25 Sylvanas Windrunner_Edge of Night - Dave Kosak.pdf - Warcraft Lore - serek.serek

Edge of Night – Dave Kosak

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Sylvanas Windrunner:

Edge of Night

Dave Kosak

Edge of Night – Dave Kosak

ICECROWN

Sylvanas Windrunner drifts in a sea of comfort, physical sensations replaced by the

purity of emotion. She can grasp bliss, see joy, hear peace. This is the afterlife, her

destiny. The eternal sea in which she found herself after she fell defending Silvermoon.

She belongs here. With each recollection, her memory of this place palls. The sound

grows distant; the warmth, cooler. The vision takes on the pallor of a half-remembered

dream. But with horrific clarity, the memory always ends the same: Sylvanas's spirit is

wrenched away. The pain is so intense it leaves her soul forever torn. The grinning face

of Arthas Menethil, with his lopsided smile and dead eyes, leers at her as he pulls her

back into the world. Violates her. His laughter—that hollow laugh—the memory of it

makes her skin crawl!

" You son of a bitch! " Sylvanas hollered, kicking aside a shattered piece of the Lich King's

frozen armor. Her voice, empty and terrifying, cracked under the strain of her hatred.

The sound echoed across the peaks of Icecrown, rolling through the valleys like the

cloying mists that forever haunted this horrible place.

She had ventured here, alone, to his former seat of power. To the very top of Icecrown

Citadel, where a frozen throne loomed on a plateau of white ice. Of course that

egotistical little boy she knew would place himself here, sitting atop the world. But

where was he now? Shattered. She could no longer feel his malevolence tugging at the

edges of her consciousness. His broken armor lay in pieces on the white peak before his

throne, surrounded with blackened cakes of frozen gore, the remains of those who had

finally brought him to his knees.

Sylvanas regretted not being there to see him broken. She picked up a shattered

gauntlet, from the very hand that had once gripped Frostmourne. He is finally dead. But

why did she feel so hollow inside? Why did she still throb with rage? She hurled the

armor from the peak, watching it disappear into the roiling mists.

She was not alone. Nine glimmering spirits encircled the pinnacle, their masked faces

turned toward her, their ephemeral forms held aloft on graceful, insubstantial wings.

They were the Val'kyr, warrior maidens of old, once enslaved to the will of Arthas. Why

did they remain in this place? Sylvanas neither knew nor cared. They stayed out of her

way, absolutely mute, immobile even as Sylvanas hollered and raged. Were they

watching her? Judging? She ignored them and crunched through the snow to the very

seat of Arthas's power.

Someone else sat atop the throne.

Edge of Night – Dave Kosak

Sylvanas at first thought it was Arthas's corpse, planted mockingly in this place of honor

and sealed in a block of ice, but the silhouette was all wrong. She approached the

throne and wiped her hand across the surface of the ice, peering at the distorted figure

within. Human, yes. She recognized the profile of an Alliance shoulderplate. But the

body was very badly burned, the flesh split open like roasted meat. He wore Arthas's

crown—and his eyes—that flicker of consciousness

They have replaced him. A new Lich King sat on the throne!

Again Sylvanas cried out, shock growing into explosive rage. She smashed the flat of her

hand against the ice, then her fist. The ice cracked. The immobile face within split open

behind a web of fractures. Her howls faded, disappearing hollowly into the mists that

enveloped the peak. They replaced him. Does this mean there will always be a Lich King?

Idiots. Naively presuming that their puppet king wouldn't someday begin twisting the

world to his own ends. Or worse: become a blunt weapon for something even more

terrible.

It was a bitter blow. She had expected to venture here in triumph, not to discover

another defeat. The victory was hollow. But she backed away from the throne,

straightened up, and accepted that the cycle would go on. Arthas was dead. What did it

matter if another corpse filled his vacant throne? Sylvanas Windrunner had her

vengeance. The vision that had driven her and her people for years had finally been

realized. And not a single fiber of her desiccated, animate corpse cared where the world

went from here.

It was over now. A part of her was surprised she was even still around, without his

lingering presence always tugging at the back of her mind. She backed away from the

throne and slowly turned to survey the cold gray world all around her. Her thoughts

returned to that place of bliss, her half-remembered glimpse of what lay beyond. Home.

It was time.

Slowly, she crunched her way to the ragged edge of the icy platform. A thousand feet

below, shrouded by the clouds, lay a forest of shattered saronite spikes she had scouted

out earlier. The fall alone couldn't kill her: her animate flesh was nigh indestructible. But

the spikes, the hardened blood of an Old God, they not only would tear the body apart

but would obliterate the soul as well. She longed for it. A return to peace. The work she

had begun in the forests of Silvermoon was finally complete with the death of Arthas.

She lifted her bow from her shoulder and cast it aside. It clattered against the uneven

ice. Then she removed her quiver. Arrows spilled from it, cascading down the side of

Icecrown Citadel, disappearing one by one into the fog. The empty quiver dropped

quietly to the ground at her feet.

Edge of Night – Dave Kosak

Her ragged, dark cloak, freed from her discarded armaments, began to whip around her

neck in the bitter wind. She could feel no cold, only a dull ache. She would feel nothing

soon. She already felt her spirit reaching a place of calm for the first time in almost a

decade. Her weight shifted toward the edge of the drop. She closed her eyes.

As one, the Val'kyr silently turned to face her.

GILNEAS

"Forwar—" the marshal cried, his command cut short as a musketball shattered his

lower jaw. The wall before him was broken but still offered cover for the snipers hidden

in the rain above. The weather poured from the sky in white sheets, drenching attackers

and defenders alike. The marshal toppled over, careening down a pile of rubble like a

sack of cordwood, coming to rest in the thick mud below. Like the bogged-down

demolishers and meat wagons of his artillery, his troops were making no progress. Any

normal man would've been dead for sure, but being that the marshal was already dead,

he soon clawed his way up from the mud, spitting coagulated blood and ichor from the

remains of his face.

To the north, across a long stretch of rutted field and on the other side of a gauzy filter

of rain, Garrosh Hellscream tried to piece together what was happening along the front.

He could see the gray silhouette of the great Gilnean wall, slotted with enormous

diagonal gaps where the Cataclysm had wrenched it wide open. Were his Kor'kron at

the front, they'd have walked right through. He grunted as a Forsaken scouting party

trundled back through the mud, ragged and beaten. Even in victory, the Forsaken

looked like corpses; in defeat, they looked even worse.

"Your scouts are useless. I sent them to harass the wall's defenses, and they crawl back

like whipped dogs." Garrosh snorted, not even looking at his companion. The great

brown-skinned orc was festooned in his most menacing battle garb, his veiny, tattooed

biceps bursting out from beneath tusked shoulderguards. Although he stood right in

front of his tent, he refused to step back out of the rain. It dribbled over his scowling

face and blackened jaw.

Next to the great orc and sheltered under the tent canopy, Master Apothecary Lydon

looked positively frail. His pockmarked face winced under a matted mess of purple-gray

hair as he tried to formulate a response that wouldn't earn him another round of verbal

abuse from the warchief. "I can assure you they're giving as good as they get," he said in

measured tones, his voice rough and shallow. "Gilnean defenses are almost certainly in

disarray."

"Then why are your scouts limping back instead of pressing forward?" Garrosh kicked

aside a barrel. Behind him, his own troops weathered out the rain: four companies of

elite handpicked orc and tauren warriors supported by five battalions of Orgrimmar's

Edge of Night – Dave Kosak

hardest. They stretched over the fields of Silverpine, a sea of green and brown faces

against a backdrop of bright-red banners. "And where are the promised regiments from

Lordaeron? They're to flood the breach. We waste time."

Lydon knew better than to talk tactics with the hard-headed warchief, but he had grown

desperate as the hour of the attack had approached. He licked his gray lips with a dark-

purple tongue and tried to answer casually, hoping to elicit some reason. "Slowed by the

rain, no doubt, but they should arrive soon They are absolutely Lordaeron's finest.

The very heart of our infantry and backbone of our entire endeavor"

Garrosh stroked the side of his face with his knuckles. He eyed the terrain and mentally

positioned the coming infantry and cavalry as Lydon spoke.

"But you can't just send them right into the central breach in the wall," Lydon

continued. "It's a a chokepoint Well fortified, closely watched. Heavy armored troops

on horseback couldn't maneuver through the breach: they'd be mown down by

musketfire from the debris. Surely you can see—"

"Of course I see!" Garrosh answered. "The door is wedged open; now it must be kicked

down. This is what your kind is good for." Now the warchief looked directly at the

master apothecary, his cool eyes fixated on the pale yellow light that filled the latter's

eye sockets. "You're already corpses, nearly impossible to kill. You flood the chokepoint,

you open the way for the rest of the Horde to come through, fresh and eager. Rushing

over a bridge of broken bodies if we have to. This is how fortifications are breached.

How wars are won."

The master apothecary lifted up two bony fingers. "But if we could just use a just a

touch of the plague. Just to open a gap. Not even enough to do any— just a smudge!

More to cause fear and panic than any actual—"

Garrosh's backhand ripped through the sky, spraying the tent with a glistening arc of

rainwater as it smashed into the side of Lydon's face. The master apothecary reeled as if

he'd been kicked by a horse, but by will alone managed to stay upright after the blow.

"If you're suggesting using even an ounce of that filth that you've got hidden away, I will

burn you and your sewer-city to the ground," Garrosh grunted. He turned back toward

the action.

Humiliated, Master Apothecary Lydon muttered a barely audible, "Yes, Warchief,"

through clenched teeth. But privately he coiled up his anger. Where is the Dark Lady,

Sylvanas? he wondered, turning his empty eye sockets toward the gray heavens. Why

isn't she here to counter this beast?

25 Sylvanas Windrunner_Edge of Night - Dave Kosak.pdf

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