Illidan

24

Streams of molten green lava flowed down cliffs of shattered basalt. The air blazed with heat and fel magic. It tingled on Illidan’s skin, filled his lungs with every breath. He glanced around and noted that on every boulder, every ledge, every shard of rock that stabbed at the sky, a demon hunter stood guard.

They had driven off the Legion guards, but there was every chance the ritual he was about to perform would draw the attention of the demons’ commanders. While in his trance state, he would be vulnerable, unable to fight or flee. He was taking a terrible risk here, but it was one that needed to be endured. If one of his followers proved to be treacherous, or even overly ambitious, his life would end.

The Throne of Kil’jaeden. The name itself had power, setting up a resonance between the demon lord and this location. Huge magical energies flowed all around. Gul’dan had used the mountain as the site of the ritual that had bound the orc clans to the service of the Burning Legion before the First War. Gul’dan’s absorbed memories now told Illidan this was the place to cast his spell. Here lay a great flaw in the fabric of the universe that was connected to the lair of the Deceiver himself. This night the flow of energies from the Twisting Nether would be at its strongest in years.

He walked the edge of the great pattern he had inscribed in letters of fire on the black rock. He mouthed the words of the incantation, a constant, repetitive chanting, binding forces that he could hold in place with a mere fraction of his mind. All around monstrous energies coiled, waiting to be unleashed. It had taken weeks to forge this spell. It could only be cast at this exact location, at this exact hour, when all the signs were right.

He stared at the dark clouds in the blazing sky. A massive gout of lava spurted from the tortured depths of the earth, like demon blood pouring from a titanic wound.

He took out the disk he had claimed on Nathreza and focused all his powers of perception on it. The psychic stench of the demon lords of the Burning Legion still clung to it. When he inspected it closely with his strange vision, he could picture them: Sargeras, bleak, uncompromising, a fallen titan radiating misery and despair; Archimonde, a mad warlord consumed with fury and rage, Sargeras’s fist; Kil’jaeden, the schemer, so adept at corrupting so many.

Who was Illidan to set himself against the likes of that awful trio? He touched the Seal of Argus, running his claws over the indentations of the runes until the cool metal squeaked. It was odd that it could stay so cold even here amid all the fire and fury.

He passed around the edge of the sorcerous circle he had created, checking the wards, making sure that the energy flowed correctly through it, that he had made no mistakes. Now was not the time for errors.

He was wasting time and that was folly. If he waited too long, the window in which the spell could be cast would close. Another would not arise for moons. He should proceed. And yet he could not make himself take the final step just yet. Soon, if things went according to his plan, he would be gazing upon those with the power to destroy him completely, and he would face them alone. It had not been so sweet, this life, and yet he found that now that the hour was upon him, he was still reluctant to leave it.

He prowled the edge of the circle, probing it with tiny traces of magical energy. Ner’zhul’s fate was a warning. The shaman had turned against his demonic masters and paid the ultimate price for his betrayal. There were times when Illidan wondered whether he was going to do the same—whether this was just a game for the demon lords, one in which the odds were all stacked in their favor and they derived amusement from the insect struggles of those who opposed them.

He took a gulp of the air, catching the brimstone taint of the green lava. It was like breathing in the smoke from a great inferno. It made the lungs tingle and burn. Time was running out.

In an instant, before he could stop himself or regret the decision, he spoke the final words of the spell, unleashing the tidal wave of power. It tore his spirit from his body and sent it tumbling headlong into the Twisting Nether.

The way opened before him. He felt as if he were falling into the rune-covered disk, but he knew this was an illusion, a construct created by his mind to give him some sense of understanding what was going on here. Ultimately that was not possible for a brain born in natural reality, but his mind would do its best to provide him with a framework he could work with.

His spirit emerged into the Twisting Nether and gazed down on Argus. The world hovered on the brink between the Twisting Nether and the physical universe, saturated with the fel energies of the Burning Legion.

He tumbled headlong toward the surface of the world. Once it must have been beautiful, a place of crystalline mountains and shimmering seas. Now it was cold and cruel. A darkness brooded over the place, and a sense of corruption and loss.

The seal pulsed in his claws. It was no longer the real disk but a representation of it, built from the magical energies of his spell, and it drew him downward to what he sought. The tug was almost irresistible and yet he fought against it, studying the sky, noting the position of stars and constellations, fixing them in his mind. Desperately he sought familiar signs in the sky, knowing that he could use them to plot his position in the cosmos. He looked also for magical energy tides, the auroral currents flowing out of the Twisting Nether.

Was this really the place he sought? He orbited it swiftly, taking sightings, looking for signs, still fighting all the time the tug of the spell he had created. Once more he felt the cold, emotionless distance from his body. A prickling of paranoia tickled his sorcerously trained senses. For a moment, he thought he sensed a presence observing him. He glanced around but could find nothing.

A thought occurred to him. If he could sense Kil’jaeden through this link, was it not possible the demon lord could sense him? He had created his spell in such a way that it should be impossible for any sorcerer to detect him, but what did he truly know of the Deceiver’s capabilities?

No sense in worrying about it now. He was committed beyond any possibility of turning back. He let his spirit swoop down over the jagged crystalline mountains, saw the corruption that festered within them and caused them to crumble. He watched dust devils born of the powdered gems rise into the air and screech down canyons of serrated rock. Light shimmered and danced as it was refracted everywhere.

Ahead of him lay a city, looming over canyons of fractured crystal. Within it were many presences, all of them capable of blasting his soul.

Illidan felt a surge of energy as his soul crossed the borders of the city. It, too, must have been beautiful once, laid out according to complex geomantic rules. Its curved structures reminded him of the draenei buildings of Outland, only these were far more intricate and beautiful. Outland’s town halls were hovels compared with the fantastic structures he passed now. These were huge machines for focusing magic. Once, according to all he had been able to uncover, they had provided peace, harmony, and health to an entire world. Now they created a cloud of fear and despair visible to Illidan’s spectral sight.

At the center of the great city stood a mighty palace. Within lurked a massive, ominous presence surrounded by those only slightly less monstrous. It was to here that the disk drew Illidan.

His spirit zoomed through the streets with the velocity of thought. He tried to slow himself down, to get things under control, to stop himself from being reeled in too swiftly. He forced himself to halt by the walls of the palace.

He sensed another presence. Something lurked close by, studying him. He extended all his senses to the ultimate. There was something there, but he could not quite pin it down. It was as shielded as he was. A sentinel? Or something else? He forced himself to watch and wait, but nothing happened. Time to move.

He slipped through the crystal corridors, past runes that glowed with evil significance. It was as if the core of all the spells that had once spread light and harmony across the city and the world had been rewritten to create the opposite. When he studied the runes, feelings of rage and despair filled his mind. Even shielded as he was, the spells affected him, filling him with visions of conquest, a lust for domination and destruction, a rage to end all things. Here, written in runes of fire, was the creed of the Burning Legion.

He looked on the representation of the seal. This would be the anchor for the gateway between Outland and Argus. He invoked the final phase of the spell. The disk pulsed in his hand as it absorbed energies from all around, strengthening the connection it already had with this place. Once he was done, he would no longer need to open a portal from the Throne of Kil’jaeden. He could use the link forged here with the seal instead.

Dark energies began to permeate his astral form. A heaviness flowed through him. His spirit congealed, took on a glutinous physical quality born from the power all around him. He moved closer to the core of this dark labyrinth, feeling more and more the aura of the Deceiver. His movements slowed. His astral form floated lower and lower. For all his precautions, he had become trapped in the web of some terrible energy. The maze of spells surrounding him was binding its evil energies to his spirit.

The presence he had felt earlier returned. He twisted, trying to locate it, but could not. He cursed. It had caught him, and it now only seemed a matter of time before his severed spirit floated into the presence of the Deceiver and was enslaved or destroyed.

Desperately he fought against the spell. He sloughed off some of the magical plasm, regained something of the sense of weightlessness, but still he drifted into the vast throne room where Kil’jaeden sat surrounded by his court of demons. The eredar lord loomed gigantically, all red and burning. Vast batlike wings emerged from his back and seemed to reach to the ceiling. Huge amber lights blazed on his spiked shoulder guards. Fiery eyes dominated the face of a mutated draenei. An aura of awesome, thunderous power clung to him.

There was no doubt. Illidan had found his way to the palace of Kil’jaeden on the lost world of Argus. Unfortunately, the burning gaze turned toward where he was. A twisted smile passed over that monstrous face. Massive nostrils flared as if catching the psychic scent of prey.

Illidan felt the other watching presence again. It enwrapped him. He struggled against it but could not cast it off, even as Kil’jaeden’s eyes lay fully upon him.

The Deceiver’s gaze rested there, pregnant with the threat of destruction; then it passed on. Something had turned it away from Illidan, and it took him a moment to realize what. The presence that enshrouded him now pushed him out of the edge of the throne room. He had a sense of it just for an instant. It was a thing of Light, so bright as almost to be painful to behold. As he became aware of it, he heard a titanic roar of rage from within the throne room of Kil’jaeden, as if the eredar lord sensed it, too.

The shackles of ectoplasm that had bound him sloughed away.

Begone from this place. You cannot survive here. Not now. The voice spoke within his head and was gone. The spell of translocation snatched him back to the Throne of Kil’jaeden.

Illidan’s spirit crashed back into his physical form. He caught himself before he could fall, realized that he had been gone for only a heartbeat in this world even if it had felt like an eternity in the Twisting Nether. The Seal of Argus blazed crimson in his hands.

He had done it.

He had survived, and he had found out what he needed. He had confirmed the presence of Kil’jaeden upon Argus. He had found the beating heart of the Burning Legion. And he had found something else, a being who had aided him to escape when all seemed lost. He thought about the Light he had sensed within it and realized he did not trust the thing.

Kil’jaeden was not known as the Deceiver for nothing. Perhaps this was all part of some vast and elaborate trap.