Jeff Grubb: The Last Guardian

The being on the balcony paused for a long moment, and Khadgar feared that he would fade away. Instead he said, “As long as there are Guardians, there is Order. And as long as there is Order, the parts are there to be played. Decisions made millennia ago set both your path and mine. It is part of greater cycle, one that has held us all in its sway.”

Khadgar craned his head upward. The sun was now touching the top half of the tower. “Perhaps there should not be Guardians then, if this has been the price.”

“Agreed,” said the trespasser, and as the strong light of day began to grow, he began to fade. “But for the moment, for your moment, we must all play our part. We all must pay this price. And then, when we have the chance, we will start anew.”

And with that the trespasser was gone, the last fragments of his being swept back into the future by an errant wind of magic.

Khadgar shook his aged head and looked at the three newly-dug graves. Lothar’s surviving men took their dead and wounded back with them to Stormwind. There was no sign of Garona, and though Khadgar would search the tower once more, he doubted that she was within. He would take what books he thought were valuable, what supplies he could, and set protective wards over the rest. Then he would leave as well, and follow Lothar into battle.

Hefting his shovel, he walked back into the now-abandoned keep of Karazhan, and wondered if he would ever return.

As the trespasser spoke a small breeze kicked up, a mere churning of the leaves, but it was enough to scatter the vision. The no-longer young man broke up and faded like dying fog, and the no-longer old man watched him go.

A single tear ran down the side of Medivh’s face. So much sacrifice, so much pain. Both to keep the plan of the Guardians in place, and then so much sacrifice to break that plan, to break the world free of its lock-step. To bring about true peace.

And now, even that was at risk. Now one more sacrifice would have to be made. He would have to pull the power from this place if he would succeed in what was to come. In the final conflict with the Burning Legion.

The sun had risen farther now, and was almost to the level of his balcony. He would have to work quickly now.

He raised a hand, and the clouds began to swirl above the peak of the tower. Slowly first, then more quickly, until the upper ranges of the tower itself were encased within a hurricane.

Now he reached deep within himself, and released the words, words made up of equal parts regret and anger, words caught within him since the day that his life ended the first time. Words that laid claim to the whole of that previous life, for good and ill. Accepting its power, and in doing so, accepting the responsibility for what was done the last time he wore flesh.

The hurricane around the tower howled, and the tower itself resisted his claim. He stated it again, and then a third time, shouting to be heard over the winds that he himself had summoned. Slowly, almost grudgingly, the tower gave up its secrets.

The power burned from within the stones and mortars, and leached outward, channeled by the force of the winds toward the base, toward Medivh. All the visions began to bubble loose of its fabric, and stream downward. The fall of Sargeras, with its hundreds of screaming demons, fell in on him, as did the final conflict with Aegwynn and Khadgar’s own battle beneath the dull red sun. Medivh’s appearance before Gul’dan and the boyish battles of three young nobles and Moroes breaking Cook’s favorite crystal, all were pulled into him. And with those visions came memories, and with those memories responsibilities. This must be avoided. This must never happen again. This must be corrected.

So too did the images and power leach upward from the hidden tower, from the pits beneath the tower itself. The fall of Stormwind flamed upward at him, and the death of Llane, and the myriad demons summoned in the middle of the night and unleashed against those in the Order too close to the truth. All of them fountained upward and were consumed within the form of the mage standing on the balcony.

All the shards, all the pieces of history, known and unrevealed, spiraled down the tower or rose from its dungeons and flowed into the man who had been the Last Guardian of Tirisfal. The pain was great, but Medivh grimaced and accepted it, taking the energy and the bittersweet memories it bore with equal measure.

The last image to fade was the one beneath the balcony itself, an image of a young man, a rucksack at his feet, a letter marked with the crimson seal of the Kirin Tor, hope in his heart and butterflies in his stomach. That youth was the last to fade, as he moved slowly toward the entrance, the magic surrounding his vision, his shard of the past, spiraled upward, unraveling him and letting the energy pass into the former Magus. As the last bit of Khadgar fell into him, a tear pooled at the corner of Medivh’s eye.

Medivh held both hands to his chest tightly, containing all that he had regained. The tower of Karazhan was just a tower now, a pile of stone in the remote reaches, far from the traveled paths. Now the power of the place was within him. And the responsibility to do better with it, this time.

“And so we start anew,” says Medivh.

And with that, he transformed into a raven, and was gone.

Jeff Grubb is the author of Starcraft: Liberty’s Crusade . He is also author or coauthor of books in the Forgotten Realms , Dragonlance , and Magic: The Gathering Lines . His job is building worlds, his hobby is explaining them to other people. He lives in Seattle with his wife and oft-times cowriter Kate Novak, and two cats.