Reap the Harvest
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(( Disclaimer: This post coincides with the beginning of the War of Thorns. ))
Silence reigned. Not the lie which passed as such among the living. When every day bore a monotonous din of which the composing parts are indistinguishable from each other, any abatement was mistaken for a reprieve. It was not so. This was true, utter, complete, silence. Standing in the darkness of the tower he had seen built, Ceruszael took a moment to appreciate it. Eyes closed, body as still as the tower all around him, he basked in it. In the back of his mind the Ebon Knight new this served only to further his descent apart from the humanity he once had. And yet, for the time being, it brought him a measure of comfort. After a measure his eyelids peeled open. Twin pinpricks of lichfire in the gloom of his solitude. They regarded his completed work.
The chamber he stood in was devoid of any adornments or accomodations beyond a large circular table in the center. Semi-glossy blackness reflected the cold gleam of his gaze from every angle as Ceruszael regarded the walls about him. Eventually he settled on the one feature which could perhaps be construed as an imperfection. In the center of the table, a thin slot marred the surface. The Knight reached back to slide his runeblade free from its sheathe. It shared the eerie glow from his eyes and sections of his armor, yet its reflection was far more complex. Myriad forms writhed and circled the edge, which in the umbral walls shifted from the serrated steelesque weapon he wielded, to a bone-adorned wickedly hooked weapon, to an ethereal cleaver, to a cold ironclad scythe into which the spirits were absorbed and regurgitated endlessly. All truths as to the nature of the Death Knight’s and his weapon. Ceruszael held it forward, the tip pointing across the table as if judging the macabre depiction in the tower’s walls. The blade then left his grip, lazily gliding forward and rotating until it hovered vertically just above the slit. When his fist closed, it descended, and the room lit with an empty approximation of life.
Eerie green luminescence danced across the chamber as a torrent of spirits were freed from the confines of the runeblade, finding new lodging within the intricate spellwork of the tower. They swirled around and around, at first swiftly and violently in revelry of liberation, then slowing as the limitations of their new prison became understood. But move they did. No respite for the restless dead. As they drifted below his feet, Ceruszael shifted his attention to the tower walls, beholding that which he had wrought. In contrast to the ground, a monochrome wasteland stretched all around him. No grass or other undergrowth clung to the dirt or shifted in the breeze. Just as well, for no wind blew to bend the branches of long-dead trees.
The Shadowlands stood before Ceruszael, viewable all around him without him needing to bodily cross. Painstakingly applied runework and necromantic spellcraft all across the tower and its foundation served equally as protection from Azeroth’s intruders, as well as those who would assail this unwanted observer from the realm of the dead. Glancing toward the bottom edge of the walls, he could glimpse the ghostlight of the torches at the tower’s base, serving as physical manifestations of his protective weave. And yet, amidst this success, Ceruszael frowned. The dead were legion, outnumbering the living as they ever would. Yet he saw none here. Nor the wardens which jailed and tormented them. Nor even the periodic intrusions of Val’kyr, in any of the forms known to him. He did not long have to wonder as to why. In contrast to the immediate vicinity, in the horizon he beheld a great disturbance. Eyes narrowed, the Acheran gestured in its direction. The decayed landscape fled beneath him, shifting as his perspective flew forward as if on the wings of a frostwyrm. Realization dawned swiftly. An offender to the cycle for millennia, the outline of a massive tree, grew larger as the damned observatory closed in. Now, the Ebon saw the dead. A teeming mass of them which grew larger by the moment.
War.
Ceruszael turned away, an arm snapping out to his side. A keening wail, audible only to those who had an ear for the manner in which dead things spoke, was silenced nearly as soon as it began as the soul engine below him receded into the runeblade before it lifted free from the table and returned to its master’s grasp. The tower fell dormant again, only a shrinking reflection of its architect seeing to his departure.
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