Archive of Our Own

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
   Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
   My love shall in my verse ever live young.

- Shakespeare, Sonnet 19

Khadgar falls to his knees, relief and power rushing through him as Medivh falls over, the green light drained from his eyes, both host and demon dead. The font is dried up, the Fel influence scattered, and Khadgar is the only one left alive.

He takes a few deep breaths, gripping onto the edge of the mana pool, as the magic within him flickers. The demon wards painted on his skin have shattered, have disappeared, as if they have sunk back into the depleted wards of Karazhan, to protect it from the next demon—except that there won’t be a next demon ever again. The room smells like blood and char, and within the chaos and the adrenaline rushing through Khadgar’s veins, something else is entering him. Something ancient and powerful, the most ancient of magic.

Khadgar breathes, exhausted, and lets it in. “Hello, Guardian,” he says to himself in the empty room, as the indescribable power of a thousand protectors before him fills his veins with new life.

Sargeras is dead for real this time, his soul scattered over millions of miles of land filled with the Light. Medivh was never himself, and the newly awakened Guardian power within him assures Khadgar that Medivh would have wanted the Fel gone, would have willingly sacrificed his life to get rid of the demon, if he hadn’t been forced to sacrifice himself by Khadgar.

He clasps Medivh’s fallen staff, the gnarled wood clutched in his bruised hands, and the new extensive magic within him relaxes at the touch. Khadgar doesn’t know how old the wood in the staff is, or how many Guardians have wielded it before him.

In the silence of Karazhan, his phone rings.

Khadgar fumbles in his bloodstained pockets to pull it out with shaking, adrenaline-pulsing fingers, and puts it against his ear. “Garona?”

“You’re alive,” she says, voice staticy over the long distance connection. “Or—am I speaking to Sargeras? Is this the Mad Titan on the line?”

“It’s me. Lowly Khadgar, no longer a slave to society’s oppressive interpretation of magic. Maybe I’ll finally remove my tattoo of the Kirin Tor. Currently I’m down one Medivh.”

“I’m talking to the new Guardian, then.”

“Yup.” Khadgar stands, strapping the staff to his back and lying on the ground, stomach-down. He’s beyond tired. He’s about to ascend from this plane of being if he doesn’t get some sleep now.

“Well, this is terrible timing,” Garona says. “Do you see a camera feed in Karazhan?”

Khadgar looks around wildly in the room. There are no security cameras in sight. There weren’t any in the blueprints, as far as he could tell. “No?”

“Well, some security camera footage is actually streaming live on CNN, ever since the bit where you killed Medivh. Still rolling actually.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

Khadgar opens and closes his mouth several times. He’s on TV. He’s on TV killing Medivh.

“Does the footage include him turning into a ten-foot-tall demon before he attacked me?”

“Unfortunately not. You’d better get the hell out of dodge before the army knocks on your door, Khadgar.”

“Of course, I could just explain the situation. I don’t have to run. I’m not a criminal, Garona. I just saved everybody in this country.”

“Consider this: no one’s going to listen to you knowing that you just killed the Guardian and have all his powers. They’re going to shoot first and ask question later.”

Khadgar scrambles to stand up, wincing at his lightheadedness. “You don’t know that. Don’t underestimate us humans.”

“I do know that, actually. That’s what they’re saying on CNN. You’ve got a warrant out for your destruction, dead or alive. They definitely won’t ask questions.”

Garona is silent for a few seconds. “...There is now complete pandemonium in the newsroom. Oh, look at that, they have some lip reading experts trying to translate the audio—and now they know that you’re talking to me. I need some lawyers on this, pronto, so get the hell over here.”

“Why would being with you help any?”

Garona scoffs. “International law, Khadgar. It’s not like Azeroth has any jurisdiction in Draenor. You don’t have any time to regroup with someone in Azeroth. The army is almost at your door.”

Khadgar disconnects the call, shoving the phone in his pocket and vaulting as quickly as possible down the giant staircase to the nearest bathroom. He’s empty, running on fumes, and needs protein and caffeine in his system as soon as possible, but he can’t stop lest he be shot dead by the army. Even with his new Guardian magic, he’s got no possible way of stopping assault weapons pointed in his face.

He’s shaking as he leans against the tile, his hair coarse against his bruised back.

Khadgar may like his hair past his shoulders, but it’s annoying while not tied up with something. As of now, it’s bunched around his shoulders, covered in flecks of blood and grime from his battle that he still can’t believe he won.

He spares a glance at himself in his small bathroom mirror. He looks like absolute shit, the Guardian staff flung over his shoulder that is his now, but doesn’t feel like it. His hoodie is covered in bright blue demon blood, staining over the Kirin Tor University logo.

Shit. He likes this hoodie. This hoodie means a lot to him. He met—and broke up with—Lothar in this hoodie.

As he looks at the mirror, the magical tattoo on his left forearm, the mark of the Kirin Tor, begins to itch like never before, and Khadgar hurriedly pulls back his hoodie to scratch it. It may be magical, but the most it has ever done before is glow. Now it feels like his entire arm is on fire.

The mark glows bright green, a color it is never supposed to be, and Khadgar feels something well up in the back of his throat. It feels like he’s about to choke, to vomit, to scream, to expel his lungs from his mouth, and he almost collapses on the floor. He looks at the dirty bathroom mirror, and reflected back at him are his eyes, bright green and emanating light that is undeniably magic.

“No,” he tells himself, even as he chokes on air, as he tries to spit out the thing lodged in his soul. “You are not Fel. I defeated the Fel.”

He grabs the Guardian staff for support, but there’s a magic backlash. He falls to the ground, hand stinging, the staff cast far away from the magnetic propulsion. Around him, everything fades into a murky green tint, and Khadgar can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t see in this fog.

“Help,” he screams at anything, anyone who would listen. “Help!”

His voice fades, his magic fizzles within him, and the only thing Khadgar can do is scream in fear and pain at the pounding in his head, the melting of his limbs, the converging of the Fel and the Guardian magic.

And then it’s over. The murk fades, Khadgar can breathe, the Guardian staff rolls back to his fingertips, and when Khadgar reaches out to touch it, the staff is just a stick of wood.

He looks at himself in the mirror as he struggles to stand. Looking back at him is just himself, dark bags under his eyes, pale sunless skin and all. No trace of the Fel in his eyes or in his gut.

Loud, harsh knocks echo from the front door of the Tower, and over a loudspeaker, someone shouts, “If you do not open this door within twenty seconds with your hands raised where we can see them, we will force our entry, and you will not survive.”

“Fuck the army,” Khadgar growls to himself, and uses the staff to hobble out of his room, towards the front door. Garona is too distrusting of others, too distant to regular humans who believe in duty and kinship, to know that the army is going to shoot on sight if he opens the door in time. Khadgar has more hope.

The door bursts open when Khadgar is a mere foot away, knocking him off his feet, landing against a bookshelf.

An armored military team streams in single-file, magic wards up around all of them, weapons raised and all pointed at him. Khadgar can feel their auras through the earth; he can feel as they all squeeze their triggers. One soldier’s hands feels more familiar than the others.

Without any conscious effort, Khadgar’s own hands are up in front of his face, blocking the assault, not with the impenetrable strength of his human skin, but by magic, called from the deepest subconscious of a force stronger than himself.

The bullets freeze in the air, gravity pulling them towards the ground, the triggers on the guns unmovable by the soldiers, but the humans free to move as they please. The bullets clatter to the ground, all falling far from Khadgar, and the military team fumbles with their weapons for seconds before realizing that all the wards in the world can’t save them from the inherited power of the Guardian.

One of the soldiers pulls their mask off, and lets it drop to the ground, rolling to a stop at Khadgar’s feet. The entire team freezes at the audacity of the soldier.

“Lothar,” Khadgar breathes. It’s been months since he’s laid eyes on the other man. Lothar looks more haggard and worn since the day he threw Khadgar out of his apartment, for good.

“Just surrender,” Lothar says hurriedly, hands up and weaponless. “Just surrender, and no one will harm you, not until a judge gives the order. You know that even with the powers you stole from Medivh that you can’t survive forever. We have the entire force of Azeroth on our side.”

“The trial? There can’t be a trial. I’m not the enemy here, Lothar. Medivh was the perpetrator smuggled the Fel into Azeroth! Medivh was also possessed by a demon. I killed the demon, and stopped the spread of the Fel.” At least, he hopes so. He hopes so with every fiber of his being. “You have to believe me.”

“You can tell your story in court. Just put your hands out where we can see them.

Khadgar’s stomach sinks. “You don’t believe me.” Lothar’s aura is staunch, determined, resolute. He values duty over Khadgar’s word. He doesn’t even consider that Khadgar isn’t a threat.

“There is no evidence to support you. Please, just come with us quietly. You don’t have to add another sentence to your growing list of convictions.”

Khadgar drops his subconscious magic, just for a second, and he can feel someone pull the trigger on their weapons, feel the bullet whistle through the air, feel the air hot on his neck where the target is.

Khadgar puts one hand up to stop the bullet, moving without thinking about it, without making a single sound. The bullet heats up when hitting his hand and shatters into a million pieces, his skin unharmed. Covered with Medivh’s blood, but still unharmed.

Everyone aims their weapons at him again, even Lothar. Khadgar knows that the target Lothar is aiming for is between Khadgar’s eyes.

Khadgar takes one last despairing look at his old friend, his ex, and frowns. The Guardian staff is still strapped to his back despite the turmoil, as if clinging to him for dear life.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and draws the magic into himself, picturing Draenor as his destination as the guns fire uselessly around him, bullets flying ever closer to embedding their lethal metal into him as he winks out of existence.

Khadgar breaks down and cries, overcome with adrenaline and emotion and too young to have killed someone, too young to be branded a criminal, as he hurtles into the tunnel of magic, his destination of Draenor at the other side of his consciousness.

When he spits out of the teleportation portal at Garona’s feet, finally collapsing in exhaustion, Garona and her lawyers startling, he’s stopped crying. He’s stopped feeling anything at all.

 “Tell me,” Khadgar says, an ice pack pressed against his eye, lounging on a sofa in Garona’s house. Her lawyers eye each other nervously.

It’s been a rough twenty-four hours. After sleeping in Garona’s office for most of the night, he had awoken to the clamor of orcs lining up outside City Hall, demanding to know why Anderson Cooper is the only one in the CNN newsroom not xenophobic against orcs. Instead of saying anything, Garona had just showed them Khadgar, drinking coffee as fast as he could in the City Hall break room, to explain the situation.

Some of the Draenorians clapped him on the back. Some spat at him. One in particular punched him upside the jaw, and when Khadgar had summoned a weak and tiny flame to defend himself, the orc was already out the door.

“We have very good ties with Azeroth,” Garona notes calmly as Khadgar shifts the ice pack to his other eye, also swollen. “Or at least, we did, until yesterday.”

“No one knows you welcomed me,” Khadgar says. “For all they know, I could be anywhere.”

“Actually—” the lawyers interrupted, both hulking full-blooded orcs with muscles that could rip out of their three-piece suits at any moment. “Several of the people who you brought in to see Khadgar took selfies with him, and have already posted them online.”

Khadgar winces, and it’s a testament to good Draenor ice that he doesn’t even feel the scab on his face split open again. “Is there any chance I could maybe have a week to heal before I appease the courts? How does international law really work, again?”

Garona cuts in before her lawyers respond. “I run the financial sector of this country, Khadgar. You might have to worry more about my financial enemies, who will use assassins and cutthroats to kill you so that our stocks plummet.”

“Holy mother of God,” Khadgar says. “I’m up against bankers? I’m the actual Guardian now, keeper of the Order of Tirisfal and all that jazz. I think I can handle some bankers.”

Garona frowns and pokes him in his side. With all of Khadgar’s adrenaline-fueled responses, he just rolls over to his other side and mutters, “Ow.”

“You’re bruised beyond recognition,” Garona says, smacking him on the face. “Your Guardian magic isn’t helping you to heal any, or to function with a lack of sleep, or to actually sit up and help us figure out how to get you free without setting one foot back into Azeroth.”

“Remind me why we don’t want to go to Azeroth again?”

One of Garona’s lawyers, Durotan, visibly rolls his eyes. “Do the words ‘discrimination against magic users’ mean anything to you?”

With all of Khadgar’s incredibly fine-tuned responses, he just nods, barely, and hugs a sofa cushion to his chest.

“Do the words—” Durotan consults his iPhone, incredibly tiny in his huge muscular hands, for dramatic effect, “‘police brutality against mages’ mean anything to you? Because a Kirin Tor student was arrested for possession of weed and then found dead in her cell last night. You know. Three hours after it was announced that the greatest criminal to ever grace the earth is a mage.”

“I get it,” says Khadgar, into his pillow. “I want to survive and therefore should stay on the wrong side of the law. But like, the law isn’t bad. My ex-boyfriend works for the law!”

At the mention of Lothar, Garona softens, and stops poking him, instead reaching to tousle his hair. “He was on the team sent to take you down,” she says. “His heroic action to lay down his weapon in front of you was recorded via body cam for the entire world to see.”

“Did the body cam also show my claim that I am not the enemy?”

“No,” Orgrim, Garona’s other lawyer, says shortly. “Of course not. It’s the media. They value nativism and an us-versus-them mentality over facts.”

“I want to see what they’re saying about me,” Khadgar decides, and grabs the TV remote off the coffee table, pointing it blearily at the gigantic plasma screen.

Privately, he just wants to know if Lothar is disowning him on live television.

The TV winks on, in the middle of some Korean soap opera—Garona winks unashamedly at him for this—and Khadgar switches the channels until he comes across his face. It’s a selfie of him last year, his last year at Kirin Tor University, wearing the iconic gray hoodie he still has on at this moment, surrounded by his friends. He looks bright and happy, one sleeve rolled up to the elbow to show off the magic tattoo of the institution he belonged to, surrounded by people with matching tattoos.

Khadgar looks at himself. He wasn’t happier back then than he was even yesterday morning, than he has been for the past eight months, ever since he sat in a guest lecture with the Guardian of Tirisfal, Medivh, and noticed that the mage had two shadows. When the administration wouldn’t accept that the Protector of Azeroth was totally being possessed by something darker, he had left immediately, fearing for his own safety and that of his classmates.

When none of his classmates believed him or followed him out the door, Khadgar called up an old friend.

However, this isn’t the version of the story the newscasters tell. One commentator clucks her tongue at the old image of him. “He doesn’t look all that imposing, does he?” she says, the disappointment evident in her voice. She wants to fear him, to hate him, but he just looked like a college student without an extra care in the world.

“He doesn’t have to look imposing to be a murderer,” another newscaster reminds her. He seems to enjoy his swivel chair, as the camera fades out from the picture and back onto them, he’s pivoting slightly, flashing the camera with his shiny porcelain teeth. “Murderers walk among us every day, even those we trust the most. Remember King Llane’s relation to the traitor Garona Halforcen?”

Next to Khadgar, Garona growls. “Should I sue them for libel?” she snaps at her lawyers, one of which is playing Flappy Bird (Orgrim) and one of which is Skyping with his infant son (Durotan).

“No,” Orgrim says distractedly.

From Durotan’s phone comes a soft coo, and then a loud roar, ending in a gurgle of laughter. Durotan smiles down at it. “That’s great,” he says, in all his enthusiastic dad appreciation. “I’ll see you when I can, okay?”

“Okay, hon,” comes the warm voice from the other end of the phone. “Tell Khadgar that he has my full support.”

Khadgar leans over until his face up to his nose is in the camera. “Thanks, Mrs. D!”

When Durotan disconnects and looks up, Garona is glaring at him. “What?” he says.

“You have a cute kid,” Khadgar says. “What’s his name?”

Garona interrupts. “Can I sue the network publishing this?” She thumbs in the direction of the TV, where the newscasters are now play-acting the violent stabbing death of King Llane, complete with the male newscaster falling over the counter, clutching his neck.

Durotan curls his lip, his pierced tusks protruding more than usual. “It’s in bad taste, considering you’ve been pardoned due to mind control, but Azeroth is very big on free speech with absolutely no repercussions for those in power. You could maybe sue them, and then they would sue you right back for harboring a criminal.”

“But international waters,” Garona sputters.

Ogrrim winces, having died again in Flappy Bird. “That’s not how international law works.”

Khadgar shushes them, resting his bruised chin on the ice pack on top of the cushion, and goes back to watching the news.

The female corresponder looks directly at the screen and says, “And now, for a more balanced perspective, we go to our agent in the field and current professor at the prestigious Kirin Tor University.”

“Oh, God,” Khadgar buries his head in the cushion. “I don’t want to know what he has to say.”

“...That one of our own would commit this kind of senseless killing is an unspeakable tragedy,” the professor says. “But for us to assume blindly that young Khadgar is the only culprit is incredibly naive. There are countless wards on the Tower of Karazhan, and for a drop out of our university to break every single one of them is impossible, to say the least. Even I don’t know the full extent of these wards. Therefore, I urge those investigating this crime to search for others who may have helped Khadgar to break in.”

Khadgar looks at Garona, who is tapping Orgrim’s shoulder repeatedly until he dies in Flappy Bird again and pays attention to the screen.

“However, there are also those who claim that if Khadgar was to return from Draenor and actually go to trial for this murder, he would have several classmates who could vouch for a plea of insanity, because before he dropped out of school, he claimed that Medivh, a guest lecturer at the time, was possessed, and when no one believed him, he left and never came back.”

“Great,” Khadgar frowns, looking down at his (washed and dried) Kirin Tor University hoodie, the bloodstains faint but still prominent. “Guess I’ll be burning this, then.”

“Do not set a fire in this house,” Garona warns. “Or in this country. Don’t get yourself arrested for arson.”

“Fine. I’ll burn this with my own magic, which has a zero chance of catching anything else on fire.”

“Didn’t you tell me that all the Guardian power couldn’t help you stand when the military knocked on your door?”

“Fine. I’ll keep this hoodie.”

Orgrim interrupts. “Your habit of using humor to cover up your pain is a surprising quirk.”

Everyone is silent, biting off their comments, and Khadgar turns back to the TV. Someone is being interviewed on screen, and by the bare arm sporting the mark of the Kirin Tor, they’re a fellow student.

“Anyone wanting to turn this into a political statement can go BEEP themselves. Magic is already regulated enough, and hasn’t been used to commit murder in decades. Decades. I’ve never met Khadgar before, but I do know that no one learns combat spells in this curriculum. Magic isn’t your precious assault weapons. We can’t just kill you if we want to. Magic wasn’t made to harm. Magic was made to create. I’m in the architecture track, and I have used it to create. If you’re so concerned about future deaths, stop blaming it on things we are born with, like magic, and—and tusks on orcs!—and look deep within yourselves until you realize that more people are killed in human wars than any other unnatural cause combined.”

Khadgar feels like applauding. He refrains from doing so.

Another interviewee comes on screen. “I think Khadgar was right,” he says, with a wide, sleazy smile. “I think we need to get rid of power that is relegated to the few and the select, chosen by those already in power. The position of Guardian was created to restrain us regular humans from living life without looking over our shoulder. I’m glad he’s gone.”

The interviewer reminds him that by killing Medivh, Khadgar is now the official Guardian, with all the powers and knowledge of the previous one.

“That’s not true,” Khadgar says. “I don’t have a demon walking around in my head.”

“That’s even better,” the man on the TV says. “So when you all kill him in the electric chair, his power will be relegated to no one, and no one will ever be able to wield it again.”

Garona yanks the remote out of Khadgar’s hands and the TV screen winks off. “That’s enough,” she says, her eyes blazing and wild, tusks bared. “No one needs to see that, least of all you.”

Khadgar rubs his tired hands together, discolored and bruised from the battle yesterday. “I do. I need to know what people think of me now. Because even if I succeed, even if I survive, no one will like me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.” Orgrim looks up from his Twitter feed. “The news just broke that Anduin Lothar, the Lion of Azeroth, used to date you. There are witnesses and everything. His media team hasn’t issued a public statement yet, but the reactions from the public are basically ‘Oh, so that’s why he tried to diplomacize you instead of shooting you to high heaven.’”

“Great,” Khadgar says again. “But why does everyone care? It ended months ago!”

Garona sends him a pitying look. “Khadgar, it ended two months ago, and you were miserable until we finally got a tracker on Sargeras, all of four days ago. If it’s important to you, it is of utmost importance to the media.”

“Fuck the media,” Khadgar says. “Thanks to them, everyone thinks I’m crazy and misguided and probably that I used Lothar to get the goddamn wards down. Which I didn’t. In case you were wondering.”

“We believe you,” Durotan says, and puts his maw of a hand on Khadgar’s shoulder. It’s supposed to be comforting, Khadgar thinks. “You don’t look heartless enough to use love as a weapon.”

“You know what you have to do?” Orgrim frowns, now using his phone as a stimming toy, bouncing it up and down on his knee. “You have to make sure your ex isn’t biased against you.”

“He totally is.”

“How do you know?” Orgrim raises a bushy eyebrow. “Because he followed the law when the news came in that you murdered someone? I’ve seen the bit of your plea that the authorities deemed suitable for everyone watching, the bit without your crazy conspiracy theory. You look like you could totally plead insanity and win. You have to tell your ex, calmly and with evidence, that you are not the villain in this story, and maybe he will get the Queen to look for more evidence to prove your innocence.”

“I have no evidence.”

“You have your visions,” Garona reminds him. “If you have enough strength in you to muster enough magic to show him that.”

“That and teleporting to him and back,” Durotan adds.

“I definitely don’t. And half the time, my vision summoning doesn’t even work! It’s like, one-fourth the reason I dropped out of university. Three-fourths because I was convinced Medivh would kill us all in our sleep, and one-fourth because I knew I couldn’t pass the finals.”

“And somehow you managed to kill the leader of the Burning Legion?” Orgrim says, unimpressed.

“Hey! That was not easy,” Khadgar reminds them.

“Well, you’re going to have to do some serious magic to convince Lothar that you’re not a murderer, so get some rest,” Garona says. “You can sleep here for now. I have stocks to attend to.”

She leaves and takes the TV remote with her. Durotan leaves, shaking Khadgar’s hand and wishing him good luck. Orgrim leaves, whistling as he boots up Clash of Clans.

Khadgar is left alone with his exhaustion and his restlessness and the power thrumming beneath his skin—the Guardian power and the soul-sapping power that came with it on the side, the power that he can’t let overtake him again.

When he dreams, he dreams of Lothar. He dreams of the apartment they used to share, with all of Lothar’s random junk from his travels—Starbucks cups, ukuleles, T-shirts proclaiming that he’s been to Lordaeron and Ironforge—and Khadgar’s toothbrush next to his, Khadgar’s shirts in a drawer next to his, Khadgar’s phone charger next to his.

They’re lying on the master bed, in the middle of the day late November, both in varying stages of dressed. Lothar is biting his tongue and concentrating on braiding Khadgar’s hair.

“It’s not rocket science,” Khadgar reminds him, bubbling with laughter and slightly turned on and wincing at the pain in his head. “It’s just three strands of hair.”

“I didn’t graduate from cosmetic school, I graduated from the damn military,” Lothar says, humming in concentration, several of Khadgar’s hairbands on his wrist. “You know, you could just cut it. Save poor people like me a ton of time and effort.”

“But then everyone would think I’m a normal human,” Khadgar smiles. “I don’t want anyone to think that for a second.”

“No one thinks you’re normal, Khadgar. You literally wear your Kirin Tor hoodie everywhere, which is the college I might remind you that you quit. But if you want long hair, who am I to disagree with you?”

Khadgar just lies on the bed, his phantom pain of the present day forgotten, resting in the memory of good times, of happier days. In his dream memory, Lothar ties up Khadgar’s braid, and Khadgar rests in the soothing presence in the familiar apartment.

“Do you ever wonder about the future?” he asks, as Lothar slings an arm around his waist. “Oh, am I the little spoon again?”

“If you don’t want to be the little spoon, you gotta make a move before I have you in my arms,” Lothar teases. “And no? I mean, I’m technically royalty, so if my current career goes down the drain, I can always just move in with Taria.”

Khadgar cranes his neck around and looks at him. “You’re not actually going to move into the castle, are you? You hate the paparazzi.”

“Well, I’m banking on the fact that my job is going to stay productive and pay me well. The real questions here is with you. Do you think about the future? Working as an informal magic consultant doesn’t exactly offer a retirement plan, and your credentials as having dropped out of college don’t help much.”

“Trust me. The people I’m helping don’t ask for my credentials,” Khadgar laughs. In his dream, there’s a pang of regret through his chest. Lying to Lothar about his job was always the one regrettable thing about their relationship, but after all his friends from college unfriended him from their social media accounts and blocked his number, he wisened up and didn’t tell anyone that he was privately investigating Medivh’s possession by an unknown entity.

Lothar is a safe home to come back to after a long, grueling day with Garona, gathering evidence and learning as much dark magic as the internet holds, watching as the bags under his eyes get bigger every time he gathers another piece of hearsay and unprovable aura remnant that proves to him that Sargeras is on the move, but won’t hold up in court.

Khadgar remembers a map he had of the five continents, of the red marker he would use to track Medivh’s movements, until the entire map was nothing but a red stain on the wall, and he trashed it along with the others before it. In his dream, he’s being held by Lothar, but as he sleeps on Garona’s couch, he aches to be held by Lothar again. It’s been two months since they broke up, loudly and explosively.

Khadgar can easily mark that exact moment as when he was fully consumed with his work with Garona, when Garona stopped joking about her banker friends and started hiring lawyers, backup plans upon backup plans, and instead of taking her insistent advice, Khadgar pushed himself until he crumbled, not a care in the world about himself, wearing the hoodie as the last remnant of what it meant to be a real person, before he just became an instrument of vigilante justice.

He has to go back to Lothar now, he knows, but he doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to stomach it. The Guardian staff is inches from his sleeping form, the magic cushioning the blows marked on his body, easing the remaining ache of his tattoo, as the combined might of the mages of Lordaeron try and track him with it. Medivh’s staff acts a shield.

In his dream, Lothar gently pushes his braid aside and plants a kiss on his neck, and Khadgar leans into it, no other care in the world except being in the moment and enjoying it. When Lothar reaches his hands around, deeper than Khadgar’s belly, soft with peach fuzz, he gasps, pushing himself further back into the man’s grasp.

When Lothar nibbles his way down Khadgar’s earlobe, down his neck, down to the small of his back, pulling the rest of his clothes off with him, Khadgar moans in appreciation against him, slipping his hand over Lothar’s calloused one to guide it exactly where he wants it to go. He says into Lothar’s neck, “This is exactly where I want to be.”

“Awesome,” Lothar breathes back. “This is exactly where you should be.”

“Please don’t stop,” Khadgar urges, moving to the rhythm of Lothar’s slow thrusts. Lothar slips his other hand down to dig his fingers into Khadgar’s hips, bringing their bodies together in a slew of slow motion sparks.

He’s in Lothar’s bed, with Lothar, and he doesn’t think he could ever be happier. Khadgar chokes out a startled, unexpected cry as he spills into Lothar’s hands, on Lothar’s sheets, and the newly created braid rests against his shoulder, the perfect memory stilling.

In reality, Khadgar tosses and turns on Garona’s sofa, his body and soul aching, unprotected and thrown into a metaphorical ocean of sharks.

Except this shark happens to be the power that sits almost out of reach of Khadgar’s vision, completely out of his grasp, that threatens to choke him and consume him.

Now, he tries to envision the dream memory, but it fades from him, Lothar’s arms that encircle him becoming firm ropes, binding him to the green mass that blocks his powers, that suffocates him.

Lothar’s fingers turn into claws, smoldering and charred, the same ones Medivh grew as he shed his human figure and turned back into the demon himself. They scratch at his throat, they draw blood from his heart, they cup over his mouth so he can’t utter a single spell.

“From light comes darkness,” the infernal voice whispers in his ear. “Don’t forget it, young Guardian. It doesn’t matter what objects you think will protect you. They have no power here, in your mind. They have no power in our shared consciousness.

“You’re dead,” Khadgar tries to say, struggling out of the grip until he staggers backwards, disrupting the green mist that surrounds his sight, curling all around him. This can’t be the end of him. It can’t.

“Who am I supposed to be?” the green monster in front of him smiles. “Sargeras? Sargeras is dead, and you killed him. His spirit is no more. You made sure of that. But I am not a single entity, young Trust. I am not an entity at all.”

“Who am I speaking to?” Khadgar shouts, and the laugh echoes in his head as the vision in front of him fades. Garona’s house appears in its stead, Khadgar clutching the sofa, shaking and sweating, the presence gone. “Who am I speaking to?”

But no one’s there. The cuts on his neck and his heart are gone, or were never there in the first place. He is alone in the quiet.

“Are you taunting me?” Khadgar screams into the midnight air. “Show yourself!”

No one answers.

Khadgar runs a quaking hand over his neck, and there’s nothing there but a healing bruise from days ago, when Medivh’s golem threw him against a wall.

“I’m not imagining you,” Khadgar tells the empty TV showing him his own haggard reflection. “You were real in Karazhan, not a figment of my mind. You can’t just fade.”

And yet, he reflects, the presence can. The presence that corrupts Khadgar’s memories and harms him to the point of death can leave whenever it wishes, and all the power of the Guardians cannot harm it.

Garona straps the Guardian staff on Khadgar’s back and lightly cuffs him on the head. “Don’t screw this up,” she warns jovially, but with a serious undertone. Khadgar can’t afford to not get Lothar on his side, especially against a force that can record a room containing no recording devices, and send it to CNN.

“I’ll try not to.”

Durotan and Orgrim stand behind her, the only other parts of the farewell party. Khadgar can’t believe they are all awake before the sun has even risen outside, or as Garona had said when she set the alarm, “There’s a twelve hour time difference between the continents, so Lothar will be eating dinner. He’ll be least prepared to fend off an attack.”

“Garona,” Khadgar had said, “I’m not planning on attacking him. I just need to talk.”

“Okay, but you’d better remember all your nonlethal combat spells. Chances are they might come in handy when Lothar uses that ceremonial longsword on his wall to run you through.”

Khadgar regrets telling her about that ornamental detail.

Now, he just shivers in the predawn winter air, the Draenorian wind bringing steam from his mouth. He is not prepared for this, and they all know it.

Durotan nods at him solemnly. He hasn’t had his morning coffee yet, and it shows. Orgrim just gives him a half-hearted wave, his reading glasses on as he begins his work day answering emails on his phone.

Khadgar looks at his reflection in the window one last time—hair stringy and knotted, tucked beneath a cap, the bags under his eyes almost purple, six o’clock stubble running rampant on his cheeks amidst a droopy moustache. He’s still wearing the Kirin Tor hoodie, the gray color having faded to a dark red after the washing and the unsuccessful bleaching of blood. Garona had offered him her clothes, but since they all consisted of the banker businesswoman type, he had declined. Then Durotan offered him his non work clothes, which consisted of 3X ratty T-shirts that proclaim he participated in a Run for Charity in 2013. Khadgar had also declined.

The main reason for this being that maybe Lothar would recognize him in the hoodie, that maybe he would remember all the good times they had together, and maybe he wouldn’t skewer him before hearing him out.

Khadgar closes his eyes, feeling the magic in the air around him. The dark power has mostly dissipated from the events last night, and as Khadgar reaches with his inner strength to gather magic into himself and pull them into fashioning a teleport, the dark power doesn’t gather with the rest. It stays away from him, waiting, biding its time.

He can’t be visibly afraid, not in front of Garona and the others. They are all trusting in him to not be like Medivh, to stand for the Light and everything that is good, to not cower beneath his fear and the weight of the Guardian staff on his shoulders that now miraculously belongs to him.

With one hand on the staff, Khadgar opens his eyes, as his world is painted in shades of blue, nodding goodbye at them all as he draws the magic into himself, his physical form surrounded by the glow and snapping into another place.

The journey of teleportation is forever and instantaneous, and Khadgar feels more than sees the streaks of earthly power run past him as he rockets towards Lothar’s apartment. Beyond the flicker of ultraviolet light in the tunnel, he sees the green mist, hovering, waiting, but never disrupting the flow of the Light.

Khadgar’s grip tightens on the staff as he bursts into existence in Lothar’s apartment. He grips the staff, prepared to draw it, his other palm flat in front of him, surrounded by runes of power and other runes that pop up alongside them, his Guardian power at work.

Stormwind is quiet, the dusky air outside fading into embers of red and yellow, and Lothar is nowhere in his apartment. Khadgar looks around, the blue glow emanating on all the junk he doesn’t remember sitting in the corners of the room, piling up in the cracks and replacing the neatness of Khadgar’s pristine memories.

Khadgar uses his runes as a light instead of flipping on a switch, and looks around. Lothar’s ornamental sword with a lion on the hilt hangs where it was before, but beneath it are a pair of used socks, and Khadgar wrinkles his nose at it. He considers, and then uses the magic to scoop up the socks and throw them in the laundry bin.

Never hurts to help.

If Khadgar had thought he went into a spiral after the breakup, Lothar had spiralled just as much, if not more. The main difference between them would be that Lothar had junk to pile up, things to not do as he moped, clothes to spill on the floor and accumulate dust, dishes to pile up in his sink. Khadgar had none of these. All he had was the mission.

He walks around the apartment, treading lightly on the creaking floorboards, piling all of Lothar’s clothes into the bin. It doesn’t seem to use up any of his energy, and as the room begins to look more like Khadgar remembers, his spirit grows lighter. He pulls a wry smile at the corner of his mouth. This is the home he remembers, the only true home he’s had since he left his parents.

He looks at the picture in a frame on Lothar’s bedstand. It’s a photo of the two of them, hugging tightly, in the midst of a fairground. Khadgar is wearing some tie-dye tank top that looks absolutely ghastly in retrospect, and Lothar is wearing a cap and sunglasses in order to not be noticed as the Queen’s brother, but even now Khadgar can see that they looked so happy.

He remembers the happiness, if not the exact occasion of the photo. He remembers when he could tap into that happiness and create works of art with his magic, before it was irreparably destroyed, and he used his power to form death instead.

Khadgar gently sets the photo back, and it clatters onto the desk, Khadgar’s hands shaking and palms aching with an acute internal pain. Heartbreak. It’s just heartbreak.

Khadgar grits his teeth, and his gums ache with the same pain. His internal organs feel unstable, about to burst, about to crawl out of his skin because he is nothing but a shadow of what he once was. He hasn’t felt happy in weeks, joyous in months. He’s the kind of person that would be sentenced to death in a court of law, because the jury would never have pity on someone as hapless and as distant as he.

Through his muddled thoughts, the door slams open, and his fight-or-flight reflexes react before he consciously does, drawing the Guardian staff out and using it as a bat to whack the other person in the head. The person goes down hard, the bullet from his gun thudding into the ceiling uselessly, and Khadgar drops the staff.

“Goddamnit,” he mutters, rushing to Lothar’s side and checking his pulse. The man is definitely alive, but he’s knocked out cold, a bruise starting to form on his forehead. “Great. Partiality is going to be so easy to convince him of now.”

He picks Lothar up—not an easy feat for someone fifty pounds lighter than his ex, and has never worked out in his life ever—and dumps him unceremoniously on the bed. In his unconsciousness, Lothar starts to drool.

“Great,” Khadgar frowns again. The bump on Lothar’s head is starting to grow. “Now where do you keep your ice?”

After finding it in the freezer, Khadgar places a bag full of ice on Lothar’s head, precariously balanced, and pulls up a chair to watch him sleep, the Guardian staff in his lap, connected to Khadgar through both hands clutching tightly to it, as if to combine his own powers with the rest of the Guardians before him to ensure that Lothar doesn’t somehow become conscious and get the better of him.

If anyone could do it, it would be Lothar. But no one can do it now, not with Khadgar mildly rested and focused on the task at hand. He’s more powerful than anyone, and all he has to fear is the power that has burrowed deep within him.

Lothar wakes up with a groan, and then a cough, and then a hiccup or two, and by the time he has fully come to his senses, Khadgar has pointed the staff at his wrists, forming binding made of something that looks like rubber. Probably not actually rubber, though.

Lothar looks down at his hands, looks at where he’s lying on his own bed, and then looks at Khadgar. When he sees the mage, he growls, trying to lunge at him, and Khadgar just points the staff at him, guiding him back onto the bed amidst the squirming.

“You know,” he says, because of great filter that always works in his brain, “this used to be kind of sexy.”

“The fuck?” Lothar says, resigned to his fate and slumping against the headboard. “You trying to kill me is not sexy. I thought you would go after the Queen first. After all, after the Guardian, who is the next most powerful?”

“What?” Khadgar says succinctly. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Sure. Sure. Like you ‘didn’t kill’ Medivh.”

“I—” told you about him, when you came to arrest and kill me. “I’m not going to kill you.”

“Then what are you here for? Information? Are you going to use me to get to Taria? Because I’ve been trained against torture via magic, and even your new skills can’t get past my walls.” Lothar spits at him, and Khadgar lets the globule hit him.

He’s never seen this side of Lothar before, the seething, rageful, no-holds-barred warrior before. The closest he’s gotten to Lothar’s dark underbelly was when they broke up, and the words exchanged that day didn’t even come close to Lothar’s insinuation that Khadgar would torture him.

“I’m not going to torture you.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that?”

“Look, I didn’t mean to knock you out. Promise. I wanted to talk to you. I want to have a normal conversation.”

“You’re a wanted murderer,” Lothar seethes, working his wrists to get out of the bindings. The rubber-like material is unmovable. “I’m not going to talk to you.”

“Okay, but now you have to.” Khadgar winces. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. He can almost hear Garona in his head, telling him that he has already screwed it up and he should get the hell out of dodge before Lothar hates him forever. “Shit, I mean, I would like to talk to you. About the events in Karazhan.”

“I already know the events. You killed Medivh with magic, breaking several federal laws in the process. It was all caught on tape, and Medivh’s automatic security system sent it to the police and the press, live.”

But Medivh never had a security system of any sort, Khadgar wants to scream. He and Garona had scoped out the tower in its entirety, from Khadgar’s visits to bribing those that had worked on reconstructing the historical monument for floor plans and electrical wiring. He didn’t have security cameras, not until Khadgar barged in the door with a dagger and demonic wards painted on his skin.

“I told you why I did it, when you came to take me in, dead or alive. I told you that the Fel had entered Azeroth by possessing him, that I had found Sargeras the demon within him.”

“You actually expected me to believe that? If the Fel was truly in that tower, why did we find no trace of it? Why were all the demon wards undisturbed? Your story has been debunked before it even began. Stop running from the truth, Khadgar.”

“What would the truth be?” Khadgar shoots back bitterly. The demon wards were undisturbed because those on his body were undisturbed until he finally took the life from Sargeras, and the Fel had left the tower, ran away from Karazhan and into something else. Someone else.

“That you’re a murderer. That you crave magic. That you wanted it so much to become the Guardian through the only means possible after dropping out of the Kirin Tor University. That you had enough friends who hate Azeroth to coerce them into helping you. We know Garona helped you, Khadgar. We know she has just become the most popular public figure in Draenor—again—because of it.”

“She didn’t kill King Llane of her own accord. That has been disproven in court,” Khadgar reminds him.

“And yet you’re trying to prove your own argument outside of the court,” Lothar counters. “You’re allowing yourself to be hunted instead of submit to the law, like Garona did. You know, deep down inside, that you have no tangible proof of your story, and that we have all the proof. You know that you’ve done wrong, but you don’t want to give up your power. I think you like it too much.”

Khadgar glares back into Lothar’s fiery eyes, and kicks his chair away in anger. It hits a cabinet, rattling it. Khadgar paces back and forth along Lothar’s bed to dispel the urge to scream at him, to tell him that the Guardians can take their fabled power back, along with the extra thing that came along with it. He doesn’t want to have enough power to protect—or destroy—all of Azeroth. He just wants to be human again.

“Fine,” he snarls. Underneath his skin, the fire is pulsing, is drawing nearer to his ever-weakening heart. The corrupted green is prodding under his skin, is sinking nearer to his core, and there is nothing Khadgar can do about it. Not now. “You want proof? I’ll find some.”

“And yet I will have more to disprove you,” Lothar says. “You say you knew that Medivh was Sargeras, apparently enough in advance to plan an elaborate execution. And yet you never told me anything, not even when I told you everything.”

Khadgar flinches. It’s true. The worst thing is that Lothar is completely correct. “I’m not perfect—”

“If your convictions were enough to bother you, then you would have told me. And yet I never knew. Did you know that the government is investigating me to see if I had anything to do with this? They think maybe I helped you, because I wanted to dethrone my sister. As if I give a shit for the monarchy. They think that we were together so you could get information about the castle and the nobles. And the worst thing is I told you.” Lothar’s eyes flash with abject hatred. “I told you everything, and you didn’t even have to ask.”

“I didn’t ask! I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to know! I wasn’t using you, Lothar. I fucking loved you.” Khadgar’s knuckles are white and shaking on the Guardian staff, and the extra energy flowing from the hundreds of Guardians since the dawn of Azeroth doesn’t calm his nerves any. There’s a lump in the back of his throat, as if he’s about to cry. As if he’s human enough to do so.

“Past tense. Fucking past tense.”

“You broke up with me!”

They’re glaring at each other, Lothar bound but struggling, Khadgar with the staff between his palms, shaking it as if it will activate something to save the situation.

And a force within him pulls on his muscles, telling him to strike Lothar between the eyes, to get rid of the nobility, to get rid of the liability. Khadgar raises his hands to strike, angry enough to do it of his own accord as well as with the dark power inside him.

But Lothar flinches. Visibly. He curls into himself, his cuffed hands outstretched over his face, unable to separate himself from the bedframe but triggering his own reflexes to hide from Khadgar.

And Khadgar is still human enough to care about Lothar, more deeply than he’s ever cared about himself. He throws the staff far away, in the corner, taking deep ragged breaths to still the bloodlust within him.

“This isn’t you,” he tells himself. “This isn’t fucking you.”

“Then what is it?” Lothar snarls. Even scared, his eyes wide, he’s still taunting, still trying to get a rise out of Khadgar.

Khadgar pulls his hands into fists and shoves them underneath his armpits. His muscles are still pent up, ready to strike Lothar down where he lays, but he can’t let them.

And then the realization comes to him. “It’s not me,” he says, the hope finally blossoming on his face. “It’s not me. It’s the staff.”

“The what?”

Khadgar runs over to the staff, gingerly wraps a dish rag around his hand, and picks it up. There’s no more urge to kill, to maim, to harm. The power has receded once again. Touching the staff doesn’t change anything.

“The proof. There was no Fel in the tower, because it had left. It all went into this.” Khadgar looks at the unassuming staff, so old with might and wisdom, and hopes and prays with all his heart that the Fel took refuge in it instead of—something else.

“How are you planning on actually proving that hypothesis?” Lothar asks, still breathing raggedly.

Khadgar looks him right in the eyes. “You need to submit it to a lab for testing for me.” Please, he doesn’t add.

Lothar almost explodes. “You want me to help prove your innocence for you? When you won’t even submit yourself to the law? Khadgar, I know you loved me. I know. But we’ve both grown so far apart that some partiality in the past won’t allow me to look past the fact that you’re a murderer.”

“You’ve killed people too. Would you be able to prove in a judicial court that you were in the right?”

“Of course I would. Every single times. With body cams, and eyewitnesses, and all the proof gathered before that those people I killed deserved it.”

“You weren’t dealing with magic then. You never had to face the challenge that magic transcends all DNA testing, everything you think you see on cameras. All I have to prove it is this staff!”

Lothar spits at him again, but Khadgar is too far away to bear the brunt of it, just to note his feelings. “Tell Garona to test it.”

“I want to be able to stand in front of a jury of my peers and present testimonials and physical proof that I have saved them all. I do. But I can’t do it with evidence tested in Draenor, and you know it. Everyone here has hated Garona for years, and now they hate me just the same. So I need you to test my staff.”

He throws it at Lothar’s feet, and stands far away from it. If the effects of the Fel from it are airborne, Lothar is as good as dead, because Khadgar doesn’t know if he can summon enough energy to fight it again.

Lothar still scowls at him, still looks like he would kill Khadgar if unbound, but he gives a sharp, jerky nod. “I’ll tell them you thought it would prove your innocence, but I have no control over what they do with it.”

“Thank you,” Khadgar says, and breathes out a heavy sigh. It’s as if all his burdens have been lifted, like his soul is flying high. He can’t believe Lothar would accept to such a thing after the ordeal he had just been through, but he has always underestimated Lothar’s heart.

Khadgar looks at the staff next to Lothar, and away from him it looks so small, so unworthy of the heritage passed down through it. It doesn’t looked corrupted by the Fel, but then again, neither does Khadgar. If he doesn’t count the utter exhaustion and the feeling of being less than human, that is.

“I’ll find how the security cameras appeared,” Khadgar tells Lothar, his brain-to-mouth filter working excellently again. “In Karazhan, that day. There were no cameras before that day, and I checked. There was no security system. I just don’t know how he knew to set me up.”

“Maybe your demon had more foresight than you knew,” Lothar scowls.

“But he didn’t know. That’s the thing. Sargeras didn’t know. That’s why our plan worked.”

“So you admit Garona was a part of it,” Lothar says.

“No—I mean. My plan. That’s why my plan worked,” Khadgar says again. He’s jittery. He got Lothar to accept to helping him, if indeed the staff turns out to hold any clue of the Fel. If not, he’s back to having nothing on his side but his own word. He doesn’t have enough energy left in his bones to do that.

“I’ll find the security cameras,” he says, more to himself than Lothar.

Lothar doesn’t say anything, and his eyes flick to a spot over Khadgar’s shoulder. And then a bullet embeds itself in Khadgar’s shoulder.

Khadgar roars in pain, tumbling over onto the floor, blood seeping from his wound. At once, the bindings holding Lothar snap, and the man jumps out of the bed and pins Khadgar underneath him.

Khadgar twists around, seeing the glint of a Kevlar suit and dark light helmet, a rifle pointed directly at his heart. Lothar looms on top of him, trapping his limbs, and he can feel the bullet in his shoulder, like a throbbing neon sign that warns of his imminent death.

“You planned this,” he says, the words coming out slurred as his head turns fuzzy and his limbs give out. “You were never going to listen to me.”

“I have a duty to my country,” Lothar growls. “Of course I wasn’t going to listen to you.”

Khadgar can’t give up now. He can’t lose everything, he can’t just die here. He has too much to live for. He’s the fucking Guardian now, of all things. He can’t be stopped by one bullet, not when he has to prove he saved the world.

So he closes his eyes and reaches deep within him. Above him, he can hear Lothar, shocked—”Stay with me, Khadgar. Goddamnit, don’t die on me, you have to answer for your crimes.” But Khadgar isn’t quite dead yet. He’s the goddamn Guardian. If Medivh survived everything throughout his life, with or without the Burning Legion within him, then so help the entire Order of Tirisfal, Khadgar can, too.

But no power comes. Khadgar searches through his inner magic, through the new power infused in him, even the residual power from his tattoo and his birthright. Nothing. It’s welled dry, it’s been shut, nothing but the fire of the bullet lodged in a bone to pay attention to.

The bullet. Binding runes on the bullet. When Khadgar realizes it, it’s too late, he doesn’t have enough strength to open his eyes. He’s trapped within himself, screaming where no one can hear, pounding the walls of the empty cavern of magic within his soul. He’s going to die. He can’t die.

“From Light comes Darkness,” a voice inside him promises, brushing over his phantom shoulder with a smooth trail of magic that dries up the pain. “And right now, you don’t have enough Light inside you to resist the Darkness.”

“No,” Khadgar tries to scream. “No!”

But the power, the nonentity, secures a hold inside his chest, and suddenly the cavern is ablaze with magic, with wells and pools of it, spinning around him, engulfing him in their bright, soothing light. And it’s not dark and haunting, no; this is the magic Khadgar is supposed to have at his disposal. It’s just not him using it.

Khadgar opens his eyes. He’s being dragged down the stairs of Lothar’s apartment building by the unnamed backup, as Lothar walks down the steps behind him, feet heavy. He can see the world in nothing but shades of blue and green, and the force within him flicks his eyes to the man in front of him.

With one smooth motion, he pulls him into a chokehold, whirling around so Lothar’s drawn weapon will only shoot the Kevlar vest.

Lothar doesn’t shoot, just keeps aiming. “You were dead,” he says heavily, roughly. There are tear tracks down his cheek.

Khadgar’s hair, stringy and filled with dirt and blood, bunched around his shoulders, swings around his face. He bares his teeth like a maw. “Never,” he says. It’s him again, it’s him in control this time. He can move his muscles now, but they are taught and primed for a specific motion.

Lothar shoots the arm choking his backup, but Khadgar doesn’t even move a limb to make them flee back into the barrel of Lothar’s gun, jamming it.

“I told you,” Khadgar babbles, “I have to find proof. I’m not going to die before I finish my goal.”

“You were dead, though. You bled out.”

It’s not him that pulls his lips into another grin, another show of dominance and aggression. It’s the thing again. “You think blood is any concern for a Guardian? Medivh only died because he wanted to, because Sargeras let him fall and the Medivh left inside had fought to trap him in his own death. Aegwynn only died because she was finished with a world she had inhabited for a millenia. I will not die because of a bullet.”

Khadgar pushes the soldier back onto Lothar, and turns and runs down the steps. Outside, there are people walking, and they all turn to see the madman running out into the open with blood covering his hoodie and his hair a literal inferno, magic pouring from his eyes.

He breathes, himself again, not feeling the other presence that controlled his body, and hurriedly draws the now-thriving well of magic around him, preparing for a teleport. Garona will be angry at the plan failing when he pops back into existence in Draenor, but not at him. Never at him.

Lothar stumbles out of the door after him, the other soldier’s weapon pointed at his face. Khadgar tries to convey everything he feels in a single, last look—regret, pain, relief. Lothar fires, and Khadgar pulls the magic in on himself, collapsing in upon himself out of existence.

The bullet tears into his stomach, and Khadgar screams for eternity in the nethers of nonexistence, the blood not yet spurting forth from another flesh wound, the magic not yet summoned to heal it.

In the portal as slow as molasses, Khadgar can feel his course shift. No longer is Garona’s house in front of him, but he is hurtling into a night sky, somewhere unknown, somewhere that she can’t help him.

Khadgar wakes up in a bush, and there is even more blood from the stomach wound than there was for his shoulder, the bullet having ripped completely through him. It leaves behind no arcane bindings, and Khadgar presses a palm to the wound, closing his eyes, healing it completely with a few words of power.

When he opens his eyes, the might of the Guardians has left him, and even his tongue is fuzzy, a pounding headache reverberating through his skull. When he looks up, Khadgar sees the floating city of Dalaran.

“Shit,” he says, and tries to summon his magic to teleport again. “The Kirin Tor know I’m here.” He has about thirty seconds until some mage pops up in full armor, ready to arrest him.

He draws an arm over his hand, blue magic streaking in it, but his headache is unavoidable any longer and Khadgar feels himself fade into the grass, completely unconscious.

Khadgar dreams again of better times. Much better times.

“Fuck,” Lothar bites out as he presses his face into the pillow, a half-startled laugh echoing around as he jerks his body at the initial reaction.

Behind him, Khadgar takes his lubed finger out of his ass. “What? I warmed it up,” he says.

“Sure, but I just haven’t done this in a while,” Lothar says, voice now muffled in the pillow as he tries to relax further, to spread his legs wider. “Come on, put it back in me. I can handle it.”

“So pushy,” grins Khadgar, and eases his lubed finger back in to the hilt, Lothar’s ass unbelievably tight even as he tries to relax. Khadgar is half hard already, the sight of Lothar beneath him, pliant and willing, and the smell of the apartment around them doing wonders for the state of his cock.

Khadgar slides a hand down the side of Lothar’s ass, taking a chunk of it and just spreading it so he can slip another finger in as Lothar tenses under him and swears into the pillow.

Khadgar swallows, abruptly breathless, hard against his hip as he holds Lothar in place, the other man just taking it. Khadgar likes this. He likes this a lot. He could get used to this, being on top.

Lothar blushes all the way down his back, shifting on Khadgar’s patient fingers and pushing back on them incrementally, blushing deeper.

Khadgar takes the opportunity to smear some more lube on his hand, whispering words of power to warm it up, before he adds a third and fourth finger in with the others, establishing a steady rhythm.

Lothar moans, one hand unclenching his pillow and wandering down to his cock, taking a few experimental pumps to warm himself up.

Khadgar spreads his ass cheeks wider, all his fingers a single organism thrusting with one intention within his boyfriend—to find Lothar’s sweet spot.

Lothar spreads his knees of his own imperative, bracketing the bed, sliding one hand up and down his excited cock, not tight, just loosely thrusting into the ring of his fingers as Khadgar fucks him with his fingers.

Khadgar hits just the right spot, and Lothar lets out a wet pant, ragged, unexpected. Khadgar grins, prodding his fingers into the exact same spot and pulling Lothar’s ass wider, digging deeper.

“Fuck,” Lothar mumbles, leaning up from the pillow and bracing his other hand on the wall, pushing back on Khadgar, shameless and wanting. “Do that again.”

Even as he breathes into Lothar’s neck and thrusts deeper with his fingers, he says, “Don’t come yet. We haven’t even reached the main event.”

Lothar nods raggedly and is hit by another wave of pleasure, clutching onto the bed and biting back moans.

“I want to hear you enjoying yourself,” Khadgar says. “I want to hear you moan.”

He traces gentle circles around Lothar’s prostate, loosening him up, and Lothar lets go of control, panting and swallowing, breathing heavily and groaning as Khadgar hits that spot, time and time again.

“Do it,” Lothar finally says, bracing his hands on the wall. “Please fuck me, Khadgar. I’m not going to last much longer.”

Khadgar isn’t going to last much longer either, and he takes his sticky fingers out of Lothar, bracing his hands on the man’s red-hot ass, slowly pushing in.

Lothar leans against the wall, utterly still as Khadgar bottoms out. Khadgar can’t control his own moans, whining and biting into Lothar’s shoulder.

Lothar says, “Tell me what it feels like,” and rotates around on Khadgar’s cock.

“You’re so good,” Khadgar breathes, clutching onto Lothar as he guides the other man down on top of him, until Lothar is almost sitting on him, buried deeper than he could ever imagine. “Fuck. I’m not going to last much longer.”

Lothar laughs, arching his back as he situates himself on Khadgar’s lap to bury himself further, as Khadgar licks his lips and wills himself to hang on for just a few minutes longer.

“I’m going to come very soon,” Lothar admits, “so you’d better fuck me. Or, better yet, I could ride you—just like this.” He starts to bob up and down on Khadgar, his thigh muscles pulsing as he slides himself up and down, slamming all the way back down every time.

He cranes his head around to look at Khadgar, who’s completely wrecked. Khadgar catches his gaze and leans in for a sweaty, uncoordinated kiss, their lips sliding together as Lothar keeps moving, thighs burning but the stretch within him oh so good, pumping his cock and meeting Khadgar’s mouth with his own as he guides Khadgar’s cock to the sweet spot inside him.

Lothar grazes Khadgar’s lips with his teeth as he comes, shaking to a stop as he pulses into his palm, still red all over, especially on his ass.

From behind him, Khadgar says, “Are you going to stop? Because if so, would you mind getting into another position—”

Lothar slams down on his cock as fast as he can, Khadgar choking on air and hanging onto the moment, Lothar smiling at the aftershocks and the fresh burn in his ass mingling together to feel absolutely heavenly. He bounces up and down again, and again, fucking himself on Khadgar, using his brace on the wall as leverage as he uses his ass to jack Khadgar off.

Khadgar comes, and Lothar doesn’t stop pounding himself on his spilling cock, even as it softens, until Khadgar pulls himself out, panting, and his come drips out of Lothar. He feels so full.

Khadgar looks at him, sated and sleep-heavy. “Love you,” he says, breathless.

Lothar bops him on the nose, collapsing into a boneless pile next to him. “Love you too, bookworm. We should do that again sometime.”

“You really liked it?” Khadgar grins, resting his sweaty head on Lothar’s shoulder.

“Yeah,” Lothar says, feeling satiated, feeling full. “I did.”

Khadgar wakes all at once, a rush of icy light pouring into his vision as he jerks to the land of the living, sweat beading on his moustache, even as the room around him grows ever colder.

It’s just his memories, Khadgar tells himself. He’s not really freezing to another untimely death. It’s just the memories of the worst years of his life in the utter bureaucracy that is Dalaran, home to the Kirin Tor University.

He’s sitting on a chair in an empty, featureless room, with no windows or helpful direction signs to tell him where he is, but he can feel it in his bones that he’s back in Dalaran. Which he swore never to go back to.

Which, he reminds himself, he didn’t mean to arrive at. It just happened.

When Khadgar inspects himself, he finds that he’s not wearing the utterly demolished Kirin Tor hoodie, but some old conjuring robes that smell of mothballs and the back of someone’s closet.

Khadgar smiles despite the constant ache in every single joint. The mages must have gotten a kick out of seeing him in their school logo, covered with blood of a few different people—mostly his own—completely unconscious, dreaming about the good life.

Khadgar looks at the cuffs on his wrists. The cuffs are thick and cold iron, crudely etched arcane symbols emitting a slight glow. They’re not tight enough to cut off the circulation from his hands, but he can feel the vast empty cavern of magic in the pit of his stomach, dry again. He’s not performing any magic in the near future.

However, he’s not bound to the chair, so he stands up, and immediately regrets it. He touches his non magical hands to the scarred bullet wound in his stomach, which isn’t perforating his guts any more, but still hurts like—well, like he got shot. Using arm acrobatics, Khadgar finds a hole about the same size in the small of his back, where the bullet exited. The wound in his shoulder isn’t as exciting, because it matches the other wounds he has from the battle with Medivh, as well as the scar from that one in undergrad when he accidentally stabbed himself with an electric tuning fork.

Pre-med was rough.

Khadgar sits back down on the bare chair, twiddling his thumbs and staring at the wall he’s half convinced is a double mirror. If he had his magic, even without the Guardian magic, it would be so easy to reach through the wall and discover who’s watching him. It would be so easy to convince them to unlock the door.

“Shit,” he realizes. “Garona’s going to be so pissed.” His voice is raw and phlegmy, and Khadgar coughs until blood bubbles up.

“Gross,” he frowns as he wipes it off his mouth. “Guess the bullet hit my lungs too, huh.” That would explain the sheer amount of blood and the sensation of drowning. If his perforated lungs caused the drowning sensation and not any dark magic, maybe the terrible power wasn’t what revived him. Maybe it was the Guardian magic kicking him into self-preservation mode.

Hopefully.

He hears the door lock snick and wipes his hand on the gray conjuring robe, smearing it with red. When he looks up, the Dean of the University, Arrexis, is walking through the door, dragging behind him a chair.

There is nothing but a blank wall behind the door, nothing for Khadgar to mark exactly where he has been taken. It’s Dalaran, he knows, but nowhere Khadgar has been before.

Arrexis sits down on the chair facing him, and in his hand is a recorder, the green light on it blinking.

“Am I being interviewed?” Khadgar says, blearily lifting an eyebrow. Even his forehead hurts.

“You’re being questioned,” Arrexis says curtly, and lifts one spectral, imposing eye to the double mirror behind Khadgar.

“I thought that would be the FBI’s job. I mean, unless you’re now an FBI consultant. Would complying with the authorities mean you’ve stopped advocating for a Lordaeron separate from Azeroth?”

“I’m questioning you before the authorities arrive,” Arrexis says testily. “They don’t have the means at their disposal to ensure you’re telling the truth.”

Khadgar clenches his jaw before he blurts out something rash on the record. This is half the reason he left the Kirin Tor. Not because of Medivh, but because all mages are pretentious self-righteous dicks who don’t deserve to wield the power they have. Not when they’re advocating torture.

“Great,” he says instead. “Torture away.”

Arrexis frowns. “The High Council isn’t going to torture you. We abide by the law. Unlike you.”

“Self-defense is against the law, now?”

“You call killing the Guardian Medivh in his own Tower self-defense?”

“Well, in that my ‘self’ represents all of Azeroth and I was defending against an invasion of the Fel; yes.” He can feel himself grow more sarcastic by the second, but not more witty. There is no wit in talking to someone who has hated him since before the incident, since before he stormed into Arrexis’ office and screamed, “I quit.”

“Let’s get one thing clear, Young Trust,” Arrexis sneers, leaning in and pointing the recorder like a weapon in his face. Khadgar trusts himself not to flinch. Maybe. “Medivh was not possessed by anything, and the extensive investigation into Karazhan has proved thus. Therefore, you have been proved an unstable lunatic, who is also a criminal. Is this clear?”

“I can explain the phenomena in Karazhan,” Khadgar leans in as well, until he’s inches away from Arrexis, sneering back as good as he gets. “It’s simple: Sargeras was a bigger entity than anyone could have imagined or prepared for. My work—my wards, my defenses—were the ones left behind. Check the magic signature.”

“You don’t have a magic signature.” Arrexis’ face warps into a victorious grin, like he’s finally caught Khadgar in a trap. “You never learned to create one.”

“Oh, go to hell,” Khadgar screams, fisting his hands and wondering if Arrexis has wards up on himself now, or if his nose would break if Khadgar punched it. “A college degree isn’t everything, you know. I can learn magic as easily off the internet as I could in the Kirin Tor. Easier, since I didn’t have to deal with stuck-up mages pretending they were the epitome of class and poise and that magic was a sacred duty to the world. You know, going to graduate school was the worst decision I ever made.”

“And teaching you the ways of ancient magic was the worst mistake we ever made,” growls Arrexis. “We’ve paid for it. Dearly. One of our own killed the Guardian; do you really think we won’t be shut down? We’re being investigated.”

“Like being investigated is a bad thing. If you don’t have any reason to hide, then don’t be scared of coming into the light!”

“The light,” says Arrexis. “Great metaphor for one so clearly corrupted by the Dark.”

A memory floats to the surface of Khadgar’s consciousness in the midst of his taut anger: From Light comes Darkness.

“Do you really think,” Arrexis continues, “that the investigation is going to give us the benefit of the doubt? Do you really think that they won’t blame us for every single trick you learned along the way, to pull your attack off? They already blame us for proving Garona innocence of King Llane’s murder in court.”

“But she was innocent,” Khadgar says.

Arrexis stabs a finger into Khadgar’s chest, and Khadgar flinches back. Too close to the bullet wound in his shoulder. Too close to the healed scar from Sargeras’ claw.

When Khadgar forces himself to uncurl from a ball, he sees that Arrexis has softened. “I know this,” Arrexis says, resigned, “but they don’t. They can almost prove she helped you kill him, so they think bringing up her old conviction will help their case. And it will. With any judge who is loyal to Azeroth, it will.”

“Why can’t you believe that Medivh was possessed by Sargeras? You know what the demon was capable of. Even the Guardian’s magic wouldn’t work against him.”

“It did, though. Aegwynn killed him. That demon hasn’t been alive in forty years, Khadgar. You’re behind on your history. The main flaw in this is that even the Fel can’t bring people back from the dead.”

“And you’re an expert on the Fel, now,” Khadgar says, breathing heavily. Defensive. The Fel can’t bring people back. But it can. But it did.

But—did it? The power that thrums through Khadgar’s veins, now blocked by the bindings, is dark and mighty and jaggedly pumping blood into his heart, and it brought him back to life. Of this he has no doubt.

But if it isn’t the Fel, what is it?

“I knew Aegwynn,” Arrexis says. “She knew the Fel better than anyone else. When she set out to hunt and kill a Titan, she knew the risk. She knew the reward. And this is one thing she was sure of: that Sargeras could not come back.”

“But what if she was wrong,” Khadgar counters. “She could be wrong. She wasn’t perfect.” From the many broadcasts of her Khadgar has watched in the past two months, it was very evident she wasn’t perfect. She was a celebrity, much-admired and hunted by the media, but a private person, only giving select interviews at charity events and royal weddings. She was also a chain smoker, but after living a thousand years, one can have vices.

Khadgar leans in toward the recorder. “Are you really willing to bet all of Azeroth on the fact that Aegwynn, even with all her ageless Guardian magic, was stronger than the Burning Legion? Because I wasn’t, when I still attended your school. Before I knew anything about the real cost of Guardianship, before I knew what magic truly was, I knew that something was up with Medivh.”

Arrexis looks towards the double mirror, and the door unlocks. Someone else steps inside. It’s a familiar face; Alonda. “The entourage is here,” she says, crossing her arms and looking Khadgar up and down.

The appearance of Alonda hits Khadgar like a bucket of ice. As one of his favorite TAs, in university she was always ready to help Khadgar in his sloppy technique or send him links to her favorite videos of trolls, but now, she looks so much older.

They’ve all had to grow up in his absence, Khadgar supposes.

“The entourage?” is all Khadgar says, raising his eyes.

Arrexis fixes him with a look. “You’ve got the bloody Queen coming to interview you,” he says, and Khadgar gapes.

“Queen Taria came here? From Stormwind? For me?”

“You’re the most high profile criminal we’ve had for a few years,” Alonda says, unimpressed. “Of course she’s coming here.”

“Wait,” Khadgar says. He can’t see her; not yet. “I have actual proof of the Fel in Karazhan. Physical proof.”

Arrexis raises an eyebrow. “I’m listening.” He glances at Alonda, who shrugs and gestures for Khadgar to continue.

“The staff of Medivh,” Khadgar says. “There’s Fel residue on it. If you test it, I swear it will be there. But you need to test it.”

“Great,” says Alonda, still unimpressed. “Where is it?”

Khadgar blanches as he remembers where he last left it and who, exactly, is coming to question him next. “Um, Anduin Lothar’s apartment.”

“Wait, what?” Alonda finally takes the chewing gum out of her mouth, and manages to look interested in the conversation. “Are you still involved with the Queen’s brother? Fuck, I could so sell this interview to TMZ.”

“No,” Khadgar says, shaking his head furiously. “I showed up, and he shot me several times. But I told him the same thing I just told you, and last I checked, he has the staff. I don’t know if he will take it to a lab, but you have to convince him. Please.”

Arrexis nods. “For the record,” he says at the recorder, “I still don’t believe you, but I do believe in proof. And if you have proof, then maybe your story has just become a little more believable. If you have proof.”

Khadgar nods. He thinks it might be relief he feels, but he’s not sure.

“Should I bring the Queen in here?” Alonda asks.

Arrexis looks around the tiny, bare room, and wrinkles his nose. “No. We’ll bring the prisoner out to her. He can’t harm anyone in this state.”

“Wait,” Khadgar says as he’s dragged up and out of his seat. He gestures to the white conjuring robe with a bloodstain on it. “I’m meeting the Queen in this?”

The Queen is waiting for him in a large room up too many flights of stairs, open to the air and consisting of a raised circular platform ten feet off the floor. Behind her stand an entourage of guards, and Khadgar immediately catches eyes with Lothar, in full Stormwind regalia.

Khadgar’s guards escorting him, one on either side, drag him to the center of the room, beneath the raised platform. Khadgar turns and looks at Arrexis, who stands behind them.

“This is the High Council’s chambers,” Khadgar says, and grins despite the gravity of the situation. All his time at the university next door, and he never even hoped he would see the inside of the Council floor. And yet, here he is.

The Queen nods sharply at the guards holding Khadgar in place. “You may all leave.”

“But, Your Majesty—” Arrexis interrupts, waving a glowing hand to indicate that if Khadgar tries to kill anyone, he could stop him.

“He’s not going to kill me,” Queen Taria says, fixing her gaze on Khadgar. “Are you, Guardian?”

The guards next to Khadgar shift uneasily, but do let him stand on his own, retreating to the edge of the room.

“You too, Councilmember,” Taria tells Arrexis, and with one last look, Arrexis leaves Khadgar alone with Taria and Lothar and a few members of the Secret Service ready to kill him, if their cocked weapons pointed right at his heart are anything to go by.

Khadgar doesn’t draw attention to the blood on his borrowed, old robes, or the fact that Taria is the sister of his ex. Taria is the very powerful sister of his ex, and why did Khadgar refuse all invitations to any ceremonial event Lothar went to? He should have met Taria before now. Before he’s being interrogated by the ruler of a country.

And yet, she called him Guardian.

So Khadgar looks at Lothar. Aside from being decked out in full bulletproof gear, with runes inscribed on his skin underneath them, and magazines hanging from his shoulders, he looks like he did the last time they met—ready to kill Khadgar, if it comes to that.

Khadgar shifts his wrists around in the cuffs. They don’t cut off his circulation, but there’s no way to slip out of them, just in case this goes south. He at least will get a trial, right? He never asked Lothar if his sister was someone who maintained peaceful control by ignoring the law when it suits her, and that information would be very helpful right now.

“Queen Taria,” he starts, with no fucking clue how to continue, “you have to believe me.”

Lothar snorts loudly. “Not this shit again,” he mutters, loud enough for Khadgar to hear.

Taria ignores her brother and harrumphs. “Khadgar, you’ve fucked my brother, I think we’re on a first name basis.”

Khadgar stares out the window. His ears might be turning red.

“I wanted to meet with you,” Taria continues, gently elbowing her brother as Lothar heaves an almighty sigh, “because I believe you.”

Khadgar doesn’t process the meaning of her words until Lothar does, taking a step away from her and saying, “You do what?”

“You believe me, Your Majesty?” Khadgar says, snapping his head up. “Erm, Taria? Did Lothar already test the Guardian staff for residual energy?”

“...No?” Taria responds, raising an eyebrow at her brother. “Anduin, why does Khadgar call you by your last name?”

Lothar looks around at all the Secret Service members and the mages outside the door, ready to blast away if anything goes wrong. “Well, you took my first name for your unborn grandson, so my last name is really the only thing sacred to just me,” he retorts, embarrassed and confused. “You’re a Wrynn now. And you actually believe him?”

“Khadgar, what does the Guardian staff contain? It’s currently in police lock-up from the crime scene.”

“Proof that Medivh was being controlled by the Fel, Your—Taria.”

Taria turns to her nearest agent. “Get the Guardian staff to the lab immediately.” The agent nods and walks off, speaking into their walkie-talkie.

“Wait, sorry,” Lothar says again. “You believe him? After he tied me up?”

“It was an accident—”

“I believe him because in the last three hours, the investigation of the Violet Citadel has brought evidence that someone has framed Khadgar.”

“But everyone knows he killed Medivh. Even he doesn’t deny it.”

Khadgar can’t believe this. Even with the massive weight of the arcane bindings on his wrist, he’s never felt as free as he does right now. “Do you have proof that he was Sargeras?”

“No,” Taria says, “but I do have proof that the story leaked to the public does not tell the entire story. Obviously, the way to fact check any story by you or Medivh’s lawyers is to check the security tapes saved before the battle, but when our agents looked through the transferred tapes, they found nothing except for that one clip. Whatever security footage was created before that time is gone, along with any security cameras in the area.”

“Which means that it must prove my innocence,” Khadgar finishes the thought, and for the first time in days he feels alive again. Granted, he’s massively dehydrated and has just recovered from death, and all his bullet wounds feel like they’ve reopened, but he might just have a chance. “Fucking hell. In framing me, Medivh alluded to his own guilt—but no, it couldn’t have been Medivh, then. Someone had to actually give the recording to everyone. Do you have any leads?”

Taria shakes her head. “That’s where I’m hoping you can help us.”

“Me?” Khadgar says faintly.

“Him?” Lothar says, motioning the barrel of his rifle at Khadgar. “But he’s broken so many laws, even if he isn’t guilty for the murder of the Guardian. Breaking and entering, obstruction of justice, running from justice—”

“I’m hiring you to be a consultant of this investigation,” Taria says, smiling benevolently down at Khadgar like the ruler she was born to be. “As of now, you are a free man, and hired.”

She waves her hand, and the cuffs on Khadgar’s wrist open, dropping to the ground. Khadgar rubs his wrist and looks at Taria in awe. “I didn’t know you had magic.”

Taria raises one perfectly-groomed eyebrow. “I am the ruler of the most prosperous country-continent this side of the Portal, Guardian. Trust me, I know magic.”

Khadgar ignites his fingers with small puffs of flame, just because he can. The fire reflects the cool blaze in his eyes, and he feels a tear fall and fizzle into the flames before setting it out. He’s free. He’s free!

Then he presses his hands to his stomach, sealing the gut wound over again with magic that is not culled any longer, and then to his shoulder. He pulls down the robes to look at the shoulder—the bullet wound is nothing but a gnarly scar, next to the scabbing wounds from the battle with Medivh.

Taria frowns. “You were shot?”

“Yes,” Khadgar says, distracted by the sudden fullness in his stomach, the way hunger dissipates after eating a large meal, his magic thrumming, life-giving at last. “Your brother killed me for a second.”

Taria turns to Lothar, but Lothar is fuming. “He almost killed me, Taria. He was going to spear me with his staff, and I could see the madness in his eyes. Of course I shot him. Khadgar, being the Guardian, survived. So it’s a moot point.”

“Well,” Taria says delicately, staring at the ground like she wants to roll her eyes, but won’t. And she’s only been the ruler of the nation for a year; she’s not been groomed for the position. Khadgar feels like she used to be the person who would totally roll their eyes when the situation called for it. “If Khadgar survived, then it’s a moot point. Anduin, I thought you were closer to him than that.”

“Are you faulting me for standing for my country over those who I loved? Even you stood in support of Garona, even though she killed your husband.”

“Hey,” Taria warns, her eyes flashing blue. “She was just as much a victim as he was. This is different. This is—imperative. We need more proof than there being no record of Khadgar or Medivh’s actions before the battle. We need a statement, a video, anything.” She turns to Khadgar. “Can your Guardian magic get us anything?”

Khadgar shakes his head. “I can call up visions, but those aren’t provable in a court of law.”

“They will do enough to convince a jury of your peers, who will be magic users themselves,” Taria says. “It’s settled. You’ll go back to Karazhan and call up as many visions as the Citadel will allow, searching for who leaked the footage, and how they did so.”

“You’re letting him go back to the font of his magic?” Lothar says. “He could destroy the entire world from there.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. The font dried up when Medivh died,” Taria says. “He will be no more powerful there than he is right now. And he’s not running away right now, which is important. Khadgar is standing with us, now that the army isn’t knocking on his door for his body, dead or alive. And you know what? Because of your doubts of his safety, I’m assigning you to accompany him.”

“Technically, you can’t assign me, you don’t have an army position,” Lothar says.

Taria raises an eyebrow. “Technically I’m the fucking Commander in Chief; of course I have an army position. It’s higher than yours. And I’m telling you that because the evidence has now swayed in Khadgar’s favor, you are to trust him, and to help him figure out who put him in this mess, and then to fess up and apologize for why you dumped him.”

Lothar glares at her, but sets his jaw, like a true professional. “Fine,” he says. “But Khadgar has to wear the arcane bindings.”

Taria curls her lip. “If you want him incapacitated that much, shoot him again. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.”

Khadgar’s subconscious kicks in and he prepares a counterspell, holding it in the air above him, runes blazing all around. “Don’t you dare try,” he says.

Lothar holsters his weapon and sighs. “I’m not going to shoot you, Khadgar, not when the evidence supports you. You know I don’t hate you, I just protect my country.”

“Do I know that, though?” Khadgar says as the doors to the hall are opened and the mages rush in, expecting a bloody massacre to have happened and finding Khadgar bickering with royalty. “You might want to apologize for breaking up with me, then.”

Lothar says, “Don’t get ahead of yourself now, Guardian.”

Karazhan looks exactly how Khadgar left it, except with more crime scene tape around the entire building that Khadgar tears off as he walks up.

Lothar follows him down the steps of the royal jet, still in full Kevlar, a gun strapped to his thigh. It was a contentious flight, to say the least. Khadgar didn’t actually say anything to him for the hours in the air, but he did consider either snarkily commenting on the abject sexiness of the thigh holster or snarkily commenting on how his bullet wounds are healing nicely.

Khadgar likes to think he’s a nice person, and Taria was also in the private jet, so he refrained from saying any of that and instead just went to the bathroom a few times to take some deep, calming breaths and use the provided cologne to smell a little bit better than before. He basically douses his Kirin Tor hoodie he took back from the institute itself in the perfume, and now as he trudges through the leftover crime scene paraphernalia, he thinks the smell is overrated.

He pulls the front door open, and it sticks this time with Lothar and the Queen watching him, because of course it does. Of course it does. Khadgar drags it open and walks into the main hall, and the library is completely in tatters, the bookshelves in pieces and on their sides, everything scattered.

Khadgar looks up to the room of the battle, and there are giant holes through the floor, shining light in rays on the library. Some property damage occurred because Khadgar couldn’t control his firebolts.

Lothar kicks at some of the overturned books and scowls. Khadgar keeps walking through the ghost tower, looking at the stairs covered in forensic equipment and the hallway leading off to the bathroom where he had his first panic attack. There are bullets in the wall.

“Fun place,” Khadgar comments, his voice echoing in the high ceiling.

Lothar makes a noncommittal grunt of assent.

Khadgar places a hand on the stairs railing, rooting around deep within him for the spark of a vision of the past. The railing is cool beneath his fingers, and his magic is buzzing in him, but there is nothing of the past on top of the fingerprint dusting and the excessive cataloguing by the police.

Khadgar walks over to a bookshelf, his Kirin Tor tattoo sparking to life, pointing him at a book smelling of mothballs and lint. He rolls up his sleeve, the mark shining brightly, and gingerly picks the heavy tome up. “Why couldn’t he just get a Kindle library?” he mutters as he opens it, a cloud of dust scattering into the air.

“I doubt there Medivh would have allowed a digital copy of these top secret files to be made,” Lothar says behind him, and then snaps his mouth shut.

Khadgar’s ears burn. “I didn’t think we were on speaking terms,” he says.

Lothar doesn’t respond, and that in itself is a very clear answer. They’re not. There’s just too much history between them to remember that.

“Just call up your visions and figure out who we can implicate in the arrival of the Fel,” Lothar frowns. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

Khadgar flips idly through the pages of the book. The magic in its binding has left it, maybe since it fell off the shelf, maybe since Medivh called all remaining magic to his fingertips to defeat him. Maybe since Khadgar became the Guardian.

“There’s nothing here for me to call up,” he says, casting his web of influence over the entire library, over the entire Citadel. “Everything’s dry.”

Lothar fiddles with the gun on his leg. “What are you going to do about it?”

Khadgar stretches out his back until it pops. “I’m not in any condition to move heavy objects around, after you riddled me with bullets. So I’m going to stand here while you put the library back where it was.”

Lothar just looks at him.

Khadgar smiles widely, and the new scar tissue on his shoulder twinges. “Putting the books and the shelves back should probably restore the circulation of magic.”

“Probably?”

Khadgar takes one of Medivh’s flat Diet Cokes out from the fridge as he watches Lothar set the bookshelf up the right way. He shouldn’t get a sense of satisfaction watching Lothar not shoot him, or not scream at him, or not break up with him, but he does anyway, as Lothar stacks random books on the shelves.

Khadgar walks over to the shelf and puts his hand on it once it is mostly filled with books, staring off into the carnage in the distance and letting the magic pour out of his eyes, letting it fill him with the power and the knowledge that comes with being the Guardian, from the history of the power and the history soaked in this bookshelf.

“There’s nothing,” he says as he comes down from his magical high, his skull aching behind his forehead. “It’s still disconnected from what it once was. Everything needs to be in place.”

Lothar swears, sweat dripping off his nose. “You’re just doing this to spite me,” he says.

Khadgar sips from his Diet Coke. “Why would you say that?”

“Because it’s what I would do in your situation. Well. Something like that,” Lothar admits, pulling another shelf upright.

“I think what you would do in my situation is shoot me.”

Lothar doesn’t look Khadgar in the eye. “I know—you have a right to be angry at me about that, Khadgar, but it wasn’t personal. You were a murderer on the run, and I had a duty to my country. Nothing more than that.”

“Okay,” Khadgar says, because he knows, because that’s all Lothar said when he actually had him tied up, “but what about the shit that was personal? When you broke up with me, for instance. That was pretty personal.” And what motivated him to start hunting Sargeras full time. He’s indirectly responsible for all this.

Lothar sighs, sliding a book onto the top row. “I was an asshole, Khadgar. That’s why. It’s who I am. I break up with people.”

“You still haven’t told me why,” Khadgar says. “I’m asking. Truly. Why? We were—we were great.” They hadn’t even gotten past the dopey stage yet. Khadgar had left too soon to truly get to know him after the attraction wore off.

The attraction still hasn’t worn off.

“Because you were nothing more to me than a rebound, at first,” Lothar finally says, forcing himself to look Khadgar in the eyes. “And I wasn’t prepared to handle something serious by the time you weren’t. I’m sorry. I truly am. But you weren’t the perfect snowflake left out in the rain, Khadgar. You were hiding your hunt for the Fel from me.”

“Of course I did,” Khadgar says. “You’ve seen the news. No one else believed me. I didn’t have any reason to believe you would, either, except for the fact that you liked me, but apparently you didn’t love me at all.” He crumples the Coke can.

“I did love you,” Lothar says, chasing Khadgar as he storms away to the kitchen. “That was when I realized I was well and truly fucked.”

Khadgar slams the Coke can into the trash bin and whirls around. “You were fucked! Oh, good for you. You left me on the street without a home, with only my toothbrush and my hoodie and my phone charger. You reshaped my entire life, Lothar; you’re the reason I had enough motivation to continue looking for Sargeras even when everyone else thought I was spectacularly bad at magic for even seeing him in Medivh. And you just left me there.”

“I’m sorry!” Lothar screams, punching the door frame. Khadgar’s eyes snap back to blue immediately, and he takes a step back.

Something in him grabs onto that moment, something that puts their hand around his mouth and breathes a command into his ear: Punch him back. Punch him for everything Lothar did to him, punch him because he can, punch him because he’s sick and tired of this shit.

Khadgar balls his hands into fists and shoves them in his jean pockets. He growls at the voice, “No.” The Guardian staff is miles away, and there’s nothing amplifying the signal reaching his brain. He should be able to withstand it easily.

Unless it’s inside him as well.

Lothar frowns. “What do you mean, no? I am sorry. I am a complete and utter asshole, and I know it now. I had my reasons, but I know it wasn’t right, Khadgar. I know. I don’t regret my actions last night, but I do regret so many others.”

Khadgar stares into the cutlery to regain his breath. “Thank you,” he says. “I understand.” The power within him retreats and leaves nothing but a sour tang on his tongue.

Lothar softens, and looks in the fridge. “You think the investigators actually left any food here?”

Khadgar wrinkles his nose. “There’s some old take out, but it’s rotten by now. I’ll cook.”

Lothar looks surprised. “You’ll cook?”

“Yeah,” Khadgar frowns. “I can cook. With the Guardian magic, I can make food. You just keep setting up the library and we’ll see how it goes.” And he hums and turns to the cabinet of spices and raw ingredients.

He looks at the cookbooks on the wall. “Hm. I might just start with a classic: hot dogs.” But when he turns around, Lothar has already left.

So Khadgar hollers after him, “Don’t expect anything gourmet!”

“Don’t worry!” the voice floats down to him. “I’m not.”

So Khadgar doesn’t, in fact, make hot dogs. He makes burned sausage with dry buns, and can’t manage to call up mustard or ketchup, but instead some half-frozen relish. He presents it to Lothar, who’s dripping from the hard manual labor, with a self-deprecating smile. It’s like a peace offering.

“Turns out I can’t cook,” he says. His peace offering sucks.

Lothar doesn’t say anything, just takes a bite out of the hot dog, sitting down at the table. “God,” he says with his eyes closed. “This is heavenly.”

Khadgar quirks an eyebrow and tries to bite into his hot dog. Even though he hasn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, he’s not hungry for this failed experiment. “So,” he says, to facilitate forced conversation, “you cleaned up all the bookshelves?”

“Most of them. Your magic connection should almost work now. And you cooked these the entire time?”

“No. I used the excellent cell reception to call Garona. Turns out she was pretty pissed for not hearing from me in over a day, and her lawyers have already drafted sworn statements that she knew nothing of my plans when I inevitably turned up dead.”

“Inevitably, huh,” Lothar huffs. “Guess she underestimated the Guardian.”

“No, she estimated me pretty well,” Khadgar shrugs. “I did die, after all. Not that I have to remind you of that.”

“And how exactly did you come back to life? I know a few magic users, but none of them can bring themselves back from the dead with an arcane blocker stuck inside them.”

Khadgar shrugs. “None of them were the Guardian,” he grins. He doesn’t know the real reason why. He doesn’t really want to know.

“Are you enjoying your new powers?”

“I can’t really feel the new powers,” Khadgar admits. “They’re subconscious. When I’m in battle, they save me, and I barely remember doing anything at all.”

“I don’t think they worked for Medivh like that,” Lothar says. “According to the press’s backstory, he was excellent at magic from the very beginning, and honed his Guardian power by reading this extensive library and practicing.”

“Of course, considering that he was a demon and not the man we all thought he was, he might have had a good grasp on the magic the entire time, but honed his knowledge of what we know about magic instead,” Khadgar considers, swallowing the hot dog without tasting one bit. He wants another Diet Coke, or better yet, some actual caffeine.

Lothar pulls a frown, finishing his hot dog and standing. He scratches his head awkwardly. “I’m going to finish doing your manual labor,” he says, looking anywhere but Khadgar, not because of the previous animosity in the room, but because he just doesn’t know what to do now that the animosity has been torn away.

Khadgar nods. Deep in his gut, the hot dog and relish isn’t sitting well, and something underneath his palms burn. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s uncertainty. “Fine,” he nods, too fast, his hair settling on his shoulders. He doesn’t look Lothar in his eyes, and for some reason, he really wants a hairband. He needs a hairband.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a hairband, would you?”

Lothar gestures to his shoulder-length hair. “I know I used to have long golden locks like you do, but not long enough to need those infernal things any longer. Sorry.”

Khadgar nods, touching his cheeks to make sure he’s not visibly burning. Why does he suddenly feel fresh out of grad school, meeting Lothar for the first time? He’s not nearly that drunk now, and he doesn’t feel that acute need to impress the cute man in front of him. Now he just wants to—be friends, maybe.

Best case scenario.

Lothar leaves, and Khadgar tries to string his untamed hair together with nothing but willpower, but it does its own thing and splays itself across his shoulders anyways.

The hot dog and relish really doesn’t settle well in his gut, and Khadgar trudges to the nearest bathroom to possibly upchuck it, possibly give himself the best pep talk in the history of pep talks to keep it down, but once he enters the room he freezes.

It’s the same room that he first ran into, after killing his first demon. After killing his first anything. Khadgar looks at the mirror, stained with his old dried blood, where he saw the dark presence for the first time, in the reflected orbs of his own eyes.

Khadgar is a million miles away from throwing up, now. He can’t concentrate on what his stomach wants to do when his lungs are spasming, when he’s breathing too deeply, when his muscles pang with the unneeded oxygen flowing to them, when there’s an itch deeper than his tattoo and deeper than the magic thrumming under his skin. Khadgar grips the edge of the porcelain sink with his aching, overheated hands, leans into the sink, wills himself not to throw up and not to choke, but he can’t.

There’s no dark presence this time, no unsuspecting byproduct of Medivh’s power imposing itself on him, nothing that Khadgar can’t physically handle; not this time. All there remains is the memory of it, the great power of the time lost in Khadgar’s mind, the words it said to him: From Darkness Comes Light.

“Fuck this,” Khadgar says, even as his knees buckle and he kneels hard on the tile floor, something internal wincing at the pain, even as he can’t do anything but lean his forehead against the cool porcelain and close his throat, willing the food down, willing his mind not to remember.

But there are some things he can’t forget. There are some prices that can’t be ignored. A voice echoes in Khadgar’s head, and it might be the power or his own subconscious, screaming, “Are you happy now? You’re about to prove you’ve been right this entire time. Are you happy?”

“Of course I’m not,” Khadgar grits his teeth together, tasting blood on his gums. But his food stays down. But his brain doesn’t recall vividly the flashes in Medivh’s eyes as the demon bursted through, the way his form flickered and was shed as the real burning fire within was revealed, the way Medivh flickered back as Khadgar drove the dagger deep in his heart, twisting and twisting and crying and twisting. “Of course I’m not happy.”

There’s a rap on the bathroom door, insistent, harried. Lothar says, “Are you okay in there?”

Khadgar tucks his head between his knees, the rushing of blood calming down until he’s not spinning upside down, just sitting on the floor of the bathroom, not drowning, just sitting. “I’m fine,” he says, and slowly stands, opening the door.

Lothar looks around the bathroom like he’s seen a ghost. “Did you...just do this?”

Khadgar takes another glance around. He really smeared a lot of blood when he stumbled in here after the fight. “No. It happened a few days ago. I’m sorry, I just...remembered everything.” He gives Lothar a watery smile, and surprises himself when he leans in for a hug, burying his face in Lothar’s sweaty shoulder and just losing himself in the terror that’s been trapped inside of him for the last few days, for the slow fear simmering inside of him for years.

Lothar holds him tight, stroking his back. “It’s okay,” he says soothingly. “It’s going to be okay. I finished uprighting the library. Your feng shui should be back in order. We’re going to find what really happened and how to prove it, and you will be home free.”

Khadgar swallows down his deepest darkest desire to tell Lothar that he’s pretty sure he’s being possessed, that it’s not just the staff that needs to be quarantined and tested in a lab. With his Guardian power, he’s Azeroth’s only hope for catching the others involved in Sargeras’s rise to power, but with the own power within him, he’s also the greatest liability.

Khadgar bites his tongue, Garona’s own advice echoing through his head. He can’t tell anyone. Not if he doesn’t want to be put in a straightjacket, never to feel his own magic again. Not if he wants to truly be the monster Azeroth envisions. He can’t tell anyone.

Something rebellious in Khadgar thinks: If his own fears about Lothar not trusting him were wrong the first time, isn’t it more likely Lothar would be on his side this time?

Then Khadgar feels his long-gone bullet wounds, pressed against Lothar, and he bites his tongue even more. All he wants to do is tell him, but it’s the last thing he can do. “Come on,” he says, more weary than he’s been in days, “let’s go see the library.”

They walk to the library, Lothar’s arm tucked under Khadgar, supporting him, and Khadgar clinging onto Lothar for dear life and sanity. When he walks into the library, Khadgar is a flower in bloom that just blossoms, surrounded by all this magic, primed and ready for him to absorb. The Guardian within him is giddy, almost childlike, and wants to crack open the nearest tome and start practicing the spells that will make him the protector Azeroth deserves.

“Yes,” Khadgar says, stopping near the closest bookshelf and running his hand up and down the seam of it, “I think this will do nicely.”

He closes his eyes and digs deep within him, opening up the runes of power inscribed on his soul to see into the past. “Take me to the others,” he intones, voice resonating from every corner of the multifaceted room, “the day Sargeras died.”

Khadgar feels the ground rush at him, feels the magic pulling him into the memory, and he sinks willingly into it, plunging himself headfirst into the vision like a swimmer to water.

It’s raining the last day Khadgar spends in Lothar’s apartment, before the winter holidays and cold enough to merit a blanket of snowfall. This is an omen neither of them see—or at least, Khadgar doesn’t see it. He’s blindsided by his overwhelming happiness he feels, in his pajamas and Kirin Tor hoodie, sitting around the fake fire in Lothar’s—their—apartment, watching the rain splatter on the window.

Lothar sits next to him on the sofa, letting Khadgar use his shoulder as a pillow, as Khadgar slips in and out of restful sleep, Lothar doing work on his phone and playing Candy Crush, Khadgar twirling around a small flame between his fingers, warming up his rosy hands.

Khadgar is relaxed, spread out, boneless, thoughtless, and Lothar is sitting stiff. Khadgar doesn’t notice, because a stiff shoulder is a good pillow, but Lothar is thinking of something. In hindsight, Lothar is thinking about something more seriously than usual, like it’s a life or death decision. His grip on his phone is precise but firm. He blinks often, brushing the hair out of his eyes. He still has hair longer than his shoulders, and his hair bands and Khadgar’s are scattered all over the apartment.

Khadgar is humming a tune he forgets the name of from college choir, something he’s half convinced is a Christmas song—but no words come to mind. Just the tune, the lilting melody that compliments the patter of rain on the window.

Lothar opens his mouth to speak. Just one sentence, and it shatters the illusion of happiness. It shatters everything. “Khadgar, we need to talk.”

Khadgar yawns and sits up. He’s still not worried about anything, the melody draping itself over his mind like a blanket. He’ll need that blanket in the oncoming days. “Sure. About what?”

Lothar clamps his jaw shut, grinding his teeth together, staring at the fake fireplace. “About us.”

Khadgar freezes, balling his hands in the pocket of his hoodie. “What about us?”

“I think—” Lothar’s nails are bitten to the quick, moving over his phone like it physically pains him to string words together in his mouth, to explain the bombshell just dropped. “I think we should take a break. As a couple.”

Khadgar, too, stares into the fire, breathing erratically, heavily, forcing air into his lungs that just won’t come. He forces his lungs to work. They must work. His ears can’t be working, though, because that can’t be what Lothar just said. “Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” Lothar finally decides upon.

Khadgar thinks about his hunt for the demon, his quest to free Medivh from possession, and all the things he can’t tell Lothar, but those are his business. They’re not Lothar’s business. It’s different than this. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated,” Khadgar hisses under his breath. In front of him, the flames look like monsters, look like the pit of hell. “You’re breaking up with me, and you’re not even giving me a reason.”

“I’m not breaking up with you—I just want to give us a break.”

“That is the very definition of a break up,” Khadgar says, and he wants to scream, maybe. He doesn’t have the energy to scream. He can’t remember what he and Lothar did last night for dinner; why can’t he remember? If this is it—if they are over—he needs to remember this. He needs to savor this. “I guess I can’t stop you.”

Khadgar knows he has nothing Lothar needs, and now he knows he has nothing Lothar even wants. There’s nothing to convince him to stay, and to be honest with himself, if Lothar wants out, that’s within his rights. This was never something that would continue indefinitely. It had an end date when they started, except they thought the end date would be the morning after.

Khadgar’s luck finally just ran out. His jaw shivers. “Okay,” he finally says. “I’ll get my stuff and get out.”

“Oh—I didn’t mean right this minute, now. I meant sometime soon.”

Khadgar’s already on his feet, using his magic to draw his toothbrush to himself and yank open the clothes drawer. His backpack is strewn on the otherwise neat floor, and he starts slamming clothes into it, numb. “I’m not staying with you one second you don’t want me, Lothar. I value you that much.”

Lothar nods. Khadgar doesn’t look him in the face, but he hopes Lothar is hurt by that. Khadgar values him enough to respect his wishes without retaliating. It’s the right thing to do. He’s doing the right thing, finally.

Lothar halfheartedly accompanies him to the door, Khadgar slinging the backpack over his shoulder, when everything of Khadgar’s is cleaned out or left behind to rot. Khadgar looks back over the apartment once, the fire still going.

He’s remembered the first lyrics to the song. In the bleak midwinter…

What a winter. Khadgar jerkily nods at Lothar and walks down the stairs to the ground floor, not even offering Lothar one last word or one last kiss. He wants both of those things, but he has the higher ground here, and isn’t about to sacrifice it for the need to make something memorable of his first and probably last real relationship.

Khadgar slams the front door to the apartment behind him and steps out into the pouring rain. His hoodies is immediately drenched, his phone only protected under several layers of clothing, and by the time he reaches the corner his backpack is, too.

He looks up at the sky. Sheets of rain pour down, and nothing before or behind him is dry. This is an omen, he decides. Khadgar is alone in the muck of his own making. This is his fault for depending on Lothar for his only form of housing since leaving the Kirin Tor. This is karma telling him he should have gotten a house months ago, that he should have been thinking practically about his future and not thinking that he could always half a fulfilling life searching for Sargeras and shacking up with Lothar.

“Where can I stay?” he asks the abandoned street sign, turning to the main highway. “Who are my friends?” Everyone he knows are Lothar’s friends that have become his friends, except for Garona.

Garona, who definitely won’t house him if he can’t pay his way through.

“But hey,” he says, slyly grinning as he digs his phone out of his pocket and dials her number, “I now have the time she needs.”

Garona’s dial tone rings as Khadgar stands alone on the side of the highway, and it clicks as she answers it.

“Garona?” he says, rainwater beading off his nose and lips. “I’m ready to take on Sargeras. I can hunt him full time, starting now.”

“Wow,” she says dryly from across the line. “What perpetrated this change of heart?”

Khadgar sits down on the curb, his pajama pants soaked to the bone. “My schedule opened up.”

The vision swarms around him, and the Karazhan library rearranges itself like Khadgar is standing in the library in the middle of the day a week ago, lights shining in the high windows, bookshelves and tomes where they should be.

Medivh walks down the stairs in full conjuring robes trailing on the steps behind him, holding himself ethereally, his two shadows falling in line behind him. He winds down the staircase, almost levitating, eyes fixed on nothing, just white orbs staring into space.

He looks to his left, and his eyes come back to normal, the magical aura he has around him dissipating in an instant. He almost catches Khadgar’s eyes as Khadgar stands, intruding on a scene that is not his to witness.

Medivh says, “The final ingredients are accounted for,” to someone right behind Khadgar.

Khadgar whirls around, but deep shadows are being casted on the walls, and whoever Medivh speaks to inhabits one of those shadows. Only a vaguely defined shadow sticks out from the wall.

The figure grunts a laugh. “Good. My men will have them in place in under a fortnight, Guardian. We will see the fruit of our labor soon.”

Medivh smiles, and then suddenly cranes his neck to sniff the air, staring at the main door to the Tower. His eyes blaze green fire. “Do you smell that?” he says.

The figure in the shadow sniffs and wrinkles his nose. “Nothing but the stench of rotting paper,” he says. “I always preferred digital libraries, myself.”

“Well, warlock,” Medivh says wryly, turning back, “the internet in my humble Tower is not as strong as that in Draenor.”

Warlock. Draenor. Khadgar looks at the figure in the shadow, but he is rooted to the spot in this vision. The figure is still formless.

The figure laughs again. “Hopefully one day you will have enough time to set up a satellite for just this Tower, yes?”

“Yes,” Medivh laughs soberly, twitching his neck back to glare at the unmoving front door. “I believe an appointment might have been sprung upon me. Let us part ways, old friend. I’ll call up a portal for you.”

“I have a jet around the back,” the figure says.

Medivh drums his fingers on his robes and chews his lip. The gesture is so human, but the puppet within Medivh is visible by the aura of soullessness that emanates from the man. “It’s faster this way,” he says, and kneels down to trace runes in the ground with his hand, glowing blue. Medivh stands, drawing the teleportation around himself like a shield. “Back to the portal?”

“Sure,” the figure says dubiously, but steps out of the shadows to join him.

Khadgar sees nothing at first but a blur of green skin and Fel ornaments. Then he notices a very familiar face and easily recognizable spikes sticking out the back of the creature, over a professional suit.

Gul’dan.

The previously-assumed-dead warlock walks up to Medivh, taking the blue thread from him. Medivh clasps their hands together. “I will see you in a fortnight,” he promises.

And then the doors burst open. Khadgar himself comes striding in, a dagger in his left hand and a firebolt in his right, eyes blazing blue and the fresh Kirin Tor hoodie on him. His hair flares out behind him like a mane, and to his present self, he looks more like the Guardian than Medivh ever did.

Past Khadgar hurls a firebolt at Medivh, missing but destroying one of the teleportation runes on the floor. Medivh ducks out of the way, and Gul’dan runs behind a bookshelf. Khadgar is hollering at Medivh in the ancient language of demons, Garona on his Bluetooth earpiece dictating every word, and Medivh grits his teeth as blood starts to drip from his ear.

Gul’dan looks at Medivh from their respective hiding places, and Medivh hisses at him, “Change of plans. Don’t interfere with this upstart. Just...record the event.”

Gul’dan frowns. “For what?”

Medivh wipes the blood off his neck. “For posterity. For inspiration to those who wish to follow us, to see my true power. Make it look like a security tape. You have contacts in the media, yes?”

“Of course,” the warlock shrugs as another of Khadgar’s bolts shatter a lamp and scorches the ground.

“Give them no context, just the video of the Guardian being attacked. That will ensure everyone who could possibly wish to rally to our cause sees it.”

“Why don’t I just end the upstart?” Gul’dan growls as Medivh grows claws in his left hand, green mist shimmering in the air.

Medivh looks back at him, fangs growing from his teeth and his jawline growing spikes. “Because all publicity is good publicity, my dear friend.”

He jumps out to attack Khadgar, and Khadgar knows the rest of this from his own memories—goading Medivh to the font, pushing him in, using the overflowing of Fel magic to stab him in the heart. The demon was mortal, after all.

The vision dissipates around Khadgar while Gul’dan follows the fighting duo up the stairs, using his green pulsing magic to follow Khadgar attacking the Guardian.

Khadgar blinks, and he’s back in the present, clutching onto the bookshelf as Lothar taps him incessantly.

“Are you okay?” Lothar says, his face white.

Khadgar feels worse than Lothar looks. “I’m fine,” he says. “But everything else is definitely not.”

“Why? What did you see? Do you have a suspect?”

Khadgar bites his lip. “I do. I have a suspect. I have reason to suspect Medivh was working on the Dark Portal Project.”

Lothar blanches. “Really? That ended the second Gul’dan was killed. None of his right-hand associates knew the inner workings of it.”

Khadgar lets loose a breath of anguish. “That’s just it. Medivh’s confidante, the person who recorded me fighting him and sent it to the press—that was Gul’dan. He’s not dead, Lothar. He was in league with Medivh, and I have reason to believe that his meeting with Medivh ensured that he has enough material to finish the Dark Portal.”

Lothar looks away from Khadgar, and Khadgar does too, noticing the marks that were made during the fight, where Medivh deflected every single one of Khadgar’s bolts, not realizing they were mere distractions until too late.

“But the Dark Portal project was thoroughly shut down,” Lothar says. “We crumbled the wall. I was part of the wrecking crew. I remember the last brick falling.”

“I don’t know,” Khadgar says, stringing his hands through his hair. “I just don’t know. I do know that Medivh had delivered the last of the ingredients for the portal to Gul’dan that day, and that the portal should be ready to turn on within a fortnight. I don’t know if that means thirteen days, or tomorrow, but it’s been a week since the conversation. The Dark Portal is about to be opened again from somewhere in Draenor.”

Lothar looks at him. “Don’t panic, Khadgar. You’re the Guardian. You have all the power Medivh did, but you’re not an actual demon, and you will fight for the Alliance. We can do this.”

“How are we going to do this?” Khadgar explodes. “We don’t know where Gul’dan is.” Not to mention that Gul’dan is one of the world’s last remaining users of the Fel, and Khadgar very possibly might also have the Fel in him. This isn’t a fight Khadgar could win, not even with all the Guardian magic in the world.

But he can’t tell Lothar that, because he has to be the Guardian to him. He has to be the Guardian to everyone, to the whole Alliance, because he’s the only hope against a warlock who could keep the secret of his life from everyone for years.

“I have a plan,” Lothar says, beginning to smile. “Trust me, you’ll love it.”

He goes away to call his sister and get the army in on his plan, and Khadgar just sinks to his knees beside the bookshelf. He can’t do this, every fiber of his being is screaming within him.

But he has to do this. For the Alliance, for Lothar, for the entire world, he has to do this.

The sands of Draenor whip around Khadgar, stinging his eyes, gathering in the crevices of the imperial conjuring robes he wears, with the emblem of the Alliance emblazoned in the center. However, not even the endless waves of sand can distract him from the magic called up within him, from the power he possesses in his hands.

Khadgar feels the blue power blaze from his eyes and draws up the strings from the ground, the magic in his control focusing on one thing: Gul’dan.

The leftover vision has left Khadgar with actual remnants of the orc warlock: the spikes protruding out of his shoulders have a unique signature, and so does the Fel he carries around him like a cloak. Khadgar loses himself in the expanse of land, his mind wandering through every inhabitant of Draenor, the Guardian power within him stretching his consciousness until he finds the signature of Gul’dan, faint but there.

Khadgar stands, out of breath, and looks at Lothar. “I know where he is,” he says.

Lothar extends a hand to him and Khadgar pulls them into a teleport to Gul’dan’s location, and in the nether space between the physical realm and the magic that threatens to swallow them whole, Khadgar takes his hand.

Lothar hasn’t been in a teleport before; this is evident by the surprise on his face when he reaches out to touch the world streaking by, displaced in everything for all time and yet for none. He looks into the reflection of himself in the galaxies, and despite the danger presented, despite clutching his gun full of arcane-binding bullets, wearing a full suit of armor, wards and runes etched all over it, he grins in awe.

Khadgar just closes his eyes and feels the vast resources of magic he can dip into now. He’s going to be okay. They’re going to win. Gul’dan is just one man, and even alone, Khadgar would be stronger than him. But they’re together. They can do anything together.

They pop into existence in front of the Dark Portal itself, carved into the side of a jagged cliff face, right behind Gul’dan. It is dusk, and the sun is setting across Draenor, bathing it in harsh shadows. There is no one else there.

Gul’dan whirls around, and Khadgar pushes Lothar out of the way of a bolt of energy that embeds itself in the base of the mountain, shaking the structure to its very core. Gul’dan glares at them, eyes turning bright crystalline green, another bolt of energy forming in his hands.

“It’s you,” he growls, voice amplified by the raw power consuming him. “The one on the news. The one that killed the Guardian.”

“You should know by now that he was not just the Guardian,” Khadgar says, and they circle each other, Khadgar in his best borrowed robes for luck, and Gul’dan in dirty, threadbare clothes. Crime apparently doesn’t pay.

Khadgar can see Lothar out of the corner of his eyes, hiding against an outcropping of rock and setting up his gun against it, leaning into it like a born sniper and aiming at Gul’dan. They have the upper hand, and Gul’dan is caught off guard. This should be easy.

Gul’dan scowls. They both glare at each other through blazing eyes, the world in front of Khadgar in shades of blue and gray. He is poised to strike Gul’dan down or to erect a shield at any moment, but Gul’dan isn’t attacking, just staring.

“You should know by now, new Guardian, that you don’t just hold the power native to Azeroth inside you. You hold a much older, much greater power within you, too.”

Khadgar doesn’t bother looking at Lothar, who can hear both of them perfectly in the still mountain scene. He just screams, launching himself at Gul’dan, fire trailing from his fingers.

His fist meets Gul’dan’s face and the warlock falls back, reaching out a hand and not even touching Khadgar, but stopping him in his tracks.

Khadgar struggles to move through the molasses imposed upon him, the world around him happening too quickly for him to react. Every fiber of his being has been stifled, and something insistently tugs at his very soul like a fishhook stuck in his gut. Khadgar doesn’t yield.

Gul’dan pulls with his hand, Fel magic on his fingers, but Khadgar doesn’t budge, doesn’t let the evil take his soul from him.

“Shoot,” he hisses at Lothar. “You have a clear shot, just shoot.”

In front of him, Gul’dan hisses, “You have more Fel in you than you should, Guardian. Still, I have more.”

He launches himself at Khadgar, hand opened and claws extended, and time around Khadgar snaps as Gul’dan extends his fingers at his heart. Khadgar lets himself crumple, and as Gul’dan runs at him, no holds barred, Khadgar aims an ice bolt at his heart, hitting his legs with his body full force and letting the magic within him loose.

The bolts go wild, fizzing into the mountainside. Behind them, the entrance of the Portal looms, a dark swirling mass shining within it, and the oppressive weight of so much Fel in one place hangs on Khadgar like an omen.

Gul’dan stumbles into the wall, laughing, and then Lothar shoots. One bullet lands in the middle of Gul’dan’s shoulder blades, and another chips into the rock face. Khadgar sees the one bullet land and sees Gul’dan go down.

He scrambles to his feet, reigniting his hands with pure magic, too hot to the touch, standing over Gul’dan. “Gul’dan of Draenor, you are hereby arrested for treason, attempted murder, illegal use of magic, and tax evasion.”

Gul’dan clasps at his heart, as if trying to claw the bullet out, choking. Green blood falls to the ground.

“I know,” Khadgar continues, “tax evasion doesn’t seem like much, but you were supposed dead for several years and haven’t paid any of your taxes, so.” He shrugs and steps into Gul’dan’s personal space, brandishing a pair of arcane binding handcuffs. “Time to pay for your sins.”

Gul’dan roars, and reaches one hand back in the direction of Lothar. With one motion, he crushes his hand on sandy air, and Lothar clutches at his neck, writhing on the ground. With the other, he places it above his heart, and pulls the bullet out of his body.

Khadgar takes a step back, dropping the cuffs. “You were bound,” he says. “There’s no way you could access your magic with the bullet, or hurt Lothar with his wards.”

“Fool,” Gul’dan chuckles, standing and facing him. “I heard about your brief stint with death. Haven’t you already learned that the Fel doesn’t follow mortal rules? With it inside us, we serve a bigger purpose.” He gestures to the Portal, primed and ready before him. “We can help our makers.”

“I do not have the Fel in me,” Khadgar hisses, even as ice claws its way up his throat. He knows what Gul’dan says is true. “I have never accepted the Fel into me. I am the Guardian. I use proper magic.”

“Of course you do,” Gul’dan says, smiling pityingly at him. “But you took all that Guardian power into yourself, I assume, from your asinine display of power. You must have taken all the Fel that Medivh himself contained.”

“No,” Khadgar shakes his head, blasting Gul’dan with the raw might of his power. “There’s no way!”

Gul’dan is slammed against the rock face as Khadgar screams, his eyes pure blue, the stream of power pure white.

“I am the Guardian!” Khadgar screams. “And you are under arrest!”

To his left, Lothar stops choking, and Khadgar prepares to finally take down Gul’dan as his power wanes.

An orc hand reaches out of the mess of blue and green and secures itself around Khadgar’s throat. His power dies instantly as Gul’dan fills Khadgar with the green, slippery magic, the dark power thrumming into his veins. Khadgar can’t breathe with the hand around his throat, but he can breathe life and death into anything he wishes. His limbs have never felt more alive.

Gul’dan releases him, and beyond the echo in Khadgar’s ears as he doubles over and closes his eyes, unable to move with the influx of more power, the orc warlock laughs. It’s a cruel and guttural sound.

“You feel it now, Guardian,” Gul’dan says. “You can’t fight against it because it’s been dormant within you for a while now. Let it consume you. Taste the extent to which you are better with it in you.”

Khadgar stands, not of his own accord, something else pulling the strings of his puppet limbs. His conjuring robes burn his skin, the wards against the Fel disintegrating off his skin, and he tears the robes off, now standing in the desert in nothing but a tank top, exposed to the sandy air that stings him, hard enough to draw blood. Something is controlling the sand.

He turns to Gul’dan, and in this green-hued light, the orc looks so much like a kindred spirit. The aura he exudes is the same as the one Khadgar tastes in the back of his throat, and his skin is the same color as everything else in Khadgar’s vision—a sickly, dying green.

Khadgar breathes, and breathes again. His heart is rabbit-fast, his hair is blowing in the wind behind him, and he is more happy than he’s been in months. He looks at Lothar, who seems to quake in his line of sight.

“You,” Khadgar says, voice shaking and splitting the rocks at his feet. “You caused me so much pain, Anduin Lothar. You broke my heart.”

“Yes,” Gul’dan says in his ear, around his soul. “Break him back.”

Khadgar casts out a hand and drags Lothar to him, through the sand. The bullets Lothar fires at him bounce off uselessly. Or maybe they embed themselves in his skin, but he brushes them off like mosquito bites. They mean nothing to him now, not when he’s ascended to another plane of existence.

Lothar casts the gun to the side, and spits out sand in his mouth as he is dragged to kneel before Khadgar. He stands, shaking the force squeezing his shoulders off, holding his fists up like he wants to fight. “Come on, Khadgar,” he says in a long-suffering voice. “This isn’t you.”

“This is me,” Khadgar bites back. “This is more me than I’ve been in a long time.” Inside, he is a mixture of emotions, but he’s chock-full of life, more than ever before. Inside, he can almost feel the soul of the man he killed, adding to his power and prestige. “And I need you to apologize before you die.”

Gul’dan laughs, next to him. “Fitting,” he sneers at the man on the ground. “You inspired him to adopt the Fel in the first place, and you can’t do anything about it.”

But Khadgar’s feeling bitter and exuberant, and he casts down the magic at his disposal, instead raising his fists in return. “You will apologize, mark my words,” he says, and attacks Lothar.

His first swing goes wild, and Lothar slams him upside the head, wrestling him down on the floor. Lothar is right over him, holding him in a headlock, and Khadgar looks at him in the shades of green and places one of his hands over his heart, drawing the life from him.

“Don’t do this,” Lothar pleads, even as his life force starts to drain. “You can break out of his hold on you, Khadgar. I know you can. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met.”

“Of course I am,” Khadgar says, not getting up from the ground even as Lothar scrambles back, breathing heavily, a hand to his heart. Khadgar is even more alive, now that he has some of Lothar’s soul in him. “That’s why you won’t win.”

“Khadgar!” Lothar says desperately, dodging a missile lobbed at his head. “We came here to defeat Gul’dan together! Remember that? You had a conviction—you believed in this—I know there’s something still good inside you!”

“Good?” Khadgar laughs. “I’m the most good I’ve ever been, right now. Don’t try and drag me down with you, Lothar. You don’t know what I’m feeling.”

“Except I do,” Lothar says, and he doesn’t struggle as Khadgar slams him to the sandy turf. “I remember what it’s like having control over another person. I tried to control you when I told you to get out of my life. I know that’s the exact same sensation that you feel now. Taking back control over your own destiny isn’t you, Khadgar. It’s just Gul’dan. You can fight it. I know you can fight it.”

“How do you know?” Khadgar roars, slamming his fist down inches from Lothar’s head.

Lothar keeps his gaze. “Because I saw that Medivh did it, when you killed him. He didn’t transform into Sargeras’s demon form, he kept himself human and let you kill him. He resisted the urge of the Fel in him, and he sacrificed himself for the greater good. You can, too.”

“Lies,” Gul’dan spits in his ear. “The Guardian was never a separate entity from Sargeras, there was no way he could resist the will of the demon controlling him. Just as you can’t resist the power inside you now.”

Lothar reaches one shaky hand up and clasps Khadgar’s forearm, stroking his hand over Khadgar’s Kirin Tor tattoo. “You can fight it,” he says weakly, coughing up blood. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met; you’re the only person I know that is good enough to defeat Gul’dan. I trust you, Khadgar.”

Khadgar blinks. His Kirin Tor tattoo is shining like the morning sun, the only blue in his vision, and Lothar keeps grasping onto it, like it means something.

Of course it means something. His tattoo was the promise of his youthful soul to the way of the Light. It is Khadgar’s goals in a nutshell, and an easy reminder of why he took the path he did.

From Light Comes Darkness, the voice inside him reminds him. It sounds like Gul’dan’s voice. It sounds like Medivh’s.

Khadgar looks at Lothar, who’s still hanging on despite barely clinging to his life and his soul. He’s nothing but a shadow of a person, but Khadgar remembers when he was full of life, when his world was color instead of monochrome, when Lothar was his best friend, and an unassuming meeting led to the greatest period in his life. He remembers the Light that shone in on their relationship, through the ups and downs of faulty human lives, how none of their experiences were bathed in Darkness.

Khadgar turns to Gul’dan. “Yeah?” he curls his lip, Lothar’s hand falling limp from his arm. “If Light leads to Darkness, then the Darkness leads right back Light, fucker.” He reaches down in his waistband and pulls out a dagger, bathed in no magic, with no special abilities or wards or runes. Just a steel weapon with the memory of Medivh’s blood on the blade.

Khadgar leans over and embeds it in Gul’dan’s gut. “This is for Medivh,” he says darkly, pushing and pushing and twisting until his hand shakes too much, until he falls back on the sand, surrounded by his blood. The magic rushes out of him, all at once, and the dusk air is visible once again in its brilliant colors. Above him, Gul’dan pulls the knife out of his gut, and looks at it in confusion.

He collapses on the sand. Khadgar casts a quick spell to slow the bleeding in his gut as he falls, and takes several breaths next to Lothar.

Lothar, whose soul is fully intact, and breathing, unharmed, next to Khadgar. Khadgar scrambles up to get the cuffs and secure them on Gul’dan, making sure the orc is soundly unconscious, before leaning down to pick Lothar up.

Lothar looks at him, as if high, grinning and inspecting him up and down. A faint frown crosses his face. “Khadgar, you’re bleeding,” he says.

Khadgar looks down at himself. He can feel the bullets in his skin, now, in his arms and one in his ankle. He can’t stand, he can’t breathe, the fire returning to his veins with the color.

“Call Garona,” he slurs as he falls, consciousness fading rapidly. “Take us back to Azeroth.” And with that, he’s out.

Khadgar is all of three hours free of the oppressive regime of the Kirin Tor, using the last of his cash to buy drinks at a bar somewhere between Lordaeron and Stormwind. He got what he paid for with the bus, which broke down on a stretch of highway between the two cities, and has been cast out into the wild that is Azeroth, by himself, with nothing but a backpack of clothes on his back and his lovely hoodie on his chest, telling the entire world that he once made the massive mistake of going to graduate school at the Kirin Tor. He should have gotten the medical degree that his parents wanted.

But it’s too late now.

Khadgar gulps down the watery beer the shitty bar serves, the bartender and some of the patron giving him shifty eyes at the abruptness of his hoodie proclaiming for the world to know that he’s a mage, and that he’s been trained by the best university on the continent. He could totally fuck anyone up if he wanted to, and there’s not anything anyone can do about it.

Khadgar laughs into his drink. As if he has enough energy to fuck anyone up tonight. He doesn’t even have enough money to stay at a hotel for the night, and is going to have to find a motel to crash in while he gets his life back on track.

Goal number one: find out where his parents are. He hasn’t seen them in—fuck, has it really been six years since he went away to college for the first time?—and they weren’t answering their old phone number, not from the shitty payphone Khadgar had used earlier.

Goal number two: find out what to do about Medivh’s two shadows. Like, it has to mean something. Khadgar wasn’t drunk or high when he attended that guest lecture, and he saw the double shadow with his own two eyes. He’s not crazy, or so he thinks.

Someone sits down next to Khadgar. This is impressive because every other patron has given Khadgar a wide berth, most likely due to his magic that could explode at any moment. Khadgar hasn’t even tried to use his magic since using it to slam the door to the dean’s office shut after quitting and forfeiting his scholarships.

The scholarships were the worst part of quitting.

The man next to Khadgar is objectively beautiful, with gold hair down past his shoulders, roaming free. Khadgar’s long but stringy hair has nothing on the beauty of that hair. The man to whom the hair belongs to is wearing a heavy-duty army uniform, obviously coming from a long day of working in army-related business. He doesn’t even look at Khadgar, just nods at the bartender and orders a beer.

Khadgar looks at the quality of his lustrous mane, how the perfect curls in his blond hair are a combination of good grooming and expensive shampoo and conditioner, and knows immediately that this beautiful man is rich.

So he decides to cozy up to him. Khadgar turns nonchalantly and sticks out his hand. “I’m Khadgar,” he introduces himself.

The man shakes his hand back. “Andu—erm, no. Lothar. My name is Lothar.”

“Okay,” says Khadgar. “Lothar. Hello. What brings you to this dismal bar?”

The bartender scowls at Khadgar as he delivers Lothar’s beer. “Be wary of that one,” he tells Lothar, not bothering to be discreet. “He’s got magic.”

Lothar finally notices Khadgar’s hoodie. “Oh. Cool. So does my sister.”

The bartender shakes his head and leaves the two alone after that.

Lothar says, “What is a Kirin Tor student like you doing this far away from Dalaran?”

“Quitting,” Khadgar grins, emptying his glass. “I just quit. It was brilliant.”

“Huh,” Lothar says, raising an eyebrow and sipping his beer. “Any particular reason?”

Khadgar almost says that one of his guest teachers, who happens to be the Guardian of Azeroth, is definitely being possessed and no one has noticed. And then he remembers that no one cares about what Khadgar has to say on the matter, and looks at the beautiful, rich man in front of him. He won’t care, either. “I’m sick of the pretentious nature of proper magic users. I suffered two years under their grooming for the bureaucratic world, and now it’s time to forge my own path.” He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand to indicate his future path in life.

Lothar grins indulgently and takes another sip of his beer. “What are your goals for this future path?”

Khadgar takes a good look of the man in front of him: muscular, bulky, with money. “Well,” he says, curling his hair around his finger to lean in intimately, “first of all, finding a place to spend the night.”

“Oh, is that a problem for you?” Lothar looks him up and down in return, and Khadgar swallows, electricity scattering his nerves.

“Well, I’ve never really tried to do—this—before,” Khadgar says, pulling his long hair around his ear and out of his face.

“Someone that looks like you has never tried to get anything from anyone using that hot bod? I’m skeptical,” Lothar winks.

“Honestly,” Khadgar says. “I used to respect that the only way to get things is through hard work and conviction, but you know, I recently fell off the rails when I told the dean of the Kirin Tor to his face that his lot were a bunch of suck-ups who just taught us to respect the status quo, and didn’t even teach us anything cool. You know they refused to teach me how to fly, right? Said I might be a flying hazard, or shot down by the military.”

“I would probably be the one shooting you down,” Lothar admits, a smile on his face.

“Well, I’m glad we’re meeting here and now, instead of you looking at my body falling through space,” Khadgar says. “But yes. First time propositioning anyone. How am I doing?”

Lothar looks him up and down. “Eight out of ten,” he decides. “Adequate.”

“Better than my grades last quarter,” Khadgar admits. “Better than average?”

“Yes,” Lothar says, reaching out to re-tuck Khadgar’s hair behind his ear. He leaves his hand on Khadgar’s shoulder. “Definitely better than average.”

They both lean in together, like there’s something innate connecting them, and Lothar’s blue-green eyes reflect Khadgar’s brown ones. Lothar whispers, “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Sure,” Khadgar says, taking the offered hand from Lothar. “I definitely want to get out of here. I just assumed that an army man like yourself would live somewhere near an army base, like Stormwind, not—wherever we are now.”

“Oh, I live in Stormwind,” Lothar says, and he jerks his head to the door. They walk out into the crisp night air, hand in hand. Khadgar feels restless and excited, because Lothar is literally the most attractive person he has ever seen, and doesn’t hate mages, and is offering a place to sleep for the night, as well as other prospects. “I’m just driving home from work.”

“Where’s your car?” Khadgar asks. Stormwind is only twenty minutes down the highway, or so the driver of the broken-down bus told him.

Lothar grins and points at the Ferrari parked on the curb, the red coat of paint glistening in the night air.

“Holy fuck,” Khadgar says reverently. “That is a sweet ride.”

Lothar responds by pressing him up against the car and kissing the shit out of him. When he draws back for air, Khadgar’s hair is even more messy than usual, his moustache skewed, and his heart racing.

Khadgar croaks, “What would you think if I wanted to start the action before we got back to your place? Would you let me suck you off?”

Lothar whistles, unlocking the door of the convertible, even as Khadgar jumps over the passenger door. He grins back at Khadgar, and admits, “I might. Depends on how good a show you give me.”

“Oh,” promises Khadgar, “I give quite a show.”

Khadgar wakes up, and he thinks idly that maybe sometime in the future he could only wake up from a long night of rest, and not every time his body feels like passing out. He glares at the clock on the wall, and the bland statement that it is ten forty-two means nothing to him in this windowless room.

He looks at the IV sticking into his wrist. In the corner of the room, a heart monitor gently beeps. So he’s in the hospital, not back in a ramshackle Dalaran holding cell. His wrists aren’t cuffed to the edge of the hospital bed, so that’s something.

Khadgar looks down at himself. He’s lethargic with the sedative the IV is pumping into his veins, and his skin almost prickles with heat that settles in his stomach like a food coma does. He’s wearing pajamas that almost look like standard hospital scrubs, except for the fact that they go down to his wrists and ankles, covering some serious bandages around his entire body. On top of his pajamas sits his Kirin Tor hoodie, irreparably stained, but dry-cleaned and smelling faintly of chrysanthemum.

Khadgar looks over to the sofa next to the hospital bed, where Lothar lays, snoring. He’s not in his Kevlar fatigues, and he isn’t bruised and bloody. The scab on his cheek is fading. One hand flops off the sofa, a coffee cup on the floor, empty. His phone lies on the bedside table, and dings every few seconds with a text.

Khadgar remembers that text message noise from an apartment he and Lothar used to share.

He reaches out to grab Lothar’s phone from the table, and grunts from the twinge in his shoulder. He must have seriously strained some muscles when he was totally badass and resisted control of the Fel and kicked Gul’dan to the curb. He turns on the phone, and reads that February has now passed, and it is March.

Damn. He’s been out for a while.

The most recent text on Lothar’s phone is from Garona.

Garona (10:42): so today khadgar wakes up? y didn’t u tell me?? is he awake omg my lawyers are standing by to represent him when the press swarms y’all

Garona (10:42): ...loth? buddy? u awake? how’s patient zero doin

Garona (10:43): pls txt me when u wake up

Khadgar grins at the phone, and presses his thumb to the home button, just in case his fingerprint is still saved on Lothar’s device, even after all this time.

It is. Khadgar looks at the sleeping Lothar and writes back a reply.

Lothar (10:44): its khadgar nd im awake loth is not & im not gonna wake him whut up

Garona (10:46): “”what up””??? youve been out for a week thats what up!! btw my lawyers r now ur laywers and theres nothing u can do abt it! have fun being protected from libel and slander my dude!! also wake lothar up so he can tell u all about the last week

Garona (10:46): its been a hassle

Khadgar huffs a laugh. Having Durotan and Orgrim as his lawyers would actually be pretty sweet, their personalities considered.

“Libel and slander, huh,” he says to no one in particular. He really doesn’t want to wake Lothar up, but he still doesn’t know whether it’s ten in the morning or evening, and he’s been out for a week.

“Lothar!” he says, not actually moving to touch the man because reaching for the phone has caused him enough damage already. “Lothar! Anduin! Wake up!”

Lothar starts to attention, always the soldier, and sits straight up on the sofa, glaring at Khadgar with a pillow indention pressed into his cheek and his hair delightfully messy. He grins, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, as soon as he sees Khadgar. “You’re awake!”

“And Garona’s been texting you while you were out!” Khadgar waves the phone at him. “Apparently you didn’t tell her today was my wake-up date. Which, by the way—you predicted when I would wake up?”

“Oh, not me,” Lothar says, taking back his phone, “but people smarter than I. The High Council has been in here numerous times, and agreed that you wouldn’t stay asleep for more than a week. You weren’t physically damaged, but you kind of expended a lot of energy and had to readjust to the changes they made to keep the Fel out of you.”

“Oh,” Khadgar says. “They figured out how to block the Fel! That’s why I’m not trapped in magic prison.” And now that Lothar mentions it, Khadgar can feel the absence of it. There’s nothing sitting in the back of his throat like ill-digested food, there’s nothing clawing at his subconscious. His dreams were vibrantly rendered memories of good times, not overshadowed by overwhelming loss.

He takes a moment to soak it all in, and then he remembers. “What happened to Gul’dan? Is he dead? Does Taria know everything?”

“My sister is quite aware of the situation, considering her personal guards are surrounding this hospital room,” Lothar says wryly. “And Gul’dan is not dead, but in custody. We have his verbal confirmation that Medivh was Sargeras on tape.”

“On tape?”

Lothar quirks an eyebrow. “Did you ever wonder why I was so reluctant to get near the action? I had a body cam, Khadgar, transmitting live.”

“Cool,” Khadgar nods, and they sit in silence. “Fuck, I’m so glad you’re alive.”

“So am I,” Lothar says, standing up and brushing old crumbs off his ratty T-shirt. “Can I maybe sit next to you? The sofa has a busted spring that’s been sticking into my back.”

“Sure,” Khadgar says, and starts to move over to one side of the bed by pulling himself on weakened arms, but they burn when he tries, and he bites off a grunt and keeps trying.

Lothar puts a hand on his wrist and stops him. When Khadgar turns, he has the weirdest expression on his face. “Khadgar,” he says softly, “when are you ever going to just tell me when you hurt?” And with that, he picks Khadgar up and places him on the other side of the bed, crawling in next to him.

Khadgar remembers. Lothar only figured out that he had the Fel inside him when Gul’dan exposed him, and not at the numerous times Khadgar had the opportunity to tell him there was a tiny problem with how he might be turning into a Guardian just like Medivh.

Khadgar looks away. His ears burn.

“No, it’s okay,” Lothar says quickly. “I know after getting mad with you that you never told me about your hunt for demons, I never gave you a reason to actually trust me enough to tell me anything else. I don’t blame you. You had a power within you that could implode the entire world, but you also had the only power that could stop it from happening.”

“Thank you,” Khadgar says. The drugs in his stomach compel him to lay his head on Lothar’s shoulder, and sleep pulls at his consciousness. “But I’m sorry. I should have told it to someone, even Arrexis, before I got consumed by it. I’ll take the responsibility for that one.”

He runs a hand over the scab on Lothar’s face. “I caused that,” he says.

“No.” Lothar takes hold of his wrist, avoiding the IV. “Gul’dan did that. Not you. You fought him, and you won, and that’s all that matters.”

“And I now have Garona’s lawyers,” Khadgar adds, “so I can sue everybody for making me look bad. That is another thing that matters.”

“But why would you want to sue the press?” Lothar asks, fishing out his phone. “They’re now calling you a hero.”

He pulls up a YouTube video that was posted a few days ago and has since gone viral—the body cam footage of Khadgar beating Gul’dan. The video itself is followed by a compilation of reaction videos, in which the participants—ranging from people filming themselves in the low light of their basement to hidden cameras on professors in the Kirin Tor University—either scream loudly in exuberance, scream bleeped-out curse words, or scream at their neighbors to come see it. It’s very loud, and very aggressively amazing, and it’s all Khadgar can do to not grin too much.

He’s become a meme.

He looks at Lothar. “They hated me a week ago, and now they love me?”

“Solid evidence tends to persuade people. Hell, it persuaded me.” Lothar winks at him. Khadgar remembers when they first met, when Lothar teased him exactly as he’s doing now, without a care in the world what comes next.

His heart aches for those times to happen again, but better. He wants to not hide things from Lothar any more, now that he knows Lothar will never betray him.

“Lothar,” he says in an attempt to quash the feelings blooming inside of him, threatening to burst out in all sorts of embarrassing situations, “how did the High Council of mages get the Fel out of me?”

“Well, in the same way they got it out of your Guardian staff,” Lothar says, gesturing to where it lies in the corner of the room. Khadgar hadn’t noticed it before, as he’d been too overwhelmed at being alive and being loved to notice the stick for what it is.

The Guardian staff has changed since Khadgar left it at Lothar’s apartment, days and weeks ago. Inscribed all down the staff are runes of power, and from this distance, Khadgar can’t read them, but he suspects they quell the power of the Fel.

Khadgar frowns. “Even the wards I drew on myself when going to fight Medivh didn’t hold back the Fel,” he says. “They just disintegrated, or were knocked into the Tower, or something. They didn’t protect me then—but the Fel is definitely gone, now.”

Lothar just smiles and says, “Take a look under your bandages.”

Khadgar lifts one of his hoodie and pajama sleeves up, and with sedative-sleepy movements, he rolls up the white bandage underneath. On his skin are anti-Fel emblems of power, tattooed on his forearm, large and imposing on his pale skin.

Khadgar boggles at them. “Holy shit, I’m tattooed—everywhere?” He looks at the bandages that travel all the way down his legs to his ankles. As he remembers, the full wards against the Fel took up a few pages, and if they were all as large as on Khadgar’s arm, then there would hardly be a spot of skin left unmarked.

“I convinced them to leave your dick be untatted,” Lothar shrugs. “I couldn’t let them redecorate a work of art like that—actually, that’s not true. When I asked about it, the tattoo artist glared at me and said that there’s no guarantee the wards would work during sex—something about auras?—and then insinuated something about how you deserve all the blowjobs you can get for the rest of your life because you almost single-handedly saved the world.”

Khadgar punches Lothar in the shoulder, ignoring how his fist stings a bit. “The tattoo artist did not say that. But seriously? Tats everywhere?” He looks down at his covered skin.

Lothar nods. “Now, it is perfectly within your right to get upset because you were not consulted during the tattoo process, as you were unconscious, but the mages assured me that was the only way the Fel would be contained within you. So feel free to be mad, but I am here to fully help you in...rediscovering your body. Also, try not to lose a limb in the next few years lest the Fel be unleashed into the world.”

Khadgar wants to punch him again. “I’m not mad, Lothar. I know how wards work. I am kind of the opposite of mad. Sure, my entire body hurts because I have ink where my body doesn’t want ink, but there’s no Fel in me. I’m not on trial for murder. The Portal is no longer happening. I’m—I’m so happy, Lothar. I can finally stop worrying.”

Lothar takes his hand. He, too, looks indescribably happy. “I know this is such incredibly bad timing, with us in the hospital in all, but I would really like to take you on a date. A proper date, not bar hopping, like we used to do. I guess we’ve both fucked up kind of bad the last time we tried this, but I fucking love you still, and if you still love me back I would be honored to go out with you. Properly.”

Khadgar looks down at their joined hands and crinkles his exhausted eyes with a smile that he might never drop. “I’ll take you up on that offer, as soon as we get out of here. Hospital food sucks for date food.”

“Agreed,” Lothar says. “You good with pasta?”

Khadgar nods, and holds his hand ever tighter. In the sterile lights of the hospital room, Lothar’s face is vastly illuminated, the only thing Khadgar could ever focus on. Both their auras are so giddy with happiness, with joy and relief, and Khadgar couldn’t imagine how his day could get any better.

The door to the room bursts open, startling him out of his reverie. He looks to see Garona standing there, in a three-piece suit, on pen jammed behind her ear and another twirling in her fingers, a wild glint in her eyes.

Behind her, flanking her, are her two lawyers, dressed in equally intimidating suits and tinted sunglasses. Durotan just stands impassively, posturing like a bodyguard, and Orgrim makes cooing noises as he plays Neko Atsume.

“Alright, lovebirds,” Garona grins at Lothar and Khadgar, rubbing her hands together in glee, “it’s time to officially instate Khadgar as the Guardian of Tirisfal. Who’s ready for some paperwork?”