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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.

Chapter Text

Anduin didn’t want to wake up.

He’d not wanted to sleep, either, and had kept himself rooted to consciousness for a full three days before he’d no longer had the strength to tell the warden of his prison that he did not want to have the nightmares again.

When he dreamed of them, the timeline of his abduction and the death of the black dragon Onyxia occurred out of order, contained scenes he knew for a certainty had never happened, and proceeded piecemeal, jittering and stuttering like a cart on an uneven track.  His perspective only sometimes started at the very beginning, when the only vaguely maternal figure he had ever known threw back the door of his bedchamber with such strength that it cracked at the hinges.  But when he lurched upright in his bed, hot fear shattering the haze of his sleep when he spied Wyll lying still in the drawing room behind Katrana Prestor, what followed was not his weak, confused shouts for a father that had gone missing.  He was miles away suddenly, thrown into a pit filled with small bones and fragments of shell that cracked and snapped whenever he tried to find his feet.  By that time, exhaustion, thirst, and terror had destroyed his voice but he’d still had enough strength to jump and claw at the sides of the whelpling grave until her voice, her terrible voice like great stones grinding together, sent him huddling down into the dirt and remains with his shaking arms tight over his head.

SILENCE.

SILENCE, OR YOU WILL JOIN THE OTHERS.

The dead whelps bit and scratched at his ankles.  They clawed up his calves and rasped squalling cries like those of an infant.  He knew what a dragon whelp sounded like; he did know, now, but they nonetheless screamed and begged that he look at them, that he take them with him when his father and two score of the kingdom’s finest came to cut his mother’s head loose from her thrashing neck.

That wasn’t right, but that was how he dreamed it.

She was stroking back his hair and putting him to bed at the same time that her claws cut through metal, mail, leather, and flesh in one deft swipe, men and women toppling before her like the tin soldiers she had given him the first Winter Veil after his father had disappeared.  She was using her tail to crush a man in Stormwind blues up against the steaming wall, cooking him in his armor well before the haggard priest tossed a tether out to save him, but she was also telling him that it was alright to be frightened of the wide, high throne, because she was there to help him ascend the steps to reach it.  Her bellowing shook the very ground beneath him, her paws sliding through the hot blood that had come to slick the sizzling earth, but she had also pressed a sweet into his palm with gentle, conspiratorial fingers and said that she and his father were just going to have a conversation for a little while.  When she came close, she did not stink of brimstone and meat, as the twitching head on the wide pallet had, and instead smelled of violets, syrups, and sweet milk, the mixture of her perfume and the little treat she’d brought with his breakfast so that he could sip from the warm cup and listen to her tell him how well he had done for her.

DO AS I SAY.

YOU ARE KING.

DO AS I SAY, OR YOU WILL JOIN THE OTHERS.

Then it all began once again and he was pressed against the far wall of the great hall, sweat pouring down his neck and back from heat that seethed off the black scales and the molten bed of the dragon’s howling mouth.  Hulking dragonspawn that had been human mere moments before stood between himself and the two men that were simultaneously his father.  It wasn’t until the nightmare that he made the nauseating association between the two faces of his only family in the world and the darkly-painted lips that had split open to reveal yellowed fangs.  They couldn’t just be one or the other, could they.  He couldn’t have the father that was noble and clever and burdened but not broken by the tragedies of his early life, he must instead have the one treading a thin line of vicious temper that would never reveal if it was the unnatural consequence of a sundered soul or merely the nature that everyone was too polite to tell him had always existed.  There was a father he’d never known, the one that Varian had been before the riots and the stone, and there were a few nights, a few lonely moments, when aimless resentment tightened his throat and made him have to rub against his eye with the root of his palm.

He was sorry.  He was sorry that he’d thought that and felt that way.  He hadn’t meant to be weak and he hadn’t meant to be selfish and he was, even while dreaming, standing straight and tall despite how the stench of blood was going to make him ill.  However the dream might try to convince him otherwise, he knew that he’d not just been a victim.  He hadn’t just let her have her way.  He’d known something was wrong and lacking the power to do anything himself, he had gone to those that could.

Anduin would tell his father, he would tell both of them when this was done and he could reach out and take the wide, rough hands that were in every way identical and so equal in his heart, that he held no grudge and no anger.  It was only her.  It was only his mother.  That wasn’t right, but that was how it was when he tried to remember how things were supposed to really go.  There had never been a time when she wasn’t a constant presence in his life, the other members of the House of Nobles fading into inconsequential ghosts.  He couldn’t go anywhere in the halls of the Keep without her chasing his shadow, taking too long to speak and then lingering beyond the borders of propriety until someone else, until Wyll or Turalyon or Bolvar, came and asked after him, though it couldn’t have possibly been Turalyon because he was gone, he’d been gone for years and they had never met.  But Wyll was unconscious in the drawing room and Turalyon had been exchanged for a simulacrum of the Light that only looked like the man that Anduin never knew and Bolvar was burning, right there beside the entrance of the hall, a dozen clashing bodies between them and yet close enough for him to hear every word that he said.

“I had to kill her, Anduin,” Bolvar said, magma dripping from his cracked lips. “She took all her secrets with her.”

The dream leaped away.

It was the world that split then, evenly divided between the black mirror below and the dazzling heavens above, the cathedral of the night sweetly adorned by ten thousand, thousand pinpricks of cold light that would last longer than any prayer candle that he might hold in solemn contemplation.  His eyes had adjusted hours prior, though the frigid and glancing wind still made him squint and fight against a new rush of tears, and if he was careful, if he did not shift overmuch within the cage of scale and claw, he could glance upward.  He could spy the belt of celestial clouds and see how it shifted by steady yet fantastically minuscule degrees, a phenomena that he had only read about before but had never been graced with the opportunity to witness himself.  He had never doubted the testimonials of the sailors that wove their stories about life at sea and the wonders it showed them nor the precise equations and measurements that scholars from Kul Tiras had used to prove not only the veracity of the tales, but the exact curvature and diameter of the planet.  It was simply that he had never dared to dream that he would see it for himself, not then, not when his world began in the Keep and ended at the harbor and the southern wall.

She had let him look.  She must have.  No matter how careful he was, he was still clumsy from the cold and dangerously lightheaded from the thin atmosphere.  She had to feel his squirming against the hot, thick pads of her paw, that mix of scale and skin that was the only thing that kept him alive through the flight from the Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor.  That wasn’t right, because she had used magic to cross from one continent to the other, but the dream continued to insist that it was a journey of hours, just her and just him.

She had to feel it when he wriggled in her arms and told her that he was too old to be held even if the steps were narrow, which existed at the same time in the same way that Varian and Lo’Gosh would until the end of his father’s life.  The paired realities did not jockey for space, but slipped into one another, water droplets in a basin or torchlights held together.  His mother and the woman that could never be her because he had saved his father from her in the end, cradled one another in the cathedral of his mind to match the moons that embraced at the very edge of the horizon.  The White Lady and the Blue Child would linger even as the empyrean river faded at first light and he would twist and crane his neck so that he could watch them in the growing dawn while held against the vast and pulsing breast of a dragon.

Anduin could have looked below and seen it all in the mirror, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

He closed his eyes and whispered a prayer to any that would listen that he could not stand to be asleep, nor could he stand to be awake.  He asked, he begged, for a succor that would somehow be neither.

I PROMISED I’D SHOW YOU SIGHTS UNSEEN, DIDN’T I?

The walls of Anduin’s prison rippled, claws pressing into soil and a tail dragging along in a slow curve until it bumped into something as brittle and breakable as old leaves.

THAT WAS MY CHAIR.

His warden made a thick, inhuman noise, its bloated tongue worming pitifully against sharp and slippery teeth.  It pricked itself; blood that tasted of ash ran down its lip.

WE WOULD GO ON A JOURNEY.

THAT WASN’T HOW IT HAPPENED, BUT I CAME TO HELP.

In defiance of his prayers, Anduin was going to have to be awake.  Someone was making it so that he could only be awake, because no matter how the events might play out in his dreams or in his memory, Wrathion could never exist in them.  He was younger than Anduin.  He’d not yet been born when the first of the worst days of Anduin’s life had happened, and whenever Anduin brought it up he would scowl to this day in the exact same way he had when they were boys and the only bad thing that had happened between them was that the whelp in the shape of a foreign prince had been caught cheating again.

ANDUIN.

He opened his eyes.

“Anduin.”

Wrathion was standing above him, looking down toward where Anduin’s chin dragged against the dirt, and yet was so small in shape and stature that a violent swell of vertigo slammed his eyelids back shut again.

All three of them.  The two innermost slithered like wet vellum.  He felt sick, but rather than the gorge a man might expect to rise in his throat, bubbles of gooey heat popped on his tongue and in his gullet in an acidic expression of anxiety and panic.  He had retched lava every flopping step from the gardens to the dairy yard and he would do so again here, he could feel the tumbling of uneven slabs of rock growing in the depths of his belly.  They would break against one another.  They would heat.  They would bubble.  They would rise, and he couldn’t – 

“Now, now.  Enough of that.”

Wrathion didn’t touch him.  As far as Anduin knew, he had not so much as moved and certainly had not raised his voice above that of pleasant afternoon conversation.

“You haven’t the energy to spare.”

But he was…doing something.

It could only be him.  Anduin was sure not because he knew what was happening, since he didn’t: the slow broiling simply ended and in its place was a pressure somewhere along his long, long spine, or maybe against the roof of his mouth, or the back of his skull.  He had no frame of reference he could use to describe it; it was not like the Light, which filled and sang, and not like the Void, which stole and whispered, and in his struggling he might guess that it was arcane.  There was a mechanism to it.  Purpose, such as might be inscribed in tomes or upon jewels to achieve a desired effect.  Joints were popping in his limbs in careful sequence and tension eased out of him in a steadying wave, vast plains of muscles being made to slide under his skin like…

Oh.  That was it.  He had learned about tectonics in Ironforge.  The crust of the world had been and would always be in motion, not the violent upheaval of the Sundering but something more natural, more integral to the geological lifecycle of the planet.  His dwarven tutor had been very proud to say that generations of careful record-keeping in the lowest reaches of their subterranean home had allowed them to extrapolate just where these immense plates might be in ten thousand years’ time.  Of course Anduin had to immediately ask where that was.

Oh, ‘bout a step or two that way, had been the reply, the great big tufts of white mustache flicking off to Anduin’s right.

The earth moved on timescales that not even Turalyon could endure.  The Prophet perhaps could, though Anduin would not ask of him one day more than he’d already given to living.  Tyrande and Malfurion might have noticed the slow shifting of the world, both before and after the ruinous conclusion to the War of the Ancients, but all the years that they had lived were, to Azeroth, a mere step or two.  When Anduin really thought about it, which he had to do since there was no throwing off the yoke of his curiosity, it might be that only beings such as the naaru, or the Titans, could bear witness to the eons it would take for the planet to reshape Herself into something entirely new.

Though, and this he had forgotten to consider as he slumped against the dirt and listed slightly to the side, he could not dismiss the possibility that for a dragon the task might not be so insurmountable.  A dragon could, and had, lived for ten times the years the draenei had spent in exile, though Anduin wasn’t supposed to know that.  Wrathion had murmured that crown jewel of forbidden knowledge over lotus seed buns and afternoon tea held on the back terrace of the Tavern, loftily proclaiming that to serve their own ends the Aspects had long hidden the true scope of their lives and mission from the mortal races.  He’d not provided an explanation of how he had come to know that, or any way that Anduin might check his claims against material evidence.  Anduin would just have to take his word for it.

He hadn’t, but if he still lacked the proofs he needed to believe him and had not received them from the mouths of the Aspects themselves after the blooming of Amirdrassil, he could in this moment be convinced that Wrathion did really know what he was talking about.

“That is much better, isn’t it?”

Wrathion had gently guided the geological pandemonium that had overtaken what was now Anduin’s earthly body.  Being so much smaller than Azeroth, Anduin was proven to be able to shift into a shape that was not shattering against itself in but the span of a few minutes, though those minutes had felt like at least one eon to him.  He didn’t know how Wrathion had done it.  He didn’t know anything and the terror of not knowing threatened to churn in the deep chamber of his body where the hellfire’s heat refused to die.

But it was just that.  A threat.

Anduin kept himself very still and slowly opened his eyes again.

Wrathion had moved a few paces away, which helped with the dizzying feeling that had overtaken Anduin before.  Anduin’s field of vision could only be likened to a telescope that somehow spanned half of his skull: without looking away from Wrathion, he could see the side of the barn that would have been visible only out of the very corner of his eye.  Enough time had passed that when he thought his eyes were about to water and ache, they didn’t; his mind thought that they should, but they didn’t.  The phantom demands from the body that he didn’t have wanted to put that acidic taste back upon his tongue, but there was something else to focus on now.

He had never seen Wrathion with his shirtsleeves rolled up like that.  He’d only ever been impeccably and purposefully dressed; if he was unkempt, it was because he had wanted to be.  Or nude.

What felt like a rock the size of a man’s fist turned over in his middle.  He didn’t know what that meant, so he tried to ignore it.  Staring at Wrathion allowed him to just think that the riding trousers and the equestrian boots were odd on him yet not unpleasant.  He had always favored certain styles out of hotter countries, so the choice of purely Stormwindian attire was just interesting enough to keep him calm.  Though he did – 

He wanted to ask him about it.  He wanted to ask who had loaned him those clothes.  He wanted to and yet his claws could only sink slowly into the dirt…and…

“I’ve been told you haven’t been able to speak.”

Anduin grew still again.  Wrathion gave him a mild, cordial smile, as though he’d just been told that Anduin would be late for lunch and not that he was rendered mute, helpless, half-mad, and dangerous to everyone around him.

“From Greymane’s lugubrious expression at the time, one might think Anduin Wrynn was dead outright and not napping in the dairy yard.”

Anduin blinked at him.  It was the first set of eyelids, those more like what an eyelid should actually be like, if more stiff and too dry.

“He and I had a bit of a row after that.  My argument was that he should not be so old as to have forgotten that he’d had to find some way to speak as a wolf.”

Yes, that…that was rather true, wasn’t it?  Genn never did like to speak about the fall of Gilneas except in the most basic of terms.  Anduin had of course never pressed him.  The loss that he had experienced, both as a father and as a king, had demanded of him nights uncountable away from his wife, his daughter, his people, and Anduin, too, as if in the solitude he might meet his ghosts and if not reconcile, then bear again the burden of their deaths.  How could Anduin demand he relive what had put his loved ones in their graves, when he already did so and would continue to do for what would possibly be the rest of his natural life?

That was what Anduin thought of when he thought of Genn and the worgen until Wrathion had spoken of them from a perspective never considered.  Anduin didn’t know how, he didn’t think that he moved, but somehow Wrathion went on, as if Anduin had mentioned this revelation to him.

“When we think of transformation, the first and easiest example would be a druid or a shaman, no?”

Yes, they would.  Anduin would.  And when he did, it was with the understanding that such acts were the intended result of long study, training, and communication with nature or the elements, respectfully.  A panther would not be anything like a night elf and a ghost wolf was not even alive, but the practitioners would be prepared to step out of themselves and into another existence entirely.  They would give everything of themselves in exchange and everything now held a weight Anduin could only consider hypothetically before, when he didn’t know what it was like to lose his fingers, his eyes, his breath, and his heartbeat.  Those perpetual, concrete definitions of himself, now cut out and replaced.

For a druid or a shaman to willingly yield themselves in such a way would require incredible self-discipline and self-image.

“Exactly.  Tremendous effort is given into adapting to these forms.  Our cantankerous friend, however, was cursed.”

It was true, and Genn had never told him when it had happened, though surely it must have happened alongside his people during the fall  – 

“It was before, actually.  Some months before, but don’t tell him that I know.  His patience is already worn dreadfully thin.”

I won’t.  He doesn’t need an argument with you while dead on his feet.

“I agree.  He has been sent to his bed, though how long he will stay there may depend on your wellbeing.”

…he should rest.  He and the others have already tried so much.

“Yes.  But not everything.  Anduin, look at me.”

Wrathion had come closer again.  Anduin’s eyes had to lift to meet his.

“How long do you think it took for Greymane to learn to speak as a worgen?”

“Knowing him, no more than three –”

Anduin stopped.  Wrathion waited for him, saying no more while the tremor passed through Anduin’s body, rocking first in his shoulders before traveling down and down that long, hunched spine.  His mind told him where it should stop and that was well before it did, the ripple of surprise and alarm and unease traveling beyond the boundaries of the ghostly human self that persisted in stubborn delusion somewhere inside the crucible of the dragon’s body.  It was akin to feeling a shiver from across the room or out the door; it was just so far and it took so long.  Forever had to pass before the fin on the end of the leaden tail shifted slightly and only then was it over.

“I…I…how…”

The sizzling sensation began again a mile down his throat, but Wrathion spoke and Anduin listened to him instead of the tensile grinding of ligaments and muscles.

“I had a theory.” Wrathion glanced briefly at the pile of broken wood a small distance away, then leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “You can walk, sleep, breathe.  You’ve produced fire and heat when agitated, the same way you should have a heart that races and sweat on your skin when threatened.  This suggests to me that you have subconsciously been willing yourself to adapt despite being unprepared and untrained. ”

“And…so…I…,” Anduin replied, one very slow syllable at a time.  Now that he was paying attention to his own body rather than being willfully distracted by their conversation, he became aware of the powerfully disconcerting sensations of muscles that were as long as his arm moving inside his neck.  The phantom throat that he was still sure he possessed, the one no larger and no stranger than any other man’s, tried to tell his mind that he was choking.  The muscles were too large.  They were going to throttle him.  They were going to burst out of his skin.

But they did not.  They only moved, narrowing and widening with his slightly elevated breaths, and he could feel that motion end at his tongue and vibrate through some cavern or cavity behind his nose.  Creaking cartilage created pressure and added moisture; it and his tongue took the pulses of breath and changed them into sounds.

“I.  EEeeye.  I can.  Caann-nuh.” Anduin’s heart, that great and bloated thing nestled black and strange inside, thumped.  But the acidic sensation that he could only now label as panic and terror did not come with it. “I can.  I can!  I can speak!”

A huge, heaving breath rolled into his body.  One that the man would take to laugh or shout; according to the phantom who told Anduin that he was still a man, that was all it was.

“WRATHION!”

The windows to either side of Wrathion shattered.

“Anduin!” 

Wrathion had hardly un-squinted his eyes after that boom of hot air had smashed him up against the barn wall when Valeera Sanguinar dropped down through the hatch to the hayloft.

“Beast!   What have you done?!”

He’d only just had the chance to look down at the glass covering the floor and be thankful the windows were shuttered from the outside when the side door slammed open and Genn Greymane thundered inside.

“Vh, Valeera?  Genn!”

Sanguinar took the impact of air admirably, but Greymane was forced to cover his ears.  Wrathion, very aware that it was early in the morning, raised his own voice to shout over at least two of the other three people in the room before the veil of secrecy was shattered and all the soldiers on the battlements raised the alarm.

“How WONDERFUL that you have regained some of yourself, my friend!  But do point your face toward the floor and breathe a little less deeply!” 

Wrathion was perhaps the only among their number that recognized the signs of embarrassment that Anduin showed directly thereafter.  Anduin’s two valiant protectors might somewhat recognize how the draconic brow lifted and the fanged jaw dropped slightly.  It was not terribly off from human chagrin, if one made allowances for the inhuman parts, but Wrathion was keenly attuned to all that went along with it: the lift and flick of crest and ear, the way the sharp tips of each shivered before flattening against the black scale.  Then, the way that his tail  turned, the fan grown as tight as his crest and the thick underside dragged a little closer to Anduin’s back legs.  The claws, too, tucked themselves into paws, the action of a creature neither defensive nor relaxed, but trying to make itself a fraction smaller.

There was a kind of irony to be had about it all.  For him, of all people, to be so expert in the tools of expression that dragons possessed when for so much of his life the dragons in his company numbered none.  He may have known their language, having listened to it in his shell and studied it once he gained his freedom, but communication’s realm did not exist solely in the spoken or the written word.  A human infant learned to smile and to laugh before it learned to speak, taught their definition and their use through the auspices of sire and dam, or whomsoever had brought it upon themselves to raise them.  This foundational skill would not be his, not when it came to his own people, until it had been many years since he had been a whelp ripe for learning.

He did not grieve for the lack.  The feeling was close to but different from grief and he chose now, as he had chosen many times before, to take it and tuck it carefully away.  Perhaps one day its time would come, but today was not that day.

There was work to be done.

“Now, if we have all calmed ourselves.” 

Much to his surprise, Greymane did not shoot him the expected withering look.  The man was hovering in the half space between the door and Anduin, his expression one that Wrathion would pretend he had not seen, knowing that if Genn were not so haggard he’d not have shown it to anyone but Anduin.  The cane that had been upon the single table in the barn, Wrathion had come to learn, belonged not to the High King, but to the former sovereign of Gilneas.  Old wounds felt at last, worgen constitution or no, and a reminder of the true weight of the years.

Wrathion had not forgotten that.  He could never.  And in the back of his mind, a thought spun like a spider’s web and he must look away from it before he felt its snare.

Anduin was staring at Genn, much as he had stared at Wrathion, no doubt pushing through the same hurdles of perception.  During the hours that Anduin had slept, he had cleared the table of its more useless contents, the potions and poultices that were far too ordinary to be of any use, and set about making neat stacks of tomes pulled out of the Royal Library.  There were fewer to be had than he would have liked: the Alliance had existed in its current form for well over a decade, almost two now by his reckoning, and yet there were few resources on druidic and shamanastic practices.  Oh, there were plenty about such topics, but not enough on the actual training they undertook and how it might be adapted to Anduin’s current affliction.

It was not the solution.  Saying that to the three people whose King had been cursed under their watch had not been a pleasant experience, but Wrathion had felt it a necessary first step.

Anduin could not be left here, mute and imprisoned.  The wooden walls were little better than a casket or a cage, one he would simply be left to endure even as he was told that it was what was best for him.

Wrathion wouldn’t allow that.

“We may have disturbed the watch outside.  I’m going to reconnoiter and inform Shaw of the developments.” Valeera chose the door, not the hatch, and though the words were directed at Greymane, the glance his way told Wrathion that whatever feelings she may have had toward him were far less important than the task at hand.  He appreciated that; while Genn had always been openly hostile and mistrustful, it was Valeera that had far more reason to corner him alone in an alley than the king did.

As ever, it was Anduin that made the difference, for him as well as for her.

“What has…been happening?”

Anduin had found his voice again, this time at a level both Greymane and the windows could easily endure.  He had found, too, a sliver of coordination, though it was the slowest, most gingerly any dragon anywhere had raised their head.  His neck had a touch more length to it than was average, creating the slightest curve for crest and frill to follow.  Watching as closely as he was, Wrathion saw when the weight of Anduin’s horns, each one a thick, round curl that jutted fierceful forward and out past the end of his short snout, upset his balance.  Anduin’s head tilted to the side, wobbling, but he caught it and Wrathion did not feel the simmering of fire and earth that he had before.

“Genn, tell me.  Is Nathan still alright?  The maids?  I know that you said that no one was badly hurt, but what has become of them since then?”  With every word, Anduin’s tone grew more confident, and the flinching that Wrathion had spied in ear and crest lessened.

“They’re under house arrest, but we’ve made it as comfortable as possible.  Mia’s with them.” Relief changed Greymane.  It put lines in his face and shifted his stance, so that he came to favor one leg over the other.  The bend of the knee stayed the same, so Wrathion could only guess that the pain was had in the hip and back. “We’ve kept to the same story.”

“I’ve been ill now for ten days.  There will be unrest, if there isn’t already.”

Greymane’s lips pressed together, his brow heavy.  He surprised Wrathion by briefly glancing his way, his look once again deeply inscrutable.  “I should have been back in Gilneas by now.  If I go and say that you have come with me, it will buy more time.”

Wrathion was taken aback.  He slipped slightly in his control, the flickering surprise found in his eyes and the tilt of his jaw, and the old wolf caught it, because for the first time in nearly a fortnight, a faint smile altered the lay of exhaustion on his face.

“If the servants come with us, it will make it more believable.  We would only need to make certain that Tess…,” his words trailed away and after a pause, he shook his head. “No, we will have to tell her.  I’d be daft to think she wouldn’t call me for the ruse the moment I returned.”

“That she would, Genn.”

Anduin’s tone and the exhausted slump beneath a fine coat that had now been slept in for far more than just one night, suggested to Wrathion that he should step outside.  He took care to be quiet, avoiding the scattered glass that might crunch beneath his boots, and shut the door gently behind him.  Outside, a cloudy morning had kept some of the fog that had gathered before dawn, down near the damp ground so that it could curl and slip around his ankles as he walked.  In the far pastures the cows gathered in knots about the feed stations, their tails tossing the mist as they swung, the whole herd now calm enough to go about their bovine business.  Anduin’s fright response had no doubt felt to them like the fiery bristling of a predator, one that they couldn’t see or flee from.  That, or they had merely adapted to the threat that dragons posed to them; Wrathion had certainly eaten one or two in his time, which did make him wonder.

Did his dear aunt do the same?  Did she slip out of this Keep in the night to invade some unsuspecting farmer’s homestead to snatch his cattle or his sheep?  She would only be able to take her true shape when she was right upon her meal or else run the risk of exposure while traveling.  Or had she abandoned that part of her nature entirely when she took up the identity that would fracture the human kingdoms?

Wrathion fitted his hands into the small of his back and began to walk the muddy path between the pastures.  The fencing was new, with strong wooden posts and a thickly woven wire instead of the simple wooden slats that would commonly be seen from one end of the Eastern Kingdoms to the other.  Curious, he stopped and took one of the wires between his fingers.  It was quite a bit stronger than he expected and the braiding of metal was uniform, faintly textured but not enough to harm even a single hair upon a dairy cow’s hide.  A little tug showed its sturdiness, the netting better able to take the pull and so more likely to resist a break as opposed to a traditional beam.

How interesting the small advancements and new ingenuity that could emerge when war did not demand every earthly resource.

Wrathion stood straight again and shook loose the dew that had gathered on his wrist.  His own body temperature had been lowered along with Anduin’s, down now to a truly human level.  The unfamiliar sensation of a chill tightened into gooseflesh on his arms, prompting him to unroll his sleeves and button them closed at his wrists.

“I admit, Auntie, I can’t picture you going this far.  Your pride would surely not allow you to be so human.” He did not often have the habit of talking to himself or to the dead, but the air was so very still. “But what do I know?  Your timely passing eliminated all opportunity for us to meet.”

Thus, he could only hope to divine her intent and her will by the deep marks that she had left upon the world and humanity in particular.  Humans had been quite the obsession among his mad kin, but while his father flirted with the possibilities of an orcish army at his command and Nefarian busied himself with gleefully crafting abominations against nature, Onyxia devoted almost twenty years to Katrana Prestor.  Entrenched in humanity, she engineered the fall of the old Alliance and hampered the creation of the new one, and anyone considering her history might be understandably focused on the methods she used to fulfill Deathwing’s wishes, which were the wishes of the Old Gods.

“But what did you want? ”

Wrathion began to retrace his steps, fitting his heels into the indentations he had left behind in the soft path.

“What did you feel in this castle, away from our dear father, your twin, and your children?  What emotion came to you when you lay in your human bed at night?  Did you imagine yourself as the only dragon left in the world?”

How dangerous he had made this little thought experiment.  Commiseration was the bedfellow of bias and his purpose, his only purpose, was to unravel the great doom she had laid upon the House of Wrynn even though twice now she had gone to the realms of death.

“...But I wonder.” Wrathion paused at the door.  Inside, he could hear Genn chuckling weakly, the sound nearly lost beneath the graveled huffing that was the best Anduin could give to laugh along with him.

“Did you really consider it a doom?”

Chapter Text

Dinner that evening was an interesting affair.

Shaw, already up to speed, slipped into the barn just after sundown in civilian dress and with a satchel of supper for all of them.  Greymane had put his proposal on the table, figuratively, for those that had not been present to hear it the first time.  The actual table in the very crowded space was half books, half spartan meals of dried strips of beef, yesterday’s loaves, and cold butter spread with a pocket knife.  There was but one flagon of water to be passed around and no utensils, and all this was unfortunately necessary as any meal not lifted out of the SI:7 barracks by Shaw would give the kitchen staff and servants something to wonder about.  They could all be told to hold their tongues and mind their business and most certainly would, but all it would take was one for the first rumor of strangeness to slip out of the castle.  It may have happened already: Valeera had reported that the watch had been caught up in debate over what might have been causing the strange sounds heard recently or how the window in the King’s tower had been broken.  The hasty closing of the King’s chambers due to his “illness” had at least been accepted without comment.  The valet and the maids that tended to it could confirm that Anduin had taken to his bed to recover and was not to be disturbed.

The situation was too precarious to take further risk.  So they dined as might an army on the march or a cell of agents on covert operation in the field, either of which was at least not a new experience to any of them.  It certainly did remind Wrathion of his days spent dodging N’zoth’s earthly agents with only a few guards for company or none at all, when the work had become so dangerous that they, too, had to be left behind unless he wanted their corpses to mark the places where he had been.  Meals were only those provisions that he had carried with him and after those had been exhausted, whatever he might catch in his true form.  That was how he had learned how unfortunately gamey and thin the vultures that skulked about Karazhan were, hardly worth the effort of chasing them.

Valeera had chosen not to join them, stowed about the hayloft or the roof somewhere, and this kept the long streak of Wrathion never once seeing the woman eat.  Perhaps she thought she was vulnerable while eating despite being among, if not friends, proven allies.  Perhaps she scorned their company.  There was truly no telling if she actually liked any of the people she worked beside; liking himself in particular was out of the question.  Perhaps her connection to the Keep and to Stormwind was tenuous at best, worn down to a single thread that was doing his best not to fidget so much that it would be noticed.

Wrathion noticed.  He was likely not the only one.

The silence needed to be broken, so it might as well be him that broke it.  He cleared his throat once, pushing his wooden plate aside and clearing the stale crumbs from his mouth with his thumb. “I think all of us have already come to the same conclusion: Anduin can’t remain here.”

Mathias had finished his meal with utilitarian haste and was already sat back in his chair, his fingers laced and his eyes upon them where they rested on the rough edge of the table.  He looked a world more rested than the Gilnean king, likely by intent: a man so severe and disciplined in his work would manage his body as well as he managed his spy network.  Wrathion had it on good authority that the only times he had ever been caught completely undone had been at the hands of a Dreadlord or a vengeful Zandalari Queen; in those cases, exhaustion could be excused.

Wrathion did let a wandering thought ponder how Shaw made himself sleep each night: meditation?  Alchemy?  A fond memory of pleasant company, with whom he allowed himself to unwind at last?  Whichever it had been, it had served him well, because he reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheaf of papers covered in his customary tight scrawl.

“Over the wall or through the main gate.” Wrathion was given the paper on the wall; Greymane was given the one for the gate. “In the dead of the night for the first or as a false corpse dragged by horses in the second.”

“Scaling the wall will require a coordination he might not have,” Wrathion said, reading quickly.  Changing the watch schedule or directing the soldiers elsewhere would be simple, so simple as to entice the choice of the first option over the second. “And could leave marks we would then need to somehow explain.”

“A dead dragon is too much of a spectacle.” The way that he bit out the word spectacle suggested that Graymane was rejecting it for reasons beyond the flimsiness of the lie they would be presenting. “No one would have seen it arrive and black dragons aren’t our enemies any longer.”

Wrathion’s brows perked.  The man did not so much as look up from the paper when he went on. “I still don’t like you, beast.  But we would be fools to announce to the world that we killed a dragon now.”

“Calling me a beast tempts me to talk of kettles and pots.”

“I don’t care.”

“I can climb the wall.” Anduin lifted his head, then grunted when the curves of his horns knocked against the hayloft.  His tail tucked while bits of dust and straw fell onto his snout, but he went on nonetheless. “I can’t fly but I can climb.  If not the wall, then the cliffs.”

“Your Majesty, the cliffs would be too high.  You would be spotted from Old Town and the Dwarven District.” Shaw was stating for Anduin what the High King could not read from the paper in Wrathion’s hand. “A body can be a corrupted dragon that was never destroyed.”

“But how would we explain –” Genn flipped his paper over and Wrathion noticed this time when he had to squint in order to read it. “Hrm.  It infiltrated in its visage.  Like all the rest of them.”

“Am I being insulted?”

“Yes.”

“Duly noted.” Wrathion set his own sheet down beside his plate. “Setting aside how utterly miserable an experience it would be for Anduin to be dragged through the city while his own people gasped and screamed, the moment the news reached the Dragon Isles exposure would come calling.”

“The Aspects?”

“At least one of them, yes.  If my brothers hear of a dead black dragon, they may very well assume I’ve come to harm and hurry here.”

“They know you’re here?” Ah, there was that familiar Greymane scowl, though it was paired with a confused scrunch to his brows.  If Wrathion had learned anything of the man, it was that he reacted poorly to being caught wrong. “You told them?”

“Of course I did.  Why wouldn’t I?” Wrathion glanced between both men.  He was paying the most attention to their frowning, but he nonetheless spied the perking of Anduin’s ears and crest in a show of clear interest. “Did you assume I’d go into an unknown portal to an unknown destination and leave no notice behind?”

Shaw’s frown had very nearly flattened the curled edges of his mustache. “We knew you would tell your forces, but not –”

“My family?” Wrathion’s reply was nothing but mild.  Nothing but smooth and unbothered. “I feel my character has been maligned beyond the bounds of politeness.”

The tension reminded him of the netted wires outside.  Taut and tightly wound, quivering in the curl of his pulling finger.

“Wrathion.”

Anduin’s great head came closer.  The air warmed and Wrathion was able to see the slit pupils set into his eyes flex and widen.  “They made an assumption based on the only information they had.  I apologize for their indiscretion.”

Anduin’s eyes were the same color.  Blue, but a blue turned to a shining glass not unlike those reverent windows in Stormwind Cathedral that took the light of the sun and made of it something saintly.  Like all dragon eyes, Anduin’s glowed, but the glow was not the same shade as his iris and as close as he had come, Wrathion could see that it was not white light that flickered beneath the crystal surface of his lens, but gray, a misty brume that floated up and away.  Light and gentle, akin to the thin wisps that would drift from the Archbishop’s thurible during mass, but smoke from a flame nonetheless.

To Anduin, it must have surely felt that he was not making the expression that he wanted to go along with the measured, practiced delivery of his words, but he need not have doubted.  Wrathion knew the look.  He felt a very familiar drawing up and into himself, his posture more proper in his seat and his half-smile set as perfectly as a portrait or a waxwork.

“Of course.” He felt the petulance gather and pluck at the vast repertoire of words he might deliver, just so that they could be the last, and for a blink it could have been six years ago, or ten, and then all he felt was quietly bitter.

Wrathion let it go.  He told himself that he had let it go. “Let us proceed, then.”

Genn surprised him by choosing not to gloat.  He only tapped his paper. “The gate’s no good, then.  Anduin has to go over the wall and any scuffs on the masonry left as a mystery.”

“I can do it.” Anduin had settled back into his tight loaf, the world’s largest feline having to duck his head or else scrape it on the hayloft again. “But once over, I’ll need somewhere to go.”

“I have a list –”

“If I may suggest –”

Wrathion and Shaw looked at one another.  Shaw surprised him, too; he made an inviting gesture with one hand. “Go on then.  You’ve probably made the same choice I did.”

“...yes.  I suspect so.” He had been prepared to carry the tension in his neck for much longer than this, but what was he to do when these two men of all people were mollifying him? “Stone Cairn Lake.”

Shaw nodded, while Anduin tilted his head. “The lake?  The memorial there is under renovation.  Surely there will be too many people about.”

“The renovation is behind schedule.  It hasn’t started yet.”

“But I signed that order last…,” Wrathion had never seen a dragon attempt to roll its eyes in the manner that a human might, but Anduin’s draconic face took the attempt quite well. “Nevermind.  That’s good for us.  The lake then.”

“It’s isolated, and the grounds and woodland around it are under royal conservatorship.  Brandyberry Village is to the south and can be used as a base of operations.” Shaw stopped in the middle of his explanation only because he spotted Wrathion and the puzzled face that Wrathion was making. “It’s a new settlement, three years old.”

“If I might take a moment to sate my curiosity: who chose the name?”

“The dwarves and gnomes that founded it.  There is a small distillery.”

“Ah.”

“So,” Genn had apparently had enough of that. “There is a village and a part of Elwynn that’s secluded.  Is that all we need?”

“Yes, and for more than just the village and the blessed seclusion.  Dear Spymaster –” Wrathion saw out of the corner of his eye that the fan on Anduin’s tail snapped as flat and as wide as possible, smacking against the dirt. “Is that kobold mine near the lake still suitably abandoned?”

“It is, but the size…” 

“I can take care of that.” Wrathion clapped his hands together. “And I can help the High King conquer the wall in his way.”

Anduin’s tail fan snapped closed again.  But his tone did not change and when he lifted his head this time, he stopped just shy of the hayloft rather than bumping against it. “Then Shaw, Valeera, the both of you see to the patrols and keeping innocent bystanders off the shortest path to the cairn.  Genn, once we’re finished here, we’ll set up a line of communication to keep you and Tess updated.”

Genn nodded and rubbed at a beard in sore need of a trim. “We’ll keep the charade going for as long as we can, but the sooner this can be…fixed, the better for us all.”

No one looked at Wrathion.  None of them needed to.  The press of expectation and sober desperation was clearly felt upon his back and shoulders, weighty as a mountain and yet coolly bleak as the bottom of the sea.  The feeling was not unfamiliar; his life had been terribly bereft of impossible tasks as of late, so what was a little foray into old realms of business?  He had to remember, and the remembering did bring the first prick of regret, that the outlook was quite grim.  Let him assume that tomorrow night, because it would take at least a day to make preparations, would go as well as it possibly could.  Anduin would be safety stowed away where no one might stumble upon him and cry that a dragon had invaded the heart of the Alliance.  He would have the solitude that he would need to further adapt, at least enough to maintain his health and wellbeing and, if they were truly unlucky, reach a point where he would be reasonably able to defend himself.

But that, like the tomes on transformation that he had half committed to memory between this morning and this evening, was not a solution.  The true crisis remained.

“Once the immediate danger is seen to, I will begin my investigation.  Anduin.”

Anduin’s pupils went a little wider when he looked his way.  His crest and his ears were slightly up to show the hint of his agitation when his voice would not and if not for the faint quivering at the end of every spine, Wrathion might have thought it was all his doing.  But while the first was an expression of displeasure, the second was a sign of fear, and no amount of bitterness could ever weigh more than the sight of Anduin afraid.  Maybe it was a strange thing to their little audience that his voice lowered and became kind, but he had spent two years in this castle beside their king, and what came before was as real and true as what came after.

“May I have your permission to enter the Queen’s wing?”

The black and gleaming sides of the dragon expanded with a deep and abrasive breath.  Anduin had the hang of it now: he was no louder when he replied than he had been before.  He was even perhaps a little more quiet and he had a curious gesture to go along with it: the lacing together of his front toes, as a man would weave his fingers together.  A spark of humanity, glimpsed in his unhappiness.

“You may, though Father had the entire wing stripped to the stones and her belongings burned.  Her quarters in particular were scoured by the court mages.  If there was anything to find, we would have found it.”

“Be that as it may, we can only benefit from being thorough.  I will begin my search for clues there, if there is nothing to be found then we will know for certain that your father successfully expunged her memory from the Keep.”

Wrathion didn’t expect and so didn’t understand the little flinch that traveled through Anduin’s jaw and neck.  It disappeared quickly and left him to wonder what it was that he had said.  If it were about Varian – 

“Alright.  I’m going to go talk to Mia.” Genn reached for his cane, unfolding from his chair with a grunt. “And the servants.  Your manservant seems a good sort, Anduin, but those girls are young and scared.  I’m hoping Tess can reassure them better than this old man.”

“Thank you, Genn.  We’ll be in touch.” Anduin tilted his head back, ostensibly to look up at the ceiling, but he did not expect the weight of his horns and so almost bumped into his own back. “Valeeraugh.  Augh, damn – ”

“I heard everything, Anduin.” She was a bit more normal in how she came down.  She used the ladder, flicking straw from her gloves and arms, and if Wrathion were not so respectful of the fact that she went everywhere armed, he might have asked her if she had been napping up there during supper. “We’ll get started on our part.”

“Please find time to rest, too.”

The mundanity of gathering up plates and papers, tucking in chairs, and dousing lamps created a strange and quiet atmosphere that grew only more oppressive as the members of their desperate conspiracy filed out into the crisp night where Anduin could not follow.  All he would have for distant company would be the cows in the other barns, once Shaw finished bringing them in.  They couldn’t have very well had staff and servants all about the dairy yard, so the care of the livestock had fallen upon their shoulders.  Wrathion would have to come down early to let them out again; when they’d drawn lots for chore assignment, that was the shift he’d found written on his little paper.  Milking, because a dairy cow must be milked every day, fell on Genn’s shoulders automatically, after he had mumbled something about his own father and a distant youth spent in summers at their country home.  He never would have pictured that Genn Greymane had at one point been a strapping young prince taught the value of work and what work was needed to put creams and cheeses on his royal table, but then not a one of them, not himself, nor Shaw, nor Valeera, were ever anything to each other except for their tasks and titles.

Wrathion knew the details of their lives: he knew what trials and tribulations with Wrynn and Bearmantle had given Valeera her fierce loyalty to both.  He knew that if not for Anduin, the downfall of the Legion would have led to her departure from Stormwind for parts unknown, if she didn’t do so to hunt down Wrathion in particular.  Shaw had never so much as hinted at a desire for violence against him, even if his association with the man could be laid out solely in the salvos of intelligence and counter-intelligence missions that SI:7 and the Blacktalon had lobbed at one another for almost two decades now.  Despite trying to keep his personal affairs out of it, Wrathion knew whom it was that he loved and where the man might be found despite constantly going wherever the winds might take him.  In this, neither of them had the true advantage: any blackmail could be returned in kind and the Spymaster had information in reserve that could be given to Anduin at any time.  Loss was mutually assured and so the only true understanding Wrathion had of him was that he was a spy, and that he loved, and, now and unexpectedly, that he was shockingly good at calming large animals.

A glance out the door showed him to be occupied with just that: his gloves pulled off and under his arm, his palm available for a cow to push her broad nose into in order to receive a pat while her calf nibbled at his sleeve.  Past him and the far edge of the pastures, Wrathion only just caught the red vanishing around the corner to the herb garden, Valeera no easier to pin in the moment than a curl of smoke.  Genn was understandably last: he was trudging with difficulty up the muddy path, the damp soil upsetting his gait and slipping under his cane.

“Wrathion.”

At his name, he looked over his shoulder, his hand upon the frame. “Yes, dear?”

Anduin’s neck and crest stiffened, but it was a reaction he pushed past. “Go and help him.  Please.”

“...you know he won’t allow that.”

“It’s been different since his abdication.” What Anduin did not say, but that Wrathion implicitly understood: for a man like Greymane, surrendering the crown would inevitably lead to the weakening of the strength he had relied upon to bear the burden of it.  That he would be more hale as a wolf than a man would be a fool’s suggestion knowing the lengths he had gone in order to preserve his daughter’s humanity.  To the last King of Gilneas, to be a worgen was still to be cursed, and he would much rather die a man than a beast.

“He still will not suffer that help to come from me.”

“Tell him that it was I that asked.”

The faint, tired thread of helplessness that wound through Anduin’s voice was what convinced him, rather than any promise of success. “Very well, Anduin.  I will try.”

“Thank you.”

Wrathion lingered at the door for the span of a few breaths.  In that time he knew that he could have said something more.  What an irony it was: truly a dragon’s hoard worth of words at his disposal and none of them ever the right thing that must be said.

Something simple, surely… “Sleep well, Anduin.”

Yet the black dragon in the barn visibly flinched and said nothing in return.

Wrathion stood slowly straighter and left it at that, mindful of the door as he left so that it did not slam behind him.  Refocusing his attention, he saw that Greymane had stopped at the intersection of paths between the first set of pastures and the second, his hand gripping the nearest post as he caught his breath.  A few quick steps were all it took to catch up with him, though Wrathion knew better than to immediately take his arm.  He came around his open side, clearing his throat as he did so even though the man would have certainly heard him as he approached.

“Might I offer –”

“No.”  Genn’s head was lowered slightly, his breath heavy through his nose but his jaw clenched. “If it’s come to it that I need help from you, just put me in my grave.”

“So you mean to say I have just been invited to be a pallbearer at your royal funeral?”

“Oh, shove off.” It was mainly a snarl, that reply, but Greymane must have surely been very tired, to let slip a begrudging chuckle.

“Anduin asked it of me.”

Genn’s next exhale was more sigh than anything else and it was long-lasting, bringing his shoulders down with it. “...that boy’s been made into a monster and he still –”

Wrathion only shook his head when the man stopped and looked at him. “To have your very self stolen and replaced with that which you never asked for is a monstrous act.  The shape is of no moment; the theft is the true crime.”

There it was again, that inscrutable look that Wrathion could not penetrate, not even when he was this close and had time aplenty to examine it while Genn was silent and occupied with whatever thoughts he had that would give him such a face.  The most he could puzzle out of it was a discomposure, as if Greymane were just as perplexed by it as Wrathion was.

“...alright, damn you.  Put out your blasted arm.” When Wrathion did, Genn gripped his forearm and put his weight into it, holding his cane up with his other hand. “Just for the stairs up.”

“Of course.  The stairs and not a step beyond.”

The ill-tempered grumble Wrathion received as a reply was so familiar as to be comforting.  It was interesting to dwell on the fact that he had known about the man for most of his life, having immediately immersed himself in the study of the global political climate after his father’s demise, but they had only met face-to-face for the first time during the battle against N’zoth.  He had approached him with very clear facts in his mind: Genn’s moods and tempers had to be courted and countered because his allyship with Anduin went beyond just the needs of their kingdoms.  Greymane had lost his son; Anduin had lost his father.  Whether Anduin wanted another father was beside the point.  The King of Gilneas was upon a steep slope and would follow its descent into the inevitable role that would put him at Anduin’s right hand for all of the Fourth War and after.  That Genn had immediately disliked Wrathion and fought his every effort was to be entirely expected: he was not just protecting the Alliance from a black dragon, he was also protecting his son.  It did not matter that Anduin held no such reciprocal feelings, because Genn was no more looking for a replacement than Anduin was.

He merely needed a son, any son, to be saved.

There was something to be envied in that.  He’d not deny it.  Wrathion kept the feeling in the same place he did the emotion that was not quite grief and let them stay there, simply existing as they had always done.  He’d not yet found a place or a time for them; now was certainly neither, not in the midst of this crisis and not while taking the three flights of wooden stairs up from the gardens to the floor that held the guest quarters for any visiting Greymanes.  At the landing, Genn at last pulled his hand away and waited up against the wall while Wrathion eased the door open and glanced up and down the hallway for any stray eyes that might wonder just what the two of them were doing in so odd a place.

“He wasn’t the same after.”

Wrathion’s shoulders stiffened.

“When you left, he changed.”

Wrathion did not look back nor move, though the coast was clear and Greymane could make his exit.  He only said, after a pause. “...if you are waiting for me to ask how, so that you may say that he changed for the better, I’d rather not begin that conversation tonight.”

“No.”

“No? ” Now Wrathion turned.  With how his body blocked the lights from the hall, most of what would be visible would be his features, lit as they were by the crimson glow.  A frightening visage, to be sure, but to it all Genn had to offer was that look, again, the look like he’d not saved his son despite trying for all these years.

“No, he wasn’t better.  Now get out of my way.”

The black and silver cane knocked lightly against Wrathion’s leg, much in the same way Tong might smack his knuckles if he was caught pinching lotus buns from the steamer basket before it was time for afternoon tea.  His habitual response came without any thought in it: he moved out of the way and Genn marched out into the hall, his cane held in his elbow and his stride purposefully straight now that there would be knights to pass and a wife and servants to inform of the plans for tomorrow.

Wrathion, who was not supposed to be here and so needed to duck back out of sight quickly, stood in the shadow of the doorway for some time, lost in thought.

“Thank the Light.” Anduin offered prayers the next morning before he had even opened his eyes. “Thank the Light.”

He hadn’t dreamed anything that night.  Nothing that he could concretely remember, not in the way that he had those oppressive, constant nightmares so clear as to be confused with those hours where he was awake and lucid.  If he had any guess to make, it might be that regaining his speech had lightened the terrible burden upon him, if only by some small measure, and if there was anyone or anything to thank for that, then it would be – 

……

Anduin groaned, the sound like wet sand turning over.  The phantom body wanted to have him rub the bridge of his nose and fight the headache that would surely be soon to come, but he had neither bridge nor headache.  There was an ache, but it was the same ache that he had begun to fight five days ago and continued to struggle with: the one in his belly.

Or…or bellies?  Whenever he tried to recall facts and details about dragons, his memory was always crowded with histories, battles, alliances, and the new trade and travel agreements with the Dragon Isles that he had been working on until Nathan came to his study to tell him that it was time to prepare for his birthday celebration.  Anduin didn’t know if dragons had one stomach, or two, or three; he only knew that the new night elf capital and so the newest member city of the Alliance could only be reached by portal or by sea.  The only land route ran through dragon territory and then through centaur territory and the treaty the dragons had with the centaur would also need to be taken into account if they wanted to move the materials needed for a deep water port in Amirdrassil.  For a mercy the effort would not be one Stormwind would shoulder alone: Jaina in her capacity as Lord Admiral had agreed to take half the work and half the cost, though the best sea route was better accessed off the northern shore of the Eastern Kingdoms.  But, every deep port in Gilneas had been destroyed in the Cataclysm and obviously never rebuilt, so while Queen Tess was just as interested in becoming part of the massive but lucrative project, they had their own rebuilding to do first.  He had of course sent a few tentative proposals to the Aspects themselves on how they might benefit if they contributed, as a strictly neutral party of course, but only Alexstrasza and Kalecgos had responded, the first to politely decline and the second to politely but regretfully point out that his domain was too far south and inaccessible to large ships due to the sea ice.

If he was honest with himself, however, and there was nothing to do in the hours after he woke save be honest and endure his aching belly or bellies, Anduin knew he had done wrong for the project, and the people that project involved, when he did not contact the Aspect of Earth.  He had every reason to: according to the maps the Expedition had provided, the Black Flight directly controlled the rocky coastlines closest to Amirdrassil, at least those that didn’t belong to the centaurs, and had manufacturing capabilities that the Alliance could negotiate the use of.  Even if there were few locations suitable for a port, their new Aspect was very sympathetic toward mortals and more likely to argue favorably for the project to the Queen of the Dragons.  Yes, it might have been true that he had a small bias for the Horde after they had accepted the Highmountain Tauren that he treasured, but when last they had spoken, Baine had nothing but praise for the dragon that had called himself Ebonhorn but whose true name was Ebyssian.  Magni had said the same after N’zoth’s defeat: Ebyssian had put himself at risk to help others and fight the Old God’s influence, as wise as he was kind and fair.  By every measure and consideration, Ebyssian should have been the first Aspect that received a letter bearing the royal seal, and that he had not had been for one reason and one reason only:

Anduin knew, because Shaw told him what Shaw’s spies on the Isles had heard as soon as it was announced, that if Stormwind opened a diplomatic channel with the Black Dragonflight, it would be done through Wrathion.

“Fool.” Anduin still could not rub the bridge of his nose, so he laid his chin in the dirt and put his hands…his…feet.  Paws.  He put his paws over his closed eyes. “I’m a fool.”

Why was Wrathion even the diplomatic liaison for his flight at all?  He had not asked that of Shaw when he learned of it, knowing that the man could only reply with the truth: that Wrathion was more well-traveled and more well-known among mortals than any other of his kind, even moreso than Kalecgos despite the years the Aspect of Magic had served on the Dalaran Council.  He had been raised among mortals, studied them, learned from them, and came to lead them; he was already insufferably confident and shockingly learned when he and Anduin met despite the boy’s visage that he wore.  When they met again, when he strode as easily and assuredly into Anduin’s life as he had when he’d walked out of it, he had only become more expert and capable.  He was a scholar, a statesman, a leader; Anduin had admired that even as it inevitably forced him to look inward and measure which of them would better fill the seat flanked by golden lions.  But with all of that being undoubtedly true, why the secondary position at all?  That was the question that Anduin truly wanted the answer to, despite there being only one person that could provide it for him.  It utterly baffled him that after a lifetime spent with Azeroth on his shoulders, Earthwarder in all but name, that when the time at last came for the mantle to be worn amongst his peers, Wrathion had simply…not.

In six years, Wrathion had become someone he did not understand, if he had ever understood him at all.

“...no.  I’m being unfair to myself.” An unfortunate habit Anduin had picked up as of late was talking to himself. “I knew he would come.  I knew that.”

That absolute certainty had been what had driven him to scrape Wrathion’s name into the dirt of the barn, days after the pain and terror had faded.  They had found no answers: there was nothing in his scorched quarters except for ash and debris.  Shaw had had SI:7 search the Keep from the towers to the cellars, to no avail.  In the city the newsprints only mourned the cancellation of the King’s Jubilee and wished for Anduin’s swift recovery from illness.  With nothing at home, they had considered acts from abroad, yet there remained no clues to follow nor hints of discontent.  There were growing pains in the north between Stormgarde and Hammerfall, but all disputes had thus far been settled amicably according to Lord Trollbane.  He even went so far as to claim it peaceful enough that he should be allowed to choose a successor and finally retire.  The wider Horde was more focused upon domestic affairs, just as the Alliance was: rebuilding, reorganizing, restructuring, with Zandalar, Quel’thalas, and Suramar slowly supplanting Orgrimmar as the seats of industry, trade, and study, though according to Baine, Mulgore and Durotar were where the elderly and the veterans of the war might be increasingly found, returning home to a quiet retirement.  No one, at least no one that they could find, had reason to wield a curse so heinous as to have never existed before in written history.

Their sole clue was what Anduin could see when he dropped his hands…when he moved, and looked at himself again in the meager sunlight that slipped in from the shuttered windows.

A color more than black.  The night itself, come down from the sky to cage him.

There was no one else to call but Wrathion.  He did not want Ebyssian, however wise and kind he may be.  He did not want those black dragons newly arrived from Outland of all places, if the reports were to be believed.  He could reason that Wrathion would be the most knowledgeable when it came to the machinations of his corrupted kin, having studied them and fought them since his birth, but the logic was the lie.

Miserable, afraid, helpless, and profoundly alone despite the good and loyal friends beside him, there was only one name that Anduin could give.

“Yet he is not here even a day before acting petulant.” Was it a sign of frustration and restlessness for dragons to chew on one of their claws?  Was it the same as a man biting at his thumbnail?  It was now, for that was why Anduin did it, sharp teeth gnawing at the thick curl of black coming off one toe. “I know he was offended.  I know it was unkind of them.  But a confrontation, now?  Then he had to go and –”

The little comments.  The slight, nearly indiscernible inflection on certain words.  Wrathion did such things purposefully.  He avoided conflict the way other men would hide a knife: no blood was shed but the knife was there and it was felt because for him, his weapons were the words and oh, he wielded them expertly.  Always just the right thing to say at the right time to make Anduin’s chest pinch and his neck heat, though the dragon body took them differently.  He’d felt a sensation like sparks or ember flecks in the back of his mouth.  His tail had not wanted to be still.  Muscles moved on his head, tugging the extra bits and pieces of skin and spike this way or that.  Wrathion would have seen it all.  He’d likely known just what it meant.  Had it made him glad, knowing he got to Anduin like that?  That the offense had been repaid because he thought it needed to be returned in kind?

“Insufferable.  Petty.” The claw did not give to his teeth, too tough to crack unless he bit down with more force, and so he began a liberal, satisfying fret. “And who gave him those clothes?  He doesn’t even know how to ride.  He doesn’t care for horses.”

Reverence had not cared for him, either.  The stallion had stamped his forehooves and snorted loudly in Wrathion’s direction, the normally quite calm and friendly animal all but daring the dragon to come closer.  The memory of Wrathion’s brows twitching with nervousness, perturbed at a large animal ready to run him down, was usually enough to get a chuckle out of Anduin, but with his current predicament the thought that Reverence would now do the same to him immediately struck him.  For twelve years now the warhorse had been a dear friend and though the prime of his life would be passing soon and Anduin would need to choose which of the yearlings would be his successor, he’d not wanted to.

Now it felt moot.  Now, he made a noise like disturbed gravel and dropped his chin back to the dirt and felt the hard press of hopelessness return after yesterday had chased it away.  There had been much that had wanted him to weep; now the thought of Reverence’s fear or rejection did the same, but he was no more able to express his anguish than he had been before.  A dragon could not cry.  Wrathion had told him so, all those years ago, but he had not said what it was dragons did instead.

His sides expanded with a deep, drawing breath and when he let it go again, the lay of his throat changed and his tongue pressed into the roof of his mouth.  It was not a howl, too sonorous and too low, but nor was it a roar or a growl or any other guttural animal’s expression of aggression or hunger or fear.  He had no word for it, other than it was a lament, and it filled his entire body and the wooden prison that was his only shelter.

“Anduin.  Oh, Anduin.”

The feeling was just the same as it had been when he’d been caught, deadly weary and wiping tears from his eyes because the wounds from the Bell kept him up at night.  His breaths were just as heavy, just as shaken, and he was at exactly the same loss for words when Wrathion was suddenly there, though the scene was so different as to be dizzying.

Wrathion was dressed in simple black from head to foot and had in hand a pack that was surely too large and with a strap far too thick to be meant for the use of men.  Was it…was he carrying a saddlebag?   The thought wanted to push another mournful cry right out of him, but Wrathion was kneeling down and putting a hand upon the top of his head, the solid brow above his eyes.  It was the first time anyone had touched him and it shocked him that it was felt.

Very lightly, but…felt.  He could feel a warmth.

“The hour has come to lessen at least some of this misery.” For the first time, Anduin noticed that the sun had long faded, the day consumed by his churning thoughts. “The watch is being called away as we speak.  I’m going to open the doors.”

Wrathion knew, because he had always seemed to know, that to have a clear course of action laid before him was just what Anduin so badly needed.  His breath steadied, calmed; the despair lay upon him like a cloak, but it became a burden well known instead of a shackle.

“Yes.  Yes, I’m ready.” By the Light, he had been ready for days.

 “Let’s go.”

Chapter Text

In the light of the half moons, Anduin was truly a sight to behold.

The permanent hunch and curl in the barn had disguised the true scope of his size.  His bulk spanned at least twice that of Wrathion’s, which was…irritating, yes, and he would never admit that, not even under the pain of death, but it was also fascinating.  By Wrathion’s estimation, Anduin was at least as large as Sabellian’s grown sons, Baskilan and Zepharion, but both of them were over a century older than he and had not yet shown the proud frill on the inside of their necks that most black dragons did after sexual maturity.  Anduin did, the strong jut of spines covered in thick skin and smaller scale swinging from the base of his jaw to the start of his chest as he shook his head to work the kinks out of his neck.  Did the curse account for Anduin’s human development, assigning him the equivalent of his own age?  Or had it forced draconic maturity artificially to meet some criteria set in the spellwork?

Wrathion had a certain interest in the subject.  He had been not at all surprised to learn that his own growth was atypical: dragon whelps, when not forced to new life stages by magic or desperate circumstances, usually required one or two decades to reach the drake stage and then quite a few more than that before they took on their adult posture and gait.  It would not be until that time that they would undertake their Visage Day; children, after all, could not be entirely trusted with the complicated spell Malygos had grafted to their species.  The common practice was to wait until they were more in control of their magic to undertake the casting.  Once they had realized themselves both as dragons and as a mortal guise they could begin to seek out mates and consorts to raise their own brood, if they so wished.  To upset that natural process ran considerable risk: mental frailty, emotional instability, magical imbalance, and, in the worst cases, physical mutations.  Which did rather explain Ebyssian and Sabellian’s troubled and horrified expressions, respectively, when he had confessed to them the circumstances of his own birth.

Typically it was only in the most dire of situations, such as the present whelps among the Blues developing more rapidly in response to their flight’s dangerously low numbers, that nature would alter its course.  If Wrathion had merely mastered his visage at an early age, he would be but a respectable prodigy.  However, his visage was no thoughtful expression of self, but an absolute necessity for survival in a mansion of cutthroats and under the ever-present eye of the Old Gods no matter how Fahrad claimed his actions were his own.  To say nothing of Deathwing!  That terrible doom Wrathion had felt even in his egg, a shadow so wide that it could crush the world.  If he could have clawed an adult out of himself then, he would have, and every year of his life thereafter had been a constant war against the helpless whelp and child that was his true self.

In five years, he achieved what he now knew was abnormal: a drake’s form and an adult visage well before their time.  Which of course begged the personal question: was he matured artificially?  Would more closely examining the grisly truth of his conception and the intentions of the dragon behind it help in the untangling of this curse?

Possibly.  The prospect writhed inside him like a parasite.

It was almost easier to think instead of the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of whelps that Nefarian and Onyxia had produced with their consorts that had barely survived a few days out of their shells.

Nefarian had kept extensive notes.  Wrathion had read them, picking through the laboratories and archives of his lair in Blackrock Mountain, locations which the many raiders and thieves trawling through the halls would skip in their search for treasure and glory.  The decoding process for the draconic-based script his uncle had used was far more enjoyable than their contents: page after page of biological data, dates of birth, dates of death, and obsessively detailed accounts of experimentation through alchemical, magical, and most gruesomely, physical means.  There were no names: the females he mated with and the children he fed into the dread machine of his psychosis were listed by number only.  And the numbers peaked sickeningly high, not even his consorts spared augmentation and mutilation in the off chance that their agony and suffering might serve his mad ambitions.

But Onyxia…

Despite her position as Broodmother for a flight constantly in need of further soldiers, Wrathion had always harbored some questions about how that arrangement worked in practice.  Nearly all of the schemes his deranged kin pursued were in the Eastern Kingdoms: the manipulation of orcs and humans during the First and Second War, Alexstrasza’s capture and enslavement, the foray into Outland through the Dark Portal, laying claim to Blackrock, and while Onyxia obviously played her part in destabilizing the Alliance, her lair was an ocean away in a deeply uninhabitable swamp.  Why the distance?  Why not with her twin, with his fortress and his army of aberrations to protect her?  It suggested that there must surely be something in or around the lair that motivated her, but the cavern had been plumbed to its last crack by the expedition that slew her and then again by looters in the years since.

Nevertheless, when he had completed his examination of the suite of rooms that Katrana Prestor once occupied, the lair would be his next destination, hopefully by portal because it was a terribly long distance to fly.

There was just the small matter of somehow getting this very sizable dragon out of Stormwind Keep.

“...you don’t have to stare like that.”

“I am not,” Wrathion replied easily and affably. “I am calculating your girth versus the stability of the wall.”

“I’m sure.”

Wrathion did not even have to lie poorly to be caught by Anduin.  Six years and he was still so frustratingly adept at trapping him in an untruth, or a mistruth, and he cannot wholly pinpoint when it was that he’d become so skilled.  It had been exceedingly gradual and Anduin had used his insight only sparingly, only when the hook had snagged deep and could not be escaped from.

As it had in this moment.  Wrathion had pushed both barn doors to the very ends of their sliders and still, Anduin had to proceed with the utmost care, his head down and his body stretched out fully only once his hind section had cleared the building.  Where he stepped, his wide, clawed paws sunk into the soft ground, and there was an undeniable sense of weight to him, weight that only grown dragons could achieve.  There were sounds as well, his ligaments so thick and his muscles so dense that motion demanded a deep, muffled crackling, akin to wood splitting on a fireplace in another room.  Too, his scales rasped and hissed in soft concordance wherever folds in his hide rubbed them together and even the spines and fins had a living noise: papery pops and rustling that reminded him of the bamboo doors in fine Pandaren homes.

The sounds…struck him.  Wrathion had heard them before: the larger the dragon, the more impossible it became for them to be silent.  He even had a few of his own, the snapping of cartilage in his throat and jaw when he breathed fire or the bony twang of his back plates when he raised or lowered them.  These things were mundane, known, nothing more or less than simple biology, and only became more forgettable the longer he was in residence in Valdrakken where a simple walk through the Enclave was to hear dragons around every corner.

But the sounds struck him.  He was listening oh so very closely.

When Anduin drew in a breath so deep that it expanded his strong chest and dark sides, Wrathion’s own stopped in his throat.  He saw, clearly and too powerfully, how the moonlight rippled across his scales in resplendent waves, a midnight sea that rumbled as only a black dragon could.

Deeply and in the core of him, where the fires would never cease.

“...Wrathion?”

Anduin’s tone shifted from annoyance to uncertainty.  Surprise flinched through Wrathion, his posture gone too straight too quickly, and it was only by virtue of years of experience that he recovered as quickly as he did. 

“Do me a service Anduin and do not tell your cohorts how I have been dawdling.  Genn in particular scolds with the proficiency of an unmarried school marm.”

“And how would you know what that was like?” Yet despite the question, Anduin chuckled, the sound a graveled, musical approximation of what it was when he was a man, and Wrathion was in control of himself then.  When the sweeping feeling passed through his chest, he could ignore it, and trot up close to Anduin’s neck.

“Lower for me, if you please.” Anduin did and Wrathion slung the hefty saddlebag of supplies over his neck, ducking under him to pull the strap from the other side and buckle it closed.  In doing so, he could hear the breath that gusted through his throat and the whispering of scales it caused, and he –

Wrathion was in control of himself.  He stood straight again and patted a gloved hand against Anduin’s neck.

“Now, this way.”

He had already seen to the opening of gates, those that led to the last pasture.  Being set against the wall, its fencing was three-sided: the task of the fourth side was given to the bright white stones themselves.  Wrathion jogged ahead of Anduin, who had to briefly occupy himself with entering the pasture without inadvertently knocking the posts down with his legs or tail.  He stopped at the very foot of the wall and looked up, needing to tilt his head to its maximum to put the battlements in his sights.  Because this particular wall served as both the exterior of Stormwind Keep and the terminus of the southern rampart of the city, it towered to a height that could consume three of Anduin, if one stretched him out longways.  Truly, such a marvel of engineering that the Stonemason’s Guild had been understandably incensed they were not paid for constructing it, but its grandeur did mean Anduin would need to climb three times his body length.

“I can do it.”  Wrathion had been immensely aware of the sound of Anduin coming closer.  A glance askance showed that Anduin’s whole head was tilted back as well, judging the distance, and Wrathion saw that while Anduin’s neck was a bit longer than the average dragon’s, it was still quite thick and obviously strong.  Rather than weakness or frailty, the shape gave a grace to him, a deeply pleasing one, and Wrathion was in control of himself. “But once I’m more than halfway up…can it take my weight?  At that height…”

“An excellent question.” There was no helping the curl of a smile that darted onto his lips.  Wrathion welcomed it and the confidence of purpose that came with it. “The answer to which is why I remain down here and have not already flown to the top to cheer you on.”

Wrathion took another half step and raised his hands to press his palms flat against the nearest stone.  Perfectly cut and expertly laid, this single block weighed over five tons, far removed now from the quarry where it had slept in the earth until men with their tools, their picks and pulleys and their hundred work horses came to change it from what it once was.  It had no defense against the swiftness and cleverness of men; it was no true stone now, but a wall, a castle, as proclaimed by men.  But this block, and its hundreds of fellows aligned in the magnificence of human achievement, had been in the earth for far, far longer than they had been in mankind’s hands.

Wrathion leaned close and whispered to it, remember.

You were once a mountain that not even heaven could move.

You leaped like fire and flowed like water.

You shaped the world before there was a hand to shape you.

Remember. 

And the stones did.

“Wh, what –”

Visually, nothing changed.  The wall was simply a wall.  But Anduin surely felt what Wrathion felt: the molten and throbbing heart within that overflowed with ancient heat from the base of the wall to its very top, the phantom waves an echo of another age.  Because Wrathion had asked it of them, the stones dreamed of the primordial symphony that came before men, before beasts, before the forests or the oceans, before even the Titans themselves beheld a flicker of Azeroth’s light.  They believed themselves immovable, unbreakable, and perpetual, and compared to living beings, that was what they had always been.  For them, a dragon scaling their mountain would not move them even a millimeter from their foundation.

“What is, how…it’s…burning…”

“It has been burning for a very long time, dear Anduin.” And he could certainly understand the difficulty the other was experiencing.  His own voice shivered just slightly; abnormal personal growth or no, he was yet a very young dragon slipping into an old, old ghost for whom he was less than a mote, less than nothing, the way a grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean would be to the last star at the edge of the Great Beyond.  If he strayed even one iota too far into this recollection, his entire self, body and soul, memory and dream, would be subsumed.  He would not merely be dead; the very concept of him would be annihilated.  “The true span of time that Azeroth has existed demands numbers we’ve yet to invent.”

“Should you…even be doing this?” Anduin fought to speak as he might fight against the pressing of a wave: he was standing, but it was no easy task. “It’s dangerous.  I can tell it’s dangerous –”

“Yes, admittedly, it…ah,” Wrathion had to stop for a quick, panted breath. “This should be the domain of only the Earthwarder, at least at this scale, but I have experimented –”

“Then stop!” Anduin had found his footing again, his head upraised and his wings pulling loose from his back on instinct.  It was deeply impressive, considering that ordinary human cognition would and should buckle under the pressure of geologic timescales. “That’s enough, it won’t fall!”

“Un…fortunately…,” Wrathion was smiling, just so he had something else to think about that was not the sweat stinging in his eyes or the watery weakness growing in his knees. “I have to…hold…or it will slip away.”

“You…!!” An enraged, draconic Anduin would have been another sight to behold, if Wrathion could look away or move at all.  He did hear the discordant cacophony of rattling scales and snapping skin, and those deep, fiery breaths that on each pass could encroach the smallest amount upon the dreams of the birth of a world.  Anduin truly never ceased to impress him. “You cocksure, reckless, thrice-damned sack of shit!”

“Oh no…Anduin, that profanity…I’m going to tell…the Archbishop –”

“Idiot!  Fool!  Shut – ”

Those huge and curving claws churned the ground.  Great wings flew out to their full stretch, a golden curtain he could just see out of the corner of his eye; the veins threaded through the skin shone like polished metal.  The long and heavy tail snapped so hard that the whip-crack became a shocking boom of sound that reverberated against Wrathion’s back and tossed his hair over his shoulders.  He heard layer upon layer of muscle pull together, cracking as a leather glove would when a shaking fist would curl.

“UP!”

Anduin leaped.

He leaped the full length of his own body and crashed against the wall with the whole force of his strength and the weight of a mature black dragon.  If the masonry had not been reinforced by Wrathion’s efforts, Anduin’s ire would have sent that entire section crashing down, perhaps even crashing through, as rage had given to the heat in his core a reason to erupt.  The air simmered and flashed strange colors; where his wings beat against it, they found the moisture there and turned it to hissing clouds not of steam, but thick and cloying mist, the temperature of his body changing the mild Stormwind spring into a slice of jungle out of Stranglethorn.  On impact, his front claws did not shatter the stone: they sank.  Blisteringly hot, he made his own footholds one molten grip at a time, and the dream of the mountain fought him with the bitterness and joy of an old lover.

Wrathion would know the feeling.  But there was no place for it, not in his head and not in his eye, not as transfixed as he was upon the heaving ascent of the dragon toward the peak only he and Anduin could see.  And…he –

It was perhaps heretical for him to think.

A show of wild bias.

And of fickleness, too, when he had been so enamored of the secret and sublime history of the world that only black dragons and the Titans could know.  The moment he glimpsed a single spark of it when experimenting with his own powers, quite recklessly considering his age, he’d felt such a profound, selfish joy.  He had at his fingertips a great secret, a great treasure!  A private, perfect miracle that he would revere and hoard and safeguard as the very last of the flight whose charge that had once been.

Those thoughts had in time been revealed to be deeply untrue.  Wrathion had only ever had one treasure.  One miracle.

He flashed over the top of the wall while Wrathion watched, finer than the night that lay behind him.

Wrathion dropped his hands.  He nearly dropped with them.  The spell broken and the recollection vanished back into the distant annals of cosmological time, he found himself all but hollowed.  He wavered like a drunkard, sweat thick in his hair and soaked into the back of his tunic, and though he knew he really must follow after Anduin immediately, he was going to have to collect himself first.

“I…ah.” Breathless and near to wheezing, he still had the wherewithal to make a comment.

“I didn’t…tell him to be careful on the way down.”

Anduin was falling.

It was ludicrous, honestly.  He should not have been falling.  He should have first judged his next move while at the top of the wall and in so doing remember once again that Stormwind Keep was cradled by cliffs, many of which were quite steep.  He should have scanned for the incline most likely to accommodate his weight, especially now that he had a better idea of both that and how far he might jump, and then slid slowly down the mountainside legs first – 

Back legs first.  His arms were legs and his legs were legs.  He had to distinguish between them.  He kept forgetting, only to remember with a sickening jolt.

But that was what he should have done.  It would have taken time to make careful progress, but that side of the cliffs were in the shadow of the moon and if he was daring with how much he let himself drop at a time, he could slip beneath the treeline of Elwynn Forest before the end of whatever false emergency Shaw and Valeera had constructed came about.  He had even planned it out in his own head earlier that day, at least when he was not lost in the spiral of uncertainty and powerlessness, and he had even taken the time to consider how best to finish the descent so that he did not damage the foliage and the forestry in any noticeable way.

Unfortunately, he was falling.

He had not stopped to consider anything.  He had hooked those black claws, claws which were burning , and he had been full of fury and worry and heartsickness and a drilling misery that was the memory of the scorched marks upon the city gates, so wide and so deep that only a monster could have left them –

Then Anduin had thrown himself forward.

Only the air was there to meet him.

Visceral deja vu almost made him faint.  Black flashed across his vision and with it a horrifying interruption of perception.  When the moonlight cut across his eyes again, the wide and shadowed sea of green was so much closer.  It leaped at him…it leaped!  Anduin screamed then, he screamed with his whole chest and the pressure valve that was his throat and the sound of it could have drowned out the thousands of felbats that had shrieked upon the Broken Shore.  Hundreds of birds went up in a cloud out of the trees below, but their noises of blind terror were little better than the pitter-patter of raindrops on a windowsill, right up until the moment that his plunging body met their upward swell toward what they thought was safety.

The birds were starlings.  He remembered that Northshire Abbey had been home to great big flocks of them.  In fact, that red and white smudge much further out, closer to the horizon, was surely the beautiful spire over the sanctum.

Would that the birds had chosen to roost there, instead of here.  They would not be breaking their bodies against him if they had done that, their shrill agony the only proof of deaths because Anduin could not even feel them.

They were too small.  They were too fragile.

Everything would be, to a dragon.  The same was true of monsters.

Anduin.

In his mind, a thought that belonged to him but that sounded like Wrathion because he did not want to listen to it, tried to break through the boiling fright and pounding anguish.

Anduin.  Darling.  Please.

He’d break against the ground.  He would break the way the birds had.  He had seen mere moments and a lifetime ago just how strong the earth truly was.  Even a monster could not conquer it and the certainty of it promised an appalling, fantastic relief.  The thought, which sounded in his head both cavalier and earnestly fond, promised something entirely different and Anduin would have to choose between them.

You have wings.

And Wration had told him that one day, they would fly together.

The colossal blanket of muscle in Anduin’s back flexed.  He heard a sound like the unfurling of a sail on a Kul Tiran galleon.

There you go, my love.

The wondrous thing was that he felt no pain until he hit the trees.  There was drag, and there was the nauseating re-orientation of his head so that it was up instead of pointed directly down, but the lumbering, foreign, frightening body took the merciless inertia without strain, when even the finest gnomish planes would break apart in a dive half as steep and half as fast.  The monster, which he’d been too ashamed to tell Wrathion that he hated being, was built for it, thrived in it, and had he not read in a report from the Isles that dragons raced one another through the high peaks where they had built their city?

Anduin had wanted to see it.  He had imagined what it would look like, daydreaming in the quiet of his study.

It was possible that he would one day see it in truth, if he lived.  And he was going to live.  Branches snapped and snagged and slapped and bowed and found the places where even a dragon might be soft, like under his tail or right against his eye, and the thick trunks, which were much sturdier than little birds and had lived long enough to borrow some of the earth’s power, hammered into his chest and limbs.  That was the real pain, that was the feeling that squeezed the breath out of him, and that was before the soil saw to it that he stopped at last.

He was sure something would break.  He expected it, braced for it, and tried not to imagine what the journey to the lake would be with a shattered limb.

What happened was that Anduin sank a full four feet into a thick mat of peat, one of the many that had formed in the unsightly and troublesome bogs that had established themselves throughout the forest since the Cataclysm had altered the local climate.  Draining them had been a costly project, not the least because their accelerated accumulation required shamanic or druidic intervention, and short of combing Elwynn one yard at a time they were hard to notice until the trees started rotting from the ground up.  They also smelled of wet dog and old vegetables, though with his head literally in the thick of it, Anduin detected something else as well, biting and sour.  He recalled that a royal alchemist had told him that the peat was little good for anything.  It was too acidic and would damage most of Stormwind’s staple crops if they attempted to use it as fertilizer.

It did amazing things for the rose bushes, however.  The royal gardens had never looked better.

Anduin just stayed like that for a while.  He was not burning, nor falling, nor screaming, and though there was some risk of discovery since he had left a sizable hole in the foliage, the distance and the darkness of both the night and himself would hide him from view.  Which was all that he could ask for; he had made a great deal of noise and there would be no disguising the claw marks he had gouged into the very walls he had made an oath before his people and the Holy Light to safeguard.

He was the King of Stormwind.  He was the High King of the Alliance.  He could not forget that.  He would not be allowed.  He was the last of the line of Wrynn and that the world was at peace only meant that perhaps he would not die before his time like the kings before him.

Anduin had up until this point done all that he could not to consider the worst case scenario.  He need not have asked Mathias or Genn to know that they had already done so: he could see it in the exhaustion that pulled at Genn’s shoulders and he could hear it in the very soft, nearly undetectable pity in Shaw’s voice whenever he said Your Majesty.  He knew neither of them meant to show him how the burden of grim possibility pressed on them both, but he had been king now for ten years.  Ten long, long years since the Legion had left no body for him to bury and sent him to fill the marbled seat.  He was no prodigy of statesmanship, but he had come to have a great skill in reading others, catching even those fantastically small signs that they did not know were there to give them away.  He was not limited to humans, either: Genn had shown him what those quirks would be in a worgen and Anduin had progressed from there, to dwarves and gnomes, to the night elves, to the draenei and all their splintered groups.  Velen’s people gestured more with their hands; the Lightforged gestured only with their eyes, as perfectly, eerily still as Turalyon could be when he let slip the human mask he was trying to wear.

He would like to say that his expertise was due to innate skill or practiced intuition.

But it was Wrathion, again.  It all began with him and how Anduin, watching as he leaned over the jihui board and rubbed his chin to hide his other hand palming a piece, knew that with the next move Wrathion would be slipping it into his pocket.

A cheat, but only when he knew he was losing.

“I could always tell.” Anduin’s deep slump of an exhale was strong enough to disturb the peat: a bit fell right on the end of his nose.  Wrathion smiled when he won.  He smiled, and invited Anduin to join him for a new game tomorrow. “And then I just let him get away with it anyway.”

Up above, there was the sound of sails again, this time snapping and humming as they did when the sea winds were high, and at last Anduin raised his head up to spy the draconic shape set against the stars.

“Oh.”

Anduin had never –

“Oh…”

Not since those early days.  Not since the Stair, when he had worked himself up into a great daring and finally told Wrathion that he had seen him cheating and if he was going to deny it like that, why didn’t he turn out his pockets?  When the game continued the rules were changed to meet Anduin’s conditions: no cheating, and the winner could ask anything of the loser.  Wrathion, his pride smarting, had nonetheless leaped at the chance, too tempted by the prize to refuse.  Anduin had seen the smug glinting, too, the overflowing confidence in posture and the flourishes his wrists gave when he moved his pieces.  Wrathion wanted to win and the want must have felt like assurance to him.  Because he wanted it, it would happen.

The face he had made when he lost.  It wasn’t even a prize to Anduin: it was a treasure.  The pushed lip, the dark flush that was both anger and embarrassment, how he crossed his arms and told Anduin that it had been a good game, thank you very much, and was lying through his teeth the entire time.  Anduin had grinned, though it would have been more polite not to, but they were friends.  When he told Wrathion what it was he wanted, he didn’t back out of it or make excuses.  They were friends, and a person didn’t go back on their word with friends, not even if the request made Wrathion flush darker and, just for a blink, show in his expression a darting uncertainty.

When Anduin saw the little whelp, no bigger than a housecat though certainly more round than one, he understood why.  The smoky scales on his back were small and flat, no spikes or plates to speak of, and the creamy-colored ones on his belly were so soft as to be indistinguishable from skin.  Each claw on the tiny forepaws and the wide back feet were short and rounded, good for digging perhaps but little else.  The tail was short and fat, wobbling back and forth as the small wings flapped to keep Wrathion afloat.  Looking at the whole picture, Anduin would have believed some trick was being played on him if not for how the whelp’s eyes glowed that distinctive, smoldering crimson.  Or how, after he took Wrathion into his lap, those little white teeth sank into his finger when he pointed out how nubby his friend’s horns were.  Anduin still had the scars from that, but Wrathion had nonetheless allowed him to place a reverent hand on his back and stroke over the smooth, warm curve of it.

That had been the last time.  Two years Wrathion had spent in Stormwind and it had always been as a man, always as the ever-charming advisor that knew the right things to say and was somehow always aware when Anduin was looking because he would use his hand and lift his curls away from his neck just so.  That perception had gradually supplanted the whelp in his memories, the scales and the small teeth and the fat tail faded before the long-fingered, smooth hands with the paint on their nails and the gentle burn of facial hair whenever the warm, warm lips were against his own.  He had not forgotten what he had seen when he was a boy, but it had become less important, the way most boyhood things became when there was a white throne that could not be left unoccupied.  The man was real, present, insufferable, and dear, and even when the man took himself out of Anduin’s life again and Anduin swore he would not forgive him this time, the man had remained more real than the dragon he would sometimes try to picture, grown out of that small, heavy shape resting on his knees.

“Anduin.”

It was his voice.  Deeper, and thrumming the way the rivers of lava did far below the thoroughfares of Ironforge.

“You seem a right mess.”

Wrathion was small, still.  He was much bigger than a man, but he was small, and he fit easily through the broad hole Anduin had left in the canopy despite the widely spread wings that beat steadily to keep him hovering above the muck.  The tiny, mismatched limbs had stretched out into four thick, powerful legs that were still thinner than his own, right down to the long toes and wickedly sharp claws.  So much of him was like that, sleek and sharp: his wings were more narrow, the spines tipped to points that stuck out a little further than the spread of crimson between them, and there was a wicked hook there at the bend.  His snout was long and put into permanent snarl, rows of razor teeth beneath the peeled, thin lip, and flanked by the jut of horns above and below.

There was a thatch of hanging hair, too.  A little beard.  A laugh wanted to pop out of Anduin’s throat, but he didn’t have the breath for it.

Wrathion’s eyes were still the same.  Red as gems.  Red as the heart of a bonfire.  They cast light across the harder, sharper shape of this new face, and up into the proud crown of horns, two of which bore bright golden rings.  Anduin could not see his back, not at this angle, but the thick scales on his shoulders and legs suggested that they would be thick everywhere, a living armor darker than smoke, then coal.  The color of most of his hide could not quite be placed, not until Anduin remembered how his dwarven tutor had taken him to see what lava became when it started to cool, though ‘cool’ was still hot enough to set things aflame if a safe distance was not maintained.

Igneous.  An igneous black.  That was the color.  Though he saw – 

And seeing it made something move in him.  It made a stone turn over in his belly and the stone became a weight that sent a slither of fright up his spine because he did not understand it.  He did not know what it meant.  He did not know why it was there.  He was back to where he had been when this had all begun, a mind in a casket of meat and bone.

But Anduin saw that the creamy underside had darkened to a sandy shale and that it was still…

It still…looked soft to him.

“Are you ready to be on the move, my dear, or would you like to bask in my magnificence a little longer?”

Dragons could cough.  Anduin learned that the moment he choked on his thin breath and began to hack so hard that bits and pieces of peat were flying up. “I wasn’t-!!”

“I’m sure.” He sounded smug.  Smug!  The insufferable…! “Do you need me to help you up?”

“No.”

That was all the incentive Anduin needed to drag himself out of the crater he had made with his impact.  It was disgusting work, his limbs coming loose from the bog with a series of truly embarrassing sounds as air displaced and moist peat squelched and shifted.  Reaching out with his hands…his front feet, he felt in the muck while pushing with his legs until toes and claws met the slightest resistance.  He chased after it, shoving through the packed decay until he couldn’t go forward, but he could go up.  He did not scrabble: once his claws could hook into dirt, he heaved himself up and out in one powerful go, dragging sackfulls of peat along with him.  He took three wide steps, wet globules falling off him, before he just gave in and did what his crawling skin wanted him to do.

Anduin planted his feet and shook.

From head to tail, he thrashed his whole body, wings half-up, and flung the mess in every direction.

“Gah!”

Anduin couldn’t grin like this, but he would have, if he could.

“You know this stinks, yes?  Like wet dog and old vegetables?” A glance back showed Wrathion knocking a wad of peat off his head and it was so much like the whelp that had kicked his wrist away when he’d tried to tickle under his chin that Anduin laughed outright.

“I thought you were a dragon of the earth?”

“The earth, not nature’s outhouse.”

Anduin laughed again, louder, and it was…it was better to laugh.  It was better than any of…all the rest.  Perhaps it was weak of him, or cowardly, but if for just a little while, he could…the thing he had missed all this time was the chance to rest.  He was told all the time to rest and his work was snatched from him if any of his good, well-meaning friends thought he had been working overlong, but then he would sit in his chair by the long hearth with its carved gryphons or in his wide bed with its new sheets and fine curtains, and he’d not rest at all.  He might sleep, but there was no rest in that either, and when the morning came gray and silent, he would rise and try to turn his mind away from the weariness etched into his very bones.

He was tired now, but the small, magnificent drake trotted past him, trailing that tail that seemed too thin for the heavy club on its end, and Anduin…

“Come then, this way.  Before this great big mess is spotted.”

Anduin could rest.  He was following, but he was also resting at last.

Chapter Text

“Wrathion, I can’t.”

“You must.”

“I can’t.”

“You must, and unfortunately you and I both know that you want to.”

“I don’t.”

And damn if Anduin did not try to slam one fist upon the mossy ground, though what happened was that he smacked the side of his forepaw into the earth and felt the uneven jolt of it travel up his leg.  It was petulant, no better than a tantrum, but it was fed with a dread that he couldn’t bring himself to call irrational, despite how he had seen better men than him swallow their disgust and eat in the field whatever could be had that wouldn’t put them out of the fight.  On the night campaigns especially, when there could be no fires no matter how long it had been since the men had had a cooked meal, if a rabbit or a fox or even a snake darted close enough to be spotted, it would be taken as it was.  Plant life could only be half-trusted: Blight was fatal the moment it took hold in the soil, but berry bushes and apple trees didn’t show it, not right away.  They’d lost good men that way and had to disseminate instructions for animals only; the disease showed itself on the living right away.

The worgen troops always had it easiest.  A human might force the blood and raw meat down in desperation, but it’d just as likely fill him with parasites and a week’s sick if he did.  A worgen, in contrast, would keep to their wolfish shape for an entire campaign, and so widely broaden how they might fill their bellies, at least to the limit of what they personally found acceptable.  Anduin had seen and made himself not look away when a Gilnean gunner put her teeth through the fox’s throat and then used her claws and her strength to distribute a leg to each of her machinery team.  That the blood ran and the bones snapped wetly was inconsequential beside the threat of spotters and a sudden hail of spellfire.  It was simply what needed to be done, a necessity of a war where every strip of meat that wasn’t plagued was precious.

That the gunner had licked slowly over her white teeth afterward was something that Anduin had politely put away.  It had reminded him too much of a late afternoon in the yard outside the Tavern, a champion recently departed and a knot of gleaming muscle nearly as big as Wrathion’s own head held in the dragon’s bloodstained hands.

It’d still been warm.  He’d seen the steam and felt something like static electricity pop on his tongue when he breathed in.  Wrathion had maneuvered it carefully, his bare fingers with their sharp black tips sinking in but not very far at all.  The heart was dense and he could spot how Wrathion’s wrists shook trying to both keep it steady and examine it, his face so close that the steam had put a false perspiration upon his upper lip.  He had said…something.  Anduin had not really been listening.

Wrathion had licked his teeth, too, the corner ones that were sharp in his human mouth.

When he first bit down, when the meat brushed red rouge onto his cheeks and dripped off his chin, and he made the softest of noises in the very back of his throat –

Anduin groaned and pressed his head forward, down until his horns could shove against the wide, fallen tree he’d chosen as his refuge from the pile of three deer carcasses that Wrathion had brought him, this the morning after everything had gone more or less perfectly to plan.  Not far was the abandoned mine that Wrathion had claimed as a hideout, using magics and body both to knock the old timbers aside and expand the interior to fit dragons instead of just kobolds.  Anduin had thought it an amusing sight at the time: Wrathion the dragon digging like a rabbit in its burrow, kicking dirt and stones out when he wasn’t sweeping them aside with his tail.  Anduin had tried to help, able to claw and push if nothing else, but Wrathion had insisted on seeing to the whole task himself.

Anduin didn’t know why.  He just seemed weirdly absorbed with it.  But his efforts had made for Anduin a place with a narrow opening but a wider cavern down the path within, pushed enough into the earth that when Anduin lay, he was not visible from the entrance.  In the near-dim that gradually grew comfortably warm from his body, he didn’t have to curl, but could stretch out wings and body fully, roll onto his side, or even tuck up against the stony wall.

He’d slept after that.  He’d slept for hours; it was well past morning now.  The sky was clear and the sun filtered through the tops of the old growth trees to cast beams of illumination across tight brush, fallen timbers host to new saplings, moss in wild greens with sometimes a shock of red or blue, and dotted crowns of Saint’s Cap mushrooms.  The trees had been full of chattering and song, at least until he had stuck his head out of the cavern at Wrathion’s call and saw what had been brought for him.

“Wrathion, I…”

Anduin was starving.

He was starving.  Every breath brought in the smell of blood and it was no different than what it had smelled like when he was a man: metallic, cloying, a butcher’s block in the summer for how strong it was to him.  And Anduin knew, he knew from every long and unavoidable day he spent on campaign against Sylvanas’s Horde, how sick the smell of blood made him.  It nauseated him.  It pressed against him until his temples throbbed and his body baked in the fine silver armor that had become splattered with it, fresh or rotted depending on which battalion met them on the battlefield that day.  The sight of it twisted in him, bringing to his mind the men and women in Alliance blue groaning in the medical tents, begging for relief from plague and poison, calling out to the Holy Light and only sometimes receiving succor.  To smell blood was to remember the hours he would give to those long rows of beds, until the blessings sounded as nonsense and the blood smell clung to his hair, his teeth, and his shaking fingertips.

Anduin was waiting for the sick feeling to come.  It always did.  It couldn’t not.

Yet he was waiting in vain.  The minutes ticked by.  A fly darted toward an empty, glassy eye, there on the head closest to him.  It slid across the slowly clouding lens, flitting down to where blood ran out of the deer’s nose and mouth.  He stared at it, waiting and hoping for the recoil that would have him slink back into his refuge, but what happened was that his midsection cramped tightly, over and over again, and hot, oily fluid slid across his tongue and gathered around the base of his teeth.

That disgusted him.  That made a shudder of pure revulsion shake in his back and shoulders, and pressed his tail up close against his legs.  He wondered, and desperately at that because he would give anything to know, how it was that Genn did it.  Anduin had seen him, too.  He’d seen the rough white ears flick and turn, his lip lifting oh-so slightly off his teeth, before Genn had politely asked to be excused from their roundtable.  He never wanted to be seen and there was never a drop of blood left on his collar or his mouth to give away what he had done when he walked off into the woods.  But they knew, they both knew, and the covenant was never to speak of it.

Did he hate it or did he hate that he enjoyed it?  Which was worse?  Anduin always kept the questions inside, down where he kept the afternoon Wrathion had smiled with a bloody mouth.

“Anduin, would it help if I joined you?”

Wrathion’s voice had changed.  The rumble was gone.  When Anduin opened his eyes, it was a man that had walked closer to him, standing on the other side of the fallen tree.  He’d found a change of clothes somewhere: sturdy trousers and historian’s leathers, the boots so high they buckled around his thighs.  A belt, a canteen, and a line of pouches were strapped to his wide belt and he was in the midst of rolling a heavy pack off his shoulders to lay it upon the ground.  The saddlebag Anduin had carried was safely in the cavern, so Anduin could only be quietly dumbfounded at how every time he was not actively watching Wrathion, he had gotten up to some other business, accomplished some new task he had set for himself and was back in time to stand before Anduin, clutching his elbows and meeting his eyes.

The bewilderment ate up some of the dread.  It occurred to Anduin, not for the first time because it had been a thought of years, that Wrathion did that sort of thing on purpose. “It…”

The memory again.  The sun, the smell of meat, the static.  The secret pulse that moved through Anduin’s body, which he never spoke of but couldn’t forget.  The one that he wanted to say that he hated, just as he did the sight of the dead and dying.

“I’m sure you need no lecture on nature or how fine venison reaches your table.” Wrathion began, his tone suited best for the discussion of taxes and zoning rules.  Things that were normal, acceptable, and not dreadful at all. “Nor a retread of how normal a thing it is to do for dragons, and many races aside from them.”

Anduin shifted, lifting his head enough to rest his chin upon the log and look up at Wrathion. “...yes.  I understand the logic of it.  And the need.  I came to terms with that before we left.”

“So then.  Is it the lack of control?”

Almost instantly, another yes wanted to leap from Anduin’s tongue.  But it would have been a lie and he had these many years held to the honesty and virtue he would ask from others, even if they seemed so disinclined to give it.  So he said nothing and stayed silent, hoping –

“Ah.  I see.”

Anduin’s relief was palpable. “I think if you…I think it would, if we ate together.”

A little smile tugged at Wrathion’s lips. “Excellent.  I haven’t eaten anything other than Shaw’s sad provisions for days.”

The exhausted chuckle that pushed out of Anduin was a relief, too.  He only had to sit and watch as Wrathion began to roll up his sleeves, then seemed to think better of it and began to unbuckle his belt and bandolier.  The vest went next and his shirt after, all piled and folded neatly upon a stump, and Anduin bore witness to Wrathion’s bare chest for the first time in six years.

It was still extremely attractive.  Wrathion was still extremely attractive.  More than a decade he had known the dragon now and the fluttered feeling inside was the same as it had been during their games when a lean or a reach for a piece would show a flash of dark skin at his wrist or neck.  The mysterious black dragon prince had always gone about fully clothed, wrapped up in the fine silks and gleaming leathers adorned with gems and gold, and Anduin would have thought it all affectation until he’d spied the squat horns Wrathion had hidden under that turban.  He’d wanted an impression of wealth and power, and no small amount of mysteriousness, but it would not be until years later and in the privacy of the king’s bedroom that he gained some insight into the other reasons Wrathion might have had to cover himself so completely.

When Wrathion bent over the pile of potential venison, Anduin could see them: the paler waves, rippling as the surface of a soap bubble might, that traveled down his back.  The lines were thin and strange in their formation, set directly into the skin so that when Anduin’s hands first moved over his shoulders or pressed against his spine, he hadn’t felt them at all.  Some nights had to pass before he’d been allowed to see them, so that however casually Wrathion treated the topic when he explained it, Anduin knew how deeply it affected him.

It had been…a year?  Yes, a year spent in Stormwind as the King’s closest advisor, before Wrathion told him why it was that “the son of Deathwing” was a creative interpretation of his lineage.  Those had been the exact words he had used, too, as if the embellishment might do what the silks and gems had done, and change the scope of the grim truth.  That Wrathion had told him at all, that it was something that he felt could be shared and shown to Anduin, had touched him deeply and lastingly.  He had wanted to return the trust tenfold and he had thought – 

He’d thought many things, back then.  And coming to the recollection of them again, Anduin did the only thing that he could do: he pulled his mind away.  The present made it easy and Wrathion was already speaking, giving him a focus that wasn’t the Wrathion of his memories.

“Normally, a dragon eats the whole of the animal.” Wrathion didn’t fish around for a knife.  He didn’t have to. “We have two stomachs: one for the soft tissues, one for bone bone, hair, keratin, and the like.”

Anduin tried, but did not quite succeed, to hold in his flinch when Wrathion sliced a deer from neck to groin with nails grown thick and curved. “Is that so?  I’d wondered.  When the hunger grows, I feel it higher up.”

“That would be the first stomach.” Wrathion pressed both arms directly into the gash he had made and came away with slick, coiling intestines falling over his wrists and elbows. “We take the offal, too, but would I be mistaken to say that might be too much for your first time?”

Anduin had already closed his eyes. “N, no, you wouldn’t be.  You know already I’ve never liked liver or tripe, either, no matter what the chef did to it.”

“We do all have our own tastes.”

A soft hum at the end of Wrathion’s words prompted Anduin to dare to open one eye and when he did he saw that the dragon’s palm cupped the shiny, dense mass of the deer’s liver.  A shock went through him, hot and swift as lightning, and every claw pressed into the soft soil.  He said nothing, heard nothing, and only watched, transfixed, as Wrathion opened his mouth to take his first bite.  His teeth were bright white against the murky red of the organ and the dark of his own lip and the corner teeth were too sharp for his human mouth.  They sank deeply, eagerly, and easily, and Anduin’s draconic hearing caught the slick and tear of it, as much as he saw blood brush against Wrathion’s cheeks and chin.

This time, though – 

This time, he met Wrathion’s eyes, because Wrathion was looking back at him.  He did not look away until, long chews and deep bites later, he had finished, and was licking between his long fingers and under the black curve of his claws.

A stone had turned over in Anduin’s belly.  He felt hot, well and truly hot, and he was so hypnotized with different sorts of hunger that the oiliness in his mouth had spilled over and out into long threads of hot drool.  The dread still existed, but it was proving less strong than other feelings, and as it had always been with Wrathion, what Anduin showed to him was what he would show no one else.  Sometimes it was anger, frustration, or hurt, and some of those he did deeply regret.

But sometimes, he showed him what he was starved for.  In that way, the trust had been returned.

“Alright.  Alright.” Anduin sounded as though he had run from here to the Keep and back again. “Let me try.  I’m going to try.”

Wrathion said nothing, only stepped aside as Anduin went over the fallen tree and put his head down to the warm, split body.  He saw slick muscle and the startling white of bone within, but what he did, what worked, was that he shut his eyes and focused only on the vision of Wrathion in his head, the one from years ago and the one from just now, with the blood caught in the finely trimmed hairs of his beard.

Anduin’s teeth sank half into meat and half into skin.  The hair on the skin scratched at his lip and the roof of his mouth, irritating and revolting in both cases, but when the heavy white fangs that lined his mouth pressed into muscle, bone, and ligament, he finally understood why it was that Wrathion always groaned quietly in satisfaction.  Anduin had always enjoyed food, his distaste for organ dishes aside: he liked to try new things.  He wanted to keep an open mind.  And it was just a simple pleasure that he had come to enjoy more and more as the years passed, grateful for the quiet and the uncomplicated satisfaction of a cut of beef and the aromatic press of rosemary and basil and coarse pepper against his tongue.  Cattle were the premiere livestock of all the human kingdoms; he’d had their meat prepared in so many different ways.  Experienced so many different cuts.  Done all that he could to make certain the men and women that fought in his armies had it at least once a week, that vital taste of home one small thing that they could look forward to.

This was like that.  It was venison, so fresh as to be warm, and it was the bones and the liquid running and the cracking of the connective tissue but it was just like that.  Anduin forgot about the hair and skin.  He bit again, more deeply, putting the whole of his mouth over it, and the only lasting frustration was that what he wanted to do wasn’t what he could do.  There were no molars fitted into his jaw, no cheeks to push the meat towards.  It wasn’t like it was for Wrathion, who in a man’s form had all the tools that Anduin longed for, and the end of his tail knocked against a tree as it began to lash.

“Push it down with your hands.” Wrathion said hands, as if he knew that, too, and he was as insufferable for it as he was a saint. “Then pull.”

Anduin did.  The tissues made a sound, but it was the bones that were the loudest.  Splintering snaps, one after another after another, until enough of them gave and Anduin’s head lifted up and away.  His forelegs twitched, the abortive motion meant to be the catch and press of hands so that his mouthful didn’t slip free, but it was already securely caught, and a lifetime of utensils and table manners could make a man forget that a human already knew how to pull and push food about their mouth with their tongue.  He loosened his jaw and tilted his head to help his tongue; it was when he opened his mouth that he heard the sizzle.

Shocked, he stopped, worried he’d somehow lit something aflame, only to take a breath and smell, against all odds, cooking meat.  Venison, how he remembered it when he’d snuck a glance into the kitchens as a boy to see what the cooks did with the game his father had caught.  But the hissing and popping of meat and fat was close.  It felt inside his skull.

“That would be you.” Anduin rolled his eyes downward, literally slack jawed.  Wrathion had appropriated a second carcass and with it, a second liver. “A feature of black dragons.  And reds, I suppose, if they feel like it.  We are hot as flame within, or hotter than even that.  Let your bite linger and cook to your taste.”

Once again, Anduin did as suggested, and the air grew full of the scent of a good, lean roast, less fatty and more smoky and seared than a cut of beef or pork.  It was just as might be had among a hunting party or a troop on the march, there over an open fire, and more of the smothering cloud of helpless distress faded away.  When next he brought his teeth together, the texture had thickened to near-familiarity and the bones crumbled to peppery ash, and though this was absolutely nothing like that dinners he and Wrathion had shared together in his study, not when he was in this huge, strange body and Wrathion was up to his elbows inside the last deer, fishing for the last liver to be had, it was…

Tolerable?  Was that all it was to him?

No.  Not at all.

“Oy Miss, you feelin’ under th’weather?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all.”

Wrathion’s reply to the dwarven innkeeper’s concerned inquiry was smooth but just the right amount of pained, his adopted accent rolling easily off his tongue. “I just had a lunch a touch too rich while out in the field.  If I may, you wouldn’t happen to have a tonic for sour stomach, would you?”

A flushed showed on the dwarf’s nose, almost as bright a red as the braided beard that had grown a little more elaborate after Wrathion had announced he would be staying in Brandyberry Village.  His belt buckle and the buttons on his jacket were freshly polished as well and was that a bit of cologne?  Pine and cherries, quite the extravagant choice for a dwarf. “Course, Miss, I got jus’ the thing!  You wait right here.”

Painted purple lips smiled in thanks.  The man all but scampered toward and past the far counter, disappearing into the back of house, which was quite considerable if the double doors were any indication.  The inn itself was of impressive size, three floors with balcony views over the square and its fanciful fountains and topiary arrangements, all of which were notable for a township as small as Brandyberry.  The hope was, he had been told more than once by the very many people thrilled to see him, that the distillery and the conservatory might attract city folk out on short holiday.  Such nascent industries could be increasingly found throughout Alliance holdings and in some of the Horde as well, as peoples free of war found that their new time and capital might be spent upon leisure and enjoyment.  It pleased Wrathion to see the first of the long term benefits he’d promised from the many of the plans that he had suggested to Anduin, even if it now meant his stay in the village was attracting a little too much attention.

Across from Wrathion at the table, the gnomish woman in brown pigtails giggled and wagged her finger. “You came here for work, not catfishing!  But you’re better at it than I ever would have thought.  How’s being a woman for you?”

Wrathion’s smile twisted just enough at one corner to match his wry tone. “More familiar than you’d think.”

The woman was named Bindles, or Bindi to her friends, which she had told Wrathion he was not  but could certainly become, if he accomplished what he’d been asked to do and return her King to his rightful shape.  She was one of Shaw’s, a hunter but only in the loosest of terms: she specialized in rifles and had only machines to assist her on assignment.  While Wrathion tended to Anduin and investigated his curse, she would keep a close eye upon the boundary of the lake and the conservatory, in the event that trespassers, emboldened by their gentle king, would slip in for a hunt or a hike.  She would also see to the maintenance of the portal back to the Keep, anchored by an artifact in one of the rooms she and Wrathion had rented for the next two months while Wrathion did his work.

Which was the work of Mahelle, a draenei historian from the Royal Library sent to survey the island at the center of Stone Cairn Lake and the surrounding shores to ensure that the impending renovation did not disturb gravesites and artifacts of historical significance to the First War.  The librarians in the Keep had been told that Mahelle was instead a member of the Dragonscale Expedition, recently returned to survey Stormwind Castle for an architectural history she was writing, and so long as the stories were kept straight between both locations, Wrathion could operate largely without interference.  And doing so in a visage not his typical would not raise questions as to what the King’s unfortunately disgraced advisor was doing back in Stormwind, especially when the High King was supposed to be in Gilneas.

“So you do this kind of thing often?  Enough to make a convincing lady?” When Wrathion didn’t answer her veiled attempts to unearth admissions of subterfuge, she giggled again and sat back in her chair. “Okay, okay, but at least answer my personal question: I thought dragons just took one visage.  The one they liked, you know, the most like themselves.”

“You’re quite well-informed.” But of course she would be, as SI:7. “You are correct.  Dragons take a visage they feel represents who they are.”

“But they can choose something else, even if it doesn’t suit them.” Wrathion’s thin-lipped smile was all the answer Bindles needed.  She chewed on it for a bit, then nodded and kicked the folding steps loose on her chair seat to climb down. “Don’t worry, I was just being curious.  I haven’t any orders to weedle the answer out of you.”

“You did just try to obtain a confession of spying.”

“Oh, that’s a standing duty.  Been that way since Garrosh.” She dropped past the edge of the table so that just her pigtails showed over the top of it. “You’re not surprised, are you?”

“No, I’m not.  It’s to be expected.”

And if Bindles detected any change in his tone, she mercifully did not point it out.  She only waved over the top of the table and departed to see to her border duties, leaving Wrathion to his.  Wrathion lingered only long enough to receive his tonic and a complimentary mug of peppermint tea, though what he truly longed for was the ginger tea that Tong would make for him whenever he over-indulged during his meals.  He even missed the scolding he would surely receive the moment the old bear heard he’d taken only liver, or gizzard, or sweetbread for lunch when a balanced diet for black dragons in particular demanded whole carcass for the calcium and phosphorous that mineralized into scales and claws.

How or when Tong learned black dragon biology he had no earthly idea.  Tong had been an apparent expert before there had been other black dragons to ask and well before the Dragon Isles had been available to visit.  He’d known when he had caught a black whelp in his little grove of peach trees, Wrathion taking the fruit as his dinner just because it tasted good only to then be picked up like a sack of beans and sat, squawking with offense, on a stump near the block where the Pandaren would butcher his meat.  It would be years before he admitted that the oxtail and chicken feet he was given had been a much, much better meal than what he had chosen and left him feeling full and energized for much longer, to say nothing of how enjoyable it was to crunch and chew them with his growing teeth.

Tong had laughed when he confessed.  Then he had demanded that Wrathion pay for the peaches that he stole.

Even now, the memory caused him a little snort through his nose, though he had to wiggle his face a bit after.  A new visage was always a learning experience: he had not told Bindles that while most dragons could take alternate forms, that did not mean they would be good at taking alternate forms.  A new body was an entirely new form of existence, overflowing with new sensations and sounds, changed motions and perceptions, and a fresh new wave of crippling dysphoria.  The leap from dragon to mortal might be the greatest - and the reverse was true, too, considering Anduin’s situation - but to shift from body to body and self to self was both very difficult and extremely taxing on the mind.  Most accounts of a dragon taking a new visage were from mistaken assumptions they had made about themselves; the new form was then more comfortable and more appropriate.  The rest were attributed solely to the Aspects, who had in their time taken various shapes to disguise themselves while they interfered in the lives of mortals.

Wrathion’s own father had done such a thing: Deathwing was a human or an orc when he needed to be to further the downfall of the lesser races.  Learning of his sire’s machinations had been what had prompted Wrathion to attempt alternate visages for himself, not knowing at the time that a whelp forcing other forms out of itself ran the very dire risk of shattering his mental and emotional identity on top of the threat of magical imbalance.

But that was what happened when one believed they were the last black dragon in the world.  There were then no limitations, no rules, no traditions, the only hurdle to overcome his own inability and weakness.  If he wished to change his gender, he could; he might not be able to easily alter his age, much to his biting frustration, but he did not have to be a human boy.  He could be an elf or an orc child, too, and in pushing all boundaries, he had found he could be a bird or a bandicoon if he so desired, though the further the shape was from his chosen visage and his dragon self, the more difficult it was to master.  Aquatic life was out of the question: too different physically and elementally.  The demonic, the necromantic, and the magical were not life as defined by the spell, and so he could not be those either.  There was even a moral line he had chosen never to cross: that of imitation.  He might steal a peach but he would never commit a theft of identity.  Every visage would be new and unique only to him and with all that very clearly in mind, then – 

Then, when the Legion had darkened Azeroth’s skies, why did he not leave the self responsible behind?  That first self, the one he clung to while the albumen from his egg dried on the floor, that was scarred and different and incorrect in ways the world would soon show him.

Why not craft a new Wrathion, one that would never have to say, it’s to be expected, with the understanding that no accomplishment or feat of heroism would ever outweigh the worst thing that he had ever done?

The answer was one any penitent man would know.

It was not a true regret if you ran from it.

“Yet it seems to be a lesson I am always relearning.” Ah, there was that bad habit again.  At the very least, the draenic woman with her lilting inflections was new to listen to. “Will it take, this time?”

The quietly humming whorl of blue beside the wardrobe did not answer.  The generous sizing of the rooms here had made it a simple thing to set up his passage back to the Keep and a single sweet request that he clean his own room had earned him the innkeeper’s promise that no one would disturb Mahelle’s privacy.  Wrathion could finish his tonic and his tea in peace and leave the bottle and mug to take back to the common room later, then do a swift check of himself in the mirror.  The woman that looked back at him had skin in a deep, smoky color with just a hint of purple and short, straight black hair that framed her narrow face and the pinkish glow of her eyes.  A moment’s consideration pointed out that an Expedition member would not be so well-kept, so he raised his hands to muss his hair some and then used his fingers to put wrinkles in his jacket and vest.  His backpack had brought a few leaves back with it, luckily, and he let them stay as he swung it up onto his shoulders.

The disorientation that doubled his vision on the other side of the portal was stronger than expected, but he could not have hoped for much better without a mage there to constantly stabilize the connection.  The dimness helped: the unused cellar Shaw had chosen as the destination location was lit by a single crystal in a lamp fitting near the door.  Empty of the many wine barrels the castle had kept in Llane’s day, there remained only a table beside the door and on it, an old key.

Wrathion took it once his vertigo had passed and used it to unlock the cellar door.  Normally, it only locked from the outside, but this part of the structure was older than the rest, a remnant of the previous castle that had survived the orcish destruction of Stormwind by virtue of being underground.  The key, long and weighty and tarnished, had once been a skeleton key for all of Stormwind Keep, and though its domain was reduced to a few basements and unused dungeons, it might still serve its king.  He pocketed it once he had locked the door behind him, then turned to take the narrow hallway at a brisk walk.

That he wobbled and bumped a shoulder was a thing he would keep to himself.  Unguligrade locomotion was always a bit of a trial to relearn; he wasn’t in the habit of taking ungulate forms.  He liked to eat too many of them and he did not care for horses in general, though in the last few days his feelings had softened somewhat toward cows.

By the time he slipped out into the Keep proper, he had walking well in hand, and wore the mask of a friendly but eternally busy academic.  She waved to servant and soldier alike and gave a winning smile to women only, with a wink for the maid who gasped when she rounded the corner the young lady was taking from the other side.  Mahelle was as approachable as she was unapproachable and she would be remembered more for her face and figure than where she was going or what she intended to do when she got there.  Only the lone guard that stood at the entry to the Queen’s Wing would have any idea and that only from the writ of permission that Mahelle held out to him.

Shaw had forged Anduin’s signature.  A simple task when he was the man in charge of inspecting documents for forgeries.

Wrathion held Mahelle’s shape until he had passed through the breezeway that connected the queen’s residence to the rest of the castle.  The walls fell away, the ceiling held only by the polished stone columns, so that visitors could bask in the scent and sight of the rose gardens that spilled in emerald radiance from either side of the low stone steps.  They were looking particularly resplendent this year, though with the exception of the old gardener, it would only be Anduin that would see them up close, when he came to walk through one of the few signs that remained that proved Tiffin Ellerian Wrynn had ever existed.

Grief had done to Varian what war could not.  The entire wing had been closed following the Queen’s death, left as it was the very morning of the riots, to gather dust and cobwebs and let the gardens grow into a wicked snarl of thorns and fallen blooms.  Those things still necessary to him and to Anduin were moved to the main castle: the nursery, the children’s library, the little study desk and instruction board that Tiffin had chosen and arranged herself, wanting to educate her child rather than leave it to a tutor.  She had wanted no nanny, either, though her health had led to the reluctant employment of a wetnurse, and so there was no one to care for an infant except for the aging caretaker Wyll and those cooks and maids that had children of their own.

At least until Katrana Prestor came to stay in Stormwind Keep.

It had not been the first time: Onyxia had maneuvered into a pleasant if surface friendship with Tiffin based upon their shared background of lesser nobility.  While no record remained of their conversations and interactions, Wrathion suspected that his aunt used the alleged destruction of the Prestor holdings as a means to gain sympathy from the kind Queen.  Tiffin would then not deny her requests for visits and short stays, even if their personalities were incompatible.  It had been the social practice for generations for the Queen to keep ladies-in-waiting, confidants, and friends with her in her residence, though Tiffin, as an outsider among the city nobility, had hardly any time to make friends before tragedy came calling.  Katrana would have lent her some social legitimacy regardless if Tiffin liked her or not, though no one remained that might confirm which one it was.

The Queen’s staff had been dismissed.  Her few ladies-in-waiting were sent back to their families and her handful of friends were allowed not even an hour to retrieve their belongings from the quarters they had inhabited.  Overnight, the entire wing became a memorial to match the one in the cemeteries behind the cathedral, and may have stayed that way if not for the tireless maneuvering of the black dragon hidden among the House of Nobles.  Katrana could not be sent away: she had no lands to return to.  She needed but the excuse of mourning her friendship and a single private moment with the devastated King to lay her spells of dominion upon Varian’s weakened mind. 

Spells that he very famously threw off as Anduin aged, driving Onyxia to more reckless action, but as Wrathion at last passed through to the cold and empty entry hall of the Queen’s Wing, he found himself once again re-examining known history.  He let the fine painted doors swing shut behind him and, after a glance out the rows of windows just to be certain, sent Mahelle’s form away, rubbing at his chin and the bristle of his beard once it had appeared.

It was accepted as fact that Onyxia wished to rule Stormwind and so engineer the downfall of the last bastion of humankind, yet Wrathion set to picking apart those steps she had taken toward that goal.  She had allowed Anduin to live; more than that, she had permitted Tiffin to conceive.  A crisis of succession would have paired excellently with the violent friction between highborn and low; it could have very well done all that she had wanted without the manufactured payment crisis.  A recognized heir to the throne only strengthened Varian’s position, his later love for his son notwithstanding, and if Wrathion were in Onyxia’s place and possessed her same madness and immorality, he would have arranged for Tiffin’s assassination before she could produce a child.  Then Katrana would be uniquely positioned to take her place once Varian was enthralled and so Onyxia could rule Stormwind as Queen until it came time for Deathwing’s final campaign against mortals and dragons alike.

It made perfect sense.  She’d had plenty of time and opportunity: reportedly, Katrana Prestor had been present at Varian’s coronation, before he had even been wed, and a death would have certainly annulled the contractual arrangement between the Wrynns and the Ellerians. 

“So why didn’t you do that, Auntie?”

The stone halls, stripped of rugs and curtains, produced truly excellent echoes.  His question warbled on long after he had put it to the air; he almost thought he might catch the words himself as he turned down the next bend.  He had memorized the layout from maps out of the Royal Library, though good sense had demanded he carry a copy in his pack, just in case.  He steered away from what had been Tiffin and the infant Anduin’s rooms, letting those ghosts be, and made for the guest quarters.  Katrana’s had been the first and the grandest, though they were in a sad state when he came to them.

Here was the only set of rooms where the doors had been removed.  The windows had been shattered and later boarded up, and the first hearth that he passed was cracked from mantle to flooring.  Merely looking at it conjured up a vision of Varian Wrynn’s famous rages.

“Did you think he would catch you if you killed her?  Were you being cautious?” Wrathion leaned in close, pushing the toe of his boot through the powder and dust. “And if you were, why did you spare her child?  Surely he was a risk you could not suffer to live.”

The long dead did not answer him, but Wrathion knew some voices that might.  He stood straight again and considered the drawing room he stood in, before flicking an orb of fire to life in the air near his shoulder and moving deeper within.  In the growing dark, the firelight flashed in what might have been a thousand malevolent eyes beneath his feet, but which proved to be the scattered shards of glass that crunched as he crossed them.  The dressing room and the private bath he passed, the gaping black maws of broken mirrors writhing briefly in the glow, before he came at last to the bedroom.  Wide, empty, and cool as a tomb, it had nothing to offer but glass and the ceiling mosaic of rosy cherubs dancing in the sky above Stormwind Cathedral.

“An interesting choice.” He was coming to learn Onyxia was replete with them.  In his youth he had convinced himself of the straightforward viciousness of his corrupted kin, only to now be faced with a more nuanced reality.

Possibly.  It was only theory until he had proof.

Wrathion spoke to the ghosts again, because it was his pleasure to converse with opponents, and Onyxia in this moment was surely opposed to him, if only from across the years. “The greatest mages of our time searched these rooms and these grounds.  They found nothing.  Not a sign of evidence removed or destroyed.  Nothing.”

Onyxia had worked spells upon Varian’s mind.  His mind showed the signs; where, then, was the rest of the spellwork?  Khadgar or Jaina could have, and should have, detected even a droplet of the arcane and corrupted energies left behind.

“That tells me that you either worked the spell in a place that was not here, or – ”

Wrathion asked the stones, do you have a secret?

“In a place only a black dragon could find.”

The stones did.

At the first hard pulse of draconic energy from where he had pressed his palm against the cold floor, the harsh sound of stones grinding against one another filled the space and echoed in lasting rasps all the way up to the cherubs and their fluttering wings.  Beneath his heels and bent knee, a rumbling shuddered and thrummed, and following its greatest strength, he tossed his light into the air above his guess and saw the stones set into the floor rolling back on themselves, until they had compressed tightly and revealed their secret:

A narrow wooden staircase fading down into a still and pooling darkness.

Chapter Text

“Now, I do have to ask – ”

A grunt interrupted him.  He had banged his elbow once again.

“Did you build all this yourself, Auntie?  It would have taken quite a bit of time, even for you.  Most especially if you were as exacting as I am.  A whole afternoon gone into digging a cave and I’m still troubled by its roughness.”

The conversation that Wrathion was carrying on with himself no longer echoed, but lingered close, the sound of his voice gone muffled and flat.  The stairwell, such as it was, just barely allowed the passage of a single body, and the steps were so tight and so suffocatingly narrow that great care had to be taken lest he go tumbling down the thus-far completely unknown distance.  Once clear of the entrance, the ceiling dropped down with him, constantly threatening to bump against the crown of his head, and though he could certainly turn around if he wanted to, it would have called for an uncomfortable bit of squeezing.  The suspicions he would likely never have confirmed were that the passage was fitted more for Onyxia’s human frame, which was presumably smaller than his own.  There had been no recorded commentary of Katrana as a wide or towering woman, but as a beauty of great exception, the fervent hope of bachelors and the envy of married men.  Any suggestion of largeness was coupled with mentions of corsets and brassieres.

“The steps are wood.  Where did you get the timber?  Who cut and shaped them for you?  I can’t imagine you would allow any soul to be privy to your plans for a secret passage, unless you intended to kill them upon its completion.”

Now was not the time to think of it, of course, but beauty had always been the trend among Sinestra’s line, hadn’t it?  A certain…proclivity to take visages of immaculate presentation and open temptation, their charm elevated for devastating purpose, and all this in homage to the unstoppable ego they all possessed.

…

Yes, he did realize what that said about himself.  Nyxondra was without a doubt of that lineage: the expression on his brother’s face when he heard her name told Wrathion all that he desired to know.  All that he had asked of Sabellian then was a confirmation: that the dragons he led, himself and his own progeny included, were the offspring of the consorts that did not survive Neltharion’s transition to Deathwing.  They were visibly distinct from Sinestra and her children and, perhaps, from Nyxondra and her brood as well; that was a question he left in the silence at the bottom of his heart.

It was simpler, and more productive, to keep his conversations with Sabellian on the topic of the flight that was and the flight that may one day be, and they were both the most comfortable when they spoke around the ten thousand year span where there was little good that could be said about their people.  Their people, and not their father, those words left in the depths of Aberrus and sealed shut by the newly seated Aspect of Earth.  Their talks instead took them to the ages when Black Dragonflight flew in numbers that could darken the sky above their Citadel, the masses separated into ‘wings’ that were their version of military hierarchy.  When arranged as an army, their flight formed its regiments based upon familial closeness, for long association established an accord and a clear chain of command when their Aspect could not be present.  Sabellian, as the elder of his line, was given the leadership of his kin, close or distant, and took them into Outland alongside Deathwing.  Those that remained on Azeroth fell under the wing of Onyxia and Nefarian, if they didn’t go so completely mad as to revert to barbarism and live out in the wilds, no better than animals.

“The depth is astounding.  I understand you had a need for secrecy but this is becoming excessive.  At this point, why the stairs at all?  Teleportation would be more efficient.”

Wild black dragons had been predictable in where they would potentially congregate.  With most disinclined to make the ocean crossing to Kalimdor and its more attractive deserts, they crowded in whatever barren and mountainous environs could be found north of the humid jungles of Stranglethorn but south of the harsh winters found at and above Dun Morogh and Loch Modan.  Naturally, many flocked to their deaths in and about Blackrock Mountain, clashing with the Dark Irons and their Lord but also falling prey to Nefarian and his insatiable desire for more meat for his grinder.  Those black dragons that thrived, insomuch as any creature could thrive with their mind rendered to paste by N’zoth, did so in the Badlands.

The mother he never knew and the mother he never wanted had both resided there, though Wrathion did not know for certain if Nyxondra had made the jutting red mesas and deep, dusty canyons her home or if Rheastrasza had brought her there after her capture.  He suspected the answer to be the first: the broad access to eggs and dead whelps, as well as the well-recorded black dragon activity in the area, painted the picture of a red dragon so enamored of her purpose that she would go into the heart of her enemy’s territory, alone and unprotected, to birth the salvation of the Black Dragonflight through the only means available to her:

Theft, torture, and what he could only believe was a slavish devotion to the greater good.

Was that the actual truth?  He hadn’t known then and knew no more now, nor would he ever.  Deathwing had killed her and she had taken her secrets with her.

But Wrathion had been angry, so angry and so haunted by that anger, as though it was his own fury that beat burning wings against his back.  Newly hatched and living on the knife’s edge from the moment he took his first breath in the open world, he made the interiors of himself home to anger only, all the better to burn out fears and doubts and loneliness.  He built up his wrath, shaped it and sharpened it, and carved cleverness and cunning and purpose into himself and then named himself for the tool that he had used while blind to the hypocrisy that only grew with every black dragon’s blood that he welcomed upon his hands.

It was, he said to the men and women he paid to do it, and to Fahrad as he writhed and begged, for the greater good.

It would be many a year before Wrathion’s eyes were clear.  Culpability stalked him in the way that his fears had, waiting until he had looked long enough away before it leapt, and it never wore the same form, ever impossible to predict.  That time, which was not very long ago at all, it’s shape had been the hard, hot accusation in Sabellian’s eyes when they had burned into his own and the elder dragon had asked:

Tell me, little one, where are the rest of your kin?

Where have all the black dragons of this world vanished to?

“I need to reach the bottom, Auntie, because being left to my own thoughts is at present an unpleasant experience.”

Onyxia did not answer him on account of being quite dead, but the sound his next footfall made was different from those that had come before.  He paused, quieting the meandering of his mind, and rested his palm upon the wall.  As well hidden as the entrance had been, Wrathion would never doubt the paranoia of his own species and be foolish enough to think that just one layer of secrecy was all the security they might use.  With great care he slipped a sliver of fiery energy into the stones and was immediately rewarded: 

Harsh runes, the edges jagged in the way that a claw mark would be, glowed to life on the very next step and on the wall just past his hand.  He could feel the fainest, quietest sizzling at the tips of his fingers, the sort of sparking that would come from a lit fuse.

“Prepared to hide the evidence and the bodies at a moment’s notice, were you?”

Wrathion’s tone was flippant in defiance of the bead of sweat that slid down the back of his neck.  He did not so much as shift his weight as he put all his concentration into gently plucking the spell structure loose.  The ends of his fingers warmed, then grew hot, and his breathing was a touch more uneven than he would have liked it to be.  Nearly thirty years this spell must have sat in the quiet and the dark, far from the fading heat of its caster, and still he felt a sharpness to it, a fang that slid its gleaming point over the leylines in his body and the nerves that they matched.  The spell threatened; it hissed against his ear.  It drove itself against those parts of his brain that could still be told that he was a whelp matured too soon, gone to places where he should not go, and committing misdeeds he would not be forgiven for, no matter how he might cower in her boiling shadow and whimper for mercy.  She would teach him as he should have been taught, rather than be allowed to run feckless and wild and foolish against the wishes of his elders, and he would learn, he would learn or else he would join all the others – 

“Ah.”

The runes flickered, then died.  Ash fell silently from the wall.

“There we are.”

Wrathion allowed himself a few slow breaths before he continued on.  When he did, it was with caution, his hand on the wall and his light brightened, so that when the space at last widened, he was able to see it clearly.

It was smaller than he had expected.  The inordinate depth had begun to give him the idea that Onyxia might have crafted herself a lair far below the city and used the one in the Dustwallow Marsh as a decoy, but no massive cavern that simmered with volcanic heat awaited him.  It was noticeably warmer, yes, and a press of his foot communicated that below him was one of the many laccoliths that formed off the magma chamber of Blackrock Mountain.  Contrary to most mortal understandings of volcanoes, the visible pool of lava bubbling in the hollowed-out section of the mountain was not the magma chamber: it was merely where the magma gathered when pressure forced it up to the surface.  The true chamber was so far into the earth that another mountain could be fitted in the distance and so large that its conduits pushed well beyond the boundaries of the Burning Steppes.

Stormwind was in no danger of being lost to eruption, at least not until Alexstrasza had tripled her age, but it did mean that if one dug deep enough, one might build a little home warmed by the heart of the world.

“I’d not imagined you so strangely domestic.”

That was the best word to describe it.

It was strange.

Wrathion stepped off the stairs and into an impressive replica of any peasant cottage one might find in Elwynn or Westfall, though it favored Elwynn with the false windows and their painted trees beyond.  The floor was stone, but the walls had been covered in neat white planks, and the corners were adorned with simulated posts, the logs cut into thirds to create the illusion that the rest of it existed somewhere beyond the imaginary boundaries of the cottage.  The furnishings were simple, country fare: an ordinary table, its accompanying chairs, and an unwrinkled tablecloth; unadorned cabinetry with slim copper handles; a wide stone sink for washing through it had no spigots and no drains; and a passable simulation of an iron stove for wood-burning except it had been fashioned from the same rock as the floor.  A rug was thrown across the center of the room and its weave was rough but cheerfully colored, done in blues and yellows and petal pinks.  Matched curtains in blue hung upon the false windows and across what he presumed to be another door, judging from the size.

He wanted to go through it at once, driven by the voracious curiosity that had caused his heart to race, but he was too cautious and too suspicious for that.  The first room had to be examined, though he all but vibrated with the need to make haste as he put his hand to each wall, then on the table, then to the cabinets, which yielded the next surprise: arrays of crystals in neat rows, connected by copper wiring and volcanic glass.  Leaning into the cabinet, he got a whiff of magic that was not earth-aspected: water, wind, a touch of nature although it was but a miserable little sliver.

“I thought the air was too pleasant…,” he gently tapped one crystal with the end of his nail. “How are you still working?  Where is the energy coming from?”

Opening the cabinet beneath that one, he saw that the wiring continued to run down the wall and disappear beyond the facsimile. “Ahh, from the thermal concentration below.  Clever!”

Clever, and a truly astounding amount of work.  And for…what?  Opening the rest of the small doors revealed only an eclectic collection of utensils, plates, cups, household tools, and the stray pot or pan.  Nothing matched and all was ordered by shape rather than by use, as shown by the pair of tongs he was fairly certain were real silver and the wood and tin scissors that surely only a poor seamstress would possess.  Ducking low to glance beneath the sink granted him the only sign of wear thus far: another apparatus was set into the stone and led into the wall, but it was violently twisted outward, split from within by force or pressure.  A source of water, perhaps?  Something to permeate the stone above?  The only water would be the canals on the surface unless there was some heretofore unknown aquifer, which he did not have leave to go hunting for when the curtained doorway was all but howling at his back.

It was actually disappointing that he saw what he had expected in the first place when he moved the curtain aside.

There was the long work table with a great assemblage of magical, chemical, and alchemical tools, dozens upon dozens of jars and bottles, stacked tomes of a no doubt forbidden nature, ominous artifacts beneath glass or secured in cages of gold, trunks set against the far wall that he would have to check for traps before he tried to open them, a hefty shelf of materials from the mundane to the exceedingly rare, a basket of enchanted scrolls that still glowed faintly, and an open box of – 

Few were the times that Wrathion came to a moment that he truly, wholly did not anticipate.

He could count them upon the fingers of one hand: Varian’s mercy for the Horde.  Gul’dan’s trespass from one timeline to another.  Sabellian’s arrival from Outland.  He had once included Anduin’s right hook among that number, but his confident stroll into the Keep had been delusion, not a lack of foresight.  He could replace it now with the black dragon that had awaited him in a dairy barn nine days after Anduin’s twenty-seventh birthday and with it, perhaps…

“What were you doing…?”

Perhaps this.

Perhaps the little box of toys and trinkets that rested at the foot of a child’s bed, neatly made.

More slowly than he had when he had feared a fiery death or eternal entombment, Wrathion crossed the clearly delineated space of a mad dragon’s foul den and into a picturesque boyhood in Elwynn forest.  There was the bed, with painted gryphons upon its headboard and simple, thin linens chosen in consideration of the constant warmth.  There were the toys, all tucked into their box, the tin soldiers in neat rows beside stacks of fitted blocks and wheeled ships and a model stallion with real horsehair for its mane and tail.  There was the little chair with its square cushion, matched with the little desk and its bell-shaped lamp, and next to them a little shelf of thin books and cups filled with charcoal sticks for writing.  There was the wide, round rug in braided blue and white, and beyond it, a trunk half the size of all the rest and colored blue with white fittings.  It was open.  It was empty.

On the wall above the bed was another imagined window.

It looked on a high, black mountain with the setting sun on its shoulder.

Wrathion was no more ready for what his cleverness wished to tell him than he had been when Genn had led him into these strange, impossible days, but his control and the swiftness with which he employed it had learned from that experience.  The first clear, whole, irrefutable understandings beaded on the surface of his consciousness and the moment that they did, he seized them and squeezed them tightly in a fist of iron.  He held them.  He held them as a man might a knife: with the absolute certainty that it would cut.  It was made for cutting.  It could no more go back on that purpose than the sun could turn and swallow up the dawn.

“What did you do?”

His hand was pressed over his mouth.  The fingertips of his glove dug into his cheek.  At his back was the Light-forsaken hoard of an elder wyrm at the height of her power and her madness, thousands of years of knowledge layered over the secret spellworking he was in search of and must find as quickly as he was able, and yet it was not toward Onyxia’s grand work nor the high-backed chair of ironwood and velvet that he walked toward.

He went to the desk, which was only slightly higher than his knee.  The surface and the legs of it were thick and sturdy, built for resilience against students just beginning their rudimentary education.  The shelf was the same, robust despite its shelves serving as the home of books no more than two dozen pages thick at best.  Their spines and heights showed two categories: a section given to many different sorts of books of all different colors and sizes, and then tucked nearest to the desk, an even row of blue notebooks bound with jute in many colors.  His eyes drifted from them back to the little library and its many small tomes, but it was neither caution nor care that urged him to look at them first.

It was denial.  Long experience had taught him what he felt and what he did when he caved to cowardice and chose to deny a truth explicitly understood.

Wrathion pulled his hand away from his mouth and reached for the first blue notebook.  He sent his light to hover more directly above himself as he delicately rested the back cover on his other palm.  Years of steady heat had rendered the simple pressed plump covers so dry and so fragile that their edges began to disintegrate to dust wherever his fingers pressed.  The thin papers within had fared only a little better, turned more brittle than old leaves but capable of holding its shape as he turned them.

The child’s scratchings within were done in charcoal.  Though granules of it fell away, most held, and revealed a steady progression from the first uneven circles and wobbling lines to the emergence of shapes, spirals or squares or lightning strikes.  By the end of the first series of pages, small imitations emerged: a door.  An oval rug.  A square in which scribbles slept.

Wrathion reached for the next book.  The shapes grew more refined and the scribbles clustered together, trying to have meaning and nearly succeeding.  A table came to have legs.  A chair had its seat.  A window had gathered lines for curtains.  So the pages and their books went, all in clear order, marking those moments when motor skills and comprehension improved, and by the last two books, pictures evolved into lopsided, overlarge, and inexpert representations of the first few letters of the Common alphabet.  When he took the last, the last although there remained space on the shelf for many more, the rudimentary letters gathered themselves and in triumph, plastered the same pattern over and over again the final few pages.

The child had learned to write their name.

It took almost more strength than he had for Wrathion to put the book back with care.  The trembling in his fingers did not show until the blue binding had been left behind and even then, it was slight, and only noticeable in that he was doing all that he could to fight what that shaking wanted to become.

If he was not careful, he would slip, and send a cleansing fire through the entire chamber that would cost him the secrets he needed but bury forever those that he knew without a shred of doubt that he would never allow to see the light of day.

Never.  It could never leave this room.

Wrathion backed away as though faced with a demon, or a dragon, and only when his heels fell upon the bare stone of Onyxia’s baleful atelier did he turn away.

Turalyon could tell that Shaw was avoiding him.

If it had been anyone except for the Spymaster, and perhaps his King and the King of Gilneas, it would not have been out of the ordinary.  Ten years was time enough to recognize the pattern and both come to terms with it and understand at least in part the reasons why it happened.

The first and most common was awe.  There were many heroes of the Alliance and many storied and beloved figures in the history of the human kingdoms but very few that returned home alive.  Their monuments and memorials were scattered from here to the blighted fields of Lordaeron, though it was less than a handful that stood in silent, stony vigil over the city of Stormwind itself.  He had more than once visited the one that overlooked the fading shore, with its green and tidy gardens and the blue banners that turned slowly in the seaward winds.  He had read the inscription there, though in the early days it had been with difficulty: his eyes expected draenic script and struggled with the thick, blocked lines of Common.  He’d spent long evenings with his son overcoming that hurdle, the first of their infrequent visits wasted upon it because he told no one else except for his son that he had forgotten it all.  If more people knew, the second reason would probably become as common as the first.

He troubled people.  He ended conversations and put discomfort in the air.  He was saluted, congratulated, and respected, but he was never talked to and it was his son, again, that spoke to him quietly after the year and some it had taken for Turalyon to realize that how he was treated was not how most men treated with each other.

“Father, it is…it’s how you look.”

“I look the same as any other man.”

“You don’t.  When you…it is that you are…”

How Arator had struggled with it, his expression harrowed by some feeling that Turalyon couldn’t understand.

“...come to the mirror with me.  I’ll show you.”

They had gone through his son’s house, away from the simple dining table and past the humble altar where he contemplated the Holy Light, which took the space Turalyon now knew most used as a gathering room for their families.  They crossed out of the house and into the training hall and armory, where Arator kept a tall mirror to use when donning his armor.  He asked Turalyon to stand beside him, their shoulders close enough that the sweep of condensed light arcanum on his pauldrons bumped against his son.  It wouldn’t be until a few visits later that Arator patiently informed him that he didn’t need to wear his armor to dinner, even if the city belonged to the Horde.  He had even bought for him several sets of clothes, which he still kept in his quarters at Stormwind Keep.

“I want you to smile, Father.  We’re going to smile together.”

He was grateful to his son.

If Arator hadn’t shown him, he likely never would have known, and as the years passed his twice monthly visits to Silvermoon City were as much to learn about the son he had left behind as they were to do the same for the man that the Alliance had raised in marble in honor of his sacrifices.  When he and Alleria had first seen them, he had made…some comment.  Some lie, Light forgive him, that he no longer recalled.

He hadn’t known that face.  Not that man, nor any of the others, except for Alleria, because she was beside him and hadn't changed at all.

He had never asked if it was the same for her.  He knew that it wasn’t.  She remembered her sisters, and her slain brother, and she remembered the city streets and where they led even if many of the buildings had changed or grown.  She had not confessed to their child that she could not read his letters nor the reports and orders a Lord Commander was duty-bound to respond to and yet couldn’t because he was ashamed.  She’d needed no boy a fraction of her age to teach her how to make any expression that didn’t wholly belong on some clay facsimile of a man.  She had remembered him, his face and his voice, after five hundred years in a realm where he could not follow, when he had – 

Turalyon had never confessed it to her.  It could be that she knew and it was in part why they could only meet now by happenstance, rather than intention.  It could be that if he had passed when he should have, in the fullness of a man’s time and not one moment longer, she would have fondly remembered him and that would have been the only immortality that he would ever truly need.

“....”

He bent his head and pressed his curled fist to his brow. “Light forgive me for my trespass.  It was a moment of weakness.”

There were so many more moments of weakness to be had when at peace than when at war.  This moment felt as one of them, burdened as it was with uncertainty and purposeless.  He had returned from Stromgarde on the scheduled day, his reports on the fieldwork and training completed that winter in the Highlands, as well as letters from Lord Trollbane and petitions from his people, only to learn that not only had his King taken seriously ill, Anduin had then immediately departed for Gilneas.

Turalyon didn’t question his choices.  It wasn’t his duty until such time as his King asked him for his input and advice, which Anduin had done whenever there had been the need.  And Shaw, in the one time that they had met since the Lord Commander had arrived five days ago, one day shy of Anduin’s departure, had assured him that the King had gone with healers and servants in tow, in the event of an unexpected relapse.  He had even, in a breach of confidentiality that Turalyon nonetheless appreciated, passed along his thought that the trip was more for King Greymane’s wellbeing than it was for Anduin’s.  The years were growing longer and harder for him and though his daughter had assumed the throne, he still pushed himself toward the duties he should have laid aside.

That Turalyon could understand.  He felt it at this moment, sitting in the quiet of his bare rooms in the castle.  When they had first been assigned, he had asked for the simplest that he could be given, only to retract his request when proximity to the quarters for servants had created a visible disruption in their work.  In the guest wing there was space enough in the halls and enough awe in the counselors and nobles that he passed that what disquieted the maids so much that they avoided him wouldn’t be as noticeable.  That the drawing room and the bedroom were so bare suited him more than any aristocratic accommodation that could have been made for him.  The bed, the desk, and the trunk where he kept the other clothes his son had chosen for him were all that he needed; the empty space that they left, rather than trouble him, would often calm his mind.

He could close his eyes and feel the wideness and stillness of the air and in it, imagine the soft, even hum of the Xenedar’s engines, the sound itself a hymn to the resilience of the Light.

But the recollection did not come easily to him today.  His King had left no orders behind and the commencement of the mid-year review of the local garrisons would not be for a few months yet.  Shaw had answered all of his questions and hadn’t given him any reason to ask more, except that after their initial briefing, the Spymaster had been so occupied with his work that he’d seen no sign of him since then.  It was another weakness to be curious, but Turalyon was.  The armistice was on the surface holding strong years on from the point when he had thought it would crumble, but could something have changed?  It would not be out of character for Shaw to support the King’s travel outside of the city if he suspected troubles close to home; assessing them would keep him busy and consistently out of his office..

He did trust the man.  The moment it became a topic the Alliance Army should know, he would know it.  His King undoubtedly already knew and the stated reason for his departure was likely one he had imparted upon Shaw so that it could be shared as needed.  His King was an intelligent, perceptive man, and he…

…he had always been clever.  Turalyon had told the story over and over again, until the new recruits would bring it to him themselves and ask eager questions, about what Azeroth was like and what foul magics the orcs had used to enter it and what a ‘king’ was and why it had been that he was so sure that Varian would uphold the – 

The Son of Stormwind lies here, the first passage on the memorial had read.  He remembered it clearly because of the effort he put into understanding it and he repeated it now, again, in his head, from start to finish.

He’d not forget it.

The quiet was oppressive today.  Turalyon was no more calm than when he had entered hours ago and he admitted at last that the battle was one he had lost.  He rose and considered the armor that did not so much as make a whisper of noise as he did so.  It had served him for six hundred years since the Lightsmiths had fitted it to his frame and his frame alone and it was forged to serve him six hundred more.  Nothing on this world or any other could compare to it, but his son had told him that there were times when it would not be needed.  If there ever came a time when they would have dinner together, for example, and though he had no intention of going for a meal, this time might be a little like that.

With great care, Turalyon pressed the release mechanisms, first beneath his shoulders, then under his arms and at his hips.  Each piece folded neatly into itself, tightening into lightweight hexagons that could be stacked and stored in the Xenedar’s arsenal bays.  There was little risk in leaving them here instead: they responded only to his soul imprint and were resistant to most Legion small arms.  He arranged them upon his desk and then passed into the bedroom to kneel beside the trunk of belongings against its foot.

The orderly sets of civilian dress had been given to him by Anduin.  He was very grateful.  That the light drape of cotton and the creak of leather sent disquiet crawling up his spine and snatching at his neck was something he would never tell his King.  That would have been just another weakness and a poor show of the thanks that he felt.  If he had gone himself, he would not have known what to choose; if Arator said that the gloves and boots in pale leathers and the red tunic suited him, then he would believe him.  He didn’t think that the mail and leather strap would hold the weight of his sword, but it did, and some of the disquiet faded when its familiar weight came to rest upon his back.

Turalyon had no plan when he departed, except the nascent idea that he would find Shaw and ask his questions after all, though he had no intention of barging into his work.  Hierarchy had to be maintained at all times for the good of the kingdom and he’d not for a moment think of upsetting it.  Satisfying his curiosity was his only true goal and it would be Alleria that would tell him that any purpose that got his feet moving and his mind focused was a good one.

And she was right, just like she was always right.  His feet carried him to Shaw’s office and though the man was once again not present, the soldiers that flanked the door were late in their salutes, so late that they apologized more than once and with low bows for their disrespect.  Turalyon reassured them just as many times, not at all troubled by it but instead experiencing a surprising elation.  Arator had told him that it would make a difference, a small one but still a difference, though Turalyon had such difficulty in picturing himself going anywhere without his armor.  There was a war going on and the Horde spies could be anywhere.

But perhaps there would be none to be found today.

There were none to be had inside, certainly.  There were only more knights for him to startle and servants that passed him by with a brief bow of their heads instead of the long stares that he had once endured.  The two minor nobles arguing outside and office did not even notice him at all when he passed them and the draenei scholar only stumbled through her greeting of G, Good morning, High Exarch because she’d not seen him around the great stack of boxes in her arms.  The library, the armory, the forges, and the war rooms no more contained the Spymaster or anyone that knew where he was than any of the rooms that came before them, but he enjoyed the visiting of them much more than he thought he would.  He knew before he exited out onto the grounds that his task was well and truly failed, Shaw likely on assignment in the city or further out in the field, but by that time moving his feet was all the purpose that he needed.

The sky was a clear and brilliant blue.  It surprised and delighted him every time he saw it.

“Hhhoooo, the thews on that one!”

“Stop.  Stop.  You’re here to work.”

“I am working.  I can work and look at the same time.”

No one in the Keep would have ever had so loud a whispered conversation with Turalyon in earshot and it was the novelty of it, not offense, that had him stop and look toward the set of voices.

“Ack, now look what you did!”

“What makes you think I’m sorry?”

The last person that spoke, a worgen woman in thick overalls and holding a shockingly large crate upon a single slim shoulder, waved her free hand at Turalyon and whistled. “Hey there, handsome!  That’s quite the sword arm!”

Turalyon was so genuinely flummoxed that he actually laughed.  He’d not meant to at all and yet it coughed right up and out of him, bursting out more from his nose than his mouth. “I…well…thank you!  I train it every day.”

“It’s doing you goooooooooood.”

Her companion, a human man with a hefty pack on his shoulders and a ladder under his arm nearly dropped that ladder trying to cover his red face. “By the Light, why does the guild keep pairing me with you.  I can’t work like this.”

“You’re here for work?” Turalyon’s curiosity had him act again, this time to stroll across the wide and vibrant grasses of the front gardens.  He had meant to make for the stables and the direction was at least a little the same; caving to a weakness could be excused. “You’re not soldiers or staff.”

“Nice as the views would be, you’d never find me in the army,” the woman said, tugging one sharp brown ear. “Deaf as a doornail on this side.”

“That’s not how that saying goes,” the man muttered, then corrected his posture and gave as good a bow as he could manage with the ladder, the backpack, and the loop of rope in his other hand. “We’re with the Stonemasons Guild.  We received a job order from the Crown.”

“Oh!” The woman said abruptly thereafter, taking a quick step toward Turalyon. “Maybe you would know!  The contract said there’s holes in the wall.  How’d that happen?”

“There’s…holes?”

His confusion only seemed to make her more eager. “Yeah!  You heard about all that racket some nights back, right?  Sounded like a whole mess of demons!  That’s what my cousin in the Watch said.  Then comes down an order about holes.”

Turalyon’s back and shoulders tightened.  Shaw had said – 

The worgen leaned in close, her crate somehow held steady even as she cupped a clawed hand near her snout. “Do you wanna see them?”

“Elise!!”

“Shush you, he came from the Keep, it’s fine!” She looked back at Turalyon. “So what do you say, handsome?”

There was no doubt in his mind.  There was even a surge of thanks, to the Light but also to these good people just doing their honest work, that helped him to see where his restlessness was meant to take him.  Nothing ever truly happened by chance.

“Yes.  I’d like to see them.”

Chapter Text

“This is such a terrible idea.”

Anduin flexed his feet and toes.  The heavy black claws put shallow grooves into the stone beneath him.

“I really don’t need to do this.  Everyone is working toward reversing this curse.”

Wrathion was working toward it.  Shaw, all his agents in SI:7, Genn, Mia, even Nathan and those two poor maids that probably never expected to be involved in a grand conspiracy when they answered the job postings for work in the castle, all of their efforts were to maintain the ruse that nothing at all had happened to High King Anduin Wrynn.  The only one of their number that had the burden of a solution was Wrathion.  Because Anduin had asked it of him.  Because when he’d felt the most hopeless and the most helpless, it had been Wrathion’s name that he had clumsily etched into the dirt.  Because Wrathion had not refused him, and would never refuse him, except for those times that he had.

“I can go back to the cave and rest.” All he had done now for…twelve days?  Two weeks?  More?  Anduin had lost count, though Wrathion had by now come to him for several mornings with fresh game in his claws, but all Anduin had done for that time was rest and do nothing, helpless as an infant. “I can go for a walk.  I can stretch my legs and…”

He had begun to say that he could do a bit of a survey himself, check for those archaeological sites of recent history, but even that bit of contrived usefulness would be ultimately pointless.  He would be asked when he’d gone and done such a thing, then how and why he had done it, because he had made of himself a King that could take his subjects’ questions without reproach or dismissal.  He no doubt could construct an excuse, but that would just be a lie upon a lie and he truly did make every effort to be only honest.  Only trustworthy.

He did sometimes still wonder how Wrathion did it.  Had the dragon’s skill in falsehoods been a natural talent?  Or had he purposefully cultivated it into a perjurious masterwork?

As with all things when they came to Wrathion, it was surely some mix of both.

“...I’m going back.”

Anduin didn’t move.  He was perched on the high, jutting tip of one of the truly massive boulders sent plummeting from the mountaintops by Deathwing’s flight through the Eastern Kingdoms.  He had chosen this one in particular for its height as well as the relatively easy climb up the slope of one side.  Back when it was part of the peaks and not stranded amongst the fallen trees it may have been a level cliff face, possibly part of one of the many, many mountain paths his forefathers had ordered carved through the range.  A hundred years it had taken to complete some and allow for clear passage through to the Burning Steppes, only for them to come crumbling down in the span of a day.  Perhaps he should have these boulders memorialized, too, etched with the tale of mortals united with dragonkind to end the Cataclysm before the world broke beneath Deathwing’s claws.

He flexed his own claws once again as the thought came to him.  He scraped the grooves a little deeper.

“Alright.  I’m going to do it.”

If nothing else, he was going to try.

Anduin didn’t know if the deep breaths he took would help his pounding heart.  If they did anything, it was to make his body seem just a little hotter.  The plates of armor that his scales formed cracked and shifted as he rolled his back and stuck out his tail, taking extra care to focus upon the limb like he had been practicing.  The greatest hurdles to flying were the irrefutable truths that a human only had four limbs, they had a brain designed to control only four limbs, and in his case, he had lived as a man with only four limbs for twenty-seven years.  The addition of three more had been nauseating, panic-inducing, and nightmarish in how little control he had over them; even now, he felt the crawling presence of squirming unease moving along his spine, trying once again to remind him that a human didn’t, and shouldn’t, have a tail.

A human did not have wings, either.  A human was never meant to fly.

That humans could and did fly, breaching the ancient barrier of the sky with ingenuity and creativity, gave him courage.  Every mortal being that had ever dreamed of being more than themselves had left a legacy of proof that told Anduin that he, too, could go beyond all limitations real and imagined.  And he…

Well, he really wanted to.

What boy watching gryphons soar proudly above the battlements did not daydream of doing the same?

Anduin took one more deep breath.  He squeezed the muscles in his back and heard the unfurling of sails.  He pushed the distress and the discomfort as far back into his mind as he could.  He narrowed his thoughts until all that could be allowed to dwell in them were those other limbs, those strange intruders he could not treat as enemies but as his.  As him.

Anduin closed his eyes.

He leaped.

Four immeasurably powerful legs pushed him away from the stone.  His wings were upright, ready, as he had seen a falcon do when sent from its handler’s glove.  At the apex of his jump, he brought his wings down with every ounce of strength that he had.

Then, he did it again.

And again.

And again.

And when Anduin dared to open his eyes, he saw the wide and rolling meadow beneath him, the tall grasses swaying wildly and sending up the first few buds of the spring flowers.  As he stared, his mind numb and his eyes going wider and wider still with shock, the meadow grew a little further away: another half length of his whole body, each powerful beat of black and golden wings somehow enough to lift his weight yet higher.  Stuck dumb with success, he could only let his limbs hang, all four legs and the tail too, as the next beat sent him up another half length.

“I…I did it!”

A bark of a laugh finally broke his stupefied silence. “I did it!!  I…!”

He was another half length higher.

He was…past the trees now, actually.  Well past them. “I…I, um – ”

The intrusive thought that interrupted his jubilation told him to stop flapping his wings.  So Anduin did.

He dropped.

“HHAAA, shhhIIITTT-!  SHIT!”

Clawing at the air for a few seconds was a few seconds too long.  He only overcame the panic and snapped his wings open again at the very last moment, which spared him any injury but did not spare him the humiliation of crashing into the meadow and rolling end over end while shouting and kicking up dirt and debris.  When he came to rest, it was in an undignified sprawl upon his back, his wings thankfully thrown out and not crushed under his body, his legs sticking up in the air instead of doing the merciful thing and laying out to the side the way a man’s arms and legs should.

In his head, he heard a certain someone’s scolding voice.  Anduin, that profanity!  I’m going to tell the Archbishop.

“You cock,” Anduin said to the air, uselessly. “You made it look so easy.”

But that too was how it had always been with Wrathion.  From the very first moment, while Anduin was tottering on crutches and attempting a shaky bow of his head, Wrathion had gone for the full flourish of bending fully at the waist, one arm neatly tucked and the other held elegantly out, with his right heel behind his left and his turban so secure that it did not shift even a millimeter for the entire gesture.  When he straightened after the required three beats pause, there was not even a curl of hair slipped free from white silk to lay across his brow.  Anduin’s etiquette tutor would have cried tears of joy to see the classical Stormwindian courtly greeting so flawlessly reproduced, though it wasn’t the perfection of form that had stuck most in his memory these many years later.

It was the ease.   No sweat on his lip.  No shake in his knees.  No pause in his words nor a break in the gaze that had settled on Anduin’s own.

As a boy, Anduin had been completely charmed by it.  He was in awe of Wrathion and Wrathion’s indefatigable confidence, and jealous, too.  He could admit that easily.  The more his father had begun to trust Anduin’s advice and decisions, the more he had fought against the needling doubts that would leave him sleepless in his bed at Lion’s Landing, wondering not only what could have been done or said differently, but if it should have been.  If the outcome was the best he could have hoped for or if he had considered all the possible consequences no matter how many years down the line they might make themselves known.  His letters to Wyll often contained confessions of his worries, to which his old friend had said that that was true of all the great leaders and great kings in history.

Doubt was the foundation of wisdom.  Certainty was the bedmate of fools.

Like most things from his boyhood, the reality was more complicated than that.  He knew Wrathion’s was no false bravado: he was exactly as sure of everything as he appeared to be.  He knew, too, that everything that Wrathion did looked easy to him because there was an unseen mountain of effort behind each flawless gesture or turn of phrase.  Anduin might not have thought that when the anger burst up and out of him in his first and last show of violence toward Wrathion, but he had come to not just know it in the years afterward: he saw it firsthand.

The Black Empire had begun its manifestation in Uldum and the Vale.  The midnight hour had come and in a few days’ time, the combined but breathtakingly small battalion of the Horde and Alliance would march upon those dread gates to pass into N’zoth’s realm.  There would be no siege stretching through months of warfare, as it had been at the gates of Orgrimmar or upon the blasted ruin of Argus, but a single, desperate lightning’s strike that could not be repeated.

Forty.  That was the scope of their forces.  Twenty in the Vale, twenty in Uldum.  Forty men and women of all races, filtered from the hundreds that had tried and failed to pass through the crucible of nightmares that Wrathion had constructed in the Chamber of Heart.  Less than half of that little army had come into the possession of a shard of Azeroth’s Worldsoul and less than half of those had it shine for them with any strength.  They and the light they held could not be wholly relied upon, for not even Magni could explain the world’s desires except as feelings, colors, and songs.  They had a plan, but it was their only plan, and Wrathion had told him that when it became a matter of instant success or instant annihilation, every measure should be made to ensure the first rather than the latter.

That night had been one of unimaginable stillness.  The sun laid a blistering summer over the open wounds of N’zoth’s infection, but that was only in the southern hemisphere: in the north, in Stormwind, the winter had placed a graven whiteness from the soft black lapping at the harbor to the stark peaks that rose behind the castle.  For a week the gray shroud of clouds that touched both horizons had smothered all light and all sound, the daytime distinguishable only in that the gulls listlessly roused themselves to pick at the dead fish bobbing beside the pier and that it was possible to see a few blocks down the road, instead of none at all.  The night was in contrast an unthinkable, pressing darkness: the clouds dropped suffocatingly near, entombing the city as surely as any casket.  Streetlamps seemed so much dimmer; the flicker of candlesticks left upon a windowsill turned to smudges, then to nothing, and where the silent snowfall gathered in the windless night, it erased all signs that somewhere in the unfathomable black, the city still lived.

Only one light broke through it all.

It had caught Anduin’s eye the moment his slow, aimless walk took him out of the Keep and into the formless, pale maze the castle grounds had become.  There was a sharp and striking redness that his eyes instantly traveled to and his feet followed, though every second step was interrupted by the click of his cane upon the salted pathways.  The cold had driven knives into the old aching of his knee; if Genn had been awake, he would have never allowed Anduin to go wandering about, as if Anduin were not High King, but a boy again in need of rest and of at least two more layers on top of his coat and scarf if he was going to insist on going out.

He’d felt a little like that boy again when he came to the light at last, on the other end of a trek that had felt an undertaking of years: of seven royal smithies that had gone dark and shut against the dour and inescapable storm at home and abroad, one had thrown its doors wide in shameless defiance.  At the light’s edge the snow withered and melted away, the fresh flakes vanishing mid-fall the moment they came in contact with the wave of powerful heat waiting for Anduin when he limped closer and glanced inside.

It was Wrathion.  He knew it would be Wrathion; it could be no one else.  But still – 

The sight took his breath away.

He had tied his hair back.  Somehow, out of everything, that was what Anduin saw first: that the thick fall of Wrathion’s hair had been gathered at his neck with black cord.  It changed the entire shape of his profile and showed the shocking grace in his throat at the same time as it revealed the sweat beading and clinging there.  Those few ringlets that had worried their way free were pressed to his temple and the shine of his brow, caught by perspiration despite the motions that wanted them loose again.  His beard and his brows seemed twice as dark when set against the blazing fire behind him, the forge roused to a heat no doubt unbearable to any mortal craftsman, and yet in its shadow Wrathion only grew sharper, finer, his eyes gilt and burning gems and his teeth flashing white when he raised a sparking thread of platinum to his mouth and cut it to measure with a single snap of superheated fangs.

Wrathion had explained to him how and why it was his craft had evolved from sewing threads in cloth over his bent knee to the profound concert of silk and silver and dragonscale rendered molten and rippling like water.

I’m sure you’ve heard whisperings by now that the Aspects were blessed and uplifted by the Titans.  It was not the story they wanted lowly mortals to know, but it is the story that is the truth.

Bent over the anvil where the last of his cloaks lay – though to call the sparking, simmering unification of spun metals and flashing scales and liquid silks a cloak, simply some garment, felt so fantastically wrong – Wrathion had smiled that slow and secret grin he kept only for his work.  While Anduin watched, he took a needle that dripped with gold and began the graceful finishing of the hem, his fingers catching the light and turning it glittered and brightly colored.  He had let some of the dragon in him enter his visage, the only time he had done so since they were boys and he’d had little horns to hide.

He didn’t hide any longer.  He’d let his own scales show, from the claw-tipped fingers up nearly to his shoulder, his replacement for the unwieldy blacksmith’s gloves that he would never wear, and the layered mail of his true self twinkled like volcanic glass.  He had worn a thin top without sleeves to accommodate them; his sweat had adhered the fabric to him like a second skin, outlining every slope and dip of muscle in his back and on his chest.  When he breathed deeply, and he did every time he brought the needle to his mouth to let flames dance off his tongue and lick the alloy to reheat it, Anduin could just see the shape of his nipples.

Neltharion was named Earthwarder and given charge and dominion over the earth.  Straightforward sounding, isn’t it?  Yet it was Khaz'goroth that blessed him and all his Flight.

His eyes had lifted from his work.  They’d met Anduin’s own, crossing all the way to the door where Anduin was rooted, stock still and full of his own heartbeat.

Khaz’goroth was a shaper.  He forged the world.

Wrathion’s long, beautiful, gem-cut fingers pressed the shape of constellations onto a field of color, the scales transmuted to heavenly, impossible blue.

How tragic it is that my kin forsook such artes to instead try and shape themse – oh.  Oh, Anduin.

How forward, my dear.

They had fucked right there in the smithy.  Wrathion had been kind enough to adjust the heat and shut the door, even whilst Anduin had put his hungry mouth on those damned nipples and bit and sucked them through the cloth until the dragon had gasped from it.  They shattered the stillness of the night with a frenzy of motion, one that put Wrathion back upon the wide worktable with his masterworks spread out beneath him and no, Anduin had not been able to look a single soldier or champion he saw wearing one in the eye ever again.  But he had not been thinking of that at the time, just as he could never think of anything or anyone but Wrathion when they crashed together like that.  There were no futures to consider, no worries to steal his sleep, and finally, blessedly, rapturously, no doubt.  Wrathion shared his certainty with him and for a time – 

For a time, it had been good.

It had been so good.

And try as he might, Anduin could not dredge up the bitterness and the loneliness of the last six years to smother the memory.  He did not actually want the memory smothered.  He wanted, really and truly, to have it fill him, to warm him in all those places that ached with weariness and old wounds.  This was the very last time and place he should be doing so and yet he was dwelling in the memory, seeing in his mind’s eye the toss of Wrathion’s hair come loose from the cord and his glittering arms pressed above his head, his claws leaving gouges in the wood, and his voice, thick and purring, rolling over his tongue and against Anduin’s ear – 

Anduin.  Anduin.

My love, Anduin – 

A stone turned over in his belly.

Anduin’s eyes snapped open.  He had not moved one inch from where his body had come to rest.  All that had visibly changed was the shape and number of clouds passing overhead in the warm spring breeze.  He was very, very far away from the smithy and from any feeling he would call pleasurable and familiar, except that…

Except that he…he was hot, again.  Hot, but not like a fire.  Not like the acidic spitting of panic and fear in his throat.  It was – 

He pictured the liquid gold that dripped along Wrathion’s lip and tongue.

That was what the stone was doing in him.  It tightened.  It shifted.  It became a low clenching of interior muscle that seemed at first breath a cramping, but it grew fluid.  Fluid and weighty, Light help him the weight of it, the great and sliding heaviness of it surely the way that molten metal would feel if that was something that a human hand could touch without being charred beyond all recognition.  Its passage created a wave of unbound quivering in his limbs, the tremors wanting his legs to stretch and his fingers and toes to clutch, wanting to press and to pull and he had grabbed Wrathion’s wrists, felt the scales like hot stones against his palm and held them down to the table while that fine and perfect expression crumbled and opened for him, just for him and no one else, ever, he’d not allow it – 

Anduin groaned.

The sound came from the very bottom of his throat, vibrating down through his body and into the earth beneath his back.  To his roving gaze, the world grew irreal, shockingly in focus, the colors so vibrant that they wanted to leap up and into his mind.  He saw everything; he smelled everything.  The grass, the flowers, the dust and human industry on the wind, the blood from his meal that morning, the foxes that had passed through this meadow, the distant lake, and oh, there.  There.

Hours old, now.  Hours old and yet so strong to Anduin that he parted his lips to breathe it more deeply, the scent sinking into an unseen gland in the top of his mouth.

Wrathion.

Wrathion.

He didn’t understand how he knew, but he knew.  It was not even those distinctions that the man had memorized: the library of colognes, the rouge and the paint for his eyelids, the fine oils for his hair, and all the myriad of metals and fabrics and gems that he worked with and gave to him the atmosphere of the finest gallery or boutique.  There was more.  There was more.  The man had never known, but Anduin knew it now: glassy smoke, with the faintest grit.  Salt out of an ancient lakebed.  Richness close to, but not, blood.  A thread of organic redness in the midst of all the stone and fire.  So much like – 

Wrathion was always so hot.  There, between the wide spread of his thighs, when Anduin pressed his palm against his mound and spread the damp lips flushed dark to show all the pinks and reds within.

Anduin groaned again, the sound tremorous in the way his lament had been, full of hot and wretched longing.  He was mad with it.  He was mad with it.  His vision spun and the air simmered from the heat that rolled off his body and when he saw the thick and shockingly colored unfurling of flesh at the bottom of his stomach, the horror of realization was not strong enough to break the unrelenting waves of yearning.  The recollection of Wrathion’s dry explanation of anatomy – All waste out one orifice.  Everything else is for mating, which I’m sure you won’t have to worry about – neither diminished the heinousness nor calmed the molten thrumming that melted his insides and pushed them out for him to witness in the midst of his appalled and helpless panting.

It was longer than a man’s arm.

It was thicker than his human thighs had been.

It was colored as no man’s cock should be: the vibrant, shameless brightness of false gold, the yellow an outright assault on the eyes when laid over the more ordinary and acceptable cream-gold of his underside.

And the shape.  The shape of it!  The base bulged obscenely, a pair of thick knuckles of flesh that sat squat upon the slit in skin and scale that had so far been invisible and forgettable but which had now revealed the vulgarity it had hidden within.  The shaft rose out of the knot into an unrepentant curve that bore the weight of rows of raised nodes, bumps thick and long as a finger to give to it all a monstrous texture.  They shortened the closer they came to the pointed tip of him, vanishing beneath the flare of the cockhead that was almost familiar in its shape if not for the ridging upon its edge and the hue it darkened to: reddish orange, like the core of a flame.

While he watched, a bead of steaming fluid gathered at its tip and was caught by gravity thereafter, dripping in a long and shining string toward his belly.

It was the most disgusting thing that Anduin had ever seen.

Yet seconds trapped in miserable revelation did not change what was true before he saw the depravity inflicted upon him.  It remained true.  It became more true: the horror was tossed as kindling into the molten sea that filled every part of him, every secret vault and unseen crevice, and the bright boiling of it would not allow him to hide the way that Wrathion did.

In the smithy, Wrathion had kept the scales on his arms without Anduin having to say a word.  Wrathion would curl a heavy tail around his leg as they clutched one another in the tangle of his bedsheets and Wrathion would wait until Anduin’s fingers raked through his hair and pressed against his scalp before he allowed the thick and heavy crown of horns to push against his palms.  He knew, he always knew, sainted in his ability to know if Anduin longed enough for it and Anduin never had to say – 

He had always wanted the dragon.  He had never seen it, not the mature match for the man that was no boy and no whelp, but he had wanted it just the same.

And he had thought himself satisfied, indulged beyond all reason.  He’d thought himself relieved of all the burdens that came with his shame and his wanting.  He had lavished Wrathion with kisses and praises and odes to his beauty and his heat and his fineness and Wrathion would purr his pleasure until the two of them were too worn for even the whispers of adoration that Anduin still had to give.

He had never had any idea how selfish he truly was.

The frightful budding of thought was inevitable.  There was no time to gather a defense against it and somehow no breath in his heaving chest to send up a prayer to the heavens.  It was already here.  It was already here, and in his mind’s eye Wrathion was pinned to the table not with his known, scarred, and shaking hands, but with wide, dark toes and the careful tucking of black and curving claws.  Between Wrathion’s wet and parted lips there were sharper, whiter fangs than any he had ever allowed to show in his visage and past them his tongue was black, shining and inky and so restless that Anduin could do no other but press his own head down and send a long, thick strand of gold out to chase it.

In the fantasy, Wrathion tasted as he smelled: of char and of salt and of that maddening, damning richness, pungent and lush, faintly acidic, faintly saline, edged in the tang that was the sweat that would drip along the insides of his thighs or through the thick bed of pubic hair, tickling the edge of Anduin’s nose where it was buried against him while his mouth pulled and kissed and worshiped the fat and swollen clit until Wrathion’s voice would hitch and crack.

“L, Light, I…ngh – ” Hot drool pooled around the base of his teeth.  Hunger squeezed the needful whimpers out and past his lolling tongue. “Khhg…!”

He would push Wrathion’s legs back.  He would cover Wrathion’s body with the shadow of his wings.  He would press his mouth and his face against the graceful curve of his neck and there would be scales rasping there, armored above but soft, so soft below, the color of sand warmed by the summer sun, the color of powdered brass, and as gloriously malleable as the gold he wore at his ear and on his throat and on his crown, too, those bright rings that flanked the fearsome maw and blazing eyes.  Anduin had next to no time at all to commit everything to memory: there was no whole drake in his mind, just the gold, and the crimson web of his wings through which the moon had shone, and the smaller slope of his back, and the winding length of the tail and how it swayed with his walk, pulling Anduin’s eye only to vanish after a few steps, stolen by the man he still loved so, in spite of everything.

He didn’t know how Wrathion’s softness would truly feel.

He didn’t know how Wrathion would truly taste beneath his roving tongue.

He didn’t know where the slit of him hid, though it must surely be in the same place.  Down and down the length of Wrathion’s draconic body and out of reach.  May all the Heavens help him, Anduin couldn’t reach even as his fevered delusions carried him higher and higher, out of himself and to the dancing tips of scarlet flame.  His arms, which were really his front legs, stretched in wild desperation but reached only the midway: there were bones and organs and scales in the way.  They wouldn’t let him bend far enough.

His own claws skittered and sparked on his body.  He had the mad thought that Wrathion would be much softer than him.

If Anduin could only touch him.  If only he was here.

Here, now, beside or below, just so long as he was close enough that Anduin’s panting, steaming mouth might nose and search and come at last to where the peppery, earthen tang was strongest.  Where the sand and the gold and the fire and the stones that Wrathion whispered to came together and melted in the cauldron of his body and spilled those striking scents that communicated what Anduin already knew but longed to learn again.

That Wrathion was beautiful.  That he was fine and eager and full of purring delight.

That no deceptive size could hide the luscious maturity that unfurled in the lay of his wing and the arch of his neck.  That in his make was etched a readiness, a heat more true to the bestial definition of the word, and every tortured fiber of him wanted nothing more than to show Wrathion that he was ready, too.

Wrathion just had to give him the time.  He just had to give him the chance.

Anduin would find the place that he should go.  If he were given an hour; if he could have just a few moments.  He would press the end of his snout to where Wrathion’s slit had plumped and swollen the way Anduin’s had done, to different effect: there would be a give.   A parting to the loving and reverent gold of Anduin’s tongue and he would steam, too, wouldn’t he?  The slick and shining scarlet of him, because it could only be scarlet, would put to the air an obscene coiling of moisture so that it would dot Anduin’s chin and snout, demanding that he roll his tongue over the droplets before sliding it back in the pressing, simmering channel.

Would there be that hard and swollen pearl, just as there was for the man?

Would it be as large and as sensitive, engorged out of its hood and waiting for his mouth?

He wanted it to be.  In his mind, it was.

Anduin’s back legs kicked now, too.  He wrenched a muscle, then another, fighting for the motion that would be a man pressing his legs together but the splay of his hip bones wouldn’t allow it.  When that became clear, he howled; the agony of wanting sent his tail crashing into the grass and whipping across the surface of the earth.  The Wrathion he imagined was doing the same, except the clubbed end of his added a thumping that could be mistaken for the shared pounding of their hearts.

“Please, please, ghh-!!”

He was begging to Wrathion.  He was holding Wrathion down.  He was twined around Wrathion in the cave that Wrathion had dug for them, industrious, endearing, so precious and so wanted that Anduin sobbed from it.

It had hurt when he left.  The first time, and then the second, because it was him.

Anduin didn’t even know if Wrathion had missed him.

He hadn’t asked him.  He couldn’t.  Even in the fantasy he couldn’t and that left to him just one course, which was to pull back, lapping at the hot fluids that clung to his mouth while his hands came down and held Wrathion open for him.

His hands, or his paws.  His fingertips, or the tucked curl of his claw.

They were one and the same and they spread the quivering crimson of Wrathion’s cunt so that he could see and perhaps Wrathion would murmur a promise, or a tease, a low and rolling are you here only to admire?  But perhaps he might instead swallow a whimper and bite his lip, if Anduin had pushed him far enough.  If with tongue and lip and claw and wing Anduin had swept the words away and shown him the countenance that Wrathion gave only to him.

Maybe.  He had always believed it was only for him.

And Anduin, wild and raving, snapped his teeth and snarled at the unassuming wind, spitting and feral with the surging greed that trampled down the doubt the man had harbored.

He would show him.  He would prove it to Wrathion.

He would make it an irrefutable fact that Wrathion would miss him every moment they were not together.

Proud and gluttonous, the self Anduin dreamed of pressed the vibrant gold of his cock against the obscene spread of Wrathion’s pussy.  The meeting of skin to sizzling skin was electric and only in that instant did Anduin understand that lightning was the last end state of fire, the swiftest, the hottest, a cauterizing flash behind his eyelids and at the end of every nerve and it would be so good.  It would be the best he had ever felt.

In that thunderstrike came divine epiphany.

Anduin heaved his entire body rightward and crashed down onto his side.  Lancing pain shot through the entirety of his right wing; he felt none of it.  With the aid of gravity his left hind leg fell inward toward its partner and it – 

The sound he made sent the birds flying from the trees.

It went on, and on, and on, and tumbled into a series of thrumming moans, their cadence decided by his squirming and just how hard he could make his scaled thigh crush his cock against his other leg.  The press was incomplete, fumbling, piteous.  He had to bend his knee and wrench both legs up toward his chest as far as he was able and yet as pathetic was it was – 

As wretched as it was – 

As shameful – 

It was paired with the euphoric illusion of his dick sinking deep, so wonderfully deep, into Wrathion’s welcoming body.  Anduin heard none of his own sounds because he was imagining what Wrathion’s would be and if the vulgar texture on the draconic cock that fucked him would change how and when he might gasp.  He wondered if the little black drake would have the same hidden corners of delight and shivering vulnerability and decided, as he crushed the smaller dragon against the grass and spring flowers of his mind, that Wrathion did still have them.  That he did still have those soft whines that would hiss behind his teeth and that he would still resort to pleas when Anduin teased him for too long.

But, and he made the decision while his front claws churned the dirt and his upraised wing sent it up into the air as a cloud of soil, Anduin wouldn’t make Wrathion wait very long that first time.  He would be good to both of them.  He would grasp Wrathion’s hand and twine their fingers together and he would do the same for the long stretch of their necks, careful of the crown of horns they both wore.

He would say, as he always said, just how perfect Wrathion was.

Over and over again, he would say it, each word punctuated by the driving of his body and rewarded by the star-shattering squeeze that for a breath could make Anduin forget his own name.  Wrathion would have his free hand clawing upon Anduin’s shoulder and down the stretch of his back and maybe there would be blood and new scars to tend to with a blasphemous application of the Light or maybe there would be instead the sparking.

Claw to scale.  Bone to metal.

Platinum snapping between white teeth.  A black and winding tail.

Crimson in the dark.

“Ghh, ghhh, nnnghh, nngghhh-!!”

Wrathion always said his name.  In a whisper or in a hum, as a shout or with the syllables scattered throughout a scream.

His was the voice that rang in Anduin’s ears in spite of the miles and the years that separated the both of them.  The profound and dreadful and sublime whiteness, which was in his head but also before his eyes as thick and steaming ropes that shamelessly flung themselves upon the crushed grasses, it snatched up all that distance that had grown between himself and Wrathion and proclaimed that for this little while, for as long as Anduin moaned and twisted and continued to come, it didn’t exist.

They had never been apart.  It had never happened.

Nothing was wrong and there were no problems to solve and he was not collapsed in the mess that he had made with cum snatching at his legs and forming a trail as the golden stretch of cockflesh began to lose its swell.

Anduin was still himself, however.  No euphoria could change that.

He knew from nearly the exact second the ecstasy of release began that as soon as it was over the great and cloying curtain of horrific shame would come to smother him with the repulsive reality of what he had done.  Not what had been done to him, no; no curse had been put upon his mind or sent into the halls of his memory.  He had no such convenient target for blame.

There was only himself.

Was it a relief, then, that the dreaded moment of self-reproach had no chance to begin?

Anduin did not think so.  He had hardly any time to think at all.

He heard in the far distance a scintillant ringing, chimes sounding together in impossible harmony as they turned in the wind.  Recognition registered in a half-blink, or less even than that, there and gone the way that a gunshot was: it existed only as an afterward, defined by the signs it left behind in the drifting smoke and dying sound.  That Anduin had a response at all might seem a feat of precognition, as though he had known the shining hammer would fall, where it would fall, when, and how hard.

Anduin was no prophet.  He had felt the divine judgement begin to form in a realm higher than this one, from which the Light bore witness to all the sin in the world.

He threw himself to the other side milliseconds before the searing, cutting construct of faith and the Holy Light created a smoking, cum-stinking crater right where he had just been.  There was no time for anything like a thought or a shouted protest afterward, not when he had to continue to claw and roll and lurch frantically away from the burning swords that erupted from the earth and followed the path of his desperate retreat.

Anduin could only run.

Chapter Text

“And that is the last of it!”

“You sound very proud of yourself.”

“Of course, I have done nothing but climb stairs for three days.  I’ve not an ounce of strength left in me and remain standing only by virtue of my indomitable will.”

Mathias did not snort into his cup of coffee, but he came very close to it.  He held it in simply because doing so would deny Wrathion the satisfaction of knowing he got a rise out of him. “You were the one that said in no uncertain terms that the conditions in her lair were fatal to mortals.”

“And they are.” This dragon wielded the last word almost as well as he did hyperbole. “Though if someone did wander in then we would know whether they would suffocate or cook first.”

“Suffocate, most likely.  A man needs breathable air.” And it wasn’t worth the time they would waste to send people equipped for diving when Wrathion was so readily available to climb stairs for three days. “But volcanic gases and incredible heat are nothing to a black dragon.”

“Naturally.  My dear Aunt was likely right at home.”

And, by that logic, so was Wrathion.  Luckily.  Providentially.  Conveniently.  Mathias found it suspicious.  He felt his suspicion like a slow creeping over the back of his skull, a thought given physical presence, but trying to pin down its exact source was like trying to snatch and hold to a thread of smoke.

It would be the easy way, the fool’s way, to lay the blame solely upon the dragon and his vaunted ability to come across as dishonest even when entirely sincere.  By now Mathias knew damn well how biased his own thinking had become; it’d be impossible not to know.  It wasn’t even that Wrathion had a smile finer and sharper than a goblin selling dirigibles at auction: Mathias held a personal grudge against black dragons and he wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t.  That the first of his two greatest shames since his appointment as Spymaster was back to viscerally haunt him from beyond the grave only made the bad blood more clear.

That he was fresh to the office and tasked with rebuilding an entire organization after SI:7’s collapse during the turbulent days between the Second and Third War didn’t matter.  That without a dragon to come flying down from its ivory tower to tell him he couldn’t have possibly known that Onyxia could manipulate the minds of men didn’t matter, either.  That no one man, no matter how he threw himself into the work, could have found every insidious thread that somehow led back to Katrana Prestor didn’t stop him from thinking for years after, for decades, that he should have.

If he could have found just one.  At least one –

Varian Wrynn had damn near tossed Katrana’s yoke from his shoulders by his will alone.

Perhaps if Mathias had been even half the man Varian was there would still be an Alliance of Lordaeron instead of kingdoms gone to Blight, and ruin, and memory.  Perhaps Tiffin would be in the Throne Room at this very moment, the Queen Dowager assuaging the worries of the aristocracy and peasantry alike by assuring them that all was well even while their King was away.  Perhaps the first ten years of Varian’s kingship wouldn’t have been fraught with political turmoil, economic collapse, kidnapping, assassination attempts, and curses that at one time he’d thought were the worst a man could endure.  That Mathias had to change that assumption now, almost twenty years later and with aches beginning to settle in his joints, only pressed those failures harder against his back and shoulders.

But during those bad nights, the ones that he spent alone and the silence let the selfishness surface akin to a wreck dredged up from a cold sea, he’d think that if he’d just done something, anything, he’d not have the memory of Edwin’s head left on a pike outside the city gates.

He’d linger on the image and remind himself that Varian’s near-freedom had as much to do with his love for Anduin as it did willpower.  He’d let himself think, maybe love would have made a difference, and that was how the night would go, in a cold and empty bed.

Wrathion had nothing to do with any of it, of course.  It was a verifiable fact that Wrathion was born two years, seven months, and twenty three days after Onyxia’s death; Mathias had verified it himself.  Judging by the bruises and the limp that Dr. Hieronymus Blam had still been nursing when SI:7 caught up to him, Wrathion had done his own questioning not long before the good doctor was escorted under guard to a safehouse in Redridge.  Blam had been confessing for hours before Mathias could arrive and confessed for hours after, descending into gibberish in the empty room where he was held.

That was the first thing Mathias learned about Wrathion: the brutality he was capable of, though that had never been in doubt.  He had left behind him a trail paved with the bodies of black dragons, some of which SI:7 had known about but many of which they hadn’t, and though his wasn’t the hand that held the assassin’s knife, all the blood led back to him.

“Is this…coffee?”

In the safety of Shaw’s third office, Wrathion had returned to the familiar visage of a man from a foreign shore that could not quite be placed.  His attire remained the simplistic and rustic fashionings of a scholar on the move, though he was in the midst of pulling off the gloves to lay them aside and pick through the arrangement of two old breakfasts and one new one on the credenza by the door.  Mathias was a man of uncomplicated choices: the cheapest bean out  of the meager Alliance holdings in Stranglethorn was all that he needed.  Even with the current import market utterly dominated by Zandalari cultivars, there was no unseating the taste he had for the strong, bitter brew he’d press and filter himself.

“I never would have thought you were a man that resorted to stimulants.” Wrathion lifted the carafe of coffee, popping the lid to give it a sniff.  He surprised Mathias when he appropriated one of the empty mugs immediately thereafter, pouring himself a generous cup. “I suppose these are unprecedented times.”

“They are,” Shaw easily replied, matching Wrathion tone for tone from earlier, and just barely spotted the twitch at the corner of the dragon’s mouth.

What they both knew, and were not saying, was that Wrathion had never had the chance to nose about in the private refuge that was the third office of Stormwind’s Spymaster and so wouldn’t know that there was where he took coffee, meals, and those materials possessed of a secrecy so great that not even the King would know of them until he absolutely needed to.  The third office and its contents could be plausibly denied, insulating the Crown from the worst that SI:7 could do or had done.  Before today, only three people had known of it: himself, Renzik, and Valeera.  His second would inherit it in the event of his demise – or his retirement, he supposed, though he cringed away from the thought every time it came back to him.  Valeera would hold the knowledge like a dagger should the Mathias before her eyes ever again prove not to be the man she thought he was, so that he could be assured that at least one of his mistakes wouldn’t be repeated.

Given the circumstances, it made sense that here was where Wrathion should transport a dragon’s hoard of illicit, dangerous, and tremendously valuable materials for analysis and study.  He’d needed to only go down a few flights of stairs to do it: Shaw’s potentially treasonous sanctum was one of the abandoned cellars that survived the destruction of the first Keep and was accessible only by King Llane’s skeleton key.

Built to age the finest wines from the vineyards burned by the Horde’s bloody advance across the countryside, the space was horizontally cavernous with a low ceiling but a floor wide and long enough for a half dozen banquet tables.  The heavy stones that formed the walls and bore the weight of the new Keep had been quarried before Mathias had been born, back when the only dangers on the roads from Westfall were wolves and kobolds.  The old ventilation shafts still worked, though he had to clear and maintain them himself and keep the office supplied with gnomish lighting fixtures to keep smoke to a minimum.  Beneath their feet was pressed dirt, over which he had thrown thick rugs originally earmarked for disposal but repurposed for his use, just like all the rest of the eclectic collection of furniture crowded near the entrance.  He didn’t have a desk so much as a series of tables collected around a set of three chairs, one for each of the secret-keepers that might meet together here on very rare occasions.

Wrathion had brought a fourth chair for himself on the second day of carrying boxes.  He slid into it now, setting his coffee and a plate of biscuits and dipping gravy upon the long side table to Shaw’s left.  The table on the right, the largest and most sturdy that Mathias could drag down here with just himself and Renzik because there was no asking Valeera Sanguinar to help move furniture, was weighed down by the deeply disturbing amount of contraband Onyxia had been able to move onto castle grounds.

His jaw tightened to look at it.

“I suppose you do have good cause to glare at it all.”  So the dragon smoothly began, stirring a pair of sugars and a generous portion of thick cream into his coffee.

Mathias finished his own – one sugar, no cream – before setting his mug down and pushing it away. “You don’t miss anything, do you?”

“I miss some things.”

A rare admission, coming from him.  Shaw first glanced his way, then turned his chair toward that branch of his workspace.  Wrathion had precious little clearance to have his meal: stacked trays of papers and folios, hexed shelves for scrolls, maps, and old wax cylinders, and a small army of sealed, dark lacquer boxes created a fortress wall between the both of them and gave the dragon a sliver of space to work with.  He did so with an economy of motion that had never been present in the grand banquet hall or the King’s private table.  There was no flourish to his hands, nor time spent on the smack of a lip after a satisfying sip or a sigh after a particularly slow and shamelessly self-indulgent bite.  He was not even looking at his biscuit before he scooped the pale gravy and sausage up with it and put it in his mouth, instead staring off into the dark to peer at the unseen.

The grudge wanted Mathias to ask: which was real?  The sensual gentleman openly delighting in the pleasure of a good meal and good company, or the detached strategist picking apart well-established evidence to search for previously undetected weaknesses?

Because he did know the look.  He knew the feeling. “You’ve never found any sign that she had this lair.”

Wrathion answered him like Mathias had asked a question, even though he hadn’t. “That’s right.  Despite the great pains I went through to unearth every secret my kin left behind, these hidden enclaves built for nefarious purpose keep presenting themselves.”

When Shaw said nothing, Wrathion’s eyes flicked back to him.  The effect had always been interesting to watch: the smoky glow left the smallest of trails in the air and changed how the shadows fit in the planes of his face. “So you are not going to ask me about the other?”

“The official stance of the Grand Alliance is to respect the sovereignty of the Dragon Isles.”

Wrathion lost the little game they had been playing since his arrival and let his own chuckle slip first. “And I suppose there is no need for spies when the champions we hastily press-ganged into assaulting Aberrus have no reason to keep secrets.”

“You know there’s no soul more openly boastful than a hired sword.” Mathias inclined his head, then allowed at last in a different tone, with different weight: “No one man can know everything.”

Wrathion’s expression shifted.  The shadow that slid across his brow in contemplation almost disguised the bitter slant to his mouth.

“But we do so try, don’t we?”

Commiseration with Wrathion was a foregone conclusion.  They were in the same business.  Their goals for years hardly aligned in any way except for broad strokes, but the burdens lay the same and worse, they were alike.  Six years it had been with not a word between Anduin and Wrathion after the dragon had been dismissed from the castle and his place in Anduin’s life, and yet the very afternoon they sent word, Wrathion had come.  With not a moment’s hesitation.  With not even a demand for more information or promised compensation.  He came with the obsessive drive of a man that needed to fix something, with the same look and the same tireless purpose that he had carried with him into a city rotting from the inside out with N’zoth’s taint.

It had been no confident word of expertise nor grand, nigh-impossible plan to fell a god that had convinced Mathias of Wrathion’s sincerity that day; it had certainly not been his impeccable recovery from Anduin’s explosive grief.

It had been the work.

The grueling, thankless, sleepless, perpetual work that began the moment Anduin assented to his counsel and would never be finished even though the Black Empire became nothing but a brief, terrible dream.  Mathias was going to carry his own mistakes and failures with him right to the end of his days, some twenty or thirty years from now, if he was lucky.  Though his work would finish eventually he knew already that he’d never be happy or satisfied with it; he would probably be shaking his wrinkled fist in impotent regret on his deathbed.  But Wrathion was a dragon and perhaps it was only a dragon’s lifetime that could possibly offer the years and years of labor as compensation necessary to lay the countless dead to rest.

Anduin had officially pardoned Wrathion for the part he had played in the Legion’s third invasion.  He had by written decree absolved him of any responsibility in the death of Varian Wrynn: Gul’dan had killed his father and the sorcerer had already paid for that crime with his life.  Anduin had forgiven Wrathion, too, the proof of it clear simply in the way that they looked at one another and walked, shoulder to shoulder, in intimate confidence.

But the work continued.

“Then let’s consider what we do know.”

Mathias stood and stepped out of the desk arrangement to come around and face the stacked boxes, tomes, and the pile of weaponry upon the floor.  Though Wrathion had already assured him that there were no hidden enchantments or fail-safes left upon them, he didn’t touch them.  He had too many scars on his hands and arms to make that kind of mistake again.

“What we have here is a level of secrecy not seen since Deathwing built his laboratory right under the noses of the Aspects.”

“He was Neltharion at the time.”

“Choice of name doesn’t change the facts.” When Wrathion didn’t argue, Mathias went on. “What that leads me to believe is that Onyxia didn’t just want this hidden from us.  She wanted it hidden from other dragons.  Possibly even other black dragons.”

Wrathion had not moved from his seat, except to push his half-finished plate and mug a little to the side. “Yes, I came to the same conclusion.  No record in Blackrock contained even a hint of a second lair for the Broodmother, nor a suggestion of any plans we don’t already know of.”

“If you’d asked me ten years ago if a black dragon could act independently from the rest of them, I would have confidently said no.  But I can admit when I’m wrong.” With Wrathion still seated, it was a bit of work to look directly at him; towers of books and correspondence interfered with his line of sight. “There’s proof of that already, isn’t there?”

“I’m flattered you’re thinking of me.”

“No, not you.”

Mathias saw it only because he was looking for it: the very subtle dimming in the red glow that betrayed a tightening in the eyelids.  Wrathion didn’t ask if he meant Ebyssian.  He knew that wasn’t that case.  The break in conversation lingered for two tense breaths, before Wrathion wiped the tips of his fingers on a napkin and stood.

“The official stance of the Black Dragonflight is that if a foreign party wishes to question our General, they do so through the proper diplomatic channels.”

“Like you were going to do?”

Wrathion’s smile slid out of the dim like a knife. “Why, of course not.  He is my brother.  I was going to simply have a friendly conversation with him.”

Waiting on Mathias’s tongue were words that could just have easily come from the grudge as they could the nagging tension at the base of his neck that demanded he acknowledge that he was somehow missing something.

Were you going to tell us that you were going to have this conversation?

Were you going to tell us what questions you were going to ask, and why?

It went against his nature to close his eyes and take a deep breath.  It flew in the face of every experience and paranoia he had endured throughout the years.  But it was also an admittance of what he could not deny seeing, or knowing, or having known for years despite how hard the pair did try to be discreet when searching for corners in the castle where they might put their arms around one another.  Before Wrathion came at their call, Anduin hadn’t been able to speak.  He’d barely been able to eat or drink.  He’d been losing his mind and not a one of them had possessed or known any way to help him.  Now Anduin was out of the castle, as safe and as healthy as he could possibly be, and in an afternoon Wrathion had uncovered plots undiscovered for thirty years.

Conveniently.  Luckily – 

“Good.”

Mathias made himself say the word.  He made himself pull away from the recursive racing of his thoughts, though he felt a throb in his temple to do so.  It was the price he was going to have to pay in pursuit of the resolution for the real problem at hand.

“What we’ve found here is not something we want on the official record.  We’ve got more than just the kingdom’s stability to consider.  Whatever she did, however she did it, is never leaving this room.”

He knew he was assuming a decision that Anduin had yet to make.  It was the one that he was going to implore his King to make and the one that he suspected that he would, but in saying it now, he was giving to Wrathion tacit permission to do what he needed so long as he kept secret whatever unspeakable spellwork Onyxia had woven to change a man not into subservient dragonkin, but a dragon in truth, sound of mind and soul in spite of his complete transformation.

“Much like the King’s current state, yes?”

After a small pause, Wrathion had come to stand beside Mathias, his hands tucked loosely into the small of his back as he surveyed the mountain of materials that was going to take days to sort through and twice that again to understand.

“That is up to His Majesty.” He’d already assumed one thing; that was his one sin for the day.  He’d not commit a second. “He has final say on who to bring into this circle.

“Naturally.” The knife had gone away.  The smile that Mathias spied out of the corner of his eye was an ordinary one, grown touched with simple pleasure as he went on. “I will consult with him over dinner.  Do the hills near Northshire still serve as a home to feral cattle?  It might comfort him to have a touch of familiar – ”

Wrathion was interrupted by a shrill ringing, one that had Mathias moving before the dragon could so much as turn and ask him what it was or where it was coming from.  To get that answer, all he had to do was watch as Shaw stormed toward the foremost desk and snatched up one of the sealed boxes.  He dug his thumbs into the back corners and the lid flipped immediately open, which cut off the sound and cast up into the air above his palms a flickering magical image.

It was the face of his best sniper, her hair down and her chest heaving for breath.  The shoulder and right arm of her tunic were torn and scorched at the edges, with flecks of blood upon her sleeve, but there was no sign of injury, not through the holes in her clothing and not on her pale and panicked face.

“Sir!  The Lord Commander breached the perimeter!”

Shaw’s stomach dropped. “Sector.  Time.”

“Sector four, three hours ago.  He destroyed my mechs and incapacitated me.”

“He refused the cover story?”

“He said he was investigating an attack on the Keep.  I was detained for questioning.”

Shaw didn’t have to ask how she’d been overpowered.  There wasn’t a paladin on this planet or any other as skilled in every use of the Holy Light as High Exarch and Knight of the Silverhand Turalyon.  There was no one in SI:7 and hardly anyone in the Alliance that could best him in a straight fight.  Not himself, not Valeera, and not Anduin.  “I’m on my – ”

The door slammed.

Wrathion was already gone.

This was his fault.

Wrathion had encountered the High Exarch in the halls of the Keep on the very first day spent transporting boxes out of Onyxia’s den.  He had been deeply alarmed to see the man back in Stormwind at the worst possible time and cursed his own inattentiveness when he realized this was the same time as he had always returned after inspections in the Highlands.  He should have kept both of those feelings at the forefront of his mind rather than give in to foolish complacency.  He didn’t consider it any mistake of Shaw’s: it was only natural that the Spymaster would take it as his responsibility to keep tabs on Turalyon.  Wrathion was not supposed to be in Stormwind.  Genn was maintaining the ruse in Gilneas.  Valeera was not a part of any Alliance chain-of-command.  Shaw was doubtless in the best position to make certain that the man was content to wait on his orders until Anduin returned from his trip.

But therein lay the fatal flaw.

Turalyon would never simply sit and wait.  He was incapable.

A thousand years was well beyond the time it would take for any ordinary man to forget how to be anything other than constantly at war.  The opponent of the hour need not be as grand and as terrible as the Legion: mere bandits would do just as well so long as the action of fighting them was near enough the same.  Simply encourage Turalyon to recall that an arrest was the rule rather than the common measure of pulling a demon’s steaming heart from its body to ensure it stayed down.  He was an impeccable military leader and arguably one of only a handful of mortals that had crossed the boundary between ordinary, achievable strength and the realm of higher powers and the Titan-blessed.  But the act, the mission, had to continue.  He’d not suffer the absence of it, even if he tried to.  He would likely even take to routing wolves and bears if there were no enemies left to fight and up until the moment that Wrathion had been dismissed from the castle, what to do with an immortal human had existed as a constant conundrum at the very back of his mind.

Humans were not meant to live that long.  Their biology was not adapted to it.  Their souls were not fitted for it.  What Xe’ra had done to Turalyon so that he would serve her purposes in perpetuum had been one of the more heinous things that Wrathion had ever heard tell of and that included the grisly reality of his own birth.  That the Betrayer had held to the nature his title implied and removed the benevolent threat that the Prime Naaru had posed had been a stroke of luck; Wrathion would not have to try and do it himself.

Instead, he had to navigate every plan and action around a demigod that Anduin had told him, in closest confidence, couldn’t remember how to write his own name.

Wrathion took the old stairs three or four at a time, shedding his resemblance to humanity in exchange for speed.  Dust flew up and flashed toward his face, only to be silently incinerated before it could touch his skin or impair his vision.  He leapt through every such cloud his passage made, pushing off with his heels and grasping the next of weathered timbers with his hands, nearly horizontal as he hit the ground floor and drove his shoulder into the door rather than wait on the key he’d not bothered to snatch from Shaw’s desk.

A scream and the shattering of dishes were his reward.  He ignored them both and barreled down the servants hall, his heart a wild beast in his chest and his blood howling in his ears.

Turalyon could kill him.

If Anduin had no time to explain.  If Anduin was asleep or unawares.  If the righteous, eternal servant of the Holy Light saw only the monster written of in the human histories he had poured over in secret to relearn his own past.

Turalyon could kill him.

This was his fault.

Wrathion lunged for the first slice of sunlight that he saw.  His only consideration for the glass was that he lifted his arms up just long enough to protect his face before he was out into air thick with the smells of greenery and cooking.  He rolled against the grass and soil and cobblestones, his arms still tucked against the shards scattered ahead of him.  Another scream met him there, and then a man’s harsh shouting, and he saw out of the corner of his eye that bodies were clustering madly about the side entrance to the kitchens.

They didn’t matter.  Nothing and no one else mattered.

This was his fault.

“Wait, wait damn you–!!”

The distinctive muted boom of displaced air from a shadow step came from a little behind and above him; Shaw’s boots hit the ground a half second later.

By that time Wrathion the man was already half-vanished into roiling smoke.  This was no artful whorl of colored mana and dancing motes, but a flash-rush of hot ash that poured up and out and off of him, hissing along his neck as it elongated and cascading from the edges of his wings.  He was in a half crouch before he finished, his muscles coiling and claws pulling up and out of the dirt, and he’d not thought nor cared about the Spymaster’s shouting at all.  The man had lost his mind if he thought there would be waiting – 

Weight came down on Wrathion’s back.  He heard the snap of leather and felt a cinching around his throat.

Shaw would have to hope that a belt and his arm were enough to keep himself in the seat that he had chosen, there at the junction between Wrathion’s neck and shoulders, because Wrathion did not so much as hesitate.

His wings came down and created a violent cloud of smoke and dust and glass particulates.  The pull of his muscles upon bone and sinew had the snap and metallic ringing of high-tension wire.  His chest and throat pushed out with the great and heaving breath he brought into his body and in the center of him, on either side of the onyx piston of his heart, the second chamber of each lung took that breath and subjected it to incredible pressure.

From that tremendous concentration came heat.

Heat which no mortal could endure.  Heat which could only be had in the deepest places of the earth.  There was no need for a delay, no need for time spent on the conversion of energy to magic or to fuel, because a black dragon’s body was the very engine for which the heat was everything.  Life, power, strength; it was everything, and Wrathion shed the yoke of the land at such speed that the ground floor windows of the Keep shattered behind him.

Shaw didn’t scream.  He didn’t fall, either.

Wrathion could ignore him entirely, then, and focus instead on the cliffs that jutted up sharply before him.  The swiftest route to the Cairn by air was over them and so he matched the pumping of his wings to the billowing of his breaths, steam streaking out of his mouth and nostrils while flecks of flame and ash flew from the webbing on his wings.  The crimson throbbed and hummed as loud as the turbines of an airship, and the bright red veins grew thick and wide with gases lighter than the atmosphere around him.  On his chest, the lines of scales thinned and stretched, acting as valves for the excess energy that seethed inside him, though there was little that needed to be released.

He used it all.  He clawed for more.  Strain twisted through the cartilage in his throat.  The black plate upon his back cracked, followed by a scale upon his side.  Threads of pain wound through the muscles at the base of each wing.  He ignored it all and made the next breath deeper and crushed it harder inside himself, willing the heat into his claws as he crashed against a sheer cliff face.  He tore into the rock like a beast consumed with starvation and hurled himself up and over it, diving into the pass beyond it and using the quick drop to fold his wings and gain momentum he wouldn’t have been able to generate himself.  Then he did it again, there at the next cliff, the next pass, leaving molten footprints and hissing debris behind and cracking stone slopes with his tail when he landed too heavily or turned too close against them.

It still wasn’t fast enough.

It felt instead as though Wrathion was attempting to crawl through a suffocating mire.  Pure terror built the swamp around him, fashioning the corpse weight of damp and rot and filth that convinced his agonized thoughts that he was barely moving at all.  His eyes tried to argue with it: he could see distant flashes of green.  He could see the peaks begin to fall away.  He was moving faster than most dragons would dare to go.  His own blood was flashing past his eye, droplets thrown from his mouth.

Yet Anduin was no closer.  The years did not vanish, nor did they grow shorter.  They remained as a vast and horrifying gulf, into which Wrathion had tossed his self-certain justification, the murmur it is better this way, because Anduin had a set future laid out before him and Wrathion was being only practical, only reasonable, when he had said those things and made the decisions that he had.

We both know you have responsibilities as King of Stormwind.

To deny them is – 

The green world exploded below him.  Wrathion tucked his wings and dove.

This time, Shaw did make a noise, something between a rasping choke and a howled swear, but he still did not fall.  He stayed crushed against Wrathion’s back and neck, even as Wrathion’s own broken scales peeled away and went spiraling off into some unknown distance.

Wrathion took another breath.  He felt a rib snap.

When his wings came down, the cracking boom of sound could be heard from Northshire to Eastvale and an acre’s worth of trees swayed and thrashed wildly beneath him.

And still.

Still.

He could not outpace the fear.

The loathsome, odious, crushing fear.

Wrathion hadn’t known it in so long.  His recent trials had possessed their own sorts of dread and difficulty.  He had gone to war with dragon killers and mad shamans and for the first time had fought his battles as a proper dragon would, with his own claws and his own bloodied teeth and with his enemies shrieking beneath his own blistering fire.  He had faced down a storm a hundred thousand years in the making and survived the hateful, miserable grudge that no imprisonment, however many ghastly centuries it entailed, could quell.  He had beheld the yawning, hungry void once again and heard its intimate whispers and had come to nearly believe them, because they had told him all that he had ever wished and fruitlessly hoped to hear.

Yet these ordeals could be overcome.  He had overcome them.  The fear they put into his breast was actionable.   He could take it, dissect it, examine it, and arrange its qualities in neat formation in his mind or before his eyes, in those many maps and missives and the carved figurines that showed where his troops had been deployed.  He could bargain with it, slip around it in shadow, or charm it as he might a Gilnean noble at a banquet, the curl of his lips dropped low to brush the back of an offered hand.  He could face it directly, his head held high and his wings a banner unfurled, and the press of his claws would crack the black and steaming stones on which he stood.  In this way, in those moments of need, it was not fear that he felt, but purpose, purpose and strength and resilience, all those qualities which he had gone through such lengths to temper in himself throughout the short, fraught years that he had lived.

All this, so that Wrathion never knew again that first fear.

The one come whimpering out of the fluid dark.

Helpless.  Helpless within the thin shell, beyond which all the hells burned and a voice like the sky breaking apart demanded that he die before he could ever live.

The past and the present existed simultaneously.  They layered over one another, first the bright and thoughtless sky, the treetops whipping in the wind that he created, the lake winking like a baleful eye growing wider, and then the dark, the liquid and the pressure and the crushing of blunt claws to his brittle prison so that he could be out, out, and never again would he ever be – 

Stone Cairn Lake rippled violently beneath him, distorting his reflection.

His tail flung itself to one side.  His trajectory adjusted.  He had memorized the sectors Shaw had laid out on the map in his office.  He did not need to adjust a second time.

He smelled first water, then soil, then fresh ash and bitter smoke and a hot, striking stink and then blood.

Blood blood blood –

The trees split open below.  Black and shining blue writhed, tumorous against the green.  Beside it, the Light flashed like a scalpel.

A dragon’s bellow rang in the air, full of pain.

Wrathion ceased to be himself.

The earth shook when he met it.  The grasses ignited in a great flare of heat.  He lunged across them, through them, and rising out of his throat was not fire, but molten rock, and it coated his snapping teeth.  His wings flared and beat, his own blood sizzling upon them, and when the blazing saber of Light, three times the length of the sword it shrouded, swung toward him, Wrathion twisted his head to the side and caught it with his horns.  They cracked, but did not burn, and he threw his whole weight forward, driving the Light away.  Away.   Away from the wide arcs of blood that had stained the grass.  Away from the other dragon fallen to the soil and the groans of pain that it struggled to speak through.  Away from the faraway sounds of a man shouting – 

“Turalyon – ”

A hammer as large as a man plunged from the heavens toward Wrathion’s back.  He kicked himself away, off to the side, and bellowed in raw defiance when his wing shattered beneath it.

“TURALYON!!!”

A weight that Wrathion had forgotten tumbled from his back.  Shaw, his right arm hanging loose and broken, blood streaking down from each ear, shouted again.

“Stand down!  Stand down!!  It’s Anduin!”

The Light flickered.  Behind it was not a demigod in armor fashioned for endless war, but a man in a torn and scorched tunic splashed with blood, though the skin that showed beyond the charred edges was pristine and without wound.

Shaw staggered forward, his left hand out and swaying dangerously on uncertain feet. “For the love of the Light, stop.  Stop.  It’s Anduin.  It’s Anduin – ”

Turalyon dropped his sword in the same moment that Shaw fell to his knees.

Wrathion stared at them both, magma dripping out of his panting maw and his wing a tattered ruin hanging off his side.

“Wr, Wrathion…Wrath–”

Wrathion started to turn his head.  He saw, just for a breath, the fine dragon pushing himself up with his forelegs and showing that though he was dripping blood, the wounds from which it had come were already sealed, nearly healed and the sight…

It broke through the layers of rage and terror.

It brought a sort of bewildered wonder.

A dragon that can use the Holy Light…?  How novel.

That thought was the last that Wrathion had before he collapsed into utter darkness.

Chapter Text

Last spring the Kul Tiran clipper AMS Honeytoast had resoundingly shattered the maritime speed record originally set by the SMS Tiffin’s Melody six years before, docking in Stormwind a mere three days after leaving Boralus.  Constructed at the Addington Shipyard in Stormsong Valley, the Honeytoast’s design had completely upended established naval engineering by discarding all considerations for combat and focusing entirely upon speed.  When its shipwright, Seraphina Sterling, laid out the sailplans for a narrow-bodied, full-sailed, undersized craft with too many crew and not a single cannon upon it, not even an armored alcove for a Tidesage to occupy while weaving the waves, she had been called a madwoman to her face and a few far less polite things behind her back.  The Proudmoore Admiralty, however, thought differently when the plans reached their hands, and through the sponsorship of the Admiral herself, Seraphina had for a year overseen the construction of her heretical ship.

The result was sleekly beautiful, fiendishly expensive, wildly difficult to operate, and the fastest vessel to ever sail Azerothian waters, shallow, deep-sea, or otherwise.  Launched with the new official prefix of Admiralty Mailing Ship, the Honeytoast now served as the very first of a civil service fleet that Admiral Proudmoore promised the peoples of Kul Tiras would be a “third mast” for their nation, alongside the military and merchant fleets.  Many harbored doubts, the Ashvane and Stormsong conservatives chief among them, but while Seraphina refined her designs within the freshly established civil sailing offices, the Honeytoast began its tour of duty.

Pirates immediately attempted to commandeer it.  But the Honeytoast and its cargo of civilian mail, light parcels, banking documents, and low-level government correspondence maintained a steady sailing speed of twenty-two knots and left its pursuer beyond the horizon within a few hours.  Since that time, the impending communications revolution became clear even to the Honeytoast’s naysayers: in a world where radio devices were short range, mage services constantly overbooked, and flighted couriers reserved for high government and the military, the humble postal service, with its low and standardized fees, would soon be accessible to all.

Similarly, but more infrequently, the Honeytoast and ships like it could serve as a means of swift transport when all other options were rendered unavailable.  In the year since its service began, the clipper’s rare passengers were primarily the elderly, infirm, or very young that could not utilize a portal, porters escorting delicate artifacts, and wealthy individuals or families on holiday that wished to experience the impressive voyage for themselves.

When the respectable Baron Sablemane paid the very considerable fee for three tickets from Boralus to Stormwind, the curious dockmaster had of course asked him about it.  Spring, after all, was a very rainy season to be making the passage and the interior cabins were a cramped sort of place to spend a holiday.

“I have business,” was all that he had said.

“But what business,” the dockmaster pondered later at the drinking table with the dockmen after hours. “Woulda noble like tha have with one of them elves?”

“Ya mean th’elf or th’bear?”

“It was two bears, if ya ask me!”

The whole table had howled with laughter and then snickered to each other about what three men at sea might have for “business” on a “holiday.”

Sabellian knew of none of this and so there was little danger of Boralus being burned to the ground despite how tremendously thin his patience had already been worn.  The moment word had reached him that Wrathion had come to harm during his trip to Stormwind and required aid, Sabellian had been ready to fly directly there himself with all speed.  Yet the women come from Wrathion’s compound, each his second-in-command for all the short time that Sabellian had known him, had said that his travel must be clandestine.

An elder wyrm would need to be clandestine, precisely because he was an elder wyrm.  Mortal-fashioned teleportation portals could not endure the sheer magical weight of a dragon that possessed his years and having never cultivated the skill himself, never having a need to, hasty travel would have to take some other form.

At the very least, the first leg of the journey had been simple: the flight from the Azure Span to a secluded corner of Kul Tiras was no more than a few hours at full speed.  It was only after that point that progression had slowed to an unimaginable crawl, their party forced to approach the harbor city on foot, in visage, and then subjected to a miserable gauntlet of paper stamping and money trading and documents collecting.  If not for the man from Wrathion’s army it doubtless would have taken twice the time; Sabellian had doubted the old beast’s usefulness, only to gladly admit that he was wrong when lines were inexplicably skipped and waiting periods waived after short conversations.

Sabellian did try to remember his name after that.  Tong, he had said it was; he was a…Pandaren, a race that he had wholly forgotten existed, if he had ever taken the time to learn of them in the first place.

Mortals and their lives had never been of great importance to him.  They had existed on the periphery of his world for most of his life, more similar to scurrying rodents or flitting birds than they were to himself and his kin.  They reproduced recklessly, died quickly, and dreamed dimly, an impression he would stubbornly cling to as the ages passed and mortal empires began to flourish and achieve the longevity and heights that only the Titan-blessed had known.  He had been there, he had lived through it: the meteoric rise and the apocalyptic fall of the Kaldorei, after which history had begun to hurtle ahead of him, mortal triumphs and mortal disasters spinning by at a dizzying speed while he, the great dragon, stood on the outside and tried to look in as his father and Aspect had demanded.

He knew for a certainty that because he tried but was never successful his father chose Onyxia and Nefarian over his other elder children, over Sabellian himself, as his agents among the mortal races.  Sabellian could not keep up with his siblings and he could not keep up with mortals, slower to grow and less capable of change than those scurrying rodents or flitting birds.  This thought, this realization, was a new one, carried in the back of his mind up and out of Aberrus, and he considered it a bitter pill worth swallowing if he wanted a future with what the Black Dragonflight would surely become.

Something new.  Something better.  A Flight that existed in the mortal world, not high above or far below it, and he could more readily admit to those qualities he lacked and take his time in fumbling through learning and improvement because the Flight as a whole was not as deficient as he.

Wrathion knew this mortal-dominated world.  He had been born in it and he had lived in it with mortals as his teachers and keepers and he had spent the tumultuous, unnaturally short years of his whelphood traveling all across it in search of allies, knowledge, and yes, in search of power, as a black dragon would.  Sabellian in his hardheaded obstinacy had scoffed when his brother had first made that proud claim, but after the sealing of their father’s dread legacy he had told Wrathion that he had come to better understand what the younger dragon had meant.

That had not been a lie.  He’d not meant to lie.

But he had lied, because Sabellian had claimed he had understood, and the moment he walked down the gangplank off the Honeytoast and into Stormwind Harbor after three wretched and rainy days, he realized he had not understood a single blasted thing.

“Spotted yellowtail!  This morning’s freshest catch, six silver a pound!  Yellowtail, Stranglethorn’s best!”

“Oi, these ain’t clams, these’re mussels!”

“Free samples!  Free samples of Jani’s Favorite Blend, made from the finest beans in Zandalar, guaranteed!”

“Glacial salmon, the season’s last shipment!  Twelve gold a pound!”

“That’s highway robbery!”

“Guess you haven’t heard about all the Scourge getting restless, mister.  That’s the lowest price on the market.”

“Midnight Souls sellswords offering escort services!  Nazjatar, Nazmir, and Uldum expeditions available!  We price match!”

“Albacore auction at noon!  It’s a six-footer, registered buyers only!”

“Bronze-aged cheeses, straight from the Dragon Isles!  Try the Temporal Parmesan, great for yesterday’s spaghetti!”

“Crates of salvage for sale!  Pick a crate, prices based on weight!  No refunds!”

“Fantastically rare, hardly seen since the Third War!  Feast your eyes upon it: a magical rooster egg!  Perhaps the last in the world!  We take gold bars, gems, and land titles!”

“Six silver?  That cheap?  What’s wrong with them?”

“AUTHENTIC NIGHT ELVEN CHARCOAL, LIMITED QUANTITY, COME GET–hey this is a legitimate business!”

“You’re under arrest for distributing contraband!  Stop in the name of the King!”

Mere feet away from the pier, Sabellian was forced to hastily sidestep a human youth – child?  It was impossible for him to discern mortal ages – as the lad went barreling by, a pack of what looked like burnt sticks on his back and his flatcap flying off his head as he threw himself into a dead sprint.  Hot on his heels were a pair of men in polished armor, clanking and huffing and shouting about fees and offensive behavior and orphanage escapees, and that was just one of the hundreds of chaotic, clamorous, claptrap vignettes taking place simultaneously up and down the sprawling harbor that had, not that Sabellian was aware, grown to twice its original size in the last six years.  Even so, every inch of space was crammed with crates, barrels, ropes, machinery, people, animals, stalls, boxes, racks, shelves, tables, signs, banners, bellringers, wagons, carts, raised podiums, lifted canopies, folded sails, and dozens of newly constructed customs and receiving houses to see to the daily business that now rivaled Boralus’s own and in a third of the space.

To say that the harbor was packed would be an understatement.  It was better to say that it was pressed: advancing even a step required pressing , either with his shoulder or his chest, up against the thick back of a Kul Tiran man.  Another sidestep just revealed the path to be blocked by an open barrel of fresh fish, the whiskery silver creatures with their gaping mouths and wild flopping tossing water up onto his robes.  Worming around it and its half-dozen fellows – an elder wyrm…worming!  The audacity of it! – just put Sabellian face to face with the scowling countenance of a draenei sailor in cartel colors, huge coils of rope under each of his bare and bulky arms.  The seaman didn’t wait for him to navigate out of the way: he pushed Sabellian, their shoulders banging together as a violent throb went off in Sabellian’s temple.

In all his long life he had never been to a mortal city, much less a human city, much less the heart of a modern Alliance transformed by prosperous years free of warfare.  The encampments in Outland that he and his brood had treated with had barely counted as civilization and before then, before everything, he had always preferred to stay in the Obsidian Citadel or on the coast of the Shores.  He went to where he was ordered to go by his father, as per the needs of the Flights, and then he returned to the familiar and welcome environs of home, where he could rest upon the black stones and feel the rumbling of the molten earth beneath him.  Since his youth there had been many a soul that felt the need to point out that by their standards, his life was surely a boring one, occupied solely with duty, training, and study; his leisure times were spent sleeping, grooming, or with his consorts and children.  It was a life that had suited him and that was well before duty became his entire purpose with a whole brood under his wing and all the rest of his kind gone from the world.

It was only at the urging of his brothers…his consorts…and every single one of his youngest children, each of them enraptured by the vibrant and living world they’d never known, that Sabellian had made some small attempts to step outside habits that had served him well for millennia.

After Fyrakk’s demise, he had willingly taken it upon himself to visit Valdrakken on occasion, though he did not keep his residence there as Wrathion and Ebyssian did, and when he had finished his meetings and social hours with them, he would then walk the markets.  If the weather was good.  If the mood struck him.  The experience had usually been pleasant enough.  The wide streets and considerable verticality were designed with dragons in mind; the winding layout of interconnected plazas had greenspace and resting areas at every intersection.  However busy a morning or evening might be, pockets of calm could be found, and Sabellian had always been quick to find them, grateful for the ancient thoughtfulness that had gone into the crafting of the City of Dragons.

How fondly he thought of the rocky gardens of the Obsidian Enclave at this moment.  How much he wished to sit upon an outcropping there, mindful of his whelps as they darted through the succulents and dry grasses, at peace and completely removed from the earthshaking indignation now pounding in both his temples and causing the previously-disguised yellow in his eyes to flare like hellish fi–

“Here.  Eat this.”

A skewer of freshly grilled fatty pork was held before Sabellian’s face at an appropriately polite distance.  Bewildered, there was little else he could do but reach out and take it, his fingers pressing against the napkin crinkled about the bottom.  The bear, Tong, smiled just enough that the corners of his eyes wrinkled, and Sabellian saw that the man had somehow made space around himself, which Sabellian could then occupy without being jostled.

“...hmph.” He eyed the lightly steaming meat, the tiny bubbles of fat still shiny and slipping down the fresh char.  He now noticed that the scent of it was thick in the air, pouring out from under the striped canopy of the nearest stall where a goblin busily went about turning her wares over grated fires, and the smell was so rich that he felt a warming on the back of his tongue in spite of himself.

He took a bite.

It felt good against his teeth.  This particular cut, he had come to learn, was considered inferior by mortals: they did not like the extra fat and the gristle of connective tissues.  But to him, and to the sharp teeth he had thus far managed to keep hidden within his mouth, the resistant texture provided a satisfying outlet for the tension that had gathered in his neck.  At the completion of the bite, the snap of his teeth together, a thread of pleasure supplanted the irritation.

“Hmph!” Sabellian did not speak until he had finished his bite.  He knew his manners. “Is all this noise and mess necessary?”

“It is said that a lively market is a sign of happiness,” the old bear replied, his tone so inoffensively friendly that Sabellian felt no urge to argue with it.

“For mortals, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” The corners of Tong’s eyes crinkled once again, while Sabellian’s brows crunched slightly together.  The Pandaren had two sizable packages in his off-arm.  When had he the time…? “Ah, our friend has nearly disembarked!”

Our friend.  The only name by which he had been referred throughout the journey.  The third member of their party had felt a considerable discomfort when it became clear that to be clandestine required not only this uncomfortable voyage, but false identities.  For Sabellian, it had been of no moment: for thirty some years the Baron Sablemane had kept his meager homestead in Blade’s Edge and shown but a handful of mortal souls his true self.  But that was himself and not –

“Is…is that Malfurion Stormrage?”

Sabellian sighed heavily through his nose and used his free hand to rub at his tightened brow.

Let it not be in doubt: he deeply respected the older of the two brothers he had met upon his return to this world.  Ebyssian had shown a depth of wisdom and kindness the black dragons of yesteryear would have dismissed out of hand, to their detriment.  While he and Wrathion had fought, as they thought that black dragons should fight to claim what each thought was theirs by right or by merit, Ebyssian had humbly guided the lost souls that their father had discarded when they no longer suited his ambitions.  What had the self-elected heirs of Neltharion done for the dracthyr once they had been cast out into a strange and unwelcoming world?  Wrathion had at least led some of them to a sort of refuge, only to then immediately leave them to their own devices when the Citadel loomed on the horizon.  Sabellian had ignored them outright.

They had in the end ceded their ambitions in favor of an Aspect that would fit the flight that they hoped to have: one where to ward was not merely to guard, but also to guide.

Sabellian knew that choice had been the right one.  The very heart of the world itself had acknowledged that it was right.  And while he did not, and would never, think any less of his brother and his Aspect, Ebyssian was, like him, possessed of certain…deficiencies.

“By the Light I think it is!  That’s the Archdruid!  That’s the leader of the Night Elves!”

“Wait, didn’t that change?  With the new tree and all?”

For ten thousand years, Ebyssian had lived his life in one form and one form only: that of the Highmountain Tauren Ebonhorn.  Rather than a false name to hide his true identity, he considered himself exactly as much a tauren as he did a dragon.  The mountain was his home, the people there were his family, and to the closest of his family, those many generations of chieftains, he would show that he had a second name and a second self, and then once more walk beside them in their shape and with the name their ancestor had given him.

“If he’s a druid, why’d he take a boat?”

Which was to say, if Ebyssian intended to go somewhere in the Alliance and be clandestine, he could not actually be a tauren.  It would be too noticeable.  But he had only ever been a tauren and though it was well within the power of the Dragon Aspects to take whichever form they might choose, just because Ebyssian could did not mean he was good at it.

“Mommy why’s that man so hairy?”

“Tim, don't stare.”

The night elf gingerly disembarking from the Honeytoast was the largest and hairiest of his kind that had perhaps ever been.  With skin so dark a purple it was nearly black and an ashen nest of beard and hair that enveloped most of his chest and all of his back, the stares that he drew were doubtless inevitable.  And perhaps it would have been only stares and not the many rising whispers if not for the fact that despite the hours of struggling and the late-night aid of a confused but willing Aspect of Magic, absolutely nothing could be done about the extremely distinctive Highmountain antlers.

They had tried a hairy human.  They had tried a deeply disconcerting hairy high elf.  They had tried a dwarf with so much beard and so much hair that all that was visible was his nose…and the moose-like attributes gifted by Cenarius to Huln Highmountain generations prior.

A night elf was the compromise.  A druid might conceivably have antlers and those antlers might conceivably belong to a moose.  And so from the moment they stepped foot in Boralus to this new moment in Stormwind, all the gawking passerby had been shouting the name Malfurion Stormrage, because although the majority of mortals had never seen the Archdruid for themselves, he was the only night elf that they knew of that would have any kind of– 

“No, you dumb git, that’s Broll Bearmantle!”

A migraine began to throb in Sabellian’s temples.

Anduin hadn’t slept in days.

How could he?  This was all his fault.

Shaw’s right arm had been broken in four places and both of his eardrums had ruptured.  He had burns of varying severity anywhere his skin had not been covered by the leathers of his uniform and his throat had been so scoured by heat and gas that he had lost his voice after those few desperate shouts.  Both himself and Turalyon had rushed to heal his injuries, but the strain and blood loss needed time and rest, not the Light’s guilty succor, and Anduin knew well from experience that the kind of break that had taken the Spymaster’s arm couldn’t just have restorative spells thrown at it without consideration for the lay of bone, nerve, and tissue.  It required a surgeon, and more time and more care than could be provided by the repentant desperation of a cursed king and the anguished paladin that had tried to slay him.

Bindles, once she too had recovered and reclaimed her post, had told Anduin that Turalyon had not left the cathedral since his return to the city.  He had retreated to the Chapel of the Silver Hand cloistered off the main sanctuary, which had twice now served as a memorial: first, to the order that died at the hands of Arthas Menethil and then to the unity between paladins of all races before the Fourth War had shattered it.  Despite the dust and the candles left unlit, there was where Turalyon bent in prayer before the stained windows that caught the light of the setting sun and washed the gold to blues and grays.  The hours that he spent there had gone unbroken since they had begun and Anduin, in silent misery, found an old and unkind suspicion confirmed.

Turalyon did not need to eat or drink.  He did not need to sleep.  He did those things because they were human and he had been trying, all this time – 

The only small comfort that Anduin had was the news that Arator had arrived from Silvermoon to care for his father and even that curdled bleakly with the knowledge that Turalyon could not tell his son what he had done or why it had driven him to beg the Light for absolution.  Though Arator’s heritage was High Elven, his family’s ancestral home was in Silvermoon and an armistice was not a peace treaty even if it should have become one six years on, and who else was there to blame except himself for that?  The hundred spent inkwells and the reams upon reams of paper that had passed across his desk but failed to form a treaty had now shackled him almost as surely as this body had.

Arator could not know why it was that his father continually prayed for forgiveness.  The staff in the Keep could only know that Wrathion had returned to aid Shaw in some vital SI:7 assignment.  Everyone else could only assume that was also why the Spymaster walked the halls with his arm in a heavy cast and tight sling.  The people of Brandyberry and the keepers of the castle library that expected to see a draenei woman going about her business could only wonder at what had happened or where she had gone.

Wrathion had yet to wake.

Anduin had done everything that he could to heal him, though it did not feel that way.  That he could search still for more that might be done and find nothing didn’t change the weight that pushed down into his chest.  For hours, and then for days, he had held his heavy paws and their wicked claws close to the battered, still form and prayed to the Light that had still seen fit to answer him despite all of his failures.  He did not ask why, or how; faith was all that he held to.  He had known only partial success: the strong-yet-delicately configured construction of Wrathion’s wing had been restored through exhausting and painstaking effort.  There were many more bones broken there than in Mathias’s arm and much more flesh lost to the Light’s flames of retribution and then to the wilds in the panic after.  For a mercy the primary bone and first joint had survived the blow and from those splintered edges and the uninjured partner Anduin could come to comprehend how the bloody tatters and sizzling flakes of bone should be arranged.

It was too much like the days and nights that a platoon of priests and the Prophet himself had spent to piece a broken Prince back together.  The parallels made him ill to his stomach and haunted him in the darkness of the cave where his only company was Wrathion’s slow, shallow, unsteady breathing.  When he had done all that he could for his wing and for every other ordinary hurt that he had found, only for Wrathion’s eyes to remain closed beneath his cracked crown, Anduin had entreated – begged, if he was honest with himself - for Bindles to help him carry Wrathion to the safety of the cave Wrathion had himself dug.  Mechanical beasts in the lumbering shape of gorillas had lifted the smaller dragon onto his back and he had, with great and guilty care, taken him to the only refuge available to them.

Not long after that, Valeera had returned from the assignment that Wrathion and Shaw had given her, and she had made her camp within view of the cave.  What had happened would have no chance to happen a second time.

It was the second of the small, cold comforts Anduin had allowed himself.

Of course he had tried to speak when he had been attacked.  Of course he had tried to flee.  He had tried, but had not done: when he needed most to use and understand this body he had failed utterly to do so, his tongue a dead lump in his mouth and his wings flopping in mad confusion.  Every jump had been a shambling lurch; every dodge a writhing cringe.  When he had clumsily tossed a paw outward to perhaps make some distance between himself and Turalyon by knocking the paladin away, Turalyon had easily slipped around his ineffectual attack to once more press his own.  It was no feat of inhuman skill, either: a tortoise could have dodged Anduin.  But under that relentless assault Anduin should have been dead three times over before Wrathion and Shaw could have arrived, if not for the one certainty left in his life that he could call upon.

Through his hide the Light had cut and though the pain of it had been like a knife that he had turned upon himself, his cry for succor had been answered in turn.  He had kept himself alive, at least for a little while, and if his prayers could only allow Wrathion to open his eyes once more he might have forgiven himself for all that came before.

But Anduin did not need Shaw or Valeera to point out that what kept Wrathion in his unsound sleep was injury or illness that no human would know how to heal.  He knew even before the failed attempts, the unhappy confidence twofold: first, that those waves of flame and smoke and thunderous sound in Wrathion’s wake had not been seen in Stormwind’s skies since the Cataclysm and second, in the same way he had at the castle wall when Wrathion spoke to the stones, Anduin could feel it.

A…brokenness.  A sensation like fissures in the earth.

If dragons could weep, he might have, but only after he had told Shaw in no uncertain terms that he wanted the only souls in this world that might be able to help Wrathion brought here with all haste.  He had kowtowed to caution enough already and look what it had invited.  He’d not do so again and whatever might come of it would be a trial they would overcome after.  All his useless shame now cast aside, Anduin was curled around the small, prone form and felt as though his body were cradling an empty hearth, the coals long gone cold.

“You’re so reckless.” Anduin had learned that dragons may not be able to weep, but they could certainly whisper.  He kept the words close, as close as he could, his head upon the earth beside Wrathion’s. “All that effort and care you put into everything and yet when it comes to me...”

Then, though not only then, did Wrathion seem the most foolish man alive.

“I am very cross with you.  I’m glad to be alive, but I’m still very cross.”

It was dark, but it did not have to be and in the moment, Anduin did not want it to be.  With a very small plea, he brought forth a soft and golden sphere of light to rest a little above the soil and stones next to them.  The shadows that it made were soft and forgiving, so that the cracks in horn and scale seemed less severe, and Wrathion himself appeared only to be in a deep and lasting sleep.  The fierce slope of a sharpened jaw and the striking white of his teeth were both so handsome still, even if the golden rings that had flanked them had been lost, reduced to shining droplets vanished into the sky.  The plates on his neck had chipped and split, but the overall shape was still fine, still graceful, and not for the first time Anduin shifted where he lay and put his nose close against it.

He was still ashamed.  He was still so ashamed that he had almost doubted the Light, because how could it answer him?  How could it judge him worthy with the sin layered so thickly upon him?

Turalyon had not said how it was that he had found Anduin so quickly in an area four times the sprawl of Stormwind.  He had said nothing of what he had seen except that he had come upon the monster he had been searching for and he had been believed by Shaw and Valeera because neither of them could conceive of the man telling a lie.

Anduin did still believe the same, but he knew now that Turalyon was capable of omitting the truth despite scripture and oaths that condemned all falsehoods and deceptions.

“I need you to wake so that I can beg your forgiveness.”

He came closer still, this time with wing and tail both, the first draped upon Wrathion’s middle and the second twining slowly but less clumsily around the more slender tail.  He could not curse his own inability while doing nothing to remedy it: in the last week, he had gone and caught for himself every one of his meals, forcing himself to better learn these limbs and this weight by denying himself the repast his spell-exhaustion demanded.  If he could not do it, then he went without, and every time that the deer scattered well before he was close to them or the boar darted under his body and slipped into the underbrush he reminded himself that the appearance of effortlessness only came at the other end of great and meaningful work.

He could not be miserable and helpless any longer.  He could not constantly be in need of saving.

For a time, Anduin had gone hungry.  But only for a time.

“I need you to scold me for my technique.” Against his side, he could feel when Wrathion took his small breaths.  He could feel the very, very faint thumping of his heart. “I need you to tease me and tell me how silly it is that I revealed myself by grunting and groaning too loud.”

He was still so ashamed, but no amount of shame would ever be greater than his desire for Wrathion to be well.

“I’m still in love with you.”

A thing Anduin could be even if he hadn’t forgiven Wrathion for the way that they had parted.  Who, then, could truly be called the fool between them?

“If I’m ashamed of anything, it’s how happy I was.” This he confessed against the fading warmth of Wrathion’s throat, his eyes closed against even the forgiving gentleness of the Light. “You and Mathias nearly killed yourselves getting here but I can’t stop being happy.  If this can’t be undone I don’t know what will happen to the city and to the Alliance, yet I…”

You’re looking for someone to absolve you of the responsibility.

So Wrathion had said that day and Anduin had come a hairsbreadth away from striking him for the second time in his life.

Wrathion just always knew.  In the worst and best ways, he always knew, and the curse and blessing of it had haunted Anduin in the years since.  On the lowest days, with work piled unfinished and his joints aching beyond their age, Anduin would let the bitterness have him and he would wonder if all those truths were as much a burden to Wrathion as they were to everyone around him.  If it really was a boon to be right so often or if that frequency just disguised the cracks at the worst of times.

History had as much proof of the second as it did the first.  There seemed no middle ground. “Unless you found it somewhere.  Maybe that’s what you’ve been doing all this time.”

Wrathion had chosen not to become Earthwarder.  He had not been usurped or denied; he had chosen.

“I want to ask you.  You must wake up, just so I can ask you.”

The cold and the dark inside Wrathion didn’t answer him.

But the sound of wings did.

The distinctiveness of the sound was what drove Anduin to raise his head sharply, his finned ears first lifting, then spreading, the quivering of the spines and skin seeking to amplify the distant din.  It was not the sail-sound of a dragon’s wings, but the heavy rustling of feathers and the snapping of leonine tails, and though Anduin’s body rushed a surge of electric hopefulness.  He listened for a breath longer, just so that he might be sure, and so caught it when a second sound crested after the wings, the drone of it drowning them out somewhat with its thrumming and puttering.

A…machine?

Confused yet consumed with the pounding of his own heart, Anduin very carefully extracted himself from around Wrathion, though he felt a dragging inside his chest and a resistance to the motion in spite of himself.  He didn’t want to leave him.  He didn’t know to whom the wings and the engine belonged and though he had a very good, almost certain guess, his claws stuck into the soil and his wing stayed stretched over Wrathion.  Willing himself to move only served to plant his body firmly in the way of the upward tunnel, which was so contrary to the needs of the moment that he all but groaned in frustration.

“Anduin?”

A glance upward showed Valeera silhouetted against the moonlight at the far entrance. “They’re almost here, Anduin.”

“Yes, I heard, I’m coming – ”

Going up that tunnel was akin to willfully biting tinfoil.  Despite knowing full well he needed to get up and out of the way and communicate what he knew, it felt so incredibly aggravating to be doing what seemed like the opposite of what he wanted to do.  What he wanted, though he felt half-mad for wanting it against sense and logic, was to remain coiled around Wrathion and, failing that, to block anyone else that might dare to approach the cave.  It was a ludicrous desire; he had wanted the help.  Wrathion needed the help!  Yet Anduin almost didn’t make it out of the cave, every crawling step an expression of raw stubbornness against the wild intrusion of thoughts that, a month ago, would have crushed him with their presence.

He had no time to be crushed.  He barely had the time to bear witness to a flying machine cresting over the tops of the trees and dipping into the clearing he had made outside the cave entrance.

“Wh…”

Anduin’s mind did not want to make sense of what he was seeing.

“Is that – ”

Of course it wasn’t Malfurion Stormrage.  He realized that immediately.  He knew precisely what the Archdruid looked like, even if it had been Tyrande who had led every diplomatic discussion since Anduin had been crowned.  But whoever it was had just enough of a passing likeness in the relatively weak light of the half-moon that Anduin was frozen for a moment, gobsmacked by the vision before him.

The flying machine – a bush copter now that technological advancement had created more than one type of flying machine – had a thick collection of ropes looped around and through the skis of its landing gear and from those ropes a person was hanging.

A person that vaguely resembled Malfurion Stormrage, if the already large man was somehow even larger and wider.

So large and wide, in fact, that it made perfect sense that he was not riding on either of the two gryphons that had already landed in the clearing and allowed their riders to dismount.  No bird in the Royal Stables or otherwise would be capable of lifting someone of that size.  It made perfect sense that short of absconding with some champion’s hard-earned mount of unusual size and strength, Renzik, because it was Renzik that was flying the bush copter and Renzik who had taken command of SI:7 while Shaw was in recovery, would choose instead to rely upon technology.

It made perfect sense, but Anduin could only drop down on his back haunches in a dumb sit and stare, not a word coming to mind that he could say.

“So.  This is your dragon-cursed King.”

An unfamiliar voice.  Alarm shot through him, and then realization.  Of course, he had never met – 

But this time, logic was not allowed a word in edgewise.  Anduin’s head snapped around and his whole body lifted up, his wings with it, and every fin from the sides of his head to the end of his tail flared wide and shook.  The bones rattled and the tendons snapped and he felt heat pour from his blood into the webbed skin and there was a golden light very unlike what he had cast in the cave.  When it flashed, it cut, too bright for a human eye, and in the far, far back of his mind, Anduin could only remember seeing its like once before in his life.

An alchemist had revealed his most recent discovery to an audience of courtiers, scholars, and the curious King: thin metal shavings that, when lit, combusted so brightly that they were fit to blind a man.

The man in front of Anduin was not blinded.  He was not a man.

He was another dragon.

Fitted into that human frame was a dragon, a black dragon, his essence so powerfully concentrated that a single strand of his locked hair held more fire than existed in Anduin’s entire body.  But he didn’t care.  He didn’t care.  He was another dragon and he was walking closer, nearing the cave, nearing Wrathion – 

Anduin was too busy snapping his teeth to spy that the man took in a harsh breath through his nose.

“You…”

Raw displeasure and rage vibrated right down into his bones.  Anduin gripped violently at the earth and furiously beat at the air with his wings, preparing to leap before the man-that-wasn’t could take another step.

“Did you mate with him?”

Sabellian may as well have kicked Anduin in the nuts for how fast every mote of hot air rushed out of his body.

Chapter Text

It was a beautiful night on the very cusp of spring.

It was in a warm, wide study that satisfied itself with only the light from the new hearth flanked by carved gryphons, each half as tall as a man and half as tall as the sprawling fireplace itself, though the crackling behind its ornate grating was deceptively gentle.  The immaculate mantle and its royal blue runner had become home to three of a set of six short tumblers, the little glasses taken to migrating throughout the room as the evening had worn on and now found cluttered amongst the unlit candles and icons of the Light.  Above them, a new painting hung in a criminally simple frame and though Wrathion had campaigned for a fetching or heroic portrait rather than the pastoral pleasantry that was the mountains over Elwynn, the High King of the Alliance had put his foot down and maintained that he was not going to be staring at his own face in his own study.

Anduin had such a stance on many a topic. “Wrathion, there is no conceivable reason for any man to have more than three wardrobes.”

“No reason?” Wrathion placed his hand on his chest in a theatrical display of extreme shock.  That his hand came to rest upon the triangle of bare skin and black curls of hair his loose robe helplessly displayed was entirely intentional. “But Anduin, you are not just any man!  You are a king!”

As predicted, Anduin rolled his eyes. “Oh, of course.  I had forgotten.”

The chance to grin was its own reward, but Wrathion also took the opportunity to rise from his chair to join its partner, rounding the low table with its scattered documents and its open bottle of cognac as he went.  The entire set of richly finished applewood furniture had been a recent gift, commissioned and hand-delivered by Count Ridgewell in celebration of Anduin’s twenty-first birthday.  Many such gifts had been paraded through the Throne Room during the celebration audience; so many, in fact, that space had become something of an issue, which Wrathion had penned into next season’s restoration goals.  Anduin’s twenty-second birthday would be held in the Grand Hall instead, once the remodeling was finished and the new windows were installed.  The Hall would allow for both a generous banquet and sitting for musicians to facilitate dancing, though all of Stormwind would have to re-learn the waltz if they wanted to reach the appropriate level of grandeur.

Anduin would have to learn, too.  There had been no time for formal social debuts or an education beyond foundational courtly etiquette; the old standards of high society were then little more than a colorful dream as war led to war, and one disaster was constantly supplanted by the next.  Wrathion did mourn the prim and proper princeling he could picture in his head that lived in a world where Archimonde stayed banished and the Lich King’s ambitions ended in Lordaeron, but in such a world they could have very well never met and that was not a past or future that he desired.

These short years in Stormwind had shown him the remarkable depth of his own selfishness.  He’d thought himself well versed with its scope and yet every allowance, every small pleasure, invited the desire for the next.

Case in point: he sat himself upon the broad and intricately embroidered arm of Anduin’s chair, the lay of his thigh leading to the open drape of his robe and the reveal of what Anduin already knew, that Wrathion wore nothing beneath, and he could not resist the desire to also boldly rest his arm upon the high back.  The tips of his fingers could then brush through and into Anduin’s hair, long loose from the blue ribbon that Wrathion had tied it with that morning, so very many busy hours ago.

Anduin let him.  Though let was not quite the right word.

When he felt Wrathion’s touch, he leaned a little back, until the pads of Wrathion’s fingers could move lightly over his scalp, the tips of his nails parting the strands of gold.  He felt a shiver in the same moment that Anduin likely did and half of his thoughts, busy collecting tasks and sorting solutions for days that were not this one, ceased their work and went quiet.  He was nowhere else except in this very room, with the thick-woven rug into which the toes of his other foot dug and the fading scent of Anduin’s cologne, those notes of juniper and bergamot and the thread of hidden jasmine that Wrathion could only find when he brought his head a little bit closer.  Wrathion had crafted the scent himself, out of those new imports come from Arathi and Pandaria and Zandalar, ostensibly to put on olfactory display what luxuries might come from the trade routes he had proposed, but in reality because he knew how good it would be to lean in like this to search out its lingering presence on Anduin’s warm skin.

He knew he’d become too absorbed when Anduin’s voice put a start through him, felt in the little twitch of his fingers.

“You are trying to tempt me into doing what you want.” Anduin took a leisurely sip of the dark liquor that turned a warm and fetching burgundy in the firelight.  He held the fourth of the six glasses in one hand, while the other grasped an unfolded piece of correspondence, one of the many that comprised the papers on the table.

Even on a day like today, he was working, but he did not come across as very engaged in the letter any longer. “You’ve resorted to indecency to coax me.”

“Am I succeeding?”

The glass did absolutely nothing to hide the smile that flickered to Anduin’s lips. “Not quite.  I had the entire House of Nobles trying to court me all day.  You’ll have to try harder.”

Anduin was getting quite good at this.  The moment he suggested a challenge, facetious as it may have been, the muscles in Wrathion’s lower back tightened.  From the onset Anduin had revealed himself to be a passionate, even insatiable lover: those tender early explorations upon the Stair all those years ago felt another world when compared to the outburst of hunger and emotion that saw Wrathion pressed back upon the map table in the War Room shortly after their reunion.  In the most literal sense, that was the case: the world of today was changed utterly from what it had been and they with it.  Anduin surprised him for the second time in as many days with an impulsive, desperate fucking that Wrathion had not, and would not, deny that he had also feverishly desired, but which had nonetheless put smears of ink across his shoulders and left bruises in the shape of the carved towers and troop markers that had been caught under him rather than scattered about the table or the floor.

In the beginning, that was how it was for them: Anduin made love like time was running out.

Wrathion knew why that was.  He’d known well before Anduin’s shaking grip closed around his wrists or his wide, scarred palms pressed Wrathion’s hips against the wood, and the knowledge continued to live in him during the days and months after as they settled into this most comfortable rhythm.

There had been arguments against Wrathion’s continued presence, of course, and a staunch campaign to deny the change of title from “advisor” to “counsel”.  The Spymaster had the more well-researched list of justifications but Genn Greymane kept his complaints the loudest, though Wrathion worried about neither of them so much as he did Valeera Sanguinar.  Anduin’s happiness alone was likely all that kept her knife out of his back, or his chest, if his suspicions about her wishing to know who it was and why it was that he was being sent to a deserved oblivion.  Some of the resistance did die with the vanquishing in Ny’alotha, but only some, an irony in and of itself when the very world had been spared eternal madness and torture in a Void-blasted ruin with his undeniable aid, but Anduin was right about him.

He did so enjoy a challenge. “Ah, my dear…”

The words came on a soft breath upon the crown of Anduin’s head.  Against his wrist, Anduin’s neck tensed and he felt the first prickle of sweat, though there was no more than that: Anduin simply flipped his letter to the other side to continue reading.  He doubtless felt it when Wrathion smiled against his hair.

“The labors that you demand of me.” He did not even attempt a false exasperation.  His posture had put the intimacy of him out into the open air and it was the air that betrayed him: no longer warm and comfortably forgettable, the beginnings of sizzling arousal in his veins had swelled thick lips to greater plumpness and a temperature above that of the room’s ambience.  Prickling gradually with new slick, his cunt wanted for simulation more than just the passing brush of the hem of his robe as he moved.  His other hand, loose at his side, might have begun to creep toward the inside of his thigh if he had allowed it to, but he did not.

He did not wish for his own fingers.  He wished for it to be Anduin’s hand or Anduin’s lips that relieved the buzzing insistence, rather than mere fabric or the admittedly familiar pleasure of his own touch, and unfortunately, just how much he wished for it was no longer something he could skillfully hide.  Anduin’s powerful persistence and astonishing perceptiveness had peeled back the veil of sexual confidence that Wrathion wore and had thought impenetrable up until this last year.  He had naturally been deeply impressed; when squirming on a mattress or against a lounge, he had also been wildly impatient and shockingly flustered.  Indignant, even, when there came a time when Anduin at last allowed himself a less frenetic pace and so learned that while Wrathion held the advantage of temptation, he personally wielded patience with more skill.  How he would tease – 

As it was a tease now, existing with want and knowing that Anduin did too but had outmaneuvered him early with just a few words.

The soft murmuring of velvet was the play that Anduin no doubt expected Wrathion to make, which was to move from the arm of the chair and come to stand before him in his perfectly relaxed and occupied pose, his near-empty glass held upon one knee and the paper pressed between his thumb and the curl of his fingers.  Anduin did not ignore him: his eyes lifted from the neat inked letters he had been pretending to read and met Wrathion’s squarely.  Two years of built confidence and a pleasant drunk all he needed to hold his gaze and let his free knee fall more to the side and show how the ridge of his cock was now visible, upsetting the tailored lay of his dress trousers.  His expression, cool nearly to the point of impassivity, did not change in the slightest except to briefly redirect his attention to his glass so that he might finish the last sliver of cognac.

Both of Anduin’s ears were completely red throughout.

Wrathion’s chest squeezed at the same moment that his groin did, though it was the second that lived between his thighs as a weight that drove him slowly to one knee, and then to the other.  These new chairs were lower than the set Anduin had used previously: Wrathion’s head was more level with Anduin’s ribs than the seat, which was probably why, when Wrathion began to run his hands up his pant legs and reach toward his belt and sash, Anduin spoke up again:

“Use your mouth.”

A hard, hot knot throbbed just behind the swelling of his clit.

Anduin must have guessed the same as Wrathion, and perhaps at the same time, when the servants had first carried the chairs and their table into the room: they were just low enough that Wrathion was able to press both his palms against the carpet and have his chin rest neatly between Anduin’s spread thighs.

The bulge of him was bigger by the time Wrathion had settled.  Dancing on the back of his tongue were words that might come forward as a tease, but he hadn’t the patience to gather them up and polish them for use.  He could feel the heat from Anduin’s thighs and Anduin’s swelling dick, every miniscule degree above the ordinary of immense importance to his senses despite how his own internal temperatures were always so much higher.  He could still feel it; he could always feel it when Anduin’s blood turned hot and his heart began to send it racing through his body.  The air changed because of it, rich warmth brushing incessantly against his chin and cheek when he brought his face close enough to take the edge of Anduin’s sash in his teeth.  He reveled in it, taking the time to take in a slow breath before he had to briefly, sadly depart so that his backward pull could loosen the garment and let it fall.  This repeated twice more for each of the ties that held his trousers closed and though he eyed the belt he let it be, daring Anduin to test his patience against Wrathion’s shameless nosing to widen the slit of pant and undergarment, so that he would not be the only one with his aching nethers exposed to the cruelty of the empty air.

Let it be known, except it would be knowledge that Wrathion knew was reserved just for himself: Anduin Wrynn had a beautiful dick.

He’d had some inkling of it when the two of them had shyly – him, shyly!  Those had certainly been the days – explored one another beneath the sheet pulled up to their chins, in the dark and with voices muffled lest they be caught by their respective retinues.  With only himself to compare against the other Prince, he had no choice but to conclude that he came up short, a lack that may have frustrated and annoyed him if not for how the first touch of Anduin’s heat and pride had stirred him to new and startling excitement.  Those handful of nights had been so sweet and so thrilling that he’d eventually come to wonder if his imagination might have embellished the memories during their years apart.  Once possessed of a properly mature visage he had without delay explored it in its entirety, which included a discovery of his own preferences across as wide an array of partners as he was able to charm.

He proved it to himself beyond all doubt: he liked the cocks he was involved with to be large.  Might he have then given the man that lived only in his fantasies more of an endowment that he in truth possessed?  Certainly, whenever he caved to selfish hopefulness to fantasize about the two of them together, Anduin’s body was always fitted to his exact tastes, and though he had dutifully compartmentalized his longings rather than face the inevitable and understandable rejection, Anduin had taken both the initiative and his immediate admiration.

While soft and at rest, Anduin was sizable, enough so that the trouser leg he preferred for tucking had to be tailored with the slightest widening to its inseam, but he truly shone when erect.  The curve?  Ideal.  The coloring?  Robust.  The thickness of the vein upon the underside?  Wonderful, so firm and so very hot that when it came to rest against the bridge of Wrathion’s nose, the sweat of the day and the jasmine of his cologne mixing into the earthy musk, it admittedly made his mouth begin to water.  He found himself going briefly still, there with the fullness of Anduin’s dick against his cheek, while the pressure inside coiled tighter and tighter still, beads of excitement slipping over flushed lips to quietly dot the rug.

“You’re supposed to be doing more than admiring.”

Anduin’s tone suggested careless displeasure.

The runaway flush on Anduin’s cheeks and the short, quick breaths he was taking through parted breaths suggested instead that Wrathion was turning the tide against the King’s vaunted patience.  He began to smile, the slow curling of his lips half in shadow, and he watched as Anduin’s jaw clenched and the letter fluttered away from his fingers.

“Damn you, I see that grin – ”

The press of both of Anduin’s hands into his hair and the thump of the glass against the rug were as sweet a victory as he could have ever hoped for, but it would be doing Anduin a disservice to say that the tight coiling of his grip didn’t set Wrathion’s heart to pounding.  He could feel the vibrations of almost-motion; he could hear the very, very quiet clenching of muscle and tendon, which only a dragon might hear and which only a dragon might find wildly exciting.  Anduin walked a thin and humming wire, caught between his desire to give his commands so that he could watch Wrathion come undone from the waiting and the raw sexual appetite that lived a secret life inside him that only knew the light of day when it was Wrathion that slipped in close beside him and stroked his fingers through his hair.

Wrathion had not merely become conceited from this state of affairs.  Modern language lacked the words necessary to describe the heights his ego had soared to.

But he had also become irredeemably enraptured, even more so than he had upon the Stair when the light through the plum blossoms had turned golden for the first time in Anduin’s hair.  His heart winged away and his body thrummed with joyous desire because it was Anduin that desperately wanted him and it was Anduin that had gripped him so tightly that he could not slip away.  It was Anduin that securely held his head and put his mouth where he wanted it, far lower on the shaft so that Wrathion’s obedient and eager tongue could press flat and hot on the bridge between cock and sack, just the way that Anduin most liked.  It was Anduin that pushed him lower still than that, his leg bent wholly out and Wrathion’s mouth then full of one heavy testicle, followed soon by next, his spit rolling over the fabric of his drawers until it had soaked through and against the pliant skin beneath.  Only then did Wrathion’s mouth come away again, a line of gleaming spit following the swell of his lower lip, and Anduin’s sharp intake of breath very nearly put stars behind his half-lowered eyelids.

The cheap newsprints in the city claimed he had bent the High King’s ear using his body.

The statement was pure libel, but not for the reasons those gossipmongers might suspect.

“Ngh, ghh, Wrathion – ”

Anduin said his name and Wrathion felt another surge of delight fill him to every extremity.

“There, there, you’re so good…”

His toes curled.  Hot shivers raced down his spine.  Fluid slid down the inside of his thigh and he throbbed so sorely for touch that a tear or two caught upon his eyelashes.  When he looked up, he caught Anduin not with his head thrown back against the chair or his eyes squeezed tight through the shudders that rolled in his body, but with all his focus locked upon Wrathion instead.  Seeing, as the pounding in Wrathion’s blood wanted himself to be seen, with a look that Wrathion would move heaven and earth to have again the moment it departed.

Anduin had confessed not very long ago that he had developed a crush almost immediately upon their meeting.

At what was almost surely the same time, Wrathion had felt the snare of love begin to cinch around his throat, the game lost before he had even begun to play.  Because it had been a game, in the beginning, a subtle – what he considered subtle, when he’d been much younger – maneuvering to influence the Alliance and Varian Wrynn in particular once his chance meeting with the Crown Prince had presented the opportunity for it.  How it had shocked him thereafter when Anduin had said that he had come looking for Wrathion; looking, while hobbling about on his crutches and only recently escaped from death’s door and the fiercely watchful eye of his father.  No one had ever come looking for Wrathion, sparing those that wanted to see him dead or brought to heel.  If he needed people, he specifically sent for them.  He carefully guided them if they were reluctant.  He plied them with promises and material rewards from his growing treasure caches if they needed compensation.  He charmed them and he lied to them, whichever might be most effective, and there was never a moment when he was not in control, not working constantly, ceaselessly, lest they slip through his fingers.

But Anduin had sought him out.

Anduin had said these many years later, coughing into his fist as his ears grew red, my heart fluttered just to see your wrist when you moved a jihui piece.  You’d smile and I’d half forget whatever debate we were having.  Every morning I wouldn’t think about how much my injuries hurt or how exhausted I was.

All I thought about was how excited I was to see you each day.

Wrathion would do anything for Anduin Wrynn.

That rebuilding the Alliance, keeping the peace, and aiding the recovery of the world after decades of disaster and strife could best be done at Anduin’s side was deeply convenient and marvelously rewarding.  If it had not been, he absolutely would not have shirked his duties as one of the last of the Black Dragonflight and the heir to Neltharion, but he knew down to the very depths of his solipsistic heart that he would have found some way to maneuver himself here again while doing it.  Now that he was here , here with all those many mistakes at last behind him, he would do all that he needed to, all that might be done, all that might be necessary, to stay – 

“Light, more, more than that, Wrathion – ”

Anduin could suffer no more hard kisses or eager rolls of Wrathion’s tongue that had continued unabated but in no hurry.  He showed him this by grasping him tightly once more, the curl of both fists so strong that a spark was sent through his scalp, and Wrathion knew just when to open his mouth wider.

Fresh off a morning shower or just out of his armor after a ride in Elwynn, Anduin always tasted the same to him, and the rush of saltsour sweat and the musk of hot skin that slid across his tongue in that first, demanding thrust was enough to liberate the moan from deep within his throat that he had so far denied him.  The noise of it, low and shameless, vibrated close against the raised veins and the little folds of skin that his tongue was able to find, pressed as it was against the hard underside of Anduin’s shaft.  He lifted his hands from the rug at last, needing to: he had to steady himself with a palm pressed against the chair and fingers wrapped around the back of Anduin’s knee.  That way he could rise up and lean at just the right angle.

Anduin’s size always did demand adjustments be made if Wrathion wished to savor all of him.  The girth required a wider spread of his lips and a stronger control of his jaw, lest any of his teeth and their hidden sharpness catch upon delicate skin when he did not mean them to.  Often, it was enough to merely stop there, Anduin fitted snugly if not entirely, and Wrathion would treat the rest of him to the press and stroke of hands slicked by their choice of lubricant for the day.

But Wrathion was a greedy lover and moreover, Anduin had challenged him.

The next breath he took was deep and he adjusted the tilt of his head for the last time.

“Wra-nggh!”

The broad meat of Anduin’s cockhead inched slowly past the base of Wrathion’s tongue.  A tremor wriggled through the bottom of his throat, but it was suppressed with an easy tightening and then loosening of muscle.  His exhale rushed hot out of his nose and he willed himself through that first, uncertain push that was the hurdle most difficult to overcome for the inexperienced.  By this time in his life Wrathion could not actually recall to what cock had gone the first pass at his throat; he had to have been very engaged with it to even make the attempt at all, or else had gotten it into his head that it was yet another skill that must be learned, the enjoyment secondary to the mastery.

The difference between then and now was that the enjoyment had become everything.

“Wrathion, Wra–Light!  Hells, and…fuck!”

Anduin’s dick sank lower, the progress necessarily but also purposefully incremental, because each advance was marked by another shout toward the mosaics of rivers and green meadows upon the ceiling.  Wrathion’s entire body thrummed to hear them; the ache of stretched tissues and the harsh, quick breaths he had to take were judged entirely worthwhile, just so that he might listen to Anduin fall fantastically to pieces.  The noise of him, the twisting of prayers into sublime profanity, the shaking that had taken Anduin’s fingers where his white knuckles pressed into Wrathion’s skull, the bright red face and the tightly clenched jaw he could just see past the fallen curls of his hair when he forced one of his eyes to stay just a little bit open, all of it, all of it, so delightful and adored and he was caving to selfishness again.  One of his hands was squirming hastily south, though even his considerable coordination was tested when trying to both deepthroat his dear King and find where his clit was swollen and wanting for touch for all this long while.

But that was alright.  He could let the artfulness go.

Now that he was here, now that his hair splayed across Anduin’s trembling thighs and his nose was pressed into the thatch of blond pubic hair, he could be clumsier.  His own noises could be louder.  He could let the wet sucking and the smothered swallows fill that very narrow space that remained between them and he could groan in time with Anduin, though his strangled gasp was all his own when his roving hand at last found his dripping cunt.  There, swollen lips waited for the eager plunge of his fingers, swallowing a pair to the second knuckle while his thumb rolled up along the underside of his own tiny dick, which Anduin would swallow as well if only biology allowed.

Perhaps there might come a day that it would.  There were experimentations with visage that Wrathion still had yet to try.  And they still had so much time.  Time enough that they could – 

They…in time, they…

Oh.

Oh, he was coming undone, too.  That always seemed to happen.

“Ghh, nhh, I’m…!”

Now it was that Anduin’s head rolled to the side and his chin dug into his shoulder.  Now it was that he had to close his eyes and show how another vein had raised along his neck, just visible through the strands of hair that had stuck there from the sweat that shone in the firelight.  Now, he gasped and whined through clenched teeth and let his back at last arch away from the chair that Count Ridgewell would be aghast to know had been sullied so thoroughly, the moment made that much sweeter when graced with scandal.  It was, and Anduin was, as beautiful a picture as any that Wrathion had ever seen, caught at the height of their pitched breaths and taken to join the rest, the other secret nights and stolen days where it was just they two, their voices and their pressing fingertips, hoarded in the vault of his memory.

“Y, Yesss, yes–”

If Anduin made love like time was running out, then Wrathion did so like the moment would never end.

“Yes, like that, I’m–WRATHION!!”

Anduin’s helpless bellow could have very well cracked the ceiling.

Yet it was far too late for him to do anything about the swift, cruel backward swing of his head in spite of Anduin’s hard grip, so that all of his cock slipped out of the warm and pressing embrace of Wrathion’s throat with a sound so lurid that it could sour sacramental bread.  Slippery, slick, and slurping, Wrathion’s lips gave one final smack upon the very top of Anduin’s dick before it escaped, so that the cum that he had left in a furious trail all along the bed of his tongue is visible in his open mouth.  All the rest of Anduin’s shuddering orgasm only had one place where it might express itself thereafter, this being Wrathion’s wet and grinning lips, Wrathion’s proud nose and strong cheekbones, and even in some of the curls that had tossed themselves away from his forehead.

The tirade of virulent swearing that escaped from Anduin for the duration would have driven the Cathedral’s initiates into a faint. 

“You…you-!!” Wrathion had never before heard the term for an orcish phallus that Anduin used then; it honestly impressed him. “YOU!”

The expected retribution came swiftly, with Anduin’s thunderous rise from his chair and the change in his grip from holding to driving.  In swift succession the little glasses and the cognac and the many letters and missives of import went scattering about the rug, rolling away or splashing in sad mess or fluttering about the both of them.  Count Ridgewell had reason to be proud, even if he most certainly would not be if he knew: the table weathered the impact of Wrathion’s back upon it fantastically well, with little more than a quiet groan that was well and truly lost beneath Wrathion’s hot gasping.

Anduin’s hands were furiously reverent.  It could be that they were bruising when they gripped the underside of each of Wrathion’s thighs and pushed them both back as far as they might go, so that the dragon’s knees very nearly met his shoulders.  In the morning Wrathion would know if there would be purpling marks left behind, but in the raucous drumming of his heart and the fantastic sweep of Anduin’s tongue up from one end of his cunt to the other, the next morning, the next day, found no room in which they might exist.

There was only this.  Only his lips and his swearing and his hot breath, and the flashing of gold between Wrathion’s pinned thighs, and the feeling that it –

That everything.

It had all been worthwhile in the end.

“With all the messes we leave behind, the staff are going to start suspecting something.”

“Anduin.  My love, my dear.  Please.” Anduin turned his head and watched as Wrathion paused to run the warm, wet towel over his face one last time.  When he finished, he left it folded over the rim of the water basin that lived a very suspicious life atop the filing drawer near his desk.  Another such basin existed in both of their bedrooms, although the act of granting Wrathion his own private quarters in the castle felt like something of a waste. “I would challenge you to find someone in this Keep that doesn’t already know that we are shameless lovers wantonly tossing ourselves upon every available surface.”

He felt his ears heat. “You don’t have to put it that way.  And no more challenges tonight, I think I pulled a muscle in my back.”

“O Priest, Heal Thyself – “

“No more blasphemy tonight, either.”

Anduin didn’t have to look at Wrathion to know that he was grinning and it was best that he had not, because to spy the smirk on swollen lips would have sorely tempted him to kiss it away.  The hour had been late before they had discarded all pretense of a quiet, comfortable evening; now a glance at the timepiece on the mantle showed that aside from the nightwatch, they were likely the only souls still awake in the castle.  Anduin should have been rightly exhausted from the long, long afternoon dominated by the birthday celebration that Wrathion had insisted be made into a grand event, and he certainly felt so now.  The surge of strength and energy that had helped make the mess he was picking up had been well and truly spent, each of Anduin’s feet dragging as he wove in and out of the furniture, picking up glasses and letters.

Wrathion was, of course, perfectly alert and energetic.  He was a dragon, after all, and a mere human would never have the stamina to outlast him. “I know you’re busy being smug, but this is your fault, too.  Come and contribute.”

“Is this a command from the High King of the Alliance?”

“If it was, would you obey?”

“...when…you put it that way – ”

Anduin raised a hand, putting a stack of letters on the mantle. “Wait.  Nevermind.  Forget I said it, I want to get some sleep tonight.”

Despite his claim, Wrathion’s warm, easy laugh sent a sweet shiver rolling all down his spine, and he knew, even dead on his feet, he would have tried for another go if Wrathion had sidled up next to him instead of acquiescing to his request and bending to gather up some of the papers that had fallen next to his chair.

Anduin was only a little disappointed.  They always had tomorrow; tonight, there was his bed, and the secret space they shared beneath the sheets in royal blue.  He could feel the anticipation of it slowly overtake any lingering excitement, the muscles in his neck and back slowly coming to relax as he fitted the top onto the cognac and made his way to the cabinet to put it away. 

“Thank you.”

“Tsk.  Such a small thing.  There is no need…hm?  Oh, this is interesting.”

Anduin clicked the cabinet door shut and glanced back toward the hearth.  Wrathion had paused, holding the stack of letters at a better angle to read. “Are you going through the King’s mail?”

“I always go through your mail.” Which Anduin knew, and Shaw knew, and Shaw was never going to forgive Wrathion for it. “But I had not seen this one.  From Count Clessington.”

Anduin groaned.  He had hoped Wrathion would miss that one, just to avoid being teased about it for the next month or two. “Just put it with the rest, I was going to turn him down first thing in the morning.”

“But why?”

For the first time that night, Anduin frowned.  He was close enough now to see Wrathion’s expression properly, that slight show of thoughtful surprise that lifted his brows and put a polite curiosity on his face.  Anduin could almost imagine the little tilt that had once come to a black whelp’s head as he had perched on a fence post to watch the fireflies dart through the shadows between the high stalks of bamboo.  He could not picture the dragon that should have by now taken the whelp’s place, because Wrathion had never shown Anduin his other, truer form as it was now, not once in the last two years.

Anduin came to rest his hand on the back of his chair, as if he were unsteady.  When he answered, it came out as a question. “Because I have no intention of marrying his daughter?”

Wrathion did not give him the answer he’d been hoping for. “Is it her age?”

The curiosity hadn’t departed.  Wrathion had a look like he’d found an interesting word puzzle in a book, one he wished to work out. “I know she is ten years your senior, but the wars have limited your options.”

“My options?” Tension crawled like a serpent up along the whole of Anduin’s back to form a tight, coiled, pulsing knot at the very base of his skull.

That damned look on Wrathion’s face barely changed.  The corners of his mouth pulled down faintly, forming what just barely what might constitute a frown, but rather than carry any dawning realization or a show of heretofore unseen understanding, there was a resistance that made Anduin’s birthday banquet curdle in his belly.

“Yes?  I’m sure you’ve begun to consider them.  Your choice of Queen is going to be vitally important going forward.”

Anduin’s chest seized.

“...no.  No I haven’t.  I’ve not thought about that at all.” His head began to pound.  “Have you?”

Now.  Now Wrathion’s expression changed.  Now he frowned in full.  He grew sharper and more upright where he stood, and Anduin’s back teeth pressed together when he saw what his mind did not want to believe was disappointment flashing through Wrathion’s eyes.

He was disappointed.  He was all but clicking his tongue. “Of course.  You’ve brought peace to the Alliance and begun its reconstruction; now you must think of its stability and longevity.  A Queen of good background and strong political capital would solidify your rulership to the people and to the nobility.  Once you have an heir, that will – ”

“An heir?!”

The harsh shout that burst out of him was a world away from the cries that had rocked Anduin a half hour before.  His grip on his chair had turned white-knuckled; it now served as a desperate anchor, keeping him stiffly upright in a room threatening to tilt and to spin and the man, the dragon, across from him turned into someone that he suddenly did not know.  The fire from the hearth left shadows on his face that were flickering and strange, catching wrongly at his cheek and under his brow.  Only the steady regard in those crimson eyes remained recognizable, but they were made somehow worse by how much had changed around them.

“Wrathion, when I have ever – what has gotten into you?!  A Queen?  Really?  You’re telling me to get married?”

Wrathion drew into himself.  His shoulders were straight as a line and the tilt in his jaw and his neck shifted from curious to imperious, authority tempering everything about him: his stance, the firm press of his lips, even the lay of the fabric upon his body, the velvet no longer relaxed and sensual, but patrician, akin to a vestment.  When he moved his hands to tuck the stack he held more neatly, the motion was slow and deliberate.  The rustling scratched against the interiors of Anduin’s ears.

“Anduin…I should not have to tell you.  Your marriage is inevitable.  You are the King of Stormwind.” Disappointed.  Disappointed.  As one might be when a child had forgotten that they were a Prince and all that that entailed.

A black needle throbbed in the very back of Anduin’s mind.  The pain of it nearly put stars into his eyes.

“How…,” roughness cracked his voice.  His throat felt full of hot glass. “How dare you.  How dare you , Wrathion!  How dare you say that to me, you, of all people!”

Wrathion’s grip tightened upon the letters.  Anduin saw the tips of sharp black nails sink slightly into the paper. “And what do you mean by that?”

The pounding in Anduin’s head and the flashing panic in his chest leapt toward that slim crack in Wrathion’s lordly veneer. “You know damn well what I mean!”

He felt both miserable and elated when he saw the strangeness fall away from Wrathion’s face and leave only a hot, unhappy uncertainty behind, a look that only a man might have, rather than an immortal, unknowable dragon.  In this time they had spent together, the longest unbroken stretch of days that was twice that of their time in the Stair, Anduin had learned that there were two things that Wrathion truly could not stand: 

The first was not knowing.  Almost all of his time was spent in knowing as much as he could.  Sometimes it seemed as though Wrathion could harbor all the knowledge in the world and it still would not be enough to satisfy him.  The silence that Anduin kept for long seconds only ground this lack deeper into Wrathion’s skull; he could almost see the pain of it at the corners of his eyes or in the flexing of the muscles in his throat.

The second – and the second was the worst – 

It was being reminded of his mistakes.  The dagger that Anduin had thrown forced Wrathion to guess which of them he was referring to, because it could have been any one of them.  They had all led to the same end.

Anduin Wrynn was King well before his time.

“You…know that I…”

The crack widened.  One of Wrathion’s arms had dropped to his side to hang listlessly.  Anduin was all but strangled by his regret.  He had said it to harm.  He had said it, yet he would turn that harm back on himself if he could.  The terrible pressure in his chest and behind his eyes wanted so badly for a release but he had never and would never – 

“But that changes nothing.”

Out of Wrathion’s drooped shoulders and turned eyes came an edge twice as mercilessly keen, every syllable as sharp as a saber and cutting to thrice the depth.  Barely clothed, his hair wild and tossed back, his beard to be soon in need of a trim and a few bruises in the shape of Anduin’s mouth beginning to show upon his neck, Wrathion had nonetheless climbed to the very top of his tower once again and when he looked at Anduin, it was down the straight, uncompromising line of his nose.

Anduin’s breath had vanished.  So had his thoughts.

“You are still King.  You still have a king’s responsibilities.  It would be the height of childishness to deny them.”

Pain like a sickness threaded across his scalp and sank into his skull, but that agony was a monumental irrelevance.  Anduin could only feel the wide and ringing hollowness inside his chest and then, after a lifetime but really only after his harsh, quick intake of breath, he felt ugliness spark there.

“...is that right.” Anduin’s grip on the chair had gone slack.  His fingers ached, the inside of each knuckle hot and tender.  His voice had bled itself of every intonation; he could hardly recognize it as himself. “And what about you, Wrathion?  How have you factored yourself into this future?”

The effect was greater than when his anger had twisted every word.  There was a noticeable pause from Wrathion before he answered and though nary an eyelash flickered, the dragon as rigid and immovable as a mountain, it was the pause itself that betrayed his mounting uncertainty.  Anduin knew without a shred of doubt that Wrathion did not want to answer and that the reason he did not want to was not because he had nothing to say or no response to give.

He stayed silent because he knew the answer was not one that Anduin wanted to hear.

He knew already it was the wrong answer.  He had to know.  He’d had to have known before he’d even read the letter and took it as an invitation to open his mouth and one would think, Anduin thought, that that knowledge might confer the idea that he would then need to search up something else, some different train of thought, a different decision, because how could a person go through life barreling down mistaken trajectory after mistaken trajectory and not once think – 

“Extramarital affairs are par the course among the aristocracy.”

There it was.  There it was.

The wrong answer. “So you want to be my mistress?!”

Anduin shoved the chair away from himself and charged forward the scant handful of steps it took to come a finger’s width away from Wrathion, the buttons on his wrinkled shirt nearly catching on the velvet hem.  He’d risen to his full height, his shoulders thrown back, and for the very first time, he realized that at some point he’d inched past him in height.  They weren’t quite level any longer; this close, it was Anduin that had to look down, just slightly.

The sensation was dizzying to the point of nausea. “Is that how you see us?!  Is that how you see me?!  What on earth gave you the idea that I would ever consent to an affair?!”

Wrathion could have been carved in marble.  He hardly seemed to even breathe. “I assumed that you would think pragmatically.”

A mad smile almost took Anduin’s face.  His scoff nearly choked him. “You…you’re serious.  You’re serious.  What in Light’s name is pragmatic about – ”

The not-quite-laugh did something to Wrathion.  His words bit surely as his teeth could and his voice rose, snapping with them. “Do not tell me you are this ignorant, Anduin!  You can’t be.  You can’t be so blind that you don’t see the damage our relationship can do to your kingdom.”

“You’ve been openly welcomed – ”

“I’ve been tolerated, Anduin!” The edifice that had been Wrathion’s expression crumbled.  Out from underneath came the anger and the disbelief that Anduin had mistaken for disappointment. “And I had to kill a god to buy even that meager acceptance!  Every year the memory of that labor will fade and the expectation of normalcy will grow.  They pardon my existence with that expectation!”

The hideous sense of it allowed Anduin to feel his heart again, now that it raced and throbbed and writhed in the cage of his ribs like an animal caught. “I’ve never let myself be governed by – ”

“Yes you have.” That Anduin’s eyes drilled into his own did not stop Wrathion from speaking. “You always have.”

“You have no idea what I – ”

“You don’t want to be king.”

The color could not have fallen faster from Anduin’s face.  Could he truly chastise Wrathion for capitalizing upon it, when he had moments before crowed miserably to spy the smallest sign of weakness?  The dragon did not jump immediately as Anduin had, but instead examined his expression slowly, the vivisection of Anduin’s most intimate doubts lasting for several excruciating breaths.

“...you’re looking for someone to absolve you of the responsibility.” There was no question in Wrathion’s voice.  No room for denial.  He was right.  He was right, and every word was but echoing confirmation. “You want it to be me.”

Anduin’s lungs were leaden.  His tongue lay as a stone. “That’s not…I’ve never asked you to – ”

“But you did.  You are.” The anger and the disbelief in Wrathion had twisted into something else entirely.  It was an emotion like the pool of blackness at the bottom of a well: Anduin could neither touch nor fully perceive it. “You want me to tell you we can just do as we please, as if a coup or a civil war are just things out of a history book.  As if heads haven’t hung for attempting the very same!”

Perhaps it was fear that had made Wrathion shout, though he never seemed to be afraid of anything.  Anduin only knew that it was fear that made him shout.  A crashing, wild, uncontrollable fear, which bulged like a tumor and split to spill a grievous rage that sent his hands flying up to snatch Wrathion by the lapels of his robe.

“I’ve never – I would never be so callous!  I’d never expect you to risk your life!!” He snarled at first, and then lost his wind in a blistering rush of hurt and comprehension. “You…”

The letters had fluttered to the floor, forgotten.  Wrathion’s fingers curled around both of Anduin’s wrists.  He had the face of a stranger. “Let me go, Anduin.”

Anduin almost didn’t hear him. “You think I am.  You think I did.  You think I’m that sort of person.”

“Let – ”

“...get out.”

“Anduin – ”

“Get out!!”

Between rage and anguish, it was rage that was easier to bear, and so it was rage that had Anduin shove his curled and shaking fists hard against Wrathion’s chest, forcing him to stumble back several steps.  The space that created was all that stood between Wrathion and the furious show of unacceptable and inexplicable and conspicuous violence that thrummed in Anduin’s arms and latched its claws into his shoulders and the back of his neck as if it were an animal that had been hunting him all of this time.  Every inch of his body felt as though it were being crushed, as if he wore armor that was not fitted too large, but too small, so that iron and steel became a squeezing second skin that would have his innards spill from their seams.

At least his end in that case would be quick.

At least he would not have to look at Wrathion and see his own doubts and denials and inadequacies looking back at him.

“Get.  OUT!!!”

They were not the only two awake in the Keep.  And unlike the vulgar racket of the sex that everyone in the castle knew about and simply tolerated, Anduin’s infuriated bellow brought three knights of the watch clamouring to his door.  The pounding of their fists upon the wood and their shouts for their King ended the night then and there, though the whole wretched collapse of Anduin’s world would be drawn out over nine pitiable days.

Nine days to extricate Wrathion from the bureaucratic and civil affairs that had come to rely on him.

Nine days to clear his rooms and find all the books he’d taken from the library and recover every sash and tunic and golden piece of jewelry that had found its way into Anduin’s rooms instead.

Nine days of conversations that began chilly and civil, only to break apart along the same faultlines and with the same sort of rigid, inescapable finality, and with each collapse the gulf between where Wrathion stood and where Anduin waited grew cavernously wide.

Nine days, and six years, and the unanswered question that was an impenetrable pall that lay over the formless march of days: was he loved, still?  They weren’t together, but was he still loved?

The emptiness where Wrathion had been had no answer to give.

Chapter Text

Wrathion’s problem had always been just how desperate an emotion love was.

For him, that was.  Most literature on the topic swooned for love, and its grandeur, and its tragedy, and its bright sweetness, but not a word was ever given to its capacity for wretchedness or the little agonies the heart would remember before it did the better times.  On the stage, love was an operatic melodrama or a breathless conquest; the single blistering comedy of love that Wrathion could recall from the last season of Stormwindian theatre had not been popular.  It was not in vogue to claim that love was cringing, graceless, or irresolvable.  That was simply not what the public wished to hear.

Though the tomes and the dramas did say that many a man and woman would do anything for love.  They did say that.

In his mind’s eye, in this strange and drifting existence that was neither wakefulness nor dreams, Wrathion had already watched his departure from Stormwind six years ago a tiring number of times.  Lacking little else to do, he used the nebulous passage of unfathomable hours to re-evaluate it.  Old habits and all that, despite the very real chance that he was either delirious and upon death’s door, or already passed beyond the Veil to a specialized hell where a theater of his regrets would keep him company for all eternity.  He would have thought karmic torture would be arranged a bit more neatly, perhaps with an opening act of his righteous familicide before segueing into a hallway beneath the Temple of the White Tiger, but death or near-death chose recency instead.

Anduin was so shockingly young.

Not to the Wrathion of then, no, not to the self that had paid for every rumor out of Stormwind well before the Speaker had come calling.  He’d been privy to all the best gossip of those days: the favored narrative of Anduin’s detractors was an even split between “weak and unfit child-king” and the much more interesting “Lordaeron’s hidden bastard.”  Anyone with sense knew that Arthas had fathered no children before his fall nor after it, of course; the timelines were all wrong.  But Anduin had been by necessity crowned at nineteen and no matter the flattering angles chosen or the armor crafted to add bulk to his frame, his age had been abundantly clear when the royal photographs, the very first of their kind, covered the front page of every newsprint in the city.  That Anduin would not be graced with his second surge in growth until the month or so before Wrathion left his company did not help matters at all, either.

At twenty-one, roundness still clung to his face and softened every aristocratic frown he tried to level against the daily bureaucratic onslaught.  The rigorous conditioning of his body for swordsmanship had thickened his arms and his shoulders while equestrianism admirably did the same below the waist, but that incremental progress had come with frustrating slowness despite the hours he spent on the training sands.  Stubble would not shadow his jaw until a week after shaving and what he grew on his chest and legs was so stubbornly wispy that a light tease was all it took for a flush to hurry onto his cheeks.

Wrathion did always soothe him after those soft jabs.  He knew Anduin was self-conscious and burdened by the words in ink and behind doors that he claimed did not trouble him; Wrathion begged his forgiveness by nuzzling the very respectable spread of blond pubic hair and smiled when the flush only darkened.  If that was not enough, then it would be Anduin’s cock that would receive the next round of compliments and eager attention, which the phantom of Wrathion’s memory was once again wholeheartedly committing to as the self of the present day watched from the not-quite-outside perspective that he could not escape.

The Wrathion of that night adored Anduin utterly.  He hurried to his knees before him.  He rushed to please.  He took the first opportunity presented to rise from his chair and cross the lonely distance its place had represented and he had thought – 

No.  He had come to the conclusion that his and Anduin’s desires neatly, properly, expectedly aligned.

But his first real thought had been that Anduin let him do those things; how quickly he had scurried away from his own impeccable insight.  The true distinction between allowance and reciprocity was much too important for him to have ignored.

As ever, hindsight was deeply uncomfortable.  So too was the abbreviated progression of his own emotional maturity: six years was not at all a considerable amount of time to most of the races on Azeroth.  It could seem short even to humans depending on their age, bemoaning as they did the length of the days but the swiftness of the years.  Yet six years was more than half of Wrathion’s life entire and he had to very begrudgingly, very unpleasantly admit that in some rare cases, the personal experience brought about only by the passage of time couldn’t be matched.  No matter how one might strive to shed every ignorance and inability through unwavering commitment, a fault could remain that time would rush to fill.

How deplorable a state of affairs.  It brought him no joy to know what the ghost on the purgatorial stage could not: it would have been a perfectly pleasant evening for the both of them if they had simply conversed, finished their drinks, and gone to bed together.

It could have been that that was all that Anduin had wanted.

“You’ve always led yourself to your own answers.”

If Wrathion had a body to spit, he would have spat with it.  Yet in the jolting surprise, there was a dizzying impression of perhaps having a body and then on the tail of that was a sudden surge of nauseating vertigo that was perhaps a turning around.  He was still looking at himself, held in Anduin’s shaking grip, but he was also spun on a heel he didn’t have, peering into a darkness that wasn’t there, and his eyes produced the very first true, physical sensation in hours and days uncounted: they watered as if thick smoke was wafting into them.

Which was certainly a disorientating experience, sudden corporeality aside.  Smoke never bothered him, nor should it.  To have such strain would have to mean there was a quality to the haze that irritated him and in making his mind certain of that, he immediately detected that quality and subsequently breathed it in: the cloying scent of mountain sage, aged pine, burning cedar, and a tobacco so strong it would put an ogre on the ground.

He knew that smell.

“You’re spiritwalking.” A moment ago, Wrathion had not had a voice, in the same way he had been bereft of lungs or eyes, but whether they had ever truly been gone was an assumption he began to doubt.

“We’re spiritwalking.” The reply came from nowhere and directly in front of him.

The tobacco leaves currently in use must have been from a particularly potent variety cultivated in secret enclaves within the most secluded regions of Highmountain, because Wrathion was so unexpectedly and fantastically calm that he could easily ask his next question without any of the mounting dread and despair he had been doggedly resisting for an unfortunate amount of time.

“Am I dead?”

“No,” Ebyssian answered, and as simply as that, he was there.

Here, but also there, conceptually present in the odd bubble of Wrathion’s prison of recollection and also entirely outside of it.  Looking at him was very much like looking at a mirror beneath slowly breaking waves: he became solid, visible, whenever Wrathion took a deep breath, then began to fade once again upon his exhale.  The blackness of his hide seemed all the smokier because of it, the wavering image robbing his form of its weight and width but not of its heat.  Redness glowed at the root of his great crown of antlers and twined in simmering tributaries up along the branching sprawl of them, darkening only at their tips, where white wisps drifted away into nothingness.  Wrathion could not help but think of a ember smoldering in a bed of ash, waiting to light, a metaphor somewhat ruined by the fact that, upon squinting with his nonexistent eyes, he realized that Ebyssian was wearing what looked like a skirt made of leaves.

“Your fashion choices have changed while I’ve been indisposed.”

“I’ve been incognito,” Ebyssian returned, a reply so profoundly absurd that Wrathion was convinced at last that this was all truly happening and not a deathly hallucination because his psyche did not have the capacity to put such words in his brother’s mouth. “Your guardian will be back from the city soon with something more comfortable for me.”

“My guardian?  What fool would have the audacity to – ”

……

“...so, Tong is here with you?”

“Yes.”

“I see.  Then, ah…ehem, it would be a tremendous favor to me if you did not tell him I called him a fool.” The discomfort in Wrathion’s voice was unbecoming of him and he entertained for a thought too long the idea that Ebyssian would think he was fearful of Tong, rather than – 

“It shows the depth of your bond that you worry for his feelings.” There was…not motion, but a change of perspective: Ebyssian came closer. “Even if he’d heard, he’d know you don’t think of him that way.”

“Yet he is very deft with a wooden spoon.  You’d be surprised by how it stings.”

Wrathion doubted his smooth, winsome recovery convinced Ebyssian even one iota that he had judged Wrathion, Tong, and their relationship incorrectly.  His brother had always been…he supposes one could use the word perceptive to describe him, but any dusty scholar or idle busybody could be perceptive.  Wrathion considered himself quite perceptive indeed, of a cut far above more plebeian practitioners, and he and Ebyssian could not be more different.

His elder brother was empathic.  He had empathy.  Perhaps this judgement might seem perfectly obvious to the casual observer, but it really did need to be emphasized how Ebyssian’s nature contrasted with all the rest of their Flight.  This wasn’t to say that there had never been black dragons that were compassionate and kind; trends of nature among the flights were simply that, trends, and all dragons were individuals.  But history, and more importantly Neltharion, had never elevated those nameless kin in the same way he had the hard and the brilliant and the ambitious.  Strength was the favored quality among the Black, strength of mind and strength of body, and their father would have never seen such attributes in Ebyssian.

He would have been mistaken, of course.  Ebyssian had strength in abundance.  It was in its expression that he differed from the rest of their remaining family.  “Your guardian is very worried about you.”

The scraps of purposeful levity that Wrathion had drawn to himself scattered quietly.  In their absence he only had the sobering echoes of voices rising out of the well of his memory. “Yes, I imagine he is.”

“Many others worry with him.”

“...you know, Ebyssian, I…mm.”

Quite without his notice, Wrathion had come to possess his body once again.  The surest clue came when his attention drifted away from his brother: he did so by looking over his shoulder, shifting back into the viewpoint he had briefly abandoned.  Below them, and also somehow beside them, the tableau continued to unfold.  The well-practiced facade that the self of yesteryear wore cracked beneath the pressure of expectation that he had borne heroically until the moment he convinced himself that Anduin, of all people, wished to add to it.  It was worse than a misjudgment; it was outright delusion.  Not a soul in this world had demanded that Wrathion bear his particular burdens; many of them had actively tried to stop him from doing so.  He had chosen his life’s work, much as he had chosen his name and the champions that would murder in service to that name, and Anduin had never and would never be responsible for the mantles that Wrathion had sought to wear upon his shoulders.

So then, why the burst of emotion, the shout and the stare?  Why did he invoke the memory of Onyxia’s head hung at the gates of Stormwind or the charred remains of his father that smoldered by the castle to this day?

Wrathion had always been too clever by far.  He could only look away from the answer for so long, having come to it long before he was ready to reconcile with it.

He had anticipated the failure.  He had spent two years preparing himself and his heart for the inevitable end of the pleasant dream that he and Anduin had shared, in much the same way as he had calmly and meticulously prepared for a scenario in which retribution took a form greater than that of a curled fist.  He concocted intricate plans to avoid failure, yet always accounted for its occurrence, and the more he loved Anduin, the more he rationalized the emotions of loss and rejection he had yet to feel to preempt the period of feeling them.  He compromised with ultimata he had yet to receive and to a point – 

To a point, it was only rational.  He did not think anticipating the civil and political fallout their relationship might have was incorrect.  The world was not so kind as to simply allow all dreams and hopes to come unequivocally true and the lifetime he spent training his whole self to be prepared was not a waste.  After all, he was still alive.  He had survived those years when one misstep would have ended the Black Prince well before his infamy might be inked into the annals of history.  Yet success demanded its tithe in the shaping of his nature: the looming spectre of disaster came to breathe so closely against his neck that he was compelled to ceaselessly prepare for its arrival.  When he was younger, he would have called it pragmatism; from across the jihui board, Anduin had called him a pessimist, though the other Prince should have used harsher language, because then Wrathion might have listened.

A defeatist could never hope for a better future.  His outburst was but self-fulfilling resignation.

He loved desperately but trusted not at all.  And while one might think that the demise of a god and his irreplaceable hand in it would engender a certain confidence in better outcomes, the triumphs of heroism were not the same as the triumphs of love.

“I find it ironic, even now.” Wrathion’s memory sent the old, cursed word echoing through the darkness and the smoke: tolerated.  Tolerance, the bosom friend of the misbegotten and the guilty. “How different now the landscape of my life, and the people that populate it.  It was Left and Right that came to you, was it not?  Anduin must have sent word to them.  And Tong is no doubt going to return with those cuts of pork I adored as a whelp, though I am now a dragon grown.  Then there is you, and – ”

A thought struck. “Sabellian is here, too, isn’t he?”

“Yes.  We made the journey together with Tong.”

“Hah.  Ahahah.” The refreshed absurdity demanded a chuckle. “That must have been…”

Wrathion trailed off.  Down below and right in front of him, the merciless recollection of Anduin pushed him away, the young King’s expression swept up into raw and pulsing hurt that made him nineteen again, or fifteen. “...tell me, Ebyssian, if I’ve surmised correctly: I drove my body to the point of death.  My soul became untethered in the process.  I have been healed, but my soul has remained adrift.”

Ebyssian exhaled roughly through his nose: smoke rushed out of it, then wafted away. “That’s right.”

“So all of this…” The scene reset.  He and Anduin were together again and some of his mistakes, just a small and precious handful, had yet to be made.  He had until now feigned a calm he did not feel, but it was largely pointless to keep on with the charade now that Ebyssian was here.

Each word came with sharp self-reproach. “I’m just doing this to myself, aren’t I.”

“...life is a valley, and death, a mountain.” Ebyssian was beside him now, close enough that their arms brushed against one another, but it was not a warm hide and smooth hair that he felt.  Great and heavy scales rasped against his own, each the size of a Stormwind shield and as hot as the coals that fed the flames in bonfires and hearths from one corner of Azeroth to the other.  Even before his ascension to the seat of Earthwarder, Ebyssian had possessed that particular quality: his fire was neither the primordial and unassailable heart of the world, nor the steely scalding of forges and metals.  His was the candlelight, the campfire, the signal light of a ship lost at sea, each an ember that men and gods carried with them that could not be put out.

Wrathion had never told him this.  He couldn’t have Ebyssian getting a big head over it.  He was the only member of the Black Dragonflight without an enormous ego; they needed at least one.  But he felt himself compelled, as anyone that his brother spoke to in that low and steady tone would be, to listen.  Even if all his cleverness could fully anticipate what his brother might say, and this was easily done as Ebyssian was tragically honest and straightforward, there remained the impetus to simply let him speak anyway, as though the saying itself had as much weight as the meaning of the words.

“When we pass from the valley, we carry our regrets with us.  If they aren’t left along the mountain path, their burden will never allow us to climb the summit.”

“I have more regrets than just this one.”

“This is the one you want to change.”

The response was as expected, though Wrathion felt that he had to correct the verbiage: “This is the one still possessed of the possibility of recovery.  I am here to save him, after all.”

“You want to exchange actions like currency.” It was lamentable that Wrathion had a spirit body, because it allowed Ebyssian to be privy to his wince. “That’s cruel to him, and to you.”

The ghostly Anduin pushed him away.  He was so young.  They were both so young.  And he could now recontextualize his obsessive search for the Dragon Isles after he had left for what it had truly been, in addition to a convenient, long-term method of avoiding everyone closest to him.  Wrathion did typically have the answers that he needed, Ebyssian had been right about that, but the real feat was convincing himself to listen to them.  The self was always the worst of opponents; he knew all his own tricks.

“...when all this is done and put to rights, I will speak with him.”

“What if the conversation goes badly?”

Wrathion winced again. “Then, I will seek advice.”

“And…?”

Wrathion bristled in lieu of squirming. “I will try to speak with him again.  Really, Ebyssian, must you twist the screws?  Do I have to say it?”

“You do.  Saying the words is as important as their meaning.”

Wrathion jerked his head around to shoot him a sharp, suspicious look. “...are you reading my mind?  Does spiritwalking allow you to hear my thoughts?”

“......”

“...Ebyssian.”

The other dragon cleared his throat and scratched the underside of his chin. “...I’m very flattered by all the complimentary things you’ve thought about me.”

“ – enough!  Enough!”

Mortification was an emotion he’d never nurtured a relationship with and to have that budding association begin now of all times was a truly odious experience.  Even lacking a body, Wrathion could nonetheless feel the insidious splashing of heat on his skin, and with it, the agony of not only having been caught in insipid admiration, but also that of the raw vulnerability that was autonomy upended.  If it had been anyone else, he would have struck them.  Striking could yet be upon the table.  Ebyssian was allowed to bear witness to the fact that the ghostly Wrathion and Anduin were going down on each other like starving animals, but invading his private thoughts was where he drew his line in the sand.

“Stop this!  Wake me!  Wake me this instant!”

To his credit, Ebyssian’s remorse was immediate, sincere, and judging by how he raised his hands, well aware of the deeper cut of Wrathion’s anger. “I have.”

“What?”

Wrathion lifted his head.

“Ah.”

For a breath he thought that Ebyssian and Sabellian had spirited him away from Elwynn Forest and returned him to the rumbling lairs beneath the Obsidian Citadel.

While most of their Flight’s ancestral fortress had been refined into sweeping hallways, grand forges, bottomless treasure chambers, and towering libraries, the undeniable odes to their nature as dragons and as once proto-dragons had remained.  Carved into the mountain or dug deep into the plutonic earth were the ancient caves where their forebears were first whelped well before the fortress even came to be.  In those places where the sculpted walls and golden ornamentation ended, the mountain persevered, and there every black dragon could go to find safe repose sprawled beneath ceilings of shining obsidian or curled snug in nests of pumice and ash.  Sabellian had told him that the digging of a black dragon’s personal den in or beneath the Citadel was considered a ceremonial sign of maturation, somewhat akin to when humans reached an age to leave their more proverbial nest.

Wrathion recalled that he had asked Sabellian if, following that logic, it was also true that young dragons that didn’t leave the family cave could be considered disappointments and shut-ins.

Sabellian had scowled and said, I remained in my family cave.  I was the new head of my line.

It wasn’t unusual.

Stop smirking.

It was a fond memory.  But it was all the memory he needed to affirm that this was not the ancestral haven of their Flight on the Dragon Isles.  The stones were far too brown for that, though they showed recent pressure scorching and refinement so that the softer sandstone and the pale, shimmery threads of gypsum that wound through it did not collapse as they were excavated.  There was a reason black dragons preferred to construct their dens in volcanic terrain: the silica-rich formations of surface rhyolite and subsurface granite were harder than sedimentary rocks, but still relatively susceptible to cracking beneath a young dragon’s claw.  As a dragon grew, their den would deepen and widen, and they would test the hardness of their teeth and the heat of their flame against diorite, andesite, and basalt, until the high concentrations of iron and tightly structured crystalline minerals at last proved a match for any dragon attempting to plumb the depths of the earth under their own power.

There had been, Sabellian had once said off-handedly, members of the Black Flight that had devoted their lives to the study of these stones and their formation through natural means, rather than magical or Titanic manipulation  The world had been shaped and reshaped as Khaz’goroth had willed and to dragonkind he had bequeathed that self-same power, but in so doing had allowed their people to realize the staggering age of the world.  Eons before the Pantheon had crossed the sea of stars in search of it, Azeroth had formed by its own means – by her own means, if Magni’s assertion of worldly gender were true.  The curious and the clever among the Black thus spent their days in the lowest reaches of their dens, carefully extracting materials which men had yet to name and that whispered to them the secret prehistory of heat, and of gravity, and of planetary accretion.

Neltharion had deemed such pursuits a waste of time.  Black dragons were already the masters of every deep part of the earth and the sentiment, as Sabellian recalled it, was that they were merely picking at gravel to the detriment of their duties.  Conveniently Neltharion had not said his interests at the time lay instead in the manipulation of flesh and magic in a subterranean lair he did not want found, but even so, it was still a powerfully misguided judgement.

Even where Wrathion lay, his head up while the rest of him was more or less plastered against Ebyssian’s massive flank, he could see between each bleary blink that along with gypsum, there were silvery dots scattered all throughout the walls and soaring ceiling.  They twinkled cheerfully in the light from the jutting shards of crystal infused with draconic fire that ringed the cavernous space and those smaller archways that he assumed led to separate chambers.  The entrance tunnel, which had comically maintained its size even as it quadrupled in depth and length judging by the pitch darkness behind it, was moon-like from the sheer concentration of flickering ore.

“Is that truesilver?” Wrathion’s voice staggered out of him.  If he hadn’t been the one who spoke, he would have assumed a hoarse toad was dully coughing the words out in some far corner.

“I believe it’s platinum.” Ebyssian’s reply rumbled down the enormous stretch of his draconic body, thrumming against Wrathion and causing his head to wobble.

“I should tell Anduin the Royal Treasury will face no shortages for the rest of his natural life, in that case.” His chuckle was an unflattering burble. “Do you see the layers of sediment?  Yes, of course you can, you must have as you were ruining my cave to accommodate your tremendous bulk.  This entire region must have been a magnificent delta hundreds of thousands of years ago.  If we analyze the terrain we may very well find dormant leylines that…ah.  My head.”

Dizziness overcame him.  Wrathion lowered his chin back to the dirt, which was pleasantly warm and somewhat loose.  It had been clawed at not very long ago; had it been him?  His limbs had all the qualities of sun-bleached driftwood, so perhaps not.

“How long have I…?” If it was nine days, he was going to be – 

“Five days.”

“Excellent.”

Ebyssian did not even have to voice his confusion for Wrathion to be aware of it.  When he and Anduin had been busy vandalizing the castle wall on a night that felt a lifetime ago, he had been preoccupied with the auditory pleasure that was listening to the mechanisms of another dragon’s powerful body.  While his brother did not evoke at all the same sort of rapt attention as Anduin had, he did not have to: when an Aspect so much as breathed, the clamor was unavoidable.  The bewildered tilt of Ebyssian’s head sent up the hissing of ten thousand rushes in gale winds, every scale in his neck and a few in his chest shifting with the pull of skin and muscle.  Tendons creaked as the mast of a galleon might, guiding the twisting of bony vertebrae so heavy they could anchor an airship to the earth.

All of which was not even half so loud as Kalecgos’s glacial cracking or the sonorous, metallic ringing of Alexstrasza’s bone structure, long ossified into bismuth.

“Wrathion…?”

Effort was needed to refocus his thoughts.  He had begun to drift, ideas and memories and little observations coiling around one another in a soothing, comfortable spiral.  There was nothing in this world he ached for more in this moment than to sleep, which was precisely why Wrathion did not allow it and willed his head to rise once again.

“I am well.  Save your worries for the next soul in need of your kindly succor.”

He felt his own mortality in the brittle unfolding of one leg, then the other, and he could see when his head dipped from the effort that the scales on his legs had dulled.  Gone was the tight and smoky shine: they were curled and dust-gray at the edges, flecks falling away from them now that they had been disturbed.  His claws were comically short, little more than hard black nubs, and he knew that they must have crumbled like plaster sometime in the last five days.  Luckily, their growth would be accelerated, rapid by virtue of a dragon’s indefatigable vitality – or would later be, once he had regained that vitality.  It was not the first time he had attempted to emulate or replicate the ability and power of his father; it would merely hold the honor of being the time he came closest to death in doing so.

When Deathwing had cracked the surface of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms and caused the sky itself to burn in his passing, his age and his strength and the amplification of both by his cursed pact with the Void had pushed his capabilities well beyond that of any other dragon on Azeroth, beyond that of even the Aspects themselves.  While any member of the Black Dragonflight could perform chemical combustion within their bodies as Wrathion had, what their fallen Aspect had done and the boundaries he had pushed well beyond would not be understood until years after his demise.

Wrathion had made it a personal goal that he would be the one to understand it, the one to understand him.  To match him, and then surpass him, which he’d thought himself no longer misguided enough to pursue but what had he thought earlier, again?  About love, and about desperation?

“Don’t take that to mean I do not appreciate the succor.  I’m very glad to be alive.”

He had gone himself to the Maelstrom.  He had traversed the skies above those eternally tempestuous seas and found those few badly eroded pillars still jutting from the endlessly churning waters.  From their stones he pulled an array of samples and the blistering memory of Deathwing’s final day, which offered him at last a glimpse at the ruin his father had become.  That the sight was a horror that had haunted his nights until he had sent N’zoth into final oblivion was beside the point.  He had learned that his father’s internal structure was endlessly in danger of splitting apart because he had elevated his capabilities beyond mere combustion.  What spilled from his chest and mouth were rivers of magma, make no mistake, but this was but side effect, simply the melting and remelting of his ceaselessly regenerating innards in the crucible of his body.

The real truth was this: where Neltharion’s indomitable heart had once been, a red and howling star burned, though Wrathion’s reams of notes and the dozens of diagrams he had drawn continuously demanded he find a word other than burn.  It did burn, but that was not all, that was not the root of it, there was a secret chemistry to how a star lived that he did not have the instruments to measure nor the mathematics to explain.  What Neltharion had done, and what he had known about how it had been done, had followed his father into the seething darkness of the sea.

Like father, like daughter, and Deathwing had left far less clues behind, comparatively.  The odds were quite in his favor for unraveling Onyxia’s spellwork, while all that remained of their father was the fading scar that was Wrathion’s notebooks and half-theorems, put away.

“But if you read my mind again, I am not liable to forgive you a second time.” Wrathion was standing.  He remained standing, though his knees were watery with weakness.  Willpower kept them locked, in the same way that willpower saw that his wings were folded onto his back, with only a moment given to quiet surprise when he saw that one in particular functioned perfectly well.  It was whole, if more than a little thin, and he was curious as to why for not very long at all.

“Though I do forgive you, this time.  It was not something that could be helped, was it?”

Ebyssian’s relief was palpable, quite literally: his sigh was so great that the inward collapse of his flanks actually caused Wrathion to gently topple over.  He’d been using his brother as something of a crutch while getting his footing.

“No.  I mean, yes.  The process is – oh, forgive me.  Here.”

Wrathion could only marvel at the care with which his brother moved his astonishing amount of mass.  Ebyssian had been a dragon of respectable proportions before, but an Aspect’s body would inevitably fit around the mold of their power.  That he could turn oh so carefully in the cave, lower his head, and use his nose to help Wrathion back up, all without so much as trodding on a crystal or scraping his tail against the wall, was deserved of another compliment that he was never, ever going to receive.  He had already received plenty.

“The further through the Veil a spirit travels, the more their thinking and their feeling changes.  They already can’t speak in the same way as the living.” When Ebyssian was sure that Wrathion would not tumble a second time, he carefully moved his head away. “We must listen to their mind and heart to understand what their words can no longer convey.”

“Then why are some ghosts so damnably chatty?” Wrathion heard his brother begin to take a breath, no doubt to give him a serious answer, and he cut him off with a weary smack of his tail against Ebyssian’s foreleg. “Don’t trouble yourself, I was being facetious.”

“Oh.  Of course.”

“Ah, and before I forget:  I am going to be charging you a usage fee if I hear tell of you utilizing my brilliant turns of phrase for your lectures.”

“...are you still being – ”

Wrathion smiled in the way that a dragon would, with a flex of his jowls and the slight rise of his gaunt wings. “Am I?”

How rewarding it was to hear even the patient Ebyssian grumble then, the sound like a cascade of stones down a rocky hillside.  It felt the next-to-last proof Wrathion needed to be certain of his survival, more so than the cold ache throbbing in his legs or the hollowness in his core.  All he needed now, then…and certainly he had by this time recognized that his tangents and his teasings were but means to delay, he could not be blamed for a degree of irrationality when he was one stiff wind away from a second collapse…but he’d had enough of his own nonsense, so he had merely to ask:

“Tell me, is Anduin…?”

Wrathion knew Anduin would be alive and well.  In the meadow he had held to consciousness long enough to see the confirmation of their success.

That was not the question that he was asking.

“He has been waiting in your room this whole while.”

A spark lit in his chest.

“My room?”

Ebyssian almost need not have turned his head to gesture where it was that Wrathion should look.  The crippling exhaustion and the lingering spectre of his own demise faded as the night’s dour fog might before the morning sun, and he was not ashamed of the flowery metaphor nor how apt it was.

Wrathion would deny it no longer: Anduin was as beautiful a dragon as he was a man.

How unkind it was to see him robbed of agency and his form callously manipulated and yet consider Anduin glorious and handsome.  Wrathion more than any other understood the rage, the violation, and the bitter helplessness; he would sooner cosign himself to the slavery or death that had been desired for him in his whelphood than he would even imply that what Anduin now endured was somehow a benevolent gift.  His purpose in coming here would never change regardless of his own feelings: he would help Anduin.  He would undo the hideous crime laid upon him.  He would spare him the life that Wrathion had lived, and Ebyssian was wrong, in the end, because so long as he succeeded, Anduin’s forgiveness would not truly matter.

That was a possible outcome he had to make peace with now, because Anduin was so beautiful and he was so happy to see him.

“Are you really just going to linger in the entryway like a voyeur?”

In the warm and flickering light, the displeased flare of Anduin’s fins and frills flashed golden. “I was giving you space you…you…!”

The words shivered in his long, proud throat.  He was healthier, cleaner, taller; the blues and purples whispered across the resplendent black of his scales, themselves murmuring like rushes in the wind or curtains at an open window.  When his first hesitant steps pressed against the beaten sandstone, Wrathion saw that only his claws, thick and longer than a man’s forearm, were dusty and crusted with dirt.

“You fool!” Anduin finally decided upon; perhaps he did not wish to swear in Ebyssian’s presence. “Back from the brink of death and already insufferable!”

Wrathion could hear Anduin’s heart pounding.  It was a wide brass drum, or perhaps a sword hilt upon a golden shield.  Toward it, his whole weary soul leaned.  So too did his body, though the swings of his legs were wide and clumsy, and he had to dodge Ebyssian’s attempt to help him because that was not what he wanted.  It truly was not.

“Yes.  Yes, perhaps this time, I’ll allow…that you may be right.  You may just be – ”

It did not surprise him that his words held out longer than all the rest of him.  They had the stamina to spare and the skill to succeed in twisting deftly around what body and soul and heart had already succumbed to.  Around only Ebyssian, his words could maintain their superiority and he could have potentially walked out of this place and away from his death with every feeling already put neatly away so that they did not interfere with the business at hand.  There was, after all, so much more work to do.

But Anduin was striding swiftly across the open space, his body an arresting concert of confident steps and a graceful, twining tail, and Wrathion felt the heat of him just before he arrived.  A flame not like that of the lifeblood of the earth nor like stars in their throbbing strangeness in the Great Beyond; it was not even of the hearth or the lamplight, as he might have thought it could be if he’d given time to examining it before.

It was the heat of the sun when it touched the soil.  It was the rays of brightness that would crest over the clouds.  It was light, if light could live in the earth, and he had penned a few equations, had he not, once in one of his many notebooks, idly pondering the correlation between fire and light and paladins and priests and nature and the sun and Anduin, dear Anduin – 

Anduin caught him when he fell.  The fall was somewhat inevitable; the catching, he had hoped, would be, too.  He was always hoping, these days.  He no longer thought of himself as such a pessimist.  People did change; that was what hindsight was for, horrible as it was to experience.

It helped people to change.

“Easy.  Easy.” Anduin’s voice rumbled under him; he had ducked down and intercepted Wrathion with his neck and shoulder. “I’ve got you.”

How nice that was.  How lovely.  How grand.  He did not have to work so hard to keep his knees steady and his head up.  Anduin was more than strong enough to lift him and delightfully and unexpectedly deft at gently rolling his shoulders until most of Wrathion was on his back, so that one foreleg could hold him there.

“Ahh…you’ve been practicing.  I was going to recommend – ”

“Save that for later, Wrathion.” The chide was so gentle that he could not even drum up a little bit of false huffing. “Just rest for now.  I’ve prepared everything.”

“You’ve…?”

“Yes.  Is that really so strange?”

“No, it is only…”

It was only that the feeling was so much like dizziness, and so strong in that, that Wrathion had to spend a few moments in silence trying to understand it.  His chin rested upon Anduin’s broad back in that meanwhile and he felt Anduin’s pulse reverberate deep into the hollows inside him that had gone so cold and so gray.

“I am merely…relieved.” That was it.  How novel.  Again, something to marvel at. “I will leave everything to you then, Anduin.”

Anduin surely replied, but his words were sacrificed to the sleep that Wrathion had so longed for.

Chapter Text

”So.  You do love him.”

“Yes, I do.”

“But you didn’t mate with him.”

“In the context you provided to me, no, we didn’t mate.  We had sex but we knew he wouldn’t conceive, not with a human.”

“Did you want him to conceive?”

Anduin had suffered through many humiliating conversations in his lifetime, but the three hours, twenty-three minutes, and forty-one seconds he spent being mercilessly interrogated by Wrathion’s brother was hands-down the most grueling out of the lot.  There had been no preparing for it: Sabellian and Ebyssian both had rushed into the cave shortly after their arrival, with what little words exchanged after that…greeting…focused solely upon trying to describe what Wrathion had done and what had been done for him since his collapse.  He had swiftly forgotten that first shock of embarrassment, the feeling quickly replaced by a relieved desperation when the night elf that had become a towering tauren said that Wrathion could be saved.

Then, there had been only the waiting.

He’d made a few game attempts at trying to distract himself.  He’d tried to compare the many reports he had received with the two prominent dragons in the flesh; Sabellian in particular had been such a vast unknown.  The secret black dragon Ebonhorn had been the subject of glowing praise from Magni and Wrathion both, though in Wrathion’s case all Anduin needed to hear was that he called Ebyssian brother.  Wrathion had only ever spoken of his family in broad terms, with Deathwing as his father and all others as merely present in the past tense.  Before their two years were up and all chances to know had vanished, it had seemed that once or twice, when they had dimmed the lanterns and put the rest of the world away behind closed doors and drawn curtains, Wrathion had come close to telling him the other half of the story.  Anduin already knew the grisly how; but from whom?  The egg of that was the last uncorrupted black dragon did not come to be in a vacuum.  There was a life that existed before his, and lives that existed beside his, but he had never spoken the names he must have surely known because Anduin knew that Wrathion would not suffer that ignorance.

Anduin could know them now, if he really wanted.  Mathias had a report.  It had been the work of three years, and was three fingers thick.  It sat unread in a magically sealed safe in the King’s study, gathering the dust of the years and the questions that Anduin had never asked.

The names were Wrathion’s to give, not Anduin’s to take.

“...no.  We had no business having a child.  After N’zoth and with the stability of – ”

“But that has changed.  You have the scent of rut all over you.”

“E…excuse me?”

Something Anduin had always known but never really thought about was that Wrathion and Ebonhorn were dragons of similar experience: they lived among mortals.  As far as Anduin knew without delving into the dossiers that lurked in the castle, Wrathion and his hidden brother had lived among mortals for all of their lives.  This had seemed a fact interesting yet inconsequential, at least from the perspective of someone whose life had been influenced by dragons since before he was born.  Every year it became more apparent just how deeply threaded through the mortal civilizations dragons had wound themselves, and it was not until Sabellian stared him down from across the small clearing they had made outside the cave that Anduin put a thought toward what a dragon’s life would be when they weren’t swaying the history of Azeroth one way or another.

Anduin had no idea how dragons lived when they were just with one another.

Did Wrathion?  Until the Dragon Isles, Anduin couldn’t be sure if he did.

“Rut, I said.  Your musk is all over this forest.  If you made your advances while he was weak then you’re more immature and irresponsible than I – ”

“W, wait.  Wait.  Hold on, sir – ”

“General.”

“I’m aware of your rank.”

“If you know that much then you must be aware we’ll not allow the mistreatment of a scion of the Black Dragonflight.”

“I can guess now that he was worried and afraid.  It must be easier to be angry than either of those and I was right there.” Anduin nuzzled a little closer to the curve of Wrathion’s neck, where the scales had regained their fetching, smokey luster, shining like dark gems in the low light.  He kept his words to a careful whisper, though he hardly needed to: Wrathion had been sleeping so soundly whole conversations had passed him by. “Right there and stinking of rut.  I wish you had warned me.”

The slumbering Wrathion only wiggled in small adjustment, worming away from Anduin and turning his head in such a way as to stick the end of his nose under the fin that was Anduin’s right ear.  It must have been very nice and warm and pleasant for Wrathion, because he had been doing it all night and every night, and it was a test of Anduin’s self control not to make noise or twitch reflexively each time a sigh of breath whistled against the small scales and thin skin hidden there.

“But I don’t think you could have.  I’m pretty sure I now know more about how dragons mate than you do.” And how Wrathion would have laughed to see Anduin, upright and rapt as a schoolboy before Sabellian’s matter-of-fact recitation of a lesson he must have given hundreds of times.

Dragons shared certain aspects of their reproduction with the proto-drakes they had once been.  They coupled physically, not magically as all the scholars had once believed, back when dragons were unapproachable creatures of legend, and they laid clutches in an array of sizes, from one or two to roughly twenty.  Incubation was split: half within the body of the brooder, half within the eggs that would harden over a few months in the nest, or elsewhere, though he did not deign to say where that may be.  But unlike proto-drakes, all of whom were beholden to a yearly breeding cycle based upon the seasons, what dragons underwent was much more nuanced.

A dragon experienced rut or heat in relatively the same manner that a proto-drake did – Sabellian also had not said what that manner was and Anduin had all but died from the effort of not asking – but its initiation was triggered solely by emotional attachment.  Dragons could at any time enjoy themselves with whomsoever they pleased in whatever form they pleased, but to mate and mate specifically as dragons was akin to marriage, if exchanging vows could alter a couple’s body chemistry.  Dragons pairbonded, typically for life, and though multiple partners might be involved in that bond, it was more rare with dragons that were not Aspects or otherwise socially prominent.  A consort was the appellation given to the partners of these dragons of title and importance; in most other cases, pairs were simply mates.

Once paired, a dragon’s sexual arousal intensified, the biological processes for procreation began, and how long the drive to…to breed lasted and how often it occurred depended upon the pair, the nature of their bond, and the circumstances of their bonding.  Environmental conditions, social factors, a dragon’s expressed gender or lack thereof, sexual preferences, asexuality, and even the lay of local leylines could affect a pair’s cycles in timing or eliminate them altogether, but at Anduin’s clear and continued confusion, Sabellian had been forced to provide examples.  With the topic being so clearly personal and private, he could only speak of his own experiences.

They had a schedule, the Outland brood.  That was the sort of patriarch that Sabellian of the Black Dragonflight was and it was a status as much informed by the personality of he and his consorts as it was by their perilous situation on the shattered Draenor.  Only one in five whelps survived the ogres, the Hellfire orcs, and the gronn; their broodmothers had to choose between fighting to defend their families or staying secluded long enough to lay.  Whole clutches would be rendered inert by mana instability.  And while it had begun as a means to field an army, an admittance that Anduin was shocked that Seballian would make to him, the King of Stormwind and High King of the Alliance, as the years wore on and Azeroth became an inaccessible memory, every mating between Sabellian and his partners was more akin to a whispered hope at the edge of a dying world.

Hope.  A word Anduin did not expect to come from the severe visage of a dragon that had, at one time, served Deathwing’s calamitous designs.

When put that way, Anduin could wade through his monumental shame and consider that he was not just a sexual deviant masturbating wildly in the woods when he should have been careful and celibate for everyone’s sake.

He was hoping for something.  He’d been hoping for six years.

“I would never do such a thing to Wrathion.  Not while I still draw breath.  I was alone and - fantasizing.  About the times when we were together.”

“Were?”

Sabellian had surprised him a second time, then.  Anduin had opened his mouth to explain, only to be interrupted:

“What did he do?”

Brothers.  That was what Wrathion had called both Ebyssian and Sabellian, yet Anduin had still found himself given to surprise when one of them showed that he knew Wrathion.  Knew in a way that was not just a symbolic show of affiliation, the much reduced and long ostracized Black Dragonflight come together out of necessity, but in the way that a brother should.  Not that Anduin knew what a brother should or should not be from personal experience, but he had heard and seen, and wondered now and then because a lonely boy always would, what it may have been like had there been a second prince or princess of Stormwind.  A prince more than a princess; he’d been seven the last time he thought about it and girls were scary no matter how much his etiquette teacher told him they were delicate and sweet.

Envy stirred in his chest, but it was a quiet thing, well-known and easy to live with.

“You’re close to them.  They care about you.” Anduin had to roll his head away from Wrathion for the tenth time, rubbing his ear against the soft soil to get the tickle out of it. “I owe you another apology for how I was in the barn.  If someone cast doubt on my relationship with my family, I would be more than just…angry…”

Family.

All it took was the word.

“Fhh.  Agh.” He had been doing so well, too. “Uther’s… asshole – ”

Anduin had to be careful.  Unwinding his tail from around Wrathion’s and lifting his wing off the smaller drake’s back had a very real chance of waking him, which would allow Wrathion to do more than just tell him that he was going to go tattle to the Archbishop about his swearing.

“You still love him and want him despite what happened.”

“Yes.  I’ve told you already that I do.”

“You’re extremely forgiving.  Bringing in a second, unwanted consort is – ”

“Is between us.  Sir.  General.  I humbly ask you to tell me how I might control my…my rut.  You’re right that Wrathion needs to rest and recover.  He shouldn’t have to manage a human’s feelings in a dragon’s body.”

“Hmph.  That’s going to be difficult.”

There was at least plenty of space to maneuver in.  The cave that Anduin had dug off the main chamber had been the project that had at last pulled his mind away from the numbing worry layered over the deep, cold fear he had not felt since the day he had watched the smiling, confident Wrathion disappear through a portal to Uldum for possibly the last time.  Much to his surprise, his claws and his forelegs had more than enough strength to crack the stone; the fin on his tail, when he worked hard enough at it, could scoop fine, dry soil from outside and carry it within, Anduin mindful of the warning that dampness was the only true enemy of Wrathion’s recovery.  When he brought his head down against the rough walls he scraped into being, he could rub the curves of his horns against them until they were smooth, the gypsum powdered by the pressure and the platinum shaved into bright flakes.  The drifting haze left behind dusted the walls and sparkled in the soil and though he had fretted over an injured Wrathion breathing in the particles, Ebyssian had assured him that for a black dragon, the earth and everything in it was a bosom friend.

So now Wrathion lay curled in a bed of starlight, inky and gleaming beneath the calcite crystals in the ceiling that Anduin had infused with the Holy Light.

Anduin couldn’t help but look at him.

“What?  Why?  Sir.”

“You’ve only recently matured.  Your feelings and their effects are stronger.”

“...I beg your pardon, but I’m almost thirty.”

“That body you’re in is a dragon that just reached its sexual prime.  Most dragons your age court for at least a century or two, but you’ve paired immediately.  Mating will be on your mind almost all of the time.”

“You – you’re certain of that?”

“I’ve been a father longer than humans have had a civilization.  Of course I’m certain.”

Sleek, sharp, and shockingly fine: that was Wrathion.  In the span of a few days, a fresh layer of obsidian mail had laid itself over legs grown thick and strong again from the meals that Anduin brought to him twice daily.  The new scales were tighter, brighter, and so keenly edged that if Anduin had allowed his human fingertips to brush in absent wonder over the elegant curve of his neck, he would have drawn blood.  The same would have happened if he’d given in to the impulsive desire and dared to cup the new and wicked claws that Wrathion curled against the soil of their bed; to call them merely knife-like would do them a disservice when they seemed capable of slicing through the hull of an airship.  Down his back, heavy plates had pushed up and out of the dry and cracked rootbeds, shiny as steel but pitch dark and smooth, without the roughness and wear they would later gain as they rubbed against one another and were subject to the scalding heat that would pour off crimson wings.

The plates were short, however.  That was what most caught Anduin’s eye in that moment.  The plates were still growing, still endearingly squat, and between them was soft, dusty scarlet skin, exposed to the air when it would otherwise be encased in natural armor.

He was staring.  He knew he was staring.

Just to his left was the exit.  Past the exit was a short tunnel dug at an angle for their privacy.  Past that would be the main chamber and from there was the climb up and out of the stony lair and into the forest, where a rutting beast could be alone and not trouble his – 

His…

Light help him.

There was no skirting away from the word as it formed in his mind.  Sabellian had cursed him with it.  Anduin had been miserable in his previous confusion and helplessness; to be informed empowered him against that, but he was now more cursed than he had been before they’d had their lesson.

“You have to be mistaken.  This is a spell.  We’re in a crisis.  How could I possibly – and moreover, Wrathion has not consented to such a thing!  Nor have I!  You can’t tell me that dragons are at the mercy of their own bodies!”

“Of course they aren’t.”

“Then – ”

“They’re beholden to their own hearts.  It’s the same with you mortals, isn’t it?”

There was a ludicrous sort of irony in the fact that the gobsmacked Anduin had been a hairsbreadth away from explaining to Sabellian that no, actually, mortals couldn’t just follow their heart’s whims whenever they wanted, because Anduin was King and as King he had responsibilities.  He had to think pragmatically.  He had to consider the political and civil implications of any relationship he might have, marital or otherwise, and how that relationship could change the future of not just Stormwind, but all of the Alliance.  He couldn’t just cave and turn his quivering body back around; it had already taken so much willpower to drag heavy paws and thick claws the few steps down the hall and away from Wrathion.

Wrathion.  His – 

“By the Light.  Can I not…just for one moment…”

No.  He could not.

He could only press his head and his horns against the wall, digging the heavy ram’s curve against the sandstone, and grit his predator’s teeth against the turning of the hot stone in his loins that would soon transition from mere feeling into the shameless phallus he’d already been forced to grind against a boulder once so far during Wrathion’s recovery.  He had picked an innocent and undeserving rock some distance from the cave, sat in the midst of a thicket wide and tall enough to hide him from view, but they had to know.  They all had to know.  Ebyssian and Sabellian could smell him; he was too loud for Valeera to miss him.  And Tong could no doubt – 

Hellfire.  Tong had caught them, all those years ago.  Hiding out in his woodshed and somehow convinced that both their retinues had no inkling that their charges had slipped out at night for a tryst that would’ve had Varian Wrynn storming the Tavern if his hands were not already full with Garrosh’s Horde.  The two of them had never been a secret; if it had all unfolded differently at the Temple of the White Tiger, his father would have pulled him aside for the inevitable talk that fate, in the end, would never allow.  Years later, when they were no longer boys but a King and his counsel, Wrathion had teased him with how obvious they both were not because he thought Anduin did not know, but because Anduin would blush every time that he did.

Someone had to have arranged for the silence of the staff and servants in the castle.  Mathias, most likely.  He had kept his own lover as a well-guarded treasure until the other man’s name appeared on the Spymaster’s next-of-kin paperwork, waiting on Anduin’s desk to receive a kingly seal of approval.  There’d been no opportunity to offer his well-wishes nor to ask the questions that burned so close to his chest.

How did you meet?  How did you know?

How do you stand to be apart?

What do you do when something has happened, and seems impossible to resolve?

Why do such things happen and why do they hurt for so long?

Had Wrathion demanded those selfsame answers from Sabellian, the brother who was also a father?  Perhaps.  Perhaps.  Anduin was so envious.  He ached for the same and he ached from the lack and he ached from his clenching teeth to his quivering tail.

He hadn‘t moved.  He breathed Wrathion’s name like a prayer.

In his mind’s eye, it was the side of his claw, not his human fingertips, that traced along the loose and rosy skin between Wrathion’s back plates.  It was the gilt tongue hiding in his mouth that enjoyed the new scales along his neck, their texture delightfully pebbled instead of dangerous and cutting.  He imagined, and he had to imagine it because he had never seen it in reality and so had to create the fantasy from whole cloth, how Wrathion might squirm when he was a dragon instead of a man.  Where would the motion begin?  In his shoulders or chest, spreading in the way that Anduin’s hard trembling did?  Or would it be elsewhere, in his throat or between his wings or lower, further down the small body that still seemed so gracefully long whenever Wrathion stretched in his sleep beside him and showed the astonishing softness of his belly.

Anduin could imagine the contrast of colors if he were to lay his cock across that more tender skin: the sandy darkness, akin to brass under candlelight, and the vulgar brightness of slick ridges and the turgid knot that pulsed below them.

His groan sent debris pattering down from the wall.  The narrow rushing of his breath was blasting the stone.

There was no sweat to squint against when he opened his eyes; he didn’t know when it was that he had closed them.  He was hot, hellishly hot, and the air in the tight confines of the tunnel warped and colored at the edges.  His insides were boiling, the viscous throbbing so strong that he thought it might roll up and out of his throat in a molten expression of desire, the very idea of which should have disgusted him, but it was too late for that.  He’d already associated the feeling with meat and blood and Wrathion’s white fangs against his dark lip and with the way Anduin’s tongue would pang and tingle as he pulled his wet chin and mouth away from Wrathion’s spread cunt.  Now that he had it, his body did not want to shed the heat.  It didn’t want to surrender that indulgence.  It was kept, vivacious and beating, in the very center of him, and the dragon that he wore, the dragon that he felt like he was, did not want to carry it up and out into the lonely night.

The man didn’t want to, either.

The man was lonely, and heartsick, and tired, so damnably tired.  The man felt as though he hadn’t hadn’t slept since the Fourth War, not a real sleep, not the kind that he needed.  The man was sorry not for the stance he had taken, but that he’d had to take it at all.  He was sorry that for he and Wrathion, for all their lives, things had never been as simple as they were for dragons, when all that dragons need do was love each other.  He’d never once thought he was wrong for having wanted it, but for the first, glorious, frightening time, he had an inkling of what it would be like if it was theirs at last.

Anduin would never tell Genn, or Mathias, or Valeera.  He would never tell Jaina, or Baine, or Magni, or dear Wyll, resting in the fine plot Anduin had arranged for him behind Stormwind Cathedral, not far from the mother that Anduin never had a chance to know.  Each and every one of them worked so hard and hoped for so much.

But Wrathion knew.  He already knew.

The deep breath that Anduin took seemed to last forever.  His long exhale after was smokey and full of winking flashes of platinum.

Anduin then took every ounce of courage that he possessed and crammed it into his limbs, demanding that they find some sense in themselves that wasn’t just clamoring wildly and eagerly back the way he had come.  If this was a choice that he was going to make, then it was going to be a choice that he was going to own, so that no version of himself looking back at the moment would have reason to regret it.  He had already done so much of that.  Sometimes it felt as though his whole life was just that.  Just the regret.  Just the long nights and the ghosts that wouldn’t answer him.

He was careful.  He was shaking, but he was careful.

He went back to the curl of warm and breathing darkness, thin threads of glowing crimson just visible beneath closed eyelids, and Anduin bowed his head toward that small and treasured flame, as if in confession.

“W, Wrathion.”

“...mm?”

There was a wonderful smell.

“Wrathion, wake up, please.”

Heat touched his neck and his cheek.  He turned his head toward it and on his next breath, that stunning scent rolled in a thick wave through his sinus and into his mouth.  It was heavy, almost cloying, but the dense moisture of it was eased by sand and dust and the distinctive tang of precious metals.  Platinum, calcium, satin spar, and salt.  The salt of the body, of blood and of breath, and oh, it stirred in him.  It coiled, pushed, and wetted his tongue, and he had to know, he really had to know – 

“Wrathion?”

He did not entertain the idea that he was dreaming.  He would have proved a poor opponent for the Void if he could not distinguish between what was real and what was not.

“Oh, Anduin.”

But he had to admit to a kind of dreamy newness, somewhat akin to the first time he’d sat on a windowsill in Ravenholdt Manor and beheld the sky that he’d heard his varied jailers and caretakers speak of while he remained trapped in his shell.  He had known it would be there, had come to loosely comprehend the concept of it, yet nothing could compare to seeing it with his own eyes.

The blue, he remembered it so well.  That brilliant blue.

Anduin was there beside him.  He expected him to be there.  But Anduin and everything around him, from the mineral rime upon the walls to the golden veins that ran through his fins and wings, held so much more splendor than they had when Wrathion had first gone to bed tonight.

Wrathion’s sigh was honest. “You smell astonishing.”

In the near dark, in the intimate space of the cave Anduin had dug for the both of them after the first had been sacrificed to necessity, he saw the proud silhouette tilt and alter, facial fins pressed back while the sharp crest rose.  It communicated what a secret smile and red to the tips of his ears would have not that long ago: pleasure, and pride, too.  Anduin had always had his own pride.  He could blush and squirm while still possessed of a grip that seemed liable to never let go and Wrathion saw a little of that, too, as he raised his head and realized that Anduin had pressed heavy paws to either side of where he lay.  Behind the other dragon was the single crystal still lit, the softly golden light making for a wide and arresting shadow cast by Anduin’s body, in which all of Wrathion had been swallowed up.

A molten thread curled inside him, startling in its heaviness.  It began well past the barrel of his ribs, closer to the hind legs that he had tucked forward so that he might lace them through his front, and where the thread passed, weighty as spun wolfram, it caused his muscles to flex and stretch.  His belly scales parted in a rolling, lazy motion, the tawny skin showing between them, and every claw curled tight against the bed of his paws, softly clicking against one another in quiet rhythm.  A prickling began where he was softest: the creases on the inside of each rear leg, where the limbs met his body, and in the fold under his tail where it flowed into his back and hind.  He was hot there, and growing hotter, blood swelling it in eager flush, and it made for an itch so strong as to be shocking.

Wrathion had never felt such a thing before, but all the alarm or attention that that might demand had been requisitioned by the glow in Anduin’s eyes: once soft and forgettable, little more than smoke off a doused candle, now it flashed to a bright and cutting blue, humming at its edges with such energy that it threatened to burst into spectrums invisible to the mortal eye.

He could not look away.  He spoke almost without considering his words at all, the little parade of them tumbling from him purely out of habit. “What troubles you at this late hour, my dear…?”

Heat spilled from Anduin, timed to the breaths that changed the lay of his chest and flexed the skin of the heavy frill that hung off his proud neck.  The creams and yellows of before had already blossomed into a splendid, healthy gold: now that flushed to rich amber from just under Anduin’s chin to the end of his tail, where the fin of it was spread, the hot skin pulled taut by quivering spines.  The thick, bony bend of his wings had pulled away from his shoulders; that fraction of a gesture seemed to have doubled the size of his shadow.

Wrathion’s next breath was deeper than his last.  He tasted Anduin upon it.  He was the salt of before.  He was the metal and the wet. “Is there yet another emergency – ”

“Wrathion.” Anduin’s voice cut through his own, the syllables rougher, more urgent and full of compelling purpose.  He had lowered his head to say them and brought the scorching atmosphere of his body with him, so that it could seep between Wrathion’s half-finished armor and soak deep into skin and sinew.

“Wrathion, please.”

The wolfram thread became a coiled, searing wire.  Every muscle in his belly clamped to quivering tightness.

“Please, let me fuck you.”

Wrathion’s breath went a place elsewhere from his body.  He seemed wholly incapable of putting it back where it belonged.  He had to somehow go on without it, left only with his heart and how it shuddered so violently that it must have turned over in his chest.  This, too, should have bred a degree of alarm, or at least some kind of notice, but it did not.  He could not.

Wrathion had never been aroused by another dragon.

It had been no wonder: other dragons began as enemies, no matter what grand purpose they might profess to have, and remained so throughout his maturation.  Every sexual experience had been with mortals instead, from the very first partner he’d taken to bed the moment he shed the stripling’s visage to the very last, which of course had been Anduin.  The first might have been Anduin, too, if they had been granted time enough for more than secret kisses in a woodshed and chaste explorations beneath sheets.  The many between were…he had enjoyed them.  He didn’t regret them.  He had found pleasure in the learning and in the experimentation and in the nights that were for forgetting the world for just a little while, but if he were asked any one of their names at this very moment, he’d not find it anywhere in his memory.

There was Anduin, and then the years, and then Anduin again, and after him – 

After him, no one.  No mortal, and no dragon, either, despite how Wrathion’s relationship with his people had recently changed.  The opportunities were plentiful: there were many young black dragons among Sabellian’s brood, all singularly attractive because their flight had never failed to produce an impeccable showing in size, strength, and fineness, but Wrathion’s appreciation was…academic.  When he was charitable to himself, he could only assume his formative experiences had simply informed his lifelong preferences.  When he was not being charitable, particularly on days when Sabellian and Ebyssian were not present in the Citadel and so he had to keep polite company with dragons that had only ever dwelt comfortably with one another, he did begin to wonder if something in his make had to do with it.

It was undeniable that no dragon anywhere shared his circumstances.  The signs and signals they sent to one another, perhaps he could not send them.  What the others felt, perhaps he didn’t have the mechanisms to feel it.  Perhaps the uncomfortable conversion he and Ebyssian had avoided when they thought it was only they two left in the world would have been rendered moot despite any desire to preserve their flight.

Wrathion had not made peace with the hypotheticals.  They rotted inside of him.

“If…you can’t – ”

The most beautiful dragon in this world and all others, more handsome and more striking than any to be found in his flight and more fantastically grand than the Aspects themselves, was struggling to go on.  The steadiest of Anduin’s breaths had been used up by the plea that was still ringing in Wrathion’s ears; what remained rushed erratically through his white and parted fangs, carrying with them the salted damp off Anduin’s golden tongue.

“I’ll understand.  Really, I will.  I’ll go – ”

Ah.  There was Wrathion’s own breath, back from wherever it had gone.

It lunged back into his body so quickly he nearly choked upon it. “An…Anduin.  Anduin.  Wait, you don’t have to leave.”

Anduin was not leaving in spite of what he had said.  He was stock still as if rooted to the mountain itself and it was Wrathion that had to find the coordination and impetus to move, which had become so much more difficult than it had a moment before.  The heat had grown exponentially, but he had always reveled in heat; any black dragon would.  That was not what slowed him.

It was the shocking pressure of it.  The air’s unseen composition was being changed by Anduin: it expanded with every heavy exhale and every low, gulping pant back in to his chest, and though much of the force slipped out the hall to exchange places with the cooler air in the chamber beyond, Wrathion nonetheless felt the stunning scope of Anduin’s strength without even being touched by him.  It was so vehement in its presence, so demanding of his attention, that he was driven to outright distraction, catching one foot with the other before his legs were well and truly beneath him and even then, upright and to his full height, he’d not left the sweltering night of Anduin’s shadow.

The coil inside of him grew impossibly tighter, a spring relentlessly squeezed.  The root of his tail twitched; the clubbed end was pulled away from the floor.  His wings hugged restlessly at his own body, their clawed hooks pulling and worrying at new scales in the same way that new claws did to the hot sand and soil. 

“Stay.  Stay.” He had never been so clumsy when he spoke.  He had never panted this way nor licked so restlessly at his back teeth. “Only – tell me that you are certain.”

Anduin had asked.  That should have been certainty enough, but Wrathion needed the words.

“I am.”

A human would have been forced to look away from Anduin’s gaze; the light was too bright.  It was bright enough to cut.  But Wrathion, who had never been a man no matter how he might have tried to emulate them, much as he was never quite the right sort of dragon to fit shoulder to shoulder with the others, could peer directly into the knife’s edge and find the look that he knew so well.

Only yesterday he would have done anything, whatever was necessary, if it meant that Anduin would look at him that way again.

“I want you.  I’ve never stopped wanting you.” Anduin was shaking.  He was shaking badly, but it was not until the very end of his snout touched against Wrathion’s cheek that he realized Anduin was exerting every ounce of willpower he had in order to keep still.  The tension that quaked inside him could snap an anchorline and yet, it was held.  Held, so that Anduin could give Wrathion his reply. “I’ll live if I can’t have you, but I – that’s not the life I want.”

Wrathion was not being intentionally cruel when he didn’t immediately answer in turn.  He was making no attempt at an ill-timed tease or a poor go at unnecessary titillation.  He couldn’t speak because he was so dizzy that every scrap of sense in him had fallen to pieces.  He was full of fever and his throat only had room for his racing breath.  He was watching the room spin out of the corner of his eye, trailing the tails of shooting stars along behind it.

He was coming to terms with the brush of Anduin’s saliva-slick teeth against his neck.

“You want me too, don’t you?” It was a question bereft of doubt.  Anduin could have very well been asking if the sun still rose in the east.  “There’s a…scent.  You have a scent.  It’s…”

Anduin’s snout traveled along the length of Wrathion’s neck, so slowly that it took two clamorous thuds of his heart for Anduin’s horns to dip out of his line of sight.  He could have turned his head and part of him did wish to, pulled as if by magnetism, but he had forgotten the mechanisms of motion.  Anduin could proceed as he pleased, passing further, progressing lower, until he stopped and left a fervent breath between Wrathion’s wings.  They twitched hard, the reflexive slap of skin and the bony rattle of the spines doing much to disguise the breathless noise of surprise that went with it, because that exhale had been felt.  Felt upon the exposed skin he only now remembered was there, shown in embarrassing pattern all down his back while his plates regrew.  The dramatic throbbing that had taken his heart sent blood in an excited rush to every place that Anduin visited in his meandering journey, Wrathion’s nerves left to sting in hypersensitivity, and the coil at the bottom of his belly had grown so tight that surely, surely, something was going to snap.

“It’s here.”

Anduin had found where Wrathion’s tail had raised.  He was able to brush his snout against the soft and pitiably tender crease underneath.

“Right…here – ”

Muscles long ignored but now painfully clenched had made a pronounced and intimate mound upon a landscape that had once dipped smoothly toward his tail.  Woefully sore and throbbing as a wound might, the scales had been pushed and the skin stretched, and at their apex they showed a wet and crimson line.

Anduin had to have seen it.  Wrathion could feel his breath upon it.

Then, he felt his tongue.

“Hhha, ah!” 

There, there, the snap!  His interiors flinched, seized, and then released, a fluid and blessed and terrifying unwinding of odious tension and mad anticipation.  Wrathion lurched forward, his body suddenly a scorching cauldron of chemicals and wildly stuttering breath, and that bawdy wound of his, new and yet not new at all because when had he ever, as a dragon?  Never.  Never.  Yet  it was there, it was his, as preciously profane as the first time he’d held a silk scarf between his teeth and put his fingers to himself to love all that he was even as the world demanded he be ashamed and cowed instead.

The wound split.  The mound flexed open, pulled by muscles like curling fingers.

He finally caught the scent then, too.

Brackish, ashen, meaty; flesh, stones, and wet.  So much wetness that he felt it course in runnels until dense droplets shook loose from the thick and hanging lips that quivered around the tirelessly flexing furl of his freshly exposed cunt.  Steam and the saline stench wafted against his legs and drifted up along his underside; that was how he realized that where the swollen curtains met again, closer to his belly, they loosely shrouded a clit larger than a man’s fist and protruding in its own vulgar excitement.

“Wrath…ion – ”

Anduin’s raw, agonized groan sent heat and sensation wafting across him, the sharp, tortuous pinpricks the inevitable outcome when they both were breathing the agitated minerals buzzing in the air.

“Pl…ease…”

Wrathion’s tongue twisted dumbly in his mouth.  It felt twice its size.  It felt as though it did not and had never belonged to him.  It was failing him, it was ruining him, and he was going to die for the lack if he didn’t answer.  He let his jaw drop and then, his forelegs quickly followed, until his chest hit the sand and he could beat the sounds out of himself with the desperate impact of it.

“Go, go – ”

He was whimpering.  He was snapping his teeth.  He was bracing his hind feet so wide that he surely must have wrenched something out of place to do so and he swung his tail wholly up and to the side.  He squeezed his wings against his body and he whined piteously when the new angle sent his own steaming fluids dripping down the clit so engorged it almost could have been a false, squat cock of its own.

“You may.  You can.  Please.  Fuck me.  Fuck – ”

Wrathion had claimed, once, that Anduin simply allowed him to do as he wished.  Perhaps he had been wrong.  Perhaps he had not given credit where it was surely due.

The brutal plunge of a scalding tongue punished him for his assumptions.

Wrathion howled. “AAHh, An, And–nggh!!”

Thick as an arm – and longer than one, long enough to coil and squirm, and flexible.  So flexible, so dexterous, that the slithery slide of it was shamelessly lapping against him, licking far deeper than Anduin’s heroic efforts ever had despite the years of practice behind him and his oh-so willing heart.  He had seemed to love tasting Wrathion more than even Wrathion himself loved to return the favor and now it was as though Anduin had finally been given the tools he had been yearning for in all this time.  He was the opposite of clumsy: his tongue plunged with calculated frenzy, writhing side to side until Wrathion heard him bark in frustration, and then that tongue was yanked back out, snapping a line of sizzling spit in the air.

Hissing sensation sparked throughout the canal that Anduin had plunged through clenching muscles; when Wrathion’s interiors spasmed, it seized up tight again, and the vulgar squeezing of fluids sent bubbles of saliva and excitement dripping down and off the tip of his clit and its heavy hood.

“I have to…no, like this – ”

Anduin might have been speaking to him, but he could have just as likely been speaking to himself; in either case, Wrathion was no in condition to answer him, stars in his eyes and miserable with irritation because it was not enough.  It was nowhere near enough.  It buzzed and it itched and he sank his claws in deeper, a nodule of displeasure and anger beginning to – 

Anduin stuck his whole head under Wrathion’s body.  Wrathion made a noise like a drunk kodo.

Then Anduin pushed up.  He lifted Wrathion’s entire lower body away from the sand, so that his back claws kicked while he shouted and swore and made demands that came together without an ounce of coherence.  He was tipped until he was nearly vertical and just when he thought Anduin was going to flip him forward and end-over-end, two long, strong forelegs wrapped around his middle and his wings and held him there.  Held him, tail up and head down, while Anduin rested back on his bent hind legs and sat like a bear that had found his way into the proverbial honeypot.

If Wrathion had been in his right mind and not psychotic with lust, he would have roared in offense and beaten Anduin about the head and neck with his tail.

If Wrathion were not staring at the largest cock he had ever seen in his life, he might have at least made some annoyance known.

The difference in size between the two of them meant that Wrathion did not hang down so far that his head was in the sand.  He instead came to rest just above the jut of Anduin’s groin and so was immediately and pointedly acquainted with his very first draconic dick.  The color was shocking: the yellow was nearly chemical in its brightness, the sheen of it flicking toward mad reds and strange citrons.  It was longer than Wrathion’s own neck and broad in its thickness, the base bulging out in a knot of fiery shades, giving an aura of anger, if an enormous cock could be anything even close to angry.

The ridges of the whole affair moved whenever Anduin took a breath.  They ringed the pointed head, swollen and soaking in steaming seminal fluid.

Wrathion had had plenty of complimentary things to say about Anduin’s penis before now.  He had always considered it handsome and robust, deeply attractive and just the right shape to please him in all the ways that he liked to be pleased.  He’d not considered this praise idle, either: he had seen many dicks in his time.  He made a point to experience all the variety of cocks that Azeroth had to offer and so could very confidently say that Anduin’s was the best of them, the most suited to his tastes.

He had never once thought that Anduin’s dick seemed a threat.

This, however.  This was a threat, and it took Wrathion’s breath away.  If – when they fucked, the feeling…it’d be unlike anything he had ever – 

To his detriment, Wrathion had forgotten about Anduin’s tongue.

Anduin had not forgotten at all, and now in a position seemingly more suited for his ends, he hugged the smaller dragon tightly against his chest, tilted his head just so, and was able to sink his tongue into Wrathion’s cunt nearly to the root.  He did not stop until his teeth dimpled the fantastically tender skin and scale of his mound and by then Wrathion’s claws were clicking and sparking against Anduin’s middle.  Anduin proved then that he did not merely like to lick pussy: he was a savant at licking pussy.  Without moving his jaw, he worked his wicked tongue like a piston, first with simple, relentless thrusts and then, as if that was somehow not enough despite the wild whimpers that Wrathion couldn’t contain, he returned to the coiling.  The bends and the undulating waves.  The pointed tip that searched like fantastically curious fingers for the hidden interior that he had memorized when they both wore mortal shapes.

“HHHhii!!”

There it was.  Tender and swollen.  Alive with molten nerves.  Seeming to live just behind and beneath the clit that throbbed.

“Ahh, annn, nnn–duin!  Anduin…!”

Wrathion couldn’t kick.  His back knees were draped over Anduin’s shoulders.  His front claws could only slide, the armor of Anduin’s scales fitted too tightly together to give him anything to hook into.  There was only the swaying, broiling cock that flicked its excitement onto Wrathion’s cheek and neck and he should have thought of this before he yelped and mewled.  Of course he should have thought of it.  He’d wasted too much time on staring.

With a snarl, he parted his teeth and lashed his tongue, crimson and covered in bubbling spit, from Anduin’s knot to his perversely dripping tip.

With immense satisfaction and a wave of vibration that nearly sent him into a dead faint, Wrathion heard Anduin’s shocked roar as much as he felt it.  The sound passed from his scalding throat into his jaw and his tongue and so directly into Wrathion’s body, where it pulsed from spread lips to the end of Anduin’s reach and then deeper than even that.  His thoughts swam afterward, heaving as a ship in a storm, and it was half instinct, half mad desire that had him dig his knees into Anduin’s back, press his forepaws against Anduin’s middle, and grind his entire wet and aching cunt against Anduin’s snout.  That wicked, guilty tongue was his then to grip; he clutched until it was Anduin that whimpered and then, oh, then.

Then, Wrathion curled his whole tongue around Anduin’s cock and squeezed.

That roar went up nearly to his chest.  Wrathion could swear he felt his bones shake with it.  But Wrathion was also lost to his sagging jaw and impudent draconic smile, all white teeth and a tossing of his head and horns.  His tongue loosened, slouching away with the brilliantly sour char of Anduin’s dick upon it; he rolled it back into his mouth, shuddering deliciously from the flavor.  He indulged in eager, lascivious rolls of his hips, in as much as he could roll them while in such a position, and was rewarded with a burst of aftershocks when Anduin whined.  Perhaps if he wriggled a little closer, he might crush his clit against Anduin’s jaw, and he would have at least made an attempt for it, if not for the sudden clack of teeth that interrupted his thoughts.

Those were his teeth.  His mouth had snapped shut.

He stared in a bewilderment that persisted even after he realized what had happened: Anduin’s tail, that somewhat thinner portion near his fin, had wrapped around his snout.  It now held his mouth firmly closed.  One foreleg pressed harder against his back; it was doing the work of two in order to keep Wrathion pinned while the other rose higher.  He felt it brush against one of his hind legs, their scales rasping together like ceramic shingles.  Fresh heat washed over his groin, demanding Wrathion’s attention return to his mound and its endless aching, which he might have relieved on his own if Anduin had given him the chance, but Anduin was apparently not going to be allowing any of that.

He had his pride.  Wrathion had been thinking that to himself just earlier.  He had his pride, and a grip liable to never let go.

“Mmph – ”

It wasn’t necessarily apprehension that he felt.  That would’ve been too rudimentary an emotion.  This was more like the anticipation that only a dragon could know, that which was felt at the edge of a cliff in high winds, where no other creature would dare to go.

The curved side of Anduin’s claw pressed against the thick and drooping hood over his clit.  Gently, so incredibly gently for a dragon of his size, he maneuvered the smooth curl of his claw underneath the swollen lip of Wrathion’s hood and then slowly pushed it up, out, and away, so that the wide bulb of nerves and blood could pang in the open air, exposed from dense root to soaked crown.  The claw came to press against his mound, stretching his hood and holding it flat, and from the lay of knuckles that Wrathion could feel, two other toes were tucked up into Anduin’s paw, and the fourth – 

The fourth, with no warning at all, used the curve of its claw to flick Wrathion’s clit so hard it made a sound, a sopping, salacious little smack.

“MMM!!”

Wrathion’s eyes could go no wider.  His back could curve no deeper.  Both forepaws were jammed into Anduin’s belly, his knees locked and his shoulders aching.  His neck strained against Anduin’s tail; his own was stretched out in a long, quivering line.

Anduin flicked him again.

“MM!”

Again.

“Mmm!!  MMM!!

Again.  Again.

“MMNnn, nn-nnnNN!!”

Again.  Again!  Again, and then again, and then Wrathion’s ragged, smothered shouting, which could have been furious rebukes or penitent pleas for mercy or goading and imperious encouragement, became the long, pitched, helpless whimpering of a man coming utterly, unequivocally undone.  Though he was a dragon and not a man; he had always been a dragon.  They were both dragons through the auspices of capricious fate and Anduin had somehow brought him to mewling surrender anyway.  He proved for the hundredth, or perhaps the thousandth time that behind the small, gentle smiles and the quiet asks that suggested uncertainty, there was a glorious beast that had few qualms and a hunger like a storm on the sea.

Without a doubt, Wrathion would be swept away.

It was a feeling like no other.

Anduin shifted the position of his claws.  Two curves pressed against the fleshy bed on either side of Wrathion’s fresh-swollen and battered bulb, showing new and lurid colors that he could not see.  Anduin’s every exhale sent another wave of stinging heat across the inflamed skin and that was truly the worst of it, because it had to be endured while he waited, pinned and panting.  Every second was like a century.  He could barely stand it.  He did not want to stand it.

He did beg.  He did so with soft sounds, and the quivering coil of his tail around Anduin’s neck and shoulders.  He begged, and irrational fear would have him believe that he would be begging forever, when in reality all that passed was a breath because Anduin had never in all their time together ever left him wanting.

Those claws squeezed.  They pushed.  And inside, Anduin’s tongue turned and likewise pushed.  The conduit of nerves, from clit to cunt, was compressed from within and without, and like a fuse, they sparked and lit.

White overtook his vision.

Wrathion didn’t claw or beat at Anduin.  Not this time.  Instead, he clung.  Unmoored, he could only reach desperately for Anduin’s heat and Anduin’s precious steadiness and so his clumsy and needful and demanding paws scrabbled for any place where they might find purchase.  His shaking tail wrapped more tightly, the club bouncing off of Anduin’s back before it came to rest between hsi wings.  His moans crashed with the rhythm and rushing of waves, bubbling up in his throat and then worming out past his pressed teeth, until Anduin finally took mercy upon him and loosened his incredible grip.  Then, Wrathion was free to desperately gulp for the air he needed to babble his fawning praise.

There wasn’t a whole word in it anywhere, but that was of no moment.  Wrathion’s care for his own dignity had evaporated into the steam that stank of the both of them.

Anduin’s tongue eased carefully out of him; Wrathion could hear the fat droplets of his orgasm splash and splatter down off of Anduin and onto his mound.  His muscles, worn and aching, sagged in fluid satisfaction, and he felt the air prickle partially into his spread hole.  That irritation was the only displeasure that existed in the cloying cloud that enveloped his thoughts and pushed out anything even remotely resembling sense: he did not like that, the openness.  The emptiness.  It had that horrible quality of a problem needing to be solved despite the tragic tenderness of a ruthlessly overstimulated pussy.

But the scent of char, and sour, and salt had not left the air.

Anduin’s tongue was numb.

His back was screaming at him.  His hind legs threatened to buckle; the fore pair were cramping at the biceps and stinging at the wrists.  A muscle in his tail was burning hot with a wicked sprain.  One wing had at one point flared out too far and banged its elbow upon the wall behind him.  He was shocked there wasn’t blood all over his underside: the scales had held against Wrathion’s paws and claws, but he could already feel wide and brutal bruises forming beneath the armor.  His neck popped when he finally pulled his snout away from Wrathion’s slit; so did his jaw, and more painfully.  Creaking, stiff, jittery, and constructed from old timbers instead of flesh and blood, Anduin had to put all his effort and care into bending over and allowing the slack and quivering body of his –

His…mate.

His mate.

His mate.  Wrathion.  The most insufferable man in the world and also the most beautiful and the most…the most carnal.  The word vulgar waited on his buzzing tongue as he pulled it back in past his fangs; surely such a word could be used for how he pressed Wrathion’s juices to the roof of his mouth just so that he could have more of that incredible taste.  Savory, piquant, saline; that he found it so good that his shoulders shook with pleasure and his tail whipped across the sand with excitement was vulgar.  But it was not a word that Anduin could bring himself to use when he looked at Wrathion and the brilliantly crimson color of his exposed cunt, the hot flesh shiny with slick and pouring the scent of ash and sex and hot stones.  In the Church of the Holy light, the profane was shameful and foul, and though in practice this was only in reference to undeath and whomever the state had proclaimed a military threat, boyhood warnings against submitting to danger and temptation could still color how he thought of himself.  He had only to think of his display in the meadow to feel the burn of shame, but…

But not for Wrathion.  Never Wrathion.  He didn’t care how much of a hypocrite that made him.

His mate was so splendid and so precious that he could barely stand to let him go, even if this was to allow for a better position for the both of them.  With extreme reluctance and a moment spent in convincing himself, he loosened his grip and let Wrathion sprawl back on the sand, his head on his forelegs and his hind legs thumping down in an erotic spread that put a disorientating spin in Anduin’s head.

He was very aware of his own cock, the engorged organ a blazing pyre so full of heat that, by this time, it had its own infernal glow.  He couldn’t liken it to a coal or anything so dim; he’d only seen such furious flame in a forge, seething upon metals superheated by the tireless furnace.  The very act of breathing put the faintest wobble into it and that was enough to pierce him with a jolt of angry desire so strong that if his eyes could water, he’d be driven to open weeping.  He was shocked the unrepentant thing hadn’t snapped itself in half from its own swelling; it seemed twice the size he remembered.  That Anduin had any wherewithal to be a person and not a raving sexual lunatic impressed even himself.  Maybe all the practice at controlling himself had paid off.

If so, then he had done himself a good turn: when he dropped back down to all four paws, the heavy motion sent his cock swinging down and then, just as quickly, right back up, so that it bounced hard against his underside.  He was able at the last moment to smother the strangled whine that wanted to escape; he still had things he had to say.

“I…,” his tongue panged, but worked when he forced it to, thank the Light.  Below him, Wrathion purred and moved his head, showing carmine light beneath his lids when he looked back.  The glow flickered like a prism turning in the sun. “Forgive me.  For – tying your mouth like that.  I didn’t want to…”

A hard gulp bulged in his throat.  When he swallowed, he tasted Wrathion again.

“I didn’t want to come.  Not in the…the air like that.  I wanted to be – ”

“Inside?”

Anduin’s chest violently seized.  Wrathion’s whole head was turned back now, his chin nearly come to rest upon his own shoulder, and that was a benefit that dragons also enjoyed, wasn’t it?  He didn’t have to turn his whole body in order to meet Anduin’s gaze; he could show to his mate the alluring red of his eyes at the same time that he did the shameless scarlet cunt open so wide that the human Anduin could have plunged his arm in up to his shoulder and Heavens help him it felt as though steam were pouring out of his ears.  It felt like it wasn’t just his dick that burned: his entire body had been fed to the bonfire, the flame’s ardor still so strong that no human could have dared to enter the cave, to say nothing of coming one inch closer to his exposed and willful and waiting mate.

His mate.  His mate.

Mating was as a marriage and Anduin had never professed to have anything other than humble, hopeful dreams.

“Yes.  Yes.  H-Hellfire, Wrathion, I want inside.  I want to be inside you.”

“Then why are you standing there?  You seemed to have no trouble having your way with me just a moment ago.”

From the tone, it would have been easy to think that Wrathion was completely at ease, but Wrathion had always been like that.  He could always seem like he was at ease; he could be in a den of enemies and seem no more ruffled than he would be before a stubborn bureaucrat.  He did not merely lie; there were always threads of truth in what he said and did and how he acted.  The lines between the false and the real were expertly, even artfully blurred, and though that masterful skill had burned him so badly in the past, Anduin had felt a little bit of the old envy over it, too.  How often had it been that he wished for that selfsame confidence?  It wasn’t merely want; he needed that composure and yet he had rarely found it in himself.  All he had learned was how to peer through that careful veneer, which had been the work of years on Anduin’s part.  If they had been men sharing a kingly bed, he would have at least been confident in his ability to find whatever Wrathion might be hiding under that charming drawl.

But they were dragons in a cave that he had dug himself.  Anduin shouldn’t have been able to decipher anything.

Yet he did.

He saw, and he saw clearly, that Wrathion was hanging on by a thread.

The scales on Wrathion’s throat were catching the light; every time the muscles within flexed imperceptibly around his silent swallowing, those scales flickered.  There was a very thin part to his teeth, though which Anduin could see his red, red tongue twitching with the panted breaths that he attempted to hide.  His wings quivered where they pressed with incredible tightness to his back, hugging his body so that they could remain out of the way.  His tail, which had not dropped down but was still curled up and over his back, shivered with tension.  The claws on each foot dug down into the sand so far they all but disappeared, bracing his body while also disguising the trembling that reached all the way up to his shoulders.

Wrathion’s words were so smooth, so unfalteringly smooth, and yet Anduin knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wanted to be fucked as desperately as Anduin wanted to fuck him.

Anduin didn’t question how he knew.  He didn’t have the strength to question anything. “You – ”

His growl was full of accusation and admiration and affection.  The sound of it was a stony grinding that sank through his throat and fed into the bellows that was his breath.  The weakness of moments ago was blasted into nothing on his next hissing exhale: he was not in pain and he was not tired and he was made of stone and steel for how hard he pressed his paws into the sand on either side of Wrathion’s shoulders.  At once, satisfaction rolled through him, demanding he lick his teeth and low a long and lasting sound that vibrated through the spines of the fins that had spread around his head and down his neck.  It was a noise no human could make; he thought of lions tangled with one another in hot, tall grasses, but even that was not quite right.

It could only belong to a dragon.  It could only be a dragon’s rumbling approval, as high and unassailable as the thunder of a sweltering summer storm.

“You don’t have to do that, Wrathion.  You can be honest.”

Anduin’s tones sank to astonishing deepness.  They dripped from his tongue, fluid and heavy in the way that magma was, and maybe that was the right metaphor.  The one that had always been so obvious and visible from the Keep, if you ascended the right tower.  Fire and stone out of the heart of a black mountain, which he murmured directly against Wrathion’s ear as he lay the whole of his body over his smaller, sleeker, infuriating, beautiful mate.

“I’m going to fuck you just like you want.”

Anduin felt Wrathion shudder from his neck down to his tail; the feeling belonged to the both of them, shared now that no space remained to separate them.  He heard the pounding of Wrathion’s heart; he realized he had been listening to it this whole while.  Every pulse was like the cracking of a cliffside and it harmonized with the hot rushing of blood and the melodic clicking of his many heavy, shining scales.  There was so much sound to a dragon.  Why had he not noticed it before?  It had to have always been there and yet it was as much a marvel as the heat and the scent of him, and Anduin did not even attempt to hold in the fearsome desire that demanded he press his legs close around Wrathion in a hard pin that was also an embrace.

He heard Wrathion’s breath hitch.  He felt his tail flick, now trapped in a curl between their bodies.  With just a slight adjustment in his stance, Anduin was able to press his cock against the back of one thigh, right along the line where thicker black scale faded into the tawny softness that he so adored.  The barbs along his shaft were compressed and in the electric thrill that snapped along his nerves there was equal part anticipation and irritation, stimulation but not how he wanted.  His growl was his own fault; when he snapped his teeth, he did so away from Wrathion’s head, and sent out a wave of breath after that sparked.

“You…you brute.”

Beneath him, Wrathion had tucked his forelegs under his chest.  His head hung, lowered as though his crown of horns had somehow doubled in weight, and Anduin glimpsed his tongue flicking out along his teeth and up onto his snout.  The scarlet streak was arresting and distracting.

“Go on then.  Go on.”

Wrathion’s eyes were opened wide; the glow in them had turned piercing, a magelight so pure that it could make a person forget that there had ever been colors other than red.  The depth of it could swallow the city; it was swallowing him.  For the very first time, Anduin could truly see the pupil hidden inside the crimson iris and he was sure only because he could hear it, too.

A red so deep it had a sound.  There was no other way for him to describe it.  Neither drone nor whisper, it popped and prickled and produced a sensation like claws running down Anduin’s back.  It was his turn to shake and pass it to his partner, his hard groans pressed closed against Wrathion’s neck, and his tail swung hard as he shifted once again.  With a heady snarl, he gave one hard rut against Wrathion, his cock slapping against the slick and swollen mound hard enough that they both gasped, himself with a bark and Wrathion with a whine.

“Aahh, ah, just like – ”

Anduin rutted again.  Wrathion’s delighted murmur was cut off, lost to a low cry and the sudden needful writhing of his hips.  When Anduin bent his knees low, he could grind not just against, but up, and he felt his mate’s fat clit catch along his barbs from his tip to the root of his dick.  The fever sizzling in his head began to peak once more, his thoughts a pot boiling over a merciless fire, and when he next moved, it was not just his hind, but a rolling push that began at his back and shoulders.  It was faster; he heard the wet smacking of skin to skin, swell to swell, and gave a mad groan when the weighty lips caught upon his barbs and were pulled, sliding and stretching as he began a hungry, punishing rhythm.

Wrathion was not quiet.

“Hhha, hahhh!!  A-Ahh, no, An – duin – ”

Anduin swung his tail again, using the motion to shift and sway his whole weight, and his dick lashed across, then up, the tender swell, the barbs flicking across the flinching hole in the depths of Wrathion’s slit.

“Nnnoo, no, that’s not what you… ahh, hnn, you said…!”

Whining, squirming, digging at the sand, Wrathion abandoned the veneer entirely, his tongue now hung out of his mouth in his panting and his pleading.  He kicked, his back crashing against Anduin’s chest, which proved immovable: he felt more like a mountain than a man, the chaotic tumult of his thoughts centering upon the single memory of the two of them at the wall, where Wrathion blithely danced upon the edge of geologic time.  He had been so angry with him then, which had really been an expression of his fear, but those echoes of terror died with every pleading snap of Wrathion’s teeth.  Wrathion wasn’t lost to unfathomable eras nor consumed by the black maw of a dead god; no, no, he was here, he was held here, and Anduin could feel it all, there under him where the smaller body bucked and chased after his cock every time he thrust his hips.  The rush of it was terrifying; he had felt its ilk before, but it was never so strong.  It never felt like it was churning in his whole chest.  It never made his dick spill the way that it did now, the precome flung in steaming lines along Wrathion’s belly and his spread and begging cunt.  It was never tinged with that…that relief.

The relief of being wanted.  The promise of never leaving.

With reverence and adoration, Anduin slid his tongue along Wrathion’s neck, following the pulse that he could feel even through his armor.  He was sure now that he would always be able to find it; he was etching the sound of Wrathion’s heart onto his own.

“I know.  I know.  I will.” Anduin licked him again, this time close to his eye and along his cheek, nuzzling against his jaw thereafter with soothing gentleness.  He made his hips be still; he rubbed his head against Wrathion’s shivering neck. “Here.  Here – ”

Wrathion closed his eyes.  The red sound turned into a quivering buzz, tickling the tips of Anduin’s spread fins. “You had…best…”

Anduin carefully adjusted once more, drawing his cock back over Wrathion’s clit one last time; they both whimpered, Anduin acutely aware of the vibrations he could feel in his throat and in Wrathion’s.  He could navigate only by feel and recent memory, but there was a raw certainty in the very back of mind that they would align; they were made to align.

“And put that broad back of yours into it, you – ”

Anduin’s tip caught on the very edge of Wrathion’s flexing hole, there where the softly wrinkled, deeply wet skin curled inward.  The twitch that he felt, the reflexive jerking of muscles, made the rim of Wrathion’s pussy press like a mouth around the end of his dick.  Like Anduin, Wrathion seemed to forget how to breathe.

The tip forward was agonizing.

It couldn’t be any other way, at least for Anduin: he had to be careful.  He had to be slow.  He wanted to be gentle and he wanted to be good, and those things could coexist with the beast that grunted like a bull and tensed every muscle in its long neck.  The first cinching ring of tension was truly the worst of it and it came up so quickly and so unfairly, the narrow tip of him sinking easily until the awful flare at the base of his head caught him and stopped him and had the both of them hissing and grinding their teeth.  His cock seemed intent on ruining him: the skirt of barbs beneath his head was spread wide, the skin pulled maddeningly taut, and this rebellious line of flesh pressed flushed and hot on the rim between pussy and canal.

Wrathion moaned something raw and incoherent.  Anduin didn’t blame him; his own words were more vibration than vocabulary. “Ggh, nnggh…we can…just…just relax – ”

Wrathion bit him on the foreleg.  He didn’t blame him for that, either, and the forgettable pain was worth it because it must have given Wrathion somewhere else to put his tension.  While his jaws gnawed, his back legs slid further apart and the stiffness bled out of his back.  Anduin didn’t waste time: when he felt Wrathion exhale, he ground his hips forward and a little up, matching the tilt of Wrathion’s spine –

The pop was obscene.  The wet skin, the displaced air, he’d heard the sound plenty of times, but never.  Never.  Had it been so loud.

It echoed. “Hellfire…!!”

Anduin cursed.  Wrathion cursed, too.  He couldn’t distinguish between their voices, the sounds crashing together, passing consonants and sharing syllables.  Any sense that he had had to be spent on listening for the only word that would matter, the stop that would be his master and his measure.  Everything else was noise.  It could be no more, not when every barb on that first ring and the several rings after was being folded back by forward motion and then crushed by the shocking pressure of Wrathion’s cunt.  Vibrant sunspots danced in his vision; muscles he’d never imagined spasmed inside his loins.  His tail whipped with such force that it found the wall; he heard stone shattering and whether he had injured himself or not was so fantastically inconsequential that he’d forgotten all about it between one blink and the next.

“L, Light, Light, ghn, hn-!!!” 

Wrathion was a…a furnace.  No, no, a forge!  By the Light, it always went back to the wretched darkness of that winter’s night and the sultry, searing light that lived and breathed, defiance personified.  He could never liken Wrathion to the heart of the mountain because that wild and perpetual heat was strong but it was not him.  It didn’t have the same unshakeable strength of purpose that was threaded through Wrathion’s entire being, the fire in him stoked ever higher, never less but always more.  He was unbelievably hotter than Anduin was himself, hot enough to render gemstones and alloys to fluid malleability, and was he…was he really surprised?  That, too, was how Wrathion had always been.  That’s what he had seen that night and on the stairs of the Tavern and in the sunlight in the study as he penned Stormwind’s prosperous future.  People were wrong, Anduin was wrong, whenever they said that Wrathion was immovable or uncompromising.

He was always moving.  He was a river that burned. “Wrathion, Wrathion…!”

The resistance had grown.  Less than half of him was…less than a third!  Most of his cock remained twinging in the open air and it was Anduin’s turn to whimper from the awful lack, but he knew why.  He knew why.  He could feel why in how Wrathion’s teeth were pressing down harder upon his leg and he willed his own sounds to be swallowed because they weren’t needed.  Rather than chase the blistering pressure deeper, he eased himself back, and when the rolling of his barbs began, this time in the other direction, he bit down upon his own tongue and kept going, all four feet braced and his tail leaving a new layer of gouges upon the wall.

“I-I…I think…” 

Feverish desperation bred sexual epiphany, and if there was any sure sign that he was a sinner, it was that he still could think of no better word for it. “Tell…me.  Tell me, if it’s…too much…alright?”

When he nuzzled the side of Wrathion’s head, he could smell his own blood, but that could be dealt with when, or if, he was capable of prayer in the nebulous afterward that didn’t yet exist in his mind.  His focus was instead on the dizzying draw of his hips back, inch by inch, ring by ring, until he came to his cockhead again and – 

The sound was never going to leave his memory.

Stormwind Cathedral was going to burst into flames the next time he entered it, or he would.

But while Wrathion mewled against the meat of his leg and Anduin considered biting the bend of his own wing to accomplish the same sort of focus, his demented hope proved mercifully, pervertedly true: the second press inside was easier than the first.  The hard flare of barbs had slicked and loosened the way.

A debauched sort of hysteria assaulted him with the thought: when the Titans gave the proto-drakes new shapes, had they accounted for the inevitable differences in size this way?  Did they give male dragons natural tools?

Anduin didn’t know.  He wasn’t going to ask Sabellian to show his cock, just so he could compare.  He was already going mad.  He was already lost to the fire.  He was already caught on molten currents and as they moved, he moved with them, and the bawdy slapping of flesh and the popping of air became part of the din that was their voices and their bodies.  The motion of his hips was short, jerking, driving: he grew the opposite of numb, the thousand nerves that must have been woven in his flesh taken by acute hypersensitivity.  Wrathion had loosened his teeth but not his grip: whenever his interiors closed in around Anduin with a searing press, his forelegs tightened around the one of Anduin’s they had chosen to grasp and it was so human, so familiar, that his next groan bore the weight of six years, and Anduin’s whole life.

“W…Wrathion…”

He slowed, then stopped just short of slipping entirely out of Wrathion’s body.  His eyes closed and he pressed, or tried to press, his face against the back of Wrathion’s neck.  That there was a dragon’s snout in the way wasn’t the pained realization that he thought it would be; it was more like remembering something small that he had forgotten.  A pair of cufflinks, maybe, or a half-finished book that he had put down.  He was reminded, and he moved on, and he turned his head so that he could press against the side of Wrathion’s neck instead.

“I love you – ”

It was deeper, this time, when his cock sank back in.

It was so much deeper.

Wrathion’s head lifted up, back, and Anduin felt their horns brush and clack together, dangerously close to interlinking.  By looking up, he could see the way that Wrathion’s eyelids shook and how the light under them danced and flashed.  The thatch of hair beneath his chin had tangled, now curled and stuck to his jaw from the wet in his mouth and the wet in the air, the humidity doubled, or perhaps tripled, since they began.  He might have felt a needle of worry if not for the fact that the constant heat led to the constant exchange of air, and…maybe that was significant, maybe he was forgetting something else, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care.

Wrathion was looking back at him and that was familiar, too.  This was one of those times, the only situation, when their roles reversed and it always came when they were tangled like this.  That it was always just they two and no one else, no one who would know what Anduin did, never made a difference.  Wrathion would look at him and Anduin would know, just the same way that Wrathion would always know what Anduin could not put into words, and it was fine.  He’d accepted it.  It had always been this way.  He knew and it was enough – 

“I…An, a-ahh…”

Now more than half of Anduin’s cock had settled into Wrathion’s body.  The loosening had helped, but what remained was advancing by half-inches.  Less.  No more than a thread’s width seemed to pass despite the rhythm of steady, rolling motions that Anduin had yet to break.  The rows of barbs had grown thicker but shorter, sinking gradually into his shaft until they all but disappeared at his knot, and so their only true barrier was tightness.  That incredible, quivering, molten pressure, which at every moment seemed to have reached the very limits of itself, only to give a little more depth, a little more length.  The stretch was frightening; he was frightened, even as triumph and exultation ballooned in all the animal parts of his brain.  He constantly wrenched keen attention away from his dick and back to Wrathion, just so he could be sure…

And he was afraid at first, when Wrathion spoke.

He was afraid that it would be like so much else in his life.  He was going to regret, and he was going to be so sorry, and the grief was like a black cloud on his heart.

“I…love – ”

The red sound changed.  The pitch was breathlessly high; when Anduin looked, he saw Wrathion’s eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“I love you.  Anduin – ”

My love, he said nearly every day when they were together.  My dear.  My lover.  My king.  My Anduin.  Those words, and not the others, and even though Anduin knew, it wasn’t…

It had never been enough.  He’d been lying when he thought that.

He’d needed the words.

The dragon had to keep at least one foreleg braced in the sand.  They both couldn’t do without that anchor or else they would both come tumbling down.  But the man demanded the use of the other, the one that Wrathion had not gripped, so that he could clutch in turn.  His leg, his arm, he slid it around Wrathion’s chest, and it was as much an embrace as it would have been for two tired and heartsick men who perhaps could have been happier, if they had done this from the very first.

“M-Me too, me too, Wrathion – ”

Anduin’s stumbling babble was helpless, grateful, foolish, and altogether unstoppable.  He didn’t even try to hold it back.  He had held back for so long and he was nearly – he was nearly there.  He was nearly inside.  Searing skin, the lovely scarlet of which he could see in his mind’s eye, was pressed tight against the bulge of his knot, and he would have thought that was going to be all.  He would be happy if that was it.  He was fit to burst with happiness already and he’d been greedy enough to last all the rest of his life, but then it was Wrathion.

Heavens help him, it was Wrathion again, proving to him that all limits were imagined.

Wrathion lifted one foot and braced it not on the sand, but on Anduin’s back knee.  The wickedly sharp claws clutched, and there was a crack from somewhere that Anduin ignored because he did not care at all, and even if he did, when Wrathion used that new leverage to drive himself down –

Now, Anduin howled.  Now, he was overcome.

A fist of molten gold and fresh-forged rubies squeezed mercilessly around his dick from dripping tip to throbbing stem.  The whole width of his knot, spanning further than the full spread of a man’s hands, had been swallowed up into insatiable pressure.  The battered clit and swollen folds enacted a vengeance patently poetic: steaming hot, they crushed against the tender creases of flesh where his cock would shrink and sink back into his body.

He had to answer.  Wrathion had shown him just how much further it was possible to go and he had to reply.

It came as a sob, and as a snarl, and both were true.  He knocked his horns against Wrathion’s as he kissed him, which was really the roving and adoring tongue that would never be without the taste of him, and he moaned his name just before the pulsing certainty in his brain demanded he find just the right spot on the back of Wrathion’s neck.  Not too high; not too low.  He had to turn his own head nearly sideways and he had to watch for where the plates were not long enough to cover the skin and avoid them entirely.  He searched, and he searched, and his hips jumped, chased, and crushed forward when Wrathion bucked back to meet him, and he was still searching…!

Then Anduin found it.

His teeth snapped closed.

Wrathion’s echoing cry shook his fins, his crest, and his flared frill, and then his mate was boneless, fluid, and pliant, the pressure lessened and he could twist, he could drive with wild industry instead of that miserable, frustrating struggle, and his vicious snarling was meant not for Wrathion, but the rest of the world and all its complexities and little miseries.  Anduin didn’t hate the world, but he was going to demand its respect and its acquiescence.  There would be no more pleading, imploring, or entreaties for the world to be better than it was.  The world would buckle before he did; what he wanted to be true, he would make true.  When he roared, it was a warning and it was a claiming and this was what he had wailed for in the meadow, that lifetime ago when he didn’t understand anything about himself.

It was proof.

Proof.  Proof proof proof.

His.  His his HIS!

The dragon beat his wings.  The man tightened his embrace.  There were no other colors in the universe except for red.  The scent was peppery and full of blood and life.  He tasted ash, and platinum, and glittering smoke.  He wept, and he crowed for joy, and he was glad, so glad that they were alive and that they were together.

He forgot his name.

He saw his mate on a bed of starlight.

He felt the catch, this time, deep within his own body.  Liquid, coiling, bubbling, the chemistry of the body that was beholden to the heart, and that was really such a pleasant way of putting it when the reality was possessed of such turbidity and force and volume that when the coil released and orgasm blasted him like a thunderstrike, he felt some reservoir within his body collapse to emptiness.

He didn’t know how much cum a dragon could have.  Maniacal imagination said it was so much that his sides had caved in with its furious release.  They hadn’t, but Anduin’s bestial, whorish moaning suggested that they had.  He was losing his breath to the sounds, groans gone to coughs, whimpers to wheezes, and he still had not loosened the press of his jaw and teeth, so that all his wild euphoria could pass to his mate, while his mate’s could pass to him in turn.  Wrathion must have taken a great gulp of air when Anduin had been too dumb with intoxicated lust to have the piece of mind: his sounds were lower, longer, lasting, a thrumming purr that brought to mind the red sound.

Blinkered and gasping, Anduin thought that maybe he saw it.  He saw the purr itself.  A sound that had length in a way that wasn’t a length of time, so that sparks of scarlet could dance in the air where it passed.

He could also be delirious.

He felt delirious.

He felt steaming cum welling up around and alongside his dick, churning in Wrathion’s body and trapped there, sealed by the pulsing plug of his knot.  The wave of satisfaction that sensation engendered put a drunken sway to his head and his body.  The finest of liquors from all corners of Azeroth could not have done the same, not with such swiftness and such incredible sweetness.

Anduin knew before it happened that he was going to fall down.  This time, he could be prepared for it.  When they toppled, they did so gently, toward the side where his trembling foreleg had thus far kept them upright.  Exhausted muscles tightened so that the descent was gradual, their heaving flanks coming to rest upon the sand, and when Wrathion’s head began to slip, Anduin maneuvered his own beneath it.  His mate’s chin thumped onto his neck and the last of his cries, those soft and weary whimpers, tickled the insides of Anduin’s ear, just behind his fin.

A laugh wanted to bubble up out of him.  He didn’t have the strength or the breath for it, but it lived in the wing that he laid across Wrathion’s smaller body and in how he twined their tails together.  They remained locked, cock to cunt, but separation was a worry for later.

For now, nothing was wrong.  There were no problems to solve.

They had been apart, but the distance was gone, and Anduin could be convinced that it would never return.

Chapter Text

For Valeera, the shape of grief was a knife.

She knew nothing so well as its heft, its length, and its sharpness.  On it she had kept a white-knuckled grip for ten years, then twenty, then for most of her life, and how close she kept it to her chest depended only on how much time she had to spare for the dead.

When it wasn’t in her hand, she kept it in a black vault at the very back of her mind, and that was where it had been since the invasion.  Since the Shore.  For a while, there had been Anguish and Sorrow to wield instead and those had demanded all of her attention, and all of her annoyance besides.  Rogues were a suspicious lot and paranoia was often the breeding ground of superstition, or else half their number would not carry lucky dice, or wyvern teeth, or carved wooden charms.  When a fresh body for the ranks of the Uncrowned first spied those storied, lawless blades upon her hip, there would always be that sharp second-take that began as disbelief, and ended as a keen excitement.

“She’s got the Kingslayers!”

“Y’think there’ll be a second royal funeral soon?”

“Hah, maybe!”

“Who’s gonna have the seat when the boy’s dead?  His balls ain’t even dropped yet, there’s no heirs.”

“Hey, you lot!  Quit jabberin’ about what ain’t happened!  You got work, go do it!”

Sanzi had always been so good at reading Valeera’s moods.  Nobody had died in the tavern, at least not during her shifts.

Years on, Valeera could recall those evenings in the Hall of Shadows with perfect clarity: bets on how long it would be before Anduin had daggers in his back were tossed across the rough-hewn planks where they took their drinks and meals, the bright gold and silver coins winking as baleful eyes as they rolled and bounced.  The faces behind the wagers were obscured by the ever-present haze, that acrid fog from pipes, cigarettes, and cigars which formed its own atmosphere above the rows of wooden benches.  The smoke turned the light from the squat tin lanterns ghostly and diluted; the far corners of the Hall would be lost in murky blackness, with the exception of whichever one Griftah and his cadre of converts had set the hookah for the evening.  The blue glow from inside the jar was hypnotically soothing and each pull on the mouthpiece would make it brighter, instead of dimmer, and draw the eye, until a newcomer would inevitably ask and be told that they had illicitly obtained Motes of Harmony in the water to pair with the hashish.  When the night had sloughed away to its den and most of their members with it, gone to whatever bed they found the most secure in a world where no one and nothing was safe, a half dozen bodies would be sprawled upon the rug and rough pillows, breathing evenly in a pool of soporific light.  The blue never did go out.

Throughout that time she never let the Kingslayers out of her sight; it had been her habit before then to never be caught unarmed, but the vigilance had taken on a new and bitter importance.  Relics tended to change hands often during the invasion: what wasn’t snatched up by demonic armies had to be pried out of the burnt and sizzling fingers of the dead.  As the months wore on and a morbid tally was put up next to the mission board, the bets were not on when Valeera would be murdering Anduin in cold blood regardless of the presence of orc warlocks, but when she’d cede the longevity record.  Always when, not if; when was the only certainty of the dire tomorrow, and the piles of gold would be parceled based on the minutiae of day, minute, and hour.

Only Garona bet on the if.  Most chalked it up to her not wanting the things back; she’d been the one to give them up to the Uncrowned in the first place.  But when she and Valeera passed one another, never speaking because there was no reason or desire to, the half-orc’s eyes would flick her way.  The muted light in them was sometimes purple, sometimes red, often white, and it did much to hide what she was looking for, or why, but Valeera didn’t even need to know about the wager to guess at what the other woman had seen.

For Valeera and the black vault inside her, there was going to be a tomorrow.  That would be true if the world burned, or if it didn’t.  Tomorrow would come.

By the Argus campaign, the circle of bodies bathed in blue was often bigger than the huddles around the tables.  There were no more new recruits.  The grinder would have to make do without rogue blood; the only mission that remained was the most straightforward one, which suited swords and shields better than daggers.  The last person to peer at her and ask the inevitable question was a dwarf boy with only a few bristles on his chin and no idea who King Llane was, who had killed him, or why any of that even mattered.  He’d been born in a village not far from the gate of Dun Algaz and orphaned at four by the orcs that raided the pass.  He signed his name with an X and had scoffed at the idea of a floating city until he had stowed away on a transport ship out of the airfields in Dun Morogh.  He was deeply unimpressed by a dagger with kingsblood upon it; there was a human king scattered all over the Shore, along with the hundreds and hundreds of other dead, and there was no one out there naming the weapons that did that.

She’d thought of slapping him on the mouth, but he’d been right.  When the terrible miracle of victory finally loomed hideously over Silithus, Valeera had gone to the edge of the city and for a while stared down at the dark, tranquil waters around Suramar.

Then she had tossed Anguish and Sorrow into the sea.

The inglorious truth of history was that given enough time, no one cared what it contained, and the length of that time could be shorter than a person might think.  Thirteen years had come and gone since the Cataclysm and that Valeera could even find the moldering remains of the towns on her list wasn’t a credit to her tracking skills, but to the neurotically meticulous records-keeping of whomever had been the census taker put to work in Westfall over two decades ago.  He or she, toiling away in some closet in a taxation office, had included not only family and estate names, but roads, rivers, landmarks, and rough distances, presumably to be put toward royal maps that were never made.

As she had made her way south through Westfall, Valeera had sketched her own.  Paused with her back up against one of the newly erected road signs, she unfolded the battered parchment and crossed out the fourteenth name with a piece of charcoal.  To her right was Tarry Creek, so named for the dark silt on the final stretch of its journey toward the coast, and a copse of apple trees just recently shed of their blooms.  Past the trunks was a white fence and a gaggle of eclectic livestock: three sheep, two goats, a cow, and a very fat donkey, all of them flicking their ears her way in curious interest.  Up the hill was the next of the many homesteads built where settlements used to be, the lands reclaimed by the Crown and redistributed to petitioning families over the last several years.  To her left was the road she’d just come up from, the dirt well pounded and swept free of stones; spread in busy patchwork across it were wagon tracks, hoof marks, and the prints from her own boots.  The high, golden grasses that encroached from the fields on either side had begun to send their runners out across it, but with spring fading into summer, the workers from the west branch of the Royal Commission for Public Works would be traveling these same roads, filling holes, removing debris, and cutting back the vegetation.

The Commission had been one of his ideas, just like the land parcels.  It put to work a generation of young men that a peacetime army didn’t need and a slew of the able-bodied veterans with pensions but no homes to return to that weren’t buried in rubble or reduced to green ash.  The plan to pay, house, and, in the case of many of the peasantry, educate these workers had been insanity at best and outright treason at worst: the Crown had accrued massive debt to banks in Ironforge and Kul Tiras during and after the Fourth War, debt which the Admiralty and the Council of Three Hammers were then encouraged to sell rather than hold while the Royal Treasury recovered, and to sell to the highly motivated buyer that sat upon a literal mountain of material wealth.

The Zandalari Empire owned the House of Wrynn down to the last gold bullion.  The nobility, their personal holdings exempt from liability, stood silently by; it cost them nothing to refrain from any patriotic protests and allow the Lion’s Seat to cede all its economic power.  Their businesses experienced no loss in profit despite the full halt to wartime production: there were roads, bridges, farmhouses, and villages to build instead, paid with debtor’s coin.  The sale had massively benefited the dwarves and the Kul Tirans: the vast majority of the above-value payment had gone to their own coffers, their reconstruction efforts, and their people.  To Stormwind went only enough to finish the allotments, establish the Commission, and fund public projects for ten years.  Jaina had tried for weeks to convince Anduin to take a percentage from the Admiralty, only to be gently refused each time.

He had been the one behind that.  His had been the figures, penned in elegant columns in accounting books that Anduin kept in the safe in his study, and his were the arguments that she could just barely hear from her spot upon the windowsill one floor up from Anduin’s rooms.  He always had some idea of when she was about, even if he could never tell where she was or how close: vital or damning information would inevitably be interrupted by some form of coitus or another.  By the time there was a moment to pull Anduin aside and ask if he was sure, if he really wanted his name on all these decrees and changes, he’d already been convinced.

On days like that, the whisper from the black vault would ask her, now?

Will it be now?

Valeera’s lips thinned and with crisp motions she folded up her map and stuck it back into its pocket inside her vest.  If she had time to reminisce, then she had time to work, and she wanted to be on the move.  The charcoal went into her satchel, joining her provisions, tied sheafs of paper, a jade teapot small enough to fit in the palm of her hand, and daggers wrapped in leather to hide their shape.  The pot was Anduin’s; to ask for its use, she’d needed to duck inside the cave where Anduin lay wrapped around the still, cool body that belonged to him.  Dead, or so close to it that she should have felt something when she first saw him.

Instead, she’d looked right past him.  She hadn’t thought about him at all.

She had moved away from the meadow to give Anduin some privacy, once she realized the turn his excursion had taken.  She’d always done the same when the mood in his study or bedroom changed; it was just decency to do so, and much easier than turning a blind eye while the two men she was tethered to in the training pits released tempers and frustrations with each other.  It was a small ask to shut a window or follow the forest path from the meadow back to camp, until it wasn’t.

It was her failure that day, and the vault had had nothing to say.

This job wasn’t penance: there was literally no one else to take it.  Shaw could barely move around the Keep and Renzik was juggling the Spymaster’s work of coordinating the house of cards that kept Anduin’s state hidden, while also still bearing the burden of his own duties.  The entire forest around the Cairn was now crawling with SI:7, but how much those agents were allowed to know was kept to the bare minimum.  Loyal and disciplined as they were, the more cards they stacked, the easier it’d be for the house to fall and everyone that knew the truth was aware of that.  In that case, her being here over anyone else had been a process of simple elimination: Shaw could not.  Renzik could not.  He obviously could not.  The black dragons that came to preserve his life could not and neither could the servant they brought with them in flagrant disregard for the need for absolute secrecy.  It was either let the list of names sit and wait for the injured to heal or the nearly dead to be revived, or she could see to it herself.

A week of walking and lying later, she’d begun to doubt there would be anything of value left to find, but the list was almost finished.  Another day, two at most, and Valeera would have chased the ghosts of every servant dismissed from the Queen’s Wing after Lady Tiffin’s death.

A twist of her wrist pulled her satchel closed.  She swung it up onto her shoulders, shifting just once against the weight she still hadn’t gotten used to; she’d never been one to wear something so bulky.  She had to remember to tug her braid out from under it, forgetting for the dozenth time that it wasn’t a tail hanging off the top of her head.  There were the goggles to think about, too, tinted to keep out the sun and hide the fel green light that was the only distinguishing trait between a blood elf and a high elf.  They pinched the bridge of her nose, an annoyance she’d become intimate with over the last several days, but the goggles and her forged paperwork were probably the only reasons why her clumsy lies were tolerated.

Her specialty was assassination, not subterfuge.  But before this all began, she’d have thought that it couldn’t be that difficult to peddle stories to farmers and the elderly, only to immediately learn that she had no idea what farmers and the elderly wanted or expected to hear.  She had a better idea now than when she had started, that was true, but it sounded no more believable the fifteenth time than it had the last fourteen times.

“Good afternoon.  I’m Marcy Brightbrook and I’m writing a Royal report on Westfall genealogy.”

The square-shouldered man in stained overalls that had answered the door looked much less interested or curious than the little crowd his cow and sheep made at the fence behind her.  The animals had trotted along beside her during her twenty minute jog through the well-tended pastrues and up the hill to the house, the steepness of which hadn’t slowed her down at all but had coated her with dust from her boots to her thighs.  Some of the braid had come unwound again, strands frizzed by the dry air flying away from her face and ears, and a quick effort to tame it had grass stalks coming away in her fingers.  Halfway across the yard she had been joined by an unfortunately black cat that was now twining around her ankles, daring her to take a step forward or back and test how much of her reflexes she was willing to show in front of civilians.

“What’s that got to do with us?”

Valeera made herself smile.  Maybe it was with excitement; she didn’t really know. “I’m glad you asked.  Your parcel is right on top of the old Cadwell hamlet from before the Third War.”

“So?”

The cat reached up and put its claws in her calf. “So, I would like to ask your permission to survey the hilltop and ask you a few questions.”

“You want to go digging around in our gardens?”

“No.” Valeera knew a person could smile while clenching their teeth; she’d simply never tried it before now. “Survey.  I want to look around.”

Farmers were just as suspicious as rogues but three times as stubborn and nearly as bloodthirsty.  A rogue knew when to cut their losses and retreat; a civilian with one leg and a pitchfork would chase a woman he didn’t know for longer than was good for him, then swear at her when she went to help him out of the ditch he’d fallen into.  This was something that Valeera had learned at the very first house, so she wasn’t surprised at all when the man at this one put on a mistrustful scowl before she’d even finished her sentence.

“You’re not gonna find anything ‘round here ‘cept for dirt and bull shit.  Cadwell?  Never heard of it.”

The infuriating sensation of being looked up and down also didn’t surprise her, but it was no more enjoyable than it had been the first dozen times.  A vein lifted in her temple; if Sanzi were here, she’d be jumping in to speak first. “According to the taxation records we have in the Royal Library – ”

“Never.  Heard.  Of it.” The man stepped back; the cat prevented Valeera from stepping forward quick enough to put her foot in the door before he started to slam it. “Piss off with your – fuck!” 

He made a noise like Valeera had stabbed him.  She hadn’t, unfortunately, but it wasn’t until he stumbled back that she saw what had: a white-haired woman clutching a rough cane with a very narrow tip.

“Banshee’s tits, Ma!” The man had his hand on his left kidney. “What was that for?”

“Get out of the door, Junior, and go help Hannah with my grandchildren.”

“But – ”

The woman was shorter than the both of them from the stoop that had taken her shoulders, but when the end of her cane hit the threshold, cracking sharply against the timbers, Junior was gone without so much as a tossed bit of spit or spite Valeera’s way.  The powerful quiet left in his wake told her that it wasn’t just the oaf that had scampered away: the animals were gone, too.  Only the cat remained, now threading its sinewy body between the old woman’s ankles instead.

“Your records are wrong.”

The old woman had skipped the introduction.  Valeera let her smile drop. “In what way?”

“Cadwell isn’t a town.  There was never a town here.  There was a roadhouse, and it was run by the Chatwells.” The woman’s eyes were the gray of cigar smoke and the lines around them were set deep into her face.  A rasp skittered at the end of every breath she took. “Don’t know who told you different or why, but nobody but the Chatwells lived on this hill until the fire.”

In Valeera’s satchel, in one of those stacks of paper, there was one of many handwritten notes that had been penned with the census records right beside it.  On the line for the Cadwell hamlet, it clearly read: abandoned after landslide. Year 18. “What fire?”

“The one that ate up that whole family in one night.” The woman didn’t move; it was her tone of voice that made it seem like she’d come closer.  It cut at the space between them and it cut at the years. “I was there.  We lived a mile down the road and across the creek back then.  Went to the roadhouse every Winter Veil, and for the party they threw when little Miss June got her job in the city.”

Valeera’s thoughts grew very still. “June – Chatwell?”

“Gladstone.  She was married by then.  Took her husband and her new little baby with her.”

Her mind’s eye roved over the list of names. “What was the job?”

It had to have pained the woman to stand straighter: her wrinkled knuckles were white on the handle of her cane and her wrists shook, but when she was upright, she and Valeera were eye-to-eye. “Miss June got picked to nurse the new prince and nanny him.  Packed up and went to Stormwind Keep just a week after her own boy was born.”

Under the uneven root of her braid, the little hairs on the back of Valeera’s neck rose.  An electric twitching wanted to start in her fingertips, but she kept them still, clutched tightly around the folio of forged royal orders she had yet to offer. “You said the whole family died in the fire.  Did that include her?”

“Her, her husband, her boy, her two sisters, all their little babies, Mr. Chatwell and Maddy – Mrs. Chatwell.” The old woman’s lips trembled. “I saw the smoke and the light.  Junior slept right through it.  My husband rode to get the men in the village.  I ran up the hill.”

For the first time, Valeera saw that the old woman’s hands were scarred, the knotted and uneven flesh half-hidden under liver spots and the sag of age.

“It burned so fast.  Never seen a fire burn that fast.  I threw soil on it, gravel, tried to stamp enough out so I could get to the door, but it just kept going.  It ate them up before the first bucket could be carried from the creek.”

The sunny hilltop defied the old woman’s words.  The winding and well-tended cobbled path from the road, the threads of gold-green grass that spilled from the wide pastures, and the bright yellow and white pops of color from the planters under each window wanted to convince Valeera that there had never been a fire, nor the lie of a landslide set in irrefutable ink.  There was no smoldering cloud of smoke nor the moon that it would hide: the sky was clear, and the warm breeze smelled of root vegetables and dandelions and large animals.  She had seen no sign of the house where the woman would have lived when she was young, not from the road and not when she’d made her way up to the homestead.  If war or nature hadn’t taken it, then the terrible shadow of burning wings must have, if that house had ever existed at all.

That was the history that was trying to fool her.  That was the history that had fooled them all.

“When did the fire happen?”

“The very night she got back, after that brute on the throne threw her and her family out.” The words had been waiting a long time; they snapped like a snare around that wrinkled throat, shortening her breath. “It weren’t her fault the queen died.  She didn’t throw no stones!  She’d done nothing but be good to that baby and all she got was the fire.  That awful fire – and the men from the fort!  They came and looked at the ash.  Looked, and said there was nothing they could do!  No bodies to bury – no crime!”

Tears fled into the crags of the old woman’s face.  “So don’t you say anybody or any other town was here!  The Chatwells lived here and they died here!  You go back to that library of yours and you tell your records-keepers that they can pretend different but I never forgot!  I’ll never forget Maddy and little June!”

“I’ll never forget that fire!”

“That awful fire!”

Everything went much quicker after that.

“Yes, you’re right, you’re right!  Th-there was a family here, it jus’...it wasn’t the one y-you had said and I – ”

It took much less than a week to go through a list of names when a person gave up on lying.  Not that Valeera had so far given any of the homesteads she had revisited her real name, but rather than a stupid alias and papers that wouldn’t be read, she prefaced her questions with a knife and received much better answers.

“It was the Mertons!”

“Not the Newtons?”

In two days, Valeera had retraced her steps.

“R-right!  Swear on my Pop’s grave, the Mertons lived here a’fore us!”

“Do you know what happened to the Mertons?”

To punctuate the ask, she tightened her grip on the man’s smudged shirt collar and came a half-step closer, pinning him against the door of the outhouse he’d been shuffling out of when she had cornered him.  His trousers were up only by virtue of the shaking hand that held them; the other was pressed up against his chest with freshly bruised knuckles and a cut on his forearm.  Just a bit of light warning, to get that sweat running down his forehead and staining his armpits.

“No.  N-No.  I don’t – ”

With the goggles still on, it was impossible for him to have seen Valeera narrow her eyes, but perhaps the Light had given him divine insight to preserve his life. “I don’t, but I know someone who does!  My Pop used to know – my Pop was friends with Old Ollie.  He’s not a homesteader, he’s been here since…uh, since…um – ”

Valeera didn’t expect the spark of recognition that hit her. “Ollie…Olivier Holt?”

The man’s eyes bulged with bewilderment. “Yes…?  Y’know him Miss – ma’am?”

“One leg, uses a pitchfork like a cane?”

“That’s…that’s him, what did you ‘n he – ” Another squeezed stopped the question before it could be finished. “Right, that’s him!  He’s been ‘round here for ages!  Pop tol’ me Ollie’s grandmam was a knife e-e-ear…”

The helpless, fearful glance toward Valeera’s ears couldn’t be done quickly enough to escape her notice, but she’d gotten what she needed.  With no warning she released her grip; she was already spun on her heel before the man had fallen into a sputtering heap.  The blade of her borrowed dagger, a straight, utilitarian thing with the wrong weight and much too short, caught the sunlight before she slapped it back into its sheath, joining its partner now buckled at her waist.  Between her and the road was the farmhouse, inside of which there was a clattering, a woman’s shouts and crying children, and however much her jaw clenched and her back tightened, the best thing that Valeera could do for the people she was terrorizing was leave as soon as possible.  They’d not see her again, and perhaps they’d feel some solace in whatever wanted poster of her likeness went up in Sentinel Hill, and in time all of them would forget, herself included.

This wasn’t true, but it was what she told herself as she jogged toward the fields of wheat and yanked her satchel from her shoulder.

When she reached the fence, she kicked off from the ground, landed lightly on her heel upon the first beam, and then kept going, vaulting into the first row of brilliant, summery green.  The half-grown stalks caught on her clothes with their cattail tops, then snapped loose to sway and shiver in her wake.  Her steps were silent, but the thick leaves rasped in many low voices, and to her ear were louder than the passing breeze and the shouts that it carried along.  The plants weren’t tall enough yet to hide her; the highest of them tapped and bounced against her elbow.  But they served to obfuscate her silhouette and how she dug around in her bag until she found the little jade teapot.

Valeera would have vastly preferred a hawkstrider, or a gryphon.  But the first would have had cries of Horde invaders spread from here to Redridge and the second would have identified her as somehow associated with the military.  Neither of them could be hidden the way that the teapot could.

Without breaking stride, she popped the hinge top off the teapot and pantomimed drinking from it.  It had nothing in it save for air, and yet there was a taste – 

“Uther’s asshole.”

Oolong.  What piss-poor luck.

“Oh, oh!!  Do you need a cup?”

The heretofore moderate breeze abruptly kicked up into an energetic and whirling wind that sent Valeera’s braid twisting back and forth until its tie gave at last and was lost to the fields.  The green stalks danced in a frenzy, rippling wildly in one direction and then in another, twisting in an invisible cyclone, until there was a surge of scents completely divorced from the ordinary acreage all around her: the woodsy brightness of mountain conifers, the dripping sweetness of honey and magnolia flowers, and the pop of fresh smoke off smoldering bark.  One breath was all it took for these exuberant aromas to translate into a celebration of layered flavor on her tongue, one moment an exquisite note of heavenly fruit, then a robust, roasted warmth the next.

Valeera slid to a stop, then spit off to the side.

She didn’t like oolong tea.

“No, my brew!”

A miniature explosion of bright yellow smoke blew Valeera’s hair back and flattened the wheat in a circle around her.  When it dissipated, a thing that seemed like a bear but was not a bear at all flopped down onto the scarlet fur of its belly and looked up at her pathetically.

“You didn’t have to spit it out…”

In Pandaren myth, a meeksi was a reclusive but joyful spirit that inhabited the dense, fragrant shrub trees that had been used in traditional tea brewing since the time of the last emperor.  They were supposedly born when a particular tree had been lovingly nurtured for at least one hundred years and would bless and guard the families that had tended them.  Though the spirits and their trees were literally rooted to their place of origin, when petitioned properly and with the appropriate reverence, the meeksi would grant a cutting from themselves that could then be housed in special receptacles.  Pandaren embarking on a journey would receive the cutting from their families before their departure, with the hope that the subordinate spirit within, or “tea child”, would aid them in their endeavors.

In the case of this one, and the four others that Anduin kept in a display cabinet in his parlor out of politeness, the High King of the Alliance had received each as a sign of good-will and friendship with Pandaria for his last five birthdays.  The trees they were sourced from were not only hundreds and hundreds of years old, they had only ever been used to produce one variety of tea; Valeera was hoping that at some point they’d run out of types.

She’d also been hoping she had grabbed the one for black tea instead.  The spirit for that one had a better temperament. “Get up.  I need to move quickly.”

“But…but…” Big, warm, honey-colored eyes began to well with equally-honey colored tears.  Shining golden ears had already drooped; now the scarlet and golden-striped tail curled unhappily around a body big enough to down an elekk.  Every unhappy fidget caused the ornate saddle in the Panderan style to sway and with it, the many teapots and cups stacked upon it and secured with ropes that would be laughably flimsy if not for the fact that they were magic. “You’re supposed to have a cup…it’s not right if you don’t…”

Valeera closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“I have it all ready…I worked really hard…I’m really sad now…”

A spirit couldn’t be killed.  She had to remind herself.  It wasn’t actually alive. “If…if, you get me back to the coast, and then to Stone Cairn Lake before nightfall, I’ll have a whole pot.”

The change was instantaneous: the spirit leaped up, misty light rippling through the whorls and cloudy patterning of gold on its fur, doubling their striking brightness and making the scarlet they were set against all the richer and darker.  At that size, the bear should have caused a tremor when it landed, but meeksi left no prints, no scent once it left an area, not even so much as a single white whisker.  If not for the jade teapot and the tiny cutting preserved within it, there’d be no proof that the tea child existed at all.  They were untraceable, and would have been the envy of every rogue from here to the Nether if not for – 

“Yay yay yay yay yay yay-!!”

With a neat sidestep, Valeera avoided the bouncing charge of unbridled enthusiasm that trailed canary-colored mist in its wake.  The innocent wheat might have feared for its life for a split second, but the spirit passed entirely through the stalks as it spun and hopped and barked in happiness.  Those first casualties from the earlier explosion were already beginning to recover: they rose up from the ground, almost synchronized, and none the worse for wear because an auspice of nature was incapable of harming its peers.  But that wasn’t to say it wouldn’t – 

Valeera sidestepped again.  Compared to the wheat, she had felt the whipping wind and the weight of the ecstatic tea child; even if a sheepish Anduin hadn’t warned her, she would’ve known better than to let it get close enough to bowl her over.  She waited until it had made its next joyful turn back toward her before she jumped, twisting easily in the air to come down upon the seat, and pressed her knees hard into its sides.

“Go!  Toward the northwest!”

“Yes!  Yes I will!”

It spun one last time, turning its head toward the distant coastline hidden behind the horizon, and though its first three bounding steps were taken on the earth, the fourth found footing upon the breeze itself.  The meeksi ascended a mountainside that only it could see, its landscape so ephemeral and fleeting that no flesh and blood creature could be privy to the invisible crags and cliffs where the Pandaren claimed their ancestors took their heavenly rest.  If she had asked for a leisurely flight without hurry, it might have been different; they could float and hover like an ordinary mageweave carpet.  But Anduin, curious but expecting little, had once asked for the fastest you can go and had learned that when a meeksi climbed the misty mountain, they were traveling through a space not-quite-ordinary.

He’d fainted the first time.  That was how Valeera had found out about the tea children at all: her King in a heap in the rose gardens, with the weeping green tea spirit beside him.  She’d also discovered that day that the meeksi could not be killed and the already timid green child refused to emerge from its pot for years afterward.

The oolong child was different. “Oh, one step in the sparrow’s dawn!  Oh, two steps in the tiger’s noon!”

Every joyful, sing-song shout was accompanied by a frolicking leap up the mountain, which in turn caused all of Westfall to blink and spin and heave below her.  Fields, roads, rivers, woodland, and the specks of people and animals were flung away along a disorientating curve, as though the world had been reduced to the size of a desktop globe and battered about by a child’s irreverent hands.  That was the truly nauseating aspect of it all: the direction of the spin constantly changed.  There seemed no true correlation between the spirit’s steps and jumps and drops with how the world jerked a hundred miles in one direction, then two hundred in the next, while their relative elevation and exact position in the sky never appeared to change.  The sun itself was steady as it had ever been, having just dipped past its noontime peak, and it was extremely tempting to stare at it just for a sense of stability.

Valeera didn’t.  That would be tantamount to losing to a stuffed animal.

“Oh, six steps in the carp’s nighttime~!  Oh, seven steps in the crow’s – we’re here!  Yay!  We’re here!”

The spirit launched itself from the last heavenly cliff and the world came to a jarring, impossible halt mid-spin.  She could have blinked and come awake from a dream for how swift it was that the Great Sea came to suddenly sprawl before her, miles and miles of sandy coastline stretching to the east and west as the hills gave way to lateral acres of seagrass and huddling dunes.  The sun had moved at last, now lazily dipping toward its home beyond the gentle caps of the waves; by traversing the heavenly mountain, a six hour ride had been reduced to one.  While the spirit loped easily toward the ground, it was possible to spy the murloc villages from the little clusters of thatched roofs and the sea pens built from ropes of woven kelp and fine membrane netting.  At this time of the day the blue and silver flashing of their fins could be seen flitting about the pens, clawed hands coming up to toss stones and debris toward the beach or to scatter feed for the prawns they were raising for the harbor market in Stormwind.

That had not been one of his ideas.  Not directly.

It was simply something that had happened as men like Olivier Holt, with no family and no ability or desire to homestead, took instead small plots better suited to…

…to their needs, Valeera supposed.  Whatever those needs may have been.  For all that she and they had lived through the same wars while the same sun relentlessly passed overhead, they barely walked the same earth.  What little they did share, what the girl huddling in an alley with stolen bread close to her chest had shared, had faded with the years as blood and struggle and providence put her beside a white throne or took her to cities that few would believe could actually fly.

She didn’t know why it was that Old Ollie, and some of the recluses like him, those sailors who couldn’t return to the sea or the soldiers that came back from the Fourth War as someone other than themselves, would sit on the porches of their meager beach houses and let the murlocs root around in their garbage.  She didn’t know how the dialogue began, or if it was a dialogue at all; it could have been that one day a handful of prawns were dumped on a doorstep in an opaque show of gratitude for some trinket that had been stolen.  She only became aware of the change when the previously rare bycatch was suddenly in fryers and steamers throughout the lower districts of Stormwind, and the murlocs settled unmolested on the beaches that were no longer contested in a resource-starved Westfall.

Valeera would have never imagined it.  She would have never even tried to imagine it.

But one person had.

“I need…I ask.  I ask for twenty years.”

She had waited for six months after he had left the Keep.  She had waited until he had deliberately separated himself from his retinue despite their protests.  She had heard the arguments even from the considerable and necessary distance she kept from them as she tailed them across the sea and deep into Pandaria.  The Blacktalon were just as skilled as SI:7; more than a few were members of the Uncrowned, and their loyalty ran much deeper.  When they moved around him, be it as bodyguards or as invisible shadows scattered among the civilians in the villages they passed through, they did so with more depth of purpose than even the personal hands to the King.  They guarded their liege as they would their closest blood family and though she didn’t doubt for a moment that she would have succeeded even with them in her way, it was much simpler when they weren’t.

“Ten.  At least give me ten.”

“You’ve already had plenty.”

She had drugged the innkeep and his wife.  She had been prepared for hidden resistance despite proof that just yesterday the orc and the human woman were on a boat bound for Kalimdor.  Wrathion had by his own design apparently arranged to be the only occupant of the tiny lodge built into the sheer cliffs of Kun-Lai above the Burlap Trail, but she’d not trusted it.  She’d trusted nothing.  It was the end, and nothing was going to be left to chance.

The contents of the austere room had been thrown into disarray during their struggle, the bed overturned, the chest burned, papers scorched and scattered, and the remains of a meager, late-night meal tossed against the wall.  The simple lantern that had sat on the table had been kicked into a far corner; it had been Wrathion’s back that occupied the space where it had been, pinned there by the knife she had slid between the bones in his right forearm and jammed deep into the aged timber.  It had not been meant to hold him there; the pain was intended to keep him from responding in time to stop her and the second knife that would no longer live in a black vault, but in the hollow of his throat.

She had drawn the moment out.  There shouldn’t have been a struggle, but Valeera had wanted him to see.  She’d wanted him to know.

And she had been prepared for him to use that time to find some way to slip her grasp.  He would transform, or he would reveal some spell or trinket hidden until his life was on the line, or anything other than what he did when she gripped his bloodied hair and put a white edge under his throat.

“Please…please.”

He had begged.

“Let me finish my work.  Give me five years to make the preparations.”

“No.” Acidity had dripped from the word.  She had reached with her other hand for the knife that pinned him and had felt the first vile flare of anticipation in her own chest at the thought of twisting it.  It hadn’t been anger so much as a sickness; it spilled like rotting ichor from the vault when her fingertips rested on the knife’s grip and open terror drowned the red in his eyes. “You’ve done enough.”

By the time that Wrathion had left Stormwind, Anduin’s reputation among his own people, to say nothing of his reputation throughout the world, had sunk to such a miserable low that he was no longer considered too weak or too soft: he was an outright laughingstock.  Mocking caricatures of him appeared in the newsprints on the daily; every formal event was a gauntlet of aristocratic sneering while the nobles entertained themselves with conversations about what new low he would stoop to next.  When she heard his name in the streets, it was always followed with a laugh.

There went the king that sold himself to the Horde.

There went the buffoon mucking with sewers instead of rebuilding the army.

There went the child that needed champions and pet dragons to kill a god that he couldn’t kill himself.

There went Varian’s greatest disappointment that he was blessed to have not lived to see, giving away land for free and counting cows instead of ruling the way that a proper king would.

“No…no, it’s not done.  I have to finish.”

Maybe it had been that she had wanted some kind of explanation.  There had to have been some reason for it all to have happened and he was the only person that could give that reason.  It couldn’t have been that it was for nothing.  It couldn’t have been that that was just how the dice fell.  If it was, then the vault would have had nothing to keep, and she’d not feel the burn of bile as it boiled inside her throat.

Valeera had stood still.  Wrathion’s eyes had flicked to the left, to the largest pile of paper debris.

“If you…ah, if you see a leather ledger…”

She wasn’t going to turn her back on him.  She had wordlessly yanked the knife from the table and listened to his scream.  Then she had waited, watching every bit of cringing, limping progress Wrathion had made to find the folio himself and only took it once it was retrieved and he had brought it to her.

Inside, there were more numbers.  More figures.  Columns of names, dates, and addresses.  There had seemed to be no rhyme or reason to them: there was the name of a Kul Tiran shipwright and the gold sent to her in patronage.  There were lists of coffee and cocoa plantations in Zandalar, then the names of Stormwindian merchants alongside them.  There were percentages that laid out investments in gnomish inventions and alchemic research out of Lordaeron.  In the very last line, which was interrupted by the wild scrawl of ink that was her ambush, there was even a notation of tea cultivars to be found in Kun-Lai that were resistant to cold weather and suited for export to Loch Modan and Highmountain.

Valeera’s nails had dug into the leather.

“What is this?”

“Those are the wages of grief.”

She had looked at him.  Blood had shrouded his face and his mangled arm had hung uselessly at his side.  While grey had pressed into his extremities, he had swayed upon unsteady feet and a twisted knee.  If he had meant to escape, that time had well passed: the thick trail of his blood and the puddle that gathered at his heels promised that soon, there would be no point in trying.

“And they must be paid.”

“Oh, are those friends?  Are they?  Do you think they want tea?”

It was unsurprising that a meeksi would be completely entranced by murlocs.  It, or he, the voice was male, would have never seen them before.  Climbing down from the seat was made more difficult by his bouncing and tapping paws, but he at least kept in one spot until Valeera had dismounted.  Her boots came down upon the thick carpet of yarrow that had overgrown the minuscule yard and threatened to start creeping up onto the one-room house that looked as though it was built before the First War.  Given what she now knew about Old Ollie, it probably had been, and though the Commission no doubt approached the man with an offer of repairs funded by the state, she suspected they had received the same sort of welcome she had.

“Yes.  I do think they want tea.  Go give them some.”

“Yay!”

The spirit immediately barreled down the sandy embankment, tripped over absolutely nothing, and went rolling all the way down to the bottom before jumping back up to its feet again, completely unruffled down to the last teacup.  Valeera lingered long enough to make sure the murlocs stayed focused on trying to jab him with spears instead of watching her, then made for the house.  The moment she looked up, she saw that the door had already opened: the thin, worn face of the first man she had “interviewed” took on different qualities now that she knew what to look for.  She’d thought his thin hair was white, when it was really the lightest shade of blond; his eyes had seemed grey, only to be a pale blue.  When she lifted her goggles up with her thumb and let them drop down to hang around her neck, she saw fright, and then rage show in his features and clenched teeth.  While he held onto the door to stay upright, his hand groped in the dark beyond her view, probably for a weapon; if not the pitchfork, then something else.

“I’m here to talk about the fires.”

Old Ollie froze.  The rage died, and in its place was something older, colder, and blacker.  It held him there until her heel touched his cracked stone stoop and then the door slammed so hard that flakes of crusted salt fell from the eaves.  Beyond the thin wood she could hear his wretched gulps for breath and the sound of a chair rattling as it hit the floor.  A body followed, heavy in its distinctiveness, and the swears cracked bitterly with a sob she would not have heard yesterday.

“If you tell me everything you know about them, I will tell you everything I know about what happened to the people that set them." This Valeera said in a clear voice to the door, though her head was slightly bent and she didn’t really see the old planks at all.

It had taken much less than twenty years.  It hadn’t even taken five.

“I can’t make it a promise, but I’ll try to get the records changed to the truth.”

Harsh breaths grew slowly quiet.  The soft rumble of the waves overtook them.

“...’s not locked.”

Valeera let her shoulders settle and pushed her wild, grass-ridden hair over her shoulder before gently easing the door open to step inside.

Chapter Text

Dinner two days later was an interesting affair.

It was also markedly different from the last time they had all sat together for one of these mealtime meetings.  No longer did they huddle around a table wont to wobble to one side on its splintering legs and very likely older than Wrathion himself.  Gone was the distraught High King hunched in a miserable curl inside a cramped and sweltering barn.  Instead of discomfort and unease, their esteemed party of conspirators and guests, the number of which had doubled since their last shared repast, were ringed around a pleasantly crackling bonfire beneath the open firmament awash with what was surely every star there was to be found in the Great Dark Beyond.  The clearing outside their abode – ehem, outside the cave where Anduin was currently sheltered from prying eyes, had been widened considerably and the logs of fallen trees arranged in a circle around the fire pit that Wrathion had been more than happy to dig the moment Tong came to him with the order.  There was sandstone aplenty for the creation of a rudimentary outdoor kitchen, with more than enough left over for piles arranged in a general perimeter; something had to be done with it all now that Ebyssian had excavated the cave down to the bedrock.  With a little more work and shaping, walls between the trees was not out of the question, perhaps with a few artful archways and curling paths, but that was a project for a nebulous future that Wrathion could not allow himself to daydream about.

As fantastic as his mood was, the situation was quite dire.

“They can’t keep it up.  The Greymanes say one day more, maybe two.”

In lieu of Mathias Shaw, who was not allowed out of the Keep even IF a broken arm was not a hindrance when it came to using a portal, Renzik the Shiv had come with reports out of Stormwind and Gilneas.  At the foot of his log seat was a bulging satchel of tied scrolls and sealed letters, some with official seals but many without.  If Wrathion were to hazard a guess, Shaw and his restlessness had more or less sent along most of his office, which Renzik had magnanimously humored despite not needing to open a single one of them.

“That’s all you got before even Tess’s threatenin’ won’t be enough to keep the tabloids from wonderin’ why the High King is visiting Gilneas but nobody’s seen him.”

Of their party, only Anduin appeared befuddled by Renzik addressing Queen Greymane by her first name.  Wrathion felt more than saw the great head that lay beside him on the log begin to tilt in confusion, the motion of his finned ears producing the softest rustle.  This was no time to smile, so rather than let his intent expression slip, Wrathion merely lay his arm atop that dark crown and allowed his fingers to slowly scratch behind one heavy, curled horn.  The very end of Anduin’s tail began to wiggle where it lay upon the scattered leaves and soil.

“And that’s just up north.  Rumors are flying all over Stormwind of a coup or a plot or a kidnapping or a secret child – ” Renzik counted off on his fingers, then threw up his hand in disgust. “Even got one guy shouting on a corner sayin’ His Majesty’s been sainted and ascended into the Light.  Nobody’s said anything officially, and nobody’s agreed on just who’s behind it, but the bluebloods are furthest along on pickin’ a favorite to blame.”

Anduin’s tail grew still. “Do you know who they’ll be pointing fingers at?”

Renzik knocked back his sixth cup of oolong tea. “Yeah.  The Horde, of course.  Zandalar.”

A noise like steel over stone cracked within Anduin’s throat.  He didn’t raise his head and he showed none of his teeth, but that growl was deep enough and strong enough that Wrathion felt it vibrating through his bones.  A reciprocal tension immediately squeezed his shoulders and the inside of his own chest, and the desire to bristle and posture was so powerful that Wrathion found he had to occupy his hands with a new task or else he’d be curling them into fists.  He chose to pluck his own cup up from the sandstone ‘table’ he had made for himself and hold it out to the side with a shake of his wrist and a winsome smile that he could only hope was not misconstrued as the open snarl that his lips wanted to form instead.

“If you would top me up, my good man – ”

“Yes!  Yes, I will!”

From Valeera’s end of the bonfire, almost completely opposite from Wrathion, unfettered elation wrapped up in an imperturbable ursine form bounded over and around the other members of the dinner party, expertly dodging the annoyed snap from Sabellian when that striped and bushy tail came too close for the elder wyrm’s liking.  For reasons he had chosen not to disclose, he was, like Anduin, in draconic form, though he was sat back away from the log that would have served as his seat had he chosen to take mortal form and partake of Tong’s truly excellent cooking.  A pan wider than the old bear was tall was perched upon sandstone pillars above a smaller series of fires and into it had been tossed a great variety of mushrooms, bamboo shoots, lotus root, cabbage, peppers, and a great many prawns and scallops glazed with salted yolk.  Great rolls of clear noodles were pulled from an equally massive pot boiling over hot stones and heaved into the pan thereafter, the scent of scallions and sesame sent out in a great wave of steam.

How Sabellian could resist it, Wrathion had no idea.  He had chosen only to glower menacingly at himself and Anduin in particular since the evening began, but since he had had nothing of significance to say when Wrathion had greeted him, Wrathion had had no recourse but to simply ignore him entirely.

“Here you go!  Here you go!”

Dutifully, Wrathion held his cup up to the levitating and mist-draped teapot to receive his requested beverage while the overexcited spirit wiggled with such delight that he seemed fit to burst into tea leaves and bear fur.  He had read about the meeksi during his very first stay in Pandaria all those years ago, but he had done little more than make a disinterested note of it before moving on to avenues of research he thought more fruitful and appropriate for his grand schemes.  A shame, truly; aside from the benefits to be found in an immortal and unfalteringly loyal spiritual servant, he did so enjoy many of the Pandaren tea styles but had never quite mastered the proper preparation of them.

Perhaps Valeera would not be adverse to parting with this one?  She didn’t seem particularly thrilled by the fact that the meeksi, his job done, happily sprinted back to her side of the fire to flop adoringly at her feet.  If he asked – 

…

No, he would not be asking.  He would have better luck hunting up one back in Pandaria, an adventure he absolutely did not have the time for.  He took a long sip of oolong to soothe the agitation still plucking at his nerves before he spoke up.  It pleased him that his voice was smooth, rather than the hoarse mess it had been just this morning.

“I’ve not had my finger on the pulse of Stormwind politics for some time – ” A full seven pairs of eyes looked at him with incredulity, though at least the tea child was doing so only so that he might be included.  Wrathion ignored all of them. “But, would I be wrong in assuming the House of Nobles' actions are financially motivated?”

Anduin’s displeased rumble of affirmation shivered up Wrathion’s arm. “All the gold they’ve made over the years and it still…”

Wrathion’s smile was wry.  This very topic had been the frequent focus of their discussions since their very first youthful debates over a quickly forgotten game of jihui.  Anduin’s draconic expression of disgust, which was the metallic snap of his teeth, suggested that he well understood that Wrathion was the unhappy winner of their oldest argument: no appeal to the better natures of people in power would outweigh the desires and ambitions that put them in power in the first place.  However many converts Anduin might gain toward the cause of the greater good, they would ever be the exception, rather than the norm.

Though Wrathion had heard that with Countess Clessington’s assumption of her father’s title at least one head of the hydra had been cut.  He’d already had the rueful thought that Anduin’s adamant refusal to even consider the former Count’s marriage arrangements might have had something to do with it. “Of course.  With no war industry to monopolize, they desire the luxury goods market instead.”

“But their hands have been tied.” To his immense surprise, it was Valeera that broke in, though she did not once look up from the bowl of noodles she slowly stirred with her borrowed chopsticks.  Her presence alone had already perplexed him; she hardly looked to be the same woman with her hair down and her clothing nondescript.  That she plucked up a mushroom to toss into the eager and waiting jaws of the meeksi seemed utterly divorced from her typical sharp tone, employed with its typical effectiveness. “Anduin’s sacrifice can’t be undermined or the public will riot.”

“I wouldn’t have called it a sacrifice, that sale was – ”

“We all know what it was.”

Wrathion truly could not discern what the woman felt or thought when she said that.  She added nothing else and only looped the steaming noodles around until they could be brought up to her mouth.  It was the first time he had ever seen her eat; it felt inappropriate to watch her confidently slurp noodles.  He had to give himself a mental shake before he could continue, clearing his throat as he did so.

“Mm!  In either case, Anduin’s apparent disappearance gives what they’ve long desired: just cause to pursue the denouncement of their preferred target.  While I doubt they have yet enough leg to stand on for open war, they need only prove that Anduin is absent and produce manufactured evidence of a perpetrator to seize trade ships and freeze local assets so they can make demands.”

Renzik stabbed a prawn in his bowl with his chopstick and stuffed it into his mouth, shell and all. “It’d be piss-poor evidence but that don’t matter.  Resentment’s got deep roots and this peace ain’t been around long enough yet.”

“Sometimes I wonder what long enough would even be.” Anduin’s deep sigh caused the bonfire to weave and jump.  Then with a gentle tilt of his head he moved out from under Wrathion’s arm and lifted up enough to look across the space to where Ebyssian sat on the log to Valeera’s right.  His pause, nearly imperceptible, lived as a little tremble in his throat. “Earthwarder – if I might ask, do you know the current climate among the Horde membership?”

Wrathion anticipated the hard flick of Ebyssian’s ears before it even happened, as well as the agitated snap of his tail. “No…no, I’m afraid not.  I am only familiar with the Tauren of the Highmountain and Thunder Bluff clans.  I know they would advocate for caution and a measured response to sudden accusations from the Alliance, but how the rest of the Council would take allegations of kidnapping or assassination…I don’t know.”

It frustrated his brother, the not knowing.  It troubled him.  It had been one of the several reasons he had put forward in his arguments against his election to Earth Aspect and though Azeroth herself had affirmed that their choice had been the right one, he did not take the gaps in his knowledge and experience lightly.  It was not merely that he thought a vast repertoire of wisdom, experience, and overwhelming strength communicated the worthiness of the title of Earthwarder; it was that when wisdom or strength were needed, when they were asked of him, he wished only to be able to give them.

Wrathion could understand the feeling.  Would that he could know it without the other burdens he had shackled to it. “I think without delving into the depths of the Spymaster’s weekly reports on the Horde we can assume the response would not be good.  And while I am sure Shaw is currently occupied with ignoring his orders for bedrest so that he may construct a slew of contingency plans, the best and most direct solution would be to return the High King to his people.”

“But you’ve not even found the spell, have you?” Sabellian no doubt saw no reason to lower his voice out of politeness the way that Anduin did; the leaves above his head shook as he spoke. “The green boy has said you’ve not even begun working.”

“I’m a grown ass man with a pension.”

“A what?”

“You are correct, my brother,” Wrathion said easily, finishing his cup before setting it and his empty bowl aside.  He rose to his feet and did not so much as allow a twitch in the corner of his eye to slip through when he felt a powerful ache shoot up his back from below the base of his spine. “However, during my long hours of rest and recovery – ”

Sabellian leveled a look at him fit to set the forest on fire.  Wrathion still had not a solitary clue as to why.

“ – I have ruminated on a key aspect of this cursework: not only is Anduin in full possession of his faculties, he is also able to call upon the Holy Light.  This suggests to me that his body is not a facsimile or misconstruction of a dragon, but as true a dragon as it is possible to be, with all the capabilities and qualities that true dragons should have.”

Sabellian’s tail thumped against the ground. “No dragon has ever used the Light.  You’re making an unfounded assumption.”

“Has any dragon ever tried, brother?”

“...”

“That’s what I thought.” And it was easier, much easier, to smile at Sabellian’s low growl of annoyance than it was to put forth the other side of his logic.  That was a wound that he needn’t open, not if it could be helped; better to leave it buried in Aberrus, with a fate no grander than to be one day forgotten. “But, let’s hypothesize that I am correct.  What, then, does that suggest that Anduin should be capable of?”

“You really can never get to the point, can you?  You have to make a production of – ”

“A visage.”

Rather than take Wrathion’s theatrical bait the way that Sabellian had, it was Ebyssian, lost in thought over his Tauren-sized bowl that Tong had thoughtfully obtained, that hit upon the possibility that Wrathion had the moment he’d been conscious enough to do so. “King Wrynn should be able to take a visage.”

“You can…call me Anduin…”

Wrathion looked up and back, and caught Anduin in the midst of his polite, automatic response while shock and anticipation and restlessness took hold of all the rest of him.  His voice might have trailed off and dropped away, but his fins and crest flared, then tucked and thrummed, as if he might dive forward at any moment and so he needed them out of the way, lest they catch on any branches.  His tail lashed back and forth, scattering sticks and soil and discarded shells, and the elbows of each wing had risen, expecting the same leap and allowing the heavy sail of each wing to unfold.  His claws tightly gripped at the log, rolling it back toward his body, and though it was not a solution, it was not what he had promised, Wrathion felt a tender elation flicker in the private chambers of his heart.

There was, too, a feeling tight and fretful, but it was a feeling that was not to be given a name.  Rather than give it time enough to be known, he sidled around to stand with his back to the bonfire so that he could look up at his mate – 

At Anduin.  So he could look at Anduin properly, finding the smoky glow of his eyes up above despite the flame that blazed brightly at his back.

The grandeur of him, the slope of his shining neck and the heavy, handsome spiral of his horns, were still enough to take his breath away.  The assumption that he had already committed them wholly to memory proved false: every glance gave to him something new, be it the arrowed shape of the scales beneath his jaw or how the claws that tipped the elbows of his wings were not the same black as those upon his paws, but the striking pale that matched his horns.  His deep resemblance to the elder children of Sintharia was undeniable, yet he was no carbon copy: it was blue, that midnight blue, that reflected off his scales when they caught the light, shaded only slightly by the twilit purples that clung to Nefarian and, more obviously, Onyxia.  No dragon like him existed in the world and when the spell was undone, there would never be another.

What Wrathion felt, knowing that, would also have to live without a name.

His words were confident and unfalteringly certain; they could be nothing else.

“Before we get ahead of ourselves, a visage is not easily attained.  All dragons may be capable of it, but it must be learned and how well it is learned varies from dragon to dragon.” Wrathion heard Ebyssian cough and politely inquire after more dinner from Tong. “That’s why, as an expert in its use, I’ll do all that I can to guide you.”

“Yeah, about that.”

Rather than the praise, thanks, or hopefulness that Wrathion was fully prepared to hear, it was Renzik that earned an annoyed turn of his head.  He spied the spy digging around in his satchel for a scroll, working his thumb under the knot that kept it tied shut once it was in his hands.  When it proved stubborn, he used his teeth, and then gave the parchment a shake to roll it loose.

“When I said we’ve got a day or two, I was bein’ generous.  His Majesty needed to be back in his seat last week.  The number of events he was all signed up for was – ” 

Anduin had by this time absolutely perfected an extremely human grimace with a draconic face.  Wrathion was honestly very impressed. “Events.  Really?  It can’t be that much trouble to cancel all of them.”

“Sure, that was true for most of ‘em.  But the Lescovar girl’s birthday party is the day after tomorrow.”

In the ensuing silence, Wrathion was the one that had to look between the goblin and the dragon-turned King.  Renzik had a look of such fantastic neutrality that Wrathion could only assume that it had been one of the reasons that Mathias Shaw would offer him a position of such complete trust, while Anduin was so still as to have been replaced by a statue in perfect rendition of himself.  To say that the atmosphere had abruptly become uncomfortable would have been disingenuous: whatever consequence that was associated with a birthday party of all things was apparently so dire that every ounce of energy had been stripped from their little gathering.  Low though their stakes were in the goings-on, both Ebyssian and Sabellian had turned all their attention to their end of the bonfire; skilled as they were at disguising their intentions, he could not know for certain if Tong or Valeera were doing the same.  There was only his gut to rely on now, and it suggested that whatever was not being said was now a subject surpassing even the importance of Anduin’s potential visage.

A needle of anger pricked in the back of Wrathion’s mind. “...I assume this hurdle is going to be explained properly.”

Renzik made no move to do so.  He was looking at Anduin.

Every claw in Anduin’s front feet dug a gouge into the log in his grip.  The cracking and splintering of the wood prefaced the brief moment he spent with his eyes closed, shoring up whatever willpower he required in order to get to the point.

“Violetta Lescovar is Baron Aldous Lescovar’s only daughter.”

“I’m shocked.” Wrathion began, frustration seizing his tongue ahead of his thoughts. “Is the young lady going to cause some issue or – ”

“I’ve been courting her for three months.”

Anduin had never seen Wrathion go so gray so quickly.

He’d not wanted to say.  He’d hoped Wrathion already knew.  All the years that he had spent hovering about Stormwind and the Alliance, all the Blacktalon spies and the rumors of Blacktalon spies that Mathias was constantly hunting down, Wrathion had even come to Stormwind himself within the last year to guide the Dracthyr toward an audience with the Lion’s Seat!  That this of all things would have to come as an unpleasant surprise was proof positive that Fate was both cruel and petty.  At his lowest, at his worst, on a night years ago when all his stress and fear drove him to unravel in front of the only soul he felt he could be truly honest with, there would have been knot of disgraceful pleasure in the bottom of his chest to see Wrathion change so drastically before his eyes.

The way his shoulders dropped.  The speechlessness.  How he held his hands, no longer busy and expressive, but loose at his sides.  When Anduin was the worst version of himself that he could be, nothing else would make him so happily miserable, because they were then peers again, equals and confidants once more, and he had never wanted anything so much as he had wanted for company.

Just the brittle echo of that feeling had him yank his claws out of the log and lean hastily forward. “Wrathion, it’s not what you think, I’m – ”

“How dare you!!”

Sabellian’s roar did not just shake the leaves.

It shook the whole forest. “You’ve pursued another partner?!  Another, after condemning him for the same!  After mating him?!  Have you no shame?!”

Having sat relatively still for all of dinner, the scope of Sabellian’s size in his true shape had been hidden by the shade of the trees and the deceptive quiet that shrouded a dragon when they were at rest.  When he surged to his feet in a burst of open rage and raw heat, the earth shook under the sudden, striking weight of his paws.  When his wings snapped open, the cracking of ligaments and joints akin to canonfire, they buckled the trees to either side of him and swiped a hole through all the branches up above.  The end of his tail, heavy as a boulder and riddled with jutting spikes, bashed through the sandstone that had been left in a pile behind him; the debris splashed in a wide arc, sending the skittering shapes of voles and mice darting out of the underbrush.  Hidden from view but undeniably present were the starlings driven out of their nighttime perches, the air full of the sounds of their shrieking when it wasn’t overpowered by the bones and sinew of a dragon so old that they had ceased to be flesh and blood.  Anduin had few comparisons that could be made to the broad, blistering shadow that was Sabellian stalking closer as shouts of alarm and warning went up all through the clearing: he was not as large as Deathwing had been when the ruin of the Fallen Aspect had broken Stormwind beneath his claws, but no dragon was, or would ever be again.  He was much more like…the resemblance was undeniable, irrefutable, like a gravemarker…he was, in weight and in presence and in the sulfur yellow of his eyes…in the black at the bottom of a pit where the light wouldn’t reach and the little bones snapped under his feet – 

DO AS I SAY.

DO AS I SAY.

DO AS I SAY, OR I WILL NEVER LOVE YOU.

Anduin cringed violently away before Sabellian could take even one step closer, though Sabellian had entirely ceased to exist.  Inverted sunspots blistered on the surface of Anduin’s eyes: each one swallowed up the landscape into a yawning emptiness, a fissure in perception where dead gods must have dwelt, once upon a time.  A hundred black needles plunged into the interiors of his skull, slicing through brain matter and memory and the mistaken thought that he understood everything about the world and the place that he was supposed to have in it.  His bellow of pain contained the ghost of a man’s wretched sob, though it couldn’t have, because he wasn’t a man and he didn’t have the means to weep anymore.  He was a dragon that was writhing backwards, flinging his head to one side, and then the other, desperate to wrench himself free of the knives that were flaying his memory, peeling the layers so that the exposed nerves could scream and his back and wings could bash against the nothing that had swallowed him up, too.  When that wasn’t enough, he drove his head toward the featureless ground, grinding down desperately, and clawing at himself in desperate ignorance of how he sliced through fins and snapped spines and left gouges on his neck and snout.

It hurt, but that pain didn’t mean anything.

It didn’t hiss at him.  It didn’t roar.  It didn’t whisper and it didn’t cup his cheeks with pale hands that were taken by a neverending fever.

ANDUIN.

Her fingers were so hot.  Her palms were like coals pulled from the hearth.

YOU

MORE THAN THEY

Wyll lay crumpled on the floor.  His father had locked the door behind them.  Bolvar was burning, though it was really Marshal Windsor that died that day.  She pressed a sweet into his palm and told him that he was King.  The stairs were narrow and led down into a close and tender darkness that he knew not to be afraid of.  The moons were reflected on the surface of the sea.

THAN ANY

The air was cold.  But she was warm.

She was warm.

She was warm.

She was warm – 

“Anduin!!!”

The tether of memory was cut.  Anduin’s eyes snapped open.

The world existed again.

The only color in it was red.

A black drake half his size had wrapped its forelegs around his head.  Deep cuts, their edges ragged and wet, had been torn through its scales where it had shielded Anduin from himself.  The slim sides of the little drake heaved and its wings were poised and open, as if at any moment it knew that it would have to fly and to chase.  He could smell the drake’s blood and he could smell the drake’s fear and he could at last hear his own miserable gasping and the raucous shouting and crashing of stones and pans and upturned pots.  He could not see anything, not really; he was only looking into the red.  A scarlet richer than cinnabar.  A crimson fuller than fire.

He fell into the red, and out of the nightmare.

“Wrathion…”

Relief stole every ounce of strength from his body.  Anduin slid gracelessly down from the tense, upright position he had held, pinned between broken trees and Wrathion’s grip.  He fell to the earth in a heap, wings and tail and leaden limbs sprawled with no thought given to comfort other than the comfort of every muscle letting go, and Wrathion released his hold but followed close in his wake.  Before Anduin’s field of vision was taken up by the red and the black-and-gold crowned head, he glimpsed a tableau of utter chaos, frozen in tense and violent uncertainty:

Sabellian straddled the scattered remains of the bonfire, the broken stones of the short-lived kitchen, and the bent and warped pot and pan that had spilled their contents all across the clearing.  Soup, oil, and bits of vegetable were sliding down and off his legs and claws, but he made no move to shake them loose: he was unable.  His raised head was stock still and out of his open jaw Valeera hung, her position maintained only by the grip of her legs around the elder dragon’s tongue.  Her teeth bared, her hair slicked with spit and clinging to her head and face, the gleaming point of each of her knives was pressed against the roof of Sabellian’s mouth, little runnels of dark, steaming blood creeping down the metal to drip onto her knuckles and shaking wrists.  At any moment, his jaws could snap shut and tear her in half, but doing so would put daggers directly into his brain.  Clinging to Sabellian’s head was the terrified tea child, his form only half-rendered, with the wreckage of the canopy visible through him and faint particles of mist and fraying leaves dribbling steadily off his body.  Ringed around the three of them were Ebyssian, fire showing in long cracks that spread along his antlers and then down his neck from his blazing eyes, Tong, a blue-white shroud of stripes and lightning fading from his arms and poised fists, and Renzik, though only the tips of Renzik’s ears were visible, poking outside of the gleaming, slightly smoking nest of roots that had wrapped tightly around him.  Close to him was a black and gently pulsing totem, carved in the shape of a dragon’s head and with soft fires burning in its eyes.  The shine of a dagger and an alchemical bomb were visible through the roots, but Renzik was still, waiting.

Anduin wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, press his head against Wrathion’s neck, and sleep until the hot and wretched throbbing inside his skull granted him the mercy of leaving him be.  If he could just rest for long enough, the pain would go the way of whatever had caused it: fading to nothing, a dream forgotten at first light, terrible in its implication but relieving in its absence.  It was gone.  It had hurt him, but it was gone, and it was only now, only this time, that rationality and logic could fight against the relief that wanted him to just leave it as a nightmare.

Because it wasn’t just that.  It wasn’t just a dream.  There was something there, and it didn’t want to be known.

Anduin didn’t let himself sleep.  He made himself shudder and struggle to at least get his forelegs working enough to prop himself up.  He made himself lift his head so that he could speak and that at least was helped by Wrathion putting his shoulder under Anduin’s chin.  His thanks, unsteady and shivering, came as a low and grateful prayer that quietly lifted up and out of the hurt and the exhaustion and the terrible specter of deep black memory.  A cascade of gentle bars of golden light traveled in slow patterns over Wrathion, finding where his legs bled silently onto darkened soil, and he watched them, borrowing the certainty that was their presence.

“I’m – I’m alright.  I’m alright.  Stand down, please.  It wasn’t anything he did.”

Muffled, a question rose out of the tangle of vegetation. “You sure, Your Majesty?  That didn’t look like an accident.”

“I’m sure.  It was – ” The very attempt at forming the words sent another black flicker through his head, forcing his eyes shut in a sharp flinch. “Just give me…a, a moment – ”

“It’s a spell on his mind.”

Wrathion’s voice rumbled close against Anduin’s neck and the inarguable firmness of it allowed Anduin to sigh and simply nod his head as best that he could.  The smaller dragon changed his position somewhat, turning carefully beneath Anduin so that instead of facing his chest, Wrathion was looking back out toward the mess of their gathering and the many waiting faces, sat back on his haunches with his tail looped around his legs.  Anduin could then rest his chin upon Wrathion’s shoulder and close his aching eyes, almost feeling Wrathion’s words more than he heard them, the gentle vibrations soothing the horrid pounding that drowned out every other thought and emotion and possible action.

Horror and disbelief could come later.  Dread, too, and whatever doubt it might breed.

Wrathion was calm, and so Anduin was, too.

“I would not have felt it if I hadn’t touched him.  It is Onyxia’s, and it bears all the qualities of the rest of her entrenched sorcery.  It is triggered rather than constantly active, but I would need to examine it more closely to determine the conditions and mechanisms.”

Wrathion paused, and said more softly, only to Anduin. “Love, spare a prayer for yourself, too.”

Right.  Right.  That would be why Anduin could still smell blood.  Without moving and only slightly parting his lips, he chose another quiet hymn, this one dutiful and pious, and let the smoky silver drift across the wounds on his head and neck that he had entirely forgotten about.

“Thank you, my dear.” The gentle composure was everything to Anduin.  A little of the pain began to die.

“I suspect that my brother, in his righteous but entirely misplaced and frankly presumptuous indignation, inadvertently met one of the trigger conditions for the spell.”

A loud and meaty and deeply displeased hiss came as a response.  It was no surprise that Sabellian couldn’t talk while Valeera was in his mouth.  Anduin didn’t open his eyes, wanting the stillness behind his lids for a little longer, but he did raise his tired voice. “Valeera, you can stop.  He was only angry on Wrathion’s behalf and if none of us knew about this spell – ”

He flinched again, though less fiercely, this time. “ – he probably didn’t either.”

“I hate to do this but, well, it’s my duty and all.” Renzik again, somewhat less muffled.  Anduin could hear the pop and crack of vines as they moved. “This dragon here was alive and helpin’ Deathwing at the same time as the other ones.  We got records of him sinkin’ the Kul Tiran navy and consortin’ with orcs here and in Outland.  How do we know he wasn’t involved?”

The threatening edge of tension made the next throb in Anduin’s temples twice as strong as the one that came before.  He could hear the twanging of countless muscles clenching and pulling, the sound nearly metallic, as if under Sabellian’s skin there was a weavework of obsidian mail around his bones.

“If Wrathion trusts him, then I trust him.  I’m asking both of you to do the same, but I will make it an order if I have to.”

“Alright.  You’re the boss.”

“And I will take responsibility for my brother, and for the actions of the Black Dragonflight that had turned away from its duty.  We came to save a member of our family, but we will stay until this past wrong has been undone.”

Up until this moment, Anduin had heard Ebyssian speak only softly, though soft for an Aspect in their true form was nowhere near quiet, and thoughtful whenever Anduin had asked after Wrathion’s condition during his healing.  His answers had been forthright and kind: that the flame in Wrathion’s body had been salvaged and re-ignited, that his spirit had not yet passed into the realms of death, and that he would be alright.  That they would both be alright.  The sudden depth to his voice, the weightiness of it, was the first true sign that in the tauren’s skin was a dragon, even though it had been the dragon that had lowered his great head and told him that all would be well.  The earth under his paws seemed to warm because of it, the heat seeping up into Anduin’s body, and he felt even Wrathion sigh, a smile hidden in his voice when he replied.

“Brother dear, that was a lovely little declaration, but would you like some constructive criticism?”

“No.  Now is not the time.”

“Aw, a shame.”

Anduin heard the Aspect of Earth snort. “Sabellian, let her go.”

There was a pregnant pause the length of one breath, before there was the somewhat unfortunate sound of a tongue slapping and spit dripping down.  The tea child gave a little cry of relief and Anduin thought he heard the smallest puff of an explosion: he opened one eye, just slightly, and saw the meeksi floating away with Valeera draped upon its back.  Sabellian’s bleeding mouth closed before the great bulk of his body vanished into a spiral of glittering ash and fiery flecks of mana.  The human visage that emerged had blood coating his chin, but Ebyssian had already approached by the time the smoke had faded.  Whatever he said, Anduin didn’t catch, and though Sabellian slapped the tauren’s broad hand away the first time, he didn’t the second, and a fascinating combination of watery aether and flickering channels of fire flowed from the palm that cupped Sabellian’s chin.

Magni had said that Ebonhorn was a shaman.  The union of elemental power and draconic magic made Anduin want to ask him how he’d done such a thing, and if his own use of the Light now was something like that, or could be something like that.

But Anduin knew that that was nothing more than a daydream, conjured up between the fading waves of pain.

“She did something to my mind, didn’t she, Wrathion.”  The first thread of fear wound around his throat and it was cold, so cold that an insidious shiver slithered under his skin and crept toward whatever parts of him were still warm.

“Mm.  Yes, most likely.” Wrathion shifted, turning his head enough to point one eye Anduin’s way.  As close as they were, he could see the slit of his iris again, flexing as he focused on Anduin’s face. “But to be fair, she also did something to your body.”

A morbid pop of sound, barely a laugh, escaped him. “You’re right.  She did.”

That was enough to do it.  It was enough for Anduin to take a few deep breaths and pull his limbs more fully under his body.  The dead weight of him, the numbness and the dragging weakness, proved to be nothing more than an illusion conjured by the ache in his head: when Anduin wanted to stand, he did, and he was able to lift his head and bring his wings back into their fold along his body.

His body.  His mind.  Still his, in spite of everything.

The small black drake, sleek and sharp, looked up at him.  His mate.  His friend.

“I’m not really going to marry Violetta.”

Now it was Wrathion that boggled a moment, crimson eyes wide and the angle of his wings drooping slightly. and then he coughed out his own laugh, which was deeper, and lasted longer, and pushed his head a little up and back.

“Anduin…Anduin.  You’re cursed twice over, and that is your priority?” The smile, Wrathion’s smile, was in the toothy parting of his jaw and the very small sway of his tail. “Soothing me?

“Yes.  Yes, it is.” And Anduin did not regret it one little bit.  He tipped his head down, touching the end of his snout to Wrathion’s brow, right between his horns. “After I pardoned the Stonemasons and Vanessa VanCleef, the Defias splintered.  Mathias suspects one of those factions is being paid with Lescovar coin.  The Baron has always been dangerously ambitious.”

“And so you’re dangling a royal marriage in front of him while your Spymaster roots out his accomplices.” Wrathion let out a hum of approval. “That’s quite uncharacteristically callous of you, to lead a young lady along like that.”

“If her father is arrested for treason, she’ll be Baroness.”

“Hah!” His next laugh was throaty and accompanied by a wiggle from the hooked claws on the bend of his wings. “Anduin, do you plan to defang the nobility by replacing them all with their daughters?”

“It’s worked so far.”

There was more, a more that Wrathion could likely guess without Anduin having to say, and it was just as well, because Renzik chose that moment to walk up to them, patting soil out of his tunic and knocking leaves off his shoulders.  If the goblin was intimidated in any way by the dragons that towered over him, all claws and teeth and drying blood, he didn’t show it.  Anduin had met with the second-in-command of SI:7 only a handful of times; tonight was probably the longest they’d ever been in each other’s company.

His impression so far had been that he and Mathias were very alike. “Okay, I’ve got a game plan for Your Lordships, if you’re done smoochin’.”

He was certainly as frank as Shaw could be. “G…go ahead.”

“Right, so.  Whole reason I brought up the girl is the Spymaster put together a way to get you back in public if all else fails.”

Wrathion tilted his head. “Did he come to the same conclusion about Anduin’s potential to take a visage?”

“Yeah, but he went a step further.  We don’t know how long it’ll take for His Majesty to pick up the knack of it and he needed to be back in Stormwind yesterday.  So.” Renzik clapped his hands together, pointer fingers extended toward the both of them. “We’re thinkin’ a body double.”

It really spoke to the tumultuous events of Anduin’s life that this wasn’t the first time it had been proposed to him that a stand-in take his place.  “He has someone that could pass for me at a social event?”

“You betcha.” Renzik now pointed his fingers firmly at Wrathion.

“This guy here.”

Chapter Text

“Ahhh, you must be Nathan.  Lovely to meet you.”

Wrathion had refused.  The moment that the goblin had opened his mouth, he knew that Shaw’s reasoning was sound, and he had cursed himself to the Nether and back for being so careless as to show his full capabilities with visage.  He had been soundly outmaneuvered, blithely walking into this inescapable situation by being the one to suggest in the first place that he masquerade as someone else while rifling through the Queen’s Wing.  He’d endured that agent’s probing, well aware that everything down to his gestures and facial expressions would make it back to Mathias Shaw, and yet he had allowed the moment to pass with little concern spared for it, having occupied most of his concern elsewhere.  No doubt the Spymaster had long suspected that Wrathion could and did take alternate visages, but until now he’d lacked the confirmation that Wrathion could do it at any time, anywhere.

He had refused, but the plan had been immediately put into motion.  There truly was no better option.

“I hope the abrupt return journey from Gilneas was not too uncomfortable.”

That Anduin had given his express and empathic permission did not make the act of mimicry any less abhorrent.  It was not to say that he had never employed illusions and disguises to pass as people other than himself before: a magical smokescreen and a change of dress had been the topic of Fahrad’s very first lesson the moment Wrathion had learned to reliably and convincingly walk, speak, and act human.  Subterfuge had been his only recourse as a whelp fresh out of its egg, his body too weak for direct combat and his mana, every last meager drop of it, reserved for the orchestration of his father’s demise.  The mastery he gained in those days had proven invaluable once he was free to operate on his own and possessed of enough time and skill to purposefully alter his visage.

After all, it quite defeated the purpose of choosing another face if you could not convincingly act as someone other than yourself.  Once mastered, his skill at transformation had been the sole reason he was not dragged to execution by the enraged Horde or the furious Alliance in the wake of Garrosh’s escape: after all, once parted from the Blacktalon, no method existed to determine which ogre child, arrakoan outcast, or displaced draenei he might be, though the ogre visage had been a spectacular failure as he’d been incapable of acting stupid enough to be convincing.  But when the doomed Admiral Taylor had taken him into custody, it was because Wrathion had allowed him to – having little recourse otherwise, exhausted as he had been by the burden on his mind and body from the constant, complicated spellwork.

Now, matured and at the fullness of his own power, his visage could be almost anyone, limited only by the clarity of their image in his mind.

“Is there something troubling you, my good man?”

Nathan Swail was a man lankier than the Stormwindian average, who carried his height tightly and moved his hands according to strict standards of royal etiquette that had not been enforced since before the First War.  He kept one palm over the back of his non-dominant hand, his fingers straight and his gloves pristine, and bent his elbows just so in order to keep the fold of his hands just above his waist.  Even the part in the plain brown of his hair was impeccably straight, not a strand out of place, and his suit looked to have been freshly pressed this very morning.  That Wrathion caught the uneasy pull at the corners of his mouth at all was because he was looking for it and even then, he suspected that the man would have been able to hide it if he were not already in on the ruse.

“This isn’t going to work.  They’re all going to notice.  They’ll think the King’s gone off his head.”

Wrathion glanced at Greymane, who had dropped into a spare seat in the guest parlor the moment he arrived with Nathan in tow, presumably so that he could glower in disapproval from a good vantage point – but in reality to rest the knee that Wrathion could see was trembling slightly.  He hunched like a gargoyle between the velvet wings of his chair, eyes flinty and his fist tight around the grip of his cane.  He had dressed for the encroaching humidity of early summer, dressed down to waistcoat and shirtsleeves, and seemed more comfortable for the change: he had plenty of breath and energy for blustering displeasure, at least while seated.  Wrathion turned toward him, to which the worgen frowned with entirely justifiable suspicion.

“Can’t you have faith in me, Genn?” Wrathion said with a smile that did not quite reach his eyes.  He lowered his chin just enough to allow blond bangs to droop over his eyes as he did so he held the man’s gaze for the span of a breath, maybe two, before he let his eyelids close with silent exhaustion.  The lay of his shoulders sagged before a willful inhale paired itself with the fingers rubbing tiredly at the bridge of his nose. “That’s all I’m asking.”

Greymane’s face pinched like he’d eaten a lemon. “Stop that.  Don’t do that.  Don’t ever do that again.”

“Well now, that would just defeat the whole purpose, wouldn’t it?” Yet Wrathion chose to be merciful, dropping the affectation as he returned to facing Anduin’s valet, the existence of whom had been both a pleasant and unpleasant surprise, but unpleasant only if he were going to allow himself to be petty.

There was no time for pettiness.  It was already a quarter past nine o’clock and the High King was expected to receive his first visitor at ten. “I am told Anduin’s clothing could not be salvaged after the fire.”

That was the official story that had rolled off the printing presses for this morning’s papers: a fire had broken out in the King’s personal quarters, specifically in his dressing room.  For a mercy, Anduin had not been in the room at the time and the fire had been stopped before it had spread any further, though it would be quite some time before the damages were repaired.  The smoke alone had quite ruined the curtains and furnishings in most of the connecting rooms.  Under the pretense of an illness and then a Royal visit, the King had been sequestered for his own safety while the fire was investigated thoroughly by the Lion’s Guard and SI:7.  All effort had been made to unearth even a sniff of nefarious plotting, not the least because all initial evidence pointed toward the fire as purely accidental, born from a handful of embers and a spattering of wood dust from the hearth.  The extra time that Anduin had been away had only been to make certain it was only an unfortunate mishap.

And how fortunate that that was all it was!  Just a startling and sadly expensive accident!  With the investigation concluded the High King had returned and all was well!  Even the mysterious holes in the castle wall had been found to be the mischief of earth elementals, as testified by High Exarch and Lord Commander Turalyon!  And the King’s vaunted former advisor had made a visit for entirely unrelated reasons but how lucky it was that he could offer his expertise on both fire and stone during his stay!

Wrathion knew of course that the tabloids were busy spinning their own interpretation of events; he had already asked for them to be brought to his study by tonight.  ‘His’ study, insomuch as the finest of the castle guest chambers could belong to ‘him’, connected by a door to this parlor and its modest riot of boxes, trunks, and racks, one of which Nathan went to after his respectful bow.

“Yes.  The daywear was unsalvageable.  Some of the nightwear was in the laundry and I’ve had it brought to the bedroom here.  Your Majesty’s riding gear and armor were safe in – ”

“In the stables and the Royal Armory,” Wrathion amiably supplied when the man abruptly stopped. “If the title is a bit much in private company, it may be dropped.  I have been assured by the Spymaster there are no eyes and ears here other than his own.”

“No, Your Majesty.”

The valet rolled the rack of coats and half-capes to where Wrathion waited, his expression schooled into impeccable politeness. “You are High King.  The proper terms of address are quite clear.”

Wrathion’s brows lifted slightly, before a smile more akin to his own quirked on his lips. “...I see that I am in good hands.”

A very Greymane-ly grumble came from Wrathion’s right. “He’s done a fair bit better than those girls.  The cleaning girls.  They were too scared to come back, begged Tess to let them stay.”

“Can they be blamed, given what they saw?”

Wrathion’s tone was mild, wholly conversational, his eyes upon Nathan as the valet’s quick fingers examined the many hastily-purchased articles of prêt-à-porter fine and fashionable clothing that were all the rage among the growing affluent commoner class in Stormwind.  There had been no opportunity to tailor anything new after the ‘accident’, internal affairs focused understandably elsewhere.  Wrathion would have offered to produce something himself if there had been any time to spare before he was paraded about in the streets in traveling clothes and a very unconvincing hooded cloak.  They’d wanted him spotted so that the newsmen and women would already be flitting about the plaza in front of the castle gates, hoping for something print-worthy in the quiet pre-dawn hours.  He was fairly confident he’d given them the proper sort of pained-but-friendly smile that he’d witnessed on Anduin’s face during their many years of association, though during the six that they had been apart, he had wondered now and then if Anduin had come to present more self-assuredly in public.

When speaking of hs convictions and his faith, he had always been collected and  composed, and recently he had shown a particularly indomitable confidence when mating –

…

Heat prickled on Wrathion’s neck.  A gentle quiver teased between his thighs and he was reminded that he now possessed a cock, which would be rather more obvious if he allowed his mind to drift too much.  Concentrated effort had to be made to change the direction of his thoughts. “Under your successor’s implacable eye is likely the best place they can be.  What of the pair of healers?”

Greymane had apparently had enough of sitting: he rose to stalk between hatboxes and a rolling tower of shoes. “Shaw’s got one, the lad’s probably bound for SI:7 if he’s got the stomach for it.  But the woman’s gone back to the Cathedral.”

The former king’s cane clacked against a table leg to punctuate his annoyance. “I don’t like it.  We should’ve kept her here.  She was as spooked as the rest of them.  What if she goes to confession?  This could easily reach the Archbishop’s ears and that’s the last thing we need.  That man is uncompromising, has been since he took the post – ”

As fantastically amusing as it was to hear Genn Greymane of all people hiss about someone being uncompromising, Wrathion interjected. “While I do believe your concerns are entirely reasonable, I doubt there will be an issue.”

“What?” That was enough to get the wolf to cease his pacing and glare at Wrathion with doubt at what he said, annoyance at Wrathion agreeing even in part with him, and the disquiet that flickered in his eyes whenever he looked at him, but Wrathion had already forgiven him for the disquiet.  It was nothing if not normal. “Why?  How can you be sure?”

Though Wrathion was in the midst of dutifully holding his arms out to be measured against, he did turn his head and offer, with deep warmth: “Faith.”

“...I’m waiting outside.  Hurry up, it’s almost time.”

Wrathion did not jump when Greymane slammed the door behind him, but neither did Nathan.  The man’s eyes were focused entirely on the fold of the sleeve he was quickly adjusting, expertly tucking the fabric inward and stitching it down tight to shorten the length.  Wrathion had leave to merely watch and, he was not at all ashamed to say, pass his expert judgement.  The stitches were good, uniform and smooth, and the valet had chosen a thread as close to the blue of the coat as it was possible to be when working with premade garments.  The draw of such clothing was, of course, how affordable they were: when a large tailoring shop crafted  garments on a set design instead of fitted to specific measurements, they could produce at thrice the rate of a specialty shop, especially if they had a well-trained workforce.  From a distance, this coat in particular, rich navy in a good fabric with a fashionable lay at the collar, would seem as fine as any aristocrat’s; it was only in the small, essential details of cut, fit, and threadwork that the illusion would fade.  There was the plainness as well, the coat bereft of embellishments, but Wrathion could see already that the man had accounted for that: folded upon the nearby end table were the vest, shirt, and silken ascot that would elevate the look.  They had but to add a good pair of cufflinks, a lion’s head pin for the ascot, perhaps a watch and chain and a ring – and indeed, there were jewelry boxes on the next table.

Wrathion hummed to himself and stepped over to inspect the contents of the boxes himself. “You will be taking the day to make adjustments to the evening wear for the party, I take it.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The man did not pause as he spoke, having already moved on to the second sleeve. “I have already chosen the garments.  Would you prefer a cape or a cloak?  Rain is expected tonight.”

There was no getting around the bubble of amusement that wanted to be a laugh, but was not allowed to be, as he was not quite ready yet to hear Anduin’s laugh in his own throat. “A cloak, if you would.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The rest was done in productive silence.  Trousers were hemmed and a vest let out; Wrathion lay out his choices of accompaniments, and the plain cord for his hair.  Ribbons were for tonight; Anduin had never suffered the ribbons except for when he had to look his finest.  For the appointments and duties long delayed, to be put together and wearing a shoulder sash to denote his rank would be enough.  To the relief of anyone with taste, shoulder pads had fallen out of fashion, and were absent everywhere save where they belonged, on armor.  But even without the cumbersome nuisance of them, the act of dressing was a hurdle unexpected: Nathan was immediately present for every article from shirt to trousers, the process obviously familiar, but it was Wrathion who was given pause when he had to move his hands away from his belt or the polished buttons of his coat.  He had always enjoyed dressing Anduin, relishing the time spent with his hands upon fabric and body both, yet it took submitting to another for him to realize that though he had by necessity experienced it during those extreme circumstances of injury and the like, he did not care for it at all.

No, he did not like the feeling of busy, impersonal fingers.

He did not like to stand and merely…allow.

The tension that crawled through his back and shoulders was noticed.  Those swift fingers paused between one button and the next.  But when Wrathion said nothing, nothing was said in return, and dressing resumed.  He nearly asked the man if he had ever considered a change of career, perhaps as a member of a largely clandestine but ultimately meritorious organization that concerned itself wholly with the preservation and stewardship of the world.  Drafting an imaginary salary and a set of duties for a valet in, say, the household of a Gilnean noble he’d like to keep an eye on did much to occupy his mind even as he held his tongue.  In this way, in no time at all, they were finished, and all that was left was to straighten the cuffs at his wrists and turn to face the slender mirror recently set against the wall for his use.

A man that was not Anduin Wrynn looked back at him.  He was a perfect recreation of the resplendent photo that one month prior had dominated the front page of the Stormwind Seabird, the premiere newsprint carried by postship to every corner of the Alliance.  The special edition of the paper had been printed specifically for Anduin’s twenty-seventh birthday, with five full pages dedicated to his life and accomplishments, and Left had dropped it on his desk the morning it was issued before he had even finished opening his mail.  His first thought had been: oh.

He’s grown his hair out.

The High King in the mirror wore his hair nearly to the middle of his back, kept in a raised tail slightly reminiscent of his father’s but not even a quarter as wild, parted neatly so that bangs might frame his face.  Gone was the sunny brightness that had so caught Wrathion’s eye that first morning on the Stair: the color of the strands had deepened with the years, the gold more burnished and full of interesting shadows.  He was clean-shaven, his jaw and proud nose now fitted into strong, straight cheeks that joined at a chin acceptable to Stormwindian standards of masculinity even without Varian’s deep cleft.  His shoulders were sturdy and attractively broad even at rest; when Wrathion changed his posture to raise them and straighten his spine, they lay in a regal line that flowed down his staunch back.  Muscular arms that were corded and tight but not hulking all but disappeared into the expertly adjusted sleeves of his coat, the lines of which drew the eye toward hips that were fetchingly narrow.  Whatever sag might still live in the ready-made fit was lost to the dark colors and the crisp folds in the vest and trousers, all flaws drowned out by the magnificent sash with bright yellow threads woven through Alliance blue, all pinned at the shoulder by the badge of Stormwind: a lion’s profile, ringed by lodestars.

Wrathion had lingered on the photo for longer than was wise.  He had asked himself again, in the privacy of his own thoughts and his office with its closed shutters, if this would be the year.  Not to acknowledge that he gone about it all wrong, having already come to that clear conclusion during long Kun-Lai winters with plenty of time to think, but to admit that to reconcile and beg forgiveness would be to accept at last that nothing had changed.

Every circumstance was still set against them.  They could never be together without consequences.  It would cost more than either of them could possibly give.  That was more true six years later than it had been that fraught night and he had weighed the lifelong bitterness of a wronged lover against the dull, gray selflessness of being the first to say that it was over.

A decision ultimately stayed by Fate’s strange hand.

Or, to speak more accurately, by his dear aunt and whatever dark, arcane spell she had used that hopefully Sabellian would find some hint of while Wrathion was otherwise indisposed.  The division of labor had been his suggestion: Sabellian to the trove of confiscated artifacts, himself to the castle to buy more time, and Ebyssian to remain with Anduin and guide him toward the assumption of a visage, which was extremely ironic, yes, but short of sending for another dragon there was no one else.  He and Sabellian could not swap, as Sabellian was the very last black dragon in the world that had known Onyxia while she had still been alive.  They were whelped within the same century, albeit to different mothers; he knew her before Aberrus, before the Primalists, before the fall of their Flight, in that long-vanished age that had already become myth by the time the first humans huddled around their meager fires in ancient Lordaeron.

They needed to speak, he and Sabellian.  There were questions that could not go unanswered.

“It is truly atrocious to look at, isn’t it?”

So said the High King in the mirror, his arms folded behind his back.  He expected no answer from Nathan, though he saw the man’s reflection freeze for a moment while bent over the wide sewing basket.

“Doppelgangers have ever been the unnerving subjects of nightmares and ghost stories – a cross-cultural thread no doubt spun by encounters with Nathrezim over these many years.” While he spoke, his gaze desired to break contact with its own reflection; he did not allow it to.  He peered unblinking into the clear, dear blue, and felt revulsion roll down his spine. “To most, a Dreadlord is indistinguishable from the original, but to those that knew them best, the replacement possesses a thousand tiny, unnatural flaws.  The copies are disquieting, disturbing.  They haunt the eye.  They should not be, and the mind cannot forget this, once the flaws are known.”

He touched his chin, and allowed his fingers to pass over his Adam’s apple as it bobbed.  He felt his pulse, but not so much as a hint of heat: the dragon that was his true self was as buried as it could possibly be. “For today’s functions I expect no issues, but for Anduin and all those that care for him, may this farce not continue overlong.”

It was quite dangerous to have a personal servant that would dutifully and continuously offer a listening ear, yet even being well aware of that he had still fallen to temptation.  Talking to himself had bred such bad habits.

“I had best not keep the masses waiting any longer.”

When he turned, Nathan was already beside the door, his hands folded; he bowed and opened the way for Wrathion as he passed into the sunlit hall where Greymane was not quite fast enough in moving away from the wall that he had leaned against.  He looked better rested than when Wrathion had last seen him, which had a surprisingly negative effect: without the ghoulish bags beneath his eyes, the untamed moustache, and his snarling scowls, it was easier to see that time had asked its tithe in weight, color, and vigor.  The lines around his mouth and under his brow were many and the pallor of his skin showed the purple threading of veins at his temple and along his neck.  The steely gray of his beard and hair had come to harbor a great many damning white flecks, the neatly trimmed ends almost entirely robbed of all color.

For quite a long time, it had been easy to forget that he was crowned King of Gilneas before the onset of the First War, when Varian Wrynn had still been a child.  When his city fell and his son with it, Liam Greymane had been a man grown, while Anduin was only just leaving his boyhood and Wrathion himself was enduring his excruciating pre-life.  He persisted through two more wars after that, though those were simply the only two of the many conflicts that were officially listed as such in the history books.  He had outlived nearly every one of his peers and all but a scant few of his enemies, and for this triumph he straightened with difficulty and a hard breath, his knuckles white around the grip of his cane.

“You took too long.  It’s five to the hour.  You’re going to be – ”

Greymane stopped and glowered at the arm that Wrathion offered out to him. “No.  Shove off with that.  I don’t need your help.”

“It’s not like that, Genn,” Wrathion replied quietly. “It’ll be more convincing.  That’s all.”

He was close enough to see the man grit his teeth to suppress a shudder.  A tense silence passed between them, before Greymane moved his cane to his other hand and tightly gripped Wrathion’s elbow. “Fine.  You need all the help you can get.”

A reasoning that Greymane no doubt held as they walked around the next corner and through the doorway to the main hall where a throng of the Lion’s Guard elite awaited what they thought was a hand-off from SI:7.  Two neat lines of five, their ceremonial armor an eye-catching uniformity of silver and gold, the flare of an eagle’s wings at one shoulder and sashes of deep blue upon the other, clasped with the proud and ever-present lion’s head.  Though an infusion of light partially obscured their eyes, it was nonetheless possible to see the rush of relief that passed through every pair that landed upon him.  The crisp salutes that they gave him were impressively synchronized: the ringing of metal fists upon their breastplates lingered in the hall as he offered a brisk nod to their captain, a woman that Wrathion remembered by the red curls that wanted to fly out from under her helm.  She had to have been in service to the Crown for ten years by now, since before the Guard was officially formed, and so Wrathion offered a small, quick smile to her.

“I’ve made myself a little late on my first day back,” he said, with a shake of his head at his own foolishness.  He watched the faintest measure of tension disappear from the woman’s neck and shoulders. “Let’s hurry.  And you – ”

He spoke to the last man in the column. “Run ahead and have them form a line outside the second audience chamber.  The one with the desks.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

The Lion’s Seat might have been the most regal and awe-inspiring edifice from which the High King might address civilian, dignitary, and bureaucrat alike, but it was also the most impractical.  Yes, yes, it was of course a sign of clear authority to have all others stand while the King sat, but Anduin had been unexpectedly away for a full month.  There was going to be more to his return than servants stealing glances from out of doors or around corners and a few nobles dropping in to give their well-wishes and hints for a private audience, an expectation proven true before they had gone down more than one full floor.  The moment that they paused at the foot of the staircase so that Greymane could growl that he did not need to catch his breath, an enterprising and notably frazzled gnomish clerk, his green hair wild and his square spectacles askew, came barreling out of a side hallway, losing half of his considerable stack of papers in the process.

“Your Majesty!  King Wrynn!  Please, a moment of your time!  This is urgent!”

His flapping robes and the badge pinned to them identified him as a fiduciary representing a financial trust and this do-or-die run was apparently not his first: when one of the Lion’s Guard stepped forward to bar his way, the man lunged forward in a flawless slide, gliding between the pair of armored ankles and then rolling out of the way of the rest.  True, he shed almost all of what was left of his stack of documents, but the most vital he had in an unshakeable grip close against his chest as he rolled to a stop before Wrathion’s feet.  He popped up right after, holding the thin sheaf up as high as he could.

“The percentage rate of charge for the harbor leases!  It needs your approval!  Half the leans granted by the Royal Treasury are in arrears!  Property holders are sitting on wages waiting for the notification!  The Seamen's Union is threatening to strike if – ”

Hah.  Seamen’s.  The nascent organization had been deep in debate to decide the final candidate for their official name when Wrathion had departed six years ago.  He had chuckled when he had seen the list and he had to take care to catch himself not to chuckle now, making himself instead lift a hand to motion for the Lion’s Guard to hold their positions.  He bent, taking the papers and flipping quickly through them while the clerk panted and wiped at his brow.

“If…if wages aren’t…”

“I understand,” Wrathion said easily and kindly, though his thumb was pressed against a line that had caught his eye. “The effective duration for this, it’s quarterly?”

“Y…yes?” The gnome nervously wiped down the front of his robes. “The peerage was adamant that the rate be more flexible…”

To better harrage the Treasury on the regular to set rates more beneficial to them at any given time, no doubt.  He held the papers down for the clerk to retrieve. “Revise this to yearly, please, and drop the rate by half a percent.”

“But – the agreements – ”

Wrathion smiled, the very corners of it suggesting a wry tone he did not actually use. “Are my responsibility.  I’ll be in the second audience chamber all of this morning, bring the revision there.”

“Yes…,” the clerk stared owlishly for a second longer, then hastily bowed his head. “Yes, Your Majesty!”

And off he went, sprinting back along the trail of papers that he had left behind, and very nearly ran face-first into the knees of the next clerk that had been lurking about in the far hallway.  From the whispers and not-quite-quiet questions that Wrathion could catch, the next person was not the last.  There were a great many people just out of sight emboldened enough to try their luck the moment Anduin returned and Wrathion could almost click his tongue for the audacity.  An even hand and a fair chance at the King’s attention had been Anduin’s style of governance since the beginning, but inevitable was the creep of entitlement and the unfortunately insidious idea that because the King was nice the rules of respecting him did not have to be adhered to so diligently.  After all, the King was kind, he was good and fair, and so what was the harm?

Discussions on authority and the role of protocol had never happened when Wrathion had last been here.  In those days, Anduin was a fool of a king whose primary purpose was his participation in a marriage bed, to the daughter of whichever noble house outmaneuvered the others.  The amount of respect he received, and the tone of that respect, reflected that and though that all did change, it did so after Wrathion had gone and left only his empty promises behind.

He had no right, then, to chide Anduin for how he had chosen to rule, not even in his own head.  So he merely cleared his throat and raised his voice so that it could be heard from one end of the hall to the other.

“Each and every one of you will have your opportunity to speak.  But that will only happen for whomsoever forms an orderly line, at the audience hall, after documenting their need with the palace registrar.” He paused to consider, then added: “It’s going to be first come, first serve.  Audiences end at noon.”

The riot of sound that followed bordered on the outright comical: the shouting, the pounding of feet, the hisses and the curses as bodies and shoulders jockeyed for position while they charged back down whichever way that they had come.  More than a few additional papers were flung out and left to drift sadly down to the rugs and Wrathion had noted even through the din the sound of what was surely an expensive vase shattering on the stones; he knew it must be expensive because he had done much of the decorating himself.  By his best guess there had been at least thirty people crammed into what revealed itself to be a rather narrow side hallway to the service stairs and those were just those among the masses waiting to see the King that knew to take that staircase in the first place.  This suggested that all the rest had been held back by the guardsmen posted along the main thoroughfares of the castle and that the rest was a considerable number indeed.

“This is going to be a long morning,” Wrathion said with a weary sigh as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Let’s go.  And – right, Miss Lily.”

A maid peeking through the crack of a door jumped and gave a little shriek, caught unawares at the sound of her own name, and had to hurry to collect herself before stepping out to give him a deep bow.  She was older than Wrathion remembered: she’d worked in the kitchens at fourteen and now tended to this floor at twenty.  Pink clouded her cheeks, a color that only grew deeper when Wrathion smiled kindly at her.

“Please see to that vase.  But be careful and go to a healer right away if you cut yourself.”

“Y-yes…yes, Your Majesty!”

Wrathion had, of course, been feigning his tiredness.  He was not tired at all.

In fact, when their trek resumed, his retinue on either side and behind, and a silent Greymane on his arm, a feeling related to but not strictly impatience pricked and buzzed and put the smallest spring into his step.  When they at last descended to the main floor with its fine banners and leaping ceilings and knights that stood at quick attention, the sensation popped brightly and became anticipation.  When he spied the wide and restless throng of petitioners and visitors that was more than sixty souls deep, most with scrolls and folios, books and bags, envelopes and lacquer boxes, the feeling that rushed through him then became electric.  His posture was rigidly straight and his eyes were forward and above, meeting the gaze of no one lest they assume they had leave to dart out of the line before he’d even had chance to enter by the far door, but within, beneath the heart he kept steady because it would not do to break out in a flush and a sweat, he was excited.  He was excited to see the long room arranged on his orders: tables once in orderly rows had been pushed to corral people into a column that led to the wide and heavy desk with arching lions carved upon its legs, it and its matching chair set upon a raised platform.  A servant was hastily laying out all the tools of office, the many inkwells and pens and wax heating pans for the seal set into velvet in a golden box that would rest beside his right hand.  The heavy curtains emblazoned with Alliance colors were run to the very end of their rods so that the midsummer sunlight showing powerfully through the dappling of dark clouds could fall directly across the surface of his desk, which was so polished that he could see his reflection in it.

Anduin’s desk.  Anduin’s reflection.  Of course.

“I swear, you love to work,” Anduin had said once, in the dark after the candles had been doused and the space between them reduced to nothing.  That night had been a difficult one, full of second and third drafts, a hundred corrected figures, and a multitude of seemingly polite letters that were really the petty hurdles left by nobles who held no regard for their King. “I don’t know how you do it.”

Even the Wrathion of then had caught the brittle edge to Anduin’s words.  He’d thought to comfort him. “It’s not the work, my dear.  I doubt there is a soul in this world that would enjoy Count Clessington’s expert harassment.”

Anduin’s soft laugh had emboldened him to add: “It’s doing the work well.  I enjoy the opportunity to excel.”

He’d not, at the time, understood the long pause. “I’m sure you do.”

Wrathion had not comforted him at all, but that was the odious certainty of hindsight, which he did acknowledge even as he went against all the good advice he had ever given himself.  If there was ever a time to do well, it was now, as every completed duty and satisfied soul was a confirmation of the stability and normalcy the Kingdom of Stormwind wanted.  So long as they had that, they’d not wonder about the castle wall, or an accidental fire, or the inexplicable return of a black dragon after his inexplicable departure.  That he did this and kowtowed to the provocative rush that came with taking his seat in the wide and heavy chair with its grand, high back could coexist simply because they had to.

There was jostling and whispering at the door.  Wrathion did not look that way; rather, he spent time choosing which instruments of office to have the closest at hand:

The mahogany pen with the golden nib.

The bottle of blue ink, not the black.

The red wax, as a personal indulgence.

Then he raised his head and looked down at the long, long column of people that waited restlessly at the entrance to the chamber.

“The first in line may approach.”

Accepting Wrathion’s suggestion against his better judgement was both a sobering indication of just how much he was willing to compromise with his own rules and a long-awaited and never-expected opportunity.

If Shaw was going to bring an elder child of Deathwing into the very heart of the Keep then he was going to do it with the full intention to carefully and meticulously probe Sabellian for every possible scrap of knowledge about him and his kind, no matter how seemingly irrelevant or mundane.  They’d known of him since the last opening of the Dark Portal: the more reckless of the Alliance sellswords that took the plunge into the unknown had come to the very edge of the shattered Draenor and found a man that claimed to be a human noble.  A preposterous disguise if there ever was one: every single man and woman that had pledged their lives to the Sons of Lothar had had their names diligently logged.  The Expedition had been formed with the full understanding that once through the Portal, there was no promise that any of them would return, alive or dead.  The deployment record was their epitaph, well-preserved and copied in triplicate, and nowhere upon it was the name Sablemane, Baron or otherwise.

It would have been a surprise if the man hadn’t been a dragon: before the final statements reached his desk, Shaw had allowed for the possibility of him being a demon or a deserter turned charlatan, but black dragons had carried orcs and stolen artifacts to Draenor.  They’d left a trail of human lives.  That thread had to lead somewhere eventually.  The scant information they’d acquired about Sabellian had painted an incomplete picture: the Baron was lordly, secretive, and uncompromising, yet he was purported to have friends, contacts and associates throughout the region who were not dragons or orcs.  He was well learned in the arcane and the alchemical and was ruthlessly efficient, yet too passionate in his actions and his violence to be merely an obedient agent of Deathwing.  When he orchestrated the deaths of the gronn that dominated the mountains of Blade’s Edge, he made his motivations clear to whatever mercenary was available to listen to them: revenge.  Justice.  Blood for blood, as was spilled by Sablemane’s children.

Children.  It was a known fact that dragons had offspring: there was always some black market trying to establish itself that offered the whelps as pets or parts, and the Dragonmaw had been breeding them for years.  But Shaw had still stared at the decrypted missives, questioning the verbiage and then questioning himself.  He’d seen dragons disguised as people.  He’d seen them act entirely human.  They raged, they simpered, they schemed; she had, in those few times that he and Lady Prestor had interacted, and it was on official record that he was fooled by her because she’d used magic on his mind.  But where was the magic when it quietly shocked him that a dragon raged and grieved for their children?  Was he fooled by an animal that was only acting like a woman or a man, or had his own biases blinded him to the fact that a dragon was as much a person as any human, with actions and motivations he could not only understand, but extrapolate and predict?

He’d changed his mindset after the Outland reports.  The decades since then had proven it the right move to make.

Shaw had retrieved his notes from those days, the paper thinned by the years but the ink still visible: elder wyrm.  Acc. to Horde, Deathwing.  Key: family.  Ransom; negotiate?  Military op.  Their only viable option at the time had been to take Sabellian down in direct confrontation and it was a course of action that he was loath to offer to Varian, and then to Anduin.  The cost in lives to end dragons of that age and with that kind of strength had been immense: many of those that had chased Onyxia across the sea had returned in pine boxes.  The Horde expedition into Blackrock had fared no better against Nefarian and the myriad of servants and abominations he had at his disposal.  Sablemane, Sabellian, was the last great black dragon threat left after the demise of Deathwing, that only because Anduin had pardoned Wrathion, and his army consisted of even more dragons.

So of course, even with tenuous trust established on Anduin’s orders – he had called it an ask, but it was really an order – Shaw was going to extract the greatest possible advantage for Stormwind and the Alliance through as subtle and thorough and ruthless an interrogation as possible.  He’d spent the earliest hours of the day in furious preparation: he’d had all the retrieved artifacts and materials brought to his fourth office, which remained secure in the wake of the exposure of his third office.  This location was the newest of the lot and downright quaint in its location: the cavernous attic space above the newly renovated grand ballroom in the Keep’s west wing.  The entryway took the form of a spiral staircase behind a false wall at the ground floor, which would have made hauling all those boxes of highly dangerous contraband to the attic difficult if not for Dalaran’s newest spellweave carpets.  The innocuous floating rugs were more than robust enough for the task: they had handled with ease a variety of tables, chairs, shelves, even a lounge, a bed, and a screen for privacy.  The dragon had called himself a Baron by choice; it suggested aristocratic taste, and if he was anything at all like Wrathion, the extra throw pillows and enchanted lighting and the array of foodstuffs to see them through this long work would coax him into relaxing.  His younger self would have found all the effort questionable at best and stupidly misguided at worst, and yet – 

“They tried to hide it.  As if I’ve not had my whelps trying to hide their couplings for ten thousand years.  For twenty thousand!  Did those two honestly believe I’ve not seen every trick they could possibly attempt?”

If Shaw were asked to somehow explain to his younger self that not only had it worked, it had worked so well that Sabellian was stalking about the stylishly appointed attic spitting complaints about how the High King and his lover were choosing to go about having draconic sex, well.

“Your King tried to bury their leavings.  Like a dog.  Offensive, and useless!  He dug nowhere near deep enough.  I could follow their trail all the way to the lake.”

He’d rather not have to explain it.

“Mark my words, they were completely irresponsible about it.  No whelp their age has the capacity to think about what hole they’re using.”

He’d rather his eardrums were still ruptured, if he were entirely honest.

“And your King claimed they didn’t want offspring!  Only to strut about with Wrathion’s stink all over his – hrn.  Here.  Another one.”

Thank the Light.  Sabellian had found another one.  Shaw pushed the ledger he had been using to the side and reached for a thinner folio with a metallic, flickering enchantment stamped onto its dark leather cover.  The first was the catalog he had been working on to log every item, a description of that item, and his recommendation for destruction, retention, or study; so far, neither Wrathion nor his family had expressed a desire to assert any sort of authority and ownership over the belongings of their deceased kin.  Until they did, he was going to operate under the assumption that Stormwind was going to be responsible for the entire cursed hoard.  But the second book, with its ominous coloring and unusually thick parchment paper that took the ink of only a very specific pen, was the far more detailed documentation of those artifacts confirmed by Sabellian to harbor the type of magic they were searching for: augmentation.

Sabellian, his rant interrupted, bent over the long banquet table turned into a macabre display of curios and forbidden tomes, and set his burning eyes upon a slender and deceptively unadorned wine glass infused with some unknown mineral during its making.  At first glance, it was merely colored enough to tinge it toward self-indulgent purple, but Sabellian seemed in no hurry to touch it.  He leaned to either side of it, his gaze tracking from base to stem to smooth rim, then back again, and Shaw, after a few seconds of this, did the same, peering across the wide space that separated the table from his work desk.

When he moved, and the lamplight passed through the glass in a different way, he saw an oily kaleidoscope of off-colors telescoping infinitely inward, into a droplet of pure ink that had a dot of dull, malignant brightness at its very center.  A different light, existing in a different way, all within the glass.

A throb shot through his temple.  He muttered a hard curse and rubbed his watering eye with his one good hand.

“Blast it, is it just more Old God wretchedness?”

“Not just.” Sabellian straightened and reached for another oilcloth out of the stack.  This he draped over his hand before he picked up the glass to take it to a different table.  He muttered every step of the way. “This was partially crystallized during its making.  There’s – something threaded between the grains.  Black flesh, black blood.  Black thoughts.  But it’s all been altered, like the rest.”

When they had started hours ago, in that bleak span between midnight and the morning that was exclusive to thieves and gravekeepers, they had of course started by looking for the obvious: transformation magic.  There were methods of transformation in nearly every school of known magic, from the arcane to the elemental, so that it was harder to find a pathway to power that did not include alteration in some form.  For the young mages in Stormwind’s many academies, hardly a day would pass between a student learning their first polymorph and the transformation of their least favorite classmate.  Those were simple, temporary things, employed as parlor tricks or fanciful funmaking in the form of the cheap wands stocked in every festival stall for Hallow’s End.  Advanced magework applied polymorphs in close skirmishes to disable opponents and at the level of Archmage, long-lasting, powerful, and complex transformations were well-known and well-studied.

They’d found none of that.  Not so much as a hint of its lingering mana signature or a stray note with arcane diagrams in any of the books that were confirmed safe to open with mortal hands.  That had been established before Sabellian had even entered the picture: the moment Shaw could stand and slip the confines of his hospital bed, he’d sent for the best mage among the ranks of SI:7 to do a preliminary evaluation of everything they had to find whatever they could of the spells even remotely similar to polymorphs.  When that turned up nothing, he’d been forced to evaluate the extremely small pool of spellcasters they had to work with.

Druids and shamans were beholden to forces well outside of Stormwind.  Priests usually couldn’t handle the work.  Warlocks would join SI:7 over his dead body.  The Pandaren woman that had spent sleepless nights in this attic with him had done all that she could, as thorough and efficient as her rank demanded, but she was no Archmage and though he had considered the Lord Admiral and the deep affection she had for Anduin, if there was no arcanum to find, then there was no more she could do than his agent.

So where did that leave him?

“As the King’s keeper, have you prepared for the possibility of an unplanned clutch?” With care, Sabellian placed the wine glass beside the four other items they had found so far that had been touched by augmentation magic. “They’ve mated.  Wrathion is his consort.  That would make him your other King.  Or Queen, whatever title you mortals demand.”

“I’m his Spymaster,” Shaw repeated for the third time. “I oversee national security and internal affairs.”

“Their potential brood falls under that oversight, does it not?”

Unfortunately, Sabellian was right, and a horrified migraine had begun to pound in the back of Shaw’s skull the moment the elder wyrm began his diatribe.  Anduin’s attraction to Wrathion had been a known factor since Pandaria: they’d been teenage boys.  They weren’t subtle.  The Mathias Shaw of those days had had to draft a slew of options for dealing with the problem, and this well before their friendship had reached Varian’s ears.  Assassination, imprisonment, ultimatums, whatever might work to pry them apart before Anduin’s father took the most direct route to a solution, though Shaw had never known whether or not Varian would kill the black dragon child that had dared to put hands on his son.  It depended on his temper, on how and when Shaw told him that said friendship had developed to the point where it had crossed a boundary, and what might remain of the brutal fury that had seen Onyxia’s head left to rot upon the gates of Stormwind as a grim and ruthless warning.

Then the trial had happened.  Wrathion had done all the work for him.  Child or not, relationship or no, he was declared an enemy of the state and had an astronomical bounty to go along with his new title.  As far as Shaw was concerned, the only outcome for Wrathion was either imprisonment by the Alliance or execution by the Horde, and the imprisonment was only because the moment where he would have to tell Varian Wrynn that his only son had been intimate with a black dragon had never happened.

Younger Mathias had had it easy.  Younger Mathias did not have to press his not-broken elbow upon the table and cover his badly aching eyes with his palm.

“...yes.  It does.  But – ”

“Then know that I will lobby for the eggs to be brought to the Dragon Isles.” Sabellian’s tone changed.  The annoyance disappeared.  The lecture died.  He rounded on Shaw, his back toward the tables and the work he’d been brought to do, and a blacker, angrier curse went off in the back of Shaw’s mind as he instantly recognized he’d been played.

The visage that Sabellian wore was not the largest man, nor the most intimidating one at first glance, even if his respectable height and width suggested Kul Tiran ancestry over Stormwindian.  The dark braids close to his scalp and gathered at his neck were tight and uniform; his moustache and the patch upon his chin were impeccably groomed.  He had not changed from the robe that he had arrived in, and its cleanliness was maintained by some obviously magical means; its styling was deceptively simple until you noticed that it was real gold woven through the patterning.  He had carried himself with a sober seriousness, even when all he had to say were open and scolding condemnations of king and kin that surely would have had him censured here or back among his own kind.  Yet even without Wrathion’s extravagant presentation and calculated charm, even without doing more than taking a few steps closer, he’d instantly made clear that he had the same demands that Wrathion did.

He was going to be listened to.  He was going to fill the space of the attic with just his straight back and the arms folded behind him.  Shaw was going to look at him and nowhere else.

It was twenty years ago now that Mathias had stood atop one of the golden, rolling hills of Westfall and watched the fields burn.  The sun had bled its fading light into the smoke and the flames, and the shadows of the men that fled from their safehouses in barns and cellars had been long.  They’d been so long.

Sabellian’s eyes were the color that had lived between the blood, the fire, and the dark.

The fingers on Shaw’s left hand curled one by one.  There was a dagger and a pistol housed beneath the desk; they wouldn’t do any good.  A black dragon was in the Keep again under his watch.  He’d let it in.

There was, and had been, Wrathion.  But that wasn’t the same.  He wasn’t, and hadn’t been, the same.

Somewhere in the attic, a timber cracked and shivered.  Sweat tracked in a line next to his ear.  His fingertips, dotted with ink from his notetaking, slid wetly against his palm.

“That’s a decision for your family to make together – ”

The muscles at the corners of Sabellian’s eyes tightened.

“ – isn’t it?”

There was no other change.

Not until the count in Shaw’s head had reached just past ten and Sabellian turned away from him to once more busy himself with the table and a reply that was devoid of anything save for the words themselves. “There will be a discussion.”

Watery weakness wanted Mathias to slump in his chair.  He didn’t.  He compartmentalized it, because he had to, because there was today and there would be tomorrow, and tomorrow hadn’t yet come.  Today was for the five items that had been plucked from the cache of treasures that had belonged to the beast, the woman, that had nearly brought Stormwind and the Wrynn dynasty to ruin.  These were what the first black dragon in this Keep had felt so necessary for her desires that she had shaped them herself, in the company of only herself, in the deep and in the dark where even her family could not find her.  Five was all that there would be: the silent morning became the afternoon, and then the night, and the black folio that Shaw, exhausted and sagging, carried to an enchanted safe that would do nothing to keep a black dragon out if it really wanted in – those papers were home to only five lines.

The wine glass.

A length of black rope.

A low, ornate metal stool.

A basin.

And a knife.

Chapter Text

“I think that went wonderfully.”

Genn was going to have a stroke.  Just a week ago he had cursed both the Gilnean Royal physician and the Abbess of the Charterhouse of the Reach for even suggesting that his blood pressure was the most immediate threat to his health.  His blood pressure!  That Mia had taken him to task for blasphemy immediately thereafter might have cooled his offense but it had done nothing for his stubbornness.  Blood pressure.  The cure for which was an invalid’s diet, the confiscation of his pipe, and an hour’s daily contemplation as prescribed by the Abbess, which did not have to be over the Agpeya of the Holy Light but it was certainly what she recommended.

He hadn’t openly scoffed; Mia would’ve had him sleeping in the coach house if he had.  But he had scoffed in his head up until this very moment, in which his chest squeezed and a wild throb went off in his temple.

“You cleared the whole line.”

Across from him, the ghastly copy of Anduin Wrynn conjured up by foul magic did not so much as look up from the stiff booklet of notes – notes! – that had been his companion for the entire four hours that he had met petitioners, two beyond the original cut-off that he had stipulated, or so Genn had been told by the castle custodian.  Genn had fallen asleep in the upholstered audience seating that lined the walls, roused only mid-afternoon by the gentle shake of the mimic himself.  He had shed a rolled neck pillow and a light blanket as he had jerked to confused consciousness, which had only made his mood that much worse.

“Yes?” The copy said at last, mildly. “That should temper the amount of visitors for a few days.”

Genn made himself take as deep a breath as possible. “That line should have taken a few days.”

“Surely it’s in our best interests to keep callers to a minimum?”

He pressed his palm against his face and dragged it down.  He told himself that even if the Royal carriage they occupied was magically soundproofed, when they arrived at Stormwind Cathedral he would still have to somehow explain why he had strangled the High King unconscious.

Unconscious.  Just unconscious.  Genn didn’t want Wrathion dead. “Yes, but you’re supposed to be convincing.  Anduin wouldn’t have – ”

He caught himself.  His jaw clenched.  He dropped his hand and pressed the knuckles of his curled fist against the plush upholstery of the seat, so that the silver and blue patterning dipped and distorted.  Wrathion was looking at him now, though he had not raised his head: he had merely glanced up, through the fall of blond recently combed, with an expression clearly waiting for Genn to say what they both knew, but that the former King would not bring himself to put into the air.

Genn was the one that looked away first.

The windows were just as enchanted as the finely finished walls and the gnomish steel springs that kept the ride luxuriously smooth: he could see the throngs of people that walked streets slowly begin to thin, citizens driven inside as the late afternoon sun bore down on the city, but they could not see him.  When a child pulled upon his mother’s hand and waved excitedly, it was toward the frosted lions that reared and roared upon the glass, and not the impenetrable darkness behind them.  Or maybe it was the four brilliantly white geldings that had him bouncing from foot to foot; Liam had been the same about horses when he’d been a boy, immune to every stern look and authoritative shushing the moment he spotted a handsome beast that caught his fancy.  The carriage and its impressive team had been a gift from Countess Clessington on Anduin’s twenty-fourth birthday, as much a show of her gratefulness for SI:7 exposing her father’s treasonous attempts at a void pact as it was a public assertion of her full support for the Crown.  The private declaration of the same had taken place a little before that, when the Countess had routed her father’s supporters from her estate, and then the estates of every branch family.  She had done so bloodlessly, approaching second, third, and fourth sons and daughters with the same offer: minor titles of lower rank that could not be inherited, but with an allocation of land that could.  Houses emptied, suddenly bereft of the vital capital that was marriages, alliances, and mentorships; hereditary ranks in the army had already been eliminated, a quiet change overlooked when the profits of reconstruction were at their all-time high.

And who was it that had slipped that line into the ten-year budget plan for the military?  Who had made arrangements four years earlier to keep land parcels in reserve during the first waves of allotment?

Anduin.

In the newsprints and in the signature inked on a library’s worth of Royal decrees, it was and had only ever been Anduin.  As far as the clerks, counselors, calculators, and treasurers knew, the constant shadow at the King’s side was ‘advising’ on other, much more obvious fronts, acting as little more than a secretary during the day and occupied with his true purpose at night, and perhaps a bit into the morning, if the King was late getting to his first appointment.  But this was an unspoken understanding that never slipped beyond the castle walls; there could have very well been a war still going on from how ruthlessly tight Shaw kept his grip on rumors and hearsay.  The Stockades became the new residence of droves of spies and aristocratic informants; castle staff that broke ranks were suddenly “on loan” to the Proudmoore Admiralty.  Everyone else that minded their business and turned a blind eye had wages higher than any knight or servant had known since before the First War.  Outside of the Keep, Wrathion barely existed: it was known that he had remained in Stormwind after N’zoth’s defeat, he was spotted on the regular in the Trade and Mage Districts, but he and Anduin were never together in public, with the exception of the day that the Black Prince had been granted a Royal pardon for his role in the Legion’s third invasion and the death of Varian Wrynn.

Genn hadn’t been there.  He hadn’t been able to stomach it.

And – Anduin had tossed him out, after a confrontation he was ashamed to remember.  He had barred him from the city entirely for the duration of the audience, ceremony, and enactment, and though the boy hadn’t made the temporary exile official, he’d damn well made sure that Genn couldn’t defy him exactly like he had been planning to: Turalyon hadn’t detached from him until he’d walked Genn through the door of his own gods-damned manor.  The trip back to Gilneas was how he’d learned that not only did the Lord Commander never sleep, he was so doggedly, blindly loyal to the Crown that his flat, unblinking stare had been his only reply to Genn’s suggestions that Anduin had been purposefully led astray.  To what purpose, he hadn’t known, but the fury and the contempt that had been boiling in his belly since his return from Nazjatar hadn’t needed any more reason than what had already been laid out before him.

The scars of that rancor ached.  They wanted him to press the heel of his palm against his chest so that they might be soothed – or overcome.  Quashed.  He closed his eyes and let the headrest cup the back of his skull.  He kept his hands where they were.

“You’re doing it again.” Genn spoke and could immediately feel the press of Wrathion’s gaze.  If he cracked an eyelid to look, the color would be blue, but since he didn’t, in his mind’s eye there was only the red that had become just as familiar to him as the years had marched mercilessly on.

“He can’t be like you.”

Pages rustled.  A pair of leather covers closed with a quiet tap.

“Are we really going to open a discussion on hypocrisy on our way to Mass?”

The reply was wrong.  It was all so wrong: the cool, unhurried venom of it.  The unflappable calm.  The measured softness pulled over tooth and claw, though with Anduin’s voice the veil was hung across gleaming steel instead.  He shouldn’t have been able to picture Anduin’s face, he shouldn’t have let himself do it, but there he was, the King that had never been.

The stature of this King wasn’t much changed.  It didn’t have to be.  In the width of his shoulders and at his full height, Anduin Wrynn was by every measure the same as his father.  He had less than half the bulk, but Varian had been known for it, exceptional among his men and in the eyes of his enemies, and Genn had never expected it of Anduin – never expected, but had thought, more than once, that it would do the boy good if he took after his sire in that way.  His coloring, the shape of his face, how soft his voice could be, even how he would hold his book of psalms when he’d read by a window, these were all the features and habits of his mother, though Genn had hardly met her more than Anduin had.  The very first time, on the day of the Royal wedding in the rebuilt Cathedral, she had offered him a shaky curtsey and a smile that was too sincere and too shy and when he had frowned, Mia had pulled him aside and told him to be gentle.  Gentle!  Had the Horde been gentle?  Were the unchecked rumors of necromancy in the north, ogres in the south, and rampaging dragons in the east cease simply because she needed the world to be more kind?  He’d not been allowed, and Mia had hovered to make sure that he did not, but someone must have spoken to Tiffin eventually: when he came to congratulate the King and Queen on the birth of their new prince, the only softness she showed was to the child in her arms.  When she thought that no one was looking, her fingers would gently trace his sleeping brow and thumb his round cheek, while all others were greeted with the appropriate distance and a more upright, regal carriage, her eyes forward, her chin raised, her arm a solid barrier between the Prince and the hostile reality that he’d been born into.

That was really the heart of it.  It wasn’t a lack of strength.

“Well?  We are almost there.  Must I order you to elaborate, Greymane?”

The King that never was – he was not a gentle man.  He could be good and he could be honorable, as devout and righteous as the martyred men on whose backs the modern Stormwind had been built, but he was not kind.  On the battlefield he was both stalwart beacon and bloodied standard, a broken sword in one hand and an orcish head in the other, and the splashes of crimson only made his lion-headed armor gleam all the brighter.  As a head of state he was decisive, authoritative, and as efficient as he was self-sufficient; what counsels he had were for the distribution of his word as it became law.  His people and his country were his one true devotion: in their defense, he would show a ruthlessness that his enemies would never forget, and his peers would fall in line with the decisions that he had made for the good of the kingdom.

But more than anything, he wasn’t gentle.  He wasn’t kind.  He was a hard, uncompromising man that didn’t know how to talk to his children but he didn’t need to know because he could make himself understood.  He acted in their best interests.  They knew that.  His people knew that.  He was a King that never doubted himself or any choice that he had made.

Liam had started drinking after the city fell.  He took to the bottle like it was an old friend.

“No, you don’t, and stop that.  I’m not attacking you.” It took effort to sit upright again.  There were the aches and pains, the same as there always was, but there was the heat, too: this summer was becoming hotter than most and this expensive bribe hadn’t been enchanted for cooling despite all the rest of its annoying extravagance.  The heat pressed into the back of his skull, a relentless distraction, and it wanted to upset the steadiness of his gaze when he looked back at Wrathion at last; he didn’t allow it to.

Wrathion scoffed.  It was so characteristically Wrathion that seeing it on Anduin’s face felt like the worst sort of parlor trick and the toss of his head was how Genn came to notice that the dragon wasn’t sweating.  Aggravating. “Pardon my incredulity.”

Genn ignored the bait meant for his temper. “Don't be so damn thickheaded.  I'm trying to help you.”

Now it wasn’t a scoff; it was a laugh, a chuckle that rolled his shoulders forward, so that even his blasted posture suggested derision. “Help?  Me?”

Genn’s temper had its way. “Yes, you, you smarmy, insufferable, mulish, know-it-all twat of a dragon!”

Wrathion apparently hadn’t anticipated the volume of Genn’s sudden shout nor its contents: he was briefly frozen in the midst of raising his fingers to stroke at the beard that was not currently present on his face.  Genn was not at all sorry for the lurid sense of pleasure he got at seeing Wrathion take a few moments to just blink and look at him, very obviously forced to rearrange his thoughts.

“...twat?”

He hadn’t denied the rest; Genn could almost laugh himself.  It was his turn to have a very good idea of what Wrathion had expected, and it was not being told he was an annoying little prick. “You’ve been giddy all morning.  You were practically skipping all the way to that desk.”

“Ah, so I should have trudged like a prisoner on his way to the gaol?  Anduin may not like the drudgery of bureaucracy but even he – ”

“That’s not what I meant.  You were thrilled.”

Wrathion’s expression slowly closed.  At his side, where the booklet rested on the seat, his fingertips tapped at the leather; the pattern was uneven, never quite the same order.  Anduin had given Genn guarded looks plenty of times, and he had definitely deserved them each time, but Wrathion’s inevitably made Genn bristle because they had always seemed like they were assuming something.  Like they knew something about what Genn meant, or what he had said, or what he had intended to do, as if the dragon had long ago pried apart the King of Gilneas and preemptively judged every flayed layer.  It seemed so clear to him that Wrathion, with his lips thinned and his gaze slicing relentlessly into his own, knew more about Genn than Genn knew about himself.  It had infuriated him.  It could very nearly infuriate him now.  No matter how many times the Abbess told him in confession that that was how it was for everyone, he never felt more helpless than he did when it seemed like nothing he did would ever really change anything about himself.

Genn’s chest felt as though a great, cruel hand was forming an iron fist within it.  The back of his neck was hot and his cravat felt too tight around his throat, horrid in how it had gathered up all his sweat.  Nonetheless, he took his deep breaths – he counted with each one, a habit now truly ingrained – and went on.

“You have Anduin doing things just the way you want them done.  You couldn’t be happier.” It was no surprise at all that Wrathion immediately stiffened; the flash of searing anger, the grit teeth, the quick swell of argument, all those things, Genn had anticipated. “Stop, let me finish – ”

He did not.  Rage transformed the visage of Anduin into a person that could only be Wrathion.  He didn’t lift from his seat; rather, he filled it more than he had the moment before, his presence weighty as an anvil and hot as a forge.  If he were on a battlefield, wreathed in the Lion’s armor, he would be a sight to behold. “If you think for one moment that I have designs on usurping Anduin – ”

“That’s not what I said.”

“But it is certainly what you have believed,” the dragon hissed back and Anduin had never looked so openly hostile.  So capable of hostility. “How did you phrase it again, in those last drafts of yours?  Ah, yes, nefarious insurgency.”

When Wrathion saw Genn pale, a smile curled faintly upon his lips. “Your communications with your captains have never been as secure as I’m sure you would have liked them to be.”

Of course.

Of course; the frigid jolt of shock couldn’t even last for very long when it made a deplorable amount of sense that Wrathion could, would, and had been spying on Genn and Gilneas for years.  He might have even been disappointed if he hadn’t, not only from the insult of it but also because that would mean Wrathion was nowhere near as ruthless as he had originally believed.  Genn would have done the same; he had even tried to do the same, though the Greyguard were stretched thin and ten years of isolation had put them well behind in the arms race that was international espionage.  Chasing Wrathion was like chasing a ghost; mere months after his expulsion from Stormwind he had vanished entirely, and resurfaced only years later, and after all this time, he had to admire it.

He did admire it.

That, too, was really the heart of it.

“Anduin already knows.” There was nothing for it; Genn could only lift his hand and do what he could to wipe the sweat from his brow and the bridge of his nose. “Before you go crowing about it, it wasn’t Shaw.  I told him.  I admitted it.”

“And how did Anduin take your little treason?”

Little treason.  What a way that was of putting it.  Humiliating and too accurate by far: Genn Greymane had begun to build a case for a motion of no confidence, not against Anduin, but against Wrathion, on the grounds that the advisor was at the very least unsuited for his position, if not outright attempting to wrest control of Stormwind away from its rightful King.  At the time, there had been no shortage of evidence for a campaign against Anduin reputation and authority: between the aristocracy incensed at the reclamation of private lands and the peasantry railing against an armistice devoid of reparations for the thousands dead, his position had grown more precarious by the day.  Their allies had begun to turn their eyes away, drawn into their own internal affairs: the night elves had had every reason to begin a withdrawal from the Alliance, placated only at the last moment by the death of Sylvanas Windrunner, and even then tensions had been high when her body had been remanded to the Horde.  And then the sale!  That blasted sale.  Since Genn had been a child, the House of Wrynn had been a figure of enduring prominence amongst the southern nobility.  He’d played in their apple orchards during diplomatic visits.  He had admired their stables and vast fields.

Gone.  All gone.  There, still, if he wanted to visit them in person, but gone into ink and paper and whatever cursed reasoning Anduin had given to Jaina that had her go along with the mad, incomprehensible plan that could only be attributed to one person.

Genn would have done anything to get rid of him and that “anything” became casting public doubt upon Anduin’s authority and judgement.  No one outside of the castle knew just who it was that was really to blame, but he did, and he wasn’t going to just let another black dragon attempt to ruin the Wrynns from within.  Anduin had asked him to wait, to be patient, to trust; that was all that he had asked of him.  Just his faith, and to stand aside, and how could he?  How could he?

He could never make Anduin see reason.  The next course seemed obvious.

“He didn’t speak to me for two years.”

Genn had gathered his hands in his lap, his fingers laced together.  Through the fabric of his gloves he could feel the calluses and the thick coil of uneven scars from powder burns. “Not the way we used to speak.”

He’d still been King himself, then.  They’d still been in the Alliance.  But Genn had learned years ago, and had somehow forgotten in the interim, that you could live in the same house with someone and still never speak to them at all. “I should’ve been clapped in irons for sedition, but you know how he is.  He’s gentle.”

The carriage had grown more quiet.  The pace had slowed; a glance outside the window showed them turning onto the main street outside Cathedral Square.

“Mm.  He is.” Wrathion’s words came slowly and full of caution.  Guarded, again, as if watching for which would happen: what he expected, or what he didn’t. “I certainly would’ve found a tower to confine you to, if the choice were mine.”

The lightness suggested a joke.  Genn didn’t take it that way. “That’s what I’ve got in mind for you if you cock this up.  Get your claws out of our affairs and put you somewhere you can’t weasel out of.”

“I’m touched.  I would’ve thought execution your preference.”

He wasn’t wrong.  It had certainly been what he had advocated for the moment he was informed of just who it was that Magni had brought directly into the heart of the Alliance without so much as prior word, though Genn could more than understand his reluctance to do so.  Begging for forgiveness was better than the gates that would have been barred well before he and Wrathion had arrived, with rows of soldiers on the battlements and every spear-thrower readied to down the beast the instant he tried to transform, or so Genn had growled when Alliance leadership had convened to discuss N’zoth’s rise and Wrathion’s proposed response to it.  The dragon had chosen exactly the opportune moment to worm his way back into Anduin’s life; he had emerged during the only crisis that could have possibly superseded the Legion.  He had positioned himself to escape every consequence for every crime he had ever committed and no, Genn hadn’t changed his mind and ended his treason before it began because he realized that Wrathion’s death would destroy Anduin or that Varian had made a choice that day that belonged to him and him alone.  He’d been well aware of both.  He’d still thought his course of action the right one.

“It used to be.”

Curiosity perked Wrathion’s brows.  Interest had him slip a little out from under his ironclad caution; it always did. “Oh?  Did my selfless commitment to the greater good finally – ”

“We’re too much alike.”

Of all the replies that Wrathion had no doubt imagined during this conversation and all their clashes throughout the years before, the one that Genn gave was so far from the one that Wrathion thought he would receive that his surprise was downright comical – downright Anduin.  The slack jaw, the obvious flush brought about by the unexpected fluster, the droop to broad shoulders, and that blinkered look like a boy that’d just been shucked off his first pony.

Liam had hidden his tears when that had happened.  Genn had boasted he’d never seen his boy cry again after that; only an old man would wonder if his son had just gotten better at hiding it.

“I’m trying to help you.” Genn had to repeat himself because Wrathion had done it again: led him in circles, away from his point and purpose.  And – he didn’t say it enough.  Even when he had the chance to, he didn’t, and the Abbess claimed that Liam would forgive him, if he could, but the if was all that he heard. “Because you’re me.  You’re my gods-damned spitting image.”

Wrathion was speechless.

From offense, judging by his expression of thunderstruck disbelief.  His face seemed not to know where to go from that: outrage did flicker, biting brightly in his eyes, but the confusion was just as strong and busy twisting his mouth into interesting shapes.  His brows furrowed deeply but his cheeks burned, highlighting the long-faded freckles and the small scars left by the acne that had tormented Anduin at age fourteen, a detail that Wrathion had committed to dutiful memory despite how unflattering it was.  Unsuitable pep and gentility aside, his reconstruction of Anduin was immaculate, and if this was six years ago, or three, or less than half of one, he’d rail against the dragon for his obsession and pull Shaw aside to lay down the foundations of a coordinated response if Anduin suddenly became someone else.

What Genn did now was roll his eyes.  This, this, was to Wrathion the worst thing that Genn had ever said to him.  Unbelievable. “You’ll catch flies with that mouth.”

Wrathion closed it.  Briefly. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.”

“Have you seen a healer to discuss the onset of dementia?”

Genn waved him off.  The carriage had stopped and he could hear the coachman climbing down from the driver’s seat.  The footmen in their blue and white livery had stepped down from the boot to flank the door.  They’d not open it, not until a signaling knock from within, but neither he nor Wrathion reached out to give it.  The dragon’s tone had been flippant, but his eyes made a demand.  The rage was still there, bubbling ominously beneath his expression of schooled skepticism, and the rage would not have them leave this carriage until Genn had somehow satisfied it, an outcome which Wrathion doubted with every inch of himself.

Genn admired the intensity of it.  He applauded the conviction.  He hated the part of himself, long unsatisfied, that felt fulfilled at last.  He could spit from how he hated it. “Anduin can’t be me, just the same as he can’t be you.  But the difference between you and me is that I’ve stopped trying to make him like me.”

“I’ve never possessed the intention to change him.”

“I know.” Genn would have known what it would look like if he had.  To even bring up the topic of mirrors, and the images viewed therein, was trite, and pointless, and not what he wanted to say. “But you have your plans, and you tell him how he fits into them, and he does his best for you because he loves you.”

This shock was more subtle.

Raw, quiet, almost unacknowledged.  The rage fell away and in its place was just nothing, his whole person absent of all the cringing and horror of just a moment before.  The lines of his face were smooth.  His lids had lowered, and the high color had faded.  If not for the subtle motions of his breathing, he’d be nearly indistinguishable from a waxwork facsimile of the High King.  If there was any impression left at all, it was that Wrathion could have been an outside observer peering in on a conversation he wasn’t really a part of, studying the intricacies of it but left untouched by them.  It left plenty of room for the assumption that Genn had been entirely wrong about him, imagining parallels where there were none, and it’d not be the first time he would have to confess to the Abbess that he’d reverted to old ways.

But he didn’t think he was wrong.  Not this time. “Don’t be like me.”

Genn shifted in his seat and reached out to rap his knuckles on the door, only to have his wrist caught by Wrathion.  He didn’t react as quick as he used to, but the dragon also didn’t put any of his strength into it, not even a mortal man’s strength, and when Genn jerked his hand away he did so easily.

“What?” He bristled hotly; he wouldn’t be manhandled. “I said my piece.”

“I just want to ask – ”

Genn glowered, but didn’t stop him.  Wrathion took that as an invitation to go on. “What made you abandon your plans?”

“What?” He asked again, less hotly.

“Your treason.  What caused you to reconsider?”

On the one hand, Genn felt that he was being insulted, as if he were incapable of changing his mind and coming to new conclusions on his own without someone or something forcing him to do it.  On the other hand, Wrathion was right, and his temper cooled as quickly as it had risen when he realized what the question meant.

“Oh.  So you don’t know.” Genn said softly, a sudden serenity in his words. “All those spies, and you don’t know.”

The corner of one of Wrathion’s eyes twitched. “...yes.  That’s why I am asking.”

For a beat, Genn didn’t say or do anything.

Then, before Wrathion could stop him, he knocked his knuckles on the window and stood up. “We’re ready to disembark.”

“Wait – ” 

The door opened.  Sunlight flooded in.  Genn squinted his eyes and raised his hand to shadow them and the gesture was all he needed in order to hide his grin.

“Brother, have you ever considered killing someone that was not an enemy?”

Sabellian had clearly not been anticipating Wrathion’s sudden question.  Neither had Nathan, but the valet made an effort not to twitch or start in surprise, whereas the other dragon had no problem looking up from one of Onyxia’s deemed-safe magical tomes to stare at Wrathion like he were a clown in a King’s half-buttoned waistcoat.

“No?” Bushy brows pushed together. “What have you done?”

“Why is it always that I must have done something?” Wrathion asked lightly, though he did not truly need an answer.

Sabellian gave it anyway. “Because you can’t stop yourself from doing things.”

Wrathion clicked his tongue. “I have been assaulted with just so many lectures recently.  I swear, you all are conspiring against me.”

The other dragon snorted and did not justify Wrathion’s reply with a response.  Recent though their relationship may have been, it had developed enough to the point where his older sibling could glean that what Wrathion said was really a veneer over some other topic.  If Wrathion wanted to share said topic, then he would, and when he didn’t, Sabellian did not press him.

Wrathion admired and appreciated his sagacity, because he did not want to admit that he’d spent the entire hour and a half Mass tearing through his memory of every Blacktalon report he had read on Genn Greymane from the last six years that might give him the slightest clue as to what event or person or event and person had led the man to abandon his treason.  It was to his benefit that the High King’s return had been so abrupt: Anduin’s habit for years had been to graciously read a handful of passages from the Patericon of the Holy Light whenever his schedule allowed him to attend services in the Cathedral.  Against all odds, he had done so at least once a week since he had been crowned, with the only exceptions those times he occupied the battlefield or had worldly threats that demanded his entire attention.  It did wonders for his public perception, especially among the older members of the citizenry, and helped his reputation tread water during those first two tumultuous years of changes, holding the possibility of a bloody coup at bay through the threat of a peasant revolt.

Such things never entered Anduin’s mind at all, of course.  Wrathion thought of them, yes, but though there was much he had come to regret about how he approached his relationship with Anduin, his choice to never intrude upon his love’s faith had been the right one.  Anduin was – he was always happy on those days.  He would take his own copy of the Patericon, well-read and well-loved with his chosen passages earmarked, and he would have walked through the city himself to attend Mass if everyone around him had not advised against it.  Over breakfast, he would thumb through the pages, and though it was some months before he did so, he eventually spent the time telling Wrathion which saintly tale or sacral lesson he had chosen for that day, and why, and the many interpretations of it since its writing.

At first, his excitement had been…not shy, but reserved.  More than once, he would add at the end of long explanation:

“Sorry.  This must be terribly uninteresting.”

“Anduin Llane Wrynn,” he would say each time. “To experience your passions firsthand is a gift I relish whenever I receive it.”

That, too, had made Anduin happy.  Wrathion had reason now to doubt how he thought things had been between them in those days, but the small, flushed smile that always followed remained so clear and certain in his memory that even with Greymane’s damned mystery and no true faith in his own heart, he would have made every effort necessary to properly communicate the next passage marked in the book by Anduin’s bed to a cathedral full of parishioners.

His commitment to Anduin’s piety had been rendered moot by a singular individual: Archbishop Photius, who for the last twelve years, since the very first day he took up his duties as the new head of the Church of the Holy Light, had kept such a strict sacramental schedule that there would be no off-the-cuff sermons, not even from the High King himself.  If Anduin, recently returned from Gilneas, wished to resume his participation, he had to first submit his chosen day, time of service, and which liturgical book he would be utilizing, no nevermind that Anduin always used the same one, at least two weeks in advance.  For a man of forty Photius was shockingly young to have ascended to his position, only to startle newcomers with a mind as sharp as a spire and an approach to the practice of Light orthodoxy as brassbound as an army sergeant.  Many were the tales of new acolytes given a hundred pages of the Agpeya to copy after lighting the transept candles in the incorrect order and veteran lectors with sixty years of faithful service corrected on their pronunciation of names out of the Arathi hagiography.  Knowledgeable, erudite, and deeply faithful, the Archbishop did not drink save for wine during specific rites, restricted himself to a rigid pescetarian diet, had never married nor courted, did not attend lay entertainment, wrote extensively but only on the topics of the Light, its history, and its worship, and had not once cursed in his entire life, not even in the name of those deities and/or Titanic precursors that did not fall under the purview of the Church.

That Greymane was so leery of him was understandable.  And perhaps Wrathion would have soothed his concerns if the man had not sat beside him for the entire Mass and moved to cover his smirk every single time Wrathion dared to glance his way.  Genn had absolutely radiated smugness for the duration, save for that stretch in the middle where he had nodded off and was allowed to drowse for several pages because despite his severity of character, Photius was unfalteringly kind to children, the infirm, the needy, and the elderly.

Wrathion had remarked on that fact in passing to Greymane on the carriage ride back to the castle.

The man had returned with: “Worried I’ll take my secret to my grave, eh?”

There would have been no excuse he could have given when they arrived at the Keep as to why the former King of Gilneas had been throttled into unconsciousness, and so Wrathion had had to stew instead of act upon his impulses.

“Will you use the wolf pin or the lion pin, Your Majesty?”

“One of the lions, if you will.  I’ve had enough of wolves.”

Wrathion had arranged his hair – Anduin’s hair – how he liked in the mirror; after this morning, he could not bring himself to allow the ever-polite valet back at him with a brush and ribbon.  Rather than a tight tail, he chose to let nearly all of the gold sweep down from his head and past his shoulders, gathered by the blue bow halfway down its length.  A few gentle snips on either side created the effect of his bangs layering into a romantic swoop toward his shoulders.  Anduin had always been self-conscious about wearing his hair loose in public, but if Wrathion’s experience with it in private were any indication, he was doing himself a disservice.

“Use the…ah, I know, does he still have the one in the Pandaren style?  A quilen’s head, with blue gems for eyes.”

“Yes.” One of the many jewelry drawers rattled.

Sabellian grunted and snapped his tome shut; it gave off black sparks, which he ignored except to flick them off the tips of his fingers. “You’ve taken well to this lifestyle.”

“Hm?” Wrathion was slightly bent, allowing Nathan to tie and pin the silk around his neck.

“The reverence.  The servants.  As you should.” There was an undeniable thread of approval in Sabellian’s words. “As their King’s consort you hold the second highest authority in the land.  Their behavior should reflect that.”

Wrathion and Nathan paused in the same moment.

It was possible in that resounding silence to hear the gnomish timepiece clicking quietly upon the mantle or, in Wrathion’s personal case, the previously-steady thumping of his heart.  Even in his irritation at Greymane it had remained determinedly calm, as it must: any excess of emotion would be quite visible on Anduin’s face.  He had always flushed so easily.  If Wrathion was not careful, if he was not mindful, then he would feel what he felt now: the faint prickling of blood, gathering at the height of his cheekbones.

So too did he feel a stirring in his manufactured lions.  His breath hitched.

All these things, he slammed an uncompromising hand down upon, quashing them mercilessly before he replied. “Unfortunately brother, there are many conditions our relationship must meet before it will be acknowledged by humans.  I have no authority at present, save for what a borrowed face allows me.”

“Hmph.” Sabellian crossed the room to hover next to him; his shoulder was a handspan above Anduin’s.  It was easy to forget, especially when he was paired with Ebyssian’s substantial tauren visage, just how large of a man he was. “You’ve mated with him – recklessly, I’d add.  The midst of a crisis that you said you would solve is no time to nest.  The instinct to go to brood will override – ”

Sweat dotted Nathan’s forehead.  Wrathion could see it as the man worked at the many pearl buttons of his waistcoat.  That his fingers could still be so steady was truly impressive.

“ – and if he is returned to a mortal shape, then what of the whelps?  What life will you cosign them to, when half their parentage has vanished into smoke?”

Sabellian had grown heated.  His voice had risen in volume and intensity.  When Wrathion looked at him, the other dragon’s eyes were as stones pulled from a pyre, bright with heat but hard, so unflinchingly hard.  It was a look that would not allow Wrathion to slip away without a true response and the weight of it was felt by more than just himself: Nathan, when he rose to retrieve the boots that Wrathion was to wear, scuffed his heel upon the edge of the rug that had given him no trouble mere moments before.

It could have also been the fact that the man was now privy to knowledge that would have him roasted alive if he were to share it.  Or, more likely, subject to the interrogations and temptations of a dozen or more organizations within Stormwind and beyond if they even suspected that the valet might possess secrets worth knowing.  Renzik had been entirely correct when he had said that the peace they had all been thoroughly enjoying had not yet been present long enough to truly matter: based on historical trends alone, there needed to be at minimum twenty conflict-free years before Wrathion could confidently say the first slip would not lead to open warfare.  Anduin’s position within his own kingdom and the Alliance was much better than it had been when Wrathion had left, his plans in place yet hardly matured, but those in positions of power that had declared the High King an irredeemable fool remained, for the most part, in those same positions of power.  The handful that had been metaphorically dethroned were not enough in number to discourage the others and Wrathion, in the same way that he had had to realistically consider the future of himself and Anduin as lovers, had to stop and turn his reluctant mind toward what felt, to him, as impossible.

A brood.  A family.

He tried to picture it, and could not.

“...you know that I have long suspected that I am sterile, Sabellian.”

“You suspect, but you don’t know.”

An irrefutable fact.  There had never been a time when he could have proven it one way or another, but his suspicion had been further informed by his null response to other dragons.  He followed no cycles and knew no receptive heat; to his own embarrassment, he’d not recognized a handful of curious and interested overtures he had received in Valdrakken strictly because he and they were not in visage, but their true forms.  His glorious homecoming to the Dragon Isles had very quickly become a ruthless test of his own adaptability as mere gestures escaped his understanding: the curl of a tail.  The fold of a wing.  The tilt of a head, or the lay of a fin, or how a stride or a deep breath might say more than a string of words.  Then there were the sounds, and then the scents, the sparks between flashing teeth and the steam that would rise between superheated scales, and then the layering of it all, the dozens of elucidations and connotations and cultural locutions that no one, no matter how brilliant and desperate they were, could simply intuit the moment that they entered draconic society.

A dragon would not celebrate their Visage Day until they were an adult.  They learned to be a dragon before they learned to be anything else.

None of this had mattered one whit when it was Anduin Wrynn that wore the dragon’s skin.  That Wrathion could recognize some of the instinctual expressions that Anduin made was much less important to him than how wonderfully, charmingly clear it was that it was Anduin that was making them.  Anduin existed in every careful footfall, in each flare of crest and frill, in the light that spilled from his eyes and in the grumbling low in his throat when they jostled with one another for the best position to sleep in.  There was nothing new to learn because he had already learned it all before: twelve years it was that he had known Anduin Wrynn, and that was most of his life.  He would know him if he were an orc, a naga, or a mountain giant; of course he knew him when he was a dragon.  When that dragon went its inevitable way, as Sabellian said, into smoke and into recollection, Wrathion could only expect to return to as he had been, a dragon alike in shape and presentation to his kin, but fundamentally, intrinsically, separate.  When he brought partners to lay with him, it would be to a mortal’s bed; when he courted them, it would be with a graceful bow and an offered hand.  He would smile, and toss his hair, and share a glass of wine or a dance or a line of salacious poetry, and once enough time had passed, there would be no longing for tails twined and the shimmering heat of the cherished dark beneath the earth.

The memory threaded through him, preciously warm.  He should have, but could not, make himself regret it.

“We would not know for some months, whatever the case might be.”

He’d thought his tone appropriately neutral, only to see flinching tightness snatch at Sabellian’s shoulders. “So your plan is to put the chance of children aside until it is more convenient for you?”

Nathan had composed himself by the time that he returned.  He knelt without issue to help Wrathion step into his boots and left behind a box with a pair of shoes on a table as he did so.  The boots, styled after the equestrian wear that was all the rage among young men, were for traveling and attending any exterior portions of the party; the shoes were for dancing, which Nathan would have available to help him into while he attended to the High King throughout the social event.  Both pairs of footwear matched his dress for the evening: the knee breeches could be fashionably worn with either, and the deep blacks of both would be striking against the paler cream and the white of his stockings.  The tailcoat he worked onto his shoulders was of a brighter blue that would not suit most men, but Anduin was not most men: his coloring complimented brightness well.  Golden, fresh-faced, smiling: rare were the times that he did not brighten a room when he entered it.

To contrast that to how cold “Anduin’s” expression was now felt unfair, almost unkind, but Wrathion had no one to blame but himself, and his brother.

“I realize we ceded our better judgement to instinct – ”

“So you know then that you must take responsibility?”

“ – but I’d rather you not project your regrets toward the Netherwing onto us.”

Again, there was the sudden cut of silence and the gentle ticking of the timepiece.

This quiet was much, much worse than the prior one.  Wrathion thought that Nathan might even ask to be excused, yet the man persevered against all odds: his work done, he had gathered up the cloak that Wrathion would wear should the approaching clouds in their towering, purpled peaks choose to unleash a summer’s storm, and fit the shoebox under one arm.  He had taken up his post by the door, waiting for Wrathion to finish adjusting the lay of his tailcoat, and he had chosen to stare at some spot on the far wall, conveniently in the opposite direction of an ancient dragon seething inside a mortal’s visage.  It was interesting to see the outlets for expression that Sabellian’s rage found within a human body: his knuckles and the joints in his fingers cracked and popped as he made his fists, then loosened them, then made them again.  Contrasted to that were his shoulders and his neck, so abruptly rigid that if not for the pulse throbbing in clear veins, it might have been possible to think he was now wrought from stone.  There was no uptick of ravenous heat, Sabellian was too controlled for that, but the room seemed inescapably smaller between one blink and the next.  He took up so much of it, and his eyes seemed capable of finding every corner of it, and the walls themselves could buckle and tremble from the weight of his ire as it passed over them.

The fury was all Wrathion needed to see to know that he was right.  He met it coolly, his arms tucked into the small of his back. “You don’t want me to make the same mistake.  I understand that.”

“Do you?”

Sabellian neither moved nor raised his voice; Wrathion nonetheless felt a watery squirm slither up his spine in spite of himself.  It had not been until he had been in the presence of elder wyrms for prolonged lengths of time that he came to understand just how profoundly crushing their posturing could be.  An attribute carried over from their previous lives as proto-drakes, no doubt: the establishment of hierarchy and the bone-deep recollection of the grandest and greatest and most terrible of their number, so massive and heinous that to even speak his name was to strike a blow upon the air, could not be easily shed from their collective heredity.  His mad father had been a cut far above the rest when it came to that feeling, it was true, and he had based all his assumptions about his elders upon that staggering ghost, to which few could compare.  If any came close…Alexstrasza, undoubtedly.  Nozdormu, whenever he was roused to action instead of introspection.  Vyranoth, and Razsageth, in whose shadow he had felt the first harrowing press of dominance since he had been an infant still in his egg.

He had defied her, in the end.  Anything else was unacceptable to who he had chosen to be.

That same response wanted to snap out from between his teeth.  And Wrathion was already mustering the bitter but necessary self-control that he would need to contain it, just so that once again he could be the one that compromised, only for Sabellian to startle him into a stare instead.

“No…no, I’m sure you do.” His brother spoke first.  He looked away.  He dragged his fingers down his beard, the gesture strikingly familiar.  He was of ordinary proportions again, impressive but not overwhelming, and he grumbled and worked his mouth around his words as though he was trying to adapt to the taste of them. “You’re the one that thought of them.  They are here now because of you.”

Them.  They.  The Dragons of the Nether, joined beneath the Storm Aspect’s wing at Wrathion’s own behest.  Abandoned by Deathwing and irreversibly altered by Draenor’s destruction, the newest generation of nether drakes had no inkling of their origins as members of the Black Flight.  This was by design: Neltharaku and Karynaku would not have their children live the life of the discarded.  They were their own flight, with their own future, and if there had ever been a time for Sabellian to be a part of their lives, it had been well before he had made the determination of which dragons would live protected in Blade’s Edge and which would not.  Wrathion had been very aware of the fact that when Sabellian had emerged from Outland to his surprising arrival in the Dragon Isles, the Netherwing had not been with him.  No word of them had passed from between his lips during all their arguments and when the hand of allyship and kin was offered, this was done by Wrathion and by Vyranoth, and not the dragon that had loudly proclaimed that he had kept the legacy of the Black alive on a broken world.

As he recalled, Sabellian had not even been present when they had arrived, and had missed how the sky hummed and changed colors from the beating of their wings.

He had to wonder what it was about today that had prompted more than one old man to reflect on the past, specifically to reflect at Wrathion, but…Sabellian had capitulated first.  That was quite the leap for him.  He let his own posture relax and turned to look up at him.  Sabellian did not flinch the way that Greymane had when Wrathion had done the same to him; the other dragon had never so much as seen a picture of the High King of the Alliance before he had come to Stormwind, and so there was no one that he saw in these foreign features except for Wrathion.

It was – the feeling was not unpleasant. “Perhaps you and I can have a deeper discussion on the matter when we are not so pressed with other tasks.  I’d appreciate your insight on an aspect of dragonhood with which I have little experience.”

A relaxed Sabellian could not be found in his eyes, which even at rest burned and glared under his noble brow, but at his mouth and jaw, the deep lines eased. “Good.  As soon as we’re finished here.”

To hear him speak of it, the rescue of a human king was more akin to a passing chore, even if it was Sabellian’s own kin that had done the cursing.  Wrathion did what he could to suppress his smile. “Whenever that may be.  To that end, before I go – ”

A few steps took Wrathion to where Sabellian had left his book – Onyxia’s book.  It lay beside a few other stray trinkets that he must have found interesting: a couple clouded crystals, a ring, a loosely bound scroll, and the like, but included with the very small hoard was a hastily written summary of what Shaw and his brother had been able to identify as “items of interest.”  Wrathion had read over the short inventory the moment that Sabellian had arrived, but it was only now, after the busywork of dressing for the party and stewing over petty slights, that the information had wholly settled in the silent, secret compartment where every thought concerning the spell, its construction, and its purpose were kept.

Wrathion’s eyes lowered toward the table.   He saw again that the ink had bled, the paper unsuited to whatever pen the Spymaster had chosen.  The order of items seemed arbitrary, each added once it was found, and with no notes to each line, it would be impossible for anyone other than their group to know what it all meant or from whence it had come.  Still, it would be destroyed, burned, before Wrathion left this room, and by dragonfire, so that only the finest ash remained.

His fingers hovered over the paper for a blink before he picked it up. “Nathan, if you would be a good man and wait outside.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Sabellian glanced toward the door as it closed; Wrathion answered him before he asked the question. “The King’s loyal valet can be party to the King’s secrets, but these mysteries in particular belong to the Black Dragonflight, no?”

The short show of surprise was quickly replaced with an approving grunt. “The less these mortals know the better.  I know that you trust them, but – ”

“But knowledge is an edge that cuts the careless.” Wrathion supplied, and added after a contemplative pause: “Though the basics of augmentation magic are already known to the mortal races through the auspices of the dracthyr.”

“Hmph.  You’re right.  The King’s man, Shaw, he’s shrewd.” Though Sabellian was scowling, it was high praise. “He made the connection after the first find.”

That did not surprise Wrathion in the least.  He had needed no report from his own Blacktalon to know of SI:7’s recent explosion of activity: he had seen the promise of it in the man’s own eyes when Wrathion dared to walk into Stormwind Keep with Scalecommander Azurathel and his Obsidian Warders at his side.  If Wrathion had had a mind to, he could have made a game of ferreting out the agents that slipped in with the waves of explorers, treasure-hunters, and sellswords that poured into the Waking Shores, but other, more pressing matters had kept himself and his people occupied.  The likelihood that his own coin had gone to SI:7 as payment for services rendered during the daily siege of the Citadel was quite high and these many months later his primary feelings on the matter was that Shaw was unfortunately in possession of yet another example of behavior that Wrathion was not proud of.  The distribution of inflammatory intel had become somewhat unbalanced.

But that was of no moment: the real prize for the Spymaster was deeper insight into the powers and capabilities of the Black Dragonflight, as exemplified by Adamanthia’s release.

Imprisoned since before the fall of Neltharion, her bindings had siphoned from the dracthyr those abilities intrinsic to all black dragons: that of shaping, as Wrathion had once explained to Anduin.  At its most rudimentary, this allowed for the shaping of the earth, forming rockslides, magma, waves of soil, so on and so forth, as any shaman could do after petitioning the appropriate elemental.  What Khaz’goroth’s blessing had granted them, to the fury of those same elementals, was the ordering, which was really another way of saying the changing of, of all earthly materials, though they would forever fall short of the Titan’s own miracles, incapable of granting their creations sentience as He had done for the titan-forged.  They could not make life, those domains gifted to others among the Aspects, though that would certainly not stop Neltharion from trying over, and over, and over again.

The dracthyr were quite lucky, compared to all the others left dead in the ruins of his father’s ambitions.  They were alive, they were free, they seemed largely stable biologically and aetherically, and they were possessed of minor expressions of the powers of all Flights, the Black included, now that Adamanthia was enjoying her newfound independence.  As invoked by the dracthyr, shaping was better understood as augmenting: the impermanent amplification of malleable materials, primarily those metals and gems incorporated into field equipment, but also those finer elements that, if mortals knew just how their strength and speed were being increased, might have turned a few stomachs.  Carbon was a significant component of all mortal bodies, alive or dead.  Calcium, phosphorous, salt; the list was quite extensive, and though it intruded upon the realms of life and nature from which black dragons were barred, the dracthyr, stunning amalgams that they were, could marry these abilities into a glorious magnification of martial might.

Briefly.  They hadn’t the reserves nor the mastery to maintain the new shape.

Of course, Onyxia should not have been able to do so, either, but the evidence of her success was hidden in a cave in Elwynn Forest.  Anduin was neither hexed nor polymorphed, magics which were transitional: the subject was not changed, but replaced.  An orc was replaced with a sheep and the soul, ephemeral, could only struggle to understand where the orc had gone.  A druid’s forms coalesced from their essence connected to the Dream and a shaman’s from the dynamic will of their spirit.  A worgen’s beastly form was simply another druid shape; a dragon’s visage was a polymorph of the highest order, as could only be crafted by the Aspect of Magic at his most brilliant.  Transitional all, a swapping, as one might slip cards in and out of a stacked deck into their hand: the suits and numbers would change with each exchange, but the deck remained the same.  The components remained unaltered.

But as any blacksmith learned on the first day of his or her apprenticeship, iron was not iron until it was made to be.  The ore pried from the cradle of the earth must first be taken to the great blast furnace, the fires of which would not be allowed to die for weeks at a time, and in the bright crucible of it, the smiths could coax chemical reactions through those humble household carbons, the charcoal and the coke pulled out of baking ovens and used to pluck oxygen and sparking slag from metals gone red-hot.  Techniques had only grown more refined as the centuries had passed: Mechagon had at its discovery a hill dominated by rotary kilns, each slowly turning shell the width and length of a Vrykul longship, the pipe burners and drive gears powered by subterranean generators.  Through ingenuity, experimentation, and admirable grit, a tiny glimmer of Khaz’goroth’s might had come to be held in mortal hands, as elements were re-ordered into the new forms that the smiths desired, and held, truly held, to those forms.  A fine blade or a polished suit of armor could never again be a thread of hematite winding through ancient sediment.  It had been shaped, augmented, altered, the hand of cards set alight and the ash pressed into sticks of graphite for new purpose.

Such a change could not, should not, have worked when driven into a mortal body.  Those that welcomed an evoker specialized in augmentation into their party were quite lucky that the dracthyr’s abilities were effectively capped, or else their skeletal structure might erupt from their flesh, or some other equally heinous outcome.  A man was not a stack of metal scrap nor a barrel of combustibles; to change his component materials would, and should have, reduced him to a slurry of organic material and a few piles of various sulfides.

Yet Anduin lived.  He was whole, hale, and unmistakably a dragon.  Onyxia had pushed through every boundary of augmentation to achieve a magical chemistry heretofore unheard of: transmutation.  It was an achievement that even the Red would surely envy, or else Rheastrasza would not have needed to butcher quite so many whelps nor forcefully harvest clutch after clutch from his mother.  His own constitution was more akin to a…grafting.  A reconstitution.  Slices and slivers of living material filched from other owners and arranged into more or less the appropriate shape.

What made Anduin was…finer.  More complete.  More perfect.

She had hidden it from everyone.  And what lengths she had gone to in order to hide it.  Buried deep and sealed away, with every possible witness run to ground and ruthlessly complex layers of magical suppression cast upon Anduin’s mind.  She had out-maneuvered Wrathion before he had even been born: there were no servants whose memories he might ply for insight into her behavior and movements during her friendship with Lady Tiffin.  No kitchen girl that might have cleaned the tables after their afternoon tea nor a house boy that might have caught snatches of conversation in the halls.  There was no nursemaid that had shared intimate moments with mother and infant, which should have only involved the Queen, the new Prince, and the nursing woman herself, but how could he know that, now?

They were gone, reduced to ash by dragonfire.  She had been so thorough.

Too thorough, perhaps.  The scorched landscape held a pattern.  The topography of it came together slowly in his mind, bereft of great swaths, and yet – 

His thumb rubbed back and forth over the texture of the paper.  He considered what question he might ask, during this brief moment of assured privacy.

“Brother, tell me: was Onyxia’s visage always human?”

Sabellian’s bafflement was quick and clear. “Yes?  Why are you asking?”

“I am hoping to understand her perspective and her nature,” Wrathion replied, making a small, general gesture to the surrounding air. “And to satisfy an old curiosity.  Your visage is human as well, yet at your age you must have surely first taken a form fashioned after what mortal races existed at the time.”

The other dragon snorted. “I’ve never seen myself in trolls or elves.  My visage is made in the likeness of Tyr.  I chose it to honor him after his death.  His strength and commitment were examples that I in my youth strove to live up to.  Our father did the same.”

“Yes.” Wrathion nodded with a hum. “Yes, of course.  Were Nefarian and Onyxia of the same mind?”

Sabellian had a habit of gripping his own fist behind his back whenever his thoughts turned more grim and sober.  He did so now, his robes rustling quietly as his posture shifted. “No…no, Nefarian rarely settled on anything.  For a few centuries his visage was a dark troll, then an elf, then whatever suited the most current scheme he was concocting.  Much like you.”

If Sabellian had wanted to insult him, he could have just called Wrathion a twat.  But it was a slight he brushed aside. “And Onyxia?”

“She – for a very long while, she didn’t take a visage at all.  I remember that she spat on the very idea, and wouldn’t have taken the spell on her body if Father hadn’t made her.” Sabellian did not pace as Greymane would have; he only grew more still, settled as a mountain might be after the passing of many an age. “It wasn’t until well after the war with the primalists was over that I saw her in her new form.  I thought she had finally chosen to follow our father’s example, but she said her visage was not a titan-forged.”

In Wrathion’s mind, he laid out a timeline long-memorized and offered: “A vrykrul?  The curse of the flesh was well settled in them by that time.”

Sabellian shook his head. “I asked her the same thing, but she made it very clear.  She’d chosen their malformed spawn instead.  The humans.”

“Was she inspired by the Kingdom of Arathor?  That was several thousand years – ”

Sabellian shook his head again, more insistently. “No, this was well before that.  The humans were just primitives roving through the old forests of the continent back then, but they were her favorite topic.  If she wasn’t warning of the danger they posed she was declaring how pathetic they were.  I know she made trips to the south to torment them.”

“Did our father encourage this?”

“He didn’t care what she did in her leisure time so long as she fulfilled her duties to the Flight.” To Wrathion’s surprise, a low, rough laugh huffed out of him. “But she was right in the end.  Humans are dangerous.  They were the death of her.  And we are still embroiled in their affairs.”

Wrathion crafted an easy smile for him. “That we are.  Thank you, brother.”

“Hmph.” Sabellian broke away from the many hundreds of years behind him and stomped back to the table to pick up the tome he had been reading. “Go, you have frivolous mortal whims to satisfy.  Our real work can continue tonight.”

Wrathion inclined his head. “That it can.  Until then.”

He turned away and made for the door, only stopping once as he passed by the fireplace.  The thin sheet of paper was still in his hand, the sharp peaks and short valleys of Shaw’s handwriting leaping out at him the moment he glanced at it.  The ink was blacker, the uneven edges of each letter more frayed, and the weight of the words wanted to sink straight through the parchment and into the belly of the earth.

Wrathion’s fingers twitched.

Eager flames licked and leapt, hungry, and then ash fell to the hearth’s stony bed.

Chapter Text

If Violetta Lescovar was sure of one thing, it was this:

“High King Anduin Llane Wrynn is the least fuckable man in Stormwind.”

Gasps erupted from around the salon table, chasing after the scandalous cloud of profanity that according to all rules of social etiquette should not have been allowed at an aristocratic gathering.  The new chandeliers, crafted from astonishing synthetic crystals imported from Mechagon, seemed themselves to flicker in shock and lose some of their iridescence when the vulgar miasma passed by on its way to the ceiling frescos.  Many were the gloved hands that raced to cover parted lips while it did so, though it was really Margaret Curtis that took center-stage with how hard the snap was from her silk fan as it opened over the bottom half of her face, hiding her appal with leaping Pandaren tigers in a bamboo forest.  Pandaren stylings for clothing and decor had never truly fallen out of fashion in the ten years since the Mists had dispersed; Violetta had coveted the jade carvings and fine silks arriving on the trade ships since she had been a girl.  This very drawing room boasted silk screens a hundred years in age and not one but five tea sets, including one with porcelain so delicate and a pattern of blue leaves on a white field so beautiful that she’d sworn never to use it except on her wedding day.

Whenever that happened to be.  She suspected it wouldn’t be soon.

“No, is that really how you feel, my dear?” Margaret was at least two years older than every young woman at the table; she flaunted her dears at every opportunity. “Even with a betrothal imminent?"

“Hm…” 

Like any lady that had learned to walk in pumps well before they overtook slippers as the runaway trend, Violetta did not answer her friend right away. She tapped the tip of her index finger against her chin, not too far below the lips painted to a dark and daring red, which she had done to match the fine red muslin she wore and its intricate embroidery of rain poppies. The dark petticoat beneath the sheer drape of her dress was likewise embroidered, this time with a river winding gracefully between hills, giving the illusion of the flowers sprouting on its banks, and it, and the agate cameo at her neck and the boldly unfashionable cascade of broad blond whorls that winged wildly over her shoulders, would serve to infuriate her father the moment she stepped into the ballroom because in his eyes a proper, marriageable woman of her excellent breeding would never wear anything except for a damsel’s white and a downturned gaze.  If she had allowed him to have his way, this party would not involve her at all, and would instead be a private meeting between the Baron and the King to lay down terms as though they were negotiating the sale of livestock.

Not that King Wrynn would do such a thing, anybody with an ounce of common sense knew that, but Father would’ve loved nothing more and that was one of the many reasons that Mother had left him. Taboo as divorce was amongst her parents’ generation, the Baron Lescovar was just that much of an intolerable ape and if not for the rules of heirship Violetta would’ve gone with her. He would never understand that Violetta sipped her digestive tea and hummed to herself not to be difficult, as he usually shouted when there wasn’t anyone of influence nearby to hear him, but because anticipation was its own sort of rewarding theater. It was what her dear friends were all here for, whiling away the last hour before the party was set to officially begin and those guests not part of Violetta’s inner circle began to arrive.

King Wrynn would be leading the pack, she was sure.  He had been distressingly punctual for this entire courtship, seemingly ignorant of what a wet fart it was to have the High King milling about the refreshments table in an empty hall.

“First,” she began, and saw through her eyelashes that some of the girls had leaned forward just a bit more than would’ve been seemly had this been the ball and banquet proper.  More than a few bodices were in danger of slipping the surly bonds of propriety. “There is no guarantee of a betrothal, as we all know.”

“But is he really just toying with you?” Tabitha Eaton had those big watery doe eyes again.  She was a sweet girl that Violetta was unfalteringly loyal to, but she was also just sixteen and had only debuted earlier this year.  She worried far too much and sadly took the newsprints, from the reputable to the gutter rags, much too seriously. “He’s a lout if he is!  A right lout!”

“Dear,” Margaret said with a little chuckle. “You can call him an asshole.”

The younger girl shrieked softly. “Noooo, no, I can’t!  I mean, I shan’t!”

Tabitha also read too many steamy romance novels.  Violetta shushed her by passing her the tray of macarons. “Second, I have my tastes, which the good King does not fulfill at all.”

The girls didn’t gasp; they flushed, Tabitha the brightest of all, though it was her before anyone else that asked the next question.  She used her teacup to try and hide the pink on her cheeks, feigning a sip despite the fact that they could all see on the way up that it was empty. “Why is…ehem, why is that?  He’s very handsome…”

Knowing that Tabitha collected those many newsprints at least in part in order to clip out the photographs of the King they frequently contained, Violetta was not as harsh as she could have been. “Oh, yes, but to me it is more a… woeful handsomeness.  His face is tragically beautiful.”

The feathers in Tabitha’s turban bobbed as she nodded empathically. “Yes…yes, that’s really it!  He just seems so sad.  Like a hero out of an epic tale.  It just makes me want to – ”

Her face swarmed with scarlet.  She slammed her cup back down, hideously embarrassed, but Violetta leaned forward, her elbows on the table in an unladylike perch, and smiled at her friend. “No, you can go ahead, Tabby.  What’s said in this room stays in this room.”

As soon as she was old enough to open her own account with the Stormwind Royal Bank – at age eighteen for women in addition to men, as set by Royal decree in the wake of the Fourth War – Violetta had made sure of that.  Mother had demanded half the Lescovar holdings in the divorce, hanging Father’s many affairs over his head in a threat to ruin his reputation, and had subsequently bequeathed half of that to Violetta when she came of age.  Every one of Violetta’s servants were paid with her own coin and with the exception of the little night elven orphan that looked after her aviary, all of them were women.  She couldn’t outbid Father if it came to that, so she bet on his vile personality and lecherous ways to discourage turncoats.

Confident, she wiggled her fingers at Tabby. “And we’re all women here.  This is women’s talk.”

For a girl of Tabitha's age, to be included among the other women put stars in her eyes and confidence in her posture.  The irony was of course that out of everyone here, Tabby was of the highest rank: when she came of age, she would be the Marchioness Eaton, the Lady of an empty house.  Her father had died in defense of Lion’s Landing in Pandaria; two brothers, the eldest of which had become the Marquis by then, were taken by the Fourth War.  Her mother had been a military priest stationed aboard the Skyfire during the disastrous attack on the Broken Shore, her body lost to demonfire, and that, more than his tragically beautiful face, was Violetta’s guess as to why Tabby was so infatuated with the King.  Alone in that huge manor with her aging governess and four graves to tend to, what else was there to do except collect newsprints, read, and dream?

Violetta had an unapologetic soft spot for her.  She understood her feelings: the three Lordlings of House Lescovar had found three different battlefields to die on, one in Lordaeron, one at sea, and one in some Titans-forsaken swamp in Zandalar.  But she had Father to defy and Mother’s weekly gifts and letters; Tabby had her crush and a dozen rooms with draped sheets and shuttered windows.

It was good to see her sit upright and smile with shy excitement. “Well…if you insist…” 

Her lower lip rolled into her mouth, pressed by her cute front teeth, before she reached for the silver spreading knife beside her empty plate.  She raised it fearlessly to punctuate her point as she spoke. “He just makes me want to protect him!  In all his portraits the burden of Kingship is just so clear on his brow and, oh, the one they took at the last Winter Veil Mass, when he was reading from the tribulations chapters in the Paternicon…you could just see how worldly suffering weighs on him.  The look in his eyes when he reminded the congregation to be kind to one another…!  He needs someone to support him, I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“And you’ll be the one to do it with that butter knife?” Margaret’s tease was gentle, the needle sharpness of her sarcastic tongue eased by the selfsame unfaltering loyalty that Violetta felt. “I don’t think that’s going to be very effective.”

Tabby blushed, but also scoffed. “Of course not with a butter knife!  I have my rifle.”

She was, in the words of her gnomish tutor, an incredible shot.  Over the last decade of warfare firearms had grown increasingly light, leagues more refined than those early, unwieldy blunderbusses, and if not for the limitations of materials, those being the composite alloys saved instead for warships, siege engines, and copters, more than just a few regiments among the 7th Legion would’ve had their swords and shields replaced by rifles.  Bolt action had reduced the reload time to a third of what it had been for muskets; less than that, if the riflewoman had quick and confident fingers, which Tabitha did after years of practice.  Her newest firearm, the custom silver and white Bluebird 1891, had stripper clips she could fit into the barrel in the blink of an eye and a winged steel sight measured to her profile.  Peacetime though it was, the Eatons had been a prestigious military family since before the First War and Tabitha, in her way, kept that banner high.  The only difference between her and the Lords and Ladies of yesteryear was her choice to discard her family’s long-standing devotion to the Light as priests and paladins, which Violetta had openly supported, and not just because the needle-guns and pocket pistols that Tabby used better suited her small frame and keen eye than a staff or shield.

The Light had led the Eatons to their graves.  If not for the fact that the King gave sermons personally once a week, Violetta suspected that Tabby wouldn’t have attended church at all.  Her sentiment was one shared by many of her peers, even those that had taken up the old vows and dutifully trained and studied in church halls and draenic temples, because no amount of preaching could hide the clear evidence before their eyes: the Light saved some, but not all.  It empowered a few, but not the many.  It could be wielded, but so could steel and the arcane.  It did not douse unjust fires and it did not feed the burned that huddled in the alleyways.  It was no proof of purity: Violetta had been eight years old, old enough to remember, when cries rose in the streets of Stormwind that Archbishop Benedictus and his conviction had been a grand and terrible lie.  Before the incomprehensible auspices of the Light, the good died just as quickly and easily as the sinful, and if the Light truly rewarded piety, then perhaps the previous King would still be on the throne, because if Violetta was sure of a second thing, it was that Anduin Wrynn was the second most pious man alive.

He lost the title of first to Archbishop Photius, whose exquisitely handsome face, easing into the regal lines of middle age, had been the reason that all the other young women aside from Tabby, and no small amount of young men, still went to church.  A single line of scripture read in that melodious voice of his was enough to send three generations of parishioners swooning; when he brushed strands of black hair away from his brow, the silvering regulated to just his temples, someone’s grandmother was always lost in a dead faint.  All that aside, he also wasn’t to Violetta’s taste, but he was to Margaret’s, and if not for Margaret’s family-ordered betrothal to Bernard Hillsgrave, she might’ve joined the many, many young women that had suddenly found the Light after laying eyes on, as Margaret put it, “that piercing blue gaze” and “those graceful tipped ears”.

Violetta would’ve never guessed the Archbishop was possessed of some sort of elf heritage.  His hair or vestments usually covered his ears, but when it came to her favorite, Margaret had eyes keener than Tabby’s. “So does that mean I will count on you to protect me and my husband once I’m Queen?”

Despite her best efforts to hide it, Tabitha still caught on to the wry edge to what Violetta had meant as just a fun rib.  She lowered her knife, that worried frown creeping back onto her features. “Violetta…”

She really was slipping.  Maybe it was the weather: the change in air pressure as the clouds had rolled in had given her a headache. “It’s fine, really.”

On the embroidered tablecloth, Tabby’s hands curled into fists. “No, it isn’t.  It’s wrong!” Frustration and worry put heat in her voice. “I don’t know why he’d court you without meaning it.  It’s cruel.  It’s not like him.”

While Violetta could say that cruelty was an essential part of the aristocratic lifestyle, she couldn’t disagree with the fact that it wasn’t like him.  It’d been a shock to the entire household when the letter with the Royal Seal had arrived one inconspicuous morning on the heels of another screaming fight with Father.  Before that, Violetta could count on one hand the times that she and King Wrynn had spoken to one another, and that was only if formal greetings during social events were enough to be called a conversation.  The stiff exchange of theories that she and Father had endured with one another had tried and failed to answer the question that remained a mystery to this day:

Why Violetta?

She had in the half-dozen or so social engagements they’d shared tried to pry the answer from the King, to no avail.  The only certainty she came away with, which was the third thing she was sure of, was that the last of the line of Wrynn had absolutely zero interest in her.

His greetings and compliments were a clear script lifted from who knew how many tomes on courtly etiquette, with a splashing of lines straight out of a copper-coin novelette sold on street corners, she assumed to try and disguise the fact that he’d very obviously practiced them all beforehand.  When he wasn’t staring her straight in the eye like he was a recruit and her his drill sergeant, he was completely fascinated by something over her shoulder or off by a window.  The punctuality plague extended to tea dates and carriage rides: they began and ended precisely as stated in his correspondence, each time with the same excuse of a King’s tight schedule and necessary duties.  His gifts were so deeply appropriate, neither lavish nor stingy, that they were downright forgettable: a pearl bracelet.  A polished comb.  A modest bouquet of calla lilies.  A fine, leather-bound pocket book of psalms, which had cracked her pleasant veneer enough for him to notice and immediately, profusely apologize.

Violetta, of course, did not need gifts.  All that she desired, she could have herself by her own means, but they were three months deep into this courtship and there was no sign he knew her any better than he had when he had first sent his letter.

He wasn’t interested.  He certainly must have had a reason for doing what he was doing, because there was nothing in that softspoken, restrained, serious manner that suggested a lark done for petty enjoyment.  He was sincere; he was lying, but he was sincere, and even in his indifference he was kind to her.  And she supposed it was cruel, if even Margaret and the other girls had gone quiet when they looked at her.

She couldn’t have that.  This was a party and they were going to have a rapturous, memorable, enjoyable time or she was not the Lady Lescovar.  She sat up straight and clapped her hands once, the deceptively soft leather of her gloves producing a sound that got a squeak out of at least a couple of her friends.

“Ladies.  Please.  You surely know me better than that.” The sleek smile with painted lips fooled almost everyone, and Tabby and Margaret were generous and good in that they did not interrupt her. “Didn’t we start this conversation wondering how it could be that the High King did not satisfy me, a lowly Baron’s daughter?”

A scattering of excited titters and exchanged glances allowed Violetta to relax again.  Margaret shook her head and sighed. “Are you actually going to tell us, dear?  And not just your tastes, because I know those – ”

She pointed her teaspoon at Violetta. “But the real beau you’re after?”

Her question got everyone upright and at full attention.  Violetta didn’t even try to stop her laugh, letting it out from behind her curled fingers. “Well…since it’s come to this…he arrived but a handful of days ago via postship – ”

Three soft knocks put an end to that.  Violetta knew it was one of her maids before the door to the salon opened a moment later; it would always be three knocks.  The woman in the prim cap bowed in the entryway before she spoke.

“My Lady, the first carriage has arrived.”

Violetta perked a brow and glanced at the standing clock to her right.  It was a little before the hour; had the King arrived early?  Without an invitation to arrive early?  She had to see what this was about. “I understand.  Please, inform the staff to ready themselves to receive our first guests.”

When she rose, the rest of the table rose with her, and she winked at the gaggle of young women that were doing their best to hide their disappointment by adjusting their dresses and headpieces.  Violetta considered her own hat, short-brimmed and low-topped with lace trim, and then slid her hand under her heavy ringlets to toss them over her shoulder.

She’d go without. “Let’s go, everyone.”

While the grand reception room of the Lescovar Estate was a third the size of the royal ballroom in Stormwind Keep, the mise-en-scène was irreproachably designed, from the hand-knotted runners that spilled enchanting courtly motifs out of the entryway to the precisely folded silken handkerchiefs that rested in the breast pocket of every suited attendant.  Each white-gloved man wore straight trousers, crisply pressed, and in their black and gold waistcoats were the match to the gilded pitchers that spilled red orchids in an artful waterfall onto the banquet tables.  The brocade curtains were thickly tasseled with gold ropes of shining thread and all measured to four times as tall as a man.  They were heavy enough to require at least two servants to move when it was time for their laundering, though today they had just been drawn closed over the sweeping windows in consideration of the weather.  The dark, angry towers of clouds had been replaced with a hundred standing candelabra, now converted to portable electric; throughout the night, the attendants would be discreetly checking their level of charge, changing the little power blocks as needed.  A chandelier thrice the size of the one in her salon dominated the center floor, its wide rings home to dozens of fine lords and ladies wrought in miniature, their crystal countenances full of warm and unwavering light, their gemstone eyes tossing flecks of color onto the ceiling and its white moulding in the pattern of hawthorn branches.

A flowering sprig of hawthorn likewise dominated the Lescovar family crest, the pops of white color set upon a red field and woven around and through a golden shield in representation of their loyalty to the Kingdom of Stormwind.  This shape, if not the colors, had been embossed upon every glass flute arrayed in neat rows beside the glittering crystal drink towers, ready and waiting to be carted off on the fine golden trays carried by the attendants.  Three tiered and absolutely magnificent, the towers had been expertly sculpted to hide the gnomish apparatuses within that kept the bubbling champagne constantly flowing from one level to the next, led into graceful arcs by the carved beaks of cranes dipping their heads to drink.  The drink tables, skirted in dark colors, flanked the edges of the ballroom for an even distribution of refreshment, while the four hulking dining tables were laid out in columns closer to either of the pockets of musicians stationed at opposite corners.  The string players, a quartet to each side, were finishing the final tuning of their instruments, set to play throughout the night not only for the enjoyment of the guests while dining, but for the dances that would take place over the course of the evening.

For a gathering such as this, there was of course a schedule for the dancing, and frankly, as much of a faux pas as it may have been for King Wrynn to arrive early uninvited, past experience told Violetta that that might just be a good thing.  She could discuss the schedule with him, lay out the pair of dances that etiquette would have them participate in, and show him where he would sit, that being the end seat at the table closest the wide, slightly raised dais that they were not going to use because he had requested at their very first social engagement that he not be given preferential seating.  Which – 

That had been Violetta’s first sign about what sort of man Anduin Wrynn truly was.

“Go ahead and help yourselves to some champagne, everyone,” she said brightly, while a motion from her left had signaled the musicians to begin the first of the chamber pieces that she had prepared.  A quick glance around the ballroom showed no sign of Father; where was he?  Drinking cognac in his smokeroom, still?

Most likely, leaving her to do all the work at her own birthday party.  She didn’t make the disgusted noise that she wished to and instead made her way toward the entrance, where the door attendant stood to the side and announced the first guest.

“Announcing his Lordship – ”

That was a new one for him to use.  Usually he just accepted the default ‘King Wrynn’.

“ – Count Bernard Hillsgrave!”

What?

“...what?” Margaret was caught with the champagne flute just shy of her lips.

In a flash, the glass was slammed back down on the table, its empty fellows tinkling against one another as the woodtop vibrated, and Violetta stepped aside to allow the breach in etiquette so that Margaret could thunder up to meet her fiancé instead of the hostess of the celebration.  The wiry man, dressed more for the library than a party, his oval spectacles settled low on his nose and his chin raised just enough as to be infuriating, seemed prepared for Margaret.  His face was already schooled into a placid and unassuming smile while hers darkened with fury and an unladylike scowl that, frankly, was completely understandable.

Their marriage had not been arranged with Margaret’s feelings in mind: her father, the lowly Viscount Curtis, desired more prestige for his heirs.  Bernard, the last of his own line, desired the considerable assets that were Curtis’s wool farms and their unconditional access to a portion of the Langflood River in Elwynn.  Usurping Margaret’s name through marriage would satisfy both parties, and that Margaret had fought the contractual union for five years was of no moment to either of them.

Violetta had, jokingly but not wholly jokingly, mentioned to Margaret that perhaps she could take up alchemy and the brewing of specific sorts of concoctions.

“You said that you weren’t attending.” Margaret hiss could have shocked a snake.

Bernard was the picture of unflappable calm. “I changed my mind.”

“You claimed you would be afield with your research partners.”

“They canceled.”

“When they’ve never canceled before?”

“I am just as surprised by it as you are.”

Another bitter row was building between them, which Margaret knew just as much as Violetta did and which Bernard had certainly intended, if he had chosen to arrive unannounced and unwanted.  Margaret did not snarl, but she said something so low that only she and Bernard were privy to it; the man’s eyes narrowed even if his smile did not falter.  Thereafter, the two of them vanished off to Violetta’s left, where a series of glass doors led to the balconies overlooking the rose gardens.  Violetta could only send a sympathetic glance after her: Margaret would accept no interference, so there was nothing to do except return to the entrance and act as though nothing had happened.  She took the time to look for her worthless parent as she did so, but he was still nowhere to be found, and judging by the fretful look on the faces of the kitchen staff rolling the first series of dishes out to the tables, even the back-of-house staff had no idea where he was.  Her headache deepened, the tension in her neck crawling toward the top of her head, but her posture was immaculate as she stood to greet the next guest, this one precisely on time.

“Announcing the Lord and Lady Pendleton!”

Violetta could only hope that her smile was just as pristine because it felt disastrously stiff.

It was extremely startling to have the opening of the party proceed so against expectations.  It was a state of affairs that she had expended days of effort on the avoidance thereof: hours and hours given to the reviewing of menus, guest lists, staffing, and schedules.  Days arranging entertainment, directing purchases and deliveries, placing orders to butchers and grocers, conferring with the gardeners, although the gardens were a lost cause with a storm on the horizon.  Long nights devoted to the balancing of the budget of her own coffers for her own birthday, because not one copper coin would slip out of Father’s clenched fist.  Not only did the minutes while away without one single sign of that reprobate, not even so much as a whisper from one of his manservants that he’d lapsed into a drunk somewhere in the house, the Pendletons were very explicitly not the person that she was waiting for.  Yes, they were guests on her list, which consisted entirely of persons she had intentionally invited as either amicable acquaintances or families she wished to strengthen her ties with, but they, and the next two, then four, then six and eight and ten guests, were not a King in finery that he looked distinctly uncomfortable in, his head raised and his steps strong but his smile impersonal and…and in a way she could not quite put her finger on, sorry.

Anduin Wrynn always came across as so sorry for everything, even as he stood beside her and held her arm and made fools of them both.

“Announcing the Duchess Moorcroft!”

Violetta cast that image away from her mind, and instead bent slightly to take the Duchess’s hands in her own.  She was old enough to be Violetta’s grandmother – even her great-grandmother, perhaps.  Stooped as she was, however, her eyes still sparkled as they exchanged their greetings, her palm patting the back of Violetta’s hand.

“Oh, how lovely you are.  Just lovely.  You’ve grown so much, you’re Viola’s mirror.”

Many years ago, Viola had been the Baroness Lescovar.  Violetta smiled warmly. “You’re very kind to say so, Duchess.”

“Please, please!  I have said that you may call me Auntie, Viola would’ve adored that.”

Violetta could only sigh sadly. “I am sure, but you know that Father – ”

“That drunkard!  The nerve!  Worthless, I told Viola he was terrible for her girl.”

A little of Violetta’s headache began to lessen.  She did enjoy listening to the Duchess rant about her father whenever she had the chance and since both he and King Wrynn had deigned to show their faces a full half hour since guests began to arrive, perhaps she should just stop allowing the both of them to ruin her mood and her evening.  While it was true that by morning  it would be all over Stormwind that she had been stood up by a Royal supposedly in search of a worthy wife, the ignominy of it, the labeling of herself and her family name as clearly lacking the qualities for Queenship – that had all been inevitable.  It could have perhaps happened on a day that was not her birthday, but it was going to happen.  The gentle lies that Anduin told her had been the promise that it would and she would be left to rebuild her dignity on her own when he had accomplished whatever it had been that he wanted to accomplish.  She would be miserable, and she would be angry, and she would be bitter, but more than any of that, she would be relieved.

If it was tonight that it would be finished, whatever it was, then she could also be happy, finally.  Violetta was done humoring him.  She was done worrying her dear friends.  So, determined, she straightened again, let her shoulders loosen, and offered out her arm for the Duchess to take while she swore inside that the melancholia coming unwound from within her chest would have no opportunity to return.

That was the kind of woman you had to be, to be a noble’s daughter in the Stormwind of today.

“Allow me to show you to your seat, Auntie, and you can tell me all about it.”

“Ohoho!  Yes, please!”

Irony waited at least long enough for Violetta to shoo away the attendants and pull out the Duchess’s seat herself, harboring a secret smile all the while in response to how Father had had to beg his way back into the manor after humiliating himself while out gambling.  More than once, even!  On account of being a worthless drunk high on his own ego.  She had the time to help the Duchess sit, affirming that yes, Father was still terrible about his drink and useless around the manor, and she had time to murmur to one of the servers that the older woman would take a tonic and water, rather than champagne, and then she could finally say that she hoped the Duchess would enjoy the evening.

“Me?  Child, it is your special day – ”

The entry door, recently shut, opened once again.  Violetta heard the ringing of mail and plate armor.  The door attendant, hurrying back to his post, stumbled over his words a breath later. 

“A, Announcing His Royal Majesty, High King Anduin the First!”

Two seats down, Tabby choked on her champagne.  Violetta snapped upright and spun on her heel, full of disbelief and a hot surge of betrayal, because how dare he – after she had been relieved – why did he have to drag this out even longer – 

…

Anduin had worn his hair down.

…almost.  He had worn it almost entirely loose.  When he rolled broad shoulders and slipped out from under his cloak with its thick collar of bear fur dotted with the first raindrops of the evening, she spied the blue ribbon tied just past his shoulderblades.  It matched the color that she expected: the overpowering bright blue of his tailcoat, itself a terrible partner to the red and black she typically chose to wear, and yet that lightness was powerfully tempered by the dark gold of his waistcoat and the black leathers of his belt and boots.  That fabric was hungry for the light, almost metallic beneath the electric glow that filled the reception hall, which enriched the coat’s embroidery, all twisting roses in black thread, that wove around the black pearl buttons that kept the garment snug against his midsection.  He had chosen an ascot over a knotted tie and though the light cream color was typical, the jeweled pin that he wore was not, and Violetta could spy the Pandaren styling to it even this many paces away.  His high riding boots were fashionable, freshly polished, and when he took a step, she heard the very soft ring of spurs – a daring choice that proclaimed the King an equestrian and most men, if they spied a peer making that boast, would’ve been compelled to challenge the assertion.  It wasn’t a style to adopt lightly.  But – 

It was true, she did remember that.  The King had been said to be an excellent rider.  He had taken his prized warhorse with him to every battlefield he occupied during the Fourth War.

But he had never gone through any effort to show that he was.

“Goodness child, are you alright?” 

The Duchess’s voice gave Violetta a start she only just managed to catch before it showed itself on her face.  When she looked down, she was all smiles. “Yes, I have never been better.  But please excuse me, Auntie.”

“Oh, of course, of course.”

If the Duchess sounded a little dubious, it was not something that Violetta could spare time for, just as she could not acknowledge the bug-eyed look that Tabby was shooting at her when she swept past the table and toward the door.  The King had just finished passing his cloak and his hat – an honest-to-the-Light top hat , complete with black ribbon – to his manservant and was addressing the two knights that had accompanied him.  They nodded to whatever orders they had been given and moved, to Violetta’s surprise, into the shadowed wings of the room, present and visible but out of the way, to take up guard posts not far from the entrance.  He was then left alone, his servant vanished into the coatroom, and Violetta stepped quickly forward out of habit, so that she might catch him – 

Only for Anduin to look directly at her.

He smiled.  His face softened.  The corners of his eyes crinkled with warmth.  He came closer, and every steady step carried the silvered ringing that would have heads turn toward him.  Motion sent gold sweeping back and forth over his shoulders and brushing against his cheeks and chin, yet his hair never fell so far as to hide his eyes from her, or from anyone.  They were the same blue that she remembered; it was impossible to forget that soulful color, as Tabitha would say with her wistful sigh, and never had they brightened as they brightened now when Anduin looked at her.

He was excited.  He was animated.  He dimmed the chandelier when it was compared against his elation.  He was present, so sincerely and unashamedly present.  He was wearing a golden watch chain and black pearl cufflinks, and he had added a fob to his sash that was a Pandaren crane carved from white jade.  He was shaking raindrops from the cuffs of his sleeves, lest they somehow make their way onto her dress.  He was…she didn’t think he was confident, not at first, because he had ducked his head just a little at the end, but it was a motion like the sharing of a secret rather than any sort of bid to hide himself, and from the tilt of his pleasantly strong chin the entire atmosphere was suddenly personal and intimate, as though the rest of the room had ceased to exist.  There was only he, and there was only she, and the distant, eager leaping of the musicians’ bows upon their strings could have been her heartbeat.

Violetta’s breath caught in her throat.  He was – 

He was already in front of her and Violetta had to hurry to grip her dress and offer him the deep curtsy that his rank demanded.

“I bid you welcome, Your Majesty.  I am honored to receive you to the Manor Lescovar.”

“Just honored…?” A soft tone.  A question asked like it already had its answer.

A white glove appeared before her lowered eyes.  Violetta’s body reacted all on its own: she reached out as she came out of her curtsy and felt strong, warm fingers squeeze gently around her own.  That genteel grip guided her hand up, up to where the King of Stormwind bowed his head for her when she had only ever seen him bow his head for the Light and pressed lips much fuller than she remembered, not to her knuckles or the back of her hand, but to the curl of her fingers.

Then, his proud nose bumped awkwardly against her hand.  One corner of his mouth quirked higher and his flush was so light that only Violetta could see it.  The softest huff of a laugh caught in his throat.

“Darn…darn, I almost had that.  I’m sorry, my Lady.”

His smile was like the sun after the rain.

Wrathion now realized that when he had asked Anduin to explain his style of not-truly-courtship so that he might better continue the farce for the duration of this party, he should have asked his love to further clarify what he meant when he said:

“Oh, right…I’ve been treating her – well.  Yes, I’ve been treating her well.”

Because judging by the young lady’s stupefied stare, he and Anduin had very different definitions of well.

“It…it is quite alright, Your Majesty.” She was in the midst of a game attempt at a recovery, which Wrathion was making much more difficult by continuing to hold her hand.  He had at least let it lower, as though the two of them were about to take a nice private stroll about the reception room and were not the absolute center of attention. “Did you…was your carriage ride pleasant?  Rain is expected tonight.”

She had to have seen him shaking out his cloak, but good manners would not have her point that out until he, until the King, did so himself.  It was easy to fall naturally in line with the cadence of expected conversation – 

“I saw my share of it on the way in, though I doubt the spitting of a few raindrops is going to ruin this excellent evening.”

– but Violetta Lescovar continued to stare at him.

…Anduin.  Anduin, dear.

What have you been doing for six years?

Not courting women, obviously, but as opposed to yesterday when he had been blissfully unencumbered by the man’s unfathomable need to emotionally connect with him, Wrathion now had Greymane’s voice in his head, chastising him for his assumptions.

“He can’t be you.”

Wrathion understood that, yet soon it would be a decade since Anduin had been crowned and surely in that amount of time – 

“Stop that.”

He was forced, then, to concede the point.  Wrathion’s first clue that he would have to be making some adjustments should have been the astonished fumbling of the man at the road entrance, who nearly slipped when scrambling across the wet gravel to get the gate open again.  When Wrathion had frowned and checked the pocketwatch inside his waistcoat, he’d seen that it was only twenty past the hour, which put him firmly and appropriately at the end of arrivals.  Or, would it be more correct to say that his first clue should have been when Nathan told him that Anduin only ever took the smallest possible entourage when attending social engagements outside of the Keep?  Peacetime, Wrathion had been told, had given Anduin the excuse of restricting his guards to two and despite employing a valet that could provide him with personal services wherever he might go, he had never done so.  Anduin’s reasoning for that, Nathan had gone on to say, was that wherever he was going already had servants, so why bring more?

In Wrathion’s defense, he had not brought Nathan with him today just because he thought Anduin should have an attendant.  He of course did think that, but Shaw and Greymane had shared his other reasoning: it was better to have someone privy to his secret present in the event that something went awry.

“Let…let me show you to your seat, Your Majesty.”

However, nothing was going awry other than Wrathion’s own commitment to impersonation, though he at least kept his expression unchanged while he thought, bewildered: the King is always seated in the same place.  It should be – 

Yet, it was not at the head of the room, as had been the case in the reception hall in Stormwind Keep where he had received petitioners much earlier that day.  It was…close to that, as close as one could be when perched at the end of the shared banquet table with a chair backed up to the dais stairs.  At once, Wrathion realized that of course Anduin would prefer to be with the other guests.  Of course he would.  As a boy he would sit with his father, no doubt, and as a man he would sit with other Alliance Leaders, and then he would sit with his friends.  He had sat with him, there at the table that they had shared in the Tavern in the Mists, where they remained peers throughout their many meals, games, and lively debates.

No one here was Anduin’s friend or peer, but he would still sit with them.

“Thank you, my Lady.”

The High King was nothing except comfortable when sliding into his chair and, moreover, gave the Lescovar girl a grateful, private smile.  Many a time Anduin had shared such a smile with him, as early as when Wrathion had first offered his arm to help the other Prince up the stairs to his room in the Inn and as late as when he would do the same before when they went to bed together after the candles had burned down to stubs.

To this, Violetta had for him another stare.  She had an incredible stare.  Truly, it bordered on the magnificently pointed, and Wrathion felt its lingering weight even as she, too, took her seat to his right.  To his left was an old woman that he recognized as the Duchess Moorcroft, who had apparently lived six years longer than he had originally expected.  If he recalled, she had no heirs, stripped of them by the many wars that had defined her lifetime, and rather than appointing a ward or adopted child as the inheritor of her name, she had long ago arranged for that name to be the last Moorcroft interred in the family mausoleum.  A full half of her worldly assets were earmarked for orphanages, halls of healing, and the construction of a school strictly for women; the rest would revert to the Crown, or so had been the case when he had last been in Stormwind.  It was markedly difficult to gauge what her current opinion was of the High King when she was giving him that pinched and hawkish look.

Anduin, he knew, would not take offense, not visibly.

He would smile blandly, as Wrathion did now, and perhaps also wonder, as Wrathion was also doing now, what he had done to get a woman older than the Order of the Silver Hand to glower at him.

The door attendant by this time had hurried back to the duty that Wrathion had oh-so-rudely torn him from, that being attending to the serving door now that everyone had arrived.  Or, mostly everyone.  The Baron Lescovar seemed to be absent, a curiosity that Wrathion would have frowned at if he wasn’t attempting to gauge just how much of a mild-but-sincere look of pleasant attentiveness he was supposed to be giving the Baron’s daughter.

“Distinguished guests!  Potage as served by Chef Hortense!”

Wrathion saw Violetta’s brows twitch.  His curiosity piqued, but he caught himself with the certainty that even though Anduin would have spotted it, he would not have asked.  He would not have thought it his place to pry into the goings-on of the lady’s life, even though it would have been explicitly his place to do so.

But, his choice made, the meal had Wrathion’s attention instead.  A glance down the long, robust tabletop showed him that the girl had chosen a hybrid serving type: the attendant’s announcement of dishes promised that courses would be delivered from the kitchens throughout the night, but the table itself was already home to a dozen artful and astonishing displays of sugar sculpture surrounded by a variety of savory hors d'oeuvres and the glasses of champagne of three different styles, judging by the color of their blush.  There were a dozen elfin model ships, sinewy cloud serpents leaping from hilltops, and rigid lines of Mogu infantry, and yet the most grand of the sweet edifices was a striking and impressively accurate representation of the Temple of the Jade Serpent – before its destruction and reconstruction!  In fact, when he leaned a little to the side, he could spy the miniature depiction of the original jade icon Yu’lon was to inhabit so that She might incarnate into a new self, here rendered with broad granules dyed glittering emerald, and surrounded by semi-transparent spun caramel scaffolding.  At the highest platform, this a paperthin cut of hard candy carved to resemble bamboo planks, a Pandaren craftsman had been formed through a fairly respectable go at the confectionery skill he had seen only in Halfhill when he had been a whelp: the shaping of liquid sugar like blown glass to create delicate figures.  It was not as artful as those birds and bandicoons on paper sticks he’d had Left and Right retrieve for him regularly, but even this amount of detail by an amateur confectioner had him wondering if he might ask who it was among the kitchen staff that had – 

...

The Duchess and the girl were staring at him.  A girl further down the table was taking a sip from an empty champagne glass while staring at him.

He had leaned to the side a little too far.

Slowly, with a small nod to himself, he sat straight again, and rested his hands on his lap while the servers placed tureens in the shape of dragon turtles upon the strategically clear portions of the banquet tables.  There were six in all, an appropriately impressive number while not overly excessive, and the many bowls into which the soups would be served were shallow, besides.  This early in the evening the feast would consist only of light fare to wet the appetite before the first dance, after which would be a round of removes.  This being Stormwind, the removes would doubtless consist entirely of fish, and whether or not they would be accompanied by lighter entrees before the great pieces depended solely upon how much wealth Violetta wished to flaunt.  If she were not watching him as though expecting him to suddenly leap out of his chair in a fit, Wrathion might have been able to judge how much pride she had or what air she had chosen to cultivate.

Anduin, when pressed, had said: “She’s a nice young woman.  It hasn’t been unpleasant.”

Wrathion knew that Shaw was spectacularly homosexual, but had he really sent Anduin to carry this plot on his back without even so much as a touch of coaching –

The soups were being served.  The turtle closest to Wrathion had its porcelain shell lifted away, the gilt edges trailing thin trails of fragrant smoke.

…oh, that smell was deliciously pungent.  Capers?  Yet the meatiness behind them could only be mutton and the richness overall promised that when he was served – and he was at least served first – that he would receive a few spoonfuls at most.  Nevertheless, it was with a certain amount of anticipation that he removed his gloves and set them aside for Nathan to retrieve when he returned, then took up his spoon.

He could smile appreciatively.  He knew that Anduin liked meat.  And Violetta apparently knew it, too, as the next handful followed the trend if not the richness: chicken consommé, cream with poultry stock, and a shockingly authentic mung bean soup that, while it would not be up to Tong’s exacting standards, was nonetheless the second impressive accomplishment to come out of Violetta’s obvious affection for Pandaria.  Which of course prompted him to ponder silently: had Anduin not used that as an avenue of conversation?  To this day he knew that Anduin looked back upon the year they spent there with tremendous fondness; more than once, he had confessed against Wrathion’s shoulder, behind the safety and privacy of the bed curtains, that some days he wanted nothing more than to put aside his sash of office and depart for those faraway shores.

Wrathion could only now understand that for the soft plea it had been; the self yesteryear had not listened, because there was work to be done.

The sobering of his mood stayed in the far recesses in his mind; he let it live there, and turned his head to Violetta.

“The mung bean is amazing.  I could be back in the Jade Forest.  Your chef, Hortense, did she train in Pandaria?”

Wrathion tempered the eagerness with shyness; it helped, because though she did stare some, Violetta did touch a napkin to her lips thereafter and reply with more comfort and the smallest thread of curiosity. “Yes, she did.  She spent two years in Dawn’s Blossom.”

“I see!” Anduin had told Wrathion of his own stay there; it had been by necessity brief, but he had only ardent praise for the inns and restaurants, if not the breweries, because even as a semi-fugitive from his own father, he would not take a sip of alcohol before he came of age.  This, too, he had found tremendously charming, and had chosen at the time not to mention to Anduin that he had overwhelmed his youthful draconic constitution with potent rice liquor the moment he was left unsupervised with the bottle. “Did she learn how to make lotus seed soup, too?  That was always a favorite.”

Wrathion saw then that when Violetta was interested in something, she leaned a little forward. “Yes, though I’m afraid we won’t see it tonight.  She doesn’t consider it up to her standards yet.”

“A shame, but I’ll be eagerly awaiting the day that it is.” Anduin had always been like that: the opportunity to try something new, or something old but in a new way, always excited him.  He found pleasure in revelations of endearing sincerity: as a boy, he’d been agog at the many inky desserts that Tong could produce from black sesame, each new iteration met with the same open wonder.  It would not be strange or out of the ordinary for Anduin to look forward to the Stormwindian rendition of a fond boyhood memory.

Violetta did not seem to think it was so strange, either.  Her small smile was far less tense. “I will tell her that you said so, Your Majesty.”

The warmer atmosphere was just enough for him to consider taking the conversation in the direction of asking what had troubled her at the start of serving, but the last turtle was now bereft of his shell and, unfortunately, the trend of enjoyable soups was at an end.  He needed one small sniff to catch the final serving: celery.  Celery, and a crystal clear consommé with savory notes.  It would have to be a lean meat with that clarity.  Game poultry, perhaps?  Quail, pheasant?  It was difficult to tell, the celery ruined the dish, and at the same time proved to Wrathion that despite ten years passing since that contemptible vegetable had been imported, the Stormwind aristocracy still demanded its inclusion in their banquets as ingredients and centerpieces.  It was difficult to grow in this climate and quick to wilt unless prohibitively expensive means were used to transport it and so its presence communicated wealth and means even as it failed to provide any culinary value whatsoever.

Wrathion did not care for celery.  And it did not escape his notice that even though Violetta had adorned her tables with numerous odes to Pandaria’s beauty and culture, she had also included glass vases of fresh-cut celery as additional ornamentation.  They served no purpose other than to act as decor: their bright greens leapt out of the reds, blacks, and golds of the table setting itself, and though he had to begrudgingly admit they served as a skillful transition of the eye to the primary centerpieces, which all contained green as a predominant color, he was nonetheless not enamored of them.

The dainty, piquant pop of celery’s flavor on his tongue as he took his first half-spoonful of soup was just additional insult to injury, most especially because he unfortunately knew that Anduin liked it.  Until he had arrived in Pandaria, celery was as spicy as Stormwind cuisine got for him, and he had once stated, proudly, shamelessly, with Tong’s excellent breakfast spread out in front of him:

“I like how it crunches.”

There was little else Wrathion could do but say, after he finished the four painful spoonfuls of celery soup: “That was a wonderful finish.  Probably my favorite.”

The table, which had eased into pleasant conversation at the same time that Violetta had relaxed, went quiet so abruptly that he could swear even the musicians had halted their playing.  The gentle ringing of silverware stopped.  The servers paused in their work.  Someone had stopped short of swallowing their sip of champagne.  The rain that had begun to patter against the windows faded into sepulchral silence.  And Wrathion, wildly, powerfully alarmed, hid the sudden shocking surge of unease behind his napkin.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could spot the nervous, clandestine looks of…was that dread?  Anticipation?  What could possibly…

It was soup!  It was a soup that he knew Anduin liked.  Yet the young girl that had been gawking at him since he had arrived had now fixed her eyes on one of the flower arrangements and slowly flushed a bright cherry red.  Violetta was looking at the ceiling and had no expression whatsoever.  The Duchess, who at her advanced age seemed to have achieved a sublime and enviable fearlessness, provided the only sliver of a clue as to what had so drastically altered the mood because she was the only member of the dinner party that had openly locked her gaze on him.

Him, and then for a few seconds, the empty bowl that the server silently retrieved.  Was it really the soup, then?  Had Anduin’s opinion on a vegetable inexplicably affected the peerage?  Was that what was going on here?  It couldn’t be that Anduin had come to hate it; Violetta would not have included it in the menu if he did.  In fact, the celery soup had been the last served, a placement reserved for the finest dish in a course, or one with special purpose.  That suggested that she had intentionally arranged it for Anduin’s enjoyment.  She knew he liked celery.  Apparently, they all – 

The Duchess’s eyes flicked to the glass vase set directly in front of Wrathion.  In it, the cut stalks of celery continued to sit, a bright green eyesore in water to preserve their freshness, proud of their place as part of the dining tableau.

A momentous dread overtook Wrathion then.

Understanding sloughed toward his consciousness, mortifying.

He didn’t want to believe it.  And yet, he could do nothing but believe it.  It was not the soup at all.  The soup was merely a precursor to what they were all waiting for, or hoping would not happen.

An appalling, cringing wave of distress crawled through his entire body.  Its turgid resistance sagged at his elbows and wrists, groaning in humiliation and denial.  Only a lifetime of indomitable self-discipline allowed him to ruthlessly goad his arms to lift and his fingers to grasp two of the forks that were part of his table setting, because…

Because, of course Anduin would use his silverware.  He had never lacked manners.

He would use his forks, and reach forward, and catch one stalk of fresh celery in the display vase between the tongs, lift it out, and place it on his hors d'oeuvre plate.  As such, Wrathion had no choice but to do the same now, even as every shred of dignity in his body writhed away from the knowledge that he was plucking the equivalent of the flowers and table runners in order to nibble on it, happy as a clam.

Once he had his prize, Anduin would pick up his knife, again, because he had manners, and use it and his fork to cut a bite-sized portion from the stalk and bring it to his mouth to happily crunch on the garnishment uninterrupted because who would tell the High King he wasn’t supposed to eat the displays?

No one.  No one would tell him, no matter…no matter how many times he did it.  Not one word was said now when Wrathion did the same.

He was not a dragon given to weeping openly, but inside – 

Inside, he could make an exception.

Chapter Text

A lifetime ago, a dark-skinned youth sat at a writing desk in the King’s Suite of the finest and most expensive inn in Booty Bay, the Siren’s Arse.  The establishment boasted the best views of the cove and the most comfortable of guest rooms, luxuries achieved by the building clinging precariously to the jutting cliff that overlooked the crowded port and bustling smugglers’ town.  Even with the wide windows open and tossing the salty seabreeze into the room, the damp was kept to a minimum: the rugs, the bed, and the linens were free of mildew and just soft enough that at night, when he was a dragon whelp and not a boy, he could burrow against the mattress and pile the cotton and knitted wool into something like a nest.

He had been in a dragon’s nest before, but he had never seen one.  He had been in his egg at the time; the red dragons that had tended him would speak of the nest where he was kept quite often, but they hardly needed to describe it to each other.  If they had anything to say, it was about their misgivings, their pity, and their doubt, as few of his first caretakers were confident that he would do anything but perish in his shell, misbegotten as he was.

He wasn’t sure, and would not be sure for many years, if they even knew that he could hear them.

But at that time, perched on the edge of a finely upholstered chair very obviously lifted from some aristocrat’s caravan, the wretched prison of his egg and the life of bondage for his own good were well and truly behind him.  His father was dead.  The reds would not find him.  Fahrad had met his deserved end.  And those survivors of the attack on the manor were scattered throughout Booty Bay, gathering intel, funds, alliances, and access to a ship that would take them out of the Eastern Kingdoms and to the shores of Theramore and from there, the neutral city of Dalaran.  He had taken complete control of his life.  He did not even have to leave this room to see his will done and so he was free to occupy himself with more personal matters:

Watching with intense interest as Left wrote out a simplified runic alphabet.  He had decided that he would learn Orcish at the same time that he learned Common, and he’d hardly kept still in his seat as the mysterious symbols finally resolved themselves into something that he could understand.

Throughout the months that Wrathion had temporarily dwelt in Booty Bay – they never did reach Theramore, not before its destruction, and altered their destination to the newly discovered Pandaria – the two unaffiliated mercenaries that he had hired to guard his life took it upon themselves to teach him what the rogues of Ravenholdt had not.  Spoken language he had known before he was born, the sounds of the world humming through the albumen and the little blood vessels that kept him alive, but all written orders and correspondence had been handled by Fahrad, ostensibly as a service to him but really as a means of repressing Wrathion’s independence.  Once free, he’d set about to remedy that vulnerability, though he’d not intended for his bodyguards to have a role in that when he had begun the effort.  Right had simply caught him pouring over the random assortment of books he’d had delivered from the shops there, trying to glean an understanding of written letters and numbers through sheer determination and ratty reprints of novels, cookbooks, and pornography rags.

Where they had found the stacks of scrap paper and the handfuls of charcoal pencils and thin writing chalk, they had never said, and somewhere in a town without children they’d unearthed school slates and a stack of battered textbooks that bore the old Lordaeron crest, all of which he had to this day, stacked neatly in a trunk in his personal quarters in the Obsidian Enclave.  Through those long, humid summer afternoons, one woman seated on his right, the other on his left, and he in the middle, kicking his feet beneath the writing desk or scratching the charcoal with his whelp’s claws when he hadn’t the energy to hold his visage, Wrathion had learned how to read and how to write.

As the days had gone on, he had learned simple arithmetic.  He had been shown how to count coins and divide figures.  He had written his name and his title in bold, dark letters, first in common, then in orcish: Wrathion the Black Prince.  He had felt secure enough that he could ask what a word for something was, those things that he had never seen before like ships’ masts, or dolphins, or the palm nuts they cracked for their milk and fruit, or the scuttling crabs that were such fun for a dragon whelp to chase toward the twilit surf while stars slowly dotted the sky.  He was taught the basics of daily personal care, though this was in the washroom with basins, brushes, combs, and soaps, as opposed to paper and books at his writing desk, and more than a few lessons had to pass before he allowed his teachers to see the scars he kept hidden beneath his clothing.  Yet more afternoons would go by before he asked them the difference between men and women, and what that meant for what he knew and felt about himself.  The lessons seemed liable never to stop; he distinctly remembered hoping that they would never end, the well of earthly wisdom seemingly bottomless.  In mere months he ravenously consumed the knowledge he did not dare seek beneath Fahrad’s mad, unfaltering eye, desperately hungry for the ten years that he had not actually lived despite the fresh prickling of puberty in the scruff on his chin and the scattered hairs on his calves.

That wasn’t to say he’d learned nothing among the Ravenholdt.  Before he could read, he could sharpen a knife, burn evidence with his infant’s breath, pick locks, identify a dozen poisons and craft a dozen more, wield both a sword and a dagger, and most importantly, lie, but he had needed Left and Right to demonstrate how forks and spoons were held and used, though Left always reminded him that using his hands was just as good and easier to do on the road, anyway.  He had taken his meals in the manor alone and as a whelp, too young to metabolize efficiently in visage and too cautious to leave himself vulnerable to company, and it wasn’t until that summer in Booty Bay that Wrathion really learned how to sit at a table and share a meal with others.

When he closed his eyes, he could see the uneven light spilling out of tin lanterns.  If he quieted his thoughts, he could hear the shouts and songs, the bets and the curses, and how it all would echo against the planks of the inn’s tavern hall.  When he took a breath, he could still taste the grilled swordfish, and he could still feel the swell of pride that had overflowed when he had taken his slices of it with his knife and his fork, to the praise of his teachers.

As cautious conversation slowly resumed at the banquet for Violetta Lescovar’s birthday celebration and the inglorious present marched mercilessly on, Wrathion found himself ruminating on those days that had passed so very quickly.  At the time, he had been glad for the swiftness; today, tonight, their brevity formed a shape a little much like grief.  He owed Left and Right more than could truly be expressed, and he could admit a certain cowardliness in that he had not yet even tried, a tremendous tenderness like a wound flinching whenever he thought himself close to telling them.  The desire to do so had stirred quite often in the last year or so, clutching strangely in his throat when he would spy the scars on Right’s hands or the threads of white streaking through Left’s ponytail, and that feeling was wound through the complicated emotion that twisted around itself inside his chest at this very moment.

Wrathion examined its components.  It was bitter, very sharply bitter, and yes, a little angry, though the simmering of it was subdued and strange.  It was certainly thoroughly humiliated.  Cringing.  What pride was to be had in it had been ground into a fine dust, which blew away when a server silently retrieved his plate with a meager chunk of celery left upon it.  He felt deeply helpless and…

That was it.  That was the component that was actionable.

If he had been present as himself for this affair, and not as a fake Anduin, he would have told his love, in private, knowing what every guest at the table did know but did not understand: what kind of life a motherless boy could have when his father was grieving, and then kidnapped, and then constantly at war, and then – 

The only teacher Anduin had ever had was buried beneath the willow trees in the churchyard, dead before the Fourth War.  Who was left, then?  Greymane?  A man whose middle name could be austerity?  Proudmoore was gone to her kingdom; Shaw was a man of ordinary birth and specific skills, just as the rogues of Ravenholdt had been.  Every noble house circled as sharks might, devoid of friend or confidant.  Every other soul that Anduin trusted belonged to peoples and kingdoms that couldn’t grasp Stormwind and its demands.  Who could there have been to sit to the right or left of him, bent close, to show him how to –

Wrathion’s mind flashed to miles below the earth.

With cold-blooded precision, he cut that thread of thought.

He already knew what to do.  He had already made his decision.

There was a scene to make. “The first dance is about to begin, isn’t it?”

Violetta, who had occupied herself with another glass of champagne and, he assumed, the reinforcement of her nerve, jumped just enough to send her drink sparkling back and forth inside its glass, the bubbles gathering on the edges of the rosy liquid.  Wrathion knew now to expect the surprise: after all, Anduin had said time and again that he was not very good at dancing, even when they were in the sanctuary of his private rooms where all mistakes would be instantly forgiven and forgotten.  The gnomish gramophone was simply a gift from the High Tinker, and when he used it, it was primarily to listen to the wax cylinders of music for relaxation, not to dance, and rare were the times that Wrathion could coax him into taking a few turns around the room with him.  It was a habit so set into him that Wrathion was already certain that nothing would have changed in six years and the quick, deep breath that the young lady took before she replied all but explicitly confirmed it.

“Yes, you and I will be taking the floor.” Her reply was respectably diplomatic.

Wrathion’s unassuming smile seemed to disarm her.  He turned his head and found the nearest server, his tray empty of glasses. “Then – you, good man.”

The attendant stopped, his step slightly off but his recovery good.  He approached and bowed deeply. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Go to the coat room and have my manservant retrieve my shoes.” Wrathion glanced back at Violetta and his look, this time, had a soft and creeping hauteur.  He was gentle, as only Anduin could be gentle, but Wrathion let slip but a sliver of the dazzling sharpness etched in his memory.  It was a gift, really.  It was Anduin leaning closer to her and allowing her entry into his wide, dark shadow.

“I’d never put boots on such a stage.”

Wrathion saw her breath catch.  One gloved hand curled into a fist just below her throat. “Of – of course.”

The usual audience was staring again: the Duchess.  The young girl who was oddly at this party without a chaperone.  And anyone near enough to catch what he said, and how he said it, and how frustrating it must have been for everyone else that he could just spy out of the corner of his eye.  The rest of their table was restless; who knew how the occupants of the other tables were fairing when they could only watch from afar?

Wrathion knew he had best give them a gift as well.

Within a few moments, as the last of the used plates disappeared into the serving doors along with the soup turtles, a different attendant approached with the King’s shoebox in hand.  A frown wanted to flicker across Wrathion’s face; he knew Anduin preferred to use the house servants when visiting other estates, but in the single day that he had come to know him, he was certain that Nathan was not the sort of man to let another usurp his duties.

It was something for him to look into after this.  Perhaps during the removes; the smell of fish was strong and it was not unusual for some diners to take a turn around the hall to help clear their air.  A quick exchange of boots for shoes, and then he was rising to his feet, picking up his gloves from the table as he did so.  He straightened his coat and tapped his heel against the floor, first one, then the other, to fit each shoe more firmly.  The sounds echoed sharply.  Behind him, the conversations halted, then resumed as low, meandering threads, a pretense held even though the entire focus of the room was once again returning to the most prominent guest despite the event having been arranged to honor another.

It was only natural.  Anduin Wrynn was the King of Stormwind.  He was High King of the Alliance.

He did not want to be, but society was deeply unkind when it came to one’s desires.

“The first dance is to be a minuet, isn’t it?”

Violetta had risen alongside him and even in pumps, she had to lift her eyes and tilt her head slightly back to look at him.  Anduin would never have his father’s width and girth, but he most certainly had Varian’s height, which the young lady seemed to realize only just now, when Wrathion touched her elbow with one shy hand, then slid his fingers down to wrap them around her own.  When his thumb passed over her wrist, he felt the hot fluttering of her pulse.

“It is,” she said, and Wrathion smiled for her.

He leaned closer, adjusting the angle of his head so that his hair fell like a curtain when he murmured close to her ear. “I have a suggestion for something different.  Would that be alright with you…?  I don’t want to impose.”

The muslin of her dress rustled, soft as rushes. “It…nothing you could suggest would be an imposition, Your Majesty.”

The lie was admirable.  He could appreciate the work she put into it. “Thank you.”

Wrathion stepped away and, rather than approach the nearest knot of musicians, he raised his voice.  It was rare that Anduin would ever shout; he had admitted to Wrathion that he didn’t like how strained he would sound at the end of every sentence, his breath and words crushed and stretched as though they could never leave his lips fast enough.  He was self-conscious, he would say, and would never speak of, nor even hint at, any of Varian’s famous rages.  Wrathion had never pressed him; command could be had in different ways.

But tonight when he spoke, the words began in his chest and traveled from one end of the room to the other.

“Gentlemen!  For the first piece of music, you have in your repertoire the Midnight Waltz, don’t you?”

Of course they did.  It was the most popular waltz of the social season.  Yet the four men – two humans, a dwarf, and a gnome completely hidden by the apparatus he was using to play his cello – seemed reluctant to confirm this until Wrathion’s smile began to fall and a dire blankness slid into his eyes.  The King was not angry; the King was never angry.  The King was kind, thoughtful, and pious, and it was the chilling weight of not knowing what the King was instead of angry that had the first of the violinists stuttering out a reply almost instantly.

“Y-Yes, yes, Your Majesty!  We can – would you like us to play it for the first dance?”

Wrathion’s reply was warm and grateful. “That’s right.  Thank you.”

A chorus of nods replied, followed by the frenetic flipping of pages.  Wrathion turned back to Violetta, who had by that time cultivated a praiseworthy amount of poise.  In fact, the perfectly cultivated expression, regal but not haughty, polite but not shrinking, suggested to him that the recovery and the curated facade was a well-known and well-practiced maneuver.  In noble society, it would certainly have to be, because if the aristocracy could lunge at every sign of weakness from their own King, just how cutthroat would they be with each other?  It was almost a shame: her expert carriage and quick thinking would have in fact made Violetta an excellent candidate for Queen – 

The hissing jolt of displeasure within himself made Wrathion pause mid-step.

Anger.  Irrational, possessive anger, so abrupt and so unexpected that Violetta let her mask slip when she saw it flash through his expression.  Only she could see it; the angle was wrong for everyone else.

“Are you alright – ”

“Yes, sorry.  Sorry, just some nerves.” He cleared his throat; he straightened his ascot.  He kept his voice low and his anger lower, much lower, savagely dragged down and as far away from his moment as was possible.  “I’ve been practicing, but it’s always different in the moment, isn’t it?”

“Yes…”

It seemed that she did not want to, or did not think it was wise, to entirely believe him, but Wrathion seized the moment to tuck one arm behind his back.  As he did so, one violin and one viola began the short, rising chords that marked the opening of the waltz.  He offered out his hand and bowed at the waist before her, as he would do only for visiting dignitaries and the other leaders of the Alliance.

“My Lady.” The words were hopeful, soft in their appeal.

He saw her swallow, but he also saw where it was that she flushed most prominently: on her ears, these being nearly hidden by the heavy ringlets of her hairstyle.  Her expression remained impeccable, though her words, too, were soft.  She curtsied deeply.

“Your Majesty.”

She took his hand.

The second violin entered in a mournful cascade of notes.  Wrathion rose when they did, out of the doleful melancholy and into delicately surging waves of sound, and he pulled Violetta up and close to his body.  The violin danced further upward, leaping to the next interval, and he guided their bodies to chase after it with a strong and sweeping first spin.  The grand turn only ended when the cello rumbled a staying beat, which decided when and how their feet would fall after every spin the violin demanded of them.  Every note was a new step, hers in half-time after his, fitting into each of the places where he had just been as the strings pulled them back and forth, and the passionately swift pace of it, the chase, the leap, the drop, were as thrilling as they were cruelly difficult to master.  The leading partner had to have the strength to catch the following party at the end of each surge and lift them again to meet the next, turning and turning, the circles intimately tight.  The following partner was ever in danger of trodding upon the shoes of the lead, forced to trust that they would not be there when the next chord began and demanded that they once again match the woeful excitement of a waltz that was as much about desperation as it was love.

The stroke of midnight was the ephemeral bridge between the old and the new.  It marked the loss of one day and the birth of the next, and oh, how mournful the violin could be as it crossed that unavoidable boundary.  Tomorrow would always come, the violin cried, it would always come, and there would be an end!

An end, and a beginning!

The violin crashed upward, joyous and needy, turning them as the midnight would ruthlessly turn the hands of the clock and the world on which they stood.  It spun and took them with it, looking back, dropping down, and how grieved with the full knowledge that yesterday was well and truly gone.

Then!  Up, again!  Rising!  A joyous, desperate separation, which had them both linked by their clasped hands but apart in all other ways, pounding heartbeats matching the march of deeper notes.  Violetta had no choice but to allow her other arm to swing through the air as they came apart, her breathless momentum carrying her so far that it seemed for a stunning moment that she might fall.

But it wasn’t so.  It couldn’t be.  The cello and the viola, low as drums for how thunder coursed through their strings, drove the King to catch her before she fell, his arm beneath her body and lifting her into the next spin, the next rise.

Again and again.  Spinning until the world blurred and disappeared.  The neverending midnight.  The bridge without time, and without rest, the waltz seizing breath and the little flecks of sweat that gathered at his temples and at the nape of her neck.

The violin collapsed, just as exhausted as they were.

Its cry drifted quietly, then ceased altogether.

By design, the dance ended with them in an embrace.  Violetta was against his chest, her lips parted and her face flushed.  His own had to be the same; Anduin always blushed so easily.  They were both trembling, she from exertion and he from willing himself to, and as incredible as the silence was in the reception hall, the now-steady rain all but hushed along with their rapt audience, it was still quite difficult to catch Violetta’s words when she spoke.

“I…don’t understand you.”

“I’m sorry,” Anduin told her.

“I know you are.”

They parted, and for a breath she searched for something in his expression that she would never find.  It was not hers to have, and it was not his to give.

The next melody that began tinkling through the air was so offensively docile that it was no surprise that no other couples chose to encroach upon the dance floor, but it did allow the room as a whole to breathe again.  Sound returned in the form of hushed and hurried conversation, the footsteps of guests departing for the washrooms to excitedly gossip in greater privacy, and the rain that battered the windowpanes and the rooftop.  The storm must have been enacting a sort of vengeance against them for having silenced it at all: when the thunder rumbled, the chandelier shook and those light sources not connected to independent power flickered visibly.  To her credit, Violetta did not follow him to sit back down at the table, and instead gave him the second curtsy that etiquette demanded before she slipped toward the side of the room to speak to one of the butlers.

He let her go.  He had accomplished all that he had desired. 

Wrathion was no expert on storms – not in a black dragon’s purview, as it were – but sound alone was enough for him to suspect that the guests would be staying later than the Lescovars had originally intended.  The roads that threaded through Elwynn were well-maintained, but there were limits as to what could be done against the capriciousness of nature.  If this region really had been a delta in its ancient history, the landscape had long been carved into a shape that encouraged the rushing of water, and though the worst of the elemental energies had been quieted, many remained.  That bog that Anduin had plunged into those nights ago was likely a result of the region's heavy tilt toward water and well-saturated ground was liable to flood in the blink of an eye.  Landslides would follow and though most villages and estates were built upon higher ground in anticipation of such emergencies, with this sort of downpour no attendee of this party was likely to leave for home any earlier than tomorrow morning.  He would need to speak with Nathan about retrieving Shaw’s communication box from the carriage so that he could…

…

…that girl a couple seats down hadn’t blinked for the last minute or so.

She was staring at him, slack-jawed and mute, while the rest of the party buzzed along anxiously around her.  Her fashionable turban had even slipped slightly, showing flayaway curls of ludicrously pink hair, and yet she made no move to adjust it, her entire being frozen in bug-eyed awe.  Aside from her, it was as he expected: no other guest had thus far addressed him, though common logic said that they should, as this was an opportunity to have the King of Stormwind to themselves, but they were doubtless trapped in the very same state of uncertainty that the musicians had been.  After that display, they did not know what Anduin might do next, nor what he was thinking when he removed his gloves once more and gently dabbed at his sweaty temples with his handkerchief.  Wrathion was, by all appearances, returned to the pleasantly unassuming politeness that Anduin was known for, and the social paranoia that created should ensure they remained behaved for the rest of the – 

“Are you going to marry her?”

Ah.

He had forgotten about the insolence of the elderly.  He turned his head and met Duchess Moorcroft’s intense look with a patently bland smile. “I beg your pardon?”

“Do not act innocent with me, Your Majesty.” The title was added in at the last moment, though from the needle sharpness of her gaze, Wrathion was not sure why she had bothered.  His rank obviously did not sway her convictions at all, and why would it?

She had been a child when Barathen had been King.  The Wrynns must have lost their luster for her well before Anduin’s rule. “I must really apologize, Duchess.  If my conduct – ”

“Violetta is a strong, wonderful girl.”

…ah. “Yes.  She is.”

“It wasn’t innocent, the way you danced with her.”

Wrathion rested his hands upon the table and laced his fingers together.  He thought of changing his expression, but this woman would not be swayed as the others had been.  She had nothing to lose; her brazen attitude showed her full confidence that if she were prosecuted, she’d willfully drop dead at last out of spite to deny the authorities the satisfaction. “We’re in the middle of courtship.”

“So you’ll marry her.”

Wrathion rubbed his thumbs over one another, an anxious gesture he remembered well. “That’s for her to decide, isn’t it?”

The Duchess clearly caught his sidestepping her question; she didn’t narrow her eyes, or anything so obvious, but she didn’t let him slip away. “Do you want to marry her?”

Too easy. “I’m trying to figure that out.”

“That wasn’t the case before tonight.”

Just how many of these gatherings had Violetta invited the Duchess to? “I’m not very experienced at courtship.  I’m afraid I’ve been unkind toward Violetta while trying to find my footing.”

“That’s horseshit.”

The elderly man beside the Duchess, the Lord Pendleton if memory served, choked on his champagne and spat his current mouthful all over the lovingly faithful recreation of the Tiffin’s Melody in sugar and fondant.  His wife was forced to slap his back while the attendants scrambled to fetch a glass of water and Wrathion, his expression and posture unchanged, really had to wonder when it was that everyone in Stormwind had begun to swear so much.  What was Photius doing, precisely, to have allowed profanity to infect the populous from the highborn to the low?

“I beg your – ”

“You either want to marry her, or you want a game.”

The change was subtle.  The Duchess had lived too long and through too many tumultuous years within society to let all of her emotions slip…but she did let slip some.  The brittle, cracking anger at the very back of her words reminded Wrathion of the dossiers he’d had made for every member of the House of Nobles.  House Moorcroft had been blessed with strong, vibrant sons, but never a daughter, nor any grandchildren whatsoever, and their long alliance with the Lescovars suggested a connection deeper than mere convenience and profit.

He was reminded, unfortunately, of Sabellian, though Sabellian had children aplenty, with a brood that…

…Wrathion found that he had to swallow before he spoke.  His throat was dry; the palms of his hands, warm. “I promise you, I don’t consider this a game.”

It must have been difficult and more than a little painful at her age, but the Duchess made herself sit upright.  It was much easier to see just how frail she really was when her shoulders pushed back and showed their thinness, her dark green dress limp upon her body despite the expert tailoring that had gone into providing the best fit possible.  There simply came a point when the ravages of time were impossible to avoid or to hide, which did beg the question as to why she would leave her estate and force her enfeebled constitution to last through multiple social gatherings in one season.

Perhaps she would do it for a girl that was both wonderful and strong. “Then answer me plainly.”

He knew that he could not.  Already, he spun a dozen lies onto waiting spools of thought so that any one of them might be plucked out in response, depending upon the question that she chose to ask.  The trouble was less with the ideas themselves and more in the future execution of them: sweat had popped on his skin again, this time on his palms, but his lips were just as dry as his throat, and it was an effort of considerable will not to lick them

Could the Duchess see that?  Eyes like cut emeralds seemed to suggest that she could. “Do you want a family with Violetta or not?”

Wrathion’s breath vanished from inside his body.  He did not exhale nor choke; it was simply gone, subsumed by the electric current that traveled from his aching throat to the depth of his borrowed loins.

Family.

The King of Stormwind rose so quickly that his silverware rattled and his empty champagne glass wobbled, then tipped gently toward the cloth table runner.  It did not shatter, but it rolled in a lazy circle, dribbling the scant remains of his drink.

“Excuse me.”

Wrathion could barely rasp the words.

He didn’t look at what expressions the rest of the guests might have made.  He didn’t check on the frozen girl to determine if she had died in her chair from lack of blinking.  He didn’t search out the Duchess’s reaction in her eyes or her posture like he certainly should have.  He did not scan the room to locate Violetta, Nathan, or his guards, the last of whom must have surely been aware of the sudden motion.

He simply didn’t have the time.

He turned, banged his hip upon the corner of the table, and began to walk toward the door with the least amount of people near it.  It wasn’t the serving door: that one was abuzz with activity as the servants prepared to begin the next round of the banquet.  It wasn’t the entryway, where every coachman and personal servant were crowded together to receive guidance from the house butlers concerning the storm and the night ahead.  It wasn’t up the stairs beside the dais, which led to the salons and washrooms where half the guests had retreated to wag their tongues at – 

Another jolt writhed inside him.

Wrathion walked faster.

There was only one other door, plain and unassuming with a copper doorknob and keyhole, half-hidden by a curtain in the shadow of the stairs.  He didn’t dare make his steps any wider than they already were, knowing full well that every available eye had to be following him, though when his heartbeat next pounded and hot blood coursed down his limbs, his resolve nearly failed him.  Every inch of skin felt prickling and hot, daubed with moisture and vulnerable to the very air around him.  The door seemed half the length of Kalimdor away and the more he advanced, the heavier his heels felt and the weaker his knees seemed to become.  Sweat soaked into his undershirt and moistened his ascot; when the mere motions of walking caused his hair to brush over his ears, he had to clench his back teeth to keep his attention away from the whispery sensation that was all too familiar.

When they made love in the King’s bed, Wrathion would endlessly run his fingers through Anduin’s long, beautiful hair.  When they kissed, strands of it would brush his cheek, and though the memory was a fond one and the sensation wonderfully pleasant, for it to be so distinctive as to dominate his memory, it was…he…

…he blamed Sabellian.  In this moment, he blamed his brother entirely.

All the way from the forest he had lectured and all of this morning he had ranted and all of this evening he had harangued Wrathion with the same blasted refrain: you have mated.  You have paired.  You are his consort.  His, Anduin’s!  Wrathion hadn’t the time to waste on demanding to know how Sabellian was so sure of that, had he spied on them?!  Or had he taken it upon himself to arbitrarily assign them roles?  Yet the emphasis that Sabellian had placed on each word had elevated their importance beyond mere vocabulary or description or title.  Wrathion had long known the significance of a dragon bearing the appellation of consort: they were the chosen partners of the Dragon Aspects and elder wyrms, serving not only as their mates but as secondary leaders among their flights.  The parallel between a consort and a queen, duchess, or countess could be easily drawn, even if dragons ascribed no gender whatsoever to any of their titles.  When Sabellian had launched into his diatribes, Wrathion’s impression had been that his brother’s relative ignorance of how mortals lived in comparison to dragons had led to the claim that he was Anduin’s consort, instead of the obvious lover, and through the lens of his bias Sabellian treated he and Anduin as he would dragons would once they joined in the relative equivalent of marriage.

But if there was anything that Wrathion had learned today, it was that he did not demand that people elaborate on what they meant anywhere near enough.

You have mated.  It wasn’t just sex.

You have paired.  It wasn’t simply loving Anduin.

You are his consort.  He was his lover, his bedmate, his friend, but that wasn’t all – 

Fervent want, which possessed a name he did not know and had taken a shape he had only just begun to understand, swelled wildly in his chest and wouldn’t be denied.  A reedy whine vibrated against his pressed lips and beads of sweat rolled down the dip of his spine.  His badly shaking hand closed at last around the copper doorknob; infinitely far away, he could hear footsteps and a rising clamor of noise, which was most certainly going to be a problem he was going to need to solve before the night was over.  The door was locked, but that didn’t matter in the least: the interior of the keyhole sizzled and the knob glowed with heat, before the door gave way to darkness and flashing claws of light.  He slammed it shut behind him in the next blink and willed the heat in the metals to dissipate, leaving the locking mechanisms and the latch melted solidly to the frame, which he would also have to explain at a later time that was not now.

A long, plain hallway stretched out in front of him.  To his left, windows spanned the entire length, and their plain shutters were only partially closed, so that the streaks of lightning created madly flickering bars of strange illumination.  To his right were a series of double doors, also plain, and in the feverish roiling inside his head, he could vaguely comprehend that this was where alternative collections of furniture, seating, and decor for the reception hall might be stored.

It would have to do.

It would have to, because his cock had seized to such shocking tightness that when he took his next step and fabric shifted against sensitive skin, his knees knocked together in helpless, instinctual desperation to feel more.  Yet it wasn’t his, it wasn’t him, it was – 

“Khh, ng, an, An–”

Anduin.  Anduin.

His…

“You’re going to want to go to brood with your mate.”

Mate.  His mate.  It wasn’t merely a word, or a descriptor that could be easily replaced by lover or partner.  Anduin was his mate, and the very thought drowned all possible rationality or reasoning, which was incredibly alarming if he was being wholly honest, if only because he had spent all these years in the careful curation of his own emotions and behaviors.  His failure to control himself had led to consequences innumerable and he had sworn…before the blood and the fire, that terrible fire, he had made an oath…!  Yet he could summon neither wretchedness nor anger while he limped toward the third nearest door – even painfully lustful, he knew better than to take the most obvious pathway –  and groped for the broad handle.  If he were to give his sanity to anyone or anything, it would be Anduin.  It had been and would only ever be Anduin, in whose arms he would willingly surrender all restraint because Anduin had seen the very best and the very worst of him, and had reached out to him just the same.

Not…not right away.  He’d led with a plea, and then years later with a fist, but even so.  Even still.  He trusted him.  He trusted Anduin.  Somehow, that held more weight than even their love.

When they were together, he did not have to try so hard.

When they were together, he could let himself go.

“You’ve been reckless.  You’ve paired too early.”

Just how early was too early?  He had loved Anduin for most of his life.  Had they become mates, then, when he had first spied Anduin reading in the shadow of Tong’s peach trees, white petals in his hair and a smile on his face?  He’d felt himself stir when that had happened, and he had dreamed of it later, of the smile and the flowers and Anduin, and embarrassed himself when he’d woken to damp sheets and a deep longing that had demanded he ask his teachers questions again so that he might understand it.  He could admit that the longing had never been wholly satisfied, even after he was grown and had filled his nights with every experience that might be bought or shared, but no…no.  He didn’t think they had been mated before.

Only when Anduin was a dragon had the definition changed.  Only when some key threshold had been passed had Wrathion responded with what felt like his entire body and soul, which was important.  It was important.  It was key, somehow, not just to the two of them but to all of this, to the mystery thirty years and a dragon’s lifetime in the making, and how monstrously ironic it was that Wrathion could not pin that vital revelation because he was once again so aroused he was almost seeing spots before his eyes.

The word had done it as much as Sabellian’s lectures had.  Family.  Children.  A legacy.  A brood, and the breeding that would have to be undertaken to have that happen.

Wrathion wanted to be bred.  He wanted it so badly he was in the middle of ruining this entire affair.

The door rattled, then swung inward with a shriek of older hinges.  Dust cascaded past him, drifting around and above his shoulders, and dozens of alien shapes bulged beneath just as many white sheets.  The next flash of lightning refined the pallid figures: very many rows of high-backed chairs, which had been in fashion in Varian’s day but were now put aside for some future woodpile.

Wrathion fell toward them, pulling the door shut behind him, though he did not have the wherewithal to make certain that it latched or locked.  He clawed at the smothering weight of his coat and then, when that had been flung away, he snatched and pulled at the ascot and its shining pin.  Where they fell, he was not sure, and spared them no other thought except that it was a glorious, wonderful relief to have them gone.  Heat poured from his skin, hovering dangerously close to more than a human body should be capable of, but short of igniting his surroundings or his clothing, there was no one here that might bear witness to it and so he let it be.  He could steam, then groan, and then collapse onto one of their chairs and focus not on walking, but on wrestling with the miserable barrier of his belt.  He put too much strength into it: he bent the buckle and tore one of the belt loops, yet once those infuriating seconds were over , that barrier, too, was gone, and he could yank the strings of his knee breeches until they loosened.

His fingers plunged greedily into the opening, sliding through thick blond pubic hair and around flesh so preciously familiar that he moaned in raw excitement.

“Mating will be all that you think about.”

Sabellian had, perhaps, been more correct than the older dragon had realized.  Since this morning…no, since the moment that they had finally parted from one another in the cave, hours after that first desperate mating, Wrathion had been thinking about Anduin.  He had been thinking about having sex with Anduin in any manner that might be available to them.  Initially, it had been troublesome but not impossible to control the wandering of his thoughts: they would begin to drift away from the task at hand, or be reminded of Anduin in some way, and then he would drag them back into proper order.  It was only a few degrees worse than the ordinary, everyday process of missing Anduin, though at least when he did that there would be more humdrum activities interspersed with the sex.  And perhaps even as absence made his heart grow fonder, it would have nevertheless been possible to keep himself in check if not for the inescapable duty that was pretending to be Anduin for a handful of days.

Once his visage had been altered, Anduin was no longer out of his reach.

Anduin was right here, a hot and tenderly familiar weight lain across his palm and curled fingers.  It was pitch dark in the room: the shutters here were wholly closed, and had been for a year or more.  There was not a shred of light with which he might see the cock he lovingly released from the terrible prison of his clothing, but he knew the texture, the weight, the heft.  He knew when and where the pad of his thumb would glide over a jutted vein and he knew that if he pressed against the tip of him, hard, purposeful –

“Nngh-!”

Oh, this was dangerous.

This was so very dangerous.

Despite the focus Wrathion had devoted to his task and the accomplishment thereof, he had thought of fucking Anduin all day.  He had thought of himself and Anduin tucked into a secluded corner, bodies pressed, while he had dressed.  He had thought of how it had felt to perch atop Anduin in their bed, his cunt so full that his eyes had rolled back, when he had climbed into the Royal carriage.  He had blasphemously sat through an entire sermon in Stormwind Cathedral seething at Greymane, when in the very back of his mind he replayed Anduin’s whisper over and over: “I’m going to fuck you just like you want.”

He’d wanted so badly to be fucked then.  He wanted so badly to be fucked now.

But here at the confluence of dozens of improbable and impossible events, a situation had arisen that was obliterating rational thought via the heinous perversion that his personal rules on mimicry was supposed to prevent.

In darkness, Wrathion closed his fingers around Anduin’s dick.

He squeezed.

“HhAHH!”

Electric sensation flashed through his hips.  He bucked, helpless, squirming, and Anduin’s cock plunged through his grip.  Reflexively, his other hand snatched forward, and he caught the wet glans in his grasping fist.  Punishing pressure lanced along hot nerves and his heel, kicking out, sent one of the other chairs skidding along the floor.  It hurt, he was gripping too hard, and yet he knew, he remembered, how Anduin would hiss and clench his teeth and shake his broad shoulders.

Wrathion hissed.  He clenched his teeth.  His thumb ground against the end of Anduin’s dick, precum swelling up in viscous beads around his fingertip, and his entire body gave way to shameless trembling.  His mind assaulted him with the ghosts of sensations that his current visage could not experience: the sweet, hard coiling of muscles inside his groin and the malleable slickness of swollen lips when he sank his own fingers between them.  There was no flushed clit to flick or press, nor a mound to grip and squeeze, and so his fingers could only push against Anduin’s foreskin, stretching it until it had nearly covered his dripping tip, until Anduin, who was really himself, whimpered a wordless plea for release.  Only then did he roll the panging lip of his hood back and back until it slid off the glans entirely and the dizzying chill of the open air made his head swim.

Anduin was at his mercy.

He was at the mercy of Anduin.

It was a double, no, a triple-layered masturbatory orgy in which Wrathion was every participant and now that the dam had collapsed before the intoxicating Pandora’s Box of usurping his lover’s rightful participation in the act, there was no stopping it.  No apology was ever going to be enough.  No confession could ever be as regretful as it needed to be.  This was a crime that was going to outlast the Legion.

“Nhha, ah, ah, y – ”

But Wrathion’s hands were roaming, one snaking under his waistcoat and cotton shirt to find where Anduin’s nipples waited for him.  They were wider than his own, their tips smaller, but the areola were soft and attractively pink, quick to dimple, fun to suck, though he had to settle for pressing his curled fingers against them and catching the nub in their center with his knuckles.  He milked them eagerly, the clutch of his fingers running from the edge of Anduin’s areola to tip of his nipple again and again, until his own voice cracked and Anduin cried out toward the ceiling, his head hung back upon the chair.

“Yes, yes, ah-!!”

The other hand was more reluctant.  With so much cock to cover – always a good size for a human, always just right, the best cock that he could ask for except for the other one that Anduin had been cursed into having – his grip had become a feverish, uneven jerking of his wrist.  It was perhaps karmic punishment for his ludicrous enjoyment: he knew how to use his hands on Anduin and he knew how to use his mouth, his lips and tongue and even his tail, but he didn’t know how Anduin used his hands.  He didn’t know the angles.  He didn’t know the pace.  He hadn’t the tricks nor the lifetime of expertise.

This led to the image of Anduin pleasuring himself in front of him.  A display just for him.

For reasons Wrathion could not fathom, they had never done this.  Why hadn’t they?  What could he have possibly been thinking to have never suggested it?  His groan was furious, half-mad, and disappointed all at once, and he punished himself by willing his hand to move and dive into his breeches once again.  Hot fingers closed around Anduin’s sack, rolling the soft and pebbled flesh into his palm and thumbing one testicle while his eyelids fluttered and his breath stuttered in his throat.  These…oh, he did like to lick these, too.  And unlike the shaft which he had treated so cruelly, these he was gentle with.  Anduin was tender here.  He wanted softness and care, splaying his thighs with something like shyness but which was really a perversion to which only Wrathion was privy.

Anduin did not like to have his balls tortured.  But he liked the threat of it.

The all-consuming demands of lust were the only reason that when Wrathion let his visage shift oh-so-slightly, his claws only grew just enough for him to feel the lightest prick of them upon the delicate skin of his sack.  The dancing pluck of them, the constant possibility that one slip might tip them away from soft eroticism and into those realms of intensity that Anduin peered into but had never dared enter – 

Muscles in his groin hitched.  His heart thundered.

Wrathion rolled his head to the side and bit the back of the chair that had so far endured his writhing and his kicking.  He heard little threads tear and only then realized that along with his claws, his teeth had begun to emerge, though they were small enough still that they did not slice through and pierce into the wood.  They merely gave him enough of a grip to bite and to hold on and that was that he needed.

He thought of his draconic teeth sinking into Anduin’s foreleg.  He thought of Anduin’s fangs biting into the plates upon the back of his neck.

His gums ached.  He gnawed against the fabric, drool dripping down his chin.

“Nnnggh, nnnnnhh-!!”

He forced his hands back to where they rightfully belonged.  Out from under his shirt, out from his breeches, and around his cock once again, this time with one gripping at his base, tightly, clamping down on the coiling there.  He knew how Anduin would get when he was going to come: the growing bend in his knees, the tightening of muscles on the inside of his thighs, and his panting.  His breath, the darting of his tongue across his lip, which Wrathion could not do while he pulled and pushed at the chair like a dog, but he knew the gasping.  He knew the whimpers.

Not yet.  Not yet.  There were still thoughts he’d not yet had.

Wrathion wanted to think of them intertwined.  He wanted to replay the waltz in his head with the partner that he had truly desired and that he had pictured when he had bowed and offered out his hand.  He had wanted it to be Anduin that was in his arms and close against his chest and he would have taken the lead, because his love was not comfortable with himself when they danced.  Upon the passionate, private stage that he dreamed of, it was Anduin that Wrathion took onto the timeless bridge with confidence, reverence, and grace.  Anduin deserved nothing else if not a night that would never end.  He wanted them to chase one another to the glorious leaping of the violin until the past and the future no longer existed, but also – 

But also, he wanted to race in the air, against a storm, through gales and over mountaintops.  He wanted them to twist together, tail to tail and claw to claw, and oh, it was a dance that he would take in the place of the other if it made Anduin happier.  If he wanted the sky instead, he could have it.  He could have anything.

Wrathion wanted to think of things impossible.  He wanted to have his own hands pin him to the bed while Anduin’s gentleness and authority looked down at him from his own face, now worn by his mate.  If it would be a crime, then let it be a crime that they shared in the same way that they shared all those most-guarded secrets.  If he had to for Anduin’s sake, he would say that it was all his ego at play when it was really so much more than that and so impossible to explain in mere words.  He would willingly lose his wits from looking down the length of his body and watching himself part his thighs and lower his fanged, smiling mouth.

His own tongue.  His screams.  Anduin’s strength, unmistakable no matter what body in which he might be found.

“Mm-mm…mm…!!”

Anduin, whom he had at last.

Anduin, who was here, in his grip, crying out.

Wrathion dug his heels into the floor.  The chair shrieked as its feet shifted back.  He heard fabric sliding and another chair falling to the side, but it didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter.  He loosened one hold and tightened the other, his thumb coming down hard on the broad crown of his cockhead, and it was providence, rather than any preparation on his part, that his legs had already fallen open wide.

None of his spill went onto his clothing.

Instead, it left a thick white line upon the floor, and a fading sound of splattering that was lost amidst his heaving breaths.  His jaw creaked when he pulled his teeth loose from the wood and he coughed a round of spit onto his shoulder, though that stain, at least, could be hidden by his coat once he put it back on.  Most of what he had done could be hidden once his trembling faded and he caught his breath: the belt could be ignored so long as no one was grabbing him about the waist.  His ascot and his pin were still somewhere in the room and could be found if he searched carefully enough.  The wrinkles on his clothing could be smoothed out with a bit of heat and some of the dampness that clung to the entire building.  The mess on the floor could be wiped up: there were sheets aplenty, enough that the King’s shame wouldn’t be found until well after this was finished and moreover, no one would be able to prove that it was him that had left it, nor when.

This was…this had all been very unfortunate, but aside from the sweat and tremors, his mind was clearing.  The release seemed literal: the desperation to mate was fading, at least for now.

This was recoverable.

Wrathion forced his cramped fingers away from himself and used the heel of his palm to push hair out of his face, opening his eyes at last so that he could –

There was light in the room.

The door through which he had fallen was partially open.

The face of Violetta Lescovar was staring at him through that crack.

She truly did…have an astonishing stare.  Just, undeniably incredible.  She was surely capable of cracking the surface of a golem with that stare.

“You…”

Wrathion’s hands were profoundly clumsy.  So fantastically clumsy!  When had that started?  Whenever that may have been, it was making it absurdly difficult to tuck his cock back into his breeches. “I…I can – ”

Violetta’s eyes bulged with incandescent rage.

“...” No, Wrathion could not explain.  There was no conceivable way to explain this. “I – apologize.  I apologize.  I’m very – ”

“You asshole!!!”

Violetta’s unbridled fury sent both double doors crashing into the interior walls and by…by all the gods that Wrathion would never swear to, the walls cracked.  Horrified, he rammed his genitals back into his clothing and yanked the ties so hard that tears sprung into his eyes.  A panic he was absolutely not accustomed to feeling slammed into his chest as he clamored to rise, all while the woman in her muslin dress thundered toward him with steps so heavy that the stones under the heels of her pumps chipped and split.

It was only when those long, heavy blond ringlets began to rise that he realized what was happening: there was mist flowing up and off her shoulders.

She has trained as a monk.

She was halfway across the room.

She must take her enthusiasm for Pandaria very seriously.

“Is this why you were acting like that?!” Her scream was as impressive as her stare, if not as steady: it cracked between a few words.  Her color was high with humiliation, her eyes wet and her fists balled. “What, did you want to shame me?  Disgrace me?  Or do you just find this fun?!”

A great many chairs were in Wrathion’s way.  To back up, he needed to stumble and scrabble around them, his feet snagging on the ends of sheets.  His feet had become just as clumsy as his hands had been and now felt twice as heavy as they had in the reception hall. “I-I promise you, that wasn’t my intention…!”

For every modicum of space he gained, her merciless advance swallowed the same. “Then what was?!  Tell me what it was, you…you hideous piece of shit!”

…hideous?  Now that was – 

Wrathion’s shoulders banged against the window shutters.  There was nowhere else to go.  That he could incapacitate Violetta if he used his true powers meant nothing in this situation: he would have to reveal himself to do so.  It was either defuse her entirely justified wrath or take her retribution head-on.

“Tell me!!!”

Sweat running down his forehead, Wrathion raised his hands in desperate surrender and said the only thing that he could: the truth.

Some of it. “I-I was thinking of my lover!”

The mist-wrapped dreadnought in front of him stopped. “...what?”

“I have a lover!” Dizziness impeded every word, but Wrathion forced them out one after another. “When we danced, I just…thought of them, and I…”

Violetta’s arms dropped.  So did her hair.  Seconds passed as she obviously turned this new information over in her mind; she used that time to catch her own breath, steadying it before Wrathion did his own. 

“...if you have a lover, why aren’t you courting her?”

“...”

“...is she a prostitute?”

“No.”

“...then are they a man?”

“...”

Violetta looked no less angry, but did appear twice as calculating.  Rather than stare, she examined, measuring him, his surrender, his state of dishevelment, and his shallow breaths, which he struggled to control.  She had him stand and sweat for a truly excruciating amount of seconds, making him feel every ounce of the pressure that was Anduin’s entire future as the King of Stormwind.  While she had not been told the entire truth, it was still a truth, and it was a truth that every member of the House of Nobles would kill to have.  With it, the Wrynn dynasty could be controlled or destroyed, whichever might serve their interests best, and they would not need to know what had really happened to Anduin Wrynn in order to usurp him.  However much the kingdom had advanced in the last ten years, they nonetheless remained a hereditary monarchy, and there was no surer yoke than that of inescapable tradition.  Already, his sluggish mind raced to put together the myriad responses that they would need should this night end even worse than it already had.

The next ten years could become a nigh-impossible gauntlet, or they could not.

Violetta would decide.

Slowly, painfully slowly, she wrapped her arms around herself, cupping her elbows in her palms.  She looked off to the side, and whomever she saw there, because it was surely not an overturned chair she was thinking of, they were not Anduin.

Then, her eyes snapped back and locked on his face.  The flashing certainty in them seemed sharper than a dragon’s claw. “...if that’s the case, then I want you to never again darken my door with your sham of a courtship.  I won’t be humiliated so that you can keep up appearances.  If you need a Queen that’ll turn a blind eye to your affairs, that Queen will not be me.”

…Wrathion couldn’t deny, there was –

There was a certain appropriateness to all of this, six years and many regrets later.

The last of the mist dissipated.  She shoved her hair over her shoulder with one arm, her chin held high. “Do that, and I’ll forget how disgusting the King of Stormwind was at my birthday party.”

Relief robbed Wrathion of strength. “I…”

It robbed him of all strength. “I…I’m…” 

Violetta scowled, even as her face tightened in confusion. “What?  Spit it out.”

Wrathion’s head fell back against the shutters with a dull thud.  The sweat that had been plaguing him since he left the reception hall had soaked through his shirt to his waistcoat and poured off a brow gone deathly pale and splotched with red.  He could no longer discern if his hands were shaking or not: they’d gone completely numb, hanging off the ends of his arms like sacks of clay.  His heart throbbed frantically, but each beat was watery and weak, and the dizziness was growing, doubling, while his vision began to haze at the edges.  When he rasped in his breath, it was thin, shockingly thin, and barely seemed to fill his lungs.

Pain crept along his limbs, a biting, continuous stabbing beneath his skin.

“I – ”

His feet went numb.  His knees slowly buckled.  He slid down the wall and all sensation except for the pain fled from his body.

“I’ve been poisoned – ”

From far away, there came the sound of more screams.

Chapter Text

“They have built themselves their own place of worship?”

“Yes, it’s a very impressive recreation of the abbey on the other side of the ridge.  Just, a lot smaller.”

“Do you know what prompted them to, er, convert?”

“Not at all.  They were already well set in their ways by the time we found out about it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

Anduin got the impression that Ebyssian really meant it when he said that, instead of just keeping up the slightly strained thread of their pleasant conversation.  It was the tail that really convinced him: the gargantuan limb spent long seconds swaying back and forth in a cat-like expression of interest, pushing the gravel of the lakeshore along with it.  When the heavy spiked club at its end slid into the water, the lake sizzled and steamed, the volcanic glow between his scales shining through the surface of the gently churning water.

The very many murloc children riding on Ebyssian’s tail shrieked and burbled in delight.  More than a few darted to the end of his tail to leap gleefully into the water, which appeared to be no hotter than a pleasant bath to them despite how Anduin was sure he could hear the rumbling of magma every time Ebyssian breathed.  Anduin was deeply envious of the control that the Aspect could obviously exert over his own energies and power; some of today had been, by necessity, covered that exact topic, but if Anduin had to judge himself, he was a middling student at best.

At least the forest wasn’t on fire anymore. “The murlocs of Elwynn and Westfall have been full of surprises these last few years.”

Sometimes, Anduin did wonder what his father would have thought of it: his son, now the King of Stormwind, negotiating peaceful treaties with murlocs.  For years clearing out the villages built of driftwood, seagrass, and reeds had been a regular duty for the Westbrook Garrison and, more often, the budding adventurers and sellswords that roamed the region trying to make a few coins.  The murlocs had always been known to be aggressive and had only grown more so in the wake of the Cataclysm, clashing with the farmers who’d had their livelihoods destroyed in Westfall and raiding the logging camps in eastern Elwynn.  It had never seemed to matter just how many of them were put to the sword: their numbers would always surge back up once again within a season or two, the little villages skulking in a new location while livestock went missing and the citizens railed against the Crown’s inability to eradicate the murlocs for good.

No one had ever asked why it was that the murlocs spread further and further inland after the Cataclysm.  The question didn’t matter and the answer, which the Tidesages had provided when reporting on ocean temperatures and the mass die-offs of sea life, only mentioned the murlocs and their behavior as off-hand curiosities.

“How so?” Ebyssian asked, though his tail was momentarily still as the swimmers all clamored back on top of it to do a little more leaping.

“Well…” On Anduin’s snout, a murloc tadpole the size of a human infant snoozed in a tight curl, their tail draped on the top of their head and their little snores whistling through their buck teeth. “First of all, they were the ones to open diplomatic relations.”

It had simply…taken some time before their peaceful overtures could be understood.  Close to two years had passed since the Westfall tribes, which had unified under the very appropriate name of Longscale, had begun their raids on pensioners cabins before it occurred to anyone with authority that the murlocs were trying to trade.  Over time, those midnight exchanges had been replaced with murlocs, baskets of fresh scallops and prawns on their backs, tromping right up to a resident’s porch mid-morning, a finned claw pointing and gesturing at a sheep, or a row of garden vegetables, or a coil of new rope.  The ropes, especially, were highly prized.  Murlocs did seem to have a tremendous interest in textiles, especially those that might be waterproof, and with the help of experts sent by the Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals…er, of Animals and Intelligent Races, the acronym had been recently changed, he had to keep reminding himself of that.  But, with their help, a thriving trade system had been put in place and for the first time since the founding of the kingdom itself, the yearly tax records had a line that read:

Acquisitions: Murloc, Longscale, Longshore, Westfall.

“But it was the Sanctifin that made all the newspapers.”

Watching Ebyssian blink in slow confusion was something else.  He was so big that it was possible to see all three of his eyelids: the first, the thinnest and closest to the eye, shimmered like the surface of a soap bubble.  The second, the middle, was thicker and less clear, and Anduin knew from experience how heavy it felt despite how easily it slid, smooth as refined oil, and there were still times when he found himself focusing on it much more than was good for his peace of mind.  The third lid, the outer lid, was all heavy skin and a coating of solid scale, and it changed the lay of the fiery light that spilled from Ebyssian’s eyes.

It was a nice color, that light, pleasant like the fireside could be.  It reminded him of a secret, candlelit corner in his boyhood chambers where he would stack all the books that he’d not had the time to read in the day.  He’d fall asleep there, legs pulled up in his plush chair, and he would only know that Wyll had been there when he’d stirred the next morning, limbs caught up in blankets and pillows that had not been there before.

But pleasant as those memories were, the longer he gazed into the fire the more his mind would drift toward a crimson hue instead, the glow deeper and far more fine, and, inevitably restless, he tried to better adjust his body where it lay upon the gravel.  This was difficult: he had his own fair share of murloc passengers, including a murloc elder with a wide flax-fiber sash perched on top of Anduin’s head reading passages aloud from a scroll.  Anduin had only gotten a quick glimpse at the elder’s polished carrying cylinder, just enough to see that it was crafted of waxy layers of wood pulp and wrapped in knotted fibers of many colors, though dominated by a clear and striking blue that he had to think about for a while before he could place what it resembled.

The sky, he had decided.  The sky when viewed through the surface of water.

Anduin couldn’t understand the reading itself: the elder was speaking entirely in Nerglish.  But the cadence of their voice was more than a little familiar. “They’re these ones here, and it’s just what it sounds like.  We’d had no contact with the murlocs of Stone Cairn for years and then one day, a whole group of them appeared at Northshire Abbey, just in time for Mass.”

The Brotherhood of Northshire had been understandably shocked.  There had been no Mass that day, but there had also been no bloodshed, for which Anduin had been deeply thankful.  By that time, relations with the Longscale had prompted a decree that murlocs were to remain undisturbed wherever they might settle in those lands under the conservatorship of the Crown; any interactions outside of that boundary were to be reported, but not escalated without the authority of the local garrison.  Anduin had kept his expectations lowered: in the eyes of the people murlocs had been no better than wild animals for literal generations.  Many could – and did – consider it a fool’s errand to go to the hardworking citizens of Elwynn, Westfall, and Redridge and tell them that not only were the murlocs now peaceful, the fishmen they had fought for all of their lives also had a right to the land where they built their villages and the resources that could be found there.

The newsprints had been blunt when covering the topic: there had been many an unflattering artist’s rendering of himself selling Alliance land for coppers to undead, orcs, and then murlocs, which he’d gone down on his knees for in celebration when they handed him two silver and a bag of fish heads.  Genn had raged when he had seen that one, but free press was as much a right of the people as was the right of the murlocs to live peacefully.  And when left to their own devices, they did.  Perhaps not in places that were not here, but the murlocs on Stormwindian land had not initiated conflict of any kind for five years.

Rather than fight, they had arrived at Northshire in their sashes threaded with skylit colors, their tadpoles blinking and burbling on their backs, ready to participate in the ceremony of the worship of the Light even if they did not understand the sermon.  And perhaps there would have been mocking caricatures of that, too, and a great deluge of protest from peasantry and peerage alike at the sheer blasphemy of it if not for the fact that when the murlocs opened their own scrolls of verse and read solemnly, the selfsame blessings glowed from finned hands.

They were blue, though, instead of white.  They rippled, mirror-like, and the chimes were deep and haunting to Anduin’s ear.

Archbishop Photius himself had only this to say from the pulpit of the Stormwind Cathedral once the news broke to the public at large: 

“The Light answers the faithful.”

And there really was no – public, in contrast to the many in private – argument that could be made against the sincerity of their faith when a murloc could stand before a hundred witnesses and cast a Holy Word.  The precedent set by the Netherlight Temple and the Sanctum of the Light during the Legion invasion had been the final justification Anduin had needed to make his decrees.  Of course, this little peace didn’t really make up for the ultimatums he had laid before the priests and paladins of the Alliance after the invasion…but it was more than nothing.  A droplet of integrity in a sea of regrets.

He was glad to have done it. “They still attend Mass at Northshire now and then.  The Brotherhood has to limit attendance to local parishioners only so it isn’t a circus.”

“The world really is changing.”

Ebyssian’s soft hum of wonder was loud enough and strong enough that Anduin not only felt it vibrating through the earth, but also how it quivered through the tips of his fins and the folded skin of his wings.  He had spent the previous night and all of today in the Aspect’s company and he was still trying to grow accustomed to the size and presence of a dragon that old and, frankly, that spectacularly massive.  Anduin had never been in a position to see any of the Aspects in their true forms except for the fallen Neltharion and as Deathwing, the former Earthwarder had seemed more like a dread storm than a creature that lived and breathed and had thoughts that could be somehow understood.  His terrible thunder had broken Stormwind in the span of an afternoon, so that Anduin’s memory of him was dominated not by Deathwing himself, but by the monstrous destruction left in his wake.  With enough focus he could pull out of his memory black wings and black clouds that could swallow the Keep, and the viscous, red-orange rain that left charred stains upon the city stones, but a being?

A person?  Despite what all the books in the Royal Library had to say about their intelligence and their society, dragons were soundly divided in his mind: there were those black and ominous shapes that crouched on the cliffs between Elwynn and the Burning Steppes, closer to beasts and monsters than a being that thought and dreamed, and then there were the human visages that were completely indistinguishable from other mortal beings.  It wasn’t until he met Wrathion that Anduin had begun to marry the two halves in his mind, even though years before Lady Prestor had – 

Not for the first time, black-laced agony lanced through the inside of Anduin’s head.  He was prepared for it even though he had been careless enough to trigger it in the first place: he braced his paws against the gravel and grit his teeth and though he heard the murloc elder squawk in displeasure, Anduin’s flinch wasn’t so hard as to toss him off.  The heavy tremors that rolled through his body and the acidic simmering of panic and raw fear in his belly were expected and so he could control them – 

Light, but it hurt.  It bit blackly at the back of his eyes.

There was nothing that could be done about the groan that made the scattered grasses shiver, nor could he keep his eyes open when the throb pitched to its peak.  His eyelids, all three of them, crawled in a trembling wave to cover his view with watery darkness and the jarring, dizzying glow of his own body reflected off fluid and translucent flesh.  It was one thing to know, logically, that the eye continued to “see” even when his lids were closed; it was something else entirely to be in the midst of swallowing hard against his uncertainty and the lasting pain only to peer helplessly and endlessly at the reflection of his own cornea.  The iris was knife-like and deeply black; it had depth in the way that a mirror did.  Deep inside it, threads thinner than strands of hair flickered with gray fire in endless, twisting webs.

He forced his eyes back open, though the pounding doubled.

Anduin was exhausted.

He had been trying to assume his visage…no, any visage, since last night.  His first accomplishment had been to make a complete mess of the campsite outside of the cave.  Ebyssian and Sabellian had both described assuming a visage as possible because of a spell and though Anduin was no mage by any stretch of the imagination, it had seemed simple enough when he thought of it in terms of invoking an expected result, that being the assumption of the human form that he very well and could picture very clearly.  He knew already that he couldn’t apply the knowledge and habits he had from channeling the Light: that was a petition, not an invocation.  It was faith, not certainty.  It was…a hymn in the dark, and the very opposite of being sure of anything.  In contrast, Jaina had always spoken of spells as mechanisms, precise blueprints with specific mathematics and requirements.  While a spell could go awry, the components incorrect or the resolution of the equations off by degrees, the outcome was still a certainty.

That “certainty” had sent fire ripping through the entire clearing and into the row of trees behind it.  Then again an hour later, then once more two hours after that.  They had moved to the lake to try and minimize the damage, and Anduin had not allowed himself to take a rest until the murlocs of the Sanctifin had cautiously approached with their priests and finadins not long before nightfall.  The gouts of fire, the shaking earth, and the rising steam of magma rolling into the lake had been hard to miss.

He’d given up for a little while after that.

He’d lain here and thought about why it was that he could not make himself be the King of Stormwind.

Ebyssian raised his head, his noise of concern drowning out the shrieking of the many children who clung to his horns and scales. “Anduin!”

“It’s – alright.  I’m alright.” He was lying, but not very well: Ebyssian’s wings and tail rose, action rolling into that massive body in the way that a landslide would course down the side of a mountain. “I thought…of her again.  I was careless.”

The elder wyrm was silent.  After a moment, he lowered again, but it was to gently shake the murlocs loose from his body.  Despite how no words passed between them, the little tadpoles seemed keenly aware of the change in atmosphere.  They obeyed his unspoken ask, droplets of bright color scampering down off Ebyssian’s neck, back, and tail, and though Anduin had not moved a second time, his passengers did the same.

They were sensitive creatures.  Intelligent, with emotional depth that a human could not understand because of…just, physiology?  Origin?  Because a human could no more understand them than they could dragons resting on red cliffs.  The murlocs had bridged that gap between their worlds first – 

“Mrrhg.  Hrlggh.”

Anduin went cross-eyed trying to look at the top of his head; it took a moment for him to realize that the elder had already moved, now standing in front of where he rested his chin on the gravel.  Up close, it was possible to see that the river stones and polished glass that had been woven into his wide sash had an abstract design a little like a fish, but with fins spread in cascading patterns that went from the darkest blue to the brightest.

“Ghm.”

There was a very soft, very deep tinkling and a wavering sigil moon-like in shape, though Anduin didn’t think it was the moon.

The ache in Anduin’s head faded, just a little. “...thank you.”

The elder didn’t nod; he didn’t have the anatomy for it.  But the fin on his head rose and flicked the way that a dragon’s crest might, and so Anduin understood the elder’s answer more than he would have during the days before this one.  When the elder turned to paddle into the lake, the many tadpoles followed him, and as a crowd, as a school, they dipped beneath the water together with only the slightest collection of dark ripples.

Night had fallen, but when Anduin rolled his tense neck so he could turn one eye skyward, there were no stars to be found and no familiar constellations to distract himself with: the cloud cover that had gathered throughout the day had solidified into a seamless black curtain that stretched from horizon to horizon.  The sky itself sagged beneath the weight of that foreboding shroud, scraping cliffsides and casting Elwynn into stifling shadow from eastern border to distant seashore.  He’d known by noon that there was going to be a storm, and not just because he had lived in Stormwind most of his life and witnessed firsthand how Deathwing had changed the pleasant summer rains into unpredictable and unruly squalls that constantly threatened to tear through the roads and villages faster than they could build them.

Every time Anduin took a breath, the moisture that had grown thick in the air steamed softly against the interiors of his mouth and nose and lingered long in his throat.  By now it gathered, dewy and hot, on his scales and in the folds of his wings, dripping down off every spine to wet the soil and the gravel below him.

He shook some of it loose, droplets trickling down his brow and off the end of his snout. “...I know I should rest.  I know expecting to master it in a day is unreasonable.  I can keep trying tomorrow.”

Wrathion had possessed a nearly perfect visage when they had met; Anduin had been entranced by the breathtaking effortlessness of it.  He’d not known what to say or to think when the Earthwarder had informed him that his own Aspectral powers, so far impressive and unmatched, could not duplicate that mastery. “We can sleep now.”

When Ebyssian sighed softly in reply, Anduin thought of when he would lie in his bed at night in Ironforge, when he could hear the rumbling of the molten rivers through the metal and stone. “Would you be able to sleep if you tried?”

“...no.”

“Then, I have been considering what else I can teach you.”

His tone caught Anduin’s attention; he lifted his head, his ears and crest perked. “You’ve been a wonderful teacher.  I’m the one that’s stumbled.”

When Ebyssian shook his head, it was such a mortal gesture that it took Anduin by surprise. “That I of all dragons am your visage teacher was a stroke of unfortunate circumstance.  But inadequate as I am in that way, I am not in others.”

He rose to his feet, each lowering of a heavy paw upon the earth causing the gravel to bounce and rasp.  At his full height, each leg outstretched and his tail extended behind him, he was from snout to club longer than a galleon; his length, if not his breadth, was greater than that of even the fallen Lion’s Oath, and the shaking of the landscape beneath them suggested that Ebyssian was heavier than any flagship ever fielded by the Alliance armies.  He still fell short of the crushing magnitude of his fallen father’s seething silhouette, which would surely seem impossible to anyone except those that had witnessed Deathwing for themselves, but even so – 

Even so, when Ebyssian spread his wings, their sound the unfurling of a thousand sails, the grandeur of it found where it was in Anduin’s heart that there still lived a boy and his sky-colored dreams.

“I will teach you how to fly.”

Anduin’s exhaustion and the lingering pain were crushed and scattered the way that the gravel was when he clamored immediately and unashamedly to his feet. “R…Really?  You can – you will?  That would be, I mean, I – ”

Two breaths, perhaps less than that, and Anduin was already perched on all four paws, his tail up and the fins around his face and down his back quivering with such anticipation that they made their own sound: a continuous, reedy thrum.  His body temperature shot up several degrees: the humidity gathered as condensation everywhere on his body was flicked away when he stretched, raised, and shook his wings.  His muscles began to heat and that was…of course it was strange still.  It was strange, even after a month’s worth of a curse, but the strangeness no longer had the depth and strength to overpower the eager, tireless, boyish anticipation.  The heat let him feel fluid, flexible, and light, and he twisted his neck and tail, working out the stiffness as a stallion might on his first day back to pasture, by pawing at the earth and kicking out with how action and wanting clutched at every muscle.  Belatedly, he realized that he had basically become a child bouncing from foot to foot and giggling with delight; there was even a chuffing noise inside his throat that was some kind of expression of excitement.  He recognized that he should probably be embarrassed at the very abrupt abandonment of decorum in front of a relative stranger, but he decided almost at once that he just…he just would not be.  He didn’t want to be.

He had flown on gryphons, airships, and tea spirits.

None had been his dream. “Please, show me how.  I tried, before, in…ah, I tried, but I didn’t get very far.”

Ebyssian smiled in the way all dragons did: with his eyes, and the lay of his throat and wing. “Then come, stand beside me, under my wing.”

When the elder wyrm stretched out his limb, casting a shadow over shoreline and lake darker than what the clouds might make, Anduin dutifully rushed to comply, and so let out a choked snort of surprise when a wall of sweltering heat rushed over his head and neck and across his body.  He raised his head, staring up at the underside of Ebyssian’s wing, and in the dark he saw hundreds of veins thicker than a man’s wrist spanning the interiors of the heavy, steaming skin.  The difference between the atmosphere beneath Ebyssian and just outside of his shadow was absolutely stunning: everywhere in the dark that Anduin peered, he could see the air rippling, and when he looked again at the wing, his irises widening to take in the light, he could see the rushing of liquid fire within the veins themselves.  Anduin lifted onto his toes, stretching his neck out until his nose nearly touched Ebyssian’s wing.

When the Aspect breathed, the torchlight in his veins pulsed in time.

“Some of it is magic,” that great, sonorous voice said. “Some of it is the body.  When whelps are born, they know the magic instinctively: they must be able to fly, or else they may be in danger.”

Anduin thought of how his belly would boil whenever he was afraid; he’d learned those first few days that it wasn’t merely the nausea that might come with mortal emotions.  It was…a reaction.  A transition.  A change, as the fluids in an alchemist’s vials would change, and if Anduin had chosen to study the potioner’s art for longer than one dull winter, would he have had a better way to describe it?  Would he know the name and properties of just what it was that shone above his head and changed the air?  Even the embarrassing displays from today weren’t just spells: the fire was made, somewhere, born out of humors and a flinty ignition from the back of his mouth.  The magma oozed from something like a stomach, and he’d felt hungry and listless afterward until he’d had something to eat, his dry throat tasting of bone and charcoal all the while.

His wings trembled.  They hummed louder than his fins and crest.

“How…do you know what to do?” His heart was pounding.  His claws pulled at the earth.

“The same way that you know how to breathe and how to weep.”

Ebyssian raised his wings higher.  The trees, already shaking in the rising winds of the storm, rolled their branches away in a wave, cloudy steam threading through their leaves.  It was impossible not to entertain the notion, however farfetched it might have been, that the trees did not merely part because of him: they did so for him, as though they acknowledged that when he began to move, they were incapable of containing him.

“Run with me, Anduin.  Run as hard as you can.”

Ebyssian surged forward.  When he landed on his forepaws, suddenly full body lengths away, he shook the very horizon.

He took Anduin’s racing heart with him.

The muscles that had coiled to steely tightness in his legs and back released, the tendons clicking loud as rifles lined on a hill.  His front feet lifted away from the gravel, trailing soil and stones from the holes he had made in the shore.  His paws tucked.  His head lowered.  The clawed elbows of his wings tilted just so , altering the way in which they resisted the air.  His neck arched, his frill darkened, and his breath was so deep he imagined that his chest doubled, then tripled, in width and thickness.  The thinnest eyelid slipped over his vision with a brief, brilliant kaleidoscope of color, and he thought about it not at all.

That first impetuous step lasted a lifetime.

When it passed, the world rocked wildly away from him, and Anduin’s claws crashed down into gravel and soil to send it up and away from him in clouds of earthly debris.  The reaching, leaping lope that was his footfalls was not the familiar gait of a Royal steed: it belonged to something wilder, to a creature not meant to be contained.  More like a wolf lunging hungrily in a dark wood, or like a great cat on golden plains that crossed the swaying grasses with a speed unmatched.  The whole weight of his body was taken by his forelegs alone, but the bone and sinew thrummed and sizzled, full of energetic burning, and it was the earth that buckled when he grasped it instead of himself.  His back legs plunged him gleefully forward, his paws snatching at the next stretch of shoreline, and the perfect rhythm of it, the pounding melody, was fueled by glorious, frenetic sensation inside his entire body that he could only describe in what felt like vastly inferior terms: the boiling of water.  The ignition of an engine.  The sparking in the throat of a stick of dynamite.

Wrathion would know just the right way to put it, he was sure.  Wrathion would know exactly what the mechanisms were, and how they made for these outcomes, and he could name the reactions as they happened.  But when his next steps fell, and then the next steps fell after that, and then the next, and the next again, his head jabbing forward with every lunge of leg and heaving chest, Anduin realized that he did not have to know how and he did not have to know what.  Ebyssian was right, and Anduin had been a little wrong.

Like weeping.  Like breathing.

Like hymns in the dark.

The first raindrops broke apart on his snout and neck, and their scattered remains flew past to turn to steam in the blazing air that came not from his back, but from below his body.  He felt in his wings what he had seen in Ebyssian’s: the concentrated searing of energy, flowing up and out of his core to be fed along the tributaries of his veins.  His inward breath turned to pressure inside his chest, which stretched his interiors but did not tear them, and he did not exhale at all, but held it.  Pressed it.  Pressed and pressed with muscle and bone and sinew against the air he had taken, which itself contained multitudes unseen, and the product of that force rushed to blaze and burn inside his wings.

And all this, in the blink of an eye.  All of it, between one crashing step and the next breathless leap. “Your wings, Anduin!  Like this!”

He saw muscles thick as timbers gather in Ebyssian’s shoulders.  The tilt of his wings changed again and through the misty rain, Anduin could see how the path of the air changed with it.

Of course.  Like a plane.  An airfoil, because of the weight –

A dragon’s wing was thick at the elbow, which bent into a heavy, curved leading bone stronger than the finger spines that stretched the skin.  But the shoulder joint was fluid and circular and gigantic, anchored by a fan of tendons hard as adamantium yet flexible in the way that only a flesh and blood creature could be.  He’d always assumed that dragons used magic to fly, defying the rules that demanded a gunship possess a dozen different engines if it ever hoped to slip the confines of the earth, and while there was certainly magic at work, the eloquence of design took Anduin’s breath away.

His next leap never ended.

The lakeshore churned by their passing fell away.

Thunder rolled, and a curtain of rain was drawn across their path, but Ebyssian’s impossibly giant form did not slow, but advanced further, higher, faster, gliding away from the land and yet still so huge, so heavy, that just looking made Anduin’s head feel addled for how dreamlike and strange it was.  With lift achieved and maintained by their momentum, their wings were free to spread, and in their heavy, desperate beating, Anduin could both feel and see the outpouring of heat: for a blink, there was an impossible gap in the rainfall.  Moisture gone to steam again, so swiftly that he could only catch the trailing ends of smoky white before the deluge took them, and he was so helplessly distracted by wonder that it took him much too long to realize that Ebyssian’s shape was once again pulling away from him, his blackness swallowed by the clouds and leaving only the molten tributaries on his back and tail behind.  The sight caused a single, shocking stab of fear to lodge in his throat, and it was impossible not to remember the helpless and very human terror of falling.  If he caved to weakness to look out of the corner of his eye he would see that he had gone so much further than any human should dare to go.

That he would begin to lag and fall behind, his body sinking down to crash into the forest, seemed an awful inevitability.  Anduin had fallen before.  He’d fall again.

His next breath hurt.  His throat fought against his will, wanting to strangle the air out of him in a howling admission of how he should not be here, how he should have known better.  Without his breath, there could be no pressure, no energetic fire, and no following as even the volcanic silhouette in front of him blurred into darkness.  He began to feel the dreadful pull of merciless gravity, aided by the cold and relentless pounding of rain upon his back.

But – 

It had to fight.  The fear had to fight him.

And no one anywhere could claim that Anduin Wrynn ever ran from a fight.

The muscles in his back squeezed against one another, while the longest set, that which lashed wing and spine to one another, pulled at his wing with an echoing crack of sound that momentarily drowned out the din of the shower.  As if to answer him, thunder boomed above his head, and he saw the shapes of the clouds as lightning darted through them, the flashpoint flickering into the sky’s dark and throbbing heart.  When he forced his jaw to creak open, when he snapped his teeth and tasted sparks on his tongue, it was in full view of the fear, and he put his back and shoulder against the fear’s seemingly immovable shape as he heaved his wings forward, down, against the yanking of the black earth and how ashamed he would be if he fell this time, too.

He took a breath.

He beat his wings.

The thunder boomed again, except there was no lightning to pair with it, and Anduin only realized that it had been an explosion of sound that came from himself when the noise itself caught up to him several seconds later, after he had hurtled forward at a speed more befitting goblin anti-aircraft artillery.

“AH, FUCK – ”

“Anduin!  Such profanity!  I’m going to tell the – ”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck!!”

The trees blurred into incomprehensible smudges of dark color; only the lake remained, a pool of ghostly, dizzying silver that blinked, a spectral, ephemeral eye as a witness to his screaming every time that the branching threads of lightning drilled toward the earth.  The raindrops no longer battered against him: he was moving too fast to be caught by what had become a torrential downpour.  The air pushed them all aside, away, around, spiraling in claptrap patterns that made it next to impossible to tell what was up and what was down, and within five fucks Anduin was once more at Ebyssian’s side…and passing him immediately.

“Damnit…!!!”

“Your tail!” The Aspect’s voice chased after him, having to rush in the way that the boom had. “Tail and legs!  Drop them!”

Right.  Drag.  And a rudder.  I understand.  I get it.

I get it.  I get it.  I – 

Anduin let his tail, its fin spread wide, drop several degrees lower than just straight out behind him.  His back legs, seized up close against his body, lowered.

The tail was just right.  He could feel the difference in speed and only a faint jab of strain in his fin.

The feet were too much. “FHH, ahh-!!”

His backside sank.  The air and his forward motion caught under his chest and flipped him upward and Anduin went spinning over himself, screaming but also cursing a blue streak that would wither pages of the Paternicon and both of these with three times the volume as before.  He brought his wings down, but they were horribly out of sync, and only at the last second did he think to cut off the amount of energy he sent into them before he broke something with the force of his mad struggling.  Now he began to fall, diving tail-first from a height much greater than before, and he might have screamed more earnestly then if Ebyssian’s great head hadn’t risen up beneath him.

“GHHG – ”

It.

Hurt.

Ebyssian must have swooped down, then up, and the force he’d gained while doing so slammed directly into Anduin’s tail.

But even with him barking and whimpering in pain, the rescue ate up Anduin’s remaining speed and gave him time to get his legs under himself again.  He was heaved back up, the motion aided by the swing of Ebyssian’s neck, and when Anduin spread his wings they were straight and matched.  Two heavy downbeats reignited the forces rushing through his veins; two more recreated his momentum.  Instinct, experience, and plain logic had him lower his head after that, pointing his snout directly at the treeline that he had so feared, and he slid into a powerful dive in a recreation of the elder wyrm’s maneuver.  He’d lost the headstart that running had given him; he had to get it back.  And mid-air, the only way that wasn’t exhausting his energy with repeated flaps was found when he folded his wings and squinted against the strangeness of catching up to the raindrops and having them splash against his face.  The distance to the canopy could be judged only every few paces: the lightning gave him a heartbeat’s worth of illumination, the jagged shadows of the trees between the raw and trembling white light imprinted in his eye.

Anduin counted the seconds.

He curled his claws so tightly he felt them prick into the bottom of his paws.

He realized, and this only at the last moment, how exhilarating it was.

Terrifying.  Impossible.  Frightful, and phenomenal.  Ever a knife’s edge away from something going wrong because he had made a mistake.  But when he made his wings open as wide as they could stretch and threw his head up while his tail whipped downward, his own voice defied the storm.

“HaHAH!  HAH, yes, yes-!!”

His wings came down.  The sound of displaced air boomed again.  The bloated clouds pulsed with ghastly light and this time, this time, he chased after it.  He followed the flash even when it danced away and died, its lifetime so brief as to be completely enthralling.  All that would remain of it would be the acintic pulsing upon the surface of his eye; he would never be able to catch it.  Nothing could travel as fast as light, and when that thought settled he wondered for a moment if he had meant lightning instead, but no, no, that wasn’t it at all.  He meant the light in truth and he’d learned this already, hadn’t he, whether it was when he was seated at a lonely desk in the Royal Library or kneeling before the great windows in the Cathedral and marveling at how the sunlight became anything but itself after it had passed through the glass.  The Light –

The Light was something to aspire toward.  It would point to where his hand was meant to reach.  It was never something that could be caught or held.

But he tried.  He did try.

He tried now, searing breath after searing breath rushing into the starving machine that was built into the depths of his draconic chest.  With every swallow he tasted the very atmosphere: the wet, the wet before anything else, the thick and untamed deluge that was the storm that sent winds whipping against his face and back, but there was more to be found than just that.  The rain was bound for the earth, where creatures great and small had long come to understand it, and what Anduin sought was not that.  He wanted what would never know soil, or sand, or the cold walls of an empty Keep.  When he bit at the storm, a crackling buzz caught between his superheated teeth and lashed, a burning wire, upon his tongue.  Unseen but there, and it tasted of fire and metal and the things he would dream about when his nose was pressed against a warm, familiar shoulder.

It was more wonderful than he could have ever imagined.

The fear was nothing, when he had this.

And it was this that drove Anduin to rise higher, then higher still, toward the flashing hilltops that rolled endlessly out from where the tempest writhed into itself, engines of atmosphere tossing tenebrous peaks of cloudstuff in thunderous delirium.  The raindrops grew closer together, forming rippling sheets of moisture miles wide, and they were so cold!  Cold, and growing colder, hissing away into haziness when he collided with them, but not for long.  The little cloudbursts he made gave way to another outpouring of droplets after he clawed and climbed shamelessly through them, which he felt on the end of his tail rather than saw, and someone somewhere in the world knew, right?  Someone must have studied this.  They must have surely come to understand what it meant when the heat of the land and the chill of the sky and the clouds weighty with water pulled from the sea met at the very top of the horizon.

The lightning began to gather.  In the immediate space all around Anduin were pops and bright, cracking sounds; the cloud’s looming shroud split along spidery, glittering threads.  He felt skittering, electric fingertips dance teasingly over his spine, leaping from scale to scale until they snapped away to no more than steam and ozone when they reached the end of his tail.

Then, the clouds were suddenly here.  He had been miles away, but now he was here.

Before him, around him, above him, below him, and no one anywhere could have written about what it would feel like and so Anduin knew that it was going to have to be him.  He would have to fill the dozens of books that it would take to describe this, if there ever came a time when he could hold a pen again and sit at a desk and somehow feel human instead of utterly outside and beyond himself.  He would tell the world that the clouds were thready, strange, and coursing, catching as rough linen but fluid as water, and across their landscape starspots of energy flickered brighter than fire and then died, their phantasmal shadows dancing eerily through his immediate memory.  He couldn’t help himself: despite his current speed, he reached out.  He clutched at the clouds desperately, and though they slipped away, no more than gossamer ghosts, he still felt them before the tireless, shameless beating of wings that glowed gold and spilled silver light took him even higher.

The stormclouds clung like the soapy surface of the baths that Wyll had given him when he was a child.  They hummed like the wind through the ancient chimes that hung in the eves of the Exodar.

Anduin laughed.  He laughed, breathless and unbound, and he could have cried for how the joy sang inside him.

He’d always wanted.  He’d wanted so badly.  Ever since he was a boy staring out the Keep’s windows; ever since he had learned how to dream.  He had wanted so much and so guiltily that he had never dared ask, so that it had shocked him into wondrous silence when Wrathion had offered it to him.  Out of the blue.  As if he’d known all along, and that had been the very first time that Wrathion had known; the first time that Anduin had come to believe that there existed at least one person in the world that he could be entirely honest with.  When a confession to others would lead only to pity and disappointment, he could sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the other Prince and listen to the promise of one day.

“One day, I will take you flying.”

The lightning gathered, but this time it was so close that it turned Anduin’s vision white when it became more than the energetic spinning of molecules.  He felt it pass close by him, thicker than a tower and hotter than a star, so that even a dragon’s armored scales and tough skin were not enough to completely guard him against its scorching baptism.

It.

Hurt.

It was bone-chilling.  Appalling.  Sublime, and cruelly breathtaking.  It was a white, blinding horror that drowned out the dragon and the very small human that lived inside of it.

Then it was gone.  Only bright vacuum was left behind, and this throbbing to nothing.

Anduin was left to gasp wretchedly, scoured and amazed and shaking and blinkered to the point of blindness, his wings aching and his bones hot and alive, so very much alive!  Burned, burning, but alive!  He laughed again, choked on it, and then laughed louder, howling joyfully until he had to gulp stupidly for air and beat his smoking wings once more and he clawed his way up the mountains of stormclouds that sprawled endlessly before him.  He crawled, fetal and shivering, and the clouds seemed neither fluid nor gas, but some sublimated form between the two.  He felt like the first person that had ever come so close to…to – he didn’t know.  He didn’t know!  He didn’t have the words!  He had ideas, things like heavens beyond this world, or undiscovered, unfathomable worlds set into the veil of darkness that was the Great Beyond, all things he had been told and had said that he understood and yet it was never going to be the same as going and seeing for himself.

He would crawl forever just to see it, again, the nameless more.

If that was how this ended, if he was left to climb rather than be himself, then –

Then –

It was here.  The more.

Trailing purple threads of cloudstuff, Anduin rose from the hulking back of the worldly storm and was met with a spectacle incomprehensible.  His eyes lifted, wide and unblinking, to peer through a clarity that could only exist when the sky itself came to an end.  Awe became a word too small to describe the feeling that overtook his soul.

“How many stars do you think there are?” A young Prince had once asked of the gnomish tutor he had for one summer.

“Oh, no more than a few thousand, according to our last survey.” That had been the confident reply.

But what was it that Wrathion had said, when they both sat, perched on the edge of Mason’s Folly, their feet dangling over the distant green of the Jade Forest?  They’d pulled their boots off and left them off to the side in a pile; Anduin had made himself look at the sky instead of the black, pointed tips of Wrathion’s toenails.  They had brought a little steamer basket of Tong’s sweetbuns with them: black sesame, red bean, pink lotus seed, though they quarreled so much over the black sesame that they should have requested that be the only flavor.  Anduin had set it down between them and because of that, their hands would bump now and then, and he had to pretend that his heart didn’t skip a beat when they did.

To hide it, he had asked Wrathion the same question he had posed to his tutor.

“More than we think.  More than we have the ability to count.”

Anduin realized that Wrathion, despite how he had been so small back then and how it would have been so, so far to fly, had seen the same thing that Anduin saw now.

Unfathomably more than a few thousand stars blazed in heartbreaking splendor.  They were as stunning in their shining coldness as they were enrapturing, and though there was nothing in this world that traveled as fast as Light, Anduin had no way of knowing if any of those stars clustered in the far reaches of the Great Beyond still burned.  The distance seemed immeasurable, irreconcilable; he could barely fathom the time that would stretch between one start and another, if a man were to walk between them. But if they did still burn, if they had, they did so brilliantly and beautifully, and their immaculate radiance shattered the darkness that surely spanned between them.  He had no true inkling of scale, except that the few thousand stars he had been promised filled but one span of Anduin’s claw, just one tiny fraction of the sky, and even those were crowded within cloudy, glittering strains of dusty ink that stained the black with every color that he could possibly name and a handful more that he whimpered from not knowing.  The longer he stared, the wider the slashed iris of his eye grew until it had all but swallowed the Wrynn blue, and so more light, more and more, became gradually visible in the form of the hazy fantasms of stars older than Azeroth Herself.  He came to understand that many stars had little partners, pairs and thirds that clung to one another in loving embrace, and the prismatic clouds thickened and grew more defined, casting their own cosmic shadows the closer they came to that stunning, radiant band of soul-searing white and rustling red that crossed the entire firmament, north to south, and disappeared into the far edge of the storm.  This…this bridge, this river that took the black heavens and made them realms of light was where the vast majority of the stars gathered, a thousand-thousand-thousand arm in gleaming arm, so many as to be a number that had not yet been recorded in any book on Azeroth, a glory that only the Titans could be privy to as gods far above men.

To see it at all was a gift inconceivable.

Anduin’s joy was so strong that it hurt him.

More than all the pains of yesteryear.  More than every fleeting happiness.  More, certainly, than the battering he had taken to reach this place at the far edge of the world.

“Are you alright?”

Ebyssian was suddenly beside him, hovering steadily a body length away.  Every monumentally slow beat of his wings sent waves of marvelous warmth over Anduin’s body, the breeze summery and deeply gentle.  It was only then that he realized he was cold, gray smoke gently rising from the seams along his scales, and though he continued to listlessly beat his own wings, there was a sensation like floating.  The earth no longer pulled at him, and his fright was listless and alluring.

“I…I’m…”

His voice sounded so strange to him, reedy and thin.  He felt dizzy, his head full of chemical simmering and the aftereffects of pushing his mind and body so far, but these ordinary concerns felt so small.  Breathless, his limbs and tail hanging without much purpose, he still could not tear his eyes away, and he felt himself teetering on the far edge of where the celestial light led.

“...it’s…I can’t describe it.  I could try for a lifetime and I’d never be able to.”

Ebyssian lifted his head to follow Anduin’s gaze, which Anduin knew only because he could hear metallic rasping of his scales when they moved against one another. “...I feel the same.  Even as a whelp, when I could not fly past the summit of Highmountain, the sight humbled me.”

The soft noise that Anduin made was the best agreement that he could offer.

In the reverence of their shared silence, he lost all track of time.  He’d been another person when he’d risen excitedly to his feet beside the lake, and he was going to be another person if he ever found the means within himself to turn away from the sky and back toward the world that felt small, too, so much smaller than it had been.  He wondered how much smaller it could still become if he simply…kept flying, kept on and never stopped.  If he chased the Light until he found its hot and colorless heart, would he be able to hold Azeroth and all its woes and needs in a single span of his claw?

The thought hurt him, too, and the pain of it was full of guilt and tenderness.

“Ebyssian…” The dragon he hardly knew, and had no right to ask.

“Did you want to be the Aspect of Earth?”

“...” A sound like a boulder turning over thrummed in the elder wyrm’s throat.  An answer that Anduin hadn’t expected to receive. “...no.”

At last, Anduin could look at Ebyssian instead. “But…”

“My brothers asked it of me.” Ebyssian must have heard Anduin’s claws clacking quietly against one another when he clenched his paws: the Earthwarder shook his head, that disarmingly mortal gesture. “If you want to know why they did not take it for themselves, only they can answer that.”

“...I know.  I know.” Anduin looked away, then up, and indifferent starlight reflected in his eyes.  He pressed his paws against his chest, claws running restlessly down over the scales, and in that motion Ebyssian must have gleaned what Anduin still wanted to know.

“They told me that I was the best suited to be Aspect, but…I don’t think so, even now.  They have everything I lack, and better than what I can give.” 

Anduin’s wings went still for a breath, his body drifting silently for just a moment. “Then…why did you do it?  If you knew that.”

“They said that they needed me.”

Anduin could feel his own heart, there beneath where his inhuman paws pressed tightly to a dragon’s chest.

“I could not turn my back on their faith.”

“...and you’d never forgive yourself if you did.”

It surprised Anduin not at all that Ebyssian caught his soft murmur. “Yes.  I’d never again know a day without regret.”

The air pressure around Anduin changed: fresh warmth gathered around him, slipping deep into sore limbs and exhausted wings, and with a lazy, curving turn of his great body, Ebyssian glided up beneath Anduin.  Anduin let his legs drop and his wings fold and he came to settle just off the center of Ebyssian’s back, one leg and paw wrapped around the thickest of the spikes that jutted from his spine.  He recognized only slowly and only with difficulty that he had driven himself well beyond mere fatigue, his muscles shaky and unsteady and the biological machinery in his body gradually cooling, though Ebyssian’s Aspectral fire was more than enough to keep the empyrean cold at bay.  A day of desperate attempts at visage and then a night of unrestrained flight had their costs and Anduin, more grateful than he could express, let his chin thump down on hot, solid scales.

Sometimes – 

Sometimes, it wasn’t Wyll that would find him curled up in his chair, books scattered at his feet and the candles burned down to dimness.  Rather than a blanket and a cushion beneath his turned cheek, it would be wide, strong arms that gathered him up, his knees draped over an elbow and his temple against a broad chest.  Halfway into his dreams, he would catch only small snatches of the world he’d left behind: creaking leather, clicking mail, the rustling of a cloak that smelled of the road.  Soil, trees, horses, and a hand rasping and rough with calluses thicker than his scars.

A thumb pressing, heavy and uncertain, across his brow and over his ear.

This was like that, just a little.  There was the roughness, and the wideness beneath him, and the heavy scent of a long, long rainfall.  Thunder tumbled, both far away and very close at hand, and misty winds combed through his fins and his wings, rattling the spines and tickling the skin.  Now and then a javelin of white flashed across his vision, but with all three lids settled, it blinked timidly and then was forgotten, nary an afterimage left behind.  The rain came and went in a pattern matched to Ebyssian’s wingbeats: when they rose, the downpour was chased away, and when they fell, a sheet of coolness swept across Anduin’s body only to flash-dry before the next wave arrived.  In his half-doze, Anduin began to count each repetition, though he never quite made it very far.

One, two.  Three, four.

Five, six, seven, eight – 

One.  Two.

Three, four.

Eight, nine, ten, and twelve.  Twenty.

One, two.

He could hear the trees again, the branches beating restlessly against one another.  Three, four.  A trunk here and there groaned, struggling against the wind and the moist ground.  Ten and twelve.  There was going to be a flood, wasn’t there?  He’d need to start writing his orders now; the water would come swiftly, and with little warning.

Twenty.  One, two – 

“Your Majesty!”

Three – 

“Your Majesty-!!!”

The trees shuddered and Anduin was, at last, slipping.

“Anduin!!!”

His eyes shot open.  He kicked, and flung himself off Ebyssian’s back.  He crashed into a cloying layer of mud, dozens of puddles blinking beneath the rushing lightning.  He shouted, the sound of it cracking and hoarse.

“What?  What?!  Ren…” 

Anduin shook his head violently.  He forced himself to look, there, there, practically at his feet, where the second-in-command of SI:7 stood perched on the nose of his gyrocopter to keep himself above the rising water.  The landing gear of his flying machine had already disappeared into the mud.

“Renzik?!”

“It’s an emergency!” The goblin had to shout over the thunder and even then, Anduin had to strain to hear him. “Wrathion’s been compromised!”

There were other words, things like treason and Defias and assassination, but the horrid splitting of a tree trunk down the hill all but drowned them out.  The great timbered oak, older than the city, slid wretchedly into the black and nearly-invisible coursing of water and Renzik, still shouting, was forced to leap from his machine as it, too, was swept away.  He had to climb, slipping and swearing, up Anduin’s badly trembling side and fumble for a grip on the sharp and slickly wet fins the goblin found on his back.  Ebyssian’s voice rose, heavy as a mountain and shattering in its rage, but even that, even the where and how long and who barely existed to him.

Anduin’s heartbeat had died in his chest.

Chapter Text

“Your Majesty-!!”

Wrathion heard Violetta Lescovar scream.  He assumed she was shocked and distraught: he couldn’t see her expression when his watering eyes were fixed on the woodgrain beneath him, dazzling black sunspots crowding one another in a bid to dominate his vision.  He tried to blink; tears were his only reward.  He flinched, and numbness bloomed like a cancer.  Great columns of lead pressed against his side or lay upon his back: these were his arms, which were no longer a part of his body, and his legs had ceased to exist in any way that mattered.  This troubled him nowhere near as much as the foreboding haze that grew inside his head, his every thought smothered out of him before he could complete them, and the ragged slivers of ideas and actions left behind throbbed with the sputtering rage of the invalid in the inescapable sickbed.

The pain was astounding, but the helplessness was horrifying.

“Anduin!!”

When Violetta snatched at the anchor weight laid across his midsection, he experienced it second-hand, and it was not until he had been flipped onto his back and her shaking hand had grasped for the front of his tailcoat that he felt anything at all.

“Wh, when…how…I-I had no – ”

The pain rose to such sublimely excruciating heights that it became a nostalgic experience.  Limping and useless and pitiful as his mind had become, it took some few seconds for him to recall just where it was that he would have felt such torture before.

“Let me…I, wait…I can – ”

The viscous dark.  That’s what it was.  He remembered now.

The purgatory before he could be alive.

In the chambers of the embryonic and the blind, there had been the fiery cutting, and the coldly indifferent light, and the wretchedness of dying, but never death, never that freedom he longed for before he knew its name, and he’d already had that realization, hadn’t he, that there was a difference to mortals when it came to the act of dying and the state of being dead and how one would always be preferred over the other if there was any opportunity to choose at all – 

Ordinary dragon whelps did not develop a brain stem until four months into their incubation.

What, then, wailed in ghastly misery at the very bottom of his memory?

He couldn’t bear to look at it.  He would rather be dead than remember.

But then, the pain changed.  Bloodshot eyes, previously clouded, found some of their vision returned.  Pointed helplessly upward, his gaze could do no other than rest on Violetta’s flushed, tear-streaked face, her hair in disarray and sticking to her cheeks and temples.  Sweat coursed off her pert nose and glistened on her neck, and he saw that her heavy jewelry and her boa of white and black crane feathers had been discarded out of his line of sight.  The room was the same, though the quality of the light had changed: all had become awash in pitch darkness except the area just around the two of them: wavering threads of melancholic green lay across them its gentle glow.  Mist coursed off of Violetta’s arms and streamed steadily into his chest, though her fingers shook where they pressed against his wrinkled, sweat-soaked shirt.

Wrathion’s alarm could be nowhere near as strong as his agony, but it did exist: time had passed, and he’d had no inkling of it.

“A-Anduin?  Anduin?” Violetta was out of breath; in that span of time he did not remember, she’d exhausted herself trying to heal him. “I, I can’t detoxify you.  I keep trying but there’s no effect – ”

The raw fear that quivered at the back of every word clashed against her gritted teeth.  She didn’t move her hands off his chest, but she turned her head to wipe at her eyes with her upper arm. “I’m not–I don’t think it’s poison at all.”

Many things could be a poison to the body without being the typical concoctions hidden in potioner’s vials and lining a rogue’s dagger, but Wrathion understood what she meant.

He, Anduin, the human visage he had crafted so expertly, was dying.  He was dying, but he was doing so in a manner so peculiar.  His midsection was molten, bloated and agonizing, and when he made his first attempt to speak, blood bubbled up his esophagus and dribbled out the corners of his mouth.  Violetta gasped, then grabbed for his shoulder to turn him on his side before he choked on his own fluids.  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the flecks and droplets of deep black and foamy pink that scattered on the floor, and he could be certain that the lining of his stomach had been perforated in some manner.  The hemorrhaging was filling his abdomen with blood.

Violetta was keeping him alive, but only just.

Just was just enough.

Beneath the obscuring layers of his clothing, his middle bulged.  New organs crowded out the old, sizzling like hot coals against his destroyed abdominal lining and the hanging threads of sinew and charred veins.  Corroded flesh flash-cauterized, singeing his underclothes, and then his whole body heaved as biological effluvium poured out of his mouth in a vile surge.  Violetta shrieked in horror, falling back before she grabbed for his head and hair, shouting Anduin’s name at a hysterical pitch.

Wrathion could not tell her that he had stripped the visage from his digestive system, then cast it back in less than a few seconds.  It did not remove whatever substance was eating away at his life; he could not do that until he knew what it was and so could identify it among the fiendishly complex layering of elements that was a flesh and blood body.  But he could remove the damage, if at a cost: the effort caused his eyes to roll back, a trickle of blood flowing from each nostril, but when he had expelled the excess mass, he was able to cough, then croak through bloodied teeth and cracked lips:

“M…mm, mngh…mmove, move…”

Very far away, he could hear a shoulder pounding against a door.

“Hhave, t…move, com…ing…”

His judgement of Violetta as a smart young woman continued to prove correct.  The time she spent staring at him, her eyes wide and her pallor deathly pale, was a few breaths at most.

Then, kneeling in the gore he had left behind, she slid her arms under his and with a grunt pulled the King of Stormwind up off the floor.  It wasn’t easy: fatigue burdened her badly, and her wobbling caused her knees to bang against the chairs that neither of them could see as the mist began to fade.  There was a series of clatters that followed, not all of them her doing: the lifeless drape of his legs no doubt did its fair share of swinging and battering.  But Violetta, with a miserable, unladylike swear, rolled him onto her back, and kicked off her pumps.  Wrathion heard her stockinged feet squelch in the mess, but neither he nor she paused to dwell on it.  Her shoulders squared and her dominant arm wrapped around Wrathin’s own, she placed her free hand on the door and shoved her way into the hall.

To their left, the door that Wrathion had left melted shut rattled, then groaned alarmingly as a shoulder was thrown against it.

“Fuck!  Damn thing won’t open!”

“Son of a bitch, he had t’have done something to the door.”

“Then just bust the thing!  That bastard went this way!”

The voices were male, rough, though only one had the shortened consonants that belonged to a Westfall accent.  It was only to be expected: the Defias had splintered quite thoroughly and few remained that could claim to have been a part of those fateful riots nearly thirty years hence.  The volume of their shouting established the state of affairs quite clearly: the situation had already grown so completely out of control that the insurgents had no reason to hide themselves.  The screams in the dining hall had gone chillingly quiet.  If there had been a struggle, presumably between the invaders and the Lescovar security, Anduin’s knights included, it had ended before he and Violetta had begun to move.

With his head drooping over her shoulder, Wrathion could hear her take a soft, sobbing breath.

Then, she turned to the right, and rushed as quickly as she could with the burden that was Wrathion’s helpless body, his heels dragging over the wood flooring and fine rugs.  She didn’t tell him that there was another door through which she must have come when she had chased after her guest of honor: she was saving her breath, rather than spend it on the obvious.  Wrathion appreciated the sensibleness of it, but did find himself in the very novel position of having to trust a young lady he had just met to keep him – keep Anduin – safe when all the world seemed arrayed against her.  But what else could be done?

He had to turn all his fevered focus toward the deeply unenviable task of solving his own murder.

Wrathion could almost laugh, except the death of the interiors of his left arm very thoroughly stole his breath away.  In the numbness came a brilliantly heinous stabbing of needles too numerous to count, each insidious point desiring nothing more than to worm through muscle and its connecting tissues, and the delay before this happened…!!  The delay was key, was it not?  There had been a bodily processing that had needed to take place, a conversion to new forms, before the substance he had imbibed gained its immediate lethality, and though Wrathion whimpered and sobbed from the pain, he in mad frenzy wrote this new understanding upon the drawing board he had erected in his mind.

The immune response was uneven, unstable; that crucial system was hampered, the reactive swelling a poor counteragent to what freely writhed through him.  The human body he wore was simply harmed, as it might be harmed by a knife, assaulted by a weapon that slid easily from his belly to his blood –

Ah.  No.  Was it in his blood?  It was already inside of his head, where the screws drilled into the backs of his eyes and half of his awareness melted away.

He thought of the fel, which annihilated its surroundings through its mere existence.  This was undeniably similar: these qualities he listed upon the board beside the heavily circled “delay”, before he struck out the word poison and wrote compound instead.

“Kh–”

Inside his sleeve, the flesh of his arm bubbled and writhed, contorting as though snakes lived within his skin.  The fine silk of his shirt charred at the edges.  He had to replace his limb whole cloth: bone, flesh, nerve, and it was the nerves – the nerves, the nerves for certain – that flinched, acid dancing along their tributaries the moment the new threads latched into the wider system at his shoulder.  Wrathion gripped Violetta’s other shoulder, his new knuckles clicking together in their bulbous line and his fingers subject to fresh, hot tingling at their tips.  His gloves hid how the ligaments wormed in after the rest, giving structure to the bones that had free-floated in the meat of his limb.

“The–banquet – ”

He hadn’t the breath to make his words louder than a rasp, but he could now shake the hand that held her, even though its partner was little better than a cut log in her grasp.  Perhaps the moment he had chosen to speak up wasn’t ideal: she was bent nearly double, her breathing labored as she hauled the both of them up a narrow servant’s staircase.  The simple copper lamps were not lit: they ascended into pitch darkness, Violetta finding her way by the hand that she kept pressed against the wall and the stairs that she counted under steady, if difficult, inhales and the hard sighs that followed.

Even so, she answered. “We ate from the same–it was shared servings.” There was no defensiveness in her tone.  Her words were those of a woman who had been asking herself the same questions that Wrathion had. “But it was…strange.  Hortense wasn’t supposed to lead the kitchen tonight.  That shouldn’t have–no one told me.”

Strange indeed.  The threads of conspiracy were as surely clear to her as they were to Wrathion.  She said no more after that, not even in her defense, but she did not have to: if she had desired the death of the monarchy, she simply would not have healed him when he first collapsed.  Moreover, she thoroughly seemed the type to commit the murder with her own two hands, rather than resort to something as gauche as poison. “We’re here.”

Her breath caught.  She stopped and shifted her weight; shortly thereafter, her palm patted against a door that Wrathion could not see.  Her nails rain over the grain until a doorknob clicked in her hand and a long, thin fragment of silver light was cast, flashing and uncertain, down the stairwell.  The thunder, which had moaned in a muffled chorus against the layers of frame and panel, became clearer once again.

Violetta dipped her head close, peering through the door opening with one eye. “It’s still clear.  The servants should have fled this way if…no, of course they wouldn’t.  They’re being held hostage.”

She was right, but also wrong: if Wrathion were the perpetrator of such an invasion, he would have had the servants killed to reduce the number of bodies that had to be managed during the search for the King.  How many of the guests that survived would depend on whatever they might offer to him, either out of fear of retribution and association or as a bid to gain power.  But, in consideration of the fact that the attendees of the party would have all been close to or supportive of Violetta, their value would have been markedly low.

But he was not the perpetrator.  He said nothing. “Alright…alright, if we can make it to the annex there’s another carriage house, and the workmen’s stables.  One of the drafts should be able to carry two…if not, there’s the geldings…”

Her words grew weaker and more tangled as she went along, even if her steps did not: a new hallway greeted them, one with narrow windows and blinds drawn only partially, the walls unadorned and the floor bare.  The wall sconces were unlit, though Wrathion’s sight was too blurry to judge if the candles had burned down or never been lit at all, but the mystery of timelines, methodology, and ultimate purpose would have to wait.  His feet had swelled so badly that his shoes were crushing against the skin and he was forced to weigh the cost in focus and energy between replacing one or both legs, but then had the choice snatched away from him: hot pokers plunged through his lower back, excavating his interiors with acidic precision, and he had no choice except to unmake his own kidneys.

“Ph, put…down-!”

It was a warning too gentlemanly for them to waste precious time upon, yet Violetta was quick enough to act on it: when Wrathion spit chunks of wrinkled, ruined flesh, he did so on the floor and not upon her shoulder.  Her breathing wheezed through her teeth, her expression paralyzed with horror, and Wrathion had no comfort or explanation to give.  Perhaps she could make her own assumptions when witnessing that which he could not hide: the hot glow of fading, fiery energies that emanated from within his own throat just before his aching teeth clicked shut.

It would be for the best that she thought that Anduin was using the Light to maintain his life.  The Light was known to take a flame-like form and desperate healing was all that Anduin would have been able to do, if Wrathion had not taken his place as strange Fate had demanded.  Quite famously, priests could not purify poisons, and so it was a despicably sensible avenue of attack upon a monarch that would otherwise be able to defend himself with or without his knights.  The Baron Lescovar was smarter than Shaw and Wrathion had given him credit for, or else Wrathion would not find his back so firmly set against a wall.

“Kh…keep.  Going.  Keep going.”

He reached for Violetta and she took his arm without a question as to when or how he’d restored it .  His eyes closed quite without his consent and he struggled piteously to crawl back toward the uneven transcription of observations he had left behind within his mindspace:

Stomach.  Nerves.  Kidneys.  Loss of hearing, loss of sight.  Numbness, swelling, and impaired brain function.  The last was absolutely the most dangerous: he could triage the rest of his body but there was no picking apart the brain.  Focus had become a finite resource and his intellect badly hobbled.  The longer he took to identify what he had taken the poorer his chances became and what was worse, there was the last symptom: lost time.  He had thought he had closed his eyes for just a moment, but when he opened his lids, he and Violetta had moved again, the narrow hall vanished and once more replaced by the wider, grander passages of the primary manor.  When…?

Wrathion cast the question aside.  He well and truly had no time for it.  He had to keep going.

So he had the symptoms, and then there was the delay for metabolization, to derive the toxin from its vector.  But what was the vector?  He needed that.  The servings at the banquet had been shared.  A vapor, then?  But that would have been impossible to control, and other guests would have shown the same effects and much sooner than he: the elderly Duchess was much more fragile and had been sitting right next to him.  So what could it have possibly –

The next profound throb in his head belonged to revelation.

It willed a groan from his lips.  He tried to resist it, but immediately failed, and groaned a second time.

No.

No.  No.

If it…everyone at the table had been expecting the King to…

The vase placement, in arm’s reach –

It couldn’t have been that habitual for him to…!

…

No.

“Anduin…?” Now driven to harsh panting whenever she breathed, Violetta leaned hard against the nearest wall the moment he began to squirm.  They had come to a literal crossroads: halls were open to their left and right, and continued straight ahead, and if she had not stopped for him, then she would have stopped to make a decision. “Are you – ”

“The celery.”

It was a truth that he couldn’t bear alone.  He just could not.  Speaking caused his throat to flinch, foul bubbles formed from unspeakable fluids gathering in the crevices of his mouth, and yet this was preferable to keeping the words within himself for the rest of his natural life. “The celery was poisoned.”

“..."

The silence was sepulchral in its scope.

“...yes.” This was all that Violetta said.  It was all that could be said.

She made her choice, the hallway to the right, and Wrathion hung limply in shameful, shivering silence as he added this crucial discovery to the board: the compound had to be soluble in water.  It had to be colorless: the vases had been clear glass.  It could be odorless, or close to it, but that wouldn’t matter with the hall filled with the scents of the banquet.  The celery would have been fresh cut just before the party began and the stalks, not yet dead, would have absorbed the water in their vases.  The compound could not be immediately corrosive, or else the vegetables themselves would have shown the damage before their ignorant target reached for them, and so he could reasonably assume that the toxin’s accretion rate was slow but had been amplified in some way, possibly with magic, to change this behavior once ingested.

While he began the grueling process of forcing his half-delirious mind to assemble a list of compounds that met these requirements, the harrowing crawl of numbness moved up his thighs, hot pops of dying nerves skittering dangerously close to his belly and the vulnerable mass of his lower intestines.  He would have to replace his innards once again, but he could spare a few more seconds to strike potential toxins from his mental list – 

Except, he could not.

The muted agony and its needled torture oozed into his groin and belly.

A terror he had never known stole the very light from his eyes.

His next actions were undertaken in less than the span of a thought, his visage had already altered before an electrical signal could pass from one neuron to another and he could ask himself what it was that he was so afraid of.

“GhhHHAH, aahh!!”

For a nightmarish instant, Wrathion was torn in twain.  He existed as two bodies, one that clung in gibbering hysteria to Violetta’s shoulders and another that kicked and writhed like a serpent pinned by a spear.  Nothing aligned: not the flesh, not the bones, not the many veins large and small that spurted blood into his trousers while his spine began to sag loose in two mismatched pieces.  Flesh stretched, splitting as the weight of one body sloughed beneath the merciless tribulation of gravity, and his pelvic bones began to splinter with it.

This, too, might have killed him.

But the terror possessed as much strength as it did misery.

In the span of another thought, the body was once more a unified whole, and Wrathion was flat on his back and staring numbly at Violetta’s terrorized, weeping face.  There had been no lost time, not in this case: he had very obviously fainted.  All his mental notes were tossed about in his head, floating on the surface of watery torpidity and blurred by the fever that simmered eagerly inside his skull now that his meager strength had been cut by another third–another half.  He could not hear what it was that she was shouting through her panic-stricken sobs, not the first few times that she had to repeat herself when he did not respond in any other way besides continuing to breathe, only for her to finally reach him after a cracking pop echoed in each ear.

“What…what is happening?!  What am I…I…!!”

Gasping with wretched speed, she reached for him with hands flinching so badly they seemed close to cramping closed. Uncertain dribbles of thin mist began to bead upon and drip off her fingertips, flicked across his blood-stained clothing by her trembling, but Wrathion raised a hand frail and cold as frosted leaves and fumbled for her wrist. “Dn…nghh, don’t…save – ”

“That’s…that’s them!”

Dread squeezed the words from his chest.  Violetta’s head jerked up and her wild, red-rimmed eyes stared down the hall.

“I see ‘em!  I see ‘em!!!”

Action subjugated every emotion that had held Violetta paralyzed above him.  She grabbed Wrathion’s arms, hauling him up and away from the floor, and there was no time or notice given to how Wrathion was now able to clumsily gather his feet under him.  They could call it a miracle later, once they had achieved the uncertain future that was making it out of this alive.

“Kill him!  Kill that fucker!!!”

Thunderous footsteps overpowered the sonorous crashing of the storm beyond the windows, the racket already loud enough to cause the panes to shake.  Two, three…four?  Wrathion swayed like a drunkard, his knees a hairsbreadth away from buckling.  The repeated, impossibly accurate transformations of visage that peeled apart whole sections of his anatomy were taking their crippling toll: once more, Wrathion had done something that should not have been done.  It was not something that could be done.  No other dragon would dare, except perhaps the Aspects themselves, and he wheezed, bent and shaking and so withered that blue veins were showing beneath the transparent white that had overtaken Anduin’s skin.

“Leave the girl!  We need th’bitch!”

…that was…interesting –

“No!!”

The hairs mattered with blood on Wrathion’s neck and arms made a game attempt at standing on end.  Lightning crackled, not beyond the windows but within them, and light as bright as a knife’s edge flashed in verdant greens up and down the hallway.  One of the thugs took the thunderbolt with his whole chest and was sent flying back down the way he had come, leaving a smoking trail and the swearing of his fellows behind.  Violetta’s arm dropped, the remains of the jadelight flickering around her wrist before she clenched her jaw and pushed Wrathion toward the wall.  There was a windowsill for him to cling to while she hurriedly reached down and tore at her dress, opening a slit in the fabric next to her leg.

She wasn’t fast enough.  A cudgel swung toward her head.  Wrathion did not even have the breath to warn her.

The crack was sickening and wet.  Her whole body was tossed by it, thrown to the side, and Wrathion’s rage and horror fought helplesslessly and uselessly to manifest in his dragging feet.  A rough hand found his collar, but with difficulty: thick fingers slid and slipped against the blood and sweat.  He saw uneven teeth bared in a violent smile and the man’s grip on his weapon changed, the bloodied end raised like the tip of a dagger.

“Hahaha, die!  Die!!  D– ”

The man’s neck snapped.  Chi flashed through his throat and sent a spray of fresh blood out of the man’s mouth and onto Wrathion’s face.  Behind his assailant’s crumpling body, which had become very nearly separated from its head, Violetta stood, red running down from her temple but mist throbbing around her raised palm.  The golden gleam of a fading elixir glittered on her bottom lip.

“You bitch!!”

There came three sets of pounding footsteps, though one was slower than the other: the two uninjured men had retrieved the other from down the hall and together, they charged.  The flashing from the windows lit their weapons: two axes.  A mace.  The only way that Wrathion could avoid that last was to let his knees do as they so deeply desired and go out from under him, dropping him to the floor while the mace crashed into the window.  At once, the hallway filled with terrible howling, and rain splattered across rugs and bodies alike.  Wrathion was showered with glass and the splinters of the broken blinds, both of which cut through his palms as he crawled desperately.

Behind him, he heard glass crack underfoot.  He flung his body to the side, and the mace broke through the floorboards and stuck fast. “Fh, fuck, you bastard!”

The man grabbed at his weapon with both hands, wrenching back and forth and frothing with impotent fury, and Wrathion clawed for whatever dregs of energy might still exist in his body.  There were few to be had, just thin scraps of flame that he nonetheless gathered in his palm.  He had to wait.  He couldn’t waste it.  He had to inch miserably onto his back and brace his shaking heels and watch for when the would-be assassin gave up on his mace with a spit and a vile shout and turned toward Wrathion anyway.

The man lunged for him.  His hands were aimed at Wrathion’s throat.

Wrathion allowed it.  He felt fingers dig into skin and cartilage, and a few disgusting leftovers of his ruined organs bulged into his mouth.

Then he reached up and laid his burning palm upon the man’s eyes.

The bleating shriek belonged to a dying animal.  The man reared back nearly double, his hands flying to his face in a mindless, frenzied attempt to catch the gore that streamed down his cheeks, and with the weight gone, Wrathion could kick and grab for the wall.  He reached for the next windowsill, his nails cracking as they dug into the wood, and he dragged himself up just in time to see Violetta desperately block a swing from an axe with bent arms wreathed in chi.

The impact once more tossed her much lighter body against the opposite wall.  Her cry was wrapped around a bitter sob: blood poured from her arms, which were whole but sliced deeply.  Her reserves were running dry and her attackers, the last pair standing, howled in their apparent victory.

“Get her, finish her off-!!”

“Fuckin’ told you we need the cunt ali– ”

A gunshot rang out, bell-like in its echoing sharpness.

“What – ”

A second gunshot, metallic and fine.

The two Defias dropped, dead before they hit the floor.

Two headshots, breathtaking in their perfection. “Violetta!  Violetta!!!”

A girl that Wrathion did not recognize – no, that was wrong.  He did recognize her.  It was the young lady that had occupied the chair a few seats down from him and had spent all of the dinner in open, obvious gawking when he so much as breathed in her direction.  Stripped of her dress and headpiece, she looked pitifully small, soaked in her slip and underclothes, except that her shoes had been replaced by boots – his boots.  And that was his cloak on her back!  Spurs rang and rain-soaked fabric slapped against her legs as she ran up to them with a gangly gallop, and in her arms she held a silver and white rifle of astonishing make, the craftsmanship delicate and yet so precisely deadly that he could, dripping and dead on his feet as he was, be a little impressed.

Slung around her chest was a bandolier of bullet clips.  He had to wonder where she had been keeping it during the banquet. “Violetta, you’re h–Your Majesty?!”

It really spoke to the girl and Violetta’s relationship that she’d seen the other woman first, rather than the wet and blood-covered ghoul that had once been the immaculately put-together King of Stormwind.  The girl, who could be no more than sixteen or seventeen, was wholly caught by her shock, her eyes all but bugging out of her head, but the moment Violetta bit back a cry as she tried to rise, Wrathion had lost the younger lady’s attention.

She at least glanced between the two of them for a second or two, appropriately torn, before she hurried to Violetta’s side, slinging her rifle into a rest strapped to her lower back. “Violetta!  Letty!  Oh, oh, Letty you’re so hurt, oh no – ”

From how her voice broke, Wrathion thought the girl would begin to weep, but her fearful eyes were dry while all the rest of her, from the plastered pink curls to the stolen boots, gave the impression that she had taken a dip in the harbor before coming to their rescue.  Violetta, with her help, was able to lean back against the wall and close her eyes, doing what Wrathion had done moments ago: search out whatever scraps of her strength might still be available to her.  Though she had to his eye an at least intermediate understanding of the monk arts, she obviously did not have the stamina of an initiate training in a monastery.  The mist flowed slowly, condensing in patches upon her injured arms until the awful gashes were replaced by angry red welts and the heavy shaking in her shoulders.

“Tabby.  Tabby…,” Violetta’s voice was thin as thread and her cheeks were grey. “Tabby, are you…alright?  What happened, did you…”

She trailed off to brace herself against a racking cough.  The girl, Tabby, took her healed arms and shook her head. “Not here, Letty!  The Defias are everywhere.  We can’t be in the open.”

“The what?” Violetta could be forgiven for her disbelief: the three corpses and the one soon-to-be corpse that squirmed and drooled on the ground looked no different from highwaymen or hired muscle.  The distinctive red scarves were entirely absent, which Wrathion found quite lazy of them.  If they were going to mount a rebellion, they could at least show some pride.  That they didn’t could be…and how had the young lady known of their identity, if they were making attempts at subterfuge…?

Wrathion tried to dredge up possibilities, but the burning inside his skull had grown.  Thoughts slipped through his fingers, hot and fluid as molten metals. “Lh, ladies…”

Both women looked at the dire figure he cut, hunched and holding on to the windowsill for dear life while leftover blood dripped out of his shirtsleeves. “I…agree with…the young lady.  Tabby…?”

The girl flushed – she might have flushed.  The colors of her face bled strangely together when he looked at her; the shape of her doubled when he blinked.  Luckily, Violetta had all the awareness that he had lost: she swallowed whatever other questions she may have had and pushed off the wall so that she could reach for his arm. “Tabby, get his other side, I can’t do it by myself.”

“Oh, oh…okay – ”

Tabby had just killed two men.  Yet it wasn’t until she wrapped both of her thin arms around his elbow that Wrathion saw, or rather, felt her hands shake.  Their advancement down the hallway was limping, awkward, and agonizingly slow, but it carried them to the next crossroads and away from the grisly scene of their encounter.  Wrathion knew that they were only buying themselves time: there was nothing that could be done about the bloody spots and footprints they left in their wake.  The tell-tail trail was inked out by their stumbling from the hall to the next narrow staircase, this one down to the ground floor, and finally to one of a half-dozen simple sliding doors, each with labels that Wrathion could not read.  When Tabby pushed their chosen entrance open, the next to last in an unfortunate dead end, a pungent, familiar odor somehow found its way to him despite the pervasive cloud of bloodsmell that clung to them.

In the windowless, unlit room, he could just make out the hulking shapes of some fifty or so wheels of cheese, aligned in silent rows on wide shelves to age and judge their sudden and unwelcome visitors.  The uncharitable council of fromages assortis vanished when the door slid closed, but only for a moment: Tabby produced a small, magical flare, the end flickering like a pale firecracker.  He could only assume that she carried such things on her bandolier alongside her ammunition.

By its light, silvery shadows made strange shapes on her dark skin and across her round, anxious face. “Letty…they said you’re doing this.”

This was not how Wrathion thought the conversation would begin.  Violetta was likewise caught unprepared, already white and shaking but now clutching at Wrathion’s ruined sleeve with both hands. “Me?  Why – ”

“I didn’t believe it!” Tabby said quickly, her voice rising. “Not for a second!”

“I…I know you wouldn’t, I know, I just, I don’t understand…”

When Violetta’s cleverness at last failed her– or, he suspected, she did not allow it to succeed– Wrathion begged his dizziness and exhaustion to show him mercy enough that he might be able to speak without fainting for a third time.  Even mired in the sluggish cauldron of his dying neurons, he was privy to information that the two girls were not, and the moment the distressed words had flown from Tabby’s lips, the whole, frightful, wickedly foolish picture became clear.

“Your–father.  The Baron.”

Wrathion’s head was drooped between them and yet, he felt their eyes. “Been…monitor–ing him.” A wet and ominous cough cut him off; both young women had to tighten their grip on him, but he was the one to clumsily shake against their hold until he was allowed to reach for one of the shelves instead.  The heavy planking held as he dragged himself up against it, his right arm hanging but the left enough to turn himself around and lean his ragged body heavily upon this new support so that he might look, haggard and sincere, toward Violetta.

He did so not to beg that she believe him, but to pay her the respect such terrible honesty demanded. “Paid…Defias – ”

Now, no amount of fear or reluctance would keep a truly clever mind at bay.  The picture was too complete; the evidence stained the halls and had set the beginning of ugly scars upon her body.  Though she was badly battered, great, red-purple bruises lifting on her hands and showing through where her dress was torn, she still only needed to drop her gaze for a moment.  The deep, labored rise and fall of her chest drew out longer, then longer still, and frailty thinned her arms and put new shadows in the hollows of her cheeks.  Without Wrathion to grasp, her nails dug into the red and black fabric of her dress instead, so fiercely that fabric might have come away if she had pulled, and then her expression crumpled into a layered, miserable certainty.

“He’s framing me.  He’s framing me for your murder.  He…”

Violetta’s voice died.  Tears swam in her eyes and dripped silently from her bent head to the dusty floor.  Her rictus hold on the muslin loosed so that she might slowly wrap her arms around herself instead, and her trembling lips pressed together in a bloodless, pale line.  Her throat twitched, tightened, and then shook, and her fingers crept up until they found her shoulders and she was held in her own dismal embrace.  Her breath hitched, her jaw flexing hard against every near-sob that attempted to escape on her unsteady exhales, and it was then that the flare was pushed into Wrathion’s hands.  He caught it, albeit weakly, and Tabby was free to throw her arms around Violetta’s stooped and trembling shoulders.  She said nothing, because there were not and never would be any words of comfort nor promises of retribution that might encompass the whole of the awful grief that was a parent that wanted their child dead.

Wrathion looked away.

When nothing else remained, she would still have her dignity. 

If she lived.  If this mad scheme could be prevented from reaching its inevitable outcome.  Regicide was high treason of the worst degree: in the chaos and the upheaval that would erupt upon the death of the last King of Stormwind, Violetta would not even be granted the shallow pretense of a trial.  The gallows would have her, if riots did not take her first, and the only conceivable way that Aldous Lescovar would escape unscathed would be if he caught and presented his daughter the traitor himself.

Wrathion could just picture it: tragically, heroically, the Baron would sacrifice his flesh and blood upon the altar of justice, and thus be positioned as a person of prominence and valor in the massive power vacuum that Anduin left behind.

It was a brilliant and brilliantly stupid plan.  It assumed that the vast network of spies SI:7 possessed had not once caught on to his dealings; it assumed that Jaina Proudmoore and Genn Greymane would not tear the city to pieces to find the true perpetrator.  It disregarded the civilian populace that outnumbered the aristocracy a thousand to one and that loved their benevolent and progressive King nearly as much as they scorned the shambling specter of old grudges that was the peerage.  The Baron had no standing army, no forces other than the sad remains of greater rebellions, and as per Shaw’s briefings, called only a handful of minor houses as clear allies.  His ambitions were courageously reckless, and yet he seemed entirely willing to take them all the way to the steps of Stormwind Keep, where the Lord Commander would cut his stain from the world, even if Turalyon would not be able to remember which King it was that he would avenge.

That was the future that the Baron would kill his daughter to achieve.

The fool.  The delusional incompetent.

All he would have succeeded in doing was killing Anduin, and even in that, Wrathion had some doubts as to whether or not Aldous had procured this compound all by his lonesome.

“Ladies, I…mm, I am – ”

Violetta did not look at him, but Tabby did, and he had to accept that as enough. “I ask…your discretion.”

This was the end of it.  This was the line.

There were limits to deception.  There were priorities that could not be ignored.  There were clear changes to circumstances and the needs of the moment.  There were voices in his head, not illusions but absolute certainties conjured up by the bitter agony that was the acidic dissolution of all but the last of his thoughts that remained, and the loudest of those voices would not be denied.

It’s not worth your life.

The room had faded out of his perception.  His optic nerves had rotted away.  But, free of distractions, he could see instead the only thing that truly mattered to him.  The face he rendered from precious memory wore a mask of grief and of rage, which he welcomed, because these feelings were only for him, were born only because of him, and there would never be any other soul to whom such things would belong.

I’ll hate you.

Yet dear as the vision was, it ground all self-sacrificing resolve into nothing.

I’ll hate you if you die here, for me.

What else could he do?

He would never be forgiven, otherwise. “Look…away.”

Wrathion grasped the shelves with his fading strength and used them to stumble blindly to the very back of the storage room, hopefully out of the flickering ring of the flare’s light.  The distance could not have been but a half dozen feet at best, yet it yawned wide as a canyon, and his steps seemed to carry him closer and closer to a bleak and crumbling edge.  How familiar this was, the dire burden of absolute success, and how shocked he remained at the desolate scope of failure.

He would succeed, or he would die.

Nostalgic, indeed.

“Please.”

He collapsed against the far wall, his palms flat upon it, and though there was little point to it, he closed his eyes.

Sputtering fire and weakly churning smoke slid sluggishly around his body.  Charry flakes fell away from him, bits and pieces of skin and torn cloth and rapidly drying blood swept into the creeping flood of feeble magic, and the lay of his coat and the fit of his trousers gradually changed.  The tailored shoulders drooped slightly; his sash and his belt slid down an inch or more, showing slivers of dark skin gone ashen with illness and strain.  His gloves, soaked and sagging, slipped off his hands entirely and plopped to the floor, one after another, when he leaned his shoulder against the wall because his arms could no longer support his weight.  The golden tail, which had long ago lost its fine blue ribbon, kinked and curled, gaining volume if not length, and inside his tightly pressed lids, he knew crimson light came to life because he could feel its warmth.

His visage, his true visage, was not human despite carefully curated appearances.  A dragon lived in his toughened skin: his interiors could heat, as they heated now one laborious degree at a time, toward temperatures unbearable to most living creatures.  In his many studies, and in the studies of his ancestors whose work had been dismissed, heat was the lens through which truths were known.  When isolated, every element had its individual reaction to heat, and there was no mineral, metal, liquid, or gas that could not be reliably identified by such, because these reactions never changed unless the element itself had changed.  Knowing everything about himself, what comprised his body that was a unification of both dragon and man, he could thus detect that in his chest, around his heart, down his arms, and in the back of his neck where the worst of the lancing pain sat, there was a weighty, foreign, liquid squirming.  It bubbled, its particles agitated, and the hotter he became, the more of the invader that he detected, accumulated throughout his nervous system in clinging, microscopic patches.

Wrathion had a guess by now.  A very reasonable guess.  He ground sharp teeth together, working his jaw as he might around a mass of bone and gristle, and he willed his insides hotter still.

To take a  form that would dissolve easily and invisibly in the water, the toxin had been chemically bound to an organic partner.  Carbon, or hydrogen, or a combination of the two in a formula he hadn’t the time nor the desire to puzzle out when it was a hairsbreadth away from ending his life.  Once it had entered his digestive system, it had been metabolized by his unsuspecting body, and the toxin’s derivative went on to wreck magically-accelerated havoc that a priest could certainly heal for a time, but not cure.  It could not be cured, in the same way that fel had blasted the Broken Shore into an inhospitable ruin, rendering the land incapable of housing life no matter how many years might pass.

Brilliant.  This, solely among the Baron’s efforts, was brilliant.  Someone had to have done it for him, a conspirator that Wrathion would see skewered on the end of his claw before the curtain fell on this sick theater.

The toxin would have, without fail, killed anyone except for the one person that had taken it.

A snarling groan rolled through Wrathion's throat.  The wood next to him was smoking; the thick black claws that had grown in the place of his nails pierced deep into the planks, mindlessly raking black furrows down the wall as he writhed and bit at the air, sparks struck from between his gnashing fangs.  His clothes were catching, smoldering against his skin, and out of his mouth and the rims of his eyes steam rose in thick bursts.

But he needed more.  It wasn’t enough.

He needed more heat.

More.  More!

Enough to boil!  Enough to burn!  Enough that electric charges leapt wickedly throughout his body, bright currents jumping between his spread teeth.  Yet still–

More.

More-!!

More…!!

The invader within popped.  Fresh, fantastic agony blossomed under every inch of his skin, boils of pressurized gas squeezing against his nerves and bruising delicate veins to the point of bursting, and with a defiant howl he snatched at every errant molecule.  Ruthlessly, and heedless of the new torment because he knew it would be the last, that this was the end, he forced the pressure to gather in the crucible of his ribcage.  His bones creaked and his heart throbbed, and then his throat ballooned outward, the skin stretched dangerously thin but holding, too thick to tear.  The dragon’s hide was too strong.  He could suffer, and oh, did he suffer, as it seemed it was writ into his destiny that he must suffer, but the dragon would survive.

Superheated muscles flexed.  A ghastly cloud poured out from between his teeth.

It glowed an alien, haunting green.

Mercury vapor, forcefully transitioned from liquid to gas by heat and pressure, and then ionized by electrical discharge.

The cloud hovered, malignant and strange, and then, heavier than air in its purified form, drifted down toward the shelves and the ash-covered floor.  Wrathion staggered away, shoving hard at the wall to create some distance before he was caught in the gentle descent of noxious miasma.  Direct exposure, to say nothing of accidental inhalation, would begin this whole abominable process over again, and for his abysmal efforts he landed flat on his back several paces away from what the Lescovars would probably need to wall up and seal forever.  If he made it out of this mad situation in any position to offer recompense, he could return and clean it up himself, but for the time being–

He lay where he fell, bereft of everything save consciousness.  He hadn’t fainted; that was good.  It was an improvement.  He felt scoured, dumb, numb, and moribund, but only in appearance: he was no longer dying.

He had succeeded.

He was alive.

“...are…”

Lethargic surprise twitched through him.  It was not that Wrathion had forgotten about them; it was more that, in the face of such monstrous and inexplicable howling and writhing so near to them, he had assumed that they would’ve thought to flee.  They’d had the time.  They’d had every reason.  It would have been a choice that he would completely understand, even if he would be forced to account for it when he began the morbid task of cleaning up after his and the Baron’s messes.

Yet here was that girl’s voice, the younger one, Tabby, rising thinly but steadily out of the near darkness. “...are you finished?”

He tilted his head and saw the backs of both girls, the pair of them curled close against the door, their arms woven together and their hands tightly clasped.

They had turned away, just as he had asked. “...almost.”

As a rule, Wrathion trusted no one.  He broke his rules for few.  But Anduin, years before the cruel march of consequences stole all his optimism from him, would have said that where trust failed, faith remained.

Wrathion had never asked him if he still believed.  He’d not had the courage, not once in all these years.

“...thank you.”

This he said in a voice that they knew did not belong to Anduin Wrynn.

With as much haste and care as might be dredged from within himself, Wrathion wove the illusion of the King of Stormwind as best he could once more, so that he might, with difficulty, roll onto his hands and knees and rise, bedraggled, bloodstained, and wheezing out feebled breaths.  Blessedly, the worst of his pains had been swept away: he could flex both hands and bend both knees, the aches in every joint the tolerable throbbing of damage now on the mend.  Little injuries unrelated to the deleterious symptoms of acute mercury poisoning remained, his nails split and his hands sliced thrice over with glass, while bruises many and varied pulsed to prominent swelling on what seemed to be every inch of his body.  And he was, of course, utterly drained of every scant droplet of fire and magic, his chest a rapidly cooling hearth save for the tepid, stubborn smoldering of his heart.

“It’s not safe in here anymore.  We need to move,” he said with Anduin’s voice, with the words Anduin might have used, and waited.

He did not have to wait long.  When she looked at him, Violetta’s pale face was rendered gaunt and sharply-edged by the feeling that could only be found on the far end of true terror: grim acceptance, the bedfellow of soldiers on the charge and children that huddled in the shadow of fathers eager for filicide.  He’d not deny a solemn commiseration, though he had at least been spared witnesses when he’d come to that selfsame sentiment in a dank cellar that was his only refuge from a world arrayed against him.  What tears she’d had left to shed had already begun to dry upon her cheeks and she spared the crusting salt only a moment of her time, the heel of her palm swiping harshly beneath one eye, and then the other.

“We’re near the kitchens.” She rasped the words with sober purpose and in speaking them, a silent contract was sealed.  Now, their only concern was survival. “There’s two exits there.  One into the gardens.  The other through the old larder.”

“They were watching it when I got away.” Tabby, as the member of their sad little party with the fewest injuries and largely free of debilitating exhaustion, took it upon herself to carefully slide the door open and peer out into the hall. “I had to go through a window.”

Though the hall they cautiously inched out into was empty, Violetta nonetheless kept her voice low. “Tabby, why didn’t you just run?”

“I wasn’t going to leave you and Maggie.” Wrathion could not criticize ludicrous heroics when they were the only reason that he was alive. “And they’re watching the stables.”

When they came to the first corner, they rested very nearly upon their own drying footprints.  After a downward glance at the crusting blood, Violetta rubbed at her lower arms, a spitting of mist running down the ugly welts that had begun to darken ominously at their edges. “Maggie–she never came back.  Not for the whole first course.  I should have – ”

“You had someone being a huge distraction.” Anduin, in the company of those he trusted, had perfected a kind of demure sarcasm.  It shocked those not in the know, in the same way that his masterful swearing shocked them. “But, Miss Tabby, tell me: my things, when did you…?”

“I went looking for your man, after Letty went after you.” At the next corner she paused, then motioned for the two of them to follow her as best they could, their progress limping, hobbled, and dangerously slow.  Far too much time had passed; there was only so much manor to search before their pursuers began to double back. “Nobody was in the coat room.  I saw blood, and things thrown around, and then a man grabbed me.”

There was something in her tone that made Wrathion draw up.  The girl was in her underdress – 

“I took care of him, but people heard the shots and I had to run.” A young lady that, to Wrathion’s knowledge, had killed at least four men this night glanced shyly at him, worrying her lower lip with her teeth.  Her words had not stumbled until this chagrined confession. “I took your things, Your Majesty.  They were right there and I, um…”

“If they helped you, then I’m glad.” He had not once had the opportunity to catch Tabby’s family name nor rank and he wondered if, perhaps, she might not care for the life of an aristocrat and would instead be amenable to contract work within an independent organization operating out of the Dragon Isles.

He suspected Anduin would not know how to feel when such a girl smiled gratefully at him, but in his case, the act of returning the expression allowed him to be in a position to look past her, toward a distant staircase that was in shadow save for a blistering blue light at the center of its landing.

“Down!!”

Over the course of this night Wrathion had become an expert in falling.  When he dropped he was able to bring both young women with him to receive a new series of bruises, rather than grievous injury from the fan of icicles that went whistling through the airspace where they had just been.

A mage. “Out, through the window, now-!!”

Violetta was closest to the wall.  She clawed up toward the windowsill and spared the latch not one glance: her elbow crashed through the glass, her other arm thrown over her eyes to protect them from the flying glass and shards of wood.  Without getting to her feet, Tabby had pulled her rifle from her back, her small hands lost in the blur of loading the clip she had to have yanked from her bandolier even as she fell.  Wrathion, possessed of no more strength and magic than the common man on the street and the target of the hour, was ready when Violetta threw her arm down for him to take.  He caught her wrist, then she his, and he pushed with his knees as she hauled with her shoulder and in tandem they threw themselves toward the window.

But, he heard the tell-tale hum of active arcanum, and then the muted bang! of air collapsing into a vacuum.

In a blink, a man’s face was inches from his own.  His eyes were a murky wine red behind oval spectacles.

Then, an arm smashed into Wrathion’s throat, crushing out of him a strangled, gurgling cry of fury and pain.  Beneath that was the clicking snap of broken cartilage and suddenly, breathing grew twice as difficult as it had been the moment before.

But he did not fall.  The rising screams of the girls were lost into another shattering hum of magic and one dizzying second later he was at the staircase where the mage had entered.  A fist had closed around a handful of bedraggled blonde, yanking his head back and showing the mottled, sickly red and purple of his crushed voicebox so that a shockingly cold shard of ice with a knife-sharp edge might be pressed against his neck.  His vision had blurred and darkened, but he could still discern that stretch of hallway where he had been a moment before was now awash in frost and gently cracking ice, some of which had crawled up Violetta’s legs and over Tabby’s back and shoulders.

“Ah-ah, little Tabitha.” The mage’s calm voice was against Wrathion’s ear. “I can see your finger on the trigger.  Do you trust yourself to be steady enough like that?”

“You fucker!!” Out of Tabby’s mouth was a shrieking snarl. “I knew it was you!  I knew it was you, Bernard!”

An infuriating laugh huffed close to Wrathion’s cheek. “No you didn’t.  Don’t lie, you stupid little child.”

“Where is Margaret?!” Violetta’s exhaustion had vanished.  She beat at her own leg with her fist, blood flying from her knuckles as they cracked against the ice. “What did you do with her?  Where is she?!!”

“Hah.  Shouldn’t you worry more about – ”

Unless he was the one to deliver them, Wrathion was no fan of monologues.

Anduin was taller than the man, Bernard.  When Wrathion let his knees buckle, the difference in weight upset his footing, and in that moment he grabbed for his wrist with one hand and the shard of ice with the other.  Blood slid through his fingers, his skin sliced upon the edge, but muscle strength was enough to adjust their position and create just enough of an opening –

A gunshot cracked in the air.

At the same moment, Wrathion became colder than he had ever been, and his own blood frosted upon his fingers.

All around, ice enclosed both himself and the man, and though it cracked, it did not give.  Beyond it were a cacophony of sounds and bright, distorted flashes of green, as well as a new abundance of shadows and hard tremors that traveled through the floor and up into the ice.  When the block dropped in a wave of hissing steam, there were four of Bernard where there had previously been one.  Each of them began to cast, one of which did so point-blank against the side of Wrathion’s head.

It was an inglorious way to die.

He despised it, utterly and completely.

He could only hope that enough of his hate showed in his eyes before they went dark.

“Why is he alive?!”

Yes…yes, why am I?

“I sent you to kill him, not drag him back here!”

Ah.  I was spared.

“He should have been dead when I found him.  I need to know why he – ”

So it was you.  Before I kill you, I must know: how did you make a mercury compound stable in water?

“He’s still breathing because your worthless concoctions failed!”

Not entirely incorrect.

“This entire plan has failed, because of you!  We have no witnesses.  It’s been too long!”

I see.  I should have died at the table, where all the guests might see.

“I’ll have to purge this entire household!”

Now, it’s too suspicious.  How unfortunate for you.

Wrathion, with great care, allowed one eyelid to lift the barest sliver.  The other would be left as it was: inflamed and swollen shut, it would be of little use to him for the remainder of the evening.

Displayed before him was a gentleman’s parlor in utter disarray.  Fine chairs had been tossed and broken, with their tables upturned and sets of glasses and cigar holders scattered across the thick, dark rugs.  Books and trinkets had been thrown from the mantle above the weakly sputtering fireplace, after which bottles of spirits must have surely followed judging by the bits of glass and the wide, wet stains in burgundy shades.  The meager light that filled the room came from the wall lamps only: the standing candelabra lay broken, drying wax splattered onto wood and fabric, though the wicks had been stamped out before the room might catch from the flames.  He lay on his side with his back presumably to the door: he could see only the high windows with their ripped drapes and the pair of men that argued in the center of the room.  The first was the mage, Bernard, his shoulders straight but his hands occupied with a thick, leatherbound notebook, and the second was Baron Lescovar, frothing, furious, and thundering back and forth like a caged tiger.

Wrathion’s arms were behind his back and though his fingers moved when he tested them, tightly wrapped cord bit into his wrists.  He dared not move any more than that, but a similar feeling told him that the same had been done to his ankles.

There was no sign of Violetta nor of Tabby.

“Is your resolve that feeble?” Bernard’s voice was cool. “Just kill them all, then.  Let the men take a few for fun and appearances, then give me Anduin for the rest of the evening.  You’ll have his body by morning.”

Wrath coiled around his heart like a burning serpent.  He told it to wait, and it listened only because when it tried to writhe out of him, no teeth could be bared and no claws could be unsheathed: the center of his chest was cold, his body wrung dry of power and incapable of shifting his visage.  He would need time to rest, or an infusion from elsewhere, neither of which he expected to receive.  Though the toxin was well and truly gone, blood still trickled gently from a hundred wounds or throbbed in bruises that spread deep into his skin, and if his nature were any less stubborn, he’d not have doggedly made his way back to consciousness.  If he wanted blood from these men in return, and oh, did he desire it most dearly, it had to be had in the way of mortals.

He waited, and closed his eye, and felt around on the floor for a shard of glass.

“You have an hour, you pernicious little shit, while I clean up your mess!”

Enraged footsteps marked the Baron’s path by the cracking of the little bits of debris under his heel and the vibrations that trembled against Wrathion’s cheek where it was pressed into the floor.  This sensation grew stronger, than stronger still, and he could only surmise that he had the misfortune of being unceremoniously dumped directly in the path to the exit.  He did not allow himself to tense; if aught moved, it was his chest with its uneven wheezing.

Nevertheless, when the steps had grown loudest, the Baron paused.

Wrathion heard leather creak.  Lescovar’s exhales were harsh, loud, and through his nose, and almost covered the cracking of his knuckles.  He’d not been armed when Wrathion had examined the scene.  If he was to do anything, it would be a deeply personal –

Ah.  But the Baron did not do anything at all.

The steps continued, followed quickly by the swing and slam of a door, and Wrathion knew then that not only was Aldous a fool, he was also a coward.

Poignant silence remained in the Baron’s wake.  Wrathion considered his next course and, quite robbed of all patience, he chose to open his eye and look at the man that remained, now flipping with great focus through the book that he held.  A vein showed at his temple; his lips had peeled back slightly, revealing the agitated grind of his front teeth.  Closer inspection yielded the torn sleeves, the dots of blood on his hands, and how heavily he was favoring his left arm, using it only when a page was too stubborn to be shaken loose when turning.  As straight as his shoulders were, his stance was uneven: his weight was carefully moved away from his left side.

A good atmosphere for conversation. “He can’t kill me himself, can he?”

Bernard’s hands froze.  Wrathion was quite pleased that the man could hear him: his voice was that of a croaking old man, and hardly above a whisper.  He had thought that the thunder and the pounding of rain upon the walls might drown him out.

“He needed you to do it.”

Wrathion found himself the new center of the man’s attention.  The notebook closed, then was dropped on the one piece of furniture that was still standing: the heavy, antique desk, solid as a war machine and positioned near bookshelves stripped of most of their contents.

“You should be dead.”

“I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you.”

The vein at Bernard’s temple grew more prominent. “...on the contrary, Your Majesty.  You’ve intrigued me.”

The man’s steps were light but his grip was surprisingly strong.  Anduin was not a small nor light man and yet rage seemed to grant Bernard strength beyond the average: his arm was taken, his shoulder wrenched, and then his whole limp weight dragged across the parlor until it could be thrown atop the desk.  Wrathion, of course, did not go quietly, but the kick of his legs found only air or bits of chair that were more than willing to do him harm rather than move or trip up his captor.  His head hung too far away for him to consider his teeth and pulling at his wrists sent a hot, searing sensation up his arm as the cord cut through skin at last.  When his back inevitably came down upon the wood, the force knocked his meager breath out of him and he was forced to cough through and against his injury, briefly at war with the dizziness that rushed to return.

In the midst of this, he heard a drawer slide open and a hand go rifling through its contents. “I’ve been trying to form a hypothesis.  Every test went flawlessly.  I watched you consume well beyond a lethal dosage.”

From where?  So Wrathion did not ask, but certainly thought, while he stared at the elaborate tin ceiling tiles far above.  The question that he allowed was not one that he needed the answer to; Anduin would ask, wanting the truth to be anything but what it was, while Wrathion already knew. “Tes…t…?”

“Of course.  You’re incapable of understanding this, but there is a process to scientific due diligence.” The drawer slammed shut and a second rattled open. “So I’ve been asking myself, are you somehow different from other male priests of the same age, weight, and constitution?  I don’t know how that could be.  I don’t have enough information.”

“Well, I’ve had…had an interesting life,” Wrathion replied around one last cough. “If you’ve got a questionnaire that I can answer, that might help.”

The scowl he received when Bernard raised his head was withering in the extreme, but only for a beat.  His expression smoothed out again; what feeling remained was in his eyes, narrowed and thorny as a briar.. “...you’re more cavalier in person than you are portrayed in newsprint.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything you read.”

The second drawer was shoved shut so hard that its runners cracked and a third did not open.  When Bernard stepped closer, Wrathion could just see a flash of something long and silver in his weaker hand, but it vanished quickly below the edge of the desk.  He first curled his fingers in the blood-soaked collar of Wrathion’s shirt, but at the vile squelch that made, thought better of it, and gripped Wrathion by the throat instead.  He did not squeeze, but the threat of it vibrated just under the sweat-damp skin of his palm.

“You’re provoking me.  You.”

It was unfortunate that Wrathion could not slow the hot fluttering of his pulse beneath the traitor’s hand, but what little of his strength that remained belonged to the meticulous manipulation of the glass hidden in his hands.  When he had cut his wrist on the cord, he had made his task more difficult: the wetness of his blood not only made it harder to keep his grip, it had also soaked into the fibers.  They were resistant to the shard’s edge, the glass merely sliding over them as he began to scratch at them.

“You’re stalling, but why?  For whom?  What else didn’t we account for?” Bernard’s gaze raked over Wrathion’s expression, and down his body, as if the answers to his hissed questions might be found somewhere in the tatters of his clothing or the exhausted hollows of his cheeks. “Your men are dead.  The roads are flooded.  No word was–no.  Your manservant and the carriage.  Was that it?”

Wrathion said nothing and showed nothing.  His eyes were flat and empty as glass.

Bernard’s fingers began to squeeze. “He refused to talk.  That brute lost his temper before I had a turn to question him.”

The words were nothing without evidence.  If anything, the fingers were his more immediate concern, and his battered throat pressed against them as his breaths grew thinner.  With every pained wheeze, Bernard leaned a little closer, so that limp strands of off-brown hair slid from his shoulder and brushed against Wrathion’s chest, and then his cheeks.  Rounded nails found where bruises had already risen on his neck and dug in until Wrathion finally granted him a flinch from the pain.  Mask-like, as if carved from pale clay, Bernard’s expression did not change, but the uneven light from the lamps turned vile and eager in his eyes.

“Do you know what the term vivisection means, Your Majesty?”

The first thread finally gave beneath the glass.

“Maybe you do.  You’ve surprised me already.”

Bernard lifted his other hand.  He held neither a knife nor a dagger, but a thin, silvered letter opener cast in the shape of a sharpened saber.  Its edge, normally blunt, glittered like a glacier’s edge, frost creeping up Bernard’s hand where he held it.

He was not swift.  When the tip hooked into Wrathion’s collar, it cut through the fabric slowly, and it was only after it had traveled from his sternum to his midsection that he realized that he had been cut along with it, the frozen skin filling with fresh, hot blood.  The pain showed in the harsh twitching of his eyelids and the furious squirm that followed, but his struggling was viciously smothered out of him as Bernard’s grip turned fiendishly strong.  His head was pressed down and fire exploded in his throat, blood and bile backing up into his mouth.  His jaw dropped as he tried and failed to gulp for air, and he hadn’t the leisure or opportunity, this time, to let his hate well up.

“Why – ”

Frozen silver first touched against Wrathion’s lower lip, pulling at the skin as it rose, and then tapped gently and curiously against the tip of his canine tooth.

“– are your teeth so sharp?” 

Then, the door exploded.

There was no other way to describe it.  Heavy, oaken, and hung on iron hinges with an iron lock, it was not broken off its frame nor kicked inward.  It neither crumpled nor buckled.  It didn’t split and it didn’t crack.  It was certainly not opened with a key and a turn of the knob.

No, it exploded in a fibrous cloud of sawdust and microscopic debris.  The largest piece that remained of the door and its carved scene of a fox hunt, no longer than a man’s hand and thinner than a finger, flew full across the room and embedded itself into the wall next to the center window.  No hand nor fist could have done such a thing, only ungodly pressure, and that pressure was a hurricane that savagely snatched up anything not nailed down or of significant weight.  Books flew, rugs overturned, the shattered furniture slid, then tumbled and clacked against one another in mad hedgerows for the many bits of paper, fabric, threads, and a gentleman’s evening robe to catch upon.  The air was suddenly full of projectiles, each rendered wildly dangerous by their speed, and it was one of these, a bookend in the shape of a sailing ship, that caught Bernard in the back of the head and sent him crashing to the floor.

It didn’t kill him.  Wrathion could hear him shouting obscenities afterward, when the pressure had passed and taken the windows and most of the room with it, the heavy boom thrown out into the rain-choked night in one deafening instant.  The rousing winds of the storm had died: there were now only the relentless curtains of wet beyond the ripped remains of the drapes and, sometimes, the lancing of great arms of lightning and the dynamite clap of infuriated thunder that followed.

By those flashes, Wrathion could just barely see the figure that lunged through the sagging doorframe: human, male, well-built, and soaked from the rain.  He was wrapped from head to toe in black, the uniform SI:7 issue with cowl, mask, and sidearm, but the regulation daggers had not been pulled.

Instead, the agent raised his hand, and from out of the floor came a thing that ate the light.

Bulbous and wet, it seemed thin as smoke yet weighty as slag.  Its deranged growth came in the form of quivering pustules that bloated off its bent back and then melted into its girth.  It was at first the size of swine, and then was as hulking as a cave bear, sloughing giddily forward on a hundred reaching limbs that dripped ink and whispers.  A ghastly wound at its center split with a sound like spilling fat, shining strings of mucus and adoration stretching between the maw’s jagged lips, and in the very center of its plush and squeezing throat was a single, shrieking eye.

The color of it hurt him to look at.  Wrathion had to wrench his head away.

The thing passed him, and the air itself seemed dull, dead, and empty where it had been.

Bernard screamed, but not for very long.  There was a collapse, a collapse densely fluid, slow, and heavy, and that Wrathion could liken it to anything at all was not because he was an expert on those horrors that lived in realms above this one, but because he was a carnivore by nature, and knew what it sounded like when organ meat came to splatter on a surface.  He didn’t look, but he could imagine: across the polished floorboards and upturned rugs would be a stain, and that stain would seem to be in the vague shape of a man.

Then the void horror vanished, merciful as a nightmare, and the room felt real again.

Wrathion let himself exhale at last. “An–”

Anduin Llane Wrynn, miraculously in the flesh, crossed the room in the blink of an eye.  This was literal: Wrathion let his lid shut and then, there were arms around him, full of strength and trembling.  He was lifted up and away from the desk as light, that dear light that he could never forget yet could never recreate in his mind as beautiful as it was in reality, cast the shadows from the corners of the room and out from under Wrathion’s eyes.  Through his head hung and his eyes ached terribly, he could see it; often, he saw it in his dreams.  Where Anduin’s tireless, shaking hands passed, he left that light behind, and there seemed no place, no matter how ragged and dirty it had become, that the plaintive tenderness of his touch would not go.  Over Wrathion’s face, they traced, stroking back his hair and then down along his cheeks, lingering where his orbital bone had been broken and then, lower, to the wretched cinching in his throat.  Along his arms next, where a dagger was drawn at last cut the cord away from him, and then Wrathion’s hands were pulled in front of him so that warm thumbs could wipe away the blood and bruises and the swelling in his fingers.

Wrathion had been healed by his love before, but never had there been such heat in his invocations: the gentle flame of the Holy Light had become greater than a hearth, greater than a blazing bonfire.  The sun itself poured into his body and surely to come this close to a star would mean that he would burn, and in a way, he was burning.  Weariness, pain, and suffering caught as kindling might and were swept up into brilliant wildfire, and he had endured too much this night to try and save his dignity here at the end: he moaned from the ache.  He whimpered from the release.  He shivered with the profound, merciful, heartbreaking relief and he pressed his forehead into Anduin’s warm, broad shoulder and let himself be gathered up and sat upright, then pulled without hesitation into a lap, so that the cords at his ankles might fall to the floor, with the dagger to follow thereafter with a careless clatter.

“Thank the Light.”

So the mantra had been in the last few moments, and continued now, between the wavering breaths that brushed against Wrathion’s cheek. “Thank the Light.  Wrathion.  Wrathion – ”

A hand taken by tremors lifted away from Wrathion’s bared chest, where lay the fading discoloration that might have once been a wound, and was held there as Anduin hesitated.  Two breaths and a shared shiver passed for the pair of them while Anduin’s fingers hovered with indecision, but the choice when it was made was done so unreservedly: he raised his hand and yanked his mask down and used his other arm to hug Wrathion close against him.  In that brief span of time before Anduin’s embrace had settled securely around him, Wrathion saw by the fading embers of the Light that here and there, on a pale cheek or along the strong column of his throat, glassy darkness gleamed in layered patterns.

The scales of a dragon, slipping free of the man.

“Don’t do this to me again.  Please.  Light, please, Wrathion.”

The fresh ache in Wrathion’s chest came from an old wound never quite mended; the Light itself could not heal it.  If he were to ask it of him Anduin would try his utmost to soothe it, but it was something that had to be lived with, like a scar.  It was Wrathion’s place to answer the plea, and not the reverse, and so he gathered up the strength that he only possessed when it was Anduin that was near and in need of him.  This way, worn to the bone and cold in all the places where Anduin had not touched him, Wrathion was able to return that sweet embrace, and his palms and fingertips pressed into cloth and leather to find the heat within.

“I did not mean to, this time.”

He said so softly, while their foreheads touched and both of Anduin’s hands could stroke his hair, and his back, and then hold his cheeks.  Wrathion smiled for him and for the first time this day, it was his own smile, broad and confident and yet somehow so tentative, as if at any moment he might be called to put it away and be someone other than himself.

Though with Anduin, that had never been the case.  His dear Anduin. “I am sorry.”

Anduin shook his head, his lips shaking as they pressed together, and by his tremulous breathing and the squeezing of his eyelids, he had clearly come to a threshold that demanded he yield, or willfully pass.  This conflict, wherever it lived, showed nowhere in his expression: he took Wrathion’s arms and moved him so that their eyes might meet and joy and relief might wet Anduin’s cheeks.

“Just–stay.  Light, just stay with me.”

Then, their lips were pressed shamelessly together, and Wrathion’s start and the flare of strange embarrassment showed on his face and in his stuttering.  Words burst out, stumbling, and were forced to find some space to exist between the wet and the gasping.

“W, Wait.  Anduin, wait, give me time, then I can change back – ”

“I don’t care.”

Anduin’s words hummed against the corner of his mouth.  They lingered, hot and close to the soft skin by his ear when Anduin turned his head so that he might find places that he had not yet kissed.

“I don’t care.  I know it’s you.  I’d know you anywhere.”

Wrathion’s throat had all but closed a second time.  It became such that there was no room for protests and he, now faced with a choice of his own, swiftly and surely resolved not to end what Anduin had begun.  His willing hands, hungry for more of him though it had been just a day, just a single long, lonely day, pushed Anduin’s cowl back and off his head so that he might sink his hands into shining gold and hold on tightly.  He was the one that chased now, seeking the mouth that had found the softest parts of his ear, and in this world there was only they two, fitted perfectly together.

Just outside the doorway, Violetta Lescovar stared in stupefied silence.

Silently, she tightened the SI:7-issue cloak around her shoulders and backed down the hallway that she had come.