Chapter Text
As he stood in a private reception room in Stormwind Keep, Wrathion could admit that he felt genuine alarm.
It was not that he had expected a cell to be waiting for him, no matter how dour the mage in suspiciously civilian dress had been, nor how uncommunicative his likewise-attired partner. A mere glance told Wrathion that both were SI:7; the small scroll he had been handed may have had the seal of House Langley, the forgettable keepers of a small barony just shy of the border to Redridge, but the succinct summons were for the capital. Though politely worded, there was no ask contained therein: he was told to leave at his earliest possible convenience through the auspices of the caster that had accompanied the messenger. They would both remain until he was ready to depart the Obsidian Enclave.
The brusqueness of the letter he could fairly confidently attribute to the former King of Gilneas, even though by last reports the man was supposed to be in his own country advising his daughter after his abdication. The purposefully obvious subterfuge, on the other hand, had to be the work of Mathias Shaw, who would have never been so sloppy except in those cases where he wanted the true intentions of a move known.
Wrathion mused that the Spymaster could’ve given him a little more credit. He would have easily surmised that there was a hidden purpose to the whole charade without quite as much theater; the method of delivery alone suggested a desire for privacy so absolute that not even the newly empowered Dragon Aspects could be privy to the letter’s meager contents. There were channels aplenty through which Wrathion might have been contacted, proper, dutifully appointed ones, and the desk he kept in the Enclave’s administrative building was home to neatly sorted correspondence that had reached him through those channels since his appointment as the official diplomatic liaison for his flight. He now, for the first time in his illustrious and notorious life, had his own written address. It would not have been odd to receive letters from Stormwind, joining those from Ironforge, Blackrock, and Orgrimmar, which was ironic given how chilly his reception there would no doubt still be, as it would be in the seat of the Alliance if not for –
……
Well. It had been six years, and year and some months since the royal wedding reception in Suramar.
Circumstances may have changed. And if a letter with a kingly seal instead of a borrowed baron’s had at last arrived in the elegant trays his secretaries brought to him each morning, he might not have made his preparations to leave with that coil of tension winding through his shoulders and up the back of his neck. His retirement from his post as an advisor to the High King may not have been on the best of terms, but that deeply unfortunate business was personal, and its abrupt resolution years later would not involve both Greymane and Shaw. He would not be asked to pack, as though for a stay even if the summons demanded only a visit. He would not be asked to come alone, even if no measures were taken to keep him from informing his staff, the Blacktalon who were much more expertly disguised as clerical aides, of his destination. Shaw at least would have to know that anyone that knew he had left would then immediately inform his brothers.
He never thought for a moment it would be a cell, nor a wall of knights come to collect on a debt long unpaid but more recently forgiven. Instead, the finely appointed reception room, with its tightly drawn curtains and cold hearth, told him that it was exactly what he had not wished it to be.
“Something has happened to Anduin.”
There was a foul scowl on Greymane’s lips at Wrathion’s words, which had stopped him before he had even finished crossing the threshold. A glance over the man’s shoulder showed a vacant hall, devoid not only of the escort his still royal station demanded, but also the Keep’s typical watch. There were no footfalls to be found, not even to draconic hearing, and when he considered the thin layer of dust upon the engraved mantle and the wrinkles in the fine rug on which he stood, there had been no servants sent to this room for at least a day.
“And it has demanded the utmost discretion.”
By then, Wrathion was fully facing the man, who looked much older than when he had last seen him. The Genn of Wrathion’s last days in this Keep had been mettlesome, upright, and insufferable in his astounding smugness to see the self-styled Black Prince summarily dismissed from the castle’s grounds. He’d learned later that Greymane had even argued to forbid Wrathion from entering the city itself for the foreseeable future, but had been denied: it was, after all, a personal matter, and was not to involve a public writ of prohibition. Even in the admittedly low state of mind and mood Wrathion had found himself in the aftermath, he had known a touch of satisfaction even if he had not been present to see Genn’s petty crusade so denied. That this was still the first time he had returned to city and keep in six years was beside the point. He’d chosen other pursuits. He had new responsibilities. He would be on a new journey soon.
Yet the whole of his thinking had narrowed to encompass only the deep bags beneath Greymane’s eyes and the emptiness of the hall through which he had come.
“If you’ve figured out that much, then shut up and follow me.”
At the small of his back, Wrathion’s fingers violently tightened. The first response he would have had for Genn’s back, which was already pointed his way, would be an easy and amicable “Why, certainly”, a fair rejoinder to the unkingly rudeness, but it did not so much as gather on his tongue. Instead, his first step was quick and sharp, but short, hardly even a full stride, because the doorway through which he had to inevitably depart was a bleak precipice his body recoiled from.
“Wait.” His tone changed. The stagnant air took it poorly, so that the sound of it was too tight and too loud. For the first time, that in and of itself distressing because he should have noticed the moment he arrived, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the expertly crafted parlor chairs were still piled upon the table and that a sheet had been thrown across the lounge by the hearth. Not just a day, then. Days. Longer. The air was cold despite the vibrancy of spring that should have come to the Eastern Kingdoms and Greymane’s dark coat was buttoned incorrectly, rumpled from having been slept in.
Six years pushed hard against the interiors of Wrathion’s throat, squeezing out the words.
“Does he live?”
What seemed like rage clutched Genn’s shoulders together.
“He does.” The words snapped, the way the clicking teeth in the wolf’s jaw would. Only in moments of true fury would the beast show beneath the irascible gentleman’s veneer and despite the hobby Wrathion had made of goading the king whenever the opportunity presented itself, he had seen such a thing only a handful of times.
The affirmation thus brought no relief. Instead, cool dread slipped like a serpent into his body and put a cold sweat upon the back of his neck. Their boots had hardly touched the stones in the hall before his thoughts had begun to race, seeking the rest of the answers that Genn had not yet seen fit to give, either because he feared prying eyes and ears even in this barren wing of the castle or because giving them was beyond his current ability. How his coiled fists shook, visibly and with no effort to hide it, told Wrathion the reason was likely the second, and so he flung his memory back through the past year of correspondence and intelligence reports.
By every discernable measure, Stormwind had been trending toward tentative prosperity after the years of domestic triage in the wake of the Fourth War. Wrathion had seen firsthand how thinly spread the Alliance had been, relative victory a poor reward for a badly depleted military and a near-emptied treasury. Multiple warfronts, irreplaceable warships dashed upon the barren seabeds in Nazjatar, and then the desperate scramble for a response to Old God incursion that cut down soldier and civilian alike both at home and abroad, to say nothing of the ultimately unnecessary marshaling of an expedition to Northrend to chase the ghostly shadow of the Banshee Queen. Wrathion had been asked, very reluctantly, to see to that himself through whatever personal forces or recruited champions he might have been able to call upon, an admission of inability that Anduin would not have made to anyone else but him.
Or, so Wrathion had liked to think at the time. He had graciously taken the entire task upon his shoulders and more besides: clear in his memory were the days they would spend in the High King’s study, Anduin at the ponderous heirloom desk that had been a coronation gift to his grandfather and Wrathion at a long table dragged close enough that they could pass parchments, ledgers, and folios to one another. Hours were given to the soft scratching of quills and fine fountain pens, the hearth crackling quietly and trays of oolong tea coming and going until Tong would imperiously declare that no business of countries or kings should have them up so long after they should have been abed. As though they were boys still and the many papers were the hypotheticals and strategies that they had debated between their games and would continue to debate if he had not proclaimed that the hour had come to douse the lanterns, so they had best make for their rooms unless they thought they could keep up their conversations in the dark.
Sometimes they did.
The memories were fond ones, warm and secret, and they had held well against that disastrous afternoon that had put an end to their nights in the study, but now he felt them grow chilled and brittle, so fragile that if he were to hold them tightly again they would shatter. His heart thumped at twice the pace of the rapping of their heels upon the floor, which jumped to thrice when Genn took a sharp corner and pushed open one of the discrete doors that led to the servant’s hallways. White stones gave way to timbered floors and walls, then to a narrow staircase taken down to an equally narrow landing. Followed by another, and then another, and by that time Wrathion’s innate sense of the stones and soil below told him that soon they would be underground if they continued in this way.
A cell, then, after all? Not for him, no, but one that could be meant to keep all else out.
Or meant to keep the worst in.
The urge to grab Genn by the shoulder and shout caught like a spark in his chest. Even knowing that such an action would have a snarling wolf lunging for his throat, thrilled with the outlet for his barely constrained fury, was not enough to smother the flames of desperation that wished to lick Wrathion’s insides. All should have been well; after years of recruitment, training, and modernization, the Alliance army was as strong as it had ever been, if not more so! Economic incentives had revitalized local business and years without war had given both the government and the individual time to accumulate capital. Tragic as the many casualties had been from the campaigns that began after the Cataclysm and did not stop until the armistice was signed between the Alliance and the Horde Council, losing a full third of the peerage had allowed the House of Wrynn to revert those lands and holdings to royal ownership. As much maligned as the lot system had been in the newsprints when announced, it had worked out exactly as Wrathion had told Anduin it would when he had proposed it over the many stacked accounting sheets and tax records between them: the unbiased granting of parcels in Elwynn, Redridge, and Westfall would serve as the backbone of the entire reconstruction effort.
And he had been right! After a year spent on lean, those families that had successfully cultivated the land they had been given gained full ownership. Those that had not were not turned out to rot, but further subdivided, until a home that could be managed by their means was achieved. Within three years, the destitute had been funneled out of the city; within six, even those refugees of little means had followed, gone to the many small townships sprouting up where there had once been only a road or garrison. Why, even one of Wrathion’s more far-fetched ideas had come to fruition: the shamanistic taming of the disorderly elements in Westfall had strengthened the Alliance’s tenuous ties to the Earthen Ring and, by extension, softened their relationship with the Horde. Thrall himself had come during the celebratory event following the successful collaboration, with wife and children in tow. He and Anduin had conversed long into the night as the torches burned low, or so the shaman he had paid to tell him had said.
All should. Have been. Well. Wrathion had been…not content in those years, but he had been…assured. He had been assured. When he asked for his reports on Stormwind and its young king, he could be certain that the news would be good, with no problems more grand than the aristocracy bickering over taxation rates or the formation of a volunteer civilian watch because there were gnolls rooting through the vineyards again. If he had known…!
Wrathion was just shy of snatching Greymane by the collar when sunlight flooded the hall.
Blinkered and in danger of a stumble, Wrathion had to spend several seconds too long recovering from the sudden transition of near darkness to crisp, sunny afternoon. To his left and right stretched rows and rows of sprouts in dark soil. Behind him, the Keep’s walls shot up sharply and before him the mountains the castle rested against stole whatever land had not been claimed by the freshly planted herb garden.
He recovered the only way he knew how, with a quick comment. “You could have had the portal directed here and spared us a walk.”
Genn said nothing and took the footpath on the right. There was nothing else to be done except to follow him, passing the many little paper labels on wooden lattices written in some kitchen maid’s neat hand. Following the Keep’s perimeter, the footpath grew more uneven, tufts of the first grass and dandelions of the season poking up through the pressed cobblestones. The wind whistling down from between the cliffs and the walls smelled at first only of the earth and the dust kicked up by its passing, but as the ground began a gentle roll downward, the strong musk of animals joined it. Hair, excrement, leather, hay, fresh cut alfalfa; if not for the lowing that reached his ears soon after, he might have thought they were bound for the stables, rather than the dairy yard.
Rounding the corner opened the space out into four neat pastures in the shadow of the Keep’s southern wall, one for each of the wide red barns. Despite the appropriate allocation of space, every cow it seemed had been put out in a single well-trampled pasture. The crowded animals were shuffling restlessly, pressing up close against the fence nearest to Wrathion and the furthest from the fourth barn, back against the wall.
Then, and only then, did Wrathion catch the ashen scent.
The choice of location was genius, in a way. The knot of distressed cattle were not only making a consistent level of din, their smell and the stench of their leavings had impaired even his senses until he was almost directly on top of them. Anyone passing through, be it the stockyard hands or the watch on the battlements, might find it momentarily curious that the animals were agitated, but a glance and a few breaths would show nothing out of the ordinary. Those of more enhanced faculties, a stray worgen or night elf perhaps, might detect a trace of the smokiness that was now filling Wrathion’s sinus with each hard breath through his nose, but even if they did, the odds were quite low that they would know what it was. After all, the expeditions to the Isles were the first time in the long history of his people that mortals and dragons lived in quarters close enough to breed familiarity.
“Why is there a dragon here, Greymane?”
That wasn’t quite the question he had wanted to ask. That one was pounding in his chest still, held viciously tight and yet demanding the explanation that his cleverness rushed to give, because he could not help it even though he wanted to stop himself for just a moment, for just a pittance of time, so that he might be ready for it instead of stepping off the precipice without even looking first.
“Why don’t you tell us?”
The wolf’s teeth crashed together once again. The unmitigated rancor that Genn poured into those words was ghastly against the sunny pleasantness all around and would have scoured Wrathion’s skin if the man could manifest them physically. For a step, his face was turned back over his shoulder, and he showed to Wrathion that his eyes had gone yellowed and that he was, for the first time in all the years of their fraught acquaintance, well beyond the unseen line he and Wrathion had chosen never to cross.
Wrathion didn’t understand. Even as adrenaline was sent sizzling through his system and he felt more clearly the weight of Succession at his hip and the burden of the pack over his shoulder, he didn’t understand. Even with his cleverness, which was murmuring a satisfied reply to him that he did not want to listen to, he still did not understand.
Genn yanked his head forward once more and rapped his knuckles hard against the entry door, the smaller one off to the side of the closed and latched bay. A finger’s width of the interior was shown a moment later and Wrathion saw a woman’s pale face and the hem of her priestly vestments. She had the same face as the king did: exhausted, worn, and, the moment she saw Wrathion, touched with anger and unease. He did not think he recognized her and yet she quivered at the sight of him, her nails digging into the door.
“How is he?”
“He…he just fell asleep.”
Genn exhaled harshly, and Wrathion nearly took him by the throat and threw him out of his way. The woman he could shove to the side once he wrenched the door from her grasp, but rather than do either of these things, he stood stock still, his jaw so tight he felt his bones creak from it, and he waited for the lifetime it took for the two of them to move, her aside and Genn within, so that he could enter.
He saw in careless passing that the woman was sweating.
Small wonder: the interior of the barn was sweltering.
The packed dirt floor had been swept clean of straw, debris, and animal mess. The gates and pens that would have held an allotment of cattle had been dismantled and taken elsewhere, as had any equipment originally present, leaving behind only the fading indentation of their weight upon the floor. Each window was shuttered, both on the ground level and in the empty hayloft, and save for the rows of benches and a single table heavy with instruments, alchemical bottles, journals, and a single black and silver cane, the barn was empty.
Except for the dragon, of course.
The dragon took up most of the space.
Even tucked tightly nose to tail, the bulk of it threatened to break through the loft or buckle the walls. To ease the discomfort of merely existing, it had clawed a divot under the cream-colored curve of its belly, but it would need half as much more if it wanted to be able to stand without risk. Scent and shape said that it was an adult, but one not long from its youth and only recently matured, and the low curling horns, like a ram’s, were still small enough to suggest the same. A flexible crest lay from its brow to the bottom of its neck, lowered in slumber so that the long spines did not jab against the tight, small scales that layered themselves over its body. Turned as the head was, the frill on its proud neck was only just visible, the same smooth, warm color as its underside and the bottoms of its toes. Its claws were black, curved, and dirty, caked with the soil it had not bothered to preen away and the rest of its hide was much the same: besmirched, unkempt, and black.
A deep and shining black that pulsed with an endless heat that would set the whole barn aflame if it were but a few degrees more intense.
Now –
Wrathion understood.
“I didn’t do this.”
The potency of Genn’s glare had diminished somewhat in the presence of that which burned much hotter, but Wrathion had felt it just the same.
“No one should have been able to do this.”
A snarl was the king’s reply. “Someone. Did.”
The acidic tone suggested that there had already been theories as to who it could have been. And Wrathion, who had not looked away even as he spoke, had already begun to formulate his own and likely based upon the same painful observations. Behind the pale horns, the dragon’s ears were finned, the fan of them connecting to its jowls; lowered as they were to match the crest, there was still a suggestion of the fearsome flare of spine and skin the dragon could make when agitated. The tail bore a wider, flatter fin of the same coloring, black with cream, almost softly golden in how it wanted to shine and flash with every small motion. The dragon had tried to use it to cover its short, unadorned snout, but its tail had fallen away as slumber had settled in its great body. When Wrathion took a step closer, this done with a warning growl at his back that did nothing to stop him, he was then near enough to see that the dominant color was near to black, being instead a blue so dark as to trick the eye until the dragon shifted in its sleep and changed how the lamplight fell across it.
Blue, and deep purples unpleasantly and alarmingly familiar to him.
“I do wonder – “
Wrathion’s throat was dry. He felt himself disturbingly adrift, tranquil over the churning emotions that he was certainly feeling but somehow not experiencing.
“ – how my dearly departed aunt could implement such an impossible scheme from beyond the grave.”
“That’s what you’re going to find out or so help me…!”
Wrathion turned and caught Genn’s wrist before the man could snatch for his shoulder; instantly, the pair of them were locked in stiffened stance and Wrathion felt, rather than heard or saw, the movement in the loft above. There could only be one person in the Keep who could have evaded his senses for so long, but Greymane was the threat most immediate to him, the man’s chest heaving with his wild breaths and a look in his eyes like a man at the end of his rope.
“How many know?” Wrathion did not move. Neither did Genn.
“Me, Mathias, Valeera.” Of course. “Two healers. Two maids, one servant.”
“How long has it been?”
“Nine days.”
Out of habit, Wrathion counted back the days in his head, and didn’t show the start of recognition he felt except to say: “His twenty-seventh birthday is a very arbitrary date for Onyxia to have chosen.”
He expected another burst of raw anger; what Wrathion received instead was a look so incomprehensible that he at last loosened his grip. It made for a silence that stretched, broken only the dragon’s, by Anduin’s, deep and graveled breaths.
Sobering clarity bade him speak. “Any one of the Aspects would have been a better choice to approach than I. Kalecgos in particular can better unravel an enchantment, even one cast by a different flight –”
“He asked for you.”
The words didn’t wish to leave Greymane’s mouth. They were all but smothered by his clenched teeth and might have been missed had Wrathion not been so primed to hear them.
This emotion he felt. This, he wholly experienced. It was frankly insidious how it spread, sliding beneath and through the seemingly impenetrable fortress that was his fear for Anduin and the debilitating uncertainty that came from not knowing how he was to be helped, if he could be helped at all. These things did not disappear because of what he felt, but they were forced to exist alongside it, and the contrariness was enough to put a spin into his head.
He was overjoyed. For a blink, those six years may as well have not passed at all.
No one else was privy to it. At least, nothing had changed in the room, except that Wrathion had tucked his hands into the small of his back and felt the waves of familiar, earthly heat even through the leather and mail of his gloves.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Nathan, tell me the truth: it really is too much, isn’t it?”
“No, Your Majesty. Your dress is appropriate for your station and the occasion.”
Anduin had come to the point where he no longer hid his small, wry smile at Nathan’s response. Three years it had taken for him to be wholly comfortable around his valet and just about the same amount of time to accept having a valet at all. The devastation the Legion had left in its wake and the rumblings of the Fourth War had given him precious little time to do more than hold a memorial for Wyll and give to the man a prayer for his peaceful and well-deserved rest. There was no time for the acquisition and hiring of personal servants; there had hardly been time to complete the gold and silver armor that he would drown in until, the dwarven smiths nervously admitted, he had grown into it. The craftsmanship had been impeccable, the lion’s helm a fearsome visage both noble and proud, and it would cut a shining path through even the most wretched of battlefields, nevermind that the fit had certainly more of his father in mind than himself. He had not chastised them; how could he? It did as they said and as the years had trod mercilessly on, he had in fact come to fit better within it as his body grew against the weight of it, and he had not needed a valet or a man-at-arms to help him don it.
It was ironic: peace had made that demand, not war.
Nathan’s fingers were as swift and as skilled at manipulating the many small pearl fittings on his waistcoat as they had been the morning he had arrived from Countess Clessington’s estate, hardly a day since Anduin had sent a polite missive inquiring after the first of the names that Wyll had placed on his list of replacements. His letter had contained neither offer nor notice of dates, pay, or duties, Anduin having left himself plenty of opportunity to change his mind about the whole affair and abandon it in favor of allocating the season’s grain stipends to the border parishes. Imagine his surprise when the castle steward announced to him that the first applicant for the position of valet to the High King was waiting in the first floor parlor.
Going to meet him had been deeply awkward. Anduin still winced when he thought of it, the stumbling of his through needs, procedures, and schedules that the steward still had to supply half of the time. Household affairs in Stormwind Keep were traditionally the responsibility of the Queen; his father had abandoned them entirely or put the whole burden upon Wyll’s aging shoulders. Anduin might very well have kept the Keep half-empty and half-staffed if not for Wrathion’s endless insistence that it –
……
“The ribbon? Really?” Anduin chose to look politely pained rather than live in his own head any longer.
Behind him, a brush in one hand and a silken blue ribbon in the other, Nathan replied with perfect aplomb, briefly meeting Anduin’s eyes in the mirror taller and wider than any one person, king or not, could possibly need. “Yes, the ribbon. The anniversary of the birth of the High King has become a premiere event in the social season.”
The social season. Such a thing had existed only as a ghost of its former self, the infrequent and modest events held amongst the nobility but pale imitations of the grand fetes, resplendent masquerades, and breathtaking balls that had filled the calendar from year to golden year during King Llane’s rule. Or so the elders of the peerage had bemoaned pitifully to him the moment war and privation began to fade enough to allow dreams of old glory to shine. Genn had shared their opinions if not their waifish pleading toward a High King that was no longer seen as too soft to wage war, but a prodigy of statesmanship that Stormwind had longed for all these deleterious years. He had, they said with wine glasses held conspiratorially close to their lips, galvanized the peasantry, tamed the Horde, revitalized the military, and magnanimously but wisely shepherded the recovery not only of Stormwind, but the entire Alliance.
Every compliment had earned a polite smile through clenched teeth. The hyperbole was admittedly not what put the throbbing in his temples that would blossom into another new and exciting migraine. It was ordinary pride that would have a human nobleman claim his king had anything at all to do with the permanent settlements at last erected on Azuremyst Isle or the long-awaited reclamation of Gnomeregan. The first had been at the behest of the Prophet, who proclaimed that with their ancient enemy at last vanquished, his people were free to take their homes where they wished, either on the world that had welcomed them during their long flight or the world that they had fled, devastated but a treasure that was once again theirs. The second had been the triumph of the new gnomish state that arose with the consolidation of Gelbin and Prince Erazmin’s peoples: mechagnomes were immune to the radiation that had rendered the old capital uninhabitable and could lead the expeditions into the depths of the city.
It was the end of war that had allowed for these things and even that had not truly been Anduin’s doing. It was not his blood that had stained the sands before the gates of Orgrimmar, just as it was not his hand that had penned the allotment plans, the Westfall Petition, or the deft restructuring of officership in the military that replaced the last of the hereditary ranks with merit advancement.
But he did make his birthday a premiere event in the social season. He did do that.
There was no holding in his sigh nor the motions that had become habitual: raising his right arm, then his left, so that Nathan could fit his white and blue embroidered coat upon his shoulders. The high collar was just shy of brushing his chin, at least until Nathan fitted the more fashionable tucked necktie beneath the quaint vintage of the coat’s cut and intricately embroidered lions sleeping in fields of alliums. The combination of the new and the traditional was intentional: like the social season, it brought to mind the vanished glory days that historians were actively and eagerly canonizing, but reminded the eye that the future was both inevitable and full of promise.
Or so Wrathion had said, when he had cajoled Anduin into being fitted for the first of what would eventually be five wardrobes of kingly attire.
……
Yes, he was bitter. He was still bitter, five years after he swore to himself he wasn’t going to buckle and forgive, not this time. He was bitter and he was very quietly miserable when it was Nathan that folded his sleeves and snapped the pearl cufflinks into place and not the long, dark fingers that would be accompanied by a tongue that clicked and commented that diamonds would be finer than pearls. The king in the mirror was nonetheless immaculate despite the absence and that, too, made it worse, so that the soft throbbing in his temples could begin now, rather than when he took the ceremonial high seat in the ballroom that had been restored in the west wing of the castle.
“What time is it, Nathan?”
On his way back from the drawers of far too many expensive leather shoes, the valet glanced at the gnomish timepiece by the oak box of powders and rouge Anduin absolutely refused to use now that there was no one to hound him into it.
“A quarter past three, Your Majesty.”
The quirk of a smile was more mordant than he wanted it to be, but if he was going to endure a headache for the entire six hour celebration, he was going to allow himself a dash of sarcasm.
“We may as well celebrate the anniversary of my birth right here. The time is just about – “
A wet and gurgling cough interrupted him.
Anduin didn’t realize that it had come from him until he saw the bright red blood splashed across the blue and golden embroidery of his coat.
“Your Majesty-!!”
The world pitched on its axis. The wall and the ridiculous mirror that it held rolled away from Anduin to sink into a dark and flashing horizon, suddenly a hundred miles from the tips of his outstretched fingers. The progression of his fall had to be measured in lifetimes: he had aged a decade before his bloodstained lips had even parted in surprise. He was an old man by the time his shoulders had tipped backward. He had lived longer than any human should when his heels at last slipped from the short stool he had been standing upon, and Anduin knew this because of how far away and unfathomable Turalyon’s eyes always were even when the man tried to smile and laugh in a way that would not betray the haunting, unnatural stretch of years behind him. Anduin had tried to be considerate of him. He was a hero of the Alliance many times over. He wanted what was best for Stormwind and for Azeroth, even if the city and the people who lived there were less than a dream to him. Anduin trusted him implicitly with the leadership of the Alliance Army and there was just nothing to be done for how Turalyon would forget to blink, sometimes, or sit far too still for far too long.
Anduin was going to have to apologize to him. He’d allowed himself to be unfairly and selfishly discomfited when in Turalyon’s company, never truly understanding what an astonishing, dreadful burden it was to live a thousand years.
He knew better, now. A thousand years was how long it took for his back to hit the rug and his head to crack upon the stones just past its fringe. In contrast to the mire that dragged at his every limb, the pain moved at a pace quicker than a lightning strike. It rushed faster than his very thoughts, so that he was gasping wretchedly from the fall when agony had already bloomed like an iron flower in his chest. His flailing hands were foolishly reaching for his head instead of his heaving chest, where every rib snapped in half in quick succession and soaked his coat from within, the skin not merely split but pushed.
Pushed, as the shattered bones bent outward, a cage of gore swinging its doors wide with strength enough to tear through silk and cotton and the many small, pearl buttons.
“Anduin, Anduin-!! ”
He hadn’t heard the window slam open. He could barely hear Valeera. His ears were melting off his head.
“Go for a healer, now!”
She should have said to fetch a priest specifically. He was going to need last rites.
He could see his heart.
There, in the nest of flesh that spanned from his clavicle to the buckle of his belt, was a throbbing mass of muscle streaked with crimson and so hot that it turned his rushing blood into cloying steam. It had bulged to four times its true size, crushing and subsuming its every neighbor to feed its hideous growth. With a meaty squirm, it grew again, supping on the coil of intestines at its root, and that was when Anduin saw that inside the writhing chambers that spilled more blood than a man should have, there was a fire burning.
Someone screamed. He didn’t blame them.
The flame, as though aware of his wide, white gaze, began to sear.
The interiors of his heart charred first, the walls going opaque as black marble, the macabre light from within visible through the splintering lines of cracks and crevices that had once been veins and ligaments. The next blistering ripple flash-dried the blood soaked into his clothing, the sweat clinging to every deathly pale inch of skin, and the tears that had tracked across his face. Salt, ash, and the powdered remains of leather and fabric fell away from him, tossed aside by the unrelenting waves of scorching heat that left their black marks on the floor and the walls and, inevitably, himself.
Though the air contorted and flickered, though his eyes rolled in their sockets as stones would in a stone bowl, he saw when it was that his skin hardened and cracked. Black, black, a glittering basalt that should have been tossed at the foot of a burning mountain and not upon a human’s writhing, kicking, howling body.
He couldn't remember when that had started. He couldn't think. His mind had been boiled out of him.
“By the Light, what in the hell has happened?! Anduin?! Anduin!! ”
“The room’s catching, get back!”
“No, damn you! If you won’t go, I –”
The next wave was so strong that it had a sound, a hammered boom of displaced air that shattered the window and the mirror. The people at the door, and he should have known who they were except that he didn’t know who even he was any longer, were tossed back out into the hall by the forced exchange of pressure. All around, a concert of buckling and snapping could be heard, the dressing table, the wardrobe, the drawers, and all the chairs and stands crushed into so many scalded and scattering bits of timber. Even the new mosaics in the ceiling, the lovely gardens and busy harbor that he had requested over scenes of triumphant battlefields and crownings, cracked and crumbled, raining paint and plaster.
Anduin couldn’t breathe.
Up until this moment, he had still been sucking in white-hot breaths that burned his lips. He had needed those so that he could scream. But his expression of the perverse and relentless agony that he felt was cut off, every mote of oxygen blasted out of the room through the window or the door.
Anduin moved. He didn’t know how. He didn’t know anything. He was dead but he was also alive and flashing behind the melted lenses of his eyes was the recent and painful memory of stepping slowly to the foot of a frozen throne.
He would need to apologize to him, too. He hadn’t properly understood then, either.
Shedding ash, hair, bone, and skin, Anduin lunged for the window.
Stone and sky and sea welcomed the hysterical sobs that new breath allowed. The sun cast its paltry warmth against his back and laid a long, strange shadow out under him, so familiar that he choked out a helpless, pleading cry.
A name. A name to which the arching shape of wings and the curve of a proud neck might belong.
A roar answered him, but it was one he did not know at all, and it tore the insides of his throat while the energy of his jump at last exhausted itself and he fell, twisting and heavy, so heavy…!!
The ground took him as it might a meteor.
There was black all around and then, as his mind at last crashed into unconsciousness, black deep within.