Hello everyone!
Been teasing this one for quite a while and very excited to finally show you Sylvanas:
Edge of Night.
This short story is available for free on the wow website and is a key moment in the
dark lady’s past, giving her a new motivation after getting her vengeance upon her Arthas.
With machinima by the one and only khayllys, voice acting from Sharm, Zarkpudd, Nora Suntrider
and Moocluck.
Model rigging from Master Vertex, all the hype...I hope you’ll enjoy!
Sylvanas Windrunner drifts in a sea of comfort, physical sensations replaced by the purity
of emotion.
She can grasp bliss, see joy, hear peace.
This is the afterlife, her destiny.
The eternal sea in which she found herself after she fell defending Silvermoon.
She belongs here.
With each recollection, her memory of this place palls.
The sound grows distant; the warmth, cooler.
The vision takes on the pallor of a half-remembered dream.
But with horrific clarity, the memory always ends the same: Sylvanas's spirit is wrenched
away.
The pain is so intense it leaves her soul forever torn.
The grinning face of Arthas Menethil, with his lopsided smile and dead eyes, leers at
her as he pulls her back into the world.
Violates her.
His laughter—that hollow laugh—the memory of it makes her skin crawl!
*** "You son of a bitch!"
Sylvanas hollered, kicking aside a shattered piece of the Lich King's frozen armor.
Her voice, empty and terrifying, cracked under the strain of her hatred.
The sound echoed across the peaks of Icecrown, rolling through the valleys like the cloying
mists that forever haunted this horrible place.
She had ventured here, alone, to his former seat of power.
To the very top of Icecrown Citadel, where a frozen throne loomed on a plateau of white
ice.
Of course that egotistical little boy she knew would place himself here, sitting atop
the world.
But where was he now?
Shattered.
She could no longer feel his malevolence tugging at the edges of her consciousness.
His broken armor lay in pieces on the white peak before his throne, surrounded with blackened
cakes of frozen gore, the remains of those who had finally brought him to his knees.
Sylvanas regretted not being there to see him broken.
She picked up a shattered gauntlet, from the very hand that had once gripped Frostmourne.
He is finally dead.
But why did she feel so hollow inside?
Why did she still throb with rage?
She hurled the armor from the peak, watching it disappear into the roiling mists.
She was not alone.
Nine glimmering spirits encircled the pinnacle, their masked faces turned toward her, their
ephemeral forms held aloft on graceful, insubstantial wings.
They were the Val'kyr, warrior maidens of old, once enslaved to the will of Arthas.
Why did they remain in this place?
Sylvanas neither knew nor cared.
They stayed out of her way, absolutely mute, immobile even as Sylvanas hollered and raged.
Were they watching her?
Judging?
She ignored them and crunched through the snow to the very seat of Arthas's power.
Someone else sat atop the throne.
Sylvanas at first thought it was Arthas's corpse, planted mockingly in this place of
honor and sealed in a block of ice, but the silhouette was all wrong.
She approached the throne and wiped her hand across the surface of the ice, peering at
the distorted figure within.
Human, yes.
She recognized the profile of an Alliance shoulderplate.
But the body was very badly burned, the flesh split open like roasted meat.
He wore Arthas's crown—and his eyes—that flicker of consciousness…
They have replaced him.
A new Lich King sat on the throne!
Again Sylvanas cried out, shock growing into explosive rage.
She smashed the flat of her hand against the ice, then her fist.
The ice cracked.
The immobile face within split open behind a web of fractures.
Her howls faded, disappearing hollowly into the mists that enveloped the peak.
They replaced him.
Does this mean there will always be a Lich King?
Idiots.
Naively presuming that their puppet king wouldn't someday begin twisting the world to his own
ends.
Or worse: become a blunt weapon for something even more terrible.
It was a bitter blow.
She had expected to venture here in triumph, not to discover another defeat.
The victory was hollow.
But she backed away from the throne, straightened up, and accepted that the cycle would go on.
Arthas was dead.
What did it matter if another corpse filled his vacant throne?
Sylvanas Windrunner had her vengeance.
The vision that had driven her and her people for years had finally been realized.
And not a single fiber of her desiccated, animate corpse cared where the world went
from here.
It was over now.
A part of her was surprised she was even still around, without his lingering presence always
tugging at the back of her mind.
She backed away from the throne and slowly turned to survey the cold gray world all around
her.
Her thoughts returned to that place of bliss, her half-remembered glimpse of what lay beyond.
Home.
It was time.
Slowly, she crunched her way to the ragged edge of the icy platform.
A thousand feet below, shrouded by the clouds, lay a forest of shattered saronite spikes
she had scouted out earlier.
The fall alone couldn't kill her: her animate flesh was nigh indestructible.
But the spikes, the hardened blood of an Old God, they not only would tear the body apart
but would obliterate the soul as well.
She longed for it.
A return to peace.
The work she had begun in the forests of Silvermoon was finally complete with the death of Arthas.
She lifted her bow from her shoulder and cast it aside.
It clattered against the uneven ice.
Then she removed her quiver.
Arrows spilled from it, cascading down the side of Icecrown Citadel, disappearing one
by one into the fog.
The empty quiver dropped quietly to the ground at her feet.
Her ragged, dark cloak, freed from her discarded armaments, began to whip around her neck in
the bitter wind.
She could feel no cold, only a dull ache.
She would feel nothing soon.
She already felt her spirit reaching a place of calm for the first time in almost a decade.
Her weight shifted toward the edge of the drop.
She closed her eyes.
As one, the Val'kyr silently turned to face her.
Gilneas "Forwar—" the marshal cried, his command
cut short as a musketball shattered his lower jaw.
The wall before him was broken but still offered cover for the snipers hidden in the rain above.
The weather poured from the sky in white sheets, drenching attackers and defenders alike.
The marshal toppled over, careening down a pile of rubble like a sack of cordwood, coming
to rest in the thick mud below.
Like the bogged-down demolishers and meat wagons of his artillery, his troops were making
no progress.
Any normal man would've been dead for sure, but being that the marshal was already dead,
he soon clawed his way up from the mud, spitting coagulated blood and ichor from the remains
of his face.
To the north, across a long stretch of rutted field and on the other side of a gauzy filter
of rain, Garrosh Hellscream tried to piece together what was happening along the front.
He could see the gray silhouette of the great Gilnean wall, slotted with enormous diagonal
gaps where the Cataclysm had wrenched it wide open.
Were his Kor'kron at the front, they'd have walked right through.
He grunted as a Forsaken scouting party trundled back through the mud, ragged and beaten.
Even in victory, the Forsaken looked like corpses; in defeat, they looked even worse.
"Your scouts are useless.
I sent them to harass the wall's defenses, and they crawl back like whipped dogs."
Garrosh snorted, not even looking at his companion.
The great brown-skinned orc was festooned in his most menacing battle garb, his veiny,
tattooed biceps bursting out from beneath tusked shoulderguards.
Although he stood right in front of his tent, he refused to step back out of the rain.
It dribbled over his scowling face and blackened jaw.
Next to the great orc and sheltered under the tent canopy, Master Apothecary Lydon looked
positively frail.
His pockmarked face winced under a matted mess of purple-gray hair as he tried to formulate
a response that wouldn't earn him another round of verbal abuse from the warchief.
"I can assure you they're giving as good as they get," he said in measured tones, his
voice rough and shallow.
"Gilnean defenses are almost certainly in disarray."
"Then why are your scouts limping back instead of pressing forward?"
Garrosh kicked aside a barrel.
Behind him, his own troops weathered out the rain: four companies of elite handpicked orc
and tauren warriors supported by five battalions of Orgrimmar's hardest.
They stretched over the fields of Silverpine, a sea of green and brown faces against a backdrop
of bright-red banners.
"And where are the promised regiments from Lordaeron?
They're to flood the breach.
We waste time."
Lydon knew better than to talk tactics with the hard-headed warchief, but he had grown
desperate as the hour of the attack had approached.
He licked his gray lips with a dark-purple tongue and tried to answer casually, hoping
to elicit some reason.
"Slowed by the rain, no doubt, but they should arrive soon.
They are… absolutely…
Lordaeron's finest.
The very heart of our infantry and backbone of our entire endeavor…"
Garrosh stroked the side of his face with his knuckles.
He eyed the terrain and mentally positioned the coming infantry and cavalry as Lydon spoke.
"But you can't just send them right into the central breach in the wall," Lydon continued.
"It's a… a chokepoint.
Well fortified, closely watched.
Heavy armored troops on horseback couldn't maneuver through the breach: they'd be mown
down by musketfire from the debris.
Surely you can see—"
"Of course I see!"
Garrosh answered.
"The door is wedged open; now it must be kicked down.
This is what your kind is good for."
Now the warchief looked directly at the master apothecary, his cool eyes fixated on the pale
yellow light that filled the latter's eye sockets.
"You're already corpses, nearly impossible to kill.
You flood the chokepoint, you open the way for the rest of the Horde to come through,
fresh and eager.
Rushing over a bridge of broken bodies if we have to.
This is how fortifications are breached.
How wars are won."
The master apothecary lifted up two bony fingers.
"But if we could just use a… just a touch of the plague.
Just to open a gap.
Not even enough to do any—just a smudge!
More to cause fear and panic than any actual—"
Garrosh's backhand ripped through the sky, spraying the tent with a glistening arc of
rainwater as it smashed into the side of Lydon's face.
The master apothecary reeled as if he'd been kicked by a horse, but by will alone managed
to stay upright after the blow.
"If you're suggesting using even an ounce of that filth that you've got hidden away,
I will burn you and your sewer-city to the ground," Garrosh grunted.
He turned back toward the action.
Humiliated, Master Apothecary Lydon muttered a barely audible, "Yes, Warchief," through
clenched teeth.
But privately he coiled up his anger.Where is the Dark Lady, Sylvanas?he wondered, turning
his empty eye sockets toward the gray heavens.
Why isn't she here to counter this beast?
Icecrown Sylvanas tottered on the edge of Icecrown's
peak, her eyes closed.
She raised her arms.
Although the wind here was biting cold, she felt only the dullest of aches.
She sensed a presence nearby and opened her eyes.
The Val'kyr had drifted closer to her, close enough that she could see their weapons glinting
against their ghostly thighs.
What did they want?
Without warning, a vision filled her head.
A memory.
She found herself in a warm, sun-drenched bedroom.
Shafts of golden sunlight spilled through the window, illuminating aimless motes of
dust and casting ornate patterns on the floor.
This was her room.
A lifetime ago.
She had not yet seen her twentieth autumn, yet already young Sylvanas was the most promising
hunter in her family.
She pulled on her thigh-high leather boots, carefully measuring the laces and decoratively
tying them.
She adjusted the leaf-patterned embroidery, then bounced herself off of the bed to admire
her reflection in the mirror.
Her waist-length blonde hair flowed like water, absolutely translucent in the light of the
sun.
She beamed at the mirror, teasing her hair until it dashed around her long, slender ears
in just the perfect way.
It wasn't good enough to be the best hunter in her family.
She needed to take everyone's breath away as she ventured out.
She was so very vain.
It was a strange, forgotten memory, and it brought Sylvanas back from the edge of the
peak.
What had prompted that recollection?
That life was lost a thousand times over.
Another memory flooded her senses.
Now she crouched behind an outcropping of smooth stone in Eversong Woods.
The autumnal foliage rustled above her, masking the sound of her companion's footsteps as
he dashed forward and then fell into hiding beside her.
"There are so many!" he barked, falling silent as she raised a finger.
"We have only two dozen rangers up there," he said, his voice now a whisper.
"They cannot survive that!"
Sylvanas didn't turn her gaze away from the dark mass of shambling corpses crushing its
way closer to the river ford.
It was the height of the Third War, and hours away from Silvermoon's fall at the hands of
Arthas's army.
"They merely need to delay them as we fortify the Sunwell's defense," she answered, her
tone measured.
"They will die!"
"They are arrows in the quiver," Sylvanas said.
"They must be spent if we are to win this."
She was brash.
Empty?
No—a fighter.
She had a warrior's heart.
Now, as sudden as the last, a third memory.
"Rightful heirs of Lordaeron!"
Sylvanas called out, holding her bow aloft.
Her forearm, still slender and muscular, was now a shade of blue-gray.
Dead.
The scene was very different now.
This vision had the cold sheen of a memory lived after death.
Before her waited a grotesque, quivering mass of corpses, their armor piecemeal, their bodies
broken, the stench unimaginable.
Their plaintive, desperate gazes reminded her suddenly of children.
They disgusted her.
But their need empowered her.
"The Lich King falters.
Your will is your own.
Are you to be outcasts now in your own land?
Or do we embrace the cruel cards fate has dealt us and retake our place in this world?"
Her questions were greeted with gurgles, then a rasping, almost desperate cheer.
Bony fists lifted toward the sky.
These poor people: peasants, farmers, priests, warriors, lords and nobles… they hadn't
yet come to grips with what had happened to them.
But for somebody—anybody—to assure them that they belongedsomewhere was electrifying.
"We are abandoned.
We are… forsaken.
But when the sun rises tomorrow, the capital will be ours," she pronounced.
And now they roared.
"But what of the humans?"
a young alchemist asked as the din faded.
Sylvanas recognized him from the previous night's fighting.
A cool intelligence flickered in his eye sockets: Lydon was his name.
Already he'd come to embrace his situation, referring to humans as if they were a separate
race; she made a mental note to make use of him.
"The humans will serve their purpose," she answered, her mind already calculating.
"They believe they are liberating the city.
Let them fight on our behalf and spend themselves for our gain.
They are"—she stumbled upon an analogy she'd used before—"arrows in our quiver."
The heaving mass of undead clapped and coughed and hacked gleefully in assent.
Sylvanas regarded the whole mob coldly.
And so are you, she thought to herself.
Arrows I will aim at Arthas's heart.
Still a warrior's heart?
She had grown cold.
No, she was the same.
In death as in life.
Sylvanas shook her head, cleared her vision.
These were her memories, but she wasn't remembering them.
They were being pulled from her.
Pulled from her by the Val'kyr.
The mute spirits hovered around her, regarding her silently.
They are probing me!
Sylvanas realized.
Judging me!
She drew cold air into her lungs, her eyes suddenly alive.
"I will not be judged!"
she cried out, turning away from the edge to face her accusers.
"Not by you.
Not by anyone."
Her fury welled up inside her.
Would her banshee's wail work against these…
things?
But she didn't need to fight at all.
She was done.
"Stay back," she commanded.
"And stay out of my head!"
Sylvanas stepped back, the wind whipping her hair and snapping her frayed cloak.
The memories of who she had been and what she had become closed a knot in her stomach,
and she moved now to unravel it.
No more would she be the vengeful leader of a mongrel race of rotted corpses.
Her work was done, and her long-denied reward awaited her.
Longing for that forgotten bliss, she allowed herself to fall backward from the top of Icecrown
Citadel.
The wind rushed past her, a growing wail.
The pinnacle, and the silent Val'kyr at its peak, disappeared…
Her body burst on the saronite stones below with a crushing finality.
And so the dark lady throws herself from the top of icecrown, but of course this would
not be the end of her journey.
The why and how we’ll continue next week so for now thank you very much for watching
everyone!
Subscribe if you like my videos, leave a like if you enjoyed this one aaaaaaand until next
time guys....see ya!