“-. .-“

  “Aye! I think somebody poked me.”

  “I’ll poke ya, you’re just imagining things!”

  “Ow! No someone’s definitely poking us!”

  “See?”

  “You see, you don’t feel poking! Ow, knock it off!”

  “HE’S RIGHT! OLAF’S RIGHT! I FELT THAT!”

  “I told ya, Eric, I told ya!”

  “I’m gonna POKE YOU IN A MINUTE!”

  “Baleog, calm down! Breathe. You’re gonna BLOW A GASKET!”

  The sound of heavy breathing practically scraped the eardrums of everyone who wasn’t one of those three madcaps that had just been having a ‘whispered’ conversation.

  Not for the first time, I double checked that my spirits really were containing all the noise, as I’d told them to do when we stopped for a break after exploring the very quiet and empty Hall of the Makers. After what we almost literally stumbled over when we tried to go further, we needed to collect ourselves. Even me, who’d had the most forewarning about what could be waiting for us in here. I’d call it a madhouse, but it’s way too big for that. “Ey you three, come here.”

  “Now you’ve done it – I mean, aye sir!” “Sir yes sir!” “Right away sir!”

  Very quickly, the brothers Erik, Olaf and Baleog were standing at attention in front of me, mulishly pretending not to notice Brann Bronzebeard with his face buried in his hands from second-hand embarrassment over there.

  I dropped to one knee so they didn’t have to crane their heads quite that much, to look up at me. “What exactly are you feeling?”

  “Something’s poking us!” Baleog snarled with face so red he almost glowed in the dark. “I bet it’s Tim.”

  “Don’t be daft, he’s back in Ironforge.”

  “So what? Daft mage’ll go out of his way to annoy us even half-way across the world!”

  “I bet it’s your mum,” Erik ‘discreetly’ muttered.”

  “My mum’s your mum too, moron!”

  “Just so we’re clear, I still have dibs on Erik’s helmet.”

  “And I get his boots soon as I punch his life out!”

  “Seventeen years,” Brann dully despaired over yonder. “And still nothing’s changed.”

  “Aye it has, you – IT HAPPENED AGAIN!” Baleog was saved from committing lese majeste at the very last moment, and this time I caught it.

  It wasn’t anything specific, more like the unseen world changed mood so slightly that I still almost missed it, but it was there. “How does it feel?”

  “Annoying!” “Jabby!” “Violating – I mean disturbing!”

  “Where?”

  “““Right here!””” Erik, Baleog and Olaf sharply pointed at their forehead, chest and navel, respectively, before glaring at each other. “Unbelievable!” “Even now you think with your belly?!” “Just because yours doesn’t have such good definition-” “Definition!? It looks like a cannonball hanging off your-“

  I stood up. “Brann, you can handle them now.”

  “I really can’t,” the youngest Prince of Ironforge muttered hopelessly, but stomped over to take the three in hand anyway.

  The spots they indicated were the third eye, the heart, and the seat of the soul, I thought as the three brothers’ argument moved away from me.

  I went to one of the massively oversized benches that this massive complex had along the walls here and there, and hoisted myself up. I was the only one big enough to do it without help, if I unshrink momentarily. There, I closed my eyes and set about… lowering my inherent resistances just long enough to – there it is.

  It’s a sleep spell, I guessed from what I could understand of how the Arcane manifested. Or at least the trigger for one?

  Just to be thorough, I spent all ‘night’ meditating on the feelings. They were magic-but-not-really triggers for a pre-cast spell (or equivalent). There were other signals too, at regular intervals. They seemed to be commands for… overriding unconscious processes? I’d call them biological processes, but they didn’t feel like it. When they interacted with my mind, they made me think about golems and robots.

  Some signals were missing too. Like whatever relay doing this was skipping some in the cycle.

  The dwarves were the only ones who felt the signals consciously, if in all manner of strange ways. Us humans and the elves were oblivious until Brann came to me to tell me about it, instead of waiting for the regular daily councils.

  The stasis, I thought silently as I came out of my meditation and looked to the great doors leading further into Uldaman. It’s being actively regulated.

  Regulated imperfectly, now. Whatever system it was, it was malfunctioning. This suggested a lack of maintenance, which meant that Archaedas and Ironaya both must have not woken up from their own stasis for a very long time. With this being the resting place of the troggs, this did not bode well.

  No use worrying about it, there’s enough of that already.

  We’d already encountered enough of just one thing for everyone to feel wary and twitchy. It was why I’d called a halt earlier than I otherwise would have. Now, though, with both rest and food in our bellies, the dwarves couldn’t find any more excuses to linger.

  “Alright,” I called the camp to break. “Figure out who’s staying behind and let’s move out.”

  The dwarves who stayed behind to guard the outside of Uldaman had been very disappointed to not see the inside of the site. Now we had too many volunteering to stay put and set up a waystation.

  As I conjured a ball of Light and cast the deathly still legions of earthen ahead of us in sharp relief, I decided it was understandable. Existential dread could do a number on anyone.

  The first section of Uldaman had turned out to be a combination of a vestibule and receiving hall connected via two side-passages. It was awe-inspiring and grandiose, well and truly miraculous, but offered no real surprises beyond cobwebs, empty space, empty seats too large for anything but giants to sit in, and green walls covered in bas-reliefs depicting men and women larger than even those enormous beings. Many of the dwarves didn’t even believe true giants existed outside of story and song, until the elves and I told them otherwise.

  The gallery immediately beyond was a necropolis.

  When people like me thought of stasis, they pictured people sleeping in pods of metal and glass. This was not like that. The earthen were beings of magic and stone, and in stasis they merely stood there, one next to another and another in lines that went on seemingly forever.

  They had blindsided us. Even my ability to see life didn’t work through these walls as well as it should, any group of beings showed up as a single, faint, undefined haze. Especially those that were barely alive, like these. I actually mistook it for the universe’s arcane background radiation.

  Each of them was like a dwarf that had been turned to stone between one moment and the next. One row was on the right of the gallery, with nine more rows behind it. On the left, the same thing.

  Twenty rows of statue-like stone dwarves flanked us as we walked between them, silent sentries standing still and quiet for an age.

  Those were just the ones on the ground floor. Behind them, the walls were carved in overlapping galleries all the way to the ceiling, each with its own legion of earthen arranged in perfect lines, every last one locked in their bodies. The ones closest to us looked like petrified beardlings in the light of our glowstones and torches. The ones farthest flickered like shades and phantoms in the faded gleam.

  “They look just like us,” Brann Bronzebeard murmured as quietly as he could where he walked on my left, afraid to break the gravely silence. “I thought – but then, we make our statues as lifelike as possible, the makers would do at least as much for a living thing...”

  “So many missing,” Kurdran Wildhammer gripped his hammer tight as he rode his gryphon on my other side, looking furtively here and there. “Is that where we – I mean our ancestors…?”

  “I think so.”

  The rows of stone dwarves weren’t full. Many spots were empty, but there were no broken remnants in their place, or any other trace. Were those the ones who became flesh, who woke up and left however long ago? How did they leave, though? By which path? We’d found no breach in the structure so far, was there one farther in? Or did something else happen? But even with the gaps in the rows, the earthen were so many.

  Discreetly, I directed Foamgust to try and shift one of the closest earthen to us. The spirit couldn’t, at least not with that little amount of force. The stone dwarf was locked in place by the feet, soles stuck to the floor through some arcane means. That explained why none of them looked to have been displaced amidst whatever rush or panic the flesh dwarves experienced in their escape.

  To wake up in this darkness, not knowing anything and understanding even less, what had it been like? And the fact that none of the earthen were damaged, that spoke of either wariness or respect. Or both.

  Or care.

  Whatever the first dwarves must have thought in that first moment of self-awareness, they treated these statues with all respect given to kin, on the way out.

  So how did they get out? And where were these legions of earthen in that old future?

  In my last life I’d always known of the difference between what made it on screen and the real scale of things, but this was still beyond my wildest expectations. In that far, lost future, barely a handful of stone dwarves were still alive by the time of the quest for Norgannon’s discs. This very gallery didn’t exist anymore by then.

  The first big cave-in was exactly here, in place of this catacomb, and it was full of troggs, not dark irons or earthen, I recalled. If the gnomes were only the latest genocide they carried out, was this the first?

  The troggs… we’d so far found none of them. I could only hope that meant they were in a separate section of the facility, instead of already escaped. I remembered that there were at least two large doors that couldn’t be interacted with in Uldaman, in that distant past life of mine. Perhaps the troggs had their own stasis rooms behind one of those? Maybe the doors just outside the Hall of the Crafters where Archaedas waited, since Tyr’s secret wing was opened from the map room in that game…

  But the original visionaries were no longer involved by then, how much could that game be trusted really? It had been hit and miss everywhere else, so it was probably the same here too.

  I wondered if we’d be able to get to either section without blasting holes in the walls. In my memories, to reach Archaedas’ chamber you had to fight through a scorpion-filled trogg tunnel, and even kill the unfortunate earthen remnants trying to repair that breach. There was no way to reason with them, or the rest of the earthen wandering the complex. But did that mean they were mad, or just angry?

  The Dark Iron dwarves got to Uldaman first in that future, how bad an impression could they have made?

  Worse than we’d managed so far, at least. If only because we’d had no one to make a bad impression on yet.

  It was near the end of our somber and quiet funerary procession, while the only light to see by were glowstones and the floating golden orb I’d conjured up, that we finally heard the first sounds in Uldaman not made by us.

  “Unscheduled movement detected,” uttered a voice like a train rail twang. Ahead of us, a faint arcane whistling heralded the erupting glow of two glowing blue eyes that suddenly outlined the form of a large stone golem. Its head turned left and right to scan us with a grinding sound, as did the eyes of a second golem next to it. “Source of disturbance identified: intruders. Fauna typologies: two, non-sapient, lacking reasoning capabilities to affect intrusion to the facility. Sapient typologies: three, bipedal. Human – degenerate vrykul matrix. Elf – solar arcana phenotype. Titanforged – earthen matrix, curse-bearing Yogg-Saron strain. Initiating Old One counter-mea-“

  “Activate override: Prothypourgós.” Blindi cut it off, shoving through us to the front. “Τρ?α σημε?α ?να τ?σσερα ?να π?ντε εννι? δ?ο ?ξι π?ντε τρ?α π?ντε-“

  I watched in astonishment as Blindi proceeded to recite all the first one hundred decimals of Pi, and then another hundred and fifty for good measure. In Greek. I had to use the Light to heal his throat several times before he was done, and his voice was still tired when he finally finished.

  “Sorry for the wait,” Blindi told us while the golem stood there, doing… something. “Would’ve taken a second to say all that in my real body. All of our creations have hardcoded overrides built in at hardware level, except the sapient ones. So don’t you lot worry none, you’re still only at risk of getting knocked out by words of magic. You know, like everyone else.”

  “Code recognized,” the Golem finally said after a long, tense pause. “Animic imprint conflicts with latest record. Seeking resolution – older imprint associated with higher-level access protocols. Conflict resolved. Animic imprint updated. Override accepted. Welcome, Prime Designate of Azeroth. Recording voice imprint. Recording phenotype imprint. Updating identifying information – complete.”

  “Disseminate update,” Blindi ordered.

  “Synchronizing input with network – identity disseminated via wireless peer-to-peer protocols. Prime Designate and auxiliaries designated non-hostiles. Stone guardians will not impede passage. Stone guardians available for inspection by Prime Designate. Query: does Prime Designate desire to assign a delegate?”

  “Affirmative. Him.” Blindi commended while pointing at me.

  The golem inspected me with very intense focus, and I felt something passing over my spirit, a scan?

  “Tell it something,” Blindi nudged me.

  “Like what, exactly? Do I just say ‘hello’ or does he need me to recite a saga to calibrate whatever this-“

  “Voice imprint recorded. Phenotype imprint recorded. Animic imprint recorded. Designation?”

  Blindi put a hand over my mouth. “Prophet of Redress.”

  I snapped my face in his direction-

  “Set Delegate command level – Highest. Set Delegate diplomatic status – Total Immunity. Set Delegate database access – unrestricted.”

  “Diplomatic status recorded. Command level set. Database access cannot be changed remotely, will require face-to-face interface with the Lore Keeper or direct hardline access.”

  “Well at least they have that for security,” Blindi groused, removing his hand from me. “Disgraceful.”

  “Assessment logged.”

  Blindi scoffed. “Resume operations.” Turning from the stone guardian, Blindi deliberately didn’t look at me. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in my spot in the line, resting my voice. Human throats are darn fragile.”

  Everyone got out of his way.

  Behind him, the golems waited.

  … I’ll talk to him about it later.

  I faced the stone guardians. “Stand aside.”

  The golems stood aside.

  I walked forward to the doors behind the two sentries and pushed. They didn’t budge.

  So much for command level.

  It did confirm some of my worse suspicions though. And some of my more hopeful ones too, about Titan knowledge of opsec.

  I pulled the Silver Hand out of my bag of holding. Like outside, its light revealed a similar lock that responded to the great hammer’s shape and energies. When I pushed the doors this time, they slid open almost soundlessly. And easily. At least what passed for easily when you were a gigantic android-thing with the strength of a thousand men, which I wasn’t. I didn’t measure up even in my current biggest form. But unlike the main doors outside, these had no wear or dust and sand in their hinges.

  Light streamed over me through the crack in the entrance, more and more as the doors opened wider. After the pitch-black darkness of the stone mortuary, it was like waking up from death for those behind me. I could feel their relief radiating at my back, foreign emotions held a poignant clarity for me these days.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  The Map Chamber of Uldaman was several times larger and more spacious than the entrance hall. It wasn’t as long as the stasis gallery we’d just passed through, but was just as tall, and much wider. There were no earthen standing about, and no golems. Most important of all, the room wasn’t crawling with troggs.

  It wasn’t even caved in, like I recalled it in the future. Instead of that dusty, brownish cave caked with clay and rock dust, it was a wonder of architecture with more than half of the lights in working order, a perfectly plane floor and ceiling, and equally perfect acoustics. Where before people had been too shy to speak because of what they were witnessing, now they kept their voices level because they risked everyone hearing them from the other end of the massive room.

  For the most part, I amended when I heard the three brothers from earlier start grousing at each other again. Was this the part where they got lost? That’s their thing, Brann said.

  Hopefully they’d stumble over something useful, if they did, instead of all the trouble we’ve been trying to avoid. “We’re putting the main camp here,” I decided, turning to look at the other leaders of the expedition. “Unless anyone disagrees?”

  “That’s a nice joke,” Brann told me with eyes wildly roaming all over the walls. Where before the bas-reliefs had been large, standalone scenes, the carvings all along the walls of this room told a singular epic. “You’ll need jemmies and wrecking bars to move us from this spot, no mistake. High Thane Wildhammer, feel free to take over our side of the logistics, I’ve got work to do!”

  “Don’t ye bloody dare-!”

  But the Bronzebeard prince was already off and away.

  “That fuckin’ dobber!” Kurdran swore. “Load me up with his job on top of mine, I’ll have his hat for garters!”

  “Wildhammers wear garters?” Olaf the Stout muttered in bewilderment from what he thought was beyond hearing distance, but clearly wasn’t or he wouldn’t have heard us. “The gents too?”

  “Must be a wild sight at parties.” “Ye reckon they mistake each other fer dames at them drugged revels?”

  “Falstad,” Kurdran hissed at his cousin. “Get’em!”

  “YE BASTARDS DONE IT NOW!”

  “INCOMING!”

  The tension of walking through the most sinister catacomb, at the heart of the silent and empty halls of the gods themselves, exploded with all the grace of an all-out bar brawl without the bar.

  I walked a circuit around the savage dwarf pileup. When the Light sprung up to contain the screaming free-far all with griffons on top, I went to help Aedelas set up our tent and bedrolls. After that, I did my rounds to check for any injuries or illness, and made lessons out of the very few and minor cases of armor chafe.

  My knights attended my random instructional episodes in shifts, like they did everything else. I’d extended an invitation with the elves too, to see if they had the mindset or affinity for the Light, but so far none had accepted. Sylvanas told me that all the ones so inclined had become clerics back in Quel’Thalas, instead of joining the rangers. She conspicuously didn’t say that she and her troops were so enamored with the instant Legolas that they weren’t open to other diversions while they got used to them.

  I was waiting for the most ironic moment to cash in on our wager.

  The dwarves were much more willing, but the euphoric escape from the judgmental non-stares of their rocky ancestors meant I’d just lost them all to the lure of glorious archeology. And face punches.

  It was a shame, I’d even caught Falstad looking in a few times, he was even asking some of my men questions about it now. I was pretending ignorance so as not to spook him, he was weirdly high-strung when ripped out of his comfort zone, but the stalled progress still bothered me.

  Oh well.

  There was always tomorrow.

  “-. .-“

  When my routine was concluded and no one needed me anymore, I went over to where Blindi had put up his folding chair next to the map that dominated the core of the room. Uldaman in three-dimensional miniature, as it used to look like in its old glory. I inspected it for a while, eventually concluding that the wing containing Tyr’s memory disc was not included in it.

  That, at least, was good.

  I glanced at Blindi and had the spirits isolate our voices. “You didn’t expect it to work, the thing with the golem? Or is there another reason you didn’t warn me?”

  “I didn’t expect it to be an option at all. Loken has access to most of our old codes you know, he wouldn’t have been able to usurp control of everything otherwise. The visuals in your memories are highly stylized, I assumed the golems here would only have superficial resemblance to those elsewhere. That they don’t means Archaedas and Ironaya either failed to make a fresh batch before fleeing Ulduar, or lost all of them by the time they went into stasis the last time.”

  “Or Loken sabotaged the golems they made, or managed to fool or constrain Archaedas and Ironaya into taking a standard batch,” I speculated when he didn’t. “You think there might be trackers in them?”

  “I’m more concerned with them being so easy to subvert, but since you mentioned it, yes. Trackers, rogue code, what have you. I’ve no doubt that Archaedas used his own means to prevent such things from transmitting during their escape, he’d have been followed otherwise. This place clearly utilizes those means writ large. But the fact we only ran into stone guardians now means he eventually came to have the same suspicions about them.”

  Logically, sentries like those golems should be actively patrolling Uldaman, especially the entrance halls. Instead, the first golems were just outside of this chamber, deeper than even the main stasis gallery that should have been a high priority. Not patrolling.

  In other words, the stone guardians were restricted to the inner perimeter of the complex, the part where Uldaman’s radio interference or anti-radar and whatever else was at least risk of failure. But the golems were also kept out of the major chambers where they could do the most harm if turned.

  They were patrolling in the future, I remembered. But there were barely a handful of them, and Uldaman was completely thrashed, any one of those breaches could have initiated contingency programming. The ones out and about were guarding the earthen trying vainly to rebuild the place.

  Maybe that contingency programming didn’t designate the troggs as hostiles… probably because they were ‘residents’ of Uldaman just like the earthen, at the end of the day?

  “Likely,” Blindi darkly agreed when I voiced my thought. “Old sentimentality never fails to come back to haunt us.”

  Since Blindi seemed to want to be alone now, I left him and approached the big double doors leading to The Chamber of Khaz'mul, where I knew Ironaya was supposed to be. Unfortunately, the doors did not react to the Silver Hand this time.

  Leaving it, I tried the other two doorways. The map Chamber had four, though not laid out symmetrically. One was just to the right of the Khaz'mul one, where the chamber extended a bit further onward, like an oversized alcove. The third was on the eastern wall. Along with the door we’d come in, that made four total. The western wall was all bas-relief storytelling.

  I returned to Blindi. “I don’t suppose you have a spare Staff of Prehistoria on you?”

  Blindi blinked out of his sullen fugue. “What’s that? Oh, the thing you said opened that door?”

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “Not confident in young Brann’s choice of ‘solution’ anymore?”

  For all his grousing, Brann Bronzebeard clearly thought highly of the ‘Lost’ brothers’ bizarre luck in finding things. He’d sponsored their membership in the Explorer’s League when everyone wanted them far away, and had immediately thought of them when I told him we might have scavenger hunts in our future.

  Now, though, I was dearly hoping I wouldn’t have to unleash the ‘Lost Dwarves’ on this place. All this smooth sailing was bound to draw Murphy’s attention. All we were missing was for them to find whatever weak points Uldaman had gained during the Sundering. No way would the troggs be able to breach this place with stone age tools, if it didn’t already have weak points.

  Those three would probably blow the cracks wide them open during one of their rolling tussles. By complete accident, they seemed just the type.

  They’d probably find the staff’s components in the doing, the Gni'kiv Medallion and the Shaft of Tsol. But it would be poor reward for unleashing the trogg serial genocides that we were trying to avoid.

  “Has it occurred to you that you might be overcomplicating things?” Blindi asked. “Or maybe it’s the opposite for you, your skillset seems to be developing into a shape closer to mine than Tyr’s, despite all odds.”

  It was? And what did he mean, ‘despite all odds’?

  “Then again, that should help you more than hinder.”

  “An explanation would be nice.”

  “You told me the Staff works by focusing the energies of this chamber into a beam aimed at the doors.” Blindi waved at the map model. “Isn’t that something you can do by yourself?”

  “Sounds like a mighty big vulnerability, if someone can just do that with magic.”

  “Not any someone. The Light of the Flame of Origin isn’t something just anyone can call upon, certainly no one among the enemy.”

  “I… don’t think that’s how the Staff works though?” I directed my attention to the ground and overlapped my spirit upon the map model, trying to discern if the power there was any similar to my own.

  “Not what I meant.” Blindi cut the wind out of my sails. “You’re treating this like it’s another one of those golems, like the only thing that matters is the door. The Staff’s function isn’t just to open the door, isn’t that what you told me? It’s to draw the attention of the guardian waiting inside. Waiting behind that door is a person, so think like a person.”

  “… There are surely some parameters programmed into the system,” I drew on my memories of the Earth modern world. Specifically, how system administrators tended to do things, and why a lot of hacking was actually just social engineering. Shifting through people’s notes. Even their trash. “But there would be some scenarios that aren’t accounted for. Or they are accounted for, but are also considered far enough outliers to prompt direct investigation anyway? And then if the standard stasis subroutines are malfunctioning for the Keepers here too, maybe there are non-standard ones that can be triggered…”

  “Sounds like a theory,” Blindi said noncommittally. He pulled out his pipe to sit back and watch me work while he blew smoke rings at me. “How will you test it?”

  With difficulty, it turned out, but not as much of it as I expected. Using the Light to Reveal the workings of the room’s subsystems was actually less strain than my diagnostic spells. By comparison, figuring out what to do with it beyond just throwing it forward like a laser was beyond me.

  I tried it anyway. Drew quite a crowd as the white beam made as if to slice the doors open like a laser cutter, but nothing happened.

  Maybe someone like Antonidas could have figured out more, but I seemed to not be far enough along yet. Then, too, my specialty back on Earth had been material science, not high-energy physics. I didn’t recognize the type of particles that ran through the three-dimensional map at my feet. All I knew was that they behaved like a substance that was gaseous but somehow also had a higher cohesion than adhesion force. They weren’t even a substance, exactly, they were a form of energy that behaved kind of sort of like one.

  Manipulating this energy in precise ways was clearly what the staff was for. The method was certainly opaque to my meager Arcane training.

  If Odyn was right, though, maybe it wouldn’t be necessary.

  Putting one hand over the slot where the staff would go, I extended my other one at the door and repeated what I did before, with one change.

  This time, I sent the laser beam forward through a conduit of Light, like water through a pipe.

  The beam still did nothing.

  I glanced at Blindi. He was watching me just like before, carefully non-expectant. There must be options I hadn’t thought of then. Or maybe he was pretending to know more than he did because that was the privilege of elders.

  I looked back at the door. I hadn’t let the beam lapse, which was draining the charge in the map model. But as much as I tried, I didn’t get any new ideas.

  It was disappointing, but I let the matter drop.

  That, paradoxically, was what showed me the answer. When I let go of my focus, the Light lost its rigidity and stopped being a mere pipe for the other energy to flow through. Instead, it mixed with it, creating a coruscating ray of gold run through with teal. The sight of it ignited in me a powerful premonition.

  I redoubled my focus, but didn’t separate the powers again. I kept blasting the laser beam at the door seemingly ineffectually, until it produced a loud groan.

  My concentration almost broke, but I held out long enough to run the laser down between the two door halves, from top to bottom. It probably wasn’t important anymore but-

  The doors to the Chamber of Khaz’mul rumbled open, and through them strode a great stone giant with a woman’s shape. She was tall and voluptuous, her skin was white as marble – it was marble – her body was clad in a peplos shaped like liquid bronze – because it was – and her hand carried a strangely primitive-looking hammer – it wasn’t.

  Like her clothing and her skin, it was a substance whose Arcane pattern reminded me of superalloys only theorized back on Earth, and which seemed to shift as needed between solid and liquid forms, flowing over her form and through the air with every step.

  “None may steal the secrets of the Makers!”

  Please don’t attack us.

  “But if you be a friend, speak the words of the Second Covenant and prove the Light you wield is your just due!”

  That’s a condition?

  “Mighty tall order, that,” Blindi rumbled from behind me, having stood up from his seat to join me. “When none but you here and the dead know any words given in secret under Zakajz’s shadow. Abide a little and I’ll remind you of sacraments even older still. Will you know me then, I wonder? Or has the stasis taken all your wits, Lady of Iron? You have missed much. It’s been much longer than you think.”

  Ironaya dismissed everyone with a glance, and pinned all of her severe glare on Blindi alone. “Your words would be sweet were your tongue less crude.”

  Any feeling of insult was swept aside when Odyn began to speak in Titan’s tongue.

  “Then sing, steel maiden, of Destroyer's rage,

  Black and bleak, that cost the Cosmos wide

  Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls

  Of sinners and saints into the Twisting Dark,

  And left whole words to burn, and fester rot

  For horrors old, and Titans' tears.

  Tell of the clash between Aggramar -

  The Young, the True – and fallen Sargeras.

  What horrors ancient set these noble two

  At throats of one another, blade on blade?

  The Burning Legion, wild and fell

  And din of chaos misbegotten

  By their despair and lies they set

  Elder on heir, champion dead

  The young, brave hero at his mentor's hand.

  Thence woe begat hereinbelow,

  Of all, by all, and upon all.”

  I was abruptly reminded that, no matter how native Odyn tended to go when adopting a mortal guise, he remained that one god that used to speak only in verse.

  All around me, the humans, dwarves and elves were all speechless. Even without understanding a word they felt the significance. They heard the emotions in Odyn’s words and were moved. I was no different.

  Neither was the giantess. “Your words strike deep, stranger. Deeper still if a stranger you are not.”

  “Don’t play coy with me girl, you know who I am.”

  “I would be sure.”

  Blindi scoffed and nudge me. “Show her. Maybe it’ll soften the blow.”

  I drew the Silver Hand from my bag and let its aura fill the chamber.

  Ironaya raised a hand to her mouth. “You found him? Or has the tale of woe only grown longer?”

  Odyn inclined his head in my direction. “The prophet found him, whereupon he eradicated Zakajz the C'Thrax and delivered Tyr’s body to my care.”

  Ironaya’s gaze was not dismissive anymore. “If that is the truth, you are welcome here and shall be honored with our praise.”

  “Don’t count your chickens yet,” Odyn huffed. “That’s only the good news.”

  Ironaya smiled wryly. “Is that not how these things always go.”

  “Not like this.”

  Odyn’s solemnity seemed to dampen the she-Titan’s spirits. “Tell me.”

  “Do you not feel it in the earth, lass? The ground above, the ground below, the land around you, maybe the walls themselves? When you listen for the signals meant to keep those little ones still in their sleep, what do you sense? What do you not?”

  Frowning, Ironaya strode towards us and knelt next to the map of Uldaman. She inserted her hammer handle-first into the socket where the Staff of Prehistory would have gone. Her other hand rested atop the miniature model of the Hall of Crafters, and then she closed her eyes and cast her senses forth into the greater structure around us.

  It didn’t take long, but her face emoted plenty in that little time.

  “How?” She breathed, opening her eyes. “Such damage – the superstructure has been undermined in several places, cracks run through the complex length for length… There are spots where the walls are only held in place by the thin sheets of carvings on them. How could this damage have occurred? Why were we not awoken?”

  “It’s been much longer than you think, lass,” Odyn said. “And the worst of everything this world will ever suffer already happened, mid-way through.”

  “How long?”

  “It has been sixteen thousand, nine hundred and eighty-nine years since Tyr fell,” Odyn grimly revealed.

  That long?

  Ironaya took it even worse. “So long…? Impossible!”

  “I suspect the damage to this place dates to merely ten thousand years ago or so.”

  “That cannot – no, yes, that is true. By the Titans, how?” The more Ironaya stayed connected to… whatever she was connected to, the more alarmed she became. “Logs indicate the oldest structural damage occurred – by the Makers, you speak truth. Nigh five millennia without waking once, and then ten more after – what sort of cataclysm could have inflicted such damage?”

  “Cataclysm indeed,” Odyn echoed her words, smiling sadly. “There’s no longer a single continent, girl. There’s four of them now, and a great big hole in the ocean where the Well of Eternity used to be, straight down into the Elemental Plane.”

  “You speak madness.”

  “We were invaded, Ironaya. Azeroth was ran through by greed and treachery. Sargeras himself stepped foot on this planet. The elves were there. The forests were there. The giants were there. The earthen were there. The dragons were there. The ancient guardians were there. The tauren, the centaur, the furbolg, even those primitives were there. But we weren’t.”

  I couldn’t contain my reaction to the weight of failure that suddenly seemed to press down on everyone. I didn’t look behind me, but I didn’t need to. No one in the room was any less uncomfortable at hearing the world’s literal gods admit to being guilty of the greatest failure this world had ever seen. I wanted to say something, but it wasn’t my place to interfere in this conversation. And at the end of the day…

  It was true. Everyone who could be there had been there. But not them.

  Ironaya sat back on her heels and brought her joined hands to her lips, struggling to contain all new, hard feelings.

  As I stood there, I felt sympathy for her, but twice as awkward too. The sad reality was that all that wasn’t even the end of it. Not even the worst of it. No, the worst of it was that Sargeras was only pushed out by blowing up the Well of Eternity right in his face, which could well have destroyed the entire world. And the thing that was just as bad, the thing that utterly infuriated me beyond anything else, was this:

  The only faction involved in the War of the Ancients that didn’t reveal itself to be full of traitors were the damned demons.

  The Silver Hand began to shine powerfully in my hand, its soothing gold light turning a deeper, wrathful hue.

  I breathed my rage out through my nose and stuffed Tyr’s hammer back in my bag.

  It was a few minutes before Ironaya finished whatever data retrieval she was doing and opened her eyes again.

  “My lady,” I interjected just as she made to address Odyn again. “It occurs to me that in all the excitement, we skipped the introductions.”

  Ironaya turned a hard gaze upon me, but whatever she was about to say died in her throat. I doubted it was just because of my glare, but the reason why I dared to challenge her at all was the same, even in this small way. Odyn was her superior in both rank and ability. If he didn’t rebuke me, who was she to try?

  Leave it to the gods to rip the veil off issues I didn’t know I had.

  And maybe, just maybe, I took it a little personally that I got to see and feel every moment of what was going on at my back. How the dwarves’ hopes and enthusiasm gradually collapsed into disappointment, and their faces fell from how their makers treated them with complete dismissal. This was the greatest, most monumental event in all of their collective history, and here they were being treated like background nothings in their own tale.

  It was better than the murderous hostility of the future, but if I were the type to settle for such low standards, I never would have lightforged a dragon.

  A dragon that Ironaya didn’t seem to recognize for what he was.

  “Lady Ironaya. Please be known to Kurdran the Brave, High Thane of the Wildhammer Kindred who wield lightning in the sky on gryphon back, and his cousin, Falstad Dragonreaver.”

  Hearing their names thankfully snapped the dwarves out of their forlorn mood, and they stepped forward to give deep nods of their head, though Falstad couldn’t help a glance in my direction at his new, yet-to-be-earned epithet.

  “Next to them is Brann Bronzebeard, third prince of Ironforge City that tamed the fiery womb of the mountains of great and wild Khaz Modan.”

  “Most honored to meet you, my lady!”

  “The lady Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-Captain of the Farstriders of Quel’Thalas.”

  “Elu'meniel mal alann, ban'dinoriel.” May peace calm your heart, gatekeeper. “The greetings of Silvermoon be with you.”

  “And on my side, we have my squire Aedelas-“

  “-Hey there iron lady-!”

  “And Lord Commander Magroth the Defender, who served as warden of Zakajz’ tomb and keeper of Tyr’s body, until its last journey up to Odyn’s halls.”

  “A duty that was finally discharged thanks to you, and now we are here, serving the cause of good.” Magroth bowed gallantly before the tall lady. “Fair tidings, goddess.”

  Ironaya set her hands in her lap and looked at all of us in turn. At last, her eyes lingered on the dwarves and her mood softened. As it should have done long before this, their race were practically her children.

  “Time and sleep unintended has taken a toll on our hospitality, it seems. Forgive my earlier abruptness. As companions of the High One, and as children of these very halls, be welcome as guests in this, our humble abode.”

  “Thank you, my lady.” I said once everyone else had had their turn. “Alas, though we are not driven by urgency, we are driven by purpose. We need to talk to Archaedas.”

  Ironaya gave me a hard stare, then exchanged an even longer one with Odyn. The latter, in a move that made me appreciate him even more than before, shrugged and motioned with his hands that everything was now my problem. My business.

  My authority.

  Ironaya raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  But without further words, she stood, motioned for us to follow, and led the way further into Uldaman, all the way down to the Hall of the Crafters where the Stone Watcher dwelt.

  I used the journey to process my new feelings, and give what silent support I could to the others with me.

  With respect to our host, we only took a few of guards each with us, in addition to a supply cart and one of each profession expert in the League, but that still added up to a fair group. My knights were awestruck, and Aedelas wasn’t much better. The elves did their best to act stoic but couldn’t quite manage it.

  The dwarves… without their gryphons they were far less confident. The only one more starstruck than Kurdran and Falstad was Brann. He looked a hair’s breadth away from a fit of nerves, with how paranoid he’d just become about his appearance, adjusting his collar and his sleeves in between adding line after line to his notepad.

  I hated to see it, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them, but that enthusiasm was doomed to go without reward. Again. I was usually more optimistic than this, but I wasn’t wrong. Soon enough, I got to see the lights in their eyes dim a second time.

  Awakening Archaedas turned out to be an affair every bit as fraught as the first, and his focus was like a laser.

  But unlike the kings, generals, wizards, dragons and all else in the future, unlike all those adventurers that were always chasing the next quest objective or the world will end, I had something they didn’t. I had a head start.

  A ten years’ head start on the next attack of the Horde and the Burning Legion.

  I wasn’t on a deadline.

  I had all the just cause, all the time in the world, and all the support of their foremost superior, to squeeze Ironaya and Archaedas for everything that Uldaman could give me.

  Bylaws of Babel (Warhammer) and A Backwards Approach to Clarke's Law (Highschool DxD, Inspired Inventor, X-Over). Links to everything .