hiding places on either side of the combat.

Llane, for all his planning, was the one caught by surprise, and the spear skewered his right arm. The broadax’s blade bit into the earth as the future king screamed a curse.

The other two concentrated on Lothar, and now the warrior was being forced back, using his broad blade with consummate dexterity, foiling first one thrust, then the other. Still, the jungle trolls showed their strategy—they were driving the two warriors apart, separating Llane from Lothar, forcing Medivh to choose.

Medivh chose Llane. From his phantom viewpoint Khadgar guessed it was because Llane was already wounded. Medivh charged, his hands flaming….

And caught the butt end of the troll’s spear in the face, as the troll slammed the heavy haft against Medivh’s jaw, then turned and with one elegant motion pummeled the wounded Llane. Medivh went down, and so did Llane, and the ax, spun out of the future sovereign’s hand.

The troll hesitated a moment, trying to determine who to kill first. It chose Medivh, sprawled on the ground at its feet, the closer of the two. The troll raised the spear and the obsidian point glowed evil in the moonlight.

The young Medivh choked off a series of syllables. A small tornado of dust rose from the ground and flung itself into the troll’s face, blinding it. The troll hesitated for a moment, and clawed at its dusty orbs with one hand.

The hesitation was all Medivh needed, for he lunged forward, not with a spell, but with a simple knife, plunging it into the back of the troll’s thigh. The troll gave a scream in the night, stabbing blindly. The spear dug into where Medivh had been, for the young mage had rolled to one side and was now rising, his fingertips crackling.

He muttered a word and lightning gathered in a ball between his fingers and lanced forward. The troll jolted from the shock and hung for a moment, caught in a blue-limned seizure. The creature fell to its knees, and even then was not done, for it tried to rise, its rheumy red eyes burning with hatred for the wizard.

The troll never got its chance, for a shadow rose behind it, and Llane’s recovered ax gleamed briefly in the moonlight before coming down on the troll’s head, bisecting it at the neck. The creature sprawled forward, and the two young men, as well as Khadgar, turned to the trolls battling with Lothar.

The future champion was holding his own, but just barely, and had backed almost across the entire campsite. The trolls had heard the death scream of their brother, and one continued to press his attack as the other charged back to deal with the two humans. It let out an inarticulate bellow as it crossed the campsite, its spear before it like a knight on horseback.

Llane charged in return, but at the last moment veered to one side, dancing aside the spear’s point. The troll took two more steps forward, which brought him up to the campfire itself, and where Medivh was waiting.

Now the mage seemed to be full of energy and, limned by the coals before him, looked demonic in his demeanor. He had his arms wide, and he was chanting something harsh and rhythmic.

And the fire itself leaped up, taking a brief animated form of a giant lion, and leaped on the attacking troll. The jungle troll screamed as the coals, logs, and ash wrapped itself around him like a cloak, and would not be shrugged off. The troll flung itself on the ground and rolled first one way and then the other, trying to dampen the flame, but it did no good. Finally the troll stopped moving entirely, and the hungry flames consumed it.

For his part, Llane continued his charge and buried his ax in the side of the surviving troll. The beast let out a howl, but its moment’s hesitation was all that Lothar needed. The champion batted away the outthrust spear with a backhanded blow, then with a level, precise swing cut the troll’s head cleanly from its shoulders. The head bounced into the brush, and was lost.

Llane, though bleeding from his own wound, slapped Lothar on the back, apparently taunting him for taking so long with his troll. Then Lothar put a hand to Llane’s chest to quiet him, and pointed at Medivh.

The young mage was still standing over the fire, his hands held open, but fingers hooked like claws. His eyes were glassy in the surviving firelight, and his jaw was tightly clenched. As the two men (and the phantom Khadgar) ran over to him, the young man pitched backward.

By the time the pair reached Medivh, he was breathing heavily, and his pupils were wide in the moonlight. Warriors and vision visitor leaned over him, as the young mage strained to push the words out of his mouth.

“Watch out for me,” he said, looking at neither Llane nor Lothar, but at Khadgar. Then the young Medivh’s eyes rolled up in his head and he lay very still.

Lothar and Llane were trying to revive their friend, but Khadgar just stepped back. Had Medivh truly seen him, as the other mage, the one with his eyes on the war-swept plains, had? And he had heard him, clear words spoken almost to the depth of his soul.

Khadgar turned and the vision dropped away as quickly as a magician’s curtain. He was back in the library again, and he almost stumbled into Medivh himself.

“Young Trust,” said Medivh, the version much older than the one laying on the ground in the vanished vision. “Are you all right? I called out, but you did not answer.”

“Sorry Med…sir,” said Khadgar, taking a deep breath. “It was a vision. I was lost in it, I’m afraid.”

Medivh’s dark brows drew together. “Not more orcs and red skies?” he asked seriously, and Khadgar saw a touch of the storm in those green eyes.

Khadgar shook his head and chose his words carefully. “Trolls. Blue trolls, and it was a jungle. I think it was this world. The sky was the same.”

Medivh’s concern deflated and he just said, “Jungle trolls. I met some once, down south, in the Stranglethorn Vale….” The mage’s features softened as he himself seemed to become lost in a vision of his own. Then he shook his head, “But no orcs this time, right? You are sure.”

“No, sir,” said Khadgar. He did not want to mention that it was that battle he was witnessing. Was it a bad memory for Medivh? Was this the time when he slipped into the coma?

Looking at the older mage, Khadgar could see much of the young man from the vision. He was taller, but slightly stooped from his years and researches, yet there was the young man wrapped within the older form.

Medivh for his part said, “Do you have ‘Song of Aegwynn’?”

Khadgar shook himself out of his thoughts. “The song?”

“Of my mother,” said Medivh. “It would be an old scroll. I swear I can’t find anything here since you’ve cleaned!”

“It is with the other epic poetry, sir,” said Khadgar. He should tell him about the vision, he thought. Was this a random event, or was it brought on by his meeting of Lothar? Was finding out about things triggering visions?

Medivh crossed to the shelf, and running a finger along the scrolls, pulled the needed version, old, and well worn. He unwound it partway, checked it against a scrap of paper in his pocket, then rewound and replaced it.

“I have to go,” he said suddenly. “Tonight, I’m afraid.”

“Where are we going?” asked Khadgar.

“I go alone, this time,” said the elder mage, already striding toward the door. “I will leave instructions for your studies with Moroes.”

“When will you return?” shouted Khadgar after his retreating form.

“When I am back!” bellowed Medivh, taking the stairs up two at a time already. Khadgar imagined the castellan already at the top of the tower, with his runic whistle and tame gryphon at the ready.

“Fine,” said Khadgar, looking at the books. “I’ll just sit here and figure out how to tame an hourglass.”