Death Never Dies

by Milton Garby

  The Lucid Dream reappeared in the Twisting Nether. Rivers of arcane and shadow, colored every color of the rainbow and several outside the visible spectrum, flowed around it. Magical currents coiled around Yogg-Saron's body, which it inhaled through its millions of mouths, tasting and drinking. There was no gravity, there was no heaviness to its body. Distant stars twinkled morosely.

  It sighed through its true head. What was it even worried about? That less than sixty-five mortals were dead? It killed thousands of times that just getting out of its prison! They were expendable and useless. Even if every one of the Titan-born went extinct and they didn't create more, who cared? Before the Titans came along the Old Gods had created their own servants and slaves. The n'raqi and aqir were just the latest in a long, long line of minions who were created and, when they grew boring, wiped out. They'd also created lesser servants, who multiplied rapidly and were susceptible to different tortures in different ways, many times.

  Yogg-Saron didn't need the orcs and trolls, the elves and dwarves, the draenei and humans. It had half a mind to return to Azeroth and wipe them out to the last at this very second. Tsa'Thannon wouldn't mind. Unpredictable change was what they were all about! It could prove it was just as much an Old God as it had ever been, that a reincarnation cycle hadn't dulled its edge.

  No, no that was all wrong. It had nothing to prove. The whole point of their rule was to have nothing to prove, to do what they wanted and be beholden to no standards.

  Yogg-Saron curled its tendrils around itself, drifting in the nether. It'd return to Azeroth in a while, keeping tabs on the planet with its magic. For the time being it needed to be separate physically.

  This was ridiculous! It had everything it wanted! Why was it acting so childish? Everything was fine, it had a good 'friend' that actually understood it, legions of souls, great food, great fun and...

  ... it distracted itself by stargazing, forcibly ending the line of thought.

  It could worry about this later.

  Yogg-Saron

  Something was wrong.

  Yogg-Saron, now again in its throne, raised two of its main tendrils out of the atmosphere, feeling the tingling of the Great Dark Beyond trying to depressurize its limb. After a moment, it lowered its tentacles back to the ground.

  Something was wrong. It wasn't enjoying this as much as it should've. There was no way it could run from this. Ruling Azeroth just wasn't all it was cracked up to be, even with the ongoing mock war with Tsa'Thannon.

  But that was ridiculous! Objectively, everything was so, so much better than when it'd been a mortal! It had no need for money, it had infinite power, food, drink, shelter, and safety! It had a friend that wouldn't judge it for what it did, and would in fact offer tips! It could torture mortals endlessly. How had it ever survived without that?! Animals subjected to agony just tried escaping but mortals, mortals begged! Wild, unpredictable change ran wild, and it was never able to predict what would come next.

  No, that was a lie. It knew exactly what the problem was. It could predict what was going on. It was already seeing the patterns. Storms here and there, mountains turning to volcanoes, so on and so forth. The unexpected was becoming the opposite of that. Obviously it couldn't surprise itself, and having just Tsa'Thannon around...

  ... it just wasn't enough.

  Growling through its million of mouths, Yogg-Saron summoned the Sara avatar and sent it flying.

  She sailed through the air, then landed on solid water and jumped. Air screamed past her face, clouds burst around her, and soon the ruddy atmosphere gave way to blackness, to thousands of stars it had long-since memorized. It would take centuries for the stars to shift into new alignments. She approached the Blue Child rapidly and flipped over, landing on her knees.

  Gravity reoriented itself, and she started pacing on the surface of the natural satellite. She'd deliberately left no crater and threw no dust into the air. It was perfectly, utterly silent, so she started pacing with her hands behind her back. She could say what she wanted about human bodies, but one of the few advantages they definitely held was being able to pace.

  "Damn it!" she shouted, but there was no noise without any air. "What is wrong with me?" she asked the vacuum, even though she already knew. She was growing bored of this. Already! It hadn't even been a year! How could she possibly stand this for another ten years? Ten thousand? Million? Billion? And the worst thing was that she loved it, too! She was finally free, unrestrained! Nobody told her what to do, nobody kept her caged. No more laws. No more biting her tongue. No more withering under disappointing looks. But oh how she hated this, because she'd... she'd...

  No. She wasn't going to put a name to it. Instead she reached her magic from her true body - still on Azeroth - into an n'raqi compound and found a slave. Orc woman, sure. As good as any other. She teleported to the far side of the Blue Child - the sun shone above, drowning out every one of the stars - and summoned air to her, then kept it from flying off. Sara's ears popped as the pressure returned. She also set up some radiation shields and dropped the temperature of the stone. With all that done she pulled, and the orc appeared before her.

  Sara, not even bothering with superficial hand motions, switched the orc's tattered rags with a dark purple gown and filled out her starved body.

  The orc collapsed - in slow motion thanks to the low gravity - and lay on the bluish stone, trembling weakly. "Alright," Sara said. "Get up, I didn't bring you here so you could huddle." She shrieked and curled up tighter. Sara rolled her eyes, hovering lower. "Oh by the void, now's not the time." She held out a hand and twisted it. A shudder ran through the orc and her sobbing ended. She uncurled and looked up at Sara. Then she looked around at the crater they were in and gasped.

  "What - how are - where - you saved me!" she breathed.

  "Oh I doubt it," Sara growled, letting her eldritch aura flow forth for a moment. "I just felt like bringing someone here. Now get up!" she snapped.

  The orc jerked up, staring up at her. "You're... you're one of them, aren't you? W-What are you going to do to me?" she asked, bringing her hands to her neck and taking a step back.

  "I... I don't know." She landed on the stone, only to uproot a stone seat and float up. Another seat appeared under the orc. She screamedbut held on to its legs as it brought her higher up. A chiseled table, with tentacles for legs, hovered between them. "I just wanted a change of pace, I suppose. Chaos, unpredictable and continuous change, you know? Here, enjoy while my mood lasts." She conjured up a spread of food and drink for the orc. Biscuits, chicken legs, wine, hot chocolate, everything she could think of.

  While Sara fixed herself a cup of hot bone marrow and a plate of basilisk eyes, the orc - Riekna - stared at the banquet uncertainly. "This is a trick," she said. "Isn't it?"

  "Not at the moment. Honestly, what've you got to lose?" After taking a moment to consider her words, Riekna dug in, eating like a woman who hadn't had a proper meal in... well, months, chowing down as if she wasn't aware of the Old God sitting patiently across from her.

  "So, I have a question for you," Sara said once she was done eating her own food. Riekna looked up from a plate of beef, sauce covering her face, and grunted. "More like a scenario to be exact. So here's how it goes. You and your kind, you have certain values, do you not?" She conjured up several images above the floating table to go along with what she said. "You like making people happy. You enjoy having challenges so long as there is nothing too high at stake, and sometimes even then based on the individual. Generally though, people like taking the easy way out for things that matter. A stable source of food and such. Housing, love, stability." She rolled her eyes. "Of course not all of your people, but your brains and souls are so similar to each others' that generally you can agree on what's good and what's bad, right?"

  Riekna nodded weakly, pulling her robes tighter. "R-Right, um, ma'am?"

  "Ma'am will do. Obviously, we don't share your standards. Your rules are not our rules, your morals are not our m
orals." She chuckled menacingly and replaced the images with new ones. "Rape, murder, torture. You all consider those pretty much the main evils. We don't. Stagnation, predictability, being ruled over, those are our hatreds. Call our sadism a product of our origin if you want. Ever since we've taken over, everything is in turmoil and I love it!" She turned her chair into a recliner and laid back.

  "What does this have to do with - "

  She closed the orc's mouth with a thread of shadow. "I died, you know. To the Kingslayers. I ejected my soul as a last ditch effort and reincarnated as a human baby. No memories. No idea what I truly was, what my true place in this world was. Not for nearly twenty-five years." She sighed in contentment, staring up at the black sky. "I've made it, though. I'm back. I don't follow any laws but my own. I get to torture whoever I want as creatively and thoroughly as I want. But..." She sat back up and changed her stone seat to cushions. "I had a trade off."

  "Forgive me if I don't feel sympathetic with a torturer!" Riekna said, grinding her teeth.

  A flash of light in Sara's eyes made her shut up. "You will listen," she intoned darkly.

  "Yes ma'am," the orc squeaked.

  Right. Fear. Fear of her. That was right. She shivered in delight. "There we go. Now, there's two of us on Azeroth. There used to be five, all acting on our impulses whenever we wanted, no fear of reprisal, or judgement. No consequences. I remember those days... so fondly." She sighed wistfully, tracing dodecahedrons on her seat.

  "But now there's just two. Tsa'Thannon and I. And it's wonderful, don't get me wrong! It pushes me so much, challenges me so hard. But it's just not the same. And it's becoming... predictable. As a human my life wasn't this predictable. I was, was at the whim of countless millions of forces beyond my control, interacting and intermingling with each other, crashing together into a jumbled mess I couldn't make heads or tails of even today! But I hated it. I always had to listen to my 'superiors', do as I was told, work for the basic necessities of life, play nice and smile around you idiots."

  She lifted a distant stone and clenched her fist, grinding it to dust. "Hmm, well who's laughing now?" she muttered. She leaned forward onto the table, one hand in her cheek. "I don't have to listen to anyone now. I get to torture whoever I want - "

  "That's despicable!" Riekna shouted, finding her nerve again. "You can't just do that to people!"

  "Says who? The people I'm torturing?" she countered. "Sit down and shut up before I decide to give you a different kind of personal attention," she snarled, building some stone tentacles from the moonscape around them to emphasize her point. That threat was enough to shut up this uppity mortal who, honestly, was starting to be more trouble than she was worth. "As I was saying, I get all these things, but now I've given up all true randomness in my life. I don't know what to do," she moaned, resting her head on the table.

  "It seems pretty obvious to me," Riekna said warily. "You should just retire. P-Put Azeroth back the way it was and - "

  "Maybe this was a mistake," she mused, preparing to teleport Riekna back for another round of mind-breaking torment. "I shouldn't have done this."

  "No, wait!" the orc shouted. "You brought me here to talk right? So let's talk!" she insisted with haggard black hair and wide, desperate brown eyes. Close to hyperventilating. "As a human you had chaos but no freedom, but now you have freedom and no chaos, right? Y-You could ease up your rule. Let us just rebuild whatever we want, and we can surprise you! We did before, right? You don't even have to give anything up! Just, like, dedicate half the planet to us!"

  Sara stared at Riekna for a few moments. "That... is the dumbest idea I've ever heard," she lied. "Goodbye," she said, ripping out her soul and tearing it to shreds before launching the body into the sun.

  She held up a hand and changed it into a mock face. "Oh, just give us back the planet," she mocked. "Just go and tell Tsa'Thannon that hey, this entire half of our world is now being dedicated to the mortals, and we each only get a quarter. This will surely help you! Give me a break." What had she expected from a mortal? It telling her to keep Azeroth and keep torturing their kind? This was just a waste of time. She turned her constructions back to rubble and let go of the habitability enchantments. With that done, she sunk through the Blue Child to the Azeroth-facing side and took off for her planet. Its ruby form hung like a marble in the sky, capped on either end with the colossal forms of herself and Tsa'Thannon, turquoise-brown and pale gray.

  Stupid. This was all stupid. What was she even asking mortals for? Of course they'd give the same answer. For that matter, her own minions would all also give the same answer as each other. What was she going to do? There was no neutral observer here.

  Azeroth grew larger and larger in her vision, and she careened towards her body. Her bristling tendrils came into focus, and then she was inside her own body, sensing every atom around her at the same time.

  She found what she was looking for in a moment. She grabbed Fardol Brighthammer's body and sent both it and her avatar to another pocket dimension. She shaped it into the Cathedral of Light, just for him. After repairing the damage his body had suffered and dragging back his soul, Fardol was brought back to life. She even gave him his paladin armor.

  "Gah! Hwa! Huh?" he sputtered, leaping to his feet and looking around wildly. "The Cathedral?" he asked out loud. Then he turned around and saw her floating, staring at him with her glowing eyes, and he readied his fists. "You!"

  "Fardol, you and I both know exactly how effective punching me is going to be." She raised a hand and made a hard motion to the ground, and he was forced to sit. She pulled a seat over for herself and sank into it, massaging her head. "Damn it. Look, you're a paladin, right? Protect the innocent, praise the Light, all that. I need advice."

  The dwarf stared at her blankly. "I think it's a little too late for that, lass."

  "Just hear me out. I... the plan was..." She growled. "I messed up, alright? I changed back into Yogg-Saron mostly so I could stomp the demons. And I made an effort not to unmake Azeroth. Really, I did! But obviously nobody gave me a chance and when I got to thinking about it, why should I hold back when it'd feel so good? And I... may have freed the other Old God and now we're ruling Azeroth together and I hate it!"

  "So you're having a crisis of conscience?" he asked hopefully.

  "No, I'm not, and that's the thing!" she moaned. "It's everything I could ever want and more. But I... look. When I was still human, I couldn't rule, my life could be imperiled, but I could be surprised. Now that I'm an Old God again I can rule, I'll never be in danger again, but I'm seriously running out of surprises. You can only look at erupting volcanoes so many times before they all start looking the same."

  "Wait, did you just say you woke up another - " Fardol shook his head. "Nevermind that! So what you're getting at is, you hate that the world's predictable, but you don't want to give up ruling it. Well Sara, I hate to break it to ya, but ya can't have your cake and eat it too."

  "The hell I can't!" she contended, hovering out of her chair.

  "Well do you have any ideas then?" She frowned and floated back down. "Right. You want my honest advice, not to just tell you what you want to hear? Here's how you fix it. You've already got your power. Just let go of Azeroth, fix it damn it, and... I don't know. Go float in the Nether or something, you can make an avatar and live through it here. There. You get all the chaos of living as a mortal, with none of the risk!"

  "Do you think I haven't thought of that?" she muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "But to do that, I'd have to get Tsa'Thannon to agree to it."

  "Tsa'Thannon?" he asked, stroking his beard in confusion.

  Sara waved it off. "The other Old God. It's not exactly, you know, my boss. But we're both ruling Azeroth together, and it's not like we've divided it up into perfect hemispheres. Think I'll be able to just go up to it and say 'Hey, I'm kind of tired of this whole endless maddening torture thing, let's leave them alone for a bit'? How do you think THAT will sound?"

&
nbsp; Fardol frowned. "Sara, listen. If you are having these doubts, there is a decent chance Tsa'Thannon is too. Try talking with it. Or at least a roundabout way."

  She shook her head. "No, no. If I do this, then I can't trust anyone else to have this kind of power and not mess it up. It'd have to be ONLY me and for that I'd have to kill it," she said, breath hitching. "Nevermind how I'm probably not strong enough to do that, I can't do that to it! I like Tsa'Thannon. It's the only one who understands me. It's the only one who's at all like me. If I kill it, I'll be alone," she whispered, staring vacantly into the cathedral around her.

  He sighed. "I'm sorry that's the case."

  "No you're not."

  "No I'm not," he agreed. "Listen, I get you brought me back. And I'm glad I wasn't around for... whatever you've been doin' to my home. But I can guess as to what's going on and I'm not going to pretend, even for a second, that I want you to keep doing it. But I'm laying my cards on the table here. You want to be in charge, and to be surprised. You can have one or the other, Sara! Keep squatting on Azeroth and you'll get one, clean up your damn mess and you get the other. You just have to ask yourself which you want more."

  There it was. There was the awful truth Sara had been dodging. She bowed her head and sighed, turning over her emotions boiling across her colossal consciousness. "We've already lost so much," she muttered. "We didn't come into being with our powers. We had to fight tooth and nail for thousands of years, through blood, sweat, and tears, to get where we are now. We were content just sitting on Azeroth. We weren't spreading to other worlds." Yet. "We weren't sending the aqir off as an interstellar civilization."

  She looked up at him with some nauseating cross between hatred and sorrow. "Your people and your creators already took so, so much from me. C'Thun, Y'Shaarj, N'Zoth. My friends..." she said, her voice cracking. "All because every planet needs to be ordered, every planet needs to follow Titan law, there can be no compromise, no quarantine, no exception. And now, you want me to kill Tsa'Thannon. To betray it, rip it apart and wipe its soul from reality as though it never existed." She laughed bitterly. "I can't do that," she said weakly.