Not so for Eranikus. The green leviathan reared back, his sleek yet massive form colliding with the wall and ceiling behind him. The chamber shook and huge chunks of stone broke from the cave walls. However, the Mother Moon’s light kept any of it from the trio.
The dragon let out a furious hiss. Yet rather than lunge again, Eranikus backed further. As he did, he began to shrink and transform.
“Consider yourselves fortunate!” he roared. “More fortunate than I could ever be…”
Already the dragon had all but reverted to the false elven shape.
Only traces here and there marked him as what he truly was.
Broll was already in action, but this time his attack was not physical. Instead, he cast a spell.
Eranikus let out a tremendous exhalation. The false elf blinked.
He looked upon the high priestess.
“A powerful attempt,” he complimented, “and almost successful… but I can never truly be soothed, even by the calm, loving light of Elune… too much tortures my heart…”
Still, the hooded figure neither renewed his attack nor fled.
Instead, he fell against the wall and shut his eyes. A shudder ran through Eranikus.
“I failed her so much. I failed her and all else…”
Tyrande prayed to Elune to lessen the moonlight, leaving it at a level that still served to allow Lucan to see all.
Eranikus slumped, finally ending up sitting on a part of the wall that thrust out like a chair.
“Great one,” she murmured. “If corrupted you once were, now that is clearly not so. Whatever failures you think you have committed, you now have the chance to right them.”
For her suggestion, Tyrande received another bitter laugh.
“Such naïveté! You have lived how long, night elf? A thousand, five thousand years?”
She stood proud. “I fought the Burning Legion when it first came to Azeroth! I faced Azshara! I was there when the Well of Eternity was destroyed!”
“More than ten thousand years, then,” Eranikus responded, his tone sounding not at all impressed. “A mere speck of time and experience compared to that of one of my kind and certainly one of my age in particular. Still, you have some meager way by which to measure my misery. Can you think of your most terrible failures?”
“I am well aware of them, yes …”
“Then multiply them by a magnitude as great as the World Tree is high and you will quite possibly barely understand …” Eranikus glowered, but his mood was steered toward himself. “I have done terrible things… and the worst of it is, I might do them again!”
Broll and Tyrande looked to one another. The high priestess finally said, “But you’re free of the corruption… I was there… it was the light of Elune, in fact, through myself and several priestesses that finally cleansed you! I would’ve recognized you immediately, if not for your changed form!”
“So I believed also… but as the Nightmare grew stronger, I discovered the truth! The shadow of it will always be within me so long as it exists… and because of me, it exists throughout my queen’s realm …” He snarled. “And that is why I do not wear the night elven form you know, and why I disguised myself as a dragon of black when forced to fly out for sustenance! I wanted no one to know it was me! I wanted no one to come in search of me!”
“But Ysera and the Emerald Dream—” the high priestess began.
“Call it as it should be! Call it as it will be! Call it the Emerald Nightmare! Our Nightmare!” As he shouted, Eranikus leapt to his feet. His form shifted, becoming again something part elf, part dragon. There was also more of an ethereal look to him, as if he were part dream himself.
Then the hooded figure solidified. Eranikus stared off into space, his expression horrified. “No… I almost… I should not have nearly done that… the line between the two realms is fading
… but it should not be this bad yet …”
Behind Tyrande, Lucan shifted into the shadows. Broll noticed the movement and Eranikus noticed Broll observing it.
“Humannn …” the green dragon, still a bizarre mixture of his two selves, stalked toward Lucan. The elven face now bore a blunt muzzle and teeth too sharp for the mortal form. Small wings flapped back and forth in agitation, and what should have been hands were savage paws with long nails. “It comes from the humannn …”
The high priestess took up a defensive position in front of the cartographer. “With all respect, this one is under the protection of Elune.”
Broll moved toward her. “And under the protection of this particular druid, too.”
Eranikus waved a hand.
The two night elves found themselves thrust in opposite directions, leaving Lucan to face the green dragon.
Steeling himself, the man stepped forward. “Slay me and get it over with, if you want! I’ve been through far too much to be worried about being eaten by a monster.”
“I prefer simpler fare,” Eranikus answered bluntly. His countenance reverted to something more elven as he studied the haggard mortal. “I only wish to see you deeper …”
Tyrande was on her feet, the glaive ready to throw. However, Broll, also rising, gestured for her to hold back. He could sense that the dragon did indeed mean no harm… at least for the moment.
And should that change, Broll already had an attack in mind.
Eranikus towered over Lucan, who was not that short a human.
The cartographer bravely looked up at the half-transformed dragon, who reached a taloned finger toward his chest.
“You humans are always the most fascinating of the dreamers,”
Eranikus murmured, sounding more calm. “Such a diversity of imagination, of desire. Your dreams can create beauty and horror in the same moment …”
“I don’t like to dream,” the man stated.
This brought an unexpected chuckle from the dragon. “Nor do I these days… nor do I.”
The taloned finger came within a hair’s breadth of Lucan… and suddenly both figures took on an emerald glow.
Broll shook his head. “That can’t be possible! He’s a human! There are no human druids!”
“What do you mean?” Tyrande asked the dragon.
“The other realm touches him, is part of him, can be open to him,” Eranikus replied, marveling. The finger withdrew. “I know you, if not by name! I have seen you, though you were barely out of the shell then …”
Lucan Foxblood swallowed, but otherwise remained steadfast.
“I’m merely a cartographer.”
“A maker of maps, a student of landscapes… the closest your human mind could come to recalling and accepting a part of you that was not of your doing …” Eranikus hissed. “Nor hers, either.”
“ ‘Hers’?” the human repeated.
“She who bore you, little one! Your mother, brought to the Dream most foully by a fey creature who seduced a young female whose man had abandoned her just as she was about to give birth! I came upon the thing as it waited for the infant in order to claim it for whatever dark purpose it had. The creature fled at my coming, leaving a mother dying from her great exertions and a lone, weak, male child …”
Lucan looked to Broll and Tyrande as if hoping this made more sense to them. It did not.
“You were not a dream and so did not belong. My queen did pass you on to one who knew humans better, though he was of our kind, a red dragon called Korialstrasz—”
“I know that name!” blurted the high priestess.
“Well you should! He is chief consort to the Queen of Life, Alexstrasza”—Eranikus’s brow furrowed angrily—“and a more competent, trustworthy mate than I was to my beloved …”
Tyrande began to comprehend some things. “You carried him out of the Emerald Dream?”
“After using a spell to heal his weakness! At my queen’s request — though it was a strange one, I thought — I gave some minute part of myself so that he would live…”
“Which would explain why he saw you as your true self, when we saw you as the black dragon you desired others to believe hunted here.”