While the city fell from the skies
The city was in utter chaos.
We'd been ordered around to check on the final wards around the citadel when the nerubians had entered. Wrecking havoc and destroying the city I had lived in for most of my life. I was up in the spire around the purple parlor when I suddenly gravity vanished. Within the time it took for me to blink I was outside the balcony doors. I could see the mage who was with me with the wards clutching to the balcony door while the air around us wanted him out as well. I was just about to get a hold of myself, take a breath and cast a portal… And then Dalaran was gone.
I had fallen just far enough to not be drawn into the void when the city imploded on itself. I could see the face of my companion as he realized, at the very last second, what would come to pass. His eyes widening, and mouth forming to scream. But it was too late.
And now I continued to fall. I fell through the sky endlessly. I thought I would scream, and it felt like my body wanted me to scream. Shout violently as I would eventually meet my violent end. But I had just seen everything I've ever lived for vanish in front of my very eyes. For twenty years I had called the city my home. And from everything it had seen, I was naïve enough to believe it would survive anything. I had seen it enclosed and isolated from the outside world, only open for mages who sought out the arcane. I had seen it open, and move to Northrend and then to the Broken Shore. I had seen the council within ebb and flow, changed and challenged by forces within or from outside. And we had survived. We had prevailed. Dalaran and her citizens were the best of what Azeroth has produced. And we would prevail. And then we didn't.
And just as I was to hit the ground below, something stopped my fall. Someone. But not enough. I impacted on the rubble underneath me, and I could feel every bone in my body break. My muscles ripped from their tendons and for a moment all senses left me. Without that break in my fall my body would have surely broken apart, pieces scattered around where my body impacted. It would have been a mercy. When my senses came back to me the only thing I could feel, think or understand was pain. From deep within me came a primal scream. A shriek.
It felt like it had taken an age before I was able to take in the sight around me. I could se bodies, mangled and bloody all around me. Stones and debris from what I recognised to be the remains of my beloved city. And running around them people were trying to heal what little remained. Heroes - champions, he had called them. Lifting rubble and healing wounds. I could see a draenei running towards me. "Continue on, heal someone else. Let me die," it wasn't a conscious thought. Only the essence of it lingering in my mind while my body was still screaming. But I could see her lifting her hands up towards the sky, calling down he Light and pointing it to me. And then everything went black.
My consciousness had returned to my body long before my ability to control it. I had listened to healers of different kinds fussing, confused over why I hadn't awoken. Questioning why the healing and spells hadn't worked. Why neither Light or Elune or Loa or the Red Crane wasn't able to wake my mind. My body had long since healed. They had even questioned if my mind had gone to the Emerald Dream, but when heroes had gone to Merithra, leader of the Emerald Dragonflight to ask if they knew, she had said I was not there.
I could feel when they came into my room to move me. Careful not to let my lame body get soars and lesion from laying flat, unmoving. I had started to get used to the four or six different people caring for me. Moving my body, washing it as need be. They spoke softly, and rarely of the matters of the world. Maybe they didn't know. But my mind was hungry for it. What had happened to us? Why had it happened?
The real fuss started when I apperantly had moved. My body shifting its positions from the back to one of my sides on it own. New attempts at waking me had started, and kept going until he had told them to stand down.
"She will awaken when she is ready," he said.
I'm ready now, I thought with all my might. But not a sound left my lips.
For what felt like days, I could sense his presence. But he was not in the room. I could feel his eyes scanning me, sometimes a quick spell to see if everything still was ok. If there had been any changes.
It had gone quiet in the room I was in. Probably deep into the night when the carers were given some time to rest while all the patients were stable and sleeping. For the first time I could feel my body in a way I hadn't done since I fell from the sky. I knew that if I wanted to, I could tell my eyelids to open and they would obey. I took a deep breath, the room having no smell but the slight crackle of arcane. And I knew if I opened my eyes, there would be someone looking back.
And so I gathered all my strength and wriggled my toes carefully. They listened. Slowly and surely I moved my fingers, and they too listened. With another deep breath, I forced my eyes open. The room was dimly lit, only the slight light form the other side of an open portal next to my bed bringing light into it. My eyes looked right into his face.
"Khadgar," I willed my voice to speak. It came out barely a squeak. But his eyes rose up from the tome he was reading, first wide and unbelieving. Then a smile rose from the corner of his mouth, slowly reaching his eyes.
"Welcome back," he told me. With a twinkle in his eyes, the smell of fresh, warm mana strudel and hot cocoa filled the space around me.
The portal didn't close, and with a sigh of relief I smiled back.
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