Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  The deity shivered in vile ecstasy as the first drops of soul energy flowed down its unspeakably long gullet and effused throughout its body. The wounds in its mouth healed. It moaned lowly even as it continued to suck in the spirits, rending them into pieces. Everything they were was reduced to nothingness, to entropic, chaotic energy that it soaked up like a sponge. All too soon it was over, and the rush of power and well-being was still fresh on its mind, the flavors sharp and electric and it wanted more because just two dozen souls couldn't possibly make up for over sixty thousand years of famine.

  No, no. Focus. Starvation could not kill it. It had things to do.

  Why had it come back into this body in the first place? Because it wanted to? Was destined to? It had told itself it was just because it needed a way to smash the Legion but even as a human, Yogg-Saron hadn't truly believed that now had it? It wanted to remake Azeroth! It wanted to conquer them all! It wanted to establish now and forever that IT was the one in charge, IT was the one that made the rules and -

  - no, no. Concentrate. It made a promise. Technically it hadn't broken it. This was just self-defense. It could establish itself on good terms with Azeroth. Once it single-handedly (Single tentacledly? Mortal sayings obviously didn't translate well) smashed the Burning Legion the planet would bend over backwards for it, gladly giving it whatever it wanted in exchange for saving everything and if they didn't it could make them and - first it had to actually smash the Burning Legion and it couldn't do that buried underground.

  Time to escape for real.

  First, however, it brought its attention to a nearby pile of rubble. A portion of Ulduar had collapsed in its throes of freedom, and with a few effortless spells the boulders cleared away to reveal a battered and broken body. Vile purple magic surrounded the body and lifted it to Yogg-Saron's head.

  This was its former body. It turned it over in its magic, inspecting the human woman with a curious purr. Was this really all that had been sheltering its soul all these years? It was so small and feeble. Legs that didn't work. Eyes that couldn't see even a thousandth of any given object. Organs and blood that were so gruesomely inefficient they could barely keep a body the size of a gnat working. The body's brown eyes were open and glassy, staring vacantly back at the Old God. The limbs were bent in the wrong directions and bone stuck out of the joints, bloody and jagged. The brown robes over its chest were stained with crimson, where a hole had been torn through to mangle the heart.

  Yogg-Saron kept staring at the tiny human corpse, gently cradling it with magic. This was who it had been not an hour ago. This was the body that had played with its mother and father, the body that had befriended a draenei with dreams of being a warrior. The body that had held Stormwind alone, the body that had laughed and cried, tortured and helped, brought the fallen back to give them another chance, and had supported its soul until it could come back to where it belonged.

  With a flick of a tentacle, the body was teleported into the Great Dark Beyond and sent on a trajectory into the sun.

  No sense keeping it around and risking some magic ritual to trap it back in that crippled shell.

  No more delays. Time to escape now.

  Yogg-Saron's body, on a large scale, mostly closely resembled an octopus. It had eight titanic limbs that sprouted from a central core, and relatively thin webbing stretched halfway from the central body to the tentacles. All along the body were smaller tentacles, and on those smaller ones still, all the way down to its smallest combat tentacles. All along its vast body were mouths, pustules, armor plates, and on the central body were several stalks, miles long, capped with heads. Most of them were decoys, but one actually housed Yogg-Saron's brain.

  It reached to the first of its eight long limbs. This one was buried under Borean Tundra. Yogg-Saron curled its head over and flexed, it wiggled, and slowly but surely the tip of its tendril began to break through stone. Then, with the power of a volcanic eruption, the land above gave way and the tip of a betentacled limb burst from a geyser field. Water and steam were sent flying into the air and huge quantities of gray stone were displaced, forming a fountain of sludge that briefly hid the blue-green tentacle.

  Yogg-Saron could project its sonar through that one as well, now. It'd erupted in the middle of the Borean Tundra, near the crossroads. The sky was blue and the air was crisp, filled with billions of microbes that immediately began to wither and die in its presence. In the distance, tribes of Tuskarr watched in horror and ran as fast as they could in the opposite direction.

  The god curled the tentacle on the ground for leverage. Then it reached for the next limb. This one exploded just off shore of Dragonblight. For a moment it peeked above the water, but then it submerged and held on to the ocean floor. Meanwhile, the waves it sent out lapped against the shore in the form of a tsunami, nearly inundating the Emerald Dragonshrine.

  Crrrack! A tentacle rose in the Grizzly Hills, uprooting the failed World Tree and obliterating the furbolgs living within. Forestry for miles around was blown back from the shockwave.

  Crrrack! Another limb, stretched out, punctured up through the Howling Fjord's center. The vrykul city of Utgarde Keep was ruptured by the rising tendril, rent to stone and sent falling into the sea beneath.

  Crrrack!

  Crrrack!

  Crrrack!

  Crrrack!

  All eight of its limbs had a foothold on the surface now. The smaller tentacles covering them were limp for now. Yogg-Saron still needed to get the hang of coordinating that many limbs. That would come later. At that moment, though, it heaved.

  Northrend trembled. The tentacles rose up more, splitting the earth as their kingdom-sized lengths rose from the earth, leaving vast chasms in their wake. The tentacle near Dragonblight in particular traced a winding path that avoided each of the Dragonshrines as well as Wyrmrest itself, leaving the zone riddled with canyons and surrounded by tentacles, but otherwise the dragons were unharmed.

  The eight tentacles traced lines back to Yogg-Saron's central body, which was still mostly buried beneath the Storm Peaks and Crystalsong. It took a deep breath through its main head, the maws along its neck. and the maws along its exposed limbs. The act created a vacuum felt for hundreds of yards around. Then, with a great heave of effort, Yogg-Saron's entire body burst from Northrend.

  The sound was calamitous. A symphony of bursting stone, crashing underground rivers, splintering ice, and displaced air. Yogg-Saron roared in ecstatic pain as it rose, stretching muscles that had gone unused for tens of thousands of years. Stone, trees and dirt clung to its body as it rose, and then it shifted, spilling the debris over its body where it fell into the gaping hole it had left in the world. Already, the oceans were rushing in to fill the jagged scar, filthy with sediment and white with rage. Clouds for miles around burst as the shockwave rushed outwards, and the earthquake rocked the globe.

  Dalaran was smashed to pieces by the rising deity. Icecrown and Wyrmrest both trembled before the earthquake, but held strong. Ulduar, the shining jewel of the north, with all its watchers and mysteries, was torn apart into scrap metal and thrown to the winds. Thousands of homes were flattened, if not by the shaking then by the shockwave. Caverns imploded. Rivers altered course. Lives were ruined. All across Azeroth, regardless of time zone, twilight fell.

  The world held its breath.

  Then Yogg-Saron laughed, stretching all of its millions of tentacles of varying sizes towards the heavens, piercing through the atmosphere and into the Great Dark Beyond. It had no bones, and there was no satisfying popping of joints, but by the void that felt good. It laughed and it laughed, letting its volume carry the laughter to the far corners of Azeroth before it finally quieted down.

  Finally, it thought. Finally!

  Alright. Now that it was free, it was time to take the fight to the demons.

  But first, Yogg-Saron's magical sensors detected dragons heading its way. Among them were all four Aspects, magic already dripping from their mouths.

 
Oh for goodness sake!

  As a human, the Aspects had been mythical, larger than life creatures it never, ever wanted to encounter. Even in its previous life as an Old God it had never actually met them. The closest it got was using N'Zoth's channel to whisper to Neltharion. So seeing them here, now, close enough to touch...

  The Aspects approached the center of its 'octopus' body, with its many decoy heads and smaller tentacles waving about them, and they unleashed their fury. Emerald acid fell upon its body, joined by biting sands, arctic shards, and cleansing flame. Yogg-Saron buckled in pain. It'd been a relatively small area, but damn it that hurt! And while it was free from the Titans' power limiters, and so its dark might was rapidly returning, it still had a long way to recover.

  The Aspects didn't stop there. They continued to fly onward, trying to stay as far above it as possible and heading northeast... towards its actual head. Did the decoys not deceive them?

  "You stop that right now!" it boomed into their minds, sending twitching waves of motion through its many combat tendrils. "I promise you if you continue onward, you are really not going to like what happens," it growled menacingly. Alexstrasza paused for a moment, but then the Aspects continued. Meanwhile other dragons began fighting it at the edges, staying at range and pelting it with magical attacks, all while the black seas below spilled into the chasm.

  Forget it. This was exactly what it had known would happen. Nobody was going to be happy to see it. Nobody was going to think of it as a hero. Nobody would look at the rising wall of tentacles and think 'we're saved!'. And going through the effort of forcibly changing their minds just seemed so... hollow.

  Concentrate. It had to concentrate. The crusher tentacles lifted and began spiraling through the air. Yogg-Saron reached into its pustules and began to pump their gas into the crusher tentacles. It emerged as a toxic fog over Northrend to diminish the power of those who inhaled it. From its body, jagged bolts of purple lightning began to fly, each with pinpoint accuracy. Apathy spells and balls of draining venom followed. Such was the power, and such was the rising intensity, that the dragons had no chance.

  They fell to the ground and succumbed to their injuries, or were bent and broken to Yogg-Saron's will and attacked their allies. Yogg-Saron tried to leave most of them alive, it really did. It had so many plans for the dragons and... they weren't its final target after all, were they?

  But why go easy if they were the aggressors?

  No, no. Forget that. They didn't see it as aggression, they saw it as a preemptive strike before it inevitably attacked on its own.

  But who cared?

  Shifting walls of emerald magic crawled along Yogg-Saron's body, shielded parts of itself from attack. Tentacles retaliated with steadily increasing fierceness as it got used to controlling so many again. Dragons dropped like flies. Sometimes, like when it smacked aside Derestrasz's resisting form, it resurrected them. Sometimes it ate their souls and shivered in delight. The Aspects, meanwhile, continued their burning path towards its true head, but it was such a long distance from Wyrmrest to the Storm Peaks even with an Aspect's power.

  Not that they'd make the journey unmolested. Its vast magic whipped into them like rain in a storm, and its larger tentacles raised into the air to try and swat them out of the sky. They rolled and ducked, spun through gaps with agility that betrayed their size, skillfully navigating across an ocean of death and despair. This was their last chance. They knew it. Yogg-Saron knew it. If they didn't kill it now it would run rampant, upturning their civilizations and establishing itself as the ruler of the planet for unutterable eons of -

  That's not the plan! Get a grip! it shouted at itself.

  But even if it wasn't the plan, oh how it hated dragons. It let loose against the Aspects.

  They fought, they twisted, they flew. They healed and burned and reversed time and froze, reached into the nether and undid its corruptive presence. But there was nothing they could do. The Aspects were seperated by its tentacles over the area that had, recently, been the border between Crystalsong and the Storm Peaks. They fought so hard, but in the end, they were less to Yogg-Saron than dust had been to Sara. It wasn't even the rapidly growing power of its magic, it was the sheer quantity of flesh they had to trek across.

  How do you fight a living continent?

  Nozdormu, interestingly, was the first to fall. Yogg-Saron got to him with physical means, pushing him in one direction with walls of magical projectiles and then grabbing him in a larger tentacle, while the smaller crushers on it battered him and drained his strength. How ironic. Wasn't Nozdormu supposed to be able to see the future? Didn't he know what Yogg-Saron was doing? Didn't his Flight know? They'd let it happen, and now they wanted to fight?

  ... though now that it paid more attention, it realized there actually weren't any bronze dragons fighting it beyond the Aspect. Curious.

  Alexstrasza came next. It wore her down with diseases and poisons, and when she barely had the strength to keep flying, with her sister separated from her, Yogg-Saron brought a long neck with one of its larger decoy heads and bit down on her midsection. She roared agonizingly as the fangs pierced through her armored scales, and with her thrashing in its grip Yogg-Saron inhaled, drawing white streaks off the queen's body as it tasted her soul. It moaned in delight as the Titan-powered life essence flowed from her. Sooo sweeeet... It stopped before she could die, letting her whimper pitifully in its maw.

  Kalecgos, the youngling, the whelp? Yogg-Saron directed its mind powers to him and broke his mind. Within minutes he flapped in mid air, looking around with glassy eyes. Then a tentacle the size of a mountain crashed into him and sent him down.

  Ysera, surprisingly enough, did the best out of all of them. Yogg-Saron suspected her experience with the Emerald Nightmare had prepared her in that regards. She ducked between spells, avoided looking at its dozens of lunatic skulls, and slipped between its thrashing tendrils. Yogg-Saron couldn't help but be impressed as she danced between its attacks, lashing out with her claws and acid to draw blood and boil flesh.

  But her fate was sealed. The injuries she inflicted were, now that it was growing used to its size, so woefully small. Once she was sufficiently isolated, Yogg-Saron gathered its magic to her location and cast the Extinguish All Life spell on her position. Dense magical fog burst around her and, while it was dialed down not to instantly kill her, her scales discolored and her wings went limp. Ysera fell out of the sky, falling halfway to its body before Yogg-Saron grabbed her with levitation.

  That was all of them. Yogg-Saron inspected the four barely-living Aspects and pondered what to do. It could just kill them, obliterate their souls and erase them so thoroughly even it wouldn't be able to bring them back... but where was the fun in that? Why shorten their suffering? Besides, even skimming the top of Alexstrasza's soul had been the greatest thing it had ever tasted, as a deity or as a human.

  Yogg-Saron's eruption from Northrend had rent the earth and pushed up a few mountains. It found one near the top and teleported the four Aspects over to it. The magical process was so... elaborate. It still had a hard time believing it could do all this so easily, all while still concentrating on fighting the lesser dragons near its edge. It formed a quartet of enchanted stone spires on the mountain, and brutally impaled each Aspect on one. They roared in agony, except for Alexstrasza who could only mewl, and it left them there. The magic would keep them weakened and alive long enough for it to figure out what to do with them.

  The God of Death took a moment. It had just... defeated all four of the Dragon Aspects, dismantled the Dragonflights. It hadn't even been a close battle, it'd destroyed them. With all of its body uncovered, there was just no way for them to get in a position where they could hurt it. And Yogg-Saron was still growing stronger. It was -

  No, no. Focus. Yogg-Saron extended its magical sonar out, washing over Azeroth. It saw the churning currents of molten iron in the core. It saw the broken, sparking husk of Ulduar's Observer Calling Mechanism, sinkin
g beneath the waves. It saw the Dark Portal, churning with mystic energies. And it saw Kil'jaeden in Ashenvale, weaving a complex ritual to open a portal and escape to the Nether.

  Oh no you don't!

  Yogg-Saron was far away from Kil'jaeden, so it needed a spell to extend its reach. Instantly it knew what to do. Just as a human could look at a pile of sticks and know 'there are four sticks', Yogg-Saron could look at this task and know 'this is the spell matrix I need to weave'. And that was exactly the spell matrix it wove. Inky purple energy flashed around Kil'jaeden, and suddenly he was in the air above one of Yogg-Saron's eight titanic limbs.

  The eredar swore in Eredun, and the deity instantly knew the words. "No, no, NO!" Fel magic wrapped itself around Kil'jaeden as he began to levitate, and he pointed a finger at Yogg-Saron.

  The hazy twilight of the world gave way, just for a moment, to blood red as a crimson lance of energy burst from Kil'jaeden's finger and smashed into one of Yogg-Saron's crusher tentacles. It jerked a little in pain as the limb was instantly overcome with necrosis and died.

  The Old God unleashed its volley, blotting out the sun with projectiles. But before they could fall upon the demon lord he was already casting, and the next finger of death spell - it knew what it was, now - forked into two and killed two of Yogg-Saron's tentacles. Another second passed, and Kil'jaeden blasted another, frantically weaving the spell over and over again, and each time up to half a dozen of Yogg-Saron's tendrils went limp and gray.

  Then the spells fell upon him.

  "Rrr, no!" he grunted, shielding himself with a magically-imbued wing. The noise was like hail on a window, and despite his levitation spell Kil'jaeden was actually being torn from position as Yogg-Saron coordinated its attack, forcing the projectiles not to just fly directly to him, but swirl around as they approached and batter him from all directions. Poisons burst against the eredar's skin, plagues leeched into his blood and dooms hung over his head. Yogg-Saron wouldn't inhibit his sanity, though. It wanted him to appreciate this.