Legacy

Khadgar dug his heel into his gryphon's flank and turned her head into the wind until she banked. The rain pelted his face and slid down the neck of his robe, but he paid it no heed. He was drawing closer to Karazhan; the edifice of its spires loomed against a sickly sky, shrouded in rainmist and failing enchantments. He could feel its presence in his back teeth and in the pit of his stomach, as though he'd stepped upon one of its ley lines.

He was not the only one who was sensitive to the tower's qualities. "Steady, girl," Khadgar cried as his gryphon balked and then yawed in the howling wind, her great wings beating hard to compensate. His words were ripped away on the gale and tossed into the thankless chasms of Deadwind Pass. A bleak place, for all of its familiarity, and all the bleaker still for his mission.

There was a single foul moon tonight. The White Lady hung in the firmament like a drowned corpse. Lightning forked between the fel meteors that infected the sky, and Argus bore down on Azeroth like a tombstone.

The Burning Legion marched again. Coming here was an act of desperation.

Decades ago, Khadgar had first arrived at the tower clutching a letter in his hand. He'd been barely more than a boy back then, filled with trepidation and determination, and the unconscious arrogance afforded the young and naïve. That hadn't been tempered by the oppressively vast trove of knowledge Karazhan contained, nor its beautifully-tiled, terrifyingly high open walkways, nor the unsettling eldritch shapes that were only ever caught from the corner of one's eye.

Nor even by the guardian of the place. The Guardian, his master, Medivh.

Merely thinking his name stirred emotions that were as piercing as the bedamned rain. Few mortals had shaped Azeroth the way Medivh had. Few had shaped Khadgar the way Medivh had.

He brought his gryphon down on the western ramparts and walked her into the lee of a parapet. There had been a working roost here once, but it had fallen into disrepair long before Khadgar's time. The tumbledown livery stables still offered respite from the driving rain, and, more importantly, ingress into the upper tower. Khadgar took a moment to gather himself. Wistfulness tugged at him. He knew he would find echoes of his life within Karazhan's walls: Garona's laugh echoing down a stairwell, Moroes despairing that he'd tracked mud through one vestibule or another. Medivh himself, sternly instructing him to put his library in order.

Memories unstuck from time. The tower tended to cling to such things; it had always been a desperately lonely place.

His gryphon fluffed her feathers and settled down. Likewise, Khadgar shook out his robes and valiantly ignored the rainwater that persisted in trickling down the back of his neck. He decided he would not be too vain for a cowl next time he were to outfit himself.

At the weathered service door, he spun an incantation. Oh, the old ones were the best. He'd had his wrist slapped many a time for this doozy. He rapped once on the door, and tendrils of arcane energy tracked along the woodgrain, unknotted a mostly-depleted ward and then pooled into the heavy iron lock. There was a series of clanks and a rusted squeal, and the door jolted open.

He stepped inside, and the rain's thunderous roar was muted and then silenced as the door swung shut behind him, plunging him into darkness. He shivered in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. Even the most magic-insensate being could not fail to recognise the power in this place.

Another incantation recited under his breath, and he thumped his staff upon the floor. It glowed with a simple magelight. The staff was one he'd been given when he was first inducted as a student of the Kirin Tor, and among the few things he'd brought with him when he'd left the Violet Citadel. He was not so unwise that he would bring Atiesh here.

The tower groaned in the wind, and a chill seeped through its stonework. As soon as Khadgar set to the stairs, it was as if he'd never been away; his feet carried him into Karazhan proper with barely a thought. He could navigate its sprawling annexes with his eyes closed, if he wanted to—and sometimes he very much wanted to. The grand vaulted ceilings were crumbling. Damp had gotten in and moss crawled up the walls. The once-colourful stained glass of the lancet windows was smirched with years of grime, filtering all but the most strenuous light.

He trekked disconsolately through the guest chambers, past the opera hall (he had never gotten a straight explanation for what that was all about), and into a labyrinth of hallways that in all reasonableness should have intersected one another, yet never did. Beyond their maze, the Guardian's library awaited him.

Here, he hoped to find the knowledge he sought. Medivh had been inextricably bound to the Legion: everything he knew of it, consciously or not, must be present here in one form or another.

The protective wards were still healthy. Despite a caved-in dome and chunks of masonry that had formed an asteroid belt high in the vaulted ceiling, the library was just as Khadgar had left it, down to the toppled bookcases in the southern stacks. Even some scattered fragments of crushed agate and quartz remained, the spent components of a warding circle.

He ran his hand along the shelves of books and scrolls as he walked among the stacks. He'd tried his juvenile lockpicking cantrip on most of these chained tomes in his time here, driven then, as now, by a craving for knowledge, a well-founded appetite for risk-taking, and a reckless disregard for explosive outcomes. He could open them with ease nowadays, but if the books did not hold the particular stink of fel-taint, there was no need for it.

Khadgar turned into an adjacent aisle and stopped short.

Among the shadows of the bookshelves, a figure sat at one of the large mahogany study tables, a chess set laid out before it, mid-game. A long finger tilted a black rook back and forth in impatience.

"It's your move," the figure said. "Come now, Young Trust. I've been waiting a long time."

Khadgar's heart pounded so hard his staff shook in his hand, and the magelight with it. "Why wait?" he said. "You always did cheat."

The figure stood slowly and approached. Its cloak luffed in unseen currents, the raven feathers ruffling. It stepped into the circle of light cast by Khadgar's staff. This was no imprint like the guests that danced an eternal gavotte in the banquet hall, or the ghostly stable hands that groomed thin air. This was unmistakably Medivh, or some vital aspect of him, observant and cognisant.

There was no question that he apprehended Khadgar completely.

"Hmm." Medivh tilted his head contemplatively, and then took Khadgar's chin and tilted his, too, studying him with those piercing green eyes. Incorporeality was not a misapprehension this shade laboured under. "Not-so-young Trust, after all. How long has it been?"

"Not as long as it appears, old friend."

Almost thirty years, and he looked as though he had twenty more on that. Khadgar closed his eyes as the past assaulted him. This cursed place. He could all but taste the moment of terror when his youth had been tapped from him, pouring out like sand from a broken hourglass. It was a memory inseparable from the next: the runeblade in his hand, the sudden give as he drove it home, lancing the corruption that had festered in Medivh throughout his life.

There had been so little left of Medivh's body in the end. It had been unspeakably heavy in his arms.

"I—don't understand," Khadgar said. "How is it that you're here?"

"Don't play the fool, Khadgar. Of course you understand." Medivh turned and strode away from him, and in a blink of an eye was at the end of the aisle. His robes susurrated as he vanished among the stacks, and his voice carried strangely in the library's acoustics. "Here is where I belong, and so here I remain."

Khadgar followed in a swift walk at first, and then at a run, his footfalls echoing. He felt urgently that he shouldn't let Medivh out of his sight, succumbing to one of the nameless fears Karazhan bred: that anything here could snag on a chaotic realignment of reality and vanish, never to be seen again. No matter how important.

But he turned a corner and Medivh was still there, stood at a bookcase and scanning the shelves with a gathering frown. Shadows loomed monstrously around him, subsiding again as Khadgar drew near.

"Why is it you've returned?" Medivh said almost absently. He slid a book halfway out, clicked his tongue and returned it to its home. "Evidently it was not to see me."

That was a question whose answer required some consideration. Like most of the tower's anomalies, this fragment of Medivh was difficult to pin on a timeline. He seemed unaware that he'd been the one to inflict this not-so-youngness on Khadgar, and that he'd met his fate at Khadgar's hand in the process. In fact, he seemed unconcerned that he had died at all. Perhaps, from his perspective, he had not, and that was all yet to come. Light knew he'd made a habit of haunting this place in life; it was difficult to tell if he were truly a restless ghost or had slipped here from times past.

A careless word here could reflow the future, and he would so hate to upset Chromie like that.

"You seem troubled," Medivh turned his attention from his books and onto Khadgar. His hand clasped Khadgar's shoulder as firmly as he had taken his chin—it really was as though he were here with him. Medivh's eyes widened, ablaze with urgency. "You should go. Khadgar, you should leave this place right away."

This sudden agitation wasn't unusual. Medivh had always been a mercurial man, inclined to fits of pique as much as kindness. "I cannot," Khadgar said, and decided Chromie could deal with any repercussions to this on their own time, of which they had plenty, unlike him. "I came here for a reason. The world hangs in the balance once again, Medivh. The Burning Legion has returned."

Medivh's gaze bore into him, and then he looked away, his shoulders falling. "Has it ever left, in truth?" he said, softly enough he could be speaking to himself.

"I seek the knowledge you kept here," Khadgar said. "I confess, I expected to have the library to myself. Give or take a mana wyrm."

"Instead, you found its guardian."

"I'm not disappointed." Khadgar bowed his head. He was not embarrassed by earnestness, nor by sentiment, but Medivh was always one to stand on ceremony. "I—have missed you sorely. I would have done well with your counsel these long years."

"Hmph," Medivh said. "Is that all you missed me for?"

Khadgar's head jerked up. Medivh was observing him, keenly speculative, lines of fondness creased about his eyes.

"Do you think I was unaware?" he said.

"—you didn't—I mean," Khadgar said, suddenly seventeen again and in thrall of his master's presence. "You never so much as intimated..."

"Of course not." Medivh turned in a flurry of robes and feathers. He sought something out among the tomes and grimoires, a particular volume. Slid it back. Retrieved it again. "You were a mere boy."

There was a strangled note to Medivh's voice, as though he fought the words, or they fought him. He looked down at the book he'd selected, his fingers playing over its scarlet binding and dark filigree metalwork. The air pressure shifted, and Khadgar's ears popped. The smell of spent mana permeated the air, and Medivh offered the tome to him.

"What's this?" Khadgar rested his staff in the crook of his arm and accepted the book on the flat of his palms. He was grateful for the change of subject, even though his heart railed wildly against the fate they had been dealt. This was not the time to go yearning after old ghosts, so to speak.

"You came seeking knowledge," Medivh said. "But you need more than that."

Despite what his younger self might have thought, one did not open a book from this library without knowing what it contained, especially when it felt substantially denser than it looked. Wariness coalesced in the back of Khadgar's mind. "What is this book, Medivh?" he asked again.

"Knowledge will only get you so far," Medivh said. "What you need is a weapon. I'm offering to you the legacy of the Guardian. Open the book, Khadgar, and accept the destiny you have avoided for too long. Embrace the power you know is your right."

The book all but doubled in weight.

Oh, but Khadgar had dreamed of this, to no longer have to think in terms of limits. He could accept the boon that the Guardianhood would confer upon him—that raw, primal power meant only for him; that biddable, eager power that would bend only for his will—and he would obliterate the Burning Legion once and for all. He would scour them from the face of Azeroth, unpick them from the fabric of reality down to the very last demon.

They would know true fear at his name.

It was immeasurably tempting.

(He always awoke from these dreams feverish with terror, an all-pervading vision of disaster in his head.)

"No," Khadgar said regretfully. He returned to book to Medivh's hands. This had been a test, and not one he was inclined to fail. "No, I cannot. I will not."

"I see age has not come with any increase in reasonableness. You are Azeroth's only chance." Medivh's voice shook with a barely-suppressed anger. "Do not forsake it for your pride, Khadgar!"

"It is not pride." Khadgar struck the tile floor sharply with his staff. He took a breath, calming his temper as the echoing retort faded. "A long time ago," he said more levelly. "I told you that there should be no more Guardians. No matter what. The temptation of such power, the risk, was too great. You were to be the last. You agreed it would be so, Medivh! What has changed?"

Medivh clutched the book to his chest momentarily, and then, as if it took great effort, returned it to the shelf. He seemed relieved—proud almost, though something like frustration still simmered beneath the surface. "Very little," he said, and snapped his fingers.

A tall mirror shimmered into existence. Khadgar recognized it as one Medivh had kept in his quarters. He had stood before it for hours at a time, learning the somatic gestures his studies demanded of him. Medivh had often appeared behind him, to rest one hand on his shoulder in approval, or to guide him with a touch to his wrist.

He would know that tarnished brass frame anywhere, and he remembered keenly the face he saw in it now. A dark-haired lad who had yet to have the teenaged softness of his features forced from him. Dust-ingrained initiate robes, a patchy beard, pale eyes that shone with an insatiable curiosity. Now, as then, Medivh stood behind him.

Khadgar shucked a glove and reached out to his reflection. His fingertips lit upon the mirror-glass, and with a whispered word, the illusion dissolved. For a long while he'd craved to inhabit his earlier self, but time had equalised him. It no longer mattered that the hand resting on the glass was sinewy and scarred, that its knuckles were knotted with age.

"You always were my most exceptional apprentice," Medivh said.

"I was your only apprentice."

"Then you were also my worst apprentice." Medivh smiled at him in the mirror. "Such impertinence sometimes." He brushed back his cowl; his hair was loose from its tail and straggled about his face. It clung to the rough-shaven stubble of Khadgar's cheek when he leaned in to whisper in his ear. "You must leave. Run from here."

Khadgar turned to face him. A muscle tightened in Medivh's jaw, and his eyes were openly fearful. He struggled to speak as Khadgar brushed the crest of his cheekbone.

"You know as well as I that there are worse things to be afraid of, Medivh," Khadgar said. "Why, I saw a dozen of them on my way in."

Medivh's eyes closed and he sighed, a short huff that was so familiarly irritated that Khadgar couldn't bear it. He drew Medivh in close and kissed him.

He knew he might only get to do it once, so he did it right—resolute but tender, galvanised by his desire. Part of him expected Medivh to disperse at his touch, as though his spirit would somehow be unbound by this overflowing of Khadgar's affection, but he remained yet. The ghostly beat of his heart filled Khadgar's senses.

If he could not find what he needed to stop the Burning Legion here, then at least he would find some measure of closure.

Medivh parted his lips, deepening the kiss. His fingernails dug sudden and cruel into Khadgar's neck, and brimstone flooded his tongue. A great cry of anguish shook Karazhan to its ancient foundations.

Ah, the capriciousness of fortune. Khadgar reeled from the intense shock of his misjudgement here. The book had failed to tempt him, as had the veiled offer of regained youth, but there was a bitter irony in Medivh himself being his downfall. His heart plummeted, and he perhaps would have let it break if he'd though he would not need its bolstering most imminently.

He sincerely was a foolish old man. He leapt away and hurled a salvo of arcane bolts. Medivh dashed them aside with ease.

The shade's skin weltered and split; flaming wings thrust through his robes and shredded his raven mantle. His beard flamed. Horns erupted from Medivh's forehead, so immense his head bowed with their weight. When he looked up, his eyes fulminated with fel magic.

"Wretched mortal." A colossal voice rumbled from Medivh's mouth, even as Medivh himself was still howling in grief, shaking the books from their shelves, cracking floor tiles, shattering Karazhan's windows.

Too late, Khadgar recognised his warnings for what they were. This barb of Sargeras must have remained embedded in Medivh and roused when his tomb was reopened, his leviathan bones disturbed once more. He was as much a shade of himself as Medivh was, but even a mote of the dark titan's power could extinguish the sun.

Yet Sargeras must want something from him. Both he and the surrounding countryside would be less than cinders otherwise.

"You demons always say that," Khadgar said, as though he were addressing nothing more than a nathrezim. He cast about—where did his staff go? "You should work on some new material."

"Be quiet, mage." Sargeras brought Medivh's finger and thumb together. Medivh's cries were abruptly silenced.

Khadgar felt as though the air itself had punched him in the throat. That's Archmage to you, he tried to say, partly indignation, though mostly to stave off the burgeoning terror of the situation. He could only wheeze.

Medivh—Sargeras-wearing-Medivh—fell back into a more human shape, though the shadow of the titan still hulked around him, and felfire flickered in his eyes. He curled his fingers around Khadgar's chin and pried his mouth open with his thumb, hooking it behind his teeth.

"Yes," Sargeras said. "You will do. It would be fitting."

Ah, so that's what it was to be. A contingency, should Azeroth's champions prevail. A new vessel; one that wasn't bound to this place.

Vessel. Now there was an unpalatable thought. Khadgar could have done without this, all things considered. But he'd dealt with the avatar of Sargeras before, and he was older and stronger now. He could do it again.

He turned his focus to the silencing spell with intent to dispel it, and was thrown down the aisle and driven back against a study table with such force the legs squealed across the tile. His breath was knocked out of him all over again.

Something hot and distressingly muscular grabbed his wrist and slammed his hand flat to the table—and his other wrist, too, yanking his arms so they were spread as though in welcome. The slick tentacles squirmed up his sleeves to hold him fast, smoldering with fel energies. His shoulders quickly began to ache.

All right, Khadgar thought. His boots slid uselessly on the floor. This was starting to become a problem.

Medivh approached, his steepled hands pointed downward. It was a posture Khadgar had often seen him adopt when delivering either lecture or scolding, though now it was at jarring odds with the malevolence burning in him. With a horrified lurch, Khadgar realised Medivh was still very present. Sargeras had given him a ringside seat to whatever was about to befall him.

As for what that might be—well. Khadgar had a few suspicions. He hadn't forgotten how Sargeras had come to possess Medivh in the first instance. He pulled against the tentacles with all of his strength. They only constricted more tightly; their excretions burned through his glove-leather and sizzled against his skin. The silencing spell was so comprehensive that it was difficult to breathe, no less cry out in pain. Khadgar's chest heaved with effort as he thrashed against his bonds.

Medivh slapped him across the face, which Khadgar found wholly uncalled for. It was somewhat frustrating to be unable to express that, but Medivh then softly laid a shaking hand to his cheek, and Khadgar understood what he meant by it. Damn fool boy, Medivh was telling him. Why didn't you listen to me. And this: sorry, sorry, sorry.

He plucked at Khadgar's collar, unbuckling it so that his mantle fell away and slid to the floor. Khadgar's neck felt perilously bare, entirely too vulnerable as Sargeras directed Medivh's hands over it. His thumbs rolled over the knot of Khadgar's throat and pressed where his blood rushed under his skin. He braced himself, but he was not so lucky as to have his neck snapped.

Medivh crowded over him, his eyes glinting so terribly that Khadgar knew he wouldn't be able to weather this by imagining it was him and only him. "He has such desires for you, mageling," Sargeras crooned in Medivh's voice. "It was easy to set the snare. He is so very hungry for this."

It was true that Sargeras knew Medivh with unparallelled intimacy. But Sargeras also lied.

A world-eater like Sargeras would not take the time to press his thigh between Khadgar's, or drag his lips along his neck. His hands would not tremble as they unfastened Khadgar's belt and methodically pulled open his robes, but Medivh—Medivh had no choice but to be complicit in this.

Indeed, a tension thrummed through him as he reached for Khadgar's smallclothes; resistance like a drawn bow. His shoulders were set back and his face pulled against the severe frown Sargeras had set it in.

"Take what is yours," Medivh muttered. He strained away from Khadgar's body. "Why do you deny yourself? Take it." Sargeras manifested a furious column of felfire that reduced Khadgar's robes to floating ashes. "Take it!"

Well, that settled his re-outfitting quandary. Khadgar spat flakes of charred cloth from his mouth and tried not to dwell upon his sudden bareness. For his part, Medivh went straight to his knees in what Khadgar chose to interpret as a bid to avoid eye contact. A nicety that was completely undermined when he kissed the inside of Khadgar's thigh.

A shudder ran through him from heel to crown. The tentacles at his wrists drew tighter in response, and a new tendril thrust from whatever forsaken void they came from to lash around one of his ankles. Another uncoiled into existence—and another, and another, binding him to the table. Yet more slithered up his leg, settling in the crease of his groin. Medivh mouthed the tensed muscle of his thigh and reached up to rest one hand on Khadgar's soft middle. From here all he could see was the leather of Medivh's glove and its shorn-off fingers, the dark polish of his fingernails, the crown of his head.

His beard prickled the inside of Khadgar's leg. That had been a feature of many a youthful midnight speculation. Aghast, Khadgar felt himself stir.

He immediately tried to bring his legs together, but the tentacles yanked them so far apart that his hips screamed for mercy. They squeezed until he could barely feel his toes. Medivh simply continued his mouthing, his breath molten and wet. The mouthing became nipping and the nips became bites, and in Khadgar's mind he had the razor-sharp maw of a demon, capable of shearing the flesh from his bones.

That helped a little. He closed his eyes and grit his teeth, and distracted himself by testing the silencing spell once more. It loosened a fraction under his inquiry, but then Medivh worked ever higher between his legs and Khadgar's focus was sent skittering down the stacks.

First it was his fingers, stroking and circling, and Khadgar broke a sweat. Medivh's nails were sharp and he was careless, scraping and catching the tender skin of his rear, then roughly pushing inside. Khadgar's hips jerked, and he gasped silently. Medivh curled his finger into a claw. It drew a thin track of pain as he dragged it out again by excruciatingly slow degrees.

Then—Light, could that possibly be his tongue, or was it one of the tentacles? Khadgar could feel a burn gathering. A tentacle then, to be certain. It smeared its caustic mucus over his skin, and he was thrown into a chain of involuntary spasms as it writhed and nudged insistently against his rear. He would have some intimate blisters after this. He'd have to find a very discreet priest, but in the meantime, he clenched for all he was worth.

Sargeras hefted Medivh back onto his feet, who swayed like a sick man and then reeled forward as though shoved from behind. The momentum carried him clumsily onto the table, robe catching and tangling as he straddled Khadgar's chest. His eyes were glassy and there was a violence to his movements, as though he'd retreated elsewhere and left Sargeras to his puppetry.

Khadgar could only hope. Still, the weight and warmth of him was kindling a physical response. A flush rose in Khadgar and made his head swim.

"Hmm," Sargeras said in Medivh's soft rasp. "Your body is eager. He is curious: are you still so inexperienced, despite your age?"

Khadgar would not have dignified that with a reply, even if he could have. Well, not a serious one.

"He suspects you had never laid with anyone when you first came to this tower. Certainly you did not during your time here." Medivh's lips parted in a deeply unkind smile, and he drew the edge of his nail along the lines in Khadgar's face, the fine creases about his eyes. Khadgar refused to flinch. "Do you wonder how he knows?"

Medivh, of course, would've had no compunction about spying on a spy. This was hardly a paradigm-shifting revelation, so Khadgar shrugged as best he could.

His indifference seemed to irritate Sargeras. The silencing spell dissipated with a sound like a knife being drawn. The slap that followed was by no means friendly this time; blood welled on the inside of Khadgar's cheek.

He gulped in a breath and found his voice, and let it out in a torrent. "Medivh, listen to me. You can fight him. I know you can do it, my friend, my—my dearest friend. Banish him back to the pit he crawled from. Medivh, please. Medivh—"

Perhaps he was supposed to have addressed Sargeras if he were going to beg. Medivh shook his head as though clearing it of a fog. His eyes focused, and welled up, and spilled tears onto his cheeks. A cruel smile curled his lips. "He can't help you," he said.

What a grand strategy. Lothar would be turning in his grave. Act first, save the desperate entreaties for later. Khadgar managed to incantate a single syllable before the tentacles hooked into his mouth. They pulled at the corners of his lips and wriggled behind his teeth, holding his mouth open no matter how he tried to close it. He made a few more indignant sounds, but warm fluid dripped onto his tongue. Khadgar swallowed the vile stuff rather than let it choke him.

Though choking might, in fact, become an issue here. Sargeras directed Medivh to tug his robes aside and unlace his breeches. Khadgar was far beyond being coy about things, what with the insistent probing his rear had been enduring: what Medivh had there was a most prodigious demon cock.

It was dark with blood, and its green-tinged skin glistened and luminesced in the library's half-light. Sargeras insisted he take a closer look; the head of the thing pressed against Khadgar's cheek, smearing its fluids over his face, and then nudged into his mouth.

"Ahn," Khadgar protested. Medivh wept still, his jaw tensed, and he shifted his hips forward. His cock was thick and unyielding, almost chitinous in texture. Demons were built, not born. It was an instrument of torture and nothing else. If Khadgar could have bitten down on it, he might not have been able to resist the impulse. The shaft forced its way into his throat, its ridges and nodules rasping over his tongue. It tasted the way charred corpses smelled.

Medivh took a fistful of Khadgar's hair and dragged his head back. His cock pushed against Khadgar's soft palate, and Khadgar went utterly slack in an attempt to not gag on the bedamned thing. Medivh kept on pushing, and Khadgar swallowed and worked his throat desperately, sweat slipping down his back as he was struck with a sharp panic over where his next breath would come from.

Sargeras seemed determined to squeeze every last inch of his cock into Khadgar with a frankly obnoxious disregard for both human anatomy and good manners. He tightened his grip in Khadgar's hair and yanked his head forward so that his nose squashed against Medivh's stomach. He could feel it pulsing in his throat, an all-conquering beat. His jaw was stretched wide and ached riotously; his vision began to gray at the edges.

Thus distracted, the tentacle between his legs nuzzled its way into him in a thick, unrelenting slide. In the grip of abjection that made him question the boundaries of his sense of self, Khadgar closed his eyes and prepared to face what he suspected would be an unarchivable death. If he were lucky, it'd be a footnote in the annals of history that read simply: misadventure. Perhaps in years to come, curious scholars would uncover the truth, and then diplomatically cover it up again for the next generation to stumble upon. He'd take his place as some kind of legend of the past, that was for sure.

The tentacle writhed inside him, striking sparks up his spine that made him writhe along with it. Black specks swam in the edges of his vision and his cock throbbed intolerably. He began to feel somewhat lightheaded.

The tentacles around his wrists and ankles shifted suddenly, then moved, slackening. Sargeras withdrew his cock with slow indulgence, so that every nub and protrusion grated against Khadgar's teeth and his sore lips. Sweet air flooded his lungs and rushed dizzyingly to his head; he gasped and breathed it greedily, his eyes steadily watering.

For an instant Medivh loomed above him, distraught, and then the tentacles were manhandling Khadgar onto his front, lashing him face-down over the study table. His erection ground against its surface, and Khadgar bit back his groan at this new agony.

He felt one of Medivh's hands, flat in the center of his back and his weight on it. The other was between his legs, stroking the seam of his body where the tentacle stretched him wide. Khadgar bit his lip, shuddered uncontrollably and leaked into the meagre space between his stomach and the desk. He grasped for an appropriate incantation or even a simple cantrip to give himself breathing room, but fear ran chaotic through his mind, and as Medivh gradually tugged the tentacle free, all that fell from his lips were jumbled nonsense syllables.

"Shh," Sargeras breathed into his ear. Medivh cradled Khadgar's face with a hand sticky with fel effluvium and leaned over him. "You will endure," he said fiercely. "Bold heart, Khadgar."

The head of his cock eased into Khadgar's rear, stretching him wider than the tentacle had, an insistent burn that refused to subside and only intensified as Sargeras fed the rest of it into him. He drove it home one inexorable inch at a time, slow enough to let him feel each brutal crest and protrusion, but not so slow that he could become accustomed to it. It felt immense, unnaturally hot, and it pulsed like a sickness in him.

Khadgar clung to the edge of the desk and dripped sweat and bit down on his tongue. He came abruptly from the sheer relentlessness of it, and it felt as though his bones might shake out of his skin.

Sargeras' satisfaction was grotesque. With a violent thrust, he tore through Khadgar's climax and in a fiery stab of pain, buried himself fully. Medivh's narrow hipbones dug into his ass. He curled over Khadgar and pressed his forehead between his shoulder blades, and Khadgar felt the thud of his heart and the desperate hitch of his breath. The air hummed.

"No," Medivh said against Khadgar's skin, though it was not Khadgar he was addressing. "You will not."

Alarm knifed through Khadgar at his words. He could feel magical energies gathering on the brink of his perception, in a thick rich current unlike anything he'd felt before. Sargeras' response was to withdraw languidly and push back in with a stroke so forceful it crushed Khadgar against the desk and jarred his teeth.

Medivh's hand kept his face pressed to the table, and the thrusts that followed were faster and harder still, sawing into him, grinding down his flesh and powdering his bones, and still the power gathered. Khadgar made a terrible connection in the back of his mind. He willed it through the pain and to the forefront, to see if he was correct.

"Yes," Sargeras intoned. Magic flowed in a tempest around them. "Fill him, Guardian. Give to him all you are worth."

Merciful Light—Khadgar scrabbled against the desk, thrashing under Sargeras' cruel grip. It was not the titan himself he was to be a vessel for. Not entirely. The hair on the back of his neck prickled.

"This is not how it is done!" Medivh roared furiously. "You will tear him apart!"

But the first tremors of orgasm shuddered through Medivh's body even as he raged. A scalding torrent of his come spilled into Khadgar with great throbbing pulsations, and more of the filth oozed down his thighs as Sargeras pulled out halfway. Magic was welling from Medivh like an arcane spring as he gasped through the throes of his climax; Sargeras amassed it greedily, poisoning it with his touch, twisting it against its will—and prepared to drive it into Khadgar with what he understood would be a catastrophic lack of finesse.

Thunder cracked and resonated around the library. Forks of violet lightning ripped through the air, and Khadgar sensed a master's hand at work, manipulating the deluge of arcane power that Sargeras had yet to taint. A pattern emerged in the chaos: an intricate weave of enchantments, aligned and interlinked, and—oh, that was devilishly clever. Khadgar leant his own magics to the spell, bolstering and empowering it, and Medivh's pride in him swelled through its currents.

Sargeras reached for a new skein of the Guardian's magic, and the trap was sprung. Karazhan shuddered and split asunder, blown outwards and deconstructed into its constituent parts: bricks and mortar and wood beams and glass, every last tile and joist and nail and screw hung in an unreal orrery against the vastness of the Great Dark Beyond—and an instant later it came together again in an immense clap of power that cracked the tower's ley lines wide open.

The burning shadow of Sargeras stood stark against the blinding rushing brightness of it, his howls drowned out by the euphoric song of Azeroth's unleashed titan soul. Khadgar watched, transfixed, as Medivh cast off his grip and raised his head, glorying in its radiance. The light shredded Sargeras' shadow and swallowed it, rushing to the apex of Karazhan like a beacon. It lit the night sky as though it were midday, and then slowly dispersed into the clouds.

The light faded but for a glimmer about the library, as though some of it had been caught by a magical tome or two. Karazhan creaked and groaned, and then settled back into its bedrock. There would be strange rains for a while. Medivh wavered on his feet.

"Oof," Khadgar said, which, in his opinion, was a fair assessment of the situation. His head spun, and he slid from the desk with the full intention of passing out for a while.

Khadgar awoke with his face pressed to some musty velvet upholstery and lying on what was inevitably a heap of books. Their edges dug into his skin, which, on the whole, felt like one big bruise. He had no judgement of how much time had passed; the quality of light in the tower was reliably strange. He lifted his head with some difficulty, and taking in his surroundings, ascertained that he was on one of the chaise longues scattered at the perimeter of the library.

Medivh sat at its foot, his face turned away and his cowl pulled low over his face. A tome rested in his lap, his hands folded neatly atop it.

"You're still here," Khadgar said, and the grateful leap of his heart set a fresh pounding in his skull. His mind shied away from the specifics of the rest of his soreness, though his stomach lurched and twisted. Instead, he tried to decide if he'd felt this rough the morning after last year's Kirin Tor tavern crawl. It was a close call. Light, every part of him was afire with pain. He groaned. "I'm getting too old for this."

"So it seems," Medivh said, not unkindly.

To Khadgar's relief, he seemed mostly like himself, if forgivably tense. Khadgar could ask directly, but if Medivh were to say that he'd finally succeeded in banishing Sargeras from his soul, neither of them would know if it were the truth.

"This book," Medivh said, running his finger along a crease in the tome's spine. He sounded distant. Flat, almost. "This book is what you came here seeking. It contains knowledge that may help you find a crack in the Legion's armour."

Khadgar arched a brow. It was unlikely to be a trick so fast on the heels of the last, and yet— "Forgive me for being suspicious, Medivh."

Medivh pulled in a deep breath, almost, but not quite, a sigh, but for all his long-suffering affectation he had yet to meet Khadgar's eyes. "Then take it to one of your champions and have them look at it," he said.

Khadgar snorted. "And if you'll forgive my impudence as well, I'd like to question your immediate priorities." He struggled to sit up, shuddering through the discovery of Sargeras' issue, gone cold and sticky on his thighs. He looked blankly at his fingers and then wiped them on the chaise.

"Azeroth has always been, and will always be, my immediate priority. As should she be yours."

Medivh had covered Khadgar with blanket of some sort; it tumbled from him as he tried to arrange himself upright. He caught it up before it could slide to the floor. He frowned at his handful of worsted fabric, the red and the black, the silver embroidery that shifted its patterns as he watched. Oh. Not blankets. A robe.

"Of course. I just want to know that you're all right." Khadgar stood to pull the robe on over his head. It smelled as musty as the couch did, and also of Medivh, in a way Khadgar remembered from his youth. His feet were cold on the stone tile floor. The whole place felt chill. It seeped like damp in to his bones, but it was preferable to the festering heat that had accompanied Sargeras' presence.

When he looked back up, Medivh had finally turned his attention to him. His lips were a pale, grim line. "Khadgar, my boy—" he said, then broke off to cover his mouth. He dragged his hand down his beard. "What sense is there in asking me that? I'm barely here at all."

"You're here enough for me to worry," Khadgar said, and tactfully looked away while Medivh lost and then regained his composure. He came to sit beside him. Ghost or fragment or echo, against his side, Medivh felt as solid as anyone else.

Medivh's fingers played along the book's binding over and again; Khadgar stilled his hand with his own, but Medivh remained silent, staring into the shadows between the library's bookcases, and without any distraction, Khadgar felt his own fortitude finally begin to unravel. His throat and chest tightened. The pain in his jaw flared to life as he clenched his teeth against a rush of directionless grief.

One breath after the next. Khadgar willed himself to calmness.

My body," Medivh finally said, "has never truly been my own. That I would take yours with such disregard was a—a monstrous violation. How you could ever bring yourself to—"

"Forgive you?" Khadgar interrupted. "Oh, now. Medivh. Haven't you paid enough for Sargeras' desecrations? I was not the only one forced into this."

"That as may be." Medivh said this as though in reflex; no argument came with it.

"Wounds heal. Bruises fade. Soon this will be just another dark moment for these old walls to keep." Khadgar rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced. "Between you and me, Karazhan is welcome to it. I've fonder memories of you."

Medivh wet his lips as though to say something, but instead grasped Khadgar's shoulder and pulled him into a fierce embrace. Khadgar returned it with equal fierceness, pressing his mouth to Medivh's shoulder to suppress a deep sigh.

"You are so full of heart," Medivh said, pulling back. He nudged Khadgar's forehead with a finger. "It is any wonder you have no room for a brain."

Khadgar grinned helplessly. "I have missed you," he said. He took a breath and then got to his feet, ignoring the protest of his joints. "But I must go now, before the Council decides to send out a search party for me."

This time he took the tome when Medivh offered it. The cover read Notable Antiquities of Ancient Azeroth in flaking gold leaf. If what Medivh said was true, his plan was more certain now, the way forward more clear.

"There is much for me to do." Khadgar hesitated. "If, when things are calmer—"

"You are always welcome here. I'll know the instant you return." Medivh brushed the corner of his jaw. "Until a brighter day, Young Trust."

"Until a brighter day, Medivh," Khadgar said, already shaping the magics that would take him back to Dalaran. An abiding hope resurfaced in him: the sun would rise on a day like that, and soon.