With an effort of will, he sent himself flashing along the trail, faster than light, quick as thought, until he found the first connecting portal. He descended from the Nether and flashed over a world. He looked upon a desert where once fields had grown, cemetery cities where unburied bodies clogged the streets. Eerie green energy flickered from disrupted portals. Amid the ruins imps frolicked and shouted obscenities. One or two sensed his proximity and peered about them as if nearsighted. In the distance an infernal lumbered, all blazing skin and burning rock for limbs.
He flashed from place to place, finding no sign of life, witnessing only destruction. He flowed past bunkers where the skeletons of creatures smaller than elves lay beside the alien weapons that had not saved them. He flashed past suits of corroded mirrored armor and the wreckage of burned-out battle machines.
War had blasted the landscape, slicing off the tops of hills, turning fertile plains to sheets of glass. The mad ghosts of a sad people keened songs of defeat and despair. Nothing lived save a few demons that had been stranded when the Burning Legion moved on to its next conquest, or had been left to stand guard over the waypoints of the Legion’s march.
Mountains had been carved to resemble dreadlords. A moat of bones surrounded the corpse of a city the size of a nation. A giant animated skeleton rose from the ossuary sea and clawed its way over a mountain of ribs and skulls and thighbones, until its spark of necromantic energy faded and it tumbled back into the mass from which it had emerged.
He followed the trail of his spell through another portal and emerged onto a different world. Water had once covered its surface, but now the ocean was red as blood, filled with poisons that had killed the whale-sized inhabitants. Massive rafts woven from dead kelp rotted on the surface. The corpses of merfolk were entwined around them. The cadavers of creatures the size of cities decomposed on the ocean floor, surrounded by the skeletons of the aquatic armies that had once guarded them. Nothing lived, not even the smallest particle of plankton. The air itself was turning poisonous without plants to purify it and keep it alive. He passed through another portal.
A world of deserts and fire. Here and there he came upon the bones of wandering tribespeople and their pack animals. The wells of every oasis had been poisoned. The sun blazed down on an empty landscape of shifting dunes, to which only the wind gave animation. Sometimes they crumbled to reveal the skeletons of great armored worms or the acid-pitted ruins of brass skyscrapers.
On and on his spirit flashed, passing through dead world after dead world, monuments to the eternal malice of the Burning Legion. Everywhere lay ruin. This would be the fate of Azeroth and Outland and the few remaining living worlds once the Burning Legion attacked. He searched for traces of life and found nothing, not even a cockroach or a rat. Sargeras’s army had set out to cleanse these places of every living thing and it had succeeded.
Illidan had known what to expect and still it appalled him, this senseless, monstrous violence, this hatred of all life, this wanton murder of world after world after world. He had been a fighter all his days. He had fought and killed and hated, but still he struggled to imagine what drove the Burning Legion to this.
Here and there he came upon hubs where the ways split and the paths of conquest led onward across multiple routes to multiple worlds. Always his spell guided him, his spirit questing through infinite worlds, seeking, seeking, seeking…
He lost all track of time. He had no idea whether a hundred seconds or a hundred years had passed back upon the world where his body waited. Perhaps he was already dead and his spirit was doomed to wander these infinite wastelands, a spectral witness to the doom of countless worlds.
He passed through another gate, despairing, hopeless, certain that he had miscalculated. This one was an odd place, a collection of rocks imbued with potent magic, floating amid the infinite void of the Twisting Nether. A tiny sun orbited it every few minutes. Dozens of miniature glowing moons followed it. Bits of rock floated in the air, held aloft by the power of magic. Potent energies saturated this place, were sunk into the very fabric of the world, and they were not the only thing here. In the distance, amid the rocks, he sensed the presence of demons of a very specific sort: nathrezim.
Was it possible he had finally found what he was looking for: Nathreza, the home of the dreadlords?
Hundreds of dreadlords were certainly here, and thousands of their servants. Cautiously he advanced. The nathrezim were creatures of power, with a near-unparalleled capacity for working magic. They would have no difficulty detecting his spirit form unless he was very, very careful. Even now Illidan thought he sensed something watching. He froze. Nothing happened. The dreadlords did not respond to his presence. Perhaps it was nothing, merely his own too-wary mind.
His bodiless state prevented him from feeling any of the physical expressions of excitement. His heart did not race. His mouth did not go dry. A cold feeling of triumph filled him. He had found it. The place he had always suspected existed was here.
Do not be too certain, he cautioned himself. You do not know that yet. You need confirmation. He drifted closer to the presence of the dreadlords, following the lay of the land and the pattern of the rocks, weaving spells of concealment and misdirection around himself. His spirit was strong but not as strong as it was when it occupied his body. There were beings here who could end his existence if they spotted him.
He searched for any spells that might alert the inhabitants to his presence. A city of basalt towers lit by the flare of green fel lanterns stood before him. Disks of basalt rose up the sides of buildings. Huge dreadlords flapped across the skies. It was odd to see so many sentient beings after passing across so many dead worlds.
He saw palaces where nathrezim planned the destruction of worlds, the enslavement of civilizations, where the end of all existence was plotted by beings sworn to the service of Sargeras. Servitors guided odd machines on unguessable errands. In the center of it all stood one gigantic windowless tower amid a grid of energy flows. Baleful green runes lit up its sides. Legions of servitors came and went. No doubt about it; he had found what he sought. Gul’dan’s visions had not lied.
He made careful calculations of the position and pattern of the gates that had carried him here, studying the astrological significance of the stars that glittered in the sky; then, when he was certain he had fixed in his mind all the information he had come here to find, he terminated the spell of spirit walking. The silver cord tightened and drew him with unimaginable speed back to his body.
Heavy flesh and dense bone imprisoned him once more. Air thundered back into his lungs. He stretched, reveling in the feel of muscles answering the commands of his will. He took a deep breath, identifying the scents. A smile flickered across his face.
Now he would take the war to the Burning Legion. Now he would make his enemies pay. All of them.
15
Maiev ducked the ogre’s blow and sliced his stomach open with the return stroke of her blade. The creature gave an idiotic chuckle and clutched at his intestines with one meaty hand, trying to hold them in. With his free hand, he brought his massive club swinging back. She jumped over the tree-trunk-sized weapon. There were times when she thought it was true what they said about ogres, that the creatures felt no pain.
Anyndra threw herself out of the way, but tripped over a clutching root and stumbled back into the murky water. Sarius growled. His cat form emerged from the shadows and pounced on the ogre’s back. Claws raked, drawing blood. Maiev focused her power, blinked through the intervening space. She aimed a blow at the jugular. Blood sprayed. This time the ogre fell. Anyndra rolled clear of the tumbling corpse and stood. Algae-discolored water streamed from her hair and turned her tunic a muddy brown.