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yukieTITLE: This Vital Fluid
FANDOM: Warcraft III/World of Warcraft
PEOPLE: Ishandarr Evenbrooke (once called Ebonrooke), a Blood elf and formerly a Death Knight under the Lich King, now a DK of the Knights of the Ebon Blade), Koltira Deathweaver (likewise, and quite the tsundere), Thassarian (a human Ebon Blade knight and one of few to see Koltira's deredere side), Darion Mograine (the head of the Ebon Blade), various other unlucky people, and the Death Knights' former...er...'employer'.
PAIRING: Thassarian and Koltira have an implied canonical bromance; as well, there are references to Ishan and the other Death Knights' relationship with their former boss.
RATING: 14A for implied past sketchy relationships and big ol' innuendo about such.
SUMMARY: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." - Nietzsche
WARNINGS: There be sketchy past relationships in this here fic. Also, mindscrew and bad dreams and unhappy hallucinations.
NOTES: This is based on an actual quest chain, too. Yes, you CAN make this damn thing in the game. How the issue of dealing with it gets solved in the fic is AU, but - yeah.
***
Most everyone thought it was a stupid rumour or idle fancy at best; the few who got involved in the project wished it actually was thus. Ishandarr knew right away that it wouldn't be easy, as the whole ordeal seemed to have been cursed from the beginning. Thassarian, on the mission to retrieve Light's Vengeance, was almost personally demolished by their former 'master', and the way from there hadn't gotten any easier.
They'd needed to use Saronite to reforge it, and Saronite wasn't the most stable of materials to begin with. Thus, attempting to fuse it with a paladin's weapon - still resonant with the Light after all these years in its resting place - could easily have been a recipe for disaster. As it was, the process of rendering and tempering the metal almost blew Highlord Mograine's rune-forge to pieces. The energy release from the reagents used to manage the fusion was significant; the infrasound THUD this reaction caused shook bits of snow off the ceiling of Light's Hammer.
Ishan wondered what the hell the Lich King thought of that.
"He likely laughed himself off the damned throne," Koltira muttered, when Ishan voiced the thought aloud. "This is absurd."
From the very start Koltira refused to have anything to do with what he called 'the very definition of a fool's errand and a cursed one at that', and he refused to let Thassarian have anything to do with it either.
The project started off badly and only went downhill from there.
Not a single smith in the Ebon Blade (none of whom knew who of their compatriots were involved; they knew only that they were one of few) could handle the damned weapon - incomplete thought it was - for too long at a time. Some started to hear disturbing whispers, some found the metal hurt their hands to touch, a few started to see shadowy, misshapen forms lurking in dreams or in their peripheral vision. This was all par for the course when you worked with Saronite, of course, but it shouldn't have been happening here - not with the care they'd taken to prevent such things. Ishan really couldn't help thinking there was more to it than the usual anyhow. The nature of the whispers, when the smiths could discern words instead of simply a malevolent hissing at a level just enough below audible, was not characteristic of the usual auditory hallucinations.
Saronite hallucinations had a set pattern. There'd been enough recorded about them that the symptom set was fairly well-known among smiths or other craftsworkers who bothered to deal with the damn stuff. What people 'heard' was generally a voice a lot like their own, only distorted, and the threats it made walked the line between vague and specific in the perfect place to inspire eventual violent paranoia in people who'd been exposed to the metal long enough.
That was the normal (if you could call it normal) result of working with or even handling Saronite (if one wasn't a Death Knight). That was why the Ashen Verdict was so bloody careful with it, why they warded the hell out of the equipment and forges, why they wouldn't let even the most stubborn smiths work with it for long stretches. Smiths here worked in shifts if they dealt with Saronite; the smiths involved with the creation of this new weapon did likewise.
The hallucinations shouldn't have been such a problem.
Yet they were, and they were disturbing on a level above and beyond the usual.
Ishan had seen one smith, a Draenei woman by the name of Samharaan, swear that the weapon had threatened her specifically by name once. After that she wouldn't get within ten feet of it. Another, a human paladin, reported that he'd suffered a sudden blinding migraine of the type Koltira used to complain of. Ishan himself felt the phantom voices seeping into his awareness like icy mist each time he handled the axe.
Shadow's Edge, they'd called it. What it would become, they could only guess.
The project was beginning to look like it WAS cursed, and the root of the malice wasn't bothering to remain subtle.
The longer it went on, the worse it got.
Ishandarr finally lost patience with it and volunteered to bludgeon the damned thing into line himself if it took all night.
Darion knew why he'd offered. Ishan had, as a Death Knight under the Lich King, turned his talents to very unseemly ends. He'd done so out of loyalty, out of devotion, out of a bizarre love for Arthas - and that love ultimately almost got him killed (again) at Light's Hope. Betrayed thus, he was furious; his anger deepened further when he thought of the harm that could have come to his friends. This project was an act of vengeance for him, really.
There was no small amount of pigheadedness involved, too. Ishandarr Evenbrooke was not an elf to back down from a challenge.
So it was that he laboured over the refined but still-rough blade; when the whispers began, he did his best to ignore them. Whispers in his mind were something he'd grown used to in Arthas's service, and the voice of his own guilt was a far crueler one anyhow.
The sound of hammer on heated metal soon drowned out those phantom voices. If they rose above the song of forging, Ishan would stop a moment, steel himself, mutter at the axe to shut up, and begin again. Being a Death Knight, he did not tire as a mortal would. He began his task at sunset, and by the time the wee hours of the morning rolled around he was still at work. From forge to anvil, back and forth.
He was haunted every step of the way.
The fears of everyone involved with this project were valid. The whispers might have initially come from the Saronite itself affecting the minds of the smiths, but no longer were they the only source.
this too will serve me when your soul is mine
Ishan flinched, then glared at the blade. "Shut up," he said, and shoved it back into the heat of the forge.
His stubbornness paid off; what began as almost but not quite a usable axe (Saronite was a very cantankerous thing, and difficult to work with even at the best of times; Light's Vengeance had been forged of a strong silver alloy itself, and thus even shaping the damned thing was beyond a chore) was now fully recognizable as the blade of a formidable weapon.
Ishan brushed his hair out of his eyes with a gloved hand and stood back from the workbench. He'd cooled the blade to examine it for imperfections; in the sullen blue light of the forge it appeared to have been carved out of glacial ice. Ishan took up the simple wooden handle he'd carved to test the balance and affixed the blade to it.
He swung it once experimentally.
remember that i, too, once sought a weapon of great power
The balance was perfect.
The next day, he took it to Darion, affixed to the handle the other smiths had already forged.
It would need to be empowered now.
The means would not be pretty.
***
Disaster struck again and again as the blade was passed from hand to hand, knight to warrior to paladin. Of the few, most couldn't tolerate the task; Ishan didn't think less of them for it. After all, they were feeding souls - however corrupt - to this weapon.
The whispering worsened. The nightmares deepened. The weapon never seemed to be satiated. Nightly it would be returned by Darion to Ishan, who was entrusted with repairing the minor damage to the blade and with the runeforging that would bind the souls to the blade.
One thousand souls was Darion Mograine's estimate of what would be needed to strengthen it enough. One thousand of the Lich King's minions slain - or more, for many had no soul left to speak of. It was a gruelling, ugly, miserable task. Fewer and fewer persisted. Ishandarr did, out of sheer spite. Every night, Darion would take the blade from the one who'd been feeding it, and give it to Ishan. Ishan in turn would reforge the runes, sharpen the blade, temper it again, make it ready for the next warrior to take it up and feed it.
It nearly cost them their own souls, more than once. The rumours reached Ishan quickly. There were complaints about the whispers rising to a crescendo in a dire situation, almost resulting in the bearer being killed through distraction. Migraines as Koltira suffered, bad enough to stagger the bearer, bad enough to make someone blind with pain. One paladin saw enemies that weren't there and almost killed an ally. In the worst case, a male human warrior refused to relinquish it and ran away, accusing Darion of wanting to keep the weapon for himself and eventually massacre them all. It took Thassarian an hour to coax the man out of the glacial cave he'd hidden in; he emerged half-dead from cold and Thassarian had to carry the blade on the way back.
"it wouldn't shut up either," he said sourly, looking at the axe lying mutely on the workbench. "Or rather HE wouldn't shut up. It's obvious to me that it's not the damned Saronite, no matter what everyone keeps telling themselves. Saronite doesn't purr at you."
"I told everyone this was a moronic idea," Koltira muttered from the doorway. "You should throw it in the forge and destroy it, Evenbrooke, before it drives anyone else mad. It might not bother you because you're touched in the head, but for those of us in possession of all our wits--"
you too are gathering souls for your own ends. are we really so different
"Oh, knock it off," Thassarian said to the axe.
"If it gets worse, Koltira, I will," Ishan said.
Koltira looked at him levelly.
"Well, I'd ask if you're sure you'll manage, but you're the most muleheaded thing in Northrend."
soon you shall have a blade for a prison
Ishan gave the axe a warning prod with the tongs, and said, "Thank you."
The daily repair of Shadow's Edge was more taxing to Ishan than he let on. He thought a few times that it might be better to split the blade into two, reforge it and disperse some of the power, so no one was handling the full brunt of it at once, but decided against it; who knew what effect trying to cut the damn thing would have? it might go off and level the citadel. While they'd be less Arthas if that happened, they'd also be less far too many more people. So he left it whole and tried to endure it.
The whispering was constant, though he didn't always hear each word. Shadows lurked at the edges of his vision, reached out for him with claw-tipped fingers, sometimes grinned with too-bright eyes and too-sharp teeth. He felt scrutinized, watched at every moment, at every turn. When alone, he was certain he wasn't. His dreams weren't something he wanted to think too long on - they ran the gamut from disturbingly surreal to hideously specific, pitting him against the spirits in the blade, against those he'd killed in Arthas's service, against Arthas himself. While he could face the dreams of murder and atrocity, the ones born of his guilt, those dreams in which he stood against his former master were another story.
Again and again he would stand against Arthas, and either fall to Frostmourne and spend eternity bound or kneel before the Lich King and -
- Ishan didn't like to think on what happened next. It wasn't as if it hadn't ever happened before, it wasn't as if he hadn't gone willingly to the man's bed before, but the fact that he'd wake from these dreams flustered and disheveled and in a state of far too much INTEREST in what he'd dreamed...what would people think of that? What would Darion think, or Thassarian, or Koltira? What would Rauthien, Aerionn and Teraeis think? And what of Kael'thas? Would his king think he was a traitor or a harlot or both?
Surely they knew about this. His mind would wander unbidden to the dreams sometimes, and he would have to fight hard to shake off the mental images. Once he blushed badly enough that Aerionn asked if he was feverish.
The stupid axe was probably going to be the end of him.
He didn't feel he had the right to complain, however, as he wasn't the one out in the thick of things killing the undead and feeding souls to an axe. What he endured was a mere fraction of what the ones entrusted with the empowering of Shadow's Edge dealt with. Every second of every minute of every hour they endured the whispers, they grappled with their doubts, they beat back the fear that they might well become the very monster they sought to kill.
Ishan was merely the maintenance staff.
Sighing, he took up the axe, then turned to the grindstone.
you stumble about in darkness; there is no light here. there is no mercy. icecrown has claimed the souls of greater heroes than you
Ishan gritted his teeth. "I'm getting so sick of the sound of your voice," he hissed.
The sound of metal on damp sandstone drowned out the whispering at first, but as during the forging this was a temporary respite. Every time he took up Shadow's Edge its effect on him was stronger, and it lingered more.
bring me your weapon, champion, that i might feed it the soul of its master
Ishan realized he stood a change of grinding a stone-width groove into the blade if he kept this up. He sighed, rubbed his temples, and grabbed the whetstone off the workbench. He'd have to do the rest by hand.
the hunger your weapon feels is but a shade of what awaits
While he started out at a steady rhythm, while the strokes were smooth and even at first, Ishan soon began to falter. The whispering was drowning out his own thoughts, and he had the horrid feeling that he truly WAS being watched, that in handling this weapon he'd once again made himself vulnerable to the influence of the man who'd once owned his mind, his heart, his body and his soul - that the Lich King could easily reach out with his consciousness and obliterate Ishan's own as simply as one could pinch out the flame of a candle.
come to me, pretender. feed my blade
Ishan yelped as the stone skidded sideways and his thumb slid along the sharp edge of the axe. Blood welled up in the cut and a drop splashed onto the engraved runes as Ishan jerked his wounded hand up and away from the axe.
The whispers immediately went quiet, and Ishan stilled, injured thumb halfway to his lips. What - what just happened?
Slowly, very carefully, he set the axe back on the workbench, retrieved the whetstone from the floor. He stood there a moment, all the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.
The room was silent. Even the dull roar of the flames in the forge seemed muffled somehow. The air seemed strangely heavy.
Ishandarr felt eyes on him.
Then, slowly, fearing the worst, he reached for Shadow's Edge. Had that careless error wrecked the blade somehow? Maybe his blood affected the weapon's capacity to - no, he hadn't felt the souls leave, and he was certain he would have if they did. Even so, he ought to make sure that bleeding all over the runes hadn't compromised or damaged the weapon somehow.
He picked it up; the blue glow of his eyes turned the blood on the weapon black. His reflection in the mirror-perfect honed edge of the axe was that of an exhausted and haggard elf, the dark smudges under his eyes even more prominent than usual. He closed his eyes, sighed, opened them again, started to set the axe down, and stopped cold.
Reflected above the top of his image's head was the blue light of another pair of eyes. He would have thought it was only Koltira or Thassarian or even Mograine come to check in on him - and he did, at first, until he realized he would have heard them enter.
He'd heard nothing. Nothing at all.
Ishan could now see, picked out in that cobalt glow, the edges of an all-too-familiar helm.
He froze in panic, his grip on the axe tightening convulsively, his hands starting to shake.
"You. You're. You're not - "
The room was too cold and he couldn't move and he couldn't let go of the axe and his tormentor was smiling at him now and as Ishan watched paralyzed by terror the Lich King reached out one hand and said
hello, ishandarr
Ishan choked and hurled the axe aside, stumbling as he tried to flee the room. he tripped over the grindstone and sent it and himself crashing to the ground. Water spilled everywhere; Ishan sprawled face-down on the floor, shaking and fighting back panic - a losing battle. He tried to get to his feet again and failed; his knees wouldn't support him, and the presence growing in his mind was almost certainly going to crush him.
How in the hell did the Lich King know his name!? He'd never, ever called Ishan by anything but Ebonbrooke, the name Keleseth had given Ishan in reward for exemplary service as a Death Knight of Acherus. Arthas could not know Ishan's real name unless he'd somehow just KNOWN it at the moment the blood struck the runes. Was it really as simple as that?
Was he really still so helpless to resist this man?
The weight of Arthas's consciousness was dragging him down. He could hardly move, could barely see - if he'd needed to breathe he would have choked, and he felt suffocated by the sheer presence of the Lich King's mind just the same.
Heavy, cold velvet. The livid, heartless blue of glacial ice.
He barely managed to drag himself across the floor. The door was no longer where he thought it had been (was there ever really a door at all) and he flattened himself against the wall and closed his eyes and tried to shut the door again in his mind (there was never a door at all), hands over his ears, eyes closed tightly, knees pulled up to his chest.
ishandarr
Ishan cringed and tried to curl up even smaller. He had no power now. None at all. Not only did Arthas have some residual control over Ishan from having renamed him, now - oh, now he knew Ishan's rightful given name.
Through blood, he'd gained this knowledge. In that moment, Ishandarr had lost himself again. Lost everything.
He was going to die, Arthas was going to kill him, Arthas was going to kill him and kill every single miserable misbegotten living being here and -
what makes you suppose i have any desire to see you dead
Ishan flinched away from the voice. "Auhh. No. Get - get out, get out get OUT - leave me the hell alone, I'm not - I don't belong to you any more, you vicious bastard, you left me to DIE, leave me alone - "
ishandarr
"NO!"
ebonrooke. my knight.
"I don't belong to you!"
oh, but you do. you swore yourself to me: your heart, your mind, your soul, your body...all of these belong to me. they will belong to me forever, and you yourself belong to me for all of eternity
Ishan cringed at the phantom touch of an incorporeal hand. "Nnh. Nnggh - no - " A violent shudder wracked him. He could feel cold hands on him and couldn't free himself from that touch or the voice or that presence in his mind.
"What do you want from me!?"
The phantom voice's purr locked his veins with ice.
everything.
Cold hands closed on Ishan's wrists and he snapped, lashing out viciously with both feet if fury and fear. His assailant snarled as a foot struck home and then shoved him to the floor and pinned him down.
"NO--GET OFF OF ME--" Ishan continued to flail. Even with his hands trapped - hell, even if he were paralyzed completely and without voice, he was absolutely NOT just going to submit, bare his throat, and -
"ISHANDARR."
"NO!"
The assailant shook him hard and snapped, "Evenbrooke, you absolute idiot, WAKE UP!"
Ishan snapped out of the trance as someone - Koltira - slapped him sharply upside the head. He stared at the other elf a moment, then abruptly went boneless with relief. "It's you."
"Evenbrooke, what happened here? I thought you'd fallen into the damned forge." Koltira's expression was as unimpressed as ever but there was genuine concern in his voice.
"I. I saw - there was - was...gahh. That thing, that axe, you were right, we were idiots, he - he was - " Ishan swallowed hard, tried to stop shivering. "He told me - "
"Who?"
Ishan couldn't make himself say the man's name, but Koltira knew well enough from his expression. "I knew it," Koltira growled. "We need to tell Mograine. And we need to destroy that axe."
"I don't even know HOW anymore," Ishan said, deeply embarrassed at the fact that he'd started weeping out of sheer relief by now. "I had that damned forge up as hot as I could possibly get it to burn without slagging the sides of it and it took ages to even get the blade hot."
"We'll find a way if we have to." Koltira let Ishan lean on him. And then: "No matter what set that off, it was NOT your damned fault what happened and I refuse to hear any nonsense to that effect out of you."
"I cut my damn thumb on the blade."
"I don't care." Koltira pressed something into his hands - one of those tall insulated mugs with a lid that the goblins up here were selling and making a killing off.
With shaking hands Ishan unscrewed the lid: there was tea in the cup. He looked over at Koltira with what had to be a ridiculously grateful expression. "Thank you."
"I'm not fond of that kind of tea. it's too strong. I know you like it, though, since you have bizarre titanium tastebuds. It seemed a shame to let it go to waste; I was on my way here anyhow to give it to you. Then you started making that racket and crashing around..."
Ishan had by this time drunk half the tea. He felt a lot less unstable now, though the cold wasn't too keen on leaving his bones just yet. "Sorry I annoyed you."
"It was less annoying than it was disconcerting. You're a fluffminded twit, but you're hardly clumsy, and that noise you were making..."
"What one--oh." Koltira was talking about....well...what, for Ishan, passed for screaming. At some point before his death he'd been choked by some enthused Scourge operative; now, if he tried to raise his voice, it soon broke on him. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Drink your tea, you sound like you've been gargling with gravel."
Ishan nodded, sipping the tea and then gazing into his teacup.
Koltira watched him a moment. Then he asked, "What's on your mind?"
Ishan looked up. "...I was thinking for a second that it was completely stupid and uncharacteristic of him to do something like that, but...it's not. It's neither. He wanted us to know that he can still" - for a moment or so he searched for the right word and then struggled to actually say it - "still claim us - I mean, assert that claim on us. Still possess us absolutely."
"He'll step up the intensity from here too, now that he's remembered it's fun," Koltira practically spat.
"We'll have to be ready for that. All of us. I'll tell Highlord Mograine about everything and we'll decide from that point what the hells to do with this." He gestured at Shadow's Edge lying by the workbench where he'd left it.
"I still think he should stuff it into the forge." Koltira snorted. "If he does, I will demand that he do it in my presence and then laugh in triumph and derision as another means to harm us goes up in smoke. Well - figuratively."
Ishan chortled, and then smiled at Koltira. It was a somewhat watery sort of a smile, but a smile nonetheless. "Thank you."
"As I said, I knew this would happen to someone sooner or later; while it's hardly 'better' that it happened to you, it's fortunate at least that it happened to one who could handle it."
"You call that 'handling it'?"
"You didn't kill anyone or yourself, Ishandarr. That's a victory." Koltira actually grinned a bit. "And you're as sane now as when you started - for relative values of sane."
"I guess so." Ishan snerked. "Thank you."
"Well," Koltira said, standing and brushing himself off a bit, "another good that's come out of this fiasco is that I FINALLY have enough proof now that this damned project is worthless at best and violently dangerous at worst. If he can even affect someone as touched in the head that strongly, what hope do the rest of us have?" he offered Ishan a hand up.
"A valid point." Ishan accepted the hand and got unsteadily to his feet. He swayed a bit and winced. "Urhh. I feel like an Elekk just did an exotic dance on my spine and my head..."
"The tea will help that."
"...I should get that thing off the floor..." Ishan looked back at the axe.
"No, you should leave that thing on the floor where it is, lock the workshop door behind you, and come help me convince Darion that his project is dead for good."
"...All right."
Ishandarr cleaned up the workroom, turning down the heat in the forge and putting up the protective warding, mopping up the water spilled from the grindstone's reservoir, putting tools away. Slowly he calmed enough that he would be able to coherently speak with Highlord Mograine about what had taken place.
About the danger inherent in wielding the blade. abut the nightmares and whispers.
About the fact that one drop of blood spilled was enough to fully open the mind of one who held the axe to malevolent influence, and the fact that he'd experienced this firsthand.
He didn't go into detail; the dreams of submission and the feeling of unseen hands on his body and what exactly he'd been told, he kept from Mograine and everyone else.
It took days for the echoes of the whispers to die. Even after they did, the memory remained.
Ishan would see those eyes and that smile and hear those words in his dreams for a long, long time.
continue onward...
...i am waiting
***
The project was put on hold after Ishan and Koltira's report of the overt psychic assault; for a long time, the axe Shadow's Edge lay in a locked chest in the vault, with Mograine reluctant to give permission for any to so much as inspect it.
Ultimately, Ishan's dear friend Teraeis Fairdawn bent the weapon to his will, splitting the two-handed greataxe's blade in half and forging it into a set of twin blades dubbed Shadowmourne. None save Teraeis and Mograine knew that the blades he bore were the weapon that very nearly cost Ishan his mind - not until long after the final battle with the Lich King was over and done.
***
Yeah, Shadow's Edge TALKS TO YOU.
You can't make it into two pieces in the game; it's one big old axe there. But Ter is awesome that way. XD
Arthas was QUITE the epic troll but he's better now.
I WISH I COULD GET STORY BITS IN A LINEAR WAY, I REALLY DO~~~
FANDOM: Warcraft III/World of Warcraft
PEOPLE: Ishandarr Evenbrooke (once called Ebonrooke), a Blood elf and formerly a Death Knight under the Lich King, now a DK of the Knights of the Ebon Blade), Koltira Deathweaver (likewise, and quite the tsundere), Thassarian (a human Ebon Blade knight and one of few to see Koltira's deredere side), Darion Mograine (the head of the Ebon Blade), various other unlucky people, and the Death Knights' former...er...'employer'.
PAIRING: Thassarian and Koltira have an implied canonical bromance; as well, there are references to Ishan and the other Death Knights' relationship with their former boss.
RATING: 14A for implied past sketchy relationships and big ol' innuendo about such.
SUMMARY: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." - Nietzsche
WARNINGS: There be sketchy past relationships in this here fic. Also, mindscrew and bad dreams and unhappy hallucinations.
NOTES: This is based on an actual quest chain, too. Yes, you CAN make this damn thing in the game. How the issue of dealing with it gets solved in the fic is AU, but - yeah.
***
Most everyone thought it was a stupid rumour or idle fancy at best; the few who got involved in the project wished it actually was thus. Ishandarr knew right away that it wouldn't be easy, as the whole ordeal seemed to have been cursed from the beginning. Thassarian, on the mission to retrieve Light's Vengeance, was almost personally demolished by their former 'master', and the way from there hadn't gotten any easier.
They'd needed to use Saronite to reforge it, and Saronite wasn't the most stable of materials to begin with. Thus, attempting to fuse it with a paladin's weapon - still resonant with the Light after all these years in its resting place - could easily have been a recipe for disaster. As it was, the process of rendering and tempering the metal almost blew Highlord Mograine's rune-forge to pieces. The energy release from the reagents used to manage the fusion was significant; the infrasound THUD this reaction caused shook bits of snow off the ceiling of Light's Hammer.
Ishan wondered what the hell the Lich King thought of that.
"He likely laughed himself off the damned throne," Koltira muttered, when Ishan voiced the thought aloud. "This is absurd."
From the very start Koltira refused to have anything to do with what he called 'the very definition of a fool's errand and a cursed one at that', and he refused to let Thassarian have anything to do with it either.
The project started off badly and only went downhill from there.
Not a single smith in the Ebon Blade (none of whom knew who of their compatriots were involved; they knew only that they were one of few) could handle the damned weapon - incomplete thought it was - for too long at a time. Some started to hear disturbing whispers, some found the metal hurt their hands to touch, a few started to see shadowy, misshapen forms lurking in dreams or in their peripheral vision. This was all par for the course when you worked with Saronite, of course, but it shouldn't have been happening here - not with the care they'd taken to prevent such things. Ishan really couldn't help thinking there was more to it than the usual anyhow. The nature of the whispers, when the smiths could discern words instead of simply a malevolent hissing at a level just enough below audible, was not characteristic of the usual auditory hallucinations.
Saronite hallucinations had a set pattern. There'd been enough recorded about them that the symptom set was fairly well-known among smiths or other craftsworkers who bothered to deal with the damn stuff. What people 'heard' was generally a voice a lot like their own, only distorted, and the threats it made walked the line between vague and specific in the perfect place to inspire eventual violent paranoia in people who'd been exposed to the metal long enough.
That was the normal (if you could call it normal) result of working with or even handling Saronite (if one wasn't a Death Knight). That was why the Ashen Verdict was so bloody careful with it, why they warded the hell out of the equipment and forges, why they wouldn't let even the most stubborn smiths work with it for long stretches. Smiths here worked in shifts if they dealt with Saronite; the smiths involved with the creation of this new weapon did likewise.
The hallucinations shouldn't have been such a problem.
Yet they were, and they were disturbing on a level above and beyond the usual.
Ishan had seen one smith, a Draenei woman by the name of Samharaan, swear that the weapon had threatened her specifically by name once. After that she wouldn't get within ten feet of it. Another, a human paladin, reported that he'd suffered a sudden blinding migraine of the type Koltira used to complain of. Ishan himself felt the phantom voices seeping into his awareness like icy mist each time he handled the axe.
Shadow's Edge, they'd called it. What it would become, they could only guess.
The project was beginning to look like it WAS cursed, and the root of the malice wasn't bothering to remain subtle.
The longer it went on, the worse it got.
Ishandarr finally lost patience with it and volunteered to bludgeon the damned thing into line himself if it took all night.
Darion knew why he'd offered. Ishan had, as a Death Knight under the Lich King, turned his talents to very unseemly ends. He'd done so out of loyalty, out of devotion, out of a bizarre love for Arthas - and that love ultimately almost got him killed (again) at Light's Hope. Betrayed thus, he was furious; his anger deepened further when he thought of the harm that could have come to his friends. This project was an act of vengeance for him, really.
There was no small amount of pigheadedness involved, too. Ishandarr Evenbrooke was not an elf to back down from a challenge.
So it was that he laboured over the refined but still-rough blade; when the whispers began, he did his best to ignore them. Whispers in his mind were something he'd grown used to in Arthas's service, and the voice of his own guilt was a far crueler one anyhow.
The sound of hammer on heated metal soon drowned out those phantom voices. If they rose above the song of forging, Ishan would stop a moment, steel himself, mutter at the axe to shut up, and begin again. Being a Death Knight, he did not tire as a mortal would. He began his task at sunset, and by the time the wee hours of the morning rolled around he was still at work. From forge to anvil, back and forth.
He was haunted every step of the way.
The fears of everyone involved with this project were valid. The whispers might have initially come from the Saronite itself affecting the minds of the smiths, but no longer were they the only source.
this too will serve me when your soul is mine
Ishan flinched, then glared at the blade. "Shut up," he said, and shoved it back into the heat of the forge.
His stubbornness paid off; what began as almost but not quite a usable axe (Saronite was a very cantankerous thing, and difficult to work with even at the best of times; Light's Vengeance had been forged of a strong silver alloy itself, and thus even shaping the damned thing was beyond a chore) was now fully recognizable as the blade of a formidable weapon.
Ishan brushed his hair out of his eyes with a gloved hand and stood back from the workbench. He'd cooled the blade to examine it for imperfections; in the sullen blue light of the forge it appeared to have been carved out of glacial ice. Ishan took up the simple wooden handle he'd carved to test the balance and affixed the blade to it.
He swung it once experimentally.
remember that i, too, once sought a weapon of great power
The balance was perfect.
The next day, he took it to Darion, affixed to the handle the other smiths had already forged.
It would need to be empowered now.
The means would not be pretty.
***
Disaster struck again and again as the blade was passed from hand to hand, knight to warrior to paladin. Of the few, most couldn't tolerate the task; Ishan didn't think less of them for it. After all, they were feeding souls - however corrupt - to this weapon.
The whispering worsened. The nightmares deepened. The weapon never seemed to be satiated. Nightly it would be returned by Darion to Ishan, who was entrusted with repairing the minor damage to the blade and with the runeforging that would bind the souls to the blade.
One thousand souls was Darion Mograine's estimate of what would be needed to strengthen it enough. One thousand of the Lich King's minions slain - or more, for many had no soul left to speak of. It was a gruelling, ugly, miserable task. Fewer and fewer persisted. Ishandarr did, out of sheer spite. Every night, Darion would take the blade from the one who'd been feeding it, and give it to Ishan. Ishan in turn would reforge the runes, sharpen the blade, temper it again, make it ready for the next warrior to take it up and feed it.
It nearly cost them their own souls, more than once. The rumours reached Ishan quickly. There were complaints about the whispers rising to a crescendo in a dire situation, almost resulting in the bearer being killed through distraction. Migraines as Koltira suffered, bad enough to stagger the bearer, bad enough to make someone blind with pain. One paladin saw enemies that weren't there and almost killed an ally. In the worst case, a male human warrior refused to relinquish it and ran away, accusing Darion of wanting to keep the weapon for himself and eventually massacre them all. It took Thassarian an hour to coax the man out of the glacial cave he'd hidden in; he emerged half-dead from cold and Thassarian had to carry the blade on the way back.
"it wouldn't shut up either," he said sourly, looking at the axe lying mutely on the workbench. "Or rather HE wouldn't shut up. It's obvious to me that it's not the damned Saronite, no matter what everyone keeps telling themselves. Saronite doesn't purr at you."
"I told everyone this was a moronic idea," Koltira muttered from the doorway. "You should throw it in the forge and destroy it, Evenbrooke, before it drives anyone else mad. It might not bother you because you're touched in the head, but for those of us in possession of all our wits--"
you too are gathering souls for your own ends. are we really so different
"Oh, knock it off," Thassarian said to the axe.
"If it gets worse, Koltira, I will," Ishan said.
Koltira looked at him levelly.
"Well, I'd ask if you're sure you'll manage, but you're the most muleheaded thing in Northrend."
soon you shall have a blade for a prison
Ishan gave the axe a warning prod with the tongs, and said, "Thank you."
The daily repair of Shadow's Edge was more taxing to Ishan than he let on. He thought a few times that it might be better to split the blade into two, reforge it and disperse some of the power, so no one was handling the full brunt of it at once, but decided against it; who knew what effect trying to cut the damn thing would have? it might go off and level the citadel. While they'd be less Arthas if that happened, they'd also be less far too many more people. So he left it whole and tried to endure it.
The whispering was constant, though he didn't always hear each word. Shadows lurked at the edges of his vision, reached out for him with claw-tipped fingers, sometimes grinned with too-bright eyes and too-sharp teeth. He felt scrutinized, watched at every moment, at every turn. When alone, he was certain he wasn't. His dreams weren't something he wanted to think too long on - they ran the gamut from disturbingly surreal to hideously specific, pitting him against the spirits in the blade, against those he'd killed in Arthas's service, against Arthas himself. While he could face the dreams of murder and atrocity, the ones born of his guilt, those dreams in which he stood against his former master were another story.
Again and again he would stand against Arthas, and either fall to Frostmourne and spend eternity bound or kneel before the Lich King and -
- Ishan didn't like to think on what happened next. It wasn't as if it hadn't ever happened before, it wasn't as if he hadn't gone willingly to the man's bed before, but the fact that he'd wake from these dreams flustered and disheveled and in a state of far too much INTEREST in what he'd dreamed...what would people think of that? What would Darion think, or Thassarian, or Koltira? What would Rauthien, Aerionn and Teraeis think? And what of Kael'thas? Would his king think he was a traitor or a harlot or both?
Surely they knew about this. His mind would wander unbidden to the dreams sometimes, and he would have to fight hard to shake off the mental images. Once he blushed badly enough that Aerionn asked if he was feverish.
The stupid axe was probably going to be the end of him.
He didn't feel he had the right to complain, however, as he wasn't the one out in the thick of things killing the undead and feeding souls to an axe. What he endured was a mere fraction of what the ones entrusted with the empowering of Shadow's Edge dealt with. Every second of every minute of every hour they endured the whispers, they grappled with their doubts, they beat back the fear that they might well become the very monster they sought to kill.
Ishan was merely the maintenance staff.
Sighing, he took up the axe, then turned to the grindstone.
you stumble about in darkness; there is no light here. there is no mercy. icecrown has claimed the souls of greater heroes than you
Ishan gritted his teeth. "I'm getting so sick of the sound of your voice," he hissed.
The sound of metal on damp sandstone drowned out the whispering at first, but as during the forging this was a temporary respite. Every time he took up Shadow's Edge its effect on him was stronger, and it lingered more.
bring me your weapon, champion, that i might feed it the soul of its master
Ishan realized he stood a change of grinding a stone-width groove into the blade if he kept this up. He sighed, rubbed his temples, and grabbed the whetstone off the workbench. He'd have to do the rest by hand.
the hunger your weapon feels is but a shade of what awaits
While he started out at a steady rhythm, while the strokes were smooth and even at first, Ishan soon began to falter. The whispering was drowning out his own thoughts, and he had the horrid feeling that he truly WAS being watched, that in handling this weapon he'd once again made himself vulnerable to the influence of the man who'd once owned his mind, his heart, his body and his soul - that the Lich King could easily reach out with his consciousness and obliterate Ishan's own as simply as one could pinch out the flame of a candle.
come to me, pretender. feed my blade
Ishan yelped as the stone skidded sideways and his thumb slid along the sharp edge of the axe. Blood welled up in the cut and a drop splashed onto the engraved runes as Ishan jerked his wounded hand up and away from the axe.
The whispers immediately went quiet, and Ishan stilled, injured thumb halfway to his lips. What - what just happened?
Slowly, very carefully, he set the axe back on the workbench, retrieved the whetstone from the floor. He stood there a moment, all the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.
The room was silent. Even the dull roar of the flames in the forge seemed muffled somehow. The air seemed strangely heavy.
Ishandarr felt eyes on him.
Then, slowly, fearing the worst, he reached for Shadow's Edge. Had that careless error wrecked the blade somehow? Maybe his blood affected the weapon's capacity to - no, he hadn't felt the souls leave, and he was certain he would have if they did. Even so, he ought to make sure that bleeding all over the runes hadn't compromised or damaged the weapon somehow.
He picked it up; the blue glow of his eyes turned the blood on the weapon black. His reflection in the mirror-perfect honed edge of the axe was that of an exhausted and haggard elf, the dark smudges under his eyes even more prominent than usual. He closed his eyes, sighed, opened them again, started to set the axe down, and stopped cold.
Reflected above the top of his image's head was the blue light of another pair of eyes. He would have thought it was only Koltira or Thassarian or even Mograine come to check in on him - and he did, at first, until he realized he would have heard them enter.
He'd heard nothing. Nothing at all.
Ishan could now see, picked out in that cobalt glow, the edges of an all-too-familiar helm.
He froze in panic, his grip on the axe tightening convulsively, his hands starting to shake.
"You. You're. You're not - "
The room was too cold and he couldn't move and he couldn't let go of the axe and his tormentor was smiling at him now and as Ishan watched paralyzed by terror the Lich King reached out one hand and said
hello, ishandarr
Ishan choked and hurled the axe aside, stumbling as he tried to flee the room. he tripped over the grindstone and sent it and himself crashing to the ground. Water spilled everywhere; Ishan sprawled face-down on the floor, shaking and fighting back panic - a losing battle. He tried to get to his feet again and failed; his knees wouldn't support him, and the presence growing in his mind was almost certainly going to crush him.
How in the hell did the Lich King know his name!? He'd never, ever called Ishan by anything but Ebonbrooke, the name Keleseth had given Ishan in reward for exemplary service as a Death Knight of Acherus. Arthas could not know Ishan's real name unless he'd somehow just KNOWN it at the moment the blood struck the runes. Was it really as simple as that?
Was he really still so helpless to resist this man?
The weight of Arthas's consciousness was dragging him down. He could hardly move, could barely see - if he'd needed to breathe he would have choked, and he felt suffocated by the sheer presence of the Lich King's mind just the same.
Heavy, cold velvet. The livid, heartless blue of glacial ice.
He barely managed to drag himself across the floor. The door was no longer where he thought it had been (was there ever really a door at all) and he flattened himself against the wall and closed his eyes and tried to shut the door again in his mind (there was never a door at all), hands over his ears, eyes closed tightly, knees pulled up to his chest.
ishandarr
Ishan cringed and tried to curl up even smaller. He had no power now. None at all. Not only did Arthas have some residual control over Ishan from having renamed him, now - oh, now he knew Ishan's rightful given name.
Through blood, he'd gained this knowledge. In that moment, Ishandarr had lost himself again. Lost everything.
He was going to die, Arthas was going to kill him, Arthas was going to kill him and kill every single miserable misbegotten living being here and -
what makes you suppose i have any desire to see you dead
Ishan flinched away from the voice. "Auhh. No. Get - get out, get out get OUT - leave me the hell alone, I'm not - I don't belong to you any more, you vicious bastard, you left me to DIE, leave me alone - "
ishandarr
"NO!"
ebonrooke. my knight.
"I don't belong to you!"
oh, but you do. you swore yourself to me: your heart, your mind, your soul, your body...all of these belong to me. they will belong to me forever, and you yourself belong to me for all of eternity
Ishan cringed at the phantom touch of an incorporeal hand. "Nnh. Nnggh - no - " A violent shudder wracked him. He could feel cold hands on him and couldn't free himself from that touch or the voice or that presence in his mind.
"What do you want from me!?"
The phantom voice's purr locked his veins with ice.
everything.
Cold hands closed on Ishan's wrists and he snapped, lashing out viciously with both feet if fury and fear. His assailant snarled as a foot struck home and then shoved him to the floor and pinned him down.
"NO--GET OFF OF ME--" Ishan continued to flail. Even with his hands trapped - hell, even if he were paralyzed completely and without voice, he was absolutely NOT just going to submit, bare his throat, and -
"ISHANDARR."
"NO!"
The assailant shook him hard and snapped, "Evenbrooke, you absolute idiot, WAKE UP!"
Ishan snapped out of the trance as someone - Koltira - slapped him sharply upside the head. He stared at the other elf a moment, then abruptly went boneless with relief. "It's you."
"Evenbrooke, what happened here? I thought you'd fallen into the damned forge." Koltira's expression was as unimpressed as ever but there was genuine concern in his voice.
"I. I saw - there was - was...gahh. That thing, that axe, you were right, we were idiots, he - he was - " Ishan swallowed hard, tried to stop shivering. "He told me - "
"Who?"
Ishan couldn't make himself say the man's name, but Koltira knew well enough from his expression. "I knew it," Koltira growled. "We need to tell Mograine. And we need to destroy that axe."
"I don't even know HOW anymore," Ishan said, deeply embarrassed at the fact that he'd started weeping out of sheer relief by now. "I had that damned forge up as hot as I could possibly get it to burn without slagging the sides of it and it took ages to even get the blade hot."
"We'll find a way if we have to." Koltira let Ishan lean on him. And then: "No matter what set that off, it was NOT your damned fault what happened and I refuse to hear any nonsense to that effect out of you."
"I cut my damn thumb on the blade."
"I don't care." Koltira pressed something into his hands - one of those tall insulated mugs with a lid that the goblins up here were selling and making a killing off.
With shaking hands Ishan unscrewed the lid: there was tea in the cup. He looked over at Koltira with what had to be a ridiculously grateful expression. "Thank you."
"I'm not fond of that kind of tea. it's too strong. I know you like it, though, since you have bizarre titanium tastebuds. It seemed a shame to let it go to waste; I was on my way here anyhow to give it to you. Then you started making that racket and crashing around..."
Ishan had by this time drunk half the tea. He felt a lot less unstable now, though the cold wasn't too keen on leaving his bones just yet. "Sorry I annoyed you."
"It was less annoying than it was disconcerting. You're a fluffminded twit, but you're hardly clumsy, and that noise you were making..."
"What one--oh." Koltira was talking about....well...what, for Ishan, passed for screaming. At some point before his death he'd been choked by some enthused Scourge operative; now, if he tried to raise his voice, it soon broke on him. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Drink your tea, you sound like you've been gargling with gravel."
Ishan nodded, sipping the tea and then gazing into his teacup.
Koltira watched him a moment. Then he asked, "What's on your mind?"
Ishan looked up. "...I was thinking for a second that it was completely stupid and uncharacteristic of him to do something like that, but...it's not. It's neither. He wanted us to know that he can still" - for a moment or so he searched for the right word and then struggled to actually say it - "still claim us - I mean, assert that claim on us. Still possess us absolutely."
"He'll step up the intensity from here too, now that he's remembered it's fun," Koltira practically spat.
"We'll have to be ready for that. All of us. I'll tell Highlord Mograine about everything and we'll decide from that point what the hells to do with this." He gestured at Shadow's Edge lying by the workbench where he'd left it.
"I still think he should stuff it into the forge." Koltira snorted. "If he does, I will demand that he do it in my presence and then laugh in triumph and derision as another means to harm us goes up in smoke. Well - figuratively."
Ishan chortled, and then smiled at Koltira. It was a somewhat watery sort of a smile, but a smile nonetheless. "Thank you."
"As I said, I knew this would happen to someone sooner or later; while it's hardly 'better' that it happened to you, it's fortunate at least that it happened to one who could handle it."
"You call that 'handling it'?"
"You didn't kill anyone or yourself, Ishandarr. That's a victory." Koltira actually grinned a bit. "And you're as sane now as when you started - for relative values of sane."
"I guess so." Ishan snerked. "Thank you."
"Well," Koltira said, standing and brushing himself off a bit, "another good that's come out of this fiasco is that I FINALLY have enough proof now that this damned project is worthless at best and violently dangerous at worst. If he can even affect someone as touched in the head that strongly, what hope do the rest of us have?" he offered Ishan a hand up.
"A valid point." Ishan accepted the hand and got unsteadily to his feet. He swayed a bit and winced. "Urhh. I feel like an Elekk just did an exotic dance on my spine and my head..."
"The tea will help that."
"...I should get that thing off the floor..." Ishan looked back at the axe.
"No, you should leave that thing on the floor where it is, lock the workshop door behind you, and come help me convince Darion that his project is dead for good."
"...All right."
Ishandarr cleaned up the workroom, turning down the heat in the forge and putting up the protective warding, mopping up the water spilled from the grindstone's reservoir, putting tools away. Slowly he calmed enough that he would be able to coherently speak with Highlord Mograine about what had taken place.
About the danger inherent in wielding the blade. abut the nightmares and whispers.
About the fact that one drop of blood spilled was enough to fully open the mind of one who held the axe to malevolent influence, and the fact that he'd experienced this firsthand.
He didn't go into detail; the dreams of submission and the feeling of unseen hands on his body and what exactly he'd been told, he kept from Mograine and everyone else.
It took days for the echoes of the whispers to die. Even after they did, the memory remained.
Ishan would see those eyes and that smile and hear those words in his dreams for a long, long time.
continue onward...
...i am waiting
***
The project was put on hold after Ishan and Koltira's report of the overt psychic assault; for a long time, the axe Shadow's Edge lay in a locked chest in the vault, with Mograine reluctant to give permission for any to so much as inspect it.
Ultimately, Ishan's dear friend Teraeis Fairdawn bent the weapon to his will, splitting the two-handed greataxe's blade in half and forging it into a set of twin blades dubbed Shadowmourne. None save Teraeis and Mograine knew that the blades he bore were the weapon that very nearly cost Ishan his mind - not until long after the final battle with the Lich King was over and done.
***
Yeah, Shadow's Edge TALKS TO YOU.
You can't make it into two pieces in the game; it's one big old axe there. But Ter is awesome that way. XD
Arthas was QUITE the epic troll but he's better now.
I WISH I COULD GET STORY BITS IN A LINEAR WAY, I REALLY DO~~~
