Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  Was this woman doubting her? "I can. Though the longer someone's been dead, and the larger they are, the harder it is." Sara handed over the papers she'd carried with her, confirming she was who she said she was.

  Peaceblossom grabbed it, scanned it quickly, then nodded. "I'm still busy here, but it's paramount that we get you started right away. We've been taking on a lot of casualties and if you can relieve even some of the pressure it'd be great."

  Sara scoffed in her head. Yeah. 'Great'.

  Peaceblossom pushed past her and motioned for her to follow. The older woman began to explain on the way. "You don't have any formal medicinal training, so we certainly can't have you with the wounded. The main infirmiry's over by the west wing of these barracks, it's where everyone we think will make it is kept. The east wing... I'm sure you can guess. There's a staff for you there so you don't over channel, I'll be watching over your first few procedures to make you you're the real deal. It's nothing personal but I do need to write down what you're doing. Mind explaining the process to me for future reference?"

  She sighed. She'd explained it to Leira before when they were kids, but the difference was that back then she'd actually wanted to and wasn't being forced to against her will in some forsaken wasteland invaded by demons -

  "Miss Smithers?" Gina asked as they went up some steps.

  "Oh, right. Sorry," she said with an airy laugh. "What happens is that when someone dies, their soul starts to sort of drift from their bodies, further away over time. So what I do is I reach in with my magic and grab their soul, pull it back into their body, fix up their body and bam, back to life. I... can't exactly do the 'fixing their body' thing outside of resurrection though. It's tied to the process of bringing back the soul."

  "I see. So you can just move someone's soul back... just like that? Pretty impressive." They arrived at a heavy metal door. "Now Sara I need to warn you, some of the people here are pretty... grisly. Think you can handle it?"

  "I'll be fine." She didn't add that she'd been torturing and killing animals in creative ways since she was two. Sara had a feeling that wouldn't go over well.

  "If you say so, just brace yourself." Peaceblossom pushed open the door and Sara followed her into the room filled with the dead and dying.

  The smell of death made her sniff once, and Sara's eyes meandered left and right. The room was brightly, almost cheerfully, lit with lamps. Cots lined the walls with white linen sheets and gryphon down pillows. Stretching back were about fifteen cots on either side. Combined with a few more at the very back, Sara countered thirty-four beds, of which only five weren't currently occupied.

  "Normally we don't let our soldiers stay here, and bury them as soon as possible," Gina explained as she took a staff off the wall and tossed it to Sara. "Not good for morale, you understand. But if you're here..."

  She grabbed the staff and looked it over. It was an impressive staff, she had to give it that. Probably the best she'd ever held. Sara couldn't quite identify the steely blue material making up the shaft, but she suspected some blend of arcanite and another metal. The head of the staff, rather than a single focusing gem, branched out like a three leaf clover with each prong holding a further three emerald shards. It was heavier than what she was used to, but just holding it she could feel the staff working to keep the strain of magic off her own body. She could certainly work with this.

  "Who's the most recently dead? I'll bring them back first, start easy and work my way up."

  "Not the oldest dead? If what you're saying and it gets harder with time..."

  "It takes days for it to get harder, and if I strain myself too hard on them I'll spend too long regaining mana to help the more recently dead. I understand you're my superior but please Gina, I know what I'm doing."

  Peaceblossom looked her dead in the eyes for a few moments, green orbs searching Sara's own brown eyes. Finally Gina nodded. "Well I suppose you're the expert. Here." She walked over to one of the closer cadavers. The body was of a dwarven woman, with a rather nasty looking gut wound wrapped up. She didn't wear anything beyond a snow white medical blouse and color was just beginning to fade from her skin. "Sergeant Tina Goldenstout. Doomguard got her just a few hours ago. Whenever you're ready, work your magic."

  Sara nodded and stepped back. The staff in her right hand, she held up her left and began casting. Purple-black-green magic swirled about her hands, then condensed into violet, and then finally to sickly green light as she reached into the dwarf's body. The soldier's soul hadn't gotten far yet, so Sara grasped it and began tugging it back with all due haste. Green fog streamed from the body as she crammed the soul back in, and then with a final flash of magic she lifted her left hand to the ceiling and mended the wounds.

  'Tina' sputtered to life with a surprised jerk, nearly falling off the cot. Gina was there in a moment, a hand on her chest. "Sergeant, sergeant relax. You're fine."

  "What happened ta me?" she asked. "I thought I was a goner!"

  "You were, but Miss Smithers here managed to perform a resurrection. You weren't gone for too long, just a few hours."

  "Wait... hours? Isn't the window for resurrection mere seconds?" The dwarf fixed her with a steely glare which Sara gladly returned. Then, the short woman nodded and laughed. "Haha, well I'm not one ta question a good thing." She pressed a hand to her head, looking suddenly confused. "I was... floating somewhere. It was so bright and I swore I saw naaru all around me... huh. Ah well, better get out there to help with - "

  "Hang on sergeant, I just need to ask a few questions to make sure you're fine. You were recently dead after all."

  "Eh, sure enough."

  Gina ran Tina through a series of medical questions that Sara couldn't make heads or tails of. Headaches, dizziness, the sort of questions she'd expect to be given to someone with a concussion, not someone who'd just been dead. Eventually, Gina relented and gave Tina a clean bill of health.

  "Told ya I felt dandy!" She hopped off the cot. "Thanks a bunch for bringin' me back Sara, I owe ya one."

  "I'm sure you do," she muttered to herself, glancing sideways

  "Pardon?" the dwarf asked.

  "Nothing, nothing," she reassured. "Anyway Miss Peaceblossom, I think I should get to the next resurrection. Who is it?"

  The older woman nodded, looking fairly impressed. "Over here. Took a fel cannon blast to the head, never knew what hit him. Think you can do it a second time?"

  "No problem," she said as she looked down at the night elf man and started up the magic again.

  Then when he was revived and had the situation explained, she went to the next corpse and revived them.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Eventually the people she brought back had been dead for days, and each one took more and more out of her mana pool than the one before. It was on the eighth person, who'd been gone for four days from a felguard axe across the throat, that she reached the limit of her magic.

  The moment the dead woman came back to life coughing and screaming, her staff clattered to the ground and her legs gave out. Sara stumbled backwards and rested her body against one of the empty cots, breathing heavily. "I'm fine, I'm fine," she insisted as she pulled herself back up, trying to clear the black spots from her vision. "Just running out of mana. Probably the last one I can do for a while." She could already feel the tickle on her throat as her body began to convert water into raw magical energy. She wondered where she could get something to drink?

  Peaceblossom pulled away from the woman and approached Sara. "I figured this might happen eventually, so I came prepared." Peaceblossom leaned over and Sara noticed there was actually a cabinet behind her, sunken into the wall. Gina opened the metal door and Sara's eyes widened. Inside were wide-bottomed vials filled to the brim with some viscous blue liquid. Mana potions?

  Gina took one out and handed it to Sara, uncorking it with her thumb as she did. "Here you go, this should get you back up."

  Sar
a sighed. "Well... there's still twenty-one people left to revive. Bottoms up." She raised the glass tube to her lips and tilted up. The liquid slid down into her mouth as she chugged, tasting like blackberries but with the same sharp, nauseating flavor that all medicines seemed to share with each other. She held her gag reflex back as the last of the mana potion slid into her stomach, and then she pulled away from the potion with a cough. "Ugh." As awful as that was, she could already feel her thirst fading away and her mana pool filling up. The spots in her vision were gone.

  Gina clapped, and behind her the woman Sara her resurrected made tracks out of the room filled with dead bodies. "Excellent! I've gotten all I need and you know about the mana potions. I have to go back and fill out more forms, you keep working here and bring back as many people as you can. I'll send someone to keep you company, and keep you from passing out. Just a word of caution though, you're probably going to get more people brought in here as you work. Never a dull moment here in the Blasted Lands. Nope, never a dull moment."

  Peaceblossom scurried out of the room, leaving Sara with her staff, forty nine mana potions, and twenty-one cold bodies. She looked around at the eight cots she'd cleared, and remembered that those people had all been dead relatively recently. Everyone else had been dead for longer, and people were still dying, and would keep dying for the foreseeable future. Bile rose in her throat and her thoughts wandered to the notebook she'd brought and the distraction gem it held.

  "Should've gone to Northrend when I had the chance," she muttered.

  Fardol Brighthammer

  He ducked, and the training dummy's sword arm flew overhead. He stood back up and raised the shield in his left hand, blocking the wooden shield of the dummy as it spun back around.

  "Hru!" he grunted, smacking the sword away with his mace and ducking below the shield slam. He blocked the returning sword, raised his mace to block the shield, rinse and repeat.

  If he wanted to test his skills he'd attach something really punishing to the training dummies, or go against several at once, probably both. This wasn't to test skills however, this was just endurance. And after an hour of fighting the dummy in his heavy plate, Fardol really felt the burn.

  Whack! Fwap! Thud!

  He wasn't the only one in the room, either. Fannah wailed away at a training dummy with her sword. Alex stood at a distance and launched frostfire bolts one after another with lethal precision. Trinkle herself didn't do anything, but the gnome let her felguard work out its demonic frustrations on the dummies. The air was filled with hissing magic, grunts of effort, and the click-clack-thud of the dummies spinning around.

  Fardol worked himself for another twenty minutes before deciding to call it quits. Minnah was probably back from her meeting with the Dragon Aspects soon, so he needed to go catch her pronto before she vanished again. Jumping back from the spinning dummy, Fardol carefully made his way to the edge of the ring, making sure not to get in anyone's way. Once at a safe distance, he began the long, arduous process of stripping his armor from his sweaty, aching body. Muscles twitching furiously beneath his skin, Fardol hefted his armor in his hands and left.

  He took a few lefts and came across Paradox's armory, a storage room lined with chest after chest. He went and found his and, with one foot, opened it up to dump his armor in, followed by his mace. Once those were gone, he reached down and pulled a waterskin from the same chest and drained it in record time before replacing it. He wiped his mouth with a hand, ignoring the stray drops on his precious beard, and turned back around.

  Paradox's guild hall was located in the Military Quarter of Ironforge, and while it was far from where they were fighting in Northrend, portals could solve that easily enough. The familiar stone ceilings of home arched overhead; everything about Ironforge was dandy. Good luck to the Legion in breaking into Ironforge, hah! The hall wasn't even a complex maze. Everything was clearly structured and ordered out. Training here, resources here, meetings here, so on and so forth. Everything had a place and everything was in its place. Well, except for him. His place was up in Northrend, keeping the attention of massive demons so they wouldn't trample his less resilient guildmates. Instead he was... in the Eastern Kingdoms fighting straw and wood.

  Damn it all.

  But perhaps it was for the best. He had to find Minnah, pronto. So he went towards where she should've been returning from the Dragonblight, in the guild's main hall.

  Paradox's central hall was a thing o' beauty. Marble pillars, maps of Azeroth, tables filled with all sorts of recipes and theories with brilliant people pouring over them. In a world constantly threatened by some eldritch beast, or space demons, or just regular armies, Paradox was a solid rock upon which anyone could depend to get the job done. Well... so was the Liberality Confederacy, and it was somewhat of a friendly competition between them at this point. Even if the L.C. lead by a wide margin.

  Still, the fact that the corridor to the meeting hall had the mounted skull of the dragon Sartharion over it was testament to the skill of his guild.

  Pushing past a few other members of his guild, including the stupid taller ones, Fardol finally managed to catch a glimpse of Minnah's pink pigtails bouncing in the air.

  "Minnah!" he said in a voice just shy of a shout. The gnome paused and turned to face him, raising an equally pink eyebrow and waiting for him. Fardol pushed next to her and nodded respectfully. Minnah stood a head shorter than him, as gnomes often did, and at the moment was dressed in a suit with their tabard laid over it. "Glad I could catch ya. Need ta talk with ya."

  "I'm busy right now Fardol, can we walk and talk?"

  He shrugged and followed after her when she started walking. "You're the boss, sure."

  "Excellent." She held up a stack of papers. "I need to get these filed pronto, the Dragon Aspects had a lot of interesting news."

  "What sort of interesting news? Things goin' alright up there?"

  She shook her head and sighed. "Afraid not. Selnek's raid has been having difficulty pushing into Wintergrasp with all the fel cannons and the dragons are too tied up with these fel wyrm... things. Sorry you couldn't go on the raid by the way, but you were in Kalimdor trailing that warlock and we had no way of contacting you. I'll need to invent something for that," she said, finishing with a mutter.

  "Yeah Minnah, about that warlock. It's kinda why I wanted to talk with ya."

  They arrived at Minnah's office, and Fardol shut the door behind them. The gnome hopped over to behind her gray desk and opened a seemingly random folder to put the papers in. "What about her? Please, sit," she said, gesturing to a lovely seat with a red cushion.

  He took the seat. "Thank ye. So this warlock. She was heading to Silithus with a bunch o' other mages and warlocks to try and learn about the Old Gods. Something about findin' a way to counter whatever's keeping them linked with Azeroth."

  Minnah rested an elbow on her gnome-sized desk and plopped her chin in it, tapping her fingers against her head. "Hmm, I seem to recall..." She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them. "Oh right! Sara Smithers yes? She got deployed to the Blasted Lands three days ago as some sort of resurrector. So again, what about her?"

  "Half of the people following her were Twilight cultists," he said gravely. "And she knew. On the boat she told me about how they ended up coming, and she did it using telepathy. It gets worse. The magic she used to make it happen was faceless magic, Minnah. Actual, Light-smite-me-for-lying faceless magic. And she was going to go within spittin' distance of C'Thun, with a dozen Twilight cultists at her back. Can ya see the problem?" Fardol continued his explanation of what happened while he followed Sara. Talking with her non-cultist followers. Learning about Leira but being unable to speak with her. Sara's refusal to actually do anything about the Hammer until they attacked them, and what happened once they were done with C'Thun's corpse.

  By the end Minnah had pulled her head up and had both elbows up, fingers locked together. "I see. So you're saying Sara can wield Old God magic, but be
yond having what is approximately antisocial personality disorder, she shows no sign of corruption?"

  "It gets worse. Ya know how she's in the Alliance army to revive soldiers? She's the real deal. Brought back half a dozen or so people minutes after dying, no sweat. Minnah, she doesn't just have Old God magic. She has Old God magic and death magic, and I looked into her background. She was born with this stuff. She's been bringin' back small critters since she was a wee lass and has been getting stronger since. The Archmages don't do anything because she hasn't done anything provably wrong, but I have a nasty feeling I know what's goin' on with her. There's only one known Old God associated with death, and her time of birth is awfully close to when the L.C. killed - "

  Minnah cut him off with a hand motion. "Okay Fardol listen. You're one of our best. You can tank a hit like nobody's business, you're smart, you're a pleasure to have around, you're in this guild for very good reason." Oh boy. "I've never had reason to doubt your word before but this? This is really stretching it. Do you have any idea how grave this sort of accusation is? You're accusing a young Magister of being the reincarnation of Yogg-Saron. 'Rise from the earth and unmake this world, beast with a thousand maws, innumerable eons of unfathomable darkness' Yogg-Saron."

  "If the shoe fits," he said simply.

  "Okay look. Fardol, let's consider this. Let's say you're right, and that I believe you. Sara Smithers is the Old God of Death reborn and is inhabiting a mortal body, biding her time to - "

  "Pardon me, but I actually don't think she knows. She wasn't making a beeline for Ulduar, she was going to Silithus. Maybe there's some convoluted reason to go to C'Thun first, but I doubt she knows what she is any more than the fact that she has Old God powers."

  "Okay, then the Old God of Death reborn in a mortal body, just walking around in the Blasted Lands, behind Alliance lines, unrestrained. What exactly do you want me to do about it, hmm?" He opened his mouth, but fell silent. He had admittedly not thought so far ahead. "So we go ahead, prove she's an Old God and what? She isn't turning against us. She's not infiltrating Stormwind Keep and talking King Anduin into slitting his own throat. She's certainly not aiding the Legion. She's just sitting in the Blasted Lands, apparently resurrecting soldiers, just like she's been told to. What can I do, send a party down there to bash her head in while she's asleep? Recruit her into our ranks when every able body is needed there and we're holding on by ourselves? What exactly are you expecting, Fardol?"