Jeff Grubb - The Last Guardian

The Lonely Tower

One

Karazhan

Two

Interview with the Magus

Three

Settling In

Four

Battle and Aftermath

Five

Sands in an Hourglass

Six

Aegwynn and Sargeras

Seven

Stormwind

Eight

Lessons

Nine

The Slumber of the Magus

Ten

The Emissary

Eleven

Garona Twelve

Life in Wartime

Thirteen

The Second Shadow

Fourteen

Flight

Fifteen

Beneath Karazhan

Sixteen

The Breaking of a Mage

Epilogue

Full Circle

About the Author

There was a sluggishness to the magic in this room. It was a thick feeling, like stale air in a room that had been shuttered for years. Khadgar tried to pull the energies together, but they seemed to resist, to follow his desires with only the greatest reluctance.

Khadgar's face grew stern as he tried to pull more of the power of the room, the energies, into himself. This was a simple spell. If anything, it should be easier in this spellroom, where such castings would be commonplace. Suddenly the young mage was swamped with the thick, fetid feel of the magic. It fell upon him in a thick blanket, crushing the spell and driving him physically to his knees. Despite himself, he cried out.

Medivh was at his side at once, helping the young mage to his feet. "There, there," he said. "I didn't expect you to succeed even that well. Good try."

"What is it?" managed Khadgar, suddenly able to breathe again. "It was like nothing I've felt before."

"That's good news for you, then," said Medivh. "The magic has been twisted here, a result of what happened earlier."

"You mean like a haunting?" said Khadgar. "Even in Karazhan, I never..."

"No, not like that," said Medivh. "Something much worse. The two dead mages here were summoning demons. It's that taint that you feel. A demon was here."

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

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To Chris Metzen, Who Kept the Vision

THE LAST GUARDIAN

Prologue

The Lonely Tower

The larger of the two moons had risen first this evening, and now hung pregnant and silver-white against a clear, star-dappled sky. Beneath the lambent moon the peaks of the Redridge Mountains strained for the sky. In the daylight the sun picked out hues of magenta and rust among the great granite peaks, but in the moonlight they were reduced to tall, proud ghosts. To the west lay the Forest of Elwynn, its heavy canopy of greatoaks and satinwoods running from the foothills to the sea. To the east, the bleak swamp of the Black Morass spread out, a land of marshes and low hills, bayous and backwaters, failed settlements and lurking danger. A shadow passed briefly across the moon, a raven-sized shadow, bearing for a hole in the heart of the mountain.

Here a chunk had been pulled from the fastness of the Redridge Range, leaving behind a circular vale. Once it might have been the site of some primeval celestial impact or the memory of an earth-shaking explosion, but the aeons had worn the bowl-shaped crater into a series of steep-edged, rounded hillocks which were now cradled by the steeped mountains surrounding them. None of the ancient trees of Elwynn could reach its altitude, and the interior of the ringed hills was barren save for weeds and tangled vines.

At the center of the ringed hills lay a bare tor, as bald as the pate of a Kul Tiras merchant lord. Indeed the very way the hillock rose steeply, than gentled to a near-level slope at its apex, was similar in shape to a human skull. Many had noted it over the years, though only a few had been sufficiently brave, or powerful, or tactless to mention it to the property's owner.

At the flattened peak of the tor rose an ancient tower, a thick, massive protrusion of white stone and dark mortar, a man-made eruption that shot effortlessly into the sky, scaling higher than the surrounding hills, lit like a beacon by the moonlight. There was a low wall at the base of the tower surrounding a bailey, and within those walls the tumbledown remains of a stable and a smithy, but the tower itself dominated all within the ringed hills.

Once this place was called Karazhan. Once it was home of the last of the mysterious and secretive Guardians of Tirisfal. Once it was a living place. Now it was simply abandoned and timelost.

There was silence upon the tower but not a stillness. In the night's embrace quiet shapes flitted from window to window, and phantoms danced along the balconies and parapets. Less than ghosts, but more than memories, these were nothing less than pieces of the past that had become unstuck from the flow of time. These shadows of the past had been pried loose by the madness of the tower's owner, and were now condemned to play out their histories again and again, in the silence of the abandoned tower. Condemned to play but denied of any audience to appreciate them.

Then in the silence, there was the soft scrape of a booted foot against stone, then another. A flash of movement beneath the lambent moon, a shadow against the white stone, a flutter of a tattered, red-hued cloak in the cool night air. A figure walked along the topmost parapet, on the crenellated uppermost spire that years before had served as an observatory.

The parapet door into the observatory screeched open on ancient hinges, then stopped, frozen by rust and the passage of time. The cloaked figure paused a moment, then placed a finger on the hinge, and muttered a few choice words. The door swung open silently, the hinges made as if new. The trespasser allowed himself a smile.

The observatory was empty now, what tools that remained smashed and abandoned. The trespassing figure, almost as silent as a ghost himself, picked up a crushed astrolabe, its scale twisted in some now-forgotten rage. Now it is merely a heavy piece of gold, inert and useless in his hands.

There was other movement in the observatory, and the trespasser looked up. Now a ghostly figure stood nearby, near one of the many windows. The ghost/non-ghost was an broad-shouldered man, hair and beard once dark but now going to a premature gray at the edges. The figure was one of the shards of the past, unglued and now repeating its task, regardless of whether it had observers or not. For the moment, the dark-haired man held the astrolabe, the unbroken twin to the one in the trespasser's hands, and fiddled with a small knob along one side. A moment, a check, and a twitch of the knob. His dark brows furrowed over ghostly green eyes. A second moment, another check, and another twitch. Finally, the tall, imposing figure sighed deeply and placed the astrolabe on a table that was no longer there, and vanished.