Daughter of Azeroth

61 | THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

When the dormitory's portal finally flared back to life, Idira was waiting for it. She slipped into it before anyone arrived, keen to escape the inevitable questions of how she could have survived Dalaran's move to the Broken Isles. She hurried across the grounds, expecting to find devastation and destruction, but the campus looked exactly the same as when she had last seen it, not even a leaf looked out of place.

From out of the buildings, residents of the Academy slowly emerged, blinking and hesitant, looking slightly dazed and disoriented but otherwise unharmed. At the Academy's gate, she collected a pass card from the empty booth so she could get back into the grounds before hastening to make her way along the still mostly deserted streets towards the concealed grassy alley that led to the foul-smelling steps down to the sewers and on to the tavern.

At the bar, no one was around. She went into the back, searching through the blanket of greasy cigar smoke for her niece. She was just about to leave when she saw a plume of cigarette smoke curling up from the shadows of one of the alcoves.

'Looking for me?' Vanessa's familiar voice asked, though she sounded a little rough.

Idira let out a sigh of relief and rushed over to the table. 'You're alive!' she said, sinking down onto one of the stools. 'But how?'

'Stealthed,' Vanessa shrugged, grunting with pain as she leaned forward to stub out her cigarette. 'There was a warded place for us to go, we'd had flyers thrown down the stairs last week about it, but the date was scheduled for tomorrow. It happened so fast, there wasn't enough time to get to the portal. I was the only one in here who survived.'

'Baxter?' Idira asked, suddenly sorry for the surly barman.

'Saw him go. Shrank down to a tiny speck. Vanished into a point of light,' she grunted again, as she rolled her shoulder. 'Not nice.'

Idira shuddered, recalling her own experience. Vanessa got up, groaning, gesturing for Idira to follow her. At the deserted bar, Vanessa went behind the counter, pulled out a pair of shot glasses and a fat, squat bottle of something the colour of amber. She filled both glasses to the brim.

'Drink,' she ordered, throwing back her hood and tossing the liquid down her throat, finishing with a hearty sigh.

Idira picked up the little glass and sipped. Fire burned over her tongue and down her throat, followed by heat, then a pleasant numbing sensation. It felt good. She tipped the rest back in one go.

'That's my girl,' Vanessa murmured, bending down to rifle behind the bar. She stood back up, hefting an iron-bound money box. She opened it. The soft gleam of gold winked back at them in the candlelight.

'Jackpot,' she smiled, closing the lid and tucking the box under her arm. 'Let's bank this first. I'll split it with you fifty-fifty, then we may as well go and watch the show.'

Idira had no idea what show Vanessa meant for them to see. She wondered if they were going to watch some sort of magical event, perhaps in the park while enjoying some more sandwiches from the Bagel Brothers. She soon realised just how wrong she was.

ত

Outside the towering walls of the city, Idira found herself standing once more in the courtyard where she had gone to join the Kirin Tor. At a safe distance from the little courtyard wall, she gazed out at a changed world. The dull-grey mountains of Deadwind Pass were gone, replaced by a sparkling deep-blue sea. Its whitecap-flecked surface stretched away to the horizon, a pristine expanse marred by the scar of a massive, charred island, completely devoid of any kind of vegetation, its surface torn ragged by rivers of churning, foul-green lava. At the island's far end, a vast, blackened structure towered up into the sky, its broken spires and decaying finials surrounded by pulsing jets of energy, lurid-green. Above the structure, the skies churned, a tumult of black clouds, seething, tortured, relentless, caught in a maelstrom of dark power, the vortex emanating from the hold's centre.