I wake up to a low rumbling, and then a crack.
This hiss, a feedback, static and ringing in my ears drives me to pull the covers over my head, but I realise it’s not something I’m hearing. I’m feeling it.
I clutch my forehead and stumble down the stairs. It must be three in the morning or something in Pandaria, and Rem wakes up and runs after me.
“Babe, what’s wrong?”
“It’s… something happened.”
I pull myself into my shed where my office portal is linked up with Dalaran, but by the time I get there the connection is closed. I breathe harder and harder, and yank open a manual rift and pull it open like a curtain. Dalaran is gone.
I breathe harder and harder.
“They moved it again… they fucking moved it again…”
“Why? Don’t they tell anyone when they’re gonna move it?’ Rem asks, and rests a hand on my shoulder as I try to stop myself from hyperventilating, already knowing what happened the last time they moved the city. “Not to an apprentice, they don’t. Especially not one that does her best to keep them as far away as possible.”
As much as I hated to admit it, Dalaran did mean something to me. Despite the corruption, the magocracy, the exploitation, Dalaran meant something. It was where years of my research was kept. It was where I went to University and learned my magic. I had friends who lived there, and maybe as many good memories as bad.
I hated to admit I was worried for it.
I fought through that constant signal, crackling in my inner lobe, and manifest as much magic as I can to find the source of the disturbance. The leylines were fucked, contracting and expanding constantly in this region directly to the west. But there should be nothing there, Kalimdor ends hundreds of miles to the northwest and certainly didn’t carry on this far south. As I put my hands together and take vibrating, viciously unstable magic and order it to listen to me as it coils around my fingertips and settles in bands and ribbons, I struggle to complete it. Rem put a hand on my shoulder, and I don’t know whether it was a loving touch or if her wiggling fingers actually channelled mana into my spell, but she finishes it off for me and takes my hand when we’re ready to go through.
Calamity.
That’s what we saw when we stepped in.
It was sunset here, but with the sky marked by arcane fallout it was anything but beautiful.
I always miss it when important events happen. I was in Northrend during the Cataclysm. On Outland when The Sword came down. And I was asleep in my bed when Dalaran fell.
The Violet Citadel, that symbol of utter control and power I hated so much, spat at, spited and looked up at lay strewn across the fields on the island coast, the crystals cracked. Rubble of stone and slime from the Underbelly spattered the surroundings.
I stepped by bodies of people I didn’t know and some of those who I had. Arcanic radiation hung like particles in the air, and I knew this was the static I had felt.
The very city itself was imbued by some of the strongest magical forces outside of anywhere but a nexus, and as it came crashing down those magics imploded and sent shockwaves so far that even someone unattuned to passively perceiving these things was reeling from it all the way in Halfhill.
Other members of the Kirin Tor, other mages, scoured the ruins for those screaming out for help. Rem and I went too. I helped levitate mountains of rubble off people who had become trapped, as Rem raced underneath to catch them before it collapsed again. We carried and teleported people to camps where the medics were. We went inside fallen buildings and found children hiding under beds, and couldn’t find the words to explain their parent’s bloodstains on the wall. Every time I ran low and felt my nose running red, I put a hand on Rem and she opens herself as a battery. Her genetic potential is twice what mine is, and she promises every drop to help get as many people out as possible.
I overhear Violet Hold guards in the distance, and hate how I’m glad they’re here.
“The Hold has been compromised.” They say to one another, as even they struggle from the fallout. “We need to make sure those prisoners don’t escape again!”
My heart sinks.
There’s one person I can’t have running free.
Rem and I run to where the hold should have been, on the southeast corner of the city.
I remember a time, a couple of years ago.
I was still adventuring, still fresh, still desperate for coin.
I had met this runewright, and we had a deal. He trades me knowledge and coin while I do his field work, collecting and recording old inscriptions and spells carved into the oldest stones on the far reaches of the world. He wasn’t afraid to learn fel, or death, or shadow, despite what the council said. He was always a pariah, and just by my luck of knowing him I stumbled into a conspiracy. I had assumed he was paranoid, but one day he was assassinated by another magister, and left everything to me so I would clean up his mess.
That same magister tried the same on me, and I barely escaped with my life.
I did everything I could to make sure he never saw the light of day. But it seems he would see a sunset.
“Brightlane!”
I scoured the ruins of the hold and find him on the ground, one of the citadel’s broken crystals impaled through his chest. He sputters blood and looks over at me with that snide fucking superior look that he always made.
“Ms. Langley. What a coincidence.”
I try and close my magic around the crystal to warp him out of it. No matter how evil someone is, I’d hate myself more if I never even tried. But he holds out a shuddering hand.
“Don’t. It’s too far already.”
I see the crystal leaching into his body, arcane glass forming over his wounds and into his flesh.
He looked around at his surroundings.
“You won.”
“What?”
“You must be happy. The institution has fallen. The system broke. Your people free.
Isn’t this what you wanted? The Violet Citadel broken at your feet?
Everything you fought against has been defeated.”
Rem lunged at him. “Don’t you dare say that! You have the pissin’ gall to posture and try say she wanted it when you’re the one who tried to kill her!”
“It is what she wanted, isn’t it?” He looked at me.
I shake my head. “I wanted Dalaran better. I wanted it equal. I wanted it fair. I didn’t want to walk through the ruins and over the bodies of people who had fallen with it.”
He scoffed. “And they wouldn’t have fallen if you hadn’t done this to me.
I was researching into improving security. After the Legion, I wanted to make sure the city could never be attacked or infiltrated again! But I heard whispers, I heard the void skittering in the darkness from the cell you put me in and I could do nothing!”
I shuddered at him. “You think I should’ve just let you go free? After all of that? By your own rules about keeping Dalaran safe, you did a pretty shitty job at keeping it together and going after the real dangers.”
He laughed at me. “For someone who hates politics, you are certainly ruthless enough for it. Who’s to say this wasn’t another design?”
Rem snarled, barely able to hold herself back. “You’re sayin’ this is her fault? You’re sayin’ that after we just came in and bled ourselves dry trying to save so many people, that this is all her fault?”
She turned and pulled my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I’m not listening to him spew hate and vomit on you. Not ever.”
I turn away with her. I wasn’t listening to it either.
And then I hear a whimper as his tone changes. The most true he’s been.
“Wait. Don’t go.”
I storm back over to him with half a mind to drive the crystal back in deeper, and he sputters out something.
“Please. I cared about Dalaran. I cared about its people. After the Legion, after the War, wouldn’t you have done anything in your power to stop the darkness you felt was corrupting your city? Your home? It’s too late for me, but you…”
I stand over him and grip Violetspire tightly, and see in the corner of my eye its crystal glow brighter than the radiation around us, the violet winds whipping at my cloak.
“You’re pathetic.
You tell me that I wanted this.
You tell me that I brought this on us.
You tell me that I planned for this to happen?
And what else. When the world is falling apart, and the city we lived in crashes to the ground, and when the stars explode above us,
What do you do in your dying moments?
You sit there, and grovel, and you think of ME!
Men like you can never fix their own problems, and lie and cheat and kill and see my magic that I built from the dirt with my bare fucking hands dare to tell me how to use it?”
“But.. mages across the world need the Kirin Tor. The world needs the Kirin Tor. You must know this!”
“In another timeline, I might’ve worked with you.
At that moment when I inherited more power than I could handle, I needed help, and guidance, and you only made me rush to it more to save myself.
I know more than anyone that magic is a struggle, and that people with power need to use it right.
I know the Kirin Tor is better off without people like you.”
I watched the crystal eat away at him, growing inside his eyelid and piercing the orb within, until he bled out.
And I fell onto my knees and cried, into Rem’s shoulder while I begged for it all to have gone any other way.