As he approached Silvermoon, he could hear the full proceedings of the funeral. It was large, impressive, and considering the timeline, extremely wasteful, but Arvis had long realized that expecting elves to consider practicality was an easy way to get disappointed.
Things probably would have been different if it hadn’t been for his unexpected presence derailing the undead invasion; and the elves suffered real catastrophic losses, but without it, their habits stayed the same.
“At least this one benefits me,” he muttered as he once again used his lung capacity as a tool for concealment, and slipped underwater, swimming toward the Isle of Quel’Danas.
It was the perfect opportunity, because every single person that mattered wanted to be there, meaning that no magister was on the isle, leaving the protection to the common soldiers.
Arvis could understand the rationale in general terms. After all, while Quel’Danas was technically an island, it was separated by a small strait that could be easily passed, and all the magisters were at the palace, close enough to respond to any emergencies.
Compared to some of the other things they had achieved, it didn’t even count as carelessness, especially since trying to use such a potent source of mana in any meaningful way was not simple, requiring complicated rituals that would alert everyone miles away.
Luckily for him, he didn’t actually want to use it for any kind of ritual. He just wanted to examine it, because arrogant elves were convinced that since they couldn’t fix it, no one else could … and the unholy corruption was getting worse.
There was a certain sense of irony that the only reason he had any hope of success was Arthas, his invasion shattering the ancient magical wards.
The new ones had been erected, but they were hasty constructions, lacking the perfection of the earlier versions that had been customized over thousands of years, a span of time that was difficult to even imagine.
The new defenses, he was confident in bypassing even before Camberon’s unintended lesson, but that upgrade made his approach even more confident. As he stepped onto the shore, he was wearing a head-to-toe black outfit, and if caught, he was ready to act like he was a servant of the Scourge before beating a hasty retreat.
Getting caught in such a sensitive location would count as a declaration of war, regardless of his intentions.
As he approached, he examined the defenses with his growing arcane senses. In some places, the old defenses still stood. He wanted it to be possible to stand there for weeks and examine them. They were not just strong, but they were also works of art, carrying the heritage of thousands of years.
Elves might have a lot of flaws, but a poor sense of design was not one of them.
Since he was in a hurry, instead of admiring the works, he compared the old defenses with the new ones. The biggest difference was that the old defenses were completely integrated, while the new ones were layered. Suppression wards, detection wards, and barrier wards existed in sequences rather than creating one that couldn’t be bypassed.
Even then, he suspected that anyone without his special combination of skills would have trouble bypassing them. He was able to bypass detection wards easily relying on his Suppression, Barriers he was able to blink around them without triggering the detection wards, and suppression wards, he merely ignored because unlike most archmages, he didn’t turn into a frail twig when he stopped channeling mana.
It looked simple, but without his ability to identify how each defense worked, it would have been impossible. But with it, it took two minutes for him to bypass all those new defenses, and he was already next to the Sunwell, though unlike the name, it resembled more of a small lake than a well.
A small lake thrumming with power, a drop of water enough to completely refill his enhanced reserves.
It was magnificent. It was also wrong.
The corruption was subtle, a little blackness in its otherwise luminous glow. It wasn’t much, but it was sticky, difficult to separate, almost like a magical disease; a confusing mess.
Worse, the corruption was not merely a leftover energy, but something more, suffusing the waters of the Sunwell, very difficult to detect, and even more difficult to isolate.
He didn’t try to unravel how it worked. He knew that his magical abilities had grown leaps and bounds, but it wasn’t enough to match an archmage, let alone the collective wisdom of all elven mages.
A solution from him would have to relate to his Abilities and Traits.
Luckily, there were no magic detectors next to the Sunwell. Not because elves were negligent; trying to detect someone casting magic in the vicinity of the greatest mana source was impossible. All he needed was to stay hidden.
He scooped a small glass of water, which had already started to evaporate, which was not a surprise. The Sunwell was a special entity, and it was known that any water that was removed would evaporate completely in a few hours, which was why elves didn’t use them as mana potions.
The only known way to settle them was to have another mana source, which ruined the whole point of taking them away in the first place.
He focused his attention on the glass and used Purification in full force, trying to cleanse it. It did … by focusing for a minute on a small glass. Still, it was progress; he decided as he used a larger glass.
But, there, he found a nasty surprise, because purifying took longer than he expected. The glass had double the water, which should mean cleansing it should take double the time. Instead, it took somewhat longer than two times, because corruption started to grow faster the moment it was removed from the Sunwell.
Curious, he used a bucket he grew with Bloom, having ten times the water. This time, the rate of cleaning was much lower.
It was the first time he was truly dealing with the limits of Abilities. Previously, the limit had always been the amount of mana he could find and channel, but this time, he hit a different limit, the amount of mana the ability could use.
From previous experimentation, he knew that the rarer the ability, the more energy they could leverage. Even Bloom would have started to lag behind if it wasn’t for the synergy between it and the Staff of Regrowth.
Even though he suspected it wouldn’t work, he tried it by using Holy Light. It worked even less, the corruption actively resisting the Holy Light.
Curious, he cut his finger, and dropped ichor into the water. It actually worked, slowing the corruption, allowing him to use purification to cleanse it far more easily.
Ichor was the answer. Not the perfect answer, probably requiring him to bleed for months, maybe years, to cleanse it. Too bad he couldn’t simply give that answer to elves. He had no illusions about their priorities. If they learned that they could fix the corruption by skewering him above the well and continuously bleed, they would.
Nothing would dissuade them.
And, worse, since his blood was that valuable, even after the corruption was fixed, they wouldn’t let him go, turning him into an alchemical ingredient.
That was unacceptable.
Worse, he knew that it wouldn’t change even if he could defend himself. Elven nobles were too spoiled to accept that as an answer, forcing his hand.
It wasn’t a fight they could afford to take while the Scourge was still trying to follow their plans.
He also couldn’t simply stop and hope elves could handle it.
“I need to experiment further,” he said. He didn’t have a convenient leyline he could set up to prevent the evaporation, but he had Magic Spring as an item, which could function the same way.
He found that approach in two steps. First, he left the Sunwell, and at the sea, and grew a huge, wooden container under water. Then, he created a smaller bucket, one that he could carry back and forth without triggering the wards. He made several trips back and forth, filling the container with corrupted water, making the same trip twenty times until he felt the presence of magisters returning from a distance.
Then, he returned to Stratholme, swimming underwater while dragging that tub of Sunwell water, with several wards around to slow down the evaporation and prevent leakage.
Previously, when he was searching for a place to deploy Magic Spring if necessary, he had discovered an underground cave, one that could only be accessed by an underground entrance, with a solid layer of rock in between.
He was initially planning to open some small channels to the surface.
Instead, he dug a large circle, placed the Magic Spring at the center, slightly elevated, and poured the corrupted Sunwell water around it. He also noticed that, the trip had been enough to increase the corruption significantly.
He had already identified that if the water was moved away from the Sunwell, the corruption spread faster. He didn’t know the exact mechanism, but it clearly worked.
“Well, let’s start working,” he said as he separated a small amount, carefully subjecting it to his Purification ability, this time with several detection spells to get a better understanding of the mechanic.
The results were difficult to parse, as the curse was extremely complicated. In some ways, it reminded of the blight, but only far more specialized and advanced. There was a high likelihood that both had been created by the same group of people.
Maybe the Lich King was personally responsible.
Not that it mattered, he decided as he started working on the waters. Trying to solve it was the most important part. With the initial data collected, he bled directly onto the water, watching the impact.
Several attempts showed that Ichor wasn’t directly countering the corruption. Instead, it was weakening the corruption for a while, allowing him to use Purification to cleanse it. He also examined it deeper to make sure the corruption wasn’t just absorbing it to get stronger … but luckily it wasn’t the case.
Just like the water from the Sunwell, once it was away from his body, Ichor slowly dissipated. As for whether it could be contained, he left that alone.
Instead, he focused on carving runes all around the cave, powered by the excess from the Mana Spring, some geared for hiding, others to measure and observe the status of the corrupted water.
Then, he focused on examining the corruption and started taking notes on its nature. He examined the corruption, which was closest to a magical disease, one that required an opposing energy of sufficient density to counter it.
It was promising. While finding something as potent as Ichor, at a scale it could be used to fix the Sunwell, was impossible, that wasn’t the only solution. After all, Ichor was merely a general solution.
A specialized solution could be developed just as well. Maybe a potion made of some specific ingredients that could be mass produced.
“It looks like I have a nightly project,” he muttered to himself with a sigh. Fixing the Sunwell was necessary, but it also wasn’t urgent. It was growing, but even the most pessimistic calculations showed that it would take months before it started to be harmful, and years until it reached a point it couldn’t be reversed.
Good, because finding a specific solution to a complicated, mysterious disease would require a lot of effort; possibly even requiring him to take a radical move and start learning about necromancy … but it was the last resort, the kind he would only consider if a year had passed without coming close to a real solution.
“At least I can expect elves not to do something rash,” he muttered. “Sitting on their ass, that’s one thing even elves can’t screw up.”
With that, he went out and came back with a great number of seeds and a set of alchemical equipment, and started the slow, thankless task of testing every single extract on the disease.
He didn’t expect to find a solution like that, but it was a good way to start. Ultimately, he guessed that he would need to find a way to imbue some of the special properties of Ichor into a plant he could grow en masse, but he couldn’t do that before understanding the plants and the process better.
Luckily, he wasn’t working alone. A lot of magisters were also working on it, and once he found a reliable direction toward a solution, he could always pass it to them.
Well, not pass it directly, as it would require a way to explain why he was knowledgeable about the exact nature of corruption. And, he doubted elves appreciated someone actually sneaking in.
He would need to find an indirect way, like disguising himself as a disgruntled assistant selling one magister’s early results to take revenge. The war already showed just how far the magisters were willing to go to increase their power. Compared to that, a little espionage was nothing.
But, he filed that plan away. He would still require weeks before he had anything actionable.
Instead, he started the slow task of reinforcing the magical protections around the underground cave, making sure it wouldn’t be easy to breach. Only when it was time for Sylvanas’ return, he departed, changed, and went to find her.
She was not at the camp, but at the Windrunner Spire, sitting alone in the garden. He sat next to her, and pulled her closer. She leaned on his shoulder, saying nothing. “Tough day?” he asked several minutes later.
“It was,” she said. “Anasterian … it was a complicated relationship. He had made too many mistakes, hurting my family, causing the needless deaths of many people in the process. Yet, I can’t feel angry. Why is that?”
“Feelings are complicated. We are raised by the idea that kings are these incredible, untouchable special beings, special because of the blood they carry, incapable of making mistakes. We want to believe that even when they commit evil, it’s some kind of grand design. The truth is, he was an old man, surrounded by advisors that constantly lied to him, long forgotten the meaning of being alive. And, now that he’s dead, there’s no point getting angry at him. At least in his last moments, he died fighting.”
She sighed. “How do you come up with that perspective?”
“Don’t forget that I lived through the same thing. The terrible decisions of Terenas and Uther destroyed my home, and I spent a lot of time cursing them in my mind, but I realized that it’s useless. They are dead and gone, and anger toward them doesn’t help. You realize that, and it saps its potency.”
She sighed. “You’re right.”
“What about the new king? Anything interesting?” he asked.
Sylvanas paused, then sighed. “We don’t have a new king,” she said.
He paused, his mind going in the worst direction, that someone had assassinated Kael’Thas. That would be horrible news, not because of any expectations, but a power vacuum would be worse. “What do you mean? Did something happen to Kael’Thas?”
“No. He refused the title of King and declared that his father will the last king of Quel’Thas. A way to honor him.”
He paused. “I don’t understand. He’s taking the throne, but just refusing the title?”
Sylvanas matched his tone. “I don’t know, but there are rumors of a regent. I think Kael’Thas plans to return to Dalaran once the crisis is dealt with. But, there’s nothing official, not yet.”
“It’s not as bad as I feared, but still a terrible choice. Now, the magisters would be competing with each other to be the regent, and it’ll keep Silvermoon distracted once again.”
“We stopped expecting anything from them in the first place, right? So, does it really matter?”
He kissed her temple. “You’re right. I guess it doesn’t really matter. At least, this way maybe some of them will try to decide them by fighting against the trolls or the undead. Having a few archmages on the front lines will make the battle much more solid. Maybe we can even hold the line with our new army rather than running around hoping to get lucky.”
“Maybe —“ she said, but that was all she was able to say before one of her rangers appeared at the boundary of the estate. “Work calls, again,” she said, stole a kiss, and left.
He sighed before he went to the library and started digging, but instead of focusing on the Sunwell, he finally started formulating the new training booster potion.
The visit to Tyr’s hand was soon, and he wanted to be able to bring a formidable force with him. Even with the latest growth, the population of Stratholme was almost merely a tenth of Tyr’s Hand, and impressing Lord Valdermar was critical before they could discuss the reallocation of refugees.
Any other time, a lord wouldn’t have to allow his people to leave unless he had no other choice, as population meant power, but he had visited the place secretly a few times to check without revealing himself, and he knew they were already straining under the number of refugees.
The corruption could wait.
It wasn’t like the Sunwell was about to blow up…