The Last Guardian (29 page)

Medivh snarled and raised a clawed hand, mystic energy dancing in his palm. Lothar screamed as his clothes suddenly burst into flames. Medivh smiled at his handiwork, then waved his hand, tossing the burning form of Lothar aside like a rag doll.

“Just. Gets. Easier,” said Medivh, biting off the words and turning back to where Khadgar had been kneeling.

Except Khadgar had moved. Medivh turned to find the no-longer young mage right behind him, with the sword Lothar had provided drawn and pressed against the Magus’s left breast. The runes along the blade glowed like miniature suns.

“Don’t even blink,” said Khadgar.

A moment paused, and a bead of sweat trickled down Medivh’s cheek.

“So it comes to this,” said the Magus. “I don’t think you have the skill or the will to use that properly, Young Trust.”

“I think,” said Khadgar, and it seemed that his voice wheezed and burbled as he spoke, “that the human part of you, Medivh, kept others around despite your own plans. As a backup. As a plan for when you finally went mad. So your friends could put you down. So we could break the cycle where you cannot.”

Medivh managed a small sigh, and his features softened. “I never meant to really harm anyone,”

he said.

“I only wanted to have my own life.” As he spoke, he jerked his hand upward, his palm glowing with mystic energy, seeking to scramble Khadgar’s mind as he had Garona’s.

Medivh never got the chance. At the first flinch, Khadgar lunged forward, driving the thin blade of the runesword between Medivh’s ribs, into the heart.

Medivh looked surprised, even shocked, but his mouth still moved. He was trying to say something.

Khadgar drove the blade home to the hilt, the tip erupting from the back of the mage’s robes.

The mage sunk to his knees, and Khadgar dropped with him as well, keeping his hands firmly locked on the blade.

The old mage gasped and struggled to say something.

“Thank you,” he managed at last. “I fought it for as long as I could….”

Then the master mage’s face began to transform, the beard turning fully to flame, the horns sprouting from his brow. With the death of Medivh, Sargeras finally came fully to the surface.

Khadgar felt the hilt of the runeblade grow warm, as the fires danced along Medivh’s flesh, transforming him to a thing of shadow and flame.

Behind the kneeling, wounded Magus, Khadgar could see the smoldering form of Lothar rise once more. The Champion stumbled forward, his flesh and armor still smoking. He raised his runeblade once more, and brought it across in a hard, level swing.

The edge of the blade burst like a sun as it struck Medivh’s neck, and severed the master mage’s head from the neck in one smooth blow.

It was like unstoppering a bottle, for everything within Medivh rushed out at once through ragged remnants of his neck. A great torrent of energy and light, shadow and fire, smoke and rage, all spilling upward like a fountain, splashing against the ceiling of the underground vault, and dissipating away.

Within the seething caldron of energies, Khadgar thought he could make out a horned face, crying in despair and rage.

And when it was over, all that was left was the skin and clothes of the Magus. All that was within
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him had been eaten away, and now that his human form had been ripped asunder, there was no way to contain it.

Lothar used the tip of his sword to stir aside the rags and flesh that had been Medivh and said,

“We need to go.”

Khadgar looked around. There was no sign of Garona. The Magus’s head had boiled away all the flesh, leaving only a glistening red-white skull.

The former apprentice shook his head. “I need to stay here. Attend to a few things.”

Lothar growled, “The greatest danger may be passed, but the obvious one is still there. We have to drive back the orcs and close the portal.”

Khadgar thought of the vision, of Stormwind burning and Llane’s death. He thought of his own vision, of his now-aged form in final battle with the orcs. Instead he said, “I must bury what’s left of Medivh. I

should find Garona. She couldn’t have gone far.”

Lothar grunted an assent and shambled toward the entrance. At last he turned and said, “It couldn’t have been helped, you know. We tried to alter it, but it was all part of a larger scheme.”

Khadgar nodded slowly, “I know. All part of a greater cycle. A cycle that now at last may be broken.”

Lothar left the former apprentice beneath the citadel, and Khadgar gathered up what was left of the physical remains of the Magus. He found a shovel and a wooden box in the stable. He put the skull and the bits of skin in the box with the tattered remains of “The Song of Aegwynn,”

and buried them all deep in the courtyard in view of the tower. Perhaps later he would raise a monument, but for the time being it would be best to not let others know where the master mage’s remains were. After he had finished burying the Magus, he dug two more graves, human-sized, and laid Moroes and Cook to rest to one side of Medivh.

He let out a deep sigh, and looked up at the tower. White-stoned Karazhan, home of the most mighty mage of Azeroth, the Last Guardian of the Order of Tirisfal loomed above him. Behind him the sky was lightening, and the sun threatened to touch the topmost level of the tower.

Something else caught his eye, above the empty, entrance hall, along the balcony overlooking the main entrance. A bit of movement, a fragment of a dream. Khadgar let out a deeper sigh and nodded at the ghostly trespasser that watched his every move.

“I can see you, now, you know,” he said aloud.

The trespasser from the future looked down from the balcony at the no-longer young man of the past.

“How long have you been able to see me?” asked the trespasser.

“I have felt bits of you as long as I have been here,” said Khadgar. “From my first day. How long have you been there?”

“Most of an evening,” said the trespasser in his tattered red robes. “The dawn is coming up here.”

“Here as well,” said the former apprentice. “Perhaps that is why we can talk. You are a vision, but different than any I have seen before. We can see each other and converse. Are you future or past?”

“Future,” said the trespasser. “Do you know who I am?”

“Your form is different than when I last saw you, you are younger, and calmer, but yes, I know,”

said

Khadgar. He motioned toward the three heaps of turned earth—two large and one small. “I thought I

just buried you.”

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“You did,” said the trespasser. “At least you buried much of what was the worst about me.”

“And now you’re back. Or you will be back,” said Khadgar. “Different, but the same.”

The trespasser nodded. “In many ways, I was never here the first time around.”

“More is the pity,” said Khadgar. “So what are you in the future? Magus? Guardian? Demon?”

“Be reassured. I am a better being than I was,” said the trespasser. “I am free of the taint of Sargeras thanks to your actions this day. Now I may deal directly with the Lord of the Burning Legion. Thank you.

There cannot be success without sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice,” said Khadgar, the words bitter in his mouth. “Tell me this then, ghost of the future.

Is all that we have seen true? Will Stormwind truly fall? Will Garona slay King Llane? Must I die, in this aged flesh, in some nether-spawned land?”

The being on the balcony paused for a long moment, and Khadgar feared that he would fade away.

Instead he said, “As long as there are Guardians, there is Order. And as long as there is Order, the parts are there to be played. Decisions made millennia ago set both your path and mine. It is part of greater cycle, one that has held us all in its sway.”

Khadgar craned his head upward. The sun was now touching the top half of the tower. “Perhaps there should not be Guardians then, if this has been the price.”

“Agreed,” said the trespasser, and as the strong light of day began to grow, he began to fade.

“But for the moment, for your moment, we must all play our part. We all must pay this price.

And then, when we have the chance, we will start anew.”

And with that the trespasser was gone, the last fragments of his being swept back into the future by an errant wind of magic.

Khadgar shook his aged head and looked at the three newly-dug graves. Lothar’s surviving men took their dead and wounded back with them to Stormwind. There was no sign of Garona, and though

Khadgar would search the tower once more, he doubted that she was within. He would take what books he thought were valuable, what supplies he could, and set protective wards over the rest. Then he would leave as well, and follow Lothar into battle.

Hefting his shovel, he walked back into the now-abandoned keep of Karazhan, and wondered if he would ever return.

As the trespasser spoke a small breeze kicked up, a mere churning of the leaves, but it was enough to scatter the vision. The no-longer young man broke up and faded like dying fog, and the no-longer old man watched him go.

A single tear ran down the side of Medivh’s face. So much sacrifice, so much pain. Both to keep the plan of the Guardians in place, and then so much sacrifice to break that plan, to break the world free of its lock-step. To bring about true peace.

And now, even that was at risk. Now one more sacrifice would have to be made. He would have to pull the power from this place if he would succeed in what was to come. In the final conflict with the Burning

Legion.

The sun had risen farther now, and was almost to the level of his balcony. He would have to work quickly now.

He raised a hand, and the clouds began to swirl above the peak of the tower. Slowly first, then more

quickly, until the upper ranges of the tower itself were encased within a hurricane.

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Now he reached deep within himself, and released the words, words made up of equal parts regret and anger, words caught within him since the day that his life ended the first time. Words that laid claim to the whole of that previous life, for good and ill. Accepting its power, and in doing so, accepting the responsibility for what was done the last time he wore flesh.

The hurricane around the tower howled, and the tower itself resisted his claim. He stated it again, and then a third time, shouting to be heard over the winds that he himself had summoned.

Slowly, almost grudgingly, the tower gave up its secrets.

The power burned from within the stones and mortars, and leached outward, channeled by the force of the winds toward the base, toward Medivh. All the visions began to bubble loose of its fabric, and stream downward. The fall of Sargeras, with its hundreds of screaming demons, fell in on him, as did the final conflict with Aegwynn and Khadgar’s own battle beneath the dull red sun. Medivh’s appearance before Gul’dan and the boyish battles of three young nobles and Moroes breaking Cook’s favorite crystal, all were pulled into him. And with those visions came memories, and with those memories responsibilities. This must be avoided. This must never happen again. This must be corrected.

So too did the images and power leach upward from the hidden tower, from the pits beneath the tower itself. The fall of Stormwind flamed upward at him, and the death of Llane, and the myriad demons summoned in the middle of the night and unleashed against those in the Order too close to the truth. All of them fountained upward and were consumed within the form of the mage standing on the balcony.

All the shards, all the pieces of history, known and unrevealed, spiraled down the tower or rose from its dungeons and flowed into the man who had been the Last Guardian of Tirisfal. The pain was great, but

Medivh grimaced and accepted it, taking the energy and the bittersweet memories it bore with equal measure.

The last image to fade was the one beneath the balcony itself, an image of a young man, a rucksack at his feet, a letter marked with the crimson seal of the Kirin Tor, hope in his heart and butterflies in his stomach. That youth was the last to fade, as he moved slowly toward the entrance, the magic surrounding his vision, his shard of the past, spiraled upward, unraveling him and letting the energy pass into the former Magus. As the last bit of Khadgar fell into him, a tear pooled at the corner of Medivh’s eye.

Medivh held both hands to his chest tightly, containing all that he had regained. The tower of Karazhan was just a tower now, a pile of stone in the remote reaches, far from the traveled paths. Now the power of the place was within him. And the responsibility to do better with it, this time.

“And so we start anew,” says Medivh.

And with that, he transformed into a raven, and was gone.

About the Author

Jeff Grubb is the author ofStarcraft: Liberty’s Crusade. He is also author or coauthor of books in the

Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Magic: The Gathering Lines. His job is building worlds, his hobby is explaining them to other people. He lives in Seattle with his wife and oft-times cowriter Kate Novak, and two cats.

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