Illidan

  Kill the weak. Kill the weak. Kill the weak, the demonic voice whispered. Images of Khariel’s half-devoured body flickered mockingly through his mind. Kill them all. All are weak.

  His dreams were things of horror. One night he woke to find himself standing, clutching his blade. He wondered then if the thing within him gained a measure of control during his nightmares. Tabelius had sneaked through the cells, slitting throats, until Needle ended his nocturnal adventuring forever by putting a skewer through each empty eye socket.

  There were times when Vandel felt as if he were locked in a cage with murderous beasts, and he was not the least murderous of them.

  He looked around him again. Illidan had been right. He could see things now as well as ever he had seen when he possessed eyes of flesh. Better. Darkness obscured nothing. Something in his mind adjusted his perceptions. He suspected the demon aided him. It wanted him to master these powers, as if the more he mastered, the more vulnerable he became to the temptations the demon put before him.

  No matter. He wanted the strength. He was glad he could see. He was glad he could hear better than any elf had a right to. He was glad he was strong as an ogre and swifter than a nightsaber. His appearance reflected the changes. He could extend claws from his fingertips, and did so in moments of danger. Massive scars marked where he had gouged himself with his dagger. The mirror showed him that a fel green glow had replaced his eyes. It intensified when he used the power.

  A hand descended on his shoulder. “Exhausted, are you, old one?” Cyana asked.

  Vandel shook his head. “I am just getting started.”

  “I hope so,” said Ravael. “This sparring session, I am going to beat you. Do not give in too easily. When you struggle, it only makes my victory all the sweeter.”

  Victory is sweet, said the voice in his head. Every day it sounded more like his own. Flesh is sweeter still.

  —

  THEY ENTERED THE COURTYARD. The high, crumbling walls of Karabor’s ruins loomed over the aspirants, massive and imprisoning. Tattooed elves crowded the open spaces between the training rings, waiting for their chance to fight. Greenish-yellow glowing runes, chiseled into the flagstones, formed the circumference of the mystic circles. The runes’ shapes suggested similarities to the tattoos inked on the aspirants’ skin.

  Each ring contained two combatants fighting under the supervision of one of the trainers. Spell-wrought auras surrounded their weapons and blunted the force of their blows, turning them from fatal into something merely bruising and painful.

  Vandel watched a pair of fighters circle and strike until one knocked the other down. “I claim victory!” the winner shouted, while the loser lolled on the ground in defeat.

  Varedis nodded and raised his hand, and the combat was over. The circle emptied. The trainer gestured for Ravael and Vandel to begin.

  Ravael stepped into the circle, a scythe in each hand. Protective auras shimmered around their blades. Varedis put the spell on Vandel’s runic dagger and the other blade he had taken from the temple armory. Vandel stepped into the circle.

  Ravael made an obscene gesture with his right-hand weapon. “Today you will learn the meaning of defeat.”

  He sprang, blazingly fast, uncannily precise in his movements. The ritual had granted Ravael even more strength and speed than it had given Vandel. It had gifted him with huge claws and twisted, circular horns. Now, in the arena, as he drew upon his demonic powers, those attributes seemed even more pronounced. The scythe impacted on Vandel’s biceps with numbing force.

  “If this were a real fight, you would have lost your arm,” Ravael taunted.

  Anger surged deep within Vandel. That had not been fair. He dismissed the thought. In combat, no demon would give him a fair chance. “In a real fight, I would come and tear your heart out.”

  He meant the words to sound mocking, but they came out utterly serious, and he knew, even as they left his lips, that he meant them. Ravael unleashed a flurry of blows, but this time Vandel was ready. Dagger clattered against scythe. The sound of metal on metal rang around the courtyard. Every blow Ravael launched, Vandel parried.

  At the end of the storm of attacks, he reached out and struck Ravael just above the heart with his dagger. If he had been a fraction quicker, he would have struck the equivalent of a killing blow, but as it was, he would merely have wounded his foe.

  “A scratch,” said Ravael.

  A spark of berserk rage ignited within Vandel’s chest. He would not be mocked. Not by one as weak and pitiful as this. Something in Ravael sensed his mood and responded. The air between them crackled with tension. Vandel threw himself forward, aiming at Ravael’s head. Ravael raised both scythes, caught his blade, and twisted, but as he did so Vandel’s second blade connected with his stomach.

  “And now you would be dead,” Vandel said, and something within him wished his foe was. “I win again.”

  He was about to turn away when he heard Ravael growling. A low, bestial sound emerged from deep within the other elf’s chest. Spittle dripped from the corner of his mouth. His eye sockets were pools of blood in which witch fires danced. Balls of ruddy light flickered around the tips of his horns.

  “I am not defeated,” said Ravael. His voice was thick and guttural and full of hate.

  Power clotted in the air around him. A sheen of shadow passed across his body, turning his skin first gray and then blacker than night. Great wings of shadow lifted from Ravael’s back. Vandel felt the air displaced by their movement. He could smell brimstone and the aura of demon, stronger in his nostrils than at any time save when he had fought with real denizens of the Nether realms.

  Ravael sprang forward, bringing his blades down. Both blows impacted painfully on Vandel’s arms. This time there was no doubt he would be either crippled or dead if the fight had been a real one. It was not enough for his opponent. Ravael rained down blow after agonizing blow. Vandel brought his own blades up and managed to parry the first scythe. The second one caught him above the temple. Pain lanced his brow. The metallic tang of blood filled his nostrils.

  Shadow had engulfed the scythes in Ravael’s hands, drowning out the protective spells. His power overcame the wards upon the blades. The scythes were deadly now, and Ravael was intent upon using them.

  No one made any move to intervene. Spectators licked their lips. Varedis made a careless gesture, indicating that the fight should continue. He looked more interested than worried by this latest development. The scythes flicked out. More blood flowed. Ravael smiled. White fangs became visible within his shadowy outline. “This time I will win.”

  No one was going to intervene as long as Ravael did not leave the circle. Vandel could step outside it himself and put an end to things by admitting defeat. He was tempted to do so, but something in him responded to the smell of his own blood and the feeling of pain. Rage reddened his vision, and with it came power. He raised his hands and wove a thunderbolt of fel energy. It surged out from his pointing finger and smashed into Ravael. The ravenous green energy tore at the shadowy integument, shredding it to blackened tatters.

  He fed more strength into the spell. Ravael screamed as his flesh roasted. Vandel knew that he should stop, but part of him did not want to, and it was not just the demonic part. He wanted Ravael to experience the same pain that he had. He poured more and more of his strength into the bolt. His heart sounded loud as a drumbeat. Breath emerged in ragged gasps. He changed the focus of the spell once he knew Ravael was dead, drawing shadowy globules of the defeated elf’s corrupted soul into his own, channeling the stolen power and using it to heal his wounds.

  Vandel knew he should feel guilty, but he did not. He felt exaltation. His only regret was that he had to restrain himself from feasting. The smell of burned demon flesh was still in the air, and it made his mouth water.

  He looked around at the faces clustered at the edge of the circle. He was tempted to unleash his power on them, to strike and slay and kill, to slake the thirst for destruct
ion that this combat had aroused. But that would be fatal, and he was not quite ready to die yet. He fought the urge down. The thunder of his heartbeat became softer in his ears. His breathing became more regular. He waited to see what his instructor would do.

  Varedis just shook his head, as if he had seen things like this before and they did not trouble him.

  He tried to kill you, said the voice in his head. And if you had not drawn on my power, he would have succeeded. You owe me your life.

  It was true, Vandel realized. He had slain one of the other recruits, and no one appeared to be doing anything about it. He stepped outside the circle. “I claim victory,” he said.

  “You are victorious,” Varedis replied.

  Illidan took nine paces across the floor of his chamber, turned, and took nine paces back. He felt calmer now. His thoughts returned to Akama. That the Broken had conspired with Maiev Shadowsong had almost cost the Ashtongue leader his life. Maiev, of all elves! Illidan would have rewarded his treachery with death, but he still needed Akama and his people, so he had devised another and better punishment. That thought gave him considerable satisfaction. He had ensured the Broken would never betray him again. Not only that, but he had found a way to get Akama to deliver Maiev into his hands. And he had fit it all into his scheme to strike back against the Burning Legion. Now he had only one more problem to solve, and he was close to doing that.

  Illidan looked down at the massive oaken desk. On it lay a number of maps and charts, held down by the Skull of Gul’dan. The patterns inscribed on them in demon blood were written in a notation that he had created himself and that only he understood completely. The geometric runes mapped the flows of energy between the portals of Outland and their terminus points in parts of the Twisting Nether.

  He rubbed his brow and concentrated. He was on the edge of a breakthrough. It was so close he could almost taste it. He had spent years accumulating this information, plundering it from libraries and wizards’ collections all over Outland. He had visited every location marked on the map and used geomantic sorcery to chart the outflows of power into the Twisting Nether.

  He had interrogated thousands of demons, listened for clues in the speech of Magtheridon and a dozen of the nathrezim, the so-called dreadlords. He had used spells to follow the trace energies of a thousand summonings. He had tortured and devoured imps and overmastered succubi. He had spent years putting together clues, and finally he was ready.

  He had been goaded by the half-recalled memories he had acquired from Gul’dan when he had absorbed the power of the orc warlock’s skull. Gul’dan’s visions had hinted at a way to achieve his wildest dreams. He had seen things that no other mortal had, and the recollections haunted Illidan.

  Excitement grew within him. Finally, at long last, he saw the pattern. The old warlock had been right. There were complex weaves of power. A mesh that fed upon itself and drew energy from the land and air around it. It held the portals open against the natural inclination of reality to force them shut. It opened pathways among dozens of worlds. Some of the arcs were incomplete. He knew they must go somewhere. Given what he knew about the forces involved, he could work out their eventual termination points with complex astronomical calculations.

  He could finally create the divination spell that could search through those portals and find what he was looking for.

  He needed to act soon, before word leaked and one of the nathrezim worked out what he was doing. The dreadlords were too damnably clever, and if they acted to forestall him, all his years of sacrifice, all the decades of planning, would be in vain.

  Wearily, but filled with growing excitement, he inscribed the syllables of the great spell. When it was done, he laid down his pen atop the sheet of parchment with a sense of profound satisfaction. He was as ready as he was ever going to be. It was time to act.

  —

  ILLIDAN WALKED DEEPER INTO the great circular chamber. On the floor, inscribed in the blood of demons and elves and draenei, pulsed a duplicate of the patterns on his charts, written a hundred times larger. Glowing runes clustered around the edges, shaping the cataracts of fel energy flowing into the chamber.

  He walked around the edge, muttering spells of warding and shielding. He wanted no prying eyes witnessing what he did here, no possible intrusions to disturb his concentration. He spoke a word of power and all the doors closed. The seals were so tight that eventually the air would turn poisonous with the effusions of his own breath. If he remained lost in the ritual too long, this place would become his tomb.

  He walked through a gap in the huge pattern and followed it to the middle of the chamber, careful not to step on any of the lines. The slightest break would be fatal.

  At the exact center of the chamber, he spread his wings, let them beat once, and hovered in the air. He pulled his legs up underneath him into the lotus position and invoked magic that let him remain hovering above the ground. He spoke another word of power, and the braziers set at each point of the compass burst into flames, igniting the aromatic essences they contained. Clouds of hallucinogenic smoke flowed through the air. Tendrils of burning incense slithered through the pattern until they reached his nostrils.

  He took three deep breaths, and each of them drove the vapor deeper into his lungs. He closed his mouth and held it in, until he felt as if he had absorbed every last fraction of the power it contained.

  Long practice in alchemy let him identify the individual components. Doomguard bone, ground with a mortar and pestle carved from the skeleton of a dragon; powdered felhound blood; distilled essence of felweed; a thousand different items. All chosen to activate key sections of his sorcerer’s mind and free his soul.

  Ancient hungers tugged, tempting him to bathe in those evil energies. His skin tingled. The hair on his scalp rose. His tongue felt thick. Power flowed into him. So much power. He felt like a god, as if he had only to will something to happen in order to make it so.

  He held the energy for a moment, just letting it stay within him, enjoying the sensation of being on the brink. Of his last moment of calm. After this, everything would change.

  Slowly, delicately, as if he were taking a scalpel to a butterfly’s wing, he invoked the last stages of the spell. A sensation of lightness struck him as his spirit dissociated from his body. He looked down upon his empty shell, hovering in the air below him. He felt a moment of vertigo, a sharp stab of fear.

  At this moment his spirit was vulnerable. If anything happened to him here, he would die. A silver thread, so thin as to be almost invisible, connected him to the husk beneath him. If that was separated, his spirit would wander forever, unable to return to his body.

  He felt the absence of so many things. No heartbeat. No blood flowing in his veins. No air rasping into his lungs. No tug of gravity on flesh and bone and muscle.

  Ever since Sargeras had taken his eyes, back when Illidan had first joined the Legion, he had been able to see into the Twisting Nether. It had taken him centuries to realize what he could do with this power. For decades dreadful dreams had blasted his sanity and driven him screaming from sleep. It had been one of the worst torments of his long imprisonment.

  He doubted anyone else could have endured what he had in order to harness this power to their will. Anyone who had not mastered sorcery as he had would have been incapable of the feat.

  It had been necessary, though. It had given him the ability to send his soul out into the Twisting Nether and the Great Dark Beyond, to see other worlds, other universes. It had given him terrifying insight into the plans and goals of the Burning Legion. Now he needed to stretch himself farther than he had ever done before, reach deeper into the infinite abyss in search of his ultimate goal.

  The fel power channeled by the great pattern roared around him. He studied it, knowing it to be both a map and a key that would open the way to where he had to go.

  He molded the flows of magic slowly, lacking the physical cues he normally took for granted. Air did not caress his limbs.
Words did not cause his diaphragm to vibrate. The power moved sluggishly in response to his will. He shaped it, channeling it through the pattern, aiming it toward the chink in the wards he had created. Like water flowing down a ravine, the spell surged through the tiny opening, creating a gap in the fabric of reality that opened out into somewhere else.

  Illidan focused his attention on that space. If something waited on the other side, it would attack as soon as the chink was wide enough to pass through. At this moment, he was very vulnerable. His strength was not what it was when anchored by his corporeal form. He waited, hoping against hope that there was nothing there. He could ill afford the distraction or the time or the energy it would take to defend himself.

  Nothing happened. He allowed his spirit to go with the flow of energy and pass through the opening between worlds and out into the Twisting Nether. It exploded into being around him.

  There were a thousand ways to perceive this place. Every voyager saw it differently, depending on circumstance and form and state of mind. For him it was a black, airless void in which a billion stars twinkled. Behind and beneath him blazed the world from which he had come. Through the void trailed the snake of energy he had summoned, guiding him outward into infinity. It represented the flows of energy of the portals the Burning Legion used to get to Outland.

  With an effort of will, he sent himself flashing along the trail, faster than light, quick as thought, until he found the first connecting portal. He descended from the Nether and flashed over a world. He looked upon a desert where once fields had grown, cemetery cities where unburied bodies clogged the streets. Eerie green energy flickered from disrupted portals. Amid the ruins imps frolicked and shouted obscenities. One or two sensed his proximity and peered about them as if nearsighted. In the distance an infernal lumbered, all blazing skin and burning rock for limbs.