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.