Chapter 3 – The One Left Behind

Chapter 3 – The One Left Behind

The green fire in the Lich King’s eyes flickered erratically. What had he been doing?

The world around him felt unreal, existing in the liminal state between dreams and reality.

Serivhal watched in confusion as a dragon emperor’s impossible nuclear dissolution reversed itself and the miles of scorched earth rebuilt, grain by grain, into the blasted landscape it had been before.

What.

The world flickered, and he was in the midst of casting his final barrier, the one meant to protect the continent from Aurendorax’s suicidal detonation. The desperation was still fresh in Serivhal’s memory: he had been frantically weaving the last thread into place even as the dragon emperor became a star. Now he was unweaving those same threads, each gesture reversing itself under his disbelieving gaze.

He watched Aurendorax grow smaller again. Watched half a dragon heart reconstitute itself from scattered light and return to the wound in his chest. Watched the wound close.

Oh.

He could guess at the next scene.

Through the eye of Time Stop, he had studied the dragon emperor’s expression in perfect stillness: eyes blazing with white-hot fury, the fury of a father and a husband and a sovereign who had nothing left to lose.

The fever dream skipped past the Time Stop entirely. One moment, the dragon emperor had been on the verge of getting his heart ripped out. The next, Serivhal’s defensive barriers were shaking as Aurendorax the Sun-Throned flowed through ancient martial forms. In reverse.

Something was wrong. Perhaps this wasn’t a dream.

Impossible. I refuse to acknowledge this.

Even as he denied reality, Serivhal filed the disparity away as an important clue.

He watched in clinical silence as the necromantic fire of his legions was slowly sucked from the blackened bark of the World Tree. Watched the branches reform, the golden leaves uncurl from their withered husks, and the green flame along them shrink and die until the World Tree blazed white and brilliant against a clear sky.

The ordered ranks of the Golden Compact spread before him, their armor shining under Yggdrasil’s light. This was from the beginning of the siege, when attrition had not yet reduced mankind’s best and brightest to withered husks, driven only by pure zeal. Their fighting spirit pressed down on him almost like a physical force.

If only they weren’t backstepping in perfect formation.

This was insanity. Time could not flow backward. The dead could not return. Three centuries of causality could not simply be undone.

Serivhal reached for his magic. He attempted to impose his will on reality. To wake up from this fever dream. Anything but acknowledge what was happening.

The world moved on, heedless of his wishes.

Curse you, Liria.

That final memory was still seared into his mind’s eye. Mankind’s desperate final flame, blazing in the darkness before dawn. All of humanity unified for the first time in one wish. Then the world going white.

He examined its implications, inspecting it from every angle.

Liria could not erase him entirely; he was not made of flesh anymore, not truly, not in the way that could be simply unmade. He was the world’s own corruption given will and shape, layered into the bedrock across three hundred years of patient work, woven into the leylines and the death-fields and the ancient burial sites of ten thousand battlefields.

If she tried to unravel him entirely, she would have to unravel the world itself.

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So she had done the next best thing. She had rewound time far enough to undo his victories, far enough to restore what he had destroyed, and trusted that whatever remained of him would be a shadow small enough to fight.

Serivhal had lost.