I
Plague renders the dead mad and bloodthirsty, but it does nothing to reverse their decay. The bones of the undead strewing the approach to Stratholme are frail and dry with age. Bleached and white, they stand mute testament to those long-ago battles fought to retake the city when the Plague was new and everyone still thought there was hope for Stratholme, for Lordaeron. Crushed beneath the paladin's heavy sabatons, those bones disintegrate into so much gravedust with barely a crunch.
Even now, years after its ghastly end, the fires still burn in Stratholme. Ashes drift from the sky, a neverending rain of ruin upon a dead brown land. The smell of cinders and decay assaults the paladin’s nostrils. As he crosses the drawbridge and steps into the shadow of the looming gatehouse, the runes on his armor begin to glow in response to the corruption within.
The paladin remembers a time when the Order wore radiant, elegant platemail. He remembers bells tolling in the towers of Lordaeron the day he took his vows; the gleaming silver plate that was entrusted to him with his title. As he knelt to be dubbed, the sun struck Uther’s golden armor, lit him up like the sun. Arise a knight of the Silver Hand, the Lightbringer said, and as the paladin rose Uther’s brilliant protégé smiled at him. The Prince of Lordaeron wore a cloak as blue as his eyes, the sigil of his forefathers in silverthread on its back.
Lordaeron lies in ruins now. Uther is dead. Arthas is something worse than dead. Stratholme, once the great northern stronghold of the Kingdom of Lordaeron, is a city of the dead. No one has the stomach for golden armor anymore. The paladin’s armor is heavy and dark, engineered for brutality and strength. There is magic woven into the steel, and not all of it is pure and holy. Nothing pure and holy can survive long against the Scourge. Spell-ribbons etched with strange runes drape his spaulders; inscribed etchings seem to shift and ripple over the surfaces of breastplate and helm. Shadow-spells of protection and wrath leave the steel dark and dull. Riveted together, strapped down, buckled into place, his armor is nearly indestructible, constricting, a burden as heavy as duty.
He comes to the gates of Stratholme, keen-eyed, watchful. Through the portcullis he sees the shambling dead, the lowest, the stupidest, and by far the most numerous of the Scourge’s forces. Milling, muttering incomprehensibly, they are not strong individually, but they are many. Enough of them, and anyone would be slowed, dragged down, trampled, overwhelmed. Even a paladin guarded by the Light. Even a mage with the elements at her command.
He is not afraid of the undead, but he is afraid. He can feel his pulse beating, heart to throat, heart to fingertips. He thinks of the missive sent from the high command of the Kirin Tor. A name, and instructions: infiltrate, search, seize & extract; was it a rescue mission or a capture? The last time he saw that name, it was on a roster of the disowned and the disgraced, posted on every street of Silvermoon. No use contemplating it now. He has a job to do.
Flakes of corrosion crumble off iron as he grips the portcullis and strains. Somewhere in the depths of the gatehouse, a great pulley groans, pops free of its rust, and begins to turn. The portcullis begins to rise, faster and faster, a crescendoing cacophony of metal on metal. He keeps his grip until he’s carried aloft by the momentum of the gate, his own weight slowing the rise. Even so, the portcullis crashes into the far end of its track. Disintegrated stone rains on the paladin’s helm, patters on bloodstained cobblestones. He lets go. Drops five or six feet, lands heavily but does not stagger.
The undead turn. Even they can hear such a din, and more importantly, they can smell him. He smells good to them: like life and blood and warmth and cleanness, all the things shorn from them. Ghostfire burns in their empty eye sockets. If they were still capable of emotion at all, the only ones they felt were envy and covetousness. The very worst of mortal sins, and the last to depart, even after the body is dead.
The paladin flexes his gauntleted hand. Gently, he lowers the visor of his helm; the sharp angles of his face replaced by a coldforged skull. Fight long enough, he thinks, and you become what you hate. He hopes he hasn’t fought long enough yet. He hopes he’ll know when he has; before he falls; before he rises as Arthas had, a knight sworn to death.
He unslings his shield and his hammer. An inhalation, deliberate and steady, and he closes his eyes. Light encircles him in rings, spreads in latticed fractals at his feet. The microscopic flaws in his armor are suddenly sealed. His veins pulse with strength; his very bones are hardened against damage. The dead are shambling for him now. They wail and moan. The paladin lets the leatherbound grip of his hammer slide into his palm. His eyes open, aglow from within, blazing with light.
One against a thousand, the paladin steps into the ashen streets of Stratholme to begin his brutal work.
II
Plague renders the dead mad and bloodthirsty, but it does nothing for their intelligence. Here comes one now, mad and bloodthirsty, shambling idiotically toward Dunamis. She thinks it might have been female in life. Possibly pretty once, and those rags may have once been rather comely garments. Can’t tell now; now it’s just empty eye sockets and gaping jaw, dragging foot, seeping rot. Disgusting, really.
Careless with familiarity, she makes a motion – it’s an eloquent, intricate little gesture of her slim hand, as though she’d cast a handful of invisible pearls before the proverbial swine. The next beat of her heart pulses hard and hot through her arteries. The air before her fingertips shimmers, condenses, suddenly grows white-hot. A roaring ball of fire bursts into existence, hungry, devouring the air, blinding, dynamic, deadly, ravenous as a starved beast. It rockets forward with a flick of her wrist, sucking her hair aloft in its wake.
There’s a muffled whoomf at the moment of collision. She feels the shockwave in the soles of her feet, behind her navel. Her hair blows back again. Instantly on impact, the desiccated walking corpse bursts into exuberant flame. The awful stench of burning rot fills the air and chokes her nostrils, reminding Dunamis once again why amongst those magi experienced with the art of re-dispatching the dead it’s generally considered a much better idea to use Frost over Fire. Fire is always permanent, that’s what they taught her when she was a mere apprentice, but Frost is so much cleaner.
At least they don’t scream, though. There is that to be said as the corpse crumples silently to its knees. A femur snaps with a low wet pop. It topples onto its side. The fire burns so hot and fast that by the time she passes on silken slippers – utterly impractical for this sort of sojourn, but then casting was so utterly hampered by anything thicker – the corpse is ash and charred bone.
So much for the mad and bloodthirsty dead. They terrify the common man, but not Dunamis. She is, after all, neither common nor human. She is a mage, a caster of magic, a weaver of mana, a wielder of the most elemental forces of the universe. What’s more, she is Sin’dorei, and if there was a race most indisputably bound to magic, fond of magic, and talented with magic, it would be her own vicious, proud, wounded people.
So, no. She is not afraid of the mad and bloodthirsty dead. They are easier to kill like this. It’s almost a letdown, compared to the foes she’s faced down. She followed Kael’thas Sunstrider himself through the Dark Portal; seen the shattered planet of Draenor alongside the first Blood Prince before his mind was utterly lost. She had the run of Tempest Keep. She stormed the Black Temple. She’s been lauded as a hero, and then tossed into the Violet Hold in chains. She’s broken out of the Violet Hold, tearing men to pieces with her mind when they tried to stop her, and she’s leapt suicidally from the walls of Dalaran only to touch gently down on the ground ten miles below. She’s crossed half of Northrend, stowed away aboard an airship back to Azeroth, crossed half of Azeroth, and all the way she’s dodged wild beasts, rampaging monsters, Alliance soldiers, Kirin Tor marshals, and the occasional San’layn assassin. All that effort, all this way, simply to teleport across the rusty gates of Stratholme and discover that this city – this notorious, cursed city where the first paladin was covenanted and the first Scourge was raised – was rather not a challenge at all.
The streets are filthy, of course. Running with very old blood, rot, and plague-ichor. What few buildings still stand are smouldering slowly. She passes beneath a shingle hanging askew from a single rusty nail. Chilton’s Magick Shoppe, it reads. A brief curiosity draws her to peer through the smoke-muddied glass, but all she can see inside are cobwebs and murky, indistinct heaps that may have once been merchandise. She decides she doesn’t care enough to investigate and moves on.
The hungry dead linger in the shadows, stare at her with sunken, coveting eyes. There’s a trail of corpses in her wake; that last one only the latest scion of a long and ignoble line. Real corpses, ones that don’t shamble and moan. Frost blooms on the skins and lips of some. Others are scorched terribly, their hides marked with the curious fractals of discharging arcane energy. Still others are simply ash. The walking dead are not intelligent, but they do seem to have some rudimentary sense of survival. They don’t approach her anymore. They shrink back from her as she stalks the streets, blinking past debris fields and the impenetrable barricades of fallen clock-towers, collapsed town square fountains.
At last she finds it. Just as it had been described in countless, insufferably laudatory texts. A small building, gabled and steepled, quite obviously a house of the Light. It stands just across the narrow alley from the magician’s shop, a stone’s throw away. Once she sets eyes on it, Dunamis isn’t quite certain how she managed to miss it before. Although humble in size and stature, there’s an aura around the building that sets it apart from the rest of this gods-forsaken place: a sanctity, an untouchability, even a sense of lightness and peace.
It is unmistakably the Alonsus Chapel, where the First Paladin was ordained by the Light itself. Or so the story goes. Dunamis never was one for stories. They bored her. They were all fables in the end, designed to teach some indisputable truth when she knew very well that every truth could be disputed, every story has two sides. Or more. She knew a boy once, a boy whose name she’s forgotten. She met him in Lordaeron when she herself was a girl. A squire of the Order of the Silver Hand, in line to become a paladin himself. He was quite taken with stories. He told her the one about the First Paladin as he knelt before the altar of the capital cathedral. She had only seen him dressed in reds and blacks and golds before then, the colors of their people, but that night he was dressed all in white. He held a bare sword point-down against the stone floor, his hand wrapped gently around the blade itself. That, too, had a story behind it; something about vigilance and respect for the weapon he was becoming, which could cut so deep if his focus and devotion wavered for even a moment. It was the other story he told her that night, though: the founding of the Order and the Light-given duty the paladins were sworn to carry out. He told her that story as he knelt before the altar in vigil, because the next day –
Well; it doesn’t matter now. Focus: that’s one thing the magi had in common with the paladins. Focus was the core of all magic, which stems ultimately from the distillation of one’s own will. See; she could repeat maxims too. She focuses, she crosses the street. There’s a shambler in her way, reaching to bat clammy awful hands across her arm. She throws it off with a twist of her arm, and she doesn’t have to look to know that frost was spiderwebbing its way across the miserable thing’s skin, worming into its flesh, freezing it solid where it stands. The Chapel rises above her as she nears it, its spire piercing the dismal sky above.
Against all odds, this building and this building alone has escaped the devastation wrought upon Stratholme. The steps are solid beneath her feet, uncreaking. There’s still stained glass in the windows. The door opens smoothly and soundlessly, and when she steps inside the constant muffled din of Stratholme seems to die away a little. The moans of the dead are farther away. The crackling of those everpresent fires dims.
It is quiet, then. The chapel is tiny inside. Bare rafters point the way up the tall, narrow spire. Two sets of pews line the nave, just three or four rows each. The altar is humble and wooden. The stained glass is still lovely, though, lit achingly by the light of Stratholme burning.
The air tastes cleaner in here. It’s as though a weight is lifted. Dunamis shuts the door quietly behind herself, and she bolts it. Then she walks up between the pews, purposeful. She steps up onto the bema, and then up to the altar. For a moment she spreads her palms across its top. There’s a faint, heavy thrum of power there, indistinguishable to those not trained in the art. She is trained, though. The sensation makes her smile. Her trip was worth it after all.
She presses firmly. She is not strong, not physically, but it is not the strength of body she needs. She closes her eyes, and her brow furrows. There it is again. That thrum of power. She seizes it, weaves it into her own heartbeat. Feels that heartbeat carried through her body: down the axis, through the limbs. Again, again. Her veins pulse with energy. The wood beneath her hands begins to glow searingly bright, spreading, becoming incandescent, then molten.
The altar falls silently to pieces. The edges are jagged and aglow, dripping light. Exposed now is the secret of the chapel: the reason this one building in the city where the undead were born, this one chapel in the unbeating heart of the Plaguelands, has stood unmolested all these years. It is an artifact of untold potential, imbued with some of the most devastating spells of the School of Light Magic. A holy relic, the boy she knew once would have said, a holy relic imbued with holy power; but then that boy would have been aghast to know what she planned.
Dunamis doesn’t hesitate. She reaches in and she grasps the artifact. It is smooth and round and perfect, an orb that begins to burn with cold white light as soon as she touches it. She – exhales; she can’t help it. Her fingertips are numb immediately. She can’t tell if it’s cold or hot. She can only tell that it is immensely powerful, and now it is hers.
She lifts it from its socket.
The ground shakes. The rafters moan. Some undefinable sense of sanctity vanishes from the air, like a candle snuffed out. She feels it. The undead outside feel it. Behind her, the door bursts heavily asunder. She barely has time to tuck the artifact into her traveling pack, and then an unchecked tide of the undead floods the chapel.
Dunamis whips around as the first of them swarm the nave. They are crawling over the pews; they are stumbling over one another. The raised bema seems to baffle them for a moment. Then they manage, climbing awkwardly on. There’s nothing awkward about the way Dunamis moves. She is smooth, efficient, light of step. She retreats, sidestepping the shattered pieces of the altar. She puts her back to the corner, which would be a very bad place indeed if she didn’t know what she was doing.
For the first time since setting foot in Stratholme, Dunamis unslings her staff. If her bearing and the flash of her eyes alone did not convey the depth of her understanding and power, the weapon she wields would. Gleaming, ornate, crafted of some dark metal that sheens and ripples like a living thing, it stands as tall as Dunamis herself. She spears it into the air, and runes come aglow all down the shaft; coruscating arcs of energy whip to life around its head. She murmurs a word as the undead swarm her position. A glyph flares across the ground.
Then the world goes mad. The hot stink of sulfur fills the room. A column of concentrated flame blasts down from the sky. The windows blow out. The roof simply ceases to exist. The undead beneath it are incinerated instantly. The floor becomes a crater. A fine white ash dusts Dunamis’s skin, puffs from her lips as she laughs aloud. The sound is vicious, but then: so is she.
Yet more undead are coming. They are stumbling past the scorched remnants of the pews, the ashes of their brethren. They seem bolder now. They clamber onto the bema. The ground is scorching hot. They leave pieces of clothing, skin, and sometimes entire limbs behind as they move. She slings fireballs; she hurls gleaming lances of ice. She casts barrages of sheer arcane energy at the dead, and they fall soundlessly by the dozens, by the scores. They keep coming. She’s not afraid. She doesn’t fear them. She hates them. Her hate comes awake as suddenly as any dragon. It roars, and she casts, and there’s sweat on her brow now, sweat down her spine; her skin feels so hot. She can’t cast forever. There’s a limit to what a mortal shell can take, even one so attuned to magic as hers. She’s seen what happens to magi who burn themselves out, but she doesn’t care, she’s seen her city burn, she’s waited half her life and walked to the edges of this world and several others, and she finally has what she needs to win.
There’s a terrific crash – the wooden wall at her back suddenly erupting. Sheer instinct saves her. She throws herself sideways, landing badly on her shoulder. An enormous rusted sickle cleaves through the corner where she stood a moment ago. Another second and she would have been cut nearly in half. A rattle of metal on metal, and then the planks of the wall burst asunder like matchsticks. She can see it, then: the huge, fleshy abomination that peers stupidly through the gap in the wall. It is easily fifteen feet tall; nearly as wide, and jiggling with bloat and fat. A scythe on a chain is bolted to its arm where its right hand should be. It stares at her. She stares back. All of a sudden it seems to recognize that she’s alive, she’s edible. It rears back. She hits the ground, she rolls blindly, the scythe whips out on its chain and carves into the floorboards, tears them open, pop pop crack pop.
Now there are undead all around her. Having no choice, she’s rolled into their midst. She lashes out with the staff, pushing them back. She’s no fighter but she needs the physical distance to be able to concentrate. The base of her staff strikes the ground. A shell of crackling energy explodes from her, throws the fiends back, and she draws her breath to cast again but she’s so overtaxed already; she’s drained herself so nearly dry in her fury.
The giant flings its scythe out again. Her balance is off, she can’t dodge this one; in desperation she brings her staff up. The scythe hits the staff so hard it throws her back, slams her down from the bema and into a pile of charred wood that used to be a pew. Her arms are numb to the shoulder from the impact; her head feels light. The corner of the chapel is caving in. The huge abomination is lurching through, hammering its meaty fists against the beams and the studs to break them open, make a space. Some of the smaller ghouls get in its way. It doesn’t even seem to see them, goes right over them, tramples them. Blood and ichor and liquefied guts squirt across the floor.
Dunamis manages to gather the last of her will. She clenches a fist she can’t feel. Her veins run cold. When she looses the spell it spins lazily on its axis, off-center. Hits the abomination, but not where she wanted to, not where she knew it would have frozen what little brains it had left, made it nothing more than dead flesh.
It hits in the arm. Freezes the dreadful sickle and the chain. Gives it pause, if only for a moment. Then it roars at her, howling, its deep bellowing voice trembling the ground beneath her. It’s on her now, it’s an instant away, it rears back with its good hand balled into a huge, crushing fist. It’ll be her next, squashed until her guts fly out her mouth. Dunamis has enough time to be indignant about the details of her exeunt; that she should die to some nameless fat corpse in some stinking, plague-ridden town, and in the same ignoble way as several other smaller corpses. It hardly seems fair. She’s better than this. She’s good enough and proud enough, at least, to face her death with her eyes open. She doesn’t flinch.
Which is why she sees when some incredibly fast, incredibly heavy object slices through the air over her head and strikes the giant in the throat. There’s a burst of light on impact, bright enough to leave dark shadows in her vision. A lesser creature would have been decapitated by the blow. This one simply gurgles in pain and stumbles back, momentarily stunned.
Whatever hit it goes clanging to the ground. She can barely make its shape out. It’s a shield, tall enough to cover a man from shoulder to ground, so heavy that it rattles back and forth only twice before coming to a stop. The underside is dull, dark metal. Dunamis is far too talented to be a mere artisan-mage, but she learned a little of the craft during her apprenticeship; she recognizes the distinctive color and resonance of shadowsteel. There are leather straps there that could bind it to its wielder’s arm; a heavy curved grip. She sees these things in the hyperclarity afforded by adrenaline, and as she realizes she’s seeing these things, seeing these things and not dead, she pushes herself to her feet. Lesser ghouls are swarming her again, drawn to movement, the signs of life. She claws her staff up from the floor, grips it in hands only beginning to tingle with sensation again, slams it down. Arcane energy bursts: they’re thrown back, and through the ringing of her ears she can hear pounding footsteps, the creak of leather straps and the grind of metal riveted too tight to clank.
A gauntleted hand grasps her wrist. She’s pushed, shoved, spun around. She finds herself behind a warrior in heavy plate – no, not a warrior. A libram of seals hangs from his hip; a massive crenellated warhammer is secure in his grip. A paladin. Of course. Who else would come running to the defense of his desecrated chapel? He stamps his foot, shouting some muffled word. Light bursts out from beneath his boot, rippling out ten feet in every direction, diffusing lazily and hazily across the ground like some nebulous, unfurled galaxy.
The undead caught in the blaze aren’t silent. Not this time. They shriek as one, terribly, bloodcurdlingly, proving once and for all that even the dead know pain. They’re just selective about it. Fire and Frost they don’t fear. But this: Light, holy magic – this is their bane. They’re clawing over each other, a mad instinctive rush to get away, and some of them go down, are trampled, sear to ash wherever their rotting flesh touches the consecrated ground.
The abomination alone seems immune to pain. It lurches forward, roaring, driving its smaller brethren unwillingly before it. The paladin swings his hammer in a devastating arc, so fast that the air itself seems to come ablaze. A wall of ghouls tumble back. The abomination raises his scythe again, frost still clinging to its cruel curvature, and the paladin is diving, grasping, sliding his arm through the straps of his shield with the surreal speed of utter familiarity. He’s back on his feet, his stance solid, a curtain wall of strength in his armor.
The scythe comes down. The shield comes up. A hideous noise as they meet – the scythe shattering into a thousand pieces. The grey dead arm of the abomination, too: frozen solid by Dunamis’s last spell. The shards go skidding across the floor. The paladin, staggering a step from the impact, is quick to seize the moment. He charges, one step closing the distance, the next launching him upward. It’s inconceivable that so much armor, so much weight can go so quickly airborne. He uses the body of the abomination itself, planting a foot on its knee, grasping a handful of its sloughing hide, pulling himself up, giving himself the leverage to raise his hammer high.
He bellows as he brings it down, a savage, wordless shout, as bloodthirsty as any noise the undead ever made. The crunch of bone giving way is startlingly loud.
And then it’s quite quiet in the chapel. The abomination slumps meatily, heavily to the ground. The paladin half-slides, half-leaps down, his dark armor stained with unknown ichors, the head of his hammer caked with the detritus of the undead. He shakes the meat and the pus free with a swing of the hammer pulled tightly short. A quick glance around at the devastation, and then he turns.
No words, no questions. Not yet. He raises his open hand, invocatory. Light imbues his every spell: a flash of brilliant gold cascades down on Dunamis. She is instantly restored, every bone back in place, every gash closed, every scratch healed. Some small portion of her will is replenished, which is a comforting sensation. Her magic runs so deep that sometimes she forgets how utterly uncomfortable it is to be depleted, drained, stripped of nearly every last scrap of energy she has. She rolls her head, limbering her neck, and then she looks wordlessly, expectantly at the paladin.
He hangs his hammer from his belt, slings his shield over his back. Then he reaches to lift the visor of his helm. The stylized skull slides up and back; the face beneath is all sharp angles and proud nose, fierce eyes that effloresce faintly in the darkness. Jet black hair, rare amongst the Sin’dorei. That was what she noticed first, so long ago. He had hair as black as hers.
“The Council of Seven sent me to find you and bring you back to Dalaran,” he says. “They didn’t tell me why. I knew I’d find you in the thick of some sort of trouble, but the heart of Stratholme is beyond all reason. What are you doing here, Dunamis?”
“Ending the war, Ilarion.” She discovers she hasn’t forgotten his name after all. “I didn’t come to the heart of Stratholme. I came to the Alonsus Chapel.”
His eyes narrow. “Why?”
She hesitates just a second. Then she takes a step to the side, turns her head toward the desecrated altar. Ilarion follows the direction of her gaze. He makes a sound – a muffled grunt, like someone punched him in the gut with a dagger. She turns to keep her back from him, wary, as he pushes past her to the altar. He doesn’t even seem to notice her, though. Plate grinds against plate as he drops to his knees, sifting through the mana-warped ruins with his fingertips. In sharp profile she sees him: his eyes scanning the ruin, his face working with some repressed emotion. It takes him only seconds to understand.
“You’ve taken the Relic of Alonsus.” His voice is hushed. The last time she heard his voice like this, he was sayingyou can’t go with him. It’s not right. This is not the way our people will be saved and you know it. The memory is startlingly vivid; then it passes. “That’s why the Scourge swarmed the Chapel after avoiding it for so long. You’ve desecrated the holt of my Order and snuffed out the last Light in the Plaguelands. You’ve ruined one of the most holy sites in the whole of Azeroth, Dunamis – for what?” Faster than she would have thought possible, he rises, he wheels on her. Whatever he’s tried to repress coalesces suddenly, and it’s fury, sheer fury. His hammer is in his hand. He advances on her. “Your thirst for power? Your own insatiable ambition?”
She doesn’t retreat a single step. “For Quel’thalas,” she spits. “For victory.”
Her focus has returned just enough for this. Just enough to craft nothing into something, to twist sheer will into matter, into ice. She moves so fast. This time her aim is true. A spear of sheer energy hurtles from her fingertips. Ilarion’s reaction is instantaneous: he swings his shield off his back, but arcane magic doesn’t care about steel. It penetrates armor like it hardly exists. It detonates in flesh. A heap of shadowsteel, leather, muscle and bone, the paladin sails back ten feet, hits a pillar with such force he cracks it, and slumps down motionless at its base.
There’s a moment when Dunamis considers leaving him there. There’d be a certain vindictive irony in that. Let him die with the ruins of his beloved holy chapel, if it meant so very much to him. Let him be devoured alive by the very legion of the damned he was sworn to defeat – never mind that not a single paladin order in the world had a feasible, concrete plan for their grand and prophesied victory, though that never stopped them from trying to interfere with hers.
The moment passes. Another death-knight raised from some paladin’s sorry corpse never did anyone any good. Grasping the leather fastenings of Ilarion’s breastplate, Dunamis begins the laborious task of hauling him out of Stratholme.
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