Medivh stiffened. Too late? What did Antonidas mean?
“The life of a Guardian demands sacrifice that you cannot begin to understand. Yet we ask you now, as a boy, to bind yourself forever to the wheel of this vocation.”
Antonidas’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew harder. Here we go, Medivh thought. “Are you willing to prepare yourself, in all ways, for the day you will become the master of the Tower of Karazhan?”
Medivh didn’t hesitate. “I am.”
“Then prove yourself!”
The creature was born of the shadows the light-magic could not reach. It went from a sliver of darkness into a fully formed, ink-black, distorted thing that towered over the boy. Medivh instinctively dropped into combat stance, the response drilled into him so rigorously he reacted even though he was taken utterly by surprise. It opened a mouth crowded with teeth as long as his arm and emitted a series of sounds that made Medivh’s gut clench. As it towered over him, he saw that it had no natural depth or contours, which only made it more terrifying. It was a thing of nightmares, its shadow-hands ending in claws that looked razor sharp—
No natural depth or contours.
It wasn’t real. Of course it wasn’t real! Medivh spared a quick glance around the room and—there, the mage Finden mumbling into his thick, bushy white beard. The boy struggled to suppress a grin.
He lifted his hand. A small orb of glowing white energy formed in his palm and Medivh hurled it—directly at Finden. The white ball flattened into a small rectangle that wrapped itself around Finden’s jaw with so much force that the elder sorceror stumbled. His fellows caught him; the only injury was to the mage’s perhaps overly inflated ego.
The shadow-thing disappeared. Medivh looked up at Antonidas, allowing the smallest of smiles to quirk his mouth. Antonidas’s eyes danced as their gazes met.
“Not what I had expected,” the archmage allowed, “but… effective.”
The surface beneath Medivh’s feet began to move. Startled, he hopped backward, watching as the inlaid pupil of the Eye of the Kirin Tor started to open like an iris. Medivh stood, mesmerized, as a pool of bubbling water began to rise up from the opening, and gasped sharply when he realized what he had taken to be churning water was in fact a white flame, burning, impossibly, in the watery depths.
Above him, Antonidas murmured an incantation and floated gently down from the ring above to stand beside his pupil. He smiled, with what looked to the boy like pride.
“Give me your hand, Medivh,” Antonidas said. Wordlessly, the boy obeyed, placing his small, pale hand in the papery skin of his master’s. The archmage turned the hand over so Medivh’s palm faced upward. “The day will come when you are called to serve.”
Medivh’s gaze flickered from Antonidas’s seamed, serious visage to the white flame, then back. “The oath you pledge is forged in light,” the mage went on. One of his hands continued to clasp Medivh’s, the other, with a deftness perhaps surprising in hands so aged, rolled back the boy’s white sleeve to his elbow. Gently, Antonidas turned Medivh so that he faced the fire which burned in the depths of the pool. The boy winced: the unnatural, but beautiful, white fire was hotter than he had expected. His eyes fell on his extended arm and he felt a knot of unease in the pit of his stomach, a cold lump in the face of the impossible heat.
“No mage shall be your peer; none, your master. Your responsibility will be absolute.”
Antonidas released Medivh’s hand and began to push him forward. The boy’s eyes widened and his breath came quickly. Whatever happened, he knew it wouldn’t kill him. The Council wouldn’t kill him.
Would they?
Would they let him die if he was found somehow wanting? The thought had never occurred to him until now, and the coldness inside him increased, spread through him with every beat of his rapidly pounding heart, chilling him even as he wanted to avert his face from the heat of the magical fire. Instinct screamed at him to yank his hand back, but the pressure on his back pushed him inexorably forward. Mouth dry, Medivh tried to swallow as his arm came closer to the flicking white tongue of flame.
Suddenly the flame snaked outward, wrapping itself around Medivh’s extended arm in an agonizing embrace. Tears formed in his eyes as the flame seared a pattern on his skin. He bit back a cry and pulled back his arm. The smell of his own burned flesh filled his nostrils as he stared down at the once-unblemished skin.
The Eye of the Kirin Tor, still smoking, gazed back at him. He had been accepted. Branded.
The pain still ripped at him, but awe chased it away. Slowly, Medivh lifted his gaze to the men and women who had stood in judgment upon him mere moments before. All six of them now stood with their heads bowed in a gesture of acceptance… and respect.
No mage shall be your peer; none, your master.
“Guardian,” said Antonidas, and his voice trembled with pride.
1
The journey had been long and brutal, harder than Durotan, son of Garad, son of Durkosh, had ever anticipated.
The Frostwolf orc clan had been among the last to answer the call of the warlock Gul’dan. Although ancient stories told that the Frostwolf clan had once been nomads, long ago one chieftain, almost as loyal to Frostfire Ridge as he was to his clan, had begged the Spirits for permission to stay. His plea had been granted, and for a time nearly as long as their guardian, Greatfather Mountain, had existed, the clan had stayed in the north; separate, proud, strong in the face of challenges.
But Greatfather Mountain had cracked open, bleeding liquid fire upon their village, and the Frostwolf clan had been forced to become nomads once again. From place to place they had wandered. Even though the clan faced great hardship, the warlock Gul’dan—a stooped and ominous figure whose skin was an unnatural shade of green—had been forced to ask them twice to join his Horde before Durotan had finally, seeing no other choice, accepted.
Gul’dan had come to the beleaguered Frostwolves with promises that Durotan was determined the warlock would honor. Draenor, their home and that of the Spirits of Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and Life, was dying. But Gul’dan claimed he knew of another world, where the proud race of orcs could hunt fat prey, drink their fill of cool, clean water, and live as they were meant to—with passion and pride. Not groveling in the dust, emaciated victims of despair, while their whole world withered and died about them.
Yet it was dusty and emaciated Frostwolves who now trudged the last few miles of their exhausting journey. For over a full course of the moon, his clan had been on the march from the north to this desiccated, scorching place. They had known little of water, less of food. Some had died, unable to endure the physical demands of walking so many leagues. Durotan wondered if the ordeal would be worth it. He prayed to the Spirits, so weak they could barely hear, that it was.
As he marched, Durotan carried with him two weapons that he had inherited upon his father’s death. One was Thunderstrike, a spear carved with runes and adorned with leather wrapping. Notches had been carved into its wooden surface, each representing a kill. A horizontal slash stood for a beast’s life; a vertical one, that of an orc. While horizontal notches all but covered the shaft, there were several vertical ones as well.
The other weapon once used by his father, and his father Durkosh before him, was the axe Sever. Durotan made sure it was always as sharp as when it had been forged, and it more than lived up to its name.
Durotan went on foot, allowing others who were weaker or ill to ride the great white frost wolves that served the clan as both mounts and lifetime companions. Beside him strode his second-in-command, Orgrim Doomhammer, the massive weapon for which his line was named slung over his broad, brown back. Orgrim was one of a small handful who knew Durotan bone-deep, and whom he trusted not only with his own life, but with those of his mate and future child.