Illidan

19

“Die, desecrator!” the mo’arg servitor shouted as he sprang forward to attack. The demon raised the barrel of his odd weapon. Magical flame sputtered.

Illidan decapitated the squat, armored creature with a casual backhand stroke of his warglaive as he entered the central archive of the dreadlords. Over everything loomed glittering towers built of countless obsidian disks layered together like stacks of coins. Each one of those disks was a record. One of them was what he sought.

He turned to the demon hunters who stood in the entrance of the huge chamber, waiting his command. “Do not enter. Hold this doorway, no matter what happens in the next five minutes.”

They nodded acquiescence, and Illidan turned once more to face the stacks. He crossed his arms on his chest and wove a spell. Tendrils of magic flashed from his hands to the towers of stacked disks. As they connected, he caught flashes of imagery, splinters of knowledge.

This was the monument of the dreadlords, the heart of their world. It recorded every triumph, every conquest, and every plot. Nathrezim schemed to have their names imprinted here. It was the living memory of their race.

Here were records of innumerable campaigns fought on countless worlds. Here were the names of long-forgotten traitors who had betrayed their homes to the Legion and were in turn betrayed by the demons. Here was knowledge of every portal the Legion had ever passed through, the names and locations of every world it had ever burned.

There was a system to it. It was organized almost chronologically, the oldest disks on the bottom of each stack. The stacks closest to the center were the oldest of these.

Illidan sent tendrils of energy racing to the middle. What he wanted would be located very near the core. The images that flashed into his mind reeked of age. He was looking at things that were old even as demons reckoned time.

A sense of urgency pushed at him. Somewhere in the distance, gates were opening. The nathrezim were responding to the invasion of their homeworld.

He became aware of the sounds of fighting. They came from what seemed like a great distance, but he knew this was because of the spell linking him to the archive. His forces were engaged with enemy reinforcements flooding in from the city above. He prayed they could hold them until his work was completed. He needed to finish quickly, or this library would become a trap and his army would be overwhelmed by the massed strength of the nathrezim.

He took a deep breath and slowed his pulse. It would not do to make a mistake here, so close to the culmination of everything he had planned for. He could not afford to fail.

There—he found the first ward, a complex spell, almost undetectable. It had been set to warn of anyone tampering with these records and rewriting history. He was not concerned with any such subtlety. He just needed the specific record he was searching for, and then he would be gone. He smashed the spell aside and felt an immediate response as defensive runes flared to life. He sensed portals opening around him.

An enormous felguard shimmered into being among the stacks. A pulse of magical energy, loud as thunder and clear as a bell to anyone with the senses to hear it, rang out. From the distance came multiple responses.

The nathrezim would know exactly where he was now. He stepped forward as the felguard aimed a blow at him. His warglaive lashed out and cut the demon in half. More felguard materialized around him. Illidan cut them down, but more and more materialized with every heartbeat.

He gazed around him with his spectral sight, looking for the pattern of the defenses, finding them inscribed around the base of each pillar of disks. Each was connected to one of three master sigils around the central pillar.

He aimed one of his warglaives at the nearest and threw. His weapon whirled through the air and scoured the stone, breaking part of the spell. The blade bounced off the pillar and returned to his hand. The onrush of felguard slackened as the portals connected to the destroyed rune collapsed.

Illidan sprang forward, moving around the pillar as the demons pursued him. Ahead lay another glowing sigil in the floor. He cut down two felguard, slid forward, powering himself with his wings, and defaced the rune with his blades, then moved toward the last of the master wards.

The remaining felguard bunched around the third glowing sigil. He sprang into the air, gained height, and swooped down on them. His blades sang as he chopped through the demonic ranks, ducking their axe strokes, evading their attempts to grip him.

He drove his blade right into the center of the runic pattern, disrupting it. A massive backwash of energy pushed him into the air. The demons howled their frustration, but the gateways through which they had come collapsed. Now he had to deal with only those who had already passed through. There would be no more reinforcements.

Once more he dived amid the demons, scattering them with the force of his flying charge. His blades decapitated some and left others limbless. He came to rest beside the central pillar. He stood next to his goal for all these long centuries.

Extending one hand, he invoked his spell of seeking once more. Images flooded his mind as tendrils of force touched the disks. One in particular, the Seal of Argus, drew him. Potent images overlaid it, the aura of beings he had encountered in the past and would never forget: Archimonde and Kil’jaeden, the two mightiest lieutenants of Sargeras, true master of the Burning Legion.

Their psychic stench was so strong, it threatened to overwhelm even his prepared mind. He felt the brutal fury of Archimonde and the subtle, intricate mind of Kil’jaeden. Even though he knew they were not present, it was all he could do to keep from lashing out as if surrounded by deadly foes.

With a mighty heave of his muscles, he tore the disk from the tower. The stack tottered but did not fall. He spoke the words of another spell, and the disk floated in the air behind him, slowly orbiting his form, the runes on its surface glowing with sinister greenish-yellow light.

A grim smile twisted Illidan’s lips. He would give the nathrezim something to remember him by. He drew on all his strength and scoured the tower of records with one of the Warglaives of Azzinoth. The smell of ozone and brimstone filled the air as sparks of magical energy discharged.

Rising into the air, Illidan defaced the pillars, damaging the weaving of spells, smashing the records of which the dreadlords were so proud. Demonic glee pulsed through his mind at the thought of their fury. Part of him mourned the loss of so much knowledge. Part of him believed that no record of the dreadlords should be allowed to remain. They deserved no monument.

From the entrance came the sounds of fighting as his demon hunters sought to keep their resurgent enemy at bay. He swooped down into the combat, landed on the back of one dreadlord, and parted the demon’s head from his shoulders with a single blow.

“To me, my soldiers!” he shouted. “It is time to leave this foul place. We have gotten what we came for.”

They battled their way back to the portal. All around, Illidan sensed the opening of more gateways as the hosts of the Burning Legion poured reinforcements in. It seemed they had not yet realized what was happening, and were responding piecemeal. Sometime soon a leader would take charge, and then things would become difficult. They needed to leave this world before that happened.

Vandel slashed at a demonic mo’arg servitor as the creature aimed a blast of flame from some engine he wore on his back. Companies of imps poured fire down on them from on high. They occupied the ridgelines.

“Varedis, take a company and clear those ridges,” Illidan ordered.

The demon hunter nodded and gestured, and he and his forces bounded up the hillside, cartwheeling and somersaulting through the gouts of flame. The demons shrieked and gibbered foul insults in their tongue and then turned to flee.

Ahead loomed a pack of voidwalkers, floating over the battlefield, legless, armored, and gleaming black. They were tough but slow. “Go around them,” Illidan ordered. “Make your way to the portal.”

He paused to glance around. His force had taken casualties during the battle in the archive, and even now attrition stalked them. He saw Elarisiel go down and hacked his way to her side. Vandel was already there, helping her to her feet.

Illidan nodded his approval. He wanted no one left behind if possible. The wounded could be healed. Those too wounded to be moved he put out of their misery.

Ahead of them the portal to Outland blazed. There were signs of conflict there. The Legion’s forces had moved to secure the gate, intending to cut off their retreat. In accordance with his orders, his own army on Outland had not moved through but remained in place to guard the way out.

“Form up into a wedge,” he ordered. “We are going to cut our way free.”

His demon hunters shouted their approval and charged. In battle they looked every bit as demonic as their foes—lithe tattooed forms marked by scars and mutations, some surrounded by integuments of shadow, some wielding fel magic as easily as any spawn of the Twisting Nether.

For a moment, the demons held. Then they were down and the portal was ahead of Illidan’s forces. He ordered them through and then turned. In the distance, the glare of gigantic gateways opening filled the darkness. Over the ridges poured demonic fighter after demonic fighter. He looked at them and laughed.

Let them come. He had found what he was looking for. They were too late to stop him.

He stepped through the portal. Already the demon hunters were racing clear of it to join the rest of his army on Outland. Illidan took one last look at the battleground in Nathreza, sensed none of his troops alive out there, and spoke the words of unbinding. The gateway unraveled in a furious discharge of energy, all the backblast directed into the nathrezim homeworld. It was his final gift to them, a surge of explosive energy that could tear apart a continent. He prayed that on the other side of the gate, the dreadlord commanders were assembled.

He had inflicted the greatest defeat that the Burning Legion had suffered in millennia, and he was pleased.

Illidan watched the last remnants of the portal’s energies collapse behind him. He looked at his army and wondered if there were any spies among it. Almost certainly it was the case. He considered the events of the day, and his mouth twisted into a wide grin.

Today had been the first unalloyed triumph he had experienced in many a long century. He had captured Maiev. He had invaded the realm of the dreadlords and acquired their most closely kept secret. He had destroyed the armies they had sent to protect their homeworld. If his calculations were correct, he had shattered Nathreza as Ner’zhul’s magic had shattered Draenor.

He gazed upon the watchful, expectant faces of his troops. His magically amplified voice boomed out over the ranks of assembled fighters. “Today we have struck a blow against the Burning Legion the like of which has not been felt in ten thousand years. We have slaughtered dreadlords and ravaged their world. We have shown them that they are not immune to our vengeance. That they will be brought to justice and made to atone for their deeds.”

Approval rippled through the ranks of the demon hunters as the realization of what they had done settled into their minds. They had been concentrating only on fighting and survival. Now they began to feel their triumph in their bones. Smiles appeared on faces whose owners had never expected to smile again. For a moment demonic rage vanished, to be replaced with something almost like calm.

“We have slain thousands and lured their armies into a trap that killed a hundred times that number, and we have this!” He brandished the disk he had taken from the archives, held it aloft with both hands so that it caught the light and sparkled. The demon hunters and the sorcerers present could all see the power it contained. The sensitive among them could catch a faint whiff of the auras permeating it, even at the distance they stood from him.

There might be spies present, he told himself, but glee loosened his tongue.

“We have found the key to the homeworld of Kil’jaeden and Archimonde, to a place where the Legion’s commanders can be finally slain. We have uncovered the location of Argus.

“The Legion has destroyed world after world, enslaved and massacred nation after nation. Now it will reap what it has sown. Today we have slaughtered the nathrezim, and that is only the first step. Today we put our feet on the path to ultimate victory. Today we found the means to cut off the head that guides our foe. We are taking the war to Kil’jaeden. We are going to teach him the meaning of defeat.”

Let there be spies present, Illidan thought. Let them report that to the Burning Legion. Let them think about what I have done this day and tremble.