enjoy

Third chapter

Do you have any idea what kind of a feeling it is to be taught by a living legend?
It’s a bit like being hypnotized the entire time and every second is being pressed into your long term memory.
Illidan only taught those that had the power to keep up with him. Sometimes he´d levitate for hours with relative ease , and only the strongest of the hundreds who followed him made it through that time.

Me and Malvanas were friends long before the war and the war only strengthened those bonds.
We both followed illidan so rigorously that at times it bordered on fanaticism. We were more than happy to act as powerpools for him to drain powers from to channel greater spells of destruction. I guess that should clarify as of how devoted we were to him.
And every day brought some new piece of information, new spell or an improved use of an old one. Every day was spend on the battlefield so every days lesson number one was simple: learn, do or die.
Slowly the numbers of his followers dwindled, some died, some were injured, some simply couldn´t accept his view on the world and others simply weren´t skilled enough.

In the end it was only me,manvalas and three others.
And then as he himself put it: „let the real teachings begin“.
Mizra he taught the greatest secrets of the frost spells. So furious in her rage that she could have single handedly taken Magtheridon by herself.
In fact he´s supposedly still frozen , somewhere in the black citadel, his bones turned to ice.
Sira´dreth he taught the ways of the phoenix and how to gain unimaginable hights in her fiery power. Ever since, her eyes were quite literally ablaze from the inside, like two little suns.
Manvalas he taught to summon the greatest servants, doomguards and infernals. Given time the walls of the black citadel would have been broken by the sheer rain of infernals by manvalas hand.
Wisim, the oldest of us , he gave a book. The book was empty but could be filled with answers only by thinking of the answers you would want to know. The book supposedly had answers to everything one could ask for.

At first he was going to teach me the same power as manvalas. But for reasons unknown to all of us it didn´t come out as planned.
From the sky came but one small stone Holding only the slightest imp, now eternally replaced by my old „faithful“ one.
I can still remember his first words and punishment on that day: „where am I and who´s the ugly one over here“
Even after the somewhat aggressive interrogations of the imp no reason was found for his binding to me. Somehow the imp was stuck on me and my every summoning spell. And he hated that about as much as I did.

Perplexed but still wanting to teach me some of his magical power illidan drew me aside and gave me maybe the most powerful gift of them all.
And as a final lesson he taught us to make together a portal between Azeroth and outland.
„Your job is to be a backup plan if I can for some reason not make a portal between the worlds. To have the gate ready at all times. Heh I guess you can be called the keepers of the gate. Yeah that sounds about right. The gatekeepers“

After illidan lost to arthas on the steps of the frozen throne, we were suddenly caught in the most terrible retreat. Everyone fled, not really knowing where to, simply running in the easiest way possible.
And at that moment our job suddenly became clear. Illidan barely had power to
breath and most surely not to make a portal to another world
So as instructed by illidan we formed the five sided channel ring and opened the portal.

Have you ever been responsible for thousands of lives? and by that I mean that if you do one mistake they´ll chase you into the afterlife?
That’s the way it was, when we held the portal open for hours it seemed. At last the final survivor escaped and we were left alone in the cold northland.
And at that point we discovered the flaw in our plan. We would not be able to go back to outland as we were the ones holding the portal open.
But with the undead fast approaching we had no other choice but to desperately try to escape. We threw ourselves into the portal hoping that it would hold together long enough, that its power would last , that we would somehow make it through.

I could hold many hours of the description of what happened after we released the portal but it would all sum up to four words: the portal didn´t hold.

I was sent somewhere far southwest but I was still in northrend.
Until recently I thought I was the only one to survive the „sundering“.
But then again until recently I thought the world made some minor amount of sense.
I ended up near an encampment of dwarfs. The final remains of Muradins party.
They took care of me for nine days and nights, somehow nurturing life back into me with the limited herbs and bandages they had.
I was lost in my mind while I was unconscious. A lot of my memories faded away or were taken over by thoughts that were not my own.

I traveled to hell and back and when I finally came back to life I found myself in the frozen hell Northrend really is.
But in this frosen land of death, the dwarfs had made a thriving camp to an extent.
The dwarfs had become experts in killing the undead, no shot missing its mark ,no slash without a meaning.
There were only about 100 of them left but those hundred were not going to go down easily. Every day, hordes of undead assaulted their camps and every day they defeated those hordes, sometimes without a loss of their brethren.
Alliance ships would sometime come to their aid, often to evacuate them but they denied any escape from the lands. Many of their comrades had fallen on this soil and this was where they would also fall, in the memory of their leader muradin.

I stayed there too, at first to repay for my life but then because I realized I didn´t have any other place to go to. And so over the years this place became home to me,an all but abandoned dwarfen camp on the outskirts of the world . I was truly happy there, the existence was simple and straightforward: fight for your life or die. I made friends there, better friends than I could have thought possible. When you´re always on the edge of death you begin to appreciate every moment you spend breathing and every friend you spend a night with.

But nothing good ever lasts does it?
When I had been there for more than four years there all that remained was a score of dwarfs , me and mesfer and all the gunpowder one could imagine.
Endlessly besieged we formed a desperate final plan.
The plan was to dig our way under the frozen throne and place large amounts of gunpowder under vital parts of the structure of the frozen throne.
It almost worked.

Almost, one hell of a word.

When we had put most of the charges in place we were assaulted by the lich kings necromancers.
It wasn´t a fight it was a slaughter, the dwarfs had no answers to their magic without their gunpowder and the battle was soon over for them.
Me and mesfer fought on while they fell around us, but in the end, fatigue and weariness brought us down.
I was sure I was going to die ,that this was the end of it all and surprisingly it didn´t feel as bad as I’d thought.
But they didn´t kill me, they kept me alive. And what happened in the frozen throne and how I managed to escape is really not a matter which we shall discuss here.
But I shall tell you what happened, to me and to mizra.

It is a way of getting information, interrogation if you will.
Believe me, the undead have horrible ways of getting what they want out of people without resorting to the ways they´ve corrupted me and mizra.
But there are information which lies deep beneath the consciousness of our minds and the lich king wanted precicely that kind of information.
And that is only a possibility by becoming one of the scource .

But the normal process destroys the mind and the soul. Nothing that the victim kept in its mind is left in there. That’s why the necromancer evolved a secret way to assimilate victims t o the scource without killing them and without destroying the mind. The soul is of course shattered to pieces but that matters not to them.
They tried this on me , tied me to a pole and placed four darkened purple gems that slowly but surely sucked the life out of me in certain key places.
I managed to stop the process. Don´t ask me how, I do not wish to destroy your view of the world but I did.

While I was there I was told what was happening, why I was taken and why we are being hunted. What I found out is that each and every one of the gatekeepers have in their mind a piece of a relic beyond the power of mortals, power of the aspects of this world and the power to make portals. And what the lich kings intends is something more grander than anyone could imagine .
So now I search for my friends in a race against time and the undead.
But they found Mizra before I did and had begun the transformation.
I don’t know how long they had been keeping her, but her marks are more clearer than mine and the aura of darkness surrounds her even more than ever.

Ankthar hadn’t said anything the whole time. He recognized the obvious loopholes in the story and decided to let them be.
But two thing puzzled him.
No one escaped the lich kings grasps unless he wanted them to, and as cunning as the lich king was ,it was more than unlikely that the only reason Exen´tor stood there before him was because the lich king wanted him to.
Which gave way to the other thing that puzzled him.
For the first time in seven months the storm had calmed.


In the closed room beside the living room Mizra suddenly woke up with wide open snow white glowing eyes and gasped:„they’re coming!“