Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  "Resurrect hmm?" he asked. "What did you say the deadline for that was?"

  "It varies based on body mass," she explained. "Heavier people are harder to bring back, but for humanoids it's generally around a week."

  "I see." They discussed her education, training, and sparring in more detail, and sleep tugged at Sara's eyes even though she had no idea what time it was. At length, the man reached under his desk and fished something out. It was... oh. A compact version of magic signature staff. Small stick, and a pinecone of transparent crystals. "Please cast into this as hard as you can, miss."

  "Of course." She took the offered staff and gripped its end tightly. An orb of dark magic appeared around her hands, pulsing and writhing. Then she poured more magic into it and it turned Old God purple, then finally it turned death green, burning her arms and scorching her bones. She didn't squint or look away. Her Old God magic surged up the staff, siphoned off into the crystals where it turned back into necrotic violet, filling them like sludge. When she deemed the staff filled, she cut off the flow of power and handed it back to him.

  He grabbed it carefully, as if afraid it would bite his hand off. He held up a hand to the crystals and arcane lights flickered between his fingers. He grabbed a pen and wrote some measurements in the margins of a nearby piece of paper. After a while, he nodded. "Your claims about your magical skill seem to be in earnest, miss. We still need to run some background checks, but we should have an answer for you in five to six hours."

  So, five to six hours to perfect her alibi in a worst case scenario.

  "Is it fine if I return to the application room in that period of time?" she asked. "I don't want to have to make you run around Ironforge looking for me."

  "That's fine," he said. The man - whose name she still hadn't caught - stood and extended a hand. She did the same and shook the offered hand, wincing at his grip. "I think you'd make a great addition to our guild, Sara. I look forward to seeing you in a few hours. Though until then you don't have to stay here."

  She spent most of the time practicing her psychosis spell. She didn't manage to lower her casting speed any more, but Sara felt like she had a better understanding of the sanity altering mechanism. There were some other spells she gave a cursory look, such as a spell to force two people to remain close together, and another spell similar to the Mortal Coil spell that would force them to separate, but mostly she tried to perfect the one spell in order to replace her dependency on shadow bolts. Sara napped some, grabbed some water, but mostly she pummeled dummy after dummy with her powers. After all, she had mana to spare.

  There were clocks scattered throughout Ironforge. It was late at night when she had applied for the Chimes of A'dal, so time passed on and on until it was early morning when she'd be accepted or not. Sleep tugged at her eyes, but she ignored the reflex and retraced her steps through the toasty, subterranean hallways back to the guild hall. Hopefully she wouldn't have to keep treading old ground soon. She wanted to get out there and start testing her new spells on living beings.

  In the middle of the Military Ward, she paused and took a few deep breaths. Patience, Sara, she told herself. Everything was fine. She was an Old God, she should be confident. Everything was under control. There was nothing they could do to hurt her.

  The guild hall hadn't changed much. She returned to the application room - there was a night elven man there now - and took a seat.

  "Hello," the man greeted. Ugh, that voice. There wasn't anything wrong with it per se, but he was talking and not telling her she was accepted so she wanted to lobotomize him. "Can I do anything for you?"

  "I don't think so," she explained. "I submitted an application for this guild and had my interview just a few hours ago. Came back after the recommended hours."

  Recommended time, she scolded herself. I words good.

  "And now here I am. Is there any news there about my application status? It's Sara Smithers."

  "I'm sorry," he said, leaning on an arm. "But if you already performed your interview then it won't be here. How long ago was this?"

  She thought back to the clock. "Five hours and forty seven minutes ago," she said.

  "Five and forty..." He drifted off, scratching one of his luminescent gray eyebrows. "Hmm, they should be tracking you down right about - "

  Footsteps echoed up the hallway and Sara turned around to see the same dark skinned man who'd interviewed her.

  "- now. Speak of Sargeras and he shall appear."

  "Very funny, ha ha," the man drawled. "Anyway miss Smithers, we conducted your background check and everything seems to be fine." Internally, Sara turned to jello. So her latest escapades hadn't made it in yet. Thank goodness for bureaucracy. Of course there was still a matter of when the rest of the Alliance took notice, but one thing at a time. For now, she was in.

  Either way she stood and shook his hand. "I'm very happy to hear that," she chimed. "I look forward to being a part of your organization." He seemed a bit off put - too mechanical? - but returned her smile anyway.

  "You'll receive a monthly stipend," he said, confirming what she'd read on the form. "And your beginner trial period will last until you first get it. In the meantime." He dug a hand into hit suit's pocket and pulled out a little brown bag, which clinked with the metal it contained. "This should be enough to last through the rest of this month," he explained, handing it to her. "Your trial slip is also inside."

  She was careful not to be too snappy about taking it. "Thank you very much," she said. "I suppose I'll just find my way to the training grounds," she offered.

  The night elf still behind the counter smirked. "Right to work, I see? A wise decision."

  After exchanging some more pleasantries and struggling to keep her magic down, she left the two men and pocketed the money with the rest. She breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, it was done. She was actually in Leira's guild. She could select an unoccupied room to stay in. She could rediscover and practice her old self's abilities in relative peace and comfort. She could make herself a better person.

  Sara went deeper into the guild hall, marveling at the places she hadn't gone before. She didn't encounter anyone. They must've been elsewhere in Ironforge, out on mission, or training. She made her way to an armory, filled with chests upon chests piled so high she had to crane her neck. Most of them were labeled with names, but some of them were labeled 'free to use'.

  Rifling through them, Sara found two bracers. They were made of a soft, flexible violet cloth, maybe netherweave, with two green gems over their middles. Sara slipped one on and bit down a yelp. A jolt of electricity raced from it along her skin, and even after the initial shock there was some buzzing deep within her soul, in her magical power. She took the clothing off and eyed it warily.

  "That's what enchanted gear feels like?" she muttered. "Huh."

  She sorted through the 'free to use' gear for a few more minutes, inspecting all the cloth items made for spellcasters. A few of them were too small, or too large, and all of them sent a blast of power straight through her when she put it on. Sara couldn't wait to see what sort of damage she could do with a full set on. And there was also that one staff. It looked like it was made by the Twilight's Hammer, or maybe more likely the Cult of the Damned. Purple and blue, with spikes and handles, and an ending that looked like two dull axes surrounding a floating purple crystal.

  The things she'd be able to do with that. But maybe later.

  Sara closed the chest and walked out of the armory. There was still so much to explore and take in. She hardly even noticed she was underground now.

  "Look ou - ah!" Sara turned around and -

  Blue.

  Then a force like a boulder hit her in the head and both Sara and the offender were on the ground. She stopped her head from cracking on the stone floor, and wiggled out from under the other person. She was calm. She was not going to kill them. She'd get kicked out of the guild and besides, it was just an honest mistake. People made mistakes. She made mistakes.
It was all good.

  As the other person pulled herself up, they scowled. "Ugh, watch where you're - " Their eyes met. It was Leira, her arm still in a sling. What were the odds? "Sara?!"

  A voice behind Leira spoke up. "Who's Sara?" A gnomish man stuck out his head behind the draenei, looking comically small next to her. "Hey, never saw you before. You new?" he offered.

  "I am," she said while rubbing her left arm. That was probably going to bruise. "I actually got my trial slip just a minute ago!" Sara reached into her bag of gold and pulled out the little yellow slip. "See? I'm in here now!"

  Leira was taller than her by a head, and she had horns, so watching her glowing white eyes stare at her and blink in shock was an uneasy experience. Then, a a grin spread ear to ear. "That's great!" With her good arm she lightly punched Sara, and then immediately frowned. "Hey Trickle, can you go on ahead? I need to speak with her."

  "Sure thing, Lei!" Then the gnome was engulfed in a flash of arcane light, and when Sara looked behind her he had already blinked there. "I'll wait for you."

  Leira turned back to her. "So, you're here. And I'm glad you're here, definitely won't turn down your help. But uh, why? I mean, in light of your, you know. You know?"

  Right. That. The part where she terrified her only friend by telling her all about how she desperately wanted to bring about the end of days. "About that. I thought about what you said and I decided, no matter how many arguments anyone makes I'm still going to want to go back. So the only thing I can do is make it so I don't want to go back anymore, and I may as well help with the war while I'm at it, so here I am." She remembered how Leira had reacted to her 'faceless' magic in Silithus. "Is that okay?"

  She was almost too quick to nod. "Of course! I saw what you did to those cultists, definitely want to see more of that. But..." The warrior tapped her chin. "If you're going to be coming on assignments with the folks, then I don't think you're quite up to the amount of walking, jogging, and hiking we need you to do."

  All of a sudden she had a bad feeling about this. "Um, what are you getting at?" she asked nervously, taking a step back from the draenei.

  Then, Leira lurched forward and grabbed Sara's shoulder with her good hand, turning her around. "Come on, I'll show you our track! It's gonna be a bit longer before my arm heals, so until then I'm gonna whip you into shape!"

  Sara didn't quite regret joining the Chimes, but she had a feeling that she would before long.

  Sara

  Sara threw herself into her work with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, so did Leira.

  Laps around all of Ironforge, including through the sweltering heat of the Great Forge and the bitter cold of Dun Morogh right outside. Bench presses. Sit ups. Pull ups. Oblique crunches. Squats. Hundreds and hundreds of push ups.

  Back in Stormwind, she'd never been a complete slouch. Sure, the academic spellcaster life was sedentary, but Sara went to duels, she walked to the Park, she lightly jogged around it, she ate well. She got enough exercise that she could, say, walk through the city of Ulduar without too much exhaustion. But it seemed Leira was fully intent on murdering her. Sara chose a dormitory for herself, and seemingly every day she crawled into bed sore and tired. She knew it'd get better. She knew that if she didn't get this out of the way now it'd come back to bite her. But that didn't make it any less miserable.

  When Sara wasn't busy being murdered, she was either working on her spells or on her craft. The public training dummies were an option when she happened to be there, but the Chimes of A'dal had their own room specifically for magicians and, by the time a week had passed, Sara could get her psychosis spell cast in just over two seconds, and she'd made significant progress on the mind malady spell. Each day she practiced her magic, she went without any enhancing gear, with only a staff to prevent over channeling, and worked until her mana pool ran dry. By then, the entire field was usually engulfed in a steady miasma of Old God magic that took her another half hour to clean up.

  She was never court martialed, or investigated, or anything. Sara wasn't sure why that was the case. Maybe the people in charge didn't care enough about her, thought they already knew what happened and it was nothing important. Maybe her paperwork slipped through the cracks. Maybe the war was going so poorly that they were just glad she was back. Or maybe it was going to happen, but hadn't yet. Either way, thank goodness for small miracles.

  There was a lot to do, and Sara didn't get a lot of chances to socialize. What chances there were usually involved nameless, faceless people congratulating her trial, welcoming her to the guild, and other meaningless drivel like that.

  She got a guild tabard, which was a blue piece of cloth with a picture of a naaru over it. The naaru was faced forward, revealing its glowing core and the chandelier-like shards that rotated around it. Whenever she wore it, the symbol of the holy creature seemed to twist and writhe against her body in protest. The gold she'd gotten was more than enough, and she could eat well and eat fearlessly. Which she needed, because if she didn't eat enough Leira's workout was going to run her into the ground.

  Sara also discovered they had a bank. It wasn't especially elaborate, but there were raw materials and gold inside which, with proper reasoning, could be taken out for use. There was fel iron, cobalt, titanium, shielded thorium, spices, herbs, everything she could think of.

  Which was how Sara found herself in her little room with a few rolls of heavy parchment, a feather pen, a pot, an ink fountain, and a rod of saronite the size of her fist.

  It was warm to the touch, and pulsed in time with her heartbeat. Just being around it cleared her head and made her thoughts flow easily. Her daily exercise was behind her - and it was finally getting easier - plus she'd eaten a big dinner, so now she could devote all her brainpower to her task.

  It was simple, in theory. Yogg-Saron's blood was normally as fluid as any other liquid. It was even less viscous than water, at least inside Yogg-Saron. Inside the Old God was a powerful acid that kept its blood from congealing. Once free of this acid, saronite become as thick as honey and, when subjected to geological pressures, it congealed further into an incredibly strong and lightweight metal.

  Solid saronite wasn't useful for her immediate intentions. She needed it to be liquefied again. To do that, she'd need to do some rather complex spellwork to its molecules. Luckily, Yogg-Saron had already done the hard part. She just needed to plug in the values and cast it from there, and she hadn't done much magic training today so she had a lot of mana to work with. Sara put the off-green bar into the pot and stared into it. Then, she called up her magic until it was bright purple, and pointed a hand at the saronite. A similar aura engulfed the metal, and she began.

  The first three minutes were spent casting the spell. After that she sustained the power and waited for the magic to do its thing.

  A minute went by.

  Then another.

  It was hard to notice, but by the third minute she could tell the saronite bar was melting. Thick droplets formed on its surface, and a puddle appeared on its bottom. As time passed it kept shrinking, like butter on a stove, until there was black sludge in the pot and nothing solid remained. At that moment she let go of the spell and breathed in sharply.

  "Now I have a pot filled with Yogg-Saron's blood," she said to herself. She grabbed the glass vial and poured the blood inside until it was half full, then took the pen in her right hand and twirled it between her fingers. "What can I make with that as an ink?" she pondered. She dipped the pen into the vial and tore off a small section of the parchment, and pondered.

  "Maybe if I add a nullification triangle there... "

  "No, the power flow will cancel out the intake... "

  "It doesn't have enough thaumatic resistance, I need to make the ring smaller."

  Glyphs were poorly understood outside the inscription field. The general idea was the ink, the parchment, and the shape of the ink would make a complex magical field and add an effect to some spell. Usually this was done by shuffling the
spell's effects around. A frostbolt could lose some of its physical force but be made much colder. Or the glyph itself could passively draw on the leylines and give an effect without other drawbacks. It was agonizingly precise work, and the act of magically grafting a piece of inked paper onto someone's soul - at the cost of said inked paper - was complicated but risk free.

  Sara's glyph in particular would have a purely additive effect, but that was tricky to do. The advantage of Old God blood was how easily it could take in and manipulate both magic and emotions, and its range of 'things it can do' was effectively limitless. However its polarity was also reversed, meaning it tended to do harmful things to lesser beings. If Sara wanted her experimental glyph to work, she needed to make it do the exact opposite of what she wanted, and then add a negation swirl.

  But she was an expert at this. It took a few do-overs, but by midnight the glyph was done and after checking, double checking, and triple checking it, Sara went to bed.

  That night, like every night since touching Yogg-Saron, Sara dreamed.

  She dreamed...

  She dreamed...

  She remembered.

  She remembered being gargantuan, her body stretching for miles and miles and miles, and if her senses were what she had then she would have been able to feel every inch of her betentacled body clutching into the land, the polluted air washing around her limbs, the smell of blood and souls of the sacrificed flowing into her millions of mouths.

  Another Old God fought against her. This one was sandy, and while its powers weren't quite as powerful as hers the tentacles were sharp and barbed, muscled far beyond even her own crushers. Green eye beams ricocheted around her body, and Sara launched millions of spells every second. They fought and wrestled with each other, dispelling and resummoning magical barriers, and whenever one of them was cut open their black blood formed amalgamates and animi that continued to battle.