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Harvest - 12
🕑 Added 2023-04-29 09:00:04 +0000 UTCThe questioning I underwent wasn't over with on the first day, nor the second, and it didn't seem likely to stop anytime soon. Sometimes it was the Chamber of Air with a variable number of the council in attendance, from as few as two but never as many as six, and other times it was individuals summoning me to check something specific. Modera had tried to reconnect, pulling me into private tutoring on Astral magic, seeing where I had progressed and giving me demonstrations and pointers.
I... appreciated the effort, but it wasn't what I was here for. If I had left Dalaran on my own terms, if I had been listened to and felt I was making progress in disseminating my knowledge, then I likely would have come back after finding Mama.
Chosen to become Modera's apprentice and changed the trajectory of my entire life. But that hadn't happened.
No matter how much I appreciated the effort, the refining and improvement of my Astral spells she helped me with, I had chosen my path in life and I wasn't going to change it now.
"Plenty of security," I muttered, watching as Archmage Antonidas disabled another ward over a door. The third we had gone through since he asked that I accompany him today. "At least you're taking it seriously now."
The door slid to the side with a grinding rumble and he walked forward into the well-lit chamber beyond. "From the moment it was discovered the Kirin Tor took the plague seriously." He said, without any hint of a reaction to my barb. "We advocated for a quarantine from its discovery and have maintained strict safety protocols for all specimens our agents have acquired."
Despite the contents of the arched stone chamber beneath the Violet Citadel, the air within was clean and scentless; as if it had been scrubbed and purified relentlessly. While it wasn't unpleasant, and certainly better than the alternative, there was nothing natural about it.
Any discomfort I felt over that I pushed aside as I strode past the archmage towards the crates of grain that were behind a shimmering blue barrier. The buzzing of Arcane magic was shielding them from me for the moment but even if I didn't already know what they were, the sigil on the side depicting two bridges around a windmill above the word Andorhal would have told me soon enough.
Plagued Grain. The source of so much suffering, misery, and death.
Elsewhere in the chamber, laid out on stone tables, were corpses in a variety of stages of decomposition and dissection. Some, those most intact, were physically restrained by heavy steel chains. And beyond that, further magical restraints held them in place and prevented any possibility of movement should they become 'active'.
"Archmage Fischer spoke highly of your mana sense. I do not expect you to glean new insights from the specimens held here but any opportunity to discern new information is valuable." With a wave of his hand the archmage levitated an enchanted metal cup through the arcane barrier, scooped up a portion of the grain, and drew it out again. "Needless as it might be, I must remind you to not ingest the grain under any circumstances."
I refrained from comment and merely rolled my eyes at him. Only to start gagging as the cup crossed the barrier and the virulent revulsion of the magic within hit me.
"Keepers all," I swore, my eyes protesting from the feeling shoved into them, "Fel, definitely Fel magic. Not just Death." My skin crawled like something was underneath it as I focused on the cup, worms wriggling through my vision and the same deeply insidious rot I had encountered twice before, once with a veteran and once with Lord Renard, assaulted my tongue. "It isn't... it's both, the Fel... it's what kills people, isn't it?"
Antonidas nodded to me. "Yes, the demonic magic within the grain is the cause of death. A lingering curse that has proven... deeply difficult to treat in humans. There has been a modicum of success in afflicted Fauna and Flora. The Death magic–"
"Is the control, prepping the resultant corpse for immediate animation." I cut in, shoving down my physical response to the magic. I was going to be doing that a lot while working here. "Allowing any wannabe necromancer to just... snap their fingers and raise an army. Or, for the Lich King in Northrend to just tell them to get up. If they don't just do it on their own..."
There was a moment of silence as Antonidas stared at me. "Yes, that is correct. Significant divination over the days since our first meeting has proven there is a connection stretching far northward. Your claims of a Lich King commanding the undead from afar have been substantiated."
With the fact I wasn't lying out of the way, we moved on to testing. The grain was wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels it kept finding new ways to make my skin crawl. Astral magic, even infused with Life, did nothing to the murderous aspects of the grain; the Fel curse still present and making me want to retch. Trying to grow the grain, which was a processed seed, was... successful if one considered a desiccated and rotting plant that lived by dying a success.
That test had been done at range, behind a barrier, and was immediately incinerated the moment I noticed it was giving off spores and trying to spread.
"Plaguelands." I said, looking down at the remaining ash. "Regions of the world deeply afflicted by the Plague become plaguelands, trees rotting and dying and giving away to fungi."
"I see." Antonidas said, running his fingers through his beard. "I shall see that this is recorded."
After several more tests to see how the grain reacted to my brand of magic, and finding no easy solution forthcoming, we moved on to the corpses. There was little I could learn from them in the test chamber, my magic unsuited to working on dead flesh, but it did give me the ability to recognise a plagued corpse from an unplagued one. I had one idea to try, but it would require another location.
Even after Antonidas triggered the animation spell on the Zombie my magic proved of limited utility in disrupting it; the method Light wielders used, where their Holy Light could heal the living and harm the dead, didn't apply for me. It simply did nothing because there was nothing for it to work on.
Rather than have me destroy one of the specimens with generic attack magic, Antonidas demonstrated his anti-undead field, and I could only stare in awe. It was so far beyond me I couldn't follow how he cast it at all, layers upon layers of magic that interlocked into something that tore away at the animating magic that kept the zombie a zombie rather than just a corpse. And, what was more, it worked on the grain too. It didn't stop it from being poison, it didn't touch upon the Fel magic in the grain at all, but it utterly destroyed the Death magic that would cause the dead to rise in the future.
"There is one last thing I wish to show you before we arrange for your outdoors test." Antonidas said, leading me out of the chamber when we were done. "While much of what was determined here today was already known you have provided new insights, and I hold out hope you will do so here as well."
The location he lead me to was much like the last, but its contents were wildly different. Resting in rows upon rows of beds were people. Each one frozen stiff, unmoving, their spark of Life locked in place by an Arcane chain.
"They're alive." I said, turning an accusatory glare onto Antonidas. "They're–"
"In stasis. The citizens of Northdale who were unfortunate enough to scavenge food from the ruins of Stratholme and become infected." He said, moving to stand over a child and check something. "Each one was informed that they would die from the plague, that the Kirin Tor was seeking a cure, and that in the worst-case scenario they would have no one should they turn."
"You're using them as guinea pigs." I accused him. Human experimentation, actual, flat-out, human experimentation. And what kind of consent was that? 'You're going to die, so let us use your bodies for testing!'
He turned a pitying gaze on me. "If we don't find a cure, they shall die regardless." He said, his voice cold.
Intellectually, I knew he was right. The moment they contracted the Plague of Undeath they were dead. And even if all of them died to find some form of cure, it wouldn't change anything, but... looking down the row upon row of people, a hundred beds or more, my eyes couldn't help but linger on the empty beds. The gaps where someone must have lain but were no longer present.
"I–" I swallowed, my stomach churning. "I won't. I can't."
They were going to die anyway. But if I had him undo the stasis, if I had him...
It would be me. My failing. I'd lost people who I couldn't heal well enough, it happened, but... this, it felt different. It shouldn't feel different. It did.
"You are young." Antonidas said, putting a wrinkled hand on my shoulder. I was In the doorway and half out of the room and I barely remembered moving to leave. "This is a burden that many balk from."
Later, as two of the heavily restrained zombies were brought into one of the Violet Citadel's private greenhouses – the best I was going to get for my experiment – I reflected on the fact he hadn't said my choice was the moral one. And, it wasn't. It wasn't the right choice, pragmatically or morally. I was refusing to help, to wake them up and let them die in the hope of a cure, to make myself feel better, not because I thought it was the right choice.
Even as I pulled the zombies, one that had been activated and was thrashing against its restraints and one that remained dormant, beneath the soil of the greenhouse and sang a hymn of rest and peace, I found myself struggling with the thought that I should change my mind.
Tell Antonidas I would do it. No matter that the idea made me sick to my stomach.
When the results came in that I had stripped the zombies of their animating magic entirely, removed the possibility of them being raised, I found it hard to be proud. It was something, but I wasn't able to bring myself to working on a cure for the Plague of Undeath.
-oOoOo-
Finally getting a day free from the archmages, a day where I could act for myself without being dragged into one meeting or another, was nice. I'd had to deal with Archmage Arugal's curiosity after he returned from Gilneas, probing me about the Order of Amber and wanting to know what secrets we had that dealt with Gilnean mythology.
While he never mentioned the worgen, it was clear where his curiosity lay. If it wasn't for the fact that, in order to deflect attention over why I was being summoned by archmages and to the council so often, the council had decided my 'reason' for being in Dalaran was to answer questions and open ties between the city of magic and a new magical order, I would've refused outright. As it was, I kept things vague, focusing on our vry'kul ancestors and the few stories that weren't secret. Which weren't much more than fairy tales, honestly; Baku the Mooneater wasn't something anyone believed in.
Yesterday, though, had been worse. Scholomance wasn't a pleasant place to think about and the council had done all they could to extract every scrap of information on the place I could give them.
Potions, memory rituals, I was even adorned with a variety of jewelry enchanted for the purpose of improving recall, and none of it worked any better than my own attempts. As before, my memories of this life became crystal clear, but my last one remained a hazy and vague mess. I even remembered the first time I'd seen the two moons in the same sky and how I'd reached my chubby toddler hand towards the Blue Child, thinking it was so pretty, but nothing at all new of my old life.
But beyond telling them that it was a school of necromancers, one that was based in an immense catacomb beneath the main keep of Caer Darrow, there wasn't much I could give them. Even the little I could recall, such as Rattlegore, was based on information at least half a decade in the future.
Twirling Rokkri's feather between my fingers I held it up to the Blue Child that hung in the evening sky, watching as it soaked in the Astral light of Azeroth's wandering moon. It was curious how many of my memories it featured in – every time I had gone to Tal'Doren it had been there, and it featured prominently in my childhood. When I'd burned my leg and healed my scars, it had been under its light.
From the day I'd been born there had been something comforting about the Blue Child, something I'd never felt at all from the White Lady.
Seeing the vanes of the feather shift, the wind trilling softly as it washed over it, I looked onto one of the pillars of Krasus' Landing and spied the same raven I saw on my first night here. Its intelligent eyes and rough feathers weren't looking at me, but towards the entrance.
Seeing the vanes of the feather shift, the wind trilling softly, I raised I started to sit up from where I was lying in the grass. "Good evening, Lady Jaina." I said, looking up at her. We'd not really had a chance to talk properly – a mix of too much of my time being occupied, and what I almost felt was her avoiding me. I should've actively sought her out, but honestly I was just tired of explaining things. "Is there something you wanted?"
"Hello." She said, somewhat awkwardly. It took her a few moments to decide to join me, though she sat on the edge of the stone circle of the landing rather than the grass. "Why is it that you consider me so important?"
"Because you are." I answered immediately, then paused. "Or were. Would be. Can still be. The one human who heeded the prophet and led her people across the sea to Kalimdor, where she would fight for the fate of Azeroth. And win." From my bag I withdrew the two books I had packed specifically for her. "Here; one for you, one for the Kirin Tor. Everything I know about Kalimdor, from the outline of the continent to the inhabitants and what path you would have taken once you got there."
Jaina took the book with clear curiosity, the well-bound tome remarkably thick for all that I felt I had forgotten more than I remembered when writing it.
"After I was... expelled, finding a way to get this to you, so that you wouldn't be unprepared, was my primary goal." I said quietly, turning my gaze towards the raven for a moment. "I never gave up. I just... stopped thinking I could do something big. So I settled for what I knew I could achieve; Darius Crowley would answer your call for aid from Gilneas, even though the king would deny it, and send the Gilneas Brigade. I started serving him because I could reach you through him before it was too late to make any difference at all."
"You sought out a number of people in your time here." She said, paging through the book slowly. Seemingly more to occupy her hands than to read it, though she paused on the sketches of quilboar, centaur, tauren, and other races that I had done. They weren't the best but I wasn't an artist. "Not just me."
"Krasus is Korialstraz, consort to the Dragon Aspect Alexstrasza." I said bluntly. "He's a dragon, a dragon with a way of reaching one of the greatest dragons alive, and he himself is known for meddling in mortal affairs. Rhonin... Rhonin is his favourite human, more or less. Someone I thought could find him for me, or at least get a message to him. And Antonidas..." I couldn't help but say his name a little bitterly. "Is the quintessential archmage. I knew he was on the council. If anyone could have disrupted events it was him."
"You have great faith in me if you place me alongside Antonidas and– and a dragon." She sounded a little incredulous, but she wasn't questioning what I said. I think, after so much already, she wasn't going to. "Is the Kalimdor Expedition another of your preparations? If it occurred in the future you saw, then surely I would not have led it. King Greymane is... was the wall your doing as well?"
I snorted, almost choking as I tried to laugh and breathe at the same time. "Keepers, no! No." I turned to her with an utterly incredulous look. "The wall is entirely Genn's. The arrogant, isolationist, stubborn idiot of a king that he is. He's not... not completely incompetent, like I thought he would be from my visions–" Something I had learned otherwise with the formation of the Order of Amber. He wasn't really an idiot, per se, but completely and utterly blinkered by his pride and patriotism. "–but he's still not a good king. I've never told him anything about the future."
Whether that would last, considering my outbursts at the ball in front of Prince Liam, I didn't know. Seeing Modera again had just made my blood boil with anger at her for... for something she hadn't done. "The expedition, however, was... sort of me? Darius was the one to arrange it, take part in funding it, and pull his allies on board with it. You fled across the sea with little preparation, last time. Now? Now you'll have a fleet that has been readying and planning for the voyage for two-thirds of a year."
Jaina had settled on the map of Kalimdor I'd drawn, but her attention was on me. "He devised the wall on his own? He cut off half of his kingdom by doing that! He practically declared they weren't Gilneans." She looked utterly appalled at the thought. "If Father ever tried to do that, Stormsong and Wavecrest would have his head."
"There's a reason I called him an idiot." I said quietly. Could I trouble her? Tell her about the problems I was going to face here? No, she had enough to think about. "But enough about Genn; he's not your problem. There's something you need to know about your father – he comes looking for you. Would come looking for you."
Tenses were still bloody annoying, even after a dozen times explaining things.
"But he takes umbrage at the allies you made while there. An orc, Thrall, is... he's better than the rest. Instrumental at the final battle." I met Jaina's incredulous eyes firmly. "He, along with you, held the line to allow the kaldorei to triumph over the demons. Guided there by the same prophet that came for King Terenas, for Antonidas, for Arthas, and finally for you. I won't lie to you and say he's a friend or ally, not now, but he could be. He desires peace. Your father..."
"Would not support any form of peace with the Horde. Not after Derek." She said quietly, closing her eyes.
"He found them before he found you and attacked, trying to restart the war. He wanted to kill them all and, no matter how you argued with him, he wouldn't stop." It was one of the greatest tragedies of the Alliance, blind hatred forcing Kul Tiras to part because he wished for a war no one could afford. Even if Garrosh proved him right in the end the Alliance wasn't ready, and Thrall... Thrall wasn't Ogrim or Garrosh. "Not until the orcs were dead and could never found a nation, a city, of their own."
Jaina let out a mournful sigh. "Father always believed the camps were the wrong decision, even if he respected King Terenas too much to speak against him. I witnessed one with... Arthas, years ago. The orcs were listless and broken, scarcely living, not the hulking monstrosities I had been told stories of." She clutched the book to her chest, tucking her chin as she retreated into herself. "I stopped him, didn't I? I couldn't... I couldn't watch as my father did to them what Arthas did to Stratholme."
"Beware, beware, the Daughter of the Sea." I sang softly, one of the few things I knew from that part of Azeroth's timeline. The Warbringers had caught my attention and the song had ensnared me. I didn't know why Teldrassil had burned, but I knew the lyrics of Jaina's song. "'Beware', I heard him cry. His words carried upon the ocean breeze, as he sank beneath the tide."
I brushed off my knees and stood. "You didn't turn against him. He turned against you. Stole your city, your forces, and used them to enact his campaign of genocide. And you... you stood aside when the consequences of his hatred caught up to him."
"If I go through with this," she said quietly, her voice so low as to leave me unsure she meant for me to hear, "I may never go home again. Never walk the streets of Boralus with my little brother, never ride through the fields of Stormsong, never..." She took a deep breath. "But you're right. This is something I would have done, something I need to do. Antonidas plans to stop Arthas here, to prevent the summoning. He and the other councillors aren't even considering following the prophecy to cross the Great Sea."
That they still weren't thinking about the possibility of their failure didn't surprise me. There had been enough talk of how, with better preparation, Dalaran couldn't possibly fall to a siege, during meetings. How they would rally the armies of the Alliance to prevent the fall of Quel'Thalas and stop the plot before it even began.
I didn't hold out much hope of their success.
"Your father went looking for you, not knowing where or why you went. Tell him before you go, send a ship home to assure him you're safe, remove his reason to chase after you..." I grimaced. "I don't know. I don't know him well enough to say what Admiral Daelin might do."
"I don't either." Jaina said sadly. "I love Father, but it has been too long since I was home. I will visit them before I leave, we will need the ships, the sailors, the soldiers, and I need to say goodbye." She looked up at me, her eyes sparking as she seemed to see me anew somehow. "Maybe even the Wicker Men of Drustvar. They were just stories Mother told me as a child, but with your Order of Amber coming out of the shadows perhaps there is some truth to them."
Wicker Men? Of course. "There certainly is. One of them is probably my father." I answered, looking out into the dark night with a frown; I now had confirmation of where my father was, more or less. "A sailor who came to Gilneas, a foreign 'witch' from across the sea who entranced my mother and left her pregnant before he took sail once more."
Drustvar was getting added to my list of places to visit. A painfully long list, these days, and one I wondered if I'd ever have the time to actually make progress against.
"When I meet him, I'm rather tempted to smack him with a tree." If not for me, as I scarcely cared about his existence at all, then I'd do it for Mama. "Or find a way to smother him with bees. I could probably talk them into it. Or..." I trailed off, shaking my head.
"How does frostbite sound?" Jaina asked, entirely serious. "Father has words to describe sailors that do that. As a Proudmoore it's practically my duty to enforce discipline on such louts."
I found myself grinning at the offer. "I'll have to take you up on that. It'd be nice to have a guide to Kul Tiras – maybe I could find my friends who went there, too." I held out my hand to the Daughter of the Sea. "But, enough about my deadbeat of a father. I put most everything I could think of in the book, but I'm no sailor and maybe there's something useful you can get from me if you ask, so I'm yours for tonight."
"Somewhere a little warmer and more comfortable, I think." She said, taking my hand and hauling herself to her feet as snow started falling around us. "It is beautiful out here but even with the wards I put up it is hardly the place to be discussing secrets."
It was telling of just how much magic was floating around that I hadn't even noticed something new get added. Coming back to Dalaran from the far quieter, at least magically quieter, Gilneas, really was something of a shock.
My teeth would stop buzzing. Eventually. They had last time.
"Tea and biscuits too!" I said cheerily. "Nothing like relaxing by a fire in winter with tea and biscuits, watching the snowfall, and talking into the late hours of the night."
For some reason, that made Jaina laugh, and I honestly couldn't guess why. It was a nice laugh, though.
-oOoOo-
"Come in," I said as there was a knock at my door. I wasn't doing anything important, just sitting with my back to the window and letting my hair soak in the midday sun. It was an oddly tingly feeling. "Archmage Kael'thas, good afternoon. Has the council changed their minds on summoning me today?"
They had planned on doing so, but sometime yesterday all plans had been cancelled. And abruptly at that. Kael was the first I'd seen of any of them, of any archmage since yesterday and not just the council. Which was more than a little odd considering they had gotten fairly far in planning their raid on Scholomance and were still using me as part of preparations despite how little I knew.
"They have not, Inventor Arevin. Though if I may I would ask for a portion of your time." He said, nodding his head politely as he made his request. "My experiment has concluded and the results were, suffice to say, unpleasant."
I blinked, not having known he was even conducting an experiment. Thinking about it, while both Modera and Antonidas had called for me personally to talk, and I was sure the other two councillors in the city had as well, Kael never had. I'd vaguely written it off as him being absent to prepare Quel'Thalas for the Scourge, but if he was conducting an experiment... I had a good idea of what he had found, and unpleasant was if anything something of an understatement.
"Mana deprivation." I said with a sigh. "How'd you even manage it?"
He smiled grimly. "There are chambers beneath the citadel intended for the purpose of testing new spells without any possible outside interference. All background magic severed at the walls. I requested a volunteer from amongst the populace and placed them within on the first day you explained the danger of losing the Sunwell to me."
That had to be borderline torture for an elf, even if they were well-fed and supplied with entertainment in there. It left me feeling uncomfortable but I couldn't blame him for it either.
"Apprentice Dawnflower had supplies to last her a month, food and water, but she depleted them all in an attempt to satisfy a gnawing hunger without end. Growing weaker and sickly all the while." He took a seat in my armchair, his bright red robes overflowing over the sides. "It is my suspicion that the removal of ambient mana exacerbated the illness greatly."
"That tracks, there's enough in the air here it would make a difference." Poor bloody apprentice better have gotten something good for being voluntold. "I'm guessing you want solutions?"
How much was I willing to tell him? I remembered, I'd recorded, that Kael'thas had been determined above all else to save his people. It was his driving goal, his one task in life after the fall of Quel'Thalas, that had led him on the path that took him to Illidan and Outland, and from there on to the Legion. He had nearly summoned Kil'Jaeden into the world, dooming us all, and yet...
"I have considered a number of options, but yes. I ask for any insight your visions might grant into aiding my people should the worst come to pass."
The faces of those high elves I knew flickered in my mind and I flinched. Overly friendly Syllia and her less kind fellows from Silvermoon, Magus Goldensword who... who had listened to me and fled with her daughter Finnall, Trysa who had tried to help me in Modera's class... all elves, all people, who didn't deserve to suffer.
This Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider wasn't the one who had chosen the Legion, he hadn't turned to Fel magic, he hadn't tried to summon Kil'Jaeden through the Sunwell. And unless I thought all the effort I was putting forth was for nothing, he never would.
"First, I'll tell you the origin of the Sunwell. How Dath'Remar came to create it." I said, leaning to the side and resting against the stone window frame tiredly. "Once, before the world was sundered, there was the Well of Eternity, a font of power that the Sunwell pales in comparison to. If the Sunwell is a single vial of water the Well of Eternity was an entire ocean." And even that was likely an understatement. "It was the breaking of that well, its destruction, that caused the Sundering that split Ancient Kalimdor apart. One elf, Illidan Stormrage, took from its waters seven vials – one of which Dath'Remar stole away across the sea."
"The Sunwell." Kael said, his tone betraying nothing at all. Not even whether he believed me or not – or whether his histories had already told him this.
"Of the six others, three were used atop Mount Hyjal to recreate the Well of Eternity, a weak thing compared to the original but still mighty. The World Tree, Nordrassil, that was grown atop it to hide its power from covetous gaze granted the kaldorei immortality. Illidan was imprisoned for its creation, and he is imprisoned to this day." Malfurion Stormrage was not a good brother; Illidan wasn't a good person, though I couldn't remember the whole of the why of that, but he wasn't deserving of ten thousand years in darkness. "And along with him, there are three more vials that contain those waters."
"Any of which could restore the Sunwell if used correctly." Kael said, bowing his head. "A more complete solution I could not expect, however many difficulties might lie between me and the vials."
I found myself smiling at his thanks. "There's another option in the same vein. Waters of the Sunwell could be taken, spared from the corruption, and used to create minor fonts of power elsewhere. Something to provide magic to your people when they need it most." Like the moonwells of the night elves, though how viable it was I didn't really know. My smile quickly faded as I continued, offering the last solution. The one that would, hopefully, never be necessary. "The solution used in the future... led to terrible things. Starving and desperate, the blood elves turned to stealing mana from anything they could; those that didn't have the self-control to not overindulge... became wretched. Twisted and ruined by their addiction beyond recovery."
Kael'thas Sunstrider folded his hands in his lap and remained silent, contemplating my words. I didn't blame him for taking the time to think, not when it involved something as big as this.
Taking the chance, I closed my eyes and refocused once again on the sunlight soaking into my hair, the feeling of its warmth being drawn deeper into my body and nestling into a little spark of essence near my core. It wasn't the nicest light I had felt this way, the Blue Child was still more comforting than any other, but I preferred the chill over the stars over the warmth of the sun.
After several minutes Kael'thas stood. "Thank you for your insight. I had begun preparations to construct an Arcane Sanctum near Quel'Danil Lodge, a way to preserve even a fraction of my people, but... I had not considered taking part of the Sunwell itself. Such a thing is unthinkable. Yet, if it were to be lost, to not have done so would be a grievous failing." He bowed his head in respect before turning to leave. "Even if all measures should fail, know that I acknowledge your efforts on behalf of my people."
"Good luck, archmage."
He paused in the doorway. "There was a vote this morning, as to whether we should restrain you within Dalaran to acquire more information or permit you to leave. Two in favour, two against, and with Councillor Drenden's death my vote was the deciding one." He met my eyes with his eyebrows downcast. "King Terenas is dead at Arthas' hand, and the capital of Lordaeron is aflame. Farewell, Inventor Arevin. May fate be kind to us both."
----
Thanks to Trestira for beta reading this chapter.
