A Fire in the Flame
Short story based on Warcraft myth
Last update 12/18/06

by Lorenzo Wang



“Vrom! Come out into these fields, I stand ready.”


“Illidan, my dear, we need make haste. The other wardens will question my patrols with this belated absence. Let this feud end swiftly, to release you even a moment for this honor bout is mortally dangerous.”


“Zelvand, my sweet, my gratitude is as eternal as my bonds, but I will tame this beast first. My sentence will be easier served with these loose ends tied.”


Snow clawed its way through the ancient trees as Illidan stood in waiting to settle his duel of honor with Vrom the Wayward. Zelvand Moonfang threw back the hood of her silken warden robes in pout, but her hand stayed against the smooth muscle of his arm. “We risk much. My dear if this foul coward does not show, then I must return you to your cell.”


If not for his love for Zelvand, and the alarm spells carved into his shackles, he would have run. The harsh winter screams around him were melody to his ears after two hundred years of imprisonment. “Would I have entreated this quest of you recklessly? The message was clear. Vrom will show.”


“Have care should he not.”


“I have care.” He turned around. “For you.”


“Care.” Her throat clenched. She looked away. “Care. No, I care for you, Illidan the Cursed, and cursed am I to be that caretaker for eternity. What more can you show me than care?”


His eyes dulled. He brushed the frost off his lips, an answer lost in the howling wind.


A roar envenomed the twilit hills around, the air grew denser, and a blademaster burst from the snowy banks and laughed cruelly. The orc was scarred with tattoos that, almost mystically, seemed to keep the snow off his verdant skin, but not his rags and barbarian ornaments.


“So it is Illidan. Ha! Vrom grown sick of asking your stench for directions, elf. Me see you're but a pet let out to play.” He belt out a hearty, yet humorless laugh. Zelvand bit her lip and flinched, but Illidan laid his hand against her and whispered “this is our fight.”


“Then Vrom, may this duel be our last, the last of your defeats. Do you hunt to spite your shame, orc? Your brother was one of many slain in war, and most have forgotten that war. Your fury lacks sanity. The war is over.”


“Pah.” The blademaster's spit disappeared into the hail and he drew a blood-fed blade. “That a son of the sundering should lecture Vrom on shame. Vrom will have your worthless head on pike yet, so promised to brother Vromalg.” Vrom crouched suddenly, and dashed out from sight in a breath's time, and became but a breath's echo.


Illidan thrust his arms, crescent blades encircling, waxing, waning, and leapt forward. His slashes tore only wind, but then struck an invisible blade and sent sparks falling like portentous stars. Vrom was too fast and whirled around Illidan in haunt.


“Illidan! Behind you!”


He spun around with blades flashing and fangs baring, and more cold sparks flew. “Zelvand! Get back!” he snarled. “This is not your fight!”


But cuts fell on him from all sides biting his back for every wrong move he made. Mirror images of Vrom were conjured up to harass him as he tried to hold his mind in discipline. Let not these illusions tempt me, Vrom will appear, and when he does I will drain the very life of this orc as I did his pitiful brother. Had he only known how wretchedly Vormalg had begged.


Zelvand gasped. The blood that wound its way down Illidan's back was dark and fresh, melting the whiteness and steaming under the moonlight. Illidan turned away and struck again to no avail, merely dissipating another mirror of Vrom. Suddenly, Zelvand saw bloodthirsty eyes flare open behind Illidan, and then a blade appeared, high and worshipful, to strike him down. She screamed and drew a poison dagger steeped in the unbroken warden tradition of inevitable capture of their quarry. But Illidan, her charge, her love, must outlive his bondage, and in mercy and forgiveness be placed one day as captive to her and her only.


In one single moment, her dagger soared out, its venomous coat glistening.


In one single moment, Illidan heard her scream, and screamed his own scream, his body alighting with all the pain and fury and magic in him. His skin erupted in unholy immolation, a deeper self exposed, and the snow shied from the cloak of flames that erupted.


In one single moment, Vrom felt his very soul burned. The wind around him broke, and he fell back to avoid the elf fire, his blade fell and sank beside him.


In one single eternity Zelvand saw her target aside, and her fatal dagger destined to drive into Illidan's heart. In one single moment she was not a warden, but a woman who sacrificed her own freedom long ago to serve as prison walls, her life a barrier for the freedoms of her people. In that moment, she blinked.


The air exploded behind Illidan, and he turned to see Zelvand’s teleport land in his flaming aura as she reached to embrace him. The dagger in her back had entered silently, reverently. It released its deadly magic and crumbled, but Zelvand slid down his body limp. Illidan let go his half-moons and they caught no other light. He embraced her back while Zelvand burned in his arms, his and the orc’s blades caging him where he knelt.


“So... this is what it's like to burn in magic... to pursue the forbidden... this is what it's like to love the great Illidan.” His pyre engulfed her, consuming the poison, the robe, the warden.


The world grew dark around him, as Illidan raged in blindness. The storm became shards and fangs, stripping at his wounded flesh. But the heart of Illidan escaped, and in a mindless metamorphosis he became a demon in grief. His flames turned dark, and otherworldly. He remembered throwing the dark energies into Vrom. He remembered Vrom's agonized screams until his throat ripped apart and only a hoarse cloud of blood came out. He remembered hearing the Quel'qalanan horns ring through the leveled forest as he continued to pour death into the orc, and how the shackles sent bursts of incomprehensible pain into some fathom of his soul. The last he remembered, before the wardenmasters spelled him away into his waiting eternity, was the fey incense of her skin burned onto his arms.

* * *

Maiev Shadowsong came to inspect the scene, the emergency requiring her to assume the wardenship for a fallen sister. The burnt scar in the snow seemed to retain its heat, and no ice dared form near the remnants of Illidan’s rage. The warden awaiting her soberly greeted her, “His sentence now shall be longer than even what we could give him,” but she wasn't listening. Maiev lifted a heavy crescent blade, and sneered at Zelvand’s lack of duty.


“That is what the lust for magic brings you, sister,” she said simply, and walked away.