His blade sat heavy on his shoulder.
The great expanse of Lordaeron’s heartland lay before him. A perch upon a mountainside; his ‘home’ for the passing months was little comfort, even for a being of his semblance. Caustic winds, buoyed by the stench of the blight and azerite which had sundered his ancestral homeland, made their presence known. Little had grown in Lordaeron since the Prince fell, less grew now.
But within him expanded a needing; there was a requirement inside him for purpose.
Doubtless others felt the same. It was a possibility he long considered from his perch amidst the mountain. For how long could he sequester his aching soul? What little there was left of it, in any case. But if even a dozen, a half-dozen, just one other …
The plans of others no longer concerned him. Kings, Queens, sons and daughters of self-assigned providence; leaders of Ego and almighty Right. He had no time for such endeavours any longer. An eternity sat before him so long as his skeletal form remained steadfast. There was far too much to be done for the flaking remnants of Old.
Caustic winds, buoyed by the stench of the blight and azerite which had sundered his ancestral homeland, made their presence known. He rose from the gray moss and slate rock of the mountainside. Fleckings of dying vegetation came free from his body. The stirring skeleton was unknown to the mountain. Yet before him expanded the great heartland of Lordaeron, her throat still burning with a stench of both the chemical and the primordial.
The first spark of illumination began in his vacant sockets, an ethereal hue which was ill suited against bone. Yet for the little he could ‘feel’, it felt … good. Alive.
This world was his no longer. But perhaps, he could help save it – with others at his back; no, shoulder to shoulder. A bulwark against the Wars to come. The Dead, for the Living.
His blade sat heavy on his shoulder, and he stepped down from the mountain.