Movement caught their attention. A fluid… crack? Line? Khadgar wasn’t sure which to call it—began to make its way vertically up the side of the cube that faced them. A semicircular segment shimmered, and Khadgar caught a glimpse of his and Antonidas’s reflections. Then, it simply vanished, leaving an open area. More slick blackness gushed forward from the newly-created entrance and rippled, forming stairs that led to the dark interior.
“—coincidence,” Antonidas finished, weakly.
Khadgar’s mouth was desert-dry. “Do… do I go in?” he managed, his voice cracking slightly.
“I don’t know.” Antonidas stared with open astonishment. “It’s never done that before.”
Ask Alodi.
Well, Khadgar thought grimly, here’s my chance. And slowly, his heart in his mouth, he stepped forward, climbing up the slightly vibrating stairs, into the heart of the thing called Alodi.
17
The cube was as black inside as it was outside. Khadgar ascended, pausing on the final stair, then stepped forward to enter. Instantly the wall behind him sealed shut and the wall in front of him emitted a slitted light. He felt the surface upon which he stood undulating. It was silent—utterly so, a stillness such as Khadgar had never experienced.
“Alodi?” he asked, and his voice was loud and strangely flat; no resonance, no echo, swallowed up as if he had not spoken, had never spoken.
Then, the silence was broken again—but not by him. “We do not have long, Khadgar,” said the voice—husky, warm, feminine. Khadgar gasped as he saw a lump materialize “I have used the last of our power to bring you to us.” The lump shifted, elongated. Now it resembled a person standing up, still covered with the black, slick substance that comprised the rest of the cube. As Khadgar stared, enraptured, the form refined itself. The black material began to look more like cloth, the shape fleshed out, becoming more detailed.
Khadgar gasped.
“I know you! The library—”
That mysterious shape, which had pointed out the book to him and then vanished. The book that had “Ask Alodi” scribbled on its pages.
“All are in danger,” Alodi continued. “We are counting on you.
“The Guardian has betrayed us,” she said, sadly.
Khadgar thought back to the flicker of green in Medivh’s eyes that had prompted his journey to the Kirin Tor. He had hoped he had been wrong. “I saw the fel in his eyes,” he told Alodi.
“He has been consumed by it,” Alodi went on. “If he is not stopped—this world will burn.”
Khadgar shook his head. This wasn’t possible. “But he’s… How could this have happened?” How could the one person who was entrusted with the welfare of a whole world want it destroyed? What had tempted him so, to betray his charge so utterly?
Alodi regarded him with great compassion from beneath her hood. The reason she gave shocked him.
“Loneliness,” was all she said.
Khadgar stared at her. Could something so simple truly have undone someone so strong?
“Like all Guardians before him, Medivh was charged by the Kirin Tor to protect this world, alone. His heart,” she said gravely, “was true. So devoted to his charge was he that he took it upon himself to find and master all forms of magic.”
The young mage listened, his soul sick. He didn’t want to hear. He didn’t want to know, but he had to.
“It was during this search, in the depths of the void, that he came upon something insidious, a power of terrifying potency…”
Alodi waved her hand. The black confines of the cube disappeared. Khadgar found himself floating in space as colors, images, and shapes whirled about him. Some he could recognize and name: Oceans, stars, purple, blue. Other concepts were so unfamiliar he could not even wrap his mind them. And at the center of the exquisite, roiling, beautiful chaos stood the Guardian of Azeroth.
His face was young, alight with joy in what he beheld. Fierce intelligence shone in those eyes, and there was both kindness and a sense of friendly mischief in the little lines at the blue-green eyes and slightly parted mouth. This was the Medivh that Llane and Taria and Lothar had known. And all at once, Khadgar understood why they were so loyal to him. Medivh embodied all that a Guardian should be.
And then, all at once, the hue, like a flaw in a perfect weaving, began to stain the celestial images of a Guardian at work. Its evil, glowing green tendrils, like blood poured into a bowl of pure water, seeped through the scene. More and more colors fell to the green, and the beautiful images turned ghastly and malformed. Medivh closed his eyes, grimacing, and when he opened them, they glowed as green as the mist that Khadgar had first beheld issuing from a dead man’s throat.
He had all but forgotten Alodi, and her voice was a welcome reminder that what he was seeing was in the past. “The fel,” she said.
Khadgar took a deep, shuddering breath. “Despite his best intentions, it consumed him—twisting his very soul. It turned his love for Azeroth into an insatiable need to spread the fel.” Alodi paused. “You must face him, Khadgar.”
He felt blood draining from his face. “I—I don’t have the power to defeat a Guardian!”
Alodi smiled. “‘Guardian’ is but a name. The true guardians of this world are the people themselves. I know you see what the Kirin Tor cannot—that’s why you left them. No one can stand against the darkness alone.”
She was right. He had always believed that the Guardian should not be isolated, that the entire burden should not rest on a single pair of shoulders. He thought the Kirin Tor should become more involved with the people they shared the world with, not stay aloof and apart from them. But even so…
“I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
Alodi stepped closer to him, her strange wispy form flowing around the outlines of her body as she turned her head to him, letting him fully see her face for the first time. He gasped, softly. Around her face were the unmistakable, spider-web traces of fel magic. But they were not green and sinister. They were scars left behind, remnants only of something that had once been there, but was no more. Of a wound that had healed.
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
And he did. He did not suffer as Medivh had. He was not alone. Medivh once had friends in the form of Llane and Lothar, but he could not stay close to them. His charge—to hold himself aloof from others ostensibly to protect them—had made him vulnerable. It was a vulnerability that Khadgar did not share.
“Lothar,” he breathed. “Lothar will help me.”
Even as Alodi’s fel-scarred face smiled approval of his understanding, her form was starting to melt away. Her voice came to him still, but faintly.
“Trust in your friends, Khadgar. Together, you can save this world. Always remember—from light comes darkness, and from darkness… Light!”
Moroes rushed to the crumpled, panting lump on the floor that was his master. Quickly, he scooped up Medivh and bore him to the font. Where was the girl? He had asked her to stay with the Guardian! Then his eyes fell on the runes the Guardian had scribbled on the floor, and he understood.
Moroes blanched as he supported his master as they stumbled toward the font.
Carefully, moving as if drunk, Medivh stepped forward to the center of the pool. The white energies gently seeped into the Guardian’s body and spirit, soothing him, caressing him, washing away the demonic grip of the fel. His gaze became lucid, and he tried bravely to smile.