The Unified Theorem - Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Part 2 of the volume climax, next chapter will conclude the show of shit.

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Chapter 19 – The Fickle Turns of Subterfuge

“-. Aiden Perenolde, King of Alterac .-“

He was blinded but could see. He was deafened but could hear. The Light had sought to rob him of even his wits, but that didn’t work either. Unlike all the others he’d since stepped over, it didn’t work. Not yet. He wasn’t as weak as the rest, and all the pieces of the Alterac Regalia that he wore had activated to sustain his body and spirit in his hour of greatest need.

How ironic, then, that it got harder and harder to push down the wish to find relief in oblivion. Not that the boy-prophet would let him. Not for the next day. One day. One day where he wasn’t deaf to his life collapsing around him, one day of being unable to escape everyone else’s gaze, one day when he was no longer the judge but the condemned!

He had one day before he was rendered an insensate cripple, because the royal artefacts would either burn out or stop working at the absence of a threat. That boy. That piece of him. That boy was in his head. In him! How did the artefacts not prevent it from happening? It was an even bigger violation than the smite! 

“All that holier than thou posturing!” growled Aiden Perenolde as he finally put his knife through the eye slit of his last bodyguard. He didn’t know where the prophet was and he didn’t care if he was heard or not. It wouldn’t make a difference with him literally inside his head now, he was sure of it! “Yet here at the end, you just aim for the same thing: to control everything! To make everyone else think the same way you do – no, the way you want them to think! Us! Me!”

Aiden had tried to act decisively after the spell, despite feeling like his body and soul had been slashed bloody, but then he crossed eyes with his guards and everything went to hell. At first they couldn’t decide if Aiden should be killed or seized, whether for ransom or trade with the prophet. Then they began to see straight through each other too, and suddenly they were killing one another in sudden personal vendettas.

Aiden only survived unscathed because two of his men actually stayed loyal.

Then they crossed paths with Valea Twinblades, and he didn’t survive unscathed anymore. Somehow, he didn’t know how, she’d gathered a whole corridor’s worth of people to her side in just the last ten or twenty minutes. Some wavered at the sight of him, only to lose all hesitation after he first avoided, then failed to avoid meeting their gaze. It was galling to look away and down like he was guilty of something, and it was no use in the end. A child got him. The Blackmoore boy. A boy that had the nerve to hold him at fault for executing his traitor father!

One of his last bodyguards stayed behind to buy time with his death, and it was just Aiden’s luck that the last one decided to have a change of heart at the worst time!

The jest was on the prophet this time, though. It was his gifted insight that warned Aiden of the incoming treachery.

In pain from cuts and many more bruises, and frantic to get a moment’s peace even if just to reassess things, Aiden fled from where his last bodyguard had tried to kill him, down secret passages only he should know.

Unfortunately, he had to double back and turn down the servant corridor when he found the last stretch caved in. Almost no dead or blind simpletons by those ways, and no children at all, which the boy-prophet would probably expect him to find meaningful.

He reached the stairway around the west-most load-bearing turret, only to hear footsteps and voices coming from above.

Shamefully, he ended up hiding in the privy. Stayed as quiet as he could while… whoever they were passed. The Gilneas party? He thought he heard-

A whimper startled him. From behind. Turning with a white-knuckled grip around his dagger, he belatedly noticed the privy was not unoccupied. One of his brownnosing weasels had had the same idea as him. When their eyes met, it was the first time that day that Aiden didn’t come out the worse from the shared double vision.

Aiden could only stand and stare at the tattered, dirty creature frozen before him. For a moment, he couldn’t fathom how the two of them could be part of the same race. The creature was opening its mouth-

He stabbed it through the throat before it could give away their presence. He covered its nose and mouth while it thrashed in death. When it subsided, he stepped back and blankly watched it slump dead on the latrine.

He stood there even after… whoever was outside passed out of hearing. Then longer, while screams, rumblings and the vague shapes and spirit lights skimmed along the edges of his vision all over the castle. Aiden stood stock-still until the ever-present stench of human waste changed enough to let him know the man-shaped thing infesting his privy room had soiled itself in death.

He stepped back out of the privy and quickly went up the way the others had come from. Once on the third floor of Alterac Keep, he rushed for the secret escape tunnel through the mountain. To his dismay, the last stretch of corridor had been collapsed by some alchemical charge. Worse, the more he dug, the more gold shone through the rubble. If he’d kept running, he’d have died in the rubble. If he kept digging, he’d just be at another dead end.

“You won’t settle for blood, will you?” Aiden muttered as he sucked at his bleeding fingers. “You won’t be satisfied until you’ve destroyed everything I’ve built.”

Was this why no hidden blade had found him yet? He thought one of the assassins or even Ravenholdt himself should have come jumping out of the shadows by now. Was that just because the boy wanted him to suffer?

Paranoid, Aiden took some sand from the debris and tossed it around, along with small pebbles, but no invisible interlopers were revealed. He filled his pockets with some more and set off randomly through his keep just so he wouldn’t stay in one place. He prayed he wouldn’t run into more traitors – no! He was not going to pray, not to that – not because some boy made him!

Now he came upon increasingly many bodies as he ran seeking safety. Men, women, and children too. By the way they’d fallen, the young ones had either been used as hostages or killed out of pure spite. All the while, the presence of that boy haunted his steps, even as he tossed handfuls of pocket sand and ground glass at every dark alcove he passed.

When he reached the end of the corridor, he didn’t think twice before he shouldered through the door. It was the suite given to Baron Mordis and his party, he belatedly realized. The one Aiden had deliberately chosen because it was impossible to be visited – or leave – without everyone else on the floor knowing about it. He’d taken the wrong turn, dammit! He pushed down the panic.

There were no dead here, except for the spy girl that he’d painstakingly insinuated into Mordis’ castle over the past year.

The sight was as bitter as it was infuriating. The lass had been personally trained by Montrose before her demise, but now he found her laid out on the en-suite kitchen floor, wide-eyed and lifeless.

No wounds on her either, which meant she’d died to the prophet’s magic outright.

Valimar Mordis himself and his people were gone. All their essentials as well, even if the quarters had clearly been packed in a hurry. They’d all been spared. These were the standards he didn’t pass, the King of Alterac thought bitterly.

Mordis wasn’t with Twinblades, Aiden recalled as he peered outside. Angevin, Twinblades, and now another traitor is revealed, how many zealots did I miss? And the collapsed escape route – how long have they lied in wait in my court?!

Outside was the aftermath of a literal civil war. The bloodbath had managed to form several opposed camps by the time it spilled out of the keep’s front doors. The crownsguard and legion had disintegrated into many groups. The few who’d joined the traitors still lived. The rest had died on behalf of splinter factions that had once been his court, though you could barely tell which was which now. Many of them were dead too, and the rest were subdued and kneeling at swordpoint.

No calls for battle in Perenolde’s name, or the nation. No organisation. Just a panicking mob that had tried to escape, only to smash-face first into an unyielding wall of golden energy, leaving them vulnerable to being cut down and subjugated from the rear. Cowardice, it seemed, was not a big enough sin for the Light to take their senses as it had tried with him, Aiden thought bitterly.

There was a stream of escaped prisoners too, coming from the side. They were helping Twinblades, Mordis, and the Gilneas party in keeping the rest suppressed, and a path clear to the gatehouse as well.

Their efforts were for naught because barely anyone was passing through. Many people still couldn’t get through the forcefield for whatever reason, damming up against the edge of the dome of Light. Those few that did pass didn’t move any further to make room. They didn’t dare.

There were two giant dragons battling right outside, roaring, arguing in their reptilian tongue, shearing the air, spells and flames spewing through the wind while the earth shook like a constant earthquake. Even there, inside the castle, Aiden could feel the thrumming through the wall. He couldn’t tell the dragons’ colors through the gold, but…

Not all is going as you want!

Aiden took off running, out of room, through the half-collapsed hallways until he managed to dig through to another. Instead of out, he went inwards. The Prophet’s curse was a frightful doom breathing down his neck, but he now discovered a hidden wellspring of spite and wilfulness.

The secret ways were blocked by obvious sabotage. The front was certain death when everyone hated him. The side tunnels were just more of the same. He’d leave through the dungeons, but those had been the first place he sent people to, and none of his task forces had come back. Aiden wished he still had his butler and lackeys, but those who didn’t die in the golden blast were either dead to traitors or each other useless like he himself would-

Suddenly, the keep shook as if a load-bearing pillar had just snapped. The ceiling and roof both creaked and rumbled. Dust rose and fell abruptly, as what felt and sounded like an entire wing of the keep collapsed. The west one.

The corridor ahead screamed with air and ash, and a sulfur stench chased by a monster’s gurgling roar, another dragon?!

Aiden turned around and ran for his life.

A dragon inside his keep! Was this why – the last escape route! It was in the same direction, but then – the dragon had buried itself? Or was buried? Now it was digging its way out, he couldn’t go that way, he had to get away, he-!

Somehow, he didn’t know how, he managed to outrun the destruction. All the while, the one thought driving him forward was the knowledge that it wasn’t just his enemies meddling here.

The enemies of his enemies were also here, and if there was one outside perhaps there was one inside as well. Earlier that morning he’d said those things to his new wife mostly in jest, but now-

If there were dragons fighting on his side, then this was not as over and done with as that boy wanted him to think. If there was no way out, that just meant the opposite was true going back in.

He made it to his throne room almost unimpeded, ignoring the way the debris thinned and the bodies gradually multiplied on the way over. He hit the hidden control in his throne to slam the main doors shut. The ward also shimmered to being despite everything, that was one expense he would no longer allow anyone to gainsay him on.

He barricaded the side door he came in through, and was just done doing the same to the other one when an unexpected voice made him nearly jump out of his skin.

“Your Majesty.”

“Hellspawns!” He whirled around with a shout and met the eyes of the Dalaran emissary before he could remember it was a bad idea.

Nothing happened.

“You – mage,” Aiden gasped, mind racing as he blinked rapidly. “You – are unaffected?”

“Not quite,” replied Archmage Krasus, formerly of the Council of Six. The elven wizard… was just there, no sudden noise of displacement of wind, he’d not teleported? Had he been waiting here, invisible? “However, I am more adept than most of my sort when it comes to lifeworker arts.”

“Your sort-?”

The door Aiden had first come through blew inwards.

Through the dust came his new wife.

… This is not how I envisioned getting the answers to my questions.

“Husband,” the far too self-assured voice of Ysolde Prestor came. “Are you well?”

For a moment, the King of Alterac was frozen in indecision. To his right was the woman he’d just married. To his left was the Dalaran Archmage who’d just recently been dismissed from the Council of Six under suspicious circumstances. Of the two, only the man dared meet his eyes. She was avoiding his and the other man’s both, even as the Archmage was shamelessly seeking hers. Elf was as unconcerned with the forced-upon magic as he was willing to use it – wait.

… The wizard is in league with the boy? Or his patron! Damn him, it never even occurred to him, at most he thought the Archbishop – but the elves! Those damned elves and their superiority, if he lived forever and wanted to put a mere mortal in his place, propping up the local hopeless idealist in a generation-long scheme would be exactly what he’d do too. “Wife,” Aiden said, looking away from the mage and straight at her. “Look at me.”

The woman, bless her, understood his meaning immediately. She grimaced in distaste, but obliged him despite that.

When the double vision came, it was his foundational memory that predominated for the first time ever.

The vision ended with an aftertaste of existential dread, and a crystal-clear reinforcement that recognizing and appeasing the proverbial cuckoo remained one’s most crucial and inherent survival skill.

He stared at his wife. The she-dragon. The cuckoo that had been won over by the nesting bird.

And as she stared back, the two wordlessly reached an understanding that Aiden had wasted far too long eluding.

If his own kind had done nothing but fail and betray him even at his worst, if they didn’t have even a measly bird’s worth of basic sense and self-preservation, what was even left for him to do but join the side of monsters?

King Aiden Perenolde of Alterac Kingdom looked into the eyes of a dragon and felt no more human than she did. Arcane lights whisked over fingers. His own were already tight around his rapier hilt.

The two of them turned to the third, united in grim purpose.

Archmage Krasus pulled his hands from his sleeves. He looked upon Aiden’s new wife with contempt. He looked upon him, the King, with pity. “As Dalaran envoy I must avoid diplomatic incidents, but my charge as a Lifekeeper is to protect all things from the predations of the void things and their slaves. This woman is a black dragon, the most insidious of her brood. For the sake of all sense and time quickly running out for all of us, Your Majesty, please stand aside.”

“I’m sorry, mage.” Aiden drew his blade. “I’m afraid I can’t do thaAH!“

A mere gesture had Aiden flying clear across the entire hall to a rolling heap at the foot of the doors.

It still didn’t spare him the scalding cascade of smoke and steam as fire and ice clashed in the middle of his throne room.

“-. Kairozdormu .-“

The Prophet had not invited him along for the last act. In return, the dragon had not pressed the issue either. He was left behind with the rest of the prisoners, which was as considerate of his crippled state as it was galling. It wouldn’t have been so humiliating if not for the reason he was spurned.

He’d tried to pass through the dome and he’d failed. The forcefield judged you on your merits, it didn’t let you pass unless you possess at least three of the nine noble virtues, at least as its caster understood them. He’d been angry, but he’d been doubly offended at the half-assed conditions for passage. If you’re going to judge people based on moral criteria, at least have the fortitude to demand they measure up to half or more!

Most of all, he’d been outraged when he didn’t measure up to even a mere third. He’d passed discipline and perseverance, only to fail courage by a narrow margin.

Now, the great bronze dragon was just another cripple being pushed and jostled, in a hasty bid by the unjustly imprisoned to escape the keep before the ‘Rotten ones’ tried to kill them again, or constant earthquakes collapsed the whole world on their heads.

It was a foolish fear, the earthquake was deliberately weak and very regular in its recurrence, clearly generated by the golden black dragon in a bid to incentivise everyone below to run as far away as possible before it was too late. Successfully too.

But he couldn’t explain that and still pass as a common victim of tyranny, so he let himself be pulled on with the rest. Limped forth on his one leg and makeshift crutch while reconsidering everything that had brought him here.

The sudden disappearance of all Infinite Dragonflight meddling from the future coincided with the moment of Wayland Hywel’s conception. That in itself was not remarkable, mortals of all races were produced every moment. But his sire, the Aspect of Time Nozdormu, had found a correlation in the increasing difficulty to scry him, whether via divination magic or the Caverns of Time themselves. A difficulty which Kairozdormu himself had been enlisted to corroborate, which he did.

The farther into the future you looked, to more likely you were to find gold glowing eyes staring back, and nothing besides save the void.

More tellingly, the Aspect of Time had seen fit to share all this with only Kairozdormu, at least for now. It was a profound change from how borderline sidelined he had been before. He was still deciding if the Time Aspect merely pre-empted Kairozdormu’s own discovery for efficiency’s sake, or if it was a roundabout way to tell him he’d been stonewalling Kairozdormu before. In which case Nozdormu had only been keeping him close to watch what was a destined traitor.

To take it all as an honor or an insult, well, that was something Kairozdormu was also still deciding. Unlike the dogmatists, he was self-aware enough to know his future self would surely be among the Infinites’ ranks, provided he didn’t die beforehand. Their purpose for existing was the same as his own secret aim: to reject the hellscape that the Golden Timeline had become – would have become – and take active steps to change the future for the better. Even if that meant traveling to the past to change history for the better.

Perhaps the Infinites still existed, but had ceased their activities because they already got what they wanted. Their disappearance from time could just as well mean they won the time war. Kairozdormu hadn’t considered it before, but he did now. 

He was reconsidering the plausibility of some of his more outlandish notions too, about what the dragonflights could do if all their powers were taken to their ultimate conclusion. Particularly if the Aspects leveraged the Titan assets still extant on this world. Nozdormu hadn’t pre-empted Kairozdormu about that, and while that could mean many things… it also allowed for the possibility that Kairozdormu wasn’t merely chasing geese.

But then why did Nozdormu make his confidence conditional on me gaining Wayland’s? The dragon in crippled human shape wondered as he stumbled to a halt when the crowd got too thick to keep on fleeing. History doesn’t change for any one person.

Kairozdormu was among the few Bronze Dragons who actually grasped the full implications of the Infinites’ existence being prevented. Not merely countered but rendered completely absent in both future and past. He was above most others in their flight because he’d worked his way into being made a Keeper of Time, as opposed to being raised to it while being fed crumbs by Nozdormu. He’d acquired his skills and insight mostly on his own, even if he’d had to go around and even against the other keepers a time or five hundred.

He even went against Nozdormu himself a time or two. Ever since Deathwing tricked the other Aspects into giving up most of their powers to the Dragon Soul, the Aspect of Time had become so absorbed by his imperfect visions of potential timelines that he’d begun to slip.

It had been frustrating, but gave Kairozdormu himself an uncommonly pragmatic understanding of the Bronze Dragonflights’ limitations, and its follies. At the very least, he wouldn’t go the way of the dogmatists like Chronormu, who wouldn’t realize that Murozond and Nozdormu were the same dragon even if it stared them in the face.

That was, in fact, objective truth – Kairozodormu had watched it happen in the future through the Caverns of Time. Before that future vanished like so many others.

It would have been comical if their plight were not so bleak. Theirs and the plight of the world, nay, the cosmos itself. Had been so bleak, though after the time he’d had recently, he was beginning to wonder if he’d made a mistake assuming things were truly better.

Perhaps the Infinites still exist, the bronze dragon thought as he stopped to catch his breath. Which he could only do because the rest of the group he was with had slowed down after emerging into the bloody aftermath of the Alterac Keep courtyard. Maybe they aren’t trying to change history anymore because they already got what they wanted. Their disappearance from time could just as well mean they won the time war. Kairozdormu hadn’t considered it before, but he did now. 

He was reconsidering the plausibility of some of his more outlandish notions too, about what the dragonflights could do if all their powers were taken to their ultimate conclusion. Particularly if the Aspects leveraged the Titan assets still extant on this world. Nozdormu hadn’t pre-empted Kairozdormu about that, and while that could mean many things… it also allowed for the possibility that Kairozdormu wasn’t merely chasing geese.

But then why did Nozdormu make his confidence conditional on me gaining Wayland’s? The dragon in crippled human shape wondered as he stumbled to a halt when the crowd got too thick to let them move further. Is he already so hard to divine that even the Aspect of Time did not discern his true character? Or did Nozdormu only keep me in the dark about it?

Being put through nigh-unbearable torture should have engendered some sympathy. Being crippled and maimed should have won him even more.

Instead, the Prophet had held Kairozdormu’s actions in contempt. All of them.

He had expected some misgivings, but not that. He’d not expected a saint to…

To be so callous.

Kairozdormu might have understood if he himself had been putting on a front, but the torture truly had been every bit as bad as it looked. He’d been put through so much torment and lost so much strength of spirit and flesh that he didn’t even dare turn back into his dragon form. He didn’t think he’d retain consciousness if he did. Limb loss was usually a problem only from the other side of the transformation, but the torture instruments were bespelled, and the poisons…

He’d been put through hell for months at this point.

He hadn’t expected Wayland to hold a prejudice against the entirety of dragonkind either. For what Nozdormu saw as the linchpin of the epoch to genuinely consider dragons to be mentally challenged as a species…

Well. It was only less outrageous than redeeming a member of the blacks. Kairozdormu had not seen that coming either. Not in what he could perceive of the time ways, and not in the Caverns of Time before he left them to play kingmaker.

Is any one human truly worth betting so much on, when the world’s fate still turns on our whims more than his?

It wasn’t something Kairozdormu used to think twice about, before the Infinites abruptly stopped trying to change history through time travel on account of no longer existing. Now, though, he was beginning to wonder if he hadn’t been too optimistic. For all the changes that the prophet had affected, they all seemed about to be undone or offset until they made no difference.

By dragons.

Kairozdormu could have understood if it was another black that attacked Fahrad, they surely wouldn’t take the redemption of the greatest kinslayer lying down.

But what the hell was the Red thinking?

And more importantly…

Can Wayland actually recover from this?

Not only had he sacrificed all the power he’d amassed in a single spellstrike, but his actions had resulted in the violent and traumatic death of men, women and even children. Hundreds of them.

Can he really be the source of all the changes, if everything he’s done can still be ruined so utterly? So easily?

By now, the group had started moving again and were almost to the gatehouse, when the golden dome rung like a gong above them from the crash of dragon upon dragon. The mass of humanity around him panicked suddenly.

Next thing he knew he was knocked over, his nose bleeding from the fall and subsequent stomp on his head. His mouth filled with mud and dust. He gasped for breath only to choke when someone else stepped on him – stomped on him as – he was being trampled!

After all I’ve done, his fury came alight like an unholy flame deep inside him. All I’ve sacrificed, all that effort for these creatures and they’re no better than braying sheep at the first sign of trouble, I should just-

The Light enveloped him, then formed a shell of protection. It had… an all-new flavor.

“Out of the way!”  The voice… It was young woman. A young woman who managed to make herself heard over the frenzied mob, and even the blasts of flames and angry roars of the red and black dragons battling up above them all. “Everyone get clear, now! Shame on you, all of you, can you not you see what you are doing?!”

Kairozdormu felt a pair of dainty hands pull him up from the ground and push more of the soothing magic into him, easing his pain. When his hazy sight cleared, he saw a girl. Or young woman? She couldn’t be any older than Wayland. He…

He knew this one. “Mara Fordragon?”

The young woman snapped her eyes to his, clearly intending to force the Truth as was now happening for all. Kairozdormu almost couldn’t suppress the shared vision in time, such was his reaction to her presence here. When nothing happened, she hesitated… then continued healing him and wiping his face of blood and dirt, just as before. “You know me, sir?”

"… You are not a face I expected to see today.”

“And I wouldn’t expect someone’s eyes to tell me so little, today, yet here we are.”

… Titans, I’ve been out of the Caverns for too long if I didn’t see her being here. What else had changed in the time since? What else did he miss? “But still not suspicious enough to deny me aid?”

“Not enough to change what I’d have done regardless.” The girl got up and helped him to his feet – foot. “Valea! I need – yes, thank you, you two, over here! Sir, I must see to others, these men will see you to safety-”

Just then the red dragon managed to finally smash the golden black off the Dome of Penitence. The two dragons grappled while they fell, crashing down on the street in a snarling frenzy of claws, bites and breath attacks. The dome didn’t dim immediately, but it started to.

The only reason none of the people outside were crushed was because a sheet of light appeared over them, causing the two to slide over it and onwards in the plaza beyond. It hadn’t come from Fordragon or anyone else inside. That left outside. The golden black. The black was protecting them at his own expense. The one dragon that should have been the worst of them all, he was the only one who hadn’t lost control.

Despite the near boiling chaos around him, Kairozdormu couldn’t help but laugh. Never mind Wayland’s actions, history was completely broken just by this! And Mara Fordragon wasn’t even alone! There was Valea Twinblades here, and Genn Greymane and his father too, the royal prince and king of Gilneas helping to coordinate the evacuation now that the fighting had finally died down.

People who still had ten or twenty years before their names were supposed to go down in history, they were all here, and more – that – was that Aedelas Blackmoore over there?! What was he even doing here? He was barely ten years old, nobody else had brought children younger than twelve to this whole farce? He was fatherless, who even was his regent – what was he doing? Thrall’s slavemaster and tormentor – caring for the sick?!

Kairozdormu laughed even harder as the little humans around him mastered their bloodlust and differences. Even as his fellow dragons of black and red battled like frenzied beasts that threatened to crush any who tried to flee. History doesn’t change for any one person, except when said person infects literally everyone else he crosses paths with!

Nozdormu, Kairozdormu, the reds, the rest of the dragons that were supposedly somewhere around here, all of them – they’d all made the same mistake of obsessing over a single person, a single linchpin, when in fact the true changes had been germinating all along everywhere else! Townsmen, peasants, craftsmen, thugs, assassins, farmers, soldiers, nobles, dragons, more dragons, even an angel!

What was even left? Would Wayland somehow convert the gods next? Mayhap even the Titans themselves!

“-thing we can do, he’s not the first and we’ll see many more break down before this is over!” Mara was telling someone even as the madness continued everywhere around them. “I hate to say it, but we’ve more wounded and young coming, we’ve done what we can for him. We could try to retake the keep, but it’s still more dangerous here than out there, Ser Saidan still hasn’t – just get him through the dome-“

CRA-KA-THOOM.

A literal thunder sounded in their ears. And their chests. Even bones. The work of spirits of some nature, he could feel wills and wisps of energy all through the air. The Prophet had even advanced his shamanism, Kairozdormu should never have let himself be caged.

Everyone stopped. Even the dragons that were half-way done crawling back up the forcefield.

“Lady Rheastrasza,” Wayland’s voice came from the keep’s front doors, flat and malcontent. “Would you kindly back off so the innocents can start getting to safety?”

The red dragon was distracted just enough for the black to kick her away. She staggered, snarled at the interruption, and finally froze at the sight of literal hundreds of people huddled both inside and out of the dome. Staring at her.

She gave Wayland an unfathomable stare, cast her eyes over the rest of the crowd, didn’t spot Kairozdormu for what he truly was, and finally pulled out of her battle lust. Finally, she realized that all the people there, especially those outside the dome, old and young alike, were cowering in fear.

Of her.

The red pulled back, jumped up and flew to hang from the side of the mountain above the keep. Too far to make out her face, which wasn’t as expressive as mortals in any case…

But Kairozdormu didn’t need to see her to know what she felt.

“Thank you,” Wayland grunted, his voice still thrumming like thunder in everyone’s chests. “Everyone move – do not stampede!” He… did not sound entirely confident or composed. “Many who live deserve death, but some who died deserved life. They’re only gone because they were killed by some of you who are here.” His voice turned cold then. “I am not judging you myself only because the true enemy is still inside. I strongly suggest you don’t make me decide you’re the more urgent problem.”

“… Take him,” Mara abruptly shoved Kairozdormu to the two men that had come to help. “I ned to – I must go!”

“Wait,” Karizdormu grunted, summoning what shred of his true strength he still could. It was barely enough to escape the hold of the humans, but he could walk. “Take me with you. I need to talk to him-”

“So does everyone else, I’m sure!” Mara was already rushing away. “Doubtless he’ll make time when we’re not all-“

“He’s my employer!” He barked, barely managing not to sway from daze at the effort. The mob had stomped on his head quite hard, damn. “I’ve been in the dungeons ever since – I need to talk to him. Now.”

“You’re what? He’s – very well, lean on me, we’ll-”

There was a roar inside the keep, followed by a massive blast of flames that blew out a dozen windows on the keep’s second floor. Rock and stone creaked and crackled in the wake of the ash and smoke, then it felt as if the entire Alterac Castle bent under a sudden weight. Kairozdormu was not a black dragon, but he could feel the earth shift such that he nearly fell off of his lone, numb foot.

A rumble. Walls cracked, ceilings and floors fell inward, glass rained down from shattered window panes.

Everyone watched in shock as half the west wing of Alterac Castle from the second story up collapsed inward.

A massive cloud of pitch and dust deluged over them all like a volcano’s flow.

Kairozdormu was too bewildered by this impossible, unforeseen development to think about protective magics in time. He choked and coughed on the ashes like everyone else, and as his eyes stung as if dunked in acid, Kairozdormu could not help but think of volcanoes and pyroclastic flows.

This rancid flavor, pitch mixed in with dust from the debris and the sulfur smell of rotten eggs – finally, the black dragon reveals itself! None of the visions had you acting in the open so blatantly, but if that’s how you want it, dear Onyx-

That wasn’t Onyxia.

The prophet’s spirits strained to keep the worst of the plume away so they didn’t all choke to death, but Kairozdormu no longer cared about that. He stared up and gaped at the hazy silhouette of a black she-dragon that wasn’t Onyxia.

What – how? It was Onyxia, I know it was – it should have been Onyxia, I saw it!

Dammit, was nothing seen in the timeways reliable anymore? He couldn’t even blame the inferior quality of bronze dragon scrying magics! He’d witnessed many variations of today’s events in the Caverns of Time in order to refine his plan, but they were variations, not completely different developments! He’d spent years setting things up after that, made every preparation, sent every feeler and laid every lure for this day. Nothing had been left to chance –

Fahrad’s redemption. The creation of Emerentius completely blindsided him…

But that shouldn’t matter! Not in such a short time window, and everything else had unfolded as he foresaw it. Perhaps not the prophet’s rejection of him, but Rheastrasza’s presence, and more importantly the way she got involved – everything unfolded exactly as he had foreseen. She was here, so was he, and with Korialstrasz and Onyxia somewhere within there was precisely one part left to play, and he’d made sure it would be a blue!

He’d painstakingly sent feelers and set lures for months to make it happen, before he hired himself on as a farmhand even, this made no sense! Who even was it if not-

“Curse you, human!” He heard her voice even before he saw it. “Curse you, but you’ve failed! You thought to bring this building down on me? We are the masters of flame and earth! We feast on searing metals and drink from magma streams, what is a house of stones and mortar? Nothing! And now you, too, are nothing! Hrgh – gckh! Pest!”

There was no man’s body that could be seen, and the dust cover was still so thick that no one could keep their eyes open for long without tearing up. Everyone was harshly choking and coughing… But you couldn’t miss or mistake the rasping, crazed timber of that monster, or the hacking sounds as she coughed up half a shield and some armor.

“No!” Lady Mara cried in anguish next to him, falling to her knees with hands over her mouth. “Ser Saidan!”

“Grrr – hrk – pah!” The black she-dragon retched and regurgitated an arm and a leg, one by one. “I’ll enjoy passing you, human, such insolence as yours – not for three hundred years have I – wait…”

Black scales, size so enormous that no one save Deathwing himself was bigger, that voice that sounded like her throat was scarred from fire despite that black dragons breathed it. Scarred – scars all over her body! Burns! Burns so hot and severe they’d even scarred a lava dweller! She was covered in them, that – this was –

“Who – oh – ohohohohoho!” Laughed the black she-dragon all of a sudden, he didn’t understand- “So that’s what you were really after! It’s not enough to bury me alive, you thought so deny me my vengeance! I see it now, you were stalling all along, you’re in league with him! You almost had me, what an insidious insect you are!”

“Sintharia,” Kairozdormu gasped through a sore throat. “Sinestra – Deathwing’s consort –“ The one that still lived – the only one who survived mating with the corrupted Aspect of the Earth, she was here?! “How – why her –? Here – this is bad! This is very, very bad!”

“Oh, how I’ve stewed and readied for revenge!” Rumbled lady Sinestra as her huge body was engulfed by the glow of shape change. “To have it denied me in the eleventh hour – no! I will not allow it!”

Inexplicably, Sintharia – Sinestra, or whatever name she went by now. She turned back into a human instead of continuing the rampage she clearly had no reservations about pursuing – she – she ran and vanished back into the keep? What?

“Accursed dragons!” Wayland’s hand split the smog with a screeching windshear. As his spirits blew the worst of the smog away and began collecting it in a whirlwind above the castle maze, he jumped straight from the top stairs of the castle into their midst. His oncoming form was like a white and golden spirit of wrath and vengeance, but his voice – it lacked its prior strength. “Light forbid we be allowed to solve our own problems! You just have to stick your noses into everything, even if it means breaking what little is left of the world! I need volunteers!”

Volunteers for what? Wayland couldn’t mean – this was no time for skewed priorities! That was – who was she wanting to – “Korialstrasz!” The realization finally found him. Kairozdormu tried to push himself up with the arm he didn’t have.

“Who said that? You – oh. Of course it’s you.” Wayland hurried over and knelt to help him sit up as best he could on a single leg. “What did you say? Who was that? Where is she going?”  

“Korialstrasz – Krasus, she wants revenge!” The heavens and hells all curse the black dragons, would they never be spared their insanity?! Kairozdormu could breathe again, and see again beyond thirty meters, but of the last dragon there was no sign. If Sinestra was here, then what about Onyxia? Where was that blasted wench?

Wayland grabbed his face with both hands. “Speak!”

“Lady Sinestra – Sintharia – she’s Deathwing’s consort. She tried to bring down the Kirin Tor some time ago, but Krasus stopped her. I don’t know why she waited so long, Krasus has been here for days, he even managed to see me in the dungeons, but – if she’s here, she’s not alone. Or she is, but she’s not the only one, Onyxia may also be here! She’s-”

“I know who she is,” Wayland let go and rubbed a hand over own his face, looking first angry, then frustrated, then bleak.

The resignation that stole over his features was enough to shock even Kairozdormu out of his frantic outrage. It – that wasn’t any mere dejection, it was despair sunk so deep that it circled all the way into toneless misery.

“What even is the point?” Wayland asked dismally, even he – even his will was spent? “Just to drive us into a corner? Why would we serve when we don’t even care enough to rule anymore? The world ended once already and their prisons are still there, this just means there’ll be less of us to fool into getting them loose. If you disenfranchise the young too much, we’ll burn the whole world down just to feel the heat.”

There had been plenty of anger and grief on the way out from the dungeons, from all the people, but those feelings were shattered now. Everyone now believed that Alterac’s royal house was controlled by evil black dragons.

Now those same feelings were as dead as their hopes. Such was the impact of seeing their holy saviour brought to despair.

Wayland closed his eyes, took a deep breath and slowly released it. “Be sober like the earth and you will not lack anything. The branch full of fruit is broken faster by wind, the seed too deep cannot push through and too much water crumbles its breath.” His eyes snapped open. “I need that debris moved, as much of it as you all can, dig out the bodies! I have enough left in me for one last calamity and one last miracle, but if they come back while still crushed and buried, I may as well be the first who falls to hell. I need volunteers!

“You have them!” Bravely proclaimed the Lady Mara, standing up at once. “Where would you have us?”

“I need people who know the castle, as many as possible, is there anyone who knows the secret ways? Some of them might still be open, if we can just find them-”

Shadows flowed out of someone Kairozdormu hadn’t thought twice about. The man blitzed through the crowd faster than you could draw a knife, left half a dozen dead in his wake and stopped on one knee before the saint. “Beg pardon, your holiness.” He said while a bunch of others did the same among the masses all over the yard. “We were hoping to find the last rotten apples, but if you need the secret ways, we know them best.”

“… Jorach. You were here all along. Of course you are.” Wayland covered his mouth, but couldn’t stop a short startled laugh slipping out. “I’ll be counting on you and yours, then – how many...?”

The answer turned out to be about a dozen assassins hidden among the crowd. Which were just the ones left after the holy smite took out the rest of the ones that Ravenholdt had brought along.

For the second time that day, Kairozdormu began to laugh. At the mess he was in, at the humans around him, at the young holy man who’d spoiled his grand scheme without even knowing about it, and most of all he laughed at himself.

With a wrench in his soul, his very spirit became fuel for a spell of temporal reversion.

His leg grew back. His arm too. At least that was what it looked like. His breath rattled with the effort, and the pain of using what dregs of spirit he still had in place of flesh, to revert his limbs to before the moment they were hewn.

Everyone but the prophet and his pet killers drew away in fright. Then further as they realized he was the source of the new mad cackling.

He was – so tired, the torture – the human form should be a healing reprieve when a dragon’s true form is grievously injured, it was no small thing to do the same in reverse. He – didn’t have enough to risk – shouldn’t try to turn back into a dragon in his state, he’d lost too much, the crippling, maiming – Perenolde had even found spirit-burning poisons, was that Sinestra’s influence as well?

“Kairozdormu…” Wayland said lowly . “You don’t have to do this.”

“Earlier, I tried – to leave the dome as you told me – but I was denied because I failed the test of courage.” Turning away, Kairozdormu exited the mass of humanity, magical shimmers coursing over his skin. “I didn’t understand it then, I never planned to leave to begin with, never intended to let anyone else decide the conclusion of this scheme of mine. How fitting that a saint should differentiate between courage and hubris!”

His change to his true form almost knocked him unconscious, such was the damage that had carried through. He – might have lost time regardless, he didn’t remember reaching the keep’s walls, or when he stopped half-way up the climb. With an effort of will, he clawed his way up to where Sintharia had burst through, took as deep a lungful of air as he ever had, and breathed the sands of time upon the ruin.

He didn’t remember stopping, but he must have. His footing was loose beneath him now, no more broken masonry and rubble littering the flooring still intact, mixed in with blood and rags. There was only the dust left at the end of entropic decay, and the untouched flesh of fresh human corpses safe inside beds of powder. Just as he’d wanted.

He fell more than climbed back down.

“That – should make it easier,” he groaned when he finally made out the Prophet and his devotees through his blurry sight, old and new. “Mortar and stone – it’s all dust now, save the bodies. Hurry now… The others – they won’t wait.”

Wayland punched his snout suddenly. “Don’t you dare pass out, you’re too big and heavy to move! At least get outside first-“

“I – won’t be able,” the dragon rasped, struggling to keep open just one eye. “That – wasn’t courage.”  

“… No,” Wayland said sadly, his hand more gentle now. “It wasn’t.”

“Do you know – Prophet – what the Aspects could do all together? And the Titan engines too! Curse Deathwing and his Demon Soul!”

If only Kairozdormu had been alive then, around to warn then not to give their powers to the traitor…

But would they have listened?

“The Aspect of Life is a record of all life in the world, anything could rebirth… Everything… Time – we bronze can scry the world as it was at any point in its history. With Dream – Ysera can fathom the entire world in her slumber, the Emerald Dream itself could become the world as it was before! If only the Earth had not betrayed us, he and the Magic together could refashion the Arcane itself according to its own pattern. Impose the Dream of the World-that-Was was upon the World-that-is! Can you imagine it?”

“… The Titan Forges,” Wayland understood, of course he did, if not him then who among the mortals even could? “Re-Origination but with extra steps – are you saying it’s possible to rewind time for the entire planet?”

Belatedly, the bronze dragon felt chagrin at just spilling his mad thoughts out in the open, two blacks were here, three if you counted the gold one. The Enemy – it always listened – had surely listened in – oh.

There was the Light and the Wind and hot mists around the two of them, Wayland had already taken steps to prevent anyone else from hearing or seeing them converse.

“I’m saying,” the dragon struggled to say before he forgot. “That I think it’s already been done.” He locked his eye on the human’s face. “You were not meant to exist, and the Infinites vanished from time the moment you began to form in your mother’s womb. The future we knew, the one that Nozdormu once knew – it’s gone.”

“Because it’s all in the past after you lot reset the world?” Instead of being thunderstruck by revelation, the young prophet was skeptical and – and something – what? “… No, I don’t think so.”

What was he – “You would just dismiss-“

“If something like that did ever happen, I doubt it happened here. Either way, it has nothing to do with me. I came over here all on my own.”

The dragon’s thoughts skittered ungainly. What did he mean – ah… The Light… it soothed his pains like the flames of life never could, it was… so –  “Nooo…” Kairozdormu moaned, rolling over and away, out of the sight and sound concealing bubble. “Don’t – the relief – leave the pain, I – I don’t dare pass out any more than you want me to. Just – need a moment…”

“… You and you, watch him. The rest of you, bring down the corpses, you needn’t be too gentle, just do your best to keep them in one piece. Lady Mara, Lady Valea, your majesties, I hate to say this but you need to pause the evacuation.”

“We understand,” came the gravelly voice of Archibald Greymane. “We need to keep numerical superiority, or the rotten ones will try to take us down with them again.”

“Father, you leave, I will stay and-“

“And nothing! I’m old, the future of our house is with you now.”

“How will we know when to leave?” Twinblades asked over the argument.

“When it’s time, everyone will know, I’ll make sure of it. If he can’t move on his own by then, save yourselves.”

“We will, do not worry for us,” said Lady Mara. “Lightspeed, your holiness.”

“Nowhere near that fast, I’m afraid.”

Kairozdormu thought that would be it, but it wasn’t. Instead, he felt Wayland’s hand on the back of his neck. “Kairozdormu, if you meant anything of what you ever told me-“

The dragon grunted. “Everything.”

“Then live. And when this is over, go ask Nozdormu if the Caverns make it possible to use portals that don’t yet exist. He’ll understand.”

Wayland turned and ran into the keep and out of hearing before Kairozdormu had a chance to reply.

Soon after, the only sounds were tromping feet, tired grunts, bodies being dragged, and calls for help and care as the humans set about their grim work.

The bronze dragon only realized he had passed out when he was abruptly snapped back awake.

Alterac Keep was rumbling like it only had when Sinestra broke it, and a mighty clangour sounded through its front doors. Roars, screams, crashes and explosions, intermixed with words muffled by wafts of cold and hot winds mixed together. Every once in a while, the castle lost another shingle or window. The noises came and they went, and came and went again, but didn’t cease.

Kairozdormu sunk his claws into the earth and made to rise. Somehow, he found the strength.

But not the will.

He – he’d definitely go in and lend his useless assistance to a cause he was virtually guaranteed not to survive anymore.

Just – just give him five more minutes.