About the Daring Blades
Before you begin reading, a little bit of context.
This story is based on the actual World of Warcraft characters of a group of longtime friends who have been playing together since the game’s original launch in November 2004. We all began our journey on the Kirin Tor (RP) realm, where roleplaying, storytelling, and character development became just as important as raids and battlegrounds.
The Daring Blades was our guild during those early years. While never one of the largest guilds on the server, it became a familiar name within the Kirin Tor roleplaying community and played a part in countless player-driven events, campaigns, and stories. Many veterans from those days may still remember the guild, its members, or some of the adventures we shared.
The characters in this tale are the very same ones we have played for more than two decades. They have grown through every expansion, every victory, every defeat, and every chapter of Azeroth’s history. Although this story is fictional and inspired by Warcraft’s lore, the friendships behind it are very real.
A Daring Blades Tale is, above all, a tribute to those friendships, to the countless memories created inside World of Warcraft, and to everyone who helped make the Kirin Tor roleplaying community such a remarkable place.
If you were there in those early days, welcome back.
If not, we hope you enjoy the journey just the same.
Due to the forum’s post length limit, The Knot of Time has been divided into seven parts so the entire story can remain within a single thread. The parts are listed below in reading order:
The Knot of Time (part 1)
The Knot of Time (part 2)
The Knot of Time (part 3)
The Weight of Anchors
The Bond of Blood and Time (part 1)
The Bond of Blood and Time (part 2)
Epilogue: The Only Certainty
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The Knot of Time (part 1)
The blue-green crack of the Stormwind portal spat Slot onto the floating platform of Valdrakken with all the delicacy of a punch to the stomach. The instant his feet touched the Titan-carved stone slabs, a sharp hot stab climbed through his lower back, forcing him to hunch instinctively. He let out a low grunt, pressing a calloused hand against his spine. At sixty years old, the chaotic current of arcane magic flowing through teleportation rifts was no longer accepted by his body with the same ease it had been in his youth; now, every journey seemed to leave behind a trail of fatigue that took hours to fade from his bones.
Straightening himself while adjusting the heavy traveling cloak draped over his shoulders, Slot drew a deep breath and was immediately struck by the unmistakable scent of the place. A dense, heavy, sulfuric odor of dragon refuse mixed with the steam of ancient forges flooded his nostrils. In all the history of Azeroth, few adventurers had ever possessed the courage to openly complain about that smell in the presence of the Red Dragonflight, but among the guild members, the stench had been ironically nicknamed “the perfume of Valdrakken.” It was the smell of a home the world had already forgotten.
As he dragged his leather boots toward the stairway leading to the central plaza, Slot glanced around and felt the weight of emptiness settle over him. The city was deserted. The once-noisy marketplaces where hundreds of heroes used to bargain over potions and gleaming armor were now nothing more than abandoned wooden stalls gathering dust carried by the winds from the mountains of Thaldraszus. The great circus of war and the endless mass of greedy adventurers had departed long ago — first for the depths of Khaz Algar, and now for the gates of Silvermoon. Valdrakken had become little more than a mausoleum of white stone beneath the setting sun.
It was the city’s absolute silence that brought back the memory of the summons. Slot slipped a hand into the inner pocket of his robes and felt the small worn communication device attached to his belt. It was a rectangular brass contraption filled with exposed wires and loose gears, built by gnomes more than four decades earlier. To any soldier of the Alliance, it would have looked like little more than engineering scrap, but for the Daring Blades, that tiny box was the guild’s official communication channel — the old legendary “g-bar-3.25”.
Slot remembered perfectly the moment the device had come back to life earlier this morning. He had been on his small modest farm on the outskirts of Stormwind, kneeling in soft dirt while desperately trying to save a row of turnips that seemed afflicted by some mysterious plague. The garden was an utter disaster of a plantation — a painful irony for a man born on a sheep farm who had clearly inherited none of the land’s gifts. He had been cursing at a dried root when the device on his belt coughed.
Bzzt... crackle... bzzt...
The sound of rusty mechanized static, sharp and worn down by years of complete silence, made Slot jump backward and drop his little hoe into the mud. He wiped his dirty hands on his trousers and grabbed the device while the static stabilized. Then, from the cracked speaker, Corvany’s voice echoed cleanly, directly, and without the slightest trace of emotion or nostalgia, as if the forty-two years they had traveled together had passed in a single afternoon.
“Valdrakken. Tavern at the foot of the tower. Don’t be late, Slot.”
The transmission ended immediately with a dry crack. No explanations. No elaboration. But before marching toward the portal, Slot still had to deal with the unusual chaos inside his own house. Slit and Slat were already independent young adults, yet they had the terrible habit of appearing at the farm without warning every now and then, transforming his home into a temporary military encampment.
Before he could finish packing his bags and kiss his daughter’s goodbye while they still slept, the old mage wasted precious minutes gathering heavy riding boots scattered across the hallway and avoiding spears and swords abandoned on kitchen chairs. Worse than the physical mess was the aftermath of the previous night: empty bottles of his special Dalaran wines and a storage room completely raided by the merciless appetites of a warrior and a monk. He had grumbled and cleaned the mess, but he smiled while covering them with blankets before leaving.
Now, walking through the deserted streets of the dragons’ capital, his left hand discreetly hiding the gray dreadlock the girls had braided across his scalp to camouflage his early signs of baldness, the old mage approached the dark entrance of the empty tavern. The sound of his own boots echoed against the stone walls, the final warning that the farmer’s peaceful rest had come to an end.
When he pushed open the heavy wooden doors of the Roasted Ram Tavern, Slot felt the echo of the past strike his chest. The hall was completely empty, exactly as it had been the first time he crossed that threshold alongside Corvany years ago, long before the Dragon Isles had been opened to the public and the flood of loud adventurers had overtaken the region.
Behind the stone counter, the innkeeper Tithris remained in the exact same place. The dragonkin’s scowl seemed carved from the very rock of Thaldraszus itself: rigid, foul-tempered, and carrying that severe look that regarded any potential customer as the source of all the problems and work in his day. Slot did not shrink from it. He returned the stare with the exact same level of irritation, holding the dragonkin’s gaze for several seconds. After all, that was one of the few privileges old age granted in Azeroth: he had earned the legitimate right to be grumpy toward whomever he pleased.
Despite the exchange of looks, there was no true hostility there. Tithris, like so many inhabitants of that city, was simply one more among the endless list of souls who had once been helped by their guild. Slot had long since lost count of how many people, villages, and entire kingdoms Corvany and the Daring Blades had extended a hand to throughout her journey without ever asking for glory in return.
Remaining silent, Slot made a subtle motion with his head toward the imposing dragon statue resting in the corner of the hall. It was a small choreographed gesture, a mute question Tithris understood immediately: Has she arrived? Is she in the private room? The dragonkin answered with an almost imperceptible nod. Slot walked toward the statue, bowed in a formal sign of respect, and in the blink of an eye the arcane current teleported him into the VIP chamber.
Inside, the atmosphere changed completely. Kritha, the innkeeper of the upper floor, welcomed him with genuine satisfaction and a broad smile. Unlike his colleague downstairs, Kritha always seemed delighted to see his most illustrious customers return. The Daring Blades’ reserved table remained untouched, clean, and permanently ready to receive them in the exact same corner as always.
And at the center of it sat Corvany.
She was seated in silence, thoughtful, her eyes fixed on an invisible point somewhere beyond the room, lost in thoughts Slot knew all too well. She wore the same serene expression and the same youthful face she had always possessed. To an outsider looking at them now, Corvany would have appeared only slightly older than Slot’s daughters, perhaps a young woman in her early twenties. But Slot had known her for forty-two years. He had watched his own beard turn white, his back grows heavy, and his hair start to disappear while Corvany remained disturbingly identical, untouched by the gears of time.
She did not even notice the mage’s arrival until his heavy footsteps approached the table. When Slot finally pulled back the chair, Corvany raised her eyes and welcomed him with the same warm familiar smile she had always worn. He collapsed into the chair with a low sigh, and silence returned, stretching comfortably between the two old friends for several more minutes.
Kritha quickly served the finest drink in the house. Slot raised the cup to his lips and savored the refined liquid, feeling the warmth descends through his throat and ease the strain left by the portal. While the silence lingered, the mage stared into the bottom of the glass and thought to himself that before leaving the island, he would somehow smuggle several barrels of that special vintage back to his farm. His personal cellar had been devastated the previous night, and he would need a proper reserve to compensate for Slit and Slat’s assault.
“The time has come, Slot.” Corvany’s voice cut through the silence of the hall with the precision of an ancient blade.
Slot froze with the glass halfway to his mouth. It was a sentence he had heard her repeat dozens, perhaps hundreds of times over the last forty-two years. Usually, those words came accompanied by a rough map spread across the table, a rumor whispered in a tavern in Stromgarde, or a strange clue regarding the Legion or the Scourge. It was the omen of yet another bizarre and surgical operation the Daring Blades would need to conduct behind Azeroth’s curtains.
But this time, the air inside the room changed. Slot tried to maintain eye contact with Corvany’s youthful face, yet the passive chronomantic pressure always surrounding her felt denser now, heavier, like a storm swollen with electricity. Her crimson eyes were no longer searching the horizon; they were searching for the old mage’s soul. Slot swallowed hard, realizing this was not a summons for another adventure. It was something final.
The Knot of Time (part 2)
“For the first time, I can tell you the truth without changing what is yet to come. I was born exactly two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five years ago,” Corvany continued, her voice carrying a cold almost mechanical cadence stripped of pride or nostalgia.
Slot blinked his one good eye, stunned. He opened his mouth to release one of his usual jokes to break the tension, but the words died in his throat. He had known Corvany for more than four decades and always understood there was something profoundly wrong with her relationship to time, but hearing the exact number spoken aloud carried the weight of a collapsing mountain.
“I was only a girl when the world as you know it began to be shaped,” she said, resting her delicate hands on the wooden table. “My family belonged to the Arathi bloodline. We were warriors and envoys used by King Thoradin to bind the wandering human tribes together. I was there when the first stones of Strom were raised upon the plains. My destiny was already decided. I would become a political bargain, a marriage arranged to seal peace between rival clans, or perhaps a sentinel on the borders against the Amani trolls. But time... time was stolen from me before I could live that life.”
Slot turned his gaze toward the sunset beginning to paint Valdrakken’s windows with melancholic orange light. He remained silent while his friend’s voice guided the tale toward the moment everything had changed.
“It happened during a cold night on the plains of Arathi,” Corvany narrated, her eyes seeming to reflect the fire of campfires extinguished thousands of years ago. “I was on a routine patrol near the edges of the encampment. The wind blew hard from the sea. Then, a short distance away, I saw a figure. A strange hooded silhouette that clearly did not belong there, vanishing between the trees with impossible speed. When I approached the place expecting to find a troll spy or a traitor, I found only disturbed earth. Half buried in the mud was a gem. A crude stone, poorly cut and poorly polished, pulsing with a dim crimson glow.”
She raised her right hand to the left side of her chest, touching the armor beneath her clavicle exactly where the hidden light rested.
“One touch was enough. In the millisecond my fingers brushed the stone, it melted. It became violent liquid heat climbing through my arm, burning my veins from the inside until it settled here. And then the world ended for me.”
Slot nervously tightened his fingers around the cup while Kritha, now completely silent, began bringing more bottles and platters of meat to the table, realizing that conversation would not end anytime soon.
“The gem did not grant me immediate power; it granted me eternity all at once,” Corvany continued. “My mind was shattered by countless futures. During the years that followed, I lived in absolute violent darkness. I could no longer distinguish the present from the future. I looked at King Thoradin and saw his skeleton buried beneath the earth; I looked at the leather tents of my tribe and saw white stone towers of kingdoms not yet born. I screamed for years, Slot. I abandoned my family, tore apart my noble garments, and became the Ghost of Strom, a ragged madwoman wandering the hills whispering incomprehensible prophecies about the end of the world and dragons falling from the sky. My mind only regained balance once the Empire of Arathor had already been consolidated and the Troll Wars had ended. I emerged from madness and discovered time had stopped for my body. I still carried the same young face. My friends had become elderly, my brothers were old, and I was an aberration. So, I vanished.”
From that point onward, Corvany’s speech ceased to feel like a recounting of events and became a raging river of memories flooding the table at the Roasted Ram. Afternoon surrendered to night, and night slowly marched toward the deepest hours before dawn while empty bottles and forgotten plates piled around the edges of the table.
Slot listened in a reverent trance for most of it, sometimes staring into the bottom of his drink, sometimes watching the shadows dancing across the stone walls. Through her words, he witnessed the rise and decline of the Empire of Arathor. He heard of the blood pact forged with the High Elves of Quel’Thalas and the destruction of the Amani Trolls. He saw how the nobility of Arathi, the final direct descendants of Corvany’s own bloodline, eventually abandoned old Stromgarde because of its exhausted soil and marched south through the frozen lands of Khaz Modan, crossing the mountains to colonize Elwynn Forest.
Corvany narrated the founding of Stormwind from its first crude wooden settlement to its transformation into the proud and imposing human kingdom the world knew. She detailed the agony of living thousands of lives within a single existence, adopting false names and pretending to be her own daughter or granddaughter so as not to arouse suspicion among short-lived mortals. She spoke of the pain of watching friends, lovers, and companions from ancient eras grow old, fall ill, and turn to dust while she herself remained static, frozen in time.
She relived the First War. She described the smell of burned flesh and the gray skies on the day the Orcish Horde crossed through the Dark Portal and reduced the Stormwind she had helped build into smoking ruins and ash. She spoke of reconstruction, of the birth of the Alliance, and of every cosmic cataclysm that had shaken Azeroth.
To Slot, every adventure, every battle, every mission in which he had fought and bled beside her throughout the years suddenly acquired a new meaning. What had once seemed to him like heroic quests or desperate world crises were, for Corvany, merely chess pieces upon a board spanning millennia. She had guided them through every danger, subtly shaping the smallest probabilities of fate to ensure the world would not collapse into one of the thousands of catastrophic timelines shown to her by the artifact embedded within her chest.
When the first bluish rays of dawn finally began slipping timidly through the cracks of Valdrakken’s windows, illuminating the silhouette of the Seat of the Aspects outside, Corvany’s voice at last fell silent. The hall was submerged in a heavy, almost sacred atmosphere.
Slot, his face weary and his brow furrowed beneath the weight of everything he had absorbed, cleared his throat. He stared at the empty bottle before him, ran a calloused hand through what remained of his gray hair, and after several long minutes of reflection asked the only question that truly mattered in the present.
“And why tell me all this now, Corvany? Why drag a sixty-year-old mage away from his failed vegetable garden just to unearth three thousand years of secrets?”
Corvany leaned slightly forward, and the reddish glow beneath her clavicle pulsed subtly through the fabric of her garments like a heart aware that its time was nearing its end.
Silence stretched for several more minutes. Slot realized she was searching for the best way to explain herself. He could see how painful it was for her, and so he waited.
“Why me, Corv?” Slot finally broke the lingering silence, using the old nickname only her closest friends still dared to utter. His voice sounded rougher than usual, worn down by the exhaustion of the night and the crushing weight of the revelation.
Corvany did not avert her gaze. The dim crimson glow beneath her clavicle pulsed in perfect synchrony with the silence of the tavern, casting a faint shadow across the wooden surface of the table.
“The object I carry in my chest does not give me exact answers, Slot. It throws me into an ocean of possibilities,” she explained, and for the first time that entire night, her voice faltered slightly, revealing a rare and subtle layer of vulnerability. “I do not see the future as a written book; I see an endless succession of probabilities. Meaningless things, distorted fragments of time, blurred faces, names that make no sense… until the moment they happen. Fifteen hundred years ago, amidst the chaos of one of those trances, the gem showed me you.”
Slot blinked his one good eye, his graying brow tightening.
“A young mage from a sheep farm who could barely cast a fire spell without scorching his own robes?” the old mage let out a nasal, self-deprecating laugh.
“Exactly.” Corvany offered the same warm smile she had always worn. “What the artifact showed me was not some legendary archmage with enough raw power to move mountains. Time does not care about Dalaran’s arcane might. It showed me someone with the exact traits, qualities, and ironically even the flaws I needed. Someone whose purity of spirit and ability to understand the suffering of others made him immune to cosmic greed. I saw in you the only anchor capable of resisting the temporal current and helping me, the Daring Blades, and all of Azeroth survive. I waited more than a thousand years to forge a new life within the same era as you, Slot. And I recruited you while you were still a boy because the fate of the world depended on your friendship.”
To any ordinary man, such an explanation would have sounded like the fantasy of a mind corrupted by centuries of isolation. But Slot was no ordinary man. He had spent the last forty-two years marching across the farthest reaches of Azeroth, confronting Old Gods, colossal demons, and cataclysms that tore the sky apart. He had witnessed the impossible happen too many times beside that woman for the truth to feel like anything other than inevitable.
The Knot of Time (part 3)
Slot looked down at his weathered hands, then at the bottles and plates scattered across the table, and finally at the friend who had walked beside him for an entire lifetime. His back protested with another sharp stab of pain, but he ignored it.
“And why now?” he asked the second question, his voice dropping into a tense whisper.
The atmosphere around them stagnated. The bluish dawn light filtering through the cracks of Valdrakken’s windows seemed to freeze in the air itself. Corvany leaned slightly forward. The surgical, unwavering gaze she had used to lead the guild for four decades returned with overwhelming force, yet behind that armor of cold control, Slot could finally see the monumental exhaustion of a soul that had carried the world upon its shoulders for three thousand years.
The answer came simple, direct, and stripped of dramatic flourish, perfectly in Corvany’s definitive style.
“Because the world will not survive if I continue to exist with this inside my body. It is time to seal this power within time itself, Slot.”
The impact of those words made the old mage’s stomach twist. The gem that had granted Corvany eternal life had become the trigger for the end of everything. Without needing further explanation, Slot understood that the forces gathering at the gates of Silvermoon and the Void lurking within the shadows of Midnight had sensed the artifact. Corvany’s very existence in the present had become the greatest threat to Azeroth. To save tomorrow, the cycle had to be closed; the power had to be ripped from flesh and returned to the past, locked inside an endless loop of time.
Slot felt his eyes sting with tears, a weakness he tried disguising by clearing his throat and adjusting the gray dreadlock across his scalp. He looked toward the horizon outside, where the sun had finally begun bathing the summit of the Seat of the Aspects in golden light, knowing that the calm silence hanging over empty Valdrakken was merely the prelude to the final storm.
“Who else knows about this?” Slot asked his third and final question, breaking the oppressive atmosphere with the practical necessity of a war veteran.
Corvany leaned back in her chair, and the chronomantic pressure surrounding her seemed to ease slightly, as though the confession of that night had removed a fraction of the burden she had carried for centuries.
“The old dragons, Alexstrasza, Nozdormu… and now you,” she replied quietly. “The Aspects of Life and Time are the only beings in Azeroth who know my true story, or at least the part they are permitted to know without tearing apart the fabric of the Sacred Timeline that protects this world.”
She paused, glancing toward the door leading back to the lower hall of the tavern.
“Veramoon has suspected something strange for a very long time,” Corvany continued. “Because of her deep connection to the Shadows and the time she carried Xal’atath’s dagger, she can sense the fluctuations around me. She knows fragments of the truth, but not the full extent of the cycle. And of course, the dwarves. Some of the elders, like Gondra and Dracma, logically understand there is something disturbingly immutable about both you and me, Slot, but they guard that knowledge like a secret of Khaz Modan. They do not know the entire story, but they understand the respect and gratitude that bind us together.”
Slot nodded silently, absorbing the names. He now understood the shape of the squad being assembled. The Daring Blades were being summoned to the summit of that tower not for another hunt for gold or glory, but to serve as anchors of reality in a blood ritual that would either free his friend from three thousand years of solitude… or destroy them all in the process.
The Weight of Anchors
The silence that settled over the table at the Roasted Ram after Corvany’s final answer felt almost solid. The golden light of morning now flooded the tavern hall completely, cutting through the lingering shadows and making the dozens of empty bottles gleam like rows of glass sentinels. Slot remained motionless, his brow furrowed and his heart beating to the dreadful rhythm of discovering that the very existence of his best friend was nothing less than a countdown to the end of the world.
Then, with the same casualness one might use to comment on the weather in the farms of Elwynn, Corvany straightened her posture, leaned back in her chair, and changed the subject entirely. The crushing chronomantic pressure suffocating the room vanished in the blink of an eye, shattered by a simple, ordinary question.
“And the girls?” she asked. “How are they doing?”
Slot blinked his one good eye, momentarily stunned by the abrupt transition. For a second, his mind wandered through the three thousand years of wars and paradoxes he had just heard about before awkwardly crashing back into the reality of his cluttered kitchen. He let out a nasal chuckle, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“Driving me insane, as usual,” the old mage grumbled, though the corner of his mouth curved into a genuine smile. “They show up at my house in the middle of the night without warning. They mess with everything, rummage through my books, empty my pantry of dried meats and fruit, annoy me until I lose my patience, and then disappear again just as fast as they came.”
Corvany laughed softly, a rare crystalline sound Slot had not heard in years.
“I told them to do exactly that,” she confessed, amusement glowing faintly in her crimson eyes. “If I didn’t send those two to wreak havoc on your farm and your life, you’d get used to that peaceful little existence of soft dirt and turnips far too quickly. And there are still adventures left for those old bones of yours, Slot.”
The mage instinctively straightened in his chair and puffed out his chest. The rheumatism in his lower back still protested from the portal journey, but the pride of a veteran forged through four decades of war spoke louder. Even old men wanted to appear capable of facing any danger when challenged by their commanders.
“Well, enough for now,” Corvany declared, rising from the table with the same immutable grace. “We should get some rest. It’s going to be a long day. Meet me at the tower at noon?”
Slot opened his mouth, countless new questions boiling in his mind, but he swallowed them. He knew that posture. There was no room for debate.
Besides, even though his thoughts burned with the secrets of the universe, there was not a single doubt in his heart about following Corvany straight into the depths of hell and beyond.
Kritha had already reserved rooms at the inn. Slot collapsed onto the soft mattress, but the little sleep he managed was restless and shallow. During the short morning nap, strange fragmented dreams haunted him: he saw himself walking through an Arathi he had never known, watching a younger version of himself burying red stones in the mud beneath a sky torn apart by dark rifts.
By the time the sun reached its zenith, Slot was already crossing the empty plazas of Valdrakken toward the base of the Seat of the Aspects. Standing beside Corvany, he looked up at the colossal structure stretching into the clouds. There were two things the draconic guards and attendants of that tower hated with visceral passion: adventurers landing directly on the terrace with flying mounts, and mages jumping from the top while casting Slow Fall purely for the pleasure of drifting through the air. To the dracthyr, both acts were a disrespectful waste of magic and a chronic insult to the sacred architecture of the place. Slot, naturally, had taken immense pride in belonging to the second category ever since his first visit to the Isles.
This time, however, they used the internal teleportation portal.
The moment the arcane light dissolved atop the tower, the immensity of the terrace revealed itself. Mountain winds swept across the summit, whipping the great banners of the Dragonflights. Up there, the Daring Blades’ welcoming committee was already waiting. Slot scanned the gathered figures and felt warmth spread across his chest as he recognized faces from an entire lifetime: the austere silhouette of Veramoon, wrapped in her familiar veil of shadows; the albino worgen Skall, whose predatory eyes watched the surroundings with savage focus; Oldhar the shaman, absent from the arenas for far too long; and the paladins Hales and Athidas, their sword hilts gleaming beneath the noon sun. Further back stood the grumpy Draann, shield already raised as if battle had begun inside his own head, while Dracma inspected everyone’s armor straps and Gondra checked over the rest. Nearby, the trio of dwarven hunters — Lourival, Bartolomeu, and Dora — adjusted the mechanisms of their rifles and harpoons.
There were newcomers as well. Several recruits from the Horde now wore the guild tabard, faces Slot still wasn’t entirely accustomed to seeing beneath the same banner. Most of those adventurers had absolutely no idea what was about to happen. They had answered the guild’s emergency call out of loyalty alone. The younger members stared with obvious awe and suspicion at the colossal draconic forms of Alexstrasza and Nozdormu resting near the edges of the terrace. The Aspects alone were an intimidating sight.
Without saying a word to the others, Corvany separated from Slot and walked toward the two great dragons. Apparently, everyone already had their own instructions and remained focused on them. The old mage observed from afar. Even for him — someone who had already witnessed nearly everything Azeroth had to offer — it was fascinating to see the subtle reverence those ancient magnificent beings showed when lowering their heads to speak with the forgotten daughter of Arathor.
Taking advantage of the moment, Slot approached the rest of the guild. The tense atmosphere that usually preceded a suicidal mission was immediately shattered by loud greetings and rough camaraderie. There were back slaps, bone-crushing hugs that made the mage’s spine crack audibly, and the usual internal jokes the Daring Blades wielded like shields against fear. Someone mocked the missing patch in Slot’s hair. Everyone instantly turned toward Hales, whose absurd military brush cut had always made him the guild’s favorite target for ridicule. The paladin immediately retaliated by accusing the dwarven hunters of spending more gold on bear feed than on armor repairs. It was their defense mechanism. The humor of the condemned.
At the center of the terrace, however, the serious work had already begun. Veramoon, Oldhar, Athidas, and Gondra stood positioned in a cross formation around an improvised cot carefully assembled from thick bear and arctic wolf pelts, surprisingly comfortable despite its appearance. The wind itself seemed to freeze when the Aspects assumed their mortal forms and walked beside Corvany back toward the center of the circle. The tension in the air reached its breaking point.
Corvany approached the cot. With calm movements, she loosened the straps of her black leather armor and let it fall onto the stone floor with a heavy thud. Wearing only a simple white silk shirt, she lay down upon the pelts. For the first time in the guild’s history, before the stunned eyes of everyone present, the strange structure embedded within her chest became visible. The thin silk could not conceal the crimson pulse of the artifact lodged beneath her left clavicle. It was impossible to stare at for too long without feeling the mind spiral into vertigo and madness. Several dwarves instinctively looked away; Veramoon clenched her jaw, enduring the pressure.
Slot stepped forward and knelt beside the cot on Corvany’s left. At the same instant, the healers and the Aspects raised their hands. The first protective spells began weaving through the air. Slot felt a wave of sacred and natural energy flood the terrace. The warmth of Athidas’s Light and the blessings of Skall and Oldhar were so intense that, for a brief moment, the old mage felt his body grow younger, the pains of age retreating before the tide of healing.
He lowered his gaze toward Corvany. She remained perfectly calm upon the pelts. One final question surfaced in his arcane mind.
“What’s the name of this artifact, Corv?” he whispered, hoping the object that had shaped human history carried a title worthy of its magnitude.
Corvany looked at him and smiled. The exact same smile she had worn forty-two years ago.
“I never bothered giving it one,” she replied calmly, her voice contrasting against the swelling hum of magic surrounding them.
The instant the intricate magical patterns of the Daring Blades merged with the temporal and life-giving power of the Aspects, a colossal burst of golden light exploded from Corvany’s chest. It was immense, mystical, blinding — and yet, by some impossible paradox, it did not hurt Slot’s eyes. The mage stretched out his trembling weathered hands toward the crimson gem embedded in flesh, preparing to seize it and begin the extraction.
But time did not wait.
Still vaguely aware of the world around him, before his fingers could fully close around the crimson metal, Slot heard the most horrifying sound any mortal could ever hear in Azeroth: the dry crack of glass shattering in a vacuum.
Dozens of violet and gray Void portals erupted simultaneously across the skies above Valdrakken, tearing open the clear heavens over the tower. From the dark ruptures came shadowed claws, aberrant nerubians, and the first advancing contingents of a colossal Void army descending upon the terrace at terrifying speed. Xal’atath had discovered the plan. The Void’s final assault had begun there. And now the Daring Blades stood between the salvation of their leader… and the total obliteration of the planet.
The Bond of Blood and Time (part 1)
The sky above the Seat of the Aspects cracked like tempered glass. The dry snap of space-time being torn apart was immediately swallowed by the deafening roar of dozens of violet and gray Void portals opening simultaneously. The ghostly calm of Valdrakken collapsed. But the Daring Blades were not ordinary adventurers who panicked before a cosmic ambush; they were a squad forged through forty years of chaos, and the group’s response was immediate, mechanical, and brutal.
At once, the two great protectors took the front line. On one side of the terrace, Hales drove his gleaming shield into the stone slabs, summoning a wall of golden consecration that halted the first wave of aberrant nerubians. On the other, the veteran dwarf Draann raised his axe, commanding the second platoon with the authority of the man who had taught Hales to become the hero he was today. Together, the two vanguard warriors coordinated the famous circular defensive positions — a tactic Corvany herself had designed and drilled relentlessly within the guild for moments of total siege.
Behind them, the rear line transformed into a scene of poetic destruction. Skall unleashed a savage echoing howl that raised the hairs on every dwarf upon the terrace — a sound blending the accumulated fury of her years in captivity with the ecstasy of battle. Her priestly garments whipped violently as two immense wings of golden light burst from her albino back. Floating several feet above the ground, the Worgen spread her mystical essence across her allies while channeling an endless bombardment of pure Light missiles, obliterating dozens of Void creatures at once.
Below her, the dwarven hunters — Lourival, Bartolomeu, and Dora — moved with terrifying synchronicity, firing and reloading their rifles and harpoons as though they were part of a single mechanism of perfectly calibrated annihilation. Dracma, clad in his iconic heavy white ornamented armor, spun his colossal forge hammer and became a whirlwind of metal capable of crushing any abomination foolish enough to breach the vanguard’s blockade. Along the edges of the terrace, dragons that had until then rested concealed within the shadows took flight, unleashing torrents of flame against the dark rifts that continued vomiting the invading army into existence.
At the center of the storm, Alexstrasza assumed command of the sacred ground, raising a barrier of living fire around the pelt-covered cot, isolating Corvany and Slot from the external battle. Within it, the four elite healers began the stabilization process. The contrast was absolute: Veramoon, wrapped in her shadow form, wove dark and heretical bindings to preserve Corvany’s physical integrity, while Gondra counterbalanced the atmosphere by channeling a torrent of pure Holy Light. Oldhar planted his healing totems into the stone floor while Athidas raised his most powerful magical barriers, linking the life force of the two old friends through an intricate web of healing. The remaining members of the guild, including the new Horde faces Slot had glimpsed earlier, attacked with coordinated fury, responding to the threat with the efficiency of a veteran army.
Then suddenly, the sound of the battlefield disappeared.
Nozdormu’s magic expanded across the summit of the tower, freezing time completely for everything outside Alexstrasza’s circle of flames. Skall’s Light missiles halted midair like suspended stars; the claws of Void monstrosities froze mere inches from the shields of Hales and Draann; dragonfire itself became sculptures of solid flame. The silence that followed was sepulchral. Empowered by the Aspect of Time’s mastery and by Slot’s hidden arcane lineage, a colossal rupture began opening before the cot. An unstable, dark, and profound portal pointing toward the plains of Arathi nearly three thousand years in the past.
Feeling the weight of the moment, Slot knelt beside Corvany’s left side. His old trembling hands stretched toward her chest. The instant his fingers crossed the invisible barrier of her aura and touched the gem embedded within flesh, reality itself seemed to twist.
Corvany’s pain was immediate and excruciating. Without her black leather armor, wearing only the silk shirt, her body convulsed violently atop the pelts of bear fur. It felt as though every century of her immortality was being ripped from her ribs together with her heart. When Slot closed his hands around the artifact and began pulling, the impact nearly made him lose consciousness. It did not feel like he was holding a magical stone; it felt as though he carried half the physical mass of Azeroth within his palms. The weight of three millennia of accumulated futures unleashed a violent temporal voltage that raced through his arms, burning through his mana channels.
Dazed by the shared suffering with Corvany and by the agony climbing through his own bones, Slot shut his eye by pure instinct.
“Don’t close your eyes, Slot.”
Corvany’s voice echoed inside his mind, a vivid memory from the confidential conversation they had shared the previous night in the tavern’s upper hall.
“You cannot lose yourself in the darkness of the nexus. You need to see what’s happening around you in order to orient yourself, or the flow of time will scatter your pieces across the ages.”
Slot forced his eyelid open again, facing the horror of reality unfolding in slow motion. Before his one good eye, the world remained frozen, but his own body had already begun suffering the distortions of the portal. He saw arcane energy fragmenting around him, the healing weaves of Athidas, Veramoon, Skall, and Oldhar stretching like luminous elastic threads ready to snap while trying to keep him whole. He was being pulled, dragged toward the dark rupture of Arathor while the artifact remained firmly trapped within his grasp.
Amidst that shared agony, with Corvany’s torso arched in suffering and the storm of the Void frozen across the heavens like a nightmare painting, Slot’s mind made an absurd unexpected turn. Feeling his physical structure being stretched apart by chronomantic forces, the old mage thought about the upholstered and absurdly comfortable armchair he had recently purchased for his farm outside Stormwind. As the portal consumed him, he genuinely wondered whether his ruined lower back would survive the impact of that journey, or whether his torso would simply disintegrate before he ever had the chance to sit in it again.
The fall into the portal was not a descent, but a fragmentation. The instant the chronomantic rupture swallowed Slot, the concepts of above and below ceased to exist. He was hurled into something resembling a black hole, an abyss without borders where the fabric of space and time stretched to the edge of rupture. The cosmic strangeness of that non-place was indescribable: absolute darkness was sliced apart by filaments of violent distorted light, and the silence was so dense Slot could hear the echo of his own thoughts before fully forming them. He realized that perhaps the crimson artifact within his hands truly was exactly that — a fragment ripped from a stellar collapse or an anomaly that had once existed somewhere forgotten in the cosmos, an answer neither he nor the world would ever know.
Then the vortex ceased spinning sideways and began marching backward. Time broke its chains and started flowing in reverse, parading the living history of Azeroth before his single good eye.
The first visions to emerge from the abyss were the most recent ones, bathed in black blood and the dust of Dornogal. Slot found himself floating through a fractured mosaic of the depths beneath the earth. He once again saw the subterranean cities carved from stone, the armies of aberrant nerubians, and the colossal halls where the Void had begun whispering its first heresies into the world. But what truly shocked the old mage was the prism through which those images were projected: he was not seeing history through his own eyes, but through Corvany’s analytical perception.
Through her mind, Slot witnessed the terrible truth behind the guild’s battles. For the Daring Blades, death was the definitive end; if they fell before a monster, that timeline collapsed into irreversible catastrophe. But the artifact embedded in Corvany’s chest acted as a hidden safety net. Horrified and fascinated, Slot watched dozens of failed ruptures in reality. He saw himself split in half, saw the vanguard fail, and watched the entire guild be annihilated in previous attempts. In silence, within the darkness of her own consciousness, Corvany witnessed every terrible death of her friends, absorbed the trauma of failure, and, using the energy of the gem, pulled reality back to the beginning of the battle. She corrected mistakes subtly, inch by inch, until the perfectly correct version finally happened and the guild emerged victorious, believing they had succeeded on the first attempt.
The temporal carousel continued spinning backward, dragging him out of the underground depths and hurling him back into the skies above Valdrakken. The Dragon Isles reemerged in the blink of an eye, alive and majestic. He saw the great dragonflights flying in reverse, the elemental storms that had nearly torn the islands apart retreating back into the heavens, and the massive Titan monuments sealing themselves shut in reverse order.
Soon afterward, the flow of images became blurred, chaotic, and violent. Time slowed as it crossed the threshold of the realm of death. There, the crimson gem lost its bearings. Being an artifact bound to the physical world, Corvany’s power could neither map nor predict what happened within those gray and gothic lands of the afterlife. For Corvany, that era had been a blind nightmare, where she and Veramoon had been forced to march alone as passengers of an uncertain fate. The rest of the Daring Blades had barely set foot in that place, spared from the madness of those halls filled with essence-draining horrors. Corvany and Veramoon bled in the dark, doing just enough to force reality back onto its proper axis, guiding the world out of death through instinct and sheer willpower.
The clock of the world continued turning backward, wiping away the blur of death and restoring the warmth of Azeroth. Slot saw the planet’s wounds closing. He witnessed the moment the world had nearly been purified by the mechanical flames of the Titans. The visions crossed the scorching sands of Uldum and the frozen halls of Ulduar in the far north, where the reorigination protocol had nearly reduced all biological life to its base elements. He relived the march against the great dragon with metal wings who had torn the continents apart during the Cataclysm. He saw the desperate war against the Burning Legion, the army of green demons that crossed the skies, and the moment the heroes imprisoned the Dark Titan upon the Seat of the Pantheon. Every great worldly crisis paraded backward before him, and Slot realized the crushing weight of the artifact was diminishing. The gem was leaking. Because it traveled in the reverse direction of time, the energy accumulated over three millennia was peeling away from it, scattering sparks of light into the void to mark the trail back home.
The speed increased. Time crossed the frozen plains of Northrend, where the Lich King and his cursed crown commanded legions of undead, and then leapt into the floating crimson skies of Outland, the shattered world beyond the Dark Portal. Until, at last, the torrent reached the decades of relative peace during which the Daring Blades had been founded. Slot saw the moment he himself — an eighteen-year-old boy fresh from a sheep farm — received the guild tabard from Corvany’s hands.
And then the film of his own existence rewound into the years of his childhood. Time slowed as it passed through the outskirts of Stormwind some fifty-five years earlier. The city stood proud, peaceful, and intact beneath the sunlight.
Through the symbiotic link with the gem, Slot witnessed a scene he had never imagined possible. He saw Corvany herself, bearing the same youthful face as always, hidden behind the fence of the sheep farm where he had grown up. She watched a small human boy with red cheeks and messy hair running clumsily after a lamb. The little boy — who was Slot himself — tripped over his own feet and received a perfectly aimed and comical headbutt from the animal, falling backward into the mud and bursting into tears. In the vision, Corvany raised a hand to her mouth, suppressing a genuine laugh while wiping a tear of amusement from the corner of her eye before retreating back into the shadows of Elwynn Forest. She had already been watching him, protecting the anchor that would one day save her destiny. The warm glimpse passed like lightning, granting Slot a breath of air amidst so much agony.
Then the void returned. Time surpassed Slot’s birth, and the old mage became an invisible witness to the deep past, plunging toward the dawn of humanity. He saw the Orcs marching backward through the Dark Portal toward their dying world. He witnessed the first tragic destruction of Stormwind happening in reverse, ashes becoming flames and flames rebuilding the original wooden homes. He saw the Arathi nobility marching northward in reverse formation, crossing the frozen mountains of Khaz Modan back toward the lands of their ancestors.
As the chronomantic abyss approached the beginning of Corvany’s story, the storm of time slowed drastically. The fall became a suspended and heavy glide, focusing upon the centuries that had shaped that woman’s immortality.
Through the blood-bound attunement of the gem, Slot first witnessed the era of stabilization and withdrawal. He saw her, already aware of the anomaly within her body, isolating herself from the human tribes. He saw the exact moment when Corvany’s mind finally developed calluses against future visions and the chaos within her thoughts at last fell silent. It was the era in which she understood, with cold and surgical terror, the true price of her newfound power: her body had become immutable. She was condemned to watch the flow of time pass over every mortal except herself.
At that point, the reverse descent accelerated abruptly, and Slot felt profound gratitude for that cosmic haste. The carousel of ages began spinning too quickly, transforming the following years into an indistinguishable blur of light and shadow. The old mage closed his eyes, relieved not to perceive the details. He respected Corvany too deeply to violate the intimacy of her past lives. He did not need to see the loves she had cultivated in secret, the families she had watched grow old and die beneath false names, or the devastating losses that had shaped the cold and focused shell she wore in the present. Those pains belonged to her alone, and time itself granted the mercy of keeping them locked within darkness.
But the descent continued rewinding, and time slowed once again, dragging Slot into the darkest period of his friend’s existence: the years of darkness and madness.
There, Slot witnessed true hell. He saw Corvany in her youth, a ragged human girl with utterly lost and soulless eyes wandering like a ghost through the steppes of Arathi. Her mind had been shattered by the paradox of the gem. Slot watched her scream in agony in the middle of the night, clawing at her own flesh while being bombarded by visions of catastrophic futures she could not comprehend. She looked upon the warriors of her tribe and saw nothing but rotting corpses; she looked upon untouched grasslands and saw rivers of blood from wars that would not occur for millennia. Corvany’s madness was the violent defense mechanism of a human mind struggling not to explode beneath the voltage of three thousand years of history. To see that proud commander reduced to a catatonic wanderer drawing meaningless maps in the mud and speaking to the wind tightened Slot’s heart with a pain no healing magic could ever ease.
As the leaking energy of the artifact reached its peak, the crimson gem became almost weightless in his hands, shedding the final remnants of its future power. The image of the insane Corvany dissolved into the air. The first stone foundations of ancient Strom shrank and vanished into the earth. Forests became saplings, and the world around him brightened beneath a clean dawn. The walls of the cosmic abyss dissolved into mist, and the primitive scent of wet grass, untouched soil, and wild wind invaded his senses. The steppes of Arathi, in their most savage, virgin, and dangerous era, awaited him on the other side of the rift.
The Bond of Blood and Time (part 2)
The transition between the abstract abyss of time and the physical solidity of the Arathi steppes struck Slot with the force of a brutal impact devoid of logic. When his boots sank into the tall damp grass of nearly three thousand years ago, the first sensation was that of untouched nature. The air filling his lungs possessed the cutting purity of a world not yet scarred by great stone cities, goblin industries, or the wounds of war magic. It was a young planet. Yet the space around him refused to accept his presence peacefully. Slot did not belong to that era, and the fabric of reality reacted to his intrusion with severe and terrifying distortion.
His movements became a nightmare of chronomantic dissonance. The simple act of taking a step forward became an ordeal: one instant gravity condensed around him, freezing his body within suffocating slow motion where the wind itself moved like thick smoke; the next millisecond reality compensated violently, hurling him several meters ahead before he could even feel the weight of his own muscles. The danger of being disintegrated by the inertia of time itself lingered with every inch he advanced. If he lost focus, his particles would scatter across the folds of the ages.
Even amidst that broken choreography, an invisible force pulled his arms toward a specific direction. The crimson gem, leaking mystical energy backward through history, behaved like a magnetic organism desperate to reunite with its original host. The artifact dictated the path, dragging the mage through the oscillations of the wild landscape.
During one of those unpredictable convulsions of time, Slot’s body was hurled violently forward. He crashed to his knees in the churned mud of a small clearing, the impact tearing a groan from his ribs. The raw gem slipped from his fingers, rolled across the dark earth, and buried itself partially within the mud, its crimson pulse becoming a faint and timid glow beneath the weak light of that primitive dawn.
Slot tried to breathe, but the air froze in his throat when the rough sound of branches snapping echoed only a few meters away. Through the low mist of the steppes, a human silhouette approached with measured steps.
It was Corvany.
The sight of that young woman — stripped of the cold shell, the ornate armor, and the veteran gaze he had known for more than four decades — brought a wave of instinctive panic. She wore simple leather and bronze garments, her hair carried by the wind, a hunting dagger raised defensively as she patrolled the borders against predators or troll spies. Desperate not to shatter the sacred order of events, Slot concentrated the remnants of his arcane energy and cast his invisibility spell. Light bent around his silhouette as he dragged himself painfully into the dark shelter of the nearest foliage, hiding among the roots of an ancient tree.
From there, protected beneath the veil of the spell, he witnessed the beginning of everything.
Corvany stopped at the edge of the clearing. Her eyes scanned the perimeter with native suspicion. She searched for the mysterious silhouette her instincts had sensed within the mist — the same hooded figure she would describe centuries later at an empty table in Valdrakken. Finding nothing but the whisper of wind through the grass, she relaxed her combat stance and sheathed the crude dagger. She took two slow steps forward and froze abruptly. Her gaze fixed upon the ground. There, resting in the damp soil he himself had disturbed moments earlier, lay the gem.
The young woman bent down. Her hand extended, fingers mere millimeters from touching the rough surface of the stone.
Within the darkness of the forest, Slot’s mind reached the edge of sanity. The duality of the moment crushed his chest with the weight of a poorly sharpened blade. Before his eyes stood the opportunity to alter destiny. One spell, one shout, a single step forward to break invisibility and pull that girl away. He could save her from the hell he knew would follow: the years of darkness, the screams in the night no one would understand, the lonely madness of Strom, and the unbearable burden of watching every loved one age and turn to dust while she remained unchanged. The desire to spare his best friend from that millennial agony burned through his muscles.
Yet the opposite side of that choice was the abyss. Preventing Corvany meant erasing the timeline that guaranteed Azeroth’s survival. It meant extinguishing the bonds, victories, and friendships of the guild she herself would one day found to save the world. Saving the girl kneeling in the mud meant condemning billions of innocents to the darkness of the Void. The anguish of that impossible decision paralyzed the mage, an internal war fought within the silence of the primitive clearing.
At the same time, Slot felt the constant pressure of a subtle bond tethering him to tomorrow. Since stepping into Arathi, a thin pulsating line of energy had anchored itself to his chest, extending deep into the temporal rupture. It was not an ordinary spell; it was a mystical umbilical cord woven together by the life force of his companions in the present. He could feel the warm protective pulse of Gondra, the rhythmic density of Oldhar’s totems, Athidas’s unwavering shield, and the dark barrier of Veramoon’s shadow form, all wrapped within Nozdormu’s golden bindings. They sustained his existence in the past, keeping his molecules together while reality itself attempted to reject him.
The agony of choice was interrupted when the memory of Corvany’s definitive words from the previous night echoed through his mind like an order that accepted no argument:
“Return as quickly as you can, Slot. Every additional second of your presence in the past can destroy everything we built.”
Before his mind could formulate a decision or his feet could yield to the impulse to intervene, the magical cord bound to his chest snapped taut with brutal violence. Veramoon’s Leap of Faith, empowered by the mystical energy of the Shadows from atop the tower, activated. The pull was so devastating the air was ripped instantly from his lungs. Slot’s invisible body was torn backward out of the vegetation and dragged into the vortex at the exact millisecond young Corvany’s fingers closed around the crimson gem in the mud.
The return was a blur of intolerable speed and physical suffering. Slot was dragged through the vacuum horizon of the temporal rift. The portal operated in a violent centripetal motion, crushing matter into a chaotic spiral of pure light and shadow as it pulled him back. His consciousness faltered, floating between the agony of overheated mana channels and complete oblivion. His bones burned, and constant pain throbbed behind his blind eye. All space around him rotated beneath crushing force, as though the universe itself were grinding his old bones apart to return them to the present.
With a deafening crack, the edge of the portal in Valdrakken spat the mage back out. He emerged from the cosmic turbulence in a spiraling arc of golden light, hurled high above the terrace in slow motion beneath the stunned eyes of the guild before the gravity of the Dragon Isles reclaimed him.
Slot crashed heavily against the cold stone slabs of the Seat of the Aspects, collapsing like a true sack of shattered bones. The instant he struck the ground, the static silence imposed by Nozdormu shattered. The sound of the world returned in an explosion of adrenaline and chaos. The clamor of battle against the forces of the Void, the metallic crashes of Hales’s and Draann’s defenses, Skall’s Light missiles, and the screams of the nerubians all resumed at full speed. He had returned to the center of hell. The cycle was sealed, the gem no longer existed there, but the physical price of walking between eras exacted its tribute from every inch of his exhausted body.
The impact against the cold stone slabs of the Seat of the Aspects broke several of Slot’s ribs with a dry crack, tearing the last remnants of air from his lungs. His head slammed hard against the floor during the fall, opening a deep gash across his brow that immediately sent a warm trail of blood down his graying face. Slot blinked hard, clearing his blurred vision. His instincts from forty-two years of warfare took control before the pain could even settle.
He tried planting his calloused hands against the ground to stand, but his exhausted body refused the command. Above him, the shadow of a gigantic nerubian abomination loomed against the sunlight, raising a colossal dark carapace claw that descended like a guillotine toward his head. In that millisecond of vulnerability, a sharp irony crossed the mage’s mind: it was almost hilarious to think that after crossing cosmic portals, surviving Old Gods, and walking through three thousand years of human history, he would end his days crushed beneath the claws of a malformed giant crab.
By pure muscular reflex, Slot reached for his mana channels. To his surprise, the journey back through the vortex had completely replenished his reserves with an energy of strange texture, cold and dense. He channeled that force to erect a barrier of frozen air around himself, already knowing deep within that the crystalline shield would never be enough to withstand the destruction descending from above.
The killing blow, however, never reached him.
A violent metallic crash echoed across the terrace when the monster’s attack was blocked at the final instant by a heavy war shield. Slit stood there, boots planted firmly into the stone, sustaining the impact of the claw through the sheer strength of a veteran warrior. A confident smile spread across her thin lips, and her strange black eyes, with the dark sclera inherited from Aunt Veramoon, glimmered with the reflections of the explosions around them. Her hair was tied into two short upward braids, giving her the appearance of a mischievous girl — which was exactly what she was.
“Hi, Daddy!” Slit exclaimed, shoving the shield forward with a violent thrust that staggered the nerubian backward.
Before Slot could respond, he felt his body lift gently, wrapped and elevated by luminous strands of green magic and healing mists. The pain in his ribs gave way to comforting warmth. He looked behind him and saw Slat. Unlike her twin sister, she possessed a noticeably more human appearance and smaller pointed ears framed by thick braids streaked with black and green. Slat maintained a serious expression, her voice lacking her sister’s relaxed warmth, though carrying the exact same hidden concern beneath its urgency.
“Get up, old man,” Slat ordered, fists raised in the posture of a monk. “We need you here.”
Slot planted his feet against the ground, feeling the blood from his brow begin to clot. His adventurer’s mind, forged through hundreds of suicidal encounters, activated almost automatically, scanning the battlefield to read the lines of force across the terrace.
A few meters away, the undead warlock Grimbones — whose entrance into the guild Slot had once regarded with such suspicion — channeled heretical rituals, opening massive portals from which Daring Blades reinforcements emerged. From the dark rifts came a gigantic scarred bear, Bigboom’s relentless defensive form, advancing like a mountain of flesh against the lines of the Void. Beside it leapt a giant cat ready to tear enemies apart with frenzied claws: Annamoon, the younger aunt of his daughters, entering the flank of the creature Slit had just repelled. Other allies crossed through the arcane portals — brightly haired gnomes hurling spells and wielding swords beside dwarves from every combat discipline.
But what truly surprised the old mage was what emerged from the opposite side of the terrace. There, crossing through the portals beneath greenish tabards resembling those of the guild, marched the contingent of the Outcasts — the second guild Corvany had secretly founded upon the Horde side three decades earlier. They were the same warriors from the past, but now older, more mature, and deadlier. Slot recognized a troll woman whose skin was dark as night, perhaps the last of her lineage in Azeroth, advancing side by side with a Haranir bard, equally unique in this world. The mage calculated the tactical implications in silence; Alliance and Horde stood upon the same stone beneath Corvany’s banner. They would resist the assault for as long as necessary.
Safe behind the defensive perimeter, Slot turned his gaze toward the cot of pelts to check on his best friend. Corvany was already standing. She had hastily strapped her black leather armor back across her torso, fastening only enough to protect herself from the imminent combat; Slot knew very well this was no time to waste adjusting buckles. The four healers who had sustained both their physical integrity during the temporal ritual — Veramoon in shadow form, Gondra balancing with the Light, Oldhar and Athidas — were visibly exhausted, their hands trembling from the strain of the nexus, yet they still turned toward the battlefield, summoning their final shields and totems to help however they could.
Suddenly, near Corvany, a hidden mechanical portal exploded open with an engineering whine Slot himself had created long ago with his magic and gnomish engineering — and had completely forgotten about. From within the contraption emerged an imposing undead figure clad in ancient worn armor of the Arathorian Empire mixed with the faded rags of the Dark Rangers. The instant the Forsaken warrior stepped onto the terrace, an enormous swarm of giant spiders burst from the rifts around him, instantly forming a circular and impenetrable defensive phalanx around Corvany, prepared to attack any threat approaching the mortal human. Slot smiled faintly; Corvany would be safe as well.
Freed from the burden of doubt, the old mage concentrated upon the strange and cold mana of time pulsing through his veins, channeling it into his element of mastery. He raised his weathered hands toward the sky and unleashed true arctic hell upon the armies of the Void. Rays of absolute frost tore through the air, shattering gigantic monsters into blocks of solid ice; torrential storms of razor-sharp crystals descended upon the violet portals, and spheres of extreme cold ripped apart the skin, flesh, and bones of the abominations attempting to break through the vanguard’s defensive line.
At his side, freed from the burden of three thousand years of forced immortality, Corvany advanced. She seemed to float amidst the chaos, spinning through the air in her classic deadly dance of combat while her iconic crimson daggers flew in every direction, harvesting enemy ranks with the precision of someone who was finally master of her own destiny.
The battle dragged on for an impossible span of time to measure. Atop the Seat of the Aspects, minutes and hours blended into a single chaotic mass of adrenaline, magic, steel, and blood; time itself flowed differently within the heat of a battle for survival, and for Slot it became impossible to tell how much remained of that day. Even sustained by the strange and cold chronomantic mana his channels had absorbed from the temporal vortex, the old mage’s body eventually began demanding payment for his audacity. Physical, mental, and magical exhaustion collapsed upon his sixty-year-old shoulders like an avalanche. His legs trembled beneath his torn and scorched traveling cloak, and every frost spell he conjured to shatter nerubians seemed to tear away a fragment of his own life force. The Daring Blades and their allies continued fighting side by side, but exhaustion had become universal.
It was at the absolute limit of everyone’s endurance that the sky above Valdrakken changed. At the center of the terrace, a thick violet Void rift exploded open with a deafening crack like thunder striking far too close, far larger than any of the other portals infesting the battlefield. From it, floating with macabre elegance, emerged Xal’atath.
The Harbinger of the Void hovered above the battlefield, observing the massacre below with her characteristic ironic disdain. Her strange eyes crossed the field, completely ignoring her own pawns as they were torn apart by imperial spiders and the blades of the united adventurer forces. Xal’atath fixed her gaze upon Slot for several long seconds. She tilted her head slightly to one side — that strange almost feline and perfectly mechanical gesture the Ren’dorei elves tended to make, a tic she must have inherited from the mortal body she now possessed. Then, with the slightest shake of her head, she dismissed the old mage’s importance. To the cosmic entity, he was nothing more than an irrelevant detail.
Her scrutinizing gaze finally found Corvany.
At the subtle command of the Harbinger, the Void troops retreated several meters, opening an isolated corridor at the center of the terrace. Xal’atath floated closer, shortening the distance. Corvany, who had sensed the enemy’s presence from the very first millisecond, remained firm atop the cot of pelts, gripping her crimson daggers with the same surgical rigidity as always.
“Ah, what a pity, girl,” Xal’atath’s voice echoed through the air, melodic, cold, and laden with theatrical disappointment. “You were promising…”
The villain cast a look of complete disdain accompanied by an ironic smile and a condescending shrug. She waved her hand lightly, dismissing the very existence of the human woman as though brushing dust from an old piece of furniture.
“You no longer mean anything to me.”
Corvany’s response did not come in measured words, but through pure reflexive steel. Her hands moved with terrifying speed, hurling the crimson daggers directly toward the enemy’s skull, aiming precisely for the strange violet void within those eyes.
“You haven’t lost yet…” Corvany hissed, her voice cutting through the wind as the blades sliced through the air.
But Xal’atath vanished before the metal could touch her flesh. Like the grinning cat from ancient mortal fables, the Ren’dorei elf’s physical form dissolved into the void, though the lingering illusion of her ironic smile remained floating for a second while Corvany’s daggers passed harmlessly through empty air. A loud, shrill, deeply irritating laugh echoed through the walls of the tower, slowly fading until it vanished completely. She was gone.
After the Harbinger’s departure, the flow of enemies diminished drastically. Xal’atath had not bothered using even the slightest fragment of her power to aid her own army; she had simply turned her back and abandoned her pawns to be destroyed by the Daring Blades. Slot observed the scene with heavy breathing, sweat mixing with the blood from his brow. Without the reinforcement of the portals, the battle was decided within minutes. The remaining monsters were cornered and obliterated by the combined fury of both factions.
With the end of combat, ordinary reality reclaimed its weight. Alexstrasza released a melancholic roar, shifted into her colossal dragon form, and rose heavily into the skies, circling the terrace to gather and mourn her draconic children who had fallen in battle. Nozdormu, maintaining his enigmatic silence, merely stepped backward, crossed through a small temporal portal, and disappeared from the present, leaving mortals alone with the consequences of their choices.
Slot attempted to take a step toward Corvany. He wanted to congratulate her, wanted to ask whether she was whole, but his legs simply gave way beneath him. The strange current of mana vanished from his channels all at once. The old mage’s body shut down completely before he could even hit the stone floor.
On the path toward darkness and total unconsciousness, Slot felt only a deep and selfish sense of relief. As his eyes closed, his final thought was that, thankfully, he would not be the one responsible for dismantling the entire post-battle chaos. He would not have to deal with the return portals, the cleaning of blood from the terrace, the healing of the wounded, or the painful preparation of the bodies of the friends who had fallen in the final battle. The world could wait. The old mage needed to sleep.
Epilogue: The Only Certainty
A persistent beam of sunlight cut through the crack in the heavy curtain, striking directly across Slot’s face. The warmth of the morning was enough to pull him from sleep, but the old mage forced himself to keep his eyelids closed. He remained motionless beneath the sheets, trying to reorient his senses. The familiar scent of his daughters lingered subtly through the room’s air; they were no longer there, but the traces of riding boots and the smell of leather revealed they had passed through the chamber recently.
His mouth was completely dry, carrying a bitter taste that made him calculate he had been unconscious for at least two full days. Mentally, Slot performed a quick inspection of every joint and bone in his body to ensure everything still remained in place after the fall atop the tower. He knew that the moment he dared to move, a devastating headache would strike him. As he touched his forehead, he felt the rough texture of a bandage tightly wrapped around his skull, covering the cut on his brow and completely concealing his injured left eye. He kept his head buried against the pillow, curling himself as much as possible so as not to reveal he had awakened.
His simulation of sleep, however, did not last long. Corvany’s presence within the dimness of the room was silent, but her patience had run out.
“Come on, Slot. Open that eye already. We don’t have all the time in the world.”
Her voice sliced through the room with its usual firmness. Slot blinked his right eye, pretending the sluggishness of someone who had only just returned from unconsciousness, but the trick convinced no one.
“You’ve been lying there for four days already,” Corvany continued, arms crossed. “The girls lost patience waiting for you to wake up and left for the battlefronts. Same as the rest of the adventurers.”
The mage dragged his body backward with a low groan, resting his back against the wooden headboard. Just as expected, the pulse of the migraine struck his temple like one of Dracma’s hammer blows. He stretched a calloused hand toward the bedside table and picked up a silver goblet filled to the brim. It was chilled water infused with the special yellow wine of the dragons that Kritha kept locked away in the tavern’s vaults. Slot drank the refined liquid deeply, feeling the citrus burn soothe the dryness in his throat. While savoring the flavor, his farmer’s mercantile instincts quickly calculated how many gold coins he would need to smuggle an entire crate of those bottles into his pantry.
“Is everyone alright?” Slot asked, his voice emerging rough from four days of disuse.
Corvany nodded, though her expression remained serious.
“Most survived,” she answered, approaching the window. “Truth be told, nobody dies in combat when you have that albino Worgen in the rear guard.”
Slot acknowledged with a painful nod. He looked toward Corvany and, for the first time in the forty-two years they had marched together across Azeroth, he managed to sustain her gaze for a prolonged moment, staring directly into his friend’s face. The suffocating vertigo that once repelled ordinary people no longer existed; the passive chronomantic pressure had vanished together with the gem. Corvany displayed the faintest trace of satisfaction at the corner of her lips; it was a relief to finally look into the eyes of her oldest friend without causing him pain.
The doubts tormenting Slot since his return through the portal began surfacing. He did not need to ask about the ritual or the journey through time; the symbiotic bond they had shared within the vortex ensured both of them knew every detail of the extraction and delivery of the gem in Arathor. Slot felt monumental relief at not needing to recount the pain of that journey. His questions now concerned what he had witnessed during the battle after his fall.
“That cadaverous ranger leading the spiders…” Slot searched through the fragmented memories of combat, frowning. “I vaguely remember seeing the robes of that undead when we walked through the ruined halls of Stratholme many years ago. Was it really him?”
Corvany confirmed with a slight nod.
“I remember he seemed completely lost and directionless back then,” the mage continued, a crooked smile emerging through the gray strands of his beard. “Apparently that mechanical portal contraption I designed in the past finally served some purpose.”
Corvany smiled as well, a soft expression contrasting against the rough leather armor she wore.
“Vaelnor Therym. He was a ranger in Arathor,” she explained, turning her gaze toward the Seat of the Aspects outside. “He was the man who cared for me during my darkest years upon the steppes, when my mind was nothing but darkness and madness. He kept me alive, fed, and protected for decades while I was only a wandering shell. When my sanity finally began stabilizing, he tried to remove the artifact from my chest while I slept, believing he was saving me. The gem destroyed him instantly. I buried him in that era, in soil from the region that centuries later would become the northern kingdom and eventually the ruins beneath the Undercity.”
She paused briefly, and the tone of her voice darkened.
“When the Val’kyr began raising the Forsaken for the Banshee Queen’s armies, he was brought back to life by mistake. He awakened in this century with almost no memories of the past remaining, aside from the ancient bond he shared with me and little else. I still need to help him find the answers he seeks… but that will only happen once all of this is over.”
Slot remained silent, absorbing the revelation. He would have liked to ask more questions, to unravel the three thousand lives Corvany had lived and the intricate web of allies and small actions she had carefully orchestrated, but he knew his friend well; there would not be many detailed answers unless the loss of the gem had drastically altered her reserved nature — which clearly did not seem to be the case. He shifted focus, searching for the only answer that truly mattered to his heart as a friend.
“And you, Corv? Are you alright?”
The question carried far more weight than simple physical health, and Corvany knew it. Slot was asking about the end of her static immortality, about the sudden silence inside a mind no longer bombarded by thousands of catastrophic futures, and about the terrifying reality of becoming an ordinary human.
“I waited nearly three thousand years for this moment, Slot,” she answered, staring directly at him. “Yes. I’m alright.”
Before the mage could fully process the relief of that response, Corvany followed it with the bluntness typical of a military commander.
“And you? When do you intend to get out of that bed? What remains of our forces is already marching toward the lands of the blood elves.”
She took two steps toward the door and continued without looking back.
“We are no longer that enormous guild from the past. The truth is, the Daring Blades of old no longer exist. What remains is merely a handful of grumpy veterans who stayed active, allies from other fronts, and young recruits with enormous potential who desperately need guidance from the older generation. We’ll act the way we always have, Slot. From the edges, trimming the world’s rough corners and steering the mass of adventurers in the right direction. This next battle against the Void will be decisive, and we won’t have the artifact’s visions to tell us which path to choose anymore. We’ll need you and your experience to guide the novices. Few of us remain capable of doing that.”
Slot released a heavy sigh and nodded. He glanced around the tavern room and noticed a finely tailored set of white robes with intricate dark patterns draped across a wooden chair.
“The Ren’dorei wove those garments,” Corvany informed him, a faint trace of irony in her voice. “The girls bought them for you before they left.”
Slot shook his head, the bad temper of sixty years instantly returning to his tone as he adjusted himself beneath the sheets.
“What nonsense… now those two have decided they can choose my clothes as well. I’m not wearing those flashy robes like some pompous Dalaran mage.”
Corvany had already reached the doorknob, possessing absolutely no patience for the domestic complaints of her companion-in-arms. But the instant she moved to leave, a violent burning stab erupted across the left side of Slot’s head, directly within the useless eye hidden beneath the bandage.
The old mage released a muffled groan, bringing his fingers to his face. He lifted the cloth covering the blind eye and blinked against the light. Corvany stopped in the doorway, turning sharply after sensing the sudden magical fluctuation.
“What is it, Slot?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
Slot kept his fingers pressed against his temple, feeling the burning gradually subside. When he looked toward her through that vision which should not have functioned, the world around him did not fragment into thousands of chaotic paths the way it had with Corvany’s ancient artifact. There were no doubts and no probabilities. The lingering chronomantic energy that had burned his eye within the vortex had transformed into the opposite gift of Corvany’s curse: Certainty.
For one single clear second, Slot did not see the exhausted Corvany standing in the doorway. He saw a definitive and crystalline image of tomorrow: Corvany standing victorious at the center of a shattered battlefield while the heretical form of Xal’atath lay completely defeated, broken, and collapsed at her feet. It was a singular future. One pure timeline that would demand the blood of every single one of them to become reality.
Slot lowered the bandage once more, covering the mysterious eye, and displayed a serious expression he rarely wore.
“Nothing, Corv,” he answered, dismissing her with a light wave of his hand. “Go on ahead.”
Corvany shook her head, assuming it was merely another eccentricity of an old mage, and closed the door behind her, leaving the hallway in silence.
Alone within the room, Slot threw the blankets aside with a haste his broken ribs attempted to prevent. He ignored the physical pain. Knowing the “circus” of war already awaited the Daring Blades at the gates of Silvermoon, the old mage began dressing himself. If that vision was real, if that definitive future truly existed beyond the coming night, then he would march to the end of the world and give absolutely everything of himself to ensure that image became reality.