Guilt and regret were the impossible weights on each ankle. They drowned her past identity in the body of her absolute failure. Old names were no longer useful. She had died after all, quite literally. Her consciousness faded in and out, fatigue wrapped around her mind like a warm blanket. Lingering awareness glimpsed only a piece of what was happening around her vellum phylactery as she pierced the veil between worlds one last time and struck like a shooting star across the skies of Dragonblight.

Darkness set in, and she slumbered for a time. As a person, perhaps she would have been recovered and nursed back to health. In her current form, however, she was merely a curiosity. An artifact full of forbidden secrets. One that, once discovered, was traded between dragonkin, the Explorer’s League, and eventually came to rest within the exalted libraries of the Violet Citadel.

“Sanguinaris,” echoed through the reading room. 

It was a small space off from the main library’s hall. Full of arcanery and tools that, under normal circumstances, she would have been able to identify easily. But she was weak, starving. How long had she been unconscious?

“Look! The bindings are loosening! It worked,” said another voice. Apprentice mages playing with power they didn’t understand. A legacy as old as Dalaran itself, and one that had rightfully earned the contempt of the Blue Dragonflight for generations.

Something warm dripped onto the monumental leather bindings of the tome that she now possessed. She could taste it. Iron. Life. Magic. Blood, she knew it to be. The leather absorbed the offering from a young woman who stood over the tome  — now all that remained of her. She drank of it greedily, and slowly came to the understanding that the magics which had saved her had also condemned her. Was this what it was to be a lich? What was she now? She could not say, could not speak, could not tell. She no longer had a mouth to do so.

She felt herself move in ways that where entirely alien. Not of her own will. The apprentice mages opened the tome, voracious to partake in whatever knowledge she had tucked away inside.

“What? Well shit,” said the young woman. “All that and for what? I'm bleeding and the damn thing is blank!”

Sanguinaris, she thought, as her conscious mind drifted away from the conversation happening around her. The pages were blank, but the knowledge contained within the grimoire was not plain for any apprentice mage to simply read. She was the knowledge, and she was not written  — but imbued. She simply was.

As weak as she felt, barely strong enough to hold her own thoughts, she compelled herself to explore the power that remained within her and the capabilities of her chosen prison.

“Look! LOOK!” Another of the apprentices exclaimed. “Get someone from the council now! Hurry.”

Indeed, a single word actively scrawled itself with the very blood that had woken her from her slumber upon a single open page. It wept and dribbled down toward the base of the tome, and the apprentices scurried off.